Red China: Dance of the Scorpion

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Curses, intimidations, threats, blackmail labels to brand people all over the sky and earth, blows at my body, an imperial decree imposed on my head and the rebukes of a certain senior general piercing my ears. Are there any more secret weapons? Bring them all out together. The universe is cleared of all dust. If you do not believe, please wipe your eyes and see.

In the shadow of the walls of Peking’s Forbidden City, where the history of modern China is being written these days in foot-high ideographs of pure vitriol, that shrill challenge was published last week over the name of Mao Tse-tung, the Red Emperor of China. The world indeed wiped its eyes in astonishment as Mao’s Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, aimed at “purifying” Chinese Communism, erupted into strife and stridency so bitter that it produced widespread chaos and verged on civil war. The revolution that for 18 years has enchained China’s 750 million people to Communism openly degenerated into a personal power struggle virtually unprecedented in history in its scope and stakes. Chinese fought Chinese in the cities, and the ubiquitous tatzebao, or posters, attacked with such catholic ferocity—condemning both Mao’s enemies and his lieutenants—that there may soon be no one left undenounced in all of Red China. To many observers in both the West and the East, it seemed as if China were reaching the final stages of the legendary dance of the scorpion—just before it stings itself to death.

Flooded with Posters. What the West saw was fragmentary, since only a handful of foreign reporters are permitted in Peking, and they get most of their information from Red Guard posters and pamphlets; it was, for example, the Toronto Globe and Mail’s David Oancia who discovered the Mao challenge last week. But though reports often clashed in detail, they left little doubt that the height of the battle was approaching between Mao and his hand-picked heir, Marshal Lin Piao, on the one hand, and the more pragmatic and liberal Politburo faction headed by Chinese President Liu Shao-chi on the other. The Yugoslav news agency Tan-yug reported that Peking was “flooded with posters and cartoons of a sinister nature, depicting numerous Chinese leaders”—and not forgetting to include Lyndon Johnson, whose caricature was attacked by children bearing spears.

In the eastern Chinese city of Nanking (pop. 1.5 million), the words and pictures of violence gave way to violence itself. The Czechoslovakian news agency reported that some 500,000 workers had poured into the city, determined to wipe out Mao’s local Red Guard contingent and end its harassing techniques. For four days, the two factions fought furiously in the streets. More than 60,000 prisoners were taken by both sides, and many were tortured in the best Chinese fashion. Said the Czechs: “Their fingers, noses and ears were chopped off, their tongues cut out.” Japan’s Kyodo news service reported that 54 persons were killed, 900 wounded and 6,000 arrested and that the city’s rail and telephone services were cut. The Great Revolution had clearly begun to devour itself.

Swim by Swimming. Like news being flashed on a neon sign in Times Square, accounts of the Nanking battle quickly appeared on Red Guard posters on Peking’s walls. “Suddenly,” said one wall poster, “an attack was mounted by the workers on our revolutionary group office, and 20 of our comrades were dragged away.” When other Red Guards went to negotiate for their release, “the workers suddenly turned atrocious and ripped off the fingers, noses, tongues and ears of our representatives. After murdering them, they threw the bodies from the fourth-floor windows. The situation in Nanking is exceedingly critical. Already from cities in the neighborhood of Nanking, including Shanghai, the reactionary workers are on the march to Nanking. Bloody clashes on an even larger scale are about to erupt.”

In Canton, South China’s largest city, the Red Guards were reported to have seized all the city’s newspapers and radio stations. In Peking itself, Correspondent Oancia* reported that one night last week gunfire chattered for more than five minutes and that the next morning the inevitable posters appeared, some of them reporting that factory workers had made trouble in the capital’s western district. Across China, the Red Guards have met with increasingly stiff resistance in their drive to spread Mao’s revolutionary fervor. “One learns how to make a revolution by making it,” Mao has said, “just as one learns to swim by swimming.” For the Red Guards, the swimming seems more and more to be upstream.

All Truth. Despite the new violence and threats of more violence, however, the main war is still being fought with words—thousands upon thousands of them. Most of them deal in sharp vilification of the villains opposing Mao’s revolution, or make an effort to arouse indignation and sympathy for Mao and thus broaden the base of mass support that he and Lin Piao must command to make their purge of China successful. The attacks are based on the deeply orthodox belief that the teachings of Mao contain all truth—and that to question or oppose them in any way is to become a heretic who must be exorcised from the body of the faithful.

President Liu Shao-chi last week was depicted in wall cartoons as Don Quixote charging against Mao’s teaching. Beside him, as Sancho Panza, rode Liu’s chief ally against Mao, Party Secretary Teng Hsiao-ping. A less kind cartoon showed Liu as a barking dog being drowned under the sun of Mao’s teachings, and Liu’s wife was crudely caricatured as a prostitute. That catty note may well have been the inspiration of Mrs. Mao, who likes to go by her screen name of Chiang Ching, which she acquired as a grade B bit actress in Shanghai in the 1930s. In the last two months, she has emerged from 25 years of obscurity to take over the cultural direction of the revolution. Last week, along with revolutionary Cheerleader and close Mao Intimate Chen Pota, she seemed to be running things in Peking, while Mao and Lin were in Shanghai.

As interim purge director, Chiang Ching uncorked a fresh villain, and one of the least likely: Mao’s propaganda chief Tao Chu, who only five months ago was bumped up by Mao to No. 4 rank in the ruling hierarchy—trailing only Mao himself, Lin Piao and the durable Red Chinese Premier Chou Enlai. Until last week Ta’ Chu had been one of the few certified Mao heroes of the revolution, providing much of the verbal firepower for the purge. But Chiang Ching denounced Tao Chu last week as a “bourgeois reactionary,” one of the dirtiest epithets in the Maoist lexicon; and immediately the Red Guards responded. One version, in fact, had it that Tao Chu had been publicly humiliated in the streets of Peking.

Sun God. The naked struggle for personal power in Peking was becoming so vicious that no one was any longer immune from at least passing poster defamation—partly because Liu and his supporters seemed to be putting up a few posters of their own, thereby confusing everyone. Thus last week posters popped up demanding: “Burn Chou En-lai to death!” As fast as they went up, they were torn down and replaced with signs proclaiming that anyone against Chou ought to have “his head bashed in.” Foreign Minister Chen Yi, considered a Mao man, was also attacked. When Reuters attempted to file a report of the attack on Chou, the Peking telegraph office refused to send it. Since the Red Chinese seldom censor anything that foreign reporters cable, Chou obviously has admirers somewhere. So Byzantine has the name calling become that last week for the first time even Mao himself was vilified in scattered posters calling him “a fanatic.”

To dare attack Mao Tse-tung in China today, however fierce the battle raging around him, is in itself a dangerously fanatic act. At 73, Mao is still the Sun God (as he is so often depicted, his face radiating fire in all directions), father figure and charismatic czar of Chinese Communism. Under the aegis of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, some 110 million youths above the age of nine have been excused from school since last June, either to serve in the Red Guards or simply cavort around the countryside while studying Mao’s writings and singing his praises to everyone within earshot. A peasant in remote Sinkiang province may never know anything about the current battle for power, but if he knows nothing else, he will know who Mao is and what he says. Even if Mao’s opponents should ultimately triumph, they would probably have to do so without impugning Mao personally. Lin Piao may succeed Mao, on the other hand, but he can only do so on Mao’s enormous coattails, which have dominated Chinese Communist his tory all the way back to the days of the Long March and the caves of Yenan.

Bourgeois Backsliding. Given Mao’s immense prestige, the wonder is that Mao and Lin are finding it so difficult to oust Liu Shao-chi & Co. and implement the Cultural Revolution. That they are having trouble is attested to by every indicator coming out of Peking. For all the increasingly violent denunciations of Liu and Teng in posters and pamphlets, both are still in office and presumably at their desks in the Forbidden City. The official Chinese news organs have never accused them of any misdeeds by name, only by implication. Of all the other officials condemned for bourgeois backsliding, such as the two former mayors of Peking, Peng Chen and Li Hsueh-feng, only one, Chou Yang, former Deputy Propaganda Chief, has ever actually been imprisoned.

Maoist and Red Guard pronunciamentos often have a tellingly defensive, almost plaintive tone. Posters claimed last week that Mao had been forced against his will to relinquish the presidency of China to Liu in 1958 and that he had had to exile himself to Shanghai for eight months in 1965-66 because Liu and a “wedge” in the Politburo had opposed his plans aborning for the Cultural Revolution. One even quotes Mao as saying that at the time, “they treated me as if I were their dead parent at a funeral.” Since, until the current conflict, all the evidence has indicated that Mao was complete boss in China, Sinologists to a man do not believe the poster tales. But Mao and the Red Guards apparently think that the stories are worth putting out as a means of winning popular sympathy for Mao’s side. One poster last week even had Mao confessing his errors in elevating Liu and Teng to “the front line” of the Politburo’s eight-man Standing Committee—an unprecedented admission of human fallibility for the Red Emperor.

Those in Authority. Nothing made Mao and Lin’s difficulties in dumping their opponents plainer than the nation’s official New Year’s Day editorial, published simultaneously in the People’s Daily and Red Flag. It recounted how “persons in authority” first opposed the Red Guards and the revolution. “Those persons reversed right and wrong, juggled black and white, encircled and suppressed revolutionaries, clamped down on different views, practiced white terror.” While predicting that the Red Guards would carry the revolution “to all classes in 1967,” the editorial over and over again railed against “those within the party who are in authority and are taking the capitalist road,” and who are “making sure of their social base and their influence inside the party.” Only by “mobilizing the masses of workers and peasants, who form 90% of the population, will it be possible today to defeat” the enemies of Mao-think. That is hardly a trumpet of victory being sounded; it gives the impression, in fact, that Liu and his faction still command at least as much support as Mao’s legions—and perhaps more.

Part of the Mao faction’s difficulties no doubt turn on straightforward personal power politics. Until the purge began, Liu Shao-chi had long been ranked No. 2 behind Mao, and was his heir apparent. Like any politician, Liu surely resented Lin’s vault into the position of dauphin—and is fighting to cut him back down to size. In such a battle, Liu commands considerable resources. Mao may have been the sun shining on Red Chinese Communism, but in the last two decades it was Liu who got down on the ground and cultivated the party apparatus. All seven governors of the provinces of China are Liu’s appointees; and hundreds, if not thousands, of lesser party and government officials owe their jobs to Liu, whatever their lip service to Mao.

Even all that would hardly suffice to protect Liu if Mao had chosen to act quickly and decisively in a classic purge. But he did not, for Mao’s purge is part and parcel of a far vaster dream that is contained in his Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. It is the romantic nostalgia of an aging revolutionary who wants to turn back the clock. Mao moved when he saw that China had begun to show signs of the same mellowing of aspirations, the same desire for material well-being above ideology, that to his horror he had watched overtake Russia in the years after Stalin. Mao does not want to go the way of Stalin in history after his death, nor does he want China to go the way of “bourgeois, revisionist” Russia. “He seeks nothing less than the rejuvenation of a great revolution,” says Hong Kong Sinologist Mark Gayn, “the rebirth in middle age of the drive, the passion, the selflessness and the discipline it had in its youth a third of a century ago.”

No Tape Recording. Mao chose the People’s Liberation Army, as one instrument to spread the revolution, and put Defense Minister Lin Piao to work preparing it for its mission of spreading the gospel—and trying to ensure its loyalty, which is the key to much that happens in Red China. Always far more than a fighting machine, the P.L.A engages in everything from road and dam construction to social services to making propaganda movies. A year before the Revolution got under way, Lin abolished ranks in the P.L.A., a hint of how far back toward some vision of beneficent anarchy Mao intended to turn the Chinese clock.

Then Lin and Mao created the Red Guards by the simple if shudder-making device of closing the high schools and universities of China indefinitely and turning the nation’s youth loose on one long, glorious holiday of travel and excitement in the service of Mao. Lin’s army helped organize the youth into coherent bands, equipped them with uniforms and badges, and sent them out to give their elders what-for in a lark whose attractiveness any teeny-bopper or Berkeley rebel would instantly recognize. Mao thus hoped to fire with revolutionary fervor the very generation that he felt Russia had lost to “revisionism,” the generation of Red Chinese that Dean Rusk once expressed the hope might be “recuperated.” The Red Guards were not, after all, a new idea in history; Germany had its Hitler Jugend. Millions of Red Guards poured into Peking and other big Chinese cities. How well Mao’s notion has worked could be seen last week in a wall poster signed by Liu Shao-chi’s own daughter, in which she denounced her father and mother, accusing them, among other things, of not allowing her to tape record their conversations at home.

Mao-Think. Legions at the ready, Mao set out last June to throw China back into an age of simplicity and Spartan evangelical purity that it had never really known. If China’s young no longer needed education, neither did any working adult need expertise: for both, the contemplation of Mao’s teachings was enough. Explorers lost in the Gobi Desert threw away their compasses and were led out by Mao-think. A North China girl spinner started out tending 100 spindles at a time but, after studying Mao’s works, was soon handling 1,600 with ease. Top-quality steel was forthcoming from an out-of-date converter once the operator began “applying the philosophical concepts expounded in Mao Tse-tung’s writings.” The Peking Review carried an article entitled: “How We Invented a Handy, Light, Well-Finished and Inexpensive Electric Wall-Ramming Machine by Grasping the Principle of Contradiction.”

Inspiring as such examples seemed in print, to the level-headed men charged with running China on a day-to-day basis—from factory managers to government bureaucrats to party officials like Liu and Teng—it looked like the Great Leap Forward of 1958 writ large in madness. By its do-it-yourself backyard-foundry mania, Mao’s Great Leap had cost China several years of economic growth. The new revolution was to be far more encompassing, and it also threatened the technocrats’ jobs. In a factory run by Mao-think, who needs a manager or even an engineer?

Not surprisingly, when the first bands of Red Guards approached the assembly lines last fall, with their little, red pocket versions of Mao’s works, some ugly clashes took place. Chou Enlai, always the mediator, stepped in and decreed that Red Guards were henceforth to refrain from interfering in industrial production or farming methods. But at the same time, Lin made plain to the Red Guards that the retreat was only temporary so far as Mao’s grand scheme was concerned.

Meantime, nearly every other element in Chinese society was under some sort of purifying assault. Such cultural entities as the National Peking Opera Theater were put under army control for having harbored artists who tried to “undermine the revolution and oppose change.” China’s Young Communist League was disbanded and replaced by the Red Guards, the Women’s Federation condemned, and the Trade Union Federation declared to be rotten with revisionism. Even the directors of the New China News Agency were attacked last week and demands made that they be ousted.

Everyone Antagonized. Purposely or not, the result has been that Mao and the purgers have antagonized and threatened nearly every educated man and woman gainfully employed in Red China. To the men who care about China’s future and want to bring it into the modern world of comparative well-being and technology, the revolution threatens to sweep all the painful achievements of nearly 20 years into the dustbin and consign China to a dark age of mindless communal litanies and Mao sun worshiping. To the men in the governments of the provinces far from the Politburo battles of Peking, the revolution brings trainloads of Red Guards usurping their authority and rocking tidy little boats that have been carefully caulked over the years.

It is all of this that has enabled the opponents of Mao and the Red Guards to gather resources against them that come from deep in the vitals of China. It is this support, which runs throughout the Chinese Communist structure, that prevents Mao from forcibly removing Liu and Teng from office.

But Mao is pressing the attack. The New Year’s editorial warned that industry’s freedom from interference by the Red Guards, negotiated by Chou Enlai, is now over. Some Sinologists think that Chou En-lai may indeed be in trouble with the Maoists, as the first round of last week’s posters indicated, precisely because he counseled moderation rather than flat-out revolution in the first place. There are hints in the Chinese press that the police, who have so far scrupulously stayed out of what has essentially been a literary battle by poster, may soon be called into action to round up Mao’s enemies.

In Peking and other large cities where the Red Guards have given the Maoists control by sheer weight of obstreperous numbers, such roundups would be fairly easy. Not so in the provinces, where conservatism is strong and resistance to the revolution is greatest. Because so much of the People’s Liberation Army has its roots in the provinces, there is no assurance that it would necessarily take orders from Lin Piao in a showdown. Bloody clashes between army units and Red Guards were reported last fall in a few places, and since then Lin Piao has pointedly not used the army in the struggle. Reason: Lin fears that its use might trigger full-scale civil war.

Confusion & Contradiction. What comes next in the battle is as unpredictable as tomorrow morning’s posters on Peking’s walls. The ways of the Chinese have always been virtually past finding out, even before the arcane mosaic of Communist politics was overlaid on them. It may well be that, for one side or the other, a carefully orchestrated plan is working to perfection, with confusion and contradiction integral to its method. Or it may be that the battle is now raging so far and furiously that not even the participants are sure what is going on any more.

Speculation is as rife as it is undependable. Lin Piao is seen by some to be shrewdly manipulating a senile Mao to get his inheritance, employing the Great Revolution as the greatest gambit in history. The emergence of Chiang Ching has sent Chinese scholars scurrying to their dynastic histories to wonder if Mrs. Mao may become the fourth woman in history to preside over the destinies of the world’s largest nation. All that is certain so far is that China is going through an upheaval the like of which has not been seen since the French Revolution.

The Russians, who have good reason to fear the madness of their hostile next-door neighbor, have actively urged the Chinese people to overthrow Mao. Presumably, Moscow thinks Liu Shao-chi would prove more amenable, which might or might not be true. French Sinologist Pierre D’Arcourt argues that it would be an error for either Moscow or Washington to assume that China’s foreign policy will be much altered, no matter who wins. Both factions, he says, “are pro-Chinese in the most Chinese way, and the actual fight now going on is as classically Chinese as Confucius.”

Moscow is not letting sentiment interfere with judgment, and its judgment is that Mao is winning. The Japanese, on the other hand, who also must live beside the thrashing Goliath and who watch it equally closely, think that Mao may be losing. No one is willing to hazard how long the contest will go on, how much more turmoil and bloodshed there may be before the dust of Mao’s universe finally settles. What is unambiguous beyond question is the enormity of the stakes being played for in China’s clash of the Red mandarins—not only for the Chinese people but for a watching and waiting world.

* Oancia, 37, is the only non-Communist North American correspondent stationed in Red China. The son of Rumanian immigrants to Canada, he is a hard-digging veteran reporter who was sent to Peking in October 1965 after five years of covering Europe and the Middle East. Less than a month after his arrival, he attended a reception at the Russian embassy, where, he cabled, “I clinked champagne glasses with Premier Chou En-lai during the weekend.” After the clink, Chou said two words to him in crisp English: “Good luck.”