Parades & Power

Salvo after salvo of blank shots sounded from the huge tanks and tractor-drawn howitzers clanking over ancient Peking's streets. Thousands of marching troops shouted "Liberate Formosa!" Jets and bombers speckled the sky. White "peace" doves fluttered above the heads of half a million workers, who held high huge portraits of Mao Tse-tung, Malenkov, Lenin, Stalin, Marx, Engels.

With a play of muscle, China's Communist rulers last week celebrated their fifth anniversary in power. On the rostrum the Chinese Reds were joined by a star-studded delegation from other parts of the Communist empire, headed by Nikita Khrushchev, No. 2 man in Russia. Also present were Boleslaw Bierut, the Polish Communist chief, Kim II Sung, and eight other delegations from sister "people's democracies." "Everybody," cried Radio Peking, "can see the greatness of our country."

On their fifth birthday the Chinese Communists were busily consolidating and expanding. To start the week, the first People's Congress voted unanimously to re-elect Mao Chairman of the People's Republic and ratified Red China's first constitution, thus ending the sham of coalition government and concentrating still more power in the hands of Mao and his coterie.

To be Mao's deputy chairman and legal successor the Congress elected neither Premier Chou En-lai nor Communist Party Secretary Liu Shao-chi, the two men who are generally believed to stand next to Mao in true authority. Instead they chose 68-year-old Chu Teh, the onetime war lord who turned from a life of opium-smoking and concubine-collecting in the 1920s to serve brilliantly as a soldier for the Red cause. Chu's new post appeared, however, to be a quasi sinecure, a sort of recognition of his past services and comparative popularity.

The real No. 2 power seemed to be Liu, the party dogmatist, who was made head of "the highest organ of state power," the People's Congress Standing Committee. By constitutional definition, the all-powerful Standing Committee has the right to annul decisions of the State Council (Cabinet), which gives Liu a veto over his rival, Chou Enlai, who was reappointed Premier. Liu's name now follows Mao's on all lists, and leads the rest when Mao's does not appear. Tall, gaunt Liu Shao-chi is one of the least known of the Peking rulers, a humorless man whose slightest pronouncement on Communist theory rings among the party rank and file more loudly than the bombast of other figures. His wife once said of him: "He has an inexorable heart."

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