Wash-Up Time

Red China, like the rest of the Communist world, is having its troubles with rebellious youth. In Peking last week Communist Party chieftains were viewing with alarm a series of sporadic demonstrations, strikes and outcries among China's 70 million students.

At Chengting, 150 miles southwest of Peking, students actually staged a march on the capital, and party officials had to cajole them into returning to their classes. In Harbin students have flatly refused to attend standard Communist lectures on "collective life, political theories and central guidance," i.e., party rule.

What caused the dissension? In part, admitted Peking's China Youth Daily, it is "the external and internal events of last year." In other words, not all of China's students have accepted their government's cold-blooded support of Russian butchery in Hungary. But there were other more fundamental causes. Many middle-school graduates find themselves conscripted to work as laborers. This year 4,000,000 primary-school graduates will be denied entrance to middle schools because China does not have the facilities for them.

Communist China seems to be producing a class of discontented, semieducated intellectuals for whom there are no suitable jobs--a category in which Communism had made its strongest inroads in other parts of Asia and the Middle East. What to do with the idle educated? Said Education Minister Chang Hsi-jo: "Let them work in the fields and factories as in the Soviet Union. We must have the younger generation educated so they may know that revolution is painful."

To support Minister Chang's ruling, propaganda mills began grinding out touching stones of Chairman Mao Tse-tung's own hard and difficult struggle as a young revolutionary, much as a capitalist uncle might rebuke a wastrel nephew with stories of his own five-mile hikes through the snow to the little red schoolhouse. Samples: "Chairman Mao's socks were full of holes, his clothes made of rough texture. He ate only two meals of rice and cabbage daily. His comrades urged him to eat more. Chairman Mao would not allow it."

Just in case these homilies proved ineffective, Deputy Director of Party Propaganda Chou Yang was ready with another means of persuasion. "Some people," he told a press conference last week, "think ideological remolding is not a pleasant phrase, but people need to wash their brains as well as their faces."

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