Handwriting on the Wall

What the opponents of Mao Tse-tung's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution need these days is a stoutly enforced Post No Bills ordinance in Peking.

The "big-character" posters pasted on the city's walls first popped up five months ago as impromptu, crudely lettered marching orders for Mao's rabble-rousing young Red Guards. As China's power struggle has gathered ferocity, handwriting on the wall has developed into the fine art of big character assassination, purge by poster and partisan propagandizing. Every morning, foreign correspondents in Peking eagerly scan the walls for information notably unavailable in the Chinese press itself.

Last week was particularly rewarding for Peking poster watchers. On Mao's 73rd birthday there appeared, crying aloud, though presumably writ small, since it was 3,000 words in length, the "confession" of President Liu Shao-chi, Mao's principal antagonist in his effort to "purify" Chinese Communism. Liu's "self-criticism," a long-practiced art among Chinese Communists, traced a litany of "sins" reaching back to 1946.

Ideological Defect. The burden of Liu's self-denunciation turned on his "lack of understanding" and "miscalculation" of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution--in other words, his opposition to Mao. Now, he said, "I have decided to submit faithfully to the regulations of the party and not to be of two minds in party matters." It all sounded definitively abject--the words of a vanquished man.

But was it? The Red Guard introduction to the poster said that Liu had made his confession last October at a party caucus. And for all the Red Guard denunciations before and since, Liu is still President of China. The conclusion of Sinologists: Mao's opposition, including such "revisionists" as Party Secretary Teng Hsiao-ping, is still too powerfully entrenched in the party apparatus, still has too much of a following in the countryside to be summarily ousted.

The posting of Liu's confession seemed aimed at rousing public ire against him and strengthening Mao's hand. The next day, some 100,000 Red Guards poured into the Peking Workers' Athletic Hall for "A Rally for Thoroughly Criticizing Liu and Teng for Their Bourgeois Reactionary Lines." The youngsters boomed approval when speaker after speaker denounced Liu as "the Khrushchev of China," the "boss of the capitalist class," and warned that unless the Liu-Teng platforms were banished, "China itself might fade away." Clearly, the Guards were pressing for a showdown.

The Fifth Bomb. Some previously unscathed idols were also tarred by Guard posters last week. Attacked as a backslider was Chen Yi, the nation's durable Vice Premier and Foreign Minister. There was no "confession" from Chen Yi, though. After the posters appeared, he continued to act as one of Mao's spokesmen by publicly lambasting the Russians for their "dirty political deals." Even more surprising was an attack on Tao Chu, who has risen rapidly since last August to become one of Mao's inner circle as party propaganda chief. Tao Chu appeared at a rally in the company of Chou Enlai the same day that he was criticized on Peking's walls. Since even Lin Piao, Mao's new heir apparent and chief hatchetman for the revolution, has on occasion been the object of a nasty poster, it may well be that anti-Maoites have been doing some midnight scribbling of their own.

Whoever was responsible for the posters, Peking's press was pushing the revolutionary word on other fronts. Article after article claimed that a miraculous upsurge in industrial and agricultural production had been brought about by jettisoning all capitalist notions of expertise and turning instead to Mao-think. The New China News Agency reported that "China reaped the biggest grain crop in its history this year." (Western experts calculate a shortfall of 5,000,000 tons in the Chinese harvest for 1966.) The Agency also cited a "new leap forward" in iron and steel output as a result of "a mass movement to storm the technical citadels."

As if to certify the value of what one writer called "the atomic bomb of Mao's thought," China exploded its fifth nuclear device last week at its Lop Nor test site in Sinkiang. As the Chinese press reported it, the test was "a heavy blow to the plot of U.S. imperialism and Soviet modern revisionism." A more objective analysis will have to wait until the fallout drifts into the hands of Western scientists.

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