The Handwriting on the Walls--and Streets

READING Red China's proliferating posters for either news or propaganda is an art in itself. In the flourishing brush strokes of Chinese calligraphy, the tatzebao alternately denounce, cajole, exhort and praise. Last week they so covered the walls of cities, government buildings and even private huts that the citizens of Canton had to read their messages on the ground, where frustrated Red Guards laid out their latest scribblings and weighted them down with stones.

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The posters appear in three forms. One is the size of a newspaper page, inscribed with delicate characters. The second is roughly the size of a sheet of typewriter paper, with its message stenciled or printed for mass distribution. The third is the chuantan, or bill poster, each of which features a single, yard-high character. Enough pages strung together make poster headlines so large that even a simple acid message, such as "Liu Shao-chi is the Khrushchev of China," requires ten yards of wall space.

Traditional Chinese rhetoric is eminently suited to making war by poster. It is full of the exaggeration and hyperbole typified by the 8th century Chinese poet Li Po's description of a bearded sage as "a man with a strand of hair 3,000 yards long." In the same vein, Red Guard posters have blithely advocated that Mao's enemies be "burned at the stake," recounted tongues and ears being torn off in street fighting and reviled Mrs. Liu Shao-chi one week as a "common prostitute" and the next, somewhat bewilderingly, as "priggish."

The Maoist postermakers have developed a shorthand of invective in the war of words. One favorite reference is to a "dog in the water," meaning an enemy who has been brought down but should be finished off to avoid all risks of a future comeback. "Black gangsters" are anti-Mao intellectuals, whose output is likely to be "poisonous weeds." Enemies of Mao who do not quite qualify as intellectuals are labeled "ghosts and monsters" who follow the "black line." The difficulty of distinguishing friendly from unfriendly posters, especially when nearly all invoke the blessing of Mao for their point of view, has led to a special sub-jargon. It warns against those "leftist in name, rightist in reality" who "wave the red flag to oppose the red flag." It also warns against "those who listen superficially" to the words of Mao but, in fact, are working against him. "The red ocean is a big plot" is an attack on a particularly dirty tactic in poster warfare: some anti-Maoists have been painting entire walls solid, sacrosanct red, thereby preventing the Red Guards from plastering them with ideographs.

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The authenticity of poster accounts is as gnawing a problem for foreigners as it is for the Chinese in the streets. After nearly a year's practice at poster exegesis, Sinologists have developed some rules of thumb. When such officials as Mao, Lin Piao or Chiang Ching are quoted directly, the gist of their remarks is likely to be true. So are reports of high-level government meetings and accounts of the arrests of individuals. Less reliable in their detail are reports of bloody clashes, though they undoubtedly indicate that trouble of some sort took place. Attacks on individuals named in posters usually have little validity beyond the important fact that the victims are on someone's blacklist.

Much of the poster spotting for the outside world is done by the nine Japanese reporters based in Peking. There are always more fresh posters each morning than all of them together can track down in a single day, and Peking's frigid winter is not conducive to street-corner translating. Result: some of the Japanese now photograph promising posters with their Polaroid cameras, then return to the warmth of their offices to translate them. Curious to see the mysterious poster warriors at work, one Japanese correspondent prowled Peking with a flashlight night after night. Although he was very diligent and although the posters were invariably new and fresh the next day, he never managed to catch anyone putting them up.

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