Nanking: Communist Cathedral

Nanking was raped by the Japanese in 1937, torn from the Nationalists by Mao Tse-tung's Communists in 1949, and racked by some of the bloodiest clashes between Red Guard fanatics and factory workers that occurred anywhere in China during the peak of the Cultural Revolution in 1967. Today it is slower, far less cosmopolitan, and a bit more relaxed and friendly than dour Peking or supercharged Shanghai. The Communist regime has turned the city into an industrial hub, but the factories are mercifully screened from view by groves of trees. TIME Correspondent Jerrold Schecter, who was permitted by Peking to stay behind in China after President Nixon's departure, visited the Yangtze River city of 1.5 million last week. His report:

THE scars of the Cultural Revolution are still visible in Nanking. The university, unlike those in Shanghai and Peking, is still not operating. But in the streets swarms of people, carts and children are building, hauling --and resolutely following the Maoist line. On the way to a commune on the outskirts of the city, I passed the new Nanking Iron and Steel Works, four-story red-brick apartment blocks near completion, and a whole series of water-conservation projects. Teams of men sang as they hefted a huge stone with ropes and tamped the earth into place. Women with bamboo baskets on yokes carried earth to build retaining walls. Schoolchildren with shovels marched in line to a day's work in the fields.

The emphasis here, as elsewhere in China, is on self-reliance, revolutionary zeal and self-defense. The great mile-long Nanking Bridge--100,000 tons of Chinese-made steel completed in 1968 after eight years of work to provide a railroad link over the Yangtze River between North and South China--is a national shrine and a political rallying point for the Maoist line. It is storied in song and film and pictured on thermos flasks, postcards, beer bottles, matchboxes and cake cartons. On either side, the approach roadway is two miles long; at each end of the span rise two 70-ft. rose-colored towers. An exhibition hall in one of the bridge towers features a 20-ft. white statue of Mao; his poems are engraved in marble on the walls. The atmosphere is that of a cathedral for Communist construction. Visitors are proudly told that while the Soviet Union helped build the Yangtze River bridge at Wuhan, 300 miles to the west, at Nanking the Chinese did it all themselves after the Russians stopped their aid in 1960 and defaulted on a contract to supply the steel.

As my guide emphasized, the bridge is also a symbol of triumph over the "revisionists." At the height of the Cultural Revolution, work stopped for two months while rival factions in Nanking argued bitterly over design details. Among other things, the revisionists --they turned out to be the Minister of Railways and several local party officials, all of whom were finally ousted --wanted the roadway to be only eight meters wide (26 feet); they lost--the road is thus a much more generous 19.5 meters (63 feet) wide. The revisionists also saw no need to have three huge red flags on the top of the bridge towers to symbolize "the general line of Chairman Mao"; the flags are there today.

Mao's line runs all through Nanking. At one school I was treated to a recital of songs by the Little Red Soldiers Mao Tse-tung Thought Team. Then there was the demonstration by the People's Militia, which practices twice a week. The marksmen--some were eight-year-old girls who were smaller than the rifles they carried --ran to the firing line shouting "Heighten our vigilance, defend the motherland!" The targets no longer carried the slogan "Defeat the U.S. aggressors and all their running dogs," but the children managed to demolish them.anyway. The platoon leader, a 30-year-old factory worker named Kung Wei-kuo, explained that the training was "entirely defensive. We want to mobilize our country old and young. We would not attack first, but we are ready to mobilize to repel any intruders." But who? Americans? Russians? Japanese? Said Kung: "We have to let history tell us."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.