Chairman Mao's New Revolution

To struggle is to advance. Not to struggle is to retrogress, to collapse, to go revisionist.

To witnesses of the Cultural Revolution that racked China from 1966 to 1969, the evangelistic tone of those words from a Peking radio broadcast last week had an ominous significance. After years of relative moderation, the country seemed on the brink of yet another convulsive turn leftward.

Hints that China was embarked on a new cycle of radicalism began appearing at the same time as last August's Tenth Party Congress. In typically arcane fashion, the campaign started with what seemed to be an academic argument over the failings of Confucius. He was criticized in party publications for wanting to restore slavery in China 2,500 years ago. Then the campaign was broadened by linking Confucius to former Defense Minister Lin Piao who died after an anti-Mao coup attempt in 1971. Lin, like Confucius, was charged with trying to restore a discarded system, in his case capitalism. The campaign continued at a comparatively low level until last week, when it suddenly blossomed into a full-scale movement.

For the first time in five years there were announcements of "mobilization rallies" of the masses to denounce the sins of China's two new "monsters and demons." A wall poster, charging Lin Piao with revisionist thinking, appeared on the docks in Shanghai, and for three nights running Peking television showed huge new screens being set up at Peking University; they obviously would soon carry their own slogans supporting the new campaign. For two days last week the entire front page of People's Daily was devoted to a formal announcement of "a mass movement initiated and personally led by our great leader Chairman Mao." "The drums of battle are rolling and the cannons are loudly roaring," echoed a Shanghai broadcast. "The struggle between those who want to go forward and those who want to go backward still exists."

Rising Chorus. As at the start of the Cultural Revolution, the new campaign has been accompanied by a rising chorus of charges against ideological backsliding. Examinations in schools were criticized for being revisionist and favoring the children of cadres and former bourgeois. One radio broadcast from Hunan charged that "class enemies" were "enticing young people to read pornographic books and periodicals" in an effort "to poison the masses."

The campaign seemed to be affecting China's foreign policy. Observers have noted that since Secretary of State Kissinger's visit to Peking last November there has been virtually no further movement toward the normalization of Sino-U.S. relations. The head of the Chinese liaison office in the U.S. has been gone from Washington for three months.

In Peking, foreign residents worried about rising xenophobia; distrust of foreigners was also one of the aspects of the Cultural Revolution. They already have cause to be concerned. Last week a sullen crowd of Chinese hauled two French residents of Peking off to the local militia station after they aimed their cameras at women shoveling snow. The Frenchmen had been mistaken for "Soviet spies," police explained after releasing them.

Odd Stuff. Cultural exchanges with capitalist countries have also come under bitter attack. Italian Director Michelangelo Antonioni, whose candid documentary on China has been showing round the world for more than a year, was vilified as "a buffoon" and "a gangster" in the Chinese press. His film's portrayal of some of the shoddier aspects of life in China represented, in the words of People's Daily, a resurgence of "reactionaries at home and abroad." In like fashion, Western music, reintroduced to China by the recent visits of three foreign orchestras, is now being termed "strange and odd stuff [that] reflects the comeback of the revisionist sinister line on literature and art."

So far, nobody knows who, beyond the ghosts of Lin Piao and Confucius, are the real targets of the new campaign. There is evidence, however, that the movement has already claimed one group of victims: the army. It was local military strongmen who finally put a halt to the radical excesses of the Cultural Revolution. But last month seven of the eleven powerful regional commanders were transferred from their comfortable, long-established headquarters and placed at the head of unfamiliar troops. The move astutely deprived them of their traditional power bases and thereby enhanced the authority of the central administration.

In the view of some China watchers, the shift away from pragmatic policies may in fact be an indirect attack on Chou Enlai. China watchers have long suspected a split between the moderate Premier and such leftist Politburo members as Wang Hung-wen and Yao Wenyuan. Yet in recent months Chou has seemed to shift more to the left. China's harder line in foreign policy, masterminded by Chou, is possibly an effort to undercut leftist criticism. At the Tenth Party Congress, some observers noted a new radical tone to Chou's pronouncements, and it was the Premier who apparently engineered the attack on Western music.

But even if there are conflicts within the top Chinese leadership, the events of last week did not yet add up to a major struggle for political control. Chou's position remained strong, if not unassailable. The best estimate of the uncertain situation was that the aging Mao, 80, was giving China a final infusion of revolutionary fervor in an effort to keep the nation from developing an entrenched, elitist bureaucracy.

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