Revisionist Music

Once again, music was the focus of ideological attack in China last week. This time, however, the object of scorn was not such decadent bourgeois composers as Beethoven and Schubert, but a Chinese opera with the ponderous title Three Ascents Up Peach Mountain. Performed in Peking in January, the new opera initially provoked nobody's wrath. But now People's Daily has castigated it as an "outrageous attack" on Mao Tse-tung's revolutionary philosophy. The party organ charged that Peach Mountain was a remake of a 1966 opera that ignored class struggle while promoting the Confucianist notion of a "kingdom of gentlemen." Most offensive of all, the original opera centered on a horse, egregiously symbolizing Mao Tse-tung, that had brain damage and could not gallop--or "leap forward."

Unquestionably, the castigations of Peach Mountain were related to the anti-Confucius, anti-Lin Piao campaign that has been unfolding in China during recent months (TIME, Feb. 18). But it also raised a larger question that has puzzled China watchers since the movement began: Just who is in charge?

Most Western observers now believe that the man in control is Premier Chou Enlai, even though some of the rhetoric seems to be directed at him. Last week the theoretical journal Red Flag endorsed what is believed to be Chou's wish to keep the movement from spilling over into such areas of basic policy as foreign affairs and international trade. In an editorial entitled "Study Conscientiously and Deepen Criticism," Red Flag stressed the need for orderly study that avoided "getting bogged down in certain problems."

Beyond that, foreigners traveling in China have been assured that nobody in the present hierarchy is a target of the current movement. And several governments have received assurances that China's diplomacy will not be affected by the new cultural revolution. Determined to keep the campaign within narrow bounds, Chou has issued warnings, echoed by provincial radio broadcasts, against getting sidetracked into such peripheral matters as "settling old scores" and "dividing into this and that faction."

Nonetheless, it is clear that some powerful figures within the Chinese leadership are violating Chou's dicta. To some experts, the attack on Peach Mountain contains oblique, invidious references to Chou. They point out that the opera was sponsored by the Cultural Group of the State Council headed by the Premier. Yet even if Chou is not the "someone" who carefully concocted this "foul, poisonous weed"--as People's Daily nicely put it--the appearance of the denunciation at a time when he is trying to tone down the new movement suggests that some rather complex political maneuvers are taking place.

Many observers believe that a group of radicals in the Politburo, headed by No. 3 Man Wang Hung-wen, a leader of the radical cadres in Shanghai, and Mao's wife Chiang Ching, have been trying to use the Confucius-Lin campaign to gain leverage against Chou--possibly with the goal of determining who will eventually succeed the aging Mao.

If that is the aim, the campaign is a long way from success. Largely because of Chou's leadership, since the Tenth Party Congress last August, membership in the Politburo is stable for the first time in nearly a decade. The power of independent military commanders in the provinces was curbed by a shuffle of command posts late in January. Moreover, several dozen formerly discredited cadres who owe their allegiance to Chou have quietly been brought back into important government positions. Chou himself put on an impressive display of party unity recently when he appeared at a banquet for visiting Zambian President Kenneth Kaunda. By his side were two of his most powerful critics: Wang Hung-wen and Chiang Ching.

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