The Tearing Down of an Idol

Mao comes under direct attack, along with his widow

In one Peking neighborhood, residents have been instructed to turn in their old Mao badges to local authorities. In the late Chairman's home town of Shaoshan in Hunan province, a hotel built to accommodate a crush of reverent pilgrims stands empty and silent. In Chengdu, capital of Sichuan province, the municipal party committee has decided to tear down the huge central statue of Mao that was built in 1968 with funds that had originally been earmarked for a sports center. Signs of a careful, calculated effort by China's current leadership to reduce the status of the once venerated Mao Tse-tung seem to be almost everywhere. Last week the campaign was stepped up considerably with the most unusual official attack on Mao since the Great Helmsman died in 1976.

The attack was published in the official Communist Party newspaper, People's Daily, which, for the first time ever, acknowledged that Mao "personally initiated and led the Cultural Revolution." It was a mistake, the paper added, that "brought grave misfortune to the party and the people." The denunciation seemed to tip the scales to a negative balance in the long and highly calibrated reassessment of Mao's historic rule.

One of the strangest aspects about the article was that, paradoxically, it seemed to provide the prime defendant in the trial of the Gang of Four, Jiang Qing, with ammunition for her defense. Ever since the trial opened in late November, Jiang has claimed that her actions could not be criminal since they had the approval not only of Mao but also of esteemed Premier Chou Enlai.

In one stormy session last week Jiang was charged with inciting her followers to persecute several well-known writers and a government official, Coal Mining Minister Zhang Linzhi, who died in early 1967 after being beaten by Red Guards. Jiang not only denied the acts but, at one point, angrily accused the judges of being "fascists and Kuomintang [Nationalist Party] agents."

The next day Jiang Qing began the so-called debate phase of the trial--already completed for all the other nine defendants--in which the unrepentant Madame Mao began to defend herself. According to Chinese observers at the trial, Jiang Qing delivered an impassioned defense of the Cultural Revolution as a correct policy, approved by both Mao and Chou. Jiang claimed that Chou even sanctioned the attack on former Head of State Liu Shaoqi, which is held now to be one of the Gang of Four's gravest crimes. Then she defiantly challenged the court to execute her publicly at a mass rally in Peking's vast Tiananmen Square.

Perhaps stymied by her spirited defense, the court went into an unexplained recess, leaving the debate phase to be finished later, possibly this week. Meanwhile, speculation swirled around a particular question: Why would Peking's current leaders have decided to step up the level of attacks on Mao even before the trial of his widow was finished? One possible explanation is that the ascendant faction led by Senior Vice Chairman Deng Ziaoping may not be opposed to an unofficial linking of the "mistakes" of Mao with the "crimes" of the Gang of Four. The pragmatic Deng seems to have decided that a thoroughgoing de-Maoization is going to be necessary.

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