Spreading the Word

Mao Tse-tung had called for honest criticism of his government and, lo, from Canton to Chungking there was criticism. The walls of Peking University blazed with multicolored placards pointedly demanding "What is more precious than individual liberty?", angrily proclaiming that "Graduate students know very little because they are allowed to study only Russian methods in physics lab." Engineer Li Pei Ying of Tientsin declared: "Intellectuals live a life that is less peaceful than it was under Japanese or Kuomintang rule."

Inevitably, some of the critics went beyond the bounds outlined by Chairman Mao in his now famous "secret" speeches (TIME, May 27 et seq.). Chu An Ping, editor of the Kwangming Daily, which speaks for Red China's eight tame "democratic" parties, had the temerity to suggest criticism of Mao himself: "People have raised many opinions against the junior monks, but no one has yet said anything about the old monks."

Aging (69) General Lung Yun, who in

Nationalist days was the tough, tight-fisted war lord of Yunnan province, took a crack at the most sacrosanct foreign idol of all. Said General Lung, now a vice chairman of Red China's National Defense Council: "It is totally unfair for the People's Republic of China to pay all the expenses of the Korean War. The U.S. has given up her claims for loans she granted to her allies during the first and second world wars, yet the Soviet Union insists that China must pay interest on Soviet loans." He would like to know, Lung added, whether the U.S.S.R. intended to reimburse China for the "huge quantities of industrial equipment" which were carted out of Manchuria by Soviet troops after World War II.

Wrecking Praises. Four months ago when Mao insisted that the time had come to begin hothouse cultivation of "the hundred flowers" of criticism, the suspicion was that he was looking for noxious weeds to bare their heads to the party scythe. He had to wait awhile; it was weeks after Mao's "rectification" campaign began before China's timid intellectuals found the courage to raise their voices. For his attack on Mao, Editor Chu An Ping was suspended from his party. General Lung's co-workers publicly rebuked him for "slandering the Soviet Union with malice." Critics could expect vigorous counter-criticism, but as yet there was-no evidence that they would suffer worse. The basic fact about their criticism is that the West's knowledge of it comes solely from Communist sources: the official newspapers first trumpet the criticism then later reject it; all is controlled.

Last week, in a kind of "State of the Union" speech to Red China's dummy Parliament, Premier Chou En-lai insisted that the Communists have achieved "basic victory in our socialist revolution"--partly by executing "16.8% of the counterrevolutionaries dealt with." Nonetheless, Chou went on, there were "remnants of counter-revolutionaries still trying to engage in wrecking activities." There were even people, he conceded, "who keep complaining because China's living standards are so low, and keep praising the American way of life."

The Ominous Word. Why all this airing of trouble and simulated display of tolerance? Even in the bowdlerized official version of Mao's major "secret" speech, the ominously evocative word "Hungary" cropped up with a frequency which suggested it was much on the chairman's mind. Indicative of Mao's fears was his none-too-veiled reference to popular resistance to Chinese rule in Tibet: "Because conditions in Tibet are not ripe, democratic reforms have not yet been carried out there."

There are many possible reasons why Red China's bosses have chosen to broadcast the attacks of their critics: to siphon off the kind of pent-up popular frustration which led to the Hungarian explosion; to put the fear of the counterrevolution into the lower levels of their own bureaucracy; even, in the case of General Lung's anti-Russian blast, to make a point which the government agrees with but cannot officially accept. But underscoring them all is one fact, ominous to Communists everywhere: Mao noted that in Hungary "the party simply disappeared in a matter of a few days," because it had no popular roots.

The proclaimed necessity for keeping in touch with the people gave Communist Finance Minister Li Hsien-nien a beautiful opening last week. Government workers in the lower levels, he announced in what deserves to be preserved as a gem of Communist thinking, will soon have their wages cut so as to "enable them to live a life even closer to the masses."

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