Sun God's Anniversary

For days, workmen had been hustling to decorate Peking's Gate of Heavenly Peace, scene of Red China's monster rallies. Up around the square went pictures of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin. On the facade of the gate towers went huge pictures of sunflowers bending to the sun, symbolic of the world's people being drawn to Chairman Mao Tse-tung. And on the north wall, dwarfing all the other portraits, was a tinted image of the sun god himself, Mao.

Everything was in place last week for National Day--the 17th anniversary of the founding of Red China. Three million Chinese crowded into the vast square as Mao and his lieutenants filed onto the reviewing stand to the martial strains of The East Is Red. Sinologists studied the standing order for clues as to who was up and who was down in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. But the order seemed unchanged from last month's rallies: Defense Minister Lin Piao was ranked No. 2, Premier Chou En-lai No. 3. There was, however, one surprise: Madame Sun Yatsen, the widow of the founder of the Chinese Republic, who has been denounced by the Red Guards as not being revolutionary enough, was on the stand in a place of honor. Apparently Mao felt that the prestige of her famed husband was still of some patriotic usefulness to Red China.

Soviet Walkout. Though some Red Guards had clamored for Mao himself to speak on National Day, he remained silent. Instead, Lin Piao once again talked for him. Lin lauded China's economic situation ("prosperous and full of vigor"), described the world climate as "excellent" for revolution, and called the U.S. and U.S.S.R. conspirators in "plotting peace swindles for stamping out the Vietnamese people's revolutionary struggle." As a result, the diplomats from the Soviet Union and six other Communist countries walked out of the celebration.

As an added irony, the official news agency on the eve of the celebration derided the Johnson Administration for being "more isolated than ever before." The propagandists were, in fact, unwittingly describing Red China's own plight. Not one foreign head of state attended the celebration, and the greetings sent from other capitals were decidedly frosty and reserved.

After the speeches, Mao rose to wave to the 1,500,000 marchers who began filing through the square. First came soldiers, then wave after wave of Red Guards, some carrying volumes of

Mao's works. As part of the celebration, Peking released a color film of China's three nuclear explosions. The Chinese achievement, said the narrator, would "smash the nuclear blackmail" of the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. The credit for the blasts went, of course, to Mao, whose thought "armed" the Chinese nuclear scientists.

Auto Pretension. If Peking could be believed, Mao's thought could, in fact, do just about anything--even provide the inspiration for the design of a new automobile. According to a Peking report, six "pacesetters" in an auto factory in Changchum, 350 miles northeast of Peking, testified that they "started from scratch" to produce a new car, with Mao's thought as the "guiding principle." What they aspired to, they proudly proclaimed, "was proletarian art, not an imitation of foreign models."

The result was the 1966 Red Flag sedan. Official pictures last week showed a good-looking sedan with crisp Italianate lines, plenty of chrome trim and white sidewall tires. In fact, the car that Mao inspired appeared strikingly similar to trie Peugeot 404, which has been in production for six years.

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