Approaching a Showdown

Ruminating on the fantastic reports that are daily pouring out of Red China, U.S. Secretary of State Dean Rusk last week was moved to declare: "We don't know what they mean, but that doesn't embarrass us, because Mao Tse-tung obviously doesn't know what they mean either." The world's capitals are all having difficulty in judging the meaning of the tales of peasant armies and pitched battles, of death in high places and kangaroo courts, of confusion and chaos from one end of mainland China to the other. But one thing is increasingly clear: the situation in China is deteriorating rapidly, as evidenced last week by Mao's desperate call on the army for help.

Mao's naked power struggle with his "bourgeois" enemies is becoming so turbulent, in fact, that it is causing mounting concern among the countries around the Asian periphery. Communist North Korea had been carefully suppressing the news from China, lest its own youth catch the Red Guard fever. But last week it lashed out against Red Guard posters that reported a plot to overthrow the North Korean government. Cried Pyongyang: "An intolerable slander." Japan is disillusioned about its recent new moves toward Red China and fretful about its carefully cultivated and growing trade with the Chinese. Pakistan, which has beea edging toward friendship with Peking, now finds itself peering un- comfortably into an abyss. Most of all, China's travail tears at the millions of overseas Chinese who are scattered around the mainland periphery, many of whom have families back home that are caught in the maelstrom.

Mongolia for the Mongolians. After months of keeping the People's Liberation Army out of the struggle, Mao's decision to employ it was an admission that he no longer has enough influence across China to be sure of winning by political means. The Liberation Army Daily's announcement in response to a call from Mao said as much: "Even though they [the Maoists] may be just a minority temporarily, we must support them without the slightest hesitation." The Maoists, in fact, have been a minority all along in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, whose excesses are opposed by a majority of Communist Party officials, bureaucrats, local and provincial commissars and apparatchiks, factory managers and often workers. The Maoist-dominated news agencies' own reports revealed flash points of "unprecedented strong resistance" last week all across China. In Sinkiang, the province that contains China's atomic-testing lands and borders on the Soviet Union, 10,000 former soldiers formed an "August First Field Army" to resist Mao's Red Guards. Seizing weapons and ammunition from an arsenal, they warned that "anyone opposing our rebellion will be shot." In the ensuing battle, according to wall posters, hundreds were--and 100 died. The August First irregulars were supported by seven of the eight divisions commanded by the boss of Sinkiang, Lieut. General Wang En-mao, who, despite his name, is an old friend and supporter of President Liu Shao-chi, Mao's chief opponent, and holds both military command and the political commissariat over local army forces.

In Inner Mongolia, troops under Colonel General Ulanfu, a Soviet- educated armyman and party leader of Mongol extraction, went into action against the Maoists. Armed with artillery and automatic weapons, they seized a Maoist newspaper in Huhehot, capital of the border province. Wall posters quoted Ulanfu as being incensed at the inflow of Chinese into his territory, and favoring a Mongolia for Mongolians. From Kiangsi province and its capital of Nanchang came local radio broad- casts telling of "great violence, gravely disrupted order and a great number of persons injured." Other clashes and disturbances were reported in the Peking suburb of Fangshan; in Taiyuan, capital of Shansi province; in Hunan's capital of Changsha; in far-off Tibet; and in cities from Manchuria down to the Yangtze River valley.

Hoodwinked in White. As the Maoist organs told it, however, not all of the news was bad. Soon after Mao's "fighting orders" were issued, the army intervened in Harbin, Manchuria, where an anti-Maoist outfit had laid siege to Maoists in party, army and industry headquarters buildings. Just as the group was about to charge, the army encircled it and made its members surrender without firing a shot. Then it singled out the ringleaders and, as it later reported, "won over those who had been deceived." The victory was hailed as "an example" for army units elsewhere to follow as "our nation's power struggle enters a showdown stage."

Showdown or no, there was still a lot of silliness emanating from Peking. A Red Guard newspaper quoted one of Liu Shao-chi's daughters as accusing her father of buying a golden belt buckle for his former wife as a "consolation gift"--and, horror or horrors, a golden shoehorn lor himself. The New China I sews Agency reported that in the air-to-air combat over the Strait of Taiwan two weeks ago with Chi- nese Nationalist jets, Communist fighter pilots dispensed with normal wing-man-intercom conversation and quoted Mao's maxims back and forth to each other for guidance and extra thrust. It did not do much good: two of them were shot down. Far less amusing were Red Guard pictures displaying Peking's ex-mayor, Peng Chen, ex-Propaganda Boss Lu Ting-yi, ex-Army Chief of Staff Lo Jui-ching, and ex-Central Committee Secretary Yang Shangkun in various postures of humiliation at the hands of a Red Guard kangaroo court. Another ominous poster reported the death of the No. 4 man in China, Tao Chu, by "heart attack."

Whichever side finally prevails, Chinese society and the legendary Chinese respect for authority may never recover from Mao's mad efforts to use the tools of revolution and mob disorder against the government and party establishment that he himself first imposed on China. Never again is any student, worker, peasant or even army officer likely to view central authority in quite the same obedient light. Mao has turned China into a place where virtually anything goes, and the traditions of ancient and orderly China are likely gone for good.

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