A Long Way to Go

In some districts of Red China, the once ubiquitous portrait of Chairman Mao Tse-tung has been replaced by that of President Liu Shao-chi, his chief opponent. This horrendous fact was reported last week, over the chop mark of Mrs. Mao's own purge committee, as proof that the Maoists' struggle to overcome the enemies of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is far from won. "They disdainfully refuse to admit their guilt," said the wall posters at the People's University in Peking. "We still have a long way to go before eliminating them all."

As events in China clearly showed last week, that warning is accurate. The Maoists are having trouble almost everywhere. In his attempt to use the army to purge dissident leaders, Mao has run into a major difficulty: the army, created by the Communist Party, is finding it unpalatably difficult to discipline or destroy its creator. In fact, there are signs that the army is badly split. For Mao, whose maxim is that "power grows from the barrel of a gun," that was bad news indeed. Many guns in the People's Liberation Army are now apparently turning in his direction.

"Wrong Tendencies." Radio reports intercepted in India confirmed the fact of massive army uprisings in Tibet, where Red Chinese Army Commander Chang Kuo-hua reportedly kicked out the Red Guards and laid siege to government installations. Peking wall posters told of fighting in the high Himalayan redoubt that left 100 or more dead. Chang, who commanded the 100,000 Chinese troops that seized Tibet in 1951 and who later directed the invasion of India, declared martial law and sat back to await the arrival of three army divisions said to have been dispatched from China proper to "crush the revisionists." Radio Moscow reported last week that anti-Maoist army units had seized "nearly full control" of Inner Mongolia, and wall posters in Peking confirmed that a titanic struggle between army and Red Guards was rocking the province. Further Chinese army uprisings were reported in Western and Central China.

Mao's tactical mistake to date in calling for a new revolution seems to have been his failure to understand the forces he was unleashing and the length to which they would go either to propagate or oppose his "thought." So far, Mao claims control in only five of China's 21 provinces; a wall poster quoted Mrs. Mao as admitting that even Peking itself is not entirely subjugated (fully ten of the city's districts are unsafe for Maoism). The rest of the capital, indeed much of the country, remains in chaos. Although many Red Guards last week were leaving for home and school as ordered by Premier Chou En-lai (TIME, Feb. 17), there were many more who found their first taste of power too heady to listen to Chou's orders. Since the Cultural Revolution began, complained the New China News Agency, "wrong tendencies have emerged in the revolutionary ranks"--specifically because, once they have taken power, too many of the Maoist rebels start behaving exactly like those they have replaced.

Dead Stop. Perhaps the worst temptation of all is to succumb to the old Marxist heresy of "economism"--a freewheeling tendency that includes the expansion of private enterprise by grabbing land for market gardens, the withholding of grain and taxes from the state storehouses, and even the chopping down of wood in state forests. After all, China's feeble economy has been virtually neglected for the past six months. Red Guard travelitis has reduced China's transportation network to near chaos, and last month the entire Shanghai area was virtually brought to a dead stop. China's biggest port was abandoned by dock workers, who went off "to ask for higher wages." Some 10,000 workers walked off the job in the Taching oilfields to head for Peking and excitement. Only in a few country villages have the winter chores been done: the hoeing and transplanting, the plowing and fertilizing that are necessary to ensure even a minimal crop. A directive issued by the Maoists last week called plaintively for farmers to "work in the daytime and make revolution at night."

For a nation involved in destructive nonsense, the directive made a certain amount of sense. Spring planting begins next month, and so far, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution has sown only the seeds of economic disaster.

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