Muzzling the Dragons

After seven months of unbridled furor and frenzy in the name of Mao Tse-tung's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, China continued last week to try to re-establish some measure of stability. Out of Peking's white-tiled Municipal Party Headquarters trudged hundreds of Red Guards, bearing their bedrolls and belongings. Only recently the chosen shock troops of Mao's purge, the youngsters had been evicted by government edict from their erstwhile headquarters and dormitory. They chucked their possessions into waiting army trucks and were driven out of the city and presumably back to school or work on the farms.

Harsh words trailed the Red Guards, who for seven months had enjoyed their own license to slander everyone in sight. Though it once cheered them on, the authoritative Maoist journal Red Flag now accused the young revolutionaries of having "begun to rest content with their past achievements" and to "chase after motorcycles, telephones and bicycles and seek a higher standard of living." They had erred also, said Red Flag, in attacking party cadres and thinking that the Cultural Revolution consisted only of "dismissing people from office," with the result that there was "no leader in a herd of dragons."

Change of Tactics. Peking issued pleas to China's 500 million peasants to make certain that spring planting gets under way, and the army was ordered to pitch in and help down on the farm. After nine months' holiday, nearly all primary and some secondary schools were reopened. Skilled government and party workers were being restored to their jobs and to official favor. Above all, as a Central Committee directive made plain, the new theme was unity, specifically a "threeway alliance" among the army, the Red Guards and the party cadres. In one Kweichow cotton mill, reported the New China News Agency last week, 17 Maoist organizations had vied to outdo each other; no longer could China tolerate such extreme factionalism.

Whether China's new sobriety represented a temporary pause or a permanent retreat remained to be seen. Moscow, which probably knows as well as anyone what goes on within Peking's inner councils, issued its own official appraisal. The Kremlin conclusion: Mao was merely changing his tactics, not his goals, a change necessitated by the "decisive resistance" of the Chinese people "to the Red Guard outrages."

Specter of Famine. No doubt, the Russians are right in assuming that even the Chinese have a nonsense-tolerance threshold that the revolution's excesses have long since passed. But there are other compelling reasons for Mao to order a breather--assuming that he is still giving the orders. Unless the spring planting takes place on schedule, the specter of famine might rise to destroy Maoists and anti-Maoists alike. Last week, for the first time in its 17 years of rule, the Communist regime admitted the existence of an epidemic; meningitis spread through four southern provinces. Moreover, governing the sprawling, disparate reaches of vast China has never been easy, and Mao may well have become alarmed at the extent of rebellion against him. After many months of effort, Mao has been able to claim more or less firm control of the local leadership in the capitals of only five provinces: Kiangsu, Shansi, Shantung, Heilungkiang and Kweichow.

The rest of China was in opposition or near chaos. As Japanese Premier Eisaku Sato observed last week to the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., Arthur Goldberg, the Maoists are now "being forced to resort to conciliatory measures" in order to restore some kind of order. But after all that has happened within China during the past year, said Sato, restoring order will "take a long, long time."

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