Cantonment in Canton

In pre-Communist days, Canton was China's historic capital of insurrection. Secret societies flourished in the teeming tearooms of the wealthy southern metropolis, and assassination was a familiar way of death. It was in Canton that the Opium War began. It was there that Sun Yat-sen's revolution broke out.

Under Mao Tse-tung, Canton (pop. 2,500,000) apparently is still the same old city. While the rest of China has been subsiding toward some measure of normality, pro-and anti-Mao factions in Canton last week continued to fight the battles of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Radio Canton warned that local party officials opposing Mao were "increasingly more cunning, insidious and vicious." The Maoist Southern Daily shrilled that the "crucial moment" was at hand in the clash between Canton's "two classes, two roads and two lines in the cultural revolution."

Then Mao stopped the clock in Canton. According to Radio Moscow, the People's Liberation Army moved as many as 180,000 soldiers into Canton, took over the civil and police administration. Army trucks laden with red banners and colored posters of Mao, their roofs hung with red bulbs, cruised through the streets announcing the takeover, touching off a massive demonstration. It was the sort of mobilization of the masses that Mao's name can still conjure, as thousands milled about waving flags, beating drums, clanging cymbals and singing Maoist anthems.

The cantonment of Canton by the army added the city and its province, Kwangtung, to the roster of five other provinces--Shensi, Kweichow, Heilungkiang, Shantung and Kiangsu--that the Maoists claim to have fully captured for the revolution with army aid. Three days later, Radio Peking proclaimed that the army had taken over industrial and agricultural production in three more southern provinces. In his struggle to impose his will on China's 750 million people, Mao has clearly turned to dependence on the army instead of the Red Guards.

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