Into the Dustbin! Onto the Garbage Heap!

Beating drums and gongs and waving their talismanic little red books of Mao, the Red Guards were at it again last week, surging in frenzied rhythm through the streets of Peking, Shanghai, Nanking and dozens of lesser cities.

In banner and chant they proclaimed their purpose: "Sweep the great renegade of the working class onto the garbage heap!" and "Sweep the Khrushchev of China into the dustbin of history!" The man so described by these sanitation-minded youngsters, who also referred to him as "a paper tiger," the "big shot" and the "main root of revisionism," was Red China's President Liu Shao-chi, the chief foe of Chairman Mao Tse-tung and his Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The renewed attacks on Liu showed that Mao and his followers have not yet succeeded in winning the day; they also signaled a new phase in China's upheaval after several weeks of comparative quiet.

The attackers were tens of thousands of the very Red Guards whom Premier Chou En-lai last month ordered back to school. Those orders were part of a general damping down of revolutionary chaos in the interests of getting the spring grain crop planted and the economy moving. But last week's youthful display indicates that Mao has changed his mind about any letup. Wall posters, in fact, reported that Chou and other Maoist officials publicly admitted that it has been a mistake to disband the Red Guards.

Final Accounts. Cranking up the Red Guards anew just to attack Liu Shao-chi seems an excess in itself. The best Western intelligence is that ever since October Liu has been President of China in name only, barred from all Politburo sessions and public affairs of state. He last appeared in public on Nov. 25. His name is no longer affixed to official telegrams to other heads of state. He may still be permitted to go to his office and await dispatches and memos that never come. He may be under some form of detention, either imprisonment or, more likely, house arrest in his villa in Peking's Fragrant Hill section.

If Liu is already powerless, why should Mao unleash what Peking radio called "mass rallies wrathfully denouncing the crimes" of Liu and vowing "to resolutely destroy him?" Best explanation: Liu is the symbol of continuing resistance to Mao's revolution throughout the party and cadre structure, which Liu himself spent 20 years building. A Red Guard leader addressing a Peking rally allowed as much, explaining that "final accounts" must be settled against Liu because "only by destroying his sinister headquarters can we ensure the recapture of the party, and political, financial and cultural power."

A Poisonous Weed. In demanding Liu's resignation as President, the Maoist mobs were really warning party and government officials to fall into revolutionary line. The latest outbursts were thus an admission of continuing Maoist weakness and of the threat that Liu might still triumph. Among the many sins that the Maoists ascribed to Liu, some of them going back to 1935, was his authorship of the book How to Be a Good Communist. Until Liu's downfall, it was second only to Mao's own writings as a source of mass meditation; last week it was denounced as mere "deceitful talk" and "a poisonous weed." In China's puritan clime, the army newspaper Red Star last week made another serious charge against Liu, who was once considered something of a swinger in the Politburo. He had, said Red Star, "energetically spread the idea that it is legal to indulge in beautiful clothes, rouge and lipstick and wining and dining."

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