Gold Boughs and Jade Leaves: The Red Junior League

Thousands of young, college-educated girls are uprooted from China's great cities every year and sent off to the boondocks for the stint at manual labor that is demanded of intellectuals in Chairman Mao Tse-tung's domain. In Peking alone, 40,000 coeds from the class of '67 have been told to start new lives in frontier villages and communes far from the capital. A select few have been carefully exempted from that harsh regimen, however, and can be expected to remain so. Not surprisingly, they are daughters of the leadership--girls whom the Chinese, in pre-Communist days, called "gold boughs and jade leaves," or descendants of noble houses. Like the rest of China's 375 million women, they adhere to austere and sexless blue-uniformity in public. There the similarity, and the egalitarianism, ends. In the plush suburban villas that Peking's leaders call home, they enjoy servants.

Foremost in the Maoist junior league are the two daughters of Mao's wife Chiang Ching, the most strident voice in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Hsiao Li, in her late 20s, gained prominence a year ago when she led a Red Guard "investigation team" at Peking University. In the acid-tongued tradition of her mother, Hsiao Li described her alma mater as a "stale pond in which many wang-pa* grow." She is now chief of the editorial committee of the Liberation Army Daily, and the regime has confirmed her importance by listing her among "leading comrades" of the Defense Ministry.

Dog Father. Her younger sister, Li Min, has been on the revolutionary stage only since last summer. A member of the Science and Technological Commission, she co-authored a Red Guard wall poster denouncing Marshal Nieh Jung-chen, commonly thought to head China's nuclear program. His crime, in Li Min's book, was sheltering "renegades" and "capitalist-readers."

Ho Chieh-sheng, daughter of famed Marshal Ho Lung by one of his early wives (he has been married nine times), achieved revolutionary fame by denouncing her father as a "despicable swine." She is now an important member of the cultural cadre, boasts that she is closer to Mao than to her own parents.

Another young woman who displayed a similar lack of filial piety in the early stages of the Cultural Revolution now languishes in jail. Liu Pingping, daughter of President Liu Shao-chi, the man whom the Maoists have denounced as the chief target of the great purge, attacked her "dog father" and mother, but apparently with insufficient force.

Early this year, after a Red Guard paper accused her of "outrageously tucking Chairman Mao's portrait under her bed," she was arrested.

Evil Wind. Less political-minded than the other proletarian princesses, but perhaps as prominent, is Lin Toutou, daughter of Marshall Lin Piao, Mao's top lieutenant and heir apparent. Her articles from the Air Force News, including an unusually emotional tribute to the late Air Force Commander Liu Ya-lou, are said to be prominently displayed under the glass plate on Marshal Lin's desk. Both the fatherly pride and the daughterly sentimentality are surprising--if ever so slight--touches of humanity in a country that has lately taken to warning its youth against "the evil wind of falling in love."

* Literally, spawn of turtles, a vulgar Chinese expression equivalent to bastard.

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