All-Round Victory

China last week became the first Communist nation in history to have a non-Communist President. Long the reviled symbol for everything "bourgeois" in China, President Liu Shao-chi, 70, was expelled from the Communist Party and denounced as a "renegade, traitor and scab" as well as a tool of those familiar Red devils, "imperialism, modern revisionism and the Kuomintang reactionaries." Despite this attack, however, Liu still hangs on as President, a post from which he can legally be removed only by the National People's Congress.

The litany of Liu's sins was reeled off at a meeting of the party's Central Committee late in October. Its expulsion of Liu was the highest-level purge in more than two years of merciless harassment of officials. When Mao launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution in 1966, Red Guards, recruited mainly from the closed-down schools and egged on by Madame Mao, Chiang Ching, succeeded in shaking the position of the entrenched party bosses. But the Guards got quickly out of hand. They began bloody battles with the more conservative workers and peasants and subdivided into factions to fight each other. In an effort to avoid martial law, the government forged a new weapon: the Workers' Mao Tse-tung's Thought Propaganda Teams, which were made up of elite industrial workers backed up by army "instructors." The teams were finally able to force the rival Red Guard factions into "threeway alliances" and to put them under the firm control of 29 municipal, provincial and regional revolutionary committees. The subdued Guards were then shipped in wholesale lots to distant rural areas to live and labor while they learned to "serve the people."

Only Tried and True. In celebrating National Day last Oct. 1, the Mao leadership triumphantly declared "all-round victory" for the Cultural Revolution. The stage was thus set for the meeting of the Central Committee, at which Mao and his No. 2 man, Vice Chair-man Lin Piao, were reported to have made important speeches. The most immediate problem, according to the committee communique, is the job of "party consolidation and party building." The faithful Maoist press warned that this vital task cannot be left only to present party members--who might simply revert to the policies of Liu Shao-chi. Instead, new party members must come from the outside, primarily from "advanced elements among the industrial workers," while only tried and true Maoists among the party members are to be promoted.

The official denunciation of Liu Shao-chi--currently under house arrest in Pe-king--seems to indicate that the Maoists believe they have regained full control of the country. Other, lower-ranking "bourgeois revisionist" leaders may yet be vilified and purged, but as part of a mopping-up operation rather than via the almost ritualistic "naming" of a scapegoat by which the Central Committee completed the official destruction of Liu.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.