Reconstruction Begins

Western analysts of Mao Tse-tung's China have long marveled at his regime's capacity for surviving repeated self-destructive outbursts. It has been at it, with greater or lesser intensity, since 1966, when Mao launched the convulsive Cultural Revolution in an effort to shake out the "revisionists" and strengthen his own slipping grip on the party machinery. The whole shebang very nearly came apart last September when an abortive barracks coup by his own Defense Minister and heir apparent, Lin Piao, forced Mao to ground the entire Chinese air force for weeks, and subsequently to cashier several Politburo members and carry out a sweeping purge of top-rank military men.

Now the analysts see signs that Mao and Premier Chou En-lai are trying to put China's fractured leadership back together. Late last month, in an effort to convince the outside world that harmony had returned to Peking, Chinese officials began speaking openly for the first time of the events of last fall, confirming many details--Lin's attempts on Mao's life, his death in an air crash in Mongolia while trying to flee--that had filtered out of China long ago (TIME, Nov. 22).

Chinese newspapers hammered the restoration theme in a joint Army Day editorial last week, urging the faithful "to unite, to be open and above board." The star of the Defense Ministry's Army Day reception was Marshal Yeh Chien-ying, an old (74) hero from the days of the Long March whom Mao summoned out of semiretirement as the September crisis was approaching. Peking has let it be known that Yeh will soon be named Lin's successor as Defense Minister in an important first step toward filling out Mao's decimated government.

There is plenty of filling to be done. Something like 130 of Peking's 300 senior military men--including the army chief of staff and top officers in the air force, the navy and the logistics command--have simply dropped from public view since autumn. With just twelve active members, the Politburo is now only half its original size, although it accurately reflects the divisions in the regime between the leftist ideological hotspurs who opposed the rapprochement with the West--and especially President Nixon's visit last February--and the old-guard pragmatists who approved of both.

Mao's wife Chiang Ching, who was the ideological power behind the radical Red Guard fanatics during the Cultural Revolution, turned up at Army Day ceremonies as No. 3 in the Politburo, after Mao and Chou. She may be jockeying for that position, however, with Yeh, who led a bloody provincial army suppression of Mme. Mao's Red Guards in 1967 and has developed no affection for radicals since.

Only when the Politburo is restored to full membership can Mao deal with Peking's fundamental problem: the succession. Much to the wonder of China watchers--and the worry of Western governments that are anxious to expand their contacts with Peking--there are no indications of who might succeed Mao, who is 78, and Chou, whom visitors have recently found looking every bit of his 74 years. Though Mao will not necessarily want to name an heir again--Lin was the third person whom the Chairman had groomed for the succession, only to have to purge him later on*--the fact is that no likely candidates have emerged. Chou is known to favor a collective post-Mao leadership, but unanimity, too, is proving elusive.

* Neither Peng Teh-huai, Lin's predecessor as Defense Minister until his ouster in 1959, nor Head of State Liu Shao-chi, who was purged in 1966 but has still not been replaced, was ever officially designated heir apparent, as Lin was, but each had worn the mantle of succession for several years preceding his political demise.

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