Last Respects

Chilled by the icy winter air that sweeps over from Mongolia, Peking last week solemnly mourned the passing of Premier Chou Enlai. The ceremonies began in the hospital where Chou died of cancer at age 77 on Jan. 8. For two days his body lay in state, draped in the red flag of the Chinese Communist Party, while high officials, including Chou's wife Teng Yingchao and First Vice Premier Teng Hsiao-ping, Chou's almost certain successor (TIME cover, Jan. 19), paid their last respects. Also among the mourners were some 10,000 selected "representatives of the masses."

Chou's body was taken in a white hearse to the Papaoshan (Hill of Eight Treasures) Cemetery, in Peking's western suburbs, to be cremated. Nearly a million people lined the route. Then the red lacquer urn containing the ashes was displayed for three days in the Working People's Palace of Culture, the former Exalted Temple used by China's emperors to pray to their ancestors.

Scattered Ashes. In an extraordinary spontaneous expression of grief, nearly two million mourners, wearing white paper flowers on their padded winter jackets, gathered to place wreaths around the Monument of the People's Heroes. Bands of weeping youths gathered to sing the "Internationale" and raise their clenched fists. All over the city people wept unashamedly before portraits of Chou. At midweek the remains were taken to the Great Hall of the People, where party officials listened to a eulogy delivered by Teng Hsiao-ping. A silent mass of people lined the Avenue of Eternal Tranquillity as the hearse bearing Chou's remains moved slowly away to scatter the ashes, as China's official news agency put it, "in the rivers and on the soil of our motherland."

Life in China quickly began to return to normal. In Peking, shops that had closed for the seven-day mourning period opened their shutters. Workers bicycled through Peking's wide, cold streets to return to their offices and factories. A lively debate in the Chinese press on educational policy, which had been halted when Chou died, was resumed in full force. Peking's official People's Daily called in an editorial for a variety of educational reforms, arguing earnestly that if China's schools equipped the masses with "socialist consciousness," they would surely "rise up against revisionism."

In Peking's view, of course, the center of "revisionism" is Moscow. In the wake of Chou's death, China made an important advance in its continuing struggle with the Soviet Union for power and influence in Asia. After months of deliberations and delay on the matter, Japan last week announced it would sign a peace treaty with China that formally ends World War II hostilities.

In doing so, Tokyo agreed to Peking's demand that the treaty include a clause opposing "hegemony"--China's current code word for Moscow's expansionist (in the Chinese view) foreign policy.

Tense Visit. Significantly, the Japanese made the announcement hours after Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko had concluded a tense official visit to Tokyo. During his stay, Gromyko had sternly warned the Japanese not to sign any peace treaty with Peking and certainly not one with an anti-hegemony clause in it. But the Japanese, for their part, were annoyed by Gromyko's refusal to return to Japan the four islands in the southern Kurile chain that the Soviets had seized at the end of the war in 1945. Riled by Moscow's unwillingness to settle the long-standing quarrel, Japanese Premier Takeo Miki told Gromyko that Japan would sign the treaty with China "as soon as possible."

Miki's decision would have pleased Chou Enlai: one of his most important foreign policy aims had been to get Tokyo to tilt more closely toward Peking than Moscow. The treaty that Miki agreed to sign last week seemed to fulfill that goal.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.