"Hundred Flowers," Part 2

Mao's heirs promise a thaw--but how warm, and for how long?

It was pure political theater, set in Peking's cavernous Great Hall of the People. All the votes were unanimous, all the speakers loudly applauded by the 3,497 delegates. The script for last week's National People's Congress, the body that theoretically serves as China's parliament, came courtesy of the all-powerful Communist Party Central Committee. The point the Central Committee wished to drive home: 18 months after Mao's death and the subsequent arrest of the radical Gang of Four. China's leadership has consolidated, and seeks, under "the great banner of Chairman Mao," to reverse the course Mao set in the chaotic Cultural Revolution. Instead of the old emphasis on "political purity" and total equality between workers and officials, the major theme of the eight-day congress, the first since Mao's death, was China's need for order and a "united front" in the struggle to modernize China.

That struggle will evidently continue to be led by Mao's relatively youthful (56) designated heir, Hua Kuo-feng, who is both Premier and Party Chairman. At week's end reports out of Peking said that Hua had been re-elected Premier, while Party Vice Chairman Yeh Chien-ying, 79, would also be China's equivalent to chief of state. Earlier, there had been speculation that the third member of the ruling troika, Vice Premier Teng Hsiao-p'ing, 73, the wily pragmatist who had been a leading victim of the Cultural Revolution, might get Hua's top job. But Teng was said to have announced that he did not want it. partly because of his age.

Still, much of the congress bore Teng's stamp. In his 3 1/2-hr. address, Chairman Hua stressed a favorite Teng program: the "four modernizations" of agriculture, industry, defense, and science and technology. And a draft of a new national constitution for China introduced by Yeh hinted at wage increases and other incentives for workers, which Mao had opposed. Since coming to power, the troika has given some 20 million workers their first pay raises in almost two decades (though average urban salaries still remain in the $20-to $30-a-month range).

Curiously, Yeh described the greater freedom that the new constitution will permit within China in terms that eerily echoed Mao's 1956 campaign "to let a hundred flowers bloom," an invitation rescinded when it produced unexpectedly virulent criticism of the government. Yet there have been many signs that the limited thaw the new regime has signaled is genuine. The new constitution would restore the so-called office of the procuracy, which before its abolition in 1975 was responsible for screening evidence before prosecutions could be brought. Before convicting an offender, said a finger-wagging article in the party journal Red Flag, "we must attach importance to evidence, investigations and studies." Meanwhile, some long-imprisoned dissidents have been freed, most notably Li Yi-che, jailed in 1974 for protesting a lack of "socialist democracy and legality" in the regime. Tellingly, that very phrase is now in vogue in Peking.

Many of the new directions seek to spur economic growth by encouraging higher productivity and renewed respect for China's educators and scientists. Teachers are now being told to spend nearly all their time in classroom work, rather than doing the manual labor so beloved by China's radicals. University entrance examinations, once scorned as "revisionist," have been reinstated. Some prominent victims of past ideological attacks have been restored to grace. Several hundred members of Shanghai's Academy of Sciences, who were once accused of being secret agents of Taiwan's Kuomintang, have been exonerated and told that slanderous files on their cases have been destroyed.

The thaw includes the arts as well.

The new constitution pledges fewer ideological restrictions on the arts and literature, which most Chinese will clearly welcome. When copies of a Chinese translation of Hamlet appeared in a shop on Peking's Wang Fu Ching Street recently, they attracted a queue of buyers that stretched 100 yds. Official journals have railed against "stereotyped writing" and "wornout themes," authorities are again permitting the old customs of ballad singing and storytelling, and movies like the anti-Japanese war film On the Sungari River, banned since the mid-1960s, can again be seen. In general, the Chinese press has gone to great lengths to portray the entire 17-year period before the Cultural Revolution as a kind of halcyon era, when life was normal and the old veteran bureaucrats were in charge.

Even so, official court notices posted last week proclaimed the execution of "counterrevolutionary elements" in Hangchow, and the campaign continues against associates of the Gang of Four. Nor has there been any softening of the regime's insistence that the U.S. abandon Taiwan (the issue is low on the Carter Administration's agenda while Congress considers the Panama Canal treaties and prepares for SALT). But U.S. diplomats took it as no more than a standard repetition of China's policy when Chairman Hua last week told the congress that the army "must make all the preparations necessary for the liberation of Taiwan."

Political rivalries may well remain at the top of the hierarchy. Many officials rocketed to prominence during the Cultural Revolution (among them: Secret Police Chief Wang Tung-hsing, Peking Mayor Wu Teh and even Chairman Hua), while others (like Teng Hsiao-p'ing) were purged. In the long run, and despite the talk in Peking of a "united front," there remains a possibility that a new power struggle will erupt between Hua's supporters and Teng's veteran technocrats.

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