Chopping Off the "Rat's Tail"

New purges reinforce Teng's power

For several months, wall posters in China's capital have been attacking Peking Mayor Wu Teh--most significantly as the RAT'S TAIL OF THE GANG OF FOUR. That menacing epithet suggested that the mayor would soon follow Chiang Ch'ing, Chairman Mao Tse-tung's widow, and her radical Gang of Four into political disgrace. Last week the writing on the wall was confirmed when Wu, 68, was replaced by Lin Hu-chia, the mayor of Tientsin. Although Wu will retain his seat in the 23-man ruling Politburo, Chinese officials said that he will be sent to a special "cadre school," one of the reform camps for ideologically wayward leaders, there to spend long hours studying Mao and Lenin and laboring in the fields.

Wu's ouster was a stunning victory for Vice Premier Teng Hsiao-p'ing, 74, who has emerged as China's major policymaker since his return to power last year. Bitter over the obloquy and humiliation heaped upon him during the Cultural Revolution, Teng has been purging the party ranks of officials who rose to prominence in those turbulent times. Chief among his targets have been those, like Wu, who attacked Teng personally, even forcing him to parade through the streets of Peking wearing a dunce cap.

Even after Premier Chou En-lai had helped to reinstate Teng, making him a Deputy Premier in 1973, Wu was among the officials who continued to oppose him. In 1976, when Teng was deposed a second time, for supposedly having fomented riots in Peking's T'ien An Men Square, Wu made a serious mistake. The mayor branded Teng a "capitalist roader," one of the worst insults in the Communist Chinese lexicon. After Teng made his sensational second comeback some 15 months ago, even attempts to save Wu by some key Politburo leaders failed to protect the mayor from the Vice Premier's vengeance.

Teng has survived to see his once scorned pragmatic economic program adopted as state policy. At the same time, thousands of provincial party leaders have been purged as co-conspirators of the Gang of Four, and Teng loyalists who had been ousted by the gang have been rehabilitated. In one huge demonstration in Shensi province last month, 741 people who had been branded by the radicals as a "black den of spies" were welcomed back to the party fold. Two weeks ago Teng stage-managed the removal of Tseng Shao-shan as first party secretary of industrial Liaoning province in northeastern China.

"There's an inexorable quality to Teng's way of operating," says one Hong Kong Sinologist. "He patiently isolates and weakens his enemies and then, when the moment is right, he gets rid of them altogether." Analysts believe that the Vice Premier's power grab worries Chairman Hua, who has been attempting to keep the purges from splitting the party leadership into pro-and anti-Teng factions. The fact that Wu lingers on in the Politburo suggests that Hua has somehow worked out a face-saving compromise -- allowing Teng his vengeance while preventing bloodshed from weakening party unity.

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