purge those officials suspected of oppositionist tendencies. The members of these Maoist groups were partly selected from within the committees and partly sent out from headquarters in Peking.

This attempt at a Maoist takeover within the party, based on nothing but Mao's claim to ideological infallibility, did not, however, carry sufficient weight to dislodge the entrenched party opposition. It therefore had to be supplemented by Mao's group with a resort to outside force, namely, the

army.

Under the leadership of Lin Piao, the PLA has in recent years become Mao's main support. The 1959 purge of its leaders was far-reaching, encompassing not only P'eng Teh-huai and Huang K'o cheng but also the Army Inspector-General (Hsiao K'o), the head of the Political Department (Tang Cheng), the head of the rear services department (Huang Hsueh-chih), and over forty other leading military men. Further purges have since taken an additional toll of high-ranking army officers."

20

21

99 22

Since the early 1960's, the purged army has been held up as an example of revolutionary virtue for the entire nation to emulate. Mao himself proclaimed at a Central Committee meeting in 1962 that the PLA should serve as the model for cultivating the correct spirit of the revolution, and since early 1964 the party press and official statements have repeatedly emphasized that "the whole country must learn from the People's Liberation Army. This campaign was soon followed by concrete steps to extend military control. At the end of 1964 army officers were placed in political departments, in government ministries, in communications, in industries, in the People's Bank, and in educational institutions, for the avowed purpose of spreading the spirit of the PLA. Thus the army gained a strong foothold in crucial departments and agencies, to be used later in the battle for power.

The revolutionary spirit in the army itself was strengthened by the regulations of May 1965, which abolished titles and insignia of rank for officers. In the same year, according to an official announcement, "hundreds of thousands of distinguished recruits and basic-level cadres of the PLA were ad

20 For a partial listing of those purged, see Fei Ch'ing Yen Chiu (Taipei), July 31, 1966, pp. 32 ff.

21 Early this year Japanese press correspondents in Peking reported the appearance of wall posters attacking two of Communist China's most distinguished military figures-Marshals Ho Lung and Chu Teh-for having "plotted" against Mao. See The Evening Star (Washington, D. C.), Jan. 21, 1967, and The Washington Post, Jan. 20, 1967, p. 1.

22 E.g., Jen-min Jih-pao editorial, Feb. 1, 1964; Jen-min Shou Tse, pp. 522-47.

mitted into the party," and by the end of 1965 one-third of all army personnel were party members. In the army itself, the study of "Mao's thought" and indoctrination against "revisionism" continued to receive high priority. In SeptemberOctober 1965, young men recently "retired" from the army made their appearance in educational institutions. Of proper small-peasant origin, they enrolled as students, often with doubtful qualifications, and at the same time received minor jobs in the school administrations. These young students of army background later emerged as leaders of the student "work groups" which last summer established Red Guard units in educational institutions throughout the country.2*

In spite of these careful preparations, the first of the work groups, established on the Peking University campus on May 23, 1966, appears to have been a plant of the opposition and reportedly had to be removed through the personal intervention of Ch'en Po-ta, Chiang Ch'ing, and Chou En-lai. Only after the elimination of this false work group did the proper organizers establish a reliable Maoist student group which, on a signal from Radio Peking on June 2, attacked the president of the university and then went on to assail the Mayor of Peking and head of the Peking party committee, P'eng Chen, the first top-ranking Communist leader to fall victim to Mao's drive."

Before moving on from the initial purges of P'eng Chen, Lu Ting-yi and others to a general offensive to regain mastery of the entire CCP organization, Mao and his supporters seem to have felt that some formal party acceptance of the program of the Cultural Revolution was necessary. For this purpose the Central Committee was called into plenary session from August 1 to 12, 1966, and the events of the meeting provided further proof of the battle within the party. Of the full Central Committee membership, only 80 were present (47 regular members and 33 candidate members), with 101 absent (44 regular and 57 candidate members); and some of those attending seem to have been newly appointed by Mao's group without proper procedure. After eight days of deliberation, the Committee adopted a 16-point resolution outlining the further prosecution of the Cultural Revolution. From the officially published text of the resolution,

23 NCNA report from Peking, Jan. 1, 1966.

24 Information furnished the author by foreign educators who recently left Communist China after teaching in Chinese institutions.

25 Same source as above.

But if Mao found it extremely difficult to muster sufficient backing in the Central Committee to pass his resolution, he must have realized that it would be even more difficult to implement it through the use of the existing party machinery, where the opposition was widely entrenched. Hence a broader attack was now unleashed against the party organization itself. The instrument of this assault was the Red Guards, first formed by the student work groups and then organized, provided with uniforms, and directed in their general movements by the army. Chinese secondary schools and colleges had already been closed down since June 1966, and in August the students were told to join the Red Guards and "make revolution." Aside from the excitement of participating in a "Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution" that was to destroy all vestiges of the old order and introduce a new era, students from all parts of China were offered the added inducement of a trip to and holiday in Peking at public expense. In a series of rallies staged in Peking's vast Tien An Men square between August and December 1966, the necessary enthusiasm was whipped up among the millions of adolescent revolutionaries who, after their Peking holiday, were to be sent out to overcome the opposition in the regional and local party organizations and spread the Cultural Revolution throughout the land. The logistics of the vast flow of Red Guards to and from Peking, and of the mass demonstrations in Peking itself, were handled by the army.2

28

29

Throughout the country, however, the movement encountered resistance from the entrenched party bureaucracy. Moreover, the denunciations hurled by the Red Guards against many incumbent party leaders and officials, both national and local, opened the gates to popular expressions of discontent directed against Communist party policy altogether. Control broke down, some collectives were dissolved, communal property was privately distributed, and warehouses were looted. Local party leaders under Red Guard attack sought to regain the support of workers and farmers in their localities by increasing wages and distributing communal funds, and in turn were denounced by the Maoists for committing the sin of "economism." 30

Once the massive effort to purge the party of opposition elements was forced to a halt, a situation of near anarchy developed. By openly claiming Maoist victories over continued resistance in various parts of China, the news media in fact confirmed the confused and shifting status of the fighting. In December 1966, Mao's wife, Chiang Ch'ing, already second-in-command of the central group directing the Cultural Revolution, was designated Counselor of the Cultural Revolution Department of the PLA, which was to become more and more the final resort in the struggle for power. Amidst the mounting chaos, Chou En-lai tried on several occasions to counsel moderation in order to avert too great a disruption of the economic functioning of the country, repeatedly warning the Red Guards not to carry the struggle into the factories and the collective farms. These warnings, however, went unheeded, and the support found by the opposition among the factory workers and peasants-originally organized by the very opposition leaders now under Maoist attack-forced Mao's supporters to dissolve the existing Communist trade union organization and attempt to establish their own revolutionary workers' and peasants' organizations. The Cultural Revolution was extended to industry on December 9, and to collective farms on December 15, 1966.

26 Jen-min Jih-pao, Aug. 9, 1966.

27 Obtained from authoritative official sources in Tokyo. 28 Jen-min Jih-pao, Dec. 21, 1966, p. 1. According to the Peking Review (Dec. 2, 1966, p. 6), Mao was seen at these rallies by a total of more than 11 million Red Guards.

29 Of special interest in this connection is a Communist film, shown recently in Hong Kong, depicting the Red Guard rally in Peking on August 18, 1966. The film not only shows the mass hysteria generated by the rally, but also documents the military direction, formation and discipline of the Red Guards as they marched to and from the rally and paraded in review. The film also provides interesting glimpses of the Chinese leaders reviewing the parade from the balcony of the T'ien An Men. Mao appears greatly aged and strongly handicapped, seeming at times to be almost unaware of his surroundings. Besides showing the main speakers-Lin Piao, Ch'en Po-ta and Chou En-lai-the film briefly picks out Liu Shao-ch'i and Teng Hsiao-p'ing standing by with expressionless faces.

Situation and Outlook

In January and February 1967, Mao's group claimed to have gained the upper hand in Peking, Shanghai, and other major cities.31 In various places

30 E. g., see Peking Review, Jan. 20, 1967, pp. 12-14, and Jan. 27, 1967, pp. 5-6.

31 See ibid., Jan. 20, 1967, and Jen-min Jih-pao, Jan. 9, 11, 16, and 25, 1967.

experiments were attempted with new forms of communes and revolutionary councils to supplant the existing party and governmental structure, but in practice the Maoists proved incapable of replacing the experienced party administrators, many of whom continued to function on a day-to-day basis. In some regions, notably in western China, the Maoists lost control, and some of their Red Guard forces came under violent attack, the excesses of the Red Guards calling forth their counterpoint in what Mao's supporters denounced as a “white terror." In January the army was called in to back up Mao's drive, but the response of local army units was not uniformly loyal, military commanders in some areas even going so far as to defy their orders from Peking and intervene on the side of the existing authorities against the Maoists.32

By March there were signs of at least a temporary retreat by Mao's faction. Statements attributed to Mao and those around him virtually acknowledged that neither the Red Guards nor 1871 French-style communes (such as that set up at Shanghai) nor revolutionary councils had succeeded in replacing the party-government structure they had set out to destroy.33 Premier Chou En-lai, while skillfully maintaining his position close to the Maoist group, continued his efforts to restore a working political structure and to prevent the political chaos throughout China from further disrupting the economy. He was the key speaker at meetings held to organize “representative conferences" composed of representatives of workers, peasants, and Red Guards, which were to serve as a provisional replacement for the existing party committees pending the development of new revolutionary committees based on "three-way alliances" combining existing party officials of proven reliability with representatives of the PLA and of the new Maoist revolutionary organizations.34

Looking back over the course of events in Communist China since 1958, the present spectacle of madness and chaos appears as the natural climax

32 See, e. g. The Washington Post, Feb. 1, 1967, citing Peking radio reports claiming a Maoist victory over a dissident army group at the port city of Tsingtao, also reports of an "anti-government army rebellion" in the western Chinese province of Sinkiang, bordering on the Soviet Union. There have also been reports of army resistance to Maoist control in Tibet and Inner Mongolia.

33 See series of articles by Stanley Karnow, "Cultural Revolution in Perspective," in The Washington Post, March 2, 4, 5, and 6, 1967.

34 Se dispatches by David Oancia, Peking correspondent of the Toronto Globe and Mail, in The New York Times, March 28, 1967, and The Washington Post, April 1, 1967.

to Mao's losing battle to impose his brand of radical, utopian communism at home and to assert his claim to world Communist leadership abroad. Having built up his power in China as a trained Communist who knew better than his rivals how to achieve Communist ideological goals in the context of Chinese conditions, Mao eventually became a maverick in his own party and in the world Communist movement. In his last stand, he had to rely on his own sycophantic court clique, on his presumably loyal but politically ambitious followers in the army leadership, and on the excitable young members of the Red Guard, who represent the roughest elements of the adolescent and post-adolescent student youth.35 Against Mao stood some of the party's most seasoned leaders, men who had been his close associates through decades of revolutionary struggle, and who had sought after the Communist victory of 1949 to keep China on a reasonable course of socialist development but were forced by Mao's own scheming into a position of resistance that finally led to open conflict.

Mao's battle appears, then, as the desperate comeback attempt of an aging and mentally declining man who could not accept the loss of his real political power in China and the defeat of his grandiose ambitions for world Communist leadership. Rather, he would himself lead the attack to tear down the very structure of which he had been the chief architect. Even if his utopian schemes of Communist development at first seemed to produce results, they could scarcely support, in the long run, a working form of government, Communist or any other.

Most logically, Mao's eventual defeat at the hands of the opposition forces within the party would seem likely to lead to "de-Maoization" by the suc ceeding leadership in an effort to restore China's Communist system to a more normal and rational pattern. This way could very possibly result in China's reconciliation with Moscow and the rest of the Communist fraternity. On the other hand, Mao's attack against the party organization may have opened a fissure for the outpouring of a vast tide of popular discontent which, in conjunction with the fall of the idol, could conceivably turn against communism itself if, as in Hungary, an alternative leadership were to emerge from within. Then the present chaos may well have been but the first act of a larger crisis with far-reaching consequences for the future of China and of the world.

35 See China News Analysis (Hong Kong), No. 26, Nov. 11, 1966.