No Questions, Please

Among the traditional Chinese sayings Mao Tse-tung likes to quote is the one about a fool: "He lifted the rock only to crush his feet." Last week, in a rare display of defensiveness, Chairman Mao was busily reassuring his subjects that hehad not dropped the rocky island of Quemoy on his toes.

Apparently even Red China's disciplined masses had found the sudden shifts in Peking's Quemoy policy too much to swallow. Only two months ago millions of Chinese students and workers were whipped into a synthetic fenzy of rage at "U.S. invasion" of Quemoy and the other offshore islands (TIME. Sept. 22). Scarcely had these demonstrations reached the proper pitch of hysteria when Peking did an about-face, proclaimed first a cease-fire and then its present senseless policy of shelling Quemoy only on alternate days, as if to show that if Red China could not take the islands, it could kill innocent people on them at will. "Some Communists may not yet understand this," conceded a government directive which Western experts thought bore the markings of having been written by Mao himself. But, added the directive. "You will understand after a while, comrades."

To make sure the comrades did understand. China's propaganda mills last week ground out a selected anthology of Mao's speeches and writings over the past 18 years entitled, "Imperialists and All Reactionaries Are Paper Tigers." Its gist: U.S. military superiority over Red China will ultimately prove as transient as did that of the Japanese and the Nationalist Chinese.

Nowhere in Mao's reflections was there any direct reference to Quemoy, but the thousands of "study groups" convened to discuss the new publication were quick to get the point. "Under the brilliant leadership of Chairman Mao," proclaimed a military school teacher, "we have gone from victory to victory. So long as we hold aloft the Red banner of Chairman Mao in ideology, we shall always triumph." In other words: don't ask questions; Mao has always been right before, and he must have something up his sleeve this time.

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