The Self-Bound Gulliver

RED CHINA

(See Cover)

"Communism is not love!" cried Mao Tse-tung. "Communism is a hammer we use to destroy our enemies!"

Mao, the somewhat enigmatic ruler of Red China, has certainly been flailing in all directions with his hammer of late, but nothing much has been destroyed. Even Nikita Khrushchev, Mao's most recent target, has emerged unscathed from Peking's incessant blows. The only thing Mao has done with his paper hammer is to fan new hatreds for himself and his Red regime.

Tiny Allies. Not too long ago, Red China had friends galore. Many of the underdeveloped nations of Asia, and colonial peoples everywhere, listened admiringly to Mao's boastful plans of a swift transition from poverty to plenty. The left wing in Western Europe and the U.S., disenchanted with Stalin's terror, saw Mao as a new and nobler architect of a peoples' socialism. In the United Nations, it seemed only a matter of time before rambunctious Afro-Asian votes overcame U.S. resistance to the idea of taking China's seat away from the Nationalists on Formosa and giving it to the Communist regime.

But Mao finds little sympathy anywhere in the world today. He has embroiled his hard-pressed country in simultaneous feuds with the U.S., the Soviet Union and India, the three most populous nations in the world after his own. In fact, he has plunged China into an isolation so complete that he can count as certain allies only tiny North Korea in Asia and even tinier Albania in Europe.

It seems like sheer lunacy for Mao to challenge the two greatest powers on earth at a time when China's industry and agriculture are still staggering from the disasters of the Great Leap Forward and before he has the armaments to engage in any large-scale contest. But it is entirely possible that Mao may have come to feel that the only way to break China's economic fetters, and still abide by his harsh ideological tenets, lies in a dramatic change in the international political order.

To that end he has emphasized both race and color in his attempt to win friends and alliances. Red China has always dreamed of one day employing Indonesia's oil, Thailand's rice, even Japan's technology, as fuel for a huge Asian alliance that could safely defy the West. And now Mao has been emphasizing color as a way to align the have-not nations of Asia and Africa against the West.

World's 90%. Fortunately, few Asian lands are in a mood to follow Red China. Japan is enjoying an industrial boom and an affluent life comparable to that of Western Europe. Formosa, with significant U.S. aid, has had successive fine harvests in contrast to mainland China, and boasts a battle-ready army of 400,000 men. The Philippines has a stable working democracy these days, and is forging close links with its fellow Malay nations. Malaysia, a state scheduled to be born this month, will federate Malaya, North Borneo, Singapore and Sarawak in an anti-Communist grouping. Indonesia is no more unstable than before. India, brought face-to-face with reality by Red China's 1962 assault, is rebuilding its army with the help of Russia, Britain and the U.S. Even the non-Communist states in trouble--South Korea, South Viet Nam and Burma--are in little danger of a Communist takeover.

Thus the rim of nations that surround the vast mainland of China is stronger economically and politically than ever before.

But Mao, the arrogant outcast, is seldom turned from a course of action because it may be difficult--either for him or his country. In his first major speech in six years, he denounced the "enslavement" of American Negroes, declared that he was "firmly convinced that, with the support of more than 90% of the earth's population, American Negroes will be victorious in their just struggle."

Wooing Brothers. Mao's minions have been beating the racial drum at huge pro-Negro rallies in major Chinese cities. In an 18-month period, 87 African delegations traveled to Peking, and red-carpet welcomes are given such visitors as Burundi's Queen Therese Kanyonga and Somalia's Prime Minister Abdirascid Scermarche. Chinese propagandists in Kenya are using the slogan: "We black brothers must unite!"

Red China is also wooing its yellow and brown brothers in the Asian Communist parties, with considerable success in Japan, Ceylon and, of all places, New Zealand. North Viet Nam's wispy leader, Ho Chi Minh, is ambiguous about his loyalties, but must reflect that Red China is next door while Russia is far away. Indonesia's Red chief, D. N. Aidit, walks a zigzag line, and Burma, typically, has two Communist factions--one for Mao, one for Khrushchev.

To Western eyes, Red China seems a Gulliver tied hand and foot by its own deficiencies. In Mao's dreams, China is a giant that first stood up when the Communists took power in 1949, and already towers militarily over the Lilliputian nations of Asia.

R Trouble. The view from Washington is at least consistent: it holds that, whatever the posture of the Chinese giant, Mao's regime legally does not exist. As for Moscow, it is employing against China the richly vituperative vocabulary built up in long years of excoriating imperialists, Trotskyites, deviationists and running dogs of fascism. The Russians called Mao a "foul liar" who is "trying to destroy the unity of the socialist camp" and charged the Red Chinese leaders with being "ready to sacrifice hundreds of millions of people in a nuclear conflict to establish world Communism." Peking trod just as heavily on Khrushchev's toe by asking who it was who "irresponsibly played with the lives of millions by recklessly introducing rockets into Cuba and then humiliatingly withdrawing them." What really outraged the Russians was Red China's presumption. Izvestia spluttered that in 1961 China equated its winning of the world championship in table tennis with the first Soviet manned space flight, and ridiculed Peking's claim that the multi-stage rocket carrier was a Chinese invention of the 9th century. The Russians added witheringly that the Chinese were even incapable of pronouncing the letter R and always said, "R-R-Revolution."

Pandas & Tigers. It would seem obvious that Mao Tse-tung has enough trouble at home without looking for it abroad. The Great Leap Forward, launched with such fanfare in 1958, was intended to bring quick success in 1) building a pure Communist state, and 2) making China over into a first-class world power. Instead, the Leap's frenzied mobilization of peasants into communes, the setting up of backyard blast furnaces, and the 24-hour-a-day speedup in the factories nearly wrecked the nation. Today, China's aging Red leadership (average age: 63) knows that it will never see the promised land, and that China must labor on for at least a quarter century--perhaps much longer --before accomplishing the second goal.

What manner of country and what sort of people must the Communists deal with in trying to accomplish their mission? China, of course, is enormous --14 times the size of Texas. It ex tends 2,400 miles from the banks of the Amur River in topmost Manchuria to the tropical jungle border with Viet Nam, and 2,500 miles across from the indented coast on the China Sea to the Kunlun Mountains deep in Central Asia. Inside this vast domain lies just about every variety of flora and fauna imaginable, from rollicking pandas to prowling tigers, from the invigorating ginseng root to groves of thin nanmu trees.

To its people, China simply means "Here." Since the days of prehistory, China has traditionally been a world in itself, separated from outside barbarians by the most perfect of physical barriers. On the east and south is the Pacific, the largest of oceans. To the west rises the highest plateau on earth. In the north stretch thousands of miles of desert; and here, to prevent repeated incursions of hard-riding nomads, Chinese emperors built the 1,500-mile Great Wall.

Rebellion's Home. Though united by an ancient culture, China has never been as monolithic as it looks. An east-west line drawn across the country between the valleys of the Yangtze and Yellow rivers divides North from South China. North of the line, summers are short and hot, winters long and bitterly cold, and the principal crops are wheat and millet. The men of North China are often as tall as Americans, relatively placid, ceremonial and--say the southerners--slow-thinking. South of the line, the climate is hot and humid, and the principal crop is rice. Broken up into valleys and small plains by innumerable mountain ranges, the South is the home of individualism, anarchy and mystical introspection. The short-statured southerners speak a multitude of dialects, are commercially enterprising and perennially rebellious--almost every Chinese revolution has originated in the South. Practically all Chinese citizens of the U.S. came originally from a small South China area near Canton called Toishan, which is today, curiously enough, known in China as "the home of volleyball."

Nation's Birthplace. China's 22 provinces baffle foreigners because so many of them sound alike (Honan, Hunan; Kiangsu, Kiangsi; Shansi, Shensi). Most typical of the northern provinces is perhaps Hopeh, which contains the capital city of Peking. From its rugged border with Manchuria, the province runs down in a shelving plain to the shallow Gulf of Chihli. Very few eminent Communists come from Hopeh or its neighboring province of Shansi, which is noted for sacred mountains and such spectacular cave temples as Yun Kang, where a mile-long cliff face has been chiseled into thousands of Buddhist images. Shensi is reverenced as the birthplace of the Chinese nation, and when the country was first unified by the Ch'in dynasty in 221 B.C., its capital was near present-day Sian.

South China is a much larger and more varied region than the north. The people of Kiangsi are the Scots of China and are said to be clannish, stingy and quarrelsome. They have had long experience of Communism and, presumably, few illusions, since the Chinese Soviet Republic was established there in 1931 and held out against the Nationalists until 1934, when Mao led what was left of his troops on the 8,000-mile Long March to Yenan in the north. Kiangsi's sound-alike neighbor, Kiangsu, had a reputation for voluptuousness and easy living. The Kiangsu city of Soochow was the Sybaris of old China, and prostitutes in all parts of the country tried to imitate the soft Soochow dialect with its musical, rounded vowels.

Land of Leaders. The fruit-rich province of Shantung, home of Confucius and his fellow sage Mencius, is inhabited by a sturdy peasantry that speaks a Mandarin dialect so harsh and unmelodic that Chinese say, "Better to quarrel with a man from Soochow than to converse civilly with a Shantungese." Beautiful Szechwan boasts that it grows enough food to feed five provinces, and it is filled with terraced hills, rivers, coal and valuable minerals. Anhwei contains the sugarloaf mountains and pinnacled rocks made famous by the misty paintings of Chinese artists.

To the Communists, the three most important provinces are the southern states of Hunan, Chekiang and Kwangtung, which produced most of today's Red leaders.*Mao Tse-tung was born near the capital city of Changsha, as was his No. 2 man, Liu Shao-chi. Other Red Hunanese: Labor Boss Li Lisan, Army Commanders Peng Teh-huai and Lo Jung-huan. Kwangtung, with its capital city of Canton, is the nerve center of South China. Its men have a reputation for pugnacity and business enterprise, its women for slim, almond-eyed beauty.

Way out West. Beyond China proper extend vast territories that were conquered centuries ago but often lightly held by the Chinese. The broad plains of Manchuria have become the three provinces of Kirin, Heilungkiang, and Liaoning. Shenyang, formerly known as Mukden, is the Pittsburgh of China, and its steel mills are within sight of the felt-covered tents of Manchu herds men, who are now outnumbered about 30 to 1 by Chinese immigrants.

At Inner Mongolia begins China's Far West, which almost exactly resembles that of the U.S.--prairie, desert and towering mountains--and is inhabited by the Chinese equivalent of American Indians, the Uighur, Kazakh and Khirghiz tribesmen, who are distinct in race and religion (Moslem) from their overlords. The tribesmen have repeatedly rebelled against all central governments and make no exception of the Communist regime.

Leap's Loss. No one can say with accuracy how many people live within China's borders. The Communists' 1953 census said 582 million. The Chinese Nationalists argue that this figure was too high; in fact, says the U.S. Census Bureau, it was far too low, and virtually all Western experts agree. In any case, the U.S. State Department believes that China's population in June of this year was somewhere in the neighborhood of 720 million.

This land and this people have now lived for 14 years under the rule of the Communists. The gains have been convulsive: schools built at the same frenzied pace as tractor plants; hospitals rushed up in provinces that had scarcely even seen a doctor; roads and railways thrown over gorges, through mountains and across deserts.

The pace was so fast and frenzied that it resulted in mismanagement and administrative lunacy to the extent that the Communists have lost China a good five years in its rebuilding, and the nation is now estimated to be just about where it was in 1957 in industry and crop production. Even in 1957, supplies were just barely sufficient for needs, and since that time, at least 70 million more Chinese have been born--and must be fed, clothed, housed and educated. Peking has dug into its slender cash reserves to buy wheat from abroad at a total cost of $782 million.

The quarrel with Russia has been equally damaging. When Soviet engineers and technicians were abruptly called home in 1960, they not only left many construction jobs incomplete but also took their blueprints with them. Peking finds spare parts for Soviet equipment hard to get, and must cannibalize some machines to keep others working. Many factories are now devoted to making spare parts instead of new items. Heavy industry has had to give way to light, and at least two railroad car plants are now turning out rubber-tired handcarts and wheelbarrows.

Iron Monuments. Agriculture is China's jugular vein, and the year's critical period is the winter crop harvest, which takes place in spring and early summer. Current estimates are that this year's crop will fluctuate around the 180-185 million tons of grain achieved last year--a good but not a sensationally good harvest.

The communes of the Great Leap exist no longer except on paper, and the countryside is dotted with rusting pillars of pig iron, melancholy memorials of the backyard furnaces that Mao thought would revitalize China. The typical farm unit now is a production team of 25 to 40 families, which are given considerable autonomy in deciding what and when to plant. Private plots were returned to the peasants in 1961, and are producing well for the free market. As usual, the Communists keep close watch: the stick comes down in the form of close regulation of the free market, and the carrot is dangled in the guarantees of slightly higher prices for crops sold to the state over and above the compulsory deliveries. In the past and in the foreseeable future, every harvest becomes a time of national breath holding. In a borderline economy, any improvement is immediately felt, and so is every decline.

Double Selves. But what most threat ens the regime is the squandered reserves of good will among millions of Chinese who had been impressed by the Communists' display of strength, incorruptibility and iron discipline. More than by physical labor, the Chinese have been worn out by mass brainwashing sessions, public-accusation meetings, collective confessions, and endless "struggle" conferences in which relays of Reds upbraid backsliders. As a result, harried citizens develop what one expert calls "double selves, an outer, superficial self that conforms to Communist demands, and an inner, moral self that remains hidden."

But in general, rigid discipline fell away with the collapse of the Great Leap, and food rations were increased to appease a restive citizenry. More recently, a new campaign has been instituted to stamp out apathy. It is a more sophisticated project. These days no one urges the citizenry to collect flies in matchboxes; the cry is: Fight waste, fight corruption, fight privilege.

Nice to Mothers. Some of the trappings of the new propaganda campaign are weird. In recent months, newspapers and magazines have rejoiced over the behavior of the "good 8th Company on Nanking Road," an army detachment on garrison duty in the heart of wicked Shanghai. These heroes have preserved their Communist purity for 14 long years in the face of innumerable temptations by bourgeois capitalist devils. When "professional loafers" tried to bribe them with wads of banknotes, the money was spurned; when "overdressed women accosted them on the street, the soldiers ordered them away." One soldier found a penny and promptly turned it over to the company's political instructor, who explained to the others: "One cent is almost nothing, but if he had kept it, he would have a shady spot in his heart."

Even more edifying is the case of 22-year-old Lei Feng, a squad leader in an army transport company stationed in Manchuria. In the bad old days, his father was buried alive by the Japanese, his two brothers starved to death, and his mother hanged herself after being raped by a landlord. In the good new days, Lei Feng was always helping old ladies across streets, buying railway tickets for mothers who had lost theirs, rushing out to do volunteer work on dikes and canals, and digging with his fingers when his shovel broke. Lei Feng died last year in an accident but, fortunately for the propagandists, left behind a 200,000-word diary filled with such sentiments as "I think my purpose in life is to work for a better life for others," and, "I am all for the Party, Socialism and Communism."

Hailed as the ideal Communist, Lei Feng is intended to be the model for Chinese youth who have trouble identifying with the grizzled veterans of the Long March and the Civil War. In the past year, at least 40 books have been written about Lei Feng, and 1,000 storytellers roam the villages enthralling illiterate peasants with his exploits and his love of Mao.

The regime's leadership set an example of Lei Feng-like solidarity last July after Vice Premier Teng Hsiao-ping failed in his effort in Moscow to end the Sino-Soviet split. When Teng returned to Peking, he was met at the airport by an unprecedented welcoming committee consisting of Mao Tse-tung and virtually every other top official not ill or on out-of-town assignment.

Collecting Coupons. If Lei Feng represents the mythical young Chinese, what is the reality like? One answer came last week from a U.S. turncoat, Belgian-born Albert Belhomme, a former G.I. who had defected to China after the Korean War. After ten years in China, Belhomme and two other U.S. defectors, Lowell Skinner and Scott Rush, became disillusioned and were allowed to leave the country.

Belhomme says the average wage at the paper factory in Tsinan where he was employed was about $18 a month. Single workers lived in dormitories with four bunks to a room, families in one-room apartments in blocks of brick flats. During lunch breaks at the factory, Belhomme recalls, workers "talked mostly about food, how to get food, and prices." When an office worker referred to the Communist cadres as "golden boys," his reward was a trip to a "labor-education camp," and then to jail. On his return, he was reemployed, but as a common laborer.

In China today, food is plentiful in some areas, scarce in others. So it is with items such as cloth. Last year, when the cloth ration in Canton was only 1 1/2 feet per person annually, it was 7 feet in Tsinan. To buy commodities, workers needed coupons as well as money: one coupon, plus the necessary cash price, got a small cooking pot. Each citizen also received a ticket for two bars of toilet soap a year, and one of laundry soap per month, and there were ration cards for cooking oil, flour, sugar and sweets. The meat ration in Tsinan is currently three ounces a month, and grain is 37 pounds for men doing "medium-heavy" work. (Most towns also have free markets, at which food is available off ration at high prices.) Says Belhomme: "People are not hungry today, but they are definitely not full."

The grimness and scarcity of life in China is sometimes brightened by exploits testifying to the ingenuity and dogged work of its citizens. Canada's Dr. Wilder Penfield, one of the world's top neurosurgeons, returned last week from Red China and told of a University of Shanghai medical team that built a heart-lung machine from scratch in 18 months. When they tested it with dogs, the animals died of air bubbles in the heart. The Chinese went back to work, guided only by articles in medical journals, and three years later came up with a far better machine which has now been used in 60 successful open-heart surgical cases.

Planned Blessings. China's future depends largely upon the pillars of the party: the army and the students. From all three must come the skills and dedi cation needed to deal with the staggering problems posed by overpopulation and underproduction. At the top of the pyramid is Chairman Mao Tse-tung, whom the party acknowledges to be omnipotent and incapable of mistakes. The people are endlessly told that Mao is the sun, the lodestar, the living Buddha, and he is said to be far greater "than the empty, hypocritical and negative Jesus Christ." Peasants are taught to sing:

The sun is rising in the east.

China has brought forth a Mao Tsetimg.

He plans blessings for the people.

Aiyayao, he is the peoples' great savior!

Whatever the propaganda, Mao has worked for more than 30 years with the other six members of the Standing Committee of the 19-man Politburo without an internal bloodbath--a record unmatched by any other modern tyranny, Communist or Fascist. Among this band of brothers, dissent is possible--you may lose your job but not your head. Economic Chief Chen Yun opposed Mao's Great Leap and it only cost him a temporary fall from power. The other five committeemen are Heir Apparent Liu Shao-chi (TIME, Oct. 12, 1959), Premier Chou En-lai (TIME, May 10, 1954), Defense Minister Lin Piao, Vice Premier Teng Hsiao-ping and Congress Chairman Chu Teh.

Unhappy Generals. The People's Liberation Army--now 2,600,000 strong--is by far the most impressive product of Red China, but there is evidence of dissatisfaction at the top and bottom of the army. Among the generals, those having a guerrilla mentality conflict with the professionals, who argue that to obtain the supplies needed by a modern army, China must cooperate closely with the Soviet Union. Defense Minister Peng Teh-huai, leading spokesman for the professionals, was dismissed from his post in 1959, but remains a member of the Communist Central Committee. The Sino-Soviet split seriously hampers the air force (3,000 planes, half of them old-fashioned MIG-15 fighters), which has been dependent on Russia for aircraft, jet fuel and spare parts. The split with Moscow doubtless upset many high-ranking officers, and last May the party launched one of the biggest of its periodic cleansings of the armed forces. Nineteen new army regulations were announced. Their aim was to "place the army under absolute party leadership and to guarantee that the army will advance victoriously in line with the directives of Party Chairman Mao Tse-tung."

Peking Posters. Red China's educational system is based on promotion of the best students and work for the rest--often as "cultured peasants" to raise the intellectual level in the villages. These luckless students and their families hate the whole business, and the Communist press is campaigning to make ex-students "gladly" accept their work assignments. One paper recently heaped glory on the college students who smirked scarcely at all when one old grad came back to take a job on the campus--cleaning the toilets.

The schools have become a casualty of the Great Leap. In 1961-62, enrollment was cut 20%, and then cut another 20% the following year. This is a dangerous business, for it was student disaffection that made the Communists' task all the easier in their final big push against the Kuomintang. Communism's problem, at this moment of industrial slowdown, is that there is a shortage of technical and managerial jobs, not of educated people.

The Communist Party has viewed the students with considerable suspicion ever since the period of the Hundred Flowers, when student manifestoes and posters denouncing government excesses were slapped on every space available. Some tattered bits of these inflammatory posters still cling to the walls and ceilings at Peking University, which has an enrollment of 100,000. Among the thousands of Chinese refugees pouring into Hong Kong in the past year and a half, there has been a small trickle of engineers and intellectuals, former believers who are now disillusioned. They are not party members, and the number is not large; the significance lies in the fact that it is the first time such Communist-educated intellectuals have been fleeing Red China.

Sheaf of Secrets. The Sino-Soviet ex changes are reaching such a point of bitterness that in earlier and simpler times, both nations would have been mobilizing their armies. Yet, for all the intemperateness of its language, Peking has been notably cautious about getting deeply involved beyond Red China's own frontiers--in line with the Red Chinese axiom, "Despise the enemy strategically, but respect him tactically." The West got an inside look at Red China's perspective on great-power conflicts back in 1961, when U.S. agents obtained possession of a 40,000-word sheaf of secret bulletins that had been issued to officers by the General Political Affairs Department of Red China's army. In one bulletin, Laos was described as an imperialist cork to keep Chinese influence out of Southeast Asia.

With typical self-concern, the Chinese called Laos the "focus" of the "world wide anti-imperialist struggle," although, for the Russians, Berlin was far more vital. But Peking welcomed the cease-fire ordered by the Geneva agreements. Partly, this was in line with their traditional formula of fight a little, talk a little. The captured documents disclosed the military tie-up with the 1961 spring of despair at home, when Red China faced internal uprisings, widespread food shortages, and morale problems in the army itself. Soldiers grumbled at conditions in the villages, complaining that "at present, what the farmers eat is even worse than what dogs eat," and charging "village cadres with beating and scolding people just as in the old society." Peking wanted no additional trouble in Laos.

Where's the Bomb? Another reason for Chinese caution was the gloomy conviction that Moscow would with hold help. Warned a Communist general, "If there is a war within three to five years, we will have to rely on the weapons we now have." Today the weapons China most desperately wants --nuclear warheads--are nowhere in sight. Peking is so bitter about Moscow's reneging on its 1957 agreement to help create a Red Chinese atom bomb that it has broadcast details of the Russian about-face. Chinese physicists are now believed to be two to three years away from detonating a nuclear blast, farther still from what the experts call a "significant capability." But work proceeds on the project, for Peking hopes that achievement of nuclear status, however primitive, will gain prestige among the underdeveloped millions on earth whose respect--and alliance--the Red Chinese are out to win.

The noise from Peking showed no sign of diminishing, and continued to fascinate the non-Communist world with fresh tales of old skeletons in Communist closets. In one announcement, Red China took full credit for forcing a weak-kneed Khrushchev ("who had decided to abandon Socialist Hungary to counterrevolution") to send Russian tanks into Budapest and crush the 1956 uprising. Peking radio also made an unprecedented reference to important factional disputes within the top ranks of the Chinese Communist Party. Khrushchev was accused of openly voicing support for "antiparty elements" in China. Western experts believe the Chinese "elements" Khrushchev was supporting were military men who opposed the growing Sino-Soviet split, most likely former Defense Minister Peng Teh-huai and his Deputy, Huang Ke-cheng. Khrushchev is additionally charged with trying to sell Peking on a "two Chinas" plan as a means of settling Mao's quarrel with Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek.

Peking radio also confirmed earlier reports that Russia was stirring up the Kazakh tribesmen in Sinkiang against their Chinese masters. Only last year, Red China charged, Russia had lured some 10,000 Kazakhs in Sinkiang into crossing the border into Soviet Kazakhstan. Despite repeated protest from Peking, Russia refused to give back the Kazakhs because of "humanitarianism" --a pretext that China clearly regarded as ludicrous.

Whether or not Red China succeeds in its great design to be leader of an Afro-Asian-Latin American alliance, Mao Tse-tung will not be around to see the result. At 69, Mao now needs help in walking. He disappears for long stretches, reportedly to meditate in his navilion facing lovely West Lake in Hangchow. No one really knows why he gave up the Chairmanship of the government in 1958 after one term in office. Perhaps it was to devote more time to his key job as head of the party. Or was he preparing an orderly transition for his successor?

So deep is the cleavage between China and the Soviet Union that it could hardly be resolved except by the death or disappearance of either Mao or Khrushchev. But, after Mao, who? The immediate successor is almost certain to be Liu Shao-chi. the party's No. 2 man. After that, it is anyone's guess. Comments a China expert: "From the outside, one can see the forces that must, or should be, coming to grips in the arena of China's internal power struggle. But we can only see these forces intellectually and, I repeat, from the outside. We can't translate them into real developments or individuals within China."

Waiting in the wings are the young and middle-aged party leaders--pragmatic technicians rather than fanatic dogmatists--who have been frustrated during the years of Old Guard rule. Mao and the veterans of the Long March have suffered few deaths. But a series of state funerals is obviously and actuarially, in the cards. China's future, and that of world Communism, clearly depends on which emergent Chinese Communists will carry the coffins.

*As well as most of Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek's unseated Kuomintang chiefs.

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