Back to the Cave!
(See Cover)
The great upheaval defied analysis. Day after day, as Red China's latest convulsion swept the nation, reason dissipated itself in the mad mobs and red banners that festooned the broad boulevards of Peking. There seemed to be no pattern to the shouted slogans, no rhythm to the dialectical drums. That Red China was undergoing a convulsion of historic proportion could not be doubted. Beneath the tremors, a few simple facts were apparent: -- Mao Tse-tung is still his nation's leader and a vigorous one at that. -- Mao's army is the chosen vehicle of a sweeping change he has decided to impose on his 750 million people. -- Mao's anointed heir and chief instrument, Defense Minister Lin Piao,*59, has emerged as the redeemer of the revolution.
Beyond those basic facts, the West could see no more than the Chinese fireworks ignited by Mao's fulminating Red Guards, who since last month have been everywhere imposing a new discipline, a new austerity and a new concept that amount to a do-it-yourself revolution.
Tears of Joy. What it might mean to China's friends or China's neighbors--from Moscow to Washington--was a matter of grave concern. The world's oldest continuous civilization has al ways proved an enigma to the rest of the world. In its current hysteria, China remains a puzzlement. The pieces of the puzzle began to fall into place last week in the nation's streets.
There, the Red Guards were running riot. Into a Canton barbershop burst a squad of Red Guards, accusing the barbers of using "capitalist-smelling" pomade. The barbers struck back, and two teen-age Guards fell, slashed to death. In a Peking side street, a woman wept as her neighbor was led away--but she was weeping for joy. The old man had once hired her for the humiliating duty of wet-nursing his children.
To compound the nightmare, the Red Guards were striking at many of the things that the Chinese have always respected. Buddhist shrines were defaced; schools were ordered closed for six months (to revise curriculums along purely Maoist lines). Respect for womanhood and religion was forcibly forgotten. Into British-controlled Hong Kong came eight victims: exhausted Franciscan nuns, one of whom died after being thrown onto a wheelbarrow and harshly trundled across the border.
Even Communists were not sacrosanct. A pair of East German army officers were dragged from their cars and knocked about like so many imperialists. The offense was severe enough to draw a stiff protest from Pankow--one of many objections from Communist countries to China's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Even Cuba's Fidel Castro, no believer in gentle Communism, denounced the Peking paranoids. "It is a sad circumstance," lamented a Havana editorial, "that the People's Republic of China has given the enemies of socialism cause for laughing and taunting." Russia weighed in with its own protest after Red Guards halted and humiliated the Soviet charge d'affaires by holding a portrait of Mao in front of him.
In its present sophistication, Moscow may be as shocked as any by such ridiculous decrees as the Red Guard demand that troops no longer pass a reviewing stand with a reactionary eyes right but adopt a properly revolutionary eyes left. The Red Guards even suggested that gold lettering be banned as crassly "capitalist." Henceforth, they ordered, all signs, inscriptions and customarily white traffic-cop batons must be rendered in red. All books not reflecting Mao-think should be burned; recordings of works by such "feudal-bourgeois-revisionist" composers as Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Shostakovich and Tchaikovsky must be banned. Also on the condemned list: taxicabs, toy wristwatches, sunglasses--and even happiness. A Mukden candy shop was ordered to drop the word happiness from its name, in keeping with the new austerity.
Pathologically Worried. What does Mao's latest purge signify? Has Red China finally been driven mad by the mounting U.S. military pressure in Viet Nam? Will a human wave of Chinese soldiers suddenly cascade into Southeast Asia as it did into Korea 16 years ago? Or does the uproar reflect nothing more than an internal struggle for party leadership? No one can be certain. Is the work of the Red Guards just a buildup to another announcement of a disastrous harvest? Elements of all these speculations seemed to be at work in Peking's purge.
To the Japanese, who only 30 years ago underwent Asia's most violent experience in totalitarian insanity, Peking's ravings raise uncomfortable memories of the hijoji (extraordinary times) used by Tojo as an excuse to lead Japan into war against the West. Indians--who have had reason to fear Red Chinese aggression ever since the Himalayan campaign of 1962--are more than usually worried. Even North Korea, to whose "rescue" Red China came in 1950, has backed away from Peking in recent weeks, quite possibly in fear of involvement in some suicidal Red Chinese military adventure.
That fear is understandable, for China without doubt is pathologically concerned about the state of its revolution.
Seventeen years in power have not won for Mao the ultimate goals he strives for. Yet, by all accounts, the Chinese people are sick of struggle and ready to settle for a less-than-glittering future; what they want is rest and contentment. Mao Tse-tung sees in Russia the seeds of his own downfall: a Red revolution that, thanks to that same contentment and economic success, shows signs of evolving into a bourgeois society. To an old fighter whose victories were forged in hardship, it is an utterly unacceptable prospect. Hence the current Chinese purge.
Sick or Secluded? With Monday morning hindsight, China-watchers now date the beginnings of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution back to 1963, when a worried Mao instituted his "Socialist Education Movement" in an attempt to get the Chinese psychology back on the revolutionary tracks. Somewhere along the line, possibly at the secret Central Committee plenum of September 1965, he decided stronger doses of Mao-think were needed.
Late last year, he vanished from sight, raising speculation that he was either ill or in seclusion with his problems. The world did not realize it, but the army was being prepared as the vehicle of the new revolution, and only in the last few months has that role come clear.
High party officials began to fall from power: Peking Party Boss Peng Chen; the capital's Deputy Mayor Wu Han; Army Chief of Staff Lo Jui-ching; Culture Minister Lu Ting-yi. Most of the party purge victims were latecomers to Maoism (only Lo and Lu were on the Long March).
On the other hand, the men who rose to power over these bodies were all outsiders to the central party organization: Tao Chu, 60, fanatical head of the Central-South regional bureau, who assumed control of the propaganda apparatus; Chen Pota, 62, Mao's longtime ghostwriter, who now bosses the Red Guards; Lin Piao himself, who, though a Politburo member since 1950, has never been deeply involved in the party machinery.
Other victims were the usual intellectuals and teachers, whose mortality rate has always been high in China: Ho Luting, president of the Shanghai Musical College and composer of The East Is Red; Philosopher Feng Ting of Peking University; Opera Singer Chou Hsin-fang (rumored to have committed suicide). Even President Liu Shao-chi, 68, who had long been listed as Mao's most likely successor, was dropped from his No. 2 spot to a distant eighth in the succession ratings. Events reached a climax at last month's secret Central Committee meeting, from which Lin emerged even more clearly as Mao's chief lieutenant.
Birth of a Tiger Cat. The rise of Lin Piao to the penultimate rung on the Peking ladder of power is itself the story of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. No one in his native Hupeh province would have expected him to become a guerrilla leader 19 years after he was born in Twisting Dragon Hill, the son of a felt-factory owner. In Manchu China, boys would be soldiers: off to Canton's Whampoa Military Academy went Lin, where he studied under Chiang Kaishek, in the company of such revolutionary notables as Chou
Enlai, now China's Premier, and North Viet Nam's Ho Chi Minh.
At Whampoa, he changed his name from Yu-Yung (Fostering Demeanor) to Piao (Tiger Cat). With that, he sprang into the field, and by the late 1920s, he was a regimental commander for the puritanical Communist General Chu Teh, whose political officer was a plump, moonfaced youngster named Chen Yi, now Peking's Foreign Minister. Many of Chu's 40,000 troops were armed with bows and arrows, and his artillery consisted of hollow logs loaded with rocks and scrap metal. The troopers sang Chinese versions of Dixie and raided Nationalist camps on feast days in order to get food. But when Chu's forces joined up with the neighboring Red bands of a guerrilla leader named Mao Tse-tung, Lin was exposed to a guerrilla technique that was later to make Mao famous.
"The Six-Legged Enemy." But for all Mao's guerrilla teachings, Chiang Kai-shek's superior Kuomintang forces drove the Reds out of populous South China, and thus began the legendary Long March--a year-long hegira of some 7,000 miles over seven mountain ranges to the remote fastness of Shensi province in the northwest. Lin commanded the vanguard of the 90,000 Red marchers, forging ahead personally on donkeyback in search of edible herbs and grasses. Riddled with illness and strafed by Kuomintang aircraft, Lin's van still managed to break through the ranks of the "six-legged enemy" (Chiang's cavalry) when the Long Marchers hit the plains of Kansu province, then spearheaded the crossing of the Tatu River, a major achievement. Only a third of the force survived.
Ensconced in the ancient caves of Yenan, dug into the loess foothills of the Liang Mountains, the Chinese Reds began to recoup their losses and regain their strength. Then, with the Japanese pressing south from Manchuria, the stage was set for a rapprochement between the Communists and the Nationalists. Now a division commander, Lin made his debut against the Japanese the high point of his military career: at dawn on Sept. 25, 1937, Lin's men ambushed the Japanese Itagaki Division in the shadow of the Great Wall. The defeat is still recalled with awe in the bars of the Ginza, where former Japanese officers recognize Lin as a master tactician.
"Let Them Eat Kaoliang!" By 1946, Lin's tactical target was the northeast of China, where the Japanese had built up a thriving industrial base during World War II. The Russians, who had pounced like vultures at war's end, were busily dismantling the best of the Japanese factories when Lin and his 150,000 men arrived, but Lin sent cadres into the countryside with the order: "Take off your leather shoes, lay down your office bags, put on the clothes of the peasants, and eat kaoliang [the coarse sorghum of Manchuria]." The lessons of Yenan were being applied.
Lin's seven columns soon isolated the Nationalists in their cities and drew them out for costly battles that chewed up whole divisions without gaining ground for either side. Bled and battered, the Nationalist-held cities began to fall: by October 1948, Lin's forces held Mukden, Changchun and the Liaotung Peninsula, and had killed or captured 400,000 of Chiang's troops (including 36 generals replete with their arsenals). Then, advancing an average of six miles a day, Lin struck out for Peking, which fell 1"5 weeks later.
Within the year, Lin and fellow Red army marshals--Liu Po-cheng ("The One-Eyed Dragon"), Chen Yi and Peng Teh-huai--had captured all of China, and the grand guerrilla mystique of Mao had proved victorious over the enemy, which outnumbered the Reds 2 to 1. Then, like some ghostly hero whose legends demand his presence only in times of great crisis, Lin Piao dropped from prominence.
Instant Utopia? The initial postconquest period was a happy time for Chairman Mao. Russian aid was pouring in, Moscow had promised to share its nuclear and aerospace technology with Peking, and the Chinese economy --despite the painful commitment in Korea--was slowly coming to life. But while the Russians were giving China aid and advice, they could not provide the kind of capital investment that Mao required for the instant Utopia he had in mind. Mao decided to strike out for Utopia on his own, and in 1957 the Great Leap Forward was born.
Starting with that winter and running on until June 1958, more than 100 million Chinese peasants were turned loose on sheer faith and Mao-think: back yard steel furnaces flared, fields were zealously plowed 44 ft. deep--far too deep for good yields--crops were harvested too early, and roads were jammed by Chinese scurrying to and from tasks that all too frequently proved futile. "The Leap set China back a decade," says Economist Albert Eckstein.
Ignominious Queues. The failure of the Great Leap Forward damaged the Communist Party's image in China more severely than any military defeat could have done. "Grey markets" flourished throughout the country; factory workers and farmers cooled it on the job; queues more ignominious than those worn by Manchu peasants formed before the depleted food shops of Shanghai, Canton, Mukden and Peking. Thousands of unemployed Chinese workers became hei jen (black people), who shuttled from city to farm to town and back to city, holding a job illegally here, living off relatives there. On the cultural level, cynicism set in, and the Marxist ideals that Mao had so fruitfully nurtured with his puritanism during the civil war began to look as shoddy and reprehensible as anything in the past.
In Peking, Mao and his minions seemed hardly aware of the depths of the national disillusion. It was not until the wife of Red China's President Liu Shao-chi visited villages disguised as a housewife that Mao learned how desperate things really were. Mao himself took off on a series of unannounced visits to communes and countryside. He came back to the capital convinced that China was bound up in a "spontaneous tendency to capitalism." So Mao set out to recharge that revolution, and as his starting battery he chose the man whose legend and luck expressed the entire history of the Chinese Communist movement: Lin Piao.
Lin won this honor through fanatical and unmatched loyalty to Mao. As early as 1959, he had proved himself by revamping the vehicle that Mao needed to carry his revolution to completion. First step: beefing up the army's General Political Department, which became in effect the command center not only for all political activities in the army but, more important, for all army conducted and inspired activities in the "civilian" world as well. Next Lin strengthened the party organization within the ranks--each army squad received a party ideologue, each platoon a "small group," each company a party branch committee. The committees re ported directly to the local hsien (county) party apparatus wherever the military unit happened to be stationed. Thus not only was the army thoroughly infiltrated by the party, but control of the party apparatus within the army lay in nonmilitary hands.
Numbers Game. To inculcate his troops with the proper Maoist spirit, Lin and his cadres concocted a mystifying mumbo jumbo of numerical rules under which troops were evaluated not on the basis of military skills but by such measuring sticks as the Maoist "three-eight style" (firm and correct political orientation, a style of plain hard work, flexibility in strategy and tactics--all set against a background of unity, keenness, seriousness and animation). Soldiers were urged to "think of sweetness" and to guide their thinking with "two remembrances and three investigations." The important thing was to be "Red," not "expert."
Apparently the numbers game worked. The New China News Agency solemnly reported a vivid example in 1963 when an army division was assigned to rebuild the Peking International Airport to jet-age standards. Horrified by the realization that he possessed neither the technical background nor the manpower for the job, the division commander ordered his troops to reread the works of Mao. After a day or two of meditation and reading, the division finished the job in jig time.
The most widely publicized example of army endeavor has been the development of the Taching oilfields in Manchuria. Taching, which produces nearly a third of China's oil, was first a laboratory and then a testing ground for the Mao-Lin theory of development. An army political cadre began moving in to Taching in 1962 and today supplies every last drilling team with a political instructor. Fortunately for Mao-think, Taching's oil reserves lie at very shallow depths, and many economists believe Taching ultimately may make China independent of the outside world for petroleum supplies.
Ubiquity v. Mobility. By last year, Lin had so thoroughly shaped the military mind to party principles that he was able to abolish all ranks and counsel soldiers to address one another as "com rade." For all its egalitarianism, the People's Liberation Army remains one of the world's most formidable fighting forces. Its 2,500,000 men are organized into some 155 divisions, of which fully 130 are combat-troop divisions. Its weaponry, which has improved considerably since the Korean War, is excellent for close-range combat, and the new Chinese family of assault rifles and machine guns has proved topnotch in its baptism of fire on the fields of Viet Nam. Infantry divisions have little organic artillery, though they pack plenty of light mortars, recoilless rifles and 75-mm. howitzers. Because China lacks trucks, the P.L.A.--with only 15% to 20% of the motor capacity of the U.S. Army--is best geared to fight in rugged terrain, where transport is not as important as endurance. The Chinese "move very well on foot and make maximum use of pack animals," says a U.S. military observer, "and they substitute ubiquity for our mobility."
The disposition of Lin's army is essentially defensive, with troops stationed at the points where China's leaders fear assault. The two biggest troop concentrations, totaling 800,000 men, are in the industrial northeast--around the Manchurian factory complexes and facing the Soviet border--and on the Great Plains between the Yellow and Yangtze rivers. Some 600,000 more troops are stacked up like nice neat boxes along the eastern coast from Kiangsu to Kwangtung province, with a 200,000-man bulge directly across from Formosa. Surprisingly enough, there are no more than 200,000 soldiers along the entire southern rim of China, including the borders with Viet Nam and Laos. Of the 50,000 Chinese troops in North Viet Nam, the bulk are cadre and support troops; no major combat units are stationed outside Chi na proper.
Scaring the Neighbors. China's air force and navy remain minuscule and primitive by big-power standards. Of the 2,600 military aircraft in China, only 300 are bombers (light, short-range Ilyushin 28s, at that), and modern fighter planes are in even shorter supply. China has only one squadron of MIG-21s (probably twelve or 15 aircraft), the only planes that can stand up to American fighters. The plague of China's air force is a shortage of fuel, which forces it to fly at only 70% of its normal operational capacity. As with the army, there has been no significant buildup of aircraft in the south. The navy is purely defensive.
A sharp debate rages among China-watchers on the question of Red China's nuclear and rocket capability. The main point of contention is whether or not the crude nuclear devices that three times in the past two years have boomed over Lop Nor in the Takla Makan Desert are deliverable atomic bombs.
One school argues that an IL-28 could easily deliver the latest nuclear test devices, while a second school believes that the Chinese are working to bypass the bomber stage and are pouring their energies into producing rocket-deliverable hydrogen warheads. Though U.S. Defense Secretary Robert McNamara maintains that the Chinese will not have a functioning ICBM until 1975, many Hong Kong China-watchers believe that Peking will have full-fledged ICBM thermonuclear capability by 1970 or 1971. "They're never going to be able to challenge the U.S. or the Soviets in a nuclear shoot-out," says one, "but within a few years they're going to have enough on the shelf--and sufficient means to deliver it--to scare hell out of a lot of neighbors."
Adventurism. Scaring is really all that China is capable of at this stage in its economic development. The fragile fabric of its economy is regarded by many China-watchers as the principal brake on Peking's adventurism. As usual, the problem is in agriculture, where 85% of the Chinese population is employed, and once again this year the old demons of drought in the north and flood in the south have cut severely into farm production. As a result, Peking will be forced to import about 5,000,000 tons of wheat from the West during 1966--a "foreign" influence that should drive the Red Guards wild with frustration. The cost of that wheat (probably about $430 million) will cut painfully into funds that Mao & Co. badly need as investment capital. Industrial production accounts for a scant 15% of China's annual $70 to $80 billion gross national product, and unless the industrial base is broadened, China can never hope to become the world power that Mao desires it to be.
Since the disaster of the Great Leap Forward, Chinese agriculture and industry have concentrated on rebuilding themselves and are finally approaching the strength they had the pre-Leap year of 1957. Rice is still rationed, but the average Chinese today rarely goes hungry. One would think Red China had learned its economic lesson.
Yet all the signs point to an attempt at bringing off another Great Leap--this time under the direction of Lin Piao and the army.
People as Tools. Party editorials have begun to use the phrase New Leap, and one theory about the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is that it is a precursor to that move. This time, Western economists feel, there will be less emphasis on such absurd innovations as backyard steel furnaces and more on employing China's vast population--at once the nation's greatest strength and greatest weakness--as an economic tool. Under the New Leap, farm workers will be moved to factories during the nonharvesting and nonplanting periods, then shifted back to the farms when crops need tending. Mao and Lin Piao apparently feel that the interchangeability of skills--on which the whole Leap could founder--is not a serious problem. If the labor force can be made multiskilled by political indoctrination, they may be right. But it remains to be seen if the new breed of worker-farmer that the leadership envisions will put up with the wrenching dislocations of home and family that the New Leap will require.
On the Hook. Amidst the rage and ambition churned up by the Cultural Revolution, China remains true to the four basic objectives of its foreign policy: 1) to lessen U.S. power and prestige in Asia and thereby reduce American pressure on China, 2) to forge a new and militant Communist bloc with Pe king as its leader, 3) to become the dominant power in Asian affairs and (hereby one of the world's three great powers (along with the U.S. and Russia), 4) to prove that wars of liberation can be fought victoriously anywhere. Says one U.S. diplomat: "China is engaged in a holy crusade to establish credibility before the rest of the world. In that respect, we're both hung on the same hook in Viet Nam."
If China is to achieve its objectives, it must achieve victory in Viet Nam. Already Peking has suffered considerably by its failure to produce victory in Southeast Asia: North Korea and the once-pro-Peking Japanese Communist Party declared themselves "neutral"' in the Red ideological war last month; Indonesia has shattered the Peking-Djakarta axis; Chinese inroads in Africa and Latin America have been marred by the clumsiest diplomacy of modern times. In Asia today, Peking can count on the support of only a few Communist parties, such as those of Ceylon, Burma and New Zealand.
Much of the damage to China's position has been done by Mao's inflexibility. The puritanism and self-hypnosis that were born on the Long March and nurtured in the caves of Yenan have become an obsession. Aging and ailing, Mao now insists on seeing his philosophy through to final victory--or final defeat. Like all revolutions, China's has reached a point of critical decision. Should it forge ahead with fanatical zeal or yield to creeping conservatism? Just as the French Revolution attempted to rejuvenate itself through successive waves of terror and the Stalin period of the Russian Revolution tried to find new inspiration through purges and mass hysteria, Mao is attempting the same thing through the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. But sheer will power, even when wielded by men as fanatically dedicated as Mao Tse-tung and Lin Piao, rarely wins out over the historical thrust of a people and culture as strong as China's. The raucous voices of the Red Guards could well be the death rattle of a revolution.
*Behind whose portrait on TIME'S cover rears the Chinese ideogram for the number 2.
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