Purges on the Left

Spring came to Peking last week, bringing crocuses to the Imperial Pal ace gardens and Mao-jacketed revolutionaries back into the streets. After a long and severe winter, the city echoed again to the feet of 100,000 mass marchers, who tromped around for two days straight chanting insults at the lat est round of "ambitious right-wingers" -- the term invariably used against the enemies of Chairman Mao Tse-tung. This time, there was one significant change. The targets of the taunts, far from being right-wingers, were three top lieutenants of Lin Piao, China's leftist Defense Minister and the heir designate of the 74-year-old Mao.

The three, all of whom were removed from their posts, were important men indeed: General Yang Chengwu, who as acting chief of the general staff had been second only to Lin Piao in the military hierarchy; General Yu Li-chin, the political commissar of China's air force; and General Fu Chung-pi, commander of the army's vital Peking garrison. All three had taken an active part in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that has been tearing China apart, and all three were appointed to their jobs by Lin Piao.

Their fall from grace indicates that Mao and Lin are under mounting pressure from the regime's comparative moderates, who want to get China back on course after the excesses of the Cultural Revolution. Chief among them is Premier Chou Enlai, a pragmatist who holds no truck with the Cultural Revolution and himself barely escaped the Red Guards' condemnation. Chou recognizes the practical necessity of compromise to hold China's 750 million people together.

To help the chances of compromise, he demanded the removal of the military leaders who had egged on the Red Guards to their excesses. To the astonishment of professional Sinologists, he was joined by Mao's wife Chiang Ching, who surfaced last week after a two-month "rest" to denounce Lin's purged officers as "counterrevolutionary, double-faced, rightist conspirators." The army's new chief of staff will be General Huang Yung-sheng, 62, who, as commander of the Canton military region, had constantly maneuvered to oppose the Red Guards.

Bugged Flowerpots. Mao has not, of course, given up his campaign to overthrow President Liu Shao-chi, the "pro-Moscow revisionist" who remains his most powerful foe. In the Kwangsi region last week, a Maoist tabloid accused one party loyalist of "bugging" flowerpots and sofas in Mao's headquarters "to procure information for China's Khrushchev"--Liu. In Peking, police forced the President's daughter to give public testimony against her father, then arrested her because her criticism was "insufficient."

At the moment, however, the party seems less concerned with persecuting Liu than with ridding itself of the extreme leftists in its military establishment. Party wall posters now hint that Public Security Minister Hsieh Fu-chih, another Lin Piao loyalist, may lose his job. And the official New China News Agency, covering a reception for 10,000 army officers given last week by Map, made it clear that many of those invited would soon become victims of the purge. The agency found only ten of the officers secure enough in their jobs to be mentioned by name, whereas in the past it had seldom listed fewer than 100.

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