Filling Vacant Ranks

Workmen and bureaucrats labored feverishly for weeks in Peking, preparing the city for the arrival of the more than 2,000 delegates from all over the People's Republic of China who will attend the Tenth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party. The congress is expected to begin this week, though the secretive Chinese have made no public mention of it.

No gathering is quite like a congress of a ruling Communist Party. To Communists it represents the highest embodiment of their party's ideological and political wisdom. Like a legislature, it enacts statutes and elects the members of the ruling Central Committee and the powerful Politburo. Like an American political convention, it adopts what amounts to a platform listing the party's tasks and priorities. Like a revival meeting, it gives the local leaders who attend as delegates renewed enthusiasm and regenerated faith.

The conclave in Peking will be especially important. Although the ninth congress met only four years ago,* the party leadership and the government since then have suffered massive upheavals. In 1971 China's institutions had just begun to recover from the dislocations caused by the worst excesses of the Cultural Revolution when they were again shaken by the Lin Piao affair. Though he was Mao's heir designate, Lin, according to the official Peking version, attempted a coup against Mao. When his plot was discovered, he tried to escape to the U.S.S.R., but died when his plane mysteriously crashed deep inside Mongolia.

Lin's followers subsequently were purged from the thousands of posts they held in the government, party and military. This nearly paralyzed the bureaucracies, even at the highest levels. Of the 21-man Politburo, only eleven members are known to be active, and its five-man standing committee has only two functioning members, Mao and Premier Chou Enlai. This week's congress must fill those vacant ranks. It is also expected that for the first time Lin will be branded a traitor and right-wing opportunist (the party's worst sin). The congress will then have to adopt a new party constitution, one which no longer names Lin as Mao's successor. The congress must also provide some answers for crucial economic questions, such as how to increase food production, how much to stress industrialization at the expense of agriculture and to what degree China should open itself to dealings with the technology-rich West.

The sessions probably will be closed to the public. Nonetheless, when the congress adjourns, after a session that could last ten days, its published resolutions and the roster of the new Central Committee and Politburo will signal the direction in which China is heading.

* Much longer intervals have separated other recent congresses. The seventh was in 1945 and the eighth in 1956 (with a second session in 1958).

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