Dislodging the Remnant Poison

And mopping up that old Gang of theirs

While Chairman Hua was cleaning up in Eastern Europe last week, his countrymen were having a little trouble with their own mop-up campaign back home. The press and radio--which normally tell only the good news--were reporting daily from the provinces that the long-running effort to wipe out the influence of the "Gang of Four" was encountering some unpleasant resistance. It was "shocking and intolerable," said one report, that a number of cadres had failed to root out all the allies of Mao Tsetung's wife Chiang Ch'ing and her cohorts. There were still some officials, declared one newspaper darkly, who insisted upon "exercising fascist dictatorship over the people."

All this, reported TIME Hong Kong Correspondent Richard Bernstein last week, served as a reminder that nearly two years after the fall of the radical Gang, a tough and sometimes even violent power struggle is still going on in hundreds of localities scattered throughout the vast territory of China.

Since 1976, thousands of once disgraced bureaucrats have been restored to their former positions, and many officials who assumed power during the Cultural Revolution have been cashiered. Chief among the restored officials is Vice Premier Teng Hsiao-p'ing, who has since presided over a dramatic revision of China's policies in education, science and technology. Now, Teng seems to be intensifying the attempt to dislodge the "remnant poison" of the old radical faction that has resisted the sweep toward moderation. Says one Hong Kong analyst: "There are still plenty of people sitting around in various places who did in other people in the past. Teng and his boys want to settle scores with them one by one."

The renewed public attention to "local tyrants" is one major indication of Teng's intentions. The Chinese press has accused some local leaders of acting like "patriarchs," "beating and cursing the masses" and even causing "unscrupulous arrests, deaths and disabilities." A document, issued last month by the Central Committee of the Communist Party, instructs local leaders to step up the criticisms of people who are trying to "keep the lid on" the anti-Gang movement. In Kwangtung, according to one broadcast, entrenched followers of the radicals infiltrated an investigation of their own affairs. The result was that evidence compiled on the local activities of the Gang of Four simply vanished. In other provinces--Liaoning, Honan, Shensi--there have been no top-level changes in a decade, which suggests that in those areas the officials who took power during the Cultural Revolution have been protected from the purge.

The Peking regime seems to suffer from an odd credibility problem occasioned by the cleanup campaign. The People's Daily has complained that many Chinese think an attack on the Gang of Four is really a criticism of the infallible Mao himself. Not so, says the newspaper. An assault on the Gang of Four is really a blow to protect the thought of Mao. Still, the paper has admitted that many people are "trembling with fright" over the prospect that they may be attacked by radicals in the future for harboring a "wrong attitude toward Chairman Mao."

Despite these problems, Teng's position is considered quite strong. "Teng has been moving very slowly," says one Hong Kong observer, "largely to hold together some sort of top-level unity. But gradually he's getting all his people on board." A few weeks ago, the entire former party secretariat of northeastern Heilungkiang province was rehabilitated en masse. More recently, there have been unconfirmed reports that former Peking Mayor P'eng Chen, a major victim of the Cultural Revolution, will be the next former villain to be restored to power. If so, Teng will have advanced one important step further in discrediting the radical legacy.

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