The Press: The Voice of Red China

The paper is a colossal bore. Turgid editorials crawl on, column after column; leaden propaganda handouts in the form of "news" stories weigh down the front page. But in Communist China, nearly everyone who is anyone reads the People's Daily of Peking—and for good reason. As the official organ of both party and government. the eight-page daily (circ. 700,000) is handbook and scripture to right-thinking Chinese Reds.

Last week People's Daily celebrated the tenth anniversary of its birth in 1948 in Yenan, whence the Communist leaders had launched their grab for all China. Today the paper employs 500 card-carrying newsmen, has just moved into a gleaming new Peking building equipped with eight gleaming new presses from East Germany, and can claim some of the most devoted readers in the world. Issues are posted at city intersections, read aloud down on the farm, devoured top to bottom and right to left by jailed counter-revolutionaries taking the cure, and spelled out by Asiatic nomads who will walk many a mile for the camel that brings in their copies.

Tract & Polemic. People's Daily, largest and most widely circulated journal ever published in China, is edited by shy, chain-smoking Wu Leng-hsi. who reportedly lost an eye fighting during the civil war. Wu is also director of the government's Hsinhua News Agency ("the ear and mouth of the Party. Government and People"), which is closely allied to People's Daily, has 31 bureaus in China and 23 overseas, e.g.. Geneva. London, Paris, but not the U.S.

Since both People's Daily and Hsinhua (also known as the New China News Agency) are directly responsible to the party's propaganda department. Editor Wu gives his readers their three cents' worth of tract and polemic. Major party decisions are announced in customarily unsigned editorials, e.g., last month's blast at "deviationist" Yugoslavia. On occasion, People's Daily even carries punditry under the most imposing bylines in the nation: Premier Chou En-lai and Party Chairman Mao Tse-tung.

To ease the ennui of story after story on agriculture reform and steel production, People's Daily offers no sports page, no comics, no Peking Tom gossipists. Instead, the paper prints letters from readers complaining about such matters as the size of bicycles ("I am 4 ft. 10 in. tall, and I've been waiting for a suitably sized bicycle for years"), and leaky fountain pens exported to Russia ("The consequences could be bad''). Occasionally, someone will attack a minor partyman. Item: an 'official named Kuo Pei-cheng was accused of keeping a 14-year-old girl up until midnight "so that he could help her with her own private five-year plan."