Red China: Handwriting on the Wall

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What the opponents of Mao Tse-tung's Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution need these days is a stoutly enforced Post No Bills ordinance in Peking.

The "big-character" posters pasted on the city's walls first popped up five months ago as impromptu, crudely lettered marching orders for Mao's rabble-rousing young Red Guards. As China's power struggle has gathered ferocity, handwriting on the wall has developed into the fine art of big character assassination, purge by poster and partisan propagandizing. Every morning, foreign correspondents in Peking eagerly scan the walls for information notably unavailable in the Chinese press itself.

Last week was particularly rewarding for Peking poster watchers. On Mao's 73rd birthday there appeared, crying aloud, though presumably writ small, since it was 3,000 words in length, the "confession" of President Liu Shao-chi, Mao's principal antagonist in his effort to "purify" Chinese Communism. Liu's "self-criticism," a long-practiced art among Chinese Communists, traced a litany of "sins" reaching back to 1946.

Ideological Defect. The burden of Liu's self-denunciation turned on his "lack of understanding" and "miscalculation" of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution—in other words, his opposition to Mao. Now, he said, "I have decided to submit faithfully to the regulations of the party and not to be of two minds in party matters." It all sounded definitively abject—the words of a vanquished man.

But was it? The Red Guard introduction to the poster said that Liu had made his confession last October at a party caucus. And for all the Red Guard denunciations before and since, Liu is still President of China. The conclusion of Sinologists: Mao's opposition, including such "revisionists" as Party Secretary Teng Hsiao-ping, is still too powerfully entrenched in the party apparatus, still has too much of a following in the countryside to be summarily ousted.

The posting of Liu's confession seemed aimed at rousing public ire against him and strengthening Mao's hand. The next day, some 100,000 Red Guards poured into the Peking Workers' Athletic Hall for "A Rally for Thoroughly Criticizing Liu and Teng for Their Bourgeois Reactionary Lines." The youngsters boomed approval when speaker after speaker denounced Liu as "the Khrushchev of China," the "boss of the capitalist class," and warned that unless the Liu-Teng platforms were banished, "China itself might fade away." Clearly, the Guards were pressing for a showdown.