World: More Violent than Imagined

Getting hard news out of Red China is tougher than pulling dragons' teeth. Since Hong Kong's China-watchers must normally settle for secondary sources—newspapers, radio, returning visitors—they tend to keep their conclusions conservative. In recent weeks, however, the China-watchers have had some evidence that the disorders sweeping many parts of China have probably been worse than anyone outside China imagined.

One main indication of this has been the grisly flotsam of bodies floating down the flood-swollen Pearl River to Hong Kong and Macao (TIME, July 5). The number by last week had reached 66, most of them tied and mangled. Last week the China-watchers got another indication of the state of affairs in side China when a batch of newspaper photographs reached Hong Kong from Wuchow, a river-trade city in the Kwangsi region of South China. Although blurred and faded, the pictures provided the first photographic proof of the recent ravages caused by factional fighting.

Appearing in a paper printed by the United Command, a relatively conservative Red Guard faction, the pictures showed burned-out buildings, debris-littered streets and general devastation in Wuchow. The accompanying text shrilly blamed the destruction on a radical faction. The radicals' newspaper, printed at about the same time, blames the damage on the conservatives and claims that the fierce fighting reduced more than 2,000 buildings to rubble, left 40,000 residents homeless and killed hundreds.

Because pictures of that sort are hardly ever available, China-watchers have usually regarded long, itemized reports of destruction with some skepticism and merely talked about "widespread violence." Armed with new proof of terror and destruction, they have seriously started re-examining whether, in their efforts to report the situation accurately, they have not underestimated the extent of violence and bloodshed in Mao's China.