CHINA: Chairman Mao's New Revolution

To struggle is to advance. Not to struggle is to retrogress, to collapse, to go revisionist.

To witnesses of the Cultural Revolution that racked China from 1966 to 1969, the evangelistic tone of those words from a Peking radio broadcast last week had an ominous significance. After years of relative moderation, the country seemed on the brink of yet another convulsive turn leftward.

Hints that China was embarked on a new cycle of radicalism began appearing at the same time as last August's Tenth Party Congress. In typically arcane fashion, the campaign started with what seemed to be an academic argument over the failings of Confucius. He was criticized in party publications for wanting to restore slavery in China 2,500 years ago. Then the campaign was broadened by linking Confucius to former Defense Minister Lin Piao who died after an anti-Mao coup attempt in 1971. Lin, like Confucius, was charged with trying to restore a discarded system, in his case capitalism. The campaign continued at a comparatively low level until last week, when it suddenly blossomed into a full-scale movement.

For the first time in five years there were announcements of "mobilization rallies" of the masses to denounce the sins of China's two new "monsters and demons." A wall poster, charging Lin Piao with revisionist thinking, appeared on the docks in Shanghai, and for three nights running Peking television showed huge new screens being set up at Peking University; they obviously would soon carry their own slogans supporting the new campaign. For two days last week the entire front page of People's Daily was devoted to a formal announcement of "a mass movement initiated and personally led by our great leader Chairman Mao." "The drums of battle are rolling and the cannons are loudly roaring," echoed a Shanghai broadcast. "The struggle between those who want to go forward and those who want to go backward still exists."

Rising Chorus. As at the start of the Cultural Revolution, the new campaign has been accompanied by a rising chorus of charges against ideological backsliding. Examinations in schools were criticized for being revisionist and favoring the children of cadres and former bourgeois. One radio broadcast from Hunan charged that "class enemies" were "enticing young people to read pornographic books and periodicals" in an effort "to poison the masses."

The campaign seemed to be affecting China's foreign policy. Observers have noted that since Secretary of State Kissinger's visit to Peking last November there has been virtually no further movement toward the normalization of Sino-U.S. relations. The head of the Chinese liaison office in the U.S. has been gone from Washington for three months.

In Peking, foreign residents worried about rising xenophobia; distrust of foreigners was also one of the aspects of the Cultural Revolution. They already have cause to be concerned. Last week a sullen crowd of Chinese hauled two French residents of Peking off to the local militia station after they aimed their cameras at women shoveling snow. The Frenchmen had been mistaken for "Soviet spies," police explained after releasing them.