CHINA: Chairman Mao's New Revolution

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Odd Stuff. Cultural exchanges with capitalist countries have also come under bitter attack. Italian Director Michelangelo Antonioni, whose candid documentary on China has been showing round the world for more than a year, was vilified as "a buffoon" and "a gangster" in the Chinese press. His film's portrayal of some of the shoddier aspects of life in China represented, in the words of People's Daily, a resurgence of "reactionaries at home and abroad." In like fashion, Western music, reintroduced to China by the recent visits of three foreign orchestras, is now being termed "strange and odd stuff [that] reflects the comeback of the revisionist sinister line on literature and art."

So far, nobody knows who, beyond the ghosts of Lin Piao and Confucius, are the real targets of the new campaign. There is evidence, however, that the movement has already claimed one group of victims: the army. It was local military strongmen who finally put a halt to the radical excesses of the Cultural Revolution. But last month seven of the eleven powerful regional commanders were transferred from their comfortable, long-established headquarters and placed at the head of unfamiliar troops. The move astutely deprived them of their traditional power bases and thereby enhanced the authority of the central administration.

In the view of some China watchers, the shift away from pragmatic policies may in fact be an indirect attack on Chou Enlai. China watchers have long suspected a split between the moderate Premier and such leftist Politburo members as Wang Hung-wen and Yao Wenyuan. Yet in recent months Chou has seemed to shift more to the left. China's harder line in foreign policy, masterminded by Chou, is possibly an effort to undercut leftist criticism. At the Tenth Party Congress, some observers noted a new radical tone to Chou's pronouncements, and it was the Premier who apparently engineered the attack on Western music.

But even if there are conflicts within the top Chinese leadership, the events of last week did not yet add up to a major struggle for political control. Chou's position remained strong, if not unassailable. The best estimate of the uncertain situation was that the aging Mao, 80, was giving China a final infusion of revolutionary fervor in an effort to keep the nation from developing an entrenched, elitist bureaucracy.