China: SIX WHO RULE - AND REMEMBER

Though Chinese politics is forever a mystery to Westerners, one can make out its outlines. Supreme power lies in the six-man Standing Committee of the Politburo. The Politburo of 25 men is where politics shifts and simmers; below it is the 210-member Central Committee, where younger people, engineers, technicians, provincial party leaders voice the growing pressures from below. Outside them all is the army — wary, suspicious, slowly being subordinated by the Standing Committee to the government.

All decisions come to final judgment in the six-man Standing Committee, a band of old wartime veterans dominated by Deng Xiaoping. He does not hold China's highest titles (he is chairman of both the party and government military commissions), but there is no doubt that he is the "para mount leader." Deng is a tiny man (approximately 5 ft. tall), half elf, half gunman; at 79 he is China's foremost pragmatist and is engagingly candid. A brilliant youngster who graduated from high school at 15, he went off to France after World War I as a student. There he met Chou En-lai (of whom Deng said recently, "I regarded him as my elder brother"), joined the Communist movement, returned to China, led peasant insurrections in Guangxi and joined Mao Tse-tung for the Long March.

Chief political commissar of Mao's personal forces on the March, he went on to fight the war against the Japanese in the mountain province of Shanxi. In the "Liberation War" he rose to become political commissar of the revolutionary Second Field Army; he wound up both wars with a record of glory and rose to membership in the Standing Committee by 1956. With the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution, he was officially named the "No. 2 capitalist reader" in the party, after Liu Shaoqi. Accused of arrogance, gluttony and dissolute habits (addiction to bridge and mah-jongg), he was purged and paraded through the streets of Peking wearing a dunce cap. He was rusticated several times—to stoop labor in Jiangxi, later to serve meals at the mess of a party training camp outside Peking. But he bears larger scars of memory. During the Great Terror, one of his sons was forced to jump—or was pushed—from the fourth-story window of his student dormitory, and is now paralyzed from the waist down, a cripple for life. Deng is a reasonable man, also a hard man. He does not forget.

Oldest of the six-man group is Marshal Ye Jianying, 86. From the Communist uprising in Canton in 1927 to the coup against the Gang of Four in 1976, Ye was central. He now carries no official title, is ailing, will almost surely be replaced soon. He too bears wounds. His son, an aviator, was forced to stoop labor during the Terror. Overworked, exhausted, beaten, the son one night put his hand into the gears of a threshing machine; the hand was mangled. That son will never fly again. So Ye does not forget.

Next comes Li Xiannian, 78, also a war hero; he has now been named officially President of China. He too carries memories. During the Great Terror, mobbed by the Red Guards, he was saved only by Chou En-lai's intercession. How can you attack this man as a "capitalist roader," asked Chou, when he is in charge of our aid to Viet Nam, where we are fighting American imperialism?