Word: cantons
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...simply slapping the Cantonese in line with his impressive credentials. Rising to speak during one of his first appearances in the city, T'ao modestly confessed he had just arrived and had little experience in Cantonese affairs. But, he said, seizing on his own introduction, experience wouldn't solve Canton's problems. It was class standpoint that had to be improved. He urged-here was the clincher-that all the lower level cadres criticize those superiors who had protected landlords...
...proceeded to slice away the local leaders' power bases. He leveled one charge after another at the assistants and proteges of top Cantoneses leaders, then gently coaxed their bosses to publish self-criticism and accept higher party posts outside the Canton area. Though T'ao waited months after taking command before promoting himself to the area's top party position, he soon had trusted deputies in all the sensitive local posts and governed Canton unchallenged...
...Guards were beginning to engulf the country. Vogel tells how T'ao frantically telephoned his deputies in Canton, urging them to save their necks by organizing compliant, home grown Red Guards. Leftists in Peking, getting wind of this, sent swarms of Red Guards from the north into Canton. In a matter of weeks they smashed T'ao's organization, just as, 15 years before, he and his men from the north had pushed out the local Cantonese leaders...
With T'ao purged and his well-oiled machine in Canton torn apart, the Cantonese in 1968 seemed forced to start all over again, as they had in 1949, to build a party apparatus, increase production, and figure out how their city, along with all the other torn, bloodied parts of China, might fit back into one whole. They faced this long haul, Vogel says, "with less optimism. less idealism, and less willingness to sacrifice," yet with "more wisdom and experience...
...farms to work off their frustrations. China remains a tense nation, but Vogel predicts events will move along paths laid down in the 1950's. The coming generation of Cantonese, he says, will slip back into the centralized system, almost as smoothly as the Pearl River slides past the Canton docks and into the South China...