Word: helmsman
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...quartet, who apparently had been arrested on Oct. 7, were the "devils, demons and goblins who falsified Chairman Mao Tse-tung's directives and conspired to split the party"-obvious allusions to charges that the radicals had forged quotes from the late Great Helmsman and had tried to assassinate Hua Kuo-feng in a futile attempt to seize power...
Known collectively outside China as the "Shanghai Mafia," they had all come to political power as a result of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution of 1966-69; the four had enjoyed close access to Chairman Mao and promoted the most radical of the Great Helmsman's policies. Using their control over China's propaganda machinery, the radicals had constantly heated up the political atmosphere, unsparingly urging the masses to attack the "revisionists," the "capitalist readers," and other "ghosts and monsters" who, they said, were hiding in the very nooks and crannies of the Communist Party itself...
...first hints that a successor to Chairman Mao Tse-tung had been chosen came in a Hsinhua communique last week on the disposition of Mao's body. Capping a month of mourning, China's official news agency announced that the body of the Great Helmsman would be enshrined in a crystal sarcophagus in a mausoleum to be built in Peking. It was also noted that Mao's complete works would be prepared under the leadership of the Politburo, "headed by Comrade Hua Kuo-feng." It was the first time that Premier Hua had been referred...
Throughout China, the Great Helmsman was mourned much as he would probably have wished. While hundreds of thousands of Chinese-bureaucrats and party officials, generals, peasants, children-filed past Mao's bier in a somber, emotional ceremony at Peking's Great Hall of the People (see box next page), millions more paid their respects by following the official admonition to "turn grief into strength...
Peking. But the book keeps an appreciative eye out for ambiguity, as when the Great Helmsman personally calls a halt to the Red Guards' activity. In the students' fiery intransigence Mao must have seen embers of his own youth...