Word: mao
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Those PLA units intervening on Mao's side in the struggle are currently trying to calm everyone down. Some guard factories, others hand out leaflets urging opponents of Chairman Mao's "Cultural Revolution" to give up. Such passive support may be enough. If it isn't if the opposition becomes stronger, young men in the PLA may be ordered to quell resistance in their own villages, or even worse, among rebel PLA units...
Such clashes would severely test all the remarkable devices Mao and Defense Minister Lin Piao have developed in the last seven years to tighten their political grip on the military. Since Lin became Defense Minister in 1959 he has tried to turn the PLA into a "Great School" of Maoist thought. He and Mao disapproved of the 1950's soldier, whose mind was directed toward tactics more than politics. The two of them could, with more justification than the Pentagon, use as their slogan for the 1960's: "Join the NEW Army." It is possible, from the scattered evidence...
Those who do get in receive rigorous physical and intellectual training. An enlisted man will find army drill difficult and intense, and boisterous ping pong matches after dinner no less exhausting. In the evening he reads or studies with a small group the works of Mao Tse-tung. Several of the shorter essays have to be memorized, especially those that describe the communist soldier's duties--obey the Party, love the People. That means, he learns, return what you borrow, do favors for the peasants, don't mistreat their daughters...
...polo in Peking during the Boxer Rebellion; a throne-room sequence shows the last Manchu ruler, the depraved Empress Dowager Tzu Hsi. There are shots of Sun Yat-sen's founding of the Kuomintang, and of his 1925 funeral; and there is a portrait of 33-year-old Mao the next year, already glowing eerily with fanaticism. The impressive wedding ceremony of Sun's Wellesley-trained sister-in-law to his heir, Chiang, is followed by Mao and Chiang on screen together, toasting each other at the 1945 truce conference arranged by U.S. Ambassador Patrick Hurley...
...omnipresent picture is death -by warlord's broadsword or Japanese bombardment, by starvation or, simply, "in gusts of senseless cruelty." The end result is shown in the present generation of young girls caroling: "Last night I dreamed of Chairman Mao." Teddy White also sees visions of the Commu nist revolutionary he remembers from the 1930s and 1940s. A film of Mao to day comes into view while the voice-over narrates: "His aging mind still lusts for permanent strife; the theme he preaches to old and young alike is hate...