Word: mao
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Counterattack. With thousands of workers pouring into Peking from the nay-saying cities, the capital was poised for trouble. Radio Moscow claimed that the situation threatened to paralyze Peking's factories and rail communications. Wall posters (see box) reported one incident in which anti-Mao mobs stormed the cabinet building and "bloody clashes ensued." Premier Chou En-lai addressed a group of railway men, urging that service be restored; he also complained that Railways Minister Lu Cheng-tsao had been held captive by the workers for five days...
Shanghai, China's richest and most important industrial city, was so firmly in anti-Mao forces' hands that Peking published and broadcast an open letter to Shanghai's citizens urging them to rise up against the "bourgeois reactionaries" bucking Mao. The anti-Maoists were accused of organizing workers into Red Militia Brigades as an answer to the Red Guards, of encouraging labor to stop production and go to Peking to protest against the Cultural Revolution. Putting "not politics but bank notes in command," railed Peking, the anti-Maoists used their control of local party funds to raise...
Changed Struggle. In Canton, reported travelers arriving in nearby Hong Kong, street fighting between Red Guards and workers was waged with iron pipes, clubs and bamboo poles. Anti-Mao posters by the dozens were spotted throughout the city, and the municipal gas, water and electric plants were all but shut down by strikes. Anti-Mao leaders in the Taching oil fields stopped production and sent 10,000 of Taching's work force to Peking to foment trouble...
...poster. It is full of the exaggeration and hyperbole typified by the 8th century Chinese poet Li Po's description of a bearded sage as "a man with a strand of hair 3,000 yards long." In the same vein, Red Guard posters have blithely advocated that Mao's enemies be "burned at the stake," recounted tongues and ears being torn off in street fighting and reviled Mrs. Liu Shao-chi one week as a "common prostitute" and the next, somewhat bewilderingly, as "priggish...
...Maoist postermakers have developed a shorthand of invective in the war of words. One favorite reference is to a "dog in the water," meaning an enemy who has been brought down but should be finished off to avoid all risks of a future comeback. "Black gangsters" are anti-Mao intellectuals, whose output is likely to be "poisonous weeds." Enemies of Mao who do not quite qualify as intellectuals are labeled "ghosts and monsters" who follow the "black line." The difficulty of distinguishing friendly from unfriendly posters, especially when nearly all invoke the blessing of Mao for their point of view...