Word: mao
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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President Liu Shao-chi last week was depicted in wall cartoons as Don Quixote charging against Mao's teaching. Beside him, as Sancho Panza, rode Liu's chief ally against Mao, Party Secretary Teng Hsiao-ping. A less kind cartoon showed Liu as a barking dog being drowned under the sun of Mao's teachings, and Liu's wife was crudely caricatured as a prostitute. That catty note may well have been the inspiration of Mrs. Mao, who likes to go by her screen name of Chiang Ching, which she acquired as a grade...
...interim purge director, Chiang Ching uncorked a fresh villain, and one of the least likely: Mao's propaganda chief Tao Chu, who only five months ago was bumped up by Mao to No. 4 rank in the ruling hierarchy-trailing only Mao himself, Lin Piao and the durable Red Chinese Premier Chou Enlai. Until last week Ta' Chu had been one of the few certified Mao heroes of the revolution, providing much of the verbal firepower for the purge. But Chiang Ching denounced Tao Chu last week as a "bourgeois reactionary," one of the dirtiest epithets...
...thereby confusing everyone. Thus last week posters popped up demanding: "Burn Chou En-lai to death!" As fast as they went up, they were torn down and replaced with signs proclaiming that anyone against Chou ought to have "his head bashed in." Foreign Minister Chen Yi, considered a Mao man, was also attacked. When Reuters attempted to file a report of the attack on Chou, the Peking telegraph office refused to send it. Since the Red Chinese seldom censor anything that foreign reporters cable, Chou obviously has admirers somewhere. So Byzantine has the name calling become that last week...
...dare attack Mao Tse-tung in China today, however fierce the battle raging around him, is in itself a dangerously fanatic act. At 73, Mao is still the Sun God (as he is so often depicted, his face radiating fire in all directions), father figure and charismatic czar of Chinese Communism. Under the aegis of Mao's Cultural Revolution, some 110 million youths above the age of nine have been excused from school since last June, either to serve in the Red Guards or simply cavort around the countryside while studying Mao's writings and singing his praises...
Part of the Mao faction's difficulties no doubt turn on straightforward personal power politics. Until the purge began, Liu Shao-chi had long been ranked No. 2 behind Mao, and was his heir apparent. Like any politician, Liu surely resented Lin's vault into the position of dauphin-and is fighting to cut him back down to size. In such a battle, Liu commands considerable resources. Mao may have been the sun shining on Red Chinese Communism, but in the last two decades it was Liu who got down on the ground and cultivated the party apparatus...