Word: mao
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Then Lin and Mao created the Red Guards by the simple if shudder-making device of closing the high schools and universities of China indefinitely and turning the nation's youth loose on one long, glorious holiday of travel and excitement in the service of Mao. Lin's army helped organize the youth into coherent bands, equipped them with uniforms and badges, and sent them out to give their elders what-for in a lark whose attractiveness any teeny-bopper or Berkeley rebel would instantly recognize. Mao thus hoped to fire with revolutionary fervor the very generation that...
...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...
Even all that would hardly suffice to protect Liu if Mao had chosen to act quickly and decisively in a classic purge. But he did not, for Mao's purge is part and parcel of a far vaster dream that is contained in his Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. It is the romantic nostalgia of an aging revolutionary who wants to turn back the clock. Mao moved when he saw that China had begun to show signs of the same mellowing of aspirations, the same desire for material well-being above ideology, that to his horror he had watched overtake...
...Tape Recording. Mao chose the People's Liberation Army, as one instrument to spread the revolution, and put Defense Minister Lin Piao to work preparing it for its mission of spreading the gospel-and trying to ensure its loyalty, which is the key to much that happens in Red China. Always far more than a fighting machine, the P.L.A engages in everything from road and dam construction to social services to making propaganda movies. A year before the Revolution got under way, Lin abolished ranks in the P.L.A., a hint of how far back toward some vision of beneficent...