Word: peach
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Once again, music was the focus of ideological attack in China last week. This time, however, the object of scorn was not such decadent bourgeois composers as Beethoven and Schubert, but a Chinese opera with the ponderous title Three Ascents Up Peach Mountain. Performed in Peking in January, the new opera initially provoked nobody's wrath. But now People's Daily has castigated it as an "outrageous attack" on Mao Tse-tung's revolutionary philosophy. The party organ charged that Peach Mountain was a remake of a 1966 opera that ignored class struggle while promoting the Confucianist...
Unquestionably, the castigations of Peach Mountain were related to the anti-Confucius, anti-Lin Piao campaign that has been unfolding in China during recent months (TIME, Feb. 18). But it also raised a larger question that has puzzled China watchers since the movement began: Just who is in charge...
Nonetheless, it is clear that some powerful figures within the Chinese leadership are violating Chou's dicta. To some experts, the attack on Peach Mountain contains oblique, invidious references to Chou. They point out that the opera was sponsored by the Cultural Group of the State Council headed by the Premier. Yet even if Chou is not the "someone" who carefully concocted this "foul, poisonous weed"-as People's Daily nicely put it-the appearance of the denunciation at a time when he is trying to tone down the new movement suggests that some rather complex political maneuvers...
...like St. Michael's casting down of Satan and the rebel angels has an epic amplitude: the heavens part in a frill of white clouds, and from it the archangel plunges down to drive his spear into the seven-headed Beast; the coiling rush and flutter of his peach-colored robe is full of an ecstatic energy that belies the flat, heraldic space...
...Kennedy Administration created the Peace Corps based on the same concept as the Alliance for Progress--it was to be an alternative to political change to appease the lower classes of Third World countries. The personal ethics of a Peach Corps volunteer, however, are not always identical to those of the politicians who created it. As an individual, the volunteer can make an effective contribution to social change...