The Madame Mao Melodrama

...However, by 1956 he started to express disillusionment with his Russian partners...

...Yet China is far from a superpower—as was pointed out recently by two qualified observers who visited the country, President-elect Carter's energy adviser, James Schles-inger, and New York Times military correspondent Drew Middleton...

...The behemoth portraits, the incantations of Chairman Says, the magic wand of the Little Red Book—all contributed to making Mao a living god...

...Last Ootober 6, shortly before the one-month mourning period for Mao was to end, Chiang, her three major confederates and dozens of their immediate followers—including the late Chairman's nephew, Mao Yuan-hsin—were arrested in Peking by the new Premier, Hua Kuo-feng...

...The favorite slogans were: "We have broken through the barrier of scientific superstition," and "One day is equal to 20 years...

...Their opponents have also held them up to ridicule for living lavishly...

...For days there was no official announcement of the arrests...

...In the economic area, they should be able to spur growth by an injection of incentives...

...The Red Guards, having served their purpose, were sent to labor camps and frontier farms...

...Thus the virtual abolition of the commune system, and allowing peasants who tilled "private plots" on their own time to sell the produce in "open markets," increased agricultural production...

...In addition, troops were deployed toward Shanghai, the clique's power center, and Mukden, the political base of Mao's nephew...

...to go along with the Chinese balancing act...

...In a huff, Mao launched the bizarre Great Leap Forward...

...The Cultural Revolution, in short, was getting out of hand...

...International trade will probably increase, but because China's limited foreign exchange is needed for capital goods, food imports and defense, the expansion here will be far short of the rosy dreams of Western businessmen...

...Outside analysts read the changes as proof that Mao's position was so secure, he could allow others to take over the day-to-day chores...

...He assigned a writer, Yao Wen-yuan, the task of producing an article entitled, "A Critique of the New Historical Play The Dismissal of Hai Shui...

...Or will they, out of fear of a vendetta, stir up urban unrest and perhaps even take to the hills, as has happened in some areas...

...His frustrations goaded him into establishing an unprecedented competitive parallel government system, with each of the rivals virtually possessing its own political party and army...

...Liu, using the typical Chinese ploy of "pretending to be deaf, acting as if mute," politely ignored his protests...

...Early the following morning the secret police seized the top quartet's propaganda strongholds: People's Daily, Hsinhua News Agency and two leading universities in the capital...

...He thus unleashed the force that eventually destroyed his widow...

...Will the Army, now back in power, achieve a working unity or be split by regionalism...

...With the Communist party in disarray and the Army receding into the background after Lin's death, the only cohesive power bloc was the Shanghai quartet, which usually received Mao's blessing—albeit occasionally his criticism...

...They also offer the most illuminating information to emerge from behind the Bamboo Curtain in nearly three decades of Communist rule...

...The entire population was pressed into digging canals, farming on communes, making backyard steel, and mining for coal with kitchen spatulas...

...Chinese classical and Western themes reemerged in art and literature...

...After Lin's death Mao also seemed to have regained some of his power...

...Education, literature and the arts should be enlivened...

...He repeatedly complained about revisionist tendencies...

...But the general trend is toward relaxation and away from the romantic grandiosity and surrealistic Marxism of Mao...

...In 1966, Mao gained the support of Marshal Lin Piao, minister of defense, who arranged for Chiang Ching to conduct a "cultural symposium" for the People's Liberation Army and issue a statement on cultural policy...

...After all, Peking supports nato, condemns the Soviet-Cuban presence in Angola, and has repeatedly thrown out strong hints that due to the expansion of Soviet influence, it would tacitly agree to the unthinkable—a strengthening of Japan's defenses and a continuation of America's presence in South Korea and Taiwan...

...It is only useful...

...So long as the Maoists were in firm control of the nation's propaganda network, they carefully built a unifying Chairman Mao cult...

...He was an atheist deified as a god, a materialist enamored of romantic mysticism, an avowed pure Communist who admired Richard Nixon and condemned the Watergate probes...

...Soon they constituted an impressive list of "heinous crimes": inciting factory strikes and factional fights...

...Although he succeeded in ousting his main critic, Marshal Peng Te-huai, Mao retreated under pressure to theoretical work...

...The direction of post-Mao China hinges on the answers to several crucial questions...

...If it spurns Peking, the Chinese could be driven into the bear's hug...

...Persuaded of this by the moderate and tactful Chou En-lai, Mao agreed to slow down the wild campaign...

...But, in fact, it really began a decade ago, and whether it is over remains to be seen...

...In this respect, one of the most intriguing aspects of the coup is that although the current leadership continues to speak of the late Chairman for the sake of legitimacy, it bitterly criticizes the four "sham Leftists" for extremist concepts that were actually Mao's own cherished dreams...

...At home he was quoted, worshipped and described as the Supreme Leader, dispenser of human wisdom, fountainhead of revolutionary fervor, source of instant happiness...

...Instead, increasingly ominous denunciations of the Four on wall posters, plus frantic activity at Communist party headquarters in Peking, inspired wild rumors and nationwide tensions...

...rifices from the masses while living as decadent capitalists...

...With Chou gone and Teng out of the way, the Shanghai clique turned their sights on the new premier, Hua Kuo-feng, who had been chosen by Mao on Chou's advice...

...Mainland China has the biggest, strongest Army of any developing nation, and is a token nuclear power...

...attacking loyal Party members...

...if the U.S...

...For the first time since coming to power, Mao was blamed by his peers for a misadventure...

...Assuming neither separatist Red warlords nor desperate guerrillas become a problem, the present leaders, who are pragmatic and sensible, can be expected to opt for moderation...

...Educational institutes were once more turned to the task of spreading knowledge...

...For several years Liu ran the country in a pragmatic fashion that restored normalcy...

...The masses, still not completely transformed, are more concerned about creature comforts than endless revolutionary slogans...

...It opened in 1964 when Mao persuaded Chiang Ching, who had been a mediocre actress in her youth, to produce and direct a ballet entitled Red Battalion of Women, a mishmash of balletic steps, heroic postures and ponderous propaganda...

...Meanwhile, more troops were sent to a number of provinces and key cities to quell unrest ranging from robberies to attacks on ammunition depots...

...But by exaggerating Mao's intentions and obliquely encouraging physical violence, Lin Piao and Chiang Ching created deep resentments among Chinese bureaucrats that led to bitter fighting...

...altering Mao's deathbed instructions...

...The Maoists reportedly tried to gain the support of Chen Hse-lien, commander of the Peking Military District, for a coup, but instead of joining them Chen alerted Hua...

...Consequently, the Chairman's prestige grew while his authority diminished...

...In reality the Chairman's stock was already declining...

...This relaxation was anathema to Mao's monastic concept of revolution...

...Certainly they shed a strange light on a supposedly classless society that demands selfless sacrifice from its masses, and they may explain why the Tien An Men rioters displayed strong anti-Maoist sentiments...

...In effect, therefore, the present campaign against the Four amounts to an oblique de-Maoization by invoking Mao himself...

...But Mao was a paradox in many ways...

...That was the Russian side, of course, and everywhere in the country Party propaganda was anti-American and pro-Soviet...

...His widow is accused of opposing his policies and earning his disapproval...

...sabotaging industry, agriculture, foreign trade, and education...

...To buttress its case, Hua's group has labeled Chiang Ching and her comrades radicals...

...demanding sacValentin Chu, a previous contributor to these pages, is the author of Ta Ta, Tan Tan—Fight Fight, Talk Talk and of Thailand Today...

...Since this fact of life heavily influences Peking's foreign policy, concern about a possible Soviet attack will undoubtedly continue to overshadow all other issues...

...Most of Mao's peers in China joined the worshipful rituals, but it turns out that their support was largely lip-service...

...Similarly, a limited rapprochement with the United States could be viewed as a deterrent to a Russian attack...

...In May of that year, with the loyal support of his wife and her two Shanghai allies, and backed by the powerful Lin, Mao personally launched the cataclysmic Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution...

...Neither can one say to what extent personal freedoms will be restored, if at all...

...Apparently the four overplayed their hand last April when their militiamen removed wreaths honoring Chou from the Martyrs' Monument near Tien An Men Square in Peking, touching off a riot by 100,000 mourners who expressed anti-Maoist sentiments...

...Soviet advisers and technicians walked out of China with their blueprints, forcing the Chinese Communists to lean on themselves...

...After Mao himself rewrote it 17 times, the piece appeared in the Shanghai daily Wen Huai Pao...

...Abroad, he inspired a rash of weird Maoist cults and impressed the world's statesmen...

...The quartet was unexpectedly seized in Peking while the 100,000 worker-militiamen and 20-odd trains it had stationed in Shanghai stood waiting for a possible march on the capital...

...Will the numerous remnants of the so-called "Shanghai mafia" be reabsorbed into the Party and government...

...Monster demonstrations involving tens of millions of people were then staged throughout China in support of the regime...

...The three-cornered dance places Washington in a delicate position...

...And this may be the most important point to remember while watching the unfolding melodrama featuring Madame Mao...

...For it seems that his apoplectic policies were even opposed by his Long March comrades...

...Early in 1967, the Cultural Revolution acquired additional muscle: Millions of "worker-rebels" formed "revolutionary units" rivaling the Communist party, and "worker-militia" rivaling the regular Army...

...But efforts to launch the critique at a top Party meeting were blocked by Liu and his followers...

...Still, he appeared to vacillate between Chou's cautious pragmatism and the quartet's extremism?based, after all, on his own concept of revolution...

...Moreover, the drama that today appears to have reached a climax of sorts was initiated by Mao himself...

...Such revelations are probably true—or only sufficiently exaggerated to have the desired impact on the Chinese public...

...The intramural conflicts plaguing the Peking hierarchy have invariably been clothed in Marxist pieties, but the plots, counterplots, conspiracies and innuendo-laden quarrels would warm the heart of any monarchist intriguer of ancient China...

...The running of the government was placed in the hands of his trusted heir-apparent, Liu Shao-ohi...

...Actually, they are not ideologues, in the sense that they advocated extremist policies merely as a convenient weapon...

...The Taiwan question, on the other hand, has receded into the background...

...Marshal Lin, either out of overambition or sensing he was about to be made a scapegoat, tried to seize power in 1971...

...When Mao drove the Nationalists from mainland China and became supreme ruler in 1949, his foreign policy keynote was: "Lean to one side...

...The next year, Mao wanted to officially criticize a new historical play, The Dismissal of Hai Shui...

...From the information now available about the decade-long power struggle, a thorough revision of the Chairman's image appears justified...

...Hai Shui was an imperial official fired by a 16th-century Ming emperor, and Mao believed the play was a disguised attack on his 1959 removal of Marshal Peng for criticizing the Great Leap Forward...

...His successors appear to agree with him that ideology is useful, but is less important than the realities of geopolitics...

...Later it was reprinted as a booklet, but that was banned in Peking by Liu...

...The logic of this approach rests on the fact that China's leaders, like Mao, are convinced a war between the United States and the Soviet Union is inevitable and do not want to be chained to either potential combatant...

...Priority will probably be given to basics, such as chemical fertilizer, small-scale farm mechanization and the modernization of industry...

...New charges against "The Gang of Four" were now being issued one after another, too...

...Mao's death in September then brought the drama to one of its periodic climaxes...

...an audience with Chairman Mao became the highest badge of political honor...

...But there is good reason for the U.S...

...This so-called "January Storm" was initiated in a Shanghai factory by a handsome young worker-activist named Wang Hung-wen...

...The Cultural Revolution achieved its goal of toppling Liu and disgracing Teng...

...If Mao was furious, he swallowed his anger...

...Although Peking will go on calling for the liberation of Taiwan, it will not allow the issue to be a stumbling block in relations with Washington...

...Yet at a meeting Mao held in Peking last June, he reportedly suggested a troika after he was gone and added: "Let the Politburo decide whether Chiang Ching should be part cf the leadership...

...After suffering 900,000 casualties and risking an American attack on Manchuria, Mao received a bill from Stalin for the Soviet military supplies China had used in the fighting...

...In two months, Wang Hung-wen was said to have spent a sum in Shanghai equal to 30 years of a worker's earnings...

...And while on a junket in South China, the decibel-shy Chiang Ching reportedly ordered a car that was bringing her capitalist amenities to have its engine turned off a kilometer away, and then be pushed by some 20 husky militiamen...

...All of this prompted one news magazine to observe that the long-awaited post-Mao power struggle seemed to be over before outsiders knew it had begun...

...Speaking at a Party meeting, he criticized the Soviet Union for mistreating peasants...

...Its fear of the Soviets notwithstanding, Peking may not want to end the quarrel, preferring controlled hostility as an effective lever on the United States...

...The healing of wounds inflicted by the political infighting could prove to be more difficult...

...Party administration was left to Teng Hsiao-ping...

...Marching under the banner of Marxist dialectics, the Maoists assaulted Liu's entrenched bureaucrats with a human sea of rampaging Red Guards...

...attempting to assassinate Hua Kuo-feng, Mao and the late Premier Chou En-lai...

...comes on too strong, Peking could up its bargaining price and heighten its coyness to keep the relationship cool...

...In 1950, Peking joined the Korean War at Stalin's request...

...building up the workers' militia to compete with the Army...

...Consistently faithful to the Chairman during his difficult years, Chiang Ching and her Shanghai friends—by then numbering three, all members of the powerful Politburo?dramatically split with Lin, who was subsequently killed in a mysterious airplane crash near the Soviet border...

...The frustrated Chairman then devoted himself to a devious offensive...

...Thus he let Chou rehabilitate Teng Hsiao-ping, but after Chou's death in January 1976, the Chairman again ousted Teng at his wife's insistence...

...After three years of this transcendental frenzy, China was in economic chaos...

...POWER STRUGGLE IN PEKING The Madame Mao Melodrama by VALENTIN CHU The events surrounding the precipitous downfall of Chairman Mao Tse-Tung's widow, Chiang Ching, are part of a continuing melodrama with Marxist dialogue and a Chinese dynastic plot...

...Perhaps the strongest echoes of the dynastic past came when the victorious faction declared itself the annointed one and charged that Chiang Ching had altered Mao's deathbed note to make it appear her group had been chosen for power...

...Hua's preemptive coup was made possible not only by the support of Commander Chen but by two significant defectors as well: Wang Tung-hsing, chief of Mao's personal bodyguards, and Yen Chi-fu, commander of the workers' militia in Peking...

...With the American debacle in Vietnam and the death of Chiang Kai-shek, Nationalist China is no longer an immediate threat, militarily or politically...

...So Peking will probably continue its vilification of Moscow without touching off an actual war, and continue its flirting with Washington without falling into the "imperialist-capitalist" camp...

...And it is impossible to predict whether repressive measures, like the forced migration of youths to the countryside, will be lifted...

...Indeed, by now enough is known about the maneuvers and motivations of the leading characters in Peking's succession struggle to provide some perspective to the political convulsions that have been fascinating China watchers...

...At the outset its main features were allegorical epithets, classical Chinese stratagems, disappearing and reappearing politicians...

...Yen, a protege of Wang Hung-wen, had helped to quell the Tien An Men riot...

...The revolutionaries denounced, dragged through the streets, imprisoned, or beat to death many Party and government workers whose only crime was serving under Liu...

...Next, Premier Hua was given the second title of Chairman of the Chinese Communist party and several formerly eclipsed Party veterans—among them ex-Premier Teng Hsiao-ping, Defense Minister Yeh Chien-ying and senior Vice Premier Li Hsien-nien-—reappeared in the limelight...

...Conventional hospitals were again valued above "barefoot doctors" in the boondocks...

...Its roots go back to the beginning of his rule...

...Because of their loyalty to Mao, Chiang Ching, Shanghai propaganda chief Chang Chun-chiao, literary critic Yao Wen-yuan, and factory agitator Wang Hung-wen were catapulted to fame and glory...

...Two years later, with Nikita Khrushchev at the helm in the Kremlin, the Sino-Soviet split came into full view...

...Troops were ordered to break up the daily street brawls...

...Mao Tse-tung once said: "We study Marxism, not because of its good words, not because there is any magic in it...

...Using the very Chinese stratagem of "knocking the side, hitting the flank," Mao sent his wife to Shanghai where she enlisted the aid of the city's propaganda chief, Chang Chun-chiao...