'War Against Demons’

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31089, 18 June 1966, Page 15

' War Against Demons’

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter— Copyright) HONG KONG, June 17. The Chinese Communist Party warned today that the antiparty group would not accept voluntary withdrawal from the political arena. It called on the Chinese people to be mobilised to expose the group’s activities. The Communist paper “People’s Daily,” in an editorial quoted by Radio Peking, hailed the reorganisation of the Peking Communist Party committee in the pre-

sent nation-wide drive against dissident intellectuals. The newspaper said that the anti-party group “would not accept voluntary withdrawal from the political arena but would strive to bolster its tottering power.” The anti-party group resorted to rumour-mongering and political slanders by labelling its opponents as counterrevolutionary, said the newspaper. The “People’s Daily” urged that a free rein be given to the masses in their attempt to “win the struggle for the proletariat.” Earlier, the “Liberation Army Daily” reported that the Chinese Communist Party chairman, Mao Tse-tung, per-

sonally initiated the current purge of dissident intellectuals and officials. The daily, organ of the Defence Minister, Lin Piao, whose department has led the campaign, said that Mao had pointed to the need to subject reactionary bourgeois ideology to criticism, at a meeting of the party central committee last September. The article, quoted by the New China News Agency, said the campaign had reached a high tide of unprecedented magnitude. But it said there have been “great poisonous weeds in the Chinese literary and cultural world since the founding of the people’s republic in 1949.” The film, “The Life of Wu Hsun,” produced soon after 1949, drew the “first largescale criticism of bourgeois reactionary ideas undertaken after the founding of new China.”

The criticisms had resulted from instructions by the central committee of the party and by Mao, it added. The “Liberation Army Daily” said: “Monsters and demons came out of their lairs in other cultural fields, too, and we waged tit-for-tat struggles against them.”

Rumanian Talks.—Twelve hours have been set aside for talks with Rumanian leaders in the programme of Chinese Prime Minister, Mr Chou En-lai’s eight-day official visit to Bucharest. There will be four separate sessions of three hours. The visit opened yesterday.—Bucharest, June 17.