Youth At Mao’s Helm

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31154, 2 September 1966, Page 10

Youth At Mao’s Helm

Mao Tse-tung’s young Red Guards—or perhaps they should now be named for Lin Piao, potential if not actual head of China's revolution—have been demonstrating in the last week or two that louts follow the same behaviour pattern regardless of race, colour, or creed. It appears they have been granted special licence to replace “ bourgeois “ ideology ” with “ revolutionary proletarian “ ideology "—magic phrases that might be expected to confound peasant thinking in any language. The demonstrations, including the desecration of Christian churches in Peking and the expulsion of members of religious communities on improbable charges of sabotage against the State, have obviously had official blessing. They could have been ended swiftly at a gesture from Lin Piao who, as Defence Minister, has an iron control over the disciplined and highly indoctrinated People’s Liberation Army. But they were let loose because they were serving a political purpose—the rounding-off stage, as it were, of the purge which has lately swept out of public life every person whose loyalty to Mao’s leadership and Marxist principles might be even remotely suspect.

Maoist politics are firmly in the saddle today: and the task of total indoctrination has begun all over again. “ Where the broom does not reach, the dust •’ will not go away by itself ”, is a saying attributed to Chairman Mao. Now it is being acted on on a scale which apparently comprehends the entire reshaping of educational policy. To this end the admission of new students is to cease for six months—and when resumed is to be sharply selective, with a leaning towards the peasantry. Colleges and senior schools are to close altogether for six months, to give time for the production of a teaching system based on “ the guidance of Mao Tse- *’ tung’s thought and the principle of placing prole- “ tarian politics in the forefront ”, Even from afar, this new phase of the revolution seems rather terrifying, relying as it does on brutality and suppression to destroy all opposition to ideas and practices not in accord with an undeviating Marxism. The organisation of the Red Guard, drawn from secondary school and university students charged with special duties associated with the purge, clearly reflects a new ruthlessness within the dictatorship. When Red Guard elements made their first public apoearance. at the massive Peking rally on August 18. they were congratulated by Mao on their revolutionary zeal Peking radio later called the destructive ramnaging of the teen-age reformers “ magnificent ”, Outside China this sudden recourse to organised brutality, for the eradication of “ imorooer practices ”, will be seen as implying the ut»er failure of 17 years of propaganda indoctrination.