Power Struggle Still Raging In China

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31168, 19 September 1966, Page 17

Power Struggle Still Raging In China

VZ Press Association —Copyright?

HONG KONG, September 18.

Powerful enemies within the Chinese Communist Party are plotting the overthrow of Mao Tse-tung, says “Red Flag”, the official magazine of the Central Committee.

Red China was in the throes of an immense power struggle, with Mao’s purge of his opponents far from over.

Other reports say that In Peking more heads may roll from top Communist Party echelons in the purge of socalled Rightists. The "Red Flag” repeatedly defined the enemies of Mao and his apparent heir, the Defence Minister, Lin Piao, as "including party-holders in the highest posts,” but did not mention names.

The report was the clearest indication yet that President Liu Shao-chi and those closest to him are leaders in the struggle for power being waged in China.

Liu was regarded for years as Mao’s heir-apparent and

his recent downgrading (to eighth in China’s hierarchy) appeared to support this theory. The “Red Flag” article was published in Peking newspapers and relayed by Radio Peking in domestic broadcasts monitored in Hong Kong It indicated that the youthful Red Guard movement had failed to intimidate elements within the party which had voiced opposition to some of Mao’s policies. Russian newspapers yesterday carried denunciations of Mao and his “cultural revolution” by the British, Spanish, Czech and Bulgarian Communist Parties.

Britain’s party said the campaign was aimed at the deification of Mao and wiping out opposition to his “fanatical, anti-Soviet” policies. The “Red Flag” described the dangerous party elements as “a small number of people

in power within the party who are taking the capitalist road.” It continued: “This handful of counter-revolutionary revisionists is the chief and most dangerous enemy. “Where they have usurped leadership, they pursue bourgeois policies and exercise bourgeois dictatorship. They make use of the power they have seized to shelter the bourgeois Rightists and suppress the proletarian Left.”

The article, said U.P.1., was in effect an admission by Mao and Lin that they still faced powerful and dangerous opposition. It also made clearer than ever that the power struggle began at the highest party levels.

Alluding to the successful diversion of some of the Red Guard activities by the intended targets, the magazine said, “The problem of direction is the most important thing in the current cultural revolutionary struggle.

“We must unite the majority for destroying the bourgeois elements and for comoletely destroying those power holders who tread the path of capitalism inside the party,” the “Red Flag” quoted Lin as saying. One expert on China said it was significant that the article referred to the intrigues in the present tense. “This certainly seems to indicate that they have not been successful in eliminating many important opponents,” he said.