RED GUARD DEMANDS

Press, Volume CVI, Issue 31226, 25 November 1966, Page 13

RED GUARD DEMANDS

(N.Z.P.A.-Reuter —Copyright) PEKING, Nov. 24. A new Red Guard pamphlet yesterday demanded that the Chinese Head of State, Liu Shao-chi, and the Communist Party’s Secretary - General, Teng Hsiao-ping, be dismissed from, office. The pamphlet also asked for guarantees that they would not regain political power. Public charges that they had opposed the party chairman, Mao Tse-tung, over a long period appeared to a 20page pamphlet issued to the name of the Red Guard organisation of Peking University.

The pamphlet, printed on red paper, was posted page by page overnight on walls along a main shopping street in the western part of Peking. Thousands of Chinese crowded pavements in the morning to read it. Observers described it as the most detailed and author-itative-looking denunciation of Liu and Teng to have appeared since the Red Guards began three months ago their campaign to root out “those in authority in the party who have taken the capitalist road,” as the Defence Minister, Lin Piao, and the official Communist Party journal “Red Flag” have expressed it. Observers said the pamphlet appeared to have been written with the help, or under the direction, of people with a close knowledge of developments in upper levels of the Communist Party over a long period. It alleged that Liu for many years had been the leader of those within the party who opposed Mao. Teng was described as his leading supporter. The pamphlet quoted passages from speeches made by Liu and Teng at the seventh Chinese Communist Party congress in 1945 and the eighth congress in 1956 as proof that both men had opposed Mao’s Marxist-Leninist line both before and after the Communists came to power in 1949.

The pamphlet said Liu had expressed doubt about Mao’s thesis that in China the peasants formed the basis for the revolution.

Teng, it said, had “spread Khrushchev’s black poison” by expressing approval for revisionist decisions passed at the Soviet Communist Party’s twentieth congress in 1956.

Liu and Teng have been criticised on numerous occasions during the last three months in Red Guard posters of varying degrees of sophistication and authority. The most frequently voiced complaints were that Liu and Teng had worked with or supported Peking’s former Mayor, Peng Chen, the only member of the top 10 in the Communist Party to have been formally dismissed in the current purge, or his successor as Peking Communist Party chief, Li Hsuehfeng. During the last few days several posters have demanded that Liu and Teng attend mass Red Guard meetings and listen to and answer criticisms of themselves by the guards. There is no evidence that Liu and Teng have complied with these requests.