‘Chinese robbers get away with $100,000'

Press, 24 August 1976, Page 8

‘Chinese robbers get away with $100,000'

By FOX BUTTERFIELD, of the “New York Times.”

through NZPA. Hong Kong

If reports from recent travellers to China can he believed, the police in Chengchow, the capital ot Honan province, are still looking for a gang of armed men who held up the local branch of the People’s Bank of China in broad daylight last month and escaped with the equivalent of more than $lOO,OOO.

Bank robbery’ is an unusual event in China, where according to official pronouncements crime has been virtually abolished. But even more bizarre, the travellers say, is that the gang, who killed one of the bank guards with a submachine-gun, have become something of folk heroes, like the characters in the classic Chinese novel of banditry’ and rebellion, “Shui Hu Chuan,” or “Water Margin.” Ironically, the novel has been under attack since last year for its supposed failure to make the bandit

hero sufficiently rebellious. The authorities in Chengchow, a city’ of more than one million on the North China Plain, reported!) have launched a major drive to uncover the robbers, who have been officially identified only as the “July 7 Counter-Revolution-ary Assassin Group,” without mention of the crime they committed. Recently, in a gesture of bravado that reportedly has won the gang increased popular following, they boasted of their escapade on a wall poster that said: “You can dig up all of Chengchow and all of Honan to a depth of three feet — but you will never find us.”

The report from Chengchow is only’ one of many accounts that travellers to China have brought back this summer of an evidently? troubled country. The individual reports may be fragmentary, some may be inaccurate.

But together with statements in the official press

factional bickering, and the day-long disturbance by ■| 00,000 people in Peking’s Tien an Men Square last \pril, they suggest a picture of growing tension, a decline in public discipline, and an uneasy sense of marking time as many Chinese await the expected death of their enfeebled leader, Chairman Mao Tsetung.

The sense of waiting is almost tangible, some travellers say. A Chinese woman returning for a visit to her girlhood home in north China was told by a relative: “You people on the outside don’t know what is going to happen. We’re just waiting.”

Perhaps it is this hesitancy, given the precarious health of the 82-year-old chairman, that has made the Chinese leadership seem unable, or unwilling, to resolve some of its most pressing political questions. The present anti-Rightist campaign, for instance, appears to have stalled, with no final outcome.