The struggle in China is approaching a new climax. The men who were brought into the leadership last summer, to replace the leaders who had been purged, are themselves increasingly under attack.
At the same time, however, there is no let-up in the campaign against those leaders who were purged at the very beginning. It is thus not possible to deduce from the attack against the more recently appointed leaders that those whom they had replaced are on the way to being rehabilitated.
Yesterday╒s news from Peking illustrates the nature of the problem. The ╥People╒s Daily╙ and other Peking papers have published a major article on the crimes of Chou Yang, the former deputy head of the party╒s Propaganda Department, who has been the subject of innumerable press attacks since the very beginning of the campaign.
Red Guard attacks
Many of the more highly placed leaders who were associated with him, such as his immediate superiors and members of the Politburo, who have also been dismissed, have not been directly criticised in the press. They have, however, been attacked even more vehemently in the ╥unofficial╙ Red Guard posters.
There has certainly been no public recantation by any of the fallen leaders, in spite of the many published appeals to them to recognise the error of their ways. But men who have held out against the great political and psychological pressures of recent months are even less likely to yield just because they have been put in prison.
If their will to resist is to be broken, if they are to confess that they are the traitors and the hirelings of capitalists and revisionists that they are made out to be, they have to be broken physically and morally ╤ by torture.
Is it thinkable that this would be done to men who only recently were among China╒s highest leaders? Stalin did it to his own associates who had been, shortly before their arrest and execution, among Russia╒s highest leaders.
There is one major difference, however. Some of Stalin╒s associates may have plotted against him, but they did not have the organisational resources to challenge him openly and to fight back. Yet this is precisely what the Peking opposition has been doing. The Red Guard posters have attacked not only the leading figures of the opposition, but also the leading figures among their persecutors.
The enemies of those who were elevated in the summer, after the purge had begun, appear to have sufficient organisational power to deal painful blows to the purgers themselves. The present arrests of the men purged at that time, and the attacks on those who purged them, have thus added to the previous exchange of insults by posters a new factor, usually described in Communist parlance as ╥administrative╙ action.
In previous Communist struggles, this was the last stage before the final showdown, but by the time this stage had been reached in those earlier struggles there was no longer any doubt as to who was going to be the victor. In the Peking struggle, on the other hand, the opposition appears to retain sufficient power to turn the scales.
