RED CHINA: Failure in the Communes

In Hong Kong last week, experts on Red China read and reread this statement: "To speak of greatness in a man is not to say that he is always correct." What lent fascination to this seemingly innocuous sentence from Peking's New China SemiMonthly was the fact that the Chinese word it used for "greatness" is one the Reds usually reserve for Mao Tse-tung. With customary bafflegab. Peking was publicly admitting that Chairman Mao has been forced into a humiliating retreat by the stubbornness of "The Old Hundred Names"—Red China's faceless peasant masses.

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