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It was Mao who set the pattern of the Chinese Communist terror in his 1949 tract, On People's Democratic Dictatorship. Said Mao: "The reactionaries must be deprived of the right to voice their opinion." One of Mao's lieutenants, writing in the Peking Current Affairs, wryly but grimly spelled out how to proceed: "Execution means fundamental physical elimination of counterrevolutionaries, and is of course the most thorough measure for depriving counter-revolutionaries of the conditions for counterrevolution ary activity." What gave the Chinese terror speed and weight was tested techniques borrowed from the Soviet Union at a time when Stalin was at the top of his power. But the Chinese system differs in one important respect from the Russian: Stalin's NKVD and MVD worked in secret, but Mao's terror gets the utmost publicity.
With Fanfare. The trial of the peasant Liu is only a village echo of hundreds of mass trials, often involving thousands of blood-yelling participants, carried out in the big cities, usually at a popular sports ground, in which the victims are publicly denigrated, then publicly shot. (In one Shanghai mass trial, described by a Shanghai business man, relatives were allowed to take the body away in a wooden coffin after paying the cost of the bullets used to kill the victim—approximately $38.) There is an official phrase for this peculiarly Chinese variation of Communist terror: "Campaign for the suppression of counter-revolutionaries with fanfare.'''' Appropriately enough, the inventor of this apt phrase last year became Mao's No. i working terrorist. His name: Lo Jui-ching.
Now in his middle 505 and tall for a Chinese (about 5 ft. 8 in.), Lo Jui-ching was born in Nanchung, in mountain-girded Szechwan. His parents belonged to a class he has since all but exterminated: the landlords. Trained in the famed
Whampoa Military Academy (onetime commandant: Chiang Kai-shek), Lo joined the Communist Party in 1928 and went early to the Soviet Union through the Eastern branch of the Comintern.
After working for a time with the Soviet secret police, Lo became a political commissar in the Chinese Red Army, made the famed Long March (1934-35) to the North, where Mao Tse-tung had fled from defeat by Chiang Kaishek. Here, in Shensi, Lo mastered the technique of intrigue: inciting disputes among the students at the Communist officers' school in order to expose their attitudes, recruiting and rewarding informers and isolating and arresting those who openly defied the Mao faction. Lo's big break came during one of the fratricidal struggles within the Communist forces, when he was ordered to clean up the anti-Mao faction in the Fourth Front Army. This he did with "such crudeness. savagery and maliciousness" (says Chang Kuo-tao, ex-Politburo member, now a refugee in Hong Kong), that he earned the gratitude of Mao, his chief sponsor today.