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Swim by Swimming. Like news being flashed on a neon sign in Times Square, accounts of the Nanking battle quickly appeared on Red Guard posters on Peking's walls. "Suddenly," said one wall poster, "an attack was mounted by the workers on our revolutionary group office, and 20 of our comrades were dragged away." When other Red Guards went to negotiate for their release, "the workers suddenly turned atrocious and ripped off the fingers, noses, tongues and ears of our representatives. After murdering them, they threw the bodies from the fourth-floor windows. The situation in Nanking is exceedingly critical. Already from cities in the neighborhood of Nanking, including Shanghai, the reactionary workers are on the march to Nanking. Bloody clashes on an even larger scale are about to erupt."
In Canton, South China's largest city, the Red Guards were reported to have seized all the city's newspapers and radio stations. In Peking itself, Correspondent Oancia* reported that one night last week gunfire chattered for more than five minutes and that the next morning the inevitable posters appeared, some of them reporting that factory workers had made trouble in the capital's western district. Across China, the Red Guards have met with increasingly stiff resistance in their drive to spread Mao's revolutionary fervor. "One learns how to make a revolution by making it," Mao has said, "just as one learns to swim by swimming." For the Red Guards, the swimming seems more and more to be upstream.
All Truth. Despite the new violence and threats of more violence, however, the main war is still being fought with words—thousands upon thousands of them. Most of them deal in sharp vilification of the villains opposing Mao's revolution, or make an effort to arouse indignation and sympathy for Mao and thus broaden the base of mass support that he and Lin Piao must command to make their purge of China successful. The attacks are based on the deeply orthodox belief that the teachings of Mao contain all truth—and that to question or oppose them in any way is to become a heretic who must be exorcised from the body of the faithful.
President Liu Shao-chi last week was depicted in wall cartoons as Don Quixote charging against Mao's teaching. Beside him, as Sancho Panza, rode Liu's chief ally against Mao, Party Secretary Teng Hsiao-ping. A less kind cartoon showed Liu as a barking dog being drowned under the sun of Mao's teachings, and Liu's wife was crudely caricatured as a prostitute. That catty note may well have been the inspiration of Mrs. Mao, who likes to go by her screen name of Chiang Ching, which she acquired as a grade B bit actress in Shanghai in the 1930s. In the last two months, she has emerged from 25 years of obscurity to take over the cultural direction of the revolution. Last week, along with revolutionary Cheerleader and close Mao Intimate Chen Pota, she seemed to be running things in Peking, while Mao and Lin were in Shanghai.