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As interim purge director, Chiang Ching uncorked a fresh villain, and one of the least likely: Mao's propaganda chief Tao Chu, who only five months ago was bumped up by Mao to No. 4 rank in the ruling hierarchy—trailing only Mao himself, Lin Piao and the durable Red Chinese Premier Chou Enlai. Until last week Ta' Chu had been one of the few certified Mao heroes of the revolution, providing much of the verbal firepower for the purge. But Chiang Ching denounced Tao Chu last week as a "bourgeois reactionary," one of the dirtiest epithets in the Maoist lexicon; and immediately the Red Guards responded. One version, in fact, had it that Tao Chu had been publicly humiliated in the streets of Peking.
Sun God. The naked struggle for personal power in Peking was becoming so vicious that no one was any longer immune from at least passing poster defamation—partly because Liu and his supporters seemed to be putting up a few posters of their own, thereby confusing everyone. Thus last week posters popped up demanding: "Burn Chou En-lai to death!" As fast as they went up, they were torn down and replaced with signs proclaiming that anyone against Chou ought to have "his head bashed in." Foreign Minister Chen Yi, considered a Mao man, was also attacked. When Reuters attempted to file a report of the attack on Chou, the Peking telegraph office refused to send it. Since the Red Chinese seldom censor anything that foreign reporters cable, Chou obviously has admirers somewhere. So Byzantine has the name calling become that last week for the first time even Mao himself was vilified in scattered posters calling him "a fanatic."
To dare attack Mao Tse-tung in China today, however fierce the battle raging around him, is in itself a dangerously fanatic act. At 73, Mao is still the Sun God (as he is so often depicted, his face radiating fire in all directions), father figure and charismatic czar of Chinese Communism. Under the aegis of Mao's Cultural Revolution, some 110 million youths above the age of nine have been excused from school since last June, either to serve in the Red Guards or simply cavort around the countryside while studying Mao's writings and singing his praises to everyone within earshot. A peasant in remote Sinkiang province may never know anything about the current battle for power, but if he knows nothing else, he will know who Mao is and what he says. Even if Mao's opponents should ultimately triumph, they would probably have to do so without impugning Mao personally. Lin Piao may succeed Mao, on the other hand, but he can only do so on Mao's enormous coattails, which have dominated Chinese Communist his tory all the way back to the days of the Long March and the caves of Yenan.