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Bourgeois Backsliding. Given Mao's immense prestige, the wonder is that Mao and Lin are finding it so difficult to oust Liu Shao-chi & Co. and implement the Cultural Revolution. That they are having trouble is attested to by every indicator coming out of Peking. For all the increasingly violent denunciations of Liu and Teng in posters and pamphlets, both are still in office and presumably at their desks in the Forbidden City. The official Chinese news organs have never accused them of any misdeeds by name, only by implication. Of all the other officials condemned for bourgeois backsliding, such as the two former mayors of Peking, Peng Chen and Li Hsueh-feng, only one, Chou Yang, former Deputy Propaganda Chief, has ever actually been imprisoned.
Maoist and Red Guard pronunciamentos often have a tellingly defensive, almost plaintive tone. Posters claimed last week that Mao had been forced against his will to relinquish the presidency of China to Liu in 1958 and that he had had to exile himself to Shanghai for eight months in 1965-66 because Liu and a "wedge" in the Politburo had opposed his plans aborning for the Cultural Revolution. One even quotes Mao as saying that at the time, "they treated me as if I were their dead parent at a funeral." Since, until the current conflict, all the evidence has indicated that Mao was complete boss in China, Sinologists to a man do not believe the poster tales. But Mao and the Red Guards apparently think that the stories are worth putting out as a means of winning popular sympathy for Mao's side. One poster last week even had Mao confessing his errors in elevating Liu and Teng to "the front line" of the Politburo's eight-man Standing Committee—an unprecedented admission of human fallibility for the Red Emperor.
Those in Authority. Nothing made Mao and Lin's difficulties in dumping their opponents plainer than the nation's official New Year's Day editorial, published simultaneously in the People's Daily and Red Flag. It recounted how "persons in authority" first opposed the Red Guards and the revolution. "Those persons reversed right and wrong, juggled black and white, encircled and suppressed revolutionaries, clamped down on different views, practiced white terror." While predicting that the Red Guards would carry the revolution "to all classes in 1967," the editorial over and over again railed against "those within the party who are in authority and are taking the capitalist road," and who are "making sure of their social base and their influence inside the party." Only by "mobilizing the masses of workers and peasants, who form 90% of the population, will it be possible today to defeat" the enemies of Mao-think. That is hardly a trumpet of victory being sounded; it gives the impression, in fact, that Liu and his faction still command at least as much support as Mao's legions—and perhaps more.