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Meantime, nearly every other element in Chinese society was under some sort of purifying assault. Such cultural entities as the National Peking Opera Theater were put under army control for having harbored artists who tried to "undermine the revolution and oppose change." China's Young Communist League was disbanded and replaced by the Red Guards, the Women's Federation condemned, and the Trade Union Federation declared to be rotten with revisionism. Even the directors of the New China News Agency were attacked last week and demands made that they be ousted.
Everyone Antagonized. Purposely or not, the result has been that Mao and the purgers have antagonized and threatened nearly every educated man and woman gainfully employed in Red China. To the men who care about China's future and want to bring it into the modern world of comparative well-being and technology, the revolution threatens to sweep all the painful achievements of nearly 20 years into the dustbin and consign China to a dark age of mindless communal litanies and Mao sun worshiping. To the men in the governments of the provinces far from the Politburo battles of Peking, the revolution brings trainloads of Red Guards usurping their authority and rocking tidy little boats that have been carefully caulked over the years.
It is all of this that has enabled the opponents of Mao and the Red Guards to gather resources against them that come from deep in the vitals of China. It is this support, which runs throughout the Chinese Communist structure, that prevents Mao from forcibly removing Liu and Teng from office.
But Mao is pressing the attack. The New Year's editorial warned that industry's freedom from interference by the Red Guards, negotiated by Chou Enlai, is now over. Some Sinologists think that Chou En-lai may indeed be in trouble with the Maoists, as the first round of last week's posters indicated, precisely because he counseled moderation rather than flat-out revolution in the first place. There are hints in the Chinese press that the police, who have so far scrupulously stayed out of what has essentially been a literary battle by poster, may soon be called into action to round up Mao's enemies.
In Peking and other large cities where the Red Guards have given the Maoists control by sheer weight of obstreperous numbers, such roundups would be fairly easy. Not so in the provinces, where conservatism is strong and resistance to the revolution is greatest. Because so much of the People's Liberation Army has its roots in the provinces, there is no assurance that it would necessarily take orders from Lin Piao in a showdown. Bloody clashes between army units and Red Guards were reported last fall in a few places, and since then Lin Piao has pointedly not used the army in the struggle. Reason: Lin fears that its use might trigger full-scale civil war.