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Atop the graceful, rose-colored Gate of Heavenly Peace in Peking last week stood the two plump, 65-year-old men who rule one-third of the earth's people. As lithe girls danced by to the rhythm of bamboo castanets, and nine huge cloth dragons whirled along in pursuit of 60 golden lions, Red China's Mao Tse-tung beamed in the morning sunlight, bland and benign-looking as ever. Beside him, applauding energetically, was Nikita Khrushchev, ruler of all the Russias, who had arrived from Moscow by propjet the day before to help celebrate the tenth anniversary of Red rule in China. Just a step behind the two leaders loomed a tall, gaunt, grey-faced figure whose voice and countenance were far better known to the ruling circles of Communism than to the paraders below. His name: Liu Shao-chi. His rank: Chairman of the Chinese People's Republic. His potent role: the No. 2 man of Red China, and steely disciplinarian of the party.
A decade had passed since a crowd of shabbily dressed Communists gathered in Peking's crumbling Imperial Palace to hear Mao proclaim the conquest of China and sound a warning: "Let reactionaries at home and abroad tremble!" Last week it was not the reactionaries but Nikita Khrushchev who seemed nervous. From the moment of his arrival in Peking. Khrushchev had been publicly pressuring his hosts to "do everything possible to preclude war as a means of settling outstanding questions"; five times in as many minutes he had sounded the call for "peaceful coexistence"; in pointed reference to his U.S. trip, he declared that "the leaders of many capitalist states are being forced more and more to take account of realities." Mao smiled and applauded, but made no answer.
Yet Red China's answer seemed plain. At the height of last week's anniversary parade, 100 dark green tanks and 144 motorized artillery pieces clanked onto the broad square before Mao and Khrushchev. The pavement rang to the cadenced tread of 100,000 soldiers, sailors and airmen, and nine massive columns of militiamen. From overhead came the whine and rumble of 155 Chinese-made jet bombers and fighters. The procession ended, heavy with menace, as 700,000 workers marched by, 100 abreast, shouting, "Liberate Taiwan!"
Fagade & Reality. Like the other guests of honor who had flocked into Peking from 87 countries, Nikita Khrushchev could scarcely fail to be impressed by Peking's display of might and by the fireworks, the glittering banquets and the gleaming new buildings that Red China's masters had conjured up to mark their tenth year in power. But behind the gala façade lay a grim reality: the world's biggest and brashest Communist state was stumbling into the most critical year of its existence. Says a Western diplomat stationed in Peking: "The place is a monumental mess."
Today Red China's economy gasps and shudders like an abused donkey engine. The "great leap forward" that was to make China a major industrial power in the twinkling of an eye has instead produced something close to chaos. In the ant-heap rural communes that were to convert 500 million peasants into depersonalized, multi-purpose labor units, there is apathy and despair.