After Mao aftermath

David Bonavia

Hongkong The confusion sown in Chinese minds by recent events in Peking showed itself poignantly in Hongkong this month, when tiny Marxist splinter groups consisting of local students and former Red Guards from the mainland hoisted the banner of protest against Peking in the colony's Victoria Park.

'Release the prisoners of the Tien An Men Square incident', one of their slogans read— somewhat belatedly, since reliable sources in Peking say that the execution of two people arrested during the April riots there has already been decreed.

Amidst ice-cream vendors, lovers and strollers, the determined little groups in the park sent their spokesmen one by one to the microphone to denounce `Maoist oppression'. Their main point was that the 5 April riot in Peking was clearly an expression of mass opinion, since at its height 100,000 people took part.

The only incident involving the police took place when scuffles broke out after a few men shouted `Long live Chairman Mao !' The British authorities had given permission for the 'demo', presumably on the grounds that to ban it would only draw more attention to this embarrassing cause. The entrenched Communist organisations in Hongkong—especially the powerful New China News Agency bureau—seem to consider the assorted Trotskyites, Anarchists and moderate Socialists too small a nuisance to be worth making a fuss about.

Nonetheless, this ragged little band is expressing a deeply-felt malaise about the future of China, which is manifesting itself in different forms on the other side of the border. Provincial radio reports tell of campaigns against saboteurs and 'rumourmongers'. A recent joint editorial of the leading party organs gave this warning: 'We must on no account relax our fighting spirit. A small handful of class enemies cannot reconcile themselves to defeat and are looking for stratagems and tricks to oppose us'.

Not since the height of the Cultural Revolution, which began ten years ago this month, have the authorities in Peking and the provinces shown themselves so worried about the political rumours flying around the country and shaking the confidence of the people. Already these are being officially attributed to 'the Teng Hsiao-ping Rumour Company', and they reputedly include falsified directives from Chairman Mao as well as the 'testament' of the late Chou En-lai. (One such rumour, reported in Hongkong, is that the scattering of the former Premier's ashes was against his express wishes. He is said to ha‘e wanted a monument instead.) Whether such rumours are true or false is less important than the fact that they have gained currency and affected official policy. The jumpiness in Peking must be seen against the background of Mao's declining health and probable imminent death.

Most China-watchers are giving Mao no more than a few months at the outside, and are basing their estimate on the carefully selected official pictures of him released by the New China News Agency. These show a clear deterioration in his condition over the past few weeks alone, to the point where he is no longer capable of doing more than mouth his thoughts indistinctly, or scribble on a pad at his right side.

To prepare the public for Mao's death makes sense from the point of view of any future ruler of China. In this case the planning seems to be done by the smallish 'radical' group clustered round Mao's wife, Chiang Ching, in collaboration with the man whom they recently put into the premiership I over the head of Teng Hsiao-ping—the Middle-aged apparatchik Hua Kuo-feng.

If the death of Chou could provoke riots in Peking and other provincial centres, the death of Mao surely carries the risk of national hysteria and a breakdown of public order on a large scale. A good half of China's population have grown up believing that Mao is the fountainhead of all wisdom, guidance and goodness. What happens to a nation when such a keystone is suddenty yanked out of its psychological arch ?

The readiness with which many former Red Guards adapt themselves politically in Hongkong suggests that, for each individual Chinese, Mao's personal impact may be somewhat less than the foreigner in China is given to understand.

But the Chinese are used to encouraging and bolstering each other in their expressions of political emotion, and the way in which public grief was built up collectively after the death of Chou is a pointer to the much more violent outburst to be expected after the loss of Mao.

The emotion will be reinforced by the anxieties of a nation which knows that from

now on there is no ultimate arbiter. Mao h been China's Lenin rather than its Stall and after his death his works will be subje to the same distortion and special pleadie as those of Lenin have been since the 1930s.,1 Mao has at one time or another expresse political sentiments which cut right acro+ the spectrum of any Marxist party colotl first with the problem of survival, and with the more complex issues of nat10N1 power. He has swung back and forth, fro' right to left, from hard to soft line, and Wh''' ever rules China in the future will rind what' ever they do legitimised by this or that sage from the Chairman's writings (some or which may be published or revived Po' humously).

Most serious is Mao's failure to trust an): one for long enough to create a stable 0.cession. It was sheer bad luck for China that Chou contracted cancer and died befol'i Mao, for he would surely have address.c' himself more succes.sfully to the successiodn problem. And Chou had the personalitY

the popularity to be accepted without ser' ous question as Mao's immediate sucassof

This cannot be said of Hua Kuo-fe",: who is unknown to the vast majority Chinese, as he is to the outside world. He evidently a follower rather than an initiator: and he presides over a Politburo racked I? personal rivalries as much as political di' agreements. Centrifugal tendencies, typical of Chit° for millennia past, are already making then' selves felt as the various regional riltiltar!e commanders entrench themselves ol°'d firmly in their local political machines,. tol,s the nation-wide applicability of PekIng,,, policy statements becomes more questil."', able. It would not be surprising if the rulitlf group in the capital lost effective control c most of the provinces after Mao's death.