Intra-Faction Struggles in Peking At the reception given on Mar. 26 by Party Chairman

Mao Tse-tong and Defense Minister Lin Piao for some 10,000 cadres of the People’s Liberation Army, Lin announced that Gen. Yang Cheng-wu, Chief of the General Staff of the PL& had been removed from all his official positions and that Gens. Yu Li-chin, political commissar of the air force, and Fu Chung-pi, com- mander of the Peking Garrison, had been arrested. Lin announced at the same time that Gen. Huang Yung- shen, chairman of the Revolutionary Committee in Kwangtung, had been appointed Chief of the General Staff, and that Wen Yu-cheng, Deputy Chief of the General Staff, was now in command of the Peking Garrison. (Both Hsinhua, on Mar. 26, and Jen-min Jib-pao, on Mar. 27, reported the changes of command, but not Lin’s speech at the reception.)

General Staff headquarters is in charge of PLA activi- ties and it was Yang Cheng-wu’s strategical arrange- ments in Peking and North China in the summer of 1966 that paved the way for the convening of the long-delayed 11th plenum of the Eighth Central Com- mittee and the official launching of Mao’s Great Prole- tarian Cultural Revolution. The purge of such a key military figure who had contributed substantially to Mao’s cause indicates fresh developments in the intra- faction struggle within the Peking hierarchy.

There are basically three centers of strength within the Maoist camp: the Cultural Revolution Group of the Central Committee under the direction of Mao’s wife Chiang Ching, with Politburo Standing Committee member Chen Po-ta as its nominal director (an Agence France Presse dispatch of Apr. 30 from Peking states that Chen has recently admitted having made mistakes in connection with Hung Ch’i, the Party theoretical journal) ; elements of the Liberation Army under the control of Defense Minister Lin Piao; and the govern- ment bureaucracy under the leadership of Premier Chou En-lai. These three factions could be harnessed together so long as the main target of attack was C.P.R. Chairman Liu Shao-ch’i, Party Secretary-General Teng Hsiao-ping and their supporters in the intra-Party power struggle. But with the opposition forces brought more or less under control by the use of military pres- sure or through negotiation or by isolation, intra-fac- tion struggles have developed, with conflicts between the Cultural Revolution Group and Lin Piao’s followers and between the Cultural Revolution Group and the government bureaucracy.

After de Wuhan incident of last July (see Commu- nist Affairs, V/s, Sept.-Oct. 1967, p. 14), when Premier Chou En-lai was entrusted with the task of setting up- through negotiation-revolutionary committees as pro- Maoist provisional organs of power in the provinces (see Communist Aflairs, VI/I, Jan.-Feb., p. IS,) he gained the upper hand, with the support of Lin Piao, over some of the extremists in the Maoist camp.

Key members of the Cultural Revolution Group were

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either purged or went into eclipse during this period: Wang Li, a deputy editor of Hung Ch’i who was in charge of propaganda for the Group and whose articles attacking “the handful of power-holders taking the capitalist road in the army” (Hung Ch’i, Aug. I, 1967) were deemed to be a contributing factor in the Wuhan incident; Lin Chieh, who was accused of being con- nected with the May 16 Military Group (it derives its name from Mao’s circular of May 16, 1966, which started the purge of the then powerful Peng Chen, Politburo member, head of the strategically important Peking municipal committee of the Party and Liu Shao- ch’i’s man) which had directed an attack against Pre- mier Chou En-lai and many administrative heads in- cluding Foreign Minister Chen Yi; Mu Hsing, who had instigated the seizure by Red Guards of confiden- tial documents from the Central Committee’s united front department (Tung-feng Chien-pao [East Wind Bulletin], Canton, Dec. 19, 1967) ; and Kuan Feng, a deputy director of the Cultural Revolution section of the PLA, who was also connected with the May 16 Military Group.

Like a chess player, Mao was obliged to sacrifice pawns in order to save the king. This was a setback for the Chiang Ching group which realized that if the strategical retreat made by Mao for expediency were to continue unchecked, it would lead to a situation in which both king and pawns would be swept off the chessboard. The change in the top PLA command amounts to a counterattack on their part.

The immediate cause was the fact that Gen. Fu Chung-pi, commander of the Peking Garrison, on Mar. 8 arrested some members of the Cultural Revo- lution Group during the drive against the ultra-leftists. It was the Peking Garrison also which last August ar- rested Lin Chieh and Mu Hsing of the Cultural Revo- lution Group hierarchy (Feiching Yenchiu [Studies on Chinese Communism], Taiwan, November 1967, p. 2). These arrests, coupled with the so-called “rightist re- versal of verdicts” which has been occurring-the re- habilitation of some of the cadres who were attacked by the leftists during the early stages of the cultural revo- lution -provoked the Chiang Ching-inspired move against Yang Cheng-wu, Chief of the General Staff, and Fu Chung-pi, his follower.

With the dismissal of Yang Cheng-wu, the scales tip in favor of Mao’s wife over Lin Piao and even Chou En-X. That Yang was able to remain in the various key positions in the capital lies largely in the fact that -apart from his service to the cultural revolution at the outset-he served under Lin Piao’s command from 1931 to 1935 and then under the command of Gen. Nieh Yung-then, one of the IO marshals and formerly the commander of the North China Field Army, the cadres of which still occupy various key positions in the North China Military Area. And Nieh Yung-then, Chou En-lai, Chen Yi, and Li Fu-ch’un have remained

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close political associates ever since their student days in France in the early 1920’s.

The new Chief of the General Staff, Gen. Huang Yung-shen, a native of Kiangsi, the original rural base of Mao’s armed rebellion, joined Mao’s forces as early as September 1927. He is regarded as one of the “San- wan cadres” faction in the PLA (it owes its name to the place in Kiangsi where Mao, after the failure of his Autumn Crop Uprising in 1927, reorganized his decimated forces into one regiment). Because of this historic association, he has a closer relation with Mao than with Lin Piao, although during the final phase of the civil war he held more important positions in the Fourth Field Army, of which Lin was commander. Since 1954 Huang has been commander of the Canton Military Area, which includes the provinces of Kwang- ttmg, Kwangsi, and Hunan. He became chairman of the Revolutionary Committee in Kwangtung in Feb- ruary, despite the fact that six months earlier he had been attacked by the Red Guards as “a human devil” (see Communist Affairs, VI/I, Jan.-Feb., p. 15).

That these changes of command in Peking, calcu- lated to strengthen Mao’s own position in the PLA, have also enhanced Chiang Ching’s position in the

‘hierarchy is evidenced by the fact that she was ranked 6th in a list of II top-level leaders who received the PLA cadres on Mar. 26 (Jen-min Jih-pao, Mar. 27). She had been ranked 8th and her supporters in the Cultural Revolution Group, Chang Chumchiao and Yao Wen-yuan, 9th and 10th respectively in the list of leaders at the May Day celebration (Ibid., May 2).

The star of Chiang Ching and her group is rising, this despite the fact that she is neither a member nor alternate-member of the Party’s Central Committee, to say nothing of its Politburo. Perhaps the overdue Ninth Congress of the Party, which the Maoists hope to convene this summer with a preponderance of dele- gates in their favor, will elect Mao’s wife to its supreme body.

Yet it is too early to predict any real change in the base of power or in the orientation of the cultural revo- lution. The other two factions are needed as instru- ments of military pressure and conciliatory negotiation, and Mao, “the great helmsman” as he is called now- adays, must do his best to coordinate all three sections of his crew lest his ship drift too far off his charted course.

-Mong-Ping Lee

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