Cent leaders, Chiang Ching , has now been arrested in a crackdown against the 'Shanghai faction'.
SiX! Red Guards demonstrate in Tien An Men Square during the Cultural Revolution. One of their most promin against its rival without in any way being able to definitively defeat it. The compromise which heralded ine ena or the cultural Kevolution, and ten expressco itself first in the fall of Lin Piao and then the rehabilitation and removal again of Teng Hsiao-ping, flows SECOND struggle. Maitan's book therefore provides the invaluable background both to recent events in China and those that are likely to follow Mao's death.
There are of course weaknesses in the book. The •treatment of Lin Piao and some of the Shanghai leaders is too uncritical, seeming even to suggest a times that they should be considered as a confused Trotskyist element instead of something rather like Zinovie - an undoubted left wing, reflecting the pressures of the workers and capable of a radical and even adventurist foreign policy, but still representing a wing of the bureaucracy rather than the interests of the working class.
elemens involved in ine cast between China and Russia are also dealt with too sketchily. Finally, the urgent necessity of re-establishing links between China and Russia is not stressed sufficiently except in relation to the policy of the two countries on Vietnam.
However, taken as a whole the book is a mile ahead of anything else available on China and is a notable addition to Trotskyist literature on the most important single revolution of the last half century. It costs £8, which is considerably more than most readers of Red Weekly can afford, but force your local library to buy it. It is the best possjble guide to the struggles whic are to come in China.
ALAN JONES