China - Frame-up Inquiry Launched

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The news from Shanghai last weekend that the Chinese Communist Party is to set up a commission of inquiry into the 'crimes of the anti-party clique' underlines the close parallels with the Stalinist purges in the Soviet Union.

Reports indicate it will be headed by Marshall Yeh Cien-ying, Party Vice Chairman and Defence Minister. The scale of the frame-ups over which he is likely to preside may be gathered from Shanghai posters reporting that the 'WangChang-Chiang-Yao clique' are under arrest and are being interrogated on their activities going back to before the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in 1966.

Similarly with Bukharin and others who were tried as 'Rights Teng with Kissinger and Trotskyites' in Moscow in the 1930's, they were accused of plotting the murder of Lenin almost twenty years earlier!

The new Chinese purges rival Stalin's also in the speed, cynicism and 'unanimity' of the political turns.

SUSPENDED

One of the effects of the announced 'inquiry" will be to suspend the work of the earlier "inquiry" headed by one of the 'gang of four' , Deputy Premier Chang Chun-chiao into the 'crimes" of Teng Hsiao-ping. . This investigation was set up immediately after the rightist' Teng was removed in April, following the clashes in Peking over the commemoration of Chou En-lai.

One of the main charges levelled by the lefts' against Teng - charges with which not one single member of the present ruling echelon publicly disagreed! - was that he had 'falsified' the thought of Chairman Mao Tse-tung.

The attacks on Teng have been quietly phased out since Hua Kuofeng and his supporters ousted the "lefts' . But the same charges are now being levelled at Teng's former main accusers.

LIES

In particular it is claimed that one of the four, Yao Wen-yuan placed his supporters in control of the People's Daily and used it to disseminate lies, and falsifications of Mao's views.

Yao's nominees have now been removed and have, reportedly, made their 'self-criticisms'. And at the end of last week the new acting editor of People's Daily, An Kang, gave an interview to western journalists in Peking during which he disputed the description of the 'gang of four' as 'leftists, claiming that they sought to "pull down the flag raised by Chairman Mao and turn China into backward society" (a thin euphemism for the restoration of capitalism).

Although An Kang denied that Among the orchestrated denunciations of the past three weeks one of the obvious charges which has been - so far - conspicuously absent has been that of any sort of complicity with the Soviet leadership.

This lends weight to the suggestion that the new leadership intend - after a decent interval - to respond to the repeated overtures from Moscow.

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the four would be executed, accusa- tions of this sort obviously provide the basis for charges of treason.