China Charges Mount up

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The list of charges levelled at the group of "leftists' ousted from the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party is beginning to resemble the mountain of accusations which Stalin piled up against his political enemies in the course of the Moscow Trials.

"Responsible" for the disasterpus effects of earthquakes in North Clima and Peking; "plotting" to overthrow the regime by a coup d'etat and set up their own dictatorship; "guilty" of attempts to disrupt production by insisting on a too rigid adherence to railway achedules; "coordinating" deliberate plans to hold back industrial output levels, "organising" plots for the restoration of capitaism in China...the charges against Chang Ching and her "accomplices" have now reached ludicrous proportions, culminating ; in a "revelation" › at the end of last week that Mao's widow sat in a villa playing poker and refusing to set out for Peking aiter she had been urgently summoned to her husband's deathbed.

NEWLY DISCOVERED

The barrage of denunciations rad newly discovered incidents put out by the Chinese state propaganda machine and repeated - almost *about variations - by lower level ¡Stalinist functionaries throughout De country: can serve only to bring into disrepute and contempt the present rime boc. plained why crimes and plots on such a scale, extending over such a long period of time, were not discovered earlier by Mao and his "ever-vigilant" state security services or the army apparatus.

NON-EXISTENT

And the answer, of course, is that they never existed. The present political smokescreen however almost certainly serves a definite, but less direct, political purpose for Hua's regime.

In destroying the 'gang of four" so closely tied by personal connection to Mao himself, the chiefs of the bureaucracy hope to provide themselves with elbow room to revise Mao's own policies in practice, but without, of course, any acknowledgement this.

SOVIET UNION

Top of the list for changes is likely to be relations with the Soviet Union, where the repeated official and unofficial overtures put out publicly by Moscow can be explained , only by a tacit encoutagement from Peking.

And it is certain that, with the Chinese bureaucracy requiring, for domestic consumption, some evidence of change in the state which they were until recently denouncing , as 'social fascist" the question of a rapprochement with China will become an important factor in the infighting in Moscow over the succession to Brezhnev.

Common friend to both so-called right' and left' wing factions - disgraced exPresident Nixon. Neither faction offers any principled road to workers. prisoners to Northern Ireland, the retention of political status for prisoners in the North, more jobs for his constituents in Fermanagh and a declaration of intent from the *Playing his cards for all they were worth" as MacManus put it, included neither the unequivocal demand for the immediate withdrawal of troops from a country they have no right to occupy nor the rejection of parliamentary horse trading with imperialist butchers.

Yet these negotiations are conducted at a time when both Dublin and London governments are weak and jittery in the extreme. The Dublin government as the junior imperialist partner displays condition that can only be called paranoic in its relation with its critics.

While it prepares to hang two political activists on trumped up charges on the one hand, the Minister of Posts O'Brien goes as far as to cut off the telephone of a truculent writer on the other.

Even the President, the supposed head of state is quickly cut down to the size that the hysterical ruling class considers appropriate for their constitution. President O'Daleigh went no further than the Pontius Pilate like gesture of referring the draconian emergency legislation to the High Court to test its legality.

This marginal crack in the ruling class ranks produced from Defence Minister Donegan the opinion that his head of state was a "thundering disgrace". Hopeless constitutionalists removed from the realities of the class struggle waited for Donegan to do "the gentlemanly and resign.

The needs of the ruling class at a time of world wide upsurge of working class militancy puts all constitutionalists and their constitutions in their place. And it was O'Naleich wha ont the hant

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SOCIALIST PRESS Metend 17th November 1976