ABSTRACT
A major political campaign in China can generate even more ferment than a parliamentary election in the West, for every man must take a public stand on the issue of moment or be condemned by his own silence–there is no funk hole like the secret ballot. All sensible Chinese were therefore seized, not by the urge, but by the sudden need to pulverize a philosopher who had long since become powder. The Chinese millions were reminded that the conflict between the Legalists and the Confucians was part of the unending class war in which the "proletarian revolutionary line" of Chairman Mao was now pitted against the "bourgeois reactionary line" of the enemy. The targets of the collective mudslinging, the ancient Confucius and the modern Lin Piao, personified the persistent "revisionist" evils in China–timeserving bureaucrats, bourgeois university examinations that held back proletarian students, books and operas that did not bear the correct social message.
