SIX WHO RULE--AND REMEMBER

Though Chinese politics is forever a mystery to Westerners, one can make out its outlines. Supreme power lies in the six-man Standing Committee of the Politburo. The Politburo of 25 men is where politics shifts and simmers; below it is the 210-member Central Committee, where younger people, engineers, technicians, provincial party leaders voice the growing pressures from below. Outside them all is the army -- wary, suspicious, slowly being subordinated by the Standing Committee to the government.

All decisions come to final judgment in the six-man Standing Committee, a band of old wartime veterans dominated by Deng Xiaoping. He does not hold China's highest titles (he is chairman of both the party and government military commissions), but there is no doubt that he is the "para mount leader." Deng is a tiny man (approximately 5 ft. tall), half elf, half gunman; at 79 he is China's foremost pragmatist and is engagingly candid. A brilliant youngster who graduated from high school at 15, he went off to France after World War I as a student. There he met Chou En-lai (of whom Deng said recently, "I regarded him as my elder brother"), joined the Communist movement, returned to China, led peasant insurrections in Guangxi and joined Mao Tse-tung for the Long March.

Chief political commissar of Mao's personal forces on the March, he went on to fight the war against the Japanese in the mountain province of Shanxi. In the "Liberation War" he rose to become political commissar of the revolutionary Second Field Army; he wound up both wars with a record of glory and rose to membership in the Standing Committee by 1956. With the outbreak of the Cultural Revolution, he was officially named the "No. 2 capitalist reader" in the party, after Liu Shaoqi. Accused of arrogance, gluttony and dissolute habits (addiction to bridge and mah-jongg), he was purged and paraded through the streets of Peking wearing a dunce cap. He was rusticated several times--to stoop labor in Jiangxi, later to serve meals at the mess of a party training camp outside Peking. But he bears larger scars of memory. During the Great Terror, one of his sons was forced to jump--or was pushed--from the fourth-story window of his student dormitory, and is now paralyzed from the waist down, a cripple for life. Deng is a reasonable man, also a hard man. He does not forget.

Oldest of the six-man group is Marshal Ye Jianying, 86. From the Communist uprising in Canton in 1927 to the coup against the Gang of Four in 1976, Ye was central. He now carries no official title, is ailing, will almost surely be replaced soon. He too bears wounds. His son, an aviator, was forced to stoop labor during the Terror. Overworked, exhausted, beaten, the son one night put his hand into the gears of a threshing machine; the hand was mangled. That son will never fly again. So Ye does not forget.

Next comes Li Xiannian, 78, also a war hero; he has now been named officially President of China. He too carries memories. During the Great Terror, mobbed by the Red Guards, he was saved only by Chou En-lai's intercession. How can you attack this man as a "capitalist roader," asked Chou, when he is in charge of our aid to Viet Nam, where we are fighting American imperialism?

Then comes Chen Yun, 78, a shy man who was elected to the Politburo as far back as the Long March in 1934. Once a soldier, he later served as Chairman of the State Financial and Economic Commission and has become China's leading economic thinker, the man who insists that China's people need consumer goods and the state must loosen its controls to provide them. This sets him against Li Xiannian, who thinks that China must focus on infrastructure and capital goods.

Chen suffered only lightly during the Cultural Revolution -- exiled to the south in 1969, returning to power only after Deng regained control.

Then follow the two "young" men. Most important for the future is probably Hu Yaobang, 68, General Secretary of the party. A peppery personality, Hu ran away from home at the age of 14 to join the Communists; trooped with them on the Long March to north China; served against both Japanese and Nationalists, rising to political commissar of an entire army group by the end of the Liberation War. He was once private secretary to Liu Shaoqi, and during the war was close to Deng too. His punishment by the Cultural Revolutionaries was years in the stables, eating and sleeping with sheep and horses.

Zhao Ziyang is the baby of the ruling group at 64. He is a favorite of Deng Xiaoping and made his mark, after the downfall of the Gang of Four, by reorganizing the province of Sichuan. Now, as Premier, he operates the governing machinery and, by all reports, does it well. He too must be considered one of the Old Guard, a warrior, having fought both Japanese and Nationalists with valor. His ordeal in the Cultural Revolution lasted only four years: 1967-1971. He was dragged from his home in Canton, paraded through the streets with the ritual dunce cap of "capitalist roaders," then rusticated.

Take this ruling group and together they shape up as the oldest in the world. All are men of Yanan, the Valley Forge of China; all but one of them veterans of the Long March when Communism was a dream that tugged them forward. They are men of the old combat army, but of a generation that is passing--as if America were, today, governed by a six-man committee consisting of Generals MacArthur, Patton, Eisenhower and a few outstanding divisional World War II commanders. They have lived long enough to be honored for large victories and to have suffered from their own triumphant revolution. Aging revolutionaries who have recaptured power, they seem to want, most of them, to give China back to the ideals of the original revolution. They are struggling to avoid such a transfer of power as Mao, in his senile dementia, tried to mastermind from the palace court. They meet, usually, in the old Zhongnanhai imperial grounds, sometimes in the Great Hall of the People, sometimes in places unspecified.

Their problem is the same as it was when they came out of the hills: How to give China government? What kind of government? How does one create a civilized order in a nation that has no history except the memory of tyrants, plus beauty, cruelty and poetry? This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.