From the South China Morning Post this week in: 1966
At the bottom of page 2 of the South China Sunday Post-Herald on June 19, it was reported that the mainland's premier, Chou En-lai [now known as Zhou En-lai ], had told Romanian Communist Party chiefs at a banquet held in Bucharest that ''a great socialist cultural revolution' was being unfolded in his country against 'anti-party and anti-socialists elements''.
'We want to demolish all the old ideology and culture and all the old customs and habits,' Chou told his hosts, according to a few paragraphs attributed to the New China News Agency (now called Xinhua). The report also quoted the Liberation Army Daily as saying 'the campaign against dissident officials and intellectuals was directed at defending the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' and preventing a return of the 'Chiang Kai-shek clique'.'
'If we do not carry out this revolution but allow the representatives of the bourgeoisie to carry out their schemes, some incident of the Hungarian-type or some counter-revolutionary coup d'etat of the Kruschev-type is bound to occur', the army newspaper reported. 'At such a moment, the possibility would arise of the Chiang Kai-shek clique returning to the mainland and great numbers of landlords and despots and their armed bands, hitting back and taking retaliation.'
It seems to have taken the Post a full day to grasp the significance of Chou's speech, which was appended to the end of a bland, wire-service report on a meeting in Geneva of 'the communist-backed World Peace Council'.
The following day, a Monday, Chou's speech received its due significance: A front-page lead and a leader informed readers that the Cultural Revolution had officially begun. Under the headline 'Chou Admits Purge In Peking', the front-page report stated the premier's speech marked the first time that 'a leading member of the Peking Government has admitted publicly, for the first time outside China, that a purge is going on in China of anti-Party, anti-Socialist and counter-revolutionary intellectuals'.