All along, the communists remained safely ensconced in the hinterland. By January 1940, according to a report from Zhou Enlai himself, more than a million soldiers had been killed or wounded, although this figure included no more than 31,000 casualties from the Red Army. Chiang Kai-shek and his government were forced to retreat to the provisional capital of Chongqing in Sichuan. Some 3,000 tonnes of bombs were dropped on the city in hundreds of air raids until the United States entered the war after Pearl Harbor.13
Not a single bullet was ever fired at Yan’an. Mao’s strategy of guerrilla warfare far behind enemy lines had some outspoken critics, but Stalin stood by Mao. In the summer of 1938 Moscow demanded that party members unite behind their leader, crushing those who had hoped to prevail against him. A few months later the Kremlin described Mao as a ‘wise tactician’ and ‘brilliant theorist’. An abridged version of Red Star over China was rushed into print.14
For the very first time Mao was without a serious rival. He used the opportunity to rewrite the past. At a plenum held in the autumn of 1938 the first item on the agenda was his report on the history of the party since its foundation seventeen years earlier. At 150 pages, it lasted three days. Mao ticked off everyone who had crossed him in the past, describing them as ‘right opportunists’ or ‘left opportunists’. A few were accused of being Trotskyists. It was the first canonical version of the party’s history, one in which a long series of errors against the correct party line had been committed until Mao Zedong had finally triumphed, leading the Red Army to Yan’an with the Long March.15
Mao’s next step was to establish himself as a theoretician. In this task he was helped by Chen Boda, a bookish but ambitious young man trained in Moscow who would become his ghost writer. Together they penned On New Democracy, a pamphlet published in January 1940 that portrayed the communist party as a broad front striving to unite all ‘revolutionary classes’, including the national bourgeoisie. Mao promised a multi-party system, democratic freedoms and protection of private property. It was an entirely fictitious programme, but one that held broad popular appeal.16
Many thousands of students, teachers, artists, writers and journalists poured into Yan’an in the following years, attracted by the promise of a more democratic future. But Mao was suspicious of these free-thinkers and demanded absolute loyalty instead. In 1942 he launched a Rectification Campaign. In the words of historian Gao Hua, the aim was ‘to intimidate the whole party with violence and terror, to uproot any individual independent thought, to make the whole party subject to the single utmost authority of Mao’.17
Mao orchestrated the entire campaign, supervising everything down to the last detail, but he allowed his henchman Kang Sheng to take centre stage. A sinister man with a pencil moustache and thick spectacles, always dressed in black, Kang had been trained in Moscow, where he had helped the secret police eliminate hundreds of students from China during the Great Terror. Under his supervision endless witch-hunts were carried out in Yan’an, as people were forced to denounce each other. Thousands of suspects were locked up, investigated, tortured, purged and occasionally executed. The spine-chilling howls of people imprisoned in caves could be heard at night.18
When the campaign came to an end, more than 15,000 alleged enemy agents and spies had been unmasked. Mao had allowed the terror to run amok, assuming the role of a self-effacing, distant yet benevolent leader. Then he stepped in to curb the violence, letting Kang Sheng take the fall. Those who had managed to survive the horror turned to Mao as a saviour.19
Mao also set up a Central General Study Committee, which he packed with close allies, among them Liu Shaoqi, a dour, puritanical party member who would emerge as Number Two. The Study Committee ran everything in Yan’an, in effect converting the Communist Party into Mao’s personal dictatorship. Leading members who had crossed Mao in the past were humiliated, forced to write confessions and apologise publicly for their mistakes. Zhou Enlai was one of them, and he tried hard to redeem himself by proclaiming his undying support for Mao. This was deemed insufficient, as he was tested in a series of denunciation meetings in which he had to call himself a ‘political swindler’ who lacked principles. It was a gruelling exercise in self-abasement, but Zhou managed to emerge from the ordeal as Mao’s faithful assistant, determined never to oppose him again. Unlike Stalin, Mao rarely had his rivals shot, turning them instead into accomplices who were on permanent probation, having to work tirelessly to prove themselves.20
On 1 July 1943, the twenty-second anniversary of the founding of the party, Mao announced that the Rectification Campaign had ‘guaranteed ideological and political unanimity in the party’. This was the green light for an unlimited cult of personality. All had to acclaim Mao Zedong, and all had to study Mao Zedong Thought, a term coined four days later by Wang Jiaxiang, a Soviet-trained ideologist. Foremost among his hagiographers was Liu Shaoqi, who hailed Mao as a ‘great revolutionary leader’ and ‘master of Marxism Leninism’. Liu’s praise was the signal for others to rally around their leader, referring to him as the ‘great revolutionary helmsman’, a ‘saving star’, a ‘genius strategist’ and a ‘genius politician’. The panegyrics were ‘nauseatingly slavish’, observed Theodore White and Annalee Jacoby, two American journalists. When Mao spoke, hardened men tempered by years of guerrilla warfare would studiously take notes ‘as if drinking from the fountain of knowledge’.21
The party’s mouthpiece, Liberation Daily, overseen by Mao, used giant headlines proclaiming ‘Comrade Mao Zedong is the Saviour of the Chinese People!’ By the end of 1943 portraits of Mao were everywhere, prominently displayed next to those of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin. Badges bearing his head circulated among the party elite, while his profile appeared in gold relief on the façade of a huge auditorium. People sang to his glory: ‘The East is Red, the Sun is Rising; China has Brought Forth a Mao Zedong; He Seeks the People’s Happiness’.22
In April 1945, after a seventeen-year interval, a party congress was finally convened. Hundreds of the delegates had been persecuted during the Rectification Campaign, some of them replaced by men loyal to Mao. All of them hailed their leader, who was elected Chairman of the top organs of the party. Mao Zedong Thought was enshrined in the party constitution. In his opening report, Liu Shaoqi mentioned the Chairman’s name more than a hundred times, referring to him as ‘the greatest revolutionary and statesman in all of Chinese history’ as well as ‘the greatest theoretician and scientist in all of Chinese history’. Mao, at long last, had turned the party into an instrument of his own will.23
When Japan surrendered on 15 August 1945 Mao controlled 900,000 troops in rural pockets across the north of China. A few days earlier Stalin had declared war on Japan, sending close to a million troops across the Siberian border to occupy Manchuria and the north of Korea, where they waited for their Allied counterparts to join them on the 38th parallel. Mao had grandiose plans to incite a rebellion in faraway Shanghai, but Stalin’s immediate concern was to ensure the departure of the American troops from China and Korea. In order to achieve this goal, he recognised Chiang Kai-shek as the leader of a united China in a Sino-Soviet treaty.
Soviet troops in Manchuria, however, quietly handed over the countryside to the communists, who began pouring into the region from Yan’an. The Soviets helped Mao transform his ragtag army of guerrilla fighters into a formidable fighting machine, opening sixteen military institutions, including air force, artillery and engineering schools. Some Chinese officers went to the Soviet Union for advanced training. Logistical support also arrived by air and by rail. In North Korea alone a full 2,000 wagonloads were allocated to the task.24
The Americans, on the other hand, in September 1946 imposed an arms embargo on their wartime ally Chiang Kai-shek. Chiang, convinced that China would never be able to defend itself without control over Manchuria, the industrial powerhouse and strategic gateway of the country, kept on pouring his best troops into the region. Mao never let up, determined to wear down his enemy in a pit
iless war of attrition, whatever the cost.
In 1948 the communists began laying siege to cities in Manchuria, starving them into surrender. Changchun fell after 160,000 civilians died of hunger. Unwilling to undergo the same fate, Beijing capitulated soon afterwards. Like dominoes, other cities fell one after the other, unable to resist the war machine built up by the communists. Chiang Kai-shek and his troops fled to Taiwan. By the end of 1949, after a long and bloody military conquest, the People’s Republic of China was proclaimed.25
The moment the red flag fluttered over Beijing, a hastily sketched portrait of Mao Zedong went up over the main gate of the Forbidden City. Over the following months portraits of the Chairman appeared in schools, factories and offices, often with precise instructions on how they should be displayed. His distinctive wart soon became a trademark and was affectionately touched in, like a Buddha figure. The study of Mao Zedong Thought became compulsory, as adults from all walks of life had to go back to class, poring over official textbooks to learn the new orthodoxy. Revolutionary songs, including ‘Mao Zedong is our Sun’ or ‘Hymn to Chairman Mao’ were belted out daily by schoolchildren, soldiers, prisoners and office workers. These tunes were also blasted from loudspeakers, installed on street corners, railway stations, dormitories, canteens and all major institutions. Carefully choreographed parades were held twice a year, as clockwork soldiers, mounted cavalry, tanks and armoured cars were reviewed by the Chairman on top of a rostrum in Tiananmen Square.26
With the cult of personality came a harsh regime modelled on the Soviet Union. ‘The Soviet Union’s Today is our Tomorrow’ was the slogan of the day. Mao emulated Stalin, seeing the key to wealth and power in the collectivisation of agriculture, the elimination of private property, all-pervasive control of the lives of ordinary people and huge expenditures on national defence.27
The promises made in On New Democracy were broken one by one. The regime’s first act was to overthrow the old order in the countryside. This was done in the guise of land reform, as villagers were forced to beat and dispossess their own leaders in collective denunciation meetings, accusing them of being ‘landlords’, ‘tyrants’ and ‘traitors’. Some did so with relish, but many had no choice as they risked being targeted themselves. Close to two million people were physically liquidated, many more stigmatised as ‘exploiters’ and ‘class enemies’. Their assets were distributed to the perpetrators, creating a pact sealed in blood between the poor and the party.28
In the cities every individual was given a class label (chengfen) based on their loyalty to the revolution: there were ‘good’, ‘wavering’ and ‘hostile’ people. A class label determined a person’s access to food, education, health care and employment. Those marked as ‘hostile’ were stigmatised for life and beyond, since the label was passed on to children.29
A Great Terror followed from October 1950 to October 1951, as the regime turned against ‘counter-revolutionaries’, ‘spies’, ‘bandits’ and others standing in the way of revolution. Mao fixed the killing quota at one per thousand, but in some regions two or three times as many were killed, often at random. The following year former government servants were subjected to a massive purge, while the business community was brought to heel. All organisations operating outside the party – religious communities, philanthropic societies, independent chambers of commerce, civil associations – were eliminated by 1953.30
A literary inquisition ensured artists and writers conformed to the dictates of the party. Books considered undesirable were burned in giant bonfires or pulped by the tonne. The Commercial Press, one of the largest in the country, had roughly 8,000 titles in print in the summer of 1950. A year later a mere 1,234 of these were considered acceptable for ‘the masses’. In every domain of the visual and literary arts the socialist realism devised by Stalin was imposed. The most prominent theme was Mao, not Stalin. His works, essays, poems, lectures, musings and mottos were churned out by the million, from cheap paperbacks to expensive gilded editions. A huge amount of propaganda work was published, telling the story of oppression and the road to liberation, sometimes in Mao’s own words and handwriting. Newspapers and magazines, too, spread his wisdom far and wide. Photographs of the Chairman dominated the front pages.31
In 1949 the Chairman handpicked a photographer named Hou Bo. She had joined the party at the age of fourteen, and her pictures were soon printed in the millions. ‘The Founding of the PRC’ (1949), ‘Mao Zedong Swimming Across the Yangzi’ (1955) and ‘Chairman Mao at Ease with the Masses’ (1959), some of them heavily touched up, were among the most widely distributed images of the twentieth century.32
No parks, streets or cities were named after Mao. The Chairman instead fashioned a more intangible monument to himself, as philosopher king of the East. At its heart was the idea that he had combined the theory of Marxism-Leninism with the concrete practice of the Chinese revolution. Instead of applying Marxism dogmatically to conditions very different from those in Russia, Mao had overseen the Sinification of Marxism. In December 1950 the Chairman published an article entitled ‘On Practice’, followed in April 1952 by ‘On Contradiction’. Both were hailed as philosophical developments of the dialectical materialism of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin. Although these essays contained little that was original, the idea of the Sinification of Marxism captured the imagination of admirers at home and abroad.33
Mao also posed as a renaissance man, a philosopher, sage and poet wrapped in one, a calligrapher immersed in the literary traditions of his country. Even as traditional poetry vanished from the shelves, the Chairman’s own verses were widely distributed. A highpoint was the publication of Chairman Mao’s Nineteen Poems. The compendium actually contained twenty-one pieces, but Mao was keen to imitate a well-known classical anthology entitled Nineteen Ancient Poems. It immediately prompted a movement to study his work, as learned professors and party secretaries vied with each other to praise this ‘historic breakthrough in literary history’.34
While Mao’s poetry was only marginally better than that of Stalin, who also liked to dabble in rhyme, he did have a genuine gift for words. His pithy slogans found their way into every household, whether it was ‘Women Hold up Half the Sky’, ‘Revolution is Not a Dinner Party’, ‘Power Comes from the Barrel of a Gun’ or ‘Imperialism is a Paper Tiger’. His motto was ‘Serve the People’, proclaimed from posters and placards everywhere, the white characters written in a flamboyant hand against a red background. His mighty brush was used to name government buildings, grace public monuments and adorn mugs, vases and calendars. To this day his calligraphy dominates the masthead of the People’s Daily.35
Mao, like Stalin, was a remote, god-like figure, rarely seen, rarely heard, ensconced deep within the Forbidden City that was once occupied by emperors. But he excelled at corridor politics, constantly meeting members at all levels of the party hierarchy. His personal appearance was deceptive. He came across as gentle, humble and almost grandfatherly in his concern for others. He was a poor public speaker, hampered by a thick Hunanese accent, but a good conversationalist who knew how to put his audience at ease. He walked and spoke slowly, always with great gravitas. He smiled often and benevolently. ‘He seems so gentle that few people notice the cold, appraising eyes or are aware of the ceaselessly calculating mind within.’ When he entered a room for a meeting, those present were required to stand up and applaud.36
Mao emulated Stalin, but his mentor feared the emergence of a powerful neighbour that might threaten his dominance over the socialist camp. Stalin had made him wait for weeks on end before signing a Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance in 1950. He also whittled down funding for China’s first Five-Year Plan, warning Mao that he was moving too fast in collectivising the economy.
Stalin’s death in 1953 came as a liberation for Mao. The Chairman could finally crank up the pace of collectivisation, as he imposed a monopoly on grain by the end of the year that obliged farmers to sell their crops at prices fixed by the sta
te. Two years later collectives resembling state farms in the Soviet Union were introduced. They took back the land from the farmers, transforming the villagers into bonded servants at the beck and call of the state. In the cities all commerce and industry became functions of the state, as the government expropriated small shops, private enterprises and large industries alike. But the Socialist High Tide, as the campaign of accelerated collectivisation was known, had devastating effects on the economy and caused widespread popular discontent.37
In 1956 Mao encountered a setback. On 25 February, the final day of the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev held an unscheduled secret session in the Great Kremlin Palace. In a four-hour speech delivered without interruption, he denounced the suspicion, fear and terror created by Stalin. In a devastating attack on his former master, Khrushchev accused him of being personally responsible for brutal purges, mass deportations, executions without trial and the torture of innocent party loyalists. Khrushchev further assailed Stalin for his ‘mania for greatness’ and the cult of personality he had fostered during his reign. Members in the audience listened in stunned silence. There was no applause at the end, as many of the delegates were dazed, leaving in a state of shock.38
Copies of the speech were sent to foreign communist parties, where it set off a chain reaction. In Beijing the Chairman was forced on the defensive. Mao was China’s Stalin, the great leader of the People’s Republic. The secret speech could only raise questions about his own leadership, in particular the adulation surrounding him. De-Stalinisation was nothing short of a challenge to Mao’s own authority. Just as Khrushchev pledged to return his country to the Politburo, Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, Zhou Enlai and others in Beijing spoke out in favour of the principles of collective leadership. They also used Khrushchev’s critique of state farms to slow down the pace of collectivisation. It looked as if the Chairman was being sidelined.39
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