Nobody wanted to fall behind in the cult of the leader. As the range of objects condemned as ‘feudal’ or ‘bourgeois’ expanded, ordinary people increasingly turned to the only politically safe commodities available. Mao photos, badges, posters and books became all the rage, as entire branches of industry were converted to produce cult objects.
In Shanghai alone seven new factories were built with a total surface of 16,400 square metres, the size of about three football fields, to keep up with demand for photos, portraits, posters and books. In Jiangsu province industrial plants were refitted to print the Little Red Book. Factories producing red ink worked around the clock but still ran dry.64
The books needed covers – shiny, bright and red. The quantity of plastic needed for the Little Red Book alone reached 4,000 tonnes by 1968. As early as August 1966 the Ministry of Trade curbed the production of plastic shoes, plastic slippers and plastic toys as factories around the country geared up to contribute to Mao Zedong Thought.65
The planned economy struggled to keep up with popular demand. When it came to Mao badges, for instance, the national output stood at more than fifty million badges per month in 1968, but it was not enough. A thriving black market emerged to compete with the state. Some government organisations produced badges for their own members, but also expanded their operations into a legal twilight zone, lured by the profit motive. Underground factories appeared, entirely devoted to feeding the black market. They competed with state enterprises for rare resources, stealing aluminium buckets, kettles, pots and pans. Such was the demand that in some factories even the protective layer of aluminium on expensive machinery was ripped away to feed the badge frenzy.66
There were thousands of different badges, a few fashioned crudely from acrylic glass, plastic or even bamboo, some carefully crafted with hand-coloured porcelain, the majority with an aluminium base and a profile image of Mao in gold or silver, invariably looking to the left. Like the Little Red Book, the badge became a symbol of loyalty to the Chairman, and was worn just above the heart. Badges were the most hotly traded pieces of private property during the first years of the Cultural Revolution, open to every form of capitalist speculation. The amount of aluminium diverted away from other industrial activities was so enormous that, in 1969, Mao ordered a halt: ‘Give me back my aeroplanes.’ The fad declined rapidly, and largely ceased after the death of Lin Biao in 1971.67
The first phase of the Cultural Revolution was marked by vicious factional fighting, as ordinary people, party cadres and military leaders were divided over the true aims of the Cultural Revolution. As different factions opposed each other, all of them equally certain that they represented the true voice of Mao Zedong, the country slid into civil war. Soon people were fighting each other in the streets with machine guns and anti-aircraft artillery. Still the Chairman prevailed. He improvised, destroying millions of lives along the way. Periodically he stepped in to rescue a loyal follower or throw a close colleague to the wolves. A mere utterance of his decided the fates of countless people, as he declared one or another faction to be ‘counter-revolutionary’. His verdict could change overnight, feeding a seemingly endless cycle of violence in which people scrambled to prove their loyalty to the Chairman.
As the violence spiralled out of control over the summer of 1967 the Chairman intervened. He toured the country, calling for a Great Alliance. On 1 October, in a great show of coordinated unity, half a million soldiers marched across Tiananmen Square, led by an enormous silver-coloured, plastic figure of Mao pointing the way forward. They were followed by hundreds of thousands of ordinary people, forced to march together, many in contingents with members from opposed factions.68
Everywhere study classes in Mao Zedong Thought were convened. The People’s Liberation Army had stood behind Mao Zedong Thought years earlier, and now it used the cult of their leader to impose order and discipline. The cult of personality, as Lin Biao phrased it, would unite ‘the entire party, the entire army, and the entire people’. A new campaign called the Three Loyalties and Four Boundless Loves was launched in March 1968. It brought the worship of Mao to new heights, requiring absolute loyalty to the Chairman, his thought and the ‘proletarian revolutionary line’. In schools, offices and factories, altars were set up to Chairman Mao. Large characters reading ‘The Red Sun in Our Hearts’ were cut out in bright, shiny red paper, forming an arc over a picture of the Great Helmsman. Sunrays emanated from his head. Everywhere people met the gaze of the Chairman the moment they woke up and reported back to him in the evening, bowing in front of his portrait.69
There was even a loyalty dance, consisting of a few simple moves with outstretched arms from the heart to the Chairman’s portrait. The dance was accompanied by the song ‘Beloved Chairman Mao’. On state television, entire evenings were devoted to ritual song and dance. A giant bust usually occupied the centre of the stage, producing rays that throbbed and flickered with electricity, as if light and energy poured forth from the godhead.70
Busts and statues of Mao sprouted like mushrooms after rain. More than 600,000 of them appeared in Shanghai alone, most made of death-white plaster, others using reinforced concrete, aluminium and tinplate. Some towered above pedestrians at a majestic fifteen metres, others stood at a more modest three metres. Scarce resources were expended in the informal competition, and in 1968 the city used 900 tonnes of tinplate alone. The Steel Institute turned to stainless steel to erect its monument at a cost of 100,000 yuan.71
The first phase of the Cultural Revolution came to an end in the summer of 1968 as new, so-called ‘revolutionary party committees’ took over the party and the state. They were heavily dominated by military officers, concentrating real power in the hands of the army. Over the next three years they turned the country into a garrison state, with soldiers overseeing schools, factories and government units. They also organised a series of purges, as all those who had spoken out at the height of the Cultural Revolution in 1966–7 were punished. At first millions of undesirable elements, including students and others who had taken the Chairman at his word, were banished to the countryside to be ‘re-educated by the peasants’. This was followed by a nationwide witch-hunt for ‘spies’, ‘traitors’ and ‘renegades’, as special committees were set up to examine the alleged enemy links of ordinary people and party members alike. A campaign against corruption further cowed the population into submission, as almost every act and every utterance – inadvertently tearing a poster of the Chairman, questioning the planned economy – became a potentially criminal act.72
Across the country people were forced to prove their devotion to the Chairman, denouncing colleagues, friends, neighbours and family members. In one senseless and unpredictable purge after another entire communities were ripped apart, producing docile, atomised individuals loyal to no one but the Chairman. And everywhere recalcitrant elements were forced to undergo re-education, whether study classes in Mao Zedong Thought for ordinary people or May Seventh Cadre Schools for party members.
In April 1969 the Ninth Party Congress passed a new constitution, establishing that ‘Marxism-Leninism Mao Zedong Thought’ was to be the theoretical basis of the party. Mao Zedong Thought was reaffirmed as the country’s guiding ideology. At long last the Chairman was able to reverse the decisions made by the Eighth Party Congress in September 1956. By now Liu Shaoqi had been expelled from the party and denounced, along with dozens of other elderly party leaders, as a ‘renegade, traitor and scab hiding in the party and a running dog of imperialism, modern revisionism and the nationalist reactionaries who has committed innumerable crimes’. He died in solitary detention six months later, covered in bedsores, his hair long and unkempt. A new Central Committee was elected in which less than one in five members were carryovers from 1956.73
Mao, however, was wary of the military, in particular Lin Biao, who had pioneered the study of Mao Zedong Thought in the army. Mao had used Lin Biao to launch and sustain the Cultural Revolution, but the marshal in turn exploite
d the turmoil to expand his own power base, placing his followers in key positions throughout the army. He died in a mysterious plane crash in September 1971, bringing to an end the grip of the military on civilian life, as the army was in turn purged, falling victim to the Cultural Revolution.
Mao’s cult, closely associated with Lin Biao and the People’s Liberation Army, was scaled back almost overnight. China moved even further away from the Soviet Union, turning instead towards the United States in 1972. Cities were spruced up for Nixon’s visit, with posters removed and anti-imperialist slogans toned down. Shanghai underwent a facelift. It took a small army of women to scrub out a huge slogan opposite the Peace Hotel proclaiming ‘Long Live the Invincible Thoughts of Chairman Mao’. New slogans appeared, welcoming the ‘Great Unity of the Peoples of the World’. All signs of the Chairman were removed from window displays. Thousands of statues were dismantled, discreetly sent off for recycling.74
The Chairman, too, was primped and preened. His meeting with Nixon was a huge propaganda coup. The news sent shock waves around the world, as the balance of the Cold War shifted away from the Soviet Union. In Beijing, Mao gloated that the United States was ‘changing from monkey to man, not quite a man yet, the tail is still there’. He had reduced Nixon, the leader of the most powerful nation on earth, to a mere emissary seeking an imperial audience. Leaders of countries from Europe, Latin America, Africa and Asia soon flocked to Beijing, all seeking recognition.75
During his final years in court the Chairman continued to play one faction against the other. When Zhou Enlai was diagnosed with cancer Mao refused to approve his treatment, allowing him to die in early 1976. His own death came a few minutes past midnight on 9 September 1976. In schools, factories and offices people were assembled to listen to the official announcement. Those who felt relief had to hide their feelings. This was the case with Chang Jung, a student from Sichuan who for a moment was numbed with sheer euphoria. All around her people wept. She had to display the correct emotion or risk being singled out, and buried her head in the shoulder of the woman in front of her, heaving and snivelling.76
She was hardly alone in putting on a performance. Traditionally, in China, weeping for dead relatives and even throwing oneself on the ground in front of the coffin was a required demonstration of filial piety. Absence of tears was a disgrace to the family. Sometimes actors were hired to wail loudly at the funerals of important dignitaries, thus encouraging other mourners to join in without feeling embarrassed. And much as people had mastered the art of effortlessly producing proletarian anger at denunciation meetings, many knew how to cry on demand.
People showed less contrition in private. In Kunming, the provincial capital of Yunnan, liquor sold out overnight. One young woman remembers how her father invited his best friend to their home, locked the door and opened the only bottle of wine they had. The following day they went to a public memorial service where people cried as if they were heartbroken. ‘As a little girl, I was confused by the adults’ expressions – everybody looked so sad in public, while my father was so happy the night before.’77
Some people felt genuine grief, especially those who had benefited from the Cultural Revolution. And plenty of true believers remained, especially among young people. Ai Xiaoming, a twenty-two-year-old girl eager to enter the party and contribute to socialism, was so heartbroken that she wept almost to the point of fainting.78
In the countryside, however, apparently few people sobbed. As one poor villager in Anhui recalled, ‘not a single person wept at the time’.79
Mao entered a mausoleum, like Stalin. Unlike Stalin, he remained there. His portrait still hangs high in Beijing, while his face beams from every banknote in the People’s Republic. Mao used the cult to turn others into adulators who enforced his every whim. He made party leaders accomplices to his crimes. And by becoming complicit they and their successors turned themselves into the custodians of his image, determined not to repeat the mistake Khrushchev had made in his secret speech.
5
Kim Il-sung
On 14 October 1945 a mass rally was held in a sports field in Pyongyang to welcome the Red Army. Half a year earlier, when Stalin had met Roosevelt at Yalta, the Allied powers had negotiated the fate of Korea, a Japanese colony since 1910. They had agreed to jointly occupy the peninsula, deciding at the last minute to divide the country along the 38th parallel. Pyongyang became the provisional capital of north Korea under Soviet control.
Flanked by Soviet officers, Kim Il-sung made his first public speech on that day. There was a stir in the audience when he was introduced by General Lebedev, as people associated his name with a legendary guerrilla fighter, a great patriot who had roamed at will over Manchuria ten years earlier, harassing the Japanese enemy. But Kim did not look the part. He was only thirty-three years old and seemed inexperienced, nervously clutching his script. In the words of one witness he looked ‘like a delivery boy from a Chinese eatery’, with a close-cropped haircut and a blue suit that was too small for his pudgy frame. He stumbled through a speech peppered with Marxist jargon in a monotonous voice, heaping extravagant praise on Stalin. A rumour swept through the crowd, accusing him of being a fake, a stooge imposed by the Soviet Union. It was an inauspicious beginning for the man who would rise to dominate North Korea.1
Kim was born a Christian, his father educated by missionaries. In 1919, when Kim was just seven years old, the family followed hundreds of thousands of other Koreans across the border into Manchuria to escape colonial oppression. In 1931 Japan caught up with them, turning Manchuria into a puppet state. Kim, by now nineteen, joined the Chinese Communist Party. But Korean partisans were suspected of spying on behalf of the Japanese, and more than a thousand of them were interrogated and tortured in a series of brutal purges. Hundreds were killed. Kim, too, was arrested, although he was exonerated in 1934.2
By then Kim was one of the few communist Koreans left. He soon commanded several hundred guerrilla fighters, carrying out raids in Manchuria and across the border in Korea. In June 1937 he and his men attacked a police garrison in a small village called Pochonbo, a mere forty kilometres from Mount Paektu, a sacred mountain believed to be the birthplace of the founder of the first kingdom. It was a strategically insignificant operation, but one which attracted widespread press coverage since it was the first time the communists were able to mount an attack inside Korea. The Japanese placed Kim on a list of most-wanted bandits, turning him into a household name among the many millions who hated their colonial masters.3
By 1940 Kim was the most wanted rebel in Manchuria, forced to cross into the Soviet Union. There he and his followers were sheltered, trained and indoctrinated by the Red Army. In 1942 he was promoted to captain, but three years later he was denied the chance to enhance his reputation further by marching victoriously into Pyongyang. A suspicious Stalin gave this role to the more trustworthy ‘Soviet Koreans’, a group with longstanding ties to Moscow. Kim and sixty of his partisan fighters instead found their own way into north Korea, disembarking in the port city of Wonsan a month after Japan had surrendered. It was an ignominious return for Kim, not as liberator of his country, but as a lowly captain in a foreign uniform. He insisted that his journey back home be kept secret.4
In Pyongyang he spent time mingling with Soviet officers, plying them with food and women, using his connections to place his followers in key positions across the public security organs. The Russians needed a figurehead for their provisional government, but they picked Cho Man-sik instead. Known as the ‘Gandhi of Korea’, Cho was a Christian nationalist who for decades had promoted a non-violent path to independence. He was highly respected, but it soon became clear that he would only collaborate with the Soviets on his own terms. When he refused a trusteeship of five years under the control of the Soviet Union, it was the last straw. Cho was placed under house arrest in January 1946. Kim came to the fore instead, as Stalin ticked his name on a shortlist of potential candidates. The only other contender was P
ak Hon-yong, an independence activist who had set up the Korean Communist Party in the south after liberation.5
Kim had made a poor impression in October 1945, but the Soviets helped him prop up his image. Pyongyang was festooned with portraits of Kim hanging alongside those of Stalin. His youth was praised, his mythical past was extolled. Kim worked on his smile, appearing kind and cheerful. He became modesty itself, telling people, ‘I am not a general, but your friend.’ One interviewer reported being struck by ‘the light of genius’ glittering in his eyes. A key moment came in August 1946, as Kim was acclaimed as ‘the great leader’, ‘hero of the nation’ and ‘leader of all the Korean people’ at the founding congress of the North Korean Workers’ Party. The novelist Han Sorya, who would soon become the chief engineer of Kim’s cult of personality, referred to him as ‘our sun’, unlike the Japanese sun towards which the colonial subjects had been forced to bow in the past.6
The moment Kim was approved by Moscow, the Soviet model was imposed at all levels of society. Industry was nationalised, drastic land reform implemented. Kim was at the centre of it all, criss-crossing the country to dispense advice to his subjects, from how to cultivate steep land to ways of increasing living standards. It was he who created a bumper harvest in 1946, and it was he who controlled the winter floods later that year. Rallies were held in the countryside, with villagers expressing their gratitude to General Kim through songs, speeches and letters. In the meantime, an estimated one million people, roughly 7 to 8 per cent of the population, voted with their feet, joining an exodus of wealth and talent to south Korea.7
How to Be a Dictator Page 15