Restless Empire

by Odd Westad

  China’s Third World influence was for all practical purposes a thing of the past.

  THE GREAT PROLETARIAN Cultural Revolution was by far the largest and most intense government campaign in Chinese history. It killed fewer people than the Great Leap and it affected the economy less, but in terms of people’s daily lives and of lives ruined and made meaningless it was far worse. All over China, people—mostly innocent of any crime or dissent—were hauled before impromptu tribunals and kangaroo courts, publicly humiliated or tortured, with their families and friends in attendance. Many of the victims had built their lives on serving the revolution and the CCP, and all of the most prominent victims were leaders of the Communist Party. Liu Shaoqi, China’s president, was tortured and left to die in prison. At public rallies, Peng Dehuai, the commander of Chinese troops in Korea, was beaten until his back was broken. The young people who carried out the killings and torture were empowered by the Chairman himself, whom they revered as a godlike figure. When Mao told them to “bombard the headquarters” and condemned his closest colleagues as revisionists and China’s Khrushchevs, the Red Guards took the kind of action the Chairman expected of them. Mao and his new circle of assistants made sure that nobody stood in their way and encouraged the violence when necessary. It was Mao’s final attempt to isolate China and to perpetuate his revolution.

  During the Cultural Revolution, almost all of China’s relations with the outside world came to a standstill. Chinese diplomats and students abroad were called back home to make self-criticisms and undergo training in Mao Zedong Thought. Foreign students in China were expelled and some of the embassies attacked. The British embassy was stormed and set on fire in August 1967. Foreigners in China compared the situation to that of the Boxer uprising sixty years earlier. As we have seen, the North Koreans and the North Vietnamese, China’s only remaining allies in the region, complained about the treatment their staffs received and about the eagerness Chinese advisers in their countries had to spread Cultural Revolution propaganda, including the ubiquitous Little Red Book of Mao quotations. The Cubans were eager to pull out; one returning group told a Soviet diplomat that “it is hard to imagine, to what type of idiocy the ranks of the ‘Red Guards’ and the people led by them reach. The Hitlerites could have learned something from them.” Meanwhile in Beijing, the Soviet embassy was put under siege by Red Guards and Soviet and East German diplomats were beaten up on the street. When they tried to issue a complaint with the Chinese Foreign Ministry, the Soviets were told that the ministry “resolutely supports the revolutionary activities of our people.”22 In Moscow, Chinese diplomats only shouted slogans from Mao’s little red book when the Soviet foreign minister asked for an urgent meeting.

  The anti-Soviet and anti-Western rhetoric increased as the Cultural Revolution progressed. The Americans and British were accused of planning to wage war on China, and they would be helped by the Soviet Union. “The Soviet Union has changed character,” claimed the CCP paper The People’s Daily in June 1967. “A dictatorship of the bourgeoisie has replaced the dictatorship of the proletariat and the bourgeoisie has effected counter-revolutionary restoration through its agents.” Kang Sheng, the head of the party’s security and intelligence bureau, who had thrown his lot in with the Cultural Revolutionaries, saw foreign agents at work everywhere within China. “The Soviet revisionists have trained many secret agents now operating in our country,” he told the Red Guards. “The Mongolian revisionists are promoting treasonous activities among our people and so are the Korean revisionists. . . . You must heighten your vigilance.”23

  At its height, the Cultural Revolution turned increasingly xenophobic. All that was foreign was viewed with suspicion. Friends of mine remember being beaten up because a foreign-language book was found when Red Guards ransacked their homes, or, on the street, for wearing glasses (an assumed accoutrement of foreignness). Meanwhile, some foreigners living in China tried their best to join the new campaign. The Polish-born journalist Israel Epstein, a veteran Communist survivor of many purges and a member of the CCP since 1964, wrote of “living through tremendous days, weeks, months that do indeed ‘shake the world’—rejuvenating, revivifying, scraping all the barnacles off the mind (and scraping off those who have themselves become barnacles on the cause).” Epstein and his boss, Sidney Rittenberg, set up a Red Guard “rebel group” to criticize other foreigners who were not quick enough to catch the political winds. But Epstein was himself relegated to the position of “barnacle” in 1968 and spent five years in prison. Rittenberg got ten. Posters put up by other foreigners after Rittenberg’s arrest proclaimed in big Chinese characters, “He has climbed so high and fallen so low” and “Rittenberg shows all the qualities we have long been accumstomed to finding in the Jew.”24

  In a world where leading figures were publicly tortured, with their families forced to watch, all was possible. The wife of President Liu Shaoqi, Wang Guangmei—a Communist since age sixteen—was kidnapped from her official residence by Red Guards from Qinghua University. She was beaten up, forced to put on the thin silk dress she had worn during an official visit to Jakarta and was paraded in public. According to the official interrogation record of Wang Guangmei, the students shouted at her:

  You are being struggled against today. We are at liberty to wage struggle in whatever form we may want to, and you have no freedom. . . . We are the revolutionary masses, and you are a notorious counter-revolutionary old hag. Don’t try to confuse the class demarcation line! . . . By wearing this dress to flirt with Sukarno in Indonesia, you have put the Chinese people to shame. . . . ([Red Guards] reading in unison [from Mao’s Little Red Book]: “Everything reactionary is the same; if you don’t hit it, it won’t fall.”)25

  Among those inside the CCP who were set to handle China’s foreign relations, all was in chaos. Zhou Enlai tried to guess in which direction the Chairman wanted to go, and then adhere to it in order to save himself and those around him. When Chen Yi, the tough veteran Communist who was now foreign minister, questioned the Red Guards’ handling of foreign affairs, Mao exploded. The Central Cultural Revolution Group (CCRG), he said, was “97 percent correct. Whoever opposes CCRG, I firmly oppose him! If you want to negate the Cultural Revolution, you will never succeed.” Diplomats in the Foreign Ministry scurried to set up their own Red Guard groups (the one in the Department of the Americas and Oceania called itself the Beat Drowning Dogs Brigade) and raised the slogan “Bombard Chen Yi, and completely lift the lid off the class struggle in the Foreign Ministry.”26 Chen Yi was publicly humilitated at struggle meetings, before being sent for re-education to a factory in Hebei province. Bizarrely, he kept the title of foreign minister until he died in January 1972.

  TO THE EXTENT THAT CHINESE foreign policy continued to exist after the onset of the Cultural Revolution, its energy was directed toward condemning the Soviet Union. By the late 1960s Moscow had become China’s number one enemy. The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968—though unrelated to Sino-Soviet relations—frightened the Chinese leaders. They knew how weak their country had become as a result of the Cultural Revolution, which, by then, had degenerated into chaos, with bands of Red Guards fighting each other with heavy weapons in the streets. The Soviet deployment of armed forces to Mongolia—at the request of Mongolian authorities, who feared the bedlam next door—also fueled Beijing’s paranoia. Even though the US war in Vietnam still preoccupied Mao and the CCP leaders (those, that is, who were still at large), the Soviet Union was an increasingly open and direct threat of a kind that the United States was not, at least for the time being.

  In 1968, Mao increasingly called the Soviet Union “social-imperialist.” The term implied that the Soviets would at some point attack China in a repeat of Russia’s past imperialist aggression. Mao defined social-imperialism as a particularly virulent form of great power expansionism, thereby grouping Moscow with Washington and London as “Western” imperialists. In his last meeting with a Soviet leader back in 1965, when Soviet p
remier Alexei Kosygin had come to Beijing, Mao harangued his visitor: “The United States and the USSR are now deciding the world’s destiny. Well, go ahead and decide. But within the next 10–15 years you will not be able to decide the world’s destiny. It is in the hands of the nations of the world, and not in the hands of the imperialists, exploiters or revisionists.”27 Three years later the Soviet Union had become the most dangerous Western imperialist power as far as China was concerned. But although Mao’s language was becoming increasingly racial, China’s only remaining ally was a European country, Albania, whose Communist leaders had fallen out with all of its neighbors. Mao was quick to hold up Albania as a beacon of world revolution, but for many in Beijing the very mention of the Albanians served as a reminder of how isolated China was in international affairs.

  In Beijing the top leaders were preparing for war. The increasing worry about having to confront the outside world led to a bizarre program of moving key parts of China’s industry to what was regarded as safer areas in the western parts of the country. These were generally the same areas where the Guomindang had survived the Japanese onslaught after 1937. Now, whole factories were dismantled and transported to what Mao called the Third Line, a big stretch of land from Gansu in the north to Yunnan in the south. Begun in 1965—as the US war in Vietnam intensified—the Third Line, increased in significance as the conflict with the Soviets intensified. The waste and dislocation of the process was significant and the damage done to China’s economy was severe. In some cases, however, the challenges of being dumped (and sometimes forgotten) in the back of beyond during the chaos of the Cultural Revolution taught industrial managers skills that they were to use to their advantage during the capitalist revolution in later decades. The policy of creating a “secure rear base area” continued up to the early 1980s, and may have consumed as much as a third of China’s total investment program for this period.28

  During the Cultural Revolution, as it built bases for war inside the country, the PRC neglected its own Chinese periphery. Hong Kong remained important as a conduit for China’s foreign trade, and Taiwan served as a tangible reminder of China’s division and therefore its national humiliation. But Beijing had no active policy toward either region. Among overseas Chinese fear ran rampant. Having listened to the few stories that got out from a small number who visited China, almost none had a wish to go back. They knew, of course, that some of those who were persecuted during the Cultural Revolution were returnees who had come back to serve China. In minority areas, Mao’s final campaigns were especially disastrous. In Tibet, temples were destroyed along with religious symbols and paintings, while monks and nuns were hauled off to be struggled against by Red Guards flown in from Beijing and Shanghai for the purpose. In Inner Mongolia at least 16,000 were killed while CCP leaders and Red Guards were hunting for a separatist party that turned out to be a chimera. In Guangxi, which the CCP had defined as an autonomous region for the Zhuang people, the Cultural Revolution descended into a murderous frenzy, with politically inspired cannibalism as one ingredient.29

  The main components of the Cultural Revolution—the xenophobia, the relocations to the interior, and the terror against minorities—served Mao Zedong’s purposes well. The mass hysteria in Beijing, where millions of young people from all over the country rallied before him at Tian’anmen Square, appealed to his limitless ego. The sending of youth from the cities to the countryside, where they were supposed to learn from the peasants, appealed to his sense of politically motivated development. To the Cultural Revolution leadership, China’s international isolation helped create a new China and save the revolution. Even after he had used the army to end the worst of the chaos on the streets in late 1968, Mao saw the processes as continuing. As he told the new party leadership in early 1969,

  We are talking about victory. This means that we must guarantee that we should unite the vast masses of the entire country to pursue victory under the leadership of the proletariat. The socialist revolution must continue. There are still unfinished tasks for this revolution to fulfill, such as to conduct struggle, to conduct criticism, and to conduct transformation. After a few years, we will probably need to carry out another revolution.30

  AMAIN REASON WHY MAO ZEDONG, assisted by Zhou Enlai and the army, pulled China back from almost total chaos of the cultural revolution in 1968 was the increasing fear of war with the Soviet Union. While there is no evidence of the Soviets having prepared such an attack, it is easy to see how such a fear could come out of the Cultural Revolution frenzy and the Chairman’s own rhetoric. Having put China and its revolution squarely at the center of world history, as the envy of all peoples, it was only logical that their enemies should try to destroy them through military force. Other scenarios than a Soviet attack were contemplated as well. There could be a Soviet-American war, which China could be drawn into. The Americans could attack from the south, if the war in Vietnam went badly for them. Mao ruminated to his visitors:

  Since Japan’s surrender in 1945, 23 years have passed. In another five years, 28 years will have passed. Without a war in 28 years? In reality, all kinds of wars have occurred since the end of World War II. According to Lenin, capitalism is war, and capitalism cannot exist without war. There are two superpowers in the world today. They not only have conventional weapons, but also have nuclear weapons. This is something that is not easy to deal with.31

  In order to suss out Soviet intentions and assure himself of the army’s loyalty, Mao agreed to a limited military operation against Soviet forces. The March 1969 attack was on Zhenbao/Damanskii island in the Ussuri river, part of the north Manchurian border zone claimed by both countries. About thirty Soviet soldiers were killed in the initial strike. While fighting continued in the area, Soviet Premier Kosygin desperately tried to speak to Mao by phone. The Chinese operator refused to connect the call, shouting slogans against the revisionists. For a few days the question of war or peace hung in the balance. The Soviets considered an attack on Chinese nuclear installations as a preventive measure. While Mao quickly backtracked, allowing negotiations to begin on the border issue, tension along the frontier remained. In August new clashes took place in the western sector, along the Xinjiang border. There were heavy casualties on both sides. This time the Chinese leaders believed that the Soviets were planning a large-scale attack on China, in spite of a visit by Kosygin to Beijing, where he tried to negotiate. Lin Biao, acting on Mao’s behalf, issued his “order number one” in October 1969, putting the army on emergency alert and evacuating the senior leaders (and their most prominent Cultural Revolution victims) from the capital.

  Although the war never came, the situation in China remained tense up to the early 1970s. The war scare of 1969 convinced Mao that China’s isolation was dangerous and ineffectual. Now he wanted more order and less revolution at home, at least for a while. His mobilization orders attempted to suspend most of the Cultural Revolution excesses:

  All factional struggle by violent means should be stopped unconditionally and immediately. All professional teams for struggle by violent means should be dissolved. All strongholds for struggle by violent means should be eliminated. All weapons should be handed back. If any team for struggle by violent means continues to occupy a stronghold and stubbornly refuses to surrender, the People’s Liberation Army can surround the stronghold by force, launch a political offensive toward it, and confiscate the weapons [held by the team] by force.32

  But the genie of disorder was not easily to put back in the bottle. Mao, after all, refused to give up his Cultural Revolution ideals and inner-party politics remained as frenzied as ever. In September 1971 Lin Biao, Mao’s putative successor, attempted to flee to the Soviet Union as the Chairman prepared to purge him from the leadership. Lin’s plane crashed in Mongolia.

  From the summer of 1969 on, Mao sought the advice of the old heads of the army (many of whom he had allowed to be tortured and imprisoned in the previous three years) about how to handle an international crisis he h
imself had created. In their report, the marshals emphasized that the Soviet Union was the main enemy, now and in the future. Soviet power was growing, they wrote, while American power was waning. They asserted that “the Soviet revisionists have made China their main enemy, imposing a more serious threat to our security than the U.S. imperialists. . . . [But] both China and the United States take the Soviet Union as their enemy, thus the Soviet revisionists do not dare to fight a two-front war.” In a personal memo to the Chairman, Chen Yi—still with the title of foreign minister, but in reality under house arrest—discussed his “wild ideas”: “It is necessary for us,” Chen wrote in September 1969, “to utilize the contradiction between the United States and the Soviet Union in a strategic sense, and pursue a breakthrough in Sino-American relations.” He suggested unconditional high-level meetings with Washington. Over the two years that followed, Mao took up many of Chen’s “wild ideas” while sticking to his Cultural Revolution agenda and condemning Chen himself as a “sham Marxist” and “anti-party careerist.”33

  MAO’S CAMPAIGNS, begun in the late 1950s, isolated China and made it vulnerable to attack. Inside the country the violent attempts to purge all outside influence and reorient party policy to center on Mao alone held back the country’s development and created a cynical generation, whose initial idealism had been drowned in blood and broken promises. For some Chinese historians, the collapse of the Sino-Soviet alliance was a good thing, because it made China more independent and nationally oriented. In reality, however, Mao wanted freedom from Soviet influence precisely so that he could undertake the disastrous campaigns that set China’s progress back by decades. To the CCP of the 1960s, Cultural Revolution and isolation went together. Both aims would make the country stronger.