by Philip Short
By 1943, Mao had achieved a status in his own Party that no Chinese communist leader had ever had before.
But his role was still limited to the areas the communists controlled, only a small part of the country as a whole. The next step would entail the fashioning of a mythology of personality and ideas which would enable him, over the next six years, to inspire and direct an armed struggle that would win the support of the population at large, unifying, this time, not merely the Party but all of China behind the communist cause.
Like the Cultural Revolution, twenty-five years later – of which it was a precursor, establishing a pattern which would apply in all the major political movements which followed – the Yan'an Rectification Campaign was far more than just a struggle for power. It was an attempt to bring about fundamental change in the way people thought.
Its roots lay in the logic of united-front politics, which had required the Party dramatically to broaden its appeal. At Wayaobu, in December 1935, the Politburo had agreed, at Mao's urging, that Party membership should be open to ‘all who are willing to fight for the Communist Party's positions, regardless of their class origin’.113 After the Comintern demurred, that formula was withdrawn. But the open-door approach continued. In order to win over the so-called ‘intermediate classes’ – the patriotic bourgeoisie, the small and middle landlords and intellectuals – that made up the rank and file of the GMD's political constituency, the CCP moderated its policies. In an article in March 1940, entitled, ‘On New Democracy’, Mao noted that while socialism remained the ultimate goal, it was still a very long way off. The current task, which would take many years, was to fight imperialism and feudalism.
This policy of class collaboration succeeded beyond all expectations. In the three years from the Marco Polo Bridge incident to mid-1940, Party membership grew almost twentyfold. But many if not most of the new recruits were drawn by patriotism more than communist conviction.114
The next problem, therefore, was how to weld this vast, disparate membership into a disciplined political force.
In the early 1930s, the Communist Party had been ‘Bolshevised’ by fear. But the wave of revulsion that had generated ruled out any repetition, even had Mao wanted it – and by the end of the Long March, he, too, had recognised that there had to be a better way of resolving inner-Party differences. Men who had shared such incredible hardships, he told Xu Haidong in 1935, could not be fundamentally disloyal.115 Subsequently, various attempts were made to devise new methods, including ‘new leaf rallies’, where erring comrades confessed their faults and pledged publicly to make a new start. But the answer Mao eventually came up with stemmed from the Classical teachings of his youth.
‘If our Party's style is completely orthodox,’ he announced at the beginning of the Rectification Campaign, ‘the people of the entire nation will learn from us.’ The force of virtuous example, as Confucius had written – of ‘Redness’, as it was termed in Jiangxi, and would be again in the Cultural Revolution – was the key to swaying people's minds.116 Where Confucius, however, had contended that the masses ‘may be made to follow a course of action, but they may not be made to understand it’, Mao, as a communist, insisted that ‘the masses are the real heroes’,117 capable themselves of generating revolutionary ideas:
All correct leadership is necessarily ‘from the masses, to the masses’. This means: take the ideas of the masses … [and] through study, turn them into concentrated and systematic ideas, then go to the masses and propagate and explain these ideas until the masses embrace them as their own, hold fast to them and … test [their] correctness in action. Then once again concentrate ideas from the masses and once again go to the masses … and so on, over and over again in an endless spiral, with the ideas becoming more correct, more vital and richer each time.118
In the Rectification Campaign, this approach was applied within the Party's own ranks. The ‘movement of enlightenment’ which Mao sought was to be brought about voluntarily, by Party members themselves: ‘Communist Party members must ask “Why?” about everything, turn matters over deliberately in their minds and ask whether they conform to reality. They certainly must not follow blindly. Nor must they encourage slavishness.’ Yet, at the same time, he insisted on the need for uniformity of thought. ‘Submission to Central leadership’ was specifically reaffirmed.119
Mao's predilection for contradictions of this kind became a hallmark of his political style. It was a fiendishly clever, yet extraordinary simple device, enabling him to modulate the progress of an ideological campaign to accommodate his political needs, to change direction at will, and to lure real or presumed opponents into exposing their views, the better to strike them down.
Rectification had never been intended as a gentle, benign process. It was to be the final struggle, not only against Wang Ming and the ideas he represented, but more broadly against all in the Party who were in any way reluctant to accept the hegemony of Mao's thought. ‘Curing the sickness to save the patient’ was a fine principle, but Mao had not promised it would be painless. ‘The first step’, he had explained, ‘is to give the patient a powerful shock. Yell at him, “You're sick!”. Then he'll get a fright and break out in a sweat. At that point, he can be put on the road to recovery.’120 Confucian-style persuasion, moreover, might be the principal method; but, like his imperial predecessors, Mao reserved Legalist coercion for those who refused to submit – not senior leaders like Wang Ming, whose status protected them from crude repression, but lesser, more vulnerable souls, whose plight would serve as a warning to others.
In Yan'an, in 1942, the foremost among these irreductibles was an idealistic young writer named Wang Shiwei.121
Sincerity, not to say gullibility, has been one of the most attractive and enduring characteristics of Chinese intellectuals through the centuries. Among the writers and artists who had flocked to the communist standard since the beginning of the war, Mao's call for inner-Party debate and the questioning of long-held truths provoked an explosion of wall newspapers – with names like Shiyudi (Arrow and Target), Qing qibing (Light Cavalry), Tuo ling (Camel Bells) and Xibei feng (Northwest Wind) – like that in the May Fourth Movement, twenty years before.
The feminist, Ding Ling, made a vituperative attack on the Party's hypocrisy towards women. Her colleague, the poet, Ai Qing, complained caustically that Mao's cultural commissars expected him ‘to describe ringworm as flowers’. But the most devastating article by far was Wang Shiwei's satirical essay, ‘Wild Lily’, which appeared in the Party newspaper, Jiefang ribao (Liberation Daily), in March. It denounced the ‘dark side of Yan'an’ – the ‘three classes of clothing and five grades of food’, which were allocated to senior officials when ‘the sick can't get a bowl of noodles, and the young have only two bowls of congee a day’ the privileged access to young women enjoyed by those who had political power; the elitism and aloofness of cadres towards the rank and file.
Even now, half a century later, Chinese still disagree whether Mao set a deliberate trap, into which Wang Shiwei, and others, fell, or whether the writers’ response took him by surprise.
Typically, he encouraged both interpretations, describing Wang, at one moment, as a sorely needed target for the Rectification Campaign, and, at another, as a distraction, undermining its political purpose.122 But whether premeditated or not, Wang's calvary became a model in the repression of intellectual dissent, whose lessons would be applied, almost unchanged, to writers and artists in China throughout Mao's lifetime and beyond.
These were spelled out by Mao himself, in May, at a specially called forum on literature and art. Satire and criticism were necessary, he said, but writers and artists must know on which side of the revolutionary divide they belonged. Those (like Wang Shiwei) who devoted their energies to exposing ‘the so-called “darkness” of the proletariat’ were ‘petty-bourgeois individualists’, ‘mere termites in the revolutionary ranks’. The purpose of art, he went on, was to serve proletarian politics. The ‘fundamental ta
sk’ of writers and artists was to become ‘loyal spokesmen’ for the masses, immersing themselves in their lives and extolling their revolutionary struggles.123
Four days later, Wang was subjected to an ideological show trial, a prototype, albeit in milder form, of the struggle meetings of the 1960s. For two weeks, his Party colleagues debated his errors. Mao's political secretary, Chen Boda, set the tone, likening Wang to a leech and referring to him as ‘Comrade Shit-stink’, a word-play on the characters that formed his name. The bold poet, Ai Qing, intoned: ‘His viewpoint is reactionary and his remedies are poisonous; this “individual” does not deserve to be described as “human”, let alone a comrade.’ Even the rebellious Ding Ling decided it was wiser to denounce him. In the logic of rectification, it was not enough for Wang merely to be purged. His fellow writers had publicly to humiliate him. His ‘trial’ marked the beginning of a practice of collective denunciation that would remain an essential part of the Chinese communists’ treatment of dissidents for decades to come.
Afterwards, he was dismissed from the Literary Association, which meant he was no longer allowed to write. ‘Everyone else’, one participant recalled, having ‘got rid of their ideological burden’ – in other words, having saved their own skins – breathed a sigh of relief and resolved to keep their heads down in future.
Mao, however, was not yet convinced that the writers had learned their lesson. Wang himself had refused to recant, maintaining that what he had written had been intended for the Party's good. According to Kang Sheng, 90 per cent of the Yan'an intellectuals had initially sympathised with him. The Rectification Campaign was therefore extended, and efforts to demonise Wang shifted into higher gear. Already, during his ‘trial’, he had been accused of Trotskyism, ‘anti-Party thoughts’, having a ‘filthy and disgusting soul’ and inhabiting the mental universe of ‘a counter-revolutionary shit-hole’. None the less, his case had been treated as that of an erring comrade, who might possibly still be saved. The following October, that changed. Wang was formally accused of being a Guomindang spy, and of leading a Trotskyite ‘Five-Member Anti-Party Gang’ which had ‘sneaked into the Party to destroy and undermine it’. He was subsequently taken into custody by officials of the Social Department, the Party's Security Police, along with some 200 others regarded as politically unreliable, and detained at a secret CCP prison in the hills beyond Zaoyuan.
The ‘Anti-Party Gang’ was a frame-up, pure and simple, of the type at which Kang Sheng came to excel. Wang and the other four alleged members, two young married couples, had known each other slightly and shared the same liberal views. That was as far as the ‘conspiracy’ went. Even Mao, who had approved the operation, tried to shrug it off later as a ‘mistake’. Yet it was no less essential to his strategy than other, subtler aspects of the Rectification Campaign. For it showed the Party at large that the leadership's tolerance went only so far, that those who placed themselves beyond the pale – whose cases, as Mao would later put it, changed from being ‘contradictions among the people’ to ‘contradictions between the enemy and ourselves’ – would find the Confucian velvet glove replaced by a Legalist chopper.
From the autumn of 1942 onwards, Kang Sheng was given carte blanche for the first (but by no means the last) time to demonstrate his prowess as Mao's axeman.
A ‘cadre screening movement’ was launched to weed out ‘spies and bad elements’, on the pretext that the growth of Party membership had allowed Chiang Kai-shek's intelligence services to infiltrate secret agents. ‘Spies’, Mao warned melodramatically, were becoming ‘as thick as fur’, But, as in Wang Shiwei's case, the word ‘spy’ was broadly construed. Voicing dissident opinions, ‘liberalism’ towards unorthodox elements, a lack of enthusiasm for rectification, having relatives who were GMD members – all became grounds for suspicion. In December, therefore, with Mao's approval, the ‘screening movement’ became a ‘rescue movement’, in which suspects were tortured into confessing in order that they might be ‘saved’. This was consistent with Mao's original formula, ‘Cure the sickness to save the patient’, but distorted into a new, savage form that few in the Party had bargained for.
By July 1943, over a thousand ‘enemy agents’ had been detained, of whom nearly half had confessed. Kang reported that 70 per cent of recently recruited Party cadres were politically unreliable. At an army communications school, 170 out of 200 students were charged as ‘special agents’. Even in the Party Secretariat, the hub of Mao's apparatus of power, ten officials out of sixty were found to have ‘political problems’. There were dozens of suicides, and some 40,000 people (5 per cent of the total Party membership) were expelled.
It was all chillingly reminiscent of Mao's campaign against the AB-tuan at Futian in 1930. The death-toll was far lower, but the reliance on torture and confession was essentially the same.
Mao's colleagues thought so, too. Zhou Enlai, who returned to Yan'an from Chongqing in the summer of 1943, challenged Kang's assertions that the underground Party in the White areas was riddled with traitors. That in turn led Ren Bishi to investigate. His report to Mao was never made public, but it was evidently highly critical of Kang's methods, for in August the Chairman started to rein in the Social Department investigators. Two months later he minuted: ‘We should not kill anyone. Most people should not be arrested. This is the policy we must stick to.’ With that, the ‘rescue movement’ ended. In December 1943, a year after the movement had begun, it was revealed that 90 per cent of those accused had been innocent and were being rehabilitated, in some cases posthumously.124
Mao's reasons for permitting the ‘rescue movement’ to get so badly out of hand cast a revealing light on his style of rule.
Nationalist pressure was one factor, as it had been at Futian. But far more important was his conviction that a leader should never appear to be soft. In 1943, as he prepared to celebrate his fiftieth birthday, Mao had reached the end of his long apprenticeship in the uses of power. His setbacks in the 1920s and early 1930s had taught him that in politics, as in war, the object was to annihilate one's opponents, not to leave them wounded to fight another day. That did not mean a return to the old, discredited policies of ‘harsh struggle and merciless blows’, which Mao blamed on Wang Ming. But it implied a recognition that persuasion had to be backed up by fear. Revolution was not a dinner-party.
Wang Shiwei was the prototypal victim of this conscious ambiguity.
After his arrest, Mao gave orders that he neither be released nor killed. He remained in detention – ‘a young man with a grey, deathly look on his face’, who spoke ‘as if reciting from a textbook’ – to serve as a living warning to others in the Party of the fate that would await them should they stray from Mao's appointed path.
In the spring of 1947, when the communists withdrew from Yan'an, He Long was the local military commander. Westerners usually depicted him as the Robin Hood of the Red Army, a daredevil, romantic figure, who hated the rich and championed the poor. But like his fellow-generals, He Long was a tough, ruthless man. They hated intellectuals like Wang, who whined about literary freedoms while young soldiers were dying at the front. On He's orders one morning, Wang Shiwei was executed, with an axe, in a village near the Yellow River. When Mao was told, he bit his lip but said nothing.
Mao's emergence as the Party's supreme leader was accompanied by a growing personality cult. Already in the late 1920s, the Cantonese-speaking villagers of southern China wove myths about the bandit leader they called Mo Tak Chung, whom the authorities could never kill. But the decision to promote his image nationally as the standard-bearer of Chinese communism had come a decade later with the publication of Edgar Snow's Red Star over China. Snow had written that he perceived in Mao ‘a certain force of destiny’.
Mao evidently felt that, too. In the winter of 1935, he had revealed the full sweep of his ambition in a poem describing the landscape of northern Shensi. It opened with the lines:
A hundred leagues are ice-bound,
A tho
usand leagues of whirling snow …
The mountains dance like silver snakes,
The highlands roll like white wax elephants challenging the heavens.125
Mao then turned his thoughts to the Chinese leaders of antiquity who had gazed before him on this same landscape – the founding Emperors of the Qin, the Han, the Tang and the Song; and Genghis Khan, the Mongol. All had triumphed, he wrote, yet all had been flawed. ‘For true heroes,’ Mao declared, ‘we must look to the present age.’
The comparison was breathtaking.
At a time when the Red Army could muster only a few thousand poorly armed men, Mao already saw himself as the founding figure in a new, communist era, ready to assume the mantle of greatness inherited from the imperial past.
Thus, from the end of the Long March, Mao was predisposed to the idea that he was an exceptional man, ordained to play an exceptional role. From there it was but a small step, once conditions were ripe, to launching a full-blown leadership cult.
In June 1937, the new CCP weekly, Jiefang (Liberation), published his picture for the first time. It was a woodcut, with Mao's face illuminated by the rays of the sun, a motif traditionally associated with emperor-worship in China. Six months later, the first collection of his writings was printed in Shanghai.126 In the summer of 1938 another milestone was passed when Mao's faithful acolyte, Lin Biao, wrote of his ‘genius in leadership’,127 a phrase that would become so overworked in the later years of Mao's life that even he would grow sick of it.