Mao

by Philip Short

  At the same time, Mao's relations with those around him underwent a subtle change.

  Western visitors in the early days of Yan'an had been charmed by the casualness of the place. Mao would drop in unannounced for dinner or a game of cards. ‘There developed’, wrote the Comintern adviser, Otto Braun, ‘what might almost be called a social life.’128 Saturday-night dances were held, which Mao – notwithstanding Agnes Smedley's comment that he had ‘no rhythm in his being’129 – particularly relished, because of the opportunities they provided for adoring female company. The American communist, Sidney Rittenberg, recalled arriving late one evening.

  I could hear a string bass, a couple of fiddles, and maybe a saxophone and a clarinet tooting away … Someone pushed open the door and I peeped inside. There, directly across the room, I saw a lifesized portrait of Chairman Mao Zedong. I recognised immediately the wide forehead and brow, and the tiny, almost feminine mouth. Framed by the doorway, against the whitewashed walls, the leonine head looked stern, almost baleful. The tableau lasted only a split second. Then the band struck up a foxtrot, and the portrait came to life, turned, gestured to his partner, and began gliding across the floor.130

  Now, behind the façade of easy fellowship – the atmosphere of an American revivalist camp, full of back-slapping and good cheer, as one visitor described it – a new formality developed.

  In the spring of 1938, Violet Cressy-Marcks, one of the remarkable generation of intrepid women travellers who spent the inter-war years journeying alone through the Orient, was escorted to Mao's courtyard at Fenghuangshan to find its outer gate guarded by a soldier with a sub-machine-gun, and a second guard, at an inner door, carrying ‘the biggest naked sword I had ever seen in my life’.131 Gone were the days on the Jinggangshan, or even at Ruijin, less than ten years before, when Mao and the other leaders lived among the peasants. Now a pervasive sense of hierarchy set in. Mao no longer visited others; they came to him.132 Later that year, he requisitioned the only vehicle in town, a donated Chevrolet van, emblazoned with the words, ‘Ambulance: Gift of the New York Chinese Laundrymen's National Salvation Association’, to serve as his personal transport. The rest of the Politburo walked.133

  Not everyone welcomed the plethora of superlatives – ‘most creative’, ‘most qualified’, ‘most talented’, ‘most authoritative’ – which now attached themselves to Mao. Even Liu Shaoqi, who was among his most consistent supporters, issued a cautious warning. In sinifying Marxism, he wrote, ‘we must not follow blindly, nor worship any idols’.

  But in the winter of 1942, came news from Europe which silenced such hesitations. The battle of Stalingrad, the ‘Red Verdun’, as Mao called it, would come to be seen as a turning-point in the war, heralding the eventual collapse of the fascist Axis and bringing closer the time when conflict would resume between the Chinese nationalists and the communists.

  That redirected attention, in both camps, to the need to build symbolic capital for the coming contest for the country's allegiance. On March 10, 1943, Chiang Kai-shek published his book, China's Destiny, setting out his claims to be China's ruler. Mao's elevation to become Chairman of the Politburo, and thus the Communist Party's champion, occurred a few days later. The territory and population each controlled was still heavily weighted in Chiang's favour. But the disparity was growing steadily smaller. Chiang's book was made compulsory reading in schools and universities in the White areas. Mao's writings on the sinification of Marxism became the guiding doctrine in the Red areas.134

  Two months later, Mao's stature was further enhanced when Stalin, in a gesture to the Western allies, dissolved the Comintern. The CCP was now, in theory and in fact, an independent, national party.

  As the personal dimension in the two parties’ rivalry became more sharply drawn, the personality cult around Mao reached new heights. In July, Liu Shaoqi, his doubts now stilled, lit the fires of unrestrained adulation. In a hagiographic article, he asserted that the only way to guarantee that the Party would not commit future errors was to ensure that ‘Mao Zedong's leadership penetrates everywhere’.135 That was the signal for his Politburo colleagues, from Zhou Enlai and Zhu De down, to join a chorus of delirious approval. Two American journalists, Theodore White and Annalee Jacoby, visiting Yan'an some months later, reported that Mao ‘was set on a pinnacle of adoration’, the object of ‘panegyrics of the most high-flown, almost nauseatingly slavish eloquence’. Even more striking, they wrote, was the practice of Mao's fellow leaders, ‘men of great rank themselves, to make ostentatious notes on Mao's free-running speeches, as though drinking from the fountain of knowledge’.136

  This was the time when the term ‘Mao Zedong Thought’ (Mao Zedong sixiang) was coined, and when the first versions of his ‘Selected Works’ were compiled. It was then, too, that the Maoist anthem, ‘The East is Red’, was written:

  The East is Red, the sun rises.

  In China a Mao Zedong is born.

  He seeks the people's happiness.

  He is the people's Great Saviour.

  Mao's portrait was painted on village walls and public buildings all over Red China.137 Schools were named after him: the Zedong Young Cadres’ School in Yan'an, the Zedong Youth School in Shandong.138 Toddlers were taught to chant: ‘We are all Chairman Mao's good little children’.139

  The following winter, labour heroes sent messages, hailing Mao as China's ‘star of salvation’, a term which, in Chinese minds, conjured up the ancient link between the Emperor and the Heavens. In the spring of 1944, Mao was invited to plant the first grains of millet, as the Emperor, in past ages, had symbolically ploughed the first furrow.140

  One element, however, was still lacking.

  All through Chinese history, the summation of the past had played a crucial part in creating the political basis for a new dynasty's assumption of power. In Mao's case, there was the additional example of Stalin's rule in Russsia. One of the Soviet dictator's first actions after the Great Purge, in which the last of his adversaries perished, had been to issue his own version of Soviet Party history – the History of the CPSU (Bolshevik), Short Course – in 1938. This was translated into Chinese and assigned for cadre study in Yan'an a year later. Subsequently it was included among the texts used in the Rectification Campaign, a message not lost on Mao's colleagues.141

  But the ‘clarification of Party history’, as it was delicately called, continued to elude him.

  The crux of the problem was that Mao, like Stalin – like Chinese leaders through the ages – would brook no rival source of authority. It was not enough that the Party's early leaders, Chen Duxiu and Li Lisan, were already discredited (and Qu Qiubai, had he not died a martyr, would surely have been, too). It was not enough that the political line of Wang Ming and Bo Gu had been repudiated. The exposure and rebuttal of non-Maoist ideas had to be carried through to the end. There was no lack of precedent for this in China's imperial past. The great Qing Emperor, Qianlong, in the eighteenth century, conducted one of the most terrible literary inquisitions of all time to root out seditious thought. Mao, too, felt instinctively that his rule would not be secure until all the intellectual alternatives within the Party had been closed off, and senior officials, starting with his own closest colleagues, had publicly confessed their past errors in supporting the mistaken policies previously associated with his rivals.

  It would take another eighteen months before he was finally satisfied that he had the degree of control that he wanted.

  From late 1943 until the spring of 1944, Liu Shaoqi, as Mao's point man, led the attack on the Fourth Plenum, which had brought Wang Ming to power. Everyone who had ever been associated with Wang, starting with Zhang Wentian and Zhou Enlai, made abject self-criticisms – and was criticised by their colleagues in turn.142

  In Zhou's case, the process was particularly painful. On at least two occasions, Mao himself made blistering attacks on Zhou's record, his lack of principle and willingness to be swayed by whichever group held power. In Jiangxi, Zhou had si
ded with the Returned Students. After 1937, he had backed Wang Ming. Mao was determined that this time, he should learn his lesson.143 Ren Bishi, now one of the Chairman's close allies, was likewise required to repudiate his former ties with Wang Ming. Kang Sheng was criticised for his handling of the ‘rescue movement’, along with lesser figures like Deng Fa (his predecessor as Security Chief, and the architect of the blood-purge in Fujian in 1931). Apart from absent members, such as Wang Jiaxiang (who was back in Moscow) and Wang Ming (who was ill), every leader went through the ritual of repentance and obeisance to Mao's ideas – with one exception: Liu Shaoqi, who in a foretaste of the hubris that would eventually cause his downfall, claimed to have been on Mao's side all along.

  In April 1944, with all opposition stilled, Mao was ready to bring the orgy of self-flagellation to an end. Wang Ming and Bo Gu, he announced, would not be punished for anti-Party crimes, as the Russian Old Bolsheviks had been. Party policy veered back towards conciliation again.

  Mao also made a tacit apology for the excesses of the ‘rescue movement’, bowing to the assembled cadres as a sign of atonement. It was a measure of the depth of hatred which that campaign had aroused that, despite his Olympian stature in the Part by this stage, he had to bow not once but three times before the audience applauded, signifying that his excuses were accepted.

  In the new, authorised version of Party history, Mao's struggles against the ‘wrong views’ of Chen Duxiu, Qu Qiubai, Li Lisan, and Wang Ming, and the triumph of his own correct thinking from 1935 on, were depicted as linked elements of a single, continuous whole. The myth that was so created would resonate well into the 1960s, and for many Chinese, beyond: since Mao had always been right in the past, how could he not be right in the future?

  A further year elapsed before the formal ‘Resolution on Certain Questions of Party History’, embodying this principle, was approved by the full Central Committee in April 1945. It had to be revised fourteen times, because almost every senior communist had a personal stake in the interpretation accorded to events in which he had been directly involved. Indeed, so contentious were some of these matters of detail that the debate had to be shifted from the Seventh Congress, where it was originally to have been held, to the preceding plenum, which was smaller and more easily controlled. In the interests of unity, Bo Gu was made a member of the drafting committee (signifying that he endorsed the criticism of his own former policies), and Wang Ming was eventually persuaded also to write a letter, recognising his errors. The same sense of unity restored pervaded the Congress itself. At Mao's insistence, Bo and Wang were both re-elected to the Central Committee, albeit in last and last-but-one place. Li Lisan, denounced for his leftist deviations, absent in the Soviet Union where he had been living in disgrace for the last fifteen years, and unaware that the Congress was even taking place, retained his membership too.

  Mao became Chairman of the whole Party, instead of merely the Secretariat and Politburo. Liu Shaoqi was confirmed as his number two and putative heir. Zhou Enlai came third in the rank order, although, in a sign that he was still on probation after the Rectification Campaign, Mao allowed him to be placed well down in the Central Committee listing, in a none too subtle reminder that Zhou held office at the will of the Chairman, not because he had a strong following of his own. Zhu De, the Commander-in-Chief, ranked fourth, and Ren Bishi, fifth.

  When the Seventh Congress ended, Mao had finally achieved the fusion of power, ideology and charisma he had been seeking since Zunyi. Over the years, the more perceptive of his visitors had sensed obscurely the changes that were at work. Edgar Snow, in 1939, found him acquiring a sage-like serenity.144 Evans Carlson noted his air of abstraction.145 But Sidney Rittenberg put it best, when he contrasted Mao with Zhou Enlai. ‘With Zhou,’ he wrote, ‘I felt I was with … a comrade. With Mao, I felt I was sitting next to history.’146

  *

  By the summer of 1944, the tide of war in Europe was flowing strongly in the Allies’ favour. Italy had capitulated. American- and British-led forces had landed in Normandy. From the east, the once invincible German army was being pushed back towards its own borders by the Russian juggernaut. In Asia, too, Japan was wavering. In China the imperial army had launched the Ichigō offensive, the biggest wartime operation Japan had ever undertaken, to open an overland route to French Indochina. But while superficially a success, the operation was misconceived. Instead of giving Japan a strategic advantage, it weakened Chiang's nationalists, who bore the brunt of the fighting, and allowed the communists to carve out new base areas behind enemy lines as the front moved south.147 Elsewhere in the Pacific theatre, the Emperor's forces were in retreat.

  While the High Command in Tokyo began contemplating the unthinkable, the defence of the home islands, Stalin and Roosevelt turned their attention to the shape of the post-war order to come.

  On July 22, 1944, an aircraft with US markings appeared over Yan'an. It caused almost as big a sensation as the arrival of Wang Ming, five-and-a-half years before – not least because as it was coming in to land, the left wheel hit a grave-mound just before the runway, causing it to lurch violently downwards and the left propeller to shear off, which then slammed into the pilot compartment, making a huge hole in the fuselage and bringing the plane to a jarring halt. Thus began the so-called Dixie Mission, America's first and last overt attempt (until the early 1970s) to establish official lines of communication with the Chinese communists.148 Astonishingly, no one was hurt, and after being greeted by Zhou Enlai, the small group of US liaison officers were escorted to their quarters – where a learning experience started for both sides. The Americans had to be reminded not to bawl ‘Boy!’, whenever they wanted something, but to call politely for their zhaodaiyuan, or ‘hospitality officer’. The Chinese found themselves for the first time in a quasi-diplomatic relationship with a group of non-communist Westerners. Mao set the tone, giving instructions that the words, ‘Our Friends’, be inserted into the Jiefang ribao headline, welcoming the mission. He and the other leaders were invited to showings of Hollywood musicals on a petrol-driven projector, and for a time films like Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times displaced the Saturday-night dances as Yan'an's main social attraction.149

  The American decision to send the US Observer Mission, as the group was officially named, reflected Roosevelt's frustration at the inability of the Generalissimo's corrupt, authoritarian and increasingly unpopular regime to prosecute the war effectively. Chiang's failure to halt Ichigō was the latest in a long series of nationalist bungling. The US President wanted a settlement with the communists so that the two sides would join together to drive out the invader.

  Stalin, who feared the creation of an American protectorate in China, wanted treaty relations with the nationalist government which would guarantee Chinese neutrality in any future Great Power struggle, and the recognition of Russia's ‘special interests’ in Manchuria, notably railway and port concessions. He, too, though for different reasons, favoured an agreement between the GMD and the communists. The Generalissimo himself was adamantly opposed to negotiations with ‘the Reds’. But, under pressure from both Washington and Moscow, he reluctantly gave in. On November 7, 1944, Roosevelt's personal emissary, Major-General Patrick J. Hurley, set out for Yan'an to begin a mediation effort.150

  Unfortunately, no one had thought to send word ahead that the General was on his way. When the weekly US plane, bringing the Dixie Mission's supplies, arrived from Chongqing, Zhou Enlai, who happened to be at the airstrip, was startled to see emerge ‘a tall, grey-haired, soldierly, extremely handsome man, wearing [a] most beautifully tailored uniform … with enough ribbons on his chest to represent every war, it seemed … in which the United States had ever engaged’. On being told who the distinguished visitor was, Zhou rushed off to find Mao, and an infantry company was mustered to form an improvised guard of honour. But the day's surprises were only beginning. Hurley, an Oklahoma orphan who had become an oil millionaire, was the incarnation of American capitalism,
as vain as a peacock, and loved to play to the cameras. As he took the salute, members of the Mission recalled, he ‘drew himself to his full impressive height, swelled up like a poisoned pup, [waved his hat in the air] … and pierced the north China stillness with a blood-curdling whooping “Yahoooo!” of the Choctaw Indians’. Mao and Zhu De gaped in astonished disbelief.151

  Hurley's three-day visit turned out to be an object-lesson in the misunderstanding of China which would characterise US policy until Richard Nixon became President, twenty-five years later.

  He offered Mao a draft agreement, replete with sonorous phrases about ‘the establishment of a government of the people, for the people and by the people’, which he had composed himself, apparently convinced that, if the communists signed on, Chiang, under American pressure, would have no choice but to do the same. The premise was false. The Generalissimo soon made clear that he was not willing to accept key provisions of Hurley's text – such as the legalisation of the Communist Party, and equal treatment for communist and nationalist forces in the allocation of military supplies – and still less Mao's revised version, which proposed a coalition government. Hurley's blunder was made all the more glaring because he had asserted publicly in Yan'an that he found Mao's counter-proposals ‘fair and just’, and they had both signed the final draft as a gauge of their good faith.

  Two weeks later the peace effort stalled. When the Dixie Mission commander, Colonel David Barrett, made a last effort to revive it in December, he was exposed to the full blast of Mao's recriminations:

  General Hurley came to Yan'an and asked on what terms we would co-operate with the Guomindang. We offered a five-point proposal … General Hurley agreed that the terms were eminently fair … The Generalissimo has refused these terms. Now the United States comes and earnestly asks us to accept counter-proposals which require us to sacrifice our liberty. This is difficult for us to understand … If … the United States wishes to continue to prop up the rotten shell that is Chiang Kai-shek, that is her privilege … We are not like Chiang Kai-shek. No nation needs to prop us up. We can stand erect and walk on our own feet like free men.152