by Philip Short
Thus, the battle lines were drawn. The dilemmas posed in these obscure debates of the early 1950s – economic growth vs. spontaneous capitalism; ideological imperatives vs. objective reality; the socialist vs. the capitalist road – would resonate through all the great political upheavals of the years ahead: the anti-Rightist campaign; the Great Leap Forward; and the Cultural Revolution. The seeds of turmoil were sown, not towards the end but at the very beginning of Mao's rule.
The dispute between Bo and Gao also provided the springboard for the first major power struggle in the Chinese leadership since Mao had ousted Zhang Guotao and Wang Ming in the late 1930s.
Gao was a rising star in the communist hierarchy. Six or seven years younger that Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai, he was unsophisticated, energetic, capable – and, more important, Mao liked him. He was also highly ambitious. In Manchuria, he had gone out of his way to cultivate Russian officials, and apparently used this channel to spread rumours that Liu and Zhou were pro-American. Liu was the real target of his attacks on Bo Yibo.14 In the late autumn of 1952, when Mao summoned Gao to Beijing to head the State Planning Commission, a crucially important task at a time when China was preparing the transition to a planned economy, he and Liu evidently liked each other no better. By the following spring, Gao was casting about for ways to supplant him.
Mao gave him discreet encouragement. The Chairman was irritated with Liu and Zhou because of what he saw as their foot-dragging over the transition to a socialist system. That winter he groused about them privately to Gao, who became convinced that the Chairman was giving him the go-ahead to take a higher-profile role himself.
Other factors concurred. Mao was finding his state duties wearisome. In 1952 he began speaking of ‘withdrawing to the second front’, by which he meant leaving the day-to-day running of the Party and government to his younger colleagues, so that he could concentrate on major strategic and theoretical issues. This did not imply any diminution of Mao's control. On the contrary, during this period, his domination of decision-making grew still more pronounced. In May 1953, he was infuriated to discover that Yang Shangkun, who headed the CC's General Office, the nerve centre of the Party, had issued directives without his prior approval. ‘This is a mistake and a breach of discipline,’ he thundered. ‘Documents and telegrams sent out in the name of the Central Committee can be despatched only after I have gone over them, otherwise they are invalid.’15 His reaction showed how profoundly his conception of his role had changed. In 1943, Mao's colleagues had given him the power, in exceptional cases, to overrule the rest of the Secretariat. Now, ten years later, he was arrogating to himself blanket authority over everything: his colleagues were allowed to do nothing without his explicit accord.
To Gao Gang, the talk of a ‘second front’ was a signal to act fast, before Mao's withdrawal allowed Liu to entrench himself as his successor. He drew further encouragement from events in Moscow, where, after Stalin's death, the comparatively youthful Georgii Malenkov inherited his mantle, while older Politburo members, like Molotov and Kaganovich, were passed over. If Malenkov could do that in Russia, Gao asked himself, why could he not do the same in China?
The result was a palace conspiracy.16
First Gao won over the east China leader, Rao Shushi, who had just been appointed head of the Party's Organisation Department, holding out to him the prospect of the premiership. Then, by an extraordinary stroke of luck, he obtained a copy of a draft list for a new Politburo, prepared by one of Liu Shaoqi's associates in the Central Committee apparatus as a working document ahead of the next Party Congress. It proposed increasing the representation of men who, like Liu, had spent most of the civil war period in the Guomindang-controlled ‘White’ areas, including, notably, Bo Yibo, at the expense of those who had fought in the Red areas. Armed with this smoking gun and claiming to have Mao's backing, Gao set about working up support among indignant ex-Red area colleagues.
Peng Dehuai fell into the trap. So did Lin Biao. But Deng Xiaoping, after beginning to negotiate with Gao about the future allocation of Party posts, sensed something amiss and sent a report to Mao. Chen Yun, who had honed his political antennae in Moscow watching Stalin at work during the purges, also jibbed. He, too, informed the Chairman, who told both men to say nothing.
Mao then set an ambush of his own. When the Politburo met in December, he announced that he intended to spend several weeks resting in the south, and proposed that, as usual, Liu should act in his place. Gao rose to the bait. Why not, in the Chairman's absence, he suggested, rotate the responsibility among other senior Politburo members? Mao indicated that he would consider the idea, and over the next few weeks Gao lobbied his colleagues frantically for other leadership changes, including his own promotion to Vice-Chairman, or alternatively, General Secretary.
By December 24, when the Politburo reconvened, Mao had heard enough. He accused Gao of unprincipled factionalism, carrying out ‘underground activities’ and attempting to enhance his personal power. The conspiracy collapsed.
In the months that followed, the winners and losers received their due rewards.
Gao was convinced that Mao had betrayed him, and in February 1954 attempted to kill himself. In August he tried again, with poison, and succeeded. Rao Shushi was arrested, to die of pneumonia, still in prison, twenty years later.
Peng Dehuai and Lin Biao were exonerated, after pleading that they had thought Gao was acting with Mao's approval (though both men's relations with Liu remained definitively soured). Deng Xiaoping was appointed Secretary-General of the Central Committee, and afterwards was promoted to the Politburo. Chen Yun also prospered. At the Eighth Congress, two years later, he became a Party Vice-Chairman, while Deng was named General Secretary.
By the spring of 1954, the Gao Gang–Rao Shushi anti-Party ‘sinister wind’, as Mao called it, had blown itself out.17 Officially, it had no wider significance. Yet if, as was plainly the case, Mao had sowed the idea in Gao's mind that Liu and Zhou were expendable, he must have had his reasons. Both men were supremely competent, dedicated to Mao personally no less than to the communist cause. He had only to give the order and they would have done whatever he wished. In retrospect, it is clear that he never had any intention of getting rid of them. But destabilising his two closest colleagues was another matter. Mao found in Gao Gang's ambition an instrument to keep them off-balance – to force them to try to read his mind better, to stay more attuned to his thinking. Gao had not been so stupid as to misread Mao's intentions entirely: he merely went too far, and in the process sealed his own fate.18
The purge cast a long shadow. That Peng Dehuai, Lin Biao and, initially, Deng Xiaoping, could all have believed that Mao was plotting behind the backs of Liu and Zhou spoke volumes about the level of trust which his imperial style of leadership had fostered. Mao's eminence and sense of national mission meant that his only remaining loyalty was to his vision of China's future. His colleagues – men and women with whom, in some cases, he had spent thirty years in shared struggle – were being reduced to tools in the working out of his dreams.
The debate over the pace of change which Bo Yibo had initiated ended with no clear consensus over how quickly collectivisation should proceed. Mao's instincts were to go faster. But each time he forced the pace, over-eager local officials coerced the rural population into ill-prepared co-operatives where socialism was regarded as ‘eating from one big pot’, the poor lived off the rich until their resources were exhausted, and then the whole venture collapsed under a mountain of debt.
In the spring of 1953, a campaign was launched, with Mao's blessing, against ‘rash advance’.19 But as soon as the situation stabilised, ‘spontaneous capitalism’ appeared: the better-off peasants began hiring labour, lending money, and buying and selling land. That sparked a new campaign, this time against ‘rash retreat’. Collectivisation roared ahead again – with even more deleterious results: rich peasants slaughtered their livestock, rather than share them with poorer neighbours. Then, in 1
954, severe flooding along the Yangtse reduced the summer harvest. Local cadres, determined to show their mettle, insisted that grain procurement be maintained. Food riots broke out. In the southern provinces, the peasants cursed the communists as worse than the Guomindang.
Accordingly, in January 1955, Mao slammed on the brakes for the third time. The collectivisation drive, he admitted, was out of step with the objective capabilities of the peasantry. The new policy would be a ‘three-word scripture: “Stop, contract, develop.”’ The number of APCs had already increased from 4,000 in the autumn of 1952 to 670,000 that winter, one in seven of all peasant households. Mao now decreed that there should be no further expansion for the next eighteen months. Liu Shaoqi authorised a plan to disband more than a quarter of existing APCs in the interests of stabilisation, and grain procurement was sharply reduced.
Had Mao been willing to leave it at that, all might have been well. In April, however, he set off on an inspection tour in the south to see things for himself. There, egged on by local officials, whose own interests were intimately linked to the collectivisation campaign and were therefore only too happy to tell Mao what he wanted to hear, the Chairman concluded that peasant resistance had been overstated.
Only Deng Zihui, a trusted ally since the late 1920s, whom Mao had appointed to oversee the collectivisation drive, had the courage to dig in his heels and tell the Chairman he was mistaken.
Deep down, Mao knew Deng had a point. In a revealing admission, he conceded: ‘The peasants want freedom, but we want socialism.’20 Yet Mao was too hooked on his vision of socialised agriculture to allow material obstacles, even when he acknowledged their existence, to stand in his way. The problem, Deng told his subordinates grimly, was that the Chairman thought ‘[material] conditions for running co-operatives are unnecessary’.21 His objections were brushed aside. ‘Your mind needs to be shelled with artillery,’22 Mao raged at him, and at a conference of provincial secretaries in July he proceeded to do just that:
A high tide in the new socialist mass movement is imminent throughout the countryside. But some of our comrades, tottering along like a woman with bound feet, are complaining all the time: ‘You're going too fast, much too fast.’ Too much carping, unwarranted complaints, boundless worries and countless taboos – all this they take as the right policy to guide the socialist mass movement in the rural areas.
No, this is not the right policy. It is the wrong one …
[This] is a … movement involving a rural population of more than 500 million and has tremendous worldwide significance. We should lead this movement actively [and] enthusiastically … instead of dragging it back by whatever means.23
With Mao's own doubts stilled, and all opposition silenced, the targets were raised exponentially. He himself spoke of collectivising half the rural population by the end of 1957. Provincial officials were determined to go still faster. In July 1955, 17 million households belonged to APCs. Six months later, the figure had reached 75 million, 63 per cent of the peasant population. Mao told his secretary that he had not felt so happy since the victory over Chiang Kai-shek.24 As he prepared to celebrate his sixty-second birthday, he gloated:
In the first half of 1955, the atmosphere was foul and dark clouds threatened. But in the second half there has been a complete change, and the climate is entirely different … This [co-operativisation movement] is a raging tidal wave, sweeping away all demons and monsters … By the time the year ends, the victory of socialism will be largely assured.25
In fact, by December 1956, only 3 per cent of the peasantry still farmed as individuals. The socialist transformation of agriculture, which was not to have been completed until 1971, had been accomplished fifteen years early.26
Ideologically it was a tremendous success. Politically it was a mixed blessing. Economically it held the seeds of disaster, for it convinced Mao, and other leaders, that, given the will to succeed, material conditions need not be decisive.
Collectivisation sapped the energies of the countryside for a generation to come, causing a levelling-down of rural society which stifled independent initiative, demotivated the most productive, rewarded the least capable, and replaced the rule of the landlords and literati with rule by the Party branch, whose members enjoyed power and privilege unconstrained by the fear of banditry and rebellion that, for centuries past, had kept their predecessors in check.
With the rural areas in socialist hands, Mao returned his attention to the cities where, he declared, the bourgeoisie was now isolated and should be dealt with ‘once and for all’. His promise of only two years earlier, that a mixed economy would continue until the mid-1960s, was conveniently forgotten:
On this matter we are quite heartless! On this matter, Marxism is indeed cruel and has little mercy, for it is determined to exterminate imperialism, feudalism, capitalism and small production to boot … Some of our comrades are too kind, they are not tough enough, in other words, they are not so Marxist. It is a very good thing, and a significant one too, to exterminate the bourgeoisie and capitalism in China … Our aim is to exterminate capitalism, obliterate it from the face of the earth and make it a thing of the past.27
That speech was made at a closed meeting of Party leaders in October 1955. In his encounters with Chinese businessmen, Mao understandably took a subtler line, which some unnamed wit among the Shanghai capitalists summed up as the ‘how to make a cat eat pepper’ approach.
Liu Shaoqi, it was said, advocated firmness: ‘You get somebody to hold the cat,’ he said, ‘stuff the pepper into its mouth, and push it down with a chopstick.’ Mao was horrified. Force, he declared, was undemocratic: the cat must be persuaded to eat voluntarily. Then Zhou Enlai tried. ‘I would starve the cat,’ said the Premier. ‘Then I would wrap the pepper with a slice of meat. If the cat is sufficiently hungry, it will swallow it whole.’ Again Mao shook his head. ‘One must not use deceit,’ he said. ‘Never fool the people!’ His own answer, he explained, was very simple. ‘You rub the pepper into the cat's backside. When it starts to burn, the cat will lick it off – and be happy to be permitted to do so.’28
Accordingly, rather than nationalise by decree, Mao asked his private sector interlocutors what they would advise him to do. The businessmen, whose backsides still burned from the peppering they had received in the ‘Five Antis’ campaign, fell over each other to tell him that nationalisation was what they longed for – the quicker, the better.29
Even so, the speed of the take-over was astonishing.
On December 6, 1955, Mao stated that all private businesses should be taken over by the state before the end of 1957, twelve years ahead of his original schedule. In practice, all private commerce and industry in Beijing was converted to joint state-private ownership in the first twelve days of the New Year. To mark the achievement, Mao and the rest of the leadership presided over a celebratory rally attended by 200,000 people in Tiananmen Square on January 15. Other major cities hurried to follow suit. By the end of January 1956, the urban economy had followed the rural areas into the straitjacket of Party and state control.30
That, in turn, was the signal for another gravity-defying leap forward.
Declaring that ‘rightist conservatism’ was the main obstacle to progress, Mao now set several new targets. Within the next few decades, he said, China must become ‘the number-one country in the world’, surpassing the United States in cultural, scientific, technological and industrial development.31 ‘I don't consider [American achievements] as anything so terrific,’ he went on breezily. If America produced 100 million tons of steel annually, ‘China should produce several hundred million tons’.I
As a first step, he called for the First Five-Year Plan to be fulfilled ahead of schedule, and unveiled a Twelve-Year Agricultural Plan proposing a doubling of grain and cotton production.32 The slogan, ‘more, faster, better’, which he had used in the last months of 1955 during the high tide of collectivisation, was modified to become, ‘more, faster, better and more economically’,
as though that somehow made it more rational.33 Saltationist socialism, as one foreign scholar called it, had established itself as Mao's favoured model for economic advance.34
On February 25, 1956, Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, who had succeeded Malenkov twelve months earlier, stood before his peers in the baroque white-and-gold banqueting hall in the Kremlin where the Soviet Party's 20th Congress was being held, and told them what they all knew in their hearts but had never expected to hear: that Stalin, before whom they had trembled for so long, had been a brutal psychopath, animated by ‘a persecution mania of unbelievable dimensions’, whose personality cult had concealed a capricious, despotic rule; whose ‘military genius’ had brought Russia to the verge of defeat by Germany; and whose sickly suspicion and mistrust had sent millions of innocent men and women to cruel and unnecessary deaths.35
The Secret Speech, as it became known, was delivered in closed session, from which representatives of fraternal parties were barred, the day before the Congress ended. A week later, Deng Xiaoping, who, with Zhu De, had headed the Chinese delegation, flew back to China with a copy, which was hurriedly translated.36
Given Mao's own problems with Stalin, he might have been expected to welcome the Soviet dictator's posthumous comeuppance. In one important sense, he did: such criticisms, he said, ‘destroyed myths, and opened boxes. This brings liberation … [allowing people to] speak their minds and to be able to think about issues.’37 Overall, however, Mao had serious doubts about Khrushchev's approach. At a meeting with the Soviet Ambassador in late March, he spoke a great deal about Stalin's errors towards China, but very little about the cult of personality – the nub of Khrushchev's attack – emphasising instead that Stalin had been ‘a great Marxist, a good and honest revolutionary’, who had made mistakes ‘not on everything, but [only] on certain issues’.38 These views were reflected soon afterwards in an editorial in the People's Daily, entitled ‘On the Historical Experience of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat’, which, nearly six weeks after Khrushchev had spoken and long after the rest of the communist bloc had endorsed the new Soviet line, set out for the first time publicly the Chinese Party's position: