Mao

by Philip Short

  Another constant theme was the Party's mistreatment of intellectuals, who were regarded as ‘dog-shit one moment and 10,000 ounces of gold the next’. If the Party needed you, a journalist wrote, it did not matter if you were a murderer; if it didn't need you, it would cast you aside no matter how faithfully you worked. An engineer complained that intellectuals were more subdued than under the Japanese occupation. Party members snooped around, reporting back to personnel offices on the behaviour of their non-communist colleagues. The result was that ‘no one dares to let off steam even privately in the company of intimate friends … Everyone has learned the technique of double-talk; what one says is one thing, what one thinks is another.’

  On May 4, only three days after the movement had been launched, Mao issued a secret directive, in which he said that, although some of the views being expressed were wrong, they should not be rebutted for the time being. ‘We should not stop it in the middle,’ he wrote. ‘If there is no pressure from society, it will be very difficult for us to get the results from rectification that we want.’ For ‘at least a few months’, therefore, criticism was to continue unchecked. Then, once the Party had been rectified, the movement could be enlarged and criticism extended to the democratic parties, the intellectuals and society at large.109

  But as the torrent of popular anger, mistrust and bitterness swelled, Mao began to have second thoughts.

  On May 15, in a memorandum entitled ‘Things are turning into their opposites’, issued for restricted circulation to officials of Central Committee rank and above, he signalled that his attitude was changing. In it, for the first time, Mao applied the term ‘revisionism’ to events at home. The revisionists, he said, denied the class nature of the press; they admired bourgeois liberalism and democracy, and rejected Party leadership. Such people were the main danger within the Party, and they were now working hand in glove with right-wing intellectuals. It was these non-Party ‘Rightists’ (another term he now used for the first time) who were responsible for ‘the current spate of wild attacks’:

  The Rightists know nothing about dialectics – things turn into their opposite when they reach the extreme. We shall let the Rightists run amuck for a time and let them reach their climax … Some say they are afraid of being hooked like a fish … [or] being lured in deep, rounded up and annihilated. Now that large numbers of fish have come to the surface of themselves, there is no need to bait the hook … There are two alternatives for the Rightists. One is to … mend their ways. The other is to go on making trouble and court ruin. Gentlemen Rightists, the choice is yours, the initiative (for a short time) is in your hands.110

  This was not quite as dramatic a shift in Mao's position as it might seem. Already, in early April, discussing the harmful views that would be expressed, he had told Party cadres in Hangzhou: ‘This is not setting an ambush for the enemy, but rather letting them fall into the snare of their own accord.’111 What was new was the change in emphasis. The focus of Mao's attention was moving ominously from ‘flowers blooming’ to the uprooting of ‘poisonous weeds’.

  Since the document was secret, the public at large, as well as the ‘Rightists’ themselves, remained in ignorance of these developments.

  The movement next spread to the campus at Beijing University, where a ‘Democracy Wall’, set up outside the canteen, was soon covered in posters several layers deep. Student orators harangued crowds of thousands on subjects ranging from multi-party elections to the respective merits of socialism and capitalism. The movement found its Pasionara in a 21-year-old literature student named Lin Xiling, who accused the Party of practising ‘feudal socialism’ and urged sweeping reforms to guarantee basic freedoms. Student associations were formed with names like ‘Bitter Medicine’, ‘Voices from the Lowest Level’, ‘Wild Grass’ and ‘Spring Thunder’, which published mimeographed journals and sent activists to ‘exchange experience’ with out-of-town colleagues.112

  After another week had passed, Mao spoke again, this time publicly. At a meeting with a Youth League delegation, he warned: ‘Any word or deed at variance with socialism is completely wrong.’113 This was immediately written up in giant, white characters on the side of a building at the campus.

  But the fire the Chairman had lit was not to be put out so easily. Student leaders called openly for an end to Communist Party rule. Their teachers, inspired by their example, stoked the flames still higher. Mao's rule was ‘arbitrary and reckless’, a Shenyang professor declared. If there was no democracy in China, it was the fault of the Party Centre. Others spoke of a ‘malevolent tyranny’ employing the ‘fascist methods of Auschwitz’. In Wuhan, middle-school students took to the streets and stormed local government offices. Trouble was also reported from Sichuan and Shandong.114

  On June 8, less than six weeks after the campaign's official launch, Mao initiated the Party's counter-offensive.

  ‘Certain people,’ said the People's Daily, were using the rectification campaign as a pretext to try to ‘overthrow the Communist Party and the working class, and to topple the great cause of socialism’.115 Mao himself, in a Central Committee directive the same day, spoke of a small section of the Party having been rotted by reactionary views – which meant, he added approvingly, that ‘the pus is being squeezed out’.116 Ten days later, his ‘contradictions’ speech in February was published for the first time – but in a heavily revised version, which set out six criteria for distinguishing ‘fragrant flowers’ from ‘poisonous weeds’. These effectively restated the assurance Mao had given privately to Party officials before the movement started – namely that criticisms were acceptable only if they strengthened, not undermined, Party leadership.117

  Finally, on July 1, in another People's Daily editorial, Mao accused the Ministers of Forestry, Luo Longji, and of Communications, Zhang Bojun, both leaders of a small coalition party called the Democratic League, of forming a counter-revolutionary alliance to promote an ‘anti-communist, anti-people, anti-socialist bourgeois line’. The implication was that the ‘Hundred Flowers’ policy had been correct, but had been sabotaged by a small group of extremists unreconciled to the communist victory who wanted to turn back the clock.118

  All this was both dishonest and wise after the event. The ‘Luo–Zhang Alliance’ was a fabrication – another in the long line that had begun with the ‘Extermination Brigades’ in Yudu in 1934, and continued with the ‘Wang Shiwei counter-revolutionary conspiracy’ in 1943 and the ‘Hu Feng clique’ in 1955 – the sole purpose of which was to justify the clampdown that was already under way. In the same way, Guangming ribao, which Mao now accused of serving ‘as a mouthpiece for the reactionaries’,119 had merely done as he had asked. So had most of the ‘Rightists’. The six criteria were so restrictive that, if they had been in the original speech, ‘blooming and contending’ would never have started at all. In fact Mao had said repeatedly, in the course of the campaign, that no limits should be laid down, because ‘the people [themselves] have the ability to distinguish … [We must] trust them … to discriminate.’120

  Why, then, did he decide that a crackdown was necessary?

  There is no simple answer. The ‘Hundred Flowers’ was not, as Mao's victims and supporters both claimed, a carefully contrived trap from the start, an example of the Chairman's cunning in ‘luring the snake out of its hole’. Nor was it a ‘colossal blunder’, as most Western scholars argue.121

  Mao had always mistrusted intellectuals. Their behaviour at Yan'an had strengthened his conviction that they were fundamentally unreliable, and nothing that had happened since, in the repeated remoulding campaigns of the early 1950s, had done anything to alter that view. He did not suddenly decide, in the spring of 1957, that they were trustworthy after all. He believed from the outset that there would be some cases, if only a few, of ‘extremists’ transgressing reasonable bounds, who would have to be uprooted. Hence his refusal to give a blanket assurance that there would be no retaliation. Hence, too, a revealing slip of the tongue at a Party c
onference in March, nearly two months before the movement began, when, in speaking of the struggle against bourgeois ideology, he referred to intellectuals as ‘the enemy’, rather than potential allies to be won over.122

  On the other hand, the economic base of Chinese society had been transformed, and therefore, in Marxist theory, the ideological ‘superstructure’ should follow suit.

  Throughout the ‘Hundred Flowers’ period, Mao used the metaphor of hair and skin, arguing that now the old, bourgeois, economic ‘skin’ had died, the intellectuals, the ideological ‘hair’, had no choice but to shift their allegiance and graft themselves on to the new ‘skin’ of the proletarian economy.123

  The unstated question all along was how numerous the ‘extremists’ would be and how much pressure they would exert. Here Mao made not one but two misjudgements. He underestimated the volume and bitterness of the criticisms, and the cadres’ ability to withstand them. What had started as an attempt to bridge the gap between the Party and the people (and had been only incidentally an effort to expose and punish a small number of anti-communist irreductibles) was turned on its head. It became a trap not for the few but for the many – for the hundreds of thousands of loyal citizens who had taken the Party) at its word.124

  This wholesale reversal was entirely of Mao's making. Yet he evidently undertook it with some reluctance.125 He said later that he had been ‘confused by false appearances’ at a time when the Party, and society at large, were panicking about the risk of large-scale unrest.126 In speeches the following summer and autumn, he made clear that he continued to believe the original ‘Hundred Flowers’ policy was correct. The ‘Rightists,’ he said, were counter-revolutionaries, but they should be treated leniently. ‘Extreme policies [in the past] did not bring good results. We ought [this time] to be a bit more far-sighted.’127

  Leniency, in Mao's lexicon, was a relative term.

  The ‘Rightists’ were not shot.128 Indeed, the more senior among them, including Luo Longji, Zhang Bojun and another minister, Zhang Naiqi, were all amnestied two years later. But 520,000 smaller fry – one in twenty of all non-communist intellectuals and officials in China – underwent labour reform or were exiled to the countryside to learn class consciousness from the peasants. In many units, local Party secretaries ordered that a fixed quota be applied: 5 per cent of the cadres had to be designated as ‘Rightists’. Those with suspect backgrounds, or who had fallen foul of the Party hierarchy at some time in the past, were invariably chosen first.129

  The professor of English, Wu Ningkun (educated in the West), was arrested and spent three years in prison camps, first in Manchuria, then near Tianjin.130 The woman police cadre in Changsha (who had criticised her section chief) was sent for labour reform in the suburbs; her husband then divorced her in a fruitless effort to prevent the ‘Rightist’ label being applied to him and their children.131 The leader of the merchants in Wangfujing (a capitalist) spent the next twenty years in and out of penal institutions. They, and half-a-million others like them, saw their lives and those of their families pitilessly destroyed. Unlike the landlords and the counter-revolutionaries, they were punished not for their actions (past or present, real or imagined), but solely for their ideas.

  Mao himself was sensitive to that charge. ‘These people not only talk, they also act,’ he claimed. ‘They are guilty. The saying, “Those who speak up shall not be blamed” does not apply to them.’132 It was a poor defence.

  The tragedy of the ‘Hundred Flowers’ was that Mao genuinely did want the intellectuals to ‘think for themselves’, to join the revolution of their own free will rather than being forced to do so. His goal, he told Party cadres, was ‘the creation of a political environment where there will be both centralism and democracy, both discipline and freedom, both unity of purpose and personal ease of mind and liveliness’.133

  Yet that formula, in practice, proved utterly self-defeating. By the mid-1950s, Mao was so convinced of the essential correctness of his own thought that he could no longer comprehend why, if people had the freedom to think for themselves, they would think what they wanted, not what he wanted – that, so long as they retained a spark of intellectual independence, they would produce ideas of which he disapproved and which he would find it necessary to suppress. In practice, discipline always won out; independence of mind was crushed. The uprooting of ‘poisonous weeds’ would lead to total stultification.

  There was another, more immediate result, too.

  The intellectuals were scorched so badly in the anti-Rightist campaign that they would never believe Mao again. A quarter of a century later, when the old merchant from Wangfujing lay dying, his last words to his family were: ‘Never trust the Communist Party!’ The very people whom Mao needed most to build the strong, new China he had been dreaming of since his youth had been definitively alienated.

  In the eight years since the establishment of the communist regime, Mao's life had changed out of all recognition. It was not simply that he had more power. As supreme leader of 600 million people, he became an august, detached figure, enveloped in an imperial aura, distant from his own colleagues and isolated from those he ruled.

  Shortly before the proclamation of the People's Republic, he had taken up residence in Zhongnanhai (literally, ‘Central and Southern Lakes’), a walled estate containing the dwellings of former Manchu princes and traditional, courtyard mansions, set amid a park adjoining the Forbidden City but separated from it by the artificial lakes from which it derives its name.134 It had fallen into disrepair when the nationalists were in power and had their capital in Nanjing, but in 1949 the one-time princely homes were refurbished for use by Politburo members and modern, three-storey blocks were built as offices for the Central Committee and the State Council. Mao and his immediate entourage lived in what had once been a library, built for the Emperor Qianlong in the eighteenth century, a splendid, grey-tiled edifice, cloistering a traditional courtyard with ancient cypress trees at its centre, whose name, Fengzeyuan, the Garden of Beneficent Abundance, was carved in the Emperor's own calligraphy on a wooden board above its massive, gabled south gate. Mao's private quarters, the Juxiang shuwu, or Study of Chrysanthemum Fragrance, occupied the northern part and comprised a vast high-ceilinged room which served as his bedchamber, study and salon, all in one; a large dining room; and, beyond it, Jiang Qing's bedroom, connected by a pathway to her living quarters in the west wing. Mao's daughters, Li Min and Li Na, who were looked after by Jiang Qing's half-sister, lived on the southern side and Mao Zemin's young orphaned son, Mao Yuanxin, had rooms nearby.

  For Mao, as for the Chinese emperors before him, Zhongnanhai was a cocoon. In place of eunuchs, he was surrounded by secretaries and bodyguards. For his protection, there were three concentric rings of special service troops, discreet but omnipresent. His food came from a designated, secure farm, and was tasted before he ate as a precaution against poison. After Ren Bishi's death in October 1950, Mao, and all the other top leaders, were assigned personal physicians. Whereas in Yan'an and Shijiazhuang, he had been free to move about as he wished, albeit with a security escort, in Beijing he could not stir without every detail of his route being planned and reconnoitred in advance. When he did travel, it was aboard an armoured special train. He rarely flew, lest the nationalists on Taiwan try to sabotage or shoot down his plane.III

  In the first years, Mao tried from time to time to break out from the protective screen his minders threw up around him. Usually it ended badly.

  His chief bodyguard, Li Yinqiao, remembered one such occasion, in Tianjin, when Mao insisted on having lunch at a restaurant. Word was sent ahead. The management cleared the place of other customers, and it was invested by plain-clothes police. But when Mao stopped at an upstairs window, to look out at the street below, he was spotted by a woman hanging out washing on a balcony opposite. Her excited cries brought crowds so dense that it took the local garrison command six hours to persuade them to disperse sufficiently for Mao to leave. Whenever af
terwards he wanted to break away from the route his security officers had prepared, this incident would be brought up as a reason for not doing so.135

  Mao's isolation was exacerbated by the absence of a family around him. Anying was dead, and Anqing was being treated at a psychiatric hospital in Dalian.136 Jiang Qing was often bedridden, initially with psychosomatic ailments, whose nature neither Chinese nor Russian doctors were able to discover, and later with cervical cancer. She made several extended journeys to Moscow, the longest lasting over a year, to undergo medical treatment. Mao was only too pleased to be rid of her and, when she begged permission to return, insisted that she stay on until she was completely cured.137 According to his doctor, Li Zhisui, by 1955 they were already leading separate lives.138 Even Li Yinqiao, who tried to be charitable, concluded that by the mid-1950s, the marriage was on the rocks.139 They ate, slept and worked apart. On the rare occasions when they did spend time together, Jiang got on Mao's nerves and he would grumble to his guards afterwards that he never wanted to see her again.

  Their estrangement made him nostalgic for his former wives: for He Zizhen, whom he met again for the first time in twenty-one years;140 and for Yang Kaihui, whose memory now drew from him a romantic, astonishingly beautiful poem, which he entitled ‘The Immortals’. It was addressed to an old friend, Li Shuyi, the woman who, thirty years earlier, had sat up, nursing her infant son, as the Horse Day massacre began. Li's husband, Liu Zhixun, had been killed not long after Kaihui. In Chinese, their names signify ‘willow’ and ‘poplar’, a play on words which Mao entwined with the legend of Wu Gang, a Sisyphus-figure condemned to cut down an everlasting cassia tree on the moon:

  I lost my proud poplar, and you your willow;