by Philip Short
Meanwhile, as part of an effort to put the Leap on a more rational footing and combat exaggerated production claims, Mao had started urging officials to express their views frankly. ‘An individual sometimes wins over the majority,’ he had told the Central Committee in April. ‘Truth is sometimes in one person's hands alone … Speaking out should involve no penalty. According to Party regulations, people are entitled to their own opinions.’233 He had cited the example of the Confucian bureaucrat, Hai Rui, of the Ming dynasty, a model of probity who had been dismissed from office for upbraiding a sixteenth-century emperor. China, Mao declared, needed more Hai Ruis. From June onward, Party propagandists began producing anthologies, articles and plays extolling the Ming official's virtues. On July 2, the day the Lushan conference opened, Mao renewed his assurance that no one would be punished for ‘making criticisms and offering opinions’.
Peng had originally intended to skip the meeting. He had just returned from a six-week-long tour of eastern Europe, and he was tired. But, at Mao's urging, he went, and, once there, soon decided that this was the right place and the right moment to fulfil his pledge of the previous winter and ‘speak out’.
The Defence Minister, as was his custom, did not mince words. At a group discussion with officials from north-west China, he declared that ‘everybody is responsible for the mistakes committed during the [Great Leap] … including Comrade Mao Zedong’. A week later he resolved to take his concerns to Mao himself. But when he appeared at Mao's quarters, on the morning of Monday, July 13, he was told the Chairman was still sleeping. That night, therefore, he set out his views in a ‘letter of opinion’, had his aide-de-camp write out a clean copy, and next morning, not without some nervousness, despatched it for Mao to read.
Peng's letter mixed considerable praise for the achievements of the Leap – notably the unprecedented growth rate, which, he wrote, proved that Mao's strategic line was ‘in the main … correct’ – with criticisms of specific failings. Taken individually, these were unexceptionable. Mao may not have relished hearing that ‘petty-bourgeois fanaticism’ had generated Leftist errors; that in the backyard steel movement there had been both ‘losses and gains’ (implying that the former predominated); that ‘we have not sufficiently understood the socialist laws of proportionate and planned development’; and that economic construction had been handled less successfully than the PLA's shelling of Quemoy or the suppression of the revolt in Tibet. However, all these were things he could perfectly well have said himself. The problem was that, cumulatively, their effect was devastating. To Mao, the burden of Peng's message was that the Great Leap, even if justified in theory, had in fact led to disaster. Woven through his text were passages linking the Chairman personally with errors that had been made, including one where he took issue with Mao's claims that ‘politics is the commander’:
In the view of some comrades, putting politics in command can take the place of everything else. They have forgotten [that] it is aimed at … giving full play to the enthusiasm and creativity of the masses in order to speed up economic construction. [It] cannot take the place of economic principles, still less can it be a substitute for concrete measures in economic work.234
But more galling than anything Peng wrote was the way in which he had arrogated to himself the right to sit in judgement. Mao's praise of Hai Rui notwithstanding, specific criticisms of policy errors were one thing, ‘upbraiding the emperor’ quite another.
Three days later, on July 17, the conference secretariat, on Mao's instructions, distributed the text of Peng's letter to all delegates. This was generally interpreted at the time as a sign, if not of Mao's approval, at least that Peng's views were an acceptable basis for discussion. Over the next few days, several other Central Committee members – including Zhang Wentian, Mao's ally in the mid-1930s, who had remained a Politburo alternate – made speeches supporting his views. Two more Politburo members, Li Xiannian and Chen Yi, indicated agreement with it, and a number of others were hesitating.
At this point, Mao spoke, and the bottom fell out of Peng's world.
Like most of the Chairman's speeches in later years, it was a rambling, somewhat disjointed statement, full of half-finished thoughts tangential to his main theme. But he made two ominous points. Peng Dehuai's letter, he said, constituted an error of political line, like those committed earlier by Li Lisan, Wang Ming and Gao Gang. Peng and his supporters were Rightists. Others, too, were ‘on the brink’. Those who were wavering, he warned, must make up their minds quickly on which side they wished to stand. Secondly, Mao said, if there were nothing but criticism, communist power would collapse. If that happened, he would ‘go away, go to the countryside, to lead the peasants and overthrow the government’ again, in order to re-establish the regime. He added menacingly, in a direct challenge to the PLA marshals, who were Peng's natural allies: ‘If you, the PLA, don't follow me, I'll go and found a [new] Red Army. [But] I think the PLA will follow me.’
After Mao had finished speaking, Peng walked home, as he wrote later, ‘with a heavy heart’. He lost his appetite and lay on his bed for hours, staring into space. His bodyguard called a doctor, who concluded that Peng must be ill. The Defence Minister disabused him. ‘If I've got a sickness,’ he said, ‘it's nothing that can be cured now.’
The conference ended on July 30. Next day, Mao convened an enlarged meeting of the Politburo Standing Committee to decide Peng's fate.235
Once again Khrushchev had simplified his task.236 Six weeks earlier, on the eve of the planned shipment to China of the sample atom bomb which the Soviet leader had promised Mao, the Russians had informed Beijing that they were cancelling the nuclear technology agreement: the Kremlin had decided that if it provided Mao with nuclear weapons, it risked being dragged into a nuclear conflict with America over Taiwan. Now, in the same week that Peng had issued his ‘letter of opinion’, Khrushchev publicly condemned the communes. Mao lost no time in circulating at Lushan an approving account of the Russian leader's remarks issued by Taiwan's Central News Agency. What better proof could there be that Peng and his supporters were ‘objectively’ aiding China's enemies – if, indeed, not actually colluding with them? Peng and Zhang Wentian, after all, had both just visited Moscow.
Against this background of innuendo, Mao had no difficulty persuading his colleagues that they were confronted by an anti-Party conspiracy, and that Peng and his ‘military club’ should be cast into outer darkness.237
The operative question was no longer whether the Chairman was right, but whether anyone had the courage to tell him he was wrong. Certainly not the malleable Zhou Enlai, for whom avoidance of confrontations with Mao was the basic premise of political survival. Not Liu Shaoqi, either: he had not forgiven Peng for giving Gao Gang a sympathetic hearing in 1953. Chen Yun was away on sick leave, and Deng Xiaoping, conveniently, had broken his leg playing table tennis. Lin Biao detested Peng, and would do whatever Mao asked of him. Of all the inner core, only the venerable Marshal Zhu De, now in his seventies, was rash – or honest – enough to speak on Peng's behalf, counselling moderation – and he was afterwards required to make a self-criticism for his pains. The others formed a political lynch-mob. The verbatim record of the Standing Committee meeting, taken down by one of the Chairman's secretaries, Li Rui, himself to be purged shortly afterwards, offers a revealing glimpse of the snakepit that life at the top in Mao's China had become:238
MAO: When you speak of ‘petty bourgeois fanaticism’, you are mainly pointing the spearhead at the central leadership organs. It's not at the provincial leaders, or even at the masses. This is my observation … In fact you are pointing the spearhead of attack at the centre. You may admit this, or, more likely, you may not. But we think you are opposing the centre. You were prepared to publish your letter in order to win people over and to organise them [against us] …
PENG: When I wrote about petty-bourgeois fanaticism … I should have recognised that this is a political problem. I did not grasp it very well
.
MAO (interrupting): Now that the letter has been made public, all the counter-revolutionaries have come out to applaud it.
PENG: This was a letter I sent to you personally … I wrote on it, ‘Please check and see if I am right, and give me your comments’. My whole intention concerning this letter was that it might have some reference value, and I wanted you to consider it.
MAO: That's not true … Whenever there is a problem, you are not straightforward about it … People [who don't know you] think you are simple, frank and outspoken. When they first know you, that's all they see. [But later] they realise … you are devious. No one can see what's in the bottom of your heart. Then they say you are a hypocrite … You are a Right opportunist. [You said in your letter] the Party leadership is no good. You want to usurp the proletarian banner.
PENG: The letter was sent to you personally. I carried out no [factional] activities.
MAO: You did.
PENG ZHEN: In the group discussions, you said everyone should take responsibility for what happened, including Comrade Mao Zedong … Who were you attacking then? …
HE LONG: You have a very deep prejudice against the Chairman. In your letter you show you are full of preconceived ideas …
ZHOU ENLAI: You have adopted a Right-opportunist stance. The target of your letter was the Party's general line …
MAO: You wanted to bring about the disintegration of the Party. You have a plan, you have an organisation, you have made preparations, you have attacked the correct line from a Rightist standpoint … [You say that] at [Yan'an], I fucked your mother for forty days. So this time, there are still twenty days to go. For you to be satisfied, you want to fuck my mother for forty days this time. I tell you, you've fucked enough …VI
PENG: If you all think this way, it's very difficult for me to say anything … [But] you need not worry, I won't commit suicide; I will never be a counter-revolutionary; I can still go out and work in the fields.
On August 2, the Central Committee met to confirm the Standing Committee's verdict. A few of Peng's junior military colleagues spoke up for him (and were promptly purged as a result). The Defence Minister humiliated himself with a speech of self-abasement in which he denounced his letter to Mao as ‘a series of absurdities’, and confessed to damaging Mao's ‘lofty prestige’ from motives of ‘exceedingly wrong personal prejudice’.239 The speech was a pointless gesture, which he afterwards regretted.
The CC, in its resolution, accused him of heading a ‘Right-opportunist anti-Party clique’; of making ‘vicious attacks’ on Mao; of having focused on ‘transient and partial shortcomings’ in order to ‘paint a pitch-black picture of the present situation’; of having formed an ‘anti-Party alliance’ with Gao Gang in 1954; and of engaging in ‘long-standing anti-Party activities’. As if that were not enough, he, Zhang Wentian, and the other members of the alleged clique, were described as ‘representatives of the bourgeoisie’ who had wormed their way into the Party during the civil war period.
Yet then came a contradiction. Having detailed a list of offences which more than justified expulsion from the Party (and, in the case of a low-level official, would have meant a long term in a labour camp, or even execution), the Central Committee ruled that the ‘conspirators’ could not only keep their Party membership, but Peng and Zhang Wentian, while losing their governmental responsibilities, would retain their Politburo posts.240
This was presented as an example of Mao's long-established policy of ‘curing the sickness to save the patient’.241 In fact, it had more to do with Peng's stature within the PLA and among the Party rank and file. Even for Mao, it was not easy to discredit one of the great heroes of the Revolutionary War, who had led the Chinese Volunteers in Korea; a man with a reputation for incorruptibility, who lived as an ascetic and was morally unassailable. Outwardly, the Chairman had no choice but to appear magnanimous, even as, in private, he continued to fume over Peng's ‘surprise attack’.
A month later, Lin Biao, whom Mao had been grooming since 1956 as Peng's eventual successor, was named Defence Minister in his place. Lin was in poor health, and had played little public role since 1949. But he was a Mao loyalist, and he set to work with a will to extirpate Peng's influence from the military, which, in the 1950s and 1960s, no less than during the civil war, remained the bedrock on which Mao's political power was based. Peng moved out of his home in Zhongnanhai, and for the next six years lived a hermetic existence under virtual house arrest in a building in the grounds of the old Summer Palace, on the northern outskirts of Beijing. Although he had retained his formal rank, he never attended another Politburo meeting, or any other official function. His career was over.
It was not simply personal cowardice and political self-interest that had made Peng's colleagues line up to savage him. If the Politburo operated in this way, it was Mao who made it do so.
Criticising the Chairman did not have to be synonymous with overthrowing Party rule. Since 1949, it had not always been like that. Yet now, after months of urging people to speak out, pledging that there would be no retribution – the moment someone did so, Mao could not stomach it. Zhang Wentian had complained at Lushan, in a passage that had especially angered Mao, that all the problems of the Great Leap had a single basic cause – the lack of inner-Party democracy, which meant that one man decided everything. ‘One would be labelled a sceptic, a tide-watcher, or a “white flag” to be pulled down, if one made a few differing remarks,’ he had told the conference. ‘Why? Why are negative views not tolerated? … What is there to be afraid of?’242
Why indeed? Why could Mao not accept the criticism which he himself solicited?
In Peng's case, there were specific factors at work. Within the pressure-cooker of the inner circle, the Chairman was open to influence by those whose views reinforced his own. During the crucial two days when he was deciding how to respond to Peng's letter, Kang Sheng and Ke Qingshi, the left-wing Shanghai First Secretary, who had both been in the forefront of the Leap and were thus particularly vulnerable to any change of policy, artfully fuelled his suspicions that the Defence Minister was orchestrating a concerted campaign of opposition. Moreover, the fact that it was the cussedly independent-minded Peng, with whom Mao had been quarrelling for decades, rather than a more congenial figure, who dared to criticise his policies, made his reaction all the fiercer.
The very day the letter was distributed, he told his staff: ‘Where Peng Dehuai is concerned, I have always had a rule. If he attacks, I attack back … [With him] it is 30 per cent co-operation, 70 per cent conflict – and it has been like that for 31 years.’243
Yet, even without these aggravating circumstances, Mao would no doubt have acted in the same way. As the 1950s drew to a close, in his mind ‘disagreement’ became identical with ‘opposition’ – whether it was the disagreement of the intellectuals, in the Hundred Flowers movement, or disagreement within the Party.
After the ‘Hundred Flowers’, he had warned that class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie would continue in Chinese society for many years to come. Now he asserted that this was true within the Party as well:
The struggle at Lushan was a class struggle, and a continuation of the life-and-death struggle between the two major antagonistic classes, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. This kind of struggle will continue … in our Party for at least another 20 years and possibly for half a century … Contradictions and struggle will go on and on for ever, otherwise the world will no longer be worthy of its being. The bourgeois politicians say the philosophy of the Communist Party is a philosophy of struggle. That is correct, only the modes of the struggle vary according to the times.244
Thus were laid the foundations for the notion, which would dominate the last years of Mao's life, that there was a ‘bourgeoisie’ inside the Party, which must be ferreted out, regardless of cost, if revolutionary purity was to be preserved.
Just as the ‘Hundred Flowers’, through the anti-Rightis
t Campaign, silenced China's intellectuals, so the Lushan conference, through the purge of Peng Dehuai, silenced Mao's Party colleagues. Zhu De had asked the Standing Committee: ‘If people like us don't speak up, then who will dare to talk?’ Now he had the Chairman's answer. Never again in Mao's lifetime would a Politburo member openly challenge his policies.
There was one, further, depressing parallel. The anti-Rightist Campaign had claimed half-a-million victims. The campaign against ‘Right opportunism’, as the movement against critics of the Leap was known, triggered a political blood-letting more than ten times larger: six million people, most of them Party members or low-level officials, were criticised and struggled against for allegedly opposing Mao's policies. In Sichuan, 80 per cent of basic-level cadres were dismissed. As in 1957, local Party secretaries assigned their subordinates quotas of purge-victims to round up. In some areas, whole groups were accused, rather than individuals. Scores of thousands died, some executed, others succumbing to the punishments inflicted on them during struggle meetings. Once again, there were numerous suicides. ‘Everybody was in a state of danger,’ one provincial First Secretary recalled, ‘mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, dared not speak to each other.’245
Far worse, however, was to come.
The attack on alleged ‘Rightists’ produced, as it had done two years earlier, a fresh upsurge of Leftism. Mao's efforts of the first half of the year to moderate the Great Leap went abruptly into reverse. To prove that Peng had been wrong, the policies which he had condemned were revived with redoubled vigour. Once again, Mao dreamed aloud of cornucopian production figures: 650 million tons of steel annually by the end of the century, perhaps 1,000 million tons of grain.246
This renewed vision of plenty coincided with a further sharp deterioration in the food supply. The 1959 harvest was the worst for several years. The government announced that 270 million tons had been gathered in; the true figure, not disclosed until more than 20 years later, was 170 million.247 The authorities blamed exceptional weather, with floods in the south and drought in the north. In fact, Chinese meteorologists later confirmed, climatic conditions were little different from normal. That year, amid celebrations for the tenth anniversary of the founding of Red China, hundreds of millions of people went hungry.VII For the first time since the communist victory, it was no longer a matter of pockets of starvation: in every part of the country, millions of peasants – the very people whom the revolution was supposed to serve – were slowly starving to death.248