Mao

by Philip Short

  When, in September of that year, Mao told Field Marshal Montgomery that Liu was his designated successor,45 it was made known widely among the upper echelons of the Party, apparently to prepare the ground for his withdrawal, at the next Party Congress, to become honorary Party Chairman, as foreshadowed by the 1958 constitution.

  Each May Day and National Day, Liu's portrait was printed in the People's Daily, side by side with Mao's, and of equal size. His writings were studied alongside Mao's (as they had been during the Yan'an Rectification Campaign twenty years before), and at the Chairman's suggestion, work started on preparing an edition of his ‘Selected Works’, an honour up until then accorded only to Mao himself. One of Liu's essays from the 1930s, entitled ‘How to be a Good Communist’, was reissued as a pamphlet in an edition of 18 million copies.46

  This did not mean there were no frictions between them. Unlike the pliant Zhou Enlai, who made a religion of loyalty to Mao, or the sycophantic Lin Biao, Liu had a mind of his own (which was what had led the Chairman to choose him as his deputy in the first place). At times – as in 1947, when Mao reproached him for excessive Leftism in the land reform movement; or in 1953, when he sought to use Gao Gang to curb Liu's independence – Liu's tendency to go his own way irritated him. But there was nothing to suggest that a breach was in the offing.

  That began to change in the spring of 1962.

  Liu's criticisms of the Great Leap Forward at the ‘7,000-cadre big conference’ were one factor. Far more important was what Mao saw as his lack of steadiness in the five months during which he withdrew to Hangzhou. At a series of Standing Committee meetings and a Central Committee work conference, Liu had warned that the situation was far worse than the Party had yet admitted and that further retrenchment was necessary.47 If Liu lost his nerve so easily when the economy failed to respond – authorising emergency measures that amounted to a sell-out of fundamental communist values – how could he be trusted to defend Mao's policies when the Chairman was no longer around? It was as though, by withdrawing, he had given Liu enough rope to hang himself, and his heir apparent had promptly obliged. In a revealing exchange after he returned to Beijing in July, Mao railed at the younger man: ‘Can't you hold the line? Why can't you keep things under control? … The [basic principles of our policy] have been refuted, the land has been divided up, and you did nothing! What will happen after I die?’. Uncharacteristically, Liu blurted out: ‘History will record the role you and I played in the starvation of so many people, and the cannibalism will also be memorialised!’48

  The rift was papered over. For the next two years, Mao would reserve judgement, but his faith in Liu had been shaken.

  The plan for him to retire as Honorary Party Chairman was not heard of again.49 Instead in a poem the following January, as he entered his seventieth year, he celebrated anew his implacable determination to move China along his chosen path:

  So many deeds cry out to be done,

  And always urgently;

  The world rolls on,

  Time presses.

  Ten thousand years are too long,

  Seize the day, seize the hour!

  The Four Seas are rising, clouds and waters raging,

  The Five Continents are rocking, wind and thunder roaring,

  Away with all pests!

  Our force is irresistible.50

  The ‘pests’ were the Khrushchevite revisionists, with perhaps just a sideways glance at revisionists nearer home. But the subtext was Mao's realisation that he would have to lead from the front himself, because he could rely on no one else to do so in his place.

  Mao's doubts about Liu showed up in other ways, too.

  Starting from the summer of 1962, he began to develop alternative instruments of power, to act as a counterweight to the Party machine, controlled by Liu, as first Party Vice-Chairman; Deng Xiaoping, as General Secretary; and Deng's deputy, Peng Zhen.

  That year, his wife, Jiang Qing, who had been kept away from the limelight since their marriage in Yan'an, twenty-five years before, began for the first time to play a public role.51 In September, her picture appeared on the front page of the People's Daily when Mao received President Sukarno of Indonesia. Three months later, when the Chairman triggered another onslaught against one of his favourite targets, China's intellectuals – this time on the pretext of eliminating revisionism from the nation's cultural life – Jiang Qing was ready and waiting to take up the cudgels on his behalf. Their personal relationship had ended long before. But politically she was his to command; her loyalty was beyond question; and she wanted nothing more in life than to prove her usefulness to him. As she put it, many years later: ‘I was Chairman Mao's dog. Whoever he told me to bite, I bit.’52 From April 1963 onwards, with Mao's encouragement and discreet help from Zhou Enlai, she began to nip the heels of Liu's cultural commissars and of the playwrights and film-makers, historians and philosophers, poets and painters that they favoured, until the whole of China's intellectual life took on the same, monotonous Maoist coloration as the ‘revolutionary model operas’ which she eagerly promoted.

  Zhou Enlai himself, ever anxious to defend his corner of the Chairman's affections against Liu's depredations, became another indispensable part of Mao's new inner circle. The Shanghai Party leaders, under Ke Qingshi and his protégé, Zhang Chunqiao, served as a radical ginger group to promote policies of which the more conservative Beijing leaders disapproved. Mao's amanuensis, Chen Boda, took on a higher profile. So did Kang Sheng, who became the Chairman's informant in Deng Xiaoping's Secretariat.53 He soon showed that he had not forgotten his old tradecraft as secret police chief in Yan'an by setting up a ‘Special Case Group’ to investigate what he claimed was a covert attempt to promote the rehabilitation of Gao Gang. In a chilling foretaste of the tactics Kang would use against Mao's enemies in the great upheavals that lay ahead, thousands of people were interrogated and a senior vice-premier purged on the sole evidence of an unpublished historical novel, set in Gao Gang's old base area in Shaanxi,II one of whose leading characters was said to resemble him.

  But the most important of Mao's placemen was Lin Biao, who, since his appointment in 1959, had worked single-mindedly to transform the PLA into a redoubt of ideological rectitude, the incarnation of Mao's view that men were more important than weapons, where politics was always ‘the supreme commander, the soul and guarantor of all work’, and Mao Zedong Thought was ‘the highest peak in today's world … [and] the apex of contemporary thought’.54 It was Lin who published the main article in the People's Daily, eulogising the fourth volume of Mao's Selected Works, when it appeared in 1960; Lin who offered the stoutest defence of the Great Leap at the ‘7,000-cadre big conference’; and Lin, a year later, who suggested that a handy compendium of the Chairman's aphorisms be compiled for soldiers to learn by heart, a proposal which led, in 1964, to the appearance of the ‘Little Red Book’ – the future bible of Chinese youth, talisman and touchstone of Mao's personality cult. Soon afterwards, in an attempt to revive the egalitarian simplicity of the early days of the Red Army, ranks and insignia were abolished; officers could be distinguished from other ranks only by the four pockets on their jackets, where ordinary soldiers had two. By then, the PLA was being held up as a model for the entire nation, exemplifying boundless loyalty, devotion and self-sacrifice.

  None of Mao's moves up to the spring of 1964 indicated any definite conclusion about Liu's fitness as a successor.55 He continued to bracket Liu's name with his own as the two principal representatives of ‘Chinese Marxism-Leninism’.56

  But the following summer, his doubts hardened.

  One factor was evidently the realisation that, despite their apparent unity of views, Liu's aims in the Socialist Education Movement were different from his own. Deng Xiaoping told a Sri Lankan diplomat in February 1964 that he hoped Mao would not notice what they were doing because if he did he would surely disapprove.57 Liu wanted to use the movement to make the Party in the rural areas a reliable, disciplined instrumen
t to enforce orthodox Marxist-Leninist economic policies. Mao wanted to combat revisionism by unleashing the energies of the masses.

  As Mao took stock of this divergence, he was reminded of Liu's behaviour in the first half of 1962, and began to reflect anew on some of the things his heir apparent had said at that time, including a remark to the ‘7,000-cadre big conference’ about Mao's ‘three Red Banners’ – the Party's general line; the Great Leap Forward; and the communes.58 ‘We will continue the struggle to uphold the three Banners,’ Liu had affirmed, ‘but there are still some issues that are not clear. We will sum up experience again in five or ten years’ time. Then we may be able to resolve them.’59 A few months later, after Mao's return from Hangzhou, Liu had warned him: ‘History will judge what you and I have done.’ Xie Fuzhi had told him that Liu had once instructed him to draw up a report on the atrocities committed during the Leap by rural cadres against the peasants. ‘If we don't uncover it while living,’ Liu had said, ‘it will be uncovered by the next generation after we are dead.’60 At a time when Mao was deeply involved in the Chinese Party's polemic with Moscow, it was a small step to start wondering whether Liu's words were not an implicit threat to reverse China's policies after his death, as Khrushchev had done after Stalin.

  Others stoked Mao's concerns. After reading Wang Guangmei's report on Taoyuan, Jiang Qing told him: ‘After Stalin died, Khrushchev made a secret report, and now you aren?t even dead and someone is making an open report.’61 Kang Sheng argued that Stalin had erred, not by repressing ‘counter-revolutionaries’ too harshly but by not repressing them harshly enough. It was his failure to ‘dig out’ people like Khrushchev that had allowed them to discredit him.62 The question was posed: would Mao make the same mistake?

  By July 1964, these ideas had crystallised to a point where Mao approved a passage, in the ninth and last of the Chinese ‘open letters’ to the Soviet Party, which referred specifically to the issue of succession:

  In the final analysis, the question of training successors for the revolutionary cause of the proletariat is one of whether or not … the leadership of our Party and state will remain in the hands of proletarian revolutionaries, whether or not our descendants will continue to march along the correct road laid down by Marxism-Leninism, or, in other words, whether or not we can successfully prevent the emergence of Khrushchev's revisionism in China … It is an extremely important question, a matter of life and death for our Party and our country.63

  In retrospect, those lines offer a startling insight into the way Mao's mind was working. At the time, however, none of his colleagues saw anything untoward. Nor, apparently, did they pay attention to a subsequent paragraph, which spoke of successors being formed through mass struggle and tempered in ‘great revolutionary storms’.

  Then, in October, Khrushchev was overthrown, accused by his successors of ruling by personal whim and imposing ‘hare-brained schemes’ on the long-suffering Russian people. Whether Mao drew a conscious parallel between his old adversary's comeuppance and the charges that could be made regarding his own style of rule is unclear. But, given the differences he now discerned between Liu Shaoqi's aims and his own, it must at the very least have made him feel vulnerable. A month later, Khrushchev's successors rebuffed a Chinese attempt to renew the dialogue between them, providing final confirmation that the Sino-Soviet schism was irrevocable and the world communist movement shattered into two unequal and irreconcilable halves.

  Mao's claim to revolutionary immortality would now rest, more than ever, on the forging of a distinctive Chinese way from which true revolutionaries everywhere would draw their inspiration. This had been implicit in the nine ‘open letters’, which had been written on the basis that the fount of revolutionary knowledge – ‘Mekka’, as Sneevliet had called it, forty years earlier – had been transferred from Moscow to Beijing. As 1964 drew to a close, it became, for Mao, explicit – the ultimate goal to which he would devote the final years of his life.

  His aim was no longer to make China rich. That was Liu Shaoqi's logic.

  Revolutionary zeal was in inverse proportion to affluence. ‘Asia is more progressive politically than Britain and the United States, because Asia's living standards are much lower,’ he had written some years earlier. ‘Those who are poor want revolution … [In future] we countries in the East will become rich. When the [Western countries’] living standards fall, their people will become progressive.’64 The unstated corollary was that if China became prosperous it would cease to be revolutionary. It was politically impossible to say so outright – few Chinese would willingly embrace continued penury in pursuit of abstract ideological goals – but in practice, in the choice between affluence and revolution, Mao came down on revolution's side.

  To make China a realm of ‘Red virtue’, in which class struggle would transmute human consciousness, generating a revolutionary continuum that would shine out like a beacon to the peoples of the world, Liu, and those who thought like him, together with the orthodoxy they represented, would have to be swept aside.

  Other factors were no doubt also involved. The fact that Liu and Deng were attempting to carry out policies with which he did not agree may well have made Mao feel that power was slipping from his grasp. In fact his powers were undiminished. But, having withdrawn to the ‘second front’, he refused to descend from his eminence and involve himself in day-to-day policy, all the more since the last time he had done so, to launch the Great Leap Forward, it had ended in disaster. That failure still rankled, not so much for the millions who had died but because he had been proved wrong. The same was true, to a lesser extent, of the Hundred Flowers campaign, which had backfired and forced him to launch the anti-Rightist movement. This time he wanted to transform intellectual and economic life permanently; to find scapegoats for his earlier failures, for which he refused to acknowledge his errors, among those of his colleagues whose reservations had proved, to his great resentment, justified; and to settle once and for all the issue of his succession. But his overriding goal was to ensure that his revolutionary legacy would continue.

  In this illuminated frame of mind, Mao attended a series of top-level leadership meetings in late November and December 1964, during which his behaviour was even more wilful and eccentric than usual.

  On November 26, while discussing long-term defence planning, he suddenly expostulated: ‘you [Liu] are first deputy chairman, but something unexpected could happen at any time. Otherwise, once I die, you may not succeed. So let's change over now. You be Chairman. You be the First Emperor.’65 Liu cautiously declined, unfazed by Mao's grumbling that he no longer had the strength for the job and no one listened to him any more. Two weeks later, the Chairman spoke blackly of a capitalist class emerging within the Party and ‘drinking the blood of the workers’. On that occasion, the phrase, ‘leaders taking the capitalist road’, was used for the first time.66 Then, on December 20, he again spoke of Liu, rather than himself, being in charge. This time he argued that the Socialist Education Movement would have to be refocused – no longer aimed at corrupt cadres and peculating peasants, but at extirpating from the Party hierarchy, through the cleansing fire of mass struggle, all trace of revisionist thought. The ‘wolves’, the ‘power-holders’, would have to be dealt with first, Mao warned menacingly; the ‘foxes’ – the petty offenders – could be handled later.67

  Unusually, Liu held his ground. He agreed with Mao that some provincial Party committees had become ‘rotten’, and that the ‘backstage Party bosses’ of corrupt officials should be targeted as a priority. But he made clear that he felt this should be done within the context of a movement whose principal focus remained the elimination of corrupt practices, rather than an ideological onslaught against ‘revisionism’.

  Mao showed his displeasure at a banquet in the Great Hall of the People to celebrate his seventy-first birthday, on December 26, when, without naming names, he charged that Liu's views were non-Marxist, and that Deng was running the Party Secretariat as an
‘independent kingdom’. The following month, in a still more extraordinary outburst – reminiscent of his threat, five years earlier, to go to the hills and found a new Red Army if his colleagues sided with Peng Dehuai – he held up a copy of the Party constitution, and after stating icily that he had as much right to express an opinion as any other Party member, accused Deng of trying to stop him attending leadership meetings and Liu of endeavouring to prevent him from speaking. No less ominously, he recalled the dispute he had had with Liu and the rest of the Standing Committee in 1962 over ‘responsibility systems’. That had been ‘a kind of class struggle’, Mao declared. Now, a new struggle was looming, whose main task would be ‘to rectify the power holders within the Party taking the capitalist road’.

  That incendiary phrase was included in new guidelines for the movement issued in January. There was one slight change of wording: instead of ‘power-holders’, the term, ‘persons in authority’, was used. In the original draft it was explicitly specified that such renegade communists might be found even in the Central Committee. But Zhou Enlai, who evidently had a shrewd idea of how the Chairman's mind was working, managed to get that modified to ‘Central Committee departments’.68

  Liu Shaoqi himself, and most of the rest of the leadership, put down his remarks as the rumblings of a cantankerous old man, an ageing megalith, still capable of striking sparks, but increasingly imprisoned by the revolutionary dreams of his past. The crisis seemed to blow over. But Liu's fate had been sealed.69 All that remained was for Mao to find an appropriate means to dispose of him.

  I In October 1960, when the extent of the famine became clear, Mao announced that he would adopt a vegetarian diet and this was widely publicised. It later emerged, however, that he continued to eat fish and seafood, as well as meat substitutes made from soybeans.