by Philip Short
II Vice-Premier Xi Zhongxun was removed for endorsing a fictionalised biography of Liu Zhidan, who, together with Gao Gang, headed the Shaanxi base area when Mao reached Bao'an at the end of the Long March in 1935. He was rehabilitated after Mao's death and played a key role in the setting up of Special Economic Zones in Guangdong province, one of Deng Xiaoping's earliest initiatives to transform China's economy. Xi Jinping is his son.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Cataclysm
In February 1965, the Chairman despatched Jiang Qing to Shanghai. Her mission was to lay the ideological powder-trail which, at the opportune moment, he would light, triggering the tortuous events that would plunge China into the fiery chaos of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.1
The device which Mao chose to provoke the coming storm had originated six years earlier in his call to Party members to emulate the Ming bureaucrat, Hai Rui.2 Peng Dehuai had taken him too literally, and was purged for his pains. But the movement continued, and in 1959 and 1960 a number of works were written to illustrate Mao's theme, including an opera by a well-known scholar named Wu Han. Some of Mao's inner circle, including Jiang Qing, had argued that Wu's opera, which was entitled The Dismissal of Hai Rui, was an allegorical defence of Peng.3 Mao, who liked Wu's work, at first discounted the charge. But his attitude changed after he read an essay by Wu, accusing Zhu Yuanzhang, the founding emperor of the Ming dynasty, of murdering those he suspected of disloyalty in order to consolidate his political power.4 Mao liked to compare himself to the Ming emperor. The criticism was too close to home. By the beginning of 1965, he had decided that Wu's opera might have its uses after all.
Wu Han was not simply a historian. He was also a deputy mayor of Beijing and, as such, a protégé of Peng Zhen. Peng was both First Secretary of the municipal Party committee in the capital and deputy head of the Central Committee Secretariat, the core of the CCP's national machine. Like many of the top leaders, he was a remote, rather solitary figure, whose isolation made him vulnerable.
An attack on Wu, Mao realised, could serve as the thin end of a political wedge to split open Peng Zhen's empire. And behind Peng stood Liu Shaoqi.
In Shanghai, Jiang Qing enrolled the services of a radical left-wing journalist named Yao Wenyuan, who had first come to Mao's notice as a hammer of bourgeois intellectuals during the anti-Rightist Campaign. In conditions of extraordinary secrecy – Yao pretended to be ill, and retired to a sanatorium to work – she commissioned from him a 10,000-word diatribe denouncing Wu's work as a ‘poisonous weed’.5
The writing took all summer. The article went through ten drafts, three of which Mao worked on himself.6 They were couriered back and forth from Shanghai hidden in boxes containing recordings of revolutionary operas.7 Even after it was finalised in August, the Chairman waited another three months, during which he took the additional precaution of sending the disgraced Peng Dehuai, who had been under house arrest in the capital since 1959, to work in a minor defence post in Sichuan.
On November 10, 1965, when both Peng Zhen and Wu Han were travelling outside Beijing, Yao's essay was published in the Shanghai newspaper, Wenhuibao. On Mao's instructions, it contained no direct reference to the Peng Dehuai affair. That was kept in reserve. Instead, Yao accused Wu Han of having portrayed Hai Rui's support of the peasantry in such a manner as to generate sympathy for the idea of private farming (which was, of course, the issue that had fuelled Mao's dispute with Liu Shaoqi). The opera, he declared, should therefore be viewed as part of ‘the struggle of the capitalist class against the dictatorship of the proletariat … Its influence is great and its poison widespread. If we do not clean it up, it will harm the people's cause.’
In the Beijing Party committee, Yao's broadside caused consternation.
Ad hominem attacks were supposed to have been forbidden under guidelines laid down by the Propaganda Department earlier in the year. It was impossible to discover who had authorised it, and Peng Zhen, on his return, ordered the Beijing press, including the People's Daily, not to reprint it. A few days later he refused to permit its distribution in pamphlet form, leading Mao to complain retrospectively that Peng's control of Beijing was so tight that ‘not even a needle could slip through or a drop of water penetrate’.8
The Chairman could perfectly well, at that stage, have simply ordered the article to be republished. But he was still unwilling to reveal his hand. Instead, therefore, he brought into play his conciliator, Zhou Enlai. On November 28, Zhou summoned a meeting in Beijing, at which, after listening to the objections of Peng's colleagues that Yao had resorted to ‘abuse and blackmail’, he laid down that the correct approach, in literary matters of this kind, was ‘to allow the freedom of criticism and counter-criticism’.9 Two days later, accompanied by an editorial note to that effect, which Zhou himself approved, Yao's article finally appeared in the literary section of the People's Daily.
The needle had been slipped in.
On the same day that Yao Wenyuan's article was published in Shanghai, Mao announced to the Politburo Standing Committee the dismissal of Yang Shangkun, the Zunyi veteran who headed the CC's General Office. No reason was given at the time, but some months later Mao's colleagues were informed that Yang had authorised the bugging of his train in 1961.10 However, Mao had been aware of that for four years without taking any action. If he moved now it was because the General Office was the Party's communications centre, and he needed to ensure that it was in reliable hands. Yang was replaced by Wang Dongxing, the pudgy commander of the Central Guards Division, known as the 8341 Unit, responsible for the leaders’ security. Wang had been a member of the Chairman's entourage for more than twenty years, and his devotion to Mao was unquestioned.
Four weeks later, another high official was purged. Luo Ruiqing's career stretched back to the 1930s in Jiangxi. When Lin Biao had become Defence Minister, Mao had appointed Luo to serve as his Chief of Staff. But the two men had fallen out over the issue of whether the PLA should be primarily a professional or a political force, and Luo had unwisely suggested that Lin should ‘spend more time resting’ in order to conserve his health.When the issue was discussed by an enlarged meeting of the Standing Committee, several leaders expressed scepticism about Lin's claims that Luo had tried to push him aside. But instead of quashing the move outright, they agreed to set up an ‘investigating group’ under Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping and Peng Zhen. Soon afterwards Luo resigned.11
Thus, by mid-December 1965, Mao's senior colleagues were struggling to make sense of a succession of inexplicable events. The Chairman had fired one Party veteran, Yang Shangkun, supposedly for errors committed several years before. He had acquiesced in, if he had not initiated, the purge of another, Luo Ruiqing, apparently to please Lin Biao. And he was encouraging an obscure literary campaign, which might, or might not, presage a full-scale attack against the Beijing Party organisation.
Liu Shaoqi, for one, was taking no chances. From the end of November on, with that fine instinct for self-preservation which all Mao's subordinates shared, he distanced himself from Peng Zhen, determined that whatever political fallout might come, it should not fall on him.12
In this tense climate, Mao made his second move.
Just before Christmas, in Hangzhou, he told Chen Boda and a small group of radicals from the Party journal, Red Flag, that Yao Wenyuan's article (in which he still admitted playing no part) had missed the point. The real problem with Wu Han's play lay in the last three words of its title: ‘Hai Rui dismissed from office’. ‘The Jiaqing Emperor dismissed Hai Rui from office,’ Mao said. ‘We dismissed Peng Dehuai from office. Peng Dehuai is indeed Hai Rui.’13 The importance of this statement was that it meant that Wu Han's case would in future be regarded as a political rather than a literary issue.
January was marked by a stalemate. Mao's remarks had not been publicised, even within the Politburo, and when one of Chen Boda's staff wrote an article, detailing for the first time (without identifying the source) the Chairman's explosive all
egation that Wu had sought Peng Dehuai's rehabilitation, Peng Zhen got his allies in the Propaganda Department to block publication. But he was unable to halt the attacks on Wu altogether. February brought more bad news. Jiang Qing, with Lin Biao's encouragement, had begun working with the PLA's Cultural Affairs Department to promote a new movement against feudal and capitalist thinking.14 The implication was that the campaign against Wu Han was about to move into higher gear.
At this point the Beijing leader made a desperate, if belated, attempt to regain the initiative.
For the previous eighteen months, he had headed a Central Committee body known as the ‘Group of Five’,15 which Mao had set up to combat revisionism in the arts. At Peng's suggestion, its members now approved new guidelines for dealing with ideological disputes. The ‘February Outline’, as it became known, affirmed that a ‘gigantic struggle’ was under way ‘between Mao Zedong Thought, on the one hand, and bourgeois ideas on the other’, and acknowledged that Wu Han had committed political errors. But it also maintained that, as Zhou Enlai had laid down in November, academic quarrels should be resolved by scholarly, not political, means.16
On February 8, Peng and the rest of the group flew to Wuhan, where they reported to Mao. The Chairman did not explicitly endorse the ‘Outline’, but neither did he voice any objection. He asked Peng Zhen whether he thought Wu Han was an ‘anti-Party element’, and again expressed concern about the significance of ‘dismissed from office’. But he added that if there were no evidence of organisational links between Wu and Peng Dehuai, the historian might continue to serve as deputy mayor.17
Peng returned to Beijing, believing that he had weathered the storm.
Luo Ruiqing had not. In March, after weeks of struggle meetings, he attempted to commit suicide by jumping from the top of a three-storey building. When his colleagues heard the news, they reacted with derision. Liu Shaoqi sneered: ‘If you're going to commit suicide, you have to have some technique, that is, heavy head and light feet. But he landed feet first and his head was not touched.’ Deng joined in: ‘He jumped like a woman diver, [feet first], looking like a lollipop.’ Mao said simply: ‘How pathetic!’.18
That month Peng's case marked time. The Chairman groused to Zhou and Deng that he was running Beijing as an ‘independent kingdom’ and that the People's Daily had become a ‘semi-Marxist newspaper’.19
More worrying, had Peng known about it, was Mao's approval of a programmatic document, drawn up after the cultural forum held by Jiang Qing and the PLA, which stated that, since 1949, ‘we have been under the dictatorship of a black anti-Party, anti-socialist line which is diametrically opposed to Chairman Mao's thought’.20 Since Peng had been in charge of culture since July 1964, he was implicated; so was the Propaganda Department, run by an alternate member of the Politburo, Lu Dingyi; so, too, more generally, was the entire post-1949 cultural establishment. Here, for the first time, clearly stated, was the prospect of a wholesale rejection of existing cultural values.
Before making his next move, Mao waited until the end of March, when Liu Shaoqi had left the country on a month-long tour of Asia. He then let it be known that he wanted to see the ‘February Outline’ repudiated on the grounds that it ‘obscured class lines’. Wu Han and like-minded intellectuals were ‘scholar tyrants’, he declared, protected by a ‘Party tyrant’, Peng Zhen. He threatened to dissolve not only Peng's ‘Group of Five’ but the Central Committee Propaganda Department, which he referred to as ‘the palace of the King of Hell’, and even the Beijing Party committee itself.21
Mao's views were formally conveyed by Kang Sheng to a meeting of the Secretariat, presided over by Deng Xiaoping, on April 9.
Kang listed Peng's ‘mistakes’ in handing the Wu Han affair; Chen Boda listed his ‘crimes’ in matters of political line going back to the 1930s. It was decided to refer the case upward to the Standing Committee for decision.22 In the meantime, the ‘February Outline’ was annulled and Peng's ally, Lu Dingyi, was entrapped by a grotesque episode in which his wife was found to have been sending poison pen letters to Lin Biao's wife, Ye Qun, accusing her of being a loose woman and Lin a cuckold. The next time the Politburo met, each member found on his chair a handwritten note from Lin insisting that Ye had been ‘a pure virgin’ when they married.23 Such was Chinese politics at the highest levels of the leadership on the eve of the Cultural Revolution.
Ten days later, when Liu Shaoqi returned from Burma, the last stop on his Asian tour, he found a summons awaiting him to proceed straight to Hangzhou, where Mao had called a Standing Committee meeting to pronounce on Peng Zhen's fate. There the Chairman informed him that Peng and his alleged associates were to be purged, and that Liu himself was to deliver the verdict at an enlarged Politburo meeting to be held, in Mao's absence, in Beijing the following month.
This gathering began on May 4 and lasted more than three weeks.
Kang Sheng, seconded by Chen Boda and the Shanghai radical, Zhang Chunqiao, again acted as prosecutor. The existence of the ‘Peng Zhen-Lu Dingyi-Luo Ruiqing-Yang Shangkun anti-Party clique’, he asserted, proved that revisionism had emerged within the Central Committee, just as Mao had predicted during the debates over the Socialist Education Movement sixteen months before. Its members must be publicly criticised and removed from all their posts.24 Zhou Enlai accused the four of ‘taking the capitalist road’.25 Lin Biao spoke melodramatically of ‘the smell of gunpowder’ and ‘the decided possibility of a coup involving killings, seizure of power and restoration of the capitalist class’.26 Whether Mao himself believed that is another matter, but it was a useful means of stoking political tension.27 After the ‘clique’ had been purged, security in the capital was stepped up. If nothing else, it was a sensible precaution against the day when revolutionary turmoil would start in earnest.
On May 16, the meeting approved a Central Committee circular, ostensibly issued to replace the now discredited ‘February Outline’, but actually the first official salvo of what was to become known (in Chinese) as the ‘Great Revolution [to establish] Proletarian Culture’ – the Cultural Revolution. It had been a month in gestation, and Mao himself had revised it no fewer than seven times. The central political issue, the circular declared, was ‘whether to carry out or to resist Comrade Mao Zedong's line on the Cultural Revolution’. Peng Zhen and his allies were not the only traitors. There were other ‘people in authority taking the capitalist road’ who must also be cleared out:
These representatives of the bourgeoisie who have sneaked into our Party … are actually a bunch of counter-revolutionary revisionists. When the time is right, they will try to seize power, turning the dictatorship of the proletariat into a dictatorship of the capitalist class. Some of these people have already been exposed by us; others have not. Some are still trusted by us, and are being groomed as our successors, people of a Khrushchev type who are nestling right beside us. Party cadres at all levels must pay special attention to this point.28
The circular announced the replacement of Peng Zhen's ‘Group of Five’ by a new body, the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group, headed by Chen Boda, with Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao and two others as his deputies, and Kang Sheng as adviser. Peng and his cohorts were cast into outer darkness – imprisonment in some cases, house arrest in others – and a Central Case Examination Group set up to investigate their ‘anti-Party conduct’.29
Thus, by mid-May 1966, Mao had signalled to the Party at large the broad aim of the great upheaval that he was so painstakingly preparing: the removal from power of ‘capitalist-roaders’ who were planning to betray the socialist cause. He had put in place a headquarters to direct it, which bypassed the Politburo and the mainstream Party chain of command and whose membership replicated precisely the quincunx of radical influence that he had begun assembling in 1962, apart from Lin Biao, for whom he had other plans. But it was far from clear, even to those closest to him, why he had set about it in the way he had, and still less what the final outcome would be. Men like Zhang Chun
qiao and Kang Sheng would admit later that they never remotely imagined that when Mao spoke of ‘people of a Khrushchev type who are nestling right beside us’, he was pointing at Liu Shaoqi.30 If that escaped Mao's inner circle, how could Liu himself be expected to see it?
One consideration which had led Mao to act in so devious and convoluted a manner was deniability.
Had the initial attack on Wu Han gone awry, he could have blamed it on the excessive zeal of Jiang Qing, whose public role in cultural affairs would have made her a credible scapegoat. He was equally prudent in making Liu Shaoqi deliver the coup de grâce to Peng Zhen, while he himself stayed away. The rest of the leadership could hardly turn round and complain that Peng had been treated unfairly when they themselves had done the dirty work.
But there was also a more fundamental reason.
At the time of the last leadership clash, in 1959, the Chairman had been able to swing the rest of the Politburo behind him by turning it into a vote of confidence in himself. His adversary, Peng Dehuai, was an irascible, pig-headed old soldier, whose sharp tongue had made more enemies than friends. It had been relatively simple for Mao to depict him as a threat to Party stability. This time, the grounds for his action were, by any objective criterion, not just flimsy but totally non-existent. Mao wished to purge Liu Shaoqi, whose prestige was second only to his own, and the General Secretary, Deng Xiaoping, neither of whom had presented any overt challenge to his policies, and who both had the support of most of the older generation of the leadership. There was no conceivable basis on which, in a straightforward debate, Mao could have persuaded his colleagues that Liu and Deng should go.
Since a frontal assault was out of the question, the Chairman fell back on the guerrilla tactics he knew best. ‘War is politics’, he had written. ‘Politics is war by other means.’ It evidently never entered Liu's head that Mao's actions might be the prelude to a larger conflict. He saw only that the Chairman was bent on launching a new movement to revolutionise culture, and that Peng Zhen had got in the way.