Mao

by Philip Short

  But where Mao's generation had contented itself with ransacking public places of worship (and Mao himself had opposed even that, arguing that the people would take action themselves when they judged the time was right),80 the Red Guards ransacked private homes. Between a quarter and a third of all dwellings in Beijing were subjected to Red Guard searches in the autumn of 1966. Antiques; calligraphy; foreign currency; gold and silver; jewellery; musical instruments; paintings; porcelain; old photographs; the manuscripts of famous writers; scientific notebooks – all were suspect, liable to be confiscated, stolen or smashed on the spot. In Shanghai, such searches yielded 32 tons of gold; 150 tons of pearls and jade; 450 tons of gold and silver jewellery; and more than six million US dollars in cash. Serious offenders, usually from one of the ‘black classes’, had their homes sequestered and were driven out of the city; minor culprits merely lost their possessions. Even such diversions as cultivating pot plants, keeping cagebirds and pet dogs and cats, which Mao had criticised, were condemned as legacies of feudalism.81

  Books were a special target. As a student, Mao had proposed that ‘all the anthologies of prose and poetry published since the Tang and Song dynasties [should] be burned’ (including presumably, his personal favourites, like The Dream of the Red Chamber and Water Margin), on the grounds that ‘the past oppresses the present’ and the essence of revolution was ‘replacing the old with the new’.82

  But, in 1917, Mao had merely proposed. In 1966, the Red Guards acted.

  In cities all over China, the accumulated haul from the sacking of temples and libraries, bookshops and private homes, was piled up in main squares. Ken Ling remembered the scene in Amoy at the beginning of September:

  The piles contained many different things: wooden ancestor tablets, old Guomindang paper currency, brightly coloured Chinese-style dresses … mahjong tiles, playing cards, foreign cigarettes … But most of all, idols and books. All the books that had been removed from the city libraries … were there – the yellow, the black, and poisonous books. Most of them were old hand-sewn volumes. The Golden Lotus … The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio – all awaited burning. Shortly after 6 p.m., 50 kilograms of kerosene were poured on the piles, which were then set afire. The flames leapt three stories high … [They] burned for three days and nights.83

  Later on, old books were sent to be pulped. In this way, many unique copies of Song and Ming dynasty texts were lost for ever.

  The greatest difference, however, between the iconoclasm of Mao's youth and that of his Red Guard successors, half a century on, was that his generation had rebelled to liberate itself from the straitjacket of Confucian orthodoxy, triggering an explosion of free thinking in which every new idea, every fashion, every social doctrine, was permitted.

  The Red Guards curtailed even the vestigial freedoms that then existed, imposing a new, Maoist orthodoxy more rigid than any that had gone before. Their object was to expunge the old, to ‘burn the books and bury the scholars alive’, as the Emperor Qin Shihuang had done, 2,000 years before, so that China would become, in Mao's phrase, ‘a blank sheet of paper’, ready to be inscribed with the holy writ of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought.

  To fill the vacuum left by the ‘Four Olds’, the ‘Four News’ were devised – ‘new ideology, new culture, new customs, new habits’.84 In practice, that meant the exaltation of Mao and his ideas to the exclusion of everything else. He was no longer venerated; he was worshipped.

  At workplaces each morning, people stood in formation and bowed three times before Mao's portrait, silently ‘asking instructions’ for the tasks of the day ahead. They repeated the same ritual each evening, to report on what they had accomplished. Red Guards told their victims to pray to Mao for forgiveness. Thanks was offered to Mao before meals. At city railway stations, passengers had to carry out a ‘loyalty dance’ on the platform before they were allowed to board the train. In country districts there were ‘loyalty pigs’, branded with the character zhong (loyalty) to show that even dumb beasts could recognise Mao's genius. Mao's works were referred to as ‘treasure books’, and special ceremonies were held whenever a consignment went on sale. Activists learned Mao's essays by heart, and festooned themselves with Mao Zedong lapel badges. Switchboard operators greeted callers with the words, ‘Mao zhuxi wansui!’ (‘Long live Chairman Mao!’). Business letters opened with quotations from Mao's writings, printed in bold type. The ‘Little Red Book’ of his aphorisms was ascribed the power to work miracles. Chinese newspapers reported how medical workers armed with it had cured the blind and the deaf; how a paralytic, relying on Mao Zedong Thought, had recovered the use of his limbs; how, on another occasion, Mao Zedong Thought had raised a man from the dead.85

  None of this was wholly new to China. Mao himself, as a schoolboy, had bowed before a portrait of Confucius each morning. In the 1920s, Guomindang members had started their meetings by bowing to a portrait of Sun Yat-sen. Chiang Kai-shek had tried, unsuccessfully, to introduce a similar cult of himself. Loyalty dances had been performed at the Tang Court, 1200 years before. As a sign of reverence, the Emperor's words were always placed higher, and in larger characters, than those of any other man (a cause, in the nineteenth century, of endless diplomatic bickering with the Powers).

  But the irony was that to bring into existence his new world, the Chairman had reached back to his roots, to the bedrock of his thought, to the days when China was ruled by a Son of Heaven – the ‘Red Sun in Our Hearts’ – to forge an emperor-system whose limitless power, once harnessed to revolutionary goals, could build the Red utopia to which he pinned his dreams.

  As 1966 drew to a close, the whole of China seemed to be marching to Mao's step.

  His imperial status, his deification, the fanaticism of the Red Guards, created a climate of militancy and menace so overpowering that no one could oppose him. The Chairman was elated. At his seventy-third birthday party, he proposed a toast to ‘the unfolding of an all-round nationwide civil war’.86 Zhou Enlai summed up the new guiding principle by which all Party leaders must act: ‘Whatever accords with Mao Zedong Thought is right, while whatever does not accord with Mao Zedong Thought is wrong.’87

  Within the Central Committee, as within the Party at large, radicals were in the minority. Most officials were appalled by the prospect of yet another upheaval that would imperil their positions. The Chairman himself had no illusions on that score. ‘When you are told to kindle a fire to burn yourselves, will you do it?’ he had asked sceptically back in July. ‘After all, you yourselves will be burned.’88 Hence his decision to enrol the young as his new revolutionary vanguard.

  By late September 1966, the focus of the terror spread by the Red Guards was shifting from their teachers to higher-level education officials and Party committees. Where most of the violence and destruction in the first months had been the work of secondary-school children, university students were now encouraged to pursue more political targets. Officially Liu and Deng Xiaoping retained their leading posts. But on National Day, when Liu, as Head of State, stood next to Mao, wearing a green military uniform and waving to the crowd, Sidney Rittenberg, who was on the platform with them, saw his eyes were ‘beady with fear’.89 At a Central Committee work conference, which opened shortly afterwards, both men made self-criticisms. But where Deng was willing to abase himself by acknowledging that he had followed what Mao was now calling a ‘bourgeois reactionary line’, Liu admitted only to ‘errors in principle and errors in line’, a seemingly arcane distinction which left him open to the charge of refusing to confess his crimes. Deng, unlike Liu, also praised the Cultural Revolution as a movement which would prevent China ever sinking into ‘revisionism and capitalist restoration’.90

  As was often the case when he felt he was winning, Mao wished to appear conciliatory. In a remarkable closing speech to the work conference, he even offered an apology for the mayhem he had caused:

  No wonder [you] old comrades did not understand too much
. The time was so short and the events so violent. I myself had not foreseen that the whole country would be thrown into turmoil … Since it was I who caused the havoc, it is understandable if you have some bitter words for me … [But] what's come has come … Undoubtedly you have made some mistakes … but they can be corrected and that will be that! Whoever wants to overthrow you? I don't, and I don't think the Red Guards do either … You find it difficult to cross this pass, and I don't find it easy. You are anxious and so am I. I cannot blame you, comrades.91

  Liu and Deng, he said, were not in the same category as Peng Zhen, for they had acted openly. ‘If they have made mistakes, they can change … Once they have changed it will be all right.’92 But the Chairman's magnanimity was strained. Wallposters had already appeared in the centre of Beijing, denouncing Liu as ‘China's Khrushchev’ and accusing Deng of being his close follower. In November the texts of their self-criticisms were distributed nationwide.93

  By then Mao had recognised that the Red Guards alone lacked the strength to achieve the decisive shift in the balance of political forces that he wanted. In August he had spoken confidently of ‘a few months of disorder’ being enough to bring about the downfall of almost all the provincial Party leaders.94 Now it was clear that it was going to take much longer.

  The Red Guards were instructed to broaden their class base. The early Red Guard slogan, ‘If the father is a hero, the son is courageous; if the father is reactionary, the son is a bastard’, was denounced as ‘historical idealism’, no better than feudalism.95 Millions of youths, who had previously been excluded from the movement and had little love for the traditional ‘Red classes’ of the Party hierarchy, now rallied to the radicals’ cause.

  Leaders whose ardour in pursuing ‘capitalist-roaders’ was judged to be insufficient were purged as a warning to others to show more enthusiasm. Wang Renzhong, the left-wing Hubei Party chief, whom Mao had personally chosen as one of the deputy heads of the Cultural Revolution Small Group, went first – accused of suppressing ‘exchanges of experience’ among Red Guards. Then Tao Zhu, who ranked fourth in the hierarchy – behind Mao, Lin Biao and Zhou Enlai – was charged with being a ‘faithful follower of the Liu–Deng line’. He had adopted what Mao considered too restrictive a view of the Cultural Revolution and had tried to defend Liu and Deng. To the Red Guards, that made him an ‘uncompromising emperor-protector’ and a ‘high-level two-faced rogue’. Marshal He Long, also a Politburo member, was accused of being in league with Peng Zhen. Even eighty-year-old Zhu De was denounced in wall-posters as ‘an old swine’ and a ‘black commander’ who had consistently opposed Mao's proletarian line.96 At a slightly lower level, about a score of Central Committee members working in the capital were brought before Red Guard struggle meetings, where they were made to wear dunce's capsI and endured verbal and physical abuse.97

  Finally, in December, Mao allowed the Cultural Revolution Group to bring back Peng Dehuai from Sichuan. He was held at a military barracks for questioning about his links with Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping.

  The choice of victims was determined partly by personal factors (Chen Boda had a long-standing grudge against Tao Zhu; Wang Renzhong had offended Jiang Qing; He Long's wife and Lin Biao's wife, Ye Qun, had loathed each other since Yan'an) and partly by political self-interest – Lin regarded fellow veterans like He and Zhu De as an impediment to achieving complete control of the PLA himself. Mao rarely initiated arrests (which allowed him, if he wished, to disavow them later), but instead let the radicals act as they thought fit. In almost every case, the underlying motive was the same. The Shanghai radical, Zhang Chunqiao, explained:

  This Cultural Revolution is precisely to pull down all of these old fellows, sparing no one. Zhu De, Chen Yi, He Long – there's not a single good egg among them! … Zhu De is a big warlord; Chen Yi is an old careerist … He Long is a bandit … Which one is worth keeping? Not one of them should be kept.98

  All represented the ‘old thinking’ which the Cultural Revolution was pledged to destroy.

  That winter, Mao added one more crucial weapon to the radicals’ armoury.

  As the Red Guard movement was enlarged, militant factory and office workers, in many cases fired by personal grievances against the Party Committees of their work units, had begun forming rebel detachments. At the beginning of November, a young textile worker in Shanghai, 31-year-old Wang Hongwen, set up the ‘Workers’ Revolutionary General Headquarters’ to coordinate radical workers’ groups in the city. When the municipal authorities refused to recognise the new body, Wang despatched a delegation to Beijing. The Shanghai Party Committee had the train on which they were travelling stopped before it could leave the city, whereupon the workers lay across the tracks – blocking rail movement for more than 30 hours. Zhang Chunqiao, who was sent in as a trouble-shooter, immediately endorsed the General Headquarters’ demands and instructed the city's acting First Secretary, Cao Diqiu, to make a public self-criticism. Mao approved his initiative and, on December 9, proclaimed that workers in all commercial, industrial and government offices had the right to establish mass organisations. A week later, this was extended to poor and lower-middle peasants in the countryside. In theory this meant that almost everyone in China had the right to form rebel groups, to exchange experience with those from other areas, and to attack the veteran cadres – and each other – in big character posters and at struggle meetings.99

  His dispositions now complete, Mao instructed the Cultural Revolution Small Group to intensify the movement against Liu and Deng. On December 18, Zhang Chunqiao passed on the Chairman's instructions to the Qinghua University Red Guard leader, Kuai Dafu. ‘Those two at the Party Centre … still won't surrender,’ he explained. ‘Go after them! Make them odious! Don't do it half-way.’100

  The following weekend, thousands of students, preceded by loudspeaker vans, marched to the main shopping area in Beijing, where they plastered the walls with slogans, urging the two men's overthrow. Jiang Qing persuaded the Head of State's daughter by a previous marriage, Liu Tao, who was also studying at Qinghua, to join the campaign – warning that if she refused it would show her lack of ‘revolutionary sincerity’. On January 3, 1967, a poster signed by the girl and her brother, entitled, ‘Witness the Despicable Soul of Liu Shaoqi’, was put up inside the walls of Zhongnanhai. Red Guard organisations made copies and sent it all over the country. The same day, some thirty members of a rebel group called the ‘Red Flag Regiment’, which had been formed, with Mao's encouragement, by young staff members and bodyguards from the Central Committee offices, burst into the Head of State's house, where they berated him for three-quarters of an hour and made him recite quotations from the ‘Little Red Book’. Deng and Tao Zhu and their families underwent similar ordeals. Even Zhu De was dragged out of his home and humiliated, until Mao ordered that attacks on him cease – as he had done earlier for certain non-communist personalities, including Sun Yat-sen's widow, Soong Ching-ling.

  Three days later, the Red Guards struck again. This time a hoax telephone call sent Liu's wife, Wang Guangmei, rushing to a Beijing hospital, where she had been told that another daughter, Pingping, was awaiting surgery after a traffic accident. On arrival, she found no injured child, but a crowd of Qinghua rebels, who took her to their campus and staged a struggle meeting against her.

  Meanwhile, with Mao's authorisation, the Central Case Examination Group, which had been set up seven months earlier to investigate Peng Zhen and his colleagues, formed a special team to examine Wang Guangmei's past. She came from a wealthy family and had been educated at an American mission school. To Kang Sheng, whom Mao had asked to resume responsibility for political security matters, that immediately raised the possibility that she could be shown to be an American spy. Later, another ‘Special Case Group’ was formed to try to prove that Liu had betrayed the communist cause while working as an underground leader in the White areas in the 1920s.

  A week after the hospital incident, Mao invited Liu for the last tim
e to the Study of Chrysanthemum Fragrance.

  Mao enjoyed his triumphs; he liked to savour them.

  He enquired solicitously after Pingping's health (knowing full well that the ‘accident’ had been a fabrication), and reminisced about old times. Liu asked Mao to allow him to resign all his official positions and return with his family to Yan'an, or to his native village in Hunan, to work on a commune as a peasant. The Chairman did not answer. He sat silently, chain-smoking, and when Liu got up to leave said merely: ‘Study well. Take good care of yourself.’ Five days later, on January 18, the special telephone line linking Liu with other members of the Politburo, including Mao and Premier Zhou, was cut. His isolation was complete.

  Deng and Liu, however, were spared the fate that awaited other top-level leaders, who were publicly struggled against at mass rallies in sports stadiums and gymnasiums all over Beijing. Newsreel film from the time shows Peng Zhen and his former colleagues in the Beijing Municipal Committee, standing or kneeling on the icy ground with placards around their necks bearing the words ‘Counter-revolutionary revisionist’, while guards yanked back their hair, forcing them to bow as the crowd, 100,000-strong screamed its hatred. That year Peng Zhen was struggled against fifty-three times. Peng Dehuai, who had been brought back from Sichuan in December to be questioned about his links with Liu and Deng, was driven through the city in an open truck, plastered with slogans, like a criminal being taken for execution. When he and Zhang Wentian reached Tiananmen Square, they were surrounded by Red Guards, shackled into a jetplane position, beaten and cursed. Similar meetings targeted leaders in provincial cities, often still more violently.101

  The workers’ groups whose establishment Mao had authorised soon split, like the students before them, into rival factions – ‘revolutionary rebels’, who sought the overthrow of all existing power structures, and ‘proletarian revolutionaries’, who wanted to preserve Party leadership, albeit in a more radical form.