by Philip Short
The day Kissinger left, the Chairman ordered Zhou to convene a Politburo meeting and explain himself. Jiang Qing accused the Premier of ‘right-deviationist capitulationism’, a charge which he rejected. He did admit, however, to ‘not having done enough’ in the negotiations with Kissinger and to errors of ‘revisionist thinking’. For the next three weeks Zhou was subjected to daily criticism at enlarged meetings of the Politburo which lasted well into December. Mao himself orchestrated the proceedings and ensured that not only the radicals but Zhou's ostensible allies, including Deng Xiaoping, took part in the assault. The Premier was accused of creating an ‘independent kingdom’ in the Foreign Ministry, of betraying the country and even of being willing to serve as a ‘puppet emperor’ if the Soviet Union invaded. He was ‘too impatient to wait to replace Chairman Mao’, Jiang claimed – a singularly absurd allegation against a man in an advanced stage of cancer – and a full scale line struggle should be waged against him, similar to those against Liu Shaoqi and Lin Biao.
At that point, Mao intervened, telling Zhou and Wang Hongwen that the only person impatient to replace him was Jiang Qing herself. Zhou had made errors, he said, but he would be allowed to make a self-criticism. Mao had suggested that if he spoke for ‘40 or 50 minutes’, that would be enough. Zhou proceeded to make a grovelling penance which lasted seven hours.86
Soon afterwards the Premier relinquished responsibility for foreign affairs (which passed to Deng Xiaoping),87 and in January 1974 the campaign to ‘criticise Lin Biao and Confucius’, which until then had been confined to academic discussions among Party theorists, was launched as a full-fledged national movement. To Mao, its purpose was to combat revisionism and protect the Cultural Revolution's achievements. To Jiang Qing and her radical allies, it was a means of undermining the Premier – and thus of strengthening their chance to play a major role in the leadership after Mao's death.88
The campaign itself was a welter of far-fetched historical allegory and innuendo, accompanied by petty attacks on Zhou's policies – based on symbolic incidents, such as a student handing in a blank examination paper to protest against the new emphasis on academic standards – under the rubric of ‘going against the tide’. The aim was to foment a new surge of unrest, in the same way as Mao's statement, ‘It is right to rebel’, had mobilised the Red Guards seven years earlier. Wang Hongwen called it, more in hope than expectation, ‘a second Cultural Revolution’, and Zhang Chunqiao, ‘a second seizure of power’.89 In fact very little power was seized and policy remained essentially unchanged. The population at large and the political rank and file were already weary of the radicals’ incessant and incomprehensible political campaigns. But armed clashes broke out in some areas; parts of the railway system was paralysed by factional struggles; and most worrying of all, at a time of military tension between China and Vietnam, the work of the army command was severely disrupted.90 Mao had hoped to use the campaign not only to humiliate Zhou but to reassert civilian leadership over the military, which was at last being persuaded to return to barracks and to let the Party run the country again. A subsidiary, and related, goal was to complete the elimination of real or supposed followers of Lin Biao. But Jiang Qing, as usual, pushed the envelope too far. On March 20 he wrote to her reproachfully:
For years I have advised you about various things, but you have ignored most of it. So what use is it for us to see each other? … I am 80 years old and seriously ill, but you show hardly any concern. You now enjoy many privileges, but after my death, what are you going to do? … Think about it.91
Mao's reference to his poor health was an uncharacteristic admission of his decline since Nixon's visit, two years earlier. He had lost more than two stone; his clothes hung off his thin shoulders and his whole body sagged. The least physical effort tired him. When he attended the Tenth Congress, oxygen tanks had to be installed in the car which took him on the three-minute drive to the Great Hall of the People; in his rooms there; and even at the podium in case he decided to speak (in the event, he did not). He drooled uncontrollably. His voice had become low and guttural, and his speech was almost incomprehensible even to those who knew him well.92
Kissinger remembered the struggle it cost him to emit each thought: ‘Words seemed to leave his bulk as if with great reluctance; they were ejected from his vocal cords in gusts, each of which seemed to require a new rallying of physical force until enough strength had been assembled to tear forth another round of pungent declarations.’93
Then Mao's eyes began to fail. Cataracts were diagnosed. By the summer of 1974 he was almost blind, barely able to distinguish a finger held up in front of his face until an operation on his right eye restored partial sight a year later.94
His ailments made him increasingly reclusive. Three years earlier he had taken as his personal assistant an intelligent, somewhat haughty young woman named Zhang Yufeng, with whom he had begun a liaison while she was working as an eighteen-year-old attendant on his special train in the early 1960s. She now became his confidential secretary, acquiring considerable influence. After Mao's sight failed, she read Politburo documents aloud to him. Because no one else could understand what he said, she passed on his instructions. When he could no longer eat solid food, she fed him. She helped to wash and bathe him.95
Yet, even in his physical decay, Mao wielded untrammelled power, as he showed dramatically over the next few months in his treatment of Deng Xiaoping and Wang Hongwen.
To Mao's disgust and annoyance, his young Shanghai protégé, instead of establishing himself as an independent force in the leadership, had foolishly (if predictably, given his background) aligned himself with Jiang Qing and the rest of the radical group.
At a Politburo meeting on July 17, 1974, the Chairman reiterated his dissatisfaction with his wife. After seating Zhou and Ye Jianying on either side of him, and at one point taking their hands in his, he told the radicals: ‘You cannot conduct this kind of criticism again’. Jiang Qing, he said, ‘does not speak for me, she only speaks for herself’, Then addressing her directly he went on: ‘Stop running those two factories, one the iron and steel factory and the other the hat factory, stop slapping big hats on others at will …. Others have opinions about you.’ Finally he warned Wang and the other radicals against forming ‘a small faction of four people’, an appellation later to become familiar as the ‘Gang of Four’.96
Immediately afterwards Mao left Beijing for Wuhan, Changsha and Hangzhou, where he spent the following autumn and winter.
By now his doctors had discovered that in addition to all his other maladies – which included bedsores, a lung infection, a diseased heart and anoxia (insufficient oxygen in the blood) – Mao was suffering from Lou Gehrig's disease, a rare, incurable, nervous disorder which causes paralysis of the throat and respiratory system. The medical team estimated that he had, at most, two years to live.97
Mao was not told of their prognosis. But his growing enfeeblement must have made clear to him that if he were going to make further adjustments to the succession arrangements, it had better be done sooner rather than later.
Once that decision had been taken, events moved swiftly.98
The following month, August, he confirmed what was already implicit in his statement to the Politburo in July: the movement to criticise Lin Biao and Confucius should be wound down. The rectification of the army was proceeding satisfactorily. ‘From now on,’ Mao declared, ‘emphasize unity and stability. It's time to move on. The Cultural Revolution has already lasted eight years … The entire Party and the army should unite.’
Deng Xiaoping's probation was over. As Mao had hoped, he had supported the anti-Confucius campaign with every appearance of enthusiasm – whatever his real feelings might have been – castigating former colleagues for their supposed revisionism; he had kept Zhou Enlai at arm's length, not visiting him even once since his hospitalisation in June; and he had established a good relationship with Wang Hongwen and Jiang Qing, to the point that Jiang, declaring that De
ng had been ‘so kind to me’, backed Mao's decision on October 4 to name him First Deputy Premier, making him effectively Zhou's successor.
Two weeks later, however, a row blew up over Chinese imports of foreign technology, a policy which Mao had approved to complement the basic doctrine of self-reliance. On October 14, Jiang Qing circulated to the Politburo a document attacking the Communications Ministry and thus, indirectly, Zhou, for supporting the purchase of foreign-made ships. Expecting Deng to support her, she pressed him to state his position. It was, as Mao said later, a battle of ‘two steel factories’: neither would give way. After first sitting, then standing through Jiang's diatribe, Deng finally told her that if she continued to behave like this the Politburo would be unable to function and walked out. Next day Wang Hongwen flew to Changsha, where he informed Mao that he had come secretly on behalf of Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan, without telling the rest of the Politburo, because they were concerned about the activities of Deng and Zhou Enlai. Zhang Chunqiao, they felt, was better qualified to lead the government than Deng; and Zhou, while claiming to be ill, was plotting secretly with other veteran leaders, creating an atmosphere of usurping power, like that at Lushan in 1970.
If the Chairman's putative successor had set out to show that he was a fool, he could hardly have done better. Wang was sent away with a stinging rebuke, and a warning not to be misled by Jiang Qing in future.
Over the next two-and-a-half months, Mao's wife attempted on three more occasions to persuade him that Deng was a liability and that he should promote her supporters instead. The only effect was to make the Chairman more determined. As well as naming Deng senior Vice-Premier, he decided that he should also have the posts of Vice-Chairman of the Party and the Military Commission, and be confirmed as Chief of Staff. Jiang Qing, he minuted, had ‘wild ambitions’ and wanted to be Party Chairman herself. ‘Don't organise a cabinet from behind the screen,’ he told her. ‘You have provoked too much enmity.’ In contrast, he praised Deng as ‘a person of extraordinary ability with a firm ideological standpoint.’99
At the beginning of January 1975, Mao's decisions were ratified by a Central Committee plenum, at which, for the last time, Zhou Enlai presided.100 It marked a watershed. Subsequent leadership meetings would be conducted not by Zhou or Wang Hongwen but by Deng.101
By now Mao had become seriously disenchanted with Wang.
He had not abandoned the idea of a leadership coalition. But the young Shanghai radical was not fit to play the principal role: he was not astute enough and not a forceful enough personality. ‘Deng Xiaoping is stronger than you in politics and ideology,’ he told Wang that winter. Jiang Qing was out of the question, too. In a self-criticism she had sent to the Chairman in November, she had written: ‘I am muddle-headed and unable to handle correctly and realistically objective situations.’102 Mao agreed. She was loyal, but a loose cannon: abrasive, overweening, incompetent – and exasperating. He had once told a perplexed Henry Kissinger that China was a very poor country but ‘what we have in excess is women’. If America liked to import some, he would be delighted; then they could create some disasters over there and leave China in peace.103 In January 1975, Mao had no illusions that Jiang Qing would be the kiss of death for any succession arrangement in which she was given a part.104
That left only Zhang Chunqiao. It was Mao's doubts about Zhang that had caused him to promote Wang Hongwen in the first place. However, someone had to be found to act as a counterweight to Deng. ‘The Centre only has these people: they must unite’, he had grumbled in December.105 So Zhang was appointed Second Vice-Premier and head of the PLA General Political Department.
The formation of the new government and the restoration of the offices of state,V five years after the Ninth Congress had brought the active phase of the Cultural Revolution to a close, directed Mao's thoughts to the economy, which had suffered from the disruption of the anti-Confucius campaign. In the process, he reflected anew on the dangers of revisionism, quoting Lenin's dictum that ‘small-scale production engenders capitalism … continuously, daily, hourly’.106 That triggered a fresh crackdown on peasants’ private plots and rural markets. None the less, Mao made clear that the priority was ‘unity, stability and development’. With his support, Zhou Enlai presented to the National People's Congress a programme, drawn up by Deng, for ‘modernising agriculture, industry, defence and science and technology before the end of the century, so that our national economy will be … in the world's front ranks’.107 In February the new First Vice-Premier took over from Zhou as de facto head of government. He was backed by Li Xiannian and Ye Jianying, who in February was put in charge of a reconstituted Standing Committee of the Party's Military Affairs Commission, and by several middle-of-the-road figures, including Hua Guofeng. Together they would spend the next ten months working to put Zhou's blueprint into practice.108
Yet the fundamental contradiction between Mao's desire to correct the excesses of the Cultural Revolution – the 30 per cent of mistakes – while affirming the movement's essential correctness and strengthening its legacy, proved insurmountable. The Politburo was separating into clearly defined, opposing camps, led respectively by Deng, who had the support of the old guard (and some of the middle-of-the-roaders) and by Jiang Qing, who was untouchable because she was Mao's wife. That winter the Chairman launched yet another ideological campaign, ‘studying the theory of the dictatorship of the proletariat’, to offset the new emphasis on economic development.109 To Deng it was an opportunity to deepen the reform of the army, which Mao had accused of ‘bloating, laxity, conceit, extravagance and inertia’. To the radicals it was another chance to undermine Zhou Enlai. This time they focused on Zhou's alleged ‘empiricism’, a supposed rightist deviation for which Mao had criticised him at Yan'an, thirty-five years before.110 Yao Wenyuan declared that this was now ‘the main danger’; Zhang Chunqiao described it as the ‘key link’ of the new campaign. In the first ten days of April, Jiang gave a series of speeches calling empiricism ‘the great enemy of the present time’. Then she demanded that the issue be taken up by the Politburo as a whole.111 To Mao, that was going too far. As in the dispute over importing foreign technology, six months earlier, his wife's actions were threatening to split the leadership. On April 23, he declared that dogmatism was just as bad as empiricism, and that the real problem, revisionism, included both. ‘Not many [people] truly understand Marxism-Leninism,’ he added. ‘Some people think they do, but in fact they don't.’112
On May 3, 1975, shortly after his return from Hangzhou to Beijing, he reiterated this before the Politburo, which he now chaired for the last time. He upbraided the radicals again, in the presence of their colleagues, for forming a ‘Gang of Four’, and drew a parallel between their conduct and that of his old adversary, Wang Ming. Ominously, he repeated the warning he had given at Lushan, before the purge of Chen Boda: ‘Practice Marxism, not revisionism; unite and don't split; be open and above-board, don't intrigue and conspire.’113
That summer marked the nadir of the radicals’ fortunes.
In late May and throughout June, Jiang Qing and her three allies, on Mao's orders, all made repeated self-criticisms before the Politburo.114 At about this time, Mao learned that Roxane Witke, an American feminist and sinologist, was preparing a book about Jiang on the basis of interviews which she had given, without his authorisation, three years earlier. That drove him into another fury. ‘She is ignorant and ill-informed,’ he railed. ‘Drive her out of the Politburo immediately! We'll separate and go our different ways.’115 Kang Sheng, on his deathbed with cancer, took Mao literally, and in August wrote the Chairman a letter in which he claimed to have discovered proof that Jiang and Zhang Chunqiao had both been GMD agents in Shanghai in the 1930s. But no one dared to deliver it; Kang died shortly afterwards and Mao was never told.116
Jiang Qing, however, was nothing if not persistent. She knew, as did Mao, that she and her fellow radicals were the only ones he could trust to keep alive t
he Cultural Revolutionary flame after he died. Curse her though he might, he needed her.
In August, the radicals seized on a chance remark by Mao to try to show that Deng's modernisation effort ran counter to the ‘proletarian line’. That summer, the Chairman had spent several weeks listening to readings from one of his favourite novels, Water Margin. The story relates the exploits of a group of bandits, the ‘108 heroes of Liangshanpo’, whose leader, Song Jiang, eventually betrayed his patron, Chao Gai, and accepted an amnesty from the Emperor. Mao had commented that Song Jiang was a revisionist, and that the value of the book lay in its description of capitulationism.117
That became the pretext for a flood of abstruse scholarly articles implying that Deng's efforts to restore economic order were a capitulation to capitalism and a betrayal of the Cultural Revolution. The climax was reached when Jiang Qing told a conference a month later: ‘Song Jiang made Chao Gai a figurehead. Are there people making Chairman Mao a figurehead? I believe there are!’118
The Chairman scrawled on the text of her speech, ‘Shit! Wide of the mark!’, and forbade its distribution.119
Neither Deng nor Zhou Enlai nor most of their colleagues would figure out what the new campaign really meant until much later in the year.120 Zhou assumed that he was the main target, since he had been attacked for capitulationism after his talks with Kissinger, nine months earlier. Deng thought it was just another blast against restoring capitalism and told his colleagues there was no reason to think that ‘things might go wrong’. But none of them knew for sure. At this late stage in his life, the Chairman had become so exceedingly difficult to read that even those closest to him were often unable to divine his intentions.
With hindsight, it appears that after Mao's criticisms of the radicals earlier in the year, which had effectively silenced them for most of the summer, Deng had grown overconfident. Imperceptibly the tide was beginning to turn.121