Mao

by Philip Short

  30. MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, pp. 47–8.

  31. Ibid., pp. 39–41.

  32. Renmin ribao, May 11 1966. Yao's charges against Deng Tuo are discussed at length by MacFarquhar (3, pp. 249–58). My own exchanges with prominent Chinese intellectuals, including some of Deng's colleagues, appear to confirm that no one saw them at the time as being aimed at Mao (not least because his prestige was such that it was unthinkable he should be the target). For a contrary view, see Goldman, Merle, China's Intellectuals: Advise and Dissent, Harvard University Press, 1981, pp. 27–38.

  33. Yan and Gao, p. 40; Wang Nianyi, p. 28; MacFarquhar, 3, p. 652, n. l.

  34. Renmin ribao, June 2 1966.

  35. Jin Chunming, Wenge shiqi guaishi guaiyu, Qiushi chubanshe, Beijing, 1989, p. 155.

  36. Zhongguo Qingnian, 10, 1986.

  37. Kuo, Classified Chinese Documents, pp. 658 and 661.

  38. Yan and Gao, pp. 60–1.

  39. MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, p. 42.

  40. Lin Zhijian (ed.), Xin Zhongguo yaoshi shuping, Zhonggong dangshi chubanshe, 1994, p. 307.

  41. Ma Qibin, pp. 272–3.

  42. History of the CCP, Chronology, p. 326.

  43. Jin Chunming, p. 135; Liu Guokai, A Brief Analysis of the Cultural Revolution, M. E. Sharpe, Armonk, 1987, p. 18.

  44. Yan and Gao, pp. 46–7.

  45. JYMZW, 12, pp. 71–5.

  46. Roux, Le Singe et le Tigre, p. 763.

  47. Renmin ribao, July 25 1966.

  48. Yan and Gao, pp. 49–52; History of the CCP, Chronology, pp. 327–8.

  49. Dittmer, Lowell, Liu Shao'chi and the Chinese Cultural Revolution: The Politics of Mass Criticism, University of California, Berkeley, 1974, pp. 89–90. MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, p. 85 (which gives a slightly different translation).

  50. History of the CCP, Chronology, pp. 328–9; Barnouin and Yu, pp. 78–81.

  51. Barnouin and Yu, p. 80.

  52. MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, pp. 88–9.

  53. Peking Review, Aug. 11 1967 (translation amended).

  54. MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, p. 91. Teiwes and Sun, pp. 63–4.

  55. Milton et al., pp. 272–83.

  56. Intriguingly, all 74 CC members present (including Mao) voted for Deng which would normally have made him third in the rank order after Mao himself and Lin Biao. But that was not what Mao wanted, so he overturned the results of the vote and imposed a rank order of his own: Mao, Lin Biao (as Vice-Chairman and heir apparent), Zhou, Tao Zhu, Chen Boda, Deng, Kang Sheng, Liu Shaoqi, Zhu De, Li Fuchun, Chen Yun. In formal terms Liu, Zhou, Zhu and Chen Yun retained their vice-chairmanships, but from then on the title was used only for Lin Biao. Soon afterwards, the very concept of rank order was abandoned, except for Mao and Lin Biao. By the end of August both the Secretariat and the Politburo Standing Committee, while continuing to exist in name – as did the Politburo itself – had ceded their practical functions respectively to the Cultural Revolution Small Group and to an ad hoc group known as the Central Caucus, both chaired by Zhou Enlai, who also continued to head the State Council. Most Central Committee departments also ceased to function. The head of the Organization Department, An Ziwen, and all his deputies were purged that month. The United Front Department, which answered to Zhou Enlai, passed under military control in 1968, as did the Investigation Department, which dealt with security matters. The International Liaison Department, which handled relations with foreign parties, was the only one to continue working more or less normally (MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, pp. 94–101).

  57. Ibid., pp. 87–8; Yan and Gao, p. 59.

  58. Yan and Gao, pp. 62–3; Rittenberg, Man Who Stayed Behind, pp. 317–19.

  59. Her father, Song Renqiong, had been a political commissar in the Eighth Route Army and after 1949 played a key role in pacifying south-west China.

  60. Schoenhals, Michael, China's Cultural Revolution, 1966–1969: Not a Dinner Party, M. E. Sharpe, Armonk, 1996, pp. 148–9.

  61. Ibid., p. 150.

  62. Yan and Gao, pp. 68–9.

  63. Ibid., pp. 76–7.

  64. Surprisingly, no serious research appears yet to have been undertaken on the parallels between the revolutionary movements which broke out in the mid-1960s in China, Europe and the United States. In each case both the underlying cause and the fundamental motivations were the same. There were also more lateral connections than might have been expected: many of the leaders of the May 1968 movement in France described themselves as Maoists; some of the Red Guards who set out to re-enact the Long March had earlier read an abridged Chinese translation of Jack Kerouac's On the Road.

  65. MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, p. 103.

  66. See Milton et al., p. 265, where Mao is quoted as telling an Albanian delegation in [May] 1967: ‘Some people say that the Chinese people deeply love peace. I don't think they love peace so much. I think the Chinese people are warlike.’

  67. The ‘Sixteen Points’ quoted Mao's 1927 ‘Report on the Peasant Movement in Hunan’ to the effect that revolution cannot be ‘refined, leisurely and gentle, “benign, upright, courteous, temperate and complaisant”.’ Although it did not cite the next sentence, which defines revolution as ‘an act of violence’, the Red Guards – as Mao certainly intended – interpreted it that way (see, for example, Ling, Ken, The Revenge of Heaven, G. P. Putnam, New York, 1972, p. 19).

  68. Yan and Gao, p. 76.

  69. Ibid., pp. 124–5.

  70. SW4, p. 418 (June 30 1949).

  71. Ling, pp. 20–2.

  72. Jing Lin, The Red Guards’ Path to Violence, Praeger, New York, 1991, p. 23.

  73. Milton et al., p. 239 (Dec. 21 1939). It was quoted in Renmin ribao on Aug. 24 1966.

  74. Yan and Gao, p. 77.

  75. Gao Yuan, Born Red: A Chronicle of the Cultural Revolution, Stanford University Press, 1987, pp. 289–90 and 307–10.

  76. Schoenhals, pp. 166–9.

  77. Yan and Gao, ch. 5.

  78. Millions of others took advantage of the free transport to go sightseeing, travelling to scenic spots like the Three Gorges, and to Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia. That, Mao understood. He had done the same himself, while travelling from Beijing to Shanghai in the spring of 1919, and afterwards accounted the experience one of the more worthwhile undertakings of his youth.

  79. Yan and Gao, ch. 4; Ling, pp. 42–59; Gao Yuan, pp. 85–94; Bennett, Gordon A, and Montaperto, Ronald N., Red Guard: The Political Biography of Dai Hsiao-Ai, Doubleday, New York, 1971, pp. 77–83.

  80. In his ‘Report on the Peasant Movement in Hunan’, he wrote: ‘It is the peasants who made the idols, and when the time comes they will cast the idols aside with their own hands; there is no need for anyone else to do it for them prematurely’ (Schram, Mao's Road, 2, p. 455). Qu Qiubai, at the Sixth Congress in 1928, likewise excoriated ‘those romantic petty-bourgeois revolutionaries who, instead of concentrating on how to seize political power … resorted to forcible means to destroy the ancestral tablets of peasant families, to cut off the pigtails of old women, and to undo the foot-bindings of women – what thorough and brave cultural revolutionaries they were! … Marx said that in a revolution there is no lack of foolish things done’ (Chinese Studies in History, 5, 1, p. 21 [Fall 1971]). Unfortunately, by 1966, such strictures had been forgotten.

  81. Oral sources; see also Yan and Gao, pp. 76–81.

  82. Schram, Mao's Road, 1, p. 139 (Sept. 23 1917).

  83. Ling, pp. 52–3.

  84. Yan and Gao, p. 74.

  85. Ibid., pp. 248–51; Short, Dragon and Bear, pp. 148–9; Urban, George [ed.], The Miracles of Chairman Mao, Nash Publishing, Los Angeles, 1971, passim; Perry, Anyuan, pp. 244–5; oral sources.

  86. Schoenhals, p. 3, n. l. A different version is given by Wang Li in ‘An Insider's Account of the Cultural Revolution’, Chinese Law and Government, vol. 27 no. 6 (November–December 1994), p. 32.

  87. Schoenhals, p. 27.

  88. Milton et al., p. 270.

  89. Rittenberg,
p. 329.

  90. MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, pp. 135–9; Dittmer, pp. 97–9; Kuo, Classified Chinese Documents, pp. 237–44.

  91. Schram, Unrehearsed, pp. 270–4.

  92. Ibid., pp. 264–9.

  93. MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, p. 146.

  94. Schram, Mao Zedong: A Preliminary Reassessment, p. 67.

  95. Renmin ribao, Jan, 1, 1967; Yan and Gao, pp. 101–11. See also Barnouin and Yu, pp. 97–106.

  96. Yan and Gao, ch. 8.

  97. Mitter, China's War with Japan, p. 115. The use of struggle meetings dated from the Yan’an rectification campaign in the early 1940s, but it, too, had antecedents in much earlier practices.

  98. Yan and Gao, p. 218.

  99. Ibid., pp. 379–84; MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, pp. 140–44; Barnouin and Yu, pp. 106–12.

  100. The following account is drawn from Barnouin and Yu, pp. 100 and 133–6; and MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, p. 147.

  101. MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, pp. 123–4 & 147–9. The public denunciation rallies against veteran leaders began on December 12 1966. See Mao, une histoire chinoise, Part 3, ARTE, 2005.

  102. Schram, Unrehearsed, pp. 275–6.

  103. Milton et al., pp. 298–9; History of the CCP, Chronology, p. 335; MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, p. 175.

  104. Wang Li, pp. 38–9.

  105. Milton et al., p. 279.

  106. MacFarquhar, Cheek and Wu, Secret Speeches, p. 419.

  107. Schram, Unrehearsed, pp. 277–9.

  108. Miscellany, 2, pp. 451–5.

  109. Ibid., p. 460.

  110. Kau and Leung, Writings of Mao Zedong, 2, p. 639.

  111. Kuo, Classified Chinese Documents, pp. 54–7.

  112. See, for instance, the long essay entitled, ‘Whither China?’, in ibid., pp. 274–99.

  113. Wang Nianyi, p. 187.

  114. Ibid., pp. 150–1; Yan and Gao, p. 202.

  115. The following draws on Liu Guokai, p. 61; Wang Nianyi, pp. 202–4; MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, pp. 175–81; Peng Cheng (ed.), Zhongguo zhengju beiwanglu, Jiefangjun chubanshe, Beijing, 1989, pp. 3–4; Yan and Gao, pp. 123–4; Barnouin and Yu, pp. 131–41.

  116. Yan and Gao, pp. 125–6; Barnouin and Yu, pp. 116–19; MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, pp. 185–94; Wang Li, pp. 41–2.

  117. Zhou Ming, Lishi zai zheli chensi, Huaxia chubanshe, Beijing, vol. 2, pp. 66–7; Yan and Gao, p. 127.

  118. MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, pp. 193–4.

  119. Quoted in Yan and Gao, p. 129.

  120. Wang Nianyi, ‘Guanyu eryue niliude yixie ziliao’ in Dangshi yanjiu ziliao, 1, 1990, p. 4.

  121. Ibid.

  122. History of the CCP, Chronology, p. 336.

  123. Ibid.; Wang Li, pp. 52–4; Barnouin and Yu, pp. 119–20.

  124. Wang Nianyi, ‘Guanyu eryue niliude yixie ziliao’, p. 6.

  125. Wang Li, p. 54.

  126. Wang Nianyi, Da dongluande niandai, p. 218.

  127. Liang and Shapiro, Son of the Revolution, pp. 133–7.

  128. Jin Qiu, The Culture of Power: The Lin Biao Incident in the Cultural Revolution, Stanford University Press, 1999, pp. 108–9; Zhang Yunsheng, Maojiawan jishi, Chunqiu chubanshe, Beijing, 1988, pp. 113–23. MacFarquhar and Schoenhals (pp. 298–301) claim that the alliance between Jiang Qing's and Lin Biao's clans began to crumble around the time of the Ninth Congress. It is true that at that point their rivalry became more pronounced. However, Jin Qiu's argument that the beginnings of the split date back at least to mid-1967, if not earlier, is persuasive.

  129. The following account is drawn from Wang Nianyi, Da dongluande niandai; Peng Cheng, Zhongguo zhengju beiwanglu; Barnouin and Yu, esp. pp. 144–6; and Yan and Gao, pp. 235–7.

  130. Wang Li, pp. 65–6.

  131. Yan and Gao, pp. 237–9.

  132. MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, pp. 214–15. In a more detailed account (‘“Why don't we arm the Left”: Mao's culpability for the “Great Chaos” of 1967’, CQ 182, 2005, pp. 277–300), Michael Schoenhals plausibly suggests that Mao's remarks about arming the Left may have been leaked to the leaders of the Wuhan Military Region, who proceeded to provide weapons to the ‘Million Heroes’ the following day.

  133. Wang Li, p. 75; Renmin ribao, July 22 1967.

  134. History of the CCP, Chronology, p. 338.

  135. Wang Li, p. 75.

  136. Hongqi, no. 12, 1967.

  137. Wang Li, p. 76; Yan and Gao, p. 239; MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, pp. 231–2.

  138. Wang Li, p. 81; Dong Baocun, Yang Yu Fu shijian zhenxiang, Jiefangjun chubanshe, Beijing, 1988, pp. 74–5; MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, pp. 222–31. Zhou suffered a minor heart attack on August 17 after a meeting with Foreign Ministry leftists who were threatening to kidnap Chen Yi and organise a struggle meeting against him (Gao Wenqian, Zhou Enlai, p. 175).

  139. Wang Li, p. 82; Barnouin and Yu, pp. 192–8; Yan and Gao, pp. 252–6; MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, pp. 221–2 & 235–8.

  140. In May 1967, students in Tianjin found copies of Shanghai newspapers dating from 1932, which reported that Wu Hao (one of Zhou's aliases in Shanghai) had defected from the Communist Party. The reports had originally been planted by the Guomindang to try to demoralize the CCP underground in the city. Zhou had been exculpated during the Yan'an rectification campaign. However, Mao now allowed the issue to fester for a while before declaring that it had been ‘cleared up a long time ago’ (see Gao Wenqian, pp. 167–70 & 176).

  141. Renmin ribao, Sept 8 1967; Barnouin and Yu, pp. 194–5.

  142. When Mao met Xu Shiyou in Shanghai on August 18, he was already worrying about the ‘really desperate’ situation which ‘arming the Left’ had created. A week later he approved a directive severely restricting the conditions under which arms could be distributed (Schoenhals, ‘Why don't we arm the left’, pp. 294–5).

  143. Ibid., p. 297; Domes, Jurgen, Myers, James T., and von Groeling, Erik, Cultural Revolution in China: Documents and Analysis, n.p., n.d., pp. 307–15. The new directive was issued on September 5. By then thousands had died in armed clashes since the beginning of August. Despite Mao's order, many groups refused to hand in their weapons and in some provinces violence continued through much of 1968. However, the worst was over by the end of October 1967.

  144. See Goldman, China's Intellectuals, pp. 146–7.

  145. Barnouin and Yu, p. 91; Yan and Gao, p. 138; Schoenhals, pp. 101–16.

  146. Yan and Gao, p. 139.

  147. Zhou Ming, 1, pp. 27–30; Yan and Gao, pp. 153–7; Li Zhisui, Private Life, pp. 489–90.

  148. Barnouin and Yu, p. 185; Kuo, Classified Chinese Documents, pp. 20–4.

  149. Jin Chunming, p. 78.

  150. Schoenhals, pp. 122–35.

  151. Yan and Gao, p. 211.

  152. Ibid., pp. 223, 252 and 266; Barnouin and Yu, pp. 187–9.

  153. Renmin ribao, Dec. 22 1967; see also Milton et al., pp. 356–60.

  154. Wang Nianyi, Da dongluande niandai, p. 271.

  155. Wang Li, p. 82.

  156. Barnouin and Yu, p. 198.

  157. Ibid., pp. 181–4. MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, Ch 15.

  158. Ibid., pp. 164–5.

  159. This account draws on Jin Qiu, pp. 110–15; Barnouin and Yu, pp. 165–71; Dong Baocun, Yang Yu Fu shijian zhenxiang. Gao Wenqian suggests a simpler explanation, that the purge was ‘part of Lin Biao's struggle to secure control over the army’ (Zhou Enlai, p. 177). That could not have applied to Fu, whose loyalty to Lin was unquestioned. However, the removal of Yang Chengwu and Yu Lijin certainly strengthened his hand, whether or not he had played a role in their dismissal, and by the summer of 1968 Lin had come as close as he ever would to achieving mastery over the PLA. The previous year he had succeeded in removing the head of the PLA's General Political Department, Xiao Hua, and Mao now agreed that the functions of the Standing Committee of the CPC Military Commission should be transferred to its General Office, headed by Wu Faxian and staffed by Lin's followers. After that, Ye Jianying, Xu Xiangqian and the o
ther marshals lost any role in military decision-making. The size of the Chinese military – five million men – and its growth from different base areas, each with its own chain of command and its own network of historical loyalties, meant that, with the exception of Mao, no single person could control it completely. But, at a time when the PLA was playing an unprecedented role in national affairs, Lin's influence was pre-eminent.

  160. Liu Guokai, p. 118; Yan and Gao, p. 393; MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, pp. 244–5.

  161. Zheng Yi, Scarlet Memorial: Tales of Cannibalism in Modern China, Westview Press, Boulder, Co, 1996. Similar incidents took place in Cambodia under Khmer Rouge rule in the mid-1970s. In both countries, part of the motivation was to obtain from the participants a physical proof of loyalty that went beyond conventional constraints. Eating a dead opponent was assimilated to class struggle. In Yunnan in June 1968, after a peasant named Zhou was executed, his penis and testicles were cut off, boiled and eaten. In Khmer Rouge Cambodia, executioners ate the livers of their victims, believing that to be the seat of courage. The practice was by no means limited to communist regimes. Chiang Kai-shek's secret police agents also on occasion ate parts of their victims (Galbiati, Fernando, ‘Peng Pai: The Leader of the First Soviet’ (D. Phil. thesis), Oxford, June 1981, pp. 829–31; Short, Philip, Pol Pot: The History of a Nightmare, John Murray, 2004, p. 371; MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, pp. 258–9; Wakeman, Frederick, Spymaster: Dai Li and the Chinese Secret Service, University of California Press, 2003, p. 165).

  162. Zhang Yunsheng, Maojiawan jishi, pp. 113–23; Hinton, William, Hundred Day War: The Cultural Revolution at Tsinghua University, Monthly Review Press, New York, 1972, pp. 226–7; Li Zhisui, pp. 502–3; and oral sources.

  163. MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, pp. 249–51.

  164. Unger, Jonathan, Education under Mao, Columbia University Press, New York, 1982, pp. 38–45 and 134.

  165. Yan and Gao, pp. 393–4; MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, pp. 268–9.

  166. CHOC, 15, p. 189, n. 120; see also Unger, p. 162.

  167. Yan and Gao, pp. 270–6.

  168. See Mao's speech to the First Plenum of the Ninth CC, in Schram, Unrehearsed, p. 288.