Thus it was that, as Mao yielded up the position of head of state to his fellow Hunanese Liu Shaoqi, giving up much wearisome protocol that he had never much relished, and “retired to the second line” as he put it, to devote more time to theoretical work, the Leap was pushed to new heights. In the face of mounting evidence of poor harvests, and with China being hit by colossal floods—some of them the worst in a century—crops almost ready for harvest were uprooted in favor of new planting plans, deep plowing to a level of three meters or more was pushed at Mao’s behest, and hundreds of millions of peasants, many exhausted by a year of ceaseless projects, were pushed into the same pattern of totally unrealistic expectations. By 1960 famine began to strike large areas of the country. Peng Dehuai was kept out of sight, his criticism ignored. For two years the crisis deepened as the Party continued to enforce the laws on grain procurement from fields where almost no crops grew. The Maoist vision had finally tumbled into nightmare.
11
Fanning the Flames
IN 1960 THE FAMINE tightened its grip across the country, exacerbated not only by a devastating drought that ruined crops on almost half of China’s farmland, but also by an erratic pattern of south-to-north typhoons that brought violent wind damage and murderous flash floods. In many areas for which accurate figures became available, between a fifth to a half of all the villagers died, with Anhui province perhaps suffering the most. And yet, so pervasive was the force of Mao’s words at Lushan, that many of the fundamental principles of the Great Leap were maintained. Communes continued to be run on the radical and egalitarian principles enunciated in 1957 and 1958. Extraction of rural “surpluses” continued, to support industry and subsidize food prices in the cities. Many peasants were taken from the land to boost the industrial labor force in the cities, where urban communes were now introduced widely, to bring the same principles of mixed and intensified production to factories, schools, and offices.
Especially during 1960, however, the focus of the leaders’ attention was not on the exact details of the domestic crisis. Instead, they were compelled to focus on the Soviet Union, which had mocked the extravagant claims put forward in the Great Leap and continued with its own policies of de-Stalinization. In particular, the leaders had to work out how to find the funds and personnel to continue the various projects abandoned by the Soviet advisers when they were pulled out of China that year. These included China’s atomic-bomb program, and also the oil fields in China’s northeast. Mao’s own writings were focused on polemics against Khrushchev and on attempts to express his interpretation of China’s place in the pattern of world revolution. Only rarely did he comment specifically on Chinese economic matters.
In 1961 this began to change. Early in the year, Mao acceded to his colleagues’ arguments that the Leap be rolled back, that productive laborers be returned to their communes, and that peasants be allowed to raise some food and livestock again on small private plots near their homes. Most aspects of communal living were canceled. Though Mao rejected Khrushchev’s unexpected offer of Soviet grain shipments to reduce the stress of hunger, the Central Committee planners decided to buy large quantities of grain from Canada. And in late January, Mao summoned one of his confidential political secretaries, Tian Jiaying, who had worked with him since 1948, to organize and dispatch three teams—each consisting of seven men—to undertake an intensive investigation of the exact situation in sample communes in three different provinces: Guangdong, Hunan, and Zhejiang. Apparently recalling his previous experiences with rural investigations in the early days of the revolution, Mao had returned to the realization that there was no substitute for hard facts in trying to come to grips with harsh reality.
We do not know whether Mao specifically turned over in his mind the contrast between his languid days in Shaoshan during the summer of 1959—chatting to elderly peasants over a banquet, lolling in the warm, shallow waters of the new mass-labor-generated Shaoshan reservoir, and poetically praising the peasants’ triumphs—with Peng Dehuai’s hard-hitting questions and bleak statistics on the same area. But clearly Mao was now trying to find out what had gone wrong. The team sent to Guangdong province was to be led by Chen Boda, his trusted aide since the two men’s dialectical-materialism discussions of 1937; the Hunan team was led by Hu Qiaomu, another close political aide and secretary to Mao (he had been present at the meeting where Deng Tuo was called “a dead man”). Others in the groups included members of Liu Shaoqi’s staff, propaganda specialists, economists, and statisticians.
Each group of seven was instructed to focus on two production brigades: one well-off, one poor. Secretary Tian pooled their conclusions and summarized them for Mao. His summary was bold and unambiguous: private plots should be allowed and compensation paid for wrongly confiscated property, the scale of the communes should be cut back, peasants should follow their own views on communal living or cooking, and cadre corruption should be addressed directly. This time Mao appeared to see that a reversal of policy was essential. He drafted—again with Tian—a document in sixty sections that addressed the main perceived problems in the communes. After Mao—who now felt he had the facts at his command—had taunted other leaders for their ignorance of the real situation in the countryside, they, too, began to undertake their own intensive explorations and were indeed horrified by what they found. Liu Shaoqi and his wife carried out their investigation in person, not through surrogates, focusing on Hunan for over a month (they also visited Mao’s old home village of Shaoshan). Everywhere they found a pattern of evasion, a reluctance to speak out, for fear of the consequences, and serious abuses of authority by the brigade officials, even those who were from poor peasant backgrounds themselves. Over the following year, Liu and his senior colleagues slowly moved China back to a more rational level of planned allocations in agriculture and industry, which would make the household or “team” the basic economic unit of accounting, though the commune system survived, with communes subdivided into smaller units.
During this entire period, Mao was smarting under an additional series of slights: a calculated move by many in the Party to downplay the role of the “Thought of Mao” in the fabric of the People’s Republic. It was at the 1945 congress that the Constitution of the Communist Party had been altered to include Mao’s thought as its guiding principle. Mao had acquiesced in dropping the phrase from a revision of the Constitution that was promulgated in 1956, which made sense in light of the denunciations of Stalin in the Soviet Union and a general nervousness about the “cult of personality.” But Mao had not intended his acceptance of that formal change to herald a change in the general status of his writings. But that is just what began to occur after the Lushan meetings, as statements were issued by the Communist Youth League that the phrase “Thought of Mao,” though sometimes essential, should not be overused. Fewer copies of Mao’s works were now available; a shortage of paper due to the Great Leap and the pressing needs for printing more school textbooks were both cited by Mao’s colleagues as the reasons. A report of the Party Center’s propaganda department in March 1960 warned against “vulgarization” of Mao’s works by attributing various triumphs to their beneficent effect—breakthroughs in medicine, for example, or triumphs in table tennis competitions. Liu Shaoqi, now head of state, instructed that the phrase “Thought of Mao” not be used in propaganda directed at foreign audiences. Other senior Party leaders commented publicly that Mao’s thought could in no way be said to surpass Marxism-Leninism, indeed that after the definitive analyses of political economy and imperialism by Marx and Lenin there was really no need for further discussion of those topics.
Two key Party figures, however, decided to risk their colleagues’ irritation by publicly reaffirming their faith in Mao’s thought; they were Mao’s public security chief, Kang Sheng, and the army general Lin Biao, whom Mao had appointed as minister of defense to replace the disgraced Peng Dehuai. Lin Biao was especially fulsome in talking with his own military officers, continuing to refer to Mao’s th
ought as the “pinnacle of Marxism-Leninism in the present era.” And in an enthusiastic accolade when the volume of Mao’s Selected Works which included the period of World War II and the civil war was published late in 1961, Lin Biao wrote that the victory in that war was also the victory of Mao’s thought; for the army as a whole “our present important fighting task [is] to arm our minds with Mao Zedong’s Thought, to defend the purity of Marxism-Leninism, and combat every form of ideological trend of modern revisionism.”
The ground was being laid for a new kind of division within the Party, one that pitted those who were truly “red”—the believers in Mao’s thought and the purifying power of trusting the masses—against those who based their prestige and policies on their specific expertise, whether that lay in precise economic planning, advanced education, or mastery of bureaucratic procedures. Between 1962 and 1966 this struggle was fought out, sometimes in public and sometimes silently, as Mao worked to prepare for the kind of renewed assault from the moral guerrilla high ground of which he had spoken in his attack at Lushan on Peng Dehuai.
To double-check his sense of how the peasants were reacting to the changes in rural policy, Mao turned again to his trusted secretary Tian Jiaying. This time Tian was to concentrate his work on three places in Hunan: Mao’s own village of Shaoshan, Mao’s grandparents’ village, and Liu Shaoqi’s home village, which was not far away from the other two. In a farewell party for Tian and his colleagues, held at a guest house in Wuchang, Mao urged them not to boss people around but to listen carefully and carry no preconceptions with them—except their belief in Marxism and knowledge of the historical context of what they saw. To his surprise, Tian found that while the peasants in Liu’s home village were comparatively content with the improvement to their current situation brought by the return of private plots and the shrinkage in the units of organization, those in Mao’s village were in favor of two policies that would be far to the “right” of the current line: these were either to apportion out production on the basis of each household (rather than any larger unit whatsoever), or else to go back to the pre-cooperative phase altogether and to divide the fields once again among the households. Nervous about the findings, Tian left Shaoshan for Shanghai, where Mao was currently living in another guest house. Though Tian sent his report in advance, Mao had clearly not read it. Instead he listened to Tian’s oral report in silence, and then made a revealing comment: “We want to follow the mass line, but there are times when we cannot completely heed the masses. For example, if they want to distribute production on the basis of the household, we cannot listen to them.” Tian also got phone calls from the head of the Central Committee’s organization department in Beijing, who was eager to discuss his findings, and met with Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqi. He found that virtually all the leaders except for Mao favored some kind of redistribution of production based on the household.
It was clear that there was now little meeting of the minds between Mao and his own senior colleagues, apart from the small group of those boosting his thoughts. As Mao got older, he had apparently further increased his isolation from his own people, even as he claimed to speak in their name. The Mao who had so often praised the virtues of living in caves, now stayed at a series of luxurious guest houses—provided for him by Party officials—in different parts of China. It was people like Tian who now acted as his eyes and ears.
In addition, it seems clear that Mao’s lifestyle had not endeared him to his revolutionary colleagues. At the now more frequent dances in Zhongnanhai, in his private room aboard his own personal railway train, and in the numerous guest houses he visited, Mao entertained a succession of young women. News of these liaisons helped spread an aura of moral vulnerability around the chairman, which was confirmed when his private railroad car was bugged by overly zealous security officials. They were not discreet about what they learned, enraging Mao when he heard what they had done. Mao’s entourage of guards were also, at least in some cases, exploitative of their power, often corrupt, and involved in sexual liaisons of their own.
Somewhat paradoxically, it was at this very time that Mao’s own family began to settle down, apparently constructively, into the society around them. His only surviving son, Anqing, whom as recently as 1956 Mao was still describing to friends as “crippled with illness,” was married at last in 1962 at the age of thirty-nine. Anqing’s wife was the half sister of his elder brother Anying’s widow. Fluent in Russian, like Anqing himself, she entered Beijing University’s department of Chinese the same year, and graduated in 1966. Urged on by Mao, Anying’s widow remarried around the same time. Li Min, He Zizhen’s surviving daughter, graduated from teachers college and married a graduate of the air force academy. She subsequently worked in the military defense bureau, while her husband taught in the academy. Jiang Qing’s daughter, Li Na, entered Beijing University’s history department in 1961 and graduated in 1965. She was to be a key link between Mao and the student community in 1966.
Mao seems to have encouraged his immediate family to lead as ordinary a life as possible and not to take an active part in politics, but he was not so protective of his brothers’ families. Mao Yuanxin, for example, the son of Mao’s younger brother Mao Zemin (executed in Xinjiang in 1943) was enrolled in the Harbin Institute of Military Engineering in 1964, and Mao used him as a foil for many of his own ideas. Their exchanges were later published. From Mao’s questions to his nephew, we can see that he was feeling out a field for himself, in which the next round of the battle could be fought to his advantage. The fact that there was a definite enemy—the forces of “bourgeois revisionism” inside China determined to undermine the revolution—was already firming up in Mao’s mind. These enemies might be found anywhere: in rural production brigades and urban factories, in Party committees and public security departments, and in the ministry of culture and the film industry. They were even among the students in Mao Yuanxin’s own institute, listening secretly to overseas radio broadcasts and filling their diaries with subversive material. “They” were also behind the rote system of lecturing and the pointless examinations that schools used to judge a person’s performance.
Now, at the age of seventy, Mao was clearly obsessed with revolutionary continuity and his belief that the young people like Yuanxin would have to bear the standard forward. Five elements were essential in this succession, Mao told his nephew: one must be a genuine Marxist-Leninist; one must be willing to serve the masses wholeheartedly; one must work with the majority and accept their criticisms, even if the criticisms seemed misplaced at the time; one must be a model of obedient discipline under the strictures of democratic centralism; and one must be modest about oneself, always ready to indulge in self-criticism. Looking at his nephew, Mao added the harsh judgment : “You grew up eating honey, and thus far you have never known suffering. In future, if you do not become a rightist, but rather a centrist, I shall be satisfied. You have never suffered, how can you be a leftist?”
With these last words, Mao had posed a question that was to obsess him and many of China’s youth into the early years of the Cultural Revolution. His answer was to be based on the idea that waning leftist revolutionary activism could be regenerated by identifying the enemies correctly, and then using all one’s ingenuity in rooting them out and destroying them. Mao had stated in the past that it was necessary to “set fires” every few years to keep the revolution alive. But doing that could also frighten people: “It’s certainly not easy to set a fire to burn oneself. I’ve heard that around this area there were some people who had second thoughts and didn’t set a big fire.” Mao came to see his mission as partly to set the fire, but also to teach the young to do it for themselves.
In this strangely apocalyptic mission, Mao found a loose association of allies. One was the defense minister, Lin Biao, who was willing to lead the People’s Liberation Army forward into revolution, via the “little red book” of Mao’s thought, which Lin commissioned in 1964 and ordered every soldier to read. A year late
r Lin Biao ordered the abolition of insignia, Soviet-style uniforms, and other signs of officer status throughout the army, re-creating—at least in Mao’s mind—an image of the simpler guerrilla aura of military life with which Mao had so long been associated. A second group of allies consisted of certain intellectuals and cadres, many of them based in Shanghai, who had a strongly leftist orientation and were genuinely dismayed by what they saw as the backward-looking direction of industrial and rural policy. A third was centered on Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, who for twenty years after their marriage in Yan‘an had not been active in politics. But in 1956, after returning from her medical trip to the Soviet Union, she began to take a lively interest in the current state of film and theater in China. Gradually she formed a nucleus of fellow believers who sought to reinstill revolutionary attitudes into the cultural world and to root out those revisionist elements that—she agreed with Mao—were lurking everywhere. A fourth ally was Kang Sheng, a revolutionary Shanghai labor organizer and spymaster in the 1920s, later trained in police techniques in the Soviet Union. He had introduced Mao to Jiang Qing in Yan’an, and later became head of the Central Committee’s security apparatus and of the Central Party School. Kang Sheng had been a pioneer in orchestrating a literary inquisition to prove that rightists were “using novels to promote anti-Party activities.”
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