The spectacle they had stage-managed astonished both father and daughter on the morning of August 18, 1966. Beyond counting in their multitudes, red banners danced in demoniac frenzy over the Plaza of the Gate of Heavenly Peace. The sun’s radiance, diffused by the powdered dust borne on the wind from Central Asia, ignited the clouds of scarlet bunting. The rebel revolutionaries sang the old favorite, “The East Is Red,” and the refrain swelled from a million throats: “Mao Tse-tung is the red, red sun in our hearts!” They beat time with booklets bound in red plastic, and crimson waves lashed the broad Plaza. The red booklets flipped open, and a million Red Guards chanted in unison from The Quotations of Chairman Mao as selected and edited by Deputy Chairman Lin Piao.
“We must distinguish between our friends and our enemies; we must defend our friends and crush our enemies.…”
The war chants reverberated from the red-brick walls of the fifteenth-century Gate of Heavenly Peace, where the Emperors had once received the homage of their people. Above the Gate’s central arch beamed a portrait of Mao Tse-tung fifty times lifesize. Red banners hanging like classical scrolls on either side were indited in enormous gold characters: HAIL THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA! HAIL THE GREAT UNITY OF THE COMMON PEOPLE OF ALL THE WORLD! The upswept eaves of the two-tiered roof shone pale yellow in the morning haze—and the Red Guards waited, as they had all night.
At ten in the morning they were finally rewarded for their patience and their ardor. Remote as wooden figures on a medieval clock tower, a miniature procession appeared on the Gate of Heavenly Peace. Emerging into the sunlight, the leading figure raised his hand in an angular, awkward salute. He leaned heavily on his shorter companion, and his ponderous head turned from side to side like a clockwork doll’s. He walked with the shuffling robotic gait characteristic of Parkinsonism. When Chairman Mao appeared in the uniform of the People’s Liberation Army for the first time in a decade, mass ecstasy transfigured the Red Guards. A million young men and women were transported from frenzied anticipation to mindless rapture.
“Mao Chu-hsi! Mao Chu-hsi! Mao Chu-hsi!” The rebel revolutionaries chanted “Chairman Mao!”—and their words merged into cataracts of joyful sound that transcended literal meaning: “Chu-hsi Mao Chu-hsi Mao Chu-hsi …” The wild cataracts rose and swelled and broke to rise and swell and break time and time again. Girls jumped high into the air, tears streaming down their contorted faces. Youths bounded up and down, pummeling each other in their transports. The red banners swirled in the bright morning breeze. The little red books rose and fell in the demented, broken rhythms of storm-born breakers. All individual identity and all individual feelings were swept away by the torrents of mass emotion.
The sanctified Chairman was the redeemer, the savior of a generation brutally frustrated in its expectations of infinite proletarian blessings. Like a Renaissance king appealing to the new bourgeoisie to join him against the wicked nobles, Chairman Mao was inviting the revolutionary masses to join him in crushing the wicked “capitalist-line” bureaucracy of the Communist Party that had contrived such bitter frustration. The most unruly youths of China were exhorted: “Dare to rebel! Rebellion is good! Dare to create disorder! Dare to make a total revolution!”
James Sekloong watched in mute astonishment and Tou-tou was moved to ecstasy beyond words when Deputy Chairman Lin Piao issued his orders to his Red Guards. The heir-apparent’s drawn features were chalky, and clear-framed spectacles bestrode his hooked nose. Slight in his olive-green tunic, he looked like a frail scholar. But his commands, echoing through a hundred loudspeakers, were as impassioned as a barbarian Mongol chieftain’s exhortation to slaughter and pillage.
“The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution is aimed at eliminating bourgeois ideology and establishing proletarian ideology—remolding men’s souls, revolutionizing their ideology, plucking out the roots of Soviet-style revisionism, and developing the Socialist system.”
Wild shouts drowned Lin Piao’s voice. The Disciple raised his eyes and paused. Mao Tse-tung shuffled to his side and peered amiably over his shoulder.
“We will strike down those men in authority who are taking the capitalist road! We will strike down the reactionary academic savants! We will strike down all bourgeois royalists! We will strike down all demons and monsters!”
Torrents of cheers again overwhelmed his shrill voice. The Disciple looked up in mild surprise. The Chairman nodded like an indulgent uncle acknowledging thanks for a birthday present.
James Sekloong felt himself far older than his fifty-nine years when the first mass rally ended. He watched with anguish the subsequent rallies that assembled additional millions of Red Guards in order to consecrate them to the revolutionary crusade. Tou-tou exulted as more than twenty million Red Guards marched out to overthrow the previously all-powerful Communist Party Secretaries of schools, factories, Communes, and government organs. Except for Lin Piao’s toadies, the generals of the Liberation Army, which was the only remaining organized power in China, refused to intervene. Like James Sekloong, they found reason to hope the insane storm would blow itself out. Though the nation’s spiritual regeneration demanded mass violence, that violence was initially directed at insensate objects, rather than living human beings. When James read the New China News Agency’s file on August 25, 1966, he felt renewed confidence that the symbolic cataclysm would be limited:
PEKING—A revolutionary fire was ignited on the campus of the Central Institute of Arts yesterday to destroy the sculptures of Buddha, the niches of Buddha, and sculptures of emperors, kings, ministers, generals, scholars, beauties, and demons of Greek and Roman origins or of ancient, feudal China.
The masses of revolutionary students and teachers were in high spirits. They cast out the sculptures of the Goddess of Mercy, princes, and the fierce-looking gods Shu Yu and Yu Lu which they had collected from various temples in China; the stone horses and tigers they had collected from Imperial tombs; the sculptures of King David of Israel—the “hero” David in the Bible; the “Goddess of Love and Beauty”—the Venus of Greek legends; Apollo; and others purchased abroad. All these were burned and smashed in broad daylight.
Tou-tou mocked her father’s complacency when he laid the file down and incautiously observed, “They’ve cleansed the Party thoroughly, and they’ve destroyed the old objects. Now’s the time to consolidate and advance.”
“It’s just beginning,” she replied with ardent malice. “The Cultural Revolution is no simple reshuffling of chairs in the Central Committee. It will shake every Party member like an earthquake. It will destroy all who dare defy Chairman Mao’s revolutionary line—whether they are members of the Politburo or low-level cadres on rural communes.”
James resigned himself to hearing her out.
“We Red Guards,” Tou-tou declared, “will smash not only the outward semblances of the old world. We will totally destroy all bourgeois vestiges—and all the remaining bourgeoisie.”
During the next few months James concluded with sorrow that his daughter had understated, rather than exaggerated the violence of the eruption. Not only senior officials, but minor cadres like the Party Secretaries of middle schools were deposed by the roving Red Guards. Chairman Mao’s children’s crusade spared neither the obscure nor the powerful. A ninety-two-year-old former Imperial Mandarin was frog-marched through the streets of Tientsin in a dunce cap for refusing to destroy a seven-hundred-year-old scroll. An internationally renowned philosopher was compelled to write confession after confession until the Red Guards finally felt that he had reformed his “evil thoughts,” the fruit of forty years of intense study in China, Europe, and America. Even the aged widows of “counterrevolutionaries” were terrorized.
As Tou-tou had predicted, the Cultural Revolution became ever more violent. She herself marched among the Red Guards who roamed China to “exchange revolutionary experiences” and to intimidate the enemies of the sanctified Chairman. School was out, and school was to remain out for years as the Red Guards re
veled in destruction and slaughter. Regional Party secretaries and provincial governors were beaten with fists, clubs, and chains. Hundreds of officials were killed, and thousands were maimed. Red Guards broke into bourgeois homes to destroy their “decadent, old possessions.” Many so-called bourgeoisie were beaten to death, while others killed themselves. Their bodies were burned on the pyres of their belongings.
The deeds appeared mindless, but their purpose was political, always political. Only by terrifying his opponents could Defense Minister Lin Piao establish his absolute personal power.
In December 1966 the Deputy Chairman ordered his adolescent storm troopers to attack his highest opponents. All China trembled before Lin Piao when he deposed Chairman Liu Shao-chi of the People’s Republic and The Organizer Teng Hsiao-ping, Secretary-General of the Communist Party. The Organizer was paraded through the streets of Peking wearing placards that proclaimed him: THE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE! THE SECOND MAN IN POWER IN THE ANTI-SOCIALIST BLACK GANG! The Red Guards pelted him with rotten fruit and human excrement.
James Sekloong stayed close to Premier Chou En-lai, who was also under attack, but agilely evading a potentially fatal confrontation with Lin Piao and his Red Guards. The Premier was even able to preserve the hard core of his powerless administration by protecting the best of his protégés. James survived, as did the Foreign Minister, a People’s Marshal who had been dragged from his office and harangued by Red Guards while he stood among the looted files of his ministry.
The old Marshal gestured toward the strewn papers and warned, “You are revealing state secrets.”
“State secrets, your mother’s,” a Red Guard leader replied. “Who gives a shit for state secrets? Everything must be open to all!”
The first six months of the Cultural Revolution were the ecstatic culmination of Tou-tou’s life, the glorious fulfilment of all her dreams. In early January 1967 she revenged herself upon Wang Kwang-mei, the wife of Comrade Liu Shao-chi, who had led the reactionary Cultural Revolution Teams at Ching Hua University. On a rain-bleak winter afternoon, Tou-tou set in train her “strategy to outflank and capture” the woman who still enjoyed a certain immunity from frontal attack. Tou-tou’s weapon was the telephone in the hospital originally established by the American-supported Peking Union Medical College.
“This is Peking Number One Hospital.” She spoke urgently into the mouthpiece. “We regret we have bad news for you.”
“What is it?” asked Wang Kwang-mei tremulously. “Tell me what’s wrong. Please tell me.”
“Your daughter Liu Ping-ping has been injured in an automobile accident. You must come immediately.”
“How badly is she hurt?” asked the distraught mother. “Her life is not …”
“I’m sorry. I can give you no further information. Come at once.”
Tou-tou replaced the handset and turned to her waiting subordinates.
“That’s caught the turtle-bitch,” she said. “We’ll drag her out.”
Wang Kwang-mei, who had not left the shelter of her residence for a month, drove up to the hospital in a Red Flag limousine twenty minutes later. She was accompanied by a single burly bodyguard, whom the Red Guards seized.
“Forget about your daughter,” Tou-tou told the astonished woman. “She may live or she may die. More important, it’s time for you to settle your accounts with the people.”
Wang Kwang-mei’s ordeal lasted for twenty-eight hours. Taken to Ching Hua University, she was reviled by shifts of Red Guards who demanded that she confess her sins against the people of China. She was mauled by girl students who forced her to wriggle into the violet-silk cheongsam and slip on the high-heeled pumps she had worn on her state visits to Indonesia and Burma. Tou-tou laughed venemously when Wang Kwang-mei complained that the shoes were too small to fit over her heavy socks and pleaded with the Red Guards to return to her home, where they had found the cheongsam, and bring her a pair of nylon stockings. That was bourgeois vanity indeed. Instead, the shameless traitress was confronted with a detailed record of her own lies and her husband’s thefts of the people’s property. A tireless Tou-tou presided over the interrogation that pressed Wang Kwang-mei time after time to acknowledge that her husband, Comrade Shao-chi, had disputed Chairman Mao’s decisions and sabotaged Chairman Mao’s policies.
Wang Kwang-mei finally confessed to her personal sins. Though she was close to hysteria because of her anxiety for her daughter and her own physical exhaustion, she stubbornly refused to admit that her husband had deliberately deceived the Chairman by plotting to restore capitalism in China. Seated on the gritty staircase of the library, she alternately wept and pleaded to be allowed to sleep. Finally, Tou-tou gave the signal from the chair where she had brooded like an indefatigable Fury throughout her rival’s long torment.
“Let her go,” Tou-tou said flatly. “She’s suffered enough—for the moment. Next time, she’ll confess all her sins.”
Before Tou-tou allowed herself to sleep on the floor of her office, she reflected that her revenge had been all the more satisfactory because of Wang Kwang-mei’s obdurate refusal to implicate Liu Shao-chi. She herself had contemptuously tossed Wang Kwang-mei aside like a gutted fish. Since the traitress’s humiliation was not yet finished, the next interrogation, which must break her totally, would be completely satisfactory.
By late January 1967, Chairman Mao’s Red Guards had split into bitterly opposed factions contending for local power amid national anarchy. They fought with crowbars, home-made pistols, daggers, cleavers, and crude spears. They shot each other with rifles and submachine guns seized from passive Liberation Army soldiers who had been ordered not to interfere with the violent course of the Cultural Revolution. Literal reports from China were so bizarre that a stunned outside world rejected them, just as it had refused to credit the initial pronouncements of the Great Leap Forward eight years earlier. Few foreigners could bring themselves to believe that Mao Tse-tung had unloosed forces that threatened to destroy his own People’s Republic of China or that those forces had already shattered the structure of the People’s Government and the Communist Party. Even fewer could understand that the pent resentment of Chinese youth was defying the directives of both Chairman Mao and Deputy Chairman Lin Piao. Outsiders simply could not comprehend events that appeared wholly irrational to them.
Dewey Miller of Newsweek was appalled at the mindless violence sweeping China. He could not dismiss the graphic dispatches of the People’s Daily, the New China News Agency, the provincial broadcasting stations—and the hundreds of broadsides and pamphlets issued by mutually hostile Red Guard groups in a flowering of freedom of publication unprecedented in the People’s Republic. He accordingly reported that China was in turmoil. Though themselves normally hungry for sensation, his less experienced colleagues accused him of gross exaggeration. Miller flatly asserted during a discussion on Hong Kong television that the Cultural Revolution was verging upon chaos. The movement, he said, had virtually destroyed the Communist Party. He warned that Lin Piao, the sorcerers’ disciple, had conjured up forces he could not control, while the half-senile Mao Tse-tung was a compliant figurehead.
A French correspondent, reinsuring his next visa to China, confidently refuted Miller: “Chairman Mao himself has planned the Cultural Revolution. Lin Piao is only his agent. And the two know exactly what they’re doing. The Cultural Revolution is a mass movement controlled by the Communist Party. It will be a glorious success!”
At that point Miller realized that it would be worse than pointless to discuss the grand design he had discerned behind the apparently aimless nation-wide violence. His editors had finally agreed—despite their own skepticism—to run a long takeout on the ideological concepts motivating the destructive antics of the Red Guards. His colleagues were unprepared even to consider that audacious purpose, which had been described in detail by Peking’s doctrinal journal Red Flag.
The Task Force Directing the Cultural Revolution, Dewey Miller concluded, sought to alter the fundam
ental character of the Chinese people. Moreover, the Maoists envisioned nothing less than mankind’s first perfect government, so perfect it transcended formal government. Their model was the egalitarian Paris Commune of 1871, which Karl Marx had described as “history’s first true proletarian government.”
Dewey Miller realized with half-incredulous awe that the Chairman was determined to transform China from a nation-state into a popular confederation. The new Revolutionary Committees were to exercise all legislative, executive, and judicial functions, while their functionaries were to be chosen from among the proletariat by a mystical consensus far more “democratic” than direct elections. Not only provinces, cities, and villages, not only factories, universities, and newspapers were to be run by the new political organisms. The Central People’s Government and the Communist Party itself were to be replaced by those Revolutionary Committees. All China was to be one Great People’s Commune. The Red Guards were seeking to destroy existing Chinese society by mass violence in order to make way for a seamlessly perfect, quint-essentially new Chinese society.
Dewey Miller despaired of discussing his insight with his fellow correspondents. They were so self-consciously cynical that they somewhat paradoxically ended by applauding—without understanding—the Chairman’s every action. Instead, he retired to the blue-carpeted bar of the Foreign Correspondents’ Club atop the Hilton Hotel to nurse his wounds and drench his anger.
Jaunty in a cashmere jacket and cordovan loafers, thirty-four-year-old Lachlan Wheatley, the new taipan of Derwent’s, slipped onto the adjoining stool to await the Japanese associates with whom he was dining. In 1967, the Correspondents’ Club was the In-place among the In-people.
“Miller, you’re wrong, you know,” Wheatley said with measured sympathy. “Of course all you pressmen exaggerate. But you talked twaddle on television. Business with China is good. They’re buying lorries, wheat, and fertilizer. How can you say things are out of control?”
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