by James Palmer
For ten years before his death, Zhou had feared his own end was near. Mao sadistically subjected him to a series of petty ordeals, such as swapping out his chair at diplomatic meetings and forcing him to sit, racked with pain, on a hard backless seat. Denying his rivals medical treatment was one of Mao’s favourite tricks, and after Zhou was diagnosed with cancer he suddenly found it hard to get pain medication and reliable doctors. There was an unstated rule that any major operation among the elite of the Party had to be approved by the Central Committee, due to the time it would remove them from work, meaning that Zhou, like others, was also medically hostage to the Chairman’s whims.
Then there was the political harassment. The ‘Criticise Lin Biao, Criticise Confucius’ campaign, launched in 1974 and seemingly eschewing the values of the Chinese past, was in fact aimed at Zhou and made constant reference to the ‘slave state of Zhou’, ostensibly referring to an early Chinese kingdom praised by Confucius. This kind of historical – cultural code was common in Chinese politics, especially during the Cultural Revolution, one of the first salvos of which was an attack on a play about honest Ming officials, which was taken to refer to Peng Dehuai’s criticism of Mao during the Great Leap Forward.5
The Chinese language itself, with characters that could be altered with one stroke into a new meaning, contributed to this kind of coded reading, which infected everyday life. Even among half-literate villagers, accidentally miswriting a character could be read as evidence of counter-revolutionary feeling, leading to humiliation, exile or death.
But Zhou remained too respected, and too popular with the public, for Mao to dispose of him completely. He and the rest of the Party elite targeted by Mao were hardly innocents. Zhou had done his share of political purging and execution in the twenties, thirties and forties, during the bitter internecine struggles in the revolutionary movement, and he and the others had had no objections to the mass murders of ‘rich peasants’, ‘bandits’ and ‘traitors to the Chinese people’ carried out after 1949. They had also been complicit in supporting Mao to begin with, and in creating a system which allowed his personality cult and murderous ideology to take root. From the start of the Cultural Revolution Zhou had reluctantly been pressed into backing Mao in persecuting others, and his own writings, when not tuned to please a Western audience, expressed the usual vicious banalities against ‘counter-revolutionaries’ and ‘class enemies’.
Mao’s motivations in launching the Cultural Revolution had been manifold. It was an opportunity to cleanse the Party leadership of those who had turned against him in the Great Leap Forward, mostly military men who were getting above themselves. It was a chance, too, for him to solidify an already developing personality cult. But there was also an ideological, or at least psychological, element. Mao delighted in being the one constant amidst the chaos, seeing it as a cleansing and purifying force. He took joy in turning the world upside down. It helped that he had an utter disregard for ordinary people’s lives – although, like all dictators, he occasionally practised sentimentalities on those around him, asking after their families and arranging small favours – and firmly believed that you couldn’t make an omelette without killing a few hundred thousand people.
Compared to millions, Zhou had it lucky. Outside the central leadership, any number of his habits, from his love of art to his contacts with the hated Nationalists (Guomindang) in Taiwan and his fluency and delight in foreign languages, not to mention his general air of cosmopolitanism, would have been enough to get him tarred ‘black’, in contrast to revolutionary ‘red’.
Mobs harassed, tortured and murdered people for wearing too much hair pomade, for having studied in Europe, for having a globe of the world (for who needed to know about anything outside China?), for having had a Nationalist husband, wife or brother, for once owning land and so on. Anyone with any pretensions to intellectualism suffered.
If Zhou had been a schoolteacher or a writer, or even a regular Party cadre, he might well have ended up kicked to death on the street, or hanging himself to escape months of relentless persecution, insults and forced self-criticism. At the least he would have been shamed, forced on the streets wearing a dunce’s hat and with a mocking billboard around his neck, made to clean the toilets in a commune or to break rocks in a quarry. His statues would have been smashed, his books burnt, his writings ripped to shreds – mostly by childish mobs barely out of their teens, egged on by the words of Chairman Mao.
Yet, for many ordinary Chinese, Zhou was seen as a great protector, almost a protective deity. His wife, Deng Yingchao, couldn’t have children. She had had an abortion as a young revolutionary worker, without telling Zhou, fearing that pregnancy would detract from her ability to carry out the work of the Party, and then suffered a miscarriage when fleeing from a Nationalist purge. She was childless and not particularly attractive, but unusually for the Communist elite, and Chinese men generally, he had not divorced her. This added considerably to his reputation as a wise moderate, a man of Confucian virtue and strength. So did his patrician ways; he had the manner of a benevolent court official of some earlier dynasty. He claimed to see the people of China as his children, and this paternal benevolence seemed very real to many, who called him ‘Father of the Country’ – a term never applied to Mao. He occupied the same pedestal in people’s minds as Ataturk in Turkey or that Nelson Mandela would in post-apartheid South Africa.
During the worst times of the Cultural Revolution, Zhou did what he could to protect the temples, old city walls and palaces of Beijing and elsewhere, deploying People’s Liberation Army (PLA) units loyal to him to guard sites such as the Forbidden City and the Temple of Heaven from mobs of Red Guards. Over most issues, though, he kow-towed to Mao, and he saved more monuments than people. Nevertheless, his reputation as a moderate, as a sane, wise man in these times of chaos, endured.
Zhou enjoyed much popular affection, but it paled compared to Mao’s own personality cult. From the very start of the PRC, Mao’s portrait had been placed in the centre of even small and remote villages. ‘Mao Zedong thought’ was a compulsory topic of discussion for everyone from scientists to schoolchildren.
After the Cultural Revolution began, devotion to Mao reached new heights. His ‘Little Red Book’ of quotations was compulsory reading – five billion were printed, enough for every citizen to own six copies. Terms previously reserved for emperors, like wansui (‘Live ten thousand years!’) were now appropriated for Mao, and his statues went up in every square.
Mao was turned from leader into god. Wherever his image appeared, it had to be ‘red, bright, and shining’. In posters, he transformed from a saintly but still human figure, blessing troops or workers, to a disembodied head floating above the people, the ‘sun which makes all things grow’. His portraits spread from public areas to private homes, where they often occupied the spot previously kept for household deities. Like Muslims offering daily prayers, people ‘asked for instructions in the morning, thanked Mao at noon, and reported back at night’, each time bowing three times before Mao’s portrait or bust, reading from his works, and stretching their arms in praise.
Three portraits had decorated most homes in the sixties: Zhou, Mao and Lin Biao, the then vice-chairman of the Party. Lin had been one of the most spectacularly successful Communist generals, a close ally and slavish sycophant of Mao’s, and a prominent supporter of the leftists when the Cultural Revolution began. But his portrait had come down overnight in September 1971. His own efforts to consolidate his power base in the military, while systematically undercutting and persecuting other leading generals, had made others, including Mao, nervous. They set out to undermine him in turn.
Yet nobody had expected the swiftness of Lin’s fall. Once Mao’s chosen successor, he had disappeared after an attempted coup and supposedly crashed in Soviet-controlled Mongolia when escaping by plane to the Soviet Union. Lin seems to have seen that Mao was turning against him, and decided to risk it all rather than endure the slow ostracism and
humiliating fall that he had helped inflict on so many others.
The details of the coup are still unclear, and it’s faintly possible that the whole affair was fabricated to dispose of Lin. But if so, it would have been politically premature: the campaigns against him were only just beginning. There were persistent rumours that he, and his family, had simply been rounded up and shot, but the coup, escape and crash (possibly shot down by either a Chinese or Soviet missile) seem to have been real. Within a few days he was transformed from hero of the nation to despised traitor. It was a grim reminder of how precarious life at the top was.
But, despite the campaigns to undermine him, Zhou had died with his portrait up. Throughout China work shut down for days, as each work unit offered its individual tribute to Zhou. They waved white silk banners in the air, with Zhou’s face embroidered on them, sang revolutionary songs, read his speeches and books and vowed to carry on his work. This was certainly not state-mandated mourning, though, but a genuine outpouring of public sorrow: old women tore their hair, young men sobbed together in unashamed grief. Among the mourners there was a certain element of self-promotion, as different work units competed to appear the most elaborately devoted to Zhou’s memory.
Beijing was like a ghost town throughout that January. People wondered whether this year was cursed. January was a month of liminal uncertainty in the new China; traditionally the New Year didn’t start until the lunar Spring Festival in January or February, but officially the country now used the Western calendar. Grief was mixed with anger; Beijing, along with Shanghai, had been an epicentre of political violence during the Cultural Revolution, and people were sick of it.
Ten years before, in the summer of 1966, Mao had summoned the Red Guards, as the radical student groups that had sprung up across the nation were known, to Beijing. The Red Guard movement had been started by a dozen young teenagers at a middle school attached to Tsinghua University, seized upon and promoted by Mao, and spread across the country like a raging fever. Their formation had been encouraged by rhetoric from the centre, and local authorities had been forbidden from shutting the groups down, but many of them had arisen semi-spontaneously. Their motivations were initially mixed, from determined hardline class struggle to a desire for social experimentation and travel, but Mao would turn them, as he had intended from the start, into a political weapon for his own use, even if one he could never fully control.
Millions of young people came, moved by ideological fervour, free travel and the chance to run riot. They milled in Tiananmen Square, in the centre of Beijing, like teenagers at a Beatles concert, screaming for Mao. On 19 August, Mao had appeared to a million Red Guards, praising their spirit and repeating a favourite phrase of his, ‘To rebel is justified!’
And they rebelled all right. They saw themselves as ‘soldiers going out to war against an old world’,6 and there were no civilians in this war. The impetus for the Cultural Revolution had come from the top, but it was seized upon by China’s youth with a fervour that went above and beyond even Mao’s call for rebellion. A central policy document approved by Mao forbade the police from interfering with the students in any way, giving the Guards carte blanche to go wild. At that Beijing meeting, a young girl, Song Binbin, had been given the honour of pinning an armband on Mao. When he heard her second name, Binbin, Mao laughed at its meaning (‘refined and courteous’), and advised her instead ‘Yao wu ma!’ (‘Be violent!’). She changed her name accordingly.
Teachers and other figures of authority were the favourite targets, and Tsinghua and Beida, the capital’s two great universities, among the first battlegrounds. The Guards wore quasi-military yellow uniforms, with a red armband and a heavy leather belt, which was often used to whip victims. Its heavy copper buckle could inflict serious damage. Among themselves, the Guards discussed the most effective beating techniques. Which angle could cause the most pain to the enemies of the revolution?
There was a child-like sense of experimentation in many of the cruelties, like torturing frogs or insects. One Red Guard:
. . . dragged [his teacher] Peng into the classroom where he had once been master. [He] found a broken chair. Discarding the wooden seat, he took the intact iron frame and shoved the makeshift stocks over Teacher Peng’s head, arms, and chest. Then he forced Teacher Peng to walk on his hands and knees all around the room. [His] peers were fascinated by this invention, and proceeded to break the other chairs [to use on other teachers].7
Lecturers were denounced as monsters, freaks, dogs and demons. The lucky ones were forced to clean toilets, others were beaten to death. Teachers were forced to sing ‘the howling song’ to show their degradation. Originally composed at a Beijing middle school, it spread around the country.
I am an ox-ghost and snake demon
I am guilty, I am guilty.
I committed crimes against the people.
So the people take me as the object of dictatorship.
I have to lower my head and admit to my guilt.
I must be obedient.
I am not allowed to speak or act without permission.
If I speak or act without permission
May you beat me and smash me
Beat me and smash me.8
Some among the Red Guards called for peaceful revolution, but they were soon swamped by those hungry for violence. Children as young as eight imprisoned and tortured adults. Elementary school teachers were forced by their pupils to swallow balls of shit and nails. In Beijing No. 6 Middle School, across the road from Zhongnanhai, the palaces that housed the Party leadership, the music classroom was turned into a prison, with ‘Long Live Red Terror’ written on the wall in blood. Three people were beaten to death there.
Hundreds of thousands of these improvised prisons were set up across the country. They were called ‘cow-sheds’, originally from a popular term of abuse for the targets, ‘cow-demons’. In many cases in the countryside, however, they literally were cow-sheds, or disused barns or the back rooms of local village halls.
Teachers were not the only victims. Virtually anybody could become a target, for as little as giving wrong directions to a group of Red Guards or failing to hang a picture of Mao in their home. Fellow students became frequent victims, especially if they dissented from the violence or had politically suspect parents. At Beijing First Middle School, 200 students from ‘problem families’ were labelled ‘children of dogs’ by their fellows, and forced to work for them. At another middle school, a schoolboy from a ‘bad family’ was tied inside a sack and beaten to death by his classmates.
Returned scholars were among the most frequently persecuted. They found the violence particularly incomprehensible. (I ran, quite by chance, into Eric Gu, a Princeton-educated mathematician, at breakfast one morning in Beijing, and we talked about his imprisonment forty years earlier. ‘They beat me,’ he said, with the uncomprehending horror of a wounded child.) They had given up the chance of a prosperous life in the West to come back and help build a new country, only to find themselves denounced as spies, counter-revolutionaries and traitors.
One doctor was imprisoned in his town morgue for five years. He was a Canadian-trained obstetrician, who had come back to teach country midwives modern birthing techniques in an attempt to lower China’s appalling rates of death in childbirth. At night in the winter, he wrapped himself in winding sheets to avoid freezing to death. To stay sane he would stand on a chair, so that he could see out of the room’s one small, high window, and recite the Gettysburg Address as he looked at the sunlight.
Torture went well beyond locked jails. The Red Guards held public ‘struggle sessions’, where the victims were mocked, humiliated and beaten. Howling children forced people into the ‘aeroplane position’, their head pressed down and their arms raised high behind their back, where they would be kept for hours as the crowd jeered and abused them. People were paraded through the streets wearing dunces’ caps, with placards listing their crimes hung around their necks.
Struggle ses
sions could be repeated for weeks or months, with prominent victims being brought out for ritualised daily abuse. Luo Ruiqing, a former army chief of staff, broke his leg in a suicide attempt in 1966 after having being denounced as a fellow plotter of Peng Dehuai’s the year before. The Red Guards would pile him in a wheelbarrow or drag him in a basket to take him to his struggle sessions; without proper medical care, his leg had to be amputated.
There was an unconscious religious aspect to the public humiliations. Public confession could be a means of redemption and cleansing, an idea with as strong roots in China – in Daoist ‘hygiene cults’ members confessed to their sins before the whole congregation – as in Europe. More often, though, struggle sessions were an exercise in sadistic humiliation. Chinese culture placed a high value on public reputation as part of a sense of self-identity.
The way others saw you was a critical part of how you saw yourself, and it was extremely common for those subjected to repeated humiliations by the mob to kill themselves, such as the Beijing revolutionary dramatist Lao She, who walked into a lake with his pockets full of stones after being tormented for two months.
The idea of suicide as an act of defiance or romanticism was also a standard trope of Chinese literature and history; one of the country’s main traditional festivals, Dragon Boat Day, celebrated the suicide of the scholar Quan Yu, driven to the deed by an unjust king. Suicide was sometimes a way of sending a message: ‘I am not the person you say I am.’ Notes left behind highlighted the deceased’s loyalty to the Communist Party, or defiantly declared that he or she was not a spy, a counter-revolutionary or a traitor to the country. More often, suicide was a product of sheer despair.
Lao She was sixty-seven, his tormentors around sixteen or seventeen, an additional indignity in a society that traditionally valued the seniority of age. Literary suicides were the most famous, such as those of Lao She and the poet Wen Jie, who gassed himself in 1971 after falling in love with one of his former tormentors (and she with him) and being denied permission to marry her. But tens, perhaps hundreds, of thousands of ordinary Chinese were driven to suicide in those years. Others came close to it. The mother of the historian Xing Lu, for instance, came home crying that she wanted to kill herself after her best friend at her workplace put up a poster accusing her of being a counter-revolutionary and a rich peasant.