by James Palmer
But, fuck, when the Cultural Revolution came along, I was suddenly one of the five red categories, a child of the workers and peasants who had been oppressed by the revisionist line in education . . . I took part in pretty much all the big events: being reviewed by Grandad Mao in Tiananmen, destroying the Four Olds, the great link-ups, armed struggle: anything that involved beating people up and smashing things and taking stuff.
Man, it was fantastic! Me and my buddies got baseball bats and worked our way up the street from south to north. We must have busted every damn shop sign along Xidan. Just try doing that today! The cops’d be all over you after the first hit. But back then, they didn’t dare. We were fuckin’ Red Guards; we were destroying the Four Olds! . . . You could get away with beating up anyone, like it was for free, as long as they were class enemies. You could beat them to death and no one would care.19
Beyond the violence, it was the sheer all-pervasiveness of the Cultural Revolution that had left people so exhausted. Yan Xuetong, a Tsinghua professor, summed it up well in an offhand remark. ‘Even during the Japanese invasion,’ he said, ‘there were people selling sunflower seeds [a popular Chinese snack] on the street. In the Cultural Revolution, there was nobody selling sunflower seeds on the street.’ In 1975, as the government backed off from past excesses under pressure from Zhou and his allies, it seemed as though the worst times were over, but with Zhou dead, everything suddenly seemed uncertain again. As they wept for Zhou, Beijingers were also voicing their own fears.
From his palace bed, himself close to death, Mao could hear the cries of mourning for Zhou. It probably disturbed him, as did any sign of too much popular support for other leaders, even the dead, but now, confined to his bed, he could hardly do anything about it. Mao had once been a man of formidable endurance, a long-distance swimmer who had reasserted his personal authority at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in mid-July 1966 by swimming the Yangtze unassisted – at the age of seventy-three. In 1976 he could barely walk by himself, and his speech was slurred and barely intelligible.
He was now eighty-two, and it was astonishing he had lived so long. Although he grew up a pampered child in a rich farmer’s house, he had lived as a guerrilla and a renegade under the harshest conditions since his twenties, travelling thousands of miles across China. Since taking power he had kept himself fit, exercising every day, but he had indulgent tastes, gorging himself at banquets and coercing young dancers from his home province of Hunan to his bed, dismissing his doctors’ warnings about personal hygiene and his recurrent venereal diseases with the blunt exclamation, ‘I wash my dick inside them!’
He had made his name as a guerrilla leader and theorist, writing brilliant essays on how successful revolutionaries ‘swam among the people’, and leading a battered Communist insurgency through Nationalist betrayal, civil war and Japanese invasion to ultimate triumph. He had also come up through a Party hierarchy in the twenties and thirties where infighting, backstabbing, undermining, accusations of treachery or political deviance, and the ruthless disposal of political enemies were common practices. It was a climate that inevitably spawned someone like Mao, a genius at internecine political warfare. He’d been using internal purges to dispose of potential rivals since 1926, when he’d manipulated rumours of an ‘Anti-Bolshevik League’ of Nationalist spies within the Communist Party to bolster his own position, a technique he’d repeated in similar purges in the Communists’ mountain redoubts in Yanan in 1944 – 5. He used the same methods he had developed as a guerrilla leader against his political enemies, never striking directly when he could first insinuate, undercut and harass. He was a master at playing factions against each other, picking out a favourite here and a protégé there.
Lin Liguo, Lin Biao’s son, had accurately summed up Mao’s tactics in a speech given to fellow plotters during the coup attempt in 1971, and later distributed in internal Party documents:
Today he uses this force to attack that force; tomorrow he uses that force to attack this force. Today he uses sweet words and honeyed talk to those whom he entices, and tomorrow he puts them to death for some fabricated crimes. Those who are his guests today will be his prisoners tomorrow. Looking back at the history of the past few decades [do you see] any one whom he had supported initially who has not finally been handed a political death sentence? . . . He will hurt you all the way, and he puts the blame for all bad things on others.20
Mao was a huge man, especially by rural Chinese standards. Nearly six feet tall and broad-shouldered, often unkempt, when younger he had the air of a shambling bear. His height added to his authority; he towered over most of his political opponents. He was a moody man, given to sudden sulks followed by outbursts of raucous humour; these had only worsened in old age. He had extraordinary personal charisma. Women were drawn to him – he was a notorious flirt and tease – and men followed him, both in battle and in politics. He liked to drop into peasant demotic – ‘Fuck your mother!’ – to make his points, but was equally adept at classical poetry or high-flown rhetoric. What really kept the whole of the leadership circling around him, even at eighty-two, was that he had crushed almost everyone inside the Party who had ever opposed him.
Like the rest of the Party elite, Mao lived in Zhongnanhai. Literally meaning ‘Central [and] South Sea’, it was part of a series of palace complexes built by the Chinese emperors over the past seven centuries, attached to the Forbidden City in the centre of Beijing. Under the Nationalist government of the thirties it had been a park, but the Communists had taken it for the headquarters of the government in 1949. The vanguard of the workers’ revolution now lived in the old houses of the imperial elite, attended by servants and guards.
The Zhongnanhai buildings ran along the lakes that gave the site its name. The traditional wooden structures of the Qing emperors had been supplemented with concrete office buildings, albeit topped by faux pavilion-style roofs. It still retained the air of a park, very different from the overcrowded compounds most Chinese lived in, with plenty of green space and the delicate design touches of master architects. The most venerable buildings tended to be used for meetings, China’s elite gathering around heavy antique tables to discuss the fate of hundreds of millions. A few dozen members of the leadership lived there in courtyard homes, as did their families, staff and doctors. Often this meant being crammed into shared apartments, with relatively little space; however, they also had far larger seaside villas a few hours away on the coast.
Being near the centre of power was worth a little overcrowding for Zhongnanhai’s residents. Zhongnanhai was marked by Mao’s presence – literally, since boards emblazoned with his calligraphy hung over both major entrances. The standard of living was far higher than that of the ordinary Chinese, complete with luxuries like refrigerators, colour televisions and record players that were almost unknown elsewhere in China. The heating bill for one Zhongnanhai family of five was higher than that of a nearby high school with 2,000 students.
Mao needed such creature comforts more than most. He had been diagnosed with Lou Gehrig’s disease in 1975, a form of motor neurone disease. The doctors gave him two years at the very best. Unable to eat by himself, he had to be fed a liquid diet by his young female attendants, lying on his side on a couch like a Roman emperor. If he swallowed water too fast he choked and spluttered, and his hands shook so badly his writing was almost unintelligible.
When he met foreign leaders, he put his head back in the chair and drooled. Paralysis was not his only health issue; he had three bullets in his left lung, was half-blind from cataracts, even after an operation, had pulmonary and coronary heart disease, and numerous infections. He was still mentally alert, but drowsy most of the time.
A medical team led by Western-educated doctors was kept on twenty-four-hour alert. Prominent among them was Dr Li Zhisui, who had been treating Mao for several years. An idealistic Communist at first, he was growing ever more sceptical as he witnessed Mao’s callousness and debauchery. Mao, however, distruste
d Western medicine, and came to rely more and more upon a female assistant and quack doctor, Zhang Yufeng, whom he had picked from obscurity in 1962 to be his ‘secretary’. They were no longer lovers, but she increasingly controlled access to him; foreign diplomats were kept waiting for hours because Zhang Yufeng was sleeping. She could understand his grunts and scribbled characters better than anyone – or so she claimed – and the wisdom of the Great Helmsman, as Mao was known, was increasingly filtered through this half-literate former railway worker.
Surrounded by women, Mao barely saw his own wife, Jiang Qing. She preferred the more spacious quarters at Diaoyutai, another former imperial residence, where she assembled her personal court. There she could indulge her love of fashion and costumes, sometimes having whole boxes of them brought to her so that she could play at dressing-up. In 1972 she befriended the American anthropologist Roxane Witke, who spent hours watching her play billiards, discuss imported movies and run her fingers through fine silks and cottons with ecstatic exclamations of appreciation that would have landed any of her less powerful countrywomen in very deep trouble. She occasionally recognised the hypocrisy of her revolutionary posturings and her own love of beautiful things. ‘We are the real capitalist roaders,’ she once said of her clique.
A short, pop-eyed figure, just into her sixties, she had once been an actress in Shanghai, and something of a looker. Her love life had been complex, and marked by frequent betrayals on all sides. ‘Sex is engaging in the first rounds, but what really sustains attention in the long run is power,’ she once remarked, and she had a remarkable nose for where power in China was shifting.
In 1937, at twenty-three, she had thrown her previous life aside and travelled to join the Communists in their mountain fastness around Yanan, where she contracted a clandestine marriage to Mao, and had a daughter. In her youth, she certainly possessed a fiery charm; and it had been one of the things that drew Mao to her. They had never been deeply in love – she was his fourth wife, and he her third husband – and they had used each other with great political ruthlessness, but he had been surprisingly dependent on her at one stage, unhappy and fretful unless she was at hand, looking after his needs. After 1949 they drifted apart personally, becoming more political partners than husband and wife, and since 1966 she had increasingly associated herself with three other radicals, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan and Wang Hongwen.
They all had roots in Shanghai, with a strong support base there. Shanghai embodied some of the same contradictions as Jiang herself; it had once been China’s most cosmopolitan city, and Shanghai women, even in 1976, were desperate for a semblance of fashion. They hitched their skirts short or wore daring hairstyles, and risked being pulled aside and harassed by the people’s militias that were self-appointed guardians of revolutionary purity. Yet Shanghai was also a fiercely left-wing city that produced the most hardline ideologues of the Cultural Revolution. They constantly called for more purges, more violence, more strikes against the enemies of the revolution. Jiang used her new political power to take petty vengeance against critics and directors who had once snubbed her, or actresses with more talent or looks than she.
After her fall, Jiang would come in for far worse criticism than any other figure of the day, criticism that was charged with naked sexist hatred of Jiang as a woman. She would be called a ‘female devil’ and a ‘white-boned demon’. One of the few undoubted achievements of the Communist take-over of China had been the liberation of women, who enjoyed far greater status than they had in the past. But China still had almost no prominent female political leaders, and Jiang was seen as being somewhat unnatural in her eagerness for power.
Jiang was, without doubt, an egocentric, unscrupulous and ambitious woman, who delighted in comparing herself to the great empress of the seventh century, Wu Zetian. A Beijing University Journal article of 20 August 1974 praised Wu as ‘experienced in using violent dictatorship, which enabled her and her innovative political group to rule for as long as fifty years’ – an inspiring model for Jiang. Others were drawn to Jiang by her fiery rhetoric and by the scent of power.
One story told about Wu Zetian, however, applies rather better to Mao than Jiang. He liked to tell it about himself, in fact. During Wu’s rule, she often had her ministers executed. A particularly brave official challenged her. How, he asked, could she expect people to keep serving her if she kept killing them off? She told him to come and visit her at one of the imperial halls that night and, trembling, he did so, nervous that a terrible fate was in store. Rather than the executioner, though, he found the empress herself, holding up a torch. Moths flocked to the open flame, burning up as they approached. Mao understood the point as well as Wu did: he could use up as many people as he wanted, since more would always be drawn by the bright allure of power.
In Jiang’s case, two of her closest allies were Yao Wenyuan and Zhang Chunqiao, both power-hungry pseudo-intellectuals with little round glasses and blank sociopathic stares. You could imagine them holding forth on the need for bloody revolution against the fascist state in a West German café in 1967, or publishing articles on the Reich’s need for racial hygiene thirty years earlier.
As old Shanghai allies of Jiang, both of them had been critical in laying the groundwork for the Cultural Revolution nationwide, but they’d also taken part in local power games. They’d provided the intellectual weight, such as it was, for the seizure of power in Shanghai in January 1967. Alongside Wang Hongwen, they’d ruthlessly disposed of not only the previous leadership of the city but also any other rebel faction they disliked.
Zhang, born in 1917, was fourteen years older than Yao. They hated most of the old revolutionaries and army leaders, partly, one feels, out of jealousy at their greater achievements. Their careers had been mostly spent in propaganda, journalism and the universities, not the brutal guerrilla wars against the Nationalists and the Japanese. Their vision was narrowly fanatic, but they had climbed all the way to the top.
Zhang was the country’s premier political theorist, responsible for finding the ideological excuses to get rid of factional opponents or old rivals. Yao Wenyuan was a propagandist, a skilful and poisonous writer. They had managed to close down newspapers, such as China Youth Daily, which opposed them, and ran the two most influential papers in the country, People’s Daily and Red Flag, as their own fiefdoms. Yao had written the attack on the play Hai Rui Dismissed From Office, which had marked the start of the Cultural Revolution – and, not incidentally, led to the death of its author, the historian and Beijing politician Wu Han.
Jiang and Zhang had only joined the Party in the late thirties, and, caught between one generation and the next, they sought to identify themselves with the ‘struggle’ of the Cultural Revolution, portraying themselves as newer, more enthusiastic, more earnest revolutionaries than an older generation tainted by bourgeois and capitalist ideals.
Another close ally of Jiang’s was Wang Hongwen. Wang’s journey to power had been the longest and highest ‘helicopter ride’ of any Cultural Revolution leader. He was, quite literally, a political bruiser. When the violence began in 1966, Wang was on the security staff of a Shanghai textile factory, a Korean War veteran and Party member of no particular importance. When angry workers from several factories joined together to declare themselves the ‘Shanghai Workers’ Revolutionary Rebels General Headquarters’ – one of the qualities shared by Marxist groups worldwide in the sixties and seventies was fabulously redundant and grandiose names – the tall, charismatic Wang had ended up as their leader and spokesman.
Amid the violence and chaos, Wang stood out, soon rallying more than 100,000 workers behind him. What made his name was an attack not on the old guard, but on another ‘rebel’ faction in Shanghai on 4 August 1966, when his men had stormed the headquarters of their enemies, the Workers United, killing eighteen people and wounding a thousand.
Wang was handy with his fists, and anything else that came to hand, but his real talent was for incendiary speeches. By Janua
ry 1967, he’d helped seize power in the city, and brought his men to bear against yet other potential claimants to the revolutionary mantle, helping spark the war of a thousand factions that tore China apart.
After he moved on to Beijing, Wang built up a little personality cult of his own in Shanghai, where his old office and apartment were preserved as pilgrimage sites, and dozens of sycophants turned out admiring works and commentaries on his speeches. Visitors were treated to a potted history of the Cultural Revolution, emphasising Wang’s key role; in the short book he had published on the events, his own name appeared 200 times. He ran Shanghai’s political affairs from the Jinjiang Hotel, once a colonial apartment block. Even amidst the austerity of the 1960s, it was infamous for girls, drink and extravagant banquets.
At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, Mao had made great use of Jiang, Yao and Zhang as willing cat’s paws against his enemies, using them to steer the country into the chaos that he dreamed would create a glorious new order. Jiang had come to prominence addressing the Red Guards in Tiananmen Square, calling on them to strike hard against the enemies of the revolution. ‘I was the Chairman’s dog,’ she famously remarked later, ‘and I bit who he wanted me to bite.’
Despite their zeal, in 1975 Mao had grumpily labelled Jiang and her allies the ‘Gang of Four’, and told them not to ‘gather together like a little clique’ and for a few brief months had seemed to be turning against them. They had been forced to undergo the humiliating process of self-criticism, reading out lists of their own faults to Party meetings, and had avoided each other to reduce suspicions of their factionalism.