by James Palmer
Another reason for Mao’s concern was Stalin’s fate in the Soviet Union. Twenty years before, Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, had denounced Stalin’s reign of terror and his personality cult in front of an audience of stunned Communist luminaries. The supposedly secret speech was soon widely leaked, and it deeply disturbed Mao. Mao had no particular liking for Stalin personally. The Soviet dictator had alternately patronised and bullied him, throwing the full weight of the USSR behind the Chinese revolution only when it appeared certain to succeed. What worried him was that Stalin’s legacy could be jettisoned so soon after his death, culminating in the removal of his body from Lenin’s tomb in 1961.
Mao believed that the USSR had abandoned basic revolutionary principles by denouncing Stalinism. Many parts of PRC’s history had repeated the Stalinist experience, such as forced collectivisation resulting in famine, hasty industrialisation, frequent purges, show trials, the war against religion and, of course, the personality cult. The parties had common ideological motivations, and the Chinese had deliberately imitated Soviet policy. Even the idea of a ‘cultural revolution’ was taken from Soviet slogans, although the far more centralised, bureaucratic mode of Soviet repression bore little resemblance to China’s years of chaos. After Khrushchev went off the beaten Stalinist path and tilted at reforms (which only half-materialised) Mao’s suspicions were confirmed.
One of the favoured insults directed against Deng Xiaoping was to dub him ‘China’s Khrushchev’, an epithet first applied to Liu Shaoqi. Mao and Khrushchev had never got along at the best of times, with Mao repeatedly challenging the portly Soviet leader to swimming contests and directing subtle conversational jabs against him. There had been a spectacular slanging match – ‘Revisionist!’ ‘Adventurist!’ ‘Tyrant!’ ‘Deviationist!’ – between the two before the Sino-Soviet split. Even after Khrushchev was unceremoniously bundled out of power in 1964, Mao argued that the Soviet Union had turned to the capitalist path, and that his successors were continuing ‘Khrushchev-ism without Khrushchev’. Mao was obsessed with his recipe for the future of China and for preserving his own place in history: Zhou dead, Deng out, and Hua in charge, with the leftists hovering in the background. Deng’s removal from power was not formally announced, but it soon became obvious, with the campaign against his reforms intensified and his failures explicitly touted. The process evoked a weary déjà vu. Posters went up on campuses across China again, followed by a blizzard of articles in the major newspapers, and drummed-up rallies to condemn Deng. A Western observer reported of one such meeting that it was ‘predictable, boring, and repetitive. Teachers embarrassed by the low quality of the debate. Nothing at all spontaneous. Every contribution read in a monotone as the audience sleeps, knits, smokes, and chats. Fear and apathy are responsible.’12
The public didn’t take this well. To begin with, many people were still smarting from what they saw as a gross lack of respect shown to Zhou Enlai. Although scenes from the funeral had been shown on TV, there had been no radio broadcast, whereas when other major leaders died the funeral had been on repeat for days. A central directive discouraging commemorative meetings and the wearing of memorial armbands – a hint that people should channel their grief into condemning the ‘right-deviationists’ – made people spit blood.
People were keenly interested in what was going on at the centre. With Mao gone from public occasions, it was clear that he didn’t have that long left. Deng’s reforms were popular because they promised a better life, although actual evidence of improvements was negligible. Public dislike of Jiang Qing and her allies, already strong, hardened as it became obvious that they were the leading figures in the campaign against him. Deng was increasingly and strongly projected as Zhou’s true political heir, and many read the attacks on him as yet more attacks on the dead Premier and all that he stood for.
Kang Sheng, Mao’s intelligence chief who had died the year before, once complained about people’s habit of ‘reading the newspapers like they were code’. Readers looked for subtle hints that pointed to a shift in the political wind or the fall of political figures both local and national. They pored over photos, wondering why X was facing towards Y, speculating on the order of Maoist quotations used in speeches, and arguing over why one politician’s words had been given slightly more prominence than another’s. Part of the reason for reading newspapers this way was because it was pretty pointless to read them for news or entertainment. Literally half of most articles was dedicated to hackneyed political phrases, with only minor divergences. With rare exceptions, they made stunningly tedious reading, and even interesting stories were intercut with variations on the current political line.
The Chinese language has a higher tolerance for cliché than English, but it was hard for anyone to believe that celebrations were always joyful, opposition always fierce, and masses always united. People needed only to look around to find a reality that clashed with the endlessly positive portrayal of life. Take a typical People’s Daily editorial:
The people are overjoyed at these happy tidings. The capital is astir as is the whole country. Army men and civilians in their hundreds of millions have turned out to parade amid cheers and the beating of drums and gongs to hail the happy news. Grand rallies have been held in various parts of the country and messages sent to Chairman Mao and the Party Central Committee, warmly acclaiming and resolutely supporting the two wise decisions. A revolutionary scene of unity in struggle prevails throughout China, with the whole nation determined to carry through to the end the great struggle to beat back the right deviationist attempt. 13
People knew perfectly well that if there was a revolutionary sense of unity, it was very well hidden, and that neither they, nor anyone else they knew, had felt particularly overjoyed that day. If there had been parades and drums, it was because the bosses had made them turn out early that morning to have a ‘rally’ where most had shuffled along shouting a slogan or two, before going off to start work. Their trust in the papers was no longer very great.
But, more than anything else, it was the fall of Lin Biao that had undermined public trust in official announcements. Lin had held such a prominent place in Party propaganda, second at points only to Mao himself, that his fall simply didn’t fit into a believable narrative. If Mao had been able to undercut him over time, gradually working him away from power before a final fall, this might not have happened. But the sheer suddenness of the events of 1971 utterly threw people.
It was akin to the impact of the Hitler – Stalin pact on Western communists more than a generation earlier; it went so much against everything that the regime had said before that it took self-deceit of a high order to convince oneself of its truth. The pale spot on a hundred million Chinese walls between Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai’s portraits testified to the memories Lin’s fall had left behind. Of course, there were always trusting souls willing to disregard the evidence of their memories in favour of whatever authority was telling them, but, even in the remotest countryside, such true believers weren’t that common.
In the absence of a reliable media, rumours were epidemic. Everybody knew somebody who was ‘connected’, who they turned to when they wanted to know what was ‘really’ going on, whether an uncle in the city or a friend in the Party. Passing on rumours inevitably required a certain amount of trust, given the multitude of informers with which Party organisations and factories were riddled, but rumours still travelled with remarkable speed.
One of the best carriers of particular rumours, as well as a vehicle for cutting satire, was the form known as shunkouliu, ‘slippery rhymes’, little pieces of doggerel made up to mock the authorities. China didn’t have the same wealth of jokes as the Soviet Union and its satellites, but shunkouliu were adequate substitutes. A good one made you laugh, or else nod in grim recognition, it was easily remembered, and was something that could be passed on to friends, a tiny piece of memetic warfare. They were sometimes framed as mock proverbs, as angry as they were witty. (One of th
is type was a verse from the starvation years – ‘Flatter shamelessly – eat delicacies and drink hot stuff. Don’t flatter – starve to death for sure.’14) They were often extremely local, attacking the foibles or crimes of village officials or local difficulties, such as the complex verse produced in Xiaojinzhuang, a supposedly ‘model village’ that satirised how tour guides received more money and acclaim than the farmers the village was meant to represent. Some, however, dealt with the very top levels, and they could travel surprisingly far. In Beijing, several would fly round every time a government minister fell until a new favourite emerged. Beijingers would then pass the rhymes on to their provincial relatives when they visited, with a conspiratorial and knowing grin.
Urban Chinese were surprisingly well travelled, even in those years, since families were often spread out across the country by work assignments. Trains were still cheap, even if it was no longer possible to ride free as the Red Guards had once done. China’s gigantic train network played a vital role in spreading rumours, not just through transport but through the trains themselves. People would paint slogans on to the side of trundling goods trains, sending their arguments across the country. Or they would paint characters or slap a poster on a wall near where trains regularly stopped, so that passengers would see the information and pass it on when they returned home.
There’s an oddly persistent myth in both China and the West that the Chinese are unusually passive, that they easily accept oppression or are naturally willing to bow down to power. It’s never been true; open any chapter of Chinese history and uprisings, revolts and dissenting intellectuals leap from the page. (Thousands more rebellions that never made it beyond the local level have been lost, of course.) Even in the later stages of the Cultural Revolution, when the country was locked in stultifying political paranoia, a minority of people kept struggling even as most of the public, quite understandably, preferred to turn away from politics as much as possible.
One of the most common sources of complaint was the economy. With real wages having dropped by 20 per cent over the previous decade, factory workers blocked railways, ran go-slow strikes, and sometimes took to the streets. Protests were often tied to local factional struggles spilling over from the regionalised civil wars of the late sixties.
The surviving losers of those conflicts often stuck together, forming tight knots of resistance to power. Resistance could be surprisingly open, like when one faction in Nanchang challenged the leadership of the local Party committee by producing a referendum signed by 150,000 people. (One wonders, however, how many of them were signed with the Chinese equivalent of ‘Mickey Mouse’.)
Protest was a far more charged and potent experience in a closed and oppressive society like Maoist China. Work is the closest that most people living in the developed world get to the experience of what living in an authoritarian society is like. I don’t mean the effort or reward of work, the energetic joy of building something with others – though that too had its place in Chinese communism, especially in the early years. Even those sent to labour in far-off villages in the 1970s sometimes felt that same sense of comradeship. I mean working in a very bad office, run from some distant and uncaring headquarters, where you operate under an idiot boss and decisions are made from the top that you, and everyone around you, knows are dumb, but have to be gone through with anyway.
Most people who’ve had to deal with a particularly obnoxious workplace harbour the fantasy of some day quitting in style. Sometimes this is about grand (or obscene) actions, but more often it’s about speech – about telling the boss exactly what you think of him, why the company is failing, what it’s like working under an idiot or a sadist or a martinet. But for the sake of the mortgage or the rent or the kids, the vast majority of people bite these words back.
Having to hold one’s tongue every day may be easier when one is likely to be harassed, imprisoned or killed for telling the truth, but the psychological effect is no less torturous. In China it was harder, too, to maintain the small sacred space of individual conscience, the knowledge that everything people were being told was nonsense, in a country where community was so strongly emphasised and the term for ‘stand out in a crowd’ carried a strong implication of being a fool. To find a chance to speak, especially in a crowd, was a vast psychological relief.
The great irony was that this was exactly how much of the Cultural Revolution had begun. Many of the protests that turned into violent ‘rebel’ movements had been sparked by genuinely bad and corrupt leadership. For a long time people had put up with the petty oppressions and the burden of little privileges usurped by bent cadres and rotten officials, and said nothing, because there had never been a safe time to speak. Protests and riots had still been frequent, especially in rural areas, but they had also been stomped on hard.
The first stages of the Cultural Revolution had broken a dam and let out a million complaints. That was one reason why it was such a fragmented affair: it was driven by intensely local grievances – ‘The village head stole food during the Great Leap Forward’, or ‘Our factory boss sleeps with the girls’ – and deep-rooted resentments against the stiflingly petty nature of everyday life. Perhaps, at another time, that outburst of popular feeling could have been channelled for positive ends but it was rapidly subverted by vengeance, fanaticism and a political cult far more rigid than ever before, while the leaders who had been pitchforked to power by this revolution within the revolution proved even more corrupt and inefficient than their predecessors.
Former Red Guards were always prominent among the protestors in 1976. When it came to notions of justice, social responsibility and political democracy, the inspiration for the vast majority of people was still derived from Marxism. The Marxist classics were so easily available; a Communist regime, after all, could hardly take Das Kapital off the bookshelves, however much the sarcasm and humanity of the book clashed with the callous humourlessness of official speech. There were other sources of resistance, such as traditional Chinese culture or, for the tens of millions of Chinese Christians and Muslims, the Bible and the Koran,15 but they were far more directly and publicly attacked, while Marxism remained sacrosanct. (For some young people, however, the public criticism of the Confucian classics was their first chance to read and be inspired by them.) The revolution provided the seeds of its own opposition.
It was something far more local and traditional than Marxism that brought people on to the streets in 1976. It was three months before the public anger at the way Zhou’s memory had been maligned burst out in full spate. Before that, there were small-scale protests in February and March, especially in Sichuan, Deng’s home province. But the real spark was the arrival of Qing Ming, the ‘Festival of Brightness’, which fell on 5 April that year.
It was a day for celebrating the past. Before 1949, people would clean and decorate their family tombs and make offerings to their ancestors, sometimes travelling hundreds of miles to do so. As a result it was also known as ‘Tomb-Sweeping Day’. The cataclysmic upheavals of the previous half century meant that many families no longer had any idea where their ancestral tombs were. Instead they would visit their parents’ or grandparents’ graves.
At the height of anti-religious sentiments in the Cultural Revolution it had, in places, been dangerous to do even this, as it could be seen as a sign of superstition or attachment to the feudal past. Elsewhere the festival had been co-opted into the Communist idealisation of revolutionary martyrs. Now it would be turned into a chance to give Zhou the respect that his enemies had stolen from him.
It was appropriate that the first wave of major protests started as a series of misreadings. Slips of the tongue or pen had endangered many lives in the last ten years, such as the village schoolteacher who meant to write ‘use Maoist thought to criticise bourgeois thought’ when marking up a student’s essay, and instead wrote ‘use Maoist thought to criticise Maoist thought’, or the family that accidentally put a bust of Mao underneath a miswritten character in a
slogan that made it look like ‘idiot’, or including in a poem the line ‘the east is white’. (Guo Morou, an extraordinarily gifted poet, scholar and politician was attacked for precisely this in 1966, when he was seventy-four. He survived until 1978, since Zhou Enlai sent men to guard him, like other cultural monuments, but two of his sons were driven to suicide.)
In this case, the first misreading was of an action, not a text. On 24 March, a photographer went to take a picture of a wreath laid to honour Zhou Enlai in the Revolutionary Martyrs’ Cemetery in the southern city of Nanjing. The wreath had a couplet praising Zhou on it, and, probably because it was interfering with the shot, the photographer removed it. When people saw the picture, however, they jumped to the conclusion that the couplet had been removed on purpose, as a deliberate slur on Zhou. They blamed Zhou’s opponents, identified with ‘the Shanghai gang’ of Jiang Qing and her followers. An angry crowd marched to the cemetery, and these ‘pilgrimages’ continued for the next few days, despite official efforts to stop them.
A day later, on 25 March, Wenhui Bao, a major Shanghai newspaper, published a front-page article on the need to criticise Deng Xiaoping. It contained an incendiary sentence, which in saner times might have prompted a flood of letters to the editor: ‘The capitalist roader inside the Party wanted to help the unrepentant capitalist roader regain power.’ This was immediately read as being close to a blatant attack on Zhou’s memory. He, it was assumed, was ‘the capitalist roader inside the Party’, while the ‘unrepentant capitalist roader’ he had been helping back into power was Deng. It didn’t help that Wenhui Bao had deliberately – at least as far as the protestors were concerned – left Zhou Enlai’s calligraphy out of a series of inscriptions in praise of Communist icon Lei Feng published three weeks earlier.16