by John Keay
Emperors were much on Mao’s mind at the time of the Great Leap Forward. In 1958–59 he called for a re-evaluation of demonised autocrats like Cao Cao of the Three Kingdoms and the megalomaniac Qin First Emperor. He also praised Li Si, the latter’s éminence grise who had famously censured Confucian scholars and burnt their books. When the enormity of the Great Leap tragedy could no longer be concealed, Mao invoked a less hands-on imperial tradition, that of the wuwei (aloof or ‘inactive’) ruler. He withdrew from public view, surrendered the chairmanship of the PRC (though not of the Party) and secluded himself in various favoured retreats. ‘The great helmsman’ was thus below decks when the ship hit the rocks, although he surfaced for Party gatherings and would later accept that mistakes had been made during the Great Leap.
The task of relieving the famine, removing those held responsible and rescuing the economy was left to the Politburo. From its ranks there emerged during the early 1960s a triumvirate whose considerable success entailed reversing recent policies and thus incurring Mao’s suspicions. Liu Shaoqi, a fine-looking and capable bureaucrat whom Mao had installed as head of state and his prefered successor (dynastic preference trumped egalitarian principle in such matters), conducted a Socialist Education Campaign that found corruption and impropriety to be endemic in the Party, the provincial administrations and the state industries. The resultant arrests ran into the hundreds of thousands. The campaign was supported by Premier Zhou Enlai, Mao’s bushy-browed and utterly dependable associate, and by Party secretary Deng Xiaoping, a small and dynamic pragmatist whose devotion to the Party may have exceeded that to its Chairman.
Between them, Zhou and Deng presided over a stabilisation of the economy. The criterion for advancement was now to be technical and professional ability as much as political orthodoxy. A quip, later appropriated by Deng Xiaoping, about it being immaterial whether a cat is black or white ‘so long as it catches the mouse,’ first surfaced in 1961.2 ‘Learning from the facts’, another Deng-ism, inevitably meant skimping on the theory. The rural communes were down-sized and their regimented ethic diluted. Communal kitchens were closed, some land was again made available for private cultivation, informal markets reappeared to handle this local output and productivity began to shoot up. This was matched in the industrial sector, where incentives were introduced, innovation encouraged and energy supplies improved when a major oilfield came on line. Mass migration from the countryside to the cities was reversed, with restrictions on internal travel to prevent a further exodus from the fields. And the problem of an exponentially growing population was addressed in the first serious attempt to promote birth control. Mao had always insisted that the larger the proletariat the better. Not so, argued Deng Xiaoping; stabilising the population was essential to economic growth and social betterment. Nevertheless, and despite the famine, the 1957 population total of around 650 million had risen to around 950 million by 1977.
The gloom at the height of the famine had been compounded – and Mao’s paranoia further excited – when in 1960 the Soviet Union withdrew its technical staff and cut off all aid. Ever since Moscow’s posthumous denunciation of Stalin in 1956, the Sino-Soviet alliance had been slowly unravelling. Each side claimed to be the legitimate ideological heir of Marx and Lenin; but as their paths drifted apart, Moscow increasingly rested its case on its achievements (in weaponry, space exploration, the Middle East), leaving the high ground of ideological rectitude and unremitting class struggle to Beijing. Khrushchev’s ridiculing of the Great Leap Forward provoked further resentment, and worse was his willingness to explore détente with the West. Not only did this leave China more internationally isolated than ever but to Mao it seemed the rankest apostasy. Moscow had betrayed the masses by taking ‘the capitalist road’; a new generation of Soviet leaders was reversing the achievements of its predecessors; and given a shared ideological heritage, the same fate could all too easily overtake China.
There were other differences: over economic orthodoxy, China’s nuclear ambitions and Soviet support for India when a dispute over Tibet’s Himalayan border flared into the short Sino-Indian war of 1962. But Khrushchev’s overthrow in 1963 brought no thaw in Moscow’s cold-shouldering. The back-sliding ‘revisionism’ of its ‘capitalist roaders’ was more pronounced than ever. The only lesson to be drawn from the Soviet change of personnel was a personal one: ‘in 1956 Mao had worried that he, like Stalin, might be denounced after his death;3 in 1963 he had reason to wonder if he, like Khrushchev, might be toppled before his death’.3 Partly to forestall such a challenge from Liu Shaoqi and his reform-minded colleagues in the Politburo, and partly to expose a younger generation to the rigours of revolutionary struggle and so inure them to the contagion of Soviet-style revisionism, in 1966 Mao unleashed the pandemonium of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
Whether Mao was right about Liu Shaoqi’s treacherous intentions is doubtful. Liu would indeed be the Cultural Revolution’s most high-profile victim, though Deng Xiaoping was also disgraced and even the faithful Zhou Enlai was obliged to offer self-criticism. But the unexciting Liu was no power-crazed gambler; nor, at the time, were accusations of revisionist treason sufficiently rare to carry much conviction. Lin Biao, the PLA zealot who replaced Liu Shaoqi as Mao’s chosen successor, fared no better, for in 1971 he also replaced Liu as prime suspect in a supposed coup. He then perished in highly dubious circumstances when an aircraft supposedly carrying him to Soviet safety mysteriously crashed in Outer Mongolia. All of which was doubly ironic because Mao’s place in the hearts of his countrymen had by then become unassailable largely thanks to the sycophantic Lin. It was Lin Biao who ensured the loyalty of the PLA throughout the most chaotic years of the Cultural Revolution, Lin who elevated the Chairman’s personality cult into something approaching a religion, and Lin who compiled the Little Red Book of Mao’s collected wisdom as brandished by several million Red Guards. The book carried as frontispiece a scrawled ‘facsimile in his own handwriting’ of Lin’s injunction to study, follow and act solely in accord with the Chairman’s teachings. So how could such an eminently suitable leader-to-be suddenly become a public enemy? If any single incident discredited the Cultural Revolution, it was this. Clearly Mao’s vain-glory and paranoia were contributing more to the chaos than any rational concern for his safety or the succession. Already in his seventies in 1966, but refreshed by a well publicised wallow in the Yangzi, the Chairman had lost none of his old appetite for acting impulsively.
On the other hand, right or wrong about Liu Shaoqi, Mao had certainly read the threat of bourgeois revisionism correctly. Within little over a decade the Party would indeed follow the Soviet Union down the ‘capitalist road’ (albeit without relinquishing the wheel) and so betray its revolutionary principles. He was mistaken, though, in supposing that this danger could be averted by rekindling a spirit of mass radicalisation. Rather was it the Cultural Revolution’s mass radicalisation, and the bitter reaction it occasioned, that propelled the Party down the rightist slope. The reaction came not only from the bloodied victims of ‘struggle sessions’ (at which ‘counter-revolutionaries’ were publicly humiliated, berated and beaten, sometimes to death) but also from the screaming ranks of their youthful tormentors, the Red Guards. For while in 1966 this new generation of dedicated idealists duly rose to the challenge of ‘overthrowing those in authority who took the capitalist road’, by 1968 their excesses were being condemned, and they themselves shunted off into the provinces to learn from the peasants. As with the ‘Hundred Flowers’ episode, activism was encouraged and then disowned, though this time it was supposed rightists who were first pilloried, and unruly leftists who were then reined in. Disgust extended across the political spectrum and led to a disillusionment with ideology itself.
There were other ironies. The Great Leap famine had hit the countryside hardest; with the domestic press muzzled and foreign correspondents restricted in their movements, its enormity had been appreciated only after the event. The Cultural Revolution w
as the opposite. Its impact was limited to the cities, where it involved the more articulate classes and was instantly reported, extensively filmed and uncomfortably experienced by the foreign community. Spectacular rallies, wholesale vandalism and chaotic ‘struggle sessions’ sent shudders of horror coursing down international spines. The British embassy was ransacked and the Soviet embassy burnt. As children denounced their parents, and pupils their teachers, as temples and churches were vandalised, schools and colleges closed, libraries incinerated, museums pillaged and senior officials humiliated, it seemed that China was undergoing a collective brain haemorrhage. The most filial, literate, bureaucratic and history-loving of societies had imploded; civil war was widely predicted. Yet the PLA stood firm; workers played only a minor and belated role in the mayhem; and the rural majority of the population was barely affected. Agricultural and industrial growth remained steady, if unspectacular. The death toll was probably under a twentieth that of the Great Leap famine, most of it attributable not to the ‘struggle sessions’ but to fighting between different Red Guard groups and to the PLA’s suppression of them.
If the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was not obviously proletarian, neither was it essentially cultural. On the contrary, according to a post-Mao aphorism ‘the Cultural Revolution was all about doing away with culture’.4 This is not to gainsay the shrill role played by Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife and sometimes mouthpiece, who was responsible for cultural affairs. But forays into literature and the theatre, as into history, seldom stopped at mere politicisation or proscription. The first salvo of the Revolution saw a ‘counter-revolutionary’ clique in Beijing University being denounced for defending a play set during the Great Rites Controversy of the 1520s. The play’s criticism of the Ming Jiajing emperor was interpreted as a criticism of Mao, while its sympathy for the honest bureaucrat who defied the emperor was taken as support for one of Mao’s revisionist victims. The ramifications of this affair brought down the mayor of Beijing, among many others. A few months later, the propaganda chief Lu Dingyi was denounced on similar grounds, this time following republication of the biography of Wei Zheng, Tang Taizong’s crusty old remonstrator. At about the same time, Zhou Enlai’s detractors delighted in rubbishing his pretensions as an elder statesman by comparing him to his namesake, the now derided Duke of Zhou; and later, by way of an explanation for Lin Biao’s fall from favour, someone dreamed up that most far-fetched of linkages with Confucius himself. Meanwhile Mao had invoked Journey to the West, the great compendium of fantasy and fable inspired by the travels of the monk Xuanzang in the seventh century. Red Guards were to model their exploits on Sun Wugong, its ‘monkey king’, and to regard his arsenal of wondrous powers and magical weapons as symbolic of their own potential for creating trouble. As ever, history and culture served as the currency of debate and suffered greatly in the process. But at stake was not a reading of the past but a correction of the present and a prescription for the future.
Perhaps the ultimate irony of the Cultural Revolution was that, even as ‘capitalist roaders’ were being hauled from their homes and publicly ‘struggled’, privately Mao and Zhou Enlai were exploring direct links with the Gomorrah of capitalism in Washington, DC. This tectonic shift, as decisive for modern China as the Cultural Revolution itself, would have few domestic repercussions until after Mao’s death. At the time, it reflected both sides’ need to reposition themselves internationally. For in 1968 the Tet offensive in Vietnam dealt a blow to American resolve, while suppression of the ‘Prague Spring’ in Czechoslovakia strengthened Soviet resolve. Washington began looking for a way out in South East Asia, Moscow for a way forward in respect of its ideological satellites. The projected US retraction argued for some understanding with China as the best way to contain Soviet influence in the East, an appreciation shared by Beijing and heightened by the Brezhnev doctrine (Moscow’s Monroe-like pledge to intervene in Communist states contemplating disengagement from the Soviet bloc). In fact, Russian units had already been redeployed to disputed sections of the Sino-Russian frontier in 1966. Bombers followed, and in 1969 serious border clashes broke out along the Ussuri River and in Xinjiang. Washington and Beijing warmed to the urgency of an understanding.
It was delayed by outrage over the 1970 US bombing of Cambodia and probably by the machinations of Lin Biao. But in April 1971 an American team of table tennis players was invited to compete in China as a goodwill gesture; ‘they may come to us, but we’ll never go to them. The US is still an imperialist country!’ exclaimed a Mao loyalist; disbelief was widespread.5 But three months later Henry Kissinger accepted an invitation to secret talks. These were soon repeated, at which point the United Nations invited the People’s Republic to replace the Republic (ie, Taiwan) as China’s representative. Then in February 1972 came what President Nixon would call ‘the week that changed the world’. His historic visit included a trip to the Great Wall and a meeting with the Chairman. Neither side gave much ground on Taiwan, but Beijing undertook to hustle Hanoi towards a settlement, and Washington gave assurances about no hostile collaboration with the Soviet Union. There was little discussion of trade, nor as yet was there much to discuss. But China’s twenty-three years in international quarantine were over.
Meanwhile the Cultural Revolution rumbled on. With the disappearance in the early 1970s of Lin Biao and other leading figures, its more extreme views came to be associated with what Mao was the first to condemn as the ‘Gang of Four’. Consisting of his wife Jiang Qing plus three ‘Shanghai radicals’, the Gang incurred his disapproval not because it robustly upheld the ideals of the Cultural Revolution – which demonstrated loyalty and suited his own divisive purposes – but because it constituted a gang; as ever, all forms of collusion were highly suspect, whether factions, cliques, gangs or parties (the Communist Party, as the essence of orthodoxy, excepted). Through the mid-1970s, this radical grouping competed with a more pragmatic alignment headed by the reinstated Zhou Enlai and the rehabilitated Deng Xiaoping. Deng’s return seemed to signify an unexpected spirit of reconciliation on the Chairman’s part. Thousands of ‘roaders’ were pardoned, all too many of them posthumously; Liu Shaoqi, for instance, had died as a result of his ill-treatment. But the reconciliation also served to discomfort the Gang of Four and leave uncertain the direction of future policy and more especially the succession.
Mao, who turned eighty in 1973, was visibly fading, blinded by cataracts and barely able to speak; interpreting his mumbled utterances added a further uncertainty to the power struggle and kept both groups guessing. Each obliquely criticised the other, with the Gang extending the Lin Biao–Confucius linkage to include Zhou and Deng, while identifying itself with the anti-Confucian ‘Legalist’ school of the ‘Warring State’ of Qin. The Qin First Emperor was now portrayed as a progressive ruler whose mobilisation of the masses had united the country; the Chairman himself was happy to be identified with him. Historical revisionists obligingly recast Qin’s autocratic totalitarianism as what one authority calls ‘a kind of protoproletarian dictatorship’.6 The 1973 discovery of the first ‘Terracotta Warriors’ lent a Heaven-sent sanction to this idea, though it is not known whether Mao was able to take a personal interest in the matter.
Zhou Enlai was also terminally ill. With terrible timing, he died in January 1976, just when, thanks to another change of heart behind Mao’s closed doors, Deng was out of favour and the Gang of Four in the ascendant. There was some official mourning for Zhou, though it was not enough for those millions who regarded him as the face (if not always the voice) of moderation, the architect of a less confrontational foreign policy, and the best chance for post-Mao stability. Unauthorised demonstrations of grief climaxed with the April 3–5 ‘Qingming Incident’ in Tiananmen Square. Thousands laid wreaths, many of which were accompanied by verses that denounced the disrespectful Jiang Qing, her Gang, and even ‘the Qin First Emperor’ himself. The clean-up operation in the Square was comparatively unbloody, although untold thousands were later hauled
in for interrogation. It had been the first unofficial and apparently spontaneous demonstration of mass disapproval ever seen in the capital of the People’s Republic.
With the Gang now in control, Deng Xiaoping was again denounced, deprived of all his offices and placed under surveillance. Five months later, in September 1976, the Great Helmsman himself passed away. This time mourners in their millions bade farewell. Their tears were genuine and there were no incidents. For all his faults, a China without ‘the great red sun in our hearts’ was unimaginable. Similarly, without its ‘gang of one’, the Gang of Four was rudderless. A doomed bid for power ended within the month when Jiang Qing and her associates were arrested. Ostensibly the work of Hua Guofeng, Mao’s nominated successor (the fourth by most counts), this rejection of all that remained of the Cultural Revolution depended on PLA support as orchestrated by Deng Xiaoping.
For the third time, the diminutive Deng was bouncing back. In 1977 he was reinstated in the Politburo and in 1978 he sidelined Hua Guofeng to launch the reform programme that would shape contemporary China. A year later he was in America being feted by Ronald Reagan and anticipating China’s becoming a superpower; a year after that, while authorising the creation of the first Special Economic Zone at Shenzhen (near Hong Kong), he lit on the formula that would turn China into ‘the workshop of the world’.
The five years 1977–82 launched the country on a new trajectory as revolutionary in its way as any in its long history. The Cultural Revolution had attacked ‘the Four Olds’ (old ideas, culture, customs, and habits); Deng’s revolution promoted ‘the Four News’ (or ‘Four Modernisations’: agriculture, industry, defence and technology); the retrospective/negative made way for the forward-looking/positive. Rural collectives were gradually dismantled. Land was leased back to individual households or village groupings and effectively privatised; provided it yielded a modest state procurement quota, it could be used as the lessees saw fit. Repair shops, brick kilns, cement works, fertiliser plants, timber mills and metal fabricators sprang up alongside fish farms, piggeries, poultry farms and market gardens. Official encouragement and easier credit meant that by the 1990s these non-urban industries employed a third of the total labour force. Meanwhile stricter enforcement of the One-Child Policy dramatically reduced the birth-rate. Population growth slowed, but still reached 1.3 billion early in the twenty-first century.