Mao: The Unknown Story

by Jung Chang

  Mao then wrote to Khrushchev confirming that he would be only too happy for China to fight a nuclear war with America alone. “For our ultimate victory,” he offered, “for the total eradication of the imperialists, we [i.e., the Chinese people, who had not been consulted] are willing to endure the first [US nuclear] strike. All it is is a big pile of people dying [our italics].”

  To keep the Taiwan issue alight, Mao ordered the shelling of Quemoy to resume, eventually cutting it back to alternate days. This characteristically Maoist extravagance put tremendous strain on the economy. The army chief of staff, who was not let in on Mao’s intentions, protested: “There is little point in the shelling. It costs a lot of money … Why do it?” Mao could find nothing to say except to accuse the general of being “right-wing,” and he was soon purged. Firing expensive shells onto the rocky island went on for twenty years, and stopped only after Mao’s death, on New Year’s Day 1979, the day Peking and Washington established diplomatic relations.

  Meanwhile, Khrushchev endorsed a number of high-end technology transfers, which led to an astonishing deal on 4 February 1959 under which Russia committed to helping China to make a whole range of advanced ships and weapons, including conventional-powered ballistic missile submarines and submarine-to-surface missiles. The first Taiwan Strait crisis had panicked the secrets of the Bomb out of Moscow; now, four years later, with the second Taiwan Strait crisis, Mao had prised out of Khrushchev an agreement to transfer no less than the whole range of equipment needed to deliver the Bomb.

  Over the years from 1953 when Mao had first outlined his Superpower Program, its scale had grown prodigiously, but each expansion had only aggravated his fundamental problem: how to squeeze out enough food to pay for his purchases. In 1956, when the scope of the Program was much smaller, deaths from starvation had become so shocking that his usually docile Politburo had balked at the plan and forced him to slow down. Now a far worse death toll was in the offing. But this time Mao did not have to make concessions to his colleagues at home. In the course of 1957 he had altered one fundamental thing. Khrushchev no longer had any authority in Peking, and Mao no longer felt constrained by him.

  A joke went the rounds in Budapest about a man buying tea. When asked: Which tea do you want — Russian or Chinese? he replied: I’ll have coffee instead!

  Khrushchev handed over two R-2 short-range, ground-to-ground missiles, which China copied, though he declined to transfer rockets with a range of more than 2,900 km. The Russians also stationed a missile regiment outside Peking, with sixty-three R-1 and R-2 missiles, on which they trained the Chinese.

  Mao decided to play the superior philosopher, and used a language full of Chinese metaphors, oblique for a non-Chinese audience, and almost impossible to translate. One of the Italian interpreters recalled: “From the Russian translation I heard, no one could understand what Mao said. I remember our translators put their heads in their hands.” In fact, even Chinese audiences had to guess what Mao was driving at when he employed this style.

  Mao had said similar things before, in less overtly callous language. In 1955 he told the Finnish ambassador that “America’s atom bombs are too few to wipe out the Chinese. Even if the US atom bombs … were dropped on China, blasted a hole in the Earth or blew it to pieces, this might be a big thing for the solar system, but it would still be an insignificant matter as far as the universe as a whole is concerned.”

  39. KILLING THE “HUNDRED FLOWERS” (1957–58 AGE 63–64)

  TERRORIZATION HAD always been Mao’s panacea whenever he wanted to achieve anything. But in 1956, after Khrushchev condemned Stalin’s use of terror, Mao had to lower the rate of arrests and killings. On 29 February, as soon as he learned about Khrushchev’s secret speech, Mao had ordered his police chief to revise established plans: “This year the number of arrests must be greatly reduced from last year … The number of executions especially must be fewer …”

  But when Khrushchev’s tanks rolled into Hungary later that year, Mao saw his chance to revive persecution. His colleagues were still saying that the troubles in Eastern Europe were the result of over-concentration on heavy industry and neglecting living standards. Liu Shao-chi argued that China should go “slower” with industrialization, so that “people won’t be going onto the streets to demonstrate … and moreover will be fairly happy.” Chou, too, wanted to scrap some arms factories. Although wholly in agreement with Mao over giving priority to nuclear weapons, he remarked pointedly: “We can’t eat cannons, or guns.”

  Mao’s view of the “lessons from Eastern Europe” was completely different. “In Hungary,” he told his top echelon on 15 November, “it’s true the standard of living did not improve much, but it wasn’t too bad. And yet … there were great troubles there.” “The basic problem with some Eastern European countries,” he said, “is that they didn’t eliminate all those counter-revolutionaries … Now they are eating their own bitter fruit.” “Eastern Europe just didn’t kill on a grand scale.” “We must kill,” Mao declared. “And we say it’s good to kill.”

  But with the trend in the Communist world blowing towards de-Stalinization, Mao decided it was not wise to be too blatant about launching a purge. To create a justification, he cooked up a devious plan. He did so mainly while lying in bed, where he spent most of his time that winter of 1956–57. He ate in bed, sitting on the edge, and only got up to go to the toilet.

  ON 27 FEBRUARY 1957, Mao delivered a four-hour speech to the rubber-stamp Supreme Council announcing that he was inviting criticisms of the Communist Party. The Party, he said, needed to be accountable and “under supervision.” He sounded reasonable, criticizing Stalin for his “excessive” purges, and giving the impression there were going to be no more of these in China. In this context, he cited an adage, “Let a hundred flowers bloom.”

  Few guessed that Mao was setting a trap, and that he was inviting people to speak out so that he could then use what they said as an excuse to victimize them. Mao’s targets were intellectuals and the educated, the people most likely to speak up. After taking power, Mao’s policy had been to give them a generally better standard of living than the average. Those who were well-known or “useful” were given special privileges. But Mao had them put through the grinder several times, not least with “thought reform,” which he himself described as brainwashing: “Some foreigners say our thought reform is brainwashing. I think that’s right, it is exactly brainwashing.” In fact, even the fearsome term “brainwashing” does not conjure up the mental anguish of the process, which bent and twisted people’s minds. Now Mao was planning to persecute the educated en masse.

  Mao confided his scheme only to a very few special cronies like the boss of Shanghai, Ke Qing-shi, keeping even most of the Politburo in the dark. In early April, he told these few cronies that as a result of him soliciting criticisms, “intellectuals are beginning to … change their mood from cautious to more open … One day punishment will come down on their heads … We want to let them speak out. You must stiffen your scalps and let them attack!.. Let all those ox devils and snake demons … curse us for a few months.” To these same few cronies, Mao spelled out that he was “casting a long line to bait big fish.” He later described his ensnaring like this: “How can we catch the snakes if we don’t let them out of their lairs? We wanted those sons-of-turtles [bastards] to wriggle out and sing and fart … that way we can catch them.”

  Mao’s trap was extremely successful. Once the lid was loosened just a fraction, a deluge of dissent burst out, mostly in wall posters and small-scale meetings called “seminars,” which were the only forums allowed.

  One of the very first things to be challenged was the Communists’ monopoly of power, which one critic described as “the source of all ills.” One poster was entitled “Totalitarian power is peril!” The Communists’ exercise of power was compared to Hitler’s. One man said in a seminar that “in not protecting citizens’ rights, today’s government is worse than the feudal dynasties or Ch
iang Kai-shek.” One professor called the Constitution “toilet paper.” Another, an economist, went right to the core of Mao’s methods, and called for banning public denunciations, “which are much worse than being in prison”—“just the thought of them makes one tremble from heart to flesh.” Democracy was the popular demand.

  So was the rule of law. One vice-minister called for the independence of the judiciary. Another administrator said he wanted to be able “just to follow the law, not the orders of the Party.” Referring to the CCP’s smothering methods of controlling everything, one well-known playwright asked: “Why is it necessary to have ‘leadership’ in the arts? Who led Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Beethoven, Molière?”

  Foreign policy, too, came in for questioning by some of the elite who had access to partial information. The former Nationalist governor of Yunnan province, who had crossed over to the Communists, protested that “it is unfair that China should pay all the costs in the Korean War”—and called for reducing the level of aid being lavished on foreign countries.

  The regime’s secretiveness also came under attack. “All absolute economic statistics are state secrets,” protested one critic, “even the output of alkali … What is this but an attempt to keep people in a state of stupidity?” He demanded information about the industrialization program. Another wrote: “I have indeed heard about peasants … dying from having just grass roots to eat, in areas so rich in produce that they are known as the land of fish and rice. But the newspapers say nothing about any of this …”

  Many contrasted the harsh life of the peasants with that of the leaders (which they could only glimpse). People’s Daily had reported a banquet for the Russian president Kliment Voroshilov, attended by 1,000 people. “Why such grandeur?” one poster enquired, when “ ‘local Party emperors’ are using methods like abuse, torture and detention to gouge food out of the peasants …?” “We must know that dissatisfied peasants could throw Chairman Mao’s portrait into the toilet,” this daring author warned.

  Most of this criticism never reached the general public, as Mao only allowed carefully selected snippets to appear in the press. The rest was confined to the two channels — seminars and wall posters — which were impermanent and easy to erase. And Mao made sure that these outlets were restricted to isolated campuses and individual institutions, to which the general public was not allowed access. Nor were these institutions permitted to contact each other, and people inside them were banned from going outside to spread their views. When some students tried to distribute handwritten journals, their samizdats were instantly confiscated, and they were punished as “counter-revolutionaries.” Dissent was thus kept rigidly fragmented, so a popular uprising was impossible.

  ON 6 JUNE 1957, Mao read a mimeographed pamphlet which speculated that the leadership was split, with himself cast as the champion of dissent, ranged against “conservatives.” In the information void he had created, some had mistakenly come to think that he was a liberal, and appeals had been heard like: “Let us unite around Mao Tse-tung — Khrushchev!” Some even expressed concern for Mao: “It seems our dear comrade Mao Tse-tung is in a very difficult position.” This suggestion that Mao was a liberal was dangerous for him, because it could well embolden dissent.

  The next day, Mao ordered an editorial for People’s Daily to be broadcast that evening, saying that challenging the Party was forbidden. Once he pressed this button, the persecution machine started rolling for what was called the “Anti-Rightist Campaign,” which lasted a year. The brief exciting moment of “a hundred flowers” was over.

  On 12 June, Mao issued a circular to the Party, to be read to all members “except unreliable ones,” in which he made it explicit that he had set a trap. He did not want his Party to think he was a liberal — in case they themselves should turn liberal.

  In this circular, Mao set a quota for victims: between 1 and 10 percent of “intellectuals” (which meant the better-educated), who numbered some 5 million at the time. As a result, at least 550,000-plus people were labeled as “Rightists.” While many had spoken out, some had not said anything against the regime, and were pulled in just to fill Mao’s quota.

  To Mao, writers, artists and historians were superfluous. Scientists and technicians, however, were largely exempted from persecution—“especially those who have major achievements,” a September 1957 order decreed; these “must be absolutely protected.” Scientists who had returned from Europe and America, in particular, were to be “neither labelled nor denounced.” Nuclear physicists and rocket scientists were treated extra well. (Throughout Mao’s reign, top scientists were given privileges superior even to those enjoyed by very senior officials.)

  As the ultimate aim of this crackdown was to create the atmosphere for harsher extraction to finance the Superpower Program, Mao made a particular point of hammering any challenge directed against his policies towards the peasantry. One People’s Daily headline screamed: “Rebuke the rubbish that ‘peasants’ lives are hard!’ ” To drive home his message, Mao personally arranged a piece of sadistic theater. One well-known figure had been saying that peasants were “on the verge of dying from starvation,” so a “fact-finding” tour was arranged for him. People’s Daily reported that wherever he went he was pursued by crowds up to 50,000 strong, “refuting his rubbish,” and was finally forced to flee, hidden under jute sacks in the boot of a car.

  Parallel with theater came executions. Mao revealed later to his top echelon that one province, Hunan, “denounced 100,000, arrested 10,000 and killed 1,000. The other provinces did the same. So our problems were solved.”

  A particular example was made of three teachers in one county town in Hubei province who were executed for allegedly stirring up a demonstration by schoolchildren over education cuts. The effect of the cuts was that only one in twenty children would now be able to go on to high school. The demonstration was branded “a Little Hungary,” and a special point was made of publicizing the executions nationwide. It is almost certain that Mao personally ordered the death sentences, as he had just arrived in the province the day before they were passed, and up till that moment the authorities had been undecided about imposing the death penalty. The huge publicity was intended to instill fear in rural schools, which bore the brunt of the education cuts Mao had introduced to squeeze out more funds for the Superpower Program.

  Funding for education was already minuscule. Now it was to be cut back even further. Mao’s approach was not to raise the general standard of education in society as a whole, but to focus on a small elite, predominantly in science and other “useful” subjects, and leave the rest of the population to be illiterate or semi-illiterate slave-laborers. What funds were allotted to education went mainly to the cities; village schools received no funding, and schools in small towns very little. As a result, only tiny numbers of rural youth were able to go on to higher education.

  Even in the cities, young people’s chances of education were drastically slashed in 1957, when 80 percent of the 5 million urban elementary school leavers (i.e., 4 million people) and 800,000 of 1 million middle-school leavers were told that they could not continue their education. There had been widespread discontent in the cities, and the executions of the teachers in the “Little Hungary” case were a warning to urbanites too.

  Execution was not the only cause of death in this campaign: suicides were rife among those condemned as “Rightists.” In the Summer Palace in Peking, early morning exercise-takers frequently encountered corpses hanging from trees, and feet sticking out of the lake.

  Most of those branded as “Rightists” were put through hellish, though largely non-violent, denunciation meetings. Their families became outcasts, their spouses were shunted to undesirable jobs, and their children lost all hope of a decent education. To protect their children — and themselves — many people divorced their spouses when they were labeled as Rightists. Numerous families were broken up, causing lifelong tragedy to children and parents alike.

  After
they were denounced, most Rightists were deported to do hard labor in remote areas. Mao needed labor, particularly to open up virgin lands. A journalist called Dai Huang described how deportees were just dumped in places like the far north of Manchuria, known as “the Great Northern Wilderness,” and had to rig up a shelter “in a hurry, using wheat stems to make a roof” in a temperature of–38 °C. Even with a fire, “it was still a dozen or so degrees below zero …”

  The grass and beaten earth huts we lived in had wind coming in from all sides … there were hardly any vegetables or meat … We got up … just after 4 at dawn, and did not stop until 7 or 8 in the evening … In these 15–16 hours … we basically worked non-stop … in summer … We had to get up at 2 am … We had at most three hours’ sleep.

  While being subjected to ceaseless, relentless harangues—“You’re here to redeem your crime! Don’t dare to make trouble, or look for ways to be lazy!”—the deportees had to work on less than subsistence-level rations. Many died from malnutrition, illness, cold, overwork and in accidents doing unfamiliar jobs like felling trees.

  This journalist, Dai, had actually spoken up after he knew that Mao had set a trap. He wrote a petition to Mao, objecting to “the new ruling class” holding sumptuous “receptions and banquets,” while “tens of thousands of people … are chewing grass roots or tree bark.” He even took a swipe at Mao’s personality cult. “A chef cooking a good meal is said to be ‘thanks to Chairman Mao’s leadership.’ ” “Don’t think you are a wise god,” he warned Mao.

  Dai Huang’s wife divorced him, and his relatives suffered discrimination. A schoolteacher nephew was denied funds for a life-saving operation because of the family connection. Dai himself barely survived the Northern Wilderness, from which many were never to return.