by Jung Chang
From the moment it was clear that Mao was coming after Liu, from the Conference of the Seven Thousand in January 1962, Guang-mei encouraged her husband to stand up to Mao. This was in vivid contrast to the behavior of many leaders’ wives, who urged their spouses to kowtow. In the ensuing years, she helped Liu to entrench his position. In June 1966, when Mao was fomenting violence in schools and universities, Liu made a last-ditch attempt to curb the mayhem by sending in “work teams,” and Guang-mei became a member of the one sent to Qinghua University in Peking. There she came into collision with a twenty-year-old militant called Kuai Da-fu. Kuai’s original interest in politics had been sparked by a sense of justice: as a boy of thirteen in a village during the famine, he had petitioned Peking about grassroots officials ill-treating peasants. But when, in summer 1966, the Cultural Revolution was presented by the media as a “struggle for power,” Kuai developed an appetite for power and led riotous actions to “seize power from the work team.” He was put under dormitory arrest by the work team for eighteen days, which Liu authorized.
In the small hours of 1 August, Kuai was woken up by cars screeching to a halt to find before him none other than Chou En-lai. Kuai was completely overwhelmed. He could not make himself sit properly on the sofa, but perched on the edge. Suavely putting him at his ease, Chou told him he had come on behalf of Mao, and quizzed him about the work team — and the role of Mme Liu. Even though he had a stenographer with him, Chou took notes himself. The session lasted three hours, until after 5:00 AM, when Chou invited Kuai to come to the Great Hall of the People that evening. There they talked for another three hours. Mao used Kuai’s complaints as ammunition, and from now on Kuai was Mao’s point man against the Lius.
On 25 December, the eve of Mao’s seventy-third birthday, on the orders of the Small Group, Kuai led 5,000 students in a parade through Peking with trucks fitted with loudspeakers blaring “Down with Liu Shao-chi!” This unusual demonstration was a step towards preparing people for the fact that the president of China was about to become an enemy, and even though it was not announced in the media, it made Liu’s fall known to the nation. Kuai and his “demonstration” also enabled Mao to make it seem that Liu’s downfall was by some sort of popular demand.
From here on, the Lius were tormented in countless ways. At dawn on New Year’s Day 1967, Mao sent New Year greetings to his old colleague by getting staff in Zhongnanhai to daub giant insults inside the Lius’ house. Similar menaces followed, all choreographed — except one.
This was on 6 January, when Kuai’s group seized the Lius’ teenage daughter, Ping-ping, and then telephoned Guang-mei to tell her that the girl had been hit by a car and was in a hospital, which needed consent to perform an amputation. Both parents raced to the hospital, which discomfited the Rebels. Kuai recounted:
The students never thought Liu Shao-chi would come, and they were all frightened. They knew they couldn’t touch Liu Shao-chi … the Centre had given no instructions [about handling Liu in person]. We dared not be rash … We knew this kind of “Down with” in politics could well turn to “Up with” … Without clear and specific instructions from the Centre, when it came to blame, we would have had it. So my pals asked Liu to go back, and kept Wang Guang-mei.
This is a good self-confession of how the Rebels really worked; they were tools, and cowards, and they knew it.
As this stunt had not been centrally orchestrated, soldiers descended on the hospital within minutes. The students scurried nervously through the motions of denouncing Guang-mei in just half an hour. While this was going on, Kuai was called to the phone, which, he remembered,
gave me a big fright when the voice on the line said. “This is Chou En-lai.” Chou told me to release Wang Guang-mei: “No beating, no humiliation. Do you understand?” I said: “I understand” … He hung up. Less than a minute later, another call came. It was from Jiang Qing — my only call ever from her. As I took the phone, I heard her giggling. She said: “You got Wang Guang-mei. What’s all this? Are you fooling around? Don’t beat her, don’t humiliate her.” She repeated Chou En-lai’s words and said: “The premier is anxious, and asked me to telephone you. As soon as you finish denouncing Wang Guang-mei, send her back.”
So ended the only spontaneous move by the Rebels against the Lius. Chou’s order to spare Guang-mei was not made out of the kindness of his heart. Kuai’s action was unauthorized, and did not fit in with Mao’s timetable.
Mao’s next step was to have Liu brought to Suite 118 in the Great Hall for a tête-à-tête in the middle of the night on 13 January. Mao showed he was well aware of the hoax played on the Lius by inquiring: “How are Ping-ping’s legs?” He then advised Liu to “read some books,” mentioning two titles both having the word “mechanical” in them, which Mao claimed were by Heidegger and Diderot. This was a way of advising Liu to be less stiff-necked, meaning he should do some kowtowing. Liu did not grovel, but repeated the offer he had made many times: to resign and go and work as a peasant. He asked Mao to stop the Cultural Revolution and punish only him, and not to harm anybody else. Mao waxed non-committal, and merely asked Liu to look after his health. With this he saw Liu, his closest colleague for nearly three decades, to the door for the last time — and to a slow and agonizing death.
WITHIN DAYS THE Lius’ telephones were cut off. House arrest was now total, with the walls covered with enormous insulting posters and slogans. On 1 April, Mao made Liu’s purge official to the general public by having him condemned as “the biggest capitalist-roader” in People’s Daily. Right after this, Kuai organized a rally 300,000 strong to humiliate and abuse Guang-mei. Chou discussed the details with Kuai beforehand, and on the day itself Chou’s office kept in constant contact by phone with Kuai’s group. Mme Mao added her personal touch by telling Kuai: “When Wang Guang-mei was in Indonesia, she lost all face for the Chinese. She even wore a necklace!” Mme Mao also accused Guang-mei of wearing traditional Chinese dresses “to make herself a whore with Sukarno in Indonesia,” and told Kuai: “You must find those things and make her wear them.” Mme Mao had been bitterly jealous of Guang-mei being able to wear glamorous clothes when she went abroad as the president’s wife, while she herself was cooped up in China, where these things were not allowed.
Kuai recalled that Mme Mao “was telling me explicitly, in effect, to humiliate Wang Guang-mei … We could insult her any way we wanted.” So a traditional Chinese tight dress was forced on to Guang-mei, over her padded clothing, making her body appear bulging and ugly. A string of ping-pong balls was hung around her neck to signify a pearl necklace. The whole rally was filmed by cameramen, undoubtedly for Mao, as it could not have been done without his authorization.
But the Maos failed to break Guang-mei. During the pre-rally interrogation, she showed extraordinary fearlessness — and a quick wit — and defended her husband eloquently. When she was hauled onto the stage to face the crowd’s blood-curdling screams and upthrust fists, her interrogators asked her: “Aren’t you scared?” Her calm answer impressed them: “No, I am not.”
Decades later, Kuai spoke with admiration about Guang-mei: “She was very strong … She stood straight, and refused to bow her head when ordered to. The students went at her with force, great force. She was pushed down to her knees … but instantly she stood up straight. Wang Guang-mei would not be cowed. She was full of bitterness against Mao Tse-tung, only she could not say it straight out.” Afterwards, she wrote to Mao to protest.
Liu did likewise, again and again. Mao’s response was to ratchet up the punishment, leaving detailed instructions with the Small Group before he left Peking on 13 July. The moment he was gone, several hundred thousand Rebels were summoned to camp outside Zhongnanhai, blasting insults like “pile of dog shit” at the Lius through scores of loudspeakers. Liu’s subordinates were dragged outside the walls of Zhongnanhai to be denounced in a sort of grotesque road show.
At the height of this, Liu was presented with a demand to “bow your head obediently and a
dmit your crimes to Chairman Mao.” This was purportedly in the name of some Rebels, to pretend that it had come from “the masses.” But it was presented to Liu by Mao’s chamberlain and chief of the Praetorian Guard, Wang Dong-xing, which left no doubt who was the puppeteer. Liu turned the demand down flat. Anticipating the worst after this defiance, Guang-mei held up a bottle of sleeping pills in front of her husband, offering to commit suicide with him. Neither spoke a word for fear of bugging, which would almost certainly have led to the pills being confiscated. Liu shook his head.
Knowing how much Liu’s strength had come from his wife, Mao ordered the couple separated. On 18 July, they were told they would be denounced at separate meetings that evening. More than three decades later Guang-mei wrote about the moment:
I said: “It looks as if it really is goodbye this time!” I just couldn’t stop my tears falling …
… For the only time in our lives, Shao-chi did my packing for me, and he folded my clothes neatly. In the last few minutes, we sat gazing at each other … Then he who rarely cracked a joke said: “This is like waiting for a sedan-chair to come and carry you off [to be married]!” … We burst out laughing.
After brutal denunciation meetings, the Lius were put in separate virtual solitary confinement. They met again only once, when they were dragged in front of a kangaroo court as a couple, on 5 August, the first anniversary of Mao’s written tirade against Liu. Mao’s point man Kuai had prepared a big event at Tiananmen Square, where a stage had been specially constructed for the Lius to be paraded in front of an organized crowd of hundreds of thousands. In the end, Mao vetoed the idea. He could not risk this being seen by foreigners. If they were to witness the savagery towards his former closest colleague, here in the heart of Peking, i.e., clearly backed by him, the whole charade could easily backfire. Not least, this could affect foreign Maoists, many of whom had already been alienated by Mao’s Purge. Nor could Mao risk the Lius speaking. Mao could count on the Lius to produce sharp rebuttals, as they had done in letters to himself and in their retorts to Rebels. Mao did not dare risk a Stalin-type show trial. So the Lius ended up receiving their salvo of abuse only inside Zhongnanhai, from Praetorian Guards dressed in mufti and from Zhongnanhai staff.
On that day, 5 August, the “capitalist-roaders” Nos. 2 and 3, Deng Xiao-ping and Tao Zhu (Liu was the “No. 1”), were denounced outside their own houses too. They had both fallen into disgrace, like many other old Mao favorites, because they had declined to cooperate with Mao’s Great Purge. But as Mao did not hate them as much as he did Liu, they were treated less fiercely. Tao Zhu’s wife, Zeng Zhi, was an old friend of Mao’s, and was spared. She recounted a telling episode which reveals how precise Mao’s control was. While her husband was being beaten up, she was allowed to sit down. A militant woman was about to set upon her when Zeng Zhi noticed a man in the audience shaking his head at the woman, who promptly backed off.
Zeng Zhi knew that Mao’s “friendship” and protection could vanish as soon as she did anything that displeased the Great Helmsman. Later, when her terminally ill husband was sent into internal exile, she was given the option of accompanying him. Both she and her husband knew that if she did so she would lose Mao’s goodwill, which would ruin her and their only daughter. So the couple decided she should not go with him, and he died in exile alone.
At the kangaroo court inside Zhongnanhai on 5 August 1967, Liu stood his ground and gave succinct answers; but as soon as he tried to say more, Little Red Books rained down on his head, and he was shouted down by the crowd yelling mindless slogans. The Lius were punched, kicked, “jet-planed,” and had their hair pulled ferociously back to expose their faces for photographers and a film crew. At one moment, the meeting was adjourned and an order was given by a Mao point man to make it more ferocious for the cameras. The film shows Liu then being trampled on the ground. In a supreme act of sadism, the Lius’ six-year-old daughter and their other children were brought to watch their parents being assaulted. The whole vile episode was also attended by Mao’s special observer — his own daughter Li Na.
Mao may have derived satisfaction from the Lius’ ordeal, but he can hardly have failed to register that they were not crushed. At one point, Guang-mei tore free and clung to a corner of her husband’s clothes. For a few minutes, under a rain of kicks and punches, the couple held each other’s hands tight, struggling to stand up straight.
Guang-mei was to pay a hefty price for her courage. A little over a month later, she was charged with spying for America — plus, for good measure, Japan and Chiang Kai-shek. For twelve years, until after Mao’s death, she was locked up in the top-security prison, Qincheng, where for long periods she was not allowed even to walk, so that years later she still could not stand up straight. She remained undaunted. Her case team called for her execution. Mao said “No.” He did not want her put out of her misery so soon.
Guang-mei’s siblings were incarcerated, as was her septuagenarian mother, who died in prison a few years later. The Lius’ children became homeless, and were subjected to beatings and imprisonment. One son of Liu’s from a previous marriage committed suicide. Meanwhile, Liu’s house, a short walk from Mao’s, was turned into a uniquely Maoist slow-death cell.
LIU WAS NEARLY seventy, and his health deteriorated fast. One leg became paralyzed, and he was in a state of permanent sleep deprivation, as the sleeping pills on which he had been dependent were now withheld. He was kept alive, barely. On 20 December 1967, his jailers recorded that they were “only keeping him alive, just short of starvation.” “Tea has been stopped …” His life-threatening ailments, pneumonia and diabetes, were treated, although, in a further Maoist turn of the screw, the doctors would curse him while patching him up. But his mental health was deliberately allowed to collapse. On 19 May 1968, his jailers reported that he “brushed his teeth with a comb and soap, put his socks on over his shoes and his underpants outside his trousers …” And in the cruel style that was the order of the day, they wrote that Liu “plays the idiot, and makes one disgusting fool of himself after another.”
That summer, Mao twice gave orders through Wang Dong-xing to the doctors and the guards that they must “keep him [Liu] alive until after the 9th Congress,” when Mao planned to have Liu expelled from the Party. If Liu was dead, this rigmarole would not provide Mao with the same satisfaction. Once the congress was over, the clear implication was that Liu should be left to die.
By October 1968, Liu had to be drip-fed through the nose, and it seemed he might die any minute. Mao was not ready for the congress, so the Central Committee — in fact, a rump minority which contained only 47 percent of the original members, the rest having been purged — was hastily convened to expel Liu from the Party. It also removed him from the presidency, an act that did not even pretend to follow constitutional procedure.
Liu’s case team had signally failed to come up with a case. Mao had told it he wanted a spy charge, which was a way of avoiding any policy issues, and of steering the investigators away from Liu’s links with himself. In fact, Mao was so nervous about Liu speaking to anyone that the team investigating Liu was forbidden even to set eyes on him, let alone ask him any questions. Instead, a large number of other people were imprisoned and interrogated, to try to turn up evidence against him. It was partly to accommodate key detainees in the Liu case that Qincheng, the prison for the “elite,” which had been built with the help of Russian advisers in the 1950s, was expanded by 50 percent. Its first inmate in the Cultural Revolution was Shi Zhe, who had interpreted for Liu with Stalin and who was pressed to say that Liu was a Russian spy. Also imprisoned here was the American Sidney Rittenberg, who had known Mme Liu in the 1940s. Pressure was put on him to say that he had recruited her, and Liu, for American intelligence. (Rittenberg observed that the interrogators, while going through the required frenzied motions, did not seem to believe their own case.) Attempts were also made to get former Nationalist intelligence chiefs to say that Guang-mei had spied for them.
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Most of those detained and called upon to tell blatant lies tried their hardest not to comply. Among those who paid dearly for sticking to their guns were two former Party chiefs, Li Li-san and Lo Fu. Their families were thrown into prison, and the two men themselves were both to meet their deaths. Li-san’s Russian wife, who had stood by him through the purges in Russia in the 1930s when he had been imprisoned there for two years, now spent eight years in Mao’s prison.
Even some of the members of the Lius’ case team declined to fabricate evidence. As a result, the team itself had to be purged three times, and two of its three chiefs ended up in prison. It found itself in a Catch-22 situation, as concocting evidence could be as dangerous as failing to unearth it. On one occasion, the team claimed that Liu had wanted American troops to invade China in 1946, and that Liu had wanted to see President Truman about this. “Making such a claim,” Mao said, “is … to treat us like fools. America sending in troops en masse: even the Nationalists did not want that.” In the end, the team just piled up a list of assertions, one being that Liu “married the American spy Wang Guang-mei who had been sent to Yenan by the American Strategic Intelligence.” Its report, which was delivered to the Central Committee by Mao’s faithful slave, Chou En-lai, called Liu a “traitor, enemy agent and scab,” and recommended the death sentence. But Mao rejected it, as he did for Mme Liu.
Mao was kept fully informed about Liu’s last sufferings. Photographs were taken showing Liu in such agony that he had squeezed two hard plastic bottles right out of shape. In April 1969, when the 9th Congress convened at last, Mao announced in a voice devoid of even a show of pity, that Liu was at death’s door.
In his lucid hours, Liu had maintained his dignity. On 11 February 1968 he had written a last self-defense, in which he even had a go at Mao about his dictatorial style from back in the early 1920s. After that, Liu went totally silent. Mao’s whole modus operandi depended on breaking people, but he had failed to make Liu crawl.