by Jung Chang
On a cold October night, half-naked under a quilt, Liu was put on a plane to the city of Kaifeng. There, local doctors’ requests for an X-ray or hospitalization were denied. Death came within weeks, on 12 November 1969. Altogether, Liu had endured three years of physical suffering and mental anguish. He was cremated under a pseudonym, his face wrapped in white cloth. The crematorium staff had been told to vacate the premises, on the grounds that the corpse had a deadly infectious disease.
The extraordinary coda to Liu’s story is that his death was never made public during Mao’s lifetime. This seemingly anomalous behavior (most dictators like to dance on their enemies’ graves) was an indication of how insecure Mao felt. He was afraid that if the news got out, it would arouse sympathy for the dead man. In fact, the vilification of Liu continued for the rest of Mao’s life, with never a hint to the public that Liu was dead. Mao had got his revenge by making Liu die a painful and lingering death. But it cannot have tasted very sweet.
NOR DID MAO emerge a victor vis-à-vis his second-biggest hate, Marshal Peng De-huai. The first Rebel leader sent to Sichuan in December 1966 to haul Peng back to detention in Peking was so moved by Peng after he talked to him that he started to appeal on Peng’s behalf. The Rebel ended up in prison, but said he had no regrets for having stuck his neck out. Another Rebel leader who manhandled Peng expressed deep remorse later for what he had done. There is no question where people’s feelings lay when they knew what Peng stood for, or met him.
In Peking, Peng was dragged to scores of denunciation meetings, on Mao’s orders, at each one of which he was kicked by Rebels wearing heavy leather boots and beaten ferociously with staves. His ribs were broken, and he passed out repeatedly.
Unlike Liu, Peng was interrogated, some 260 times, as Mao genuinely feared he might have had some connection with Khrushchev. In solitary, Peng’s mind began to crack, but his redoubtable core never did. He wrote a lucid account of his life, refuting Mao’s accusations. The ending, written in September 1970, proclaimed: “I will still lift my head and shout a hundred times: my conscience is clear!”
Peng was a man of rugged constitution, and his ordeal lasted even longer than Liu’s — eight years, until 29 November 1974, when he was finally felled by cancer of the rectum. Like Liu, he was cremated under a pseudonym, and his death, too, was never announced while Mao remained alive.
The Belgian Communist Jacques Grippa, the most senior Maoist in Western Europe and a man who had himself been tortured in a Nazi camp, now wrote to Liu, as president, in Zhongnanhai. The letter was returned marked “Does not live at this address.”
50. THE CHAIRMAN’S NEW OUTFIT (1967–70 AGE 73–76)
BY EARLY 1967, Mao had axed millions of Party officials and replaced them mainly with army men. But he immediately found himself facing problems with the replacements. Most lacked sufficient brutality, and often protected and even re-employed purged officials, a feat they achieved by enlisting Mao’s hypocritical remark that “most of the old cadres are all right.” This was bad enough, but there was an additional cause for concern on Mao’s part. He had to rely on army officers to choose Rebels to staff the new set-up. The trouble was that in every region and institution there were different, rival groups, all calling themselves Rebels, and the military tended to incorporate the more moderate ones, even though Mao told them to promote “the Left,” i.e., those harshest in persecuting “capitalist-roaders.”
If the army men were allowed to have their way, Mao’s revenge would be incomplete. More important, if these new army enforcers turned out to be like the old officials, he would be back where he started. He had intended the Great Purge to install much more merciless enforcers.
One place that was giving Mao a headache was the city of Wuhan, his favorite spot for symbolic swims in the Yangtze. The commander there, Chen Zai-dao, had joined the Red Army in 1927 as a poverty-stricken peasant of eighteen, and risen through the ranks. General Chen was deeply averse to the Cultural Revolution, and had even shown sympathy for Mao’s primary target, Liu Shao-chi. In the province under his control, he reinstated large numbers of old officials, disbanded the most militant Rebel groups and arrested their leaders. In May 1967, when the moderates united into a province-wide organization called “the Million Peerless Troops,” which boasted a membership of 1.2 million, he supported them.
In mid-July, Mao came to Wuhan in person to order General Chen to change his position. Assuming that General Chen would just cave in, Mao planned then to use Wuhan as an example to get army units all over the country to follow suit.
But Mao was in for a huge shock. When he told General Chen that the Peerless was a “Conservative” organization, and that the military had committed grave errors in backing it, Chen told Mao to his face: “We don’t admit that.”
Next came something equally unheard-of: rank-and-file members of the Peerless, together with sympathizers in the army, reacted to Mao’s verdict with defiance. On the night of 19–20 July, when the message was relayed to them by military and civilian grandees whom Mao had brought with him from Peking, outraged crowds took to the streets, with hundreds of trucks carrying nearly 1,000 soldiers with machine-guns, as well as tens of thousands of workers armed with iron bars. The demonstrators blasted protests through loudspeakers at Mao’s villa compound. Many knew that this ultra-mysterious, top-security lakeside estate was Mao’s, and, seeing the lights on, guessed that he was in residence. Though no one dared to attack Mao openly, giant posters in the streets carried slogans attacking the Small Group and its leader, Mme Mao, indirectly aiming at Mao himself: “Jiang Qing keep away from power!” “Chairman Mao is being hoodwinked!” General Chen received extraordinary letters; one even urged him to “use your power … to wipe off the face of the Earth those worst dictators in the world who want no history and no culture …”
Most scary for Mao, hundreds of demonstrators and armed soldiers broke into the grounds of his villa, and got within a stone’s throw of him, carrying off a key member of his entourage, Small Group member Wang Li, who took a fearsome beating.
Never in eighteen years of compulsive, all-inclusive, self-protection had Mao faced so concrete a threat, both to his personal safety and to his sense of total power.
Chou En-lai, who had come to Wuhan ahead of Mao to arrange his security, had just returned to Peking, but had to fly straight back with 200 fully armed Praetorian Guards. He reverted smoothly to his old underground style, though this time operating in the state whose prime minister he was: waiting until dark before proceeding to Mao’s place, changing clothes and donning dark glasses. At 2:00 AM on 21 July, Mao was whisked away through the back door of his villa. All his three forms of transportation were on standby — his special train, his plane, and warships. Mao gave the order to leave by train, but once he was on board he switched to a plane — though not his own. The pilot was not told the destination, Shanghai, until he was airborne.
This was Mao’s last flight ever — and it was a flight. Soldiers rampaging right inside his estate was something utterly unthinkable. So was a demonstration openly hostile to his orders — and moreover, one involving fully armed troops.
The regime acted swiftly to show that it would not tolerate Wuhan. Chou got Small Group member Wang Li released, and embraced him demonstratively, putting his unshaven cheek to his. Wang Li returned to Peking to a staged welcome the like of which the country had never seen. A crowd of tens of thousands greeted him at Peking airport, headed by a teary Chou. This was followed by a million-strong rally on Tiananmen Square, presided over by Lin Biao.
General Chen was purged, and replaced by a man of unquestioning loyalty to Lin Biao. Army units involved in the defiance were disbanded, and sent to do forced labor. The Peerless disintegrated, and those who tried to hold out were physically beaten into collapse. Over the next few months, as many as 184,000 ordinary citizens and cadres were injured, crippled or killed in the province. General Chen and his deputies were ordered to Peking. There something else ext
raordinary happened, probably a world “first.” The Wuhan generals were beaten up — and not in some squalid dungeon, but at a Politburo meeting chaired by Chou En-lai. The perpetrators were senior officers headed by air force commander-in-chief Wu Fa-xian. The scene in the Politburo chamber was just like a street denunciation meeting, with the victims made to stand bent double, their arms twisted back in the jet-plane position, while they were punched and kicked. General Chen was knocked down and trampled on. Even in Mao’s gangster world, for the Politburo to become the scene of physical violence was unprecedented.
THE UPRISING IN Wuhan led Mao to conclude that over 75 percent of army officers were unreliable. He had a stab at initiating a huge purge among the military, and started denouncing “capitalist-roaders within the army,” but he had to pull back almost immediately. Having sacked most civilian officials, he simply could not afford to create more enemies in what was now his only power base.
Mao had to placate the army, so he threw it a few sops, pretending that he was not responsible for having tried to purge it. One sop was Small Group member Wang Li, of the Wuhan episode. Mao now made him a scapegoat. On 30 August, Wang Li was arrested. Hardly a month before, he had stood on Tiananmen Gate being hailed by a million people as the hero of Wuhan, the only occasion when leaders ever lined up there without Mao. Actually, this prominence was his undoing. The sight of him on Tiananmen, Mao’s preserve, annoyed the Great Helmsman, who said Wang Li had “got too big for his boots, and must be cut down to size.”
Purging Wang Li, however, did not solve Mao’s problem. He still had to find a way to make sure the new army enforcers would be men who would do what they were told unconditionally. To select such men, he depended on Lin Biao, who had to dig into the second tier of the army to find them. Mao thus found that he had no alternative but to allow Lin to turn the army leadership into a personal fiefdom, run by Lin’s cronies and working on the basis of what amounted to gang loyalty. On 17 August 1967, Mao authorized Lin to form a new body called “the Administration Office” to run the army. This consisted of Lin’s wife and a few generals who owed their careers, and sometimes even their lives, to Lin.
Typical of these was General Qiu Hui-zuo, the head of Army Logistics. At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution he had been denounced and beaten up. One of his ribs was broken, and his shoulder joints and muscles severely torn. He passed out on stage and was brought around by cold water for more beatings. Just when he thought he was going to die, an order came from Lin Biao to release him. He wrote afterwards to the Lins: “Hour 0:40 on 25 Jan 1967 was the moment of my second life, the moment I, my wife and children will never forget …”
Qiu promoted a personal coterie and indulged in a vendetta against those who had made him suffer. In his old department alone, 462 subordinates were arrested and tortured; among their lesser torments were being forced to eat bread soaked in excrement, and being kicked in the genitals. Eight died.
Qiu was an example of a person who had become totally cynical, for reasons that went back much further than the Cultural Revolution, and related to the unscrupulous nature of the Party itself from the earliest days. On the eve of the Long March, he and several other Red Army youngsters, including one aged eleven, had been ordered to hide some Party documents, which they sealed and sank in a river tied to stones. As they were climbing back up the river bank, they found themselves staring into the gun-barrels of their own comrades who had been sent to eliminate them so that no trail would be left. Qiu only survived because of a chance intervention.
Lin let Qiu and his other cronies wage their vendettas and build their own gangs as long as they obeyed him. Mao did the same with Lin. For a while, Mao tried to keep his own men in the army, and appointed one of his acolytes, General Yang Cheng-wu, as acting chief of staff. But Lin did not want General Yang on his back, and eventually got Mao to clap him in prison in March 1968. Mao even suspended the Military Council, the old supreme authority which he himself chaired. Mao retained just one vital veto: moving any force from battalion-strength up required his direct authorization.
Lin installed a sidekick called Huang Yong-sheng to be army chief of staff. Huang was so junior that Mao could not even put a face to his name. A well-known womanizer, he soon became Mrs. Lin’s lover. Ye Qun was a woman of voracious sexual appetite, for which she had little outlet with the clearly impotent marshal, whom she described as “a frozen corpse.” The relationship between her and her lover is revealed in a three-hour telephone conversation that was bugged.
YE QUN [YQ]: I am so worried you might get into trouble for pursuing physical satisfaction. I can tell you, this life of mine is linked with you, political life and personal life … Don’t you know what 101 [Lin Biao’s code name] is like at home? I live with his abuse … I can sense you value feelings … The country is big. Our children can each take up one key position! Am I not right?
HUANG: Yes, you are absolutely right.
YQ: … Our children put together, there must be five of them. They will be like five generals and will get on. Each will take one key position, and they can all be your assistants.
HUANG: Oh? I am so grateful to you!
YQ: … I took that measure [implying contraceptive]. Just in case I have it and have to get rid of it [implying baby], I hope you will come and visit me once. [Sound of sobbing]
HUANG: I will come! I will come! Don’t be like this. This makes me very sad.
YQ: Another thing: you mustn’t be restricted by me. You can fool around … I’m not narrow-minded. You can have other women, and be hot with them. Don’t worry about me …
HUANG: … I’m faithful to you alone.
YQ: If you fancy other women, that’s all right. But just one thing. She must be absolutely tight-lipped. If she talks, and if I am implicated, there will be tragedy …
HUANG [speechless] …
YQ: I feel that if we handle it well, it will be good for you, good for me … Do you believe this?
HUANG: I do! I do! I do!
With this mixture of genuine personal feeling and bare-faced political calculation, the fate of the new chief of staff was bound up with that of the Lins.
Lin turned the air force into his main base. His lackey there made the Lins’ 24-year-old son “Tiger” deputy chief of its war department and told the air force it “must report everything to [Tiger], and take orders from [Tiger].” Lin’s daughter Dodo was made deputy editor of the air force paper.
IN SUMMER 1967, dissatisfied with the army, Mao contemplated forming a kind of “storm trooper” force, composed of those Rebels whom he called “the Left.” After the Wuhan scare in July, in a vengeful mood, Mao incited “the Left” to stage assaults on other groups that he termed “the Conservatives.” When Mao fled to Shanghai, he got “the Left” there to attack the rival group. The result was the biggest single factional battle in Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution, which took place two weeks after Mao arrived. That day, 4 August, over 100,000 “Left” militants, armed with spears and iron bars, surrounded some 25,000 of their rivals in a factory by the sea, with the exit sealed off by the navy — a deployment inconceivable without Mao’s orders. By the end of the day, over 900 people had been wounded, many of them crippled and some dying. Two helicopters filmed the scene — again impossible unless Mao gave the word — and a camera crew had set up in an ideal vantage point two days ahead. A 2½-hour documentary of the event was shown to organized crowds. Mao watched it in his villa. The man who led the attack, Wang Hong-wen, was subsequently promoted by Mao to be his national No. 3. “I’ve seen your film,” Mao told him, congratulating him on “winning a victory.”
On the day of the battle, Mao gave orders to form his “storm troopers.” “Arm the Left,” he wrote to his wife, the leader of the Small Group. “Why can’t we arm the Left? They [the Conservatives] beat us up, we can beat them up, too.”
But this order to distribute arms to civilians opened up a can of worms. While in some places, like Wuhan, the distinct
ion between moderates and “the Left” was fairly clear, in many others even the most devoted Mao followers could not tell which group was more militant, as all the groups were vying to appear the most aggressive. Typical was Anhui province, where the two opposing blocs rejoiced in the ultra-political names of “Wonderful” and “Fart.” Because the former had got into the old government offices first, it declared that it had seized power from the capitalist-roaders, and proclaimed: “Our seizing power is wonderful.” The latter snorted: “ ‘Wonderful’? What a load of fart!”
Neither in fact was more militant than the other; both were just competing to be incorporated into the new power structure. Lacking any criterion more precise than the ill-defined “militancy” towards capitalist-roaders, army units handed out weapons to whichever faction they decided was “the Left.” Other factions then raided arsenals to seize weapons for themselves, often with the collusion of their own sympathizers in the army. As a result, guns became widely available. Factional fighting escalated into mini — civil wars across China, involving practically all urban areas. The regime began sliding into something close to anarchy for the first time since taking power nearly two decades before.
Mao quickly realized that his “storm troopers” notion would not work everywhere. So, while he continued to build up a force of them 1 million strong in Shanghai, where he had particularly strict control, elsewhere he had to rescind his decree to “arm the Left,” and on 5 September ordered that all guns must be returned. However, those who had acquired them were often reluctant to give them up. More than a year later, Mao told Albania’s defense minister that 360,000 weapons had been collected in Sichuan alone (a province of 70 million people), and a lot more were still out there. With guns now in unofficial hands, “bandits” appeared in remote areas.