by Jung Chang
Mao had unleashed a dynamic that was undermining his own power. He had to abandon his attempt to identify factions as Left and Conservative, and called for all groups to unite. But his orders were ignored. Claiming that they were crushing “Conservatives,” young men, mostly, carried on fighting, finding it more fun than doing boring jobs.
People stopped going to work. The economy was now seriously interrupted. Arms industries, even the nuclear program, were upset for the first time since the Cultural Revolution had started. An element of anarchy even crept into the Praetorian Guard. One of its members gave Mao’s travel schedule to a student who fancied himself as a detective, who was able to tail Mao covertly. Although both were soon arrested, such a lapse in security had never happened before.
A YEAR LATER, in 1968, factional clashes with firearms had shown little sign of abating, despite a flood of commands from Peking. One man who was being conspicuously unruly was Kuai Da-fu, the Qinghua University student whom Mao had used to torment Liu Shao-chi and his wife. Kuai had by now become the most famous “leftist” in the country, and he was determined to bring his opponents in the university to their knees. He ignored repeated orders to stop, as he claimed that his rivals were “Conservatives,” and therefore fair game to beat up, in accordance with Mao’s earlier directive. Mao had to step in personally to get him to toe the line, and simultaneously made an example of him to send a warning to the whole country that factional wars had to stop.
On 27 July, 40,000 unarmed workers were dispatched to Kuai’s university to disarm his group. Not knowing that the order came from Mao, Kuai resisted, and his group killed five workers and wounded more than 700. Next day Kuai was summoned to the Great Hall of the People. There he was astonished to see Mao, flanked by all the top leaders. Kuai threw himself into Mao’s arms — probably the only time an outsider ever did this — and sobbed his heart out. Mao, too, apparently cried, quite possibly out of frustration at his own inability to reconcile his impulses with his practical needs. The impulse side of Mao wanted the many “Conservatives” he knew were out there to be beaten to a pulp. But the practical side recognized that in his own interest he had to restore order. He told Kuai and the other top Rebel leaders present that he himself had been behind the disarming of Kuai’s faction, and that if they, or anyone else, went on fighting, the army would “eliminate” them. Kuai and his colleagues signed a record of this message, which was made public.
Kuai was packed off to a plant in far Ningxia. All university student organizations were now disbanded, and the students put to work in ordinary jobs, with many dispersed to the hinterland. This diaspora was followed by that of well over 10 million middle-school pupils, who were scattered to villages and state farms across China. In the following years, over 16 million urban youth were rusticated — which was also a way of dealing with unemployment. This ended the era of the student Red Guards.
But among non-student Rebel groups, sporadic mini — civil wars dragged on in many places. To stop them, a phantom conspiracy called “the May 16 Corps” was invented as a catch-all to condemn anyone who disobeyed orders. Kuai, who was nationally famous, was turned into its “chief” and detained. Altogether, under this rubric, a staggering 10 million Rebels were condemned, of whom 3.5 million were arrested.
STATE TERROR NOT ONLY hugely raised the level of violence, but was much more horrific than the factional fighting itself. The clearest illustration of this came in the southern province of Guangxi in summer 1968. There, one faction refused to recognize the authority of Mao’s point man, General Wei Guo-qing (who had helped direct the climactic battle against the French at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam in 1954). Wei was determined to use any degree of force to crush his opponents.
This involved not only using machine-guns, mortars and artillery, but also inciting gruesome murders of large numbers of people designated by the regime as “class enemies.” As the boss of Binyang County, an army officer, told his subordinates: “I’m now going to reveal the bottom line to you: in this campaign, we must put to death about one-third or a quarter of the class enemies by bludgeoning or stoning.” Killing by straightforward execution was rated not frightening enough: “It’s OK to execute a few to start with, but we must guide people to use fists, stones and clubs. Only this way can we educate the masses.” Over a period of eleven days after the order was given, between 26 July and 6 August 1968, 3,681 people in this county were beaten to death, many in ghastly ways; by comparison, the death toll in the previous two years of the Cultural Revolution had been “only” 68. This bout of killing claimed some 100,000 lives in the province.
The authorities staged “model demonstrations of killing” to show people how to apply maximum cruelty, and in some cases police supervised the killings. In the general atmosphere of fostered cruelty, cannibalism broke out in many parts of the province, the best-known being the county of Wuxuan, where a post-Mao official investigation (in 1983, promptly halted and its findings suppressed) produced a list of 76 names of victims. The practice of cannibalism usually started with the Maoist staple, “denunciation rallies.” Victims were slaughtered immediately afterwards, and choice parts of their bodies — hearts, livers and sometimes penises — were excised, often before the victims were dead, and cooked on the spot to be eaten in what were called at the time “human flesh banquets.”
Guangxi is the region with perhaps the most picturesque landscape in China: exquisite hills rising and falling over crystal-clear waters in which the peaks look as real as they do above. It was against these heavenly double silhouettes, by the purest rivers, that these “human flesh banquets” were laid out.
An 86-year-old peasant who, in broad daylight, had slit open the chest of a boy whose only crime was to be the son of a former landlord, showed how people had no trouble finding justifications for their actions in Mao’s words. “Yes, I killed him,” he told an investigative writer later. “The person I killed is an enemy … Ha, ha! I make revolution, and my heart is red! Didn’t Chairman Mao say: It’s either we kill them, or they kill us? You die and I live, this is class struggle!”
STATE-SPONSORED KILLINGS reached their extreme in every province in 1968. That year was dominated by a mammoth campaign called “Sort Out Class Ranks.” The aim of this drive was to make an inventory of every single “class enemy” in the entire population, and to impose various punishments on them, including execution. So all the victims from both before and during the Cultural Revolution were dragged out and persecuted again. In addition, the regime set out to uncover new enemies by scrutinizing the history and conduct of every adult in the nation, and looking into every unsolved suspicion. The number of labels for official outcasts ran to as many as twenty-three, and the number of people persecuted amounted to many tens of millions — more than ever before.
An eyewitness described how the new boss of Anhui province, an army general, made decisions about executions. Flipping languidly through a list of “counter-revolutionaries” presented to him by the police, he paused every now and then, and raised his voice in a quintessentially official inflection (drawing on the end of a sentence in a pinched nasal tone, sounding rather bored): “Are you still keeping this one? Might as well kill him.” “What about this one? Mm — finish her off.” Then he asked how many people the provinces next to his planned to execute: “How many is Jiangsu killing this month? And how many is Zhejiang?” When told, he said: “Let’s take the average between the two.” People were executed accordingly.
One of the worst-ravaged provinces was Inner Mongolia, where Mao harbored suspicions about a plot to detach the province and link it up with Outer Mongolia and the Russians. The new boss there, General Teng Hai-qing, vigorously investigated this suspicion of Mao’s, using torture on a large scale. According to post-Mao revelations, cases included a Muslim woman having her teeth pulled out by pliers, then her nose and ears twisted off, before being hacked to death. Another woman was raped with a pole (she then committed suicide). One man had nails driven into his
skull. Another had his tongue cut out and then his eyes gouged out. Another was beaten with clubs on the genitals before having gunpowder forced up his nostrils and set alight. Post-Mao official figures revealed that over 346,000 people were condemned and 16,222 died as a result in this one case. The number of people in the province who “suffered” in some way was later officially put at over 1 million — of whom 75 percent were ethnic Mongols.
Another province that went through great trauma was Yunnan, in the southwest, where (according to official figures) in one trumped-up case alone nearly 1,400,000 people were persecuted under the new provincial boss, General Tan Fu-ren. Seventeen thousand of them were either executed or beaten to death, or driven to suicide. In a rare dramatic example of how those who rule by the sword can be felled by the sword, General Tan himself was assassinated in December 1970, making him the highest official ever to have died this way in Mao’s China, where assassinations were extremely rare. The shooter was an HQ staff officer called Wang Zi-zheng, who actually held no personal grudge against General Tan. It was Mao’s regime he hated. Back in 1947, he had been involved with an anti-Communist force that had shot dead a Communist militia chief. He had then escaped. Now, over two decades later, his home village had started a manhunt for him. Even though he was more than a thousand miles away and had changed his name, he was found and detained in April 1970. Knowing what his fate was likely to be, he decided he would try to kill General Tan, who was not only the biggest VIP around, but was doing terrible things to Yunnan. One night, the staff officer escaped from detention, went home to say goodbye to his wife and son, stole two pistols and twenty bullets from the HQ, where they were locked in a safe (as always), climbed into General Tan’s house and shot him dead. When his pursuers came for him, this unique avenger shot and wounded two of them before turning the gun on himself.
BY EARLY 1969 Mao’s new power apparatus was secured. In April he convened a Party Congress, the 9th, to formalize his reconstructed regime. The previous congress had been in 1956. Although the Party charter stipulated one every five years, Mao had held off letting this one convene for thirteen years, until he felt that all opposition had been thoroughly purged.
The new delegates were selected exclusively for their loyalty to Mao, and the yardstick of loyalty was how cruel and harsh they had been to Mao’s enemies. Inside the congress hall, where no such enemies were present, they tried to demonstrate their fealty by jumping up incessantly, shouting slogans such as “Long live Chairman Mao!” while Mao was speaking. It took Mao twenty minutes to get through two pages of his opening address. This farce was not something he wanted from his top echelon, which was meant to be a practical machine. He looked irritated, and cut short his speech. After the session, he had the congress secretariat issue rules banning unscheduled slogan chanting.
The core leadership under Mao now consisted of Lin Biao, Chou En-lai and two chiefs of the Small Group: Chen Bo-da and Kang Sheng. The Small Group, Mao’s office dealing with the Cultural Revolution, was wound up. Mme Mao was brought into the Politburo. So were Lin Biao’s wife and his main cronies, such as army chief of staff (and Lin’s wife’s lover) Huang Yong-sheng. In the Central Committee, 81 percent of the members were new, and nearly half the new intake were army men, including the generals who had presided over the atrocities in Guangxi, Yunnan and Inner Mongolia. Lin himself collected the ultimate prize of being written into the Party charter as Mao’s No. 2 and successor, an unprecedented badge of power and glory.
Mao had completed his Great Purge, though this did not mean that killings ceased. In the ten years from when Mao started the Purge until his death in 1976, at least 3 million people died violent deaths, and post-Mao leaders acknowledged that 100 million people, one-ninth of the entire population, suffered in one way or another. The killings were sponsored by the state. Only a small percentage was at the hands of Red Guards. Most were the direct work of Mao’s reconstructed regime.
51. A WAR SCARE (1969–71 AGE 75–77)
MAO HAD PRESENTED the Cultural Revolution as a move to rid China of Soviet-style “revisionists.” So, when he was gearing up to declare victory and inaugurate his post-Purge regime at the 9th Congress in April 1969, he looked for a symbol of triumph over the Soviet Union. He set his mind on a small, controlled, armed engagement with Russia, a border clash.
There had been many clashes along the 7,000-kilometer Sino-Soviet border. For the site of his battle, Mao chose a small uninhabited island called Zhenbao (Damansky in Russian), in the Ussuri River on the northeast border. This was a clever choice, as Russia’s claim to the island was far from established.
On 2 March, using a specially trained and equipped elite unit, the Chinese laid an ambush that left 32 Russians dead and between 50 and 10 °Chinese wounded or killed. The Russians brought up heavy artillery and tanks, and on the night of 14–15 March a much bigger encounter ensued, in which the Russians fired missiles 20 kilometers into China. About 60 Russians and at least 80 °Chinese were killed. One CIA photo expert said that the Chinese side of the Ussuri was “so pockmarked by Soviet artillery that it looked like a ‘moonscape.’ ” The Russians were obviously serious.
The fierceness of the retaliation took Mao aback, and he became worried that the Russians might invade, which he described to his inner circle as a possibility. He urgently ordered his army to stop fighting, and to do nothing even when the Russians continued shelling.
A week later, the old hot line from Moscow unexpectedly came alive. It was the Soviet premier Aleksei Kosygin asking to speak to either Mao or Chou En-lai. By this time, China and Russia had had virtually no diplomatic contacts for some three years. The operator refused to put the call through, saying on the fourth attempt that they could not take a call for Chairman Mao from “that scoundrel revisionist Kosygin.” Next day, the Chinese detected Russian troop movements near the disputed island. Mao at once told the Foreign Ministry to inform Moscow that it was “ready to hold diplomatic negotiations”—meaning he did not want a war. Mao was especially scared that the Russians might target a surprise air strike on the 9th Congress, which was due to open in Peking in ten days’ time, and at which he himself had no choice but to make an appearance.
So the congress met in conditions of secrecy extraordinary even by the regime’s ultra-secretive standards. The event was not announced until it was already over, and the 2,000 delegates and staff were imprisoned in their hotels with the curtains closed, and banned from opening windows facing the streets. Instead of being driven direct from their hotel to the venue, the Great Hall of the People, delegates were bused by circuitous routes round Peking before being delivered to the Hall surreptitiously, at intervals. On the day of the opening, 1 April, when Mao was scheduled to attend, the Hall was made to look as if nothing was happening there at all. Thick curtains concealed the fact that the lights were on (the session did not open until 5:00 PM) and that the building was full of people.
Mao had grounds for alarm. A few months later, on 13 August 1969, the Russians attacked thousands of miles to the west, on the Kazakhstan — Xinjiang border, where they had overwhelming logistical advantages. Scores of Russian tanks and armored vehicles drove deep inside China, surrounding and destroying Chinese troops.
Mao had no effective defense against Soviet tanks, if they chose to target Peking. He had always banked on the size of China and its population as insurance against anyone wanting to invade. But ever since Malinovsky had sounded his close colleagues out about getting rid of him in late 1964, the idea of a quick Soviet thrust at his capital in coordination with his opponents had preyed on Mao’s mind. He had issued an order: “Pile up some mountains if there aren’t any,” and spent a fortune in money and labor building “mountains” to block Russian tanks. Each of these was designed to be 20–40 meters high, 250–400 meters wide, and 120–220 meters deep. Earth and rocks were moved from far away, and elaborate defense works were constructed inside, before the project was abandoned some years later. All who saw these “mount
ains” (among them former US defense secretary and ex-CIA chief James Schlesinger) concluded that they were completely useless.
Mao was also worried about a nuclear strike against his atomic installations. In fact, Moscow did envisage such an operation, and went as far as sounding out Washington. Mao got so nervous that he broke his rule about shunning all contact with the Kremlin, and agreed to Kosygin stopping over in Peking in September 1969 on his way back from the funeral of Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi. The Soviet premier was confined to the airport, where Chou En-lai met him in the lounge. The first point Chou raised was a Russian strike, but he failed to extract a commitment from Kosygin that Russia would not attack China. A week later, when Chou wrote asking Kosygin to confirm that both sides had agreed that neither would launch a nuclear attack on the other, Moscow declined to confirm Chou’s “understanding.”
In the meantime, an article was published in a London newspaper by a KGB-linked Russian journalist called Victor Louis (who had recently acted as Moscow’s first known emissary to Taiwan). Louis said the Kremlin was discussing bombing Mao’s nuclear test site, and planning to set up an “alternative leadership” for the CCP.
Mao was seriously unnerved. He had agreed to a Russian delegation coming to Peking for negotiations on the border dispute. This itself now became a source of anxiety. The delegation was due to fly in on 18 October. Mao and his cabal feared that the aircraft might be carrying atomic bombs rather than negotiators, so he and Lin Biao both left Peking for the south: Mao to Wuhan on the 15th, and Lin for Suzhou on the 17th. On the 18th the marshal forwent his regular siesta to follow the Russian plane’s flight path, and only went to lie down after the Russians had alighted from the plane.
Just before the Russians arrived, Chou En-lai decamped from his residence in Zhongnanhai and moved into the nuclear bunkers in the Western Hills, where he stayed until February 1970. Mme Mao holed up there too, most likely to keep an eye on Chou.