Mao Zedong Read online

  It was natural for these disparate forces to gradually coalesce, to find novelists, dramatists, historians, and philosophers on whom to pile their criticisms, and to use Shanghai as a base for mass campaigns that could also be coordinated with the army’s various cultural departments. Once the apparatus of leftist criticism was in place in the cultural sphere, it could easily be switched to tackle problems of education in schools and universities, the municipal Party committees that were technically in charge of those cultural realms or educational systems, and the individual Party leaders to whom those committees reported. If galvanized from the center, a remarkable force might be generated.

  By late 1965 this was exactly what began to happen. Mao was frustrated with the laggardly implementation of revolutionary policies, and genuinely suspicious of his own bureaucracy. He had grown to distrust the head of state, Liu Shaoqi, and to be skeptical about Liu’s ability to guide the revolution after Mao. Mao also had grown more hostile to intellectuals as the years went by—perhaps because he knew he would never really be one, not even at the level of his own secretaries, whom he would commission to go to the libraries to track down classical sources for him and help with historical references. Mao knew, too, that scholars of the old school like Deng Tuo, the man he had summarily ousted from the People’s Daily, had their own erudite circles of friends with whom the pursued leisurely hours of classical connoisseurship, which was scarcely different from the lives they might have enjoyed under the old society. They wrote elegant and amusing essays, which were printed in various literary newspapers, that used allegory and analogy to tease the kind of “commandism” that had been so present in the Great Leap, and indeed in the Communist leadership as a whole. It was surely of such men that Mao was thinking when he wrote: “All wisdom comes from the masses. I’ve always said that intellectuals are the most lacking in intellect. The intellectuals cock their tails in the air, and they think, ‘If I don’t rank number one in all the world, then I’m at least number two.’ ”

  Mao did not precisely orchestrate the coming of the Cultural Revolution, but he established an environment that made it possible and helped to set many of the people and issues in place. In November 1965 a new round of polemics appeared in a Shanghai journal, attacking the historian Wu Han, who was the direct subordinate of the powerful Party boss Peng Zhen, controller of a five-man group that was the arbiter of the Beijing cultural realm. Peng Zhen was unprepared to handle the onslaught, though publication of the article in Beijing was blocked by his staff. Seizing on the chance disruption as a good trigger for action, Mao moved swiftly to remove the head of the Central Committee’s general office, which controlled the flow of crucial information for senior Party leaders. It must have been an added inducement to Mao that this man was Yang Shangkun, who had ordered the bugging devices planted in Mao’s personal train and in the guest houses where he stayed. In Yang’s place, Mao appointed the head of the central Beijing garrison, whom he knew to be fiercely loyal.

  At the same time, Lin Biao began to replace key personnel at the top of the military, including the current army chief of staff and former minister of security Luo Ruiqing. In March 1966, after months of relentless questioning about his political loyalties and his attitudes toward political indoctrination in the army ranks, as well as a major series of “struggle sessions” with his inquisitors, Luo tried to commit suicide by jumping from a building. Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, joined the fray by briefing army commanders on the bourgeois decadence and corruption in the arts, which led to the publication of a joint “army forum on literature and art work.” Mao had already, in a meeting with his secretaries, shared with them his conviction that the works of the historian Wu Han were intended to be defenses of Peng Dehuai in his earlier struggle at Lushan, and he proceeded to deepen the attacks on the Beijing party and cultural establishment. Lin Biao sharpened the tension by warning that the “right” was planning a coup against Mao. Security was tightened in the Zhongnanhai residential area. Two men knew, as well as any in China, what all this must portend. They were Deng Tuo, the former editor of People’s Daily, and Tian Jiaying, Mao’s confidential secretary for eighteen years, who had reported negatively on the peasants’ feelings about communes. In the last weeks of May, both men committed suicide.

  Much of this struggle had taken place in secret, or at least in the well-insulated world of the Party hierarchy. But in late May, some Beijing University teachers put up wall posters denouncing the rightists, or “capitalist-roaders,” in their campuses and in the cultural bureaucracy; Mao endorsed the posters, and students began to follow suit, with attacks against their own teachers. People’s Daily editorialized in favor of the dissidents, and the movement spread to other cities in China, and from colleges to high schools. Groups of students began to wear paramilitary uniforms with red armbands and to declare themselves Red Guards and defenders of Chairman Mao. Mao himself, who had been watching these events from the security of a guest house in the celebrated beauty spot of Hangzhou, traveled in July to Wuhan and took a leisurely swim down the Yangtze, which was rapturously publicized across the nation as proof of the chairman’s energy and fitness.

  Returning to Beijing, Mao reconstituted the Politburo Standing Committee, to remove or demote those he had identified as his enemies. As for himself, Mao wrote in a brief editorial comment that appeared in People’s Daily: “My wish is to join all the comrades of our party to learn from the masses, to continue to be a schoolboy.” In August, with the oracular pronouncement that “to rebel is justified,” and that it was good “to bombard the headquarters,” Mao donned military uniform and from the top of Tiananmen reviewed hundreds of thousands of chanting students, accepting from them a Red Guard armband as evidence of his support. By September, several of the rallies were attended by a million people, who began to flock to Beijing from around China. The students from Beijing, in turn, began to travel the countryside in squads—free train travel was made available to them—to spread the word of what was now called the Cultural Revolution.

  The violence of the Cultural Revolution was manifested at two levels. One of these was orchestrated from the political center, which was now controlled by a small group totally loyal to Mao, through what was called “The Central Case Examination Group,” chaired by China’s premier Zhou Enlai but directly accountable to Mao. In its heyday this group was composed of eleven Party members, including Jiang Qing, Chen Boda, and Kang Sheng. Under this leadership group were three bureaus that were assigned their own cases and worked closely with the Beijing garrison command, the army general staff, and the Ministry of Public Security. They investigated 1,262 “principal cases” and an unknown number of “related case offenders.”

  The job of the three bureaus was to prove the correctness of “rightist” charges—including being Taiwan or Guomindang spies, or “Khrushchev-type persons”—and to use whatever means were necessary to achieve that goal. Torture, sleep deprivation, round-the-clock group interrogations, withholding of food, and many types of mental and physical pressure were used by the case investigators—in virtually all cases their victims were prominent or even once-revered revolutionaries. Peng Dehuai was brought back from Sichuan to face his own group of investigators. Incarcerated in high-security prisons (of which Qincheng was the most terrifyingly notorious), the victims could not write letters home or see family. Letters they wrote to Mao or Zhou Enlai requesting more compassionate treatment were filed away, unread. Only “confessions” were considered a tolerable form of writing.

  These political prisoners only encountered the outside “revolutionary masses” at carefully orchestrated occasions. Red Guard groups would use printed forms to apply to “borrow” one of the victims, as long as they were “returned promptly.” Red Guard units might have to pay the cost of renting a place for these confrontations, which would then be advertised in advance. Certain “struggle rallies” were postponed in case of rain, and some victims were in such demand that their appearances had to be limited to
three denunciations a week. Liu Shaoqi died from these experiences, as did Peng Dehuai. Deng Xiaoping survived, perhaps because Mao only intended to intimidate him, not to destroy him altogether. This system of case investigation was spread systematically to the provinces, and by the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976 as many as two million cadres had been investigated by these or similar means.

  The second level of cultural revolutionary violence was unorchestrated, coursing down its own channels in an only vaguely designated direction, in search of rightists or “feudal remnants,” “snakes and monsters,” or “people in authority taking the capitalist road.” An announcement from the “Beijing Number 26 Middle School Red Guards,” dated August 1966, gave the kind of program that was to be followed by countless others. Every street was to have a quotation from Chairman Mao prominently displayed, and loudspeakers at every intersection and in all parks were to broadcast his thought. Every household as well as all trains and buses, bicycles and pedicabs, had to have a picture of Mao on its walls. Ticket takers on trains and buses should all declaim Mao’s thought. Every bookstore had to stock Mao’s quotations, and every hand in China had to hold one. No one could wear blue jeans, tight pants, “weird women’s outfits,” or have “slick hairdos or wear rocket shoes.” No perfumes or beauty creams could be used. No one could keep pet fish, cats, or dogs, or raise fighting crickets. No shop could sell classical books. All those identified by the masses as landlords, hooligans, rightists, and capitalists had to wear a plaque identifying themselves as such whenever they went out. The minimum amount of persons living in any room could be three—all other space had to be given to the state housing bureaus. Children should criticize their elders, and students their teachers. No one under thirty-five might smoke or drink. Hospital service would be simplified, and “complicated treatment must be abolished”; doctors had to write their prescriptions legibly, and not use English words. All schools and colleges were to combine study with productive labor and farmwork. As a proof of its own transformation, the “Number 26 Middle School” would change its name, effectively immediately, to “The Maoism School.”

  The number of victims from the uncoordinated violence of the Cultural Revolution is incalculable, but there were many millions. Some of these were killed, some committed suicide. Some were crippled or scarred emotionally for life. Others were tormented for varying periods of time, for an imprecise number of “crimes,” such as having known foreigners, owned foreign books or art objects, indulged in classical studies, been dictatorial teachers, or denigrated Mao or the Party through some chance remark. Children suffered for their parents’ or grandparents’ deeds, or sought to clear themselves of such charges by exhibiting unusual “revolutionary zeal,” which might include trashing their own parents’ apartments, beating up their school-teachers, or going to border areas to “serve the people” and “learn from the masses.” Many families destroyed their own art objects, burned or shredded their family photographs, diaries, and letters, all of which might be purloined by roving Red Guards. Many Red Guards units fought each other, sometimes to the death, divided along lines of local allegiance or class background, or by occupation, as in the case of some labor union members, construction workers, even prison wardens.

  The tiny figure atop the rostrum at Tiananmen, waving his hand in a slow sideways motion to the chanting sea of red flags and little red books spread out before him as far as the eye could see, had only the faintest inklings of the emotions passing through the minds of the weeping faithful. It was enough that they were there, chanting and with tears in their eyes. It was enough that to them he had become, at last, the “Great Helmsman, great teacher, great leader, and the Red, Red sun in their hearts.”

  12

  Embers

  AT A WORK CONFERENCE with the Party leaders in late August 1966, Mao told his colleagues that matters seemed to be developing satisfactorily: “In my opinion, we should let the chaos go on for a few months and just firmly believe that the majority is good and only the minority bad.” The best thing would be to wait four months and see what happened. Let the students take to the streets, let them write “big character posters.” And “let the foreigners take pictures” of all this if they wanted to. It was of no importance what the imperialists thought.

  Yet before the four months were up, Mao felt a touch of apprehension. At a follow-up meeting of the Central Work Conference on October 25, 1966, Mao reminded his colleagues that he was formally only “in the second line,” and hence did “not take charge of day-to-day work” anymore. He had taken this second place deliberately, to build up their prestige, so that “when I go to see God there won’t be such a big upheaval in the State.” The result of this policy, however, had been that “there are some things I should have kept a grip on which I did not. So I am responsible; we cannot just blame them.” With this elliptical apology over, Mao admitted that he had been swept away by the pace of events, like everyone else. “The time was so short and the events so violent” that the Red Guards had erupted and taken things into their own hands. “Since it was I who caused the havoc, it is understandable if you have some bitter words for me.”

  Yet, as he had done in 1959, after being criticized by Peng Dehuai, Mao continued to pursue the policies that he knew might not be working in the short term, but from which he still expected great things. The early stage of the revolution lasted twenty-eight years, he reminded his listeners, from 1921 to 1949. It was now only five months since the first moments of the Cultural Revolution—“perhaps the movement may last another five months, or even longer.” In the earlier stage of the revolution, “our path gradually emerged in the course of practice.” The same would be true again, for “things can change, things can improve.” They would all have to work together, to benefit from the new world of change into which events had plunged them.

  Students, however, were one thing, and workers and People’s Liberation Army troops were another. In the course of those next few months, through which Mao had said they must watch things develop, two issues surfaced that had to be addressed. One was whether the industrial workers should be allowed to exploit the situation by uniting (or even striking) to achieve higher pay, more autonomy, and better working conditions. With few exceptions, the opinion of even the radical Cultural Revolutionary leaders was that they should not be allowed to do so, and steps were taken to curb the power of those workers’ groups that had begun to emerge. The second issue was what the role of the army should be, now that under Lin Biao’s enthusiastically pro-Maoist rhetorical guidance many Red Guard units were bringing economic and political chaos all across the country. Again, the ultimate decision was a conservative one (though it was given a leftist-sounding air): the political leadership vacuum that had now formed in many areas should not be filled by student or other Red Guard groups alone. In every workplace and community new “revolutionary committees” should be formed, each of which would be a “three way alliance” with three constituent parts: the People’s Liberation Army; experienced party cadres who had been screened and cleared of any charge of being counterrevolutionaries or “capitalist-roaders”; and representatives of the radical mass organizations who had been recently “steeled” in revolutionary experience.

  Mao himself never wrote a single, comprehensive analysis of what he intended to achieve by the Cultural Revolution, or of how he expected it to proceed. It does seem to have been a case of allowing theory to grow out of practice, as he had always interpreted the revolutionary process to be. Indeed he issued very few statements at all after the fall of 1966, and he did not speak to the masses in any public forums, with the lone exception of a few words he uttered over a microphone fitted to the rostrum on Tiananmen at the seventh mass Red Guards rally in November. The speech in its entirety ran as follows: “Long live comrades! You must let politics take command, go to the masses, and be with the masses. You must conduct the great proletarian Cultural Revolution even better.” Even in the inner circles of Party leaders, where
some of his words were transcribed and later circulated, his words and thoughts were far more condensed than they had been earlier. To the new leaders who had emerged from the literary wars of the Shanghai left, he reiterated the theme that in the Cultural Revolution one class was “toppling another,” which constituted “a great revolution.” He added that “many newspapers ought to be suspended,” acknowledging in the same breath that “there must be newspapers.” The key point, therefore, was who should run them, for “to revolt, one must first of all create a public opinion.” Mao illuminated this thought with a personal flashback to the early 1920s, when he was running his journals in Hunan and also working on the early strikes of the printers: “We had no money, no publishing houses, no bicycles. When we edited newspapers, we got on intimate terms with printing workers. We chatted with them and edited articles at the same time.” Mao had always loved the idea that political power could be strengthened through such informal and unstructured means.

  Even these truncated ruminations were exceptions, however. From early 1967 onward, Mao let his thoughts be known mainly in the form of aphorisms or comments, just a few characters in length. These were printed as boxed editorials in People’s Daily, usually on the front page. Thus after only a few seconds of reading, people all around the country could gauge their chairman’s current thoughts. And probably these were his thoughts—there was no need to submit such brief and simple comments to Party scrutiny and to watch for possible deviations from the correct line. Mao was the line. As he observed in April 1968: “Except in the deserts, at every place of human habitation there is the left, the center, and the right. This will continue to be so 10,000 years hence.”