Mao

by Philip Short

  More than any of this, however, the Chairman was concerned that the meeting had done nothing to reassert basic socialist truths. ‘If our country does not establish a socialist economy,’ he had warned the delegates, ‘we shall become … like Yugoslavia, which is actually a bourgeois country.’23 There had been no response. Amid economic collapse, preserving socialist shibboleths was not uppermost in most delegates’ minds.

  Accordingly, when the meeting ended, Mao withdrew to Hangzhou, where he spent the spring and early summer, leaving, for the first time, the triumvirate of Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping in sole charge of Party and state affairs.24

  In part, Mao was sulking: he had no wish to be involved in policies of which, deep down, he disapproved. In part, he was testing the waters: putting his colleagues in control on their own would show what stuff they were made of. But there was also a parallel with Mao's behaviour much earlier in his political career, when in the 1920s and 1930s, at critical moments, he had withdrawn, voluntarily or involuntarily, to await more propitious circumstances in which to effect his return.

  He did not have to wait long.

  In March, he sent his personal secretary, Tian Jiaying, to his home village of Shaoshan to see at first hand how the peasants were faring. Tian was astonished to find that all they wanted to talk about was the ‘household responsibility system’, of which both he and Mao strongly disapproved.25 Since collectivisation in 1955, they explained, the harvest had declined in each successive year. By farming on their own, they could reverse that trend. By May, Tian had been converted: family farming might be politically incorrect, but, in the desperate straits in which China found itself, it was the best way to increase production and it was what the peasants wanted.26 Chen Yun and Liu Shaoqi concurred. At a meeting of the Secretariat in June, Deng Xiaoping quoted a Sichuanese proverb: ‘It doesn't matter if the cat is yellow or black; so long as it catches the mouse, it is a good cat.’27 Deng Zihui, the agricultural supremo who had clashed with Mao over the setting-up of co-operatives, drew up a national programme for putting the ‘responsibility system’ into effect. In many areas, the peasants had already gone ahead anyway. That summer, 20 per cent of China's fields were being farmed on an individual basis.28

  When Tian informed Mao of his findings, the Chairman's response echoed his words to Deng Zihui, seven years earlier: ‘The peasants want freedom; but we want socialism.’ There were times, he told Tian drily, when ‘we cannot completely heed the masses’, and this was one of them.29

  For a few weeks longer, Mao held his fire. The situation in the countryside was still too critical for even him to risk rocking the boat. But at the beginning of July, when it became clear that the summer harvest would be better than in either of the previous two years30 – and that, therefore, agriculture was recovering without the ideological compromises that ‘responsibility systems’ would entail – he intervened decisively. Without bothering to inform the ‘first front’ leaders on the Politburo Standing Committee, he returned to Beijing, where he ordered Chen Boda, his former political secretary in Yan'an, now a Politburo alternate and a leading radical, to draw up a Central Committee resolution on strengthening the collective economy.31 As word leaked out that the Chairman was back, and on the warpath again, his colleagues ran for cover.

  Deng Xiaoping issued a panicky instruction for the ‘black cat, yellow cat’ phrase to be deleted from the written texts of his speeches. Chen Yun left on sick leave, where he would languish on and off for the next fifteen years, returning to assume major responsibilities only after Mao's death. Liu Shaoqi got away with criticising himself for failing to prevent the other leaders’ mistakes. Even the ultra-cautious Zhou Enlai was upbraided for falling prey to pessimism. ‘We've been discussing difficulties and darkness for two years now,’ Mao fumed. ‘It's become a crime to look on the bright side.’32

  Private farming, however, was not the Chairman's only grievance. He was also unhappy with the conciliatory stance Liu had adopted towards the United States and the Soviet Union. This had been prompted by a paper drawn up by Wang Jiaxiang, the Returned Student who, in the late 1930s, had helped to convince Stalin of Mao's claims to the leadership, and now headed the Party's International Liaison Department. At a time of acute internal strain, Wang had argued, China should try as much as possible to avoid international complications. Liu and Deng agreed. The spring brought faint signs of an easing of tension with India and the Soviet Union, and in June an understanding was reached with the Americans to avoid renewed conflict over Taiwan.33

  To Mao, all this oozed betrayal.

  On the very first occasion that he had ceded control to the men he had hand-picked to lead China when he himself passed on, they had shown themselves, on two crucial issues – opposing imperialism and ‘its running dog, revisionism’, abroad; and preventing capitalism at home – at best, capable of massive misjudgements; at worst, guilty of unprincipled compromises for short-term practical ends.

  The Chairman launched his counter-attack at the annual summer work conference at Beidaihe. The ‘responsibility systems’, he declared, were incompatible with the collective economy. The Party, therefore, faced a stark choice: ‘Are we going to take the socialist road or the capitalist road? Do we want rural collectivisation or don't we?’ It was the same tactic that he had employed at Lushan, when he had confronted the Central Committee with an equally Manichaean choice between Peng Dehuai and himself. With Mao, there was never a middle path.

  Having thus transferred the question of farming practices from the economic to the political arena, Mao raised again, as he had in January, the example of Yugoslavia as a country which had ‘changed colour’ by abandoning its socialist economy. Class struggle, he reminded his audience, continued under socialism, and, as developments in the Soviet Union had shown, ‘the capitalist class can be reborn’. The same thing, he implied, might one day happen in China.

  A month later, at the Central Committee's Tenth Plenum, Mao reverted to those themes:

  In our country, we must … admit the possibility of the restoration of reactionary classes. We must raise our vigilance and properly educate our youth … Otherwise, a country like ours may yet move towards its opposite. Therefore, from now on, we must talk about this every year, every month, every day … so that we have a more enlightened Marxist-Leninist line on the problem.34

  Mao added, reassuringly, that there was to be no repetition of what had happened at Lushan, when ‘all [Peng Dehuai's] mother-fucking messed up the conference and practical work was affected’.35 This time, after tens of millions of famine deaths, not even he was willing to put class struggle in a position where it might again abort economic recovery. None the less, he declared, right-opportunism, or ‘Chinese revisionism’, as he now called it, existed ‘within the country and within the Party’, and had to be combated.36

  So ended Liu Shaoqi's brief effort to put Chinese policy on a more rational basis, guided not by class struggle but by economic imperatives.

  No one in the Politburo attempted to rein in Mao's pyromaniac ideological urges, any more than they had tried to curb his powers at the moment of his greatest weakness, at the ‘7,000-cadre big conference’, the previous January. As a result, the notion that a bourgeoisie might emerge within the Party, which Mao had first raised at Lushan in August 1959, was once again placed centre stage, now explicitly linked to a rejection of degenerate Soviet communism in a simple, four-character slogan: Fan xiu, fang xiu – ‘Oppose revisionism (abroad), prevent revisionism (at home)’.37 That fatal nexus would inform Mao's thinking, and dominate the politics of China, for the last fourteen years of his life.

  The first outward sign of the new Leftist spin that Mao had so effortlessly imparted to Chinese policy-making in the autumn of 1962 came in the Himalayas. Armed clashes had broken out in July after Indian troops began establishing checkpoints along the disputed border between Tibet and India's North-east Frontier Agency. In October, after Nehru had spoken incautiously of ‘free
ing occupied Indian territory’, Mao decided the time had come to teach ‘that representative of the reactionary national bourgeoisie’ a lesson. In a series of engagements, involving some 30,000 Chinese troops, Indian units were decisively defeated, and by the time the Chinese declared a unilateral ceasefire, on November 21, Nehru had been compelled to make a humiliating appeal for help to the West.

  In the early stages of the conflict, Khrushchev had been more supportive than in China's last spat with India, in 1959. But he was then embroiled in a crisis of his own, in Cuba, where the CIA was about to discover the emplacement of Soviet missiles, and he needed Chinese support. Once the Cuban debacle was behind him, the Soviet leader reverted to his more usual, pro-Indian stance – causing Mao's disgust to redouble, not only at Khrushchev's betrayal of socialist solidarity but at the ill-judged mixture of adventurism and capitulation with which he had affronted the Americans. Within days, Sino-Soviet polemics, which had been muted since the Russians had excommunicated Albania at the end of 1961, resumed in full flood, culminating, a year later, in a series of nine immensely long open letters – known as ‘The Polemic on the General Line of the International Communist Movement’ – in which, for the first time, the Chinese attacked the Soviet Party by name (and the Russians responded in kind).38 By then Mao had decided that there was no longer any hope of persuading Khrushchev to change his views and that Beijing would need to assume the movement's leadership, even if it split as a result.39

  Renewed militancy abroad was matched by militancy at home.

  The decision to ban private farming led, in the winter of 1962, to a number of provincial initiatives which were soon afterwards brought together, with Mao's personal imprimatur, under the name, the Socialist Education Movement. Its raison d'être was simple. If the peasantry, and the local cadres who led them, were still hankering after capitalism in the form of ‘responsibility systems’, they needed to relearn the virtues of the collective economy and the superiority of socialism.

  In its initial form, the movement was directed against cadre corruption, and such anti-socialist behaviour as arranged marriages, geomancy, sorcery, Buddhist and Daoist rites, and ancestor-worship. Meetings were held at which older commune members were encouraged to ‘speak bitterness’, dilating on the miseries of the old society in order to persuade younger peasants that, even in times of famine, life under the communists was preferable. Party propagandists created a new role model, a PLA soldier named Lei Feng, who had spent his military career washing his comrades’ bedding, helping the cooks to clean cabbages and old ladies to cross roads, under the motto, ‘It's glorious to be a nameless hero’, before dying selflessly for the good of the revolutionary cause. Lei was the quintessential rustless screw, whose devotion, unswerving loyalty and obedience to Mao and to the Party was catalogued in a diary of nauseating servility:

  I felt particularly happy this morning when I got up, because last night I had dreamed of our great leader, Chairman Mao. And it so happens that today is the Party's 40th anniversary. Today I have so much to tell the Party, so much gratitude to the Party … I am like a toddler, and the Party is like my mother who helps me, leads me, and teaches me to walk … My beloved Party, my loving mother, I am always your loyal son.40

  But the movement had to have a harder edge than merely ‘speaking bitterness’ and emulating Lei Feng. At a Central Committee work conference in February 1963, Mao asserted that the only way to prevent revisionism was by class struggle. ‘Once [this] has been grasped,’ he declared, ‘everything will be solved.’ Accordingly it was agreed that a nationwide campaign should be launched to carry out ‘Four Clean-ups’ in the countryside (to check production team accounts, granaries, housing, and the allocation of work-points), and ‘Five Antis’ in the towns (against embezzlement, graft, speculation, extravagance and red tape).41 Three months later, another work conference at Hangzhou drew up a formal programme for the movement, in which Mao depicted in apocalyptic terms what was at stake if the slide towards revisionism were not stopped:

  If things were allowed to go on this way, the day would not be too far off – a few years, over 10 years, or a few decades at the most – when the resurgence of a nationwide counter-revolution becomes inevitable. It would then be a certainty that the Party of Marxism-Leninism would turn into a party of revisionism, of fascism. The whole of China would then change colour … The Socialist Education Movement is … a struggle that calls for the re-education of man … [and] for a confrontation with the forces of feudalism and capitalism that are now feverishly attacking us. We must nip their counter-revolution in the bud!42

  After this call to arms, Mao once more retired to the sidelines to see how the ‘first front’ leaders would cope with the new mission he had entrusted to them.

  It was a delicate assignment. Rural capitalism was to be suppressed, but rural markets and private plots, judged essential for economic recovery, encouraged. Mass criticism, to purge corrupt cadres, was to be promoted, but without any deleterious effect on production.

  As the movement progressed, those issues paled into insignificance against the sheer scale of the task the Party leaders found they faced. Initially Mao had employed his usual rule of thumb to suggest that perhaps 5 per cent of the rural population had ‘problems’ that needed correcting. By the spring of 1964, both he and Liu Shaoqi were talking in terms of a third of rural production teams being controlled by hostile forces. An investigation group headed by Liu's wife, Wang Guangmei, which spent five months at Taoyuan, in Hebei, reported that the Party branch there was imposing ‘a counterrevolutionary double-faced regime’ and the branch secretary was a ‘Guomindang element’ who had sneaked into the Party. Not only was cadre corruption almost universal, but so many grass-roots officials had been purged in one political campaign or another in the course of the preceding ten years that there were no more ‘clean’ local leaders to draw on. Outside cadres, seconded to oversee the movement, found themselves having to replace one group of flawed officials with another equally dubious group because no one else was available.

  To deal with that situation, Liu Shaoqi unleashed, in September 1964, the most sweeping purge of rural Party organisations ever undertaken in China.

  One-and-a-half million cadres were mobilised, organised into work teams of 10,000 people or, in some cases, several tens of thousands, and despatched to selected counties for a minimum of six months, to act like a human wave, cleansing leadership groups from the village level up. The targets of the campaign were expanded to include ideology, politics and organisation, as well as economic offences. Violence was universal. Even in the initial moderate stages, 2,000 people died in one trial group of counties in Hubei, while in Guangdong, 500 committed suicide. Later, in the words of one lowly Party cadre, ‘all hell broke loose’. Wang Renzhong, one of Mao's favourite provincial leaders, who had been appointed First Secretary of Hubei, urged a ‘violent revolutionary storm’, in which most lower-level Party branches would collapse and power would be temporarily ceded to poor peasant associations. Liu Shaoqi himself spoke of the upheaval lasting five or six years.43

  It was a prospect which should have entranced Mao, as an apostle of class violence. As 1964 drew to a close, he and Liu seemed closer in their thinking than at almost any time since the younger man had become Mao's heir apparent. But, as so often, appearances were misleading.

  Mao's original plan to withdraw to the ‘second front’, first mooted in the early 1950s, had been designed partly to allow him to escape the routine duties of Head of State, which he detested, and to concentrate on strategic issues; and partly to give his putative successors experience in running the Party and state while he was still there to guide them. Events in the Soviet Union soon made this second reason primary. Malenkov, Mao said later, had failed to endure because Stalin had never allowed him to exercise real power in his lifetime. For that reason, he explained, ‘I wanted [Liu Shaoqi and the others] to have their prestige established before I died.’44

  The Sovie
t Union's bad example did not end there. Khrushchev, in Mao's eyes, turned out to be an even less worthy candidate to continue the revolutionary cause, discarding not only ‘the sword of Stalin’ but ‘the sword of Lenin’ as well. Under his leadership, the Soviet Union became a revisionist state, practising capitalism. The inheritance of Marx and Lenin had been squandered – all because of Stalin's failure to groom revolutionary successors to carry on his cause.

  Until 1961, Mao seems to have been in no doubt that Liu Shaoqi was the right choice to act as steward of his own revolutionary legacy. Liu was organisation personified, a remote, intimidating man, with no real friends, no outside interests and little sense of humour, whose phenomenal energy was channelled in its entirety into the service of the Party – which in practice meant making possible whatever it was that Mao wanted to happen. He was exacting with himself and his family; eschewed privilege of any kind; and cultivated a puritanical public persona which spoke of eighteen-hour workdays and a code of conduct so absolute that when he found out he was being paid an extra one yuan (at the time, about 30 pence) a day because he worked after midnight, he insisted on reimbursing every last penny through deductions from his salary.