by Philip Short
Mao's poster confirmed what Liu had begun dimly to apprehend some days earlier: the Chairman had decided to get rid of him.
With Liu's days numbered, his allies in the Politburo, led by Deng Xiaoping, and his supporters in the Central Committee, waited for the axe to fall on them too. It did not. Mao was still taking no chances. On his instructions, Chen Boda, Kang Sheng, the Public Security Minister, Xie Fuzhi, and other radical spokesmen concentrated all their fire on the Head of State. Few of those present understood what Liu was supposed to have done wrong. But nor did anyone try to defend him. For thirty-two years, since the start of the Long March, no one had picked a fight with Mao and won. August 1966, with the Chairman stirring up mayhem in the leadership and the country at large, did not seem the best time to start.
The previous day, Mao had sent a plane to fetch Lin Biao from Dalian, where he had gone with his family to escape the summer heat. Zhou Enlai met him at the airport and, as they drove into Beijing, briefed him on what was going on. Then the Chairman himself received him, and informed him that he was to become deputy leader of the Party in Liu's place. Lin, who was only too well aware of the danger of such a dizzying promotion, tried to refuse, pleading poor health. But Mao's mind was made up.54
On August 8, the CC meekly passed – by unanimous vote – a document, to which Mao himself had put the finishing touches, known as the ‘Sixteen Points’. It was the blueprint for the daluan, the ‘great chaos’, that would engulf China for the next three years.
The Cultural Revolution, it declared, was ‘a great revolution that touches people to their very souls’, an ‘irresistible general trend’, which would vanquish bourgeois and feudal ideology, and instil a ‘proletarian world outlook’, exemplified by ‘the great Red banner of Mao Zedong Thought’. It was a revolution from the bottom up, in which the masses would liberate themselves and oppose ‘old ideas, culture, customs and habits’. ‘Trust the masses,’ Mao exhorted the Party, ‘rely on them, and respect their initiative, cast out fear and don't be afraid of disturbances.’ He had said much the same in 1957. But this time his shock troops were ‘revolutionary young people’, ‘daring and courageous path-breakers’. Their task was different, too, from that of the bourgeois intellectuals he had unleashed during the ‘Hundred Flowers’. The target now was not the sloth and arrogance of bureaucratic cadres, but ‘all those people in authority who are taking the capitalist road’.55
Mao was not quite ready to say openly that Liu Shaoqi was their chief. But when the plenum elected a new Politburo Standing Committee – on the basis of a list drawn up, not, as the rules required, by the Party's Organisation Department, but by Jiang Qing, in accordance with Mao's private wishes – Liu slipped from second to eighth place in the rank order. The ‘first’ and ‘second’ fronts disappeared. Lin Biao became Mao's sole deputy, with the title of Vice-Chairman. Premier Zhou Enlai, as before, ranked third, but, like the ailing Chen Yun and Zhu De, was now merely a Standing Committee member. They were joined by Mao's radical allies, Chen Boda and Kang Sheng, and by the Guangdong leader, Tao Zhu, who had replaced Peng Zhen in the Secretariat. Deng Xiaoping found himself promoted – despite his association with Liu – from seventh to sixth place in the hierarchy.56 His case was merely postponed.
On the day the plenum opened, August 1, Mao had written a letter expressing ‘warm support’ for the Red Guards at Qinghua University Middle School, where the movement had been launched. ‘You say it is right to rebel against reactionaries,’ he told them. ‘I enthusiastically support you.’57 It was the signal for Red Guard organisations, which until then had been confined to the capital, to spread all over China.
Two weeks later, a million Red Guards, some from as far away as Sichuan and Guangdong, converged on the capital for the first of ten gigantic rallies in Tiananmen Square. At midnight on August 17, detachments of schoolchildren and college students, singing revolutionary songs and carrying red silken banners and portraits of the Chairman, began marching down Changan dajie, the Avenue of Eternal Peace, to take up their positions. Mao's appearance was timed to coincide with the first rays of the rising sun. Shortly after 5 a.m., he walked out from the Forbidden City and mingled briefly with the crowd, before retiring to the pavilion above the gate to meet Red Guard representatives.58
To underscore the mood of militancy, the Chairman, like the rest of the Politburo, wore a green PLA uniform – something he had not done since the despatch of Chinese forces to Korea in 1950.
The meeting opened with the playing of the Maoist anthem, ‘The East is Red’. Chen Boda and Lin Biao whipped up the fervour of the crowd, praising Mao as the ‘Great leader, Great teacher, Great helmsman and Great commander’. Then a girl student from a Beijing middle school – who was also the daughter of a veteran Red Army general59 – pinned a Red Guard armband to Mao's sleeve, triggering scenes of delirium among the young people crammed into the square below. Mao himself said nothing. He did not need to.
Let me tell you the great news – news greater than heaven [ran one typical letter home] … I saw our most, most, most, most, dearly beloved leader, Chairman Mao! Comrades, I have seen Chairman Mao! Today I am so happy my heart is about to burst … We're jumping! We're singing! After seeing the Red Sun in Our Hearts, I just ran around like crazy all over Beijing … I could see him ever so clearly, and he was so impressive … Comrades, how can I possibly describe to you what that moment was like? … How can I possibly go to sleep tonight! I have decided to make today my birthday. Today, I started a new life!!!60
An orgasm of devotional enthusiasm swept feverishly through the streets. A few independent spirits saw through the divine charade, like the student who wrote a few weeks later: ‘The Great Cultural Revolution is not a mass movement, but one man moving the masses with the barrel of a gun.’61 But the vast majority did not. Mao had found his new guerrilla army to assault the political heights. A whole generation of young Chinese was ready to die, and to kill, for him, with unquestioning obedience.
And kill they did.
`It began within days of the August 18 rally. One of the first victims was the eminent writer, Lao She, author of Rickshaw Boy and Teahouse. With some thirty other cultural figures, he was taken to the courtyard of the former Confucian Temple in Beijing. There they were given yin-yang haircuts (with one half of the head shaven, the other left uncut); black ink was poured over their faces; and signs labelling them as ‘ox demons and snake spirits’ hung around their necks. Then they were made to kneel as the Red Guards beat them with stakes and leather belts. Lao She, who was sixty-seven, lost consciousness. When he was sent home, in the early hours of next morning, his clothes were so thick with congealed blood that his wife had to cut them from his body. Next day he drowned himself in a shallow lake, not far from the Forbidden City.62
Thousands of lesser victims met similar fates. There was scarcely a housing block in Beijing where the Red Guards did not beat at least one person to death. Over four days at the end of August, in one small suburban area, 325 people were killed, ranging from a six-week-old baby (the child of a ‘reactionary family’) to an old man in his eighties.63
The rapidity with which peaceable, idealistic young students were transformed into avenging furies astounded older people. Perhaps it should not have done. The generation which had grown up after 1949, unable to remember the civil war and the hardships it had entailed, was markedly different from its forebears (as were its counterparts elsewhere, whose energy fuelled the civil rights and anti-war movements in the United States, May 1968 in France and ‘communism with a human face’ in Prague). What they had in common was frustration with the values of their parents and revolutionary zeal to overthrow the systems they represented.64 In January 1965, Peng Zhen had warned his Politburo colleagues that in the schools which their own children were attending, violence festered beneath the surface and risked exploding into ‘indiscriminate struggle’.65 This was the energy that Mao harnessed to drive the Cultural Revolution. The Chairman saw it as a sign
of the Chinese people's ‘fighting spirit’.66 How many times before, from the May Fourth movement in 1919, to the ‘Hundred Flowers’ forty years later, had apparently tranquil campuses erupted in a matter of hours to become seething cauldrons of political agitation? This time, the most powerful man in the land, Mao himself, had personally pointed the way, recalling (in the ‘Sixteen Points’) that revolution was ‘an act of violence whereby one class overthrows the power of another’.67 Lin Biao urged them to ‘smash the Four Olds; – ‘old thought, old culture, old customs and old practices’ – and the Security Minister, Xie Fuzhi, ordered the police not to interfere:
Should Red Guards who kill people be punished? My view is that if people are killed, they are killed; it's no business of ours … If the masses hate bad people so much that we cannot stop them, then let us not insist .… The people's police should stand on the side of the Red Guards, liaise with them, sympathise with them and provide them with information, especially about the five black categories – the landlords, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries, bad elements and Rightists.68
It was rarely put that bluntly. However, a central directive, approved by Mao on August 22, laid down that ‘mobilising the police to suppress the student movement is strictly prohibited’,69 and Xie went little further than Mao himself had done, when he had declared, shortly before the communist victory in 1949, he had declared: ‘the state apparatus, including … the police and the courts … is the instrument by which one class oppresses another. It is an instrument … [of] violence.’70
Violence, revolution and power were the trinity by which Mao had struggled to realise his political vision all through his long career.
In the 1960s, violence served the same purpose as it had in the Hunan peasant movement in 1926, in the ‘land investigation movement’ in Jiangxi in the 1930s, and during the land reform of the 1940s and 1950s. The Red Guards who tortured and killed in the Chairman's name – like the peasants who beat to death their landlords – were committing themselves to the Maoist cause irrevocably. Ken Ling, a Red Guard in Fujian, described his own initiation as a sixteen-year-old middle-school student:
Teacher Chen, over 60 years old and suffering from high blood-pressure, was … dragged up to the second floor of a classroom building and … beaten with fists and broomsticks … He passed out several times, but was brought back to consciousness … with cold water being splashed on to his face. He could hardly move his body; his feet were cut by glass and thorns. He shouted, ‘Why don't you kill me? Kill me!’ This lasted for six hours, until he lost control of his excrement. They tried to force a stick into his rectum. He collapsed for the last time. They poured cold water on him again. It was too late … People began to run away, one after the other. The killers were a little frightened. They … summoned the school doctor, [who] … finally wrote on the death certificate: ‘Death due to a sudden attack of high blood pressure … ’ When [his wife] rushed to the scene, she was forced to confirm this cause of death before being allowed to take the body …
After a night filled with dreadful nightmares, I mustered enough courage to go to school the next day to witness more of this torture … After 10 days or so, I became used to it; a blood-smeared body or a shriek no longer made me feel uneasy.71
Teachers with bourgeois connections; members of the ‘democratic parties’; those from the ‘five black categories’ (later enlarged to seven to include traitors and spies; and finally to nine, by the addition of capitalists and ‘stinking intellectuals’) – in short, the ‘usual suspects’ – were among the first to be targeted, often with the tacit encouragement of Party committees, which sought in this way to draw the Red Guards’ fire away from themselves. Very soon, with support from the police and from sympathisers in the military, the killings became systematic. After the Cultural Revolution, another teacher, crippled by his students, described what that had meant:
On the athletic field, every few days, several teachers would be taken out and shot in public … Some teachers were buried alive. On the roof of that building over there, four teachers were ordered to sit on a pack of explosives and [forced] to light them themselves. [There was] a tremendous sound, and nobody could be seen – only legs and arms were in the trees and [scattered] over the roof … [Altogether] about one hundred [school officials] were killed.72
To adolescents, there could be no more potent symbol of the overthrow of the old order than the physical destruction of those set in authority above them. Mao's injunction, ‘it is right to rebel’, dating from December, 1939, when he was encouraging writers like Ding Ling and Wang Shiwei to shake things up inside the Party, was now emblazoned across the front page of the People's Daily, and the Red Guards made it their own.73 By publicly humiliating their victims, when they did not actually kill them, they ensured that none could remain indifferent to the extraordinary changes that Mao was bringing about. Like the ‘people-beating meetings’ staged in certain Beijing theatres and in the city's parks,74 the Red Guards’ terror had an educational, as well as a punitive, role.
Before long, the revolution began to devour its offspring.
The rebels split first on class lines, between the children of workers, peasants and soldiers, and those from less desirable backgrounds; then through factional cleavages, as rival groups were manipulated by competing political and military forces at provincial and national level. The violence turned inwards. By mid-autumn, many Red Guard units had set up ‘reformatories’ and ‘detention centres’, where wayward members were disciplined and enemies punished. Fifteen-year-old Gao Yuan recalled finding some of his friends after their schoolmates had tortured them:
Some lay on the floor bound with ropes. Some were strung from beams … The discovery of Songying [a seventeen-year-old girl] was the biggest shock. She lay unconscious on the floor in a pool of blood. Her pants had been stripped off. Her blouse was torn, revealing her breasts. She had been beaten so badly that her whole body was purple … Her tormentors had pushed dirty socks and twigs into her vagina, causing heavy bleeding …
Another boy, Zongwei, lay dying on a bed. Gao rushed to get the school doctor:
As she slit open [his] trouser legs with scissors, she flinched. When I looked at Zongwei's bare legs, I knew why. They were riddled with holes the diameter of a pencil, surrounded by strings of loose flesh the consistency of shredded pork. Blood and pus oozed from the wounds. ‘What in hell did they use on him,’ Dr Yang muttered. Looking round the room, I found the answer to her question: the pokers used to tend the stove.75
Among the many thousands who died that autumn was the young man who had written so ecstatically of seeing Mao in Tiananmen Square. Less than three weeks afterwards, he was savagely beaten and committed suicide.76
The Cultural Revolution Small Group made half-hearted attempts to stop the Red Guards’ internecine killings. Mao showed little concern; excesses were inevitable.
The Red Guard leaders were doing no more than he himself had done, when he had ordered the purge of the AB-tuan and the ‘suppression of counter-revolutionaries’ at Futian. It was not the best way of dealing with opponents or with renegades, but it was a necessary, perhaps, to a degree, even a desirable part of the ‘great revolutionary storm’ by which the ‘young Generals’ were to be tempered as successors, just as Mao's generation had been, thirty years before.
The parallel with the early stages of the Chinese revolution was deliberate. Both for Mao and for his young followers, the Cultural Revolution was in part an attempt to recreate the glory days of his own struggle for power.
At the end of August, the Chairman had endorsed a nationwide ‘networking movement’, inspired by the Long March, under which Red Guards were given free train passes to travel all over the country, spreading the gospel of the Cultural Revolution, while provincial youths came to the capital to be fired by the Red Guard rallies at which Mao presided.77 In the process, millions of young Chinese visited his birthplace at Shaoshan; the first Red base area on the Jinggangshan;
and other revolutionary sites, often making the journey on foot to relive the experiences of their revolutionary forebears.78
Similarly the campaign against the ‘Four Olds’ emulated the iconoclasm of the decade that had ended in the May Fourth movement.
Where Mao and his student friends had sheared off Manchu pigtails, the Red Guards declared war on ‘Hong Kong-style haircuts, Hong Kong-style clothing, cowboy trousers, winkle-pickers and high-heeled shoes’, in order, as one group put it, ‘to stop up every orifice leading to capitalism, and [to] smash every incubator of revisionism’. Correction stations were set up at street corners to shave offending heads. Where, half a century before, Chen Duxiu's ‘new culture movement’ had ushered in a change of language, from the classical to the vernacular, now there was a ‘movement’ to change names: old ‘feudal’ shop signs were discarded in favour of terms like Weidong (Defend Mao Zedong), Hanbiao (Defend Lin Biao), Yongge (Permanent Revolution) and so on. Children changed their given names to Hongrong (Red Glory) or Xiangdong (Face the East). The road outside the Soviet Embassy became ‘Anti-Revisionism Street’; the Beijing Union Hospital, established in 1921 by the Rockefeller Foundation, the ‘Anti-Imperialism Hospital’. The Red Guards even changed the traffic lights, so that red became the signal for ‘go’, until Zhou Enlai told them that red got people's attention better and therefore should remain ‘stop’. It was Zhou, too, who sent troops to guard the Forbidden City, when Red Guards came with pickaxes to smash its ancient sculptures. Other historic sites were less fortunate. All over China, city gates and temples were demolished, tombs desecrated, bronze statues and artefacts melted down, mosques and monasteries vandalised, paintings and sutras destroyed, monks and nuns defrocked. Confucius's birthplace at Qufu, in Shandong, which Mao had admired as a student on his way back to Changsha from Beijing, suffered particularly severe destruction: more than a thousand stone steles were broken and 2,000 graves vandalised.79
