by Philip Short
In Shanghai, the Workers’ General Headquarters, backed by the Cultural Revolution Small Group in Beijing, engaged in an increasingly violent power struggle with its conservative rival, the Scarlet Guards, tacitly supported by the city Party committee. On December 30, tens of thousands of workers fought running street battles outside the Party committee's offices. Strikes broke out. The port was paralysed, with more than a hundred foreign ships waiting to be unloaded. Rail transport came to a halt as tens of thousands of Scarlet Guards blocked the main north–south trunk line, demanding the right to present their case in Beijing. Workers who had been sent to the countryside during the famine after the Great Leap Forward began demanding the right to return. Starting on January 3, 1967 – the day that the campaign against Liu Shaoqi and his wife went into high gear in Beijing – Wang Hongwen's rebels seized control of Shanghai's main newspapers, first the Wenhuibao, then two days afterward, the Party paper, Jiefang ribao.
At that point, Mao himself intervened, sending Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan to the city with instructions to establish ‘a new political authority’ in place of the Shanghai Party Committee – whereupon the balance tilted definitively in the rebels’ favour. Two days later, on January 6, 100,000 people gathered in the central square for a rally at which the General Headquarters announced that ‘revolutionary rebels’ in the city government would assume responsibility for day-to-day affairs.
The ‘seizure of power’ in Shanghai became a model for the rest of the country. Mao called it a ‘great revolution’ of ‘one class overthrowing another’. He cited an old proverb: ‘Don't think that because Butcher Zhang dies, we will have to eat pork with the bristles still on it.’102 The sense was that the country could keep going even if the provincial committees did fall. Over the next three weeks, rebel groups seized power in seven other provinces and cities, including Beijing itself, Anhui, Guangdong and Heilongjiang.
There was a problem, however. The unseating of Party committees was one thing; what to put in their place was quite another.
Neither Mao, nor the rebel groups themselves, had really thought this question through. Zhang Chunqiao was initially preoccupied with warding off challenges from rival Red Guard groups and revolutionary factions, and it was not until February 5, 1967, that, with backing from local Red Guards and PLA units, he felt sufficiently in control of the situation to be able to proclaim the establishment of the Shanghai People's Commune.103
In taking this step, Zhang was convinced he had Mao's full support. A few days earlier, Chen Boda had telephoned to say that the Chairman was about to approve the setting-up of a Beijing Commune, and that Shanghai should do the same.104 The ‘Sixteen Points’ had called explicitly for ‘a system of general elections, like that of the Paris Commune’,105 to establish local organs of power to serve as a bridge between the Party and the masses. As the most important of all the ‘newborn things’ produced during the Great Leap Forward, the communes symbolised the originality of the Chinese revolution. Mao himself, in 1958, had looked forward to the day when ‘everything will be called a commune … [including] cities and villages’.106
Unexpectedly, however, the Chairman changed his mind. Other cities and provinces were told not to follow Shanghai's example, and Zhang and Yao Wenyuan were summoned to Beijing to hear Mao's explanation.
A series of problems arises, and I wonder whether you have thought about them [he said]. If the whole of China sets up people's communes, should the ‘People's Republic of China’ change its name to ‘People's Commune of China’? Would others recognise us? Maybe the Soviet Union would not recognise us, whereas Britain and France would. And what would we do about our ambassadors in various countries? And so on.107
The reasoning was spurious – and Mao knew it. A name-change would make no difference whatever to China's international relations. None the less, this was what was broadcast by the Red Guards, and soon came to be generally accepted as the reason for the ‘commune’ form of organisation being rejected. It implied force majeure: whatever Mao's own preferences might be, external constraints ruled it out.
The reality was rather different. The Shanghai leaders’ move had forced Mao to look into the abyss – and he did not like what he saw.
A system based on the Paris Commune, with free elections and unrestricted political activity, meant allowing the masses to rule themselves. This was the logic of his injunction to ‘trust the masses and rely on them’ – the logic, in fact, on which the entire Cultural Revolution had been based. But where would that leave the Party? As he put it to Zhang Chunqiao: ‘There must be a Party somehow! There must be a nucleus, no matter what we call it.’108 Truly free elections were a utopian dream. Doing away with leaders and ‘overthrowing everything’ might look progressive, but in fact it was reactionary and would lead to ‘extreme anarchism’.109
In one view, Mao lost his nerve, just as he had, ten years earlier, when he had clamped down on the ‘Hundred Flowers’, only to acknowledge afterwards that he had been ‘confused by false appearances’ and might have acted prematurely.110
Another way of putting it would be that he demonstrated, once again, the skills of a consummate politician. Age had done nothing to dull the acuteness of the Chairman's political antennae. The Cultural Revolution might appear to be a descent into madness, but Mao had moved at each stage with circumspection. He had made clear from the outset that destruction would have to be followed by rebuilding – that ‘the great disorder’, as he had put it in July 1966, would eventually have to yield to ‘great peace’.111 That was why he had stayed in the background, letting others do the dirty work, while he kept clean hands – ready to rally, and to rehabilitate, the survivors when the time came to build a new Party on the ashes of the old. It was a pretence to which even his victims, like He Long and Peng Dehuai, subscribed, for they knew that Mao alone had the power, if he wished, to save them; it was in their interests, as well as his, to believe that he was innocent of the horrors perpetrated in his name.
Whether from prudence or fear, or a judicious mixture of both, the outcome was that the visionary ideology of the Shanghai Commune was abandoned.
The Cultural Revolution had reached its Rubicon, the moment at which it lost its compass, when the ideals which had inspired it, no matter how misbegotten they were, became irredeemably tainted. Faced with a choice, Mao had preferred a flawed instrument of rule to no instrument at all. On his proposal, Zhang Chunqiao announced the establishment of a new organ of power, to be known as the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee, formed from a ‘three-in-one alliance’ of representatives of mass organisations, PLA officers and veteran cadres. The same name had been used for the provisional communist administrations set up in towns and villages after the Autumn Harvest Uprising, forty years before.
Despite Mao's sleight of hand in attributing the change of course to diplomatic pressures, not everyone was fooled. As the revolutionary committees multiplied, ultra-Leftists among the Red Guards spoke darkly of ‘capitalist restoration’.112 To most Chinese, it did not seem like that. But, from February 1967 onward, the Chairman was in ideological retreat, the struggle against the ‘capitalist-roaders’ became increasingly focused on issues of raw power and steps were taken to try to insulate the economy and national security from excessive radical disruption.
Notwithstanding the long-term implications for Mao's dream of a ‘realm of Red virtue’, the immediate and visible effect of the power seizure in Shanghai was to give a potent, new impetus to the spiral of revolutionary violence.
In the provinces, Red Guards and revolutionary workers redoubled their efforts to topple provincial committees. The first secretaries of Shanxi and Yunnan committed suicide, and the Anhui leader, Li Baohua, was brought to Beijing to be struggled against.113 A new directive from the Chairman was published, urging ‘proletarian revolution groups’ to seize power. Crowds gathered outside the West Gate of Zhongnanhai to demand that Liu, Deng Xiaoping and other Central leaders be dragged out. The Coal Minister
, Zhang Linzhi, was forced by Red Guards to wear an iron hat weighing 60 kilograms and afterwards beaten to death.114
At the same time, the PLA, which until then had been largely insulated from the disorders, began to be sucked into the morass.115 In January, Mao had approved the dismissal of Liu Zhijian, the head of the PLA's Cultural Revolution Group, signalling the start of a short-lived drive to ferret out military supporters of Liu Shaoqi's ‘bourgeois reactionary line’. His case illustrated a dilemma which the Chairman would wrestle with for the next eight months. Should the army be permitted to engage in the Cultural Revolution on the same basis as civilian groups? Or was there an overriding need to maintain war preparedness and military discipline?
Liu's crime, for which he paid with seven years in prison, was to have tried to dissuade cadets from the country's military training colleges from harassing regional army commanders. In this, he had had the support of Ye Jianying, who was in day-to-day charge of the Military Commission, and of three other PLA marshals – Chen Yi, Nie Rongzhen and Xu Xiangqian. To Jiang Qing and Chen Boda, Liu and, by implication, the marshals, as well, were ‘obstructing the Cultural Revolution’.
Mao equivocated. On the one hand he called on the army ‘actively to support … genuine proletarian Leftists when [they] ask for help’. On the other he approved a Central directive prohibiting ‘any person or organisation from attacking the organs of the PLA’, the ‘arbitrary ransacking of homes’ and attempts to use armed force to resolve ‘contradictions among the people’. It was ambiguous, but it reassured the military region commanders, many of them Mao's companions since the days of the Long March, who risked becoming seriously disaffected. Earlier that month, the Nanjing military region chief, General Xu Shiyou, had threatened to order his men to open fire if the Red Guards made any more trouble. One of his colleagues, Fu Chongbi, spoke darkly of going up into the mountains and waging war against them. Mao's call for radical restraint was seized on by PLA officers everywhere as providing authority to restore order, while the other part of his message – to ‘support the Left’ – was passed over in silence.
In Xinjiang a regimental PLA commander sent troops to subdue radicals in the town of Shihezi, leaving several hundred people wounded. In Sichuan, where the Military Region headquarters had been besieged for a week by Red Guards and workers, 100,000 ‘rebels’ were arrested and held in harsh conditions in cramped cells for several months. In the remote province of Qinghai, bordering on Tibet, the military district commander despatched soldiers to surround the offices of the local Party newspaper where radicals had ‘seized power’ and beaten to death a number of journalists. When they refused to surrender, he ordered an assault in which more than 170 people were killed and a similar number wounded. In Wuhan, after another dispute involving a ‘power seizure’ at a Party newspaper, a thousand radicals were detained, some of whom were imprisoned, others released after making public confessions. Similar incidents occurred in seven other provinces.
Parallel to the ‘February Crackdown’, as these events came to be known, a ‘February Adverse Current’ developed. Mao himself inadvertently lit the fuse, by lashing out at Jiang Qing and Chen Boda for their role in the purge of Tao Zhu. He had approved of Tao's removal. But he objected to their having taken the initiative without consulting him first. Chen was ‘an opportunist’, he fumed. Jiang Qing was ‘ambitious but incompetent’. Even Lin Biao, who had initially tried to protect Tao, was accused of failing to keep the Chairman informed. The conservatives in the Politburo (the four marshals and several vice-premiers), already deeply unhappy over the purge of senior cadres, took this as a signal – wrongly, as it turned out – that Mao was losing patience with the radicals’ excesses. At a Military Commission meeting in January, when that subject had been broached, Ye Jianying had banged the table so hard that he broke a bone in his hand. Now, at a meeting of the Central CaucusII chaired by Zhou Enlai on February 11, Ye warned again, supported by Xu Xiangqian and Chen Yi, of the danger of anarchy. Did the proclamation of the Shanghai Commune, he asked, mean that the Party and the army were redundant? No one answered.116
Five days later, when the Caucus reconvened, Vice-Premier Tan Zhenlin, one of Mao's oldest associates, who had headed the first Workers’ and Peasants’ Soviet at the Jinggangshan base area in 1927, picked a quarrel with Zhang Chunqiao.
‘Masses this and masses that!’ Tan raged. ‘You don't want the leadership of the Party. You insist on the masses liberating themselves, people teaching themselves and conducting revolution themselves. What is that but metaphysics?’ He went on: ‘Forty-year veterans of the revolution have had their homes burst into and dear ones dispersed … This is the cruellest instance of struggle in Party history.’117 Chen Yi added fuel to the flames, asserting that Liu, Deng and Peng Zhen had been Mao's strongest supporters at Yan'an and that those to whom the Chairman was now giving power would inevitably one day betray him, just as Khrushchev had betrayed Stalin.118 Tan declared furiously: ‘If I had known it would come to this, I would never have joined the revolution … I should never have followed Chairman Mao!’ The next day, he poured out his bitterness towards Chen Boda, Jiang Qing and the rest of the Cultural Revolution Small Group in a letter to Lin Biao:
They are completely ruthless; one word and a life can be snuffed out … Our Party is ugly beyond repair … They will push you over the edge, even for a minor offence. And yet … can they take over? I doubt it … The Premier is big-hearted … He can wait it out. But how long are we to wait? Until all of the old cadres are downed? No, no, ten thousand times no! I will rebel!119
Mao's first impulse was to dismiss these strictures as ‘old soldiers sounding off’. But when he learned of Chen Yi's diatribe, he decided otherwise.120 Of the twenty-one members of the Politburo appointed six months before, four had been overthrown (Liu, Deng, Tao Zhu and He Long), and four were inactive or neutral (Chen Yun, Dong Biwu, Liu Bocheng and Zhu De). Over the previous few days, seven of the remaining thirteen had come out against Cultural Revolution policies.
At midnight on February 18, Mao summoned Ye Jianying and two of the other critics – Li Xiannian, who was in charge of finance; and Li Fuchun, the Planning Minister – along with Zhou Enlai and two leading radicals.
‘What kind of Party leadership do you want?’ he asked with an old man's petulance. Why didn't they bring back Wang Ming? Or let the Americans and the Russians run China? If they wished to restore Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, he fumed, he would go back to the Jinggangshan to start another guerrilla war. It was the same threat that Mao had made eight years earlier at Lushan. But, this time, even though he was furious – Kang Sheng said afterwards he had never seen him so angry – there was an element of play-acting. After delivering his ultimatum, he stormed out in a huff.121
In fact, on the three basic questions at issue – the role of the Party; of the army; and of the veteran cadres – the Chairman had considerable sympathy for the arguments that Ye and his colleagues had raised. Two weeks earlier, he had condemned the Shanghai rebels for putting forward the principle of ‘suspecting everyone and overthrowing everyone’.122 He had laid down that veteran cadres, meaning those veteran cadres who had ‘passed the test’ of the Cultural Revolution, were to be included in the ‘three-in-one alliances’ on which the new revolutionary committees were to be based – and what was true of the provinces was no less true for the Centre. He knew, too, that there was a limit beyond which it would not be prudent to test the loyalty of the military commanders. For all these reasons, he was disinclined to press the marshals too hard. Even Tan Zhenlin, who had infuriated Jiang Qing by comparing her with the Empress Wu, a Tang dynasty consort regarded as one of the most evil women in Chinese history, was eventually forgiven.
Over the next month, the old guard were made to attend all-night study meetings at which their errors were condemned by members of the Cultural Revolution Group. In the streets outside, Red Guard posters called for their overthrow. But, unlike Tao Zhu and He Long, they were no
t purged. At the end of April, Mao summoned all of them to a ‘unity meeting’ at which he noted that they had not ‘plotted secretly’, and tried to soothe ruffled feelings.123
None the less, their action had important repercussions.
After February 1967, the Politburo, which for the previous six months had existed little more than in name, ceased to function altogether. Mao was not willing to take the risk of a majority uniting against him.124
At the same time the wall-poster campaign against the veterans put the traditional military hierarchy on the defensive and encouraged a fresh upsurge of leftist militancy. Mao himself became convinced that the military leaders’ efforts to restore stability in the ‘February Crackdown’ had been excessive. Officers who had shown special zeal in repressing radical assaults – including the Qinghai commander – were denounced as ultra-Rightists and court-martialled. Lin Biao, who until then had supported the regional commanders’ efforts to limit radical disruption, now began to warn of ‘an armed Liu–Deng line’.125 On April 1, Mao approved a directive condemning the ‘arbitrary stigmatising of mass organisations’. Military units, which previously had been permitted to open fire to suppress ‘reactionaries’ – a catch-all term which was applied to almost any rebellious group – or as a last resort in self-defence, were now prohibited from using their weapons against radicals in any circumstances.126
Factional violence rapidly escalated. Large quantities of weapons were stolen, including arms consignments being sent by rail to Vietnam. At Yibin, on the Upper Yangtse, pitched battles broke out involving tens of thousands of people. At Chongqing, rival groups used anti-aircraft guns to bombard each other's positions. In Changsha, they used missiles. Thirteen-year-old Liang Heng found himself in the middle of one such firefight:
