by Philip Short
I went out to buy kerosene to use when there were shortages of electricity … Then suddenly, too suddenly, 50 or 60 men carrying machine-guns ran past the gate of the Hunan Daily [building] toward me. A short man in black carried the flag with the words, ‘Young People's Bodyguard Squad’ on it, the name of one of the groups in the [radical] Xiang River Wind and Thunder faction … When the men were almost abreast of me they opened fire, aiming off down the road into the distance …
The enemy was out of sight, but it responded with force … The flagman fell in front of me and rolled over and over like a lead ball. The flag never touched the ground. Someone caught it and raised it, hardly breaking stride. Then he crumpled and rolled, and someone else seized it and carried it forward …
At last … they retreated to the nearest shelter … [where] other ‘Bodyguard Squad’ members were waiting with trucks and stretchers … Those still unharmed reloaded madly, breaking open huge wooden crates and spilling the long pointed bullets in random hillocks on the ground …
In the meantime, three shining black cannon had been taken off the trucks and the Rebels were trying to get the soldiers to show them how to use them. The soldiers were refusing … Finally [they] decided to go ahead [anyway]. They shot three times, but each time the shell went wildly astray … At the time, I found this vaguely amusing, but later … a worker … told me how he had shot and killed his best friend at a distance of two feet because he did not know how to use a machine-gun …
Someone they called Commander Tang [then arrived], a distraught young man with two guns in his belt and a small contingent of bodyguards. ‘Quickly, quickly,’ he was saying furiously. ‘Retreat, retreat …’ They piled into the trucks, a bloody collection of bandages and filth, the motors roared, and they were gone …
The city shook the whole day, and that evening the sky glowed a queer orange … The next day we learned that members of the [radical] ‘Changsha Youth’ organisation had levelled anti-aircraft missiles at the Xiang Embroidery Building on May First Square in an attack on the [conservative] Workers’ Alliance. The entire block-long four-storey building had burned to the ground.127
The ‘all-round nationwide civil war’ which Mao had toasted the previous winter had become a reality.
At that point Lin Biao, with Mao's tacit support, concluded that the threat to military stability – the ultimate guarantor of communist power – had gone too far. To put down a marker, he intervened in an episode which in any other circumstances would have seemed surreal. On May 13, a performance by the arts troupe of the Air Force, several of whose girl dancers were frequent visitors to Mao's bed, was violently disrupted by radicals linked to Jiang Qing. Two days later, Lin sent a group of senior officers to show solidarity with the injured. In the coded language of the time, Lin and the military commanders were telling the Cultural Revolution Small Group to back off. The incident left scars. Beneath a veneer of shared devotion to the Cultural Revolution, Lin's military faction and Jiang Qing's civilian radicals were beginning to grapple for power.128
At the beginning of the summer, the Chairman left for a two-month-long tour of the provinces, to see for himself how the Cultural Revolution was progressing. His first stop was in Wuhan, where armed clashes had been occurring between a conservative workers’ group, known as the ‘Million Heroes’, which was supported by the regional military commander, Chen Zaidao, and the radical ‘Workers’ General Headquarters’, whose leaders had been in prison since the ‘February Crackdown’. In the worst incident, in June, more than a hundred people had been killed and some 3,000 wounded.
Mao's presence was kept secret, and exceptional security was in force. The entire staff of the East Lake state guest-house, where he stayed, was changed on the eve of his arrival in case it had been infiltrated by counter-revolutionaries.
On Monday, July 18, after two days of talks with local leaders, Mao concluded that Chen had committed errors and must make a public self-criticism, while retaining his command; the ‘Workers’ Headquarters’ should be regarded as the core group of the Left; and the ‘Million Heroes’ should be encouraged to unite with them. They were, after all, workers, he said, and there should be no fundamental conflict of interest.129 This was announced that night by Wang Li, the Cultural Revolution Group's propaganda chief, and a summary of his remarks, in which he described the ‘Million Heroes’ as a conservative group, was broadcast over the city's street loudspeaker system. Next day, the Security Minister, Xie Fuzhi, gave a more detailed account to the Military Region Party Committee.
Chen Zaidao accepted Mao's verdict. The ‘Million Heroes’, unaware that it came from the Chairman, did not.
The following night, thousands of the group's followers commandeered army lorries and fire trucks and drove in convoy to the Military Region headquarters, demanding that Wang Li come out and talk to them. When he failed to appear, they went to the East Lake guest-house and stormed the building where he was staying – having no idea that Mao was less than a hundred yards away. Supported by uniformed troops from a local regiment, they broke into Wang's room, dragged him out into a car and took him to a struggle meeting, where he was severely beaten and one of his legs was broken. For the next three days and nights, several hundred thousand people – members of the ‘Million Heroes’ and their supporters, including large numbers of fully armed soldiers – paraded through the city in a show of strength, calling for the dismissal of Wang Li and Xie Fuzhi, and the overthrow of the Cultural Revolution Group radicals.
Mao was never in any danger. Even if he had been, it probably would not have bothered him greatly. Three months earlier he had horrified his staff by insisting that the masses must be allowed to storm Zhongnanhai if they wished.130
But for the radicals, it was a heaven-sent opportunity to press for a nationwide campaign to root out conservative resistance in the army once and for all.
Jiang Qing portrayed the Wuhan events as a full-scale mutiny. Mao himself, who was flown out to Shanghai in the early hours of Thursday morning – breaking, for the first and last time in his life, the rule imposed by the Politburo in 1959, forbidding him to travel by air for fear of an accident – pooh-poohed that idea, pointing out that if Chen Zaidao had wanted to stage a rebellion he would not have been permitted to leave. None the less, the fact that he had been pressured into a precipitate departure as a result of military unrest irritated him greatly.
Wang Li was released next day, and flew back with Xie Fuzhi to Beijing, where the two men were given a heroes’ welcome. Lin Biao, hedging his bets, presided over a rally of a million people in Tiananmen Square, attended by the whole leadership (except the marshals, who were pointedly not invited), to denounce the Wuhan military region for ‘daring to use barbaric, fascist methods to besiege, kidnap and beat up the Centre's representatives’.
Chen Zaidao was summoned to the capital and stripped of his command. But, on Mao's instructions, he was not designated a counter-revolutionary; and when thousands of cadets tried to drag him out for a struggle meeting, the Beijing garrison commander, Fu Chongbi, hid him for two hours in a lift, immobilised between two floors of the guest-house where he was staying, until they had dispersed. The defeated ‘Million Heroes’ were less fortunate. Their radical opponents from the ‘Workers’ Headquarters’ launched a pogrom which, in Wuhan alone, left 600 workers dead. In the province as a whole, an astounding 184,000 people were seized, beaten and maimed, or killed.131
Mao was torn. On the one hand, the military weakness of the left worried him. On the other, he understood that he could not push the military leadership too far.
Even before the Wuhan events, he had proposed to Zhou Enlai that workers and students should be armed. ‘Why can't we arm [them]?’ he had asked. ‘I say we should.’132 Zhou prudently took no action. Then, after Mao reached Shanghai, he urged Lin Biao to ‘drag out that small handful [of capitalist roaders] within the armed forces’ – an expression used a few days earlier by Lin's son, Lin Liguo, in an article in the Peo
ple's Daily on Wang Li's triumphal return to Beijing.133 Later that month, Jiang Qing publicised the slogan ‘Attack by reasoning, defend by force’, which was seized on by radical groups to justify armed struggle.134 Then, on August 4, in a private letter to Jiang Qing – which she read out to a meeting of the Central Caucus – Mao went further. It was imperative to arm the Left, he wrote, because the great majority of the army was backing conservative workers’ groups. The stealing of arms by workers was ‘not a serious problem’. The masses should be encouraged to take the law into their own hands.135
In this febrile climate, the Party journal, Red Flag, published an editorial to mark the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the Red Army on August 1, which made clear that the struggle against capitalist-roaders in the army was the next major national task.136
When Mao read it, he changed his mind.
Just as he had after the proclamation of the Shanghai Commune, he now decided, for the second time, that the Cultural Revolution had reached a Rubicon. For the second time, he ordered a retreat.
Mao himself liked to explain such reversals in terms of dialectics: when a thing reaches its extreme, it turns into its opposite. Thus, in February 1967, he had moved to preserve the principle of Party rule against the day when he would want to rebuild it. Now, six months later, with the Party hierarchy virtually destroyed, he recognised an overriding imperative to preserve the one instrument of power that remained: the army. This time, it was not the fear of anarchy that had given him pause, but the politician's instinct for the possible. In the trade-off between radical activism and military stability that he had been juggling with since the winter, he had pushed the radicals’ cause to the limit. The moment had come for the pendulum to swing decisively back the other way.
On August 11, he sent word to Beijing that the policy of ‘dragging out a small handful [of capitalist roaders] in the army’ was ‘tactically inappropriate’. That was enough for Lin Biao and Jiang Qing to drop it like a hot brick. Soon afterwards, Mao returned the Red Flag editorial with the fateful words, ‘poisonous weed’, scrawled on it.137 It had been written by the editor of Red Flag, Lin Jie, and another Cultural Revolution Small Group propagandist named Guan Feng, and approved by Chen Boda. Ten days later, on August 22, in retaliation for the arrests of communist journalists by the authorities in Hong Kong, Red Guards from the Foreign Languages Institute, which was under Foreign Ministry jurisdiction, sacked the British Legation in Beijing. Zhou Enlai, who had been working round the clock, had suffered a minor heart attack that week. ‘Where will it all end, if this is allowed to go on?’ he asked Yang Chengwu, the acting Chief of Staff, whom he sent to Shanghai to brief Mao. Zhou thought the sacking of the legations reflected the influence of Guan Feng as well as of Wang Li and another member of the Cultural Revolution Group, Qi Benyu. Some weeks earlier Wang had given a speech at the Foreign Ministry urging rebels there to take a firmer stand against the old guard and specifically against the Foreign Minister, Chen Yi, whom he denounced by name. Guan and Qi had criticised the ministry's ‘timidity’.
Mao was not pleased. The burning of the British mission, following earlier incidents involving the Burmese, Indian and Indonesian embassies, showed that China was failing to meet its international obligations. Wang Li's speech at the ministry, he said, was ‘a big, big, big poisonous weed’. He and Guan Feng were ‘wrecking the Cultural Revolution’ and must be arrested at once – one of the very rare cases in which Mao is known to have given such an order himself. Qi Benyu, a talented polemicist whose historical writings Mao admired, was to be spared for the moment to see how he behaved.138
The combination of the Wuhan incident, the aborted campaign against capitalist roaders in the military and the leftist takeover of the Foreign Ministry, all in rapid succession, convinced him that the army's role as a disciplined force must be preserved at all costs.
In February, the Chairman had justified the retreat from the Shanghai Commune on a diplomatic pretext. In the autumn, to protect the army, a different device was employed.
The radicals’ ‘excesses’ were blamed on a shadowy ultra-leftist organisation called the ‘May 16 Group’. It was not wholly fictitious: a Red Guard groupuscule of that name, with about forty members, had been formed that spring at the Beijing Iron and Steel Institute, and had distinguished itself by making wall-poster attacks on Premier Zhou Enlai as the ‘backstage boss’ of the ‘February Adverse Current’.139 Other radical groups were making similar accusations at that time, tacitly encouraged by followers of Jiang Qing, who already saw Zhou as an impediment to her political ambitions.140 For some weeks Mao had left Zhou to face the onslaught unaided before ordering Chen Boda to state publicly that the Premier was a member of the Chairman's ‘proletarian headquarters’, at which point the agitation stopped. By August, the ‘May 16 Group’ had ceased to exist – and, in any case, it had no connection with Wang Li and Guan Feng, or any of the other senior figures who were later named as its leaders. But that was of no importance. What mattered was the concept it represented. From September 1967 onwards, when Mao personally branded it a ‘conspiratorial counter-revolutionary clique’ with ‘unspeakably evil purposes’,141 ‘May 16’ became a catch-all weapon for wiping out any manifestation, suspected or real, of political dissent.
By then the Chairman had reversed himself on ‘arming the left’ as well.142
A directive was issued forbidding weapons seizures by the rebels and authorising troops to fire in self-defence. On Mao's instructions, Jiang Qing delivered a speech, condemning armed struggle and denouncing the idea of ‘seizing a small handful in the army’ as ‘a trap’ set by right-wingers in order to ensnare the left. ‘We must not paint the PLA black,’ she went on. ‘They are our own boys.’ The army commanders’ problems were not over. But the threat that had hung over the military since the beginning of the year had finally been lifted.143
The repudiation of the ‘February Adverse Current’ in the spring of 1967 had not only triggered an upsurge of radical attacks against the army. It had also signalled the start of a new stage in the criticism of Liu Shaoqi and of the bourgeois ideology he was held to represent.
It had begun on April 1, 1967, with a long article in the People's Daily, written by Qi Benyu, which broke new ground by attacking Liu directly (though still not by name) as ‘the top Party person in power taking the capitalist road’. The article, entitled ‘Patriotism or National Betrayal’, had been revised by Mao himself. Like many Cultural Revolution polemics, the topic was extremely obscure – a film made in 1950, set in the time of the Emperor Guangxu, which Mao had once denounced as treasonous because it denigrated the Boxer Revolt but which Liu was said to have approved.144 The burden of the article was that the Boxers, like the Red Guards, were revolutionary, and that Liu's support of the film was a paradigm for his many other acts of betrayal. On April 6, the ‘Red Regiment’ at Zhongnanhai staged another raid on Liu's home – the first since January – and questioned him about Qi Benyu's charges. Next day, the Head of State put up a wall-poster outside his house, denying any traitorous intent. It was torn down after a few hours, and on the 10th his wife, Wang Guangmei, was taken to a struggle meeting before thousands of Red Guards at Qinghua University, where she was humiliated by being made to put on a silk dress, silk stockings and high-heeled shoes (which she had worn during a State Visit to Indonesia), as well as a necklace made of ping-pong balls, to symbolise her supposed bourgeois tastes.145
The media barrage continued. In May, Liu's book, How to be a Good Communist, was denounced as ‘a big anti-Marxist-Leninist and anti-Mao-Zedong-Thought poisonous weed’. The Chairman himself described it as ‘a deceitful work, a form of idealism, opposed to Marxism-Leninism’.146
The climax came in July. On the eve of Mao's departure for Wuhan, Red Guards from the Beijing Institute of Aeronautical Engineering, backed by the Cultural Revolution Group, set up a ‘Collar Liu Shaoqi Frontline Command Post’ outside the West Gate of Zhongnanhai. Dozens of loudspeaker
vans blared out Maoist slogans day and night. By July 18, several hundred thousand people had gathered in the streets outside, vowing to fast until Liu was ‘dragged out’. This was not done, because Mao had expressly forbidden it. But that evening the ‘Red Regiment’ held an ‘accusation meeting’ within the leadership compound, at which Liu and his wife were made to stand silently for two hours, bowing from the waist, while their accusers harangued them. Mao's doctor saw them being beaten and kicked, while soldiers of the Central Guard Unit stood by and watched: Liu's shirt had been torn open, and people were jerking him around by the hair. Two-and-a-half weeks later, the process was repeated. This time the couple had to stand in the Red Guards’ ‘jetplane’ position, bending forward with their arms stretched back behind them, while Liu was interrogated anew about his alleged ‘national betrayals’. Deng Xiaoping and Tao Zhu and their wives were subjected to similar indignities.
It was mild stuff compared to the treatment meted out to lesser officials. None the less, Liu was seventy years old. He was forced to kneel before Red Guard posters, with rebels pulling his hair and pushing his head to the ground. His left leg was injured, and afterwards, as he was frog-marched back to his residence, his face was swollen and a bluish, ashen colour.147
On August 7, he wrote to Mao, resigning as Head of State.
He received no reply. Soon afterwards he was separated from his family. Wang Guangmei was imprisoned. Their children were sent to work as peasants in the countryside. The accusation meetings ceased. From then on Liu was held in solitary confinement at his home, while the Central Case Examination Group continued to assemble ‘evidence’ of treachery that would justify his formal dismissal.
This body took on growing importance as the swirl of movements that constituted the Cultural Revolution became ever more complex. It was chaired by Zhou Enlai and answerable directly to Mao. But in practice it became the personal empire of Kang Sheng. Alongside the Red Guards and the rebel worker detachments, who were the revolution's foot soldiers, and the PLA, whose ‘support for the Left’ made up for the radicals’ numerical weakness – Kang's political police provided the edge of cold steel which ensured that, in all circumstances, ‘proletarian dictatorship’ would triumph.
