by Philip Short
From the spring of 1967 onwards, the Examination Group's remit, initially limited to the investigation of Peng Zhen and his associates, and then of Liu and Wang Guangmei, was dramatically enlarged.
One of the first new cases Kang devised was that of the so-called ‘61 Renegades’. This involved a group of senior Party officials, including the former Finance Minister, Bo Yibo, and the Organisation Department head, An Ziwen, who had been imprisoned in the 1930s in Beijing. With the agreement of the then Party leader, Zhang Wentian, and of the rest of the Politburo (including Mao), Liu Shaoqi, as head of the North China Bureau, had authorised them to renounce their Party membership as a means of winning release. The matter had been reviewed at the Seventh Party Congress in 1945, and it had been agreed that Liu had acted correctly.
When Kang initially suggested that the case should be reopened, Mao demurred. But, by February 1967, he had overcome his scruples.148 A month later, the Cultural Revolution Group approved a directive, labelling the sixty-one officials ‘a clique of traitors’, and accusing them of having ‘betrayed the Party’ as the price of their freedom.149 Mao, Zhou Enlai, Kang himself and the rest of the leadership all knew perfectly well that the charge was a complete fabrication. But it was useful, both to discredit Liu among the Party rank and file, and as a means of removing some of his principal supporters.
Unlike Stalin, Mao appears to have taken no interest in the sordid details of his victims’ treatment. Kang had a free hand, employing a mixture of Red Guard violence and the subtler tortures of trained professional interrogators. Bo Yibo kept a record of his torment, written on scraps of newspaper that he scattered in his cell, guessing correctly that his persecutors would preserve them – and that, one day, when the political wind changed, they would become a part of the indictment against them:
I received another round of severe beatings today [he wrote]. I am now covered in wounds and injuries, and my clothes are all in tatters. At one point, because I became dizzy and moved my body a couple of times, I was hit … and kicked over and over again … [Another time] my two arms were held behind my back, twisted, and when they put me on the ‘jetplane’, they forced me to keep my legs wide apart, while pressing my back down as far as it would go but keeping my head up and at attention. Then they took turns pulling my hair while kicking and beating me … I can no longer hold a pen steadily. How can I write a confession?150
Two more ‘Special Case Groups’ were formed to deal with Peng Dehuai and He Long. In July 1967, Peng was beaten so severely, in an attempt to make him confess that he had plotted against Mao, that the interrogators broke four of his ribs. He Long died of diabetic complications after being denied medical treatment.151
Other investigations followed into the Party's underground networks in the 1920s and 1930s. In east Hebei, 84,000 people were arrested, of whom 2,955 were executed, tortured to death or committed suicide. In Guangdong, 7,200 people were interrogated, and 85, including a provincial vice-governor, beaten to death. In Shanghai, 6,000 people were detained. Most were accused of working for the nationalists (an easy enough charge to make about a period when the CCP and the Guomindang had formed a united front), and about half were labelled traitors. Another small ‘renegade clique’, similar to Bo Yibo's, was unearthed in Xinjiang. In the north-east, an even more fantastic story was concocted, in which it was claimed that a group of senior army officers were ‘remnant followers’ of the Manchurian leader, Zhang Xueliang, and had plotted against Lin Biao: they, too, were purged. In Yunnan, 14,000 Party cadres were executed in an investigation to ‘ferret out traitors’. But the most extraordinary case of all was in Inner Mongolia. There 350,000 people were arrested; 80,000 people were beaten so badly they were permanently maimed, and more than 16,000 died, in an effort to prove that the veteran provincial leader, Ulanfu, a Politburo alternate, had established a rival ‘black party’ to compete with the CCP for power.152
None of these cases had any basis in fact. All were based on confessions, extracted by torture, and on the weaving together of isolated incidents, taken out of context, to produce a web of paranoid suspicion. In Mao's new ‘all-round nationwide civil war’, he had reverted to the logic, and the methods, of the old – to the practices of the 1930s during the frenzied blood-purges in the beleaguered Red base areas. Terror was again the means by which Red China would be cleansed, ready for the creation of the new utopia.
By the autumn of 1967, the first, firestorm year of the Cultural Revolution was drawing to a close. Liu Shaoqi had been vanquished. His allies had been purged, and Kang Sheng's ever-widening net was sweeping up their supporters, imagined or real. The Red Guards and rebel worker detachments had broken the hold of veteran Party officials in the provinces.
In the triad of ‘struggle, criticism, transformation’, on which all Mao's political movements were based, the time for struggle was over; criticism would continue; but the priority was now transformation – replacing the old with the new.
Amid the chaos of a country, all of whose main institutions except the army, the secret police and the economic ministries, had been effectively destroyed, this was easier said than done. In September 1967, during his tour of the provinces, Mao issued a new directive, requiring rival Red Guard and workers’ factions to unite and form ‘grand alliances’.153 In Beijing and Shanghai, this was done fairly quickly – though violent factional strife continued among university Red Guards. In other provinces, the army was instructed to maintain a policy of neutrality while rival Red Guard organisations despatched delegations to the capital, where, under the watchful eyes of the Cultural Revolution Group, they were ordered to negotiate until they resolved their differences.
To promote unity, the opposing factions were no longer described as ‘radicals’ and ‘conservatives’. Instead, local names were used. Thus, from Anhui there was the ‘good’ faction (hao pai) and the ‘fart faction’ (pi pai) – so-called because the radicals had said the power seizure in the province was ‘good’, while the conservatives said it was ‘as good as a fart’. But even with that encouragement, and the personal intervention of leaders as highly placed as Jiang Qing and Kang Sheng, it took fourteen months before the Anhui groups reached agreement. Up to the autumn of 1967, only seven provinces had been able to establish Revolutionary Committees. Everywhere else the Red Guards and other mass organisations were still arguing about which of them should take part and which of the former provincial leaders qualified as ‘revolutionary cadres’ whom they could therefore support.154
Meanwhile, to put steel into the Chairman's call to order, the campaign against the ultra-Leftist ‘May 16’ group was vastly expanded. That winter, Qi Benyu was arrested, joining his former colleagues, Wang Li and Guan Feng, as one of the three ‘black hands’ who had supposedly acted as the group's backstage bosses. Over the next four years, 10 million people would fall under suspicion as ‘May 16’ elements, and more than three million people would be persecuted – one in twenty-five of the adult urban population.155 At the Foreign Ministry, where Wang Li's influence was alleged to have been strongest, more than half of the 2,000 diplomats and officials were purged under the ‘May 16’ banner.156 The sheer scale of the movement meant that the main investigative role had to be taken by the army, which also had the leading role in a parallel campaign, launched at the same time, for ‘cleansing the class ranks’, whose purpose was to allow the leaders of the nascent revolutionary committees to crush those they regarded as politically hostile. Often such cases overlapped with those initiated by Kang Sheng's Central Case Examination Group, notably in Inner Mongolia – where so many people were killed that the Chairman and First Vice-Chairman of the Revolutionary Committee were both arrested for excessive zeal – and in Hebei and Yunnan. The best estimate is that, during the two years the campaign lasted, at least 36 million people were investigated; between 750,000 and 1.5 million were killed, many by what was termed ‘enforced suicide’; and an approximately equal number were permanently maimed. The commonest accusations
were of being ‘spies’, ‘bad elements’ or ‘newly emerged counter-revolutionaries’.157
Others, whose offences were linked directly to Cultural Revolution activities, were detained under new public security regulations which made it a counter-revolutionary crime to criticise Mao, Lin Biao, or, by extension, any of the other radical leaders. The regulations had been promulgated in January 1967, but were not applied until efforts to restore order began in earnest at the end of that year.
Despite this battery of repressive weaponry, the Chairman did not have it all his own way. The campaign against the ultra-Leftist ‘May 16’ group encouraged conservatives to question certain aspects of the Cultural Revolution Small Group's policies. Ninety-one Chinese ambassadors and other senior diplomats signed a wall-poster supporting the Politburo moderates who had been denounced during the ‘February Adverse Current’. A Red Guard group did the same. Xie Fuzhi, whom Mao had named to head the Beijing Revolutionary Committee, was accused of extreme Leftism. Similar attacks were made on radical leaders in Shanghai and Sichuan.158
Mao's counter-offensive, when it came, was from an unexpected quarter. On March 21, 1968, Jiang Qing and Kang Sheng made speeches, claiming that 'certain people' were trying to 'reverse the verdict' on the February Adverse Current.159 The following day it was announced that three top generals had committed 'serious mistakes' and had been dismissed.
Yang Chengwu, the acting Chief of Staff whom he had appointed two years earlier to succeed the disgraced Luo Ruiqing, was one of the outstanding heroes of the Long March. As a young battalion commander, he had been responsible for two of the feats which had passed into PLA legend: the crossing of the Dadu River, and the storming of Lazikou Pass. The others were Fu Chongbi, the Beijing garrison commander, who had protected Chen Zaidao after the Wuhan incident, and Yu Lijin, the Political Commissar of the PLA air force. Why these three were singled out is unclear. There is evidence that Yang and Fu had offended Jiang Qing and, in Yang's case, Mao as well. Lin Biao also had grounds for wanting to see two of them removed. At a time when he was steadily strengthening his control over the military, Yang was too independent-minded for his liking, while Yu was at odds with one of his key allies, the air force commander, Wu Faxian. Yang would be replaced by another of Lin's protégés, Huang Yongsheng, the Commander of the Canton Military Region. Like Wu Faxian; Li Zuopeng, the Political Commissar of the Navy; and Qiu Huizuo, the head of the General Logistical Department, Huang had served under Lin since before the Long March.
Whatever the precise mechanism of the purge, Mao's motives were clear enough: he needed scapegoats to justify a new campaign against the Right, both to rebut the accusations of the Foreign Ministry conservatives and their supporters and to provide cover for the Left during the vast military clampdown that he was about to launch to end the violence of the Red Guards and the worker-rebel detachments. Ever since Mao had decided the previous August that the PLA should remain aloof from the political struggle, his colleagues had been waiting for the other shoe to drop. The purge of the three generals for fomenting a ‘rightist wind of reversing correct verdicts’ signalled that the moment had come.
That summer, Mao moved decisively to restore order in Shaanxi then in the grip of full-scale civil war, and in Guangxi, where heavy weaponry had been looted from shipments bound for Vietnam and factional fighting had reduced parts of the provincial capital, Nanning, to rubble.160 Troops were sent in to separate the warring parties. On July 3, the Chairman issued a directive, calling for an immediate end to the violence. In Nanning, it would take another five weeks before the army was able to declare victory, by which time the city streets were literally awash with blood. Two thousand, three hundred captured rebels were publicly executed. Military Control Commissions were installed in the worst-affected counties to punish those who resisted. They found indiscriminate slaughter and, in some areas of Guangxi, political cannibalism: alleged traitors were killed and parts of their bodies eaten, in the same way as forty years earlier, Peng Pai's followers in Hailufeng, further up the coast, had killed and eaten their adversaries at ‘banquets of human flesh’ – with those who refused to take part being branded as ‘false comrades’.161 Finally, on August 20, a revolutionary committee was established, headed by the former First Secretary, Wei Guoqing.
The army was also entrusted with re-establishing discipline in the country's schools and universities, where ‘workers’ propaganda teams’ were sent to prepare for the resumption of classes, suspended for the previous two years while students rebelled.
This gave rise to another bizarre incident, less gruesome but in inspiration no less atavistic than the events in Guangxi.
At the end of July, Mao despatched 30,000 workers and PLA men to Qinghua and other campuses in Beijing where radical Red Guards were refusing to lay down their arms. The Qinghua students resisted. Five members of the work team were killed and more than a hundred wounded. As a token of support, Mao sent them a gift of mangoes, which he had received a few days earlier from a visiting Pakistani delegation. These were treated with all the reverence prescribed in the Liji, the Book of Rites dating from the fifth century BC, a period of China's antiquity whose precepts the Cultural Revolution was supposed to have swept away. Like holy relics – a tooth of the Buddha, or a nail from the Cross – the mangoes were venerated, and eventually, when they were half rotten, preserved by being coated in wax, while ‘replicas’ were distributed to other organisations.162
The fighting at Qinghua was a last hurrah. The following day Mao summoned the five principal Beijing Red Guard leaders to a meeting at the Great Hall of the People, where he told them that a ‘black hand’ was trying to suppress them. The ‘black hand’, he then added, was himself. Their violence had alienated too many people, he said. Now they faced a choice: either to submit to military control or voluntarily to disperse.163
The reopening of the schools helped to restore civil peace, but it did nothing to resolve the problem of the millions of youths who should have graduated during the previous two years and instead had spent their time roaming the country as Red Guards.
Even before the Cultural Revolution, youth unemployment in the cities had necessitated a voluntary rustication programme for school-leavers.164 The political turmoil since had made jobs still harder to find. Industrial output had fallen nearly 14 per cent in 1967, and would decline by a further 5 per cent the following year.165
In the autumn of 1968, therefore, the rustication programme was revived on an expanded basis – but this time it was compulsory. Over the next two years, five million young people would be sent to the countryside.166 In a parallel programme, several million cadres and intellectuals were ordered out of the cities to live in rural ‘May 7 Cadre Schools’ – so-called because Mao had put forward the idea of work-study among the peasants in a letter to Lin Biao on May 7, 1966.167 That most peasants wanted nothing to do with the new arrivals, regarding them as yet another unwelcome burden, was beside the point. To Mao, it was a neat solution: ideologically, it fulfilled his cherished ideal of breaking down barriers between town and country; politically, it forced the bureaucracy, the ‘new class’ which he believed had degenerated because of the softness of urban life,168 to seek renewal through manual labour; and socially, it removed from the cities both the former Red Guards and many of their former victims.
Here, too, the military played a key role.
Many of the rusticated youths wound up working on army-run farms in the border regions. Army officers oversaw the ‘cleansing of class ranks’ at the cadre schools. Military work teams were installed in every government department and ministry, in factories and newspaper offices.
But the full extent of the PLA's dominance was shown most clearly in the provincial administration. Half the members of the new revolutionary committees were PLA officers, as against less than a third from Red Guard and rebel worker detachments, and only 20 per cent, veteran cadres. In the standing committees – which served as the provincial governments – al
most three-quarters of the members were army men.169 At the grass roots, the proportion was still more striking: in a run-of-the-mill province like Hubei, where disruption had not been out of the ordinary, an astounding 98 per cent of county-level revolutionary committees were chaired by PLA officers.170 In practice, most of China was under military rule.
That, however, was the price of ending the descent into anarchy. The devastation of the social tissue had been too deep to admit of any other solution.
At the beginning of September 1968, it was announced that the last of the twenty-nine provincial revolutionary committees – in Tibet and Xinjiang – had been established. The Cultural Revolution Group proclaimed that ‘the entire country is Red’ and, at a mass rally two days later, Zhou Enlai declared: ‘We have finally smashed the plot of the handful of Party persons in power, taking the capitalist road.’171 The stage was at last set for the political denouement which Mao had begun preparing nearly four years before.
On October 13, 1968, the Central Committee, or what was left of it, gathered in Beijing to begin its Twelfth Plenum. More than two-thirds of its original membership had been purged, and of those that remained, only forty full members were present – too few to constitute a quorum. To remedy that, ten of the nineteen alternates present were promoted to full membership and the meeting was enlarged to include seventy-four PLA officers and leaders from the newly formed revolutionary committees, who – in violation of Party statutes – were also given voting rights.
