Mao

by Philip Short

  The plenum had three main tasks: to ratify the overthrow of Liu Shaoqi; to confirm the designation of Lin Biao as Mao's new successor – a state of affairs that had been implicit since August 1966, when Lin had become sole Vice-Chairman, and which Mao had explicitly acknowledged in November 1967; and to condemn the ‘February Adverse Current’ and its sequel, the ‘Right-deviationist wind’ of March 1968.

  Of these, by far the most important was the resolution damning Liu. Jiang Qing, who had taken personal charge of the ‘Special Case Group’ carrying out the investigation, had compiled three large volumes of evidence – based entirely on confessions obtained through torture – which purported to show that he had betrayed the Party to the Guomindang on at least three occasions: in Changsha in 1925; in Wuhan in 1927; and in Shenyang in 1929. To obtain even those flimsy charges of treachery four decades before, Kang Sheng's investigators had had to interrogate 28,000 people, most of whom were later imprisoned as counter-revolutionaries, and to pore over four million files. One key witness, Meng Yongqian, who had been arrested with Liu in 1929, was questioned continuously for seven days and nights to force him to admit that he and Liu had turned traitor while in captivity. When he recovered, he retracted his ‘confession’ – but this was concealed.

  Jiang Qing herself evidently recognised that these were slim pickings, and in her report she listed other, more recent, examples of Liu's perfidy – including collusion with ‘the US secret agent, Wang Guangmei’; sending ‘valuable information’ to the CIA in Hong Kong; and opposing ‘Chairman Mao's proletarian revolutionary line’. Evidence to back up these charges would be published later, she said, though in fact it never was.

  None the less, the plenum voted ‘to expel Liu Shaoqi from the Party, once and for all’; to dismiss him from all his posts as ‘a renegade, traitor and scab … [and] a lackey of imperialism, modern revisionism and the Guomindang reactionaries’; and ‘to continue to settle accounts with him and his accomplices’. It was not quite a unanimous vote. Zhou Enlai, Chen Yi, Ye Jianying and the other veteran leaders all raised their hands obediently to condemn their erstwhile colleague.172 But one elderly woman CC member refused to go along with the charade and abstained. She was purged afterwards too.

  Lin Biao's nomination as Mao's successor was also approved – without dissent.173

  The one issue on which serious differences did arise was the treatment of the Politburo moderates. Zhou Enlai, not for the first and not for the last time during the Cultural Revolution, was cast as Mao's attack dog – lambasting not only the marshals but also his own State Council allies, Chen Yun, Li Xiannian and Li Fuchun, for careerism and opposing Mao's line. It was the opening scene of the kind of political theatre at which Mao excelled. Jiang Qing and Kang Sheng, both determined to see the role of the moderate leaders reduced, then played the role that Mao expected of them and, with Lin Biao's agreement, instructed their supporters to launch concerted attacks on the old guard when the plenum broke into group discussions. Zhu De was accused to his face of being ‘an old right-wing opportunist’, who had opposed Mao's leadership since their days on the Jinggangshan; Chen Yun was said to have resisted the Great Leap Forward; the four marshals, by instigating the ‘February Adverse Current’, had sought to reverse the verdict on Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping and Tao Zhu.

  With the stage thus set, Mao could afford to be conciliatory. The veterans, he insisted, had merely exercised their right to express their opinions. Even Deng Xiaoping, he added, was not in the same category as Liu Shaoqi.174

  In Deng's case, Mao had held this view since the start of the Cultural Revolution. At one point in 1967, he had toyed with the idea of bringing him back into the leadership. The same year he rejected a proposal from Kang Sheng to establish a separate ‘Special Case Group’ to investigate Deng's past, agreeing only that the team investigating He Long – a relatively minor inquiry – might set up a subgroup for that purpose. Now he dismissed the Cultural Revolution Small Group's suggestion that Deng, as well as Liu, should be expelled from the Party. It was an insurance policy. ‘That little man … has a great future ahead of him’, he had once told a foreign visitor. Deng was never officially attacked by name during the Cultural Revolution. Mao preferred to keep him in reserve, in case he should need his talents again.175

  Six months later, when the Ninth Congress met to bring the Cultural Revolution to a triumphal close, the Chairman was equally prudent.176

  The leaders who had taken part in the ‘February Adverse Current’, all except Tan Zhenlin (who had been blackballed by Lin Biao), retained their positions as Central Committee members, and two of them, Ye Jianying and Li Xiannian, were reappointed to the Politburo which gradually resumed its normal functions. Three other veterans – Zhu De; the ‘One-eyed Dragon’, Marshal Liu Bocheng, now totally blind; and Dong Biwu, who, besides Mao, was the only surviving founder member of the Party – also kept their Politburo seats, and two younger professional soldiers – Xu Shiyou and Chen Xilian, the Military Region commanders in Nanjing and Shenyang – joined that body for the first time.

  In one sense, these seven were political ballast.

  Power lay with the Standing Committee, whose membership had not changed since it suspended work in 1966 – Mao; Lin Biao, now officially described as the Chairman's ‘closest comrade in arms’; Zhou Enlai; Chen Boda and Kang Sheng – and with the two radical clans within the leadership, led by Lin and Jiang Qing. Jiang had the support of the Shanghai leaders, Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan, and the Security Minister, Xie Fuzhi – all of whom became full Politburo members. Lin's group comprised his wife, Ye Qun; and the four generals – Huang Yongsheng, Wu Faxian, Li Zuopeng and Qiu Huizuo – who were similarly promoted. The Central Caucus ceased to function and the Cultural Revolution Small Group was disbanded five months later.

  Politburo sessions after the Ninth Congress often took the form of what were called ‘occasional work meetings’, from which the old guard were excluded. Yet the Chairman's decision to make a place for the moderates was important. It was not simply a gesture of magnanimity. Rather Mao was attempting – as he had at the Seventh Congress in 1945 – to fashion a coalition representing the different interest groups that made up the communist polity. He was lucid enough to know that, even at a time of radical dominance, men like Zhu De and Liu Bocheng (and still more, Zhou Enlai) had a political constituency which Lin Biao and his followers could not reach. Fifty years of political infighting had taught Mao not to put all his eggs in one basket.

  There was a more fundamental, reason, too.

  Officially the Cultural Revolution had been an outstanding success. Mao was credited with raising Marxism-Leninism ‘to a higher and completely new stage’, creating a guiding philosophy for ‘the era when imperialism is heading for total collapse and socialism towards worldwide victory’. His aphorisms had become so rooted in the nation's consciousness that, in everyday conversation, they had acquired the status given to quotations from the Confucian Classics in the speech of earlier generations. The Ninth Congress had affirmed class struggle as the Party's ‘basic line throughout the period of socialism’, and had laid down that future generations should conduct policy under the rubric of ‘continuing the revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat’.

  But, after three years, of turmoil, how much had actually been achieved?

  Liu Shaoqi had been definitively purged. Deng Xiaoping was under house arrest. Peng Dehuai was in prison. He Long had died in captivity that summer, after Mao had told the 12th Plenum in 1968 that he could ‘no longer be protected’, which his doctors took as a signal to hasten his demise by intentionally giving him the wrong medication.177 Tao Zhu died a few months later. Hundreds of thousands of lesser figures at all levels of the Party hierarchy had been removed from power. Many of them, too, were in jail. One million people had been killed – a figure which would more than double as the purge of ‘May 16’ elements and ‘cleansing the class ranks’ unearthed fresh ‘counter-revolutionaries’ a
nd sent them to their deaths.178 All outward manifestations of bourgeois thought and behaviour had been crushed.

  In Liu's place, Mao had put Lin Biao. In one respect, he was a better choice of successor; he was almost ten years younger. But he was chronically sick, to the point where even Mao referred to him contemptuously by the soubriquet, ‘Forever Healthy’.179 Lin suffered from a nervous disorder – akin to Mao's neurasthenia – which caused him to sweat profusely. Unlike Mao, he was also a hypochondriac. He hated meeting people, and the ordeal of having to receive a foreign delegation left him drenched in perspiration. While undergoing medical treatment in the Soviet Union in the early 1940s, he had become addicted to morphine, and had never entirely quit the habit. He developed an aversion to sunlight. In his office the blinds were perpetually drawn. He refused to go out in the wind. Indoors, the temperature had to be maintained at a constant 21 degrees centigrade, summer and winter alike.

  Even by the standards of a leadership where personal friendships were the exception, Lin's behaviour was irrationally antisocial. He lived in semi-seclusion in a heavily guarded mansion at Maojiawan, in the north-western quarter of Beijing. Visitors were discouraged, and he never visited others, often declining to see even his own military subordinates. He refused to read documents himself, instead getting his secretaries to give him an oral summary, which was not allowed to take up more than thirty minutes a day.

  None of these eccentricities disqualified Lin from becoming Mao's successor. The role of Party Chairman was not executive but strategic. In Mao's eyes, Lin's supreme merit was that, ever since they had met on the Jinggangshan in 1928, he had been a totally loyal follower. He had an impressive intellect. Alone among Mao's subordinates, he peppered his major speeches with apt historical allusions (which he employed a team of researchers to find for him), and when he was not wallowing in panegyrics on the Chairman, he was capable of articulating Mao's views with a cogency and clarity that none of the others could equal. Politically, he had the prestige that came from being the most brilliant of the communists’ civil war commanders. Ideologically, he adhered religiously to the precepts of Mao Zedong Thought.

  But Lin was not a charismatic leader, and it must have been clear to Mao that he would need to be well seconded.

  Therein lay the difficulty. When the Chairman looked around the auditorium in the Great Hall of the People where the Ninth Congress was being held, he could hardly fail to notice that more than a quarter of the 1,500 delegates were wearing green PLA uniforms.180 A third of the new Central Committee was from the army. Fewer than a fifth were veteran cadres. The newcomers might be politically and ideologically sound, but very few were of the calibre of the first-generation leaders they had replaced.

  In the country at large, the success of the Cultural Revolution was even more problematic. ‘Cleansing the class ranks’ had caused an explosion of violence in the countryside, as local cadres seized the opportunity to purge and kill real or suspected enemies. But the Cultural Revolution itself had been essentially an urban phenomenon. Many of China's 600 million peasants, far from being ‘touched to their very souls’ – as revolutionary propaganda had it – heard only distant rumours of the tumult in the cities.

  Outwardly, China had become a sea of collectively owned grey buildings, of collectively farmed fields, of uniform blue cotton clothes – where the only colour came from the red flags on buildings and the bright jackets and leggings of small children. Ornament of any kind was forbidden. Culture had been reduced to Jiang Qing's eight revolutionary model operas. There were no markets, no street stalls, no pedlars. Every bicycle was black.

  But to eradicate the individualism of the spirit – to achieve a ‘proletarian revolution of the mind’, as Mao put it181 – was a much more uncertain undertaking.

  In 1966, he had written that cultural revolutions would have to be unleashed ‘every seven or eight years’ to renew the nation's revolutionary élan and halt the onset of bourgeois degeneration. Now, in April 1969, he repeated that the task had not yet been completed, and ‘after a few years’ it might have to be done all over again.182

  Mao never admitted, then or later, that the Cultural Revolution had fallen short of his original design. None the less, it is hard to believe that a man of his questioning, dialectical bent could not see that the new ‘realm of Red virtue’ whose birth pangs had been marked by such terror, cruelty and pain, was of stultifying shallowness. If he did, he did not let it show. The Cultural Revolution had provoked a collective demonstration of the worst instincts of a nation; even Lin Biao, in private, dismissed it as a ‘Cultureless Revolution’.183 But Mao had other concerns. Revolution, he was fond of saying, was not a dinner-party. The overriding priority was the perennity of class struggle.

  In the service of that cause, China had become a vast prison of the mind. The old world had been smashed. Mao had nothing to put in its place but empty, Red rhetoric.

  In the end, the void was filled with unwitting help from Moscow.

  On the night of August 20, 1968, Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia to crush the ‘Prague Spring’ and overthrow the reforming communist government there.184 To justify their action, the Russians argued that all Soviet-bloc states had a duty to defend the socialist system wherever it was threatened. This ‘Brezhnev doctrine’, as it was called, was formally limited to Europe. But to Mao, it provided a basis for a possible Russian attack on China.

  The following spring, he decided to pre-empt that.

  Minor incidents had been occurring haphazardly along the Sino-Soviet border for several years. The clash that took place on March 2, 1969 was premeditated, however. Three hundred Chinese troops, wearing white camouflage outfits, advanced under cover of darkness across the ice of the Ussuri River on to Zhenbao (Damansky) Island, a disputed speck of territory on the river frontier 150 miles south of the Siberian city of Khabarovsk. There they dug foxholes in the snow, and lay in ambush. Next morning, a Chinese decoy party moved ostentatiously on to the island. When a Russian patrol arrived to intercept them, the Chinese opened fire. The Soviets then brought up reinforcements and succeeded in driving the Chinese back, losing more than thirty men dead and wounded. Another, bigger battle in the same area two weeks later ended with sixty Russian and several hundred Chinese casualties. In a third battle, on March 17, not made public at the time, the Russians brought in tanks and artillery.185

  Mao's plan was of breathtaking simplicity. If the Soviet Union had become China's main enemy, then the United States, on the principle that ‘my enemy's enemy is my friend’, had become a potential ally – even if it was engaged in a brutal and destructive war on China's southern frontiers against another of Beijing's allies, Vietnam.186

  The fighting on Zhenbao Island was the beginning of a prolonged Chinese effort to convince the newly elected US President, Richard Nixon, that Beijing's foreign policy priorities had undergone a fundamental change. The Russians, unaware of Mao's objectives, unintentionally strengthened his case by stepping up military pressure to try to force China to negotiate. All through the spring and summer, border incidents multiplied – accompanied by heavy hints from Moscow of Warsaw Pact intervention and the possible use of nuclear weapons (just as the Americans had brandished the nuclear threat during the Taiwan Straits crisis in 1958). The Kremlin began a massive build-up of Soviet forces in Mongolia. China approved a 30 per cent increase in military spending. In August a civil defence programme was launched in Beijing and other large cities, in which millions of people were mobilised to dig air-raid shelters for use against nuclear attack.

  Having made his political point, Mao agreed, after a suitable show of reluctance, to a meeting in September between Zhou Enlai and the Soviet Premier, Andrei Kosygin – held symbolically at Beijing airport to underline that the Middle Kingdom was still determined to keep the barbarians at the gate. They reached an understanding to maintain the status quo along the frontier; to resume border negotiations; and to avoid further military clashes.

  With
that, the crisis was defused.

  While it lasted, it created an appropriately militant backdrop for the holding of the Ninth Congress. Four hundred million people, half of China's population, were said to have taken part in demonstrations against the ‘new tsars’. In the longer term, the escalating rhetoric aimed at ‘Soviet social-imperialism’ provided a new political focus for the nation's energies (just as, twenty years earlier, anti-American rhetoric had galvanised China at the time of the Korean War).

  It also allowed Mao to tie up loose ends. In mid-October, Lin Biao ordered a ‘red alert’, in which a million troops were mobilised for a possible Soviet attack.187 This was not totally far-fetched. Although the border crisis had eased, China had just carried out its first successful underground nuclear test, sparking concerns that the Russians might launch a surgical strike against Chinese nuclear facilities. Whether the Chairman really believed, as was claimed later, that they might also stage a punitive bombing raid on Beijing is another matter. But it provided him with a pretext for dispersing the veteran Party leaders to the provinces, as part of a general leadership evacuation from Beijing, and at the same time removing from the capital – three years after their fall – Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping.

  Deng was sent with his wife to Jiangxi, where he lived under guard in an army barracks and spent his days working part-time in a nearby tractor repair plant. That year his eldest son, Deng Pufang, became a lifelong cripple after jumping from a third-storey window to escape his Red Guard tormentors.III But Deng himself was under Mao's protection. The head of the CC General Office, Wang Dongxing, was instructed to ensure that the family's conditions were acceptable and Deng's children, including Pufang, were later permitted to join him.188

  Liu had been bedridden since the summer of 1968, when he had contracted pneumonia. When he was told that he had been expelled from the Party, he ‘broke out into a sweat, became short of breath [and] began to vomit’. He never spoke again. He became covered in bed sores and had to be fed intravenously. His thinning hair, which had turned white, had not been cut for two years and was a foot in length. On Mao's instructions, he was taken out of Zhongnanhai on a stretcher on October 17 and flown to Kaifeng, the capital of Anhui. There he was held in the basement of an empty unheated building at the Municipal Party Committee headquarters. He developed pneumonia again, but permission to treat him in hospital was denied. After a cruel and long drawn-out agony, he died an abject death, his bed sheets covered in vomit and excrement, on November 12, four years almost to the day after Mao had launched the campaign against him. His corpse was put in the back of a jeep and taken to be cremated under a false name.189