by Philip Short
The Chairman did not give a direct order for Liu's death, any more than he ordered the deaths of He Long or Tao Zhu, or of Peng Dehuai who also died later in prison.
But he did not raise a finger to prevent them.
I The use of dunce's hats, like other Red Guard practices, was part of a much older tradition. Mao wrote of it in his account of the peasant movement in Hunan in 1927. Ten years later a Chinese journalist described the fate of suspected collaborators at Taiyuan during the war against Japan: ‘Each collaborator was wearing a high paper hat, on which was written clearly each one's name, personal details and his treacherous behaviour. They were placed in a vehicle and taken through the streets, and the squad used a really big drum, beating it as they went along …. The streets were full of people watching those collaborators, and all of them with one voice yelled and cursed them.’ The treatment meted out to Mao's opponents in the 1960s was exactly the same.
II This was an ad hoc body, created the previous August to do the work of the Politburo Standing Committee which no longer met.
III Years later Deng Pufang recalled in an interview with the author: ‘Some [radicals] detained me and held me in a kind of prison. I felt I had no future whatever. They beat me up – physical persecution was a very common thing at that time – until finally I felt my life simply wasn't important any more. I thought it would be better if I just ended it all. So I jumped deliberately from [the top of] the building [where I was being held]. At that moment … whether I was disabled or not was a matter of complete indifference.’
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
Things Fall Apart
Six weeks after Liu Shaoqi's death, Mao celebrated his seventy-sixth birthday. He was a heavy smoker and suffered from respiratory problems. But, that apart, his health was good. His doctor, returning after a year's absence, found that he was still waited on by a harem of young women, and would sometimes invite ‘three, four, even five of them simultaneously’ to share his great bed.1
With age, he had grown increasingly capricious and unpredictable. He had always expected his subordinates to stay in tune with his thinking – if not to anticipate him, at least not to get out of line. All the major victims of the previous two decades, Gao Gang, Peng Dehuai, Liu, Deng and Tao Zhu, had fallen because they failed that test. But now it was growing even harder to fathom the Chairman's true intentions. Not only would he push a policy to its extreme and then abruptly reverse it – as he had with the Shanghai Commune, and with the purge of ‘capitalist-roaders’ in the army in 1967 – which invariably left his supporters wrong-footed; but, more often than in the past, he would deliberately conceal his real views, or cloak them in utterances of Delphic ambiguity, in order to see how others would react.
A whiff of paranoia began to emanate from the Study of Chrysanthemum Fragrance. ‘In his later years’, one Politburo radical wrote, ‘almost nobody trusted him. We very seldom saw him, and … when we [did], we were terrified of saying something wrong in case he took it as an error.’2
The result was that all Mao's colleagues assumed the role, and the habits, of courtiers.
Zhou Enlai was best at it. It was he who, in March 1969, realising that the Chairman's ruling to exclude Jiang Qing from the new Politburo was merely to avoid the appearance of nepotism, put her name (and that of Ye Qun) on the list anyway. It was Zhou, too, who, in his speech to the Ninth Congress, spoke of Mao having developed Marxism-Leninism ‘creatively’ and ‘with genius’, terms which the Chairman had deleted from the new Party constitution. Again, he judged correctly. What Mao found unacceptable in the CCP's public statutes was one thing; what might please him in a speech confined to the Party faithful was quite another.3
But good judgement alone was not enough. Mao's suspiciousness required that he be constantly reassured of the loyalty of his inner circle.
Zhou survived because he would betray anyone he thought necessary to maintain the Chairman's trust. When his adopted daughter was tortured by Red Guards and then thrown into prison, where she eventually died from maltreatment, Zhou was informed – but refused to take any action to protect her. To do otherwise, he reasoned, would expose him to charges of putting family before politics. The most vicious attack on Deng Xiaoping by any leader during the Cultural Revolution was contained in a minute appended to a ‘Special Case Group’ report, not by Jiang Qing or Kang Sheng – but by Zhou.4 In statements to the Cultural Revolution Small Group, he denounced exceptionally harshly the failings of the veteran cadres.5 Even his chief bodyguard, a close companion of many years’ standing, was abandoned the moment Jiang Qing, on a whim, took against him; Zhou's wife, Deng Yingchao, urged that the man be arrested because ‘we don't want to show any favouritism towards him’.6
The Cultural Revolution Small Group, in the late 1960s, was even more a nest of vipers than the Politburo a decade before.
This was partly due to the amoral nature of the movement itself, which sapped whatever vestiges of probity might have remained. But the presence of Jiang Qing certainly did not help. In middle age, she had become shallow, vindictive and totally self-centred. Many of those who had been kind to her early in her career were now hunted down and imprisoned to ensure that they could not divulge details of her actress past.7 When she learned that Chen Boda had contemplated suicide after Mao had criticised him, she laughed in his face, telling him, ‘Go ahead! Go ahead! Do you have the courage to kill yourself?’8 Kang Sheng, whose own career had profited from his early support of her liaison with Mao, viewed her as dangerous and unreliable. Lin Biao could not abide her, and became so enraged during one meeting at Maojiawan that he told Ye Qun (out of Jiang's hearing, however): ‘Get that woman out of here!’9 Even Mao lost patience with her. But, like Zhou, she was useful to him. And, because she was a conduit to Mao, she was useful to others. The Shanghai radicals clung to her with limpet-like devotion, acting as front men in her unremitting efforts to undermine Zhou Enlai. So, to a lesser extent, did Kang Sheng and Xie Fuzhi, although in Kang's case that would change.
Before 1969, these personal animosities were subsumed into the larger struggle to eliminate ‘capitalist-roaders’ and promote the radical cause.
At the Ninth Congress they began to spill over into policy. In his report, Lin had wanted to put the emphasis on promoting production and raising living standards. Mao had insisted that the main message be the need to continue the Cultural Revolution. He had rejected Chen Boda's draft, which had been based on Lin's ideas, and instructed Zhang Chunqiao to draw up an alternative. When Lin received it, he put it to one side and reportedly refused to sign the text. Zhang's allies would later accuse him of deliberately reading it out at the Congress in a perfunctory fashion to indicate that he disapproved of its contents.10
Within the Politburo, Jiang Qing and Lin Biao had roughly equal support. In theory, Lin was stronger. He controlled the army, which in turn controlled China. However, Jiang Qing had a privileged relationship with Mao, who controlled everything. In Lin's eyes, that was an uncertain advantage. The Chairman did not always take his wife's side.
Since they had few overt policy differences – whatever Lin may really have felt about the Cultural Revolution, he was too canny to let it show – the only ground for their rivalry was power. They fought their battles by palace conspiracies, whose sole and unique purpose was to win the Chairman's favour. Thus was the basis established for a succession of events which, over the next two years, would blow apart all Mao's carefully laid plans to ensure that his policies survived him.
It began simply enough. Liu Shaoqi's disgrace and death had created a vacancy for the post of Head of State. In March 1970, as part of the general rebuilding of the Chinese polity after the Cultural Revolution, Mao set out guidelines for a revised state constitution, under which that office would be abolished and the ceremonial functions attached to it would devolve to the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress, the Chinese parliament. This was approved by the Politburo and, soon afterwards, by a Central Committee
work conference.
Lin rarely attended Politburo meetings, and was therefore absent when these decisions were taken. Five weeks later, however, on April 11, he sent a message to Mao, urging him to reconsider and take back the post himself on the grounds that otherwise ‘it would not be in accordance with the psychology of the people’ – in other words, as the incarnation of the Chinese revolution, the Chairman should be surrounded by the full panoply of state honours. Next day, Mao turned him down. ‘I cannot do this job again,’ he told the Politburo. ‘The suggestion is inappropriate.’ Later that month he reiterated that the post did not interest him.11
None the less, Mao was intrigued.12
That Lin should have made such a suggestion was wholly out of character. Where Zhou Enlai made a religion of loyalty, Lin's fetish was passivity. ‘Be passive, passive and again passive,’ he had told his friend, Tao Zhu, who came to him for advice shortly before his fall.13 He was so cautious that he had actually formulated as a personal guideline the principle, ‘Don't make constructive suggestions’ – on the grounds that anyone who did so would be held responsible for the results. ‘At any given time, in all important questions,’ he told the Ninth Congress, ‘Chairman Mao always charts the course. In our work we do no more than follow in his wake.’
Mao's political antennae were humming for other reasons, too. Since Lin had become his ‘closest comrade-in-arms and successor’, the reclusive Marshal had become more confident – ‘self-important’, in the view of one of his secretaries. Mao had noticed. ‘When [he] farts,’ he said angrily to his staff, ‘[it's] like announcing an imperial edict.’14 Lin's decision to put the army on ‘red alert’ during the crisis with the Russians the previous October had worried him. If nothing else, it had shown how easily control of the PLA could slip from his grasp.15 He had been struck, too, during his travels in the provinces by the number of military uniforms everywhere. ‘Why do we have so many soldiers around?’ he kept grumbling. He knew the reason, of course: it had been his own decision to use the PLA to restore order. But that did not make him like it. Then there was the puzzle of Lin's relationship with the fourth-ranking member of the leadership, Chen Boda. Just before the Ninth Congress, Chen had fallen out with his erstwhile colleagues in the Cultural Revolution Small Group and had transferred his allegiance to Lin and Ye Qun. Mao instinctively mistrusted such alliances.16
Accordingly the Chairman blurred his signals. Instead of issuing a categorical ruling which would have ended the discussion once and for all – as he very easily could have done – he allowed a measure of doubt to subsist.17 That had always been one of Mao's favourite techniques: he placed his colleagues before a situation where they had to make a choice, and then stood back and waited to see which way they would jump.
Plate 33 Members of the Politburo Standing Committee in a rare, unposed shot at the ‘7,000-cadre big conference’ in January 1962. From left: Zhou Enlai, Chen Yun, Liu Shaoqi, Mao and Deng Xiaoping.
Plate 34 Swimming in the Yangtse.
Plate 35 Jiang Qing (centre), appearing with Mao in public for the first time in September 1962 to greet the wife of Indonesia’s President Sukarno.
Plate 36 Mao’s propagandist, Yao Wenyuan.
Plate 37 From left: Mao, with Lin Biao, Liu Shaoqi, Zhu De and Dong Biwu during the 1966 National Day celebrations.
Plate 38 In Tiananmen Square, reviewing Red Guards at one of the ten gigantic rallies held at the outset of the Cultural Revolution to encourage China’s youth to rebel.
Plate 39 Magic talisman: the ‘Little Red Book’.
Plate 40 Red Guards giving the yin-yang haircut to the Governor of Heilongjiang at a struggle meeting in September 1966. The placard around his neck labels him ‘a member of the reactionary gang’.
Plate 41 Smashing ancient stone carvings at the Confucian Temple in Qufu, during the campaign against the ‘Four Olds’.
Plate 42 and 43 Top, from left: Lin Biao with Edgar Snow and Mao on Tiananmen during the 1970 National Day celebrations. Eighteen months later, US–China relations had progressed to a point where (below, from right) Henry Kissinger and President Richard Nixon would meet Mao, with interpreter Nancy Tang and Zhou Enlai, at the Chairman’s residence in Zhongnanhai.
Plate 44 The Chairman’s inner sanctum, dominated by his vast bed, in the Study of Chrysanthemum Fragrance.
Plate 45 Mao with his last companion, Zhang Yufeng, nine months before his death, in December 1975.
Plate 46 and 47 The memorial meeting for Mao in Tiananmen Square on September 18, 1976. Above, from left: Marshal Ye Jianying; Hua Guofeng (reading the eulogy); Wang Hongwen; Zhang Chunqiao and Jiang Qing.
Lin persisted. With his backing, the issue of the state chairmanship was raised again in May, and in July, after which Mao disowned the idea for a fourth time.18
By then, it had become enmeshed in the rivalry between Lin's and Jiang Qing's supporters in the Politburo. In August, this took on a new dimension. Wu Faxian, backed by Chen Boda, proposed writing into the state constitution a reference to Mao having developed Marxism-Leninism ‘with genius, creatively and comprehensively’. Lin had used these terms in his preface to the Little Red Book but the Chairman had forbidden their inclusion in the Party statutes. Wu now argued that it would be wrong to use Mao's dislike of boastfulness in order to minimise the importance of his theoretical contributions. Kang Sheng and Zhang Chunqiao, who had initially objected, were evidently intimidated by this tortured argument and next day the proposal was passed.19
Mao kept his own counsel. The cult of his personality had been an invaluable tool to mobilise the country against Liu Shaoqi. But now that Liu had fallen, it had lost its usefulness. So why was Lin determined to prolong it? To the Chairman's mistrustful mind, the Defence Minister's emphasis on his theoretical ‘genius’ and on Mao Zedong Thought – and his insistence of dignifying him with the title of Head of State – began to look suspiciously like an attempt to kick him upstairs.
There was some basis for this. The original succession plan, under which Mao was to become Honorary Chairman of the Party, had been swept aside when Liu Shaoqi fell. The idea that he should retreat into an elder statesman role, in an honorific capacity as Head of State, must have seemed to Lin a sensible alternative.
It was not something the Defence Minister could propose directly: he knew Mao well enough to realise that any such suggestion, unless it came from the Chairman himself, would be anathema. But Mao's blurred signals made him believe that the concept of an exalted office, to highlight Mao's unique status in China, might in the end prove acceptable – if, indeed, it was not what he had wanted all along. After all, Zhou Enlai had shown that it was sometimes best not to rely on what the Chairman said, but to intuit the way his mind was working and carry on accordingly.
What Lin failed to realise was that Mao had been so badly burned by his first experience of retiring to the ‘second front’ that any hint of a repetition was totally unacceptable.
The result was a massive political misjudgement.
On August 23, 1970, the Defence Minister delivered the keynote speech at a Central Committee plenum at Lushan, the same ill-fated mountain resort where the career of his predecessor, Peng Dehuai, had ended eleven years before.
Mao had approved in advance an outline of what Lin had to say, which included a conventional paean of praise to the Chairman's greatness and a proposal that the new state constitution find an appropriate way of honouring his unique position.20 If he was unhappy that Lin, in his oral remarks, had again used the word ‘genius’, he did not show it. With his agreement, the text was distributed as a conference document.21
Next day, when the plenum divided for group discussions, all Lin's followers made the ‘genius’ issue the main theme of their speeches.
The bombshell, however, was dropped by Chen Boda, who launched into an excited attack on ‘a certain person’, who, he charged, was opposing the use of the term ‘genius’, in a covert attempt to disparage Mao Zedong Thought as the n
ation's guiding ideology. When other members of the group demanded that he name the guilty party, he indicated that he was referring to Zhang Chunqiao.
From a man of Chen's seniority – with Mao, Lin, Zhou and Kang Sheng, he was one of the five members of the Standing Committee – this was a very serious charge indeed. He then stoked the flames still higher by asserting that ‘certain counter-revolutionaries’ were ‘overjoyed’ at the idea that Mao might refuse the state chairmanship. That caused pandemonium. Chen's group drafted a bulletin, urging Mao to become Head of State with Lin as his deputy, and warning against the activities of ‘swindlers in the Party’ (a reference to Zhang). Such people, it went on, were ‘power-hungry conspirators, reactionaries in the extreme and authentic counter-revolutionary revisionists.’
