by Philip Short
Encouraged by these developments, Zhou Enlai began a full-scale effort to rebuild the administration and restore economic production.
He was in a stronger position than he had been for many years. The factional clashes which had disrupted transport and industry had finally been brought to an end. Of the five members of the Standing Committee, Lin was dead; Chen Boda was in prison; and Kang Sheng had cancer. That left just him and Mao. In one sense this was dangerous: Mao had a record of turning against those who got too close to him. Zhou was well aware of the risk that such proximity entailed.63 Shortly after Lin Biao's demise, Ji Dengkui, finding him deeply depressed, had tried to lift his spirits. ‘You don't understand,’ Zhou had burst out. ‘It's not finished!’ Somewhere down the road, the struggle for Mao's succession would have to start all over again.III For the moment, however, even disregarding the Chairman's anguished outburst from his sickbed, asking him to take over, the tide was running vigorously in the Premier's favour. The disgrace of Lin Biao had put Jiang Qing and her fellow radicals on the defensive. China's admission to the United Nations and the Nixon visit had shown that pragmatic policies brought results. Zhou's discovery, during a routine medical check-up in May, that he, too, was suffering from cancer, simply made him more determined.64 He knew now that this was the last chance he would have to place his own seal on China's progress – to nudge the country on to a path of orderly, balanced development that would assure its people a better and happier future.
The Premier's strategy was to use the movement against Lin Biao – officially known as the ‘campaign to criticise revisionism and rectify working style’ – for an all-out offensive against ultra-Leftist policies and ideas. In April, the People's Daily fired the opening salvo, describing veteran cadres as ‘the Party's most treasured possession’ and urging that they be rehabilitated and given appropriate positions.65 Chen Yun, the doyen of old-guard economists, reappeared in public (although, prudently, he pleaded that his poor health would not permit him to resume work).66 Expertise was emphasised again. A Beijing radio station began broadcasting English-language lessons. For the first time since 1966, China sent students abroad.67 Zhou criticised the Foreign Ministry for failing to change its Leftist ways, using the ingenious argument that unless ultra-Leftism were denounced, Rightism would surely re-emerge.68
But even a thicket of straws in the wind could not hide the fact that Mao had conspicuously refrained from giving Zhou public support.69 Pragmatism abroad was one thing. Demolishing Cultural Revolution policies at home was another. In December 1972, the Chairman decided that the pendulum had swung too far.
The trigger was a page of articles which had appeared in the People's Daily two months earlier condemning anarchism. The themes it raised were familiar: the persecution of veteran cadres, the trashing of the role of the Party, the waste and destruction of the ‘great chaos’ – which the newspaper blamed on ultra-Leftism. But cumulatively the articles called into question all that the Cultural Revolution stood for. Zhou's supporters on the paper then proposed a campaign on the theme that ‘the right is bound to return unless we thoroughly denounce the Left’. At that, Mao put his foot down. On December 17, he ruled that Lin's errors, while ‘Left in form’, were ‘right in essence’, and that Lin himself had been an ultra-Rightist, who had plotted conspiracies, splits and betrayal. Criticising ultra-Leftism was ‘not a good idea’.
Two days later Zhou Enlai showed the stuff of which he was made.
He repudiated his previous statements, echoed Mao's revised view of Lin, and cast his unfortunate allies at the People's Daily to the wolves.70
From then on, the campaign underwent a sea change. Where Zhou had tried to use it as a lever to undo Cultural Revolution policies, the radicals made Lin a scapegoat for the movement's excesses. The new line was spelt out in a New Year's Day editorial, which commended the Cultural Revolution as ‘much needed and very timely for consolidating the proletarian dictatorship, preventing capitalist restoration and building socialism’.71
However, the Chairman was not about to reverse himself completely.
The pendulum might have swung too far. But there was a limit to the extent it would be allowed to swing back. At Mao's insistence, the rehabilitation of veteran cadres continued. The last four years of his life would be taken up with an effort, so inherently contradictory that it was almost schizophrenic, to maintain an unstable balance between his radical yearnings and the country's all too evident need for a more predictable, less tortured future.
The conflict played out, as Zhou had anticipated it would, over the succession.
In 1972, when Mao contemplated the ruins left by Lin Biao's defection, he had few options. Zhou Enlai – moments of panic apart – was too old, too moderate and, in the final analysis, too weak, to be considered a possible heir, and in any case he adamantly rejected the idea. Moreover, as Wang Ruoshui, the scholarly People's Daily editor who had been responsible for the October articles, concluded after the December 17 decision, deep down Mao did not like Zhou. Jiang Qing was a loyal radical but, as Mao well knew, she was almost universally detested – greedy for power, haughty, vain and incompetent. Yao Wenyuan was a propagandist, no more able to command others than a man like Chen Boda. Among the younger Politburo members, the only possible candidate was Zhang Chunqiao. He was fifty-five years, old. His fidelity to the Cultural Revolution was unquestioned. He had proven qualities of leadership. Mao had even once mentioned him as a potential successor to Lin.
But Mao did not choose Zhang Chunqiao.
Instead, in September 1972, he summoned from Shanghai one of Zhang's deputies, Wang Hongwen, whose Workers’ General Headquarters had engineered the Cultural Revolution's first ‘seizure of power’ almost six years before.
Wang, now a Central Committee member, was a tall, well-built man, who, at the age of thirty-nine, retained some of the earnestness of youth. He came from a poor peasant family; had fought in the Korean War; and afterwards had been assigned to a textile mill. To Mao, that meant he combined the three most desirable social backgrounds – peasant, worker and soldier. He was not told why he had been brought to the capital, and was mystified when the Chairman in person received him and plied him with questions about his life and views. Evidently he passed with flying colours, for Mao set him to studying the complete works of Marx, Engels and Lenin – a task far beyond his meagre educational accomplishments and which he found excruciatingly boring. He also found it hard to adjust to Mao's night-owl work habits and made homesick phonecalls to his Shanghai friends, complaining how tedious life was.72 None the less, at the end of December, two days after Mao's seventy-ninth birthday, Zhou Enlai and Ye Jianying introduced him at a conference of the Beijing Military Region Party Committee as ‘a young man the Chairman has noticed’, adding that it was Mao's intention to promote people of his generation to vice-chairmanships in the Central Committee and the Military Commission.73
This was not mere caprice on Mao's part. Liu Shaoqi and Lin Biao had both had the stature to carry the whole Party with them. Zhang Chunqiao did not. He was too deeply involved in radical factionalism (and perceived as being too close to Jiang Qing) to command the loyalty of the Party mainstream, and too sectarian in his attitudes to work together with moderate leaders who could.
Wang was an outsider, a dark horse, who, because he had been far from the capital, was not tarred with the same factional brush.
In May 1973, he began the next stage of his apprenticeship in power when, on Mao's instructions, he started attending Politburo meetings. So did two other neophytes: Hua Guofeng and Wu De. Hua had first caught Mao's eye in the 1950s as Party Secretary of the Chairman's home county of Xiangtan. After the Cultural Revolution he had been appointed First Secretary of the Hunan Provincial Party Committee before moving to Beijing as a member of the commission investigating the Lin Biao affair. Wu De had succeeded Xie Fuzhi as First Secretary of the Beijing Party Committee following Xie's death from cancer. Both were older than Wang: Hua was fifty
-one; Wu, sixty. Like him, both had been beneficiaries of the Cultural Revolution yet were sufficiently middle-of-the-road to build support across factional lines. They were there as a backstop, in case Mao's primary strategy should miscarry.
That left just one more piece of the puzzle for the Chairman to put into place.
On April 12, a short, stocky man with a bullet head and slightly greying hair attended a banquet for the Cambodian Head of State, Prince Sihanouk, in the Great Hall of the People, looking as though he had never been away. Deng Xiaoping, the ‘number-two Party person in authority taking the capitalist road’, had been quietly rehabilitated a month earlier to resume work as a vice-premier.74
Deng was then nearly sixty-nine years old, almost twice Wang Hongwen's age. His return had been prompted partly by Zhou's cancer, which had made it urgent to find an understudy, and partly by a shrewdly worded appeal, which he had sent the Chairman the previous August, praising the Cultural Revolution as ‘an immense monster-revealing mirror’ that had exposed swindlers like Lin Biao and Chen Boda (and mentioning, in passing, that he would like to get back to work himself). Astutely he had also given undertakings never to ‘reverse verdicts’ on the Cultural Revolution, and never to attack Jiang Qing.75 But the fundamental reason for Deng's reinstatement was Mao's awareness that Wang would not be able to assume the succession without help. The Chairman's grand design was that they should work together, Wang heading the Party and Deng the government, until the younger man acquired the knowledge and experience, ten or fifteen years down the road, to run China on his own. Deng had the prestige to keep the army in check; Wang, Mao knew very well, did not. Deng had the ability to keep the administration turning; Wang, again, did not. But if Wang could be established before Mao died as the inheritor of his Party mantle, his youth and commitment to Cultural Revolution values looked like being the Chairman's best hope of ensuring that his ideological legacy would outlive him.
With this aim in view, Wang was given a starring role at the Tenth Party Congress, an oddly abbreviated, ritualistic gathering, held in total secrecy in the Great Hall of the People from August 24 to 28.IV He chaired the Election Committee, with Zhou Enlai and Jiang Qing as his deputies; he introduced the new, revised Party constitution (eliminating the reference to Lin Biao as Mao's successor); he placed Mao's ballot in the voting urn, when the Chairman was too frail to do so himself – a symbolism which was not lost on those present; and, in the new Politburo, to the astonishment of Party and non-Party members alike, he took third place in the hierarchy, behind Mao himself and Zhou, with the rank of Vice-Chairman.76
Deng was restored to the Central Committee – though not, at that stage, to the Politburo. For the moment he was on probation: the Chairman wanted to see how he would behave before promoting him further.
The Congress also put flesh on the bones of Mao's new formula of having a mix of radicals and veteran cadres to rule China after his death. In the Politburo and the Standing Committee, there was an approximate balance between Jiang Qing's group, on one side, and the old guard, headed by Zhou Enlai and Ye Jianying, on the other. As well as Deng, a number of other prominent veterans were re-elected to CC membership, including Tan Zhenlin, who had fallen foul of Jiang Qing at the time of the ‘February Adverse Current’; the Inner Mongolian leader, Ulanfu, who had survived a regional purge in which tens of thousands of his followers had been killed and injured; and Wang Jiaxiang, Mao's early supporter at Zunyi, who had fallen foul of the Chairman by advocating moderation towards the United States and Russia in the early 1960s.77
That autumn, Mao sent Deng and Wang Hongwen on a tour of the provinces to see how they could work together. On their return, Deng told him, with characteristic bluntness, that he saw a risk of warlordism. Twenty-two out of the twenty-nine provincial Party committees were headed by serving army officers.78
Mao had reached the same conclusion. At the 10th Congress the number of military men in the Central Committee had been halved. Now, in December 1973, he ordered a reshuffle of the commanders of China's eight military regions. He told the Politburo and the Military Commission that in future there must be a clearer division of responsibilities between military and political work, and that Deng, whom he described as ‘a man of rare talent’, should from now on participate in meetings of both bodies, while also assuming the duties of Chief of the General Staff.79
The following April, Mao chose Deng to lead the Chinese delegation to the United Nations, where he unveiled the Chairman's latest thoughts on international affairs, the so-called ‘Three Worlds’ theory, under which the two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, were viewed as the ‘first world’; the other industrialised nations, communist and capitalist alike, as the ‘second world’; and the developing countries as the ‘third world’.80
Two months later, when a very sick Zhou Enlai entered hospital for long-term cancer treatment, Mao designated Wang Hongwen to take day-to-day charge of the work of the Politburo and Deng to head the work of the government.
Thus, by June 1974, the Chairman had put in place the political partnership that he hoped would continue his work after him. It was all still highly provisional. Deng had returned to the Politburo just six months earlier. Wang existed politically only because Mao had created him. Yet it seemed that a consensus, however fragile, was finally being established for the orderly succession which had eluded Mao twice before.
Once again it would turn out to be a house of cards.
The fatal flaw in the logic of Mao's arrangements came from the tension inspired by his contradictory impulses towards radicalism and reason. As long as he himself had the whiphand – as he did in 1973 and 1974 – the rival halves of the leadership that mirrored this ideological conflict could be made to work together in an uneasy coalition. But as his strength ebbed away, his physical weakness meant that he was less often present to impose his authority and the two groups grew into warring factions.
Instead of dominating this struggle, as Mao had hoped, Wang and Deng were both sucked into it.
As so often, it was Mao himself who chose the terrain. In May 1973, he had proposed to a Central Committee work conference a campaign to criticise Confucius (who had, of course, died 2,500 years earlier). The pretext was that Lin Liguo had likened Mao to Qin Shihuang, the First Emperor of Qin, who had ‘burned the [Confucian] books and buried the scholars alive’. Mao generally welcomed that comparison. In a poem that autumn, he had assumed the mantle of Qin Shihuang's successor:
The business of burning and burying requires discussion;
Although the ancient dragon is dead, his empire lives on,
While the lofty frame of Confucianism is but chaff.81
Lin Biao and his followers, he charged – since they opposed Qin Shihuang – were supporters of Confucius, and therefore of the feudal landlord system that the Sage had extolled in his writings. But the campaign had more than one layer of meaning. By associating Confucius with Lin Biao, Mao was playing the old game of ‘pointing at the locust tree in order to revile the mulberry’. The true target of the new movement was neither Confucius nor Lin Biao, but Zhou Enlai, whose efforts to repair the damage caused by the Cultural Revolution were causing the Chairman growing concern. At the Tenth Congress, the Revolution's shortcomings, which by his usual rule of thumb Mao had estimated at 30 per cent, were all but forgotten. The emphasis was on preserving the 70 per cent of achievements.82 The Party constitution which the Congress approved stated that new Cultural Revolutions ‘will have to be carried out many times in the future’ and quoted Mao's warning that ‘every seven or eight years monsters and demons will jump out [again]’.
The connection between Confucius and Zhou was never openly admitted. However, Mao had dropped a broad hint at a meeting with Wang Hongwen and Zhang Chunqiao that summer, when he reiterated the need to criticise Confucius while, almost in the same breath, grumbling that the Foreign Ministry was not discussing ‘important matters’ with him, and that if this continued, ‘revisi
onism is bound to occur’. The Ministry was Zhou's responsibility. It was there, a year earlier, that the Premier had spoken out against ultra-Leftism. Mao had not forgotten. From June onwards, both the radicals and Mao himself kept up a drumbeat of criticism of Zhou's handling of foreign affairs.83
Their attacks, coming on top of the Premier's illness, sapped his strength. When Kissinger came to Beijing, on his sixth visit to China in November 1973, he found Zhou ‘uncharacteristically tentative’. The old bite and sparkle were missing. During their discussions on Taiwan, Kissinger wrote later, he sensed, for the first time, a willingness to envisage the normalisation of US–Chinese relations without a formal rupture between Washington and Taibei (an impression which he felt was confirmed when he met Mao the following day).84 In fact, Kissinger was mistaken. Mao's message, elliptical as ever, was that while the Soviet Union might accept that kind of arrangement, China would not.85 Zhou did, however, indicate that a peaceful settlement with Taiwan was not ruled out, and there was also discussion of the possibility of setting up a hotline between Washington and Beijing to give early warning of any future Soviet missile attack against China. None of that was especially contentious but, for whatever reason, the Chairman seized on it as a pretext to step up the pressure on Zhou. He may have been irritated that Zhou had discussed closer military cooperation with the United States without first seeking his approval; he may have found Zhou's remarks on Taiwan too conciliatory; or he may simply have been looking for new grounds to voice the dissatisfaction that had been festering since Zhou's campaign against ultra-leftism a year earlier. It is possible, too, that jealousy played a part. Mao was unhappy that foreigners gave Zhou most of the credit for the Nixon visit and the Sino-American rapprochement which had followed.
