by Philip Short
As his life drew to a close, Mao had few illusions that the legacy of the Cultural Revolution would survive intact. With his heart, he hoped. But his head told him that, even if something were salvaged, the essence of his vision would perish with him.
Jiang Qing, in her arrogance and stupidity, helped to ensure that happened.
Mao had dealt the radicals what could have been a strong hand. Their main rival, Deng Xiaoping, had been removed. Deng's highest-ranking ally, Ye Jianying, while still Defence Minister, had lost day-to-day control of the Military Commission. The radicals occupied two of the four seats on the Politburo Standing Committee and had substantial, perhaps even majority, support in the Central Committee. There was in theory a sufficient community of interest between Hua and themselves for at least a temporary modus vivendi at the old guard's expense.
But Jiang Qing and Zhang Chunqiao, pumped up with their own power and importance, had no interest in a tactical alliance. Jiang saw herself as Party Chairperson, a Red Empress to succeed Mao just as Empress Lu of the Han dynasty, 2,000 years earlier, had succeeded the Han founder, Liu Bang. Zhang would be her Prime Minister and Wang Hongwen the Head of State.149 Hua, ‘a nice gentleman of Malenkov's ilk’, as she called him witheringly,150 was an obstacle to these plans. Throughout the summer – with Mao too ill to know what she was doing, let alone control her – she worked relentlessly to undermine him.
That drove Hua into the arms of her opponents. In July, after Jiang Qing had accused ‘Han traitors’ and ‘slaves of foreigners’ of ‘selling out the country’ and Zhang had spoken darkly of a ‘bourgeois class’ within the Politburo, Hua discussed with Wang Dongxing, who as head of the Central Guards Regiment was responsible for the leaders’ security, what steps might be taken to deal with her and her chief allies. Ye Jianying was involved in similar exchanges with Marshal Nie Rongzhen and a group of senior generals.
Independently they reached the same conclusion. As Ye put it: ‘Spare the rats because of the precious dish.’ Nothing could be done as long as Mao was alive.151
On September 2, the Chairman had another massive heart attack.152 On the evening of the 8th, the members of the Politburo came in groups and filed slowly past Mao's bed. As Ye Jianying was about to leave the room, Zhang Yufeng called him back. Mao's eyes were open, he grasped Ye's hand and tried to speak. But only a hoarse sound came.153 Three hours later, just after midnight, in the early morning of September 9, the imperious will faltered. The line being traced by the electrocardiograph became flat. It was over.
I The plane initially flew west from Shanhaiguan before turning north towards the border, which might indicate that the pilot was told to head for Mongolia only after the group learned that Zhou Enlai had ordered Chinese airspace closed. On the other hand, Lin's chief bodyguard reportedly testified that Lin had asked on the way to the airport how long it would take to reach Irkutsk. But that evidence may have been manipulated. Whenever the decision was made, it enabled Mao to claim later that Lin had been trying to defect to Russia because he was opposed to an improvement in relations with America. No evidence has ever been produced to support this allegation. Lin normally avoided foreign policy, which was the province of Mao and Zhou Enlai, although ironically one of the few subjects which did interest him was the forthcoming visit of President Nixon, which had been announced in July.
II It emerged later that Zhou had been in favour of inviting the US team all along but had decided that the best way to win Mao's approval would be to submit a recommendation from the Foreign Ministry that the approach be rejected as premature. Mao, he calculated, would bridle at such bureaucratic caution and rebuff the advice. He did.
III To try to assure Mao of his loyalty and his refusal to consider himself a candidate for the succession, Zhou made a lengthy self-criticism that summer in which he acknowledged ‘serious mistakes’ in previous line struggles and declared that in the event of ‘more serious transgressions’ he should be dismissed from all his posts. ‘I cannot be at the helm,’ he added. ‘I can only be an assistant.’
IV To avoid attracting attention, the 1249 delegates, who had been summoned at very short notice, were brought to the Great Hall of the People through the underground tunnel network which links the building to Zhongnanhai. Such was the last-minute nature of the arrangements, that at the Central Committee plenum which followed, five members from Shanghai, who had been omitted from the list of delegates, had to be awakened during the night and put on a plane to Beijing. One of them, whose only pair of trousers was being washed when the summons arrived, would be nicknamed by his colleagues, ‘Mr Wet Pants’.
V The only exception was the State Chairmanship, which, under the new constitution, was abolished. Instead, the functions of Head of State devolved to the Chairman of the National People's Congress, who, from January 1975 until his death, eighteen months later, was Zhu De.
Epilogue
When the news was broadcast by Beijing Radio, it caused shock and apprehension, but not grief. There was none of the outpouring of emotion that marked the disappearance of Zhou Enlai. The extinction of a titan brings no personal sense of loss.
However, history rarely wraps up its work neatly. Mao had left unfinished business.
On the night of Wednesday, October 6, exactly four weeks after his death, Hua Guofeng summoned Wang Hongwen, Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan to an enlarged Standing Committee meeting in the Great Hall of the People.1
Wang arrived first, to find Hua and Ye Jianying waiting. As he entered, four soldiers from Wang Dongxing's Central Guards Regiment sprang out from behind a screen and seized him. Hua read out a brief statement: ‘You have entered into an anti-Party and anti-socialist alliance … in a vain attempt to usurp the leadership of the Party and to seize power. Your offence is serious. The Centre has decided that you shall be taken into custody for a full examination.’ Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan were afterwards detained in the same manner. An hour later, Jiang Qing was arrested at Zhongnanhai, where she had moved back with her staff shortly before Mao died. As she was being taken away, popular legend has it that one of her servants spat at her.
The purge had been decided almost four weeks earlier. On September 12, three days after Mao's death, Hua had discovered that, without his knowledge, provincial leaders had been told to channel all future communications to the Party Centre through a newly established ‘duty office’, controlled by Wang Hongwen. He had concluded, understandably, that it was the opening move in an attempt by the radicals to seize power. At the end of that month, Hua, Li Xiannian, Wang Dongxing, Wu De and Ye Jianying – the five prime movers in the events that followed – decided that it would be too risky to try to dismiss the radicals from their posts by a vote in the Central Committee and that force would have to be used. Ye initially intended to move against them on October 10, but rumours – unfounded as it turned out – that they might try to launch a pre-emptive strike earlier led to the date being moved forward.2
None of the four attempted to resist. There were no disturbances after their arrests. Less than a month after his passing, Mao?s great experiment was at an end.
It was a prospect that already haunted him in the early 1960s, when he first began to have doubts about Liu Shaoqi. But at that time he was still convinced that, whatever the setbacks along the way, the ultimate triumph of communism was ineluctable. ‘If our children's generation go in for revisionism,’ he told the Central Committee, ‘so that although they still nominally have socialism, it is in fact capitalism, then our grandsons will certainly rise up in revolt and overthrow their fathers, because [otherwise] the masses will not be satisfied.’3 Four years later, in 1966, he was less sanguine. If the Rightists came to power after his death, he wrote then, their regime would ‘very probably’ be short-lived. ‘The Rightists may prevail for some time by using my words, but the Leftists may also use my words to overthrow them.’4 In his last years, even that confidence slipped away.
At one level, Mao's prescience was uncanny. For tw
o years after his death, there was indeed a ‘war of words’, in which the Cultural Revolution's beneficiaries, led by Hua and Wang Dongxing, used Mao's writings to fight off efforts by the old guard to win control of the Chairman's ideological legacy. Deng, whose rehabilitation Hua delayed but was unable to prevent, did establish a regime which, while ‘nominally socialist’, was capitalist in every other respect. Mao had been right about Deng Xiaoping: improbable though it had seemed at the time, he was a ‘capitalist-roader’ all along – and the moment he was in a position to do so, he began dismantling the socialist system the Chairman had built and putting what Mao would have considered a bourgeois dictatorship in its place. There was indeed a ‘bourgeois class’ within the Communist Party and the country did indeed ‘change its political colour’.
The only point on which Mao was wrong was the reaction of the masses. Far from rebelling against capitalism, the overwhelming majority of China's people responded to Deng's new policies with unconcealed delight.
Stripped of pejorative jargon, the ‘capitalist road’ for China meant putting prosperity first and ideology last. The result was an unparalleled surge of economic development, creating a professional and business elite whose aspirations and way of life – from cellular telephones to Porsches – became increasingly indistinguishable from those of its counterparts in Hong Kong, Singapore and Taiwan. The new wealth trickled down, generating inequalities along with opportunities. Corruption and crime sky-rocketed, along with drug use, Aids and prostitution. In an amazingly short space of time, China acquired most of the problems, and many of the joys and freedoms, which normal countries have.
Deng Xiaoping might order the slaughter of hundreds of students in and around Tiananmen Square, shattering the illusions of Western liberals, but Chinese who compared his rule with the mindless terror that had preceded it had no doubt which they preferred.
The losers in political struggles no longer disappeared into oblivion. Hua and Wang Dongxing, despite their conflicts with Deng, went into honourable retirement. Jiang Qing, after her trial, was allowed to spend long periods in hospital before she committed suicide in 1991. Her ally, Yao Wenyuan, was released after serving a fifteen-year sentence and allowed to return to his old home in Shanghai. So were Chen Boda and other Cultural Revolution luminaries, including the alleged leaders of the ‘May 16’ group. China had not become a democracy. But it was a livelier, more tolerant place. The curtain of fear that stifled even the tiniest freedoms in Mao's day had at least been partly lifted.
In these circumstances, where so much that Mao had done was being reversed and implicitly condemned, his successors did not find it easy to make a judgement on his historical role. After interminable discussions, the CCP Central Committee declared that ‘his merits are primary and his errors secondary’ in the proportion of seven to three, the same rule of thumb that Mao himself had applied to Stalin. Chen Yun's judgement was more poignant: ‘Had Mao died in 1956, his achievements would have been immortal,’ he said. ‘Had he died in 1966, he would still have been a great man. But he died in 1976. Alas, what can one say?’5 None the less, the ‘seven/three’ formula suited the Party's needs. It allowed Deng and the old guard to repudiate whichever of Mao's policies they disliked without inviting a challenge to the legitimacy of Communist Party rule.
*
Political constraints aside, to evaluate the juggernaut who wrenched China from its medieval torpor and forced it into the contours of a modern nation state is a formidable task.
The achievements of Mao's great contemporaries, Roosevelt, Churchill and De Gaulle, are measured against those of their peers. Even Stalin built on Lenin's accomplishments. Mao's life was played out on an altogether vaster canvas. He was unquestioned leader of almost a quarter of mankind, inhabiting an area the size of Europe as far as the Urals. He wielded powers equalled only by the most awesome of Chinese emperors in an era when China's history was so compressed that changes which, in the West, had taken centuries to accomplish, occurred in a single generation. In Mao's lifetime, China made the leap from semi-colony to Great Power; from millennial autarky to socialist state; from despoiled victim of imperialist plunder to Permanent Member of the UN Security Council, complete with H-bombs, surveillance satellites and ICBMS.
Mao had an extraordinary mix of talents: he was visionary, statesman, political and military strategist of genius, philosopher and poet. Foreigners might sniff. In a memorable put-down, Arthur Waley, the great translator of Tang dynasty poetry, described Mao's poems as ‘not as bad as Hitler's paintings, but not as good as Churchill's’. In the judgement of another Western art historian, his calligraphy, while ‘strikingly original, betraying a flamboyant egotism, to the point of arrogance, if not extravagance … [and] a total disregard for the formal discipline of the brush’, was ‘essentially inarticulate’.6 Most Chinese scholars disagree. Mao's poems, like his brushwork, seized the tormented, restless spirit of his age.
To these gifts, he brought a subtle, dogged mind, awe-inspiring charisma and fiendish cleverness.
The philippic penned by Lin Biao's son – ‘Today he uses sweet words and honeyed talk to those whom he entices; tomorrow he puts them to death for fabricated crimes’ – unconsciously echoed the judgement of the historian Sima Qian, written 2,000 years earlier about the greatest of China's founding emperors: ‘The King of Qin is [like] a bird of prey … There is no beneficence in him, and he has the heart of a tiger or a wolf. When he is in difficulties, he finds it easy to humble himself. But when he has achieved his aim, he finds it just as easy to devour human beings … If [he] realises his ambitions concerning the Empire, all men will be his slaves.’7
Mao knew by heart the lessons of the dynastic histories. It was not chance that led him to choose, among all his imperial predecessors, the First Emperor of Qin – who throughout Chinese history had been feared and reviled as the epitome of harsh rule – as the man against whom he wished to measure himself. ‘You accuse us of acting like Qin Shihuangdi,’ he once told a group of liberal intellectuals. ‘You are wrong. We surpass him a hundred times. When you berate us for imitating his despotism, we are happy to agree! Your mistake was that you did not say so enough.’8
To Mao, the killing of opponents – or simply of those who disagreed with his political aims – was an unavoidable, indeed a necessary, ingredient of broader political campaigns.
He rarely gave direct instructions for their physical elimination.* But his rule brought about the deaths of more of his own people than any other leader in world history.9
The victims of the land reform, of his political campaigns – the ‘movement to suppress counter-revolutionaries’; the ‘Three Antis’; the ‘Five Antis’; the anti-Rightist Campaign; the movement against ‘Right opportunism’; the Socialist Education Movement; the Cultural Revolution; the campaign against ‘May 16’ elements; and the ‘cleansing of class ranks’, to mention but the most important – and of the famines triggered by the Great Leap Forward – have been exceeded only once, by all the dead of the Second World War.
By comparison, Stalin's liquidation of the kulaks and his destruction of the Russian intelligentsia in the labour camps, claimed 12 to 15 million lives; Hitler's holocaust, half that number.
Those parallels, while persuasive, are in one important sense false. Stalin set out deliberately to encompass the physical extermination of all who stood in his way. During the Great Purge, he and Molotov personally signed NKVD lists containing the names of thousands of high officials for arrest and execution. Hitler's ‘final solution’ was designed to extirpate in the gas chambers an entire racial group – the Jews – whose genetic stock was held to besmirch his new Aryan world order.
The overwhelming majority of those whom Mao's policies killed were the victims of an unintended famine. The others – some six to seven million people – were the human scourings, the detritus, of his epic struggle to transform China.
That was cold comfort for his victims; nor did it diminish in any way the eg
regious misery that Mao's colossal effort of social engineering caused. But it put him in a different category from other twentieth-century tyrants. Just as, in law, there is a capital distinction between murder, manslaughter, and death caused by negligence, so in politics there are gradations of responsibility, related to motivation and intent, for leaders who bring massive suffering to their peoples.
Stalin cared about what his subjects did (or might do); Hitler, about who they were. Mao cared about what they thought.
China's landlords were eliminated as a class (and many of them were killed in the process); but they were not exterminated as a people, as the Jews were in Germany. Even as his policies caused the deaths of millions, Mao never entirely lost his belief in the efficacy of thought reform and the possibility of redemption. ‘Heads are not like chives’, he said. ‘They do not grow back again.’10
What was achieved at the cost of such bloodshed and pain?
Mao's own judgement, that his two major accomplishments were his victory over Chiang Kai-shek and the launching of the Cultural Revolution, offers a partial answer, though not quite in the sense he had intended. The one reunified China after a century of division and restored its sovereignty; the other gave the Chinese people such an overdose of ideological fervour as to immunise them for generations to come. Mao's tragedy and his grandeur were that he remained to the end in thrall to his own revolutionary dreams. Where Confucius had taught harmony – the doctrine of the mean – Mao preached endless class struggle, until it became a cage from which neither he nor the Chinese people could escape. He freed China from the straitjacket of its Confucian past. But the bright Red future he promised turned out to be a sterile purgatory.
