“You’re still a bourgeois, still a treaty-port Sekloong,” his wife charged. “You simply don’t understand Chairman Mao’s transcendental insights. The greater the disorder, the greater the final victory. We shall build a magnificent new world on the ruins of the old.”
“Don’t talk jargon to me,” James replied coldly. “I was a Communist when you were still tending pigs in Kiangsi. We can’t build Communism on a battlefield strewn with corpses. If this Cultural Revolution spreads, it’ll put China back a generation.”
“Your thoughts are manacled by the old ideas,” Tou-tou retorted. “At Ching Hua we’ve already won a great victory over the revisionist Soviet-line traitor Liu Shao-chi. Every comrade expresses his own opinions in big-character posters. This’s true democracy, extensive democracy—not fake, bourgeois democracy. We are using words and weapons to break the rigid, reactionary rule of the concealed capitalist agents in our midst.”
James had risen from the breakfast table and pulled on his comfortably shapeless cloth cap with the red star embroidered on its front. Stalking from the courtyard, he realized that he might just have concluded the last frank discussion he would ever have with his wife and daughter. Candor was not merely imprudent, but dangerous in a divided household.
His sour forebodings were interrupted when his driver braked hard at Wangfuching Street. An abrupt halt was rarely necessary, since Peking’s sparse motor-traffic was still limited to official, public, and diplomatic motor-vehicles almost eighteen years after the city’s Liberation. A column of young men and women was flowing onto the Boulevard of Protracted Peace. Some were obviously students in their blue tunics; others from farming communes wore home-tailored trousers and shirts. All displayed brassards scrawled with the spiky characters: Hung Wei Ping—Red Guard. Chairman Mao and Defense Minister Lin were bringing up their shock troops, deploying the doctrine-intoxicated youths to outflank the regular troops of the Liberation Army. The Red Guards’ martial chant reverberated: “We shall level the old world! We shall destroy all old things!”
James stroked his baggy cotton tunic, which was adorned only by red collar flashes. In 1964, Lin Piao’s Defense Ministry had taken cognizance of China’s public quarrel with the Soviet Union by abolishing formal ranks in the Liberation Army and discarding the gold-braid-encrusted, Soviet-style uniforms. James wondered whether the uniforms would change again if the limping talks with the United States at Warsaw finally led to reconciliation between Washington and Peking. That radical change was not immediately in prospect. But how many would have predicted ten years earlier that the Chairman would turn against the Soviet Union, which he had hailed as China’s Big Brother in 1950? Talking with the Americans might avert the threat that haunted James Sekloong and most other professional soldiers—confrontation with the formidable forces the Americans were committing to South Vietnam. China was virtually defenseless, since the Defense Minister believed that seas of guerrillas could overwhelm any modern enemy. The Chief-of-Staff who had advocated a technological build-up was in disgrace, already marked for sacrifice to the great purge that was gathering momentum.
James shivered in the hot, dry air. He realized that his right hand was stroking his Adam’s apple, and he pressed his palm against the seat. His hand, it seemed, possessed its own independent will and was deeply concerned for his throat. He might himself be the next senior officer consigned to a Labor Reform Camp.
The staff car halted at the Eastern Entrance to the Great Hall of the People, and the alien sentries before the towering doors saluted perfunctorily. James involuntarily stroked his throat again, but relaxed fractionally when he saw that his staff was at work in his new offices beside the Premier’s suite. The adjacent offices of Chairman Liu of the People’s Republic of China were vacant. Comrade Shao-chi had prudently retreated to his residence on the Central South Lake behind the walls of the Inner City, where he was protected by his personal bodyguard.
“This is ridiculous,” James had remarked to the Premier. “What is happening when the Chief-of-State feels threatened in his own office?”
“Ridiculous, Ai-kuo?” The Premier’s reply had been heavily ironic. “We live in ridiculous times. But very sensible on Comrade Shao-chi’s part. And I like it. I like a little distance between me and Comrade Shao-chi at this moment.”
Sipping green tea and lighting his fifteenth cigarette of the morning, James wondered who was the humorist on his staff. An unknown hand had hung the obligatory colored photograph of a benevolent Chairman Mao between paired classical scrolls that lauded familial and national harmony, the very qualities the Chairman denounced as the greatest obstacles to “progress through struggle.” Levity was nowhere encouraged in the New China; levity regarding politics was a grave “error”; and even the hint of levity toward Mao Tse-tung was a heinous offense. The Peking Municipal Committee of the Communist Party had just been dismissed en masse because of its newspapers’ heavy-handed satire of the Chairman.
The General bolted the door, clambered up on a chair, and removed the scrolls. Rolling them tight, he tucked them behind a filing cabinet. He might, he reflected, be suffering from incipient paranoia, but better paranoid than purged.
James Sekloong returned to his desk and lit his sixteenth cigarette with fingers that quivered. He was as absurdly ashamed of his stealthy removal of the old scrolls as an adolescent leafing through pornographic pictures behind a locked bathroom door. But the atmosphere of Peking in late July 1966 was itself absurd. Chairman Mao had proclaimed a war of extermination against all the customs, the thinking, and the material works of the old civilization that had been China’s proudest possession, the civilization that had, in a wider sense, been China itself. The apparently innocuous scrolls on his wall were, therefore, a direct threat to James Sekloong.
Mao Tse-tung, the man, had grown far larger than his office. Transcendent reverence for the Chairman, greater than the supernatural awe that had invested the Emperors, paralyzed the will of the senior members of the Communist hierarchy. None of the nearly two hundred men and women who in theory ruled the vast nation of almost seven hundred million persons was free of the pervasive fear, and none could trust any other. The Premier’s discreet drawing away from the embattled Chairman of the People’s Republic, his old comrade-in-arms Liu Shao-chi, was symptomatic of the terror Chairman Mao had deliberately inspired. The Shanghai Rebel Revolutionary Group’s success in setting the oldest friends against each other was its most powerful weapon.
James’s desk was heaped with files marked URGENT. “The terrifying efficiency of the bureaucracy,” the Premier had remarked, “is in full operation. The frightened cadres throw up heaps of paper without meaning, most as relevant to our problems as the classical ‘eight-legged essays’ of the Imperial Civil Service Examinations. Just words, words, and more words—beautifully and symmetrically organized—but meaningless.”
The reports from the Intelligence Section of the Peking Military Region were, however, highly relevant, particularly the Daily Situation Report. Their terse language, unburdened by the customary political jargon, in itself attested to the severity of the tremors that were shaking the People’s Republic.
James turned to the folders without enthusiasm. His interest was low, though he knew their contents could in the long run determine his own fate. The reports had already been overtaken by events. Late the preceding night, his orderly had brought him a note abruptly canceling the plenary meeting of the Central Committee originally scheduled for that morning by the Premier, Comrade Liu Shao-chi, and the Secretary-General of the Communist Party, the abrasive Teng Hsiao-ping, whose administrative talents had won him his nickname, The Organizer. The pro-Liu majority of the Central Committee, which had assembled in Peking, dared not convene under the threat of Red Guard violence and Lin Piao’s guns.
The operations reports graphically set forth the reasons for Lin Piao’s successful use of terror. Though most of the generals of the Liberation Army were loyal to the legitimate authority rep
resented by Comrade Shao-chi, the removal of the Chief-of-Staff had immobilized them while Lin Piao’s armies occupied key road and railway junctions commanding ingress to the capital and then marched into Peking unopposed. Signal after signal offered variations on the same theme: “We set out as ordered, but found no logistical support.… My division was incapacitated by an epidemic of influenza.… There was no transport.” The stumbling excuses—and the absence of any communications whatsoever from some major commanders—were a grim record of the irresolute inaction that had permitted Lin Piao’s coup d’état to triumph.
When he returned to his dissension-torn household that evening, James Sekloong’s spirits were at their lowest ebb. He wrapped himself in the protective silence that was to cloak his despair during the next ten days while he watched the dissolution of the vision of a perfect China that had inspired him since 1926.
The Maoists seized the propaganda machinery that conveyed the wishes of their rulers to both the cadres and the people. By late July, the Maoists had purged the Party’s Propaganda Bureau and taken over the People’s Daily, the Central Broadcasting Station, and the New China News Agency. Power, they knew, sprang from the pen and the microphone, as well as the gun. The Maoists controlled those weapons, and they had neutralized most of China’s guns.
Having secured the capital physically, the Maoists finally launched their formal political attack. Four Ilyushins landed at Peking Airport on July 28, 1966 to discharge the Chairman, his disciple Lin Piao, his wife Chiang Ching, and the Maoist minority of the Central Committee of the Communist Party. The “bombardment of the headquarters of the men in power following the capitalist road,” the preparatory attack Tou-tou had initiated, was intensified on July 29. Hundreds of thousands of zealots, led by students and shepherded by the Defense Minister’s troops, surged through the streets. They chanted their loyalty to the Chairman and raged against his opponents. Tou-tou marched among them, exulting in her personal triumph. Her Red Guards had broken Liu Shao-chi’s Cultural Revolution Teams on the campus of Ching Hua University in pitched fights with clubs, hammers, and chains. At that moment, the actual power of the obscure twenty-eight-year-old instructor in history was appreciably greater than her high-ranking father’s.
The men (and the few women) who met two days later in the Great Hall of the People to decide China’s fate had been winnowed by Lin Piao’s troops and intimidated by the street mobs. They numbered less than half the one hundred and ninety-three members of the Central Committee, and those who questioned the new order prudently kept silent.
James Sekloong was seated among his wary peers under the star-dust lights of the small auditorium. The lining of his mouth was puckered and acrid with the nicotine-and-tar detritus of his daily intake of ninety-odd cigarettes. Though the session had begun only half an hour earlier the auditorium was already hung with smoke, and the light beams shining from the ceiling were twined with writhing gray spirals. Around him James saw nervous faces haggard with fatigue, their set mouths sucking on cigarettes. The men and women who were in theory supreme in China had been exhausted by the turmoil of the preceding weeks. James felt as if he were seated among an assembly of phantoms drained of mortal will.
Nonetheless, it was marginally better to be present than to be absent; it was preferable to face the menacing stares of the Defense Minister’s storm troopers, who paced the aisles, than to have already been cast into the outer darkness. Faithful to the Premier’s wry advice, James had adroitly avoided committing himself irrevocably to either faction. He was seated in the middle ranks of the Central Committee, neither too close to the front nor too far to the rear. The impassive Premier sat among the Political Bureau behind a long table on the stage, the rhythmic clenching and unclenching of his stiffly cocked right hand revealing his inner tension. Comrade Shao-chi was pale and distant as a gray ghost. The Chairman smiled blandly from the seat of honor, but did not speak. The satraps of China, themselves cowed into silence, had already heard reports that the Chairman was suffering from Parkinsonism, which severely impeded his speech.
“We are going to dismiss a number of people, promote a number, and keep some in their present posts,” the wax-white Disciple Lin Piao announced shrill-voiced and vitriolic. “Those who are incorrigible will be relieved of their posts immediately.”
The rulers of China stealthily regarded each other under lowered eyelids like terminal-cancer patients wondering who would go next. The Deputy Commander of the Peking Military Region disciplined his features into a noncommittal mask. Never in his adult life had he felt such paralyzing fear. The Defense Minister’s tirade, veering from harsh assertion to near-hysterical self-justification, eroded the convictions that had sustained James’s courage through forty years of battle and intrigue. Without the Communist Party, he himself was nothing—and the Party for which he had lived was being destroyed. The Chairman, whose authority derived from the consent of the Central Committee, was imposing his personal will on the Central Committee by force.
Mao Tse-tung beamed vacuously, as if presiding over a ceremonial dinner. Comrade Shao-chi shrank physically under the verbal assault against himself and all his works. The Premier’s face was fixed in closed rigidity, and his hands lay like flexed claws on the table.
“Recently my heart has been quite heavy.” At his moment of triumph, Lin Piao still paraded the mock humility that had so long concealed his illimitable ambition. “I am not equal to my task, and I may fail in my duties.… But I am doing all I can to minimize my mistakes. I shall rely upon the Chairman, upon my comrades of the Standing Committee of the Political Bureau, and upon the comrades just appointed to the new Task Force Directing the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.”
James suppressed his involuntary start. The Task Force included the Chairman’s termagant wife, who was irremediably bitter. She had, she felt, been systematically slighted by the Party’s intellectual establishment ever since her unsuccessful struggles to become a star of left-wing motion-pictures in Shanghai in the mid-1930s. He feared she would be a new, more vengeful Empress Dowager.
“Chairman Mao is the central axis, and we are the mill-stones that revolve on that axis and grind fine,” Lin Piao declaimed. “We must in all our deeds adhere to the brilliant thought of Mao Tse-tung. There cannot be two policy lines or two proletarian headquarters. Only the Chairman can command, and we must unswervingly obey his every command.… I never interfere with the Chairman on major matters, nor do I trouble him with minor matters.”
The public pretence of “socialist legality,” James noted, was discarded in that last sentence, as was, finally, Lin Piao’s personal pretence of humility. His former company commander had asserted his personal supremacy over the Cultural Revolution—and all China.
Personal dictatorship was supplanting collective rule, but not one delegate dared object. The vacant chairs of those who had resisted Lin Piao’s coup d’état mutely enjoined obedience. The armed soldiers standing along the walls overwhelmingly demonstrated that the ultimate source of all power was naked force. The militant Red Guard activists, the “rebel revolutionary” students and workers, roared in the gallery behind James. Their wild chanting heralded the violent anarchy the Chairman and the Minister of Defense were releasing upon the nation.
The rump Central Committee carried Lin Piao’s “proposals” by acclamation. The enormity of the planned Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution so shocked James Sekloong that he automatically jotted notes he later read with startled disbelief: “Create entire new society after destroying—totally—all old ideas, culture, customs, and habits. Dismiss all erring officials throughout the nation. Erect new government structures called Revolutionary Committees to replace all existing Government and Party organs. Establish reformed educational system and create totally new culture. License adolescent Red Guards to rampage through China—burning and killing to impose new order.”
In a moment of eerie clarity, James distinctly heard his own daughter’s voice shrieking in the ga
llery: “All hail to Deputy Chairman Lin! Hail, hail, hail the thought of Mao Tse-tung! Destroy all demons and monsters!”
Lin Piao was thus acclaimed as Chairman Mao’s heir-apparent and the sole Deputy Chairman of the Communist Party, replacing the four incumbent Vice-Chairmen. Comrade Shao-chi was degraded from first Vice-Chairman to eighth rank in the Political Bureau, just beneath Secretary-General Teng Hsiao-ping, The Organizer. One omission permitted James to hope still for the future of China as he walked numbly toward the Eastern Exit of the Great Hall of the People among his silent, shuffling peers. Though no longer second Vice-Chairman, Chou En-lai remained the third-ranking member of the Communist Party. Even Lin Piao did not yet dare dispense with the man who had been his teacher at the Whampoa Academy forty years earlier.
The first assignment given an apprehensive James Sekloong by the new master of China paradoxically bestowed uneasy peace upon his household. He directed the Liberation Army’s support for the first mass rally of Red Guards. Some 900,000 “rebel revolutionaries” from Peking were to be joined by an additional 100,000 transported by airplane, truck, and railroad from the far corners of the nation. The preparations only the military could carry out imposed a logistical burden far greater than moving several army corps. James was assisted in his labors by his daughter Tou-tou, when she was not diverted by her ideological duties as one of the five chief leaders of all China’s Red Guards. Though Tou-tou assumed that she was virtually running China, father and daughter worked well together. Their intense concentration upon their practical tasks left them neither energy nor time to quarrel.
James was deterred from taunting her as much by fear of the harridan his daughter had become as by his preoccupation with the staff work. Soaring high on the thermal currents of elation, Tou-tou could not descend to the personal disputes with her father that had made their home life acrimonious for months.
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