by Jung Chang
Mao tried to deflect dissatisfaction by his usual method of designating scapegoats. The people he picked on were first of all village cadres, whom he blamed for “beating people up and beating them to death,” and for “causing grain harvests to drop and people not to have enough food to eat.” Next he blamed the Russians, and his third scapegoat was “extraordinarily big natural calamities.” As a matter of fact, meteorological records show that not only were there no natural calamities in the famine years, but the weather was better than average. But even if cadres had no general picture, and half believed Mao, hungry officials still felt that something must be terribly wrong with the way their Party was running the country if the entire population, including themselves, was brought to such a state of wretchedness.
Mao also tried to win his cadres’ sympathy vote by announcing to Party members that he would “share weal and woe with the nation,” and give up eating meat. In fact, all he did, for a while, was to eat fish instead, which he loved anyway. Nor did his meatless regime last long. Indeed, it was right in the middle of the famine that he developed a fancy for meat-rich European cuisine. On 26 April 1961, a comprehensive set of European menus was presented to him, under seven headings: seafood, chicken, duck, pork, lamb, beef and soup — each with scores of dishes.
Mao went to the greatest lengths to keep his daily life completely secret. His daughter Li Na was boarding at the university, so she lived during the week on normal rations and was starving. After one weekend at home, she smuggled a few of her father’s usual luxuries out of the house. Mao ordered her never to do it again. Nothing must puncture the illusion that he was tightening his belt along with the rest of the nation. As a result, Li Na contracted edema in 1960 and she stopped menstruating. The following year she abandoned the university altogether and stayed at home.
To his staff, who could see what Mao was eating, and who themselves were half-starved, like their families, Mao claimed that his food was a reward to him “from the People,” and that others had “no right” to it. When Mao’s housekeeper took some scraps home, he found himself exiled to the freezing Great Northern Wilderness and was never heard of again.
Mao’s attempt to win the sympathy vote did not work; the deprivation was just too great. One of the things that had completely disappeared was soap, because Mao was exporting the fat required to make it. Mao wanted people to accept doing without soap, so he told the Party that he himself was forgoing the use of soap to wash his hands. “Of course he doesn’t use soap,” one official snapped, in private. “He doesn’t do any proper work!” Senior officials were saying other unthinkable things to one another such as: “Why doesn’t he just kick off!” Mao knew what bitter comments they were making. One remark that reached his ears was: “If what’s happening had happened in the past, the ruler would have had to resign long ago.”
When Mao’s daughter Chiao-chiao went to sweep the tomb of his late wife Kai-hui, she heard people cursing Mao, and reported it back to him. When the purged former defense minister Peng De-huai, who had been under house arrest since 1959, was allowed to visit his home area in October 1961, he got a very warm welcome from officials as well as ordinary villagers, as they had heard he had been purged for opposing Mao’s policies. Two thousand “pilgrims,” some of whom had walked up to 100 km on half-empty stomachs, poured into Peng’s old family home to thank him for speaking up. Peng talked till he lost his voice.
If the scheduled congress met and held a vote, there was a strong possibility that Mao would be voted out. His fears were spelled out later by one of his closest henchmen (Zhang Chun-qiao, one of the notorious “Gang of Four”): “If the old Party charter had been followed, and the 9th Congress had been held then … Liu Shao-chi would have become the Chairman …”
Many officials called for a congress to be convened to address the catastrophic situation. Mao vetoed the idea, and came up with the device of convening a conference that would not have voting powers, thus averting the threat of being removed. The conference would be attended by the top few people in each ministry, province, city, region, county and major industrial enterprise.
In January 1962, these officials—7,000 in all — came to Peking from all over China for the largest gathering in the Party’s history, known as the Conference of the Seven Thousand. It proved to be a landmark, because it was after this conference that famine was brought to a halt. But what is little known is that this victory was only secured by Liu Shao-chi ambushing Mao.
When he called the conference, Mao had had no intention of stopping his deadly policies. On the contrary, his aim had been to use the occasion to spur on his officials, so that they would go back home and turn the screws tighter. He had said then to his inner circle: “It’s not the case that we don’t have things [food]. True, there are not enough pigs, but there are plenty of other foods. We just don’t seem to be able to lay our hands on them. We need a spur.”
The method Mao used to lay down his line was to give the delegates the text of the keynote speech before it was delivered. The text glossed over past disasters, which were only vaguely and briefly referred to as “mistakes,” before announcing that “the most difficult time is over.” Most ominously, it not only claimed that “our domestic situation is on the whole good,” but also declared that there would be another Great Leap in the coming years.
The delegates were told to voice their views, and that their amendments would be taken into account before the speech was delivered. But Mao made sure it was extremely hard for anyone to speak up, by organizing the discussions in groups, each chaired by an intimidating henchman. Anyone who ventured sharper questions was instantly gagged with heavy-handed threats. As one brave delegate wrote in an anonymous letter to the leadership, the sessions were simply “for everyone to sit there and kill time.”
This went on for two weeks. Mao kept tabs on the delegates, and smugly read discussion bulletins while lounging in bed in his girlfriends’ arms. His plan was that Liu Shao-chi would deliver the finalized speech to the one and only plenary session on 27 January, and the conference would then close. His program would thus be set in stone, and Liu and all the participants would be co-responsible.
BUT MAO’S COZY PLAN fell apart. On the 27th, Liu did something that took Mao utterly by surprise. With Mao in the chair, Liu gave a different speech from the circulated keynote text he was supposed to deliver.
With this huge audience of all the 7,000 top officials in the country listening, Liu laid into Mao’s policies. “People do not have enough food, clothes or other essentials,” he said; “agricultural output, far from rising in 1959, 1960 and 1961, dropped, not a little, but tremendously … there is not only no Great Leap Forward, but a great deal of falling backward.” Liu dismissed the official explanation for the calamities, saying there was “no serious bad weather” in the areas he had visited, nor, he strongly hinted, anywhere. He called on delegates to question the new Leap that Mao had advocated, and raised the possibility of scrapping the communes and even the Mao-style industrialization program.
Liu established beyond a glimmer of a doubt that past policies had been disastrous, and had to be discarded. He openly rejected a standard Mao formula that “Mistakes are only one finger whereas achievements are nine fingers.” This, he said flatly, was untrue. When Mao cut in and insisted it was true in many places, Liu contradicted him.
Liu’s speech brought a torrential response from his audience, who could hardly wait to raise their voices. The discussions that day took on a totally different tone and mood. Now they knew that the president was behind them, delegates spoke their minds, condemning the old policies passionately, and insisting they absolutely must not be repeated.
Mao had not expected the normally ultra-prudent Liu to pull a fast one. Inwardly, he was black with rage, but he decided it was wise to hold his fire, as Liu clearly had the support of the 7,000 participants, and Mao could not afford to have a head-on collision with this vast body of officials, which included just about eve
rybody who ran the country. So he had to pretend there were no differences between himself and them. His first move was to extend the conference, presenting this as a sympathetic response on his part to the delegates’ sentiments, telling them it was so they could “get their anger off their chest” (chu-qi). Privately he was fuming, and called it “letting their farts off” (fang-pi).
Mao plunged into damage control, to kill any idea that he was responsible for the famine. He designated some provincial bosses and agricultural chiefs and planners to make speeches taking responsibility for the disasters, thus implicitly exonerating him. But his most important maneuver was to wheel out his crony, Defense Minister Lin Biao, who was the first person to speak after the conference was extended, on 29 January. The marshal had started his collusion with Mao as far back as 1929, and he was someone Mao could rely on for support, however awful the cause.
To the 7,000, Lin Biao trotted out the kind of heartless clichés Mao loved to hear: disasters were inevitable “tuition fees”; Chairman Mao’s ideas were “always correct”; “in times of difficulty … we must all the more follow Chairman Mao.” When he finished, Mao was the first to clap, and praised Lin fulsomely to the audience. Only now did Mao feel safe enough to hint at his loathing for what Liu Shao-chi had done, using an ominous expression that amounted to “I’ll get you later.” Lin Biao had saved Mao’s bacon.
Once he saw Lin Biao appear, Liu Shao-chi’s heart sank. His widow told us that Liu murmured: “Lin Biao comes, and talks like this. Trouble.” This total solidarity with Mao from the army chief, expressed in the kind of peremptory language which signaled that there could be no rational debate, immediately cast a frightening shadow over the participants. In the following days, they toned down their language and the ways they expressed their anger, though continuing to criticize the disastrous economic policies. The result was that Mao’s policies did not get the scrutiny and forceful condemnation Liu had hoped for. And no one dared to criticize Mao directly, least of all by name.
Nonetheless, Mao could feel the force of the sentiment of the 7,000, and felt compelled to produce a “self-criticism” in front of them, on 30 January — his first ever since coming to power in 1949. Although he characteristically made it sound as if the disasters had been other people’s fault and that he was rather altruistically accepting the blame, using carefully slanted formulae like “I am responsible … because I am the Chairman,” he had to admit that there was much to be blamed for. Having made this admission, Mao had to swallow a policy change. He was forced to abandon the lethal scale of food levies planned for 1962 and onwards. As a result, tens of millions of people were spared death by starvation.
AS SOON AS the conference was over, on 7 February, Mao stormed off to Shanghai to be among his cronies, under local boss Ke Qing-shi. He had to take a back seat while Liu and his other colleagues, mainly Chou En-lai, Chen Yun and a rising star, Deng Xiao-ping, made major changes to his policies. Requisitioning was greatly lowered. Costly and unrealistic projects like nuclear submarines were suspended, although the basic nuclear program was unaffected. Spending on arms factories was enormously scaled down, while consumer goods industries received unprecedented funding. In a blow to the promotion of Maoism, overseas aid was slashed drastically — to virtually zero for the year. Mao’s extravagance had been extremely unpopular with officials who knew about it. The man who ran military aid later wrote: “Every time I saw foreigners’ smiling faces after signing yet another aid agreement, my heart would be filled with guilt towards my own people.”
Investment in agriculture rose sharply. In many places, peasants were allowed to lease land from the commune, and effectively were able to return to being individual farmers. This alleviated starvation and motivated productivity. It was in defense of this practice that Deng Xiao-ping quoted an old saying, which became his most famous remark: “It doesn’t matter whether it’s a yellow cat or a black cat, as long as it catches mice.” In the cities, working hours were reduced so that the malnourished population could recover some energy, and this also allowed more private time and family life. In less than a year people’s lives improved perceptibly. By and large, deaths from hunger stopped.
The regime even allowed a number of people to leave the country. Normally, people trying to escape abroad were sent to labor camps, but now the authorities opened the fence to Hong Kong for a few days to let some 50,000 people flee. Border guards even lent a hand to lift children over the barbed wire.
The year 1962 was to be one of the most liberal periods since Mao’s reign had begun. That spring, Liu and his colleagues rehabilitated wholesale those condemned following the purge of Peng De-huai in 1959, who totaled a staggering 10 million. Some “Rightists” (victimized in 1957–58) were also rehabilitated. In the arts and literature a host of creations burst forth. It had taken tens of millions of deaths to bring this degree of relief to the survivors. It was also in this year that the Panchen Lama felt able to write to Chou En-lai, chronicling the brutality the Tibetans had suffered. There was some relaxation in Tibet; some monasteries were restored and religious practices tolerated.
BEING FORCED TO change policy by his own Party — without the backing of Moscow — was the biggest setback Mao had suffered since taking power. First he had been outsmarted by the seemingly ultra-cautious Liu. Then he had effectively been given the thumbs-down by virtually all of the stratum that ran the country. From this moment on, Mao nurtured a volcanic hatred for Liu and the officials who had attended the conference — as well as for his Party, which these people obviously represented. He was out for revenge. The president of China and the backbone of his Party were his target. That is why, a few years later, he launched his Great Purge, the Cultural Revolution, in which Liu and most of the officials in that hall, and numerous others, were to be put through hell. As Mme Mao spelled out, Mao had “choked back this grievance at the Conference of the Seven Thousand, and was only able to avenge it in the Cultural Revolution.” Of course Mao was not just in quest of revenge, savage and devastating though that was. It was obvious to him that this set of officials was not prepared to run the country the way he wanted. He would purge them and install new enforcers.
Quite a few left the conference with a sense of foreboding for Liu. Liu himself knew that this was the biggest turning-point in his life, but he had decided that his priority was to fend off more tens of millions of deaths. During this period the normally reserved Liu was unusually passionate and vocal about the plight of the Chinese people, who had suffered so terribly at the hands of the regime of which he was a leading member.
Over the next few years, Liu and his like-minded colleagues worked at getting the economy back into shape — while Mao planned revenge.
45. THE BOMB (1962–64 AGE 68–70)
BY LATE 1962, famine had eased. In the following years, while tolerating food levies on a scale that allowed his subjects to subsist, Mao began to resuscitate the pet projects that had been shelved as the result of the famine, such as satellites and nuclear submarines. And new projects joined them. When Mao was told about lasers, at the time seen only as a deadly weapon, and translated into Chinese as “the Light of Death,” si-guang, he instantly decided on huge investments in laser research, giving a characteristic order: “The Light of Death: get some people to devote entirely to this. Feed them and don’t let them do anything else.”
For now, the focus of Mao’s attention was the atomic bomb. In November 1962, a special committee was formed, chaired by Chou En-lai, to coordinate the several hundred thousand people involved and pool the whole country’s resources to produce a Bomb within two years. The concentration of resources was on a scale that astonished even a top echelon accustomed to totalitarian organization. Each of the numerous preparatory tests would take up nearly half of all China’s telecommunication lines, and much of the country, including factories, would recurrently find itself without electricity or transport, because power had been diverted for these tests.
How to pro
tect the Bomb, and indeed his entire nuclear complex, was Mao’s constant preoccupation; and not without reason. At the tripartite (US — UK — USSR) Nuclear Test Ban talks in Moscow in July 1963, President Kennedy told his negotiator, Averell Harriman, to sound out Khrushchev about destroying Mao’s nuclear facilities: “try to elicit K[hrushchev]’s view of means of limiting or preventing Chinese nuclear development and his willingness either to take Soviet action or to accept U.S. action aimed in this direction.” Khrushchev rebuffed the approach. But Kennedy told a press conference on 1 August that a nuclear China — which, he emphasized, was “Stalinist,” “with a government determined on war as a means of bringing about its ultimate success”—posed “potentially a more dangerous situation than any we faced since the end of the Second [World] War … and we would like to take some steps now which would lessen that prospect …”
Kennedy seriously considered air strikes on China’s nuclear facilities. He was advised that the Lanzhou gaseous diffusion plant could be destroyed in such a way as to make it look like an accident, but that nuclear strikes might be needed to destroy the plutonium plant at Baotou.
After Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963 (by an “oil king,” Mao told Albania’s defense minister) his successor, Lyndon Johnson, was soon toying with the idea of dropping Taiwan saboteurs to blow up the facilities at Lop Nor, China’s atomic test site.
Lop Nor and other nuclear sites deep in the Gobi Desert were sealed off by land, and everyone there, from top scientists to laborers, was completely isolated from their families and society for years, even decades. But the sites were exposed to America’s spy planes — and attack from the air, which Mao feared most.
