by Jung Chang
AT THE END of May 1966, Mao set up a new office, the Cultural Revolution Small Group, to help run the Purge. Mme Mao headed it for him, with Mao’s former secretary, Chen Bo-da, its nominal director, and purge expert Kang Sheng its “adviser.” This office, in addition to Lin Biao and Chou En-lai, formed Mao’s latest inner circle.
Under the new cabal, the cult of Mao was escalated to fever pitch. Mao’s face dominated the front page of People’s Daily, which also ran a column of his quotations every day. Soon, badges started appearing with Mao’s head on them, of which, altogether, some 4.8 billion were manufactured. More copies of Mao’s Selected Works were printed — and more portraits of him (1.2 billion) — than China had inhabitants. It was this summer that the Little Red Book was handed out to everyone. It had to be carried and brandished on all public occasions, and its prescriptions recited daily.
In June, Mao intensified the terrorization of society. He picked as his first instrument of terror young people in schools and universities, the natural hotbeds for activists. These students were told to condemn their teachers and those in charge of education for poisoning their heads with “bourgeois ideas”—and for persecuting them with exams, which henceforth were abolished. The message was splashed in outsize characters on the front page of People’s Daily, and declaimed in strident voices on the radio, carried by loudspeakers that had been rigged up everywhere, creating an atmosphere that was both blood-boiling and blood-curdling. Teachers and administrators in education were selected as the first victims because they were the people instilling culture, and because they were the group most conveniently placed to offer up to the youthful mobs, being right there to hand.
The young were told that their role was to “safeguard” Mao, although how their teachers could possibly harm “the great Helmsman,” or what perils might beset him, was not disclosed. Nevertheless, many responded enthusiastically. Taking part in politics was something no one had been allowed to do under Mao, and the country was seething with frustrated activists who had been denied the normal outlets available in most societies, even to sit around and argue issues. Now, suddenly, there seemed to be a chance to get involved. To those interested in politics, the prospect was tremendously exciting. Young people began to form groups.
On 2 June, a group from a middle school in Peking put up a wall poster, which they signed with the snappy name of “Red Guards,” to show that they wanted to safeguard Mao. Their writing was full of remarks like: “Stuff ‘human feelings!’ ” “We will be brutal!” “We will strike you [Mao’s enemies] to the ground and trample you!” The seeds of hate that Mao had sown were ready for reaping. Now he was able to unleash the thuggery of these infected teenagers, the most malleable and violent element of society.
To make sure that students were fully available to carry out his wishes, Mao ordered schooling suspended from 13 June. “Now lessons are stopped,” he said, and young people “are given food. With food they have energy and they want to riot. What are they expected to do if not to riot?” Violence broke out within days. On 18 June, scores of teachers and cadres at Peking University were dragged in front of crowds and manhandled, their faces blackened, and dunces’ hats put on their heads. They were forced to kneel, some were beaten up, and women were sexually molested. Similar episodes happened all over China, producing a cascade of suicides.
MAO ORCHESTRATED THESE events from the provinces. He had left the capital the previous November as soon as he had set the Purge in motion. Peking was no longer safe: it was full of foes he wanted to purge, and uncomfortably close to Russian troops on the Outer Mongolia border. For more than eight months, Mao stayed way down south, travelling incessantly.
He was also relaxing and storing up energy for the coming tempest. He took walks in the misty hills along the lake at Hangzhou, and flirted at his twice-weekly dancing parties. That June, while mayhem was rising, he spent some time in a particularly serene villa that he had never been to, outside his home village of Shaoshan. He had ordered this villa built during his previous visit seven years before. While swimming in a reservoir there, he had been much taken by the secluded beauty of the surroundings, and said to the provincial boss: “Mm, this place is pretty quiet. Would you build a straw hut here for my retirement?” As the man was soon purged, nothing was done until Mao brought it up again a year later, in the depth of the famine. So began “Project 203,” the building of a giant steel and cement edifice called Dripping Grotto. The whole mountain range was sealed off, and the local peasants evicted. A helicopter pad and a special railway line were planned, and an earthquake-and atom bomb — proof building, with shock-absorbers, was later incorporated. Altogether, Mao stayed here for all of eleven days in that violent June, and never again.
This grey monstrosity was surrounded, incongruously, by soft green hills alive with blazing wildflowers, and the back abutted onto the Mao family’s ancestral burial ground. Its front door faced a peak called Dragon’s Head, auspicious in the view of geomancy. This delighted Mao, who chatted jovially with his entourage about the feng shui assets of the place.
Though he was just on the edge of his native village, Mao did not meet a single villager. On his way, a little girl had caught a glimpse of him in his car, and told her family. Police descended at once, and warned the family: “You didn’t see Chairman Mao! Don’t you dare to say that again!” Meetings were called to warn the villagers not to think that Mao was there. Mao spent most of his time reading and thinking. He did not even go swimming, although the reservoir was right on his doorstep.
By the end of June, he was ready to head back to Peking and start the next stage of his Purge. En route, he stopped at Wuhan, where on 16 July he swam for more than an hour in the Yangtze, watched by tens of thousands of people. Like his swim a decade before, this was to send the message to his foes that, at the age of seventy-two, he had the health, the strength and the will for a gigantic fight. And this time the symbolic gesture was also intended for the population at large, especially the young. The message was distilled into one slogan: “Follow Chairman Mao forward through high winds and waves!” Chanted repeatedly from the now ubiquitous loudspeakers, it fanned the flames in many restless heads. Having cranked up his media to ballyhoo this swim to the maximum, even making it famous abroad, Mao returned to Peking on 18 July. He immediately adopted a hands-on approach, frequently chairing meetings with the Small Group that ran the Purge, and meeting every day with Chou En-lai, who was in charge of day-to-day business.
Mao did not go back to his old house, claiming he did not like the way it had been redecorated. Instead, he moved into unexpected quarters in another part of Zhongnanhai — the changing-rooms of the swimming pools, which he made his main residence for the next ten years. He did not move there to swim. He was taking precautions against the possibility that bugging devices — or worse — had been installed during his absence.
IT WAS IN these nondescript changing-rooms that Mao created the terror of “Red August,” with the aim of frightening the whole nation into an even greater degree of conformity. On 1 August he wrote to the first group of Red Guards, who had vowed in their posters to “be brutal” and to “trample” Mao’s enemies, to announce his “fiery support.” He circulated this letter, together with the bellicose Red Guard posters, to the Central Committee, telling these high officials that they must promote the Red Guards. Many of these officials were actually on Mao’s hit list, but for now he used them to spread terror — one that would soon engulf themselves. Following Mao’s instructions, these officials encouraged their children to form Red Guard groups, and these children passed the word to their friends. Red Guard groups mushroomed as a result, invariably headed by the children of high officials.
Learning from their fathers and friends that Mao was encouraging violence, the Red Guards immediately embarked on atrocities. On 5 August, in a Peking girls’ school packed with high officials’ children (which Mao’s two daughters had attended), the first known death by torture took place. The
headmistress, a fifty-year-old mother of four, was kicked and trampled by the girls, and boiling water was poured over her. She was ordered to carry heavy bricks back and forth; as she stumbled past, she was thrashed with leather army belts with brass buckles, and with wooden sticks studded with nails. She soon collapsed and died. Afterwards, leading activists reported to the new authority. They were not told to stop — which meant carry on.
A more explicit incitement to violence soon came from Mao himself. On 18 August, dressed in army uniform for the first time since 1949, he stood on Tiananmen Gate to review hundreds of thousands of Red Guards. This was when the Red Guards were written about in the national press and introduced to the nation, and the world. A leading perpetrator of atrocities in the girls’ school where the headmistress had just been killed was given the signal honor of putting a Red Guard armband on Mao. The dialogue that followed was made public: “Chairman Mao asked her: ‘What’s your name?’ She said ‘Song Bin-bin.’ Chairman Mao asked: ‘Is it the “Bin” as in “Educated and Gentle?” ’ She said: ‘Yes.’ Chairman Mao said: ‘Be violent!’ ”
Song Bin-bin changed her name to “Be Violent,” and her school changed its name to “The Red Violent School.” Atrocities now multiplied in schools and universities. They started in Peking, then spread across the country, as Peking Red Guards were sent all over China to demonstrate how to do things like thrash victims and make them lick their own blood off the ground. Provincial youngsters were encouraged to visit Peking to learn that Mao had given them enormous destructive license. To facilitate this process, Mao ordered that travel be made free, together with food and accommodation while traveling. Over the next four months, 11 million young people came to Peking and Mao made seven more appearances at Tiananmen Square, where they gathered in massive, frenzied, yet well-drilled crowds.
There was not one school in the whole of China where atrocities did not occur. And teachers were not the only victims. In his letter to the Red Guards on 1 August 1966, Mao singled out for praise some militant teenagers who had been dividing pupils by family background and abusing those from undesirable families, whom they labeled “Blacks.” Mao announced specifically that these militants had his “fiery support,” which was unequivocal endorsement for what they were doing. In the girls’ school where the headmistress was tortured to death, “Blacks” had ropes tied around their necks, were beaten up, and forced to say: “I’m the bastard of a bitch. I deserve to die.”
With models set up by Mao, this practice then spread to all schools, accompanied by a “theory of the bloodline,” summed up in a couplet as ridiculous as it was brutal: “The son of a hero father is always a great man; a reactionary father produces nothing but a bastard!” This was chanted by many children of officials’ families, who dominated the early Red Guards, little knowing that their “hero fathers” were Mao’s real targets. At this initial stage, Mao simply used these children as his tools, setting them upon other children. When the Sichuan boss returned from Peking, he told his son, who was organizing a Red Guard group: “The Cultural Revolution is the continuation of the Communists against the Nationalists … Now our sons and daughters must fight their [Nationalists’] sons and daughters.” This man could not possibly have given such an order unless it had come from Mao.
AFTER TERROR IN SCHOOLS, Mao directed his Red Guards to fan out into society at large. The targets at this stage were the custodians of culture, and culture itself. On 18 August, Mao stood next to Lin Biao on Tiananmen while Lin called on Red Guards throughout the country to “smash … old culture.” The youngsters first went for objects like traditional shop signs and street names, which they attacked with hammers, and renamed. As in many revolutions, puritans turned on the softer and more flamboyant. Long hair, skirts and shoes with any hint of high heels were pounced on in the streets, and sheared by scissors-wielding teenagers. From now on, only flat shoes, and uniform-like, ill-fitting jackets and trousers, in only a few colors, were available.
But Mao wanted something much more vicious. On 23 August he told the new authorities: “Peking is not chaotic enough … Peking is too civilised.” As Peking was the trail-blazer and the provinces all copied the capital, this was a way to pump up terror nationwide. That afternoon, groups of teenage Red Guards, many of them girls, descended on the countryard of the Peking Writers’ Association. By then, a “uniform” was firmly in fashion for the Red Guards: green army-style clothes, often ordinary clothes dyed army green, or sometimes real army uniforms handed down by parents, red armband on the left arm, Little Red Book in hand — and a leather belt with brass buckles. Thus attired, the Red Guards rained blows with their heavy belts on some two dozen of the country’s best-known writers. Large insulting wooden plaques were hung on thin wire from the writers’ necks, as they were thrashed in the scorching sun.
The victims were then trucked to an old Confucian temple, which housed Peking’s major library. There, opera costumes and props had been brought to make a bonfire. About thirty of the country’s leading writers, opera singers and other artists were made to kneel in front of the bonfire and were set upon again with kicks and punches, sticks and brass-buckled belts. One of the victims was the 69-year-old writer Lao She, who had been lauded by the regime as “the people’s artist.” The following day, he drowned himself in a lake.
The site, props and victims had all been chosen to symbolize “old culture.” The selection of the victims, all household names, was unquestionably done at the very top, since till now they had all been official stars. There can be no doubt that the whole event was staged by the authorities; the loosely-banded teenage Red Guards could not possibly have organized all this on their own.
Mao had also cleared the way for the atrocities to escalate by issuing explicit orders to the army and police on the 21st and 22nd, saying that they must “absolutely not intervene” against the youngsters, using uncommonly specific language such as “even firing blanks … is absolutely forbidden.”
To spread terror deeper and closer to home, Mao got the young thugs to make violent raids on victims selected by the state, which gave their names and addresses to the Red Guards. The boss of Sichuan, for instance, ordered the department in his province that looked after prominent cultural figures to hand out a list to his son’s Red Guard organization — something he could only have done if Mao had told him to.
On 24 August, national police chief Xie Fu-zhi told his subordinates to pass out such information. Clearly responding to questions like “What if the Red Guards kill these people?” Xie said: “If people are beaten to death … it’s none of our business.” “Don’t be bound by rules set in the past.” “If you detain those who beat people to death … you will be making a big mistake.” Xie assured his reluctant subordinates: “Premier Chou supports it.”
It was with the authorities’ blessing that Red Guards broke into homes where they burned books, cut up paintings, trampled phonograph records and musical instruments — generally wrecking anything to do with “culture.” They “confiscated” valuables, and beat up the owners. Bloody house raids swept across China, which People’s Daily hailed as “simply splendid.” Many of those raided were tortured to death in their own homes. Some were carted off to makeshift torture chambers in what had been cinemas, theaters and sports stadiums. Red Guards tramping down the street, the bonfires of destruction, and the screams of victims being set upon — these were the sights and sounds of the summer nights of 1966.
There was a short list of notables to be exempted, drawn up by Chou En-lai. This later brought Chou totally unmerited plaudits for allegedly “saving” people. In fact, it was Mao who got Chou to draw the list up, on 30 August, and the purpose was purely utilitarian. The only reason Chou had charge of it was because he was running the whole show, not because he stepped in to save people. The list comprised a few dozen names. By contrast, later official statistics show that in August — September, in Peking alone, 33,695 homes were raided (which invariably involved physical violence), an
d 1,772 people were tortured, or beaten, to death.
To cover himself, Mao had Chou En-lai announce to a Red Guard rally on Tiananmen on 31 August: “Denounce by words, and not by violence.” This announcement allowed most Red Guards to opt out of violence by saying that Mao was against it. Some victims were also able to protect themselves by quoting this back to their persecutors. But as perpetrators of atrocities went unpunished, violence raged on.
One of Mao’s aims with the house raids was to use the Red Guards as proxy bandits. They confiscated tons of gold, silver, platinum, jewelry, and millions of dollars in hard currency, which all went into the state coffers, as well as many priceless antiques, paintings and ancient books. The looting, along with mindless on-site destruction, cleaned virtually all valuable possessions out of private hands. Some of the plunder was exported to earn foreign currency.
The top few leaders were allowed to take their pick of the booty. Mme Mao selected an 18-carat gold French pendant watch, studded with pearls and diamonds, for which she paid the princely sum of 7 yuan. This was in line with the Maoist leadership’s “un-corrupt” practice of insisting on paying for paltry items like tea leaves at meetings, but paying nothing at all for their scores of villas and servants, and having the de facto private use of planes and trains and other expensive perks. Kang Sheng, an antiques lover, privatized some house raids by sending in his own personal looters disguised as Red Guards. Mao himself pilfered thousands of old books. Sterilized by ultraviolet rays, they lined the shelves of his enormous sitting room, forming the backdrop to photographs of him receiving world leaders and impressing foreign visitors. The room, Kissinger mused, looked like “the retreat of a scholar.” In fact, unknown to the American visitors, it had more in common with one of Goering’s mansions adorned with art seized from victims of Nazism.
The regime squeezed something else out of these raids: housing space. The housing shortage was acute, as virtually no new dwellings had been built for ordinary urban residents under the Communists. Now the battered families who had been raided were squeezed into one or two rooms, and neighbors were moved into the rest of the raided houses, often resulting, not surprisingly, in excruciatingly bitter relations.
