by Jung Chang
Some families who had been raided were exiled to villages, escalating a process which Mao had already initiated in order to turn cities into “pure” industrial centers. In Peking, nearly 100,000 were expelled in less than a month from late August. One eyewitness saw the vast waiting room at Peking railway station crammed with children waiting to be exiled with their parents. Red Guards ordered the children to kneel down, and then walked around aiming blows at their heads with brass-buckled belts. Some even poured scalding hot water over them as a farewell souvenir, while other passengers tried to find a place to hide.
IN SUMMER 1966 Red Guards ravaged every city and town, and some areas in the countryside. “Home,” with books and anything associated with culture, became a dangerous place. Fearing that the Red Guards might burst in and torture them if “culture” was found in their possession, frightened citizens burned their own books or sold them as scrap paper, and destroyed their own art objects. Mao thus succeeded in wiping out culture from Chinese homes. Outside, he was also fulfillling his long-held goal of erasing China’s past from the minds of his subjects. A large number of historical monuments, the most visible manifestation of the nation’s civilization, which had so far survived Mao’s loathing, was demolished. In Peking, of 6,843 monuments still standing in 1958, 4,922 were now obliterated.
Like the list of people to be spared, the list of monuments to be preserved was a short one. Mao did want to keep some monuments, like Tiananmen Gate, where he could stand to be hailed by “the masses.” The Forbidden City and a number of other historical sites were put under protection and many were closed down, thus depriving the population of access even to the fraction of their cultural inheritance that survived. Not spared was China’s leading architect, Liang Si-cheng, who had described Mao’s wish to see “chimneys everywhere” in Peking as “too horrifying a picture to bear thinking about.” Now he was subjected to public humiliation and abuse, and brutal house raids. His collection of books was destroyed, and his family expelled to one small room, with broken windows and ice-covered floor and walls. Chronically ill, Liang died in 1972.
Contrary to what is widely believed, the vast majority of the destruction was not spontaneous, but state-sponsored. Before Mao chided the Red Guards for being “too civilized” on 23 August, there had been no vandalism against historical monuments. It was on that day, only after Mao spoke, that the first statue was broken — a Buddha in the Summer Palace in Peking. From then on, when important sites were being wrecked, official specialists were present to pick out the most valuable objects for the state, while the rest were carted off and melted down, or pulped.
It was Mao’s office, the Small Group, which ordered the desecration of the home of the man whose name was synonymous with Chinese culture, Confucius. The home, in Shandong, was a rich museum, as emperors and artists had come there to pay homage, commissioning monuments and donating their art. The locals had been ordered to wreck it, but had responded by going slow. So Red Guards were dispatched from Peking. In their pledge before setting off, they said that the sage was “the enemy rival to death of Mao Tse-tung Thought.” Mao did, indeed, hate Confucius, because Confucianism enjoined that a ruler must care for his subjects, and as Mao himself put it, “Confucius is humanism … that is to say, People-centred-ism.”
In the annihilation of culture, Mme Mao played a key role as her husband’s police chief for this field. And she made sure there was no resurrection of culture for the rest of Mao’s life. Partly thanks to her, for a decade, until Mao’s death in 1976, old books remained banned, and among the handful of new books of general interest that were published, all of them sported Mao’s quotations, in bold, on every other page. There were a few paintings and some songs around, but they all served propaganda purposes, and eulogized Mao. Virtually the only performing arts allowed were eight “revolutionary model shows” and a few films that Mme Mao had had a hand in producing. China became a cultural desert.
BY MID-SEPTEMBER 1966, the country was thoroughly terrorized and Mao felt confident enough to start stalking his real target: Party officials. On 15 September, Lin Biao instructed a Red Guards’ rally on Tiananmen Square that they were to shift their target and “focus on denouncing those power-holders inside the Party pursuing a capitalist road,” known as “capitalist-roaders.” What Lin — and Mao — really meant was the old enforcers who had shown distaste for Mao’s extremist policies. Mao aimed to get rid of them en masse, and the call went out to attack them right across China.
For this job, new groups were formed, who sometimes called themselves Red Guards but were generally known as “Rebels,” because they were taking on their bosses. And these Rebels were mostly adults. The original Red Guard groups, most of them made up of teenagers, now fell apart, as they had been organized around the children of those same high officials who now became targets. Mao had used the young Red Guards to terrorize society at large. Now he was moving against his real enemies, Party officials; and for this he used a broader, mainly older force.
With Mao’s explicit support, Rebels denounced their bosses in wall posters and at violent rallies. But anyone who thought the Party dictatorship might be weakened had their hopes dashed fast. People who tried to get access to their own files (which the regime held on everyone), or to rehabilitate those the Party had persecuted, were instantly blocked. Orders poured out from Peking making it clear that, although Party officials were under attack, the Party’s rule was not to be loosened one bit. Victims of past persecutions were banned from joining Rebel organizations.
After some months to generate momentum, in January 1967 Mao called on Rebels to “seize power” from their Party bosses. Mao did not differentiate between disaffected officials and those who were actually totally loyal to him and had not wavered even during the famine. In fact, there was no way he could tell who was which. So he resolved to overthrow them all first, and then have them investigated by his new enforcers. The population was told that the Party had been in the hands of villains (“the black line”) ever since the founding of the Communist regime. It was an index of how deeply fear had been embedded that no one dared to ask the obvious questions, like: “In that case, why should the Party go on ruling?” or “Where was Mao all these seventeen years?”
The Rebels’ basic assignment was to punish Party cadres, which is what Mao had been longing to do for years. Some Rebels hated their Party bosses, and jumped at the chance to take revenge. Others were hungry for power, and knew that the only way to rise was to be merciless towards “capitalist-roaders.” There were also plenty of thugs and sadists.
Stalin had carried out his purges using an elite, the KGB, who swiftly hustled their victims out of sight to prison, the gulag or death. Mao made sure that much violence and humiliation was carried out in public, and he vastly increased the number of persecutors by getting his victims tormented and tortured by their own direct subordinates.
A British engineer who was working in Lanzhou in 1967 caught a glimpse of life in one remote corner of the northwest. Two nights after being entertained at an official dinner, he saw a corpse strung up from a lamp-post. It was his host of two nights before. Later, he saw two men being deliberately deafened into unconsciousness by loudhailers—“so that no more reactionary remarks enter their ears,” his minder told him.
The first senior official tortured to death was the minister of coal, on 21 January 1967. Mao hated him because he had complained about the Great Leap Forward — and about Mao himself. He was exhibited in front of organized crowds, and had his arms twisted ferociously backwards in the form of torment known as being “jet-planed.” One day he was shoved onto a bench, bleeding, shirtless in a temperature well below freezing, while thugs rushed forward to cut him with small knives. Finally, a huge iron stove was hung around his neck, dragging his head down to the cement floor, where his skull was bashed in with heavy brass belt buckles. During all this, photographs were taken, which were later shown to Chou — and doubtless to Mao.
P
hotographing torture had hitherto been rare under Mao, but it was done extensively in the Cultural Revolution, especially where Mao’s personal enemies were concerned. As Mao’s usual practice was not to keep records for posterity, let alone proof of torture, the most likely explanation for this departure from his norm is that he took pleasure in viewing pictures of his foes in agony. Film cameras also recorded gruesome denunciation rallies, and Mao watched these displays in his villas. Selected films of this sort were shown on TV, accompanied by the soundtrack of Mme Mao’s “model shows,” and people were organized to watch. (Very few individuals had TV in those days.)
Mao was intimately acquainted with the types of ordeal visited on his former colleagues and subordinates. Vice-Premier Ji Deng-kui later recalled Mao doing an imitation for his entourage of the agonizing “jet-plane” posture which was routine at denunciation meetings, and Mao laughing heartily as Ji described what he had been through.
Eventually, after two or three years of suffering in this manner, millions of officials were exiled to de facto labor camps which went under the anodyne name of “May 7 Cadre Schools.” These camps also housed the custodians of culture — artists, writers, scholars, actors and journalists — who had become superfluous in Mao’s new order.
THE REPLACEMENTS FOR the ousted cadres came mainly from the army, which Mao ordered into every institution in January 1967. Altogether, over the next few years, 2.8 million army men became the new controllers, and of these, 50,000 took over the jobs of former medium-to high-ranking Party officials. These army men were assisted in their new roles by the Rebels and some veteran cadres who were kept on for continuity and expertise. But the army provided the core of the new enforcers — at the expense of doing its job of defending the country. When one army unit was moved away from the coast opposite Taiwan to take control of a province in the interior, its commander asked Chou En-lai what would happen if there was a war. Chou’s answer was: “There will be no war in the next ten years.” Mao did not believe Chiang would invade.
In March, with the new enforcers in place, pupils and students were ordered back to their schools — although, once there, they could only kick their heels, as the old textbooks, teaching methods and teachers had all been condemned, and nobody knew what to do. Normal schooling did not exist for most young people until after Mao’s death, a decade later.
In society at large, the economy ran much as usual, except for relatively minor disruptions caused by the personnel changes. People went to work as before. Shops were open, as were banks. Hospitals, factories, mines, the post, and, with some interruptions, transport, all operated fairly normally. The Superpower Program, far from being paralyzed, as is often thought, was given unprecedented priority in the Cultural Revolution, and investment in it increased. Agriculture did no worse than before.
What changed, apart from the bosses, was life outside work. Leisure disappeared. Instead, there were endless mind-numbing — but nerve-racking — meetings to read and reread Mao’s works and People’s Daily articles. People were herded into numerous violent denunciation rallies against “capitalist-roaders” and other appointed enemies. Public brutality became an inescapable part of daily life. Each institution ran its de facto prison, in which victims were tortured, some to death. Moreover, there were no ways to relax, as there were now virtually no books to read, or magazines, or films, plays, opera; no light music on the radio. For entertainment there were only Mao Thought Propaganda Teams, who sang Mao’s quotations set to raucous music, and danced militantly waving the Little Red Book. Not even Mme Mao’s eight “model shows” were performed for the public yet, as their staging had to be under draconian central control.
ONE TASK OF the new enforcers was to screen the old cadres to explore whether they had ever resisted Mao’s orders, even passively. Each of the millions of ousted officials had a “case team” combing through his or her past. At the very top was a Central Special Case Team, a highly secret group chaired by Chou En-lai, with Kang Sheng as his deputy, and staffed by middle-ranking army officers. This was the body that investigated people personally designated by Mao. Since he especially wanted to find out whether any of his top echelon had been plotting against him with the Russians, the key case in the military was that of Marshal Ho Lung, the unlucky recipient of Russian defense minister Malinovsky’s remarks about getting rid of Mao. All Ho’s old subordinates were implicated in this case, and Ho himself died as a result.
The Central Special Case Team had the power to arrest, interrogate — and torture. They also recommended what punishments should be meted out. Chou’s signature appeared on many arrest warrants and recommendations for punishment, including death sentences.
While suspects were being interrogated under torture, and while his old power base endured unprecedented suffering, Mao cavorted. The dancing still went on at Zhongnanhai with girls called in, some to share his large bed. To the tune of “The Pleasure-Seeking Dragon Flirts with the Phoenix,” which was deemed “pornographic” by his own regime, and long banned, Mao danced on. One by one, as the days went by, his colleagues disappeared from the dance floor, either purged, or simply having lost any appetite for fun. Eventually, Mao alone of the leaders still trod the floor.
Out of his remaining top echelon, there came only one burst of defiance. In February 1967, some of the Politburo members who had not fallen spoke up, voicing rage at what was happening to their fellow Party cadres. Mao’s old follower Tan Zhen-lin, who had been in charge of agriculture during the famine (showing how far he was prepared to go along with Mao), exploded to the Small Group: “Your purpose is to get rid of all the old cadres … They made revolution for decades, and end up with their families broken and themselves dying. It is the cruellest struggle in Party history, worse than any time before.” Next day, he wrote to Lin Biao: “I have come to the absolute end of my tether … I am ready to die … to stop them.” Foreign Minister Chen Yi called the Cultural Revolution “one big torture chamber.”
But these elite survivors were either devoted veteran followers of Mao’s, or men already broken by him. Faced with his wrath, they folded. With the critical duo of Lin Biao and Chou behind him, Mao had the dissenters harassed; then, when they had been suitably cowed, he extended them an olive branch. The mini-revolt was easily quelled.
Not cowed as easily as the Politburo members was a brigadier called Cai Tie-gen, who even contemplated organizing a guerrilla force, making him the only senior cadre known to have thought of trying to “do a Mao” to Mao. He was shot, the highest-ranking officer executed in the Purge. Saying farewell to a friend who was nearly shot with him, he encouraged him to continue the fight, and then went calmly to the execution ground.
There was other truly heroic resistance from ordinary people. One was a remarkable woman of nineteen, a student of German called Wang Rong-fen, who had attended the Tiananmen rally on 18 August 1966, and whose reaction to it showed astonishing freshness and independence of spirit, as well as courage. She thought that it was “just like Hitler’s,” and wrote to Mao posing a number of sharp questions: “What are you doing? Where are you leading China?” “The Cultural Revolution,” she told Mao, “is not a mass movement. It is one man with the gun manipulating the masses. I declare I resign from the Communist Youth League …”
One letter she wrote in German, and with that in her pocket she got hold of four bottles of insecticide and drank them outside the Soviet embassy, hoping the Russians would discover her corpse and publicize her protest to the world. Instead, she woke up in a police hospital. She was sentenced to life imprisonment. For months on end, her hands were tightly handcuffed behind her back and she had to roll herself along the floor to get her mouth to the food that was just tossed onto the floor of her cell. When the handcuffs were finally removed, they had to be sawn off, as the lock was jammed with rust. This extraordinary young woman survived prison — and Mao — with her spirit undimmed.
49. UNSWEET REVENGE (1966–74 AGE 72–80)
IN AUGUST
1966, Mao toppled Liu Shao-chi. On the 5th, after Liu met a delegation from Zambia in his capacity as president, Mao had Chou En-lai telephone Liu and tell him to stop meeting foreigners, or appearing in public, unless told to do so. That day, Mao wrote a tirade against Liu which he himself read out to the Central Committee two days later, in Liu’s presence, breaking the news of Liu’s downfall (the general population was not told). Just before this, on the 6th, Mao had had Lin Biao specially fetched to Peking to lend him weight, in case there was unmanageable opposition. Lin Biao formally replaced Liu as Mao’s No. 2.
Mao’s persecution of the man he hated most could now begin. He started with Liu’s wife, Wang Guang-mei. Mao knew that the two were devoted to each other, and that making Guang-mei suffer would hurt Liu greatly.
Guang-mei came from a distinguished cosmopolitan family: her father had been a government minister and diplomat, and her mother a well-known figure in education. Guang-mei had graduated in physics from an American missionary university, and had been about to take up an offer from Michigan University to study in America in 1946 when she decided to join the Communists, under the influence of her radical mother. People remembered how at dancing parties in the Communist base in those civil war days, Liu would cross the threshing-ground that served as a dance floor with his characteristic sure steps and, bowing, ask for a dance, in a manner unusual for a Party leader. Guang-mei had elegance and style, and Liu was smitten. They were married in 1948, and the marriage was an exceptionally happy one, particularly for Liu, who had had a string of unsuccessful relationships (and one wife executed by the Nationalists).
