Anthony Grey

by Peking- A Novel of China's Revolution- 1921-1978 (epub)

  Upon arrival in the capital they had been met by Peking Red Guard groups led by teachers and stern, tough-looking students. Loaded into open trucks, they had been taken directly to already jam-packed dormitories attached to a middle school in the suburbs. There they were supposed to sleep on straw-covered desks or on bamboo mats spread over mounds of straw on the floor, but excited discussions on how the Four Olds campaign was being conducted in different cities and provinces had gone on all night long with the other Red Guard groups billeted there. The bartering of Mao Tse-tung lapel badges and arm bands identifying Red Guard groups from different regions had quickly become an obsessive pastime, taking up many waking hours; there was also a bewildering array of big- character wall posters to be read all over the city. Overnight the Cultural Revolution seemed to have turned austere, well-ordered China into a gaudy political carnival ground and Kung and Ai-lien, like all the other Red Guards they met, had surrendered themselves wholeheartedly to the intoxicating atmosphere which held out the promise of future glory in the service of Chairman Mao. The journey to the area adjoining the Square of Heavenly Peace and their dramatic dawn awakening among a vast crowd of one million kindred souls seemed to Kung and Ai-lien to be bringing the heady carnival to a great climax and as the hour for the rally to begin drew near, they became almost breathless with impatience and excitement.

  “Eat your provisions now!” shouted the soldiers at eight-thirty, and Kung and Ai-lien opened the little reticular bags which they had been given, containing eggs, fruit, and man t’ou, a steamed bread. Before they had eaten them, trucks arrived and began to off-load big white character signboards and the thousands of tall red standards that looked so dramatic when moving in a forest above a marching multitude. With these distributed, the vast throng of Red Guards that stretched for several miles along the western arm of Chang An began to resemble a disciplined political rally, and the suspense of waiting became almost unbearable.

  Enough Red Guard formations to fill the hundred-acre square had already been moved into position in front of the Gate of Heavenly Peace and great scarlet balloons trailing red and white streamers were drifting lazily at their anchorages in the sky above. Giant colored portraits of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Sun Yat-sen flanked the square but the biggest human image of all adorned the front of the Gate of Heavenly Peace itself. Set in a vast gold-painted frame, the unsmiling amber face of Mao stared out across the great mass of humanity, suggesting that the omnipresent Party chairman was presiding invisibly over the gathering even before his physical arrival. Helicopters had begun to sweep the sky overhead and long queues of Red Guards formed suddenly to pay last-minute visits to makeshift lavatories that lined every street in central Peking. No more than pits dug in the roadside verges and surrounded by bamboo mats, each had its own pile of earth heaped beside it. All the Red Guards scattered a handful or two of earth into the pits after using them and the reek from these rudimentary closets added a pungent odor to the morning breeze that imprinted itself on Kung’s memory, along with every other detail.

  A little before ten o’clock, one of the stern Peking Red Guard leaders who had supervised the Changsha group since its arrival in the capital picked his way through the squatting crowd to the area where Kung and Ai-lien were sitting on the ground. Looking about him, he held up his hand to attract attention.

  “Today, comrades from Changsha,” he yelled, “an important announcement will be made from the Gate of Heavenly Peace, giving a historic new direction to the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. A new stage in the struggle has been reached. And tonight you will join with a group of Red Guards from the capital to carry out an important mission.” He paused, looking about, searching faces. “Are Liang Kung and Liang Ai-lien present?” he demanded.

  “Here, comrade!” Kung leapt to his feet with a raised hand. His heart was thudding loudly with a mixture of pride and apprehension at being singled out by name, but he fixed a calm, responsible expression on his face.

  “Good!” The young Peking leader motioned Kung to sit down again. “Make sure you and your sister are both at the assembly point at the school with all the other Changsha Red Guards at nine o’clock tonight.”

  “Certainly, comrade!”

  Kung and Ai-lien gazed at one another in mystification — but before they could start speculating on the nature of the new mission, the stirring strains of “The East Is Red” blasted suddenly from loudspeakers ranged along both sides of the street and a thunderous storm of cheering rolled slowly down the Boulevard of Eternal Peace from the direction of the square. Gradually the cheering settled into regular chants of

  “Mao chu hsi wan sai! Mao chu hsi wan sui! Mao chu hsi wan sui!” — “Long live Chairman Mao! Long live Chairman Mao! Long live Chairman Mao!” — and Kung and Ai-lien held their breath. The chanting grew louder and more frantic; then, over the loudspeakers, rising high above the slow cadences of “The East Is Red,” they heard a solitary female voice intervene.

  “Chairman Mao has come among us!” shrilled the voice frantically, repeating the phrase over and over again. “Chairman Mao has come among us!”

  Kung and Al-lien sprang involuntarily to their feet along with all the Red Guards around them. A tidal wave of excitement swept Chang An, catching them up in its surge, and they stumbled frantically against one another as they rushed to their marching positions.

  3

  Standing beneath one of the giant crimson ceremonial lanterns that decorated the gallery of the Gate of Heavenly Peace, Marshal Lu Chiao looked numbly down at the multitude of Red Guards flowing endlessly across the square below. The forests of tall flags, the huge, moving character boards, the Hung Wei Ping arm bands, and the countless booklets of Mao’s quotations borne proudly like weapons colored the great mass of humanity predominantly red as they surged excitedly through the heart of the ancient capital. The sinister implications of the rally and all the others that had been held in the past month were sufficient to churn Chiao’s stomach, but despite his rising sense of anxiety, he felt himself deeply moved by the sight of China’s youth so spectacularly on parade.

  At the age of sixty-three Chiao had become gray-haired, but he still looked lean and strong, and something of the vigorous physical self-confidence which had led him into acts of heroism during the Long March was still recognizable in his calm demeanor. While appearing to gaze down admiringly at the passing parade, out of the corner of his eye Chiao was in fact watching the bulky, imposing figure of Mao Tse-tung. Only a few yards away from him, Mao was moving back and forth along the ornate balustrade, jerkily lifting an arm every so often to wave in the direction of the deliriously chanting throng. Despite the riot of noise washing up from the square, Mao’s big, moonlike face remained expressionless but Chiao could see that the Party chairman was behaving more animatedly than he had at any of the previous rallies. His female nurse, who had always been discreetly in attendance during his public appearances in recent years, was no longer shadowing him so closely; instead she remained inside the red-pillared pavilion, standing quietly among a group of uneasy looking Party leaders who were following Mao’s movements almost as obsessively as she was.

  Like everybody else on the gate, Chiao could not fail to notice that Mao was somehow drawing new physical and mental energy from the massive rallies: minute by minute he seemed to be absorbing something tangible from the waves of adoration rising up from the vast square. For a year or two it had been rumored among the leadership that he was secretly suffering from Parkinson’s disease and his slow, labored movements in public had previously supported the conjecture. But each successive rally had seemed to have a cumulative, reinvigorating effect on him and Chiao noticed that he was now moving with an unexpected sprightliness, almost darting along the gallery, followed dutifully by his chief ally, the deceptively frail- looking defense minister, Lin Piao, and Premier Chou En-lai.

  One of ten People’s Liberation Army leaders honored with the exalted rank of marshal in 1954, Chiao himself had fo
r the past five years served as a vice chairman of the Military Affairs Commission, taking responsibility for supervising the Operations Directorate of the PLA General Staff. He had attended all four of the Red Guard rallies held since the middle of August — but far from becoming accustomed to the emotional intensity and the near-hysteria which the occasions generated, his sense of dismay had grown with each parade. Although Chiao knew that the gallery of the Gate of Heavenly Peace was high enough above the square to reduce Mao Tse-tung and other leaders, including himself, to little more than matchstick sized figures, he could see that female and male Red Guards alike were again in the grip of a tearful hysteria as they stumbled past the old imperial reviewing platform. Despite the constant drilling they had received, discipline was breaking down as soon as the young marchers came in sight of the gate. After advancing in good order along the Boulevard of Eternal Peace, the dense green and khaki throngs invariably disintegrated into a scramble as they approached the western borders of the square. Clearly overcome by the occasion, all the participating Red Guards were instinctively slowing their pace, ignoring the fast-tempo marching beat of “Sailing the Seas Depends on the Helmsman, Making Revolution Depends on Mao Tse-tung’s Thought” that boomed from loudspeakers all over the center of the capital. In an attempt to prolong the long-awaited moment when they at last caught sight of the living legend who was reviewing them, the wavering ranks stumbled helplessly into one another, stepping on each other’s heels, sometimes falling, sometimes losing their shoes. Some were trampled and hurt but somehow the seething mass of marchers continued to flow eastward, each youth gazing fixedly up toward the high balcony for as long as it was in sight.

  At the first rally, on August 18, the scene below the gate had possessed an unreal, dreamlike quality. But today, Chiao realized, the occasion had taken on the overtones of a nightmare and although nobody on the gallery was voicing such thoughts, Chiao knew instinctively that he was not the only one to feel it. A few yards away along the balcony in the other direction, Liu Shao-chi, the already white-haired head of state, stood rooted to the spot. Ascetic and dour by nature, he rarely spoke unnecessarily but now he had become an ashen-faced robot whose narrowed eyes looked out over the square without seeing. At his side, the diminutive Szechuanese general secretary of the Party, Teng Hsiao-ping, was equally pale and tense, and nobody approached to speak with either of them. The two men controlled the vast nationwide network of Party cadres who had pulled the country together after the destructive excesses of the Great Leap Forward and Chiao knew that the ears of the president and the general secretary must still be ringing with the violent words of Lin Piao’s speech, delivered to the rally shortly after Mao made his dramatic entrance.

  “Bombard the headquarters!” the defense minister had shrieked in his curiously nasal, high-pitched voice. “That must be the new war cry of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. You have done well so far in washing away all the sludge and filth left over from the Four Olds society. But now you must concentrate your fire on the principal target in the capital and at all local levels throughout the country! Bombard the bourgeois revisionists, bombard the handful of persons in power inside the Party who are taking the capitalist road!”

  The square had erupted with great orchestrated roars of “Bombard the headquarters! Bombard the headquarters!” and Lin Piao had waved his “Little Red Book” of Mao’s quotations wildly above his head in response. The emotive phrase had been coined by Mao himself several weeks earlier when he wrote his first and only big character wall poster in praise of rebellious Peking students who had begun attacking “bourgeois” academic figures at their university — but now Lin Piao had reemployed the slogan artfully to give a chilling new direction to the whole Cultural Revolution. Chou En-lai had also spoken briefly, lending his own authority to the directive to attack “only designated individuals in the Party,” and new roars of “Long live Chairman Mao! Long live Chairman Mao!” had welled up from the square after both speeches.

  Chiao had seen President Liu Shao-chi and the Party general secretary exchange baffled, uneasy glances arid he noticed that the only people smiling on the upper gallery were Lin Piao and members of the Cultural Revolution Group appointed by Mao to supervise the movement. Mao himself stood to one side, remote and silent, in communion with only the crowd. He was as impassive as a Buddha in his military uniform and round PLA cap and neither he nor Lin nor any member of the Cultural Revolution Group had spoken to President Liu or the general secretary or even once looked in their direction since their arrival. Every Party and army leader present knew that the two men had already been singled out as prime targets of the Cultural Revolution; although neither so far had been mentioned directly by name, ferocious Red Guard attacks in wall posters and unofficial newspapers had recently begun to condemn “China’s Khrushchev” and “another top Party leader in authority taking the capitalist road.” The consistency of the attacks had made it obvious that such references, though irrational, were officially inspired and could apply only to the Party’s two top bureaucrats. But as he stood above the caldron of noise which the Square of Heavenly Peace had become on that September morning, Chiao realized that in the growing atmosphere of hysteria, few of the other men on the balcony around him could be certain that they themselves would not sometime come under attack.

  He noticed that even Marshal Chu Teh, the old Red Army commander of the Long March, now eighty, was watching the proceedings uneasily through half-closed eyes, occasionally reaching out with an unsteady hand to support himself on one of the stout wooden pillars. A legendary military figure in his own right, Marshal Chu looked bemused and uncomprehending. His green uniform sagged now on a wasting body that had once possessed the physical strength and stamina of a horse, and the dull resignation visible in Chu’s posture increased Chiao’s own sense of unease.

  Chiao had for some time been aware that he might himself attract the unwelcome attentions of the Red Guards. Like most of the Party leadership, he had wholeheartedly supported the logical policies of President Liu and Teng Hsiao-ping in the difficult years following the Great Leap Forward, and the irrationality of the new speeches made him aware that no member of the Politburo was safe from attack under the irresponsibly vague directive “Bombard the headquarters!” The rally was clearly designed to open the way for arbitrary Red Guard attacks on any Party leader or cadre who had incurred Mao’s displeasure, and Chiao felt a dull ache intensify in his right shoulder as this realization grew in his mind. The discomfort, he knew at once, was a sure sign that tension was growing in him; the old Hsiang River wound, inflicted by Kuomintang machine gunners as he clung to his precious pontoon bridge of makeshift bamboo rafts, had troubled him off and on over the years, and intense anxiety of any kind invariably triggered pain. To take his mind off it he closed his eyes briefly, making a conscious effort to blot out the hubbub of noise around him. For half a minute he focused his mind inward in accordance with the Taoist-inspired techniques of self-cultivation which he had practiced assiduously all his life, centering and concentrating his physical and spiritual energies deep within himself. Slowly the ache in his shoulder faded and when he opened his eyes again and glanced about, he sensed from the faces around him that many of the aging men who had strode twenty thousand li across China together on the Long March were wrestling silently with similar fears.

  All were now fully aware that their cunning guerrilla leader had outmaneuvered them all as skillfully as he had outmaneuvered the Kuomintang divisions during the Long March. The scale and logistics of the rallies themselves were an impressive display of power, and the same agonizing questions were obviously exercising the minds of all those gathered on the gallery: would formal recantations and public self-criticism by those he termed his enemies assuage the desire for vengeance that had clearly smoldered in Mao’s breast since i 959? Or were the stark slogans of the rally to be taken literally? It seemed inconceivable that the ailing figure stumping awkwardly back and forth before them s
hould want to smash the entire Party apparatus just to satisfy a personal ambition to seize back undisputed control of China for a year or two — but nobody present could deny the evidence of his eyes and ears, which unmistakably argued the reverse.

  President Liu, Teng Hsiao-ping, and the tireless premier Chou had always worked assiduously in the past to restrain the extravagance of Mao’s impatience; whenever they failed they had set out as quickly as possible to counteract the damage. The sheer force of personality which Mao brought to bear in the Party’s inner counsels had always made it impossible to confront him head on. More than once in the fifties he had angrily threatened to take to the mountains and raise another peasant Red Army to fight the Party if they refused to go his way, and the memory of this threat had lingered in the subconscious minds of all those around him. These memories had often induced a fainthearted resistance to Mao’s proposals and Chiao realized a little shamefacedly that in recent months he had been just as guilty in this respect as any other member of the leadership circle. Their efforts to stifle the Cultural Revolution during the months when it still centered on newspaper attacks on writers had not been sufficiently courageous; he and others had stood by as the mayor of Peking, the army chief of staff, and the Party’s orthodox propaganda chief had been purged, hoping that the sacrifice of such prominent victims might placate Mao and bring the campaign to an early end. But now, as a result of their lack of courage, they were virtually trapped in a capital city that was garrisoned by forces personally loyal to Mao, watching an effective Red Army of China’s youth screaming slogans that could presage the downfall of each and every one of them.