On the Front Lines of the Cold War

by Seymour Topping

  My office, which I shared with our resident correspondent, Ian Stewart, was just up the hill from one of our most important sources of information, the U.S. Consulate. The staff of the consulate, with its huge China-watching team, was much larger than the staffs of most American embassies. To supplement the central China press, whose articles were distributed abroad by Xinhua, the official Chinese news agency, the consulate obtained smuggled copies of provincial newspapers and magazines forbidden for export. Mainland radios were monitored. Refugees, who came by the hundreds every month, and travelers were painstakingly interviewed. American diplomatic posts around the world and the various intelligence agencies reported on the movement of Chinese officials, ships, and planes. Information also came from high-flying U-2 reconnaissance planes, financed by the CIA and piloted by Nationalist Chinese Air Force personnel based in Taiwan. Apart from official American sources, Stewart and I worked the other foreign consulates and intelligence agencies, interviewed refugees and travelers, and with the help of our Chinese staff studied the mainland press. On my travels around the China periphery I picked up tidbits of information. Nightly, from 9 P.M. to midnight, Stewart or I would check the English version of Xinhua for important Peking announcements. Thereafter, the monitor of the Reuters news agency would telephone us if an important news break developed. With a thirteen-hour lead time over New York, we were often called out of bed to write for the first edition at three or four in the morning.

  In analyzing the flow of China information, the experience I gained in my three years in Moscow was of inestimable value. China watching was not unlike Kremlin watching. The Chinese Communists patterned the makeup of their print press and radio broadcasts on the Soviets, using similar Marxist-Leninist jargon and techniques in signaling the official line to the Communist faithful abroad. Repeated omission of a name, for example, from published guest lists at Peking receptions or a change in the order of mention at other functions could be the first hint of a reshuffle in the leadership or a purge. The China watcher who could read the code would often be the first to detect seismic tremors of a political upheaval.

  In February 1966, I detected such tremors. I reported in a dispatch from Hong Kong to the Times that the Chinese Communist leadership seemed to be “laboring under a severe strain in an atmosphere of uncertainty in Peking.” The last official appearance of Mao Zedong had been on November 26, 1965. In the next few weeks, I learned that Mao had slipped out of the capital with his wife, Jiang Qing, repairing to her old haunts in Shanghai. Soon hints appeared in the press of what they were plotting. It was a power play targeted against Liu Shaoqi, the head of state, and Deng Xiaoping, the secretary general of the party. These were the two leaders of the faction that had nudged Mao out of the seat of supreme power. Liu Shaoqi, whom I had interviewed in Yenan in 1946 when he was serving as Mao’s deputy, had in April 1959 replaced his boss as head of state. Rebelling against Mao’s failed economic policies, the Central Committee had elevated the more pragmatic sixty-one-year-old Liu Shaoqi to the management of the government. Although Mao remained as Chairman of the Communist Party, he was relegated ostensibly to the work of resolving theoretical pursuits, while Deng Xiaoping, allied with Liu Shaoqi, took day-to-day control of party affairs.

  Mao had been suffering this displacement for six years, complaining that he had become a “dead ancestor,” respected but not consulted. Intent on restoring Mao to supreme power, Jiang Qing, defying the bars to her involvement in politics imposed earlier by party leaders, marshaled an aggressive radical clique in Shanghai, which would become known as the “Gang of Four,” to undermine Mao’s opponents. Only a few weeks after I reported on the strains manifest in the leadership, Jiang Qing and her young supporters launched their first attacks in the press on Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. The attacks were opening shots in what was to become known as the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.” The term “Cultural Revolution” was to become common usage in China and abroad, but in the years I covered this shattering political upheaval, I never thought of it to be either a revolution or cultural in the sense of having roots in Chinese tradition. What it constituted in reality was an internal power struggle that rent China for a decade—1966–76.

  Opposition to Mao was rooted in the national disasters stemming from his economic policies, which he put into effect during 1958–59. These policies were based on Mao’s revolutionary thesis that the masses through “socialist education” could be spurred ideologically to a “high tide” of endeavor. This “tide” would be the driving force in the Great Leap Forward, a gigantic production effort in factories and home workshops, designed to hasten the industrialization required for the realization of Communism. In tandem with this industrial surge, Mao undertook an intensive program of agricultural collectivization. In 1952, Mao had reneged on a promise given to the peasants who rallied to him during the Civil War in response to his cry “Land to the Tillers.” With collectivization, they were deprived of the distribution to them of land which had been confiscated from affluent landlords. The peasants were herded into cooperatives whose output was bought by the state at fixed prices. Then, in a further step, Mao merged those cooperatives, embracing about 99 percent of the peasantry, into 24,000 giant farm units. These so called People’s Communes pooled land, houses, agricultural implements, and farm animals. On average each comprised about 2,000 households, with laborers divided into brigades and teams. In 1958, Mao’s supporters claimed this twin mass approach had achieved fantastic increases in industrial and agricultural production. But as results were checked out more closely in 1959, disillusionment set in. As a consequence of the forced pace, severe production dislocations had developed. The population, pummeled by Maoist propaganda, was emotionally and physically spent. With agricultural and industrial production in sharp decline, the Central Committee ordered a retreat from Mao’s policies. But the change came too late. The disruptions in production, which continued into the “bitter years” of 1960–62, took the lives of millions in widespread famines. Estimates of the total number of people who died as a consequence of the Maoist policies ranged from the official Chinese toll of 14 million to projections by independent scholars of more than 30 million.

  Mao’s failed policies could in some degree be attributed to what I observed in Yenan in 1946. For the Maoist leadership, as nearly as I could detect then, total victory in the Civil War with Chiang Kai-shek seemed such a distant possibility that little, if any, attention was being given to practical planning as to how an impoverished nation of half a billion people would be governed. As late as 1947, a year in which Chinese Communist armies triumphed in a series of critical battles, the leadership was still estimating that at best it would take another four years to gain control of the mainland. When the turnabout in the war came at astonishing speed following the victories in Manchuria and Central China and his troops marched into Peking on January 31, 1949, Mao was ill prepared to cope with the basic economic and social problems confronting him. There appeared to be no prospect of obtaining American economic support or obtaining substantial aid from the Soviet Union, which was struggling itself to repair the massive destruction of World War II. Operating since the 1930s on the run in the hinterland, although quite widely read, Mao lacked experience in the administration of large urban areas, let alone a nation. As a revolutionary, he had performed a historic service for the Chinese people by breaking down the old semifeudal structure that existed under Chiang Kai-shek, so that a new modern China could eventually emerge. But as he took the seat of power in Peking, Mao was unable in thought and action to make the transition from guerrilla revolutionary to statesman. To consolidate his power and eradicate all opposition, he launched a series of monstrous purges that took the lives of millions. Confronted by enormous economic problems, Mao instituted a fumbling regime that relied on inept ideological incentives and strategies, some of them based on the guerrilla “mass line” of Yenan days.

  In May 1971, at a banquet given in the Great Hall of th
e People by Zhou Enlai for her father, Chester Ronning, Audrey asked the premier: “When you and Chairman Mao were in Yenan, did you imagine that in a few years you might be governing China?” Zhou replied: “When we were in the caves of Yenan, it all seemed simple. All we had to do was win. It was after victory that we had our big problems. We are still learning how to govern a country.” He was clearly alluding to Mao’s failed policies.

  As early as 1959, Mao was subjected to thinly veiled attacks by party critics. They suggested that he had become feeble minded and that his revolutionary romanticism was no substitute for modern statecraft. The yearning within the Communist Party for pragmatic governance rather than rule by Maoist ideological fantasy surfaced publicly on June 16, 1959. On that date, the party organ, People’s Daily, published an article entitled “Hai Rui Upbraids the Emperor,” in which a mandarin of the sixteenth-century Ming court tells Emperor Jiajing: “For a long time the nation has not been satisfied with you. All officials, in and out of the capital, know that your mind is not right, that you are too arbitrary, and that you are perverse. You think that you alone are right. You refuse to accept criticism and your mistakes are many.” The article was written under a pseudonym by Wu Han, deputy mayor of Peking, who was also a historian. It appeared to many as a bold attack on Mao.

  Two months later, a frontal assault was made on Mao at a Central Committee meeting convened on Mount Lu in Jiangxi Province by Peng Dehuai, who had risen to become Minister of Defense after leading Chinese forces in the Korean War. The general and his supporters complained that Mao had set up the agricultural communes “too soon and too fast and they had gone wrong.” The dissidence was also an expression of dissatisfaction within the military. A new professional army leadership had arisen which was impatient with Mao’s political controls. The army leaders were critical of his split with the Soviet Union, which had choked off their major source of modern weaponry and the know-how they sought for development of a nuclear-missile arsenal.

  Mao struck back at his critics by purging Peng Dehuai and his army chief of staff, Huang Yongsheng. In place of Peng, he appointed Lin Biao, the Civil War hero, who readily accepted Mao’s thesis of “man over weapons,” declaring that Mao Zedong Thought was a “spiritual atom bomb” mightier than any weaponry that might be supplied by the Soviet revisionists. At first, Liu Shaoqi did not come out openly in support of the critics led by Peng Dehuai. Mao’s critics, whom I termed the “pragmatists” for want of a more precise description, did not as yet comprise a well-organized opposition group. But as the country struggled with the after effects of the Leap, the pragmatists became progressively bolder in challenging Mao. The struggle burst into the open again in January 1961 when the Wu Han article reappeared in Peking Literature and Art in the form of a historical play, Hai Rui Dismissed from Office. The play criticized Emperor Jiajing for having dismissed Hai Rui for telling him unpleasant truths. In a country where historical allusions have been used in adversary politics for centuries, it was plain that the emperor was Mao and Hai Rui was Peng.

  On November 10, 1965, the Shanghai radicals mounted their counterattack on Mao’s detractors with the publication in the Shanghai newspaper Wenhui Bao of an article denouncing Wu Han as the author of Hai Rui Dismissed from Office. The writer was Yao Wenyuan, a young literary critic, who had been working with Jiang Qing in her campaign to bend literature and the performing arts to a more radical emphasis based on class struggle. In his article, written under Jiang Qing’s guidance, Yao accused Wu Han of being a dangerous class enemy who distorted history. Wu Han was lumped together in a “Three-Family Village Black Gang” with Deng Tuo and Liao Mosha, senior officials of the Peking Municipal Committee who had written a series of articles in the Peking press that were also considered veiled criticisms of Mao. They were accused of seeking to block Mao’s effort to heighten the class consciousness of the masses and school them in the need for pressing forward with class struggle. In the framework of this seemingly theoretical debate, the decisive power struggle was launched.

  At this juncture, Liu Shaoqi was in strong position. He controlled the party organization through Deng Xiaoping and much of the state apparatus, and his adherents were in charge of much of the media. Most of the intellectuals, including artists, literary writers, educators, and scientists, were weary of the Maoist ideological strictures. They leaned to the pragmatists, who accepted the classics and were tolerant of some deviation from the ideological strictures in contrast to Jiang Qing’s view of culture as a tool that should be devoted totally to “socialist education” of the masses. At his side in the confrontation with the pragmatists, Mao had Premier Zhou Enlai, who stood ready to pick up the reins of government from the oppositionist head of state. With his appointment of Lin Biao as defense minister, Mao could also count for support on a strong faction in the army. Grouped around him ideologically were other radicals opposed to Liu and Deng’s “right opportunist line,” which they asserted would lead to a revival of capitalism. As proof that Liu and Deng were “capitalist-roaders,” the radicals pointed to the introduction by the two leaders of material incentives for workers such as payment for overtime, piecework, and merit bonuses rather than relying on the Maoist vision of “socialist education.” Liu had fostered these incentives as part of his program to repair the damage done to production by Mao’s Great Leap. They were not much different from the reliance on incentives in the “New Democracy” policy that Liu described to me in Yenan. Liu favored the collectivization of agriculture but at a slower and more measured pace than Mao’s mass hurried approach known as “rash advance.” Rather than plunging ahead as Mao did in the Leap, Liu favored waiting upon industrialization that would produce the tools needed by the farmers for more effective production.

  Fundamentally, the confrontation between the radicals and pragmatists was a struggle about who would govern China and how, not so much about basic Communist tenets. Their common goal was the eventual transformation of China into a classless Communist society. In Yenan, I had observed the close ideological affinity of Liu and Mao and their common acceptance of the tactical need to make economic and other compromises in a period of New Democracy on the road to their Communist utopia. Both spoke of a bourgeois-type revolution to precede the socialist stage. To the extent that there was an ideological divide at the onset of the Cultural Revolution, the argument was more on transitional methodology and timing in getting to the Communist utopia than on fundamental doctrine. The Maoist accusation that the pragmatists were retreating from Communism to capitalism was little more than a sloganeering cover designed to facilitate the destruction of their opponents in their reach for ultimate power.

  As the Maoists arrayed themselves for a showdown battle, Liu Shaoqi made a fatal tactical error. On March 26, 1966, he left Peking on a scheduled state visit to Pakistan and Indonesia. On May 3, Xinhua broadcast an editorial from the army newspaper, Liberation Army Daily, calling for vigilance against “anti-Party, anti-socialist” intellectuals. The substance of the editorial and its terminology convinced me that a major purge was under way, and I cabled a dispatch to the Times saying: “A widespread cultural purge with clearly stated political overtones is underway within the Chinese Communist Party.” I also reported that Zhou Enlai had made a speech on April 30 in which he stated: “A socialist cultural revolution of great historic significance is being launched in our country. This is a fierce and protracted struggle as to who will win, the proletariat or bourgeoisie, in the ideological field.” Calling for the eradication of “bourgeois ideology” from all fields, the premier said: “This is a key question in the development in depth of our socialist revolution at the present stage, a question concerning the situation as a whole and a matter of the first magnitude affecting the destiny and future of our party and country.”

  The morning after I filed my dispatch, May 4, signaling the eruption of the Cultural Revolution, I was stunned to receive a casual message from the Foreign Desk of the Times saying that my story had been held
over for lack of space. In great agitation, I telephoned the editor on duty and told him that my dispatch signaled the onset of momentous events on the China mainland. He consulted with Harrison Salisbury, then an assistant managing editor, who immediately saw the significance of the dispatch. It was on the front page the next day. Zhou Enlai later recalled that the Cultural Revolution was launched definitively on May 16.

  In Liu’s absence while in Pakistan, the Maoists struck effectively at his supporters. The “Black Gang” trio of the Peking Municipal Party Committee, which had parodied Mao, was ousted. The purge was then extended to Peng Zhen, the mayor of Peking, a close ally of Liu; Lu Ping, the president of Peking University; and the staff of the central and municipal media. The Maoists then turned their attention to the provinces where Liu’s people exercised firm control.

  In early June, I experienced the frustration of an American Hong Kong China watcher. I took my wife to the Kowloon railway station and put her on the train to Guangzhou while I stayed behind to report from a distance the erupting power struggle on the mainland. American correspondents were still barred from China, but Audrey, a Canadian citizen, identifying herself as a housewife, had obtained a three-week tourist visa for a tour of seven cities. There were no objections forthcoming from the Chinese when it became evident to them that she was working as writer and photographer for the New York Times Magazine. Draped in cameras, she bade me farewell with a pixie grin and boarded the train for Guangzhou. On her travels, she encountered the first evidence of the Cultural Revolution in Nanjing when her visit to the university there that she had once attended was canceled. The Nanjing radio announced that Guang Yaming, the rector, had been purged because of his “ignoble and villainous conspiracy to suppress the revolutionary movement in the university.” She came upon the onset of the violent stage of the Cultural Revolution upon arrival in Peking on June 16. The Cultural Revolution was unfolding, and violent Maoist demonstrations were erupting on the streets of the old capital. When she checked into the Peking Hotel, she asked for a front room overlooking Chang’an Boulevard, the city’s major thoroughfare, but despite her protests was given a back room without a view of the action in the streets. Never shy when on the job, Audrey decided to telephone her father in Hanoi, who had told her in Hong Kong that he would be staying at the Metropole Hotel. When the Metropole telephone operator responded by telling her that she did not know the ambassador’s whereabouts, Audrey said firmly: “This is his daughter. I am calling from Peking. Ambassador Ronning is there on a special mission, so please call your leader Ho Chi Minh and ask him where Chester Ronning is.” The operator, who spoke English, said: “I will call you back in fifteen minutes.” On the dot, a Peking Hotel clerk banged on the door to announce that Ronning was on the phone. Audrey chatted with her father about doings in Peking and Hanoi, and the ambassador, who was on his “Smallbridge” mediation mission, also inquired about the well-being of our two older daughters, who were attending a missionary school on Taiwan, and about Charlie, our pet cockatoo. After the ambassador hung up, the Peking Hotel clerk returned bowing—obviously the telephone call had been monitored—to escort Audrey to a far more luxurious front room with a balcony view that enabled her to photograph the chaos in the streets below. Giant processions of young demonstrators with cymbals and gongs sounding and fireworks exploding were parading before the Central Committee Building, shouting “Long Live Chairman Mao.”