On the Front Lines of the Cold War

by Seymour Topping

  Despite our qualms, Rosenthal and I agreed that I should leave for China immediately, to be followed in July by Reston, and that I would return on June 10, four days before we intended to publish the Papers. We planned to communicate by cable or telephone if Rosenthal had urgent need of my presence at his side using as a confirming code the designation “Lloyd,” the middle name of our foreign editor, James L. Greenfield. We locked hands and embraced in farewell, knowing that there would be trying days ahead. As I was going out the door, Rosenthal shouted: “Have fun! I’ll cable you when we’re ready to go to press.”

  34

  MAOIST PURGE OF THE PARTY AND GOVERNMENT

  I landed in Hong Kong on May 18, 1971, preoccupied with a spate of concerns: worry about leaving Abe Rosenthal to cope with the burdens of publishing the Pentagon Papers; how to cover the tumultuous events in Peking coming in cold on the story after an absence of two decades from the mainland; and my longing to be with Audrey. Early the next day, an official of the China Travel Service telephoned me at the Mandarin Hotel, to say that I was awaited across the border in Guangzhou. After two days in Guangzhou reporting on the devastation the city had suffered at the hands of the rampaging Red Guards, I was put smartly on a plane for Hangzhou unaware of what was a Communist plot to put me, as ordered by Premier Zhou Enlai, into the arms of my wife on her May 21 birthday. The plane wheeled over the East China Sea and then skimmed over Hangzhou Bay to the garden city on the shore of the ethereal West Lake. Audrey was waiting beside the airport runway, told only an hour or so earlier that I would be arriving. Dressed in a red gingham shirt and blue jeans, draped in cameras, she was vivacious and beautiful as ever. We drove from the airport along the shore of West Lake, on whose waters were gliding gondola-like pleasure boats, to the elegant Hangzhou Hotel. Rising beyond the hotel were the green terraced hills of the tea-raising communes. In secluded sections of the lake’s nine-mile-long wooded shore there were nestled walled vacation retreats of Mao and other Chinese leaders.

  Audrey had come to Hangzhou from Wuhan in Central China, where she and her father witnessed the use of acupuncture anesthesia in major surgery. Through an observation dome in the Wuhan hospital they watched a surgeon remove a tumor from the throat of a fully conscious fifty-four-year-old woman. Twenty minutes before, an acupuncturist had inserted two flexible needles into each wrist and whirled them until the patient reported numbness in the throat. Seconds after the last suture was tied, the patient sat up, ate some orange slices, put on her robe, thanked the operating team, and walked out waving her “Little Red Book” of Mao’s sayings, no doubt as suggested by party officials. After testing the technique of acupuncture anesthesia in thousands of operations, mainly in remote areas where the usual apparatus and drugs were not available, Chinese doctors decided to demonstrate it to Westerners. Audrey, who had observed the technique in Wuhan and later saw it performed in Shanghai in open-heart surgery, was the first Western journalist to witness the procedures. Her reports stirred debate in the United States about the efficacy of acupuncture. Acupuncture came into wide usage later in many countries outside of China for a variety of treatments including use as a pain killer, but not for anesthesia in surgery. Chinese doctors did continue to employ it in surgery in later years when they felt it was preferable to the use of drugs or where operations had to be conducted at localities lacking modern anesthesia apparatus, Dr. Elizabeth A. Frost, an international expert on anesthesiology, told me.

  In Hangzhou Audrey and I visited the West Lake People’s Commune. In June 1966, when the Cultural Revolution was just beginning to spill into the provincial cities, Audrey recalled seeing portraits of Liu Shaoqi hung beside those of Mao. Now, the portraits of Liu were gone. Outside a nursery where rosy-cheeked tots of three and four sang songs in praise of Chairman Mao, there were wall posters denouncing the “traitor Liu Shaoqi.”

  Ronning was returning to Canada, and we said good-bye before going on to Shanghai en route to Peking. We flew to the capital on a day when the “yellow wind” had brought the dust, as it does each spring, from the Great North China Plain. The city was enfolded in a haze that lent a mystic quality to the imperial palaces and temples. But I soon found, alas, that beyond those monuments little remained of the imperial capital I had known. In 1947, I left a gem of a walled city in which camel caravans and donkey carts plodded along narrow cobbled alleyways lined with garden villas. Now, there was an endless stream of cars, buses, and army trucks flanked by countless bicyclists on the boulevards. The walls were almost entirely gone, and the city radiated out from Tiananmen, the Gate of Heavenly Peace, onto a paved square of ninety-eight acres. The expanse was marked with tiny squares each numbered so that the people summoned to demonstrate fealty to the Communist leaders standing on the rostrum of the vermillion gate would know their assigned places. Preserved on the west was Xinhuamen Gate, flanked by stone lions, the entrance to Zhongnanhai, the secluded Central South Lake Park. There, in a wood of cedars and pines where once the Ming emperors dwelt, stood the pavilions now occupied by Mao, Lin Biao, Zhou Enlai, and other leaders. No mention was made in the Chinese press of where the new emperors resided, nor were photographs published revealing their living styles.

  On the west side of Tiananmen Square stood the modern Great Hall of the People, where Zhou Enlai was presiding over what seemed to be a thaw in the Cultural Revolution. In the Great Banquet Hall he was receiving a steady influx of foreign delegations. Among the first to be invited had been an American ping-pong team for what was less of a sporting event and more of a subtly contrived political gesture serving as a stage setting for the forthcoming visit by President Nixon. People encountered on the bustling streets and shops appeared to be enjoying their most relaxed spring since 1966, when the capital was first swept by the tumult of the Cultural Revolution. But this surface calm was deceptive. The raw wounds inflicted during the Cultural Revolution were not yet healed. Zhou Enlai was having difficulty managing the affairs of the country in the aftermath of the massive purge of government and party officials which had disrupted normal life. Mao was in failing health, possibly the early symptoms of Parkinson’s disease, and maneuvering had already begun within the party as to who might succeed him in the seat of power.

  Audrey and her father had been in Peking on May Day when Mao made his first public appearance of the year. Hundreds of thousands massed in Tiananmen Square for the festivities, but Mao, accompanied by Lin Biao, spent only a few minutes on the rostrum greeting the crowds. Ronning was seated on the balcony beside Zhou Enlai, who introduced him to Mao. Ronning said afterward that Mao offered him a very limp handshake and he appeared in his manner to be somewhat confused. He was accompanied by two attendants who apparently were nurses. After leaving the rostrum, Mao sat at a table with Prince Sihanouk, chatted for a few minutes, glanced up at the evening fireworks, and left. Lin Biao, also on the rostrum, seemed frail as well. We heard rumors that Lin Biao, known to be tubercular, had undergone an operation to have a lung removed.

  The capital was bedecked with Maoist portraits and emblems, but less so than in the previous year. The cult adulation had been a useful means of rousing the masses, especially the youth in the early days of the Cultural Revolution. But now the extremist cult worship had been reined in by Mao as he sought to bring the riotous Red Guards under control. There were warnings in the press about those who bowed before Mao but in reality “waved the red flag to oppose the red flag.”

  Audrey and I camped at the Xin Jiao, a plain six-story hotel near the old foreign Legation Quarter. Built in the Soviet style, it had a Western restaurant on the top floor and a Chinese restaurant in the lobby. There was a large sign at the entrance to the Chinese restaurant, which, in the Chair-man’s words, said: “The east wind is prevailing over the west wind.” This seemed a fair commentary on the hotel food. On the street opposite to the hotel, mounds of earth were being removed, remains of the last section of the great south wall of the imperial capital that was being torn down to make way
for the subway which doubled as an air raid shelter against the possibility of a Soviet missile strike. In the countryside we were shown huge storage bins filled with grain for emergency distribution in the aftermath of a possible Soviet attack. Our days were filled with calls on government and party officials, some of them old acquaintances, and visits to nearby communes, factories, and universities. Our notebooks became filled with the shocking details of what the city had endured during the Cultural Revolution and accounts of those leaders who had fallen in the massive purges.

  As we made the rounds, I asked to see Foreign Minister Chen Yi. At his dinner during the Laos Conference in 1961, he had invited me to call upon him. I was told by ministry officials that the foreign minister was no longer active. From others, I learned that in May 1967 when ultra-leftist Red Guards were storming out of control through the streets of Peking, they had attacked the Foreign Ministry, stripped its files, and seized Chen Yi, condemning him as a “rightist.” Zhou Enlai rushed to the Foreign Ministry and rescued him from Red Guards who were questioning and beating him. The seventy-three-year-old warrior who had led his armies across the Yangtze to occupy Nanking and Shanghai and later readied his Third Field Army for an invasion of Taiwan before Truman interposed the Seventh Fleet, never recovered from his ordeal. Upon his death from cancer on January 6, 1972, Zhou Enlai delivered the funeral eulogy before an urn containing his ashes at the Babaoshan (“Eight Treasure”) cemetery for revolutionary martyrs. Mao rose from a sickbed to attend the funeral shod in slippers and wearing a silk robe over pajamas under a coat. The exposure to the brutal cold worsened his already poor health. It was Mao’s last public appearance before his death in September 1976. Mao’s appearance at Chen’s bier was a gesture that symbolically gave Zhou Enlai license to rehabilitate other comrades purged as insufficiently loyal to Maoist dogma. “Old Cadres,” Zhou declared, “are the property of the party. We cannot treat them like enemies and we can’t struggle endlessly against them.”

  Chen Yi was not the only hero of the Long March and the Civil War to become a victim of the Cultural Revolution. In 1966, General Peng Dehuai paid the price of his expressed opposition to Mao’s policies—the Great Leap Forward and formation of the agricultural communes—at the Central Committee meeting at Mount Lu in 1959. Peng was replaced by Lin Biao as defense minister and put under house arrest. In December 1966, Red Guards broke into Peng’s house in Chengdu, capital of Sichuan Province, at 4 A.M. Accused of opposing Mao and advocating a “bourgeois line,” Peng was repeatedly beaten by the Red Guards, severely injured, and later paraded bound before mass demonstrations. No quarter was given, although Peng had served as deputy commander in chief of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in the war against Japan, defeated Chiang Kai-shek’s forces in western China during the Civil War, and commanded Chinese troops in the Korean War. In 1978, four years after his death, Peng Dehuai was politically rehabilitated by Deng Xiaoping and honored for his battlefield achievements. Marshal He Long, who fought beside Peng during the Civil War in the northwest in command of the Second Front Army, was also purged in 1966 by Mao, who charged him with attempting to usurp military power. He died in disgrace in 1969. Liu Bocheng, the famed “One-Eyed Dragon” of the Civil War, was blind by 1966 and spared in the purges. In 1971, Zhou Enlai restored Zhu De, whom I had met in Yenan when he was commander in chief of the Red Army, to his position as chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, the rubberstamp parliament. He had been purged from that post in 1966.

  Mao’s nationwide purge beginning in 1966 of officials in government and the party who were seen as linked to Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping spilled over in a second stage into the leftist camp itself in a savage internecine struggle over policy and power. The line of the Cultural Revolution had oscillated left and right as Mao pursued a zigzag course. Those oscillations inspired at times armed struggle among the rival coalitions of Red Guards and revolutionary workers and cadres. At the onset of the Cultural Revolution, Mao had leaned hard to the side of the leftists or radicals. He told the Red Guards: “It is right to rebel against reactionaries” and not be afraid of disorder, encouraging them to paralyze the entrenched bureaucracy. He also instructed the army to support the “broad masses of the left.” The army, obeying Mao’s injunction, had stood aside as the Red Guards took over municipalities and assaulted opposition groups. However, in early 1967, the army grew uneasy about the excesses and moved in to protect vital installations. Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, intervened on behalf of the Red Guards. She persuaded Mao to issue a directive ordering the army to refrain from interfering with Red Guard activities. But the next month, Mao and Zhou Enlai saw a serious threat to their power developing. Thousands of ultra-leftist Red Guards took to the streets in Peking and attacked the Foreign Ministry. Only the intervention of more moderate Red Guards averted destruction of the Foreign Ministry. Placards appeared on the streets denouncing Zhou as a “rightist.” Over the next few months the ultra-leftists ruled the streets as the army looked on, growingly restive. Under pressure of the Peking radicals, intimidated army commanders allowed Red Guards to break into depots to seize guns and trucks, which they used in their factional strife. In August, hundreds of thousands of ultra-leftist Red Guards again surged through Peking. They burned down the British Embassy and attacked the Indonesian and Burmese embassies. An attempt was made to seize the files of the Central Committee. For two days Zhou Enlai was isolated by Red Guard mobs in the Great Hall of the People, subjected to questioning by radicals who accused him of being a “right-wing deviationist.”

  Alarmed, Mao made his tour of the provinces, seeking to rein in the disorder, and then yielded to the army’s demands for restoration of order. Lin Biao’s troops moved into the capital and after severe fighting managed to disarm and disperse the Red Guards. A purge began then of radicals who dominated the Central Cultural Revolution Group on the charge that they and others who were said to be members of an ultra-leftist “May 16 Faction” had tried to seize power, leaving Mao as only a figurehead. When I arrived in Peking, only four of the original eighteen members of the Central Cultural Revolution Group, the body that Mao had empowered to lead the Cultural Revolution, had not been purged. Jiang Qing’s Gang of Four had survived the purge. But with the decline of the radicals, Mao’s wife had slipped from fourth to fifth in her standing in the party’s Politburo. She now was ranked behind Mao, Lin Biao, Zhou Enlai, and Huang Yongsheng, a protégé of Lin Biao, chief of the army’s General Staff. Army officers were given the key posts in new Revolutionary Committees which took administrative control of the provinces. The army, under the leadership of Lin Biao, was in the ascendancy. But Jiang Qing had not given up her bid for power, and unexpected events later in 1971 gave her the opportunity.

  From Peking I reported one of the more dramatic episodes in the decline of the radicals. I learned that Yao Dengshan, a high-ranking ultra-leftist who headed the revolutionary group which had seized control of the Foreign Ministry in the summer of 1967, had been condemned to death. He had been taken before four thousand people in an indoor stadium where he was denounced and confessed to plotting to do injury to Zhou Enlai and holding Chen Yi prisoner. He was also charged with responsibility for burning down the British Embassy. As a gesture of revenge, Zhou Enlai arranged for Chen Yi, who was still suffering the disabilities of his manhandling by the Red Guards, to attend the mass trial. Zhou personally apologized to John Denson, the British chargé d’affaires, and offered to pay the costs of replacing his burned-down embassy.

  At midnight I filed a story to the Times about the Yao trial. At 3 A.M., my hotel phone rang. It was Ji Mingzhong of the Information Department of the Foreign Ministry, asking if he could drop by to see me. Ji was responsible for dealing with foreign correspondents; there were three permanently stationed in the country representing the Toronto Globe and Mail, Agence France-Presse, and DPA, the West German news agency. I waited at the hotel entrance for Ji. He soon arrived in a chauffeured Mercedes and us
hered me back into the hotel lobby, where he ordered tea. He was a fine-featured man who had served as a diplomat in London and spoke flawless Oxford-accented English. Ji began: “Mr. Topping, just by chance, the clerk at the telegraph office who took your dispatch about Yao also attended the meeting you described. He noticed several errors”—Ji cleared his throat apologetically— “and he telephoned me.” It seemed that Yao had been sentenced to a long prison term, not to death, as I had written. When I suggested that we go to the telegraph office to correct the dispatch, Ji welcomed my proposal as a fine idea, his manner suggesting that it had not occurred to him. We proceeded to the telegraph office, where I corrected my dispatch. Then back to the hotel, chatting about the weather, and with another graceful wave of his hand Ji was gone. We never discussed the matter again in our subsequent contacts. Correspondents were not always treated so gently. On August 18, 1967, Anthony Grey of Reuters was seized by ultra-leftist Red Guards and kept in a small room in his house in solitary confinement for twenty-six months in retaliation for the arrests of leftist Chinese by British authorities during their rioting in Hong Kong.

  The Cultural Revolution was not yet over in 1971 as far as internal party struggle was concerned, but the enormous human cost up to that year was already very evident. There had been hundreds of thousands of casualties in the factional battles among Red Guards and other revolutionary groups. Other hundreds of thousands died or were maimed as consequence of persecution, torture, and other physical maltreatment. Millions of young Red Guards, once shock troops of the Cultural Revolution, were uprooted from their homes, lost their educational opportunities, and became the lasting debris of the Cultural Revolution. The Red Guards—the “revolutionary successors” ranging in ages from twelve to the early twenties, mostly middle-school and college students—had joined with a spirit blended of revolutionary dedication, romanticism, and adulation of Mao. Millions abandoned their classrooms. When the schools began to reopen in 1968, there were not enough places for them. Confronted by millions of idle youths, rambunctious and demonstrating for jobs or return to school, the Revolutionary Committees began shipping hundreds of thousands of unhappy youths to the rural areas. Some returned to schools, factories, and government jobs, but most were compelled to remain in the rural areas and integrate with the peasantry in the communes. They became a lost generation.