On the Front Lines of the Cold War

by Seymour Topping

  Chinese scholars are still documenting the full cost in terms of human suffering of the Cultural Revolution. Extrapolating from Chinese archives, the scholars Yang Su and Andrew G. Walter, in their March 2003 article published in the China Quarterly, “The Cultural Revolution in the Countryside: Scope, Timing and Human Impact,” estimated that in rural areas alone 36 million people experienced some form of persecution between 1966 and 1971. Of that total, between 750,000 and 1.5 million were killed and about the same number injured. The persecutions were perpetrated by a variety of political and military groups and organizations in the name of purging those said to be opponents of Mao Zedong Thought, counterrevolutionaries, class enemies such as “capitalist-roaders,” or those accused of some relationship with Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang. The study’s figures do not include the hundreds of thousands of dead and maimed in urban areas where, in addition to those swept up in the purges, factional struggles among the Red Guards and worker organizations took a deadly toll.

  The horror also extended to Tibet. On a visit there in 1979, Audrey and I found the Chinese assisting the Tibetans in repairing the destruction wreaked during the Cultural Revolution on the Jokhang Temple, the Potala Palace, and the Drepung Monastery. In 1966, as in the rest of China, Tibet had been engulfed suddenly by the ideological frenzy of the Cultural Revolution. Hundreds, perhaps thousands were killed or wounded in the fighting in Lhasa and other towns among rival Red Guards made up largely of young Chinese sent down to Tibet. The Red Guards sacked the monasteries and also vandalized and closed the Buddhist temples. When we arrived in Lhasa, we learned that only 10 of the 2,464 monasteries in Tibet remained intact and the number of monks had declined to 2,000 from 120,000 in 1959, the year in which the Chinese crushed a Tibetan uprising for independence and the Dalai Lama fled to exile in Dharmsala, India.

  Our first effort in October 1979 to travel to Tibet was frustrated. We were turned back at the border by Chinese guards. But the effort proved very rewarding in another, most unusual way.

  We had planned to go to Tibet on the Old Silk Road entering China from Pakistan. Shortly after arriving in Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, we interviewed Prime Minister Zia-ul Haq, the military dictator of the country. Then, with his sanction and with an escort of Pakistani soldiers and army engineers, we set out for China on the newly opened Himalayan Karakoram Highway, the first foreign journalists permitted to travel the length of the road. For two years we had sought Pakistani and Chinese permission to view this engineering marvel. It took twenty years for Pakistani and Chinese engineers to construct the Karakoram Highway through remote parts of Pakistani-controlled Kashmir to the Khunjerab Pass, where the highway enters China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. The engineers cut through mountains—which Audrey and I circled in a helicopter—that are among the highest in the world. They are topped by glaciers exceeded in size only by those in the polar regions. While circling K-2, the highest, Audrey lost one of her cameras to the wind as she leaned out of the helicopter door, held only by a seat belt, to photograph the mountain. I pulled her back into the craft.

  In building the paved road, the engineers suffered glacial mudflows, avalanches, and seismic convulsions which, we were told, cost one Pakistani or Chinese life for each mile of the 500-mile length of the highway. The highway, now a truck route for trade, was more important at the time for another, more compelling reason. It was built to support the passage of heavy tanks. Strategically, it gave the Chinese an overland link to friendly Pakistan as they confronted massed Russian divisions on their Xinjiang border.

  On the highway, we traveled by car, jeep, and helicopter, at times circumventing rockslides, to the Khunjerab Pass on the China border. From 15,100 feet we looked into China. Beneath us lay the winding road to Kashgar, the great caravan oasis on the Old Silk Road which we had hoped to reach that day. The Pakistanis served us tea and sugar lumps so that we could better stand the altitude but then told us regretfully that for some reason the Chinese had closed the border road temporarily. We returned to Islamabad and flew to Peking. Our account and photos of the journey on the Karakoram Highway became a cover story in the New York Times Magazine.

  Upon arrival by air in Peking from Islamabad, we were invited to the Great Hall of the People for a talk with Li Xiannian, whom Audrey had met at the Peking Railway Station with Deng Xiaoping in 1973. At the time of our meeting he was a member of the Politburo and a vice premier and later would serve as state president, the head of government, from 1983 to 1988. We had just visited Memorial Hall in Tiananmen Square, where we viewed the mummified body of Mao Zedong. We had filed past a white marble statue of a seated Mao and into a cavernous, dimly lit chamber where, in a crystal sarcophagus, the Great Helmsman lay embalmed, dressed in a gray tunic, partially draped in a flag. The Chinese walking by the bier, four abreast, gazed upon the Great Helmsman with gaping curiosity. But as we watched, there were no tears for Mao—no manifestations of the adulation which we had witnessed in past years.

  At the Great Hall of the People, I asked Li Xiannian how Mao and his writings would be viewed by the Chinese in generations to come. “We do not believe Mao Zedong Thought implies a cult of personality,” Li said. “His writings represent the collective wisdom and experience of many Chinese leaders. The words of every leader, including Chairman Mao, must be tested through social practices. What the Chairman said during the Cultural Revolution might not be applicable today. Communist leaders are not fortunetellers. The test of social practice is the only criterion of truth. The people now know that Chairman Mao made errors in his work. But they also understand his role in the Chinese Revolution and the next generations will remember him as a great leader and teacher.”

  After our talk with Li, we then set out on a 5,000-mile journey which on this second effort took us to Tibet, through the Sichuan heartland and back to Shanghai from Lhasa. Interviewing senior officials, workers, and peasants, we found that the new folk hero was Zhou Enlai, revered as the leader who had struggled within the party enclaves against Jiang Qing, mitigating the worst abuses of the Cultural Revolution. At an exhibition of paintings in Shanghai, we found an array of canvases depicting Zhou Enlai as a student and as a visionary, as the man who had brought Deng Xiaoping out of political limbo. There was only a single portrait of Mao, as a teacher instructing a young soldier. And in a nearby alcove, the positioning of two paintings on opposite walls offered an implied rebuke of the Chairman: one canvas showed Mao’s first wife, Yang Kaihui, seated in a cell with bloodied forehead before her execution by Chiang Kai-shek’s troops in 1930; the other depicted a street artist cartooning Jiang Qing as a dowager empress while spectators jeered.

  At the time of our talk with Li, Deng Xiaoping had already become the country’s “paramount leader,” although Hua Guofeng perfunctorily held the titles of party chairman and premier. Deng was already at work settling old scores. In the next year, Liu Shaoqi and other comrades purged in the Cultural Revolution would be politically rehabilitated. In May, Liu was honored at a state funeral at which his ashes were presented to his widow. The memory of the denunciation of Liu and his wife by their eldest daughter resonated for me in 2003 when Audrey and I dined in the luxurious house in Peking owned by the couple’s younger daughter, Liu Ding, whose fortunes had flourished in the market economy introduced by Deng Xiaoping under his slogan “To Be Rich Is Glorious.” She was president of the Asia Link Group, consultants in corporate finance, after having graduated from Boston University and the Harvard Business School.

  Mao’s portrait adorns the Tiananmen Gate, and for most Chinese he remains more than anything else the heroic revolutionary who founded the People’s Republic. Traveling through China in 2008, I found that it had become cliché among many Chinese when asked about Mao to rate him as 60 percent heroic and 40 percent destructive. After Mao’s death, his heir, Deng Xiaoping, evaluated him as “seven parts good, three parts bad.” As for the bad, the tyrannical regime Mao established after the Civil War, marked by massi
ve political purges, the economic blunders of his Great Leap Forward, and the upheaval of the Cultural Revolution, cost the lives of many millions of his compatriots. But as a revolutionary, military strategist, and visionary, he earned the respect of his compatriots. He secured the borders of China and laid down the foundation for the eventual emergence of a new, powerful nation. He defeated Chiang Kai-shek in the Civil War against enormous odds and unified the mainland. He wiped out the humiliating colonial concessions wrested from China by an array of foreign powers such as the extraterritorial enclaves at Shanghai, Tianjin, Qingdao, and Hankou. President Truman blocked him from retrieving Taiwan by interposing the Seventh Fleet in the Taiwan Strait. But President Nixon was compelled by Zhou Enlai in their joint Shanghai Communiqué to accept that “there is but one China and that Taiwan is part of China.” Reasserting China’s historic claim to Tibet in 1950, Mao reincorporated it in 1951 as an autonomous region. The designation was more bureaucratic than real, however, since as late as 2008 the exiled Dalai Lama was still struggling to bring about greater autonomy for his people from domination by Peking’s Han administrators. In the Korean War, although his troops suffered enormous casualties, Mao succeeded in driving MacArthur’s forces back across the thirty-eighth parallel and thus repositioned North Korea as a buffer state. Mao also rebuffed Russian penetration of both Manchuria and Xinjiang Province in Central Asia. In 1955 he regained Soviet-occupied Dalian and Lüshun in the northeast. Mao provided the weaponry and the safe haven for training, together with Chinese advisers, that enabled the Vietnamese Communists to defeat the French and subsequently the United States with its South Vietnamese allies. His support of Hanoi, apart from the ideological, was motivated by the need he saw of securing his southern border through the elimination of American bases in Southeast Asia. Mao thus banished his fear which he often voiced since the 1960s of hostile encirclement and dismemberment by a coterie of hostile powers. The hostile coalition, more phantom than real, of which he warned comprised the United States, poised in military bases in Southeast Asia, Japan in alignment with the United States, the Soviet Union, and India. He interpreted the Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation, signed by the Soviet Union and India in 1971, as a military alliance aimed at China. In furtherance of Mao’s goal of bringing about a unified China, his heir, Deng Xiaoping, negotiated the arrangements for the return of the leased British colony of Hong Kong in 1997 and of Macau by Portugal in 1999. Deng pledged that Peking would tolerate Hong Kong’s capitalist economy for fifty years in keeping with a political philosophy of “one country– two systems” which he envisioned as a potential framework for reuniting Taiwan with the mainland.

  In sum, as a consequence of Mao’s consolidation of China’s strategic position, coupled with the global expansion of economic influence stemming from Deng Xiaoping’s policies, the foundation was laid for a bid by China to supplant the United States as the leading power in East Asia.

  Deng Xiaoping is rendered tribute by most Chinese, who recognize that his economic policies raised the living standards of millions of Chinese and elevated China to a leading position in the world. But as in the case of Mao, there are reservations about Deng’s domestic legacy, both economic and political. While igniting an explosion of urban development and wealth, he did not substantially reduce the huge income gap between the middle-class affluent of the cities and the peasants. It was not until 2008 that President Hu Jintao, alarmed by peasant discontent, the flight of millions of impoverished farmers to the cities, and shrinking agricultural development, introduced a rural reform policy that allowed farmers to lease or transfer land-use rights, a step that should significantly raise lagging peasant incomes. A target date of 2020 was set to bring about a doubling of the disposable income of the 750 million peasants.

  Deng’s free market has evolved into a form of authoritarian capitalism under strict government control. While there has been a remarkable expansion of free enterprise in some sections of the economy, key industries remain state owned. About three-fourths of the some fifteen hundred domestic companies listed in 2009 on the Chinese stock exchange were state owned. Corrupt practices by some local officials managing properties pose a continuing problem. Nevertheless, through the earnings of its export industries and foreign investments China has become the largest holder of U.S. Treasury securities, about $212 trillion in official reserves in September 2009.

  In their relentless drive to reinforce the Chinese economy and maintain living standards, Chinese leaders stress the need to maintain societal stability. This has been made an excuse for the lack of progress toward major political reforms and suppression of any dissidence that might challenge or dilute the authority of the Communist Party hierarchy. To maintain that discipline, the media and the Internet are censored by a Propaganda Department.

  There is a chapter in Chinese history which the Communist Party does everything it can to hide. In 1989, as the country’s paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping compelled Zhao Ziyang to resign from the post of general secretary of the party. As both premier and then party chief, Zhao had inspired the first moves toward a free market economy but also urged the Politburo to begin to consider the possibilities of transition to a more democratic society. When students in the spring of 1989 demonstrated in Tiananmen Square en masse for democratic reforms, Zhao went to the square to consult with them and urged moderation and calm. At a meeting of the party leadership before going to Tiananmen, Zhao withstood demands by hard-liners that troops be used to crush the student demonstrations. Deng Xiaoping brushed him aside and ordered tanks and troops into Peking, resulting in clashes during which hundreds of the demonstrating students and their supporters were killed. When Zhao protested, he was ousted as general secretary of the party and placed under house arrest. His name was expunged from all public mention. But Zhao Ziyang, whose death in 2005 was noted in a party obituary by a single line, is not forgotten by those Chinese who hope for an atoning statement by the party leadership confessing that the Tiananmen repression was a mistake and greater progress toward a more democratic society.

  Rising generations of Chinese are likely to learn of the Zhao Ziyang saga as a consequence of a most unexpected development. In May 2009, a Zhao memoir of his travails, Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang, surfaced in Hong Kong. The book is based on transcriptions made by Zhao on thirty musical tape cassettes relating his experiences in the Tiananmen episode and his policies prior to his ouster from the Politburo. The tapes were transcribed during his imprisonment and smuggled out to Hong Kong by friends. The book was banned on the mainland, but details have become known there through Chinese bloggers on the Internet who have learned how to evade the censors.

  Zhao’s legacy will interest China’s youth, but it will not stir them to demonstrations such as those in Tiananmen Square in 1989, when students were protesting both lack of democracy and adverse economic conditions. In the fall of 2008, when I traveled through China lecturing at several universities, I found no inclination among the students to become involved in political action. They were primarily interested in jobs and enhancement of lifestyle. Like others of the middle class, they deplore censorship and corruption among some officials but seem content to await fulfillment of government promises of greater democracy through consensus and respect for human rights within the existing political framework.

  38

  FALL OF INDOCHINA

  AMERICA IN RETREAT

  The wars which consumed Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos for thirty years ended during April 1975 in Communist victories and the eviction of the U.S. presence from all Indochina. North Vietnamese troops seized Vietnam, while the Khmer Rouge took over in Cambodia and the Pathet Lao triumphed in Laos. The American withdrawal was total: embassies, military and economic aid missions, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the few units of marine embassy guards, which were remnants of what once had been a force of more than a half million American soldiers.

  Saigon fell to the North Vietn
amese on April 30, 1975, in the final phase of a war that was fought first and lost by France, then by the United States and its South Vietnamese allies. It followed the breakdown of the cease-fire concluded in Paris on January 17, 1973, by Henry Kissinger and Le Duc Tho, the envoy of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Sporadic fighting erupted between South Vietnamese and North Vietnamese troops along the agreed line of demarcation between the two forces. In December 1974 the North Vietnamese launched a major attack along the Cambodian border north of Saigon, and when after a pause they resumed their advance in March 1975, the South Vietnamese retreated in disarray. The South Vietnamese appeals for intervention by American B-52 bombers went unanswered. President Nixon had already resigned, and the withdrawal of American troops under his policy of Vietnamization, the turnover of ground operations to the South Vietnamese, was nearly complete. On April 20, after a hard-fought ten-day battle, the North Vietnamese captured Xuan Loc, twenty-six miles from downtown Saigon, and a week later encircled the city.

  In New York, as the North Vietnamese closed on Saigon, we debated: Should we order our correspondents to leave so as to ensure their safety or allow them to remain to cover the fall of the capital?

  In Phnom Penh, the decision as to whether to remain for the Khmer Rouge occupation was left to Sydney Schanberg, and he chose to stay on. Our Saigon correspondents were not allowed a choice. In the Times newsroom, we watched television images of marine Chinook helicopters evacuating Americans from the U.S. Embassy compound. Unnerved by what happened to Schanberg, publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger intervened and ordered our Vietnam correspondents to leave Saigon. We waited apprehensively to learn whether they would be among the 978 Americans being loaded into marine helicopters on the embassy roof to be taken to ships of the Seventh Fleet and other vessels standing by in the South China Sea.