33 TO REBEL IS JUSTIFIED
The work teams were withdrawn, but Mao did not calm down. “The dispatch of work teams was in fact an act in opposition to the proletarian revolution from the bourgeois stand,” he thundered, demanding that the Cultural Revolution be carried out only with the support of the young people and revolutionary teachers. “If we cannot rely upon them, then on whom can we rely?” he inquired.1
On August 1, he sent a greeting to one of the youth organizations that had been founded on May 29, in a middle school attached to Tsinghua University. This organization called itself hongweibing (Red Guards), a name Mao liked very much. He praised its members: “No matter where they are, in Peking [Beijing] or anywhere else in China, I will give enthusiastic support to all who take an attitude similar to yours in the Cultural Revolution movement.”2
When the letter was made public, Red Guard groups were organized among young students all over the country. Mao rubbed his hands with glee: with such an army he could “storm Heaven.” “We believe in masses,” he acclaimed. “To become teachers of the masses we must first be the students of the masses. The present great Cultural Revolution is a heaven-and-earth-shaking event. Can we, dare we, cross the pass into socialism? This pass leads to the final destruction of classes, and the reduction of the three great differences.”3
In early August he convened an enlarged regularly scheduled plenum of the Central Committee, to which he invited “revolutionary teachers and students” from various institutions of higher education. In all there were 188 persons present, among them 75 Central Committee members and 67 alternates. The author of the “first Marxist-Leninist” dazibao, Nie Yuanzi, also attended.
The plenum, which opened on August 1, had been scheduled for five days but stretched to thirteen. Mao, who was responsible for extending the plenum, cursed the work teams, accusing them now of “terrorism.” At the first session he rudely interrupted Liu Shaoqi, who was making a political report. Mao said that 90 percent of the teams had made mistakes of line, had stood on the side of the bourgeoisie, and opposed proletarian revolution.4 That same day, August 1, he distributed his letter to the Red Guards at the middle school attached to Tsinghua University.
Trying to calm the enraged Chairman, the next evening the terrified Liu visited one of the universities in Beijing to see what the work teams were up to. He continued his investigation the following two evenings, and invited the members of the work team to visit him in Zhongnanhai, where he mildly criticized them. “If you don't permit them [students] to rebel, they will get rid of you for sure.”5 Meanwhile, at the plenum on August 2 and 3, his supporters timidly tried to soften the extremely harsh criticism Mao had leveled at Liu and the work teams.
The Great Helmsman, however, became even more furious. On August 4, he abruptly interrupted the plenum and hastily convened an enlarged meeting of the Politburo Standing Committee. There he castigated Liu and the other “capitalist roaders,” comparing them not only with the northern militarists, but also with the CCP's main enemy, the Guomindang, which had also suppressed the students. He told the cowed members of the Standing Committee and the others, “There are monsters and demons among the people present here!” He said this in response to a rejoinder by the party veteran Marshal Ye Jianying: “We have a multi-million man army, and we are not afraid of evil spirits.” To Liu Shaoqi, who took responsibility for everything that had happened in Beijing, Mao irritably noted, “You have established [here] in Beijing your own dictatorship. Good for you!”6
The following day, at Mao's behest, Zhou Enlai informed Liu that he was no longer to appear in public or receive foreign guests as head of the PRC. Afterward Liu called the first secretary of the Beijing Municipal Party Committee, Li Xuefeng, and told him he was no longer to visit higher educational institutions. “[I]t seems that I am not qualified to lead the Cultural Revolution,” he said.7 Obviously Liu felt very bitter and realized he was doomed.
What he did not yet know was that on the same day, August 5, while the plenum was in session, Mao wrote his own dazibao titled “Bombard the Headquarters—My Big Character Poster,” which caused many party officials to tremble in fear.8 Everyone now understood that the Cultural Revolution was aimed against Liu Shaoqi. Revising its agenda, the plenum investigated the personal affairs of Liu and his closest associate, Deng Xiaoping.9
On August 8, the plenum adopted a special “Decision of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of China Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” (the so-called Sixteen Points). Chen Boda and his Central Cultural Revolution Group had drafted the text in July, but Mao approved it only during the plenum after having corrected it thirty times. Its key paragraph said:
Although the bourgeoisie has been overthrown, it is still trying to use the old ideas, culture, customs and habits of the exploiting classes to corrupt the masses, capture their minds and endeavor to stage a come-back. The proletariat must do just the opposite: it must meet head-on every challenge of the bourgeoisie in the ideological field and use the new ideas, culture, customs, and habits of the proletariat to change the mental outlook of the whole of society. At present, our objective is to struggle against those persons in authority who are taking the capitalist road, to criticize and repudiate the reactionary bourgeois academic “authorities” and the ideology of the bourgeoisie and all other exploiting classes and to transform education, literature and art and all other parts of the superstructure that do not correspond to the socialist economic base, so as to facilitate the consolidation and development of the socialist system.10
The exhilarated Red Guards memorized this excerpt.
The resolution did not pass without some opposition. As Mao subsequently recalled, “[O]nly after discussion did I succeed in gathering scarcely more than half of the delegates. It goes without saying that, as before, many did not accept this point of view.”11
Striving to eliminate resistance from Liu's supporters, Mao reorganized the leading organs of the Politburo and added his associates Lin Biao, Kang Sheng, and Chen Boda to the Politburo Standing Committee. Lin filled the post of the sole deputy chairmann82 and became Mao's newly designated successor in place of the discredited Liu Shaoqi.12 In order to weaken Deng Xiaoping's influence the post of general secretary of the Central Committee was abolished and the Secretariat itself was shorn of any influence whatsoever in the party. After the plenum its functions were given to the Cultural Revolution Group.
On August 18, five days after the plenum, standing on the rostrum of the Gate of Heavenly Peace (Tiananmen Gate), Mao, Lin Biao, and others greeted hundreds of thousands of ecstatic Red Guards assembled on the square below. Many of the students, overcome with emotion, began sobbing with joy. Enthusiastic shouts of “Long Live Chairman Mao!” and the songs “The East Is Red,” “Sailing the Seas Depends on the Helmsman,” and “I Love Chairman Mao's Books Best of All” floated across the square. Many young men and young women, bearing bouquets and garlands of flowers, danced together. Red banners fluttered above the sea of people and gigantic portraits of the Leader were held aloft.
The greatest outburst of emotion occurred when a young female Red Guard, invited onto the rostrum, tied a scarlet armband with the inscription “Red Guard” around the Leader's left arm. The crowd roared. Numerous cameras snapped pictures and television and movie cameramen recorded this historic moment. Mao, smiling slightly at the slender girl with big glasses, softly asked, “What's your name?”
“Song Binbin [“Well-mannered Song”],” she replied, and froze on the spot.
Mao raised his eyebrows. “You must become a warrior [yao wu ma],” he said and burst out laughing.
The embarrassed young girl became completely tongue-tied. But after her historic meeting with the Great Helmsman, she changed her name to Song Yaowu (“Song Who Will Be a Warrior”).13 Her comrades took the Chairman's words as a direct summons to more resolute actions.
That same day, Mao met with Peng Xiaomeng, an eighteen-year-old female student at the middle school attached to Peking University, renowned throughout China for having beaten the leader of the work team, the party veteran Zhang Chengxian, with a copper-buckled leather belt. The fifty-one-year-old Zhang was deputy director of the Propaganda Department of the North China Bureau of the Central Committee, but neither his age nor the lofty position of her victim bothered the girl. Mao was immediately informed of Peng's “feat” and was delighted by this hooliganism. On August 1, 1966, in his aforementioned letter to the Red Guards of the middle school attached to Tsinghua University, he referred to “little” Peng, giving her “enthusiastic support.”14
The meeting with Peng on August 18 was brief but significant. Mao was in excellent spirits; he was making jokes, and teasing Peng Xiaomeng, he taught her how to swim by making comical swimming motions with his arms in the air. But suddenly, at an instant, he turned serious when Peng asked him what the Red Guards should do from now on. He responded passionately, “Of course, rebel! Without rebellion nothing that is bad can be fixed. First you must struggle, second you must criticize, and third you must carry out transformation. All this must be done in accordance with the Sixteen Points.”15 The political crisis further intensified, and the Cultural Revolution was increasingly stained blood red. After the parade in Tiananmen on August 18, 1966, the Red Guards emerged from the university and school campuses onto the streets of the cities.
A wave of violence swiftly inundated the country. In this bloody drama the main role was not played by university students, but by juveniles, middle school and even primary school kids who were delirious from the atmosphere of total permissiveness.16 These were children who had not yet grown up, wolf cubs who scented the smell of blood, ignorant fanatics who fancied themselves titans rebelling against the “Four Olds” behavioral norms—old ideas, culture, customs, and habits—and the capitalist roaders. There were some thirteen million of them throughout the country. It was on them that Mao placed his immoral wager in fanning the wild conflagration of the Cultural Revolution. With his “directives,” appeals, and dazibao he poisoned the souls of these children and committed the most egregious of crimes. What could be more criminal than the molestation of the young?
In Beijing in just two months (August–September) the crazed youngsters killed 1,773 persons suspected of being capitalist roaders. In Shanghai during the same period 1,238 people perished, of whom 704 took their own lives, unable to bear the insults of the juvenile Red Guards. The Ministry of Public Security did not intervene. “In the final analysis, bad people are bad people, so if they are beaten to death it is not a tragedy!” the minister of public security, strictly following the instructions of the Great Helmsman, informed his subordinates.17 On August 21, 1966, the CCP Central Committee adopted a resolution prohibiting the Ministry of Public Security from interfering with the actions of the “revolutionary students.” A similar resolution with respect to the PLA was confirmed that same day by the General Staff and the General Political Administration of the Chinese army.18
The young people persecuted their teachers as their primary targets. In some schools individual classrooms were turned into prisons, where the students tormented teachers they had arrested on the charge of belonging to the “black gang of bourgeois reactionary authorities.” These teachers were humiliated, beaten, and tortured, many to the point of death. One such jail was directly across the street from Zhongnanhai, in the music classroom of Beijing No. 6 Middle School. On the wall they wrote with the blood of their teachers: “Long live the red terror.”19 This is how the youth understood the slogan “In this great cultural revolution, the phenomenon of our schools being dominated by bourgeois intellectuals must be completely changed.”20
Excited by the impunity they had been granted, starting in September 1966 the Red Guards of the capital and other cities began to spread out around the country, sowing misfortune and terror everywhere. In their travels they invariably visited Shaoshanchong and Jinggang, Zunyi and Yan'an to pay their respects to these “sacred places.” They saw their main objective everywhere as enlightening the backward masses and uprooting capitalist-road vermin. Mao was overjoyed to hear of these “revolutionary initiatives”:
Let them travel about! They can relieve each other, taking turns looking after their parents [who remain at home]. They should be given letters of introduction, let them all travel about. The members of the Cultural Revolution Group can give them permission to travel…… The departing students should be given provisions. Some people say the students have nowhere to sleep. Where are there places without lodging? There are homes everywhere. This is just a pretext [not to allow the students to go].
Animated by the good news, at the end of August he observed to the staff of the People's Daily,?“It is not necessary to wrap up the Cultural Revolution by the end of the year. At first we'll keep it going until lunar New Year [i.e., the beginning of February 1967], and then we'll talk about [ending] the revolution.”21
The “revolutionary students” were enormously enthusiastic about the Great Helmsman's support. “We were not tourists,” one participant recalls. “We were soldiers going out to war against an old world…… From now on, we no longer need envy our parents for their heroic deeds in revolutionary wars and feel sorry because we were born too late…… We will enlighten and organize the masses, dig out hidden enemies, shed our blood, and sacrifice our lives for the final victory of the Cultural Revolution.”22 In 1966, the author of these reminiscences was barely fifteen years old, so it is impossible to doubt that her juvenile outburst was sincere. However, she did not have to shed her own blood, unlike those whom she and her comrades consigned to the ranks of capitalist roaders. It was useless for these people, like all the others who were “adherents of old culture,” to beg for mercy. The young “missionaries” of the new were proud that their revolution was no less merciless than their parents' revolution before them.
In cities and hamlets across China, the Red Guards mounted didactic performances in which the leading actors were the “capitalist roaders” they had arrested. Terror-stricken elderly people, their arms broken, were led along the streets to the jeers and malicious shouts of the mob. They were crowned with dunce caps just as the village extremists in the 1920s had done to their targets. Placards were hung around their necks reading, “Counterrevolutionary revisionist element so-and-so,” and “Member of the anti-party black gang so-and-so.” The victims' faces were smeared with tar or ink, their clothes ripped, and they were forced to bow before the “revolutionary masses,” confessing all of their “sins” until they were exhausted. Meanwhile, the gawking onlookers shouted imprecations and thrust their clenched fists in the air to shouts of “Down with!”
The hearts of those crushed under the “Red Wheel” were filled with terror. If those doomed to such tortures managed to survive, the dismal pictures of these tribunals remained in their memories for the rest of their lives:
Fiery red armbands set flames to young hearts. Resounding quotations urged children to fight. Charge, fight, smash, go out with red in your eyes and build a red, red world. But they still didn't know who their opponents were……
“Answer: you hate the Party, don't you? What kind of dreams do you dream about recovering your lost paradise?”
“Answer: what kind of anti-revolutionary plots have you hatched? How are you now preparing to overthrow the Party?”
“Answer: what kind of old documents have you kept, hoping to get back all your old property? You want Chiang Kai-shek to come back to power so you can get revenge and kill off the Party, don't you……”
A leather belt snapped, a chain clanked, and an anguished cry rang out.
“Answer, answer, answer!”
“I love the Party!”
“Bullshit! How could you love the Party? How could you possibly love the Party? How dare you say you love the Party? How could you deserve to love the Party? You're a stubborn mule with a head of granite!”
Swish, clank, belt and chain, fire and ice, blood and sweat.23
Robbery, too, was an indivisible component of the red terror to which the “backward” teachers and “black” party officials were subjected. All movable property was dragged from the homes of the “evil” person, and what could not be moved was destroyed. In Beijing alone, in late August and early September the Red Guards pillaged 33,695 homes from which they carried off 5.7 tons of gold, more than 19 tons of silver, about 55.5 million yuan in cash, and 613,600 jade objects. During this same time the “bearers of the new culture” in Shanghai robbed 84,222 homes; in addition to a large number of precious stones and metals they confiscated $3.24 million in American dollars, $3.3 million in other currencies, 2.4 million in Chinese Nationalist currency, and 370 million in PRC currency. Throughout China, by October 1966 about 65 tons of gold alone had been confiscated. (Of course, these figures do not give a complete picture of the scale of the theft; they represent only the amounts that the Red Guards surrendered to the Bank of China. No one knows how much they appropriated for themselves. Nonetheless, even the volume of stolen goods that was reported impressed the leaders of the CCP. In October 1966, a regular working session of the CCP Central Committee showered praise upon the new “heroes of the Liangshanbo.”)n83 24
It was not only the homes of ordinary citizens that were pillaged and robbed; state institutions—cultural institutions in the first instance such as museums, libraries, and exhibition halls—also fell victim to the Red Guards. Wherever possible, historical monuments were destroyed. In November 1966, students from Beijing Normal University, who traveled to the birthplace of Confucius in the city of Qufu, Shandong province, destroyed roughly seven thousand monuments, including a thousand ancient stone steles, and smashed two thousand graves. They defiled the burial place of the great philosopher. Three months earlier, a group of Red Guards in Shandong defiled the grave of Wu Xun, a nineteenth-century Confucian educator. The remains of the scholar were exhumed and burned while the crowd whooped and hollered. The bones of Hai Rui, exhumed from his grave on Hainan, were likewise destroyed.25
Not all party leaders welcomed the Red Guards. Many, including quite a few members of the Central Committee, were dismayed. A struggle within the party leadership continued throughout September. Those who still managed to preserve their reason tried to contain the chaos in the hope of avoiding another economic crisis. In mid-September, sober-minded Central Committee officials headed by Zhou Enlai convinced Mao to approve a prohibition against worker and peasant involvement in the Red Guard movement.26 But soon the orthodox Maoists administered a new blow against Liu's group. At a Central Committee work conference in mid-October, Lin Biao attacked Liu and Deng by name, accusing them of pursuing “a line of repression of the masses and opposition to the revolution.”27 His speech was obviously vetted by Mao. Jiang Qing took part in the conference even though she was not a member of the Central Committee. Starting in late August she functioned as head of the Cultural Revolution Group, in place of Chen Boda, who was overloaded with work.28
Liu had to engage in self-criticism. On October 23, at the work conference he delivered a speech that ended his political career. Deng followed, also acknowledging his mistakes.
Mao did not attend the first two weeks of the conference, but he controlled its proceedings through Lin, Zhou, Chen, and Kang Sheng. It was not until October 25, two days after Liu's and Deng's self-flagellation, that he appeared in the hall. He began circuitously, even mildly criticizing himself for “not paying attention to day-to-day affairs” since he was not on the front line, but on the so-called second line in the rear for a long time. Then he took the offensive.
This meeting has had two stages. In the first stage the speeches were not quite normal, but during the second stage, after speeches and the exchange of experience by comrades at the Centre, things went more smoothly and the ideas were understood a bit better. It has only been five months. Perhaps the movement may last another five months, or even longer…… [T]he five months of the Great Cultural Revolution, the fire …… I kindled. It has been going on only five months, not even half a year, a very brief span compared to the twenty-eight years of democratic revolution and the seventeen years of socialist revolution. So one can see why it has not been thoroughly understood and there were obstacles…… I think that there are advantages in being assailed. For so many years you had not thought about such things, but as soon as they burst upon you, you began to think.29
Some time later, after the conference, Mao, obviously savoring his victory over the silenced Central Committee, added:
The babies want to rebel—we must support them. Let them make their own way; we should not be afraid they will make mistakes…… If we don't start to learn from the little generals, then we are done for…… As soon as the masses come on the scene, the evil spirits will vanish. Strictly speaking, there are no evil spirits; it is only in the cerebral cortex of certain people that an evil spirit dwells, and the name of this evil spirit is “fear of the masses.” …… Disorders are caused by people, and those who create disorder are not guilty of any crimes…… The young create great things in the world.30
We already know just how great these things were, but Mao evidently hoped for even more. He seemed unconcerned that the wild outbursts of the Red Guards would threaten China's economy.
But the economic situation began to suffer when young workers in Shanghai and other cities ignored the Central Committee's September resolution prohibiting workers and peasants from getting involved in the movement. They began to organize revolutionary groups spontaneously. In early November, delegates of working youth from seventeen industrial enterprises formed the so-called Shanghai Workers' Revolutionary Rebels General Headquarters (Shanghai gongren geming zaofan zong silingbu), with a young guard at one of the textile plants by the name of Wang Hongwen as the leader. He had already come to the attention of the Maoists in June 1966, when he became the first Shanghai worker who posted an extremist dazibao criticizing the factory administration. This militant and energetic young man fulfilled all the revolutionary criteria. By his thirty-first year, he had already served in the army, fought in Korea, and joined the party.
Wang Hongwen's organization, however, was not recognized by the Shanghai Municipal Party Committee, which had not yet reoriented itself and viewed the actions of Wang and his comrades as harmful to production. Then, Wang, acting impetuously, had provoked an incident at the Anting railroad station in suburban Shanghai that shut down the rail line to Nanjing for thirty hours. His followers, numbering more than two thousand, lay down on the tracks, demanding they be provided a train to take them to Beijing to meet the Great Helmsman and inform him of the “outrages” committed by the municipal authorities. Wang Hongwen's “revolutionary action” was supported by Zhang Chunqiao, Jiang Qing, and Yao Wenyuan, who, after condemning the Shanghai Municipal Committee, began to make use of the workers. Thereafter, all across China organizations of young workers and employees were established parallel to the Red Guards. These were called zaofan (Rebels), after the Shanghai organization.
This appellation was borrowed from a famous phrase Mao had formulated in Yan'an when speaking on the occasion of Stalin's sixtieth birthday. “The laws of Marxism are intricate and complex, but in the final analysis they boil down to one thing: ‘To rebel is justified' (zaofan youli).”31 On June 5, 1966, People's Daily reminded its readers of this phrase, after which the same Red Guards from the middle school attached to Tsinghua University used the expression “To rebel is justified” in their dazibao. They sent these publications to Mao, who, in his reply that we have already noted, exclaimed, “You say it is right to rebel against reactionaries; I enthusiastically support you.”32 Thereafter, the expression “To rebel is justified” became the main slogan of the Cultural Revolution.
In early December an enlarged Politburo plenum chaired by Lin Biao repudiated the September resolution that prohibited Red Guards from expanding into people's communes and industrial enterprises. China's economy was once again threatened. The transportation system was in crisis. Inspired by Mao's greetings to the Red Guards on August 18, fanatical youth and adolescents jammed onto trains bound for Beijing. Every Red Guard and Rebel wanted to see the Great Helmsman. Mao welcomed this, explaining to the Central Cultural Revolution Group that the more people would see him the better for the revolution. “One of the reasons why the Soviet Union had discarded Leninism was that too few people had seen Lenin alive,” he said.33
By the end of November he had presided over eight receptions cum parades on Tiananmen Square involving more than 11 million people. The largest were those of November 25 and 26 in which 2.5 million revolutionary students took part.
It is impossible now to read the Xinhua News Agency reports of these parades with a straight face.
“Yesterday at 11:30 A.M.,” an anonymous correspondent reported breathlessly,
to the solemn strains of The East Is Red our Great Teacher, Great Leader, and Great Commander, the Great Helmsman Chairman Mao Zedong and his close comrade-in-arms Lin Biao mounted the central rostrum on Tiananmen Square…… At this moment all of Tiananmen Square and the streets adjoining it on the east were transformed into a triumphal human ocean…… Everyone jumped up and down from excitement and joy. Waves of never ending exclamations of “Long live Chairman Mao! A long life to him! A long, long life to him!” rolled through the human sea…… Then to the tune of Sailing the Seas Depends on the Helmsman more than 600,000 youthful revolutionaries passed through Tiananmen Square…… They continuously declaimed the slogan in honor of the Great Leader, “Long Live Chairman Mao!” …… On November 25, the temperature in the capital fell to minus seven Celsius. Nevertheless, our most respected and most beloved Great Leader Chairman Mao Zedong, coatless, in a khaki-colored uniform, ascended the central rostrum from which he cordially waved his hand and applauded the young revolutionaries, inspiring them to carry out the Great Cultural Revolution to the end…… On the afternoon of November 26 Chairman Mao Zedong reviewed a parade of more than 1.8 million revolutionary teachers, employees, and Red Army men who had gathered on Tiananmen Square…… To the sound of ardent and joyful exclamations, Chairman Mao Zedong, his close comrade-in-arms Comrade Lin Biao, and other leading comrades from the party center set out in open cars from Tiananmen Square to the west, into the heart of the army of the Cultural Revolution.34
Among those present on the rostrum of Tiananmen were both Liu and Deng who were still included among the party leadership. But their days were already numbered. As early as October 21, dazibao had been posted at Beida that openly proclaimed: “Liu Shaoqi is China's Khrushchev!” On October 24, the day after Liu's and Deng's self-criticism, a dazibao saying “Deng Xiaoping is also China's Khrushchev!” appeared at the Central Committee's Organizational Department. It asserted for the first time that in the early 1960s Deng Xiaoping had proclaimed: “The color of the cat does not matter, as long as it catches mice.”35
On December 18, one of Jiang Qing's deputies, the Shanghai leftist Zhang Chunqiao, instructed the leader of the Tsinghua University Red Guards: “You, the little revolutionary generals, must unite, fill yourselves with revolutionary spirit, and beat the dog in the water, dethrone them [Liu and Deng], and do not stop at half measures.” He added that Liu and Deng, “these two upholders of the bourgeois reactionary line in the Central Committee, have still not surrendered.” Seven days later a five-thousand-person demonstration took place in Beijing under the slogan of “Down with Liu Shaoqi! Down with Deng Xiaoping! Carry out the bloody battle against Liu and Deng to the end!”36
Soon similar demonstrations were being held throughout the country. Liu and Deng instantly disappeared from the political stage. On January 1, 1967, on the wall of Liu's house in Zhongnanhai appeared the inscription “Down with China's Khrushchev Liu Shaoqi!” Two days later a “criticism and struggle meeting” was organized at the offices of the Central Committee, where Liu and his wife were subjected to public censure. Subsequently such “meetings” became commonplace. One of the participants described the meeting:
Soldiers and officers from the Central Garrison Corps were there, too, watching. No one was offering even the slightest help to Liu Shaoqi. Liu and his wife Wang Guangmei were standing in the center of the crowd, being pushed and kicked and beaten by staff members from the Bureau of Secretaries. Liu's shirt had already been torn open, and a couple of buttons were missing, and people were jerking him around by the hair. When I moved closer for a better look, someone held his arms behind his back while others tried to force him to bend forward from the waist in the position known as “doing the airplane.” Finally, they forced him down and pushed his face toward the ground until it was nearly touching the dirt, kicking him and slapping him in the face. Still the soldiers from the Central Garrison Corps refused to intervene. I could not bear to watch. Liu Shaoqi was already an old man by then, almost seventy, and he was our head of state.37
After numerous requests for an audience, on January 13, Mao finally received his defeated enemy. Liu asked only that he be allowed to resign and to withdraw to the countryside to live out his life as an ordinary peasant. But Mao turned him down.38
By then the Cultural Revolution had entered its bloodiest phase. On December 27, 1966, Jiang Qing dispatched Red Guards from Beijing to Sichuan, where the disgraced Peng Dehuai was living. A band of thugs burst into his house, seized him, and brought him to the capital, where he was thrown into prison. Peng was tortured and beaten more than a hundred times, his ribs were broken, his face maimed, and his lungs damaged. He was repeatedly dragged to criticism and struggle meetings. The elderly marshal groaned continuously and could barely speak. From prison he wrote to Mao, “I send you my final greeting. I wish you a long life!” In 1973 he was transferred to a prison hospital. He died on November 29, 1974.39
Another hero of the Chinese revolution, Marshal He Long, was also subjected to horrible tortures. A convivial jokester and ladies' man, he was one of the few who had gladly supported Mao when he began living with Jiang Qing in Yan'an. His earlier friendship with the wife of the Leader did not save him. In the early 1960s he fell out with Lin Biao, openly expressing his contempt for Lin, whom he considered an ignoramus in the sphere of modern weaponry. This is what led to his downfall. On December 30, 1966, Jiang Qing summoned students at Tsinghua University to strike a blow at He Long. He Long sought protection from Zhou Enlai, asking the premier to give him shelter in Zhongnanhai. But the frightened premier replied, “Even in Zhongnanhai the situation is tense. You need to find a quiet place farther away to rest up.” But there were no longer any such places in China. Several months later the exhausted marshal was arrested and passed through the circles of hell. Tired of trying to vindicate himself, he finally stopped eating and died on June 9, 1969. Not long before he died he said to his wife, “I have only one wish, that Chairman Mao would pronounce a single sentence, ‘He Long is our comrade.'”40
Not long after He died, on June 22, Li Lisan, who had been terribly persecuted by the Rebels, took his own life. This was the same Li Lisan who had headed the Communist Party in the early 1930s. He had returned to China from the Soviet Union in early 1946, served on the Central Committee, and had held leading posts in the party, the trade unions, and the government. In late 1966, young people dragged him to a criticism and struggle meeting, then left him alone for a time, but in late January 1967 he was picked on again. He was beaten and tortured for two and a half years, until he could no longer endure it and took a large dose of sleeping pills. “My spiritual and physical tortures are unbearable,” he wrote to Mao.41 The day after Li's death, his Russian wife and their two daughters, who had also gone through countless “criticism and struggle meetings,” were arrested.42 Li's widow recalled that when she found herself locked in a quiet cell she was so relieved after all the stress that she thought to herself, “I am free, I am saved.”43
On August 24, 1966, Li Da, the rector of Wuhan University and one of the founders of the CCP, died, unable to endure the torture to which he had been subjected. That same year, Tian Jiaying, Mao Zedong's secretary who had once told the Leader the truth about the mood of the peasantry, committed suicide. On September 19, 1966, Wang Xiaotang, first secretary of Tianjin Municipal Committee, died soon after the Red Guards forced him to stand for several hours under the scorching sun. In January 1967, Zhang Lingzhi, minister of the coal industry, died under torture during an interrogation. At the same time Zhao Erlu, deputy director of the Defense Industry Committee of the Central Committee Military Council, and Wei Heng and Yan Hongyan, first secretaries of the Shanxi and Yunnan provincial party committees respectively, committed suicide.
Liu Shaoqi, too, succumbed to persecution. Throughout most of 1967 he was mocked at meetings both in Zhongnanhai and elsewhere in Beijing. In mid-September his wife was imprisoned, after which the grief-stricken Liu suffered from hypertension and elevated blood sugar levels. This was accompanied by disruption in the functions of his autonomous nervous system. Then he came down with pneumonia. Terribly ill, he was kept under house arrest and practically refused any medical attention. In mid-October 1969 he was secretly transported to Kaifeng under the fictitious name of Liu Weihuang and left there to die, completely without hope, in a building belonging to the local “revolutionary” authorities. There was no furniture in the room where he was put except the dirty stretcher on the floor that served as his bed. A month later, at 6:45 A.M., the former chairman of the PRC expired. An ambulance arrived two hours after he died.44 On his death certificate in the space for “Occupation,” the doctor wrote, “unemployed.” The cause of death was listed as “illness.” Many other lesser-known CCP leaders also became victims of the Red Guard and Rebel terror. The Cultural Revolution spread across the country like a firestorm.
Did Mao know about all of this? Did the groans of his former comrades reach his ears? There can be no doubt about this. It was he who made the ultimate decisions regarding the fate of individual party leaders. It was he who removed them from their government and party positions. It is true that unlike Stalin, he did not personally sign their death warrants. But isn't driving someone to suicide the equivalent of execution? And wasn't his connivance with the fiends who tortured and brutalized the arrested likewise the equivalent of issuing a death sentence? Is it possible that Mao could not conceive of the scale of the lawlessness, that he could have failed to understand where the universal permissiveness would lead? No, he understood everything perfectly, and that is why he bears responsibility for the miserable fates of the victims. He was the chief culprit of the senseless and merciless mass terror. More than a million persons were tortured, shot, or driven to suicide during these years of “complete chaos under Heaven,”45 and a hundred million suffered to one degree or another. Only a small fraction of them were party members or cadres. Mao knew everything and understood everything.
Over a long period not only did Mao fail to try to stop the outburst of anarchy; on the contrary he encouraged it any way he could. An irrepressible lust for violence, clearly evident as far back as his Report on an Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan, was never extinguished in Mao. How could it have slackened when it was constantly reinforced by revolutionary struggles and reading of Marxist literature? All his life Mao believed in the false formula that “without destruction there can be no creation.” He was unaffected by the life-and-death dramas of the victims of the Cultural Revolution. Even when his daughter Li Min complained to him that the insane warriors against revisionism were beginning to level idiotic accusations against her and her husband, Mao did not lift a finger. He simply laughed and replied, “There's nothing terrible about it, you're just gaining some experience.”46 On December 26, 1966, celebrating his seventy-third birthday with his inner circle, Mao gave a toast: “To the unfolding of nationwide all-round civil war!”47
He lived in his own world, where there was no place for human suffering. He spent his free hours in the company of pretty seventeen- and eighteen-year-old girls; from time to time he traded them in for Zhang Yufeng, whom he still found attractive. At night he shut himself in with them in the spacious and well-furnished Room 118 in the Great Hall of the People, and from late 1966 he began to hold group “pajama parties” in Zhongnanhai in a building with an indoor swimming pool. He now preferred this to his study in the Pavilion of Chrysanthemum Fragrance.48 Meanwhile, he constantly kept his hand on the pulse of the enormous country. Not a single important question was decided without his knowledge. He, the Chairman, was the ultimate arbiter of truth. Acting on a whim he alone could save someone who had been condemned.
This is how he dealt with Deng Xiaoping, whose “case” he finally distinguished from that of Liu Shaoqi. Although Mao cursed him repeatedly at various meetings, grumbling that for six years “starting in 1959, [Deng] had not reported” to him “about his work,” he would not allow anyone to destroy Deng. No matter how angry he was at the “diminutive Deng,” he still valued his phenomenal organizational abilities. “When Deng Xiaoping was denounced and overthrown, he was protected by Mao, both physically and politically,” his younger daughter, Deng Rong (Maomao), wrote. In July 1967 he even blurted out to one of his comrades in arms, “If Lin Biao's health gets worse I intend to call Deng back. I'll make him at least a member of the Standing Committee of the Politburo.”49
The former general secretary experienced the horrors of privileged imprisonment. He was forced to engage in self-criticism, to wear a dunce cap, and get down on his knees, but he was not killed. On October 22, 1969, together with his wife and stepmother, Deng was sent to Jiangxi province, where he spent three and a half years in a labor reform school for cadres. Meanwhile, his spiritual sufferings were immense. It was not so much because he had been deprived of his positions and his power. The Cultural Revolution struck a heavy blow at Deng Xiaoping's family. At the end of August 1968, his eldest son, Pufang, a student at Peking University, unable to endure the mockery directed at him, jumped out of an upper-story window in one of the university buildings. Miraculously, he did not die, but he broke his spine and remained paralyzed the rest of his life.
Liu Shaoqi's son, Yunpin, was not as fortunate; he succeeded in his attempt at suicide. The ferocious explosion of terror in 1966–68 prompted many people to commit suicide. Artists and writers, university professors, and officials in party organizations unable to endure inhumane treatment resorted to suicide. At the end of August 1966, following a savage criticism and struggle meeting, Lao She, a brilliant writer, drowned himself in Taiping Lake in Beijing.
In late December 1966, egged on by Zhang Chunqiao, the Red Guards and Rebels of Shanghai stormed the headquarters of the Shanghai Municipal Party Committee and in early January 1967 occupied it. This uprising was led by the head of the Shanghai Rebels, Wang Hongwen. The battle for the committee lasted more than four hours and caused lots of casualties. The Maoists celebrated victory. As Zhang Chunqiao said, after the “revolutionary” actions of Wang Hongwen and his fellows “the Municipal Party Committee was paralyzed and toppled and nobody will listen to it anymore.”50
Mao was ecstatic upon learning of the seizure of the Municipal Party Committee in Shanghai. “This is one class overthrowing another,” he asserted. “This is a great revolution.”51 The only thing that worried him was the relative weakness of the Red Guards and the Rebels; so he ordered Lin Biao to send PLA troops to aid the “leftists.” After this the seizure of power by young rascals from ultrarevolutionary organizations accelerated everywhere.
1 Quoted from History of the Chinese Communist Party—A Chronology of Events, 328; Borisov and Titarenko, Vystupleniia Mao Tsze-duna, ranee ne publikovavshiesia v kitaiskoi pechati (Mao Zedong's Speeches Previously Unpublished in the Chinese Press), series 5, 84, 129.
2 Schram, Chairman Mao Talks to the People, 260.
3 Ibid., 254. The three great differences are those between workers and peasants, city and countryside, and mental and physical labor.
4 See MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, Mao's Last Revolution, 87; Liao, Mao Zedong baike quanshu (Encyclopedia of Mao Zedong), vol. 6, 3216; Liu and Chen, Liu Shaoqi nianpu, 1898–1969 (Chronological Biography of Liu Shaoqi, 1898–1969), vol. 2, 647.
5 Quoted from MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, Mao's Last Revolution, 89.
6 Borisov and Titarenko, Vystupleniia Mao Tsze-duna, ranee ne publikovavshiesia v kitaiskoi pechati (Mao Zedong's Speeches Previously Unpublished in the Chinese Press), series 6, 216–17; Pang and Jin, Mao Zedong zhuan (1949–1976) (Biography of Mao Zedong [1949–1976]), vol. 2, 1427–28; History of the Chinese Communist Party—A Chronology of Events, 328; Liao, Mao Zedong baike quanshu (Encyclopedia of Mao Zedong), vol. 6, 3216.
7 Quoted from MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, Mao's Last Revolution, 89.
8 For the text of this dazibao, see ibid., 90.
9 See Pang and Jin, Mao Zedong zhuan (1949–1976) (Biography of Mao Zedong [1949–1976]), vol. 2, 1428–29; Liao, Mao Zedong baike quanshu (Encyclopedia of Mao Zedong), vol. 6, 3215; Liu and Chen, Liu Shaoqi nianpu, 1898–1969 (Chronological Biography of Liu Shaoqi, 1898–1969), vol. 2, 649.
10 CCP Documents of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution 1966–1967, 42–43.
11 Borisov and Titarenko, Vystupleniia Mao Tsze-duna, ranee ne publikovavshiesia v kitaiskoi pechati (Mao Zedong's Speeches Previously Unpublished in the Chinese Press), vol. 5, 195.
12 See Lichnoe delo Mao Tsze-duna (Personal File of Mao Zedong), RGASPI, collection 495, inventory 225, file 71, vol. 3, sheets 104–5; Liao, Mao Zedong baike quanshu (Encyclopedia of Mao Zedong), vol. 6, 3215; History of the Chinese Communist Party—A Chronology of Events, 329.
13 See Wu Liping, “Wenhua da geming zhongde nü hongweibing” (Women-Hongweibings in the Great Cultural Revolution), Ershiyi shiji (Twenty-first century), no. 68 (2007): 57.
14 Schram, Chairman Mao Talks to the People, 260.
15 Borisov and Titarenko, Vystupleniia Mao Tsze-duna, ranee ne publikovavshiesia v kitaiskoi pechati (Mao Zedong's Speeches Previously Unpublished in the Chinese Press), series 5, 96.
16 See MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, Mao's Last Revolution, 104.
17 Quoted from ibid., 125.
18 See Pang and Jin, Mao Zedong zhuan (1949–1976) (Biography of Mao Zedong [1949–1976]), vol. 2, 1438.
19 See MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, Mao's Last Revolution, 126.
20 CCP Documents of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution 1966–1967, 50.
21 Quoted from Pang and Jin, Mao Zedong zhuan (1949–1976) (Biography of Mao Zedong [1949–1976]), vol. 2, 1439.
22 Rae Yang, Spider Eaters: A Memoir (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 131.
23 Wang Meng, Bolshevik Salute: A Modernist Chinese Novel, trans. Wendy Larson (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1989), 12–14.
24 See Elizabeth J. Perry and Li Xun, Proletarian Power: Shanghai in the Cultural Revolution (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1997), 12; Wang Shaoguang, Failure of Charisma: The Cultural Revolution in Wuhan (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1995), 72; MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, Mao's Last Revolution, 115.
25 See MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, Mao's Last Revolution, 113–16, 118–22.
26 See CCP Documents of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution 1966–1967, 73–74, 77–78.
27 Quoted from History of the Chinese Communist Party—A Chronology of Events, 331.
28 See Lichnoe delo Mao Tszeduna (Personal File of Mao Zedong), RGASPI, collection 495, inventory 225, file 71, vol. 3, sheet 77; History of the Chinese Communist Party—A Chronology of Events, 324–25.
29 Schram, Chairman Mao Talks to the People, 271, 273.
30 Borisov and Titarenko, Vystupleniia Mao Tsze-duna, ranee ne publikovavshiesia v kitaiskoi pechati (Mao Zedong's Speeches Previously Unpublished in the Chinese Press), series 5, 136–37.
31 Xin Zhonghua bao (New China), December 30, 1939.
32 Schram, Chairman Mao Talks to the People, 260.
33 Quoted from MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, Mao's Last Revolution, 107.
34 Dosie k lichnomu delu Mao Tszeduna (Dossier to the Personal File of Mao Zedong), RGASPI, collection 495, inventory 225, file 71, vol. 4, sheets 10, 11–13.
35 See MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, Mao's Last Revolution, 146.
36 Quoted from Liu and Chen, Liu Shaoqi nianpu, 1898–1969 (Chronological Biography of Liu Shaoqi, 1898–1969), vol. 2, 652.
37 Li, The Private Life of Chairman Mao, 489–90.
38 See MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, Mao's Last Revolution, 147.
39 See History of the Chinese Communist Party—A Chronology of Events, 333; Peng, Memuary marshala, 18–20; Peng Dehuai nianpu (Chronological Biography of Peng Dehuai) (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1998), 851.
40 Quoted from He Long nianpu (Chronological Biography of He Long) (Beijing: Zhonggong zhongyang dangxiao chubanshe, 1988), 455. See also M. I. Sladkovskii, ed. Informatsionnyi biulleten': Seriia A: “Kulturnaiia revoliutsiia” v Kitae: Dokumenty i materialy (perevod s kitaiskogo), Vypusk 2, “Hunveibinovskaia pechat” o Den Siaopine, Pen Chzhene, Yan Shankune, i Khe Lune (Information Bulletin: Series A: The “Cultural Revolution” in China: Documents and Materials Translated from Chinese, 2nd Installment, The Red Guard Press on Deng Xiaoping, Peng Zhen, Yang Shangkun, and He Long) (Moscow: IDV AN SSSR, 1968), 225–329.
41 Quoted from Tang, Li Lisan zhuan (Biography of Li Lisan), 168.
42 For details see Li Sha, Wode zhongguo yuanfen: Li Lisan furen Li Sha huiyilu (My Chinese Fate: Memoirs of Li Lisan's Wife Li Sha) (Beijing: Waiyu jiaoxue yu yanjiu chubanshe, 2009).
43 Alexander V. Pantsov's interview with Elizaveta Pavlovna Kishkina (Li Sha) in Beijing, June 14, 2010.
44 See Liu, Liu Shaoqi zishu (Autobiographical Notes of Liu Shaoqi), 179–254; Wang Guangmei and Liu Yuan, Ni suo bu zhidao de Liu Shaoqi (The Unknown Liu Shaoqi) (Zhengzhou: Henan renmin chubanshe, 2000); Liu and Chen, Liu Shaoqi nianpu, 1898–1969 (Chronological Biography of Liu Shaoqi, 1898–1969), vol. 2, 653–61; Yen Chia-chi and Kao Kao, The Ten-Year History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Taipei: Institute of Current China Studies, 1988), 168.
45 According to some estimates, the toll killed in rural China alone is between 750,000 and 1.5 million. The number of people killed in cities is still unknown. See MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, Mao's Last Revolution, 262.
46 Quoted from Li, Moi otets Mao Tszedun (My Father Mao Zedong), 265.
47 Quoted from MacFarquhar and Schoenhals, Mao's Last Revolution, 155.
48 See Li, The Private Life of Chairman Mao, 478–81.
49 Quoted from Deng, Deng Xiaoping and the Cultural Revolution, 39, 53.
50 Quoted from History of the Chinese Communist Party—A Chronology of Events, 334.
51 Schram, Chairman Mao Talks to the People, 275.
n82 Prior to this, besides Lin Biao there were four other deputy chairmen: Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De, and Chen Yun.
n83 This was the name of the base of the rebellious peasants in the novel Water Margin.