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I remained disengaged from politics, ignorant of the growing tension between Mao and the central leadership. But by early 1956, I was beginning to sense that the Chairman was in the grips of a gnawing, still inchoate political malaise. Looking back, I know that 1956 was a turning point, the year that the seeds of the Cultural Revolution, the massive political upheaval that would convulse the country a decade later, were sown. Khrushchev's secret speech against Stalin at the Soviet Union's Twentieth Party Congress in February 1956 was the watershed.
Mao did not attend the Moscow meeting. Zhu De, the grandfatherly founder, together with Mao, of the Red Army and the wartime commander in chief of the guerrilla forces, headed the delegation instead. Zhu De was about seventy then, a kindly old man with thick black hair and a ready smile. He had no political ambition. He had gone into semi-retirement after liberation, serving largely in honorary roles—as a vice-chairman of the Central People's Government Council (1949–54), as vice-president of the republic (1954–59), and as a vice-chairman of the National Defense Council. He devoted his time to official inspection trips and to raising orchids in his Zhongnanhai greenhouse—he had over a thousand flowers in all. His position as vice-president of the People's Republic was a sinecure, but we still called him commander in chief and he continued to be greatly respected by all Chinese for his role in bringing the Communist party to power. Zhu De had not been prepared for Khrushchev's attack, and when he cabled Mao with the news and asked for instructions on how to respond, the former military commander suggested that China support Khrushchev's critique. Mao was furious. “Zhu De is an ignorant man,” he fumed. “Khrushchev and Zhu De are both unreliable.”
Mao had an almost mystical faith in the role of the leader. He never doubted that his leadership, and only his leadership, would save and transform China. He was China's Stalin, and everyone knew it. He shared the popular perception that he was the country's messiah. Khrushchev's attack against Stalin forced Mao to the defensive, threatened to undermine his rule, and called his own leadership into question. For Mao to agree to the attack against Stalin was to admit that attacks against himself were permissible as well. This he could never allow. In 1953, after Stalin's death, Mao had welcomed Khrushchev's assumption of Soviet leadership. Following his attack on Stalin, though, Mao turned bitterly hostile, convinced that the new Soviet leader had violated a fundamental tenet of revolutionary morality—that of unswerving loyalty. Khrushchev owed his own position to Stalin. He had turned against the very man who had made him what he was.
And he saw Khrushchev's attack as playing into the hands of the Americans—the imperialist camp. “He's just handing the sword to others, helping the tigers harm us,” Mao complained. “If they don't want the sword, we do. We can make the best use of it. The Soviet Union may attack Stalin, but we will not. Not only that, we will continue to support him.”
I had always admired Stalin. He was to the Soviet Union what Mao was to China—the great leader and savior. But Mao's refusal to accept de-Stalinization had nothing to do with his respect for the man. In fact, Mao despised Stalin. I was shocked, listening to Mao describe the history of his relations with the late Soviet leader, to hear that he and Stalin had in fact never gotten along. No doubt the history that Mao imparted to me in early 1956 was colored by his anger. Only now do I realize that Mao often lied to suit his political ends.
Mao had a deep-seated personal antagonism toward Stalin that traced back to the days of the Jiangxi soviet, in the early 1930s.
In 1924, when the Chinese Communist party was barely three years old, the Comintern had directed the new party to form a political alliance with the Guomindang. China was in chaos, with no real central government, and the Comintern wanted the Chinese communists to cooperate with the nationalists to overthrow the regional warlords and unite the country under a single rule. A united front was established, but in 1927, Chiang Kai-shek turned ferociously against the urban-based communists, decimating the party in the cities. Mao returned to the countryside of his native Hunan, where he witnessed peasants in revolt. Traditional Chinese rebellions had often emanated from the countryside, and Mao was convinced from this experience that the twentieth-century Chinese revolution would also be rural, relying on the peasantry as the leading force. He proposed a daring strategy, unorthodox in Marxist-Leninist terms but well suited to China's historical conditions: He wanted the Communist party to lead the peasant revolts. Mao established a rural base in the remote and backward mountains of Jiangxi province, where he set about mustering peasant support, working to reform the rural landholding system while launching guerrilla attacks on Chiang Kai-shek's forces, hoping eventually to so weaken the nationalists that the peasants could take over the cities. Gradually, under Mao's leadership, the Jiangxi soviet expanded.
In 1930, Stalin appointed Wang Ming, then only twenty-five years old and fresh from several years of study in the Soviet Union, as his Comintern representative in China. Wang Ming himself never took over leadership of the Chinese Communist party, but his faction, according to Mao, did and then insisted on returning the locus of revolutionary activity from the countryside to the city, leading the still weakened communists into battles they could ill afford to fight. Mao was labeled a conservative by the international communist camp and pushed aside. “A turnip, that's what Stalin called me—red on the outside but white on the inside,” Mao said.
The Jiangxi soviet began to flounder. Chiang Kai-shek encircled the mountain base area and launched a series of deadly military assaults—“extermination campaigns,” Chiang called them. The campaigns nearly succeeded. With Chiang's fifth attack on the Jiangxi soviet, the annihilation of the Communist party was imminent. It was then that the party made the decision to break out of the encirclement and begin the epic retreat that came to be known as the Long March. Only en route was Mao's leadership restored.
Mao blamed Stalin and the Comintern for the party's early disasters. He thought the Comintern had taken a good situation and turned it into a mess. “In the Guomindang-controlled areas of China then,” he said, “our losses were one hundred percent. In the soviet base areas, our losses were ninety percent. But we didn't blame Stalin or the Soviet Union for the disaster. We blamed our own comrades for their errors of ideological dogmatism.” Wang Ming, the faithful follower of Stalin's line, rather than Stalin himself, was blamed for the disasters, charged by Mao with being a “left adventurist.”
Mao also accused Stalin of bowing before American might after the Second World War, trying to convince the Chinese Communist party to follow the example of the French, Italian, and Greek Communist parties by surrendering its guns to the government—the Guomindang. Mao refused. During the civil war between the nationalists and the communists, Stalin offered no help, refusing to give the communist forces a single gun or bullet, “not even a fart,” Mao said. Stalin had urged them to stop their campaign north of the Yangtze River and allow the Guomindang control over the south. “We didn't pay attention to him,” Mao said.
I had always heard that much of the weaponry the Chinese communist forces used during the civil war was from the Soviet Union, left behind when the Soviets evacuated Manchuria at the end of the Second World War. Mao, though, could not admit that the Soviets had helped at all, and I was in no position to argue.
He said that when the communists took over the Guomindang capital in Nanjing and Chiang Kai-shek was forced to flee to Guangzhou (Canton), the embassies of England and the United States remained in Nanjing, prepared to do business with the new government. The Soviets, however, supported the Guomindang, moving their embassy with Chiang to Guangzhou, refusing to have anything to do with the communists. Stalin, Mao said, did not want the communists to win.
“Then in the winter of 1949, only months after liberation, I went to the Soviet Union for negotiations,” Mao continued. “But Stalin didn't trust me. He let me stay there for two months without negotiating. So finally I got mad and said, ‘If you don't want to negotiate, then let's not negotiate. I'll go home.' That was how the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance was finally concluded.”
The Korean War was yet another source of tension between Mao and Stalin. I had always thought that China and the Soviet Union had cooperated during the war, but Mao insisted they had not. “During the Korean War, when the American army reached the border between China and Korea at the Yalu River, I told Stalin we had to send our forces down there to fight,” Mao said. But Stalin had said no. He thought it would be the beginning of the Third World War. Mao had told Stalin that if he did not want to fight and if the Americans conquered all of Korea, both China and the Soviet Union would be threatened—like teeth getting chilled through broken lips. Mao would fight anyway, but he wanted Soviet weapons. If the Soviet Union was afraid of being accused by the United States and England of assisting China, then China would buy the weapons from the Soviet Union. China would do its own fighting and not involve the Soviet Union in any other way. Mao also accused Stalin of trying to further divide China by supporting Gao Gang, trying to make Gao the emperor of Manchuria, hoping to create a separate communist party there.
Mao's assertions astonished me. By all public accounts, the Soviet Union was China's big brother, the model for our own socialist development. China and the Soviet Union were the closest of allies. But the relationship in reality, Mao said, was more like that of emperor and subject. “They're trying to eat us up,” he said. Mao refused to be subject to anyone. History had taught him to befriend distant states and be wary of those that are near, and he continued to distrust Soviet expansionism.
But Mao never allowed his complaints to become public. The legitimacy of his own revolutionary leadership was still too closely linked to Stalin.
Khrushchev's speech was a watershed in China's domestic politics, too. Zhu De's suggestion that China support the attack on Stalin was a terrible affront to Mao. I never believed that Zhu De was a threat to Mao and always felt Mao's anger against him was misplaced. But Mao and Zhu had clashed once before, in Jiangxi, and Mao insisted that Zhu De's initial stance on Khrushchev's speech was “a reflection of his personal character.” He remained suspicious of Zhu De's loyalty.
On May Day 1956, two months after Khrushchev's speech and Mao's outburst against the commander in chief, Zhu De was taken ill. His health should have prevented him from attending the festivities atop Tiananmen. But the May Day photograph of China's ranking leaders was an important political scorecard, and Zhu De was worried about the public message his absence would send. “If I don't go,” he told Ren Bishi's widow, my friend Chen Zongying, “people will say I have committed some terrible political mistake and was not allowed to attend.” Zhu De, pale and drawn, was present when the photograph was taken, assuming his official place in the political lineup not far from Chairman Mao.
Mao never forgave Khrushchev for attacking Stalin. But as 1956 progressed, I saw how dissatisfied he was with the leadership of his own Communist party. At first he focused on what he saw as their obsequious, uncreative imitation of the Soviets.
By 1956, much in China had already been borrowed from the Soviet Union. A massive state bureaucracy, extending down to the rural townships, had been established under the direct control of the Communist party. Agricultural collectivization was complete, and major factories and shops in the cities were under state control. Smaller, less developed handicraft factories and shops had also been collectivized or taken over by local governments. Economically and bureaucratically, the socialist transformation seemed complete.
But the transformation of the spirit, the dynamic rebirth of China that Mao sought, was more elusive. With the massive bureaucracy in place, onetime revolutionaries had become bureaucrats themselves, more devoted to their own comfort and the social status quo than to Mao's revolutionary ideal. Mao was impatient. He wanted to move quickly, continuing the revolution. But the party bureaucrats, including ranking leaders, preached caution, clinging to the notion of gradual development, in accordance with the Soviet model. Their emulation of the Soviet Union, Mao thought, lacked creativity. Institutions and organizational arrangements were being copied without regard to the special circumstances of China. Mao was irritated with his own lieutenants.
Mao's revolution demanded daring, verve, and struggle and Mao felt that China's other party leaders lacked these qualities. That some of them had even agreed with Khrushchev's attack on Stalin was a challenge to his leadership. Mao's guard was up. He did not want any of his underlings becoming Chinese Khrushchevs after his death, writing “black reports” attacking him. He was constantly alert to attempts to undermine his rule.
It was this disaffection with his own party that would fester for years and grow, leading finally to the catastrophe of the Cultural Revolution.