III 1957–1965
20
Lin Ke tried to fill me in on what had happened during my absence.
Mao was furious over the slights he had received at the Eighth Party Congress—the call for collective leadership, the assertions that China would never have a cult of personality, the removal of Mao's thought as the guiding principle for the nation, and the criticisms of adventurism. He still saw many of the ranking party leaders as too conservative and slow at instituting revolutionary change. He was still angry at the Second Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee that had met in mid-November, just as I was beginning my studies. In his speech to the meeting, Mao announced his intention to launch a “rectification” of the party, to wipe out what he called “subjectivism, sectarianism, and bureaucratism.”
It was just after the November meeting, Lin Ke said, that Mao took to his bed, staying there for months, as he often did in the midst of an unresolved political struggle, rising only to use the bathroom and make an occasional speech. Mao used these apparently debilitating depressions to plot his next political moves.
Mao's February 27, 1957, speech was part of his strategy. Mao had risen from his bed to talk to the Supreme State Conference, convened under his authority as chairman of the republic. The meeting was attended not only by the party politburo, ranking leaders of the Military Affairs Commission, and high-level government officials, but by the leaders of the “democratic parties” as well. Mao harshly criticized the party bureaucracy, and he urged members of the “democratic parties” to voice their own criticisms of the party's mistakes and to suggest means of reform. He declared the revolution a victory and socialism a success, arguing that the time for class struggle was over. Counterrevolutionaries continued to exist, but their numbers were so small—a few weeds in the midst of a field of grain—that they could do no harm. Henceforth, social contradictions were “non-antagonistic,” easily manageable differences among the people. In the upcoming rectification of the party Mao would call on intellectuals from outside the party to criticize the party's faults.
Rectification movements were not new to the Communist party. Mao had directed the first one in Yanan, in 1942. The difference between this and earlier party rectifications was that this one would not be an exclusively internal affair. Mao no longer trusted the party to rectify itself. He intended to call upon the public at large, and especially intellectuals within the “democratic parties,” to speak out in criticism of the party. It was a highly unusual move. The Chinese Communist party was a tightly knit, powerful, and secretive organization, and non-party people had never been allowed to criticize it. Those who did risked being labeled counterrevolutionary, as hundreds of thousands of often innocent people already knew.
Moreover, Mao was deeply suspicious of China's intellectuals. Publicly, he advocated uniting with and using them, but he continued to doubt their loyalty. Politically, intellectuals had to be reformed. “Thought reform” of educated Chinese had begun immediately after liberation, which meant teaching them to toe the party line. When they did not, the most recalcitrant and vociferous were singled out for vitriolic attack.
The writer Hu Feng had been the most recent object of attack. An outspoken critic of Mao's insistence that literature should serve his political ends, Hu Feng had not feared to offer constructive criticisms directly to the Ministry of Culture. But his most outspoken attacks had been private, voiced only in conversations and letters with friends. Some of these friends were party loyalists who had handed their letters over to the authorities. In 1955, Hu was imprisoned as head of a “secret anti-party clique” for criticism he had naively believed to be private. Hu Feng's arrest did not incline other intellectuals to speak frankly, even among friends.
Mao's policy of encouraging intellectual debate, of letting “one hundred flowers bloom and one hundred schools of thought contend,” was a gamble, based on a calculation that genuine counterrevolutionaries were few, that rebels like Hu Feng had been permanently intimidated into silence, and that other intellectuals would follow Mao's lead, speaking out only against the people and practices Mao himself most wanted to subject to reform.
Mao had reason to believe that his gamble would work. Every time he met with representatives of the “democratic parties,” he was showered with the same obsequious flattery I had first witnessed from the provincial party leaders during our trip south in the summer of 1956. With the Hu Fengs silenced, the remaining intellectuals, loyalists, could be expected to follow Mao's lead.
At the Supreme State Conference in February 1957, after Mao blamed his own failure in leadership for the country's decline in economic production, Zhang Zhizhong, onetime Guomindang general and leading negotiator in the talks between the communists and the nationalists in 1945, rose to defend the Chairman. Zhang had defected to the communists in 1949, at the urging of Zhou Enlai. He had become an ardent, outspoken supporter of his erstwhile adversaries.
“I often compare the Chairman with Chiang Kai-shek,” Zhang said at the Supreme State Conference. Chiang Kai-shek, Zhang said, always blamed others when anything went wrong. He never took responsibility himself. Mao, though, blamed no one. “He takes responsibility himself. What a difference! How admirable!”
The criticisms Mao called for were slow in coming. Most intellectuals were afraid to speak out. Mao was such an overwhelming presence, surrounded by the aura of righteousness and power, that even the brave and the honest were overcome by awe, suddenly obsequious before him. The truth Mao so often extracted in private, face-to-face meetings was in the form of confessional, abject apologies for having doubted or wandered in the past. The confessions would be followed by promises of loyalty. Nothing about Mao's presence, in public or in private, encouraged dissidents to speak the truth and so he believed that his popular support was nearly universal.
When the intellectuals remained quiet, Mao rose from his bed and took to the podium again. At a National Propaganda Work Conference, held from March 6 to 13, 1957, attended by ranking party leaders and non-party “democratic elements,” Mao repeated the message of his February speech and again invoked the policy of “letting one hundred flowers bloom, one hundred schools of thought contend,” urging leaders of the “democratic parties” to overcome their hesitations and speak out. Newspaper articles repeated his theme and party leaders in local work units throughout the country took up the gauntlet. The more one loved the party, the saying went, the more one would speak out in criticism of it.
The rebukes, when they began, were mild and often petty.
Finally, the “democratic elements” began to oblige and criticism increased.
It was at this point, in early May, just as the criticisms were becoming strident, that I returned to Mao's side.
As days went on, the “mistakes” of the party were subjected to increasingly ruthless criticism. Finally, the very right of the party to rule was questioned. Not only were individual members of the party called to account, but the party as an institution was rebuked. People were suddenly arguing that the Communist party had no intrinsic right to rule, that power should be shared. Some people called for a multiparty system or a policy of political rotation, in which each party had a turn. A few misguided souls even argued that the “democratic parties” should have their own armies.
In the end, Mao's own leadership was criticized. The Communist party was likened to a Buddhist monastery where the abbot (Mao) dictated the “scriptures” that were then echoed by the monks—the leaders under Mao. Some people complained that they were allowed to criticize only the minor monks and not the abbot himself.
Mao of course was shocked. He had never intended that any of the criticisms be directed against him. He had never meant the party as an institution to come under attack. Accustomed as he was to the flattery of everyone he met, certain that his real enemies had been eliminated or put in jail, he had not realized the depth of the intellectuals' dissatisfaction.
By mid-May, the criticisms were reaching a zenith. The tide of Chinese public opinion seemed to be turning against the party. Even members of the State Council's Office of Counselors, high-level intellectuals from the “democratic parties” to whom the government frequently turned for advice, were joining the attacks. When one counselor stood up to make a speech defending the party, no one paid attention. The People's Daily, the Communist party's own newspaper, headed then by Deng Tuo and under the supervision of the deputy director of the party's Propaganda Department, my friend Hu Qiaomu, also ignored the counselor's speech.
Mao had grossly miscalculated. He stayed in bed, depressed and apparently immobilized, sick with the cold that called me back, as the attacks grew ever more intense. He was rethinking his strategy, plotting his revenge. He was furious.
On May 15, only days after my return, Mao wrote an article entitled “Things Are Changing,” which was secretly circulated to high-level leaders. The nature of the rectification campaign was soon to be transformed. Mao was planning a counterattack against those who had spoken out so vociferously in criticism. In the next few days, as local leaders and newspaper editors learned of the coming counterattack, newspapers were encouraged to continue publishing criticisms of the party while allowing defenses of the party and attacks against the “rightists” to be published, too.
“We want to coax the snakes out of their holes,” Mao told me around this time. “Then we will strike. My strategy is to let the poisonous weeds grow first and then destroy them one by one. Let them become fertilizer.” The intellectuals were still being encouraged to speak out, but party leaders now knew that a counterattack against them was about to begin.
“I wanted to use the democratic parties to rectify the Communist party,” Mao told me. “I never realized they were so unreliable.” He thought members of the Democratic League, formed in the 1940s by a group of intellectuals hoping to find a moderate solution somewhere between the communists and the nationalists, were the worst. “They are nothing but a bunch of bandits and whores,” he said. Khrushchev's attack on Stalin in February 1956 and the Hungarian revolt in the fall of that year had set off a tide of worldwide anti-communism, he thought, and in China both party officials and ordinary people had succumbed. Mao accused them of being muddle-headed.
He turned his wrath on Hu Qiaomu for having done nothing to stop the People's Daily's attacks on the party. “If you can't manage the newspaper,” he told Hu, whose job was to keep the editor of the party newspaper in check, “then resign and let others do it.” He told Hu to prepare for an attack on the rightists.
On June 8, 1957, the People's Daily published the first open hint that the policy of encouraging intellectuals to speak out was about to change. An article written by Mao, “What Is This For?,” accused a small number of people of attempting to overthrow the socialist government and called upon the masses to begin a counterattack.
On June 19, 1957, the speech Mao had given on February 27, in which he first encouraged intellectuals to speak out, was finally published in the People's Daily. Titled “On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People” and presented as an almost verbatim transcript of the original speech, it was in fact very different from Mao's original talk. Its tone completely reversed the liberal, conciliatory Mao. People who had heard the original speech said that in it, Mao had set no conditions on acceptable criticism. Critics were strongly encouraged to speak out, to let one hundred flowers bloom. There was no mention of “poisonous weeds” or of snakes coming out of their holes. But in the June 19 version of the speech, Mao set forth six constraints: Criticisms must serve to unite rather than divide; must serve to build socialism and to consolidate the people's democratic dictatorship; must help the socialist system, the leadership of the Communist party, and the unification of the international communist movement.
Just as Mao felt betrayed by the intellectuals who had spoken out, now it was the intellectuals' turn to feel grievously betrayed by Mao. His message to speak out had been echoed in newspapers and work units everywhere in China. Reluctantly, they had voiced their criticisms. And when they did, Mao turned against them.
Mao knew the intellectuals felt betrayed. “Now some of the rightists are saying that I plotted against them,” he said after the June 19 version of the speech was published. “They say that I urged them to participate in the blooming-and-contending campaign and then retaliated when they did as I said. But I haven't hatched any ‘secret plot.' I did it openly. I told the rightists to criticize us in order to help the party. I never asked them to oppose the party or to try to seize power from the party. I told them from the very beginning not to make trouble. ‘It won't be good for you to make trouble,' I warned them. ‘Just try to be helpful to the Communist party.' Some of them listened. But most of them didn't.” Mao, I know now, was being disingenuous. His strategy of using the intellectuals to criticize his foes within the party had backfired.
It was around this time, toward the end of June, about six weeks after my return, that the new security chief, Wang Jingxian, came to see me. “Get ready to take a trip,” he told me. Mao was leaving Beijing. Where he was going was still a secret, but Wang knew we would be gone for a while. The period of blooming and contending was over. Mao's campaign against the rightists had begun.