21
We traveled as usual on Mao's luxurious train, the schedule still tied to the Chairman's unorthodox sleeping habits. But the security arrangements were completely changed. Mao's personal entourage had been reduced to less than a tenth of the force that used to accompany us when Wang Dongxing was in charge. Wang Jingxian, a timid man who had taken over as head of Mao's security forces, had been reluctant to take on his awesome assignment. He was following Mao's wishes to the letter, reducing the Zhongnanhai security staff to a minimum and relying primarily on local security forces for protection.
Once Mao decided on a counterattack, his health quickly revived; his cold was gone and his old vigor and spirit were back. He had plenty of time to talk en route, and so did Lin Ke, and my conversations with both helped me catch up on news of the events in my absence. Often I would hear my late-night conversations with Mao delivered a day or two later in the form of a speech.
“I handle opponents by letting them attack first,” Mao told me. “Only later do I strike back. I have three rules: First, I follow the ancient philosopher Laozi. I, the father, do not initiate action.1 When under attack, I retreat, doing nothing, remaining silent. We let the enemy feel he has scored a few points.” If we were to answer enemies immediately, Mao said, they would not dare to show their true face. So he wanted to wait until they exposed themselves. Only then do we retaliate, doing to them what they have been doing to us, Mao said. “This is the Confucian way.”
It was not really the Confucian way but a tactic Mao used with both the rightists and his foes within the party.
“In the beginning, people didn't know who the rightists were or what they looked like, and it was hard for us to explain,” Mao continued. “But now we can identify them clearly. They are counterrevolutionaries. No—don't call them counterrevolutionaries. That doesn't sound good. Just call them rightists.”
Mao's second rule was that he did not imprison his opponents unless they had committed some egregious deed, something, he said, that really antagonized the people. “They can work,” he said. “Why should we waste their productive power by imprisoning them? If they aren't qualified to be leaders, their labor can still produce something of value. This method has a long tradition in Chinese history.”
Mao's third rule was that opponents would be reformed within their own work units. The work unit would be responsible for observing the rightists' behavior and listening to what they said. Rightists teach by negative example, he said, letting us know what is wrong and bad. If rightists can be properly reformed, Mao said, that was fine. They'll feel good after they have been rectified. Those who cannot be rectified, whose minds are as hard as granite, will just die with their granite brains intact. “There is nothing else we can do,” he said. But he doubted that many people were that hardheaded.
Mao thought that just about everyone could be reformed. Everyone can become a good person, he said. “A cow is not born tilling the land or giving us milk. An untrained horse can't be ridden. Cows and horses have to be domesticated in order to benefit man. A counterrevolutionary—or, for that matter, a spy—must have some sort of special talent. If not, how could he become a counterrevolutionary or a spy or a rightist? So why can't we reform them and make use of their talent?”
Mao's greatest anger was reserved for the Democratic League. “There's not a single good person in it,” he said. “We thought about disbanding the League, but we wanted to try to unite with them. But now the Communist party is going to rectify the Democratic League and all the other democratic parties. We're going to single out hundreds of thousands of rightists. We won't kill anyone, though, because if we were to kill anyone we would have to kill them all. This is a rule we laid down during the rectification campaign in Yanan in the early 1940s, when Wang Shiwei launched an attack on the party and published Wild Lilies. When we investigated, we discovered that Wang was a Trotskyite and a secret agent, but I insisted that he not be killed. It was when we were retreating from Yanan under Guomindang attack that our security forces executed him. They were afraid he might try to run away. I criticized them for killing him.”
The writer Wang Shiwei had published scathing criticisms of the party in Yanan, accusing the leaders of living the good life even as they preached asceticism and egalitarianism. While the leaders danced, ordinary Chinese were suffering desperately in the struggle against the Japanese invasion. Critical though he was, Wang was no Trotskyite, and when I read Wild Lilies years after my conversation with Mao, I knew that Wang's accusations had been correct. He had been criticizing the same corruption I saw later in Zhongnanhai. The degeneration of the party had begun as early as Yanan, I realized.
We stopped first in Jinan, Shandong, and then traveled on to Shanghai, where we were hosted by one of Mao's most ardent supporters, mayor Ke Qingshi. Ke Qingshi was the only party leader who had actually seen Lenin. He had been studying at the University of the Orient in the Soviet Union and was working in a factory when Lenin gave an address. Mao said that Ke had never forgotten the scene, as though the influence of seeing Lenin had led Ke Qingshi to become a great revolutionary. “See how powerful the influence of a great leader can be on the people?” Mao said when he told me the story.
Ke had arranged for the Chairman to stay in the opulent bronzeroofed marble mansion once owned by Silas Hardoon, a Jewish businessman who had made his fortune in Shanghai in the 1910s. Located in the heart of the city and enclosed by high brick walls, the grounds of the estate were still magnificent, the rolling green lawns dotted with frog-filled lily ponds and ancient trees. But Mao was uncomfortable with this Western-style opulence and insisted, over Ke's objections, on moving back to his train.
Unlike Mao's earlier trips, this visit to Shanghai was a public event. Everyone knew he was there. He wanted the country to know that he was in charge and that a campaign against rightists had begun.
The anti-rightist campaign in Shanghai was already unfolding. We visited a factory where workers had already put up “big character posters”—huge sheets of paper covered with large characters whose messages attacked the rightists. Mao declared the big character posters a great creation. He delivered a speech to local party, army, and government cadres. He met with the city's leading leftist artists—the writer Ba Jin, the actor Zhao Dan, his wife, Huang Zongying, and the actress Qing Yi.
Mao in attack was Mao on the move. We soon left the bustle of Shanghai for the peace of Hangzhou, the most beautiful of China's cities, its West Lake the most enchanting spot in the world. I have never seen anything so exquisite as the place where we stayed. Liuzhuang, it was called. Now remodeled and modernized for Mao, it had once been the home of a fabulously wealthy tea merchant. Located on a flower-filled, secluded peninsula that jutted into West Lake, Liuzhuang was smaller and more tasteful than the Summer Palace in Beijing, its gardens bigger and more opulent than those of Suzhou. Built in the traditional style, the numerous tile-roofed buildings were set in the middle of ponds and streams and connected to each other by graceful arched white-marble bridges. The fish were as plentiful as the flowers, and our chef was deft in transforming the daily catch into delicious dishes.
Soviet leader Anastas Mikoyan came to meet Mao in Hangzhou. He was on a secret mission to soothe Mao's feelings over the recent Malenkov-Molotov purge—and for some difficult talks on China's proposed development of nuclear weapons. Mao asked me to see him.
A short, stooped man of about sixty, the Soviet leader was suffering from arthritis in his back and legs and wondered whether acupuncture would help. I arranged for him to see a famous acupuncturist in Beijing, but as we chatted about his health, he offered me a glass of vodka and switched the topic to the perils of nuclear war. His discussions with Mao had clearly shaken him, and he needed to talk. He was greatly distressed by Mao's nonchalance about the massive loss of human life.
Mao had been expounding his “paper tiger” theory again, arguing that China could afford to lose tens of millions of people in a nuclear war. Mikoyan wanted to impress on me the horrible destructiveness of the atom bomb. He hoped that China would learn from the experience of the Soviet Union and cease trying to build the bomb. The cost—millions and millions of rubles—was only one consideration. He also described the debilitating illness—aplastic anemia, in which the bone marrow loses the ability to produce blood cells—that had killed a senior Soviet official in charge of testing the bomb.
“I am a physician,” I had replied to his warnings. “I know very little about the atom bomb. But from the point of view of medical ethics, I oppose it. It is just like other weapons. It kills people.”
I had no right to discuss such sensitive issues with leaders of foreign countries and felt compelled to report the conversation to Mao. But for Mao the issue of the atom bomb was one of control, not human lives. “Mikoyan told me, too, that the Soviet bombs were enough for both our countries,” he said. “ ‘The Soviet nuclear umbrella can cover us all.' But the Soviet Union wants to control us,” he insisted. “That's why they don't want us to have the bomb. The fact is they can never control us. The Soviet Union is worried that we don't listen to them. They're afraid we might provoke the United States. But we're not afraid of getting into trouble with other countries. I will definitely develop the atom bomb. You can count on it. Nobody should try to restrict us. Nobody should try to intimidate us. No one can lord it over us.”
If Mao was willing to lose so many ordinary Chinese people to nuclear war, why should he not be willing to allow the deaths of tens of thousands of rightists? He might not order their executions, just as he had not ordered the death of Wang Shiwei, but he would do nothing to intervene.
Mao gave another talk in Hangzhou and then rested a few days, but we soon moved on to Nanjing, staying at a villa once owned by a Guomindang official. It was already July and Nanjing was sweltering, the temperature often climbing to over one hundred degrees. Mao was always less bothered by the heat than I. His aides would bring fresh barrels of ice to his room each day; as Mao discoursed on the anti-rightist campaign, the ice melted and I sweated.
The campaign was swirling like a tempest outside. Mao was reading the domestic Internal Reference with relish, savoring the criticisms of the rightists that filled its pages. Our nocturnal chats became more frequent, often extending into the early-morning hours. That he was sleeping less seemed only to exhilarate him, as did the unfolding political drama.
Lin Ke, who had been in close contact with Mao while I was at Beijing Hospital, told me his political analysis of Mao's new mood. He thought that Mao was being forced to make temporary peace with his opponents within the party in order to launch a united counterattack against the intellectuals outside the party who had been so vociferous in their rebukes. Deng Xiaoping was put in charge of the anti-rightist campaign. Deng had sometimes irritated Mao, but he was not one of those Mao had accused of foot-dragging. Only much later would I learn with what vengeance Deng conducted the anti-rightist campaign and how viciously he attacked those who would undermine the party's rule.
From the vantage of hindsight, I see Mao's attempts to rectify the party in 1957 as an abortive Cultural Revolution. What we remember most about 1957 today are the terrors committed against the rightists outside the party. But in the beginning Mao's antagonists were actually leading members within the party, men who had slighted him, belittled his power, and urged caution when Mao insisted on plunging ahead with his utopian socialist dreams. Mao wanted these opponents attacked, perhaps even ousted. But he did not want the socialist system or the right of the Communist party to rule called into question. Above all, he did not want his own rule to be undermined. Faced with attacks from outside the party, Mao was forced back into temporary alliance with his opponents within the party. They, in turn, now joined him enthusiastically because their right to rule, even more than Mao's, had also been called into question.
But Mao had put the party leadership on notice that he could call upon outsiders to attack them, and the implicit threat stood as a sword over the heads of those who might challenge his rule. Most leaders, for the time being, fell in line with Mao's demands. Fear that Mao would again unleash his own anger, and the wrath of the intellectuals, against them was as much a reason for their support of his later Great Leap Forward as their shared belief in his utopian dreams. Mao was still testing the party leadership. The Chairman was struggling to regain control, regrouping his forces, mustering his strength, prepared to strike back at a later time.
In the meantime, he wanted to call a party meeting to take stock of the situation. Nanjing was too hot. Jiang Weiqing, the crippled first party secretary of Jiangsu province, where Nanjing is located, assembled several provincial leaders to come up with a more hospitable venue.
They decided on Qingdao, the coastal resort in Shandong province once controlled by the Germans, where the weather was cool and the swimming excellent. The weather was too hot for the Chairman to travel by train, so we flew in two Soviet-built IL-14 airplanes, stopping briefly in Jinan, where Mao gave a rousing speech against the rightists—an abbreviated version of the meandering discourses of our late-night chats—to a group of party and military cadres from the Shandong region.
Qingdao, cooled by a refreshing sea breeze, was a welcome respite from the furnace of Nanjing. The town was hilly like San Francisco and German in flavor, with rows of neat red-brick, red-roofed houses set among lush shrubbery and trees, surrounded by red-brick walls. Mao and his personal entourage stayed in the magnificent hilltop castle that had once housed the region's German governor. The view was spectacular—a panoramic vista of the city and the sea.
Mao visited the town's most famous attractions—the aquarium, which was considered the best in China; Shandong University, where Jiang Qing claimed to have audited the lectures of the noted Shakespearian scholar Liang Shiqiu; and a locomotive factory, where Mao and the workers both seemed delighted to meet, even though Mao only waved and did not speak. Security measures in Qingdao were heavy. Mao's presence in the resort was supposed to be secret, but between his sight-seeing excursions and the extensive security precautions, the residents surely had cause to wonder. Many of Qingdao's streets remained closed to both vehicles and pedestrians.
The meeting of provincial and municipal-level party secretaries began on July 17, 1957, shortly after our arrival, and went on for several days, with the discussions focusing on the unfolding anti-rightist campaign and how to further the socialist transformation. The People's Daily published Mao's report from the conference in an article entitled “The Political Conditions in the Summer of 1957.” It was yet another attack on the rightists and a restatement of his vision of socialism—modern industry and agriculture built by a huge army of socialist-minded technocrats. Mao spoke in paradoxes—of the centralization of power and of democracy, of discipline and freedom, of unity through ideology and of individual will. The task, he said, was to surpass the United States economically within forty or fifty years, beginning from 1953, and to move from socialism to communism. Something was germinating in Mao's mind. It was not yet clear what it was.
From the protective cocoon of Mao's personal entourage, living in unimaginable luxury, shielded from the mundane world, I had no way of conceiving what the anti-rightist campaign was really about—how widespread the attacks might be, what it meant to those who were singled out, what types of punishment were being handed down. Even Mao's conversations had an air of unreality. The implications of what he said were almost impossible for me to grasp.
And I was very busy in Qingdao, preoccupied with problems that had nothing to do with politics.
1 Laozi, in Chinese, means both Laozi the philosopher and “father.” Mao intended both meanings.