64
By January 1967, the country was in chaos. Fighting was breaking out, and some of the combatants had guns. Party and government offices were paralyzed. Factory production was plummeting. In some places, production had stopped altogether. Transportation was breaking down. Lin Biao and Jiang Qing were leading the rebels. “Overthrow everything” and “Wage civil war” were their slogans.
Factories and schools were split in two, with groups of militant rebels leading the attacks against the party committees while party supporters—the “protect-the-emperor faction”—fought aggressively back. The party committees were often badly divided, too. Party leaders everywhere were turning against each other in order to gain power themselves.
The conservatives still had the upper hand. Party committees over the years had amassed too much power to be easily overthrown. Ideology and principle had little to do with the struggles.
Mao took the side of the rebels. He wanted the conservative party committees purged. In late January, he called in the army to support the rebel left. He did this, he told me, because the Cultural Revolution cannot succeed unless we back the leftists. The army's job was to support the leftist masses, industry, and agriculture, and to carry out the militarization of all government agencies and give military training to all high school and college students. Within months, some 2 million soldiers had been called in to “support the left.”
In Beijing, Mao turned to Wang Dongxing and the troops of the Central Garrison Corps for support. The Central Garrison Corps—known now also by its code name,1 the 8341 Corps—stood outside the military chain of command. Mao had a direct line of communication with Wang Dongxing and could give orders without having to go through the cumbersome military bureaucracy of Lin Biao and the regional military commanders. But Mao did not see Wang Dongxing every day. I did. So I became part of the loop. Mao often ignored official protocol by asking me to pass his instructions on to Wang.
In the spring of 1967, I informed Wang Dongxing that Mao wanted him to send troops from the Central Garrison Corps into several factories in Beijing, beginning with Beijing Textile Factory. Wang, in turn, ordered his deputy at the Central Garrison Corps, Yang Dezhong, to establish an office for “supporting the left.” The “support-the-left office” established a “military-control committee,” consisting of some eighty members of the Central Garrison Corps. Responsibility for taking over Beijing Textile Factory was given to two members of the military-control commission, Long March veteran Gu Yuanxin and Central Garrison Corps political department deputy director Sun Yi. Gu and Sun soon led a team to the textile factory.
Mao would not let me sit on the sidelines. He wanted me to join the Central Garrison Corps team being dispatched to Beijing Textile Factory. I would serve as an observer and liaison—Mao's eyes and ears, he said—reporting back to the Chairman on the situation there. Other members of Group One were sent to other model factories.
I hated the assignment. It was a trap. The political situation was too complex for me to maneuver without making mistakes. I blamed Jiang Qing for the assignment. She was already accusing me of locking myself inside Zhongnanhai and refusing to get involved. Noninvolvement, which I regarded as a virtue, she saw as a vice. Mao, too, was insistent. He wanted me to participate in this Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Only then would he know for certain whose side I was on. It was an opportunity, he said, to transform myself through participation in the revolutionary storm.
I tried to compromise. I wanted to confine my activities to medical matters. I suggested to Mao that I form a medical team and go into the factories as head of the team. “This way we can approach the workers naturally and get the information we want,” I told him. He agreed.
I arrived in the factory in early July, a few weeks after the military commission.
Beijing Textile Factory was located in the eastern suburbs of the city, about a half-hour bicycle ride from Zhongnanhai, and it produced both cotton and polyester and specialized in the manufacture of underwear. The factory's greatest claim to fame was its export of women's underwear to Romania. The factory had close to one thousand workers, and they were divided into two factions. The party committee had already been overthrown, and the former party chief and his deputy had been demoted to foremen. But the struggle over which of the factions would ultimately control the plant continued. The vast majority of workers—eight hundred of the nearly one thousand—were watching the struggle from the sidelines, trying to avoid involvement. But the two hundred activists had thrown the place into turmoil. Management had completely broken down, no one was working, and fistfights were breaking out. Gu Yuanxin and Sun Yi, Wang Dongxing's representatives from the Central Garrison Corps, were nowhere close to settling the disputes. But they saw my arrival as a way to unite the two groups. They could use me to invoke the authority of Mao.
“We were sent here personally by Chairman Mao,” the two Garrison Corps officers insisted to the leaders of the two factions not long after my arrival. “Chairman Mao wants the two sides united.”
When the factory leaders refused to believe that the military team had been sent by Mao, I was brought out as proof. “If you don't believe us, take a look. Chairman Mao's own personal physician is with us.”
The factory leaders did not believe that I was Chairman Mao's doctor. I had come quietly, incognito. Outsiders were still not supposed to know my relationship to Mao.
The military team showed the factory leaders pictures of me standing next to the Chairman while he was reviewing the Red Guards. Their skepticism was shaken. I found out later that they had someone tail me when I left the factory. When they saw my car being waved into Zhongnanhai, they concluded that I must be Chairman Mao's doctor after all. With my own position thus demonstrated, the leaders of the contending factions could believe that the military commission really had been dispatched by Chairman Mao himself. Suddenly both the rebels and the “protect-the-emperor faction” were willing to compromise and accept the mediation of the military team. Their differences were quickly settled. In September 1967, a new “revolutionary committee” was established to run the factory, and production soon got rolling again.
I had been reporting frequently to Mao. He was delighted when I told him the news. He did not believe the working class had any basic internal differences. The workers should be united, he said. So Mao wrote a note to support the workers to prove that the military commission really was under his direct control. “Tongzhimen, nimen hao?” Mao wrote, handing the note to me. “Comrades, how are you?”
I passed the note to Wang Dongxing, who gave it in turn to the factory's new revolutionary committee. The committee members were so ecstatic that they immediately convened a meeting of the entire factory to “present” Chairman Mao's message to the workers. I refused their offer to sit on the stage, preferring to stay invisible. When the workers learned that Chairman Mao himself had written them a note—“Comrades, how are you?”—they went wild with cheers and applause. Mao's note was posted on the bulletin board in the factory courtyard, where everyone came to look. Then the factory leaders took a photograph of the note and had it enlarged to hundreds of times its original size. The inscription was as big as a wall. The enlarged photo was hung at the entrance to the factory for everyone to see whenever they arrived for work.
The newly established revolutionary committee was declared a model committee, operating under the personal direction of Chairman Mao. Much of the credit for the factory's success went to Wang Dongxing. By the spring of 1968 five other leading factories were under Wang Dongxing's control—the New China Printing Plant, the North Lumber Yard, the Second Chemical Plant, the Nankou Motor Vehicle Plant, and the February 7 Motor Vehicle Plant. These six factories were soon known throughout the country as Chairman Mao's personally directed model factories.
Suddenly everyone wanted to jump on the 8341 Corps band-wagon and come to Beijing Textile Factory to be under the direct control of Mao. The first group to join was dominated by female attendants from the Great Hall of the People and female staff from the Zhongnanhai General Office. An attendant from Room 118 organized the young women, and both Wang Dongxing and Mao welcomed their participation. The women, dressed for the occasion in military costume, arrived at the factory with great fanfare, enthusiastically welcomed by their male comrades, who gave them a huge rally. Reporters were there to record the event for history, and both People's Pictorial and Liberation Army Pictorial ran photos of the triumphant arrival at the textile factory of the “women soldiers.”
Jiang Qing was distressed when she saw the photographs, accusing the attendants from the Great Hall of the People of “disguising” themselves as soldiers. Everyone was dressing like soldiers then, including Jiang Qing. But Jiang Qing resented lowly attendants assuming the lofty position of soldier. She was quickly silenced when Wang Dongxing assured her that Mao himself had authorized the team and permitted its members to wear military uniforms.
Lin Biao's wife, Ye Qun, and chief of the general staff Huang Yongsheng were next to visit the factory and bestow their blessings on its great accomplishment as a model personally directed by Chairman Mao. They singled out Sun Yi, the deputy director of the military-control committee, for particular praise. Promising him a promotion, they invited Sun to relate the story of his successful negotiations to a meeting of the Military Affairs Commission and the headquarters of the air force. Having thus established a solid friendship with Sun Yi, Ye Qun and Huang Yongsheng began intruding into the management of the factory, sending their own representatives as permanent observers.
With the participation of Ye Qun and Huang Yongsheng, the line from Mao to the factory was no longer so straight. I thought the primary loyalty of both Wang Dongxing and Sun Yi ought to be with Mao and never trusted the “leadership” Ye Qun was bringing to the plant. I was afraid her interference might bring trouble to Wang Dongxing and Sun Yi. What if Sun Yi were to boast of his close relationship with Ye Qun and Huang Yongsheng? Would not the Chairman become suspicious?
I raised my concerns with Wang Dongxing. “Sun Yi is your subordinate, and Mao might think you're switching loyalties,” I explained.
But Wang Dongxing did not agree. His power was growing as the Cultural Revolution unfolded, and he was entering into alliances with whoever would further his goal. His hatred of Jiang Qing continued unabated, and his long-term aim was to bring her down. Lin Biao was important to his long-term goals, and he took every opportunity he could to build political support with the man who was slated to become Mao's successor.
During Lin Biao's illness in August 1966, after I accompanied Wang to visit him, Wang Dongxing told me that he had made a private visit, taking the opportunity to explain the nature of his work with Mao. Convinced that Lin Biao's alliance with Jiang Qing was merely expedient, Wang also told Lin about his own ongoing conflict with the Chairman's wife. Wang seemed convinced that once Lin Biao's power was secure, he might be willing to break his alliance with Jiang.
By August, that alliance had been forged. Lin Biao promised to protect Wang should he ever be in trouble. Wang Dongxing agreed to keep Lin Biao informed of important developments around Mao.
Wang's strategy was dangerous in the extreme. “If anybody leaks this agreement, it will be disastrous,” I told him.
Wang thought otherwise. “I swear I will do everything I can to bring Jiang Qing down,” he insisted. “Leak? Who will leak? Not you, not me.” I was the only person, so far as I know, whom Wang told about his covenant with Lin Biao. But every time I saw the effusive greetings Wang extended to Lin Biao and his wife, I felt queasy. I was always uncomfortable with Lin Biao's leadership and knew Mao's demand for loyalty was total. Wang Dongxing was playing with fire.
1 During the Cultural Revolution, as many party secrets were revealed, the code name for the Central Garrison Corps was also made public. Afterward, all military units were assigned new numbers, but the Central Garrison Corps continued to be referred to popularly as the 8341 Corps.