65
My relations with Mao had been deteriorating, too. He was suspicious of everyone and interpreted my reluctance to get politically involved as a sign of less than total loyalty to him. One did not need to side with the opposition to make Mao suspicious. Staying on the political sidelines roused his suspicions, too.
The first concrete sign of Mao's displeasure came on July 13, 1967. Mao was leaving for Wuhan that day, and for the first time since I had taken over as his doctor, he did not invite me to go. Lin Biao had suggested that one doctor from the army and another from the air force accompany him.
I was alarmed, and so was Wang Dongxing. My exclusion from the trip, he was certain, was the work of Jiang Qing. Lin Biao did not know enough to suggest that I stay behind. Jiang Qing must have made the suggestion to him, and Wang was afraid she would use the occasion of Mao's absence to destroy me.
The violence of the Cultural Revolution elsewhere continued to spread. Organizations were split. The beatings and fistfights continued, and so did the use of guns. The situation in Wuhan, where Mao had spent so much time, was particularly serious. He was going there to mediate.
Beijing was on the verge of chaos. With Mao gone, Jiang Qing would be in control, and Wang Dongxing feared that I might be kidnapped by someone on her side. He urged me not to return to the textile factory. One of her agents could grab me there. “Stay in Zhongnanhai,” he said. “If you get into trouble, come immediately to join us in Wuhan.” In Zhongnanhai, at least if trouble broke out I could find a way to communicate with Wuhan.
I did stay in Zhongnanhai, but only to witness Wang Dongxing's worst fears come true. With Mao gone and Jiang Qing's group in control, even that privileged haven soon disintegrated into violence.
Head of state Liu Shaoqi was the primary object of attack. Hundreds of young student protesters began gathering outside the west gate shortly after Mao left the city, filling Fuyou Street to the west of Zhongnanhai and shouting slogans demanding the overthrow of Liu. The vermilion walls were plastered with big character posters attacking the man Mao had once declared his successor. As the afternoon wore on, the crowd grew larger, and traffic stopped altogether. That night the students set up camp outside the gate. The place was a mess with so many people, and the smell, from thousands of sweaty bodies in the heat of July, the rotten food, and the open, makeshift toilets was nauseating. I remained in Zhongnanhai, sleeping uneasily in my office, wary of what each new day might bring. Never in the history of the People's Republic had Zhongnanhai been besieged. Members of Wang Dongxing's Central Garrison Corps, responsible for protecting the leaders' compound, were standing impassively by as the crowd of protesters continued to grow. Whatever Wang Dongxing may have thought was of little consequence then. He was in Wuhan with Mao.
On July 18, the situation turned nasty. I was in my office reading the morning newspaper when a guard rushed in. Liu Shaoqi was being “struggled against” outside the State Council auditorium. I ran there immediately.
A crowd had gathered, consisting mostly of cadres from the General Office's Bureau of Secretaries. 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.
I left the struggle session against Liu Shaoqi and went first to the living quarters of Deng Xiaoping and his wife, Zhuo Lin, and then to see Tao Zhu and his wife, Zeng Zhi. They, too, were being struggled against, though not quite as violently. The two men and their wives were being pushed and shoved and jeered at by a crowd, but there was no kicking or beating.
Yang Dezhong was observing the attacks, too, and I asked him what had happened. The Central Cultural Revolution Small Group had announced the night before that the top leaders would be struggled against today. Yang had called Wang Dongxing as soon as he heard the announcement but had received no word from Wang since.
Wang was in a difficult position. He could not inform Mao directly of the violence in Zhongnanhai. To make such a report would be to oppose a decision of the increasingly powerful Central Cultural Revolution Small Group, and no one would dare risk criticizing the rising leftists. Besides, Wang's relations with Mao had long been strained over the question of Liu Shaoqi. Wang had accompanied Liu and his wife on their trip to Indonesia in 1963. Mao had given his formal approval and Wang had met with the Chairman afterward to report, but Mao's suspicion that Wang was too close to Liu Shaoqi remained, and Wang did not want to appear to be siding with the man Mao was determined to overthrow.
On July 21, three days after the struggle sessions against Liu, Deng, and Tao, Wang Dongxing called me. He had gone to Shanghai. Mao was there, too. An air force plane was waiting for me at the Beijing airport. I was to join them in Shanghai immediately.
Within hours, I was in Shanghai, being escorted to the western suburbs guesthouse, where Mao and his entourage were staying. Security for the Chairman had not been so tight in years. More than a hundred armed guards from the Central Garrison Corps were there, in addition to the local Shanghai security forces. Violence was everywhere now, and the safety of the Chairman was a matter of continual concern. His staff of secretaries, clerks, and couriers had also grown, and every room in the sprawling complex was filled.
Mao was suffering from one of his frequent attacks of bronchitis and had a new venereal complaint as well—genital herpes. His sexual contacts were too far-flung and my own relations with the Chairman were too strained for me to be able to identify the source. I treated it with Chinese herbal medicine and administered Ceporin for his bronchitis. I cautioned him that herpes was contagious and could spread through sexual contact, but he ignored my warnings. He did not think the problem was so bad.
The Chairman wanted to talk and asked me about the situation in Beijing. I told him that the rebels had seized Zhongnanhai and described the violent struggle sessions against Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xioping, and Tao Zhu. Mao was silent. Uncertain of my political stand, he was more reserved with me now than in the past. But his silence was also a sign of displeasure over the events in Beijing.
I saw him again that night, and he asked me to repeat my description of the situation in Zhongnanhai. “They just don't listen to me,” he complained when I had finished, referring to the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group, which included his wife. Mao insisted that he had told them not to abuse the three leaders. “They ignored me,” he insisted, clearly upset with the Small Group. I concluded that he had not ordered the attacks after all.
I stayed with Mao in Shanghai for close to a month. He was waiting to return to Wuhan. Mao had gone to Wuhan on July 14, but the situation was so unstable that Zhou Enlai, who was also there, feared for the Chairman's safety and persuaded him to leave. The factional struggles in Wuhan had become violent. Chen Zaidao, the Wuhan military commander who had nearly drowned when he tried to swim upstream during Mao's first dip in the Yangtze, had been under heavy attack from the opposing rebel faction, which was trying to overthrow him. Before Mao went to Wuhan to mediate, the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group had sent the ultraleftist Wang Li to negotiate a reconciliation between the contending sides, but in fact Wang Li had supported the rebels opposing Chen Zaidao. Chen Zaidao's faction was so enraged with Wang Li that they seized him and put him under arrest.
It was then that Zhou Enlai went to Wuhan to investigate the situation and to negotiate for the release of Wang Li. Then Mao arrived, staying as usual in Meiyuan guesthouse, on East Lake. Some of Chen Zaidao's supporters, still holding Wang Li in custody but determined to demonstrate their loyalty to Mao, swam to the island where Mao was staying, hoping to meet the Chairman and explain their side of the story. Mao's security guards arrested the swimmers and took them into custody.
When Mao learned what happened, he opposed the arrest of the swimmers. Even as the rebel faction accused the swimmers of plotting to bring harm to the Chairman, Mao, confident of the adulation of the masses and knowing that Chen Zaidao was still his loyal supporter, was certain the swimmers only wanted to talk. He wanted to meet with both groups and negotiate a reconciliation between them. Zhou Enlai was nervous. The disputants were armed, and Zhou wanted to put some of them under arrest. He feared for Mao's safety and urged the Chairman to leave Wuhan immediately. Zhou himself would stay behind to negotiate the reconciliation.
Mao went to Shanghai while Zhou stayed to negotiate. Through Zhou's mediation, Wang Li was finally released, and both Wang Li and Chen Zaidao were escorted to Beijing.
A month later, I flew with Mao on his return to Wuhan. Mao did not think there were any counterrevolutionaries among the two Wuhan factions, he told me as the plane was circling over the city preparing to land. “The trouble is that Wang Li provoked them into fighting. And when Zhou Enlai came to mediate the dispute, the fighting scared him to death. He forced me to flee to Shanghai in a hurry. But there aren't any counterrevolutionary factions here.” Mao thought that Wang Li, Guan Feng, and Qi Benyu—three of the most provocative members of the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group—were the ones who had fomented the trouble and allowed the feuding to get out of hand.
Mao's return to Wuhan was triumphant. To prove that there were no counterrevolutionaries and no one who wanted to harm him, he rode slowly through the streets in an open jeep, with me sitting directly behind him and one hundred armed guards in civilian clothes surrounding us. Enthusiastic crowds, representing both the pro– and the anti–Chen Zaidao factions, lined the streets yelling, “Long Live Chairman Mao! Long Live Chairman Mao!” This was Mao's way of “receiving the masses of the two factions.”
In Mao's absence, Beijing remained in the hands of the leftists, and Wang Li and Guan Feng turned their attacks against Mao's old colleague foreign minister Marshal Chen Yi. Chen Yi had been outspoken in his criticism of the Cultural Revolution, joining with other ranking military leaders in February 1967 to protest military involvement and challenging the excesses of the young Red Guards. In August, Wang Li and Guan Feng, with Jiang Qing's support, organized a group called the May 16 Rebels, named after the circular announcing the start of the Cultural Revolution. They seized control of Chen Yi's Foreign Ministry and later burned the offices of the British chargé d'affaires to the ground.
Mao had Wang Li and Guan Feng purged immediately upon his return to Beijing in August. The arrest of their associate Qi Benyu took place the following January.
Wang Li, Guan Feng, and Qi Benyu were radical and provocative to be sure, but they were only scapegoats. The real power within the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group lay with Kang Sheng, Chen Boda, and Jiang Qing. They were making the decisions. Mao was clearly unhappy with Jiang Qing. One day while we were still at Meiyuan guesthouse in Wuhan and Mao was reading some short stories by Lu Xun, he suddenly looked up and began talking about one of the least likable of Lu Xun's female protagonists, a promiscuous maid named A Jin, whose many boyfriends were always making noise, getting in trouble, and picking fights. A Jin was a woman who enjoyed making trouble for others. “Ye Qun is just like A Jin,” Mao said, referring to Lin Biao's wife. “So is Jiang Qing.”
But even with all the trouble his wife was then making, even though he was obviously perturbed, Mao still made no move to stop her.