There was one aspect of Chinese life that did not
change after the communist victory in 1949:
China continued to be ruled autocratically by a
powerful leader who used the threat of punishment
to keep the people under control. Mao
Zedong manipulated a tight group of supporters
in the central party apparatus, ridding himself of
‘enemies’. During the twenty-seven years from
1949 to his death in 1976, his was the guiding
spirit. He made clever use of the Politburo
members to represent a variety of policies, from
the radical and revolutionary socialist to the more
pragmatic reformist. Mao would back one group
against another according to what suited his
immediate purpose; he felt no personal loyalties.
This way of operating allowed him every option,
and a change of policy would discredit yesterday’s
men rather than the chairman. Mao believed in
driving the revolution forward by appeals to the
masses, but just as important was the exercise of
control through coercion. The great surges of
revolutionary fervour were masterminded by Mao
himself, though at crisis-points he expediently
accepted pauses, even temporary reversals. Thus
the revolutionary drives were interspersed with
periods of retrenchment during which economic
recovery was permitted to take precedence over
revolution. But Mao feared that too long a
soft period would weaken mass revolutionary
ardour and lead China back onto the capitalist
road to ‘bourgeois values’, instead of advancing
it towards a communist utopia.
Continuous revolution, faith in the power of
the masses and in his ability to compel them to
follow his lead, self-help if foreign aid was not
available without unacceptable strings, the need
to propel China irrevocably towards its communist
goal – these remained Mao’s consistent guidelines
even when abrupt changes of direction
bewildered the outside world. Those who opposed
him were ruthlessly eliminated. The picture of
the benign, fatherly Mao was as much a product
of propaganda as that of ‘Uncle Joe’.
Soon after Mao’s death in 1976, the concepts
of ‘revolution’ and ‘socialism’ were replaced by
new ideas about modernisation; class conflict was
dropped from the official vocabulary; capitalist
experiments were encouraged. Much of Mao’s
revolutionary Marxism was now condemned. Yet
in one crucial respect there was no change. The
all-powerful inner group of party leaders could
alone decide on the proper course China should
follow. As none of Mao’s successors could hope
to achieve his prestige, the struggles within the
party leadership assumed a new significance.
Mobilising the masses involved the use of terror
against those designated as the enemy. Whole
families were made to suffer for the alleged delinquency
or opposition of any one of its members.
Revolutions require enemies and after 1949 these
enemies were ‘uncovered’ not only outside the
continental confines of China but also within. The
first target was the hated landlord class, who were
delivered up to peasant vengeance. During the
first four years of communist rule some threequarters
of a million enemies, principally landowners,
were summarily executed. Four-fifths of
China’s population lived in the countryside, so
Mao was making sure that they would view the
revolution favourably: this was the first step
towards their mass indoctrination. To this end
Mao allowed the landlords’ holdings to be divided
up among the peasants – a step backwards from
his ideal of a socialised peasantry.
The redistribution of land after 1950 gave the
peasants what they most hungered after. Their
tiny holdings, although still meagre, were on
average doubled or trebled in size. The richer
peasants, the so-called ‘middle peasants’, benefited
the most. The extortion of taxes was abolished
and a more just system introduced. Before
the road to communism could be taken, China’s
industrial strength had to be built up and greater
yields obtained from the land. The Chinese head
of state, Liu Shaoqui, declared these to be the
country’s basic policy aims; Mao, chairman of the
party and the undisputed overall leader of China,
was prepared until the mid-1950s to bide his time
before driving the revolution on. From 1949 to
1955 the party preached harmony (except for its
hostility towards feudal landlords and agents of
Chiang Kai-shek). In the cities private enterprise
and ownership were allowed to persist in a mixed
economy, while in the vast rural areas socialist
schemes were brought in gradually and were
always voluntary. The peasant owned his land, but
‘mutual aid teams’ introduced shared labour and
shared use of animals and equipment, and a
number of cooperatives were formed. The most
urgent task in 1949 was reconstruction. For this
the professionals, the engineers, the businessmen
and the owners of factories in the newly liberated
areas were for the time being indispensable, and
they were provided with the class label of
‘national bourgeoisie’.
Mao’s China in 1949 proclaimed not a communist
republic but the People’s Democratic
Dictatorship. Democratic did not mean that the
proletariat would be supreme in the state; rather,
it meant that the four classes of peasants, workers,
petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie
would work together under the leadership of the
party to bring about China’s recovery. How long
this apparent harmony would be allowed to continue
only Mao knew. While he presided over an
apparently cohesive central party committee,
allowing his principal lieutenants wide-ranging
debate over different policy options and acting as
chairman, receiving advice from different quarters,
his deeper purpose was revealed by his incessant
discovery of new contradictions, his stirring
up of new conflicts. In 1951 he launched a campaign
against the ‘three evils’ of corruption, waste
and bureaucracy among the local communist
cadres, its purpose being to increase central
control and keep local party officials on their toes.
The following year was added a campaign against
the ‘five evils’; this time the masses were aroused
against the ‘bourgeoisie’ in a struggle to eradicate
bribery of government officials, tax evasion, theft
of state property, cheating on government contracts
and speculation. In this way private industrial
and commercial enterprises were constantly
threatened. Mao’s revolution fed on fear, intimidation
and denunciation – three genuine evils of
the system.
Nevertheless, the first years of communist rule
also brought about genuine improvements for
most of the Chinese people. The cessation of
fighting and destruction was the greatest and most
immediate. There was also a measure of mass idealism,
as the people acted together to improve
conditions. This was most noticeable in the cities,
where neighbourhood groups organised by party
officials tackled the sanitation systems and spread
poison to get rid of the rats, carriers of disease.
Life on the land and in the factories was made
more congenial. One measure of success was a
dramatic fall in the mortality rate. After the
ruinous inflation of the Kuomintang years, prices
had become stable. Living standards, especially of
the poorest peasants, had risen. In the cities
unemployment was halved, attendance at school
and college nearly doubled; cholera and plagues
had been brought under control. The gross
output of industry was one and a half times greater
in 1952 than it had been in 1949; agricultural
output, on which the country depended, was up
by half. Roads and railway lines were constructed.
These were the considerable accomplishments.
In 1952 Mao set out the general line of policy
to be followed. China was in a period of transition,
from the foundation of what was now
called the People’s Republic to the socialist transformation
of agriculture, industry and handicrafts,
to be accomplished ‘step by step over a
fairly long period of time’. The priorities were to
increase production, to raise standards of living,
and to strengthen China’s defences. Liu Shaoqui
announced at the Eighth Party Congress in 1956
that the transition to socialism had been largely
accomplished and would be completed over the
next decade.
During the early years of Mao’s rule China
conducted itself aggressively on the international
stage. In 1950–1, it claimed sovereignty over
Tibet, overcoming local resistance with great brutality.
The US developed an implacable hostility to
China and maintained its support for Chiang Kaishek
in Taiwan. The outbreak of the Korean War
opened another front, when Mao, overriding his
more cautious advisers, decided on China’s intervention
in November 1950. Isolated from the
West, China had no alternative but to align itself
with the Soviet Union. The Korean War imposed
huge strains and sacrifices on China, and until the
armistice was signed at Panmunjon in July 1953,
Mao had to restrain his revolutionary drive.
When planning began in 1953 to increase
China’s industrial base, the Soviet model was
adopted. The Russians provided assistance and
sent 10,000 engineers to work with the Chinese
while three times that number of Chinese were
accepted for training in the Soviet Union. Plants,
machinery and technical designs all came from
Russia. The emphasis was on the expansion of
energy supplies and heavy industry – iron and
steel mills, electricity power stations, machinetool
factories. In all, 156 projects were sponsored
by the Soviet Union. Without this help China’s
modernisation of industry would have been far
slower. America’s Marshall Aid to Europe likewise
accelerated the recovery and prosperity of
Western Europe, but it came in the form of loans
and grants that enabled the Europeans to import
from the US what they needed. Soviet aid came
in the form of people, training and technology,
but the Chinese had to pay for them. The Soviet
Union needed capital for its own reconstruction
and its loans to China were small. But the joint
Soviet–Chinese companies that had been established
were not a success. Mao insisted on complete
Chinese sovereignty and they were dissolved
in 1954 after Stalin’s death.
Just as the First Five-Year Plan was getting
under way, Mao bypassed the central party leadership
and in 1955 began his long campaign to
transform China’s independent landowning peasantry
into collectivised socialist workers on the
land. Despite vicissitudes, Mao never abandoned
that aim and had substantially achieved it by the
time of his death. But the cost to China was huge.
The famines that followed alone caused some 20
million deaths.
Mao’s plans for collectivisation illustrate his
determination to build socialism with Chinese
characteristics. The peasant continued to own his
home and, in less radical phases, small plots – but
the rest of the land and all the labour were collectivised
in three tiers. The bottom tier was
called the production team, perhaps a village of
thirty or forty families. Everything was pooled and
the earnings of the team shared out between
them. A larger collectivised unit was the production
brigade, made up of several production
teams. Production brigades together formed the
collectives. Whether earnings would be accounted
for and distributed at the production team,
brigade or collective level depended on Mao’s
decree and varied with different phases of more
or less radical policies.
The better-off ‘middle peasants’ were reluctant
to cooperate with the poorer, and the production
of rice and soya beans, staple Chinese foods,
scarcely kept pace with the country’s growing
population. For a short period the party blamed
the poor results not on Mao but on the over-hasty
setting up of the large cooperatives. Following the
Soviet model, the party leaders concluded, had led
to a lopsided development of heavy industry at the
expense of light industry and agriculture. From
1956 until early 1957 was a period of relaxation
and consolidation. The emphasis at the Eighth
Congress of the Communist Party in September
1956 was shifted from building socialism, which it
was claimed had been more or less accomplished,
to increasing productivity and correcting the agricultural
backwardness. This new line, which was
intended to help China catch up with the West,
required more individual enterprise, encouraged
in part by the provision of incentives. Students and
intellectuals, cowed by previous campaigns against
them, were now wooed. Deng Xiaoping, one of
Mao’s rising lieutenants, advocated more worker
participation in management as one way of
increasing productivity. This, in the Chinese definition,
was greater participation – always subject,
though, to the leadership of the party.
In February 1957 Mao delivered a speech ‘On
the Correct Handling of Contradictions among
People’. One passage in particular received widespread
publicity for its apparent espousal of
freedom of ideas among the scientific and intellectual
community – ‘letting a hundred flowers
blossom and a hundred schools of thought
contend’. But what seemed to the West to be a
move towards tolerance and plurality was no more
than a tactical device, a means to an end, the perceived
precondition for what became known as
the Great Leap Forward. It encouraged China’s
intellectuals and was meant to act as a restraint
on party bureaucracy at the local level. Freedom
of thought would not, however, be allowed to
challenge central control and leadership.
During the winter of 1957 and into the spring
of 1958, 60 million peasants were put to work on
water-conservancy constructions to aid agriculture.
Mass human power was to be used in place
of more advanced technology to achieve quick
results. At the same time as plans for the Great
Leap Forward were implemented, a purge of
intellectuals was begun in a bewildering reversal
of the previous year. The pendulum had thus
swung once more. Mao intervened to pronounce
a new line after watching the turmoil of destalinisation
in Poland and Hungary in 1956; this was
called the Anti-Rightist campaign. The ‘hundred
flowers’ had blossomed for little more than one
season. In every factory 5 per cent of the workers
had to be denounced as ‘rightists’ and subjected
to a witch-hunt. Up to 700,000 ‘intellectuals’, or
educated Chinese, were thrown out of their positions
and professions and sent to the countryside
for so-called labour reform. The contempt for the
intellectuals, the need to control and subjugate
them, now took precedence over China’s desperate
need for their skills. It was easy to treat them
harshly as they were isolated from China’s masses
of peasants and workers. Denunciation by family,
friends, colleagues and fellow workers, which
inevitably sowed distrust, was one of the party’s
most effective means of control. Abroad, China’s
softer line cooperating with a neutral Third
World, exemplified by the Bandung Conference
in 1955 and the stance of ‘peaceful coexistence’,
was followed by increased militancy and selfassertion.
In 1958 China’s relations with Taiwan
reached a new crisis-point, and on India’s border
in 1959 there were armed clashes.
Mao’s faith that the ideologically motivated peasants
and workers could overcome all obstacles,
that the grassroot masses were what mattered, not
the professionals and intellectuals, found practical
expression in what party propaganda described as
the Great Leap Forward – actually two leaps, in
1958 and 1959–60. They proved an unmitigated
disaster for the Chinese economy and people.
In the countryside the people’s cooperatives
were merged into huge communes under ideological
local party leadership. They now comprised
not only agriculture but also grass-roots
industrial units. Unrealistic production targets
were set. Now not only would steel be smelted in
the new modern mills, but iron would be produced
in small peasant furnaces. Chaos ensued:
industrial production declined and agricultural
output dropped by a quarter. A renewed ‘leap’ in
1959 and 1960 resulted in further disastrous agricultural
and industrial losses. In the first quarter
of 1961 alone output of twenty-five key industrial
products dropped by between 30 and 40 per cent.
There was a chronic grain shortage as China’s
population increased, and famine became widespread.
More than 20 million people died.
After the failure of the Great Leap Forward,
Mao permitted a reformist party leadership to
follow policies at variance with his longer-term
objectives, because priority had to be given to
increase food supplies and resume industrial
growth – in other words, to repair the ravages of
the Great Leap Forward. Thus from 1960 to
1963 the party returned to more rational planning.
China’s professionals were appeased and
told that they were part of the working people.
Private plots and handicraft enterprise were again
permitted. The peasantry were allowed to sell
their produce in a free market provided they fulfilled
their state quotas. To feed China’s growing
population – it increased by 80 million between
1957 and 1965 – incentives were necessary to
raise production. Even so, agriculture barely
recovered to its 1957 level and the shortfall had
to be made good by grain imports.
All these policies of the so-called reformists
were opposed by an ultra-left group that placed
the revolutionary class struggle first. The reformers
were led by the nominal head of state,
Liu Shaoqui, and Deng Xiaoping; the defence
minister Lin Biao, who in 1959 had replaced
Peng Dehuai, dismissed for openly criticising
Mao’s Great Leap Forward, was a sycophantic
supporter of Mao’s most extreme policies; Mao’s
wife, the former actress Jiang Quing, was another
uncompromising extremist. Then there were
various groupings between the two; Premier
Zhou Enlai was the most enduring and able,
manoeuvring cleverly so that he never lost Mao’s
approval. Mao waited until he judged the time
right before resuming the revolutionary lead.
Unquestionably there was serious inner-party
strife at the top level of the Politburo from 1958
to 1966. Mao permitted the different groupings
to coexist, acting only if there were any outright
criticisms of the chairman himself, such as those
voiced by the disgraced Peng. The inner workings
of Chinese party politics permit more than
one interpretation. It is possible that Mao genuinely
had to struggle against opponents in the
party to reassert his authority. Much more likely,
Mao deliberately chose to withdraw from time to
time to study and reflect, and to dissociate himself
from ‘rectification’ policies that he would later
attack and condemn.
This explains certain simultaneous but contradictory
currents in Chinese politics. In the
autumn of 1962 Mao indicated a return to a more
radical course with a campaign against writers and
the resurfacing of bourgeois and capitalist tendencies.
He turned to a new generation: ‘youth
must be educated so that our nation will remain
revolutionary and incorruptible for generations
and forever’. In the spring of 1963 he claimed
that landlords and rich peasants were regaining
their influence, corrupting and manipulating
local party officials, and ‘developing counterrevolutionary
organisations’. Meanwhile, Deng
Xiaoping, now the party’s general secretary, was
giving priority to economic recovery, above all to
repair the ravages in agriculture. Deng had
expressed this view uncompromisingly: ‘As long
as we increase production, we can revert to individual
enterprise; it hardly matters whether a
good cat is black or white – as long as it catches
mice.’ This did not mean that Deng was a liberal
in the Western sense, that he envisaged abandoning
communism or authoritarian control
from the centre. He was adopting a pragmatic
approach to China’s immediate economic problems
– any incentives offered to private enterprise
would be determined by the party. The party
would continue to control China.
By 1963, Mao was preparing to move against
Deng and the policies he advocated, but ‘selfcriticism’
saved him in 1966. Liu Shaoqui was not
so fortunate; dismissed from all his posts in 1968,
he died in prison a year later. With the help of
Lin Biao, Mao embarked on an intensive campaign
to radicalise the young army recruits with
‘the thoughts of Chairman Mao’.
The famous Little Red Book was written to
indoctrinate them. ‘Study Chairman Mao’s writings,
follow his teachings and act according to his
instructions’, ordered Lin Biao. Mao’s quotations
can be cited in justification of all the changes of
policy resorted to and cover every possible condition.
They are taken from his writings and
speeches from the 1920s to the 1950s. By grouping
them in thirty-three thematic chapters under
headings such as ‘Self-Reliance and Arduous
Struggle’, ‘Serving the People’ and so on, but
then jumbling up any chronological sequence
within each section, they can be used to support
many different arguments by selective citation.
They thus convey a sense of infallibility despite
their contradictions. The Little Red Book became
the holy writ of the student youth revolt of 1966
– that is, of the Red Guards.
China’s difficulties were compounded by its international
isolation. Khrushchev’s destalinisation in
the Soviet Union led to a breach with Mao, who
accused him of revisionism and of leading the
Soviet Union back on to the capitalist road. He
condemned him for betraying the revolution
while exhibiting great-power chauvinism by suppressing
nationalism in Eastern Europe. Mao
vehemently rejected the Soviet leader’s attempts
to use the assistance given to China to control its
policies. In 1959 Khrushchev first withdrew
Soviet help from the programme to build China’s
own atomic weapons. Faced with America’s
nuclear threat, China would have to construct
nuclear weapons by itself, and it succeeded in
doing so. In 1960 Khrushchev dealt a heavy blow
to the Chinese economy, stopping all aid and
recalling some 30,000 Soviet engineers and technicians
from China. Mao discerned ominous signs
of Soviet–American collusion after the Soviet
failure in Cuba, and the Test Ban Treaty in 1963
was a clear indication to him that the US and the
Soviet Union were joining one great-power camp.
Mao placed China in opposition to this supposed
collusion, calling on the Third World countries
in Asia, Africa and Latin America not to be
afraid but to struggle for their independence:
‘People of the world, unite and defeat US aggressors
and their running dogs . . . Monsters of all
kinds shall be destroyed.’ Nuclear weapons need
not strike fear in the hearts of peoples struggling
against imperialism, Mao declared, using a
colourful metaphor, for the nuclear powers were
just ‘paper tigers’. But when in 1962 he conceived
the fear that America would back a Chiang
Kai-shek invasion, he allowed himself to be reassured
by a hastily arranged contact between the
Chinese and American embassies in Warsaw.
Mao took care not to involve China again
directly in any fighting against a stronger enemy.
His diatribes against the Soviet Union and the US
remained rhetorical. He was opposed to any military
confrontation with the US, even when he was
urged to intervene in Vietnam, where the
Americans were stepping up their support for the
anti-communist southern republic. The case of
India was different. Earlier good relations with
Nehru deteriorated when the Indians expressed
their sympathy for the subjugated Tibetans and
welcomed the Dalai Lama and Tibetan refugees
after the revolt of 1959. When the Indians occupied
some Chinese border posts on the ill-defined
Sino-Indian frontier, Mao reacted forcefully.
Launching a major military offensive in October
1962, he routed the inferior Indian forces. But,
having taught India a painful lesson, he declared a
unilateral ceasefire in November and withdrew to
a rectified frontier line which India later accepted.
Thus, the early 1960s were years of danger and
crisis as perceived by Mao; his response to the
US, the Soviet Union and Taiwan was not
appeasement but independence, a determination
to defend China. But he was also cautious, avoiding
direct military engagement except on the
Indian frontier, where it was strictly limited.
As Mao contemplated Khrushchev’s errors in the
1960s, he feared that leading party members in
China might well be tempted to emulate him and
take the capitalist road. So his condemnation of
Khrushchev was intended also to serve as a warning
at home to the party. One of the roots of the
Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was certainly
Mao’s concern that the revolution was
being betrayed by the ‘bourgeois’ ideas of Deng
and Liu.
Mao sought to revive the revolutionary spirit
by unleashing a conflict between the masses on
the one hand, and the party functionaries, the
bureaucracy and all those who had a stake in preserving
the status quo in China, on the other. To
Westerners one of the most curious features of
Chinese politics is the oblique way a new policy
is signalled by a development that might seem
quite trivial. Mao preferred this approach. He
began his assault in 1965 by criticising the writer
Wu Han, one of whose plays some years earlier
he had interpreted as an attack on himself. This
seemed innocuous. But Wu was the protégé of
Deng Xiaoping, the party general secretary. Mao
then left the capital and manoeuvred to gain
support among the various factions within the
widespread Chinese power structure. In February
1966, with his wife Jiang Quing now playing a
prominent role, he declared his intention to
launch the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
A distinguished Chinese economic historian,
Xue Mugiao, director of China’s Economic
Research Centre, in the 1980s condemned the
Cultural Revolution as initiated by a leader
labouring under a misapprehension and capitalised
on by counter-revolutionary cliques; it led
to domestic turmoil and brought catastrophe to
the party, the state and the whole people. Such
criticism of Mao became possible only in the
reformist 1980s. At the time party members
attempted to defend themselves while sycophantically
declaring their loyalty and obedience to the
chairman. Liu was not so lucky.
The convulsion of the Cultural Revolution
wrecked millions of lives. From 1966 to 1968 the
struggles assumed the proportions of a civil war,
with fierce fighting and brigandage in many parts
of the country. Mao had aroused the people to
denounce each other. In the process he raised
his teaching to an unprecedented personality cult.
The revolution began with the dissident students
and disgruntled teachers, who organised themselves
spontaneously into ‘Red Guards’ to carry
out Mao’s will. The Cultural Revolution was
unique among student revolts of the late 1960s
in that it was encouraged from the very top
against the more privileged elders. The students
proceeded physically to assault the ‘monsters and
demons and all counter-revolutionary revisionists
of the Khrushchev type’ and to ransack their
homes; they vowed that they would carry Mao’s
socialist revolution through to its end. Their
instruments were terror and humiliation. On
18 August 1966, Mao appeared on the gallery of
the Tiananmen Gate of Heavenly Peace, to be
adulated by huge crowds of Red Guards, who
packed the square before him all day. Eventually
he descended into the square itself to be among
them; more than a million Red Guards had come
from outside Beijing to join those in the capital
already. They were ordered to ‘spread disorder’,
to attack the party bureaucrats, to root out
Chinese tradition and bourgeois revisionism –
indeed to eliminate all the elements that had
infiltrated the party and were taking the false
capitalist road.
The student Red Guards fanned out throughout
the country to radicalise the masses in the
cities; the vast countryside of China remained less
affected. In factories they enlisted workers. It was
a movement that became anarchic and violent;
teachers, professionals, anyone in authority could
become the target of their attacks, sons and
daughters denounced parents or failed to protect
them. The Red Guards were rendering China’s
urban centres virtually ungovernable, as local
party structures were paralysed by their onslaught.
Much destruction was inflicted on Mao’s orders,
but the Red Guards were incapable of putting a
new orderly structure in place of those that had
ceased to function.
After a few months Mao had to call a temporary
halt. The People’s Liberation Army was the
one force able to restrain Red Guard rampages,
and had already intervened in places. But it was
not a proper instrument for furthering revolution;
it was more suitable for repressing disorder of
whatever ideological nuance. By the spring of
1967 the army had become a dominant force in
the country and was gradually restoring order,
fighting the radicals, replacing the party, moving
into factories and controlling the extremists. It
was not the outcome of the revolution Mao had
planned. Cities were destroyed, and hundreds of
thousands of lives were lost.
Mao now unleashed the second phase of the
revolution, attempting to curb the army. Red
Guards went back on the rampage. Throughout
China different factions were locked in confrontation.
Mao could influence events but even
he could not control their outcome. Among
the most strident voices encouraging the Red
Guards to persevere was that of Mao’s wife, Jiang
Quing. Violence reached new heights in August
1967. The revolutionary committees, which had
replaced the local party machines, now battled
against more extremist youths. Trains carrying
weapons destined for Vietnam were looted.
Peasants in rival factions, army units, Red Guard
groups all fought each other. In Wuhan military
groups refused to obey directives from Beijing.
The army itself became divided. In Beijing, Liu
Shaoqui, nominal head of state, still remained as
a symbol of party opposition to Mao, although
he had been made to ‘confess his crimes’. But the
control Mao and his supporters could exercise
over the central apparatus could do nothing to
restore China to order and sanity.
By September 1967 Mao was ready to accept
that the most important task now was to stop
China from disintegrating further. Only the professional
army could restore order; blame for
excesses could now be shifted on to Mao’s
advisers and the Red Guards, who had exceeded
their functions. The betrayal of his most fervent
supporters meant nothing to Mao. The myth of
his detached infallibility of judgement had to
be preserved, although he was the author of
China’s woes. His wife indirectly admitted to mistakes
and now sided with the army against the
Red Guards, who were exhorted to practise selfcriticism.
Mao had to admit that they had proved
incapable of providing leadership and impetus to
revolutionary China. Only strife and chaos had
followed in their path. Behind the scenes Prime
Minister Zhou Enlai and Lin Piao, the defence
minister, were taking charge. The distinction
between a Red Guard and a criminal became
blurred. Many were executed. The restoration of
order was an enormous task, only gradually
achieved, and social ferment and the killings by
radical factions continued sporadically even as late
as 1968. The army was now praised for imposing
revolutionary discipline and for defending the
‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. The Red Guards,
yesterday in the vanguard of socialist progress,
had become ‘leftist opportunists’, ‘anarchists’ and
‘class enemies’. Mao’s army ‘Thought Teams’
were sent in to take charge of universities and
colleges.
Mao now initiated a new movement that won
the approval of both the army and the Beijing
moderates. The cities and universities were
cleared of students and intellectuals and rowdy
youths; they were overpopulated anyway. Some
20 million Chinese were forced into the countryside
in 1968 and 1969 to learn to labour as
peasants. The ‘young intellectuals’ were undergoing
re-education. In October Liu Shaoqui’s
disgrace was complete. Only Mao emerged intact.
Lin Piao at the Ninth National Congress of the
Chinese Communist Party in April 1969 absolved
Mao of all blame and buried the Cultural
Revolution, describing its demise as a ‘great
victory’. The cost, in lives and in blighted careers,
was enormous and was to set China back by a
decade even after the immediate losses of production
in 1967 and 1968 had been made good.
During the last years of his life Mao became
more remote, removed from the day-to-day running
of the state. Now deified he continued to
symbolise for China the communist victory and
China’s emergence as a world power. And herein
lies the final contradiction: Mao’s benign reputation
was not deserved; terror and violence were
the result of the ideological utopias he had pursued.
He had ruined millions of lives in the Great
Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution and the
wholesale forced migrations. Mao had attempted
to ensure that as his life drew to a close the revolutionary
fire would not be extinguished with him.
The excesses of the Cultural Revolution, however,
taught some of the Chinese leadership a bitter lesson
in the dangers of Mao’s line of thought and
action. By the time he died in September 1976, in
the context of economic planning there would
only be a revolutionary flicker of his radical ideas
left. But the heritage of a repressive political oneparty
state remained very much intact.
The Chinese revolution had created its own
Gulag, a network of forced job placement and
labour camps. Millions of prisoners were condemned
to forced labour, sometimes for decades,
without trial. During the frequent famines, such
as that after Mao’s disastrous experiment in 1958,
life was reduced to searching for scraps of food.
We know from surviving witnesses that in such
camps the obsession with food replaced all feelings
and other desires. Those suspected of ‘wrong
thinking’, the ‘rightists’ and other dissidents fared
the worst and had to submit to sessions of re-education
to crush their independent spirit. How
many hundreds of thousands did not survive can
only be estimated. There were variations between
conditions in different camps depending on the
camp commanders, the work to be performed and
the prevailing political mood. One truth emerges
from all this horror: the resilience and courage of
the survivors show that the human spirit knows
no boundaries of nationality or race.
World History
