Mao's Great Famine (5 page)

Back in Beijing, less than two weeks after his return from the Soviet Union, Mao secured the backing of senior vice-chairman Liu Shaoqi for a leap forward. A frugal and taciturn man, tall but slightly stooped with greying hair, Liu had dedicated his career to the party line, regularly toiling away through the night. He also saw himself as the Chairman’s successor, a position he believed would come to him as a reward for years of hard and selfless work. A few months earlier Mao himself had indicated his intention of stepping down from the post of head of state, and may even have privately assured Liu that he supported him in his role as heir apparent.
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Liu embraced Mao’s vision: ‘In fifteen years, the Soviet Union can catch up with and surpass the United States in the output of the most important industrial and agricultural products. In the same period of time, we ought to catch up with and overtake Britain in the output of iron, steel and other major industrial products.’
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Before the end of the year press articles heralding great advances in water conservancy, grain production and steel output appeared all over the country. On New Year’s day in 1958 the
People’s Daily
published an editorial approved by Liu Shaoqi which captured the leader’s vision: ‘Go All Out and Aim High’.
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Li Fuchun, a bookish man with a self-effacing air who as head of the State Planning Commission regularly sent blueprints as thick as a telephone book to each province, detailing how much of each product should be produced, also lent his support to Mao. A fellow Hunanese and childhood acquaintance of the Chairman, a veteran of the Long March, Li was the first among the economic planners to jump on to the bandwagon of the Great Leap Forward, whether out of fear, conviction or ambition. He joined Liu Shaoqi in praising Mao’s bold vision.
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Under the drumbeat of propaganda, and goaded and coaxed by Mao in private meetings and party conferences, provincial leaders threw their weight behind his go-all-out campaign, promising higher targets in a whole range of economic activities. At a small gathering of party bosses in Hangzhou in early January 1958, Ke Qingshi, a tall man with a bouffant haircut who was mayor of Shanghai and lived in genuine awe of the Chairman, enthused about the ‘new high tide in socialist construction’, proposing that the country ‘ride the wind and break the waves’ by relying on the great masses.
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Surrounded by supporters, and energised by Ke Qingshi, Mao was no longer able to contain the anger pent up over several years, exploding in the face of Bo Yibo, one of the chief economic planners who had resisted his vision. Bo was a veteran revolutionary, but one of his concerns was to keep a balanced budget. ‘I will not listen to that stuff of yours!’ Mao yelled. ‘What are you talking about? For the past few years I have stopped reading the budgets, but you just force me to sign off on them anyway.’ Then he turned to Zhou Enlai: ‘The preface to my book
The Socialist Upsurge in the Countryside
has had a tremendous influence on the entire country. Is that a “cult of personality” or “idolatry”? Regardless, newspapers and magazines all over the country have reprinted it, and it’s had a huge impact. So now I have really become the “arch criminal of rash advance!” ’
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The moment had come to crack the whip and herd the planners on to the road to utopia.

Situated in the extreme south of the country, Nanning is known as the ‘green city’ because of its lush, subtropical climate, mild enough for sweet peach, betel nut and palm trees to thrive all the year round. With citrus trees in blossom and a balmy temperature of 25 degrees Celsius in the middle of January, the setting should have provided some relief for party leaders coming from wintry Beijing, but the atmosphere was tense. As Zhang Zhongliang, the zealous leader of Gansu province, enthused, ‘From start to finish the Chairman criticised rightist conservative thinking!’
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Mao set the tone on the opening day of the meeting: ‘Don’t mention this term “opposition to rash advance” again, all right? This is a political problem. Any opposition would lead to disappointment, and 600 million discouraged people would be a disaster.’
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Over several days Mao repeatedly lost his temper as he badgered the planners, accusing them of ‘pouring cold water on the enthusiasm of the people’ and holding back the country. Those guilty of opposing ‘rash advance’ were a mere ‘fifty metres away from the rightists’. Wu Lengxi, editor of the
People’s Daily
which had published the critical editorial on 20 June 1956, was at the very top of the list of leaders summoned by Mao. The Chairman’s verdict: ‘Vulgar Marxism, vulgar dialectics. The article seems to be anti-leftist as well as anti-rightist, but in fact it is not anti-rightist at all but exclusively anti-leftist. It is sharply pointed against me.’
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Huge pressure was applied to the assembled leaders, and even for hardened men accustomed to the rigours of party life the stress was soon to prove too much. Huang Jing, chairman of a commission responsible for technological development and former husband of Mao’s wife, collapsed after the Chairman took him to task. Lying in bed, staring at the ceiling and mumbling incomprehensibly, he gave the doctor a bewildered look, begging for forgiveness: ‘Save me, save me!’ Put on a plane for medical treatment, he fell to his knees to kowtow before Li Fuchun, who was accompanying him to Guangzhou. Placed in a military hospital, he jumped through a window and broke a leg. He died in November 1958 aged forty-seven.
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But the real target for Mao’s ire was Zhou Enlai. On 16 January Mao brandished in front of the premier a copy of Ke Qingshi’s ‘The New Shanghai Rides the Wind and Breaks the Waves, Accelerating the Construction of Socialism’. ‘Well, Enlai, you are the premier, do you think you could write anything as good?’ he asked scornfully. ‘I couldn’t,’ the premier muttered, straining to absorb the attack. Then, after the ritual of public humiliation, came the blow: ‘Aren’t you opposed to “rash advance”? Well, I am opposed to opposition to “rash advance”!’
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A number of leftist party leaders joined the fray. Ke Qingshi and Li Jingquan, the radical leader of Sichuan, tore into the premier.
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Three days later Zhou made a lengthy speech of self-criticism, taking full responsibility for the reversal in 1956, admitting that it was the result of ‘rightist conservative thinking’ and accepting that he had deviated from the Chairman’s guiding policy. Mao’s notion that mistakes made by the party should not be overemphasised, being only ‘one finger out of ten’, was enshrined in the meeting’s manifesto, thus marginalising those who had attacked the Little Leap Forward.
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Zhou Enlai, whose suave, soft-spoken, slightly effeminate manners made him the ideal choice as China’s foreign emissary, had a talent for landing right side up. He could be all modesty and humility when required. Before the communist victory the nationalists used to call him Budaoweng, the Chinese name for the weighted toy tumbler that always lands upright.
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Early in his career as a revolutionary, Zhou had resolved never to challenge Mao. His decision was made after both had clashed in an incident that had left Mao seething with resentment. At a conference in 1932, critics of guerrilla warfare had ripped into Mao and handed command over the battlefront to Zhou instead. The result was a disaster, as a few years later nationalist troops mauled the Red Army, forcing the communists on the Long March away from their base areas. In 1943, as Zhou realised that Mao’s authority had become supreme, he proclaimed his undying support to the Chairman: ‘The direction and leadership of Mao Zedong’, he declared, ‘is the direction of the Chinese Communist Party!’ But Mao did not let him off the hook so easily. Zhou’s loyalty was tested in a series of self-criticism meetings in which he had to admit to his political crimes, labelling himself a ‘political swindler’ who lacked principles. It was a gruelling experience in self-abasement, but one from which Zhou emerged as the Chairman’s faithful assistant. From here onwards an uneasy and paradoxical alliance developed. Mao had to keep Zhou at bay as a potential contender for power; on the other hand he needed him to run the show. Mao lacked interest in matters of daily routine and organisational detail, and he was often abrasive with other people. Zhou was a first-rate administrator with a knack for organisation, a smooth operator skilled at forging party unity. As one biographer puts it, Mao ‘had to draw Zhou close even as he raised the whip, and sometimes lashed the man he could not live without’.
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The whipping did not stop at Nanning. Two months later, in Chengdu, the final days of a party gathering were devoted to rectification seminars. But first Mao spewed disdain on the blind faith with which the planners had been following Stalin’s economic path: a heavy emphasis on large industrial complexes, a sprawling apparatus of bureaucrats and a chronically underdeveloped countryside. As early as November 1956 he had lambasted some of his colleagues for ‘uncritically thinking that everything in the Soviet Union is perfect, that even their farts are fragrant’.
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Creative thinking was needed to find China’s own path to communism, rather than rigid adherence to Soviet methods, now frozen into socialist dogma. China should ‘walk on two legs’, simultaneously developing industry and agriculture, tackling heavy as well as light industry. And Mao, as the leader on that road, now demanded full allegiance. ‘What is wrong with worship? The truth is in our hands, why should we not worship it? . . . Each group must worship its leader, it cannot but worship its leader,’ Mao explained; this was the ‘correct cult of personality’.
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The message was immediately picked up by Ke Qingshi, who quivered enthusiastically: ‘We must have blind faith in the Chairman! We must obey the Chairman with total abandon!’
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Having consecrated his own cult of personality, Mao handed over the proceedings to Liu Shaoqi, his political crony. While virtually all the participants offered self-criticisms, the situation must have been agonising for Zhou. Both men were intensely competitive, and Liu may have seen Zhou as a threat to his prospects of taking over from the Chairman.
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That day Liu outdid Zhou in adulation of the leader: ‘Over the years I have felt Chairman Mao’s superiority. I am unable to keep up with his thought. Chairman Mao has a remarkable knowledge, especially of Chinese history, which no one else in the party can reach. [He] has practical experience, especially in combining Marxist theory and Chinese reality. Chairman Mao’s superiority in these aspects is something we should admire and try to learn from.’
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Zhou, for his part, felt intense pressure to appease the Chairman, who had stripped him of his authority in economic planning after Nanning. Again, he submitted a long confession about his errors, but his offerings failed to impress Mao.

In May, at a formal party gathering of over 1,300 people, Zhou Enlai and the party’s economics tsar Chen Yun were summoned to prepare yet another self-examination. No longer knowing what would satisfy Mao, Zhou spent days in self-imposed isolation, struggling to find the right turn of phrase. After a telephone conversation with Chen Yun, who was in a similar predicament, he sank into such dejection that his mind simply went blank. All he could do was mumble a few words followed by long silences as he stared at his secretary. That evening late at night his wife found him sitting slumped at his desk. Trying to help, the secretary pencilled in a passage about Zhou and Mao having ‘shared the boat through many storms’. When Zhou later pored over the document, he angrily rebuked the secretary, tears welling in his eyes, accusing the man of knowing too little about party history.
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In the end Zhou grovelled, lavishing praise on the Chairman in front of the assembled party leaders and telling the audience that Mao was the ‘personification of truth’ and that mistakes occurred only when the party became divorced from his great leadership. A few days after this display, Zhou handed Mao a personal letter promising to study his writings earnestly and to follow all his directives. The Chairman was finally satisfied. He declared Zhou and the others to be good comrades. Zhou had saved his job.

During these first months of the Great Leap Forward, Zhou was repeatedly humiliated and demeaned, but he never withdrew his support, choosing instead quietly to accept the Chairman’s blistering outburst in Nanning. Zhou Enlai did not have the power to overthrow his master, but he did have the planners behind him, and he could have stepped back – at the cost of his career. But he had learned to accept humiliation at the hands of the Chairman as a way of staying in power, albeit in his colleague’s shadow. Zhou was loyal to Mao, and as a result the many skills of the servant went to abet his master.
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Mao Zedong was the visionary, Zhou Enlai the midwife who transformed nightmares into reality. Always on probation, he would work tirelessly at the Great Leap Forward to prove himself.

As Zhou Enlai was debased in a spectacle of power and humiliation, other top economic officials quickly fell in line. Li Fuchun, chair of the State Planning Commission, never had to resort to self-criticism, having broken ranks with the other planners by rallying round Mao’s slogans in December 1957. Chen Yun made several self-critical statements. Li Xiannian, minister of finance, and Bo Yibo, chair of the State Economic Commission, both opponents of the Little Leap Forward in 1956, now realised that they could not resist the tide. None dared to disagree. Li Fuchun and Li Xiannian were enlisted in the secretariat, the inner core of the party, after they had proclaimed their allegiance to Mao.