Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (108 page)

This gigantic piece of social engineering was also accompanied by Mao’s first shot at mental engineering, or brainwashing, which he termed ‘thought reform’. It was designed to replace traditional family piety with filial piety to the state as the central moral value of the nation and to elevate Mao into a substitute father-figure.
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Mao defined ‘thought reform’ (23 October 1951) as a vital precondition
for ‘the thoroughgoing democratic transformation and the progressive industrialization of our country’. He set up a nationwide ‘Movement for the study of Mao Tse-tung’s Thoughts’; those who rejected them were branded as ‘Westerners’ and ‘reformed’ in prison, often shackled for varying periods with heavy, painful irons.
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The drama, however, embraced not only the victims of the ‘land reform’ and those who criticized the way it was done. Many of the total of eight ‘Amis’ were directed at merchants, industrial managers and bureaucrats: the campaign
in
fact embraced virtually the whole nation.

Like all Mao’s successive dramas, it fizzled out as he lost interest or confidence in its results, or as the disastrous consequences became apparent in lower agricultural productivity and famine. But by 1955 Mao’s impatience was rising again. In a speech of 31 July 1955 he suddenly announced a speed-up in the rate o collectivization of farms and the abrupt nationalization of all commerce and industry still in private hands. He called 1955 ‘the year of decision in the struggle between socialism and capitalism’.
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“his campaign, too, was to change mentalities: the ‘poor peasants’ would acquire ‘control’ and then ‘strengthen unity’ with the ‘middle peasants’, even the ‘upper-middle peasants’, against the ‘infiltration’ of ‘counter-revolutionaries’, ‘rascals’ and ‘devils’. Disappointed by the response, Mao produced with equal suddenness his ‘Let a hundred flowers bloom’ policy in 1956, to persuade a variety of voices to speak out. As he put it, ‘Correct ideas, if pampered in hot-houses without exposure to the elements or immunization against disease, will not win against wrong ones.’ Khrushchev took the view that the whole ‘hundred flowers’ episode was a mere ‘provocation’. Mao merely ‘pretended to be opening wide the floodgates of democracy’ to ‘goad people into expressing their innermost thoughts’, so he could ‘destroy those whose thinking he considered harmful’.
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At all events the campaign was brutally reversed without warning. ‘Rightist elements’ were sent to work-camps; professors who had briefly ‘bloomed’ found themselves cleaning lavatories; and in 1957 the tentative protections of ‘socialist legality’ were withdrawn.
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These confused events, or abortive mini-dramas, should be seen against the background of Mao’s increasing dissatisfaction with the policies of Stalin’s successors in Moscow. He had disliked and disagreed with Stalin: his reaction to Stalin’s death was to instigate the suicide or murder of Kao Kang, the Stalinist agent and head of the State Planning Committee, in February 1954. But he objected strongly to ‘deStalinization’ as an attempt to blame collective mistakes on the character of a single man. He thought Khrushchev’s ‘secret session speech’ repudiating Stalinism of 1956 a hypocrisy.
The others, Khrushchev included, had been up to their necks in Stalin’s crimes. How did Khrushchev, he demanded, see his role ‘when he beats his breast, pounds the table and shouts abuse at the top of his voice’? Was he a ‘murderer’ and a ‘bandit’ himself? Or merely a ‘fool’ and an ‘idiot’?
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Mao was clearly afraid that the Moscow campaign against ‘the cult of personality’ might be used against himself. More fundamentally, however, he felt that the sheer intellectual poverty of the new Moscow leadership strengthened his claim, now Stalin was dead, to the pontifical primacy of the bloc. He determined to astound the comrades, east and west, by the sheer audacity of his next move, and in September—October 1957 announced the new drama of the Great Leap Forward, which was launched with tremendous publicity the following spring.

The Great Leap was perhaps the purest expression of Mao’s chronic impatience, his belief in mind over matter, his confidence that, granted the will, the age of miracles was not over. He wanted to move to Communism in one bound, even to the stage when the state would ‘wither away’. He projected his itch to telescope history onto the peasants: they were ‘poor and blank’, and this was ‘a good thing – poor people want change, want to do things, want revolution. A clean sheet of paper has no blotches and so the newest and most beautiful words can be written on it.’
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As a piece of social engineering, the Leap was reckless and impulsive even by Mao’s standards. He justified it by arguing that Stalin had walked ‘only on one leg’ – that is, he created industrial and agricultural areas, each separate and monoped. China would begin ‘walking on two legs’, moving directly to self-reliant communes (modelled historically on the Paris Commune of 1870), each with its own industrial, agricultural and service sectors and its own defence militia: ‘unity of work and arms’.
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The scale and speed of this experimental theatre was almost beyond belief. In January—February 1958, then after a brief pause to sort out the confusion, between August and December, about 700 million people (90 per cent of the population) had their economic, political and administrative life completely transformed. In Henan Province, for instance, 5,376 agricultural collectives were knocked into 208 large ‘people’s communes’ with an average of 8,000 households in each. These units were expected to be virtually self-supporting and, in particular, to produce their own steel. It was a case, as Khrushchev put it, of Mao ‘acting like a lunatic on a throne and turning his country upside down’. He said that Chou En-lai came to Moscow and admitted that the Chinese steel industry was in a mess as a result. A.F.Zasyadki, deputy-chairman of the State Planning Commission, was sent out to investigate. He reported to
Khrushchev that the Soviet-trained steel engineers were now being forced to work in agriculture and the steel industry was ‘a shambles’. The steel mill he visited was ‘in the charge of an old man’. All Russia’s equipment, money and effort was being wasted.
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Khrushchev seems to have concluded that Mao was another Stalin and worse; a madman who would wreck his country and blow up the world if he had the means. The Great Leap therefore led directly to the end of Russia’s technical assistance programme (including nuclear weapons) in 1959 and to the open admission of the Sino—Soviet breach the following year at the Romanian Party Congress, when Khrushchev denounced the Chinese leadership as ‘madmen’, ‘pure nationalists’ who wanted to unleash a nuclear war.

In China itself the Great Leap movement came to a juddering halt on 23 July 1959, Mao ringing down the curtain with an abrupt ‘The chaos caused was on a grand scale, and I take responsibility’.
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But the consequences of the drama had their own irresistible momentum. Nineteen-fifty-nine was a year of natural disasters, and combining with the unnatural disaster of the Great Leap produced a man-made famine on the scale of Stalin’s catastrophe in the early 1930s, which lasted till 1962.
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To this day outsiders do not know exactly what happened to Chinese agriculture during these terrible years. The steel industry was wrecked and had to be rebuilt virtually from its foundations. Agriculture was yet again reorganized by a return to co-operatives and a fall in the size of commune units to 2,000 households. But the crops and livestock lost were lost for good. People just starved. How many millions died from the Leap is a matter of conjecture: figures are not available.

The Great Leap disaster seems to have exhausted a large portion of the political capital Mao had banked with his colleagues during the successful revolutionary war. He never held the supreme and solitary power of a Hitler and a Stalin, both because of the intractable nature of China’s problems, her lack of centralization and modern communications, and because he never possessed a terror apparatus on the same scale as the
KGB
or the Gestapo-ss. The party was more regionalized than in Russia; in particular, there was a profound polarity between the conservatism of Peking and the radicalism of Shanghai. After the curtain came down on the drama of 1959, Mao eschewed histrionics for a while; he seems to have been ‘resting’. From this point dated the beginning of ‘the two-line struggle’, with ‘revisionists’ temporarily on top. They never again allowed Mao to touch the productive process directly, either in agriculture or in heavy industry. Instead he brooded on culture and education. He had always disliked mandarinism and the cultural establishment. In a sense, he hated ‘civilization’ as much as Hitler
did. In China it represented not the international Jewish conspiracy but the dead hand, the insufferable, insupportable weight of a 4,000-year past. In this respect his revolution appeared to have changed nothing – and it was because of this cultural failure, he reasoned, that the Great Leap had proved impractical.

By 13 February 1964 Mao was making ominous noises: ‘The present method of education ruins talent and ruins youth. I do not approve of reading so many books. The method of examination is a method of dealing with the enemy. It is most harmful and should be stopped.’
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Nine months later he betrayed unmistakable signs of impatience and a hankering for a new drama: ‘We cannot follow the old paths of technical development of every country in the world, and crawl step by step behind the others. We must smash conventions … when we talk of a Great Leap Forward, we mean just this.’
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Thus the Leap was transmuted from a physical to a mental one: by the beginning of 1965 Mao’s interest in brainwashing had revived and was to be the dominant feature of his next and greatest drama.

By this point China was effectively run by a triumvirate: Mao himself, the head of state Liu Shao-chi, in charge of the Party and in particular of the Peking apparatus, and the army head, Lin Piao. Mao chose to open the new play indirectly, by pushing onto centre-stage his film-actress wife, Chiang Ching. She was well cast for the star role in what was soon termed the ‘Cultural Revolution’. It was characteristic of Mao’s romanticism that he always had a soft spot for actresses. He had had an affair, for instance, with the famous Lily Wu. His then wife, Ho Tzu-chen, found out, brought an action and got a divorce at a special Central Committee court, which then banished both women.
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In 1939 Mao married Chiang Ching, who had acted in Shanghai in the 1930s under the stage name of Lan Ping. According to her account, she went into the profession at the age of thirteen, became a party member at nineteen, and was twenty-three when Mao sought her out in Yenan, by offering her a free ticket to a lecture he was giving at the Marxist-Leninist institute.
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But other versions make her older and say she was married three if not four times in 1930s Shanghai, had numerous affairs in the film world and acquired many hatreds and enmities.

Chiang Ching kept, or was kept, very much in the background for the first twenty years of her marriage. There is a deep-rooted suspicion of the scheming political wife in China, what might be called the ‘Dowager Empress syndrome’. In the early 1960s it was considered remarkable that Wang Kwang-mei, the wife of the head of state, Liu, should dress fashionably, wear pearls and even dance (she had been born in the USA) while accompanying her husband
abroad, and this may have excited Chiang’s jealousy. She herself became the centre of a group of disgruntled pseudo-intellectuals, failed writers and minor actors and film-directors, mainly from Shanghai, who wanted to take over the arts and radicalize them. There was a certain party mandate for their ‘line’. In 1950, following the Zhdanov cultural purges in Soviet Russia, an ‘opera reform bureau’ was set up in China, drawing its inspiration from a theatre group founded at the Red Army Academy in 1931 and the so-called ‘Chinese Blue Blouse Regiment’ which used impromptu theatre to project ideology from mobile stages. In 1952 the Peking People’s Art Theatre was set up to produce ‘modern’ didactic drama.
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But little came of this. Well into the 1960s, Chinese classics remained dominant and many independent theatres flourished, performing Ibsen, O’Neill, Shaw, Chekhov and using the Stanislavsky method.
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Chiang’s own group, the League of Left-Wing Dramatists, found it difficult to get their works performed and was even suspected of Trotskyism.
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She seems to have brought to the Chinese scene, already envenomed by the bitter sectarian factionalism inherent in Marxist—Leninist politics, the spirit of the theatrical vendetta.

She got her breakthrough in June—July 1964 when the frustrated Mao allowed her to put on the Festival of Peking Opera on Contemporary Themes in the Great Hall of the People. This consisted of thirty-seven new operas (thirty-three on the Revolution, four on earlier revolts), performed by twenty-eight proletarian companies from nineteen provinces. Even more surprisingly, Mao allowed her to deliver a speech, the first by a woman since he took power. She said there were 3,000 professional theatrical companies in China, including ninety supposed to be dealing with ‘modern’ drama. Nevertheless, the Chinese stage was dominated by old themes, heroes and heroines, ‘by emperors, princes, generals, ministers, scholars and beauties, and on top of these, ghosts and monsters’. There were ‘well over 600 million workers, peasants and soldiers in our country’ as opposed to ‘only a handful of landlords, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries, bad elements, Rightists and bourgeois’. Why should the theatre serve these few and not the 600 million? She recommended for universal performance certain ‘model operas’, such as
Raid on the White Tiger Regiment
and
Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy.
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None of this went down well in Peking, the repository and guardian of Chinese culture. Its mayor and party-boss, the ultra-mandarin Peng Chen, called her operas ‘still at the stage of wearing trousers with a slit-seat and thumb-sucking’. Everyone disliked her burgeoning habit of phoning her opponents and critics in order to ‘struggle with them’. When she asked Peng to give her an opera troupe ‘to reform on my own’ and showed him a new
revolutionary opera with which she proposed to reform it, he flatly refused, snatched the score from her hands and challenged her ‘to take up a strong position if she pleased’.
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