Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (109 page)

Her strong position was to persuade Mao to leave Peking and spend most of 1965 in Shanghai. There a number of themes came together in his head: hatred of Soviet Russia and its leadership, and of the new class of bourgeois bureaucrats who had frustrated his Great Leap, the longing of an elderly hero to appeal to the young again, his contempt for formal education, his loathing for the people who flourished by virtue of mandarinism, his jealousy of Liu. Liu’s book,
How to be a Good Communist
, sold fifteen million copies 1962–6, as many as Mao’s books at that time. Official editorials urged the comrades to study Liu on a par with Mao. The two men had quarrelled violently over the reasons for the failure of the Leap.
⁴¹
Thus to the suppressed ambitions of a failed actress were added the grievances of an injured author. Mao gave up reading the Peking
People’s Daily
, turning instead to the forces paper,
Liberation Army Daily.
He was gearing up for another dramatic explosion. He observed grimly to André Malraux: ‘I am alone with the masses – waiting.’ To the sycophantic French ambassador, who told him youth was with him, Mao retorted: ‘The things you saw represented only one side of the situation – you didn’t see the other side.’ He told a group of Albanians that the new privileged élite in Russia had sprung first from literary and artistic circles and the same was happening in China: ‘Why are there so many literary and artistic associations in Peking? They have nothing to do … army performances are the best, local troupes rank second and those from Peking are the worst.’ Official culture groups, he said to a group of planners, were ‘just transplants from the Soviet Union … all ruled by foreigners and dead men’. Peking’s Academy of Sciences was ‘fairyland’, stuffed with ‘antiquarians’ who ‘read unreadable journals’.
⁴²
He would rely on the earthy, peasant army. He broke its chief of staff, Luo Rui-qing, for alleged pro-Soviet activities. He built up its head, Lin Piao, against Liu and his Peking ‘clique’. The shape of things to come was his permission to Chiang Ching to convene in Shanghai a ‘Forum on Work in Literature and Art in the Armed Forces’. Before it took place, a nervous Lin held a briefing of senior officers:

She is very sharp politically on questions of literature and art.… She has many opinions which are valuable. You should pay good attention to them and see that they are applied ideologically and organizationally. From now on, all the army’s documents concerning literature and art should be sent to her.
⁴³

Having lined up the army behind himself, Mao went over to the attack. The actual detonator to what soon became known as the
‘Cultural Revolution’ was personal pique – Mao’s reaction to a play,
Hai Jui Dismissed from Office
, actually written in 1961 by Wu Han, Deputy-Mayor of Peking, and another official mandarin.
⁴⁴
It was about an upright Ming-dynasty official who disagreed with the Emperor’s land policy and was unjustly punished for being frank. When Mao finally saw it he could not but regard it as a clear attack on himself, plainly inspired by Liu and all the more galling in that the agricultural disasters for which he was thus publicly blamed had undeniably occurred. His attack was launched with a review of the play in the Shanghai daily,
Literary Currents
, 10 November 1965. Back in Peking near the end of the year, he saw the Soviet premier, Alexei Kosygin, and sneeringly asked him if Soviet Russia would come to China’s help if America attacked her over the Vietnam War: Kosygin had no answer. But Mao admitted to him frankly that he was at loggerheads with his colleagues. Indeed he made little attempt to conceal the coming explosion. Back in Shanghai early in the new year, he snarled at Teng Hsiao-ping and other senior colleagues (who had travelled down from Peking) in front of an amazed delegation of Japanese Communists, addressing them as ‘You weak-kneed people in Peking’ for being ‘soft on Russia’. The Japanese ‘cringed in amazement’.
⁴⁵

From that point on, the Cultural Revolution gathered momentum. Mao (as he later put it) ‘gave the nod’. In February 1966 Lin, now Chiang Ching’s firm if apprehensive ally, appointed her ‘Cultural Adviser’ to the entire army forces. The obnoxious mandarin Mayor of Peking was dismissed and moved, along with Liu, into the shadows, though the two men, Teng and others were not arrested until the next year. On 20 March Mao, the old wizard, decided to conjure the brutal force of unlettered youth out of the earth. ‘We need determined people who are young, have little education, a firm attitude and the political experience to take over the work’, he said. ‘When we started to make revolution, we were mere twenty-three-year-old boys, while the rulers of that time… were old and experienced. They had more learning – but we had more truth.’
⁴⁶
On 16 May, Chiang Ching, now the leading spirit in a group of activists, mainly from Shanghai, whom Mao had officially designated as in charge of the Cultural Revolution, issued her first circular. It attacked ‘scholar-tyrants’ who had ‘abstruse’ language to silence the class struggle and keep politics out of academia, using the fallacy ‘everyone is equal before the truth’. Its sixth point was an open invitation to vandalism: ‘Chairman Mao often says that there is no construction without destruction. Destruction means criticism and repudiation – it means revolution.’ The
People’s Daily
and other Peking papers refused to print it. Two days later Lin Piao made a
remarkable speech about power to the Politburo, analysing the history of
coups d
‘état.
Echoing Goebbels, he argued that force and propaganda were irresistible in conjunction: ‘Seizure of political power depends upon gun-barrels and inkwells.’ And what was power for? ‘Political power is an instrument by which one class oppresses another. It is exactly the same with revolution and with counter-revolution. As I see it,
political power is the power to oppress others.’
⁴⁷
That was frank enough; and, coming from the man who was supposed to be in charge of the nation’s stability, it might well make the men round the table tremble. Even worse news was that the man in charge of the secret police, Kang Sheng, had thrown in his lot with the cultural revolutionaries. That meant there would be no restraint on the new ‘gun-barrels and inkwells’, which in the second half of May rapidly made their appearance, in the shape of Red Guards and wall-posters.

Scholastic violence and political change had long been linked in China. The student revolt in Peking had detonated the 4th May Movement in 1919 and the 9th December Movement in 1935. There had been a similar upsurge during the ‘hundred flowers’, eventually put down (by Teng and Liu, among others, eagerly reacting to Mao’s ‘nod’) with the sacking of 100,000 teachers in 1957–8.
⁴⁸
But this was something on an altogether different scale. With a population of 800 million, China now had 90 million children in primary schools, 10 million in middle schools and 600,000 in university.
⁴⁹
The first Red Guards appeared on 29 May. They were from the middle school, aged about twelve to fourteen, wearing red cotton armbands with the characters ‘Hung Wei Ping’ (Red Guards) on them in yellow. Their first act was to attack Tsinghua University.
⁵⁰
Soon they were joined by children from younger and older age-groups, by students and, most important, by members of the
CCP
Youth Leagues who, with Mao’s encouragement, revolted against their official leadership and took to the streets in gangs. During the early summer, the entire educational system in China came to a standstill, as dons and teachers fled in terror (when they were lucky enough to escape capture and ‘re-education’) and juvenile lynch-law took over.

There was later some misunderstanding of the Cultural Revolution in the West. It was represented as a revolt of intellectuals. In fact it was quite the reverse. It was a revolution of illiterates and semi-literates against intellectuals, the ‘spectacle-wearers’ as they were called. It was xenophobic, aimed at those who ‘think the moon is rounder abroad’. The Red Guards had a great deal in common with Roehm’s Brownshirts, and the entire movement with Hitler’s campaign against ‘cosmopolitan civilization’. It was the greatest witch-hunt in history, which made the Zhdanov purges in post-war
Russia seem almost trivial. Nevertheless, it is significant that this great upsurge of vandalism attracted a certain type of radical academic, who was to become depressingly familiar in Europe and North America over the next few years. At Peking, the first ‘big-character poster’, addressed to and attacking the university authorities, was put up by a woman philosophy don, Nieh Yuan-tzu, who was to become the Madame Defarge of the campus horrors. It read: ‘Why are you so afraid of big-character posters? This is a life and death struggle to counter the Black Gang!’ Within a week, 10,000 students had put up 100,000 posters, ‘as big as doors’, often with characters four feet high.
⁵¹
The phrases were reiterated: ‘You absolutely won’t get away with this… our patience is exhausted.’ The first violence began at the same time. The rampaging street-gangs seized girls with long braided hair and cut it short; boys with foreign-style stove-pipe pants had them ripped off. Hairdressers were told not to give ‘duck-tail’ cuts, restaurants to simplify menus, shops to stop selling cosmetics, dresses with slit skirts, sunglasses, fur-coats and other finery. Neon signs were smashed. There were huge street bonfires of forbidden goods, which included (as an exhibition of ‘confiscations’ showed) bolts of silk and brocade, gold and silver bars, chess-sets, ancient trunks and chests, playing-cards, mah-jong sets, gowns, frock-coats, top-hats, jazz records and a vast range of works of art. The Red Guards shut down teashops, coffee-houses, independent private theatres and all private restaurants, they put itinerant musicians, acrobats and strolling actors out of business, and they forbade weddings and funerals, holding hands and kite-flying. In Peking the ancient walls were pulled down, Bei Hai Park and the National Gallery of Fine Arts closed. Libraries were ransacked and shut, books burnt. Even when libraries remained open, few dared to visit them. Ten years later, Teng said that of the eight hundred technicians of the Research Institute for Non-ferrous Metals, for example, only four had the courage to use the library during the Cultural Revolution; he said that any of the 150,000 technical cadres of the Academy of Sciences who visited their laboratories during this dark time were denounced as ‘white specialists’.
⁵²

There was no authority to prevent these activities. When shopkeepers and other injured parties sought police protection, they were reminded of ‘The Decision of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’ (1 August 1966), which read: ‘The only method is for the masses to liberate themselves …trust the masses, rely on them and respect their initiative …. Don’t be afraid of disturbances …. Let the masses educate themselves … no measures should be taken against students at universities, colleges, middle and primary
schools.…’
⁵³
In fact party leaders who sought to curb the Red Guards were paraded through the streets wearing dunces’ caps and placards. Every single school superintendent seems to have been dismissed.

As the movement got under way, violence became common, then universal. Red Guard leaders seem to have come from the lowest social strata.
⁵⁴
Some of them were mere street-thieves and hooligans, sporting thick leather belts with brass buckles. Their posters urged ‘Boil him in oil’, ‘Smash his dog’s head’ and so on. Men and women classified as ‘ghosts and monsters’, ‘bad elements’ and ‘counterrevolutionaries’ had their heads shaved. Snippets of ‘political debates’ were later reported: ‘Of course he is a capitalist. He has a sofa and two matching armchairs.’
⁵⁵
Hundreds of thousands of private homes were broken into and ransacked for such reasons. But Red Guards raided government offices too, and forced officials to give them their archives on pain of being denounced as ‘tools of the revisionists’. The Foreign Ministry was taken over by a gang led by Yao Teng-shan, a former petty official. He recalled every ambassador except one, stripped them of rank and assigned them to minor tasks. His notes to foreign powers, written in the style of Red Guard posters, were politely returned with the request that future communications be signed by Premier Chou. But Chou himself, normally the still centre of Chinese life through all Mao’s dramas, seems to have been in danger at one stage. While it is true that, at the very top level, the Red Guards were not allowed to kill anyone, many died in gaol. Liu himself was left to die (1973) in his own excrement, naked on the freezing floor of his concrete cell.
⁵⁶
But at a lower level the loss of life was catastrophic. The Agence France Presse, in the most widely respected figure, estimated (3 February 1979) that the Red Guards had murdered about 400,000 people.

Meanwhile Chiang Ching had been ruling the world of culture and addressing mass meetings at which she denounced capitalism (which she said destroyed art), jazz, rock and roll, striptease, Impressionism, Symbolism, abstract art, Fauvism, Modernism – ‘in a word, decadence and obscenity, to poison and corrupt the minds of the people’. Her platform oratory was modelled on that of the secret police boss, Kang Sheng, with whom she often appeared. ‘Do you want to study the Communiqué and the Sixteen-Point Directive?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Do you want to study them again and again?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Do you want to learn them thoroughly?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Do you want to understand them?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Do you want to apply them?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Do you want to use them to carry out the Cultural Revolution in your school?’ ‘Yes, Yes, Yes!’
⁵⁷
During the second half of 1966, virtually every main cultural organization in China was brought under her army organization.
All her old scores against the theatre and film world, some dating from the 1930s, were worked off. Leading directors, playwrights, poets, actors and composers were accused of ‘fawning on foreigners’, praising ‘secondary foreign devils’, ‘ridiculing the Boxers’ (now seen as cultural heroes), and portraying ordinary Chinese as ‘prostitutes, opium smokers, jugglers and women with bound feet’, thus breeding a ‘national inferiority complex’. The Red Guards were ordered by her to ‘dig up the roots of the Black Line’, ‘rip off the masks’, destroy films, songs and plays of the ‘national defence line’ and ‘drag out’ members of the ‘Black Gang’.