Modern Times: The World From the Twenties to the Nineties (110 page)

On 12 December 1966 many ‘public enemies’, the ex-mayor of Peking and leading cultural mandarins – including, it seems, every film and theatre director who had ever crossed Chiang Ching – were marched to the Workers’ Stadium in front of 10,000 people, with heavy wooden placards round their necks.
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One of the worst aspects of the Cultural Revolution was the treatment of wives, who were often more brutally humiliated than their husbands. On 10 April 1967, for instance, Liu’s wife was dragged in front of 300,000 people on the campus of Tsinghua University, dressed in a tight evening gown, with stiletto-heel shoes, an English straw hat and a necklace of ping-pong balls decorated with skulls, while the mob bayed, ‘Down with ox-devils and snake-gods!’
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Chiang Ching’s squads took over radio and
TV
stations, newspapers and magazines; they seized cameras and films, ransacked studios for evidence, confiscated all existing films and issued them re-edited, and impounded scripts, prompt-copies and musical scores. Painters no longer dared to sign work with their own name but instead used the slogan ‘Ten Thousand Years to Chairman Mao’.
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‘With hammer in hand’, said Chiang Ching, ‘I set out to attack all the old conventions.’ She attended rehearsals of the Central Philharmonic Orchestra and interrupted them, goading the conductor Li Te-lun into a furious shriek ‘You’re attacking me with a big hammer!’ She made composers write works which were then tried out on ‘the masses’ and altered to take account of their reaction. She claimed she had to ‘hit them with a hammer’ to make them obey and eliminate ‘foreign influences’.
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Some of her followers took her imagery literally, and one Western-trained concert pianist had his hands smashed. Hammers, fists, thumping and smashing were the emblems of revolutionary art. Taking over the ballet, Chiang Ching banned ‘orchid fingers’ and upturned palms, favouring instead clenched fists and violent movements to show ‘hatred of landlord class’ and ‘determination to seek revenge’.
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Having banned virtually all forms of artistic expression in 1966, Chiang Ching strove desperately to fill the void. But not much was produced: two orchestral works, the Yellow River piano concerto and
the Shachiaping symphony, four operas and two ballets, all eight classified as
yang-pan hsi
or ‘model repertory’, on the analogy of model farms. There was a sculpture series called The Rent-Collectors’ Courtyard and a few paintings, of which the best known was a portrait of Mao wearing a blue gown, investigating mining conditions in the early 1920s, which was ‘composed’ by a collective of Peking students and actually painted by the son of a ‘poor peasant’. Few films were made because (she later claimed), there was ‘sabotage’; her actors, actresses and directors were given ‘bad dormitories’, no hot meals and power was cut off from her stages and film-sets.
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After the heady days of 1966, when Mao did his swim and the cult of his personality reached its apogee, China began to lurch into civil war. On 5 February 1967, Mao’s protégés in Shanghai set up a ‘commune’, an indication he was still hankering after the Great Leap policy. It was based upon the dockers, especially the militant 2,500 of the Fifth Loading and Unloading District, who in a single day (in June 1966) had written and put up 10,000 big-character posters. Of this district, 532 workers resisted. They had posters written against them and were made to wear tall dunces’ hats and carry opprobrious posters with mysterious slogans such as ‘Four-Family Village’ and ‘Anti-Party Clique’; they also had their houses ransacked and were sentenced to ‘symbolic’ death sentences, which might easily become real ones.
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The Shanghai commune was supposed to detonate others across the country. But the workers did not rise. Indeed they often resisted Red Guard invasions of their factories. Even in Shanghai the city authorities fought back with their own Scarlet Guards. Each side had enormous banks of loud-speakers, whose slogans battled it out deafeningly from dawn to dusk: ‘The February seizure of power is illegal’, ‘The February seizure of power is admirable’. There were kidnappings, torture and gang-warfare, using bicycle chains and knuckle-dusters, ‘troops’ being rushed from one part of the city to another.

At the universities, private armies were formed. The ‘Chingkan-shang regiment’ of Tsinghua University, an
‘élite
group’ of the Far Left, fought pitched battles against ‘ghosts and monsters’ using bamboo spears and home-made armoured cars and cannon. Other units included the Five-One-Six, the New Peita commune, the Geological Institute’s ‘East is Red’ commune, and the ‘Sky’ faction of the Aeronautical Institute. These were imitated in the factories and the non-university towns, and a kind of feudal anarchy began to develop, as China lurched back into organized gang-warfare and war-lordism. In July 1967 there was a ‘mutiny’, as it was called, in Wuhan, actually a large-scale battle between a Red Guard workers’ force and a conservative group known as the Million Heroes. The
local army commander backed the Heroes. Chou En-lai was sent down to restore peace. He was lucky to escape with his life and two of his companions were arrested and tortured. As a result, Chiang Ching produced the slogan ‘Offend by reason and defend by force’, and quantities of arms were issued to Red Guard groups.
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The violence seems to have reached a climax in the late summer of 1967. As that point Mao, as usual, became both alarmed at what he had done and bored with the incessant wrangling. He seems to have told Chiang Ching to call it all off. In September she announced that violence must be verbal only; machine-guns were to be used only when ‘absolutely necessary’. Those who disobeyed were accused of ‘mountain-strongholdism’. Attacks on the British Embassy and its staff were the work of ‘ultra-Leftists instigated by the May Sixteenth clique’.
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Mao also took a hand. ‘The situation developed so rapidly as to surprise me,’ he told the Central Committee, ‘I cannot blame you if you have complaints against me.’ He was annoyed that the Foreign Minister, Chen Yi, had lost twenty-seven pounds during a Red Guard grilling, adding, ‘I cannot show him to foreign visitors in this condition.’ He told the ‘young firebrands’ and ‘little devils’ to go back to school. He broke the Shanghai commune. ‘China is now like a country divided into eight hundred princely states,’ he complained.
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In the autumn of 1967 Mao withdrew official support for the Cultural Revolution, at any rate in its active Red Guard form, and used the People’s Liberation Army (
PLA
) to restore order and take over from groups he now denounced as ‘incompetent’ and ‘politically immature’. He justified this use of force by remarking, ‘Soldiers are just workers and peasants wearing uniforms.’ Fighting continued in some places in 1968, but in diminishing volume. In the summer, at his home in South-and-Central Lakes, he had a curious ‘dawn dialogue’ with Red Guard leaders: ‘I have never made any tape recordings before, but I am doing it today. Otherwise you will interpret what I say today in the way you wish after you go home …. Too many people were arrested, because I nodded my head.’ Police Minister: ‘I am the one to blame for excessive arrests.’ Mao: ‘Don’t try to free me from my mistakes or cover up for me.’ Chen Boda (left-wing theorist): ‘Follow the Chairman’s teaching closely.’ Mao (snappish): Don’t talk to me about teachings.’ Later he threatened that if Red Guards fought the army, killed people, ‘destroyed means of transportation’ or ‘lit fires’, they would be ‘annihilated’. But he was unwilling to drop his anarchism entirely: ‘Let the students fight for another ten years. The earth will revolve as usual. Heaven is not going to fall.’ All the same, the five chief Red Guard leaders were soon at work on pig-farms deep in the countryside.
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The drama was over.

The years which followed the collapse of the Cultural Revolution, when the bill for it was being paid by the economy and ordinary Chinese, were grim. Someone had to take the blame. On 12 September 1971, a Trident aircraft crashed 250 miles beyond the Chinese border in the Mongolian People’s Republic. It contained the bodies of the
PLA
commander, Lin Piao, and his second wife, Yeh Chun. Everyone on board was dead and some of the corpses were riddled with bullets. According to Peking, Lin had been fleeing after the discovery of a plot of his to murder Mao. ‘Captured documents’, in which Mao was referred to by the code-name ‘B-52’, were produced, proving that Lin had sought to kill Mao in a traffic-accident, poison his food, use the air force to bomb his house, and blow up his train. He had written: ‘B-52 is a paranoid and a sadist … the greatest dictator and tyrant in China’s history …. Those who are his greatest friends today will be his prisoners tomorrow …. Even his own son has been driven mad by him.’ The plot was allegedly betrayed to Chou En-lai by Lin’s daughter by an earlier marriage, ‘Little Bean’, who hated her stepmother.
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A more plausible version had it that Lin had been killed some time before by his colleagues, at a meeting in the Great Hall of the People – a real-life revolutionary drama this time. The next year a major plot was ‘exposed’ within the army, and a score of senior officers tried to escape to Hong Kong. A great many books and documents in which Lin had had a hand were recalled, together with his ‘epitaphs’ and portraits. Eleven famous photos of Mao, with Lin on them, were withdrawn. The episode, about which the truth remains obscure, closed with a note in the Chinese press, 20 February 1974, revealing that ‘Little Bean’ had been shot to death near Canton, a strip of red cloth pinned to the body reading ‘Treason and heinous crime’.
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By this time the Mao era was drawing to its close. Chou was already suffering from cancer, Mao himself from Parkinson’s Disease. His last phase was marked by acrimony, consciousness of failure and confusion. He quarrelled with Chiang Ching and by 1973 they had ceased to live together. She had to submit in writing requests to see him, stating her reasons. A note from him to her dated 21 March 1974 read: it is better not to see each other. You have not carried out what I have been telling you for many years. What is the good of seeing each other any more? You have books by Marx and Lenin and you have my books. You stubbornly refuse to study them.’ He told her her ‘demands’ had injured his health, ‘I am already eighty years old. Even so you bother me by saying various things. Why don’t you have sympathy? I envy Chou En-lai and his wife.’ What must have frightened her as much was the reappearance of her enemy Teng, back from the dead and thereafter known as ‘Lazarus’; he told
journalists he had been at ‘reform school’ in Jiangsi Province. In 1975 Mao produced his final slogan, ‘Three Mores and One Less’: ‘Chou should rest more, Teng should work more, Wang should study more and Chiang Ching should talk less.’ He appended a maxim: ‘The ears are made so as to remain open but the mouth may shut.’
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Sometimes, in his last period, Mao was perky: ‘People say that China loves peace. That’s boasting. In fact the Chinese love struggle. I do for one.’ He kept his hatred of formal education: ‘The more books one reads, the stupider one becomes.’ On the other hand, just before his death he received a report on the education system from the head of Qinghua University, who had been purged by Chiang Ching, then rehabilitated. Mao told him to speak only for three minutes. He was told, grimly: ‘Thirty seconds will be enough. College students study the textbooks of secondary schools, and
their
academic level is that of primary schools.’ Mao (sadly): if this situation goes on, not only will the Party fail, but the nation itself will perish.’
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His mind wandered between religious and secular belief. ‘My body is riddled with diseases. I have an appointment with God.’ On another occasion he asked colleagues: ‘Are there not some of you who thought I would go to see Marx sooner?’ ‘None.’ ‘I don’t believe it.’
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His last saying was enigmatic: ‘The people do not support the reversals of verdicts.’

The watershed year of 1976 opened an era of opaque confusion. Chou died early in April. This discreet mandarin, much respected abroad, who kept himself curiously detached from the failures and murderous squalor of the regime, seems to have been the only member of it to have aroused genuine popular feelings in China. When, on 5 April, the authorities removed wreaths placed in his memory in Peking’s main square, 100,000 people rioted. Teng was immediately blamed for this disturbance and disgraced for the second time. Mao died on 9 September. During the last months of his life there was intense faction-fighting around his bedside. As soon as he was dead, Chiang Ching claimed a reconciliation had taken place. She produced a bit of paper which she claimed was a poem Mao had written to her
in extremis:
‘You have been wronged,’ it said, ‘I have tried to reach the peak of revolution but I was not successful. But you could reach the top.’
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However, another bit of paper was waved by Hua Kuo-Feng, who had succeeded Chou as premier. Hua was then fifty-five, a relative newcomer, having been on the Central Committee only since 1969 and Minister of Public Security since the previous year. He was almost a ‘helicopter’, a term more usually applied to Chiang Ching’s fast-rising protégé Wang Hung-wen, now the party boss of Shanghai.
Mao liked Hua partly because he was a peasant from his favourite province, Hunan, chiefly because he was cunningly sycophantic. On 30 April the old tyrant had scratched out for Hua six characters: ‘With you in charge I have no worries.’ Hua’s bit of paper was undoubtedly authentic. In any case he had more impressive credentials: control of the top security unit in Peking, Number 8341, which protected Mao himself and which Hua had inherited from the old security boss Kang Sheng, who had died in December 1975.