China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice (23 page)

This is important. If the movement created by
Mao was to eradicate the “disease,” as Wang called it, of China immemorial, it needed to eradicate both the cruelty of Stygian authority and the blind, automatic obedience to it as well. The revolution could not simply replace one unquestioned authority with another, and Wang dared to question the unquestioned authority of Mao as well as of international Communism itself, at whose apex was Joseph Stalin in Moscow. There is a seeming paradox in this, because Mao made various ostentatious verbal gestures in favor of independent thinking; he brandished an intolerance for stale ideas and dogmatic attachments, though in reality he was prosecutorially intolerant of criticism directed against himself. His main rivals in the Communist movement were a group of men, led by a powerful party official named
Wang Ming, who had spent years in Moscow under the auspices of the
Comintern and whose aura of authority came from their previous proximity to the headquarters of the global revolution. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, Mao used political campaigns to silence this Moscow faction, whom he accused of blindly applying a set of
rigid principles to Chinese circumstances, and to become the undisputed top leader of the Chinese Communist movement.

Mao could get away with it. Wang Shiwei, who went treacherously far in his questioning of Stalin’s authority, could not. Among the received ideas challenged by Wang were Stalin’s ways of getting rid of his opponents. He doubted the honesty of Stalin’s show trials and his persecutions of Soviet leades like Karl Radek and Grigory Zinoviev. He wrote essays exploring the dividing line between the “truly great politician” and the leaders who advance “
their own reputation, position, and profit and thus harm the revolution.”

Wang was encouraged to express these views. A few years earlier, following one of Mao’s iconoclastic injunctions, the Central Committee had issued a proclamation inviting party members to “discuss everything,” since “no matter what opinion, right or wrong, all should be raised without reservation.” Wang, who was not naïvely idealistic, knew that this appearance of openness to diverse opinions was going to be limited at best, and in one of the first statements that got him into trouble, he described it as a sham. He wrote of a “certain comrade” who had written a critical wall poster and afterward been so severely “criticized and attacked” that he became “partially demented.” Still, Wang said, “
I will dare to follow that certain comrade and speak on egalitarianism and hierarchy.”

This was his main concern and his main offense, calling attention to the difference between the egalitarian ideal of Yenan and its actual hierarchy. Contrary to the impression garnered by foreign visitors, an elaborate system of perquisites and privileges had developed in Yenan that seems remarkable given the Communists’ theoretical emphasis on material equality and the informality, the lack of insignia or pretension, that so impressed the Dixie Mission members. Of course, the senior Chinese communists, many of whom had lived or studied in the Soviet Union, knew that a hierarchy of privilege was firmly encrusted into Stalin’s supposedly classless society, and perhaps that’s why they believed it to be normal and acceptable to enjoy a similar hierarchy themselves. In Yenan, the privileges began with the ambulance, donated by the Chinese Laundryman’s Association of New York, that was reserved for the exclusive use of Mao and was the only car in the entire Communist encampment. Nobody seems to have thought it odd that the party chairman should have his own vehicle. More bothersome were the everyday distinctions made—three kitchen levels, for instance, by
which people at different ranks got significantly different food, high-level cadres served better food in what were called “small pots”; the nannies and special kindergartens of section and department heads to which they sent their children; and preferred access to hospitals for giving birth and getting scarce medications. Various people had different cigarettes, candles, and writing paper. Everybody in Yenan seemed to dress the same, but some people received underwear made of imported cotton softer than the underwear available for the rank and file. Above all, there was a certain hypocritical arrogance to these ranking bureaucrats who called on those below them to accept revolutionary austerity while rejecting it for themselves.

Mao, like the Central Committee, urged revolutionary cadres with complaints to
speak out. In speeches to the Central Party School in 1942, he had presented himself as a kind of freethinking iconoclast, comparing dogma to manure and empty, theoretical talk to “
the foot-bindings of a slattern, long and foul-smelling.” It’s easy to see now how this earthy pose of intellectual libertarianism actually produced a deadening authoritarian effect, how it magnified the power and glory of Mao himself, who could somehow appear to be at the same time both an avatar of bold thinking and a tyrant requiring absolute obedience. It was also “
fiendishly clever,” as Mao’s biographer
Philip Short has written. His mixture of contrarianism and authoritarianism enabled him “to modulate the progress of an ideological campaign to accommodate his political needs, to change direction at will, and to lure real or presumed opponents into exposing their views, the better to strike them down.”

In 1956, seven years after taking power, Mao, in a notorious reenactment of this fiendish cleverness, called for “a hundred flowers” to bloom and “a hundred schools of thought” to contend. This bracing call for freedom of expression was followed by the brutal repression known as the
Anti-Rightist Campaign, in which tens of thousands of China’s most thoughtful, educated, and loyal citizens who had expressed dissenting views were herded into concentration camps for what was euphemistically called reform through labor.

Something very similar, a sort of foreshadowing of what was to come, took place in 1942. In the old walled town of Yenan, much of it reduced to rubble by the Japanese aerial bombardments of 1938 and 1939, there was a district where the many artists and writers who had been drawn to Mao’s standard put up what had always been a unique Chinese mode of expression, the
big-character poster or wall newspaper. This is a large
placard with an opinion on it that anybody could stand and read right there and, presumably, talk to others doing the same thing. The wall newspapers had titles like
Arrow and Target, Light Cavalry,
and
Northwest Wind
, on which the Yenan cultural elite took Mao up on his call for intra-party debate. Wang Shiwei argued at meetings that the writers of wall newspapers should be protected by anonymity, but this notion was rejected.

Wang did not make his famous criticism of hierarchical privilege on a common big-character poster but in the pages of
Liberation Daily
, the party newspaper, in March 1942. One of the characteristics of Yenan, unremarked by Snow, Davies, Forman, Epstein, and the others, was its isolation from outside influences. Between 1937 and 1940 or so, the Yenan population had increased twentyfold, but among those tens of thousands of people, including thousands of urban intellectuals like Wang Shiwei, there were almost no radios, no newspapers from outside. Those big-character posters and wall newspapers weren’t so much an index of intellectual ferment but rather of how extremely limited was the space allowed for unsupervised expression of opinion. In that context,
Liberation Daily
wasn’t just another newspaper. It was essentially the sole regular source of information, which meant that the publication of Wang Shiwei’s views on CCP hierarchy and privilege was more than simply an individual view, like an op-ed article in an American newspaper. A leading figure on
Liberation Daily
was a writer named
Ding Ling, celebrated for her stories about young women struggling to gain control over their own bodies and lives (and a future winner of the Stalin Prize for literature),
who encouraged the paper to publish Wang’s essay.

It was called it “
Wild Lilies,” after a flower that grew in the hills around Yenan and that Wang saw as a “
pure and noble image.” The essay began by reporting that “
the youth of Yenan seem dispirited and are apparently harboring some troubling discomfort. Why?” Some people, he continued, might attribute the discontent to the absence of nutrition, or perhaps to the male-female ratio of eighteen to one, which meant not much of a sex life for most of the males, except, though Wang doesn’t mention this, for the senior party and army leaders to whom the few women were distributed. But those were not the primary reasons, since young people didn’t come to Yenan to have lives of ease and enjoyment. What bothered people most was the system of rank and privilege. “I am
not an egalitarian,” he wrote, “but the three classes
of clothing and five grades of food are not necessarily reasonable and needed—this is especially true with clothes.” The “unreasonable perks” that some “big shots” get, he continued, lead “subordinates to see their superiors as belonging to another species.”

It was at this point that “far-seeing
Mao” held the event that
Harrison Forman referred to in his 1945 book as a salutary reform of culture, one aimed at bringing arrogant and supercilious urbanites from Shanghai into line with the cultural needs of peasants, and that had “amazing good results,” the sort of results that a professional theater critic like
Brooks Atkinson could praise. The event in question was the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art, one of the central initiatives taken by Mao in the larger political upheaval given the name
Rectification Campaign, that Mao engineered in Yenan and that was designed both to indoctrinate the thousands who had flocked to Yenan and to eradicate his opponents inside the party. The long-range effect of this famous meeting was to reduce the magnificent art and culture of China, historically one of the greatest contributions to global culture ever made, to standardized, officially approved propaganda. But the immediate, drastic effect was on the artists who had come to Yenan hoping to break away from Kuomintang oppression and the constraints of the Confucian tradition and to create a new culture befitting the new China, only to find that they were under suspicion and under attack.

Mao used the forum to attack Wang Shiwei personally. He was labeled a “petit-bourgeois individualist,” which was a capital offense. Mao’s loyal followers held weeks of criticism and struggle sessions against Wang. He was called “Comrade Shit-stink.” The poet
Ai Qing, who himself had complained about Mao’s demand “to describe ringworm as flowers,” made up for his transgression by calling Wang a “reactionary,” and
Ding Ling, the fiercely feminist writer who had brokered Wang’s essay in
Liberation Daily,
made up for this error by joining the mob. As
Philip Short has written, “
It was not enough for Wang merely to be purged. His fellow writers had publicly to humiliate him. His ‘trial’ marked the beginning of a practice of collective denunciation that would remain an essential part of the Chinese Communists’ treatment of dissidents for decades to come.”

The Rectification Campaign lasted for two years. Mao, in the sort of comment he did not make to visiting foreigners, articulated the psychological theory behind it. “
The first step is to give the patient a powerful shock,” he said in February 1942 as the campaign was just beginning,
even before Wang Shiwei wrote his fatal article. “Yell at him, ‘You’re sick!’ then he’ll get a fright and break out in a sweat. At that point he can be put on the road to recovery.”

Mao has been excused by some historians for being different from Stalin in this regard, for wanting to cure the patient rather than do what Stalin did during his purges in the Soviet Union, which was have them executed, and this is true. Mao was a believer in reeducation rather than elimination, though in practice reeducation was not a gentle process; when it meant imprisonment for years in primitive work camps with substandard food and no medical treatment, it was tantamount to elimination. “
Party meetings are fixed by an order from above,” Pyotr Vladimirov, supposedly a TASS News Agency correspondent in Yenan and an agent of the GRU, Soviet military intelligence, wrote in his diary,

As the campaign unfolded, the shock treatment took the form of accusations of membership in a spy ring working for Chiang Kai-shek. The underlying purpose of this, some historians believe, wasn’t only a general thought remolding in the context of a revolutionary struggle, where, after all, a certain ideological discipline might be warranted. Rather, it was more importantly a way of establishing Mao’s absolute power by branding any dissent not just wrong but an act of espionage for the enemy—in other words, disloyalty, treason.

The movement was notable in this sense for the rise of one of the more sinister figures of Chinese Communist history,
Kang Sheng, Mao’s chief enforcer. Kang perfectly illustrated a particular archetype spawned by the totalitarian movements of the twentieth century, one also embodied by Stalin’s secret police chief, Lavrenty Beria, or the Nazi Heinrich Himmler, all of them ruthless guardians of the revolution and loyal protectors of its semi-deified Great Leader, whether Hitler, Stalin, or Mao. Kang had earlier belonged to the
Moscow faction of
the party, having spent four years in the Soviet Union with Mao’s great rival in the party,
Wang Ming, whom he was in the habit of calling “
a genius leader.” But when he came to Yenan with the rest of the Moscow group, he cleverly switched from one genius leader to another, joining Mao, who was always leery of possible plotting against him by colleagues and subordinates and needful of a figure whom he could trust absolutely. It didn’t hurt that when Mao decided to marry the Shanghai actress
Jiang Qing, who had not been fully accepted by most of the senior leadership, only Kang and Mao’s personal secretary,
Chen Boda, gave their enthusiastic approval.