China 1945: Mao's Revolution and America's Fateful Choice (24 page)

Over time, Kang became an easily recognizable figure in Yenan, though he appears to have been invisible to the American visitors of 1944 and 1945: they never mention him in dispatches that are full of descriptions of other senior Communist leaders. “
Kang always wore Russian jackets and knee-high boots and he went around with a big dog,” one ranking party member,
Shi Zhe, who was Mao’s Russian interpreter, has written in a memoir. “He was followed by four security guards whenever he went out, and he looked very confident. He was already the most frightening figure in Yenan. He was like a faithful dog always ready to follow his master’s [Mao’s] command and attack his master’s enemies.” Pyotr Vladimirov saw a lot of Kang, who, he said, spoke Russian, albeit “with an accent, without conjugating verbs,” and with a “very poor vocabulary.” As if to illustrate the inequality that Wang complained about, he lived in a big house with its own peach orchard that formerly belonged to a landlord. He has, Vladimirov wrote,

Mao with Kang Sheng, the chief of his secret police and the principal organizer of his ideological purges.
(illustration credit 6)

It was in the Rectification Campaign of 1942 that Kang, with Mao’s evident approval, perfected his technique, which was to find some exemplary target, make a plausible accusation, and then pressure him into an admission of guilt as an example to everybody else—or, as the Chinese proverb has it, to kill the chicken to frighten the monkey. Confessions were extorted in the fashion that became standard in China—a combination of extreme isolation, mass denunciation rallies, a newspaper campaign, wearying interrogations, torture, and a vow to the accused that a full admission of guilt and a self-criticism would lead to lenient treatment while stubborn insistence on non-guilt would be punished severely. All of this took place as a sort of perverse group therapy, in which first destabilizing a person with “a powerful shock” and then getting him on the “road to recovery” were the key ingredients. The Rectification Campaign was a cure for thinking independently, or, as the Chinese journalist
Dai Qing said of the Wang Shiwei case, it enacted “
the ugliest nightmare in human history—the smothering of dignity and freedom of thought in the name of revolution.” It had, in addition, that particular Orwellian element that distinguishes the psychological methods of twentieth-century totalitarianism: the goal was not simply to make the thought-control target admit his errors and flaws but to so thoroughly destroy his sense of autonomous individuality that he feels gratitude and love for the leader who restored him to the correct path—Chairman Mao.

An early example of the method involved a nineteen-year-old man named
Zhang Keqin, who was a student at what was called the Xibei,
or northwest school, set up by Kang precisely to train agents for the job of internal intelligence. Zhang was a handy target because, in 1942, someone he knew from Chungking sent him a pro-Kuomintang magazine. His father, a doctor, had treated Kuomintang officials, which was taken as evidence of a special relationship with the enemy. In addition, Zhang had been denounced as a Kuomintang spy by one of the young men who had come to Yenan with him. There was no evidence to support this accusation, but Zhang, still a teenager and, no doubt, terrified, was unable to prove that it was false. Kang Sheng ordered him arrested and interrogated. He was questioned for three days and nights in a method called
chelunzhan,
literally “cartwheel war,” in which interrogators replace each other in a nonstop bombardment of questions during which the suspect has no respite and no sleep. In the end Zhang, unable to endure any more, admitted to the charge against him.

Zhang’s case contained all the elements sought by the engineers of what the historian
Gao Hua has called “this live show.”
With tears streaming down his face, he manufactured a story that fit the Communists’ preferred narrative of betrayal and redemption. He said that he had become a secret agent, joining a Communist cell that was actually set up as a kind of decoy by the KMT. He fingered others who were secret agents among the friends who had journeyed to Yenan with him, including the person who had initially fingered him, and then he expressed his gratitude to the party for saving him from his errors and making him a new person. Having demonstrated the perfect functioning of the system of confession and reform, Zhang was then dispatched by Kang Sheng to lecture to other students at the Xibei school. His example, psychological torment followed by treatment as an ideological model, induced others in Yenan to manufacture stories of shortcomings, misbehavior, and ideological errors and of their need for thought reform so that they could become models also. “
Once you confessed, you had a better life,” Shi Zhe wrote in his memoir, “and if you didn’t confess you were tortured and stayed in prison. The more stories you made up the better you were treated.”

In 1944, after two years in the hands of the Yenan security apparatus, Wang Shiwei was ushered out to be interviewed by some Chungking-based Chinese reporters (no foreigners were ever given access to him). One of Wang’s crimes had been to express the view that Stalin’s show trials of the 1930s were “dubious.” Very likely he knew that after months or years in detention the falsely accused would be expected to make
full, abject public confessions, admitting to thoughts and deeds either that they never had or that were in no way criminal. The Czech writer
Milan Kundera spoke of the moral inversion produced by Stalinist persecution in which the disoriented person desperately searches his life in order to find crimes to admit to. This seems to be what happened to Wang Shiwei. When first accused, Wang refused to admit any guilt, but now, brought before the Chungking reporters, looking, one of them said, like he was “reciting from a textbook,” Wang became what he had most despised. “I deserve to be executed,” he said. “But Mao is so magnanimous … I am extremely grateful for his mercy.”

Wang Shiwei remained an object of public vituperation for the duration of the Rectification Campaign. He was, the propaganda intoned, the inhabitant of a “
counter-revolutionary shit-hole.” He was a member of an “anti-party gang” that had “sneaked into the party to destroy and undermine it.”
A mob of other writers obediently wrote articles in which they drew the mandatory lessons from Wang’s ideological errors; these articles had titles like “Thoroughly Smash Wang Shiwei’s Trotskyite Theories and Anti-Party Activities” and “The Literary and Artists Circle’s Correct Attitude and Their Self-Examination Regarding Wang Shiwei,” which was by
Ding Ling. Wang was locked up in a Yenan prison unknown to members of the American military mission, and in 1947, as the
CCP evacuated Yenan in advance of KMT troops, he was hacked to death and his body dumped into a well in a village near the Yellow River.

Twenty-five years later, with Mao ensconced inside what Beijing residents didn’t dare call the new forbidden city, a talented and renowned essayist and playwright named
Wu Han, who was also a deputy mayor of Beijing, wrote a historical allegory called
Hai Rui Dismissed from Office
. It was about a just official in the Ming dynasty who had been punished for speaking truths to power, and it was an unmistakable reference to Mao and his practice of cashiering old revolutionary comrades for daring to criticize his autocratic rule. Wu Han’s play was performed and published in 1961, and it took five years for Mao to find the political backing he needed to launch a counterattack, which he did in 1966 when one of his radical henchmen,
Yao Wenyuan,
accused Wu Han of wanting to “replace the state theory of Marxism-Leninism with the state theory of the landlord and bourgeoisie.” In such a way did the Great Proletarian
Cultural Revolution, which lasted for ten sanguinary years and produced the ultimate apotheosis of Mao, begin with a campaign
against a writer and his impure thoughts. Wu Han was imprisoned for having created a work of literature, a play. In 1969, he was beaten to death. The Communists, as
Harrison Forman put it, “take their culture seriously.”

Does it really matter
that the members of the Dixie Mission were ignorant of the Rectification Campaign, that some journalists said some ridiculously worshipful things about Mao, or that most of the American travelers to Yenan in the final months of World
War II missed the essential nature of Maoism, its ruthlessness, its cruelty, its repressiveness, its Orwellian manipulation of the truth? The United States has had cordial relations with numerous dictators over the years, including dictators like Chiang Kai-shek. Once the Cold War broke out, it was not a country’s domestic arrangements that determined its relationship to the United States; it was whether it aligned itself with the Soviet Union and put itselt in the service of Soviet goals. In the long stretch of time since the months of the Dixie Mission, numerous observers and scholars have forcefully argued that there was nothing inevitable about Chinese enmity toward the United States. If Washington had constructed a separate, cooperative relationship with Mao and his cohort in the final months of the war, rather than giving one-sided support to Chiang Kai-shek, then, as Service has put it, we might not have ended up with “
the close friend and ally we once hoped for,” but we would at least have had something better than “bitter enmity.” Most important, Service and numerous other scholars and observers have argued in later years, we would not have ended up backing the losing side in a harsh and bloody civil war, and therefore “Korea and Vietnam would probably never have happened.”

And yet it was important to Davies, Service, and
Stilwell that the Communists were potentially democratic; that they seemed more American than Russian; that they sought nothing more radical or revolutionary than a reform of rural taxes; that they would go their own vigorously independent and nationalistic way rather than the way of Stalin and the Russians. To say that they were wrong is not to condemn them or to find them negligent in their duties. These were brave, intelligent, honest, and admirable men trying to puzzle out the truth in murky circumstances, and, moreover, they were more realistic than their adversaries inside the very divided American government and their policy
prescriptions were more reasonable. Very few people placed in their complex and difficult situations would have done better than they did. But they made mistakes, and the main one they made was to overestimate the compatibility of Chinese Communism with American values and aspirations. Perhaps there was an element of self-delusion in this, of wishful thinking, because though the
China hands were realists, they were also believers in the American mission of fostering democracy in the world, and it would have been more difficult proposing closer ties to Mao if they had been clearer about the profoundly illiberal, destructively totalitarian regime he would establish. This is where their ignorance of the Rectification Campaign becomes significant. In later years, many have contended that Mao and his cohort were driven into radicalism because they were first thrust into isolation and insecurity by the West. But the Rectification Campaign shows that this is incorrect. What the Americans in Yenan did not see or understand was that the elements of Mao’s rule that would become visible after the Communists took total power in China were already in place years before that occurred, and that included the adoption of all the methods of twentieth-century totalitarianism.

An argument exactly opposite to the one made by Service and the other China experts in the Foreign Service has also frequently been made; it was made by the new American emissary,
Patrick J. Hurley, by Henry Luce, by General
Wedemeyer, by the members of what came to be called the
China Lobby, and by the congressmen and senators in Washington who later conducted a witch hunt for those they believed responsible for “the loss” of China to the Communists. This argument was that the Foreign Service officers’ rosy view of Mao coupled with their denigration of Chiang led to an erosion of support for the KMT, and if that support had not eroded, the Communists would not have come to power, and so the wars in
Korea and Vietnam would never have occurred.