Wild Swans: Three Daughters of China (46 page)

There were a number of success stories which boosted the nation's pride.  In October 1964 China exploded its first atomic bomb.  This was given huge publicity and touted as a demonstration of the country's scientific and industrial achievement, particularly in relation to 'standing up to imperialist bullies."  The explosion of the atomic bomb coincided with the ousting of Khrushchev, which was presented as proof that Mao was right again.  In 1964 France recognized China at full ambassadorial level, the first leading Western nation to do so.  This was received with rapture inside China as a major victory over the United States, which was refusing to acknowledge China's rightful place in the world.

In addition, there was no general political persecution, and people were relatively content.  All the credit was given to Mao.  Although the very top leaders knew what Mao's real contribution was, the people were kept completely in the dark.  Over the years I composed passionate eulogies thanking Mao for all his achievements and pledging my undying loyalty to him.

I was thirteen in 1965.  On the evening of I October that year, the sixteenth anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic, there was a big fireworks display on the square in the center of Chengdu.  To the north of the square was the gate to an ancient imperial palace, which had recently been restored to its third-century grandeur, when Chengdu was the capital of a kingdom and a prosperous warlord city. The gate was very similar to the Gate of Heavenly Peace in Peking, now the entrance to the Forbidden City, except for its color: it had sweeping green tiled roofs and gray walls.  Under the glazed roof of the pavilion stood enormous dark-red pillars.  The balustrades were made of white marble.  I was standing behind them with my family and the Sichuan dignitaries on a reviewing stand enjoying the festival atmosphere and waiting for the fireworks to begin.  Below in the square 50,000 people were singing and dancing.  Bang.  t Bang.t The signals for the fireworks went off a few yards from where I stood.  In an instant, the sky was a garden of spectacular shapes and

The Cult of Mao 36I colors, a sea of wave after wave of brilliance. The music and noise rose from below the imperial gate to join in the sumptuousness.  After a while, the sky was clear for a few seconds. Then a sudden explosion brought out a gorgeous blossom, followed by the unfurling of a long, vast, silky hanging.  It stretched itself in the middle of the sky, swaying gently in the autumn breeze.  In the light over the square, the characters on the hanging were shining: "Long Live Our Great Leader Chairman Mao!"  Tears sprang to my eyes.

"How lucky, how incredibly lucky I am to be living in the great era of Mao Zedong!"  I kept saying to myself.

"How can children in the capitalist world go on living without being near Chairman Mao, and without the hope of ever seeing him in person?" I wanted to do something for them, to rescue them from their plight.  I made a pledge to myself there and then to work hard to build a stronger China, in order to support a world revolution.  I needed to work hard to be entitled to see Chairman Mao, too.  That was the purpose of my Life.

 15.  "Destroy First, and Construction Will Look After Itself'-The Cultural Revolution Begins (1965-1966)

At the beginning of the 1960s, in spite of all the disasters Mao had caused, he was still China's supreme leader, idololized by the population.  But because the pragmatists were actually running the country, there was relative literary and artistic freedom.  A host of plays, operas, films, and novels emerged after long hibernation.  None attacked the Party openly, and contemporary themes were rare.  At this time Mao was on the defensive, and he turned more and more to his wife, Jiang Qjng, who had been an actress in the 193OS.  They decided that historical themes were being used to convey insinuations against the regime and against Mao himself.

In China, there was a strong tradition of using historical allusion to voice opposition, and even apparently esoteric allusions were widely understood as coded references to the present day.  In April 1963 Mao banned all "Ghost Dramas," a genre rich in ancient tales of revenge by dead victims' spirits on those who had persecuted them.  To him, these ghost avengers were uncomfortably close to the class enemies who had perished under his rule.

The Maos also turned their attention to another genre, the "Dramas of the Ming Mandarin," the protagonist of which was Hai Rui, a mandarin from the Ming dynasty (1368-1644).  A famous personification of justice and courage, the Ming Mandarin remonstrated with the emperor on behalf of the suffering ordinary people, at the risk of his own life.  He was dismissed and exiled.  The Maos suspected that the Ming Mandarin was being used to represent Marshal Peng Dehuai, the former defense minister who in 1959 had spoken out against Mao's disastrous policies which had caused the famine.  Almost immediately after Peng's dismissal, there was a noticeable resurgence of the Ming Mandarin genre.  Mme Mao tried to get the plays denounced, but when she approached the writers and ministers in charge of the arts they turned a deaf ear.

In 1964, Mao drew up a list of thirty-nine artists, writers, and scholars for denunciation.  He branded them 'reactionary bourgeois authorities," a new category of class enemies.

Prominent names on the list included the most famous playwright in the Ming Mandarin genre, Wu Han, and Professor Ma Yin-chu, who had been the first leading economist to advocate birth control.  For this he had already been named a rightist in 1957.  Mao had subsequently realized that birth control was necessary, but he resented Professor Ma for showing him up and making it clear that he was wrong.

The list was not made public, and the thirty-nine people were not purged by their Party organizations.  Mao had the list circulated to officials down to my mother's level with instructions to catch other 'reactionary bourgeois authorities."  In the winter of 1964-65, my mother was sent as the head of a work team to a school named "Ox Market."

She was told to look for suspects among prominent teachers and those who had written books or articles.

My mother was appalled, particularly as the purge threatened the very people she most admired.  Besides, she could plainly see that even if she were to look for 'enemies' she would not find any.  Apart from anything else, with the memory of all the recent persecutions few had dared to open their mouths at all.  She told her superior, Mr.  Pao, who was in charge of the campaign in Chengdu, how she felt.

Nineteen sixty-five passed, and my mother did nothing.

Mr.  Pao did not exert any pressure on her.  Their inaction reflected the general mood among Party officials.  Most of them were fed up with persecutions, and wanted to get on with improving living standards and building a normal life.

But they did not openly oppose Mao, and indeed went on promoting his personality cult.  The few who watched Mao's deification with apprehension knew there was nothing they could do to stop it: Mao had such power and prestige that his cult was irresistible.  The most they could do was engage in some kind of passive resistance.

Mao interpreted the reaction from the Party officials to his call for a witch-hunt as an indication that their loyalty to him was weakening and that their hearts were with the policies being pursued by President Liu and Deng.  His suspicion was confirmed when the Party newspapers refused to publish an article he had authorized denouncing Wu Han and his play about the Ming Mandarin.  Mao's purpose in getting the article published was to involve the population in the witch-hunt.  Now he found he was cut off from his subjects by the Party system, which had been the intermediary between himself and the people.  He had, in effect, lost control.  The Party Committee of Peking, where Wu Han was deputy mayor, and the Central Department of Public Affairs, which looked after the media and the arts, stood up to Mao, refusing either to denounce Wu Han or to dismiss him.

Mao felt threatened.  He saw himself as a Stalin figure,about to be denounced by a Khrushchev while he was still alive.  He wanted to make a preemptive strike and destro~ the man he regarded as "China's Khrushchev," Liu Shaoqi, and his colleague Deng, as well as their followers in the Party.  This he deceptively termed the "Cultural Revolution."  He knew his would be a lone battle, but this gave him the majestic satisfaction of feeling that he was challenging nothing less than the whole world, and maneuvering on a grand scale.  There was even a tinge of self-pity as he portrayed himself as the tragic hero taking on a mighty enemy the huge Party machine.

On 10 November 1965, having repeatedly failed to have the article condemning Wu Han's play published in Peking, Mao was at last able to get it printed in Shanghai, where his followers were in charge.  It was in this article that the term "Cultural Revolution' first appeared. The Party's own newspaper, the People's Daily, refused to reprint the article, as did the Peking Daily, the voice of the Party organization in the capital.  In the provinces, some papers did carry the article. At the time, my father was overseeing the provincial Party newspaper, the Sichuan Daily, and was against reprinting the article, which he could sense was an attack on Marshal Peng and a call for a witch-hunt. He went to see the man in charge of cultural affairs for the province, who suggested they telephone Deng Xiaoping.  Deng was not in his office, and the call was taken by Marshal Ho Lung, a close friend of Deng's, and a member of the Politburo.  It was he whom my father had overheard saying in 1959: "It really should be him [Deng] on the throne."  Ho said not to reprint the article.

Sichuan was one of the last provinces to run the article, doing so only on 18 December, well after the People's Daily finally printed it on 30 November.  The article appeared in the People's Daily only after Zhou Enlai, the premier, who had emerged as the peacekeeper in the power struggle, added a note to it, in the name of 'the editor," saying that the Cultural Revolution was to be an 'academic' discussion, meaning that it should be nonpolitical and should not lead to political condemnations.

Over the next three months there was intense maneuvering, with Mao's opponents, as well as Zhou, trying to head off Mao's witch-hunt.  In February 1966, while Mao was away from Peking, the Politburo passed a resolution that 'academic discussions' must not degenerate into persecutions.  Mao had objected to this resolution, but he was ignored.

In April my father was asked to prepare a document in the spirit of the Politburo's February resolution to guide the Cultural Revolution in Sichuan.  What he wrote became known as the "April Document."  It said: The debates must be strictly academic.  No wild accusations should be allowed.  Everyone is equal before the truth.  The Party must not use force to suppress intellectuals.

Just as this document was about to be published in May, it was suddenly blocked.  There was a new Politburo decision.  This time, Mao had been present and had got the upper hand, with Zhou Enlai's complicity.  Mao tore up the February resolution and declared that all dissident scholars and their ideas must be 'eliminated."  He emphasized that it was officials in the Communist Party who had been protecting the dissident scholars and other class enemies.  He termed these officials 'those in power following the capitalist road," and declared war on them.  They became known as 'capitalist-roaders."  The mammoth Cultural Revolution was formally launched.

Who exactly were these 'capitalist-roaders'?  Mao himself was not sure. He knew he wanted to replace the whole of the Peking Party Committee, which he did.  He also knew he wanted to get rid of Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, and 'the bourgeois headquarters in the Party."  But he did not know who in the vast Party system were loyal to him and who were followers of Liu and Deng and their 'capitalist road."  He calculated that he controlled only a third of the Party.  In order not to let a single one of his enemies escape, he resolved to overthrow the entire Communist Party.  Those faithful to him would survive the upheaval.  In his own words: "Destroy first, and construction will look after itself."  Mao was not worried about the possible destruction of the Party: Mao the Emperor always overrode Mao the Communist.  Nor was he Faint hearted about hurting anyone unduly, even those most loyal to him.

One of his great heroes, the ancient general Tsao Tsao, had spoken an immortal line which Mao openly admired:

"I would rather wrong all people under Heaven; and no one under Heaven must ever wrong me." 

The general proclaimed this when he discovered that he had murdered an elderly couple by mistake the old man and woman, whom he had suspected of betraying him, had in fact saved his life.

Mao's vague bat He calls threw the population and the majority of Party officials into profound confusion.  Few knew what he was driving at, or who exactly were the enemies this time.  My father and mother, like other senior Party people, could see that Mao had decided to punish some officials.  But they had no idea who these would be.  It could well be themselves.  Apprehension and bewilderment overwhelmed them.

Meanwhile, Mao made his single most important organizational move: he set up his own personal chain of command that operated outside the Party apparatus, although by formally claiming it was under the Politburo and the Central Committee he was able to pretend it was acting on Party orders.

First, he picked as his deputy Marshal Lin Biao, who had succeeded Peng Dehuai as defense minister in 1959 and had greatly boosted Mao's personality cult in the armed forces.  He also set up a new body, the Cultural Revolution Authority, under his former secretary Chen Boda, with his intelligence chief Kang Sheng and Mme Mao as its de facto leaders.  It became the core of the leadership of the Cultural Revolution.