I was in the newsroom of the Times on September 21, 1971, three months after leaving Peking, when Jim Greenfield, our foreign editor, pointed out to me a Reuters dispatch from the Chinese capital. The October 1 National Day parade, which had been held every year since the founding of the People’s Republic, had been canceled. All civil and military flights had been suspended without explanation from September 13 to 15. Cancellation of the parade meant there would be no lineup of the Politburo on the Tiananmen reviewing stand, the order of which would reveal any reshuffle of the leadership. Speculation all over the world centered on the health of Mao Zedong, intensified by a French Radio report that he was ill or dead.
One hour before the Times was to go to press with a front-page story reporting the speculation, I got through by telephone to the Information Department of the Foreign Ministry in Peking. Ji Mingzhong, my friendly overseer in Peking, who answered, was startled out of his customary imperturbability by the call, since there were no regular telephone connections between New York and Peking. When I asked him to confirm or deny the reports concerning Mao, there was a long silence before Ma Yuzhen, his superior, came on the line and said: “We usually do not answer questions on the telephone, but this is an exceptional case. The pernicious rumors about Chairman Mao Zedong are untrue. He is in very good health.” The Times carried Ma’s statement in the first edition, but we still did not know the nature of the crisis in China, and rumors continued to abound as to the health, whereabouts, and status of both Mao and Lin Biao, his designated successor. Lin Biao had earlier disappeared from public view, as did his four top generals: Huang Yongsheng, chief of the General Staff; Wu Faxian, the air force commander; Li Zuopeng, the navy political commissar; and Qiu Huizuo, chief of logistics for the armed forces.
The mystery deepened on September 30 when Tass, the Soviet press agency, announced that a Chinese Communist jet had violated the air space over the People’s Republic of Mongolia on the night of September 12–13 and crashed in the mountains. Nine badly burned bodies were found in the wreckage of the plane, which had been bound for the Soviet Union. It would be almost a year before mention was made again in the Chinese press of Lin Biao’s name and then only in conjunction with his denunciation and the revelation that he, his wife, Ye Qun, and his son, Lin Liguo, were aboard the crashed aircraft.
All of the circumstances preceding their flight on the night of September 12–13 have not yet, as late as the year 2009, been officially disclosed. The Chinese leadership has not been willing to reveal every detail. What has been gleaned from Chinese government archives is the official allegation that Lin Biao’s son, an air force officer, having become convinced that the Maoists were planning the downfall of his father, gathered other officers into a group, which called itself the “Joint Fleet,” with the intention of assassinating Mao Zedong. Lin Liguo was also said to have planned to kidnap Lin Biao’s four senior generals and take them together with his parents to Guangzhou, where a rival regime would be set up to challenge the Maoists. When the plot was uncovered, Lin Liguo was said to have persuaded his parents, who were staying at Beidaihe, a coastal vacation resort not far from Peking, to flee with him and other conspirators to the Soviet Union. The Lin family boarded a Trident jet at an airport near Beidaihe. Aware of their flight, Zhou Enlai was said to have asked Mao if he should have the plane shot down. Mao is reputed to have shrugged off the suggestion with the comment: “Rain has to fall, girls have to marry, these things are immutable, let them go.” The Trident jet commandeered hastily by Lin Liguo apparently did not have sufficient fuel and crashed in the Mongolian mountains.
It remains a mystery as to whether Lin Biao himself was involved in his son’s alleged plot. Lin’s four top generals, who disappeared after the plane crash, apparently were not involved. Nevertheless, they were dismissed by Mao on September 24 as members of what he characterized as a treacherous faction.
In November, the Chinese press emphasized that the armed forces were under “the direct leadership and command of Chairman Mao.” Once again the slogan was revived: “The party commands the gun and the gun must never be allowed to command the party.” The death of Lin Biao, whatever the circumstances preceding it, provided the Maoists with the rationale for diminishing the army’s power in the provinces and control of the Defense Ministry by Lin’s Fourth Field Army faction. To replace Lin Biao as defense minister, Mao appointed a trusted old stalwart, Marshal Ye Jianying, whom I knew well when he was chief of staff of the People’s Liberation Army and head of the Communist branch of Executive Headquarters in Peking. There lingers the possibility that the story about an assassination plot directed against Mao may have been simply concocted. Lin Biao may have been targeted for a purge to eliminate the possibility of a challenge by him and his Fourth Field Army loyalists to Mao’s authority. Lin may have fled in the Trident jet with his family in anticipation of a Maoist attempt to arrest him. I believe this to be a distinct possibility, and it remains a matter of very private speculation among some Chinese historians.
At the Tenth Party Congress held in Peking August 24–28, 1973, Lin Biao was formally denounced and expelled from the party. There was no acknowledgment of his historic victories in the war with Japan or that he was the most effective field commander during the Civil War. Earlier, just after the death of Lin Biao in 1971, the two top generals who fought in tandem with him in the defeat of Chiang Kai-shek’s forces joined in the sweeping denunciations, obviously to please Mao. The famed “One-Eyed Dragon,” Liu Bo-cheng, by then totally blind, declared: “In all the decades I knew him, he never spoke the truth.” Chen Yi spoke of Lin’s “sinister conduct, double dealing, cultivation of sworn followers, and persistent scheming,” although he did concede: “I don’t want to deny that previously he did some useful things, under the leadership of the Chairman and the Party center.” Prior to the congress, the Central Committee distributed a confidential circular memo to key personnel of the party, government, and army all around the country laying out the accusations against Lin Biao. The memo came as a shock to many and for some put into question the stability of the leadership and the logic of the Cultural Revolution.
Zhou Enlai, who delivered the principal indictment of Lin Biao at the congress as well as the Politburo’s Political Report, emerged as number two to Mao, but not necessarily his successor. With Mao’s prior agreement, Zhou brought Deng Xiaoping back from his exile in Jiangxi Province and appointed him as a vice premier.
Ronning, Audrey, and our daughter Susan were present on October 14 when Deng made his first public appearance as the reinstated deputy to Zhou Enlai. The three were on a visit to Inner Mongolia when Zhou Enlai summoned Ronning to the Peking Railway Station for a reception in honor of Pierre Trudeau, the Canadian prime minister. Trudeau was leaving on a tour of provincial cities of China. Deng Xiaoping was in Zhou Enlai’s entourage for the occasion as well as Li Xiannian, a member of the Politburo. Describing the meeting, Audrey said:
We were back, arriving by train, from a cold two-week tour of Inner Mongolia and dad was wearing a coat lined with goat hair. We were met at the railway station by Zhou Enlai and escorted into a guest room where Li Xiannian and Deng Xiaoping were waiting. Zhou introduced Deng, a short, pale man of austere demeanor, as his great friend and colleague. We then were invited to take off our coats and pose for pictures. When dad took off his coat, we saw that the white goat hair of the coat’s lining had come off on his dark Sun Yat-sen tunic. “Oh!” said Zhou, “You can’t meet your prime minister looking like that.” Then Zhou and Deng began brushing off the hair. This was the moment, of course, for Trudeau to walk in and embrace his fellow Canadian. When they parted, Trudeau and the Chinese were covered with goat hair. Everyone laughed so loudly that the security people standing outside the door were alarmed and dashed in. When Deng laughed, he looked very different than when we first entered the room. He had become more relaxed, as if this incident had broken the ice.
At the reception, Zhou told dad privately that Deng was the man to watch. He said he had just reinstated him as a vice premier and he was preparing him to be his successor.
The previous month at a dinner in Peking for Iphigene Sulzberger, mother of the New York Times publisher Arthur Ochs Sulzberger, who was being escorted by Ronning and Audrey on a tour of China, Zhou indicated that he had a health problem. He had, in fact, been diagnosed on May 18, 1972, as suffering from bladder cancer. Despite his deteriorating health, Zhou accompanied Trudeau to the ancient city of Luoyang to visit the Buddhist caves at Longmen Temple. Ronning, who had another commitment, was not able to accept Zhou’s invitation to accompany them.
At the Peking Railway Station, Zhou Enlai left the train vestibule to embrace Audrey on the station platform in farewell, saying: “I will never forget what you have done for China.” He had just looked over her new book on China, Dawn Wakes in the East. It was the last meeting for Audrey and her father with Zhou Enlai. Their next attempted contact with him was an intensely painful and mysterious one.
In September 1975, Ronning was again in China, accompanied by Audrey; our daughter Lesley, a film editor; Richard Westlein, a nephew who worked as a television cameraman; and his mother, Meme, Audrey’s sister. The group was planning to do a documentary on the Yangtze River. During the trip Audrey filed to the New York Times the first news story on the spectacular archaeological unearthing, forty miles east of the ancient capital of Xi’an, of more than six thousand life-size terra-cotta sculptures of warriors with their horses, guardians of the tomb of the first emperor of China, Xin Shi Huangdi, founder of the Qin dynasty (221–207 B.C.), which unified China. Audrey’s articles and photos on the find became cover stories in the National Geographic and Horizon magazines.
On arrival in Peking on September 29, Ronning asked to see his old friend Zhou Enlai, who had been hospitalized. Zhou had undergone surgery for his cancer on September 20 for the fourth time. The previous year, with Mao’s concurrence, he had turned over management of government affairs to Deng Xiaoping. Zhou remained peripherally involved, holding conferences at times at his bedside. Ronning was told by the Foreign Ministry that the premier would see him when he returned from his tour of China, which was to take two months. On an intermittent stopover in Peking during the tour, Ronning was given a similar reply when he once more asked to see Zhou. Ronning began to suspect that something sinister was involved. On November 9, the Ronning party returned to the Chinese capital. They checked into the Peking Hotel, where Ronning received a message from the Foreign Ministry stating that the premier was too sick to see him. It was conveyed to him by Zhu Qiusheng, a diplomat of the Foreign Ministry, who was an old friend and had traveled in China with the Ronnings.
“Later, that same evening,” as Audrey related the incident to me,
Zhu returned to our room in the hotel and in a hushed voice told us that Zhou wanted Chester and me to come urgently to see him in the hospital. Zhu handed dad a penciled note from Zhou written in Chinese on a small scrap of paper. I didn’t know exactly what it said, except dad was asked to come to the hospital to see him. Zhu nervously asked dad to destroy the note, which he did immediately. Zhu said that Zhou was in a nearby hospital. We didn’t understand the urgency, but we grabbed our coats and hurried out the door with Zhu. In the lobby two men in blue Mao suits, whose demeanors were those of security agents, accosted us and told us to return to our room. They said that the premier was too sick to see us. Dad protested, but Zhu said it was better that we go back to our room and that we could go in the morning. Zhu, a frail man, looked pale and shaken. The next morning, without waiting for Zhu, we set out again but we were stopped at the hotel entrance by two armed army guards who said firmly that no one could leave the hotel because there had been an accident in the street. We went back to our room, but then, Zhu returned and whispered: “Come, we can go now.” We hurried down but were again turned back in the lobby by the security agents. We didn’t want to get Zhu into trouble, so we turned back once again. But after Zhu left, we decided to try again. We got to the main entrance of the hotel, but we were stopped again by the armed guards. Dad argued with them in Chinese, saying we just wanted to go for a walk and then losing his patience shouted at them: “Out of our way!” At that, one of the guards pointed his bayoneted rifle at dad and ordered us back to our room. We had no choice. We never heard from Zhou Enlai again.
The incident occurred at a moment when the Politburo was mired in an ideological struggle whose outcome could determine who would rule China after Mao. The Chairman was ill, suffering from a number of critical health problems, Parkinson’s disease among them. The struggle as to who would succeed him was very much in play. Deng Xiaoping, who had been returned to power as vice premier by Zhou Enlai, was under attack by Jiang Qing’s Gang of Four. As pretext, they were citing criticism which Mao had leveled against Deng that had stemmed from a debate as to how the Politburo should evaluate the Cultural Revolution, which was nearing its end. Mao was pressuring the Politburo to assess the Cultural Revolution in a formal resolution as 70 percent successful and 30 percent as a failure. Deng Xiaoping, an early victim of the Cultural Revolution, was balking at adopting any such resolution. The Gang of Four was mounting a campaign on university campuses accusing Deng of seeking in opposition to Mao to discredit the Cultural Revolution. By implication, they were also denouncing his mentor, Zhou Enlai. A Politburo meeting was to take place on November 20 to resolve the issue, but in the interim, Jiang Qing’s Gang of Four with the sanction of the sickly Mao was reigning as the dominant political force in Peking. Mao was also being urged by the Gang of Four to replace Zhou as premier with one of its members, Zhang Chunqiao.
At the time of the hotel incident on November 10, Ronning and Audrey were very aware of these political tensions and the aggressive role of Jiang Qing, although they did not have specific knowledge of what was transpiring within the Politburo. But it seemed to them that being barred from seeing Zhou Enlai was part of a plot by Jiang Qing’s Gang of Four to isolate their political adversary, Zhou Enlai. This view was shared by Huang Hua, one of the premier’s closest associates and friend over many years, and his wife, He Liliang, who told us that they too had been barred from entering the hospital to see Zhou. The Ronnings speculated that Zhou Enlai was trying to get a message out through his friends, likely one expressing support for his ally, Deng Xiaoping. A month earlier, on September 7, Zhou had received a delegation of Communist officials from Romania in the hospital. At that meeting he had voiced his support of Deng Xiaoping and expressed his conviction that Deng, to whom he had already turned over his official duties, would continue to carry out the policies he had set forth. It was entirely likely that Zhou wanted to meet with his trusted friend Chester Ronning and Audrey, the journalist, so as to have them reveal his support of Deng to the world. There was no indication that the Romanians, possibly not wishing to meddle in internal Chinese Communist Party affairs, had told others of Zhou’s endorsement of Deng. Huang Hua and the Ronnings also anxiously wondered whether Zhou Enlai was being given the medicines and the other necessary medical care he needed to survive.
Two months later, at dawn on January 9, the Peking Radio announced that Zhou Enlai had “died of cancer at 09:57 hours on January 8, 1976, in Peking, at the age of seventy-eight.” China was plunged into mourning, and unprecedented homage was paid to him both within the country and abroad for his role in the Chinese revolution and conduct of international affairs. At the Congregational Church in Scarsdale, New York, Chester Ronning, at the request of the congregation, delivered a eulogy in tribute to his old friend.
I too was personally saddened by the death of Zhou Enlai. I felt that he had served the Chinese people extremely well as a statesman and government leader. True, he had been involved or simply remained silent when Mao committed some of his worst abuses as party chief, but it had been a matter of survival not only for himself but for the nation so that he could carry on effectively and serve to moderate Maoist policies where possible, which he did at great risk. In Peking, I would years later view an inscription on a bronze plaque in front of the Yonghegong Tibetan Buddhist Temple, which said in part: “The Temple survived ten turbulent years of the Cultural Revolution thanks to Premier Zhou Enlai.” His action in preserving the largest lamasery in Peking, built in 1964, was typical of what Zhou Enlai did to safeguard the Chinese heritage.
On January 15, at the memorial service for Zhou Enlai, which was not attended by Mao, Deng Xiaoping delivered the eulogy. Deng had already been effectively stripped of power by Mao’s criticism of him at Jiang Qing’s urging, and it was his last public appearance for a year. As late as May 1976, the Chinese press was still denouncing him “for crimes of trying to subvert the dictatorship of the proletariat and restore capitalism.” Several days after the Zhou funeral, the Politburo appointed Hua Guofeng, one of its members, as acting premier. He was a compromise choice acceptable to all the factions.
But even in death Zhou Enlai continued to exercise profound influence on events shaping the future of the country. On March 19, during the Qingming Festival, when traditionally Chinese sweep the graves of their ancestors, a wreath honoring Zhou Enlai was laid by the Cow Lane Primary School on the Monument to the Revolutionary Martyrs in the center of Tiananmen Square. When word spread that wreaths in tribute to Zhou Enlai were being placed at the monument, it inspired numerous marches to the square, embracing people from every sort of institution as well as ordinary folk who wished to render tribute. Almost 2 million people were said to have passed through the square on April 4 in organized demonstrations or simply to view the hundreds of wreaths, inscribed manifestos, and poems stacked around the monument in dedication to Zhou Enlai and his principles. For some, hailing Zhou Enlai was by implication support for Deng Xiaoping. There was also an outpouring of condemnation by ordinary folk of Jiang Qing and her Gang of Four. In placards and poems the Gang of Four was denounced for bringing about the savagery and disruption of the Cultural Revolution. Jiang Qing was accused of ambition to become the ruling queen of China.
Alarmed by the uncontrolled mass demonstrations, the like of which had not been seen in the capital since the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, with Mao’s approval, Hua Guofeng acted to restore order. In the early morning hours of April 5, Peking garrison troops cleansed the square of wreaths and posters. This served only to induce protest demonstrations by thousands of people before the Great Hall of the People. In the evening, thousands of troops and police stormed through the square once again to clear it of the last stubborn demonstrators. Deng Xiaoping, who did not visit the square, was spirited away with his wife to a small villa in Peking, where for the next three months they were in effect under house arrest. But this second purge was not lasting and ended with the death of Mao on September 9, 1976.
Two days after the death of Mao, Hua Guofeng became alarmed when the Gang of Four made a number of moves within the party bureaucracy that indicated its members were positioning themselves for an outright seizure of power. Drawing on a study of Chinese archives, Professors Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals described in their book Mao’s Last Revolution what transpired in the next weeks. Working secretly with Wang Dongxing, a senior member of the Politburo and a key security official influential in party affairs, and Marshal Ye Jianying, now the secretary-general of the Central Military Affairs Commission, Hua Guofeng readied a countercoup. On October 6, Hua summoned a Politburo meeting to take place in Huairen Hall in Zhongnanhai, the secluded enclave behind the walls of the Forbidden City where the offices of State Council, the party’s Central Committee, and the residences of the leadership were located. Three members of the Gang of Four, Wang Hongwen, Zhang Chunqiao, and Yao Wenyuan, as they arrived for the meeting, were in turn seized by guards. Jiang Qing was also arrested in her Zhongnanhai residence. All were charged with plotting a coup to seize power.
With Jiang Qing’s arrest, the catastrophe of the Cultural Revolution had come to its end. The Gang of Four, accused of attempting to subvert the state in plots against Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping, and the torturous persecution of Liu Shaoqi, were put on trial on November 26, 1980, before thirty-five judges and six hundred selected spectators arrayed in the Ceremonial Hall of the Public Security compound on Peking’s Street of Righteousness. It was more of a show trial than a legal proceeding, since the process and the subsequent conviction and sentencing were likely dictated not by the judges but secretly by the Politburo. At the conclusion of the trial, which lasted until January 1981, Jiang Qing and Zhang Chunqiao were sentenced to death with two-year reprieves. The sentences were commuted to life imprisonment in 1983. Wang Hongwen and Yao Wenyuan, who had written the article denouncing Wu Han’s play Hai Rui Dismissed from Office, the opening gun in the Cultural Revolution, also received lengthy prison sentences.
Jiang Qing never confessed or repented, insisting that all she did was on the command of Mao. “I was Chairman Mao’s dog. Whoever he asked me to bite, I bit,” she was quoted as saying at the trial. While confined in Qincheng Prison, notorious for its cruel maltreatment of inmates during the Cultural Revolution, she was diagnosed sometime during the mid-1980s with throat cancer. She declined an operation. Her next years were divided thereafter between detention in prison and house arrest in the Public Security Hospital. She was in the hospital on May 14, 1991, when she committed suicide by hanging herself in her bathroom. When her death at the age of seventy-one was announced briefly in the Chinese media, I thought of that evening in Yenan forty-five years earlier when I saw her chatting and laughing gaily sitting beside Liu Shaoqi in the front row of the Peking Opera House, then only housewife to Mao Zedong.
Chinese scholars are still documenting the full cost in terms of human suffering of the Cultural Revolution. Extrapolating from Chinese archives, the scholars Yang Su and Andrew G. Walter, in their March 2003 article published in the China Quarterly, “The Cultural Revolution in the Countryside: Scope, Timing and Human Impact,” estimated that in rural areas alone 36 million people experienced some form of persecution between 1966 and 1971. Of that total, between 750,000 and 1.5 million were killed and about the same number injured. The persecutions were perpetrated by a variety of political and military groups and organizations in the name of purging those said to be opponents of Mao Zedong Thought, counterrevolutionaries, class enemies such as “capitalist-roaders,” or those accused of some relationship with Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang. The study’s figures do not include the hundreds of thousands of dead and maimed in urban areas where, in addition to those swept up in the purges, factional struggles among the Red Guards and worker organizations took a deadly toll.
The horror also extended to Tibet. On a visit there in 1979, Audrey and I found the Chinese assisting the Tibetans in repairing the destruction wreaked during the Cultural Revolution on the Jokhang Temple, the Potala Palace, and the Drepung Monastery. In 1966, as in the rest of China, Tibet had been engulfed suddenly by the ideological frenzy of the Cultural Revolution. Hundreds, perhaps thousands were killed or wounded in the fighting in Lhasa and other towns among rival Red Guards made up largely of young Chinese sent down to Tibet. The Red Guards sacked the monasteries and also vandalized and closed the Buddhist temples. When we arrived in Lhasa, we learned that only 10 of the 2,464 monasteries in Tibet remained intact and the number of monks had declined to 2,000 from 120,000 in 1959, the year in which the Chinese crushed a Tibetan uprising for independence and the Dalai Lama fled to exile in Dharmsala, India.
Our first effort in October 1979 to travel to Tibet was frustrated. We were turned back at the border by Chinese guards. But the effort proved very rewarding in another, most unusual way.
We had planned to go to Tibet on the Old Silk Road entering China from Pakistan. Shortly after arriving in Islamabad, the capital of Pakistan, we interviewed Prime Minister Zia-ul Haq, the military dictator of the country. Then, with his sanction and with an escort of Pakistani soldiers and army engineers, we set out for China on the newly opened Himalayan Karakoram Highway, the first foreign journalists permitted to travel the length of the road. For two years we had sought Pakistani and Chinese permission to view this engineering marvel. It took twenty years for Pakistani and Chinese engineers to construct the Karakoram Highway through remote parts of Pakistani-controlled Kashmir to the Khunjerab Pass, where the highway enters China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. The engineers cut through mountains—which Audrey and I circled in a helicopter—that are among the highest in the world. They are topped by glaciers exceeded in size only by those in the polar regions. While circling K-2, the highest, Audrey lost one of her cameras to the wind as she leaned out of the helicopter door, held only by a seat belt, to photograph the mountain. I pulled her back into the craft.
In building the paved road, the engineers suffered glacial mudflows, avalanches, and seismic convulsions which, we were told, cost one Pakistani or Chinese life for each mile of the 500-mile length of the highway. The highway, now a truck route for trade, was more important at the time for another, more compelling reason. It was built to support the passage of heavy tanks. Strategically, it gave the Chinese an overland link to friendly Pakistan as they confronted massed Russian divisions on their Xinjiang border.
On the highway, we traveled by car, jeep, and helicopter, at times circumventing rockslides, to the Khunjerab Pass on the China border. From 15,100 feet we looked into China. Beneath us lay the winding road to Kashgar, the great caravan oasis on the Old Silk Road which we had hoped to reach that day. The Pakistanis served us tea and sugar lumps so that we could better stand the altitude but then told us regretfully that for some reason the Chinese had closed the border road temporarily. We returned to Islamabad and flew to Peking. Our account and photos of the journey on the Karakoram Highway became a cover story in the New York Times Magazine.
Upon arrival by air in Peking from Islamabad, we were invited to the Great Hall of the People for a talk with Li Xiannian, whom Audrey had met at the Peking Railway Station with Deng Xiaoping in 1973. At the time of our meeting he was a member of the Politburo and a vice premier and later would serve as state president, the head of government, from 1983 to 1988. We had just visited Memorial Hall in Tiananmen Square, where we viewed the mummified body of Mao Zedong. We had filed past a white marble statue of a seated Mao and into a cavernous, dimly lit chamber where, in a crystal sarcophagus, the Great Helmsman lay embalmed, dressed in a gray tunic, partially draped in a flag. The Chinese walking by the bier, four abreast, gazed upon the Great Helmsman with gaping curiosity. But as we watched, there were no tears for Mao—no manifestations of the adulation which we had witnessed in past years.
At the Great Hall of the People, I asked Li Xiannian how Mao and his writings would be viewed by the Chinese in generations to come. “We do not believe Mao Zedong Thought implies a cult of personality,” Li said. “His writings represent the collective wisdom and experience of many Chinese leaders. The words of every leader, including Chairman Mao, must be tested through social practices. What the Chairman said during the Cultural Revolution might not be applicable today. Communist leaders are not fortunetellers. The test of social practice is the only criterion of truth. The people now know that Chairman Mao made errors in his work. But they also understand his role in the Chinese Revolution and the next generations will remember him as a great leader and teacher.”
After our talk with Li, we then set out on a 5,000-mile journey which on this second effort took us to Tibet, through the Sichuan heartland and back to Shanghai from Lhasa. Interviewing senior officials, workers, and peasants, we found that the new folk hero was Zhou Enlai, revered as the leader who had struggled within the party enclaves against Jiang Qing, mitigating the worst abuses of the Cultural Revolution. At an exhibition of paintings in Shanghai, we found an array of canvases depicting Zhou Enlai as a student and as a visionary, as the man who had brought Deng Xiaoping out of political limbo. There was only a single portrait of Mao, as a teacher instructing a young soldier. And in a nearby alcove, the positioning of two paintings on opposite walls offered an implied rebuke of the Chairman: one canvas showed Mao’s first wife, Yang Kaihui, seated in a cell with bloodied forehead before her execution by Chiang Kai-shek’s troops in 1930; the other depicted a street artist cartooning Jiang Qing as a dowager empress while spectators jeered.
At the time of our talk with Li, Deng Xiaoping had already become the country’s “paramount leader,” although Hua Guofeng perfunctorily held the titles of party chairman and premier. Deng was already at work settling old scores. In the next year, Liu Shaoqi and other comrades purged in the Cultural Revolution would be politically rehabilitated. In May, Liu was honored at a state funeral at which his ashes were presented to his widow. The memory of the denunciation of Liu and his wife by their eldest daughter resonated for me in 2003 when Audrey and I dined in the luxurious house in Peking owned by the couple’s younger daughter, Liu Ding, whose fortunes had flourished in the market economy introduced by Deng Xiaoping under his slogan “To Be Rich Is Glorious.” She was president of the Asia Link Group, consultants in corporate finance, after having graduated from Boston University and the Harvard Business School.
Mao’s portrait adorns the Tiananmen Gate, and for most Chinese he remains more than anything else the heroic revolutionary who founded the People’s Republic. Traveling through China in 2008, I found that it had become cliché among many Chinese when asked about Mao to rate him as 60 percent heroic and 40 percent destructive. After Mao’s death, his heir, Deng Xiaoping, evaluated him as “seven parts good, three parts bad.” As for the bad, the tyrannical regime Mao established after the Civil War, marked by massive political purges, the economic blunders of his Great Leap Forward, and the upheaval of the Cultural Revolution, cost the lives of many millions of his compatriots. But as a revolutionary, military strategist, and visionary, he earned the respect of his compatriots. He secured the borders of China and laid down the foundation for the eventual emergence of a new, powerful nation. He defeated Chiang Kai-shek in the Civil War against enormous odds and unified the mainland. He wiped out the humiliating colonial concessions wrested from China by an array of foreign powers such as the extraterritorial enclaves at Shanghai, Tianjin, Qingdao, and Hankou. President Truman blocked him from retrieving Taiwan by interposing the Seventh Fleet in the Taiwan Strait. But President Nixon was compelled by Zhou Enlai in their joint Shanghai Communiqué to accept that “there is but one China and that Taiwan is part of China.” Reasserting China’s historic claim to Tibet in 1950, Mao reincorporated it in 1951 as an autonomous region. The designation was more bureaucratic than real, however, since as late as 2008 the exiled Dalai Lama was still struggling to bring about greater autonomy for his people from domination by Peking’s Han administrators. In the Korean War, although his troops suffered enormous casualties, Mao succeeded in driving MacArthur’s forces back across the thirty-eighth parallel and thus repositioned North Korea as a buffer state. Mao also rebuffed Russian penetration of both Manchuria and Xinjiang Province in Central Asia. In 1955 he regained Soviet-occupied Dalian and Lüshun in the northeast. Mao provided the weaponry and the safe haven for training, together with Chinese advisers, that enabled the Vietnamese Communists to defeat the French and subsequently the United States with its South Vietnamese allies. His support of Hanoi, apart from the ideological, was motivated by the need he saw of securing his southern border through the elimination of American bases in Southeast Asia. Mao thus banished his fear which he often voiced since the 1960s of hostile encirclement and dismemberment by a coterie of hostile powers. The hostile coalition, more phantom than real, of which he warned comprised the United States, poised in military bases in Southeast Asia, Japan in alignment with the United States, the Soviet Union, and India. He interpreted the Treaty of Peace, Friendship and Cooperation, signed by the Soviet Union and India in 1971, as a military alliance aimed at China. In furtherance of Mao’s goal of bringing about a unified China, his heir, Deng Xiaoping, negotiated the arrangements for the return of the leased British colony of Hong Kong in 1997 and of Macau by Portugal in 1999. Deng pledged that Peking would tolerate Hong Kong’s capitalist economy for fifty years in keeping with a political philosophy of “one country– two systems” which he envisioned as a potential framework for reuniting Taiwan with the mainland.
In sum, as a consequence of Mao’s consolidation of China’s strategic position, coupled with the global expansion of economic influence stemming from Deng Xiaoping’s policies, the foundation was laid for a bid by China to supplant the United States as the leading power in East Asia.
Deng Xiaoping is rendered tribute by most Chinese, who recognize that his economic policies raised the living standards of millions of Chinese and elevated China to a leading position in the world. But as in the case of Mao, there are reservations about Deng’s domestic legacy, both economic and political. While igniting an explosion of urban development and wealth, he did not substantially reduce the huge income gap between the middle-class affluent of the cities and the peasants. It was not until 2008 that President Hu Jintao, alarmed by peasant discontent, the flight of millions of impoverished farmers to the cities, and shrinking agricultural development, introduced a rural reform policy that allowed farmers to lease or transfer land-use rights, a step that should significantly raise lagging peasant incomes. A target date of 2020 was set to bring about a doubling of the disposable income of the 750 million peasants.
Deng’s free market has evolved into a form of authoritarian capitalism under strict government control. While there has been a remarkable expansion of free enterprise in some sections of the economy, key industries remain state owned. About three-fourths of the some fifteen hundred domestic companies listed in 2009 on the Chinese stock exchange were state owned. Corrupt practices by some local officials managing properties pose a continuing problem. Nevertheless, through the earnings of its export industries and foreign investments China has become the largest holder of U.S. Treasury securities, about $212 trillion in official reserves in September 2009.
In their relentless drive to reinforce the Chinese economy and maintain living standards, Chinese leaders stress the need to maintain societal stability. This has been made an excuse for the lack of progress toward major political reforms and suppression of any dissidence that might challenge or dilute the authority of the Communist Party hierarchy. To maintain that discipline, the media and the Internet are censored by a Propaganda Department.
There is a chapter in Chinese history which the Communist Party does everything it can to hide. In 1989, as the country’s paramount leader, Deng Xiaoping compelled Zhao Ziyang to resign from the post of general secretary of the party. As both premier and then party chief, Zhao had inspired the first moves toward a free market economy but also urged the Politburo to begin to consider the possibilities of transition to a more democratic society. When students in the spring of 1989 demonstrated in Tiananmen Square en masse for democratic reforms, Zhao went to the square to consult with them and urged moderation and calm. At a meeting of the party leadership before going to Tiananmen, Zhao withstood demands by hard-liners that troops be used to crush the student demonstrations. Deng Xiaoping brushed him aside and ordered tanks and troops into Peking, resulting in clashes during which hundreds of the demonstrating students and their supporters were killed. When Zhao protested, he was ousted as general secretary of the party and placed under house arrest. His name was expunged from all public mention. But Zhao Ziyang, whose death in 2005 was noted in a party obituary by a single line, is not forgotten by those Chinese who hope for an atoning statement by the party leadership confessing that the Tiananmen repression was a mistake and greater progress toward a more democratic society.
Rising generations of Chinese are likely to learn of the Zhao Ziyang saga as a consequence of a most unexpected development. In May 2009, a Zhao memoir of his travails, Prisoner of the State: The Secret Journal of Premier Zhao Ziyang, surfaced in Hong Kong. The book is based on transcriptions made by Zhao on thirty musical tape cassettes relating his experiences in the Tiananmen episode and his policies prior to his ouster from the Politburo. The tapes were transcribed during his imprisonment and smuggled out to Hong Kong by friends. The book was banned on the mainland, but details have become known there through Chinese bloggers on the Internet who have learned how to evade the censors.
Zhao’s legacy will interest China’s youth, but it will not stir them to demonstrations such as those in Tiananmen Square in 1989, when students were protesting both lack of democracy and adverse economic conditions. In the fall of 2008, when I traveled through China lecturing at several universities, I found no inclination among the students to become involved in political action. They were primarily interested in jobs and enhancement of lifestyle. Like others of the middle class, they deplore censorship and corruption among some officials but seem content to await fulfillment of government promises of greater democracy through consensus and respect for human rights within the existing political framework.