11
Rebuilding the Economy (1962–5)
It is true that Mao Zedong said I took no notice of him, but it was not just me; other leaders did the same.1
Mao had stepped down as chairman of state (president) and in April 1959 was replaced at the National People’s Congress by Liu Shaoqi, who held the post until the Cultural Revolution. Mao retained the chairmanship of the Chinese Communist Party. The government headed by Liu and Deng reverted to Soviet-style economic planning and political stability, but within the Party Mao continued the battle for his own vision of socialism in China.
Deng had become conscious, at an early stage, of the negative impact the Great Leap was having on industry, and had been raising the issue in meetings of the Secretariat as early as January 1959. At the ninth full session of the Eighth Central Committee in Beijing from 14 to 18 January 1961, Deng had taken responsibility, with Li Fuchun and Bo Yibo, for ‘Regulations on the Work of State Industrial Enterprises’ (the ‘Seventy Articles’), a draft document circulated by the Central Committee on 16 September 1961. It set out measures for improving the management of state enterprises, creating representative councils of workers and office staff, establishing wage and salary structures, enforcing technical standards and improving accounting and financial control. This was not revolutionary but it was essential to undo the damage left by the Great Leap, and the process by which it was created indicates Deng’s modus operandi and the problems he faced. Deng coordinated the work of the Secretariat, State Planning Commission and State Economic Commission and established 11 working groups based in Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Taiyuan, Jilin and other cities to carry out investigations to inform the policy. Li Fuchun dealt with industrial enterprises in Beijing and Deng went out to the north-east to listen to reports from Liaoning Province. Between 3 and 6 May 1961, Bo Yibo held a conference in Beijing at which Party officials from the centre and Beijing, Tianjin, Liaoning, Heilongjiang, Jiangsu and other areas met to discuss the draft document. At the end of May and the beginning of June, responses from these reports and meetings were filtered through to the Central Committee. The evidence made grim reading. Industrial production was falling significantly, many basic construction projects had been forced to close down, there had been serious losses of equipment and many accidents. Rumblings of discontent and confused management risked paralysis in industrial production.
Bo Yibo was not optimistic when he addressed the Secretariat on 20 May and could not see how the report would solve the problems. Deng advised that they write ‘some policy clauses dealing with the system of responsibility, technical policies and capital policies etc’. but the meeting was still unable to agree on how to proceed. This was Deng Xiaoping’s favoured milieu – the committee room, the drafting of documents, the creation of a consensus, and the production of a policy document – and the difficulty the committee was having is an indication of the problems they faced. On 26 July Deng came back to the Secretariat with a report on the situation in the north-east as the possible basis for a policy.
The problems of industry were more intransigent than those of agriculture. A sudden decline in coal and steel production was adversely affecting the whole of Chinese industry and Li Fuchun suggested a separate group to analyse this problem. Bo Yibo travelled to the north-east with his Beijing working group and officials from the State Planning Commission. They consulted management and staff in Shenyang, Harbin and Changchun before revising the Seventy Articles.
When the Seventy Articles were finally completed in September 1961, Mao expressed his formal appreciation, even though the policy went directly against the spirit of his Great Leap Forward. The regulations on industry were part of a suite of political initiatives orchestrated by Deng and Liu Shaoqi as part of the second Five-Year Plan. Within a few years, supporters of Mao would be excoriating Liu and Deng for these initiatives as the two ‘top party persons taking the capitalist road’.2
Lin Biao and ‘Mao Zedong Thought’
When Peng Dehuai was dismissed as minister of defence after the Lushan meetings, he was replaced by another marshal of the PRC with a distinguished war record, Lin Biao, who became increasingly committed to supporting Mao Zedong. Lin launched an ideological campaign in the People’s Liberation Army to create a body of officers and other ranks who were personally loyal not just to the Chinese road to socialism and Marxism-Leninism but to ‘Mao Zedong Thought’ (Mao Zedong sixiang), a phrase that was becoming increasingly common. While there is much to criticise in Mao’s theoretical writings and his attempts to be seen as a major Marxist philosopher, the version that was taught to uneducated and often barely literate peasant troops was inevitably a crude and simplistic version. It was, as Deng argued, a vulgarisation of Mao’s theoretical writings which many Party members still valued as a distinctively Chinese contribution to Marxism-Leninism in a milieu that had been dominated by Stalin and other Soviet theorists. Soldiers had to memorise aphorisms and short texts which were published in May 1964 as Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong, the infamous ‘little red book’. Educated Chinese, including many in the Chinese Communist Party, ridiculed this vulgarisation and the idolatry of Mao that accompanied it, but it rapidly took hold in the military and then spread into schools, colleges and universities and more widely. Lin Biao is now blamed primarily for this vulgarisation, but it was condoned by Mao, and Lin had become his ‘close comrade in arms’ and heir apparent.
At an enlarged meeting of the Standing Committee of the CCP Military Commission (junwei changwei) on 12 September 1960, and then at the full meeting of the Military Commission (also enlarged to ensure support for Lin Biao’s proposals) that ran from 14 September to 24 October, Lin Biao pressed the Party’s military authorities to agree that political and ideological work, based on the adulation of Mao Zedong, should become the core of training in the PLA, at the expense of military or technical skills. The length of the meeting is an indication of the battle that was taking place. Tan Zheng, the director of the General Political Department of the PLA and a highly respected field commander during the Korean War, tried to resist Lin’s ideological takeover but was severely criticised and eventually dismissed. Lin won the day and his proposals were approved not only by the Military Commission but by the Party’s Central Committee on 21 December 1960.
Deng had consistently ridiculed the tendency to attribute any and every Chinese success story to ‘Mao Zedong Thought’. When Rong Guotuan won the men’s singles title in the 25th World Table Tennis Championship in Dortmund on 5 April 1959 – admittedly a significant achievement as it was the first world sports title ever won by a Chinese citizen – the press claimed that it was a victory for Mao’s thought. Deng asked what would have happened if Rong had lost – would that have been a defeat for ‘Mao Zedong Thought’? He expanded his ideas on this at a meeting in Tianjin on 25 March 1960, arguing that vulgarising Mao’s ideas and neglecting the rest of the Marxist-Leninist tradition was self-defeating.
The tide was running against Deng. In April 1961, Lin Biao, while inspecting a unit of the PLA, proposed that Liberation Army Daily (Jiefangjun bao), the official newspaper of the Chinese military, should carry quotations from Chairman Mao’s works on a regular basis. The paper inserted its first quotation to the right of the masthead on 1 May 1961, with a comment by Lin Biao placed immediately below. This started an unstoppable trend – no-one was prepared to be the first to exclude quotations from the chairman. Luo Ronghuan, who had taken over as director of the PLA General Political Department, tried to resist this outbreak of sycophancy, arguing that the troops should be familiar with the arguments in Mao’s writings and the spirit of his thinking but that they should not be parroting and memorising quotations ‘like Buddhists monks reciting sutras’. Lin Biao ignored him, so Luo sent a formal report to Deng Xiaoping, as CCP general secretary, setting out his differences with Lin. Deng tabled the report for discussion at a meeting of the Secretariat and Luo Ronghuan’s criticisms were supported by all present. It was to no avail and Lin Biao’s politicisation of the army in Mao’s name went ahead.
A decade later, after Deng had returned to Beijing from his Cultural Revolution exile in Jiangxi Province, he was staying in an official guest house when he met Luo Ronghuan’s wife Lin Yueqin and their three children. He told the children that they should remember their father as someone who had supported the ideas of Mao Zedong (who was still alive at the time) but had resisted the vulgarisation and the campaign for the ‘living use and living study of Mao Zedong Thought’ (huoxue huoyong Mao Zedong sixiang) which encouraged people to apply Mao’s aphorisms to every conceivable situation. He frequently commented on Luo’s resistance to Lin Biao, conscious perhaps of his own political impotence in the wake of a movement that was beyond his control, but he blamed Lin Biao for the vulgarisation not Mao. Lin died in a plane crash after an abortive coup d’état in September 1971.3
Preparing for the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference (January–February 1962)
The CCP Central Committee held an ‘enlarged working conference’ in the Great Hall of the People between 11 January and 7 February 1962, ten days after the New Year celebrations and with a distinct chill in the air, meteorologically as well as politically, although the atmosphere was much warmer once the conference began. This conference, convened to entrench the political ascendancy of Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, was enlarged to an unusual extent, even for an ‘enlarged’ meeting, a regular Party device for packing a conference hall to achieve agreement on difficult policies. Mao had been persuaded to extend what was originally intended as a working conference ‘to ensure that the spirit of the conference would be implemented’4 throughout the whole Party at all levels. It is usually referred to as the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference (qiqianren dahui): it was attended by 7,018 Party officials – there is a preference in China for large round numbers – representing provincial and local government and economic enterprises. In addition to its remarkable size, it lasted for a total of 28 days, a record at the time.
Wiser counsels were prevailing in the leadership of the CCP and there were regular meetings to discuss lessons to be learned from the failure of the Great Leap Forward. During 1961 the Central Committee had approved a long series of documents that one by one reversed the policies that Mao had espoused, although they were approved by Mao and retained some of his rhetoric. At working conferences of the Central Committee in May and June 1961, Mao had conceded that the country had paid a high price for ‘going counter to objective laws’ (weibei keguan guilű) but he tried to excuse the ‘three lean years for the land, the people and animals’, as mistakes on the road to socialism. The full Central Committee, meeting in ill-starred Lushan in September 1961, had decided on a period of economic retrenchment, reducing the targets for industrial and basic construction projects to give agriculture a chance to recover. In spite of the superficial consensus there was no unanimity within the Party – Mao did not approve of the changes.
Deng Xiaoping was given the responsibility of organising the enlarged conference. Wu Lengxi, the director of the Xinhua News Agency and editor-in-chief of People’s Daily, recalled that Deng worked closely with Liu Shaoqi on the preparations. They drafted reports setting out the errors of the previous four years and measures to ensure the recovery of the national economy. What might seem to outsiders sensible and practical measues were highly sensitive political issues. Although there was no intention of overthrowing Mao, it was essential – a matter of life and death for millions of Chinese suffering from famine – that these policies were approved. Even if Mao could not be won round, his opposition had to be neutralised.
In preparation for the conference, Deng and the Secretariat produced a situation report (xingshi baogao) based on documentation issued by the Central Committee since 1958. This report laid the blame primarily on the Central Committee and secondly on the provincial authorities and it set the tone for the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference. On 6 November 1961, Deng Xiaoping convened a meeting of officials who were working on drafts of the conference reports in Building 8 of the Diaoyutai State Guest House, which had been completed on the eve of National Day in 1959 to accommodate visiting heads of state and other international dignitaries. He gave them a clear framework as the basis for their reports.
The agricultural situation, he told them, was beginning to improve and although industrial production had been declining it was basically stable, so current policies of restructuring should be continued. It was essential to strengthen the centralised and unified leadership of the Central Committee and the system of democratic centralism. There needed to be clear agreement on policies without one faction dissenting. The Party working methods had to be improved: they should be practical and realistic (shishi qiushi), follow the ‘mass line’ (in this context take into account the real needs of the population) and respect internal Party democracy (dangnei minzhu). After prolonged discussions with Liu Shaoqi, Deng chaired a meeting on the first draft of the reports on 21 December 1961.
The degree of preparation is an indication of how Deng worked to exercise his authority, by controlling the agendas and attendees at meetings and, above all, the documents that emerged. Deng was able to carry out these mundane tasks and motivate his team to work in great detail and with great speed when necessary. By the time the conference opened, the final reports from the conference had been drafted. Democratic centralism in the Chinese Communist Party was more central than democratic.5
The Seven Thousand Cadres Conference in session
The conference opened on 11 January 1962 with Mao presiding, but this was something of a formality. He was no longer at the political centre and it was Liu Shaoqi who presented the written report on behalf of the Central Committee. From the opening ceremony until the morning of 29 January, the business of the conference revolved around Liu’s report. The report had gone directly to the conference without going through the Politburo, which Mao could usually dominate. Since the vast majority of the delegates were lower-level cadres it was an opportunity to assess the views held by grass-roots cadres (jisi guangyi).
After meetings to discuss the minutiae of the reports, Mao presided over a plenary meeting on 27 January at which Liu expanded on the thinking behind the report. Liu said that in the past they had often weighed successes and failures in terms of ‘the relationship between one finger and nine fingers’ but that in the present situation it was more a case of ‘the relationship between three fingers and seven fingers’. In some areas peasants were talking about ‘three parts natural disaster and seven parts man-made disaster’. The use of the fingers to indicate the percentage (one finger equals ten per cent) of right and wrong or success and failure continued well into the 1970s and is still used to assess Mao Zedong’s overall contribution to China’s revolution.
Liu was making it clear that he and Deng regarded the Great Leap Forward as overwhelmingly a man-made disaster and one that was caused primarily by Mao. This was a turning point, not only in the conference, but also in the political culture of China, and was one of the high points of the conference. The original plan was that after speeches by the central leadership (zhongyang zhuyao lingdaoren) the conference would close. However, supporters of Mao made clear their dissatisfaction with the way Liu and Deng were dominating the conference and it was agreed that they should be allowed to speak. This dissipated the tension that had built up and was another high point of the conference.
On 30 January Mao made a long speech, and, in an unusually self-critical frame of mind, assumed personal responsibility for the mistakes of the Great Leap Forward. ‘Whatever mistakes were made directly by the Central Committee they were my mistakes, the indirect ones I was partially responsible for as I was chairman of the Central Committee.’ He appeared to be acknowledging that lack of internal democracy was to blame.
Deng Xiaoping addressed the conference on 6 February. He argued that the Party had the ability to lead the people towards ‘victory in the construction of socialism’ and shoulder its responsibilities in the wider world communist movement. However, there had been serious faults in the leadership and the work of the Party which had weakened the Party’s tradition of excellence. The reasons for this were twofold: firstly insufficient study of Mao Zedong Thought with impractical tasks and slogans being proposed; secondly struggle within the party had produced deviations (piancha) which had harmed many Party cadres. Democratic centralism had not been properly exercised and there had been too many campaigns.
Dealing with Mao was the key problem for Liu and Deng and their strategy was to focus on ‘democratic centralism’ within the Party, which Mao had already raised. He reminded delegates that the CCP was now a ruling party (zhizheng dang), and a party in office was not the same as one in a revolution. Mao Zedong was still inclined to treat the CCP as if it was still a revolutionary party, arguing that the alternative was the way back to capitalism – as had already happened in the Soviet Union.
Deng maintained that there was a breakdown of communication between the top level of the Party and those below, and to counter this, supervision by Party committees or the Secretariat (which he controlled) was necessary. Liu Shaoqi suggested ‘inner-party life’ (dangnei shenghuo) meetings and they discussed how frequently such meetings should take place. It speaks volumes about problems within the leadership that even infrequent Party meetings had to be proposed at a special conference. Mao accepted that committees should ‘inspect work, summarise experiences and exchange ideas’ but the proposals on greater democracy found a powerful echo within the body of the conference. From 31 January to 7 February small working groups of provincial, central bureau, state organisation and central Party bodies discussed the implications of these points. Criticism and self-criticism of mistakes that had occurred in the work of the Party were made at all levels and provincial Party secretaries stood side by side with their county-level counterparts to apologise for their own part in the disastrous policies. The meeting became emotional and by all accounts cathartic. The Seven Thousand Cadres Conference was unprecedented in the way in which Party cadres at all levels spoke openly about the problems that China had been through. The degree of healthy criticism and self-criticism was seen as extremely positive and would allow the Party to forge ahead with a new unity and greater motivation; the conference ended on an optimistic note.
Only the speeches made by Lin Biao were out of step with this optimistic assessment. In sycophantic terms that were completely out of tune with the general tone of the conference, which should have sounded alarm bells in the minds of Deng and Liu’s supporters, he stated bluntly that any mistakes were entirely the result of insufficient attention to Mao Zedong Thought. The implication was that if other leaders had slavishly followed Mao, there would have been no catastrophe after the Great Leap Forward. Since they had all deviated either to the left or the right and obstructed Mao, it was hardly surprising that there were mistakes. This was what Mao Zedong wanted to hear, and Lin’s speech was a harbinger of Mao’s attempt to wrest power back from Liu and Deng.6
Mao’s response to the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference
Open divisions began to emerge almost immediately after the conference. Deng was positive about the way Mao had behaved, but there was a reversal during a meeting in July and August 1962 at Beidaihe, the Communist Party’s favoured summer retreat on the coast of the Bohai Sea. Mao began to raise the issue of class struggle once again, although, back in Beijing at the Tenth Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee (24–27 September 1962), he acknowledged in public that class struggle should not interfere with the restructuring of the economy. Mao personally used the Four Cleanups (siqing) campaign, also known as the Socialist Education Movement (shehuizhuyi jiaoyu yundong) that was launched in his name to insist on the importance of class struggle. This campaign was essentially a trial run for the Cultural Revolution and emphasised a return to peasant values to eradicate ‘bourgeois’ attitudes in the Party, including the leadership. It also introduced China and the world to the bizarre cult of the proletarian hero-martyr, Lei Feng, a selfless 21-year-old soldier who was said to have died on duty when hit by a falling telegraph pole.
By late 1964 there were references in the media to ‘people in authority taking the capitalist road’ (zou zibenzhuiyi daolu de dangquan pai), and it was being said that there were two independent kingdoms in Beijing (haishi chu Beijing you liang ge duli wangguo). The economy had taken a turn for the better, but there had been no real resolution of the differences in the leadership. For all Deng Xiaoping’s planning for the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference and its apparent success, the problem of Mao’s ego and his personal and political ambitions had not been resolved.
Class struggle is central to any Marxist analysis of social and political change, but Mao applied it in an idiosyncratic fashion, although there are parallels with the way that Stalin used it in the USSR. From the mid-1950s onwards, Mao interpreted any opposition, either personal or to his policies, as evidence of the emergence of a new bourgeois class in China which the proletariat (of which he saw himself as the representative) must overthrow. This approach was behind the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1957 and the Cultural Revolution in 1966. It is clear that the establishment of the People’s Republic of China had resulted in the creation of a new ruling elite, or a new class, as Milovan Djilas had argued in his analysis of similar regimes in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe.7 Mao presented himself as a principled outsider with the interests of the peasant masses at heart, but he was as much a part of that elite as any of the other leaders.
Liu and Deng were not interested in class struggle to continue the revolution but were planning the reconstruction of China. The only model that was realistically available to them in 1962 was the model that appeared to have worked in the Soviet Union. This was anathema to Mao.8
Legacy of the 1929 Guangxi uprising
As if the political negotiations, plots and intrigues were not enough, Deng discovered that his past was about to be used against him. The authorities in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region had planned a series of publications to celebrate a decade of the Communist Party’s control over the province which had been designated an autonomous region in 1958, in deference to the minority Zhuang people who make up about a third of the region’s population and whose language is distantly related to Thai.
The books planned included volumes on fiction, poetry and folk tales but Reminiscences of the Revolution in Guangxi (Guangxi geming huiyi lu), which was issued on behalf of the Guangxi Military District, was the centrepiece of the whole project. It appeared in September 1959 with a dedication by General Zhang Yunyi who had fought with Deng Xiaoping in the Baise uprising of 1929 in Guangxi. There was no inscription by Deng, which was possibly a deliberate slight, but it was suggested that this was because of the tight publishing schedule.
Whatever the reason for the omission, it was thought necessary for Zhang Yunyi, who had worked in Guangxi from 1949 to 1955, to write personally to Deng with profuse apologies, asking him to contribute a calligraphic dedication that could be included in the second edition. Zhang’s letter was taken to Beijing during the Spring Festival (Chinese New Year) of 1963 by Zhang Wu, a member of the editorial committee. Deng accorded this a high priority and produced within a week a brief inscription that contained conventional revolutionary nostalgia and exhortation in a hand that is elegant but not artistic. The publishers of Reminiscences of the Revolution in Guangxi soon found themselves in serious political trouble and the book was criticised as a ‘poisonous weed’, presumably on the instructions of Lin Biao. The publishers and authors, including military and local officials who had supported the idea of an inscription by Deng, were purged and sent to the countryside for re-education during the Socialist Education Movement. During the Cultural Revolution, Red Guards sealed up the cupboard in which the original manuscript of the book was stored (but with admirable political caution did not destroy it). Zhang Wu managed to preserve Deng’s dedication and was rewarded for his efforts when the book was eventually published with the dedication in the 1980s. The story of this book indicates the links between the personal and the political and the way in which political rhetoric and judgements often masked vicious personal attacks.9
Wu Han
Wu Han was a distinguished historian and the author of an authoritative and readable biography of the first emperor of the Ming dynasty, Zhu Yuanzhang. He was also a bridge partner and close friend of Deng Xiaoping, who liked to call him ‘professor’. Wu was a prominent member of the Democratic League, one of the non-Communist parties that was permitted to remain in existence after 1949 and possibly also a member of the Communist Party, although that was not made public until the Cultural Revolution. His reputation rests on a play that he wrote in the 1950s, Hai Rui Dismissed from Office (Hai Rui baguan), based on the life of an exemplary and honest official of the Ming dynasty. It was originally written in 1951 but was revised several times, and when it became popular as a Beijing opera in 1959 only the most obtuse reader or spectator could have failed to notice the parallels with the purging of Peng Dehuai during the Great Leap Forward. Criticism of this play by Yao Wenyuan, later notorious as one of the Gang of Four, was one of the first public signs that the Cultural Revolution was underway.
In 1965 Wu Han heard rumours that his play, Hai Rui Dismissed from Office, was likely to be criticised, and Peng Zhen wrote to Deng Xiaoping on his behalf. Peng Zhen was the mayor of Beijing and Wu Han, in addition to his academic and historical work, was also deputy mayor. Deng responded that he had seen the performance of Hai Rui starring the leading Beijing opera star Ma Lianliang (1901–66), and that there was really nothing to worry about; it was just a case of people ‘trying to climb on the shoulders of others to rise to the top’ and ‘pulling pigtails when they only had a half-baked idea of what was going on’. ‘Tell the professor’, he said, ‘that this is nothing out of the ordinary.’ He also told Peng Zhen that politics and art should be kept apart; mixing them up was fraught with danger as it would stifle opportunities for expressing opinions. He was correct about the danger but he miscalculated the threat to Wu Han. He underestimated Mao’s willingness to use cultural controversy to gain leverage in political faction fighting and he did not fully appreciate the growing authority of Jiang Qing in Shanghai cultural circles and her political machinations.
Later on, during a game of bridge with Deng, Wu Han threw in his hand and apologised, saying that he did not have the heart to play cards that day. Deng, much the tougher character, asked the ‘professor’ what he was afraid of, observing that the sky had not fallen in. Deng told Wu that he was 61 that year, had been through many ups and downs in his revolutionary career and had learned two important things. ‘Firstly never be afraid and secondly be optimistic. Look ahead, look to the future and everything will work out.’ He assured Wu Han that he and the Party would look after him and, somewhat reassured, Wu carried on with the game of bridge.
Wu Han should not have felt so reassured because the sky would eventually fall on him. As far back as the meeting of the Seventh Plenary Session of the Eighth Central Committee in Shanghai on 5 April 1959, in the context of a discussion on whether people had the courage to speak the truth and criticise him, Mao raised the question of Hai Rui. He said that he had read the original biography of Hai Rui in the Mingshi (Ming History), the multi-volume standard history of the Ming dynasty produced under the Manchu Qing dynasty. Mao had also sent a copy to Peng Dehuai, and had advised Premier Zhou Enlai to read it. He invited the assembled members of the Central Committee to tell him who among them had the kind of courage that Hai Rui possessed. Mao was clearly spoiling for a fight and after the meeting, Hu Qiaomu, who was also a historian and had been Mao’s secretary during the 1940s, passed on the gist of Mao’s remarks to Wu Han, suggesting that it might be politic for him to write something appropriate about Hai Rui. Wu Han hurriedly wrote an article ‘Hai Rui criticises the Emperor’ (Hai Rui ma huangdi) which appeared in People’s Daily on 26 June 1959. He also published another article on 17 September, also in People’s Daily, entitled ‘On Hai Rui’ (Lun Hai Rui), which had been checked and revised by Hu Qiaomu, who had responsibility for cultural matters. As the vicious Lushan meetings had just started, Wu Han carefully added a postscript criticising ‘right opportunist elements’ (which could only have referred to Peng Dehuai). At this point Ma Lianliang, who was not only a star performer but also the director of the Beijing Opera Company, asked Wu if he would turn his play on the heroic deeds of Hai Rui into a Beijing opera. Wu did not feel entirely comfortable about writing for that medium but thought it would be ungracious not to accept the offer. In March 1960 the new historical opera, Hai Rui, was completed but, at the suggestion of a friend, the title was changed to the now familiar Hai Rui Dismissed from Office and it was performed by the Beijing Opera Company at the beginning of 1961.
Defenders of Wu Han have argued that the history of the play indicates that it cannot have had any connection with the dismissal of Peng Dehuai after the Lushan meetings, but this seems a little disingenuous. Wu Han was sufficiently aware of the political tempest that was brewing up to have appended a cautious postscript to his articles; to rewrite the script and have it staged after Mao had drawn attention to the historical parallel between Peng Dehuai and Hai Rui in 1959 was, to say the least, risky. If Wu Han did not foresee problems surely Ma Lianliang should have done.
However, it was not until 1965 that the blow fell, when an article attacking the play appeared under the name of Yao Wenyuan, who was a close associate in Shanghai of Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, in the 10 November edition of the Shanghai newspaper Wenhuibao. This was followed in early 1966 by attacks on the Notes from Three Family Village, satirical newspaper articles by Wu Han, Deng Tuo and Liao Mosha, in which they had lampooned some of the grosser idiocies of the Great Leap Forward and which, together with Deng Tuo’s Evening Talks at Yanshan, were popular with educated Chinese readers in the early 1960s. Wu Han was not the primary target but he was a convenient scapegoat and was arrested and interrogated, probably on the direct orders of Jiang Qing and Lin Biao, and died in prison on 11 October 1969. There were rumours that he had been forced to commit suicide but he may have been beaten to death or died from the recurrence of his tuberculosis and lack of adequate treatment. Deng Xiaoping could do nothing to save his friend, as by this time he had also been purged and sent to Jiangxi. Wu Han was not posthumously rehabilitated until 1979, partly at the instigation of Deng, who presided over a memorial meeting to help restore his good name.10
Final days as general secretary
At the time of the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference in 1962, the major political obstacle to Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqi was Mao Zedong. By 1965 the picture was becoming cloudier. Mao was in his early seventies and there were doubts about his health and mental stability. His wife, Jiang Qing, and his minister of defence, Lin Biao, were competing for influence and looking ahead to a possible succession contest.
That year saw the criticism and dismissal of Luo Ruiqing, the PLA chief of the general staff. Luo had resisted the politicisation of the army and the downgrading of military training and technical expertise, which inevitably resulted in conflict with Lin Biao. Luo was dismissed after meetings of the Central Committee and Politburo Standing Committee in Shanghai in December 1965, after having been accused by Lin Biao of anti-Party activities, although he did retain his position of deputy premier until the Cultural Revolution. Deng would not accept these accusations and made a coded speech at the end of the meeting defending the general. Deng then went to Luo’s house with his wife Zhuo Lin and Zhou Enlai. While Deng and Zhou Enlai were talking to Luo, Zhuo Lin went upstairs to find Luo’s wife, Hao Zhiping, told her how much they regretted what had happened and invited her to stay with them in Beijing. They flew to the capital in the same aircraft as the Dengs and Li Fuchun on 17 December 1965. The fact that Deng and Zhuo took care of the Luos would later form part of the indictment against Deng during the Cultural Revolution. It had become clear that Deng’s influence was now insufficient to protect his political allies and friends.
Inspecting the north-west
Deng’s last major official duty, before the Cultural Revolution put an end to all normal political and administrative activity, was a tour of inspection to Xi’an, Lanzhou and Xining – the provincial capitals respectively of Shaanxi, Gansu and Qinghai – in March and April 1966. He arrived in Xi’an on 10 March with Li Fuchun and Bo Yibo, as part of a State Council delegation interested primarily in the progress of construction in this remote and poor region of China. In Xi’an he heard reports from local officials and made the usual round of visits to factories before leaving for Gansu. On 16 March at 3 o’clock in the afternoon the delegation arrived by special train in Lanzhou, where they were based for most of the month, taking particular interest in Gansu’s oil and aviation industries. Photographs of Deng during this inspection trip show him as less relaxed and more formal than usual. The members of the delegation were all attired in the formal Sun Yat-sen jackets (zhongshan zhuang) favoured by Mao. Warm clothing was essential for protection against the wind and sand of this semi-desert region, but the suspicion must be that care was also taken to dress conservatively and formally for photo opportunities in a way that would not distinguish them from Mao and his acolytes. The factory visits and meetings were routine affairs but Deng took a particular interest in predicted production quotas as these had been such a controversial issue in the Great Leap Forward.
The delegation moved on to Qinghai on 29 March, where they stayed in the Victory Park Guesthouse before taking the train westwards, and Deng and his colleagues were briefed by local leaders in a compartment in the middle of the train. Qinghai, an ethnically mixed area on the borders with the Tibetan Autonomous Region and one of the least developed regions within the PRC, had suffered badly during the famines after the Great Leap Forward and it was not difficult for Deng, with his personal and political experience in the south-west, to see that the critical development issues were agriculture, herding and minority relations. Deng heard that the grain yields were recovering from the disastrous levels of 1961 and that the current year’s figures were the best ever. The naturally sceptical Deng accepted that there had been much improvement.
Modern industry in Qinghai included mineral extraction but also nuclear installations, including the nuclear weapons development base at Jinyintan, deep inside the grasslands of Haiyan County. This reminded Deng of Maoergai, a town in Sichuan close to the border with Gansu which he had passed through with the Red Army on the Long March. As Deng inspected the nuclear facility he recalled that it had been built with Soviet assistance during the 1950s but that in 1960, when Moscow withdrew all of its technical aid, the CCP had decided to go it alone and continue to develop nuclear technology both for military and peaceful purposes. China’s first atomic bomb was tested on 16 October 1964 and for China and for Deng this was a symbol of the country’s modernity, strength and independence.
Deng’s party returned to Lanzhou on 31 March to hear a report on the situation in Xinjiang from the first secretary of the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region, Wang Enmao, who presented a positive picture of satisfactory developments in agriculture, industry, the military and the militia, particularly commending the role of the Xinjiang Production and Construction Corps. Deng did not visit Xinjiang, but Lanzhou was the home of the military region which had the responsibility for control over Xinjiang. The final stopping point of the inspection tour was the old communist base area of Yan’an, which they reached on 3 April.
Deng’s final visit, to Yan’an, provided an opportunity to see the Revolution Memorial Hall (geming jinian guan) that had been built on the outskirts of the city in 1950, and to visit the nearby cave complex of Yangjialing in which the Communist Party lived and worked from 1936 to 1947. Deng was accompanied by Li Fuchun and Cai Chang, and his youngest daughter and biographer Maomao had also joined them in Yan’an. Cai Chang reminded them that Deng and Zhuo Lin had been married at the entrance to one of the caves at Yangjialing and Deng insisted that he remembered this well. They recalled who had lived in each cave: this tiny enclave had been home to Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and Liu Shaoqi and to Deng Xiaoping when he visited from the Taihang Mountains. This had been the core of the CCP leadership that had taken power in 1949 but had started to disintegrate and was now collapsing. Deng was well received by hundreds of officials and local people in the stadium.
The visit to the north-west had been productive and cheerful and the delegation discussed how to develop the region’s economy, avoiding references to political tensions in Beijing. This came to a sudden end on 8 April 1966 when Kang Sheng telephoned Deng Xiaoping, recalling him immediately to Beijing. Kang Sheng was an aide to Mao Zedong and acted as his hatchet man, ready to attack any actual or potential rivals. Deng travelled back to the capital from Yan’an by a special flight: he was general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, one of the most powerful individuals in the Party and the government, yet he had no idea that a convulsion on the scale of the Cultural Revolution was about to overwhelm the Party, the nation and the people, or that he personally would become the target of a mass campaign of hatred and vilification. Deng was one of the leaders most seriously affected by the Cultural Revolution and, although he was also a veteran of the Long March, the Japanese occupation and the civil wars, he would later freely acknowledge that this was one of the worst periods of his entire life.
Retrospective: Deng Xiaoping from 1949 to 1966
Deng’s role in modernising China after 1978 is universally praised, perhaps excessively and at the expense of others who also played important roles, but on the whole with justification. As it is difficult to evaluate his role between 1949 and 1966 it is useful to consider his own evaluation of that period and his own performance. Deng took the view that the first seven years of the Peoples’ Republic – up to about 1956 – had been broadly successful. This was a period of postwar reconstruction and included the period of the first Five-Year Plan, which was also positively evaluated by outside analysts; there was, however, severe repression of real or imaginary enemies of the regime. Deng argued that the process of socialist transformation of agriculture and industry was also successful, although at times the Party leadership had been too hasty.
He continued to believe that the Anti-Rightist Campaign of 1959 should still be assessed positively (haishi yao kending), but that after this campaign there were more and more mistakes (cuowu yuelai yueduo le). Mao’s published speeches, ‘On the Ten Great Relationships’ and ‘On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People’, were basically fine (shi haode): his errors dated from the end of the 1950s. The Great Leap Forward was wrong (bu zhengque) as was the headlong rush (yi hong er qi) to convert all farms into People’s Communes. The attempt (by Mao) to turn everything into large-scale public units in which everybody ‘ate out of the same big pot’ (chi daguo fan) was the cause of the disaster that followed. In the first half of 1959 these ‘leftist’ mistakes were corrected by a decision to decentralise the management of the communes and even at the beginning of the meetings at Lushan in the summer of that year there had been serious discussion of how to develop the economy. What followed, however, was a period of difficulties (kunnan shiqi).
Deng’s response to these difficulties was a bureaucratic one as that was the area in which he was both able and had authority; he had been responsible for developing policies on industry and agriculture. He insisted that during the failed harvests and widespread famine, as a result of which tens of millions died, the Party responded to try to overcome those difficulties, but conceded that only certain sections of the party really did so. He also maintained that mistakes should not all be attributed to Mao since other members of the Central Committee were implicated. Deng also insisted that he had to take part of the responsibility for some of Mao’s mistakes, even though he had the best of intentions and his conscience was clear. These comments by Deng date from about 1980, four years after the death of Mao Zedong and when he was finally and comfortably in command. It is worth recalling Mao’s evaluation of Deng in 1956 when he was the chairman’s candidate as general secretary. ‘This man Deng is fair and reasonable (gongdao). Like me he has made mistakes but he is pretty fair. He is impartial (gongzheng) when he deals with problems and if he makes a mistake he is hard on himself.’ This is an astute evaluation of Deng and also goes a long way to explain why he tried to remain loyal to Mao even as he was rejecting Mao’s political perspective. Deng’s political status and credibility depended on his association with Mao: during the 1960s he was performing a delicate balancing act, professing his loyalty to Mao while gradually distancing himself from what would eventually be accepted by the Party as a whole as the chairman’s serious errors.11