The coming to power of the Chinese Communists has been discussed in Chapter 11. That account ended in 1953, the year of Stalin’s death. This chapter covers a no less tumultuous period – from 1953 to the demise of Mao Zedong in 1976. It was a period of huge significance both for China and in its implications for the rest of the Communist world. Just as momentous as the years of civil war and revolution in China were the four major events on which I focus in this chapter: the ‘Hundred Flowers’ campaign and the repression which followed it; the ‘Great Leap Forward’, which ended in disaster; the Sino-Soviet split, which was a turning point in the history of the international Communist movement; and the ‘Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’ of Mao’s last decade as Chinese ruler – a movement which caused immense suffering and had important unintended consequences.
Until the mid-1950s, the policy of the Chinese Communists in power drew very heavily on Soviet experience. A five-year plan running from 1953 to 1957 aimed to double industrial production and to raise agricultural output by a quarter.1 Soviet aid, though not great in financial terms, was significant in providing expertise. Russian engineers and technologists undoubtedly played a constructive part in helping to develop China’s industrial infrastructure during the 1950s. Industrial policy yielded better results than the attempt to collectivize agriculture – even though the Chinese tried to avoid the excesses of Stalin’s compulsory collectivization of the late 1920s and early 1930s in the Soviet Union. Agricultural Producers’ Co-operatives were set up which embraced everyone in small villages. They were expected to expand gradually – from a few tens of households to several hundred in each co-operative. Growth of agricultural output was much slower, however, than predicted and argument broke out in the Communist Party between those who favoured a more gradualist approach (including the retention of private plots and some free markets) and the harder-liners, led by Mao, who favoured more rapid socialization.2 Yet by 1956, in the Chinese economy as a whole, the basic transfer of the means of production from private hands into state or collective property had been accomplished.3
As in other Communist countries, substantial progress was made in education. At the highest levels there were losses – especially, and crucially, of intellectual freedom in the humanities and social sciences (although Mao thought there had been too little ideological indoctrination)–but the spread of basic education was on a huge scale. The number of children attending primary school rose from 24 million in 1949 to 64 million in 1957.4 In the same period the numbers in higher education doubled. There remained, however, vast differences between town and country, with few good schools outside the cities, as well as great disparities between men and women. Even in the primary schools, boys outnumbered girls by two to one.5 There were substantial improvements in public health during the Communists’ first decade in power. This brought problems in addition to benefits. The death rate declined much more sharply than the birth rate and an annual population increase of 2 per cent put a further strain on scarce resources.6
Soviet experience and the most recent developments in the Soviet Union continued to influence Chinese politics. Thus, at the Eighth Congress of the Chinese Communist Party in September 1956, Mao’s role was less emphasized than at the previous congress in 1945. Mao Zedong Thought was removed (for the time being) from the party statutes and there was a strong emphasis on collective leadership. These changes were at least partly a consequence of the dethroning of Stalin at the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party and the more general attack there on ‘the cult of personality’.7 The inner core of the Chinese party leadership was retained at the Eighth Congress, although a significant promotion to it was of Deng Xiaoping, later to become one of the most important figures in twentieth-century Chinese history. Talking to the Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev in 1957, Mao pointed to Deng and said: ‘See that little man there? He’s highly intelligent and has a great future ahead of him.’8 The remark seems particularly apposite in retrospect, but since Deng’s future involved reversing much that had been said and done by Mao Zedong, it was hardly what Mao had in mind. The Eighth Congress appeared to mark a new stability in political life, with various bureaucratic interests, notably economic ministries and provincial party organizations, making their claims heard.9 It turned out, however, to represent no more than a lull before a series of storms.
The Hundred Flowers
For a brief period it looked as if the congress was, unexpectedly, going to be followed by a developing pluralism. It appeared to many in China and abroad that Mao Zedong had inaugurated a new phase of post-revolutionary development when he encouraged people to take a more critical look at what had been achieved thus far. What became known as the Hundred Flowers movement in 1956–57 derived from Mao’s remark, ‘Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend.’10 Although inaugurated in 1956, the campaign was stepped up in the first half of 1957. Mao encouraged criticism of what had been accomplished since 1949, although he had in mind the pinpointing of specific shortcomings rather than root-and-branch critiques. In general, he took a positive view of conflict, holding that party members should criticize not only themselves but each other. He drew the line, though, at criticism of himself or of the Communist system. But some of the criticisms aired were of fundamentals. They included questioning even the Chinese Communist Party’s right to rule without any checks on its power or accountability for its decisions. By the time Mao issued an instruction to high-ranking party officials in May 1957 that they should allow the criticism to continue, his motives were suspect. By then, if not earlier, he was attempting to lure his enemies and those who were opposed to the system into the open. That would enable him, like Lenin in 1921, ‘to put the lid on opposition’ or, in Mao’s own words (as he continued to favour horticultural metaphors), to dig out ‘the poisonous weeds’.11
The Soviet leadership had been alarmed by the Chinese talk of allowing a hundred flowers to bloom, since it added to the pressure for freer expression in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. In retrospect, at least, Khrushchev believed that ‘Let a hundred flowers bloom’ was nothing but a provocation: ‘Mao pretended to be opening wide the floodgates of democracy and free expression. He wanted to goad people into expressing their innermost thoughts, both in speech and in print, so that he could destroy those whose thinking he considered harmful.’12 The partial liberalization which had, however briefly, allowed an airing of heterodox ideas, meant, nevertheless, that Mao’s position had been temporarily weakened. The campaign damaged his authority and revealed sharp differences of opinion within the ruling party. Mao’s response was to mount an ‘anti-rightist campaign’ and to re-emphasize the importance of class struggle.13
Not only intellectuals of ‘bourgeois’ background but also students who had received their higher education in the Communist period had been among those who expressed their discontent, some of them questioning the party’s competence. All this pointed to a growing alienation from the system of many of the most educated segments of society.14 The attack on the ‘rightists’ which followed hit the intellectuals hard. Over half a million of them were tarred with the ‘rightist’ brush and put under great psychological pressure, leading to a number of suicides. Many of the intellectuals were consigned to manual labour. It was one of the ironies of Communist systems – the same thing was to happen in Czechoslovakia after the crushing of the Prague Spring and at various times in other Communist states – that, although manual workers constituted the official ruling class, a standard punishment for intellectuals who had been guilty of unorthodox writings or of politically suspect activities was to remove them from the ranks of professions requiring a higher education and to turn them into workers. Paradoxically, then, they were ‘demoted’ into the ‘ruling class’.
The Chinese leaders were sensitive to what was going on elsewhere in the Communist world. They had taken some account of Khrushchev’s Secret Speech to the Twentieth Congress of the CPSU in 1956, although Mao had serious reservations about its wisdom and was furious at having been given no forewarning of such a dramatic change of line. They were also greatly concerned about the political role being played by intellectuals in Poland and Hungary in the same year. The lesson Mao and his closest allies took from the Hundred Flowers movement was that Chinese intellectuals, too, had turned out to be ideologically unreliable. The party leadership remained aware that they needed the expertise of higher professionals. Accordingly, they stressed that the anti-rightist campaign, which followed the failure – from their standpoint – of the Hundred Flowers initiative, was not targeted at the majority of the Chinese intelligentsia. However, the attack on those who had been sufficiently bold, or naïve, to take at face value the idea of open contention of different schools of thought was to dampen, rather than stimulate, the already waning enthusiasm of many intellectuals for the party’s goals.
The Great Leap Forward
Visiting Moscow in October 1957, Mao was complimentary about Soviet achievements, especially in the light of the USSR’s recent feat of being the first country in the world to put a spacecraft in orbit. In the East – West conflict, he declared, the East wind was prevailing over the West wind.15 However, just one year later, Mao and those close to him were moving away from the Soviet model of development which they had followed, in its essentials, hitherto. The idea of a Great Leap Forward, which they espoused, was a programme of mass mobilization in which the enthusiasm and willpower of the mass of the people were to be fully harnessed. Mao aimed to bring managers, technicians and workers closer together, rejecting the more technocratic and hierarchical approach of Soviet advisers. The Soviet engineers and technologists were largely sidelined, as were the bureaucratic agencies of the Chinese central government. So that the countryside could become more self-sufficient in all respects, every locality was encouraged to establish small-scale technology to complement the large-scale industry already constructed. This Mao called ‘walking on two legs’. It meant, among other things, the creation of backyard furnaces which were a waste of labour and economically useless. The Great Leap Forward heralded a redistribution of power. It handed the initiative from central officials and managers to political generalists in the provinces whose task it was to inspire the workers ideologically.16
Mao, while jealously guarding his personal power, also took ideas seriously, and he was eager to advance the communization of Chinese society. In particular, this meant converting the Agricultural Producers’ Co-operatives into much larger ‘people’s communes’. Many more women were brought into the workforce when these massive farms were created, with men often working far away from their native village. The utopianism of the Great Leap Forward may have been initially inspiring, but its results were disastrous. Disdain for material obstacles and for professional expertise alike led to chaos in the countryside and, in turn, to a devastating famine. False reporting of increased grain output contrasted with the harsh reality of a drastic drop in production. Rural transport was disrupted and farm equipment neglected. Matters were made worse by floods and droughts in 1959 and 1960. The best estimate of the number who died as a result of the economic turmoil created by the Great Leap between 1958 and 1961–the ‘excess deaths’, in statistical terms, in that period – is in the order of thirty million people. That means that one person in twenty in the Chinese countryside was a fatal victim of this largely man-made disaster.17
In Tibet, which had been incorporated in the Chinese People’s Republic (PRC) in 1950, the threat of the kind of change involved in the Great Leap was enough to create serious unrest in 1959. Tibetans are one of fifty-five officially recognized different ethnic groups within the PRC, although the Han Chinese are numerically overwhelmingly dominant in China as a whole, making up more than 90 per cent of the population. However, with their distinctive language, culture and religion, Tibetans were already at loggerheads with the Han Chinese who had migrated to their region. The revolt in 1959 was put down forcibly by Chinese troops, and the Tibetans’ spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, took refuge in India. While the Chinese authorities were able to maintain their control over Tibet in the years that followed, the issue of religious and political autonomy for the indigenous population of Tibet remains a contentious international issue to the present day.18
As it became increasingly clear to some in the Chinese leadership at the end of the 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s that the Great Leap Forward had been a monumental mistake – a giant step backwards, in fact – it brought into public view tensions which, in some cases, had been there below the surface for years. Prominent among those who criticized Mao for the fiasco of the Great Leap Forward was Peng Dehuai, who had distinguished himself as a general in charge of Chinese forces in the Korean War. Peng favoured close relations with the Soviet Union and, as minister of defence, wished to model China’s armed forces on the Soviet army. Mao suspected Peng, without any real evidence, of co-ordinating his attacks on him with criticism that was soon to emanate from Moscow. Peng was promptly dismissed from his post, but Mao’s somewhat weakened position was reflected in the fact that he gave up his office as head of state in 1959, although he retained the more powerful post of chairman of the Chinese Communist Party.
Deng Xiaoping had become general secretary of the party and, as such, wielded great authority within its secretariat, but so long as Mao was alive, the general secretaryship, unusually for a Communist Party, was not the most powerful post. The chairmanship of the party, since Mao held it, was the top job. At the time when Mao spoke highly of Deng Xiaoping to Khrushchev in 1957, Deng was still the chairman’s strong supporter, but that changed in the course of the Great Leap Forward. He became less deferential to Mao, who later – during the Cultural Revolution – complained that Deng ‘had not listened to him since 1959’.19 Mao’s successor as head of state, Liu Shaoqi, announced in 1961 that, notwithstanding the serious flooding which had occurred in a number of Chinese provinces, 70 per cent of the various famines which had afflicted the country were due to human errors rather than being natural disasters.20 This was not presented by Liu as an indictment of Mao but, especially in retrospect, could be seen as a veiled criticism of him. It was Liu and Deng together who developed the policies from 1961 until the middle of the 1960s which put the Chinese economy back on a somewhat more rational course. Expertise was again given its due and steps were taken to strengthen the party apparatus as a disciplined body.21
The Sino-Soviet Split
The Sino-Soviet split had its origins in 1956–with Khrushchev’s speech to the Twentieth Congress, which troubled the Chinese, since they had given uncritical public support hitherto to Stalin.22 That was also the year in which, with his Hundred Flowers initiative, Mao began to promote policies which were strikingly divergent from, and potentially embarrassing for, the Communist rulers of the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. By 1957, a number of differences were emerging. The outcome of the Anti-Party Group crisis in Moscow was a case in point. Mao disagreed with Khrushchev’s removal from the Soviet leadership of such old Bolsheviks as Molotov, even though Mao himself was a decade later to treat his own old comrades with still less respect.23
In the wake of the crisis within the Soviet leadership in 1957, following the much more tumultuous events in Poland and Hungary the previous year, the Soviet Communist Party set about trying to restore and reinforce the unity of the international Communist movement. A conference of Communist Party leaders was convened in Moscow in November 1957 at which an effort was made to bring together all the major parties. This meant, in particular, securing the attendance of both Mao and Tito. Mao turned up, but Tito did not. The Yugoslav leader had objected to a draft declaration which referred to the ‘socialist camp’ – a term he did not like, since it might call into question Yugoslavia’s freedom of action. He also objected to the phrase, the ‘struggle against dogmatism and revisionism’. The term ‘dogmatism’ referred to hard-line Stalinist policies and was to be increasingly applied to China. ‘Revisionism’ had long been the term of abuse in the international Communist movement for deviation in the opposite direction – concessions to the market or to political tolerance. Ever since the expulsion of Yugoslavia from the Cominform, ‘revisionist’ had been one of the epithets applied by other Communists to the Yugoslavs.
By 1961–62, Yugoslavia was no longer the outcast from the international Communist movement it had been in the last years of Stalin’s life, but the term ‘revisionist’ was repeatedly applied to them in those years by the Chinese leadership. Yugoslavia, however, had by then become a codename for the Soviet Union. This was in the period shortly before the Chinese Communists began publicly attacking Khrushchev and the Soviet leadership as ‘revisionists’. And just as the Chinese initially directed their open polemics at Belgrade rather than Moscow, the Soviet Union publicly criticized the ‘dogmatism’ of the ‘Albanians’ (standing in for the Chinese) who, under Enver Hoxha’s leadership, had transferred their allegiance in 1960 from Moscow to Beijing. There was a reluctance in the Soviet Union, in particular, to reveal to all and sundry that the world’s two most important Communist states were at loggerheads. Serious analysts of the Communist world had little difficulty, however, in discerning the depth of disagreement between China and the Soviet Union. In the course of 1962 that fact became still more abundantly clear, although some obtuse Western politicians, especially in the United States, chose to believe for years to come that the Sino-Soviet dispute was an elaborate ruse to deceive the ‘free world’.
Differences between China and the Soviet Union had been emerging gradually, but Mao shocked many of his listeners when, in a speech during his November 1957 visit to Moscow, he contemplated with equanimity the prospect of nuclear war. Perhaps 700 million people would be killed (about a third of the world’s population at the time), or possibly as many as half of all people on earth, but they would soon be replaced, Mao said, and the gains would be enormous. Imperialism would have been crushed and the whole world would have ‘become socialist’.24 Even Khrushchev at his most impetuous (as in the early stages of the Cuban missile crisis) never thought, still less said, anything remotely as irresponsible. The reaction of the Czech and Polish Communists was one of horror. Mao could say that he was prepared to lose half the population of China in a nuclear war – which, in the late 1950s, would have meant the deaths of 300 million Chinese – but, as the Czech Communist leader Antonín Novotný said to Khrushchev, Czechoslovakia would lose ‘every last soul’ in such a war.25
When Khrushchev visited China in 1958, he found Mao highly resistant to the idea of allowing Soviet submarines to use Chinese ports or of a radio station being located on Chinese territory for communication with the Soviet fleet. Mao offended Khrushchev by comparing his desire to make such use of Chinese territory to the activities of Britain and Japan in the past. He did not yet use the word ‘imperialist’, but the implication was clear. He also went out of his way to humiliate Khrushchev in other ways. Mao was a notable swimmer. At the age of seventy-two, in 1966, he joined 5,000 participants in an annual swim in the River Yangtze and, aided by a strong current, covered a distance of ten miles.26 Khrushchev, in contrast, was not much better a swimmer than he was a dancer. If Stalin had embarrassed him by instructing him to dance the gopak, Mao’s method of oneupmanship was to conduct political discussions in a swimming pool. As Mao swam around effortlessly, expounding views which were immediately translated, Khrushchev was left to splutter his answers in between mouthfuls of water. ‘Of course’, he remarked in his memoirs, ‘I couldn’t compete with Mao in the pool – as everyone knows, he’s since set a world record for both speed and distance.’27
Signs of rapprochement between the Soviet Union and the United States were anathema to Mao, who disapproved of Khrushchev’s visit to the USA in September 1959. Three months previously, Moscow had reneged on an earlier promise to supply China with the atomic bomb (which before long they were to develop by themselves). The Chinese leadership assumed that the backtracking had occurred to please the Americans, although, in fact, there were Soviet worries that the United States might retaliate by supplying nuclear weapons to West Germany.28 (There was no factual foundation for that supposition, but memories of the Second World War remained sufficiently fresh in 1959 for the Germans still to be seen as the Soviet Union’s major potential enemy in Europe. It was with the election to the chancellorship of West Germany a decade later of Willy Brandt – and his government’s policy of constructive engagement with the Soviet Union and the countries of Eastern Europe – that perceptions of Germany in Russia and East Europe underwent a major shift.)
By the time Khrushchev made his third and last visit to China in October 1959, the tensions between the two countries – as well as the testiness between the two top leaders – had become much more pronounced. Border skirmishes between China and India had been an embarrassment to the Soviet Union. Although diplomatic mediation was not his strongest suit, Khrushchev counselled restraint. The USSR enjoyed good relations with Nehru’s India and yet remained, officially at least, the fraternal Communist ally of China. Khrushchev did not endear himself to his hosts by fulfilling a promise he had made to President Eisenhower whereby he brought up the subject of five Americans who were being held in captivity in China. Both Mao and Zhou Enlai treated these and other remarks of Khrushchev’s as if he were a spokesman for the USA. When Mao complained about the United States having sent its fleet close to the Chinese coast, Khrushchev responded frankly: ‘One should keep in mind that we also are not without sin. It was we who drew the Americans to South Korea’ – a reference to Stalin’s responsibility for starting the Korean War.29 It was Khrushchev’s turn to be belligerent, however, when the conversation turned to Tibet. Mao said that they had intended to ‘delay the transformation of Tibet by four years’, to which Khrushchev responded: ‘And that was your mistake.’ Mao was also forced to defend China’s failure to stop the Dalai Lama from leaving Tibet. Khrushchev made it clear that he regarded this as political incompetence, saying: ‘As to the escape of the Dalai Lama from Tibet, if we had been in your place, we would not have let him escape. It would be better if he was in a coffin. And now he is in India, and perhaps will go to the USA. Is this to the advantage of the socialist countries?’ Mao replied that the border with India was very long and the Dalai Lama could cross it at any point.30
By July 1960, Chinese Communist leaders, in their internal communications, were referring to a struggle between ‘Marxism and opportunism’ in the international Communist movement, in which, of course, they were the Marxists and Khrushchev was the number one ‘opportunist’ and also a ‘schemer’.31 The dispute moved beyond words when that same month the Soviet Union informed Beijing that they were withdrawing immediately the 1,400 or so specialists who had been working in China. In a confidential letter, the Soviet side gave their reasons for this sudden action. They included the allegation that criticisms had been made in China of the specialists’ work, disregard of the specialists’ advice (although it was Chinese rejection of Soviet political, rather than technical, counsel that weighed more heavily), and, especially, Chinese Communist Party propaganda against the CPSU.32 Nevertheless, whatever their disillusionment with Khrushchev and the Soviet leadership, the Chinese recognized the practical help which the Soviet engineers and technologists had provided. At a farewell dinner, held in mid-August 1960, in honour of the departing Soviet specialists, Zhou Enlai thanked them for the contribution they had made to the construction of ‘socialism’ in China.33 As part, however, of the worsening of relations between the two major Communist powers, in that same year Soviet – Chinese trade virtually ended, adding to the difficulties of the Chinese economy in the throes of its Great Leap Forward.
The Chinese tried to propagate their ideological position and their view of the dispute with the Soviet Union inside Russia, handing out documents in Moscow research institutes giving the Chinese side of the story. The Soviet leadership retaliated by expelling three Chinese diplomats and two other Chinese citizens. They returned to Beijing in early July 1963 to a heroes’ welcome, attended by Zhou Enlai.34 This was the month in which the dispute became a public one. Pravda published on 14 July, as an open letter, the response of the Central Committee of the CPSU to proposals the Chinese had made a month earlier.35 By this time the Chinese were openly attacking Soviet ‘revisionism’, and the years 1963–64 marked a watershed in the international Communist movement. The two largest Communist parties in the world engaged in open polemics against each other and had clearly moved into an antagonistic relationship. The idea of Communism as an ideology which united revolutionaries and ‘anti-imperialists’ throughout the world suffered a blow from which it could never fully recover. The Soviet leadership, accustomed as it was to the idea that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union played a leading, if not dominant, role within the international Communist movement, sought to maintain unity, but not at the price of ideological surrender to the position of the Chinese. Mao, however, was content to keep the polemics going, partly because he feared ‘revisionism’ at home as well as within the broader movement. By putting himself at the head of the assault on Soviet apostasy, he was strengthening his position for an attack on domestic backsliders. Some of the Chinese leaders, such as Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqi, who had assiduously argued with their Soviet counterparts in support of Mao’s line, were to find that similar accusations of ‘revisionism’ – and, indeed, stronger terms, such as ‘capitalist roaders’ – would be levelled against them in the Cultural Revolution.36
When Khrushchev was toppled by his colleagues in October 1964, Mao briefly hoped this meant that the Soviet leadership had accepted his critique of Khrushchev’s policies. Equally briefly, the Soviet leaders imagined that the removal of the less than tactful Khrushchev would make it easier for them to resolve their differences with the Chinese Communist Party. However, the dispute was much more than personal. There were profound political and ideological issues at stake. Zhou Enlai led a delegation to the celebration of the anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution on 7 November 1964, just three weeks after the removal of Khrushchev. Leonid Brezhnev, in his official speech on this occasion, called for a new international meeting of the fraternal Communist parties. This remark was greeted by stormy applause in which, however, Zhou Enlai conspicuously failed to join. At a reception later the same day the Soviet minister of defence, Marshal Rodion Malinovsky, told a military member of the Chinese delegation that they should follow the Soviet example and get rid of Mao, just as they had rid themselves of Khrushchev.37 Malinovsky was fairly drunk at the time, but Brezhnev’s attempt to persuade the outraged Chinese that this was not official policy – merely a result of Malinovsky’s over-imbibing – met with the response from Zhou that, on the contrary, the alcohol had simply enabled Malinovsky to say what he believed.38 Given that Malinovsky’s remark would have been reported to Mao, Zhou himself would have been in dire trouble in Beijing had he reacted in any way other than vehemently denouncing it.
Incidents on the Soviet – Chinese border added to the tensions between the two sides. Later – in 1969–they were to result in scores of deaths in the border regions of both countries and raise fears of a full-scale war between the two Communist giants. However, the territorial disputes, while real, were not fundamental to the break between the Soviet Union and China. Central to it were ideological differences. The Chinese at that time were more committed to world revolution and the Soviet Union had become tolerably content with the European and broader international status quo, so long as they occupied one of the two most important places in the world hierarchy, along with the United States. The Soviet Union was in favour of ‘peaceful co-existence’, which meant that it did, indeed, wish to avoid war, though it was resolutely opposed to ideological co-existence. (The Soviet authorities, like Communist rulers elsewhere, tried hard to avoid the dissemination of non-Communist ideas in their own country, while doing their best to promote their own ideology worldwide.) In contrast to the Soviet stress on peaceful co-existence, Mao appeared ready to consider war as a way of advancing Communism, although he was more cautious in practice in the international arena than his rhetoric might suggest.39
There was also disagreement between the two leaderships in their attitude to Stalin. This became less pronounced after October 1964, for Khrushchev’s successors soon decided that criticism of Stalin and Stalinism was potentially destabilizing, and put a stop to it at home. Although, however, there were those within the Soviet political elite who wished to rehabilitate Stalin, this did not happen, and between the fall of Khrushchev in 1964 and the death of Mao in 1976, Stalin was lauded much more in Beijing than in Moscow. Moreover, in a number of his actions – not least in his (pyrrhic) victory over party officialdom which was at the heart of the Cultural Revolution – Mao seemed to be following in Stalin’s footsteps. Certainly, in China’s ‘Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’, there were echoes of Stalin’s purges of the late 1930s in which so many party members of long standing perished. There were disagreements between the leaderships of the two Communist states on the way the economy should be run, with Mao despising the highly bureaucratized nature of the Soviet state and concerned to combat such tendencies in his own country. In addition to the real ideological differences must be added Mao’s personal ambition to be the leading theorist in the Communist world and his aspiration to make a transition to communism, in the utopian sense of the term, ahead of the Soviet Union. After the fall of Khrushchev, Soviet leaders paid no more than occasional lip-service to the very notion of this supposedly final stage of development of society, so Mao had that field to himself.
The Cultural Revolution
With the collapse of the Great Leap Forward, Chinese government in the first half of the 1960s had become more orderly and increasingly institutionalized. Although Mao Zedong sat at the top of the political hierarchy, a number of institutions wielded real power and authority. They included the Politburo of the Central Committee of the CCP; the Central Committee Secretariat, led by Deng Xiaoping; regional and city party organizations, especially that of Beijing, headed by Peng Zhen; the State Council, which comprised the ministerial network, at whose head stood Zhou Enlai; and the official headship of state, a post occupied by Liu Shaoqi, who, more importantly, had a strong base in the party machine. He was number two in the Politburo after Mao and had been identified as Mao’s successor. In the early 1950s the slogan ‘The Soviet Union’s today is our tomorrow’ had been seen as a cheerful forecast of speedy economic progress and a cause for optimism. By the 1960s, Mao, with his increasingly dyspeptic view of Soviet developments, saw it as an awful warning.40 If China was not to slip into a pattern of bureaucratism and revisionism, the system must undergo another fundamental shake-up.
Hence, Mao was susceptible to the urgings of those who felt they had been held back by the old guard who were now running the country’s major institutions. He was influenced, not least, by the faction led by his wife, Jiang Qing, who had an especially keen eye for any departures from revolutionary correctness on the cultural front. The Cultural Revolution, in the fullest sense of the term, lasted from the spring of 1966 until the spring of 1969. Since, however, it was never formally declared to be at an end so long as Mao lived, in milder form it lingered on until his death in 1976. Along with Chen Boda, the Communist Party intellectual (though a man of poor peasant origin) closest to Mao, Jiang Qing led what became known as the Cultural Revolution Small Group. Initially, it lacked a serious power base in the party, but with Mao’s crucial support it became one of three organizations with whom he principally interacted during the Cultural Revolution, the others being the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), headed by the minister of defence, Lin Biao, and the State Council, led by Zhou Enlai.41 Peng Zhen and Liu Shaoqi, paying in part for previous unwillingness to take Jiang Qing seriously as a political actor, were among the earlier victims of the Cultural Revolution. Zhou Enlai survived by taking positions that were ‘just radical enough to avoid destruction while he worked to minimize the chaos’.42
Lin Biao, although he ultimately became a casualty of the Cultural Revolution, was a key ally of Mao throughout the greater part of it. In spite of some similarities with Stalin’s Great Purge, Mao came much closer to overthrowing the party than did Stalin, who remained aware that he needed it. Another notable difference was in the role played by the Soviet and Chinese armies. In the late 1930s, the Soviet army was decimated by Stalin and his henchmen and very far from playing a serious role in domestic politics. In contrast, the PLA, as both the party organizations and the ministerial network came under attack, became the main institutional bulwark on which Mao Zedong could rely between 1966 and 1969. Mao was also enthusiastically supported by young people, the Red Guards, who had been introduced as a new force in Chinese politics, but the PLA, as befitted an army, were much more disciplined. Unbound by rules, and disdainful of hierarchy, the Red Guards ultimately scared even the CCP chairman. Although Mao was psychologically ready to initiate conflict within the party and society, and to re-establish the dominance of his own views, it was Jiang Qing who, with his approval, struck the first blow. She argued that a play by a historian, Wu Han, Hai Rui Dismissed from Office, which had been performed in Beijing in 1961, had been a covert attack on Mao’s policies. Wu Han, in addition to his academic background, happened to be deputy mayor of Beijing. He thus enjoyed the protection of the party first secretary in the capital, Peng Zhen. Accordingly, Jiang Qing could find no author in Beijing who would write a polemical article against Wu Han – a good indication of the power wielded by the city party boss. Undaunted, she went off to Shanghai, and the party first secretary there, aware that Mao had approved his wife’s enterprise, assigned two propagandists to the task of unmasking Wu Han. They duly described the play as ‘a reactionary intervention in the great class struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat’.43
The publication of the denunciation of Wu Han (the text of the article having been edited by Mao personally) launched the Cultural Revolution. From this time on it became ever more meaningful to speak of Maoism and of Maoists, for it was the chairman who defined what was authentic revolutionary doctrine, distinguishing it from what had been accepted hitherto. He used his authority, and the manufacture of a cult of his personality which reached new heights, to replace one senior member of the Chinese political and cultural establishment after another. Wu Han and Peng Zhen were among the first to be ousted. Lin Biao, whose PLA had given crucial support to Mao, was among the last. In 1971 he was accused of conspiring with his son, a PLA officer, to assassinate Mao. With his wife and that son, Lin Biao made a midnight dash to an airport, where they commandeered an aircraft. They attempted to fly to the Soviet Union, but the plane crashed in Mongolia, in all likelihood having run out of fuel.44 Earlier in the Cultural Revolution Lin Biao had taken Liu Shaoqi’s place as heir apparent to Mao, but that was always a dangerous position to be in. Lin was still being denounced at orchestrated meetings in China several years after his death. Liu Shaoqi himself had been the most senior target of the first and most manic stage of the Cultural Revolution between 1966 and 1969. Removed from office in 1967, he died under house arrest in 1969. He had been formally denounced as a ‘traitor, renegade, and scab’. His wife, Wang Guangmei, was imprisoned for twelve years. After Mao’s death Liu was posthumously rehabilitated, with all the allegations against him dismissed as baseless.
Far fewer people died during the ‘Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution’ than during the Great Leap Forward. That was partly because the Cultural Revolution affected mostly the urban population, whereas a majority of people – some 620 million in the late 1960s – still lived in the countryside.45 Yet it is estimated that a minimum of half a million people, out of some 137 million living in the towns in 1967, died as a direct result of the Cultural Revolution.46 The political purge of officials was, in percentage terms, even higher than that conducted by Stalin between 1936 and 1938, although a lower proportion in China were executed or imprisoned. Between 60 and 70 per cent of officials in the central organs of the Communist Party were removed from office. Of thirteen members of the Central Committee Secretariat in 1966, only four were still there by 1969, and only fifty-four out of 167 members of the Central Committee retained their positions. Half of the ministers in the State Council lost their posts. Many of these ousted officials from the central and regional party and government organs were sent to ‘cadre schools’ in the countryside, where they had to undergo ideological re-education interspersed with hard physical labour. Some, however, suffered worse treatment, being beaten to death or tortured. Wu Han, the author whose disgrace Jiang Qing organized, was among those who attempted suicide.47 Deng Xiaoping was denounced as a ‘capitalist roader’ (a description that was a gross exaggeration at the time, but might be thought to have contained a grain of truth when he wielded supreme power a decade and a half later) and dismissed from all his posts. He was sent to work as a fitter in a factory, a job for which he was not without qualifications, albeit somewhat dated, since during his studies in France forty years earlier he had worked part-time in that capacity in a Renault factory. Deng’s elder son was crippled for life when he jumped out of an upstairs dormitory window of Beijing University in an attempt to escape from his Red Guard tormentors.48
It was, in fact, the schools and universities which suffered the worst effects of the Cultural Revolution. Millions of teachers were pilloried, and universities were shut down for several years from 1966 so that the students could participate as Red Guards in the revolutionary process. Most of the young people who took part began as true believers in the ‘purification’ of the revolution that was going on and with implicit faith in the wisdom of Mao Zedong. The distillation of Mao’s thoughts in the ubiquitous Little Red Book became compulsory reading – and not just for students. (I well recall, from the academic year I spent at Moscow State University in 1967–68, seeing diplomats from the Chinese embassy walking in single file, in Mao-style uniforms, each of them reading, as he walked, the Little Red Book.) Turmoil in the Chinese educational system continued in the first half of the 1970s, and many former Red Guards who were relocated to the countryside, with their education interrupted for up to a decade, had ample time to repent of their youthful revolutionary zeal.
UNINTENDED CONSEQUENCES IN CHINA
There was a partial re-evaluation of the Cultural Revolution even while Mao Zedong was still alive. Mao by 1975 was using the formula that it had been 70 per cent a success and 30 per cent a failure.49 Once he had pronounced, it took a bold person to disagree. Deng Xiaoping, who had been brought back into the leadership as a vice-premier, found himself under attack, however, for his understandable reluctance to agree that the Cultural Revolution had, all things considered, been a success story. He had to engage in self-criticism, but what he said fell far short of satisfying Mao. Deng was once again demoted after he attributed his errors to ‘a profound inability to understand what the Cultural Revolution was all about’.50
As well as insisting that the Cultural Revolution had been successful, Mao in 1975 criticized factionalism within the Communist Party, including the faction most fanatically engaged in this revolution, of which his wife, Jiang Qing, was a member. Mao described it within inner party circles as the ‘Gang of Four’ – a phrase which after his death was to become far more famous than he intended. (Jiang’s relationship to Mao was not as close as her status as his spouse would suggest. Among the duties of the head of Mao’s security, General Wang Dongxing, was maintaining a constant supply of young women whose sexual services the ‘Great Helmsman’ enjoyed. They were euphemistically known as the ‘Cultural Work Troupe’.)51 The other members of the Gang of Four, apart from Jiang Qing, were Wang Hongwen, a radical labour leader in the early years of the Cultural Revolution who in the early 1970s was considered a possible successor to Mao; Yao Wenyan, the Shanghai literary critic who was the major author of the attack (at Jiang Qing’s behest) on the play, Hai Rui Dismissed from Office; and Zhang Chunquiao, a senior propagandist in Shanghai who by the mid-1970s was chairman of the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee and a vice-premier of the State Council.
The Cultural Revolution was a personal disaster for millions of Chinese people. The more educated they were, the more likely they were to be among its victims. It was also in almost all respects an anti-Cultural Revolution, inasmuch as it involved the wanton destruction by Red Guards (often acting on their own initiative) of cultural artefacts, whether books, paintings, the contents of museums, graveyards or historical sites.52 The Red Guards had, though, been encouraged already in 1966 to attack the ‘Four Olds’. Old thought, old culture, old customs and old habits had to be eliminated.53 One of the things, it seems, which motivated Mao in the launch of the Cultural Revolution was the desire to secure his legacy. He wanted to be followed, and revered, by radicals, not by ‘revisionists’.54 However, the disaster of the Cultural Revolution, following fast on the even greater disaster of the Great Leap Forward, helped to ensure the triumph of what he would have regarded as extreme revisionism.
The Cultural Revolution did, indeed, have unintended consequences that were ultimately beneficial for China, however tragic it was that such a heavy price had to be paid for a resurgence of common sense. One major reason why radical economic reform was almost impossibly difficult to introduce in the Soviet Union was the strength of vested interests – in the first place, the bureaucracies of the economic ministries and the regional party organizations. In China, the Cultural Revolution totally disrupted those structures and they never fully recovered their former coherence and domination. Thus, bureaucratic resistance to market reform was much weaker than it otherwise would have been when economic innovation got seriously under way after Mao Zedong’s death. Moreover, the campaign against ‘revisionism’ had led to such irrational extremes that the zealots of the Cultural Revolution soon found themselves on the defensive when their mentor and protector, Mao, was no longer there. The Gang of Four were arrested on 6 October 1976, less than a month after Mao’s death, and were kept in prison for four years before being brought to trial in 1980. As a group, they were accused of causing almost 35,000 deaths. Two of them – Mao’s widow, Jiang Qing, and Zhang – were given death sentences which were later commuted.55 The publicity given to their crimes helped still further to discredit the extremism of the Cultural Revolution and to aid the full rehabilitation of officials, including those of reformist disposition, who had been persecuted in those years. The party leadership could not afford to discredit Mao comprehensively, for he was their Lenin as well as their Stalin. Thus, too much of the legitimacy of Communist rule would have been lost had they done so. Nevertheless, a Central Committee ‘Resolution on Party History’, without going so far as to turn the Gang of Four into a Gang of Five, did not evade Mao’s ultimate responsibility for the disastrous decade from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s. It noted: ‘The “cultural revolution”, which lasted from May 1966 to October 1976, was responsible for the most severe setback and the heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the state and the people since the founding of the People’s Republic. It was initiated and led by Comrade Mao Zedong.’56
The hold of Communist ideology could never be the same again in China. Neither Marxism-Leninism nor Mao Zedong Thought, although lip-service continued to be paid to both, dominated people’s minds in the way in which they had before and, to an extreme extent, during the earlier stages of the Cultural Revolution. Utopianism was out, pragmatism was in. Indeed, almost everything Mao had intended to destroy for ever, and which constituted his primary motivation for launching and persisting with the Cultural Revolution, was given a new lease of life in the reaction against the turmoil and arbitrariness of ‘Mao’s Last Revolution’.57 The old officials who returned to their posts, after suffering to varying degrees at the hands of revolutionary zealots of their own generation and, still more, from the youthful fanaticism of the Red Guards, were united in their determination never again to put up with such extremism and insubordination. (Recent experience of what young people could do when they were apparently given their heads did nothing, however, to incline the returning cadres toward political democracy.) While many Chinese continued to believe that Mao, in the course of his long career as a revolutionary and ruler, had done more good than harm, he was no longer deified. Both Mao and Mao Zedong Thought had been secularized.
UNINTENDED INTERNATIONAL CONSEQUENCES
Even during the lifetime of Mao Zedong there was a retreat from some of the violent disorder engendered by the Cultural Revolution. Mao had to call on the services of the PLA to curb the wilder excesses of the Red Guards. But it was in foreign policy that he reversed course most spectacularly. Having chastised and ridiculed the Soviet leadership for being soft in its attitude to the arch-imperialist power, the United States, Mao began in 1970–71 to send signals to Washington that a less antagonistic relationship would be welcome. It was in 1969 that China had come closer to war with the Soviet Union than ever before, and to be on equally bad terms with both superpowers seemed inadvisable. The Cultural Revolution had exacerbated the Sino-Soviet conflict. It had united most of the Soviet establishment – whether reformers or conservative Communists – against China, for it reminded them of the Great Terror of the 1930s. Indeed, one unintended consequence of events in China for Soviet politics was that, at a time when the Brezhnev leadership had put a stop to criticism of Stalin, a number of anti-Stalinist – indeed, thoroughly ‘revisionist’ – Soviet authors wrote books and articles which were ostensibly about Mao and China but which their more discerning readers realized were about Stalin and the Soviet Union. Just as ‘Yugoslavia’ for a time served, in Chinese polemics, for the Soviet Union, and ‘Albania’, in the Soviet responses, stood in for China, so Mao became a surrogate for Stalin and writings about him became a way of pressing the case for moderation, reform, and a rule of law in the USSR.58
Conscious of their international isolation at the beginning of the 1970s, the Chinese leadership began to show a new interest in being accorded a seat at the United Nations. For most of the outside world, it had long been regarded as an absurdity that they were not already there. The stumbling block had been the United States – hence the tentative Chinese overtures to the Nixon administration, to which President Richard Nixon and his secretary of state Henry Kissinger responded. Although American recognition of China was little more than a belated recognition of the obvious, and while Nixon’s meeting with Mao Zedong in 1972 was less consequential than Nixon and Kissinger made out, the fact that a Republican president – and one who, during the McCarthyite period, had been an enthusiastic red-baiter – took the plunge, changed the contours of international diplomacy.59
From that time on, the United States could attempt to play the ‘China card’ against the Soviet Union, although this turned out to be of no significance whatsoever at the time when relations between the USA and the Soviet Union improved most dramatically – during the second half of the 1980s. Historically, the Sino-Soviet split was a far more important occurrence than the development of a Sino-American working relationship. The latter was overdue and it made sense. It often, however, involved hypocrisy on both sides, with the Soviet Union, during the presidencies of several of Nixon’s successors, much more castigated for its human rights record than China. That was in spite of the fact that China’s record of repression and intolerance – especially in Mao’s lifetime – was very much worse than even Brezhnev’s USSR.