MAO

The surveys he had carried out in Jiangxi in the early 1930s had focused on class relations in the countryside, not the dynamics of rural trade. Even when his avowed aim was to describe the commercial life of a small market town, the result was an exhaustive listing of hundreds of obscure local products, meticulously compiled, but with painfully little understanding of what made the economy grow, generating employment and prosperity, or what, in bad times, made it falter.²

In Yan'an, a decade later, Mao's New Democracy platform, conditioned by the political needs of the united front and the war against Japan, envisaged a mixed economy with a strong capitalist component. The two substantial innovations which the communists made in the economic field in the early 1940s, the introduction of co-operatives and a movement for economic self-sufficiency in the Red Army, were likewise politically motivated – the one as a step away from individual peasant ownership towards a collectivised system, the other a means of lessening the burden the military imposed on the civilian population.³ Both continued in the People's Republic. When the PLA occupied Tibet, in the winter of 1951, Mao's prime concern was that the army produce enough food to meet its own needs. Otherwise, he warned, it would be impossible to win over the Tibetans and eventually they would rebel.⁴

Mao's stress on self-sufficiency was a product of the peasant economy in which he had been reared, reinforced by his experience in Red base areas that were under constant threat of enemy blockade. Economic autarky, both at the provincial and the national level, was an article of faith. China's historical experience had taught that foreign countries were exploitative, and should be kept at arm's length. For most of the Maoist period, foreign trade was held to a minimum, and the balance of payments was kept firmly in the black. China accepted foreign loans only from the Soviet Union, and then, apart from military supplies during the Korean War, only in limited amounts. When, in 1949, the Russians offered a five-year credit totalling 300 million dollars, even at that time a very modest sum, it was widely attributed to Stalin's niggardliness. Mao himself was privately relieved that China's borrowings would remain small.⁵

Shortly before nationwide victory, Mao spoke publicly of his concerns about the economic tasks ahead. ‘We shall have to master what we do not know,’ he warned. ‘We must learn to do economic work from all who know how, no matter who they are … We must acknowledge our ignorance, and not pretend to know what we do not know.’⁶

Three years later, when he and his colleagues were confronted with the task of drawing up a comprehensive development strategy for their vast, newly pacified country, they did precisely that – and called in Russian experts to help. A Five-Year Plan was worked out, modelled on Soviet practice, with more than a hundred large Soviet-built heavy industrial plants at its core.⁷

Mao would afterwards complain that ‘dogmatism’ had taken hold at that time. ‘Since we didn't understand these things and had absolutely no experience,’ he grumbled, ‘all we could do in our ignorance was to import foreign methods … It didn't matter whether a [Russian] article was correct or not, the Chinese listened all the same and respectfully obeyed.’⁸ But in 1953 Russian guidance was exactly what Mao wanted. That spring he personally urged officials to ‘whip up a high tide of learning from the Soviet Union throughout the whole country’.⁹

Only in two major respects did China stray from the Soviet path. In place of a Stalinist programme of forced collectivisation, Mao laid down a voluntary, step-by-step approach. Villagers were first encouraged to form Mutual Aid Teams, in which a handful of families joined together to pool draught animals, tools and labour power; then came lower-level Agricultural Producers’ Co-operatives (APCs), whose members were remunerated in proportion to the amount of land and labour they contributed; and, finally, higher-level APCs, where the land and equipment of a whole village became collective property and members were paid on the basis of labour alone.¹⁰ Similarly, in commerce and industry, the ‘general line for the transition to socialism’, which Mao put forward in the summer of 1953, retained substantial elements of the New Democracy platform.¹¹ To build a socialist economy, he declared, would take ‘fifteen years or a little longer’ in the cities, and eighteen years in the countryside. In the meantime, China's private businessmen (whose spirit had by then been crushed by the violence of the ‘Five Antis’ campaign) were to transform their enterprises into partnerships with the state, from which they would be permitted to continue drawing a quarter of the profits.¹²

It all sounded eminently reasonable. Too reasonable, no doubt, for a country of festering class hatreds, led by a group of revolutionaries devoted to radical change. In any event, it turned out to be too reasonable to last.

Already in 1951, a dispute had developed over the pace of the transformation they were trying to accomplish. That year, the Finance Minister, Bo Yibo, supported by Liu Shaoqi, had spoken out forcefully against pushing rural collectivisation too fast. Twelve months later, with Mao's approval, Gao Gang, now a senior Politburo member and Party chief of Manchuria, presented the opposite view. Rapid collectivisation was imperative, he said, because if the ‘spontaneous tendency of the peasants towards capitalism’ went unchecked, China would have a capitalist, rather than a socialist, future. Afterwards, the two men clashed again, this time over tax policy. Bo proposed equal treatment for state and private firms. Gao charged that he was advocating ‘class peace’. Again, Mao supported Gao. Bo, he said, had been struck by a ‘spiritual sugar-coated bullet’ which had caused him to succumb to the influence of bourgeois ideas. If the Party's cause were to triumph, such ‘right-opportunist deviations’ must be corrected and ‘the question of the socialist road versus the capitalist road must be clarified’.¹³

Thus, the battle lines were drawn. The dilemmas posed in these obscure debates of the early 1950s – economic growth vs. spontaneous capitalism; ideological imperatives vs. objective reality; the socialist vs. the capitalist road – would resonate through all the great political upheavals of the years ahead: the anti-Rightist campaign; the Great Leap Forward; and the Cultural Revolution. The seeds of turmoil were sown, not towards the end but at the very beginning of Mao's rule.

The dispute between Bo and Gao also provided the springboard for the first major power struggle in the Chinese leadership since Mao had ousted Zhang Guotao and Wang Ming in the late 1930s.

Gao was a rising star in the communist hierarchy. Six or seven years younger that Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai, he was unsophisticated, energetic, capable – and, more important, Mao liked him. He was also highly ambitious. In Manchuria, he had gone out of his way to cultivate Russian officials, and apparently used this channel to spread rumours that Liu and Zhou were pro-American. Liu was the real target of his attacks on Bo Yibo.¹⁴ In the late autumn of 1952, when Mao summoned Gao to Beijing to head the State Planning Commission, a crucially important task at a time when China was preparing the transition to a planned economy, he and Liu evidently liked each other no better. By the following spring, Gao was casting about for ways to supplant him.

Mao gave him discreet encouragement. The Chairman was irritated with Liu and Zhou because of what he saw as their foot-dragging over the transition to a socialist system. That winter he groused about them privately to Gao, who became convinced that the Chairman was giving him the go-ahead to take a higher-profile role himself.

Other factors concurred. Mao was finding his state duties wearisome. In 1952 he began speaking of ‘withdrawing to the second front’, by which he meant leaving the day-to-day running of the Party and government to his younger colleagues, so that he could concentrate on major strategic and theoretical issues. This did not imply any diminution of Mao's control. On the contrary, during this period, his domination of decision-making grew still more pronounced. In May 1953, he was infuriated to discover that Yang Shangkun, who headed the CC's General Office, the nerve centre of the Party, had issued directives without his prior approval. ‘This is a mistake and a breach of discipline,’ he thundered. ‘Documents and telegrams sent out in the name of the Central Committee can be despatched only after I have gone over them, otherwise they are invalid.’¹⁵ His reaction showed how profoundly his conception of his role had changed. In 1943, Mao's colleagues had given him the power, in exceptional cases, to overrule the rest of the Secretariat. Now, ten years later, he was arrogating to himself blanket authority over everything: his colleagues were allowed to do nothing without his explicit accord.

To Gao Gang, the talk of a ‘second front’ was a signal to act fast, before Mao's withdrawal allowed Liu to entrench himself as his successor. He drew further encouragement from events in Moscow, where, after Stalin's death, the comparatively youthful Georgii Malenkov inherited his mantle, while older Politburo members, like Molotov and Kaganovich, were passed over. If Malenkov could do that in Russia, Gao asked himself, why could he not do the same in China?

First Gao won over the east China leader, Rao Shushi, who had just been appointed head of the Party's Organisation Department, holding out to him the prospect of the premiership. Then, by an extraordinary stroke of luck, he obtained a copy of a draft list for a new Politburo, prepared by one of Liu Shaoqi's associates in the Central Committee apparatus as a working document ahead of the next Party Congress. It proposed increasing the representation of men who, like Liu, had spent most of the civil war period in the Guomindang-controlled ‘White’ areas, including, notably, Bo Yibo, at the expense of those who had fought in the Red areas. Armed with this smoking gun and claiming to have Mao's backing, Gao set about working up support among indignant ex-Red area colleagues.

Peng Dehuai fell into the trap. So did Lin Biao. But Deng Xiaoping, after beginning to negotiate with Gao about the future allocation of Party posts, sensed something amiss and sent a report to Mao. Chen Yun, who had honed his political antennae in Moscow watching Stalin at work during the purges, also jibbed. He, too, informed the Chairman, who told both men to say nothing.

Mao then set an ambush of his own. When the Politburo met in December, he announced that he intended to spend several weeks resting in the south, and proposed that, as usual, Liu should act in his place. Gao rose to the bait. Why not, in the Chairman's absence, he suggested, rotate the responsibility among other senior Politburo members? Mao indicated that he would consider the idea, and over the next few weeks Gao lobbied his colleagues frantically for other leadership changes, including his own promotion to Vice-Chairman, or alternatively, General Secretary.

By December 24, when the Politburo reconvened, Mao had heard enough. He accused Gao of unprincipled factionalism, carrying out ‘underground activities’ and attempting to enhance his personal power. The conspiracy collapsed.

Gao was convinced that Mao had betrayed him, and in February 1954 attempted to kill himself. In August he tried again, with poison, and succeeded. Rao Shushi was arrested, to die of pneumonia, still in prison, twenty years later.

Peng Dehuai and Lin Biao were exonerated, after pleading that they had thought Gao was acting with Mao's approval (though both men's relations with Liu remained definitively soured). Deng Xiaoping was appointed Secretary-General of the Central Committee, and afterwards was promoted to the Politburo. Chen Yun also prospered. At the Eighth Congress, two years later, he became a Party Vice-Chairman, while Deng was named General Secretary.

By the spring of 1954, the Gao Gang–Rao Shushi anti-Party ‘sinister wind’, as Mao called it, had blown itself out.¹⁷ Officially, it had no wider significance. Yet if, as was plainly the case, Mao had sowed the idea in Gao's mind that Liu and Zhou were expendable, he must have had his reasons. Both men were supremely competent, dedicated to Mao personally no less than to the communist cause. He had only to give the order and they would have done whatever he wished. In retrospect, it is clear that he never had any intention of getting rid of them. But destabilising his two closest colleagues was another matter. Mao found in Gao Gang's ambition an instrument to keep them off-balance – to force them to try to read his mind better, to stay more attuned to his thinking. Gao had not been so stupid as to misread Mao's intentions entirely: he merely went too far, and in the process sealed his own fate.¹⁸

The purge cast a long shadow. That Peng Dehuai, Lin Biao and, initially, Deng Xiaoping, could all have believed that Mao was plotting behind the backs of Liu and Zhou spoke volumes about the level of trust which his imperial style of leadership had fostered. Mao's eminence and sense of national mission meant that his only remaining loyalty was to his vision of China's future. His colleagues – men and women with whom, in some cases, he had spent thirty years in shared struggle – were being reduced to tools in the working out of his dreams.

The debate over the pace of change which Bo Yibo had initiated ended with no clear consensus over how quickly collectivisation should proceed. Mao's instincts were to go faster. But each time he forced the pace, over-eager local officials coerced the rural population into ill-prepared co-operatives where socialism was regarded as ‘eating from one big pot’, the poor lived off the rich until their resources were exhausted, and then the whole venture collapsed under a mountain of debt.

In the spring of 1953, a campaign was launched, with Mao's blessing, against ‘rash advance’.¹⁹ But as soon as the situation stabilised, ‘spontaneous capitalism’ appeared: the better-off peasants began hiring labour, lending money, and buying and selling land. That sparked a new campaign, this time against ‘rash retreat’. Collectivisation roared ahead again – with even more deleterious results: rich peasants slaughtered their livestock, rather than share them with poorer neighbours. Then, in 1954, severe flooding along the Yangtse reduced the summer harvest. Local cadres, determined to show their mettle, insisted that grain procurement be maintained. Food riots broke out. In the southern provinces, the peasants cursed the communists as worse than the Guomindang.

Accordingly, in January 1955, Mao slammed on the brakes for the third time. The collectivisation drive, he admitted, was out of step with the objective capabilities of the peasantry. The new policy would be a ‘three-word scripture: “Stop, contract, develop.”’ The number of APCs had already increased from 4,000 in the autumn of 1952 to 670,000 that winter, one in seven of all peasant households. Mao now decreed that there should be no further expansion for the next eighteen months. Liu Shaoqi authorised a plan to disband more than a quarter of existing APCs in the interests of stabilisation, and grain procurement was sharply reduced.

Had Mao been willing to leave it at that, all might have been well. In April, however, he set off on an inspection tour in the south to see things for himself. There, egged on by local officials, whose own interests were intimately linked to the collectivisation campaign and were therefore only too happy to tell Mao what he wanted to hear, the Chairman concluded that peasant resistance had been overstated.

Only Deng Zihui, a trusted ally since the late 1920s, whom Mao had appointed to oversee the collectivisation drive, had the courage to dig in his heels and tell the Chairman he was mistaken.

Deep down, Mao knew Deng had a point. In a revealing admission, he conceded: ‘The peasants want freedom, but we want socialism.’²⁰ Yet Mao was too hooked on his vision of socialised agriculture to allow material obstacles, even when he acknowledged their existence, to stand in his way. The problem, Deng told his subordinates grimly, was that the Chairman thought ‘[material] conditions for running co-operatives are unnecessary’.²¹ His objections were brushed aside. ‘Your mind needs to be shelled with artillery,’²² Mao raged at him, and at a conference of provincial secretaries in July he proceeded to do just that:

A high tide in the new socialist mass movement is imminent throughout the countryside. But some of our comrades, tottering along like a woman with bound feet, are complaining all the time: ‘You're going too fast, much too fast.’ Too much carping, unwarranted complaints, boundless worries and countless taboos – all this they take as the right policy to guide the socialist mass movement in the rural areas.

No, this is not the right policy. It is the wrong one …

[This] is a … movement involving a rural population of more than 500 million and has tremendous worldwide significance. We should lead this movement actively [and] enthusiastically … instead of dragging it back by whatever means.²³

With Mao's own doubts stilled, and all opposition silenced, the targets were raised exponentially. He himself spoke of collectivising half the rural population by the end of 1957. Provincial officials were determined to go still faster. In July 1955, 17 million households belonged to APCs. Six months later, the figure had reached 75 million, 63 per cent of the peasant population. Mao told his secretary that he had not felt so happy since the victory over Chiang Kai-shek.²⁴ As he prepared to celebrate his sixty-second birthday, he gloated:

In the first half of 1955, the atmosphere was foul and dark clouds threatened. But in the second half there has been a complete change, and the climate is entirely different … This [co-operativisation movement] is a raging tidal wave, sweeping away all demons and monsters … By the time the year ends, the victory of socialism will be largely assured.²⁵

In fact, by December 1956, only 3 per cent of the peasantry still farmed as individuals. The socialist transformation of agriculture, which was not to have been completed until 1971, had been accomplished fifteen years early.²⁶

Ideologically it was a tremendous success. Politically it was a mixed blessing. Economically it held the seeds of disaster, for it convinced Mao, and other leaders, that, given the will to succeed, material conditions need not be decisive.

Collectivisation sapped the energies of the countryside for a generation to come, causing a levelling-down of rural society which stifled independent initiative, demotivated the most productive, rewarded the least capable, and replaced the rule of the landlords and literati with rule by the Party branch, whose members enjoyed power and privilege unconstrained by the fear of banditry and rebellion that, for centuries past, had kept their predecessors in check.

With the rural areas in socialist hands, Mao returned his attention to the cities where, he declared, the bourgeoisie was now isolated and should be dealt with ‘once and for all’. His promise of only two years earlier, that a mixed economy would continue until the mid-1960s, was conveniently forgotten:

On this matter we are quite heartless! On this matter, Marxism is indeed cruel and has little mercy, for it is determined to exterminate imperialism, feudalism, capitalism and small production to boot … Some of our comrades are too kind, they are not tough enough, in other words, they are not so Marxist. It is a very good thing, and a significant one too, to exterminate the bourgeoisie and capitalism in China … Our aim is to exterminate capitalism, obliterate it from the face of the earth and make it a thing of the past.²⁷

That speech was made at a closed meeting of Party leaders in October 1955. In his encounters with Chinese businessmen, Mao understandably took a subtler line, which some unnamed wit among the Shanghai capitalists summed up as the ‘how to make a cat eat pepper’ approach.

Liu Shaoqi, it was said, advocated firmness: ‘You get somebody to hold the cat,’ he said, ‘stuff the pepper into its mouth, and push it down with a chopstick.’ Mao was horrified. Force, he declared, was undemocratic: the cat must be persuaded to eat voluntarily. Then Zhou Enlai tried. ‘I would starve the cat,’ said the Premier. ‘Then I would wrap the pepper with a slice of meat. If the cat is sufficiently hungry, it will swallow it whole.’ Again Mao shook his head. ‘One must not use deceit,’ he said. ‘Never fool the people!’ His own answer, he explained, was very simple. ‘You rub the pepper into the cat's backside. When it starts to burn, the cat will lick it off – and be happy to be permitted to do so.’²⁸

Accordingly, rather than nationalise by decree, Mao asked his private sector interlocutors what they would advise him to do. The businessmen, whose backsides still burned from the peppering they had received in the ‘Five Antis’ campaign, fell over each other to tell him that nationalisation was what they longed for – the quicker, the better.²⁹

On December 6, 1955, Mao stated that all private businesses should be taken over by the state before the end of 1957, twelve years ahead of his original schedule. In practice, all private commerce and industry in Beijing was converted to joint state-private ownership in the first twelve days of the New Year. To mark the achievement, Mao and the rest of the leadership presided over a celebratory rally attended by 200,000 people in Tiananmen Square on January 15. Other major cities hurried to follow suit. By the end of January 1956, the urban economy had followed the rural areas into the straitjacket of Party and state control.³⁰

Declaring that ‘rightist conservatism’ was the main obstacle to progress, Mao now set several new targets. Within the next few decades, he said, China must become ‘the number-one country in the world’, surpassing the United States in cultural, scientific, technological and industrial development.³¹ ‘I don't consider [American achievements] as anything so terrific,’ he went on breezily. If America produced 100 million tons of steel annually, ‘China should produce several hundred million tons’.^I

As a first step, he called for the First Five-Year Plan to be fulfilled ahead of schedule, and unveiled a Twelve-Year Agricultural Plan proposing a doubling of grain and cotton production.³² The slogan, ‘more, faster, better’, which he had used in the last months of 1955 during the high tide of collectivisation, was modified to become, ‘more, faster, better and more economically’, as though that somehow made it more rational.³³ Saltationist socialism, as one foreign scholar called it, had established itself as Mao's favoured model for economic advance.³⁴

On February 25, 1956, Nikita Sergeyevich Khrushchev, who had succeeded Malenkov twelve months earlier, stood before his peers in the baroque white-and-gold banqueting hall in the Kremlin where the Soviet Party's 20th Congress was being held, and told them what they all knew in their hearts but had never expected to hear: that Stalin, before whom they had trembled for so long, had been a brutal psychopath, animated by ‘a persecution mania of unbelievable dimensions’, whose personality cult had concealed a capricious, despotic rule; whose ‘military genius’ had brought Russia to the verge of defeat by Germany; and whose sickly suspicion and mistrust had sent millions of innocent men and women to cruel and unnecessary deaths.³⁵

The Secret Speech, as it became known, was delivered in closed session, from which representatives of fraternal parties were barred, the day before the Congress ended. A week later, Deng Xiaoping, who, with Zhu De, had headed the Chinese delegation, flew back to China with a copy, which was hurriedly translated.³⁶

Given Mao's own problems with Stalin, he might have been expected to welcome the Soviet dictator's posthumous comeuppance. In one important sense, he did: such criticisms, he said, ‘destroyed myths, and opened boxes. This brings liberation … [allowing people to] speak their minds and to be able to think about issues.’³⁷ Overall, however, Mao had serious doubts about Khrushchev's approach. At a meeting with the Soviet Ambassador in late March, he spoke a great deal about Stalin's errors towards China, but very little about the cult of personality – the nub of Khrushchev's attack – emphasising instead that Stalin had been ‘a great Marxist, a good and honest revolutionary’, who had made mistakes ‘not on everything, but [only] on certain issues’.³⁸ These views were reflected soon afterwards in an editorial in the People's Daily, entitled ‘On the Historical Experience of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat’, which, nearly six weeks after Khrushchev had spoken and long after the rest of the communist bloc had endorsed the new Soviet line, set out for the first time publicly the Chinese Party's position:

Whatever the mistakes [that have been made], the dictatorship of the proletariat is, for the popular masses, always far superior to … the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie … Some people consider that Stalin was wrong in everything: this is a grave misconception … We should view Stalin from an historical standpoint, make a proper and all-round analysis to see where he was right and where he was wrong and draw useful lessons therefrom. Both the things he did right and the things he did wrong were phenomena of the international communist movement and bore the imprint of the times.³⁹

Under Stalin's leadership, it insisted, the Soviet Union had made ‘glorious achievements’ in which he had ‘an ineffaceable share’, while his ‘mistakes’ had been confined to the latter part of his life.

The editorial marked the beginning of the slow unravelling of the Sino-Soviet[Q1] alliance. It made clear that, in future, China would copy Soviet experience only selectively. It raised questions, even though implicitly, about the role of Stalin's subordinates, now his successors, in the crimes of which he was accused – triggering, not long afterwards, an acrimonious exchange between Mikoyan and Peng Dehuai. ‘If we had spoken out, we would have been killed!’ the Armenian admitted. ‘What kind of communist is it that fears death?’ came Peng's disdainful reply.⁴⁰ But, most important of all, the People's Daily's comments signalled a fundamental change in the Chinese attitude to Moscow. It was written from the standpoint not of a junior partner but of an equal. Mao was sitting in judgement on the hasty actions of a neophyte Soviet leadership.

Ideological differences were part of the problem. Wu Lengxi, the official note-taker at meetings dealing with Soviet affairs, described in his memoirs how the Politburo spent days on end discussing differences with Moscow over Marxist-Leninist theory.⁴¹ But Mao also objected viscerally to what he called the Soviet Party's ‘self-proclaimed big brother position’, arrogating to itself the right to set the agenda for the world communist movement and to interfere in the internal affairs of other parties. China was not demanding leadership or even joint leadership of the movement, he said, but he did expect the Russians to consult the Chinese Party to ensure that they were in agreement on ‘correct’ ideological positions instead of proclaiming them unilaterally.

As 1956 unfolded, Mao's concern that Khrushchev was ‘throwing out the communist baby along with the Stalinist bathwater’,⁴² as one contemporary writer put it, seemed amply justified. After riots during the summer in Poland, the Soviet-backed leadership in Warsaw, which Khrushchev had personally installed only half a year before, was replaced, over strong Russian objections, by a new ‘liberal’ group, headed by one of Stalin's victims, Wladyslaw Gomulka. Soon afterwards, a still graver challenge to Moscow's dominance came from Hungary, where the Stalinist First Secretary, Matyas Rakosi, was deposed by reformists led by Imre Nagy.⁴³

In Poland, Mao supported Gomulka, on the grounds that the root of the problem was the same Russian ‘great power chauvinism’ that China had had for so long to endure.⁴⁴ Liu Shaoqi was despatched to Moscow, where in October he persuaded Khrushchev not to resort to armed intervention. But when Hungary announced that it was leaving the Soviet bloc military alliance, the Warsaw Pact, Mao took a very different view. Supporting the right of a brother party to choose its own path to socialism was one thing; sitting with folded hands in the face of counter-revolution was another. Again, Liu put pressure on Khrushchev – this time to send in troops to put down the revolt by force.

The mess the Soviet leaders had made in their own east European backyard further lowered them in Mao's estimation.

On November 15, 1956, shortly after the Russian army occupied Hungary, he gave the new Chinese Central Committee, elected at the Eighth Congress a few weeks earlier, the benefit of his reflections on the past year's events:

I think there are two ‘swords’: one is Lenin and the other Stalin. The sword of Stalin has now been discarded by the Russians … We Chinese have not thrown it away. First we protect Stalin, and second, at the same time, we criticise his mistakes …

As for the sword of Lenin, has it not also been discarded to a certain extent by some Soviet leaders? In my view, it has been discarded to a considerable extent. Is the October Revolution still valid? … Khrushchev's report at the 20th Congress of the CPSU says it is possible to seize state power by the parliamentary road, that is to say, it is no longer necessary for all countries to learn from the October Revolution. Once this gate is opened, by and large Leninism is thrown away …

How much capital do [the Russians] have? Just Lenin and Stalin. Now [they] have abandoned Stalin and practically all of Lenin as well – with Lenin's feet gone, or perhaps with only his head left, or with one of his hands cut off. We on our part stick to studying Marxism-Leninism and learning from the October Revolution.⁴⁵

That was far harsher than anything Mao had said before, even in the privacy of the Politburo. Although his remarks were kept secret, they inspired a second People's Daily editorial, published at the end of December under the title, ‘More on the Historical Experience of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat’. The road of the October Revolution, and specifically the violent seizure of power by the proletariat from the bourgeoisie, it declared, were ‘universally applicable truths’. Any attempt to ‘evade this road’ was revisionist.⁴⁶

When Zhou Enlai visited Moscow in January 1957, he found, unsurprisingly, that the Soviet leaders were ‘displeased’.⁴⁷

By then, four major areas of dispute had emerged between the two Parties – all stemming from the 20th Congress. First came the assessment of Stalin: Mao insisted that he was ‘three parts bad, and seven parts good’.⁴⁸ Next, there was the argument over Khrushchev's ‘parliamentary road to socialism’, which was closely linked to the third issue, peaceful coexistence. Imperialism, in Mao's view, was unremittingly hostile towards the socialist camp. The December editorial had concluded: ‘The imperialists are always bent on destroying us.⁴⁹ Therefore we must never forget … class struggle on a world scale.’ For China, this made perfect sense: its UN seat was still occupied by Taiwan;^II its last sustained contact with America had been on the battlefield in Korea. The Soviet leaders felt quite differently. They dealt with the United States and the other capitalist powers, at the UN and through diplomatic channels, as a matter of routine. For the Kremlin, a judicious mixture of competition and contact with the West was far more attractive than the sterile immobilism of the Cold War. Last and in some ways most troubling for the Russians – because it was impossible to tell where it might lead – was Mao's stress on contradictions. This had never sat well in Moscow. Stalin himself had criticised it as un-Marxist. Yet here was Mao now proclaiming that Stalin's abuses of power showed that contradictions arose even under socialism. In December, the People's Daily had affirmed the existence of ‘contradictions in socialist countries between different sections of the people, between comrades within the Communist Party, [and] between the government and the people’, as well as ‘contradictions between socialist countries, [and] contradictions between Communist Parties’.⁵⁰ From the Russian standpoint, which held that monolithic unity was the highest possible good, that was a can of worms that no one wished to see opened. The communiqué issued after Zhou Enlai's visit was adamant: ‘There have been and are no essential contradictions … in the relations between socialist states. Even if in the past there were … shortcomings, they are now being rectified and eliminated.’⁵¹

Despite these differences, there was little at the beginning of 1957 to suggest an imminent rupture.

While Zhou complained of the Soviet leaders’ unwillingness to face up to their own mistakes, their ‘subjectivity [and] narrowmindedness … and [their] tend[ency] to patronise others and interfere with other brotherly parties’ and governments’ internal affairs’, he was careful to add that ‘in spite of all the above, Sino-Soviet relations are far better now than during Stalin's era’.⁵² Mao, too, was relatively sanguine. ‘Not all Soviet farts are fragrant!’ he noted. Khrushchev had a swollen head and was blinded by power, and if the Russians persisted in their errors, ‘it is certain that, one day, it will all have to be brought out into the open’. But disputes between communist parties were inevitable, and Beijing and Moscow would continue to seek common ground.⁵³

Throughout the first half of the 1950s, China's intellectuals had been treated as one of the ‘black classes’, hostile or at best lukewarm towards the communist revolution.

The thought reform movement which accompanied the Korean War was punctuated by personalised attacks against named individuals and their works, among them the philosopher, Hu Shi, whose lectures Mao had attended as a library assistant in Beijing.⁵⁴ There were also campaigns against films, such as The Secret History of the Qing Court, set during the Boxer Rebellion, which was denounced for capitulation to imperialism; and The Life of Wu Xun, about a nineteenth-century beggar who used his savings to build schools for the poor, accused of promoting capitulation to feudalism.⁵⁵ Another major effort to bring the intellectuals into line involved the liberal thinker, Liang Shuming, who had had the temerity to criticise the communists for taxing the peasants too heavily. At a meeting of the Central Government Council, to which Liang had been invited as a guest, Mao pilloried him for more than an hour:

Mr Liang styles himself a ‘man of integrity’ … Do you really have ‘integrity’? If you do, then make a clean breast of your past history – how you opposed the Communist Party and the people, how you assassinated people with your pen … There are two ways of killing people: one is to kill with the gun and the other with the pen. The way which is most artfully disguised and draws no blood is to kill with the pen. That is the kind of murderer you are.

Liang Shuming is utterly reactionary, yet he flatly denies it … What service did you do, Liang Shuming? In all your life, what service have you ever done for the people? Not the slightest, not the least bit … Liang Shuming is an ambitious schemer, a hypocrite.⁵⁶

It was using a sledgehammer to crack a nut. To Mao, any expression of heterodox thought might carry the seeds of future opposition. Liang escaped with a verbal drubbing. But two years later, when Mao decided that the intellectuals needed a sterner lesson, the abrasive glove of persuasion gave way to overt repression.

In a case that bore strong parallels to the persecution of Wang Shiwei, at Yan'an, a left-wing writer named Hu Feng was accused of leading a ‘counter-revolutionary clique’ and imprisoned. During the second half of 1955, a countrywide witch-hunt was conducted for ‘Hu Feng elements’, provoking numerous suicides in literary and academic circles.⁵⁷ Like Wang, thirteen years earlier, Hu's offence had been to refuse to submit to the Party's will. Like Wang, his fate offered a terrifying warning to the intelligentsia generally of the perils of failing to toe the Party line.

It should therefore have been no surprise that in April, 1956, when Mao called for a new blossoming of intellectual debate under the slogan, ‘Let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools of thought contend,’ it fell on very stony ground indeed. After the bludgeoning they had received over the previous six years, the last thing Chinese intellectuals wanted was to have to stick their necks out publicly and start speaking their minds again.⁵⁸

A variety of factors had combined to bring about this abrupt – and, at the time, wholly unconvincing – change of course.

China was at peace. The Party was securely in control. The transition to a socialist economic system was already far advanced. The exceedingly tight grip the regime had maintained on every aspect of national life, justifiable, perhaps, in the early years, had become counter-productive. The main theme of Mao's speeches that spring was the need to decentralise power. ‘Discipline that stifles creativity and initiative should be abolished,’ he said at one point. ‘We need a little liberalism to facilitate getting things done. To be strict all the time won't work.’⁵⁹

Sooner or later, a thaw of this kind was inevitable. As Mao would have put it, it was part of the dialectic inherent in all things. ‘If war is not brewed⁶⁰ during times of peace, how can war come so suddenly? If peace if not brewed during war, how can there be peace so suddenly?’

But in the early part of 1956, two additional factors began pushing the Party towards liberalisation. One was the shortage of skilled manpower – above all, of scientists and engineers – which was blocking Mao's plans to speed up economic development. To try to remedy this, intellectuals’ salaries were raised; they were allotted better apartments; attempts were made to woo back Chinese professors living in the US and Europe.⁶¹ But Mao soon recognised that, if the problem were to be resolved, Party bureaucrats would have to stop interfering in academic matters they did not understand; and intellectuals would have to be given more latitude to work as they thought best.⁶² The second factor was the Secret Speech, and China's decision as a result to stop mechanically copying Soviet methods. In education, in factory management, in fields as diverse as genetics and music, Chinese intellectuals and managers suddenly found themselves, for the first time in years, with a margin of freedom in which to experiment.

In the summer of 1956, none of these changes could be described as dramatic. The most visible effect of relaxation was to lend new colour and vitality to the spartan austerity of Chinese daily life. Young women began wearing flowered blouses. Foreigners reported the occasional cheong-sam, the traditional Chinese long skirt, slit decorously to an inch above the knee. Dances were permitted, to the music of Gershwin and Strauss. The People's Daily went from four pages to eight, and Liu Shaoqi admonished Chinese journalists to make their stories less boring.⁶³

Politically, the repercussions were minimal. The personality cult around Mao survived essentially intact.⁶⁴ The only significant change came at the Eighth Congress in September, when references to ‘Mao Zedong Thought’ as the Party's guiding ideology were excised from the CCP Constitution. But that was treated as a glitch occasioned by the changes taking place in the Party's leadership structure as Mao began to implement his plan, under discussion since 1952, to withdraw to the ‘second front’.⁶⁵ He was beginning to feel his age, he had written to Sun Yat-sen's widow, Soong Chingling, earlier that year. ‘One must recognise the symptoms that one is on the downward side of things.’⁶⁶ A new post of Honorary Party Chairman was created but left vacant, to await the time (generally expected to come in 1963, as Mao entered his seventieth year), when Liu Shaoqi would assume his mantle.⁶⁷

Communist regimes everywhere watched, horrified, fearing that the contagion would spread, as the socialist bloc threatened to implode. China was no exception. In the winter of 1956, Mao made speech after speech, reassuring the Party, and its non-communist allies, that there was little chance they would be exposed to similar unrest.⁶⁸

He went on to ask what had caused the storms in eastern Europe. Part of the answer, he told the Central Committee, was that the Communist Parties in Poland and Hungary had failed to do a proper job of eliminating counter-revolutionaries. China had not made that error. But the other factor was bureaucratism, which had led Party cadres in both countries to become estranged from the masses. This problem China had not solved:

Right now there are certain people who behave as if they can sit back and relax and ride roughshod over the people now that they have the country in their hands. Such people are opposed by the masses, who [want to] throw stones at them and hit them with their hoes. From my point of view, this is what they deserve and I find it most welcome. There are times when nothing but a beating can solve the problem. The Communist Party has to learn its lesson … We must be vigilant, and must not allow a bureaucratic work-style to develop. We must not form an aristocracy divorced from the people. The masses are justified in removing anybody who has a bureaucratic work-style … I say it's better to remove such people; they ought to be removed.⁶⁹

The answer, Mao said, was another rectification campaign – but in a form which would provide a safety valve for popular discontent. The problem in Hungary, he argued, was that the Party there had failed to deal in a timely fashion with the contradictions between rulers and ruled, with the result that they had festered and become antagonistic. ‘If there is a pustule it must emit pus,’ he went on. ‘It is precisely from such things that we must learn our lesson.’ It followed that in China, workers should be allowed to strike because ‘this will be helpful in solving contradictions among the state, the factory directors and the masses’, and students should be allowed to demonstrate. ‘They are just contradictions, that's all. The world is full of contradictions.’⁷⁰

Thus, by the end of 1956, the two major elements of what was to become the Hundred Flowers Campaign – a rectification movement to make the Party more responsive to the wishes of the people; and a relaxation of controls to allow the venting of public dissatisfaction – had both already been decided. The only uncertainty was over when it should start (Mao had suggested the following summer), and how sweeping it should be.

Some of the younger writers, encouraged by continuing signs of cultural liberalisation, had at last plucked up their courage and begun to test the limits of the Party's new tolerance. Conservatives were outraged. On January 7, 1957, a group of cultural commissars in the PLA published a letter in the People's Daily, complaining of a resurgence of traditional literary forms at the expense of socialist realism, and that the principle of art serving politics, which Mao had enunciated at Yan'an, was being honoured in the breach. The avalanche of favourable comment that followed showed their views were widely shared.⁷¹

Publicly, his response was low-key. Five days after the letter appeared, he sent a selection of his poems, written in the classical style, for inclusion in the inaugural issue of the magazine Shikan (Poetry). The implicit message was that, contrary to the PLA group's assertions, traditional literary forms still had their place in China.⁷²

In private, Mao was more forthright. The critics had got it wrong, he told a conference of senior Party officials later the same month. There was not too much freedom but too little. Writings hostile to Marxism, such as the works of Chiang Kai-shek, should be published openly in China, because ‘if you haven't read anything written [by him], you won't be able to do a good job of opposing him’.⁷³ Circulation of Cankao xiaoxi (Reference News), a compendium of Western news reports for restricted use by senior officials, should increase a hundredfold in order ‘to publicise imperialist and bourgeois [thinking]’.⁷⁴ Even men like Liang Shuming should be free to spread their ideas: ‘If they have something to fart about, let them fart! If it's out, then one can decide whether it smells bad or good … If the people think their farts stink, they will be isolated.’⁷⁵

It was wrong to quarantine things, Mao declared. Better by far to ‘vaccinate’ the masses by exposing them to harmful ideas, so as to strengthen their political immunity.⁷⁶ The guiding principle should be:

Truth stands in contrast to falsehood and is developed out of the struggle against it. Beauty stands in contrast to ugliness and is developed out of the struggle against it. The same is true of good and bad things … In short, fragrant flowers stand in contrast to poisonous weeds, and are developed out of the struggle against them. It is a dangerous policy to forbid people to meet face to face with false, ugly and antagonistic things … Such a policy would lead to … people being incapable of facing the outside world, and unable to meet the challenge of a rival.⁷⁷

Within the Party, the use of ‘negative teaching material’ had been current since the 1930s. But this time Mao was proposing that the same method be applied among the population as a whole. If disturbances resulted, he maintained, that was nothing to be afraid of:

Wouldn't it be a little strange if we communists, who have never feared imperialism or Chiang Kai-shek's Guomindang … were now to be afraid of students causing trouble and peasants raising a fuss over the co-operatives? Fear is no solution. The more afraid you are, the more ghosts will come to visit you … I think that whoever wants to cause trouble should be allowed to do so for as long as he wants. If a month is not sufficient, give him two months. In short, don't stop the show until he's had enough. If you stop the show too hastily, one of these days he will cause trouble again … What good will come out of this? The good will be that we will expose problems fully and distinguish right from wrong … We can't just stifle everything all the time … Contradictions have to be exposed before problems can be solved.⁷⁸

Mao's audience of provincial Party secretaries, the men who would have to manage ‘trouble’ in the event that it arose, was distinctly underwhelmed. A few weeks later he conceded that ‘50 or 60 per cent’ of the Party disagreed with him, and 90 per cent of high-ranking cadres.⁷⁹ His blasé statements that ‘in a population of 600 million, I would think of it as normal if every year there were a million people making trouble’,⁸⁰ and that even, in a worst case, if large-scale disorders did result, ‘We'd just go back to Yan'an, that's where we came from anyway!’,⁸¹ can only have alarmed them still more.

Ten or twelve years earlier, their opposition might have given Mao pause. By 1957, he was beyond that. Both of the major decisions he had taken since the founding of the People's Republic, disregarding the doubts of his colleagues – to enter the war in Korea, and to speed up collectivisation – had been triumphantly vindicated. If the Party was reluctant again this time, it simply made him want to push all the harder. In his speeches that spring, he paraphrased a favourite statement of Lenin's, which he had first quoted in 1937: ‘The unity of opposites is temporary; antagonistic struggle is absolute.’ Harmony was transient; strife was eternal. The student who, forty years earlier, had written, ‘it is not that we like chaos, but simply that … human nature is delighted by sudden change’, now told his colleagues: ‘It is good if life is a bit more complicated, otherwise it is too boring … Should there be only peace and no trouble … [it] would lead to mental sluggishness.’⁸²

There were other, more practical reasons for Mao's determination to press ahead. The shortage of engineers and technicians, which had helped trigger the liberalisation movement in the first place, was merely the tip of the iceberg. China had a proletariat of 12 million, and a petty bourgeoisie (including the peasantry) of 550 million. To develop the economy, all their energies were needed. But that, Mao argued, required a policy of mutual supervision, in which petty-bourgeois intellectuals were free to criticise the communists, and they, in turn, ‘educated’ the petty bourgeoisie.⁸³

These ideas were given formal expression for the first time before a wider public on February 27, 1957, in a speech entitled, ‘On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People’. It lasted four hours, and was delivered before an invited audience of nearly 2,000 people, including scientists, writers, and leaders of the democratic parties.⁸⁴

Mao began by speaking in laudatory terms of the process of self-transformation, of being ‘steeled’ in the communist cause, that intellectuals had undergone. Thought-remoulding, he said, was still necessary, but in the past it had been ‘a bit rough, [and] people were hurt’. From now on, the policy would be different.

[The slogan of] ‘Let a hundred flowers bloom, a hundred schools of thought contend’ … was put forward in recognition of the various different contradictions in society … If you want to grow only [fragrant flowers] and not weeds, it can't be done … To ban all weeds, and stop them growing, is that possible? The reality is that it is not. They will still grow … It is difficult to distinguish fragrant flowers from poisonous weeds … Take, for example, Marxism. Marxism was [once] considered a poisonous weed … The astronomy of Copernicus … the physics of Galileo, Darwin's theory of evolution were all, at the start, rejected … What is there to fear from the growth of fragrant flowers and poisonous weeds? There is nothing to fear … Among the bad flowers there might be some good flowers … [like] Galileo [and] Copernicus. [Conversely], flowers that look Marxist are not always so.⁸⁵

The use of ‘crude methods’ to solve ideological problems, Mao added, did more harm than good. What if agitation ensued? ‘I say, let them agitate to their hearts’ content … I, too, created disturbances at school because problems could not be resolved … Expulsion is the Guomindang way. We want to do the opposite of Guomindang methods.’

The speech was not published at once, but tape-recordings were played to gatherings of intellectuals and Party cadres in cities all over China.

Reactions were mixed. One man was allegedly ‘so stimulated by Chairman Mao's address that he could not sleep for one whole night’.⁸⁶ Robert Loh, a Shanghai businessman, remembered: ‘I was in a daze. After Mao's speech anything seemed possible. For the first time in many years, I allowed myself to hope.’⁸⁷ But most were wary. As the Chinese proverb has it, ‘A man who has been bitten by a snake is afraid of a piece of rope.’ The anthropologist Fei Xiaotong wrote of ‘early spring weather’, which brought the risk of sudden frosts.⁸⁸ The historian Jian Bozan was blunter. Intellectuals, he said, did not know whether to trust Mao or not. ‘They have to guess whether [his] call is sincere or just a gesture. They have to guess to what extent, if the call is sincere, flowers will be allowed to blossom, and whether the [policy will be reversed] once the flowers are in bloom. They have to guess whether [it] is an end, or just a means … to unearth [hidden] thoughts and rectify individuals. They have to guess which problems can be discussed, and which problems cannot be discussed.’ The result, he added, was that most had decided to remain silent.⁸⁹

Their prudence would have been yet more marked had they known what Mao had said in the secrecy of the Party conclaves that had preceded the public launching of the Hundred Flowers Campaign. In public, he had declared that the bourgeoisie and the democratic parties had made ‘great progress’; in private, he said they were untrustworthy. In public, he had spoken of the students ‘loving their country’; in private, he complained that 80 per cent of them had bourgeois backgrounds, so there was ‘nothing strange’ if they opposed the government. In public, he had insisted that ‘poisonous weeds’ must be allowed to grow; in private, he said they would be cut down and turned into fertiliser. In public, he had said there were ‘only very, very few’ counter-revolutionaries; in private, that they must be ‘resolutely suppressed’. In public, he had spoken of allowing disturbances; in private, of allowing ‘bad people’ to ‘expose and isolate themselves’.⁹⁰

To Mao's dialectical mind, these were just two sides of the same coin. ‘In a unity of opposites,’ he explained, ‘there is always one aspect, that is primary and the other secondary.’⁹¹ The problem was that, with Mao, which was which could change.

Throughout March and April, Mao laboured to get the Hundred Flowers Campaign off the ground. It proved a herculean task. Beyond the ambiguities in his own position (which, to the extent that the intellectuals sensed them, fed into their misgivings), the middle and lower ranks of Party officialdom remained deeply hostile. They, after all, were the natural targets of any antibureaucratism campaign, and once rectification started, they would be at the receiving end of the agitation and disturbances Mao promised.

At the summit of the hierarchy, the Politburo was curiously silent. The ‘Hundred Flowers’ was Mao's show. ‘I am alone with the people,’ he would say later, and in a sense he was.⁹² So long as his colleagues supported him in public (which they did), it hardly mattered if Liu Shaoqi and the Beijing Party leader, Peng Zhen, were privately lukewarm, or that Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping were personally enthusiastic.⁹³ ‘Blooming and contending’, as it came to be called, was not susceptible to administrative fiat. People had to be persuaded to speak their minds, and grass-roots Party officials had to be persuaded to let them do it.

To that end, Mao undertook a three-week-long train journey through eastern China, in which he acted, in his own words, as a ‘wandering lobbyist’.⁹⁴ Half his time was spent trying to convince Party cadres that the coming movement would be ‘calm and unhurried’, ‘ultra-fine drizzle, not torrential rains’, and would not be permitted to expand into large-scale mass struggle. The other half was devoted to calming the fears of non-Party groups. In the process, the rationale for the campaign – and the means by which it would be conducted – became more sharply defined.

Now that class struggle against the landlords and the bourgeoisie was basically at an end, Mao explained, differences between the Party and the people had naturally come to the fore. ‘In the past we fought the enemy alongside the people. Now, since the enemy is no longer there … only the people and we remain. If they don't argue with us when they have grievances, who can they argue with?’ If these differences were to be resolved, people had to be encouraged to think for themselves. ‘If we … do not allow [this], our nation will be sapped of its vitality.’ The method used would be criticism and self-criticism, with the democratic parties playing the leading role. ‘[They must make] sarcastic comments revealing our shortcomings,’ Mao declared. ‘We must brace ourselves and let them attack … The Communist Party has to let itself be scolded for a while.’⁹⁵

At face value – and, in the end, most intellectuals did take it at face value – this was a heady prospect, especially when Mao went on to speak of permitting, at least in academic and press circles, a significant erosion of the Party's monopoly of power. Up until now, he acknowledged, a non-communist might be the president of a university, or the editor of a ‘non-Party’ newspaper, but in reality power was always held by a deputy who was a Party member. In future, non-communists should have ‘position and power in fact, not just in form. From now on, no matter where, whoever is the chief is in charge.’⁹⁶

He had found it necessary to promise Party officials that, as a general rule, ‘blooming and contending’ would be limited to criticisms which ‘strengthened Party leadership’, and would not be permitted to produce ‘disorganisation and confusion’.⁹⁷ He had also referred to the intellectuals’ fears that the Party was setting a trap – and alert cadres would have noticed that he did not deny that this might be the case.⁹⁸ Fortified by these assurances, the hierarchy stopped dragging its feet.⁹⁹

Even the People's Daily, whose silence on the new policies had faithfully reflected the Party's doubts, now fell into line, though not until Mao had summoned the editor, Deng Tuo, to a blistering session of reproaches, which he delivered in his bedroom, sprawling on his outsized bed, covered in piles of books. One of Deng's deputies, Wang Ruoshui, a neat, fastidious man, who was called midway through to join them, remembered being struck by the slovenliness of the scene, as the Chairman, now a flabby figure, well past middle age, raged at them in his nightrobe: ‘Why are you keeping the Party's policies secret? There's something fishy here. In the past, this paper was run by pedants. Now it's being run by a corpse.’ Glaring at Deng, he went on: ‘If you can't shit, get off the privy and make way for someone who can!’ When the beleaguered editor offered to resign, Mao waved the offer aside. Wang was ordered to write an editorial promoting the ‘Hundred Flowers’, which appeared on April 13. From then on, the word began to spread among the population at large that non-communist criticisms of the regime would be welcomed.¹⁰⁰

A week later, the Politburo met, and decided to bring forward the official start of the campaign. Provincial leaders were told to report on the status of ‘blooming and contending’ within fifteen days.¹⁰¹ But Mao was not willing to wait even that long. In practice, he said, rectification had ‘already been going on for two months’. While Chinese celebrated the May Day holiday, the ‘Hundred Flowers’ slogan was blazoned across the front page of the People's Daily, followed by every other newspaper in the country as, within the Party and outside it, the movement got formally under way.¹⁰²

The ‘Hundred Flowers’ was the most ambitious attempt ever undertaken in any communist country to combine a totalitarian system with democratic checks and balances. Even Mao was unsure what it would produce. ‘Let's try it and see what it's like,’ he said at one point. ‘If we acquire a taste for it, there will be no more worries.’¹⁰³ What would happen if the Party did not ‘acquire a taste for’ being criticised was left discreetly unsaid.

As May unfolded, non-communist academics, writers and artists, members of the democratic parties, businessmen, and even some workers and rural officials, gradually plucked up their courage and decided to speak out – or more often were persuaded to do so against their better judgement.

Although the Central Committee had stated that participation by non-communists must be voluntary, local Party officials were under strong pressure to ensure that ‘blooming and contending’ in their units was seen to be a success.¹⁰⁴ Wu Ningkun, an American-educated professor of English at an elite Party school, remembered being approached by a senior colleague, who complained that, at faculty meetings, ‘no one seems willing to air their views … Chicken feathers and garlic skins [i.e. trivia] are all that has been brought up.’ After several further proddings, Wu recounted, ‘I had no reason to question their sincerity, so I spoke up.’¹⁰⁵ A woman cadre in the Changsha Police Department was told that if she wanted to join the Party, she should show willing and ‘come up with something’.¹⁰⁶ One of the leaders of a merchants’ association in Beijing's main shopping street, Wangfujing, was urged by the local Party Secretary to speak out, ‘to set an example for the others’.¹⁰⁷ He, too, racked his brains and complied. So did millions of others.

The main thrust of the criticism that ensued was that the communists, whom the intelligentsia had welcomed in 1949 as liberators from Guomindang misrule, had developed, after less than eight years in office, into a new bureaucratic class which monopolised power and privilege and had alienated itself from the masses.¹⁰⁸ Mao, it turned out, had not been wrong in the lessons he drew from the Hungarian revolt: in the eyes of non-communists, Party officials had indeed become ‘an aristocracy divorced from the people’. One of the most trenchant critiques came from Chu Anping, editor of the influential non-Party newspaper, Guangming ribao, who observed that the communists had turned China into a ‘family domain, all painted a single colour’.

Lesser figures were still blunter. Party members behaved as ‘a race apart’, one professor wrote. They received preferential treatment, and regarded the rest of the population as ‘obedient subjects, or to use a harsh word, slaves’. An economics lecturer complained: ‘Party members and cadres who wore worn-out shoes in the past now travel in saloon cars and put on uniforms made of wool … Today the common people avoid the Party like the plague.’ He went on:

If the Communist Party distrusts me, it's mutual. China belongs to [all of its] 600 million people, including those who are counter-revolutionaries. It does not belong to the Communist Party alone … If you [Party members] work satisfactorily, all well and good. If not, the masses may knock you down, kill you and overthrow you. This cannot be described as unpatriotic, for the communists would no longer be serving the people. The downfall of the Communist Party would not mean the downfall of China.

Another constant theme was the Party's mistreatment of intellectuals, who were regarded as ‘dog-shit one moment and 10,000 ounces of gold the next’. If the Party needed you, a journalist wrote, it did not matter if you were a murderer; if it didn't need you, it would cast you aside no matter how faithfully you worked. An engineer complained that intellectuals were more subdued than under the Japanese occupation. Party members snooped around, reporting back to personnel offices on the behaviour of their non-communist colleagues. The result was that ‘no one dares to let off steam even privately in the company of intimate friends … Everyone has learned the technique of double-talk; what one says is one thing, what one thinks is another.’

On May 4, only three days after the movement had been launched, Mao issued a secret directive, in which he said that, although some of the views being expressed were wrong, they should not be rebutted for the time being. ‘We should not stop it in the middle,’ he wrote. ‘If there is no pressure from society, it will be very difficult for us to get the results from rectification that we want.’ For ‘at least a few months’, therefore, criticism was to continue unchecked. Then, once the Party had been rectified, the movement could be enlarged and criticism extended to the democratic parties, the intellectuals and society at large.¹⁰⁹

But as the torrent of popular anger, mistrust and bitterness swelled, Mao began to have second thoughts.

On May 15, in a memorandum entitled ‘Things are turning into their opposites’, issued for restricted circulation to officials of Central Committee rank and above, he signalled that his attitude was changing. In it, for the first time, Mao applied the term ‘revisionism’ to events at home. The revisionists, he said, denied the class nature of the press; they admired bourgeois liberalism and democracy, and rejected Party leadership. Such people were the main danger within the Party, and they were now working hand in glove with right-wing intellectuals. It was these non-Party ‘Rightists’ (another term he now used for the first time) who were responsible for ‘the current spate of wild attacks’:

The Rightists know nothing about dialectics – things turn into their opposite when they reach the extreme. We shall let the Rightists run amuck for a time and let them reach their climax … Some say they are afraid of being hooked like a fish … [or] being lured in deep, rounded up and annihilated. Now that large numbers of fish have come to the surface of themselves, there is no need to bait the hook … There are two alternatives for the Rightists. One is to … mend their ways. The other is to go on making trouble and court ruin. Gentlemen Rightists, the choice is yours, the initiative (for a short time) is in your hands.¹¹⁰

This was not quite as dramatic a shift in Mao's position as it might seem. Already, in early April, discussing the harmful views that would be expressed, he had told Party cadres in Hangzhou: ‘This is not setting an ambush for the enemy, but rather letting them fall into the snare of their own accord.’¹¹¹ What was new was the change in emphasis. The focus of Mao's attention was moving ominously from ‘flowers blooming’ to the uprooting of ‘poisonous weeds’.

Since the document was secret, the public at large, as well as the ‘Rightists’ themselves, remained in ignorance of these developments.

The movement next spread to the campus at Beijing University, where a ‘Democracy Wall’, set up outside the canteen, was soon covered in posters several layers deep. Student orators harangued crowds of thousands on subjects ranging from multi-party elections to the respective merits of socialism and capitalism. The movement found its Pasionara in a 21-year-old literature student named Lin Xiling, who accused the Party of practising ‘feudal socialism’ and urged sweeping reforms to guarantee basic freedoms. Student associations were formed with names like ‘Bitter Medicine’, ‘Voices from the Lowest Level’, ‘Wild Grass’ and ‘Spring Thunder’, which published mimeographed journals and sent activists to ‘exchange experience’ with out-of-town colleagues.¹¹²

After another week had passed, Mao spoke again, this time publicly. At a meeting with a Youth League delegation, he warned: ‘Any word or deed at variance with socialism is completely wrong.’¹¹³ This was immediately written up in giant, white characters on the side of a building at the campus.

But the fire the Chairman had lit was not to be put out so easily. Student leaders called openly for an end to Communist Party rule. Their teachers, inspired by their example, stoked the flames still higher. Mao's rule was ‘arbitrary and reckless’, a Shenyang professor declared. If there was no democracy in China, it was the fault of the Party Centre. Others spoke of a ‘malevolent tyranny’ employing the ‘fascist methods of Auschwitz’. In Wuhan, middle-school students took to the streets and stormed local government offices. Trouble was also reported from Sichuan and Shandong.¹¹⁴

On June 8, less than six weeks after the campaign's official launch, Mao initiated the Party's counter-offensive.

‘Certain people,’ said the People's Daily, were using the rectification campaign as a pretext to try to ‘overthrow the Communist Party and the working class, and to topple the great cause of socialism’.¹¹⁵ Mao himself, in a Central Committee directive the same day, spoke of a small section of the Party having been rotted by reactionary views – which meant, he added approvingly, that ‘the pus is being squeezed out’.¹¹⁶ Ten days later, his ‘contradictions’ speech in February was published for the first time – but in a heavily revised version, which set out six criteria for distinguishing ‘fragrant flowers’ from ‘poisonous weeds’. These effectively restated the assurance Mao had given privately to Party officials before the movement started – namely that criticisms were acceptable only if they strengthened, not undermined, Party leadership.¹¹⁷

Finally, on July 1, in another People's Daily editorial, Mao accused the Ministers of Forestry, Luo Longji, and of Communications, Zhang Bojun, both leaders of a small coalition party called the Democratic League, of forming a counter-revolutionary alliance to promote an ‘anti-communist, anti-people, anti-socialist bourgeois line’. The implication was that the ‘Hundred Flowers’ policy had been correct, but had been sabotaged by a small group of extremists unreconciled to the communist victory who wanted to turn back the clock.¹¹⁸

All this was both dishonest and wise after the event. The ‘Luo–Zhang Alliance’ was a fabrication – another in the long line that had begun with the ‘Extermination Brigades’ in Yudu in 1934, and continued with the ‘Wang Shiwei counter-revolutionary conspiracy’ in 1943 and the ‘Hu Feng clique’ in 1955 – the sole purpose of which was to justify the clampdown that was already under way. In the same way, Guangming ribao, which Mao now accused of serving ‘as a mouthpiece for the reactionaries’,¹¹⁹ had merely done as he had asked. So had most of the ‘Rightists’. The six criteria were so restrictive that, if they had been in the original speech, ‘blooming and contending’ would never have started at all. In fact Mao had said repeatedly, in the course of the campaign, that no limits should be laid down, because ‘the people [themselves] have the ability to distinguish … [We must] trust them … to discriminate.’¹²⁰

There is no simple answer. The ‘Hundred Flowers’ was not, as Mao's victims and supporters both claimed, a carefully contrived trap from the start, an example of the Chairman's cunning in ‘luring the snake out of its hole’. Nor was it a ‘colossal blunder’, as most Western scholars argue.¹²¹

Mao had always mistrusted intellectuals. Their behaviour at Yan'an had strengthened his conviction that they were fundamentally unreliable, and nothing that had happened since, in the repeated remoulding campaigns of the early 1950s, had done anything to alter that view. He did not suddenly decide, in the spring of 1957, that they were trustworthy after all. He believed from the outset that there would be some cases, if only a few, of ‘extremists’ transgressing reasonable bounds, who would have to be uprooted. Hence his refusal to give a blanket assurance that there would be no retaliation. Hence, too, a revealing slip of the tongue at a Party conference in March, nearly two months before the movement began, when, in speaking of the struggle against bourgeois ideology, he referred to intellectuals as ‘the enemy’, rather than potential allies to be won over.¹²²

On the other hand, the economic base of Chinese society had been transformed, and therefore, in Marxist theory, the ideological ‘superstructure’ should follow suit.

Throughout the ‘Hundred Flowers’ period, Mao used the metaphor of hair and skin, arguing that now the old, bourgeois, economic ‘skin’ had died, the intellectuals, the ideological ‘hair’, had no choice but to shift their allegiance and graft themselves on to the new ‘skin’ of the proletarian economy.¹²³

The unstated question all along was how numerous the ‘extremists’ would be and how much pressure they would exert. Here Mao made not one but two misjudgements. He underestimated the volume and bitterness of the criticisms, and the cadres’ ability to withstand them. What had started as an attempt to bridge the gap between the Party and the people (and had been only incidentally an effort to expose and punish a small number of anti-communist irreductibles) was turned on its head. It became a trap not for the few but for the many – for the hundreds of thousands of loyal citizens who had taken the Party) at its word.¹²⁴

This wholesale reversal was entirely of Mao's making. Yet he evidently undertook it with some reluctance.¹²⁵ He said later that he had been ‘confused by false appearances’ at a time when the Party, and society at large, were panicking about the risk of large-scale unrest.¹²⁶ In speeches the following summer and autumn, he made clear that he continued to believe the original ‘Hundred Flowers’ policy was correct. The ‘Rightists,’ he said, were counter-revolutionaries, but they should be treated leniently. ‘Extreme policies [in the past] did not bring good results. We ought [this time] to be a bit more far-sighted.’¹²⁷

The ‘Rightists’ were not shot.¹²⁸ Indeed, the more senior among them, including Luo Longji, Zhang Bojun and another minister, Zhang Naiqi, were all amnestied two years later. But 520,000 smaller fry – one in twenty of all non-communist intellectuals and officials in China – underwent labour reform or were exiled to the countryside to learn class consciousness from the peasants. In many units, local Party secretaries ordered that a fixed quota be applied: 5 per cent of the cadres had to be designated as ‘Rightists’. Those with suspect backgrounds, or who had fallen foul of the Party hierarchy at some time in the past, were invariably chosen first.¹²⁹

The professor of English, Wu Ningkun (educated in the West), was arrested and spent three years in prison camps, first in Manchuria, then near Tianjin.¹³⁰ The woman police cadre in Changsha (who had criticised her section chief) was sent for labour reform in the suburbs; her husband then divorced her in a fruitless effort to prevent the ‘Rightist’ label being applied to him and their children.¹³¹ The leader of the merchants in Wangfujing (a capitalist) spent the next twenty years in and out of penal institutions. They, and half-a-million others like them, saw their lives and those of their families pitilessly destroyed. Unlike the landlords and the counter-revolutionaries, they were punished not for their actions (past or present, real or imagined), but solely for their ideas.

Mao himself was sensitive to that charge. ‘These people not only talk, they also act,’ he claimed. ‘They are guilty. The saying, “Those who speak up shall not be blamed” does not apply to them.’¹³² It was a poor defence.

The tragedy of the ‘Hundred Flowers’ was that Mao genuinely did want the intellectuals to ‘think for themselves’, to join the revolution of their own free will rather than being forced to do so. His goal, he told Party cadres, was ‘the creation of a political environment where there will be both centralism and democracy, both discipline and freedom, both unity of purpose and personal ease of mind and liveliness’.¹³³

Yet that formula, in practice, proved utterly self-defeating. By the mid-1950s, Mao was so convinced of the essential correctness of his own thought that he could no longer comprehend why, if people had the freedom to think for themselves, they would think what they wanted, not what he wanted – that, so long as they retained a spark of intellectual independence, they would produce ideas of which he disapproved and which he would find it necessary to suppress. In practice, discipline always won out; independence of mind was crushed. The uprooting of ‘poisonous weeds’ would lead to total stultification.

The intellectuals were scorched so badly in the anti-Rightist campaign that they would never believe Mao again. A quarter of a century later, when the old merchant from Wangfujing lay dying, his last words to his family were: ‘Never trust the Communist Party!’ The very people whom Mao needed most to build the strong, new China he had been dreaming of since his youth had been definitively alienated.

In the eight years since the establishment of the communist regime, Mao's life had changed out of all recognition. It was not simply that he had more power. As supreme leader of 600 million people, he became an august, detached figure, enveloped in an imperial aura, distant from his own colleagues and isolated from those he ruled.

Shortly before the proclamation of the People's Republic, he had taken up residence in Zhongnanhai (literally, ‘Central and Southern Lakes’), a walled estate containing the dwellings of former Manchu princes and traditional, courtyard mansions, set amid a park adjoining the Forbidden City but separated from it by the artificial lakes from which it derives its name.¹³⁴ It had fallen into disrepair when the nationalists were in power and had their capital in Nanjing, but in 1949 the one-time princely homes were refurbished for use by Politburo members and modern, three-storey blocks were built as offices for the Central Committee and the State Council. Mao and his immediate entourage lived in what had once been a library, built for the Emperor Qianlong in the eighteenth century, a splendid, grey-tiled edifice, cloistering a traditional courtyard with ancient cypress trees at its centre, whose name, Fengzeyuan, the Garden of Beneficent Abundance, was carved in the Emperor's own calligraphy on a wooden board above its massive, gabled south gate. Mao's private quarters, the Juxiang shuwu, or Study of Chrysanthemum Fragrance, occupied the northern part and comprised a vast high-ceilinged room which served as his bedchamber, study and salon, all in one; a large dining room; and, beyond it, Jiang Qing's bedroom, connected by a pathway to her living quarters in the west wing. Mao's daughters, Li Min and Li Na, who were looked after by Jiang Qing's half-sister, lived on the southern side and Mao Zemin's young orphaned son, Mao Yuanxin, had rooms nearby.

For Mao, as for the Chinese emperors before him, Zhongnanhai was a cocoon. In place of eunuchs, he was surrounded by secretaries and bodyguards. For his protection, there were three concentric rings of special service troops, discreet but omnipresent. His food came from a designated, secure farm, and was tasted before he ate as a precaution against poison. After Ren Bishi's death in October 1950, Mao, and all the other top leaders, were assigned personal physicians. Whereas in Yan'an and Shijiazhuang, he had been free to move about as he wished, albeit with a security escort, in Beijing he could not stir without every detail of his route being planned and reconnoitred in advance. When he did travel, it was aboard an armoured special train. He rarely flew, lest the nationalists on Taiwan try to sabotage or shoot down his plane.^III

In the first years, Mao tried from time to time to break out from the protective screen his minders threw up around him. Usually it ended badly.

His chief bodyguard, Li Yinqiao, remembered one such occasion, in Tianjin, when Mao insisted on having lunch at a restaurant. Word was sent ahead. The management cleared the place of other customers, and it was invested by plain-clothes police. But when Mao stopped at an upstairs window, to look out at the street below, he was spotted by a woman hanging out washing on a balcony opposite. Her excited cries brought crowds so dense that it took the local garrison command six hours to persuade them to disperse sufficiently for Mao to leave. Whenever afterwards he wanted to break away from the route his security officers had prepared, this incident would be brought up as a reason for not doing so.¹³⁵

Mao's isolation was exacerbated by the absence of a family around him. Anying was dead, and Anqing was being treated at a psychiatric hospital in Dalian.¹³⁶ Jiang Qing was often bedridden, initially with psychosomatic ailments, whose nature neither Chinese nor Russian doctors were able to discover, and later with cervical cancer. She made several extended journeys to Moscow, the longest lasting over a year, to undergo medical treatment. Mao was only too pleased to be rid of her and, when she begged permission to return, insisted that she stay on until she was completely cured.¹³⁷ According to his doctor, Li Zhisui, by 1955 they were already leading separate lives.¹³⁸ Even Li Yinqiao, who tried to be charitable, concluded that by the mid-1950s, the marriage was on the rocks.¹³⁹ They ate, slept and worked apart. On the rare occasions when they did spend time together, Jiang got on Mao's nerves and he would grumble to his guards afterwards that he never wanted to see her again.

Their estrangement made him nostalgic for his former wives: for He Zizhen, whom he met again for the first time in twenty-one years;¹⁴⁰ and for Yang Kaihui, whose memory now drew from him a romantic, astonishingly beautiful poem, which he entitled ‘The Immortals’. It was addressed to an old friend, Li Shuyi, the woman who, thirty years earlier, had sat up, nursing her infant son, as the Horse Day massacre began. Li's husband, Liu Zhixun, had been killed not long after Kaihui. In Chinese, their names signify ‘willow’ and ‘poplar’, a play on words which Mao entwined with the legend of Wu Gang, a Sisyphus-figure condemned to cut down an everlasting cassia tree on the moon:

I lost my proud poplar, and you your willow;
Poplar and willow soar to the highest heaven,
Wu Gang, asked what he has to offer,
Presents them humbly with cassia wine.
The lonely goddess in the moon spreads her ample sleeves
To dance for these good souls in the endless sky.
Of a sudden comes word of the Tiger's defeat on earth
Tears stream down like an upturned bowl of rain.¹⁴¹

The tears (at Chiang Kai-shek's defeat) were bitter-sweet, reflecting Mao's own mood that summer as he cast his mind back to earlier, simpler times.^IV

Into the gap left by present loneliness and a past which could never be recaptured, Mao brought, first, a succession of mistresses, and then, in his sixties, the earthier, more anonymous pleasures of physical companionship with much younger women.

The tradition of Saturday-night dances in Yan'an had survived the move to Zhongnanhai. From the dance-floor, Mao and his young partners would gravitate to his study, where they would make love beside the piles of books stacked on his vast bed. The girls came from dance troupes organised by the cultural division of the PLA, chosen both for their looks and their political reliability. Mao's lovemaking, like his dancing, was clumsy, according to one former partner, but varied and indefatigable. The French politician, Maurice Faure, once remarked of François Mitterrand: ‘il a besoin des fluides feminines.’ Mao was the same.

Among the vast collection of historical and literary tomes lining his shelves were copies of the ancient Daoist manuals by which Chinese literati, since immemorial times, had initiated their male descendants into the arts of the bedchamber. They included a Han dynasty text, ‘The Secret Methods of the Plain Girl’, which had particular relevance for older men:

The union of man and woman is like the mating of Heaven and Earth. It is because of their correct mating that Heaven and Earth last forever. Man, however, has lost this secret. If a man could learn [it], he would obtain immortality … The principle of this method is to have frequent intercourse with young girls, but emit semen only on rare occasions. This method makes a man's body light and will expel all diseases … All those who seek to prolong their life must seek life's very source.¹⁴²

The Chinese are a practical people, behind their outward prudery more tolerant of sexual licence than the Americans or the British. If Mao indulged himself, no one thought much the worse of him. Even Jiang Qing suffered his philandering in silence. The only real criticism of such behaviour in China, and that not voiced until long after his death, was over Mao's hypocrisy: in a country where illicit sex was grounds for sending an ordinary citizen to a labour camp, the Chairman could, and did, fill his bed with as many young women as he wished. The ‘Plain Girl’ and the other old texts offered a fig-leaf of classical authority, justifying his libertine ways as gathering yin, the female essence, to replenish his yang, in a millennial tradition of conserving male potency and health. His bodyguards had a simpler explanation: he had power, and it was his right.

The arrangement suited both sides. Mao's young women were not concubines in the old imperial sense. They were more like groupies, congregating around the Chairman as some young women in the West seek out racing drivers and pop singers. For a while, they basked in the reflected glory of his bed, proud beyond measure of their good fortune. Then Mao's aides ensured they were married off to good communist husbands.¹⁴³

Among his entourage, some surmised that he was becoming obsessed with old age, fending off intimations of mortality.¹⁴⁴ But Li Yinqiao probably had it best when he said Mao surrounded himself with young people to escape from solitude. Young women served that purpose. So did the young men who were his body-servants. In the last twenty years of his life, Mao himself acknowledged, they became his surrogate family.¹⁴⁵ He saw far more of them than of his own daughters, who spent most of their time at boarding school. The bodyguards gave him his nightly sleeping pills and massaged away his insomnia; they helped him to dress; they served his meals; they watched his every move. But they were an impermanent family, whose members could be dismissed at a whim; a simulated family, involving no responsibilities, no worries and no binding ties.

Beyond this tight, small circle, Mao, in his years of untrammelled power, was cut off from all normal human contact. His relations with the rest of the Politburo were exclusively political. Where Stalin had caroused late into the night with his cronies, Mao withdrew further and further into the seclusion of his own thoughts. Friendship was ruled out. ‘The relationship between man and “god” is one of prayer, and of the answer to prayer,’ wrote Li Yinqiao, years later. ‘There can be no exchange between them on an equal footing.’¹⁴⁶

Before, much of Mao's attention had been devoted to military affairs – civil war, war with Japan, civil war again and then war in Korea. After 1953, only politics remained.

The ‘Hundred Flowers’ movement had been Mao's first attempt to break away from the rigid top-down command system of Soviet communism, and to find a distinctive Chinese path for the state he now ruled. Khrushchev had disapproved.¹⁴⁷ In private, Mao retorted that the Russians’ minds were petrified, they were abandoning Marxist-Leninist fundamentals.¹⁴⁸

When the experiment came to a bruising end amid the anti-Rightist campaign, he began hankering once more after the old tried-and-tested strategy of mass mobilisation, used to such good purpose in the collectivisation movement.

He had attempted to apply this principle to the economy in the spring of 1956. But the so-called ‘Little Leap Forward’ had foundered, as local cadres set impossibly high targets, and peasants and disgruntled workers downed tools in protest. When Zhou Enlai had urged a slower pace, Mao had reluctantly agreed. An editorial in the People's Daily on the theme of ‘opposing rash advance’, which had been sent for his approval, was returned, marked in his handwriting with the two words: ‘Not read’.¹⁴⁹

At the time he had explained away this setback by arguing that in economic construction, as in warfare, advance was never in a straight line, but came in successive waves. ‘There are ups and downs,’ he said, ‘with one wave chasing another … Things must develop and go forward in accordance with the laws of the waves.’ The ‘Little Leap’ had failed, he suggested, because it coincided with a ‘trough’ in China's economic advance; at a more propitious moment of the cycle, it might succeed far better.¹⁵⁰

This time, most of the rest of the leadership agreed. The Soviet model was perceived to be failing. The co-operatives were not generating the agricultural surpluses necessary to finance a Soviet-style industrialisation programme; the intellectuals, needed to run it, had shown themselves unreliable; and Soviet financial aid, to help pay for it, was not available – because the Russians were using their money to shore up their client states in eastern Europe.¹⁵¹ A consensus was emerging that an alternative means would have to be found to jump-start China's economy, translating surplus rural labour power into industrial capital.

Throughout the ‘Hundred Flowers’ in the spring, Mao had repeated constantly the formula approved by the Eighth Congress, that class struggle was ‘basically over’.¹⁵² After the anti-Rightist campaign started in June, he argued that while ‘large-scale turbulent class struggle’ was ‘in the main at an end’, class struggle per se was very much alive.¹⁵³ The principal contradiction in Chinese society, he now held, was not economic, as the Congress had wrongly claimed, but the old, elemental fault-line between ‘the socialist and capitalist roads’.¹⁵⁴ In short, the stage had been set for a renewed upsurge of Leftism.

At a Central Committee plenum in October, Mao envisaged a radiant future based on economic revolution in the countryside. China, he said, would attain the highest crop yields in the world. Steel production would reach 20 million tons annually within fifteen years (four times the 1956 production level). More bizarrely, he also insisted that the ‘Four Pests’ must be eliminated, making China ‘a country of the four “noes”: no rats, no sparrows, no flies and no mosquitoes’.¹⁵⁵ Citizens everywhere rallied to his call. A visiting Russian expert recalled:

I was awakened in the early morning by a woman's blood-curdling screams. Rushing to my window, I saw that a young woman was running to and fro on the roof of the building next door, frantically waving a bamboo pole with a large sheet tied to it. Suddenly, the woman stopped … but a moment later, down in the street, a drum started beating, and she resumed her frightful screams and the mad waving of her peculiar flag … I realised that in all the upper stories of the hotel, white-clad females were waving sheets and towels that were supposed to keep the sparrows from alighting on the building.¹⁵⁶

The plan worked. Hecatombs of sparrows fell dead from exhaustion. Another foreigner reported some months later that in four weeks he saw not a single sparrow, and flies, usually singly, on only fifteen occasions.¹⁵⁷ Unfortunately, Mao had ignored warnings that sparrowcide¹⁵⁸ would cause the crops to be infested with caterpillars (which the birds usually ate). The following year the target was changed to bedbugs instead.

Revolutionary élan at home was matched by events abroad. On October 4, while the CCP plenum was in session, the Soviet Union launched the first sputnik at a time when, as Mao put it, the United States ‘hadn't even launched a potato’.¹⁵⁹

Shortly afterwards, Khrushchev spoke of surpassing Western levels of meat and dairy production, insisting that this was ‘not an arithmetical matter; it is a political issue’ – a phrase which was music to Mao's ears, for he had just told his own Central Committee that, in the duality of politics and technology, ‘politics is primary and [always] takes first place’.¹⁶⁰ The following month, while Mao was visiting Moscow to take part in the Conference of World Communist Parties, the Soviet leader announced plans to overtake the United States in the production of iron, steel, coal, electric power, oil and many types of consumer goods, within fifteen years. Not a man to let pass a challenge, Mao promptly informed the assembled leaders of world communism that China would overtake Britain in fifteen years.¹⁶¹

Then he gave them his views on the current state of the world by referring to a saying from the novel, The Dream of the Red Chamber. ‘Either the East wind prevails over the West wind, or the West wind prevails over the East wind’:

At the moment I sense that the international situation has come to a turning-point … It is characterised by the East wind prevailing over the West wind. That is to say, the forces of socialism have become overwhelmingly superior to the forces of imperialism … I think we can [say] that we have left the Western world behind us. Are they far behind us? Or just a tiny bit behind us? As I see it – and maybe I am a bit adventurist in this – I say that we have left them behind us once and for all.¹⁶²

In this overheated, not to say euphoric state of mind, Mao flew back to Beijing in late November to confront the economic challenges at home. The direction had been set. By promising to overtake Britain, Mao had committed China to producing 40 million tons of steel by the early 1970s (twice the already high figure approved at the CC plenum less than two months before), as well as surpassing British production of cement, coal, chemical fertiliser and machine tools.¹⁶³ The only question was how.

To find the answer, Mao set off on a four-month-long tour of the provinces, which took him from south China to Manchuria; westward to Sichuan in March; then by Yangtse river-steamer to Wuhan; and finally to Hunan and Guangdong in April.

Ostensibly, he was ‘seeking truth from facts’ by carrying out grass-roots investigations before proceeding to formulate new policies, just as he had in Jiangxi in the 1930s. But there was a crucial difference. In the Chinese Soviet Republic, a quarter of a century before, he had been free to investigate as he wished. In the People's Republic, in 1958, his every move was choreographed days or weeks in advance. ‘Going to the grass roots’ now meant meeting provincial first secretaries and visiting carefully selected model farms where everyone had been briefed to tell Mao only what the provincial authorities wanted him to hear. He still got no accurate, first-hand information. Instead, he had the illusion of being well-informed, which was to prove far more dangerous than ignorance.

At each stage of Mao's peregrination, he summoned a leadership conference, at which the theoretical basis for the ‘Great Leap Forward’ was gradually put in place.

At Hangzhou, on January 4, 1958, he propounded for the first time his view of ‘uninterrupted revolution’ (a concept which, he was quick to explain, had nothing to do with the Trotskyite heresy), whereby the ‘socialist revolution’ (collectivisation of the means of production), which had now been completed in China, would be followed seamlessly by a ‘revolution in ideology and politics’ and by ‘technological revolution’. The latter term, he made clear, signified a new ‘high tide’ in production.¹⁶⁴

Ten days later, in Nanning, he vented his rage against those who had persuaded him to abort the ‘Little Leap’, eighteen months before. ‘I am the “chief culprit” of rash advance,’ he announced defiantly. ‘You are against rash advance. Well, I am against opposing it!’¹⁶⁵ Zhou Enlai made a humiliating self-criticism, confessing that he had ‘wavered about policy’ and had committed ‘right conservatist errors’, and offered to resign. For several months his fate hung in the balance. Only after several more self-abasing speeches did Mao relent and inform him that he was to continue as Premier. By then he had grovelled publicly about the ‘miraculous construction and revolutionary mettle’ which the Chairman's policies had achieved, declaring:

Chairman Mao is the representative of truth. Departing from or violating his leadership and directives results in error and loss of bearings and damages the interests of the Party and the people, as the errors I have repeatedly committed have amply proven. Conversely, doing things correctly and at the correct time are inseparable from Chairman Mao's correct leadership and leading ideology.¹⁶⁶

In March, at a Politburo Standing Committee meeting in Chengdu, the Chairman castigated the planning ministries for adhering slavishly to Soviet practices, and the Party, for exhibiting a ‘slave mentality’ towards ‘experts’ in general and bourgeois experts in particular.¹⁶⁷ A month later, in Hankou, he went further, declaring that bourgeois intellectuals constituted an exploiting class which must be struggled against, and that China should not be shackled by the economic laws they had devised:

We must break down superstition, believing in – yet also disbelieving – the scientists … Whenever a problem is discussed, we must also discuss ideology. When we study a problem, we must subdue the [facts] by [adopting] a viewpoint, and activate the affair at hand with politics … How can [anything be resolved] when only numbers are discussed, without politics? The relationship between politics and numbers is like that between officers and soldiers: Politics is the commander. (Emphasis supplied)¹⁶⁸

The exaltation of political will was familiar enough, but Mao had rarely affirmed quite so brazenly that facts and figures could be ignored. In the late spring of 1958, he was on an adrenalin high, pumped up by the limitless vista of a bright communist future in which nothing would be able to withstand the concerted efforts of 600 million people.

His confidence had been fired by a nationwide irrigation movement launched the previous winter. In the space of four months, provincial leaders reported, 100 million peasants had dug ditches and reservoirs to water almost 20 million acres, far in excess of the initial target.¹⁶⁹ Only much later did it emerge that those claims, like most of those made at that time, were vastly exaggerated. Mao was euphoric. It was only necessary to ‘lift the lid, break down superstition, and let the initiative and creativity of the labouring people explode’, he told the Second Session of the Eighth Congress, which officially launched the Great Leap in May, and miracles could be achieved. He added, almost as an afterthought, ‘No, we are not insane!’¹⁷⁰

Insane or not, the targets set that year for both agricultural and industrial production rose exponentially.

At the Chengdu meeting, in March, Mao had urged provincial leaders to stay within the realm of the possible. ‘Revolutionary romanticism is good,’ he told them, ‘but it's no use if there's no way to put it into practice.’¹⁷¹

By May, he had increased that year's steel target from six to eight million tons, and cut the length of time needed to overtake Britain by half (to seven years) and the United States to fifteen years, the same as Khrushchev had proposed for Russia. Indeed, China might get there first, Mao suggested, and ‘reach communism ahead of schedule’.¹⁷² After that, all restraint was cast to the winds. In the autumn, the 1958 steel estimate was raised to 10.7 million tons, and three weeks later to ‘11 or 12 million’. By then Mao envisaged annual steel output in 1959 of 30 million tons (surpassing Britain); in 1960, 60 million (surpassing Russia); in 1962, 100 million (surpassing the USA); and 700 million tons – several times the production of the whole of the rest of the world – by the early 1970s. The 1958 grain target rose in tandem, first to 300 million tons (half as much again as the previous record harvest), then to 350 million.¹⁷³

The aim, as ever, was to make China great. Although we have a large population,’ Mao told the Politburo, ‘we have not yet demonstrated our strength. When we catch up with Britain and America, [even US Secretary of State] Dulles will respect us and acknowledge our existence as a nation.’¹⁷⁴ Nor was that all. The new Communist China would also be elegant. ‘The French’, Mao noted, ‘have made their streets, houses and boulevards very beautiful: if capitalism can do it, why can't we?’¹⁷⁵ It would be replete with creature comforts, too. Tan Zhenlin, once one of Mao's battalion commanders on the Jinggangshan, who had replaced his contemporary, the sober-minded Deng Zihui, as agricultural supremo, unveiled a vision of plenty which put Khrushchev's ‘goulash communism’ to shame:

After all, what does communism mean? … First, taking good food and not merely eating one's fill. At each meal one enjoys a meat diet, eating chicken, pork, fish or eggs … Delicacies like monkey's heads, swallow's nest and white fungus are served, ‘to each according to his needs’ … Second, clothing. Everything people want should be available. Clothing of various designs and styles, not [just] a mass of blue garments … After working hours, people will wear silk, satin … and overcoats lined with fox furs … Third, housing … Central heating will be provided in the north and air conditioning in the south. Everyone will live in high-rise buildings. Needless to say, there will be electric light, telephone, piped water [and] television … Fourth, communications … Air services will be opened in every direction and every county will have an airport … Fifth, higher education for everyone … The sum total of all these means communism.¹⁷⁶

Tan was not alone in such extravagant speculations. Mao himself envisaged asphalt highways¹⁷⁷ which would also serve as airstrips, with each township having its own planes and its own resident philosophers and scientists. ‘It's like playing mahjong,’ he exclaimed delightedly as he contemplated China's riches piling up: ‘You just double your stakes!’¹⁷⁸ The rest of the leadership concurred. Even the supposedly down-to-earth Deng Xiaoping foresaw every Chinese owning a bicycle, and women wearing high heels and lipstick.¹⁷⁹

How did this extraordinary sea-change in attitudes come about? How could Mao, who, in order to win power, had spent the whole of his adult life making finely calibrated judgements about what was possible and what was not, suddenly suspend all rational criteria to espouse a utopian dream which even the most cursory reflection ought to have shown to be impossible? How could men like Zhou Enlai and Bo Yibo, who had held out against much more modest targets only a year earlier, now support plans which, it should have been obvious at the time, were the sheerest fantasy?

Even now, more than half a century later, it is not easy to give a complete answer.

Russia's successful launch of the sputnik, which awoke Mao to the possibilities opened up by technological advance, was a catalyst.¹⁸⁰ Science, once his interest had been aroused, fascinated him, but in a medieval rather than a modern sense. He read avidly, but less for new insights than to comfort his own view of the world. His speeches were soon peppered with scientific analogies illustrative of his political ideas: the structure of the atom demonstrated the contradictions inherent in all things; the proliferation of chemical elements showed that ‘matter always changes and converts into its opposite’; metabolism was an example of the tendency of everything to split.¹⁸¹ To Mao, scientific progress justified his long-held belief that mind could triumph over matter (or, as he had put it in 1937, ‘the operation of mental on material things’). Like a latter-day philosopher's stone, it would transmute China's poverty-stricken reality into a glowing new world without scarcity or hunger. Not for him the rigorous discipline of analysis and proof. China had had no Galileo, no Copernicus, no Darwin or Alexander Fleming, to foster a spirit of sceptical enquiry. Modern science, like modern industry, was a recent, alien import, with no roots in Chinese culture, and Mao freely admitted he knew nothing about either.¹⁸² It was the concept that he seized on – the prospect of unbounded progress through technical revolution.

In a country with a tradition of scientific and industrial expertise, the targets advanced in the Great Leap would have been dismissed as the idle dreams they were.

But not in China. Within the Politburo, only Chen Yun asked awkward questions on economic matters, and at the beginning of 1958 he was deprived of responsibility for them and forced to make a self-criticism.¹⁸³ Zhou Enlai may have had reservations. But if so he kept them to himself: he had already risked losing his post after opposing Mao's insistence on ‘rash advance’: once was enough.

Among the other leaders, Liu Shaoqi had his own reasons to champion the Chairman's cause. His relationship with Zhou contained a much greater element of rivalry than either man admitted. The Great Leap was to be run by Liu's Party apparatus, not Zhou's State Council: whatever was bad for the one stood to benefit the other. Moreover, Mao had informed the members of the Politburo Standing Committee two years earlier that, as part of his withdrawal to the ‘second front’, he intended to step down as Head of State.¹⁸⁴ At the Second Session of the Eighth Congress, in May, it was officially announced that Liu would succeed him. If Liu had doubts about the Great Leap – and there is no evidence that he did – the prospect of marking his assumption of the highest office of state with a dramatic upsurge in economic growth was evidently enough to make him close his eyes to them.

The same was true of Deng Xiaoping, who as General Secretary was put in charge of the Party Centre's ‘small groups’ which, in a further sign of Mao's dissatisfaction with Zhou and Chen Yun, were set up that summer to supervise the work of the government and the conduct of the Leap.¹⁸⁵

The rest of the Politburo was composed of old-guard loyalists, like Lin Boqu, who had been with Mao in Canton in the mid-1920s, and Li Fuchun, now Chairman of the State Economic Commission, whose association with him went back to the days of the New People's Study Society; recently promoted men, such as the first secretaries of Shanghai and Sichuan, whose appointments Mao had sanctioned precisely because of their enthusiasm for the Leap; and military figures, led by Lin Biao (newly elevated to the Politburo Standing Committee) and Defence Minister Peng Dehuai, who had learned the hard way over the years that on all major issues, Mao was invariably right.

None of these men, in 1958, was prepared to challenge him. Most were as convinced as he that a new era of prosperity was at hand. The only group which might have disabused them – the non-Party intellectuals – had been silenced in the anti-Rightist Campaign.

That spring, Mao knew what he wanted; he knew why; but he still did not know how to accomplish it. The middle of May found him still asking plaintively: ‘Apart from the Soviet method, is it possible to find something even faster and better?’¹⁸⁶

In fact, although he had not recognised it, the germ of the answer was already at hand. The previous winter's irrigation movement had begun a chain reaction of mergers of co-operatives, in order to permit cadres to mobilise the vast quantities of manpower necessary to build networks of dykes and canals.¹⁸⁷

Here were the ready-made building blocks for the communist society to come. By the time the month was out, Mao had found a name, and a concept, dating from pre-Marxist days, which would take this process a step further. What was needed, he said, was a form of ‘large commune’ combining agriculture, industry, commerce, culture, education and self-defence. The name derived from the Paris Commune of 1871, whose ‘deep significance’ he had noted in an article in 1926; the concept came from the utopian socialism of Kang Youwei, who had proposed the abolition of private property and the family, and from the experiments in communal living that he had dabbled in as a young student-teacher during his anarchist days at the end of the First World War.¹⁸⁸

On August 9, 1958, Mao formally proclaimed, ‘People's communes are good’, a verdict enshrined three weeks later by an enlarged Politburo meeting at the seaside resort of Beidaihe, on the Yellow Sea coast north of Tianjin.¹⁸⁹ The commune, the Politburo asserted, was ‘the best organisational form for the building of socialism and the gradual transition to communism’.¹⁹⁰ Mao's secret police chief from Yan'an days, Kang Sheng, who had remained one of the Chairman's confidants, put it more succinctly in a jingle he wrote, which was sung that autumn by peasants throughout China:

Communism is Paradise,
The People's Communes are the way to get there.¹⁹¹

Mao himself was yet more reckless. ‘The communist spirit is very good,’ he told his colleagues at Beidaihe. ‘If human beings only live to eat, isn't that like dogs eating shit? What meaning is there to life if you don't … practise a bit of communism? … We should put into practice some of the ideals of utopian socialism.’¹⁹² The way forward, he argued, lay in a return to the ‘supply system’ which the communists had used in Yan'an. Progressively, China would shift towards a non-monetary economy, where food, clothing and housing would all be supplied free. ‘Eating in public mess halls without paying for it is communism’, he declared.¹⁹³ Eventually even money itself might be abolished.¹⁹⁴ Liu Shaoqi quoted Mao as saying that, under communism, there would be ‘no government, no country, no family. This will be implemented everywhere in the future … The family is a historically produced phenomenon and will be eliminated.’¹⁹⁵

Over the next two months, the Leap, which had been inexorably gathering momentum since the spring, exploded into a frenzy of activity that changed the face of the Chinese countryside for ever.

Some 500 million people, many of them still struggling to adjust to living in co-operatives, which had been established only two or three years before, found that they now belonged to something called a renmin gongshe, literally, ‘people's communal organisation’, in which they were to share weal and woe with thousands of complete strangers formerly scattered in separate villages. The commune became the basic unit of rural society and the presumptive model for the rest of the country as well. ‘In future’, Mao said, ‘everything will be called a commune, [including] factories … and cities.’¹⁹⁶

Private plots and livestock were confiscated, usually without compensation. In south China, even remittances from relatives overseas were siphoned off for the communal pot. Families were forced to hand over their cooking implements, on the grounds that the mess halls had made them redundant. ‘Happiness Homes’ were promoted for the elderly, and boarding kindergartens for the very young. Parents were urged to give up ‘bourgeois emotional attachments’ in favour of a collectivised, militarised lifestyle, in which the ideal family unit was an able-bodied couple, willing and able to work Stakhanovite hours as members of a shock brigade.

Officially everyone was supposed to have at least six hours’ sleep a night, but some brigades boasted of working four or five days without stopping. Since no one could keep that up, there was widespread faking. The peasants left lanterns alight in the fields all night while they slept, with a look-out to give the alarm should a cadre come along. Material incentives were decried and supposedly rendered unnecessary by the system of free supply, but many communes found that their members refused to work without them. Only the most advanced units could offer the ‘10 guarantees’ which were the system's ultimate goal, assuring their members ‘meals, clothes, housing, schooling, medical attention, burial, haircuts, theatrical entertainment, money for heating in winter and money for weddings’.¹⁹⁷

Much of this was animated by nostalgia for the simplicity and fervour of the early years of the communist revolution.¹⁹⁸

Party cadres were ordered to toil alongside the masses. Mao himself, together with Premier Zhou Enlai and other Politburo members, was photographed ‘toiling’ at the site of a new reservoir near Beijing. PLA officers, from generals down, were ordered to spend a month a year serving in the ranks. A militia drive was launched under the slogan, ‘Everyone a soldier’, and peasants worked in the fields with antiquated rifles stacked beside them.¹⁹⁹

At the core of the Great Leap, however, lay the targets for steel and grain production.

When it became clear that the country's medium and large steel plants would be unable to meet the new targets, Zhou Enlai, whom Mao had placed in charge of the steel drive, proposed a mass campaign using ‘backyard furnaces’, similar to the small, native iron-smelting plants used in the countryside to make farm implements.

The results were immediate and spectacular. The Chinese countryside became a lattice of smoking chimneys. Sidney Rittenberg, who had joined the Party in Yan'an and now worked for Radio Beijing, was an enthusiast. ‘Every hill, every field’, he wrote, ‘glowed with the light of the home-made ovens turning out steel in places where not a thimbleful of metal had ever been produced before.’²⁰⁰ Albert Belhomme, another American who had embraced the communist cause, saw it rather differently. When his paper mill in Shandong was ordered to build furnaces, ‘members of the Party street committees went from house to house, confiscating pots and pans, ripping up iron fences and even tearing locks off doors … They tore the radiators out of our shop at the mill and melted them down.’²⁰¹ An English visitor to Yunnan, in the far south-west, described how, in one village where four improvised blast furnaces had been rigged up, he found ‘a furious, seething, clattering scene of frenzy … People carried baskets of ore, people stoked, people goaded buffalo carts, people tipped cauldrons of white-hot metal, people stood on rickety ladders and peered into furnaces, people wheeled barrows of crude metal.’ The commune chairman explained that they had learned steel-making from reading a newspaper article.²⁰²

The same scenes were replicated in every town and village in China. In Beijing, factories, government offices, universities, even the writers’ association, set up primitive foundries. The editors of Peking Review reported:

In response to the government call … we, too, turned to making steel in our own courtyard … Some brought in broken pans, pots and kettles; others contributed old bricks and limestone; still others turned in all sorts of odds and ends. In a matter of hours, a reverberatory puddling furnace, Chinese style, was built … The only person in the group who could claim some technical know-how was a young man who had visited several office-built furnaces before our furnace went into operation.²⁰³

In September 1958, 14 per cent of China's steel production came from small, local furnaces; in October, the figure was 49 per cent. When the movement was at its peak, 90 million people, close to a quarter of the active population, abandoned their normal pursuits to take part.

The result, inevitably, was an acute shortage of agricultural labour, putting at risk the autumn harvest. In October, schools were ordered closed, and students and other non-essential personnel, including shop assistants, sent to work in the fields. Once again, peasant shock brigades toiled through the night.

Mao, and the rest of the leadership, were convinced that an exceptional crop was being gathered in. Close planting, combined with deep ploughing techniques, on experimental plots had produced reports of phenomenal yields. One enterprising model peasant conned Deng Xiaoping into believing that he had obtained the equivalent of 200 tons an acre. Even ‘normal’ high-yielding fields were said to produce 30 tons, and ordinary fields, 9 to 15 tons – in a country where the average yield, even in good years, had up until then been one ton per acre. The Politburo spoke of production increases of ‘one hundred per cent, several hundred per cent, over one thousand per cent and several thousand per cent.’ By the onset of winter, some of the claims were becoming so extravagant that even Mao started to doubt them. But he was still confident enough in the astounding surge in productivity his green revolution had supposedly unleashed to propose that two-thirds of China's arable land be afforested or allowed to lie fallow.²⁰⁴

The drawback of intensive farming was that it required high labour inputs. That led Mao to the fateful decision to abandon China's birth control programme, ultimately the most enduring of all the consequences of the Great Leap.²⁰⁵

Meanwhile China's leaders, in a collective suspension of disbelief, savoured what they were all convinced would be a radiant future.

Had Mao and his colleagues been of a mind to notice, there were already signs that a crisis was brewing. In Yunnan, during the water conservancy campaign, starvation had appeared in some villages as early as February 1958. Later that spring, famine struck Gansu and parts of Guizhou. By April, even before the Great Leap had officially begun, the Central Committee General Office was reporting food shortages and riots affecting more than six million people in sixteen provinces, entailing suicides, starvation, the selling of children by parents unable to feed them, cases of mothers killing their children, and a mass exodus of beggars from the countryside to the cities.²⁰⁶ To a greater or lesser extent, that happened every spring – and had done in China since time immemorial – in the hungry months when the previous year's grain had all been consumed and the new harvest had not yet ripened. The problem had become more acute since the State had proclaimed a monopoly on food crops in December 1953 in order to be able to feed the growing urban population. But such troubles were usually viewed as ‘isolated incidents’, caused by failures of leadership on the part of provincial and local cadres and sabotage by counter revolutionaries and bad elements. In 1958, that was how they were interpreted too.

This time, however, the causes were different. After the men had been sent away to work on irrigation schemes and backyard furnaces, only women, old people and children were left to till the fields. In the autumn, when the harvest was brought in, communal dining halls were established. The peasants gorged, taking literally Kang Sheng's jingle that the communes were the way to paradise and each person could eat his fill. In two months, the food supply was exhausted. The peasants expected the government to provide more. It did not. Hunger set in.²⁰⁷ To Mao communal eating was a step towards the bright communist future that was his ultimate goal, a way to promote a collective lifestyle and produce economies of scale, since each family would no longer have to cook for itself, and at the same time to eliminate private property, seen as the root of capitalism and of inequalities. In practice, the opposite occurred. Local cadres, entrusted with allocating scarce food supplies, suddenly acquired powers of life and death over the population they controlled. A work group leader or production team secretary could determine whether or not an uncooperative villager survived. While the cadres feasted, and sent up optimistic reports of bumper harvests to the upper levels, the peasants ate bark and elm leaves – if they were lucky – or filled their stomachs with river clay.

By the time the Central Committee met in Wuhan in December, some of this had begun to percolate through. Mao announced that grain production would be a staggering 430 million tons, more than twice the previous best harvest, but that, in the interests of ‘prudence’, a lower figure of 365 million would be made public. The steel target of 10.7 million tons had been fulfilled, he said, but only nine million tons (later revised downward to eight million) were of acceptable quality. That led him to the remarkable admission that the Beidaihe steel figures had been unrealistic. ‘I made a mistake,’ he told the plenum. ‘I was [too] enthusiastic at that time, and failed to combine revolutionary fervour with a practical spirit.’ But his very willingness to criticise himself in this way was the clearest proof that he believed the Leap to have been a huge success. That was obvious, too, from the new steel targets he proposed: although lower than at Beidaihe, they were still resolutely upbeat: 18 to 20 million tons in 1959, and 60 million in 1962.²⁰⁸

Mao was not completely blind. In October, one of the model communes which he and other leaders had visited, at Xushui, in Hebei, 100 miles south-west of Beijing – and which claimed to be on the verge of introducing a true communist system, with all property and produce held in common and each member able to take whatever he needed – had been exposed as a fraud.²⁰⁹ From other areas came reports of peasants being worked to death, given starvation rations, or tortured and killed when they were unable to meet the local leaders’ demands. That autumn the Chairman had begun urging a period of retrenchment. Cadres were ‘practicing coercion, telling lies, making false reports’ and paying too much attention to production at the expense of people's livelihood, he told the Central Committee.²¹⁰ In a detailed instruction the following spring, conveyed to basic-level cadres throughout the country, he insisted:

In setting production quotas, state only how much you can actually produce and don't make false claims … On harvests, state how much you have actually harvested instead of falsely claiming a figure inconsistent with reality … Those who are honest and who dare to speak the truth are ultimately serving the best interests of the people and will not come to grief for it. Those who like to make false claims do harm to the people and to themselves and will ultimately suffer the consequences. It should be said that much of the falsehood has been prompted by the upper levels through boasting, pressure and reward, leaving little alternative to those below … We must have enthusiasm and drive, but lying is not allowed.²¹¹

Subsequent Central Committee directives reduced the scope of communal dining, and allowed the peasants to raise small amounts of livestock and to cultivate household plots.²¹² Although the problems were ‘temporary and localized’, Mao maintained, the peasants were feeling ‘great fear and anxiety’.²¹³ It was necessary to give them a breathing space and to clamp down on abuses in order that the policies underlying the Great Leap might be fully realised.^V

As 1958 drew to a close, Mao looked back with satisfaction on what had been achieved. ‘During this [past] year, there have been so many good things,’ he mused. ‘Trails have been blazed. Many things have been realised, about which we did not even dare to dream before.’²¹⁴ His vision of China pioneering its own path to communism was beginning to come true. The Russians were being left behind.²¹⁵

Two years earlier, at the start of the Little Leap, he had written of the Chinese people being ‘poor and blank’. This was an advantage, he declared, because ‘once a piece of paper has been written on, you cannot do much more with it’.²¹⁶ Throughout the Great Leap Forward, poverty and ‘blankness’ remained a constant theme. As he put it in an article in April:

China's 600 million people have two remarkable peculiarities; they are, first of all, poor, and secondly blank. That may seem like a bad thing, but it is really a good thing. Poor people want change, want to do things, want revolution. A clean sheet of paper has no blotches, and so the newest and most beautiful words can be written on it, the newest and most beautiful pictures can be painted on it.²¹⁷

That statement, with its stupendous arrogance, its megalomaniac ambition to mould, like putty, the lives and thoughts of almost a quarter of mankind, provided an alarming glimpse into Mao's mind as old age approached. Hubris on such a scale presaged catastrophe. It was not long in coming.

The Russians watched these developments with mounting disquiet. Already, in November 1957, Mao's visit to Moscow for the Conference of World Communist Parties had left a residue of unease. On his arrival there, Khrushchev had greeted him with an offer too good to refuse: a secret agreement to provide China with nuclear weapons technology, including a sample atom bomb, in return for Mao's support of the Soviet leader personally, and of Russia's leading role in the international communist movement.²¹⁸ On both counts he had been happy to oblige. The ‘new’ Khrushchev, who wanted to surpass America, was better to his liking than the author of the Secret Speech; and Mao had never disputed that international communism needed a leader – his concern was simply that China's views be taken into account when Moscow and Beijing had differences. At the 1957 meeting, that position had been respected: Khrushchev had not only given Mao an advance draft of the final resolution, but had accepted Mao's proposed amendments – and then, at Mao's insistence, had circulated the amended draft for comments from all the sixty-eight parties taking part, instead of steamrollering through the Soviet version without discussion as had been the practice before.

Reassured by the Soviet leader's attitude, and buoyed up by his conviction that ‘the East wind prevails over the West’, Mao had given the leaders of world communism an apocalyptic vision of their future triumph. If peace could be maintained, he said, the socialist camp would become invincible. But there was also another possibility:

Let us speculate. If war broke out, how many people would die? There are 2.7 billion people in the entire world, and one-third of them may be lost … If the worst comes to the worst, perhaps one-half would die. But there would still be one-half left; imperialism would be razed to the ground and the whole world would become socialist. After a number of years, the world's population would once again reach 2.7 billion and certainly become even bigger.²¹⁹

There was nothing particularly new in this: Mao had expressed the same view to Nehru in 1954, when tensions over Taiwan had led America to hint at possible nuclear weapons use, and he repeated it in even more cataclysmic terms to a Finnish diplomat a few months later. ‘If the US had atom bombs so powerful that … they would make a hole right through the earth,’ he told the astonished envoy, ‘that would hardly mean anything to the universe as a whole, though it might be a major event for the solar system.’²²⁰ Mao's point was that nuclear blackmail did not work against those who showed no fear of it. But it was one thing to philosophize in such terms in private conversation, quite another at a meeting attended by communist leaders from all over the world. To them, Mao's words were chilling. The Soviet leadership found itself wondering whether a man who spoke of nuclear armageddon with such total unconcern could really be trusted with an atomic arsenal of his own. But by then, the technology agreement had been signed.

The following spring, Mao plunged into the Great Leap Forward, secure in the knowledge that nuclear partnership with the USSR would spare China the need for a costly build-up of conventional forces.

Meanwhile, Khrushchev cast about for ways to increase Soviet leverage over Beijing's atomic weapons policy. To that end he proposed a further broadening of military co-operation, including an agreement to setup a jointly owned ultra-long-wave radio station to communicate with the Soviet submarine fleet in the Pacific (70 per cent of the cost to be met by Russia, the remainder by the Chinese side), and another for a joint Soviet–Chinese nuclear submarine flotilla.

To his amazement, Mao reacted very badly. At a meeting with the Russian Ambassador, Pavel Yudin, in late July, the Chairman poured out in venomous terms his accumulated resentment at what he portrayed as Moscow's high-handedness:

You never trust the Chinese! You only trust Russians. To you, Russians are first-class citizens, whereas Chinese are among those inferior peoples who are stupid and careless. That's why you came up with this question of joint ownership and operation. Well, if that's what you want, why don't you have it all – let's have joint ownership and operation of our army, navy, air force, industry, agriculture, culture, education! Would that be all right? Or you can have the whole of China's 10,000 kilometres of coastline, and we'll just keep a guerrilla force. Just because you have a few atomic bombs, you think you are in a position to control us by seeking leases. How else can you justify your behaviour? … These remarks of mine may not sound so pleasing to your ear … [But] you have extended Russian nationalism right up to the Chinese coast.²²¹

To Mao, ‘joint ownership’ smacked of the unequal treaties imposed during China's humiliation at the hands of the Western powers, and of the Soviet Union's demands in 1950 for special privileges in Manchuria and Xinjiang. Khrushchev, he told Yudin, had had the good sense to annul the accords which Stalin had imposed, yet now he was himself behaving in exactly the same way.

Khrushchev recalled in his memoirs that Yudin's report on this meeting came ‘like a thunderbolt out of a clear blue sky’,²²² and there is no reason to disbelieve him. Less than ten days later, he flew secretly to Beijing, accompanied by the Defence Minister, Rodion Malinovsky, to try to sort out the mess.

He failed. Not only was Mao intransigent, refusing to countenance arrangements even for shore leave in China for Soviet submariners, but, in a mischievous symbolic snub, the naval talks were held beside an open-air swimming pool which Mao had had built at Zhongnanhai, where they sunned themselves, as Khrushchev remembered, ‘like seals on the warm sand’, and the Russian leader, who could not swim, was forced to suffer the indignity of wallowing about in the water buoyed up by a rubber float.²²³

In January 1958, preparations had begun for yet another Chinese attempt to occupy the islands of Quemoy and Matsu.²²⁴ That summer, a left-wing coup in Iraq, which led the United States and Britain to send troops to the Middle East, had given Mao the opportunity he had been waiting for. On July 17, he told the Politburo that an attack on the nationalist outposts would divert American attention from the Iraqi imbroglio and show the world that China was serious about supporting national liberation movements. An additional consideration, which he did not mention, was that a proxy conflict with the Americans over Taiwan would raise the political temperature at home, much as the Korean War had done, facilitating the mass mobilisation needed to make the Great Leap succeed. The initial plan was for the bombardment of Quemoy and Matsu to begin nine days later – shortly before Khrushchev's arrival – but in the event it was delayed until late August. By then, the Soviet leader had proposed a four-power summit with the Americans, British and French, to defuse Middle East tensions, which led the People's Daily to comment caustically on ‘the nonsensical idea that peace can be achieved only by currying favour and compromising with the aggressors’.

As it turned out, Mao had misjudged American resolve. After a disagreeable ten days, in which the US dropped heavy hints about the use of nuclear weapons, the Chinese were forced to back off. Khrushchev, having assured himself that Russia no longer risked being dragged in, promised China maximum assistance. Two months later, the crisis ended with the PLA announcing, in the best Beijing opera tradition, that it would continue the bombardment of the island, but only on even-numbered days.

The short-term effect of these disputes was to remind both China and the Soviet Union that it was in their national interests to maintain a normal working relationship. China cooled its rhetoric about an imminent leap into communism, which had exasperated the Russians; and Khrushchev approved a five-billion-rouble loan for Chinese industrial development projects.

But behind the façade of renewed amity, their mutual mistrust deepened. To Khrushchev, Mao's refusal to permit closer military co-operation despite Moscow's agreement to help China build atomic weapons, his cavalier attitude to nuclear destruction and his wild flights of doctrinal unorthodoxy, made him an erratic, ungrateful and unpredictable partner. To Mao, Khrushchev was weak. The priority he accorded to improving relations with the United States was a betrayal of the international communist movement and the revolutionary cause it was pledged to promote. The Russian leader's conversation that winter with a prominent American politician, Senator Hubert Humphrey, in which he poured scorn on the Chinese communes, was just one more example, in Mao's eyes, of Moscow's dereliction of basic socialist solidarity.²²⁵

Throughout the spring of 1959, the campaign to consolidate the Great Leap, which Mao had initiated at Wuhan in December, steadily continued. The backyard furnace movement was abandoned in recognition that much of what it produced was unusable – leaving the rural landscape pockmarked with rusting hulks of congealed metal, Byronesque monuments to a national folly. By early summer Mao had agreed that the 1959 steel target should be cut back again, from 20 to 13 million tons, and it was beginning to sink in that the previous year's grain production, while good, had been grossly exaggerated.²²⁶ ‘Just as a child plays with fire … and knows pain only when it is burnt,’ he acknowledged ruefully, ‘so, in economic construction, we declared war on nature, like an inexperienced child, unfamiliar with strategy and tactics.’²²⁷ Provincial leaders were ordered not to push the peasants too hard. Otherwise, Mao warned chillingly, the CCP might end up like the ancient Qin and Sui dynasties, which had succeeded in unifying China only to lose power a few decades later because of the harshness of their rule.²²⁸

It was still a matter of fine-tuning, not of changing basic principles; communism might not be realised tomorrow, Mao said, but it was achievable in fifteen to twenty years ‘or perhaps a little longer’.²²⁹ None the less, it seemed that some sense of reality was finally returning.

In this relatively sober frame of mind, the Central Committee gathered in July at the hill resort of Lushan, just south of the Yangtse. On the way, Mao visited his old home at Shaoshan for the first time since 1927.²³⁰ What he was shown there strengthened his conviction that the Leap was succeeding, but also that the adventurist notions of utopian Leftists in the provinces needed further damping down and soon after reaching Lushan he began to apply himself to that purpose.

Mao, however, was not the only Chinese leader to have returned to his roots that year. The Defence Minister, Peng Dehuai, had gone back several months earlier to his native village, Niaoshi, not far from Mao's birthplace in the same county, Xiangtan, also for the first time since the 1920s, but had come away with very different impressions.²³¹

What had stayed in Peng's mind was the detritus of the steel campaign – lumps of pig-iron rusting uselessly in the fields; the shells of deserted houses, stripped of their timbers to feed the furnaces; and fruit trees cut down for the same purpose. At the so-called ‘Happiness Homes’ for the aged, he had found spindly old people, subsisting on minimal rations without even blankets to keep them warm. ‘The old can grit their teeth,’ one elderly man said, ‘but babies can only cry.’ The peasants were mutinous, Peng had concluded. They hated the militarisation of daily existence, the enforced communal eating in the mess halls, the destruction of family life. The cadres were under constant pressure to outdo rival communes, leading to systematic exaggeration of crop yields, often by a margin of ten or twenty times. The alternative, they had told him, was to be branded as Rightists.

Peng was not Mao's favourite colleague. They had clashed too often in the past – going back all the way to the winter of 1928, when Peng and his small army of fellow-Hunanese had been left behind on the Jinggangshan, and Mao had failed to execute a promised diversionary manoeuvre to allow them to break out. The Defence Minister's loyalties were to the Party, not to Mao as an individual.

In Shaoshan, the Chairman had been moved to write a poem, eulogising the ‘waves of growing rice and beans, and heroes everywhere going home in the smoky sunset’. Peng, too, had set his thoughts in verse on his last night in Hunan. But he had seen ‘scattered millet … and withered potato plants’, and had made a solemn vow to ‘speak out on behalf of the people’.

In fact, however, Peng did no such thing. In the first half of 1959, he uttered not so much as a word of criticism of the Great Leap. This may have been partly because his attention was taken up by the rebellion in Tibet, which broke out in March; and partly because Mao himself, by then, was preaching the virtues of moderation in a way that promised to correct the more egregious errors. But the main reason was the sheer difficulty, even for a man of Peng's stature, who had been at Mao's side for three decades, to call into question policies with which the Chairman was so intimately involved.

Five years earlier, Gao Gang had overstepped the bounds Mao had fixed and it had cost him his life. In 1955, Deng Zihui had opposed Mao – on technical, rather than political grounds – over the speed of collectivisation; Deng had survived but had lost most of his power. The following year, Zhou Enlai questioned the Little Leap, only to find himself forced to make cringing self-criticisms eighteen months later. Nor was the fate of those who spoke out during the ‘Hundred Flowers’ an encouragement to candour.

By 1959, it had become obvious that the only person who could safely criticise Mao and his policies was Mao himself; others did so at their peril. Back in Beijing, Peng's enthusiasm for ‘speaking out’ waned. Like other leaders who had doubts, he kept them to himself.

Food shortages had begun to affect the cities. Rice rations were reduced. Vegetables and cooking oil disappeared from the shops. The 1958 harvest had not been 430 million tons, nor even 260 million, which was the government's new best estimate, but actually (though it would not be admitted until after Mao's death) only 200 million tons, still a record but nowhere near the grandiose predictions of a few months earlier, when Mao had spoken airily of China having more grain than the country would know what to do with and every peasant being able to eat five meals a day.²³²

Peng was better informed than most about the true state of the harvest. Within the PLA there were already ominous rumblings as the overwhelmingly peasant recruits received news from home that their families were going hungry.

Meanwhile, as part of an effort to put the Leap on a more rational footing and combat exaggerated production claims, Mao had started urging officials to express their views frankly. ‘An individual sometimes wins over the majority,’ he had told the Central Committee in April. ‘Truth is sometimes in one person's hands alone … Speaking out should involve no penalty. According to Party regulations, people are entitled to their own opinions.’²³³ He had cited the example of the Confucian bureaucrat, Hai Rui, of the Ming dynasty, a model of probity who had been dismissed from office for upbraiding a sixteenth-century emperor. China, Mao declared, needed more Hai Ruis. From June onward, Party propagandists began producing anthologies, articles and plays extolling the Ming official's virtues. On July 2, the day the Lushan conference opened, Mao renewed his assurance that no one would be punished for ‘making criticisms and offering opinions’.

Peng had originally intended to skip the meeting. He had just returned from a six-week-long tour of eastern Europe, and he was tired. But, at Mao's urging, he went, and, once there, soon decided that this was the right place and the right moment to fulfil his pledge of the previous winter and ‘speak out’.

The Defence Minister, as was his custom, did not mince words. At a group discussion with officials from north-west China, he declared that ‘everybody is responsible for the mistakes committed during the [Great Leap] … including Comrade Mao Zedong’. A week later he resolved to take his concerns to Mao himself. But when he appeared at Mao's quarters, on the morning of Monday, July 13, he was told the Chairman was still sleeping. That night, therefore, he set out his views in a ‘letter of opinion’, had his aide-de-camp write out a clean copy, and next morning, not without some nervousness, despatched it for Mao to read.

Peng's letter mixed considerable praise for the achievements of the Leap – notably the unprecedented growth rate, which, he wrote, proved that Mao's strategic line was ‘in the main … correct’ – with criticisms of specific failings. Taken individually, these were unexceptionable. Mao may not have relished hearing that ‘petty-bourgeois fanaticism’ had generated Leftist errors; that in the backyard steel movement there had been both ‘losses and gains’ (implying that the former predominated); that ‘we have not sufficiently understood the socialist laws of proportionate and planned development’; and that economic construction had been handled less successfully than the PLA's shelling of Quemoy or the suppression of the revolt in Tibet. However, all these were things he could perfectly well have said himself. The problem was that, cumulatively, their effect was devastating. To Mao, the burden of Peng's message was that the Great Leap, even if justified in theory, had in fact led to disaster. Woven through his text were passages linking the Chairman personally with errors that had been made, including one where he took issue with Mao's claims that ‘politics is the commander’:

In the view of some comrades, putting politics in command can take the place of everything else. They have forgotten [that] it is aimed at … giving full play to the enthusiasm and creativity of the masses in order to speed up economic construction. [It] cannot take the place of economic principles, still less can it be a substitute for concrete measures in economic work.²³⁴

But more galling than anything Peng wrote was the way in which he had arrogated to himself the right to sit in judgement. Mao's praise of Hai Rui notwithstanding, specific criticisms of policy errors were one thing, ‘upbraiding the emperor’ quite another.

Three days later, on July 17, the conference secretariat, on Mao's instructions, distributed the text of Peng's letter to all delegates. This was generally interpreted at the time as a sign, if not of Mao's approval, at least that Peng's views were an acceptable basis for discussion. Over the next few days, several other Central Committee members – including Zhang Wentian, Mao's ally in the mid-1930s, who had remained a Politburo alternate – made speeches supporting his views. Two more Politburo members, Li Xiannian and Chen Yi, indicated agreement with it, and a number of others were hesitating.

Like most of the Chairman's speeches in later years, it was a rambling, somewhat disjointed statement, full of half-finished thoughts tangential to his main theme. But he made two ominous points. Peng Dehuai's letter, he said, constituted an error of political line, like those committed earlier by Li Lisan, Wang Ming and Gao Gang. Peng and his supporters were Rightists. Others, too, were ‘on the brink’. Those who were wavering, he warned, must make up their minds quickly on which side they wished to stand. Secondly, Mao said, if there were nothing but criticism, communist power would collapse. If that happened, he would ‘go away, go to the countryside, to lead the peasants and overthrow the government’ again, in order to re-establish the regime. He added menacingly, in a direct challenge to the PLA marshals, who were Peng's natural allies: ‘If you, the PLA, don't follow me, I'll go and found a [new] Red Army. [But] I think the PLA will follow me.’

After Mao had finished speaking, Peng walked home, as he wrote later, ‘with a heavy heart’. He lost his appetite and lay on his bed for hours, staring into space. His bodyguard called a doctor, who concluded that Peng must be ill. The Defence Minister disabused him. ‘If I've got a sickness,’ he said, ‘it's nothing that can be cured now.’

The conference ended on July 30. Next day, Mao convened an enlarged meeting of the Politburo Standing Committee to decide Peng's fate.²³⁵

Once again Khrushchev had simplified his task.²³⁶ Six weeks earlier, on the eve of the planned shipment to China of the sample atom bomb which the Soviet leader had promised Mao, the Russians had informed Beijing that they were cancelling the nuclear technology agreement: the Kremlin had decided that if it provided Mao with nuclear weapons, it risked being dragged into a nuclear conflict with America over Taiwan. Now, in the same week that Peng had issued his ‘letter of opinion’, Khrushchev publicly condemned the communes. Mao lost no time in circulating at Lushan an approving account of the Russian leader's remarks issued by Taiwan's Central News Agency. What better proof could there be that Peng and his supporters were ‘objectively’ aiding China's enemies – if, indeed, not actually colluding with them? Peng and Zhang Wentian, after all, had both just visited Moscow.

Against this background of innuendo, Mao had no difficulty persuading his colleagues that they were confronted by an anti-Party conspiracy, and that Peng and his ‘military club’ should be cast into outer darkness.²³⁷

The operative question was no longer whether the Chairman was right, but whether anyone had the courage to tell him he was wrong. Certainly not the malleable Zhou Enlai, for whom avoidance of confrontations with Mao was the basic premise of political survival. Not Liu Shaoqi, either: he had not forgiven Peng for giving Gao Gang a sympathetic hearing in 1953. Chen Yun was away on sick leave, and Deng Xiaoping, conveniently, had broken his leg playing table tennis. Lin Biao detested Peng, and would do whatever Mao asked of him. Of all the inner core, only the venerable Marshal Zhu De, now in his seventies, was rash – or honest – enough to speak on Peng's behalf, counselling moderation – and he was afterwards required to make a self-criticism for his pains. The others formed a political lynch-mob. The verbatim record of the Standing Committee meeting, taken down by one of the Chairman's secretaries, Li Rui, himself to be purged shortly afterwards, offers a revealing glimpse of the snakepit that life at the top in Mao's China had become:²³⁸

MAO: When you speak of ‘petty bourgeois fanaticism’, you are mainly pointing the spearhead at the central leadership organs. It's not at the provincial leaders, or even at the masses. This is my observation … In fact you are pointing the spearhead of attack at the centre. You may admit this, or, more likely, you may not. But we think you are opposing the centre. You were prepared to publish your letter in order to win people over and to organise them [against us] …
PENG: When I wrote about petty-bourgeois fanaticism … I should have recognised that this is a political problem. I did not grasp it very well.
MAO (interrupting): Now that the letter has been made public, all the counter-revolutionaries have come out to applaud it.
PENG: This was a letter I sent to you personally … I wrote on it, ‘Please check and see if I am right, and give me your comments’. My whole intention concerning this letter was that it might have some reference value, and I wanted you to consider it.
MAO: That's not true … Whenever there is a problem, you are not straightforward about it … People [who don't know you] think you are simple, frank and outspoken. When they first know you, that's all they see. [But later] they realise … you are devious. No one can see what's in the bottom of your heart. Then they say you are a hypocrite … You are a Right opportunist. [You said in your letter] the Party leadership is no good. You want to usurp the proletarian banner.
PENG: The letter was sent to you personally. I carried out no [factional] activities.
MAO: You did.
PENG ZHEN: In the group discussions, you said everyone should take responsibility for what happened, including Comrade Mao Zedong … Who were you attacking then? …
HE LONG: You have a very deep prejudice against the Chairman. In your letter you show you are full of preconceived ideas …
ZHOU ENLAI: You have adopted a Right-opportunist stance. The target of your letter was the Party's general line …
MAO: You wanted to bring about the disintegration of the Party. You have a plan, you have an organisation, you have made preparations, you have attacked the correct line from a Rightist standpoint … [You say that] at [Yan'an], I fucked your mother for forty days. So this time, there are still twenty days to go. For you to be satisfied, you want to fuck my mother for forty days this time. I tell you, you've fucked enough …^VI
PENG: If you all think this way, it's very difficult for me to say anything … [But] you need not worry, I won't commit suicide; I will never be a counter-revolutionary; I can still go out and work in the fields.

On August 2, the Central Committee met to confirm the Standing Committee's verdict. A few of Peng's junior military colleagues spoke up for him (and were promptly purged as a result). The Defence Minister humiliated himself with a speech of self-abasement in which he denounced his letter to Mao as ‘a series of absurdities’, and confessed to damaging Mao's ‘lofty prestige’ from motives of ‘exceedingly wrong personal prejudice’.²³⁹ The speech was a pointless gesture, which he afterwards regretted.

The CC, in its resolution, accused him of heading a ‘Right-opportunist anti-Party clique’; of making ‘vicious attacks’ on Mao; of having focused on ‘transient and partial shortcomings’ in order to ‘paint a pitch-black picture of the present situation’; of having formed an ‘anti-Party alliance’ with Gao Gang in 1954; and of engaging in ‘long-standing anti-Party activities’. As if that were not enough, he, Zhang Wentian, and the other members of the alleged clique, were described as ‘representatives of the bourgeoisie’ who had wormed their way into the Party during the civil war period.

Yet then came a contradiction. Having detailed a list of offences which more than justified expulsion from the Party (and, in the case of a low-level official, would have meant a long term in a labour camp, or even execution), the Central Committee ruled that the ‘conspirators’ could not only keep their Party membership, but Peng and Zhang Wentian, while losing their governmental responsibilities, would retain their Politburo posts.²⁴⁰

This was presented as an example of Mao's long-established policy of ‘curing the sickness to save the patient’.²⁴¹ In fact, it had more to do with Peng's stature within the PLA and among the Party rank and file. Even for Mao, it was not easy to discredit one of the great heroes of the Revolutionary War, who had led the Chinese Volunteers in Korea; a man with a reputation for incorruptibility, who lived as an ascetic and was morally unassailable. Outwardly, the Chairman had no choice but to appear magnanimous, even as, in private, he continued to fume over Peng's ‘surprise attack’.

A month later, Lin Biao, whom Mao had been grooming since 1956 as Peng's eventual successor, was named Defence Minister in his place. Lin was in poor health, and had played little public role since 1949. But he was a Mao loyalist, and he set to work with a will to extirpate Peng's influence from the military, which, in the 1950s and 1960s, no less than during the civil war, remained the bedrock on which Mao's political power was based. Peng moved out of his home in Zhongnanhai, and for the next six years lived a hermetic existence under virtual house arrest in a building in the grounds of the old Summer Palace, on the northern outskirts of Beijing. Although he had retained his formal rank, he never attended another Politburo meeting, or any other official function. His career was over.

It was not simply personal cowardice and political self-interest that had made Peng's colleagues line up to savage him. If the Politburo operated in this way, it was Mao who made it do so.

Criticising the Chairman did not have to be synonymous with overthrowing Party rule. Since 1949, it had not always been like that. Yet now, after months of urging people to speak out, pledging that there would be no retribution – the moment someone did so, Mao could not stomach it. Zhang Wentian had complained at Lushan, in a passage that had especially angered Mao, that all the problems of the Great Leap had a single basic cause – the lack of inner-Party democracy, which meant that one man decided everything. ‘One would be labelled a sceptic, a tide-watcher, or a “white flag” to be pulled down, if one made a few differing remarks,’ he had told the conference. ‘Why? Why are negative views not tolerated? … What is there to be afraid of?’²⁴²

In Peng's case, there were specific factors at work. Within the pressure-cooker of the inner circle, the Chairman was open to influence by those whose views reinforced his own. During the crucial two days when he was deciding how to respond to Peng's letter, Kang Sheng and Ke Qingshi, the left-wing Shanghai First Secretary, who had both been in the forefront of the Leap and were thus particularly vulnerable to any change of policy, artfully fuelled his suspicions that the Defence Minister was orchestrating a concerted campaign of opposition. Moreover, the fact that it was the cussedly independent-minded Peng, with whom Mao had been quarrelling for decades, rather than a more congenial figure, who dared to criticise his policies, made his reaction all the fiercer.

The very day the letter was distributed, he told his staff: ‘Where Peng Dehuai is concerned, I have always had a rule. If he attacks, I attack back … [With him] it is 30 per cent co-operation, 70 per cent conflict – and it has been like that for 31 years.’²⁴³

Yet, even without these aggravating circumstances, Mao would no doubt have acted in the same way. As the 1950s drew to a close, in his mind ‘disagreement’ became identical with ‘opposition’ – whether it was the disagreement of the intellectuals, in the Hundred Flowers movement, or disagreement within the Party.

After the ‘Hundred Flowers’, he had warned that class struggle between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie would continue in Chinese society for many years to come. Now he asserted that this was true within the Party as well:

The struggle at Lushan was a class struggle, and a continuation of the life-and-death struggle between the two major antagonistic classes, the proletariat and the bourgeoisie. This kind of struggle will continue … in our Party for at least another 20 years and possibly for half a century … Contradictions and struggle will go on and on for ever, otherwise the world will no longer be worthy of its being. The bourgeois politicians say the philosophy of the Communist Party is a philosophy of struggle. That is correct, only the modes of the struggle vary according to the times.²⁴⁴

Thus were laid the foundations for the notion, which would dominate the last years of Mao's life, that there was a ‘bourgeoisie’ inside the Party, which must be ferreted out, regardless of cost, if revolutionary purity was to be preserved.

Just as the ‘Hundred Flowers’, through the anti-Rightist Campaign, silenced China's intellectuals, so the Lushan conference, through the purge of Peng Dehuai, silenced Mao's Party colleagues. Zhu De had asked the Standing Committee: ‘If people like us don't speak up, then who will dare to talk?’ Now he had the Chairman's answer. Never again in Mao's lifetime would a Politburo member openly challenge his policies.

There was one, further, depressing parallel. The anti-Rightist Campaign had claimed half-a-million victims. The campaign against ‘Right opportunism’, as the movement against critics of the Leap was known, triggered a political blood-letting more than ten times larger: six million people, most of them Party members or low-level officials, were criticised and struggled against for allegedly opposing Mao's policies. In Sichuan, 80 per cent of basic-level cadres were dismissed. As in 1957, local Party secretaries assigned their subordinates quotas of purge-victims to round up. In some areas, whole groups were accused, rather than individuals. Scores of thousands died, some executed, others succumbing to the punishments inflicted on them during struggle meetings. Once again, there were numerous suicides. ‘Everybody was in a state of danger,’ one provincial First Secretary recalled, ‘mothers and fathers, husbands and wives, dared not speak to each other.’²⁴⁵

The attack on alleged ‘Rightists’ produced, as it had done two years earlier, a fresh upsurge of Leftism. Mao's efforts of the first half of the year to moderate the Great Leap went abruptly into reverse. To prove that Peng had been wrong, the policies which he had condemned were revived with redoubled vigour. Once again, Mao dreamed aloud of cornucopian production figures: 650 million tons of steel annually by the end of the century, perhaps 1,000 million tons of grain.²⁴⁶

This renewed vision of plenty coincided with a further sharp deterioration in the food supply. The 1959 harvest was the worst for several years. The government announced that 270 million tons had been gathered in; the true figure, not disclosed until more than 20 years later, was 170 million.²⁴⁷ The authorities blamed exceptional weather, with floods in the south and drought in the north. In fact, Chinese meteorologists later confirmed, climatic conditions were little different from normal. That year, amid celebrations for the tenth anniversary of the founding of Red China, hundreds of millions of people went hungry.^VII For the first time since the communist victory, it was no longer a matter of pockets of starvation: in every part of the country, millions of peasants – the very people whom the revolution was supposed to serve – were slowly starving to death.²⁴⁸

At this point relations with the Soviet Union – still, despite mutual tensions, China's only major ally – took an abrupt turn for the worse. The Tibetan revolt that spring, and the subsequent flight of the Dalai Lama, had caused friction with India. In August, less than ten days after the end of the Lushan plenum, a border clash occurred in which an Indian soldier was killed. Khrushchev, to Mao's fury, adopted an attitude of neutrality. A month later, after returning from a triumphal visit to the United States, which consecrated the policies of peaceful coexistence that China so detested, he flew to Beijing, ostensibly to attend the tenth-anniversary celebrations, but in fact to make one last attempt to get the relationship back on a normal footing. It was doomed from the outset. The Russian leader's decision to abrogate the nuclear co-operation accord; his wooing of American imperialism; his insistence in recent months that Taiwan be recovered only by peaceful means; not to mention the Indian dispute – were all, in Mao's view, so many acts of deliberate betrayal.

The suspicion that had begun to form in Mao's mind in 1956, that the Soviet leadership was abandoning ‘the sword of Leninism’, now crystallised into certainty. Just as in Stalin's day, he decided, Russia would always put its own interests first and those of China, second: it was time to make the conflict public.²⁴⁹ For Khrushchev, too, the visit marked a parting of the ways. Mao, he concluded, was bellicose, duplicitous and nationalistic. The basis for a fraternal relationship simply no longer existed.

In February 1960, at a Warsaw Pact meeting in Moscow, the two sides aired their differences over peaceful coexistence before the east European members of the bloc.²⁵⁰ In April, in an article to mark the ninetieth anniversary of Lenin's birth, which Mao himself revised, the People's Daily set out the ideological basis for China's stance. As long as imperialism existed, it said, wars would occur; peaceful competition was a fraud, perpetrated by ‘the old revisionists and their modern counterparts’. Both sides began canvassing support among other communist parties. Inevitably, an open clash followed. At the Romanian Party Congress in June, Khrushchev, for the first time, denounced Mao by name as ‘an ultra-Leftist, an ultradogmatist and a left revisionist’ who, like Stalin, had become ‘oblivious of any interests but his own, spinning theories detached from the realities of the modern world’. Peng Zhen, representing China, responded in kind. Khrushchev, he said, was behaving in a ‘patriarchal, arbitrary and tyrannical’ manner in order to impose non-Marxist views.

Bizarrely, Mao and his colleagues remained convinced that this inter-Party struggle could be confined to the ideological plane without affecting state-to-state relations. The chances of a complete rupture, the Politburo decided, were ‘relatively small’.²⁵¹

Three weeks later, the Soviet leadership informed China that, with immediate effect, all Russian experts were being withdrawn and all Russian aid was being terminated. Factories were left half-built; blueprints torn up; research projects abandoned. Nearly 1,400 Soviet specialists and their families boarded special trains to Moscow.

If Khrushchev's intention had been to force Mao to back down, as his aides asserted, he had miscalculated grievously. Even those Chinese leaders who harboured private doubts about the communes and Mao's Great Leap Forward strategy now rallied to their defence. Russia's treachery proved that Mao's insistence on China finding its own independent path to communism had been amply justified. Never again would it allow itself to become reliant on a foreign power.

The break with Moscow, while damaging, had little direct impact on the famine. None of the cancelled projects was agricultural.²⁵² Indirectly, however, it did play a role. It distracted Mao's attention from the grain crisis, and he insisted that, for reasons of face, China should repay its debts to Moscow ahead of schedule. Roughly 650 million roubles (equivalent to 5 billion US dollars in today's terms) were reimbursed in four years. To generate those sums, the peasants had to be squeezed still more harshly to produce exportable foodstuffs while starvation was rampant. For the same reason, Chinese foreign aid to Third World countries was maintained throughout this period, averaging 500 million RMB (equivalent to 1.6 billion US dollars) a year.²⁵³ Those decisions exacerbated the famine. But the root cause was the Great Leap itself and Mao's continuing refusal to take effective action to remedy its terrible effects.

By July it was clear that the 1960 harvest would be even worse than the previous year's. This time the weather did play a role.²⁵⁴ One hundred million acres, more than a third of all cultivated land, were in the grip of the worst drought for a century. In Shandong, eight of the twelve main rivers were bone-dry. Even the Yellow River fell to a point where men could wade across its lower reaches, something not seen within living memory. Then came floods. Another 50 million acres were devastated. After a winter of hunger, the peasantry had neither the strength to fight back, nor – more crucially – the means to do so because of the disruption caused by the frenzy of the Leap. ‘The people are too hungry to work, and pigs are too hungry to stand up,’ one young soldier complained. ‘The commune members are asking: “Is Chairman Mao going to let us starve?”’ That year, China did starve. All the grain that could be gathered amounted to a paltry 143 million tons. Even on the outskirts of Beijing, people ate bark and weeds. The death-rate in the capital, the best-supplied city in China, rose two-and-a-half times. In parts of Anhui, Henan and Sichuan, where Leftist provincial secretaries had promoted the Leap most strongly, a quarter of the population perished. Altogether more than 20 million people died in the famine in 1960, far more than in any other year.²⁵⁵

The campaign against right-opportunism launched after the Lushan conference had made a bad situation infinitely worse. A year later Mao would acknowledge:

What was the nature of our error? … We should not have transmitted the resolution against Peng [Dehuai and the others] below the county level … Below that level, only … the measures against leftism should have been disseminated … Carrying it further resulted in a large number of people being accused as right-deviating opportunists. Now we can see that that was a mistake, and that good people who spoke the truth were labelled as [rightists] or even as counter-revolutionaries.²⁵⁶

It was a lame excuse. The problem was not that the movement against rightism had been enlarged: the problem was that Mao had launched it in the first place. Even if it had been less extensively publicised, grass-roots cadres would have learned that Mao was once more on the warpath against rightists. Every campaign since 1949 – the land reform; the suppression of counter-revolutionaries; the cultural campaigns against The Life of Wu Xun and The Secret History of the Qing Court; the campaign against Hu Feng; the anti-Rightist movement; the repudiation of those who opposed ‘rash advance’; and now the campaign against right-opportunism – all, in one way or another, had targeted ‘rightists’. To find a time when Mao had opposed leftism, it was necessary to go back to the civil war, when he had opposed excessive rigour in the land reform, if not to the 1930s, when the Party was split over the Li Lisan line.

At the end of the 1950s, Mao was at the summit of an imperial system, reinforced by a Leninist organisational structure, in which all power and privilege flowed from the top down. He himself spoke of ‘combining Marx with Qin Shihuang’ – legalist despotism with a totalitarian base.²⁵⁷ In such a system, one Chinese historian wrote: ‘Each official wore two faces: before his superiors, he was a slave, and before his subordinates, a tyrant.’²⁵⁸

Those who wanted a retreat from the Great Leap, as the Central Committee had urged in the spring, knew that if they spoke out they risked being purged as followers of Peng Dehuai. Acknowledging food shortages, overwork or starvation – a word whose use was forbidden; officials spoke instead of ‘an epidemic’ (of what was left unsaid) – was viewed as right deviationism, to be struggled against and crushed.

At the most basic level, in the communes, in the production brigades and teams and in the work groups, the cadres resorted to coercion of medieval barbarity: villagers suspected of stealing food were branded on the face with red-hot irons, forced to eat excrement, drenched in urine, beaten to death or buried alive. Starving children who stole food risked the same fate.

There were exceptions. In some areas, local officials turned a blind eye to the peasants’ attempts to feed themselves and allowed what were called ‘salvation fields’, where they could grow their own crops. But most tried to protect their own backs by mercilessly squeezing those under their authority.

As in famines throughout Chinese history, men sold their wives, if there were buyers – and women were pleased to be bought, because purchase meant survival. Banditry reappeared. Cannibalism was rife. Bodies were exhumed and eaten. During the winters of 1959 and 1960, when the ground was too hard for burials, corpses littered the roadsides and river banks. Scavengers cut off the flesh and cooked it. There were cases of parents killing and eating their own children, and elder brothers and sisters eating younger siblings. That, too, was not new. In the north China famine of the 1870s, when a third of the population of Shanxi died, missionaries who travelled to the area found children being boiled and eaten.^VIII

At every level, officials tried to prevent their superiors discovering the true state of affairs in order to save their own skins. In Guizhou, when a county Party committee learned that inspectors were about to arrive, ‘sick villagers and neglected children were locked up by the militia, while tell-tale trees without bark [which starving villagers had eaten] were torn out, roots and all’. In another incident, in Anhui, 3000 villagers suffering from oedema were rounded up and kept out of sight.²⁵⁹ Militiamen manned checkpoints to prevent travel out of famine-stricken areas. Letters which mentioned the famine were intercepted and destroyed and the writers arrested. Provincial leaders, in turn, sent reassuring reports to the central leadership. When later the truth emerged, they claimed, falsely, that they had been duped by their subordinates. For some this murderous charade was a cynical means of winning advancement. But most acted out of fear: to tell those in power that Mao's policies were failing was a risk few wished to take.

None the less, by October 1960, after the campaign against right opportunism had been raging for more than a year, the death toll was beyond the power of even the provincial leadership to conceal. That month two of Mao's cousins came to see him from Shaoshan. ‘Chairman brother,’ said Mao Zerong, ‘You live in Beijing, as remote as the Emperors of old, and you don't know what's happening. Now all is in chaos and people are starving. You need to do something!’²⁶⁰ Shortly afterwards, Mao received a report on the situation in Xinyang prefecture, in Henan, where more than a million people, an eighth of the population, had starved to death.²⁶¹ At an emergency meeting of the State Council, summoned to discuss the situation, Zhou Enlai insisted: ‘Not a single person reported [this] to us. The central government knew nothing about it.’ That was a barefaced lie. Eight months earlier, a senior official in the Central Committee's internal affairs department had minuted that 200,000 to 300,000 people had died in Xinyang, but Tan Zhenlin, the vice-premier in charge of agriculture, had had the report suppressed. Tan had also objected to a second report, which spoke of 400,000 deaths. Later Liu Shaoqi shelved a report stating that there were 600,000 dead.²⁶² From February to October, while the state granaries were bulging with grain, most of Mao's colleagues were well aware of the extent of the starvation, yet did nothing. Had they acted to open the grain reserves in order to feed the starving, more than ten million lives might have been saved. They did not because they were unwilling to commit themselves until the Chairman had spoken.

The Xinyang Incident, as it was called, forced a change of policy. In one third of the country, Mao now conceded, ‘the situation is very bad … Scoundrels have taken power, people have been beaten to death, food production has dropped, people are going hungry.’²⁶³ In January 1961, the Central Committee finally approved a wholesale retreat, disguised as ‘adjustment, consolidation, replenishment and enhancement’. Relief grain was sent to the worst-affected areas.²⁶⁴ But the leaders, from Mao on down, refused to admit their own responsibility. Wang Renzhong, then second secretary of the South Central Bureau, told the Henan provincial Standing Committee that winter that the errors had been at the local level:

To see the masses dying, yet keep the grain locked in storerooms and refuse to distribute it; to watch the communal kitchens close down and yet not allow the masses to light stoves in their own homes; to refuse to let the masses harvest wild herbs or flee the famine; to deny walking sticks to those crippled with starvation; to treat people worse than oxen or horses, arbitrarily beating and even killing them, lacking even a shred of human feelings – if these were not the enemy, what were they? … These people, for the sake of their own self-preservation, slaughtered our class brothers, and we just kill them with equal ruthlessness.²⁶⁵

Who were ‘these people’ who had acted so shamefully? To Mao they were ‘class enemies’ – ‘landlords and local despots, henchmen of feudalism, bandits, reactionary secret societies and secret agents’ – who had survived the ‘new democratic revolution’ which had accompanied the communist victory and had then managed to usurp positions of power in the countryside. Their actions were an attempt at ‘counter revolutionary class restoration’.²⁶⁶

It was singularly unconvincing. Indeed, one may wonder whether even Mao believed it, for none of these supposed ‘class enemies’ was executed and, after undergoing ‘study sessions’, most were allowed to keep their posts. The majority of the provincial leaders also escaped unscathed, and the smaller fry who had been purged as right opportunists were rehabilitated. In the end the only ones to be punished were Peng Dehuai and his colleagues – the group which had had the courage to tell Mao to his face that his plans were misconceived and would lead to nationwide disaster, as indeed they had.

There was, none the less, a grain of truth in the leadership's explanation. A Central Committee Special Investigation Group reported that local cadres had adopted ‘the tactics of the landlords and the Guomindang’. As often in revolutions, those charged with enforcing the new order had embraced the brutal and discredited methods of those they had overthrown.

But the roots of the catastrophe lay elsewhere. Officials at the county and provincial level, let alone on the communes and production brigades, could never have wrought the havoc that they did had Mao not established a system where no one, not even his closest colleagues, could question his decisions, and none of those around him could move to alleviate the tragedy that was unfolding until Mao himself allowed them to do so.

Throughout the period of the Great Leap and for decades after, the extent of the disaster was a closely guarded secret. In each province only five people had access to demographic statistics: the Party first secretary and his deputy; the governor and his deputy; and the head of the Public Security Bureau. At the national level, even the Politburo was kept in the dark: only members of the Standing Committee were informed, and not all of them. In 1961, the Food Minister, Chen Guodong, and two other senior officials were directed to compile detailed records from each province. They estimated that the population loss throughout the country was in the tens of millions. Their report was sent only to Mao and Zhou Enlai. After Zhou had read it, he ordered that all copies be destroyed.²⁶⁷

Twenty years later, in June 1980, Hu Yaobang, who was then about to succeed Hua Guofeng as Party Chairman, became the first Chinese leader publicly to acknowledge the magnitude of the tragedy. He told a group of Yugoslav journalists that 20 million people had died. That figure was not reported within China, however. Subsequently the leadership approved a figure of just under 17 million, which remains the official death toll today. Yang Jisheng, who has made the most careful study of the population figures thus far, has concluded that a total of 36 million deaths ‘approaches the reality but is still too low’, and that in addition there was a shortfall of 40 million births, because women stopped menstruating and couples were too weak to procreate. That is probably as close as we shall ever come to a definitive figure.²⁶⁸ It is, in all conscience, enough.

As Mao contemplated the ruins that his delusions had brought about, he began gloomily to implement his long-delayed promise to retire to the ‘second front’. The Great Leap had ended in an apocalyptic failure. His grandiose dream of universal plenty had metamorphosed into an epic of pure horror. At the end of 1960, he set aside once and for all the idea of making China a great economic power, never to concern himself with it again.

I It is sobering to reflect that those predictions, which at the time were dismissed in the West as pure fantasy, have since been borne out. China overtook the United States in steel production in 1993, and twenty years later was producing more than 800 million tons a year, almost ten times the American figure. Despite slowing growth, the Chinese economy is on track to become the world's largest by 2025 or earlier (as Mao envisaged in 1955, when he told the 6th Plenum of the 7th Central Committee that China would catch up with the United States in 50 to 75 years: see Lin Yunhui, Wutuobang yundong: Cong dayuejin dao dajihuang, 1958–1961, Xianggang zhongwen daxue chubanshe, Hong Kong, 2008, p. 9).

II Following the communist victory in 1949, Chiang Kai-shek's regime on Taiwan, with the support of the United States, continued to occupy China's UN seat. On Stalin's orders, the Soviet Union boycotted meetings of the Security Council from January to October, 1950, ostensibly in protest against the nationalists’ presence. The result was to perpetuate the exclusion of the People's Republic, in keeping with Stalin's aim of maximising Chinese dependence on, and subjection to, Moscow. After China's entry into the Korean War, Beijing's debarment was ratified by annual votes of the General Assembly until 1971, when Taiwan, in its turn, was excluded. Although Eisenhower agreed to ambassadorial talks with China in August 1955, first in Geneva and then in Warsaw, they marked time until 1970 when Kissinger visited Beijing.

III This was less far-fetched than it might sound. In 1955, an airliner that was to have taken Zhou Enlai to Indonesia was blown up in mid-air by a bomb which had been placed aboard by a nationalist agent in Hong Kong. Zhou changed his travel plans after Chinese intelligence got wind of the plot. Several other members of the Chinese delegation, who were allowed to go ahead with the trip, lost their lives when it crashed.

IV A few weeks after writing ‘The Immortals’, Mao invited Chen Yuying, the maidservant who had worked for Kaihui and himself in Changsha, to visit him in Beijing. They talked for two hours, and before she left, he told her: ‘Seeing you today, it seems as if I have seen Kaihui again.’

V Mao's more controversial – and contentious – statements during this period, notably his remarks in Shanghai in March 1959, which some recent writers have claimed as evidence that he was indifferent to the prospect of mass starvation, are discussed in the afterword of this book, Mao: Western Judgements.

VI Mao was replying here to an earlier remark of Peng's, in which the Marshal had referred to criticisms to which he had been subjected (apparently related to the Hundred Regiments Campaign) before the Seventh Congress in 1945. ‘You fucked my mother at Yan'an for forty days,’ Peng had said. ‘I've been fucking your mother in Lushan for only eighteen days and you've already come out to stop me!’

VII To mark the anniversary, a major building programme was undertaken in Beijing, including the enlargement of Tiananmen Square, the construction of the Great Hall of the People, the National History Museum, the Diaoyutai state guest house and seven other large complexes. Despite the onset of the famine, it was completed as scheduled. The following year, in Mao's birthplace, Shaoshan, where 30,000 people would die of starvation, a luxurious presidential guest house was built for him. While the famine was at its height, similar residences for the use of Politburo Standing Committee members were built in many other cities.

VIII The Welsh missionary, Timothy Richard, recorded in his diary while taking famine relief to Shanxi: ‘That people pull down their houses, sell their wives and daughters, eat roots and carrion, clay and leaves, is news which nobody wonders at … The sight of men and women lying helpless on the roadside, or if dead, torn by hungry dogs and magpies [and] of children being boiled and eaten up is so fearful as to make one shudder’ (cited in Thompson, Larry Clinton, William Scott Ament and the Boxer rebellion, McFarland, North Carolina, 2009, p. 21). Frank Dikötter, who relies mainly on official accounts in Chinese archives, concludes that there were few cases of peasants killing and eating family members and suggests that the issue has been sensationalised (Mao's Great Famine, pp. 320–3). Where cannibalism did occur, he says, it may have been encouraged by the spectacle of ‘state sponsored violence’. The prevalence of such practices in earlier famines gives the lie to that. Yang Jisheng, who treats the issue at much greater length, writes that both cannibalism and necrophagy were practised in every area where severe starvation occurred, and that in the worst-hit provinces, like Anhui, ‘there was not a single commune where cannibalism was not discovered’ (Tombstone, pp. 40–6, 141–4, 278–9, 289–90 and 302–4).