CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Musings on Immortality

It would take five years to restore even a semblance of normality after the haemorrhaging away of wealth and population that Mao's stupendous folly had caused.

The first year of recovery was taken up with a desperate scramble to find whatever stopgap measures might serve to keep the People's Republic from falling apart. In Sichuan, and in three other western provinces, as well as Tibet, the PLA had to be called out to suppress armed rebellions, launched by starving peasants.¹ In Henan, the militia, which had been created to give the communes a means of self-defence, went on the rampage, committing armed robberies, rapes and murders. The peasants referred to the militiamen as ‘bandit kings’, ‘tiger bands’ and ‘beating-up gangs’. There and in Shandong, another of the provinces where the excesses of the Leap had been most stark, government authority in many districts disintegrated altogether.² Liu Shaoqi warned that China was facing a descent into anarchy, similar to that which the Soviet Union had experienced during the civil war in the early 1920s.³

To reduce the pressure on urban food supplies, 28 million city-dwellers were forced to move to the countryside – a feat that Mao described admiringly as ‘equivalent to deporting the population of a medium-sized country like Belgium’ (his arithmetic was faulty: it was three times the population of Belgium). Even then, massive grain imports were needed to feed those who remained.^I In 1961, nearly six million tons of wheat were purchased abroad, mostly from Australia and Canada, some even from the United States, its origin disguised as being from Europe.⁴ Imports would remain at that level into the 1970s.

Alongside these practical measures, Liu and his colleagues began to re-examine the false assumptions on which the Great Leap had rested.

The difficulty, as always, was Mao.

His retirement to the ‘second front’ had not meant relinquishing power, merely exercising it in a different manner. Whereas before, the Chairman had set the pace and everyone else had followed, now he expected the other members of the Politburo Standing Committee to take the lead – but only in ways that were consonant with his own thinking. Peng Dehuai had learned to his cost that Mao alone was permitted to question the policies he had framed. Now Liu and Deng Xiaoping, in their turn, discovered the perils of being on the ‘first front’. ‘Which emperor took this decision?’ Mao demanded in March 1961, after Deng had proposed (without first securing his agreement) that agricultural policy should be handled differently in the north and the south.⁵

The result was extreme caution. Rethinking the ‘newborn things’ of the Great Leap Forward – the communes, the collective kitchens, the system of free supply – was resolutely avoided until it became clear which way the Chairman's own mind was working. Thus, in March 1961, the Central Committee strongly reaffirmed the value of communal eating arrangements.⁶ But when, a month later, Mao endorsed a report stating that communal dining halls had become ‘an impediment to developing production and a cancer in relations between the Party and the masses’, his colleagues instantly changed course.⁷ Within days, the Chairman's new line was being echoed by Liu Shaoqi, then making an inspection tour of Hunan; by Zhou Enlai, visiting Hebei; followed in quick succession by Deng Xiaoping, Peng Zhen and Zhu De.⁸ The repercussions were even felt in the labour camps, where China's prison population was set to making aluminium kitchen utensils, to replace the iron ones smelted down in the backyard steel campaign, so that peasant households might once more have the means to cook for themselves now that collective catering was at an end.⁹

In May, the supply system was abandoned as well. The amount of land that could be allocated for private plots was increased. The principle of ‘more pay for more work’ was restored, along with the Leninist slogan, ‘He who does not work shall not eat’ – a grim warning indeed at a time of mass starvation. Rural fairs and markets, which had been banned during the Leap, were authorised again, and pedlars and street-traders reappeared. That month, at a Central Committee work conference, Liu charged for the first time that the problems had not been caused by natural disasters, as the government had been claiming, but by ‘deficiencies and errors’ by leaders at every level.¹⁰ He went on:

In feudal society, the landlord used to squeeze peasants out of their grain ration. Today it turns out that we, too, have been squeezing peasants out of their grain ration … The problem in the last few years was caused by unrealistic grain-collecting quotas, unrealistic estimates, unrealistic procurement figures and unrealistic workloads … In Hunan people say that three tenths was natural calamity and seven tenths man-made … I don't think we can use [the analogy of] one finger [out of ten] to describe our setbacks. We must be honest … The Central Committee must take the main responsibility.¹¹

The reference to ‘one finger out of 10’ – a formula which Mao regularly used to dismiss setbacks as minor – came dangerously close to a direct criticism of the Chairman. But Liu was careful to emphasize that the policies of the Great Leap had been ‘completely correct’ – the problem lay in the way they had been implemented ? and Mao let the charge pass, even acknowledging a measure of responsibility. His understanding of how to build socialism in China had not been profound enough, he said.

Finally, in September 1961, the Chairman made one last concession.

During the summer, with the leadership's approval, many communes had been subdivided to about a half, or a third, of their original size, in an attempt to make them less unwieldy. Now Mao informed his colleagues that he had decided that the basic management unit, which assigned each household its labour and shared out the fruits of the harvest, should also be made smaller, reverting from the ‘brigade’, grouping several villages, to the ‘production team’, equivalent to the original one-village co-operatives set up five or six years before. The aim was to restore the peasants’ motivation by linking their rewards directly to their own efforts and those of their neighbours, rather than making them pool their resources with families from other communities.¹²

It was a far cry from the principles Mao had set out in 1958. Then he had proclaimed that the superiority of the communes was that they were ‘first, big; and second, publicly owned’. Now the best he could hope for was that the concept of the commune might be preserved against the onslaughts of famine and nationwide demoralisation.

Once again, however, the Chairman's pre-emptive retreat turned out not to go far enough.

Part of the problem was that there had been so many twists and turns in the recent past that local cadres were reluctant to change course, even if the Politburo ordered them to, lest the wind shift yet again and they find themselves being denounced as Rightists.

Others – not only at the local level but including Politburo radicals like Kang Sheng; Ke Qingshi in Shanghai; and the Sichuan leader, Li Jingquan – were so closely identified with Leftist policies that any overt repudiation of the Great Leap would leave them politically exposed. Accordingly, they dragged their feet – Li Jingquan even to the point of defending communal eating after Mao himself had condemned it.

Both groups, moreover, noted that the Chairman remained deeply ambivalent about the change in direction that events had imposed. Not only did he refuse to admit that the previous policies had been mistaken – the furthest he would go was to say that no one was immune from error – but the plans which were worked out that year to revive commerce and industry, and to encourage new efforts in science, education, literature and the arts, all contained inherent ambiguities (and had to, in order to obtain Mao's approval), allowing them to be given either a radical or a moderate interpretation, depending on the prevailing political wind. Zhou Enlai summed up the unstable compromise on which the new policies were based by urging officials ‘on the one hand to wage class struggle, on the other to consolidate the united front’ – a squaring of the ideological circle which he knew quite well was impossible.¹³

In these circumstances, Mao's colleagues continued to adhere rigorously to the parameters the Chairman had laid down.

The steel and coal targets were cut back to levels which, for the first time since 1957, had some connection with reality. Industrial workers were permitted bonuses again, and factory managers given back their old powers. Deng, Liu and the Foreign Minister, Chen Yi (though not the ever-prudent Zhou Enlai) all elaborated on Mao's tacit admission that mistakes had been made – with both Deng and Liu quoting the peasants in areas they had visited as saying the famine was due ‘30 per cent to natural calamities, 70 per cent to human failings’.¹⁴ But no one said what the mistakes were, and still less who had made them.

The impasse, therefore, continued.

For the rest of the autumn, Mao, as befitted his new role on the ‘second front’, remained silent. His colleagues urged greater realism, but in such equivocal terms that no one was convinced. Lower-level officials held their fire, awaiting clearer signals.

The result was that, by December, there was still no sign of the economy bottoming out. In Anhui and other hard-hit provinces, cadres began experimenting with so-called ‘household responsibility systems’, under which land was contracted out to families to farm individually.¹⁵ Zhu De, on a visit to his native Sichuan, found cases of peasants abandoning the communes to grow crops on their own, and asked whether, in the current extremity, such expedients should not be officially approved, since ‘even if you don't write it in, it will happen anyway’.¹⁶

To Mao, that raised the spectre of collectivisation in the countryside unravelling altogether.

Accordingly, in January 1962, he summoned a Central Committee work conference in Beijing, to be attended not just by the two or three hundred senior officials normally present at such meetings, but by more than 7,000 cadres, drawn from county and commune Party committees all over China.

The idea behind this exceptional gathering was that it should mark a turning-point. But where Mao wanted the conference to call a halt to the erosion of socialist values, Liu Shaoqi and the other ‘first front’ leaders saw it as a moment of truth, when, at long last, lessons could be drawn from past errors and the Party would make a fresh start on the basis of consensus policies which the local cadres in attendance would convey directly and convincingly to the grass roots.

Liu set the tone with a report which lavished fulsome praise on Mao's correct guidance ‘at every critical moment’ and then repeated essentially the same charges, in somewhat watered-down form, that he had made the previous May. However, in the interval, the political mood had changed. As it had become increasingly obvious that the Leap had been a disaster, lower and mid-level cadres wanted to see the blame pinned where it belonged, on the national leaders who had caused it. It was one thing for Liu to criticise the conduct of the movement before an elite audience of Central Committee members and senior officials, quite another to voice the same complaints before thousands of cadres from the provinces. This time, when he declared, as he had in May, that ‘the primary responsibility for the shortcomings and errors in our work in these past few years lies with the Party centre’, there were immediate demands from the floor that he name the leaders responsible. Neither Liu, nor anyone else, was prepared to commit himself in open session.¹⁷ But a few days later, in committee, the north China leader, Peng Zhen, was more forthright. The Party Centre, he said, included Mao, Liu Shaoqi and the rest of the Politburo Standing Committee. To the extent that they were responsible, they should share the blame. Mao himself, Peng went on, was not immune from mistakes. It was he who had spoken of making the transition to communism in ‘three or five years’, and who had been behind the setting-up of the now abandoned communal kitchens. Even if he had been ‘only one-thousandth part mistaken’, failing to criticise him would ‘leave a bad influence on our Party … From Chairman Mao to every branch secretary, each bears a share of responsibility.’¹⁸

Ten days later, Mao gave his response:

Any mistakes that the Centre has made ought to be my direct responsibility, and I also have an indirect share of the blame because I am the Chairman of the Central Committee. I don't want other people to shirk their responsibility. There are some other comrades who also bear responsibility, but the person primarily responsible should be me.¹⁹

As a ‘self-criticism’, this was perfunctory in the extreme. Not only did Mao fail to acknowledge any personal errors of judgement, but there was no hint of an apology, no expression of remorse for the millions who had died, no admission of the true extent of the calamity that his policies had brought about. Instead, he sought to minimise his role, insisting that at all levels of the leadership ‘everyone has his share of responsibility’, and urging others to face their mistakes, too.

Those of you who … are afraid of taking responsibility, who do not allow people to speak, who think you are tigers, and that nobody will dare to touch your arse – whoever has this attitude, 10 out of 10 of you will fail. People will talk anyway. You think that nobody will really dare to touch the arses of tigers like you? They damn well will!

Minimal though it was, Mao's acknowledgement of liability electrified the meeting. He did not need to say more: in a Party which had learned to regard him as infallible, it was extraordinary enough for him to admit to any failings at all.

For the next week, tiger after tiger, from Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping down, ritually flagellated themselves with detailed confessions of error.²⁰ When the meeting ended, on February 7, there was a new sense, in the Politburo and among the regional delegations, that a page had been turned, and that it would at last be possible to give effect to the moderate, pragmatic policies that had evolved over the previous year.

For Mao, the ‘7,000-cadre big conference’, as it was afterwards known, had been a thoroughly disagreeable experience. He had not enjoyed criticising himself (while recognising that it was essential in order to draw a line under the past). He had been dismayed by the hostility shown by grass-roots delegates to Great Leap Forward policies, and by demands from the hall for an explanation of why the disaster had occurred. ‘They complain all day long and watch plays at night, they eat three full meals a day – and fart; that's what Marxism-Leninism means to them,’ he grumbled.²¹ He had relished even less the strictures of Peng Zhen – though the changed circumstances resulting from three years of famine and economic ruin meant that he could no longer respond as he had in the case of Peng Dehuai. The meeting had produced, too, a worrying undertow of support for the disgraced marshal's rehabilitation, now that his critique of the Leap had proved so well justified. Liu Shaoqi, who knew his own position would be at risk if Peng were vindicated, had vigorously squashed any suggestion that he be allowed to return, but in such a way as to let the audience understand that Peng's criticisms had been correct – his errors had been ‘colluding with Russia’ and ‘plotting against the Party leadership’.²²

More than any of this, however, the Chairman was concerned that the meeting had done nothing to reassert basic socialist truths. ‘If our country does not establish a socialist economy,’ he had warned the delegates, ‘we shall become … like Yugoslavia, which is actually a bourgeois country.’²³ There had been no response. Amid economic collapse, preserving socialist shibboleths was not uppermost in most delegates’ minds.

Accordingly, when the meeting ended, Mao withdrew to Hangzhou, where he spent the spring and early summer, leaving, for the first time, the triumvirate of Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping in sole charge of Party and state affairs.²⁴

In part, Mao was sulking: he had no wish to be involved in policies of which, deep down, he disapproved. In part, he was testing the waters: putting his colleagues in control on their own would show what stuff they were made of. But there was also a parallel with Mao's behaviour much earlier in his political career, when in the 1920s and 1930s, at critical moments, he had withdrawn, voluntarily or involuntarily, to await more propitious circumstances in which to effect his return.

He did not have to wait long.

In March, he sent his personal secretary, Tian Jiaying, to his home village of Shaoshan to see at first hand how the peasants were faring. Tian was astonished to find that all they wanted to talk about was the ‘household responsibility system’, of which both he and Mao strongly disapproved.²⁵ Since collectivisation in 1955, they explained, the harvest had declined in each successive year. By farming on their own, they could reverse that trend. By May, Tian had been converted: family farming might be politically incorrect, but, in the desperate straits in which China found itself, it was the best way to increase production and it was what the peasants wanted.²⁶ Chen Yun and Liu Shaoqi concurred. At a meeting of the Secretariat in June, Deng Xiaoping quoted a Sichuanese proverb: ‘It doesn't matter if the cat is yellow or black; so long as it catches the mouse, it is a good cat.’²⁷ Deng Zihui, the agricultural supremo who had clashed with Mao over the setting-up of co-operatives, drew up a national programme for putting the ‘responsibility system’ into effect. In many areas, the peasants had already gone ahead anyway. That summer, 20 per cent of China's fields were being farmed on an individual basis.²⁸

When Tian informed Mao of his findings, the Chairman's response echoed his words to Deng Zihui, seven years earlier: ‘The peasants want freedom; but we want socialism.’ There were times, he told Tian drily, when ‘we cannot completely heed the masses’, and this was one of them.²⁹

For a few weeks longer, Mao held his fire. The situation in the countryside was still too critical for even him to risk rocking the boat. But at the beginning of July, when it became clear that the summer harvest would be better than in either of the previous two years³⁰ – and that, therefore, agriculture was recovering without the ideological compromises that ‘responsibility systems’ would entail – he intervened decisively. Without bothering to inform the ‘first front’ leaders on the Politburo Standing Committee, he returned to Beijing, where he ordered Chen Boda, his former political secretary in Yan'an, now a Politburo alternate and a leading radical, to draw up a Central Committee resolution on strengthening the collective economy.³¹ As word leaked out that the Chairman was back, and on the warpath again, his colleagues ran for cover.

Deng Xiaoping issued a panicky instruction for the ‘black cat, yellow cat’ phrase to be deleted from the written texts of his speeches. Chen Yun left on sick leave, where he would languish on and off for the next fifteen years, returning to assume major responsibilities only after Mao's death. Liu Shaoqi got away with criticising himself for failing to prevent the other leaders’ mistakes. Even the ultra-cautious Zhou Enlai was upbraided for falling prey to pessimism. ‘We've been discussing difficulties and darkness for two years now,’ Mao fumed. ‘It's become a crime to look on the bright side.’³²

Private farming, however, was not the Chairman's only grievance. He was also unhappy with the conciliatory stance Liu had adopted towards the United States and the Soviet Union. This had been prompted by a paper drawn up by Wang Jiaxiang, the Returned Student who, in the late 1930s, had helped to convince Stalin of Mao's claims to the leadership, and now headed the Party's International Liaison Department. At a time of acute internal strain, Wang had argued, China should try as much as possible to avoid international complications. Liu and Deng agreed. The spring brought faint signs of an easing of tension with India and the Soviet Union, and in June an understanding was reached with the Americans to avoid renewed conflict over Taiwan.³³

To Mao, all this oozed betrayal.

On the very first occasion that he had ceded control to the men he had hand-picked to lead China when he himself passed on, they had shown themselves, on two crucial issues – opposing imperialism and ‘its running dog, revisionism’, abroad; and preventing capitalism at home – at best, capable of massive misjudgements; at worst, guilty of unprincipled compromises for short-term practical ends.

The Chairman launched his counter-attack at the annual summer work conference at Beidaihe. The ‘responsibility systems’, he declared, were incompatible with the collective economy. The Party, therefore, faced a stark choice: ‘Are we going to take the socialist road or the capitalist road? Do we want rural collectivisation or don't we?’ It was the same tactic that he had employed at Lushan, when he had confronted the Central Committee with an equally Manichaean choice between Peng Dehuai and himself. With Mao, there was never a middle path.

Having thus transferred the question of farming practices from the economic to the political arena, Mao raised again, as he had in January, the example of Yugoslavia as a country which had ‘changed colour’ by abandoning its socialist economy. Class struggle, he reminded his audience, continued under socialism, and, as developments in the Soviet Union had shown, ‘the capitalist class can be reborn’. The same thing, he implied, might one day happen in China.

A month later, at the Central Committee's Tenth Plenum, Mao reverted to those themes:

In our country, we must … admit the possibility of the restoration of reactionary classes. We must raise our vigilance and properly educate our youth … Otherwise, a country like ours may yet move towards its opposite. Therefore, from now on, we must talk about this every year, every month, every day … so that we have a more enlightened Marxist-Leninist line on the problem.³⁴

Mao added, reassuringly, that there was to be no repetition of what had happened at Lushan, when ‘all [Peng Dehuai's] mother-fucking messed up the conference and practical work was affected’.³⁵ This time, after tens of millions of famine deaths, not even he was willing to put class struggle in a position where it might again abort economic recovery. None the less, he declared, right-opportunism, or ‘Chinese revisionism’, as he now called it, existed ‘within the country and within the Party’, and had to be combated.³⁶

So ended Liu Shaoqi's brief effort to put Chinese policy on a more rational basis, guided not by class struggle but by economic imperatives.

No one in the Politburo attempted to rein in Mao's pyromaniac ideological urges, any more than they had tried to curb his powers at the moment of his greatest weakness, at the ‘7,000-cadre big conference’, the previous January. As a result, the notion that a bourgeoisie might emerge within the Party, which Mao had first raised at Lushan in August 1959, was once again placed centre stage, now explicitly linked to a rejection of degenerate Soviet communism in a simple, four-character slogan: Fan xiu, fang xiu – ‘Oppose revisionism (abroad), prevent revisionism (at home)’.³⁷ That fatal nexus would inform Mao's thinking, and dominate the politics of China, for the last fourteen years of his life.

The first outward sign of the new Leftist spin that Mao had so effortlessly imparted to Chinese policy-making in the autumn of 1962 came in the Himalayas. Armed clashes had broken out in July after Indian troops began establishing checkpoints along the disputed border between Tibet and India's North-east Frontier Agency. In October, after Nehru had spoken incautiously of ‘freeing occupied Indian territory’, Mao decided the time had come to teach ‘that representative of the reactionary national bourgeoisie’ a lesson. In a series of engagements, involving some 30,000 Chinese troops, Indian units were decisively defeated, and by the time the Chinese declared a unilateral ceasefire, on November 21, Nehru had been compelled to make a humiliating appeal for help to the West.

In the early stages of the conflict, Khrushchev had been more supportive than in China's last spat with India, in 1959. But he was then embroiled in a crisis of his own, in Cuba, where the CIA was about to discover the emplacement of Soviet missiles, and he needed Chinese support. Once the Cuban debacle was behind him, the Soviet leader reverted to his more usual, pro-Indian stance – causing Mao's disgust to redouble, not only at Khrushchev's betrayal of socialist solidarity but at the ill-judged mixture of adventurism and capitulation with which he had affronted the Americans. Within days, Sino-Soviet polemics, which had been muted since the Russians had excommunicated Albania at the end of 1961, resumed in full flood, culminating, a year later, in a series of nine immensely long open letters – known as ‘The Polemic on the General Line of the International Communist Movement’ – in which, for the first time, the Chinese attacked the Soviet Party by name (and the Russians responded in kind).³⁸ By then Mao had decided that there was no longer any hope of persuading Khrushchev to change his views and that Beijing would need to assume the movement's leadership, even if it split as a result.³⁹

Renewed militancy abroad was matched by militancy at home.

The decision to ban private farming led, in the winter of 1962, to a number of provincial initiatives which were soon afterwards brought together, with Mao's personal imprimatur, under the name, the Socialist Education Movement. Its raison d'être was simple. If the peasantry, and the local cadres who led them, were still hankering after capitalism in the form of ‘responsibility systems’, they needed to relearn the virtues of the collective economy and the superiority of socialism.

In its initial form, the movement was directed against cadre corruption, and such anti-socialist behaviour as arranged marriages, geomancy, sorcery, Buddhist and Daoist rites, and ancestor-worship. Meetings were held at which older commune members were encouraged to ‘speak bitterness’, dilating on the miseries of the old society in order to persuade younger peasants that, even in times of famine, life under the communists was preferable. Party propagandists created a new role model, a PLA soldier named Lei Feng, who had spent his military career washing his comrades’ bedding, helping the cooks to clean cabbages and old ladies to cross roads, under the motto, ‘It's glorious to be a nameless hero’, before dying selflessly for the good of the revolutionary cause. Lei was the quintessential rustless screw, whose devotion, unswerving loyalty and obedience to Mao and to the Party was catalogued in a diary of nauseating servility:

I felt particularly happy this morning when I got up, because last night I had dreamed of our great leader, Chairman Mao. And it so happens that today is the Party's 40th anniversary. Today I have so much to tell the Party, so much gratitude to the Party … I am like a toddler, and the Party is like my mother who helps me, leads me, and teaches me to walk … My beloved Party, my loving mother, I am always your loyal son.⁴⁰

But the movement had to have a harder edge than merely ‘speaking bitterness’ and emulating Lei Feng. At a Central Committee work conference in February 1963, Mao asserted that the only way to prevent revisionism was by class struggle. ‘Once [this] has been grasped,’ he declared, ‘everything will be solved.’ Accordingly it was agreed that a nationwide campaign should be launched to carry out ‘Four Clean-ups’ in the countryside (to check production team accounts, granaries, housing, and the allocation of work-points), and ‘Five Antis’ in the towns (against embezzlement, graft, speculation, extravagance and red tape).⁴¹ Three months later, another work conference at Hangzhou drew up a formal programme for the movement, in which Mao depicted in apocalyptic terms what was at stake if the slide towards revisionism were not stopped:

If things were allowed to go on this way, the day would not be too far off – a few years, over 10 years, or a few decades at the most – when the resurgence of a nationwide counter-revolution becomes inevitable. It would then be a certainty that the Party of Marxism-Leninism would turn into a party of revisionism, of fascism. The whole of China would then change colour … The Socialist Education Movement is … a struggle that calls for the re-education of man … [and] for a confrontation with the forces of feudalism and capitalism that are now feverishly attacking us. We must nip their counter-revolution in the bud!⁴²

After this call to arms, Mao once more retired to the sidelines to see how the ‘first front’ leaders would cope with the new mission he had entrusted to them.

It was a delicate assignment. Rural capitalism was to be suppressed, but rural markets and private plots, judged essential for economic recovery, encouraged. Mass criticism, to purge corrupt cadres, was to be promoted, but without any deleterious effect on production.

As the movement progressed, those issues paled into insignificance against the sheer scale of the task the Party leaders found they faced. Initially Mao had employed his usual rule of thumb to suggest that perhaps 5 per cent of the rural population had ‘problems’ that needed correcting. By the spring of 1964, both he and Liu Shaoqi were talking in terms of a third of rural production teams being controlled by hostile forces. An investigation group headed by Liu's wife, Wang Guangmei, which spent five months at Taoyuan, in Hebei, reported that the Party branch there was imposing ‘a counterrevolutionary double-faced regime’ and the branch secretary was a ‘Guomindang element’ who had sneaked into the Party. Not only was cadre corruption almost universal, but so many grass-roots officials had been purged in one political campaign or another in the course of the preceding ten years that there were no more ‘clean’ local leaders to draw on. Outside cadres, seconded to oversee the movement, found themselves having to replace one group of flawed officials with another equally dubious group because no one else was available.

To deal with that situation, Liu Shaoqi unleashed, in September 1964, the most sweeping purge of rural Party organisations ever undertaken in China.

One-and-a-half million cadres were mobilised, organised into work teams of 10,000 people or, in some cases, several tens of thousands, and despatched to selected counties for a minimum of six months, to act like a human wave, cleansing leadership groups from the village level up. The targets of the campaign were expanded to include ideology, politics and organisation, as well as economic offences. Violence was universal. Even in the initial moderate stages, 2,000 people died in one trial group of counties in Hubei, while in Guangdong, 500 committed suicide. Later, in the words of one lowly Party cadre, ‘all hell broke loose’. Wang Renzhong, one of Mao's favourite provincial leaders, who had been appointed First Secretary of Hubei, urged a ‘violent revolutionary storm’, in which most lower-level Party branches would collapse and power would be temporarily ceded to poor peasant associations. Liu Shaoqi himself spoke of the upheaval lasting five or six years.⁴³

It was a prospect which should have entranced Mao, as an apostle of class violence. As 1964 drew to a close, he and Liu seemed closer in their thinking than at almost any time since the younger man had become Mao's heir apparent. But, as so often, appearances were misleading.

Mao's original plan to withdraw to the ‘second front’, first mooted in the early 1950s, had been designed partly to allow him to escape the routine duties of Head of State, which he detested, and to concentrate on strategic issues; and partly to give his putative successors experience in running the Party and state while he was still there to guide them. Events in the Soviet Union soon made this second reason primary. Malenkov, Mao said later, had failed to endure because Stalin had never allowed him to exercise real power in his lifetime. For that reason, he explained, ‘I wanted [Liu Shaoqi and the others] to have their prestige established before I died.’⁴⁴

The Soviet Union's bad example did not end there. Khrushchev, in Mao's eyes, turned out to be an even less worthy candidate to continue the revolutionary cause, discarding not only ‘the sword of Stalin’ but ‘the sword of Lenin’ as well. Under his leadership, the Soviet Union became a revisionist state, practising capitalism. The inheritance of Marx and Lenin had been squandered – all because of Stalin's failure to groom revolutionary successors to carry on his cause.

Until 1961, Mao seems to have been in no doubt that Liu Shaoqi was the right choice to act as steward of his own revolutionary legacy. Liu was organisation personified, a remote, intimidating man, with no real friends, no outside interests and little sense of humour, whose phenomenal energy was channelled in its entirety into the service of the Party – which in practice meant making possible whatever it was that Mao wanted to happen. He was exacting with himself and his family; eschewed privilege of any kind; and cultivated a puritanical public persona which spoke of eighteen-hour workdays and a code of conduct so absolute that when he found out he was being paid an extra one yuan (at the time, about 30 pence) a day because he worked after midnight, he insisted on reimbursing every last penny through deductions from his salary.

When, in September of that year, Mao told Field Marshal Montgomery that Liu was his designated successor,⁴⁵ it was made known widely among the upper echelons of the Party, apparently to prepare the ground for his withdrawal, at the next Party Congress, to become honorary Party Chairman, as foreshadowed by the 1958 constitution.

Each May Day and National Day, Liu's portrait was printed in the People's Daily, side by side with Mao's, and of equal size. His writings were studied alongside Mao's (as they had been during the Yan'an Rectification Campaign twenty years before), and at the Chairman's suggestion, work started on preparing an edition of his ‘Selected Works’, an honour up until then accorded only to Mao himself. One of Liu's essays from the 1930s, entitled ‘How to be a Good Communist’, was reissued as a pamphlet in an edition of 18 million copies.⁴⁶

This did not mean there were no frictions between them. Unlike the pliant Zhou Enlai, who made a religion of loyalty to Mao, or the sycophantic Lin Biao, Liu had a mind of his own (which was what had led the Chairman to choose him as his deputy in the first place). At times – as in 1947, when Mao reproached him for excessive Leftism in the land reform movement; or in 1953, when he sought to use Gao Gang to curb Liu's independence – Liu's tendency to go his own way irritated him. But there was nothing to suggest that a breach was in the offing.

That began to change in the spring of 1962.

Liu's criticisms of the Great Leap Forward at the ‘7,000-cadre big conference’ were one factor. Far more important was what Mao saw as his lack of steadiness in the five months during which he withdrew to Hangzhou. At a series of Standing Committee meetings and a Central Committee work conference, Liu had warned that the situation was far worse than the Party had yet admitted and that further retrenchment was necessary.⁴⁷ If Liu lost his nerve so easily when the economy failed to respond – authorising emergency measures that amounted to a sell-out of fundamental communist values – how could he be trusted to defend Mao's policies when the Chairman was no longer around? It was as though, by withdrawing, he had given Liu enough rope to hang himself, and his heir apparent had promptly obliged. In a revealing exchange after he returned to Beijing in July, Mao railed at the younger man: ‘Can't you hold the line? Why can't you keep things under control? … The [basic principles of our policy] have been refuted, the land has been divided up, and you did nothing! What will happen after I die?’. Uncharacteristically, Liu blurted out: ‘History will record the role you and I played in the starvation of so many people, and the cannibalism will also be memorialised!’⁴⁸

The rift was papered over. For the next two years, Mao would reserve judgement, but his faith in Liu had been shaken.

The plan for him to retire as Honorary Party Chairman was not heard of again.⁴⁹ Instead in a poem the following January, as he entered his seventieth year, he celebrated anew his implacable determination to move China along his chosen path:

So many deeds cry out to be done,
And always urgently;
The world rolls on,
Time presses.
Ten thousand years are too long,
Seize the day, seize the hour!
The Four Seas are rising, clouds and waters raging,
The Five Continents are rocking, wind and thunder roaring,
Away with all pests!
Our force is irresistible.⁵⁰

The ‘pests’ were the Khrushchevite revisionists, with perhaps just a sideways glance at revisionists nearer home. But the subtext was Mao's realisation that he would have to lead from the front himself, because he could rely on no one else to do so in his place.

Mao's doubts about Liu showed up in other ways, too.

Starting from the summer of 1962, he began to develop alternative instruments of power, to act as a counterweight to the Party machine, controlled by Liu, as first Party Vice-Chairman; Deng Xiaoping, as General Secretary; and Deng's deputy, Peng Zhen.

That year, his wife, Jiang Qing, who had been kept away from the limelight since their marriage in Yan'an, twenty-five years before, began for the first time to play a public role.⁵¹ In September, her picture appeared on the front page of the People's Daily when Mao received President Sukarno of Indonesia. Three months later, when the Chairman triggered another onslaught against one of his favourite targets, China's intellectuals – this time on the pretext of eliminating revisionism from the nation's cultural life – Jiang Qing was ready and waiting to take up the cudgels on his behalf. Their personal relationship had ended long before. But politically she was his to command; her loyalty was beyond question; and she wanted nothing more in life than to prove her usefulness to him. As she put it, many years later: ‘I was Chairman Mao's dog. Whoever he told me to bite, I bit.’⁵² From April 1963 onwards, with Mao's encouragement and discreet help from Zhou Enlai, she began to nip the heels of Liu's cultural commissars and of the playwrights and film-makers, historians and philosophers, poets and painters that they favoured, until the whole of China's intellectual life took on the same, monotonous Maoist coloration as the ‘revolutionary model operas’ which she eagerly promoted.

Zhou Enlai himself, ever anxious to defend his corner of the Chairman's affections against Liu's depredations, became another indispensable part of Mao's new inner circle. The Shanghai Party leaders, under Ke Qingshi and his protégé, Zhang Chunqiao, served as a radical ginger group to promote policies of which the more conservative Beijing leaders disapproved. Mao's amanuensis, Chen Boda, took on a higher profile. So did Kang Sheng, who became the Chairman's informant in Deng Xiaoping's Secretariat.⁵³ He soon showed that he had not forgotten his old tradecraft as secret police chief in Yan'an by setting up a ‘Special Case Group’ to investigate what he claimed was a covert attempt to promote the rehabilitation of Gao Gang. In a chilling foretaste of the tactics Kang would use against Mao's enemies in the great upheavals that lay ahead, thousands of people were interrogated and a senior vice-premier purged on the sole evidence of an unpublished historical novel, set in Gao Gang's old base area in Shaanxi,^II one of whose leading characters was said to resemble him.

But the most important of Mao's placemen was Lin Biao, who, since his appointment in 1959, had worked single-mindedly to transform the PLA into a redoubt of ideological rectitude, the incarnation of Mao's view that men were more important than weapons, where politics was always ‘the supreme commander, the soul and guarantor of all work’, and Mao Zedong Thought was ‘the highest peak in today's world … [and] the apex of contemporary thought’.⁵⁴ It was Lin who published the main article in the People's Daily, eulogising the fourth volume of Mao's Selected Works, when it appeared in 1960; Lin who offered the stoutest defence of the Great Leap at the ‘7,000-cadre big conference’; and Lin, a year later, who suggested that a handy compendium of the Chairman's aphorisms be compiled for soldiers to learn by heart, a proposal which led, in 1964, to the appearance of the ‘Little Red Book’ – the future bible of Chinese youth, talisman and touchstone of Mao's personality cult. Soon afterwards, in an attempt to revive the egalitarian simplicity of the early days of the Red Army, ranks and insignia were abolished; officers could be distinguished from other ranks only by the four pockets on their jackets, where ordinary soldiers had two. By then, the PLA was being held up as a model for the entire nation, exemplifying boundless loyalty, devotion and self-sacrifice.

None of Mao's moves up to the spring of 1964 indicated any definite conclusion about Liu's fitness as a successor.⁵⁵ He continued to bracket Liu's name with his own as the two principal representatives of ‘Chinese Marxism-Leninism’.⁵⁶

But the following summer, his doubts hardened.

One factor was evidently the realisation that, despite their apparent unity of views, Liu's aims in the Socialist Education Movement were different from his own. Deng Xiaoping told a Sri Lankan diplomat in February 1964 that he hoped Mao would not notice what they were doing because if he did he would surely disapprove.⁵⁷ Liu wanted to use the movement to make the Party in the rural areas a reliable, disciplined instrument to enforce orthodox Marxist-Leninist economic policies. Mao wanted to combat revisionism by unleashing the energies of the masses.

As Mao took stock of this divergence, he was reminded of Liu's behaviour in the first half of 1962, and began to reflect anew on some of the things his heir apparent had said at that time, including a remark to the ‘7,000-cadre big conference’ about Mao's ‘three Red Banners’ – the Party's general line; the Great Leap Forward; and the communes.⁵⁸ ‘We will continue the struggle to uphold the three Banners,’ Liu had affirmed, ‘but there are still some issues that are not clear. We will sum up experience again in five or ten years’ time. Then we may be able to resolve them.’⁵⁹ A few months later, after Mao's return from Hangzhou, Liu had warned him: ‘History will judge what you and I have done.’ Xie Fuzhi had told him that Liu had once instructed him to draw up a report on the atrocities committed during the Leap by rural cadres against the peasants. ‘If we don't uncover it while living,’ Liu had said, ‘it will be uncovered by the next generation after we are dead.’⁶⁰ At a time when Mao was deeply involved in the Chinese Party's polemic with Moscow, it was a small step to start wondering whether Liu's words were not an implicit threat to reverse China's policies after his death, as Khrushchev had done after Stalin.

Others stoked Mao's concerns. After reading Wang Guangmei's report on Taoyuan, Jiang Qing told him: ‘After Stalin died, Khrushchev made a secret report, and now you aren?t even dead and someone is making an open report.’⁶¹ Kang Sheng argued that Stalin had erred, not by repressing ‘counter-revolutionaries’ too harshly but by not repressing them harshly enough. It was his failure to ‘dig out’ people like Khrushchev that had allowed them to discredit him.⁶² The question was posed: would Mao make the same mistake?

By July 1964, these ideas had crystallised to a point where Mao approved a passage, in the ninth and last of the Chinese ‘open letters’ to the Soviet Party, which referred specifically to the issue of succession:

In the final analysis, the question of training successors for the revolutionary cause of the proletariat is one of whether or not … the leadership of our Party and state will remain in the hands of proletarian revolutionaries, whether or not our descendants will continue to march along the correct road laid down by Marxism-Leninism, or, in other words, whether or not we can successfully prevent the emergence of Khrushchev's revisionism in China … It is an extremely important question, a matter of life and death for our Party and our country.⁶³

In retrospect, those lines offer a startling insight into the way Mao's mind was working. At the time, however, none of his colleagues saw anything untoward. Nor, apparently, did they pay attention to a subsequent paragraph, which spoke of successors being formed through mass struggle and tempered in ‘great revolutionary storms’.

Then, in October, Khrushchev was overthrown, accused by his successors of ruling by personal whim and imposing ‘hare-brained schemes’ on the long-suffering Russian people. Whether Mao drew a conscious parallel between his old adversary's comeuppance and the charges that could be made regarding his own style of rule is unclear. But, given the differences he now discerned between Liu Shaoqi's aims and his own, it must at the very least have made him feel vulnerable. A month later, Khrushchev's successors rebuffed a Chinese attempt to renew the dialogue between them, providing final confirmation that the Sino-Soviet schism was irrevocable and the world communist movement shattered into two unequal and irreconcilable halves.

Mao's claim to revolutionary immortality would now rest, more than ever, on the forging of a distinctive Chinese way from which true revolutionaries everywhere would draw their inspiration. This had been implicit in the nine ‘open letters’, which had been written on the basis that the fount of revolutionary knowledge – ‘Mekka’, as Sneevliet had called it, forty years earlier – had been transferred from Moscow to Beijing. As 1964 drew to a close, it became, for Mao, explicit – the ultimate goal to which he would devote the final years of his life.

His aim was no longer to make China rich. That was Liu Shaoqi's logic.

Revolutionary zeal was in inverse proportion to affluence. ‘Asia is more progressive politically than Britain and the United States, because Asia's living standards are much lower,’ he had written some years earlier. ‘Those who are poor want revolution … [In future] we countries in the East will become rich. When the [Western countries’] living standards fall, their people will become progressive.’⁶⁴ The unstated corollary was that if China became prosperous it would cease to be revolutionary. It was politically impossible to say so outright – few Chinese would willingly embrace continued penury in pursuit of abstract ideological goals – but in practice, in the choice between affluence and revolution, Mao came down on revolution's side.

To make China a realm of ‘Red virtue’, in which class struggle would transmute human consciousness, generating a revolutionary continuum that would shine out like a beacon to the peoples of the world, Liu, and those who thought like him, together with the orthodoxy they represented, would have to be swept aside.

Other factors were no doubt also involved. The fact that Liu and Deng were attempting to carry out policies with which he did not agree may well have made Mao feel that power was slipping from his grasp. In fact his powers were undiminished. But, having withdrawn to the ‘second front’, he refused to descend from his eminence and involve himself in day-to-day policy, all the more since the last time he had done so, to launch the Great Leap Forward, it had ended in disaster. That failure still rankled, not so much for the millions who had died but because he had been proved wrong. The same was true, to a lesser extent, of the Hundred Flowers campaign, which had backfired and forced him to launch the anti-Rightist movement. This time he wanted to transform intellectual and economic life permanently; to find scapegoats for his earlier failures, for which he refused to acknowledge his errors, among those of his colleagues whose reservations had proved, to his great resentment, justified; and to settle once and for all the issue of his succession. But his overriding goal was to ensure that his revolutionary legacy would continue.

In this illuminated frame of mind, Mao attended a series of top-level leadership meetings in late November and December 1964, during which his behaviour was even more wilful and eccentric than usual.

On November 26, while discussing long-term defence planning, he suddenly expostulated: ‘you [Liu] are first deputy chairman, but something unexpected could happen at any time. Otherwise, once I die, you may not succeed. So let's change over now. You be Chairman. You be the First Emperor.’⁶⁵ Liu cautiously declined, unfazed by Mao's grumbling that he no longer had the strength for the job and no one listened to him any more. Two weeks later, the Chairman spoke blackly of a capitalist class emerging within the Party and ‘drinking the blood of the workers’. On that occasion, the phrase, ‘leaders taking the capitalist road’, was used for the first time.⁶⁶ Then, on December 20, he again spoke of Liu, rather than himself, being in charge. This time he argued that the Socialist Education Movement would have to be refocused – no longer aimed at corrupt cadres and peculating peasants, but at extirpating from the Party hierarchy, through the cleansing fire of mass struggle, all trace of revisionist thought. The ‘wolves’, the ‘power-holders’, would have to be dealt with first, Mao warned menacingly; the ‘foxes’ – the petty offenders – could be handled later.⁶⁷

Unusually, Liu held his ground. He agreed with Mao that some provincial Party committees had become ‘rotten’, and that the ‘backstage Party bosses’ of corrupt officials should be targeted as a priority. But he made clear that he felt this should be done within the context of a movement whose principal focus remained the elimination of corrupt practices, rather than an ideological onslaught against ‘revisionism’.

Mao showed his displeasure at a banquet in the Great Hall of the People to celebrate his seventy-first birthday, on December 26, when, without naming names, he charged that Liu's views were non-Marxist, and that Deng was running the Party Secretariat as an ‘independent kingdom’. The following month, in a still more extraordinary outburst – reminiscent of his threat, five years earlier, to go to the hills and found a new Red Army if his colleagues sided with Peng Dehuai – he held up a copy of the Party constitution, and after stating icily that he had as much right to express an opinion as any other Party member, accused Deng of trying to stop him attending leadership meetings and Liu of endeavouring to prevent him from speaking. No less ominously, he recalled the dispute he had had with Liu and the rest of the Standing Committee in 1962 over ‘responsibility systems’. That had been ‘a kind of class struggle’, Mao declared. Now, a new struggle was looming, whose main task would be ‘to rectify the power holders within the Party taking the capitalist road’.

That incendiary phrase was included in new guidelines for the movement issued in January. There was one slight change of wording: instead of ‘power-holders’, the term, ‘persons in authority’, was used. In the original draft it was explicitly specified that such renegade communists might be found even in the Central Committee. But Zhou Enlai, who evidently had a shrewd idea of how the Chairman's mind was working, managed to get that modified to ‘Central Committee departments’.⁶⁸

Liu Shaoqi himself, and most of the rest of the leadership, put down his remarks as the rumblings of a cantankerous old man, an ageing megalith, still capable of striking sparks, but increasingly imprisoned by the revolutionary dreams of his past. The crisis seemed to blow over. But Liu's fate had been sealed.⁶⁹ All that remained was for Mao to find an appropriate means to dispose of him.

I In October 1960, when the extent of the famine became clear, Mao announced that he would adopt a vegetarian diet and this was widely publicised. It later emerged, however, that he continued to eat fish and seafood, as well as meat substitutes made from soybeans.

II Vice-Premier Xi Zhongxun was removed for endorsing a fictionalised biography of Liu Zhidan, who, together with Gao Gang, headed the Shaanxi base area when Mao reached Bao'an at the end of the Long March in 1935. He was rehabilitated after Mao's death and played a key role in the setting up of Special Economic Zones in Guangdong province, one of Deng Xiaoping's earliest initiatives to transform China's economy. Xi Jinping is his son.