MAO

In February 1965, the Chairman despatched Jiang Qing to Shanghai. Her mission was to lay the ideological powder-trail which, at the opportune moment, he would light, triggering the tortuous events that would plunge China into the fiery chaos of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.¹

The device which Mao chose to provoke the coming storm had originated six years earlier in his call to Party members to emulate the Ming bureaucrat, Hai Rui.² Peng Dehuai had taken him too literally, and was purged for his pains. But the movement continued, and in 1959 and 1960 a number of works were written to illustrate Mao's theme, including an opera by a well-known scholar named Wu Han. Some of Mao's inner circle, including Jiang Qing, had argued that Wu's opera, which was entitled The Dismissal of Hai Rui, was an allegorical defence of Peng.³ Mao, who liked Wu's work, at first discounted the charge. But his attitude changed after he read an essay by Wu, accusing Zhu Yuanzhang, the founding emperor of the Ming dynasty, of murdering those he suspected of disloyalty in order to consolidate his political power.⁴ Mao liked to compare himself to the Ming emperor. The criticism was too close to home. By the beginning of 1965, he had decided that Wu's opera might have its uses after all.

Wu Han was not simply a historian. He was also a deputy mayor of Beijing and, as such, a protégé of Peng Zhen. Peng was both First Secretary of the municipal Party committee in the capital and deputy head of the Central Committee Secretariat, the core of the CCP's national machine. Like many of the top leaders, he was a remote, rather solitary figure, whose isolation made him vulnerable.

An attack on Wu, Mao realised, could serve as the thin end of a political wedge to split open Peng Zhen's empire. And behind Peng stood Liu Shaoqi.

In Shanghai, Jiang Qing enrolled the services of a radical left-wing journalist named Yao Wenyuan, who had first come to Mao's notice as a hammer of bourgeois intellectuals during the anti-Rightist Campaign. In conditions of extraordinary secrecy – Yao pretended to be ill, and retired to a sanatorium to work – she commissioned from him a 10,000-word diatribe denouncing Wu's work as a ‘poisonous weed’.⁵

The writing took all summer. The article went through ten drafts, three of which Mao worked on himself.⁶ They were couriered back and forth from Shanghai hidden in boxes containing recordings of revolutionary operas.⁷ Even after it was finalised in August, the Chairman waited another three months, during which he took the additional precaution of sending the disgraced Peng Dehuai, who had been under house arrest in the capital since 1959, to work in a minor defence post in Sichuan.

On November 10, 1965, when both Peng Zhen and Wu Han were travelling outside Beijing, Yao's essay was published in the Shanghai newspaper, Wenhuibao. On Mao's instructions, it contained no direct reference to the Peng Dehuai affair. That was kept in reserve. Instead, Yao accused Wu Han of having portrayed Hai Rui's support of the peasantry in such a manner as to generate sympathy for the idea of private farming (which was, of course, the issue that had fuelled Mao's dispute with Liu Shaoqi). The opera, he declared, should therefore be viewed as part of ‘the struggle of the capitalist class against the dictatorship of the proletariat … Its influence is great and its poison widespread. If we do not clean it up, it will harm the people's cause.’

Ad hominem attacks were supposed to have been forbidden under guidelines laid down by the Propaganda Department earlier in the year. It was impossible to discover who had authorised it, and Peng Zhen, on his return, ordered the Beijing press, including the People's Daily, not to reprint it. A few days later he refused to permit its distribution in pamphlet form, leading Mao to complain retrospectively that Peng's control of Beijing was so tight that ‘not even a needle could slip through or a drop of water penetrate’.⁸

The Chairman could perfectly well, at that stage, have simply ordered the article to be republished. But he was still unwilling to reveal his hand. Instead, therefore, he brought into play his conciliator, Zhou Enlai. On November 28, Zhou summoned a meeting in Beijing, at which, after listening to the objections of Peng's colleagues that Yao had resorted to ‘abuse and blackmail’, he laid down that the correct approach, in literary matters of this kind, was ‘to allow the freedom of criticism and counter-criticism’.⁹ Two days later, accompanied by an editorial note to that effect, which Zhou himself approved, Yao's article finally appeared in the literary section of the People's Daily.

On the same day that Yao Wenyuan's article was published in Shanghai, Mao announced to the Politburo Standing Committee the dismissal of Yang Shangkun, the Zunyi veteran who headed the CC's General Office. No reason was given at the time, but some months later Mao's colleagues were informed that Yang had authorised the bugging of his train in 1961.¹⁰ However, Mao had been aware of that for four years without taking any action. If he moved now it was because the General Office was the Party's communications centre, and he needed to ensure that it was in reliable hands. Yang was replaced by Wang Dongxing, the pudgy commander of the Central Guards Division, known as the 8341 Unit, responsible for the leaders’ security. Wang had been a member of the Chairman's entourage for more than twenty years, and his devotion to Mao was unquestioned.

Four weeks later, another high official was purged. Luo Ruiqing's career stretched back to the 1930s in Jiangxi. When Lin Biao had become Defence Minister, Mao had appointed Luo to serve as his Chief of Staff. But the two men had fallen out over the issue of whether the PLA should be primarily a professional or a political force, and Luo had unwisely suggested that Lin should ‘spend more time resting’ in order to conserve his health.When the issue was discussed by an enlarged meeting of the Standing Committee, several leaders expressed scepticism about Lin's claims that Luo had tried to push him aside. But instead of quashing the move outright, they agreed to set up an ‘investigating group’ under Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping and Peng Zhen. Soon afterwards Luo resigned.¹¹

Thus, by mid-December 1965, Mao's senior colleagues were struggling to make sense of a succession of inexplicable events. The Chairman had fired one Party veteran, Yang Shangkun, supposedly for errors committed several years before. He had acquiesced in, if he had not initiated, the purge of another, Luo Ruiqing, apparently to please Lin Biao. And he was encouraging an obscure literary campaign, which might, or might not, presage a full-scale attack against the Beijing Party organisation.

Liu Shaoqi, for one, was taking no chances. From the end of November on, with that fine instinct for self-preservation which all Mao's subordinates shared, he distanced himself from Peng Zhen, determined that whatever political fallout might come, it should not fall on him.¹²

Just before Christmas, in Hangzhou, he told Chen Boda and a small group of radicals from the Party journal, Red Flag, that Yao Wenyuan's article (in which he still admitted playing no part) had missed the point. The real problem with Wu Han's play lay in the last three words of its title: ‘Hai Rui dismissed from office’. ‘The Jiaqing Emperor dismissed Hai Rui from office,’ Mao said. ‘We dismissed Peng Dehuai from office. Peng Dehuai is indeed Hai Rui.’¹³ The importance of this statement was that it meant that Wu Han's case would in future be regarded as a political rather than a literary issue.

January was marked by a stalemate. Mao's remarks had not been publicised, even within the Politburo, and when one of Chen Boda's staff wrote an article, detailing for the first time (without identifying the source) the Chairman's explosive allegation that Wu had sought Peng Dehuai's rehabilitation, Peng Zhen got his allies in the Propaganda Department to block publication. But he was unable to halt the attacks on Wu altogether. February brought more bad news. Jiang Qing, with Lin Biao's encouragement, had begun working with the PLA's Cultural Affairs Department to promote a new movement against feudal and capitalist thinking.¹⁴ The implication was that the campaign against Wu Han was about to move into higher gear.

At this point the Beijing leader made a desperate, if belated, attempt to regain the initiative.

For the previous eighteen months, he had headed a Central Committee body known as the ‘Group of Five’,¹⁵ which Mao had set up to combat revisionism in the arts. At Peng's suggestion, its members now approved new guidelines for dealing with ideological disputes. The ‘February Outline’, as it became known, affirmed that a ‘gigantic struggle’ was under way ‘between Mao Zedong Thought, on the one hand, and bourgeois ideas on the other’, and acknowledged that Wu Han had committed political errors. But it also maintained that, as Zhou Enlai had laid down in November, academic quarrels should be resolved by scholarly, not political, means.¹⁶

On February 8, Peng and the rest of the group flew to Wuhan, where they reported to Mao. The Chairman did not explicitly endorse the ‘Outline’, but neither did he voice any objection. He asked Peng Zhen whether he thought Wu Han was an ‘anti-Party element’, and again expressed concern about the significance of ‘dismissed from office’. But he added that if there were no evidence of organisational links between Wu and Peng Dehuai, the historian might continue to serve as deputy mayor.¹⁷

Luo Ruiqing had not. In March, after weeks of struggle meetings, he attempted to commit suicide by jumping from the top of a three-storey building. When his colleagues heard the news, they reacted with derision. Liu Shaoqi sneered: ‘If you're going to commit suicide, you have to have some technique, that is, heavy head and light feet. But he landed feet first and his head was not touched.’ Deng joined in: ‘He jumped like a woman diver, [feet first], looking like a lollipop.’ Mao said simply: ‘How pathetic!’.¹⁸

That month Peng's case marked time. The Chairman groused to Zhou and Deng that he was running Beijing as an ‘independent kingdom’ and that the People's Daily had become a ‘semi-Marxist newspaper’.¹⁹

More worrying, had Peng known about it, was Mao's approval of a programmatic document, drawn up after the cultural forum held by Jiang Qing and the PLA, which stated that, since 1949, ‘we have been under the dictatorship of a black anti-Party, anti-socialist line which is diametrically opposed to Chairman Mao's thought’.²⁰ Since Peng had been in charge of culture since July 1964, he was implicated; so was the Propaganda Department, run by an alternate member of the Politburo, Lu Dingyi; so, too, more generally, was the entire post-1949 cultural establishment. Here, for the first time, clearly stated, was the prospect of a wholesale rejection of existing cultural values.

Before making his next move, Mao waited until the end of March, when Liu Shaoqi had left the country on a month-long tour of Asia. He then let it be known that he wanted to see the ‘February Outline’ repudiated on the grounds that it ‘obscured class lines’. Wu Han and like-minded intellectuals were ‘scholar tyrants’, he declared, protected by a ‘Party tyrant’, Peng Zhen. He threatened to dissolve not only Peng's ‘Group of Five’ but the Central Committee Propaganda Department, which he referred to as ‘the palace of the King of Hell’, and even the Beijing Party committee itself.²¹

Mao's views were formally conveyed by Kang Sheng to a meeting of the Secretariat, presided over by Deng Xiaoping, on April 9.

Kang listed Peng's ‘mistakes’ in handing the Wu Han affair; Chen Boda listed his ‘crimes’ in matters of political line going back to the 1930s. It was decided to refer the case upward to the Standing Committee for decision.²² In the meantime, the ‘February Outline’ was annulled and Peng's ally, Lu Dingyi, was entrapped by a grotesque episode in which his wife was found to have been sending poison pen letters to Lin Biao's wife, Ye Qun, accusing her of being a loose woman and Lin a cuckold. The next time the Politburo met, each member found on his chair a handwritten note from Lin insisting that Ye had been ‘a pure virgin’ when they married.²³ Such was Chinese politics at the highest levels of the leadership on the eve of the Cultural Revolution.

Ten days later, when Liu Shaoqi returned from Burma, the last stop on his Asian tour, he found a summons awaiting him to proceed straight to Hangzhou, where Mao had called a Standing Committee meeting to pronounce on Peng Zhen's fate. There the Chairman informed him that Peng and his alleged associates were to be purged, and that Liu himself was to deliver the verdict at an enlarged Politburo meeting to be held, in Mao's absence, in Beijing the following month.

Kang Sheng, seconded by Chen Boda and the Shanghai radical, Zhang Chunqiao, again acted as prosecutor. The existence of the ‘Peng Zhen-Lu Dingyi-Luo Ruiqing-Yang Shangkun anti-Party clique’, he asserted, proved that revisionism had emerged within the Central Committee, just as Mao had predicted during the debates over the Socialist Education Movement sixteen months before. Its members must be publicly criticised and removed from all their posts.²⁴ Zhou Enlai accused the four of ‘taking the capitalist road’.²⁵ Lin Biao spoke melodramatically of ‘the smell of gunpowder’ and ‘the decided possibility of a coup involving killings, seizure of power and restoration of the capitalist class’.²⁶ Whether Mao himself believed that is another matter, but it was a useful means of stoking political tension.²⁷ After the ‘clique’ had been purged, security in the capital was stepped up. If nothing else, it was a sensible precaution against the day when revolutionary turmoil would start in earnest.

On May 16, the meeting approved a Central Committee circular, ostensibly issued to replace the now discredited ‘February Outline’, but actually the first official salvo of what was to become known (in Chinese) as the ‘Great Revolution [to establish] Proletarian Culture’ – the Cultural Revolution. It had been a month in gestation, and Mao himself had revised it no fewer than seven times. The central political issue, the circular declared, was ‘whether to carry out or to resist Comrade Mao Zedong's line on the Cultural Revolution’. Peng Zhen and his allies were not the only traitors. There were other ‘people in authority taking the capitalist road’ who must also be cleared out:

These representatives of the bourgeoisie who have sneaked into our Party … are actually a bunch of counter-revolutionary revisionists. When the time is right, they will try to seize power, turning the dictatorship of the proletariat into a dictatorship of the capitalist class. Some of these people have already been exposed by us; others have not. Some are still trusted by us, and are being groomed as our successors, people of a Khrushchev type who are nestling right beside us. Party cadres at all levels must pay special attention to this point.²⁸

The circular announced the replacement of Peng Zhen's ‘Group of Five’ by a new body, the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group, headed by Chen Boda, with Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao and two others as his deputies, and Kang Sheng as adviser. Peng and his cohorts were cast into outer darkness – imprisonment in some cases, house arrest in others – and a Central Case Examination Group set up to investigate their ‘anti-Party conduct’.²⁹

Thus, by mid-May 1966, Mao had signalled to the Party at large the broad aim of the great upheaval that he was so painstakingly preparing: the removal from power of ‘capitalist-roaders’ who were planning to betray the socialist cause. He had put in place a headquarters to direct it, which bypassed the Politburo and the mainstream Party chain of command and whose membership replicated precisely the quincunx of radical influence that he had begun assembling in 1962, apart from Lin Biao, for whom he had other plans. But it was far from clear, even to those closest to him, why he had set about it in the way he had, and still less what the final outcome would be. Men like Zhang Chunqiao and Kang Sheng would admit later that they never remotely imagined that when Mao spoke of ‘people of a Khrushchev type who are nestling right beside us’, he was pointing at Liu Shaoqi.³⁰ If that escaped Mao's inner circle, how could Liu himself be expected to see it?

One consideration which had led Mao to act in so devious and convoluted a manner was deniability.

Had the initial attack on Wu Han gone awry, he could have blamed it on the excessive zeal of Jiang Qing, whose public role in cultural affairs would have made her a credible scapegoat. He was equally prudent in making Liu Shaoqi deliver the coup de grâce to Peng Zhen, while he himself stayed away. The rest of the leadership could hardly turn round and complain that Peng had been treated unfairly when they themselves had done the dirty work.

At the time of the last leadership clash, in 1959, the Chairman had been able to swing the rest of the Politburo behind him by turning it into a vote of confidence in himself. His adversary, Peng Dehuai, was an irascible, pig-headed old soldier, whose sharp tongue had made more enemies than friends. It had been relatively simple for Mao to depict him as a threat to Party stability. This time, the grounds for his action were, by any objective criterion, not just flimsy but totally non-existent. Mao wished to purge Liu Shaoqi, whose prestige was second only to his own, and the General Secretary, Deng Xiaoping, neither of whom had presented any overt challenge to his policies, and who both had the support of most of the older generation of the leadership. There was no conceivable basis on which, in a straightforward debate, Mao could have persuaded his colleagues that Liu and Deng should go.

Since a frontal assault was out of the question, the Chairman fell back on the guerrilla tactics he knew best. ‘War is politics’, he had written. ‘Politics is war by other means.’ It evidently never entered Liu's head that Mao's actions might be the prelude to a larger conflict. He saw only that the Chairman was bent on launching a new movement to revolutionise culture, and that Peng Zhen had got in the way.

Had the rest of the leadership joined together at that point to stop him, they might conceivably have averted the disaster bearing down on them. But to do so would have required them to confront Mao face to face, in the Politburo Standing Committee. None had the stomach for that kind of fight.

The same mixture of cowardice and self-interest that had made possible Peng Dehuai's fall at Lushan was still more pronounced in 1966. The sanctification of Mao and his writings, promoted assiduously by Lin Biao, had by then reached such undreamed of heights that to oppose him directly had become unthinkable. In any case, Mao left nothing to chance. Liu Shaoqi's absence until the eve of the Hangzhou meeting meant that there was no time to organise resistance, even had anyone wished to. The subsequent Politburo session in Beijing was enlarged, on Mao's instructions, to include sixty of his hand-picked supporters. Although they could not vote, their presence made reasoned discussion impossible.

Yet there were warning signs that should have told the leadership that this latest movement would be unlike any Mao had launched before.

The May 16 Circular had referred to ‘a revisionist line’ within the Party – a term which harked back to the epic struggles of the Party's early days, against men like Li Lisan and Wang Ming – and had predicted ‘a great revolution, more profound, more complex and more arduous’ than any undertaken in the past. Zhou Enlai had warned that it would ‘target the centre rather than the localities, … higher levels rather than lower levels’.³¹ The language of the polemics was more extreme, more emotionally charged – geared to whipping up a mob to frenzy rather than making a political case. Personal and political motives were from the start inextricably mixed. Mao's use of Jiang Qing, and of a coterie of personal trusties, and Lin's reliance on Ye Qun, reinforced this trend.

One other development in May might have alerted Liu Shaoqi to the plot that Mao was brewing.

Yao Wenyuan published a new polemic, this time attacking not only Wu Han but two of his collaborators – Deng Tuo, the one-time People's Daily editor whom Mao had excoriated in 1957 for failing to publicise the ‘Hundred Flowers’; and a novelist named Liao Mosha – who had worked with him in the early 1960s on a weekly satirical column entitled ‘Notes from a Three-family Village’. The column, Yao now claimed, had used Aesopian language to attack Mao by innuendo in the time-honoured Chinese tradition of ‘pointing at the locust tree in order to revile the mulberry’.³²

The charge was almost certainly unfounded. Although, with hindsight, pieces with titles like ‘The Royal Way and the Tyrant's Way’ and ‘Amnesia’ (describing a mental disorder for which the only cure was ‘complete rest’) seemed written in such a manner that they could only apply to Mao – no one in China made that connection at the time, any more than anyone at the time had seen ‘Hai Rui Dismissed from Office’ as a defence of Peng Dehuai. Instead the essays were read as witty caricatures of lower-level officials whose stupidities had contributed to what were euphemistically called the ‘three years of natural disaster’ – which was no doubt all they were.

If a Politburo member, Peng Zhen, had been able to install a ‘black anti-Party, anti-socialist line’ opposing the Chairman's cultural policies; and if a group of Party writers had been able, for four years, to lampoon him with impunity in the public prints of the capital – why had the man Mao had placed in charge of the Party, Liu Shaoqi, done nothing to stop it?

There were only two possible answers. Either Liu was incompetent, or he was in league with Mao's opponents.

Having completed his preliminary dispositions, Mao set in motion the next stage of his infernal machination.

On May 14, Kang Sheng sent his wife, Cao Yiou, to Beijing University to make contact with the Party Secretary of the Philosophy Department, a radical firebrand named Nie Yuanzi.³³ Ten days later, after Cao had given Nie assurances of high-level backing, she and a group of supporters wrote a wall-poster accusing the university president, Lu Ping, of having suppressed Mao's directives on the Cultural Revolution, and pasted it up on the same wall, outside the university canteen, where the ‘Hundred Flowers’ movement had blossomed, nine years earlier. It urged students and lecturers ‘resolutely, thoroughly, cleanly and completely to eliminate all demons and monsters, and all Khrushchev-type counter-revolutionary revisionists, and to carry the socialist revolution through to the end’.³⁴

The University Party Committee, which Lu Ping chaired, went into overdrive. By next morning, hundreds more posters had appeared, most of them condemning Nie's group.

Mao in person endorsed Nie's poster, and ordered it broadcast by radio stations throughout China. The People's Daily, which had been taken over two days before by Chen Boda, denounced the university as ‘a stubborn anti-Party and anti-socialist bastion’ and Lu Ping as the leader of a ‘black gang’.³⁵ Nie became an instant celebrity. Telegrams of support poured in from all over the country. Students from other Beijing colleges flocked to the university to see her, and to seek guidance on how to deal with recalcitrant Party committees at their own institutes of higher learning.

Secondary-school pupils in the capital, led by the offspring of the elite (who heard from their parents of the political convulsions under way), moved even faster.

At the end of May, an enterprising, forever nameless pupil at the Qinghua University Middle School had coined the term hongweibing – ‘Red Guard’.³⁶ The movement to which this gave rise spread through Beijing's schools like wildfire, fuelled by a campaign to adulate Mao that became more extravagant and outlandish with every passing day. Lin Biao had started it with a speech to the Politburo on May 18, when he asserted: ‘Chairman Mao is a genius … One single sentence of his surpasses 10,000 of ours.’³⁷ The People's Daily then took up the cry: ‘Chairman Mao is the red sun in our hearts. Mao Zedong Thought is the source of our life … Whosoever dares to oppose him shall be hunted down and obliterated.’ Mao's works, it said, were ‘more precious than gold’; ‘every sentence is a war drum, every utterance a truth’.³⁸

On June 3, two days after Mao endorsed Nie Yuanzi's poster, a new Beijing Party Committee was appointed to replace Peng Zhen and his ousted ‘black hands’, prompting ritualistic demonstrations of support in which enthusiasm was tempered by puzzlement, as the reasons for Peng's dismissal remained secret. Ten days later the government decreed that all schools and universities (and even kindergartens) should ‘temporarily’ close so that the students and staff could devote themselves full-time to class struggle.

Already during the spring, there had been a foretaste of the ruthlessness with which the anti-revisionist witch-hunt would be pursued. The crippled Luo Ruiqing was brought in to struggle meetings in a wicker frame of the kind normally used to carry vegetables to market.³⁹ After the publication of Yao Wenyuan's article, Deng Tuo committed suicide. Less than a week later, it was the turn of Mao's secretary, Tian Jiaying. Accused of obstructing the campaign against Wu Han, he, too, killed himself.⁴⁰ Suicides had long been a common feature of political movements in China, but there had been no case of a senior Party official taking his own life since Gao Gang, in 1954. The deaths of Deng Tuo and Tian Jiaying were widely seen as the traditional Chinese scholar's way of protesting against injustice.

To these grim events within the political establishment was now added spiralling turmoil in colleges and schools.

Liu and Deng knew full well – having witnessed the effects nine years earlier, during the ‘Hundred Flowers’, not to mention their own youthful experience as student agitators – how quickly campus disorders, once ignited, could set the whole country aflame. This time, moreover, Chen Boda, evidently with Mao's approval, was publishing incendiary editorials which stoked the fire still higher. The usual recourse in such circumstances was to send in outside work teams, which carried out rectification and reorganised defective Party committees. This had already been done, as a stop-gap measure, at Beijing University. But was it what the Chairman wanted?

Mao was still in Hangzhou. He had not set foot in the capital since the previous November. Liu telephoned to ask him to return and take charge of the movement himself. Mao replied that he would remain in the south a little longer, and they should deal with the situation as they thought best. A few days later, Liu and Deng flew down to seek instructions directly. Mao gave the same response. This time he did vouchsafe that the use of work teams was not excluded, only ‘whether they should be sent or not sent, they must not be sent in hastily’.⁴¹ The phrase was ambiguous, and designedly so.

None the less, on that basis, teams of Party cadres and Youth League members were despatched to all institutions of higher learning in the capital and other large cities, under instructions to restore order and bring the movement under their control.⁴²

This orthodox, top-down approach sat ill with the fiery exhortations being pumped out by the People's Daily and other newspapers. It also failed to acknowledge the students’ genuine grievances. At Chinese universities, on the eve of the Cultural Revolution, the problems which the ‘Rightists’ had raised during the ‘Hundred Flowers’ had not only not gone away; they were now, in most cases, far worse. Mao's charges that Party bureaucrats at the universities behaved like ‘scholar tyrants’ resonated among those who had had to suffer their arbitrary whims. Incompetent staff members were protected; originality was repressed; cronyism and nepotism were rampant. The preferred method of teaching was still ‘duck-stuffing’ – as it had been in the 1930s – since rote-learning carried less political risk. Party and Youth League members got the plum job assignments; and, because the economy was still floundering, there were far fewer of those to go round.

Within days, conflicts developed. The work teams treated the student rebels as ‘anti-Party and anti-socialist elements’. The radicals held that Liu's men were ‘black gangsters’ in league with the ousted Party committees. By late June, nearly forty teams had been manhandled out of the campuses. In response, Liu branded thousands of students as ‘Rightists’ and struggle sessions were organised against their leaders. Faculty members who supported them were detained as counter-revolutionaries.⁴³

In retrospect, it is hard to understand how Liu and Deng could have misjudged so fundamentally Mao's intentions.

At the time, however, the enormity of what the Chairman was contemplating was beyond the comprehension not only of his adversaries but even of his allies. That he had decided to unleash the masses against the Party itself was too far-fetched for any in the Politburo to believe. When radicals at Beijing University staged a struggle meeting at which Lu Ping and sixty other ‘black gang elements’ were forced to kneel, wearing dunce's caps, their faces blackened, clothes ripped, and wall-posters plastered all over their bodies, for students to pummel and kick, to yank their hair and bind them with ropes, before parading them through the streets, not only Liu Shaoqi but also Chen Boda and Kang Sheng declared it to be a ‘counter-revolutionary incident’ whose authors must be severely punished.⁴⁴

While Mao concealed his hand, each tried to make sense in his own way of the events that were unfolding. To Liu and Deng, it was a sinister re-run of the ‘Hundred Flowers’, to ‘lure the snake out of its hole’ and expose those who retailed capitalist ideas, while at the same time teaching a lesson to youths who were hoodwinked by them. Chen Boda and Kang Sheng were beginning to understand that Mao was out to curb the power of Liu Shaoqi, but saw it as part of a renewed effort to radicalise policy, not as the start of an onslaught aimed at demolishing the Party system.

Great disorder under heaven yields to great order. And after seven or eight years, great disorder starts all over again. Monsters and demons leap out. Given their class nature, they cannot do otherwise … I am confident, even though I doubt myself a bit. I always feel that when there are no tigers on the mountain, the monkey becomes king. That's how I became such a king … I am part tiger (that is the main part) and part monkey (that is secondary). I've already quoted [to you] a few sentences from the letter which Lu Gu of the Han dynasty wrote to Huang Zhong: ‘Whatever is tall bends easily. Whatever is white is easily soiled. The more difficult the song, the fewer are able to sing it. When a man is famous, it is hard for him to live up to his fame.’ Those last two sentences sum up my situation exactly … Things always go to the opposite extreme … The black band is trying to overthrow the Party and to overthrow me … Our present task is to overthrow the rightists (at least partially, for to do so completely is impossible) … In seven or eight years another movement will have to be launched to wipe out the monsters and demons, and that will be repeated many times in the future.⁴⁵

Mao's trap was about to be sprung. Having spent the years since the Great Leap biding his time with the cunning of the monkey, it was time to become a tiger again.⁴⁶ As he had told Kang Sheng, in Yan'an, a quarter of a century before: ‘Melons ripen. Don't pick them when they are not yet ripe. When they are ready, they will just drop off.’

On July 16, Mao swam for over an hour in the Yangtse near Wuhan, drifting nine miles downstream with the current. It was a demonstration of vigour, a metaphor for throwing himself back into the fray. Photographs of the 72-year-old Chairman's exploit were printed in all Chinese newspapers, and newsreels shown at cinemas.⁴⁷

That night, in a further snub, Mao, closeted with Chen Boda and Kang Sheng, refused to receive the Head of State.

Soon afterwards he told Liu that sending the work teams had been a mistake. Jiang Qing went to Beijing University, where she told radical students: ‘Whoever does not join us in rebellion, let him stand aside! Those who want revolution, stand with us!’ Chen Boda declared that the mass struggle session against Lu Ping had, after all, been a revolutionary, not a counter-revolutionary, event. On the 24th, Mao called for the work teams to be withdrawn altogether, describing Liu's policy as ‘an error of orientation’. Two days later, the members of the Cultural Revolution Small Group went to Beijing Normal University where, at a mass rally, they called on the students to ‘overcome all obstacles, liberate their thinking and carry out a thorough-going revolution’.⁴⁸

At a rally of 10,000 teachers and students in the Great Hall of the People on July 29, Liu criticised himself for the work teams’ errors. But now there was an edge of resentment to his words, a dawning realisation that Mao had set him up. ‘You ask us how this [cultural] revolution should be run,’ he told them. ‘I tell you frankly, we don't know ourselves. I believe that many comrades of the Party Centre and many members of the work groups do not know.’ The result, he added pointedly, was that ‘even when you have made no mistakes, someone else says you have’. Deng and Zhou Enlai, who spoke before him, had explained the errors of the previous month as ‘old revolutionaries encountering new problems’ with which, as Zhou put it, ‘we were not familiar’. At that, Mao, who, unknown to them, was listening in a room nearby, snorted, according to his doctor: ‘Old revolutionaries! Old counter-revolutionaries is more like it!’ As the rally ended, Mao strode onto the stage to wild applause from the audience, ostentatiously ignoring both Deng and Liu.⁴⁹

On August 1, the Chairman convened a Central Committee plenum – the first for almost four years – to approve the political and ideological basis on which the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution should be conducted.⁵⁰ In his political report, Liu again acknowledged mistakes in the work teams’ approach. But, as before, he suggested that these resulted more from a lack of clarity (on the part, he implied, of Mao) than from any fundamental error in line. The debate that followed made clear that there was a good deal of sympathy for his views.

Accordingly, three days later, Mao convened an enlarged meeting of the Politburo Standing Committee, where he likened the sending of the work teams to the suppression of student movements by the northern warlords and Chiang Kai-shek's Guomindang. Without naming them, he accused Liu and Deng of carrying out ‘an act of suppression and terror ’, and added menacingly: ‘There are “monsters and demons” among people present here.’ When Liu retorted that he was ready to assume responsibility, since he had been in charge in the capital at the time, Mao sneered: ‘You were exercising dictatorship in Beijing. You did a fine job!’.⁵¹

This inflammatory statement was immediately circulated as a conference document. Like his speech at Lushan, condemning Peng Dehuai, seven years before, Mao's anger left the plenum transfixed. That night Liu received a student work team at Zhongnanhai and told them: ‘I've made mistakes. You may expose them. You may expel me from the Party, you may remove me from office … It is right to bombard the headquarters’.⁵²

The following day, Mao appropriated that phrase for a document he entitled, ‘Bombard the Headquarters! – my big-character poster’, which was distributed to the plenum on August 7. Since mid-June, Mao asserted, certain ‘central leading comrades’, who had opposed him on two previous occasions – in 1962 (over private farming) and in 1964 (over the Socialist Education Movement) – had been resisting the Cultural Revolution and trying to install a bourgeois dictatorship: ‘They have inverted right and wrong, and confused black and white. They have encircled and suppressed revolutionaries, and stifled opinions different from their own. They have practised White terror, glorifying capitalism and denigrating the proletariat. How venomous!’ The poster's title reinforced the attack by implying that the unnamed ‘leading comrades’ had formed a bourgeois headquarters within the Party.⁵³

Mao's poster confirmed what Liu had begun dimly to apprehend some days earlier: the Chairman had decided to get rid of him.

With Liu's days numbered, his allies in the Politburo, led by Deng Xiaoping, and his supporters in the Central Committee, waited for the axe to fall on them too. It did not. Mao was still taking no chances. On his instructions, Chen Boda, Kang Sheng, the Public Security Minister, Xie Fuzhi, and other radical spokesmen concentrated all their fire on the Head of State. Few of those present understood what Liu was supposed to have done wrong. But nor did anyone try to defend him. For thirty-two years, since the start of the Long March, no one had picked a fight with Mao and won. August 1966, with the Chairman stirring up mayhem in the leadership and the country at large, did not seem the best time to start.

The previous day, Mao had sent a plane to fetch Lin Biao from Dalian, where he had gone with his family to escape the summer heat. Zhou Enlai met him at the airport and, as they drove into Beijing, briefed him on what was going on. Then the Chairman himself received him, and informed him that he was to become deputy leader of the Party in Liu's place. Lin, who was only too well aware of the danger of such a dizzying promotion, tried to refuse, pleading poor health. But Mao's mind was made up.⁵⁴

On August 8, the CC meekly passed – by unanimous vote – a document, to which Mao himself had put the finishing touches, known as the ‘Sixteen Points’. It was the blueprint for the daluan, the ‘great chaos’, that would engulf China for the next three years.

The Cultural Revolution, it declared, was ‘a great revolution that touches people to their very souls’, an ‘irresistible general trend’, which would vanquish bourgeois and feudal ideology, and instil a ‘proletarian world outlook’, exemplified by ‘the great Red banner of Mao Zedong Thought’. It was a revolution from the bottom up, in which the masses would liberate themselves and oppose ‘old ideas, culture, customs and habits’. ‘Trust the masses,’ Mao exhorted the Party, ‘rely on them, and respect their initiative, cast out fear and don't be afraid of disturbances.’ He had said much the same in 1957. But this time his shock troops were ‘revolutionary young people’, ‘daring and courageous path-breakers’. Their task was different, too, from that of the bourgeois intellectuals he had unleashed during the ‘Hundred Flowers’. The target now was not the sloth and arrogance of bureaucratic cadres, but ‘all those people in authority who are taking the capitalist road’.⁵⁵

Mao was not quite ready to say openly that Liu Shaoqi was their chief. But when the plenum elected a new Politburo Standing Committee – on the basis of a list drawn up, not, as the rules required, by the Party's Organisation Department, but by Jiang Qing, in accordance with Mao's private wishes – Liu slipped from second to eighth place in the rank order. The ‘first’ and ‘second’ fronts disappeared. Lin Biao became Mao's sole deputy, with the title of Vice-Chairman. Premier Zhou Enlai, as before, ranked third, but, like the ailing Chen Yun and Zhu De, was now merely a Standing Committee member. They were joined by Mao's radical allies, Chen Boda and Kang Sheng, and by the Guangdong leader, Tao Zhu, who had replaced Peng Zhen in the Secretariat. Deng Xiaoping found himself promoted – despite his association with Liu – from seventh to sixth place in the hierarchy.⁵⁶ His case was merely postponed.

On the day the plenum opened, August 1, Mao had written a letter expressing ‘warm support’ for the Red Guards at Qinghua University Middle School, where the movement had been launched. ‘You say it is right to rebel against reactionaries,’ he told them. ‘I enthusiastically support you.’⁵⁷ It was the signal for Red Guard organisations, which until then had been confined to the capital, to spread all over China.

Two weeks later, a million Red Guards, some from as far away as Sichuan and Guangdong, converged on the capital for the first of ten gigantic rallies in Tiananmen Square. At midnight on August 17, detachments of schoolchildren and college students, singing revolutionary songs and carrying red silken banners and portraits of the Chairman, began marching down Changan dajie, the Avenue of Eternal Peace, to take up their positions. Mao's appearance was timed to coincide with the first rays of the rising sun. Shortly after 5 a.m., he walked out from the Forbidden City and mingled briefly with the crowd, before retiring to the pavilion above the gate to meet Red Guard representatives.⁵⁸

To underscore the mood of militancy, the Chairman, like the rest of the Politburo, wore a green PLA uniform – something he had not done since the despatch of Chinese forces to Korea in 1950.

The meeting opened with the playing of the Maoist anthem, ‘The East is Red’. Chen Boda and Lin Biao whipped up the fervour of the crowd, praising Mao as the ‘Great leader, Great teacher, Great helmsman and Great commander’. Then a girl student from a Beijing middle school – who was also the daughter of a veteran Red Army general⁵⁹ – pinned a Red Guard armband to Mao's sleeve, triggering scenes of delirium among the young people crammed into the square below. Mao himself said nothing. He did not need to.

Let me tell you the great news – news greater than heaven [ran one typical letter home] … I saw our most, most, most, most, dearly beloved leader, Chairman Mao! Comrades, I have seen Chairman Mao! Today I am so happy my heart is about to burst … We're jumping! We're singing! After seeing the Red Sun in Our Hearts, I just ran around like crazy all over Beijing … I could see him ever so clearly, and he was so impressive … Comrades, how can I possibly describe to you what that moment was like? … How can I possibly go to sleep tonight! I have decided to make today my birthday. Today, I started a new life!!!⁶⁰

An orgasm of devotional enthusiasm swept feverishly through the streets. A few independent spirits saw through the divine charade, like the student who wrote a few weeks later: ‘The Great Cultural Revolution is not a mass movement, but one man moving the masses with the barrel of a gun.’⁶¹ But the vast majority did not. Mao had found his new guerrilla army to assault the political heights. A whole generation of young Chinese was ready to die, and to kill, for him, with unquestioning obedience.

`It began within days of the August 18 rally. One of the first victims was the eminent writer, Lao She, author of Rickshaw Boy and Teahouse. With some thirty other cultural figures, he was taken to the courtyard of the former Confucian Temple in Beijing. There they were given yin-yang haircuts (with one half of the head shaven, the other left uncut); black ink was poured over their faces; and signs labelling them as ‘ox demons and snake spirits’ hung around their necks. Then they were made to kneel as the Red Guards beat them with stakes and leather belts. Lao She, who was sixty-seven, lost consciousness. When he was sent home, in the early hours of next morning, his clothes were so thick with congealed blood that his wife had to cut them from his body. Next day he drowned himself in a shallow lake, not far from the Forbidden City.⁶²

Thousands of lesser victims met similar fates. There was scarcely a housing block in Beijing where the Red Guards did not beat at least one person to death. Over four days at the end of August, in one small suburban area, 325 people were killed, ranging from a six-week-old baby (the child of a ‘reactionary family’) to an old man in his eighties.⁶³

The rapidity with which peaceable, idealistic young students were transformed into avenging furies astounded older people. Perhaps it should not have done. The generation which had grown up after 1949, unable to remember the civil war and the hardships it had entailed, was markedly different from its forebears (as were its counterparts elsewhere, whose energy fuelled the civil rights and anti-war movements in the United States, May 1968 in France and ‘communism with a human face’ in Prague). What they had in common was frustration with the values of their parents and revolutionary zeal to overthrow the systems they represented.⁶⁴ In January 1965, Peng Zhen had warned his Politburo colleagues that in the schools which their own children were attending, violence festered beneath the surface and risked exploding into ‘indiscriminate struggle’.⁶⁵ This was the energy that Mao harnessed to drive the Cultural Revolution. The Chairman saw it as a sign of the Chinese people's ‘fighting spirit’.⁶⁶ How many times before, from the May Fourth movement in 1919, to the ‘Hundred Flowers’ forty years later, had apparently tranquil campuses erupted in a matter of hours to become seething cauldrons of political agitation? This time, the most powerful man in the land, Mao himself, had personally pointed the way, recalling (in the ‘Sixteen Points’) that revolution was ‘an act of violence whereby one class overthrows the power of another’.⁶⁷ Lin Biao urged them to ‘smash the Four Olds; – ‘old thought, old culture, old customs and old practices’ – and the Security Minister, Xie Fuzhi, ordered the police not to interfere:

Should Red Guards who kill people be punished? My view is that if people are killed, they are killed; it's no business of ours … If the masses hate bad people so much that we cannot stop them, then let us not insist .… The people's police should stand on the side of the Red Guards, liaise with them, sympathise with them and provide them with information, especially about the five black categories – the landlords, rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries, bad elements and Rightists.⁶⁸

It was rarely put that bluntly. However, a central directive, approved by Mao on August 22, laid down that ‘mobilising the police to suppress the student movement is strictly prohibited’,⁶⁹ and Xie went little further than Mao himself had done, when he had declared, shortly before the communist victory in 1949, he had declared: ‘the state apparatus, including … the police and the courts … is the instrument by which one class oppresses another. It is an instrument … [of] violence.’⁷⁰

Violence, revolution and power were the trinity by which Mao had struggled to realise his political vision all through his long career.

In the 1960s, violence served the same purpose as it had in the Hunan peasant movement in 1926, in the ‘land investigation movement’ in Jiangxi in the 1930s, and during the land reform of the 1940s and 1950s. The Red Guards who tortured and killed in the Chairman's name – like the peasants who beat to death their landlords – were committing themselves to the Maoist cause irrevocably. Ken Ling, a Red Guard in Fujian, described his own initiation as a sixteen-year-old middle-school student:

Teacher Chen, over 60 years old and suffering from high blood-pressure, was … dragged up to the second floor of a classroom building and … beaten with fists and broomsticks … He passed out several times, but was brought back to consciousness … with cold water being splashed on to his face. He could hardly move his body; his feet were cut by glass and thorns. He shouted, ‘Why don't you kill me? Kill me!’ This lasted for six hours, until he lost control of his excrement. They tried to force a stick into his rectum. He collapsed for the last time. They poured cold water on him again. It was too late … People began to run away, one after the other. The killers were a little frightened. They … summoned the school doctor, [who] … finally wrote on the death certificate: ‘Death due to a sudden attack of high blood pressure … ’ When [his wife] rushed to the scene, she was forced to confirm this cause of death before being allowed to take the body …

After a night filled with dreadful nightmares, I mustered enough courage to go to school the next day to witness more of this torture … After 10 days or so, I became used to it; a blood-smeared body or a shriek no longer made me feel uneasy.⁷¹

Teachers with bourgeois connections; members of the ‘democratic parties’; those from the ‘five black categories’ (later enlarged to seven to include traitors and spies; and finally to nine, by the addition of capitalists and ‘stinking intellectuals’) – in short, the ‘usual suspects’ – were among the first to be targeted, often with the tacit encouragement of Party committees, which sought in this way to draw the Red Guards’ fire away from themselves. Very soon, with support from the police and from sympathisers in the military, the killings became systematic. After the Cultural Revolution, another teacher, crippled by his students, described what that had meant:

On the athletic field, every few days, several teachers would be taken out and shot in public … Some teachers were buried alive. On the roof of that building over there, four teachers were ordered to sit on a pack of explosives and [forced] to light them themselves. [There was] a tremendous sound, and nobody could be seen – only legs and arms were in the trees and [scattered] over the roof … [Altogether] about one hundred [school officials] were killed.⁷²

To adolescents, there could be no more potent symbol of the overthrow of the old order than the physical destruction of those set in authority above them. Mao's injunction, ‘it is right to rebel’, dating from December, 1939, when he was encouraging writers like Ding Ling and Wang Shiwei to shake things up inside the Party, was now emblazoned across the front page of the People's Daily, and the Red Guards made it their own.⁷³ By publicly humiliating their victims, when they did not actually kill them, they ensured that none could remain indifferent to the extraordinary changes that Mao was bringing about. Like the ‘people-beating meetings’ staged in certain Beijing theatres and in the city's parks,⁷⁴ the Red Guards’ terror had an educational, as well as a punitive, role.

The rebels split first on class lines, between the children of workers, peasants and soldiers, and those from less desirable backgrounds; then through factional cleavages, as rival groups were manipulated by competing political and military forces at provincial and national level. The violence turned inwards. By mid-autumn, many Red Guard units had set up ‘reformatories’ and ‘detention centres’, where wayward members were disciplined and enemies punished. Fifteen-year-old Gao Yuan recalled finding some of his friends after their schoolmates had tortured them:

Some lay on the floor bound with ropes. Some were strung from beams … The discovery of Songying [a seventeen-year-old girl] was the biggest shock. She lay unconscious on the floor in a pool of blood. Her pants had been stripped off. Her blouse was torn, revealing her breasts. She had been beaten so badly that her whole body was purple … Her tormentors had pushed dirty socks and twigs into her vagina, causing heavy bleeding …

As she slit open [his] trouser legs with scissors, she flinched. When I looked at Zongwei's bare legs, I knew why. They were riddled with holes the diameter of a pencil, surrounded by strings of loose flesh the consistency of shredded pork. Blood and pus oozed from the wounds. ‘What in hell did they use on him,’ Dr Yang muttered. Looking round the room, I found the answer to her question: the pokers used to tend the stove.⁷⁵

Among the many thousands who died that autumn was the young man who had written so ecstatically of seeing Mao in Tiananmen Square. Less than three weeks afterwards, he was savagely beaten and committed suicide.⁷⁶

The Cultural Revolution Small Group made half-hearted attempts to stop the Red Guards’ internecine killings. Mao showed little concern; excesses were inevitable.

The Red Guard leaders were doing no more than he himself had done, when he had ordered the purge of the AB-tuan and the ‘suppression of counter-revolutionaries’ at Futian. It was not the best way of dealing with opponents or with renegades, but it was a necessary, perhaps, to a degree, even a desirable part of the ‘great revolutionary storm’ by which the ‘young Generals’ were to be tempered as successors, just as Mao's generation had been, thirty years before.

The parallel with the early stages of the Chinese revolution was deliberate. Both for Mao and for his young followers, the Cultural Revolution was in part an attempt to recreate the glory days of his own struggle for power.

At the end of August, the Chairman had endorsed a nationwide ‘networking movement’, inspired by the Long March, under which Red Guards were given free train passes to travel all over the country, spreading the gospel of the Cultural Revolution, while provincial youths came to the capital to be fired by the Red Guard rallies at which Mao presided.⁷⁷ In the process, millions of young Chinese visited his birthplace at Shaoshan; the first Red base area on the Jinggangshan; and other revolutionary sites, often making the journey on foot to relive the experiences of their revolutionary forebears.⁷⁸

Similarly the campaign against the ‘Four Olds’ emulated the iconoclasm of the decade that had ended in the May Fourth movement.

Where Mao and his student friends had sheared off Manchu pigtails, the Red Guards declared war on ‘Hong Kong-style haircuts, Hong Kong-style clothing, cowboy trousers, winkle-pickers and high-heeled shoes’, in order, as one group put it, ‘to stop up every orifice leading to capitalism, and [to] smash every incubator of revisionism’. Correction stations were set up at street corners to shave offending heads. Where, half a century before, Chen Duxiu's ‘new culture movement’ had ushered in a change of language, from the classical to the vernacular, now there was a ‘movement’ to change names: old ‘feudal’ shop signs were discarded in favour of terms like Weidong (Defend Mao Zedong), Hanbiao (Defend Lin Biao), Yongge (Permanent Revolution) and so on. Children changed their given names to Hongrong (Red Glory) or Xiangdong (Face the East). The road outside the Soviet Embassy became ‘Anti-Revisionism Street’; the Beijing Union Hospital, established in 1921 by the Rockefeller Foundation, the ‘Anti-Imperialism Hospital’. The Red Guards even changed the traffic lights, so that red became the signal for ‘go’, until Zhou Enlai told them that red got people's attention better and therefore should remain ‘stop’. It was Zhou, too, who sent troops to guard the Forbidden City, when Red Guards came with pickaxes to smash its ancient sculptures. Other historic sites were less fortunate. All over China, city gates and temples were demolished, tombs desecrated, bronze statues and artefacts melted down, mosques and monasteries vandalised, paintings and sutras destroyed, monks and nuns defrocked. Confucius's birthplace at Qufu, in Shandong, which Mao had admired as a student on his way back to Changsha from Beijing, suffered particularly severe destruction: more than a thousand stone steles were broken and 2,000 graves vandalised.⁷⁹

But where Mao's generation had contented itself with ransacking public places of worship (and Mao himself had opposed even that, arguing that the people would take action themselves when they judged the time was right),⁸⁰ the Red Guards ransacked private homes. Between a quarter and a third of all dwellings in Beijing were subjected to Red Guard searches in the autumn of 1966. Antiques; calligraphy; foreign currency; gold and silver; jewellery; musical instruments; paintings; porcelain; old photographs; the manuscripts of famous writers; scientific notebooks – all were suspect, liable to be confiscated, stolen or smashed on the spot. In Shanghai, such searches yielded 32 tons of gold; 150 tons of pearls and jade; 450 tons of gold and silver jewellery; and more than six million US dollars in cash. Serious offenders, usually from one of the ‘black classes’, had their homes sequestered and were driven out of the city; minor culprits merely lost their possessions. Even such diversions as cultivating pot plants, keeping cagebirds and pet dogs and cats, which Mao had criticised, were condemned as legacies of feudalism.⁸¹

Books were a special target. As a student, Mao had proposed that ‘all the anthologies of prose and poetry published since the Tang and Song dynasties [should] be burned’ (including presumably, his personal favourites, like The Dream of the Red Chamber and Water Margin), on the grounds that ‘the past oppresses the present’ and the essence of revolution was ‘replacing the old with the new’.⁸²

In cities all over China, the accumulated haul from the sacking of temples and libraries, bookshops and private homes, was piled up in main squares. Ken Ling remembered the scene in Amoy at the beginning of September:

The piles contained many different things: wooden ancestor tablets, old Guomindang paper currency, brightly coloured Chinese-style dresses … mahjong tiles, playing cards, foreign cigarettes … But most of all, idols and books. All the books that had been removed from the city libraries … were there – the yellow, the black, and poisonous books. Most of them were old hand-sewn volumes. The Golden Lotus … The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio – all awaited burning. Shortly after 6 p.m., 50 kilograms of kerosene were poured on the piles, which were then set afire. The flames leapt three stories high … [They] burned for three days and nights.⁸³

Later on, old books were sent to be pulped. In this way, many unique copies of Song and Ming dynasty texts were lost for ever.

The greatest difference, however, between the iconoclasm of Mao's youth and that of his Red Guard successors, half a century on, was that his generation had rebelled to liberate itself from the straitjacket of Confucian orthodoxy, triggering an explosion of free thinking in which every new idea, every fashion, every social doctrine, was permitted.

The Red Guards curtailed even the vestigial freedoms that then existed, imposing a new, Maoist orthodoxy more rigid than any that had gone before. Their object was to expunge the old, to ‘burn the books and bury the scholars alive’, as the Emperor Qin Shihuang had done, 2,000 years before, so that China would become, in Mao's phrase, ‘a blank sheet of paper’, ready to be inscribed with the holy writ of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought.

To fill the vacuum left by the ‘Four Olds’, the ‘Four News’ were devised – ‘new ideology, new culture, new customs, new habits’.⁸⁴ In practice, that meant the exaltation of Mao and his ideas to the exclusion of everything else. He was no longer venerated; he was worshipped.

At workplaces each morning, people stood in formation and bowed three times before Mao's portrait, silently ‘asking instructions’ for the tasks of the day ahead. They repeated the same ritual each evening, to report on what they had accomplished. Red Guards told their victims to pray to Mao for forgiveness. Thanks was offered to Mao before meals. At city railway stations, passengers had to carry out a ‘loyalty dance’ on the platform before they were allowed to board the train. In country districts there were ‘loyalty pigs’, branded with the character zhong (loyalty) to show that even dumb beasts could recognise Mao's genius. Mao's works were referred to as ‘treasure books’, and special ceremonies were held whenever a consignment went on sale. Activists learned Mao's essays by heart, and festooned themselves with Mao Zedong lapel badges. Switchboard operators greeted callers with the words, ‘Mao zhuxi wansui!’ (‘Long live Chairman Mao!’). Business letters opened with quotations from Mao's writings, printed in bold type. The ‘Little Red Book’ of his aphorisms was ascribed the power to work miracles. Chinese newspapers reported how medical workers armed with it had cured the blind and the deaf; how a paralytic, relying on Mao Zedong Thought, had recovered the use of his limbs; how, on another occasion, Mao Zedong Thought had raised a man from the dead.⁸⁵

None of this was wholly new to China. Mao himself, as a schoolboy, had bowed before a portrait of Confucius each morning. In the 1920s, Guomindang members had started their meetings by bowing to a portrait of Sun Yat-sen. Chiang Kai-shek had tried, unsuccessfully, to introduce a similar cult of himself. Loyalty dances had been performed at the Tang Court, 1200 years before. As a sign of reverence, the Emperor's words were always placed higher, and in larger characters, than those of any other man (a cause, in the nineteenth century, of endless diplomatic bickering with the Powers).

But the irony was that to bring into existence his new world, the Chairman had reached back to his roots, to the bedrock of his thought, to the days when China was ruled by a Son of Heaven – the ‘Red Sun in Our Hearts’ – to forge an emperor-system whose limitless power, once harnessed to revolutionary goals, could build the Red utopia to which he pinned his dreams.

As 1966 drew to a close, the whole of China seemed to be marching to Mao's step.

His imperial status, his deification, the fanaticism of the Red Guards, created a climate of militancy and menace so overpowering that no one could oppose him. The Chairman was elated. At his seventy-third birthday party, he proposed a toast to ‘the unfolding of an all-round nationwide civil war’.⁸⁶ Zhou Enlai summed up the new guiding principle by which all Party leaders must act: ‘Whatever accords with Mao Zedong Thought is right, while whatever does not accord with Mao Zedong Thought is wrong.’⁸⁷

Within the Central Committee, as within the Party at large, radicals were in the minority. Most officials were appalled by the prospect of yet another upheaval that would imperil their positions. The Chairman himself had no illusions on that score. ‘When you are told to kindle a fire to burn yourselves, will you do it?’ he had asked sceptically back in July. ‘After all, you yourselves will be burned.’⁸⁸ Hence his decision to enrol the young as his new revolutionary vanguard.

By late September 1966, the focus of the terror spread by the Red Guards was shifting from their teachers to higher-level education officials and Party committees. Where most of the violence and destruction in the first months had been the work of secondary-school children, university students were now encouraged to pursue more political targets. Officially Liu and Deng Xiaoping retained their leading posts. But on National Day, when Liu, as Head of State, stood next to Mao, wearing a green military uniform and waving to the crowd, Sidney Rittenberg, who was on the platform with them, saw his eyes were ‘beady with fear’.⁸⁹ At a Central Committee work conference, which opened shortly afterwards, both men made self-criticisms. But where Deng was willing to abase himself by acknowledging that he had followed what Mao was now calling a ‘bourgeois reactionary line’, Liu admitted only to ‘errors in principle and errors in line’, a seemingly arcane distinction which left him open to the charge of refusing to confess his crimes. Deng, unlike Liu, also praised the Cultural Revolution as a movement which would prevent China ever sinking into ‘revisionism and capitalist restoration’.⁹⁰

As was often the case when he felt he was winning, Mao wished to appear conciliatory. In a remarkable closing speech to the work conference, he even offered an apology for the mayhem he had caused:

No wonder [you] old comrades did not understand too much. The time was so short and the events so violent. I myself had not foreseen that the whole country would be thrown into turmoil … Since it was I who caused the havoc, it is understandable if you have some bitter words for me … [But] what's come has come … Undoubtedly you have made some mistakes … but they can be corrected and that will be that! Whoever wants to overthrow you? I don't, and I don't think the Red Guards do either … You find it difficult to cross this pass, and I don't find it easy. You are anxious and so am I. I cannot blame you, comrades.⁹¹

Liu and Deng, he said, were not in the same category as Peng Zhen, for they had acted openly. ‘If they have made mistakes, they can change … Once they have changed it will be all right.’⁹² But the Chairman's magnanimity was strained. Wallposters had already appeared in the centre of Beijing, denouncing Liu as ‘China's Khrushchev’ and accusing Deng of being his close follower. In November the texts of their self-criticisms were distributed nationwide.⁹³

By then Mao had recognised that the Red Guards alone lacked the strength to achieve the decisive shift in the balance of political forces that he wanted. In August he had spoken confidently of ‘a few months of disorder’ being enough to bring about the downfall of almost all the provincial Party leaders.⁹⁴ Now it was clear that it was going to take much longer.

The Red Guards were instructed to broaden their class base. The early Red Guard slogan, ‘If the father is a hero, the son is courageous; if the father is reactionary, the son is a bastard’, was denounced as ‘historical idealism’, no better than feudalism.⁹⁵ Millions of youths, who had previously been excluded from the movement and had little love for the traditional ‘Red classes’ of the Party hierarchy, now rallied to the radicals’ cause.

Leaders whose ardour in pursuing ‘capitalist-roaders’ was judged to be insufficient were purged as a warning to others to show more enthusiasm. Wang Renzhong, the left-wing Hubei Party chief, whom Mao had personally chosen as one of the deputy heads of the Cultural Revolution Small Group, went first – accused of suppressing ‘exchanges of experience’ among Red Guards. Then Tao Zhu, who ranked fourth in the hierarchy – behind Mao, Lin Biao and Zhou Enlai – was charged with being a ‘faithful follower of the Liu–Deng line’. He had adopted what Mao considered too restrictive a view of the Cultural Revolution and had tried to defend Liu and Deng. To the Red Guards, that made him an ‘uncompromising emperor-protector’ and a ‘high-level two-faced rogue’. Marshal He Long, also a Politburo member, was accused of being in league with Peng Zhen. Even eighty-year-old Zhu De was denounced in wall-posters as ‘an old swine’ and a ‘black commander’ who had consistently opposed Mao's proletarian line.⁹⁶ At a slightly lower level, about a score of Central Committee members working in the capital were brought before Red Guard struggle meetings, where they were made to wear dunce's caps^I and endured verbal and physical abuse.⁹⁷

Finally, in December, Mao allowed the Cultural Revolution Group to bring back Peng Dehuai from Sichuan. He was held at a military barracks for questioning about his links with Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping.

The choice of victims was determined partly by personal factors (Chen Boda had a long-standing grudge against Tao Zhu; Wang Renzhong had offended Jiang Qing; He Long's wife and Lin Biao's wife, Ye Qun, had loathed each other since Yan'an) and partly by political self-interest – Lin regarded fellow veterans like He and Zhu De as an impediment to achieving complete control of the PLA himself. Mao rarely initiated arrests (which allowed him, if he wished, to disavow them later), but instead let the radicals act as they thought fit. In almost every case, the underlying motive was the same. The Shanghai radical, Zhang Chunqiao, explained:

This Cultural Revolution is precisely to pull down all of these old fellows, sparing no one. Zhu De, Chen Yi, He Long – there's not a single good egg among them! … Zhu De is a big warlord; Chen Yi is an old careerist … He Long is a bandit … Which one is worth keeping? Not one of them should be kept.⁹⁸

All represented the ‘old thinking’ which the Cultural Revolution was pledged to destroy.

As the Red Guard movement was enlarged, militant factory and office workers, in many cases fired by personal grievances against the Party Committees of their work units, had begun forming rebel detachments. At the beginning of November, a young textile worker in Shanghai, 31-year-old Wang Hongwen, set up the ‘Workers’ Revolutionary General Headquarters’ to coordinate radical workers’ groups in the city. When the municipal authorities refused to recognise the new body, Wang despatched a delegation to Beijing. The Shanghai Party Committee had the train on which they were travelling stopped before it could leave the city, whereupon the workers lay across the tracks – blocking rail movement for more than 30 hours. Zhang Chunqiao, who was sent in as a trouble-shooter, immediately endorsed the General Headquarters’ demands and instructed the city's acting First Secretary, Cao Diqiu, to make a public self-criticism. Mao approved his initiative and, on December 9, proclaimed that workers in all commercial, industrial and government offices had the right to establish mass organisations. A week later, this was extended to poor and lower-middle peasants in the countryside. In theory this meant that almost everyone in China had the right to form rebel groups, to exchange experience with those from other areas, and to attack the veteran cadres – and each other – in big character posters and at struggle meetings.⁹⁹

His dispositions now complete, Mao instructed the Cultural Revolution Small Group to intensify the movement against Liu and Deng. On December 18, Zhang Chunqiao passed on the Chairman's instructions to the Qinghua University Red Guard leader, Kuai Dafu. ‘Those two at the Party Centre … still won't surrender,’ he explained. ‘Go after them! Make them odious! Don't do it half-way.’¹⁰⁰

The following weekend, thousands of students, preceded by loudspeaker vans, marched to the main shopping area in Beijing, where they plastered the walls with slogans, urging the two men's overthrow. Jiang Qing persuaded the Head of State's daughter by a previous marriage, Liu Tao, who was also studying at Qinghua, to join the campaign – warning that if she refused it would show her lack of ‘revolutionary sincerity’. On January 3, 1967, a poster signed by the girl and her brother, entitled, ‘Witness the Despicable Soul of Liu Shaoqi’, was put up inside the walls of Zhongnanhai. Red Guard organisations made copies and sent it all over the country. The same day, some thirty members of a rebel group called the ‘Red Flag Regiment’, which had been formed, with Mao's encouragement, by young staff members and bodyguards from the Central Committee offices, burst into the Head of State's house, where they berated him for three-quarters of an hour and made him recite quotations from the ‘Little Red Book’. Deng and Tao Zhu and their families underwent similar ordeals. Even Zhu De was dragged out of his home and humiliated, until Mao ordered that attacks on him cease – as he had done earlier for certain non-communist personalities, including Sun Yat-sen's widow, Soong Ching-ling.

Three days later, the Red Guards struck again. This time a hoax telephone call sent Liu's wife, Wang Guangmei, rushing to a Beijing hospital, where she had been told that another daughter, Pingping, was awaiting surgery after a traffic accident. On arrival, she found no injured child, but a crowd of Qinghua rebels, who took her to their campus and staged a struggle meeting against her.

Meanwhile, with Mao's authorisation, the Central Case Examination Group, which had been set up seven months earlier to investigate Peng Zhen and his colleagues, formed a special team to examine Wang Guangmei's past. She came from a wealthy family and had been educated at an American mission school. To Kang Sheng, whom Mao had asked to resume responsibility for political security matters, that immediately raised the possibility that she could be shown to be an American spy. Later, another ‘Special Case Group’ was formed to try to prove that Liu had betrayed the communist cause while working as an underground leader in the White areas in the 1920s.

A week after the hospital incident, Mao invited Liu for the last time to the Study of Chrysanthemum Fragrance.

He enquired solicitously after Pingping's health (knowing full well that the ‘accident’ had been a fabrication), and reminisced about old times. Liu asked Mao to allow him to resign all his official positions and return with his family to Yan'an, or to his native village in Hunan, to work on a commune as a peasant. The Chairman did not answer. He sat silently, chain-smoking, and when Liu got up to leave said merely: ‘Study well. Take good care of yourself.’ Five days later, on January 18, the special telephone line linking Liu with other members of the Politburo, including Mao and Premier Zhou, was cut. His isolation was complete.

Deng and Liu, however, were spared the fate that awaited other top-level leaders, who were publicly struggled against at mass rallies in sports stadiums and gymnasiums all over Beijing. Newsreel film from the time shows Peng Zhen and his former colleagues in the Beijing Municipal Committee, standing or kneeling on the icy ground with placards around their necks bearing the words ‘Counter-revolutionary revisionist’, while guards yanked back their hair, forcing them to bow as the crowd, 100,000-strong screamed its hatred. That year Peng Zhen was struggled against fifty-three times. Peng Dehuai, who had been brought back from Sichuan in December to be questioned about his links with Liu and Deng, was driven through the city in an open truck, plastered with slogans, like a criminal being taken for execution. When he and Zhang Wentian reached Tiananmen Square, they were surrounded by Red Guards, shackled into a jetplane position, beaten and cursed. Similar meetings targeted leaders in provincial cities, often still more violently.¹⁰¹

The workers’ groups whose establishment Mao had authorised soon split, like the students before them, into rival factions – ‘revolutionary rebels’, who sought the overthrow of all existing power structures, and ‘proletarian revolutionaries’, who wanted to preserve Party leadership, albeit in a more radical form.

In Shanghai, the Workers’ General Headquarters, backed by the Cultural Revolution Small Group in Beijing, engaged in an increasingly violent power struggle with its conservative rival, the Scarlet Guards, tacitly supported by the city Party committee. On December 30, tens of thousands of workers fought running street battles outside the Party committee's offices. Strikes broke out. The port was paralysed, with more than a hundred foreign ships waiting to be unloaded. Rail transport came to a halt as tens of thousands of Scarlet Guards blocked the main north–south trunk line, demanding the right to present their case in Beijing. Workers who had been sent to the countryside during the famine after the Great Leap Forward began demanding the right to return. Starting on January 3, 1967 – the day that the campaign against Liu Shaoqi and his wife went into high gear in Beijing – Wang Hongwen's rebels seized control of Shanghai's main newspapers, first the Wenhuibao, then two days afterward, the Party paper, Jiefang ribao.

At that point, Mao himself intervened, sending Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan to the city with instructions to establish ‘a new political authority’ in place of the Shanghai Party Committee – whereupon the balance tilted definitively in the rebels’ favour. Two days later, on January 6, 100,000 people gathered in the central square for a rally at which the General Headquarters announced that ‘revolutionary rebels’ in the city government would assume responsibility for day-to-day affairs.

The ‘seizure of power’ in Shanghai became a model for the rest of the country. Mao called it a ‘great revolution’ of ‘one class overthrowing another’. He cited an old proverb: ‘Don't think that because Butcher Zhang dies, we will have to eat pork with the bristles still on it.’¹⁰² The sense was that the country could keep going even if the provincial committees did fall. Over the next three weeks, rebel groups seized power in seven other provinces and cities, including Beijing itself, Anhui, Guangdong and Heilongjiang.

There was a problem, however. The unseating of Party committees was one thing; what to put in their place was quite another.

Neither Mao, nor the rebel groups themselves, had really thought this question through. Zhang Chunqiao was initially preoccupied with warding off challenges from rival Red Guard groups and revolutionary factions, and it was not until February 5, 1967, that, with backing from local Red Guards and PLA units, he felt sufficiently in control of the situation to be able to proclaim the establishment of the Shanghai People's Commune.¹⁰³

In taking this step, Zhang was convinced he had Mao's full support. A few days earlier, Chen Boda had telephoned to say that the Chairman was about to approve the setting-up of a Beijing Commune, and that Shanghai should do the same.¹⁰⁴ The ‘Sixteen Points’ had called explicitly for ‘a system of general elections, like that of the Paris Commune’,¹⁰⁵ to establish local organs of power to serve as a bridge between the Party and the masses. As the most important of all the ‘newborn things’ produced during the Great Leap Forward, the communes symbolised the originality of the Chinese revolution. Mao himself, in 1958, had looked forward to the day when ‘everything will be called a commune … [including] cities and villages’.¹⁰⁶

Unexpectedly, however, the Chairman changed his mind. Other cities and provinces were told not to follow Shanghai's example, and Zhang and Yao Wenyuan were summoned to Beijing to hear Mao's explanation.

A series of problems arises, and I wonder whether you have thought about them [he said]. If the whole of China sets up people's communes, should the ‘People's Republic of China’ change its name to ‘People's Commune of China’? Would others recognise us? Maybe the Soviet Union would not recognise us, whereas Britain and France would. And what would we do about our ambassadors in various countries? And so on.¹⁰⁷

The reasoning was spurious – and Mao knew it. A name-change would make no difference whatever to China's international relations. None the less, this was what was broadcast by the Red Guards, and soon came to be generally accepted as the reason for the ‘commune’ form of organisation being rejected. It implied force majeure: whatever Mao's own preferences might be, external constraints ruled it out.

The reality was rather different. The Shanghai leaders’ move had forced Mao to look into the abyss – and he did not like what he saw.

A system based on the Paris Commune, with free elections and unrestricted political activity, meant allowing the masses to rule themselves. This was the logic of his injunction to ‘trust the masses and rely on them’ – the logic, in fact, on which the entire Cultural Revolution had been based. But where would that leave the Party? As he put it to Zhang Chunqiao: ‘There must be a Party somehow! There must be a nucleus, no matter what we call it.’¹⁰⁸ Truly free elections were a utopian dream. Doing away with leaders and ‘overthrowing everything’ might look progressive, but in fact it was reactionary and would lead to ‘extreme anarchism’.¹⁰⁹

In one view, Mao lost his nerve, just as he had, ten years earlier, when he had clamped down on the ‘Hundred Flowers’, only to acknowledge afterwards that he had been ‘confused by false appearances’ and might have acted prematurely.¹¹⁰

Another way of putting it would be that he demonstrated, once again, the skills of a consummate politician. Age had done nothing to dull the acuteness of the Chairman's political antennae. The Cultural Revolution might appear to be a descent into madness, but Mao had moved at each stage with circumspection. He had made clear from the outset that destruction would have to be followed by rebuilding – that ‘the great disorder’, as he had put it in July 1966, would eventually have to yield to ‘great peace’.¹¹¹ That was why he had stayed in the background, letting others do the dirty work, while he kept clean hands – ready to rally, and to rehabilitate, the survivors when the time came to build a new Party on the ashes of the old. It was a pretence to which even his victims, like He Long and Peng Dehuai, subscribed, for they knew that Mao alone had the power, if he wished, to save them; it was in their interests, as well as his, to believe that he was innocent of the horrors perpetrated in his name.

Whether from prudence or fear, or a judicious mixture of both, the outcome was that the visionary ideology of the Shanghai Commune was abandoned.

The Cultural Revolution had reached its Rubicon, the moment at which it lost its compass, when the ideals which had inspired it, no matter how misbegotten they were, became irredeemably tainted. Faced with a choice, Mao had preferred a flawed instrument of rule to no instrument at all. On his proposal, Zhang Chunqiao announced the establishment of a new organ of power, to be known as the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee, formed from a ‘three-in-one alliance’ of representatives of mass organisations, PLA officers and veteran cadres. The same name had been used for the provisional communist administrations set up in towns and villages after the Autumn Harvest Uprising, forty years before.

Despite Mao's sleight of hand in attributing the change of course to diplomatic pressures, not everyone was fooled. As the revolutionary committees multiplied, ultra-Leftists among the Red Guards spoke darkly of ‘capitalist restoration’.¹¹² To most Chinese, it did not seem like that. But, from February 1967 onward, the Chairman was in ideological retreat, the struggle against the ‘capitalist-roaders’ became increasingly focused on issues of raw power and steps were taken to try to insulate the economy and national security from excessive radical disruption.

Notwithstanding the long-term implications for Mao's dream of a ‘realm of Red virtue’, the immediate and visible effect of the power seizure in Shanghai was to give a potent, new impetus to the spiral of revolutionary violence.

In the provinces, Red Guards and revolutionary workers redoubled their efforts to topple provincial committees. The first secretaries of Shanxi and Yunnan committed suicide, and the Anhui leader, Li Baohua, was brought to Beijing to be struggled against.¹¹³ A new directive from the Chairman was published, urging ‘proletarian revolution groups’ to seize power. Crowds gathered outside the West Gate of Zhongnanhai to demand that Liu, Deng Xiaoping and other Central leaders be dragged out. The Coal Minister, Zhang Linzhi, was forced by Red Guards to wear an iron hat weighing 60 kilograms and afterwards beaten to death.¹¹⁴

At the same time, the PLA, which until then had been largely insulated from the disorders, began to be sucked into the morass.¹¹⁵ In January, Mao had approved the dismissal of Liu Zhijian, the head of the PLA's Cultural Revolution Group, signalling the start of a short-lived drive to ferret out military supporters of Liu Shaoqi's ‘bourgeois reactionary line’. His case illustrated a dilemma which the Chairman would wrestle with for the next eight months. Should the army be permitted to engage in the Cultural Revolution on the same basis as civilian groups? Or was there an overriding need to maintain war preparedness and military discipline?

Liu's crime, for which he paid with seven years in prison, was to have tried to dissuade cadets from the country's military training colleges from harassing regional army commanders. In this, he had had the support of Ye Jianying, who was in day-to-day charge of the Military Commission, and of three other PLA marshals – Chen Yi, Nie Rongzhen and Xu Xiangqian. To Jiang Qing and Chen Boda, Liu and, by implication, the marshals, as well, were ‘obstructing the Cultural Revolution’.

Mao equivocated. On the one hand he called on the army ‘actively to support … genuine proletarian Leftists when [they] ask for help’. On the other he approved a Central directive prohibiting ‘any person or organisation from attacking the organs of the PLA’, the ‘arbitrary ransacking of homes’ and attempts to use armed force to resolve ‘contradictions among the people’. It was ambiguous, but it reassured the military region commanders, many of them Mao's companions since the days of the Long March, who risked becoming seriously disaffected. Earlier that month, the Nanjing military region chief, General Xu Shiyou, had threatened to order his men to open fire if the Red Guards made any more trouble. One of his colleagues, Fu Chongbi, spoke darkly of going up into the mountains and waging war against them. Mao's call for radical restraint was seized on by PLA officers everywhere as providing authority to restore order, while the other part of his message – to ‘support the Left’ – was passed over in silence.

In Xinjiang a regimental PLA commander sent troops to subdue radicals in the town of Shihezi, leaving several hundred people wounded. In Sichuan, where the Military Region headquarters had been besieged for a week by Red Guards and workers, 100,000 ‘rebels’ were arrested and held in harsh conditions in cramped cells for several months. In the remote province of Qinghai, bordering on Tibet, the military district commander despatched soldiers to surround the offices of the local Party newspaper where radicals had ‘seized power’ and beaten to death a number of journalists. When they refused to surrender, he ordered an assault in which more than 170 people were killed and a similar number wounded. In Wuhan, after another dispute involving a ‘power seizure’ at a Party newspaper, a thousand radicals were detained, some of whom were imprisoned, others released after making public confessions. Similar incidents occurred in seven other provinces.

Parallel to the ‘February Crackdown’, as these events came to be known, a ‘February Adverse Current’ developed. Mao himself inadvertently lit the fuse, by lashing out at Jiang Qing and Chen Boda for their role in the purge of Tao Zhu. He had approved of Tao's removal. But he objected to their having taken the initiative without consulting him first. Chen was ‘an opportunist’, he fumed. Jiang Qing was ‘ambitious but incompetent’. Even Lin Biao, who had initially tried to protect Tao, was accused of failing to keep the Chairman informed. The conservatives in the Politburo (the four marshals and several vice-premiers), already deeply unhappy over the purge of senior cadres, took this as a signal – wrongly, as it turned out – that Mao was losing patience with the radicals’ excesses. At a Military Commission meeting in January, when that subject had been broached, Ye Jianying had banged the table so hard that he broke a bone in his hand. Now, at a meeting of the Central Caucus^II chaired by Zhou Enlai on February 11, Ye warned again, supported by Xu Xiangqian and Chen Yi, of the danger of anarchy. Did the proclamation of the Shanghai Commune, he asked, mean that the Party and the army were redundant? No one answered.¹¹⁶

Five days later, when the Caucus reconvened, Vice-Premier Tan Zhenlin, one of Mao's oldest associates, who had headed the first Workers’ and Peasants’ Soviet at the Jinggangshan base area in 1927, picked a quarrel with Zhang Chunqiao.

‘Masses this and masses that!’ Tan raged. ‘You don't want the leadership of the Party. You insist on the masses liberating themselves, people teaching themselves and conducting revolution themselves. What is that but metaphysics?’ He went on: ‘Forty-year veterans of the revolution have had their homes burst into and dear ones dispersed … This is the cruellest instance of struggle in Party history.’¹¹⁷ Chen Yi added fuel to the flames, asserting that Liu, Deng and Peng Zhen had been Mao's strongest supporters at Yan'an and that those to whom the Chairman was now giving power would inevitably one day betray him, just as Khrushchev had betrayed Stalin.¹¹⁸ Tan declared furiously: ‘If I had known it would come to this, I would never have joined the revolution … I should never have followed Chairman Mao!’ The next day, he poured out his bitterness towards Chen Boda, Jiang Qing and the rest of the Cultural Revolution Small Group in a letter to Lin Biao:

They are completely ruthless; one word and a life can be snuffed out … Our Party is ugly beyond repair … They will push you over the edge, even for a minor offence. And yet … can they take over? I doubt it … The Premier is big-hearted … He can wait it out. But how long are we to wait? Until all of the old cadres are downed? No, no, ten thousand times no! I will rebel!¹¹⁹

Mao's first impulse was to dismiss these strictures as ‘old soldiers sounding off’. But when he learned of Chen Yi's diatribe, he decided otherwise.¹²⁰ Of the twenty-one members of the Politburo appointed six months before, four had been overthrown (Liu, Deng, Tao Zhu and He Long), and four were inactive or neutral (Chen Yun, Dong Biwu, Liu Bocheng and Zhu De). Over the previous few days, seven of the remaining thirteen had come out against Cultural Revolution policies.

At midnight on February 18, Mao summoned Ye Jianying and two of the other critics – Li Xiannian, who was in charge of finance; and Li Fuchun, the Planning Minister – along with Zhou Enlai and two leading radicals.

‘What kind of Party leadership do you want?’ he asked with an old man's petulance. Why didn't they bring back Wang Ming? Or let the Americans and the Russians run China? If they wished to restore Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, he fumed, he would go back to the Jinggangshan to start another guerrilla war. It was the same threat that Mao had made eight years earlier at Lushan. But, this time, even though he was furious – Kang Sheng said afterwards he had never seen him so angry – there was an element of play-acting. After delivering his ultimatum, he stormed out in a huff.¹²¹

In fact, on the three basic questions at issue – the role of the Party; of the army; and of the veteran cadres – the Chairman had considerable sympathy for the arguments that Ye and his colleagues had raised. Two weeks earlier, he had condemned the Shanghai rebels for putting forward the principle of ‘suspecting everyone and overthrowing everyone’.¹²² He had laid down that veteran cadres, meaning those veteran cadres who had ‘passed the test’ of the Cultural Revolution, were to be included in the ‘three-in-one alliances’ on which the new revolutionary committees were to be based – and what was true of the provinces was no less true for the Centre. He knew, too, that there was a limit beyond which it would not be prudent to test the loyalty of the military commanders. For all these reasons, he was disinclined to press the marshals too hard. Even Tan Zhenlin, who had infuriated Jiang Qing by comparing her with the Empress Wu, a Tang dynasty consort regarded as one of the most evil women in Chinese history, was eventually forgiven.

Over the next month, the old guard were made to attend all-night study meetings at which their errors were condemned by members of the Cultural Revolution Group. In the streets outside, Red Guard posters called for their overthrow. But, unlike Tao Zhu and He Long, they were not purged. At the end of April, Mao summoned all of them to a ‘unity meeting’ at which he noted that they had not ‘plotted secretly’, and tried to soothe ruffled feelings.¹²³

After February 1967, the Politburo, which for the previous six months had existed little more than in name, ceased to function altogether. Mao was not willing to take the risk of a majority uniting against him.¹²⁴

At the same time the wall-poster campaign against the veterans put the traditional military hierarchy on the defensive and encouraged a fresh upsurge of leftist militancy. Mao himself became convinced that the military leaders’ efforts to restore stability in the ‘February Crackdown’ had been excessive. Officers who had shown special zeal in repressing radical assaults – including the Qinghai commander – were denounced as ultra-Rightists and court-martialled. Lin Biao, who until then had supported the regional commanders’ efforts to limit radical disruption, now began to warn of ‘an armed Liu–Deng line’.¹²⁵ On April 1, Mao approved a directive condemning the ‘arbitrary stigmatising of mass organisations’. Military units, which previously had been permitted to open fire to suppress ‘reactionaries’ – a catch-all term which was applied to almost any rebellious group – or as a last resort in self-defence, were now prohibited from using their weapons against radicals in any circumstances.¹²⁶

Factional violence rapidly escalated. Large quantities of weapons were stolen, including arms consignments being sent by rail to Vietnam. At Yibin, on the Upper Yangtse, pitched battles broke out involving tens of thousands of people. At Chongqing, rival groups used anti-aircraft guns to bombard each other's positions. In Changsha, they used missiles. Thirteen-year-old Liang Heng found himself in the middle of one such firefight:

I went out to buy kerosene to use when there were shortages of electricity … Then suddenly, too suddenly, 50 or 60 men carrying machine-guns ran past the gate of the Hunan Daily [building] toward me. A short man in black carried the flag with the words, ‘Young People's Bodyguard Squad’ on it, the name of one of the groups in the [radical] Xiang River Wind and Thunder faction … When the men were almost abreast of me they opened fire, aiming off down the road into the distance …

The enemy was out of sight, but it responded with force … The flagman fell in front of me and rolled over and over like a lead ball. The flag never touched the ground. Someone caught it and raised it, hardly breaking stride. Then he crumpled and rolled, and someone else seized it and carried it forward …

At last … they retreated to the nearest shelter … [where] other ‘Bodyguard Squad’ members were waiting with trucks and stretchers … Those still unharmed reloaded madly, breaking open huge wooden crates and spilling the long pointed bullets in random hillocks on the ground …
In the meantime, three shining black cannon had been taken off the trucks and the Rebels were trying to get the soldiers to show them how to use them. The soldiers were refusing … Finally [they] decided to go ahead [anyway]. They shot three times, but each time the shell went wildly astray … At the time, I found this vaguely amusing, but later … a worker … told me how he had shot and killed his best friend at a distance of two feet because he did not know how to use a machine-gun …

Someone they called Commander Tang [then arrived], a distraught young man with two guns in his belt and a small contingent of bodyguards. ‘Quickly, quickly,’ he was saying furiously. ‘Retreat, retreat …’ They piled into the trucks, a bloody collection of bandages and filth, the motors roared, and they were gone …

The city shook the whole day, and that evening the sky glowed a queer orange … The next day we learned that members of the [radical] ‘Changsha Youth’ organisation had levelled anti-aircraft missiles at the Xiang Embroidery Building on May First Square in an attack on the [conservative] Workers’ Alliance. The entire block-long four-storey building had burned to the ground.¹²⁷

The ‘all-round nationwide civil war’ which Mao had toasted the previous winter had become a reality.

At that point Lin Biao, with Mao's tacit support, concluded that the threat to military stability – the ultimate guarantor of communist power – had gone too far. To put down a marker, he intervened in an episode which in any other circumstances would have seemed surreal. On May 13, a performance by the arts troupe of the Air Force, several of whose girl dancers were frequent visitors to Mao's bed, was violently disrupted by radicals linked to Jiang Qing. Two days later, Lin sent a group of senior officers to show solidarity with the injured. In the coded language of the time, Lin and the military commanders were telling the Cultural Revolution Small Group to back off. The incident left scars. Beneath a veneer of shared devotion to the Cultural Revolution, Lin's military faction and Jiang Qing's civilian radicals were beginning to grapple for power.¹²⁸

At the beginning of the summer, the Chairman left for a two-month-long tour of the provinces, to see for himself how the Cultural Revolution was progressing. His first stop was in Wuhan, where armed clashes had been occurring between a conservative workers’ group, known as the ‘Million Heroes’, which was supported by the regional military commander, Chen Zaidao, and the radical ‘Workers’ General Headquarters’, whose leaders had been in prison since the ‘February Crackdown’. In the worst incident, in June, more than a hundred people had been killed and some 3,000 wounded.

Mao's presence was kept secret, and exceptional security was in force. The entire staff of the East Lake state guest-house, where he stayed, was changed on the eve of his arrival in case it had been infiltrated by counter-revolutionaries.

On Monday, July 18, after two days of talks with local leaders, Mao concluded that Chen had committed errors and must make a public self-criticism, while retaining his command; the ‘Workers’ Headquarters’ should be regarded as the core group of the Left; and the ‘Million Heroes’ should be encouraged to unite with them. They were, after all, workers, he said, and there should be no fundamental conflict of interest.¹²⁹ This was announced that night by Wang Li, the Cultural Revolution Group's propaganda chief, and a summary of his remarks, in which he described the ‘Million Heroes’ as a conservative group, was broadcast over the city's street loudspeaker system. Next day, the Security Minister, Xie Fuzhi, gave a more detailed account to the Military Region Party Committee.

Chen Zaidao accepted Mao's verdict. The ‘Million Heroes’, unaware that it came from the Chairman, did not.

The following night, thousands of the group's followers commandeered army lorries and fire trucks and drove in convoy to the Military Region headquarters, demanding that Wang Li come out and talk to them. When he failed to appear, they went to the East Lake guest-house and stormed the building where he was staying – having no idea that Mao was less than a hundred yards away. Supported by uniformed troops from a local regiment, they broke into Wang's room, dragged him out into a car and took him to a struggle meeting, where he was severely beaten and one of his legs was broken. For the next three days and nights, several hundred thousand people – members of the ‘Million Heroes’ and their supporters, including large numbers of fully armed soldiers – paraded through the city in a show of strength, calling for the dismissal of Wang Li and Xie Fuzhi, and the overthrow of the Cultural Revolution Group radicals.

Mao was never in any danger. Even if he had been, it probably would not have bothered him greatly. Three months earlier he had horrified his staff by insisting that the masses must be allowed to storm Zhongnanhai if they wished.¹³⁰

But for the radicals, it was a heaven-sent opportunity to press for a nationwide campaign to root out conservative resistance in the army once and for all.

Jiang Qing portrayed the Wuhan events as a full-scale mutiny. Mao himself, who was flown out to Shanghai in the early hours of Thursday morning – breaking, for the first and last time in his life, the rule imposed by the Politburo in 1959, forbidding him to travel by air for fear of an accident – pooh-poohed that idea, pointing out that if Chen Zaidao had wanted to stage a rebellion he would not have been permitted to leave. None the less, the fact that he had been pressured into a precipitate departure as a result of military unrest irritated him greatly.

Wang Li was released next day, and flew back with Xie Fuzhi to Beijing, where the two men were given a heroes’ welcome. Lin Biao, hedging his bets, presided over a rally of a million people in Tiananmen Square, attended by the whole leadership (except the marshals, who were pointedly not invited), to denounce the Wuhan military region for ‘daring to use barbaric, fascist methods to besiege, kidnap and beat up the Centre's representatives’.

Chen Zaidao was summoned to the capital and stripped of his command. But, on Mao's instructions, he was not designated a counter-revolutionary; and when thousands of cadets tried to drag him out for a struggle meeting, the Beijing garrison commander, Fu Chongbi, hid him for two hours in a lift, immobilised between two floors of the guest-house where he was staying, until they had dispersed. The defeated ‘Million Heroes’ were less fortunate. Their radical opponents from the ‘Workers’ Headquarters’ launched a pogrom which, in Wuhan alone, left 600 workers dead. In the province as a whole, an astounding 184,000 people were seized, beaten and maimed, or killed.¹³¹

Mao was torn. On the one hand, the military weakness of the left worried him. On the other, he understood that he could not push the military leadership too far.

Even before the Wuhan events, he had proposed to Zhou Enlai that workers and students should be armed. ‘Why can't we arm [them]?’ he had asked. ‘I say we should.’¹³² Zhou prudently took no action. Then, after Mao reached Shanghai, he urged Lin Biao to ‘drag out that small handful [of capitalist roaders] within the armed forces’ – an expression used a few days earlier by Lin's son, Lin Liguo, in an article in the People's Daily on Wang Li's triumphal return to Beijing.¹³³ Later that month, Jiang Qing publicised the slogan ‘Attack by reasoning, defend by force’, which was seized on by radical groups to justify armed struggle.¹³⁴ Then, on August 4, in a private letter to Jiang Qing – which she read out to a meeting of the Central Caucus – Mao went further. It was imperative to arm the Left, he wrote, because the great majority of the army was backing conservative workers’ groups. The stealing of arms by workers was ‘not a serious problem’. The masses should be encouraged to take the law into their own hands.¹³⁵

In this febrile climate, the Party journal, Red Flag, published an editorial to mark the fortieth anniversary of the founding of the Red Army on August 1, which made clear that the struggle against capitalist-roaders in the army was the next major national task.¹³⁶

Just as he had after the proclamation of the Shanghai Commune, he now decided, for the second time, that the Cultural Revolution had reached a Rubicon. For the second time, he ordered a retreat.

Mao himself liked to explain such reversals in terms of dialectics: when a thing reaches its extreme, it turns into its opposite. Thus, in February 1967, he had moved to preserve the principle of Party rule against the day when he would want to rebuild it. Now, six months later, with the Party hierarchy virtually destroyed, he recognised an overriding imperative to preserve the one instrument of power that remained: the army. This time, it was not the fear of anarchy that had given him pause, but the politician's instinct for the possible. In the trade-off between radical activism and military stability that he had been juggling with since the winter, he had pushed the radicals’ cause to the limit. The moment had come for the pendulum to swing decisively back the other way.

On August 11, he sent word to Beijing that the policy of ‘dragging out a small handful [of capitalist roaders] in the army’ was ‘tactically inappropriate’. That was enough for Lin Biao and Jiang Qing to drop it like a hot brick. Soon afterwards, Mao returned the Red Flag editorial with the fateful words, ‘poisonous weed’, scrawled on it.¹³⁷ It had been written by the editor of Red Flag, Lin Jie, and another Cultural Revolution Small Group propagandist named Guan Feng, and approved by Chen Boda. Ten days later, on August 22, in retaliation for the arrests of communist journalists by the authorities in Hong Kong, Red Guards from the Foreign Languages Institute, which was under Foreign Ministry jurisdiction, sacked the British Legation in Beijing. Zhou Enlai, who had been working round the clock, had suffered a minor heart attack that week. ‘Where will it all end, if this is allowed to go on?’ he asked Yang Chengwu, the acting Chief of Staff, whom he sent to Shanghai to brief Mao. Zhou thought the sacking of the legations reflected the influence of Guan Feng as well as of Wang Li and another member of the Cultural Revolution Group, Qi Benyu. Some weeks earlier Wang had given a speech at the Foreign Ministry urging rebels there to take a firmer stand against the old guard and specifically against the Foreign Minister, Chen Yi, whom he denounced by name. Guan and Qi had criticised the ministry's ‘timidity’.

Mao was not pleased. The burning of the British mission, following earlier incidents involving the Burmese, Indian and Indonesian embassies, showed that China was failing to meet its international obligations. Wang Li's speech at the ministry, he said, was ‘a big, big, big poisonous weed’. He and Guan Feng were ‘wrecking the Cultural Revolution’ and must be arrested at once – one of the very rare cases in which Mao is known to have given such an order himself. Qi Benyu, a talented polemicist whose historical writings Mao admired, was to be spared for the moment to see how he behaved.¹³⁸

The combination of the Wuhan incident, the aborted campaign against capitalist roaders in the military and the leftist takeover of the Foreign Ministry, all in rapid succession, convinced him that the army's role as a disciplined force must be preserved at all costs.

In February, the Chairman had justified the retreat from the Shanghai Commune on a diplomatic pretext. In the autumn, to protect the army, a different device was employed.

The radicals’ ‘excesses’ were blamed on a shadowy ultra-leftist organisation called the ‘May 16 Group’. It was not wholly fictitious: a Red Guard groupuscule of that name, with about forty members, had been formed that spring at the Beijing Iron and Steel Institute, and had distinguished itself by making wall-poster attacks on Premier Zhou Enlai as the ‘backstage boss’ of the ‘February Adverse Current’.¹³⁹ Other radical groups were making similar accusations at that time, tacitly encouraged by followers of Jiang Qing, who already saw Zhou as an impediment to her political ambitions.¹⁴⁰ For some weeks Mao had left Zhou to face the onslaught unaided before ordering Chen Boda to state publicly that the Premier was a member of the Chairman's ‘proletarian headquarters’, at which point the agitation stopped. By August, the ‘May 16 Group’ had ceased to exist – and, in any case, it had no connection with Wang Li and Guan Feng, or any of the other senior figures who were later named as its leaders. But that was of no importance. What mattered was the concept it represented. From September 1967 onwards, when Mao personally branded it a ‘conspiratorial counter-revolutionary clique’ with ‘unspeakably evil purposes’,¹⁴¹ ‘May 16’ became a catch-all weapon for wiping out any manifestation, suspected or real, of political dissent.

By then the Chairman had reversed himself on ‘arming the left’ as well.¹⁴²

A directive was issued forbidding weapons seizures by the rebels and authorising troops to fire in self-defence. On Mao's instructions, Jiang Qing delivered a speech, condemning armed struggle and denouncing the idea of ‘seizing a small handful in the army’ as ‘a trap’ set by right-wingers in order to ensnare the left. ‘We must not paint the PLA black,’ she went on. ‘They are our own boys.’ The army commanders’ problems were not over. But the threat that had hung over the military since the beginning of the year had finally been lifted.¹⁴³

The repudiation of the ‘February Adverse Current’ in the spring of 1967 had not only triggered an upsurge of radical attacks against the army. It had also signalled the start of a new stage in the criticism of Liu Shaoqi and of the bourgeois ideology he was held to represent.

It had begun on April 1, 1967, with a long article in the People's Daily, written by Qi Benyu, which broke new ground by attacking Liu directly (though still not by name) as ‘the top Party person in power taking the capitalist road’. The article, entitled ‘Patriotism or National Betrayal’, had been revised by Mao himself. Like many Cultural Revolution polemics, the topic was extremely obscure – a film made in 1950, set in the time of the Emperor Guangxu, which Mao had once denounced as treasonous because it denigrated the Boxer Revolt but which Liu was said to have approved.¹⁴⁴ The burden of the article was that the Boxers, like the Red Guards, were revolutionary, and that Liu's support of the film was a paradigm for his many other acts of betrayal. On April 6, the ‘Red Regiment’ at Zhongnanhai staged another raid on Liu's home – the first since January – and questioned him about Qi Benyu's charges. Next day, the Head of State put up a wall-poster outside his house, denying any traitorous intent. It was torn down after a few hours, and on the 10th his wife, Wang Guangmei, was taken to a struggle meeting before thousands of Red Guards at Qinghua University, where she was humiliated by being made to put on a silk dress, silk stockings and high-heeled shoes (which she had worn during a State Visit to Indonesia), as well as a necklace made of ping-pong balls, to symbolise her supposed bourgeois tastes.¹⁴⁵

The media barrage continued. In May, Liu's book, How to be a Good Communist, was denounced as ‘a big anti-Marxist-Leninist and anti-Mao-Zedong-Thought poisonous weed’. The Chairman himself described it as ‘a deceitful work, a form of idealism, opposed to Marxism-Leninism’.¹⁴⁶

The climax came in July. On the eve of Mao's departure for Wuhan, Red Guards from the Beijing Institute of Aeronautical Engineering, backed by the Cultural Revolution Group, set up a ‘Collar Liu Shaoqi Frontline Command Post’ outside the West Gate of Zhongnanhai. Dozens of loudspeaker vans blared out Maoist slogans day and night. By July 18, several hundred thousand people had gathered in the streets outside, vowing to fast until Liu was ‘dragged out’. This was not done, because Mao had expressly forbidden it. But that evening the ‘Red Regiment’ held an ‘accusation meeting’ within the leadership compound, at which Liu and his wife were made to stand silently for two hours, bowing from the waist, while their accusers harangued them. Mao's doctor saw them being beaten and kicked, while soldiers of the Central Guard Unit stood by and watched: Liu's shirt had been torn open, and people were jerking him around by the hair. Two-and-a-half weeks later, the process was repeated. This time the couple had to stand in the Red Guards’ ‘jetplane’ position, bending forward with their arms stretched back behind them, while Liu was interrogated anew about his alleged ‘national betrayals’. Deng Xiaoping and Tao Zhu and their wives were subjected to similar indignities.

It was mild stuff compared to the treatment meted out to lesser officials. None the less, Liu was seventy years old. He was forced to kneel before Red Guard posters, with rebels pulling his hair and pushing his head to the ground. His left leg was injured, and afterwards, as he was frog-marched back to his residence, his face was swollen and a bluish, ashen colour.¹⁴⁷

He received no reply. Soon afterwards he was separated from his family. Wang Guangmei was imprisoned. Their children were sent to work as peasants in the countryside. The accusation meetings ceased. From then on Liu was held in solitary confinement at his home, while the Central Case Examination Group continued to assemble ‘evidence’ of treachery that would justify his formal dismissal.

This body took on growing importance as the swirl of movements that constituted the Cultural Revolution became ever more complex. It was chaired by Zhou Enlai and answerable directly to Mao. But in practice it became the personal empire of Kang Sheng. Alongside the Red Guards and the rebel worker detachments, who were the revolution's foot soldiers, and the PLA, whose ‘support for the Left’ made up for the radicals’ numerical weakness – Kang's political police provided the edge of cold steel which ensured that, in all circumstances, ‘proletarian dictatorship’ would triumph.

From the spring of 1967 onwards, the Examination Group's remit, initially limited to the investigation of Peng Zhen and his associates, and then of Liu and Wang Guangmei, was dramatically enlarged.

One of the first new cases Kang devised was that of the so-called ‘61 Renegades’. This involved a group of senior Party officials, including the former Finance Minister, Bo Yibo, and the Organisation Department head, An Ziwen, who had been imprisoned in the 1930s in Beijing. With the agreement of the then Party leader, Zhang Wentian, and of the rest of the Politburo (including Mao), Liu Shaoqi, as head of the North China Bureau, had authorised them to renounce their Party membership as a means of winning release. The matter had been reviewed at the Seventh Party Congress in 1945, and it had been agreed that Liu had acted correctly.

When Kang initially suggested that the case should be reopened, Mao demurred. But, by February 1967, he had overcome his scruples.¹⁴⁸ A month later, the Cultural Revolution Group approved a directive, labelling the sixty-one officials ‘a clique of traitors’, and accusing them of having ‘betrayed the Party’ as the price of their freedom.¹⁴⁹ Mao, Zhou Enlai, Kang himself and the rest of the leadership all knew perfectly well that the charge was a complete fabrication. But it was useful, both to discredit Liu among the Party rank and file, and as a means of removing some of his principal supporters.

Unlike Stalin, Mao appears to have taken no interest in the sordid details of his victims’ treatment. Kang had a free hand, employing a mixture of Red Guard violence and the subtler tortures of trained professional interrogators. Bo Yibo kept a record of his torment, written on scraps of newspaper that he scattered in his cell, guessing correctly that his persecutors would preserve them – and that, one day, when the political wind changed, they would become a part of the indictment against them:

I received another round of severe beatings today [he wrote]. I am now covered in wounds and injuries, and my clothes are all in tatters. At one point, because I became dizzy and moved my body a couple of times, I was hit … and kicked over and over again … [Another time] my two arms were held behind my back, twisted, and when they put me on the ‘jetplane’, they forced me to keep my legs wide apart, while pressing my back down as far as it would go but keeping my head up and at attention. Then they took turns pulling my hair while kicking and beating me … I can no longer hold a pen steadily. How can I write a confession?¹⁵⁰

Two more ‘Special Case Groups’ were formed to deal with Peng Dehuai and He Long. In July 1967, Peng was beaten so severely, in an attempt to make him confess that he had plotted against Mao, that the interrogators broke four of his ribs. He Long died of diabetic complications after being denied medical treatment.¹⁵¹

Other investigations followed into the Party's underground networks in the 1920s and 1930s. In east Hebei, 84,000 people were arrested, of whom 2,955 were executed, tortured to death or committed suicide. In Guangdong, 7,200 people were interrogated, and 85, including a provincial vice-governor, beaten to death. In Shanghai, 6,000 people were detained. Most were accused of working for the nationalists (an easy enough charge to make about a period when the CCP and the Guomindang had formed a united front), and about half were labelled traitors. Another small ‘renegade clique’, similar to Bo Yibo's, was unearthed in Xinjiang. In the north-east, an even more fantastic story was concocted, in which it was claimed that a group of senior army officers were ‘remnant followers’ of the Manchurian leader, Zhang Xueliang, and had plotted against Lin Biao: they, too, were purged. In Yunnan, 14,000 Party cadres were executed in an investigation to ‘ferret out traitors’. But the most extraordinary case of all was in Inner Mongolia. There 350,000 people were arrested; 80,000 people were beaten so badly they were permanently maimed, and more than 16,000 died, in an effort to prove that the veteran provincial leader, Ulanfu, a Politburo alternate, had established a rival ‘black party’ to compete with the CCP for power.¹⁵²

None of these cases had any basis in fact. All were based on confessions, extracted by torture, and on the weaving together of isolated incidents, taken out of context, to produce a web of paranoid suspicion. In Mao's new ‘all-round nationwide civil war’, he had reverted to the logic, and the methods, of the old – to the practices of the 1930s during the frenzied blood-purges in the beleaguered Red base areas. Terror was again the means by which Red China would be cleansed, ready for the creation of the new utopia.

By the autumn of 1967, the first, firestorm year of the Cultural Revolution was drawing to a close. Liu Shaoqi had been vanquished. His allies had been purged, and Kang Sheng's ever-widening net was sweeping up their supporters, imagined or real. The Red Guards and rebel worker detachments had broken the hold of veteran Party officials in the provinces.

In the triad of ‘struggle, criticism, transformation’, on which all Mao's political movements were based, the time for struggle was over; criticism would continue; but the priority was now transformation – replacing the old with the new.

Amid the chaos of a country, all of whose main institutions except the army, the secret police and the economic ministries, had been effectively destroyed, this was easier said than done. In September 1967, during his tour of the provinces, Mao issued a new directive, requiring rival Red Guard and workers’ factions to unite and form ‘grand alliances’.¹⁵³ In Beijing and Shanghai, this was done fairly quickly – though violent factional strife continued among university Red Guards. In other provinces, the army was instructed to maintain a policy of neutrality while rival Red Guard organisations despatched delegations to the capital, where, under the watchful eyes of the Cultural Revolution Group, they were ordered to negotiate until they resolved their differences.

To promote unity, the opposing factions were no longer described as ‘radicals’ and ‘conservatives’. Instead, local names were used. Thus, from Anhui there was the ‘good’ faction (hao pai) and the ‘fart faction’ (pi pai) – so-called because the radicals had said the power seizure in the province was ‘good’, while the conservatives said it was ‘as good as a fart’. But even with that encouragement, and the personal intervention of leaders as highly placed as Jiang Qing and Kang Sheng, it took fourteen months before the Anhui groups reached agreement. Up to the autumn of 1967, only seven provinces had been able to establish Revolutionary Committees. Everywhere else the Red Guards and other mass organisations were still arguing about which of them should take part and which of the former provincial leaders qualified as ‘revolutionary cadres’ whom they could therefore support.¹⁵⁴

Meanwhile, to put steel into the Chairman's call to order, the campaign against the ultra-Leftist ‘May 16’ group was vastly expanded. That winter, Qi Benyu was arrested, joining his former colleagues, Wang Li and Guan Feng, as one of the three ‘black hands’ who had supposedly acted as the group's backstage bosses. Over the next four years, 10 million people would fall under suspicion as ‘May 16’ elements, and more than three million people would be persecuted – one in twenty-five of the adult urban population.¹⁵⁵ At the Foreign Ministry, where Wang Li's influence was alleged to have been strongest, more than half of the 2,000 diplomats and officials were purged under the ‘May 16’ banner.¹⁵⁶ The sheer scale of the movement meant that the main investigative role had to be taken by the army, which also had the leading role in a parallel campaign, launched at the same time, for ‘cleansing the class ranks’, whose purpose was to allow the leaders of the nascent revolutionary committees to crush those they regarded as politically hostile. Often such cases overlapped with those initiated by Kang Sheng's Central Case Examination Group, notably in Inner Mongolia – where so many people were killed that the Chairman and First Vice-Chairman of the Revolutionary Committee were both arrested for excessive zeal – and in Hebei and Yunnan. The best estimate is that, during the two years the campaign lasted, at least 36 million people were investigated; between 750,000 and 1.5 million were killed, many by what was termed ‘enforced suicide’; and an approximately equal number were permanently maimed. The commonest accusations were of being ‘spies’, ‘bad elements’ or ‘newly emerged counter-revolutionaries’.¹⁵⁷

Others, whose offences were linked directly to Cultural Revolution activities, were detained under new public security regulations which made it a counter-revolutionary crime to criticise Mao, Lin Biao, or, by extension, any of the other radical leaders. The regulations had been promulgated in January 1967, but were not applied until efforts to restore order began in earnest at the end of that year.

Despite this battery of repressive weaponry, the Chairman did not have it all his own way. The campaign against the ultra-Leftist ‘May 16’ group encouraged conservatives to question certain aspects of the Cultural Revolution Small Group's policies. Ninety-one Chinese ambassadors and other senior diplomats signed a wall-poster supporting the Politburo moderates who had been denounced during the ‘February Adverse Current’. A Red Guard group did the same. Xie Fuzhi, whom Mao had named to head the Beijing Revolutionary Committee, was accused of extreme Leftism. Similar attacks were made on radical leaders in Shanghai and Sichuan.¹⁵⁸

Mao's counter-offensive, when it came, was from an unexpected quarter. On March 21, 1968, Jiang Qing and Kang Sheng made speeches, claiming that 'certain people' were trying to 'reverse the verdict' on the February Adverse Current.¹⁵⁹ The following day it was announced that three top generals had committed 'serious mistakes' and had been dismissed.

Yang Chengwu, the acting Chief of Staff whom he had appointed two years earlier to succeed the disgraced Luo Ruiqing, was one of the outstanding heroes of the Long March. As a young battalion commander, he had been responsible for two of the feats which had passed into PLA legend: the crossing of the Dadu River, and the storming of Lazikou Pass. The others were Fu Chongbi, the Beijing garrison commander, who had protected Chen Zaidao after the Wuhan incident, and Yu Lijin, the Political Commissar of the PLA air force. Why these three were singled out is unclear. There is evidence that Yang and Fu had offended Jiang Qing and, in Yang's case, Mao as well. Lin Biao also had grounds for wanting to see two of them removed. At a time when he was steadily strengthening his control over the military, Yang was too independent-minded for his liking, while Yu was at odds with one of his key allies, the air force commander, Wu Faxian. Yang would be replaced by another of Lin's protégés, Huang Yongsheng, the Commander of the Canton Military Region. Like Wu Faxian; Li Zuopeng, the Political Commissar of the Navy; and Qiu Huizuo, the head of the General Logistical Department, Huang had served under Lin since before the Long March.

Whatever the precise mechanism of the purge, Mao's motives were clear enough: he needed scapegoats to justify a new campaign against the Right, both to rebut the accusations of the Foreign Ministry conservatives and their supporters and to provide cover for the Left during the vast military clampdown that he was about to launch to end the violence of the Red Guards and the worker-rebel detachments. Ever since Mao had decided the previous August that the PLA should remain aloof from the political struggle, his colleagues had been waiting for the other shoe to drop. The purge of the three generals for fomenting a ‘rightist wind of reversing correct verdicts’ signalled that the moment had come.

That summer, Mao moved decisively to restore order in Shaanxi then in the grip of full-scale civil war, and in Guangxi, where heavy weaponry had been looted from shipments bound for Vietnam and factional fighting had reduced parts of the provincial capital, Nanning, to rubble.¹⁶⁰ Troops were sent in to separate the warring parties. On July 3, the Chairman issued a directive, calling for an immediate end to the violence. In Nanning, it would take another five weeks before the army was able to declare victory, by which time the city streets were literally awash with blood. Two thousand, three hundred captured rebels were publicly executed. Military Control Commissions were installed in the worst-affected counties to punish those who resisted. They found indiscriminate slaughter and, in some areas of Guangxi, political cannibalism: alleged traitors were killed and parts of their bodies eaten, in the same way as forty years earlier, Peng Pai's followers in Hailufeng, further up the coast, had killed and eaten their adversaries at ‘banquets of human flesh’ – with those who refused to take part being branded as ‘false comrades’.¹⁶¹ Finally, on August 20, a revolutionary committee was established, headed by the former First Secretary, Wei Guoqing.

The army was also entrusted with re-establishing discipline in the country's schools and universities, where ‘workers’ propaganda teams’ were sent to prepare for the resumption of classes, suspended for the previous two years while students rebelled.

This gave rise to another bizarre incident, less gruesome but in inspiration no less atavistic than the events in Guangxi.

At the end of July, Mao despatched 30,000 workers and PLA men to Qinghua and other campuses in Beijing where radical Red Guards were refusing to lay down their arms. The Qinghua students resisted. Five members of the work team were killed and more than a hundred wounded. As a token of support, Mao sent them a gift of mangoes, which he had received a few days earlier from a visiting Pakistani delegation. These were treated with all the reverence prescribed in the Liji, the Book of Rites dating from the fifth century BC, a period of China's antiquity whose precepts the Cultural Revolution was supposed to have swept away. Like holy relics – a tooth of the Buddha, or a nail from the Cross – the mangoes were venerated, and eventually, when they were half rotten, preserved by being coated in wax, while ‘replicas’ were distributed to other organisations.¹⁶²

The fighting at Qinghua was a last hurrah. The following day Mao summoned the five principal Beijing Red Guard leaders to a meeting at the Great Hall of the People, where he told them that a ‘black hand’ was trying to suppress them. The ‘black hand’, he then added, was himself. Their violence had alienated too many people, he said. Now they faced a choice: either to submit to military control or voluntarily to disperse.¹⁶³

The reopening of the schools helped to restore civil peace, but it did nothing to resolve the problem of the millions of youths who should have graduated during the previous two years and instead had spent their time roaming the country as Red Guards.

Even before the Cultural Revolution, youth unemployment in the cities had necessitated a voluntary rustication programme for school-leavers.¹⁶⁴ The political turmoil since had made jobs still harder to find. Industrial output had fallen nearly 14 per cent in 1967, and would decline by a further 5 per cent the following year.¹⁶⁵

In the autumn of 1968, therefore, the rustication programme was revived on an expanded basis – but this time it was compulsory. Over the next two years, five million young people would be sent to the countryside.¹⁶⁶ In a parallel programme, several million cadres and intellectuals were ordered out of the cities to live in rural ‘May 7 Cadre Schools’ – so-called because Mao had put forward the idea of work-study among the peasants in a letter to Lin Biao on May 7, 1966.¹⁶⁷ That most peasants wanted nothing to do with the new arrivals, regarding them as yet another unwelcome burden, was beside the point. To Mao, it was a neat solution: ideologically, it fulfilled his cherished ideal of breaking down barriers between town and country; politically, it forced the bureaucracy, the ‘new class’ which he believed had degenerated because of the softness of urban life,¹⁶⁸ to seek renewal through manual labour; and socially, it removed from the cities both the former Red Guards and many of their former victims.

Many of the rusticated youths wound up working on army-run farms in the border regions. Army officers oversaw the ‘cleansing of class ranks’ at the cadre schools. Military work teams were installed in every government department and ministry, in factories and newspaper offices.

But the full extent of the PLA's dominance was shown most clearly in the provincial administration. Half the members of the new revolutionary committees were PLA officers, as against less than a third from Red Guard and rebel worker detachments, and only 20 per cent, veteran cadres. In the standing committees – which served as the provincial governments – almost three-quarters of the members were army men.¹⁶⁹ At the grass roots, the proportion was still more striking: in a run-of-the-mill province like Hubei, where disruption had not been out of the ordinary, an astounding 98 per cent of county-level revolutionary committees were chaired by PLA officers.¹⁷⁰ In practice, most of China was under military rule.

That, however, was the price of ending the descent into anarchy. The devastation of the social tissue had been too deep to admit of any other solution.

At the beginning of September 1968, it was announced that the last of the twenty-nine provincial revolutionary committees – in Tibet and Xinjiang – had been established. The Cultural Revolution Group proclaimed that ‘the entire country is Red’ and, at a mass rally two days later, Zhou Enlai declared: ‘We have finally smashed the plot of the handful of Party persons in power, taking the capitalist road.’¹⁷¹ The stage was at last set for the political denouement which Mao had begun preparing nearly four years before.

On October 13, 1968, the Central Committee, or what was left of it, gathered in Beijing to begin its Twelfth Plenum. More than two-thirds of its original membership had been purged, and of those that remained, only forty full members were present – too few to constitute a quorum. To remedy that, ten of the nineteen alternates present were promoted to full membership and the meeting was enlarged to include seventy-four PLA officers and leaders from the newly formed revolutionary committees, who – in violation of Party statutes – were also given voting rights.

The plenum had three main tasks: to ratify the overthrow of Liu Shaoqi; to confirm the designation of Lin Biao as Mao's new successor – a state of affairs that had been implicit since August 1966, when Lin had become sole Vice-Chairman, and which Mao had explicitly acknowledged in November 1967; and to condemn the ‘February Adverse Current’ and its sequel, the ‘Right-deviationist wind’ of March 1968.

Of these, by far the most important was the resolution damning Liu. Jiang Qing, who had taken personal charge of the ‘Special Case Group’ carrying out the investigation, had compiled three large volumes of evidence – based entirely on confessions obtained through torture – which purported to show that he had betrayed the Party to the Guomindang on at least three occasions: in Changsha in 1925; in Wuhan in 1927; and in Shenyang in 1929. To obtain even those flimsy charges of treachery four decades before, Kang Sheng's investigators had had to interrogate 28,000 people, most of whom were later imprisoned as counter-revolutionaries, and to pore over four million files. One key witness, Meng Yongqian, who had been arrested with Liu in 1929, was questioned continuously for seven days and nights to force him to admit that he and Liu had turned traitor while in captivity. When he recovered, he retracted his ‘confession’ – but this was concealed.

Jiang Qing herself evidently recognised that these were slim pickings, and in her report she listed other, more recent, examples of Liu's perfidy – including collusion with ‘the US secret agent, Wang Guangmei’; sending ‘valuable information’ to the CIA in Hong Kong; and opposing ‘Chairman Mao's proletarian revolutionary line’. Evidence to back up these charges would be published later, she said, though in fact it never was.

None the less, the plenum voted ‘to expel Liu Shaoqi from the Party, once and for all’; to dismiss him from all his posts as ‘a renegade, traitor and scab … [and] a lackey of imperialism, modern revisionism and the Guomindang reactionaries’; and ‘to continue to settle accounts with him and his accomplices’. It was not quite a unanimous vote. Zhou Enlai, Chen Yi, Ye Jianying and the other veteran leaders all raised their hands obediently to condemn their erstwhile colleague.¹⁷² But one elderly woman CC member refused to go along with the charade and abstained. She was purged afterwards too.

Lin Biao's nomination as Mao's successor was also approved – without dissent.¹⁷³

The one issue on which serious differences did arise was the treatment of the Politburo moderates. Zhou Enlai, not for the first and not for the last time during the Cultural Revolution, was cast as Mao's attack dog – lambasting not only the marshals but also his own State Council allies, Chen Yun, Li Xiannian and Li Fuchun, for careerism and opposing Mao's line. It was the opening scene of the kind of political theatre at which Mao excelled. Jiang Qing and Kang Sheng, both determined to see the role of the moderate leaders reduced, then played the role that Mao expected of them and, with Lin Biao's agreement, instructed their supporters to launch concerted attacks on the old guard when the plenum broke into group discussions. Zhu De was accused to his face of being ‘an old right-wing opportunist’, who had opposed Mao's leadership since their days on the Jinggangshan; Chen Yun was said to have resisted the Great Leap Forward; the four marshals, by instigating the ‘February Adverse Current’, had sought to reverse the verdict on Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping and Tao Zhu.

With the stage thus set, Mao could afford to be conciliatory. The veterans, he insisted, had merely exercised their right to express their opinions. Even Deng Xiaoping, he added, was not in the same category as Liu Shaoqi.¹⁷⁴

In Deng's case, Mao had held this view since the start of the Cultural Revolution. At one point in 1967, he had toyed with the idea of bringing him back into the leadership. The same year he rejected a proposal from Kang Sheng to establish a separate ‘Special Case Group’ to investigate Deng's past, agreeing only that the team investigating He Long – a relatively minor inquiry – might set up a subgroup for that purpose. Now he dismissed the Cultural Revolution Small Group's suggestion that Deng, as well as Liu, should be expelled from the Party. It was an insurance policy. ‘That little man … has a great future ahead of him’, he had once told a foreign visitor. Deng was never officially attacked by name during the Cultural Revolution. Mao preferred to keep him in reserve, in case he should need his talents again.¹⁷⁵

Six months later, when the Ninth Congress met to bring the Cultural Revolution to a triumphal close, the Chairman was equally prudent.¹⁷⁶

The leaders who had taken part in the ‘February Adverse Current’, all except Tan Zhenlin (who had been blackballed by Lin Biao), retained their positions as Central Committee members, and two of them, Ye Jianying and Li Xiannian, were reappointed to the Politburo which gradually resumed its normal functions. Three other veterans – Zhu De; the ‘One-eyed Dragon’, Marshal Liu Bocheng, now totally blind; and Dong Biwu, who, besides Mao, was the only surviving founder member of the Party – also kept their Politburo seats, and two younger professional soldiers – Xu Shiyou and Chen Xilian, the Military Region commanders in Nanjing and Shenyang – joined that body for the first time.

Power lay with the Standing Committee, whose membership had not changed since it suspended work in 1966 – Mao; Lin Biao, now officially described as the Chairman's ‘closest comrade in arms’; Zhou Enlai; Chen Boda and Kang Sheng – and with the two radical clans within the leadership, led by Lin and Jiang Qing. Jiang had the support of the Shanghai leaders, Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan, and the Security Minister, Xie Fuzhi – all of whom became full Politburo members. Lin's group comprised his wife, Ye Qun; and the four generals – Huang Yongsheng, Wu Faxian, Li Zuopeng and Qiu Huizuo – who were similarly promoted. The Central Caucus ceased to function and the Cultural Revolution Small Group was disbanded five months later.

Politburo sessions after the Ninth Congress often took the form of what were called ‘occasional work meetings’, from which the old guard were excluded. Yet the Chairman's decision to make a place for the moderates was important. It was not simply a gesture of magnanimity. Rather Mao was attempting – as he had at the Seventh Congress in 1945 – to fashion a coalition representing the different interest groups that made up the communist polity. He was lucid enough to know that, even at a time of radical dominance, men like Zhu De and Liu Bocheng (and still more, Zhou Enlai) had a political constituency which Lin Biao and his followers could not reach. Fifty years of political infighting had taught Mao not to put all his eggs in one basket.

Officially the Cultural Revolution had been an outstanding success. Mao was credited with raising Marxism-Leninism ‘to a higher and completely new stage’, creating a guiding philosophy for ‘the era when imperialism is heading for total collapse and socialism towards worldwide victory’. His aphorisms had become so rooted in the nation's consciousness that, in everyday conversation, they had acquired the status given to quotations from the Confucian Classics in the speech of earlier generations. The Ninth Congress had affirmed class struggle as the Party's ‘basic line throughout the period of socialism’, and had laid down that future generations should conduct policy under the rubric of ‘continuing the revolution under the dictatorship of the proletariat’.

Liu Shaoqi had been definitively purged. Deng Xiaoping was under house arrest. Peng Dehuai was in prison. He Long had died in captivity that summer, after Mao had told the 12th Plenum in 1968 that he could ‘no longer be protected’, which his doctors took as a signal to hasten his demise by intentionally giving him the wrong medication.¹⁷⁷ Tao Zhu died a few months later. Hundreds of thousands of lesser figures at all levels of the Party hierarchy had been removed from power. Many of them, too, were in jail. One million people had been killed – a figure which would more than double as the purge of ‘May 16’ elements and ‘cleansing the class ranks’ unearthed fresh ‘counter-revolutionaries’ and sent them to their deaths.¹⁷⁸ All outward manifestations of bourgeois thought and behaviour had been crushed.

In Liu's place, Mao had put Lin Biao. In one respect, he was a better choice of successor; he was almost ten years younger. But he was chronically sick, to the point where even Mao referred to him contemptuously by the soubriquet, ‘Forever Healthy’.¹⁷⁹ Lin suffered from a nervous disorder – akin to Mao's neurasthenia – which caused him to sweat profusely. Unlike Mao, he was also a hypochondriac. He hated meeting people, and the ordeal of having to receive a foreign delegation left him drenched in perspiration. While undergoing medical treatment in the Soviet Union in the early 1940s, he had become addicted to morphine, and had never entirely quit the habit. He developed an aversion to sunlight. In his office the blinds were perpetually drawn. He refused to go out in the wind. Indoors, the temperature had to be maintained at a constant 21 degrees centigrade, summer and winter alike.

Even by the standards of a leadership where personal friendships were the exception, Lin's behaviour was irrationally antisocial. He lived in semi-seclusion in a heavily guarded mansion at Maojiawan, in the north-western quarter of Beijing. Visitors were discouraged, and he never visited others, often declining to see even his own military subordinates. He refused to read documents himself, instead getting his secretaries to give him an oral summary, which was not allowed to take up more than thirty minutes a day.

None of these eccentricities disqualified Lin from becoming Mao's successor. The role of Party Chairman was not executive but strategic. In Mao's eyes, Lin's supreme merit was that, ever since they had met on the Jinggangshan in 1928, he had been a totally loyal follower. He had an impressive intellect. Alone among Mao's subordinates, he peppered his major speeches with apt historical allusions (which he employed a team of researchers to find for him), and when he was not wallowing in panegyrics on the Chairman, he was capable of articulating Mao's views with a cogency and clarity that none of the others could equal. Politically, he had the prestige that came from being the most brilliant of the communists’ civil war commanders. Ideologically, he adhered religiously to the precepts of Mao Zedong Thought.

But Lin was not a charismatic leader, and it must have been clear to Mao that he would need to be well seconded.

Therein lay the difficulty. When the Chairman looked around the auditorium in the Great Hall of the People where the Ninth Congress was being held, he could hardly fail to notice that more than a quarter of the 1,500 delegates were wearing green PLA uniforms.¹⁸⁰ A third of the new Central Committee was from the army. Fewer than a fifth were veteran cadres. The newcomers might be politically and ideologically sound, but very few were of the calibre of the first-generation leaders they had replaced.

In the country at large, the success of the Cultural Revolution was even more problematic. ‘Cleansing the class ranks’ had caused an explosion of violence in the countryside, as local cadres seized the opportunity to purge and kill real or suspected enemies. But the Cultural Revolution itself had been essentially an urban phenomenon. Many of China's 600 million peasants, far from being ‘touched to their very souls’ – as revolutionary propaganda had it – heard only distant rumours of the tumult in the cities.

Outwardly, China had become a sea of collectively owned grey buildings, of collectively farmed fields, of uniform blue cotton clothes – where the only colour came from the red flags on buildings and the bright jackets and leggings of small children. Ornament of any kind was forbidden. Culture had been reduced to Jiang Qing's eight revolutionary model operas. There were no markets, no street stalls, no pedlars. Every bicycle was black.

But to eradicate the individualism of the spirit – to achieve a ‘proletarian revolution of the mind’, as Mao put it¹⁸¹ – was a much more uncertain undertaking.

In 1966, he had written that cultural revolutions would have to be unleashed ‘every seven or eight years’ to renew the nation's revolutionary élan and halt the onset of bourgeois degeneration. Now, in April 1969, he repeated that the task had not yet been completed, and ‘after a few years’ it might have to be done all over again.¹⁸²

Mao never admitted, then or later, that the Cultural Revolution had fallen short of his original design. None the less, it is hard to believe that a man of his questioning, dialectical bent could not see that the new ‘realm of Red virtue’ whose birth pangs had been marked by such terror, cruelty and pain, was of stultifying shallowness. If he did, he did not let it show. The Cultural Revolution had provoked a collective demonstration of the worst instincts of a nation; even Lin Biao, in private, dismissed it as a ‘Cultureless Revolution’.¹⁸³ But Mao had other concerns. Revolution, he was fond of saying, was not a dinner-party. The overriding priority was the perennity of class struggle.

In the service of that cause, China had become a vast prison of the mind. The old world had been smashed. Mao had nothing to put in its place but empty, Red rhetoric.

On the night of August 20, 1968, Soviet troops invaded Czechoslovakia to crush the ‘Prague Spring’ and overthrow the reforming communist government there.¹⁸⁴ To justify their action, the Russians argued that all Soviet-bloc states had a duty to defend the socialist system wherever it was threatened. This ‘Brezhnev doctrine’, as it was called, was formally limited to Europe. But to Mao, it provided a basis for a possible Russian attack on China.

Minor incidents had been occurring haphazardly along the Sino-Soviet border for several years. The clash that took place on March 2, 1969 was premeditated, however. Three hundred Chinese troops, wearing white camouflage outfits, advanced under cover of darkness across the ice of the Ussuri River on to Zhenbao (Damansky) Island, a disputed speck of territory on the river frontier 150 miles south of the Siberian city of Khabarovsk. There they dug foxholes in the snow, and lay in ambush. Next morning, a Chinese decoy party moved ostentatiously on to the island. When a Russian patrol arrived to intercept them, the Chinese opened fire. The Soviets then brought up reinforcements and succeeded in driving the Chinese back, losing more than thirty men dead and wounded. Another, bigger battle in the same area two weeks later ended with sixty Russian and several hundred Chinese casualties. In a third battle, on March 17, not made public at the time, the Russians brought in tanks and artillery.¹⁸⁵

Mao's plan was of breathtaking simplicity. If the Soviet Union had become China's main enemy, then the United States, on the principle that ‘my enemy's enemy is my friend’, had become a potential ally – even if it was engaged in a brutal and destructive war on China's southern frontiers against another of Beijing's allies, Vietnam.¹⁸⁶

The fighting on Zhenbao Island was the beginning of a prolonged Chinese effort to convince the newly elected US President, Richard Nixon, that Beijing's foreign policy priorities had undergone a fundamental change. The Russians, unaware of Mao's objectives, unintentionally strengthened his case by stepping up military pressure to try to force China to negotiate. All through the spring and summer, border incidents multiplied – accompanied by heavy hints from Moscow of Warsaw Pact intervention and the possible use of nuclear weapons (just as the Americans had brandished the nuclear threat during the Taiwan Straits crisis in 1958). The Kremlin began a massive build-up of Soviet forces in Mongolia. China approved a 30 per cent increase in military spending. In August a civil defence programme was launched in Beijing and other large cities, in which millions of people were mobilised to dig air-raid shelters for use against nuclear attack.

Having made his political point, Mao agreed, after a suitable show of reluctance, to a meeting in September between Zhou Enlai and the Soviet Premier, Andrei Kosygin – held symbolically at Beijing airport to underline that the Middle Kingdom was still determined to keep the barbarians at the gate. They reached an understanding to maintain the status quo along the frontier; to resume border negotiations; and to avoid further military clashes.

While it lasted, it created an appropriately militant backdrop for the holding of the Ninth Congress. Four hundred million people, half of China's population, were said to have taken part in demonstrations against the ‘new tsars’. In the longer term, the escalating rhetoric aimed at ‘Soviet social-imperialism’ provided a new political focus for the nation's energies (just as, twenty years earlier, anti-American rhetoric had galvanised China at the time of the Korean War).

It also allowed Mao to tie up loose ends. In mid-October, Lin Biao ordered a ‘red alert’, in which a million troops were mobilised for a possible Soviet attack.¹⁸⁷ This was not totally far-fetched. Although the border crisis had eased, China had just carried out its first successful underground nuclear test, sparking concerns that the Russians might launch a surgical strike against Chinese nuclear facilities. Whether the Chairman really believed, as was claimed later, that they might also stage a punitive bombing raid on Beijing is another matter. But it provided him with a pretext for dispersing the veteran Party leaders to the provinces, as part of a general leadership evacuation from Beijing, and at the same time removing from the capital – three years after their fall – Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping.

Deng was sent with his wife to Jiangxi, where he lived under guard in an army barracks and spent his days working part-time in a nearby tractor repair plant. That year his eldest son, Deng Pufang, became a lifelong cripple after jumping from a third-storey window to escape his Red Guard tormentors.^III But Deng himself was under Mao's protection. The head of the CC General Office, Wang Dongxing, was instructed to ensure that the family's conditions were acceptable and Deng's children, including Pufang, were later permitted to join him.¹⁸⁸

Liu had been bedridden since the summer of 1968, when he had contracted pneumonia. When he was told that he had been expelled from the Party, he ‘broke out into a sweat, became short of breath [and] began to vomit’. He never spoke again. He became covered in bed sores and had to be fed intravenously. His thinning hair, which had turned white, had not been cut for two years and was a foot in length. On Mao's instructions, he was taken out of Zhongnanhai on a stretcher on October 17 and flown to Kaifeng, the capital of Anhui. There he was held in the basement of an empty unheated building at the Municipal Party Committee headquarters. He developed pneumonia again, but permission to treat him in hospital was denied. After a cruel and long drawn-out agony, he died an abject death, his bed sheets covered in vomit and excrement, on November 12, four years almost to the day after Mao had launched the campaign against him. His corpse was put in the back of a jeep and taken to be cremated under a false name.¹⁸⁹

The Chairman did not give a direct order for Liu's death, any more than he ordered the deaths of He Long or Tao Zhu, or of Peng Dehuai who also died later in prison.

I The use of dunce's hats, like other Red Guard practices, was part of a much older tradition. Mao wrote of it in his account of the peasant movement in Hunan in 1927. Ten years later a Chinese journalist described the fate of suspected collaborators at Taiyuan during the war against Japan: ‘Each collaborator was wearing a high paper hat, on which was written clearly each one's name, personal details and his treacherous behaviour. They were placed in a vehicle and taken through the streets, and the squad used a really big drum, beating it as they went along …. The streets were full of people watching those collaborators, and all of them with one voice yelled and cursed them.’ The treatment meted out to Mao's opponents in the 1960s was exactly the same.

II This was an ad hoc body, created the previous August to do the work of the Politburo Standing Committee which no longer met.

III Years later Deng Pufang recalled in an interview with the author: ‘Some [radicals] detained me and held me in a kind of prison. I felt I had no future whatever. They beat me up – physical persecution was a very common thing at that time – until finally I felt my life simply wasn't important any more. I thought it would be better if I just ended it all. So I jumped deliberately from [the top of] the building [where I was being held]. At that moment … whether I was disabled or not was a matter of complete indifference.’