|
|
|
|
China's Transition, by Andrew J. Nathan
No other leader in history held as much power over so many people for so long as Mao Zedong, and none inflicted such a catastrophe on his nation. 1 Mao's lust for control and fear of betrayal kept his court and his country in turmoil. His vision and his intrigues drove China through the Great Leap Forward and its terrible consequences, the great famine and the Cultural Revolution, with deaths in the tens of millions.
Nor has any other dictator been as intimately observed as Mao is in The Private Life of Chairman Mao , a memoir by Dr. Li Zhisui, who served as his personal physician for twenty-two years. Suetonius's Lives of the Twelve Caesars shows the deranging effects of absolute power in the gluttony, lechery, greed, sadism, incest, torture, and commission of multiple murders by Tiberius, Caligula, and Nero, but the author did not know his subjects personally. Procopius's Secret History is a scandalous attack on the Roman Emperor Justinian and his wife, Theodora, devoid of sympathy or understanding. Albert Speer knew Hitler well, but their common interests were limited to public works and war. Stalin's daughter seldom saw her father. The diaries of Napoleon's and Hitler's personal physicians are merely clinical. 2
Personal memoirs about great democratic leaders, like Moran's Churchill and Herndon's Lincoln , tell us less about history than the biographies of dictators do, because democratic leaders have less room to impose their personalities on events. 3 As for the Chinese tradition, the "basic annals" of each reign record the rituals, portents, alliances, memorials, and enfeoffments that made up each emperor's performance of his role, but they rarely reveal the personalities beneath the robes. Even Chinese fictionalized accounts of historical rulers, like the Romance of the Three Kingdoms , deal with types rather than characters. The combination of access and insight makes The Private Life of Chairman Mao unique.
The real Mao could hardly have been more different from the benevolent sage-king portrayed in the authorized memoirs and poster portraits that circulate in China today. To be sure, on first meeting he could be charming, sympathetic, and casual, setting his visitor at ease to talk freely. But he drew on psychological reserves of anger and contempt to control his followers, manipulating his moods with frightening effect. Relying on the Confucian unwillingness of those around him to confront their superior, he humiliated subordinates and rivals. He undertook self-criticism only to goad others to flatter him, surrounding himself with a culture of abasement.
Emulating the first Tang emperor, Mao bound men and women to him by discovering their weaknesses. Dr. Li Zhisui came from an upper class family, was trained at an American-sponsored school in Suzhou, and had an early and trivial involvement with the Guomindang. These potentially dangerous facts enslaved him to Mao. Corruption existed within Mao's entourage and Mao knew it, but he needed people who could cut corners. Fish cannot live in pure water, Mao liked to say. He enjoyed swimming in polluted water and walking through fields of night soil.
Mao's retainers remained on permanent probation, whatever their backgrounds. Old comrades were sent into internal exile, in some cases to their deaths, although Mao's role in these tragedies was indirect. In one scene we see Mao sitting on a stage behind a curtain listening, unseen, as two of his closest colleagues are attacked at a mass meeting. Mao controlled his top colleagues' medical care, denying some of them treatment for cancer, because he was convinced that cancer could not be cured and he wanted them to work for their remaining time. Having lost children, a brother, and a wife to war and revolution, he seldom seemed moved by the suffering of lovers, children, and friends any more than he flinched from imposing misery on millions of the faceless "masses" in pursuit of his economic and political schemes. He understood human suffering chiefly as a way to control people. In politics and personal life alike, he discarded those for whom he had no present use, just as coolly calling them back when he wanted them, if they were still alive.
Dr. Li usually found Mao with a book of Chinese history in his hand. He loved the traditional stories of strategy and deception. He was an expert in when to wait, feint, and withdraw, and how to attack obliquely. He liked to "lure snakes out of their holes," encouraging others to show their hands so he could turn against them. His closest colleagues could seldom sense whether he agreed with them or was waiting to pounce. Dr. Li says Mao was a marvelous actor. He could sentence a retainer to exile with a story so convincing that the victim backed out bowing in gratitude.
Imperial power allowed the ultimate luxury, simplicity. Mao spent much of his time in bed or lounging by the side of a private pool, not dressing for days at a time. He ate oily food, rinsed his mouth with tea, and slept with country girls. During a 1958 tour of Henan, Mao's party was followed everywhere by a truckload of watermelons. Mao liked cloth shoes; if he had to wear leather ones for a diplomatic function, he let someone else break them in. He did not bathe, preferring a rubdown with hot towels, although this made it hard for Dr. Li to stop the spread of venereal infections among his female companions. He slept on a specially made huge wooden bed that was carried on his private train, set up in his villas, airlifted to Moscow.
He exercised sovereignty over clock and calendar. The court worked to Mao's rhythm, and many of its activities took place after midnight. It was not unusual to be summoned to Mao's chambers at 2 or 3 in the morning. He traveled frequently, convening meetings of the nation's leaders wherever he was. He sought to triumph over death through Daoist methods of sex. He followed no schedule except on May Day and National Day and on the rare occasions when he received foreign visitors. Then he had to dress, taking barbiturates to control his anxiety.
Women were served to order like food. While puritanism was promoted in his name, Mao's sex life was a central project of his court. A special room was set aside in the Great Hall of the People for his refreshment during high-level party meetings. Party and army political departments, guardians of the nation's morality, recruited young women of sterling proletarian background and excellent physical appearance, supposedly to engage in ballroom dancing with the leader, actually for possible service in his bed. Honored by the opportunity, some of those chosen introduced their sisters.
Each province's Party Secretary built Mao a villa. He moved from place to place partly for security concerns, partly out of paranoia. "It's not good for me to stay in one place too long," he told Dr. Li. All rail traffic stopped and stations were closed as his special train went through. Security officers posing as food vendors lent the stations an air of normality for his benefit. During the Great Leap, peasants were mobilized to tend transplanted crops along miles of tracks, creating the impression of a bumper harvest when the harvest was a disaster. Mao's favorite villa was located on a small island in the Pearl River, where he enjoyed privacy in the middle of the busy city of Guangzhou. Special food grown in a labor camp near Beijing was airlifted to him and tried by tasters before he ate it. Guards cooled his room with tubs of ice.
Absolute power affected Mao's mental and physical health, his human relations, and through these, his country and the world. He spent months in bed, ill with worry. But when the political struggle was going his way, he might fill up with cheerful energy that kept him from sleeping. Dr. Li dosed him constantly with barbiturates so he could rest. Political stress sometimes made him impotent, at other times stimulated his libido. As tens of millions starved to death during the Great Leap Forward and the Chairman lost face before the Party, he temporarily gave up meat. But he needed more women. One of them told Dr. Li that the Great Helmsman was great in everything, even in bed.
Politics in a dictatorship begins in the personality of the dictator. Mao established a regime like no other, an ensemble of economic, social, and political institutions that grew from his effort to build a unique form of socialism in a country that was poor, backward, and vulnerable.
Facing the hostility of the West, Mao aligned with Moscow. But his admiration for the West was one reason he chose the American trained Dr. Li as his physician, and was a subject of many of their conversations. He told Dr. Li that America's intentions toward China had always been benign. But he held his allies the Russians in contempt. Mao aimed to surpass the primitive Russian model with Chinese-style socialism, raise his country to the level of the advanced Western world, and by this achievement join the pantheon of Marxism-Leninism. The Great Leap Forward was his effort to create a model of socialism better than that of his northern neighbors, and the Cultural Revolution was his attempt to sustain the experiment in the face of its failure.
In a vast, continental country with a huge and poor population, Mao sought economic growth through mass mobilization, trying to substitute ideological fervor for material rewards. He froze the people's standard of living at subsistence levels in order to build a massive, wasteful industrial structure. In doing so, he ignored realities that contradicted his vision. A farmer's son from rural Hunan, he allowed himself to be deluded by vast Potemkin fields at the start of the Great Leap Forward. As Dr. Li says, why should Mao have doubted that the communist paradise had arrived when he himself was living in it? He thought there was more to learn about leadership from the pages of Chinese history than from textbooks of modern engineering. While people starved he imagined that they had more than they could eat.
The ideology that bore Mao's name promoted self-denial, defined a person's value in terms of political virtue, and dehumanized the class enemy. A system of work units, class labels, household registrations, and mass movements fixed each citizen in an organizational cage, within which people exercised political terror over themselves and each other. A pervading bureaucracy governed the economy, politics, ideology, culture, the people's private lives, and even many of their private thoughts. The apparatus led the people in singing the praises of the regime that had expropriated them. Mao toppled the party machinery when it proved insufficiently responsive to his fantasies of speed but rebuilt it when he needed it to stop factional violence.
At the top, thirty to forty men made all the major decisions. Their power was personal, fluid, and dependent on their relations with Mao. Dr. Li describes the system of Central Committee organs, political and confidential secretaries, bodyguards, kitchens, car pools, and clinics that served the leaders. An underground tunnel complex allowed the leaders to move secretly from their headquarters in Zhongnanhai to buildings elsewhere in Beijing. Mao's closest retainers bugged his premises, trying to keep better records of his decisions, but found themselves cashiered for spying on him.
Set up to serve and protect the leaders, the structures of power isolated them, Mao more than the others. Mao's comrades gradually ceded to him the Forbidden City swimming pool, the dance parties, and the best Beidaihe beach. The saga of his swim in three great rivers, over the objections of his security men, symbolized his solitary struggle against the bureaucracy, his fear that the revolution might bog down, and his challenge to comrades he thought were betraying his radical aims.
At the Eighth Party Congress in 1956, Mao's colleagues attempted to rein him in, taking advantage of de-Stalinization in the Soviet Union to write his guiding thought out of the party constitution, pledge the Party against the cult of personality, and criticize Mao's attempts to force the premature birth of communism. Mao claimed falsely to Dr. Li that he had not been consulted about these decisions. Forces abroad also threatened his control. The new Soviet leader, Khrushchev, wanted an accommodation with the West. Dr. Li portrays the bitter last meeting between the two by the side of Mao's swimming pool, which marked the start of an open split with the Soviets and the onset of China's long period of isolation.
Mao held fast to three ultimate tools of power: ideology, the army, and his spider's position at the center of the Party's factional web. He summoned up the epochal Great Leap Forward with a whistle-stop farm tour that passed a message over the heads of the economic planners to the basic-level cadres. At the Lushan Plenum in 1959, when the other leaders again tried to rein Mao in, he threatened to raise a new army and take to the hills. The others surrendered.
After the famine began, Mao retreated to a secondary position of power. As the other party leaders restored the economy, he brooded that they were "zombies," and complained about their failure to consult him. He patiently ensnared them in a debate over classic operas and enmeshed them in confusion over the issue of rural corruption. When his colleagues were vulnerable enough, he launched the Cultural Revolution.
Millions of victims later, Mao stood victorious at the Ninth Party Congress of 1969, his rivals dead or in internal exile, the nation singing his praises and waving his red book before his ubiquitous poster. By his side stood the abject Lin Biao, the sole survivor from the old ruling group. Mao's dream of development had failed, but his power was absolute in the country he had ruined. Lin Biao's coup attempt two years later disappointed Mao so badly that Dr. Li traces his final decline from then. He used his final energies to engineer the opening to the West, which later made possible Deng Xiaoping's reforms.
Psychological pathologies flourished in the atmosphere of court politics. The more complete Mao's control, the greater his fear of others' attempts to control him. Their anxiety to please made them more suspect. He thought his villas were poisoned and panicked when he heard wild animals scratching inside the roof of one. Mao spied on the other leaders by managing their secretaries through his chief secretary and their guards through his chief of guards. Although he surrounded his rivals with his men, he was never sure they were not spying on him through his women.
Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, suffered from hypochondria, aversion to noise, light, cold, and heat; and compulsive quarreling. Having driven her mad with boredom, dependency, and enforced idleness, Mao at first tried to spare her the knowledge of his love affairs. But when he needed her as a political proxy, he brought her into the inner circle. Like her equally sick colleague Lin Biao, Jiang once in power flowered into robust health, making friends with Mao's favorite female companion to get better access to the source of power.
Dr. Li shows us Lin Biao in the arms of his wife, crying with pain from a kidney stone; Hua Guofeng sitting in Mao's anteroom for hours unable to see the great leader because his companion and gatekeeper, Zhang Yufeng, is napping; Zhou Enlai kneeling on the floor before Mao to trace the route of a proposed motorcade; Jiang Qing in fury as a sick Mao hands control over the whole country to Zhou, only to recover and outlive him.
Of all Mao's followers, only Zhou kept relatively aloof from the byzantine networks that laced the court. Because he did so, Dr. Li and the other courtiers ironically viewed him as disloyal and dangerous. For Zhou to report information to appropriate colleagues in the formal chain of command struck the others as a sign of weakness and treachery.
At the end, the most loved man in China was friendless. During his long decline, his servants' chief obsession was to avoid blame for his demise. Only his favorite, Zhang Yufeng, had the decency to treat him like a human being by quarreling with him, fearless of being accused of angering him to death. But as he weakened, she found other interests, having become indispensable because only she could decode his slurred speech.
Dr. Li Zhisui's frank, round, slightly smiling face stands out from the rows of stony-faced retainers in the group photographs of Mao's household. His open expression, soft cheeks, and neat clothes betray him as the one who came back from the West. His foreign tincture made him doubly valuable, denoting both competence and dependency. For Mao was secure to the extent that Dr. Li was vulnerable. Surviving under Mao's protection, he stuck to his business, maintaining the health of the man whose acts cost the lives of millions.
Only a certain willingness to look away from evil can make a man the ideal guardian of a dictator's life. Dr. Li's limits as an observer of history were one of his qualifications for his job. But politics sometimes forced itself on him. Mao sometimes insisted on talking about events or on sending Dr. Li away from the court to observe and report. At court, Dr. Li had to learn who protected and who opposed him. Aside from Mao, his patron was Wang Dongxing, chief of bodyguards. Their alliance provides the book's bias, but also much of its insight into court politics.
Since he left China, Dr. Li has been all but erased from official history. Of the countless books on Mao's personal life published by Chinese presses, only one or two mention him. Apparently, there has been a central directive to treat him as a nonperson. But his image survives in unretouched film footage and photos, and reliable sources confirm his identity. Official and semiofficial works corroborate many details in his account but differ from his in leaving out aspects of the story that would embarrass the regime, which still rules by the soft light of Mao's official image. No authorized account offers a portrait of Mao that rings as true as Dr. Li's. It is the most revealing book ever published on Mao, perhaps on any dictator in history.
In 1981, five years after Mao's death, the Chinese Communist Party Central Committee adopted an official verdict on his life, "Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party Since the Founding of the People's Republic of China." It called Mao a great revolutionary whose contributions outweighed the costs of his mistakes. This book tells a different story. It shows how excessive power drives its possessor into a shadow world, where great visions become father to great crimes.
In 1958, at about the time covered by the texts translated in The Secret Speeches of Chairman Mao: From the Hundred Flowers to the Great Leap Forward , 4 Mao attended a command performance in Shanghai of the The White Snake, a tragic Chinese opera. As Mao's captain of bodyguards tells it in a recent memoir (published in Chinese), the chairman settled into his front row sofa to the applause of the assembled cadres, allowed the bodyguard to loosen the belt over his ample stomach, lit a cigarette, and sat back to enjoy the show. (Doctors had ordered Mao to stop eating so much fatty pork, but he was too willful to listen.) Just at the point where the feudalistic Buddhist abbot Fahai starts to bury the White Maiden beneath the Thunder Peak Pagoda, Mao jumped up, shouting, "You won't let her make revolution? You won't let her rebel?" His pants dropped around his ankles. 5
Mao is similarly undressed in some of the nineteen texts in The Secret Speeches , which the editors have selected from twenty-three volumes of his speeches, monologues, and letters that were circulated in classified editions in China and have recently been obtained by Harvard's Fairbank Center for East Asian Research. The first set of texts translated here dates from the Hundred Flowers movement of the spring of 1957, and includes the original transcript of Mao's February 27, 1957, speech, "On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People," which laid out the rationale for allowing the intellectuals to criticize the Party in what became known as the Hundred Flowers campaign. The second set of documents dates from 1958, the first year of the Great Leap Forward. Among them is a series of five impromptu talks Mao gave to his Politburo colleagues and other top officials at the seaside resort of Beidaihe in late August, in which he dilated feverishly on his vision of imminent communism.
The texts have never before been available outside a small circle of party specialists in China. They add to our understanding of Mao's character and thinking at a crucial turning point in contemporary Chinese history. For a regime that was constantly torn by factionalism and was normally at war with one or another major section of its society, the years 1957 and 1958 were a unique interlude of self-confidence and optimism--at least for Mao, although many of his colleagues were skeptical. Looking back, the path of decline from the regime's relatively happy days of 1957-58 to the disaster of June 1989 is surprisingly clear, considering the amount of time and tragedy in between.
The sense of security had been earned at a large cost in earlier violence, even after the Chinese Communist Party won victory in a bloody civil war. In a passage eliminated from the official published version of "On the Correct Handling of Contradictions," Mao tells his audience that in the 1950-52 campaign to wipe out counterrevolutionaries, "700,000 were killed, [and] after that time probably over 70,000 more have been killed. But less than 80,000. . . . In the past four or five years we've only killed several tens of thousands of people." These figures do not include the costs in death and suffering of land reform, the thought reform of the intellectuals, and the so-called five-anti campaign for the takeover of private businesses. There were a few mistakes, Mao goes on, but "basically there were no errors; that group of people should have been killed."
Mao tries to convince his party colleagues that 1956 marked the end of 116 years of class struggle, counted from the Opium War of 1840, and that it is time for the Party to lay down the cudgel. He assures them that what happened in 1956 in Hungary--where they "basically did not eliminate counterrevolutionaries"--could not happen in China. The negative example of Hungary has remained a nightmare for Chinese leaders. Deng Xiaoping's speeches throughout the 1980s and Li Peng's in the 1989 crisis were full of references to counterrevolution in Hungary and Poland, both in 1956 and in the 1980s.
But in 1957, Mao denied the existence of any real threat to party control. "We won," he says. "Indeed you won, that certainly counts! Being able to win always deserves credit. Since you won, what else is there to say?" The answer he proposes is that the Party now faces a new challenge, economic construction, which it does not know how to win. It needs the cooperation of the bourgeois intellectuals until it can train its own generation of proletarian intellectuals. The Party must stop repressing the intellectuals and learn to get along with them. The intellectuals will have to be allowed to criticize the Party cadres, Mao says. But this should be no more frightening for the Party than "washing its face." The Party is too securely rooted now to be blown down even by a "force-12 typhoon."
These documents dispose of the theory that the Hundred Flowers campaign was a trick to get the Party's critics to expose themselves--to "lure snakes out of their holes." Mao's purpose was to convince Party cadres, used to treating everyone who crossed them as a counterrevolutionary, to learn how to tolerate differences of opinion among those they had to work with on the tasks of economic construction. "Our strong points are no longer any use. Our strong points are class struggle, politics, and military affairs. Our weak points are our lack of culture, lack of science, and lack of technology. We must learn these things." Mao wanted to offer the intellectuals a junior partnership in the regime. The documents also remove any doubt that Mao had agreed with Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping when they declared the effective end of class struggle at the Eighth Party Congress of 1956--a fact obscured by Cultural Revolution attacks on Liu and Deng for what they said then.
To provide a Marxist theoretical basis for the new era of class harmony, and to persuade the intellectuals that their criticisms of the Party would go unpunished, Mao developed the theory of the "two kinds of contradictions" in his February 1957 speech. He argued that contradictions among the people are nonantagonistic and should be handled by persuasion, unlike contradictions between the enemy and ourselves, which are antagonistic and must be handled by coercion. The theory became part of the jargon of Chinese communism. In May 1989 Li Peng tried to make talismanic use of it by declaring that the regime would "strictly distinguish between the two different kinds of contradictions" in dealing with the democracy protesters, among whom the bad elements were "an extremely small, extremely small number." 6
Saying so didn't make it so in 1989, or in 1957. Mao was radically overoptimistic about the loyalty of the intellectuals. When they finally accepted his invitation to criticize the Party, they unlocked unsuspected reserves of bitterness, in a process similar to that which occurred in Chinese cities in the spring of 1989. The criticism rapidly reached a hostile crescendo and had to be stopped. Several months later the official version of "On the Correct Handling of Contradictions" was published with heavy revisions which radically changed the ground rules of the campaign. Some 600,000 persons were labeled "rightists" for having gone beyond the rules. They were punished with up to twenty years of labor camp or internal exile.
One can glimpse the theoretical origins of both the Cultural Revolution and post-Tiananmen conservatism in Mao's 1957 analysis of the intellectuals' relationship to the Party. His decision to characterize the intellectuals' conflicts with the Party as a contradiction "among the people" is explicitly not based on a sense of identity with them--he estimates that fewer than 10 percent are really committed to socialism--but on a tactical judgment that they are now sufficiently cowed and isolated to go along with the regime. He states frankly in March 1957, "There is still class struggle, particularly in the ideological sphere, but we treat it as a contradiction among the people."
When the intellectuals betrayed him, he concluded in 1958 that "classes in terms of political thinking . . . are not easily abolished, and they have not yet been abolished--that is what we discovered during last year's Rectification [Hundred Flowers] Campaign." This spurred him to develop the theory of "uninterrupted revolution," which called for pushing ahead toward communism without giving "bourgeois ideology" a chance to take root--what he elsewhere referred to approvingly as "transition [to communism] in poverty." The idea that class struggle continues long past the abolition of the economic bases of class became the rationale for the Cultural Revolution. In the post-Mao era it justified the regime's assaults on "bourgeois liberalization."
The documents in the book skip over the second half of 1957 when the crackdown on the intellectuals occurred, and pick up again in early 1958 when the ebullient Mao is full of renewed confidence, this time in the peasant masses and their enthusiasm for socialism. Mao at this time sounds like a man on a caffeine high. Indeed, according to the memoirs of his bodyguard, he had no regular habits of eating, sleeping, or exercise. His body ran on a 28-hour day, so his sleeping patterns constantly changed. He might eat once or twice a day, depending on when he was hungry. When he was excited he would stay up for three or four days at a time, and then he had great trouble getting to sleep. He was addicted to sleeping pills, constantly drank tea, and ate the tea leaves to combat constipation. He was such a heavy smoker that many of his guards got stomach ulcers from the smoke. 7
Mao relished the heaven-storming atmosphere of the Great Leap. A decade earlier, he told his colleagues at Beidaihe, his health had improved in Yan'an after the town was attacked by a Kuomintang general. Now he felt that the Western embargo of China was also a good thing, because it helped create a crisis atmosphere that "will mobilize all [our] positive forces." "To have an enemy in front of us, to have tension, is to our advantage." Earlier, in another passage excised from the official version of "On the Correct Handling of Contradictions," Mao said that he debated with Nehru over whether World War III would bring about the elimination of the human race. "I don't accept this argument. . . . As regards fighting World War III, I say that in the first place we do not welcome [it], [but] it's OK [too]." War "stimulates people's activism, arouses people's consciousness, makes revolution erupt."
In 1958, Mao was convinced that the masses had become aroused. Once they poured their huge energies into the task of production, all China's problems would be solved. China would become a great industrial power within "three, five, or seven years." There would be so much surplus grain that it would take three years to eat a year's crop; he worried that with such plenty people might quit cultivating the land. Excess population, which had concerned him as recently as 1957, was no longer a problem. "With many people, there's lots of power." More labor power would make for more wealth. Rural workers released from farming would be put to work in industry. The country would get so crowded that people would have to line up to go out on the street. "Every large commune will have highways constructed, wider roads of cement or asphalt, with no trees planted [alongside] so that airplanes can land--they will be airports."
The opportunity was ripe to strike toward communism. Mao warned his colleagues not to let the Soviet Union find out about this too soon, for they would be mortified to be left in the dust. The only worry was to find some tasks to leave for the next generation.
Mao's image of communism was drawn straight from Marx's enigmatic "Critique of the Gotha Program," which he took quite literally. People would work for the pleasure of it, not for wages, and would spend one-third of their time in leisure. They would eat without paying. Goods would no longer be produced for exchange but would be allocated on the basis of need, without regard to exchange value. The patriarchal family system would end with the availability of widespread social security; education and child care would be taken over by the community. Officials would engage in manual labor; military officers would spend time in the ranks; villages, schools, factories, and neighborhoods would be organized into communes that would combine governmental, economic, and military functions. The state would cease to have any role but national defense and the registration of births, deaths, and marriages.
It was easy for Mao to think of junking the commodity economy because he had little understanding of its workings. Until the early 1950s he and the other Communist leaders had lived under a "supply system" in which the Party provided directly for their needs. After taking power and assuming control over the vast bureaucracy already in place, the Party had to introduce a wage-grade system for officials. Mao himself received a salary of 530 yuan. But he hardly knew what to do with it. His bodyguard says he never touched money and hated it.
And for a farmer's son, Mao knew surprisingly little about agriculture. In December 1957, according to his bodyguard, Mao spent a sleepness night wondering why the peasants were still so poor; he saw no reason why socialism shouldn't already have made them rich. 8 At Beidaihe, he reminded the Party of his orders to enforce two innovations: deep plowing--better for eliminating weeds, he thought--and close planting, so as to get more plants per acre. In a later meeting he ordered close planting for fruit trees, too, because "when they all grow together, they will be comfortable." Deep plowing and close planting both turned out to be disastrous, although less so than his regime's stress on ill-conceived water conservation and land reclamation projects that did long-term environmental damage.
Mao claimed to be skeptical of reported super-high grain yields, but he had no idea of what a realistic figure might be. In November 1958 he discounted a claim of 450 million tons of grain to what he thought was a credible 370 tons--double the previous year's harvest. He believed that the communes could readily double agricultural output in one year by concentrating the labor force and land management. He told his colleagues that grain production would soon be so high that one-third of the land could be planted to fruit trees, one-third to grain, and one-third could be left fallow--a howler repeated to me with wonder by young Chinese economists in the 1980s, but never before documented on the public record. Mao claimed there would soon be so much grain that China would supply it free to other countries whenever they were in need.
Mao was a walking example of the danger of a little learning. His interests were wide-ranging, but his knowledge was unsystematic and inaccurate. He had enormous faith in the "Critique of the Gotha Program" and in a Soviet political economy textbook that he frequently quoted, remarking at one point that "dogs are superior animals quite capable of understanding human nature, but the only thing is that they don't understand Marxism, they don't understand steel production--more or less like capitalists." Yet Stalin's economic writings were too dispassionate for him. "In his economics, everything is cold and cheerless, wretched and miserable, and totally gloomy."
According to a recent book on Mao's reading habits, on one trip out of town in October 1959 he instructed his secretary to pack works by Marx, Engels, Lenin, Stalin, Plekhanov, Hegel, the utopian socialists; an anthology of Western philosophy; works of classic Chinese philosophy, including the Legalists and the Daoists; the twenty-four dynastic histories; and works of contemporary Chinese Marxist writers. 9 It was an ambitious reading program, but narrow and highly theoretical. His economic prescriptions at Beidaihe were theoretical in the worst sense--abstract, contradictory, and damaging. After twenty-seven years of rule, his legacy was an inefficient modern economic system that had been created at exorbitant cost sitting atop a backward rural economy.
Mao was deeply afraid of and contemptuous of intellectuals. "The trouble lies in the fact that whereas they have read a few books, we haven't. And because we haven't, they get so stuck up that it's really hard for us to deal with them." His talks are full of slighting references to professors in particular. In his ramblings before educated audiences on philosophy, history, literature, physics, biology, and chemistry, he self-consciously throws in peasant-like references, which seem intended preemptively to deflate his own intellectualizing while also establishing a superior claim to authority on the basis of materialist dialectics. Thus, in a disquisition on the sources of knowledge, Mao remarks, "the formula for protein has not yet been discovered, [but] the 167 types of reactive dyes have. The world's first, marsh gas, is H4C; farts are H2S."
Yet the intellectuals we encounter in these pages treat Mao with real deference. In several of the texts, groups of distinguished party and nonparty intellectuals seek his advice on a wide range of issues, and he answers every question with self-assurance, although often delphically. The atmosphere is reminiscent of Confucius' dialogues with his disciples; Mao's dicta might as well be tagged "the Master said." Although his authority came partly from his ability to bully and humiliate others, it also drew from the prevalent belief that he really did have the correct answers to all questions. Few Chinese intellectuals, even inside the Party, knew enough about Marxism to challenge Mao's claim to interpret it. In fact, in an interesting sidelight, one of Mao's interlocutors in 1957 states that only about 47 percent of Marx's works have been translated into Chinese. Until the disaster of the Great Leap, Mao's political copybook was in fact unblotted by any major failure. He fostered the image of a sage-king, and for a long time his society was inclined to believe in his powers of vision.
Mao was a master of obfuscation masquerading as dialectics. He says that in writing newspaper articles, "[We] can combine stiffness and gentleness together." "[If] Lu Xun were alive, I think he'd both dare and not dare to write." "Our theory is different: . . . War turns into peace, peace turns into war, life turns into death, death turns into life." One of his favorite devices is to use his vision of the long term to deny the importance of problems in the short term. Arguing for the Hundred Flowers policy against those who fear that Marxism may come under challenge, he comforts them with the thought that "Marxism itself will come to an end some day. . . . The earth will rot one day. Humanity may also be negated." And he insists on the catch-22 proposition that the coercive history of his regime provides no excuse for people failing to speak up boldly. "The genuine Marxist [and] thoroughgoing materialist fears nothing, so he can write." Ignoring his regime's history of coercion, he urges, "We hope to make ours a lively country, where people dare to criticize, dare to speak, dare to express their opinions. [We] should not make people fearful to speak."
Once the Hundred Flowers were suppressed, of course, it was too late for this project to be achieved. The palmy period of the regime came to an end with the collapse of the Leap and the massive famine that followed--the largest in the history of the world. By 1976, when Mao died, the Party was widely unpopular. From 1978 on, Deng Xiaoping restored its authority by playing the economy like a slot machine, finding policy combinations that successively unlocked the suppressed productivity of the villages, underemployed urbanites, small town factories, and the coastal regions with links to the Chinese diaspora. But the payouts were all pocketed by the mid-1980s. The reforms seemed at a dead end and the regime's legitimacy began to slide. Unable to buy consent, Deng Xiaoping had to revert to rule by coercion.
Over its history one of the surprising features of the Chinese Communist regime has been its repeated ability to be surprised by its unpopularity with its own people--in the Hundred Flowers, the Cultural Revolution, the Democracy Wall movement of 1978-79, and the Beijing Spring of 1989. The dynamics of self-isolation and self-deception are clear in Mao's talks of 1957-58. At one meeting recorded in this volume he finishes a disquisition to a group of Party cadres in Tianjin and then asks for questions. There aren't any; they are afraid to talk to him. He misunderstood his people because he cut himself off from them by his brutality.
The same has been true of the Deng Xiaoping regime. Deng had to reconfront the contradiction that Mao was trying to resolve in 1957, between the coercive grounding of the regime and its need for the cooperation of the intellectuals. "Dictatorship, arbitrariness, and suppression cannot be applied to ideological problems," Mao warned in 1957. "[If you] want people to obey, [you] have to persuade rather than coerce [them]." It was advice he didn't follow himself. But at least when Mao tried to enforce ideological conformity there was some substance to his thought, however incoherent it may have been at a deeper level, and the intellectuals were disposed to have faith. Today when the regime demands that people "love socialism," the very concept is vacuous, having been sapped of all meaning by years of ideological revisionism. The terror that was imposed under Deng was more Stalinist than Maoist. Mao's terror, at least until the early 1970s, relied for its effectiveness on the ideological conviction of both its perpetrators and its victims. The terror in China after Mao was simply that of a police state, a much more fragile kind.
Who was Kang Sheng? Was he really, as The Claws of the Dragon claims, "the man Mao trusted more than any other," a man who could "control, even mesmerize Mao," "one of the most influential forces in modern China"? Is it really correct to believe that "next to Kang, Mao himself seems to shrink in importance and interest"? 10
Starting in 1927, Kang was one of the leaders in the small Communist underground in Shanghai, placed by Zhou Enlai in charge of a secret service that fought a running battle with the Kuomintang's police and conducted assassinations of Communist defectors. When the Communists pulled out of Shanghai, Kang went to Moscow for ideological training and allegedly cooperated with the NKVD in purging "hundreds" from among the visiting Chinese Communist cadres studying there. In 1937 he returned to China, to become head of the Party School in Yan'an, the Communists' capital. A year later he was also appointed to head the intraparty security agency known as the Social Affairs Department, about whose work little is known.
The height of Kang's power as the Chinese Communist Party's secret police chief was past by the time the People's Republic was established in 1949. From 1949 to 1956, he was either physically or politically ill and out of power. By the time of Great Leap Forward in 1958, he had returned to Mao's side and although he did not occupy a high post, he was prominent in supporting Mao's call for the Leap. For the next several years he continued to serve as one of Mao's theoretical advisers, helping to devise the ideological rationale for the split with the Soviet Union and helping, with Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, to generate the critique of "revisionist" trends in literature and art that led to the Cultural Revolution. At that time he persecuted a novelist and a philosophy professor, each of whom had promoted ideas that he deemed retrograde; later hundreds of victims were hounded in connection with each of these cases.
Kang reached a brief second peak of influence during the Cultural Revolution, as a cat's paw of Mao's, without independent power. He was adviser to the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group and de facto head of the Party's Organization Department, reached protocol position number 4 in the Communist hierarchy, and was elected to the Politburo Standing Committee. He helped launch the Red Guard movement at the Party School and at Beijing University, exercised influence over the Party Investigation Department and the Ministry of Public Security, and (like several other CCP leaders) developed a private security force of 500 agents.
During this period, Kang took the lead in a number of intraparty persecutions, including those of Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. Because of his knowledge of senior cadres' personnel histories, he knew whom to accuse plausibly of what, though the story is also told of his framing someone as a traitor simply because he thought the man looked like one. According to John Byron and Robert Pack, Kang "personally supervised ten special case groups that investigated the 'crimes' of 220 defendants from the very apex of the Communist Party." He also gave a talk to Red Guards from Inner Mongolia, who subsequently carried out a witch hunt that affected hundreds of thousands, and he had vaguely delineated ties to a purge in Yunnan Province that affected tens of thousands.
Byron and Pack conclude that more than 30,000 deaths were "directly attributable" to Kang, but it is not clear whether this number includes the deaths in Inner Mongolia and Yunnan, to which he is connected only indirectly, deaths that themselves exceeded 30,000 in number. Then in 1970 Kang was stricken with cancer. He was soon incapacitated and although continuing to hold high office ceased to play an important role. He died in 1975.
From these facts Byron and Pack--identified on the book jacket as a pseudonymous senior diplomat and a veteran investigative reporter--create a picture of Kang as "the creator of China's Gulag," the godfather of the Cultural Revolution," China's Beria, "a purveyor of terror to the largest nation in history," "the most callous and unrestrained" among China's Communist rulers. They base their account heavily on an officially sponsored Critical Biography of Kang Sheng issued for internal circulation within the Party in 1982. In turn, the Critical Biography is a popularized version of material compiled by a "special case group" charged with justifying Kang's posthumous expulsion from the Chinese Communist Party in 1980. Like the documentation released within the Party after the purge of Liu Shaoqi, the fall of Lin Biao, and the arrest of the Gang of Four, the Kang Sheng dossier was issued because the subject commanded substantial prestige. Drawing on the ancient tradition of Chinese "praise-and-blame" historiography, such materials seek to blacken the subject's reputation in every possible way. The Critical Biography portrays Kang as not just on the losing side, but as a thoroughly bad egg: a roué from a landlord background, a selfish materialist who lacked human kindness, engaged in sexual license, betrayed his friends, and may have been a hidden traitor to the Party.
In such works, the subject's crimes are separated from historical context and Byron and Peck perpetuate the error. Kang's relations with Zhou Enlai, his original patron in the Party, are hidden. Mao is portrayed as a victim, rather than as a beneficiary, of Kang's lies and deceits. Kang is made to appear a deviant from the Maoist system rather than a product of it.
Byron and Pack blacken the names of all those figures whom the CCP now blackens and paints in favorable terms the ones the Party praises. Zhou Enlai, Chen Yun, Peng Dehuai, and Liu Shaoqi receive sympathetic treatment, while Jiang Qing, Wang Ming, and Chen Boda are sneered at. These judgments are often conveyed through the use of potted physical descriptions. The propagandist Yao Wenyuan was "round-faced and rotund," and radical philosophy professor Nie Yuanzi was "a plump woman of 45." General He Long triumphs as "a heroic, dashing figure with a clipped mustache," and Deng Xiaoping is described favorably as "combative, energetic, and pushy."
The authors do supplement the Critical Biography with other sources, including interviews; but nearly all of them are with people who disliked Kang. Byron and Pack seem to believe that this adds to their informants' credibility. An interviewee who misremembered Kang's home province and his height is cited as the sole gospel for the controversial charge that it was Kang who betrayed five fellow-communists to the KMT police in 1931. An uncorroborated source subtitled The Thief and the Prostitute is used to prove that Kang was addicted to opium in the 1960s. And the authors labor even harder than their source to endow Kang with a deplorable sexual history.
Thus they expand two sentences in the Critical Biography , consisting of the Chinese equivalent of clichés like "Kang and his young friends painted the town red," into two pages filled with circumstantial detail of a "wild adolescence in Jiao county." They retail weakly founded rumors that Kang had an early sexual relationship with fellow Shandongese Jiang Qing. They call the rumors "plausible" because, "Jiang Qing was a precocious girl" and "Kang had a reputation for sexual escapades." Later they state gratuitously that "whether [Kang and Jiang] resumed or developed a physical relationship in Yan'an remains a mystery."
They cite an unreliable book in Chinese called Personalities of the Red Dynasty to assert that in the 1930s Kang was frequently in and out of brothels. They speak of "rumored amorous escapades" during the 1950s with no cited evidence. They make much of his watching "bawdy" traditional opera in the early 1960s, sometimes in the company of Jiang Qing, ignoring the fact that this was part of his job as head of the Theoretical Small Group and that even the bawdiest of Chinese operas is devoid of pornographic effect. They note insinuatingly that in the mid-1960s, when Kang helped Mao launch the Cultural Revolution, he was "aided by several women, including his wife and the ever present Jiang Qing and a university lecturer notorious for her sexual opportunism"--a woman who like many Chinese had divorced her spouse when he was labeled a rightist and who later married a highly placed cadre twenty years her senior.
The Claws of the Dragon often embroiders on the bare framework of Kang's curriculum vitae, which in many spots is all the Critical Biography provides. This makes the book slow-moving as we are treated to architectural detail on cities in which Kang lived, or accounts of historical events in which he played no direct role. The authors attribute states of mind to Kang without evidence. He is described as infuriated, fearful, carefully concealing his jealousy; as sensing, appreciating, enjoying; as being inspired by the exploits of traditional Chinese spymasters. His consistent and sometimes risky support for Mao's shifting line is portrayed as opportunism, part of "his quest for the unholy grail of total power."
If we are to have an imaginary Kang, I prefer a less banal one. Not knowing Kang's mind, I prefer to imagine it as Hannah Arendt imagined her totalitarians, as the mind of a fanatical ideologue who believed that all things are possible. When Kang justifies the brutality of the Cultural Revolution as a small price to pay for China's attempt to remake human nature, Byron and Pack see only nonsense. One might instead see the antiutilitarianism typical of totalitarian ideologies. It was an ideology not generated by Kang, but created by Mao and voiced at different times by the entire Chinese Communist leadership.
Some of the main Maoist techniques of terror as an instrument of rule were perfected during the Yan'an Rectification Movement of 1942-44. Byron and Pack follow the Critical Biography in blaming the mass-meeting denunciations, arrests, tortures, and executions on Kang. They leave Mao, the progenitor and beneficiary of the movement, in the background, ignore the collective involvement of the rest of the party leadership (some of whom are still in power), and overlook the complicity of the victims, without which the vortex of hysteria could not have been generated.
In any case, the Rectification Movement fits Byron and Pack's thesis poorly. It marked a shift from secret, professional anti-espionage work to the use of public spy hysteria as a tool to ensnare thousands of innocent victims and frighten masses of people into total compliance with the new ideology of "Mao Zedong Thought." For Kang it marked the end of whatever independent power he had and his enlistment as a loyal tool of Mao.
To say that Kang "used the security organs to turn China into a chamber of horrors" is thus erroneous in three ways. First, his victims were concentrated among the party and intellectual elite, not the whole of China. Second, the terror that swept both the elite and the entire population was not Kang's creation but that of Mao and the party apparatus, though Kang played his part in spurring the process along. Third and most important, the terror was not the product of the security organs, but primarily of other institutions in Mao's system of rule.
Mao's system was totalitarian, but it was not a "police state," as Byron and Pack call it. In a police state, the political police become a separate organization, more powerful than the regular police, the military, or the party organization. They operate without legal restriction, serve as the primary pillar of the regime, and have direct access to the leader. One thinks of Stalin's KGB, Hitler's SS, the Iranian Savak, Saddam Hussein's Mukhabarat, or the former South Korean Central Intelligence Agency. China had no similar organization. The Party never lost political control over the Ministry of Public Security, and its minister never ranked among the top figures of the regime. The Party's internal investigatory and disciplinary organs were independent from the police. So far as is known, these organs concentrated on intraparty and overseas intelligence work rather than domestic security, although information on them is extremely scarce. Under Mao, the military and rural and factory militias also served important security roles.
The huge bureaucracy of the Public Security Ministry reaches from the central government down to each neighborhood and village. Much of its work is public and nonpolitical: traffic policing, household registration, criminal investigations, fire fighting. Until 1983, it also ran the huge network of prisons and labor camps (since shifted to the Ministry of Justice), which is described in Hong-da Harry Wu's important book, Laogai--The Chinese Gulag . 11 A prisoner of conscience for nineteen years, Wu collected his information both during his imprisonment and during several risky return trips disguised as a Chinese-American businessman, one of them reported on "60 Minutes." Besides providing unique detail on the organization and distribution of the camps and life inside them, Wu incidentally provides proof of the export of labor camp products to the United States and other markets.
Like police anywhere, the Chinese police engage in some amount of surveillance, opening of mail, tapping of telephones, and infiltration of political groups, though not with great efficiency. But by far the major part of the job of political surveillance in Mao's time was performed by the hierarchy of work units--factories, communes, schools, neighborhood committees, military companies--in which most people were fixed for their entire careers. Each unit was dominated by its Party Secretary and controlled almost all aspects of its members' lives. The party apparatus and the security department within each unit took responsibility for the political lives of its members, as well as for most criminal problems, and maintained links with the local police. (This helps to explain China's extremely low crime statistics, because they include only those cases that get beyond the boundaries of the work unit and enter the regular police and judicial system.) The police were free to direct their attention to special targets, to organizations outside of work units, to circles of intellectuals, students, and workers in larger cities, to foreigners with whom Chinese citizens might have contact.
Political terror was delivered mostly through the unit. Terror commonly took the form not of jackboots on the stairs and the knock on the door, but a summons to a unit political study meeting. The life-long dissident Ni Yuxian, for example, constantly ran afoul of the regime. As Anne F. Thurston describes in her account of his life, A Chinese Odyssey , 12 Ni's oppressors were the political instructor of his high school class, his company commander and political instructor in the military, party officials in the college he attended, the worker propaganda team both in his college and in a factory he worked in, Red guards, and factory militia--in other words, control mechanisms within the unit. When Ni, like millions of others, was incarcerated during the Cultural Revolution, it was not in the prison system but in his own unit's "cow shed" (a broom closet, spare room, outhouse, or lavatory). He was never arrested by the police until after Mao's death, when he hung a wall poster on the side of one of Shanghai's major hotels.
Kang's trade was not in mass terror but intraparty terror. As the Critical Biography states with outrage, "Those he harmed were not ordinary people." (Kang also had links to some Red Guard groups during the Cultural Revolution. In Beijing and elsewhere, Red Guards may have been used occasionally both by special case groups and by the police to carry out searches or arrests, but almost nothing is known of this relationship, and The Claws of the Dragon does little to clarify it.)
Perhaps it was precisely because China lacked a highly developed and autonomous secret police apparatus, and relied so heavily for security on the party hierarchy in the units, that Mao and his allies had to turn to extraordinary methods in order to purge that very hierarchy. Kang's persecutions in the 1960s were conducted largely through entities called "special case groups." These were ad hoc groups of investigators, authorized by the Mao-controlled party center to investigate particular suspects. Their task was not to eliminate victims, but to conduct extensive investigations so that a plausible, if false, case could be put together to justify punishment--just as was done by the special-case group that produced the material for the Critical Biography . Many persecutions and tortures of secondary people had no other goal than to collect damaging information on major party figures. Whether police were among the case group members, and whether the groups had organizational links to the police, remain unknown, although it is plausible that the case groups borrowed professional staff from the police.
With the collapse of the old control mechanisms under Deng Xiaoping's liberalizing reforms, China came to resemble a classic police state more rather than less. Agencies dealing with counterespionage and border security were removed from the Ministry of Public Security to form a Ministry of State Security. Deng separated some military units involved in internal security to form the People's Armed Police (PAP). Elite counterterror and civil unrest units were reportedly established and received training in Eastern Europe. After Tiananmen, money was poured into the PAP to improve its technical surveillance capabilities, and control over it was shifted from the Ministry of Public Security to the more pivotal Military Affairs Commission. As work units increasingly refused to inform on their members or to conduct effective political campaigns, police surveillance and illegal police detentions increased.
Not every totalitarian state is a police state, and not every head of party security is a Beria. So far from being Mao's evil genius, the progenitor of the Cultural Revolution, or a man more interesting than Mao himself, Kang Sheng could have said in his defense what his colleague, Jiang Qing, said at her trial: "I was Chairman Mao's dog. When he said bite, I bit."
Note 1: This chapter consists of the following items, with footnotes added: "Foreword" in Dr. Li Zhisui with Anne F. Thurston, The Private Life of Chairman Mao (New York: Random House, 1994), pp. vii-xiv; "The Road to Tiananmen Square," The New Republic (July 31, 1989), pp. 33-36; "The Enforcer," The New Republic (April 6, 1992), pp. 32-36. Back.
Note 2: Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, The Twelve Caesars , trans. Robert Graves, revised with an introduction by Michael Grant (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979); Procopius, Secret History, trans. Richard Atwater (Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1969); Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich , trans. Richard and Clara Winston (N.Y.: Macmillan, 1970); Svetlana Alliluyeva , Twenty Letters to a Friend , trans Priscilla Johnson McMillan (New York: Harper and Row, 1967); Henri-Gratien Bertrand, Napoleon at St. Helena: The Journals of General Bertrand from January to May of 1821, Deciphered and Annotated by Paul Fleuriot de Langle , trans. Frances Hume (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1952); David Irving, ed., Adolf Hitler: The Medical Diaries, The Private Diaries of Dr Theo Morell (London: Sidgwick and Jacksonm, 1983). Back.
Note 3: Churchill, Taken from the Diaries of Lord Moran: The Struggle for Survival, 1940-1965 , (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1966); William H. Herndon, Herndon's Lincoln: The True Story of A Great Life. The History and Personal Recol-lections of Abraham Lincoln , 3 vols. (Chicago: Belford Clarke and Company, 1899). Back.
Note 4: Edited by Roderick MacFarquhar, Eugene Wu, and Timothy Cheek, with contributions by Merle Goldman and Benjamin Schwartz (Cambridge: Harvard Council on East Asian Studies, 1989). Back.
Note 5: Pants: Quan Yanchi, Zouxia shentan de Mao Zedong (Mao Zedong coming down off the altar) (Beijing: Zhongwai wenhua chuban gongsi, 1989), pp. 47-49; pork: Li Yinqiao as told to Quan Yanchi, Zouxiang shentan de Mao Zedong (Mao Zedong going toward the altar) (Beijing: Zhongwai wenhua chuban gongsi, 1989), p. 193. Back.
Note 6: Huaqiao ribao , June 14, 1989, p. 4. Back.
Note 7: Quan, Zouxiang , pp. 176, 192; Zouxia , pp. 62ff., 100, 117-18. Back.
Note 8: Quan, Zouxiang , p. 221. Back.
Note 9: Gong Yuzhi, Feng Xianzhi, and Shi Zhongquan, Mao Zedong de dushu shenghuo (Mao Zedong's reading life) (Beijing: Sanlian shudian, 1986), pp. 18-19. Back.
Note 10: John Byron and Robert Pack, The Claws of the Dragon: Kang Sheng, the Evil Genius Behind Mao--and His Legacy of Terror in People's China (New York: Simon and Schuster. 1992). Back.
Note 11: Boulder: Westview, 1992. Back.
Note 12: New York: Scribner's, 1991. Back.
Email this citation