14.2.1 Mao Prepares the Cultural Revolution
The debacle of the communes and the GLF was such a terrible blow to Mao’s standing within the CC that his opponents considered the time had come to openly criticise his policies. The enlarged CC of 22 February 1962, heard Peng Zhen call for Mao to make a self-criticism, and Liu Shaoqi claimed that the economic difficulties being experienced were 30% due to natural disasters and 70% due to the serious errors and mistakes in Party work. Liu and Peng supported by Deng Xiaoping, were openly attempting to kick Mao upstairs into a symbolic figurehead stripped of all real power.
So severe was his loss of prestige, that Mao was forced to bow to the majority, but he was not ready to retire and immediately began to re-build his base within the Party, preparing his counter-attack to destroy the Liu/Peng grouping. This was possible because although Mao was temporarily removed from frontline politics, he remained the figurehead of the regime with considerable formal authority within the Party and a base within the army. Lin Piao, a Mao loyalist and Defence Minister, would play a central role in Mao’s bid to regain his authority. His response to the disaster of the GLF was the opposite of that taken by Liu and Peng, and he began a campaign intended to turn the army into a Maoist bastion. He had Mao glorified; the first issue of the Little Red Book was published. The battle lines were being drawn for what became within a few years, the GPCR.[2]
Liu Shaoqi and the Politburo introduced a period of economic relaxation: in the communes, private plots were allowed, trade in private services such as mending and repairs was encouraged. However, during this period when Liu and his co-thinkers held supremacy within the Party, their practices remained firmly Stalinist and quite indistinguishable from those of the previous period. Thus, when intellectuals were told they could widen their studies to include even politics and the class struggle – but with the clear proviso that the authority of the Party must not be challenged – they remained too cowed by the experience of the Hundred Flowers Movement to respond. It was intellectuals in the higher echelons of the Party, who, better understanding the intentions and limits of the new policy, took the opportunity to publish between-the-lines criticisms of Mao’s GLF adventure.
A group around Teng T’o (editor People’s Daily, 1952-1957, member of the Beijing Party Committee) which included Wu Han (vice-mayor of Beijing and a leading historian), and Liao Ma-sha (member of the Secretariat of the Beijing Party), supported by Peng Zhen, published a number of articles critical of Mao’s leadership over the period 1961-1965. Criticisms were oblique and hidden in stories and plays concerning historical characters and incidents: one such was the play by Wu Han, Hai Jui Dismissed from Office. The honest official Hai Jui was dismissed from his post by the emperor for criticising bureaucratic misdeeds – a reference to Mao’s dismissal of Peng Dehuai for his criticisms of the GLF made at the Lushan Conference. It was still not possible to openly or directly criticise Mao in the press so, for example, to make an assessment of Mao’s voluntarism, Teng T’o wrote an article analysing the works of Ernst Mach, an influential German physicist and philosopher, an anti-materialist who denounced natural-scientific materialism. Teng would become increasingly bold in his criticisms, culminating in his declaration that Mao’s famous slogan “The East wind will prevail over the West wind” was … “hot air.”[3]
How did such a group arise in Beijing? In May 1961, as a Politburo member, Peng Zhen had initiated a research project to determine what lessons could be learned from the GLF. The emphasis was on what instructions and guidance was given in central directives written by Mao personally. Teng T’o was given responsibility for leading the investigation. His findings placed the blame for the disaster directly on the GLF strategy itself. The centre had accepted unquestioningly too many false reports, had issued too many conflicting directives, and had ignored the few who had attempted to report the reality. The blame for the GLF disaster was laid at the door of the Politburo and Mao.[4] Biting though these criticisms were, they were of Mao and his voluntarist policies not the Stalinist system that gave rise to them.
At the CC meeting of September 1962, it was agreed that a rectification campaign was needed to address the errors and excesses of rank and file cadres committed during the GLF. Such a campaign would have been, and was intended to be, immensely damaging for Mao. However, to maximise the impact of the campaign the leadership needed to make an assessment of the situation at rank and file level within the Party. It was felt that little confidence could be placed in reports received from Party personnel submitted through the usual bureaucratic channels, so trusted individuals were sent to work incognito in the provinces to draw up reports based on their experiences.
During the interim period while the testimonies were being compiled, Mao declared support for the rectification campaign and, in December 1963, launched a pre-emptive broadside saying art and culture was a serious problem, promoting feudal and capitalist aims. Mao picked an issue on which he could appear to agree with the Liu group who also wanted control of intellectual criticism of the regime. However, Mao widened the attack in February 1964 when he disparaged the role of intellectuals in China’s history, emphasising that the only two Ming emperors of any worth were barely literate and that “to read too many books is harmful.”[5]
At the same time Mao also began an attack on Tung Pien, editor of Women in China, and ally of Liu Shaoqi, for being a feminist and for her editorial policies. The specific charges against her were that she emphasised interests such as love, marriage, and the family, while neglecting the class struggle. Mao’s standing in the Party meant she was dismissed from her post. The attack on Tung Pien was the beginning of an open attack on the Party faction that had ordered the retreat from the GLF. This should be seen as significant an event as the later and better known attack on Wu Han in auguring the GPCR.
The reports received from the countryside were deeply worrying; corruption was again widespread involving many lower and middle cadres, and the Party was widely viewed with distrust and even hatred. The CC agreed, in late 1964, to launch a Socialist Education Campaign (to be known as The Four Cleans Movement – to clean the Party economically, organisationally, politically, and ideologically), the emphasis of which would be to combat corruption within the Party and re-impose discipline. However, in January 1965, Mao seized the initiative by unilaterally publishing his own programme for the Socialist Education Campaign that turned it into a general campaign against revisionism within the Party. The chosen target was CC member Yang Hsien-chen (President of the Higher Party School of the Central Committee), who, after a visit to the countryside in 1958, had written an article that claimed the GLF had represented the theory of obedience to the will and abandonment of objective laws. Yang was a carefully chosen target, he was a close associate of Liu Shaoqi, and an attack on Yang for the reasons given, effectively silenced criticism of the communes and the GLF.
However, events at the international level would force Mao to launch his counter-offensive sooner than he had planned. The Indonesian Communist Party was the largest in the capitalist world, with three million members and ten million sympathisers. Mao had invited the leader of the Indonesian Communist Party, D N Aidit, to Beijing many times and had convinced Aidit to adopt a policy of co-operation with the Sukarno government, modelled on CCP-KMT collaboration during the second Chinese Revolution. The result was to disarm the Indonesian CP in the face of a military coup which took place in October 1965, and during which as many as one million Communists and militants were slaughtered, including Aidit. The policies advocated by Mao had produced exactly the same outcome as they had in China during 1925-27.
This horrific tragedy dealt a further heavy blow to Mao’s credibility. Liu and, particularly, Peng Zhen, voiced their dissatisfaction with Mao’s policies at a special meeting of the CCP called to discuss the Indonesian events. At the meeting, Peng Zhen, went so far as to say: “Everyone is equal before the truth”, and if Chairman Mao had made mistakes he should be criticized.[6] Following on from the catastrophe of the GLF, the annihilation of the Indonesian Communist Party, because it had followed advice given by Mao personally, fatally undermined Mao’s standing with many of the intelligentsia. These were the people most vociferous in demanding an honest and open discussion on Party history, so it is no wonder that Mao chose them as his initial target.
Mao left Beijing for Shanghai to regroup his forces, among them Yao Wenyuan, literary critic and editor of the important Chinese newspaper, Literary News published in Shanghai. Under Mao’s guidance, Yao wrote and published a criticism of the play Hai Jui Dismissed from Office, (Jiang Qing appeared as co-author). This article is widely considered the first shot of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
14.2.2 The PLA is Made Ready and the Cultural Revolution Begins
The support of the PLA was crucial to Mao but officers in army units in the different regions often had considerable loyalty to local party cadres because these were the people they had fought beside during the civil war. These officers were usually the senior ranks, and Mao and Lin moved quickly to neutralise their influence.
It was widely reported at the time, May 1965, that the PLA had abolished all military ranks. The abolition of distinctions and symbols of rank was described as a reversion to the army’s revolutionary practice intended to promote closer relations between officers and men, and between soldiers and civilians. Many impressionable people on the left greeted this at face value as a move towards greater democracy and as evidence of the radical nature of the Maoists. In fact the command structure was not abolished but simply re-defined in such a way as to give Lin Piao and Mao greater control of the PLA.
The 8th Route Army, for example, did not have ranks but it had a clearly defined command structure which enforced a strict discipline. Officers were in post and had titles such as Squad Commander or Company Commander, etc. The uniforms of the officers were identical with those of other ranks, but officers could be identified in numerous ways: they carried pistols, they had orderlies, they issued orders and were obeyed, Divisional Commanders rode a horse or a mule, and so on.
The reforms maintained the field command structure more or less intact. The big change was that the number of troops directly commanded now determined status within the military establishment. Top ranking officers, those more likely to ally with Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, tended to have desk jobs, directly commanded few if any soldiers, and so lost rank and the status it conferred. On 5 April 1966, the Liberation Army Daily gave the game away when it warned previously high ranking officers they now had no rank to protect them, they were completely at the mercy of Lin Piao. To safeguard themselves they were urged to
remould their world outlook and completely subordinate themselves to the thinking of Mao Zedong.[7]
Lin Piao stepped up the campaign to propagandise Mao’s thought and the Liberation Army Daily carried slogans such as: “Mao’s thought is the beacon of revolution for the world’s people.”[8] An editorial on 1 January 1966, stated:
Every word of Chairman Mao is truth …We must firmly support and carry out everything conforming to Mao Zedong’s thought and we must firmly resist and oppose everything which does not conform to Mao’s thought.
This message was a direct challenge to Liu Shaoqi and the CC.[9]
By April 1966, the ongoing criticisms of Wu Han and his play Hai Jui Dismissed from Office had taken on a very dark tone and moved from Wu being mistaken in his thinking to being anti-Party and possibly a counter-revolutionary. The attacks spread outwards and soon included Peng Zhen. Liu and Deng Xiaoping called an emergency meeting of the CC in an attempt to block Mao. Mao refused to attend. In an open declaration of factional war and a clear indication of how far he would go to preserve his authority, Mao had Piao send troops to occupy the offices of the Beijing local government. In a public display of his approval for this action Mao returned to Beijing and proclaimed the “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution”. The Beijing municipal government, headed by Peng Zhen, would be formally dismissed in early June along with Lu Ting-i, head of the Party’s propaganda department, Chou Yang, vice-minister of culture, and many other high-ranking cadres in cultural institutions.[10]
Mao launched the Great Leap Forward in the Ideological Field to eliminate all those within the Party who did not toe the Maoist line, with Peng Zhen, Liu Shaoqi, and Deng Xiaoping at the front. However, Mao had been forced to launch this inter-bureaucratic struggle to regain his authority before he had the chance to fully mobilise his support within the Party. The disaster in Indonesia and the moves by the CC for a rectification campaign that might reveal the truth about his role in the GLF forced his hand. An important consequence of not having a sufficient base within the Party hierarchy, was that Mao was compelled to seek support from outside the Party. In this he took the unprecedented step of by-passing the monopoly of authority of the local Party cadres and mobilising students to act outside the Party structure.[11] Mao chose middle and high school students to be his battering ram and on 16 May 1966, he launched a frontal attack on meritocratic education policies and educators generally.
Education was a natural battlefield between the two factions. Mao’s stress on voluntarism made him over-emphasise the importance of the remnants of bourgeois ideas in education. This led him to favour opening the doors of education preferentially to the children of CCP cadres, while the Liu/Deng group favoured a more meritocratic approach and in this were supported by most of the existing educational establishment.[12]
Liu and Deng responded quickly to head-off Mao’s initiative and on 3 June, directed the Party to send ‘work teams’ of experienced cadres into the universities, major colleges, and schools to ‘guide’ the formation and development of Red Guard groups. The children of higher Party cadres took the leading role in founding the Red Guards under the slogan: “The father’s a revolutionary, the son’s a hero.” In many Beijing schools the first Red Guard organisations were composed almost exclusively of the children of Party cadres.[13] The work teams presented the GPCR as an extension of the Anti-Rightist Campaign and their efforts were concentrated on restraining those students who showed any independent initiative.
Mao’s reaction to this latest attempt to block him was immediate, by mid-June 1966 he had ordered the closure of all schools, from elementary to university level in the name of the GPCR. Next he convened a special, enlarged plenum of the CC, 1-12 August. The character of the plenum can be deduced from it being the first for four years, included a large number of representatives from the Red Guards, and was held in Beijing under the watchful eyes of PLA troops who had just been instrumental in overthrowing the local government. The plenum lasted for twelve days and adopted an official programme for the GPCR, commonly known as the 16-Points Decision.[14]
The 16-Points was a clearly factional document with its major goal: “to struggle against and crush those persons in authority taking the capitalist road.” To this end it sought to re-assure the great bulk of Party members (“95%”) that they had nothing to fear because only a “handful” had taken the capitalist road. This was a deliberate smokescreen to minimise opposition. The army as part of Mao’s power base was, naturally, to be excluded from the factional struggle (Point 15).
Mao fully appreciated that the Party cadres were, in reality largely loyal to the capitalist roaders, and to be successful his scheme required some form of parallel organisation to balance “those in authority” in the Party. The 16-Points contained in Point 9 a call for the establishment of Cultural Revolutionary Groups, the “organs of power” of the Cultural Revolution. These would institute a system of elections, “like that of the Paris Commune” whereby delegates would be elected by the masses and subject to recall.
Immediately following the CC meeting, the Party’s theoretical organ Red Flag published an article entitled “The General Election System of the Paris Commune” which aimed to mobilise the masses in support of Mao. It was very clearly intended that these new organisational forms would be under the control of the Maoist faction of the CCP. There was no intention that the GPCR would introduce workers’ democracy.
However, there is many a slip between cup and lip, and in Shanghai a “People’s Commune” was set up and existed for 20 days before being put back into the Maoist straightjacket. The so-called Shanghai Commune became a genuine inspiration for large numbers of Chinese students and workers who threatened to break free of Party control. For revolutionaries this can be said to be the highest point of the GPCR.
The 16-Points called on students “to criticize and repudiate the reactionary bourgeois academic ‘authorities’ and the ideology of the bourgeoisie and all other exploiting classes and to transform education” opposing “reactionary bourgeois scholar despots”. After 1949, the schools contained an increasing proportion of peasant and working class pupils who often came into conflict with the traditional teaching methods and attitudes of the staff who had been inherited from the KMT regime. Many of these students were alienated by their treatment and hostile to the educational establishment. It was this pent-up animosity that Mao would tap into for his counter-attack. Tutors were an easy first target.
Almost all presidents and principals of universities and middle schools, as well as many teachers and professors were removed from office, publicly humiliated and, sometimes, beaten to death for “intellectual elitism”, having “bourgeois tendencies” and being “counter revolutionaries.”[15] Under the general direction of Ch’en Po-ta, the Red Guard “heroes” were egged on to commit horrible acts – the Beijing News reported a total of 1,772 people killed in Beijing alone during August and September 1966.[16] After this trial run, in the autumn of 1966, Mao instructed the Red Guards to “take Beijing to the rest of the country”.
Andreas claims that about this time there began an increasing differentiation within the Red Guard groups. An opposition to those groups led by the children of higher cadres, which had increasingly become mouthpieces for one or the other Party factions, was starting to form based on the children of workers, peasants, and lower cadres who wanted increased independence and freedom of criticism. This separation was much more clear-cut in the universities where, to gain entry, the children of peasants and workers had scored high marks in tough entrance examinations and so had greater self-confidence.
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Peng Shuzi An Appraisal of the Political Life of Mao, Monad, 1980, 394-399.
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Peng Shuzi, The Chinese Communist Party in Power, Monad Press, 1980, p270-275.
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Twitchett, D. and Fairbank, J. (eds) Cambridge History of China, CUP, 1987. Vol 14, p130.
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Ibid, p464 and 476.
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Peng Shuzi, Two Interviews on the Cultural Revolution, 1967, w.m.org.
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Rice, E. Mao’s Way, Univ. of California Press, 1972, p208.
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Peng Shuzi, Two Interviews … Op. cit.
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Peng Shuzi, The Relationship and Differences Between Mao Zedong and Liu Shaoqi, 1968, w.m.org.
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Peng Shuzi, Two Interviews … Op. cit.
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Andreas, J. Battling over Political and Cultural Power during the Chinese Cultural Revolution, Theory and Society 31(4)463-519.
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Ibid.
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Ibid.
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Peking Review, Vol 33 No 33, Decision of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party Concerning the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, www.massline.org.
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Yan Jaiqi and Gao Gao, A Turbulent Decade, 1996, Univ. of Hawaii, pp55 et seq.
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www.npr.org.