THE QINGMING FESTIVAL, WHEN CHINESE FAMILIES honour their ancestors, generally falls around 5 April. Graves and shrines are swept clean, flowers are arranged, ribbons tied, and the deceased plied with food and token gifts – imitation banknotes, cut-out Toyotas, cardboard cell-phones. Those unable to attend in person can access online catalogues of these make-believe modernities for virtual donation. A new generation is having to reconfigure the traditions of Qingming, because for nearly half a century the festival was in abeyance. It fell foul of Communist contempt for all superstitions and then of the Cultural Revolution’s censure of ‘old thinking’. In 1976 it acquired a positively insidious dimension when on 3–5 April a display of Qingming floral wreaths and poster poems brought crowds of mourners to Beijing’s Tiananmen Square. They were protesting against official indifference to the recent death of Premier Zhou Enlai, which they saw as disparagement of a revered and long-serving revolutionary by the hard left leadership of the Cultural Revolution. Cars were overturned and a police post torched. But the main casualty was Vice-Premier Deng Xiaoping; accused of orchestrating the affair, he was dismissed from all his Party offices. Sometimes known as the Tiananmen incident, this 1976 protest is now more commonly called the Qingming incident, so avoiding confusion with the more prolonged Tiananmen confrontation of 1989.
Deng of course soon rose again; and thirty years later, on 5 April 2006, Qingming itself was back in favour. Next day the papers were full of it. From Xi’an in Shaanxi came news of lavish ceremonies at a mausoleum lately built to commemorate Huangdi, the Yellow Emperor. First of the mythical Five Emperors, the Yellow Emperor was now credited by the China Daily with having fathered the Chinese people and invented the boat, the cart, the long bow and Chinese medicine ‘among other things’. Over $15 million had been subscribed for the emperor’s new shrine, though Shaanxi’s governor insisted that a more fitting memorial would be ‘reunification of the motherland’. He was thinking of Taiwan, from where much of the money and many of the participants had come.
Meanwhile in Shaoxing (Zhejiang province) the Qingming celebrations had focused not on the first of the Five Emperors but the last. This ‘Great Yu’ was he who, by making his son his heir, had founded the Xia dynasty, the earliest in China’s long dynastic pedigree. Among the 3000 who had reportedly attended ‘the ancient rituals’ staged at Shaoxing were the city’s Communist Party secretary, the Zhejiang Party’s deputy secretary, the vice-chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress, and 115 people with the surname Si, all of whom claimed direct descent from Emperor Yu. A similar assembly, this time of Kongs, was reported at Confucius’ birthplace of Qufu in Shandong. Out of his now 2 million to 3 million descendants (there’s a DNA test to prove it) luckily only a fraction had turned up; but more were expected for his birthday. Reviled as late as the 1970s, Confucius had been rehabilitated in the 1990s. Confucian injunctions were now eclipsing the slogans of both Marxism-Leninism and ‘Mao Zedong thought’ in official discourse. Pride in those three thousand to six thousand years of continuous civilisation, rather than the recent achievements of the proletariat, had been chosen as the theme of the Beijing Olympics. Emperors, no longer monsters of exploitation, were again being accorded national respect. And Qingming had been reinstated in the official calendar. In fact, in 2008 it was made a public holiday. As the nation headed en masse for the ancestral burial grounds, thousands of extra bus and train services were laid on, incoming charter flights were taking off from Taiwan at the rate of one every fifteen minutes and the traffic jams around Shanghai were said to be the worst ever recorded.
China has transformed itself – and is still doing so – more dramatically than any other region in the world. The rate of change is so fast that it wrong-foots all but the most agile China-watchers. Up-to-the-minute histories written in the 1970s felt obliged to explore, in mind-numbing detail, the dialectics of Marxism-Leninism as adapted by Mao and adumbrated in the opaque pronouncements of plenums and praesidiums. Subjecting Asia’s agrarian masses to an ideology devised for Europe’s industrial proletariat seemed an experiment worth studying. The staggering statistics churned out by annual audits of output and successive five-year plans also proved irresistible. Faith in the efficacy of scientific socialism, planned economics and democratic centralism enforced the idea of progress as product: given the right machine and the right settings, it could be churned out like pig iron. To lubricate the leviathan, campaigns were launched and diktats promulgated-‘the Four Clean-ups’, ‘the Five Antis’ (anti-corruption etc), ‘the Ten Great Relationships’, ‘the Sixty Articles on Work Methods’, and so on. China-watchers needed clear heads and a sceptical turn of mind.
They were not to know, writing in the 1970s, that within a generation many of the policies they had discerned would be considered mistaken and their studious analysis of them therefore excessive. With nose pressed against the present and eyes trained on the praesidium, it had been difficult to tell just what to make of it all. Isolating the significant needs patience and perspective, commodities not available in the heat of the moment, then or now. As history’s stately march breaks into the trot of current affairs, then into the stampede of news stories, scholars are expected to swivel from the reconstruction of a reticent past to the deconstruction of a clamorous present. Hammered by reality, the historian turns annalist, turns journalist.
Because so many Maoist achievements were quickly discredited, there then arose a tendency to gloss over all those initiatives that had loomed largest at the time – Soviet collaboration, agricultural collectivisation, industrialisation, the Great Leap and the Cultural Revolution – in favour of a narrative buoyed by the incidence of liberalising interludes. This ran from the 1956 ‘Hundred Flowers’ movement to the 1972 détente with the United States, the 1978 ‘Democracy Wall’ outburst, Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms, the 1989 Tiananmen Square challenge, and of course the end-of-century triumph of consumerism. But such a narrative has its drawbacks too. It supposes a progressive ‘opening up’ that was not self-evident at the time, and it foreshadows an ultimate liberalisation – including multi-party politics, electoral accountability, freedom of expression and legal redress – that is far from assured.
It also misrepresents the Maoist era by down-playing some very real achievements. When on 1 October 1939 the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was officially announced by Mao in Beijing, the People’s Liberation Army had much liberating still to do. Guangdong had yet to be reached (it fell two weeks later); Tibet and Xinjiang, comprising nearly half of the erstwhile empire’s landmass, aspired to qualified independence; the British were back in Hong Kong; and from Taiwan, alienated by the relocation there of Chiang Kai-shek’s still internationally recognised Republic of China, a reinvasion of the mainland remained a distinct possibility. When the Korean War broke out in June 1950, the United States immediately moved its Seventh Fleet into the Taiwan Straits, so ratcheting up this threat; and when non-Communist South Korea was quickly reduced to a tiny bridgehead around Pusan, Washington showed no hesitation in finding the land, air and naval forces for a massive counter-attack. Thus within a year of the inauguration of the PRC, most of the Korean peninsula had been retaken by the PRC’s ideological opponents and US troops were nearing the Sino-Korean frontier. It was not unreasonable to suppose that, with Taiwan as the bridgehead, an equally devastating assault might be launched into China itself. Indeed it probably would have been, had Beijing not insisted that a Chinese counter-intervention in Korea was the work of a maverick ‘People’s Volunteer Army’ rather than the official People’s Liberation Army.
Regardless of such fine distinctions, China and the United States were effectively at war in Korea from 1950 to 1953. And though the Korean peninsula was eventually partitioned along the 38th Parallel, China’s ideological encirclement continued. ‘The bamboo curtain’, which looked from the inside more like an offensive blockade than defensive ‘containment’, extended down the length of China’s sea-board from bisected Korea to the Taiwan Strait and on to an about-to-be-bisected Vietnam. Thus Communist China was as firmly closed to the world’s maritime trade as imperial China before the Opium Wars. The gargantuan task of reintegrating the nation, redistributing its assets, and reorganising and re-educating its society, all in accordance with principles of socialist revolution that were decidedly novel in Asia, had to be undertaken by a regime that was still embattled.
Ring-fenced to the east and south, China’s Communist leaders sought support from the north and west. The Soviet Union had inspired, funded, armed and often directed its revolutionary Chinese brethren throughout the war years. Both sides now had victories to celebrate and pledges to redeem. In December 1939, on his first ever trip outside China, Mao took the train to Moscow. There Stalin, basking in the cult of his own personality while tyrannising both people and Party, encouraged Mao’s autocratic tendencies without over-indulging his revolution. But in hammering out the terms of a treaty of ‘Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance’ the principles of ideological fraternity and Sino-Soviet collaboration were established. In return for international solidarity, secret recognition of Moscow’s strategic interests in Xinjiang and Manchuria, and various raw materials, Mao secured a promise of support in the event of war, a $300 million loan (half to be used for military purchases), and the know-how and personnel to set up fifty state-owned heavy-industrial complexes. Additional armaments and aircraft were soon being supplied to aid the Chinese involvement in Korea. Assistance in the development of atomic weaponry was later promised, though soon withdrawn.
This Soviet support did nothing to advance Beijing’s claims to Taiwan or Hong Kong; but it did facilitate the reintegration of regions once contested by Russia, notably the north-east (formerly Manchuria) and the far west (now Xinjiang). Thanks to Soviet links with India, it also silenced some of the international disquiet over the reclamation of Tibet. Thus within a year of its inauguration, the China of the People’s Republic was territorially nearly as vast as the China of the mid-Qing empire. It was at last rid of foreign interference, master of its future, and more united than it had been for over a century. Given the appalling chaos that had overtaken republican China, this was no mean achievement. Order had been restored, inflation was being contained, national pride had been redeemed, self-belief had returned. To the Party and the PLA it all lent an impressive legitimacy, plus a certain latitude.
Since the PLA’s success owed much to the discipline and dissemination of Marxist-Leninist precepts, it was to be expected that the new regime would give priority to extending the revolution to the whole country. This would involve sacrifices, but for many it was an exciting prospect. In the cities, families were organised into units based on places of work and residence (danwei); they encouraged a sense of local participation and purpose, as well as ensuring the surveillance associated with traditional systems of neighbourhood organisation such as the Ming baojia and Qin’s ‘legalist’ groupings. In the countryside, where 85 per cent of the population still lived, mobilising the masses was expected to take longer. Trained Party activists descended on village after village, identified and classified all households, incited the denunciation of those designated ‘rich landlords’ and, having dispossessed and disposed of these ‘enemies of the people’, redistributed their property among the landless. A million or more landowners and counter-revolutionaries may have been executed in this first phase of retributive justice; Mao himself would put the death toll at 700,000. But several hundred million peasants found themselves beneficiaries of the redistribution as, for the first time, they tilled their own fields and reaped the fruits of their labour.
Naturally the resultant proliferation of small subsistence holdings argued strongly for some collaborative work practices. Local co-operatives based on the sharing of draught animals and some pooling of labour were encouraged, although the results were disappointing. Newly landed peasants had a tendency to put personal profit before the common good; politicised cadres were often drawn into village vendettas; and the growth in output barely kept ahead of the growth in population. The generous surpluses needed to feed the expanding urban and industrial centres looked unlikely to materialise. This in turn would jeopardise the creation of an industrial base which, as per the Soviet model, was the pre-requisite for a strong and self-sustaining socialism.
In 1955, rid of the Korean War and still on good terms with the Soviets, Mao addressed this problem personally by calling for an immediate acceleration in the pace of agrarian revolution. Co-operatives were now to be amalgamated into larger collectives. Land and implements would be collectively owned, the peasant’s only input being labour and the only reward a share of the collective’s produce based on a complicated calculation of the ‘work points’ earned by each individual. Again, the scheme was not universally unpopular. Many of those with minuscule or marginal holdings welcomed the greater security on offer from collectivisation. Others were fired by the egalitarian ideals of the revolution. Women acquired some independence as a result of their individual entitlement to work points. Economies of scale promised a higher combined yield; small fields were amalgamated, dykes and pathways ploughed under, and the cultivable area expanded by deploying the larger labour force to terrace, clear and irrigate marginal lands. The state provided a market for the commune’s surplus at guaranteed prices; and if these procurement quotas tended to escalate, that supposedly reflected the results of reclamation and irrigation.
With Party encouragement, by 1957 some districts were taking the process a stage further. Just as co-operatives had been merged into the larger collectives, so now collectives were being merged into the still larger communes. Mao endorsed the move with an exhortation for all production to be ‘larger, faster, better, cheaper’. Any privately owned plots that had survived collectivisation were now incorporated in the communised land area. With a work force of 20,000 to 100,000, a commune required an administrative infrastructure that, besides doling out work points and drumming in slogans, offered services likely to keep the existing work force in good shape and augment it by freeing up women otherwise detained at home. Organised child-care, basic schooling, dispensaries, communal dining and competitive work teams were certainly a novelty. But while they undermined the traditional primacy of the household and the family, they also introduced some genuine social uplift. In return for better healthcare, wider literacy and several square meals a day, many saw neglecting the ancestors at Qingming and putting up with round-the-clock indoctrination as a small price to pay. The 1950s would later be remembered as Maoist China’s ‘golden age’ – a comparative verdict, obviously – with the early phase of communisation being especially cherished as the ‘eat it up’ period. This was a reference not to the state’s appetite for ever more unrealistic procurement quotas but to the workers’ ‘eat as much as you want’ approach to the communal kitchens. ‘Ah, in the beginning [of the communes] we were all so fat!’ recalled a Guangdong peasant, ‘We could eat anytime we liked at the canteens.’1
And it was all free. Free food and healthcare enhanced longevity, free education promised greater opportunity and liberal new laws on inheritance and divorce ushered in more equality and association between the sexes. It sounded like bliss, a genuine liberation, in fact a lot like Heaven. For these were precisely the celestial rewards that had been on offer from those milleniarist movements in the past. From the Yellow Turbans to the Taipings and Boxers, they too had promised a dazzling new utopia and inspired great idealism. But they had failed to deliver. Marxism-as-thenew-milleniarism was actually making good on its promises. Mao had conjured up visions of a socialist paradise with peace and plenty for all; sure enough, for a few months in early 1957, this ‘great harmony’ (da tong: he used the Confucian term) seemed imminent.
Even the barriers to freedom of expression were being lowered as dissidents and scholars were encouraged to speak their minds. This was another of Mao’s ideas. In policy-making as in dialectics, he was fascinated by contradiction, by how friction sparked innovation, conflict generated endeavour, revolution validated authority. Order arose from chaos; but without more chaos, it would atrophy. Accordingly, and echoing the tag commonly applied to the Warring States period of philosophical speculation, he urged ‘a hundred schools of thought’ to contend in the field of science and ‘a hundred flowers’ to bloom in the meadow of culture.
Both meadow and field were hastily ploughed under. Springtime’s ‘great harmony’ lasted only weeks. ‘The hundred flowers’ bloomed in unacceptable shades of opinion and ‘the hundred schools’ contended much too contentiously; they even debated the defiance that had just been silenced in Hungary by Soviet tanks. By summer 1957 all those who had been rash enough to speak out were rounded up. Mao pretended that exposing and then purging these ‘rightist’ elements had been the plan all along. Whether that is true or not, it now seemed that nothing could be taken at its face value when viewed through the looking-glass of Maoism. A new unease permeated the Party and extended down through the ranks of the administration; to deluded ambitions born of extravagant idealism were added servile compliance and duplicity born of the terror of disapproval.
Ironically, the 1958 harvest gave grounds for optimism. It was the best yet, though not as exceptional as the returns – or the procurement quotas based on them – suggested. Now heavy industry, especially steel production, was the sector lagging behind. Mobilising the masses to torment sparrows, mice and other grain-eating vermin had supposedly boosted the harvest; just so, mobilising the masses to turn pig-iron into steel would boost industry. In danwei and communes, the night sky flared as thousands of backyard blast-furnaces spewed forth sub-standard metals. Fantastic production targets were set, and if the quality was ignored and the returns believed, were nearly met. Thanks to a traditional technology – the blast-furnace had probably been pioneered in Henan in the third century BC – China would become a world-class economy in one ‘great leap forward’. This mass-action formula was emulated up and down the country as millions marched forth to undertake Herculean construction projects with no more in the way of equipment than the barrows and baskets used by the builders of the Great Wall and the Grand Canal. Caution was thrown to the wind; anything seemed possible in a climate of hysterical mass endeavour. Instead of grinding through the geared stages of growth laid down in the Marxist-Leninist manual – heavy industry first, then mechanisation, collectivisation and eventually state-ownership of all the means of production – Mao revved the engine and let fly the clutch.
But already there were rumours of famine; the reports were suppressed, the observers silenced. Instead of an investigation, the communes were favoured with a new wave of young urban ideologues intent on teaching the peasants how to grow corn, albeit ‘larger, faster, better, cheaper’. Their innovations and naivety contributed to the impending disaster. Procurement quotas for 1959 had been set at hopelessly unrealistic levels; even without the drought of that year, the cold and rains of the next and the inevitable Yellow River flood, the state’s requisitions could be met only at the expense of the communal kitchens. There meals became fewer, weeds replaced vegetables, and muddy water was passed off as soup. The severity of the famine varied – from serious in the cities to acute in some provinces, absolute in others. Talk of cannibalism and of graziers eating their own grass was dismissed as mischievous; the bountiful reports still emanating from the local cadres belied it.
So wheat continued to be exported while those who grew it grazed on grass. And so, in an age when roads and railways should have made relief a formality, nothing was done. Alleviating conditions meant admitting the disaster; but since the leadership and its policies were beyond criticism, those responsible must be incompetent or reactionary elements within the communes. In effect, whistle-blowers merely denounced themselves. Prudence dictated signing-off on the fictitious production figures and keeping quiet.
How many victims were claimed by the famine of 1958–61 will never be known. It was certainly the twentieth century’s worst. From the pattern of population growth for the period, statisticians have extrapolated a catch-all figure of 2030 million. Half may have actually starved to death; the rest were circumstantial victims. Minor diseases proved fatal to the enfeebled; the old died younger and the young failed to replace them. Aborted, still-born and short-lived babies were probably exceeded by the millions who were simply never conceived, abstinence and infertility being concomitants of malnutrition. Communes turned into death-camps. The fields lay fallow because the new seed had been eaten or the people were too weak to sow it. Mao’s impatient crashing of the gears had thrown the economy into reverse. The Great Leap Forward occasioned a catastrophic lurch backward.
A possible verdict on Mao’s manic chairmanship might echo that applied to the Qin First Emperor, he whose great failing had been ‘not changing with the times’. According to Grand Historian Sima Qian, the qualities essential for acquiring an empire were not the same as those needed for ruling it; or as an adviser had pointed out to Liu Bang, founder of the Han dynasty, an empire won from the saddle could not be run from the saddle. Violent and impulsive tactics were fine in the field but quite inappropriate in the council chamber. Thus, failing to adapt, or ‘not changing with the times’, was a flaw common to many dynastic founders. Mao was exceptional in just two respects: he lasted longer than most, so multiplying his potential for mischief, and he discovered a rationale for prolonging the mischief that masked his mere love of power. This lay in his belief that constant turmoil and class struggle were essential to the integrity of the revolution, which would otherwise be undermined by inertia, corruption and ideological back-sliding. It did not occur to him that the revolution might also be undermined by histrionic efforts to perpetuate it.
Emperors were much on Mao’s mind at the time of the Great Leap Forward. In 1958–59 he called for a re-evaluation of demonised autocrats like Cao Cao of the Three Kingdoms and the megalomaniac Qin First Emperor. He also praised Li Si, the latter’séminence grise who had famously censured Confucian scholars and burnt their books. When the enormity of the Great Leap tragedy could no longer be concealed, Mao invoked a less hands-on imperial tradition, that of the wuwei (aloof or ‘inactive’) ruler. He withdrew from public view, surrendered the chairmanship of the PRC (though not of the Party) and secluded himself in various favoured retreats. ‘The great helmsman’ was thus below decks when the ship hit the rocks, although he surfaced for Party gatherings and would later accept that mistakes had been made during the Great Leap.
The task of relieving the famine, removing those held responsible and rescuing the economy was left to the Politburo. From its ranks there emerged during the early 1960s a triumvirate whose considerable success entailed reversing recent policies and thus incurring Mao’s suspicions. Liu Shaoqi, a fine-looking and capable bureaucrat whom Mao had installed as head of state and his prefered successor (dynastic preference trumped egalitarian principle in such matters), conducted a Socialist Education Campaign that found corruption and impropriety to be endemic in the Party, the provincial administrations and the state industries. The resultant arrests ran into the hundreds of thousands. The campaign was supported by Premier Zhou Enlai, Mao’s bushy-browed and utterly dependable associate, and by Party secretary Deng Xiaoping, a small and dynamic pragmatist whose devotion to the Party may have exceeded that to its Chairman.
Between them, Zhou and Deng presided over a stabilisation of the economy. The criterion for advancement was now to be technical and professional ability as much as political orthodoxy. A quip, later appropriated by Deng Xiaoping, about it being immaterial whether a cat is black or white ‘so long as it catches the mouse,’ first surfaced in 1961.2 ‘Learning from the facts’, another Deng-ism, inevitably meant skimping on the theory. The rural communes were down-sized and their regimented ethic diluted. Communal kitchens were closed, some land was again made available for private cultivation, informal markets reappeared to handle this local output and productivity began to shoot up. This was matched in the industrial sector, where incentives were introduced, innovation encouraged and energy supplies improved when a major oilfield came on line. Mass migration from the countryside to the cities was reversed, with restrictions on internal travel to prevent a further exodus from the fields. And the problem of an exponentially growing population was addressed in the first serious attempt to promote birth control. Mao had always insisted that the larger the proletariat the better. Not so, argued Deng Xiaoping; stabilising the population was essential to economic growth and social betterment. Nevertheless, and despite the famine, the 1957 population total of around 650 million had risen to around 950 million by 1977.
The gloom at the height of the famine had been compounded – and Mao’s paranoia further excited – when in 1960 the Soviet Union withdrew its technical staff and cut off all aid. Ever since Moscow’s posthumous denunciation of Stalin in 1956, the Sino-Soviet alliance had been slowly unravelling. Each side claimed to be the legitimate ideological heir of Marx and Lenin; but as their paths drifted apart, Moscow increasingly rested its case on its achievements (in weaponry, space exploration, the Middle East), leaving the high ground of ideological rectitude and unremitting class struggle to Beijing. Khrushchev’s ridiculing of the Great Leap Forward provoked further resentment, and worse was his willingness to explore détente with the West. Not only did this leave China more internationally isolated than ever but to Mao it seemed the rankest apostasy. Moscow had betrayed the masses by taking ‘the capitalist road’; a new generation of Soviet leaders was reversing the achievements of its predecessors; and given a shared ideological heritage, the same fate could all too easily overtake China.
There were other differences: over economic orthodoxy, China’s nuclear ambitions and Soviet support for India when a dispute over Tibet’s Himalayan border flared into the short Sino-Indian war of 1962. But Khrushchev’s overthrow in 1963 brought no thaw in Moscow’s cold-shouldering. The back-sliding ‘revisionism’ of its ‘capitalist roaders’ was more pronounced than ever. The only lesson to be drawn from the Soviet change of personnel was a personal one: ‘in 1956 Mao had worried that he, like Stalin, might be denounced after his death;3 in 1963 he had reason to wonder if he, like Khrushchev, might be toppled before his death’.3 Partly to forestall such a challenge from Liu Shaoqi and his reform-minded colleagues in the Politburo, and partly to expose a younger generation to the rigours of revolutionary struggle and so inure them to the contagion of Soviet-style revisionism, in 1966 Mao unleashed the pandemonium of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
Whether Mao was right about Liu Shaoqi’s treacherous intentions is doubtful. Liu would indeed be the Cultural Revolution’s most high-profile victim, though Deng Xiaoping was also disgraced and even the faithful Zhou Enlai was obliged to offer self-criticism. But the unexciting Liu was no power-crazed gambler; nor, at the time, were accusations of revisionist treason sufficiently rare to carry much conviction. Lin Biao, the PLA zealot who replaced Liu Shaoqi as Mao’s chosen successor, fared no better, for in 1971 he also replaced Liu as prime suspect in a supposed coup. He then perished in highly dubious circumstances when an aircraft supposedly carrying him to Soviet safety mysteriously crashed in Outer Mongolia. All of which was doubly ironic because Mao’s place in the hearts of his countrymen had by then become unassailable largely thanks to the sycophantic Lin. It was Lin Biao who ensured the loyalty of the PLA throughout the most chaotic years of the Cultural Revolution, Lin who elevated the Chairman’s personality cult into something approaching a religion, and Lin who compiled the Little Red Book of Mao’s collected wisdom as brandished by several million Red Guards. The book carried as frontispiece a scrawled ‘facsimile in his own handwriting’ of Lin’s injunction to study, follow and act solely in accord with the Chairman’s teachings. So how could such an eminently suitable leader-to-be suddenly become a public enemy? If any single incident discredited the Cultural Revolution, it was this. Clearly Mao’s vain-glory and paranoia were contributing more to the chaos than any rational concern for his safety or the succession. Already in his seventies in 1966, but refreshed by a well publicised wallow in the Yangzi, the Chairman had lost none of his old appetite for acting impulsively.
On the other hand, right or wrong about Liu Shaoqi, Mao had certainly read the threat of bourgeois revisionism correctly. Within little over a decade the Party would indeed follow the Soviet Union down the ‘capitalist road’ (albeit without relinquishing the wheel) and so betray its revolutionary principles. He was mistaken, though, in supposing that this danger could be averted by rekindling a spirit of mass radicalisation. Rather was it the Cultural Revolution’s mass radicalisation, and the bitter reaction it occasioned, that propelled the Party down the rightist slope. The reaction came not only from the bloodied victims of ‘struggle sessions’ (at which ‘counter-revolutionaries’ were publicly humiliated, berated and beaten, sometimes to death) but also from the screaming ranks of their youthful tormentors, the Red Guards. For while in 1966 this new generation of dedicated idealists duly rose to the challenge of ‘overthrowing those in authority who took the capitalist road’, by 1968 their excesses were being condemned, and they themselves shunted off into the provinces to learn from the peasants. As with the ‘Hundred Flowers’ episode, activism was encouraged and then disowned, though this time it was supposed rightists who were first pilloried, and unruly leftists who were then reined in. Disgust extended across the political spectrum and led to a disillusionment with ideology itself.
There were other ironies. The Great Leap famine had hit the countryside hardest; with the domestic press muzzled and foreign correspondents restricted in their movements, its enormity had been appreciated only after the event. The Cultural Revolution was the opposite. Its impact was limited to the cities, where it involved the more articulate classes and was instantly reported, extensively filmed and uncomfortably experienced by the foreign community. Spectacular rallies, wholesale vandalism and chaotic ‘struggle sessions’ sent shudders of horror coursing down international spines. The British embassy was ransacked and the Soviet embassy burnt. As children denounced their parents, and pupils their teachers, as temples and churches were vandalised, schools and colleges closed, libraries incinerated, museums pillaged and senior officials humiliated, it seemed that China was undergoing a collective brain haemorrhage. The most filial, literate, bureaucratic and history-loving of societies had imploded; civil war was widely predicted. Yet the PLA stood firm; workers played only a minor and belated role in the mayhem; and the rural majority of the population was barely affected. Agricultural and industrial growth remained steady, if unspectacular. The death toll was probably under a twentieth that of the Great Leap famine, most of it attributable not to the ‘struggle sessions’ but to fighting between different Red Guard groups and to the PLA’s suppression of them.
If the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was not obviously proletarian, neither was it essentially cultural. On the contrary, according to a post-Mao aphorism ‘the Cultural Revolution was all about doing away with culture’.4 This is not to gainsay the shrill role played by Jiang Qing, Mao’s wife and sometimes mouthpiece, who was responsible for cultural affairs. But forays into literature and the theatre, as into history, seldom stopped at mere politicisation or proscription. The first salvo of the Revolution saw a ‘counter-revolutionary’ clique in Beijing University being denounced for defending a play set during the Great Rites Controversy of the 1520s. The play’s criticism of the Ming Jiajing emperor was interpreted as a criticism of Mao, while its sympathy for the honest bureaucrat who defied the emperor was taken as support for one of Mao’s revisionist victims. The ramifications of this affair brought down the mayor of Beijing, among many others. A few months later, the propaganda chief Lu Dingyi was denounced on similar grounds, this time following republication of the biography of Wei Zheng, Tang Taizong’s crusty old remonstrator. At about the same time, Zhou Enlai’s detractors delighted in rubbishing his pretensions as an elder statesman by comparing him to his namesake, the now derided Duke of Zhou; and later, by way of an explanation for Lin Biao’s fall from favour, someone dreamed up that most far-fetched of linkages with Confucius himself. Meanwhile Mao had invoked Journey to the West, the great compendium of fantasy and fable inspired by the travels of the monk Xuanzang in the seventh century. Red Guards were to model their exploits on Sun Wugong, its ‘monkey king’, and to regard his arsenal of wondrous powers and magical weapons as symbolic of their own potential for creating trouble. As ever, history and culture served as the currency of debate and suffered greatly in the process. But at stake was not a reading of the past but a correction of the present and a prescription for the future.
Perhaps the ultimate irony of the Cultural Revolution was that, even as ‘capitalist roaders’ were being hauled from their homes and publicly ‘struggled’, privately Mao and Zhou Enlai were exploring direct links with the Gomorrah of capitalism in Washington, DC. This tectonic shift, as decisive for modern China as the Cultural Revolution itself, would have few domestic repercussions until after Mao’s death. At the time, it reflected both sides’ need to reposition themselves internationally. For in 1968 the Tet offensive in Vietnam dealt a blow to American resolve, while suppression of the ‘Prague Spring’ in Czechoslovakia strengthened Soviet resolve. Washington began looking for a way out in South East Asia, Moscow for a way forward in respect of its ideological satellites. The projected US retraction argued for some understanding with China as the best way to contain Soviet influence in the East, an appreciation shared by Beijing and heightened by the Brezhnev doctrine (Moscow’s Monroe-like pledge to intervene in Communist states contemplating disengagement from the Soviet bloc). In fact, Russian units had already been redeployed to disputed sections of the Sino-Russian frontier in 1966. Bombers followed, and in 1969 serious border clashes broke out along the Ussuri River and in Xinjiang. Washington and Beijing warmed to the urgency of an understanding.
It was delayed by outrage over the 1970 US bombing of Cambodia and probably by the machinations of Lin Biao. But in April 1971 an American team of table tennis players was invited to compete in China as a goodwill gesture; ‘they may come to us, but we’ll never go to them. The US is still an imperialist country!’ exclaimed a Mao loyalist; disbelief was widespread.5 But three months later Henry Kissinger accepted an invitation to secret talks. These were soon repeated, at which point the United Nations invited the People’s Republic to replace the Republic (ie, Taiwan) as China’s representative. Then in February 1972 came what President Nixon would call ‘the week that changed the world’. His historic visit included a trip to the Great Wall and a meeting with the Chairman. Neither side gave much ground on Taiwan, but Beijing undertook to hustle Hanoi towards a settlement, and Washington gave assurances about no hostile collaboration with the Soviet Union. There was little discussion of trade, nor as yet was there much to discuss. But China’s twenty-three years in international quarantine were over.
Meanwhile the Cultural Revolution rumbled on. With the disappearance in the early 1970s of Lin Biao and other leading figures, its more extreme views came to be associated with what Mao was the first to condemn as the ‘Gang of Four’. Consisting of his wife Jiang Qing plus three ‘Shanghai radicals’, the Gang incurred his disapproval not because it robustly upheld the ideals of the Cultural Revolution – which demonstrated loyalty and suited his own divisive purposes – but because it constituted a gang; as ever, all forms of collusion were highly suspect, whether factions, cliques, gangs or parties (the Communist Party, as the essence of orthodoxy, excepted). Through the mid-1970s, this radical grouping competed with a more pragmatic alignment headed by the reinstated Zhou Enlai and the rehabilitated Deng Xiaoping. Deng’s return seemed to signify an unexpected spirit of reconciliation on the Chairman’s part. Thousands of ‘roaders’ were pardoned, all too many of them posthumously; Liu Shaoqi, for instance, had died as a result of his ill-treatment. But the reconciliation also served to discomfort the Gang of Four and leave uncertain the direction of future policy and more especially the succession.
Mao, who turned eighty in 1973, was visibly fading, blinded by cataracts and barely able to speak; interpreting his mumbled utterances added a further uncertainty to the power struggle and kept both groups guessing. Each obliquely criticised the other, with the Gang extending the Lin Biao–Confucius linkage to include Zhou and Deng, while identifying itself with the anti-Confucian ‘Legalist’ school of the ‘Warring State’ of Qin. The Qin First Emperor was now portrayed as a progressive ruler whose mobilisation of the masses had united the country; the Chairman himself was happy to be identified with him. Historical revisionists obligingly recast Qin’s autocratic totalitarianism as what one authority calls ‘a kind of protoproletarian dictatorship’.6 The 1973 discovery of the first ‘Terracotta Warriors’ lent a Heaven-sent sanction to this idea, though it is not known whether Mao was able to take a personal interest in the matter.
Zhou Enlai was also terminally ill. With terrible timing, he died in January 1976, just when, thanks to another change of heart behind Mao’s closed doors, Deng was out of favour and the Gang of Four in the ascendant. There was some official mourning for Zhou, though it was not enough for those millions who regarded him as the face (if not always the voice) of moderation, the architect of a less confrontational foreign policy, and the best chance for post-Mao stability. Unauthorised demonstrations of grief climaxed with the April 3–5 ‘Qingming Incident’ in Tiananmen Square. Thousands laid wreaths, many of which were accompanied by verses that denounced the disrespectful Jiang Qing, her Gang, and even ‘the Qin First Emperor’ himself. The clean-up operation in the Square was comparatively unbloody, although untold thousands were later hauled in for interrogation. It had been the first unofficial and apparently spontaneous demonstration of mass disapproval ever seen in the capital of the People’s Republic.
With the Gang now in control, Deng Xiaoping was again denounced, deprived of all his offices and placed under surveillance. Five months later, in September 1976, the Great Helmsman himself passed away. This time mourners in their millions bade farewell. Their tears were genuine and there were no incidents. For all his faults, a China without ‘the great red sun in our hearts’ was unimaginable. Similarly, without its ‘gang of one’, the Gang of Four was rudderless. A doomed bid for power ended within the month when Jiang Qing and her associates were arrested. Ostensibly the work of Hua Guofeng, Mao’s nominated successor (the fourth by most counts), this rejection of all that remained of the Cultural Revolution depended on PLA support as orchestrated by Deng Xiaoping.
For the third time, the diminutive Deng was bouncing back. In 1977 he was reinstated in the Politburo and in 1978 he sidelined Hua Guofeng to launch the reform programme that would shape contemporary China. A year later he was in America being feted by Ronald Reagan and anticipating China’s becoming a superpower; a year after that, while authorising the creation of the first Special Economic Zone at Shenzhen (near Hong Kong), he lit on the formula that would turn China into ‘the workshop of the world’.
The five years 1977–82 launched the country on a new trajectory as revolutionary in its way as any in its long history. The Cultural Revolution had attacked ‘the Four Olds’ (old ideas, culture, customs, and habits); Deng’s revolution promoted ‘the Four News’ (or ‘Four Modernisations’: agriculture, industry, defence and technology); the retrospective/negative made way for the forward-looking/positive. Rural collectives were gradually dismantled. Land was leased back to individual households or village groupings and effectively privatised; provided it yielded a modest state procurement quota, it could be used as the lessees saw fit. Repair shops, brick kilns, cement works, fertiliser plants, timber mills and metal fabricators sprang up alongside fish farms, piggeries, poultry farms and market gardens. Official encouragement and easier credit meant that by the 1990s these non-urban industries employed a third of the total labour force. Meanwhile stricter enforcement of the One-Child Policy dramatically reduced the birth-rate. Population growth slowed, but still reached 1.3 billion early in the twenty-first century.
Neither population control nor rural employment was enough to counteract the drift to the cities. There, as controls were lifted and investment encouraged, entrepreneurial activity ran riot. The impetus came from the Special Enterprise Zones. Investment, mostly in foreign joint-ventures producing for export, was attracted by a raft of incentives and preferences plus the availablity of a disciplined, low-cost and limitless labour pool. The model proved so successful that the three initial zones were quickly replicated, vastly extended to include whole regions, and then so copied by provincial administrations as to become almost universal. Capitalism was back, red in tooth and claw. Fortunes were made and brazenly flaunted; earnings rose; so did the skyline; and so did labour exploitation, environmental pollution, land appropriations, nepotism, crime and a whole culture of corruption. ‘To get rich is no sin,’ argued Deng; pauperism tarnished socialism, prosperity vindicated it. But it was the people in general – and especially their Republic – that must benefit, not just individual tycoons. This meant wholesale restructuring of all the organs of the state including the loss-making state industries, the over-manned PLA and militias, the faction-ridden administrations, the costly public services and the corruption-riddled Party.
It was a massive undertaking and not without its setbacks. But GNP rose by about 8 per cent per annum through the 1980s, then soared into double digits. Sectoral imbalances, urban migration and the effects of inflation still troubled the leadership; a 1983 agreement with Britain about the rendition of Hong Kong in 1997 mollified it. The wider world, while profiting handsomely from commercial access, focused on what it saw as China’s democratic deficit. Post-Mao, a more collective and consensual form of leadership had been adopted. Deng himself was never either chairman or premier; high office circulated more freely, and the demoted no longer disappeared. But within the high command this neither ended personal and ideological rifts nor ensured any popular accountability. Western observers, on doubtful evidence, predicted that a liberalised economy must in time induce a liberalised society. Even Deng talked of ‘democracy’. But it was as a pot of gold at the end of the market-socialist rainbow. Elections, other than at the lowest village level where party cadres could influence them, would have to wait; strength and prosperity came first.
Not everyone agreed. The ‘Fifth Modernisation’, that is ‘democracy’, was first touted by the polemicist Wei Jingsheng in 1979. He was promptly imprisoned and the ‘Democracy Wall’, where he and others pasted their posters, was closed down. In the mid-1980s more specific demands for the redress of various grievances and greater tolerance of dissent resurfaced among students. This time some official sympathy was forthcoming, most notably from Party General Secretary Hu Yaobang. But in 1986, as the protests threatened to get out of control, the students were dispersed and Hu forced to resign his office. He remained in the Politburo, a focus for liberal sentiments and for restraint in handling them, until his sudden death in April 1989.
Events then closely mirrored those of the Qingming Incident of 1976, though on a very different scale. Student mourners poured into Tiananmen Square in the thousands, then from all over the country in the millions. Sympathy for the deceased Hu translated itself into censure of the regime and demands for a whole gamut of Western liberal reforms. Beijing’s citizens seemed to support the protesters, the local authorities seemed ambivalent, the Politburo undecided. For six weeks the world looked on in amazement. As an alfresco spectacle, Tiananmen Square would defer only to the Berlin Wall later in the same year. The protesters in their jeans and T-shirts looked much like students anywhere; their music was familiar, their tactics standard, their cause universal. When a hundred or so went on hunger strike, amazement turned to admiration; then admiration turned to horror as the talks broke down and the tanks moved in.
The students had taken their cue from the May 3 protests of 1919 and the Qingming Incident of 1976. But the leadership was more mindful of 1966 and the start of the Cultural Revolution. Then, too, radical youth had descended on the capital en masse, denounced the Party and its leadership, elected its own leaders and challenged the whole power structure. A repeat of the chaos that had ensued then would now derail the modernisation process, discredit the Party, endanger the government and plunge the country back into chaos. Although the Politburo remained divided, Deng secured sufficient support for the necessary crackdown from the old guard of the Party and the PLA. Crudely but literally, it was to be business as usual. Embalmed nearby in his mausoleum, Mao was having the last laugh. The Cultural Revolution had finally borne fruit; ‘bourgeois liberalisation’ had been halted in its tracks; the fear of radical mayhem had succeeded where mayhem itself had failed.
In the 1960s the Western world had lost no sleep over the excesses of the Cultural Revolution; China was a global irrelevance; such things were to be expected of Marxist-Leninist fundamentalists in the Third World. But in the 1990s, with China a major trading partner and emerging world power, the televised defiance and the ruthless repression of a popular movement for democratic rights could hardly be ignored. The US responded with economic sanctions and a suspension of weapons sales and high-level contacts; a few other Western countries followed suit; and Hong Kong, counting down the days till its 1997 handover, witnessed such large demonstrations of sympathy that its last British governor was emboldened to introduce some belated democracy of his own. But as Beijing had calculated, most of this was window-dressing. No nation broke off diplomatic relations, no multi-national corporation withdrew, and there was no renegotiation of Hong Kong’s future. For the world too, it was business as usual. Within a matter of months normal relations with the US resumed, as did the rate of inward investment; in fact in 1991–93 it rose by a staggering 500 per cent. The collapse of the Soviet Union brought a Sino-Russian rapprochement; but neither that, nor the bombing of China’s Belgrade embassy, the downing of a US spy-plane, the on-going frictions in Tibet and Xinjiang, and the occasional outcries over human rights (especially in connection with the Falun Gong) were allowed to disrupt the passage of goods and the penetration of capital. In 1997–98 Presidents Jiang Zemin and Bill Clinton exchanged visits that were rich in talk of ‘strategic partnership’ and ‘complementary economies’. Three years later China was admitted to the World Trade Organization [it is “Organization” on its website] and Beijing was awarded the 2008 Olympics. The leadership greeted both as international recognition of China’s coming of age and vindication of its insistence on ‘stability’. The global podium had a new contender.
Attracting foreign investment and technology had been a high priority ever since the 1970s; but as with the nineteenth-century swing in trade from tea to opium, the tide had now turned. Such had been the growth of China’s economy, such the competiveness of its exports, and such the restraints on domestic spending that surpluses now swamped deficits while outward investment powered ahead of inward. Globalisation had come at just the right moment. Deregulated, and supercharged by the new communications technology, the movement of goods and capital accelerated just when China had most to shift. The main beneficiaries were foreign consumers and foreign currency reserves, principally US Treasury bonds; and as of old, this largesse encouraged a dependency among the beneficiaries that in Chinese minds blurred the distinction between trade and tribute. Similar sentiments could be detected in China’s dash to secure reliable sources of energy and raw materials, principally in Africa and Central Asia. The concept of ‘All under Heaven’, now expanded and integrated to an extent unforeseen even by Clinton and Jiang Zemin, had acquired new substance. The ‘Middle Kingdom’ was closer to the middle, more pivotal and powerful, than at any time in its history.