The Party: The Secret World of China's Communist Rulers (36 page)

Li was more than simply a survivor of Mao. At the time I met him, he was perhaps the only senior insider living in China willing to talk publicly and in explicit detail about the taboo topic of Mao’s legacy. The China built in the wake of Mao’s death in 1976 is largely unrecognizable from the xenophobic, dispirited and sinister country, verging on collapse and civil war, that the Great Helmsman bequeathed his successors. But Mao himself survives as the single unifying thread tying the vital, modernizing country that greets visitors to today’s China with the horrors that preceded it. Mao’s presence remains so ubiquitous in twenty-first-century China that it barely provokes comment any more.

‘What is there new to say about Mao?’ said a prominent US Sinologist when I prodded him on the issue. But that is precisely the point. The victims of Mao’s political campaigns put him firmly among the big three slaughterers of the twentieth century, along with Stalin and Hitler. By drawing a veil over Mao, the Party has effectively shut down all political debate. ‘The Mao issue is the dark heart of everything that is contemporary China,’ said Geremie Barmé, of the Australian National University. ‘The whole project [of modern China] is based on a series of lies, not just about Mao, but the collective leadership he has come to represent. It has profound ramifications–it means that China can’t grow up. It is a society that has forbidden itself from being able to grapple not only with the legacy of Mao, but with civil change.’

Mao’s exalted status is easily explained, up to a point. As the leader of the Communist Party and the Red Army, he founded a new and united China in 1949, restoring pride to a nation dismembered by multiple foreign powers over a century, starting with the ceding of Hong Kong to the British after the first opium war in 1842. Beyond the revolution, the explanation for Mao’s survival as a symbol of the nation is equally straightforward. Mao’s fate is tied to that of the Party. ‘The biggest legacy of Mao is the Communist Party of China,’ Li said. ‘As long as the Party exists, the impact of Mao will be enduring.’

Li admits to having been enthralled by Mao when they met, but his outspokenness soon got him into trouble. In Yan’an, he helped set up
The Lighthorseman
, a newspaper circulated by being affixed to walls around the town. The paper’s life followed a pattern for the press that would become familiar in Mao’s early years. Its frankness was invigorating, until it offended a senior leader, after which it was promptly shut down and its editors politically crucified. Li then became a writer for
Liberation Daily
, a party paper, where his forceful editorials coincided with a brutal purge of people damned as ‘reactionaries and spies’. It was poor timing for Li, who ended up facing trumped-up charges of spying himself. Hundreds of people were tortured and left to die. Li was lucky. He was jailed for just over a year. About ten years later he came to his leader’s attention again during an early debate about the construction of the Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze river, a massive project that eventually got under way amidst huge controversy in the nineties. In 1958, Mao, favourably impressed by Li’s views, hired him as one of his advisers. Once again Li’s timing was out. By 1959, Mao was under pressure after the first reports of the unfolding famine began to percolate up to the centre.

At a meeting of the Central Committee in the lushly green mountain retreat of Lushan that year to discuss the Great Leap Forward, Li voiced criticism of the policy in a meeting with Mao and some colleagues. At first, Mao seemed receptive. ‘One reason Mao could listen and accept some opposite opinions was that these ideas were raised by small potatoes like us, who posed no threat to him, rather than by a member of the Standing Committee.’ But Mao’s mood changed when Peng Dehuai, a Politburo member and Defence Minister, condemned the campaign. Li compounded his sins by comparing Mao with ‘Stalin in his late years’, saying ‘he cannot cloud the whole sky with his single hand’. Sensing a threat to his leadership, Mao lashed back. Peng was removed and ‘small potatoes’ like Li were thrown out with him.

At Lushan today, tourists crowd the hall and other buildings, which have been preserved in honour of Mao and the historic meeting. In an Orwellian touch, the accompanying exhibition says Mao ‘first discovered’ the problems of the Great Leap Forward during the meeting. In fact, he had already received reports of starvation, and even then continued the policies, prolonging the famine for another two years, at the cost of approximately another 20 million lives. ‘Mao’s basic aim was to be the strongest, most powerful Emperor of China ever,’ Li recalled. ‘And he thought that an Emperor should never have to make a self-criticism.’ As punishment for opposing Mao, Li was separated from his wife and two daughters and exiled to the Chinese gulag in Heilongjiang, in the frigid north-east. As he recounts the story, Li opens his diary on the table in front of him and points out the pages recording this period: ‘I picked up a little green melon in the wild land, ate it and then felt like I was a savage. I’ve become so used to having wild vegetables now. We were too optimistic at Lushan, too optimistic in 1958!’ Li sighs and puts the book down. ‘The strongest suffering a person can have is starving,’ he says. Li worked fifteen hours a day and watched as other exiled intellectuals collapsed and died around him.

Li was later sent to Anhui, where he worked in the power industry for two years until the launching of the Cultural Revolution in 1966. For Li, the memory of the moment the campaign caught up with him is vivid. Late one evening in 1967, he was savouring a rare purchase of honey when two jeeps with six armed men rushed into his compound and invited him to come to the city ‘for a chat’. He knew his fate the moment he stepped on board the plane for Beijing the next day and saw that, besides the guards, he was the only passenger. He was transported to Beijing’s Qincheng, notorious since 1949 as a jail for political prisoners. He didn’t get a chance to savour honey, or anything remotely like it, for the next eight years. ‘I was a dead tiger by then.’

By the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976, Mao was a dead tiger of sorts as well. He had withered, physically and politically, and died later that year. But his spirit has endured. No major set-piece speech by a top Chinese leader today is complete without an obligatory reference to the enduring importance of ‘Mao Zedong thought’. Mao’s soft, fleshy visage, with its Mona Lisa-like ambivalence, still hangs in pride of place over the entrance to the Forbidden City in the capital. Opposite, his body lies in a crystal coffin in a mausoleum in Tiananmen Square, ‘so the masses can look on with reverence’. To ensure that his corpse remains in good condition, the Mao Zedong Mausoleum Management Bureau holds regular symposia to study the science of body preservation.

When China introduced new banknotes in 2001, the fifth set since the 1949 revolution, Mao’s face alone adorned every note above one renminbi (worth 0.14 cents). Other former leaders and the farmers and workers who had been displayed in proletarian splendour on previous notes were removed. No public explanation for the change was advanced at the time, but Deng Wei, a painter who helped design previous generations of banknotes, said in an interview it was to ‘conform with the international practice’ of having a single person on banknotes. That logic left the designers with a single choice–Mao–to represent modern China.

The Party took years to find a way to repudiate the insanity and murderousness of Mao’s rule without signing its own death warrant. After a year-long internal debate, involving, Li says, 4,000 officials, the Party announced its verdict in 1981 in a party resolution. It decreed that Mao had made ‘gross mistakes’, but concluded that overall ‘his merits were primary and his errors were secondary’. Li was baffled that anyone could think that the deaths of tens of millions of people could be neatly packed away. ‘Aren’t these terrifying numbers? Have we gained a clear picture of what these numbers mean?’ he asks. ‘If we cannot get a clear perspective on past history, we will not be able to improve society, but the propaganda ministry is still trying to cover up these crimes.’

Although the Party did not include it explicitly in its resolution on Mao’s career, it informally gave it a mark, as you might when grading a student. This grading, often quoted in China, says Mao was ‘70 per cent good, 30 per cent bad’. The debate and the ruling, which was managed by Deng, who became leader in 1978, still stands as the final word on Mao in all public discourse. ‘Unlike the Stalin cult, we are dealing with a man who is Stalin, Lenin and Marx,’ says Geremie Barmé. ‘Deng thought–if we get rid of him, we will open [the Party] up, not today, not tomorrow, but eventually, to a complete negation of the whole system by some radical thinkers.’

In school textbooks, the Party still polices Mao’s image as zealously as it scrutinizes what Japanese children are taught in Japan about the invasion of China by Imperial Japan. In Shanghai, a team of academics led by Professor Su Zhiliang of Shanghai Normal University struggled for years to force a more honest reckoning of Mao’s rule. ‘Take the Great Leap Forward and Cultural Revolution for example,’ Su told me when I interviewed him in 2004. ‘Our practice in the past was to make [the period] vague rather than clear. But in our most recent edition [of the school textbook], a thorough denunciation is made of Mao’s decision to launch these campaigns.’ The previous textbook had ascribed the Cultural Revolution to Mao’s ‘wrong idea that a large proportion of [the Party’s] power had been snatched by capitalists’. The new version said ‘individual cults and autocratic leadership’ were partly behind the campaign. ‘China’s reform took the route of “economy first, politics second”,’ Su said. ‘We are trying to make history objective by replacing the groundless conclusions with factual descriptions.’

When the
New York Times
published an article in 2006 highlighting the absence of Mao from newly issued world history textbooks used for a single year of high school in Shanghai, a huge furore erupted. Mao, along with conventional historical accounts of war and revolution, had been supplanted by texts focusing on issues such as culture, economics, transport and eating habits, an alternative form of historical narrative favoured by some teaching streams in the west. The paper’s provocative headline–‘Where’s Mao?’–prompted furious commentary on the internet. Lieutenant-General Li Jijun, a powerful two-star general and former director of the Central Military Commission, told Xinhua the attempt to play down revolution and ideology was ‘absurd’. Other commentaries on the internet compared the changes to a ‘
coup d’état
by stealth’ and the start of an ‘orange revolution’ in China. Su protested vainly that social history embodied a proper ‘Marxist view of civilization’, by focusing on social trends rather than single leaders. Years in the making, the entire set of new textbooks was withdrawn by the authorities in Shanghai. Before the controversy, Su was frank about the limits imposed on him. ‘History textbooks are a public interpretation of the country’s political will,’ he said in the 2004 interview. ‘Editors are therefore like birds dancing in a cage.’

Textbook editors are not the only ones encircled by the Mao myth. Mao’s successors must also pay obeisance to their predecessor. On the one hundred and tenth anniversary of Mao’s birth late in December 2004, Hu Jintao donned a Mao suit to praise the Great Helmsman in a series of ceremonies. As is usual on such occasions, scores of Mao’s books and poems were published. In a twenty-first-century touch, a rap song was also composed for the occasion. But the 2004 anniversary was different in one important respect: a group of six writers and exiled dissidents published a daring letter, entitled ‘An Appeal for the Removal of the Corpse of Mao Zedong from Beijing’. One passage declared:

Mao instilled in people’s minds a philosophy of cruel struggle and revolutionary superstition. Hatred took the place of love and tolerance; the barbarism of ‘It is right to rebel!’ became the substitute for rationality and love of peace. It elevated and sanctified the view that relations between human beings are best characterized as those between wolves.

The letter concluded with an appeal for Mao’s body to be buried in Shaoshan, Mao’s hometown, in Hunan, ‘to mark the start of a process of alleviating the sense of national grievance and violence prevalent in Chinese society’.

When I met one of the authors, Yu Jie, in a Beijing hotel complex, he suggested we abandon our initial rendezvous, at a table in an open-plan restaurant, and find a private room. It was not so much the surveillance that might come with meeting a foreign journalist that worried him. It was talking critically about Mao aloud in public. The last time he had done so in a restaurant, a patron at an adjoining table had stood up and screamed ‘You liar!’ at him. ‘In private, we can talk about these things openly,’ he says. ‘But in public and the media, we can’t.’

Yu, who hails from Sichuan in China’s west, is no firebrand in the flesh. Mild and bespectacled, he spoke softly about why he helped organize the letter. ‘It wasn’t a radical thing to do. I am just telling the basic truth.’ But Yu was being disingenuous. In the Party, telling the bald truth about history is about the most radical thing you can do. Yu argues that Mao’s brutality has poisoned not just China’s political culture but everyday language. All social movements become ‘campaigns’, he says. Every rivalry is turned into a ‘war’. You don’t just best your opponents in any dispute, you ‘eradicate’ them. In this way, Mao amplified and entrenched the worst qualities of Chinese tradition and society. ‘In Chinese traditional culture,’ he says, ‘the winner is the king and the losers are all rascals.’ While the Mao letter garnered some publicity overseas, in China itself it circulated briefly on the internet before sites featuring it were blocked. When Yu was interviewed on the phone by the BBC’s Chinese-language service about the letter, the line went dead soon after he started answering questions.

The response of the guardians of establishment history to the litany of Mao’s horrors is as instructive as it is surreal. According to Xia Chuntao of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, a state think-tank with the status of a ministry, Mao is not an issue of political sensitivities but a ‘matter of principle’. For Xia, the Party’s discussion of the issue in the early eighties, which resolved that Mao was 70 per cent good, 30 per cent bad, settled the debate decisively. ‘Now, when we look back we can see how politically wise the conclusion was. There was a voice to deny Mao completely. Had it been done, it could have had a big negative impact on Chinese society,’ he said. ‘The story of Mao is a real-life subject. Mao lived quite close to us, so it is not easy to make up stories about him.’