In the summer of 1966, one man made a historic swim in the Yangtze River. This feat — at a ripe old age of seventy-three — was not just an assertion of his good health, but also a re-assertion of his authority in China’s political landscape. “The Great Helmsman of China”, Chairman Mao, was staging a comeback, and along with it — a torrent of political, social and cultural upheavals that would shake the nation to its core.
Retreat into the Political Background
“The Three Red Banners have been refuted, the land has been divided up, and you did nothing? What will happen after I die?” — Mao to Liu, July 1962
Mao Zedong’s “Great Leap Forward” (1958–1962) had begun with the ambition of turning China into an industrial powerhouse. Instead, it ended in a disastrous man-made famine, with a death toll of more than 30 million Chinese.
To rectify China’s ruinous economy, reforms followed, spearheaded by pragmatist leaders such as Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping and Chen Yun. In the factories, incentives were re-introduced and the production targets were kept realistic. Meanwhile, communes shrunk in size, and rural markets were permitted to flourish once again in the countryside. In some provinces, local leaders even tinkered with private ownership of land.
As a result of the reforms, grain production in China rose, and its industrial sector boomed. Production of steel by 1965 had reached a level double of that before the Great Leap Forward’s. The reforms of the pragmatists were a success… but what about China’s ideological “purity”?
For Mao, the cataclysmic failure of the Great Leap Forward meant a potential challenge to his leadership and legacy. In its aftermath, Mao would choose to retreat to the Party’s “second-line”, observing the “first-line” leaders from the political background.
In January 1962, Liu — the President of the People’s Republic of China and then Mao’s designated successor — launched a critique of the Great Leap Forward, claiming that it was caused by “70% human error” propagated by the “Party Center”, which undoubtedly included the Chairman himself. Furthermore, Mao found little love for the economic reforms initiated by the “first-line” leaders, which he deemed a betrayal of the values he stood for — much less the growing corruption and the bureaucratization of the Party. Slowly over the next few years, these rifts would widen, and Mao would begin to drift away from his appointed heir.
The “Socialist Education Movement” (1963) would intensify Mao’s distaste for his protégé. Aimed at combating local corruption and “revisionism”, the Socialist Education Movement was launched to fulfil the delicate task of punishing rural “capitalism”, while permitting local markets and private plots to maintain economic recovery. By dispatching “workgroups” from the Center to investigate local officials and subsequently purge guilty ones, Liu’s chose to crack down on corruption by adopting a “top-down” approach.
The Socialist Education Movement punished an estimated 5 million party members, with more than 77000 people dead, but it did little to improve Liu’s standing with the Chairman. Rather, Mao gradually came to see in the movement what he feared: a bureaucratic CCP who was dominated by the top brass of leaders lacking in revolutionary fervor, choosing to appoint their allies to positions of power, while insulating themselves from claims of “revisionism”. Mao had always preferred a “bottom-up” approach, and Liu’s publicized praise of his own wife for leading a workgroup strengthened the Chairman’s suspicion.
To Mao, the Party was rotten, filled with leaders — like Liu and Deng — “taking the capitalist road”. If they were willing to forsake Mao’s ideology for “stability” and “growth” even when he was alive, what will happen once he’s dead? Once the new leaders came to power, how will they remember him? What will happen to his legacy? These fears plagued the aging Mao, who did not have to look far to see “revisionism” played out in real life.
Khrushchev and Revisionism
Events in the nearby Soviet Union did little but stoke the fears of the aging Chairman. Despite a rocky relationship, Mao ultimately still held some respect for his Soviet counterpart, Joseph Stalin. He could hardly say the same for Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, whose “unfitness” as a true communist leader horrified him. In a “Secret Speech” in 1956, Khrushchev denounced the evils of Stalinism and the Cult of Personality espoused by the late Soviet leader. Under the baton of “de-Stalinization”, Mao saw the Soviet Union as becoming a revisionist, capitalist state. Pungent overtures to the USA, and Khrushchev’s ideal of “Peaceful Co-Existence”, further soured Mao’s views. His dislike of Khrushchev’s revisionism would intensify the Sino-Soviet rivalry, personalizing the icy relations between the two communist superpowers.
The toppling of Khrushchev in a bloodless coup did little to ease Mao’s fears. Even as new leaders took over Khrushchev’s position, relations remained tense, and reconciliation between the two Communist superpowers was not in sight. However, now that the Soviets got rid of Khrushchev, would the Chinese “following [their] example and [getting] rid of Mao Zedong” lead to friendly relations? A drunken Soviet minister had remarked as such. Khrushchev’s fall may or may not have had an effect on Mao, but his fall was hardly an encouraging sign.
Nevertheless, Khrushchev had been remembered by Mao as someone who desecrated the legacy of Stalin and Lenin, rejecting the revolutionary aspect of communism that fought against capitalism and capitalist states. The fear of Mao’s very own “Khrushchev”, which had become synonymous with “counter-revolutionary” and “revisionist” in China, combined with the actions of the pragmatist leaders, slowly drove Mao to make the conclusion that to secure his place in history, he would have to act while he was alive.
And this would remove the purging of some of the leader’s top officials, particularly but not limited to Liu Shaoqi.
The Hai Rui Affair
Often seen as the “opening shot” of the Cultural Revolution, Chairman Mao’s reaction to a play based on a Ming-era Emperor would be a sign of what was to come, both for China and its top echelon of leaders.
Titled The Dismissal of Hai Rui, the play told the story of a Ming bureaucrat who was dismissed from his position by the Emperor, for his sin of exposing the poor conditions in the kingdom and criticizing the Emperor’s tolerance of corruption.
Despite Mao’s initial approval of the play, his view would change when he realized how the playwright aimed to draw parallels with real-life events and real-life people.
The Emperor had alluded to Mao, blind and stubborn to change in the face of the catastrophic conditions of China during the Great Leap Forward. And the brave official who stood up against Mao became Peng Dehuai, the Defence Minister who had boldly criticized the Chairman at the height of the Great Leap Forward and was rewarded by being branded a “rightist” and purged from the Party. The allegorical criticism of Mao was not hard to miss.
The “Hai Rui Affair”, as it came to be known, saw the discrediting and purging of the playwright Wu Han, aided by Mao’s radical loyalists, such as his wife Jiang Qing. In May 1966, Beijing’s mayor, Peng Zhen, who had been a close friend and mentor to the playwright, was implicated, accused of disobeying Chairman Mao and “running an independent kingdom” in Beijing. Along with him fell the “Group of Five”, the Party’s apparatus in controlling the arts, media and culture.
Instead, a new and much more loyal group, the “Cultural Revolution Group”, which included Madame Mao, would take its place as the state’s cultural apparatus. By far more radical and obedient to Mao’s vision of a cultural “revolution”, some of its members would become more important than ever in the CCP hierarchy. Working under the words of Mao, the group would help fan revolutionary sentiments in China, playing a vital role in the oncoming Cultural REvolution.
Beijing’s mayor had fallen to Mao’s wrath, but Peng Zhen would not be the last of Mao’s targets. His crosshair was placed squarely on the Party’s “capitalist-roaders”, including the top echelon of leaders like Liu and Deng. Even their denouncement of Peng Zhen and support of his purge from the party would not be enough to save their own hides.
But against the country’s top leaders, Mao would use the power of the masses, exploiting the energy and the ideological fervor they possessed to cleanse the ranks of the CCP. An intellectual’s diatribe against her university would grant Mao the impetus to mobilize the masses against revisionism in all sections of society.
Nie Yuanzi and the Rise of the Red Guards
On 25 May 1966, a dazibao (a big-character poster) appeared in the Beijing University, claiming that the university was plagued by “Khrushchev-type counter-revolutionary revisionists”. It urged readers to “carry the socialist revolution through the end”, garnering much attention from students, teachers and professors in Beijing — some criticizing, others defending the poster. The author was a philosophy teacher Nie Yuanzi, who sought revenge against the university president, previously backed by the recently purged Beijing mayor Peng Zhen. He would be an easy target.
Mao would throw his weight behind her vengeful poster. Nie’s Big Poster was broadcasted across the state’s mouthpiece The People’s Daily, now firmly in the hands of the Cultural Revolution Group, and Mao would publically declare his support for her message.
In a wave of confusion, revolution swept through China’s educational institutions. Schools were closed down, freeing up 103 million primary school students, 13 million secondary school students and half a million university students to join the revolution. “Mao Zedong Thought” was broadcasted across China. Banners of Mao flooded the cities, and the collection of Mao Zedong’s quotations, “The Little Red Book”, was being furiously printed and circulated by the state’s cultural apparatus.
Inspired by Nie’s fiery poster and fanned by the nation’s cultural apparatus, the youths attacked the establishment, out of their veneration of the Mao Zedong Thought, or out of genuine grievances they had harbored against the state. These students would later take on the name of the “Red Guard”, a group of youths loyal to Mao, and mobilized by the Chairman to attack “counter-revolutionary” and “revisionist” elements that plagued Chinese society. Urged to attack the “Four Olds” of China — Old Ideas, Old Culture, Old Custom and Old Habits of Suppressing the People — intellectuals, artists and teachers often became the subject of the Red Guard’s violence for the values they embodied.
As the flames of revolution reached even higher heights and mayhem paralyzed cities, Mao would conceal his true intentions from the “first-line leader”, by purposefully staying away from the capital. Forced to act to restore order, Liu chose to dispatch workgroups to suppress the Red Guard activities, branding the students as “rightists”.
This would prove to be a fatal error.
Two days after Mao’s landmark swim at the Yangtze River, the Chairman would return to the capital to deal the finishing blow, denouncing Liu Shaoqi for trying to nip the revolutionary student movement, and therefore, a “counter-revolutionary”. The reputation of the Red Guards was rehabilitated, and Liu now found himself between the youth movement he had antagonized and the Chairman who had skillfully outmaneuvered him into a corner. Faced with a bombardment of criticism and derision within the Party, forced to engage in self-criticism, by July 1966, Liu would suffer a demotion, falling from his position of heir apparent.
But essentially, Liu’s days were numbered. More suffering would await not just Liu and his wife, but other “capitalist-roaders” in the Party.
“Bombard the Headquarter”, Mao declared in August in his own dazibao. The Red Guard was encouraged and emboldened by the Chairman himself to get rid not just the local authorities, but also the high-level leadership of the CCP, dominated by “counter-revolutionaries”. Guided by Jiang Qing’s “struggle list”, leaders like Deng and Liu, as well as their families, became victims of Red Guard violence, who subjected them to beatings, torture and public humiliation. Previous leaders purged from the party, such as the Defence Minister Peng Dehuai and the Beijing Mayor Peng Zhen, would meet similar fates, to be tormented and killed at the height of the Cultural Revolution.
Liu Shaoqi, Mao’s designated successor for many years, would die in solitary confinement in 1969, after being tortured and kept barely alive.
Having successfully unleashed the horrors of the Red Guards on China’s “counter-revolutionary” elements, the rise of a new form of challenge to his rule would force Mao to change tact.
Meanwhile, Deng, Liu’s long-term political ally, avoided death but scarcely fared better. Sent to a corrective labor camp in 1969, discredited and purged from the party, the odds of Deng staging a political comeback seemed impossible. But in a new chapter of the Cultural Revolution, Deng Xiaoping would manage to return. In a struggle to inherit Mao’s legacy, Deng would eventually manage to outmaneuver his opponents, becoming China’s Paramount Leader in 1978.
References:
Chairman Mao’s historic swim — glorified in China but ridiculed by the rest of the world. (2018, July 16). Retrieved from https://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/long-reads/article/1999098/chairman-maos-historic-swim-glorified-china.
Dikötter Frank. (2017). The cultural revolution: a peoples history, 1962–1976. New York: Bloomsbury Press.
FENBY, J. O. N. A. T. H. A. N. (2019). Penguin History Of Modern China: the fall and rise of a great power, 1850 to the present, third … edition. Place of publication not identified: PENGUIN Books.
MacFarquhar, R., & Schoenhals, M. (2008). Maos last revolution. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Short, P. (2017). Mao: the man who made China. London: I B Tauris & Co Ltd.
The Great Helmsman Goes Swimming. (n.d.). Retrieved from https://www.historytoday.com/archive/focus/great-helmsman-goes-swimming.
Walder, A. G. (2017). China under Mao: a revolution derailed. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
