Out of Mao's Shadow: The Struggle for the Soul of a New China (15 page)

“It was exhilarating. The masses were fully mobilized, marching and protesting and staging sit-ins. Every street in the city was plastered with big-character posters,” Xi recalled. “As middle school students, we were so excited about everything, blindly following others and joining organizations. But actually, we didn’t understand what was going on. We were just being loyal to Chairman Mao.” Mao’s cult of personality had reached a fever pitch, approaching religious worship. Students read his words aloud as if they were reciting prayers, sometimes directly addressing his portrait, which was everywhere. Billions of badges and buttons with his image were manufactured, and people collected them like spiritual amulets. Not everyone bought into the cult. But in that charged environment, dropping a Mao badge on the floor, or making a careless remark about the Chairman, could be a serious offense, enough to be labeled an opponent of the Revolution. So those with doubts kept them hidden.

If the Red Guards in Chongqing were united in their loyalty to Mao, they were nonetheless divided in their opinion of the local party authorities. One camp defended the city’s party committee and followed its lead. Established and supported by local officials, these “royalist” Red Guard units dominated the movement at first. But as the weeks passed, the rebel camp critical of the local party establishment began to win support. Members of this “August 15” faction included students and teachers from Chongqing University and other colleges, as well as factory workers, intellectuals, and others alienated and victimized by the party’s past policies. As the royalist and rebel Red Guards accused one another of betraying socialism, arguments escalated into scuffles across the city. Young people in China had been raised by the party to believe in ideological absolutes. Compromise was a sin, and if you stood with Mao and socialism, then those who opposed you must certainly be enemies of socialism.

Xi and his classmates were in the August 15 camp, if only because older students from the universities told them they were. He participated in a mass rally and a hunger strike in front of city hall, and he joined a group that said it would march to Beijing to expose the local officials, though he turned back after twenty-five miles. “I was quite muddleheaded, mindlessly following others and just having fun,” he said. “But I knew the Chongqing government wanted to maintain the status quo and suppress the students, who were accusing the government of taking a capitalist, reactionary road. The government told us to go back to school, but Chairman Mao said to rebel is justified. We had memorized that, and so we rebelled.”

In the fall, public opinion shifted toward the August 15 faction as it became clear Mao was siding with rebel Red Guards against local party committees in other cities. With their support dwindling, the royalists decided to turn against their patrons in the city’s party leadership, too. But rather than welcome the reversal, the August 15 faction accused the royalists of hiding their true colors and trying to hijack the Revolution. The rivalry came to a boil on December 4, when the royalists held a mass rally in Chongqing’s main sports stadium to denounce city and provincial party leaders. More than one hundred thousand people filled the stadium, including Xi’s eleven-year-old brother, Qingchuan, who had also joined a Red Guard unit. The rally had just begun when fighting broke out between the two factions and a riot erupted. “First there was some commotion, and then it was chaos,” Qingchuan recalled. “Once the fighting started, it quickly got out of control. They were beating each other with wooden clubs and steel rods, and everyone was trying to get out.” Qingchuan escaped unharmed, but hundreds were injured. The clash at the stadium was the first major outburst of violence of the Cultural Revolution in Chongqing. It wouldn’t be the last.

Early on, Mao and those closest to him made clear that violence would be permitted, if not encouraged, to achieve the goals of the Cultural Revolution. In disbanding the work teams that other party leaders had sent to the schools to lead the Cultural Revolution, Mao also rejected their efforts to suppress violence. His wife, Jiang Qing, who emerged as a leading voice of the Cultural Revolution, passed on his thoughts to a rally in Beijing: “When good men beat bad men, the bad men get what they deserve.” As the violence spread in Beijing and people such as the girls’ school vice principal Bian Zhongyun were beaten to death, a few students wrote an appeal urging the party to intervene. Mao responded by complaining that Beijing was still “too civilized.” At the first Red Guard rally in Tiananmen, he invited one student to the podium who had publicly assaulted a party official, and he suggested another student change her name from “gentle and refined” to “be martial.” But it was his decision to prohibit police from arresting students who were “making revolution” that had the widest impact. Police were encouraged to befriend Red Guards instead. “Don’t say it is wrong of them to beat up bad people,” the minister of public security advised. “If in anger, they beat someone to death, then so be it. If we say it’s wrong, then we’ll be supporting bad people. After all, bad people are bad, so if they’re beaten to death, it’s no big deal.”

On his seventy-third birthday, in December 1966, Mao delivered a toast to “the unfolding of nationwide all-round civil war.” Within weeks, Red Guards led by his lieutenants seized power from the party committee in Shanghai, and denounced the city’s leaders in a mass rally broadcast live on television. Similar power transfers followed elsewhere in China as Mao ordered military authorities in each region to support the rebels. In Chongqing, with the royalists defeated, the August 15 faction took control of the government at the end of January with the blessing of the 54th Army. The city’s party leaders surrendered, and were denounced at a rally attended by as many as three hundred thousand people. Like other officials across the country, they were publicly humiliated, forced to wear dunce caps and stand bent over with their heads bowed and their arms raised backward—the notorious “airplane” position. The rebels roughed them up and splashed black ink on their faces, marking them as members of “black gangs.” The ranking official in the city, a ruthless Politburo strongman named Li Jingquan, endured several of these public “struggle sessions.” His wife was said to have hanged herself. As in other cities, some deposed Chongqing officials—tough men who had no doubt inflicted their share of misery while in power—also chose suicide to escape the torment. Mao and his allies showed little sympathy. After the Yunnan provincial chief took his own life, Premier Zhou Enlai labeled him a “shameless renegade.” One senior army general, crippled in a failed attempt to kill himself by jumping from a building, was carried to rallies in a crude basket for further denunciation.

The victory of the Red Guards over local party authorities didn’t end the violence. In Chongqing, they began fighting among themselves almost as soon as they took power. Some were upset after being left out of the ruling committee established by the military, while others criticized the August 15 leaders for working with the 54th Army, which they considered part of the old “capitalist” establishment. The military-backed government moved to silence the opposition, arresting hundreds if not thousands of Red Guards in the following months. But at the end of March 1967, Mao concluded that the army was stifling his revolution, not just in Chongqing but in cities across the country. His new deputy, the defense minister Lin Biao, ordered the military to back off and release those who had been detained. As the 54th Army complied, a new Red Guard camp emerged in Chongqing and came to be known as the “Rebel to the End” faction.

Xi said he and his young comrades favored these Rebels, but his parents supported the August 15 faction. His father was a truck driver for a state bookstore; his mother worked in the bookstore’s warehouse. Solid members of the proletariat, they had both been active in the Cultural Revolution, but they seemed to sense the chaos that was coming. One afternoon, as Xi was boasting at school about his performance in a debate with other Red Guards, he turned around and saw his mother standing in the doorway. She grabbed him by his belt and dragged him outside, where his father was waiting with a car. From that day on, he was grounded. His mother stayed home to stop him from going out.

It was a bit of parenting that might have saved his life. The arguments between the two factions in Chongqing quickly escalated into some of the worst violence of the Cultural Revolution anywhere in the nation. The fighting began with scattered clashes in the spring, but on June 5, thousands engaged in a pitched battle in front of the library of a teachers’ college that lasted three days. Other major confrontations followed. The Red Guards attacked one another with stones, clubs, and metal rods, then knives, swords, and spears. Soon the focus of the battles turned from schools and colleges to the city’s arms factories. Chongqing was a base of weapons production because of its inland location far from the nation’s borders, and its factories produced all manner of lethal munitions: semiautomatic weapons, hand grenades, light and heavy machine guns, flamethrowers, howitzers, antiaircraft guns, artillery cannons, tanks, warships—almost everything but fighter jets. Now the rival factions fought to control these factories and distribute the materiel. The Red Guards on both sides established combat bases, fortifying factories, schools, and bridges as well as radio stations, key assets for spreading propaganda.

On July 7, the first shooting deaths occurred, and over the following weeks the city descended into civil war. By late July, the two camps were using grenades, machine guns, and flamethrowers. Tanks and artillery cannons were deployed by early August. And then the fighting spread to the rivers, where Red Guards were raiding ships for food and supplies. On August 8, in perhaps the only naval battle of the Cultural Revolution, three aging gunboats that the Rebels had fitted with artillery cannons clashed with a small fleet of ships manned by August 15 fighters with machine guns. Afterward, at a memorial service for one of the dozens of sailors killed in the battle, a Rebel leader ordered two prisoners executed with the sailor’s gun and their bodies dumped in the river as a sacrifice in his honor. A few days later, an August 15 commander ordered five prisoners executed, including a couple expecting a child. The husband begged his captors to spare his wife, or at least delay her execution until after she had given birth. His pleas were ignored.

The numbers of dead and wounded climbed with each battle, some of which involved more than ten thousand combatants and resulted in as many as a thousand casualties. Newspapers published gruesome reports describing how “martyrs” were stabbed, shot, maimed, electrocuted, or found dead in the water, their faces mutilated. Crowds cheered as armored trucks transported fresh-faced Red Guards to battle zones, then looked on with dread as the same vehicles returned carrying the wounded and dead. The city was laid to ruin, with windows shattered everywhere, buildings burned to the ground, and the main harbor destroyed. More than 180,000 people fled the city, seeking refuge in the provincial capital, Chengdu.

At first, Xi was excited by the combat. “Every night, you could hear the gunfire and the artillery explosions. It was amazing! Tanks were moving in the streets! I really wanted to go. I was very interested. I thought participating in the armed fighting was glorious and would be a lot of fun,” he recalled. But his parents wouldn’t let him leave the house. Later, they took him to see what a neighborhood looked like after a battle, and his enthusiasm was replaced by fear. “It was horrible, a big mess of corpses scattered around…. All the buildings were empty shells, and there were burned cars and dead bodies everywhere. I was terrified, and whenever I heard a gunshot, I would hit the deck.”

Chongqing wasn’t the only city in China to experience such armed warfare in the summer of 1967. Similar spasms of violence occurred in almost every major city in the country. One news bulletin in Beijing reported twenty to thirty armed clashes in the provinces every day in August. But the fighting in Chongqing was perhaps more intense and deadly than anywhere else, because of its concentration of munitions factories. Some of Mao’s lieutenants traveled to Chongqing and urged an end to the violence, but the message from the top was muddled. Mao made clear he was not worried about Red Guards obtaining weapons, and called on the military to “arm the left,” a phrase that became a slogan across the country. “Why can’t we arm the workers and students?” he asked. “I say we should arm them!” Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, endorsed another slogan: Attack with reason, defend with force. “You cannot be so innocent and naive,” she told a group of Red Guards in Henan Province. “When a pinch of people provoke violence, when they attack you with weapons, the revolutionary masses can take up weapons and defend themselves.” The editor of a Red Guard newspaper in Chongqing read her remarks and distributed them to his colleagues. “I only said one thing: ‘Since even the center doesn’t want to control the situation, what are we waiting for?’” he recalled. “Everybody said, then let’s fight!”

As the clashes got worse, Xi and his family split up and left their apartment for safer quarters. His three youngest siblings were sent to stay with relatives, while his parents took him and his brother Qingchuan to the distribution center of the bookstore where they worked. They crowded into an office on the ground floor with twenty to thirty others, sleeping on the wood floors and keeping the lights off at night so as not to draw fire. But during the third week of August, a battle erupted that put them in the middle of the crossfire. August 15 forces on a hill to one side of their building were trying to seize control of a mountain held by the Rebels on the other side. Xi watched from the building as tanks and antiaircraft guns began firing at the Rebel position. He could see the shells landing and exploding on the mountain, and the Rebels taking cover. The August 15 fighters climbed slowly up the mountain, occasionally exchanging gunfire with the Rebels. From the distance, they looked like insects making their way up an anthill. Xi watched as they seized the first of the Rebel trenches, but then something happened and they were suddenly scurrying down the mountain, retreating much faster than they had advanced. Rebel reinforcements had arrived with machine guns.