The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957 (46 page)

Some villagers – with or without the connivance of local cadres – made it all the way to the capital, despite the restrictions the household-registration system imposed on their freedom of movement. At any one time there were dozens of petitioners gathered outside the State Council, seeking redress in an act of last resort. In one case a woman with four emaciated infants approached the main gate with a sign strapped to her body: it read ‘starvation’, a stark term of accusation against a regime that had promised that nobody would die of hunger. On another occasion a man lit a lantern in broad daylight and approached the main gate of the party headquarters at Zhongnanhai seeking an audience with Chairman Mao. His unmistakable message was that the communist party was an agent of darkness which had shrouded the land.
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Other groups of protesters reached the capital. Since liberation, 5.7 million soldiers had been demobilised, but they harboured many grievances. At best they were abandoned to their own fate in the countryside, but during collectivisation many were treated like pariahs, unable as they were to earn their keep. Half a million suffered from chronic diseases, although the regime showed little interest in their medical needs. Their anger spilled over in the winter of 1956–7, as large groups congregated in the cities to put pressure on the local authorities. A few organised revolutionary committees, promising with some bravado to launch a guerrilla campaign. Chen Zonglin, who hailed from a region ravaged by famine in Anhui, argued loudly: ‘if the government does not give us jobs we will fight them to the end!’ On five separate occasions groups of veterans camped in front of the State Council to press their demands.
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Observing the strikes in Shanghai, Robert Loh felt that ‘One could feel new life flowing back into the beaten-down people, and it was indescribably exhilarating. Equally indescribable was the changed attitude of the communist officials. They were confused as well as frightened, and their arrogance was gone. They tried to placate everyone, especially the workers whom always they seemed to fear the most.’ For good reason, the cadres were in no position to suppress the strikes. The Chairman himself defended the democratic right of students, workers and peasants to express themselves and take to the streets. He had become a champion of the people, allowing a hundred flowers to bloom.
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After Khrushchev had delivered his secret speech in February 1956, Mao spent two months carefully considering his position. He had to be cautious with Khrushchev. Not only was he the powerful head of the Soviet bloc, but he had also increased aid to the People’s Republic, trying to put relations with Beijing on a new footing after Stalin’s death. A year earlier Khrushchev had even promised to provide China with the expertise necessary to make an atomic bomb. The Chairman’s hands were also tied as his colleagues proposed to cut back on industrial projects and slow the pace of collectivisation, invoking Khrushchev to rein in his policies.

Mao’s response to deStalinisation came on 25 April, when he addressed an enlarged meeting of the Politburo in a speech entitled ‘On the Ten Great Relationships’. China, he announced, was ready to strike out on its own, finding a Chinese way to socialism. The Chairman was scathing about those who ‘copy everything indiscriminately and transplant it mechanically’. Instead of slavishly following the old Stalinist model, with its lopsided emphasis on heavy industry, China should develop its own version of socialism. The Soviet Union had made a grave mistake by taking too much from the peasants through a system of compulsory sales, but China, he explained, took into account the interests of both peasants and the state by having a very low agricultural tax. He believed that ‘We have done better than the Soviet Union and a number of East European countries,’ where agriculture and light industry had been neglected. In developing its own road to socialism, China should even learn from capitalist countries. But those who followed Khrushchev in rejecting every aspect of Stalin’s legacy were also wrong: ‘When the north wind is blowing, they join the north; tomorrow, when there is a west wind blowing, they switch to the west.’ ‘In the Soviet Union,’ he added, ‘those who once extolled Stalin to the skies have now in one swoop buried him thirty kilometres deep in the ground.’ Mao saw himself as occupying the middle ground, declaring that Stalin was a great Marxist who was 70 per cent right and 30 per cent wrong.

The Chairman was seeking consensus, trying to rally his colleagues around him by accommodating many of the objections that had been raised against collectivisation. He stole their agenda by proposing a balance between heavy industry on the one hand and light industry and agriculture on the other. This was necessary ‘to ensure the livelihood of the people’. The ‘pressing problems in their work and daily life’ must be addressed and wages adjusted. Mao championed the ordinary man.

But he went much further than merely making concessions on the economy. Seeking to reclaim moral leadership over the party, he tried to do so by posing as a protector of democratic values. He admonished his colleagues, placing himself above them: ‘The Communist Party fears two things: first it fears the people noisily crying like a baby, and secondly it fears the democrats making comments. If what they say makes sense, how can you not listen?’ Less than a year earlier, Mao had denounced Liang Shuming and Peng Yihu as ‘counter-revolutionaries’. Now he praised them as the guardians of democracy: ‘We have deliberately kept the democratic parties, we have not knocked them down, nor have we knocked down Liang Shuming or Peng Yihu. We should unite all the people around us, let them abuse us and oppose us. As long as their abuse is reasonable, no matter who says what, we can accept it, it is very useful for the party, the people and socialism.’ He embraced other parties: ‘We should hail two parties, long live the Communist Party, and long live the Democratic Party, but we should not hail the capitalist class, they should have no more than two or three years left.’
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Mao outdid Khrushchev. Months earlier he had been forced on the defensive, looking like an ageing leader out of touch with reality and clinging to a model that had failed in the past. Now he, rather than Khrushchev, was the true rebel, striking a far more liberal and conciliatory tone than his counterpart in Moscow. A week later, on 2 May, he encouraged freedom of expression among intellectuals, asking the party to ‘let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools contend’.

But Mao was still annoyed with his colleagues. He had been compelled to endorse spending cuts and other economic reforms, and there was nothing he could do to block a return to the principles of collective leadership. A few days later he boarded a plane and travelled to the south, trying to bolster support from regional leaders. At the end of May, he sent a warning signal to his inner circle by swimming in the muddy, dangerous Yangzi, the mightiest river in China. He did so on three occasions, despite strong currents and whirlpools, surrounded by his security men. Dr Li Zhisui had to use all his energy to stay afloat. He was a fast learner. He turned around and soon floated along with the Chairman, basking in the sun. By braving the Yangzi, the Chairman had demonstrated his determination to his colleagues. A poem soon followed:

I don’t care whether the winds thrash me or the waves pound me,

I meet them all, more leisurely than strolling in the garden court.
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Over the following months Mao continued to approve popular unrest and open discussion of the country’s problems. He kept quiet during the Eighth Party Congress, which dropped the Socialist High Tide, deleted all reference to Mao Zedong Thought from the constitution and denounced the cult of personality. He appeared conciliatory, biding his time.

The Hungarian revolt provided him with an opportunity to reclaim the initiative. As Soviet troops crushed the rebels in Budapest in early November, the Chairman faulted the Hungarian Communist Party for having become an ‘aristocratic stratum divorced from the masses’, allowing complaints among the people to fester and run out of control. Mao wanted a purge of the ranks in its Chinese counterpart to avoid a similar fate. What he proposed was nothing less than a new Rectification Campaign, invoking the days of Yan’an when he had compelled every party member to go through the wringer, ferreting out spies and enemy agents. The real dangers, Mao opined in a meeting with his top echelon, were not workers and students demonstrating on the streets, but ‘dogmatism’, ‘bureaucratism’ and ‘subjectivism’ inside the party itself. ‘The party needs to be given some lessons. It is a good thing that students demonstrate against us.’ In 1942, Mao had asked young, idealistic volunteers to attack ‘dogmatism’ inside the party, trying to use them against his rivals. Now he wanted the Chinese Communist Party to welcome critical views from outsiders in a great reckoning: ‘Those who insult the masses should be liquidated by the masses.’ Mao was using the students and workers on strike everywhere in the country as a way of putting his comrades on notice.
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There was, of course, the danger that some intellectuals would voice counter-revolutionary ideas. In 1942, instead of following the Chairman’s cues, the young volunteers had savaged the way in which the red capital was run. Mao turned against them with a vengeance, forcing them to denounce each other in endless struggle meetings. But fourteen years later the Chairman was confident that this would not happen again. Repeated campaigns of thought reform had produced a pliant intelligentsia. Only a year earlier 770,000 people had been arrested as counter-revolutionaries. Mao assured his doubtful colleagues that they had nothing to fear, as ‘right now nine and a half out of ten counter-revolutionaries have already been cut out’. This was confirmed by security boss Luo Ruiqing two weeks later. During the Hungarian uprising a few weeks earlier, he reported, some people had written anonymously to advocate the overthrow of the party. A few even wanted to get rid of the Chairman. But these were isolated voices, as all the hotbeds of counter-revolution had been successfully wiped out the previous year.
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Still, few among Mao’s colleagues relished the prospect of another Rectification Campaign, let alone one in which non-party members were allowed openly to voice their discontent. The Chairman sugared the pill by promising a ‘gentle breeze and mild rain’, as those who had strayed from the path would face ideological education rather than disciplinary punishment. Even then, senior leaders like Liu Shaoqi and Peng Zhen feared that the situation might spiral out of control if people were encouraged to air their grievances openly.

Many inside the party preferred a clampdown on all popular opposition. The Chairman had to do the rounds. A few counter-revolutionaries might take centre stage, he ventured on 18 January 1957, but repression would only make matters worse. ‘Don’t be afraid of disturbances, the bigger and the longer, the better,’ he said a few days later. ‘Let the demons and ogres come out, let everybody have a good look at them . . . let those bastards come out.’ They were nothing but a few poisonous weeds that appeared among fragrant flowers, and they were bound to grow every year, no matter how often they were pulled up. Then, on 27 January, he wondered: ‘Even if mistakes in the party line were made and the country were to descend into chaos, even if several counties and provinces were occupied, with rebel troops all the way up to West Chang’an Avenue in Beijing, would the country collapse? Not as long as the army is reliable.’
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Mao’s big day came on 27 February 1957, almost exactly one year after Khrushchev’s secret speech, as he addressed an enlarged session of the Supreme State Council Conference. His speech was entitled ‘On the Correct Handling of Contradictions among the People’. In Hungary, Mao explained, people had taken to the streets four months earlier, but most of them were not counter-revolutionaries. The fault lay with the party, in particular bureaucratic cadres who failed to distinguish between legitimate concerns expressed by the people and more malicious threats posed by enemies of the regime. The result was that force instead of persuasion had been used. In China too, Mao acknowledged, mistakes had occurred in the past, for instance during the political campaigns of 1951 and 1952. Many of those sentenced to labour camps, he reassured his audience, would soon benefit from an amnesty. He even expressed regret at the loss of innocent lives. He also warned that if legitimate complaints by ordinary people were badly handled, China could go the way of Hungary, as contradictions among the people would turn into contradictions between the people and the party, making the use of force necessary. The Chairman rang with sincerity, as he enumerated examples of serious errors made by the Chinese Communist Party. He was harsh with the party bureaucracy. He announced that a Rectification Campaign would soon be inaugurated to help party members improve their work. The public at large were required to help the Chinese Communist Party by airing their grievances so that social injustices could be redressed. No retaliation would be taken against those who spoke out. Again came the Chairman’s dramatic call to ‘let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools contend’. Mao ended his speech by comparing himself to a star in an opera, growing too old to continue playing the leading role. He hinted that he might soon step back from the stage.
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The speech was a tremendous achievement. Mao came across as an earnest proponent of a more humane form of socialism, departing radically from past tradition. The Chairman did what he did best: rally a majority around him with promises of a better future. The meeting was attended not only by ranking party leaders and government officials, but also by members of organisations outside the party. It was taped and played to select audiences around the country. Robert Loh, who listened to the speech with 200 other delegates in Shanghai, was convinced that Mao was utterly sincere. For more than a year he had been preparing his escape to Hong Kong, but now he was dazed. ‘After Mao’s speech everything seemed possible. For the first time in many years, I allowed myself to hope.’
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