Mao: The Unknown Story

Mao brought all the participants together for the first time on 23 July. He opened in a characteristically thuggish, and plaintive, manner: “You have talked so much. Now allow me to talk for an hour or so, will you? I have taken sleeping pills three times and still couldn’t sleep.” He made it sound as if someone had been preventing him speaking, and even sleeping. To create an atmosphere where rational debate would be smothered and he could evade the real issues, Mao worked himself into a rage, and belittled the catastrophe his policy had caused with remarks like: “All it means is a little less pork, fewer hairpins, and no soap for a while.” Then he unsheathed the ultimate deterrent. If I am opposed, he declared, “I will leave … to lead the peasants [!] to overthrow the government … If the army follows you, I will go up the mountains and start guerrilla warfare … But I think the army will follow me.” One general recalled: “We felt the atmosphere in the hall freeze.” Mao had polarized the issue into one of: Peng or me; and if you back Peng, I will fight you to the death.

Everyone knew that Mao was unbeatable. He drove home the point about the army obeying him by arranging for his crony Marshal Lin Biao, whose prestige in the military was as high as Peng’s, to appear at the conference the next day. Up to this moment, Lin had not been in Lushan itself; he had been on hand, lurking at the foot of the mountain.

When Lin got up to Lushan, he attacked Peng venomously, and gave Mao his total and demonstrative support. There was nothing Peng or anyone else could do to defy Mao or to reason with him. Mao had also made it easier for people to go along with him by pretending to make some concessions — on food extraction levels, steel output targets, and expenditure on arms factories — and by expressing a willingness to put some money into agriculture. Mao had no intention of honoring any of these promises, and was soon to renege on them all.

Mao labeled Peng and other critics, including Chief of Staff Huang Ke-cheng and former Party No. 1 Lo Fu, as an “anti-Party clique.” He now enlarged the conference to a plenum of the Central Committee, so that his critics could be condemned more formally. Mao read out the resolution himself, and simply announced that it was passed, without even going through the motions of asking the participants to raise their hands. After the obligatory degrading denunciation meetings, Peng was put under house arrest, and the others suffered various punishments. Their families became outcasts with them. Huang’s wife went out of her mind. The youngest and most junior of the group, Mao’s occasional secretary Li Rui, went through nearly 100 denunciation meetings, and was then sent to do forced labor in the Great Northern Wilderness. His wife divorced him, and under her influence his children disowned him with a frosty letter, turning down his request to have a photograph of them. He spent virtually all of the next two decades in and out of forced labor camps and solitary confinement in prison, narrowly escaping a death sentence. This bravest of men emerged with his sanity, intellect, and moral courage undiminished, and continued to speak out against injustice in the post-Mao years.

AFTER LUSHAN, Peng was replaced as defense minister by Lin Biao, who immediately started to purge Peng’s sympathizers in the army. He also set about promoting Mao’s cult on an even grander scale. From January 1960 he ordered the armed forces to memorize quotations from Mao — a move that was to develop into the compendium known as “the Little Red Book.” Mao was overjoyed. He later told the Australian Maoist Edward Hill that Lin “has invented a new method, that is, to compile quotations … Confucius’s Analects is a collection of quotations. Buddhism also has collections of quotations.” Mao then mentioned the Bible. This was the company in which he thought his aphorisms belonged.

Across the nation anyone resisting hyper-requisition and slave-driving was hounded down. Over the next couple of years, according to post-Mao leader Deng Xiao-ping later on, an “estimated 10 million” people were made victims in this drive, which in addition jeopardized the life of “several tens of millions” of their relations. Many of the 10 million victims were grassroots cadres. Their replacements were people willing to slave-drive as harshly as ordered.