Mao: The Unknown Story

In 1965 China began talking about transferring nuclear know-how to Pakistan — or, more accurately, dangling the prospect. Pakistan had grown more and more useful to Mao as a staging post to the Middle East, and Peking aggressively backed Pakistan’s ambitions over Kashmir, training Kashmiri guerrillas for what China presented as a “national liberation” war.

^†In September 1963, Chou En-lai brought PKI chief Aidit to a secret summit at Conghua in South China with Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh and the head of the Laotian Communists, to coordinate military strategy in Indonesia with the war in Indochina. This summit placed Indonesia on a strategic par with Indochina, and linked developments in Indonesia with the much more advanced military conflict in Indochina.

These parts of Mao’s talks were withheld from the published version, and were made available to us by the Japanese Communist Party Central Committee.

PART SIX. UNSWEET REVENGE

47. A HORSE-TRADE SECURES THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION (1965–66 AGE 71–72)

IN NOVEMBER 1965, Mao was finally ready to launch the Great Purge he had long been planning, to “punish this Party of ours,” as he put it.

Mao proceeded in stages. He decided to fire his first shot at culture, and this is why the Great Purge was called the Cultural Revolution. Mme Mao spearheaded the assault. She was an ex-actress who actually loved culture, but cared nothing about denying it to other Chinese. And she enjoyed the chance to vent her venom, which she possessed in abundance. “Jiang Qing is as deadly poisonous as a scorpion,” Mao once observed to a family member, wiggling his little finger, like a scorpion’s tail. Mao knew exactly how to exploit her potential as a persecution zealot. In 1963 he had assigned her to the Ministry of Culture as his private supervisor to try to get operas and films condemned. Officials there had largely ignored her. She was already paranoid, and had been accusing her nurses of trying to poison her with sleeping pills and scald her when she took a bath. Now, she claimed that the officials she dealt with “suppressed and bullied” her — and she began revenging herself on them mercilessly. Mao made her his police chief for stamping out culture nationwide.

One of her tasks was to draw up a manifesto denouncing every form of culture, on the grounds that they had all been run by officials who were following a “black line opposed to Mao Tse-tung Thought.” Mao told her to do this in collaboration with Lin Biao, the army chief. On the night of 26 November, Mme Mao telephoned Mrs. Lin Biao, who usually took her husband’s calls, and acted as his chief assistant. Lin Biao pledged his help for the undertaking.

Mao and Lin Biao actually rarely met socially, but their collaboration went back nearly four decades — to 1929, when the two struck up an alliance to sabotage Zhu De, whom Lin Biao loathed and Mao was bent on dominating. From then on, a special crony relationship evolved between Mao and Lin. Mao tolerated an extraordinary degree of independence on Lin’s part. For example, when Lin was in Russia during the Sino-Japanese War, he had spoken his mind to the Russians about Mao’s unwillingness to fight the Japanese and how eager Mao was to turn on Chiang Kai-shek — an act Mao would never have swallowed from anyone else. During the Yenan Terror, Lin again did what no one else was allowed to: he simply removed his wife from detention and refused to let her be interrogated. Under Mao, everyone had to do humiliating “self-criticisms” in public, but not Lin. In return for giving Lin this degree of license, Mao expected him to come through for him in times of need, which Lin always did.

When Mao was launching the Great Leap Forward in 1958, he promoted Lin to be one of the Party’s vice-chairmen, as a counter-weight to his other colleagues. When former defense minister Peng De-huai challenged Mao over the famine in 1959, Lin’s staunch backing for Mao ensured that few dared to take Peng’s side. Mao then moved Lin in to replace Peng as defense minister. Throughout the famine, Lin propped up Mao’s image by promoting the cult of Mao’s personality, especially in the army. He invented the Little Red Book, a collection of very short quotations by Mao, as a mechanism of indoctrination. At the Conference of the Seven Thousand in 1962, Lin saved Mao’s skin by championing the equivalent of papal infallibility for him. Afterwards, when Mao was laying the ground for his Great Purge, Lin continued to build the army into the bastion of the cult of Mao.