Mao: The Unknown Story

Mayor Peng cared about the Party. He was also gutsy. He even complained to foreigners about Mao, something quite amazing among the tight-lipped CCP leadership. When a Japanese Communist asked him about the Hai Rui opera, Mayor Peng replied that: “It is not a political issue, but a historical play. Chairman Mao says it is a political issue. How troublesome!” This was unbelievably outspoken language for someone in the inner circle to use to an outsider.

With Mayor Peng taking the responsibility for blocking the Mao-sponsored article, even the People’s Daily refused to reprint it. The editor, one Wu Leng-xi, knew that he was crossing Mao, as an eyewitness at a small meeting with him and Mao saw. Mao asked smokers to hold up cigarettes, and then said: “It seems on this point too I am in the minority.” “At that remark,” the witness recalled, “I saw Wu Leng-xi … turn chalky white, stop taking notes and go rigid. Something about what Mao had just said had frightened [him].”

And yet the editor held out for a week more, until Chou En-lai stepped in and ordered him to run the article, citing instructions from Mao. But the editor still managed to half-bury the article way back on page 5, in a section called “Academic Discussions,” which meant that it was not a Party order to start a persecution campaign. The editor ended up in prison. To his successor Mao said menacingly: “Wu Leng-xi disobeyed me. And I wonder how you would behave.” The successor was so panic-stricken that he could not stammer out what he wanted to say: “I will definitely obey Chairman Mao.”

The fact that an article so overtly sponsored by Mao was treated in this way showed the degree of resistance he was facing from very powerful forces in the Party. Mao needed a system to carry out his will, and that made Lin Biao’s instant help essential. Lin knew it, and he knew what he wanted in return: Chief of Staff Luo must suffer. So Mao conceded, even though Luo the Tall had been ultra-loyal, and Mao needed such men more than ever at this of all times. But Lin was the man he could not do without: there was no one with comparable clout who would do Mao’s bidding. Luo the Tall was able and loyal, but he was not a marshal, and did not have long-established prestige in the army, and so he was sacrificed.

On 8 December, Mrs. Lin Biao addressed a Politburo meeting chaired by Mao, and spoke for a full ten hours about the alleged crimes of Luo the Tall, accusing him of having “bottomless” ambitions, starting with coveting Lin’s job as defense minister. For Lin’s wife to play such a role at a Politburo meeting was unheard-of, as she was neither a Politburo member nor even a high official, and wives of the top leaders had till now been kept very much in the background.

Luo the Tall was not present at the meeting. When he learned about his downfall, his legs turned to jelly. This powerfully built man was unable to walk upstairs. He was put under house arrest.

For his family, a nightmare began. One day very soon after this, his daughter, who attended a boarding school and had not heard the news about her father, was cycling home across Beihai Bridge opposite Zhongnanhai. The arch was flanked by elegant carved white marble balustrades. Through the dense dust borne by the cold wind from Siberia, she noticed three boys riding after her, close friends whose parents were also friends with hers. As they passed by her, they turned round and fixed her with a look of such coldness and disdain that it nearly knocked her off her bicycle. They knew something which she did not — that her father was now an enemy. That look, chilling, cruel, intended to hurt and break, from people whom only yesterday one had assumed to be friends, was to become a hallmark of the forthcoming years.

But Lin Biao was still not satisfied with the level of pain inflicted on Luo the Tall. He asked Mao to have Luo condemned for the equivalent of high treason: “wanting to usurp the Party and state.” Mao was reluctant to allow this, as to do so would mean casting his old stalwart away irrevocably. So, for a few months, Luo the Tall was not charged with treason.

Lin therefore held back about helping Mao. When Mme Mao came to see him on 21 January 1966 about writing the planned “manifesto” against the arts in the name of the army, he made a show of willingness, and assigned a few writers from the army, but behind her back he told them: “Jiang Qing is sick … and paranoid … Just listen to what she says and say as little as you can … Don’t make any criticisms about how the arts are run …” As a result, when their draft was submitted to Mme Mao in February, she called it “totally useless.”