Mao: The Unknown Story

There was a short list of notables to be exempted, drawn up by Chou En-lai. This later brought Chou totally unmerited plaudits for allegedly “saving” people. In fact, it was Mao who got Chou to draw the list up, on 30 August, and the purpose was purely utilitarian. The only reason Chou had charge of it was because he was running the whole show, not because he stepped in to save people. The list comprised a few dozen names. By contrast, later official statistics show that in August — September, in Peking alone, 33,695 homes were raided (which invariably involved physical violence), and 1,772 people were tortured, or beaten, to death.

To cover himself, Mao had Chou En-lai announce to a Red Guard rally on Tiananmen on 31 August: “Denounce by words, and not by violence.” This announcement allowed most Red Guards to opt out of violence by saying that Mao was against it. Some victims were also able to protect themselves by quoting this back to their persecutors. But as perpetrators of atrocities went unpunished, violence raged on.

One of Mao’s aims with the house raids was to use the Red Guards as proxy bandits. They confiscated tons of gold, silver, platinum, jewelry, and millions of dollars in hard currency, which all went into the state coffers, as well as many priceless antiques, paintings and ancient books. The looting, along with mindless on-site destruction, cleaned virtually all valuable possessions out of private hands. Some of the plunder was exported to earn foreign currency.

The top few leaders were allowed to take their pick of the booty. Mme Mao selected an 18-carat gold French pendant watch, studded with pearls and diamonds, for which she paid the princely sum of 7 yuan. This was in line with the Maoist leadership’s “un-corrupt” practice of insisting on paying for paltry items like tea leaves at meetings, but paying nothing at all for their scores of villas and servants, and having the de facto private use of planes and trains and other expensive perks. Kang Sheng, an antiques lover, privatized some house raids by sending in his own personal looters disguised as Red Guards. Mao himself pilfered thousands of old books. Sterilized by ultraviolet rays, they lined the shelves of his enormous sitting room, forming the backdrop to photographs of him receiving world leaders and impressing foreign visitors. The room, Kissinger mused, looked like “the retreat of a scholar.” In fact, unknown to the American visitors, it had more in common with one of Goering’s mansions adorned with art seized from victims of Nazism.

The regime squeezed something else out of these raids: housing space. The housing shortage was acute, as virtually no new dwellings had been built for ordinary urban residents under the Communists. Now the battered families who had been raided were squeezed into one or two rooms, and neighbors were moved into the rest of the raided houses, often resulting, not surprisingly, in excruciatingly bitter relations.

Some families who had been raided were exiled to villages, escalating a process which Mao had already initiated in order to turn cities into “pure” industrial centers. In Peking, nearly 100,000 were expelled in less than a month from late August. One eyewitness saw the vast waiting room at Peking railway station crammed with children waiting to be exiled with their parents. Red Guards ordered the children to kneel down, and then walked around aiming blows at their heads with brass-buckled belts. Some even poured scalding hot water over them as a farewell souvenir, while other passengers tried to find a place to hide.

IN SUMMER 1966 Red Guards ravaged every city and town, and some areas in the countryside. “Home,” with books and anything associated with culture, became a dangerous place. Fearing that the Red Guards might burst in and torture them if “culture” was found in their possession, frightened citizens burned their own books or sold them as scrap paper, and destroyed their own art objects. Mao thus succeeded in wiping out culture from Chinese homes. Outside, he was also fulfillling his long-held goal of erasing China’s past from the minds of his subjects. A large number of historical monuments, the most visible manifestation of the nation’s civilization, which had so far survived Mao’s loathing, was demolished. In Peking, of 6,843 monuments still standing in 1958, 4,922 were now obliterated.