Mao: The Unknown Story

Like the list of people to be spared, the list of monuments to be preserved was a short one. Mao did want to keep some monuments, like Tiananmen Gate, where he could stand to be hailed by “the masses.” The Forbidden City and a number of other historical sites were put under protection and many were closed down, thus depriving the population of access even to the fraction of their cultural inheritance that survived. Not spared was China’s leading architect, Liang Si-cheng, who had described Mao’s wish to see “chimneys everywhere” in Peking as “too horrifying a picture to bear thinking about.” Now he was subjected to public humiliation and abuse, and brutal house raids. His collection of books was destroyed, and his family expelled to one small room, with broken windows and ice-covered floor and walls. Chronically ill, Liang died in 1972.

Contrary to what is widely believed, the vast majority of the destruction was not spontaneous, but state-sponsored. Before Mao chided the Red Guards for being “too civilized” on 23 August, there had been no vandalism against historical monuments. It was on that day, only after Mao spoke, that the first statue was broken — a Buddha in the Summer Palace in Peking. From then on, when important sites were being wrecked, official specialists were present to pick out the most valuable objects for the state, while the rest were carted off and melted down, or pulped.

It was Mao’s office, the Small Group, which ordered the desecration of the home of the man whose name was synonymous with Chinese culture, Confucius. The home, in Shandong, was a rich museum, as emperors and artists had come there to pay homage, commissioning monuments and donating their art. The locals had been ordered to wreck it, but had responded by going slow. So Red Guards were dispatched from Peking. In their pledge before setting off, they said that the sage was “the enemy rival to death of Mao Tse-tung Thought.” Mao did, indeed, hate Confucius, because Confucianism enjoined that a ruler must care for his subjects, and as Mao himself put it, “Confucius is humanism … that is to say, People-centred-ism.”

In the annihilation of culture, Mme Mao played a key role as her husband’s police chief for this field. And she made sure there was no resurrection of culture for the rest of Mao’s life. Partly thanks to her, for a decade, until Mao’s death in 1976, old books remained banned, and among the handful of new books of general interest that were published, all of them sported Mao’s quotations, in bold, on every other page. There were a few paintings and some songs around, but they all served propaganda purposes, and eulogized Mao. Virtually the only performing arts allowed were eight “revolutionary model shows” and a few films that Mme Mao had had a hand in producing. China became a cultural desert.

BY MID-SEPTEMBER 1966, the country was thoroughly terrorized and Mao felt confident enough to start stalking his real target: Party officials. On 15 September, Lin Biao instructed a Red Guards’ rally on Tiananmen Square that they were to shift their target and “focus on denouncing those power-holders inside the Party pursuing a capitalist road,” known as “capitalist-roaders.” What Lin — and Mao — really meant was the old enforcers who had shown distaste for Mao’s extremist policies. Mao aimed to get rid of them en masse, and the call went out to attack them right across China.

For this job, new groups were formed, who sometimes called themselves Red Guards but were generally known as “Rebels,” because they were taking on their bosses. And these Rebels were mostly adults. The original Red Guard groups, most of them made up of teenagers, now fell apart, as they had been organized around the children of those same high officials who now became targets. Mao had used the young Red Guards to terrorize society at large. Now he was moving against his real enemies, Party officials; and for this he used a broader, mainly older force.

With Mao’s explicit support, Rebels denounced their bosses in wall posters and at violent rallies. But anyone who thought the Party dictatorship might be weakened had their hopes dashed fast. People who tried to get access to their own files (which the regime held on everyone), or to rehabilitate those the Party had persecuted, were instantly blocked. Orders poured out from Peking making it clear that, although Party officials were under attack, the Party’s rule was not to be loosened one bit. Victims of past persecutions were banned from joining Rebel organizations.