Mao: The Unknown Story

In March, with the new enforcers in place, pupils and students were ordered back to their schools — although, once there, they could only kick their heels, as the old textbooks, teaching methods and teachers had all been condemned, and nobody knew what to do. Normal schooling did not exist for most young people until after Mao’s death, a decade later.

In society at large, the economy ran much as usual, except for relatively minor disruptions caused by the personnel changes. People went to work as before. Shops were open, as were banks. Hospitals, factories, mines, the post, and, with some interruptions, transport, all operated fairly normally. The Superpower Program, far from being paralyzed, as is often thought, was given unprecedented priority in the Cultural Revolution, and investment in it increased. Agriculture did no worse than before.

What changed, apart from the bosses, was life outside work. Leisure disappeared. Instead, there were endless mind-numbing — but nerve-racking — meetings to read and reread Mao’s works and People’s Daily articles. People were herded into numerous violent denunciation rallies against “capitalist-roaders” and other appointed enemies. Public brutality became an inescapable part of daily life. Each institution ran its de facto prison, in which victims were tortured, some to death. Moreover, there were no ways to relax, as there were now virtually no books to read, or magazines, or films, plays, opera; no light music on the radio. For entertainment there were only Mao Thought Propaganda Teams, who sang Mao’s quotations set to raucous music, and danced militantly waving the Little Red Book. Not even Mme Mao’s eight “model shows” were performed for the public yet, as their staging had to be under draconian central control.

ONE TASK OF the new enforcers was to screen the old cadres to explore whether they had ever resisted Mao’s orders, even passively. Each of the millions of ousted officials had a “case team” combing through his or her past. At the very top was a Central Special Case Team, a highly secret group chaired by Chou En-lai, with Kang Sheng as his deputy, and staffed by middle-ranking army officers. This was the body that investigated people personally designated by Mao. Since he especially wanted to find out whether any of his top echelon had been plotting against him with the Russians, the key case in the military was that of Marshal Ho Lung, the unlucky recipient of Russian defense minister Malinovsky’s remarks about getting rid of Mao. All Ho’s old subordinates were implicated in this case, and Ho himself died as a result.

The Central Special Case Team had the power to arrest, interrogate — and torture. They also recommended what punishments should be meted out. Chou’s signature appeared on many arrest warrants and recommendations for punishment, including death sentences.

While suspects were being interrogated under torture, and while his old power base endured unprecedented suffering, Mao cavorted. The dancing still went on at Zhongnanhai with girls called in, some to share his large bed. To the tune of “The Pleasure-Seeking Dragon Flirts with the Phoenix,” which was deemed “pornographic” by his own regime, and long banned, Mao danced on. One by one, as the days went by, his colleagues disappeared from the dance floor, either purged, or simply having lost any appetite for fun. Eventually, Mao alone of the leaders still trod the floor.

Out of his remaining top echelon, there came only one burst of defiance. In February 1967, some of the Politburo members who had not fallen spoke up, voicing rage at what was happening to their fellow Party cadres. Mao’s old follower Tan Zhen-lin, who had been in charge of agriculture during the famine (showing how far he was prepared to go along with Mao), exploded to the Small Group: “Your purpose is to get rid of all the old cadres … They made revolution for decades, and end up with their families broken and themselves dying. It is the cruellest struggle in Party history, worse than any time before.” Next day, he wrote to Lin Biao: “I have come to the absolute end of my tether … I am ready to die … to stop them.” Foreign Minister Chen Yi called the Cultural Revolution “one big torture chamber.”

But these elite survivors were either devoted veteran followers of Mao’s, or men already broken by him. Faced with his wrath, they folded. With the critical duo of Lin Biao and Chou behind him, Mao had the dissenters harassed; then, when they had been suitably cowed, he extended them an olive branch. The mini-revolt was easily quelled.