Mao: The Unknown Story

LIU WAS NEARLY seventy, and his health deteriorated fast. One leg became paralyzed, and he was in a state of permanent sleep deprivation, as the sleeping pills on which he had been dependent were now withheld. He was kept alive, barely. On 20 December 1967, his jailers recorded that they were “only keeping him alive, just short of starvation.” “Tea has been stopped …” His life-threatening ailments, pneumonia and diabetes, were treated, although, in a further Maoist turn of the screw, the doctors would curse him while patching him up. But his mental health was deliberately allowed to collapse. On 19 May 1968, his jailers reported that he “brushed his teeth with a comb and soap, put his socks on over his shoes and his underpants outside his trousers …” And in the cruel style that was the order of the day, they wrote that Liu “plays the idiot, and makes one disgusting fool of himself after another.”

That summer, Mao twice gave orders through Wang Dong-xing to the doctors and the guards that they must “keep him [Liu] alive until after the 9th Congress,” when Mao planned to have Liu expelled from the Party. If Liu was dead, this rigmarole would not provide Mao with the same satisfaction. Once the congress was over, the clear implication was that Liu should be left to die.

By October 1968, Liu had to be drip-fed through the nose, and it seemed he might die any minute. Mao was not ready for the congress, so the Central Committee — in fact, a rump minority which contained only 47 percent of the original members, the rest having been purged — was hastily convened to expel Liu from the Party. It also removed him from the presidency, an act that did not even pretend to follow constitutional procedure.

Liu’s case team had signally failed to come up with a case. Mao had told it he wanted a spy charge, which was a way of avoiding any policy issues, and of steering the investigators away from Liu’s links with himself. In fact, Mao was so nervous about Liu speaking to anyone that the team investigating Liu was forbidden even to set eyes on him, let alone ask him any questions. Instead, a large number of other people were imprisoned and interrogated, to try to turn up evidence against him. It was partly to accommodate key detainees in the Liu case that Qincheng, the prison for the “elite,” which had been built with the help of Russian advisers in the 1950s, was expanded by 50 percent. Its first inmate in the Cultural Revolution was Shi Zhe, who had interpreted for Liu with Stalin and who was pressed to say that Liu was a Russian spy. Also imprisoned here was the American Sidney Rittenberg, who had known Mme Liu in the 1940s. Pressure was put on him to say that he had recruited her, and Liu, for American intelligence. (Rittenberg observed that the interrogators, while going through the required frenzied motions, did not seem to believe their own case.) Attempts were also made to get former Nationalist intelligence chiefs to say that Guang-mei had spied for them.

Most of those detained and called upon to tell blatant lies tried their hardest not to comply. Among those who paid dearly for sticking to their guns were two former Party chiefs, Li Li-san and Lo Fu. Their families were thrown into prison, and the two men themselves were both to meet their deaths. Li-san’s Russian wife, who had stood by him through the purges in Russia in the 1930s when he had been imprisoned there for two years, now spent eight years in Mao’s prison.

Even some of the members of the Lius’ case team declined to fabricate evidence. As a result, the team itself had to be purged three times, and two of its three chiefs ended up in prison. It found itself in a Catch-22 situation, as concocting evidence could be as dangerous as failing to unearth it. On one occasion, the team claimed that Liu had wanted American troops to invade China in 1946, and that Liu had wanted to see President Truman about this. “Making such a claim,” Mao said, “is … to treat us like fools. America sending in troops en masse: even the Nationalists did not want that.” In the end, the team just piled up a list of assertions, one being that Liu “married the American spy Wang Guang-mei who had been sent to Yenan by the American Strategic Intelligence.” Its report, which was delivered to the Central Committee by Mao’s faithful slave, Chou En-lai, called Liu a “traitor, enemy agent and scab,” and recommended the death sentence. But Mao rejected it, as he did for Mme Liu.

Mao was kept fully informed about Liu’s last sufferings. Photographs were taken showing Liu in such agony that he had squeezed two hard plastic bottles right out of shape. In April 1969, when the 9th Congress convened at last, Mao announced in a voice devoid of even a show of pity, that Liu was at death’s door.