Mao: The Unknown Story

In his lucid hours, Liu had maintained his dignity. On 11 February 1968 he had written a last self-defense, in which he even had a go at Mao about his dictatorial style from back in the early 1920s. After that, Liu went totally silent. Mao’s whole modus operandi depended on breaking people, but he had failed to make Liu crawl.

On a cold October night, half-naked under a quilt, Liu was put on a plane to the city of Kaifeng. There, local doctors’ requests for an X-ray or hospitalization were denied. Death came within weeks, on 12 November 1969. Altogether, Liu had endured three years of physical suffering and mental anguish. He was cremated under a pseudonym, his face wrapped in white cloth. The crematorium staff had been told to vacate the premises, on the grounds that the corpse had a deadly infectious disease.

The extraordinary coda to Liu’s story is that his death was never made public during Mao’s lifetime. This seemingly anomalous behavior (most dictators like to dance on their enemies’ graves) was an indication of how insecure Mao felt. He was afraid that if the news got out, it would arouse sympathy for the dead man. In fact, the vilification of Liu continued for the rest of Mao’s life, with never a hint to the public that Liu was dead. Mao had got his revenge by making Liu die a painful and lingering death. But it cannot have tasted very sweet.

NOR DID MAO emerge a victor vis-à-vis his second-biggest hate, Marshal Peng De-huai. The first Rebel leader sent to Sichuan in December 1966 to haul Peng back to detention in Peking was so moved by Peng after he talked to him that he started to appeal on Peng’s behalf. The Rebel ended up in prison, but said he had no regrets for having stuck his neck out. Another Rebel leader who manhandled Peng expressed deep remorse later for what he had done. There is no question where people’s feelings lay when they knew what Peng stood for, or met him.

In Peking, Peng was dragged to scores of denunciation meetings, on Mao’s orders, at each one of which he was kicked by Rebels wearing heavy leather boots and beaten ferociously with staves. His ribs were broken, and he passed out repeatedly.

Unlike Liu, Peng was interrogated, some 260 times, as Mao genuinely feared he might have had some connection with Khrushchev. In solitary, Peng’s mind began to crack, but his redoubtable core never did. He wrote a lucid account of his life, refuting Mao’s accusations. The ending, written in September 1970, proclaimed: “I will still lift my head and shout a hundred times: my conscience is clear!”

Peng was a man of rugged constitution, and his ordeal lasted even longer than Liu’s — eight years, until 29 November 1974, when he was finally felled by cancer of the rectum. Like Liu, he was cremated under a pseudonym, and his death, too, was never announced while Mao remained alive.

The Belgian Communist Jacques Grippa, the most senior Maoist in Western Europe and a man who had himself been tortured in a Nazi camp, now wrote to Liu, as president, in Zhongnanhai. The letter was returned marked “Does not live at this address.”

50. THE CHAIRMAN’S NEW OUTFIT (1967–70 AGE 73–76)

BY EARLY 1967, Mao had axed millions of Party officials and replaced them mainly with army men. But he immediately found himself facing problems with the replacements. Most lacked sufficient brutality, and often protected and even re-employed purged officials, a feat they achieved by enlisting Mao’s hypocritical remark that “most of the old cadres are all right.” This was bad enough, but there was an additional cause for concern on Mao’s part. He had to rely on army officers to choose Rebels to staff the new set-up. The trouble was that in every region and institution there were different, rival groups, all calling themselves Rebels, and the military tended to incorporate the more moderate ones, even though Mao told them to promote “the Left,” i.e., those harshest in persecuting “capitalist-roaders.”

If the army men were allowed to have their way, Mao’s revenge would be incomplete. More important, if these new army enforcers turned out to be like the old officials, he would be back where he started. He had intended the Great Purge to install much more merciless enforcers.

One place that was giving Mao a headache was the city of Wuhan, his favorite spot for symbolic swims in the Yangtze. The commander there, Chen Zai-dao, had joined the Red Army in 1927 as a poverty-stricken peasant of eighteen, and risen through the ranks. General Chen was deeply averse to the Cultural Revolution, and had even shown sympathy for Mao’s primary target, Liu Shao-chi. In the province under his control, he reinstated large numbers of old officials, disbanded the most militant Rebel groups and arrested their leaders. In May 1967, when the moderates united into a province-wide organization called “the Million Peerless Troops,” which boasted a membership of 1.2 million, he supported them.