Mao: The Unknown Story

YQ: If you fancy other women, that’s all right. But just one thing. She must be absolutely tight-lipped. If she talks, and if I am implicated, there will be tragedy …

HUANG [speechless] …

YQ: I feel that if we handle it well, it will be good for you, good for me … Do you believe this?

HUANG: I do! I do! I do!

With this mixture of genuine personal feeling and bare-faced political calculation, the fate of the new chief of staff was bound up with that of the Lins.

Lin turned the air force into his main base. His lackey there made the Lins’ 24-year-old son “Tiger” deputy chief of its war department and told the air force it “must report everything to [Tiger], and take orders from [Tiger].” Lin’s daughter Dodo was made deputy editor of the air force paper.

IN SUMMER 1967, dissatisfied with the army, Mao contemplated forming a kind of “storm trooper” force, composed of those Rebels whom he called “the Left.” After the Wuhan scare in July, in a vengeful mood, Mao incited “the Left” to stage assaults on other groups that he termed “the Conservatives.” When Mao fled to Shanghai, he got “the Left” there to attack the rival group. The result was the biggest single factional battle in Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution, which took place two weeks after Mao arrived. That day, 4 August, over 100,000 “Left” militants, armed with spears and iron bars, surrounded some 25,000 of their rivals in a factory by the sea, with the exit sealed off by the navy — a deployment inconceivable without Mao’s orders. By the end of the day, over 900 people had been wounded, many of them crippled and some dying. Two helicopters filmed the scene — again impossible unless Mao gave the word — and a camera crew had set up in an ideal vantage point two days ahead. A 2½-hour documentary of the event was shown to organized crowds. Mao watched it in his villa. The man who led the attack, Wang Hong-wen, was subsequently promoted by Mao to be his national No. 3. “I’ve seen your film,” Mao told him, congratulating him on “winning a victory.”

On the day of the battle, Mao gave orders to form his “storm troopers.” “Arm the Left,” he wrote to his wife, the leader of the Small Group. “Why can’t we arm the Left? They [the Conservatives] beat us up, we can beat them up, too.”

But this order to distribute arms to civilians opened up a can of worms. While in some places, like Wuhan, the distinction between moderates and “the Left” was fairly clear, in many others even the most devoted Mao followers could not tell which group was more militant, as all the groups were vying to appear the most aggressive. Typical was Anhui province, where the two opposing blocs rejoiced in the ultra-political names of “Wonderful” and “Fart.” Because the former had got into the old government offices first, it declared that it had seized power from the capitalist-roaders, and proclaimed: “Our seizing power is wonderful.” The latter snorted: “ ‘Wonderful’? What a load of fart!”

Neither in fact was more militant than the other; both were just competing to be incorporated into the new power structure. Lacking any criterion more precise than the ill-defined “militancy” towards capitalist-roaders, army units handed out weapons to whichever faction they decided was “the Left.” Other factions then raided arsenals to seize weapons for themselves, often with the collusion of their own sympathizers in the army. As a result, guns became widely available. Factional fighting escalated into mini — civil wars across China, involving practically all urban areas. The regime began sliding into something close to anarchy for the first time since taking power nearly two decades before.

Mao quickly realized that his “storm troopers” notion would not work everywhere. So, while he continued to build up a force of them 1 million strong in Shanghai, where he had particularly strict control, elsewhere he had to rescind his decree to “arm the Left,” and on 5 September ordered that all guns must be returned. However, those who had acquired them were often reluctant to give them up. More than a year later, Mao told Albania’s defense minister that 360,000 weapons had been collected in Sichuan alone (a province of 70 million people), and a lot more were still out there. With guns now in unofficial hands, “bandits” appeared in remote areas.

Mao had unleashed a dynamic that was undermining his own power. He had to abandon his attempt to identify factions as Left and Conservative, and called for all groups to unite. But his orders were ignored. Claiming that they were crushing “Conservatives,” young men, mostly, carried on fighting, finding it more fun than doing boring jobs.