Mao: The Unknown Story

People stopped going to work. The economy was now seriously interrupted. Arms industries, even the nuclear program, were upset for the first time since the Cultural Revolution had started. An element of anarchy even crept into the Praetorian Guard. One of its members gave Mao’s travel schedule to a student who fancied himself as a detective, who was able to tail Mao covertly. Although both were soon arrested, such a lapse in security had never happened before.

A YEAR LATER, in 1968, factional clashes with firearms had shown little sign of abating, despite a flood of commands from Peking. One man who was being conspicuously unruly was Kuai Da-fu, the Qinghua University student whom Mao had used to torment Liu Shao-chi and his wife. Kuai had by now become the most famous “leftist” in the country, and he was determined to bring his opponents in the university to their knees. He ignored repeated orders to stop, as he claimed that his rivals were “Conservatives,” and therefore fair game to beat up, in accordance with Mao’s earlier directive. Mao had to step in personally to get him to toe the line, and simultaneously made an example of him to send a warning to the whole country that factional wars had to stop.

On 27 July, 40,000 unarmed workers were dispatched to Kuai’s university to disarm his group. Not knowing that the order came from Mao, Kuai resisted, and his group killed five workers and wounded more than 700. Next day Kuai was summoned to the Great Hall of the People. There he was astonished to see Mao, flanked by all the top leaders. Kuai threw himself into Mao’s arms — probably the only time an outsider ever did this — and sobbed his heart out. Mao, too, apparently cried, quite possibly out of frustration at his own inability to reconcile his impulses with his practical needs. The impulse side of Mao wanted the many “Conservatives” he knew were out there to be beaten to a pulp. But the practical side recognized that in his own interest he had to restore order. He told Kuai and the other top Rebel leaders present that he himself had been behind the disarming of Kuai’s faction, and that if they, or anyone else, went on fighting, the army would “eliminate” them. Kuai and his colleagues signed a record of this message, which was made public.

Kuai was packed off to a plant in far Ningxia. All university student organizations were now disbanded, and the students put to work in ordinary jobs, with many dispersed to the hinterland. This diaspora was followed by that of well over 10 million middle-school pupils, who were scattered to villages and state farms across China. In the following years, over 16 million urban youth were rusticated — which was also a way of dealing with unemployment. This ended the era of the student Red Guards.

But among non-student Rebel groups, sporadic mini — civil wars dragged on in many places. To stop them, a phantom conspiracy called “the May 16 Corps” was invented as a catch-all to condemn anyone who disobeyed orders. Kuai, who was nationally famous, was turned into its “chief” and detained. Altogether, under this rubric, a staggering 10 million Rebels were condemned, of whom 3.5 million were arrested.

STATE TERROR NOT ONLY hugely raised the level of violence, but was much more horrific than the factional fighting itself. The clearest illustration of this came in the southern province of Guangxi in summer 1968. There, one faction refused to recognize the authority of Mao’s point man, General Wei Guo-qing (who had helped direct the climactic battle against the French at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam in 1954). Wei was determined to use any degree of force to crush his opponents.

This involved not only using machine-guns, mortars and artillery, but also inciting gruesome murders of large numbers of people designated by the regime as “class enemies.” As the boss of Binyang County, an army officer, told his subordinates: “I’m now going to reveal the bottom line to you: in this campaign, we must put to death about one-third or a quarter of the class enemies by bludgeoning or stoning.” Killing by straightforward execution was rated not frightening enough: “It’s OK to execute a few to start with, but we must guide people to use fists, stones and clubs. Only this way can we educate the masses.” Over a period of eleven days after the order was given, between 26 July and 6 August 1968, 3,681 people in this county were beaten to death, many in ghastly ways; by comparison, the death toll in the previous two years of the Cultural Revolution had been “only” 68. This bout of killing claimed some 100,000 lives in the province.