Mao: The Unknown Story

Another province that went through great trauma was Yunnan, in the southwest, where (according to official figures) in one trumped-up case alone nearly 1,400,000 people were persecuted under the new provincial boss, General Tan Fu-ren. Seventeen thousand of them were either executed or beaten to death, or driven to suicide. In a rare dramatic example of how those who rule by the sword can be felled by the sword, General Tan himself was assassinated in December 1970, making him the highest official ever to have died this way in Mao’s China, where assassinations were extremely rare. The shooter was an HQ staff officer called Wang Zi-zheng, who actually held no personal grudge against General Tan. It was Mao’s regime he hated. Back in 1947, he had been involved with an anti-Communist force that had shot dead a Communist militia chief. He had then escaped. Now, over two decades later, his home village had started a manhunt for him. Even though he was more than a thousand miles away and had changed his name, he was found and detained in April 1970. Knowing what his fate was likely to be, he decided he would try to kill General Tan, who was not only the biggest VIP around, but was doing terrible things to Yunnan. One night, the staff officer escaped from detention, went home to say goodbye to his wife and son, stole two pistols and twenty bullets from the HQ, where they were locked in a safe (as always), climbed into General Tan’s house and shot him dead. When his pursuers came for him, this unique avenger shot and wounded two of them before turning the gun on himself.

BY EARLY 1969 Mao’s new power apparatus was secured. In April he convened a Party Congress, the 9th, to formalize his reconstructed regime. The previous congress had been in 1956. Although the Party charter stipulated one every five years, Mao had held off letting this one convene for thirteen years, until he felt that all opposition had been thoroughly purged.

The new delegates were selected exclusively for their loyalty to Mao, and the yardstick of loyalty was how cruel and harsh they had been to Mao’s enemies. Inside the congress hall, where no such enemies were present, they tried to demonstrate their fealty by jumping up incessantly, shouting slogans such as “Long live Chairman Mao!” while Mao was speaking. It took Mao twenty minutes to get through two pages of his opening address. This farce was not something he wanted from his top echelon, which was meant to be a practical machine. He looked irritated, and cut short his speech. After the session, he had the congress secretariat issue rules banning unscheduled slogan chanting.

The core leadership under Mao now consisted of Lin Biao, Chou En-lai and two chiefs of the Small Group: Chen Bo-da and Kang Sheng. The Small Group, Mao’s office dealing with the Cultural Revolution, was wound up. Mme Mao was brought into the Politburo. So were Lin Biao’s wife and his main cronies, such as army chief of staff (and Lin’s wife’s lover) Huang Yong-sheng. In the Central Committee, 81 percent of the members were new, and nearly half the new intake were army men, including the generals who had presided over the atrocities in Guangxi, Yunnan and Inner Mongolia. Lin himself collected the ultimate prize of being written into the Party charter as Mao’s No. 2 and successor, an unprecedented badge of power and glory.

Mao had completed his Great Purge, though this did not mean that killings ceased. In the ten years from when Mao started the Purge until his death in 1976, at least 3 million people died violent deaths, and post-Mao leaders acknowledged that 100 million people, one-ninth of the entire population, suffered in one way or another. The killings were sponsored by the state. Only a small percentage was at the hands of Red Guards. Most were the direct work of Mao’s reconstructed regime.

51. A WAR SCARE (1969–71 AGE 75–77)

MAO HAD PRESENTED the Cultural Revolution as a move to rid China of Soviet-style “revisionists.” So, when he was gearing up to declare victory and inaugurate his post-Purge regime at the 9th Congress in April 1969, he looked for a symbol of triumph over the Soviet Union. He set his mind on a small, controlled, armed engagement with Russia, a border clash.

There had been many clashes along the 7,000-kilometer Sino-Soviet border. For the site of his battle, Mao chose a small uninhabited island called Zhenbao (Damansky in Russian), in the Ussuri River on the northeast border. This was a clever choice, as Russia’s claim to the island was far from established.