Mao: The Unknown Story

UP TO NOW, August 1970, the Mao — Lin partnership had worked extremely well. For the past four years Lin Biao had delivered the support from the army that Mao needed to purge the Party and reconstruct his regime. And Mao had done the maximum to satisfy Lin Biao’s thirst for power, basically handing the army to him, and writing him into the Party charter as No. 2 and successor. Lin’s wife had been brought into the Politburo (making her one of only two women members, along with Mme Mao), breaking a long-standing taboo against wife-promotion. Mao even tolerated a Lin mini-cult. Each day, when the chant went up: “May the Great Helmsman [etc.] Chairman Mao live for ever and ever!” accompanied by the brandishing of the Little Red Book, the homage was followed by: “May Vice-Chairman Lin be very healthy, and for ever healthy!”

But at Lushan, it was brought home to Mao that he had let Lin grow too powerful, and that this now posed a threat to himself. It started with a seemingly innocuous dispute about the presidency, a post last occupied by Liu Shao-chi. Mao wanted the post abolished. Lin insisted that it should stay, and that Mao should be the president. The reason Lin stuck to his contrary position was because he wanted to be vice-president, which would make him the formal No. 2 in the state hierarchy. Among the top five (Mao, Lin, Chou, Kang Sheng and Chen Bo-da), the line-up was four in favor of Lin’s view, against Mao’s solitary one. This was an amazing sign of Lin’s power, as it showed that for Mao’s top colleagues, Lin’s interests overrode Mao’s wishes.

Mao was further enraged when Lin went ahead and announced his proposal to the conclave on 23 August without first clearing it with Mao. Immediately after Lin spoke, the head of the Praetorian Guard, Wang Dong-xing, backed him up, demanding in fevered language that Mao become president, and Lin vice-president—even though he, too, knew that this was diametrically opposed to what Mao wanted. The man on whom Mao relied for his life was also putting Lin’s wishes before Mao’s.

The reason the head of the Praetorian Guard acted this way was because he felt Lin’s patronage was essential. He had seen the fate that befell his de facto predecessor, Luo the Tall, who had been as close to Mao as it was possible to be, and yet whom Mao had sacrificed when Lin had demanded it. And now he saw Mao apparently making another similar sacrifice: Mao had just endorsed Lin’s request to victimize yet another man who had Mao’s deep trust, the Party No. 7, Zhang Chun-qiao.

The 53-year-old Zhang had been a middle-ranking functionary in Shanghai who had caught Mao’s eye with his ability to churn out articles that dressed up Mao’s self-serving deeds in Marxist garb. At the start of the Cultural Revolution, Mao had jumped him to the top to perform the crucial job of packaging the Purge in ideological phraseology. Zhang was the person largely responsible for the texts that caused many people in China and abroad to entertain illusions about the true nature of the Cultural Revolution.

Zhang was reticent and reserved, and wore a face that colleagues found hard to read. He had been dubbed “the Cobra” by Lin and his coterie, partly because he wore glasses, and partly because of his snakelike qualities. Lin Biao hated him because he was not one of his own cronies, and because Mao, ever one to sow discord among his underlings, had told Lin that the Cobra might one day succeed Lin when Lin got old. For some time, Lin had been trying to undermine the Cobra by sending Mao dirt on him. Just before delivering his speech at Lushan, Lin told Mao that he intended to condemn the Cobra in it, and Mao gave Lin the nod to proceed. After Lin’s speech, which was fierce, other participants piled in, demanding, in the brutal language of the day, that the Cobra be “put to the death of the thousand cuts.”

The lesson was clear: however close or important anyone was to Mao, that person had to have Lin’s blessing to survive. Mao’s favor on its own was not enough. This was a huge power shift. The thought that Lin’s patronage was now more critical than his own rocked Mao.

He set out at once to demonstrate that Lin was not omnipotent. He vetoed any possibility of having a presidency, and called a halt to attacks on the Cobra, and to any further discussion of Lin’s speech. Mao proceeded to show enormous displeasure towards Lin, and then condemned his old secretary Chen Bo-da, the Party No. 5, who had become too pally with Lin. As usual in such cases, Chen was put under house arrest, and then thrown into prison — an experience he described as like being “hit on the head by an atom bomb.”