Mao: The Unknown Story

The regime carefully controlled the way it dribbled out information about Lin’s death. Deng heard the news officially two months later, when a document was read out to workers in his tractor factory. The document mentioned Lin’s “crimes of persecuting veteran comrades.” The official who was chairing the meeting said: “Chairman Mao would never have driven old cadres to death” (i.e., as Lin had done), and turned to Deng: “Old Deng is sitting here, he can vouch for this. Old Deng, wouldn’t you say so?” Deng stolidly declined the invitation to advertise Mao’s innocence, remaining totally silent, his expression not changing one flicker.

When he came home that day, Deng allowed himself to show excitement and condemned Lin explicitly, which for him was really letting rip, as he never talked politics with his family. Two days later, he wrote to Mao for the first time since his downfall five years before, asking for a job. With Mao’s major prop gone, he sensed that Mao might have to repeal the Cultural Revolution.

No reply came from Mao. To reinstate the man he had publicly condemned as “the second-biggest capitalist-roader” would be an admission of failure. Even when Chou En-lai was diagnosed with cancer in May 1972, and Mao had no one else but Deng with the caliber to run his vast kingdom, still he would not send for Deng.

Instead, Mao promoted Wang Hong-wen, the former Rebel leader in Shanghai, one of the products of the Cultural Revolution. Wang was a faceless good-looking 37-year-old, who had been a security man in a textile factory before the Purge. He was clever, and, like a lot of Rebel leaders, had a certain flair for inspiring gang allegiance. Mao brought him to Peking and began to train him up, and a year later, in August 1973, made him his No. 3, after Chou.

But the Protégé was not up to filling Chou’s shoes, especially when it came to dealing with foreigners. The Australian ambassador, Stephen FitzGerald, who met him with Mao in November 1973, noted that he was extremely jumpy, and did not speak a word during the entire meeting, except at the end. The Australian prime minister, Whitlam, had mentioned the Communist “Nanchang Uprising” of 1927, and had observed that the youngish man could not have been born at the time. When the meeting was over, the Protégé piped up nervously: “Prime Minister, you said that at the time of the Nanchang Uprising I was not born. But I have been making revolution for a long time.” This was his only contribution.

Mao felt he had to have a standby. So, when Chou’s cancer worsened, Mao had Deng brought to Peking in February 1973, and made him a vice-premier, mainly to entertain visiting foreign statesmen. Although Deng lacked Chou’s polish, and spat constantly during meetings, which unsettled quite a few of his interlocutors, he had stature.

Late that year, Chou’s health deteriorated drastically. Mao made the momentous decision to put Deng in charge of the army (for which Deng was restored to the Politburo). Deng was the only person who could guarantee stability in the military, where Mao’s Protégé had zero influence. Marshal Yeh, the man Mao had appointed army chief after Lin Biao’s death, lacked the necessary gravitas.

Giving Deng this much power was a gamble, but it proved well judged. Deng never made a move against Mao’s person while Mao was alive, and even after Mao’s death, insisted that Mao must not be denounced personally, although he repealed much of Mao’s core legacy.

As soon as Deng assumed power, he started to push through his own program. Central to this was rolling back the Cultural Revolution. He tried to rehabilitate and re-employ more purged cadres en masse, to resurrect some culture, and to raise living standards, a concern that had been condemned as “revisionist.” Mao regarded the Cultural Revolution as his greatest achievement since taking power in 1949 and kept four remaining Cultural Revolution Rottweilers in place to counter Deng: Mme Mao, Zhang “the Cobra,” media chief Yao, and Protégé Wang — a group that Mao dubbed “the Gang of Four.” (Kang Sheng was out of action by now with terminal cancer, and was to die in 1975.) This was Mao’s own gang, who represented his true policy.