THE SCORPION’S BITE AND THE FALL OF LITTLE CANNON: MAO UNLEASHES JIANG QING
In November 1965, the seventy-one-year-old Mao, after enduring three years of rising opposition, summoned his wife Jiang Qing, the ex-actress turned cultural commissar who admired classical movies and operas yet had become the enforcer of Party kitsch, and ordered her to draft a manifesto of revolution. Culture was the tool, the aim ‘to punish this Party of ours’, the target ‘the black line opposed to Mao Zedong Thought’. Watching him cavorting with his harem of dancers, Jiang was hurt. ‘In political struggle,’ she remarked, ‘no leaders can beat him,’ but ‘in private conduct, nobody can restrain him either’. When she discovered Mao, in his mid-sixties, in bed with a nurse, she yelled at him and left. On reflection she sent him a note from the novel Journey to the West: ‘My body is in Water Curtain Cave, but my heart is following you.’ Mao had his lovers, she wanted a career. Mao had privately come to loathe Jiang – ‘poisonous as a scorpion’ – but for years she had been disdained by Party grandees. Now she had her revenge. ‘I was Chairman Mao’s dog,’ she said later. ‘Whoever Chairman Mao asked me to bite, I bit.’
Mao ordered her to recruit Lin Biao, the vicious, hypochondriacal and cadaverous marshal recently promoted to vice-chairman, who had compiled a red book of Mao’s sayings. Now Mao promised to make him his successor. Lin and his equally neurotic wife, who was embittered by sexual gossip about her past, joined Mao’s cabal along with the black-clad security boss Kang Sheng. The wives were to be players; jealousies would play their part; vengeance was savoured.
Mao’s crisis was self-inflicted. In 1958, he had launched a Great Leap Forward, a frenzied, demented industrialization campaign designed to help China ‘overtake all capitalist countries’ at breakneck speed by forcing peasants and workers to produce surplus food to pay for more steel, more ships, overruling the advice of experts: ‘Bourgeois professors’ knowledge should be treated like dog farts.’ The food was sold to pay for new technology and weaponry. Ninety million Chinese were forced to build steel furnaces that produced worthless metal. Soon the peasants were starving: in three years, thirty-eight million perished, the worst famine of the century.* ‘Working like this,’ said Mao in May 1958, ‘half of China may have to die.’ He added, ‘This happened before a few times in Chinese history.’ In 1959, the defence minister Peng criticized the Leap but was removed and replaced by Lin Biao. By 1962, even President Liu Shaoqi, Mao’s deputy, was attacking the Leap: ‘People don’t have enough food.’ Liu, Premier Zhou and the pragmatic vice-premier Deng Xiaoping, who would be the other key figure of the Chinese century, moderated the requisitioning of food.
Abroad, while jousting with the bewildered Russians, Mao was projecting power, the start of a new version of history in which China appears as a perpetual paramount power of east Asia – a role it had played for the climaxes of the Tang, Ming and Manchu interspersed with centuries of fragmentation. In 1959, Mao swallowed Tibet, driving out its young sacred king, the Dalai Lama, who was welcomed by Nehru in India. Mao decided to teach Nehru a lesson in Chinese power.
Nehru had presided over the world’s biggest democracy for a decade, pursuing socialistic planning projects and developing power and steel production, officially ‘non-aligned’ but effectively allied with the Soviets: he criticized the Anglo-French invasion of Egypt but simultaneously refused to criticize Khrushchev’s crushing of Hungary. His challenge was ‘creating a just state by just means’ and ‘creating a secular state in a religious country’, yet he did little to challenge poverty or the caste system, which he regarded as part of Hindu culture. His approach to the people was aristocratic. ‘I rather enjoy these fresh contacts with the Indian people,’ he told Edwina Mountbatten. ‘The effort to explain in simple language … and reach the minds of these simple folk is both exhausting and exhilarating.’ Yet his inherited British Raj was bedevilled by armed rebellions, all brutally suppressed, and by the ulcer of Kashmir. In 1961, he seized Goa from Portugal and in the next year received Pondicherry from France.
Nehru had started to procure the Bomb for India. ‘We must have the capability,’ he said. ‘We should first prove ourselves and then talk of Gandhi, non-violence and a world without nuclear weapons.’ Khrushchev had visited Delhi, but Nehru got on best with Zhou Enlai; he was fascinated by China, which he saw as India’s great partner in the coming Asian century. Yet now Mao challenged the Indian–Chinese border, ill defined by the Manchus and Victorians. ‘Not a yard of India is going out of India,’ responded Nehru, who appointed an inept Kashmiri crony as chief of staff and ordered him to remove Chinese troops.
In October 1962, Mao’s troops routed the Indians and advanced. Nehru, who had revelled in his Chinese alliance, desperately rang Washington and begged for US bombers. Indira’s forty-ninth birthday party the following month was miserable. When the family asked Nehru how he was, he just replied, ‘The Chinese have broken through the Sela Pass.’ Mao could have continued all the way to Kolkata, but he halted. ‘Nothing grieved me more,’ Nehru said. Indira noticed his decline: ‘The strain is tremendous.’ On 27 May 1964, Nehru, after eighteen years as prime minister, died of a heart attack aged seventy-four. Indira had lost her closest companion and even her home, for she had lived in Nehru’s residence since independence. As she considered leaving India and running a boarding house in London, Congress grandees chose Lal Shastri as prime minister, who appointed Indira information minister. Her time would come sooner than she expected.
Successes abroad did not secure Mao at home. In April 1966, he unleashed Jiang Qing and her ‘kill culture’ manifesto, an ‘anti-Party clique’ were denounced and Lin Biao declared that anyone who criticized Mao should be ‘executed … the whole nation must call for their blood’. As Mao unlocked a seething resentment against Party barons, in private at the Politburo Lin Biao answered the poison-pen letters signed ‘Montecristo’ that accused his wife of sexual adventures by bizarrely reading out a declaration that Madame Lin ‘was a virgin when she married me’ and ‘had no sexual amorous relationship’. In May, once he had secured the backing of Premier Zhou, Mao orchestrated the Terror in detail through his Cultural Revolution Group,* ordering students to punish any ‘bourgeois ideas’ among teachers and suspending lessons. Professors at Beijing University were beaten by gangs of so-called Red Guards.
In July, Mao signalled his power by swimming in the Yangzte. ‘I wanted to show off,’ he admitted afterwards, but if he had not been surreptitiously helped by his guard, ‘I’d have died.’ At Zhongnanhai, the reinvigorated septuagenarian moved into a new residence, the Poolside House, next to his own indoor pool. Within Zhongnanhai, when Mao summoned his courtiers, the guards would say, ‘You’re wanted at the swimming pool.’
That August, Mao himself wrote a letter to the nation’s students, attacking ‘poisonous’ Party leaders and ‘the arrogance of the bourgeoisie’ and ordering, ‘Bombard the headquarters.’ He then appeared with Lin at a parade holding his Little Red Book. He instigated a public witch-hunt: the minister of coal was beaten, bent forward with his arms pulled back – the torture known as jet-planing – and then stabbed with knives. Across China, gangs of students and brigands attacked their bosses, from teachers to Party leaders, holding ‘struggle sessions’ in which the victims were beaten up but forced to incriminate themselves – a new template for leftist intolerance.