Mao Zedong (16 page)

As the recognized leader of the new China, presiding over close to 600 million people and an immense stratified bureaucracy, Mao was forced to spend much of his energies on national planning. Yet at the same time, from the preserved files of Mao’s correspondence in the early 1950s it is possible to see how news reached him across space and decades from three groups of people that he had known at a much more intimate level: the family of his previous wife, Yang Kaihui; the residents of his native village of Shaoshan or the adjacent market town of Xiangtan; and those who taught Mao or studied with him in Changsha. These letters gave him an intimate view of how the revolution was affecting individuals he knew well, and enabled him to place the larger national criteria in a smaller-scale series of contexts.

The Yang family were quickest off the mark. The first of their letters reached Mao just a week after he formally announced, from his rostrum atop Tiananmen, the formation of the People’s Republic of China. It came from Yang Kaihui’s brother, Yang Kaizhi. Kaizhi asked permission to come to the capital with some of his relatives. His mother—Mao’s previous mother-in-law—was not well, and she needed assistance. Kaizhi also wanted a job. In a frank but courteous reply, Mao told his brother-in-law not to come to the capital and not to put Mao “on the spot” by requesting special favors. Let the Hunan provincial committee of the Communist Party find him appropriate employment.

But the mere fact that Mao replied at all gave the Yang family recipients prestige and a major lift in their communities. By the following April, Yang Kaizhi could report that he was working for the provincial government of Hunan. An uncle of Yang Kaihui’s also wrote to Mao and received a courteous if guarded reply. Mao was more forthcoming when he got a letter from Li Shuyi, Yang Kaihui’s closest girlhood friend in the Fu xiang girls’ school of Changsha. Li Shuyi’s husband, a close boyhood friend of Mao‘s, had been shot by the same warlord who killed Yang Kaihui, giving the two surviving spouses an unusual kind of bond from the old days, which they relived by sharing poems. Li Shuyi desired to come to Beijing so that she could “study Marxism-Leninism with greater seriousness.” Mao dissuaded her from coming, but she later wrote again, asking Mao to help her get a job at the Beijing Literature and History Museum. Mao demurred, but offered to help her with some of the money he made from his publishing income. Presumably he was being well paid for his “Selected Works.”

A different voice from the intimate past was that of the nanny, Chen Yuying, whom Mao and Yang Kaihui had hired to look after their three children in the late 1920s. Writing on December 18, 1951, she reminded Mao of her loyalty to his children and requested permission to come and visit him. He gently deflected her, using “thrift” as his reason. She should stay in Changsha and work there, but if she needed assistance, Mao would try to see that she received it. Other letters show that Mao was sending, through his personal secretary, two payments every year to the Yang family as a “subsidy.” The payments were large, each one being at least ten times more than a well-off peasant’s annual income at that time. Mao also arranged for visits to the Yang family graves, and for special celebrations in honor of Yang Kaihui’s mother, who was still alive in the early 1950s.

Other correspondents, evoking Mao’s past, had stranger tales to tell. One classmate of Mao’s from the Changsha normal school had gone on to become an assemblyman under the Beijing militarists and later a member of the Guomindang. Now he was in financial straits. Mao arranged for him to be given some help. Another schoolmate of Mao’s from an even earlier time, when they attended the Xiangxiang primary school, reported that his two sons had been shot as counterrevolutionaries during the land reform of 1952. Because of his children’s crimes, the father was put under surveillance for a year and forbidden membership in the local peasant association. His only crime was to have worked for the Guomindang for five months in 1928. He now claimed poor-peasant status. Mao suggested he continue to reform and “listen to the cadres.”

Pushing Mao’s memories back to the fall of the Qing dynasty, two of Mao’s Changsha normal-school teachers wrote, one a former principal and the other a history instructor. Now in their seventies, both were in dire financial need. They also reported that Mao’s revered classical literature teacher, “Yuan the Beard,” had died, leaving his seventy-year-old widow starving. Mao suggested a small subsidy from local Party funds for all three. The daughter-in-law of Mao’s math teacher from the same school (he had hated mathematics) wrote, trying to get three (of her eight) children into a school for Communist cadre relatives. Mao was not sure it would be possible, but he gave her some names to try and said she could use his reply letter to vouch for her. A spate of other letters came from army men he knew in 1911, Shaoshan and Xiangtan residents, staff of the 1919 magazine
New Hunan,
and members of the New People’s Study Society, of which Mao had been the diligent secretary in 1920. Some of these pointed out grave local abuses in the way the Party was now operating, especially in grain requisitioning and bandit suppression.

But such personal village and family voices tailed off as Mao’s obligations increased. By late 1953, when he celebrated his sixtieth birthday, Mao was not only chairman of the Communist Party, which now had more than five million members, and chairman of the military commission that controlled the armed forces, he was also chairman of the People’s Republic of China itself. In addition to the maze of the ministries in Beijing—there were already thirty-five, and the number was soon to double—the Party had its own organization in every province and rural township, while the military were subdivided into regional zones, each of which had to integrate its operations with the administrative and Party structures. The small Standing Committee of the Politburo, over which Mao presided, thus had to supervise the ultimate integration of all these subunits. With all these demands on Mao’s time, the growing array of private secretaries and bureaucrats around him began to process and sort his letters for him, and those that criticized the government or the Party were often returned—without Mao’s knowledge—to the very local leaders who were being criticized. Furthermore, the end of the Korean War and Stalin’s death in 1953 left Mao in a virtually unchallengeable position within the world Communist pantheon. Mao’s “thought” was specified as being the inspiration for the country’s economic growth and political energies. Yet at the same time Mao himself often felt isolated from events, as expert organizers like Zhou Enlai and Liu Shaoqi coordinated the multifaceted layers of foreign and economic policy.

In 1953 and 1954 Mao used his personal prestige to purge two of the formerly most powerful Party political bosses, one in Manchuria and one in Shanghai, whom he suspected of being disloyal to his overall revolutionary goals. In 1955, he began to call for sharper levels of radical reorganization in the countryside and for the formation of larger cooperative units, in which more of the land would be worked in common by peasants and the use of private plots and informal markets would be strictly limited. This so-called Little Leap was intended to generate more income for the industrial sector, as well as to tighten the revolutionary fervor of the people. The cooperative idea was paralleled by the mass mobilizations of tens of thousands (sometimes hundreds of thousands) of rural workers to undertake major projects such as reservoir building or digging canals and terracing hillsides. Such projects were customarily hailed in the state-controlled press as proof of the “higher stage” of socialist organization, and if they were not given intensive coverage Mao suspected disloyalty on the part of the editorial staff.

These huge ventures were either orchestrated by Mao in person or implemented by local Party leaders who sought thus to ingratiate themselves with the “chairman,” as Mao was now generally addressed. But many senior leaders in the Party found these methods ideologically distasteful and economically unsound. They felt that the bulk of rural wealth was generated by the ablest and hardest-working rich peasants, who therefore should be encouraged to increase their holdings and their crop harvests, so that the state could extract the surplus for the industrial sector. In a forceful speech of July 1955, Mao struck back at such theorists: “An upsurge in the new, Socialist mass movement is imminent throughout the countryside. But some of our comrades, tottering along like a woman with bound feet, are complaining all the time, ‘You’re going too fast, much too fast.’ ” Of course there were minor problems, said Mao: sometimes poor peasants were kept out of co-ops despite their poverty; sometimes middle peasants were forced into cooperatives against their interests. Also, though there were around 650,000 cooperatives in China, containing a total of 16,900,000 peasants, they averaged out at only about twenty-six households in each, and tended to be bunched in north China. Unless they could be consolidated in larger units and spread more widely, rapid growth was out of the question. This expanding co-op movement, Mao believed, had two distinct kinds of problems. One was overoptimism, which caused cadres and peasants to be “dizzy with success.” This could be considered a “leftist deviation.” The other was to be “scared of success” and eager to cut back the movement. That was a “rightist deviation,” and was currently the main problem.

The phrase “dizzy with success” in such an agrarian context was drawn from the works of Stalin, as Mao’s listeners would have known well. It referred to the early stages of Soviet collec tivization, when many officials moved too fast, alienating millions of farmers and causing widespread suffering. Yes, said Mao, there had been “impetuosity and rashness” in the Soviet Union, but “on no account should we allow these comrades to use the Soviet experience as a cover for their idea of moving at a snail’s pace.” In many rural areas in the Soviet Union there had been inadequate preparatory work, and the peasants were not at a high level of political consciousness. China was already rectifying both areas, and Mao intended the full plan to implement “socialist cooperative agriculture” to take eighteen years in all, from the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949 to the end of the Third Five-Year Plan, in 1967-68.

Mao had already, in fact, decided to move considerably faster than that, but before he did so, he had to woo over foot draggers in the Party, and also be sure of the enthusiastic support of the writers and intellectuals who fueled the Party’s propaganda campaigns and educational work. The situation was complicated by Nikita Khrushchev, First Secretary of the Communist Party of the U.S.S.R., whose totally unexpected denunciation of Stalin in 1956, in a speech that not only denigrated the Soviet Union’s core leader, in Mao’s eyes, but also by implication criticized Mao himself, for his “cult of personality” was by this time well orchestrated and perfectly obvious to any informed outside observers.

Ever since the Yan‘an days, Mao had been determined to play a leading role as a cultural critic and arbiter. After 1949, Mao often intervened in discussions on film, literature, and philosophy to emphasize the need for vigilance in rooting out negative aspects of the old society, and he supported ordinary people, whom he sardonically referred to as “the nobodies,” whenever they had the courage to attack well-known artistic works in the name of revolutionary purity.

In late 1956 and early 1957 these various tracks converged in Mao’s mind: the ability of the nobodies of China to transform their society, the obstructionism of the Communist Party’s own new establishment, the possibilities of vast economic strides forward if those with “bound feet” would get out of the way, the need to deepen the channels of criticism and the flow of information and to keep the brightest flames of socialism burning. All of these played a part both in the outpouring of criticism during the middle of 1957, and the launching of the Great Leap Forward in industry and agriculture later that year.

A long text by Mao gives a sense of his thinking in February 1957. These are the rough notes to an informal four-hour speech that Mao gave in a rather formal setting—that of the Supreme State Conference, attended by leaders of the bureaucracy, the cultural and propaganda spheres, and selected non-Party intellectuals.

The topic of the speech was “contradictions,” within Chinese society and within the Party, and this evoked the theme that Mao had first broached in his earliest attempts to have himself seen as an expert in Marxist dialectical materialism back in 1937. “Contradictions,” to Mao, were of two kinds, those between “the enemy and ourselves,” which were to be called “antagonistic,” and those “among the people,” which were “non-antagonistic.” The “enemy,” in the Chinese context, would include landlords, “imperialist elements” (presumably those with foreign connections), and the Chinese refugees in Taiwan. Such people were correctly deprived of their civil rights under people’s dictatorship and democratic centralism. This was what constituted Chinese democracy: it was “democracy with leadership,” or “class freedom,” more genuine in China than the bourgeois “facade” of parliamentary freedom in the West. But though the logic of class war would suggest that the Chinese national bourgeoisie would also be the enemy of the Chinese working class, that was not in fact so. “Antagonistic contradictions, if properly handled, can become unantago nistic,” and that was just what happened in China due to the joint struggle against foreign imperialism. Care was needed in defining enemies and working out when to exercise compassion, or to decide when transformation was completed. “The American moon and the Chinese moon are the same moon,” noted Mao; the American moon was not better. In other words, each society looks up to the sky from its own class vantage point.

Mao had decided that the process of unity-criticism-unity should be seen as the correct way to resolve contradictions among the people or contradictions within the Communist Party itself. Such a method was better than the “ruthless struggle and merciless blows” approach used by Stalin, for Mao now felt that when Stalin was in power, he often “did things badly.” The Seventh Party Congress of 1945 was an example of the correct process at work. Looking at the Chinese counterrevolutionaries who had been killed—according to Mao, some 700,000 “local bullies and evil gentry” between 1950 and 1952—one saw there were no errors. All of them deserved to die. But when Hong Kong papers claimed twenty million had died they were obviously wide of the mark. “How could we possibly kill twenty million people?” Mao asked.