Red Star over China (75 page)

Evidently Mao had possessed strength enough in the CC to win sanction for the GPCR but not formally to attack and depose President Liu in a frontal assault on the whole Party-state bureaucratic administrative apparatus largely built up by Liu and by Teng Hsiao-p'ing. The alternative was to mobilize and indoctrinate millions of extra-Party youths, and Red Guards reinforced by the PLA, to overthrow key anti-Mao bureaucrats (“revisionists”) regionally entrenched in power. In 1966 it became clear that Liu was the No. 1 target of the GPCR among “the handful of those in the Party in authority who are taking the capitalist road.” But not until August, 1967, did the Maoist press (seized from the revisionists by “rebel revolutionaries”), having depicted Liu as “China's Khrushchev,” openly charge him and his accomplices with concrete acts of collusion with Marshal P'eng Teh-huai.

Now publication of excerpts from the 1959 CC resolution revealed that P'eng, Lo Fu and a few others who enjoyed the “shelter of the bourgeois headquarters headed by China's Khrushchev” had “viciously attacked” Mao's “general line” at the Lushan (1959) meeting, calling it “left adventurism” and “petty bourgeois fanaticism.” According to P'eng the GLF was a “rush of blood to the brain,” “a high fever,” and the communes, “set up too early,” were “a mess.” After P'eng's dismissal Liu himself had deplored the effects on Party unity, had repeated some of P'eng's criticisms, and had called the economic crisis “three parts natural calamities and seven parts man-made disasters.” What the farmers needed, he was accused of having told cadres, were the incentives of larger private plots and wider free markets. What small enterprise needed was less centralization and more freedom to produce for consumer demand. That was more or less (after 1960) what they had got. And what the country needed was “open opposition both among the people and within the Party.” And that too was what the Red Guards had got—but open opposition to Liu Shao-ch'i, the man for material incentives, and not to Mao, who stressed motivations of service, class struggle, and revolutionary glory.

Now it was also revealed that P'eng Teh-huai had secretly written an 80,000-word book amplifying his critique, and had circulated it among army and CC leaders. Among those who attended the eleventh plenary session the book had probably been carefully read. Once the GPCR was launched P'eng's views must have found far wider circulation—not least in Szechuan, where P'eng apparently had found sanctuary and sympathizers. After more than a year of ceaseless Red Guard pressure (which Mao had insisted must eschew violence and win by persuasion alone—advice partly ineffective) evidently neither Liu Shao-ch'i nor Teng Hsiao-p'ing had offered satisfactory “confessions” of error. Nor had P'eng Tehhuai
huai or, as far as is known, any of the other “top persons in the Party taking the capitalist road.”

Not even to secure Russia's backing in the event of a Sino-American war would Mao compromise over ideological and national differences, as Liu and others may have sought to do. Nor would he compromise to preserve the unity and power of the Party at the expense of his own prestige—which he identified absolutely with China's survival. Indeed the GPCR aimed at no less than to destroy that Party bureaucratic power over which Mao's Thought could not command absolute authority. It sought to seize and place that power in the hands of persons and producers (especially youth) committed only to Mao, to those in the Party committed only to Mao, and to the army over which—in so far as Lin Piao could command it—Mao's Thought reigned supreme. In this new “three-way alliance” all but the Mao-dedicated among the managerial elite would be thrown out or downgraded, while a new ruling system—bypassing at least part of a whole generation of Party-trained aspirants to power—might emerge in real control of the means of production and administration. Would it go so far? Or would it end, like the Great Leap Forward, pronounced a success to cover a retreat and redirection of energies, the better to resume the struggle another day?

In China's 3,000 years of written history the combination of Mao's achievements was perhaps unique. Others had ridden to power on the backs of the peasants and left them in the mud; Mao sought to keep them permanently erect. Dreamer, warrior, politician, ideologist, poet, egoist, revolutionary destroyer-creator, Mao had led a movement to uproot one-fourth of humanity and turn a wretched peasantry into a powerful modern army which united a long-divided empire; provided a system of thought shaped by valid Chinese needs and aspirations; brought scientific and technical training to millions and literacy to the masses; laid the foundations of a modernized economy, able to place world-shaking nuclear power in Chinese hands; restored China's self-respect and world respect for or fear of China; and set up examples of self-reliance for such of the earth's poor and oppressed as dared to rebel. No wonder Mao refused to yield ground to those who sought to revise his success formula.

For Mao, as he neared the three-quarter-century mark, the GPCR might be a last struggle. But Maoism had become larger than Mao, and if the GPCR failed to suppress revisionism, neither could revisionism permanently erase the impact, for better or worse, of the life of Mao Tse-tung.

(In 1965 the author talked with Mao for four hours and found him mentally alert and in good health for his age. At this writing there was still no evidence to support newly made rumors of Mao's “fatal” illnesses—cancer, heart trouble, Parkinson's disease, etc.)

Mif, Pavel
(p. 424) was Stalin's appointee to the CMT Far Eastern Department to replace Lominadze after the latter joined Syrtzov in an attempt to overthrow Stalin. Mif had been on the CMT “China Commission” as early as 1925; as a teacher at Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow he helped to
expel pro-Trotsky Chinese students there in 1927. He was made director of the university in 1929, when he also took over the CMT China desk and eliminated Earl Browder as chief of the CMT Far Eastern Bureau. Mif's role as brood-hen of his Chinese students sent back to take over the CCP leadership is briefly described in
Part Four
,
Chapter 6
, note 3. His influence waned after Mao's rise in 1935 but he continued to serve in the CMT until 1938. He then became a joint editor of
Tikhii Ocean,
organ of the U.S.S.R. Council of the Institute of Pacific Relations.

Nieh Ho-t'ing
(p. 257n) was born in Hu-yuan, Anhui, in 1908, in a family of small landlords. After primary school he studied one year in the Han-Mei (Chinese-American) Middle School in Anyuan, then graduated from a two-year teachers' training school in Anyuan. Involved in revolutionary student activity, he fled from an arrest order, to Nanchang, where he entered a military academy. In 1924 he joined the CCP and was sent back to Anhui, where he taught for a year and organized a Party cell. After April, 1927, he took part in an Anhui uprising which failed. He participated in the Nanchang and Canton uprisings, and escaped to Hongkong. He worked underground in Shanghai (1928-29) and entered Kiangsi in 1930. As a Red division commander he was wounded, recovered in time for the Changsha victory, and fought throughout the Kiangsi campaigns. In 1935 he was deputy chief of the political department of the Red Army. In the war against Japan he organized large guerrilla forces in Shansi and Hopei. A member of the CC and of the National Defense Council, he seemed somewhat eclipsed after the dismissal of P'eng Teh-huai in 1960.

Nieh Jung-chen
(p. 329) was in 1967 a member of the CC, a vice-premier of the State Council, vice-chairman of the National Defense Council, a member of the Party military affairs committee, and chairman of the Scientific and Technological Commission to which China's nuclear program was entrusted. He was born near Chungking, Szechuan, in 1899, in a rich peasant family. He left Chungking Middle School to join the Work-Study group that went to France in 1920. He worked part time in the Schneider munitions plant, then entered a “workers' college” in Belgium, studied natural science two years, and acquired some technical training as an electrician. In France he met Chou En-lai, studied Marxism under the French instructor who taught Li Fu-ch'un, and joined the CCP by way of the branch CYL in France. He learned French and some German and English. In 1924 he studied in the Red Army Military Academy in Moscow for six months, and in 1925–26 was secretary of the political department of Whampoa Academy. He participated in the Nanchang Uprising, as political commissar in Yeh T'ing's division, took part in the Canton Commune, and from 1931 was in the political department of the Red Army in Kiangsi. He made the Long March and in 1936 was chief of staff of the First Red Army Corps. During the Resistance War he became famous as an organizer of guerrilla forces in the Wu-T'ai Mountains, and after the Liberation War was made one of China's ten marshals of the PLA. In 1966 he entered the PB as a full member, with duties of the highest responsibility.

P'eng Chen
(p. 419), the dynamic former mayor of Peking, stood only twenty-ninth in CC precedence but was listed as ninth in PB rank before his seeming political eclipse in 1966. It was under Liu Shao-ch'i that P'eng rose to prominence in the Party for his work (1935-39) in the North China Bureau. Their close relationship persisted when, while P'eng was Peking Party secretary, and first deputy to Teng Hsiao-p'ing on the CC secretariat, Chairman Liu became the main target of the Red Guards among “those in the Party in authority who are taking the capitalist road.”

Born in Shansi in 1899, in an impoverished gentry family, P'eng attended a normal school where he was infected by the May Fourth Movement. He drifted into radical company, studied Marxism in the CYL in 1922, helped organize railway workers, and was briefly jailed in Peking. He joined the CCP in 1926 but played no significant role until he began to organize students and teachers in the Peking-Tientsin area in 1935, at a time when Liu Shao-ch'i was chief of the bureau there (underground) and K'e Cheng-shih was his first deputy. In 1937 he visited Yenan and was assigned to work in Shansi and Hopei. From 1939 to 1942 he taught at the Party school in Yenan and, as a deputy director under Lin Piao, had special responsibilities for indoctrination in “rectification” principles. Elected to the CC in 1945, he accompanied Lin Piao to Manchuria and served there (1946-49) as Party deputy under Ch'en Yun, after which he became secretary of the Peking Party Committee (1949-66) and mayor (1951-66). Re-elected to the PB in 1956, he was No. 2 under Teng Hsiao-p'ing in the CC secretariat, the operational arm of the PB.

P'eng began to emerge as CCP CC spokesman abroad when he denounced Khrushchev at Bucharest in 1960 for criticizing Mao and advocating coexistence with the U.S.A. Subsequently he led various delegations abroad (1961-63). This work was climaxed (1965) by a long speech in Indonesia which bitterly denounced Russia and contained all the essential exhortations repeated later in Lin Piao's call for world revolution under Mao's banner—“Long Live the Victory of the People's War!”

P'eng was accused by the press and by Red Guard posters of planning a “February [1966] coup” against Mao, but the charges rested publicly unsubstantiated two years later. Stripped of his posts in the spring of 1966 and succeeded by Li Hsueh-feng as Peking Party secretary, he was variously reported killed or a suicide. But in April, 1967, he was recognized by a foreign visitor when seen (partly bald, of medium height, a brief case under his arm) strolling through the Imperial Palace grounds of Peking, a stone's throw from Mao Tse-tung's residence. Official Peking press vilification of P'eng as a “renegade,” “revisionist,” “counterrevolutionary,” and “anti-Party minister” continued throughout 1967 but no confession by P'eng was yet forthcoming.

P'eng P'ai
(p. 157), a member of the Central Committee, held views on the poor peasants as a “main force” of the revolution very similar to Mao Tse-tung's. In the same month (November, 1928) that Mao set up a soviet at
Chingkangshan, P'eng P'ai led formation of the Hailufeng Soviet on the Kwangtung provincial border. Hailufeng was destroyed by KMT forces and P'eng P'ai was executed in 1929. See
RNORC.

P'eng Teh-huai
(p. 169) was deputy commander-in-chief of the Eighth Route Army, under Chu Teh. He successfully expanded guerrilla war against Japan (1937-45). As deputy commander of the Northwest Border Area during the Second Civil War (1946'49), P'eng defeated KMT forces which invaded Shensi. In 1950 he succeeded Lin Piao as commander-in-chief of the Chinese “Volunteers” in North Korea and held that position until the truce with the United Nations forces. As a marshal of the army (1955), a member of the PB, and Minister of Defense, P'eng was until 1960 the chief liaison between the PLA and the Soviet military advisers during the modernization of China's armed forces and basic construction of modern military industries.

As bitter Sino-Soviet ideological and strategic differences intensified during 1957–59, P'eng apparently favored placating Russia to gain time and strength. He did not believe China was yet ready to “go it alone.” He also opposed Mao's “self-reliance” strategy and a return to Yenan guerrilla-style training in the army. In September, 1959, P'eng was defeated in a fateful meeting of the Party and defense chiefs and was dismissed from his posts. Under P'eng's successor, Lin Piao, Russian influences were extirpated from the army. (See
RNORC
and
TOSOTR
.) In 1967 the Red Guard and official press aired charges against P'eng Teh-huai as a counterrevolutionary who conspired with Liu Shao-ch'i against Mao as early as 1959.

Po I-po
(p. 419) rose steadily in the Party hierarchy, reaching the PB in 1956. He was re-elected in August, 1966, but in 1967 came under attack by the Red Guards for alleged past sympathy with the policies of Chairman Liu Shao-ch'i.