Mao: The Unknown Story

He focused on Chou, who was in charge of planning and administering the Program. Mao described Chou as being “only 50 metres away from being a Rightist”; Chou’s attempts to curb investment in arms industries in 1956, Mao said, were on a par with the Hungarian Uprising, and had “considerably influenced the Rightists.” These were ominous charges, carrying the direst potential consequences. To make things even more menacing, Mao removed Chou as foreign minister in February 1958, and senior diplomats close to Chou were encouraged to attack him.

The heat around Mao was unbearable, even by the usual nerve-racking standards of his regime. One minister who had been in the firing line had a fatal breakdown. When Mao’s doctor went to give the minister a check-up, he found him lying in bed, “muttering again and again: ‘Spare me! Please spare me!’ ” The minister was flown off to a hospital in Canton. In the plane, he suddenly sank to his knees and banged his head on the floor, begging: “Please spare me …” He died in Canton within weeks, aged forty-six.

As the climax of this process of intimidation and abasement, Mao ordered Chou to make a self-criticism that would imply that he was a quasi-Rightist in front of the 1,360 delegates to a special Party Congress in May 1958. Chou apologized for his previous efforts to hamper Mao’s desired rate of “industrialisation,” whose military nature was not revealed even to this high-level gathering, nor its catastrophic implications. This self-denunciation caused Chou a great deal of pain. It took him ten days to write his speech. The normally dapper premier spent days on end shut up in his room, unshaven and unkempt, not even getting dressed. The secretary taking his dictation recalled that Chou spoke extremely slowly, Chou then dictated, on the verge of tears. Chou had chosen his wife not out of love, but out of mutual devotion to the Communist cause, and she lived right up to that specification.

sometimes unable to say a word for five or six minutes … So I suggested I leave his office and let him compose quietly … It was midnight, and I returned to my room and lay in bed with my clothes on, waiting to be called.

At about 2 am [Mrs. Chou] summoned me. She said: “En-lai is sitting in the office staring blankly. How come you went to bed?…” So I followed [her] to [his] office, where she and comrade Chou En-lai argued for a long time …

Chou duly delivered his speech, to Mao’s satisfaction. The atmosphere at the congress was more frightening than usual, as reflected in the language of the press announcement, which said the meeting had “denounced Rightists who have wormed their way into the Party”—in Communist jargon, barely one step away from damning such people as enemy agents. Orchestrated by Mao, a host of provinces announced how they had uncovered Rightists among their own provincial leaders. The provincial chief of Henan was condemned and dismissed for saying the peasants could not afford to hand over too much to the state as they were “starving.” Henan, he said, had endured “endless floods, droughts and other natural disasters,” and its inhabitants were “having to pull ploughs, since many draft animals have died because of the shortage of food.”

Liu Shao-chi also came under bitter attack from Mao’s henchmen at the congress for his role in the 1956 cuts. Like Chou, he too capitulated fulsomely, as did everyone who had a managerial role in Mao’s Superpower Program. Mao’s notes show that he had been ready to charge anyone who refused to toe his line with what amounted to treason (“using illegal methods … to carry out opposition activities”). In the end he did not need to go this far, as all surrendered.

Liu stayed on as No. 2. Chou was so battered that he asked Mao “whether it is appropriate for me to go on being prime minister.” He was told to carry on, and he remained foreign affairs supremo, even though he was not reinstated as foreign minister. Mao was well aware that no one else could put so seductive a face on his regime. The man who took Chou’s place as foreign minister, Chen Yi, remarked ruefully that he found himself being “no more than a glorified entertainer.”

MAO MADE ONE most important personnel shift at the congress. He promoted his old crony Lin Biao to be one of the Party’s vice-chairmen (alongside Liu, Chou, Zhu De and Chen Yun). This gave Mao an ally-in-need in the core, one who also held a top army rank: a marshal. Formal military ranks had been introduced in 1955, when Lin and nine other generals were made marshals.

Along with these steps, Mao intensified his personality cult, which he had started to promote from the time of the Yenan Terror in 1942–43. In March 1958 he told his top echelon (colleagues, provincial chiefs and ministers): “There has to be a personality cult … It is absolutely necessary.” His henchmen vied to declare their “blind faith” in Mao, with Shanghai boss Ke actually advocating the herd instinct: “We must follow the Chairman like a blind herd.”