Titans of History

In 1951–2, Mao subjected China to his so-called Three-Anti and Five-Anti campaigns to eliminate China’s bourgeoisie. Spies infiltrated everywhere, informing on supposed transgressors, who were heavily fined, sent to labor camps or executed. Mao ruled like a red emperor, paranoid about his security, always on the move, shrewdly manipulating his henchmen and pitilessly sacrificing old comrades to maintain power at all costs. He constantly declared: “Too lenient, not killing enough.” While he lived like an emperor on fifty private estates using military dancing girls as “imperial concubines,” he drove China to become a superpower, deploying Chinese troops against America in the Korean War as a way of persuading Stalin to give him military, especially nuclear, technology. It would not matter, he mused, “if half the Chinese were to die” in a nuclear holocaust.

Mao continued to wage war on his people throughout the 1950s. The 1958–9 Anti-Rightist Campaign—through which over half a million people were labeled rightists—saw hundreds of thousands consigned to years of hard labor or execution. The Great Leap Forward of 1958–62, a massive drive to increase steel production, encouraged villagers to create useless little forges, coupled with a move to collectivize China’s peasantry into rural communes. Emulating Stalin with his manmade 1932–3 famine, Mao sold food to buy arms even though China starved in the the greatest famine in history: 38 million died. When defense minister Marshal Peng Dehuai criticized his policies, Mao purged him but his anointed successor, President Liu Shaoqi, managed to claw back some power from Mao in 1962.

Denouncing Liu, who was destroyed and allowed to die in poverty, Mao avenged himself by getting control of the army and state through his chosen successor, the talented, neurotic Marshal Lin Biao and supple chief factotum Premier Zhou Enlai. He masterminded another terror, the Cultural Revolution, in which he asserted his total domination of China by attacking the party and state, ordering gangs of students, secret policemen and thugs to humiliate, murder and destroy lives and culture. Three million were killed between 1966 and 1976; millions more were deported or tortured.

From 1966, Mao used his wife Jiang Qing to promote his purges. An only child and the daughter of a concubine, Jiang had become an actress after leaving university, acquiring an enduring belief in the importance of the arts. She had married Mao in 1939. Her call for radical forms of expression, instilled with “ideologically correct” subject matter, escalated into an all-out assault on the existing artistic and intellectual elites. Renowned for her inflammatory rhetoric, she manipulated mass-communication techniques to whip young Red Guards into a frenzy before sending them out to attack—verbally and physically—anything “bourgeois” or “reactionary.” In an orgy of denunciation, terror and murder, the Communist Party, including moderates like President Liu Shaoqi and General Secretary Deng Xiaoping, was purged. Mao personally directed both the individual persecutions of his closest comrades, using Jiang Qing, whom he hated, and the vast chaotic violence aimed at restoring his absolute tyranny.

The aging Mao fell out with Lin Biao, creator of the Little Red Book, who died in a plane crash while fleeing in 1971. This left Mao in the hands of the grotesque Jiang Qing and the Maoist radicals known as the Gang of Four.

Having fallen out with Moscow, Mao pulled off one last coup: US President Richard Nixon’s visit to China in 1972. Dying, Mao restored, then again purged, the formidable pragmatist Deng Xiaoping. Mao disdained Jiang Qing but she and the Gang of Four remained powerful. Mao died in 1976.

Deng arrested Madame Mao in a palace coup. In 1981 Jiang was found guilty of “counter-revolutionary” crimes. Her death sentence was commuted to life imprisonment but she committed suicide in 1991. A hated figure, she was described by one biographer as a “vicious woman who helped dispose of many people”; the “white-boned demon” who, in her own words (when on trial), was “Chairman Mao’s dog. Whomever he asked me to bite, I bit.”

In the 21st century, Mao’s China has been tempered by capitalism but he remains its Great Helmsman, his mummy still worshipped in its tomb, his Communist Party still in absolute control, his secret police still brutally repressing political, cultural and personal freedom. Mao remains the most formative and powerful Chinese statesman of the last few centuries.

ISAAC BABEL

1894–1940