Mao: The Unknown Story

The delegates were told to voice their views, and that their amendments would be taken into account before the speech was delivered. But Mao made sure it was extremely hard for anyone to speak up, by organizing the discussions in groups, each chaired by an intimidating henchman. Anyone who ventured sharper questions was instantly gagged with heavy-handed threats. As one brave delegate wrote in an anonymous letter to the leadership, the sessions were simply “for everyone to sit there and kill time.”

This went on for two weeks. Mao kept tabs on the delegates, and smugly read discussion bulletins while lounging in bed in his girlfriends’ arms. His plan was that Liu Shao-chi would deliver the finalized speech to the one and only plenary session on 27 January, and the conference would then close. His program would thus be set in stone, and Liu and all the participants would be co-responsible.

BUT MAO’S COZY PLAN fell apart. On the 27th, Liu did something that took Mao utterly by surprise. With Mao in the chair, Liu gave a different speech from the circulated keynote text he was supposed to deliver.

With this huge audience of all the 7,000 top officials in the country listening, Liu laid into Mao’s policies. “People do not have enough food, clothes or other essentials,” he said; “agricultural output, far from rising in 1959, 1960 and 1961, dropped, not a little, but tremendously … there is not only no Great Leap Forward, but a great deal of falling backward.” Liu dismissed the official explanation for the calamities, saying there was “no serious bad weather” in the areas he had visited, nor, he strongly hinted, anywhere. He called on delegates to question the new Leap that Mao had advocated, and raised the possibility of scrapping the communes and even the Mao-style industrialization program.

Liu established beyond a glimmer of a doubt that past policies had been disastrous, and had to be discarded. He openly rejected a standard Mao formula that “Mistakes are only one finger whereas achievements are nine fingers.” This, he said flatly, was untrue. When Mao cut in and insisted it was true in many places, Liu contradicted him.

Liu’s speech brought a torrential response from his audience, who could hardly wait to raise their voices. The discussions that day took on a totally different tone and mood. Now they knew that the president was behind them, delegates spoke their minds, condemning the old policies passionately, and insisting they absolutely must not be repeated.

Mao had not expected the normally ultra-prudent Liu to pull a fast one. Inwardly, he was black with rage, but he decided it was wise to hold his fire, as Liu clearly had the support of the 7,000 participants, and Mao could not afford to have a head-on collision with this vast body of officials, which included just about everybody who ran the country. So he had to pretend there were no differences between himself and them. His first move was to extend the conference, presenting this as a sympathetic response on his part to the delegates’ sentiments, telling them it was so they could “get their anger off their chest” (chu-qi). Privately he was fuming, and called it “letting their farts off” (fang-pi).

Mao plunged into damage control, to kill any idea that he was responsible for the famine. He designated some provincial bosses and agricultural chiefs and planners to make speeches taking responsibility for the disasters, thus implicitly exonerating him. But his most important maneuver was to wheel out his crony, Defense Minister Lin Biao, who was the first person to speak after the conference was extended, on 29 January. The marshal had started his collusion with Mao as far back as 1929, and he was someone Mao could rely on for support, however awful the cause.

To the 7,000, Lin Biao trotted out the kind of heartless clichés Mao loved to hear: disasters were inevitable “tuition fees”; Chairman Mao’s ideas were “always correct”; “in times of difficulty … we must all the more follow Chairman Mao.” When he finished, Mao was the first to clap, and praised Lin fulsomely to the audience. Only now did Mao feel safe enough to hint at his loathing for what Liu Shao-chi had done, using an ominous expression that amounted to “I’ll get you later.” Lin Biao had saved Mao’s bacon.

Once he saw Lin Biao appear, Liu Shao-chi’s heart sank. His widow told us that Liu murmured: “Lin Biao comes, and talks like this. Trouble.” This total solidarity with Mao from the army chief, expressed in the kind of peremptory language which signaled that there could be no rational debate, immediately cast a frightening shadow over the participants. In the following days, they toned down their language and the ways they expressed their anger, though continuing to criticize the disastrous economic policies. The result was that Mao’s policies did not get the scrutiny and forceful condemnation Liu had hoped for. And no one dared to criticize Mao directly, least of all by name.