Mao: The Unknown Story

In spring 1963, Mao turned his attention to traditional Chinese opera. Unlike opera in the West, Chinese opera was popular entertainment. For hundreds of years, different regions had developed their own distinctive styles, performed in village markets as well as city theaters, danced in the northern mountains amidst winds and dust, and sung under moonlight and kerosene lamps on southern islets, listened to by fishermen on houseboats. Mao himself was a fan, indeed a connoisseur of regional operas. He had a collection of over 2,000 cassettes and records, and would discuss interpretations of arias knowledgeably with opera singers. The only time he let people see him wearing glasses was at operas. He was a very involved viewer as well, and once he became so engrossed that he not only sobbed and blew his nose loudly, but shot straight up from his seat, whereupon his trousers fell down, as his servant had loosened his belt to make him more comfortable. He had a particular taste for those operas his own regime deemed “pornographic.”

Mao’s passion for the opera did not prevent him suppressing a large number of them soon after his reign began. But when he embarked on this new purge he set out to get the old repertoires banned in toto, starting with a genre known as “Ghost Dramas,” in which dead victims’ spirits took revenge on those who had driven them to their death. Mao had the genre banned in March 1963; having just been the agent of tens of millions of deaths, he regarded these on-stage avengers as uncomfortably close to reality.

At the end of 1963, he accused “all art forms — operas, theater, folk arts (including ballad-singing, traditional story-telling and stage comics), music, the fine arts, dance, cinema, poetry and literature” of being “feudal or capitalist,” and “very murky.” Even works produced under his own regime to sing the praises of the Communists were condemned as “poisonous weeds.” Mao ordered artists to be sent down to villages to be “seriously reformed.” “Throw singers, poets, playwrights, and writers out of the cities,” he said in his quintessentially blunt style in February 1964. “Drive the whole lot of them down to the villages. No food for those who don’t go.”

Ancient monuments, the visible signs of China’s long civilization, fell victim too. Mao had started having city walls and commemorative arches knocked down indiscriminately soon after he came to power; by the end of the 1950s the vast majority were destroyed. He now added temples and old tombs to his hit list, and complained to one of his secretaries in December 1964 about the slow obedience to his order: “Only a few piles of rotten bones [i.e., tombs] have been dug out … You take the enemies [i.e., those resisting] too lightly. As for the temples, not one of them has been touched.”

Mao even pushed for the elimination of horticulture: “growing flowers is a hangover from the old society,” he said, “a pastime for the feudal scholar class, bourgeois class and other layabouts.” “We must change it now,” he ordered in July 1964. “Get rid of most gardeners.”

What Mao had in mind was a completely arid society, devoid of civilization, deprived of representation of human feelings, inhabited by a herd with no sensibility, which would automatically obey his orders. He wanted the nation to be brain-dead in order to carry out his big purge — and to live in this state permanently. In this he was more extreme than Hitler or Stalin, as Hitler allowed apolitical entertainment, and Stalin preserved the classics. In fact, Mao criticized Stalin on this score; in February 1966, Mao said: “Stalin took over the so-called classics of Russia and Europe uncritically, and this caused grave consequences.”

IN THE YEARS 1962–65 Mao made some headway in turning every facet of life into something “political” and killing culture, but the result was far from satisfactory for him. He had to rely on the Party machine to execute his orders, and virtually everyone had reservations about his policies, all the way from the Politburo downward. Few welcomed a life without entertainment or color. Mao found that almost everyone was dragging their feet, and that recreations patently harmless to the regime, like the classics and flowers, continued to exist. He was angry and frustrated, but was unable to have his way.

He was more successful in one area, indoctrinating the population, for whom he created a role model: a safely dead soldier called Lei Feng. Lei Feng had most conveniently kept a diary in which he allegedly recorded how he was inspired by Mao to do good deeds, and swore that for Mao he was ready to “go up mountains of knives and down into seas of flames.” Total obedience to Mao, to be what the regime lauded as perfect “little cogs” in Mao’s machine, was elevated to the ultimate virtue. This cult of impersonality, the necessary obverse of the cult of Mao’s personality, was cloaked in a deceptive appeal to be selfless — for “our country” or “the people.”