Mao: The Unknown Story

Not cowed as easily as the Politburo members was a brigadier called Cai Tie-gen, who even contemplated organizing a guerrilla force, making him the only senior cadre known to have thought of trying to “do a Mao” to Mao. He was shot, the highest-ranking officer executed in the Purge. Saying farewell to a friend who was nearly shot with him, he encouraged him to continue the fight, and then went calmly to the execution ground.

There was other truly heroic resistance from ordinary people. One was a remarkable woman of nineteen, a student of German called Wang Rong-fen, who had attended the Tiananmen rally on 18 August 1966, and whose reaction to it showed astonishing freshness and independence of spirit, as well as courage. She thought that it was “just like Hitler’s,” and wrote to Mao posing a number of sharp questions: “What are you doing? Where are you leading China?” “The Cultural Revolution,” she told Mao, “is not a mass movement. It is one man with the gun manipulating the masses. I declare I resign from the Communist Youth League …”

One letter she wrote in German, and with that in her pocket she got hold of four bottles of insecticide and drank them outside the Soviet embassy, hoping the Russians would discover her corpse and publicize her protest to the world. Instead, she woke up in a police hospital. She was sentenced to life imprisonment. For months on end, her hands were tightly handcuffed behind her back and she had to roll herself along the floor to get her mouth to the food that was just tossed onto the floor of her cell. When the handcuffs were finally removed, they had to be sawn off, as the lock was jammed with rust. This extraordinary young woman survived prison — and Mao — with her spirit undimmed.

49. UNSWEET REVENGE (1966–74 AGE 72–80)

IN AUGUST 1966, Mao toppled Liu Shao-chi. On the 5th, after Liu met a delegation from Zambia in his capacity as president, Mao had Chou En-lai telephone Liu and tell him to stop meeting foreigners, or appearing in public, unless told to do so. That day, Mao wrote a tirade against Liu which he himself read out to the Central Committee two days later, in Liu’s presence, breaking the news of Liu’s downfall (the general population was not told). Just before this, on the 6th, Mao had had Lin Biao specially fetched to Peking to lend him weight, in case there was unmanageable opposition. Lin Biao formally replaced Liu as Mao’s No. 2.

Mao’s persecution of the man he hated most could now begin. He started with Liu’s wife, Wang Guang-mei. Mao knew that the two were devoted to each other, and that making Guang-mei suffer would hurt Liu greatly.

Guang-mei came from a distinguished cosmopolitan family: her father had been a government minister and diplomat, and her mother a well-known figure in education. Guang-mei had graduated in physics from an American missionary university, and had been about to take up an offer from Michigan University to study in America in 1946 when she decided to join the Communists, under the influence of her radical mother. People remembered how at dancing parties in the Communist base in those civil war days, Liu would cross the threshing-ground that served as a dance floor with his characteristic sure steps and, bowing, ask for a dance, in a manner unusual for a Party leader. Guang-mei had elegance and style, and Liu was smitten. They were married in 1948, and the marriage was an exceptionally happy one, particularly for Liu, who had had a string of unsuccessful relationships (and one wife executed by the Nationalists).

From the moment it was clear that Mao was coming after Liu, from the Conference of the Seven Thousand in January 1962, Guang-mei encouraged her husband to stand up to Mao. This was in vivid contrast to the behavior of many leaders’ wives, who urged their spouses to kowtow. In the ensuing years, she helped Liu to entrench his position. In June 1966, when Mao was fomenting violence in schools and universities, Liu made a last-ditch attempt to curb the mayhem by sending in “work teams,” and Guang-mei became a member of the one sent to Qinghua University in Peking. There she came into collision with a twenty-year-old militant called Kuai Da-fu. Kuai’s original interest in politics had been sparked by a sense of justice: as a boy of thirteen in a village during the famine, he had petitioned Peking about grassroots officials ill-treating peasants. But when, in summer 1966, the Cultural Revolution was presented by the media as a “struggle for power,” Kuai developed an appetite for power and led riotous actions to “seize power from the work team.” He was put under dormitory arrest by the work team for eighteen days, which Liu authorized.