A History of the World (87 page)

He has said that, in despair, he jumped. This was not unusual. One of the tactics used by the Red Guards was ‘suiciding’, a word neatly balanced between killing yourself and being killed. Either way, he was found mangled on the pavement below, his spine smashed. He might have been healed, had he been given medical treatment, but when he was taken to hospital by passers-by he was refused admittance – the son of a capitalist-roader had no right to health care. Deng Pufang was left to cope as best he could on a damp floor with other crippled patients. Amazingly, he lived. Paraplegic, he learned to weave wire baskets to earn money for food. For a year, his parents had no idea what had happened to him.

His father was Deng Xiaoping. A wiry man who had led Communist armies in their final victory over the Nationalists in 1948–9, he had been one of Mao’s comrades on the Long March. Indeed, Deng had been a favourite – Mao called him ‘the little man’. Like Mao, Deng came from a relatively well-off farming family in a remote corner of rural China, and had been brought up in a large thatched house many miles from the nearest road. The China of the early twentieth century was, as we have seen, a politically complicated and dangerous place. Deng’s father was a respected political reformer and was also allied with the local warlord, which, then and there, was not entirely a paradox. His bright son, remembered by playmates as being particularly good at somersaults, was sent off to the nearest town to study under a radical teacher who prepared pupils to travel abroad on a Chinese–French study programme.

In 1920 Deng sailed to France, where the money for study soon ran out. In Paris, he worked on the shopfloor of the Schneider and Renault
factories and in restaurants, living off milk and croissants. Mingling with other poor immigrant workers, he began picking up the revolutionary ideas coursing through Europe at the time, and in 1925 became a Communist, meeting Zhou Enlai, later Mao’s number two, who was also in Paris. After a visit to Moscow, Deng returned to China as a fully fledged revolutionary, and was soon plunged into the underworld of Shanghai politics and guerrilla revolt. After this blooding, he joined Mao’s fighting forces during the Long March. After Mao’s victory he proved himself a loyal and ruthless follower, first in Sichuan, his home province, and after 1952 in Beijing as a member of the ruling clique.

Deng had supported the murderous purges of ‘rightists’ and the folly of the Great Leap Forward. He was becoming known as Mao’s golden boy, and by 1955 was a member of the ruling politburo, and the fourth most powerful man in China. So Deng was no liberal. But these were desperate times. By the time the Cultural Revolution was under way, Mao’s policies had already made him the greatest killer in human history. By the early 1960s the economic and human destruction caused by the Great Leap Forward was so massive that even Mao’s inner clique realized that things had to change. At a huge conference in 1962 of seven thousand Communist Party delegates, the policies of seizing food and other essentials for export, and spending everything on factories and weaponry, were drastically scaled back – in direct contradiction of everything Mao had stood for.

Peasants were allowed to start farming their own land again. The famine began to recede. In the new liberal atmosphere Deng, one of the prime movers of the policy change, quoted a peasant as saying that it did not matter whether the cat was black or white; if it caught mice, it was a good cat. This expression of economic pragmatism was something Mao had long held against him. Deng seemed to be saying that the choice of capitalism or Marxism was less important than growth. The handbrake turn in policy had, in truth, been forced on Mao by those around him – Zhou Enlai, the Chinese president Liu Shaoqi, and Deng himself. Maoism seemed on the retreat.

The Cultural Revolution, unleashed in 1966, was Mao’s response. Though it started over what seemed a tiny issue – a historical play put on in Shanghai which Mao considered a satirical attack on himself – it was intended to upend Chinese society. Not for the first time, Mao would use creative destruction to strengthen himself against his
enemies. Four extremist supporters, including his terrifying wife Jiang Qing, a former actress from Shanghai, led the assault on all forms of authority below that of Chairman Mao himself. The young – schoolchildren, students, factory workers – and anyone in a basic job or a clerical position, could be recruited as ‘Red Guards’. Whipped up by violent and scabrously abusive posters, and self-organized into detachments, wearing their distinctive red armbands, they smashed classrooms and offices, terrorized teachers and bureaucrats, and in an orgy of gang violence often turned on one another.

Writers, artists, and sometimes people merely wearing spectacles, were seized, had their heads shaved and were denounced by screaming crowds. Old men and women had dunce’s caps put on them, wooden placards hung round their necks, and then were beaten, sometimes to death. Many killed themselves. Children denounced their parents; students their teachers. In the first phase around half a million people are reckoned to have died, but some writers put the overall death-toll during the decade when the Cultural Revolution raged, from 1966 to 1976, at up to three million – and this from deliberate, often public, killing, rather than the effects of famine and failed policies. One study claims far more deaths, around twenty million.

The Gang of Four declared they would defeat the ‘four Olds’. These were ‘Old Thought, Old Culture, Old Customs, Old Habits’. In practice this meant that anything or anyone associated with Chinese tradition was to be destroyed – temples, religious practice of all kinds, traditional weddings and festivals, irreplaceable books, paintings, sculptures and ancient buildings were all attacked. Today’s voracious enthusiasm for buying back ancient Chinese art in Western salerooms derives partly from the lack of Chinese cultural objects left after the Cultural Revolution. Not even the most extreme French revolutionaries, trying to wipe out the calendar and religion of the
ancien régime
, nor the Moscow Leninists, had attempted to draw such a deep line between past and present.

This was the storm that broke on the family of Deng Xiaoping and on President Liu Shaoqi. Mao – well out of it himself, on an estate far from Beijing – had called on the Red Guards to ‘bombard the centre’. At a party for his seventy-third birthday, he toasted ‘nationwide all-round civil war’. As a result, the leadership compound of Zhongnanhai was soon surrounded by a vast camp of rebels with loudhailers and protest
banners. On 1 January 1967 people who had been working for the Communist leaders’ telephone exchange, now calling themselves a ‘combat team’, broke in and denounced Liu and Deng. They were followed by clerical staff, now ‘the Red Flag Regiment’. A vicious game of cat-and-mouse began, featuring public humiliation of the leaders who were forced into the ‘aeroplane position’, with their arms reaching above and behind their heads, and numerous ‘self-criticism’ meetings. Liu proved a tough nut: when he was beaten particularly badly his young children were brought in to watch the president and his wife suffer. Aged seventy, ill with diabetes and pneumonia, he endured three years of agony and humiliation, refusing to abase himself to Mao, before he finally died.

Deng, perhaps because of his closeness to Mao during the years of the Long March, was not treated quite as badly. Mao announced that he ‘should not be finished off with one blow’. But after being arrested he was stripped of all his posts. In October 1969 he and his wife were exiled from Beijing – where unknown to them, their son Pufang was still lying untreated in a concrete cell – and sent south to Jianxi. There they lived simply, chopped wood for fuel, grew vegetables to eat and were taken to work at a tractor-repair plant. Deng was apparently still a good worker, popular with his colleagues, and spent much of his time walking to keep fit, and reading widely.

He and his wife were desperate to be reunited with Pufang, who finally rejoined them in the summer of 1971, still in a terrible state. Deng, who had not been very active as a father during his long years as soldier and leader, massaged his son daily to try to bring some life back into his legs, and turned him every two hours to avoid bed sores.

Back in Beijing, the Cultural Revolution was careering into chaos. Just as the revolutionary violence of France had ended in the guillotining of most of its leaders, and just as Russia’s old Bolsheviks had ended up with bullets in the back of the head, so the Chinese leaders began to fall out. Lin Biao, who had been nominated as Mao’s successor, plotted a coup and was discovered. He and his family died in a mysterious plane crash. Deng, who had been an enemy of Lin’s, was allowed back to Beijing and slowly rehabilitated. He refused, however, to engage in very convincing self-criticism, pretending to be deaf at party meetings and larding his self-analysis with sarcasm.

Mao had decided the correct line to take about the Cultural Revolution (and about the Great Leap Forward) was that it had been ‘70 per
cent positive, 30 per cent negative’. Deng, despite the urgings of the Gang of Four, begged to disagree. By this time Mao was very ill, with a rare disorder of the nerve cells. Zhou Enlai, much loved in China, died before him, in January 1976. Zhou, Deng’s old comrade, had protected him during his disgrace and may have saved his life. But now the Gang of Four were again attacking Deng as their number one enemy. In death Zhou would protect him again – and accomplish his most remarkable feat. For after dying, Zhou killed off the Cultural Revolution and buried Maoism.

It happened like this. The Gang of Four did not want too much mourning for Zhou. He had been pliable, but he was a moderate, not one of them. The people of China seemed to feel very differently. There were already signs of rebellion against the Cultural Revolution, in Sichuan, which had had to be closed to foreign visitors, and in Shanghai. In Nanking memorial marches took place in Zhou Enlai’s memory, and in Wuhu posters went up denouncing the Gang of Four as ‘farting rumour-mongers’ and calling Jiang Qing ‘poisonous snake, devil woman!’ But the most extraordinary event took place that year in Tiananmen Square in the heart of Beijing, the vast space carved out on Mao’s orders from the old city, and scene of the massacre of 1989.

The month of April saw an old Chinese festival for the souls of the departed. With the advent of Communism this had been rebranded as a time to remember revolutionary martyrs. Zhou might be being officially ‘forgotten’, but the pupils of Cow Lane Primary School were not put off. They arrived in the square and laid a wreath for him. It was quickly removed, but pupils from a middle school followed suit. And then factory workers, office workers, other school and university students, even soldiers. These wreaths were not removed. Slogans appeared on many of them, denouncing the Gang of Four in the rudest terms. Of Jiang Qing one said:

The Gang were indeed looking on, in mounting horror. On the day of the festival itself, 5 April, it is reckoned that some two million people arrived in the square – the biggest protest since the Communists had
come to power in 1949. Was this to be the beginning of a general uprising? The crowd and the placards were cleared away and the Gang continued to rant against Deng, even responding to an earthquake, which had killed a quarter of a million people, by calling on the stricken city, Tangshan – as if it were to blame for the event – to redeem itself by intensifying its attack on Deng Xiaoping’s ‘counterrevolutionary revisionist line’.
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But what the crowd in Tiananmen Square had demonstrated was that the orchestrated anarchy of the Cultural Revolution now sickened China; and when Mao died in September 1976 the Gang were soon arrested in what was, in effect, a coup by the moderates. Jiang Qing, who showed admirable defiance in court, eventually killed herself.

Deng was still in official disgrace, but by the following year had been rehabilitated again and was well on his way to real power. He outmanoeuvred Hua Guofeng, Mao’s chosen successor, and encouraged criticism of the Cultural Revolution in the ‘Beijing Spring’ of 1976. Deng was never a liberal figure. The later Tiananmen Square protest and massacre showed how ruthless he could be when caught between students demanding civil rights and the forbiddingly leftist Maoists still in the party. But he opened up China to outside influence, tore up the extreme policies that had caused so much misery, and set his country in the direction of emulating the ‘Asian Tiger’ economies all around it.

His was a kind of bravery that perhaps we make too little of, the bravery of the gritted-teeth survivor, the man who bows his head and keeps going without ever quite grovelling, always keeping his eye on what he believes to be essential. His is the victory of the tortoise. Deng made modern China out of the ruins of Maoism, waiting through the dramas and disasters until his moment came – never giving in, never capitulating, but always avoiding that last, lethal confrontation. Today’s China, Deng’s China, remains in some ways a coldly unsentimental place. For all the superlatives that can be applied to its growth, its industrial might, its vast new cities and its rampant consumerism, it is still a nation where the poorest workers are very badly treated, where children can be knocked down by drivers who then reverse over them to ensure they don’t have to pay for hospital treatment, and where the kindness of strangers is more rarely encountered than elsewhere.

Except that there is a coda to the story. Deng Pufang, the son who was thrown from a window and crippled, who nearly died and was later lovingly tended in exile by his father, survived. He became a passionate humanitarian and campaigner, establishing the China Welfare Fund for the Disabled. He was among the organizers of China’s triumphantly successful 2008 Beijing Olympics. Now a revered, wheelchair-bound figure and a leader of a different kind, he too carries a message from the darkest days of the 1960s. The father led China to prosperity; in today’s China of economic miracle and breakneck growth, the son’s message of kindness and care will matter just as much.