The Tragedy of Liberation: A History of the Chinese Revolution 1945-1957 (38 page)

He also drifted away from his colleagues. Mao had led his men to victory in 1949. Korea, too, was his personal glory, as he had pushed for intervention when other leaders in the party had wavered. He stood head and shoulders above his peers.

Even before Stalin died, Mao had started to undermine Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai, who were in charge of the day-to-day handling of the economy, and were becoming too influential for Mao’s comfort. Zhou, the soft-spoken, slightly effeminate premier, had learned a decade earlier never to challenge the Chairman. In 1932 rivals of Mao had handed command over the battlefront to Zhou. The result had been a disaster, as Chiang Kai-shek mauled the communist troops and forced them on a Long March away from their bases in the south. After Mao had gained the upper hand in Yan’an, Zhou’s loyalty was tested in a series of ferocious self-criticism sessions from September to November 1943. He was accused of having led a faction that had sided with one of Mao’s rivals. Zhou grovelled and admitted that he had been a ‘political swindler’ who lacked principles, something he blamed on his pampered upbringing in a ‘feudal aristocratic family’. It was a gruelling experience, but Zhou managed to emerge from the ordeal as Mao’s faithful assistant, putting his organisational skills entirely at the service of the Chairman in order to redeem himself.
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Liu Shaoqi had gone to Moscow as a student in 1921. He was a frugal, taciturn man, best known as a zealous apparatchik who would regularly toil away through the night. Two decades later, in Yan’an, he and Zhou had sat at opposite ends of the table, as Liu was neck-deep in the campaign to flush out spies and saboteurs from the party. Although he left the dirty work of extracting confessions from suspects to Kang Sheng, the grim man who had worked with the Soviet secret police, Liu was the main architect of a theoretical framework justifying the witch-hunt. He excelled at his task and became Mao’s second-in-command in 1943.
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Mao lacked interest in matters of daily routine and organisational detail, and he needed first-rate administrators he could trust to carry out his vision. Zhou and Liu were his able servants, always at his beck and call, come day or night. The Chairman’s schedule was erratic, as he suffered from severe insomnia, anxiety attacks and depression, often caused by his constant fear that other high-ranking leaders were disloyal to him. Trust was of the essence. Mao relied on heavy doses of barbiturates, chloral hydrate and sodium seconal to sleep, and he often dozed off during the day and worked throughout the night, not hesitating to summon his staff and colleagues at all hours. He expected them to turn up immediately. So, in turn, top officials like Liu and Zhou relied on sleeping pills to get some rest, as they could never quite synchronise their working schedules with the routines of the Chairman.

Lack of sleep was only a minor inconvenience. They had to cope with Mao’s unpredictable mood swings, tiptoe around him, flatter his ego and avoid any comments that might provoke suspicion or misunderstanding. They had to decipher his often obscure remarks, used to keep them guessing about his intentions. But the Chairman also deliberately employed vague terms to conceal his own ignorance, particularly in the realm of economics, of which he understood very little. He rarely voiced an opinion on concrete financial issues; when he did so, he sounded uninformed. This too was a delicate issue for Zhou and Liu, all the more so since they had to assume responsibility for running an increasingly complex state bureaucracy encompassing millions of employees. It was tempting for them to leave aside some of the more technical details of the economy in order to avoid embarrassing their master. But this was also fraught with danger, as Mao had a habit of switching unpredictably from complete aloofness in government affairs to obsessive attention to detail. During the purge of government ranks in 1952, for instance, he issued directives on the number of culprits to be arrested almost daily, only to abandon interest suddenly as the campaign tapered off, leaving Liu to cope with the mess.
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By 1952 Zhou and Liu had assembled a powerful team of economic managers, including Bo Yibo, Chen Yun, Li Fuchun and Deng Zihui. Mao began to feel that he was being sidestepped, losing his grip over his subordinates as the debate over the economy became ever more complex. He was also impatient with slow economic growth, and realised that some of his colleagues had doubts about the pace of collectivisation. Liu, in particular, took the view that a transition to socialism would take a great deal of time. He even envisaged a business community that would contribute to the national economy for years to come. This jarred with Mao, but while Stalin was still alive he had to be prudent in taking Liu to task. Liu had studied in Moscow. In the summer of 1949 he had been the party’s envoy to the Soviet Union, and Stalin had showered attention on him in six separate meetings. Mao, on the other hand, had been given the cold shoulder. In late February 1953, as Mao learned that Stalin was on his deathbed, he tried to stop Liu, who was in hospital for an appendectomy, from finding out. Liu was excluded from the memorial ceremony in honour of Stalin a few weeks later.
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In early 1953 Mao confronted Bo Yibo, the minister of finance who was part of Zhou and Liu’s team of economic managers. Bo was responsible for a new tax system that alleviated some of the pressure on the private sector. In a note circulated to Bo and copied to several other top leaders, the Chairman complained bitterly: ‘I did not know about this until I read about it in the newspapers, and I still don’t understand it!’ Zhou immediately realised that the Chairman was angry, and wrote a letter that very evening to try to defuse the situation. But a few days later the Chairman confronted Bo Yibo during a top leadership meeting: ‘The revision of the tax system was not reported to the Centre in advance, but it was discussed with the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie is seen to be more important even than the Party Centre! This new system is welcomed by the bourgeoisie, it is a mistake of rightist opportunism!’ Mao’s real targets, beyond pressing for speedier collectivisation, were the two men behind Bo, namely Zhou and Liu. The Chairman adopted a tactic he called ‘pitching a stone to cause a ripple’, using a proxy to assail the two most powerful men below him.
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The Chairman did not relent in the following months, despite Bo Yibo making several self-criticisms. Mao was strengthening his grip over the government even as he undermined his colleagues, demanding in March that ‘all major and important directives, policies, plans and events in government work must be reported to the Centre for instruction beforehand’. In May he wrote a menacing note to Liu, insisting that ‘all documents and telegrams issued in the name of the Centre can only be issued after I have seen them,
otherwise they are invalid
. Please be careful.’ Before the assembled leadership a few weeks later, he reprimanded those who ‘do not care so much’ about collective leadership, preferring instead to be left alone.
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Having put Zhou and Liu on notice, Mao announced a change of speed in the pursuit of socialism at a Politburo meeting on 15 June 1953. Here is how he phrased it in the parlance of Marxism-Leninism:

The general line or the general task of the party for the transition period is basically to accomplish the industrialisation of the country and the socialist transformation of agriculture, handicrafts and capitalist industry and commerce in ten to fifteen years, or a little longer. This general line is a beacon illuminating our work in all fields. Do not depart from this general line, otherwise ‘Left’ or Right mistakes will occur.
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Mao called his speech ‘Refute Right Deviationist Views that Depart from the General Line’. Zhou and Liu were never named, but his audience was in no doubt about what was happening. Both had worked hard to maintain the pretence of a New Democracy, used on Stalin’s advice to assure entrepreneurs and industrialists that they could continue to run their businesses on a private basis. Mao savaged Zhou Enlai’s formulation of ‘the social order of New Democracy’, and the term would never be used again. Even slogans about ‘sustaining private property’, according to the Chairman, were manifestations of ‘rightism’. Democracy was out, socialism was in. The Chairman proposed the General Line, and in doing so he positioned himself above the party, using it as a yardstick to determine who was a rightist and who was a leftist on the road to socialism. It was a yardstick he would change repeatedly.
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Mao also promoted a number of outsiders to senior positions in Beijing as part of his strategy to undermine the tight group of economic managers gathered around Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai. He called this ‘putting sand in the mix’. The most important newcomer was Gao Gang, the leader of Manchuria, who arrived in the capital in October 1952 to head the newly created State Planning Commission. He also took responsibility for eight economic ministries, ranging from light industry and fuel to textiles, thus sharing a large portion of what had previously fallen under Zhou Enlai’s exclusive purview. Soon he was a fixture at all important leadership meetings. At the party headquarters in Zhongnanhai, the beautifully manicured compound where the empress dowager had lived, he had an office just across the hallway from Mao. His family moved into a spacious residence on Dongjiao Mingxiang, formerly occupied by the French embassy. There was extensive personal contact between the two, with discussions going into the early hours of the night. Gao took cues from the Chairman, laying into Bo Yibo at one of the self-criticism meetings with the minister of finance, carefully reading from notes that Mao had revised and approved beforehand. Gao relished the attack on one of his personal enemies. A year earlier Bo had handed the Chairman a report on corruption in Manchuria, directly implicating Gao. Mao circulated the letter within the higher echelons of the party.
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The Chairman was impressed with Gao, and in the summer of 1953 trusted him with another task. He ordered him to investigate Liu Shaoqi’s past to find out whether his number two had spied for the nationalists in the 1920s. Gao interpreted this as a sign that the Chairman wanted to get rid of Liu. But Mao was a master of the divide-and-rule game. Just as he held grudges against Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai, he was also wary of Gao Gang. Years earlier, Gao had accompanied Liu to meet Stalin in Moscow. At one meeting that summer of 1949, Gao had floated the idea that Manchuria be declared the seventeenth republic of the Soviet Union to protect it from the United States. Stalin had fixed his eyes on Gao, and after a moment of awkward silence he had shrugged off the idea with a joke. But the proposal prompted Liu to telegraph Mao, demanding that Gao be recalled to Beijing. Mao approved the request, and on 30 July 1949 a defeated Gao went to the airport unaccompanied by other members of the delegation. Months later, when Mao undertook his own pilgrimage to Moscow, Stalin handed him a dossier containing incriminating evidence showing that Gao had personally sent confidential messages to the Soviet leader. Exactly what was in these files remains a mystery, but it did not seem to harm Gao’s career. He remained in charge of Manchuria, which soon had thousands of technical advisers from the Soviet Union, working in every capacity from top executives to lowly trackmen on the railways, operated jointly by China and Russia.
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Mao tolerated Gao while Stalin was alive. But by bringing him into the Politburo in Beijing in October 1952, the Chairman also removed him from his fiefdom and distanced him geographically from the Soviet Union. He could observe him more closely. Gao did not fare well. He was a talker, and his reputation for shooting off his mouth was confirmed as he met with several Soviet diplomats. He expounded on internal politics. He scoffed about the budget deficit. He provided details about infrastructure projects that had backfired. He ratted on his colleagues.
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How much of this Mao knew is unclear, but he sent Gao to Moscow in August 1953 to liaise with the new Soviet leadership. After Stalin had choked to death, his eyes bulging in a last gasp for air, his security boss Lavrenti Beria had been the first to leap forward and kiss his lifeless body. The following day Beria seized power from his terrified colleagues and reigned for a brief two months. On 28 June, Nikita Khrushchev and several others ambushed him and placed him under arrest for ‘criminal activities against the party and the state’. Gao met Khrushchev but stayed in Moscow for only two days. He had not been allowed to travel with his own secretary. Ye Zilong, Mao’s personal secretary, went along instead, watching Gao’s every step. On the way back to Beijing, Gao was reportedly downcast, feeling that ‘the clouds were gathering around him, and this trip would bring him nothing good’.
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What precisely these worries were is not certain, but in the following months Gao started lobbying for power, hoping to oust Liu Shaoqi as number two. There were endless parties at his residence, as Gao tried to woo potential allies. He was in cahoots with Rao Shushi, the powerful leader who had controlled most of east China. He leaked a highly confidential list of potential members to be considered for a future Politburo. He toured the south to meet military leaders like Lin Biao, who was not on the list, trying to win their support in removing Liu Shaoqi as the Chairman’s successor – with a delegation of twenty other regional leaders in tow.

Gao’s political fortunes waned dramatically on 17 December after Chen Yun and Deng Xiaoping visited the Chairman to expose his underground activities. They had three lengthy meetings, joined by Zhou Enlai and Peng Dehuai. Mao spoke to other leaders in the following days. He met Gao alone on 23 December. The next day the Chairman assembled his inner circle and warned that there were two headquarters in Beijing, only one of which was under his command: ‘In front of No. 8 Dongjiao Mingxiang [Gao’s residence], there has been a stream of horses and carriages, while in front of the New China Gate [the formal entrance to the Zhongnanhai compound], it has been so quiet that one can catch sparrows.’
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