W: LP: GRP: SW: China: How a revolution can go bad.

The River at the Center of the World: A Journey Up the Yangtze, and Back in Chinese Time by Simon Winchester

Interesting view of China from the mid-1990s via a trip up the Yangtze River. I would love to visit China, and among the many things to see, I should very much like to visit the Three Gorges Dam now that it is finished. Currently personal economics and the US government might militate against this for some time, so I will have to content myself with travelogue books like this one. I have now passed the part of the journey where the author visits the People's Theatre near Guling. Here he stops to relate an important event in the early revolutionary history of modern China. The time was 1959 at a major meeting of party leaders...

The author eloquently describes the events of 1959 and subsequent years:

1959 was the second year of the Great Leap Forward. So it was a time when some kind of evaluation could be made of Chairman Mao's bold plan to increase, drastically, China's agricultural and industrial production. His plan had been radical, and in many senses, bizarre: it had called for the establishment of giant agricultural communes, for the transfer of millions of city dwellers to work on grandiose irrigation projects, for the building of tens of thousands of "backyard furnaces" that would turn steelmaking into a nationwide cottage industry and swell production. People were told to hand in their pots and pans for melting; communal feeding halls were set up as household kitchens vanished. Society underwent a profound change, with unanticipated and often haphazard consequences, and all in the vain hope of elevating the world's most populous nation into the international premier league.

The Great Leap Forward was an unmitigated disaster--perhaps the most searing indictment of a command economy since Stalin had forced collectivization on the Ukraine in the thirties. Anyone with any insight who gathered in Lushan that summer, for the eighth plenum of the Communist Party Central Committee, knew that it was a disaster--or at the very least that it was going badly wrong. But hardly anyone had the courage or the folly to say so--no one, that is, except for a tiny group of moderates led by the ill-educated but shrewd bulldog of a defense minister, a man who has since been pilloried and victimized into legend, Peng Dehuai. Peng alone felt able to say that what was going on was madness; and in a letter sent from his cool bungalow at one side of Guling to Mao's compound on the other, he told him so.

Given the cruel imperium that was beginning to grip Mao's rule, the result was predictable. The Chairman began by admitting to some mistakes--though in is own defense said that Lenin and Marx had made errors too, but were brilliant and invincible nonetheless--and tried to give the impression of flexibility. It was merely a feint: for the rest of the Lushan meeting Mao tore into Peng and those few men who dared support him--with the result that when all trooped down from the hills at the end of that July, Peng was out of a job, the People's Liberation Army (PLA) was firmly under the hand of Mao, and Peng himself was dispatched into a six-year political exile in a slum on the outskirts of Beijing, sweeping his own floors and carrying out his own night soil, reduced from a hero to a scapegoat in the blink of an eye.

If it was possible to make a connection in Lushan between the growing of tea and the eventual collapse of Imperial China, so it turns out also to be possible, and also in Lushan, to construct a filigree of connections between the angry exchanges in the People's Theatre in 1959 and the terrors that were unleashed in Beijing by Mao and his supporters seven years later that came to be known as the Cultural Revolution. The connections might seem tenuous, only half visible: but unlike the saga of tea and opium and war and treaties, where the links are mostly commercial, political, western and obvious, those that link Peng's sacking and the start of the madness of 1966 are very Chinese, relying as they do to deliver their force on hints, allusions, literature and legend. It is a complicated story, but it is one that has Lushan as its backdrop, and manages to be of huge importance in the history of the country.

Peng Dehuai had found himself in trouble simply because he had told the truth. Doubtless he saw himself as a martyr, though he left no written record saying so. But the deputy mayor of Beijing, a noted and brilliant Chinese historian, party propagandist and occasional essayist named Wu Han, essentially said as much in an article in the "People's Daily" shortly after the Lushan meeting, alluding in well turned historical phrasings to all that had happened. Wu did not mention Peng by name. Instead, he used his stature as a historian to reprise a famous and often told story from the Ming dynasty: that of the summary sacking and imprisonment, in February 1566, of a devout, honest and well-loved court official named Hai Rui.

Hai, who worked for the Board of Revenue, had sent a minute to the Emperor, accusing him of extravagance, banditry and corruption--all of which was evidently true. The Emperor was duly outraged, sacked and fettered Hai--and then suddenly died himself. Hai was released, and then went and did more or less the same thing twice more in his checkered life--he was impeached and dismissed by the governor of Suzhou, whom he had similarly accused, and then he was censured for calling for the introduction of the death penalty for corruption. Hai was too righteous for his own good, perhaps--a prophet without honor in his own time.

Wu Han had been studying Hai Rui, and had already published one article about Hai's decision to stand up for right against the Ming Emperor. This had appeared in the "People's Daily" on the eve of the Lushan meeting, and it is more than possible that Peng read it. He may even have been inspired by it. But the more important article came after Peng had been sacked. It was a lengthy essay about the sacking of Hai in which he was called 'a man of courage for all times,' someone who refused to be intimidated. The Emperor, on the other hand, was 'self-opinionated and unreceptive to criticism,' a man 'craving vainly for immortality.' To any Chinese skilled in reading between the lines of ideographs, the allusion was quite clear: yet another good man had been sacked for standing up for right, and a tyrant was in power, behaving as a classical demagogue.

Two years later Wu developed the theme of this now celebrated article into a full-length play, "The Dismissal of Hai Rui from Office". It was staged in a Communist Party theater in Beijing, and it was also published in book form. The idea, lèse-majesté that it obviously was, was being broadcast far and wide. But--was it real criticism, thinly veiled? Was it a red herring? Why was Wu himself not arrested and humiliated for daring to speak out? Scholars still wrestle with such matters: theses tumble from the presses, their authors poring over the bones of the Lushan encounter and all that stemmed from it.

They do so because the echoes of Lushan and the allusive saga of Hai Rui reverberated down the years, most strongly in 1965. It was then that Mao moved to secure absolute control over the PLA, and in that same year Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, had her colleague Yao Wenyuan attack Wu Han's by now infamous play. Yao, Mao's wife and Mao himself were at long last saying: thus far and no further. Those who dared to compare Mao's energetic running of China with the behavior of a vain and corrupt Ming emperor were, in essence, the new enemy. China must be purged of them, and of all who dared to think like them. Those foolish people who agreed with Wu Han were people who would have agreed with Peng Dehuai; those who condemned Peng and stood alongside Mao would be safe. For the remainder--who knew?

This, then, was the very beginning of what would swiftly become the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, a ten-year nightmare that changed the face of the country, horribly and terrifyingly, forever. Tender and elegant though the essays of the seven-year interregnum may have been, they hid the realities of a mighty power struggle that had been going on ever since the Lushan meeting, and which penetrated to the very core of the new China. As usual, what took place in the Middle Kingdom was hidden, at least at first, by the obsequies and curlicues of history and literature. What began with a brief display of plays and poems ended with the deaths of millions in thousands of prisons, and in limitless acres of mud and dirt.

It saw the end of Peng Dehuai's life. He was arrested by Red Guards at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, fell ill in prison, was denied any treatment for his ailments. He died in pain eight years later, but four years would pass before his family was told. His victimization, which began at Lushan, continued with all the special bitterness that a revolution can employ only when it chooses that to further its ideals it must consume its own children.*

(bold emphasis mine)

This passage serves as a warning and a metaphor for all would-be revolutionaries.


*Wu Han was arrested and brutalized, and died within three years. Yao Wenyuan, who wrote the attack on Wu Han's play, went on to become one of the infamous Gang of Four, a steersman of the Cultural Revolution. Once Mao had died he, Mao's widow and their two colleagues were arrested and put on trial: Yao was sentenced to eighteen years in prison.