The Politics of the Chinese Cultural Revolution: A Case Study

The Politics of the Chinese Cultural Revolution

This volume is sponsored by the Center for Chinese Studies University of California, Berkeley The Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, supported by the Ford Foundation, the Institute of International Studies (University of California, Berkeley), and the State of California, is the unifying organization for social science and interdisciplinary research on contemporary China.

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HONG YUNG LEE

The Politics of the Chinese Cultural Revolution A CASE STUDY

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS

Berkeley • Los Angeles • London

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England

Copyright © 1978 by The Regents of the University of California ISBN 0-520-03297-7

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 76-19993 Printed in the United States of America

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To My Parents and Whakyung ’s Parents

Contents

Contents

Tables

Acknowledgments

Abbreviations Used in the Notes

Introduction

CHAPTER 1 The Campaign Against Wu Han: The First Phase of the Cultural Revolution

CHAPTER 2 The Work Teams and the Student Revolt: Early Summer, 1966

CHAPTER 3 The Student Mobilization from the Bottom to the lop: The Rising Tension in the Red Guard Movement

CHAPTER 4 The Rise of the Radical Red Guards

CHAPTER 5 The January Power Seizure

CHAPTER 6 The February Adverse Current

CHAPTER 7 Patterns of Alliance in the Red Guard Movement from January to July 1967

CHAPTER 8 The Red Guard Movement After the Wuhan Incident

CHAPTER 9 Demobilization

CHAPTER 10 A lest of the Radical-Conservative Hypothesis: A Case Study of the Kwangtung Cultural Revolution

CHAPTER 11 Conclusion

APPENDIX 1 List of the Sample

APPENDIX 2 Major Issues and the Responses of the Conservatives and the Radicals

Index

Tables

1. Students of Proletarian Class Backgrounds (Including Cadres)

as a Percentage of Total College Enrollment 79

2. Class Backgrounds of Senior Middle School Graduates from the

No. 101 Middle School 81

3. Class Backgrounds of Students in the Middle School Attached

to Peking University 81

4. Class Backgrounds of a Freshman Class in Kwang-ya Boarding

School in Kwangtung 81

5. Ratio of Radical and Conservative Workers in Kwangtung Big

Industries 135

6. Power Seizures in the Government Ministries 163

7. The Members of the Heaven and Earth Factions 217

8. Political Factions in Kwangtung Province 233

9. Distribution of the Kwangtung Red Guard Newspapers

by Faction 303

10. Distribution of Articles Reporting on the Central Leaders and

the Cultural Revolution in Other Provinces 305

11. Distribution of Articles Dealing with the Official Policies 307

12. Distribution of the Contents of Quotations from Mao by East

Wind and Red Flag 312

13. Distribution of Articles Criticizing Persons 313

14. Numbers of Cadres with Known Positions Who Were Criticized

(a) by Either Faction or (b) by Both Factions 314

15. Criticisms of Party Secretaries and Members of Standing

Committees 315

16. Identified and Unidentified Positions of Criticized Cadres 315

17. Criticisms of Chiefs and Deputy Chiefs 316

18. The Fields of the Criticized Cadres 316

19. Cadres Criticized by East Wind 317

20. Types of Criticism 318

21. Position and Function of 43 Radical Cadres 319

22. Distribution of Articles Criticizing the Opposition Faction 320

Acknowledgments

This study would not have been possible without the generous assistance that I have received from many people in the last several years. Though any shortcomings contained herein are solely my responsibility, I would like to share any credit with those who have assisted me in various ways.

I owe a particular personal and intellectual debt to Tang Tsou of the University of Chicago, who has for many years guided my intellectual growth and rendered his unstinting help at every stage in the preparation of this study, including a painstaking reading with extensive comments on every chapter in a long series of preliminary drafts. My special thanks go to Chalmers Johnson, who has read my dissertation and encouraged me to revise it for publication. For their careful readings and valuable comments and criticisms, I am grateful to Michel Oksenberg, Frederic Wakeman, John Starr, and John Service. Robert Scalapino and Joyce Kallgren were unsparing in giving me encouragements and suggestions. As the members of my dissertation committee, Lloyd Rudolph and William Parish helped in laying down the basic framework of this study. David Milton and Nancy Milton generously shared their rich experiences in Peking with me in a series of stimulating discussions. I profited greatly from the exchange of opinions with my friends, Lowell Dittmer, Mitchell Meisner, Brantly Womack, and Marc Blecher.

The Center for Chinese Studies at the University of California generously provided the financial support that made it possible for me to spend the academic years 1973-1975 revising the final draft. Mr. Paul Weisser has done a marvelous job of editing and typing the final draft.

Finally, I must acknowledge the help that I received from Whakyung Lee, my wife, who not only courageously shared hardship and difficulty with me, but also showed unwavering confidence in me. Sonya and Sunyoung Lee have also contributed to this study by sacrificing their due share of my time.

Though all of the aforementioned helped me well beyond my ability to express my debt to them in an acknowledgment, none should be held responsible for any errors of fact or interpretation that remain.

Abbreviations Used in the Notes

xiii

Introduction

In a meeting on July 27, 1968, with five representatives from the Peking Red Guards who were protesting the workers’ intervention in the students’ sphere of the Cultural Revolution, Mao Tse-tung declared that the ‘black hand’ is nobody else but me. This statement virtually marked the end of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution that had thrown all of China into turmoil and disarray for more than two years. Why did Mao start the Cultural Revolution by mobilizing the Chinese students into Red Guards, and then end it by using the workers to control the students? What were the objectives and how did he actually lead the mass movement? Did the mass movement take the course that its initiator had planned? If not, how must we conceptualize the actual proceedings of the Cultural Revolution? These questions are not only intellectually challenging, they are also crucial for understanding the Chinese political system which followed the Cultural Revolution.

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was certainly one of the most complex political events in the entire history of the Chinese Communist Party. It involved virtually all of the Chinese people, raised debates on a wide range of issues, and revealed a multitude of conflicts at various levels. Although the elite groups initiated the mass mobilization, once the masses were mobilized the movement gained its own momentum. The elite groups endeavored to manipulate the masses, but the masses found numerous ways to express themselves spontaneously. The Cultural Revolution manifested every conceivable type of human problem and every kind of political behavior. It was a study in contrasts, as emotional outbursts challenged rational calculations, individual demands opposed group interests, and personal loyalties undermined organizational allegiances. As the struggle developed, the discrepancy widened between ideological pronouncements, on the one hand, and actual motivations and actions, on the other.

Because of this complexity, interpretations of the Cultural Revolution among Western scholars have differed widely. Alternative theories have dubbed it a great purge arising from a power struggle; an ideological struggle coupled with policy differences; a crisis caused by the regime’s declining legitimacy; a confrontation between a charismatic leader and a bureaucratic organization; a simple two-line struggle between proletarian revolutionaries and capitalist revisionists; and an expression of Mao’s personal idiosyncrasies (which urged him to idealize permanent revolution and a revival of the Yenan spirit).

For all its complexity, however, one can readily observe certain attributes unique to the Cultural Revolution. First of all, Mao Tse-tung mobilized the masses to attack the Communist Party, the party of which he was Chairman, and which was the instrument for ruling as well as revolutionizing Chinese society. Mao’s unique and decisive role distinguishes the Cultural Revolution from the typical revolution in which a rising counter-elite mobilizes the masses to seize power from a ruling elite.

Second, the Cultural Revolution involved a large segment of the general population and all the ruling groups, both in the government and in the Party, from the Central Committee down to Party branches in the schools and factories. Moreover, a wide variety of issues was raised, discussed, and debated. These included broad ideological and political questions, as well as specific questions on economic, cultural, and educational policy.

Third, the Cultural Revolution lasted more than two years, during which it passed through several stages. Each stage exhibited its own unique features in terms of the dominant actors, issues, and coalitions. In turn, each actor tried to adjust himself to the changing situation by improvising new tactics and forming a new coalition.

Fourth, the Chinese masses, once freely mobilized, usually split into two or more warring factions, and their factional struggle affected the course of the Cultural Revolution more than any other factor. The warring factions emerged in almost all of the existing occupational and social units, and a fragment of one social unit often formed an alliance with a faction from the other. Moreover, the mass organizations, the basic units in the factional struggle, came into existence, merged with one another, and disappeared, as their membership and the issues they debated underwent constant change.

Consistent with these characteristics, we hypothesize that the Cultural Revolution started with an elite conflict and split over the dispute on how to cope with the widening gap between the elite and the masses in a socialist China. One group of Chinese leaders—headed by Mao—considered the narrowing of the gap not only essential for the continuing Communist revolution, but also necessary for the effective operation of the Chinese political system. But the Party organization was less willing than Mao to take drastic measures to reduce the gap, because it was thought that the radical egalitarianism might interfere with the principle of efficiency and the rapid economic development of Chinese society.

These different perspectives reflected two diverse interpretations of Marxism: a strict economic interpretation of Marxism justified the Party’s position; whereas the Maoists justified their view by stressing the Marxist concepts of voluntarism and political consciousness. This dispute was not a mere ideological debate, but was intimately related to the power position of each group in the Chinese political system. Obviously, the Party organization’s interpretation of Marxism, combined with the Leninist notion of a vanguard party, tended to overlook the rising elitism of the Party, which was the major locus of political power in the society.

The Cultural Revolution can thus be best described as Mao’s attempt to resolve the basic contradictions between the egalitarian view of Marxism and the elitist tendencies of Leninist organizational principles. By drawing the Chinese masses into the political process, Mao wanted to reverse the trend toward restratification caused by the bureaucratization of the Party, and he also wanted to build a mass consensus on the future direction of the society.

Yet, to Mao’s apparent disappointment, when he removed or weakened the control exercised by the Party organization (until that time, the major instrument for regulating Chinese public opinion), all the latent tensions and contradictions in the society surfaced. The Chinese masses quickly polarized into two factions: one interested in the radical restructuring of the Chinese political system, and the other in maintaining the political status quo. As the Cultural Revolution unfolded along its unexpected course, the Chinese elite was further divided over the constantly arising political and socio-economic issues. Soon the Maoist coalition at the top also split along conservativeradical lines, thus forming a vertical cleavage which cut across the horizontal cleavage between the elite and the masses.

This book is an attempt to analyze the Cultural Revolution in its proper historical and social contexts as a stage in the continuing Chinese revolution. In particular, it attempts to recapture the dynamics of the mass movement by focusing on the vertical as well as the horizontal cleavages. Thus, conflict rather than consensus, and struggle rather than unity, occupy the larger portion of the analysis. A special effort has been made to explain the four characteristics of the Cultural Revolution mentioned above. The more specific questions examined in the book include these: What were the issues which created the deep cleavage among the Chinese elite? Were there any discernible patterns in the factional struggle among the mass organizations? If so, how do we explain the basic cleavages in the mass movement? What

Figure 1

A Schematic Outline of the Cleavages and Coalitions in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution

were the relationships between the conflicts at the elite level and those at the mass level? And how was the elite conflict revealed to the Chinese masses?

Our approach examines the interactions of seven political actors (Mao, the Cultural Revolution Small Group, the People’s Liberation Army, the Party organization, the government, the radical mass organizations, and the conservative mass organizations) operating on three different levels (the supreme leader, the elite, and the masses).

The political behavior of each group in the Cultural Revolution was largely determined by its ideology, its policies, and its power considerations. In turn, the internal structure of each group and its position in the hierarchy of the Chinese political system defined its interests and priorities. Of the seven political actors, the Party, the government, and the Army began as organized institutional groups. The Cultural Revolution Small Group started as a semi-official group, but later developed into a well-established formal body. The radical and conservative mass organizations emerged and organized themselves more or less spontaneously, in the process manifesting previously latent conflicts in the society.

As the supreme leader with unchallengeable authority, Mao could concern himself primarily with broad ideological questions. In fact, he radicalized or deradicalized the prevailing official ideology depending on the nationwide situation of the movement, and he did this without being overly concerned with the effects his actions might have on his own or other groups’ power interests. In contrast, the elite groups had to harmonize their power interests with the official ideology and policy at any given moment. In order to do so, each elite group utilized its own political assets: the Party organization utilized its decision-making powers; the Small Group, its proximity to Mao; the government, its essential supervision over day-to-day operations, especially in economic affairs; and the People’s Liberation Army, its coercive power and its organizational capability as the only surviving organizational structure capable of carrying out the Peking leaders’ will after the Party organization was completely destroyed.

The Party, the government, and the People’s Liberation Army shared Mao’s desire to maintain a certain degree of the regime’s continuity and status quo. Hence, they could support Mao insofar as he was willing to respect their basic institutional interests. For instance, the People’s Liberation Army could tolerate the radicalization of the Cultural Revolution only to the extent that this did not threaten its basic institutional interests. When the radicals later challenged the organizational integrity of the Army and its privileged position in China, the Army suppressed the radicals, despite Mao’s and the Small Group’s orders.

On the other hand, the ideology, policies, and power interests of the Small Group were extremely radical. Created outside the formal power structure of the Chinese political system, the Small Group as a whole had no special interests to protect and little stake in the political status quo. Yet, despite the differences of ideology, policy, and power considerations among themselves, the elite groups were obliged to take into account the basic interests of the regime as a whole against their various sectarian interests.

In contrast, the mass organizations were almost exclusively concerned with narrow group interests, particularly power interests. To them, ideological and policy considerations were mere means to advance their political interests. The mass organizations upheld the official ideology and policy of a given moment only if these coincided with their power interests, and they rejected them if not. Since they tended to push their own ideological viewpoints to extremes without considering their broader ramifications, the radical-conservative cleavage was much more clearly manifested at the mass than at the elite level.

It is one of our main theses that the radical mass organizations were largely composed of underprivileged social groups, whereas the conservatives were heavily drawn from the better-off social groups. The radicals attempted to change the political status quo as much as possible, whereas the conservatives strenuously defended the status quo. Mao declared that the conflict in the Center reflected the conflict in society, and not vice versa, when the radical Red Guards asserted that their factional struggle reflected the conflict among the elite. The coupling of the elite conflict with the latent conflict at the mass level gave rise to the vertical factional structure along radical-conservative lines.

In order to substantiate these hypotheses, I will try to identify the major issues over which the elite groups divided, and I will relate their positions to the interests of the various mass organizations. Since my aim was to write a comprehensive and balanced history of the Cultural Revolution in all its complexity and subtlety, rather than to provide a provocative new interpretation, I have organized the book chronologically. Concepts and insights from the social sciences have been freely drawn upon to illuminate various aspects of the movement, but caution has been taken not to overemphasize any particular thesis. This organizational format has the advantage, among others, of providing the reader with a clear view of each stage of the Cultural Revolution in which the dominant actors, issues, and patterns of coalition changed. Analytically speaking, the Cultural Revolution went through four different stages.

The Politics of Bureaucracy: October 1965 to August 1966

It was during this period that the intra-elite conflict was deepening and the initial line of forces within the elite was taking on definitive shape. The main actor was the Party organization, which still exercised its traditional leadership over the incipient mass movement. Meanwhile, Mao was playing the game on two different levels: on the one hand, he tried in formal meetings to persuade the Party organization of the need to launch the Cultural Revolution; and on the other, he organized the Cultural Revolution Small Group and enlisted the support of the People’s Liberation Army. Yet, the elite conflict by and large still took place within the boundaries of the existing rules and away from the public eye.

Unable to carry out Mao’s demand to purge the revisionist elements within itself, the Party first adopted the evasive tactic of stressing procedural rules in decision-making. As the Maoists stepped up their pressure after June 1, 1966, the Party organization increasingly relied on the old bureaucratic strategy of waving the red flag to oppose the red flag, and obeying outwardly and disobeying inwardly. This meant that the Party organization was distorting Mao’s wishes in the process of implementing them. As a result, the gap widened between the official ideology and the actual policy that the Party carried out, the ideology proclaiming the need for freely mobilizing the masses, while in fact the Party and the work teams restricted the mass movement by emphasizing Party leadership. Some rebellious students challenged the Party in the name of Mao’s Thought, but they were ruthlessly suppressed.

Two chapters cover this period. Chapter One analyzes Mao’s initial move against the Peking Municipal Party Committee (the most vulnerable spot in the entire Party organization) and the countermove of the Party leaders. Chapter Two examines how the Party organization carried out its own version of the Cultural Revolution through the work teams.

The Politics of Manipulation: August 1966 to December 1966

In retrospect, this was the period when, as Mao asserted, the previously amorphous Cultural Revolution took on a definitive shape and its orientation was corrected. At first, however, an increase in the number of actors created uncertainty and suspense, as the masses, which soon split into conservatives and radicals, entered the already complicated political arena. The suspense was further heightened by new rules which stressed ideology over organization and mass initiative over Party leadership, coupled with the near absence of any clear-cut guidelines on the major tasks, participants, and targets of the movement. The power relationships between the Party and the Cultural Revolution Small Group at the elite level and between the conservative and radical mass organizations at the mass level were particularly undefined, but the trend for the elite groups to manipulate the mass organizations was clearly discernible.

The major issues at this time concerned the selection of targets, the evaluation of the work teams, the rehabilitation of those stigmatized by the work teams, and the membership qualifications for joining the Red Guards. Adjusting itself to the new rules of mass mobilization, the Party organization began to mobilize the pro-Party social groups and attempted to direct the movement toward relatively harmless targets and issues. By denouncing the practice of limiting Red Guard membership to students from good family backgrounds and by opening membership to students from bad family backgrounds, the Small Group rallied the discontented social groups to its side. The Small Group and the radicals also exaggerated the importance of the work team issue by making the criticism of the teams the major task of the Cultural Revolution. By the end of this phase, the radical Red Guards had captured the leadership of the movement from the original group of conservative Red Guards, and the main targets of the movement were the power holders taking the capitalist road within the Party.

The People’s Liberation Army, which hitherto had been collaborating with the Small Group against the civilian Party organization, vacillated in this period, refraining from taking a clear stand in the mounting disputes between the radical and the conservative Red Guards. Chou En-lai was also trying to keep in step with the changing situation, but the extension of the movement into the economic field inevitably drew his government functionaries into the mainstream of the struggle. Resenting the manipulation of the aggrieved workers by the Small Group, the government functionaries and local Party committees retaliated with economism. Meanwhile, Mao, who at first appeared undecided on the future course of the movement, was finally convinced to take a radical course of action, swayed by the dynamics of the events.

Two chapters deal with this period. Chapter Three analyzes the changing political situation after the withdrawal of the work teams and also considers the major issues of the movement, which was still dominated by the conservatives. Chapter Four describes the rise of the radicals over the conservative Red Guards, as the movement shifted its principal focus to the campaign against the power holders. The political and socio-economic characteristics of the radical workers are also analyzed in Chapter Four.

The Politics of the Masses: January 1967 to August 1967

With the Cultural Revolution entering the stage of the January Power Seizure, the unstable balance between the elite’s control and the masses’ spontaneity was shifted decisively in favor of the latter. Not only were the Chinese masses freed from the control of the elite, but they were actually encouraged to seize power from the ruling structures. In the process, the influence of the elite groups fell to an all-time low, and they found themselves suddenly the objects of attack by the masses.

The net result of this type of mass politics was chaos and anarchy. After taking control from the hands of the elite, the Chinese masses were drawn directly and suddenly into the political process without the benefit of previous experience. The leadership then created a power vacuum by failing to define the meaning of the power seizure or making clear what was to be done with the newly won power. On the other hand, the power holders shrewdly exploited the chaotic situation to protect their own interests, further intensifying the factional struggle among the masses.

In the face of a complete breakdown in order and production, Mao moderated the official policy of ordering the cadres and the People’s Liberation Army to provide leadership for the power seizure. However, this new policy only exacerbated the factional struggle. The Army, the cadres, and the conservative mass organizations formed an alliance against the radicals and the Cultural Revolution Small Group and pushed the movement in the opposite direction from the radicalism of January, thus creating what the radicals later called the February Adverse Current.

In March, the radical forces hit back, and by the end of the month the radical-conservative confrontation had reached a stalemate on both the elite and the mass levels. Meanwhile, the Peking leadership pursued two contradictory goals: (1) they tried to stabilize the situation by restricting the activities of the Red Guards; and (2) they tried to continue the power seizure. However, the attempt to pursue these two contradictory goals simultaneously was as ineffective as the attempt to pursue them sequentially had been. The radical and conservative mass organizations, both unable to justify their actions in terms of the official policy line, intensified their armed struggle until it culminated in the open revolt, in July 1967, of the Wuhan regional military force, which sided with the conservatives.

This period is covered by three chapters. Chapter Five analyzes the evolution of the January Power Seizure and the reasons for its failure. Chapter Six examines how the moderate official line in February prompted the government functionaries and the Army to suppress the radical mass organizations. And Chapter Seven describes the organizational structure of the Red Guards and analyzes their factional struggle in the context of the changing official line.

The Politics of Factionalism: After September 1967

In order to avert a direct confrontation between the Small Group and the radical mass organizations, on the one hand, and the Army, the government functionaries, and the conservative mass organizations, on the other, Mao criticized both sides and then imposed a compromise solution on the elite groups. With Mao firmly backing a policy of retrenchment, there was no longer any room for the elite factions to manipulate the policy issues.

By October 1967, when it had become obvious that the mass mobilization would soon end, the issue at stake in the elite conflict was no less than who would dominate the Party organizations that were to be reconstructed—that is to say, who would rule China after the Cultural Revolution. Once power became the major bone of contention, Chou En-lai came out in support of the Small Group, despite its earlier attacks on him and despite his proximity to the Army on various substantive policy issues. Thereafter, the political process increasingly came to resemble a purely factional power struggle with ideological issues retiring into the background.

At this last stage of the mass movement, the most clearly discernible vertical cleavage was that between the Small Group, which had collaborated with the radicals, and the Army, which had collaborated with the conservatives. The Small Group and the Army made desperate moves to enhance or preserve the strength of their own mass organizations, since the strength of their client mass organizations had substantial bearing on their own power positions among the elite groups. In turn, the rise and fall of the mass organizations were ultimately determined by the relative power positions of their patrons among the central leaders and by their patrons’ successes or failures in pursuing issues favorable to their clients. Thus, when the Red Guard organizations stepped up pressure on their respective patrons, the conflicts among the Red Guards were readily transposed to the elite groups, reinforcing the tension between the Small Group and the Army.

Since the radical and conservative mass organizations were closely affiliated with either the Small Group or the Army, it was impossible to resolve the conflict at the mass level without first solving it at the elite level. However, Mao could not afford to eliminate or decisively weaken either the Small Group or the Army. He needed the Army to maintain a semblance of order and discipline, since it not only possessed a monopoly on coercive power, but was also the only nationwide body with its organizational capability intact. But neither did he want to discredit the Small Group, which would have been tantamount to discrediting the Cultural Revolution as a whole. Furthermore, he could not impose his will organizationally from the top to the bottom, because that would have meant resorting to the very method he had criticized in the past.

Confronted with this dilemma, Mao temporized, but finally improvised a new method to resolve the conflict: the Workers’ Mao’s Thought Propaganda Teams. Even though he succeeded in demobilizing the mass organizations through this ingenious method, the legacy of this period has continued to influence Chinese politics. The political structure of the country immediately following the Cultural Revolution displayed three distinctive but interrelated trends: the rise of the Army’s political influence; a tendency toward decentralization of political power to the local leaders (mainly the regional Army leaders); and the rise of the mass groups which had fought in the Cultural Revolution on the conservative side. A coalition of these three forces, probably with Lin Piao as its leader, constituted the most powerful political force in China from 1968 to 1970.

Chapter Eight analyzes the intensifying power struggle between the Small Group and the Army, a struggle that centered on the control of the revolutionary committees. Chapter Nine describes the demobilization process, focusing on the Workers’ Mao’s Thought Propaganda Teams, the campaign to purify class ranks, and the rebuilding of the Party organization. Chapter Ten tests the hypothesis of the radical-conservative cleavage with data drawn from Kwangtung.

The author’s major source of information has been the Red Guard newspapers, for which he has compiled an extensive index under the sponsorship of the Center for Chinese Studies at the University of Michigan. Since the present volume does not include a bibliography, interested readers may wish to consult A Research Guide to the Red Guard Materials in the United States (forthcoming in the Occasional Papers Series of the University of Michigan, Center for Chinese Studies).

CHAPTER 1

The Campaign Against Wu Han: The First Phase of the Cultural Revolution

The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution started with the apparently insignificant criticism of Peking vice-mayor Wu Han, a well-known historian specializing in the Ming period. In 1961, Wu Han had written an historical play, Hai Jui Dismissed from Office, at a time when the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) had somewhat relaxed its control over society after the failure of the Great Leap Forward.1

In the play, Wu Han praised Hai Jui, a quasi-historical official of the Ming period who had been dismissed from office by the Emperor after returning lands to the peasants that corrupt officials had seized from them. At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, the Maoists wanted to condemn the play as a veiled political attack on Mao’s 1959 dismissal of P’eng Teh-huai, but the Party organization tried to divert the campaign against Wu Han into an academic debate. Gradually this apparently minor difference developed into an ideological and political controversy among the entire Chinese elite, which resulted in the reorganization of the Peking Party Committee and the purge of the Committee’s first secretary, P’eng Chen.

The Campaign Unfolds

At the CCP Work Conference held in September-October 1965, Mao proposed that criticism of Wu Han be made on two levels. First, he asked P’eng Chen, the head of the Group of Five in charge of revolutionizing literature and art, to criticize Wu Han at the official level. Second, he instructed the informal Chiang Ch’ing group to prepare a critique of Wu Han’s play in complete secrecy. When P’eng Chen failed to act against his own vice-mayor, Mao arranged for an article entitled "Comments on the Newly Written Historical Opera, Dismissal of Hai Jui" to be published under the name of Yao Wen-yüan in the Shanghai Wen hui pao of November 11, 1965.

Although its tone was quite mild, this article nonetheless proved so alarming to P’eng Chen that he initially forbade the Peking newspapers to reprint it.2 However, as it became clear that Mao was responsible for the article’s original publication, P’eng Chen reluctantly lifted his ban, but only after he provided several safeguards to mitigate its impact on the public.3

First, he forbade the Peking newspapers to carry the article simultaneously.4 Second, he gave the job of opening the debate to Teng T’o, who had joined Wu Han in criticizing Mao in 1961; P’eng Chen personally instructed Wu Han to examine your thinking where you are wrong and persist where you are right to uphold truth and correct mistakes.5 Third, he had Pei- ching jih-pao carry moderate editorial notes that defined the issue of Wu Han as a purely academic question.6 Finally, he prepared to attack the radical intellectuals under Chiang Ch’ing on the grounds that they had formed a faction in the fields of literature and art.7 8 In short, P’eng Chen was conceding, by the end of November, that Wu Han’s play had raised some academic questions, but he still refused to take a political position on them.

Articles supporting and opposing Wu Han’s academic views thereafter competed in the public news media. Probably dissatisfied with such an inconclusive debate, even when limited to academic questions, Mao revealed his own position in an interview with high party officials on December 21, 1965. After making a sweeping attack on the policy of concession, formal logic, and abstract philosophical thinking that had been evident in the debate thus far, Mao indicated that the matter of dismissal was the key question in Hai Jui Dismissed from Office.*

On December 24, however, P’eng Chen had an exclusive interview with Mao. Although no records of the meeting are available, P’eng Chen’s subsequent behavior indicates that he succeeded in persuading Mao to delay the political conclusion of the controversy, while agreeing to criticize Wu Han’s academic position.⁹ After this interview, P’eng Chen and Lu Ting-yi, the Director of the Propaganda Department, publicly declared that Wu Han was wrong in describing Hai Jui as an honest official, and that the play should be criticized on that account.¹⁰ On orders from P’eng Chen and with help from Teng T’o, Wu Han prepared his self-criticism of his academic views.¹¹ Soon the bureaucratic intellectuals were busy writing articles denouncing Wu Han’s academic views, and articles defending him disappeared.¹²

With the Party’s position on academic questions clearly decided, the Propaganda Department moved to reassert its organizational leadership over the campaign. It ordered the news media to submit all the relevant articles to the Department for approval before publication; it sent out three volumes of reference materials to guide the academic debate; and it organized numerous conferences to transmit the official guidelines to the lower levels.¹³

At the same time, the Party organization moved to have its views adopted in a formal Party decision. Hsü Li-chün, the deputy director of the Propaganda Department of the Central Committee, prepared a draft outline of the opinions that had emerged in the various meetings organized by the Party.¹⁴ On February 3, 1966, the document was submitted to the Group of Five, which approved it over K’ang Sheng’s opposition.¹⁵ On February 5, P’eng Chen obtained Liu’s approval, and wrote on the cover that [because of the pressures of time], this report has not been examined by every member of the Group of Five.¹⁶

On February 8, P’eng Chen, Wu Leng-hsi, and Hsü Li-chün (some sources also include Lu Ting-yi) took the Outline to Hangchow, where, according to the Red Guards, P’eng Chen verbally explained its general terms to Mao. When Mao raised the question of Wu Han’s motivation, P’eng Chen attempted to mollify Mao by promising that the Party would first deal with the academic issues and then censure the intellectuals who criticized the Great Leap Forward. ¹⁷ On his return to Peking, P’eng Chen allegedly lied to Liu Shao-ch’i and Teng Hsiao-p’ing by stating that Mao had approved the document. On February 12, 1966, the February Outline was sent as an official document to all levels of the Party organization, and the Party convened numerous meetings to explain the spirit of the Outline.

While the Party organization vigorously propagated its duly adopted February Outline, the Maoists worked through the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) to develop an outlet for their own views. Delegated by Lin Piao to prepare the guideline for the PLA’s literature and art work, Chiang Ch’ing, together with the Maoist intellectuals, produced the Forum on Work in Literature and Art in the Armed Forces (also known as the Shanghai Forum).18 In contrast to the February Outline, which was strictly a Party document prepared by Party bureaucrats, the Maoist intellectuals wrote the Forum under the name of the PLA and with extensive consultation with the members of the Military Affairs Commission (MAC).19 Mao himself took an interest in the document’s preparation and personally revised it three times with the help of Ch’en Po-ta. Chiang Ch’ing forwarded the document on March 16,1966, to Lin Piao, who in turn submitted it to the Central Committee as an official document of the MAC on March 30. On April 10, the Central Committee sent it down to the Asien-level Party committees.

The content of the Forum opposed that of the Outline in almost every respect.20 First, the Forum reaffirmed Mao’s basic thesis that the political victory of the proletarian class would not automatically determine the outcome of the struggle in the superstructure. Hence the class struggle in the field of ideology was crucial in deciding which class would rule China. Then, the Forum judged the various academic questions in political terms and condemned the opponents’ views as a black line that not only opposed Mao’s ideas on literature and art but also imposed its own dictatorship over the field. By specifically denouncing the slogan of literature for national defense, the document made it clear that the leader of the black line was none other than Chou Yang, the deputy director of the Propaganda Department.

With the Shanghai Forum in his hand, Mao ended the two-month moratorium on the political question of Wu Han and swiftly moved into final battle with P’eng Chen and the bureaucratic intellectuals. At a March 28 Politburo meeting, Mao unleashed his criticisms of P’eng Chen, the February Outline, and the Department of Propaganda and sought support from the MAC and Chou En-lai for P’eng’s purge.21 Informed by K’ang Sheng of Mao’s resentment, P’eng Chen transmitted Mao’s warning in general terms, but still defended his own innocence in a hurriedly convened meeting of the Peking Party Committee. The meeting authorized a small group to prepare a self-examination of the Peking Party Committee’s past works, and it was decided to sacrifice Teng T’o.22

The Peking Party Committee’s belated efforts to purge itself of its guilt for resisting Mao did not forestall outside measures to deal with its problems. First, a meeting of the Secretariat, presided over by Teng Hsiao-p’ing and attended by Chou En-lai, K’ang Sheng, and Ch’en Po-ta, finally decided to disband the Group of Five and annul the February Outline. Then, the Standing Committee of the Politburo, meeting in Shanghai on April 16, approved the Secretariat’s decision and forwarded it to the Peking Party Committee.23 Receipt of the document prompted the Committee to convene an emergency session.24

According to the charges of the Red Guards, the session did not follow the customary procedure of explaining instructions from the higher level so as to allow the participants to express their views without being influenced by the opinion of the Center.25 Still defying the Center, the meeting attributed Mao’s wrath to a conspiracy of K’ang Sheng and Chang Ch’un-ch’iao and concluded that there was nothing wrong with either the Peking Municipal Committee or the February Outline. The Center in Hangchow had to transmit five more documents on P’eng Chen’s mistakes before the still defiant Peking Party Committee finally sent a delegate to see Li Fu-ch’un, the Central Committee member in charge of work in Peking, to learn the real attitude of the Center. The talk with Li finally persuaded the Peking Party Committee to reorganize itself.26

Meanwhile, the Peking Party Committee made a public gesture at selfcriticism in a three-page editorial in the April 16 Pei-ching jih-pao. The editorial, written with Teng T’o’s prior understanding, attacked the columns Notes on a Three-Family Village and Night Talks at Yenshan, in which co-authors Teng T’o, Wu Han, and Liao Mo-sha had criticized Mao.27 Although the Peking Party Committee admitted its own responsibility for permitting publication of the columns, it condemned them for their antiParty, antisocialist content. Not surprisingly, the Center rejected this belated self-criticism.28 On April 19, the Secretariat of the Central Committee notified all the units under the Peking Party Committee that the self-criticism was feigned and should be disregarded, and that all the newspapers should publish all their articles as planned, without being influenced by the selfcriticism. It also instructed all the institutes of higher learning and all the other organs and units under the jurisdiction of the Peking Party Committee to stop implementing the Committee’s decisions.29

On May 16, 1966, the Politburo held an enlarged meeting, probably to inform local Party leaders of P’eng Chen’s fate. Lin Piao set the tone of the meeting with a kickoff speech in which he accused P’eng Chen, Lo Jui- ch’ing, and Lu Ting-yi of attempting a coup d’etat to seize political power, and implied that the PLA would not tolerate any resistance from them.30 No doubt, the Party organization was not convinced by Lin Piao’s thesis of coup d’etat. Even Mao was annoyed, at least according to the admittedly unreliable letter he is supposed to have sent to Chiang Ch’ing: His [Lin Piao’s] address was devoted entirely to a political coup. I was quite uneasy at some of his thinking. … I was driven by them to join the Liangshan rebel. … I expressed my opinion, which was different from that of my friend [Lin Piao]. I could do nothing else.31

After twelve days of debate, the meeting adopted the May 16 Notice, which criticized the February Outline along the lines presented in the Shanghai Forum. After charging that the Outline distorted Mao’s theory of class struggle in order to turn the movement against staunch leftists, the Notice redefined the goal of the Cultural Revolution:

The whole Party must… thoroughly expose the reactionary bourgeois stand of those so-called academic authorities who oppose the Party and socialism. … To achieve this, it is necessary at the same time to criticize and repudiate those representatives of the bourgeoisie who have sneaked into the Party, the government, the Army, and all spheres of culture, to clear them out or to transfer some of them to other positions. Above all, we must not entrust them with the work of leading the Cultural Revolution. In fact, many of them have done and are still doing such work, and this is extremely dangerous. … Some of them [the representatives of the bourgeoisie] we have already seen through, others we have not. Some are still trusted by us and are trained as our successors; persons like Khrushchev, for example, are still nestling beside us. Party committees at all levels must pay full attention to this matter.32

The Notice, which was sent down to the hsien level and to the PLA regimentlevel Party Committee, set up the Cultural Revolution Small Group, staffed mostly with radical intellectuals under the leadership of Chiang Ch’ing, who took control of the Party propaganda machine.

Taking a cue from the May 16 Notice, Nieh Y(ian-tzu, a lecturer and a member of the Party Committee of the Department of Philosophy—the only department Party committee controlled by radicals—put up a big-character poster on May 25, 1966. Under the heading of What the Peking University Party Committee Is Doing in the Cultural Revolution, Nieh accused the school Party Committee of suppressing the student movement on the pretext of strengthening leadership.33 Lu P’ing, the president of the University, immediately reported the matter to his superior, Li Hsüeh-feng, the newly appointed secretary of the Peking Party Committee. Li went to the University at midnight and ordered the school Party Committee to suppress the poster.34 On the following day, the school Party Committee mobilized students through the Chinese Youth League (CYL) to counterattack Nieh and to pledge their support for the school Party Committee.35 By May 27, when the campus was again calm, the Party Committee instructed every academic class to study the question What lesson can be learned from the old lady [Nieh]? On orders from the newly reorganized Peking Party Committee, the other Peking schools had banned dissemination of the big-character poster.

But the situation soon changed drastically. On June 1, Mao instructed K’ang Sheng to broadcast the content of the poster over Peking Radio, and the June 2 issue of Jen-min jih-pao (the People’s Daily) carried the poster with commentators’ notes explaining its implications. These events brought about the collapse of the Peking University Party Committee, paving the way for the eventual Red Guard movement.

Analysis

So far, we have presented in a straightforward fashion the evolution of the Wu Han campaign. In the remaining part of this chapter we will discuss three questions which are crucial for interpreting the Cultural Revolution as a whole. They are (1) why Mao initiated the criticism of Wu Han; (2) what linkage one can establish between the criticism of Wu Han and the subsequent downfall of P’eng Chen and Lu Ting-yi; and (3) to what extent the moves and countermoves of the Maoist leaders and the Party bureaucrats were known to the public at the time.

Mao s Motives

In retrospect, Mao seems to have had good reason to attack Wu Han. Undoubtedly, Wu Han’s play was intended to criticize Mao’s dismissal of P’eng Teh-huai by using the classical technique of borrowing from antiquity to criticize the present, the method that traditional Chinese scholars had used to censor their emperors.36 Thus Mao might well have regarded Wu Han as typical of those Chinese intellectuals who had reached politically powerful positions but still derided Mao’s Thought, his Great Leap Forward policy, and his personal power. Also Mao’s motive might well have been to revolutionize Chinese literature and art. In the past he had personally initiated several well-known campaigns, including the ones against the legend of Wu Hsün and the writings of Yu P’ing-po.37 In addition, Mao might also have intended the secret attack on Wu Han to give an impetus to his ongoing effort to revolutionize ideology—particularly the current Socialist Education Movement in the rural areas and the campaign to reform literature and art in the urban areas.38

Wu Han was an ideal opening wedge for a larger campaign. His position at the middle level of the Chinese political hierarchy was neither so high that it might force Party leaders to form an open anti-Mao bloc nor so low that it might allow the Party organization to shift the campaign to an attack on lower-ranking cadres, as it had already done in the Socialist Education Movement.

The Purge of P'eng Chen

If Mao had good political as well as personal reasons for criticizing Wu Han, did he foresee the purge of P’eng Chen? In other words, was his attack on Wu Han the initial move against P’eng Chen? There are three different theories on this question. The test theory suggests that Mao used the Wu Han issue to test the loyalty of his associates. This interpretation credits Mao with some genuine concern for revolutionizing the superstructure,