China ponders the dubious legacy of Mao

Press, 2 May 1988, Page 20

China ponders the dubious legacy of Mao

Ken Coates,

who lived in Peking

for two years, on the doubts about the late “Great Helmsman”

IT IS 22 years.since the first young Red Guards appeared in China — bn the campus of Peking University. The terror unleashed by Mao Tse-tung in the so-called Cultural Revolution that followed was comparable with that in Nazi Germany. The time taken by the authorities to decide to remove the giant statues of Mao at the University reflects the dilemma facing Chinese of how to treat the hero of the 1949 seizure of power. The 10 years of madness and chaos from 1966-76 are still vividly remembered by millions. Mao, contemptuous of experts and intellectuals, believed a growing bureaucracy was an elitist class reverting to capitalism. New Zealanders might complain at the pace of this Government’s change, but Mao’s support of the Red Guards brought an explosion.

More than 10 million converged on Peking to receive Mao’s blessing. They packed trains from all corners of the country; they demanded and got free transport, free accommodation, food and entertainment — all paid for by the State. Mao, standing high on the gallery of the Gate of Heavenly Peace, at the entrance to the Forbidden City, home of emperors, smiled and waved at the fired-up young zealots roaring adulation in Tianamen Square. Millions, wearing red armbands, were suddenly encouraged to ferret out, attack and humiliate teachers, party officials, anyone in authority. The youngsters swept the country, purging the supposed enemies of Mao in factories, cities and among officialdom.

As they searched, they broke into factions. Some seized arms, even mortars and began killing each other. Factory workers joined what threatened to become civil war, and Mao called in the Army, which he controlled.

From 1971, the picture became more convoluted. Mao’s third 'wife, Jiang Qing, the B-grade Shanghai movie actress with “catlike icy charm,” schemed to gain power for herself and her supporters. As the ageing chairman was suffering from Parkinson’s disease, and becoming more deaf, aides had to watch his lips to guess what he wanted to say.

This kept him further isolated from what was going on, and the schemers, later dubbed “the Gang of Four,” including Jiang Qing, who is today still in jail outside Peking, made the most of the situation.

Even today, the outside world knows little of the organised persecution, terror and death that went on in the last years of Mao’s life. Hundreds. of thousands of people, perhaps millions, some in high positions, were falsely accused, dragged in front of kangaroo courts,"interrogated brutally and imprisoned. Some died when medical care wad deliberately withheld; others died from cold,; hunger and disease in labour camps in remote areas, and in prisons. Thousands died through beatings, shooting and brutal persecution. Many committed suicide. Everyone was supposed to learn to become equal by "learning from the peasants.” This meant anyone with an education, anyone suspected of whispering a protest in officialdom, institutes or even in the army, could be sent down to the countryside. “Stinking intellectuals” were supposed to learn from sweeping out pig sties or spreading human excrement on the fields. Universities were closed for from three to 10 years as teachers and professors came under fire. Today people in their thirties speak sadly of missed opportunities. Some valiantly struggle to make up for years when they were the Red Guards in a “revolution” that turned sour.

During the trial in 1980 of Jiang Qing and her cohorts, it was officially reported that 34,274 people had been “persecuted to death.” This is another way of saying they were murdered, or died unnaturally. Elsewhere it has been reported 729,511 were subjected to “unwarranted persecution.” But these figures have been Questioned by Western observers who suspect millions suffered, including those who died in fighting, in riots and in stonings, beatings and stabbings. Everyone has a story about the Cultural Revolution. One told me concerns a respected university professor selected for condemnation. He had a brilliant student, who was told one night by a friend that he would be ordered next day by Red Guards to beat his professor. The young man was told he would have to beat the older man to death. Horrified, the student managed to get to his professor.

“You must do as they ask” the old man told him. “I have lived my life, but you must live. Do as they say.” The youth sobbed that he could not possibly harm his beloved and respected teacher. He crept away from the man’s cell, went back to his dormitory where he hanged himself. The next day, the professor was beaten to death by Red Guards. Mao’s instructions to rebel, to burn out enemies everywhere were proclaimed nationally. He continued to wield power, though to a diminishing degree as his powers faded, until the end of his life — on September 9, 1976. One failing of the Great Helmsman was that he believed he was infallible and hung onto power too long — a fault his successor, Deng Xiaoping, seems determined not to repeat. Today, Mao has been gone for a dozen years. His huge portrait still remains above Tianamen Square, but he lies in a crystal sarcophagus in the massive mausoleum, a hundred metres from Peking’s Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet. The man who became a god, backed by his bible of the “Little Red Book” of his quotations, is now an emperor whose clothes became shabby and bloodstained.

He is revered for the days of glory, for making it possible for China to stand up in the world. For most Chinese, the important thing is that he unified China. Mao was a brilliant military commander, who believed in speed and flexibility. He became known to the outside world to a degree that no figure in China’s 3000-year history had even been. Chinese alive today who experienced the horror of the 10 years of chaos say the period destroyed faith in the Communist Party. Once when I was discussing Mao as a world leader with a group of Chinese journalists, they burst into derisive laughter at the notion that he had charisma. “The old man,” as he is sometimes referred to, is seen as being ultimately responsible for the terrible persecutions of the Cultural ' Revojution. He is blamed, too, for the disastrous Great Leap Forward of 1958. But openly criticising leaders has never been in fashion in China, less so after what hap-

pened in recent times. You never know when what you say might be held against you. Deng Xiao ping has said Mao was 70 per cent good and 30 per cent bad. Others reverse the order.

Even when the scheming Jiang Qing was sentenced after her trial, she did not receive the death penalty, not because her crimes did not warrant it, but because she was the widow of China’s ruler for a quarter of a century. So rather than expunge Mao from history, the Chinese have compromised. Even at the recent thirteenth National Congress of the 46-million-member Communist Party, the history-making blueprint adopted for the future included adherence “to Marxism and the thoughts of Mao Tsetung.” Just which particular thoughts ' the comrades had in mind was significantly not stated. Mao hated stability and believed everything is in flux. He periodically attacked the concept of bureaucracy, which in a country with a billion people, is like setting out to feed them without rice.

It is ironic that the “ten years of chaos and devastation” as they are officially recognised, could have unintended benefits.

Deng’s ambitious package of reforms may not have advanced so quickly without them. By the time Mao died, the nation was yearning for stability and change. *

In one sense, many Chinese want to forget Mao in the context of the Cultural Revolution. There is hardly a workplace where former accuser and victim are not sitting side by side, each pretending that their animosity is a thing of the past.

One woman told me that whatever the hour of the day„or night Mao made an announcement in Beijing, they all had to turn out into the streets and loudly praise him.

But while there is no doubt Mao launched the Cultural Revolution and silpported twists and turns in its course, the explosion of bloodletting and destruction, the anger and loathing, cannot all be attributed to his influence alone.

And the fact remains that on most Saturdays, there are long, patient queues of people from the country shuffling forward in Tianamen Square. They are waiting to pay their respects to Chairman Mao, a colossus needed in the past, but not relevant to building modern socialist China.