In 1967, we had to deal with the Cultural Revolution in Hong Kong itself. But, as I wrote my family then, “We are actually thriving on our diet of disturbance. The boys are well, and Sheila, whose political sense is as sharp as her others, has been fascinated. As for myself, I can only admit to having a ball. Political trouble is what we are trained for and wait for.”
5
The Cultural Revolution
Earthquake Warning
The first tremor of the political earthquake that almost destroyed the People’s Republic hit Shanghai in late 1965. Publication in the local press of a review fiercely criticizing the revival of an opera, Hai Jui Resigns His Office, set off alarms throughout China and among the Watchers in Hong Kong. Hai Jui was an official revered in history for having the courage to criticize a misguided, overbearing emperor and to retire in protest. The opera was seen as an allegorical attack on Mao. The stinging review, experienced hands in the Mainland Section agreed, was aimed at Mao’s enemies. It was the kind of sensitive signal that sends snakes and roaches scurrying before a seismic event. Something huge was in the offing.
My placid apprenticeship as a China analyst came to an abrupt end as we struggled during the following months to track the torrent of media attacks, first on the leadership of the Beijing Party Committee, and then during the summer of 1966 on the top leaders of the national party apparatus. The Red Guards made their debut then at a series of gigantic, hysterical rallies in Tiananmen Square worshipping Chairman Mao that launched their rampage throughout the country and the society. They first attacked their teachers and parents and all remnants of traditional culture and then, directly, the party apparatus throughout China.
The early vehicles of attack were “Big Character Posters,” handwritten broadsheets, pasted by the thousands to the walls of buildings throughout China’s cities. Historically used by students to voice their protests, these sprang up everywhere, excoriating Beijing Party boss Peng Zhen, President Liu Shaoqi, Party Secretary Deng Xiaoping, and others down the line. Red Guard groups began publishing their own newspapers expanding the attacks. On the ground, mass public criticism sessions ended with target officials paraded through the streets in dunce caps, their arms stretched out wide behind them in a derisive and painful position known as the “jet plane.” Red Guard student groups ravaged historic sites, destroyed valuable old books and paintings, and ratted on their parents and teachers.
The Origins of Upheaval
Most simply, as we pieced it together over time, leftists in the party, led by Chairman Mao, his wife Jiang Qing, and Army Chief Lin Biao, had organized and launched the movement in an effort to restore the primacy they had lost when the Great Leap Forward collapsed in 1959. Ever since the victory of the Communists ten years earlier, the party had been divided between those who believed that you could use the same techniques to run a nation state that you used when you seized power—mass campaigns of struggle and attack––and those who felt you needed more practical approaches. Tension between the “red” and the “expert” factions were the Yin and the Yang of Chinese politics.
The failure of the Great Leap—a huge mass political effort to force the Chinese economy to new heights, mobilizing the people to build blast furnaces in their backyards, and reorganizing the Chinese peasantry into agricultural communes—had discredited Mao and the “red” approach. Millions starved as agricultural production fell. The alliance between the Chinese and the Soviets fell apart, and the industrial economy suffered as Russian experts abruptly left the factories they had designed. Pragmatic elements in the party, led by Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, gained steadily in power and prestige throughout the first half of the sixties. Brooding, Mao came to the conclusion that his revolution was dying because two key elements of society were rotten through with bourgeois influence—the party and the youth. He decided to turn one against the other in one climactic purifying event—the Cultural Revolution.
A Different Job
The tools and techniques of China watching changed radically. Gone was the careful listening for sour notes in the daily symphony. The orchestra dissolved into bedlam, and musicians threw their instruments at each other and fought on stage. We paid attention to the central media, because the leftists still controlled it. But wall posters and Red Guard newspapers became the most sought after sources of information, always juicy and often wrong. Our demands for these were insatiable. Friends from foreign embassies in Beijing obliged, ripping posters from the walls and stuffing them, flakes of concrete still attached, into diplomatic pouches bound for Hong Kong.
The staid weekly dispatch I had produced became a daily telegram, approved in person by Consul General Edward Rice, in a vain effort to satisfy Washington’s voracious appetite for news and analysis. I was in the hottest of seats, and enjoying the temperature, but wondering whether I could maintain the pace.
Happily, help arrived in the form of Charles Hill, a fresh graduate of the language school in Taichung. He shared my fascination with China’s domestic politics, love of rowing, and unwillingness to take too seriously either himself or the momentous events we witnessed. Perhaps the highpoint of our collaboration occurred when the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution arrived in Hong Kong during the summer of 1967. We stood together on the roof of the Consulate General, transfixed by the absurd sight of local fat-cat communist officials leaping from their Mercedes cars to wave Mao’s Little Red Book at the Governor ’s Residence. Together we followed the tortuous course of the Cultural Revolution and formed a lasting partnership that took new shape decades later when we both served as special assistants to Secretary of State George Shultz.
The Violence Grows
In the summer and fall of 1966, the Red Guards were encouraged to travel throughout the entire country spreading the chaos originally focused on the capital. The results were often deadly, as the targets of mass criticism and humiliation cracked under pressure, killed themselves, or were beaten to death. The Red Guard generation, liberated from school, free as never before to rebel against their elders and to travel anywhere they wanted, were willing instruments of the Leftists during the early months of the movement. But by the turn of 1966, the party structure was still standing. Officials, driven from their office buildings, were performing their duties from garages and other makeshift headquarters.
Realizing that the youth were not capable of toppling the party structure by themselves, the Leftists pulled out the last stop in Shanghai, declaring the “January Revolution” of 1967, which empowered anyone, of any age or walk of life, to rebel against established authority. That blew the lid off. In city after city throughout China during the next nine months, party structures were swept away by the waves of warfare waged between rival factional organizations.
These factional entities formed very quickly after the lid came off. They were marvels of Chinese organizational skill, with their own propaganda arms, dance troupes, street combat units, and work and welfare brigades. As the weeks passed, they united into mass coalitions along “have” and “have not” lines. Those with something to lose––the children of party and government cadres, the established workforces of state-owned enterprises, the peasants from rich suburban communes––combined to defend themselves against the attacks of the dirt poor and the disenfranchised. Anyone with a grudge or a score to settle piled on. The factions outdid each other in adopting revolutionary nomenclature—East Is Red, Red Flag Fighting Corps—making it very difficult for observers to understand the underlying motivation of the struggle. And they killed each other in large numbers. Sailing our pleasure junks in Hong Kong waters, we would encounter bodies floating out from the Pearl River Estuary, casualties in the battle for Guangzhou (formerly known as Canton).
I learned about the “have–have not” cleavage from a young man who had served as a telephone operator for the big “have not” faction in Guangzhou. He had fled for his life