Mao faced enemies within his party
In a 2019 article by Chaowu Dai, a distinguished professor at Yunnan University and director of the YNU Institute for Indian Studies in Kunming, China, admitted that from 1960 to October 1962, judging that India was unwilling to negotiate a solution, China “made preparations for the deployment of its military,” creating interlocking positions “for long-term armed coexistence on the border issue ultimately proceeding to the border conflict”1.
This statement is nearest to the truth and India was not prepared for an attack. But the fact is that between 1960 to 1962, China was in a state of turmoil.
On September 8, 1962, Nehru left for London to attend the Commonwealth Prime Ministers’ Conference. He returned on October 2, after visiting Paris, Lagos and Accra, and then left for Colombo on October 12, returning to New Delhi on October 16. Defence Minister V K Krishna Menon was in New York from September 17-30 for the UNGA session. On October 2, the Chief of General Staff, Lt Gen B M Kaul, an inefficient close relative of Nehru, was holidaying in Kashmir.
No country that is preparing for an attack would allow its Prime Minister or senior generals responsible for war planning to be away from its capital.
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Nehru with Mao in Beijing, 1954
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The immediate provocation was an avoidable statement of the Prime Minister to journalists on October 12 while leaving for Colombo that “he had instructed the Army to clear the Indian territory of Chinese intrusions and the date had been left to the army to decide.”
He was perhaps referring to a decision taken in the Defence Ministry to clear the recent limited intrusion in the Kemong Division of NEFA, now Arunachal Pradesh. People’s Daily, the Chinese communist party mouthpiece, taking advantage of Nehru’s remarks, said on October 14, “so it seems Nehru had made up his mind to attack China on an even bigger scale”.
The unfortunate statement of Nehru has been used by Chinese communists to fabricate the theory of “self-defence counter-attack”. At the same time, India cannot escape blame for not being serious about settling the border question, despite repeated Chinese pleas. Whatever the Indian stand, it had certain fissures that do not stand scrutiny.
Nehru, in explaining his reluctance to discuss the border question, had said in Rajya Sabha on December 8, 1959, that since we’re “sure of our borders, the question was why to invite discussions about a thing on which we had no doubt”.
Even this statement was opaque. The western border, which created the major dispute, was “undefined” in the Survey of India maps that India inherited in 1947, and which were later reprinted. Similarly, Nehru was not unaware that China in the past had never accepted the McMahon Line in the eastern sector, the outcome of the Simla Convention of 1914, and it was unlikely to accept it — and yet insisted this was non-negotiable.
In 1954, at the time of talks on Tibet, India had taken the stand that the border question would not be discussed. An opportunity to settle the border was allowed to slip. The Tibet Agreement signed on April 29, 1954, also called the Panchsheel Agreement, officially the Agreement on Trade and Intercourse Between Tibet Region of China and India, was signed by China and India in Peking. The preamble of the agreement stated the panchsheel, or the five principles of peaceful coexistence, that China proposed and India favoured.
The agreement reflected the adjustment of the previously existing trade relations between Tibet and India to the changed context of India's decolonisation and China's assertion of suzerainty over Tibet. Swedish author and China/India expert, Bertil Lintner (3) records that in the agreement, "Tibet was referred to, for the first time in history, as 'the Tibet Region of China."The agreement expired on June 6, 1962, as per the original term limit, in the midst of Sino-Indian border tensions.
Nehru ordered in 1954 July that a line should be drawn to demarcate the Ladakh-Aksai Chin border, which would not be open for discussion — ignoring that this was an international border, and required consultations and agreement of the other stakeholder.
Having changed the status of the border unilaterally, he created a vacuum by not establishing a check post, or even unfurling a flag.
The area was neglected to the extent that India was unaware that China had constructed a 120 km highway through it. In his letter of January 23, 1959, the Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai had suggested talks since, as he said, historically no agreement on the boundary had ever been concluded, and the absence of formal delimitation created discrepancies which often led to “minor border incidents which are probably difficult to avoid”.
While these parleys were on, an event was waiting to happen, which would alter the Sino-Indian relationship forever.
Dalai Lama in India
On March 10, 1959, Chinese general Zhang Chenwu invited the Dalai Lama to a performance by a Chinese dance troupe. Soon after though, he received a message from the General asking him to appear without any soldiers or armed bodyguards. The peculiar request by the Chinese was expectedly met with a large amount of suspicion from the Tibetans who had in any case been suffering the oppression of the Chinese for over a decade.
By the beginning of the 1950s, a large part of Tibet had been forcefully acquired by the Chinese. The next few years were witness to the Dalai Lama trying to evade a full-scale military takeover of Tibet by Chinese forces. The Chinese on the other hand had been trying their best to indoctrinate him into the Communist ideologies.
Given the backdrop of Chinese aggression in Tibet, the officials surrounding the Dalai Lama were quick to guess a sense of deceit in the Chinese invitation. As a cautionary measure, he was soon advised to escape from Tibet. On March 17, 1959, therefore, the Dalai Lama dressed up as a soldier and slipped out of the shelter of the monastery that he would never see again. Accompanying him were 20 of his officials. Barefoot, the spiritual leader made his way across the arduous Himalayan region, which included crossing the 500-yard-wide Brahmaputra river.
He finally reached India on March 30 and settled down at the Tawang monastery in Arunachal Pradesh. The following month he reached Mussoorie in present-day Uttarakhand, where he was later met by then Prime Minister Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru to discuss the future of the Tibetan refugees who followed him.
Meanwhile, back in Tibet the Chinese imposed a curfew in Lhasa and close to 2000 people died in the ensuing battle between the local people and the Chinese forces. Close to 800 artillery shells were fired into the summer palace of the Dalai Lama. A day later, China announced the dissolution of the Tibetan governing body and a Tibetan autonomous region was established within the People’s Republic of China.
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Nehru with Dalai Lama, 1959
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Politically, the arrival of the Dalai Lama in India was a crucial moment in Indo-Chinese relations. For Nehru, maintaining cordial relations with China was always seen as a diplomatic necessity. According to historian Ramachandra Guha, “Nehru saw China at once as a peer, comrade and soul mate.”
However, over time arguments emerged between India and China, particularly around the issue of border creation post the departure of the British. In this atmosphere of antagonism, India’s grant of refuge to the Dalai Lama was an essential trigger that pushed both countries to the point of the war. The Sino-Indian war of 1962 which was eventually won by China, was one of the most critical products of the Dalai Lama’s escape to India.
Five days after Dalai Lama fled with the help of the CIA, (2) on March 22, 1959, Nehru noted that the sector from the trijunction of the Nepal, India, and Tibet boundary up to Ladakh (Ladakh-Aksai Chin sector) was traditional and known by custom, usage, the application of the principle of watershed and old revenue records and maps, etc. These facts are important inputs when negotiating an agreement, but by themselves could not constitute an agreement.
Despite suffering from doubts, Nehru insisted in Rajya Sabha on December 9, 1959, that India should hold its position, hoping that “lapse of time and events would confirm it, and by the time challenge came, we would be in a much stronger position to face it”. There was an opportunity to clear the doubts at the summit talks in April 1960, but that too was allowed to slip because India insisted on China accepting its maximalist position — not realising that in a dispute, both sides have to make compromises to come to a settlement.
Even after the 1960 talks, China tried to bring India to the negotiable table many times, but Nehru’s rigidity did not help. Yet he did accept in Parliament the undemarcated status of the border.
China continued to insist on the need for a well-defined demarcation of borders on scientific lines. Unfortunately, India remained in denial. The result was 1962.
The war within
An alternate narrative is offered by Bertil Lintner, on the 1962 war. He maintains that the Chinese offensive was not a reaction to India’s “forward policy” but a pre-meditated operation, ordered well before October 1962 by Chairman Mao Zedong to divert attention from the ongoing domestic power struggle and to teach India a lesson.
Lintner cites the considerable time required to build roads, forward-deploy 80,000 PLA troops and position logistics in mountainous terrain. Lintner also attributes the detailed knowledge of Indian terrain, shown by advancing PLA troops, to months of prior reconnaissance and intelligence-gathering by Tibetan-speaking PLA officers.
Ever since the end of its Civil War in 1949, China has been engaged in serial strife, domestic as well as external; invading neighbours, Korea, Tibet, Russia, Vietnam and India. The prelude to the Sino-Indian war saw Mao launch the tumultuous and destructive Great Leap Forward, which resulted in 25-30 million deaths by starvation and state violence. In the midst of ongoing domestic turmoil and devastation, Mao’s ruthless calculus perceived advantage in mounting a military campaign to deliver a sharp blow to India, both as a distraction from the ongoing power struggle, and to prove China’s superiority.
In the spring of 1949, Mao proclaimed that, while in the past the Chinese revolution had followed the unorthodox path of “encircling the cities from the countryside,” it would in the future take the orthodox road of the cities leading and guiding the countryside. In harmony with that view, he had agreed in 1950 with Vice Chairman Liu Shaoqi that collectivization would be possible only when China’s heavy industry had provided the necessary equipment for mechanization.
In a report of July 1955, Mao reversed that position, arguing that in China the social transformation could run ahead of the technical transformation. Deeply impressed by the achievements of certain cooperatives that claimed to have radically improved their material conditions without any outside assistance, he came to believe in the limitless capacity of the Chinese people, especially of the rural masses, to transform at will both nature and their own social relations when mobilized for revolutionary goals.
He denounced those in the leadership who did not share that vision as “old women with bound feet.” He made those criticisms before an ad hoc gathering of provincial and local party secretaries, thus creating a groundswell of enthusiasm for rapid collectivization such that all those in the leadership who had expressed doubts about Mao’s ideas were soon presented with a fait accompli. The tendency thus manifested to pursue his own ends outside the collective decision-making processes of the party was to continue and to be accentuated.
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Chinese farmers welcome tractors, 1958
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Even before Stalin’s successor, Nikita S. Khrushchev, had given his secret speech (February 1956) denouncing his predecessor’s crimes, Mao and his colleagues had been discussing measures for improving the morale of the intellectuals in order to secure their willing participation in building a new China. At the end of April, Mao proclaimed the policy of “letting a hundred flowers bloom”—that is, the freedom to express many diverse ideas—designed to prevent the development in China of a repressive political climate analogous to that in the Soviet Union under Stalin.
In the face of the disorders called forth by de-Stalinization in Poland and Hungary, Mao did not retreat but rather pressed boldly forward with that policy, against the advice of many of his senior colleagues, in the belief that the contradictions that still existed in Chinese society were mainly nonantagonistic. When the resulting “great blooming and contending” got out of hand and called into question the axiom of party rule, Mao savagely turned against the educated elite, which he felt had betrayed his confidence. Henceforth he would rely primarily on the creativity of the rank and file as the agent of modernization. As for the specialists, if they were not yet sufficiently “red,” he would remould them by sending them to work in the countryside.
Chaos after the Great Leap Forward
It was against that background that Mao, during the winter of 1957–58, worked out the policies that were to characterize the Great Leap Forward, formally launched in May 1958. While his economic strategy was by no means so one-sided and simplistic as was commonly believed in the 1960s and ’70s and although he still proclaimed industrialization and a “technical revolution” as his goals, Mao displayed continuing anxiety regarding the corrupting influence of the fruits of technical progress and an acute nostalgia for the perceived purity and egalitarianism that had marked the moral and political world of the Jinggang Mountains and Yan’an eras.
Thus it was logical that he should endorse and promote the establishment of “people’s communes” as part of the Great Leap strategy. As a result, the peasants, who had been organized into cooperatives in 1955–56 and then into fully socialist collectives in 1956–57, found their world turned upside down once again in 1958. Neither the resources nor the administrative experience necessary to operate such enormous new social units of several thousand households was in fact available, and, not surprisingly, the consequences of those changes were chaos and economic disaster.
In retrospect, it is evident that Mao had in fact responded to the tensions in the Party by promoting free speech and criticism under the Hundred Flowers Campaign. This was also a ploy to allow critics of the regime, primarily intellectuals but also low-ranking members of the party critical of the agricultural policies, to identify themselves.
By the completion of the first five Year Economic Plan in 1957, Mao had come to doubt that the path to socialism that had been taken by the Soviet Union was appropriate for China. He was critical of Khrushchev's reversal of Stalinist policies and alarmed by the uprisings that had taken place in East Germany, Poland and Hungary, and the perception that the USSR was seeking "peaceful coexistence" with the Western powers. Mao had become convinced that China should follow its own path to communism. China's isolation from most of the rest of the world, along with the Korean War, had accelerated Mao's attacks on his perceived domestic enemies. It led him to accelerate his designs to develop an economy where the regime would get the maximum benefit from rural taxation.
Thus the Great Leap Forward (Second Five Year Plan) of China was an economic and social campaign led by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) from 1958 to 1962. Local officials were fearful of Anti-Rightist Campaigns and they competed to fulfil or over-fulfil quotas which were based on Mao's exaggerated claims, collecting non-existent "surpluses" and leaving farmers to starve to death. Higher officials did not dare to report the economic disaster which was being caused by these policies, and national officials, blaming bad weather for the decline in food output, took little or no action. Millions of people died in China during the Great Leap, with estimates ranging from 15 to 55 million, making the Great Chinese Famine the largest or second-largest famine in human history.
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The public canteen of a commune
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Around 6 to 8% of those who died during the Great Leap Forward were tortured to death or summarily killed.
The major changes which occurred in the lives of rural Chinese people included the incremental introduction of mandatory agricultural collectivization. Private farming was prohibited, and those people who engaged in it were persecuted and labelled counter-revolutionaries. Restrictions on rural people were enforced with public struggle sessions and social pressure, and forced labour was also exacted on people. Rural industrialization, while officially a priority of the campaign, saw "its development ... aborted by the mistakes of the Great Leap Forward". The Great Leap was one of two periods between 1953 and 1976 in which China's economy shrank.
The Great Chinese Famine
The disorganization and waste created by the Great Leap, compounded by natural disasters and by the termination of Soviet economic aid, led to widespread famine in China.
The Great Chinese Famine was a period between 1959 and 1961 in the history of China, characterized by widespread famine. Some scholars have also included the years 1958 or 1962. It is widely regarded as the deadliest famine and one of the greatest man-made disasters in human history, with an estimated death toll due to starvation that ranges in the tens of millions (15 to 55 million). The most stricken provinces were Anhui (18% dead), Chongqing (15%), Sichuan (13%), Guizhou (11%) and Hunan (8%).
The major contributing factors to the famine were the policies of the Great Leap Forward (1958 to 1962) and people's communes, launched by Mao, such as inefficient distribution of food within the nation's planned economy; requiring the use of poor agricultural techniques; the Four Pests Campaign that reduced sparrow populations, which disrupted the ecosystem; over-reporting of grain production; and ordering millions of farmers to switch to iron and steel production.
Policy changes affecting how farming was organized coincided with droughts and floods. As a result, year-over-year grain production fell dramatically in China. The harvest was down by 15% in 1959 compared to 1958, and by 1960, it was at 70% of its 1958 level. Specifically, according to China's governmental data, crop production decreased from 200 million tons (or 400 billion jin) in 1958 to 170 million tons (or 340 billion jin) in 1959, and to 143.5 million tons (or 287 billion jin) in 1960.
There are widespread oral reports, though little official documentation, of human cannibalism being practised in various forms as a result of the famine. To survive, people had to resort to every possible means, from eating earth and poisons to stealing and killing and even eating human flesh. Due to the scale of the famine, some have speculated that the resulting cannibalism could be described as "on a scale unprecedented in the history of the 20th century."
Yang Jisheng's seminal book, Tombstone: The Chinese Famine 1958-1962 has described instances of cannibalism during that period.
In Henan alone, there were at least 20 cases of people eating human flesh. An 18-year-old girl drowned her five-year-old cousin and ate him. The boy's 14-year -old elder sister was also driven by hunger and ate her brother's flesh. In Anhui, there were 63 cases of cannibalism between 1959 and 1960. A couple strangled their eight-year-old son, and then cooked and ate him. In the same province, a man dug-up a corpse, ate some of it, and sold a kilo as pork.
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| Starving children in Shanghai during the famine |
Famine along the mid-Yangzi was averted in 1956 through the timely allocation of food aid, but in 1957 the Party's response was to increase the proportion of the harvest collected by the state to insure against further disasters. Moderates within the Party, including Zhou Enlai, argued for a reversal of collectivization on the grounds that claiming the bulk of the harvest for the state had made the people's food security depends upon the constant, efficient, and transparent functioning of the government.
By the winter of 1958–59, Mao himself had come to recognize that some adjustments were necessary, including decentralization of ownership to the constituent elements of the communes and a scaling down of the unrealistically high production targets in both industry and agriculture. He insisted, however, that in broad outline his new Chinese road to socialism, including the concept of the communes and the belief that China, though “poor and blank,” could leap ahead of other countries, was basically sound.
In 1959, Mao had to delegate day-to-day leadership to pragmatic moderates like Chinese President Liu Shaoqi and Vice Premier Deng Xiaoping.
Mao retires, Shaoqi becomes head of state
As the horrifying (and almost entirely preventable) results of the Great Leap Forward became obvious, leaders began to discuss how to bring relief to those areas hardest hit by famine.
in the midst of this chaos, on 25 March 1959, the expanded Politburo of the CCP met in Shanghai. Though the issue that topped the agenda was the Great Leap Forward, the Tibetan issue came up because the Tibetan revolt has just been crushed and the Dalai Lama had fled to India. Both Deng and Liu Shaoqi were advocating more realistic economic policies. But Deng was a hardliner when it came to dealing with Tibet.
Despite the consensus on Tibet, Mao was still in trouble and the Shanghai meeting endorsed his retirement from his post as the Chairman of the People's Republic or the head of state. That post was given to Shaoqi. Mao stayed on as Chairman of the Party and continued manipulation.
The well-educated Zhou Enlai had actually been one of the first to initiate a campaign against Mao, as early as 1956. But Zhou, feeling insecurity, undertook 'self-criticism' in March 1958, for opposing Mao. He confessed in front of the Party commission: "I take the main responsibility for submitting the report opposing rash advance (of Mao), in effect dashing cold water on the upsurge among the masses...at the time I lacked perception, and it was only later that I gradually came to understand that this was a directional error on the issue of socialist construction."
With this opportunism, a humiliated Zhou rescued himself from later purges by Mao. He demonstrated opportunism again when the CCP convened a meeting of its Politburo and a plenum of the CC at Lushan, a mountain resort in Jiangxi, in July 1959.
Peng Dehuai's missive to Mao
After a personal fact-finding trip through many of the regions most affected by the campaign, defence minister Peng Dehuai learned of the severe suffering and widespread starvation. Peng Dehuai, as a veteran of the Long March, hero of the Korean War, and longtime friend of Mao, felt compelled to broach the issue and to prevent any further deterioration of the situation. Peng presented his findings after the Central Committee had confirmed the “success" of the movement during the Lushan Meeting.
The Lushan Conference was a meeting of the top leaders of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) held between July and August 1959. The CCP Politburo met in an "expanded session" between July 2 and August 1, followed by the 8th Plenum of the CCP Eighth Central Committee from August 2 – 16. The major topic of discussion was the Great Leap Forward.
Although many of the more moderate leaders had reservations about the new policy, the only senior leader to speak out openly was Marshal Peng Dehuai. He denounced the excesses of the Great Leap and the economic losses they had caused.
While the Conference was on, Peng wrote a letter to Mao on July 13 and 14, 1959, in which he did not seek to grandstand and went to great lengths to make his comments constructive. He did, however, point out the failures of the movement in a frank and forthright manner, while most of his colleagues chose to remain silent. As a result of Mao Zedong's failure to address the agricultural mistakes, the country experienced three years of famine, killing over 30 million people.
In the letter, he said that " there is a growing tendency towards boasting and exaggeration on a fairly extensive scale" and "the exaggeration trend has become so common in various areas and departments that reports of unbelievable miracles have appeared in newspapers and magazines to bring a great loss of prestige to the Party." (4)
He further said: "Petty-bourgeois fanaticism which makes us vulnerable to "left" errors. In the Great Leap Forward of 1958,1, like many other comrades, was misled by the achievements of the Great Leap Forward and the zeal of the mass movement. As a result, some "Left" tendencies developed in our heads. We were thinking of entering a communist society in one stride, and the idea of trying to be the first to do this gained an upper hand in our minds for a time. So we banished from our minds the mass line and the working style of seeking truth from facts, which had been cultivated by the Party for a long time."
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Peng Dehuai,1934-1935
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With Peng's letter in hand, Mao set out to test the loyalty of each person in attendance at the Lushan Conference. And, to accomplish this, he personally circulated Peng’s letter of opinion to everyone present. By gauging their reactions, he could see who was steadfastly in support of Mao’s leadership, and who was not. Sensing what Mao was up to, Peng urgently requested to have all copies of his letter retrieved, claiming that it was a private missive intended for Mao’s eyes only. The request was denied.
Next, to prevent potential defectors from conspiring behind his back in small group meetings, Mao convened a full plenary session of the Lushan Conference. Speaking to the assembled party leaders on July 23, he addressed head-on the question of rising dissatisfaction with the Great Leap.
Mao confronts Peng
By turns humble, rambling, introspective, egotistical, sarcastic, and downright intimidating, Mao confronted his chief critic, Peng Dehuai:
Now that you’ve said so much, [Mao began,] let me say something … People say we’ve become isolated from the masses, but the masses still support us … [Some comrades] are wavering. They [pay lip service], affirming that the Great Leap and the people’s communes are good and correct. But we must see on whose side they [really] stand. I would advise them not to waver at this crucial point in time. [Their] brinkmanship is rather dangerous. If you don’t believe me, [just] wait and see what happens.
Having said this, Mao paused for effect. Casting his gaze in the general direction of a group of top PLA generals seated in the conference hall, he laid down the gauntlet: “If the People’s Liberation Army won’t follow me,” he said, “then I will go down to the countryside, reorganize the Red Army guerrillas, and organize other People’s Liberation Army.”
Pausing yet again for effect, he continued: “But I think the Army will follow me.” At that point, several Chinese generals stood up and shouted their pledges of allegiance to Mao.
When Mao finished speaking, Peng Dehuai’s famously short temper erupted. He accused Mao of despotism, comparing him to Stalin in his later years; and he warned that “if the Chinese peasants were not so patient, we’d have another Hungary [on our hands].”
The gloves were off, and Mao now responded in kind, accusing Peng of being a rightist, of sabotaging the people’s democratic dictatorship, and of attempting to organize an opposition faction within the Communist Party.
Things turned even uglier when Mao attempted to cut short the defence minister’s retort, at which point Peng angrily reminded the chairman of a quarrel they had had two decades earlier, during the anti-Japanese War. The defence minister had overplayed his hand. Several key leaders who had initially been inclined to endorse his criticism of the Great Leap, including such senior figures as Zhou Enlai, Liu Shaoqi, and Marshal Zhu De, now backed off, intimidated by the chairman’s display of full-bore combativeness. Mao had won.
Peng is sacked
In the days that followed, no one ventured to speak out in Peng Dehuai’s defence. At Mao’s initiative, Peng and his small inner circle of supporters, including the PLA chief of staff/ Vice Chairman of the Central Military Commission Zhu De, deputy foreign minister Zhang Wentian, and Mao’s own longtime personal secretary Tian Jiaying, were officially charged with having formed an ‘anti-party clique’, and they were subjected to varying degrees of punishment. Peng himself was stripped of his post as defence minister and placed under house arrest in Beijing.
Zhang Wentian, a party veteran, a Politburo member, and General Secretary of the Party during 1935-1943, was outspoken in his criticism of Mao. Peng, Zhang and other critics were branded 'rightists' and 'counter-revolutionaries' and were purged after the Lushan conference. Zhang was accused of having 'illicit relations with a foreign country, which meant the Soviet Union, and buckets of sewage water were poured over his head as he was ordered to confess his mistakes.
The lessons of Peng Dehuai’s abject defeat at the hands of Mao were not lost on anyone in the party’s leadership circle: First, it was clearly safer to err on the side of leftism than on the side of rightism. And second, despite Mao’s open invitation to his colleagues to speak out freely and openly, challenging the chairman could be extremely hazardous to one’s political health. As a senior Chinese diplomat put it, “After Lushan, the whole party shut up. We were all afraid to speak out.”
Mao denounced Peng (who came from a poor peasant family) and his supporters as "bourgeois", and launched a nationwide campaign against "rightist opportunism". Peng was replaced by Lin Biao, who began a systematic purge of Peng's supporters from the military. He was immediately removed from all party and state posts and placed in detention until his death during the Cultural Revolution.
From that time, Mao regarded any criticism of his policies as nothing less than a crime of lèse-majesté, meriting exemplary punishment. The old marshal Zhu De, founder of PLA, had tried to protect Peng at Lushan by criticising him only mildly. That was enough for Mao, and Zhu was dismissed from his post as vice chairman of the Central Military Commission.
The CCP studied the damage which was done at conferences it held in 1960 and 1962, especially at the "Seven Thousand Cadres Conference". Mao did not retreat from his policies; instead, he blamed problems on bad implementation and "rightists" who opposed him.
Though few spoke up at Lushan in support of Peng, a considerable number of the top leaders sympathized with him in private. Almost immediately, in 1960, Mao began building an alternative power base in the People’s Liberation Army, which the new defence minister, Lin Biao, had set out to turn into a “great school of Mao Zedong Thought.” At about the same time, Mao began to denounce the emergence, not only in the Soviet Union but also in China itself, of “new bourgeois elements” among the privileged strata of the state and party bureaucracy and the technical and artistic elite. Under those conditions, he concluded, a “protracted, complex, and sometimes even violent class struggle” would continue during the whole socialist stage.
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| Peng was brought to Beijing in chains, in 1966 |
Thus the effects on the upper levels of government and the Party in response to the disaster were complex, with Mao purging Peng Dehuai, temporary promoting Lin Biao, Liu Shaoqi, and Deng Xiaoping, and Mao himself losing some power and prestige following the Great Leap Forward, which led him to launch the Cultural Revolution in 1966.
Peng lived in virtual obscurity until 1965, when the reformers Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping supported Peng's limited return to government, developing military industries in Southwest China. In 1966, following the advent of the Cultural Revolution, Peng was arrested by Red Guards. From 1966–1970, radical factions within the Communist Party, led by Lin Biao and Mao's wife, Jiang Qing, singled out Peng for national persecution, and Peng was publicly humiliated in numerous large-scale struggle sessions and subjected to physical and psychological torture in organized efforts to force Peng to confess his "crimes" against Mao and the Communist Party.
In 1970, Peng was formally tried and sentenced to life imprisonment, and he died in prison in 1974. After Mao died in 1976, Peng's old ally, Deng Xiaoping, emerged as China's paramount leader. Deng led an effort to formally rehabilitate people who had been unjustly persecuted during the Cultural Revolution, and Peng was one of the first leaders to be posthumously rehabilitated, in 1978.
Mao's Spy
One big reason that Mao was able to intimidate his critics so consistently and so effectively—aside from his famous mercurial temper and iron will—was his chief of internal security, Kang Sheng. Ever since the mid-1930s, Kang Sheng had been entrusted by Mao with the task of compiling secret dossiers on all party leaders at or above the provincial level.
Knowing that such career-damaging ‘black materials’ existed and that Mao would not hesitate to use them to destroy his colleagues was a huge deterrent to would-be critics. In this respect, Kang Sheng was Mao’s chief enabler, in much the same way that Lavrentiy Beria had been Joseph Stalin’s principal spy. Without such loyal and utterly ruthless security chiefs, both Stalin and Mao might not have enjoyed such apparent invincibility.
Kang Sheng was a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) official, best known for having overseen the work of the CCP's internal security and intelligence apparatus during the early 1940s and again at the height of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s and early 1970s. A member of the CCP from the early 1920s, he spent time in Moscow during the early 1930s, where he learned the methods of the NKVD.
In 1936, Kang established the Office for the Elimination of Counterrevolutionaries and worked closely with the Soviet secret police, the NKVD, in purging perhaps hundreds of Chinese in Moscow.
After returning to China in 1937, Kang switched his allegiance to Mao and became a close associate of Mao during the Anti-Japanese War, the Chinese Civil War and after. Kang was a valuable catch for Mao as he strove to consolidate the power he had won at the Zunyi Conference in January 1935. Kang could betray all the secrets of Wang Ming, Mao's political rival in the Party, and his supporters.
At Yan'an, Kang was close to Jiang Qing, who may have been Kang's mistress when he visited Shandong in 1931. (5) In Yan'an, Jiang became the lover of Mao, who later married her.
Kang Sheng was the mastermind behind the "pain and friction" that underlay the Rectification process. He used a classic Soviet technique of accusing loyal party members of being Nationalist spies. Once they had confessed under torture, their confessions could then set off an avalanche of accusations and arrests. At the same time, Mao was not keen to have a single man in such a position of power. Accordingly, following the CCP's Seventh Congress in April 1945, Kang was replaced as head of both the Social Affairs Department and the Military Intelligence Department.
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Kang with Mao
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After his fall from the security posts, in December 1946 Kang was assigned by Mao Zedong, Zhu De and Liu Shaoqi to review the Party's land reform project in Longdong, Gansu Province. In the name of social justice, he encouraged the peasants to settle scores by killing landlords and rich peasants.
Early in 1948, he was appointed deputy chief of the Party's East China Bureau, under Rao Shushi. Some commentators speculate that the private humiliation of being placed under a former subordinate may be one reason why Kang "fell ill" and largely disappeared from view until after Rao's fall in 1954. Kang seems to have displayed, manic-depressive psychosis and temporal lobe epilepsy.
The challenges that Kang faced during the early months of 1956 underscored the dangers he would have risked by continuing his retreat. As soon as he reappeared, Kang encountered serious problems that caused his position in the hierarchy to fluctuate dramatically. After the purge of Gao Gang and Rao Shushi in 1954, he ranked sixth, below Chairman Mao, Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De and Chen Yun. But in February 1956, just weeks after his return to public life, he was listed below Peng Zhen.
By the end of April, he was reported in tenth place, even below Luo Fu, the only member of the 28 Bolsheviks who still held a Politburo seat. Yet on May Day of 1956, Kang was suddenly back in sixth place. Kang suffered a severe reversal of fortune at the Central Committee plenum that followed the first session of the CCP's Eighth Congress when he was demoted to alternate, nonvoting member of the Politburo.
Mao's own position was weakening, as evidenced by the decision of the CCP's Eighth Congress to delete the phrase "guided by the thought of Mao Zedong" from the new Party constitution and by re-establishing the role of General Secretary, abolished in 1937. Kang's emergence during the cultural revolution as one of the most important Maoist stalwarts suggests that it is not unlikely that at the 8th Congress Mao saved Kang from even greater humiliation.
Thereafter, Kang remained at or near the pinnacle of power until his death in 1975. After the death of Mao and the subsequent arrest of the Gang of Four, Kang was accused of sharing responsibility with the Gang for the excesses of the Cultural Revolution and in 1980 he was expelled posthumously from the CCP.
To divert the mass attention from the strife in China and the threat to his leadership inside the Party, Mao planned the attack on India.
The attack on India
The open split with the Soviet Union, though it can be traced to Mao’s resentment at Khrushchev’s failure to consult him before launching de-Stalinization—resulted, above all, from the Soviet reaction to the Great Leap policies. Khrushchev regarded Mao’s claims for the communes as ideologically presumptuous, and he heaped ridicule on them; he underlined his displeasure by withdrawing Soviet technical assistance in 1960, leaving many large industrial plants unfinished. Khrushchev also tried to put pressure on China in its dealings with Taiwan and India and in other foreign policy issues. Mao forgot neither the affront to his and China’s dignity nor the economic damage.
As for class struggle in China itself, Mao’s fear that revisionism might appear there was heightened by the policies pursued in the early 1960s to deal with the economic consequences of the Great Leap Forward. The response to the famine by Liu Shaoqi (who had succeeded Mao as chairman of the People’s Republic in 1959), Deng Xiaoping, and the economic planners was to make use of material incentives and to strengthen the role of individual households in agricultural production. At first, Mao agreed reluctantly that such steps were necessary, but during the first half of 1962, he came increasingly to perceive the methods used to promote recovery as implying the repudiation of the whole thrust of the Great Leap strategy. It was as a direct response to that challenge that at the 10th Plenary Session of the Central Committee in September 1962 he issued the call, “Never forget the class struggle!”
During the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference in early 1962, Liu Shaoqi, then President of China, formally attributed 30% of the famine to natural disasters and 70% to man-made errors.
Dr Li Zhisui, Mao's personal physician, wrote in Mao's biography later that Mao's support within the Party was waning even after Lushan. In January 1962, when Mao convened another expanded CC to discuss the continuing disaster, his support within the Party was at its lowest. At the meeting, President Shaoqi openly blamed the famine on 'man-made disasters.' Shaoqi wanted to bring back the leaders who had been purged, which made Mao furious.
A failed Mao, to win over the masses, show heroism, and regain control inside the Party, waged an attack on India, with his crony Lin Biao.
Before launching the Himalayan military intervention, Beijing sought and received reassurances from both superpowers. The US indicated that it had no immediate plans to either “unleash Taiwan” or to escalate the Indo-China conflict. Moscow, too, sent word that it would remain neutral in case of a Sino-Indian conflict.
In India’s remote and inaccessible Aksai Chin, it was months before New Delhi realised, in 1955, that China was building a road linking Xinjiang and Tibet. In 1961, to overcome the impression that India had not adequately pursued its territorial rights, PM Nehru adopted what came to be known as the “forward policy,” moving its outposts forward and closer to Chinese forces.
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Nehru with Sikh Regiment, 1962
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The Chinese attack on India took place in two stages; a brief preliminary offensive on October 20, 1962, followed by a massive assault in mid-November, reaching the Himalayan foothills. Indian soldiers fought gallantly in NEFA (now Arunachal) as well as in Ladakh, often to the last man and last bullet, but in vain. The rout lasted all the way up to November 20 when the Chinese declared a unilateral ceasefire and withdrew 20 km north of the LAC.
During the next three years Mao waged such a struggle, primarily through the Socialist Education Movement in the countryside, and it was over the guidelines for that campaign that the major political battles were fought within the Chinese leadership. At the end of 1964, when Liu Shaoqi refused to accept Mao’s demand to direct the main thrust of class struggle against “capitalist roaders” in the party, Mao decided that “Liu had to go.”
Liu's conflict with Mao
Liu Shaoqi had spoken very strongly in favour of the Great Leap Forward at the Eighth CCP National Congress in May 1958. At this Congress Liu stood together with Deng Xiaoping and Peng Zhen in support of Mao's policies against those who were more critical, such as Chen Yun and Zhou Enlai.
As a result, Liu gained influence within the party. In April 1959, he succeeded Mao as Chairman of the People's Republic of China (Chinese President). However, Liu began to voice concern about the outcomes of the Great Leap in the August 1959 Lushan Plenum. In order to correct the mistakes of the Great Leap Forward, Liu and Deng led economic reforms that bolstered their prestige among the party apparatus and the national populace. The economic policies of Deng and Liu were notable for being more moderate than Mao's radical ideas.
Liu was publicly acknowledged as Mao's chosen successor in 1961; However, by 1962, when Mao waged the war against India, Liu's opposition to Mao's policies had led Mao to mistrust him. After Mao succeeded in restoring his prestige during the 1960s, Liu's eventual downfall became "inevitable". Liu's position as the second-most powerful leader of the CCP contributed to Mao's rivalry with him at least as much as Liu's political beliefs or factional allegiances in the 1960s, especially during and after the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference (1962 January 11-February 7), indicating that Liu's later persecution was the result of a power struggle that went beyond the goals and well-being of either China or the Party.
In a conference at the seaside town resort of Beidaihe in August 1962, Mao blamed the disastrous consequences of his Great Leap Forward on Liu, Zhou, Deng, Chen Yun and other moderates.
According to Roderick MacFarquhar in his book, Origins of the Cultural Revolution (p303), a major build-up of war material and an increase in the number of Chinese troops along the border could be noticed only a few days after the Beidaihe conference was concluded on 27 August.
Liu was labelled as a "traitor" and "the biggest capitalist roader in the Party"; he was displaced as Party Deputy Chairman by Lin Biao in July 1966. By 1967, Liu and his wife Wang Guangmei were placed under house arrest in Beijing. Liu was removed from all his positions and expelled from the Party in October 1968. At Congress, Liu was denounced as a traitor and an enemy agent. Zhou Enlai read the Party verdict that Liu was "a criminal traitor, enemy agent and scab in the service of the imperialists, modern revisionists and the Kuomintang reactionaries". Liu's conditions did not improve after he was denounced in the Ninth Party Congress in 1969, and he died soon afterwards.
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Liu with Indira Gandhi, 1954
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By 1966, few senior leaders in China questioned the need for widespread reform to combat the growing problems of corruption and bureaucratisation within the Party and the government. With the goal of reforming the government to be more efficient and true to the Communist ideal, Liu himself chaired the enlarged Politburo meeting that officially began the Cultural Revolution. However, Liu and his political allies quickly lost control of the Cultural Revolution soon after it was called, when Mao used the movement to progressively monopolize political power and destroy his perceived enemies.
The Cultural Revolution declared in 1966, was overtly pro-Maoist, and gave Mao the power and influence to purge the Party of his political enemies at the highest levels of government. Along with closing China's schools and universities, and Mao's exhortations to young Chinese to randomly destroy old buildings, temples, and art, and to attack their teachers, school administrators, party leaders, and parents, the Cultural Revolution also increased Mao's prestige so much that entire villages adopted the practice of offering prayers to Mao before every meal.
Mao established himself as a demigod accountable to no one, purging any that he suspected of opposing him and directing the masses and Red Guards "to destroy virtually all state and party institutions". After the Cultural Revolution was announced, most of the senior members of the CCP who had voiced any hesitation in following Mao's direction, including Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, were removed from their posts almost immediately and, with their families, subjected to mass criticism and humiliation.
Liu and Deng, along with many others, were denounced as "capitalist roaders". Liu was labelled as a "traitor" and "the biggest capitalist roader in the Party"; he was displaced as Party Deputy Chairman by Lin Biao in July 1966. By 1967, Liu and his wife Wang Guangmei were placed under house arrest in Beijing. Liu was removed from all his positions and expelled from the Party in October 1968. After his arrest, Liu disappeared from public view.
He was denied medicine for his diabetes, and for pneumonia, which developed after his arrest. Liu was eventually given treatment only when Jiang Qing, the actress wife of Mao, feared he would die; she desired that Liu be kept alive to serve as a "living target" during the Ninth Party Congress in 1969.
At Congress, Liu was denounced as a traitor and an enemy agent. Zhou Enlai read the Party verdict that Liu was "a criminal traitor, enemy agent and scab in the service of the imperialists, modern revisionists and the Kuomintang reactionaries". Liu's conditions did not improve after he was denounced in Congress, and he died soon afterwards, on November 12, aged 70.
After the launch of Reforms and Opening Up, the Chinese Communist Party officially stated in June 1981 that the famine was mainly due to the mistakes of the Great Leap Forward as well as the Anti-Rightist Campaign, in addition to some natural disasters and the Sino-Soviet split.
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1. China’s Strategy for Sino-Indian Boundary Disputes, 1950-1962, Asian Perspective, Johns Hopkins University Press
2. The CIA's Secret War in Tibet, Kenneth Conboy, James Morrison, University Press of Kansas, 2002
3. China's India War, Bertil Lintner, Oxford University Press, 2018
4. Memoirs of a Chinese Marshal, Peng Dehuai, Foreign Languages Press, Beijing, 1984
5. Faligot, Roger; Kauffer, Remi (1989). The Chinese Secret Service. Translated by Christine Donougher
© Ramachandran
