Nixon and Mao by Margaret MacMillan Read Free Book Online

and socialist China. Only a handful of foreign journalists and diplomats had remained in Beijing, and their movements had been severely limited, or worse. The British mission was ransacked and burned by Red Guards. Soviet diplomats were penned up in their embassy by days of demonstrations; when the Soviet Union finally withdrew their families in 1967, women and children were beaten or forced to crawl under pictures of Mao on their way to their planes.
    The Chinese press was filled with wild attacks on some of the old heroes, the leading figures of the Communist revolution. Could it really be true that the former Chinese president Liu Shaoqi had been planning to restore capitalism in China? That the great revolutionary general Peng Dehuai had spent years plotting against the revolution? Glimpses of curious events reached the outside world: millions of ecstatic Red Guards jamming Tiananmen to wave their Little Red Books, weeping and cheering as their idol, Mao, appeared on the reviewing stand; mass rallies to denounce elderly men and women; provincial governors paraded through the streets with dunce caps and placards around their necks; a steady stream of vitriol against the enemies of the revolution from Chinese radio, along with extraordinary claims of miracles performed by Mao’s words. Party officials, it was announced, were being reeducated in factories or on farms. The universities and many of the high schools were closed so that the students could take part in the new revolution and their teachers go off for their own reeducation.
    Then suddenly, it seemed, the whole thing was over. In the fall of 1968 the authorities ordered the students to stop rampaging about and to head for the countryside. Slowly and cautiously, the schools and universities reopened. Mao remarked, with his customary insouciance, that it would probably be necessary to have another cultural revolution “in a few years.” In fact, the factional fights let loose by the years of turmoil went on, in some cases until Mao’s death seven years later, in 1976. In 1969, the Ninth Party Congress officially ended the Cultural Revolution, declaring it a great triumph and a victory for the forces of socialism.
    The Chinese who had suffered through the Cultural Revolution had a different view. The bill for that hideous event is still being totted up and may never be fully known. An entire people were encouraged to turn on their own society and culture, and on one another. Any cruelty, any excess was permitted as long as it was done in the name of Mao and the revolution. Being descended from the wrong class—landowners, for example—or owning a foreign book or old porcelain, or saying something that appeared to criticize Mao were all grounds for persecution. Teachers, blamed for transmitting old values, were arrested by their students and, in many cases, tortured to death. Children were told to denounce their parents if they had incorrect attitudes. Neighbors and colleagues turned on one another.
    It was dangerous to work for the government or be a member of the party, and particularly dangerous at the higher levels. Marshal Peng, who had contributed so much to the Communists’ survival and eventual victory in 1949, was beaten until his ribs broke and he could no longer lie down; his lingering death was made worse because he was denied medical treatment until it was too late. Liu Shaoqi, the former president, was publicly humiliated and tormented, and then placed in solitary confinement, where his guards and medical attendants had strict orders to treat him harshly. He went mad and died in squalid misery. The persecution did not spare family members. (The son of another leading Communist, Deng Xiaoping, was thrown out a window and became a paraplegic.) Young children were turned out of their homes and left to wander the streets. All over China, at all levels of society, there were similar tragedies. A recent estimate is that between 1966 and 1976 three million