China must confront dark past, says Mao confidant
Communist party veteran says Tiananmen students were right to
demand more democracy and less corruption
Jonathan Watts in Beijing
Thursday June 2, 2005
The Guardian
His giant portrait still hangs in pride of place over the entrance
to the Forbidden City, his embalmed body lies in a mausoleum in the
middle of Tiananmen Square, and his visage is the only one to adorn
the latest set of banknotes.
Almost 30 years after his death, Mao still remains the central
figure in China. While the legend and legacy of Mao Zedong is now
under fresh, and intense, scrutiny overseas, there is no debate
here.
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A new English biography of him by Jung Chang, the author of Wild
Swans, describes Mao as the biggest mass murderer in history, yet
the book will not be the talk of Beijing's coffee shops and
restaurants, nor will its claims fill the pages of Chinese
newspapers. For the book will not be published in China, and
references to it are hard to come by on the internet.
According to a confidant of Mao - a retired senior member of the
Communist party - it is this refusal to confront and reassess the
darkest episodes of China's past that is preventing the country
from achieving its potential in the future.
In a rare interview, Li Rui, Mao's personal secretary during the
Great Helmsman's most murderous period in power, told the Guardian
that the biggest problem facing modern China was its inability to
face up to history.
Few people know the horrors it contains more intimately than the
88-year-old, whose outspoken views have taken him in and out of the
centre of power in Beijing and the political wilderness of gulags
in freezing Heilongjiang province.
Most of the punishments were meted out by his mentor and chief
tormentor, Mao, whose worst crimes are still a taboo subject.
"That's China's biggest problem," Mr Li said. "Mao was too
autocratic. He couldn't bear to hear disagreements. He had a
superstitious belief that he was always and absolutely right. But
Mao's problem is also a problem of the system. It was caused by the
party system."
Mr Li has yet to read the new work on his former boss, but its
claim that Mao was culpable for the deaths of tens of millions of
people during the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution is
likely to come as no surprise.
"Mao's way of thinking and governing was terrifying. He put no
value on human life. The deaths of others meant nothing to him,"
said Li, who shakes with fury when asked about the chairman's
personality. "I really didn't like him."
Despite his unusually blunt criticism, Mr Li is no dissident. On
the contrary, he is a party man through and through, a cadre who
survived some of the roughest political turmoil of the 20th century
with his reputation intact.
His Beijing home in "Ministers House", an apartment block reserved
for senior communist pensioners, is proof of that.
But his fierce public comments are entirely consistent with a life
history that is filled with rebellions, often at great personal
cost, against those who abused their power. As a high school
student in Hubei, he led student protests against local warlords,
at university he threw himself into the movement against Japan, and
soon afterwards he was thrown into prison by Chang Kai-shek's
Kuomintang authorities for distributing Marxist textbooks.
Upon his release he joined Mao's communist forces in Yanan, where
he wrote stinging editorials for the party newspaper, Liberation.
The attention proved dangerous. After a brutal purge against
"reactionaries" he spent a year in prison on charges of
spying.
His independence of thought initially won him promotion to Mao's
inner circle, where he held the advisory position of personal
secretary. But in 1958 the same outspokenness got him thrown into a
gulag for two years when he dared to publicly criticise the
disastrous Great Leap Forward policy and, by extension, a leader
who was starting to project himself as infallible.
"As early as 1958, Mao said the personality cult was necessary," Mr
Li said. "By the time of the Cultural Revolution, this had become
an evil cult.
"Mao's methods were even harsher than the emperors of ancient
times. He tried to control the minds of the people."
Yet, despite this and his own suffering, Mr Li accepts the official
Communist party judgment that Mao was three parts bad, seven parts
good, because his revolutionary achievements in expelling the
colonial powers outweighed his failures once in power.
Since the insanity of the Cultural Revolution, China has also
changed almost beyond recognition. Its people are richer and far
freer to travel and express their views in private and to
foreigners, if not to the domestic public.
"Now I can talk to you. In the past, if I talked like this, I would
have been killed or jailed," Mr Li said.
None the less, his poems and essays, which attack corruption,
environmental destruction and domestic censorship, are published in
Hong Kong. When a mainland newspaper, the Southern Metropolitan,
printed his proposals for a tripartite division of power, the
authorities blocked its distribution and changed the editor.
Though the gulag is no longer a threat, there are considerable
risks in speaking out. This has been shown by the frequent arrests
of journalists, most recently Ching Cheong of the Straits Times,
who faces charges of spying because he tried toacquire notes of
secret interviews with the late premier Zhao Ziyang, who opposed
the Tiananmen Square killings on June 4 1989.
Mr Li is as disturbingly and admirably frank on this most sensitive
of subjects as he is on every other.
"The leadership did not understand the students. It worried that
they were organised by foreign powers and were part of an attempted
takeover by someone inside the party. The leadership's measures
were wrong. The students' calls for more democracy and less
corruption were right."
Last year, on the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen protests, there
were reports that prominent officials were calling for a review of
the crackdown, which the government has always justified as a
necessary measure to put down a revolt that threatened
stability.
Mr Li is one of the few to risk retribution from the authorities by
going public with such a call.
"We should talk about it. We should reassess what happened on June
4. But we must do it properly, not now," he said. As for Nazism in
Germany, or military dictatorship in South Korea, a judgment would
eventually be made by history. "But it is hard to say if it will
take five, 15 or 20 years."
Chairman's legacy
The Long March
Mao was among several leaders of a protracted retreat that started
in October 1934 and took the communist army 9,000km. Although it
ensured the survival of the party, only 20,000 of the 90,000 who
started out on the march in Jiangxi province made it to the end in
Yanan in Shaanxi. As well as disease, exposure and battles with the
Kuomintang, the high rate of fatalities was a result of repeated
inner-party purges.
Hundred Flowers Campaign
Emboldened after the early successes of the republic, Mao decided
in April 1957 to relax censorship and invite constructive criticism
about his rule. "Let a hundred flowers bloom" in the arts, he said.
But such was the flood of complaints that the Great Helmsman
quickly changed his stance. Within six months, 300,000
intellectuals were either killed, imprisoned, sacked or branded
"rightists" in need of political re-education.
Great Leap Forward
Mao was personally responsible for this disastrous attempt to
jumpstart the economy by collectivising agricultural production and
establishing smelting kilns in every village to match Britain's
industrial output in 10 years. The radical experiment started with
the attempted abolition of money and private property, and ended
with a famine that killed between 30 million and 60 million
peasants after the failure of harvests in 1959 and1960.
Cultural Revolution
An aging Mao attempted to build a new political base through the
spread of a personality cult. From 1966 devoted students across the
country formed Red Guard units, which spearheaded a vicious purge
against Mao's opponents - real and imagined. Anything related to
the Four Olds - old ideas, old customs, old culture and old habits
- was a target. Millions died. When the students threatened to move
out of control, Mao used the People's Liberation Army to crush
dissent.