Chiang Ching The Revolutionary Ambitions of a Communist
Leader
By Zafia Ryan
* Bracketed numbers refer to source material which is listed
at the end of this article.
For fifteen years Chiang Ching had been held
captive by the revisionists who took power in 1976 and restored
capitalism in China, and it was in their ignoble, blood-stained
hands that her life came to an end on May 14th, 1991, under very
suspicious circumstances.
With the death of Comrade Chiang Ching, the international
proletariat has lost one of its finest leaders.
To those who dare to dream of revolution -- and
even more, who dare to make it -- Chiang Ching stands as a powerful
example of fearlessly attacking the old and outmoded, of boldly
charting the way for the emergence of the new through all the
twists and sometimes bloody turns of the struggle to give birth
to a new social order. Her lifelong devotion to the communist
cause to Mao Tsetung's cause enabled her to make important contributions
to the experience and understanding of proletarian revolution.
She defended to the roots of her fiery soul the right of the masses
to storm the heavens, to challenge tradition in every sphere.
She fought for (and clashed head-on with those who didn't) Mao's
far-reaching vision of transforming the world from the bottom
up and sweeping away classes and all forms of social inequality.
Hers was the ideological stand and outlook of Marxism-Leninism-Mao
Tsetung Thought.
Although she mainly was prevented from playing
a public political role until the 1960s, Chiang Ching took big
strides in preparation for this by carrying out investigation
in the arts and other areas, including the movement for land reform.
In the sharp inner-Party struggle after the Great Leap Forward
she stepped to the fore to actively help Mao and the revolutionaries
launch the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR). She quickly
and enthusiastically rose to the heights demanded of her by the
tremendous times of the Cultural Revolution, which found her on
the front lines injecting forceful political energy and leadership
into it, encouraging the rebel youth, and providing practical
guidance to people striving to bring about pathbreaking socialist
innovations. Chiang Ching rapidly became an indispensable leader
of the revolutionary Left.
Her struggle against the revisionists who dominated
the important arenas of culture and education paved the way for
their overthrow during the Cultural Revolution. She was also instrumental
in revolutionizing the arts. She fought to bring women forward
both by breaking down the barriers to this and by setting a powerful
example herself. As a prominent leader of the Communist Party
of China (CCP) during the ten last remarkable years of proletarian
rule, she became more embroiled in the fierce class struggle inside
the Party, fighting unrelentingly to strengthen the revolutionary
character and correct line of the Party under Mao's leadership
and to defend and fully implement and consolidate the advances
of the Cultural Revolution.
The revisionist camps within the CCP, hoping
with every turn in the class struggle and every new realignment
of forces to crush Mao's revolutionary line, to restore capitalism
and drag China down the road of prostitution to imperialism once
again, joined forces after Mao died, and they arrested Chiang
Ching and the followers of the Left less than a month later. The
capitalist roaders immediately had to suppress opposition. At
first they paraded themselves as the true successors of Mao and
portrayed Chiang Ching and the Left as the revisionists, the renegades
and Mao's enemies. (Just to confuse people, they even put some
of their own "bad eggs" on trial with the Four as she and her
comrades were called.) They vilified Chiang Ching, launching a
vicious campaign to discredit her whole life, backed up with a
show of repression and force in order to intimidate her followers
from hewing to the revolutionary road in the face of their revisionist
coup d'état and usurpation of state power. But she refused to
buckle under their dastardly attacks, and in the face of their
threats, she defied them to kill her, continuing, along with her
revolutionary comrade Chang Chun-chiao, to heroically raise the
red flag, to defend the right to make revolution and to expose
them and their social system in the historic trial of 1980.
A Rebel Against Tradition
From the time she yanked the binding off her
feet as a young girl, Chiang Ching was a rebel. She grew up in
a China carved up by the imperialist powers, in the barbarous
days of poverty, when, as Mao said, "the trees [were] as naked
as the people because the people are busy eating them", and in
conditions of feudal oppression in which "peasant women longed
to be reborn as dogs so as to be less miserable".[38]* The German-held
areas of Shantung province, where Li Chin (as she was then named)
was born into a poor artisan family in 1914, were taken over by
Japan in World War I as a foothold to gain access to all of China.
Her father, a wheelmaker, took out his fury at being poor by beating
his wife and children, until her mother left him to work as a
servant for a landlord. Chiang Ching recalls often being hungry,
but luckier than many because she could go to school. She told
an interviewer that the class she hated most in primary school
was self-cultivation in Confucian morality (or, how to obey authorities),
and she was beaten for daydreaming. She remembers her nausea and
horror as a child at seeing the decapitated heads of debtors hanging
on a pole, and the sounds of executions of thieves who had stolen
food ringing in her young ears.[47]
Chiang Ching first became interested in acting
when, at the age of 15, she studied at an experimental art theatre
school run by the government, having been accepted only because
not enough girls had been enrolled. But the school closed shortly
afterwards under the pressure of a warlord's army stationed in
the town of Tsinan, and she and some of the teachers and students
went to Peking as part of a touring theatrical group. It was the
Mukden Incident on 18 September 1931, when the Japanese imperialists
seized Manchuria, that represented a first political turning point
for Chiang Ching. Since a young age she had hated foreign occupation
of her country, but now decided she had to take a stand. She soon
joined the League of Left-Wing Dramatists (which was led by the
Communist Party) in Tsingtao, where she worked as a library clerk
at the university, and began to read Lenin.
With friends she formed the Seaside Drama Society
which went out to the countryside to put on anti-Japanese plays
and popularize the "Soviet" areas that had been set up by the
Chinese Red Army. They discovered poverty they had never seen
in the cities and realized that more clearly distinguishing between
the goals of the nationalist Kuomintang (KMT) forces and the Communists
was no academic question. Chiang Ching, in reaction to Japanese
aggression, supported a line of "total resistance" and began to
be known as a "troublemaker" around the university circles she
moved in.
Actually Chiang Ching only had a total of eight
years of formal education, including five in primary school, although
quite frequently she sat in on university classes that interested
her. As she describes it she learned the most from "social education",
from the school of experience, which for her started in 1933,
when she sought out and was later admitted into the then underground
Chinese Communist Party. In the turbulent period of the 1930s
she had decided that making revolution was much more important
than writing poems and essays.
However, when Chiang Ching was sent to do work
in Shanghai in the spring of 1933, becoming an active Party member
proved much more difficult. Under the domination of Mao's chief
political rival, Wang Ming, and his urban insurrectionist line,
the Party structure was almost completely dissolved there and
opportunism was rife.1 Many of these CCP leaders, if they were
not collaborating directly with the KMT, used the fresh forces
attracted to communism from among the hundreds of thousands of
left wing intellectuals drawn to the cosmopolitan city of Shanghai
to shield themselves from the Kuomintang's regular dragnets.
Chiang Ching's first assignment in Shanghai was
with the Shanghai Work Study Troupe. She became a stage actress,
performing in numerous progressive plays that called on the people
to defend China against Japan. During a later stint as a night
school teacher for women workers, she visited many factories and
became intimately familiar with the wretched conditions of factory
contract labour, especially in the large Japanese-owned textile
mills and the British-owned cigarette factories. She was arrested
by the KMT (with the "help" of an old friend of hers, who had
turned into a renegade from the CCP and joined the secret police)
and was held for eight months; at least, she recounted, her jail
time taught her some lessons about how to fool her KMT jailers
with outward appearances.
Being a film actress in the 1930s in Shanghai
meant going up against tradition on every front. It was looked
down on, and considered a profession for "loose" and socially
radical women. Actresses were targets of widespread personal persecution,
with the aim of stirring its victims' feudal "instincts" and driving
the women to suicide a frequent result. The renowned revolutionary
writer, Lu Hsun, who was very influential in this period and who
sympathized with the Communists, was one of Chiang Ching's mentors.
He wrote about this problem and the problem of women's emancipation
in general in several essays, notably one called "Gossip is a
Fearful Thing", which spoke to the unjust slander against women
in the performing arts and to misogynist press attacks.[47]2
In the mid-1930s Mao and the Red Army were winding
up the Long March. Chiang Ching became more involved in film acting,
mainly in order to eat, and found that it was still totally dominated
by Hollywood, with the exception of a few democratic films. She
also wrote some articles in the leftist journal Enlightenment.
After her kidnapping was falsely reported in the press (to pressure
her to commit suicide), she denounced this personal threat in
a Shanghai newspaper article, called "My Open Letter". In 1937,
not long before the Japanese moved in to bomb Shanghai, Chiang
Ching journeyed north to the CCP's Eighth Route Army Headquarters
in Sian, where she and many other young radicals asked to go join
the Red Army base at Yenan, some 300 mountainous miles away.
Yenan: Mao's Student and Comrade-in-arms
Although Chiang Ching had joined the Party some
years earlier, everything in her story indicates that it was the
period in Yenan which represented a real political and ideological
leap for her. She attended lectures by Mao Tsetung and joined
the Party School while she worked and took classes at the Lu Hsun
Academy of Literature and Arts (which among other things trained
theatrical troupes to serve at the front). Acting was no longer
her main activity arriving during a lull in the war, she also
took six months of military training and got down to the business
of seriously studying Marxism-Leninism. Mao was keenly interested
in questions of culture and went out of his way to seek discussion
of art and politics with the new arrivals, and Chiang Ching, for
her part, became an avid student of Mao's. In late 1938, she and
Mao Tsetung were married. They had one daughter, Li Na, and raised
her with another daughter of Mao's, Li Min.
On the wreath of flowers she made for Mao's funeral
in 1976, Chiang Ching's dedication read, "from your student and
comrade-in-arms". Throughout their 38 years of marriage she characterized
her relationship to the Chairman in this way, and though the political
storms they faced together were many and diverse, it was during
the intense days they lived through in the cave dwellings they
shared in Yenan and throughout the last years of the liberation
war Mao was leading in China's Northwest that these close bonds
were forged.
Foreign visitors describe the radically spirited
"war communist" atmosphere of these strenuous Yenan days, when
communist leaders mixed easily with the peasants, young and old
danced together and soldiers pitched in to grow food, when life
was relatively simple and organized around the single-minded purpose
of waging a revolutionary war of the people and when fresh green
shoots of a new society were beginning to sprout. As one of Mao's
slogans charcoaled on the ancient walls of Yenan read: "With a
Hoe over One Shoulder and a Rifle over the Other We Will Become
Self-Sufficient in Production and Protect the Party's Central
Committee!"[47]
It is unclear to what extent the CCP intervened
in Mao and Chiang Ching's marriage, but it is widely reported
that some of the Party leaders consented to it only if Chiang
Ching were not allowed to play a public political role, a situation
which was to stifle her initiative many times over the coming
years after liberation had been won and the tasks of socialist
revolution and socialist construction began in earnest.
Chiang Ching joined a group that set off to do
six months of manual labour in the hills of Nanniwan as part of
a land reclamation project and self-sufficient community Mao had
started in 1939 to encourage production in the area. She also
began to serve as Mao's personal secretary, for a time, and attended
the famous Yenan Forum on Literature and Art in that capacity.3
Mao, who always insisted on penning his articles in his own hand,
only allowed her to take up this task at a time when disease prevented
him from writing, but even in this post she says she was denied
full respect by the other men in the CCP leadership. Despite problems
battling tuberculosis through the early 1940s, Chiang Ching taught
dramatic arts at Lu Hsun Academy and led the production of plays
calling on the masses to resist Japanese aggression, which were
taken out to the local people and the front.
Chiang Kai-shek bombed Yenan in March 1947, forcing
the Party leadership to move out. Chiang Ching served as a political
instructor of the Third Regiment in the Northwest theatre, where
she says the most difficult years of the liberation war were fought,
from March 1947 to June 1949. This is the period which inspired
the celebrated new works developed during the Cultural Revolution
the Yellow River Piano Concerto and two of the revolutionary operas
The Red Lantern and Shachiapang. She remembers the warmth of the
masses and their tears of jubilation when Mao and she visited
some villages along the march route, as well as the pains they
took to protect him by refusing to say his name in public.
Coinciding with Mao's "Double Ten Manifesto"
(issued on 10 October 1947) which called on all the people to
defeat Chiang Kai-shek and to unite the nation, one of her duties
was to organize a campaign to recall past suffering among the
troops and to carry out the "three check-ups", which meant overseeing
compliance with the Red Army's code of conduct as concentrated
in the Three Rules of Discipline and the Eight Points for Attention.4
Soon afterwards, as Mao's writings popularizing New Democracy
spread throughout China, a more general campaign to consolidate
the army was begun, partly as a prelude to land reform. Chiang
Ching also led a debate group as part of the work of a mobile
propaganda unit. Later, as the New Democratic state was being
organized in Peking, in the spring of 1949, she joined the Party
Secretariat.
Chiang Ching tells of using the time between
engagements with the enemy to learn more about the social and
political situation of the peasants, as groundwork for launching
land reform. One story about the woman question from a coastal
province during that period, in which concubinage was common,
was revealing. A landlord, who had forced his multiple concubines
to do menial tasks like carry him around in a wicker sedan chair
and do all the field work, was particularly hated. During land
reform, "his" concubines denounced him before the whole community,
destroying him; they, in turn, each received a piece of his land
to work as their own.
Land Reform and Social Investigation
Chiang Ching's ability to develop her knowledge
as a revolutionary critic and to promote a proletarian line on
the arts, as well as to lead others in the cultural sphere, was
partly rooted in her experience of carrying out bold and extensive
investigation in the 1950s as she stubbornly battled the forces
who sought to keep her invisible and silent. Along with studying
and developing the political and ideological questions involved,
her drive to work among the masses, to better know first-hand
the conditions and problems faced by the peasants and workers
who were fighting to revolutionize society, proved to be of great
benefit during the struggle with artists some ten years later
over how to portray the revolutionary qualities of these new heroes
replacing the landlords and empresses on China's stage, not to
mention her being able to take a correct stand in the class warfare
raging at the top levels of the Party.
Weakened from the war and suffering from a number
of health problems, Chiang Ching was sent to Moscow repeatedly
over the next decade for long periods of medical treatment, since
most of China's hospitals had been destroyed during the years
of war. It seems that Mao's political enemies also saw this as
a way of keeping her out of their way; she tells of being refused
permission to return to Peking in the late 1950s, even when the
Moscow doctors were doing nothing to improve her condition and
she was on the brink of death from cervical cancer.
Chiang Ching recalls her elation at news of the
bold strike of the People's Liberation Army (PLA) against the
lingering British warship, the Amethyst, in April 1949, which
she heard on Soviet radio. Shortly after the People's Republic
was founded in the autumn of 1949, she returned to Peking and
made plans to investigate some rural areas near Shanghai, where
land reform was getting underway. Already during the Northwest
Campaign she had gained some experience putting Mao's revolutionary
agrarian policy into effect leading the peasants to overthrow
landlords and to redistribute the land.
After an officially organized trip to the rural
areas outside of Shanghai was obstructed by some Party renegades
controlling the vast eastern region (seemingly, Wang Ming loyalists
who, unknown to the Party, had gone over to the KMT), Chiang Ching
was forced to strike out on her own to get to the industrial city
of Wusih in Kiangsu province. There she studied the background
of the region, the land tenancy system and the local economy before
visiting the surrounding countryside. She learned, for example,
that peasants were not able to be self-sufficient in food and
devoted part of their land to tea and silk production in exchange
for rice. And the disruption of production from the Japanese occupation
period was still preventing them from getting enough to eat.
A few years later she visited what had been a
KMT "model county", where although "women did most of the work",
as the men gambled and drank tea, they were not allowed to plough.
"So I went and ploughed on my own", she said. Material inequalities
between men and women were also more pronounced in the countryside
than the cities. Although agrarian reform distributed land to
both sexes on the basis of equality, such laws were carried out
unevenly. Women often got smaller plots or the worst land, and
because of the weight of their oppression, did not fight back.
Men often took advantage of this also to refuse to share farming
tools, and to leave the worst jobs with lowest pay for women,
despite the new government policy of equal pay for equal work
established by the Communist Party.
The Marriage Reform passed in 1950 was mainly
to protect women, to give them free choice and the right to divorce.
As Chiang Ching described, old practices and traditional ideas
are hard to overthrow, and arranged marriages continued in some
areas. She went into some villages during this period to help
settle divorce disputes and give guidance to local Party Committees
to learn to handle these volatile questions and to create public
opinion for persuasion rather than tailing the masses' demands
for more antagonistic solutions such as death sentences in divorce-type
conflicts, for example.
Chiang Ching was eager to take part in the class
struggle to transform China's countryside, and in the autumn of
1951 set off with a work team to follow land reform developments
in the area of Wuhan, on the Yangtze River. While Mao supported
her, others high in the Party apparatus opposed this contact with
the masses5, and had her along with her bodyguards pulled off
the train before it reached the countryside. Refusing to give
up, Chiang Ching took her bodyguards and with them organized investigation
on their own, in a particularly difficult area which had been
a KMT stronghold during the long years of people's war and was
exceptionally resistant to land reform.6
Land reform had its twists and turns. Mao had
set the three big mountains feudalism, bureaucrat capitalism and
imperialism as targets, which in the countryside meant focusing
on the landlord class and local tyrants who ran the organizations
of landlords. Working with the community, Chiang Ching's team
singled out the 8 to 20% worst offenders and, based on the Agrarian
Reform Law, brought them to justice. She recounted the difficulty
of restraining the masses' anger, once unleashed against these
hated tyrants: occasionally the work team would have to protect
them from being beaten to death on the spot, and at times the
team itself was attacked physically in the process. The team brought
them before the People's Court for sentencing, sometimes to death.
Then land and movable property were redistributed, and for this,
careful class analysis had to be made. The spontaneous tendency
was to broaden the social targets, meaning that middle peasants
(who generally had insignificant small plots) were expropriated,
or rich peasants were called landlords; but some "right errors"
also cropped up, letting landlords completely off the hook. And,
Chiang Ching stressed, the stratification varied from one area
to another, so the agrarian laws had to be applied differently.
In dividing up the landlord's property, the Party team encouraged
"broadness of mind" and that each household take only what they
needed. She laughingly recollected an image from those days, of
waddling landlords who put on so many gowns and suits in order
to save as much as they could that they were unable to budge!
In order to carry out the land reform work, Chiang
Ching's team studied Marxism-Leninism and tried to follow through
on Mao's emphasis on the need to "Get Organized". After land was
distributed, they devoted themselves to this task, setting up
a new, democratic, local government and organizing elections to
peasant associations.
About the time Mao put together the collection
of articles, "Socialist Upsurge in China's Countryside", in order
to create public opinion in favour of cooperatives in 1955, Chiang
Ching also wrote a piece called, "Do the People Get Enough to
Eat from Grain Rations?" Detailing individual needs, she argues
for grain rationing in the cities, where there was considerable
resistance to the reorganization of production in the countryside.
Learning to Go Against the Tide
Chiang Ching used the long intervals she spent
recovering from a number of serious illnesses to read widely on
a broad range of subjects, focusing on the "main political struggle
between the class enemy and ourselves", as she put it. She pored
over new books and articles and selected the most important materials
for Mao Tsetung to read, indicating what she thought were the
key issues. She was assigned to investigate international questions
in particular. While he sat at her bedside in the winter of 1953,
she kept him abreast of events and read newspapers and telegrams
to him.[46,47]
In 1954 she came across an article written by
two students criticizing the bourgeois views of a professor who
passed as the expert on the eighteenth century historical novel,
Dream of the Red Chamber. She showed the article to Mao who had
her instruct the People's Daily to reprint it. She began to probe
into the story and found that both leading literary journals and
the People's Daily had refused to publish it because it was written
by "nobodies", and didn't merit rocking the literary boat the
same reaction Chiang Ching got from the Central Committee's Propaganda
Department. Mao issued a directive hailing the article as the
"first serious attack in 30 years" against so-called authorities
on the novel.
Chiang Ching had already stirred up a hornet's
nest over several other works defending the feudal and old bourgeois
classes and brought them to Mao's attention. Among them was Inside
the Ching Court, a film about the Boxer Rebellion of 1900 that
portrayed the peasantry as ignorant and barbaric, while glorifying
the Manchu emperor, who represents the liberal aristocracy. Chiang
Ching objected to its circulation and promotion as a "patriotic"
film (by Liu Shao-chi, among others), and when Mao saw it, he
called it a film of national betrayal.
At the time The Story of Wu Hsun appeared back
in 1950 during the land reform movement, she exposed the film's
endorsement of bourgeois aspirations and its basic message that
preached liberation and social success through education, as well
as its conciliatory stand towards the feudal landlords. Wu Hsun
was a pauper who carefully saved every bit of cash he could, gaining
interest on it from landlords and usurers, until he had enough
to buy property and build a school offering free education to
poor children. When Chou Yang, Vice Minister of Culture, said
he could put up with a little reformism, Chiang Ching flung the
door closed, with, "Then go ahead with your reformism!" Although
even Mao at first thought she might be wasting her time, she delved
into an eight-month-long investigation into the life and legend
of Wu Hsun; she wanted to be in a position to launch a thoroughly
informed criticism and to begin to attack the pillars and defenders
of this bourgeois line in the arts.
In the beginning Chou Yang tried to prevent Chiang
Ching from carrying out this project, but when he failed he sent
a secretary to be her assistant and to sabotage the work in Shantung
province, where Wu Hsun's legend was especially strong. As it
turned out, a local landlord was promoting the Wu Hsun model to
the people, and the more she dug into the fellow's past, the more
she uncovered about his own class origins. She called on the local
people to help get to the bottom of this "spirit" of Wu Hsun.
She found out he was not only a landlord with several mistresses,
but had been promoted to oppose widespread peasant revolts then
shaking western Shantung.
She sent back reports to the Chairman, and People's
Daily began publishing the results of the investigation; rival
"fact-finding" teams appeared, and the debate over the Wu Hsun
model became a widespread social question in 1951. Mao himself
wrote an editorial for the People's Daily based on Chiang Ching's
report, pointing out "the degree of ideological confusion reached
in our country's cultural circles! In the view of many writers,
history has developed not by the replacement of the old by the
new, but by the straining of every effort to preserve the old
from extinction, not by class struggle to overthrow the reactionary
feudal rulers who had to be overthrown, but by the negation of
the class struggle of the oppressed and their submission to these
rulers, in the manner of Wu Hsun." He called for a discussion
on the film and on essays relating to the Wu Hsun story.[23]
Although unknown to the public, Chiang Ching
therefore made contributions early on in this area that was almost
totally dominated by bourgeois intellectuals with the backing
of high-ranking revisionists in the CCP. While Chou Yang whined
that she was "upsetting" the writers and artists, she had in mind
a different problem: here were millions of peasants who were making
colossal revolutionary efforts to transform agriculture and social
relations in the countryside and they had the chance to see maybe
one movie or play a year. Was it going to be about glittery emperors
and empresses who squashed their rebellions and haughty landlords
counting money, or the new actors, the masses of labouring people
sacrificing their blood and devoting their lives to change society?
Chiang Ching refused to back off from controversy
and, armed with Mao's pathbreaking analysis from the 1940s of
art and politics, helped to break up the peace of the sacred spheres
that so far had scarcely been challenged, much less transformed,
by the revolution, and she used this controversy to expose the
outmoded thinking of writers and artists clinging to the "standards"
of the past. Together with Mao she encouraged the fresh "nobodies"
to upbraid the staid and mouldy "authorities" and began to develop
views on promoting proletarian ideology and revolutionary heroes.
These rumblings of thunder in the cultural arena
a decade before the spring storms of the Cultural Revolution broke
out fully were encouraged by Mao's initiative in 1957 to open
the floor to questions directly affecting the superstructure the
campaign to "Let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools
of thought contend". Mao insisted: we are overtly, not covertly,
as often charged, inviting the poisonous weeds to jump out so
we can better criticize them. "Class struggle is an objective
reality, independent of man's will.... It cannot be avoided even
if people want to avoid it. The only thing to do is to make the
best use of the situation and guide the struggle to victory."[24]
Attacking the Old Superstructure... and its Guardians
As the 1950s drew to a close, the political struggle
within the Central Committee sharpened up dramatically. The two
roads and two lines were becoming increasingly clear to push ahead
with socialist construction of the economy and revolutionization
of society as a whole, or to stop and "rest", as the bourgeois
elements, those veteran Party leaders "stuck" in the first, bourgeois
democratic phase of the revolution would have it, and develop
capitalism. In addition, Khrushchev's call for goulash instead
of communism greatly reinforced the danger inside China.
During the stormy Politburo meetings at Lushan
in 1959, Mao wrote to Chiang Ching, sending her the response he
had prepared to counter Defence Minister Peng Teh-huai's opposition
to accelerating the transition to socialism. Peng was about to
be knocked down as the leading representative of the line within
the Central Committee that advocated forming a modern army like
the Soviet Union's (and opposed creating a people's militia),
a line linked to the broadside attack on the cooperative transformation
of agriculture in the Great Leap Forward in the name of promoting
heavy industry and building up the military.7 Although Mao tried
to stop her, warning that the very intense struggle would be too
demanding for her fragile health, Chiang Ching insisted on joining
him at the meetings in order to fully understand the situation.
In the early 1960s struggle focused on how to
sum up the Great Leap Forward and communization in general. Liu
Shao-chi, Mao's chief opponent and the chief representative of
those Party officials taking the capitalist road, jumped out more
openly, calling for greater monetary incentives for agricultural
production, the extension of private plots, more rural (capitalist)
fairs and so on. Not coincidentally, Liu began paying visits to
Confucius' shrine. Although Mao and the proletarian camp were
firmly in command of the Party overall, the bourgeois forces,
increasingly concentrated at the top levels of the Party, were
strong and energetically creating public opinion for a takeover
of power. These revisionists had a strong grip on both the educational
system and the arts, areas key to spreading their ideology and
influencing the masses.
The Left prepared a counter-attack and began
to create their own public opinion for a major offensive against
the bourgeoisie in the Party.
Chiang Ching plunged into the political battles
alongside Mao. She began publishing articles in her own name in
some women's and youth journals, as well as going back out among
the masses in 1963 as part of the Socialist Education Movement,
Mao's offensive to combat revisionism, bourgeois practices and
thinking, which was the precursor to the Cultural Revolution.
He called on cadres, artists and writers from the cities to go
to the countryside and learn from the masses. At the Tenth Plenum
of the Eighth Central Committee meeting in 1962 a decision was
made after much struggle to let Chiang Ching challenge the revisionist
stronghold of the Peking Municipal Committee presided over by
Politburo member and Mayor of Peking Peng Chen (which had responsibility
for setting national policy on culture). These were the people
who controlled much of China's press, its theatres and cultural
circles and who fostered a school of thought (opposing Mao's push
to further revolutionize society and promoting nest-feathering
in the name of modernization) that was influential among intellectuals
in general.
They created a haven for new bourgeois writers
like Wu Han, author of the play Hai Jui Dismissed from Office
that appeared in 1961, which was a protest against Mao for dismissing
Peng Teh-huai as Defence Minister in 1959, covered only by thin
analogy to the Ming Dynasty era. They were also the sponsors of
the newspaper column "Three Family Village" that satirically attacked
Mao and his line.8 If the revolutionaries criticized the writings
or dramatic productions sponsored by this new bourgeoisie, who
were actively working to stamp cultural and intellectual life
in general with their class outlook, such criticisms were dodged
with phoney self-criticisms or counter-articles that touched on
secondary points.
This dilemma was magnified by the fact that the
Left could not even get much of what it wanted published, and
thus had to partially rely on channels within the army, under
the command of Lin Piao. Some time later, in early 1966, Mao was
moved to call the central Ministry of Propaganda the "Palace of
the Prince of Hell" "It must be overthrown! It is to the advantage
of despots to keep people ignorant. It is to our advantage to
make them intelligent."[25]
Chiang Ching tried to get criticisms of Hai Jui
Dismissed from Office written and printed in Peking, but this
clique threw a fit and blocked it everywhere. Finally, working
quietly under Chiang Ching's and Mao's leadership, a young writer
named Yao Wen-yuan, who had become active during the anti-rightest
movement following the Hundred Flowers Campaign, wrote a blistering
critique of this play. But it was only in Shanghai that it could
be printed at first and not until November 1965, when Mao called
it the "signal" for the Cultural Revolution. The Peking clique
of writers then tried to bury the huge controversy that broke
out in academic nuances of history, even resorting to distancing
themselves from author (and Vice Mayor of Peking) Wu Han in order
to save their own positions.
Revolution in the Peking Opera
A host of bigwig "experts" and defenders of feudal
and bourgeois drama and music arrogantly held sway in most all
of the arts, opera being among the worst. This dominion over important
areas of the superstructure by the new bourgeois elite connected
to revisionists in the top ranks of the Party was a reflection
of the incomplete transformation of the economic base of society,
which, while overall socialist, still had significant capitalist
features. The profound truth that Mao enriched that the political
struggle to make revolution had to be carried out in the superstructure,
in the sphere of ideas, values, customs and culture stared defiantly
at both classes, the proletariat and the new bourgeoisie, locked
in struggle.
In over a decade of proletarian rule giant strides
towards transforming backward, semi-feudal, semi-colonial China
had been taken: private ownership had basically been changed through
collectivization and the nationalization of industry, and, since
China had been wrested out of the claws of foreign domination,
the economy as a whole was based on answering people's needs rather
than filling imperialist coffers. The onerous cycle of poverty
and debt had been broken, and famine and illiteracy had in the
main been wiped out. Women began to enter the schools in much
larger numbers and to take an active part in productive and political
life. At the same time, breakthroughs in many areas were partial
or totally blocked by a revisionist line and the oppressive weight
of the past. Nowhere was this clearer than in narrowing the "three
great differences" between city and countryside, workers and peasants,
and manual and mental labour. In 1964 Mao branded the Department
of Public Health the "Health Ministry of Urban Gentlemen". In
some factories revisionist-led management urged workers to limit
political discussions to thirty minutes per day so as not to interrupt
production. And, as one aspect of Chang Chun-chiao's penetrating
analysis of bourgeois right revealed, in the countryside ownership
was still collective and not "by the whole people", a situation
that facilitated capitalist tendencies[1]; furthermore the quality
of land varied tremendously among the different communes, giving
rise to important advantages for some. This contradiction between
socialism and the remnants of semi-feudalism plus newborn capitalism
was also clearly illustrated by the escalating and difficult struggle
to liberate Chinese women, who had begun to be integrated into
industry, teaching jobs and lower-level Party and government posts,
yet still faced tremendous hurdles of feudal ideas and traditional
oppressive roles in the home. Only unleashing the conscious struggle
in the superstructure could begin to tear off these ideological
shackles and in turn lead to further socialist transformation
of the economic base.
The struggle in the arts erupted as a reflection
of this. The bourgeois line reduced it to a clash over the issue
of too "narrowly" handling questions of art, the pace of "socialist
reform", or of the "genius" needed for creation. In reality the
struggle posed in a concentrated way the fundamental problem of
whether the proletariat was going to seize control of this sphere
and make revolution in the superstructure or not. Was the cultural
realm going to serve the socialist base or undermine it? The Left
was not just preparing an offensive against bad ideas, but against
those ideas, beliefs and cultural works that preserved the old
oppressive divisions of society. The old Peking opera itself was
a stubborn stronghold of the landlord and capitalist classes in
the ideological field, whose repertories mainly propagated Confucian
virtues of obedience and loyalty. As was to be summed up ten years
later, "the selection of Peking Opera as the place to make a breakthrough
by the proletarian revolution in literature and the arts is itself
a major struggle to criticize the doctrines of Confucius and Mencius;
it aims at dismantling the spiritual props on which the reactionary
classes have relied for centuries to create a hell on earth."[22]
Chiang Ching carried out a great deal of investigation,
visiting many theatre troupes, talking with performers, viewing
films and attending plays and operas all over the country. What
she found was not socialist innovation highlighting the feats
and heroism of the masses, but a stultifying mixture of new revisionism
and tedious, oppressive old works that defended privilege and
class differences and staged ornate and superstitious traditional
characters, or the wholesale imitation of foreign plays by bourgeois
writers.
Although under Chou Yang new theatres had been
set up, the old works persisted, as did the existence of local
opera companies performing stuffy, glamourous feudal operas to
very meagre audiences. But also new revisionist art was produced,
combining tradition with "new theatre". It eclectically blended
things together with the effect of preserving evil, negative heroes
(one of the hallmarks of Peking Opera) and the old styles and
melodies, while preventing the emergence of distinct revolutionary
themes and heroes with new artistic forms. For example, plays
appearing during the agrarian revolution of the Great Leap Forward
featured feudal empresses suddenly showing compassion for the
peasant masses they ruled over; the liberation war was the springboard
to promote love themes, and under the banner of "realism and naturalism",
the masses would be portrayed as tired and shabby, hardly inspiring
heroic images.
Chiang Ching's findings in part prompted Mao's
famous denunciation of the Ministry of Culture as a "Ministry
of Emperors and Princes, Generals, Mummies, Gifted Scholars and
Foreign Beauties... if they don't change, we'll rename them."[18]
Chiang Ching began work to transform the Peking Opera investigation
started in 1961, "we took action" in 1963. The Mayor of Shanghai,
Ko Ching-shih, was one of the few to support Chiang Ching's drive
to replace the feudal demons and monsters of the stage with revolutionary
dramas featuring the masses of workers, peasants and soldiers.
Artists were called on to carry the class struggle into these
spheres and develop new socialist repertories. Studying Mao's
Talks at the Yenan Forum on Literature and Art, a small number
of pioneers under Chiang Ching's lead sharpened their tools of
criticism and began both to expose the old works and to vigourously
struggle with artists and writers to revise the scripts and to
write new ones.
In the space of a few years, some 37 new and
revised operas and plays were developed, including the first model
works. To create good modern plays Chiang Ching had initiated
the method of three-in-one combinations in the arts, linking Party
cadres, playwrights (who were sent to live among the peasants,
soldiers and workers to better understand the experience they
were to convey), and revolutionary masses, who watched and criticized
in order to improve the actual productions.
For example, Chiang Ching saw a performance of
a Huai Chu (folk) opera in 1963 and proposed adapting it to the
Peking Opera, On the Docks, which became one of the first plays
set in the socialist period. It was originally composed with the
help of the Shanghai dock workers, who were very excited: "In
the old days we were just coolies, we had no right to watch from
the audience, let alone go on stage." But the Shanghai Peking
Opera Theatre was a stronghold of the revisionist line in the
arts, and its writers immediately began to modify the script,
trying to dilute its internationalism and raise "middle characters"
to the main roles. The dock workers were furious. "Every one of
our families has a history of bitter suffering.... When it comes
to the revolutionary cause of the Party we veteran workers are
alive, ready and decisive. Your opera makes us stupid and sluggish....
We will never approve such an opera!"[45]
In March 1965, Chiang Ching led the reorganization
of the cast and scriptwriting, recreating the story of Shanghai's
advanced dockers who struggle to load a ship with wheat destined
for the national liberation struggles in Asia, Africa and Latin
America, but encounter sabotage by a backward worker, who has
support from revisionists in the Party. The real-life revisionists
again counter-attacked, calling this version poor artistically,
and criticizing the strong role played by the woman Party leader
(who leads the struggle to uncover the plot and get the shipment
out on time) as "unrealistic". They tried to block its performances.
More struggle followed. Chiang Ching stressed internationalism
to encourage the troupe: "The oppressed people all over the world
are longing to see our operas on revolutionary contemporary themes.
We should have the highest aspirations and resolve to serve the
needs of the Chinese people as well as the oppressed people of
the whole world."[3] Two years later, after the fires of the Cultural
Revolution had focused the struggle between two lines in the political
arena, the opera was completed and presented on the 25th anniversary
of the Yenan Forum.
Besides entering into the line struggles over
theme and content and over the artists' need to remould their
outlook as well as to learn about the lives of the classes they
were representing on stage, Chiang Ching also paid close attention
to artistic form and the all-important unity between revolutionary
political content and perfecting artistic form. She personally
went into the theatres to encourage innovation and to struggle
with the performers themselves about how to change everything
from their acting and posture to the lighting, props, costumes,
colour, music, dance and singing to reflect a different class
stand. No more wailing like in the old opera. Women cried standing,
turning their grief into anger. Instead of covering their mouths
when they smiled, as in feudal society, they laughed outright
with joy and determination. Militant fists replaced the weak,
delicate "orchid finger" gesture of aristocratic China.
Much of Chiang Ching's investigation was revealed
in her speech to the Peking Opera Festival, held in the summer
of 1964, which brought together 5000 representatives from opera
companies in the provinces and cities, under the uneasy watch
of the revisionist cultural hierarchy. New revolutionary operas
created in the midst of the sharp struggle in the realm of culture
were performed, including such works as Raid on the White Tiger
Regiment, set during the Korean War, and Shachiapang, which emphasizes
the close relationship between the army and the peasant masses
during the guerrilla war against the Japanese (also made into
a symphony). Experiences in waging class struggle against the
revisionists, who keenly opposed this process of transformation,
were exchanged. New shoots of socialist society were springing
into being.
In this first public appearance Chiang Ching
asks the assembled artists: "Shall we serve this handful [of landlords,
rich peasants, counter-revolutionaries, bad elements, Rightists
and bourgeois elements], or the 600 million [workers, peasants
and soldiers]?... The grain we eat is grown by the peasants, the
clothes we wear and the houses we live in are all made by the
workers, and the People's Liberation Army stands guard at the
fronts of national defence for us and yet we do not portray them
on the stage. May I ask which class stand do you take? And where
is the artists' conscience' you always talk about?" She says
that the "foremost task" is to create revolutionary heroes, and
calls for fostering some "pace-setters", for producing "some historical
operas which are really written from the standpoint of historical
materialism and which can make the past serve the present". She
insists on the importance of developing new plays, by creative
writing and by adaptation.[3]
Behind the scenes Chiang Ching's (and Mao's)
political enemies laid a scheme for how to coopt this growing
movement that they could not openly oppose. They had to go along
with the festival, for example, but at the time they tried to
sabotage preparations of the operas for it and afterwards revised
Chiang Ching's speech before publication. The original version
did not appear in print until three years later, in May 1967,
the first time that Chiang Ching's instrumental role in revolutionizing
the Peking Opera was broadly made public.
Some time later, in 1965, Chiang Ching directly
confronted Peng Chen, Mayor of Peking, about helping to proletarianize
the arts, pursuing what had already been started with works like
the ballet White-Haired Girl in Shanghai: so wouldn't he like
to give her authorization to work with a Peking Opera troupe to
begin such reforms there? He haughtily refused, tearing out of
her hands the opera score she had brought to show him.[47] Preoccupied
by the pursuit of fame and fortune, Deng Xiaoping was more philistine
in his attitude towards reforming the opera: "I'll raise both
hands and vote yes as long as I don't have to watch any of them!"
he was heard to say. His equally broad-minded revisionist chum
Tao Chu9 announced he'd rather play mahjong with Deng than have
to watch revolutionary operas.[45]
As things heated up at the beginning of the
Cultural Revolution, these revisionist chieftains made gestures
of rectification to save their positions of authority, but before
long they began to trip and fall in the early seizures of power
during the GPCR.
Uncovering villains and exposing their preservation
and encouragement of the old order was only a part of the work
to be done. To fully give rein to the fresh and new rising to
smash and replace the old, the masses had to be unleashed to demand
and to participate in the creation of revolutionary works of art
that reflected their proletarian class interests, and this was
totally linked to the battle emerging in every area of society
to strengthen the dictatorship of the proletariat. These skirmishes
between two lines in the arts announced even bigger storms to
come, where culture and the superstructure in general became an
important arena of the class struggle in the sweeping ten-year
battle of the Cultural Revolution.
Cultural Revolution Leader
Although things broke loose in the realm of culture
with the Left's stinging counterattack against the play Hai Jui
Dismissed from Office, the issue at the heart of the Great Proletarian
Cultural Revolution was political power itself. Whether China
would stay on the socialist road and the people would transform
the society from top to bottom and move towards the elimination
of classes and class differences altogether, there and throughout
the world, depended upon the crucial question of who would win
out in the struggle for power: the revolutionary communists in
the Communist Party leading the proletariat to exercise its dictatorship
in every sphere of society, or the new bourgeoisie the encrusted
bureaucrats and conservative Party leaders who stopped making
revolution long before and were now squarely opposed to the advance
of the socialist revolution and actively working to steer China
down the road of capitalism.
Seeing clearly that this was what was at stake,
Mao put everything on the line to lead the struggle to consolidate
the political power of the proletariat in the only way that he
could relying on the masses and arousing them to overturn the
revisionists high in the Party from below and in an all-round
way. Needing a revolutionary headquarters to organize and lead
this revolution within the revolution, he created the Cultural
Revolution Group (CRG), with Chen Po-ta at its head, and brought
forward Chiang Ching to be first deputy leader, along with Chang
Chun-chiao, a revolutionary Party leader from Shanghai.
Chiang Ching courageously shouldered the challenges
and responsibilities given to her in the midst of the rising waters
of sharp class struggle; she not only swam with determined strokes
against the powerful and swift revisionist current, but in this
tremendous revolutionary upheaval, for which no previous road
had been charted in the world, she rose to the occasion to play
a crucial and leading role throughout the GPCR. Undoubtedly this
will be remembered as her greatest contribution. It is certainly
this most unpardonable sin, of helping the masses to strengthen
their grip on political power and her close identity with the
Cultural Revolution overall, that earned her the complete enmity
and vilification of the bourgeoisie around the world.
One of her first tasks as part of the committee
assigned to draft documents for the Cultural Revolution was to
write a circular to counter Peng Chen's revisionist February Outline
Report on socialist culture that sought to derail and defuse the
Cultural Revolution.10 The sharpness of the line struggle in its
top ranks became known throughout the Party, as the May 16th Circular
(several times revised by Mao, according to Chiang Ching) names
"those like Khrushchev who nestle beside us". Soon, with the appearance
of the big character poster at Peking University in May 1966,
which Mao wholeheartedly supported, the floodgates of the Cultural
Revolution were flung wide open.
Chiang Ching became rapidly involved in the opening salvoes,
going to Peking University and other schools in July 1966 to talk
to the students and to listen to the debate raging there. She
soon uncovered the counter-revolutionary role of work teams that
were smothering the students' rebellion. In late July, the CRG
dissolved these teams that had been sent out by Liu Shao-chi and
Deng Xiaoping to spread confusion about the Party centre's line
on the upsurge. The two-month hold on power by the revisionists
in Peking (while Mao was away), who through "encirclement" and
"white terror" sought to deflect the struggle away from themselves
and to "restore order", was short-lived. These leading people,
who "puff up the arrogance of the bourgeoisie and deflate the
morale of the proletariat", became the targets of Mao's famous
big character poster of August 1966, the dazibao called "Bombard
the headquarters!", encouraging the fires of revolt to spread
far and wide, but especially to aim right at those taking the
capitalist road in the Party's top ranks, where the class struggle
was concentrated.
One of the things that will always be remembered
about Chiang Ching was that she, like Mao, was strongly associated
with the youth. But in her position as part of the CRG (which
in effect had been delegated political leadership of the Cultural
Revolution by the Central Committee), she was able to play a different
role than Mao, going on the spot and sometimes directly entering
the fray to boldly and energetically support the rebellion of
the youth. She brought greetings from the Chairman, which encouraged
them greatly in the heat of the complex struggle of contending
lines and programmes, and she helped to distinguish the threads
of class struggle in society related to the struggle inside the
Party itself. She and the other members of the CRG met with delegations
of students, workers, soldiers, peasants, teachers and artists
to battle out questions that came up sharply in the course of
the Cultural Revolution, including what methods to use, whom to
target, how to deal with divisions and factionalism, how, in short,
"to demarcate sharply between the enemy and ourselves", as Chiang
Ching frequently put it, but how at the same time to unite the
masses and build alliances to carry forward the revolution.
Among the youth and students, for example, the
left-sounding but right-in-essence call to castigate everyone
from a privileged or conservative family background caused considerable
confusion at first. Chiang Ching convinced the youth to change
their slogan, "a hero begets a hero, a reactionary's son is a
rotten egg", to "if parents are revolutionaries, their children
should follow in their path; if parents are reactionaries, their
children should rebel".[34,36]
The Red Guards made their momentous entry into
Peking in August and September of 1966, foreshadowing the participation
of the workers and peasants in the movement shortly afterwards
and signaling that this Cultural Revolution was shaking loose
all of society. Chiang Ching began to speak in public, urging
the massive rallies of youth, especially, to take history into
their hands. Promptly becoming known in her military cap and uniform,
she appeared at seven out of the eight receptions of Red Guards
by Mao. She also addressed university and middle school teachers,
artists and cinematographers, as well as the 100,000 PLA soldiers
who came to support and oversee the millions of youth who flocked
to Peking in the next few months, many on foot. Throughout the
autumn she sponsored performances of the model operas for the
Red Guards and in late November delivered an important speech
on the cultural revolution and the sharp class struggle within
the Peking Opera and on other artistic fronts to 20,000 literary
and art workers.
Speaking to the Red Guards, Chiang Ching called
on them to pull out the top capitalist roaders in the Party, to
wipe out the four olds of ideology, culture, custom and habits,
and to carry out the process of struggle-criticism-transformation,
in accordance with the revolutionary headquarter's main document
issued to lead the Cultural Revolution, the Sixteen Points.11
"I'm sure you'll do a good job", she told them.[5]
For the revolutionaries had the job of not only
sharpening the struggle against the Right, guiding it to victory,
but in the process strengthening the Left and bringing forward
new revolutionary blood and leaders into its ranks. "I ask you,
if the Left doesn't unite and grow stronger, will it be able to
wipe them out?" "No!" the crowd of young Red Guards thundered
back to her.[7]
In January 1967, as worker and peasant delegations
joined the convergence of students and youth exchanging revolutionary
experience in the capital, Chiang Ching addressed leaders of the
Red Guards, whose responsibility it was to manage the crowds that
were now being encouraged to return home. This was a complicated
task, for it required a high political level of the youth in order
to both bolster the political enthusiasm and drive of those who
genuinely came to the capital looking for revolution, and at the
same time to struggle with these masses to spread the revolution
in their local regions. The massive numbers even became a burden
on the city's resources, but this had to be handled correctly.
(It should be noted that adding to this burden was the intention
of some local revisionist authorities, who tried to get the "rebels"
out of their hair with pay hikes or free train tickets to Peking
to air their complaints.) "If the people who come to Peking from
outside need to take power, we must mobilize them to go back home
and take power there", Chiang Ching directed the Red Guards.[10]
At a meeting of the CRG in late December 1966,
representatives from a rebel workers' group denounced the contract
labour system. They said it divided the workers, encouraged revisionism
by developing a "hotbed" for the restoration of capitalism, and
stifled the revolutionary activism of the masses. "This system
was instituted after Liu Shao-chi's report on his inspection made
in various parts of Hopei province in 1964", the representatives
said. When they also described efforts in some places to break
the fighting spirit of the workers by switching from contract
labour to regular workers, Chiang Ching told them not to fall
for this: "What you want is revolution!" She ordered the Minister
of Labour and trade union federation secretary to come immediately
to the meeting and answer the angry workers. Asked what they did
all day long, they said, "our responsibility is to educate and
organize the workers". Chiang Ching grew furious and retorted,
"You don't work for them, you don't serve them, you don't report
to the Central Committee, nor do you solve problems. Have you
any quality of a Communist at all?... Contract workers are also
proletarians and revolutionaries. How did you big-shot ministers
treat the workers? If things should go on like this, what future
is there for our workers?"
The rebel workers then took over the trade union
headquarters and sealed off the offices of the Ministry of Labour
and those responsible for distribution of labour throughout the
country. Chiang Ching proposed a mass "accusation-criticism-repudiation
meeting" and the drafting of a CRG circular declaring that all
contract and temporary labourers must be permitted to participate
in the GPCR and that anyone dismissed because of this would be
reinstated with pay.[8]
Seizing Power
Following the example of the mighty 1967 January
Storm in Shanghai a movement to seize local political power from
the capitalist roaders and to organize new organs of leadership
swept the country. Chiang Ching enthusiastically supported this
and popularized this completely new experience the proletariat
was gaining. New three-in-one combinations brought together revolutionary
Party cadre, revolutionary representatives from the army and representatives
from the revolutionary masses to make up the newborn centres of
power, called revolutionary committees.
During this phase of the GPCR Chiang Ching's
leadership concentrated in large part on implementing the vital
line developed by Mao and the CRG of building great alliances
to seize power, setting up revolutionary committees and carrying
out the process of struggle-criticism-transformation.
After one of the main bastions of the revisionist
power-holders, the Peking Municipal Committee (closely associated
with the old Propaganda Department of the Central Committee and
the old Ministry of Culture), was finally overthrown, Chiang Ching
presided over the celebration of the founding of the Peking Revolutionary
Committee. She said that the behind-the-scenes bosses of the Peking
clique are the handful of top Party persons in authority taking
the capitalist road. "For 17 years, they have been putting forward
and stubbornly persisting in a bourgeois reactionary line. The
proletarian revolutionary line represented by Chairman Mao has
been developed in the struggle against this line", whose influence
on the political, economic, ideological and cultural fronts must
be thoroughly wiped out, planting in its place the great red banner
of Mao Tsetung Thought.
Chiang Ching linked the changes that needed to
be carried out in Peking to the overall task of the Cultural Revolution
and pointed to the need to launch a mass movement to carry out
the process of struggle-criticism-repudiation and transformation,
alongside the forging of an alliance to seize power. "The task
of struggle, criticism and repudiation and transformation in the
various departments and the work of criticizing and repudiating
the top Party persons in authority taking the capitalist road
are not mutually exclusive and can be combined." She explained
that each can give strong impetus to the other and bring about
a fuller and deeper exposure and criticism of the top capitalist
roaders; she reminded people that all this requires studying Mao's
works well and carrying out thorough investigation. She said it
is essential for the socialist revolution and socialist construction
to carry through the struggle, criticism and repudiation and transformation
in the various organizations and departments successfully. "It
is a major task, crucial for the next hundred years."[13]
In one of her speeches to a delegation from the
faction-torn province of Anhwei, Chiang Ching struggles vigourously
with the two factions to unite and form a great alliance so that
power can be seized and revolutionary committees created. Only
then "shall we have people to lead us. And the revolution cannot
proceed without leaders!" She warns against the strong foul wind
already "being stirred up with the object of dissolving all revolutionary
committees set up with the approval of the Central Committee",
and that in the present "excellent situation we should be alert
against this. Naturally there may be some reversals but we should
not be afraid of them." Reversals of power are a normal thing.
And besides, the situation throughout the country is uneven, but
unevenness is also normal.[15]
Twists and Turns of Revolution
There are two things that really drive the bourgeoisie
mad the masses making revolution and revolutionary leaders in
power supporting and leading them. While it is not uncommon for
the bourgeoisie to attribute all of the violence of the Cultural
Revolution to Chiang Ching's "personal" energetic support of the
revolutionary masses, a close look at her role shows that overwhelmingly
she fought rigourously to uphold Mao's orientation that the handful
of capitalist roaders high in the Party could be toppled without
violence. This was objectively true because the revolution was
indeed within the revolution it took place under the dictatorship
of the proletariat, whose primary function is to suppress the
enemies of the working class and the people. This is quite the
opposite from the situation in China today, where a new Communist
Party must be formed to lead the masses to violently overthrow
the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie that has been established
there since 1976.
So, although armed suppression of the leading
capitalist roaders was not necessary because the proletariat was
in command, at the same time Mao did not shrink from the fact
that once the masses were fully aroused to make revolution and
bring about sweeping political changes, some things were certain
to get out of hand. Neither was he surprised, as occurred repeatedly
in the GPCR, that lines opposing that of the Centre emerged, fanning
violence so as to sidetrack the main political struggle. "In the
cataclysmic changes that have developed over the past year there
has naturally been chaos everywhere. There is no connection between
the chaos in one place and that in another. Even violent struggle
is very good, because once contradictions are exposed they are
easily solved. The losses in this great cultural revolution have
been minimal and the achievements huge."[28]
In the heat of the summer of 1966 when the Cultural
Revolution was just getting off the ground Chiang Ching struggled
against an ultra-left tendency to want to attack the capitalist
roaders and their supporters physically and avoid the much more
difficult process of ideological and political struggle that the
Left was calling for. "Struggle by force can only touch the skin
and flesh, while struggle by reasoning things out can touch them
to their very souls."[6]
In part the turn towards violent clashes was
spontaneous and an expression of the sharp class struggle: workers
fought verbally but also in the streets over seizing power from
the municipal committees in at least eight different provinces
in early 1967. The army was also called in to assist the workers
and Red Guards in these seizures and to help restore order. At
the same time, forces of the Right in some areas openly advocated
violence by distorting certain slogans or by inciting the masses
to focus their attack on smaller capitalist roaders in order to
divert attention away from themselves. The slogan, "Drag out a
handful in the army", was taken quite literally in some areas,
for instance, and applied everywhere the Right could get away
with it, including at times seizing weapons from the regular troops.
Chiang Ching exposes this line:
"Let us not fall into the trap. The slogan is
wrong. Because the Party, government and the army are all under
the leadership of the Party. We can only talk about dragging out
the handful of Party capitalist roaders in authority and nothing
else. Were we to do otherwise, that would be unscientific, and
the result would be that we got the wrong people everywhere, and
almost all military districts would be raided, without distinguishing
good from bad. Even if some comrades, a minority of comrades,
some individual comrades in our army committed serious errors,
they need not be dealt with in such a way...."
Chiang Ching then goes on to say that youth of
course like action, but that it was also necessary to "exercise
your minds", to carry out the harder process of struggle-criticism-transformation.
Travelling around from place to place appeals to youth, but they
may not know the particular conditions everywhere and may make
mistakes. "You must believe in the local masses and must not do
the things which they should do themselves, just as we cannot
make revolution on your behalf. All we can do is consult with
you and give guidance."[15]
In fact, it was not always so clear how to handle
the contradictory nature of the violence produced by the revolutionary
zeal of the masses and the intensity of the situation without
acting as a brake on the revolutionary momentum that was righteous
and necessary for the process of transforming society and for
the proletariat to exercise its dictatorship, including in the
realm of fully recapturing political power itself. If in revolution
there is disorder and excesses, both of which Mao took responsibility
for, it is also objectively true that recognizing and correctly
handling them cannot always be accomplished until some of the
smoke clears. At the same time, some forces take advantage of
this for their own opportunist reasons. Within the CRG group itself,
which Chiang Ching helped to lead, some elements (such as Chen
Po-ta) openly embraced the use of force, and people followed their
example, especially after the provocation and mutiny by military
units supporting the Right in the city of Wuhan in 1967. These
CRG leaders, later identified as ultra-"leftist", whose goal was
to create chaos and turn it to their advantage, could not be removed
until some time later. The Right also organized violence among
a section of the Red Guards it had turned against the CRG.12 Chou
En-lai, on the other hand, who always had a wide Rightist streak
despite his alliance with Mao, and who often appeared in public
with the Left, played a very centrist role and always stressed
calm and restoring order, while accusing the "anarchists" of continuing
civil war.
Chiang Ching consistently advocated attacking
and overthrowing the enemy ideologically and politically, and
called for restraint by the masses whose anger was fully aroused.
In her speeches she pointed out that Liu Shao-chi had been dragged
from power without force of arms. However, when arms were issued
"for defence" to certain Red Guard units and rebel forces against
rightist strongholds of the PLA, she went along with this. Her
well-known slogan, "Attack by reason, defend by force", was not
promoted because it tended to confuse the dividing line between
the two, and ended up encouraging the use of arms among other
sections of the people as well, which didn't solve the kind of
contradictions arising among groups and organizations of the masses.
Who was to know exactly where defence ended and attack began?
In September 1967 Mao arrived back in Peking after visiting a
number of regions, and shortly afterwards a circular was released
forbidding further arms from being seized.[17]
"It's easy to make revolution against others and hard
to make revolution against oneself."
During the Cultural Revolution Chiang Ching developed a close
relationship with the revolutionary masses, who came to wildly
appreciate her as a revolutionary leader of the Party. Observing
a meeting he attended, a Soviet sinologist described the animated
crowd, which "kept bursting into applause": "After Chen Po-ta,
Kang Sheng, and Li Hsueh-feng, whose speeches I am completely
unable to remember, since they so skillfully said nothing of interest,
the floor was given to Chiang Ching, who in her green military
uniform and hat never stopped moving. Her speech set the room
on fire.... "You are the revolutionary new generation', she
said. "You are the ones who must carry on the revolution.
You must take it further. We, the older generation, are leaving,
and as we go, we give you our revolutionary traditions. Chairman
Mao is leaving China to you. The state will be in your hands.
The school of the Cultural Revolution is a great school!' The
effect was immediate. From the moment that the leaders departed,
the meeting continued without let-up. Speakers replaced one another,
everyone trying to outdo the other by his enthusiasm...."[45]
By her own example Chiang Ching roused others
to dare to be like her, to dare to put all they had on the line
for the political rule of the proletariat, as she had, to refuse
to give in to the shrewd and calculating counter-revolutionaries,
and especially to be clear on the enemy, so as to carefully differentiate
between top capitalist roaders in the Party and those simply under
their influence who were ideologically weak and easily manipulated
to oppose their own fundamental interests. She was artful at combining
revolutionary confidence in the masses and disdain for the enemy
with practical leadership to guide the handling of complex and
multiple contradictions erupting everywhere as the people waged
struggle to seize power from the capitalist roaders.
Addressing delegations from all over and from
diverse sections of society, she stressed the need to strengthen
the ideological outlook of the proletariat, to encourage bold
criticism and self-criticism, to wrestle with opposing ideas and
stand firm in the face of difficulties. Chiang Ching urged the
veteran revolutionaries to stay young politically, and to let
themselves be tempered by the fire of the youth who were breaking
new ground for the proletariat. She encouraged the youth to temper
themselves in the struggle too, and to look beyond age and outward
characteristics in order to deeply grasp political line and act
in accordance with the correct line.
For example, to help create conditions for the
masses to take power, in part by struggling against factionalism
which arose sharply in several places, the CRG played an important
role bringing together leaders and delegates of opposing factions
in order to help solve problems and assist them in distinguishing
serious disagreements from secondary ones. And, like Mao (who
had said that the premises for the great alliance are destroying
self-interest and becoming devoted to the people along with carrying
out healthy struggle), Chiang Ching linked closely the question
of outlook to the possibility of uniting to form great alliances:
"Comrades, if you think what I have to say is
useful then let's try to implement it. We must become revolutionaries
of Mao Tsetung Thought and not members of this group or that faction.
The factional mentality is a petit-bourgeois trait; it is the
mountain-stronghold mentality, departmentalism, or anarchism in
its most serious form.... It is good that both sides make self-criticism....
In this way we shall sit down and talk and seek agreement over
the major issues while preserving differences over minor ones.
Uniting on the main points, that is revolution, the GPCR.
"...Whether you stand on the side of the proletarian
revolutionary line led by Chairman Mao or on the side of the line
taken by the capitalist roaders is a question of big right or
big wrong. On this premise, if you are all struggling against
the top Party person in authority taking the capitalist road (or,
in Anhwei, against the small clique led by Li Pao-hua on the capitalist
road) is there any reason for being unable to unite and for not
uniting? If we judge from your factional character I think that
you work for yourselves and not for the revolution, the people
and the proletariat.
"...You must make high demands on yourselves
and on your own group and not on others. If you quarrel, fight,
wage armed struggle, and seize weapons, you cannot keep your heads
cool and cannot distinguish between right and wrong....It is easy
to make revolution against others, but hard to make it against
oneself."[15]
Mao addressed this from another angle: the possibility
of keeping political power itself. Speaking about the Cultural
Revolution in March 1967, he summed up that the main task is to
seize power from those taking the capitalist road, but, he says,
"this is by no means the goal. The goal is to solve the problem
of world outlook; it is the question of eradicating the roots
of revisionism." Otherwise, he argued, how can the GPCR be considered
a victory? In other words, without political power, socialist
transformation could not take place, but without increasingly
remoulding ideological outlook, it would be impossible to hold
onto power.
When Mao declared that the working class must
lead in every sphere of society, including in all aspects of culture
and the superstructure, he especially targeted education and the
arts. He made the pointed remark, knowing it would offend some
and infuriate others, that intellectuals had basically not abandoned
their bourgeois outlook. "Please consider whether or not this
view is out of date", he asks rhetorically.[29]
Breaking with Old Ideas
The arena of culture, in which Chiang Ching continued
to give leadership, was a major battlefield exactly because of
this problem of outlook. Big advances and hard-fought victories
had been won in creating new proletarian art but everywhere the
political and ideological struggle had to be pushed further. Speaking
at a Peking Forum on Literature and Art in November 1967, Chiang
Ching points out that the unevenness of the GPCR in the propaganda
and cultural units was a reflection of the laws of class struggle.
Some still need to form great alliances, while others have done
so, but haven't yet made a success of revolutionary three-in-one
combinations and need to carry out more widespread debate and
criticism, and to solve cadre problems. "Has the movement been
carried out deeply and thoroughly?" she asks. "I think not. For
the enemy is very shrewd; he has many companies of actors. After
you dispose of one company he will turn up in yet another. So
I feel there must be a penetrating investigation and study of
the literary and artistic circles. We should be steady, accurate
and harsh towards our enemy."
Several questions are raised in this forum: whether
enough works are being produced, how to popularize them and to
raise standards, whether model works are the "peak" of national
art. But from each angle Chiang Ching returns to hit at the chief
obstacle to fully unleashing the revolution in the arts: "The
central task now is still to combat self-interest and repudiate
revisionism, and to organize the revolutionary troops. Otherwise,
it would be impossible to produce things really serving socialism
and really suitable for the needs of workers, peasants and soldiers.
To combat self-interest and repudiate revisionism is a difficult
matter." She agrees that it is fine to send small teams to the
countryside and factories to popularize the works, as a forum
participant has suggested, but insists there is no point in going
there if it is just to escape from struggle.
Similarly, in responding to those "impatient
ones" who believed that not enough new operas have been produced,
she says it is understandable, but argues that if they are done
crudely, "people will strike us down". At the same time, she calls
on the artists to get organized and to get down seriously to producing
and reforming more works. She defends the eight model works which
have "cleared the stage and screen of emperors and generals and
the bourgeoisie", as well as the beginning achievements in reforming
ballet and symphony, for, despite shortcomings, they have created
a "shock and sensation" in the world.[16]
Tremendous breakthroughs had been made between
1963 and 1965 in the socialist transformation of the arts, with
Chiang Ching and a small group of comrades leading the charge.
However, until all of society was engaged in the battle for political
power in the GPCR, the problem of forming troops to carry out
this transformation on a broad scale could not be solved. Nor
could the vital problem of making the new revolutionary culture
available to the masses in a deep and widespread way throughout
the country. In 1967 this began to change, and, among other things,
plans were developed to put the model works out in a film version
so as to make them more accessible all across China, extensive
popularization was carried out through the PLA cultural units,
and the work of the popular and innovative mobile cultural teams
was greatly expanded.
Chiang Ching had frequently addressed meetings
or rallies of artists and writers during the early phases of the
Cultural Revolution, challenging them to fully participate in
its overall tasks, as well as to make revolution in their units.
Yet it appears that it was not until the spring of 1967 that the
Party was really able to unleash an offensive to develop the debate
over culture among the broad masses, going into the sharp two-line
struggle to transform the arts and popularizing the successful
experience led by Chiang Ching in revolutionizing Peking Opera
in particular. Numerous articles and essays appeared in the press
and theoretical organs. The important summary of the 1966 Forum
on Art and Literature in the Armed Forces was also released to
the public along with some brief statements by Mao on those questions.
The new model operas were given special prominence, with Mao and
other central leaders attending performances. And Chiang Ching
was given the honour of presiding over the 25th anniversary celebration
of the Yenan Forum, where new model works were performed.
Early on the Left had paid close attention to
fully bringing the PLA into the political turmoil of the Cultural
Revolution. This had the advantage of strengthening the Left's
line among the masses of soldiers, raising their political and
ideological level, and enabling them to see the two-line struggle
and class struggle in the army as well as in society. Amid other
responsibilities, Chiang Ching was appointed cultural advisor
to the PLA in February 1966 and advisor to a Cultural Revolution
Group set up within the army one year later.
Under Chiang Ching's leadership on the cultural
front, major questions of line in developing proletarian arts
were struggled out and new works were created and produced. Conferences
on creative writing were held and special attention was paid to
the raising of an "army" of literary and art critics. Some of
the "cultural" fruits of the Cultural Revolution overall and of
the Left's line in particular could be easily seen within the
PLA in the late 1960s, as the soldiers began to participate on
a qualitatively different level in political and cultural activities
ranging from political study to writing, producing and performing
skits and operas, to organizing forums and amateur arts festivals
in local PLA units throughout the country.
New Rounds of Struggle
Although back in December 1964 she had attended
the National People's Congress as a representative from her home
Shantung province, Chiang Ching fully came into her own as a political
leader during the Cultural Revolution. This was made "official"
only at the Ninth Party Congress in 1969 when she was elected
to the Politburo of the Central Committee. From that time on her
responsibilities drew her increasingly into the political struggles
of the Party's top leadership, and she was able to contribute
in her own right to strengthening the position of the Left in
these struggles.
In the later years of the Cultural Revolution
China was actively engrossed in carrying out more thorough socialist
transformation in the economy, health care, the arts and culture,
especially the old educational system, including through building
and strengthening the revolutionary committees. These were changes
that hit hard at both the material and political underpinnings
of capitalism and made it possible for the proletariat to extend
its rule to new spheres. They also reflected the profound ways
in which relations among people carrying out production were being
recast, reaching into and opening up a future when new social
relations in all realms of society have relegated the exploitative
and oppressive ones that human history has mainly known to encyclopedias
on primitive man in the era of social classes.
This myriad of new things included, among many
others: workers, peasants and soldiers enrolled in the universities,
the educated youth went to the countryside and Party cadres participated
in productive labour; workers took part in administration and
the reform of old rules and regulations, variations of three-in-one
combinations were implemented in every domain, including for technological
innovations in the factories and rural areas and for scientific
achievements in general; the slogan red and expert, or politics
leading professional skills, combined people armed with a correct
political understanding and those with specialized knowledge;
women were brought into Party posts and three-in-one leadership
combinations, as were older masses, whose rich experience was
combined with the energy of the youth; mass movements in science
and technology were sponsored, model cultural works were developed
and became the property of the masses, poetic and colourful revolutionary
literature sprang up, the widespread study of Marxist theory was
organized; a network of free or nearly free health care clinics
with barefoot doctors trained from among the peasants was set
up to serve the countryside.
Some opposed these "socialist new things", as
they were called, which emerged as part of overthrowing the Right.
Many of its leading representatives holding important Party posts
had been replaced. However, even some who pretended to be Mao's
closest comrades, like Lin Piao, began to thwart these innovations
of the Cultural Revolution.
As early as his July 1966 letter to Chiang Ching,
Mao warns that, "Certain of our friend's ideas greatly disturb
me", referring to the way in which Lin Piao was promoting Mao
almost like some kind of holy force. "It is all exaggerated",
he wrote her.[36] She also recalled the Chairman's extreme annoyance
at Lin Piao's stupid refrain in 1959 when he had just been promoted
to defence minister, "One of Mao Tsetung's sentences equals 10,000
sentences."13
Chiang Ching sums up briefly that Lin Piao, who
in the aftermath of overthrowing the capitalist roaders led by
Liu Shao-chi was named Mao's successor at the Ninth Party Congress,
tried to usurp the leadership of the Party, state and military.
Besides publishing in Mao's name (and heavily "editing" his works
into "Lin Piao Thought", as she put it), he created great chaos
by stirring up fighting, brandishing arms and putting on pointless
displays of military force. Chiang Ching also describes the extravagant
style of his personal life, his Confucian zeal "to become an official
and get rich".[47]
Coming at the time the Central Committee was
preparing its case against Lin Piao, which Chiang Ching was instrumental
in putting together, this account is mainly anecdotal, but nonetheless
revealing. This traitor, as she calls him, had nestled close to
Mao, and thus his brutish stab at power profoundly shook both
the Party and society just as the gains of the GPCR and nationwide
unity were being consolidated, and in the context of the growing
military threat by the Soviet Union. Of the ten major two-line
struggles in the CCP in its history (up until 1972), Chiang Ching
said the most serious was with Lin Piao.
Lin Piao had been closely associated with the
Left in the mid-1960s when they needed allies to get their views
disseminated and to bolster their offensive against the Right
and against the danger of capitalist restoration. At the time,
Lin Piao played an important role in carrying out socialist education
in the military, rectifying Peng Te-huai's line (of "modernizing"
the army by relying on advanced technology, as did the Soviet
revisionists). But Lin Piao and his supporters also used the occasion
to build a tighter base of support and to glorify Mao, and even
Chiang Ching to some extent, as icons they hoped to knock down.
Lin Piao wanted to use the army to restore order, and by 1967-1968
he was already saying production should be above political struggle.
By the Ninth Party Congress in 1969 Lin's fully
rightist programme had become clear: the principal contradiction
was said to be between the advanced socialist system and the backward
productive forces the same Chinese goulash line as that of Liu
Shao-chi, defeated years before. He considered the socialist new
things as obstacles to the masses getting "food and fuel", and
although he was outwardly opposed to Chou En-lai's capitulation
to the U.S. imperialists (since Lin preferred the "bad socialists"
of the USSR), he actually shared much in common with Chou's more
"moderate" but essentially rightist modernization aims, his surrender
to imperialism, etc. Lin also resisted Mao's efforts to re-establish
the full leading role of the Party and to curtail that of the
army.[32]
At this time intense struggle over the international
situation heated up within the CCP leadership. In 1970 Mao agreed
(with Chou, but for different reasons) to an opening with the
West, creating an alliance between the Left and centrist Chou
forces (primarily the "old guard" of the Party centre and the
military hierarchies) against Lin. Politically defeated, Lin Piao
continued to organize his coup and assassination plans against
Mao, all of which ended instead in his flight to the USSR and
death in a plane crash in September 1971. He waved the red flag
to defeat it. On one side it was red, but on the other was a black
skull and crossbones, Chiang Ching remarked bitterly.[47]
Lin Piao's downfall considerably strengthened
Chou En-lai's position. The circumstances required the Left to
do what Chou advocated bring back Rightists knocked down in the
Cultural Revolution to fill the posts left by the Lin Piao forces,
including in the army. Deng Xiaoping was even brought back, and
if by day these Rightists made self-criticisms and promised to
uphold the Cultural Revolution, by night they overall gained in
strength. The Left faced the necessity of digging further at the
roots of the revisionism of Lin Piao, and while organizationally
not as strong, politically they had the freedom to arm the masses
about the rightist essence of his line, while exposing secondarily
his ultra-"left" cover and his idealist "geniuses make history"
line. Even though the Right had gained in strength, at the Tenth
Party Congress in 1973 the Left upholding the Cultural Revolution
and the socialist new things, as well as their line of "Grasp
Revolution, Promote Production" were overall politically victorious.
Chiang Ching was re-elected to the Politburo, but on the Standing
Committee only Chang Chun-chiao was fully in Mao's camp.
Chiang Ching speaks of the positive effect of
the study organized among cadres to repudiate Lin Piao's line,
and the evident raising of the political level of the masses and
their conscious ability to act as they more systematically took
up Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought in this period.
The Left launched the Campaign to Criticize Lin
Piao and Confucius in 1974. Confucian doctrine also preached restoration
of the old (slave) order, capitulation to foreign aggressors and
blind obedience for the masses, who had only the right to be ruled
over. By historical allusion this campaign targeted Deng Xiaoping,
(Confucius) and secondarily Chou En-lai, whose centrist program
was the bandwagon for the rise of the Right.
The Last Great Battle
Chiang Ching began to collide again with the revisionist
line in culture, which endorsed imitating Western models in the
name of becoming "modern" and sought to degrade proletarian art
such as the new revolutionary operas and other cultural achievements
of the Cultural Revolution. Wherever this line held sway, it began
to reverse the line of these works or to introduce new revisionist
ones. In the context of Chou's push for an opening to the West,
numerous foreign orchestras were invited to China, most likely
at his initiative. This was only one of the fronts on which there
was mounting tension between the Premier and Chiang Ching, as
there was a growing offensive by the Right on the cultural front
and an emboldened political offensive overall between 1973 and
1975. It is not that the Left opposed foreign symphonies visiting
China as such, but they demanded that it be clear for what political
purpose they were being welcomed. A penetrating article on "absolute
music" was published about that time, challenging the premise
that this music had no meaning or class content and was above
place and time, with rich examples from history and the development
of class society. It argued that such a view tried to disguise
the bourgeois class character of these untitled instrumental pieces,
although some techniques of classical music could be critically
assimilated.[2]
(It is important to note that as the number of
international visitors mushroomed during this same period, Chiang
Ching frequently received foreign heads of state and delegations
and presided over numerous international sporting exchanges and
other public events.)
The tenth anniversary of the revolution of Peking
Opera in 1974 featured articles and celebrations upholding new
socialist culture and rather openly polemicizing against those
who judge as "improper" putting heroic workers and peasants on
stage and who clamour for a return to the days where princes and
emperors had their proper place there instead!
At the same time new works appeared popularizing
the socialist transformation in various spheres, feats in agricultural
production, the model developments in industry, such as the Taiching
oilfields and socialist new things like barefoot doctors. There
were some minor differences among the Left over which works to
approve, and how high standards should be. Chiang Ching argued
strongly against compromising on high standards either politically
or artistically, and due to her knowledge of the cultural world,
was able to recognize and criticize nuances and veiled allusions
that others missed. In addition, it seems that Mao approved some
films which Chiang Ching had objected to on various points; this
is significant only in that it became wildly exaggerated when
the Right took power and arrested the Four, and dragged this out
as "proof" that Mao didn't approve of Chiang Ching, and other
such ridiculous charges.
Chiang Ching and the Left also exposed and temporarily
aborted the film debut of Hua Kuo-feng, who had filmed a light
opera about education called Song of the Gardener which extols
the virtues of wise teachers and likens them to refined flower
cultivators.[39] Such glossy opposition to politics interfering
with young people's studies contrasts markedly with a film produced
under the Left's revolutionary line in this period, Breaking With
Old Ideas. This film vividly portrays the class struggle in society
over who gets to go to school and the difficulty of going up against
both rigid traditional teachers and a curriculum more suited to
bourgeois education than to the needs of the masses in transforming
society. Although the film is set during the Great Leap Forward,
these themes prove just as relevant for the 1970s, and the film
became indeed a lasting work of universal significance. Together
the students and Party leaders overthrow the academic snobbery
and irrelevance of the old ways, winning over many vacillators
in the process.
This arose in the midst of sharpening class struggle
in the Party between two lines and two roads. A number of revisionists
had been restored to key positions. And in January 1975 at the
Fourth National People's Congress, while the Left again won out
politically, the Right's organizational position and initiative
continued to grow. The Left called for strengthening the revolutionary
committees at all levels, while Chou En-lai laid out a plan to
modernize China by the year 2000 (by depending on imperialism,
restoring capitalism and fueling class differences). This was
echoed by Hua Kuo-feng's project to mechanize agriculture in the
same rightist political vein. Chiang Ching, who had been following
the developments of the Tachai agricultural brigade closely,14
was reported to have labelled Hua's report "revisionist" at a
"Learn from Tachai Conference" in October 1975, where keen struggle
erupted. The report was actually part of the rising rightist wind
and attempted to divert the central question of whether revolution
would lead the overall development of the economy.[37]
Mao and the Four had responded with a campaign
to study and reinforce the dictatorship of the proletariat, pointing
out that although ownership was in the main socialist, there were
many holdovers from capitalism, such as the commodity system,
graded wage scales and material inequalities. Bourgeois right
material and social privileges based upon the unequal value of
the labour power of different individuals and their different
requirements to maintain their families had not been eliminated.
In the summer of 1975, Mao called for criticism of the historical
novel The Water Margin, exposing the modern-day Sung Chiangs (the
character who capitulates to the Emperor after having first joined
the peasant rebels) to focus the aim on traitors Deng and Chou
and others like them.
This two-line struggle broke out in education
shortly afterwards, over whether revolutionizing education held
back production; some teachers at Tsinhua University wrote to
Mao complaining of the "lowering of academic standards", in fact
accurately referring to the deterioration of bourgeois standards.
Mao called for a mass debate, and the Four actively helped to
carry this out, with Chang Chun-chiao playing an especially key
role. His now famous point was probably made in this struggle:
"Bring up exploiters and intellectual aristocrats with bourgeois
consciousness and culture, or bring up workers with consciousness
and no culture which do you want?" The Right twisted this to mean
he said workers did not need culture, dropping of course his reference
to culture serving the bourgeoisie.[37]
The struggle continued to sharpen up against
Deng Xiaoping, long the open representative of the rightest pole
in the CCP characterized by his motto, "black cat, white cat,
who cares, as long as it catches mice"; his views were concentrated
in his General Programme of taking the "three directives" (instead
of and to negate proletarian class struggle) as the key link.15
After Chou's death in January 1976, the Left's ability to more
thoroughly expose Deng (without Chou to protect him) was heightened,
and they seized the initiative. However, they were not strong
enough to get Chang Chun-chiao appointed Premier in the struggle
for succession. (In addition to Chang Chun-chiao's key role in
the Cultural Revolution as a member of the CRG, and in Shanghai,
where the powerful January Storm swept away the old revisionist
officials he had developed as a key leader in the Party overall.
He was the author of pathbreaking theoretical articles such as
"On Exercising All-Round Dictatorship Over the Bourgeoisie",[1]
and was instrumental in the Shanghai political economy study group
as a whole, which authored important works making a class analysis
of the economic laws under socialism and of its contradictory
nature.) While blocking Deng, the Left had to settle for Hua,
who was not a prime figure of the rightest front and had no strong
personal following.
Chiang Ching was active in this struggle and
again played a very public role, which annoyed Deng Xiaoping.
In an attempted show of strength, the Right instigated the counter-revolutionary
Tienanmen riots in April 1976 in order to attack Mao and his policies
under the signboard of paying tribute to Chou En-lai and his line
of "modernization". But the revisionists openly targeted Chiang
Ching instead, with their cheap Confucian label of "Empress Dowager"
(the feudal ruler who put down the 1900 Boxer Rebellion and historically
more resembled the bloody Deng regime that massacred students
and workers in 1989). After this reactionary display had been
put down by the PLA and people's militia, it was reportedly Chiang
Ching's task to organize the removal of the memorial wreaths from
the square an act the Right was deeply offended by and later tried
to use against her.16
Deng was knocked down from all his posts for
staging the riots, and Mao and the Left accelerated the dictatorship
of the proletariat campaign, directing the fire at him and the
right deviationist wind. It was at this time that Mao made his
famous statement, "You are making socialist revolution and don't
know where the bourgeoisie is it's right in the Communist Party.
The capitalist roaders are still on the capitalist road." This
was the heart of the question, and the offensive of the Left with
the "Five", Mao and the Four, its political core stung the Right
badly, often provoking open confrontations between the two headquarters
within the Party, including strikes, sit-ins and the toppling
of ministers, though as much as possible the revisionists tried
to block the campaign and the developing mass movement.[37]
Mao's Death and the Capitalists' Coup
On September 9th, 1976, Mao Tsetung died. As
the masses in China, alongside millions in every country throughout
the world, mourned this immeasurable loss, the revisionists in
China rejoiced and prepared their takeover. With "official" successor
Hua Kuo-feng at their head, and based upon the portions of power
they had already seized, including within the armed forces, they
were able to mount a military coup d'état within a month of Mao
Tsetung's death, and arrested the Four and their close supporters.
Proletarian rule came to an abrupt and brutal end in China, bringing
back like a rude wake-up call Mao's warning in his 1966 letter
to Chiang Ching of the possibility of the Right using some of
his words to stage an anti-Communist coup d'état in China after
his death but also assuring her that they would know no peace.
In fact many knew it was the end of the revolution
and saw right through the barrage of political propaganda, and
for this reason the coup was presented alongside gleaming gun
barrels, as if to illustrate another important point of Mao's.
The mass media announced that the Four were the "real revisionist
Right", that they, especially Chiang Ching, were KMT renegades,
that these Four Chiang Ching, Chang Chun-chiao, Yao Wen-yuan,
and Wang Hung-wen along with a goodly number of their comrades,
were actually enemies of Mao; it was even fancied that Mao would
have supported this clampdown against "counter-revolution". The
low political level of the invective revealed the magnitude of
the coup-makers' quandary and, in a desperate need to consolidate
power, they quickly supplemented it with an even lower, that is
gutter-level, slur campaign, filled with the wildest personal
slander they could think of as well as insignificant incidents
they exaggerated into mad fairy tales.
These modern-day Confucians, working at the same
time to tighten tradition's chains with the rumour mill they generated,
chose to most savagely victimize the woman, Chiang Ching. As the
Chairman's wife she was also supposed to suffer and bear the responsibility
for all the "evils" China had ever experienced, ancient or modern,
but especially during the Cultural Revolution. For these capitalist
roaders, the worst of these "evils" was, of course, having to
endure almost 30 years of Mao leading the masses to revolutionize
the society they wanted to get rich off of and, related to that,
their failure to unseat Mao and his revolutionary comrades from
the centre of power long before.
Yet people resisted. In many ways. One of the
major accusations at the historic 1980-81 "trial" would be that
of plotting an armed rebellion in Shanghai against the coup d'état.
Chang Chun-chiao and others had a strong political following in
this city, forged through the sharp struggle and important changes
of the Cultural Revolution. Shanghai was famous for the January
Storm, when millions of workers, joined by peasants and students,
seized back power from the revisionist-led Municipal Party Committee
in 1967. In August 1976, as expectations of a showdown in the
Party grew, arms and munitions were handed out to the million-strong
Shanghai militia that had been set up by the Shanghai Municipal
Revolutionary Committee several years earlier.
After news of the Four's arrest filtered out,
detailed plans were laid to block the harbours and airports, to
shut down the press and radio, to launch work stoppages and demonstrations
and mobilize the militia men and women, along with the garrison
command of Shanghai. An older Communist leader, Zhu Yong-jia,
a close comrade of Chang Chun-chiao and head of the writing group
of the Shanghai Party Committee, rallied the revolutionaries to
prepare for action, calling on them to "do a Paris Commune. If
we cannot keep up the fight for a week, five or three days would
suffice to let the whole world know what's happening...." In other
words, this rebellion would be a declaration that a revisionist
coup in China had taken place and that it was being actively resisted
by revolutionaries. Most reports are based on Hong Kong newspapers
and even accounts by the revisionist press itself, so details
of the plan are scanty.
The rebellion was delayed when the leaders were
purposely called to Peking, and it seems the revolutionaries lost
the initiative for the full-scale uprising they planned as the
coup-makers swept into the city to prevent it. Nonetheless, there
was reportedly armed fighting in some militia units on October
13th, one week after the Four were arrested, and as soon as word
of the arrests spread on October 10th, thousands of people gathered
every day at key headquarters to see what actions the leaders
would take. Zhu had correctly pointed to the crucial need for
"quick, decisive action drawing wide support" not only in Shanghai
but throughout the country.[42,40] For a number of reasons the
leadership failed to move at the critical moment. This underlines
even more the importance of the decisive, unwavering stand of
defiance of Chiang Ching and Chang Chun-chiao.
Despite the smokescreen put up by Hua that he
was acting on Mao's behalf, on the streets of China, among many
of the masses, a five-finger salute behind officials' backs was
common, needing no verbalization: Mao and the Four were the revolutionaries
being overthrown. A foreign observer in Shanghai during the coup
reported that conversations and movements were tightly controlled,
and that tension was extremely high among the people. Official
posters of the Central Committee denouncing the Four were stripped
from the railway station walls in Nanjing.[39] Undoubtedly many
other stories have yet to see the light of day, as the counter-revolutionaries
clamped down quickly and brutally, arresting and jailing known
sympathizers of the Left, many of whom were executed.
The coup in China represented a tremendous blow
to the peoples of the world and the international proletariat
as a whole. Revolutionary China was a beacon to hundreds of millions
of people who yearned to liberate themselves. For ten incredible
years, the GPCR led by Mao and the revolutionary headquarters
inside the Party had prevented this reversal of proletarian power
and the restoration of capitalism by unleashing the conscious
activism of the masses. For ten long years, breathtaking strides
were being made by history's formerly forgotten and downtrodden,
breaking new socialist ground for the international proletariat.
In the course of all this, the revolutionary science was developed
to a qualitatively new level and became recognized as Marxism-Leninism-Mao
Tsetung Thought. New organizations and parties based on this ideology
sprang into being all over the world.
To see history's most radical and far-reaching
transformation of society under proletarian rule snatched away
by the arrogant handful of bourgeois reactionaries inside the
Communist Party usurping power for their own narrow get-rich aims
was indeed unbearable. At the same time, in the very depth and
breadth of the socialist revolution, Mao had laid the basis for
Marxist-Leninists to pick up the weapons he enlarged and sharpened
to understand both the nature of this reversal and how to continue
to chart the way forward. This was not an easy task it required
sharp struggle over summing up the nature of socialist society
and Mao's contributions to the science as well as the events in
China themselves. Yet, fired in no small way by Chiang Ching and
Chang Chun-chiao's courageous stand, many Marxist-Leninist parties
and organizations not only refused to abandon the course of revolution
in the face of the Chinese revisionists' betrayal and the simultaneous
anti-communist ideological offensive by the international bourgeoisie,
but succeeded in making qualitative advances in turning around
the crisis in the international communist movement and forging
an embryonic international centre based on this understanding,
represented today by the Revolutionary Internationalist Movement.
After the arrest of the revolutionary headquarters,
the regime carried out waves of purges in the Party, and in 1977
executions began in earnest. Within two years of the coup, revolutionary
committees had been abolished, and entrance exams and privilege
(benefiting primarily Party officials' children) became the criteria
for access to higher learning. Films and other works produced
under Chiang Ching's leadership were revised or banned outright.
The revisionists brought back the pre-Cultural Revolution version
of the ballet White-Haired Girl, for example, featuring its central
love theme. Infanticide against baby girls returned as capitalism
put a premium on male offspring. As the waiting foreign vultures
like Coca Cola and Mitsubishi pounced to set up new markets in
China, production began to accommodate imperialism's needs and
was boosted through bonuses and greater wage differentiation.
In short, capitalism was restored with a vengeance. All this in
a climate of heavy repression, toeing the official line, and the
shutting off of the political struggle which had guided and promoted
socialist construction for more than 20 years.
The Twentieth Century's Most Notorious Trial:
"I am happy to pay Chairman Mao's debt!"
For four years Chiang Ching and her comrade Chang
Chun-chiao were imprisoned without any official charges. Hong
Kong papers claim Hua tried to get her to confess for two years,
to which Chiang Ching scoffed, "I dare you to release me!" In
1978 Hua was replaced by the real figure pulling the strings,
Deng Xiaoping. As a special revenge, Deng put arch-revisionist
Peng Chen (of the old Peking Municipal Committee, knocked down
in the Cultural Revolution) in charge of interrogating her before
the 1980 trial. In one of her statements at the trial Chiang Ching
says that while in prison she prepared herself physically for
the trial, so that she could do her best in court to defend the
Cultural Revolution. "Every day at the cock's crow, I got out
my sword", referring to a well-known general readying himself
for battle.
The revisionists' primary tactic was to reverse
the verdict on Lin Piao, brand him an ultra-leftist, and try the
ten defendants as one "clique". They threw in some old military
generals who had plotted as part of the Right against Mao in the
early 1970s, just to confuse the political lines even more. It
is reported that the pre-trial arraignment film had to be shot
three times because Chiang Ching's unpredictable outbursts made
"unsuitable" public viewing. Asked if she wanted a lawyer, her
reply sharply exposed the kangaroo court: Only if he took the
Ninth and Tenth Party Congresses as the political basis for the
defence! Request denied.... Chiang Ching announced that she would
defend herself.[40]
She prepared a 181-page statement slamming the
revisionists with their own indictments: if the Left "framed up"
veteran leaders, what are you doing now? What's wrong with the
Cultural Revolution overthrowing the capitalist headquarters of
Liu Shao-chi and company and restoring the true face of the Party?
She got right to the heart of the matter: "I'm not going to admit
to any crimes, not because I want to cut myself off from the people,
but because I'm innocent. If I have to admit to anything, I can
only say I lost in this struggle for power.
"You have power now so you can easily accuse
people of crimes and fabricate false evidence to support your
charges. But if you think you can fool the people of China and
worldwide, you are completely mistaken. It is not I but your small
gang who is on trial in the court of history."
This is exactly what her testimony did in the
trial itself, which started November 20th, 1980, and went into
January 1981. Unlike Wang Hung-wen and Yao Wen-yuan, who capitulated
before the court, admitting everything they were charged with
in exchange, they hoped, for a lighter sentence, Chang Chun-chiao
remained defiantly silent (except when he rejected the indictments),
refusing to recognize the court of some 35 judges and its jeering,
hand-picked spectators and televised spectacle. Chiang Ching showed
nothing but contempt for her would-be executioners and boldly
turned the fire of interrogation right back at them: "Most of
the members of the court present, including your president Jiang
Hua, competed with each other in those days to criticize Liu Shao-chi.
If I am guilty, how about all of you?"
She drew out clearly the link between her actions
and Mao's revolutionary line, again silencing her judges, who
of course could not prove otherwise and were reduced to telling
her to "shut up" again and again. "Since you won't let me speak",
Chiang Ching would then retort, "why don't you put a clay Buddha
in my chair and try it instead of me. I was Chairman Mao's wife
for thirty-eight years.... I followed Mao's line and the Party's
line. What you are doing now is asking a widow to pay her husband's
debt. Well I'll tell you, I am happy and honoured to pay Chairman
Mao's debt!" And in one dramatic moment, she repeated a well-known
statement of Mao's that true revolutionaries are bound by neither
heaven nor law. The authorities could stand no more. As she was
dragged from the room she shouted, "It's right to rebel! Down
with the revisionists led by Deng Xiaoping! I am prepared to die!"
Shaken, the revisionists postponed their frame-up for a few days
to decide what to do.
Chiang Ching's actions inspired people throughout
China and everywhere, as even reactionaries there have admitted.
Around the world, support demonstrations and meetings were held,
from Sri Lanka, where the Chinese embassy was attacked, to the
U.S., Paris and London. An ad signed by 2000 people to "Save Chiang
Ching" was published in the French daily, Le Monde. A new leap
was forged in the international communist movement at the First
International Conference of Marxist-Leninist Parties and Organizations,
which started the process of regrouping the Maoists worldwide,
helping to lay the foundation of RIM in 1984.
The regime (Deng's Politburo) agonized for nearly
a month before announcing the death sentence against Chiang Ching
and Chang Chun-chiao. The revisionists were unsure which would
do themselves more harm executing these two revolutionaries, or
letting them live as two of the world's foremost political prisoners.
They were given two years to "confess". When she heard the word
"death", Chiang Ching yelled out, "It's no crime to make revolution!"
Chiang Ching was held in the centuries-old prison
of Quin Cheng, and spent many of her 15 years there in isolation.
When she refused to cooperate with the authorities, she was denied
food or exercise, or was beaten by guards. Much of this time she
had no right to speak except under interrogation. The only person
she was allowed to see was her daughter Li Na.
In prison Chiang Ching sewed dolls with her name
on them, making them "useless" for sale, and refused to write
the monthly self-criticisms required of political prisoners. A
1983 New York Times article reported that she defied her jailers
to "chop off her head" in written slogans slashed across her cell
walls. She demanded to meet with Deng Xiaoping, who refused, and
she wrote political position papers exposing the revisionist regime.
She reportedly also asked to present her views in an open debate
at the Twelfth Party Congress in the summer of 1982. In 1983 Chiang
Ching's sentence was commuted to life imprisonment. There were
reports of leaflets appearing on the streets of Peking and Shantung,
supporting the Cultural Revolution and denouncing the capitalist
roaders in power, said to be written by her and smuggled out.
On the outside, a message was clandestinely published
in China and sent to Marxist-Leninists abroad in late 1980. It
hailed the heroic stand of Chiang Ching and Chang Chun-chiao as
well as entering into some of the problems of political line which
held back revolutionaries from acting decisively at the moment
required to carry through the armed uprising after the coup in
1976. It calls on the people to judge the four years of bourgeois
dictatorship they have lived under and vows to put power back
in the hands of the proletariat. Later Japanese sources confirmed
its wide and bold circulation in China, along with some open agitation
on the streets.17
Mao's Wife and Comrade for 38 years
Significantly, Mao made sure he accomplished
two more things before his death on September 9th, 1976. He met
with the Politburo and in July wrote a letter to Chiang Ching.
At the meeting he rebuked the Right for hoping he would die soon
so they could get on with their plots, and at the same time warned
that both the U.S. and USSR must be fought. His lines to Chiang
Ching contain a challenge with a self-critical edge, urging her
to firmly take hold of the political baton. "You have been wronged.
Today we are separating into two worlds. May each keep his peace.
These few words may be my last message to you. Human life is limited,
but revolution knows no bounds. In the struggle of the past ten
years I have tried to reach the peak of revolution, but I was
not successful. But you could reach the top. If you fail, you
will plunge into a fathomless abyss. Your body will shatter. Your
bones will break."18
Among his last words aimed squarely at the revisionist
power holders who wanted to create a rift between them, were "Help
Chiang Ching raise the red flag".
The Chinese revisionists dredged up whatever
they could, inventing when necessary, to try to show that Mao
and Chiang Ching were on opposite sides at the end of Mao's life.
This is patently untrue and merely an awkward stab at trying to
use Mao's tremendous prestige to help mask their own fascist deed
of October 1976, which, in order to succeed, meant undermining,
confusing and attempting to neutralize the revolutionary masses
who loved and supported both Mao and Chiang Ching.
If Mao, on the other hand, instructed people
on his deathbed to help Chiang Ching raise the red flag, it is
because he thought she was one of the few left in the top ranks
of the CCP who could do so!19
The plain truth is, Mao supported Chiang Ching
and she supported and was led by Mao throughout the entire time
they made revolution together, though affirming this is not to
be naive and pretend such strong unity came without any struggle.
But it was struggle to advance the tremendous revolutionary wave
they were part of, the historic nature and earthshaking importance
of which they both firmly grasped, and for which they assumed
great responsibility to lead forward.
When her political enemies and international
critics paint her as "without a single virtue" and as plotting
out of pure self-interest to "steal Mao's throne", as they say,
their main point is that Mao should never have had power anyway.
But close behind is that certainly no woman should dare to stand
up tall, to be ambitious one of their big and often-echoed charges
against Chiang Ching and have the audacity to fight for revolutionary
political power! And since many are not easily fooled by their
logic that revolutionary ambitions to lead and serve the people
are a "lost cause", these critics and political enemies with their
narrow Me-First outlook try to prove that her ambition was merely
"personal". From there it is a short dive to probing into the
marriage, and in this the feudal and decadent bourgeois specialists
have a lot in common. With their chauvinist noses they rummage
through empty closets looking for dirty laundry, since for them
a woman's merits should ultimately be judged on the basis of her
individual relations, especially with men.
One thing is no secret. Chiang Ching never had
a moment's peace since she married Mao. But personal "peace" was
not what Chiang Ching was about. She courageously fought to play
a crucial role in the history-making battles shaking China, but
she did have to fight to play that role. Undoubtedly in the 1940s
and 1950s, Mao's strongly anti-feudal sentiments against the custom
of little family fiefdoms becoming centres of power prevented
him from personally promoting Chiang Ching within the Party. While
it seems some of the CCP leaders insisted she be kept out of the
public eye, as Chiang Ching developed into a revolutionary communist
in Yenan, Mao supported her activities and correct line, and years
later, very obviously chose to bring Chiang Ching forward to take
up leading responsibilities to prepare for what was to develop
into the Cultural Revolution. He did this knowing she would face
even more trouble and come under direct fire as a public figure
defending his political views. It must be said at the same time
that he certainly recognized the urgency of bringing more women
forward to play leading roles, and overall strongly encouraged
this within the Party.
As for Chiang Ching, hers was a lifetime of rebellion
and going against the tide of women's oppression against feudalism
and tradition, against chauvinism and the "woman's place" in society,
against the Confucian sanctity of the home and the hypocritical
ritual of blaming the wife for the husband's faults. As the Chairman's
wife, this meant endlessly enduring the petty rumour-mongering
and backbiting as well as the vicious attacks of his political
enemies who dared not directly attack him.
This also had repercussions in their personal
lives. On one occasion back in the 1950s these same enemies apparently
took advantage of Chiang Ching's absence during a treatment for
cancer to take away from her one of Mao's children from a previous
marriage whom she raised as her own and had grown especially fond
of.[47]
Throughout her political life Chiang Ching forcefully
and continuously encouraged women to come forward and struggled
with others over this. In the arts she fought against the male-dominated
theatre not just the playwrights, directors and musicians, but
on the stage itself the actors were all men to bring forward women
as proletarian artists, and she wrote and revised revolutionary
heroines into the new scripts. A central theme of a number of
the model works she led is women throwing off the stifling yoke
of the old days to follow the Party's call to take up revolution.
One of the first things she eliminated was the degrading feudal
tradition of male actors impersonating women. And, in the real-life
struggles of the Cultural Revolution, she constantly paid attention
to the role the women were playing, and encouraged the advanced
to shoulder more responsibilities.
But Chiang Ching also struggled hard on this
front within the Party leadership.20 For the CCP was a product
of Chinese society emerging overwhelmingly as a force in opposition
to its oppressive nature and although qualitatively different
and representing the future of total emancipation, it was not
entirely free from this overall semi-feudal and colonized social
fabric, heavily laden with backward notions on women, the family,
and relations between men and women. These were habits and ideas
the Party as a whole fought against and, especially, proved bankrupt
by first actively engaging women in the liberation war21 and then,
after liberation, by proceeding to tear down oppressive barriers
to women participating in production on as equal a footing as
possible to men, bringing them into the Party and carrying out
political education to develop women cadres and leaders. Men were
struggled with ideologically to share household responsibilities.
Central eating facilities, nursery schools and child care, for
example, were set up to free women from stifling household work
as part of the Great Leap Forward and the movement to establish
communes.
Formal socialist policies are very important
in setting guidelines, but ultimately how fast and how thoroughly
the inequalities between men and women can be reduced in the process
of building socialism is linked to the revolutionary transformation
of people's outlook and to women themselves stepping forward to
rebel against the old ways and fighting to bring alive the new
and higher forms of "holding up half the sky" that proletarian
power for the first time in history makes possible.
At the same time, the question of women developing
as leaders in China was closely related to the two-line struggle
itself inside the Party. The revisionists (and bourgeois statesmen,
with their Thatchers or Aquinos for that matter) never objected
to women leaders who preach enslavement, even the modern variety,
and taking the capitalist road, such as Liu Shao-chi's wife, Wang
Guang-mei.22 But women leaders who arouse the masses for all-around
liberation and not just for superficial bourgeois equality for
a minority, that is something else altogether, and that is in
no small part the resistance Chiang Ching ran into from the veteran
leaders of the Right.
Chiang Ching was a powerful model in this regard.
As a communist leader she fought for the cause of total emancipation
until she died, and by this alone pulled many women (and men)
to their feet. And not just in China. But no one should assume
that as a woman, or as Mao Tsetung's wife, this was an easy accomplishment.
Murdered Until Proven Otherwise
Chiang Ching was ripped away from us after fifteen
years of enduring the Chinese regime's dungeons. In addition to
the foul stench emanating from those in Peking's high quarters
who withheld the announcement of her death until the anniversary
of the 1989 Tienanmen massacre, three weeks later, is the very
suspicious description of this as "suicide". Again relying on
Confucian nonsense to try to pass this ancient "tradition" off
to the world as an act of final defiance of authority, the regime
tried to wash its hands of the whole affair.
Needless to say, their blood-stained hands look
ever bloodier, and until proven otherwise, everything points to
them as the instruments of Chiang Ching's death. She has never
given in to difficult conditions or personal attack and has always
fought to drag rats like those running China today into the light
of day and to put the question of seizing power back on the table.
Reports of a last "testament" by Chiang Ching, which the regime
has apparently tried to deny, claim this is one of its key points.
Another one is said to be denouncing them for the Tienanmen massacre
and predicting that their rule will be short-lived.
Her suicide is also contested by scholars and
other "China watchers", according to reports published in several
Hong Kong newspapers.23 For one thing, her daughter Li Na visited
her a week before her death, and reported her to be in good health
and better spirits than before, partly because she had been moved
to relatively more spacious quarters within the prison. Secondly,
Chiang Ching's every move was followed on remote control monitors.
She had announced she would write an autobiography, according
to these sources, and was furious that the authorities had taken
away the memoirs she had written. These accounts also make mention
of a poem one of her guards recently wrote for her, which excited
her and moved her to work on together with him until the prison
found out and discharged him back to his home village.
Even in her death, the Chinese rulers had a big
problem. A Hong Kong magazine notes the appearance of 16 different
protest signs all over Peking, including a slogan posted on the
gates of a primary school that read, "Long Live the Victory of
Chairman Mao's Revolutionary Line! Down With Deng Xiaoping's Phoney
Communist Party!" On the side of a hotel, they reported a military-style
portrait of Chiang Ching, with the words, "Chairman Mao, We Will
Always Remember You". In what must have resembled stormtroopers
trying to stomp out sparks here and there, the Deng Xiaoping police
then banned the sale of any books or materials about Chiang Ching,
or even old photos, and raids were to be carried out to confiscate
any such items. Television and radio were forbidden to play any
selections from the revolutionary operas and ballets.[42]
Dare to Be Like Chiang Ching!
The loss of Chiang Ching is a momentous loss:
she, who never abandoned Marxism-Leninism Mao Tsetung Thought
and in fact lent her life and passion to strengthening it, who
confidently and uncompromisingly stood with Mao and with revolution.
She was a leader who had represented the international proletariat
in power, and gave enormous inspiration and courage to communists
and revolutionaries around the world, who also refused to abandon
revolution when socialist China was being strangled by the bourgeoisie
inside the Communist Party. In this sense, her stand and that
of Chang Chun-chiao's reflected the truth that the Cultural Revolution
and the experience in China as a whole had taken world proletarian
revolution a twist higher in the spiral of its development. How
different from 1956 when Stalin died and no leading CPSU members
stepped forward to defend the red flag, to hold it high out of
the muck and mire of the Soviet revisionists' seizure of power!
And how astute Mao was, encouraging her again just months before
his death to strive to take the revolution all the way, knowing
that as high as the stakes were, so were the risks.
The role Chiang Ching decided to play should by no means be taken
for granted. The history-making epoch she was part of did objectively
take revolution higher to the highest peak that the international
proletariat has achieved to date. But at the same time individuals
can be decisive in furthering or obstructing this cause (or being
plain irrelevant). This GPCR produced a Chiang Ching, and a Chiang
Ching who did not waver, whose firmness and determination gave
inspiration and courage to millions worldwide who watched and
judged the revisionist debacle. A Chiang Ching who ridiculed her
jailers, prosecutors and China's ruling counter-revolutionaries
and filled even them with awe at her resilience and stand. She
threw the political grenade back in their faces, seizing the occasion
not to "clear her name" but to expose even more what stuff these
revisionists are made of. She became a very dangerous woman for
them and for the bourgeoisie in general. The whole world saw an
unrepentant communist confess only to the "crime" of following Mao Tsetung
to make revolution.
Her life reflects a strategic confidence in the masses and in
the ultimate justness and victory of the communist cause, a sense
of having given fully to the mounting of the proletariat onto history's
stage, even if in this round we were
temporarily pulled off that stage. What attitude one adopts and
what role one decides to play in the face of obstacles and even
great setbacks can assume qualitative proportions. Whether it
is a long-term, spiral-like view of defeating the enemy, or one
of compromise to obtain some kind of self-seeking, immediate rewards
to avoid death, unpleasant conditions of imprisonment and so forth
all this is a crucial reflection of one's attitude towards the
science and ideology of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Tsetung Thought.
Compare Chiang Ching's attitude and responsibility towards the
world's oppressed and revolutionary masses, towards the making
of history itself, with that of Wang Hung-wen and Yao Wen-yuan,
who had made contributions to the Cultural Revolution, but who
floundered and crashed ideologically when put to a very crucial
test of their class stand and willingness to sacrifice.
The enemy call Chiang Ching an aspiring empress,
for their own tyranny and rule thrive on demolishing revolutionary
heroism; her outlook was the opposite of that of their bourgeois
(and feudal) dynasties. She acted on behalf of the international
proletariat and not for herself; she defiantly spit on all the
enemy's schemes in order to deflate their arrogance, to reveal
the emptiness of their historical cause at a time when disappointment
and demoralization in the wake of the enormous loss from the overthrow
of the revolution in China was widespread. With confidence, she
was heard to remark after the trial, "I have accomplished what
I set out to do!"
Comrade Chiang Ching's vision of a society without
barbarous class divisions and social inequalities, just like the
spectre of the masses consciously wresting political power, in
no matter what country, chills the blood of the oppressors everywhere,
and they despise her for it. As for the sour and mainly sensationalist
chorus of attacks on her from bourgeois journalists and academic
mouthpieces, hitched to the fashionable refrain these days of
the "collapse" of communism what we have to say is, the contempt
is completely mutual! Summing up this historic period that left
big scars on an injured bourgeoisie around the world, while enabling
the international proletariat to soar to new heights, will continue
to be a battle between the two sides. But more than that, we can,
and will, scale even greater heights in the years to come.
Like Mao before her, Chiang Ching is not an easy
model to live up to, but she has handed the political baton on
to us, their successors. She has helped us to raise the red flag.
FOOTNOTES
1. In this struggle Wang Ming was influenced by the Comintern,
which insisted that the Chinese should follow the Soviet model
rather than charting the path of people's war in the countryside.
Wang Ming ran the underground Shanghai Party operation mainly
from Moscow between 1931 and 1935, returning to China in 1937.
2. Around Lu Hsun especially was concentrated a sharp struggle
over the correct orientation for art, which divided cultural figures
long after the civil war. He vehemently opposed the nationalists'
line of "national defence" with his own slogan: "people's literature
for national revolutionary war", a slogan which Mao adopted.
3. Held in May 1942, this was a forum of several days of sharp
and wide-ranging debate. A basic line was hammered out by Mao
on the relation of art and politics in front of crowds who had
walked from miles around, spilling out of the lecture hall into
the streets to hear him, including specifically the many people
in the arts who had come to Yenan to join the revolution.
4. The Three Rules of Discipline are 1) Obey orders in all actions,
2) Don't take a single needle or piece of thread from the masses,
3) Turn in everything captured. The Eight Points: 1) Speak politely,
2) Pay fairly for what you buy, 3) Return everything you borrow,
4) Pay for anything you damage, 5) Don't hit or swear at people,
6) Don't damage crops, 7) Don't take liberties with women, 8)
Don't mistreat captives.
5. Notably Chou Yang of the Ministry of Culture, because of her
exposures of his fleet of revisionist writers.
6. The Party led land reform but relied on the masses to carry
out expropriation or redistribution and sent teams into various
areas to arouse them for that purpose. While this had already
been started in areas where the liberation army passed through
even before 1949, areas which were under KMT control until liberation
remained relatively backward and conservative until this process
of arousing the peasants could be organized.
7. The Great Leap Forward spread into a mass upsurge in 1958,
especially in the countryside, as peasants began to rely on themselves
to develop small, light industries to serve agriculture (such
as local mills and backyard steel smelting), to establish larger
collective farms with greater public ownership as well as People's
Communes. The ensuing struggle in the CC that accused Mao's policy
to "go all out, aim high to achieve greater, faster, better and
more economic results in building socialism" of bringing ruin
on the economy led to Mao's famous statement, "The chaos caused
was on a grand scale and I take responsibility," referring in
part to the difficulties and excesses that were a secondary aspect
of the tremendous advances and new breakthroughs resulting from
the masses' conscious initiative. Shortly afterwards, Soviet technicians
and aid were suddenly withdrawn, causing a severe jolt to the
Chinese economy, followed by a series of natural disasters, both
of which escalated the line struggle over socialist construction
and over taking a different path than the Soviet Union.
8. One of these anti-Mao writers, Liao Mosha, a co-author with
Wu Han of the "Three Family Village" column, whom Chiang Ching
had known in her days among radical writers and artists in Shanghai,
was brought forward to testify at her trial, accusing her of KMT
relations he himself probably maintained. She was removed from
court for "abusing the witness" the "famous writer" with her continual
interruptions of his testimony about being unjustly harassed in
the Cultural Revolution.[40]
9. Tao Chu was a prominent figure in the Party's propaganda work
and argued, among other things, that writers should also explain
the shortcomings of the people's communes. Yao Wen-yuan answered
this by saying, "There is a song called The People's Communes
Are Fine. Is it necessary to modify this title with another sentence
the people's communes have shortcomings'?"[33]. In the Cultural
Revolution caricatures appeared on the walls humourously exposing
the capitalist roaders in the Party under fire: one of these in
February 1967 depicts Tao Chu setting up an insurance office to
protect revisionists.[35]
10. The Sixteen-Point Decision calls the GPCR a new stage in
the socialist revolution. It targets those in the Party taking
the capitalist road, and calls for criticism and repudiation of
the reactionary bourgeois academic "authorities", the ideology
of the bourgeoisie and all other exploiting classes, and for the
transformation of education, literature and art and all other
parts of the superstructure so as to facilitate the development
of socialism. It emphasizes that whether the Party dares to boldly
arouse the masses will determine the GPCR's outcome, and insists
on the fact that the masses must liberate themselves and educate
themselves in the movement, and it hails the new forms of organization
being developed by them; the Decision calls for reasoning things
out in the course of debate and not using force.
11. Chiang Ching had been given the responsibility (back in 1962)
when the Left was preparing their public opinion for a showdown,
to draft a document, which later became known as the May 16th
Circular, setting a basic policy for a proletarian line on the
arts. It was first published in the Party journal Red Flag as
"The Intellectuals' Way Forward".[47]
12. One of these, the United Action Committee, was composed of
the sons and daughters of Party officials upholding the Right,
and for a short time in 1967 singled Chiang Ching out for attack
in its posters and materials.
13. In a document of the Lushan meetings in 1970, Mao responds
with his well-known ironic humour towards his enemies: "One sentence
equals one sentence. There is one matter on which I have spoken
six sentences but which have come to nothing, not even one-half
a sentence." Here Mao was referring to Lin Piao's repeated demand
to restore the position of head of state, vacated by Liu Shao-chi,
so that he himself, preferably, could occupy it, which Mao wanted
no part of.[47]
14. In the mid-1960s Mao had approved of Tachai as a model brigade
for the nation because it had surmounted natural disasters and
obstacles to reach high yields by mobilizing the masses against
revisionism and bourgeois ideology in general.
15. The three directives developing the national economy, promoting
stability and unity and studying the theory of the dictatorship
of the proletariat were all separate instructions of Mao's in
1974, which Deng combined into one whole as a guide to modernization.
Mao remarked in 1975 or 1976, "What! Take the three directives
as the key link'! Stability and unity do not mean writing off
class struggle; class struggle is the key link and everything
else hinges on it."[37,41]
16. Asked about the event during her trial, Chiang Ching retorted,
"I was not responsible for the suppression of the Tienanmen incident.
You can ask the Minister of Public Security at that time to come
act as my witness", referring to none other than Hua Kuo-feng
himself.
17. The underground messages were signed by the "Chinese Communist
Party (Marxist-Leninist) Central Committee", and printed January
1981. Several months later, this same group wrote a pamphlet denouncing
the revisionists' "summation of Mao" approved at the "Sixth Plenum
of the Eleventh Central Committee" in June 1981 and called for
revolutionaries to "don battle gear" in the struggle to overthrow
the revisionists in power.[30,31]
18. This last phrase he had used in a letter to her 10 years
earlier as the Cultural Revolution unfolded, referring to the
risk he too faced in his all-out bid to continue the revolution
and prevent the restoration of capitalism.
19. One unconfirmed report from a Hong Kong newspaper cites Chiang
Ching declaring in court that the, "With you in charge, I'm at
ease" quote by Mao, referring to the compromise candidate of Hua
Kuo-feng as his successor, had several more characters that were
suppressed: "If you have any questions, ask Chiang Ching."
20. For example, she told representatives of Szechwan (a backward
area and former KMT stronghold) where disturbances had broken
out during the early years of the Cultural Revolution: "Today
we bombarded you, tomorrow you may bombard us"; she pointed out
that women comrades had done good work and told these representatives
not to be so feudalistic "Why not recruit some women generals!"[47]
21. Both the ballet Red Detachment of Women (1964) and the film
Island Militia Women (1976) were based on historical events.
22. Another of Chiang Ching's "towering crimes" was to have harassed
chief capitalist roader Liu Shao'chi's wife, Wang Guang-mei, herself
a firm and active Party revisionist ally of her husband.
23. These articles quote a Chinese professor who argues, "It
is impossible for Mao's widow Chiang Ching to kill herself." In
speculating about why Deng Xiaoping won't succumb to his own illnesses
as long as Chiang Ching is still alive, he adds, "Because Chiang
Ching knows best Deng's undersides. Only Chiang Ching understands
best why Mao purged Deng back then, and knows best how Deng, after
Mao's death, unseated Hua Kuo-feng and grabbed the supreme power
of the party, the state and the army." He accuses the authorities
of foul play and regrets that "precious historical materials"
along with Chiang Ching's sole ability to set history's record
straight are "buried for good". (The articles are from Cheng Meng
and Sing Tao, both extreme right anti-Deng Xiaoping publications.
The person quoted here has published his views against the Cultural
Revolution.)
Sources
(primary)
1. Chang Chun-chiao. "On Exercising All-Round Dictatorship Over
the Bourgeoisie", AWTW No. 14, originally published by Foreign
Languages Press (FLP), Peking, 1975.
2. Chao Hua. "Has Absolute Music No Class Character?". Peking
Review (9) 1974. Reprinted in Lotta.[37]
3. Chiang Ching. Most of these speeches are reprinted in two
collections. * marks those reprinted in Chung-Hua-min & Miller[34]
and ** marks those found in CCP Documents of the GPCR[20].
-. July 1964. "On the Revolution in Peking Opera", FLP, Peking,
1968. A collection of articles, including one cited about On the
Docks by Hsieh Wen-ping, "A Fierce Struggle for Control of the
Peking Opera Stage", pp 30-33.
4. -. February 1966. "Summary of the Forum on Literature and
Art in the Armed Forces with which Comrade Lin Piao Entrusted
Comrade Chiang Ching", Peking Review, May 1967.*
5. -. 6 August 1966. Speaking to Two Groups of Red Guards, Current
Background, 26.6.66, American Consulate General, Hong Kong. Cited
in Chung Hua-min pp 146-47.
6. -. 28 November 1966. "Chiang Ching Speaks at Peking Cultural
Revolution Rally of Literary and Art Workers", Hsinhua News Agency-English,
Peking, 3.12.66.*
7. -. 17 December 1966. Speech at the Workers Stadium in Peking.
Published in Red Guard of the Capital, 21.12.66.
8. -. 26 December 1966. "Minutes of Talks of the Leading Comrades
of the Cultural Revolution Group of the Central Committee of CCP
at Interview Granted the Representatives of the All-China Red-Worker
Rebels General Corps". Reprinted by Liaison Office of Revolutionary
Rebels of the Economic Institute of Peking stationed in the Ministry
of Labour, 4.1.67.*
9. -. 10 January 1967. "Speech Delivered by Chiang Ching at a
Reception Given to the Representatives of Red Guards at People's
Assembly Hall", published by Red Guards in Peking, 18.1.67.*
10. -. 17 January 1967. Speech to Peking Red Guards, in Dongfanghong
(The East is Red), organ of the Peking Polytechnic Institute,
21.1.67.
11. -. 1 February 1967. "Comrades Chiang Ching and Chi Pen-Yu's
Talks with the Representatives of the Revolutionary Masses of
the Central Documentary Films Studio and the August 1 Movie Studio".*
12. -. 27 March 1967. "Chiang Ching Speaks at Congress of Red
Guards of Peking Middle Schools", Peking Kuangming Daily, 27.3.67.*
13. -. 20 April 1967. "Chiang Ching Speaks at Inaugural Meeting
of Peking Revolutionary Committee" (edited version), Hsinhua News
Agency, English, Peking, 20.4.67.*
14. -. 3 July 1967. "Instructions on the Symphony Shachiapang",
from Kuang-ung Wen-i Chan-pao, 5.7.67,*
15. -. 5 September 1967. "Important Talk Given by Comrade Chiang
Ching on Sept. 5 at a Conference of Representatives of Anhwei
Who Have Come to Peking". Printed by the Great Preparatory Committee
of People's Automobiles, Red Flag, Municipal Communications and
Transport Department. Released with 9.9.67 Circular of CCP/CC
and both are reprinted in CCP Docs.*
16. -. 9 & 12 November 1967. "Talk of Comrade Chiang Ching",
Issued as a Document of the CCP/CC, in Chung-fa, No. 354 13.11.67.**
17. Chinese Communist Party, "Order of the CCP Central Committee,
the State Council, the Central Military Commission and the Central
Cultural Revolution Group Concerning the Prohibition of the Seizure
of Arms, Equipment, and other Military Supplies from the PLA",
(5 September, 1967), Chung-fa No. 288 (67).**
18. -. Ninth Party Congress documents. Peking: FLP, 1969.
19. -. Chinese Literature. Nos. 2-1969, 6-1972, 3-1974, 10-1976,
Peking.
20. CCP Documents of the GPCR, 1966-1967. Hong Kong: Union Research
Institute, 1968. Contains some key speeches of Chiang Ching.
21. Documents of the CCP/CC, Sept. 1956-April 1969, Vol 1. Hong
Kong: Union Research Institute, 1971.
22. Chu Lan. "A Decade of Revolution in Peking Opera". Peking
Review (31) 2.8.74; Reprinted in Lotta [37]
23. Mao Tsetung. "Give Serious Attention to the Discussion on
the Film The Life of Wu Hsun", 20 May 1951. In Jerome Chen's The
Mao Papers (1970), pp 78-79.
24. -. "Wen Hui Pao's Bourgeois Orientation Should be Criticized".
(July 1957), Selected Works of Mao Tsetung, Vol. 5, p 454 (FLP:
Peking, 1975). Also cited in Avakian's MIC, p 230.
25. -. "The Intelligence of the People". 11 February 1966. in
Chen, p 103.
26. -, Letters from Mao to Chiang Ching, July 1966 and July 1976.
Both widely reprinted. 7.66 in Han Suyin's Wind in the Tower,
p 319; 7.76 in Manchester Guardian 7.11.76
27. -. "Mao's Latest Instructions". A selection of Mao's remarks
between 1966 and 1969 made by editors Wheelright & McFarlane,
in The Chinese Road to Socialism, London: Pelican, 1973.
28. -. "Mao Tsetung Analyzes the Cultural Revolution". An unofficial
collection of Mao's remarks from 1967 as appendix in Daubier,
p 309.
29. -. "Talk to the Albanian Military Delegation". (May 1967)
in AWTW No. 1, 1985.
30. Chinese Communist Party (Marxist-Leninist) Central Committee.
"Statement by Shanghai Revolutionaries on the Restoration of Capitalism
in China", Shanghai, January 1981. Reprinted in AWTW, No. 14.
Message smuggled out abroad, translation by the Revolutionary
Worker newspaper.
31. -. "Persevere to the End in the Struggle Against the Counter-Revolutionary
Capitalist Roaders", Shanghai, August, 1981. In this pamphlet
the underground revolutionaries respond to the revisionist CCP
6th Plenum of the 11th Central Committee Report and its "summation
of Mao Tsetung". Reprinted in RW, 4.9.81.
(Secondary sources)
32. Avakian, Bob. The Loss in China and the Revolutionary Legacy
of Mao Tsetung. Chicago: RCP Publications, 1978.
33. -, Mao's Immortal Contributions. Chicago: RCP Publications,
1979. (Communes are fine, p 218.)
*34. Chung Hua-min & Miller, Arthur. Madame Mao, A Profile
of Chiang Ching. Hong Kong: Union Research Institute, 1968.
Contains several speeches by Chiang Ching. (Slogan "children-parents"
p 146)
35. Daubier, Jean. A History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution.
New York: Vintage, 1974. (Tao Chu caricatures, p 135)
36. Han Suyin. The Wind in the Tower, Mao Tsetung and the Chinese
Revolution 1949-1976. Herts: Triad Panther, 1978. ("children-parents"
slogan, p 327.) For liberation war see her Morning Deluge (1893-1954)
(1972).
37. Lotta, Raymond (ed.). And Mao Makes Five. Chicago: Banner
Press, 1978. Contains introduction on last battle of 1973-76 and
reprints of key documents from the Left and the Right. (Tachai
p 35; Chang Chun-chiao & culture p 36; for Deng and 3 directives,
see Cheng Yueh's "A General Program for Capitalist Restoration",
reprinted p 274.)
38. Malraux, André. Anti-Memoirs. New York: Holt, Rinehart &
Winston, 1968. Interview with Mao Tsetung.
39. Masi, Edoarda. China Winter. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1982.
Original title: Per la Cina, 1978. (for Song of the Gardner p
178; posters stripped down p 175)
40. New World Press. A Great Trial in Chinese History. Peking,
1981. Chinese revisionists' rendition of the trial. (Liao Mosha
p 53; the armed rebellion, pp 25, 191-93 is one of their major
charges. Chiang Ching's defence, p 26)
41. Revolutionary Communist Party, USA. "Revisionists are Revisionists
and Must Not Be Supported; Revolutionaries are Revolutionaries
and Must Be Supported", in Revolution and Counter-Revolution (Report
on China by Bob Avakian, Chairman). (For 3 directives vs class
struggle as key link, see especially pp 23-42.)
42. Revolutionary Worker, Voice of the RCP,USA, Chicago. "The
Shanghai Rebellion Plot'", 30.1.81; "Walls Salute Chiang Ching",
11.8.91, citing 7.91 issue of Cheng Ming, Hong Kong.
43. Robinson, Joan. The Cultural Revolution in China. Harmondsworth:
Pelican, 1969.
44. Sing Tao, Hong Kong, 7.6.91 (right-wing newspaper) p 3.
45. Tai, Dwan. Chiang Ching. Hicksville, NY: Exposition Press,
1974. (Docks pp 102-3. Also see Peking Review 25.8.67. (Deng &
Tao Chu vs opera, p 99; Soviet observer of Red Guard meeting,
p 124, citing Zhelokhovtsev, A. The Cultural Revolution Seen by
a Soviet.)
46. Wilson, Dick. Mao, The People's Emperor. London: Futura Publications,
1979. (reading to Mao and convalescing, p 392)
47. Witke, Roxanne. Comrade Chiang Ching. London: Weidenfeld
& Nicolson, 1977. (Chiang Ching describing her early childhood,
heads on pole, pp. 49-51; her "social education", p 62; Chiang
Ching on Lu Hsun, p 138; Yenan wall slogans p 167 citing The Red
Flag Waves, 16, p 134; Chiang Ching denied respect p 186; Chiang
Ching tells concubines and hated landlord story p 210; Moscow
and health p 271; Chiang Ching on her Wusih experience, pp 227-29;
Chiang Ching on divorce practices, p 230, pp 251-53; Chiang Ching's
description of land reform, pp 244-248; "Do People Eat Enough"
p 264; keeping abreast, p 260; Chiang Ching's investigation into
Wu Hsun, pp 238-243; May 16th Circular, p 517; Chiang Ching recounts
Lin Piao affair, pp 365-67 (see Doc. 12 of the CCP/CC (68) for
Mao's original remarks); women generals p 354; son, pp 164-65.)
Because it is based on the account of her interviews
with Chiang Ching in 1972, this book by academic historian Roxanne
Witke seems to be the most informed available source in English
about Chiang Ching's early life, and consequently it has been
used extensively for this part of the article. A word of caution:
her book is sprinkled with the poison of her thoroughly bourgeois
outlook that leaders make history as individuals and only out
of self-interest. However if one can manage to cast aside Witke's
annoying parenthetical interruptions and her summations that generally
stand things on their head, one can glean quite a bit about Chiang
Ching's remarkable life from Chiang Ching herself (or what she
might have said) through the parts in which Witke lets her speak.
Nonetheless, it can in no way be honestly maintained that Witke
fulfilled her promise to Chiang Ching to do a book on the history
of the revolution mainly from Chiang Ching's point of view. And,
it is highly unfortunate that someone who fails to grasp the class
struggle in China and has as much distaste for revolution as Witke
does (areas she assumes are as incomprehensible to her reading
public as to herself) should have taken on Chiang Ching's story.
Witke also waited to publish her book until after Mao's death
and Chiang Ching's arrest, lending her voice to the prescribed
anti-communist liturgy performed by the international bourgeois
media and some academicians that presumptuously aimed to put the
seal of death on Maoist revolution after the coup d'état of 1976.
This violation of Chiang Ching's trust by the
"moderate" Witke displayed in the 1977 biography turned into rabid
revolutionary-bashing and base rumour-mongering about Chiang Ching's
personal life in Witke's articles after her death in 1991, as
though Witke willingly surrendered any credibility as a serious
source today.