China must confront dark past, says Mao confidant
Communist party veteran says Tiananmen students were
right to demand more democracy and less corruption
Jonathan Watts in Beijing
Thursday June 02 2005
The Guardian
His giant portrait still hangs in pride of place over
the entrance to the Forbidden City, his embalmed body
lies in a mausoleum in the middle of Tiananmen Square,
and his visage is the only one to adorn the latest set
of banknotes.
Almost 30 years after his death, Mao still remains the
central figure in China. While the legend and legacy of
Mao Zedong is now under fresh, and intense, scrutiny
overseas, there is no debate here.
A new English biography of him by Jung Chang, the
author of Wild Swans, describes Mao as the biggest mass
murderer in history, yet the book will not be the talk
of Beijing's coffee shops and restaurants, nor will its
claims fill the pages of Chinese newspapers. For the
book will not be published in China, and references to
it are hard to come by on the internet.
According to a confidant of Mao - a retired senior
member of the Communist party - it is this refusal to
confront and reassess the darkest episodes of China's
past that is preventing the country from achieving its
potential in the future.
In a rare interview, Li Rui, Mao's personal secretary
during the Great Helmsman's most murderous period in
power, told the Guardian that the biggest problem
facing modern China was its inability to face up to
history.
Few people know the horrors it contains more intimately
than the 88-year-old, whose outspoken views have taken
him in and out of the centre of power in Beijing and
the political wilderness of gulags in freezing
Heilongjiang province.
Most of the punishments were meted out by his mentor
and chief tormentor, Mao, whose worst crimes are still
a taboo subject.
"That's China's biggest problem," Mr Li said. "Mao was
too autocratic. He couldn't bear to hear disagreements.
He had a superstitious belief that he was always and
absolutely right. But Mao's problem is also a problem
of the system. It was caused by the party system."
Mr Li has yet to read the new work on his former boss,
but its claim that Mao was culpable for the deaths of
tens of millions of people during the Great Leap
Forward and the Cultural Revolution is likely to come
as no surprise.
"Mao's way of thinking and governing was terrifying. He
put no value on human life. The deaths of others meant
nothing to him," said Li, who shakes with fury when
asked about the chairman's personality. "I really
didn't like him."
Despite his unusually blunt criticism, Mr Li is no
dissident. On the contrary, he is a party man through
and through, a cadre who survived some of the roughest
political turmoil of the 20th century with his
reputation intact.
His Beijing home in "Ministers House", an apartment
block reserved for senior communist pensioners, is
proof of that.
But his fierce public comments are entirely consistent
with a life history that is filled with rebellions,
often at great personal cost, against those who abused
their power. As a high school student in Hubei, he led
student protests against local warlords, at university
he threw himself into the movement against Japan, and
soon afterwards he was thrown into prison by Chang Kai-
shek's Kuomintang authorities for distributing Marxist
textbooks.
Upon his release he joined Mao's communist forces in
Yanan, where he wrote stinging editorials for the party
newspaper, Liberation. The attention proved dangerous.
After a brutal purge against "reactionaries" he spent a
year in prison on charges of spying.
His independence of thought initially won him promotion
to Mao's inner circle, where he held the advisory
position of personal secretary. But in 1958 the same
outspokenness got him thrown into a gulag for two years
when he dared to publicly criticise the disastrous
Great Leap Forward policy and, by extension, a leader
who was starting to project himself as infallible.
"As early as 1958, Mao said the personality cult was
necessary," Mr Li said. "By the time of the Cultural
Revolution, this had become an evil cult.
"Mao's methods were even harsher than the emperors of
ancient times. He tried to control the minds of the
people."
Yet, despite this and his own suffering, Mr Li accepts
the official Communist party judgment that Mao was
three parts bad, seven parts good, because his
revolutionary achievements in expelling the colonial
powers outweighed his failures once in power.
Since the insanity of the Cultural Revolution, China
has also changed almost beyond recognition. Its people
are richer and far freer to travel and express their
views in private and to foreigners, if not to the
domestic public.
"Now I can talk to you. In the past, if I talked like
this, I would have been killed or jailed," Mr Li said.
None the less, his poems and essays, which attack
corruption, environmental destruction and domestic
censorship, are published in Hong Kong. When a mainland
newspaper, the Southern Metropolitan, printed his
proposals for a tripartite division of power, the
authorities blocked its distribution and changed the
editor.
Though the gulag is no longer a threat, there are
considerable risks in speaking out. This has been shown
by the frequent arrests of journalists, most recently
Ching Cheong of the Straits Times, who faces charges of
spying because he tried toacquire notes of secret
interviews with the late premier Zhao Ziyang, who
opposed the Tiananmen Square killings on June 4 1989.
Mr Li is as disturbingly and admirably frank on this
most sensitive of subjects as he is on every other.
"The leadership did not understand the students. It
worried that they were organised by foreign powers and
were part of an attempted takeover by someone inside
the party. The leadership's measures were wrong. The
students' calls for more democracy and less corruption
were right."
Last year, on the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen
protests, there were reports that prominent officials
were calling for a review of the crackdown, which the
government has always justified as a necessary measure
to put down a revolt that threatened stability.
Mr Li is one of the few to risk retribution from the
authorities by going public with such a call.
"We should talk about it. We should reassess what
happened on June 4. But we must do it properly, not
now," he said. As for Nazism in Germany, or military
dictatorship in South Korea, a judgment would
eventually be made by history. "But it is hard to say
if it will take five, 15 or 20 years."
Chairman's legacy
The Long March
Mao was among several leaders of a protracted retreat
that started in October 1934 and took the communist
army 9,000km. Although it ensured the survival of the
party, only 20,000 of the 90,000 who started out on the
march in Jiangxi province made it to the end in Yanan
in Shaanxi. As well as disease, exposure and battles
with the Kuomintang, the high rate of fatalities was a
result of repeated inner-party purges.
Hundred Flowers Campaign
Emboldened after the early successes of the republic,
Mao decided in April 1957 to relax censorship and
invite constructive criticism about his rule. "Let a
hundred flowers bloom" in the arts, he said. But such
was the flood of complaints that the Great Helmsman
quickly changed his stance. Within six months, 300,000
intellectuals were either killed, imprisoned, sacked or
branded "rightists" in need of political re-education.
Great Leap Forward
Mao was personally responsible for this disastrous
attempt to jumpstart the economy by collectivising
agricultural production and establishing smelting kilns
in every village to match Britain's industrial output
in 10 years. The radical experiment started with the
attempted abolition of money and private property, and
ended with a famine that killed between 30 million and
60 million peasants after the failure of harvests in
1959 and1960.
Cultural Revolution
An aging Mao attempted to build a new political base
through the spread of a personality cult. From 1966
devoted students across the country formed Red Guard
units, which spearheaded a vicious purge against Mao's
opponents - real and imagined. Anything related to the
Four Olds - old ideas, old customs, old culture and old
habits - was a target. Millions died. When the students
threatened to move out of control, Mao used the
People's Liberation Army to crush dissent.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/internatio...496991,00.html
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