Overview of China's Communist Revolution

Major funding for this program was provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Additional funding was provided by the Ford Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Albert Kunstader Family Foundation, The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and by annual financial support from viewers like you. In October 1949, the Chinese people celebrated the victory of the Communist Party. The leader of the Communists and the hero of the revolution was Mao Zedong. Our dream is true. True dream is the one that can't be broken. For Mao and the Chinese Communist Party, taking power was just a first step. The real revolution was about to begin. In 1949, China lay devastated by decades of civil war and foreign invasion. The previous regime, corrupt and incompetent, had left the country bankrupt. People hoped the new communist government would bring unity and peace, pride and prosperity. Everybody felt that the liberation in 1949 was an historic demarcation. Before that, it was the old society with many ugly things in it. After the communists came, most people were idealistic and they began to fight for the same cause, for a new China. Mao and his colleagues had a vision of momentous change. They wanted to transform the lives of one quarter of mankind and create a strong and modern industrial China. The Communists forged a new political structure. They set up a network of party branches, which reached down from the capital to every village in the country. At local levels, officials explained party programs. Communism meant political equality for everybody. The people would be masters of the country. That was the propaganda. People would have enough to eat and wear. Poverty would be a thing of the past. The reforms went far beyond economics, into personal relations. Before liberation, women had to do whatever they were told. They had no rights. There were three obediences and four virtues. Obedience to father before marriage, to husband after marriage, and to your son after your husband died. You had no rights at all. the government's first major legislation made women legally equal to men. Marriages arranged by parents are mat... The matchmakers were stopped. Women could marry the men they loved. So they were very happy. The communists organized people into work units, which provided employment, health care, housing and education. Work units also gave the party direct control over people's lives. Everyone belonged to a work unit. At first, people weren't comfortable with them, but gradually they got used to them. In the countryside, the changes were just as profound. For centuries, most peasants had struggled to survive hardship and poverty. During the revolution, Mao had won peasant support with promises of a better life. Now, he gave them land. Party officials told peasants to seize property from their landlords. It was fierce. The whole village, hundreds of people, came beating drums. They dragged me to the meeting ground and wanted to beat me. I said, don't hit me. I know my family has exploited the people for generations. I'll give you my house, land, everything. After they discussed it, they labeled me an enlightened son of a landlord family. They let me keep my house, although there wasn't much left in it. But in fact I did well. Many people died. Officials encouraged peasants to humiliate and beat their landlords. Often, the violence went much further. Across China, hundreds of thousands of landlords were killed. Nearly half of all China's arable land was distributed to poor peasants. Before land reform, we only had three quarters of an acre of land. It was not enough to feed us all. During land reform, we got nearly three acres of land. Because we had more land, we could grow more. Gradually, our life became better. Now it was the people who were the masters. They really liked that. Land and houses were taken from the landlords and given to them. People saw that they benefited, so they supported the Communist Party. The leaders of the party were veteran revolutionaries who had worked with Mao for years. Second in authority was Liu Shaoqi. Zhou Enlai was foreign minister and then premier. Gaining in prominence was Deng Xiaoping. Zhou Enlai was the gifted administrator and the loyal servant who never challenged Mao. He had a human touch that made him both popular and respected. Liu Shaoqi was more reserved. He was an orthodox communist, a cautious economic planner, and a devoted father. Mao was married to Zhang Qing, a former movie actress. During the 1950s, she never appeared in public. Mao was the party visionary, a poet, and a romantic revolutionary for whom no theory was sacred. He was also an astute strategist. Mao believed that China needed strong international support, and within weeks of taking power in 1949, he visited Moscow. But Joseph Stalin was a difficult ally. For three days, he did not even acknowledge Mao's presence in Moscow. Finally, he gave the Chinese limited aid and agreed to a defense treaty. On his return to Beijing, Mao addressed his colleagues. Chief among the imperialists was America. The United States did not recognize Mao's government. Only months after this speech, the two sides would be at war in Korea. In June 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea. America was outraged and called for immediate action. The United Nations sent troops from 15 countries to defend South Korea. They were led by the American general, Douglas MacArthur. After months of hard fighting, the UN forces pushed the North Korean army out of the south. In October, they reached the North Korean capital, Pyongyang. The original orders that we gave MacArthur were, when he was able to do so, to expel the North. from the south and in doing so to keep well clear of the Chinese borders because we did not want to give them any pretext to come in but MacArthur's troops continued north towards the Yalu River and the border with China. MacArthur had much broader objectives to take advantage of the attack, to attack China and remove Chinese communists as a threat in the area. And he's continually trying to do things that would bring China into the war. Mao's government was barely a year old and in the midst of radical reforms. It could hardly afford a war, but Mao felt the UN forces were an intolerable threat to China's security. Under the command of General Peng Dehuai, a quarter of a million Chinese troops secretly crossed into Korea. At the end of October 1950, they attacked, taking the UN forces completely by surprise. The UN troops soon fled in a massive retreat. In China, the government launched a propaganda campaign called Resist America and Aid Korea. People donated money for planes and ammunition for the war effort. Every family gave. We heard people saying how our soldiers were bravely fighting. fighting in the icy fields, and how they were beating the Americans, carrying them away in their sleeping bags one by one. We were so moved that we all donated. One day I got my two-week salary. I gave it all. By the spring of 1951, the war was a grim stalemate. Both sides were dug in around the 38th parallel, separating North and South Korea. While fighting continued, peace talks began. Finally, after two years, the talks produced an armistice. The Korean War forced us to recognize, and the American people to recognize, that the new regime, the communist regime in China, was a fact of life with whom we were going to have to live. In China, the war created great national pride. The Chinese army had suffered terribly, with nearly one million casualties. But it had fought to a standstill the armies of the strongest nations in the world. The Resist America campaign proved how effectively Mao's government could mobilize the entire country. Now it began a series of smaller campaigns against people inside China, people Mao called enemies without guns. The Zhang family had one of many small businesses still operating in Wuhan. My in-laws were capitalists. They were told to report all their property to the government. So they made an inventory of everything in the store. Later, there was a struggle meeting. The shop assistants tied up my mother-in-law because they didn't like her. They yelled at her. My brother-in-law got impatient and said, we don't have anything more. You keep saying we have more, but we don't. Then they tied him up too, saying he had a bad attitude. What we used as our dinner table was actually a bench, this long. They told her to kneel on it. It's very hard to kneel on a bench like that. If you bend just a little, you fall. You have to stay very straight to kneel on it. They kept us there until 11 at night. They really couldn't get any more out of us. Thousands were jailed or executed. People with money, with foreign connections, or with ties to the previous regime. With these campaigns, the Communists crushed all potential political opposition. But the vast majority of people were not hurt by the campaigns. For many Chinese, life was improving. Mao was not like the rest of us. He had no sense of time. Day or night, 24 hours were the same to him. He worked whenever he wanted and slept whenever he wanted. He didn't have regular meetings, once a week or once a month. Any leader who wanted his permission to make a decision would send him a note. After Mao read it, he would write his comments on it and send it back. The leader's first words were, I'm sorry, The leaders and their families lived in Zhongnanhai, a huge walled compound in the heart of Beijing. They spent their summers at the same beach resort, reserved for high officials. Usually, the dance party started at 7 on Saturday evening. Mao would come at about ten. As soon as he entered, people would all stand and clap to welcome him. Then many girls would come and ask him to dance. He would sit for a while, then dance with them, one after another. Then he would dance with them one after another. These girls seemed to be in a circle. So this dance... Supposedly, the party was for all the leaders. Actually, it was for Mao himself. It was a recreational activity organized for him. While the leaders danced to Western music, the strongest foreign influence in the mid-50s was Russian. With the help of Soviet advisers, Mao's government began dozens of huge industrial projects. This development and Soviet help had to be paid for. Mao looked to China's peasants to foot the bill. But traditional family farms could not produce enough to pay for industry. In 1953, the Communist Party of China The communists began to socialize agriculture. First, they encouraged families to pool their property in small farms called cooperatives. When you explained clearly to people what it meant to till the land together, with people working together we would have more manpower and we would be able to increase production and our life would become better. When people accepted this, a few families started working together. After the cooperative was set up, our life was much better. We could afford to raise pigs. Before, we didn't have enough grain to raise them. When the pigs grew, I sold them and got more cash. I also sold vegetable seeds in the town market. We had more land. enough labor, plus some sidelines, so our income increased. Cooperatives grew at an astonishing speed. By the end of 1955, almost two-thirds of the peasants had joined. This was much faster than Mao had ever hoped. Seizing the momentum, he ordered the country to move to the next stage of socialism, to collectivization. But for most peasants, this was going too far. In collectives, private property was abolished. People had to give up their animals, their tools, and their land. Party officials put intense pressure on families to join. By then, people were unhappy. They weren't comfortable forming a collective with the whole village. Some villagers didn't get on with others. My father was quite well off, so he didn't want to join either. I was a party official in the village. I told him if I weren't an official, I wouldn't insist he join. If you didn't join, you wouldn't look good in front of your neighbors. With my persuasion and the example of others, he gave in. But he joined with reluctance. His income was quite high. It went down after he joined, so he was unhappy. Within months, all of China's 600 million peasants were working in huge collectives. For the first time in history, the farm output of the entire nation was under government control. The government decided how much grain the peasants could keep. The rest had to be sold at low prices to the state. The grain ration for the peasants was very low, not enough. Plus, you had to obey the leadership. You had to fulfill the state quota. State first, then the people. Peasants complained about the policies. They said, we can't keep one extra ear of grain for ourselves. Do you think this is fair? I said, it's not fair. So I wrote to the provincial leadership. Things couldn't go on like this. No matter how much you grew, you still had to give it to the state. You couldn't eat it. The province sent people down to investigate. They saw things were just the way I said, but they couldn't solve it. It was a big problem. Collectives did not make the peasants better off, nor did they increase production. Mao still had to find a way to finance his vision of an industrial China. President Jiu said that you young people are in a state of panic, in a period of hope. It seems that the sun is rising at 8 or 9 o'clock. Hope is in your hands. The children are new, better than the past. Let's go! The Communists controlled most intellectual life. Plays and films had to follow strict guidelines. Mao saw that this control was stifling potentially useful new ideas. He was also disturbed by the emergence of a new elite in the party itself. In 1956, Mao decided to encourage constructive criticism of the party. He called for a hundred flowers to bloom in the arts. and a hundred schools of thought to contend in science. I was all for the slogan of letting a hundred flowers bloom. We all felt that we had really started to have democracy. Soon, all the walls in Beijing University were covered with big posters. People expressed their points of view and asked the Communist Party for changes. Yu Bei-chan called many high school teachers unqualified. Shang Da-she complained medical research was falling behind. More and more people criticized party corruption and inefficiency. Committee members and leaders at all levels were criticized by ordinary people. They had quite a tough time. So they did not like 100 Flowers. They felt as if they were punching bags. They were not happy. Under pressure from the Party, Mao reversed himself. In June 1957, he published an article calling the people who had spoken out enemies and rightists. Mao appointed Deng Xiaoping to lead the anti-rightist movement. I was supposed to have committed 29 crimes. One was that I supported the policy of letting a hundred flowers bloom. It was Mao Zedong himself who started the policy. How could it be a crime? But it was. The rightists were denounced in front of their colleagues in struggle meetings. Professor Ge Pei-chi was criticized in this meeting at the People's University in Beijing. You want to be a member of the Party? I think it's my own idea. I think that since the liberation, the people have been so kind to us. That's my idea. The words, the word, are not correct. That's my idea. It's probably wrong. What kind of position do you stand on? Do you stand on the position of a professor of the People's University of Jiangxi? Or do you stand on the position of a former general? Who do you stand on? Ge Peiqi lives next to me. Ge Peiqi was my neighbor. He was already done for. That's what we called it. I saw his youngest child, who was about five or six months old. his nurse had quit the baby was crawling outside the building under the burning sun I felt sorry for him and picked him up some people said you shouldn't do that Gopay Chi is a bad person why are you holding his child you'll get into trouble They meant well. I said, the baby hasn't done anything wrong. Gu Peiqi's family was ostracized for years. Gu Peiqi himself spent the next two decades doing hard labor. I had been in the revolutionary ranks for so many years. At the meeting, I was the most senior person there, but I was finished. I suddenly realized that I had fallen from the sky down to the earth. I could never get up again. I was a rightist, and I was kicked out. In an internal party document, Mao estimated that about 10% of the people were rightists. Local officials interpreted this to mean they had to find 10 rightists among every 100 people. They accused my wife of telling my son to tell other children that their land and house were ours. It wasn't true. She never said anything like that. But when you were told to confess, you had to say something. They wouldn't let you go if you didn't. People at the meeting shouted, struggle against her, hit her. She was just a peasant woman. She wasn't like me. I could make things up on the spot so I wouldn't get hurt. She couldn't do that. What could we do? Someone took her backstage. He said to her, just say anything. Say you were wrong in saying this or doing that. But my old woman was stupid. Her mind did not work fast. She was taught what to say. She walked onto the stage saying, OK, OK, I'll say that. But when she was there, she forgot everything. She was scared stiff. When she got home, she cried and cried. It was 1958 during the anti-rightist movement. It was the first time she was ever repudiated. But she was not labeled a rightist. She was not qualified, not at all qualified. Nearly one million people were condemned as rightists. They were sent to jail and prison camps or to work in the countryside. The anti-rightist campaign effectively silenced China's intellectuals. Mao had decided that they were no longer needed. Mao was also beginning to question China's relationship with the Soviet Union. When Nikita Khrushchev and Mao met in 1958, they kept up appearances of solidarity. But in private, they disagreed on major issues. During the visit, Mao did not tell Khrushchev that he was about to launch military action against his old enemy, the Nationalists. When the Communists took power in 1949, the defeated nationalist government fled to Taiwan, also called Formosa. Led by Chiang Kai-shek, they still claimed to be the true government of China, and they had American support. The United States must remove any doubt regarding our readiness to fight, if necessary, to preserve the vital stake of the free world in a free Formosa. The Nationalists hoped one day to retake the mainland. Their troops trained on islands which lay just off China's coast. In August 1958, the Communists began to shell them. President Eisenhower stood firm in his commitment to the Nationalists. Mao did not want a war with the United States. After a few tense weeks, he stopped the bombardment. The crisis petered out, but it had lasting repercussions. While Khrushchev backed the Chinese communists in public, he was furious with Mao. The attack could have triggered a superpower war. In 1959, the two men met for the last time. A year later, they broke off relations. But foreign criticism did not sway Mao's government. They viewed conflict with the nationalists as a purely domestic matter. The same was true, they asserted, of their actions in Tibet. For centuries, this remote and religious... religious land had been regarded by the Chinese as part of China. In 1950, the Communists enforced their claim by taking over Tibet. In 1959, Tibetans rebelled. The People's Liberation Army crushed the revolt. As reports of atrocities and destruction reached the outside world, China's international isolation deepened. Mao's first concern was still China's economy. Industrial output had doubled in five years, but he was not satisfied. Mao Zedong always hoped to build a socialist economy in China faster than... the Soviet Union. He always thought fighting the Revolutionary War was very difficult. There must be a way to speed up agricultural or industrial production. Could it be more difficult than fighting a war? In 1958, Mao launched his most ambitious campaign to date, the Great Leap Forward. His goal was to make China the industrial equal of Western nations in just 15 years. His method was to mobilize the entire country to work day and night by promising a better future. We built reservoirs, planted cotton, cultivated trees and things like that. When we worked, we had a slogan. Catch the stars and moon. We had to work when the stars and moon were out. We had breakfast very early and came home very late. So we worked all day long. We were so enthusiastic. To make work exciting, flags flew high in the fields and loudspeakers squealed. People shouted slogans one after another. Mao decided to visit some villages to see what was going on. I went with him. Once we came to a village and saw a banner with these words on it. People's communes are good. He read the words, people's communes are good. A reporter happened to be next to Mao and took down his words. The next day, the words appeared in the newspapers. That's how people's communes started. Mao's word was so powerful that almost overnight, people's communes sprang up across China. A commune encompassed many villages with thousands of families. Each day was strictly regimented. and family life was virtually abolished. Children were placed in communal nurseries while their parents worked around the clock. People ate in the fields or in communal dining halls. To increase industrial output, communes were ordered to make steel. The slogan was, to overtake England and catch up with America. The idea was that if everybody worked hard, and everywhere in the country people refined steel, then we would catch up very soon. People collected walks, pots, bed frames, and tools, anything made of iron or steel. They built small furnaces to melt them. The biggest challenge was to keep the furnaces fueled. We burned tables, chairs, window frames. And finally, we even opened old coffins and used the wood. They really stink. We kept the fires burning day and night. And for convenience, we built worksheds close to the furnaces. One day I worked very late and I was totally exhausted. We had separate sheds for men and women. But I was so tired I couldn't tell the difference. I just walked into a shed, lay down and fell asleep. When I woke the next morning, I found I was in the men's shed. Of course it was all right, nobody cared. All we cared about was making as much steel as we could. At night you could see many furnaces along the railroad. Fire shot out of the furnaces. This made people excited. China was going through a great change. China was becoming a very rich and strong country. All this seemed to have happened overnight. Mao was very pleased. But the steel people made was useless. We used it to make pots of all sizes. But when people heated them, they cracked and leaked. If only we had the equipment to make good steel. But we didn't. We only had people. Our methods were very primitive. Of course we didn't make good steel. People were unhappy, but nobody dared say anything. The result was that everything made of iron and steel was taken from every family and was made useless. We had no tools left to use. While the government called on everyone to make steel, they also wanted to increase farm output. How could we increase the grain harvest? People said that if you did close planting and used more fertilizer, you would definitely increase output. People got carried away. They were hot-headed. From Mao Zedong and the Central Party Committee down to leaders at all levels, everyone was full of enthusiasm. It was hot. During the Great Leap Forward, we believed miracles could happen. There was a saying, the corn will grow higher the more you desire. Communes and schools reported their wonderful news to the party. If one commune said they could turn out 150 tons an acre, another one would say their target was 180 tons. Each commune or school would promise a higher amount until the last school gave their highest figure. Our school set the target of 470 tons an acre. We dug a hole, something like a swimming pool. We thought if we put all the fertilizer in it, we would achieve our target. Then we poured the seeds in, which built up into a layer about this thick. There was a photograph in the People's Daily that showed the wheat in a field supporting the weight of children. Some leaders of the Central Party Committee were so happy that they put this photo on their desks at work. Most people believed it. We were surprised to see that photo and wondered how it could be possible. But because we were city people, we couldn't be sure it was a fake. When I went with Mao to the villages, I really did see so much grain in the fields, so much rice. The yields were so high. At the time, I thought everything was true. After the anti-rightist campaign, few dared to ask questions. Only one teacher spoke out. How thick would the wheat be if we did produce 470 tons? Immediately, He was accused of being a rightist and not believing in the Party. Later, I learned it was all fake. The peasants were putting on a show for us. They moved grain from other places and put it all in one field. It was all a show for Mao. Under pressure to produce more, to launch satellites to heaven, as it was called, Party officials inflated production figures. An ominous cycle began as the state took more and more grain based on false figures, leaving the peasants with nothing to eat. For example, the output was five tons of grain, but ten tons were reported. Then the state would collect grain based on ten tons. Our commune committee calculated that our yield was 1,800 pounds an acre. It didn't qualify us to go up to heaven. But the deputy had an idea. He added the melons, fruits, pears, peaches, turnips and vegetables to the grain. counting them as grain output. So the yield became 2,600 pounds per acre. Now we were qualified to go up to heaven. The commune committee did not want to calculate this way. It was cheating. But those people were higher up. What could we do? I have this problem. I get emotional very easily. I wondered why the higher the official, the more he dared to lie, to deceive the party and the people. Jiang Hongbin, the financial secretary, was horrified when he heard such an enormous figure. He said, are you letting people eat? This is sheer absurdity. Party officials ignored the protests and continued to submit the inflated figures. The state took the grain accordingly. It was sent to feed the cities, repay Soviet debts, or left to rot in warehouses. Peasants across China were beginning to starve. Anhui was one of the four provinces worst hit. All my mother could do was gather weeds with my aunt. There wasn't enough grain, so we ate weeds. By the summer of 1959, the leaders knew the great leap forward was going badly wrong. Mao decided to go back to Shaoshan, his hometown, to have a look. He wanted to find out the truth. He wanted people to speak freely. I think that when he was in Shaoshan, he found that there really were problems in the great leap forward. After his trip, Mao decided to moderate production targets. In July 1959, the party met at the mountain resort of Lushan to set new, realistic goals. Minister of Defense Pong Dehuai, the hero of the Korean War, was one of Mao's oldest revolutionaries. comrades. For my generation of officials, Peng Duhui was a very down-to-earth peasant and an excellent combat general. He hated fraud and hypocrisy. He said what was on his mind. Back in the early days, if he needed to talk to Mao and saw that Mao was still in bed, he would go and pull off his quilt, saying, get up, let's talk. He said, but now it's very difficult to have that kind of relationship. He is the chairman. It's so hard to see him, let alone discuss things with him. Peng wrote to Mao describing what he saw as the problems of the Great Leap Forward. What Peng intended as loyal criticism, Mao saw as political treachery. When Mao Zedong started the meeting, He said he had not slept all night. He couldn't sleep, even after he took his sleeping pills. He just got up and called this meeting. He was very serious. You could see that at times he was very anxious. angry. He said, it's all right for you to oppose me. When I have no alternative, I'll just take the Liberation Army, go up to the mountains, and carry out guerrilla warfare. Finally, the resolution was that Peng Duhui was against the Communist Party. When Mao left the room, I was following him. Peng was in front of us. Mao called him. Marshal Peng, if there are any questions, we can talk. Peng swung his arm and said, What's there to talk about? There's nothing more to say. Zhou Enlai and Liu Shaoqi agreed with Peng, but even they did not dare speak out. Nobody had the courage to oppose Mao Zedong. He was considered absolutely correct. He stood high and looked far. People thought they were not up to Mao's level. Even if someone wanted to make a comment, he would not dare say anything or reveal his own feelings. As a result, production goals were not cut. Officials continued to demand more grain than the peasants could give. The great leap forward continued through 1960. Millions of peasants were starving. Old peasants said in a fury, no. Grain comes from the blood and sweat of peasants. It doesn't grow on the backs of intellectuals. Who do they think they're fooling? In wartime, we protected them and saved their lives. Now we provide them with food and clothing. They have full stomachs, and still they come to cheat us. Don't they have a conscience? Ma Yanz family was a typical big family in the countryside, with several generations living together. There were 36 people altogether. During the three years of famine, one died after another. Eventually, only three people were left alive. At first, when someone died, they would take the body and bury it. Later, they didn't have the strength to take the bodies out. They could only look at them. They watched the bodies being eaten by rats and their eyeballs dug out. People didn't even have the strength to chase the rats away. The famine was very severe and widespread. but newspapers did not report it at all. People only knew that their local area was suffering. To keep the news from spreading, peasants were not allowed to leave their areas, even to beg. At first, peasants ate everything they had at home. Then they ate Ganyan earth. It's a kind of white clay. There's a legend in the village passed down from generation to generation. It says that this clay was provided by old mother Ganyan, who sympathized with the poor people. People would eat it during the famine because it was very fine, but still it was hard to swallow. At first the peasants could swallow a little, but after four or five days it destroyed their intestines. And they died. After eating all the grass roots and tree bark, they ate the earth. The famine lasted three years. An estimated 30 million people died. Mao's revolution, fought to give the Chinese people a better life, had helped create the largest famine in history. In 1961, Peng Dehuai, a lone voice, wrote, Grain scattered across the ground. Potato leaves withered. Strong young people have gone to make steel. Only children and old women reap the crops. How will they eat next year? Please, think of the people. So yeah. A campaign called Remember the Bitter Past and Think of the Sweet Present was launched. The peasants were told, Chairman Mao and the party want you to talk about your suffering before 1949, so that young people will realize what a happy life they have now, and how they owe all this to the party and Chairman Mao. The peasants started to talk about the bitter past. Then they forgot that they were supposed to be talking about the old society before 1949. They got carried away and talked about the famine of the last three years. They cried and cried. The officials were scared to death. It was as if the peasants were blaming the Communist Party and Chairman Mao. They said, Grandma Zhang, Grandpa, you can't talk like this. The peasants said, why not? So many in our families died. Never, ever have we had such a terrible time. In China, between 1959 and 1961, an estimated 30 million people died of hunger. Officially, the Communist government blamed the catastrophe on floods and drought. But in party meetings, they admitted that the famine was largely created by their own policies. Their efforts to rebuild the country would spark a struggle inside the party, a struggle that would engulf the Chinese people in chaos and terror. Mao Zedong was the head of the Communist Party, the man who had instigated the disastrous policies of the Great Leap Forward. But no one would ever dare hold him responsible. Mao's reputation remained untarnished. During this time, Mao had chosen to withdraw from day-to-day government. Liu Shaoqi took over. Although people respected Liu Shaoqi, and he had great authority, he could not compare with Mao. I remember after Mao resigned as head of state, the People's Congress elected Liu Shaoqi to succeed him. We had parades to celebrate, but people shouted, Long live Chairman Mao. Not a single person shouted, Long live Chairman Liu. Liu was a veteran revolutionary and one of the most conscientious and talented in the party. He worked with Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping to rebuild the country. They had to do it without foreign help. China's communist government had long viewed America as its principal enemy. Now, as U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War escalated, so did anti-American rhetoric. Relations with the Soviet Union were no better. In the 1950s, Soviet experts had helped build Chinese industry. But by the end of the decade, disagreements between Mao and Nikita Khrushchev reached breaking point. Soviet experts shredded their blueprints and returned home. Now, Liu shifted economic focus from developing heavy industry to making consumer goods. He relaxed controls on the peasants. They remained in communes, but they were allowed to make money farming on the side. China's recovery was fast. People who had worked day and night were given time off. The early 1960s were quiet years for Mao. He studied political economy. He read the Chinese classics of warfare and romance. Later, there were more dance parties. Before, they were once a week on Saturday. Then they were increased to twice a week on Wednesday and Saturday. There was another big change. Another room was set up by the ballroom. Sometimes, during the party, Mao... took young girls into this room to rest with him. He would rest for an hour or so. I think Mao got great pleasure from these parties. By 1963, Mao had tired of political seclusion. At 70, he still dreamed of realizing a communist utopia. He began to plan the final and most revolutionary act of his political career. Minister of Defense Lin Biao became his strongest ally. In 1964, Lin published a pocket-sized book called Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong. First it was distributed throughout the army, then in work units and schools across the country. We were educated to love the party, our country and our leader. Even if we didn't understand his words, we deeply believed that he was always right. As long as we did what Mao said. We were doing the right thing. My teachers taught me that Chairman Mao was the great savior of China. And he brought liberation to China. This idea was stamped in my mind and ran through my blood. The cult of Mao soon elevated him to the stature of a living god, all powerful but remote. For Mao rarely appeared in public. His speeches were not broadcast. Most Chinese had never heard his voice. Liu, Deng and Zhou did not oppose the cult. Mao personified the revolution. To attack him would undermine their own legitimacy. Instead, they quietly ignored his radical ideas. Their programs of careful economic growth were working. By 1966, China was increasingly prosperous and the world's fifth nuclear power. But Mao was more and more dissatisfied. He did not control party policy, and he felt that Liu Shaoqi and the other leaders were betraying the revolution. Mao disagreed with people like Liu Shaoqi on building the economy. Zhou Enlai and Liu wanted to curb radical policies. Mao wasn't happy. Mao thought that curbing radicalism was wrong. For Mao, communism could be achieved only through radical means, through continuing revolution, a never-ending process of struggle and change. He decided that the Communist Party itself, the party he had led for more than 30 years, was the main obstacle to his vision of revolution. In May 1966, Mao began an attack on the Party. Through the columns of China's main newspaper, he called on young people to attack Party officials and replace them with true revolutionaries. Mao Zedong had unleashed the great proletarian cultural revolution. For the first time since 1949, our supreme leader, Chairman Mao, a godlike figure called on people at the very bottom of society people like us students with no work and no profession He told us to rebel against party officials. This had a tremendous impact on us. It was said there were people who were against Chairman Mao. We felt it was time for us to give our blood and our lives to protect Chairman Mao. Young people took to the streets. They wrote wall posters, attacking their teachers and party officials. Within days, schools and universities were in turmoil. Having launched the Cultural Revolution, Mao left Beijing. Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping were left to manage the growing disorder. They asked Mao for instructions, but he gave them none. On July 16th, 1966, Mao staged a huge media event, swimming in the Yangtze River. It was a signal to the nation that Mao, aged 73, was vigorous and in command. Two days later, he returned to the capital. A meeting was held in the Great Hall of the People with students from Beijing University and other colleges. At the meeting, Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, and Zhou Enlai were sitting on the stage. Unknown to the participants, Mao was listening backstage. Dr. Li sat next to him. Liu Shaoqi described how the Cultural Revolution started. He said, we veteran revolutionaries have encountered new problems, and we don't know how to deal with them. Mao immediately said, I hear you. What veteran revolutionaries? You're an old counter-revolutionary. My heart sank. It was already very clear that in Mao's eyes, Liu Shaoqi was no longer the head of state, no longer a communist. He was an old counter-revolutionary. Mao had already condemned him. I knew Liu Shaoqi would have no way out. Within weeks, Mao reordered the party hierarchy. Deng Xiaoping was demoted to number six, Liu Shaoqi even lower to number eight. Lin Biao replaced him. Kim and Mao says, Marxism consists of thousands of truths, but they all boil down to one phrase. It's right to rebel. Students banded together to carry out Mao's orders. They called themselves Red Guards. On August 18, 1966, Mao began a series of public appearances, greeting millions of young people in Tiananmen Square. Donning the armband of the Red Guards, Mao gave them his blessing. We saw Mao wave to us. He said something, but we couldn't hear clearly. Later we learned that he said we should carry on the Cultural Revolution to the end. We felt it was the greatest honor of our lives to see Mao in person. With Mao's approval, the Red Guards traveled for free around the country to gain revolutionary experience. In September 1966, schools did not open for the academic year. This was the first chance we had to break away from our parents, to do whatever we wanted. The first morning we were in high spirits. We sang revolutionary songs as we walked. We walked the whole day. The second day we had blisters on our feet. We were exhausted. Army trucks often passed us on the way. The Liberation Army men would say, Chairman Mao's Red Guards, where are you going? We answered, we're going to Beijing to see Chairman Mao and to get revolutionary experience. Then they would say, good, our truck is empty, we'll give you a lift. We would answer, thank you, Liberation Army men, we want to walk to Beijing. We'll spread Mao Zedong's thought and get revolutionary experience on the way. The 13 of us walked and walked for many days. On October 1st, 1966, National Day, the rallies with Mao reached their most extravagant level. Lin Biao, now called Mao's closest comrade in arms, led the ceremony. Oh Mao encouraged the Red Guards to attack Western influences and to destroy the four olds. Old ideas, old culture, old customs, old habits. Without this destruction, he said, socialism cannot be achieved. The Red Guards tore down street signs and put up new revolutionary names. They ransacked museums, libraries, and temples. They searched and looted people's homes. At first they took my books together with a bookcase. The second time they searched for money. You're a thinker. that would get me in trouble. Later they took the sewing machine and sofa, even the desk. There was no reason for it. My children were scared to death, shaking with fear. Groups of Red Guards roamed the countryside, urging peasants to attack local officials. They came to Wugong in November 1966. Some villagers seized the chance to take revenge against officials who for years had given the best grain to the state. They criticized old Shu. They said, you old woman, you sifted and selected until there wasn't a single husk in the grain. You delivered such good grain to the state. You didn't want to leave any for us to eat, did you? Several people went up to the platform and put a tall paper hat, it was at least this tall, on old Xu's head. They held her by the scruff of the neck and paraded her through the streets. The violence soon turned against traditional targets of class struggle, like the former landlord's son, Li Maoshou. I was tied up, hung up, and beaten. One afternoon, I passed out four times. I stopped breathing. Later, they didn't even have to hit me. My breathing would stop when they hung me up. That's how bad it got. In China, fathers and sons traditionally have close ties. But now you had to end your relationship. It was really sad. But you just had to do it. After my son was struggled against for the first time, I claimed that our relationship had been broken off. Awful things would have happened to him if I hadn't done that. Throughout China, party officials, intellectuals, people with foreign connections, former businessmen, millions were paraded and beaten in public. It is estimated that at least 400,000 people were killed. We called him Secretary Zhang. He was the secretary at the state farm where my mother had worked. We all knew him when we were children. Once he dragged me by the ear for hundreds of yards, the side of my head got all swollen. He treated his subordinates very badly. When the Cultural Revolution came, the Red Guards and workers dragged him out to struggle with. He was not treated nicely because he'd been so mean to people. He was forced to kneel on the ground, on sand, broken stones and glass, for more than two hours. He knelt with a heavy board hanging from his neck. It had his name written on it, with red crosses through it. That's how someone who was going to be shot was treated. The board was hanging on a very thin wire, so after two hours, blood oozed out on the wire and dripped down. He was over 50, or close to 60, and he was struggled against many, many times because people really hated him. Soon he died. The people we beat up were all hooligans and loose women whose names were given to us by the workers. I put them on a truck and told them to kneel down. I whipped them with a leather belt. They were men and women, most were women. We beat them hard. I had a kind of animal instinct. I used to enjoy beating people. I didn't know most of the people who were struggled against. When we heard different views, we wondered, if you sympathized with the party official, did it mean you were too simplistic? Did it mean you lacked political consciousness and couldn't see his evil capitalist rotor nature? Whenever a question came up, our first reaction was not to believe the official might be innocent, but that we were too naive and too inexperienced. I didn't think about it much. Chairman Mao called on us to be involved with affairs of state, to be active in making revolution. We felt this was revolution. Chairman Mao had said, a revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another. It's not a dinner party. We had to be rough and harsh and wild. In my class, there was a student whose grandfather had owned a big fabric store, so he was a capitalist. I heard that everyone was to go to their house to criticize him. I got there late, and by the time I arrived, the capitalist had been beaten to death. I remember that his head was all swollen and dark and bruised. I didn't look for long and then we all left. But later I learned that this capitalist was killed after my classmates got there. Other students and probably Red Guards from the neighborhood also got involved. All those people beat him to death, including his own granddaughter, my classmate. I didn't think much about it then because this kind of thing happened a lot. But years later, I thought about it many times and I wanted to find an answer. The question was very difficult. It was, if I had not arrived late, what would I have done? Would I have beaten him? He was a capitalist, but at the same time he was a man, an old man. I have never been able to answer this question. By 1967, the radical Cultural Revolution Group dominated the government. Members included Lin Biao and Mao's wife, Jiang Qin. She often appeared as Mao's spokesperson and had gained great power. Her calls for violent struggle were immediately obeyed by millions of Red Guards. Moderate leaders, repulsed by the fanaticism, felt closer to Zhou Enlai. Zhou's role in the Cultural Revolution is ambiguous. He tried to moderate events, but in the end he always sided with Mao. He tried to protect people, but his power had limits. Many close to him would soon be brutally attacked. People from the Cultural Revolution Group told us to drag out Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping and overthrow them. Crowds of people filled the street. Loudspeakers were blasting towards Zhongnan High, demanding that Liu be handed over to be struggled against. It was very revolutionary, very fashionable to drag him out. Zhou tried to send the students away. He warned Liu and his wife, Wang Guangmei, to stay inside the leader's compound at Zhongnanhai. In April 1967, Red Guards tricked Wang into leaving, saying one of her daughters had had an accident. They dragged her in front of this crowd. They dressed her as a whore and repeatedly humiliated her. Later, Wang Guangmei was jailed. She spent 12 years in solitary confinement. Deng Xiaoping was struggled against and exiled to a remote village. Liu Shaoqi was attacked and beaten. He was kept under house arrest for two years. Then, weakened by torture and cancer, no longer able to eat, speak, or use his hands, he was wrapped in a sheet and flown to this remote prison. Weeks later, Liu Shaoqi, China's head of state for ten years, died, naked and alone. In 1967, a cultural revolution entered a new stage, factional warfare. The Red Guards had never been a unified movement. At first, only students with good communist backgrounds were admitted. The millions of young people left out formed their own groups and called themselves rebels. We organized our own Red Guards. We called ourselves the Red Guards of Mao Zedong's Vault. We were part of the rebels. We made armbands the same as the others. You say you're defending Chairman Mao? Okay, so am I. You're making revolution? So am I. At first, the rebels and Red Guards clashed over ideology. Then they fought for local power. Soon, millions of workers and soldiers joined the conflicts. In Shanghai, the rebel group, led by colleagues of Mao's wife... Jiang Qing overthrew the local party committee. Mao immediately supported the rebels. Now that the revolutionary forces in Shanghai have risen up, he declared, there is hope for China. Across the country, rebel groups responded by trying to seize power from local party authorities. Each faction had its own weapons. They robbed military arsenals, and army units supported one faction or another. They gave their side weapons. I really wanted to have a gun. Before and after every action, we use Mao's songs and quotations to encourage ourselves. Be resolute, be daring, overcome all obstacles, and be victorious. They weren't just small fights. It was real war. There were ex-servicemen on both sides. They'd fought in many wars. Both sides had expert marksmen and soldiers who could drive tanks and use artillery. Several people died in each battle. In Beijing, embassies were attacked. Rebel factions occupied the foreign ministry for two weeks. The violence Mao had unleashed had spiraled beyond even his control. He described the summer of 1967 as utter chaos and all-out civil war. Again and again, Zhou Enlai, on Mao's behalf, ordered the different factions to stop fighting, but they did not. Finally, in July 1968, Mao turned on the Red Guards and rebels. personally ordering them to disband. This time they obeyed, as soldiers took over schools and colleges and terrorized the students into submission. A few people called the dictatorship team came in. The person who was declared a criminal was dragged out of his seat. Then two from the dictatorship team would hit the person's legs with their rods so that he would kneel. Then they'd handcuff you and announce your crimes. They shoved your head down. The rest of the audience would shout slogans and you were dragged away. It was scary. You never knew who would be next. Mao Zedong! Mao Zedong! Mao Zedong! By the end of 1968, rigid conformity and repression ruled people's lives as never before. The army under Lin Biao pushed the cult of Mao to new heights. People had to report all their thoughts to Mao twice a day. 千万个红星在激烈地跳动千万大夏天像个红太阳我们祝愿祝福你老人家万寿无疆,万寿无疆,万寿无疆 I was a little disgusted with the cult of Mao and I said a few things. Lin Biao had said every sentence Chairman Mao said was the truth. I said nobody can say everything that is the truth. So I was labeled a reactionary student. At school they held several criticism meetings against me. What was most unbearable, and even today still makes me uncomfortable, was that none of my friends would speak to me. I became totally isolated. We heard older people talk about Jiang Qing and knew they really looked down on her. So we made up jokes. And we said the chaos of the Cultural Revolution was due to Jiang Qing. And Mao should divorce her. Jiang Cheng's group heard about what we said. For his casual remarks, Zhang Longlong spent the next ten years in jail. At the end of 1968, Mao started a campaign to have city youth, former Red Guards and rebels, re-educated by the peasants. Millions of families were wrenched apart as young people were sent to spend years in China's most remote regions. But for some, it was a chance to start anew. After we got onto the tractor, one of the students asked me something. I remember that as soon as she opened her mouth, I cried because it had been a very, very long time since anyone had spoken to me. Later I told them I was not like them. I was someone who was wrong, who was guilty. But they were especially nice to me. We stayed together for five years. Even now, they are my best friends. April 1969. Most delegates of the Congress were radicals who had risen to power through the Cultural Revolution. Many moderate officials were still under attack and in prison. Lin Biao, long seen as Mao's heir apparent, was officially appointed his successor. Lin's keynote speech signaled a new government preoccupation with foreign relations. He denounced both the Soviet Union and the United States as imperialists and enemies. Just weeks before, fighting had broken out on the border between China and the Soviet Union. Mao and Zhou Enlai now saw the Soviet Union as a greater threat than their traditional enemy, America. They sent signals to the U.S. that they would like to begin talks. Lin Biao opposed the overtures to America. He is alleged to have plotted a coup against Mao. In September 1971, when the plot was discovered, Lin reportedly tried to escape, but his plane crashed over Mongolia. Death of Lin Biao was a great shock to everyone. Before his death, the entire propaganda machine treated him as the heir to Mao Zedong. He had very high stature, second only to Mao. People treated him as a revolutionary saint. Now, suddenly, he was a traitor, a very bad person. After Lin Biao died, we stopped the daily rituals praising Mao and Lin. The fanaticism faded. It was as if we had all been in a dream. For the first time, people began to question Mao's infallibility. Did Mao trust the wrong person? If Mao had trusted Zhou Enlai instead of Lin Biao, would that have been better? There was a vague feeling that Mao had made a mistake. But of course no one dared talk about it. After the Lin Biao incident, Mao looked calm on the surface. But from a doctor's point of view, I knew that his health was greatly affected. Sometimes I tried to persuade him to take medicine for his pneumonia and heart disease. He would take some and then refuse. One day, at the beginning of February, he asked me, Do you know that Nixon is coming? I answered, yes, I do. He said, can you get me well before Nixon comes? I said, yes, I can, but you'll have to cooperate. He said, all right, you can start now. In February 1972, after months of secret negotiations, President Richard Nixon arrived in Beijing to begin a new relationship with China. Nixon saw two major advantages to this improved relationship with China. First, I think Nixon always saw the relationship on its own merit. The other involved the major Soviet role in Southeast Asia. Hanoi was a proxy of the Soviet Union. Now, I think Nixon... recognized that a great restraint on Moscow would be the result of an improved relationship between Beijing and the United States. I remember that Mao said to Nixon, after our two countries resume diplomatic relations, we will still have to curse you a little in our newspapers, calling you American imperialists. You can also curse us a bit. This is just for show, firing a few empty shots. It'll be easier for ordinary people to accept. If we suddenly say that the American imperialists are no longer imperialists and they've become friends of China, people will find it hard to accept. We expected and frequently received diatribes for public consumption, both in the press and in the diplomacy itself. The real, the careful issue was not to be carried away by this and overly offended by it as we attempted to achieve a greater outcome. The outcome was an historic agreement called the Shanghai Communique. The joint communique which we have issued today will make headlines around the world tomorrow. This announcement will be the world's top news tomorrow. But what we have said in that communique is not nearly as important as what we will do in the years ahead. To build a bridge across 16,000 miles and 22 years of hostility which have divided us in the past. Issues like America's role in Vietnam and U.S. relations with Taiwan could not be resolved. In those cases, both sides stated their positions and agreed to move ahead. Nixon's visit signaled China's opening to the world. Gradually, China would become an active player in world politics. As the country began to emerge from the worst terror of the Cultural Revolution, Mao turned his attention to China's peasants. Small rural factories were set up to make farm tools and process local crops. Thousands of paramedics, or barefoot doctors, brought free, basic health care to remote villages. Working with Zhou Enlai, Mao began to rehabilitate party members who had been attacked. Many, like Deng Xiaoping, returned to their posts. By 1974, Mao appeared in public only to receive foreign dignitaries. When his eyesight deteriorated, he requested someone to read Chinese literature to him. I was hurried into the room where I saw Chairman Mao Zedong. He was sitting on a sofa. I was shocked. I had expected him to be in glowing health, our red sun. But the Chairman Mao I saw was pale and haggard. And he had become very thin. I thought, I have so many things to tell you. I've dreamed about you and hoped to pour out all my suffering to you. How could you be like this? So I cried. I must have looked ridiculous. With this old man in front of me. The grandeur and brilliance of the Mao I had imagined totally disappeared. The question of who would succeed Mao dominated Beijing politics. Mao, now 81 years old, played one faction off against the other. Zhang Qing's group Later reviled as the Gang of Four, wanted to continue the Cultural Revolution, they viewed Zhou Enlai as their main rival, and they orchestrated a campaign against him, with Mao's approval. It really shook me. I didn't expect such a situation in the party. I had great respect and reverence for Mao Zedong. I respected him greatly. As for Zhou Enlai, I loved him very much. Like many people, I loved him very much. But now I realized that the two leaders had very different opinions. I thought, oh, Lord, whom should I follow? I, a party member. It was a dilemma for me. Although Zhou suffered from the campaign, he kept his position. Many believe Mao saved him to run the country. By 1974, however, Zhou was ill with cancer. When he made a rare appearance at a dinner, the guests were overjoyed at his apparent recovery. But Zhou's health was fast deteriorating. Joe and Lai died on January 8th, 1976. Joe was too ill to attend the funeral. That spring at the annual festival honoring the dead, thousands of people went to Tiananmen Square. They laid wreaths, flowers, and poems in honor of Zhou. The tribute quickly turned into a demonstration against the Gang of Four, and indirectly, against Mao himself. For the first time, I felt that there in Tiananmen Square, I could be free. Everyone felt the same. At last, I found freedom there. During the night, police removed the tributes. The next day, 100,000 people returned. The crowd was ordered to leave. Many refused. It never occurred to me they would use lethal force. It seemed that communists would never do that because Mao had said those who put down a mass movement come to no good, and this was a mass movement. Jiang Qing was in the Great Hall of the People, watching the events in Tiananmen. About eleven that night, Jiang Qing came. She hurried into Mao's room. After she came out, I heard her say, we've won, we've won. Chairman Mao has agreed that it is a counter-revolutionary riot. We should celebrate. That night, militia were sent to Tiananmen Square to put down the demonstrations. The number of casualties and arrests is not known. In July, the worst earthquake in history devastated the city of Tangshan. At least 400,000 people were injured or killed. According to Chinese superstition, a disaster of this magnitude portends a change of dynasty. It came two months later on September 9th, 1976. I went over to Mao's bed. He saw me and said, Dr. Li, do you think there's any hope for me? I knew very well that there was no hope at all, but I couldn't say that to a patient. I said, there's hope. We're still trying. He looked very bad before I spoke. After, it seemed his face got a little color. I felt his pulse, which seemed a little better too. Suddenly, I felt that there was no more strength in his hand. His hand dropped. I saw his eyes were closed. Then I looked at the electrocardiogram. The waves had become a straight line. In other words, his heart had stopped. All was finished. We thought at once, who could hold up this guy now? China was such a big country. Who could hold it up after Mao died? What will happen to us? I always thought Mao Zedong was a great hero of the Chinese nation. But I also thought that he was a tragic hero. many absurd things that happened and everyone was struggling in a whirlpool of absurdity. That was something perhaps he could not understand. He thought he was doing good all the time. Mao showed us a very rare case in which cruelty, selfishness, hypocrisy and shamelessness We're all found in the same person. Although he always tried to cover his actions with the most beautiful words, I don't think he ever had any moral principles. Never, ever will I forgive Mao for the crimes he committed against the Chinese nation. I didn't really feel anything special or feel sad, but I still think he was a great leader that the Chinese people should feel proud of and that the Chinese revolution should feel proud of. China's new leader, the unknown Hua Guofeng, led the funeral ceremony. If you showed any sign of joy, people would think you were gloating. You could not show deep grief either because you would be suspected if you did. We put on expressionless faces like pieces of wood. We knew an era, the era of Mao Zedong was gone, but we didn't know what was ahead of us. Major funding for this program was provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Additional funding was provided by the Ford Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Albert Kunstader Family Foundation, The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and by annual financial support from viewers like you.

In October 1949, the Chinese people celebrated the victory of the Communist Party. The leader of the Communists and the hero of the revolution was Mao Zedong. Our dream is true.

True dream is the one that can't be broken. For Mao and the Chinese Communist Party, taking power was just a first step. The real revolution was about to begin.

In 1949, China lay devastated by decades of civil war and foreign invasion. The previous regime, corrupt and incompetent, had left the country bankrupt. People hoped the new communist government would bring unity and peace, pride and prosperity.

Everybody felt that the liberation in 1949 was an historic demarcation. Before that, it was the old society with many ugly things in it. After the communists came, most people were idealistic and they began to fight for the same cause, for a new China. Mao and his colleagues had a vision of momentous change.

They wanted to transform the lives of one quarter of mankind and create a strong and modern industrial China. The Communists forged a new political structure. They set up a network of party branches, which reached down from the capital to every village in the country.

At local levels, officials explained party programs. Communism meant political equality for everybody. The people would be masters of the country. That was the propaganda.

People would have enough to eat and wear. Poverty would be a thing of the past. The reforms went far beyond economics, into personal relations. Before liberation, women had to do whatever they were told.

They had no rights. There were three obediences and four virtues. Obedience to father before marriage, to husband after marriage, and to your son after your husband died.

You had no rights at all. the government's first major legislation made women legally equal to men. Marriages arranged by parents are mat... The matchmakers were stopped.

Women could marry the men they loved. So they were very happy. The communists organized people into work units, which provided employment, health care, housing and education.

Work units also gave the party direct control over people's lives. Everyone belonged to a work unit. At first, people weren't comfortable with them, but gradually they got used to them.

In the countryside, the changes were just as profound. For centuries, most peasants had struggled to survive hardship and poverty. During the revolution, Mao had won peasant support with promises of a better life.

Now, he gave them land. Party officials told peasants to seize property from their landlords. It was fierce.

The whole village, hundreds of people, came beating drums. They dragged me to the meeting ground and wanted to beat me. I said, don't hit me.

I know my family has exploited the people for generations. I'll give you my house, land, everything. After they discussed it, they labeled me an enlightened son of a landlord family.

They let me keep my house, although there wasn't much left in it. But in fact I did well. Many people died. Officials encouraged peasants to humiliate and beat their landlords.

Often, the violence went much further. Across China, hundreds of thousands of landlords were killed. Nearly half of all China's arable land was distributed to poor peasants. Before land reform, we only had three quarters of an acre of land. It was not enough to feed us all.

During land reform, we got nearly three acres of land. Because we had more land, we could grow more. Gradually, our life became better.

Now it was the people who were the masters. They really liked that. Land and houses were taken from the landlords and given to them. People saw that they benefited, so they supported the Communist Party.

The leaders of the party were veteran revolutionaries who had worked with Mao for years. Second in authority was Liu Shaoqi. Zhou Enlai was foreign minister and then premier.

Gaining in prominence was Deng Xiaoping. Zhou Enlai was the gifted administrator and the loyal servant who never challenged Mao. He had a human touch that made him both popular and respected.

Liu Shaoqi was more reserved. He was an orthodox communist, a cautious economic planner, and a devoted father. Mao was married to Zhang Qing, a former movie actress.

During the 1950s, she never appeared in public. Mao was the party visionary, a poet, and a romantic revolutionary for whom no theory was sacred. He was also an astute strategist.

Mao believed that China needed strong international support, and within weeks of taking power in 1949, he visited Moscow. But Joseph Stalin was a difficult ally. For three days, he did not even acknowledge Mao's presence in Moscow. Finally, he gave the Chinese limited aid and agreed to a defense treaty. On his return to Beijing, Mao addressed his colleagues.

Chief among the imperialists was America. The United States did not recognize Mao's government. Only months after this speech, the two sides would be at war in Korea.

In June 1950, North Korea invaded South Korea. America was outraged and called for immediate action. The United Nations sent troops from 15 countries to defend South Korea. They were led by the American general, Douglas MacArthur.

After months of hard fighting, the UN forces pushed the North Korean army out of the south. In October, they reached the North Korean capital, Pyongyang. The original orders that we gave MacArthur were, when he was able to do so, to expel the North. from the south and in doing so to keep well clear of the Chinese borders because we did not want to give them any pretext to come in but MacArthur's troops continued north towards the Yalu River and the border with China. MacArthur had much broader objectives to take advantage of the attack, to attack China and remove Chinese communists as a threat in the area.

And he's continually trying to do things that would bring China into the war. Mao's government was barely a year old and in the midst of radical reforms. It could hardly afford a war, but Mao felt the UN forces were an intolerable threat to China's security. Under the command of General Peng Dehuai, a quarter of a million Chinese troops secretly crossed into Korea.

At the end of October 1950, they attacked, taking the UN forces completely by surprise. The UN troops soon fled in a massive retreat. In China, the government launched a propaganda campaign called Resist America and Aid Korea.

People donated money for planes and ammunition for the war effort. Every family gave. We heard people saying how our soldiers were bravely fighting.

fighting in the icy fields, and how they were beating the Americans, carrying them away in their sleeping bags one by one. We were so moved that we all donated. One day I got my two-week salary. I gave it all. By the spring of 1951, the war was a grim stalemate.

Both sides were dug in around the 38th parallel, separating North and South Korea. While fighting continued, peace talks began. Finally, after two years, the talks produced an armistice.

The Korean War forced us to recognize, and the American people to recognize, that the new regime, the communist regime in China, was a fact of life with whom we were going to have to live. In China, the war created great national pride. The Chinese army had suffered terribly, with nearly one million casualties.

But it had fought to a standstill the armies of the strongest nations in the world. The Resist America campaign proved how effectively Mao's government could mobilize the entire country. Now it began a series of smaller campaigns against people inside China, people Mao called enemies without guns. The Zhang family had one of many small businesses still operating in Wuhan. My in-laws were capitalists.

They were told to report all their property to the government. So they made an inventory of everything in the store. Later, there was a struggle meeting.

The shop assistants tied up my mother-in-law because they didn't like her. They yelled at her. My brother-in-law got impatient and said, we don't have anything more.

You keep saying we have more, but we don't. Then they tied him up too, saying he had a bad attitude. What we used as our dinner table was actually a bench, this long.

They told her to kneel on it. It's very hard to kneel on a bench like that. If you bend just a little, you fall.

You have to stay very straight to kneel on it. They kept us there until 11 at night. They really couldn't get any more out of us.

Thousands were jailed or executed. People with money, with foreign connections, or with ties to the previous regime. With these campaigns, the Communists crushed all potential political opposition.

But the vast majority of people were not hurt by the campaigns. For many Chinese, life was improving. Mao was not like the rest of us.

He had no sense of time. Day or night, 24 hours were the same to him. He worked whenever he wanted and slept whenever he wanted.

He didn't have regular meetings, once a week or once a month. Any leader who wanted his permission to make a decision would send him a note. After Mao read it, he would write his comments on it and send it back.

The leader's first words were, I'm sorry, The leaders and their families lived in Zhongnanhai, a huge walled compound in the heart of Beijing. They spent their summers at the same beach resort, reserved for high officials. Usually, the dance party started at 7 on Saturday evening. Mao would come at about ten. As soon as he entered, people would all stand and clap to welcome him.

Then many girls would come and ask him to dance. He would sit for a while, then dance with them, one after another. Then he would dance with them one after another. These girls seemed to be in a circle. So this dance...

Supposedly, the party was for all the leaders. Actually, it was for Mao himself. It was a recreational activity organized for him. While the leaders danced to Western music, the strongest foreign influence in the mid-50s was Russian. With the help of Soviet advisers, Mao's government began dozens of huge industrial projects.

This development and Soviet help had to be paid for. Mao looked to China's peasants to foot the bill. But traditional family farms could not produce enough to pay for industry.

In 1953, the Communist Party of China The communists began to socialize agriculture. First, they encouraged families to pool their property in small farms called cooperatives. When you explained clearly to people what it meant to till the land together, with people working together we would have more manpower and we would be able to increase production and our life would become better. When people accepted this, a few families started working together. After the cooperative was set up, our life was much better.

We could afford to raise pigs. Before, we didn't have enough grain to raise them. When the pigs grew, I sold them and got more cash. I also sold vegetable seeds in the town market.

We had more land. enough labor, plus some sidelines, so our income increased. Cooperatives grew at an astonishing speed.

By the end of 1955, almost two-thirds of the peasants had joined. This was much faster than Mao had ever hoped. Seizing the momentum, he ordered the country to move to the next stage of socialism, to collectivization.

But for most peasants, this was going too far. In collectives, private property was abolished. People had to give up their animals, their tools, and their land.

Party officials put intense pressure on families to join. By then, people were unhappy. They weren't comfortable forming a collective with the whole village.

Some villagers didn't get on with others. My father was quite well off, so he didn't want to join either. I was a party official in the village. I told him if I weren't an official, I wouldn't insist he join.

If you didn't join, you wouldn't look good in front of your neighbors. With my persuasion and the example of others, he gave in. But he joined with reluctance. His income was quite high. It went down after he joined, so he was unhappy.

Within months, all of China's 600 million peasants were working in huge collectives. For the first time in history, the farm output of the entire nation was under government control. The government decided how much grain the peasants could keep. The rest had to be sold at low prices to the state. The grain ration for the peasants was very low, not enough.

Plus, you had to obey the leadership. You had to fulfill the state quota. State first, then the people.

Peasants complained about the policies. They said, we can't keep one extra ear of grain for ourselves. Do you think this is fair?

I said, it's not fair. So I wrote to the provincial leadership. Things couldn't go on like this. No matter how much you grew, you still had to give it to the state. You couldn't eat it.

The province sent people down to investigate. They saw things were just the way I said, but they couldn't solve it. It was a big problem.

Collectives did not make the peasants better off, nor did they increase production. Mao still had to find a way to finance his vision of an industrial China. President Jiu said that you young people are in a state of panic, in a period of hope.

It seems that the sun is rising at 8 or 9 o'clock. Hope is in your hands. The children are new, better than the past. Let's go!

The Communists controlled most intellectual life. Plays and films had to follow strict guidelines. Mao saw that this control was stifling potentially useful new ideas. He was also disturbed by the emergence of a new elite in the party itself.

In 1956, Mao decided to encourage constructive criticism of the party. He called for a hundred flowers to bloom in the arts. and a hundred schools of thought to contend in science. I was all for the slogan of letting a hundred flowers bloom.

We all felt that we had really started to have democracy. Soon, all the walls in Beijing University were covered with big posters. People expressed their points of view and asked the Communist Party for changes. Yu Bei-chan called many high school teachers unqualified.

Shang Da-she complained medical research was falling behind. More and more people criticized party corruption and inefficiency. Committee members and leaders at all levels were criticized by ordinary people.

They had quite a tough time. So they did not like 100 Flowers. They felt as if they were punching bags. They were not happy. Under pressure from the Party, Mao reversed himself.

In June 1957, he published an article calling the people who had spoken out enemies and rightists. Mao appointed Deng Xiaoping to lead the anti-rightist movement. I was supposed to have committed 29 crimes.

One was that I supported the policy of letting a hundred flowers bloom. It was Mao Zedong himself who started the policy. How could it be a crime? But it was. The rightists were denounced in front of their colleagues in struggle meetings.

Professor Ge Pei-chi was criticized in this meeting at the People's University in Beijing. You want to be a member of the Party? I think it's my own idea.

I think that since the liberation, the people have been so kind to us. That's my idea. The words, the word, are not correct.

That's my idea. It's probably wrong. What kind of position do you stand on? Do you stand on the position of a professor of the People's University of Jiangxi? Or do you stand on the position of a former general?

Who do you stand on? Ge Peiqi lives next to me. Ge Peiqi was my neighbor.

He was already done for. That's what we called it. I saw his youngest child, who was about five or six months old. his nurse had quit the baby was crawling outside the building under the burning sun I felt sorry for him and picked him up some people said you shouldn't do that Gopay Chi is a bad person why are you holding his child you'll get into trouble They meant well. I said, the baby hasn't done anything wrong.

Gu Peiqi's family was ostracized for years. Gu Peiqi himself spent the next two decades doing hard labor. I had been in the revolutionary ranks for so many years. At the meeting, I was the most senior person there, but I was finished. I suddenly realized that I had fallen from the sky down to the earth.

I could never get up again. I was a rightist, and I was kicked out. In an internal party document, Mao estimated that about 10% of the people were rightists.

Local officials interpreted this to mean they had to find 10 rightists among every 100 people. They accused my wife of telling my son to tell other children that their land and house were ours. It wasn't true. She never said anything like that. But when you were told to confess, you had to say something.

They wouldn't let you go if you didn't. People at the meeting shouted, struggle against her, hit her. She was just a peasant woman. She wasn't like me. I could make things up on the spot so I wouldn't get hurt.

She couldn't do that. What could we do? Someone took her backstage. He said to her, just say anything.

Say you were wrong in saying this or doing that. But my old woman was stupid. Her mind did not work fast. She was taught what to say. She walked onto the stage saying, OK, OK, I'll say that.

But when she was there, she forgot everything. She was scared stiff. When she got home, she cried and cried.

It was 1958 during the anti-rightist movement. It was the first time she was ever repudiated. But she was not labeled a rightist. She was not qualified, not at all qualified. Nearly one million people were condemned as rightists.

They were sent to jail and prison camps or to work in the countryside. The anti-rightist campaign effectively silenced China's intellectuals. Mao had decided that they were no longer needed.

Mao was also beginning to question China's relationship with the Soviet Union. When Nikita Khrushchev and Mao met in 1958, they kept up appearances of solidarity. But in private, they disagreed on major issues.

During the visit, Mao did not tell Khrushchev that he was about to launch military action against his old enemy, the Nationalists. When the Communists took power in 1949, the defeated nationalist government fled to Taiwan, also called Formosa. Led by Chiang Kai-shek, they still claimed to be the true government of China, and they had American support.

The United States must remove any doubt regarding our readiness to fight, if necessary, to preserve the vital stake of the free world in a free Formosa. The Nationalists hoped one day to retake the mainland. Their troops trained on islands which lay just off China's coast.

In August 1958, the Communists began to shell them. President Eisenhower stood firm in his commitment to the Nationalists. Mao did not want a war with the United States.

After a few tense weeks, he stopped the bombardment. The crisis petered out, but it had lasting repercussions. While Khrushchev backed the Chinese communists in public, he was furious with Mao. The attack could have triggered a superpower war. In 1959, the two men met for the last time.

A year later, they broke off relations. But foreign criticism did not sway Mao's government. They viewed conflict with the nationalists as a purely domestic matter. The same was true, they asserted, of their actions in Tibet. For centuries, this remote and religious...

religious land had been regarded by the Chinese as part of China. In 1950, the Communists enforced their claim by taking over Tibet. In 1959, Tibetans rebelled.

The People's Liberation Army crushed the revolt. As reports of atrocities and destruction reached the outside world, China's international isolation deepened. Mao's first concern was still China's economy.

Industrial output had doubled in five years, but he was not satisfied. Mao Zedong always hoped to build a socialist economy in China faster than... the Soviet Union.

He always thought fighting the Revolutionary War was very difficult. There must be a way to speed up agricultural or industrial production. Could it be more difficult than fighting a war? In 1958, Mao launched his most ambitious campaign to date, the Great Leap Forward. His goal was to make China the industrial equal of Western nations in just 15 years.

His method was to mobilize the entire country to work day and night by promising a better future. We built reservoirs, planted cotton, cultivated trees and things like that. When we worked, we had a slogan.

Catch the stars and moon. We had to work when the stars and moon were out. We had breakfast very early and came home very late. So we worked all day long. We were so enthusiastic.

To make work exciting, flags flew high in the fields and loudspeakers squealed. People shouted slogans one after another. Mao decided to visit some villages to see what was going on. I went with him. Once we came to a village and saw a banner with these words on it.

People's communes are good. He read the words, people's communes are good. A reporter happened to be next to Mao and took down his words. The next day, the words appeared in the newspapers.

That's how people's communes started. Mao's word was so powerful that almost overnight, people's communes sprang up across China. A commune encompassed many villages with thousands of families.

Each day was strictly regimented. and family life was virtually abolished. Children were placed in communal nurseries while their parents worked around the clock. People ate in the fields or in communal dining halls. To increase industrial output, communes were ordered to make steel.

The slogan was, to overtake England and catch up with America. The idea was that if everybody worked hard, and everywhere in the country people refined steel, then we would catch up very soon. People collected walks, pots, bed frames, and tools, anything made of iron or steel.

They built small furnaces to melt them. The biggest challenge was to keep the furnaces fueled. We burned tables, chairs, window frames.

And finally, we even opened old coffins and used the wood. They really stink. We kept the fires burning day and night.

And for convenience, we built worksheds close to the furnaces. One day I worked very late and I was totally exhausted. We had separate sheds for men and women.

But I was so tired I couldn't tell the difference. I just walked into a shed, lay down and fell asleep. When I woke the next morning, I found I was in the men's shed.

Of course it was all right, nobody cared. All we cared about was making as much steel as we could. At night you could see many furnaces along the railroad.

Fire shot out of the furnaces. This made people excited. China was going through a great change. China was becoming a very rich and strong country.

All this seemed to have happened overnight. Mao was very pleased. But the steel people made was useless. We used it to make pots of all sizes.

But when people heated them, they cracked and leaked. If only we had the equipment to make good steel. But we didn't.

We only had people. Our methods were very primitive. Of course we didn't make good steel. People were unhappy, but nobody dared say anything. The result was that everything made of iron and steel was taken from every family and was made useless.

We had no tools left to use. While the government called on everyone to make steel, they also wanted to increase farm output. How could we increase the grain harvest? People said that if you did close planting and used more fertilizer, you would definitely increase output.

People got carried away. They were hot-headed. From Mao Zedong and the Central Party Committee down to leaders at all levels, everyone was full of enthusiasm. It was hot.

During the Great Leap Forward, we believed miracles could happen. There was a saying, the corn will grow higher the more you desire. Communes and schools reported their wonderful news to the party.

If one commune said they could turn out 150 tons an acre, another one would say their target was 180 tons. Each commune or school would promise a higher amount until the last school gave their highest figure. Our school set the target of 470 tons an acre. We dug a hole, something like a swimming pool.

We thought if we put all the fertilizer in it, we would achieve our target. Then we poured the seeds in, which built up into a layer about this thick. There was a photograph in the People's Daily that showed the wheat in a field supporting the weight of children. Some leaders of the Central Party Committee were so happy that they put this photo on their desks at work.

Most people believed it. We were surprised to see that photo and wondered how it could be possible. But because we were city people, we couldn't be sure it was a fake.

When I went with Mao to the villages, I really did see so much grain in the fields, so much rice. The yields were so high. At the time, I thought everything was true.

After the anti-rightist campaign, few dared to ask questions. Only one teacher spoke out. How thick would the wheat be if we did produce 470 tons?

Immediately, He was accused of being a rightist and not believing in the Party. Later, I learned it was all fake. The peasants were putting on a show for us.

They moved grain from other places and put it all in one field. It was all a show for Mao. Under pressure to produce more, to launch satellites to heaven, as it was called, Party officials inflated production figures.

An ominous cycle began as the state took more and more grain based on false figures, leaving the peasants with nothing to eat. For example, the output was five tons of grain, but ten tons were reported. Then the state would collect grain based on ten tons.

Our commune committee calculated that our yield was 1,800 pounds an acre. It didn't qualify us to go up to heaven. But the deputy had an idea. He added the melons, fruits, pears, peaches, turnips and vegetables to the grain.

counting them as grain output. So the yield became 2,600 pounds per acre. Now we were qualified to go up to heaven. The commune committee did not want to calculate this way. It was cheating.

But those people were higher up. What could we do? I have this problem. I get emotional very easily.

I wondered why the higher the official, the more he dared to lie, to deceive the party and the people. Jiang Hongbin, the financial secretary, was horrified when he heard such an enormous figure. He said, are you letting people eat? This is sheer absurdity.

Party officials ignored the protests and continued to submit the inflated figures. The state took the grain accordingly. It was sent to feed the cities, repay Soviet debts, or left to rot in warehouses. Peasants across China were beginning to starve.

Anhui was one of the four provinces worst hit. All my mother could do was gather weeds with my aunt. There wasn't enough grain, so we ate weeds.

By the summer of 1959, the leaders knew the great leap forward was going badly wrong. Mao decided to go back to Shaoshan, his hometown, to have a look. He wanted to find out the truth. He wanted people to speak freely.

I think that when he was in Shaoshan, he found that there really were problems in the great leap forward. After his trip, Mao decided to moderate production targets. In July 1959, the party met at the mountain resort of Lushan to set new, realistic goals. Minister of Defense Pong Dehuai, the hero of the Korean War, was one of Mao's oldest revolutionaries.

comrades. For my generation of officials, Peng Duhui was a very down-to-earth peasant and an excellent combat general. He hated fraud and hypocrisy. He said what was on his mind. Back in the early days, if he needed to talk to Mao and saw that Mao was still in bed, he would go and pull off his quilt, saying, get up, let's talk.

He said, but now it's very difficult to have that kind of relationship. He is the chairman. It's so hard to see him, let alone discuss things with him. Peng wrote to Mao describing what he saw as the problems of the Great Leap Forward. What Peng intended as loyal criticism, Mao saw as political treachery.

When Mao Zedong started the meeting, He said he had not slept all night. He couldn't sleep, even after he took his sleeping pills. He just got up and called this meeting. He was very serious. You could see that at times he was very anxious.

angry. He said, it's all right for you to oppose me. When I have no alternative, I'll just take the Liberation Army, go up to the mountains, and carry out guerrilla warfare.

Finally, the resolution was that Peng Duhui was against the Communist Party. When Mao left the room, I was following him. Peng was in front of us.

Mao called him. Marshal Peng, if there are any questions, we can talk. Peng swung his arm and said, What's there to talk about?

There's nothing more to say. Zhou Enlai and Liu Shaoqi agreed with Peng, but even they did not dare speak out. Nobody had the courage to oppose Mao Zedong.

He was considered absolutely correct. He stood high and looked far. People thought they were not up to Mao's level. Even if someone wanted to make a comment, he would not dare say anything or reveal his own feelings. As a result, production goals were not cut.

Officials continued to demand more grain than the peasants could give. The great leap forward continued through 1960. Millions of peasants were starving. Old peasants said in a fury, no. Grain comes from the blood and sweat of peasants.

It doesn't grow on the backs of intellectuals. Who do they think they're fooling? In wartime, we protected them and saved their lives.

Now we provide them with food and clothing. They have full stomachs, and still they come to cheat us. Don't they have a conscience?

Ma Yanz family was a typical big family in the countryside, with several generations living together. There were 36 people altogether. During the three years of famine, one died after another. Eventually, only three people were left alive.

At first, when someone died, they would take the body and bury it. Later, they didn't have the strength to take the bodies out. They could only look at them. They watched the bodies being eaten by rats and their eyeballs dug out.

People didn't even have the strength to chase the rats away. The famine was very severe and widespread. but newspapers did not report it at all. People only knew that their local area was suffering.

To keep the news from spreading, peasants were not allowed to leave their areas, even to beg. At first, peasants ate everything they had at home. Then they ate Ganyan earth.

It's a kind of white clay. There's a legend in the village passed down from generation to generation. It says that this clay was provided by old mother Ganyan, who sympathized with the poor people. People would eat it during the famine because it was very fine, but still it was hard to swallow.

At first the peasants could swallow a little, but after four or five days it destroyed their intestines. And they died. After eating all the grass roots and tree bark, they ate the earth.

The famine lasted three years. An estimated 30 million people died. Mao's revolution, fought to give the Chinese people a better life, had helped create the largest famine in history. In 1961, Peng Dehuai, a lone voice, wrote, Grain scattered across the ground.

Potato leaves withered. Strong young people have gone to make steel. Only children and old women reap the crops.

How will they eat next year? Please, think of the people. So yeah.

A campaign called Remember the Bitter Past and Think of the Sweet Present was launched. The peasants were told, Chairman Mao and the party want you to talk about your suffering before 1949, so that young people will realize what a happy life they have now, and how they owe all this to the party and Chairman Mao. The peasants started to talk about the bitter past.

Then they forgot that they were supposed to be talking about the old society before 1949. They got carried away and talked about the famine of the last three years. They cried and cried. The officials were scared to death. It was as if the peasants were blaming the Communist Party and Chairman Mao. They said, Grandma Zhang, Grandpa, you can't talk like this.

The peasants said, why not? So many in our families died. Never, ever have we had such a terrible time. In China, between 1959 and 1961, an estimated 30 million people died of hunger. Officially, the Communist government blamed the catastrophe on floods and drought.

But in party meetings, they admitted that the famine was largely created by their own policies. Their efforts to rebuild the country would spark a struggle inside the party, a struggle that would engulf the Chinese people in chaos and terror. Mao Zedong was the head of the Communist Party, the man who had instigated the disastrous policies of the Great Leap Forward. But no one would ever dare hold him responsible. Mao's reputation remained untarnished.

During this time, Mao had chosen to withdraw from day-to-day government. Liu Shaoqi took over. Although people respected Liu Shaoqi, and he had great authority, he could not compare with Mao.

I remember after Mao resigned as head of state, the People's Congress elected Liu Shaoqi to succeed him. We had parades to celebrate, but people shouted, Long live Chairman Mao. Not a single person shouted, Long live Chairman Liu.

Liu was a veteran revolutionary and one of the most conscientious and talented in the party. He worked with Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping to rebuild the country. They had to do it without foreign help.

China's communist government had long viewed America as its principal enemy. Now, as U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War escalated, so did anti-American rhetoric. Relations with the Soviet Union were no better.

In the 1950s, Soviet experts had helped build Chinese industry. But by the end of the decade, disagreements between Mao and Nikita Khrushchev reached breaking point. Soviet experts shredded their blueprints and returned home.

Now, Liu shifted economic focus from developing heavy industry to making consumer goods. He relaxed controls on the peasants. They remained in communes, but they were allowed to make money farming on the side.

China's recovery was fast. People who had worked day and night were given time off. The early 1960s were quiet years for Mao.

He studied political economy. He read the Chinese classics of warfare and romance. Later, there were more dance parties. Before, they were once a week on Saturday. Then they were increased to twice a week on Wednesday and Saturday.

There was another big change. Another room was set up by the ballroom. Sometimes, during the party, Mao...

took young girls into this room to rest with him. He would rest for an hour or so. I think Mao got great pleasure from these parties. By 1963, Mao had tired of political seclusion.

At 70, he still dreamed of realizing a communist utopia. He began to plan the final and most revolutionary act of his political career. Minister of Defense Lin Biao became his strongest ally. In 1964, Lin published a pocket-sized book called Quotations from Chairman Mao Zedong. First it was distributed throughout the army, then in work units and schools across the country.

We were educated to love the party, our country and our leader. Even if we didn't understand his words, we deeply believed that he was always right. As long as we did what Mao said. We were doing the right thing. My teachers taught me that Chairman Mao was the great savior of China.

And he brought liberation to China. This idea was stamped in my mind and ran through my blood. The cult of Mao soon elevated him to the stature of a living god, all powerful but remote. For Mao rarely appeared in public. His speeches were not broadcast.

Most Chinese had never heard his voice. Liu, Deng and Zhou did not oppose the cult. Mao personified the revolution. To attack him would undermine their own legitimacy. Instead, they quietly ignored his radical ideas.

Their programs of careful economic growth were working. By 1966, China was increasingly prosperous and the world's fifth nuclear power. But Mao was more and more dissatisfied. He did not control party policy, and he felt that Liu Shaoqi and the other leaders were betraying the revolution. Mao disagreed with people like Liu Shaoqi on building the economy.

Zhou Enlai and Liu wanted to curb radical policies. Mao wasn't happy. Mao thought that curbing radicalism was wrong.

For Mao, communism could be achieved only through radical means, through continuing revolution, a never-ending process of struggle and change. He decided that the Communist Party itself, the party he had led for more than 30 years, was the main obstacle to his vision of revolution. In May 1966, Mao began an attack on the Party.

Through the columns of China's main newspaper, he called on young people to attack Party officials and replace them with true revolutionaries. Mao Zedong had unleashed the great proletarian cultural revolution. For the first time since 1949, our supreme leader, Chairman Mao, a godlike figure called on people at the very bottom of society people like us students with no work and no profession He told us to rebel against party officials.

This had a tremendous impact on us. It was said there were people who were against Chairman Mao. We felt it was time for us to give our blood and our lives to protect Chairman Mao.

Young people took to the streets. They wrote wall posters, attacking their teachers and party officials. Within days, schools and universities were in turmoil.

Having launched the Cultural Revolution, Mao left Beijing. Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping were left to manage the growing disorder. They asked Mao for instructions, but he gave them none.

On July 16th, 1966, Mao staged a huge media event, swimming in the Yangtze River. It was a signal to the nation that Mao, aged 73, was vigorous and in command. Two days later, he returned to the capital.

A meeting was held in the Great Hall of the People with students from Beijing University and other colleges. At the meeting, Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, and Zhou Enlai were sitting on the stage. Unknown to the participants, Mao was listening backstage. Dr. Li sat next to him.

Liu Shaoqi described how the Cultural Revolution started. He said, we veteran revolutionaries have encountered new problems, and we don't know how to deal with them. Mao immediately said, I hear you.

What veteran revolutionaries? You're an old counter-revolutionary. My heart sank.

It was already very clear that in Mao's eyes, Liu Shaoqi was no longer the head of state, no longer a communist. He was an old counter-revolutionary. Mao had already condemned him.

I knew Liu Shaoqi would have no way out. Within weeks, Mao reordered the party hierarchy. Deng Xiaoping was demoted to number six, Liu Shaoqi even lower to number eight. Lin Biao replaced him. Kim and Mao says, Marxism consists of thousands of truths, but they all boil down to one phrase.

It's right to rebel. Students banded together to carry out Mao's orders. They called themselves Red Guards.

On August 18, 1966, Mao began a series of public appearances, greeting millions of young people in Tiananmen Square. Donning the armband of the Red Guards, Mao gave them his blessing. We saw Mao wave to us.

He said something, but we couldn't hear clearly. Later we learned that he said we should carry on the Cultural Revolution to the end. We felt it was the greatest honor of our lives to see Mao in person. With Mao's approval, the Red Guards traveled for free around the country to gain revolutionary experience. In September 1966, schools did not open for the academic year.

This was the first chance we had to break away from our parents, to do whatever we wanted. The first morning we were in high spirits. We sang revolutionary songs as we walked. We walked the whole day.

The second day we had blisters on our feet. We were exhausted. Army trucks often passed us on the way.

The Liberation Army men would say, Chairman Mao's Red Guards, where are you going? We answered, we're going to Beijing to see Chairman Mao and to get revolutionary experience. Then they would say, good, our truck is empty, we'll give you a lift. We would answer, thank you, Liberation Army men, we want to walk to Beijing. We'll spread Mao Zedong's thought and get revolutionary experience on the way.

The 13 of us walked and walked for many days. On October 1st, 1966, National Day, the rallies with Mao reached their most extravagant level. Lin Biao, now called Mao's closest comrade in arms, led the ceremony. Oh Mao encouraged the Red Guards to attack Western influences and to destroy the four olds.

Old ideas, old culture, old customs, old habits. Without this destruction, he said, socialism cannot be achieved. The Red Guards tore down street signs and put up new revolutionary names. They ransacked museums, libraries, and temples. They searched and looted people's homes.

At first they took my books together with a bookcase. The second time they searched for money. You're a thinker. that would get me in trouble. Later they took the sewing machine and sofa, even the desk.

There was no reason for it. My children were scared to death, shaking with fear. Groups of Red Guards roamed the countryside, urging peasants to attack local officials.

They came to Wugong in November 1966. Some villagers seized the chance to take revenge against officials who for years had given the best grain to the state. They criticized old Shu. They said, you old woman, you sifted and selected until there wasn't a single husk in the grain. You delivered such good grain to the state. You didn't want to leave any for us to eat, did you?

Several people went up to the platform and put a tall paper hat, it was at least this tall, on old Xu's head. They held her by the scruff of the neck and paraded her through the streets. The violence soon turned against traditional targets of class struggle, like the former landlord's son, Li Maoshou.

I was tied up, hung up, and beaten. One afternoon, I passed out four times. I stopped breathing. Later, they didn't even have to hit me.

My breathing would stop when they hung me up. That's how bad it got. In China, fathers and sons traditionally have close ties. But now you had to end your relationship.

It was really sad. But you just had to do it. After my son was struggled against for the first time, I claimed that our relationship had been broken off.

Awful things would have happened to him if I hadn't done that. Throughout China, party officials, intellectuals, people with foreign connections, former businessmen, millions were paraded and beaten in public. It is estimated that at least 400,000 people were killed.

We called him Secretary Zhang. He was the secretary at the state farm where my mother had worked. We all knew him when we were children. Once he dragged me by the ear for hundreds of yards, the side of my head got all swollen. He treated his subordinates very badly.

When the Cultural Revolution came, the Red Guards and workers dragged him out to struggle with. He was not treated nicely because he'd been so mean to people. He was forced to kneel on the ground, on sand, broken stones and glass, for more than two hours.

He knelt with a heavy board hanging from his neck. It had his name written on it, with red crosses through it. That's how someone who was going to be shot was treated.

The board was hanging on a very thin wire, so after two hours, blood oozed out on the wire and dripped down. He was over 50, or close to 60, and he was struggled against many, many times because people really hated him. Soon he died.

The people we beat up were all hooligans and loose women whose names were given to us by the workers. I put them on a truck and told them to kneel down. I whipped them with a leather belt. They were men and women, most were women. We beat them hard.

I had a kind of animal instinct. I used to enjoy beating people. I didn't know most of the people who were struggled against. When we heard different views, we wondered, if you sympathized with the party official, did it mean you were too simplistic? Did it mean you lacked political consciousness and couldn't see his evil capitalist rotor nature?

Whenever a question came up, our first reaction was not to believe the official might be innocent, but that we were too naive and too inexperienced. I didn't think about it much. Chairman Mao called on us to be involved with affairs of state, to be active in making revolution.

We felt this was revolution. Chairman Mao had said, a revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence by which one class overthrows another. It's not a dinner party.

We had to be rough and harsh and wild. In my class, there was a student whose grandfather had owned a big fabric store, so he was a capitalist. I heard that everyone was to go to their house to criticize him.

I got there late, and by the time I arrived, the capitalist had been beaten to death. I remember that his head was all swollen and dark and bruised. I didn't look for long and then we all left. But later I learned that this capitalist was killed after my classmates got there. Other students and probably Red Guards from the neighborhood also got involved.

All those people beat him to death, including his own granddaughter, my classmate. I didn't think much about it then because this kind of thing happened a lot. But years later, I thought about it many times and I wanted to find an answer. The question was very difficult. It was, if I had not arrived late, what would I have done?

Would I have beaten him? He was a capitalist, but at the same time he was a man, an old man. I have never been able to answer this question.

By 1967, the radical Cultural Revolution Group dominated the government. Members included Lin Biao and Mao's wife, Jiang Qin. She often appeared as Mao's spokesperson and had gained great power.

Her calls for violent struggle were immediately obeyed by millions of Red Guards. Moderate leaders, repulsed by the fanaticism, felt closer to Zhou Enlai. Zhou's role in the Cultural Revolution is ambiguous. He tried to moderate events, but in the end he always sided with Mao. He tried to protect people, but his power had limits.

Many close to him would soon be brutally attacked. People from the Cultural Revolution Group told us to drag out Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping and overthrow them. Crowds of people filled the street.

Loudspeakers were blasting towards Zhongnan High, demanding that Liu be handed over to be struggled against. It was very revolutionary, very fashionable to drag him out. Zhou tried to send the students away.

He warned Liu and his wife, Wang Guangmei, to stay inside the leader's compound at Zhongnanhai. In April 1967, Red Guards tricked Wang into leaving, saying one of her daughters had had an accident. They dragged her in front of this crowd. They dressed her as a whore and repeatedly humiliated her.

Later, Wang Guangmei was jailed. She spent 12 years in solitary confinement. Deng Xiaoping was struggled against and exiled to a remote village.

Liu Shaoqi was attacked and beaten. He was kept under house arrest for two years. Then, weakened by torture and cancer, no longer able to eat, speak, or use his hands, he was wrapped in a sheet and flown to this remote prison. Weeks later, Liu Shaoqi, China's head of state for ten years, died, naked and alone.

In 1967, a cultural revolution entered a new stage, factional warfare. The Red Guards had never been a unified movement. At first, only students with good communist backgrounds were admitted.

The millions of young people left out formed their own groups and called themselves rebels. We organized our own Red Guards. We called ourselves the Red Guards of Mao Zedong's Vault.

We were part of the rebels. We made armbands the same as the others. You say you're defending Chairman Mao? Okay, so am I. You're making revolution?

So am I. At first, the rebels and Red Guards clashed over ideology. Then they fought for local power. Soon, millions of workers and soldiers joined the conflicts.

In Shanghai, the rebel group, led by colleagues of Mao's wife... Jiang Qing overthrew the local party committee. Mao immediately supported the rebels.

Now that the revolutionary forces in Shanghai have risen up, he declared, there is hope for China. Across the country, rebel groups responded by trying to seize power from local party authorities. Each faction had its own weapons.

They robbed military arsenals, and army units supported one faction or another. They gave their side weapons. I really wanted to have a gun. Before and after every action, we use Mao's songs and quotations to encourage ourselves.

Be resolute, be daring, overcome all obstacles, and be victorious. They weren't just small fights. It was real war.

There were ex-servicemen on both sides. They'd fought in many wars. Both sides had expert marksmen and soldiers who could drive tanks and use artillery. Several people died in each battle.

In Beijing, embassies were attacked. Rebel factions occupied the foreign ministry for two weeks. The violence Mao had unleashed had spiraled beyond even his control.

He described the summer of 1967 as utter chaos and all-out civil war. Again and again, Zhou Enlai, on Mao's behalf, ordered the different factions to stop fighting, but they did not. Finally, in July 1968, Mao turned on the Red Guards and rebels.

personally ordering them to disband. This time they obeyed, as soldiers took over schools and colleges and terrorized the students into submission. A few people called the dictatorship team came in.

The person who was declared a criminal was dragged out of his seat. Then two from the dictatorship team would hit the person's legs with their rods so that he would kneel. Then they'd handcuff you and announce your crimes.

They shoved your head down. The rest of the audience would shout slogans and you were dragged away. It was scary.

You never knew who would be next. Mao Zedong! Mao Zedong! Mao Zedong!

By the end of 1968, rigid conformity and repression ruled people's lives as never before. The army under Lin Biao pushed the cult of Mao to new heights. People had to report all their thoughts to Mao twice a day. 千万个红星在激烈地跳动 千万大夏天像个红太阳 我们祝愿祝福你老人家 万寿无疆,万寿无疆,万寿无疆 I was a little disgusted with the cult of Mao and I said a few things.

Lin Biao had said every sentence Chairman Mao said was the truth. I said nobody can say everything that is the truth. So I was labeled a reactionary student. At school they held several criticism meetings against me. What was most unbearable, and even today still makes me uncomfortable, was that none of my friends would speak to me.

I became totally isolated. We heard older people talk about Jiang Qing and knew they really looked down on her. So we made up jokes. And we said the chaos of the Cultural Revolution was due to Jiang Qing.

And Mao should divorce her. Jiang Cheng's group heard about what we said. For his casual remarks, Zhang Longlong spent the next ten years in jail. At the end of 1968, Mao started a campaign to have city youth, former Red Guards and rebels, re-educated by the peasants. Millions of families were wrenched apart as young people were sent to spend years in China's most remote regions.

But for some, it was a chance to start anew. After we got onto the tractor, one of the students asked me something. I remember that as soon as she opened her mouth, I cried because it had been a very, very long time since anyone had spoken to me. Later I told them I was not like them.

I was someone who was wrong, who was guilty. But they were especially nice to me. We stayed together for five years. Even now, they are my best friends.

April 1969. Most delegates of the Congress were radicals who had risen to power through the Cultural Revolution. Many moderate officials were still under attack and in prison. Lin Biao, long seen as Mao's heir apparent, was officially appointed his successor.

Lin's keynote speech signaled a new government preoccupation with foreign relations. He denounced both the Soviet Union and the United States as imperialists and enemies. Just weeks before, fighting had broken out on the border between China and the Soviet Union. Mao and Zhou Enlai now saw the Soviet Union as a greater threat than their traditional enemy, America. They sent signals to the U.S. that they would like to begin talks.

Lin Biao opposed the overtures to America. He is alleged to have plotted a coup against Mao. In September 1971, when the plot was discovered, Lin reportedly tried to escape, but his plane crashed over Mongolia.

Death of Lin Biao was a great shock to everyone. Before his death, the entire propaganda machine treated him as the heir to Mao Zedong. He had very high stature, second only to Mao. People treated him as a revolutionary saint. Now, suddenly, he was a traitor, a very bad person.

After Lin Biao died, we stopped the daily rituals praising Mao and Lin. The fanaticism faded. It was as if we had all been in a dream. For the first time, people began to question Mao's infallibility. Did Mao trust the wrong person?

If Mao had trusted Zhou Enlai instead of Lin Biao, would that have been better? There was a vague feeling that Mao had made a mistake. But of course no one dared talk about it.

After the Lin Biao incident, Mao looked calm on the surface. But from a doctor's point of view, I knew that his health was greatly affected. Sometimes I tried to persuade him to take medicine for his pneumonia and heart disease.

He would take some and then refuse. One day, at the beginning of February, he asked me, Do you know that Nixon is coming? I answered, yes, I do. He said, can you get me well before Nixon comes? I said, yes, I can, but you'll have to cooperate.

He said, all right, you can start now. In February 1972, after months of secret negotiations, President Richard Nixon arrived in Beijing to begin a new relationship with China. Nixon saw two major advantages to this improved relationship with China. First, I think Nixon always saw the relationship on its own merit. The other involved the major Soviet role in Southeast Asia.

Hanoi was a proxy of the Soviet Union. Now, I think Nixon... recognized that a great restraint on Moscow would be the result of an improved relationship between Beijing and the United States.

I remember that Mao said to Nixon, after our two countries resume diplomatic relations, we will still have to curse you a little in our newspapers, calling you American imperialists. You can also curse us a bit. This is just for show, firing a few empty shots. It'll be easier for ordinary people to accept.

If we suddenly say that the American imperialists are no longer imperialists and they've become friends of China, people will find it hard to accept. We expected and frequently received diatribes for public consumption, both in the press and in the diplomacy itself. The real, the careful issue was not to be carried away by this and overly offended by it as we attempted to achieve a greater outcome. The outcome was an historic agreement called the Shanghai Communique.

The joint communique which we have issued today will make headlines around the world tomorrow. This announcement will be the world's top news tomorrow. But what we have said in that communique is not nearly as important as what we will do in the years ahead.

To build a bridge across 16,000 miles and 22 years of hostility which have divided us in the past. Issues like America's role in Vietnam and U.S. relations with Taiwan could not be resolved. In those cases, both sides stated their positions and agreed to move ahead. Nixon's visit signaled China's opening to the world. Gradually, China would become an active player in world politics.

As the country began to emerge from the worst terror of the Cultural Revolution, Mao turned his attention to China's peasants. Small rural factories were set up to make farm tools and process local crops. Thousands of paramedics, or barefoot doctors, brought free, basic health care to remote villages. Working with Zhou Enlai, Mao began to rehabilitate party members who had been attacked.

Many, like Deng Xiaoping, returned to their posts. By 1974, Mao appeared in public only to receive foreign dignitaries. When his eyesight deteriorated, he requested someone to read Chinese literature to him.

I was hurried into the room where I saw Chairman Mao Zedong. He was sitting on a sofa. I was shocked.

I had expected him to be in glowing health, our red sun. But the Chairman Mao I saw was pale and haggard. And he had become very thin. I thought, I have so many things to tell you. I've dreamed about you and hoped to pour out all my suffering to you.

How could you be like this? So I cried. I must have looked ridiculous. With this old man in front of me.

The grandeur and brilliance of the Mao I had imagined totally disappeared. The question of who would succeed Mao dominated Beijing politics. Mao, now 81 years old, played one faction off against the other. Zhang Qing's group Later reviled as the Gang of Four, wanted to continue the Cultural Revolution, they viewed Zhou Enlai as their main rival, and they orchestrated a campaign against him, with Mao's approval. It really shook me.

I didn't expect such a situation in the party. I had great respect and reverence for Mao Zedong. I respected him greatly. As for Zhou Enlai, I loved him very much.

Like many people, I loved him very much. But now I realized that the two leaders had very different opinions. I thought, oh, Lord, whom should I follow?

I, a party member. It was a dilemma for me. Although Zhou suffered from the campaign, he kept his position.

Many believe Mao saved him to run the country. By 1974, however, Zhou was ill with cancer. When he made a rare appearance at a dinner, the guests were overjoyed at his apparent recovery. But Zhou's health was fast deteriorating. Joe and Lai died on January 8th, 1976. Joe was too ill to attend the funeral.

That spring at the annual festival honoring the dead, thousands of people went to Tiananmen Square. They laid wreaths, flowers, and poems in honor of Zhou. The tribute quickly turned into a demonstration against the Gang of Four, and indirectly, against Mao himself. For the first time, I felt that there in Tiananmen Square, I could be free.

Everyone felt the same. At last, I found freedom there. During the night, police removed the tributes.

The next day, 100,000 people returned. The crowd was ordered to leave. Many refused.

It never occurred to me they would use lethal force. It seemed that communists would never do that because Mao had said those who put down a mass movement come to no good, and this was a mass movement. Jiang Qing was in the Great Hall of the People, watching the events in Tiananmen.

About eleven that night, Jiang Qing came. She hurried into Mao's room. After she came out, I heard her say, we've won, we've won. Chairman Mao has agreed that it is a counter-revolutionary riot. We should celebrate.

That night, militia were sent to Tiananmen Square to put down the demonstrations. The number of casualties and arrests is not known. In July, the worst earthquake in history devastated the city of Tangshan.

At least 400,000 people were injured or killed. According to Chinese superstition, a disaster of this magnitude portends a change of dynasty. It came two months later on September 9th, 1976. I went over to Mao's bed. He saw me and said, Dr. Li, do you think there's any hope for me?

I knew very well that there was no hope at all, but I couldn't say that to a patient. I said, there's hope. We're still trying. He looked very bad before I spoke. After, it seemed his face got a little color.

I felt his pulse, which seemed a little better too. Suddenly, I felt that there was no more strength in his hand. His hand dropped. I saw his eyes were closed.

Then I looked at the electrocardiogram. The waves had become a straight line. In other words, his heart had stopped.

All was finished. We thought at once, who could hold up this guy now? China was such a big country.

Who could hold it up after Mao died? What will happen to us? I always thought Mao Zedong was a great hero of the Chinese nation.

But I also thought that he was a tragic hero. many absurd things that happened and everyone was struggling in a whirlpool of absurdity. That was something perhaps he could not understand. He thought he was doing good all the time.

Mao showed us a very rare case in which cruelty, selfishness, hypocrisy and shamelessness We're all found in the same person. Although he always tried to cover his actions with the most beautiful words, I don't think he ever had any moral principles. Never, ever will I forgive Mao for the crimes he committed against the Chinese nation.

I didn't really feel anything special or feel sad, but I still think he was a great leader that the Chinese people should feel proud of and that the Chinese revolution should feel proud of. China's new leader, the unknown Hua Guofeng, led the funeral ceremony. If you showed any sign of joy, people would think you were gloating. You could not show deep grief either because you would be suspected if you did. We put on expressionless faces like pieces of wood.

We knew an era, the era of Mao Zedong was gone, but we didn't know what was ahead of us. Major funding for this program was provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Additional funding was provided by the Ford Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Albert Kunstader Family Foundation, The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, and by annual financial support from viewers like you.

Transcript for:Overview of China's Communist Revolution

Transcript for:
Overview of China's Communist Revolution