THE GREAT WALL: China Against the World 1,000BC-2,000AD
by Julia Lovell
Atlantic £19.99 pp412

Today, the Red Guards lie buried in the Chinese psyche like the clay warriors of Xian. Their ecstatic ranks flicker in black-and-white newsreels, and their misdeeds have been distorted to make history suit the victors of a dynastic power struggle. But truth will out, and, in the hands of the authors of Mao’s Last Revolution, the drama needs no exaggeration. Mao’s calculated decision to purge his rivals and purify the Chinese revolution in the late 1960s brought the country to the brink of ruin.

In August, 1967, no fewer than 10,000 artillery shells fell on Chongqing in battles between communist factions that razed the harbour district to the ground and sent 180,000 citizens fleeing. Shanghai, now the epitome of capitalism, became a radical redoubt that witnessed the creation of a commune, mob rule and eventual military intervention. Everywhere, temples, antiques and priceless manuscripts burnt. The death toll in the countryside alone was between 750,000 and 1.5m, according to one authoritative survey cited here by the authors. When the casualty figures for China’s cities become known, they say, the numbers will be staggering. The list of atrocities is so grotesque that, were it not for the fact that even party historians acknowledge that “counter-revolutionaries” were “beaten to death and had their flesh and livers consumed”, it would be tempting to write some off as anti-Chinese propaganda. Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals quote an account of a mass rally in Yunnan at which a farmer was sentenced to death and executed. Then one man cut out his heart, another sawed into his skull, removing his brain and tongue. A third man cut off the victim’s genitals, and a fourth man “proceeded to boil and eat them”.

Immured in his pavilion boudoir, the poet-king Mao never heard the screams, only the applause. Like the Qin emperor, whose crimes of state were praised by late Maoist doctrine, his dual memory as monster and unifier in Chinese history is secure even if his secret records of it remain sealed. Yet the history that the authors have unearthed is remarkable. For a controlled society, Mao’s China was a riot of periodicals, pamphlets, manifestos, poems, plays, songs and essays; all of which the two scholars handle with utter mastery. And the Chinese released sheaves of official papers to damn the “Gang of Four” led by Mao’s wife after their fall.

Four striking conclusions come out of these documents. First, the origins of the cultural revolution had nothing to do with ideology, but lay in the Sino-Soviet split, in Mao’s obsession with autocracy and in his determination to escape the fate of the ousted Nikita Khrushchev. Hence the personality cult of Mao and his adoration by the Red Guards. Second, all the Chinese leaders who survived were tainted, even Deng Xiaoping, who collaborated with Mao in the first round of purges in 1966 before his turn came. As for Zhou Enlai, who is still respected by most Chinese, he emerges as a slavish courtier ever ready to do the dictator’s bidding. Third, only now can we grasp how momentous was the convulsion that shook China from 1966 until Mao’s death 30 years ago — although it is fascinating to compare this book with newly declassified CIA documents that show that America’s China watchers, peeking through the bamboo curtain from Hong Kong, did an extremely good job of working out what was going on. Fourth, the cultural revolution proved that the Chinese Communist party rivalled any other 20th-century dictatorship in its institutional criminality. Top cadres such as Zhou outdid each other in “working towards the chairman” by anticipating his wishes, a precise echo of the Nazi phrase and practice of “working towards the Fü hrer”. The party established a Central Case Examination Group in 1966, whose “privileged employees were the . . . equivalent of Lenin’s Cheka and Hitler’s Gestapo”, say the authors. “It dealt exclusively in violence.”

In the end, Mao’s incitement led to anarchy, the party reimposed order at gunpoint and exiled its rebellious youth to carry nightsoil in villages. The consequences of the cultural revolution were a shattered culture and a strengthened doctrine of authoritarian rule. The ultimate arbiter of power remains the Chinese military.

As Julia Lovell, a young Cambridge sinologist, argues in The Great Wall, her richly detailed survey of 1,000 years of Chinese history, politics in China have thus reverted to the mean. She uses classical literature with great skill to illustrate how the country’s periods of attraction and repulsion towards the world beyond recur down its dynasties.

The metaphor of the Great Wall runs through her work: just as ancient Chinese rulers erected its ramparts against barbarians, modern ones seek to make a Great Firewall against subversion on the internet. Behind such barriers (whether of stone, software, psychology or language) the tyrants flourish, and their minions, like the Xian warriors and the Red Guards, are buried and forgotten when their use is done.

Force fed

The cult of Mao and his little red book reached ridiculous levels in the late 1960s. Each day, before breakfast, workers and children had to stand before portraits of him to seek “morning instructions”, after which they sang songs from his Sayings and listened to half-hour recitals from his writings.

Read on... books:

Mao: The Unknown Story by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday (Vintage £15)
Polemical portrait of a monster

Available at Books First prices of £20.95 (Mao) and £17.99 (inc p&p) on 0870 165 8585 and www.timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst

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