Liu Shaoqi and the Chinese Cultural Revolution

Lowell Dittmer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317466000
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Public Policy
• Index: Politics & International Relations

By addressing the issues that decimated China's monolithic elite in the late 1960s, this text illuminates not only the life and fate of Liu Shaoqi, but also the policy-making process of a revolutionary state facing the diverting exigencies of economic modernization and political development.

PART I

Liu’s Fall

And it shall come to pass afterward, that I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall dream dreams, your young men shall see visions: And also upon the servants and upon the handmaids in those days will I pour out my spirit.

—JOEL 2: 28–29

It is good for them to argue. Let them rebel a little. What good does it do to make them say, “Yes, Papa,” “Yes, Mama,” all the time? I don’t approve of that. Yet I feel to be strict to one’s children is to love them.

—JIANG QING, April 12, 1967

Our actions are our own; their consequences belong to Heaven.

—THOMAS FRANCIS

—— 1 ——

Introduction

To seek the meaning of Liu Shaoqi’s life is to become embroiled in inevitable controversy, for, by an unexpected turn of events in 1966, Liu’s life came to be subjected to the most far-reaching reinterpretation by a nationwide movement of militant young activists who claimed to speak on behalf of Mao Zedong and the Chinese people. Because of Liu’s intimate involvement for more than four decades with the major events that have shaped contemporary China, this reinterpretation opened Chinese Communist history to reassessment as well. Study of the controversy is an experience at once frustrating and rewarding. It is frustrating because some of the questions that the reinterpretation have posed must remain open, while we can at best reduce others to a limited number of objective possibilities. It is rewarding because such study places us in the eye of the storm of “mass criticism” whereby meaning and history are publicly created in modern China.

Liu’s life may be viewed as an attempt to combine order with revolution and equality with economic efficiency and technocratic values. Over a period of more than a quarter century, he served as a constructive and stabilizing force within the Party and the regime. Unlike most Chinese Communist leaders, who tended to distinguish themselves in some particular endeavor and then pursue their careers along related lines, Liu had experience in numerous aspects of the Chinese Communist movement—trade unions, mass movements, underground organizations, guerrilla bases—but in all of these fields he exhibited the same fundamental concerns. During the revolutionary period of the 1920s and 1930s, his role as a Party and trade union organizer led him to place particular emphasis on an attempt to synthesize order and revolution. “Criticism and self-criticism,” as definitively set forth by Liu in his 1941 essay, “On Inner-Party Struggle,” was the most successful and important attempt to institutionalize this combination. His more extensive experience in the “White areas,” and later as the operational administrator of the “first line” in Liberated China, led him to try to combine equality and economic efficiency as well. Perhaps his greatest success in this endeavor was in pulling the nation back together after the debacle of the Great Leap Forward (GLF) of 1958–60 and achieving a sustained economic recovery.

In the end, however, Liu’s vision of how this combination of order and revolution, equality and economic efficiency could be achieved was overwhelmed by the sweep and depth of the revolutionary drive in China, as symbolized by Mao Zedong. Liu was dismissed as heir apparent and then purged, bringing his civil existence to an end. But his greatest contribution to the Chinese revolution was his last, as its victim, a role he played according to the principles that had guided his previous career. From August 1966 to the spring of 1967, despite the rising tide of public criticism, he chose not to oppose Mao actively and thus plunge China into even greater chaos. In his dignified, “cultivated” bearing during two years of intense and relentless polemical attacks, Liu lived up to his own prescription for a good Communist:

Even if it is temporarily to his disadvantage and if, in upholding the truth, he suffers blows of all kinds, is opposed or censured by most other people and so finds himself in temporary (and honorable) isolation, even to the point where he may have to give up his life, he will still breast the waves to uphold the truth.¹

This last phase of Liu’s career began in the spring of 1966, when Mao Zedong launched a “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution” (GPCR), which was designed to provoke mass criticism of a “small handful” of “Party persons in authority taking the capitalist road” and to bring China’s “bourgeois” cultural superstructure into closer conformance with its socialist base. As the ranking vice-chairman of the Central Committee (CC) during Mao’s absence from Peking, Liu dispatched work teams in June and July 1966 to various schools and government organs to supervise the burgeoning movement. Upon his return to Peking in late July, Mao sharply criticized the activities of the work teams and requested their withdrawal. At the Eleventh CC Plenum in August, Liu came under criticism for his dispatch of work teams and was demoted from second to eighth place in the Politburo and relieved of his office as vice-chairman of the CC.

Two months later Liu submitted a self-criticism, which was reported to have been accepted, but his status remained uncertain; then in the next six months he became the target of a nationwide polemical assault, which characterized him as “China’s Khrushchev,” the leader of a “bourgeois reactionary line” that had been leading China down the “capitalist road” and was continuing even yet to resist Mao’s “proletarian revolutionary line.” Despite Liu’s apparently passive reaction to these allegations, the “great repudiation” campaign continued for nearly two years before it culminated in his formal dismissal from all leadership positions and banishment from the Communist Party at the Twelfth CC Plenum in October 1968.

It was in the course of the GPCR that Liu’s life, which seemed to have achieved such logical and felicitous unity, was to disintegrate. By a sudden turn of events, Liu’s control over the meaning of his life was wrenched from his hands and “took wings” in the critical communication process of the GPCR. Liu’s person and his public meaning became completely estranged: the former was cut off from the instruments of policy and sequestered in his official residence at Chungnanhai, but the other “Liu” became the animating spirit of opposition against which the GPCR was waged, and indeed proved so dauntless and resourceful an opponent that he could be vanquished only after two years of fierce “struggle.” Since his downfall, this “Liu” has allegedly inspired repeated counterattacks against the GPCR, led by his former opponents, Chen Boda and Lin Biao. Thus the meaning of Liu’s life has passed from his hands to the Chinese people as a part of their heritage, and his name has become an integral part of the polemical vocabulary indicating the direction in which the continuing Chinese revolution should move.

We are, perforce, concerned with two Liu Shaoqis, and with the nature of the process that rent him in twain. Perhaps, like Humpty Dumpty, Liu Shaoqi can never be reassembled to form a fully convincing whole. Our objective is to understand the forces that unraveled his life and, in the process of putting him back together, to form a picture of Liu’s China, as well as of China’s Liu. The portrait that emerges will be in the cubist style, from several different perspectives, with rough edges.

This book consists of three parts. The first features a chronological reconstruction of Liu’s attempt to impose form on the world, of the gradual, subtle deviation of Liu’s order from Mao’s vision of China’s future in response to various exigencies of nation-building and modernization, and of the confrontation between that order and the revived forces of revolutionary change in China. Chapter 2 presents a brief biographical sketch of Liu’s life before 1959, skirting areas of controversy in the hope of establishing a sound factual framework in terms of which later reinterpretations may be understood. It seeks to show how Liu’s vision of the political process emerged as a result of various formative experiences in his life. Chapter 3 reviews the decade between 1956 and 1966. By tracing the main criticism themes of the GPCR to their origins in a series of unresolved political disputes, it seeks to reconstruct the decision to launch the GPCR and to determine the relationship between that decision and the decision to subject Liu Shaoqi to mass criticism. In chapters 4 and 5, Liu is swept into the GPCR, which exposed him as the Chinese revolution’s greatest and most consistent nemesis. In a recent article, Howard Boorman compared Liu Shaoqi “as a human being” to the submerged portion of an iceberg, noting that his real personality “scarcely emerges in the polemical pyrotechnics” of the GPCR.² Chapter 4 aims to correct this situation by describing the GPCR as Liu experienced it, as an interpersonal drama of crime and unsuccessful atonement involving Liu and those with whom he had contact and whom he may have influenced. Chapter 5, in contrast, describes Liu’s fall “objectively,” i.e., as a symbol caught up in the rhetoric of a mass criticism movement over which he exerted minimal influence. It views his fall as the outcome of the conflictual and cooperative interaction among political actors in a greatly expanded decisionmaking arena.

Part II consists of an analysis of the Chinese attempt to reconstruct the past of the Mao-Liu rupture, the so-called struggle between two lines. Both the “struggle” and the polemical distortion of its significance are of momentous importance for China’s future—the latter because it was accepted as reality, the former because it is real. Chapter 6 compares the personalities and political styles of Liu Shaoqi and Mao Zedong; chapter 7 analyzes Liu’s policies, and their political and economic ramifications, in the context of an evaluation of the Maoist criticisms of Liu. These two chapters attempt not only to explore the value implications and feasibility of two diverging roads to communism but to solve the puzzle of their origin: if Mao and Liu differed so profoundly, how were they able to cooperate for so long? And yet if they did not, why was Liu subjected to such comprehensive criticism?

Part III seeks to come to terms with Liu Shaoqi’s impact on China’s political future. Liu stood for a concept of socialist modernization that stressed the institutionalization of revolution within complex structures of elaborately qualified formal rules regulating nearly every aspect of life. “Criticism and self-criticism” may stand as a paradigm of this attempt, inasmuch as it sets forth the parameters for decision-making and discipline at every level in the Party organization, including the highest. Mao’s GPCR involved a deliberate abrogation of the formal rules of criticism and self-criticism in the name of substantive justice. Liu, to the end, played the game according to rules that Mao, a more flexible man, altered to suit his ends. Part III analyzes “criticism and self-criticism,” Liu’s most significant legacy to Chinese politics, as it was transformed during the GPCR and as it seems likely to evolve henceforth. Chapter 8 first formalizes the process of “mass criticism” in a semiotic model of social roles and intended meanings, then analyzes the Liu Shaoqi case in terms of that model. Chapter 9 compares mass criticism to the “normal” functioning of the mass line: it attempts to assess the impact of such innovations as the displacement of a national organization of professional bureaucrats by an ad hoc network of amateur publicists, the partial eclipse of the orderly process of formally adopted central directives by the direct dissemination of polemics through the mass media, and, of course, the advent of unprecedented popular participation in the movement. The final chapter describes the structural evolution of the process of “criticism and self-criticism” in China from its origins in 1942–44 in the Zhengfeng (rectification) Movement as a system of mediated and regulated collegial conflict to its climactic emergence in 1966 as a national mobilization and rectification technique.

I have been deliberately eclectic in assembling sources on the assumption that, if an “objective” analysis of the meaning of Liu’s life and fall is probably impossible, a consideration of the widest possible array of subjective judgments will at least facilitate a balanced perspective. The sources include original and translated materials from the Chinese and Japanese press, as well as a wide assortment of secondary monographs in English, German, and French.

With regard to methodology, I have taken to heart Lewis Edinger’s proposal that “for the analysis of individual political leaders we employ conceptual models and quantitative analysis in conjunction with a frank but disciplined use of empathy and other forms of imaginative speculation.”³ Quantitative indices are of course much scarcer and of more doubtful validity in China than in Germany, but chapters 8 and 9 do make use of content analysis in an attempt to attain somewhat more precision in the characterization of meanings. Much of the book, however, is based on evidence that is neither quantitative nor of assured validity. Whereas I continually try to move beyond available evidence to propose theories that plausibly link discrete events, sometimes going so far as to suggest alternative hypotheses to explain the same sequence, these explanations should conform to the Weberian methodological criteria of “objective possibility” and “subjective meaningfulness.”⁴

Despite occasional forays into neighboring disciplines, this is a political biography and should be evaluated in terms of its ability to shed new light on Chinese politics at a critical transition point. In placing Liu’s biography within the broad social and political milieu that lent meaning to his life, and in using various social science techniques to analyze the structure ofthat milieu, this study hopes to contribute to innovation in the uniting of political biography and political history.

—— 2 ——

The Life and Times of Liu Shaoqi

Liu Shaoqi¹ was born in Huaminglou village, Ningxiang county, Hunan, on November 24, 1898. He was the youngest in a family of four boys and five girls. His father and grandfather were educated rich peasants (not landlords, as al...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Figures and Tables
• Abbreviations
• Preface to the Second
• Acknowledgments
• Part I. Liu’s Fall
• Part II. Two Roads
• Part III. Criticism and Self-Criticism
• Afterword
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index