Battle for China's Past : Mao and the Cultural Revolution

THE BATTLE FOR CHINA’ S PAST
In order to prevent what was perceived to have happened in the
former Soviet Union, Mao decided to carry out what was called the
Socialist Education Movement and Liu was put in charge of this. In
November 1963 Liu sent his wife, Wang Guangmei, to the Tao Yuan
Brigade of Hebei province to do a pilot project on Socialist Education
in rural China. In June 1964 Liu took a work tour in Hebei, Shanghai,
Henan, Shandong and Anhui, promoting his wife’s work in what was
called the Tao Yuan Experiment. Liu asserted that Wang Guangmei’s
pilot project showed grassroots organization in rural China was
completely rotten, either corrupted or changed politically to be on the
side of class enemies: the landlords, rich peasants and counter-revolutionaries.
Liu ordered all senior party officials to carry out
investigations like Wang by staying in one village for a long period of
time (the Chinese term is 蹲点 dun dian). Liu shocked his attentive
audience when he forcefully told them that those who did not dun dian
would not be qualified to be members of the CCP central committee.
He also added that Mao’s work should not be taken as dogma, that
Mao’s investigative method of group interviews was out of date and
that a new way of encamping in a village to establish contacts (zhagen
chuanlian) was required.
Mao’s idea was totally different however. He thought that the majority
of grassroots cadres should not be the targets of struggle and that
parachuting in so many people from the outside to one place to carry out
struggle was politically wrong and technically impossible: it was wrong
politically because the assumption was that the local people could not be
trusted. It was technically impossible because there was no way in which
resources could be mobilized to carry out the task for the whole country.
When Mao’s personal secretary Tian Jiaying, on Mao’s instructions,
conveyed the two points to Liu, Liu frowned and said nothing. Though
he was not very keen on the Tao Yuan Experiment, Mao initially agreed
to make the Wang Guangmei Report a CCP document for circulation, as
Liu recommended. However, he soon changed his mind and ordered the
withdrawal of the Report. According to Wang Li (2001), this was mainly
because Jiang Qing had reported Liu’s work-tour speech to Mao by
saying: ‘Liu is already criticizing you when you are still alive, whereas
Khrushchev made the secret report denouncing Stalin only when the
latter was dead.’ However, Wang Li admits that he interpreted Mao’s
change of mind in that way only because that was what Jiang Qing had
told him. He also admits that Mao changed his mind after consulting
other provincial leaders such as Li Xuefeng, Wu Lanfu, Tao Lujia and Liu
Zihou.
To carry out the struggle against grassroots cadres, Liu sent work
teams totalling 15,000 people from outside into the county of Xincheng,
which had a population of less than 300,000. Mao asked Liu: how could
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