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

THE BATTLE FOR CHINA’ S PAST
persecuted and humiliated; but he died of a natural death (though he
might have lived longer had he not suffered the strain of persecution).
Chang and Halliday have to admit that it was Mao who rejected a
report recommending the execution of Liu Shaoqi’s wife. In order to
twist this fact in their favour Chang and Halliday make a claim that
would be comic if it were not for the fact that it was about life and
death: that Mao wanted Liu and his wife Wang Guangmei’s slow death
by torture. So slow that Wang was still alive in the twenty-first century.
In 2004 Wang even celebrated Mao’s birthday with the latter’s relatives
(Kong Dongmei 2006). The meeting was called by Wang herself and
organized by one of Liu’s sons Liu Yuan. Photos were taken with Wang
Guangmei sitting between Mao’s two daughters Li Na and Li Min.
There are numerous other cases that show that Mao was not like
Stalin or Hitler. When Mao was told of Lin Biao’s fleeing in a plane, he
is reported to have ordered that the plane should not be shot, saying
tian yao xiayu, niang yao jiaren, rang ta qu ba (you cannot stop it if it rains,
you cannot stop it if your mother wants to remarry; let him go). The
story of Deng Xiaoping is well known: though humiliated and criticized
Deng was never physically harmed. During the most turbulent
days of the Cultural Revolution in the second half of 1966, when
everyone of the CCP hierarchy was under attack except Mao and Lin
Biao, Mao was determined to protect Zhu De and Chen Yi (Wang Li
2001: 714), the two people who were very critical of Mao in the 1930s
and, with Zhou Enlai, Zhu and Chen, were in fact responsible for
removing Mao from the command of the Red Army.
There is another example that shows that Mao judged people on
their ideas. During the Great Leap Forward year of 1958, the Mayor of
Shanghai, Ke Qingshi, was known to follow Mao’s ideas closely and
Mao therefore wanted to promote him to the powerful Politburo. But
Liu Shaoqi opposed Ke’s promotion, on the basis that Ke had objected
to Liu’s push in the 1940s for everyone to take Mao as the central leader
of the CCP. Mao then asked Ke to talk to Liu and persuade him to
forget about that incident (Wang Li 2001: 755).
Fairy tale and how scholarship changes
It is incredible how unreflecting and how shameless modern show
business can be. As Heartfield (2005) points out, it was Chang, in Wild
Swans, the best-ever-selling family memoirs, who tells us that Chiang
Kai-shek had adopted a policy of non-resistance in the face of the
Japanese seizure of Manchuria and Japan’s increasing encroachments
on China proper. Chang also claims that it was Chiang who, instead of
mobilizing forces to fight the Japanese invasion, had concentrated on
trying to annihilate the Communists. But in many instances, The
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