The Chinese Communist Party During the Cultural Revolution: The Case of the Sixty-One Renegades (St. Antony's)

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The Chinese Communist Party and the Cultural Revolution The Case of the Sixty-One Renegades

Pamela Lubell

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St Antony’s Series General Editor: Richard Clogg (1999– ), Fellow of St Antony’s College, Oxford Recent titles include: Pamela Lubell THE CHINESE COMMUNIST PARTY AND THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION The Case of the Sixty-One Renegades Klaus Gallo GREAT BRITAIN AND ARGENTINA From Invasion to Recognition, 1806–26 Peter Mangold SUCCESS AND FAILURE IN BRITISH FOREIGN POLICY Evaluating the Record, 1900–2000 Mohamad Tavakoli-Targhi REFASHIONING IRAN Orientalism, Occidentalism and Historiography Louise Haagh CITIZENSHIP, LABOUR MARKETS AND DEMOCRATIZATION Chile and the Modern Sequence Renato Colistete LABOUR RELATIONS AND INDUSTRIAL PERFORMANCE IN BRAZIL Greater São Paulo, 1945–60 Peter Lienhardt (edited by Ahmed Al-Shahi) SHAIKHDOMS OF EASTERN ARABIA John Crabtree and Laurence Whitehead (editors) TOWARDS DEMOCRATIC VIABILITY The Bolivian Experience Steve Tsang (editor) JUDICIAL INDEPENDENCE AND THE RULE OF LAW IN HONG KONG Karen Jochelson THE COLOUR OF DISEASE Syphilis and Racism in South Africa, 1880–1950 Julio Crespo MacLennan SPAIN AND THE PROCESS OF EUROPEAN INTEGRATION, 1957–85 Enrique Cárdenas, José Antonio Ocampo and Rosemary Thorp (editors) AN ECONOMIC HISTORY OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY LATIN AMERICA Volume 1: The Export Age Volume 2: Latin America in the 1930s Volume 3: Industrialization and the State in Latin America Jennifer G. Mathers THE RUSSIAN NUCLEAR SHIELD FROM STALIN TO YELTSIN

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Marta Dyczok THE GRAND ALLIANCE AND UKRAINIAN REFUGEES Mark Brzezinski THE STRUGGLE FOR CONSTITUTIONALISM IN POLAND Suke Wolton LORD HAILEY, THE COLONIAL OFFICE AND THE POLITICS OF RACE AND EMPIRE IN THE SECOND WORLD WAR The Loss of White Prestige Junko Tomaru THE POSTWAR RAPPROCHEMENT OF MALAYA AND JAPAN, 1945–61 The Roles of Britain and Japan in South-East Asia Eiichi Motono CONFLICT AND COOPERATION IN SINO-BRITISH BUSINESS, 1860–1911 The Impact of the Pro-British Commercial Network in Shanghai Nikolas K. Gvosdev IMPERIAL POLICIES AND PERSPECTIVES TOWARDS GEORGIA, 1760–1819 Bernardo Kosacoff CORPORATE STRATEGIES UNDER STRUCTURAL ADJUSTMENT IN ARGENTINA Responses by Industrial Firms to a New Set of Uncertainties Ray Takeyh THE ORIGINS OF THE EISENHOWER DOCTRINE The US, Britain and Nasser’s Egypt, 1953–57 Derek Hopwood (editor) ARAB NATION, ARAB NATIONALISM Judith Clifton THE POLITICS OF TELECOMMUNICATIONS IN MEXICO Privatization and State–Labour Relations, 1928–95

St Antony’s Series Series Standing Order ISBN 0–333–71109–2 (outside North America only) You can receive future titles in this series as they are published by placing a standing order. Please contact your bookseller or, in case of difficulty, write to us at the address below with your name and address, the title of the series and the ISBN quoted above. Customer Services Department, Macmillan Distribution Ltd, Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS, England

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The Chinese Communist Party and the Cultural Revolution The Case of the Sixty-One Renegades Pamela Lubell The Harry S. Truman Research Institute for the Advancement of Peace The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

in association with

St. Antony’s College, Oxford

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© Pamela Lubell 2002 All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission. No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted her right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2002 by PALGRAVE Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE is the new global academic imprint of St. Martin’s Press LLC Scholarly and Reference Division and Palgrave Publishers Ltd (formerly Macmillan Press Ltd). ISBN 0–333–91955–6 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Lubell, Pamela, 1949– The Chinese Communist Party and the Cultural Revolution: the case of the sixty-one renegades / Pamela Lubell. p. cm. – (St. Antony’s series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0–333–91955–6 1. Zhongguo gongchandang–History. I. Title. II. Series. JQ1519.A5 L796 2001 324.251’075’09046–dc21 2001046006 10 11

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Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham, Wiltshire

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For Miriam (Mimi) Feldman and in memory of Sam Feldman with love and respect

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Contents Acknowledgements

ix

Abbreviations

xi

Introduction

1

1

1936: On the Eve of War and Freedom The common enemy The CCP in northern China An organizational shambles An, Yang, Bo and Liu under arrest Beijing under threat The party and the students Risk assessment: Song, Liu and the sixty-one

20 22 28 32 39 45 47 49

2

Release from the Guomindang Prison, 1936 Caolanzi prison The roles of Liu Shaoqi and Zhang Wentian Into the great wide open: Shanxi 1936–43 Cadre screening Yan’an, 1943–45

52 53 67 73 79 85

3

Levers of Power: Careers 1949–66 Dossier access Liu Lantao and the Central Control Commission An Ziwen and the Organization Department Yang Xianzhen and the Party School Bo Yibo: heavy power Summary

94 98 101 106 118 123 135

4

Prison Again – the CCP Version 1–12 August 1966: the Eleventh Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee Revving Up: Kang Sheng’s role, August–September 1966 Zhou Enlai’s role in November 1966: shoring up the defence

138

vii

140 142 145

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viii Contents

5

6

December 1966 to February 1967 Ofﬁcial condemnation: March–May 1967 Spreading the net Winding up the case

147 151 154 158

Rehabilitating the Sixty-One Rehabilitation policy and balance-of-power politics in the early 1970s May 1975: a brief spring thaw A barely changing climate Hu Yaobang and rehabilitation policy 1978: the COD acts Muted tones of rehabilitation The sixty-one rehabilitated The CDIC and the CAC Bo Yibo: post-Cultural Revolution Remembrance

161

A Prejudiced Conclusion

190

163 166 168 170 173 176 179 181 182 186

Appendix: The Sixty-One

196

Notes and References

197

Bibliography

233

Index

253

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Page ix

Acknowledgements I would like to express my gratitude to the following foundations and institutions for their generous support: the Polonsky Foundation; the Louis Freiberg Research Fund for East Asian Studies; The Dean’s Ofﬁce, Faculty of Humanities at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the Dean himself, Professor Yair Zakovitch; the Minerva Center for Human Rights at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and last but not least, my second home, the Harry S. Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace. I would like to thank the Warden and Fellows of St Antony’s College, Oxford and those who awarded me the Israeli Junior Research fellowship (1998–9) for a wonderfully peaceful and academically fruitful year. I am indebted to those who have read parts or all of this book in the various stages of its evolution: Professors Lyman P. Van Slyke, Frederick Teiwes, Vera Schwarcz, Michael Schoenhals, Thomas Kampen, Irene Eber, Harold Z. Schiffrin, Ellis Joffe, Yitzhak Shichor, Theodore Friedgut, Norman Rose and Eyal Ben-Ari. I thank them and the anonymous readers for their perspicacious comments and suggestions. Both Michael Schoenhals and Thomas Kampen generously volunteered documents that were most helpful. The book’s failings are my own. I would also like to thank the academic and administrative staff at the Truman Institute and the former and current chief librarians: Cecile Panzer and Tirzah Margolioth. My thanks in particular to the Institute’s East Asia librarian, Riccardo Schwed, for his ever-gracious assistance. Librarian Nancy Hearst at Harvard University’s John King Fairbank Centre for East Asian Research was tremendously helpful, not only responding promptly to my many requests, but also furnishing me with additional enlightening materials. Many thanks to Lin Qian, Zhang Hunbo, Weijia Dukes (all at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem) and Kan Shio-yun (at the Institute for Chinese Studies, Oxford) for their invaluable research and translation assistance. I am very grateful to those involved in the editing and production of this book: Helen Simpson, Keith Povey, Rosalind Duke; and at Palgrave: Josie Dixon, Alison Howson, Peter Dent and Anthea Coombs. On a more general note, I would like to acknowledge my debt to my mentors at Hebrew University. Professors emeritus Harold Z. Schiffrin, founding father (along with Avraham Altman) of East Asian studies in ix

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x Acknowledgements

Israel, and Irene Eber introduced me to Chinese history and culture. I am privileged to have beneﬁted from the phenomenal depth and breadth of their knowledge. I don’t know where to begin or end in thanking Ellis Joffe. In fact there is no end but since he is such a master of succinct prose, I will try and do this in two simple sentences. As a teacher, scholar, writer, loyal friend and boss, Ellis is a superb role model. I respect and thank him for being all these things. Yitzhak Shichor supervised my doctoral dissertation on which this book is based. It was Yitzhak’s idea originally that I tackle the subject of political survival in China, and this in turn led me to the curious story of the ‘sixty-one’. I thank him for the many hours of stimulating discussion on China’s political culture, for his profound insights into its changes and continuities – and no less for his warm friendship, patience and the time invested in guiding me through many a bureaucratic maze in academia. I would also like to thank the many relatives and friends – among them, Clive and Seth Sinclair, Haidee Becker, David Kretzmer, Anna and Jon Immanuel, Pam Blum, William and Haya White, Stephanie Segal, Ronnie and Naomi Ban, Louise and Laurie Cohen, Ines Smyth and Tom Hewitt, for enduring my woes and sustaining me with warmth, wisdom and not infrequently good food and wine. Finally, to all those who are constantly amazed at my unwavering ability to see the negative in everything, be assured there is a sphere in my life where this isn’t the case: to Jonathan, and to Noam, Yoel and Ma’ayan, cosi revayah. Thank you. PAMELA LUBELL

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Abbreviations APC CAC CC CCC CCP CDIC CCEG COD CNLV CYL/CYC CRG FEC GMD JCJ JJLY NURGs PRC SCC SEC SPC

Agricultural Producers’ Cooperatives Central Advisory Commission Central Committee Central Control Commission Chinese Communist Party Central Discipline Inspection Commission Central Case Examination Group Central Organization Department China National Liberation Vanguard Communist Youth League/Corps Cultural Revolution Group Financial and Economic Committee Guomindang Jin–Cha–Ji (region) Jin–Ji–Lu–Yu (region) Nankai University Red Guards People’s Republic of China State Construction Commission State Economic Commission State Planning Commission

xi

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Introduction

First, he has a high communist morality . . . Second, he has the greatest revolutionary courage . . . Third, he learns how best to grasp the theory and the method of Marxism–Leninism . . . Fourth, he is the most sincere, most candid and happiest of men . . . Fifth, he has the greatest self-respect and self-esteem . . . But when it is necessary to swallow humiliation and bear a heavy load for some important purpose in the cause of the Party and the revolution, he can take on the most difﬁcult and vital of tasks without the slightest reluctance, never passing the difﬁculties to others [emphasis added]. (Liu Shaoqi, ‘How to be a Good Communist’, July 1939)1 What could be more humiliating for a dedicated Chinese communist than to sign a newspaper declaration renouncing allegiance to communism and afﬁliation to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)? This was the humiliation that one particular group of cadres reluctantly swallowed in the late summer of 1936 in order to gain their release from a Guomindang (GMD) prison in Beijing. Authorized by the CCP Central Committee, the Party’s North Bureau had secretly ordered them to recant because their release would serve a most important purpose – in fact, a dual purpose. As Japan’s creeping domination of China’s northern provinces advanced, urban China burned with patriotic fervour. The CCP urgently needed an appropriately skilled cadre corps who could galvanize this ‘inﬂamed state of mind’ into an effective antiJapanese united front, and at the same time rebuild the party’s pathetically depleted presence in northern China.2 Experienced in CCP–GMD 1

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2 The Chinese Communist Party and the Cultural Revolution

united-front work in its previous incarnation (1923–27) and in urban underground work since 1927, these imprisoned comrades ﬁtted the bill. They knew the cities, they knew the campuses and they had the contacts. A few prisoners refused to heed the bizarre decree to recant despite its backing by the highest party authorities, but the majority – several dozen – obeyed. The released, who included future leading CCP ofﬁcials such as Bo Yibo, An Ziwen, Liu Lantao and Yang Xianzhen, set about their party-building and united-front tasks with dedicated zeal – and remarkable success. Nevertheless throughout their political careers they indeed bore a heavy load – the lingering stigma of apostasy – despite the party’s role in their release, despite their contribution to the communist revolution and despite their prominent party roles before and after the birth of the People’s Republic of China (PRC) in 1949. Rather than acknowledging full responsibility for decreeing the collective act of disloyalty, the Central Committee chose to cover up the precise nature of its unorthodox role. Responsibility fragmented and shifted to more amorphous spheres, as cadres in their conﬁdential dossiers referred vaguely to ‘rescue by the party’.3 There was no glory to be gained for party or cadre by disclosing the ignominious details. This vulnerability, this complication in their past, with its potential for ugly manipulation, was kept largely, though not altogether, in check for thirty years until the Cultural Revolution, when collective amnesia struck the CCP Central Committee. On the basis of evidence presented by the Central Case Examination Group (CCEG), with a little help from eager Red Guards inspired by the radical leaders of the Cultural Revolution Group (CRG), the ‘Case of the Sixty-One Renegades’ was born in the autumn of 1966.4 On 16 March 1967 the Central Committee formally condemned the sixty-one as renegades.5 Clearly the party had turned its back on these cadres and the ethical dilemma it had wrought for them in 1936. Twelve years elapsed before they were rehabilitated by the party’s Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee in late December 1978 and could shufﬂe back into the political arena. Not all did. Some had died long before the Cultural Revolution and some during it, for imprisonment by the CCP when they were in their ﬁfties and sixties took a harsher toll than the GMD incarceration in their youth. Within its Cultural Revolution context the case was of critical signiﬁcance. For one thing it triggered a witch-hunt after thousands of cadres who had worked for the party in the white areas – those parts of China under nationalist control from the late 1920s and Japanese occupation

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Introduction 3

in the 1930s and 1940s. For another the case was pivotal in the toppling of PRC chairman – and Mao’s esrtwhile intended successor – Liu Shaoqi, who, as North Bureau chief in 1936, had ordered the sixty-one to follow the GMD release procedures. For these reasons alone the case deserves scrutiny. But it has a broader signiﬁcance than its Cultural Revolution conﬁnes, for it rolls up the blinds on a taboo subject in ofﬁcial party history – the ambivalent status of white area cadres within the revolutionary generation. The party’s ofﬁcial line has always been that there was no difference in revolutionary calibre between cadres of the red (liberated soviet) and white areas. Yet such protestations only draw attention to the white area cadres’ invisible but indelible ‘second-class hero’ tag. How and why has the image of these cadres as inferior heroes been perpetuated? Why is it that for half a century the lives and experiences of white area cadres inhabited only the haziest shadows of China’s communist revolutionary history?

Outsiders The ﬁrst dent in the white area cadres’ image lay not so much in what they had done for the revolution and where, as in what they had not done and where they had not been. They had not participated in those core moments that individually and collectively – at the time and in retrospect – constituted major transformative experiences in the Chinese communist revolution: the 1931–34 Jiangxi soviet (or any of the other soviets), the legendary 1934–35 Long March, and the birth of the Yan’an era (1935–47), the era that the CCP still claims as its exemplary golden age. Until the late 1930s and early 1940s white area cadres had not fought in or alongside the Red Army. They had not rubbed shoulders with Mao Zedong. These experiences were at the centre of the Maoist version of party history and it was the relatively well documented Maoist version that remained dominant, occupying the foreground of China’s revolutionary history – in clear focus and full colour. The Mao-centred approach controlled all input to ofﬁcial party history and effectively elbowed other revolutionary strands out of the limelight.6 Since white area cadres functioned elsewhere during the formative years of the Maoist mainstream, the perception of them as outsiders and their revolutionary role as peripheral has persisted. In the post-Mao era there has been some attempt by party historians to rectify the balance between foreground and background, not by diminishing the centrality of the

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former but by respectfully acknowledging and painting in details of the latter.7 Lack of detail was more than a second dent. It made them unrecognizable. There are no heroes without stories. As long as the white area cadres remained relatively storyless in ofﬁcial memory, the perception of them as outsiders to the revolution was deepened. The dearth of material on their activities could not be blamed entirely on the selective–exclusive approach of ofﬁcial party history. There were natural causes. Underground work demanded maximum secrecy. As little as possible was committed to paper. Minutes of underground party meetings, if taken at all, were likely to be destroyed before the ink was dry. Messages and instructions tended to be by word of mouth rather than pen. What was penned would be in code.8 The white area cadre acted frequently alone, with infrequent organizational contact, in order to reduce the possibility of exposure of his party cell or branch organization. Although since the early 1980s there has been a signiﬁcant increase of material on white area life, much of it has had to rely on the recollections of aged participants, recollections more often than not of solo performances, less veriﬁable than the group acts typical of red area life.9 Thirdly, if the passage of information was limited within the white area operational networks, there was even less between these local networks and party central headquarters. At times there was none at all. This was often the situation when the party was forced underground in 1927 and when the Shanghai leadership moved gradually to Ruijin (the Jiangxi soviet capital) in the early 1930s, and during the 1934–35 year of transit to Sha’anxi. There was still a paucity of communication when the party’s headquarters ﬁnally settled in its remote Yan’an enclave. Without full knowledge of what was going on in its urban apparatus, the party centre could not exercise effective control, and it had no interest in giving subsequent credit or publicity to networks it did not fully control. It did not want to advertise itself as cut off and not pulling all the strings of the revolution. It did not want to diminish the carefully cultivated image of omnipotent, omnipresent leadership of the Chinese communist movement. Furthermore, had the spotlight shone on the party’s urban underground operations from 1927 onwards there would have been little to boast about. The urban organizations were, for the most part, in a dire mess. After the ﬁrst crushing blows of Chiang Kai-shek’s ‘white terror’, thousands were either dead or under arrest, or had deserted the cause. Many surviving communists had abandoned the cities and joined the growing crop of rural soviets. What communication there was indicates

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Introduction 5

a signiﬁcant degree of disagreement between central and local leaderships on what could and should be done and how to do it. Despite the tightening up of local organizations by the party’s 1931 leadership, its directives continued to demand high-proﬁle activities from the meagre urban cadre force, a hunted, endangered species that desperately needed to lie low and conserve the little strength it had. In fact some of the central leadership’s directives were tantamount to shining a spotlight on the urban cadres and guiding the GMD authorities directly to them. There were many botched operations. Repeated failure did not make the white area cadres look good, whether or not the responsibility was ultimately theirs. And sometimes they were at fault, be it through inept local organization, individual carelessness – or betrayal.

The usual suspects Betrayal was a huge problem. For whatever reason – fear, disillusionment or greed – betrayal was rife. Gu Shunzhang, who headed the CCP’s security police, stands out as traitor par excellence. Arrested in the spring of 1931, he delivered the communist underground networks of east and central China to the GMD authorities. ‘Eventually, the entire Party organization was endangered as were red unions, communication centers, publications, the headquarters of the Jiangsu Provincial Committee and even the Central Committee.’10 The memoirs of underground workers, in particular those referring to the late 1920s and early 1930s, provide an overwhelming impression that most of their mental and physical energy was invested not so much in the masterminding and performing of dramatic and revolutionary acts as in the less heroic tasks of being on the run, constantly looking over one’s shoulder, avoiding capture and wondering if captured colleagues had talked.11 It was the ﬁrst thought that crossed a white area cadre’s mind on hearing that a comrade had been arrested. Had he or she informed on colleagues, on safe houses, cells, local headquarters and plans? Was it time to pack up and move on, yet again? Nobody was treated with greater suspicion than those comrades who had not only been arrested and imprisoned by the Guomindang authorities but had also been released. Since the early 1930s, weighing up the detriment of creating a hero-martyr syndrome against the beneﬁts of wide-scale execution of communists, the GMD had instituted ‘re-education’ programmes for its political prisoners and restricted its execution policy (somewhat) to unrepentant communists and those who were found to have held fairly high positions in the movement.

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Re-education was followed by release usually on condition that the apparently reformed prisoner made a formal statement of recantation. The GMD tried – with success in some cases – to feed released cadres back into the movement as spies.12 There was good reason for the apparent paranoia exhibited in the CCP’s so-called Rescue Campaign of 1943–44 in Yan’an. Release, conditional or not, after several years’ imprisonment would at the very least provoke communist concern about the erosion of commitment to the cause, or far worse, fear that a spy or double agent was now lurking in their midst. The GMD re-education policy was therefore particularly effective. Not because it necessarily turned prisoners into authentic GMD supporters but because it created an aura of suspicion around every imprisoned and released white area cadre. Who had genuinely recanted? Who had wavered momentarily? Who had falsely confessed to speed the moment and resume revolutionary work? Because of its need for manpower the CCP often turned a temporary blind eye to individual acts of recantation initiated by prisoners themselves, perhaps pressured by their anxious families or even authorized by the local party branch. This blind eye, however, developed a miraculously watchful capability as soon as the comrades resumed their party work. White area cadres without a GMD prison record but with gaps in their active party life were also subject to scrutiny. In the late 1920s and into the mid 1930s local party organizations were frequently raided and destroyed by the GMD secret police. Sometimes regional bureaux and local branches were dismantled and restructured by the party centre itself, reﬂecting changes in the party leadership. Often enough, and through no fault of their own, cadres working in the menacing shadows of the underground, ﬂeeing from one city or province to another, lost contact with the party for weeks, months or even years. On regaining contact they then faced the difﬁcult task of proving their interim loyalty to a new and justiﬁably suspicious local leadership. That was not the end of the story. From then on, whenever a periodic checking of cadre dossiers occurred the gaps in their party history were liable for reinvestigation. Similarly cadres who had been imprisoned had to prove again and again that their release had not involved betrayal. Difﬁculties in veriﬁcation laid both prison and non-prison white area cadres open to suspicion. Trust was therefore a scarce commodity. If white area cadres found it hard to trust each other, because of bitter experience or the impossibility of predicting how one’s comrade might react under the severest of pressures, why should red area cadres regard them with anything less

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Introduction 7

than guarded suspicion? White area cadres – those outsiders to the red rural revolution – arriving in Yan’an in the late 1930s and early 1940s found that even if they could account convincingly for their survival, trust was still not automatically conferred on them. They might be able to prove their loyalty in speciﬁc circumstances but they could not dispel doubts of a more general nature: had their revolutionary ﬁbre been tainted by their white area environment and the very nature of their work?

Red simplicity: white complexity That tensions existed between red and white cadres has been accepted by scholars, some of whom have commented on the differing composition and characteristics of the two mainstreams of manpower that formed the communist elite: The CCP elite was split between those in the ‘Red area’ forces, comprised of peasant armies and guerrilla generals under Mao Tse-tung, on the one hand and those in the ‘White area’ forces consisting of urban students, workers and peasants operating under Liu Shao-ch’i on the other.13 Certainly, differing socioeconomic backgrounds supplied ample fuel for tension. Educated, well-read white area cadres arrived in Yan’an in the late 1930s and early 1940s better versed in Marxism–Leninism than a good many of their red area counterparts, including Mao himself. This was particularly true of prison cadres – like the sixty-one – who had been able to acquire and study materials on communist theory during their incarceration.14 The inﬂux of urban cadres who were not only educated but also skilled and experienced in organization and management was sometimes perceived by red area rural cadres as threatening their own roles in the party hierarchy. Furthermore the better-educated white area cadres were all too easily identiﬁed by the less discerning eye with the politically inadequate but radically patriotic, idealistic young intellectuals whom it had been their responsibility to recruit to Yan’an. One of the initial aims of the 1942–44 Yan’an Rectiﬁcation Campaign was to defuse such tensions and reinforce party unity. But red and white cadres were separated by more than the levels of education and skills that the Rectiﬁcation Campaign sought to adjust. Though some of the party elite had shared experiences in the early and mid 1920s, their revolutionary worlds had diverged quite dramatically since 1927.

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Throughout the 1930s red and white cadres faced dissimilar challenges, problems and ways of solving them. As Tony Saich points out, ‘The revolution looked quite different to a Party member ducking in and out of Shanghai’s foreign concessions while arranging clandestine meetings than to a Red Army soldier gazing out from a barren mountain-top in a relatively safe Communist base area.’15 First of all, however tough the physical conditions in the liberated soviet area, the resident communists enjoyed autonomy, solidarity and a sense of control over their destinies that white area cadres could scarcely dream of. In Mao’s words, ‘To arrive in a [revolutionary] base area is to arrive in an epoch unprecedented in the several thousand years of Chinese history, one where workers, peasants, soldiers and the popular masses hold power’.16 The red area cadre could wear his communist badge proudly on his sleeve. He existed in a rareﬁed, ‘pure’ atmosphere, a cocoon of egalitarian brotherhood and a relationship of mutual respect with neighbouring peasant populations. Work could be done in the liberated areas in a framework of ‘party discipline and administrative and ideological control’.17 Life was not comfortable, but it was clear-cut, simpliﬁed in the consciousness of unity between one’s thoughts and deeds. Knowledge and action meshed in ﬂuid harmony. This is obviously a wildly over-idealized and romanticized image of the red area cadre, but it is nevertheless the conﬁdent self-image – one of revolutionary purity and simplicity – that evolved and was successfully and effectively projected. The heroic military activities, participation in the Long March and frugal, ascetic life-style of the liberated area cadres have all been documented, recounted and frequently gloriﬁed – and not only by party historians.18 Even in the light of evidence that paints a more realistic picture, harshly highlighting the impurities, these fell far short of the levels of crime, corruption, decadence and miserable inequalities of life in the white areas.19 White area life in the ‘semi-feudal, semi-colonial society ruled by landlords and the big bourgeoisie’ was considered the complete antithesis of the ‘new democratic society under the leadership of the proletariat’.20 White area cadres, however unwavering in their commitment to communist principles, had to behave in keeping with the ‘corrupt’ environment in which they operated, to observe the norms of bourgeois society. Unlike their red area counterparts, white area cadres could not align inner purity of commitment with outer conduct – they could not be both inwardly and outwardly sincere. They had to adopt double, if not multiple, personas because they had constantly to dissemble.

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Deceit, perforce, was second nature. This was the case whether they worked in legally permitted, united front activities with non-communist personnel or in the illegal, underground party organizations. Either way their communist identity had to be concealed. Either way their outer behaviour was essentially pragmatic. The complexities of communist cadre life in a non-communist milieu challenged the simplistic notions and concepts of communist morality enjoyed by those in the liberated areas. In the white areas there seemed to be inﬁnite shades of grey in terms of what a cadre could do to promote the communist cause. Paradoxically this could even include denouncing communism, as did the sixty-one. If such unprincipled means could be employed in the service of principled ends it was no wonder that white area cadres came to be regarded with suspicion by their red area colleagues. The pasts of white area cadres are often referred to as ‘complicated’, a euphemism for ‘fraught with suspicious and highly dubious aspects’. Respectful obituaries take pains to stress – from a rather poignantly defensive stance – that the deceased was always ‘open and above-board’ when in fact a white area cadre’s life and revolutionary role depended on his ability to adopt the very opposite characteristics.21 The dichotomy between simplicity and complexity was perhaps the most fundamental and powerful of contrasts in the respective life-style and Weltanschauung of red and white area cadres.22 Lowell Dittmer has contrasted Mao’s ‘fairly uncomplicated approach to inner-Party struggle’ with the ‘rather more complex system of ethics’ promoted by Liu Shaoqi. The former could afford to be less complicated, operating as he did from the ‘security of the red area bases’, but for Liu ‘White area forces were “ﬁsh” in a non-Party sea and exposed to much more serious security problems’.23 Minimizing white area cadres’ exposure to danger and maximizing the effectiveness of their party work were Liu Shaoqi’s primary objectives when he arrived in Tianjin in the spring of 1936 to head the party’s North Bureau. He began by clarifying party policy on how white area work was to be carried out henceforth: united front and underground work were to be kept strictly separate in terms of personnel and content. As many cadres as possible were required for united-front operations with the burgeoning bourgeois patriotic movement, which desired civil unity and resistance to Japan. These patriots were students, intellectuals, professionals, businessmen and soldiers – a responsive population eager to have their dynamic, volatile nationalist feelings organized into effective expression and action. Without identifying themselves

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as communists, party cadres were to lend their organizational and public relations (propaganda) skills, thereby supporting and, wherever possible, leading legal organizations that promoted national unity and resistance. This type of work was referred to as overt (legal) or semi-overt work. While ‘the scope of overt work should be broadened as much as possible and all that can be done openly should be done so’, Liu declared that ‘the scope of covert work should be reduced as much as possible, and only such work as cannot be done openly should be done covertly’.24 No cadre should be assigned simultaneously to both types of work, and as few as possible were required for the small, secret underground party organizations. The underground cadre worked largely alone. Discipline was self-administered. Here was no cocoon of group support and mutual supervision. Ideally the only direct contact the individual cadre was supposed to have with the party was via one cadre at the next operational level in the hierarchy. Beyond this level the relationship between cadre and party was somewhat distant and impersonal. Not for him the immediate and visible presence, as in Yan’an, of the charismatic Mao and his leadership colleagues. The underground cadre had to have faith in the notion of a tightly organized, small and secret party hierarchy, the Leninist model of party leadership based on the principle of democratic centralism. He had to have faith in it and protect it above all else, because this was his lifeline in the shark-infested non-communist sea. Projects and plans that might threaten the existence of the party organizations were to be suspended until the time was ripe. Comrades should act with ‘foresight, persistance and patience’ – or not at all.25 Ensconced and cut off in Yan’an, the Maoist leadership voiced full support and understanding for the more-cloak, less-dagger approach to white area work. Pragmatism, the use of ﬂexible tactics and safeguarding one’s numerically inferior manpower were hardly foreign concepts to Mao. They were the very essence of guerrilla warfare. But their bloodand-guts application on the battleﬁeld had a heroic qualitative edge over white area activities in the salons and teahouses of Beijing and Tianjin. The red area leadership certainly recognized the complexities and peculiarities of white area work as necessary – but as necessary evils that could not be incorporated into the vocabulary of revolutionary purity. When slogans referring to white area work did enter the ofﬁcial lexicon they were double-edged swords, for they addressed not only honourable objectives but also ambiguous methods, with all their loaded potential for misinterpretation, both by those who chose to do

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so and by those naive enough to believe the distortions. Thus the oftrepeated (with minor variations) party depiction of white area comrades as ‘well-selected cadres working underground for a long time, accumulating strength and biding their time’ could also conjure up a less kind image – comrades doing precious little and concerned mainly for their own personal safety.26 Even without this twist in meaning, slogans such as the above or the ‘red heart, white skin’ policy still underscored an essential difference between the red and white area milieux.27 Conditions and events beyond their control constrained and determined the choice of actions by white area cadres. In the autonomous liberated area, communists had far greater freedom to create initiatives for action, for openly mobilizing the masses. In effect Mao had a head start in developing the ingredients of his man-over-matter and countryside-ﬁrst brand of communism, whereas until the late 1930s white area cadres in their urban setting seemed to be going about the business of revolution in a more conventionally Leninist mould.28

Self-sacriﬁce Liu Shaoqi made valiant attempts to convey the heroic side of white area work, which he described as thousands of times more difﬁcult than work in a liberated base area, where one immediately receives work, food and clothing. The white area cadre must ﬁnd his own food, ﬁnance the Party, and be willing to put his head on the block at any time for he is in ever-present danger of being caught by the enemy.29 But try as he did to package the white area cadre’s image in heroic terms, the realities of white area work and the work methods that Liu himself promoted (and that the Maoist Party leadership supported from afar) nurtured the seeds of prejudice. Willingness to put one’s head on the block was one thing. Actually putting it there was something that Liu encouraged party cadres to avoid. He rejected all vestiges of empty heroism – ‘The Party member should not play the individual hero’ – condemning it as ‘conceit’ and ‘ostentatiousness’.30 What the party needed in 1936 was live manpower, not dead martyrs. As far as Liu was concerned there had been too many of the latter, owing to the irresponsible approach of his predecessors’ ‘left-adventurist’ or ‘closed-door’ white area policies. While there could be no compromise on matters

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of principle, there could and should be life-preserving ﬂexibility in method. He demanded cautious, rational planning: There are always several possible solutions to concrete and practical problems. There are always several roads to get from one place to another. These ways and roads have their respective advantages and disadvantages depending on the circumstances. A certain path might seem to hold the greatest beneﬁts for us, but since it entails risk, we will play it safe by taking another which seems less advantageous.31 But playing it safe, the low-proﬁle, prudent work-style that Liu sought to cultivate, contradicted the simplistic and conventional notions of heroism: bold, highly visible acts of deﬁance and daring. Sacriﬁcing oneself for the party had an array of meanings for Liu, only one of which was death. His approach to the ethic of loyalty accorded with the ‘rational, relativist’ tendency in Chinese history.32 He did not question the principle of loyalty, but was willing to bend convention in the ways of demonstrating it. Giving up one’s good name, as the sixty-one risked doing, could therefore also be considered self-sacriﬁce if it was in the party’s interest. But the language of revolutionary purity in which the Yan’an era was wrapped harked back to the equally prevalent tradition in which absolute loyalty to the ruler was expressed in absolute ways – plumbing religious inspiration for ‘ritual human sacriﬁce’ and the ‘tendency of the absolute imperative to conﬂate loyalty with ﬁlial piety’.33 Lucien Pye refers to the mythical and real self-sacriﬁcing heros of Chinese literature and politics, placing them ﬁrmly within the ethos of loyalty in the Maoist rebel brotherhood culture: ‘For the Maoists, dedication, commitment and self-sacriﬁce constituted the essentials of loyalty, which is a key value in all politics’.34 In the red areas, deﬁnitions of such essentials were simple and straightforward. They had to be if they were to reach the greatest number of people – most of whom were not well educated – in the shortest time. As the paramount role model of communist morality the party had to set crystal-clear, unambiguous standards of revolutionary purity for its members’ conduct, and these standards continued to be transmitted in party teminology. Hence, for example, the following commemoration of three imprisoned communists who met their death in 1946: ‘They remained unyielding and awe-inspiring, by upholding justice against the vicious enemy and remained faithful to the party until they were killed. They demonstrated the fearless spirit and revolutionary heroism of communists.’35 The use

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of the terms ‘unyielding’ and ‘remained faithful’ indicated the antithesis of recantation. Martyrs remained in control of their communist identity. Theirs was an act of starkly unambiguous simplicity, suiting the red area revolutionary ideal milieu just as it was later to suit the Cultural Revolution milieu. In such a deﬁnition of revolutionary heroism there was no room for recanters such as the sixty-one, however sham their recantation, however worthy its ultimate purpose.

Confession A surrender is a surrender, and no surrender is phoney. As far as a communist who has fallen into the hands of the enemy is concerned, he has to make the choice between laying down his life for the revolution and betraying the revolution for his personal safety. There can never be any third road to take. . . . Every ‘phoney surrender’ was a genuine betrayal.36 These words encapsulate the uncompromising perspective of the Cultural Revolution media on the conduct of the sixty-one. Not choosing to risk death was bad enough as far as the revolutionary purists were concerned, but escaping this fate via confession compounded the evil. The act of confession carried its own weighty baggage of positive and negative associations from China’s political–legal and Marxist–Leninist traditions. The legal tradition demonstrated generous lenience to the offender who confessed, to the extent of withholding punishment altogether if the confession was made before the offence had come to light or reducing the punishment following the confession of a crime already committed.37 But this could put the confessant in an awkward situation. The more lenient the law, the more cowardly the confessant appeared in the eyes of his peers, and all the more so if he had been convicted and then confessed in order to avoid a sentence involving physical punishment, not to mention a potential death penalty. The trend of full or partial mitigation of punishment for those who confessed their offences continued with variations under both GMD and CCP rule.38 Both parties politicized and incorporated aspects of the legal tradition’s approach to confession into their respective thoughtreform methods and legal systems, promising lenient treatment to those willing to cooperate and renounce their former political afﬁliations. Both parties drew on the Confucian approach to self-rectiﬁcation via education and practice, to zixin (becoming a new person), though what was once a private and self-imposed process became increasingly public

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and coercive in its twentieth-century political attire. But what the old and new modes still had in common regarding the act of confession was that it facilitated the demonstration of benevolence on the part of the ruling authority, placing the latter in an enhanced moral light and at the same time underlining its supreme power. Recantation as a culmination of thought reform thus appealed to the GMD (just as much as it did to the CCP) as symbolic proof of its re-education techniques, but above all as a very real acknowledgement of GMD power. In an era of bitter struggle between the two parties, one contending for the power the other held, the recantations by the sixty-one were quite a coup, for these comrades were a hefty proportion of the party’s leading activists in north China. Confession to the GMD authorities, false or not, was a thorny issue for the communists. Attempts were made by the party, for example in 1937 (by no small coincidence, not long after the release of the sixtyone) and 1941, to formulate policy toward comrades who had followed GMD confession procedures.39 Could their party membership be resumed immediately, or did they require a probationary trial period? Did different categories of confession demand different forms of treatment? Was signing a newspaper recantation in widely circulated GMD newspapers more serious than participating in a ‘turning over a new leaf’ ceremony? In the long run, despite attempts to create categories there were no blanket solutions. Each case had to be investigated on an individual basis. Because of the Central Committee’s involvement in their release and the ensuing high-level protection, the sixty-one were able to escape rigorous individual inspection – up to a point. That point was the Cultural Revolution, when their protection was shattered and the language of revolutionary purity knew no bounds in literal interpretation. Apostasy was not be stomached, not by Red Guard zealots too young to have had ﬁrst-hand experience of the complexities of white area life, and not by radical leaders – Kang Sheng, Jiang Qing, Chen Boda among them – who had had so much of it that they felt compelled to draw a holier-than-thou line between themselves and unfortunates such as the sixty-one.40

The sixty-one The Chinese Communist Party’s ambivalence towards its white area cadres is epitomized in the experiences of the sixty-one. This monograph charts their voyage over half a century from the early 1930s until the 1990s. It follows the leading sixty-oners’ careers from their under-

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ground party roles and their arrest and imprisonment by the GMD, through to the peak of their PRC careers and beyond – Bo Yibo became one of the foremost policy makers and administrators of the PRC economy, An Ziwen was to head the party’s powerful Organization Department, Yang Xianzhen ran the Party’s Central School, and Liu Lantao directed the party’s disciplinary watchdog, the Control Commission, in the mid 1950s and subsequently moved on to govern an entire region of China as ﬁrst secretary of the Northwest China Bureau. While many of their former cell mates rose to illustrious positions as party secretaries and government ministers, Bo, An, Yang and Liu remained the most prominent ﬁgures among the sixty-one. The paths of the sixty-one, though not strewn with obstacles thrown up from the past, did incur the odd bump and pothole well before the Cultural Revolution. Some learnt to manoeuvre round these hazards more successfully than others. But the Cultural Revolution was non-negotiable. All the sixty-oners who had been rounded up were treated as equally bad and equally dispensable. They had all fallen into the same pit, reserved for renegades only. This book opens with a brief survey of the broad historical context, the international and domestic conditions that inaugurated the CCP–GMD united front and precipitated the release of the sixty-one. The second chapter addresses their GMD prison experience (1931–36) and how this has been remembered by some of the participants as a revolution in micro. Their portrayal rejects any Rip van Winkle images of passivity, of inmates frozen in space and time – more than ﬁve years – while their peers were practising war and revolution. In reconstructing their prison years, the sixty-one stake their claim as no less dynamic actors in the communist revolution, despite their restrictive prison environment. The fateful decision to which they bow, the release plan, is the next subject under scrutiny. Who inititated it? How was it arranged and executed? The convolutions involved are a worthy demonstration of the complexities of party life in the white areas, both inside and outside prison. The labyrinthine process involves a motley cast of agents, including a university lecturer, an ex-prisoner, a friendly prison guard and, at a later stage, a chicken. Interestingly the facts of the release presented in Red Guard materials, so antipathetic to the sixty-one, are almost entirely corroborated by the sympathetic post-Cultural Revolution accounts.41 The interpretation, of course, is different, as is the issue of Central Committee involvement – an issue that is never satisfactorily resolved even in the

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Central Committee resolution exonerating the sixty-one in 1978.42 Had the Central Committee formally recorded that it as a collective body – not just one or two individuals – backed the 1936 release, and that the cadres were guilty of nothing more than obeying party orders, this might have pre-empted some of the problems the sixty-one were to encounter. The ﬁrst such encounter occurred after their arrival in Yan’an in the early 1940s, when aspersions were cast on their suitability as delegates in the run-up to the party’s Seventh Congress (1945). This issue closes Chapter 2, following a survey of the diverse party activities pursued by the sixty-one in their ﬁrst years of freedom. Their work in building up new liberated base areas and recruiting new blood to the party was invaluable to the Chinese communist movement’s eventual accession to power in 1949.43 Chapter 3 opens with an overview of the subsequent PRC career paths of the sixty-one – an impressive array of high-level appointments: heads and deputy heads of central and regional Party organs and government bodies. By 1958 several had achieved Central Committee status. In 1956 two were appointed as alternate members to the party’s highest echelons of power, the Politburo and the Secretariat – Bo Yibo to the former and Liu Lantao to the latter. Yet neither achieved full membership status in these institutions.44 Focusing on Bo, An, Yang and Liu, Chapter 3 examines their high-proﬁle roles and political power bases, highlighting factors that may have reinforced the subsequent Cultural Revolution image of disloyalty, constructed on their 1936 renunciations. It looks at their responses to speciﬁc events, such as the Gao Gang affair, to policy disputes over party building and the pace of economic development, as well as their behaviour in periods of crisis such as the Great Leap Forward and its aftermath. It raises the question of whether their political responses were determined by a feeling of vulnerability (because of their complicated histories), by a need to prove and prove again that they were loyal servants of the party – and its unpredictable master. Despite their impressive collective curriculum vitae, they were still subject to the occasional veiled allusion to their past, to a questioning of their ﬁtness (that is, loyalty) as participants in the party’s leading ranks. In the early 1950s, when Party unity was a theme close to his heart, Mao took care to quash such tendencies, but his attitude was far from consistent as time went on, and the whole notion of party unity was turned on its head during the Cultural Revolution’s ferocious attack on party bureaucracy. The subsequent chapters discuss the fall of the sixty-one in the early stages of the Cultural Revolution and their very late rehabilitation at

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the end of 1978. Chapter 4 looks at the collusion of radical leaders with Red Guards and the media in building up the ‘case of the sixty-one renegades’. The party leadership – and here Zhou Enlai played an active role – at ﬁrst tried in vain to stem the ﬂow of publicity about the case, fearing exposure of the Central Committee’s role in the 1936 release. Trying to make the best of the situation, it then opted for a strategy of limited containment. Zhang Wentian was forced to say that he alone, in his 1936 role as secretary-general of the Central Committee, had authorized Liu Shaoqi’s release plan without consulting Mao or any other Central Committee colleagues. However the untidy dynamic of the Cultural Revolution could not be neatly contained. The incrimination of the sixty-one led to a campaign against former white area cadres in general, especially those who had been imprisoned in the 1930s and 1940s. Once the sixty-one were ofﬁcially condemned as renegades by the Central Committee’s resolution of mid March 1967, the campaign against Liu Shaoqi moved into high gear. If Mao had previously entertained a more merciful approach to Liu, implying that he was not beyond re-education, the March resolution was a turning point, for renegades belonged to the most abysmal category of contradictions, that between the people and the enemy. Not only had Liu been linked to various episodes of alleged betrayal, but he had decreed the disloyalty of the sixty-one. He was the devil–renegade incarnate. The 1936 recantation was the sixty-one’s ticket out of the GMD jail. A costly ticket, it was still valid more than three decades later to transport them back to prison in Beijing, this time under the custody of their own party. Their harsh treatment – torture and medical neglect – cost some their lives, as it cost Liu Shaoqi his in October 1969. Others somehow endured. As has been documented by Michael Schoenhals, leaders such as Zhou Enlai were far from ignorant of these conditions and were just as accountable as Kang Sheng and other more conventionally perceived perpetrators of Cultural Revolution iniquities.45 Chapter 5 traces the long-drawn-out process of rehabilitation. The case of the sixty-one still had a role to play in the mid 1970s, when Mao pursued his extraordinary balancing act between the radical and moderate elements in the party leadership. On the one hand, survivors among the sixty-one were released from prison in 1975; on the other, they were not rehabilitated – far from it. They were expelled from the party and mostly removed from Beijing to remote areas for internal exile. After Mao’s death and the Gang of Four’s arrest, and throughout 1977 and 1978 when still more prominent ofﬁcials were rehabilitated,

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the sixty-one and other notable white area cadres, such as Peng Zhen, remained personae non gratae. Renegades were still renegades. It was the most difﬁcult label to remove. Eventually the uniquely traditional Chinese preference for restoring disgraced ofﬁcials to ofﬁce held sway even for the sixty-one. The Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee (December 1978) rehabilitated most of the remaining purged high-level cadres and former white area cadres. The tendency to return its rejected and ejected cadre ofﬁcials to the fold and reactivate them, has distinguished the Chinese communist regime from European ones, particularly the Soviet Union, where rehabilitation was, in the vast majority of cases, posthumous.46 One practical motive for rehabilitation, with an identiﬁably Confucian origin, was to make use of skilled and experienced personnel for the sake of efﬁcient government and hence for the good of the people. Thus disgraced ofﬁcials often came to expect relatively lenient treatment and could hope for rehabilitation. At a more philosophical level lay the desire to restore cosmic harmony upset by wrongful or excessive punishment. Translated into post-Cultural Revolution terms, this meant the desire to restore a sense of order following a decade of chaos. One way to do this was to bestow fair treatment upon victims of injustice. Being seen to restore harmony and administer justice was no less important, demonstrating not only benevolence but also absolute power. In this respect the concerns of the post-Cultural Revolution leadership were no different from those of its various imperial antecedents, nor at times from those of its immediate predecessor, the Maoist regime. But even in its rehabilitative role the party maintained an ambivalent tone in its handling of the sixty-one. Other late rehabilitees, such as Yang Shangkun and Peng Zhen, fared better in terms of ofﬁcial positions in the political arena. Neither the Central Organization Department’s investigative report of November 1978 on the so-called sixty-one renegades’ case nor their subsequent formal exoneration by the Central Committee the following month did much to contradict the impression that Zhang Wentian, rather than the Central Committee as a whole, had authorized the release plan in 1936. It was presented as a ‘one-off’ situation, special circumstances at a special time. The Central Committee was determined to shake off any impression that it was in the habit of issuing such distasteful instructions. Similarly when Liu Shaoqi was ﬁnally and posthumously rehabilitated in 1980, other renegadism charges against him were dismissed in copious detail, but the sixty-one affair was brieﬂy glossed over.47 This seemed to imply a lapse in judgement in his handling of the whole sorry business.

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Many of the communist cadres who emerged from the Guomindang jails of the 1930s and 1940s were to enrich the Chinese communist movement with their white area background and experience, their skills in party building, civil administration and economic planning and, perhaps above all, with their faith in the Leninist model of party leadership and discipline. In the hazardous underground they learnt caution; in prison they learnt patience. They constituted a signiﬁcant component of the CCP leadership’s educated core, the Leninist vanguard of the revolution. The present Chinese leadership owes more to the rational Marxist–Leninist mindset than to Mao’s voluntarist tradition. Yet despite the essentially pragmatic socioeconomic policies and activities of the post-Mao era, the vocabulary of communist morality remains largely stuck in the time warp of revolutionary purity. A good communist is still deﬁned as one who behaves according to the clearcut norms of idealized Yan’an morality. The ambiguities of white area life cannot be wrapped up in a neat ready-to-emulate model. Nobody has ever wanted to hold up the 1936 affair, with all its moral complexity, as something to be proud of. Nor is anyone likely to in the foreseeable future.

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1 1936: On the Eve of War and Freedom

The year 1936 was a turning point for everybody. The Versailles settlement of 1919 gave way to the overtures of World War II: Hitler reoccupied the Rhineland, Mussolini ﬁnished the conquest of Ethiopia, they set up the Berlin-Rome Axis, the League of Nations collapsed, civil war began in Spain. Me, I ﬁnished my D.Phil (Oxon.) and began to face issues of policy and livelihood. ( John K. Fairbank, Chinabound)1 I arrived in Tianjin in spring, 1936. The task assigned to me by the Central Committee was to direct the work of the Party organization in north China, . . . to unite all parties, groups and social strata in north China . . . to establish an anti-Japanese united front . . . to devise slogans and forms of struggle suited to the concrete circumstances of an already rising tide in the revolutionary movement (especially among the students and the intelligentsia) . . . (Liu Shaoqi, Selected Works)2 1936 was indeed a turning point, not just for scholars and revolutionaries but for entire nations and vast continents. For China it was the year that all its disparate forces – Guomindang government and military leaders, the Chinese Communist Party, warlord generals, radical students and National Salvation activists – ﬁnally converged on the one path of a united front against Japan.3 For Bo Yibo, An Ziwen, Yang Xianzhen, Liu Lantao and their comrades in Beijing’s Caolanzi prison, 1936 was the year they achieved freedom and took up a new and formative role in the communist revolution. Most of the group had been incarcerated together since 1931, an enforced bonding experience for these individuals, who hailed from all 20

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over China and from a variety of class backgrounds, and whose ages ranged, at the time of their arrest, from the late teens to the early thirties. In general they had completed at least secondary education and many – Bo, An, Yang and Liu included – had gone on to tertiary level, to teacher-training colleges or universities, though not all had graduated since their revolutionary activities had tended to interfere with their academic progress. A few, such as Yin Jian, Hu Xikui and Liu Xiwu, had studied abroad. Apart from being better educated than their peasant counterparts in the rural soviets, the most this group had had in common in 1931 had been an active involvement in the clandestine communist movement in urban north China, though not all had been formal party members before their imprisonment. They had held positions at various organizational levels in the party’s northern network, which had operated in up to nine provinces, so few had been personally acquainted before the relentless intimacy of their Caolanzi years.4 Besides the security constraints of underground work (not always observed in practice), there had been no reason for a provincial party secretary in Henan to know a grass-roots party worker in Chahar, or a courier in Shandong to know a municipal secretary in Shanxi. Why, as spring turned to summer in 1936, did it become imperative to engineer the release of these few dozen cadres from the GMD prison in Beijing? Why risk the damage of publishing recantation notices in widely read newspapers? The answers to these questions constitute the broad and narrow historical context behind the release of the so-called ‘sixty-one renegades’, and the subject of this chapter. There were three main and interrelated components of this context. The ﬁrst was the CCP’s decision to opt for a nationwide anti-Japanese united front, for which it had many willing partners – and some less so. The second was the CCP’s lack of available personnel to set up and operate a united front. What this task required was not the hardy peasant soldiers who had endured the Long March but cadres of another ilk: those who had a common language with urban civilians in general and students in particular, as well as with military ofﬁcials desirous of a united front; cadres who were experienced in mass work and party building in the cities and their environs. By the mid 1930s, in the northern cities of Beijing, Tianjin and Taiyuan there were more such cadres inside the GMD jails than out. The third component was the perceived imminence of Japan’s seizure of Beijing. If Japan was to step up its creeping annexation of Chinese territory – and in spring 1936 it seemed on the brink of prising Beijing away from its shaky Chinese sovereignty – these imprisoned cadres would be shown no mercy.

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The common enemy Since Japan’s occupation of Manchuria after the Mukden incident of September 1931, Japan’s designs on Chinese territory had cast an increasingly sinister shadow.5 By mid 1935 the Japanese had established the Inner Mongolian Autonomous Government and, worse still, by November eastern Hebei was ﬁrmly in Japan’s grasp, in the form of the East Hebei Autonomous Anti-Communist Zone. But that was not all. In early July the secret He-Umezu agreement had been drawn up between the Japanese and the GMD, signifying Japan’s intention of separating the ﬁve northern provinces, Hebei, Shandong, Shanxi, Chahar and Suiyuan, from the rest of China. In the meantime, to maintain at least a semblance of ‘national integrity’, the nationalist government had established the Hebei–Chahar Political Council under the chairmanship of General Song Zheyuan. The Japanese exerted relentless pressure on Song to sever his links with the GMD Nanjing government and declare autonomy – a euphemism for a Japanese puppet regime. China was not alone in feeling threatened. Her neighbour the Soviet Union viewed with growing alarm Japan’s steady advance in its direction and – further threatened by the possibility of an anti-Soviet alliance composed of Japan, Germany and a Japan-dominated China – was determined to encourage an anti-Japanese united front between the GMD and Chinese communists. The Comintern, increasingly bound by the Soviet Communist Party and state interests, had all but abandoned its message of international proletarian revolution, and was advocating instead that the left should ally with bourgeois democratic elements in united or ‘popular’ fronts to throw off the yoke of fascist imperialism. In encouraging CCP–GMD negotiations, the Soviet Union could thus employ an ideological rationale that might be palatable to both Chinese parties.6 At the same time, as an alternative safety device, it encouraged the CCP to ally with the northern warlords, who were frustrated with Chiang Kai-shek’s policy of appeasement, and to maintain an independent buffer zone against Japan should Chiang falter and make further concessions to the Japanese. Despite the incompatibilities in this dual approach, there were positive responses from all concerned. The Soviet Union further stimulated these responses through the mention of aid and military supplies to both nationalists and communists. Meanwhile Chiang Kai-shek was more than wary of both the Soviet communist regime and Japan. Perceiving China as ‘wedged between two dangerous, expansive powers’, he sought ‘to use the inﬂuence and support of each to check the advances of the other’.7 If he continued to

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negotiate with Japan and avoid confrontation he might beneﬁt from Japanese assistance against the resurgent communist movement. However, should non-confrontation become untenable he would have no recourse but to turn to the USSR. Chiang therefore sought to keep his options open with the Soviets by exchanging delegates, indicating interest in Moscow’s proposal for GMD–CCP negotiations, and having government ofﬁcials and political allies engage in such contacts on his behalf. This may also have been done with an eye to alleviating the continuous and mounting domestic pressure on Chiang to halt his internal ‘paciﬁcation’ campaigns against the communists and turn his attention fully to the Japanese threat. It was largely because Chiang persisted in yoking ‘internal paciﬁcation’ to ‘resisting the Japanese’ – the former as a precondition for the latter – that urban public opinion, including that of some leading GMD ﬁgures, began to identify eradication of the communists with appeasement of the Japanese, and wanted the entire formula turned on its head. Domestic pressure was exerted by highly respected national ﬁgures such as Song Qingling, the widow of Sun Yatsen, by intellectuals, professionals and businessmen who had banded together in National Salvation Associations. More vocal still were the students who injected dramatic momentum into the patriotic movement in the winter of 1935, protesting at China’s grim plight as the GMD’s hold on the northern provinces crumbled away. Armed with a manifesto that opposed the so-called autonomy of these provinces and ‘demanded open foreign conduct and restoration of civil liberties’, some 2000 students converged on the streets of Beijing on 9 December 1935. Five days later a further demonstration took place with more than 7000 student participants.8 Demonstrations spread to Nanjing, Shanghai and Tianjin: In many places, the criticism of Chiang Kai-shek and his policies was nearly as bitter as the condemnation of Japan. Not only was China’s youth ﬁnding its political voice after nearly four years of silence, but it was on the verge of repudiating the Nanking government.9 But perhaps the most insidious pressure, as far as Chiang was concerned, came from his own military ranks and at the highest levels. Former warlords, who had been no less bent than he on destroying any communist presence in the territories they commanded, had been co-opted as generals in Chiang’s army in the wake of his national uniﬁcation efforts during the previous decade. They had observed the growth of the Red

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Army and were impressed by its troops’ discipline and ability to mobilize support amongst the rural population via effective propaganda, rural reforms, organizational skills and respectful behaviour. The warlords-cum-generals – such as Zhang Xueliang, who had lost Manchuria to the Japanese, and Yan Xishan, who was threatened with a similar fate in Shanxi – realized they could look to the Red Army not only as an active ﬁghting ally but also as an agent capable of rallying support and attracting recruits. Furthermore some considered that Soviet military aid was more likely to materialize through the communist channel than via the Nanjing government’s negotiations. Something of a symbiotic relationship thus developed between the CCP and certain warlords: the latter would permit the communists a degree of freedom of manoeuvre among their troops in exchange for potential joint action against Japan – protecting the warlords’ territorial interests as well as China’s national integrity. The communists saw this as an opportunity to expand their soviet base areas and attract troops into their own armies. Zhang Xueliang and Yang Hucheng, who commanded Chiang’s ‘bandit’ (that is, communist) suppression forces in northern China, tried to persuade Chiang to stop attacking the communists and turn his ﬁrepower on the foreign enemy who had entered the gates. Eventually the generals resorted to the language of persuasion they knew best: force, culminating in the curious and fateful Xi’an Incident, the kidnapping of Chiang Kai-shek, as 1936 drew to a close. Negotiations with the communists became ofﬁcial, direct – and unavoidable. And what of Chiang’s bête noire, the Chinese communist movement? How had it fared since the ﬂight of most of its members from the GMD’s ever-tightening encirclement campaigns around the Jiangxi soviet? By the autumn of 1935, the Long March was over. Some 30 000 communists, including the CCP’s central leadership, had survived. They were ensconced in a soviet in the rugged, inhospitable terrain of northern Sha’anxi. The party’s headquarters were in Bao’an. Mao Zedong was well en route to establishing himself as ‘leader of the Party, the Soviet, and the Army’.10 The communists’ situation had considerably changed now that they possessed a territorial base and, perhaps even more signiﬁcantly, an army. But time was sorely needed for consolidation, for the preservation and expansion of military strength. In their new liberated base they still faced harsh realities: vulnerability to GMD attack, scarcity of food, isolation from the remaining clandestine communists in the urban GMD-controlled areas.11 A united-front resistance agreement would remove the GMD military threat from the communist doorstep,

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committing the GMD forces to ﬁght against the Japanese. The CCP could look to the urban public to support a united front; Mao was determined to nurture and use the growing national fervour for resistance against Japan to the best advantage, as he saw it, of both country and party.12 The convergence of these domestic constraints and international interests ushered the second united front into being as the most appropriate option to serve the respective goals of the parties involved. The CCP could not, even if it had wanted to, ignore the prestige of the Soviet Union’s leading role in communist theory and practice.13 If the dictates of Soviet state interests and Comintern policy were now fused in a call for communist alliance with bourgeois democratic elements against fascism and imperialism, the CCP would have to hearken to the call. If it had not ﬁtted their current perceptions, they would have had to juggle their perceptions and their interpretation of the Soviet call to make it do so. But it did ﬁt. The Chinese communists’ revolutionary passion had always been heavily imbued with national pride, and the notion of national unity was more an inclination of natural instinct than a major mental leap. In any case there was little sensible alternative for the relatively small Chinese communist force. If it wanted not only to expand but also to gain legitimacy, it would have to demonstrate its desire for alliance with as many sectors of Chinese society as possible in the ﬁght against Japan. Thus it was that by the end of 1935 the CCP leadership had concluded, not without prodding from the Soviet Union and much inspired by the impact of the student December Ninth Movement, that the time had come to relegate class struggle temporarily to the number-two spot and promote the national struggle against Japan as the immediate principal task of the revolution.14 It took a few more months for the party leadership to give public expression to the unpalatable fact that an authentic and completely united front imposed from above would have to include Chiang Kai-shek. Considering the recent bitter past, the illfated ﬁrst united front, the 1927 massacres, and the subsequent, relentless encirclement campaigns waged against them, the fact that Chiang was anathema to the communists was hardly surprising. Nevertheless there was a limit to the support the CCP could garner without declaring its willingness to unite with Chiang, and furthermore the war against Japan could not be fought without his Nanjing troops. An unequivocal invitation to join an anti-Japanese united front was communicated by the CCP to Chiang and his government on 25 August 1936.15

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This signiﬁcant readjustment to CCP public policy came in the wake of a veritable fever of secret contacts between CCP and GMD elements. Between winter 1935 and summer 1936, direct and indirect contact took place, sometimes initiated and facilitated by the parties themselves, sometimes by the Comintern and sometimes by supposedly more neutral agents, the leading national patriotic ﬁgures. By secretly engaging in contact with GMD leaders the communists indicated that the door was not hermetically sealed against Chiang Kai-shek. This aided the CCP’s attempts to form an alliance with those for whom resistance to Japan was top priority, but who at the same time did not want to appear disloyal to Chiang. Considering their paucity in numbers, the urban underground communists in north China played a signiﬁcant role in initiating and maintaining such contact. On behalf of the CCP, Lu Zhenyu – Beijing university lecturer by day and Beijing party committee member by night – met Zeng Yanji, GMD vice-minister of railways, in November 1935 and April 1936. Pan Hannian, one of the party’s foremost intelligence cadres, negotiated ﬁrst with Deng Wenyi, Chiang Kai-shek’s military attaché in Moscow, in January 1936 and then in June and September with Chen Lifu, Chiang’s powerful and close associate.16 By the spring of 1936 the CCP had stationed ofﬁcial liaison representatives with the troops of Zhang Xueliang and Yang Hucheng – cadres from the party’s clandestine North Bureau had negotiated the arrangement with Yang Hucheng. In April 1936 Zhou Enlai met Zhang Xueliang to ﬁnalize the arrangements that had been discussed with operatives from the Shanghai underground party organization.17 In the autumn Bo Yibo, just out of prison, was dispatched to Shanxi to negotiate and operate a remarkable programme of cooperation with Yan Xishan (discussed in Chapter 2). These contacts, whether secret or open, engendered a change in the political climate. Talking to one’s erstwhile enemies and reaching mutually favourable accords had become not only politically acceptable but ofﬁcial party policy. Thirty years later, during the Cultural Revolution, such contacts were ripped from their ofﬁcially sanctioned united-front context and denigrated as an offence against revolutionary purity. Within the framework of negotiating a united front, the release of political prisoners such as the sixty-one was a legitimate objective. The issue was put forward by the communists at every possible turn, and echoed by the patriotic movement. The CCP proposal forwarded to Chen Lifu in spring 1936 listed the following terms: (1) political freedom for anti-Japanese movements; (2) a broad-based national

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defence government; (3) a halt to the civil war, including attacks on the soviet area; (4) recognition of the legality of the soviet area; and (5) the release of all political prisoners.18 There was no response to the ﬁfth point. Meanwhile Zhou Enlai had achieved an agreement with Zhang Xueliang whereby political prisoners would be released from prisons under his jurisdiction and allowed freedom of action if they agreed ‘not to oppose the government and attack the leader’.19 This involved making what the communists referred to as a ‘non-anticommunist statement’ or an ‘ordinary statement’. Yang Xianzhen, one of the sixtyone, later described this procedure as one that he and his colleagues were willing to consider; they had tried to negotiate with the prison authorities permission to ‘publish an “ordinary” announcement, only promising to be peasants or teachers after being released from prison, or looking for other jobs and not to mention anything about anticommunism and politics’.20 In June the manifesto and political programme of the National Salvation Alliance (the umbrella organization for some sixty salvation associations) emphasized the need for an end to civil strife and offered its services as mediator.21 An appeal for the release of political prisoners was included and reiterated in the alliance’s formal proposal to the GMD Second Central Committee Fifth Plenary session.22 In July the Beijing student union similarly appealed to the plenum to ‘prepare for war against Japan, terminate civil war, unshackle the patriotic movement, release political prisoners and institute constitutional rule’.23 At the end of August 1936, when Mao announced to the GMD that the CCP was willing to enter into a united front with Chiang, Madame Sun, perhaps in the hope of a positive response from Chiang, called for a general amnesty for political prisoners. Her proposal was said to have attracted ‘widespread attention in judicial and legislative circles’, but there was no ofﬁcal response.24 The release of the ﬁrst batch of the sixtyone from Caolanzi, also at the end of August, came not in the form of an amnesty but as a result of the prisoners fulﬁlling stringent conditions laid down by the prison authorities – including the signing of explicitly and virulently anticommunist statements. After their release the issue remained high on the communist agenda, since there were still hundreds of cadres in other prisons. In December 1936 the release of political prisoners was among the eight proposals placed before hostage Chiang Kai-shek by his kidnappers – Zhang Xueliang and Yang Hucheng – in Xi’an. It was repeated in the demands laid before Chiang by Zhou Enlai prior to Chiang’s own release and return to Nanjing, and yet again in the CCP’s telegram

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to the GMD’s Third Plenary Session of the Fifth GMD Central Committee in mid February 1937.25 The formal united front agreement – reached only in September 1937, when the war with Japan had been raging for more than two months – did not mention prisoner release, but by then the GMD was in practice permitting some to be released unconditionally. While the patriots viewed the freeing of political prisoners as a gesture of good faith and an afﬁrmation of national unity by the GMD authorities, for the Chinese communist movement it had far more tangible signiﬁcance: the release of imprisoned cadres was not simply an issue of principle or a predictable negotiating stance, but a matter of dire urgency. Over almost a decade the GMD’s obsession with eradicating all vestiges of communism had devastated the communists’ urban network, leaving it desperately short of cadres to galvanize into action the vast pool of human resources that now lay at its ﬁngertips: national salvation patriots, regional leaders, soldiers, thousands of students and, of course, the immense rural population, as yet largely untapped. If the communist movement wished to expand it would have to inject very special cadres into this tableau. Men and women seasoned in the secrecy of underground work and equally comfortable operating in the open (as required by the united front); educated people who understood the art of propaganda, who could organize, train and lead citizens from all walks of life, and who could dally among government ofﬁcials, manoeuvre around warlords and drive intellectual debate. A few hundred cadres ﬁtted this description. Scarce on the ground at the best of times, most had been locked up in nationalist jails since the early 1930s. Among them were the sixty-one. How and why had these individuals landed in prison? The GMD’s ruthless policing was largely but not solely to blame.

The CCP in northern China The best of times was the year prior to the anticommunist coup of spring 1927. Membership of the party swelled to almost 58 000. Yet even then, only about 3000 members operated in northern China. Of these, about half worked in the two main northern cities of Beijing and Tianjin in Hebei province.26 Most of the action was in central and southern China. The communists’ ﬁrst united front (1923–27) with the Guomindang, which had been extending its control of central and southern China since 1926, had given the CCP substantial operational space – under the GMD ﬂag. Northern China provided no such nurturing environment

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for the communist movement. In 1919 Beijing had spawned the passionate May Fourth intellectual revolution, but the unstable warlord alliances and their governments seated in Beijing clamped down on political expression from any direction. The ﬁrst united front collapsed in spring 1927. Chiang Kai-shek’s GMD forces and his notorious Green Gang accomplices engaged in the slaughter of communists and suspected sympathizers in Shanghai, and the forces of Manchurian warlord Zhang Zuolin (the father of Zhang Xueliang) began killing off the CCP’s northern leadership in Beijing, among them Li Dazhao, the founding father of the Chinese communist movement. Of the party’s 58 000 members, only about 10 000 survived the massacres. The few who remained in urban GMD areas were forced underground; other survivors ﬂed to the countryside and joined in the creation of rural soviets. From 1927 the Chinese communist entity thus embarked on a process of metamorphosis, if not of reinventing itself as a largely peasant-based party. The growth of the movement to some 300 000 members during the early 1930s was largely due to rural recruitment in the soviet areas. The overall picture in the cities of northern China, however, was of dismal decline. By early 1929 there were only 120 members left in Beijing and about the same in Tianjin. The numbers rose, fell and rose again brieﬂy, but by the end of 1934 they had dwindled to a few tens in each city and a few hundred in the entire province of Hebei. ‘The Beiping Party leadership could contact only 7 members; and there were only 30 communists in Tianjin.’27 The GMD authorities boasted of having closed down in 1934 ‘the Northern Military Committee, Hebei Provincial Committee, Beiping City Committee, and many branches or sectional committees under it. The secretaries of these organizations, as well as the divisional and sectional chiefs, were among the 180odd persons we arrested.’28 Of the situation in April 1936, Liu Shaoqi wrote: What remained of our Party organizations in the White areas? Our answer, though painful, must be that only the ﬂag of our Party has been preserved. In general our Party organizations had ceased to exist, with the exceptions of a provincial committee in Hebei, local organizations in certain cities and villages and a number of cadres at the middle and grass-roots levels.29 The blame for this sorry situation did not rest entirely with the ruthless efﬁciency of warlord and GMD intelligence services. The CCP – and its

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Comintern senior partner – were no less responsible. Internecine strife, inappropriate policies and vague and contradictory instructions from the centre to local organizations combined to deleterious effect: erosion of commitment, alienation and many a case of desertion and/or betrayal. Some betrayed under torture and some under the threat of torture, of reprisal against their innocent families or of long years of imprisonment. But others betrayed because they felt betrayed – by a party that had lost its way and seemed callously indifferent to the fate of its members. Illusions and delusions of revolutionary grandeur created an unbridgeable gap between the centre’s notions of what should be achieved and the local organizations’ awareness of what could be achieved in these cities of strategic, political and economic signiﬁcance. Missions really were impossible, given the reality of an oppressive and repressive regime whose hold on the countryside may have been weak but who made up for this with ferocious tenacity in the cities. One objective reality, consistently ignored by the CCP central leadership, was the strength of the GMD-controlled ‘yellow’ unions, which concentrated on the economic needs of urban workers. The workers remained unstirred – or worse, were frightened – by the inﬂammatory political slogans spouted by communist labour organizers. Yet one after another the rapidly changing CCP leadership constellations in the late 1920s and early 1930s urged the northern cadres to incite politically motivated strikes in factories, mutinies in armies and armed uprisings in villages. Each leadership – under Qu Qiubai, then Li Lisan and the 1931–34 leadership – continued to demand high-proﬁle involvement by its cadres. It was as if the clock had stopped before the 1927 crackdown and they were still living in the headier days of the May Thirtieth movement, when the ﬁrst united front had enabled the communists to make temporary inroads in labour organization. Even then their success had been hampered by lack of manpower, but now they had far less manpower and no open space in which to manoeuvre. Every leaﬂet dropped, every slogan uttered was a life risked. Despite the mounting importance ascribed to the peasant ‘content’ of the revolution, the CCP leadership simply could not conceive of even temporarily abandoning the proletariat, the object of its unrequited love and, in theory at any rate, the lifeblood of any authentic communist movement.30 Though the party’s tactics changed to favour rural uprisings, the formation of soviets and the development of armed forces, the purpose was still to reinforce or spark off proletarian action and liberate the cities. The leadership continued to demand not only a vibrant communist-dominated labour movement but also a solid

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working-class backbone to the party’s membership and less reliance on the intelligentsia. What it got in the cities was a frustrated cadre force dominated by intellectuals whose most fruitful work was with other intellectuals and students. Increasingly this was to become the story of the communist underground’s survival in the 1930s in the northern cities and, as Patricia Stranahan has related, in Shanghai.31 Thus well before the the CCP decided to pursue the new united-front option, certain aspects of its necessary machinery had been well oiled by the urban underground. The relationship between the Central Committee and the local organizations mirrored that between Moscow and the CCP Central Committee, and suffered from the same syndrome. Each successive leadership acknowledged the failures of its predecessor and professed the need to put things right – to streamline the bureaucracy, reduce top-heavy local organizations, increase work at the grass-root level and increase the security measures for underground work. Each initially advised against rushing into revolutionary action without adequate preparation, but then fell quickly into the same trap, deploring the lack of results with workers, peasants and soldiers, and demanding action. Failure to act constituted rightist opportunism and defeatism. Acts that failed constituted leftist adventurism or ‘putschism’. The provincial and local organizations suffered an additional symptom: time-lag. By the time they had deciphered the signals from the centre regarding what was or was not wanted and had started to put their interpretation into action, the central leadership was already undergoing criticism from the Comintern, echoed internally, and shifting into another gear. The response of local cadres veered haphazardly between rash martyrdom and paralysis. It is amazing that more people didn’t just give up and leave. That they continued to risk their lives for the party was a measure of their dedication to the cause and their unswerving adherence to Leninist principles of party discipline.32 (Within the party organizational forum, cadres could express disagreement on a proposed policy or plan of action until a majority decison was reached or had been received from a higher level in the hierarchy, at which point they had to obey orders and carry out the party’s decision.) Their continued allegiance may be explained by additional factors, such as the passion of youthful idealism. Reason embedded in faith, combined with the Confucian ethic of the noble ofﬁcial who leads and serves in the best interests of the people, was a powerful combination ﬁring the hearts and minds of young people who believed they could change the world.

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Perhaps they had faith that each new leadership at central and local level would make a difference, take cognizance of the realities. Perhaps, because they had survived while so many of their comrades had not, their continued allegiance was an attempt to give meaning to those deaths.33 If survivor guilt motivated veterans of the Long March, this was also true for white area cadres who survived the consequences of GMD terror, Comintern ignorance and CCP ill judgement.

An organizational shambles No less amazing than individual allegiance was the organizational shambles in which the northern cadres were supposed to function. Between 1927 and mid 1931, by which time most of the sixty-one were under lock and key, the party’s northern administration underwent some form of restructuring every few months. The dizzying frequency with which this happened not only reﬂected changes in the central leadership but was also indicative of ongoing Central Committee dissatisfaction with its northern arm. Its concern, and the importance it attributed to the desired CCP role in Beijing, Tianjin, Tangshan and elsewhere in the north, was further demonstrated by the sending of a series of prominent party leaders – including Cai Hesen, Liu Shaoqi and Zhang Guotao – to try to whip things into shape during those four years. After the cruel spring of 1927 – when the CCP’s North Regional Committee in Beijing was destroyed, along with the various city committees and organizations in Hebei – came the summer of internal purge. Mounting criticism of alleged ‘rightist opportunism’ had led to the removal of CCP founder and leader Chen Duxiu. Directed by the new Qu Qiubai leadership, the same criticism was extended to the surviving northern leaders. The North Regional Committee was replaced by a new structure, the Shunzhi (Hebei) Provincial Committee,34 based in Tianjin, to run party work in northern China, including the provinces of Hebei, Shanxi, Shandong, Chahar, Henan, Sha’anxi and Rehe. New city committees were set up in Beijing and Tianjin, and soon enough a new North Bureau was created to oversee the Shunzhi Provincial Committee and ensure that no lingering support for Chen Duxiu was in evidence. The new northern leadership, intent on showing how different a political beast it was from its predecessor, went a little too far in the eyes of the Central Committee, which promptly accused it of adopting a military adventurist approach, and of lacking concrete and speciﬁc detail in respect of policy and operational planning. The Central

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Committee said derisively that the Shunzhi plan for large-scale uprisings in southern Hebei, Rehe, Beijing and Tianjin was surely ‘a joke, was it not?’35 (Considering the monumental failure of the Central Committee-inspired uprisings of August–December 1927, this criticism seems no less of a joke.)36 The Shunzhi committee was severely reprimanded for paying insufﬁcient attention to the labour movement, for the superﬁciality of its reorganization of high-level party organizations and for its failure to conduct any reorganization at all at lower levels. By the end of the year the Central Committee had recalled Cai Hesen, its representative in the north, and abolished the North Bureau again, and by early 1928 the city committees were reorganized.37 In its new plan, submitted to the Central Committee in the spring of 1928, the Shunzhi committee was careful to stress the necessity of preparation (that is, propaganda, organization and struggle among workers, peasants and soldiers) for a limited seizure of power – but not the unleashing of a general uprising, for which the time was not yet ripe. The circumstances seemed to favour such preparations, since the warlords were busy ﬁghting each other and GMD forces were about to join in the northern fray and ﬁnalize the northen expedition to unify the country. However in its plan the Shunzhi committee used rather strong terminology to describe its spurring of mass struggle, which would lead workers and peasants to engage in violent acts, including killing and burning (of overlords and property).38 In its response (May 1928) the Central Committee pounced on this terminology – it smacked of ‘putschism’ (the very word being used to criticise Qu Qiubai’s leadership) and of ‘red terror’, which would alienate the masses. The north, so the Central Committee announced, was not ready for this sort of action, for seizing political power, although it is doubtful that the northern leaders had had that in mind.39 It is more likely they had intended to pre-empt criticism by not sounding too lily-livered – talking only of preparation without any resulting action. While the GMD was ﬁnally extending formal control over Beijing in June 1928, in alliance with the city’s ruling force, warlord Zhang Xueliang, the CCP held its Sixth Congress in Moscow and put a formal end to Qu Qiubai’s leadership. Xiang Zhongfa, an authentic proletarian but lacking charisma, became the party’s next ofﬁcial leader. The congress also heralded the advent of Li Lisan’s (de facto) ﬁery leadership, which was to bring another brief era of costly, ill-conceived operations. Some of the Shunzhi leaders who attended the congress were not returned to their posts. Under the guidance of Liu Shaoqi, the Central Committee’s representative in the north, Peng Zhen took over as acting

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provincial secretary for Shunzhi.40 (Peng, whose prison experiences in the 1930s and unenviable treatment in the Cultural Revolution closely parallelled those of the sixty-one, became the best-known white area cadre after Liu, and an elite ﬁgure in the PRC.) By late 1928 it was clear that things were still not running smoothly between the centre and its northern satellites. ‘Extreme democratic’ tendencies were reported, comrades were defying their superiors’ instructions and there were many cases of desertion.41 Another round of city committee reorganization took place, but the Central Committee was still not satisﬁed. In April 1929 it condemned the rightist tendencies and unwelcome imbalance (too many intellectuals) in the party’s leading organizations, and demanded the building up of the proletarian base.42 Further reorganization ensued, continuing into the autumn of 1929, by which time Liu Shaoqi had moved on to Manchuria and Peng Zhen had been demoted to the district leadership in Tianjin. At that time the provincial and Tianjin city leadership had been badly damaged by the botched assassination of two disgruntled former Shunzhi leaders, Wang Caowen and Li Degui. Having lost their jobs after the Sixth Congress, they had, it was alleged, threatened exposure of the northern underground network unless they were sufﬁcently recompensed. With authorization from the Central Committee, the Provincial Committee had carried out the assassinations, killing Li outright but giving Wang enough time before his demise to incriminate the assassins – and others. Peng Zhen was among the arrested (he was released in 1935, after which he renewed his working relationship with Liu Shaoqi, joining him at the North Bureau in 1936).43 Another cadre arrested that autumn was Bo Yibo. He was picked up by police in Tangshan in October 1929, but was soon released because of their failure to pin anything on him. That year Bo had worked in his ‘above ground’ cover role for the GMD police, and underground for the Provincial Committee’s Military Committee headed by Liao Huaping (who, according to Bo, turned traitor in mid 1931, betraying Bo and hundreds of other cadres). Bo was rearrested in the spring of 1930 after the failed Tangshan mutiny, of which he had been a leader; the mutiny was exactly the type of activity that the increasingly radical Li Lisan leadership was encouraging.44 This time Bo did not escape so easily. A former schoolmate working as court stenographer identiﬁed him as a communist and he was imprisoned in Tianjin (in the same prison as Peng Zhen) for several months, until his release and that of some thirty others was arranged by an undercover CCP member in the GMD government.45

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Despite the Tangshan failure the Li Lisan line moved into ever higher gear. No sooner had Bo been released than he was ordered into another perilous scheme by He Chang, a devoted supporter of Li Lisan who had been sent to head a new North Bureau and reform the Shunzhi Provincial Committee in Li’s image. In June 1930 Li, convinced that (a) revolution in China would set off a global revolution and (b) a ‘revolutionary high tide’ had arrived, announced his new brainchild of ‘victory in one or several provinces’.46 The organizational hierarchies were to give way to ‘action committees’. By early autumn He Chang had set up such a committee to direct simultaneous workers’ strikes, peasant uprisings and military mutinies; the targets were Beijing, Tianjin, Tangshan and ﬁve strategic railway lines. Bo was to head the committee’s activities in the Beijing–Hankou Railway area. In his memoirs Bo details the severe misgivings he expressed to He Chang; these were rejected.47 Many comrades were killed in action or captured and executed, among them Zhang Zhaofeng, Bo’s deputy and Military Committee colleague. The all-too-frequent reorganizations, unrealistic expectations and intensifying demands for radical action were taking their toll on the northern organizations. Not only were members and sympathizers deserting, becoming double agents or betraying, but those who remained were breaking up into factions, some supporting the policies of Li Lisan and others still yearning for the leadership of Chen Duxiu. More worrying still was the increasing support for the ideas of He Mengxiong, whose political career had been moulded in the CCP’s northern administration under Li Dazhao and subsequently in Shanghai and the Jiangsu provincial network.48 He Mengxiong opposed Li Lisan’s high-proﬁle actions and rapid-results demands, and recommended a far more cautious long-term approach, concentrating initially on workers’ economic needs, in cooperation with the yellow unions. His views were considered rightist by the Li Lisan leadership, but He Mengxiong nevertheless developed a signiﬁcant following at the central and local leadership levels – in Beijing, Tianjin and Shanghai in particular – and at the grass-roots level. Much of his pragmatic approach was forcefully echoed by Liu Shaoqi when he took up his North China Bureau post in 1936. This chaotic state of affairs required a tightening of Party discipline and cadre management. In August 1930 He Chang brought a new face into the North Bureau to serve in its Organization Department. An Ziwen, who had worked in CCP underground communications in Henan, had come to the attention of the Central Committee and been

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employed in its Shanghai-based communications network, transferring documents and escorting party VIPs around the country. An had been sent to report to He Chang for instructions for work in Sha’anxi. He Chang must have been impressed with An, for he diverted him from this course and snapped him up for communications work in the North Bureau headquarters, bestowing on him the additional dirty and dangerous task of dealing with counterespionage within the party.49 There was no shortage of work for An. Just as Bo Yibo had once worked undercover in the GMD (military) police, so too did at least two other CCP Hebei ofﬁcials: Li Chun and Zhang Kaiyun. They, however, were also working for the GMD against the CCP. It was An’s brief to eliminate such unwelcome phenomena. Li Chun was successfully ‘taken out’ in October 1930, but the Zhang Kaiyun mission was aborted because of An’s own arrest in February 1931. In the six months between An’s arrival at the North Bureau and his arrest there were dramatic developments at the party centre and in its northern network. While the northern cadres were carrying out Li Lisan’s bidding under He Chang’s direction – and getting killed in the process – Li himself was coming in for criticism from the Comintern, which had concluded that he had completely misread the global and domestic situation and distorted Comintern guidelines. Zhou Enlai and Qu Qiubai were supposed to have made this clear at the party’s Third Plenum in September but their criticism, pointing merely to tactical errors on Li’s behalf, was too muted for the Comintern’s liking. So muted, in fact, that in spite of it Li managed to add a few cronies to the Central Committee, including He Chang.50 And He, for his part, returned to Tianjin conveying a message of dismay from the Central Committee about rightist inﬂuences in the North Bureau that were discouraging the Li-inspired mutinies and uprisings. While Zhou and Qu seemed to be sitting on the fence, other players appeared on the ﬁeld, and Li Lisan had to contend with opposition not only from the He Mengxiong faction but from party cadres recently returned from the Soviet Union, where they had studied at the Sun Yatsen University, directed by Pavel Mif. Wang Ming (Chen Shaoyu), Qin Bangxian (Bo Gu) and Wang Jiaxiang criticized Li’s radicalized June 1930 policies and were penalized for doing so. These former students became part of a larger group who returned to China between 1929 and 1933, variously labelled the ‘twenty-eight [or ‘281/2’] Bolsheviks’, the ‘Returned Students’ or the ‘Internationalists’.51 Several of them moved into central leadership positions in the early 1930s. One, Chen Yuandao, was said to have incited the majority of the Henan Party organization, in which

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he worked, against its secretary, who supported Li’s radical action line. He Chang, as head of the North Bureau, had severely reprimanded Chen.52 This picture was to change quite rapidly, with Li Lisan being summoned to Moscow at the end of November. Matters came to a head during December, with the arrival in Shanghai of Pavel Mif, now Comintern representative, and the creation of ‘an independent organization with an executive committee of twentyseven’, led by He Mengxiong.53 Under Mif’s auspices, a Fourth Plenum was hastily convened on 7 January. Mif brandished a double-edged sword that felled both ‘rightists’ and ‘leftists’. Zhou Enlai, mastering the genre of self-criticism and the art of survival, lined up behind Mif; Li Lisan lost his Politburo seat, as did Qu Qiubai and Li’s supporter Li Weihan. Mif’s protégé Wang Ming was catapulted into the Politburo. Xiang Zhongfa continued as general secretary. The so-called ‘rightists’ were completely sidelined. Informed of the plenum at the last minute, given observer status only and no opportunity to present their views, He Mengxiong and his followers met on 17 January to set up their own party organization with a proposed list of Central Committee candidates.54 Within days they were expelled from the party and, in a stroke of extraordinary convenience for their opponents in the Central Committee, He Mengxiong and four dozen supporters were arrested by the GMD authorities. Half of them, including He, were executed in early February. But the story of the rival party organization did not end there, for it had already taken root not only in Shanghai, where He Mengxiong’s support was so extensive, but also in the northern cities, where support that had been substantial but amorphous gathered momentum and structure, in the form of Emergency Preparatory Committees. Zhang Jingren (known also as Zhang Mutao) led the Hebei rival committee. Having once served as a party secretary for the Shunzhi Provincial Committee he had excellent connections in the area and put them to good use; the result, according to Bo Yibo, was chaos in the organizational network.55 At the lower levels, cadres who performed tasks for the party on an intermittent basis and had little direct contact with party personnel were utterly confused. To which party organization did they belong? After all, rumblings of a change in Central Committee policy had reached the northern cadres just a couple of months ago, when they had been told to disband the Li Lisan-styled action committees; the North Bureau itself had been abolished at the end of December, and He Chang was therefore out of a job; the Li Lisan line had been ofﬁcially rejected at the January plenum, and He Chang had made an abject

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self-criticism: ‘I made shameful mistakes . . . I failed to provide positive leadership to the struggle against Li Lisan’s line . . . and even blocked its progress.’56 Not surprisingly, people at all levels of the hierarchy found it hard to ﬁgure out where their allegiance lay organizationally, let alone ideologically. The new central leadership could not allow this situation to continue. In the last ten days of January 1931 the Central Committee attempted to reassert its control over the north. It began by issuing a resolution on the Hebei problem, abolishing both the Shunzhi Provincial Committee and the rogue Hebei Emergency Committee. It dispatched to Tianjin an odd triumvirate. First, to the astonishment of some Hebei personnel, their former boss He Chang reappeared – his strength as an antirightist obviously outweighing his weakness as a Li Lisan supporter. He, like the ‘rebel’ Zhang Jingren, could be expected to know who was who in the Shunzhi communist network, certainly at the upper levels of its hierarchy. Then there was Sun Yatsen University alumnus Chen Yuandao, who had some experience of northern provincial work – and had been on the receiving end of He Chang’s wrath not so long ago. Last and deﬁnitely least was Central Committee alternate member Xu Lanzhi, whose railway-worker background lent a stamp of proletarian authenticity to the group, just as Xiang Zhongfa’s boatman past made him an appropriate general secretary of the CCP. This combination of forces, the Central Committee hoped, would quell the northern chaos. The three arrived in Tianjin early in February and set up a Temporary Hebei Provincial Committee. Xu was party secretary, Chen Yuandao headed the Organization Department and An Ziwen continued in his role as deputy secretary. He Chang, barely out of disgrace, had a more nominal-sounding title: ‘inspector for Shanxi’. Chen Yuandao was considered the real leader of the new administration.57 Meanwhile Zhang Jingren and his supporters had been joined by other He Mengxiong followers who had attended the January meetings and the controversial Fourth Plenum. Though the new Temporary Committee did chalk up successes in recruitment, it failed to track down the grass-roots cadres. It was forced to turn for help to the semiindependently functioning Military Committee, of which Bo Yibo was a member. One way in which the new committee attempted to bring clarity to the situation was by expelling all the rebel members. How could party security have functioned efﬁciently in an atmosphere of such bitter rivalry and confusion? It must have been easy enough to make a mistake – but how many mistakes were deliberate?

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How loyal was an arrested comrade from one group to his former associates in the other group? In the second week of February a wave of arrests by the GMD military police netted a number of leaders of the Emergency Committee. Not all were able to withstand torture.58

An, Yang, Bo and Liu under arrest Less convenient for the Temporary Committee was the arrest of cadres from its own network, including Zhou Zhongying and An Ziwen, towards the end of February. Zhou, who had attended the Whampoa Military Academy and participated in the CCP’s 1 August 1927 Nanchang Uprising, had worked for the party’s Beijing Military Committee until the end of 1927. In 1928 he had worked as a courier, travelling frequently between Shanghai and Tianjin. In the winter of 1930 he had taken over An’s responsibility for communications in the new Provincial Committee.59 The arrest of Zhou and An was an example of lax security, probably resulting from the reigning confusion. The ‘Kenye Company’ ofﬁce had been created as a front for the former North Bureau’s headquarters in Tianjin, using hotel rooms in the French Concession. Despite security concerns, the new committee had hesitated about moving to new premises. Perhaps it had feared that new premises might only add to the confusion, and therefore had taken the risk of at least temporary continuity. But frequent changes of address were de rigueur in the underground handbook – and for good reason. The premises were under surveillance and Zhou was arrested on arrival. This must have been done unobtrusively, because a few days later the police picked up An Ziwen as he approached the ofﬁce.60 Just before An’s arrest Zhang Guotao of the CCP Politburo Standing Committee, founding member of the CCP and labour organizer, arrived in Tianjin, sent by the Central Committee to give the new administration and remaining members a pep talk. Zhang described the event as a cathartic and creative experience for the northern cadres.61 They poured out their hearts to him, expressing their pain at constantly being labelled ‘rightists’ or ‘opportunists’ and insisting that the problem really lay with the central leadership, which misread or ignored the reality of conditions in the north. Zhang claimed to have come to an agreement with the cadres, laying out ground rules on how the working relationship between the centre and the provincial organizations should continue. Zhang also informed An Ziwen that he was to be transferred to the Shanghai Special Service section. An had delayed his departure in

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order to organize the elimination of Zhang Kaiyun.62 His arrest prevented the achievement of either objective. By March 1931 the situation was showing signs of stabilizing, largely because so many of the Emergency Committee cadres were in prison. But this stability was shattered by further GMD raids, and by the end of April some sixty cadres belonging to the party’s Hebei administration had been arrested and were awaiting sentence along with Zhou Zhongying and An Ziwen in the Tianjin Security Bureau. Among them were Chen Yuandao, whose career as provincial leader was so pathetically brief, and his wife Liu Yaxiong, who had only just taken over An’s duties in the Provincial Committee; Xu Lanzhi, the new provincial party leader; Liu Ningyi; and Chen Boda (who was to become Mao’s secretary in Yan’an and play a leading role in Cultural Revolution radical politics).63 It is unclear whether the multiple arrests were due to carelessness, or to betrayal by rival comrades or one of their own. With the destruction of the Tianjin network the Hebei party headquarters relocated to Beijing. Yin Jian was the Central Committee’s choice for the new leader of the Hebei Provincial Commitee. Yin had also studied at the Sun Yat-sen University under Pavel Mif’s direction.64 He had returned to China at the beginning of the year, and had been thrust immediately into action as head of the Trade Union Federation, replacing Wang Kequan, who had been ousted for his support of He Mengxiong.65 Yin was to have the dubious honour of being the only one of the ‘twenty-eight Bolsheviks’ to be also one of the ‘sixty-one renegades’. One of Yin’s ﬁrst tasks in his new Hebei post was to try to engineer the release of his Tianjin comrades. The Central Committee, shocked at this substantial loss to the cause, had decided to launch its own effort to rescue these cadres. Not an impossible task, since bribery and personal connections had been used often enough in the past. CCP member Hu Egong, who had been sent to Tianjin to develop intelligence work, was instructed to seek contacts able to effect the prisoners’ release. Hu himself had useful warlord connections. He also had an enterprising assistant, Yang Xianzhen, who had spent two and a half years (1927–29) behind bars in Hubei as a political prisoner and had subsequently worked as a secondary school teacher in Henan. When this cover was exposed and Yang was placed on a wanted list by the local authorities, he ﬂed to Shanghai, where he met Hu Egong. Hu and Yang arrived in Tianjin from Shanghai in April. Lai De, the Hebei Provincial Mutual Assistance Committee secretary, had been deputed by Yin Jian to meet them and provide any help and information they might require with regard to the

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prisoners, and the names of useful contacts who might help with their release.66 One potential contact was Liu Shaobai, a former civil ofﬁcial in Tianjin and now resident in Beijing. Liu, a supporter but not yet a member of the CCP, was highly motivated to help, for his daughter was none other than prisoner Liu Yaxiong and his son-in-law was prisoner Chen Yuandao. (Since Chen’s imprisonment, Liu Shaobai had assumed the vital role of passing funds from the Central Committee leadership in Shanghai to the Hebei Committee, a fact known only to party secretaries Yin Jian and Guo Yaxian.) As it happened Liu Shaobai had already arrived in Tianjin, intent on achieving his daughter and son-inlaw’s release, and had been given to understand that the Tianjin lawcourt would be amenable to releasing the comrades for a fee of four to ﬁve thousand silver dollars. Hu Egong and Yang were informed (presumably by Hebei Provincial committee representative Lai De) of Liu’s progress regarding the ‘ransom’. Hu decided to ask the Central Committee leadership in Shanghai for a green light – and the funds. While the leadership was in the process of deciding, the devastating consequences of the arrest of the CCP’s head of security police, Gu Shunzhang, in Shanghai on 24 April 1931, and his subsequent wholesale betrayals, began to unfold.67 CCP general secretary Xiang Zhongfa was arrested in Shanghai on 21 June and executed a few days later. The entire central party leadership was now vulnerable. Many sought refuge in other cities or in villages, and some moved south to the new liberated area, the Jiangxi soviet, where Mao Zedong led the ﬂedgling soviet government. One of the CCP’s leading intelligence cadres, Chen Geng, ﬂed Shanghai for Tianjin, and Yang Xianzhen was given the job of protecting and escorting him.68 (This same Chen Geng later tried to prevent the sixty-one from being entered as delegates to the Party’s Seventh Congress, held in 1945.) When Hu Egong brought back from Shanghai the news that the party leadership had agreed to fund the release of the Tianjin captives, Yang Xianzhen accompanied Chen Geng to Liu Shaobai’s Tianjin hotel. But Liu was nowhere to be found. It transpired that Gu Shanzhang’s betrayal had reverberated far beyond Shanghai. The Hebei Committee, so recently re-established in Beijing, had also been exposed, and one of its secretaries, Guo Yaxian, was alleged to have turned traitor and informed on Liu Shaobai, among others.69 The Beijing police had looked for Liu at his Beijing residence and one of his domestic staff had immediately travelled to Tianjin to warn him, hence his hasty exit without letting Yang Xianzhen know.

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Hu now sent Yang to Beijing, hoping to locate Liu there. He also gave him ﬁve copies of a small note to deliver to ﬁve Beijing comrades. The notes were headed ‘Developing an Intelligence Programme for the North’ – just the kind of evidence an underground operator would not want to be caught with. Yang left Tianjin for Beijing by train on 24 July 1931. The following day the fourth recipient of the intelligence programme directed Yang to Liu Shaobai’s house. I went in alone. . . . Seeing the shadow of an old lady, I asked, ‘Is this Mr. Liu’s house?’ Coldly, she replied, ‘His house is in the yard’. . . . I couldn’t tell anything from this old woman’s blank expression, so in I walked, straight through the yard to Mr Liu’s house, where I found his son, Liu Jingxiong, terriﬁed, clinging to his mother. A military policeman was sitting there and another was standing behind the door. I was stuck – and I still had the ﬁfth intelligence programme on me! . . . I had to ﬁgure out how to destroy it. . . . Should I try and invent some kind of fake confession . . . ? One of the policemen had gone out to the yard, perhaps to phone in a report; the other was looking for a piece of paper to write on. At that moment as I sat down, I took the chance and stuffed the note into my mouth, chewed it and swallowed. I breathed a sigh of relief, for there was no other suspicious evidence.70 Yang was nevertheless arrested and taken to the military police headquarters. As evening fell his interrogation began, and as his eyes became accustomed to the dark interrogation room he glimpsed a familiar face. ‘I suddenly realized what had happened . . . I knew that Lai De had been arrested and betrayed us. Enemies are bound to meet on a narrow road. The situation was far from encouraging.’71 On his arrival at the police headquarters Yang had caught sight of two other captives, Liu Lantao and Kong Xiangzhen (who subsequently became his comrades in the Caolanzi prison), both of whom, Yang believed, had been betrayed by Guo Yaxian. Liu had worked mainly in northern Sha’anxi since joining the Communist Youth League (CYL) in 1926 and the CCP in 1928. Following a brief stint behind bars in late summer 1930 he was transferred to Beijing, where he was contacted by Guo Yaxian and informed that he was to start work with the Mutual Assistance Committee. However he had not even begun his ﬁrst day of work when the Beijing CCP organanization was raided by the GMD authorities. Liu decided to beat a hasty retreat from Beijing, and sought

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out a friend from whom to borrow the train fare to Taiyuan. Unfortunately Guo Yaxian caught sight of the penniless Liu and pointed him out to the police.72 As for Kong Xianzhen, he too had only just begun his party assignments in Beijing when he was arrested on the basis of Guo’s information. Kong had previously worked with the Shunzhi Military Committee in Tangshan.73 As we shall see, Kong was to be instrumental in the release of the sixty-one from Caolanzi (he himself was released from Caolanzi a few years before the sixty-one, on the grounds of ill-health.) Another important ﬁgure who was arrested at that time and became part of the sixty-one group was Hu Xikui. After studying in Moscow and attending the Party’s Sixth Congress there, he had worked in Shanghai in communications for the Central Committee’s Organization Department. He then worked in propaganda in northern China, becoming editor-in-chief of party publications such as Beifang Hongqi (Northern Red Flag) and Huoxian (Firing Line). He became municipal party secretary in Beijing and was then assigned to the same post in Tangshan.74 Hu Xikui had returned to Beijing at the end of June and been arrested. Also under arrest in Beijing by the end of June was Bo Yibo. According to Bo his own boss, the head of the Military Committee, Liao Huaping, had revealed Bo’s address in Beijing. When Liao failed to meet him one evening Bo realized that something was up. Rather than go home he went to the cinema, and then on to a comrade’s house for the night. Suddenly he remembered that he had left at his lodgings a rather important Military Committee document, hidden inside his favourite Goethe novel. He decided to take the risk of returning in order to burn the document, which he did – but not his beloved novel. As dawn broke, he was packing his belongings when there was an ominous knock on the door: ‘Mr Liao Huaping would like a word with you.’ Bo realized that Liao had been arrested and had probably betrayed him. He could not escape through the bathroom window because it was guarded, as was the front door. There was an added complication: another comrade was due to arrive shortly. It was too late for Bo to save himself, but could he at least prevent his comrade from being arrested? Seconds before the comrade was due to arrive, Bo picked up his bag and opened the door, doing everything slowly and methodically. Three military policemen followed him from the door into the yard. Bo could see the comrade approaching. The latter took in the situation in a split second and walked on as if he did not know Bo.75 Bo was then escorted to the police station, where he saw Liao Huaping and became duly convinced that the latter had turned traitor. Gu

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Shunzhang may have provided basic information on the CCP’s northern network but, if Yang Xianzhen and Bo Yibo are to be believed, Liao Huaping and Guo Yaxian ﬁlled in the details. As a result, between three and four hundred northern cadres were arrested in June and July 1931. Among them were the Hebei Provincial Committee leader, Yin Jian, and other future members of the sixty-one, including Liu Xiwu, who was working as a secretary for the Beijing City Committee at the time; Li Chuli, who had taken over communications work following Zhou Zhongying’s arrest in February; and Wang Hefeng and Li Jukui, both only sixteen years old, who had just embarked on a training course run by the Hebei Military Committee.76 In the summer of 1931, those who had been arrested between February and April in Tianjin (An Ziwen, Zhou Zhongying, Chen Yuandao and so on) were transferred to Beijing, where they joined their imprisoned comrades (Bo, Yang, Liu Lantao, Kong Xiangzhen, Yin Jian and so on) in General Zhang Xueliang’s Armed Forces’ Military–Legal Department. In the autumn they were transferred to Caolanzi prison, which was euphemistically renamed the ‘Military Personnel Self-Examination Centre of Beiping’ (for the sake of brevity I shall continue to call it Caolanzi).77 Between 1927 and 1937 – the period known as the ‘Nanjing decade’ – some 24 000 communist or communist-afﬁliated individuals were arrested and imprisoned. Some were executed; another 30 000 were made to ‘repent and surrender voluntarily’.78 Towards the end of August 1936 the Guomindang minister of justice, Wang Yongbin, stated that there were ‘about 2100 political prisoners in ordinary gaols and 1060 in provincial reformatories. These ﬁgures did not include Sinkiang, Chinghai, and Kwangsi.’79 Until late 1935 the communists did what they could to engineer the release of individual comrades, through the use of bribery and social connections, and by permitting comrades in prison to sign ‘ordinary’ (non-anticommunist) statements. Once the united-front negotiations began between the CCP and GMD it became possible to pursue these efforts at higher levels. Clearly the subject of prisoner release was as legitimate a topic for representatives of the CCP’s North Bureau to negotiate with Song Zheyuan (the GMD general formally in charge of Beijing) as it had been between Zhou Enlai and Zhang Xueliang. There was a marked difference, however, in the results. Unlike Zhang Xueliang in Xi’an, the GMD authorities in Beijing did not agree to the unconditional release of the communist prisoners, nor to their signing the fairly innocuous non-anticommunist statements.

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Beijing under threat80 Had Zhang Xueliang still been in control of Beijing, Liu Shaoqi might have exacted more favourable terms for the release of the sixty-one. Zhou Enlai had had an easier task, because in the spring of 1936 Zhang Xueliang had little left to lose and far more to gain by seeking partners to resist the Japanese. He had lost Manchuria to the Japanese in 1931 through the policy of non-resistance, and Rehe (Jehol) in 1933 through abysmally poor resistance. His command of Chiang Kai-shek’s northern forces had been transferred to General He Yingqin (minister of war in the Nanjing government) that spring, thus ending Zhang Xueliang’s authority over Beijing.81 While the sixty-one sat in Caolanzi prison, the fate of Beijing hung in the balance. With Japanese forces barely thirteen miles away in May 1933 and their reconnaissance planes hovering over the northern cities, the fall of both Beijing and Tianjin appeared imminent. Chiang Kaishek chose to keep his best troops in the south, encircling the communist soviet in Jiangxi, and sought a diplomatic solution that would avoid the loss of Beijing and Tianjin to the Japanese. The Beijing Political Affairs Council was established, to be led by Huang Fu, a Nanjing appointee acceptable to the Japanese. The council was made responsible for the ﬁve northern provinces of Hebei, Shandong, Shanxi, Chahar and Suiyan and for the municipalities of Beijing and Tianjin, and was given sufﬁcient autonomy by the Nanjing government – and therefore accountability – to negotiate a truce with Japan. The Tanggu Truce of 1933 delayed Japan’s outright seizure of Beijing and Tianjin but provided for a demilitarized zone (DMZ) between the Great Wall and a line running just north of Peiping and Tientsin. The southern boundary ran 250 miles from Yench’ing to Lutai and passed within ten miles of Peiping and thirty-ﬁve miles of Tientsin. The DMZ included approximately 5000 square miles of Hopei (roughly the size of Connecticut) and over 5 million inhabitants. The Chinese army was to withdraw to the west and south of the area . . .82 Chinese police authorities not hostile to Japan were supposed to maintain law and order in the DMZ. In 1934 and 1935 Chiang did all he could to avoid conﬂict with Japan and continue his domestic paciﬁcation programme (that is, the eradication of communists and communism in China). The Japanese forces in China, however, looked unfavourably on any rapprochement

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between their government and that of Chiang Kai-shek. They seized on every semblance of provocation by the Chinese as an opportunity to rattle their samurai swords and threaten full invasion of the cities. At the end of May 1935 the murder of two journalists working for Japanese-sponsored publications in Tianjin provided the pretext for Japan’s demand for GMD forces – including the 3rd Corps of the GMD Military Police in Beijing (which controlled Caolanzi prison) and two divisions from Hebei – to be withdrawn. They further demanded the dismissal of Hebei administrative personnel deemed anti-Japanese, and the removal from Beijing and Tianjin of some 30 000 51st Army troops, formerly part of Zhang Xueliang’s Northeastern Army. These demands, a blatant attempt to bring Beijing and Tianjin into an enlarged demilitarized zone, were verbally agreed upon by He Yingqin and the Japanese commander, General Umezu. Song Zheyuan (until then governor of Chahar), who was deemed more amenable than Zhang to the Japanese, was permitted to move 30 000 of his 29th Army troops to the Beijing– Tianjin area. Japan continued to tighten its noose around northern China and to magnify anti-Japanese protest incidents. By the end of August 1935 it had cowed the Nanjing government into abolishing its symbol of authority in Beijing, the Political Affairs Council. In October, Song Zheyuan agreed to enlarge the DMZ, which meant that its borders would come even closer to Beijing and Tianjin, and promised to abolish the Military Affairs Commision for Beijing the following month. The Nanjing government and Song were prepared to make further economic concessions – Chiang was even ready to recognize the Japanese Manchukuo (Manchuria) regime if the Japanese relinquished their plan for an ‘autonomous’ northern China. But this did not satisfy the Japanese military, which presented Song with an ultimatum to declare the autonomy of the provinces of Hebei and Chahar by 20 November. The ultimatum was backed up with the deployment of 15 000 Japanese troops and two bomber squadrons to occupy Hebei if need be. Where did Song stand? Would he bend and become a Japanese puppet ruler like the commander of the DMZ, which on 25 November became the East Hebei Anti-Communist Autonomous Council, with its capital a mere twelve miles from Beijing? Song’s precise thoughts remain a mystery. He did not respond to the Japanese ultimatum but did inform Chiang Kai-shek that without assistance from Nanjing he would not be able to withstand Japanese pressure for northern autonomy.83 Chiang’s assistance came in the form of a diplomatic solution – a new Hebei–Chahar Political Council under Song’s leadership, which it was

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hoped would ensure his loyalty to Nanjing, while at the same time satisfying Japan by appointing pro-Japanese ofﬁcials and not a single GMD member to the council. War over Beijing and Tianjin was once again averted. The word ‘transparency’ cannot be used to describe the various agreements, written and verbal, that the Nanjing government reached with the Japanese in the early to mid 1930s. Secrecy gave rise to tremendous suspicion among China’s urban population that Chiang Kai-shek and Song Zheyuan had sold out, delivering control of Hebei and Chahar – and therefore Beijing – to the Japanese. This suspicion and general frustration culminated in the massive student protests of December 1935. Ironically the removal of GMD military police from Beijing and Tianjin had given leftist and radical students more room to manoeuvre, while the new authorities under Song, as well as those of the Japanese, had yet to learn the ropes of policing those cities effectively.

The party and the students The Chinese communists have tended to claim sole credit not only for organizing and leading the patriotic movement but for actually launching the December Ninth student movement of 1935. According to Mao Zedong, ‘Youth and students were like the wood fueling the December Ninth Movement, and all we needed then was a match to ignite it. Who struck the match? The CCP did.’84 This was a somewhat self-laudatory overestimate of their role. On the other hand it did not require a great deal of foresight for the communists to recognize the immense potential for their own movement if they could succeed in harnessing this wave of patriotic fervour, and this was duly noted by Mao in his Wayaobao report.85 It was an opportunity the CCP could ill afford to miss – to reach a broad cross-section of the urban population where their own numbers had dwindled away. But the sad fact was that in Beijing in late 1935 and early 1936 there were as few as twenty to thirty communist activists facing the seemingly impossible task of recruiting support among 38 000 university and middle-school students.86 This small cadre force contributed propaganda in literary and philosophical form to the student publications at Qinghua and Yanjing Universities, and helped to establish the Beijing Student Association in October 1935. At Beijing University a party branch was established in the autumn of 1935, and over the next few months party activists were sent to ‘instigate the students to demonstrate’ in Nanjing, Shanghai and Tianjin.87 In Beijing in January 1936 the Chinese National Liberation

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Vanguard (CNLV) was inaugurated as a legal ‘extension of the Communist Youth Corps’.88 With an initial membership of 300, including left-wing students, the vanguards were organized in tight Leninist fashion: ‘three to ﬁve-man cells . . . secretly organized with no horizontal relations with one another but only vertical relations with the next highest unit’.89 Also in January 1936 a few hundred students made a propaganda tour of northern China’s countryside, their aim being to broaden support for a united front. These inexperienced propagandists came into contact with peasants who had little notion of the looming Japanese threat and were more concerned with their tax burden. Within three weeks the students’ countryside activities were rudely curtailed when Song Zheyuan’s troops and police returned them to Beijing. As Israel and Klein suggest, the impact of the experience was greater on the student participants than on their target population.90 Their well-intentioned but ineffectual mission underlined the CCP’s need for more experienced cadres to train and educate inexperienced candidates. Students’ high-proﬁle activities soon met a right-wing backlash on various campuses. By mid February police raids and the arrest of leftwing students had left the movement weakened and divided, as left and right continued their radical actions. On 25 March Song announced that the death penalty would apply if the emergency measures forbidding demonstrations and meetings were deﬁed.91 Less than a week had elapsed when radical students, as if in direct challenge to Song, marched through Beijing bearing a cofﬁn in protest at the death of an imprisoned middle-school pupil. Fifty were arrested; several were expelled from university.92 It was at this juncture that Liu Shaoqi assumed command of the CCP North Bureau, and it was this type of adventurist action that he wished to discourage.93 In order to separate secret and open work, the Communist Youth Corps was reorganized in May 1936. Its members became party members while the broader-based CNLV loosened its organizational structure, permitting previously forbidden ‘horizontal’ relations among cells in different schools – more beﬁtting an open, legal organization.94 But the more radical students could not be restrained for long. In June an anti-Chiang strike resulted in the expulsion of some 200 vanguards, communist cadres among them. These and others began the move to the north-west, to the soviet base in Bao’an; many more arrived in Xi’an, where generals Zhang Xueliang and Yang Hucheng offered them generous freedom of movement among their troops.95 With the loss of

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these vanguard cadres the Beijing Party was in disarray. It was still desperately short of experienced, disciplined cadres to continue and expand its work with the students – and control the unruly elements. From the end of August and through the next few months this need began to be met. Older hands, among whom were cadres just released from prison, such as Peng Zhen and An Ziwen, appeared on the campuses.96 Students who had experienced many a bloody encounter at Song Zheyuan’s hands began to fraternize with his 29th Army troops. By the end of the year students were no longer heard to shout ‘Down with traitor Song Zheyuan!’ Instead the clarion call was moderated to ‘Support General Song Zheyuan in the ﬁght against Japan’ and ‘Support the 29th Corps in the ﬁght against Japan’.97 By the summer the CNLV boasted 1300 members and by November over 2000. CNLV guerrilla training camps (for the potential purpose of warfare against the Japanese invaders) and popular theatrical performances increased the membership.98 The students who now swelled the communist ranks were entrusted with mass work and encouraged to enlist with the nationalist armies in the north, working with the troops and local populations. Over 1000 students were said to have undergone military training with Song Zheyuan’s troops and subsequently participated in battles in Beijing and Tianjin.99 They were joined by many of the recently released party veterans, such as Liu Zhao and Zhu Zemin of the sixty-one.100 In September General Yan Xishan of Shanxi began to welcome students to his League for National Salvation through Sacriﬁce in Taiyuan. Non-students joined too, among them Bo Yibo and some dozen comrades released from Caolanzi. With Yan Xishan the CCP cultivated perhaps the most symbiotic of all its warlord relationships.

Risk assessment: Song, Liu and the sixty-one Throughout 1936 Song Zheyuan had staggered precariously along a tightrope, pressured from all directions: from the citizens of China’s urban north and an increasing number of soldiers in his own army to mount active resistance to Japan; from the Nanjing government to avoid armed conﬂict with Japan but resist its demand for northern autonomy; and from the Japanese to declare independence from Nanjing and link up with his East Hebei counterpart. Domestic pressure did appear to strengthen the resolve of Song and the Hebei–Chahar Council vis-à-vis Japan, but the student demonstrations provided a potential pretext for Japanese intervention.

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Japan grew increasingly belligerent, maintaining its pressure on Song and criticizing his refusal, in early spring 1936, to accept its offer of military aid against Zhang Xueliang (Japan claimed Zhang had linked up with the communists to remove Yan Xishan from Shanxi and invade Hebei, Chahar and Suiyuan). They also criticized Song for not stamping out anti-Japanese protest and repeated the old demand that he declare autonomy. In May 1936 Japan’s North China Army added more than 6000 soldiers to its forces in the Beijing – Tianjin area and other parts of north China.101 War seemed imminent yet again. In July Chiang Kai-shek added ﬁre to the Japanese belligerency by declaring (at last) that there would be no further compromises on China’s territorial integrity. Liu Shaoqi, the CCP’s North Bureau chief, was well-attuned to Song’s predicament and equally aware that his tolerance of communist activity in his domain was perforce zero. The communist entity was an anathema to both of Song’s masters: the Japanese invading force and the Chiang Kai-shek leadership. At best the North Bureau hoped to deﬂect Song’s attention away from ‘internal paciﬁcation’ by encouraging the students to offer him positive reinforcement. This was a realistic goal, which the North Bureau worked hard to attain. But the goal of attaining the release of the Caolanzi prison cadres was more severely constrained by Song’s difﬁcult position, and compounded by the pervading sense that war might erupt at any moment in Beijing. From Song’s point of view the unconditional release of a large group of communist prisoners would provide yet another excuse for Japan to escalate the increasingly ominously conﬂict. Nor would such a release endear him to Chiang Kai-shek, for whom only conditional release – complete with damning anticommunist statements – had some value. If the communist leaders really wanted these cadres so badly, conditional release would do. Their freedom might even earn him some kudos with the National Salvation patriots. As far as Liu Shaoqi was concerned there was no guarantee that, with or without reinforcements from Chiang, Song’s army could withstand a full-scale Japanese invasion of Beijing and Tianjin (indeed when war ﬁnally did break out the following year these cities fell within the ﬁrst weeks).102 With this justiﬁable doubt in mind, combined with the uncomfortable knowledge that the Japanese forces were even more vociferous than Chiang in their anticommunism, Liu Shaoqi and his colleagues had to decide whether to leave the imprisoned cadres to their fate or to make every effort to rescue them before the last vestiges of Song’s limited authority in Beijing ﬁnally crumbled.

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Based on the party’s immediate and future needs in terms of party building and the united front, a rational decision was made: the sixtyone were ordered to carry out the GMD release procedures. In terms of these needs the North Bureau and the Central Committee had made the right call. The release of communist prisoners in northern China was to contribute hugely to the qualitative and quantative difference that the united front made to the Chinese communist movement in legitimating its presence and converting its emergent strength from a peripheral to a mainstream force. When the North Bureau, endorsed by the Central Committee, ordered Bo Yibo et al. to pretend to renege, it was expected that there would be some temporary embarrassment to the party and the individuals involved. What the decison did not anticipate was the long-term legacy of confused perceptions of party loyalty and behavioural norms – or the temptation to exploit it.

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2 Release from the Guomindang Prison, 1936

We are grateful for the Government’s leniency in pardoning our misdeeds in the past and allowing us to repent and renew ourselves. Now we have repented sincerely and are willing to become loyal citizens, resolutely against Communism, under the Government leadership. Hereafter we will never join any Communist organization nor engage in any reactionary activities. We also hope all promising youths shall not come under the inﬂuence of Communist agitation. (Huabei ribao [North China Daily], 31 August 1936)1 On the basis of this and similar subsequent press statements, Bo Yibo, An Ziwen, Liu Lantao, Yang Xianzhen and several dozen other communist cadres were released from the Caolanzi Reformatory in the autumn of 1936. Committing their renunciation of communism to newsprint was only one of the requisite release procedures negotiated by the prison authorities with the CCP North Bureau representatives, but it appears to have been the most damaging in terms of its consequences for the signatories and their counsellors. Although many questions remain unanswered as to what details were known to whom, sufﬁcient information is available in Cultural Revolution and post-1978 sources (that is, anti- and pro-sixty-one, respectively) to reconstruct a feasible scenario of this curious episode. Both sets of sources agree that the CCP Northern Bureau, headed by Liu Shaoqi, issued a directive to the imprisoned cadres to comply with the GMD’s prerelease procedures, and that Central Committee authorization was conferred by General Secretary Zhang Wentian. The sources also agree that Xu Bing and Kong Xiangzhen were part of the communication chain that delivered directives to the prisoners. None of the 52

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sources, however vehement in its criticism of the sixty-one, disputes the fact that the prisoners obeyed instructions from party authorities higher than themselves at the local and central levels.2 Discrepancies arise over the number of directives (two or three) and the order in which the directives and the party centre’s approval were issued. Post-Cultural Revolution sources claim that approval was sought from the Central Committee before the directives were issued. Some Cultural Revolution sources indicate that at least one directive was issued before Zhang Wentian’s assistance was sought. Further discrepancies concern the very loaded question of Zhang’s role. Did he confer with his colleagues or was this decision made by him alone? Was he given all the information – that is, the details of the release procedures – or was he merely told that a simple procedure had been agreed? A similar question arises about Liu Shaoqi’s role. Did he devise and preside over every last detail of the arrangements or did he authorize his subordinates to draw up the details? This chapter describes the 1936 release process and discusses these questions. It then turns to the united-front activities of the sixty-one after their release, and traces the progress of the most prominent amongst them to Yan’an in 1943. It was in the liberated Yan’an base, where united-front policies were formulated but not directly experienced, that the sixty-one were confronted with the ﬁrst shadow of doubt as to whether the 1936 episode had been or ever would be well and truly buried. They had been released, but the release itself was a paradoxical, invisible fetter from which they were never to be totally free. Chapter 1 dealt with the situation and events in China leading up to the sixty-one’s release. But what was going on in Caolanzi prison during that period? Were these lost years for the sixty-one? Not according to their memoirs. Life in Caolanzi has been revealed as a functioning microcosm of the communist underground in the most adversarial of white area conditions.

Caolanzi prison Caolanzi prison had been established with the speciﬁc aim of reforming (some might say brainwashing) political prisoners. The Chinese communists had no monopoly on thought reform, which was rooted as much in Chinese tradition as it was in any European practice of communism. Re-education culminating in recantation appealed equally to the Guomindang leadership as a useful alternative to the wide-scale

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execution of suspected communists. Rather than swell the CCP pantheon of martyrs with characters who had usually played undistinguished, paltry roles, execution would be reserved for the stubbornly unrepentant and more important catches.3 In the early 1930s, therefore, a number of prisons were transformed into ‘reformatories’. In the Jiangsu reformatory, for instance, there were lectures on Guomindang ideology, followed by examinations. Prisoners were also encouraged to form ‘autonomous societies’ as a creative political outlet – to write essays, perform plays and publish periodicals, preferably with an anticommunist content.4 This did not preclude the use of harsher methods and torture. The prison authorities’ ultimate aim was to bring the prisoners to a state of self-examination, the outer trappings of which would constitute a signed confession and a public anticommunist declaration. These activities, prerequisites for a prisoner’s release, were believed to have a disintegrative effect on CCP morale. If a prisoner actually internalized the re-education lessons and continued after his release to identify openly with the GMD, that would of course represent a victory for the GMD. But an even greater advantage was the future employment of a reformed ex-prisoner as a secret agent, inﬁltrating him back into CCP organizations for information and disinformation purposes, a policy referred to as ‘clearing up the case and leaving the root’.5 While the rate of success remains unknown, the GMD’s real achievement lay in the cloud of distrust that descended on all released cadres who resumed party work. Upon their arrival at the Military Personnel Self-Examination (Introspection) Center of Beiping in Beijing’s Caolan Lane in autumn 1931 the prisoners entered a walled compound. Here, in the prison yard, they would take their brief daily exercise. At one end of the yard stood an austere, grey, two-storey building – the prison ofﬁces – and behind it a long cells building: home for the foreseeable future. The cell building was divided by a corridor into two blocks, north and south, and was intended to hold some hundred political prisoners. Between the blocks were two rooms for women prisoners and an ill-equipped sickbay, often in use since the poor food and miserable sanitary conditions were conducive to illness: Zhou Zhongying and Wei Wenbo, for instance, contracted tuberculosis. The prisoners were watched day and night. The male prisoners all wore iron fetters weighing up to four kilos. Food was meagre, unvaried and often unpalatable – grit in the rice, steamed buns barely cooked, and watery soup. Solitary conﬁnement was meted out to anyone who

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disobeyed the prison rules. Any incoming funds from relatives and friends were deposited with the prison authorities. At ﬁrst the GMD invited Catholic priests to try to sway the inmates from their political convictions, but at the end of 1931 the head of the Nanjing Military Commission’s political education division arrived in Beijing to announce a new ‘confess or else’ policy. Prisoners would have opportunities to confess during the course of three six-month periods, but at the end of these eighteen months, if they had still not confessed and repented they would be sentenced to death. A confession court was set up accordingly. After the ﬁrst six months three party members agreed to sign confessional statements, as did a handful of non-members. Before the second period was up, more than a dozen were ready to sign. This left the more resilient core of communist prisoners, but they were subjected to a different kind of pressure when a new regime – the Third Military Police unit under He Yingqin – took over from Zhang Xueliang’s Northeastern Army prison authorities in late 1933. According to the new regulations, no matter how long the sentence, repentance meant immediate release; conversely, no repentance meant no release – ever. The new administration also worked on the prisoners’ families to persuade them to repent. Some prisoners found it hard to resist family pressure, but were nevertheless permitted to resume party work after their release if they were able to prove there had been nothing else untoward in their behaviour. Prisoners came and went, and by and large those who went did so because they had signed confessional statements. The exceptions were those released via amnesty, mostly because of ill health. These included some twenty prisoners in late 1932 and early 1933, among them Chen Yuandao, former leader of the Hebei Provincial Committee in Tianjin, and his wife, Liu Yaxiong. Chen was rearrested the following year and executed. (Liu lost contact with the party for a few years, until Bo Yibo was released and assigned her party work.)6 Others released because of ill health were Feng Jiping, Wei Wenbo, Yang Shiren and Kong Xiangzhen (who would be instrumental in passing the release instructions from the North Bureau and Central Committee to the prisoners in 1936). Some three hundred prisoners made confessions and were released between 1931 and 1936.7 Many were young students, new to the cause and not yet sufﬁciently imbued with either the ideology or the discipline that helped others resist the temptation to opt for freedom. Bo Yibo has claimed that among the confessants was Chen Boda, future secretary to Mao Zedong in Yan’an, party theorist and Cultural Revolution radical leader.8

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Veteran party members soon realized that, to help comrades cope with the duress of prison life and combat the pressure to confess, it would be necessary to organize resistance. Secret party branches were formed, one for the north cell block and one for the south. Each had its own rotating hierarchy of secretary and committee members. Electing the personnel was easier said than done, since the divisions that had fractured the Hebei Party organization prior to the various arrest debacles of 1931 had not dissipated into thin air at Caolanzi’s iron gates. They were still rife within the prison walls. Expelled rival Emergency Committee members, ‘central’ cadres, those who had been dispatched to the north by the party centre but seemed to have little understanding of local conditions, local cadres who saw local needs and little else – all jostled together for ideological and organizational space in the prison’s narrow conﬁnes. Just agreeing upon slogans to give themselves hope proved difﬁcult. Bo had to use all his powers of persuasion to have the positive slogan ‘We will march out under the Red Flag’ adopted, as opposed to the negatively orientated ‘We will never surrender’, which sounded like a potential martyr’s death-wish.9 In 1931 the south block’s ﬁrst party secretary was Kong Xiangzhen. Kong had studied in the Soviet Union and had worked in both central and local spheres, and was therefore deemed an acceptable leader. He soon fell ill and was succeeded by Yin Jian, a ‘central’ cadre who had also studied in the Soviet Union and had brieﬂy headed the Hebei organization after it moved to Beijing in the spring of 1931. When Yin too fell ill, Bo Yibo became the south party branch secretary, and it was during his term of ofﬁce in 1936 that the prison release plan went into operation. (By this time the north branch was headed by one Liu Geping, who had entered the prison only in January 1936. Liu was to gain admiration during the Cultural Revolution for not joining the sixty-one in confessing.)10 Other party branch activists were Chen Yuandao, An Ziwen, Liu Lantao, Yang Xianzhen, Liu Zijiu, Hu Xikui, Li Chuli, Zhang Youqing, Zhao Bo, Dong Tianzhi, Liu Xiwu, Ma Huizhi, Zhao Lin and Wang De. The organization made a number of decisions geared to strengthening the prisoners’ resolve, which depended on the meeting of mind, body and soul. The communists may have failed to energize the labour movement in urban China because they had tried to raise political consciousness among the proletariat while neglecting the latter’s urgent economic needs, but the imprisoned communists eventually learnt the lesson. They were now the down-trodden class who had to struggle for

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improved living conditions – for small but tangible victories that helped to free the mind and elevate motivation. Living conditions The Party organization in the prison pursued several approaches aimed at maintaining the prisoners’ physical wellbeing. It encouraged them to exercise and keep as ﬁt as possible, and it organized them to petition the prison authorities for speciﬁc improvements, such as monthly baths and haircuts (granted in November 1932). Hunger strikes were found to be an effective tactic, although as Bo Yibo warned, if used to excess they could become counterproductive. Yang Xianzhen refers to a strike that won the prisoners slightly better food, showers and lighter fetters for sick prisoners, but not the right to read books and newspapers.11 Nor were they granted access to writing materials. An Ziwen’s biography describes a successful seven-day hunger strike in late 1934 that ‘forced the authorities to accept their demands for an improvement in prison food, to allow them to buy books and subscribe to newspapers, and to allow them out into the fresh air three times a day’.12 Another tactic was to bring their plight to the notice of public pressure groups and respected national ﬁgures. Harold Isaacs, the editor of China Forum, published a letter from imprisoned Tass reporter Liu Zunqi. Liu’s description of the squalid and inhumane conditions in Caolanzi attracted the attention of leading human-rights activists, some of whom visited the prison.13 The party branch used information from new prisoners and GMD newspapers on the growing patriotic campaigns for action against Japan and an end to civil conﬂict. It organized its own campaign for prisoners to be released unconditionally in order to ﬁght the enemy. The campaign was launched as an open activity (that is, a united-front activity in which all prisoners, not only communists, could participate), but in effect it was ‘semi-open’ as it was not open to the authorities. The prisoner population was divided into about twenty cells, each with its own representative, and all were represented by General Speaker Li Chuli. The cells formed a prison committee, which in reality was under the control of the party branch, to produce anti-Japanese resistance articles and slogans pressuring for release. Lastly, the prison wardens themselves were targeted to alleviate the wretchedness of prison life. Wardens were ranked as the lowest-level soldiers and tended to come from poor families. They were ideal subjects on which to practise propaganda – and if that didn’t work, bribery did. Sometimes it was a combination of improved self-image and a well-lined

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pocket that did the trick. An Ziwen was particularly adept at cultivating the sympathy of the lowly prison wardens. Ox, whose real name was Nian Baozheng, was from a poor family and sometimes showed a sense of right and wrong in expressing approval of the ﬁghting spirit of the Communist prisoners and contempt for the cowardice of traitors who sold out. . . . After careful discussion the Party branch decided that An and Bo should make friends with the guard. The two began to approach Ox . . . giving him the change when he bought things for them, and one of them gave him a sweater which he himself could ill spare. With their help, Ox became politically awakened.14 Through Ox and others like him the prisoners could buy food to supplement their poor diet and, even more importantly, maintain links with the outside world, with friends, relatives and party comrades. As long as the prisoners followed the daily regimen and did not make trouble for the wardens, the latter, and certainly the more sympathetic among them, did not intervene in what appears to have been a hive of political and intellectual industry. Some, like Ox, even helped to obtain communist and other reading matter from the Frenchmanaged international bookshop at the Beijing Hotel. Forbidden newspapers, journals, books, letters, messages and writing materials began to ﬁnd their way into Caolanzi, and the party members began constructively to exploit their unsolicited leave of absence from the outside world to deepen their political understanding and raise their political consciousness. Study Prisons have always been the universities of revolutionaries. . . . Although I had had the good fortune to spend four years at university before going to prison . . . my true university was jail. . . . I began to study economics and western philosophy in real earnest.15 The list of publications the Caolanzi prisoners claim to have read between 1931 and 1936 makes the prescribed reading matter – the famous twenty-two documents of the 1942–44 Yan’an rectiﬁcation campaign – look puny. Perhaps that was the intention of Bo, Yang and others in the 1980s and 1990s, when they described the rich scope of works they had studied long before their red area counterparts began to grapple with basic texts – most of which were by the CCP leadership.

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The following are just some of the texts studied by the sixty-one: Marx and Engels’ Preface to The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, Manifesto of the Communist Party and Preface to Outlines of a Critique of Political Economy; Engels’ Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, Anti-Duhring, The Paris Commune and Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of Classical German Philosophy; Lenin’s Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder and Materialism and Empirico-Criticism; Marx’s Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution and Imperialism: the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Socialism and War; and Stalin’s Marxism and the National and Colonial Question, Foundations of Leninism and Problems of Leninism. They also read Lewis Henry Morgan’s Ancient Society as well as newspapers and journals in Russian, such as the Bolshevik and the Comintern’s International Newsletter, and Communications in English. Those who had studied in Russia or had studied Russian in China (Yin Jian, Hu Xikui, Yang Xianzhen, Liao Luyan, Liu Zijiu and Liu Zunqi) translated laboriously. Yang Xianzhen later described how he exploited the time he spent in the sickbay tending to the ailing Yin Jian (who died in 1937, just three months after his release). Together they tried to translate and edit a few thousand words a day, and Yang then circulated the material to his comrades in numbered paragraphs. This trafﬁc of material turned out to be a two-way process. When sitting in a Tianjin courtyard, some months after his release, and chatting with Wang Ruofei, recently released from prison in Taiyuan, Yang was pleasantly surprised to discover a mimeographed copy of his translation of Socialism and War.16 In 1940 Peng De and Liao Luyan remarked that all their knowledge of Marxism had been acquired in Caolanzi. Certainly for the younger inmates it was an intensive and extensive introduction to communist theory, and for all the comrades it was a learning experience they could not have undergone amid the instabilities of underground work. And not only communism was studied. The prisoners pooled their knowledge of Chinese, Japanese and Western literature, history, philosophy, culture and economic theory. Li Chuli, for instance, took the opportunity during physical exercise time to tell stories from Russian and American literature to his cell mates. Liu Zunqi was another who translated from English to Chinese. The branch also managed to circulate its own publication, Red October. Edited by Hu Xikui and Yang Xianzhen, it consisted of ideological material and news items about the party and the Red Army, which one person would read to a group. The paper included a blank section that was designed to encourage people to comment in writing. On the blank

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pages the prisoners wrote their own articles, which were handed back, edited into small volumes, recirculated and discussed. Debate Debate, while a natural by-product of the study of ideas and the prisoners’ awareness of domestic and international current events, had gone on from the moment the prisoners set foot in Caolanzi. As has been stressed, the prisoners were not all of the same mould, and one issue that caused ﬁery argument was the party’s priorities in the face of Japan’s increasingly aggressive posture in China. What should come ﬁrst at this time, the struggle between nations or domestic class struggle? Memoirs of the sixty-one indicate that the discussions inside the prison reﬂected the so-called ‘two-line debate’ outside the prison.17 However the extent to which a clear-cut, two-line situation existed in the early 1930s is a moot point – if not an artiﬁcial or at least highly exaggerated construct Mao placed on party history retroactively in the early 1940s to give an ideological basis to the rivalry between himself and Wang Ming.18 What is clear is that their environment had not cut off the prisoners from discussion of vital issues occupying the CCP. On the contrary, Bo Yibo seems to imply that he and some of his comrades were already advancing pro-united-front arguments in the very early 1930s before this had become the party’s ofﬁcial line: Some of us held that the KMT could no longer use its old methods to continue to rule, and that it would have to use a more cunning and deceptive way, namely resistance against Japan, to maintain its rule; that we must expose it because it was even more reactionary. Others held that while that was a crucial moment for national survival, a moment of acute national contradiction, we should welcome the national bourgeoisie and form a united front with them because the January 28, 1932 resistance against Japan showed the progressiveness of the national bourgeoisie in turning to the revolution and opposing the policy of non-resistance.19 Both opinions were written up and passed on to the Hebei Provincial Committee. News from the outside continued to stir debate. The prisoners learnt of the Central Committee’s slogan for forming an ‘anti-Japanese United Front’, and they read Dimitrov’s report to the Comintern Seventh Congress on such a front. However it was Mao Zedong’s report ‘On Tactics Against Japanese Imperialism’, presented at the December 1935

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Wayaobao Conference, that resolved their debate: ‘The report showed us that at the crucial moment of the revolution, Comrade Mao knew how to keep to the correct course and adopt far-sighted tactics and strategy in uniting all available forces to strive for new victories.’20 The united front was no longer something happening in the outside world while the cadres theorized about it behind bars; the prisoners themselves were about to be co-opted into those ‘available forces’ and become instrumental in the struggle ‘for new victories’. Meanwhile the party branch’s activities and debates had provoked suspicion, and in spring 1935 GMD agents, appropriately attired in fetters and handcuffs, were planted among the prisoners. They reported the branch’s existence to the Nanjing authorities and the cover of some dozen cell mates was blown. Bo, An and ten others, now held separately, were sentenced to death for preventing others from repenting and confessing. According to An and Yang it was only the dramatic turn of events in May–June 1935 – when the He–Umezu agreement brought about the retreat of GMD forces and the Third Military Police Regiment from Beijing – that prevented the execution of the branch leaders.21 The prison spies left with the military police. The reprieved prisoners resumed their normal prison life with their comrades in June, but they were more vulnerable now that their identities had been exposed. At the end of the year Beijing’s steadily worsening situation vis-à-vis Japan prompted them to press the authorities yet again for their release, which would enable them to join the anti-Japanese resistance. Party branch members offered to submit an ‘ordinary’ or ‘regular’ confession – that is, not speciﬁcally anticommunist but devoid of political content, one that simply promised they would become teachers, agricultural workers and so on. They presented a draft statement to the authorities, but when they were called in to sign it they found it had been tampered with and converted to an anticommunist statement. They refused to sign.22 A few months later, in the spring of 1936, Liu Shaoqi arrived in Tianjin to head the party’s North Bureau. With the symbiotic tasks of resuscitating the party’s faded presence in the white area and activating the party’s united-front policy, Liu had no intention of overlooking an obvious source of manpower: ready-made crews of several hundred communist cadres held and to an extent nurtured in the GMD reformatories. Their greater vulnerability in the face of the alarmingly increased presence of Japanese troops in the area reinforced Liu’s almost immediate decision to orchestrate their release. His order, authorized by the Central Committee, to the prisoners to sign the prison authorities’ anticommunist statements sparked a new debate among the prisoners.

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To what extent were they prepared to compromise their reputations as loyal communists in order to participate in and contribute their skills to the new policy and the party’s needs in northern China? Arranging the release Ke Qingshi (secretary of the Front Committee of the Hebei Provincial Committee and director of the Front Committee’s Organization Department) furnished Liu Shaoqi with information on the imprisoned cadres, their prison terms and the possibility of negotiating their early release.23 On behalf of the North Bureau, Nan Hanchen was delegated to organize negotiations with General Song Zheyuan (the leading nationalist ﬁgure in Beijing) and Yan Wenhai, who headed the Military Legal Department and whose godson was the prison director.24 The intention was to persuade them to authorize an unconditional release. This was not granted. Instead the prisoners were informed that if they went through a ‘symbolic’ procedure they might be released fairly rapidly. This symbolic procedure would consist of three stages: (1) the prisoners would sign individual confession and renouncement forms; (2) they would publish an anticommunist announcement in nationalist newspapers; and (3) they would participate in a ‘new leaf’ repentance ceremony led by the prison director prior to receiving their release papers. Post-Cultural Revolution sources claim that at that point, before any directive was issued to the prisoners, Liu contacted Zhang Wentian, whose approval was issued on behalf of the Central Committee. Bo Yibo later stated unequivocally that following the communication from Liu Shaoqi and Ke Qingshi, ‘The Party center, Chairman Mao and Comrade Zhang Wentian ratiﬁed their proposal.’25 The following is the reported content of Liu’s communication to Zhang: If a group of cadres now in prison in Peking can be released, this may solve the problem of the shortage of cadres in the White areas. Recently from the prisons came the news that after the ‘He–Umezu Agreement’ the prison administration was prepared to leave Peking and wanted to dispose of this group of prisoners at an early date. It was said that the prisoners could be released if only they went through a simple procedure of indicating their stand against communism.26 The ﬁrst notiﬁcation the prisoners received was the North Bureau’s ﬁrst directive, which was not accompanied by written authorization from

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the Central Committee. Ke Qingshi had passed the instruction to Professor Xu Bing at the China University. Xu, who was highly active in united-front work, particularly in the upper echelons of Beijing society, contacted former Caolanzi inmate Kong Xiangzhen (released because of ill health in 1932) and told him of the North Bureau and Central Committee plan. Kong accordingly wrote to Yin Jian, ‘We launched our work in various areas but we don’t have enough people to implement the work. We need people. The North Bureau orders you to carry out the so-called leaving prison formalities (ﬁngerprinting prepared statements for newspaper publication)’.27 According to Red Guard sources Kong, quoting the North Bureau leader, also wrote: Although making an announcement in the paper cannot prevent unfavourable inﬂuence, it will preserve the remnants of our cadres in the KMT jails and preserve revolutionary power. This is justiﬁed. This is a correct principle in unifying both legal and illegal struggles. So long as the revolution can be waged well, it will be possible for us to make up a loss in reputation.28 The letter was smuggled by Ox, the sympathetic warder, into the prison, where it caused much surprise. There was also some doubt about the authenticity of its content. Yin Jian, Bo Yibo and Liu Lantao met to discuss it, and concluded that since the party centre could not possibly have made such a decision they would ignore the directive. There is uncertainty, even among sympathetic post-Cultural Revolution sources, about how much time passed before the second communication was received. Either a fortnight or a couple of months had elapsed without any response from the prisoners when Kong Xiangzhen sent a second letter, explaining to the prisoners that, in case they had not realized it, ‘Hu Fu’, the author of the ﬁrst directive, was none other than Liu Shaoqi, the party’s chosen representative in the white areas and the head of the North Bureau. Kong repeated the original instruction but this time he also ‘copied by hand the Central Committee’s approval’.29 There was still no response from the prisoners. After receiving this letter, we did not reply straight away. Instead, we tried through the secret communication channel to verify whether this order had been approved by the Central Committee. Just then, the North Bureau sent us a third letter deﬁnitely stating that the resolution in question had been approved by the Central Committee. In addition, we corroborated the matter with various sources.

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Only then did we follow this instruction of the Central Committee and perform the ‘release formalities’.30 The prisoners had suspected that this was a GMD hoax, or perhaps a well-meant but ill-conceived plan on the part of a local party organization or the North Bureau itself. They were incredulous at the notion of the party leadership requesting them to follow the GMD’s shameful release procedures. Liu Shaoqi, on his own initiative or under the order of the Central Committee, may have preferred not to mention the Central Committee’s role – for security reasons and to avoid setting precedents. Bo Yibo’s version simply underscores the prisoners’ unwillingness to follow the release procedures until they were absolutely convinced of the Central Committee’s approval. One Cultural Revolution source refers to a ‘three-point request’ from the prisoners, which Liu passed on to the Central Committee. The request presumably pressed for a guarantee that there would be no repercussions for them.31 Indeed Liu’s ﬁnal order to the prisoners could not have made the following three points more clearly: ‘The party now promises you it is completely responsible for the decision. Politically you will not be regarded as traitors. Organizationally you will not be discriminated against.’32 All versions agree on the content of this ultimate and unequivocal order from Liu to the prisoners. They had been correct in the past to ‘have persevered for years in the struggle against the “introspection policy” ’ and not to have signed anticommunist statements, but now there was a new political situation. The party was not merely permitting them to go through these formalities, it was ordering them to do so. You were totally correct not to perform the ‘release formalities’ as demanded by the enemy; however, if now you still refuse to carry out the Party’s resolution by rejecting the formalities as you did in the past, it means that you will commit an unpardonable mistake. You are now required to implement this resolution promptly.33 The majority were ready to comply on the basis of the party’s manifesto principle that the individual must obey the party organization. Their adherence to this principle was to become the motif of their defence throughout the Cultural Revolution. Final but futile attempts were made to persuade Liu Geping and Zhang Liangyun, who remained adamantly opposed.34 Bo Yibo dispatched Hu

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Xikui and three others to the northern ward in the hope of softening Liu and Zhang’s stand, informing them that: the order was a decision of the organization and a military order, which could only be carried out and could not be discussed, and that if they did not get themselves out of prison, they would be disobeying the organization’s orders and would be expelled from the Party.35 His words fell on deaf ears. Perhaps Liu Geping could afford this bravado since he had been imprisoned in Caolanzi only a few months previously. (He went on to serve his full term of imprisonment and was not released until 1944.)36 During the seven months until March 1937 the communist cadres were released in batches of nine as each duly followed the prescribed procedure, publishing anticommunist statements in the Huabei ribao [North China Daily] and Yishi bao [Social Welfare Tribune]. When the party branch was deciding who would be in the ﬁrst batch, Liu Xiwu begged not to be included among them. Still sceptical of the instruction’s authenticity, he asked that the ﬁrst releasees, once they were out, send him a message (in the form of a chicken) to indicate that the party centre was really behind the plan. Liu duly received his fowl proof and he too went through the release procedure.37 The release procedure The following information is drawn largely from Red Guard accounts, based on their interrogation of ex-prisoners such as Liu Shenzhi and Liu Xiwu.38 The post-1978 accounts are far more reticent about the release and prefer to expatiate on the sixty-one’s brave struggle while in prison. This omission may constitute reluctant acknowledgment that the Red Guard descriptions are basically correct. Bo Yibo and Yang Xianzhen were the ﬁrst to participate in the required procedure. Since Bo headed the prison’s party branch, it is feasible that he felt it incumbent upon himself to be ﬁrst in this uncomfortable process. Confession forms had to be collected from the prison authorities, and then signed and ﬁngerprinted by the prisoners. The confession stated that ‘the applicant, after his education in the Institution for Rehabilitation of Criminals, had recognized his past mistakes, repented, and turned over a new leaf, and that in future he would not oppose the government but would resolutely ﬁght communism under the government’s leadership’.39 This was similar in gist to the press statement the prisoners were required to issue, which began by saying that:

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the undersigned have been arrested and detained at the Military Penitentiary Branch in Peiping to undergo self-repentance and renewal because of our ideological ignorance, weak observation, association with bad friends, and negligence in speech and conduct. At this moment of national crisis, all Chinese youths must follow a deﬁnite principle to ﬁght for the interests of the fatherland.40 The statement concluded with the anticommunist resolutions quoted at the start of this chapter. The ﬁrst such announcement appeared in the Huabei ribao on 31 August 1936. It was signed, under their pseudonyms, by An Ziwen, Yang Xianzhen, Dong Tianzhi, Ma Huizhi, Xu Zirong, Liu Lantao, Zhou Zhongying, Xian Weixun and Bo Yibo.41 The prisoners then took part in a ceremony in the prison courtyard under the Guomindang ﬂag. The director exhorted them to ‘revert to good deeds’, and the group answered in unison that their reform was sincere; the ﬁnale was a group photograph. Prisoners were required to have present at the ceremony guarantors who would vouch for the sincerity of their repentance and vows for the future. Bo Yibo had two guarantors, both supplied by General Yan Xishan, who controlled Shanxi province, which indicates that Bo’s future cooperation with Yan had already been negotiated with the North Bureau.42 The ﬁnal stage of the procedure involved the collection of individual release cards or certiﬁcates, upon which was printed ‘Reforming errors and reverting to good deeds; making self-examination and a new start’.43 The cards were then ﬁngerprinted and mimeographed. Fingerprints and photographs are anathema to any self-respecting underground worker and the Red Guard sources do not fail to point this out, but presumably the prisoners’ photographs and ﬁngerprints were anyway in the police archives. This episode set a precedent for the similar release of several hundred cadres imprisoned in the north and north-east.44 One of the ﬁrst duties imposed on some of the released was to carry letters of instruction from the North Bureau to other reformatories. Bo Yibo, for instance, passed on the instructions to the Shanxi GMD Penitentiary and the Taiyuan Nationalist Army Prison, effecting the release of Wang Ruofei, Qiao Mingfu, Gong Zirong, Yang Xiufeng and at least a hundred others before the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese war in July 1937.45 Once out of prison, many cadres assumed new identities and pseudonyms. Their subsequent autobiographical accounts in their individual party personnel dossiers did not provide the details of the release described above. The dossier statements were limited to more innocu-

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ous wording, such as ‘I got out of prison thanks to efforts by the organization to save me’ or ‘In accordance with a directive from the Centre and the spirit of the 1 August declaration, I wrote a simple statement.’ Even after their 1978 rehabilitation, cadres continued to refer with discreet brevity to the release: ‘when the Party rescued me from prison’ or ‘I was rescued from prison by the Party’.46 This type of euphemistic terminology was also used in eulogies for the posthumously rehabilitated: ‘In October 1936, Comrade Hu Xikui and his comrades-in-arms were successfully rescued from prison through the efforts of the party organization’, and in the eulogy for Xu Bing, ‘the Party Central Committee decided to rescue the large numbers of experienced cadres from the prisons in Beiping’.47

The roles of Liu Shaoqi and Zhang Wentian Liu Shaoqi In his third confession during the Cultural Revolution, Liu Shaoqi claimed that Zhang Wentian, on behalf of the Central Committee, had instructed that the ‘matter should be handled by Comrade Ke Qingshi’.48 Liu further claimed that he had not known then ‘what speciﬁc formalities they went through’, nor had he found out until the Cultural Revolution that they had published anticommunist notices in the Guomindang press.49 Although he may not have wanted to be told too precisely, it is unlikely that he was unaware of what the release formalities entailed. However as head of the North Bureau Liu was ultimately responsible, with or without prior knowledge of the intricacies of the arrangements made by his subordinates, as even he was prepared to admit: ‘I accept a certain amount of responsibility in this matter.’50 Despite Liu’s protestations of ignorance, like any veteran Chinese communist he surely had more than an inkling of what was entailed. If it had not been controversial there would have been no argument among the prisoners, many of whom had been incarcerated together for ﬁve years. Between 1931 and 1936 they had had many opportunities, initiated by the prison authorities, to recant, but had exploited none of these opportunities. Only authorization from the highest level of the party’s leadership convinced them to comply with the prison authorities’ release procedures. My assumption is that Liu was extremely reluctant to involve the party centre in the matter. He must have been aware that, even if local

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party organizations sometimes authorized (prior to or retroactively) the false recantation of a cadre who was well known and trusted, a request to the party’s central leadership for prior approval of an entire group’s recantation was highly unusual, if not unprecedented. This was hardly a position the centre would relish, nor a decision it would want to publicize. Furthermore Liu risked a negative response, which would have jeopardized this opportunity to turn round the abysmal cadre situation in northern China and breathe new life into white area work. Therefore even if he did have more information at his disposal, it would be quite feasible to phrase the request to Zhang Wentian in somewhat vague generalities regarding the proposed release, which would involve ‘certain formalities’,51 or ‘a simple procedure of indicating their stand against communism’.52 (Zhang Wentian’s widow, Liu Ying, claimed that Zhang was given to understand that the ‘simple procedure’ required an ordinary statement promising non-antigovernment activity, rather than a speciﬁcally anticommunist statement.53 But this is illogical, for if the statement had been so innocent and uncontentious there would have been no need for Liu Shaoqi to turn to the party centre for its authorization.) One of the Cultural Revolution criticisms levelled at Liu Shaoqi with regard to his role in the release of the sixty-one was that the GMD’s relatively weak position in Beiping meant that he could have negotiated less ignominious terms: The upsurge in the resistance against Japan created extremely favourable conditions for the struggle in the prisons in the White areas. At the same time, after the ‘He–Umezu Agreement’ Song Zheyuan took over Beijing. Song at the time was not on speaking terms with Chiang Kai-shek. If such a favourable situation were grasped and the struggle inside the prison were closely coordinated with that outside it would be entirely possible to win support from the masses and force the enemy to release the political prisoners unconditionally. However, as a chief responsible member of the Northern Bureau at the time, Liu Shaoqi did not do so. Instead he adopted the method of shameless surrender.54 Red Guard sources imply that the authorities were looking for a way to get the prisoners off their hands and Liu would have simply been doing them a favour. But this ignores certain facts. Song Zheyuan was well aware that the communists were desperate to gain this valuable, scarce

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resource in northern China – experienced, ‘tempered’ cadres at a time when tens of thousands of young people were clamouring for effective leadership against the Japanese. He could have simply left them to await their fate at the hands of the Japanese. At least through negotiation he might gain the immediate face-saving measure of the prisoners’ public renunciation of communism, which would have more than face-saving potential if it also damaged the party’s reputation. At the same time Song would bolster his own dubious image of having some effective authority in Beijing. Another aspect to be considered is Liu’s cultivation of relations with Song as part of the new united-front policy. From the moment Liu took over the North Bureau he had clearly expressed his plans to effect the CCP’s united-front policy of forming ‘temporary alliances with those persons in the enemy camp who may co-operate with us or who are not yet our chief enemy, so as to weaken the enemy as a whole and destroy his alliance against us’.55 Song, like Yan Xishan, Zhang Xueliang and others, was an appropriate target for such a temporary alliance. The act of negotiating the prisoners’ release achieved the objectives of increasing the number of communist cadre personnel while simultaneously functioning as a conﬁdence-building measure to convince nationalist forces, dismayed with Chiang Kai-shek, that the communists were serious about pursuing a united front with them. The GMD warlord generals were also keen to enlist the organizational skills of the communist cadres to channell the growing national fervour for anti-Japanese resistance activities (and possibly to erode Chiang Kaishek’s authority) – provided it was done without open recruitment to the communist cause. This is borne out by Yan Xishan’s speedy participation regarding Bo Yibo in the Caolanzi reformatory, and the subsequent release of prisoners from reformatories under his jurisdiction. Finally, with regard to Liu’s role in the affair it should be noted that the unconditional release of political prisoners was repeatedly proposed by the communists in the initially secret, but later open, united-front negotiations with the nationalists. Since this point was again raised by the communists in February 1937 in their telegram to the GMD Central Executive Committee plenary session, we can deduce that Chiang Kaishek had still not acceded to the demand.56 Whether all the prisoners were eventually released unconditionally is a moot point. If they were the Red Guards would have mentioned this to highlight what they considered to be Liu’s poor, premature, if not traitorous judgement. Perhaps they did not wish to draw attention to Zhou Enlai’s role as chief negotiator with the enemy.57

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Zhang Wentian Since February 1935, following the Zunyi conference, Zhang had held the post of Party general secretary. It was his duty to handle ‘day-today’ matters, to preside over meetings of the Secretariat and Politburo and put his signature to the documents issued from such meetings. Liu Shaoqi’s request was a particularly delicate, controversial and possibly unprecedented issue. So, thirty years on, during the Cultural Revolution, when Zhang said that he had not brought Liu’s request before the Central Committee he was probably telling the truth, for this was a large and relatively public forum in which to discuss a sensitive issue demanding the utmost secrecy. On the other hand it is highly unlikely that Zhang would have taken ‘a decision of this magnitude’ completely alone and without consulting the Central Secretariat, of which Mao Zedong was a member.58 Hu Hua’s biography of An Ziwen unambiguously says that the release was discussed by the Secretariat.59 This top-level body, which also constituted the Politburo Standing Committee, was a far smaller forum than the Central Committee, and therefore more suitable for addressing the matter. In fact one glance at the Secretariat’s composition might lead one to conclude that the decision-making process was an extremely intimate affair. Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai, Qin Bangxian (Bo Gu) and Xiang Ying were Zhang’s Secretariat colleagues; and Xiang Ying, then engaged in Jiangxi–Fujian guerrilla operations, was not available for consultation. (As for the Politburo itself, the majority of its members were not even in Bao’an between April and August 1936, when this particular decision was made.) Politburo Standing Committee member Qin Bangxian was there, and bearing in mind Zhang Wentian’s and Qin Bangxian’s shared background – as fellow students in Moscow and their experience with white area work – it would seem that Qin was a natural partner for consultation. Ascertaining whether Zhou Enlai was present at the time is not so easy. He was heavily involved in negotiations with Zhang Xueliang in Yan’an in April, and the secret negotiations with GMD representatives may have involved his direct participation, travelling to Shanghai and Nanjing between May and August. In June 1936, when Edgar Snow arrived at the revolutionary base, Zhou was stationed some three days’ journey by horse from Bao’an and was in communication with the Bao’an headquarters by radio or messenger.60 So he was accessible at various times during this period. If Zhang conferred with anybody, Zhou would have been the most logical choice, not only because of his authority in the party and exper-

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tise in white area work, but also because of his high-proﬁle role in engineering the party’s new united-front policy, and his efforts to negotiate the release of political prisoners. This suggests that he would naturally have been involved in a decision on such a closely related matter as freeing cadres to build up the white area communist presence and to work with nationalists whose top priority was resistance to Japan. On the other hand Zhou may have been hesitant about authorizing the false confessions, since this could undermine his attempts to have the prisoners released unconditionally. Last but certainly not least in the Secretariat was Mao Zedong. In 1936 Mao’s world revolved around the consolidation of his leadership, the revolutionary base, the strategy and tactics of the various red armies, his acrimonious conﬂict with Zhang Guotao, rivalry with Wang Ming, relations with the Comintern and overall united-front policy making.61 He had also become deeply engaged in the formulation of the ‘Mao Zedong Thought’. The nitty-gritty of white area affairs was far from his top priority. But if, as is widely held, Zhang Wentian had moved closer to Mao since the Zunyi conference, it makes sense that simply as a trustbuilding measure he would have consulted Mao, and not taken any potentially alienating, maverick action. In his day-to-day work Comrade Wentian had great esteem for Chairman Mao. After the Zunyi conference and for some time after arriving in Northern Sha’anxi, he always consulted with Chairman Mao over the agenda or had Chairman Mao outline the questions to be discussed prior to every meeting of the Secretariat or the Political Bureau, which he presided over. Some documents were drafted by him and then revised by Chairman Mao before they were submitted to the meeting for discussion and approval.62 I can only deduce that Zhang Wentian did confer with his available ‘inner cabinet’ colleagues, though the information he had been given, and in turn passed on to them, may have been severely limited. This does not mean that Zhang and his colleagues were any less familiar than Liu Shaoqi with the GMD’s conditional demands for prisoner release. But not having all the excruciatingly unpalatable details of the release procedures spelt out and placed on ofﬁcial record made the decision-making process much easier. Zhang’s colleagues would not have to dwell upon the negative aspect of the ethical dilemma. Instead they could focus on its positive motive: the vital organizational needs of building up the party in the white areas and increasing the

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manpower that would eventually ﬂock to Yan’an. Everyone concerned, therefore, from Liu to Zhang and Zhang to his party centre colleagues, preferred a minimum of communicated information, for it enabled them to act on the basis of ‘need to know’ or, as Lyman Van Slyke suggests, ‘plausible deniability’.63 The assumption that the party centre received limited information is reinforced by the account by Liu’s widow, Wang Guangmei, of how Zhou Enlai contacted Liu Shaoqi in late November 1966 about the 1936 release and how ‘Liu Shaoqi recounted in detail the points which Comrade Zhou Enlai did not know’. The implication is that Zhou certainly did know some details in 1936.64 Poor communications over long, arduous distances and brief communications vital to security also combined to minimize and justify the relay of limited information between the white areas and the liberated soviet area. As Mao told Bo in their ﬁrst ever conversation in Yan’an in 1943: ‘In the past I did not have a good understanding of your activities. You were in the white area and we were in the soviet area. The passage of information was blocked by the Guomindang.’65 In some respects this situation was quite convenient for the red area leadership in terms of its relationship with white area activities. It could dictate broad lines of policy without directly participating in or appearing to condone speciﬁc and dubious methods of policy application. And later it could protest blissful ignorance of such activities. It would also be able to deny any collective responsibility for this particular dilemma, because authorization was issued in the name of one person only, Zhang Wentian. Again owing to the prevailing security needs, it was not uncommon for the leadership to convey a decision in a non-formal format, in this case a personal telegram from Zhang (who was after all the party’s leading ofﬁcial).66 As we shall see, because of pressure and criticism from white area party personnel, particularly Liu Shaoqi in the late 1930s, attempts were made to secure for the darker side of white area tactics the explicit sanction, if not the blessing, of the party centre. The devastating effects of the Japanese occupation on communist activities in northern rural areas in the early 1940s reinforced these efforts. But any such sanction remained in ‘internal’ party documents and could not compete with the public rhetoric, which intoned that one should die rather than display disloyalty of any sort to the party. Meanwhile almost all of the Caolanzi group who had put their reputations but not their lives on the line emerged from prison and gave active credence to the pragmatic logic that had convinced the party centre to back the release plan.

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The authorization for the captured Communists to obtain release from the Kuomintang prison through pretended surrender and renewals was in fact the wisest move the CCP had ever taken. . . . The released Communists, as proved by later events, were able to strengthen Communist united front operations in the war zones. Thus they paved the way for the subsequent wartime Communist expansion and the postwar Communist rebellion and seizure of the whole of mainland China.67

Into the great wide open: Shanxi 1936–4368 Under the instruction of the North Bureau at least a third of the released Caolanzi cadres made their way to Shanxi, where Yan Xishan had decided that an alliance with the communists was his best option in the face of the looming Japanese threat on the one hand, and Chiang Kai-shek’s interest in exercising his own authority over Shanxi on the other. Despite the brutal revenge that Yan had recently wrought on those he had perceived as communist sympathizers after Liu Zhidan and Xu Haidong’s brief but impressive victory in February 1936, by the early summer he was clearly ready to work with his erstwhile enemy.69 His approach dovetailed neatly with the current CCP united-front policy. The representatives of Yan who had acted as guarantors for Bo Yibo’s release from Caolanzi had taken an invitation from Yan to fellow Shanxi native Bo to ‘defend Shanxi together’. Bo later referred to his misgivings about the idea of cooperating with this warlord governor: When I got out of prison in late August 1936, a representative of Yan Xishan came to see me. He brought along with him a cable message from Yan, inviting me to return to Shanxi to ‘participate in the work of safeguarding Shanxi’. In the past I was always doing underground work for the party and had never done any high-level united front work. Nor was I willing to have anything to do with Yan Xishan. Therefore I politely declined to accept Yan’s offer.70 Bo’s reluctance reﬂected a situation that Liu Shaoqi had been ﬁnding problematic since his arrival in Tianjin. Veteran cadres had still to shake off the lingering inﬂuences of leftist attitudes and ‘closed-doorism’. They were slow to adapt to the new united-front policies and to differentiate between open and secret work methods, despite Liu’s continued

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coaxing and coaching.71 Professor Xu Bing worked hard on behalf of Liu Shaoqi to persuade Bo. The next day, Comrade Xu Bing told me: ‘Comrade Hu Fu [Liu Shaoqi] has said that this is a rare opportunity and you must go. . . . Most probably you believe that we should not cooperate with Yan Xishan to resist Japan, that we should only do mass work at the basic level and that we should not carry out work at the high level. This shows you do not understand the situation well enough . . . Japan seeks to destroy China. Chiang Kai-shek continues to implement the policy of non-resistance, while Yan Xishan is still vacillating. The Party’s present task is to carry out mass work well at the basic level, and at the same time do a good job at the high-level united front. Now Yan Xishan asks you to go. This is an excellent opportunity, because he is approaching you and asking you to go. You will lose this good chance, if you refuse to go.’72 It was over a month before Bo reported back to the North Bureau that he was prepared to undertake this mission. Almost six decades later he still felt it necessary to remind the public that Mao had been as ardent a proponent of the united-front policy as Liu, and that he, Bo, had been following Mao’s bidding, as dispatched to the North Bureau: ‘with regard to the leading army and government persons in the six North China provinces and cities, “we should make contacts as soon as the opportunity arises. We must bear in mind that the united front attaches priority to the armies of all actions.” ’73 Accompanied by Yang Xianzhen, Dong Tianzhi, Han Jun and Zhou Zhongying, Bo returned to Taiyuan. Gradually they were joined by others of the sixty-one: Liu Youguang, Hou Zhenya, Liao Luyan, Wang Hefeng, Fu Yutian, Li Liguo, Tang Fanglei, Zhao Lin and Caolanzi exprisoners, including Kong Xiangzhen, Feng Jiping and Liu Yaxiong.74 Before the ﬁrst group’s departure for Taiyuan, Xu Bing passed on a number of guidelines and instructions from Liu Shaoqi. Under no circumstances were they to ‘engage in “left” adventurism and “phrasemongering” ’. Bo described the situation as follows: I arrived in Taiyuan in the capacity of an anti-Japanese activist, reached an agreement with Yan Xishan, and established a special form of united front. Proceeding from Shanxi’s reality, we deﬁed being labelled an ‘ofﬁcial organization’, refrained from raising any slogan that was unacceptable to Yan Xishan and took over and reor-

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ganized the ‘Shanxi Alliance for Sacriﬁce and National Salvation’ chaired by Yan Xishan.75 A party work committee to oversee united-front work was to be set up in Shanxi under the direct leadership of the North Bureau; two of the sixty-one, Zhang Youqing and Xu Zirong, were to head a related committee, the Shanxi Workers’ Committee. Open and secret work were to be kept completely separate. Thus began a two-year period of cooperation with Yan Xishan within the open/legal front of Yan’s civil administration – within the ‘Sacriﬁce League’ established in September 1936 and the armed ‘Dare-to-Die’ columns created in August 1937, known later as Yan Xishan’s New Army. We expanded the Ximenghui [Sacriﬁce League] organizations to embrace factories (including the munitions factory), schools (including military academies) and rural areas . . . we set up a number of training units under the name of the ‘Shanxi Military and Administrative Training Committee’. . . . We recruited tens of thousands of progressive youths in Shanxi and other provinces for training in these units. These training units virtually became our party’s military and administrative cadres’ schools.76 In July 1937, following the Japanese occupation of Beijing, the North Bureau transferred its headquarters to Taiyuan, but when in November the Japanese occupied Taiyuan too, it moved again, this time to Linfen in south-west Shanxi, along with Yan Xishan’s own headquarters. On both occasions An Ziwen (who since his release had been in Beijing, where he headed the Organization Department of the party’s Municipal Committee, organizing and recruiting students and rescuing other prison cadres) was instrumental in making the necessary arrangements to establish the North Bureau’s new headquarters. Also part of the North Bureau presence in Beijing and Taiyuan were Caolanzi sixty-one releasees Ma Huizhi, Wang De, Liu Shenzhi and Li Chuli. After their release they had initially been engaged in united-front and undercover work with National Salvation activists, but following the occupation of Beijing and Taiyuan, Ma had become secretary of the Hebei Provincial Party Committee. Two others, Liu Zhao and Zhu Zemin, who had remained in Beijing after their release, had joined up with Song Zheyuan’s troops, following the North Bureau’s instruction that procommunist students (and presumably communist underground

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workers) should now be encouraged to support and enlist in the 29th Corps.77 Yan Xishan had turned over many of the civil administration posts to his Sacriﬁce League colleagues, in full knowledge of the communist leanings and even membership of a good many of them. Thus the communists were in control of ﬁve of the seven administrative districts. Bo Yibo, for instance, directed the Third Administrative District in southeast Shanxi, where his Dare-to-Die column operated. Bo was in charge of 13 counties, including Qinxian, where the Third District ofﬁces were situated.78 The special commissioners of the Shanxi government’s First, Fifth and Sixth Administrative Districts were also communists, as were the leaders of at least 60 of the 105 Shanxi counties and the magistrates of 77 counties. Again, Liu’s comments on the difﬁculty of adapting to the new united-front policy are veriﬁed in An Ziwen’s biography. Those appointed by An and Bo to work under Yan Xishan’s auspices initially viewed their new tasks with a lack of enthusiasm: ‘they believed these positions to be symbolic of reactionary power but they ﬁnally agreed because of An Ziwen’s thoroughgoing and painstaking ideological work’.79 Like Bo, the communist district administrators were concurrently commanders of Dare-to-Die columns, comprising some 40 000–50 000 armed militia troops; also like Bo, the commanders had recently been released from Chiang Kai-shek’s prisons.80 They spread out across the Shanxi countryside: ‘As soon as they arrived at their new destinations, they assumed command over speciﬁc geographic areas, each comprising several counties.’81 Eventually Liu Shaoqi was able to sum up united-front work in Shanxi most positively: ‘By helping Yan Xishan to resist Japan, we persisted in the war of resistance in Shanxi, pushed the revolution in the province forward and also advanced ourselves.’82 The new civilian and militia presence in south-east Shanxi facilitated the arrival of the 129th Division of the 8th Route Army (8RA), led by Liu Bocheng and Deng Xiaoping. By the spring of 1938 they had established the Taiyue–Taihang military base, an integral feature of what soon became the Shanxi–Hebei–Henan–Shandong or Jin–Ji–Lu–Yu ( JJLY) border region. Among those of the sixty-one who had accompanied Bo to Shanxi and were involved in the civil and military organizations were Yang Xianzhen and Liu Youguang, a company political instructor and political commissar of one of the Dare-to Die columns. Once the 8RA’s presence was established, Liu Youguang was appointed director of one of its Political Department subcommands within the Taiyue Military

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Area Command and 13th Brigade political commissar. Liao Luyan, Zhou Zhongying and Wang Hefeng were also responsible for political work with the forces. In 1940 Yang Xianzhen was transferred to the North Bureau Secretariat, where he worked in administration and cadre training. He was also involved in the ‘building-up of the bureau’s Party school’, where it was his responsibility ‘to create teaching material to connect theory with reality’.83 Yang’s Party School associations were to continue well into the mid 1960s. A conﬂuent development in the Taiyue region was the initiation of a party organization. Liu Shaoqi had instructed An Ziwen in late 1937 to join Bo in Qinxian, and in early 1938 to set up a party presence in the Taiyue mountain area. North Bureau Organization Department director Peng Zhen (imprisoned by the GMD in Tianjin between 1929 and 1935) accompanied An and assisted him in creating the new organization before moving on in December to the Shanxi–Chahar– Hebei or Jin–Cha–Ji (JCJ) area. An Ziwen served on the JJL party committee and the following year became secretary of the Taiyue Special Zone and secretary of its working committee, as well as directing its united-front operations. His operational ﬁeld covered twelve counties, based mainly in Qinxian, Qinyuan, Andan and Fushan. The Taiyue Party Committee headquarters moved to Qinyuan after Japanese troops occupied Qinxian in the summer of 1939. In the counties of Hebei, Shandong and Henan, where communist organizations functioned, party membership grew so rapidly during 1938 and early 1939 – from mere hundreds to tens of thousands – that the Central Committee Politburo felt it necessary to slow down recruitment and tighten up the screening of all cadres. A further strengthening of communist power in Shanxi was evident in early 1940. Yan Xishan, alarmed at the increasing communist control of areas within his province, allowed his ‘old army’ to attack the ‘new’ in December 1939. The result was signiﬁcant: the defection of some 30 000 of Yan Xishan’s New Army troops to the three divisions of the Red Army’s 8RA. Political Commissar Han Jun (of the sixty-one) led his 2nd Dare-to-Die column to join the 8RA’s 115th Division. Units of other columns joined under commander-in-chief Bo Yibo. Han Jun became commander of the 1st Army and Niu Yinguan (an ex-Beijing student recruited by An Ziwen in 1937) of the 2nd Army. Another participant in the mutiny, an ex-prison cadre from the Shanxi GMD Penitentiary, Liu Taifeng, became a council member of the JJLY regional government and director of its Department of Construction. The JJLY border region

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government was established in July 1941 with Professor Yang Xiufeng as chairman and Bo as vice-chairman. In accordance with the CCP’s suggested ‘three-thirds’ formula, 46 of the 134 elected assembly members were CCP cadres.84 During the last few years of the Sino-Japanese War, Bo Yibo was division commander in the JJLY military region and political commissar of the Taiyue military subdistrict, the western sector of the JJLY military region; he then became deputy political commissar of the JJLY military region. Continuing as JJLY vice-chairman he was also responsible for its civil affairs and president of its general assembly. Another of the sixty-one, ‘one of the more important communists in the Hebei– Shandong–Henan area during and after the Sino-Japanese War, was Zhang Xi.85 Zhang was secretary of the JJLY Special Party Committee and of the District Party Committees of Hebei–Henan and Tainan, and, like Liu Zijiu in west Henan, he was also political commissar of the military district. I have dwelt on the Shanxi contingent of the sixty-one, but I should point out that many cadres released from other prisons were equally active in Shanxi,86 and that others of the sixty-one were equally active in other base areas: Hu Xikui, Liu Lantao and Li Chuli in east Hebei, with Liu Lantao and Hu Xikui later playing roles in the JCJ Beiyue district; Zhao Bo, He Zhiping, Zhao Mingxin and Zhu Zemin in Shandong; and Liu Zijiu, Wang Qimei, Li Jukui, Wang Xinbo and Zhang Manping in Henan. Like their sixty-one colleagues in Shanxi, and their white area colleagues in general, who all participated in border region government and party activities, acquired a tremendous range of skills in the organizational and ﬁnancial spheres of civil administration, particularly in the implementation of rural policies involving land taxation and rent reduction.87 They also honed their skills in recruiting party members, organizing guerrilla units and militias and generally swaying rural support in northern China in the communist movement’s favour. At the same time, however, their united-front work, their open or secret work initiated and authorized by the party centre, added layer upon layer to the complex and often suspect image of the white area cadre. There were few illusions about the nature of white area work, both open and secret, and there was every understanding that it had to be done. In the late 1930s the party leadership agreed that the ‘front line of battle has moved from the soviet to the white areas’.88 In fact, as we shall see, the parameters of the permissible in white area work grew broader as the party’s situation in the north grew more dire under

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Japanese occupation. But there remained an unbridgeable gap between the dictates of policy and the attitude towards those who executed it; a failure to integrate the white area worker’s brief with the identikit proﬁle of a respectable party member. This was most apparent when it came to the periodic screening of party members, as well as checking the credentials of delegates to party congresses and candidates for Central Committee membership. All three processes occurred between 1939 and 1945 and each time cadres had to account for their behaviour in enemy prisons and the manner of their release.

Cadre screening Since taking on his leading role in the North Bureau, Liu Shaoqi had campaigned relentlessly not only for a fresh approach to white area work but also for greater trust in those who participated in such work, challenging the party’s conventional notions of loyalty and heroism.89 How could he combat the attitude of suspicion and prejudice towards white area cadres? The party had genuine security needs – it really did have to guard against the inﬁltration of enemy agents – but in addressing these needs, comments such as the following by Chen Yun were bound to fuel mistrust of cadres such as the sixty-one: ‘The so-called Communist confessions that sometimes appear in the press are in fact fabricated by enemy agents.’90 The latter, warned Chen, ‘pass themselves off as revolutionaries who have escaped or been released from imperialist or KMT jails. They appear with blood dripping from their heads and claim to have been tortured.’91 By uncanny coincidence these comments appeared in October 1936, just after the ﬁrst few groups of the sixty-one had been released. Even the ‘genuine revolutionary’ who had been imprisoned was, as far as Chen Yun was concerned, at least temporarily a persona non grata on his release: ‘there is a possibility that he was photographed while in jail, and detectives are bound to shadow him in pursuit of other revolutionaries’.92 Chen was most emphatic that the party should not rush to contact anyone just out of prison but instead should subject them to ‘rigorous investigation’ – after all, surely a ‘genuine revolutionary’ would stoically understand the party’s security needs. Less than a year later Liu Shaoqi proposed a diametrically opposed approach, one that was to afford direct and retroactive protection for the sixty-one. It found expression in a secret internal Central Organization Department (COD) resolution dated 7 July 1937, the day war at last broke out between China and Japan.93 This document was referred

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to thirty years later, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, as evidence of collusion between Zhang Wentian and Liu Shaoqi to legalize the basis of the 1936 release by permitting the resumption of party membership to those who had published anti-CCP statements. Collusion or not, the document was far more controversial than the Cultural Revolution investigators realized. It was entitled ‘The Decision on How to Handle So-called Confessants’, and its timing suggests that it was intended as a ﬁnal bid to persuade local communist organizations to encourage their imprisoned cadres to get themselves released before the Japanese became their warders – or their executioners. Beginning with a dutiful paean to those who remained loyal to the party throughout their prison term (that is, did not make false confessions in order to obtain their release), the resolution then demonstrated remarkable generosity towards a whole range of alternative behaviours. More importantly, it recommended that upon arrest, if their communist identity had not been revealed, cadres should sign the confession forms along with arrested non-communists in order to obtain immediate release; the same applied to imprisoned cadres. This was followed by a clause that offered further protection for the sixty-one and implied full trust in the loyalty of such cadres: the membership of those who signed confessional statements with party approval remained effective and they could therefore resume work without delay (that is, without undergoing investigation). Those who signed without approval could continue their revolutionary work but would be reinstated in the party only after investigation, and provided that their anticommunist statement was not accompanied or preceded by any betrayal or exposure of the party network. None of the above should be regarded as having reneged. As for those whose confessions were genuine, if this was simply a temporary aberration – if they had momentarily ‘wavered’ – and as long as their confession had not damaged the party (for example by betraying names or organizations), they could continue to work for the good of the party, although not as members. However if they subsequently accumulated an impressive record of achievement, a special committee above provincial level could approve their readmission following reinvestigation. The resolution was so generous that even excadres expelled as proven traitors were not beyond the pale. If they repented, they could still be rehabilitated as progressive elements. Furthermore expelled traitors now working for anticommunist administrations but not directly harming the party – and occasionally helping the party – could likewise be categorized as progressive elements. The

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ﬁnal clause criticized as ultraleftist those who lumped all confessants together and denounced them without differentiating between the contexts in which the act of confession had taken place. At the same time it warned that too relaxed an attitude towards betrayal was a form of ultrarightism. Altogether this document revealed both practicality and extraordinary sensitivity towards a complex issue. It recognized that the party was not in a position to fritter away manpower, neither its loyal cadres nor those who had fallen from grace to become merely erratic sympathizers. It recognized that people had the capacity to change for the better, for the worse, for the better again, and so on; that most people were not supernatural or foolhardy heroes, but just ordinary mortals struggling to keep themselves and their families alive. The echoes of the Confucian tradition were strong – the notion of making use of people and their skills for the public good and the notion that people could be rectiﬁed through education. These echoes bounced back again and again in the Maoist tradition and underlay movements such as the rectiﬁcation campaign that unfurled in Yan’an in 1942–44. But echoes of a more purist nature were equally strident, and it was these that carried the campaign into sinister and paranoid spheres where guilt of betrayal was assumed and innocence had to be proven. Nothing better illustrates the continuing ambiguities in party policy towards arrested cadres than the range of articles in the ﬁrst issue of The Communist in October 1939. On one hand the ﬂexible tactics of open and secret white area work were advocated; on the other a rigid code of behaviour was unequivocally demanded in an article entitled ‘How to Handle the Cases of Arrested Communists and the Question of Morality’: ‘in no circumstances should one make confessions before the enemy such as ﬁlling out confession forms, writing pledges of repentance or releasing similar statements to the press’.94 This was a complete contradiction of the 1937 COD resolution. In the summer of 1940 the COD (by then under the leadership of the wary Chen Yun) deﬁned screening procedures, some of which related to the loyalty of underground cadres who had been out of contact with the party and/or imprisoned: (1) Whether there is a disruption in their association with the Party and what are the causes for such disruption. Is there any evidence of their effort to keep in touch with the Party at the time of disruption and in what manner have they resumed this organizational relationship?

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(2) Whether they have been arrested and imprisoned, what they have confessed or whether they have betrayed the Party in their imprisonment. Is there any evidence that can prove loyalty or disloyalty while they were in prison? (3) How have they been released from imprisonment? Is there any evidence showing whether they have written any confession, repentant statement or pledges?95 Although Chen Yun moderated his language – and to an extent his views – on the party’s position towards confessants, he continued to maintain that an investigation and a breathing space of undeﬁned duration outside the party was necessary for all categories of personnel who had been cut off from the party for one reason or another, or had been forced to follow GMD procedures such as the ‘turning over a new leaf’ ceremony, in which case ‘they can deal with the situation as non-Party people, but they must be careful not to harm the Party organization in any way. Anyone who protects the Party and continues to work for the revolution may be reinstated in the Party when the time comes.’96 (This difference between Chen Yun and Liu Shaoqi on the issue of delayed or immediate re-entry to the party sanctum for cadres who been out of contact with the party or had made a recantation – albeit a false one – was connected to another bone of contention: the limiting or expansion of party recruitment, Chen favouring the former and Liu the latter.) Another category of cadre concerned Chen deeply – those involved in the controversial ‘white skin, red heart’ (baipi hongxin) policy, also referred to as the ‘revolutionary double-dealing policy’.97 This policy, adopted as a necessary evil to survive under Japanese occupation, was a potent example of how party policy for white area work could rebound on those who executed it. White skin, red heart If the communist presence in northern China had ﬂourished in the late 1930s, the early 1940s saw a downward spiral in its fortunes. Following the battle of 100 Regiments in the summer of 1940, when communist forces attacked transport lines and Japanese-established blockhouses, the Japanese forces turned their full and ferocious attention to the rural areas where the communists were nestled.98 In the ‘burn all, loot all, kill all’ manifestations that ensued, the rural population was utterly demoralized as crops were destroyed, animals killed or conﬁscated and family, friends and neighbours suspected of aiding communists or cooperating

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with the border region government were murdered. The communist bases were ‘nibbled away’. By 1942, 90 per cent of the plains bases were reduced to guerrilla status or outright enemy control. In the mountainous T’aiyue district of the Chin–Chi–Lu–Yu base, a cadre admitted that ‘not a single county was kept intact and the government ofﬁces of all its twelve counties were exiled in Chin-yuan’.99 That the communists survived at all, and maintained a more than symbolic presence, was in itself no small victory. Their survival was due largely to their use of appropriate responses to counter the effects on peasant morale of the harsh repression: ‘reducing the material risks of martyrdom’ and ‘reducing demands for heroism’, encouraging peasants to cooperate ‘with the Japanese by day and the border region by night’.100 ‘The policy permitted sympathizers to do a little bit for the resistance cause at a fairly small risk – collect a little tax grain, help hide a few guerillas for the day – rather than presenting them with a choice of doing a great deal . . . at an enormous risk . . . or doing nothing at all.’101 One of the leading ﬁgures among the sixty-one, An Ziwen, who introduced the policy in the JJLY Taiyue district, called it ‘the tactics of double-faced power’.102 Although this policy was not the original invention of the border region’s party organization, and although it facilitated the survival of the communist presence (adversely affecting Japanese intelligence efforts along the way), it was just the sort of operation that subsequently fed prejudices against white area cadres. For not only were the peasants encouraged to collaborate with puppet government personnel, so were the cadres themselves: ‘Indeed, many puppet governments were inﬁltrated by Communist party members who even got elected under the Japanese auspices. They did as they were told by the Japanese, but passed information on to the Communist side.’103 The policy had a centrally sanctioned basis in the CCP Secretariat’s ‘Notice on the Work in Major Cities Behind Enemy Lines’ of 15 September 1940, which permitted cadres to ‘penetrate puppet organizations and work in the puppet regime . . . to work in the enemy and puppet troops and to recruit “operatives” . . . wavering individuals in the puppet regime. . . . We can capitalize on their double-dealing psychology and interests to use them for intelligence purposes’.104 In November 1978 Chen Yun claimed that in July 1941 the COD, under his leadership, had issued a resolution intended to protect cadres

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involved in such work – as well as those who had been imprisoned – from a subsequent charge of betrayal.105 He also claimed that at the time he had been unaware of the existence of the 1937 decision on how to deal with confessants, which already covered the issue of faked renegadism. Be that as it may (and it seems doubtful that he would not have made it his business to know of such matters when he returned from Moscow in November 1937 and took up his new COD post), Chen’s resolution was decidedly less generous and comprehensive than the 1937 one it superceded. Nothing was left to chance or trust. Reinvestigation was a prerequisite for resumption of party work and membership in all cases. Even in 1978, when Chen himself proposed the rehabilitation of those who had been discriminated against or expelled during the Cultural Revolution, either because of their work with puppet administrations or because of their release from enemy prison back in the 1930s and 1940s, he still insisted that they undergo a full investigation before readmission.106 Despite the differences between Chen Yun and Liu Shaoqi on cadre recruitment and screening policies, and despite Liu’s 1937 stinging critique (see note 89) of the earlier ‘left-deviationist, adventurist’ approach to white area work, which had offended earlier white area policy makers – of whom Chen was one – there was nevertheless a growing consensus among the party leaders on how open and covert work should operate. Meanwhile one person who had not been offended by Liu’s bombardment of criticism was Mao Zedong. On the contrary, Mao viewed Liu with increasing interest and appreciation. At the time he could not have realized it, but in his critique Liu had set a precedent for Mao in the rewriting of party history that made its debut as the April 1945 ‘Resolution of the CCP CC on Certain Historical Questions’.107 Liu had thus carved his niche as potential junior partner to Mao in the latter’s ﬁnal ascent to formal leadership of the CCP in 1943 at the height of the Yan’an rectiﬁcation campaign. While red area cadres were in the early throes of this campaign, sorting out the texts to be used for educating party members in communist theory, practice and morality, their white area colleagues were still stretching permissible operational methods into such slippery spheres as collaboration with the enemy. But it was not long before a number of the sixty-one found their way to Yan’an for the ostensible purpose of engaging in the rectiﬁcation process of study, criticism and self-criticism. By the spring of 1943 commanding ofﬁcers, political commissars of the 8th Route Army and the New 4th Route Army, secretaries of party organs at county level and above, and respon-

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sible party cadres in various mass organizations had been summoned to Yan’an.108

Yan’an, 1943–45 In the course of the Yan’an rectiﬁcation campaign thousands of white area cadres were hounded as suspected GMD agents, spies and traitors, so one might be surprised to ﬁnd that in general the sixty-one appear to have escaped attention, or at least with regard to the speciﬁc question of their recantation.109 This can be explained fairly simply. In the late 1930s and early 1940s Mao may have been considered ﬁrst among equals, but he had yet to consolidate his position in terms of posts held and as the party’s leading theoretical authority. In the latter sphere he still felt – justiﬁably – overshadowed by Wang Ming. But as noted above, Mao had found a critical (in both senses of the word) ally in Liu Shaoqi. Mao and Liu had built up a mutual support system that bolstered their almost parallel rise in importance, Mao as the red-area-based preeminent leader of the CCP and Liu as the party’s chief representative in the white areas. The sixty-one were part of Liu’s support base and therefore part of the larger support system that Liu could offer Mao.110 Under such patronage it was unlikely that the sixty-one would suffer during the rectiﬁcation campaign, and the incorporation of some of the group’s leading members into the machinery that operated the rectiﬁcation campaign contributed to their protected status. Furthermore it seems that it was less the veteran and more the recently recruited white area cadres, especially intellectuals, who were the main targeted groups. The campaign was well under way when leading ﬁgures among the sixty-one arrived in Yan’an in the spring of 1943. Although the campaign did not begin ofﬁcially until February 1942, early rumblings had been evident since the enlarged meeting of the Politburo in September 1941. The rectiﬁcation campaign’s aims were several. It was to bring a sense of unity to a party in which diversity of geographical, socioeconomic, educational and other backgrounds had served to fragment rather than unite. It was to establish educational and disciplinary standards and, via a process of criticism and self-criticism, to bring the individual to a state of identity with, and loyalty before all else to, the party. It was to do away with dogmatism, subjectivism and sectarianism, sins that Mao considered Wang Ming and other returned students to be especially guilty of. In retrospect the campaign provided the CCP’s Maocentred framework upon which Mao imposed his unique stamp, his Siniﬁcation of Marxism–Leninism, that is, the adaptation of communist

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theory to the practical realities of China. This framework also embraced the arduous task of summing up the party’s history so far, essentially a critique of past leaderships’ errors and misdemeanours. As far as cadre discipline and education were concerned, the rectiﬁcation campaign’s persuasive techniques were soon abandoned for harsher, coercive ones. In the spring of 1943 the campaign became inseparably intertwined with a cadre-screening movement, which Kang Sheng enthusiastically administered and euphemistically called the ‘rescue campaign’.111 It veered wildly out of control and became a witchhunt for traitors and spies in their hundreds and thousands. Who were the most obvious suspects? Cadres who had arrived from the contaminated milieu of the white areas.112 The rescue campaign thus foreshadowed the Cultural Revolution’s hunt for renegades almost a quarter of a century later. Similarly foreshadowed was the blaming of Kang Sheng for ‘excesses’. But in both cases – in the rectiﬁcation campaign and the Cultural Revolution – Kang had peers and superiors who were no less accountable. Initially the rectiﬁcation campaign operated within the framework of the party school, which had been revamped and divided into departments for this purpose. Mao was the school’s president (replacing Deng Fa in April 1942) and ex-prison cadre Peng Zhen was vicepresident in charge of its daily running. In the ﬁrst department were cadres at prefectural level and above, plus some below that level who had been selected as potential delegates to the Seventh National Party Congress. In the second department were the original Party School students at county and regimental level, some 600–800 cadres. An Ziwen, who arrived in Yan’an in May 1943, was sent to study in the ﬁrst department but illness soon prevented his attendance. After his recovery in July he was appointed deputy director of the second department.113 In May 1943 the third department absorbed the party’s Research Institute, hosting the chief targets for rectiﬁcation – some 825 white area urban intellectuals, of whom 745 had been in the party only since 1937.114 An’s biographers claim that he ‘repeatedly’ warned against discriminating against white area cadres, whose complicated histories must be regarded ‘in the context of the times. People who had worked underground in the White regions, in particular, were peculiarly situated, and this factor must be taken into account.’ If no witnesses could be found to verify or contradict a cadre’s testimony, he should ‘be given the beneﬁt of the doubt’.115 This was to become a recurrent theme in An’s later COD career, and was an early indication of his awareness that cadre

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behaviour, including his own, in the white areas could easily be misconstrued. An’s biographers also claim that he was both responsible for restoring the good names of many cadres wrongly accused as traitors, and instrumental in Mao’s curtailment of Kang’s coercive excesses and returning the campaign to a gentler persuasive footing. The punitive action against suspected spies and traitors alienated countless more than the thousands who were hounded and expelled. Ofﬁcial party history says the reining-in of the campaign commenced in August 1943 – a mere two months after it began – with Mao’s ‘Decision on the Screening of the Cadres’.116 But if Mao did begin to pull the plug on the coercive and absolutist approach to party purity at that time, he did so rather gingerly, warning that it was necessary to ﬁnd the right moment to curtail leftist excesses and that it was just as countereffective to do so too early as too late. This must have sounded rather cavalier to the innocent who were being persecuted or to those who felt they might be next in line. Nevertheless there were signs that he was prepared to reassert the pragmatic tradition, which also had a ﬁrm place in his thought. It was preferable ‘not to arrest and kill’ and ‘commit irreversible errors’, but to emulate the GMD techniques of ‘winning over and softening members so that they serve their cause’. [W]e must not only focus on recruiting CP members. . . . We must also pay attention to counter-revolutionary spies, transforming them into revolutionary cadres who will ferret out traitors. The greater the spy, the greater his use will be to us when he turns.117 Cadre investigation was to continue, ordered Mao, but without the extortion of confessions by means of ‘pressure’. Those found innocent should have their reputations restored. ‘We must not automatically assume that all who have been accused are important spies or spies at all.’118 The campaign wound down slowly. Reinvestigation and rehabilitation did not begin until the end of the year, continuing into the spring of 1944, and Mao found himself apologizing more than once to a deeply troubled community of white area cadres.119 As Bo Yibo did not arrive in Yan’an until November 1943 he missed the worst of the campaign. He and Zhao Lin, another of the sixty-one, were appointed party branch leaders in the school’s ﬁrst department. The day after he arrived, Bo met Mao for the ﬁrst time and was given a marathon eight- to nine-hour audience, in which Mao apparently demonstrated great interest in and admiration for the Caolanzi cadres’

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party activities during and after their imprisonment. Bo claims that he submitted to Mao a full list of the cadres released from Caolanzi in 1936. The following day Bo reported to Ren Bishi about the 1936 release. According to Bo, both Mao and Ren told him that they were well aware of the matter and that the Central Committee had given its permission at the time.120 (In March 1943 there had been a streamlining of the party’s central organs and Ren Bishi now stood with Mao and Liu Shaoqi at the top of the leadership pyramid, the new Central Secretariat. Liu was appointed vice-chairman to the Military Commission and also secretary of the Central Organization Commission, which ranked him above the other commission members – Ren Bishi, Chen Yun, Kang Sheng, Deng Fa, Wang Jiaxiang, Zhang Wentian and Yang Shangkun.)121 If most of the sixty-one breathed a sigh of relief as the rectiﬁcation movement drew to a close, those nominated as delegates to the party’s Seventh Congress were less free of apprehension. Eleven were nominated as formal delegates and two as alternates – Bo Yibo, Liu Lantao, An Ziwen, Zhou Zhongying, Zhao Mingxin, Wu Yunpu, Wang De, Peng De, Ma Huizhi, Li Chuli, Liu Shenzhi, Fu Yutian and Liu Zijiu – not an insigniﬁcant proportion of the 547 formal delegates and 208 alternates. They were to spend an initial period in the ﬁrst department of the party school for study and examination; which meant having their candidacy credentials further scrutinized. One sympathetic account of the case of the sixty-one hints that at that juncture Bo Yibo felt that it might be in the sixty-one’s best interests to place the collective experience of the 1936 release episode – and the Central Committee’s role in it – on ofﬁcial record, once and for all. The humiliating experiences undergone by so many other white area cadres during the rectiﬁcation campaign and ‘rescue’ movement must have given him and his colleagues more than a glimpse of the ironic vulnerability of white area cadres in what was supposed to be the safety of their own home – the liberated base area. Bo put forward a request to report to the Seventh Party Congress in order to ‘clarify the details of its [the release] process and request a conclusion’.122 Perhaps he intended his request to reach the committee preparing the ‘Resolution on Certain Historical Questions’. The committee had been established in May 1944; its members were Ren Bishi, Liu Shaoqi, Zhang Wentian, Zhou Enlai, Peng Zhen, Gao Gang, Kang Sheng and Qin Bangxian. Bo might well have expected a sympathetic reception from several of them. But his request only got as far as the Central Committee’s Qualiﬁcations Committee – where it stayed. Ren Bishi reassured the committee:

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These comrades have no political problems. It was the Party organization which rescued them from prison; it was the North Bureau that made this suggestion and it was the Central Committee that agreed to it by telegram. So this should not affect their delegate qualiﬁcation.123 On the basis of Ren’s words and its own investigations, the committee concluded that each cadre was ﬁt to be a delegate. Verbal assurances were one thing, but what was written – or not – was another matter. The party’s 1936 decision to rescue the group would not be recorded in the party’s ofﬁcial annals, but would remain buried in the individual dossiers. This served to fragment the image of party responsibility for the affair and play up the personal responsibility of each cadre. Had there been a documented party resolution on the issue, Bo Yibo would not have had to face yet another eligibility hurdle, this time in respect of Central Committee membership. But without such pre-emptive protection, the circumstances in which ‘cadre X’ was released from prison remained uppermost in the minds of those whose task it was to assess his party loyalty. Initially Bo had been nominated for alternate membership. One of the leading military cadres, Chen Geng, opposed his nomination on the grounds of his prison release experience. According to Bo, Mao’s reply had turned Chen’s objection on its head. ‘Why shouldn’t he be an alternative member? He should be a full member!’124 Why had Chen objected? Did he believe that the sixty-one had not tried hard enough to seek an alternative to false confession? Chen had had his own experience of GMD imprisonment in the early 1930s. Despite Chiang Kai-shek’s personal offer to release Chen (who had apparently saved Chiang’s life in 1925) if he agreed to join the nationalists, Chen is said to have refused and later escaped.125 Perhaps it was a personal grudge or dislike of Bo and/or others among the sixty-one. He had worked at close quarters with Bo in the JJLY region in previous years, and, as mentioned in Chapter 1, had had dealings in underground work with Yang Xianzhen back in 1931. Or was Chen simply trying to distance himself from them and this type of unwholesome white area experience? Such distancing, or putting on ‘holier than thou’ airs, may not have been uncommon. Quite a few leading cadres had come to Yan’an with rich experience of work in the white areas in the late 1920s and early 1930s, including Peng Zhen and Chen Boda, not to mention Kang Sheng himself. In taking on formal roles in Yan’an in cadre rectiﬁcation, for instance (as did some of the sixty-one themselves), perhaps they

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believed they were shedding their white skins and cultivating redderthan-red ones. Cultural Revolution accounts claim that Liu Shaoqi had tried and failed to have a clause inserted into the 1945 revised constitution stating that those who had made a false recantation should not be automatically barred from Central Committee membership.126 The same sources say that his effort was stymied by Kang Sheng. If indeed Liu did put this forward, it is unlikely that Kang’s opposition would have been effective. Kang was out of favour at this congress because of the witchhunt excesses he had inspired in 1943, while Liu was very much in favour.127 (In May 1944 Liu was one of the ﬁve members of the Presidium created to replace temporarily the Politburo and Secretariat. He then joined the new Seventh Central Committee Secretariat.) Furthermore the clause to which the Cultural Revolution materials allude may have related to party membership in general rather than speciﬁc Central Committee membership. In Liu’s 14 May 1945 report to the congress, ‘On the Party’, the following proposal appears in his section on party membership, but it does not appear in the equivalent section in the revised party constitution adopted by the Congress the following month: Should a member apply for reinstatement because of having been forced to lose contact with the Party, he is to be reinstated immediately after his application has been veriﬁed by the Party committee of a province or border region or at any higher level, without having to go through the procedure required of a new member.128 With the elections for the Seventh Party Congress, another hurdle had been cleared. Bo Yibo, Liu Lantao and Liu Zijiu were elected to the Central Committee, Bo as a member and the two Lius as alternate members. But it appears that before the next congress in 1956, each nominee from the sixty-one would again have to go through the process of proving himself worthy, limiting the detail of his 1936 release to an authorized ‘rescue’ operation by the party. By then the most prominent among them were in positions of party and government status at the central as well as the regional level, forging their own not insigniﬁcant power bases as they went along. Their 1937–49 work experiences both led to and enriched their post-1949 careers. Yang Xianzhen, who had arrived in Yan’an in January 1945, just before the Congress, taught at the Party School, where more than 5000 students were enrolled. In 1948 he became the school’s vice-president,

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‘responsible both for creating a formal teaching and research program’.129 From 1945 An Ziwen became well entrenched in the COD. At ﬁrst he served as deputy director under Peng Zhen, but when the latter moved to north-east China, An took control of the department’s daily operations under the supervision of party Secretariat member Ren Bishi. One of An’s tasks was to select cadres for work in the north-east, and he was responsible for the transfer of some 200 000 cadres there.130 He also supervised the movement of cadres to GMD-occupied areas for underground work. In the winter of 1946 An ordered the ‘cleaning-up’ of some 20 000 dossiers, that is, the deletion of data entered during the Kang Sheng ‘rescue’ operation. With the Yan’an base facing imminent attack, An was ordered to streamline all the existing dossiers in order to facilitate mobility. The dossiers were to be divided into three categories – those in the ﬁrst category were to be preserved at all costs, while those in the third were to be destroyed. The preserved ﬁles were moved ﬁrst to Linxian in Shanxi and then in 1949, after the liberation, to Beijing. The destruction of dossiers (which might have contained embarrassing material) was to be one of the charges levelled against An during the Cultural Revolution. Following the GMD attack on Yan’an in March 1947, the party Secretariat was divided into two sections. One, headed by Mao, Zhou Enlai and Ren Bishi, stayed in northern Sha’anxi. The other, led by Liu Shaoqi and composed of a working committee, with Zhu De as deputy secretary and An Ziwen as secretary-general, moved to northern China – to Xibaipo in Hebei in the JCJ liberated area. Late in 1947, as more and more areas were liberated, An transferred over 50 000 cadres to work with the population of 100 million in the areas now under communist control. In May 1948 Mao and the Central Committee arrived in the JCJ region, and the working committee, ‘having completed its historical task, was declared abolished’,131 or as an ofﬁcial contemporary party history puts it, ‘merged with the Central Committee’.132 Since early 1946 Bo Yibo had been deputy political commissar of the entire JJLY region, where he also continued as government vicechairman. This post gave him virtual control over all civil affairs in the region, which covered an area of 100 000 square miles and had a population of some 25 million.133 In May 1948 the JCJ and JJLY regions merged, with Nie Rongzhen as commander and Bo as political commissar. Bo was then appointed ﬁrst vice-chairman of the North China People’s Government, vice-chairman of the Financial–Economic

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Committee, both under Dong Biwu, and ﬁrst secretary of the North China Bureau.134 Also serving in the North China Bureau in 1948 was Liu Lantao, a member of its Standing Committee and director of its Organization Department. In January 1949 Liu became third secretary of the North Bureau under Bo Yibo, director of the North China Revolutionary University and vice-chairman of the North China People’s Government. Hu Xikui was appointed vice-president of the North China University in October 1949, under Liu Lantao. This university was responsible for ‘recruiting and remoulding large numbers of intellectuals and turning out cadres for the vast liberated areas’.135 Wang Hefeng, another of the sixty-one and a North Bureau cadre, served as secretary of both the JJLY Sub-Bureau and the Taiyue District Committee in the late 1940s. Li Chuli, Ma Huizhi and Liu Xiwu had also found their way to highlevel ofﬁcialdom in the north-east by the late 1940s, as had Xu Zirong and Liu Zijiu in the central plains, and Zhu Zemin and He Zhiping in the east. Zhang Xi and an ex-Caolanzi inmate who had played a vital role in the release scheme, Kong Xiangzhen, held important positions in the central south. Sixteen of the group did not live to see the establishment of the communist regime. Ten died at the hands of the Japanese or GMD. Yin Jian, Qiu Shaoshang, Gao Tingkai and Hao Jinbo died of illness. Han Jun commited suicide. One cadre, Liu Kerang, was ‘mistakenly’ executed in the liberated area.136 Another, Fu Ping, left the party after his release. While occasional small clusters of the sixty-one appeared in various locations, it is apparent that they did not stick together as one large group, geographically or institutionally. Since what had bound them together had been followed by the stigma of prison release via recantation, there was little reason to maintain a group identity and stick out like a sore thumb. While the post-release careers of many may have contributed substantially to the establishment of the communist regime, eventually they became grist to the Red Guard mill, which generally distorted the second united-front period, and speciﬁcally the cooperation with Yan Xishan, as further evidence of their betrayal. In the interim sixteen years (until summer 1966) a number of the sixty-one moved into positions of considerable prominence in both party and state structures. From these post-1949 careers, too, Cultural Revolution activists were subsequently able to pick out events and trends, weaving them together into an image of disloyalty, the centre-

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piece of which was the 1936 release. Until then, if certain circumstances, such as the periodic cadre-screening procedures, jogged uneasy memories, the seemingly solid leadership presence of Liu Shaoqi was there to assuage them. Once that began to crumble, the release episode that had linked Liu and the sixty-one together became pivotal to their mutual downfall.

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Big renegade Po I-po . . . alternate member of the Central Political Bureau, Vice Premier of the State Council, and Chairman of the State Economic Commission. He controlled the industrial and communications fronts and the lifeline of the national economy. Big renegade An Tzu-wen controlled the Central Organization Department. He collected demons and monsters . . . in organizational preparation for Liu Shao-ch’i’s capitalist restoration. Big renegade Yang Hsien-chen monopolized the Central Higher Party School, in an attempt to corrupt and reform our Party from the ideological front. (Chunlei [Spring Thunder], 13 April 1967)1 The Red Guards’ assessment of the tremendous power wielded by three of the most prominent of the sixty-one prison cadres was not inaccurate. However their conclusions about how, and for what purposes, this power was exercised are far more questionable. Bo Yibo, An Ziwen, Yang Xianzhen and Liu Lantao, plus a signiﬁcant number of their 1930s Caolanzi colleagues, occupied the highest echelons of some of the major functional systems of the party and government apparatus, covering the spheres of economics, organization and personnel, theory and propaganda.2 The 1956 Eighth Central Committee saw Bo’s rise to alternate membership status on the Politburo and Liu Lantao’s to alternate membership of the party’s Secretariat. An Ziwen and Yang Xianzhen were Central Committee members (Yang was ﬁrst appointed alternate member, then promoted to full member in 1958). Liao Luyan, Xu Zirong and Zhang Xi were alternate members. By the time the Cultural Revolution broke out in 1966, more than a third of the original Caolanzi group (and almost half of those still alive in 1966) 94

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held high-level central and regional posts in party and government (Table 3.1). Viewed through the Cultural Revolution prism, the prison cadres had proved their betrayal of the communist cause in 1936 when they had followed the dictates of the GMD release procedure. That act was to serve as the basic premise for the radical and Red Guard portrayal of the sixty-one cadres’ disloyalty. Any seemingly politically incorrect manifestations in the cadres’ subsequent careers were simply further proof of their treachery, or at least their inadequacy as communists; any apparently politically ‘correct’ behaviour was interpreted as hypocrisy, a smokescreen. Weaving together statements quoted out of context was a favoured technique of defamation; layer upon layer of accusations built up an image of disloyalty to communism and ipso facto to Mao Zedong. The ‘renegade’ cadres had established ‘independent kingdoms’,

Table 3.1 Posts held by members of the sixty-one in 1966 Government: Vice-premier and chairman, SEC: Bo Yibo Vice-chairman, SEC: Zhou Zhongying Minister of agriculture: Liao Luyan Vice-minister of public security: Xu Zirong Vice-minister, Seventh Ministry of Machine Building: Liu Youguang Vice-chairman, Guangxi Autonomous Region: Fu Yutian Vice-chairman, SPC, until his death in 1959: Zhang Xi Vice-minister of communications: Ma Huizhi Party: Director, COD: An Ziwen Deputy director, COD: Li Chuli Vice-president, Central Party School, till December 1965: Yang Xianzhen Members, Central Control Commission: Liu Lantao, Liu Xiwu, Li Chuli, Liu Shenzhi, Wang Hefeng, Zhou Zhongying Director, Second Archives Ofﬁce of the Central Committee: Hu Jingyi First secretary, Northwest China Bureau: Liu Lantao Secretaries, Northwest Bureau Secretariat: Liu Lantao, Hu Xikui Alternate secretary, Central South Bureau, and director of its Organization Department: Wang De Secretary, Northeast China Bureau Control Committee: Wang Hefeng Member, East China Bureau Standing Committee, and director of its Control Committee: Liu Shenzhi Deputy secretary, Tibet CCP Working Committee: Wang Qimei Secretary, Fujian CCP Provincial Committee Secretariat: Hou Zhenya Acting ﬁrst secretary, Jilin CCP Provincial Committee: Zhao Lin

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and had revealed themselves ultimately as partners to capitalism and its odious personiﬁcation, Liu Shaoqi. Here the image neatly ended as it had begun, sealed with the print of Liu, who in 1936 had initiated their primary act of betrayal. The purpose of this chapter is not to present a defence of the prison cadres, but to examine those factors in their 1949–66 careers that made them convenient prey for the Cultural Revolution radicals, enabling the latter to construct an image of disloyalty upon the 1936 episode. What was the nature and extent of their power bases? How might their involvement in intraleadership rivalries and policy disputes have contributed to their disloyal image? To what extent, if any, did their ‘complicated’ history affect their careers, in terms of perceived and/or real discrimination? We shall focus on episodes in the careers of the most prominent four of the sixty-one: Bo Yibo, An Ziwen, Yang Xianzhen and Liu Lantao (de facto leader of the Central Control Commission from 1955 to 1961 and subsequently head of the party’s Northwest Bureau until 1967). These men were the Cultural Revolution media’s hard-core target whenever the prison cadres were mentioned. The sixty-one became a four-headed monster, embodying the evil of renegadism and all that was ‘complicated’ in the history of white area underground cadres. Perhaps foremost among the factors that laid these particular prison cadres open to attack was their very prominence in their respective bureaucratic structures (where their status naturally involved them in leadership conﬂicts). Since the party bureaucracy itself became the target of the Cultural Revolution, those who commanded it were especially vulnerable. Second, there had been several appointments of exCaolanzi and other north China prison associates to most of these structures. Inferences could therefore be made about power bases of a ‘vertical’ nature, that is, the formal power engendered in the command of a single bureaucratic structure. This power may have had informal origins – personal ties – that became formalized via professional association and identity of interest, both in terms of bureaucratic interest and on policy issues. Third, coordinational links between or overlaps in policy implementation occurred between the functional systems that Bo, An, Yang and Liu administered, which involved them in joint planning and consultation; for example Bo and An worked closely together on the Sanfan campaign (the 1951–52 ‘Three-Anti’ campaign against corruption, waste and bureaucratism), and An and Yang would have cooperated on education and training programmes for high-level cadres, particularly during the rectiﬁcation campaigns. Hence there would have

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been mutual reinforcement between their personal political power (and hence the power of their bases) and their ‘horizontal’ links. Power bases and active factions are not synonymous. The former, a result of evolution rather than planning, may be a prerequisite for the latter, but it is not an inevitable process. No doubt the bonding of the prison years, followed by the frequent intermingling of career paths up to 1949, largely explains the continuing professional association among the cadres after 1949. Furthermore there is little doubt that these bonds were vitalized by like-mindedness on certain core issues, such as an afﬁliation to the Leninist concept of tight party organizational discipline, and a fervent belief that the party should be led and populated by members who were both educated and educable in the study of communist theory. But a little of the ubiquitous patron–client guanxi – jobs for the boys, in this case because of the old prison uniform rather than the old school tie – was a far cry from factional activity, from engaging in power struggles or coup conspiracies. These cadres had no reason to act in a factional manner; they owed their reactivation in party life and their careers to the unconventional party decision of 1936, which had remained shrouded in secrecy, and to which it was not in their interest to draw attention. On the contrary, they tended to toe the party line, despite their misgivings about policies. Their white area experiences in both party underground and the united front had taught them patience in adversity and had left them well versed in defensive strategy – in knowing when and how to cooperate with those with whom they were not in agreement. When they did step out of line they were reprimanded and disciplined, sometimes lightly, sometimes severely; An, Yang and Bo all suffered distinct career setbacks even before their Cultural Revolution fate. But it was not until late 1966, when the locus of power had slipped away from Liu Shaoqi, that the ‘secret’ of their 1936 release was released to the public and used with a vengeance against them, culminating in the long, unhappy hiatus in their careers until December 1978. All four cadres had to an extent developed specialized career lines before the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949. Their organizational and educational skills were a scarce and highly valued resource, meeting the needs of the newly established regime, which suddenly had to extend its control over the vast territory of China. Most urgently required were cadres experienced in the less familiar ﬁeld of urban economic management, and in cooperating with the urban bourgeoisie and intellectuals. Bo Yibo, Liu Lantao, An Ziwen and Yang Xianzhen fell into this category. Bo had moved rapidly into the central economic

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policy-making and administrative arena while still nominal leader of northern China, where his immediate subordinate, Liu, actually ofﬁciated. Yang, who had established the North Bureau’s Party School in the early 1940s, had worked for the central party school in Yan’an from 1945. An, who had run the day-to-day affairs of the Central Organization Department since 1945, was called on to organize the massive recruitment and transfer of cadres in the early years of the regime. Their reputations were thus well established, and their respective bases of power, well rooted before 1949, were nurtured in the atmosphere of leadership consensus that reigned in the regime’s early years. Until the late 1950s, potential cleavages in the leadership were contained because of the overall commitment to establishing and consolidating the new communist regime, and to effecting the industrial modernization and social transformation of China. Differences of opinion were conﬁned to to the pace, scope and intensity of policy implementation. As Frederick Teiwes notes, because of ‘the mutually reinforcing interplay of Party unity and policy success’, the policies themselves were not challenged. ‘Unity contributed to effective solutions to problems; success in solving problems further deepened leadership solidarity. Success also served to mask or diminish any latent conﬂict over goals.’3 When, however, doubts and scepticism were expressed about the wisdom of certain policies, such as the Great Leap Forward, the potential cleavages were less easily contained. Mao’s habit of manoeuvring and campaigning for policy support and implementation outside the central party apparatus, his almost mystical faith in human willpower and mass mobilization, and his propensity to give the edge to practice over theory, were all tendencies that intensiﬁed in the late 1950s and 1960s. Above all he considered that the bureaucratization of the party was leading it down the path of revisionism. While the central party apparatus concurred that bureaucratization was an evil that naturally evolved once a revolutionary party was established in power, it also believed that this evil could and should be checked internally, through mechanisms created by the party itself for this purpose. These two approaches were integral elements of the collision course in the Cultural Revolution.4

Dossier access Before turning to the individual careers of Bo, An, Liu and Yang, attention should be drawn to another factor that combined both power and

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potential vulnerability in the post-1949 careers of some of the former white area prison cadres. Until 1966 they enjoyed a power awarded to a relatively limited number of high-level ofﬁcials: access to personnel dossiers. The content of these dossiers, upon which cadres’ professional careers and reputations depended, were and are considered state secrets. Access was therefore a form of power, with all the inherent potential for its abuse. Dossiers are kept on all members of the party and on state employees. They contain a cadre’s biography in two formats: answers on ofﬁcial forms, and a written autobiography. Both cover not only personal history, professional experience and class background, but also social relations. Cadres are expected to detail whether they or their relatives had ever been arrested or imprisoned and the manner of their release.5 The dossiers contain references, documentation on transfers, promotions and so on, and applications for party membership. Assessments and self-evaluations are added annually, while political campaigns generate more random investigations of dossiers and the addition of further assessment data. The dossier thus provides an on-going proﬁle of a cadre’s political loyalty and professional competence. On one hand it appeared that trust was vested in those cadres who had dossier access. On the other, for those with prison release histories, this prize was also tantamount to holding burning coals. For just as much as the party was indicating trust, it was also signalling that accountability was in the hands of these cadres. It was their burden to manage the content and security of dossier material. They could be accused – as indeed they were during the Cultural Revolution – of abusing their dossier-access power, of concealing, distorting or destroying evidence. As Hong Yung Lee notes, the dossier system provides the regime with a means to ‘maintain tight political control over the cadres’, given the all-inclusive nature of the data entered: ‘The dossier may offer the regime a solid basis for selecting cadres according to the criteria emphasized at a given moment, or it may offer an excuse to persecute anyone the regime may choose to.’6 This powerful lever of internal control was available to several political and government hierarchies in two of the main functional systems: organization and political–legal. The several supervisory bodies that maintained and/or had access to sensitive dossier material on top-level cadres were the COD, which held the dossiers on all centrally employed party and state cadres and the highest-ranking provincial and municipal party cadres, the Central Committee’s General Ofﬁce, which maintained the party archives, the Central State Organs Committee, the

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Central Control Commission, the Public Security Bureau, the Personnel Ministry until its abolition in 1954, and the Supervision Ministry until it was abolished in 1959. The Personnel Bureau (later the Ministry of the Interior), with the COD, maintained the dossiers on all ministry personnel of bureau-chief rank and above. An Ziwen – COD deputy director and minister of personnel from 1950 until 1954, and COD director from November 1956 – undoubtedly enjoyed dossier access. One of An’s vice-ministers in the Personnel Ministry was Caolanzi prison colleague Li Chuli; by 1955, Li had moved to the COD, where he ran the Cadre Examination Ofﬁce. Other 1930s prison cadres in the COD included Qiao Mingfu, Shuai Mengqi and Li Mengli. Among the Caolanzi sixtyone who held Organization Department posts at the regional level, and therefore handled dossiers, were Wang De, Wang Hefeng and Liu Shenzhi. Since the early 1950s Gong Zirong, a Shanxi Penitentiary colleague of Qiao Mingfu, had been a member of the party’s Central State Organs Committee and since 1954 deputy secretary-general of the State Council. Within three years he had become ﬁrst secretary of the Central State Organs Committee, which supervised party cadres in the central government. Gong therefore had access to their dossiers. In 1958 he was also made deputy director of the General Ofﬁce of the Central Committee, under Yang Shangkun. This department, which supervised the Party Central Archives, had generous access to party leaders’ personal histories via their dossiers. Other prison cadres in the archives sector were its director, Zeng San, and Hu Jingyi of the sixty-one, who was director of the second archives ofﬁce. Another dossier access point, this time in the government administration, was the Public Security Bureau and Ministry. Here we ﬁnd Xu Zirong of the sixty-one, who directed the bureau’s personnel section in the early years of the regime and in 1952 was appointed vice-minister (he held the post until the Cultural Revolution), adding to this role the deputy directorship of the State Council’s Internal Affairs Ofﬁce in 1965. Xu certainly had access to the dossiers on all public security personnel, and he would have had similar access to dossiers on anybody under investigation, or anybody who was a candidate for investigation. In the same functional system was another ex-Caolanzi prison cadre, Feng Jiping, deputy director of Public Security in Beijing from 1949 until 1955, when he was promoted to director. His duties, though conﬁning him to the Beijing municipal government, gave him ample opportunity to gain access to the dossiers on the capital’s ofﬁcials. Feng was concurrently vice-mayor of Beijing, and therefore subordinate to its mayor,

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Peng Zhen, a Politburo and Secretariat member whose own Tianjin prison past was to become a pet topic of the Red Guard media. Access to personnel dossiers was thus one source of power shared in the 1949–66 regime by a number of the prison cadres, cutting across the top echelons of several political and government hierarchies in two of the main functional systems. Ironically, when the rules and regulations on limited access to dossiers crumbled during the Cultural Revolution, the continuing value of the dossier played a key part in increasing the Red Guard media’s power. Leaked references to the 1936 release in various dossiers of the sixty-one set the Red Guards on their trail. Some cadres were accused of having destroyed dossier evidence; others of having covered up ‘complicating’ factors in their past by stating in their dossiers merely that in 1936 they had been ‘rescued’ from the GMD prisons by the Party organization, without furnishing the details of the release procedure.7 The power the former prison cadres could wield vis-à-vis other cadres turned into terrifying vulnerability. One other central Party organization empowered with dossier access was the Central Control Commission, which brings us to the ﬁrst ofﬁcial on the Caolanzi shortlist, Liu Lantao.

Liu Lantao and the Central Control Commission (CCC)8 Section 5 of the State Procuratorate Indictment in the Gang of Four trial charged that, during the Cultural Revolution, thirty-seven of the sixty members and alternate members of the CCC were falsely labelled as renegades, counterrevolutionary revisionists and the like.9 For the ﬁrst six years of its existence, however, from April 1955, the CCC was a much smaller elite of no more than twenty ofﬁcials led de facto by Caolanzi graduate Liu Lantao (the ageing Dong Biwu was its titular head). Liu, who served as deputy secretary-general of the Central Committee, was promoted in 1956 to alternate membership of the Central Committee Secretariat. He was the only CCC member to serve concurrently on the Secretariat (as an alternate member). As minister of north China affairs in the early 1950s and a secretary in the Party’s North China Bureau under former prison colleague Bo Yibo, Liu was one of the powerful regional leaders brought to the capital in the wake of the Gao–Rao (Gao Gang and Rao Shushi) affair.10 This affair had accelerated the process of political and governmental administrative centralization and the concomitant reduction of the power of regional leaders.

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Not only had Gao, as leader of the nation’s most economically powerful region, the north-east, demonstrated an overintimate relationship with his Soviet neighbours, but he had also indiscreetly bid for the number-two spot in the leadership, Liu Shaoqi’s position. Whether out of personal ambition, ideological commitment or both, Gao had raised the issue of red military versus white area cadres, claiming that the former were better qualiﬁed to inherit the mantle of party leadership, and the latter were unscrupulously bent on the pursuit of power at the expense of the former. Gao’s indiscretion lay as much in his inappropriate choice of campaign method as in his objective – he travelled the country in an attempt to draw other leaders to his side, one by one, tempting them with promises of future ‘job’ rewards. These activities, when eventually revealed to Mao, drew his wrath, and Gao’s party-splitting aims and techniques were duly noted in the announcement of his purge. This was one of the rare occasions when publicity, albeit negative, was given to the discriminatory attitude towards white area cadres. When the issue was raised within the leadership it was rapidly quashed, for it was entirely antithetical to the strong consensus on party unity and the commitment to maintaining a stable regime – of top priority for Mao, certainly during the early political and economic consolidation of the regime, with the years of civil war still fresh in the nation’s consciousness. Public notice of Gao’s offences coincided with the establishment of the CCC; Franz Schurmann refers to the 5 April 1955 Renmin ribao article announcing that the CCC and its local branches were to have ‘far-reaching power to investigate unreliable Party members, in particular partisans of the Kao–Jao group’.11 In Liu Lantao’s hands, the CCC was intended to be an autonomous organizational structure, an external or objective mechanism for ‘keeping watch’ over party discipline. The 1956 party constitution deﬁned the scope of the CCC’s powers accordingly. It should examine and deal with cases of violation of the Party constitution, Party discipline, Communist ethics, and state laws and decrees on Party members; to decide on or cancel disciplinary measures against Party members; and to deal with appeals and complaints from Party members.12 Curiously the CCC, when ﬁrst established, was composed largely of people with a white area underground and even prison background. Red

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area cadres had only token representation. Three of the ﬁve CCC deputy secretaries – Liu Lantao, Liu Xiwu (both members of the sixty-one) and Qian Ying – had spent several years in GMD prisons in the 1930s. The fourth, Wang Congwu, was a North China Bureau and government associate of Liu Lantao and a colleague of An Ziwen in the COD. Of the eleven members, ﬁve (Li Chuli, Liu Geping, Shuai Mengqi, Wang Weigang and Ma Mingfang) had had similar prison experiences, as had Gong Zirong, one of the three alternate members.13 Was the CCC established as a compensatory and conciliatory measure towards the white area cadres after Gao’s insulting inferences that this ilk was not to be trusted? Was this a signal indicating trust, by formalizing it in a bureaucratic structure and empowering these very people with the guardianship of the behavioural norms of party members? If so, there was an inherent and ironic ﬂaw, a double bind in the message: the CCC’s powers were limited to the important but nevertheless secondary sphere of organizational unity, recommending punitive action when this was violated. The CCC members were not the educators or the inspirers or the guardians of ideological uniformity. Furthermore a body whose raison d’être was disciplinary and punitive in nature possessed a somewhat negative image within the (Maoist) Chinese communist ethic, which stressed, at least theoretically, opposition to heavy-handed, excessive measures, preferring gentler educational and consciousness-raising techniques. Liu Lantao attempted to portray party control in the more positive light of the ‘creative power’ it afforded party members, rather than emphasizing its negative punitive role, and assured them that ‘tightening up party discipline must not and cannot be regarded as a means of turning each party member in to a “yes” man, blindly obeying orders, echoing others and being careful in the minutest particulars’.14 Whether anyone was convinced by this is a moot point. If the CCC was limited in terms of the rationale underlying its creation, its proposed role as an independent authority was absurdly undermined by at least two functional peculiarities. First, at the central level most of its ofﬁcers held concurrent party and government posts and could hardly be considered disinterested when it came to investigating or disciplining themselves or their respective organizations. Liu Lantao was, as previously mentioned, in the Secretariat; Li Chuli, Wang Congwu, Shuai Mengqi and Ma Mingfang were all deputy directors in the Organization Department; Gong Zirong held the same rank in the General Ofﬁce; Qian Ying was minister of supervision; and Xiao Hua headed the General Political Department of the People’s Liberation

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Army (PLA). Second, the intended ﬂow of authority down the vertical structure to the local level was severely hampered, if not prevented altogether, by the branch control committees being subordinate to the local party committees. Similarly this horizontal interference meant that information did not always travel directly up or down via the control committee channels. As one of the few analysts of the control committee bureaucracy has observed, the local branches were regarded as ‘an obtrusive but subordinate stepchild of party ofﬁcialdom’.15 Although the CCC’s structural weaknesses impaired its effectiveness, its image as a corrective authority, the party’s right hand, enhanced the status and respectability of its individual administrators. Moreover it may well have accentuated and extended the powers of those members who held key posts elsewhere. As far as Liu Lantao was concerned, even if the CCC offered a satellite power base, rather than an independent one, his visibility as a central party leader was dramatically increased. In a report on control work, delivered at the Eighth Party Congress in September 1956, Liu made it clear that he was aware of the constraints in this sphere, for unlike their Soviet counterparts, in China the controllers too were subject to control: ‘in this respect we shall never permit the idea of special rights. Our principle must . . . be placed under the leadership of the Party and the Party committees.’16 After the September 1962 Tenth Plenum the CCC expanded its membership to sixty, but this increase in number was not necessarily accompanied by an increase in the effectiveness of the CCC’s role.17 Mao may have looked to the CCC as a legitimate ‘in-house’ tool to reinvigorate the party bureaucracy, but the very nature of the expanded CCC, which now enjoyed a more balanced representation of the various population sectors, including military and provincial ofﬁcialdom, caused it a degree of immobilism in its effort to preserve this balance. The subservience of its local branches to the party committees continued, and the CCC lost its attraction for Mao when he came to the conclusion that only external forces could effectively prevent the party from sinking to a bureaucratic doom. By this time, however, Liu’s status in the CCC had changed – he was no longer chief deputy secretary, but a regular member. This should not be interpreted as a setback in his career, for in the autumn of 1960 he had been appointed ﬁrst secretary of the party’s newly created Northwest China Bureau. In the wake of the Great Leap Forward’s excessive and chaotic decentralization of political and economic power, the party was attempting to reestablish central control over the regions. An October 1959 article by Liu, fervently advocating the party’s overall

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supremacy in all matters, may have convinced the leadership that here was the right man for the right job at the right time; or perhaps Liu wrote in the knowledge that this change was in the ofﬁng. He reiterated his earlier view that the control organs were subordinate to the object of their control. Outside the centre, the party committees, not the control committees, were the ‘principal source of supervision’. The last few paragraphs offered fulsome praise of Mao, even reinvoking the almost forgotten ‘Thought of Mao Zedong’. When we have followed the Thought, we have succeeded, when we have departed from it we have failed. Mao’s leadership is indispensable. We depend upon and beneﬁt from his example, wisdom, experience, and his coordination of the universal truths of Marxism– Leninism with the concrete practice of the Chinese revolution.18 Liu also stressed the necessity of collective leadership, tight party discipline, party supremacy and organizational leadership in all spheres, irrespective of the party member’s expertise or non-expertise in the sphere he was leading. The CCC was a convenient auxiliary stage from which to air his consistently expressed view on party supremacy, rather than an intentionally cultivated ‘independent kingdom’. If anything Liu obediently kept the CCC subordinate to the party rather than exploiting its potential as an external structure with supervisory authority. He did not take advantage of the criticism that, as we shall see, was levelled at the Central Organization Department in the early 1960s for monopolizing tasks that could have been shared with the CCC. (Perhaps he did not want to embarrass his former prison colleague An Ziwen, who headed the department.) As far as Liu was concerned the CCC was a temporary, secondary and therefore expendable power base. His next posting, though originally designed to enhance central party authority over the regions, brought him far greater reward in terms of personal power. Unlike his leading sixty-one colleagues, Liu remained in Mao’s favour until late 1966, when he was promoted to alternate membership of the Politburo. Since it is hard to detect anything that the Cultural Revolution activists may have found offensive in the Control Commission’s actions or statements during Liu Lantao’s tenure, one might conclude that its composition, with a preponderance of Liu’s white area prison cadre associates, was the irksome factor. This, plus the impression by the mid 1960s that it was an ineffective, almost non-functioning bureaucratic structure, made it an easy target.

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Another target, though one less easily disposed of, was the Central Committee’s Organization Department, led by An Ziwen. The reasons for the downfall of this department and its director were quite different.

An Ziwen and the Organization Department19 The locus of political power in China was the CCP, particularly its Organization Department, the political–legal apparatus, and the Party Secretariat, and in portions of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA). Pursuit of power involved building a career within one of these organizations. . . . As to seniority, the key positions of power were monopolized by the generation of cadres who had joined the CCP before 1949 [emphasis added].20 Earlier in this chapter attention was drawn to dossier access as a powerful tool for certain departments in the party and government bureaucracy. This power was most widely vested in the COD, and for twenty-one years (from 1945) An Ziwen had led this department as deputy director, acting director and ﬁnally (from November 1956 until the Cultural Revolution) director. Although An frequently participated in Politburo and Secretariat meetings in his COD capacity, he became a Central Committee member only in 1956, and did not achieve higher party rank than that. Yet his powers were extraordinary; in running the COD he was, in effect, patron to a clientelist network of macro proportions, a power base par excellence. It was the COD that laid down the criteria for party membership, the COD that recruited, examined and reexamined members, transferring them around the country, training, educating and disciplining them. The execution and administration of rectiﬁcation campaigns were in its domain. It recommended and authorized all top party appointments at the provincial level and all central-level appointments. As the Politburo and Secretariat’s bureaucratic arm, it became an obvious target for criticism when the campaign that set out in 1966 to crush the bureaucratization of the party gathered ominous momentum: It was . . . alleged that a ‘counter-revolutionary clique’ had entrenched itself in the Organization Department, which had become ‘a sinister den’ and had ‘established a nationwide network of counter-revolution which recruited renegades to form a clique to pursue its own selﬁsh interests’.21

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Although there were a number of ex-prison cadre appointees (including Li Mengli, Shuai Mengqi and Qiao Mingfu) in the COD, An, perhaps out of professional discretion, does not seem to have overexploited his powers by surrounding himself with old Caolanzi associates, apart from Li Chuli and, at the regional level, Hou Zhenya and Wang De. Perhaps he preferred to concentrate on strengthening the top-level links between his department and other central bodies. After all he was in a position to implement the appointment of colleagues in party and state posts in most spheres except the military. Thus while moderating the tone of the abovementioned Cultural Revolution terminology, one might plausibly conjecture that such appointments could easily have contributed to a strong fabric of associates in the highest echelons of power nationwide. An’s career had not been without its pitfalls, and by highlighting them and ignoring or distorting his many achievements with which Mao had no quarrel, the Cultural Revolution media constructed its negative image, cementing it together with the subtheme of disloyalty – the 1936 disavowal of communism. Among An’s activities that came under most frequent attack were his handling of party recruitment and his emphasis on maintaining and raising the standard of party members. Most of these activities were, of course, well within the policy consensus at the time of their execution. It was An’s misfortune that Mao’s views on these subjects tended to shift, while his own remained fairly constant. An’s controlled, selective approach to party building laid him open to the Red Guard charge that he had limited the growth of the party in order to weaken it. Early PRC recruitment policy and the eight criteria In the 1950s there were three distinct periods of rapid and massive recruitment to the party. An had by no means been remiss in implementing that policy; he had also combined it with a policy of risk management. Each rapid infusion of party members brought with it its own set of problems and rectiﬁcation mechanisms. The two later recruitment campaigns, 1954–56 (during the accelerated Agricultural Producers’ Cooperatives [APCs] drive) and 1958–60 (during the Great Leap Forward) were part and parcel of the policy implementation of economic development via mass mobilization. The ﬁrst drive, from 1949 to 1953, was a matter of sheer expediency, since the ‘sudden and vast expansion of areas under Communist control left the Party acutely short of the personnel and skills needed for nationwide rule’.22 By late 1950 the CCP membership had more than doubled, reaching 5.8 million.

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In order to ensure the Party’s presence in and establish its authority over the industrial sector, recruitment policy focused on urban workers from 1950 to 1953. An Ziwen clariﬁed the policy thus: At present attention is mainly directed at creating Party organizations in industrial enterprises, at increasing Party membership by admitting more industrial workers. While this is being done, the admission of new members in the villages of the old liberated areas has been temporarily stopped and in the newly liberated areas, it has been limited . . . to properly adjust the social constitution of the leadership.23 The party, with Mao’s support, had in June 1950 expressed the hope that within three to ﬁve years a third of all industrial workers would be drawn into the party’s ranks, but only 13 per cent had joined by 1956–57. One of the Cultural Revolution claims against An was that he had been responsible for the meagre numbers, that he had sabotaged the party’s efforts.24 In fact the pace of recruitment had been affected by the screening procedures and the various rectiﬁcation campaigns, such as the Sanfan and Wufan movements, that had been conducted throughout the period – all ofﬁcial party policy.25 As a result the overall membership of the party was reduced by some 10 per cent. An explained that the pace of recruitment had to be controlled because of the earlier (1948–50) rapid and somewhat indiscriminate recruitment, during which ‘serious mistakes’ had been made and ‘Certain Party organizations lowered their standards for joining the Party’.26 Consequently the First National Conference for Organization Work, held in the spring of 1951, had laid down guidelines in the form of ‘Eight Criteria’ required of party members. These criteria were announced in Liu Shaoqi’s concluding speech to the conference. Their nature appears innocent enough, yet there does not seem to have been immediate formal approval from the Central Committee in the form of a circular or directive, as was usually the case with COD proposals. Instead the COD directly instructed its branch departments to observe these criteria when selecting members. Was Mao in some way miffed? Cultural Revolution sources quote him thus: ‘What does the Organizational Work Conference mean? What does the “Eight Criteria for Party members” mean? Why did it not come to my knowledge?’27 Perhaps it was the manner in which the criteria had been issued – independent of Mao’s guiding hand – rather than the in nature that so irked him.

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The criteria were aired publicly the following year (1 July 1952) in a Renmin ribao article by An Ziwen. During the Cultural Revolution An was absurdly criticized for leaving mention of ‘Mao Zedong Thought’ to the last of the eight criteria, and for his reference in the second criterion to the ‘struggle for the consolidation of the New Democratic system’ as the current stage towards the CCP’s ultimate goal, the realization of communism.28 The Cultural Revolution media had taken An’s terminology completely out of context, since it was not until 1953 that the transition to socialism was ofﬁcially inaugurated. In 1951, when the Eight Criteria were formulated, the term ‘New Democracy’ was not merely acceptable, it was Maoist orthodoxy. One point that the Red Guards did not pick up on was the watereddown version of the third criterion in An’s 1952 version – ‘Each and every member of the Party must be determined to devote his whole life to persist in the revolutionary struggle courageously’ – compared with the original draft proposal from the previous year. [A]ll Party members must be courageous and resolute, must not ﬂinch from any serious or difﬁcult environment, must never surrender themselves to the enemy, and must never betray the Party and communism; otherwise they cannot be Party members.29 Perhaps Liu Shaoqi had allowed himself this absolutist, traditional party rhetoric in 1951 since GMD control and Japanese occupation had receded into the past. But as we shall see, one of the deﬁning characteristics of An’s career was his continuing need to convey the caution with which white area cadres should be investigated and judged – the need to steer people away from black-and-white deﬁnitions of loyalty and betrayal. An’s own shocking experience in the course of the Gao Gang affair made this need all the more urgent. Gao’s trap The Gao Gang affair cost An Ziwen a career setback. In the spring of 1953 Gao approached An with a request from Mao, or so he claimed, for a list of proposed candidates for the next Politburo. Gao, it seems, had hoped that An would consult Liu Shaoqi, and thus involve him in this mischief. Whether or not Liu was involved in the preparation of the list, it was An who was subsequently censured before and during the Finance and Economic National Work Conference in June to August 1953 (when Bo Yibo came under severe criticism for his tax policy) and the September–October 1953 National Organization Work Conference.

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Gao is supposed to have accused An of omitting army leaders such as Lin Biao and Zhu De while including white area cadres such as Peng Zhen, Bo Yibo and Liu Lantao. Such a line-up would have upset the carefully achieved status quo in respect of posts held by the various groups from these different revolutionary backgrounds.30 Bo Yibo claims that Gao deliberately misrepresented the contents of An’s list by omitting the names of Lin Biao and Zhu De, and that An’s mistake was not so much the list’s content as that it was drawn up without the necessary authorization.31 At the Finance and Economic conference, Gao and Rao Shushi, Organization Department director since February 1953, had complained about the appointment of cadres with ‘complicated’ histories, naming speciﬁc individuals. An Ziwen directed his secretary . . . to look up the ﬁles of those comrades one by one. On the face of it those few comrades who had been named did have a ‘complicated’ history, but conclusions had been made on the important questions that were clear. The reason the history of these cadres was ‘complicated’ was the Party’s struggle against the Guomindang reactionaries. They had carried out many different kinds of complex struggle, open or secret, legal or illegal, against the enemy under instruction from the Party.32 Who was named? For a start it seems logical that Bo Yibo was, since he was under scathing attack at this conference for his bourgeois-orientated approach to taxation; furthermore his was one of the names on An’s Politburo list to which Gao Gang had vociferously objected. Another was Peng Zhen, also with a white area prison past. An refused to comment but the issue was brought up again a few weeks later at the National Organization Work Conference. This time Rao Shushi overstepped the mark, attacking Liu Shaoqi, and on Mao’s instruction the conference was closed. A leadership small group met under Liu Shaoqi’s auspices; Rao was criticized, while the department’s work, and An’s in particular, was praised. Nevertheless there were repercussions for An. He was disciplined for his preparation of the Politburo list. While retaining his deputy directorship of the COD, he was demoted from his supervisory role in its day-to-day affairs. With the purging of Gao and Rao in early 1954, Deng Xiaoping now headed the Organization Department. In less than a year An was back in this post, so his disgrace was only a temporary embarrassment. But the experience was traumatic. He is described as having

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become ‘silent and morose,’ unable to sleep or eat during the conference days.33 This direct attack on cadres with ‘complicated’ pasts reinforced An’s determination to clarify, once and for all, the situation of party members in this category. He was to make further efforts in this direction in 1955–56. Cadre management and the reregistration of party members, 1953–55 Meanwhile, during Deng’s COD reign two resolutions, originally intended as measures suited to a period of consolidation of party membership, were implemented. The ﬁrst was administrative, dividing cadres into nine categories, to be managed by the corresponding Central Committee departments and local party committees, and ultimately under the command of the COD and its branches. This was largely achieved by the end of 1955. The ﬁrst resolution also recommended that party cadres undergo technical education and training.34 An was to remain quite consistent on the issue of cadres acquiring technical expertise in addition to political study and practice. The second resolution required the examination and reregistration of party members, which naturally involved the rechecking of dossiers. According to Red Guard sources, there was deﬁnite foot-dragging on the issue of reexamination.35 An Ziwen zhuanlue, the sympathetic biography of An, conﬁrms the Red Guard statistics, indicating that by 1955 only one-ﬁfth of party cadres had been examined. By 1957 some 50 per cent of cadres in eighteen provinces and twenty-eight municipalities had been examined.36 There are two possible explanations for the delay. First, during 1954 and 1955, as a result of the speed-up of agricultural cooperativization and spurred by Mao’s July 1955 directives, there was a second mass recruitment drive, which brought the party some 2.8 million new members. As with the earlier large recruitment drive, the various OD branches just could not keep up with the rapid inﬂux; it was beyond their manpower and technical capacity to check the standards and suitability of each new member. The second explanation is perhaps of more interest here. In 1955 the COD established the Cadre Examination Ofﬁce (CEO) under Li Chuli, of the Caolanzi sixty-one. The CEO exempted various categories of cadres from investigation, conﬁning it to those from what might be termed ‘politically correct’ backgrounds – the vast inﬂux of the recently inducted poor and lower-middle-class peasants. An indicated his wariness of this type of rapid recruitment: ‘in the period 1955–1957 . . . new Party members should be recruited in a planned way . . . in the rural

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areas, the number of Party members in this period should be controlled at 1 percent and that in the future, the control number should be generally around 2 percent of the rural population’. He added unequivocally that ‘the quality of rural cadres fell short of need’ and that the solution lay in (educational) training and strengthening the management of them.37 His lack of enthusiasm for large-scale peasant recruitment and his preference for technically trained cadres in the industrial sector placed An clearly in the camp of those leaders, such as his colleague Bo Yibo, who at least initially preferred a slower approach to the APC revolution. This approach provided excellent fodder for criticism by the Cultural Revolution media. But potentially even more damning were the categories An chose to exempt from reinvestigation. Pro- and anti-An sources agree on the issue of exemptions, albeit with some textual differences.38 Altogether the orientation was towards exempting cadres who showed ‘virtue’ (political) and ‘ability’ (technical expertise and productivity), even though their family backgrounds and social relations may have been problematic; this category was particularly helpful to intellectuals and urban workers. Also exempt were cadres who had been previously examined and had experienced no political problems in their past, and cadres who had once had problems – which had been investigated and conclusions had been drawn on them – but had had none since. (This would have exempted the sixty-one, upon whom conclusions had been drawn before the 1945 Seventh Congress.) As for those ‘cases involving confession or betrayal to the enemy’ on which conclusions were still to be drawn, An had this to say: The circumstances surrounding cases involving confession or betrayal to the enemy are extremely complicated. In handling each case, we should judge the seriousness of the situation, consider the individual’s performance after recovering party membership or upon reentering the party, the extent of his or her later contributions, whether or not he or she had tried to cover up this history, and the extent of the person’s present understanding of the question.39 An reveals here a desire for greater sensitivity, and less generalization about ‘complicated’ cases. As he himself had been on the receiving end of suspicion and derogatory comments by professional colleagues for his underground past, it is understandable that he wanted to establish fair procedural norms for the checking of similar cases. His biographers claim that his 1 August 1955 report on cadre-screening procedures was

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discussed by the Politburo, and afﬁrmed by the Central Committee in October.40 According to Red Guard sources, An showed similar concern when determining who was qualiﬁed to serve as a deputy to the Party’s Eighth Congress and who was eligible for Central Committee membership. Those with ‘complicated’ pasts were not to be left out of the selection process. An and Liu Shaoqi evidently came up with a formula, the ‘Six Articles’, intended to cover the entire gamut of ‘complicated’ (confession or betrayal) histories: ‘The formulation of the “Six Articles” is to pave the way for convening the 8th Party Congress, to conﬁrm and exonerate a number of people, some as delegates to the 8th Party Congress and some as Central Committee members.’41 Little is known about the Six Articles except for the details supplied by the Cultural Revolution media, which claimed that the proposed categories ranged from excusable to inexcusable: mistake, serious mistake, once wavered, surrendered, betrayed, seriously betrayed. One thing is clear: despite some distortions the Six Articles, as recorded in Cultural Revolution documents, appear remarkably similar to the categories in the 1937 COD ‘Decision on how to treat so-called confessants’. [T]hose prisoners who had signed the surrender statements prepared by the enemy were simply considered to have committed a ‘wrong deed in the face of the enemy’ instead of being regarded as having surrendered. Persons in this category should be given posts again. The Regulation [Six Articles] also provided that after being arrested, those who had made an anti-communist announcement in the enemy’s newspaper might still be offered jobs being regarded as only having surrendered. Those who had revealed names of comrades or Party secrets but subsequently reversed their attitude, were classiﬁed as ‘once wavered’ and there was slight restriction to their reinstatement.42 Liu and An’s Six Articles also ‘stressed the point that some of those who made confessions in the press did so “in pretense” to “fool the enemy” and therefore could not be regarded as having made a political mistake and that some confessed because they were afraid to die, but that act was not a betrayal of the Party’.43 Whatever slant the Six Articles may have been given by the Red Guards, they nevertheless constituted an elaboration of An’s requirement for a more discerning attitude towards such cases. They were also

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the most damning link that the Red Guards could ﬁnd between An’s post-1949 Organization Department activities and the 1936 episode. From quality to quantity . . . and back again An’s credentials passed muster. Subsequent to the Congress, in November 1956 An Ziwen, now a Central Committee member, was promoted to director of the COD. Since January that year a policy of mobilizing intellectuals to work for the party had been in effect, and the COD had been ordered to plan the recruitment of a third of the approximately 100 000 high-level intellectuals to the party over the next ﬁve years.44 An’s faithful attempt to carry out this policy was later attacked in the anti-intellectual context of the Cultural Revolution, but in 1956–57 the policy of increasing the number of educated members and those with expertise in the party prevailed. At the Eighth Party Congress Liu Shaoqi had implied that the quantitative spurt in party membership in 1954–56 had had a qualitative cost. Consolidation, rectiﬁcation, education, training and specialization were now essential. Rapid promotion was undesirable. At a COD conference in December 1956 An announced: [O]ur policy regarding cadres is to stabilize their positions and raise their quality. Only through being stabilized at their posts can cadres hope to master their work. . . . Stabilization means (1) cadres will become specialized in the trade or profession they are engaged in; and (2) work will be for a long time at that post.45 This programme was temporarily abandoned, however, with the antirightist campaign of May 1957 and the Great Leap Forward (1958–60). Barely a word of criticism was levelled at An’s antirightist and Great Leap performance by the Cultural Revolution media; and his biographers likewise have precious little to say on the subject. These omissions indicate that An did not step out of line but, on the contrary, pursued his tasks obediently. In the Great Leap’s wave of massive recruitment, close to 6.5 million new members were admitted. The question of quantity versus quality resurfaced with a vengeance. The gradual dawning on various PRC leaders of the enormity of the damage done by the Great Leap Forward, plus the alarming fate of its critics – Defence Minister Peng Dehuai had been denounced and dismissed – left many perplexed as to where they stood. The dilemma was resolved for some in what was later criticized as being ‘left in form and right in essence’. One wonders whether An did not begin to feel a creep-

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ing in of weariness, wariness or even cynicism in adjusting to rapid policy switches (as cadres at subordinate levels did). It is difﬁcult to trace a coherent course in An’s actions and motives in the early 1960s. In trying to steer a course of pleasing both the increasing radical presence among the political elite and the ‘readjusters’ in the party bureaucracy – that is, those, including Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, bent on repairing the Great Leap damage – An seems to have fallen between two stools. The readjusters appeared irritated by the COD’s inefﬁciency and snail-like pace in implementing the tasks in hand, such as speeding up the reversal of verdicts of against ‘rightists’.46 An, having played so faithful a role in the antirightist and rightist–opportunist campaigns, had not been equally speedy in undoing the fruits of his labour. In November 1961 the Central Committee issued its ‘Report of the Organization Department on Improving the Education and Management of Party Members’, which criticized party organizations that had become excessively and unnecessarily involved in economic development and administrative tasks, to the detriment of the education and management of party members.47 A year went by and the subject was still on the agenda at the National Organization Work Conference in late October 1962, following the Tenth Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee in September. An attended the conference despite being on ‘sick leave’. Was he really ill, or was this a euphemism for an unofﬁcial form of discipline? Had he shown a lack of industriousness in implementing the cadre management and education policies? Reiterating the Central Committee’s November 1961 criticism, Liu Shaoqi appeared to rebuke An’s department for its sloppy work and for intruding in areas not of its concern: ‘If your department is placed on a strict basis, it will not be so easy to break through your barrier.’48 A report prepared under An’s direction was presented in response. It concluded with a selfcriticism of the COD’s 1958–60 activities: During that period the Organization Department failed to take corrective measures on, or report to the Central Committee in time, such problems as the disruption in some regions of democratic-centralism in inner-party life, disruption of the principle of combining collective leadership with individual responsibility in party committees . . . the deviation of going to an excess in inner-party struggle. At the same time, the department had relaxed giving direction to the regular organizational work and cadre work of party organizations and did not strictly control the work of promoting cadres and admitting new members.49

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Both Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqi stressed the need for a tightening up of cadre supervision, and for higher standards in their selection and education for the purpose of party building in the period of socialist construction: All of us are revolutionary-minded. We are adept at revolution but not at technology. . . . In supervising these persons (meaning technical cadres) we must ﬁnd people who are educated in technology to do the job. . . . The Organization Department must take in new elements.50 If the readjusters were concerned about An’s efﬁciency, they probably did not doubt his basic commitment to cadre education; here An was clearly in their camp, and as the Socialist Education Movement rolled on the radicals’ and An’s notions of what it took to educate a party member became more and more blatantly at odds. When Mao called for the ‘rotational training’ of cadres in socialist construction, the COD complemented this with its own educational plan for party members.51 The plan involved the study of communist theory, the party’s history and traditions and ethics; there was particular emphasis on Liu Shaoqi’s ‘How to Be a Good Communist’. Then An either demonstrated his belief in a ﬁrmly based theoretical education by rotating himself off to the Party School in autumn 1963, or he was rotated. He spent four months immersed in the study of Das Kapital. A prolonged visit to the school was not an unusual phenomenon in the punitive rectiﬁcation of high-level cadres. Revolutionary successors The 1964 debate on cultivating revolutionary successors brings us to the ﬁnal episode before the Cultural Revolution, where we ﬁnd An attempting to steer an increasingly obstacle-strewn path of allegiance to Mao and to his own views on how China should become an industrialized, modern communist state, led by an educated party elite. In the late summer and early autumn of 1964 a spate of articles on revolutionary successors appeared in the media.52 They were not unconnected to, but were somewhat dwarfed by, the ‘two combine into one’ versus the ‘one divides into two’ philosophical debate that had just saturated the press. This theoretical debate on dialectical mechanics had pitted Mao against An’s ex-Caolanzi colleague Yang Xianzhen, former president and since 1961 vice-president of the party’s Central School. The Maoist interpre-

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tation of one dividing into two was the philosophical code language – the symbol for struggle – for learning through practice as the means to produce and reproduce revolutionary spirit. It was at the heart of his intention in the socialist education movement. In the late spring of 1964 Mao listed ﬁve requirements for revolutionary successors; ironically, each had its twin in ﬁve of Liu Shaoqi and An Ziwen’s 1951 Eight Criteria. It was therefore not difﬁcult for An to come out in apparent full support of Mao’s ﬁve requirements. However there were some signiﬁcant differences of emphasis between a Hongqi editorial that appeared on 31 July 1964 and An’s 23 September article three issues later.53 The editorial, presumably penned by editor Chen Boda (or someone under his auspices), was essentially a call to youth, stressing the need to recruit under-forty-year-old cadres in ‘large numbers’. It was addressed to the ‘new blood’, younger cadres being trained in the basic-level units that were the latest source of revolutionary inspiration: Only through popularization and implementation by the basic-level units will the policies of the Party be accepted by the masses and translated into action by the masses. . . . Large numbers of Party and State cadres must be trained and supplied by the basic-level units.54 The editorial paid lip service to the valuable advice from oldergeneration cadres, but added that their role would not be complete until they handed over the tasks of the revolution to the younger generation. ‘If a unit has fulﬁlled all tasks except the task of training personnel . . . it has failed to make a success of personnel work and Party-building work.’55 This was a clear challenge to those involved in personnel work, a challenge that An, with overall responsibility for the organization of personnel work, attempted to meet in his article, ‘Cultivating and Training Revolutionary Successors is a Strategic Task of the Party’. The ﬁrst section was a long treatise on communist revisionism, warning against revisionists disguised as Bolsheviks and phoney Marxist– Leninists who ‘cheat young people and curry favour with them’. Was this a surreptitious dig at the clarion call to youth in the Hongqi editorial? An then analysed the ﬁve requirements, and the contrasting viewpoints visibly emerged. Meeting these [the ﬁve] qualiﬁcations, they can become more versed in their trades, master techniques, learn how to administer the state and manage the economy, science and culture, can better serve

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socialism and become proletarian revolutionaries politically red and professionally proﬁcient.56 There in a nutshell was the ‘red and expert’ dialectical concept, the policy of cadre strengthening and management that had been pressed for in 1956, 1957, 1961 and 1962. The Hongqi editorial did not once refer to the acquisition of technical expertise. An’s attention was focused on the work-team personnel – party members who had been temporarily sent for training and ‘steeling’ to the basic-level units – rather than on the basic-level unit personnel. The work-team members were there both to learn and to teach, and were to be led by veteran cadres. ‘In the ﬁnal analysis the work of training and cultivating successors has to be done by veteran cadres.’57 An was less interested in encouraging massive recruitment from the basic-level units than in ensuring that those who were to train revolutionary successors were ﬁt to do so. Mao responded unambiguously at the January 1965 Central Work Conference: An Ziwen was guilty of ‘closed-doorism’.58

Yang Xianzhen and the Party School59 Of the power bases held by the four leading members of the sixty-one, Yang’s was the narrowest and the most vulnerable, despite its ‘depth’. Throughout his revolutionary career, Yang had stayed largely within the cloisters of theoretical education in communism, conforming closely to the traditional image of ‘scholar ofﬁcial’. He does not appear to have built up networks of professional associates beyond the Central Party School and in the Propaganda Department, to which the school acted as an adjunct. He does seem to have made a number of inﬂuential enemies – Kang Sheng, Chen Boda, Ai Siqi and Wang Ruoshi – within the institutions to which he was connected. Not only was Yang’s power base narrow, but the resources available within the conﬁnes of the school engendered an essentially shaky form of power. An Ziwen had the vast resource of party and state manpower at his disposal, Bo Yibo was among those who commanded a grand variety of resources in China’s heavy industry and communications systems, and Liu Lantao governed an entire region of China. Yang Xianzhen’s sphere of manoeuvre was all in the mind – his understanding of communist theory and his views on how this should be practised in China. The fact that this was very much Mao’s turf increased Yang’s vulnerability, a situation exacerbated by their disagreement on certain fundamentals of communism.

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Yang’s problems began early on and have been documented by both unsympathetic and sympathetic sources in China, not to mention Yang himself, as well as by Western scholars.60 Yang suffered a number of setbacks in his career from 1959 onwards, and was criticized and demoted at least twice, but the renegadism charge was not levelled against him until the Cultural Revolution. This charge, plus some deft ﬁnishing touches of guilt by association with Liu Shaoqi, completed the negative portrayal of Yang, most of which was well in place by the summer of 1964. Yang’s association with the Central Party School began in Yan’an in 1945. By 1948 he had become its vice-president or dean, a position he held until 1955 when he became president, replacing Liu Shaoqi, who continued as Politburo and Secretariat adviser to the school. Like several others among the sixty-one who were honoured at the Eighth Party Congress in September 1956, Yang became an alternate member of the Eighth Central Committee, and in May 1958 was promoted to full membership. That was the good news; unfortunately for Yang, after the Eighth Congress Kang Sheng was appointed Politburo representative to the school, and his wife, Cao Yi’ou, was appointed to the school’s administration. By 1955 Yang had clearly outlined his orthodox Marxist views on materialism and his anti-idealism. He favoured a gradual transition of economic stages towards communism.61 Certainly until the mid 1950s, until Mao’s July 1955 speech urging the accelerated APC drive, this gradualism was within the mainstream of leadership viewpoints. The views of other theoreticians such as Ai Siqi and Chen Boda, who had already shown a preference for a more radical line, were vindicated by Mao’s July 1955 direction, and at that Yang point opted for discreet silence. The philosophical theoretical base for his economic standpoint had also been stated in 1955; on the relationship between thought and existence, Yang maintained that ‘true materialists must uphold the absolute primacy of material reality’.62 Hence objective conditions must determine the nature of revolutionary action. The Great Leap Forward turned such ideas on their heads. Yet Yang participated with alacrity at least in the initial stages of the Great Leap, later admitting to being a ‘little hot-headed’ like many others at the time.63 Students at the Party School, instead of commencing the 1958 autumn term, returned to their units. Teaching staff were relocated to factories or the countryside. By November Yang was showing some signs of distress about ‘unrealistic targets’, but he moderated any critical signal by adding that ‘the main current

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remains good’.64 That month Mao himself referred to his sleepless nights over the multitude of problems in policy execution.65 Yang, visiting his erstwhile philosophy students in Henan in January 1959, began to fathom the inconsistencies between what was reported and what was reality. However it was not until June and July 1959, at a meeting with a delegation from the Henan Party School, that Yang sharply and sarcastically criticized the Great Leap Forward’s slogans and fake statistics: ‘Monkey’ was able to pull out a strand of hair, breathe on it and have whatever he wanted. We no longer possess that ability of his. . . . What we need now is real iron, and real steel, not some fake ‘steel sputnik’. Big talk will not give us socialism: only hard work will create it, step by step. We must not reward those who hand in fake reports, and give ‘black banners’ to those who speak the truth.66 He also ridiculed the notion that studying the Marxist classics ‘stressed the past’ and belittled the study of Mao’s works (‘slighting the present’). Finally, he roundly condemned idealism: ‘I ask all of those who practice idealism to knock it off! You have already created one “miracle,” e.g. that of starvation; . . . We must earnestly condemn utopian communism . . .’67 But even then he believed, perhaps naively, that he was speaking off the record in a private forum, and he must have been somewhat unnerved to receive an edited transcript of his comments, copies of which apparently found their way into Politburo and Secretariat circles. In the meantime Yang attended the Lushan Eighth Plenary session of the Eighth Congress in August, and on the advice of his Caolanzi associates Bo, An and Liu Lantao, decided against speaking out.68 This time his discretion was too late; despite a vigorous speech at the Party School in late October condemning rightist opportunism, Yang could not escape criticism for his stinging commentary on the Great Leap Forward. For several months he underwent criticism in a series of closed sessions of the Central School’s Party Committee, which reached a verdict of rightist opportunism and reported accordingly to the Central Committee in July 1960. In January 1961 he lost his prestigious posts as president of the Party School and secretary of its Party Committee, and was demoted to vice-president and vice-secretary. One wonders what deals were engineered during this 1960 limbo period as far as Yang’s fate and the command of the school were concerned. Considering the vituperous nature of Yang’s criticism of the

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Great Leap Forward, the punishment meted out to him – the closed forum criticism and the one-slot demotions – seems relatively light, especially if one compares this with the fate of Peng Dehuai and others for their Great Leap criticisms. There are several possible explanations. First, as suggested by Michael Schoenhals, Yang’s comments were targeted at ‘lower level cadres and propaganda ofﬁcials’ rather than Mao personally, which could be interpreted as an attack on the implementation of the Great Leap Forward rather than on the policy concept itself.69 Second, his remarks were ‘unofﬁcial’, whereas Peng’s were in the form of a letter to Mao. Third, Yang enjoyed far less recognition from the general public than Peng, who was minister of defence, a military hero and a household name – and a peasant household name at that. Another possibility is that Yang was directly or indirectly protected by associates such as An Ziwen, or even Liu Shaoqi. That might explain why it was Wang Congwu of the school’s Party Committee who replaced Yang as president and Party Committee ﬁrst secretary in autumn 1961, and not Ai Siqi, who had served as acting president in Yang’s absence. Wang, who may well have been responsible for conﬁning the criticism, had served as deputy director of the COD (and was therefore an associate of An Ziwen), and as deputy secretary in the Control Commission (an associate, therefore, of Liu Lantao). Wang’s tenure was certainly to Yang’s satisfaction; as he stated in 1981, ‘After the meeting of the 7000, the democratic life in the Central Party School was restored.’70 The verdict on Yang was reversed in mid 1962, but his return to normal life did not last long. As Carol Lee Hamrin notes: The well-known purge of Yang in 1964–65 on the charge of raising the slogan of ‘combining two into one’ to oppose Mao’s ‘dividing one into two’ was in many ways the mere playing out of the substantive disagreements and power struggles between Yang and his competitors.71 I shall relate only brieﬂy the philosophical content of this welldocumented and well-analysed episode – an episode of some two and a half years’ duration, at the end of which Mao danced Yang off the school ﬂoor in their Hegelian–Marxist pas de deux. In May 1963 Mao issued his ‘First Ten Points’ in respect of the socialist education campaign, and spoke of his understanding of the relationship between contradictions, of struggle as the mechanism activating the mutual

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transformation of opposites.72 In Mao’s view human consciousness, spirit, transformed matter, the world; in Yang’s view ‘revolutionary spirit . . . had to be combined with a sober respect for objective limitations’.73 This was the era of at least paying lip service to class-struggle terminology, even if actions might lend themselves to other interpretations; the language in which Yang’s viewpoint was expressed, however, stressed compromise and tolerance. Yang said he was simply following Mao’s directive on publicizing dialectics when he delved into his library that summer and came up with the ‘combine two into one’ phrase from the seventeenth-century Ming–Qing scholar Fang Yizhi. He worked on this idea for several months, discussing it extensively in Party School circles; his stimulated students wrote and published an article on the concept at the end of May 1964. Unfortunately the article was titled ‘Dividing One into Two: Uniting Two into One’.74 This, as Hamrin has suggested, set up the two phrases as if on the one hand challenging and on the other complementing each other,75 neither option endeared itself to Mao. By mid June Kang Sheng had orchestrated a newspaper attack on Yang’s theory. Between 18 and 24 August, during the course of his ‘Talks on Problems of Philosophy’, Mao criticized Yang by name: ‘When the Kuomintang troops came, we swallowed them piece by piece. This is not Yang Xianzhen’s theory of combining two into one.’76 A further spate of media attacks ensued, continuing throughout the following year, but despite the ferocious publicity Yang was not removed from the Party School until December 1965, and even then his disgrace was far from absolute. He was transferred to the Academy of Sciences at Mao’s order. Again the protective kid-glove treatment was afforded by another former white area cadre, Lin Feng, who had served in the North Bureau in the 1930s and had replaced Wang Congwu as president of the school. Furthermore, while one might give Mao the beneﬁt of the doubt, considering his oft-proclaimed distaste for excessive punishment, his radical cohorts were not yet in possession of sufﬁcient authority to engineer party purges, and in the meantime had to make do with media smear campaigns. During the Cultural Revolution, Yang’s critics linked him to Liu Shaoqi, showing how in early 1956 Liu and Yang had planned to alter the curriculum, changing its balance to increase research into economic policy and technical education. This is conﬁrmed by pro- and anti-Yang sources.77 It was also alleged that Yang, under Liu’s direction, had attempted to limit the teaching of Mao’s Thought at the school and in cadre education programmes. Yang later conceded that some in the

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school’s theoretical training department were guilty of ‘disparaging Comrade Mao Zedong’s works’ and that at the school’s second party delegates’ meeting in 1956, ‘we unequivocally provided that, in the teaching plans and the booklists in the future, Chairman Mao Zedong’s works must be included among the Marxist classics’.78 In the Cultural Revolution context the phrase ‘must be included’ was woefully inadequate – ‘must be foremost’ might have done the trick.

Bo Yibo: heavy power79 [T]he planners and leaders of heavy industry created a system that produced and disposed of heavy industrial products in ways that maintained their dominance and impenetrability . . . their insatiable demands for investment meant that funds for light industry and agriculture were squeezed even more tightly.80 The above is not a scornful Red Guard comment but the conclusion of a Western scholar.81 The Cultural Revolution media were, of course, even less complimentary to this sector and its allegedly nefarious chief, Bo Yibo, referring to him as ‘an old-time renegade’, ‘turncoat’ and the ‘top Party person in authority taking the capitalist road in the industrial and communications system’.82 Just as with his three colleagues, the radical media pounced on the 1936 episode as the epitome and the rationale of Bo’s behavioural code, padding out the portrayal with their own slanted interpretations of his policy-making and implementational roles in China’s economy. If his three colleagues operated in the relationship sphere between superstructure and base, Bo’s feet were planted ﬁrmly in the latter – where in his immediate vicinity one can easily identify an impressive array of characters from his past; a power base of deep and broad dimensions.83 Former white area cadres, including Caolanzi and other prison associates from the 1930s, Dare-to-Die comrades and North China Bureau cadres all ﬁgured prominently in the bureaucratic institutions led by Bo in the 1950s and 1960s.84 An Ziwen played no small part in contributing to Bo’s base, in terms of the approval given for high-level party and state appointments by the Organization Department (and for state posts approved when An was minister of personnel). Not only opulent in cliental terms, Bo Yibo’s base was economically powerful because of its wealth of material resources. While I do not mean to suggest that Bo acted in anything but what he believed to be the best

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interests of nation and revolution – that is, turning China into a modern, powerful, communist state – the economic functional system with which he was identiﬁed was undeniably mighty. It should also be emphasized that, however mighty any functional system was, or any individuals or groups were, such might was always relative to the might of Mao Zedong and how or whether he chose to exercise it. The organizational bureaucratic structure into which much of Bo’s power was fed and organized was the State Economic Commission (SEC), which he chaired for a full decade from 1956. Added to this in 1961 was the chairmanship of the Industry and Communications Staff Ofﬁce of the State Council, and in the following year the post of vicechairman to the State Planning Commission. Although Bo was also a Politburo alternate member from September 1956, his operational base was mainly in the state sphere (the State Council, of which he was vice-premier from November 1956), and as such perhaps enjoyed an atmosphere of slightly less political–ideological intensity than would have been the case in a party base of equivalent stature. There were certainly periods in the PRC’s economic history when Mao’s and Bo’s approaches to economic development neatly dovetailed (during the Great Leap Forward, for instance), and Cultural Revolution spokesmen seemed hard-pushed to produce any substantial complaints against him; on such occasions he was accused of ‘double-dealing tactics of feigning compliance’. But there were also times when they did not see eye to eye, whereupon Bo was accused of having ‘boycotted Chairman Mao’s instructions’. Some aspects and episodes of Bo’s 1949–66 career may have fuelled such charges. Bo and the tax dispute Although Bo continued ofﬁcially to hold his various north China posts (secretary of the North China Bureau, ﬁrst vice-chairman of the North China People’s Government, and vice-chairman of its Financial and Economic Committee), he immediately entered the central echelons of power upon the establishment of the People’s Republic in October 1949. Bo was appointed as a member of the Central People’s Government Council (CPGC) and of the Government Administration Council (GAC), and was made vice-chairman of the GAC Financial and Economic Committee (FEC), of which Chen Yun was chairman. This was ‘the important committee charged with the task of coordinating the work of the ministries concerned with ﬁnance, industry, trade, food, railways, communications, water conservancy, agriculture, forestry and labour as well as the People’s Bank of China’.85

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One other post held by Bo from 1949 was that of ﬁnance minister, and it was in this capacity that he found himself tottering on the brink of early political demise, an experience that may well have inﬂuenced his subsequent political choices. Apparently without prior Central Committee consultation, in late 1952 Bo publicly proposed the equalization of taxes for private and state-owned enterprises.86 Both the content of and the manner in which the proposal was presented were scathingly criticized by Mao at the June–August 1953 National Conference on Financial and Economic Work: Bo Yibo’s mistake is a reﬂection of bourgeois ideology. It is beneﬁcial to capitalism and harmful to socialism. . . . A spiritual sugar-coated bullet has hit the mark in Bo Yibo. . . . Politically and ideologically he is somewhat corrupted, [so] it is absolutely necessary to criticize him.87 There was more than chilling irony in Mao’s words, for Bo had conducted and only recently wound up the Sanfan movement, directed at corrupt urban cadres, and the Wufan movement, targeting fraudulent capitalists in particular and the national bourgeoisie in general. The conference was an altogether alarming, if not shocking, experience for Bo and not just because of Mao’s closing speech. Gao Gang (chairman of the State Planning Commission), Rao Shushi (director of the Organization Department) and others attacked Bo for his accumulation of personal power, or independent kingdom building, and for his surrender ‘to the rich peasants and the bourgeoisie’. Bo was also criticized by his peers, including Li Fuchun and Zhou Enlai. An Ziwen did not spring to Bo’s defence, but maintained a steady silence.88 Support from An, who was under attack for his Politburo list, would only have done more damage and reinforced the aspersions cast by Gao on white area cadres. Zhou Enlai found Bo’s atonement attempts unsatisfactory: Comrade Bo Yibo has already made two self-criticisms. In the second Comrade Bo Yibo has shown increased realization of his mistakes but has not been able to expose the roots of his mistakes . . . [which] stem from his ideological, social and historical roots. . . . I agree with the opinion expressed by Gao Gang and others that the most conspicuous problem with Comrade Bo Yibo’s bourgeois individualism is in having wrongly placed his personal position [above] that of the Party, in not having been honest with the Party, and in his lack of democracy in working style.89

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This damning criticism was at least alleviated by Zhou’s reference to praiseworthy aspects of Bo’s past, in that he had ‘fought valiantly against the enemy’ and ‘made relatively major achievements’ when he had followed the correct party line.90 Mao was less generous. He criticized Bo’s defeatist attitude about the peasantry’s ability to move from individual to collective economy. He criticized Bo’s contravention of the principle of collective leadership. Harshest of all was his attack on Bo’s bourgeois ideology: [D]uring the three periods when we cooperated with the bourgeoisie, that is, during the ﬁrst period of cooperation between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party of China, the period of the War of Resistance against Japan, and the current period, it was always bourgeois ideology that inﬂuenced some people in the Party and caused them to waver. Bo Yibo’s mistake was committed under such circumstances.91 Mao’s words could not have held any comfort for those white area cadres who had actually carried out the policy of direct cooperation with the bourgeoisie, unlike the cadres who had enjoyed the less contaminating luxury of simply theorizing on the subject. Gao Gang had voiced far more overt criticisms of white area cadres’ ideological purity, but Mao’s words, perhaps without conscious intent, cast subtler but no less worrying aspersions. Similarly there was an intentional or unintentional subtext, a menacing echo in Zhou Enlai’s choice of phrase: Bo had placed his ‘personal position’ before that of the party. This was the crux of the sixty-one’s 1936 dilemma – that they would be perceived as motivated by personal safety rather than by obedience to the party. Apart from the ignominy of criticism and self-criticism in front of his elite peers and the small superelite, the formal expression of Bo’s punishment was the loss of his Finance Ministry post.92 Considering that he remained in all his other posts and considering the severity of criticism, the organizational aspect of the punishment seems almost trivial. We can attribute this to at least two reasons. First and foremost was Mao’s overarching concern at that time to preserve party unity and maintain the balance of power amongst the ‘differently advantaged’ (in terms of their revolutionary backgrounds) leadership cadres. Second, he had no intention of being bullied by Gao or anyone else into losing the skills of a highly competent man of proven experience, whose ideological aberration need not be irreversible. Third, the criticism itself was probably deemed sufﬁciently punitive and educational.

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The extent to which Bo learnt and applied painfully acquired survival guidelines for the future is difﬁcult to ascertain. In the meantime other guidelines of a more general application were emerging from the conference; the PRC’s New Democracy phase was over and China was now treading the gradual path of socialist transformation, which involved the nationalization of industry and agricultural cooperativization, to be completed within ten to ﬁfteen years. The national bourgeoisie, sobered by their experiences in the Wufan campaign, would continue to be tolerated, though less and less so, within the framework of a peaceful and gradual takeover of capitalist industrial and commercial enterprises by the state. The First Five Year Plan was (again) reﬁned; the leadership committed itself to the application of the Soviet model, with heavy industry as the priority sector and agriculture acting as its supportive (accumulation) base. As far as goals were concerned, there certainly appeared to be leadership consensus. But how to achieve these goals, at what pace, and the proportion of resources to be allocated to the different economic sectors – these were questions that would arise over and over again among the leadership’s policy makers and implementers. Building on a heavy base, 1954–56 During the ﬁnancial and economic conference and a period afterwards, we had a misunderstanding about Comrade Yibo. But the misunderstanding would not be cleared up without the exposure of the Gao Gang–Rao Shushi anti-party clique. ‘A long journey proves the stamina of a horse and the passage of time tells the true from the false.’ Comrade Yibo is our good comrade.93 Bo’s disgrace (like An Ziwen’s) did not last long. An improvement in his fortunes coincided with a reverse in Gao’s. In September 1954 a restructuring of the state central administrative organs took place. The GAC was replaced by the State Council (SC); the FEC was dissolved, and the State Planning Commission, which Gao had headed, moved under the wing of the new SC; and the State Construction Commission (SCC) was established, with Bo as its chairman. The SCC was to supervise capital investment in accordance with the Five Year Plan. Under the State Council were eight ‘general’ or staff ofﬁces, each responsible for policy coordination among groups of ministries in speciﬁc sectors, six of which were economic. Bo was appointed director of the Third Staff Ofﬁce, controlling the Ministries of Heavy Industry, Fuel, Construction

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and Engineering (also known as Building), First and Second Machine Building. The ministries under Bo’s control governed the giant share of industrial investment: ‘Over half of investment was channelled into industry, and of this almost 90 percent was allocated to producer goods branches such as the metallurgy, machine-building, electric power, coal, petroleum and chemical industries.’94 Together with the State Planning Commission and in accordance with the Soviet system of material balance planning, ‘the central government ministries drew up output and distribution plans for the most important industrial products. That placed the distribution of key commodities under the direct control of central planners, not the market mechanism.’95 Change, however, appeared to be in the ofﬁng as the leadership in general became less enamoured of the Soviet model and increasingly aware of the plight of the agricultural and light industrial sectors and their relationship with the rapidly growing heavy industry sector. Two factors led to the end of this situation: shortfalls in the grain supply, and the accelerated establishment of the APCs. Through collectivization the CCP hoped to extend its control over the agricultural sector and organize grain allocation. This differed from the Soviet approach in that Mao was calling for collectivization before the mechanization of the agricultural sector, instead of a gradual, simultaneous process. Although Mao had obtained his colleagues’ agreement on the issue of mechanization, there were considerable differences of opinion on his July 1955 initiative on speeding up collectivization. The main obstacle was the pace. Bo, in the distinguished company of Liu Shaoqi, Chen Yun and Li Xiannian, would have preferred a gradual collectivization, but Mao’s reference to Deng Zihui (minister of agriculture) as a ‘right deviationist’ served as sufﬁcient warning for Bo and others to fall meekly into line by mid autumn. By 1956 the incredibly swift socialist transformation of the agricultural and commercial sectors was almost complete and well ahead of schedule. Its swiftness, however, was paralleled by its superﬁciality and the tremendous ‘imbalances and planning chaos in the overall economy’.96 A variety of economic strategies were suggested during 1956–57, as it became clear that there was some rethinking to be done vis-à-vis economic planning, and that this would involve more than ﬁne-tuning the adjustments to the Soviet model. Ideas ranged from increasing investment in agriculture and light industry to devolving planning and allocation powers for certain light industry commodities downward and outward to the respective localities. Chen Yun had begun to formulate his own idea on moving away from

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material balance planning towards ‘the three balances’: ‘a balanced budget, balanced bank loans and repayments, and balanced material supply and demand’.97 In the spirit of democratic centralism, Mao had called for reports from a whole range of economic institutions in early 1956. Bo had been instrumental in organizing this effort. Comrade Liu Shaoqi had asked responsible persons of the industrial departments to make reports and hold forums, many new problems were discovered. When I reported this to Chairman Mao, he said happily, ‘This is very good. Organize similar activities because I would like to hear about them.’ He later personally heard the reports of 34 departments of industry, agriculture, transportation, commerce and ﬁnance of the central authorities. This was an important act of investigation and study of our country’s socialist construction, and I had personally taken part in the entire course of such reporting activity.98 On the basis of these reports, Mao had been moved to make his speech ‘On the Ten Great Relationships’, proposing economic adjustments such as increased investment in agriculture and coastal industrial development. Even as he argued for these increases, he did so within the framework of his commitment to heavy industry as the key sector, ‘the centre of gravity’.99 If Bo was troubled by the notion of a reduced imbalance in investment among the sectors, he was perhaps compensated by a further restructuring of the economy’s functional system hierarchy. In May 1956 the State Economic Commission (SEC), was established, with Bo as chairman. Planning powers were split: long-term planning – the Five Year Plans – remained the domain of the State Planning Commission under Li Fuchun, but short-term, year-to-year planning was the new SEC’s responsibility: it was given the task of effecting a balance at the national level between the supply of and demand for raw materials. While Bo’s powers had previously been in the realm of coordinating and implementing dictated policies in the heavy industry sector, his new SEC powers extended to policy making and overall economic planning. This was underlined by his election as alternate member of the Politburo in September 1956. In these capacities he could not possibly be oblivious of the continuing pressure for increased investment in agriculture.

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Second – and third – thoughts on agriculture At the end of February 1957, in his speech ‘On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People’, Mao reiterated the need for agricultural investment and its integral relationship with heavy industry: [I]ndustry must develop with agriculture, for only thus can industry secure raw materials and a market, and only thus is it possible to accumulate fairly large funds for building a powerful heavy industry . . . it is not yet so clearly understood that agriculture provides heavy industry with an important market.100 In August, Bo announced that there would be an increase in investment in this sector in the 1958 plan, and that equal emphasis was required on the development of industry and agriculture, because ‘the development of agriculture will not only improve the living standards of the people, but will promote the development of light and heavy industry’.101 Mao was clearly attracted to Chen Yun’s ideas on economic decentralization, and sympathetic to local leaders who naturally concurred with such views. Bo was given the task of ﬁguring out how central control was to be maintained as economic powers devolved.102 By late 1957 the central planners were prudently courting Mao with a reform programme that included a decision to invest in medium-sized and small heavy industrial plants to serve local needs, thereby alleviating the bottlenecks that occurred in production and distribution. Savings could even be made in agricultural and light industrial production (and presumably ploughed back into heavy industry) by increasing production but reducing quality control if there was better preproduction planning. These decentralizing innovations were termed ‘self-reliance’ and essentially constituted the blueprint for the Great Leap Forward. Thus ensued the eventual dovetailing of the economic strategies of Bo and his heavy industry associates with the desire of Mao and his supporters for mass mobilization efforts to accelerate socialist transformation. In theory the September 1957 policy to decentralize the control of many light industrial products left central control of planning and allocation in the heavy industry sector relatively unaffected. Similarly the September 1958 Central Committee and State Council directive on planning reform, while detailing a ‘double-track’ system that would give priority to the local ‘horizontal’ track, still allowed for more than a signiﬁcant degree of central control over planning and allocation.103

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In practice of course the decentralization of economic power during the Great Leap Forward went far beyond its theoretical concept. Bo leaps Bo, like most others in the leadership, ultimately gave his full support to the Great Leap Forward. That he had not leapt fast enough is evident from Mao’s criticism of him and other leaders (including Zhou Enlai, Chen Yun and Li Xiannian) at the January 1958 Hangzhou and Nanning conferences.104 In May 1958, at the second session of the Eighth Party Congress, Bo and the aforementioned offered self-criticisms for their tardy support of the 1956 measures (‘opposing rash advances’) and the ﬁrst sets of plans for the 1958 plan.105 Once Bo became caught up in the vortex of revolutionary euphoria, there was, as far as heavy industry was concerned, method in the madness. Increased investment in agriculture (and hence a decrease in capital construction) would be minimal because of the policy of self-reliance and dependence on local resources (raw materials, equipment and labour) in the countryside, where the communes would run the small industries. This should have alleviated the burden on the central heavy industry sector. What actually happened was another story. Communes, in their efforts to ‘go in for industry in a big way’, retained many superﬂuous materials. Provincial authorities, attempting to build up comprehensive industrial complexes within their own provinces, had set up and expanded various industries, almost regardless of cost. As a result many key raw materials were in short supply, the state’s priority projects were adversely affected, and the situation was out of control.106 This was but one element of the chaos and tragedy engendered by the Great Leap. It is difﬁcult to avoid being judgmental about the ensuing famine and mortality. Though one can understand the initial enthusiasm amongst the leadership, the nationalistic pride they felt in this attempt to carve out a unique Chinese model of socialist industrialization, it is far less easy to understand those who were ready to take up the cudgel a second time, immediately after the grim facts had begun to accumulate and reach the leadership’s ears. In late 1959 Bo Yibo was among those who ardently supported the revived Leap and the continued drive to raise steel and iron output.

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In the interim period, November 1958 to July 1959, there had been acknowledgement of the growing chaos, and directives on readjustment – speciﬁcally for reducing the planned output quotas for the steel industry – had been issued. However the July–August Lushan conference, at which Mao blasted Peng Dehuai and others for their criticism of the Great Leap’s failures and called them right-deviationist opportunists, paralysed the implementation of the proposed readjustments. While Peng was censured for ‘coming out of the closet’, in later years Bo was censured for hypocritically staying in it. Attuned to the hostile atmosphere, he did not deliver the critical speech prepared for him on the basis of data supplied by Ma Hong and Sun Yefang.107 Instead he spoke favourably of the Leap. Was he visited with a sinister sense of déjà vu, casting his mind back six years to when he had been condemned as bourgeois ideology incarnate?108 If survival instincts sprang to the fore, did they also embrace pragmatic thoughts on a continuation of the Leap? The latter had vastly increased the steel production targets; investment in state-owned units was almost double that of 1957; and 1587 large and medium-sized enterprises in metallurgy, coal, electric power, chemicals, construction materials and machine-building had been established in 1958.109 In 1959 investment soared to 43.4 per cent of national income, and the capital construction funds for heavy industry dropped by a mere 0.3 per cent from the 57 per cent high of 1958.110 Bo was sufﬁciently astute to realize that, with or without investment cuts, changes to the industry would have to come, changes that in both the short and the long term could beneﬁt this sector. In the autumn of 1959 an article by Bo harped back to an old and favoured theme: the mechanization of agriculture. The heavy industry sector should cultivate its departments responsible for agricultural machinery, chemical fertilizers and electricity. Research was necessary. Large industrial enterprises are the main support of agriculture. We should actively develop those big industries which serve agriculture, expanding or building factories that make agricultural machines, tractors, power equipment, chemical fertilizers, insecticides, lorries etc. We should do all we can to increase the output and improve the quality of industrial products (including such fuels as petroleum) needed for the technical transformation of agriculture.111 Although Bo’s article appeared during the peak of the revived Leap, and did not contradict the ‘walking on two legs’ policy of simultaneous

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development in agriculture and industry, its emphasis on industry serving agriculture moved Bo considerably closer to common ground with the reformers and readjusters, who subsequently reestablished their hold on economic policy making and implementation. The salient aspects of the policy he had outlined, altering priorities within the heavy industry sector, were adopted and implemented during the readjustment undertaken in the early and mid 1960s. Adjustments in strategy This was a well-judged move on Bo’s part, for during the summer and autumn of 1960, sense and sensibility gradually crept back into the economic leadership; Chen Yun’s policies appeared to be in the ascendant. Mao had removed himself from the direct involvement in economic policy making that had characterized the Great Leap Forward, leaving the ﬁeld open for the economic reformers. Chen had Liu Shaoqi’s full support, much reinforced after Liu’s spring 1961 investigation of the situation in Hunan. The starved agricultural sector, ‘the foundation of all things’, would receive all available resources; private plots would be restored; peasants could once again engage in sideline production and free trade; and they would receive 70 per cent of payments from the collective income in the form of wages.112 ‘Readjustment, consolidation, ﬁlling out and raising standards’ became the national economic slogan. While it is probably true that the reformers welcomed Bo’s cooperation in altering heavy industry’s developmental priorities, it is no less true that his alignment options were singularly limited anyway, with Mao’s temporary disengagement from direct management of the economy and the uniﬁed approach to economic reform among the other top leaders: Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping and Chen Yun. In June 1961 Bo, leading a ‘ten-man small group’, was given the responsibility of formulating industrial readjustment plans.113 The resulting seventy-article document, ‘Regulations on Industry Mines and Enterprises’, basically reversed the Great Leap policies. Except in a few specially regulated cases, all capital construction programs were to be terminated . . . and all industrial enterprises set up in haste and in deﬁance of economic rationality (i.e., those suffering ﬁnancial loss) were to be closed down. . . . Rationality, rather than mass movement, became the dominant theme of industrial management; factory managers were again given production

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authority, and the importance of engineers and technicians in production processes was reemphasized. . . . Quality was favoured over quantity.114 Despite the objection of heavy industry personnel such as Wang Heshou (metallurgy minister), steel output was reduced by almost two thirds between 1960 and 1962. In 1963 roughly 25 per cent of state investment was allocated to agriculture and water conservancy projects, more than three times the allocation in the ﬁrst Five Year Plan and two and a half times the 1958–59 allocation. As Bo had surmised in his 1959 article, industry was now to support agriculture. There was tremendous growth in the output of crude oil and natural gas, and the oil-reﬁning, petrochemical, chemical fertilizer and synthetic ﬁbre industries ﬂourished. By late 1963 China was self-sufﬁcient in petroleum. Heavy industry suffered not so much a loss as an internal rearrangement. In April 1961 Bo took over from Li Fuchun as director of the Third Ofﬁce of the State Council, adding a number of ministries associated with light industry, transport and communications to his rich portfolio. The following year, 1962, Bo became vice-chairman of the SPC and also joined Chen Yun on the Finance and Economic Small Group. Meanwhile Mao, who had tacitly or otherwise accepted a limited degree of responsibility for the economic disasters, watched the virtual dismantling of the communes and the general backtracking or socialist ‘distransformation’ with mounting dismay, bitterly criticizing the economic leadership in the spring and summer of 1962. Chen Yun was singled out, and the SPC, the SEC and the State Council Finance and Trade Ofﬁce were angrily referred to as independent kingdoms. In lipservice deference to Mao’s wrath, minor adjustments were made to agricultural policy. The agricultural sector gradually recovered, approaching the pre-Leap yields, and in some spheres transcended these levels. The industrial sector, despite or perhaps because of the apparent clampdowns, enjoyed a swifter recovery. ‘Light and heavy industrial output grew at 27 and 17 percent a year, respectively in 1963–1965. By 1965 the level of output of such major products as steel, electric power, cement and heavy trucks was more than double that of 1957.’115 While still carping about the trend of the economy, Mao nevertheless conﬁned himself largely to politics, to his Socialist Education Movement, and the economic readjustment programme continued in other capable hands until 1965. With the increased party political presence in the countryside, the economic strategy eventually returned to rapid industrial growth. The bulk of Cultural Revolution criticism against Bo

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relates to his performance during the years of economic readjustment, to his support for revisionist or capitalist style ‘enterprise management’, for the work teams he had sent out from the industrial and communications departments ‘to suppress the revolutionary masses’, and for his destruction of evidence against himself after the 1–12 August Eleventh Plenary Session of the Eighth Central Committee, at which he had been criticized.116 At the October Central Work Conference, Bo was branded as antiparty and antisocialist. The renegadism charge was not formally brought until early 1967, and was then used as the ultimate proof of Bo’s covert but continuous renunciation of communism throughout his career. Even without the renegadism charge, the Red Guards would have felt they had sufﬁcient support from Mao and the radical leaders to act against Bo. On both a personal and a professional basis, Mao had good reason to feel antagonism towards Bo, to whom he had given a chance back in 1953 to redeem himself from his seemingly bourgeois ideological inclinations. But Bo had bitten the hand that fed him: moving suddenly from his cautious, conservative (pro-Soviet model) approach to a short-lived alignment with the radicals, and then doing an equally rapid U-turn, Bo had abandoned Mao and turned against his Socialist Education Movement. From the angle of Bo’s Weltanschauung, in terms of his economic strategy and certainly his power base interests there were no zig-zags. The Great Leap could be viewed as an extreme intensiﬁcation of, or a radically alternative method for, the policy objective of keeping heavy industry as the main priority and extracting the maximum from agriculture on its behalf.117 Similarly, in the early 1960s, when effective economic leadership was clearly in the hands of the reformers and readjusters, Bo’s alignment with them made sense in terms of continued investment in heavy industry, with some reallocation of this investment within the sector. Even if agriculture had become the priority, heavy industry continued to receive ‘the lion’s share of total investment’ and Bo and his colleagues remained at the pinnacle of economic policy making.118

Summary The nature and extent of the power bases of Bo, An, Liu and Yang were very different. Bo Yibo’s and Yang Xianzhen’s were the furthest apart. Unlike Yang, Bo was not conﬁned to one institution but enjoyed a rich, complex base within which he could move from one bureau-

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cratic structure to another. He could make pragmatic alignment choices and still maintain solid cliental support. Furthermore he operated in the government’s economic administration, where his political–ideological credentials were under an occasional rather than a continuous spotlight. He groomed associates for top-level positions alongside him, but this accumulation of colleagues with past working associations, shared prison pasts and in some cases provincial afﬁliations brought upon him factional, clique-forming charges. His acceptance of and contribution to the economic readjustment programme of the early 1960s retied him to his alleged bourgeoisie sympathies of the early 1950s and detached him from his Soviet model and Great Leap economic partnership with Mao. Yang’s operational base, small, academic and inﬂexible, was further constrained by the ‘too close for comfort’ presence of Kang Sheng, Chen Boda and Ai Siqi. Worst of all, Yang was in a state of ongoing and direct ideological conﬂict with Mao – an inexcusable sin. His differences with Mao on communist theory were so fundamental as to be undisguisable. He was fortunate in having a degree of patron protection between 1960 and 1964, which delayed earlier ousting from his base. Liu Lantao’s sphere of activities at the centre indicated that he had initially derived some beneﬁt from his ‘complicated’ past. If the CCC was created partly to mollify the wounded dignity of white area cadres with such complicated histories, the beneﬁts were superﬁcial because of the limited deﬁnition of the CCC’s powers. Liu acknowledged this, and acting with due circumspection was rewarded with a more effective base – responsibility for an entire region. An Ziwen was apparently the only one of the four to reveal palpable signs of concern about discrimination against cadres with ‘complicated histories’ such as his own, and indicated a need or desire to clarify and justify such pasts. Within the scope of his extensive COD powers, he had the ability to act on these instincts. His success, if at all, was brief and rapidly undone in the context of the negation of his alleged ‘elitist’ (as opposed to ‘mass’) approach to party building. Attacks on these four and the case of the Sixty-One Renegades were to serve several Cultural Revolution purposes: detaching top-level party and state ofﬁcials from their power bases and debilitating the bureaucracy; the viliﬁcation of Liu Shaoqi; and the persecution of white area cadres in general and prison cadres in particular. All were woven together into a poisonous web of bourgeois ideology. When looking at Bo, An, Liu and Yang, at their bases and choices of alignments, this chapter has tried to cast light on the conﬁdence, and sometimes lack of

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it, with which they performed between 1949 and 1966. This focus on the four most politically visible of the sixty-one can be seen as a kind of ‘play within a play’. The real theatre – the potent word symbols, the humiliating public parades, the unmasking of political villains – this theatre of the grotesque and cruel absurd was yet to come.119

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4 Prison Again – the CCP Version

[O]ur ﬁghters braved wind and snow to make investigations . . . railroads were ice-bound. . . . They could only march long distances on foot over the snow. . . . One comrade had his feet . . . benumbed by frostbite. Some ﬁghters checked and veriﬁed cases for three days and nights in succession without sleeping. . . . Ch’en Ts’ung . . . was so worn out that he suddenly shrieked in the middle of the night, ‘Aiya, I am ﬁnished!’ . . . his face had turned very pale and his pulse had stopped beating. (Nankai University ‘August 18’ Red Guards describe their winter 1966–67 experiences in researching the Case of the Sixty-One Renegades)1 On leaving the plane, it seemed they had jumped into a steamer. In the extremely hot summer . . . it was even difﬁcult for them to gasp for breath. . . . Jia Suping and others were busily rushing about conducting their investigations. . . . They looked up ﬁles day and night. . . . Jia Suping was too tired, and he suffered a heart attack. (The COD group’s summer 1978 experience in reinvestigating the Case of the Sixty-one Renegades)2 Upon reading the above accounts, a literary critic might scoff at the all-too-obvious meteorological reversal and the almost identical exhaustion-induced ailments suffered by the investigatory teams of 1966 accusers and 1978 exonerators. Despite the lack of literary subtlety the two documents provide piquant detail on the opening and closure of the Case of the Sixty-One Renegades. This chapter traces how the case was handled during the Cultural Revolution,3 focusing on the period from August 1966 to summer 1967, 138

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by which time the ofﬁcial (March 1967) Central Committee’s condemnation of the sixty-one had become public. Aside from its intrinsic interest, the case offers a microcosmic view of how Cultural Revolution forces, once unleashed, spiralled rapidly out of control; how the disintegrating party leadership responded to the networking of the radical elite with the various ofﬁcial media organs, with the Central Examination Committee (CEC) and Central Case Examination Group (CCEG), and with Red Guard organizations and their unofﬁcial media operations.4 Above all the case’s almost inextricable relationship with the fate of Liu Shaoqi is brought sharply into focus. If the 1936 release from prison stamped ‘betrayal’ on the image of each of the sixty-one, the effect on Liu Shaoqi’s image was all the more damning. Not only was he guilty, from the organizational, administrative point of view, of having given the order, but he had advocated this unethical action in accordance with his ‘philosophy of survival’, as interpreted by the Cultural Revolution radical elite from their reading of his 1939 essay ‘How to be a Good Communist’. This philosophy was deemed integral to Liu’s unacceptable ‘antirevolutionary’ political line. Furthermore his perceived sin was not conﬁned to 1936, but had spilt over in time and space: he had ‘protected’ these cadres from then onwards, facilitating their rise to positions of power. It may seem, from an overall perspective, that both the radical elite and the remaining party leadership used the case for the seemingly identical intention of ‘nailing’ Liu Shaoqi; their objectives, however, were diametrically opposed. The radical leaders saw in the case justiﬁcation for increasing their attacks on groups and individuals in the party and state cadre corps. Party leaders such as Zhou Enlai, having failed to prevent exposure of the case, appears to have sought some compensatory beneﬁt from it. Perhaps Zhou hoped that if the focus of attacks was narrowed to this one signiﬁcantly representative group, it might satisfy the appetite of the radicals and forestall the scapegoating of other high-level cadres, himself included. The name of Kang Sheng also crops up frequently. Clearly he, like others in the radical elite, generally manipulated and exploited the Cultural Revolution chaos. Kang, in his capacity as a member of the CCEG and overseer of its activities on behalf of the Politburo Standing Committee, ordered ofﬁcial investigations into the sixty-one and encouraged the Red Guards in their research and exposure of the so-called renegades. Post-1978 PRC historiography casts Kang as the chief villain of the piece, but he cannot be held solely accountable:5 he did not operate

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in a vacuum. The Cultural Revolution was Mao’s initiative and the role of the enigmatic Zhou Enlai, which has yet to be fully explained, appears increasingly suspect. As Michael Schoenhals has pointed out, it was Zhou who chaired the Central Case Examination Group meetings. The leadership was therefore well informed of the harsh day-to-day fate of its purged and imprisoned leading cadres.6 Kang Sheng died in 1975. Allowing the full blame to rest in peace along with the demonic or demonized, but certainly deceased, Kang Sheng (for whom there was no formal posthumous trial) meant not raising the question of the party’s responsibility, let alone Mao’s or Zhou’s.

1–12 August 1966: the Eleventh Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee What then was the objective of the GPCR? Its objectives seem to have been to remedy an accumulation of frustrations from which Mao had suffered during the previous decade.7 Mao’s perception of the deteriorating political maladies of revisionism and ossifying bureaucratization, within the party and the erosion of his own political power gave rise to much of his frustration. His ﬁrst opportunity to give vent to it centred on the Cultural Revolution’s initial and superﬁcially cultural focus, Wu Han’s drama The Dismissal of Hai Rui. Mao and the radical elite perceived distinctly political – and subversive – overtones to the play, but rejected the critique (the February Outline) from the group (led by Politburo member Peng Zhen) appointed to deal with the issue. This in turn led to the dismissal in June 1966 of Peng Zhen from his prestigious post as mayor of Beijing, the reorganization of the Beijing Party Municipal Committee and in August 1966, at the Eighth Central Committee’s Eleventh Plenary Session, to Peng’s removal from the Politburo. At least as signiﬁcant at that plenum was the demotion of Liu Shaoqi from second to eighth position in the leadership hierarchy, signifying Mao’s contempt for Liu’s work teams, which had tried to regain authority for party leadership in the face of rising campus radicalism. Organized resistance to the work teams had evolved into Red Guard groups, supported by the Cultural Revolution Group (CRG), established in May 1966 and composed of Chen Boda, Kang Sheng, Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, Qi Benyu, Wang Li and Guan Feng. Liu Shaoqi’s criticism of radical student leader Kuai Dafu of Qinghua Uni-

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versity on the one hand, and Kang Sheng’s support on the other, was an indication of the party leadership’s polarization vis-à-vis the Cultural Revolution. On 5 August, with the plenum still in session, Mao expressed publicly, in wall-poster format, his own radical sentiments.8 Coupled with the CRG criticisms accumulating inside the plenum against those, such as Bo Yibo, who had supported and activated the work-team programme, it was clear that things did not bode well for certain party cadres. At the plenum, in which ‘Mao obtained the formal endorsement of the party’s Central Committee for a criticism of revisionism’, the dichotomous motif for the ensuing period of the Cultural Revolution was thus set.9 For while the plenum’s ‘sixteen-point decision’ called ominously for struggle against those in authority who were taking the capitalist road, there were also voices of moderation. Stipulations were introduced requiring that though such persons should be criticized they should not be attacked in the press unless prior approval had been given by the appropriate party committee. Party cadres were divided into four categories: good (the majority); relatively good; those who had made serious mistakes but were not antiparty and antisocialist (that is, their mistakes were considered as contradictions among the people); and ‘a small number of anti-Party, anti-socialist rightists’, guilty of ‘contradictions between ourselves and the enemy’. Even fourth-category cadres could still turn over a new leaf.10 Ofﬁcially, errant cadres were to be criticized within the closed circle of their immediate institutional framework. They were expected to offer genuine self-criticism and would then be permitted to return to the fold. In effect the hotline between the radical elite and the mass organizations enabled the latter to identify targets, publicize them in the unofﬁcial media of wall posters and tabloids, and parade them with dunces’ caps. The categories of internal and external contradictions became hopelessly blurred as targets were ‘struggled’ against by Red Guard groups. Although Mao and Zhou Enlai were known to have admonished struggle and advocated criticism, ignoring Central Committee and State Council directives became systemic and symptomatic during the Cultural Revolution. While Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping were probably considered third-category cadres at that point, it seems that public awareness of the different categories invited eager critics to place other targets in the fourth. Hence we ﬁnd that radical organizations immediately labelled both An Ziwen and Bo Yibo antiparty, antisocialist, anti-Mao Zedong (or simply ‘three-anti elements’). At the plenum Mao complained that

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‘The Central Organization Department is no longer in our hands’. Almost immediately (on 19 August) a COD mass meeting attacked An Ziwen and some of his COD colleagues (including Li Chuli of the sixtyone),11 and three days later An was taken into custody; Bo Yibo was also labelled a ‘three-anti element, following scathing criticism at the plenum. However their roles in the 1936 release episode were not referred to at that stage, and the promotion at the plenum of Caolanzi fellow and regional leader Liu Lantao to alternate membership of the Politburo indicates that the case of the sixty-one had not yet found its way onto the Cultural Revolution agenda. That situation was to change rapidly – almost overnight.

Revving up: Kang Sheng’s role, August–September 1966 As the plenum drew to a close the mobilization of the masses began. Between August and November 1966 there were eight major rallies, in which some 13 million Red Guards participated. On 18 August, at the ﬁrst huge Tiananmen rally, Kang Sheng initiated – possibly unintentionally – the investigation into the sixty-one when he met ‘a Red Guard contingent’ from Tianjin’s Nankai University. He gave the group written instructions to investigate renegade connections in Liu Shaoqi’s pre1949 history: ‘Please organize Red Guards to investigate the renegades who inﬁltrated every unit and department. Investigate the arrest and treachery of Liu Shaoqi and others. Kang Sheng. 18 August.’12 At that stage the Red Guards did not, apparently, ﬁnd conclusive evidence against Liu vis-à-vis his early arrests, but they did turn up some interesting material on the 1936 prison release and Liu’s involvement in it. In investigating their own leading university personnel at Nankai, the ‘18 August’ group found that the secretary of the university’s Party Committee, Gao Yangyun, had a ‘complicated’ white area history: imprisonment in and release from Caolanzi. The Red Guards had inadvertently made their ﬁrst discovery in the ‘Case of the Sixty-one Renegades’. Whether Kang Sheng’s memory of the episode was triggered by the early Red Guard information, or whether it was his prior intention to reopen the matter ofﬁcially, is not and probably never will be known. Either way, as the matter had always been kept under wraps by the party, once Kang decided to expose it he would have had to make use of unofﬁcial as well as ofﬁcial channels. Perhaps he manipulated the Red Guards in order that eventually there would be some sort of ofﬁcial response. Clearly there were parallel investigations by the CCEG and

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Red Guard groups, encouraged by the CRG members. Information ﬂowed back and forth between these bodies. In September 1966 the CEC (Central Examination Committee) group investigating the crimes of Peng Zhen turned its attention to the sixtyone. One case group was established to investigate An Ziwen, and another – the 1949 Case Group, headed by Guo Yufeng – was to investigate the alleged destruction of ﬁles by An at the time of Beijing’s liberation.13 By mid September Kang Sheng was able to write to Mao and other senior leaders: ‘Bo Yibo and these sixty-one comrades have conducted resolute anti-communist renegade activity, but Liu Shaoqi’s decision legalized this anti-communist renegade behaviour.’14 There does not appear to have been any top-level response, perhaps because of potentially damaging embarrassment to the party establishment for its action thirty years previously: ofﬁcial investigators with access to restricted documents might just prove that Central Committee authorities even higher-ranking in 1936 than Liu Shaoqi had authorized the release. As long as such a hazard existed, neither Mao nor Zhou Enlai would have wanted the case opened up. In fact only a week previously, alarmed by the uninhibited foraging of Red Guards into such strictly classiﬁed materials as party personnel dossiers, to prevent exactly that type of activity the Central Committee and State Council had issued a directive: ‘Regulations of the CCP Central Committee and the State Council Concerning the Protection of the Security of Party and State Secrets during the Great Cultural Revolution Movement’.15 The foraging nevertheless continued. In early October the ‘masses’ in the Ministry of Agriculture discovered the 1936 renegade past of Minister Liao Luyan. Liao was ‘dragged out’ to a mass rally in the ministry and forced to confess that he had signed a statement in Huabei ribao in 1936. His interrogators paid a visit to the Beijing public library and veriﬁed his story.16 The Nankai University Red Guards (NURGs) meanwhile continued their investigations. Their interrogation of Gao Yangyun led them to Yang Xianzhen. We made a direct onslaught against Yang Xianzhen with a ‘concentrated force’. At ﬁrst Yang was crafty and dishonest. After we crossed swords with him, under the pressure of the inﬁnitely powerful thought of Mao Zedong, he was forced into explaining . . . how he and Gao Yangyun betrayed the Party in 1936 by publishing in the newspaper their ‘anti-communist announcement’ in order to secure their release from prison. We pressed on with the attack in the ﬂush of victory and traitor Yang revealed that their group comprised also

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Bo Yibo, An Ziwen, Liu Lantao, Hu Xikui, Liu Xiwu, Liao Luyan and others. He also stated unequivocally that they acted as instructed by Liu Shaoqi.17 Yang’s testimony thus appears to have become the key to the unfolding of the entire story. During the ten days they spent in the Beijing Library in October, the NURGs further substantiated their suspicions while checking the August 1936 to March 1937 issues of Huabei ribao and Yishi bao (Social Welfare Post). They found lists of the traitors and also the anticommunist statements. They were only brieﬂy stymied by the fact that the names on the lists were pseudonyms; this obstacle was overcome by ‘checking the dead with the living’ and ‘making a ﬂexible investigation of dead materials’.18 The ‘living’ included Xu Bing, director of the United Front Department, and two of the sixty-one: Zhu Zemin, president of the Institute of Agricultural Science, and Yang Xianzhen, who underwent a second interrogation. The NURGs were now in possession of ‘ironbound evidence of the betrayal . . . by several dozen persons’.19 At that point the eager investigators stopped to ask themselves some pertinent questions: ‘why was it that these traitors, after their betrayal and capitulation to the enemy, were allowed to sneak once again into the party for as long as thirty years, usurp important Party and government posts and ﬂagrantly carry out counter-revolutionary activities?’20 The NURGs’ answer to these rhetorical ruminations was that Liu Shaoqi and others had protected the prison cadres. Despite the evidence and their enlightenment, the Red Guards felt somewhat daunted. Although Liu Shaoqi was facing difﬁculties, he was still considered a political giant. Bo Yibo, though obviously a target of criticism, was still vice-premier, and Liu Lantao was secretary of the Northwest Bureau. Gao Yangyun was small fry in comparison. Furthermore Zhou Enlai had arranged for Bo to be sent to a convalescent home in Guangzhou, so he was temporarily out of harm’s way.21 The Red Guards’ hesitation to take the case further did not last long. Concomitant with their October investigations was a further radicalization of the Cultural Revolution. Especially to the NURGs’ advantage was Liu Shaoqi’s increasing vulnerability. His mistakes had now been deﬁned as of a ‘line’, denoting consistently incorrect ideology as opposed to occasional deviations from the correct line. His drastically weakening position culminated in his self-criticism during the Central Committee Work Conference in Beijing on 9–28 October 1966. What followed again typiﬁed the double-track management – or

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rather mismanagement – of the Cultural Revolution. Mao was apparently willing to accept Liu’s confession, in which Liu dated his errors back to 1946. Despite urging from Lin Biao and Kang Sheng, Mao did not class Liu with the antiparty plotters; on the contrary, his errors had been made in the open. Mao expressed his belief in Liu Shaoqi’s rehabilitation potential and reiterated earlier statements that most cadres who had erred could reform themselves.22 But that was not the message the public received. CRG members apparently leaked the contents of Liu’s self-criticism to the Red Guards and rumours were spread that he had retracted his confession. By November wall posters to this effect began to appear, even though Mao had expressed his opposition to posters of this nature. If Liu had confessed to errors as far back as 1946 there would be no stopping the Red Guards, who had proof of earlier misdemeanours, such as Liu’s role in the 1936 episode. And publicity on this was presumably exactly what the CRG people wanted, but had not been able to engineer within ofﬁcial circles. As far as the Central Committee was concerned, however, the 1936 episode remained taboo, despite Kang Sheng’s attempt to draw attention to it the previous month. Had it been on the October Work Conference agenda, Liu would surely have referred to it in his October self-criticism (as he did later). Clearly neither Mao nor Zhou Enlai wanted this delicate matter opened up. Zhou’s adamant insistence on maintaining party secrecy about it became evident the following month.

Zhou Enlai’s role in November 1966: shoring up the defence Between 1 and 9 November the NURGs sent interim reports of their ﬁndings, and requests for further instructions, to the Central Committee, Chairman Mao, Vice-chairman Lin Biao, Premier Zhou Enlai and the Cultural Revolution Group. They requested certain clariﬁcations. (1) Has Liu Shaoqi explained things to Chairman Mao and Vicechairman Lin Biao on this question? (2) Has a conclusion been drawn on this question within the party? If the answer is afﬁrmative, who is the author of this conclusion? We are of the view that this question must be examined afresh. (3) Regardless of how things stand, we are of the opinion that all of them are traitors, and must be completely exposed and ﬁrmly struck down! The Central Committee is asked to instruct us when we should hit out.23

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There was no response.24 When their ﬁnal batch of reports was dispatched on 9 November, the NURGs displayed their ﬁrst dazibao (wall poster) in Tianjin, exposing Gao Yangyun and his surrender. The poster also named Peng Zhen (a former white area prison cadre, but not one of the sixty-one), Bo Yibo, An Ziwen, Yang Xianzhen and Liu Lantao as traitors.25 Within days Red Guards were demanding that Liu Lantao, ﬁrst secretary of the Northwest Bureau, be ‘dragged out’. The authorities in the Northwest Bureau hastily contacted Zhou Enlai. His response, on 24 November, was explicit: Your telegram of the 23rd has been received. Please explain to the Weidong Red Guards of Nankai University and to the students of the Xi’an Bombard the Headquarters Militant Detachment that the Central Committee of the Party is aware of Comrade Liu Lantao’s release from the Guomindang prison. If any new materials are found, they can be sent by representatives to the Central Committee for investigation and handling, but they are not to be made public or investigated by the students themselves [emphasis added].26 Zhou’s Selected Works, published long after the Cultural Revolution, note that he then wrote to Mao that ‘as representative of the Central Committee [Liu Shaoqi] had made the decision . . . [and] the case had been examined and cleared at the Seventh and Eighth National Party Congresses, so the Central Committee must now conﬁrm its action’.27 This may be interpreted as an attempt by Zhou to protect Liu Lantao, but the downside is that he seems to have been less interested in protecting Liu Shaoqi. Zhou may well have considered that Liu Shaoqi was by then (November 1966) a ‘dead tiger’ and therefore there was little point in protecting him.28 Less than a week had elapsed when Zhou was consulted on another of the sixty-one: Zhao Lin, ﬁrst secretary of the Jilin Party Provincial Committee. Zhou replied to the Northeast Bureau and the Jilin committee, ‘unequivocally pointing out that it [the Central Committee] had known about Comrade Zhao Lin’s being released from prison and that this event should not be made public or inquired into at meetings’.29 This time Zhou also addressed himself directly to the Red Guards (at Jilin Normal University) by telegram on 30 November 1966, repeating that the Central Committee was aware of the prison discharge problem: ‘I hope that you will act according to the Party Central’s telegraphed instructions. Do not make announcements or do investigations in mass meetings: do not spread pamphlets or paste up slogans.’30

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This is a clear indication that the Central Committee, or at least both Zhou and Mao, still opted for establishment secrecy about the case. Yet under pressure from two directions (radical leaders and Red Guards) – neither of them particularly discreet – there was by now little likelihood of such a strategy succeeding: too much had already been made public. Those of the sixty-one and others who had been questioned continued to maintain that the Central Committee had given its backing to the 1936 release, and Zhou himself, in trying to maintain the secrecy, stated that it had been known to the Central Committee. There were two options. The best scenario was somehow to ‘prove’ that it had been Liu Shaoqi’s sole responsibility, despite all the claims to the contrary. The second-best scenario was to admit to Central Committee involvement but limit it to the ‘error’ of one man: Zhang Wentian, the party’s 1936 general secretary, who had handled day-to-day affairs. Under Kang Sheng’s guidance, both options were pursued relentlessly.

December 1966 to February 1967 On 18 December 1966 the Wang Guangmei case group – in fact the real target was Wang’s husband, Liu Shaoqi – was formed under the auspices of Kang Sheng, Jiang Qing and Xie Fuzhi.31 Among the ﬁrst to be interrogated was Zhang Wentian, who apparently denied that Liu had been solely responsible and maintained that the Central Committee had authorized the release plan. Accounts sympathetic to Zhang claim that he wrote twice to Kang Sheng, furnishing him with as much detail as his fading memory could recall after thirty years, and suggesting that Kang check the party archives for detail. Kang did not respond.32 In the meantime anti-Liu Shaoqi feeling was growing stronger. Militant Qinghua students formed the United Jinggangshan Regiment, posted a dazibao on 24 December listing ten major crimes by Liu Shaoqi, and shortly afterwards held a Tiananmen rally condemning him. Throughout December, in speeches to Red Guard and mass organizations the CRG leaders uninhibitedly denounced high-ranking cadres by name, among them Zhang Wentian, Peng Zhen, Yang Xianzhen, Bo Yibo, Lin Feng and Gu Mu. Though Mao and Zhou appeared to oppose the personal attacks on Liu Shaoqi, they were committed to criticism of the reactionary antirevolutionary line, of which Liu had become the personifying symbol. Amid the chaotic political conditions of the 1967 ‘January Power Seizure’, pressure upon the Central Committee was stepped up by both Red Guards and the radical elite to deal with the case of the sixty-one, and above all to incriminate Liu Shaoqi.33 The case

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became more and more public as more of the sixty-one were ‘exposed’ and ‘trials’ were conducted within their organizational units. The NURGs saw to it that Liu Shenzhi of the East China Bureau Control Commission was brought to trial. In addition Wang De (director of the Organization Department of the Central South Bureau), Fu Yutian (vice-chairman of the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region) and, in Beijing, Ma Huizhi (vice-minister of communications) were all ‘dragged out’ on the basis of information extracted from another of the sixty-one, Wang Xinbo.34 Agriculture minister Liao Luyan’s alleged testimony can hardly have helped Liu Shaoqi: Since my imprisonment I consistently and ﬁrmly opposed the enemy. However during August–September 1936 the prison warden received a notice from an organization at a higher level asking for our release from imprisonment. It appears to me now that what was decided upon in the past was wrong . . . before I was a Communist Party member: I am one now . . . I carried out the wrong decision.35 On 9 January a second NURG report on the Caolanzi renegades was forwarded to Zhou Enlai and the CRG leaders, again requesting instructions but this time also requesting authorization to bring Liu Shaoqi, Bo Yibo and An Ziwen to trial. On the same day radical leader Qi Benyu announced that, in the public investigation of the ‘An Ziwen party renegades, the chief organizer of these turncoats and renegades is Liu Shaoqi. . . . On this point, we must learn from them [the Red Guards]. They are concerned with the most important affairs of the State. They seized the traitorous statement of An Ziwen. An Ziwen’s gang of traitors against the Party was directed by Liu Shaoqi. Therefore the Red Guards are very good . . . [they have] exposed the personal backgrounds of these people.36 Praise by the radical elite for the Red Guards’ activities and condemnation of the sixty-one leaders was followed up by Guan Feng, who pointed out that An Ziwen, Bo Yibo and Liu Lantao occupied important posts in the Organization Department, the Supervisory Commission (jianwei),

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and the industry and communications system (gongjiaokou), with all the authority in their grasp. They practised capitalist dictatorship. In starting the Cultural Revolution, the ‘little red soldiers’ have accomplished meritorious deeds. These people [An, Bo and Liu] all turned themselves in and are therefore traitors.37 Of further pertinence to the investigations was the transfer in January of the COD into the hands of Kang Sheng. Over the next few months the COD staff were purged and replaced, and Kang’s right-hand man, Guo Yufeng, who had been investigating An Ziwen, was given overall responsibility for the department. This of course meant that the CCEG investigatory teams now had unlimited access to sensitive dossier materials. CRG-controlled newspapers published Red Guard articles denouncing traitors’ philosophy.38 Red Guard wall posters and tabloids naming the sixty-one – complete with copies of the Huabei ribao anticommunist statements – proliferated in Beijing, Tianjin, Shanghai and Xi’an. To little effect, towards the end of January the Military Affairs Commission (several of whose members were veteran cadres) issued instructions against the public humiliation of cadres, and on 1 February Mao reiterated this in writing to Zhou Enlai.39 This did not stop Zhou making derogatory comments on the sixty-one and Liu Shaoqi, and praising the NURGs. When I received XX organization of Nankai University I called upon them to conduct more investigations. With great determination they went to many libraries to conduct research for several months. It is a student who found out that An Tzu-wen was a black gang element. . . . In the case of An Tzu-wen’s betrayal, Liu Shao-ch’i approved the action of the whole group who gave themselves up. After entry into the city An Tzu-wen, who was chief of the Organization Department, refrained from producing this particular document.40 The Red Guards’ investigations and interrogations continued. Their tasks were further assisted by the vacuum left when the original local party authorities exited the scene in the wake of the January power seizure. The idea of the party committees’ replacement by a Paris Commune model had been rejected by Mao, who favoured a ‘three-inone’ administrative model of revolutionary committees. But this process did not even begin to get effectively under way until mid February,

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following the ‘February Adverse Current’ meetings. Nothing could be more symbolic of Zhou’s apparent plight than the post-Cultural Revolution description of the seating arrangements at this series of meetings, which Zhou chaired in mid February. He is said to have sat at the head of the table, with the ‘veteran’ leading cadres seated along the righthand side of the table and the radical elite along the left. But had he really? Until recently the February Adverse Current has been portrayed as having challenged Zhou’s credibility as a supporter of the Cultural Revolution.41 However his image as the protector of abused colleagues, damage control expert and the sole voice of sanity who could still whisper in Mao’s ear – an image of sense and sensibility that has been so precious to the Chinese – has begun to suffer cracks and no doubt will continue to do so at the hands of both Western and Chinese scholars. They may well conclude that Zhou was simply trying to stay one step ahead, interpreting and executing Mao’s will while conserving his own power and, of course, ensuring his survival in such uncertain times.42 At the February meetings, some veteran cadres voiced their concern about the excessively harsh treatment of their colleagues, and demanded their restoration to power. They also expressed doubts about basic conceptual aspects of the Cultural Revolution and suggested it be wound down. This was interpreted by Mao as a personal attack: their actions had backﬁred, their colleagues were not to be brought back and they themselves became objects of CRG-inspired criticism.43 Nevertheless some order-restoring, compromise elements did emerge: representatives of mass organizations were ordered to stop travelling around the country, to leave the various departments connected to the functioning of the economy and to return to their native posts. On 17 February another directive was issued, in the name of the State Council and the Central Committee, reiterating the secrecy restrictions on archive and dossier materials.44 But with regard to restoring those who had been criticized to public positions, there seems to have been no room for manoeuvre, despite repeated ofﬁcial assurances that those who had deviated from the correct line were to be treated with forbearance. By February, as far as Zhou Enlai was concerned, the fate of the sixtyone and Liu Shaoqi was sealed. If he really had tried to protect any of them, there was no longer any point.45 They were extremely dead tigers. However their burial required the elimination of one risk: damage to the Central Committee’s reputation. Conveniently, Zhang Wentian changed his testimony.

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Ofﬁcial condemnation: March–May 1967 On 7 March 1967 the Peng Zhen Special Case Group submitted its report on the sixty-one to the central authorities. The contents simultaneously and unsurprisingly found their way into various Red Guard publications that appeared the following day in Beijing. The report was accompanied by other incriminating documents, one of which was a statement by Zhang Wentian to the effect that he had sent Liu Shaoqi a personal letter signing the North Bureau’s request for approval for the prisoners to follow a ‘simple procedure’ in order to gain release, plus a three-point request from the prisoners themselves that their party membership would be in no way affected.46 Zhang added ‘I did not report the matter to Chairman Mao, nor did I bring it up at a Central Committee meeting.’47 It was this last statement that clinched the issue for the Central Committee, at last enabling it to join in the condemnation of Liu and the sixty-one. At some point between January and March, Zhang Wentian had agreed to assume sole responsibility for the 1936 decision. In 1995 Bo Yibo remarked that it was only after the Cultural Revolution that he was able to understand why Zhang Wentian ‘did not lay all the cards on the table’ (that is, why he did not reveal the names of whoever in the central leadership knew of the instruction when it was issued): Zhang ‘was warned by the investigators specially assigned by Kang Sheng and his band “not to disclose the approval of the Central Committee and, what is more, not to involve Chairman Mao in the case” ’.48 Perhaps Zhang was promised a degree of protection for himself and his wife for the duration of the Cultural Revolution.49 Since he was under criticism anyway for his 1959 support of Peng Dehuai and his economic policies, and had been labelled a three-anti element, he may have decided that assuming sole responsibility for the 1936 decision on behalf of the Central Committee was not such a bad option. In fact, to an extent it was the converse of a typical Cultural Revolution ethical dilemma in that he was being asked not to name others. ‘Others’ might well have included Zhou Enlai – one of the few who might still have been able, if he chose, to afford at least a degree of protection to his colleagues. Furthermore it was probably made clear to Zhang that it was Liu Shaoqi, not he, who was the real target, and that both Liu and the sixtyone were already lost causes. Under the circumstances Zhang Wentian achieved a relatively honourable compromise: while he got the Central Committee as a whole off the hook, he somewhat reduced Liu Shaoqi’s degree of responsibility by sharing it and added weight to the sixty-one’s

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defence plea that they had obeyed what they had understood to be party orders. Once Zhang had spoken, Mao and Zhou no longer needed to try to push back the waves; the secret – no longer a secret, owing to the combined efforts of the radical elite and the Red Guards – could now be ofﬁcially addressed without causing scandalous embarrassment to the Central Committee.50 On 16 March 1967 the Central Committee issued its directive (Zhongfa 96) on the issue and distribution of ‘Materials on the Problem of the Release from Prison of Bo Yibo, Liu Lantao, An Ziwen and Yang Xianzhen et al.’, conﬁrming the sixty-one as a ‘renegade clique’.51 The directive said unambiguously that the 1936 release had been ‘planned and decided by Liu Shaoqi and Zhang Wentian without informing Mao Zedong’, and that a letter from Zhang, plus various other documents, including the report of the Peng Zhen Special Case Group, had been forwarded to ‘Chairman Mao, Vice-Chairman Lin, the CRG leading ofﬁcials, the Politburo, Secretariat, Military Commission and to other leading comrades’. Much of this circular echoed the CCEG report of the previous week, including commentary on the sixty-one themselves, implying that they could not be let off the hook for simply ‘obeying orders’ because they had been cowards to begin with, and that Liu’s orders had just ‘provided the legal grounds for confession and betrayal of the Party. They not only betrayed themselves but also tempted others into betrayal.’ Although the directive did not immediately reach public scrutiny, the CCEG’s ﬁndings were public knowledge and the affair did not rest. The campaign against Liu Shaoqi accelerated: on 21 March twenty Red Guard organizations, some of which were attached to Qinghua and Beijing Universities and the Beijing Aeronautical Institute, formed the Preparatory Committee for Smashing the Liu Shaoqi Renegade Clique. The ofﬁcial condemnation and release of information heralded a turning point in Mao’s attitude towards Liu Shaoqi. The kid gloves were off. Ofﬁcial investigation by the CCEG into alleged instances of betrayal by Liu in 1925, 1927 and 1929 ensued. On the day that Zhongfa 96 was issued, Mao is said to have deleted a passage in his own works praising Liu.52 He suggested that Liu’s ‘How to be a Good Communist’ – one of the twenty-two hallowed documents of the Yan’an rectiﬁcation campaign – be scrutinized and excised from the classics of Chinese communism. The radical elite and Red Guards jumped on this with alacrity. They quoted out of context passages on ‘self-interest’ and ‘survival’ that appeared to offer theoretical justiﬁcation for the 1936 release episode as well as for Liu’s own alleged betrayals. Kang Sheng had this to say: ‘Liu

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Shao-ch’i has also stated that one must have the highest ‘self-dignity’ and self-love. . . . This is Khrushchev’s philosophy of self-survival. That is why he asked Bo Yibo and An Ziwen to give themselves up. Such is his self-cultivation.’53 Bandying about the vocabulary of treason, traitors, renegades, capitulation, surrender and so on, in contrast to those heroic martyrs who had died in the name of the revolution, the radical leadership added a new and seriously damaging dimension to the besmirching of Liu Shaoqi’s reputation. Following the Central Committee’s condemnation of the sixty-one, on 1 April the ofﬁcial party journal, Hongqi, added the culminating touch in an article by Qi Benyu entitled ‘Patriotism or National Betrayal’.54 Pointedly addressing Liu Shaoqi, the article demanded explanations from him on a number of issues, one of which was his role in the 1936 episode. Why did you, on the eve of the war of resistance against Japan, energetically promote the philosophy of survival, the philosophy of capitulation and the philosophy of being a renegade, and direct others to confess their betrayal of the cause, and tell them to surrender to the Kuomintang, revolt against the CCP, openly issue anticommunist directives and take an anti-communist oath?55 On 10 April Liu’s wife, Wang Guangmei, attempted to defend him against these charges. She told her interrogators that the whole idea had emanated from Ke Qingshi and that Liu had agreed to it in order to preserve the effective strength of the revolution.56 In contemptuous response, one week later Red Guard tabloids in Tianjin published not only a partial list of the sixty-one and their anticommunist statements, but also lists of cadres released from the Shanxi reformatory and two Taiyuan reformatories. Mao later referred to the publication of Qi Benyu’s accusatory article as marking the fourth and most important phase in his periodization of the Cultural Revolution, ‘for it marks the seizure of ideological power from the revisionists and the bourgeoisie’.57 From that point onwards the ofﬁcial media intensiﬁed their attack on Liu: The author of ‘Self-cultivation,’ namely the number one person in power taking the capitalist road . . . , carried out secret activities of recruiting deserter renegades and forming cliques. . . . In one instance . . . he openly directed his subordinates to write statements of

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confession to the Kuomintang, to publish anti-communist directives in the newspapers and to become turncoats. In order to legalize these acts of betrayal, he advocated the philosophy of the ‘justiﬁcation of betrayal’ in his ‘Self-Cultivation’.58 In late March and early April CRG members made at least ten public speeches denouncing Liu, with speciﬁc reference to ‘How to be a Good Communist’, and throughout April there were anti-Liu rallies almost every day. On 7 May 1967 a joint Hongqi–Renmin ribao editorial, revised by Mao himself, was published. Its title was ‘Betrayal of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat is the Essential Element in the Book on “SelfCultivation” ’.59 On the same day the Japanese press reported that Bo Yibo and An Ziwen had been dragged out to a criticism and struggle rally at the People’s University in Beijing.60 Barely a week had elapsed when posters appeared in Beijing quoting Zhongfa 96 at length, naming approximately half of the ‘traitorous sixty-one clique’, and detailing their party and state ranks. The names included Bo Yibo, Liu Lantao, An Ziwen and Yang Xianzhen. The posters stated that thirty-six of the sixty-one were still alive, fourteen of them working in Beijing and twenty-two in the provinces.61 Publication of the ofﬁcial verdict on the sixty-one heralded a new stage in the role of the Sixty-One Renegades Case in the Cultural Revolution: the hunt for other renegades.

Spreading the net The circulation of Zhongfa 96 gave rise to a sinister campaign of ‘ferreting out renegades’ throughout the country. . . . Lin Biao and Jiang Qing asserted that there had been an ‘organizational line of Liu Shaoqi’s renegades clique’. This followed by the framing of the ‘Xinjiang renegades clique’, the ‘northeast renegades clique’, the ‘south China renegades clique’ and other major wrong cases.62 The Red Guards lost no time in pursuing further groups and individuals. In mid May even Zhou Enlai found himself under brief but embarrassing suspicion when the ‘Wu Hao Incident’ surfaced. ‘Wu Hao’ was an alias used by Zhou during his CCP underground years. The ‘Announcement of Wu Hao and Others Quitting the Communist Party’ had been published in several Shanghai newspapers in February 1932, by which time Zhou had transferred from Shanghai to the CCP soviet

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in Jiangxi. Red Guards discovered this item during their newspaper archive research and passed it on to Jiang Qing. However Kang Sheng was quick to vouchsafe Premier Zhou’s loyalty at the time and to conﬁrm Zhou’s point that the announcement had been pure fabrication by the GMD. Zhou also provided a fully documented account of the episode; his account satisﬁed Mao, who ordered the incident closed.63 In early June a Red Guard tabloid, Zhui qiongkou (Pursue the Tottering Foe), published a list of prisoners released in the 1930s from the GMD Suzhou reformatory in Jiangsu. Of the forty-two people named, almost half held central state administrative posts (one, Zhang Hanfu, was vice-minister of foreign affairs) and four held high-level posts in the Education Ministry. Leading intellectuals were well represented, including Liao Mosha, Ai Qing and Chen Paichen. Cao Diqiu, the former acting mayor of Shanghai, was another familiar name. The document did not describe the release procedures but alleged that some had gained their release by agreeing to spy for the GMD. All this information was supplied by the NURGs, who had so scrupulously investigated the sixty-one.64 In the same tabloid another Red Guard group offered a list of former Beijing Party Committee cadres who had been imprisoned in the white areas, this time not limiting itself to 1936–37.65 A typical Red Guard method of labelling a person a renegade was to give a few details of the person’s imprisonment history followed by a list of professional and personal links he or she had had since then with known renegades. An article attacking Gu Mu, chairman of the State Capital Construction Commission, listed fourteen such people – guilt plus guilt by association.66 Another use made by the Red Guards of ‘renegade’ material was to interweave it with political–economic theory, suggesting that renegadism and capitalism went hand in hand. Thus economists, such as Sun Yefang, who had been imprisoned by the GMD were party to economic theories unacceptable to Mao but of course supported by Liu Shaoqi, and were therefore integral components of his heretical ‘line’.67 The ‘renegade’ cliques referred to in the quotations that opened this section were also investigated during 1967. The Xinjiang case refers to the 1946 release of 129 cadres imprisoned there by warlord Sheng Shicai since mid 1941, when they had been en route from the USSR to Yan’an.68 Other imprisoned communists, including Mao’s brother, Mao Zemin, had been executed by Sheng and had since been frequently commemorated as martyrs. During the Cultural Revolution this heroic fate was sharply contrasted with the survival of other prominent Xinjiang released communists such as Ma Mingfang, leader of the

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Northeast Bureau of the CCP. Ninety-two cadres were accused of being renegades. The ‘Northeastern renegades clique’ were those in the Party’s Northeastern Bureau who had communicated with Chiang Kai-shek in February 1946 to demand the release of Zhang Xueliang. Ninety cadres were accused of having capitulated to the enemy. Accusations against the ‘Southern renegades’ referred to some 7100 people who had worked in the Guangdong underground party organization. Investigations against them were under way in autumn 1967.69 In the meantime traitor-catching fever was getting anarchically out of hand. In internecine rivalries, various mass organizations were naming traitors not only in ofﬁcial echelons but also in one another’s organizations. On 28 June 1967 the Central Committee issued Zhongfa 200, ‘Notiﬁcation on Catching Traitors’. Five guidelines were laid down, with the emphasis on greater discernment; traitors must be distinguished from cadres with ‘ordinary’ historical problems: (1) The conclusion drawn in respect of whether or not a person is a ‘traitor’ is a grave political question bearing on the political life of that person. It is therefore imperative to make careful investigation and adopt a cautious attitude. Don’t declare at individual discretion a certain person a traitor on the basis of incomplete materials that have not been veriﬁed. Don’t lightly make public such materials. (2) Emphasis should be laid on ferreting out the traitors among a handful of Party persons in authority taking the capitalist road. Those who are known to have committed acts of betrayal in history must also be investigated but they must be dealt with differently according to the importance of their cases, whether they have made a clean breast of themselves to the Party, whether they have worked in collusion with Party persons taking the capitalist road, and how they have presented themselves in the great proletarian cultural revolution [emphasis added].70 The italicized statement is ironically reminiscent of earlier modifying provisos on the categorization and deﬁnitions of betrayal that implied the possibility of extenuating circumstances – modiﬁcations apparently suggested in the 1950s by Liu Shaoqi, An Ziwen and those in the Organization Department who were now accused of being traitors. Such modiﬁcations were not to the liking of the radical elite; neither was Liu Shaoqi’s third confession (2 August 1967), which reiterated Wang Guangmei’s earlier statements on the sixty-one and his somewhat disin-

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genuous claim that he had been unaware until the Red Guards made their revelations that the sixty-one had signed anticommunist press statements.71 On 9 August a joint editorial in Jiefang ribao, Wen huibao and Zhibu shenghuo rejected the concept of extenuating circumstances or modiﬁcations in respect of the issue of betrayal; it was reprinted in the 17 August edition of Hongqi. Though relating speciﬁcally to the 1936 episode, it denounced surrender in any form. A surrender is a surrender, and no surrender is phoney. As far as a communist who has fallen into the hands of the enemy is concerned, he has to make the choice between laying down his life for the revolution and betraying the revolution for his personal safety. There can never be any third road to take. . . . Every ‘phoney surrender’ was a genuine betrayal.72 Simultaneously the Central Committee demonstrated equally forceful determination to exercise control via the media. On 14 August 1967 a Central Committee circular was issued to all revolutionary committees and military control committees in all regions and provinces, to all departments of the Central Committee and State Council and to all mass organizations and propaganda units. Entitled ‘Notice on the Question of Criticism and Repudiation by Name in Publications’, it was designed to clarify once and for all who had been criticized thus far in central and local publications, with the approval of Mao and the Central Committee, and who should be similarly subjected in the next stage.73 Among the ten new names listed for repudiation in central publications were those of Bo Yibo, An Ziwen and Zhang Wentian. Twenty-three people were named for local castigation, among them three more of the sixty-one: Liu Lantao, Hu Xikui and Zhao Lin. The timing of this notice can also be understood as part of the backlash by the forces of moderation following the radicals’ apparent victory in the Wuhan incident the previous month.74 It seems that Mao, Lin Biao and Zhou Enlai had reached the conclusion that it was time for de-escalation, rather than further radicalization as encouraged by the CRG. One expression of this de-escalation was the enforced loosening of the CRG’s hold on the media. Four of the radical elite who were deputy editors of Hongqi under Chen Boda were ousted shortly after the publication of the 17 August editorial. The journal then temporarily suspended publication and at the end of the year Qi Benyu was also dismissed.

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On 5 September 1967 the Central Committee, State Council, Military Affairs Commission and CRG issued a joint directive ordering an end to armed struggle. Throughout that autumn the balance of power shifted in favour of the regional military commanders rather than the mass organizations. In September Mao outlined his strategic plan, advocating the re-establishment of party authority, but this was not realized until another year had elapsed and most of the Revolutionary Committees had been formed. Periodic bouts of radicalization, such as that in spring 1968, hardly accelerated the process. By July 1968 Mao’s plan was well under way, with eighteen provinces under Revolutionary Committee administration and power effectively in the hands of the military. The Party’s Eighth Central Committee Twelfth Plenum in the latter half of October 1968 again exhibited how the balance of forces lay. On the one hand most of the veteran cadres who had been actively involved in the February Adverse Current retained their posts. On the other hand the radicals had their pound of ﬂesh with the ﬁnal ofﬁcial condemnation of Liu Shaoqi and his expulsion from the party and all his ofﬁcial posts on 1 November, following the submission of the CCEG’s ‘Investigation Report on the Crimes Committed by Renegade, Traitor and Scab Liu Shaoqi’ to the plenum on 18 October.75

Winding up the case It was at the Twelfth Plenum that the Sixty-One Renegades Case entered the last scene in the downfall of Liu Shaoqi. The CCEG report condemned Liu on three main charges of betrayal in 1925, 1927 and 1929. It added a brief list of several other ‘serious and unforgivable crimes’, the ﬁrst of which was his role in the 1936 release of the sixty-one: Liu Shao-ch’i instigated 61 traitors, including Po I-po, Liu Lan-t’ao and An Tzu-wen to publish an ‘anti-communist announcement’ to declare that they surrendered to the Kuomintang and betrayed the communist party. This case has been made public by the Party Central Committee after a careful investigation.76 With Liu’s political demise, his use as the focal symbol of the Cultural Revolution had peaked. The case of the sixty-one had helped seal his fate, but what had happened to the so-called renegades themselves? Between January 1967 and early 1968 they and others connected with the case, such as Xu Bing and Kong Xiangzhen, were detained one by

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one and imprisoned. Xu Zirong, Liu Xiwu, Wang Xinbo and Hou Zhenya were all arrested in January 1967.77 Yang Xianzhen, detained since May 1967 at the Philosophical Research Institute of the Academy of Sciences, was imprisoned on 23 September 1967.78 An Ziwen, under detention since 22 August 1966, was not formally imprisoned until 21 January 1968.79 Liu Lantao and Bo Yibo were placed in detention in January 1967; Liu was imprisoned in early January 1968 and Bo shortly afterwards. In the early days of the Cultural Revolution it was usual initially to keep high-level cadres who were being investigated under house arrest, a form of ‘protective custody’.80 Detention in the prison facility at the Beijing garrison, to which some were transferred, was still considered protective custody. Conditions there have been described as ‘appalling and degrading’.81 In Caolan chunqiu, Wu Linquan and Peng Fei detail the torture, suffering and medical neglect endured by Liu Lantao, Li Chuli, An Ziwen and Bo Yibo while investigators attempted to extract confessions of renegadism. The prisoners were sometimes ‘lent’ to Red Guard rallies for public humiliation.82 Bo’s interrogators submitted to the CCEG daily reports that quoted from Bo’s written accounts of his experiences at the denunciation rallies, and his persistent refusal to admit to any renegade activity.83 In 1969 most of the high-level detainees were transferred to the Qincheng prison, about an hour from the centre of Beijing. The conditions there were even worse (treatment is said to have included medical experimentation), but they improved marginally in 1972 when Mao apparently intervened. Bo Yibo, An Ziwen, Yang Xianzhen and Liu Lantao survived the Cultural Revolution, but several others of the sixty-one died in prison, including Liu Xiwu and Wu Yunpu. Wang Qimei died in 1967, Xu Zirong in 1969, Hu Xikui in October 1970 and Liao Luyan in January 1972.84 Case group investigators continued to put pressure on An during his detainment and imprisonment, and on Zhang Wentian while he was under house arrest, to conﬁrm that the 1936 release had been designed and authorized solely by Liu Shaoqi, but apparently they failed to elicit the desired response.85 (They also interrogated An, Liu Lantao and Li Chuli about alleged crimes by Deng Xiaoping.) Some of the sixty-one wrote lengthy appeals in defence of themselves; they justiﬁed having followed the 1936 release procedures on the grounds that it had been an act of self-sacriﬁcial loyalty to the party, obedience to party organizational discipline and obedience to a decision emanating from a higher party authority – a basic tenet of the Communist Party ethic.

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Individuals should obey the organization; the lower-ranking should obey the higher-ranking; the minority should obey the majority. Does this organizational principle matter or not? If we are traitors because we obeyed the North China Bureau, then you should revise the Party constitution.86 This and other such appeals were considered in 1975 – and rejected. The renegade label remained until the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Party Congress in December 1978.

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5 Rehabilitating the Sixty-One

To call a cadre a renegade is the most effective tactic for discrediting any party cadre in the public eye. Unlike other political mistakes . . . being a renegade is an almost unforgivable sin. . . . Once applied, these labels substantially decreased anyone’s chance for a verdict reversal, even when the political atmosphere changed drastically. In fact those who had been condemned as renegades – mostly those from the White areas – were the last to be rehabilitated.1 The rehabilitation of Cultural Revolution victims began as early as 1968 and continued well into the 1980s. There were peak years – 1973 and 1978 – and years in which the numbers dropped sharply, for example 1976.2 The question of who was eligible for rehabilitation was both a recurrent theme and a frequent cause of leadership conﬂict, but the principle of political rehabilitation was never invalidated, even by the most radical in the leadership. On the contrary the notion that a man’s political consciousness could be rectiﬁed and recharged despite his previous political record was an integral element of the Thought of Mao Zedong – as it was in traditional Chinese culture – and had been at the heart of almost every political campaign initiated during the Maoist era. Since political re-education was supposed to be more of a privilege than a punishment, the rehabilitated often referred to their period of detention or internal exile as a fruitfully ‘tempering’ experience – even if they returned to the fold after the accusations against them were proved false or unjust. This attitude served to obscure the Party’s role in an act of injustice and enhance its image as an educator.3 The regeneration of revolutionary consciousness was the quintessential rationale behind the Cultural Revolution, involving for many the 161

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familiar purge – re-educate – rehabilitate process. That is not to say that the PRC ever adopted a consistent approach to the application of the rehabilitation principle. The boundaries of those who were deemed ‘potentially rehabilitable’ expanded and contracted pragmatically – sometimes to embrace even ‘enemies of the people’ (those in the antagonistic contradictions categories) upon their satisfactory reeducation, while at other times such people were dealt with harshly and fatally. In Mao’s words, ‘A POW, a disarmed enemy, a disarmed spy, whom [we] clearly recognize as such, we decide not to kill. So what then? Remould him. To remould is to proceed from the desire for unity.’4 On the other hand a grimmer fate befell some seven hundred thousand so-called counterrevolutionaries in the early 1950s. On the whole, and certainly in theory, the party opted for the betterment rather than the beheading of erring individuals. ‘In treating an ideological or political malady one must never be rough or rash but must adopt the approach of “curing the sickness to save the patient” which is the only correct and effective method.’5 Mao prided himself and the party on this as a notion not merely of benevolence but also of efﬁciency, in that talents and skills did not go to waste. In the wake of the Cultural Revolution, ideological and pragmatic considerations further combined in a number of ways to govern the rehabilitation of former leadership cadres. One such consideration was the potential effect on the balance of power among the various leadership groupings. These groupings have conventionally been identiﬁed as Cultural Revolution radicals (the Gang of Four, its supporters and Lin Biao), beneﬁciaries (largely middle-level cadres, such as Hua Guofeng, who had risen in rank to ﬁll the vacancies left by purged senior cadres), survivors (those who had been criticized but not purged, such as Li Xiannian and Ye Jianying) and rehabilitated victims (such as Deng Xiaoping).6 MacFarquhar and Harding have detailed the back-and-forth swings of the Chinese power pendulum in the 1970s.7 Clearly the radicals were unlikely to press for the return to power of those who might strengthen the rival ‘survivor’ camp. But the rehabilitation of top-level cadres was restricted even within a particular group or coalition, because of the limited availability of posts in the formal structures of party and government. Even survivors and the (early) rehabilitated may therefore have been less than hasty in bringing their former colleagues in from the cold, despite the proximity of their political–ideological orientations. Perhaps the most sensitive issue in the rehabilitation of central-level cadres was the reversal of verdicts sanctioned by top-level leaders,

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including Mao himself. The rehabilitation of lower-level cadres was a far easier proposition, involving only local leadership bodies. By the end of 1972 ‘virtually all cadres at and below county level and in basic production units had been liberated’.8 Reversing the verdict on high-level cadres was another matter. Such an action not only constituted the discrediting of leadership judgements on speciﬁc individuals but chipped away at the very raison d’être of the Cultural Revolution. In no case was this more obvious than in that of Liu Shaoqi, arch-villain and focal symbol of the Cultural Revolution: his rehabilitation would be interpreted as the ultimate repudiation of the revolution. For those associated most directly with Liu, such as the sixty-one, rehabilitation took a long time, over twelve years; but when it at last came it contributed an essential preparatory element of Liu’s posthumous rehabilitation in the spring of 1980, preceding the leadership’s June 1981 rejection of the Cultural Revolution.9 We may refer to the above factors as the external logic behind the delay in rehabilitating central-level cadres. But each case had its own inner facets and vocabulary that helped accelerate or decelerate the advent of rehabilitation. For cadres who had been ofﬁcially classed as ‘renegades’ or ‘spies’, rehabilitation policy remained uniformly negative until Hu Yaobang assumed directorship of the Central Organization Department at the end of 1977. This did not necessarily mean that the issue of reviewing renegadism verdicts was never discussed. From time to time the imprisoned cadres were reinterrogated and permitted to submit appeals. The fate of the sixty-one in the late spring and early summer of 1975 and at the end of 1978 provides an excellent illustration of the period’s ‘balance of power’ dynamic and its interplay with rehabilitation policy.

Rehabilitation policy and balance-of-power politics in the early 1970s The mysterious death of Lin Biao in September 1971 placed the moderate leadership forces (that is, the survivors) in a relatively stronger position than the radical leaders, facilitating the ﬁrst wave of rehabilitations of purged senior cadres and the reappearance of others who had been less formally disgraced. The substantially lower proﬁle of the military in the political leadership elite removed the rationale for the superﬁcial alliance between radicals and moderates, and enabled issues on which these latter two groups differed (such as the rehabilitation of veteran cadres) to surface. In April 1972 a Renmin ribao editorial by

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Zhou Enlai referred to veteran cadres as the ‘party’s greatest treasure’, heralding the reappearance of Chen Yun, Wang Zhen, Zheng Daiyun and Chen Zaidao on 1 August 1972 (Army Day) and culminating in the return of Deng Xiaoping in March 1973 as vice-premier.10 The moderates justiﬁed their approach to rehabilitation and criticized Lin Biao’s approach (and implicitly the leftists) as a denial of Mao’s comment that 95 per cent were good and only a handful bad, and of his ‘lenient and patient line toward ofﬁcials who had “made mistakes” during the early 1960s’.11 The Tenth Party Congress in late August 1973 saw the reinstatement of a number of veteran cadres who had been excluded from the Ninth Central Committee: Ulanfu, Wang Jiaxiang, Li Jingquan, Tan Zhenlin, Li Baohua, Liao Chengzhi and Yang Yong. While the radicals may have welcomed the reduced presence of the military in central and provincial party posts, they were surely dismayed at the prospect of these posts being ﬁlled by people who had but recently been subjected to their harsh scorn and criticism. This prompted murmurings on the part of the radicals against such rehabilitation as a ‘restoration of the old’, the essential media message in their subsequent anti-Lin, anti-Confucius campaign. The radicals were still well represented at Politburo level and were inﬂuential in the media, but they feared not only a reinforcement of support for the moderates’ economic programme but also the distinct probability that rehabilitees would seek revenge on those who had ousted them and bring about a purge of radicals. As far as the radicals were concerned, the least welcome of the rehabilitees was of course the highly competent former ‘number two capitalist roadster’, Deng Xiaoping. His return was preceded by the dramatic catapulting of ‘newborn thing’ Wang Hongwen into third place in the leadership hierarchy, perhaps reﬂecting Mao’s conﬂicting approach to the problematic question of succession and his vision of a continuously revolutionary China. Disappointed with Wang’s performance, by autumn 1974 Mao appears to have accepted that, at least until a better alternative appeared, Deng would be the most appropriate person to handle the party’s daily affairs in the absence of the ailing Zhou Enlai. Mao duly advocated that Deng be appointed vice-premier, participate in the Military Affairs Commission and become the People’s Liberation Army chief of staff. In January 1975 Deng was also reinstated in the Politburo Standing Committee and made vice-chairman of the party, and with much gusto undertook the ‘four modernizations’ programming. But his zeal alarmed Mao. Roderick MacFarquhar summarizes Mao’s dilemma:

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Mao’s behaviour throughout Teng Hsiao-p’ing’s year in power was contradictory. He backed Teng’s measures, and defended them from attacks by the Gang of Four, but he simultaneously propounded his own leftist views and allowed Chang Ch’un-ch’iao and Yao Wenyuan to publicize theirs. . . . Mao’s ambivalence may have reﬂected indecision, a genuine conﬂict between head and heart. It may also have been a manifestation of his increasing inﬁrmity.12 Meanwhile the radicals made a thinly veiled attack on Zhou Enlai, denigrating his efforts to ‘bring old men out of obscurity’. This attack reached its peak in early 1974 in the form of the Pi Lin, Pi Kong (Criticize Lin Biao, Criticize Confucius) campaign. The young Wang Hongwen participated vociferously, scorning those whose desire it allegedly was to ‘Sweep the temple; invite the real god; old marshals must return to their posts; little soldiers must return to their barracks.’ . . . They mean that all those traitors, enemy agents, capitalist roadsters including Liu Shao-ch’i will return to their posts and that all the new-born things of the Cultural Revolution will be abolished. It is a typical restoration of the old, a counterattack or a liquidation.13 Wang was careful to pay lip service to the principle of an errant cadre’s re-education and rehabilitation potential, but warned that some had been only superﬁcially re-educated and that though ‘it would be a mistake not to exploit the veteran cadres, it would also be a mistake to determine their position by experience and age regardless of their performance in the real class struggle’.14 Three months later Wang Dongxing – Politburo member, CCP General Ofﬁce director, leading ﬁgure in the public security system and Cultural Revolution beneﬁciary – detailed the party’s current rehabilitation policy, making it clear that mere opposition to Lin Biao in the past was not necessarily a criterion for the rehabilitation of a purged cadre. Nor did Lin Biao’s involvement in a cadre’s purge necessarily invalidate the reasons for the purge. He declared ten conditional categories that permitted rehabilitation and ten categories that ruled it out. On at least two counts, rehabilitation for the sixty-one seemed impossible: ‘with regard to those with historical problems for which decisions have already been made, there should be no rehabilitation and no consideration of their cases’; and ‘ “Renegades”, “enemy agents”, “Trotskyites” and “alien class elements” who have sneaked their way into the

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“revolutionary ranks” shall be liquidated from the party, regardless of whether or not they were opposed to Lin Biao and Chen [Boda] and their sworn followers.’15 These categories remained intact even after the fall of the Gang of Four, preventing the rehabilitation of the sixty-one and others labelled ‘renegades’.

May 1975: a brief spring thaw Mao’s doubts about aspects of the moderates’ economic and social reforms and his fear of the invalidation of the Cultural Revolution perhaps motivated him to give relatively free rein to the radicals in their anti-Confucius media campaign throughout 1974. Yet it was also clear that he did not want a full-scale swing back to political upheaval; on several occasions he bade his Politburo members to act for the sake of unity and not to form factions.16 By the spring of 1975 Mao’s patience with Jiang Qing and her colleagues was wearing thin. Between the end of April and early June, Jiang Qing underwent self-criticism at Politburo meetings presided over by Deng Xiaoping. At one, on 3 May 1975, Mao warned his wife not to form a Gang of Four, but to support stability and unity, to oppose not only empiricism (the euphemistic term for revisionism, which the radicals applied to the moderates’ socioeconomic policies) but also dogmatism (that is, radical media-type hyperbole).17 Mao’s attempt to maintain a balance in the leadership was evident in the treatment of the sixty-one at that time. He had agreed to the release from prison of a number of veteran cadres for medical treatment or for job assignments – but not to their rehabilitation, an issue that Deng Xiaoping is reported to have raised, saying ‘We must solve this so-called sixty-one problem. We can’t say it was the individual’s responsibility – that’s not fair.’18 On 24 May 1975 An Ziwen was taken from Qincheng prison by train to Huainan city in Anhui and put to work in a fertilizer factory. Yang Xianzhen was sent on 19 May to Tongguan County in Shanxi, where he was hospitalized (apparently through Deng’s intervention he had been released from prison in December 1974 because of ill health). Liu Lantao was released on 28 May and sent to Anqing in Anhui.19 Bo Yibo enjoyed slightly more privileged treatment. Having been released from prison a few months earlier (also apparently at Deng’s behest), he remained under a form of house arrest in a Beijing hostel belonging to the State Council, despite attempts by the CCEG to have him exiled to Henan. Kong Xiangzhen was exiled to Yichang in Hubei and Zhang Wentian to Wuxi, where he was permitted to live with his wife under

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less rigorous surveillance than previously. Bo Yibo and Liu Lantao were less fortunate: their wives had committed suicide in the early years of the Cultural Revolution.20 By mid summer 1975 the radicals were again moving onto the offensive, with, it seems, Mao’s backing as he anxiously recoiled from the moderates’ rapid output of socioeconomic plans – for Mao a déjà-vu of the experience of the early 1960s. A brief spring thaw ended when the radicals put into practice a campaign subsequently entitled ‘Fight Back the Rightist Attempt to Reverse Verdicts’. Despite the degree of relief in the sixty-one’s physical conditions, barely two months elapsed before their ofﬁcial status as ‘traitors’ was reafﬁrmed. They were approached by CCEG investigators, who requested that the cadres put their signatures to this reafﬁrmed conclusion for insertion in their personal dossiers. On 17 July 1975 Bo Yibo, on being asked his opinion of the following wording – ‘They acted traitorously in accordance with Liu Shaoqi’s black instructions’ – retorted grimly, ‘First, omit the adjective “black”; second, change “Liu Shaoqi” to “Central Committee”; and ﬁnally add that we carried out these instructions to leave the prison in order to work for the Party. If you change all that, then I’ll sign.’21 Similarly An Ziwen, Liu Lantao, Yang Xianzhen, Zhou Zhongying, Li Chuli and Chen Bozhong (the wife of Zhang Xi, who had died in 1959) refused to sign, reiterating Bo’s argument that their only crime had been to obey party orders. They also objected to the accusation that they had concealed their release from the party authorities and had not entered it in their personal dossiers. Liu Lantao vehemently defended himself: In my conclusion it says: ‘Liu Lantao hid his traitorous crimes.’ This is totally unfounded! I carried out a Central Committee order to leave the prison. How can you suggest this is concealing a crime? . . . In the winter of 1944 I went to Yan’an . . . to report to the responsible comrades of the Central Committee . . . and I referred to the experience of our release from the Beijing prison.22 In August 1975 Yang Xianzhen, when ordered to sign a similar conclusion, responded: ‘It was according to the Party’s decision that I left the prison – and this is in accordance with the Party’s organizational principle – the individual must obey the organization. This is not a case of getting out of prison by means of betrayal.’23 Such indignant objections were to no avail. The sweetened pill of internal exile following their harsh prison experiences was now laced with a bitter additive: expulsion from the party.24

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Latching onto Mao’s comments on the portrayal of capitulationists in Outlaws of the Marsh, the radicals accelerated their campaign, attacking Central Committee leaders who wished to ‘correct the mistakes of the Cultural Revolution’.25 Deng was more or less neutralized politically, functioning only in the arena of foreign affairs. Zhou Enlai’s death two months later appeared to move the fragile balance of power further in favour of the radicals and beneﬁciaries. Deng was removed from his posts in April 1976, though not expelled. The campaign against him continued not only after Zhou’s death but also after Mao’s death and the elimination of the Gang of Four, and until the last minute before his reinstatement to all his former posts in July 1977 at the Tenth Central Committee’s Third Plenary Session.

A barely changing climate Any ﬂicker of hope that the sixty-one may have felt at the purge of the Gang of Four in October 1976 was soon extinguished. In the same month a policy document was issued reiterating the irreversibility of renegade verdicts, while advocating the rehabilitation of others whose only crime was to have resisted the Gang of Four. Victimized opponents of the gang could be reinstated, unless they fell into the categories of ‘ “renegades, spies, Trotskyites, counter-revolutionaries, KMT elements, or degenerates,” as well as cases for which the organization had already arrived at a conclusion’.26 The haste with which the directive was issued indicates concern on the part of the beneﬁciaries that others might consider the moment ripe for a wholesale rehabilitation of veteran cadres, who would swell the ranks of survivors and earlier rehabilitated cadres. The beneﬁciaries’ concern was, however, dwarfed by the vast ideological and charismatic vacuum left by Mao’s death, and the death of other larger-than-life ﬁgures such as Zhou Enlai and Zhu De. Their demise, plus the vacancies in the party structure after the removal of the Gang of Four, prompted new thoughts on leadership alignments – and on who should be rehabilitated. A mere three weeks elapsed between the closing of the July 1977 plenum, at which Deng was reinstated, and the opening of the Party’s Eleventh National Congress. More than a third of the sixty-three new members of the Central Committee were rehabilitated cadres. One wonders if, during this period, the question of rehabilitating cadres imprisoned by the GMD back in the 1930s was not being indirectly and subtly addressed in the press. On 3 August a poem, ‘Song From Prison’ by Ye Ting, was published on the front page of Renmin ribao:

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The door is locked so people cannot go in or out, The cave is open for the dog to crawl out, A voice shouts: Let me crawl out! Give me freedom! I too thirst for freedom But I deeply know The body of a man cannot crawl out from the dog’s cave. I wish for the day when a ﬁre will burst from underground and burn me in this living cofﬁn – Thus will I ﬁnd eternal life through raging ﬂames and boiling blood.27 Implicit in the poem and the accompanying article were two points. Ye’s release from a GMD prison in March 1946 had been negotiated by top-level CCP leaders, including Mao and Zhou, with the GMD in Chongqing in January 1946. The fact that the release of prisoners had been discussed with the GMD by such illustrious persons was being publicly afﬁrmed, not hushed up as it had been during the Cultural Revolution.28 Second, the emphasis on Ye’s bravery and stoicism, his never bending to his captors, implied that one could behave honourably if not heroically without dying a martyr, and still be released from a GMD prison. No sooner had this article seen print, however, than another appeared commemorating communist martyr Fang Zhimin. He too had written a poem in prison, ‘The enemy can chop off my head – he can never shake my faith.’ His death wish had been immediately granted – he had been executed in July 1935. The article stated that ‘The Guomindang reactionaries used torture and soft tactics, but Fang Zhimin stood ﬁrm. He showed the ﬁne qualities of a Communist Party member.’ Coming so rapidly on the heels of the previous article, this was a clear rebuttal of any notion of an honourable release from a GMD prison. Note also the poem’s prophetic line about Fang’s induction into the party in 1923: ‘From this day on, I’ll give all I have, even my life, for the Party.’29 Hua Guofeng made his position clear: he would continue to draw the rehabilitation line to exclude ‘proven renegades’. In his political report to the August 1977 Eleventh Central Committee First Plenum, remarkable for its lack of reference to the rehabilitation of Cultural Revolution victims, Hua quoted Mao (as had the moderates a few years previously) from early 1967: The overwhelming majority of our cadres are good and only a tiny minority are not. True those party persons in power taking the capitalist road are our target, but they are a mere handful. Except for

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those who defected, turned renegade, or surrendered to the enemy, the overwhelming majority of our cadres have surely done good work in the last dozen years or so, or in the last few decades [emphasis added].30 Hua thus implied that cadres such as the sixty-one could not be rehabilitated. But unlike the moderates, when echoing the ‘most cadres are good’ theme Hua was not saying, ergo let us rehabilitate more Cultural Revolution victims, but was calling for a minimalist approach to the targeting, screening and punishment of Gang of Four sympathizers and Cultural Revolution activists. Towards the end of his report Hua made grudging reference to the possibility of reaching verdicts on unsettled cases (not those of the sixty-one, for which ofﬁcial verdicts had been reached) and of repudiating and cancelling false charges made by the Gang of Four. But rather than adding that such cadres could be restored to their former positions, he simply warned that they must have a ‘correct attitude’ towards the Cultural Revolution, that is, they should not negate it. The biography of An Ziwen, An Ziwen zhuanlue, conﬁrms Hua’s hard line on the non-negotiability of the renegade verdicts. On behalf of the Central Committee, Hua approved yet again the CCEG’s conclusion on An Ziwen; it was announced to An by a representative of the group on 17 August 1977 (while the plenum was still in session) in Huainan, where he was exiled.31 Others of the sixty-one were similarly informed. If Hua took a hard line, the survivors and rehabilitated took no line at all – or at least not publicly. Deng Xiaoping, Ye Jianying, Chen Yun, Nie Rongzhen and others do not appear to have championed the cause of their still languishing colleagues at that stage. Neither Deng Xiaoping nor Ye Jianying raised the issue of rehabilitation in their speeches to the Congress; Deng was hardly in a position to do so, since he had only just been reinstated following the campaign against him. In late September 1977 Chen Yun – who a year later did champion the speciﬁc cause of the sixty-one – did not mention the need to rehabilitate other cadres in his long article ‘Mao’s Views on Party Work Style’.32 If Deng Xiaoping was unlikely to jeopardize his fresh return to power with any immediate controversial statements, the sixty-one would have to look elsewhere for their saviour.

Hu Yaobang and rehabilitation policy A turning point in rehabilitation policy at last came in October 1977, when a Renmin ribao article demanded the reversal of wrong verdicts

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wrought by the Gang of Four and their followers.33 The article was written by ‘comrades of the Central Party School in accordance with Hu Yaobang’s views’, and ‘The comrades took the lead in preparing public opinion for redressing the wrongs suffered by cadres who had been unjustly and falsely charged.’34 In the ﬁrst section the authors were careful to use the quote from Mao that Hua Guofeng had used in his Eleventh Congress Political Report. They went on to echo Hua’s plea – invoking Mao’s lenient cadre policy – to deal lightly with those who might have erred, only here Hua’s intentions were turned around and it was the Cultural Revolution victims and not the activists who were the ‘patients’ to be ‘saved’. It was ‘not right to judge a cadre by what he does during a certain period of time about a certain thing. Rather we should take the cadre’s entire history and his work performance as a whole into consideration.’35 Furthermore, and for the ﬁrst time since the Cultural Revolution had ended, the issue of Cultural Revolution renegade charges and the possibility of their being false was raised: ‘They [Gang of Four supporters] attacked particular faults . . . instead of considering the whole and exaggerated the latter’s mistakes to the maximum. Without grounds they condemned others as renegades, enemy agents or unrepentant capitalist roadsters.’36 No speciﬁc names or cases were mentioned, but the door had at last been pushed slightly ajar: it was necessary to address the issue of renegadism charges and whether they should be reinvestigated. There was one other notable departure from previous statements on cadre policy. The article directly asked, if not challenged, the Party’s Organization Department at all levels to tackle the reversal of wrong verdicts without further delay. It prompted thousands of letters of support, including a poignant appeal on 11 October 1977 from Kong Xiangzhen to the COD for a reinvestigation of the ‘Sixty-One Man Case’. He pleaded that as the sole survivor of the organizers of the 1936 release he should be allowed to give his evidence. Because I was responsible for delivering messages to Party members jailed by the GMD regime, I was imprisoned for 8 years during the Cultural Revolution and was sent to the countryside for 2 years. I was paralysed and have not recovered. Fortunately Vice-Chairman Ye Jianying approved my return to Beijing this year, and now I can receive medical treatment in Beijing. Before I die, I want to clarify one matter. Day and night, I always think of how some cadres left the Beijing Military Self-Reproaching House. If I cannot make it clear to the Party organization and the masses, I will have everlasting

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regrets. Why? Because those who witnessed this event have died. Zhang Wentian, Ke Qingshi, Xu Bing, and Yin Jian have all died. I am now the only survivor who can give testimony on this event. If I do not say anything, who will know the details of that event? This is not my personal matter, but a matter concerning the political life of dozens of party cadres. If I do not give a report to the Party central organ as soon as possible before I die, I will take these everlasting regrets to my grave.37 His request was eventually granted, but not until there was a change of personnel in the COD. Within a month of the Central Party School comrades’ article, Hu Yaobang (whose guiding hand lay behind it) was appointed head of the COD, replacing Kang Sheng’s successor, Guo Yufeng, who had been so active in the CCEG investigations of the sixtyone ‘renegades’. In Hu Yaobang, the sixty-one were to ﬁnd their saviour. His task was not easy – there was still opposition to and ambivalence about the rehabilitation of this particular group. Nevertheless, advance warning of the COD’s new determination to reinvestigate the Cultural Revolution renegadism verdicts began to appear in the media. On 24 November 1977 an obituary demanded full posthumous rehabilitation for Dong Yan, a Jiangxi CCP ofﬁcial and vicegovernor who had died in April 1968 at the age of ﬁfty three, a victim of the Cultural Revolution. In February 1933, when the party organization in Jinan was wrecked by the enemy, Dong Yan was arrested and jailed. In prison, he maintained a ﬁrm stand and put up a stubborn struggle against the enemy. He was unconditionally released in November 1937 during the period when the Guomindang and CCP cooperated and political prisoners were released. . . . He behaved heroically while under arrest and slanders and charges pressed on him by Lin Biao’s confederates are rubbish and must be refuted. He must be rehabilitated.38 If this was a trial balloon, it was a lot closer to the nature of the case of the sixty-one than Ye Ting’s poem: ﬁrst because Dong had been imprisoned at the same time, and second because he had been associated with the white area underground rather than the military. The one major difference between Dong’s release and the sixty-one’s was that his had been unconditional – if we accept that adjective at face value. While the obituary reﬂected the intended broadening of the parameters of rehabilita-

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tion policy, it also revealed the concomitant problem of foot-dragging in its implementation, a problem Hu Yaobang had attacked in his article the previous month. That foot-dragging was not peculiar to Jiangxi was abundantly clear, as critical articles on this theme continued to appear throughout the following year, stressing the need for correcting erroneous verdicts, criticizing cadres’ tardiness in doing so, and hinting that local-level party organization departments were still under the unhealthy inﬂuence of the Gang of Four. They are preventing the movement from developing [by] causing delays in drawing conclusions on the work of screening cadres and assigning jobs to them, and boycotting and sabotaging implementation on the cadre policy. . . . [This is also true of] comrades [who] have no direct connection with the ‘gang of four’ organizationally. . . . They always show an unwillingness to give verdicts or handle backlogged cases that call for further investigation.39 The case of the sixty-one, however, had to be reinvestigated at the highest and the most central level, that is, under Central Committee auspices. If the verdict was to be reversed, it would have to be done by the Central Committee, which had indicted and convicted them in the ﬁrst place. However several heavy shadows continued to hang over the case. Foremost was the connection with Liu Shaoqi, who was still being viliﬁed, albeit in less shrill terms. Then there were the 1977 revelations of the past misdemeanours of Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao and the father of Yao Wenyuan.40 These charges, of the former radical elite’s own 1930s renegadism and capitulation after GMD imprisonment, did not necessarily help the cause of the Cultural Revolution victims. Not only did it look suspiciously tit-for-tat, but the use of an identical vocabulary may have served to equate rather than contrast them in the public consciousness. After all, arguments for extenuating ‘surrender’ circumstances could work both ways.

1978: the COD acts Hu’s tenure as director of the COD began ofﬁcially on 19 December 1977. No sooner had he assumed his new ofﬁce than he received, via Deng Xiaoping, a letter from Wang Xianmei, widow of Wang Qimei, who had been one of the sixty-one and a former CCP secretary in

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Tibet.41 Wang Xianmei appealed on behalf of her offspring, who could not be employed because their of their father’s case. Deng noted that Wang Qimei had done much good work since the Sino-Japanese war and that the issue of his earlier problem (his release from Caolanzi) should be resolved. In fact Wang Qimei’s case could be used as a model, a precedent, the basis upon which each of the sixty-one could be rehabilitated. Having conferred with General Ofﬁce director Wang Dongxing, Deng passed on the letter, with the above comment, to Hu Yaobang. (We perhaps should note Deng’s ambivalence: the release issue was a genuine problem, although one that could and should be solved, since, as he had stated back in 1975, the sixty-one as individuals were not to blame.) One of Hu’s ﬁrst moves in the COD was to establish a group to handle the cases of veteran cadres. However, since the verdict against the sixtyone had been authorized by Mao and the Central Committee, and since the CCEG had no intention of negating its earlier work, General Ofﬁce and CCEG personnel were in no rush to cooperate with any competing body, and COD staff were denied access to Central Archive materials.42 Hu realized it would be necessary to circumvent these ofﬁces and in June 1978 he decided upon a full reinvestigation of the sixty-one man case. He approached leading cadres whom he believed would support the reopening of the case, and having received the blessing of Ye Jianying, Deng Xiaoping and others, in early July he obtained Chairman Hua’s permission to establish a four-man investigatory team. They were instructed to complete their mission within three months – in time to present their ﬁndings to the Third Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee. Throughout the hot summer of 1978 and until the middle of October the investigators worked intensively, travelling the country and interviewing survivors among the sixty-one: Bo Yibo, Zhou Zhongying, Liu Youguang, Kong Xiangzhen, Ma Huizhi, Zhu Zemin, An Ziwen, Liu Lantao and Tang Fanglei.43 It is interesting to note that the investigators concluded that the investigation was to some extent unnecessary, ‘because by simply studying the data and materials provided by Kang Sheng’s special investigation group, a correct conclusion contrary to the frame-up could be drawn’, indicating that it was not so much the facts of the case as the interpretation that was in dispute.44 Nevertheless investigate they did, interviewing former white area North Bureau ofﬁcials and JJLY delegates to the Seventh Party Congress in the mid 1940s. Those interviewed included Li Baohua, Wang Congwu and Wang Heshou, as well as cadres who had worked closely with Kang Sheng in

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the late 1940s in Shandong and had heard him say that these cadres had acted on Central Committee instructions. The investigators also raked through old GMD ﬁles.45 Eventually, with Hu, the investigators drafted the COD’s seven-part ‘Investigation Report on the Case of the Sixty-One’, which covered the handling of the case in 1966–67 and the decision in 1978 to reopen it.46 The report listed the sixty-one, summarizing how many had joined the party and when, and gave their ranks and posts prior to the Cultural Revolution. It noted that the majority of the prisoners who passed through Caolanzi between 1931 and 1936 had been released after voluntary confession, whereas the sixty-one had refused to do so until they were thus ordered by the North Bureau with the Central Committee’s authorization. Their obstinacy had been noted by no less a person than GMD General Song Zheyuan: ‘they stubbornly stick to their wrong course and ﬁrmly refuse to fulﬁl the anti-communist formalities. Instead they prefer to die in the reformatory.’ (Song’s comment, written on 11 September 1936, suggests he was unaware of the ﬁrst group’s recantation, published eleven days previously.)47 Part ﬁve of the report noted that before the party’s 1945 seventh congress, the Central Committee’s Qualiﬁcations Committee had checked the credentials of proposed delegates among the sixty-one and had ruled that they were eligible.48 The report concluded that Bo Yibo and the others had conducted themselves well during their Caolanzi prison years, and precisely because they had proved their reliability the Central Committee and North Bureau had permitted them to follow the enemy’s required procedures and sign the anticommunist statement. This ‘was a special measure adopted by the organization under the speciﬁc historical conditions prevailing at that time’49 – hardly praise but a forced and deeply reluctant acknowledgment of extenuating circumstances, of a one-time necessary evil. The report stressed that responsibility for the plan had not been Liu Shaoqi’s alone, but should also be attributed to other North Bureau ofﬁcials, singling out Ke Qingshi. Formal authorization had come from Zhang Wentian, the party’s general secretary, representing that of the Central Committee. Furthermore, the report said, there was reliable evidence from many comrades that Mao had indicated to them the Central Committee’s knowledge of the release procedures. By stopping short of a clear statement that Zhang had actually consulted his Central Committee colleagues and that they and Mao had known of the plan before it was implemented, the report perpetuated the fogging over of collective Central Committee responsibility. It did at least state that even if

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the instruction had been improper, responsibility should rest with the instructor and not the instructed.50 Finally, the COD’s investigatory committee recommended that the verdict on the sixty-one be reversed, that the survivors’ party membership be restored, and that they be given suitable work and be ﬁnancially compensated (their salaries paid retroactively). Inappropriate judgements against their families should be corrected. Memorial services should be held for those who had died. The report was passed on to the Politburo and the Central Committee on 20 November. Meanwhile, in preparation for the Party’s Eleventh Congress Third Plenum, a Central Work Conference was in progress. Hua Guofeng tried to conﬁne it to economic issues but many leading cadres objected, insisting that political and historical problems had to be aired. On 12 November, in a speech to the conference’s Northeast Group, Chen Yun listed six matters requiring urgent review. The ﬁrst was the case of the sixty-one. The second was the COD’s controversial 7 July 1937 ‘Decision on how to treat so-called confessants’ which had seemed tailor-made to help the sixty-one, but which Chen had replaced in 1941 with a less generous version. His other concerns were Tao Zhu and Wang Heshou, Peng Dehuai, the Tiananmen incident of 1976 and Kang Sheng.51 Chen made an interesting comment: ‘Without resolving these [historical] questions, there is no way of unifying the people.’52 Implied here is the need to do justice, not so much for the sake of the individual victims as in order for the party to be redeemed in the people’s eyes by openly meting it out. Chen may also have been trying to salve his own conscience, harking back to his suspicious allusions to white area cadres and his lack of support for Liu Shaoqi’s white area policies in the 1930s.

Muted tones of rehabilitation Two days before the Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee (18–22 December 1978) the Central Committee issued Zhongfa 75, afﬁrming the contents of the COD report and ordering its distribution to party committees throughout the country. The communiqué of the Third Plenum, however, did not mention the case of the sixty-one and referred only to the leading member of the group: ‘The session examined and corrected the erroneous conclusions which had been adopted on Peng Dehuai, Tao Zhu, Bo Yibo, Yang Shangkun and other comrades’ [emphasis added].53 It seems that the central leadership still considered the case too ‘delicate’ or ‘complicated’ for overt public reference.

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The memorial service to mark the posthumous rehabilitation of Zhang Wentian did not take place until some months later, in August 1979, and in his memorial eulogy Deng Xiaoping chose not to refer to Zhang’s role re the sixty-one.54 Others, however, such as Yang Shangkun, when eulogizing Zhang referred to his bravely taking sole responsibility for the 1936 episode, and in doing so used Liu Shaoqi’s deﬁnition of a good communist. It was widely spread among party comrades that he neither shifted responsibility onto others nor was vague about the ‘61-person case’. He endured humiliation in order to carry out an important mission and, taking the interests of the whole into account, he assumed sole responsibility for the case [emphasis added].55 But even this wording is sufﬁciently vague for the lack of clarity to be maintained – was he solely responsible for the decision in 1936, or did he pretend in 1966 and 1967 that he had been? Either way it was implicit that there was something ‘negative’ or at least highly controversial for which responsibility had to be admitted. Yet when praising Zhang some also took pains to allude to his insistence that the decisionmaking process should involve organizational and collective discussion and never be ‘arbitrary’ or ‘peremptory’.56 As for Liu Shaoqi, it was not until February 1979 that the Central Committee decided that the COD and the Central Discipline Inspection Commission should jointly reinvestigate the ‘renegade, traitor and scab’ verdict that had been passed on Liu in October 1968, and even then the leadership took a full year to arrive at a consensus on his case. In February–March 1980, by means of Zhongfa 25, the Fifth Plenary Session of the Eleventh Central Committee reversed the verdict on Liu.57 The charges against him of renegadism in 1925, 1927 and 1929 were related in copious detail and refuted as baseless, but his role in the 1936 episode was only given terse and brief reference: the document said merely that this case had already been resolved at the December 1978 plenum. The reason was, as stated above, that the facts upon which the Cultural Revolution radicals had based their charges re this case were indeed the facts. It was the use made of the facts that was questionable. As Lowell Dittmer has commented, the allegation was ‘essentially accurate but invalid’, unlike the ‘inaccurate’ 1925–29 charges.58 One reason for the year-long delay in Liu’s ofﬁcial rehabilitation was that certain ﬁgures in the leadership wanted reference to be made to Liu’s mistakes as well as to his positive contributions. Liu’s widow, Wang

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Guangmei, had objected to mention of Liu’s mistakes unless they were ‘described precisely and in the context of the objective conditions prevailing at the time’.59 Although Zhongfa 25 did not relate his mistakes, both Deng Xiaoping in his memorial eulogy and an editorial that followed in Renmin ribao made a point of mentioning that Liu had not been without fault.60 The editorial was astonishingly honest about the difﬁculties involved in rehabilitating Liu, including the problem of thoroughly investigating ‘historical issues of over half a century ago. . . . Even if only a fraction of what was included in the [renegade, scab, traitor] resolution was true, it would not be easy to redress the case.’61 The inclusion of the detailed refutations of the 1925–29 charges in the above-mentioned texts, and the determined avoidance of reference to the 1936 charge, indicates that the latter may well have been considered one of Liu’s ‘mistakes’ – an error of judgement, a tactic that had put the party in a distressingly uncomfortable and untenable position. Not that the party leadership in 1980 necessarily believed that the cadres should have been left to rot in 1936 rather than usefully deployed. But their silence on this and not on the other charges against Liu Shaoqi indicate that at least some considered that Liu had failed in not ﬁnding another way out for the cadres, one that would have prevented party complicity in their following of enemy procedures. That silence seems to have perpetuated the radicals’ 1967 address to Liu on this issue.62 The omission of the case of the sixty-one from the indictments in the Gang of Four’s trial is the ultimate indication of the party’s ambivalence about it and Liu Shaoqi’s role in it. Every other major case of false and unjust accusation against individuals, groups, central and local institutions, including cases ‘left over from history’, such as the Xinjiang 1942 episode, was referred to in the indictments, if not in the ﬁnal judgment. References to the injustice of renegade charges against the sixty-one were subsumed under such charges against the institutional groups to which they had belonged: the Organization Department, the Control Commission, the Ministry of Public Security and so on. At the time of the trial (late 1980 and early 1981) references to the injustice of the case were relegated to articles denigrating deceased Cultural Revolution leaders such as Kang Sheng and Xie Fuzhi, and since these men were already dead and therefore could not be tried, clearly the case of the sixty-one was not going to receive the kind of attention given to others in the Gang of Four trial.63 There was one other important document that omitted reference to the case. Like the 1945 CCP Resolution on Party History, the June 1981

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Resolution on CPC History underwent many a revision before it was released. The 1981 resolution was critical of Mao from the Great Leap Forward onwards, especially with regard to the Cultural Revolution, and singled out leading cadres who were victims of the party’s ‘erroneous’ activities, such as the struggle against the so-called antiparty clique of Peng Zhen, Luo Ruiqing, Lu Dingyi and Yang Shangkun, and the socalled headquarters of Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. It also referred to the veteran cadres involved in the February Adverse Current and the wrong criticism of Chen Yun and Zhu De. Bo Yibo and company did not merit a mention. The Central Committee was thus reversing the faltering steps it had taken in its December 1978 resolution towards assuming responsibility for the sixty-one’s dilemma. It preferred, as it always had, to lower the proﬁle of this story and bury it in the individual dossiers.

The sixty-one rehabilitated Twenty-six of the sixty-one were still alive when the Central Committee reversed its verdict on their case at the end of 1978. The ﬁrst leading ﬁgure to make a public appearance was Bo Yibo (in the company of another late rehabilitee, Yang Shangkun), when he attended the funeral of Deputy Security Minister Yang Jijing on 2 December 1978, that is, before the ofﬁcial announcement of the verdict’s reversal.64 On 24 December 1978, immediately following the Third Plenum communiqué, a joint memorial service was held for Cultural Revolution victims Peng Dehuai and Tao Zhu. Among the friends attending were many of the sixty-one: Bo Yibo, An Ziwen, Liu Lantao, Liu Youguang, Zhou Zhongying, Liu Zijiu, Wang Hefeng, Zhao Lin, Fu Yutian, Li Chuli, Zhu Zemin and Yang Xianzhen (and Kong Xiangzhen).65 For these survivors, just as their verdict had had some verbal limitations, their rehabilitation in terms of reinstatement to ofﬁce was somewhat lacklustre. An Ziwen, Bo Yibo and Liu Lantao regained their Central Committee membership at the Eleventh Central Committee’s Fourth Plenum in September 1979; however neither Liu nor Bo regained his Eighth Central Committee Politburo position, nor did Liu return to the Secretariat. This contrasts sharply with GMD prison cadre and even later rehabilitee Peng Zhen, who regained his Politburo status in September 1979, and former General Ofﬁce director Yang Shangkun (of mixed red and white area background), who was promoted to the Twelfth Central Committee Politburo in 1982. Given the presence of these two in the Politburo, along with Deng Xiaoping, Chen Yun, Li

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Xiannian, Ye Jianying and a number of other septua- and octogenarians who did not retire until September 1985, one could hardly argue that the age of Bo or Liu was an impediment. Yang Xianzhen did not even regain his Central Committee alternate membership, a slight that can be put down to Yang’s direct and open conﬂict with Mao on political theory. This supposition is substantiated by the fact that he received further and ‘complete’ rehabilitation only in November 1980, when ‘The Secretariat of the CPC CC approved a decision of the CPC Central Committee Party School . . . repudiating all labels imposed on him by Kang Sheng and others, like “opposing Mao Zedong’s Thought”.’66 However in September 1979 Yang did receive an honorary position as adviser in his former professional home, the Party School. Honorary, especially ‘advisory’, positions appear to have been generally the lot for the rehabilitated sixty-ones, with few exceptions. Yang Xianzhen, Ma Huizhi (former communications vice-minister) and Li Chuli (former COD deputy director) were appointed to the Fifth Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC) Standing Committee in June 1979. Liu Lantao was appointed vice-chairman of the Standing Committee and continued in the Sixth CPPCC in that capacity. An Ziwen, Bo Yibo, and Liu Youguang were deputies to the Fifth National People’s Congress (NPC), and An was appointed vicechairman of its Legal Commission in February 1979. Liu Youguang continued to serve on the Sixth NPC and was a member of its Law Committee. He also served as political commissar to the National Defence Science and Technology Commission from 1981 until at least 1983. Others given advisory posts were Liu Zijiu, adviser to the Labour Ministry, of which he had once been vice-minister, and Zhou Zhongying, adviser to the State Economic Commission, in which he had once served as vice-chairman. Surprisingly An Ziwen was appointed adviser to (and vice-president of) the Central Party School, not to the Central Organization Department with which he had been identiﬁed throughout his career. He died the following year, on 25 June 1980. Between 1979 and 1982 Liu Lantao served as ﬁrst deputy director and adviser to the United Front Work Department. Survivors of the sixty-one who had been purged from provincial posts were generally reinstated at the same level but in different locations, and the duration of their appointment was brief, presumably in accordance with the plan to promote younger cadres. Fu Yutian became secretary of the Jiangxi Provincial Party Committee in 1979 and vice-

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governor of the province in December that year; he had formerly held a similar rank in Guangxi. Wang De, former party secretary in Guangdong province and alternate member of the Central South Bureau Secretariat, was reappointed party committee secretary of Guangdong Province CP in April 1979, where he remained until September 1981. Between July 1982 and March 1983 he served as a party committee secretary in Hunan. He did not receive any regional appointment equivalent to his earlier Central South Bureau status. Zhao Lin appears to be one of the few provincial ofﬁcials among the sixty-one to have achieved improved status. He was a secretary on the Shandong Provincial Party Committee in 1979–83, and vice-chairman of the same during 1979. At his send-off ceremony in Jilin, where he had served as acting ﬁrst secretary in pre-Cultural Revolution days, Zhao thanked ‘the dear Party which has given a political life for the second time’.67 In September 1982 he entered the Central Advisory Commission and was in the leading group in the Central Commission for Guiding Party Rectiﬁcation (CCGPR) in January 1985.

The CDIC and the CAC Two new central institutions, the Central Advisory Commission (CAC) and the Central Discipline Inspection Commission (CDIC), offered some of the sixty-one an honourable transit vehicle to retirement. The addition of Chen Yun and Hu Yaobang to the Politburo at the watershed Third Plenum and the ousting of Wang Dongxing from the General Ofﬁce were formal and tangible evidence of the changing policy on the investigation and rehabilitation of the party’s veteran victims. The infamous CCEG was to be dismantled.68 Cadre investigations would in future be held under the auspices of either the COD or the newly established CDIC, headed by Chen Yun. The CDIC was a revamped Central Control Commission – in more senses than one. In January 1979 several of the sixty-one were appointed to its Standing Committee: Ma Huizhi, Li Chuli, Wang Hefeng and Zhou Zhongying. Two other Caolanzi cadres, Kong Xianzhen and Wei Wenbo (released before the sixty-one), also joined the CDIC, Kong on the Standing Committee and Wei as deputy secretary. In fact there was a quite signiﬁcant presence of white area prison cadres on this commission, including Wang Heshou, Wang Congwu, Shuai Mengqi and Zhang Zhiyi – a situation comparable to the establishment of its forebear, the 1955 Central Control Commission. Was this again a compensatory gesture towards white area and especially

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prison cadres, indicating the party’s trust in them as ‘models in party style’? If this was a gesture of respect, it was short-lived, again a situation comparable to the fate of the CCC. The September 1982 Twelfth Party Congress saw a radical change in the composition of the CDIC and a broadening of its powers. Only twenty-six members of the former CDIC entered the new 132-man CDIC.69 All six Caolanzi cadres lost their seats. Only one of them, Li Chuli, was transferred to the CAC, established at the Twelfth Congress. Bo Yibo was one of the four vice-chairmen of this commission; Liu Lantao was on its standing committee and Yang Xianzhen and Zhao Lin were members. After 1985 only Bo and Liu continued in their CAC capacities. The remarkable ascent of the CAC’s inﬂuence during the one decade of its life was unexpected, not only to those who created it but also to analysts of the Chinese political scene. As one commentator observed, ‘appointments to the CAC may be regarded as a face-saving measure in order to retire them [aged cadres] with grace. There is little evidence that their alleged “advisory” functions amount to signiﬁcant factors in the governing of China.’70 How wrong this proved to be! With the advantage of hindsight, Lucien Pye has described the interim arrangement for veterans of the revolution as ‘an institutional base for maintaining their power’ and their seniority as the essence of this power.71 The end result was as follows: The [Fourteenth] Congress conﬁrmed the important decision to abolish the Central Advisory Commission, which had become an institutional base of support for Chen Yun’s sniping at Deng Xiaoping . . . the existence of such commissions . . . gave ostensibly retired veterans a formal excuse to interfere directly in decisionmaking. Its abolition must be interpreted as a victory for Deng and his supporters . . . there is now no formal regulation allowing them to attend either Politburo or Central Committee meetings.72 It is largely within this context that we shall review the paradoxically bright twilight years of the last survivor among the foremost members of the sixty-one: Bo Yibo.

Bo Yibo: post-Cultural Revolution Bo’s career took something of a novel turn after the Cultural Revolution. Although he continued to hold several positions in the state

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economic system, he became highly visible in the ideological–political sphere.73 He played a prominent role in the Party rectiﬁcation campaigns of 1983 and 1987, and, far more strangely, in the downfall of his erstwhile saviour, Hu Yaobang. Although this role appeared to place Bo in the ‘conservative’ or ‘leftist’ camp – and in the early 1980s Bo’s views on economic reforms certainly bore closer resemblance to Chen Yun’s than to Deng Xiaoping’s – it seems that he either moved closer to Deng’s views as the decade wore on or at least suppressed his own, supporting Deng in exchange for some limelight in the political arena, not to mention the prestigious honour of having his collected and selected works published between 1991 and 1993 and the ﬁrst volume of his autobiography in 1996.74 On the ﬁrst anniversary of the CAC’s establishment, Bo chose to emphasize that, while it was imperative to promote younger cadres, ‘veteran cadres are the backbone. It will not do to let them all step down immediately’, and predicted a ten- to ﬁfteen-year duration for the CAC, ‘until the party and state have a perfect retirement system’.75 He was to return to this theme of the vital role still to be played by his dwindling revolutionary peer group on a number of occasions. In the meantime Bo listed the various tasks of the CAC, among them ‘its political role as an assistant and consultant . . . to offer some supplementary opinions to the Party Central Committee’s directives and decisions before they are made public and while they are being implemented’.76 Bo augmented his authority as a leading veteran cadre in the sphere of ideology and politics when he became vice-chairman of the Commission for Guiding Party Consolidation (CGPC), an institution created speciﬁcally to do away with ‘spiritual pollution’. This was the term applied to (what were perceived as) subversive thoughts on humanism and alienation that since the spring of 1983 had been seeping out of the Institute of Marxism–Leninism–Mao Zedong Thought in the Academy of Social Sciences and the Central Party School, and into public discourse.77 The Second Plenary Session of the Twelfth Central Committee in mid October called for a party rectiﬁcation movement under the auspices of the CGPC, its chairman, Hu Yaobang, and vice-chairman, Bo. Unhappy with the campaign, Hu was responsible for its rapid curtailment – a mere twenty-eight days after its inception. It is possible that this was a source of friction between Hu and Bo, who appeared intent on continuing the campaign, sending out the second batch of liaison ofﬁcial groups on 22 December. The campaign nevertheless ﬁzzled out.

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Exacerbating the tension were the remarks made by Hu just before the Fourth Plenary Session of the Twelfth Central Committee (16 September 1985), which accepted the resignation of a signiﬁcant number of ageing cadres from the central leading bodies (including Yang Xianzhen from the CAC). Hu, with characteristic tactlessness, referred to the ‘old age and limited knowledge’ of the CAC and CDIC members, and the need to admit new, younger members. This would not have endeared him to Bo. Adding insult to injury, in January 1986 Hu told cadres in central organizations that the blame for party ills should be laid on the top echelons, not the lower ones.78 It is difﬁcult to ascertain whether Bo was wrapping himself in his new party ideologue cloak as a means to legitimize his continuing political ‘elder’ presence, which was constantly being harassed and challenged by this ‘pro-youth’ lobby. His lack of Politburo status made him even more vulnerable. At the same time one must acknowledge the probability that CCP cadres (such as Bo) whose party membership dated back to the 1920s, and who were now observing the disintegration of party authority in the USSR, gravitated toward each other in solidarity, blocking any whisper of political reform. Deng Xiaoping was no exception. And there were such whispers. Hu Yaobang himself had raised the daring suggestion that classic Marxism–Leninism might not meet all of China’s current needs.79 The scholars he patronized at the Marxist–Leninist Institute entered into an industrious reassessment of Marxism with the intention of eliciting and elaborating on what was applicable to China’s current stage of economic and political development. Their ﬁndings were to be included in Hu’s report to the Thirteenth Party Congress.80 However the combined effect of mooted concepts of political reform and the concurrent student demonstrations at the end of 1986 fuelled a new party rectiﬁcation campaign, initiated by the conservative elders in January 1987. The purpose was ‘to oppose bourgeois liberalization’. The charge was led by Bo Yibo. Five months later, when winding up the campaign, he commented bitterly on the direct relationship between the 1983 and 1987 campaigns: [S]ome leading individual comrades have not implemented the decision of the Party Central Committee and have been unwilling to come round from the extreme of being slack and weak. Accordingly, the struggle to oppose spiritual pollution was quickly cut short soon after the beginning of party rectiﬁcation. They protected the activities of and connived with those who advocated bourgeois liberalization.81

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In this report Bo was once again careful to stress the role of old cadres, ﬁrst in the context of training younger theorists in ‘applying stands, viewpoints, and methods of Marxism–Leninism–Mao Zedong Thought to solve China’s practical problems’.82 He then turned to strengthening the leading bodies. Although he acknowledged the need to make them younger, ‘better educated and professionally more competent’, he stated emphatically that the qualiﬁcations of ‘ “political integrity” and “more revolutionary” come ﬁrst. . . . Making the leading bodies younger in average age does not mean the younger the leading bodies, the better they are. We must not demand uniformity in age.’83 Like its 1983 predecessor, the 1987 campaign was brief. Hu Yaobang this time contributed to its brevity in the role of chief target. The elders’ pound of ﬂesh was Hu’s ‘resignation’ as party general secretary and the expulsion of some prominent intellectuals from the party. In return Deng ﬁrmed up support from his peers for economic reform. The Thirteenth Congress in October 1987 bade farewell to the remaining elders on the Politburo (apart from Yang Shangkun). Perhaps Bo felt relief at no longer being the odd one out. On the other hand Chen Yun was appointed to head the new CAC, but Bo was quick to assume a new role – as unofﬁcial mediator between the CAC and the Politburo (and Deng). Bo’s position midway between Deng and the CAC became apparent when a CAC meeting was called in mid February 1992, coinciding with the end of Deng’s southern tour. The upshot of the meeting was a critical letter to Deng requesting that the Marxist–Leninist party line be upheld. It was signed by thirty-ﬁve leading members of the CAC; Bo’s name does not appear to be among them.84 In April a Hong Kong source reported that Deng had appointed Bo to oversee the selection of candidates to the Fourteenth Party Congress, and to help with the selection of replacements for State Council positions. After a further stinging critique from Chen Yun and the CAC in the summer of 1992, Deng decided to delay no further in ending the formal powers of his elderly colleagues.85 The CAC was abolished at the Fourteenth Congress in October 1992. Afterwards Bo’s assistance continued to be sought: he was to ‘act as a bridge between the Politburo and the elders’ and he was ‘a regular attendant of brieﬁng sessions convened by Jiang Zemin where advice was sought from ﬁrst-generation revolutionaries’.86 The Fourth Plenum of the Fourteenth Central Committee put an end to any remaining direct intervention by the ‘elders’, passing an internal resolution permitting them to attend Politburo meetings but not to vote.

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By dint of his astuteness and good health Bo occupied centre-stage among the few remaining ‘elders’ in the 1990s. His views on the economy, detailed in his essays, suggested that he did not favour a wholesale switch to a full market economy.87 Nevertheless Bo was sufﬁciently pragmatic to present a low verbal proﬁle on this issue, and discreetly put his views in writing to conserve for prestigious and respectable posterity. Instead he concentrated his active political efforts on the preservation of party authority, an objective shared by his peers – not least Deng Xiaoping: The present task of party building and the strengthening of party ranks is more arduous and is of more decisive importance than the War of Liberation and the socialist transformation. This task and struggle can also be seen as a test and an appraisal of veteran cadres. They should not rest on their laurels, pose as people who have rendered great service.88 Bo’s post-Cultural Revolution career thus illustrates his ﬁnely tuned survival instincts. As his Caolanzi colleagues faded away one by one, he was perhaps less burdened by association with the so-called sixty-one renegades. How Bo will be eulogized is not difﬁcult to predict.

Remembrance On 25 January 1979 a memorial service was held for ﬁve prominent cadres among the sixty-one who had died in the course of the Cultural Revolution: Liao Luyan, Xu Zirong, Hu Xikui, Liu Xiwu and Wang Qimei. Li Xiannian ofﬁciated and Hu Yaobang eulogized the deceased. ‘Neither in their prison experiences from 1931 on, nor 1966 on, did these men ever capitulate; they ﬁrmly struggled.’89 Provincial ofﬁcials such as Wu Yunpu (Shanxi), Liu Wenwei (Sha’anxi) and Hou Zhenya (Fujian) were accorded similar posthumous honours at the local level.90 Eulogies of the recently deceased have much the same function as the historical analogy so commonly employed in Chinese political culture, where ‘symbols tend to have longer life expectancies . . . than in other political systems’.91 One potent function of a eulogy that positively reevaluates a previously maligned political ﬁgure is to renovate the image of the survivor’s associates. When the author of the eulogy just happens to be among the latter, this offers him a subtle and acceptable way of ‘blowing his own trumpet’. Lowell Dittmer has discussed Deng Xiaoping’s commemoration of Liu Shaoqi in this light, and I believe that the

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same principle can be applied to the Caolanzi Cultural Revolution survivors who eulogized their late comrades. There was one dilemma inherent in all the eulogies and descriptions of the sixty-one’s experiences. How could their need to be etched into the public consciousness as courageous heroes of the revolution be realized as long as what bound them together as a group in the public eye was not only their noble struggle within the prison conﬁnes, but also its ﬂawed concomitant, their ignoble release? They could do little but draw attention to the former and omit mention of the latter, or at most refer to it brieﬂy as the party’s responsibility. Bo Yibo and Liu Lantao, for instance, when eulogizing Hu Xikui on his underground work, described how he had ‘courageously pitted his wits against the enemies under extremely adverse and dangerous conditions’, and referred to the activities of Hu and his comrades (that is, themselves) in GMD prisons: They secretly carried out arduous work among their fellow prisoners and encouraged their comrades to foster revolutionary faith and wage a tit-for-tat struggle against the enemy. . . . During those 5 long years, he endured great hardships at the hands of the enemy and stood up to the test for the cause of the liberation of the Chinese people. He was indeed a worthy son of the Chinese people and a loyal ﬁghter of the Party.92 An Ziwen was among a group of authors to eulogize Xu Zirong, who had ‘doggedly waged a revolutionary struggle in an environment of white terror’, and ‘while in prison . . . engaged in party branch activities . . . [and] waged a resolute and brave struggle against the enemy’.93 He had of course been ‘open and above-board’ and his ‘lofty qualities such as his loyalty to the party and the people’ were worthy of emulation. The eulogy also referred to an incident in Xu’s subsequent Ministry of Public Security career, when had he warned against using ‘mass struggle to solve complicated cases’ for in this way ‘you cannot avoid making mistakes. You may even be used by bad people and those who bear grudges and want to pay off old scores.’94 Likewise noted was Xu’s warning not to quote leaders’ articles and speeches out of context but to ‘give proper historical background as illustration’.95 Xu’s reference was actually to Luo Ruiqing, but the writers of this eulogy perhaps used it as a reminder of how Liu Shaoqi’s writings on self-sacriﬁce had been taken out of context during the Cultural Revolution to incriminate him and the sixty-one for putting personal safety above party loyalty.

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Another interpretation of this reference is that it inferred that the background to the 1936 episode should be taken into account before judging the participants. In both eulogies the actual release was given brief reference: the latter article simply mentioned that after Xu’s release from prison he had been sent by the party to Shanxi. The Hu Xikui article was marginally more informative: ‘In October 1936, Comrade Hu Xikui and his comrades-inarms were successfully rescued from prison through the efforts of the party organization.’96 Similarly Bo Yibo, when eulogizing An Ziwen, made only passing mention to ‘the party rescuing us from prison’, highlighting instead the struggles they had ‘waged together’ in Caolanzi and how An Ziwen had ‘ﬁrmly resisted the enemy’s “self-reproach” policy and roused inspiring awe by upholding justice because he did not yield to the enemy who repeatedly tried to kill him’.97 At the ‘package’ memorial service for Liao Luyan, Xu Zirong, Hu Xikui, Liu Xiwu and Wang Qimei, Hu Yaobang chose to use the terminology of self-sacriﬁce, referring to Hu Xikui’s ‘indomitable spirit of sacriﬁcing himself’ and to Liu Xiwu’s Caolanzi experience, in which he had displayed the ‘revolutionary virtue of a communist’ by being ‘fearless, heroic, obstinate, ﬁrm in stand and indomitable’. Similarly Wang Qimei, ‘when engaged in underground party work, [had] displayed heroism and wisdom and persisted in struggle in [the] face of vicious white terror. When in jail he [had] never yielded to mistreatment . . . displaying the dignity and revolutionary virtue of a communist.’98 Although Hu Yaobang did his best to cloak the tarnished prison cadre image in ethical, revolutionary hero terms, even he had to skip over the release procedures in which the sixty-one had participated. Although several provided detailed accounts of their struggle in Caolanzi prison, none of the sixty-one or their sympathizers appear to have detailed the release procedures in the post-Cultural Revolution period. Perhaps they felt more than a little ambivalent. They had been caught in a classic ‘catch 22’ situation: be dammed as foolish, closeddoor adventurists damaging the party if they had chosen to disobey the 1936 order, thereby risking death in prison and preventing the party from rebuilding its strength; or be dammed as they eventually were for the shaming public ‘renunciation’ of communism and the party, paradoxically permitted by the party itself. It seems that the sixty-one themselves were none too eager for all the facts to come out. Perhaps the dark, clandestine underside of white area work would always remain misunderstood and misconstrued and was better left buried in secret party archives, as Bo suggested:

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As for some major controversial issues, we may collect data on them and do research on them or just ﬁle them away; we do not have to be impatient about such issues, much less disclose data on them without approval from higher authorities. We must act with caution.99

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6 A Prejudiced Conclusion

In North China there are many good communists like Peng Zhen and Bo Yibo. They were locked up in prison. Do you think that only we outside fought hard? Did they not ﬁght hard? They struggled against the enemy from within the prison. . . . Amongst our white area cadres are those who survived without having been in prison; those who survived imprisonment . . . those in prison who died there. They all struggled bravely and were ready to sacriﬁce their lives. . . . Their achievements count. We must appreciate the work they did. (Mao Zedong speaking at the Central Party School, 15 February 1945)1 Our revolutionary martyrs are like towering peaks that rise into the clouds, while this handful of traitors are nothing more than earth mounds. The Khrushchev of China and the handful of traitors under his protective wings are unable to wash away their disgrace with all the waters of the East China Sea. The verdict of history is that you will leave an infamous memory to posterity. (Hongqi, 17 August 1967)2 In the ﬁnal autumn of Zhou Enlai’s life, as he fought a losing battle with cancer, he was troubled by a matter that had been resolved with Mao’s approval several times over – in 1932, 1968 and 1972. Yet the thought preyed on his mind that posterity might doubt his loyalty to the party, might believe that in 1932, under the alias Wu Hao, he had published a newspaper declaration that he was quitting the party. He requested that his account and all the accompanying materials that proved the GMD’s fabrication of the announcement be brought to his hospital bed. In September 1975 he once again signed his name to the documents, 190

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which were then returned to the party archives. Here was a man whose every moment for more than ﬁfty years had been dedicated for better or worse to the Chinese Communist Party, a man who had been involved in every dramatic twist and turn the party had taken, a man who had stood at Mao’s side and at the side of those leaders who had preceded Mao. One of the giants of the communist revolution, he had personally negotiated with the friends and enemies of the CCP and the PRC. He was revered and loved by his people – and yet his last thoughts were disturbed by an episode that might appear to us as marginal, if not trivial. As it turns out, as his role as protector of his peers during the Cultural Revolution diminishes and is replaced by a far less benign image, it seems that Zhou had good reason to be concerned about his posthumous reputation – but not because of the Wu Hao incident. His fear of being posthumously tagged as a renegade was misplaced. But what a powerful fear that was for him and how much more so for those communists, like the sixty-one, who did publish antiparty newspaper declarations. The signing of such declarations – and party authorization of such acts – simply did not belong in the party’s rhetoric of communist morality. Not surprisingly the party chose to project its identity through a prism of wholesome, revolutionary purity in thought and action. This utopian and simplistic conceptualization was the powerful message of the hallowed Yan’an era, when Mao consolidated his leadership of the CCP and rewrote its history. Not surprisingly the complex ambiguities of white area activities were brushed under the carpet. Yet once upon a time, before the liberated areas existed, the communist movement’s leading cadres had all been in the same boat. They had all been white area cadres, hounded and on the run, donning an alias or even a disguise – and fearing betrayal by colleagues and friends. However once the soviets were created, cadres who moved to them became ‘red area cadres’, enjoying the freedom to live openly as communists. This was a moral luxury not afforded to those who remained in the white areas and certainly not to those in enemy prisons. It was as if they had been left behind physically and historically while the red area cadres were evolving into a higher form of Chinese communist species. A double standard operated towards the white area cadre, accepting his work as necessary – even lauding it as brave and an integral part of the revolution – yet constantly reminding him of his vulnerability to the inﬂuences of the corrupt white area environment, and thereby challenging his integrity. Sneaking doubts and sometimes open antagonism

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towards the white area cadres bred ﬁssures in the revolutionary generation. Despite their crucial role, white area cadres were cast at best as heroes of a lesser kind. On the whole this discrimination was kept in check, but in certain periods their complex past spilled forth as politically exploitable capital. When controls were removed in the Cultural Revolution the double standard became singly, unambiguously and ruthlessly focused. Far from being the unsung heroes of the revolution, the white area cadres were cruelly recast as traitors. This double-standard pattern was ﬁrst observed by some of the sixtyone when they arrived in Yan’an during the Rectiﬁcation Campaign. On the one hand, along with red area cadres and other leading white area cadres such as Peng Zhen, they were entrusted with the running of the campaign, especially in respect of administering study programmers. On the other hand many white area cadres, along with intellectuals who had recently ﬂocked to Yan’an, bore the brunt of persecution in the course of the 1943 ‘rescue campaign’. From merely observing discriminatory attitudes, leading cadres among the sixty-one began to experience them ﬁrst-hand during the selection process for delegates to the Seventh Party Congress, when it began to look like the 1936 release might torpedo their candidacy. It did not, but the fact that the issue was raised – whether by others, or by themselves to preempt others – was indicative of their vulnerability and the threat – perceived or real – of a challenge to their ﬁtness as delegates. The ultimately ﬁnely balanced representation of delegates from all ‘mountaintops’ or walks of party life at the Congress signiﬁed Mao’s determination to effect party unity. But it took Mao several attempts, including giving voice to the words that opened this chapter, to appease the feelings of the white area cadres. Perhaps he grew a little fed up with eating humble pie, because his apology in April 1945 sounds cavalier, if not begrudging: Comrades from enemy-occupied areas . . . thought that they were better than people from the base areas. The investigation of cadres placed them under suspicion and caused them trouble. . . . Now everything is clear. Apologies have been made to those who have had wrong hats put on them. The hats have been taken off, and due respect should be paid to them. They will gradually adapt to the workstyle of the base areas with which they do not feel comfortable.3 Notwithstanding this demonstration of niggardliness, Mao continued his efforts to preserve party unity after the establishment of the regime

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in 1949, by an apparently carefully balanced distribution of party and government posts among cadres from red and white areas. I use the word ‘apparently’ since white area cadres received good but not the best upper echelon jobs and precious few achieved the highest positions in the party hierarchy (such as full membership of the Politburo). Nevertheless what they did receive was sufﬁcient for them not to complain and risk appearing greedy. It is also reasonable to assume that the principle of party unity was as dear to their hearts as it was to Mao’s at that time and that their enthusiasm to share in China’s new era outweighed any seemingly petty discontent about job allocations. As long as party unity was not only Mao’s primary goal but also within his capacity to effect, prejudice against white area cadres was likely to be contained. With the Gao Gang affair, the skeleton slipped brieﬂy out of the cupboard. In Politics at Mao’s Court Frederick Teiwes revised his earlier thesis on the Gao Gang affair thus: ‘the effort to manipulate tensions between “red” and “white” area cadres was far more potent than originally believed’.4 It was potent because these papered-over tensions were real and deep. Gao, however clumsily, was in effect exposing a hypocrisy. That his prejudicial sentiments were not unshared can be deduced from the overemphatic protestations by party leaders such as Deng Xiaoping: ‘Our Party is a uniﬁed one, the vanguard of the working class; it has never been and can never be divided into the “party of the base areas and the army” and the “party of the white areas” ’.5 Gao Gang was purged for his Party-splitting attempts and was not rehabilitated. Ironically, however, his opinions on the superiority of red area and military cadres and the inappropriate leadership stature accorded to Liu Shaoqi found explicit legitimacy during the Cultural Revolution. Until then there do not appear to have been further outbursts against white area cadres. Discrimination returned to its subtler guise and the double standard resumed with the subsequent establishment of the Central Control Commission, its composition heavily weighted in favour of white area and prison cadre personnel. The overt message seemed to be: ‘Granting you (white area cadres) disciplinary powers over cadre behaviour is proof of our trust in you.’ The covert side of the coin was the narrow limitation of these powers – a manifestation of underlying misgivings towards the same cadres. White area and prison cadres continued to feel vulnerable, which explains the attempts by An Ziwen and the COD in the 1950s and 1960s to categorize actions taken by white area cadres in the pre-1949 era in ways that would determine their acceptability, by taking into account the precise nature of individual cases and the speciﬁc circumstances

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surrounding their actions. These efforts became a focus for Cultural Revolution radicals to charge An Ziwen et al. with trying to justify or cover up the less savoury aspects of their past. The relative ease with which the radical leaders in 1966–67 dislodged and dispensed with white area cadres – particularly those who had spent years in GMD prisons – underscored the lingering mistrust: During the Cultural Revolution . . . Lin Biao and the ‘gang of four’ . . . even regarded the underground party members sent to work among the enemy forces as ‘deserters who were recruited’ by the enemy. They thought that all those who had been arrested and imprisoned by the enemy were renegades, disregarding their behaviour in prison.6 If accusations against high-level cadres regarding their post-1949 performance were not sufﬁciently incriminating, charges of pre-1949 renegadism, capitulation and betrayal in the white areas provided the icing on the cake. Furthermore we cannot rule out that a possible reason for the very late rehabilitation of these cadres was that doubts continued to sway even their moderate peers. In 1982, long after the purges and rehabilitations, there was still evidence of the same old prejudice, as the following comment in Hongqi, the CCP’s ofﬁcial journal, illustrates: When the great revolution in 1927 failed, many comrades died heroically. They are heroes and deserve to be called communist ﬁghters. . . . Under Chiang Kai-shek’s white terror, there were also some people who became dejected, and lost faith in the revolution. Some dropped out of the revolutionary ranks. . . . Others published confessions in Guomindang newspapers and some others even became traitors.7 The author tempers the tone by saying that to understand how such mistakes could be made, one must investigate the circumstances and take the historical context into consideration – not to excuse, but to know how to prevent this in the future: Purging the Party of those who betrayed it will make our party stronger, purer and more combat-worthy. Moreover we have to handle correctly the problem of how we should treat those comrades who are still loyal to the revolution but have committed mistakes. We do not approve the adoption of any absolute attitude toward these comrades. . . . We should concentrate our efforts on analysing

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the background in which the mistakes were committed, the details of the mistakes and their social, historical and ideological sources, and adopt the policy of learning from the past mistakes to avoid future ones, and curing the sickness to save the patient.8 As the last of the CCP’s founder generation fade away, so too fades the particular sickness of prejudice that tended to blight the unity of this elite group. Often a dormant rather than an active virus, it was one that its host, the party leadership, preferred not to acknowledge. But as it lingered on, it could be played upon, consciously or not, for political capital. The case of the sixty-one renegades was a natural outcome of the prejudice engendered by the Chinese communist red area–white area dual morality structure. Their post-Cultural Revolution exoneration was lukewarm and left the critical issue of the Central Committee’s collective responsibility hanging in the air. Zhang Wentian remains the Central Committee’s scapegoat. This was a baby nobody wanted to hold, a buck everyone passed with alacrity. Liu Shaoqi, the sixty-one and their sympathizers pinned the inspiration for the release plan on North Bureau cadre Ke Qingshi. Conveniently dead since 1965, this radical Shanghai cohort of Jiang Qing was unable to counter the claim. Both Zhang and Liu claimed unconvincingly that they had not been aware of the full extent of the humiliating release procedures, the implication being that had they known they might not have been so forthcoming in authorizing the release. The sixty-one passed the buck back to the Central Committee – they had just been obeying orders. Prejudice aside, the sixty-one faced a dilemma of a ubiquitous nature – the conﬂict between the individual conscience and allegiance to a group’s cause. Should a loyal communist die rather than renounce his credo? But what if the party bids him to recant in order to survive and contribute his skills in building up the party? Should a loyal communist struggle with his conscience and assume personal responsibility if he considers a party order to be a mistake; or is the individual’s obedience to the party, as dictated by the party constitution the cardinal value? In pursuing the latter choice the sixty-one believed they had resolved their dilemma. Lenin, in his adherence to strict party discipline and the accountability of the lower to the higher levels of the party hierarchy, might have doffed his cap in respect; it was the sixty-one’s misfortune that so many closer to home did not.

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Appendix: The Sixty-One 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

An Ziwen Bo Yibo Ding Xizhen Dong Tianzhi Du Boyang Feng Leijin Fu Ping Fu Yutian Gao Tingkai Gao Yangyun Han Jun Hao Jinbo He Zhiping Hou Zhenya Hu Jingyi Hu Xikui Li Chuli Li Jukui Li Liguo Liao Luyan Liu Kerang

22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41.

Liu Lantao Liu Shangzhi Liu Shenzhi Liu Wenwei Liu Xiwu Liu Youguang Liu Zhao Liu Zijiu Ma Huizhi Ma Yutang Peng De Qiao Jiansheng Qiu Shaoshang Tang Fanglei Wang De Wang Qimei Wang Hefeng Wang Xinbo Wang Yong Wang Yutang

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

Wang Zhenlin Wu Yunpu Xia Fuhai Xian Weixun Xu Zirong Yang Xianzhen Yang Cai Yi Mingdao Yin Daoli Yin Jian Zhang Manping Zhang Xi Zhang Youqing Zhang Zhengsheng Zhao Bo Zhao Lin Zhao Mingxin Zhou Yang Zhou Zhongying Zhu Zemin

Two others, Li Yunchang and Yin Guangshan, were not listed in the 1978 COD investigation report but were listed in other sources, such as Bo Yibo’s Qishi nian (1996, pp. 195–6).

196

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Notes and References Introduction 1. Selected Works of Liu Shaoqi, vol. 1 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1984), pp. 137–9. 2. Lyman P. Van Slyke, Enemies and Friends: The United Front in Chinese Communist History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1967), p. 68. 3. Wu Linquan and Peng Fei, Caolan chunqiu [Caolan Annals] (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1988), p. 231. 4. The CCEG, which was accountable to the Politburo and Mao Zedong, ran three ofﬁces to investigate alleged crimes by high-level party cadres. See Michael Schoenhals, ‘The Central Case Examination Group, 1966–79’, The China Quarterly, no. 145 (March 1996), pp. 87–114. The members of the Cultural Revolution Group (CRG), established in May 1966, were Chen Boda, Kang Sheng, Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Guan Feng and Wang Li. 5. CCP Central Committee document Zhongfa 96 (1967), ‘Zhonggong zhongyang guanyu yinfa Bo Yibo, Liu Lantao, An Ziwen, Yang Xianzhen deng chuyu wenti cailiao de pishi’ [Instruction of the CCP Central Committee Concerning the Printing and Distribution of Materials on the Problem of the Release from Prison of Bo Yibo, Liu Lantao, An Ziwen, Yang Xianzhen et al.] (from a collection of Cultural Revolution documents [title page missing] on ‘Cleansing the Class Ranks’ at the Fairbank Center Library, Harvard University). 6. See for example Patricia Stranahan’s comments in Underground: The Shanghai Communist Party and the Politics of Survival, 1927–1937 (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littleﬁeld, 1998), pp. 2–3. 7. See for example Zhang Zhuhong, Zhongguo xiandai geming shi shiliaoxue [Historiography of China’s Modern Revolutionary History] (Beijing: Zhonggong dang shi ziliao chubanshe, 1987) in Timothy Cheek and Tony Saich (eds), ‘A Guide to Material on the Chinese Communist Movement’, Chinese Studies in History, vol. 24, no. 3 (Spring 1991), pp. 76–7. 8. Liu Shaoqi, ‘Lun gongkai gongzuo yu mimi gongzuo’ [On Open and Secret Work] (20 October 1939), in Liuda yilai dangnei mimi wenjian [Since the Sixth Party Congress – Secret Inner-Party Documents], vol. 2 (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1952, 1981), pp. 220–1. 9. Xie Xiaonai, ‘On the Organization of Party Historiography’ (speech at the National Work Conference on Collecting Party History Materials, 10 August 1981), Chinese Law and Government, vol. 19, no. 3 (Autumn 1986), p. 109. 10. Stranahan, Underground, op. cit., pp. 106–7. 11. See for example Bo Yibo, Qishi nian fendou yu sikao [Seventy Years of Struggle and Reﬂection], vol. 1 (Beijing: Zhonggong dangshi chubanshe, 1996), pp. 113–18. 12. U. T. Hsu, The Invisible Conﬂict (Hong Kong: China Viewpoints, 1958), pp. 51–4. 197

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198 Notes and References 13. Lowell Dittmer, ‘The Structural Evolution of “Criticism and Self-Criticism” ’, The China Quarterly, no. 56 (December 1973), p. 712. 14. Detailed in Chapter 2, pp. 58–60. 15. Tony Saich, ‘Introduction: The Chinese Communist Party and the AntiJapanese War Base Areas’, The China Quarterly, no. 140 (December 1994), p. 1001. 16. Bonnie S. MacDougall, Mao Zedong’s ‘Talks at Yan’an Conference on Literature and Art’: A Translation of the 1943 Text with Commentary (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 1980), pp. 84–5. 17. David S. Nivison, ‘Communist Ethics and Chinese Tradition’, Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 16, no. 1 (November 1956), p. 52. 18. See for example Edgar Snow’s Red Star Over China (London: Victor Gollancz, 1968) and Mark Selden’s The Yenan Way in Revolutionary China (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972). 19. See for example Chen Yung-fa, ‘The Blooming Poppy under the Red Sun: The Yan’an Way and the Opium Trade’, in Tony Saich and Hans van de Ven (eds), New Perspectives on the Chinese Communist Revolution (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1995), pp. 263–98. See also David E. Apter and Tony Saich, Revolutionary Discourse in Mao’s Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994) and Selden’s reassessment, ‘Yan’an Communism Reconsidered’, Modern China, vol. 21, no. 1 (January 1995), pp. 8–44, which acknowledges the ‘repressive and elitist tendencies that were insufﬁciently recognized in the original study’ (p. 40). 20. MacDougall, Mao Zedong’s ‘Talks’, op. cit., p. 84. 21. For example the eulogy for Zhou Zhongying of the sixty-one: ‘He was open and above-board throughout his life.’ See ‘Deng and Other Leaders Mourn CCP Member’s Death’, Xinhua, 8 June 1991; Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 10 June 1991, p. 35. 22. Gregor Benton indicates a similarly dichotomous perception in contemporary historiography of the Long March and the 1934–37 Three-Year War (in southern China): ‘The march united the party and brought its different factions into one political line; the war required the creative adjustment of policy to varied circumstance, compromise, improvisation, ﬂexibility and independent initiative.’ See Benton, ‘Under Arms and Umbrellas: Perspectives on Chinese Communism in Defeat’, in Saich and van de Ven, New Perspectives, op. cit., p. 142. 23. Dittmer, ‘The Structural Evolution’, op. cit., p. 712. 24. ‘Eliminate Closed-Doorism and Adventurism’ (April 1936), in Selected Works of Liu Shaoqi, op. cit., p. 40. 25. ‘The Party and its Mass Work in the White Areas’, in ibid., p. 74 (report presented in May 1937 at the Yan’an conference of representatives of party organizations of the white areas). 26. See Joseph K. S. Yick, Making Urban Revolution in China: The CCP–GMD Struggle for Beiping–Tianjin, 1945–1949 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1995), pp. 40–5. 27. At peak periods of repression (such as under the Japanese occupation in the early 1940s) in areas where support for the communists was waning, people – including party members – were encouraged to cooperate with and even to work for the enemy’s local administration and at the same time to

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28.

29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35.

36.

37.

38. 39.

provide aid, however minimal, to the local communist presence. This ‘red heart, white skin’ tactic was also referred to as the ‘double-edged policy’ or the ‘tactic of two-faced power’. See Kathleen Hartford, ‘Repression and Communist Success: The Case of Jin-Cha-Ji, 1938–1943’, in Kathleen Hartford and Stephen M. Goldstein (eds), Single Sparks: China’s Rural Revolutions (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1989), pp. 113–18. For a discussion of these two traditions within the Chinese communist movement, Maoist voluntarism and the Leninist rational–bureaucratic mode of operation, see Timothy Cheek and Carol Lee Hamrin’s Introduction to Hamrin and Cheek (eds), China’s Establishment Intellectuals (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1986), pp. 3–20. Bo Yibo, Qishi nian, op. cit., pp. 189–90. ‘How to be a Good Communist’ (July 1939), in Selected Works of Liu Shaoqi, op. cit., pp. 137–45. ‘On Inner-Party Struggle’ ( July 1941), in ibid., p. 205. Ian McMorran, ‘A Note on Loyalty in the Ming–Qing Transition’, Etudes Chinoises, vol. 13, nos 1–2 (Spring–Autumn 1994), p. 48. See also Wei-chin Lee, ‘Crimes of the Heart: Political Loyalty in Socialist China’, Studies in Comparative Communism, vol. 25, no. 3 (September 1992), pp. 229–30. McMorran, ‘A Note on Loyalty’, op. cit., p. 64. Lucien W. Pye, The Mandarin and The Cadre: China’s Political Cultures (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1988), p. 50. Li Xiannian, ‘Learn From Revolutionary Martyrs, Preserve Communist Purity – Cherishing the Memories of Martyrs Zhang Wenjin, Wu Zuyi, and Mao Chuxiong’, Hongqi, no. 17 (1 September 1985); Joint Publication Research Service, 85-022 (19 November 1985), p. 4. Editorial departments of Wenhui ribao, Jiefang ribao and Zhibu shenghuo, ‘Scheming to Betray the Party is Aimed to Usurp the Party’, Hongqi, no. 13 (17 August 1967), in Selections from China Mainland Magazines, 592 (11 September 1967), pp. 1–5. W. Allyn Rickett, ‘Voluntary Surrender and Confession in Chinese Law: The Problem of Continuity’, Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 30, no. 4 (August 1971), p. 797. The term zishou denoted voluntary surrender or confession before an offence was committed. The terms zibai and tanbai were used to indicate a confession after the event. Zishou was the term the communists continued to use for confession to political inadequacies in their thoughtreform and re-education programmes. Ibid., pp. 797–814. CCP Central Committee document (7 July 1937): ‘Zhongyang zuzhibu guanyu suowei zishou fenzi de jueding’ [Decision of the Central Committee Organization Department on how to treat (certain) so-called confessants], in Liuda yilai, vol. 1, pp. 145–6; ‘Guanyu guoqu luxing chuyu shouxu zhe (tianxie huiguoshu shengming tuodang fangong) zanxing chuli banfa’ [Provisional measures concerning those who in the past followed the release from prison procedures (ﬁlling in a statement of repentance, a statement of leaving the Party and opposing communism)] (22 July 1941), referred to in Chen Yun Wenxuan [Selected Works of Chen Yun, 1956–1985] (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1986), p. 208, p. 364, n. 127.

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200 Notes and References 40. These radical CRG leaders all had white area experiences prior to their Yan’an days. Between 1931 and 1933 Kang Sheng headed the Party’s Special Work Committee in Shanghai, which ran the party’s entire secret service operations. Chen Boda, who became Mao’s political secretary in Yan’an, had been imprisoned along with the sixty-one but had been released several years earlier, succumbing, according to Bo Yibo, to pressure to recant; see Bo Yibo, Qishi nian, op. cit., pp. 148–9. 41. Cultural Revolution sources include ‘Selected Edition on Liu Shaoqi’s Counter-Revolutionary Revisionist Crimes’: pamphlet by the Liaison Station ‘Pledging to Fight a Bloody Battle with Liu-Deng-Tao to the End’ attached to August 18 Red Rebel regiment of Nankai University, April 1967, in Selections from China Mainland Magazines, 653 (5 May 1969), pp. 1–9; ‘Inside Story of the Traitorous Group of Liu Shaoqi, An Ziwen and Bo Yibo’, edited by the Investigation Group of Weidong Red Guards for the ‘6 March Special Case’, Nankai University, March 1967, in Classiﬁed Chinese Communist Documents: A Selection (Taipei: Institute of International Relations, 1978), pp. 136–47; ‘Overthrow Liu Shaoqi – Boss of a Big Clique of Renegades’, Hongqi Combat Team of Beijing Aeronautical Institute, 8 March 1967, Selections from China Mainland Press, supplement 182, 11 May 1967, pp. 25–38; ‘Utterly Smash Liu Shaoqi’s Renegade Clique’, by the Joint Headquarters of the Revolutionary Rebels of Mao Zedong Thought, 1 August School of Beijing, in Chunlei [Spring Thunder], 13 April 1967, Selections from China Mainland Press, 3951 (2 June 1967), pp. 1–6. Post-1978 accounts include Chen Yeping and Han Jingcao (eds), An Ziwen zhuanlue [The Biography of An Ziwen] (Taiyuan: Shanxi renmin chubanshe, 1985). Several chapters of this biography have been translated and published in Lawrence Sullivan (ed.), ‘The Biography of An Ziwen and the History of the Organization Department’, Chinese Law and Government, vol. 21, no. 4 (Winter 1988–89); Wu and Peng, Caolan chunqiu, op. cit., Bo Yibo, Qishi nian, op. cit., Xiong Huaiji, Tiandi you zhengqi: Caolanzi jianyu douzheng yu ‘liushi yi ren an’ [Heaven and Earth have Upright Spirit: the Struggle in Caolanzi and the ‘61-Man Case’] (Beijing: Beijing dichu geming she, Beijing chubanshe, 1982); Yang Xianzhen zhuan [Biography of Yang Xianzhen] (Beijing: Zhonggong dangshi chubanshe, 1996); Yang Xianzhen and Guan Shan, ‘Ru Caolanzi jianyou qianhou’ [Before and After Entering Caolanzi], Geming shi ziliao, October 1980, pp. 6–22. 42. CCP Central Committee Document Zhongfa 75 (16 December 1978): ‘Zhonggong zhongyang zhuanfa zhongyang zuzhibu guanyu – “liushiyi ren anjian” de diaocha baogao – de tongzhi’ [Notice of the CCP CC to transmit the COD investigative report concerning the ‘sixty-one man case’]. See ‘Guanyu “liushiyi ren anjian” de diaocha baogao’, in Sanzhongquanhui yilai: zhongyao wenxian huibian [Since the Third Plenum: Collection of Important Documents] compiled by the Documentation Institute of the CCP CC] (Renmin chubanshe, 1982), pp. 25–35. 43. Joseph W. Esherick, ‘Ten Theses on the Chinese Revolution’, Modern China, vol. 21, no. 1 (January 1995), p. 60. 44. Liu was also appointed alternate member to the Politburo in 1966 – a rather short-lived appointment. 45. Schoenhals, ‘The Central Case’, op. cit., pp. 110–11.

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Notes and References 201 46. Hong Yung Lee, ‘The Politics of Cadre Rehabilitation Since the Cultural Revolution’, Asian Survey, vol. 18, no. 9 (September 1978), p. 935; see also Hong Yung Lee, From Revolutionary Cadres to Party Technocrats in Socialist China (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991), p. 163; Lucien Pye, The Dynamics of Chinese Politics (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, 1981), pp. 12, 205–6. For political rehabilitation in the Soviet Union, see for example Albert P. Van Goudoever, The Limits of Destalinization in the Soviet Union (London: Croom Helm, 1986); Alexander N. Yakovlev (ed.), Rehabilitatsiia: Politicheskie Protsessy 30–50kh Godov (Moscow: Iztatel’stvo Politicheskoi Literatury, 1991). 47. CCP Central Committee Document Zhongfa 25 (1980), ‘Notice of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party to Conscientiously Transmit the Resolution on the Rehabilitation of Comrade Liu Shao-ch’i’, Issues and Studies, vol. 16, no. 11 (November 1980), p. 89.

1

1936: On the Eve of War and Freedom 1. John King Fairbank, Chinabound (New York: Harper & Row, 1982), p. 133. 2. ‘Report on Experience Gained in Six Years of Work in North and Central China’, Selected Works of Liu Shaoqi, vol. 1 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1984), pp. 246, 248–9. 3. For background information on this period, in the ﬁrst two chapters of this study I have drawn on Lyman P. Van Slyke, Enemies and Friends, The United Front in Chinese Communist History (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1967); Lloyd E. Eastman, Jerome Ch’en, Lyman P. Van Slyke and Suzanne Pepper, The Nationalist Era in China 1927–1949 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); James Pinckney Harrison, The Long March to Power: A History of the Chinese Communist Party, 1921–1972 (New York: Praeger, 1972); Tony Saich (ed.), The Rise to Power of the Chinese Communist Party (New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1996); Shum Kui-Kwong, The Chinese Communists’ Road to Power: The Anti-Japanese National United Front, 1937–1945 (Hong Kong: Oxford University Press, 1988). 4. Background information on the sixty-one is drawn from the biographical dictionaries cited in the Bibliography and from Wu Linquan and Peng Fei, Caolan chunqiu (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1988); Xiong Huaiji, Tiandi you zhengqi (Beijing: Beijing dichu geming shi, Beijing chubanshe, 1982); Chen Yeping and Han Jincao (eds), An Ziwen zhuanlue (Taiyuan: Shanxi renmi chubanshe, 1985); Bo Yibo, Qishi nian fendou yu sikao (Beijing: Zhonggong dangshi chubanshe, 1996); Yang Xianzhen and Guan Shan, ‘Ru Caolanzi jianyou qianhou’, Geming shi ziliao, October 1980, pp. 6–22. 5. For a detailed account of Japan’s presence in China between 1931 and 1937, see Parks M. Coble, Facing Japan: Chinese Politics and Japanese Imperialism, 1931–1937 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991). The Mukden Incident refers to the hostilities that broke out between Chinese and Japanese troops following the Japanese accusation that the Chinese had attacked the railway line near Mukden. 6. See for instance E. H. Carr’s discussion of the Seventh Congress of the Comintern, July 1935, in Twilight of the Comintern, 1930–1935 (New York:

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202 Notes and References

7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

Pantheon, 1982), pp. 403–27; John W. Garver, Chinese–Soviet Relations, 1937–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), pp. 11–12. John Garver, ‘The Soviet Union and the Xi’an Incident’, Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, no. 26 (July 1991), p. 149. John Israel and Donald W. Klein, Rebels and Bureaucrats, China’s December 9ers (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1976), pp. 87–95. Van Slyke, Enemies and Friends, op. cit., p. 66. Benjamin Yang, From Revolution to Politics: Chinese Communists on the Long March (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1990), p. 181. After the Wayaobao Conference of December 1935, attempts began to establish radio links with urban party organizations: ‘a communication line was established between northern Shaanxi and Xi’an, Shanghai, Beiping and Tianjin through underground party organizations and various social connections. A secret radio station was set up to keep the CPC Central Committee in contact with the underground party organizations in Tianjin and Shanghai and to transmit the principles and policies of the CPC Central Committee promptly to the areas under KMT rule.’ See Tong Xiaopeng, ‘The First Model in the United Front Work – Reading Selected Works of Zhou Enlai on the United Front’, Guangmin ribao, 24 April 1985; Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 8 May 1985, K.12. See Shum Kui-Kwong, The Chinese Communists’ Road, op. cit., p. 57, for an analysis of the united front as the ‘best solution to the CCP’s current predicament’. Lyman P Van Slyke, ‘The Chinese Communist Movement during the Sino-Japanese War 1937–1945’, in Eastman et al., The Nationalist Era, op. cit., p. 185. ‘On Tactics Against Japanese Imperialism’, Selected Works of Mao Zedong, vol. 1 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1967), pp. 163–7. Mao delivered this report on 27 December 1935 at Wayaobao, following the Politburo conference there. ‘Zhongguo gongchandang zhi Zhongguo guomindang shu’ [Letter from the Chinese Communist Party to the Guomindang Government of China], 25 August 1936, Liuda yilai dangnei mimi wenjian [Since the Sixth Party Congress: Secret Inner Party Documents] vol. 1 (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1952, 1981), pp. 773–7. For information on the fascinating character of Pan Hannian and his tragic fate, see Hu Hua, Zhonggong dangshi renwu zhuan [Biographies of Personalities in CCP History] (Shanxi: Shanxi renmin chubanshe, 1984), vol. 25, pp. 24–51, and Hu Yuzhi, ‘Weida de bu pingfan de douzheng de yi sheng – yi Pan Hannian tongzhi’ [The Struggle for Rehabilitation of a Great, Unusual Life – Remembering Comrade Pan Hannian], Renmin ribao, part 1, 14 July 1983, part 2, 15 July 1983. Chen Lifu (1900–93) and his older brother Chen Guofu (1892–1951) were known as the ‘CC Clique’ in the Guomindang leadership. See Chen Lifu’s memoirs, The Storm Clouds Clear Over China, edited by Sidney H. Chang and Ramon H. Myers (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1994). See Li Xin, ‘Preliminary Survey of the Xi’an Incident’, Lishi Yanjiu [Historical Research], no. 11 (November 1979); Joint Publication Research Service, 7514-59 (15 February 1980), pp. 29–35.

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Notes and References 203 18. John Garver, ‘The Origins of the Second United Front’, The China Quarterly, no. 113 (March 1988), p. 52. 19. Zhang Xueliang, ‘Penitent Confession on the Xian Incident’, Mingbao, vol. 3, no. 9 (1968), translated in Chinese Studies in History, vol. 22, no. 3 (Spring 1989), p. 71; Keiji Furuya, Chiang Kai-shek: His Life and Times (New York: St John’s University, 1981), p. 510. Li Xin, in ‘Preliminary Survey’, op. cit., p. 42, states that political prisoners under the jurisdiction of Zhang Xueliang and Yang Hucheng were not released until after the Xi’an incident, that is, until December 1936. 20. Yang and Guan, ‘Ru Caolanzi’, op. cit., pp. 20–1. 21. Zhou Tiandu, ‘The National Salvation Society and the Seven Gentlemen Case’, Renmin ribao, 25 February 1985; Joint Publication Research Service, 83259-410 (14 April 1983), pp. 173–4. 22. Van Slyke, Enemies and Friends, op. cit., p. 69. 23. Ibid., p. 67. 24. Report dispatched from Nanjing on 28 August and published in the North China Herald, 2 September 1936. 25. Selected Works of Mao Zedong, op. cit., pp. 281–2. 26. Joseph K. S. Yick, Making Urban Revolution in China: The CCP–GMD Struggle for Beijing–Tianjin, 1945–1949 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1995), pp. 4–5. 27. Ibid., p. 6. 28. U. T. Hsu, The Invisible Conﬂict (Hong Kong: China Viewpoints, 1958), p. 114. 29. ‘Report on Experience’, Selected Works of Liu Shaoqi, op. cit., pp. 247–8. 30. Saich, The Rise to Power, op. cit., p. 281. 31. Patricia Stranahan, Underground: The Shanghai Communist Party and the Politics of Survival, 1927–1937 (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littleﬁeld, 1998), pp. 104, 183–4 and ch. 5. 32. See Kathleen Hartford’s comments in ‘Fits and Starts: The Chinese Communist Party in Rural Hebei, 1921–1936’, in Tony Saich and Hans van de Ven (eds), New Perspectives on the Chinese Communist Revolution (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1995), pp. 166–7. 33. Ibid., p. 167. 34. ‘Shunzhi’ (actually Hebei province) was a composite of the area’s traditional names, Shundefu and Zhili. 35. ‘Letter to the Shunzhi Provincial Committee and [Comrade Cai] Hesen’ (25 December 1927) in Hyobom Pak (ed.), Documents of the CCP 1927–1930 (Hong Kong: Union Research Institute, 1971), p. 341. 36. See, for instance, Harrison, The Long March, op. cit., pp. 120–3 for the Nanchang Uprising, pp. 129–34 for Autumn Harvest Uprisings, and pp. 137–40 for the Canton Commune. 37. Yick, Making Urban Revolution, op. cit., p. 6. 38. ‘Political Tasks of the Shunzhi Provincial Committee during the War of the Fengdian and GMD Warlords’ (The Resolution of the Shunzhi Provincial Committee) (11 April 1928), in Pak, Documents, op. cit., pp. 475– 88. 39. ‘The Question of Work Deployment in Shunzhi during the Fengdian–GMD War. Letter from the Central to the Shunzhi Provincial Committee’, in ibid., pp. 489–94.

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204 Notes and References 40. See ‘Peng Zhen: From Disgrace to Rehabilitation’, Issues and Studies, vol. 15, no. 9 (September 1979), pp. 95–6. 41. Warren Kuo, Analytical History of the Chinese Communist Party, vol. 2 (Taipei: Institute of International Relations, 1968), pp. 53–4. 42. ‘The Present Weakness of the Party Organization and of the Central Task of Organization’, in Pak, Documents, op. cit., pp. 529–39. 43. See ‘Peng Zhen: From Disgrace’, op. cit., p. 96. 44. Hartford, ‘Fits and Starts’, op. cit., pp. 149, 152. 45. See Bo, Qishi nian, op. cit., pp. 88–104, for details of his various arrests between 1927 and 1930. 46. Hartford, ‘Fits and Starts’, op. cit., p. 149. 47. Bo, Qishi nian, op. cit., pp. 98–103. 48. Stranahan, Underground, op. cit., pp. 76–85. 49. Chen and Han, An Ziwen, op. cit., pp. 11–13. 50. Thomas Kampen Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and the Evolution of the Chinese Communist Leadership (Copenhagen S: Nordic Institute of Asian Studies, 2000) p. 35. 51. Kampen’s detailed study Mao Zedong, Zhou Enlai and the Evolution (op. cit.), challenges much of the conventional academic wisdom regarding the ‘twenty-eight Bolsheviks’. 52. Kuo, Analytical History, op. cit., pp. 148–9. 53. Stranahan, Underground, op. cit., p. 81. 54. Ibid., p. 82. 55. Bo, Qishi nian, op. cit., pp. 105–12. 56. Kuo, Analytical History, op. cit., pp. 221–2. 57. Bo, Qishi nian, op. cit., p. 110. 58. Ibid., pp. 117–19. 59. Wu and Peng, Caolan chunqiu, op. cit., pp. 5–11. 60. Chen and Han, An Ziwen, op. cit., p. 14. 61. See Chang Kuo-t’ao, The Rise of the Chinese Communist Party 1928–1938, vol. 2 (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press, 1971), pp. 159–63, for Zhang’s account of his visit to the new northern administration. 62. Chen and Han, An Ziwen, op. cit., pp. 13–14. 63. Bo, Qishi nian, op. cit., p. 118. 64. Wu and Peng, Caolan chunqiu, op. cit., p. 20. 65. Kuo, Analytical History, op. cit., p. 218. 66. Yang and Guan, ‘Ru Caolanzi’, op. cit., p. 7. 67. Stranahan, Underground, op. cit., pp. 105–9. 68. Yang and Guan, ‘Ru Caolanzi’, op. cit., pp. 7–8. 69. Ibid., p. 9. 70. Ibid., pp. 10–11. 71. Ibid., p. 12. 72. Wu and Peng, Caolan chunqiu, op. cit., p. 22. 73. Ibid. 74. Bo Yibo, Liu Lantao, Cheng Zihua and Nie Zhen, ‘In Deep Memory of Hu Xikui, Loyal Fighter of the Party’, Renmin ribao, 3 April 1980; Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 14 May 1980, L. 8–10. 75. Bo, Qishi nian, op. cit., pp. 120–22. 76. Ibid., p. 122.

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Notes and References 205 77. Chen and Han, An Ziwen, op. cit., pp. 14–15. 78. Kuo, Analytical History, op. cit., p. 326. 79. North China Herald, 2 September 1936; report from Nanjing, 28 August 1936. 80. Unless otherwise stated the information in this section is drawn from Coble, Facing Japan, op. cit., pp. 56–73, 90–119, 241–80, 297–309. 81. Zhang Xueliang went into temporary self-imposed exile in Europe, and on his return in 1934 was given the vice-command of anticommunist suppression forces in central China and in 1935 in north-west China. 82. Coble, Facing Japan, op. cit., p. 111. 83. Israel and Klein, Rebels and Bureaucrats, op. cit., p. 88. 84. Speech by Mao Zedong, 9 December 1939 at a rally to mark the fourth anniversary of the 9 December Movement (Hongqi, no. 23, 1 December 1985; Joint Publication Research Service, 86-002, 23 January 1986, p. 8). Mao preceded the ﬁre-lighting analogy with the following comments: ‘The CPC no doubt played a backbone role in the 9 December Movement. It would have been impossible for the 9 December Movement to take place if the CPC had not played that backbone role. First of all, the CPC’s 1 August declaration had provided the youth and students with a clear and deﬁnite political principle. Next, the arrival of the Red Army in northern Sha’anxi had promoted the National Salvation movement in northern China. The third factor was the direct leadership of the CPC Northern Bureau and CPC organizations in Shanghai’. See also History of the Chinese Communist Party, A Chronology of Events (1919–1990) (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1991): ‘December 9: With the national crisis deteriorating every day, several thousand patriotic students, led and organized by the CPC Provisional Working Committee in Beiping . . .’ (p. 101). 85. ‘On Tactics’, Selected Works of Mao Zedong, op. cit., p. 161. 86. Israel and Klein, Rebels and Bureaucrats, op. cit., p. 95. 87. Ting Wang, ‘ “Twelve-nine” and “People’s Vanguards” – Chinese Communist Student Movement (1935–1938)’, paper presented at the Conference on the History of the Republic of China (Taipei, Taiwan, 23–28 August 1981) pp. 7–8. 88. Van Slyke, Enemies and Friends, op. cit., p. 67. 89. Israel and Klein, Rebels and Bureaucrats, op. cit., p. 103. 90. Ibid., pp. 98–102. 91. Nym Wales, Notes on the Chinese Student Movement, 1935–1936 (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution, 1959), p. 53. 92. Israel and Klein, Rebels and Bureaucrats, op. cit., p. 108. See also, Sun Sibai, ‘White-haired Old Men on the December 9th Movement’, Hongqi, no. 23 (1 December 1985); Joint Publication Research Service, 86-002 (23 January 1985), p. 56. 93. ‘Report on Experience’, in Selected Works of Liu Shaoqi, op. cit., p. 251. 94. Israel and Klein, Rebels and Bureaucrats, op. cit., p. 115. 95. Ibid., pp. 116–17. 96. Ting Wang, ‘ “Twelve-nine” and “People’s Vanguards” ’, op. cit., pp. 9, 16. 97. Bo Yibo, ‘A Historic Contribution by Comrade Liu Shaoqi’, Renmin ribao, 5 May 1980; Summary of World Broadcasts (BBC), FE/6422/B11/4. 98. Israel and Klein, Rebels and Bureaucrats, op. cit., p. 115.

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206 Notes and References 99. A. Titov, ‘The December 9 Movement of 1935’, Far Eastern Affairs, no. 4 (1976) and no. 1 (1977), pp. 103–4. 100. Wu and Peng, Caolan chunqiu, op. cit., p. 207. 101. Coble, Facing Japan, op. cit., p. 300. 102. Lloyd E. Eastman, ‘Nationalist China during the Sino-Japanese War, 1937–1945’, in Eastman et al., The Nationalist Era, op. cit., p. 118.

2

Release from the Guomindang Prison, 1936 1. This translation appears in Warren Kuo, Analytical History of the Chinese Communist Party, vol. 3 (Taipei: Institute of Internation Relations, 1970), p. 263. 2. Cultural Revolution sources include ‘Selected Edition on Liu Shaoqi’s Counter-Revolutionary Revisionist Crimes’, Selections from China Mainland Magazines, 651 (1969), pp. 1–9; ‘Inside Story of the Traitorous Group of Liu Shaoqi, An Ziwen and Bo Yibo’, Classiﬁed Chinese Documents: A Selection (Taipei: Institute of International Relations, 1978), pp. 136–47; ‘Overthrow Liu Shaoqi – Boss of a Big Clique of Renegades’, Selections from China Mainland Magazines, 182 (1967), pp. 25–38; ‘Utterly Smash Liu Shaoqi’s Renegade Clique’, Survey of China Mainland Press, 3951 (1967), pp. 1–6. Post-1978 accounts include: Chen Yeping and Han Jingcao (eds), An Ziwen zhuanlue, (Taiyuan: Shanxi renmin chubanshe, 1985), pp. 14–23, and translated excerpts in Lawrence Sullivan (ed.), ‘The Biography of An Ziwen and the History of the Organization Department’ Chinese Law and Government, vol. 21, no. 4, (Winter 1988–89), pp. 15–25; Bo Yibo, Qishi nian fendou yu sikao, vol. 1 (Beijing: Zhonggong dangshi chubanshe, 1996), pp. 129–96; Xiong Huaiji, Tiandi you zhengqi: Caolanzi jianyou douzheng yu ‘liushi yi ren an’ (Beijing: Beijing dichu geming shi, Beijing chubanshe, 1982), pp. 22–100; Wu Linquan and Peng Fei, Caolan chunqiu, (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1988), pp. 53–192; Yang Xianzhen and Guan Shan, ‘Ru Caolanzi jianyou qianhou’, Geming shi ziliao, October 1990, pp. 15–23; Yan Jiaqi and Gao Gao, Zhongguo wenhuadageming shinian shi [Ten Year History of China’s Cultural Revolution] (Tianjin: Tianjin renmin chubanshe, 1986, pp. 160–4, and the English version, translated and edited by D. W. Y. Kwok, Turbulent Decade: A History of the Cultural Revolution (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1996), pp. 140–3. Unless otherwise noted, biographical data on the sixty-one in this chapter and descriptions of their life in Caolanzi prison are drawn from these post-1978 accounts. 3. See ‘Lifting the Black Curtain of the Puppet “Kiangsu Reformatory” ’, Zhui qiongkou [Pursue the Tottering Foe], 7 June 1967; Survey of China Mainland Press, 4030 (28 September 1967), p. 4; Wang Fanxi, Memoirs of a Chinese Revolutionary (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), p. 164. 4. ‘Lifting the Black Curtain’, op. cit., p. 5. 5. Ibid., p. 4. 6. Bo Yibo, Preface to ‘Collection of Works Commemorating Comrade Liu Yaxiong’, Renmin ribao, 17 February 1989; Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 24 February 1989, p. 28. 7. Yan and Gao, Zhongguo wenhuadageming, op. cit., p. 162.

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Notes and References 207 8. Bo Yibo, Qishi nian, op. cit., pp. 148–9. In his July 1932 statement, Chen is alleged to have said, ‘I am a scholar who joined the GMD party and . . . I then joined the CCP. I studied communism. Personally I believe that communism is not suitable to China’s conditions so I am willing to turn over a new leaf.’ 9. Ibid., p. 134. 10. ‘Overthrow Liu Shaoqi’, op. cit., p. 28. Liu, a Hui (Muslim) from Hebei, was active in minorities affairs in the post-1949 era. He was a member of the 8th and 9th Central Committees. 11. Yang and Guan, ‘Ru Caolanzi’, op. cit., p. 16. 12. ‘The Biography of An Ziwen’, op. cit., p. 23. 13. Liu’s plight was brought to the attention of the Beijing liberal Wang Zhuoran, whose personal connections with the GMD helped bring about Liu’s release. Despite this, during the Cultural Revolution Liu was accused of renegadism. See Harold Isaacs, Re-Encounters in China: Notes of a Journey in a Time Capsule (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1985), pp. 95–100. 14. ‘The Biography of An Ziwen’, op. cit., p. 22. 15. Wang Fanxi, Memoirs, op. cit., p. 171. 16. Yang and Guan, ‘Ru Caolanzi’, op. cit., p. 18. 17. Wu and Peng, Caolanzi chunqiu, op. cit., p. 165. 18. See for example the chapter by Tony Saich, ‘Writing or Rewriting History? The Construction of the Maoist Resolution on Party History’, in Tony Saich and Hans van de Ven (eds), New Perspectives on the Chinese Communist Revolution (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1995), pp. 299–338. 19. Bo Yibo, ‘Respect and Remembrance – Marking the 60th Anniversary of the Birth of the CCP’, Hongqi, no. 13 (1 July 1981); Joint Publication Research Service, 78817 (24 August 1981), p. 100. The 28 January reference is to Japan’s attack on Shanghai in 1932; the citizens of Shanghai, together with the 19th Route Army, managed to hold out for a month. 20. Ibid. 21. Chen and Han, An Ziwen, op. cit., p. 21; Yang and Guan, ‘Ru Caolanzi’, op. cit., p. 20. 22. Yang and Guan, ‘Ru Caolanzi’, op. cit., pp. 20–1. 23. See Liu’s third Cultural Revolution confession, translated in Chinese Law and Government, vol. 1, no. 1 (Spring 1968), p. 76. Ke Qingshi had been engaged in underground work since the early 1920s. In his post-1949 career he held the prestigious post of mayor of Shanghai from 1958 until his death in l965. Although he died before the onset of the Cultural Revolution, he was strongly identiﬁed with the radical elite. 24. Wu and Peng, Caolan chunqiu, op. cit., p. 184. 25. Bo Yibo, Qishi nian, op. cit., p. 185. 26. ‘Overthrow Liu Shao-ch’i’, op. cit., pp. 35–6. Conﬁrmed in post-1978 sources, for example Wu and Peng, Caolan chunqiu, op. cit., p. 183. 27. Liu Shaoqi nianpu 1898–1969 [Chronicle of the Life of Liu Shaoqi, 1898–1969] (Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 1996), pp. 154–5. 28. See for example, ‘Inside Story’, in Classiﬁed Chinese Communist Documents: A Selection (Taipei: Institute of International Relations, 1978), p. 138. Conﬁrmed in post-1978 sources, for example Wu and Peng, Caolan chunqiu, op. cit., pp. 179–91, and Bo Yibo, Qishi nian, op. cit., pp. 184–96. 29. Liu Shaoqi nianpu, op. cit., p. 154; Xiong Huaiji, Tiandi, op. cit., pp. 111–12.

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208 Notes and References 30. Bo Yibo, ‘Preface to Report on Zhang Wentian’s Proposal on Opening Up the Market’, Renmin ribao, 26 August 1995; Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 20 October 1995, p. 30. 31. ‘Overthrow Liu Shaoqi’, op. cit., p. 36. 32. Yan and Gao, Zhongguo wenhuadageming, op. cit., p. 163. 33. Bo Yibo, ‘Preface to Report on Zhang’, op. cit., p. 30. 34. ‘Inside Story’, in Classiﬁed, op. cit., p. 138. In the early stages of the Cultural Revolution, when the so-called ‘61 Renegades case’ was exposed, it was claimed that Liu Geping’s career had suffered because of his refusal to obey the 1936 order. Certainly he initially beneﬁted during the Cultural Revolution, being appointed chairman of the Revolutionary Committee for Shanxi Province, though he fell from grace in 1969. 35. ‘Utterly Smash Liu Shaoqi’, op. cit., p. 2. 36. Zhang Liangyun and two other prisoners whose sentences were anyway brief (and one of whom subsequently defected) refused to recant and were released when their term was up in the summer of 1937. Zhang died before 1949. See ‘Liu Geping tongzhi dui beiping fanxingyuan de huiyi’ [Comrade Liu Geping’s Memoir of the Beiping Reformatory] in Liu Geping zhengwei tong Liu-Deng hei silingbu de douzheng [Political Commissar Liu Geping’s Struggle against the Sinister Headquarters of Liu (Shaoqi) and Deng (Xiaoping)], published by Shanxi dongfeng hongse zaofan bingtuan [the Shanxi East Wind Red Rebel Corps]; Taiyuan shi yinshigongsi 1.19 wuchanjieji gemingpai [the January 19th Proletarian Revolutionary Forces of the Taiyuan Food and Drink Co.]; Shanxi dongfeng bingtuan taiyin fentuan [Shanxi East Wind Corps, Taiyin branch], September 1967, p. 19. 37. Wu and Peng, Caolan chunqiu, op. cit., p. 190. 38. Appendices vii and viii to ‘Overthrow Liu Shaoqi’, op. cit., pp. 37–8. 39. Ibid., p. 37; ‘Utterly Smash Liu Shaoqi’s Renegade Clique’, op. cit., p. 3. 40. Kuo, Analytical History, op. cit., p. 263. 41. An Ziwen (Xu Ziwen), Yang Xianzhen (Yang Zhongren), Dong Tianzhi (Dong Xutou), Ma Huizhi (Feng Junchai), Xu Zirong (Xu Lirong), Liu Lantao (Liu Huafu), Zhou Zhongying (Zhou Bin), Xian Weixun (Xia Weixun) and Bo Yibo (Zhang Congbu). 42. Bo Yibo, Qishi nian, op. cit., pp. 198–204. 43. ‘Inside Story’, in Classiﬁed, op. cit., p. 140. 44. Kuo (using Red Guard tabloids) refers to 270 thus released (naming 169 who were still alive at the start of the Cultural Revolution) from the Shanxi GMD Reformatory, the Taiyuan Nationalist Army Prison, the Taiyuan Garrison Headquarters, the Jiangsu GMD Penitentiary and Caolanzi. See Kuo, Analytical History, op. cit., pp. 275–83. 45. ‘What is Bo Yibo, Liu’s Faithful Running Dog?’, Jinggangshan [Jinggang Mountains], no. 46 (13 May 1967); Joint Publication Research Service, 41858 (17 July 1967), p. 181. Hu Hua, Zhonggong dangshi renwu zhuan, vol. 20 (Taiyuan: Shanxi renmin chubanshe, 1984, pp. 59–61) insists that Wang Ruofei’s release was unconditional. 46. ‘Utterly Smash Liu Shaoqi’s Renegade Clique’, op. cit., p. 3. For further details of the party’s practice of maintaining such dossiers, see Chapter 3. 47. See respectively ‘In Deep Memory of Hu Xikui’, Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 21 May 1980, L.9, and Qiang Zhiguang, Xu Disin, Ping

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Notes and References 209

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53.

54. 55. 56.

57.

58. 59. 60. 61.

62.

63. 64.

65.

Jiesan, Xue Zizhang, Tong Xiaoping and Jin Cheng, ‘In Memory of the Party’s Loyal Fighter Comrade Xu Bing’, Renmin ribao, 22 March 1980; Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 21 May 1980, L.12. ‘The Third Confession of Liu Shao-ch’i’, Chinese Law and Government, vol. 1, no. 1, p. 76. Ibid. Ibid. Ibid. ‘Overthrow Liu Shaoqi’, op. cit., p. 36. Liu Ying, Zai lishi de jiliu zhong: Liu Ying huiyilu [In the Turbulent Current of History: the Memoirs of Liu Ying] (Beijing: Zhonggong dangshi chubanshe,1992), p. 165. ‘Overthrow Liu Shaoqi’, op. cit., p. 26. ‘Eliminate Closed-Doorism and Adventurism’, Selected Works of Liu Shaoqi, vol. 1 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1981), p. 39. See Chapter 1 for references to the CCP’s demands for the release of political prisoners. During the CCP–GMD negotiations after the Xi’an Incident, the CCP, having demanded that the GMD unconditionally release all political prisoners, rejected the GMD’s counterproposal that (1) the CCP provide lists of their party members in the GMD prisons, and (2) that these cadres would go through ‘supporting the government’ formalities prior to their release. That the CCP should simultaneously reject any notion of conditional release and at the same time secretly bid its members to do the exact opposite is one good explanation of its subsequent need to keep this matter under wraps. Zhou Enlai zhuan 1898–1949 [Biography of Zhou Enlai, 1898–1949] (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1989), p. 368, refers to Zhou Enlai and Ye Jianying’s successful efforts in August 1937 in Nanjing, resulting in the release of CCP members, including Tao Zhu and Qian Ying. On the other hand, during the Cultural Revolution Tao Zhu (CCP Politburo member and ﬁrst secretary of the Central South Bureau) was accused of recanting in order to be released from prison. He died in November 1969 and was posthumously rehabilitated in December 1978. Kuo, Analytical History, op. cit., p. 265. Hu Hua, Zhonggong, op. cit., pp. 95–6. Edgar Snow, Red Star Over China (London: Victor Gollancz, 1968), pp. 68–90. Neither Zhang nor Wang had yet arrived in Bao’an in the summer of 1936, but this does not mean that Mao was any the less preoccupied with the threat they posed to his leadership ambitions. Liu Ying, ‘Mourning Comrade Zhang Wentian with Profound Grief’, Xinhua, 26 August 1979; Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 29 August 1979, L.11. Comment by Van Slyke on my doctoral thesis, Political Rehabilitation in Chinese Communism (Jerusalem: Hebrew University, 1997). Wang Guangmei, ‘He Showed his Integrity in a Difﬁcult Time, the Spirit of Justice will be Preserved Eternally – In Memory of Comrade An Ziwen’, Gongren ribao, 14 July 1980; Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 5 August 1980, L.11. Bo Yibo, ‘Respect and Remembrance’, op. cit., p. 100.

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210 Notes and References 66. See Benjamin Yang, From Revolution to Politics, Chinese Communists on the Long March (Boulder, CO: Westview Press), p. 207. 67. Kuo, Analytical History, op. cit., p. 267. 68. Into the Great Wide Open, Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers (MCA Records, 1991). 69. See Donald G. Gillin, Warlord Yen Hsi-shan in Shansi Province 1911–1949 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1967), pp. 218–56. 70. Bo Yibo, ‘A Historic Contribution by Comrade Liu Shaoqi’, Renmin ribao, 5 May 1980, L. 6; Summary of World Broadcasts (BBC), FE/6422/BII/2-13 (17 May 1980). 71. ‘Report to the Central Committee on North China Work’, 18 September 1936, in Liu Shaoqi Nianpu, pp. 159–60. 72. Bo Yibo, ‘A Historic Contribution’, op. cit., L. 6. 73. Bo Yibo, ‘Shanxi United Front in Flames of War of Resistance Against Japan – Preface to Book “Recalling Flames of War of Resistance” ’, Renmin ribao, 18 September 1995; Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 31 October 1995, p. 13. 74. Bo describes his recruitment of the widowed Liu Yaxiong in late 1936: ‘On her arrival in Taiyuan in late 1936, she took up the post of political instructor of the 11th Company of the Shanxi Military and Political Training Session. . . . At the end of 1937 she . . . organized a guerrilla detachment of 200 people under the leadership of the Dare-to-Die corps . . . in Southeast Shanxi, she on one occasion took up the post of commissioner . . . of the 3rd Administrative District’. Bo Yibo, ‘Preface to Collection’, op. cit., p. 28. 75. Bo Yibo, ‘Shanxi United Front’, op. cit., p. 14. 76. Ibid. 77. Ma Huizhi and Li Chuli, ‘Huiyi Liu Shaoqi tongzhi zai beifangju’ [Remembering Comrade Liu Shaoqi in the North Bureau], Renmin ribao, 14 May 1980. Liu Xiwu of the sixty-one also worked for the North Bureau immediately after his release. 78. Lyman P. Van Slyke, ‘The Chinese Communist Movement during the SinoJapanese War 1937–1945’, in Lloyd Eastman, Jerome Ch’en, Suzanne Pepper and Lyman P. Van Slyke, The Nationalist Era In China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 206. 79. Hu Hua, Zhonggong, op. cit., pp. 100–1. 80. Jack Belden, China Shakes the World (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970), pp. 51–2. Song Shaowen, recently released from the Jiangsu GMD Penitentiary, went on to become Chairman of the JCJ Border Region Government. Zhang Wenang had been released from a Shanxi GMD penitentiary. Kuo, Analytical History, op. cit., 3, p. 278. 81. Henry G. Schwarz, Liu Shao-ch’i and “People’s War:” A Report on the Creation of Base Areas in 1938 (Lawrence, KS: Center for East Asian Studies, University of Kansas, 1969), p. 16. 82. ‘Six Years of Work in North and Central China’, in Selected Works of Liu Shaoqi, op. cit., p. 256. 83. Carol Lee Hamrin and Timothy Cheek (eds), China’s Establishment Intellectuals (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe), p. 56. 84. See Van Slyke, ‘The Chinese’, op. cit., pp. 206, 263–4.

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Notes and References 211 85. Donald W. Klein and Anne B. Clark (eds), Biographic Dictionary of Chinese Communism 1921–1965, vol. 1 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 30. 86. For example writer Chao Shuli, who joined the Sacriﬁce League in 1937, worked in the Taihang mountain area and joined the 8RA (see Belden, China, op. cit., pp. 87–96); Shi Yizhi worked for the party organization in Shanxi–Henan in 1940, was director of the Taiyue 4th Administration District and held the same post in the 1st District in 1943; Wu Guangtang, magistrate of Yulin in Shanxi in 1937, held the same post in Wuxiang in 1940 and was appointed special commissioner of the Taihang 3rd Administrative District in 1943; Yan Xiufeng worked for the Shanxi Provisional government under Yan Xishan as deputy director of the South Shanxi Administrative Ofﬁce; Wang Zhoru was South Shandong District Party Committee secretary. 87. See for example, David Goodman’s description of the Taiyue base, which although small was ‘important in two crucial ways for the CCP cause. The ﬁrst was its access to banking expertise and resources largely as a result of the League’s activities. . . . The second major signiﬁcance . . . was also in economic affairs. Taiyue . . . was the granary of JinJiLuYu to some considerable extent’. David S. G. Goodman, ‘JinJiLuYu in the Sino-Japanese War: The Border Region and the Border Region Government’, The China Quarterly, no. 140 (December 1994), p. 1016. Goodman also comments (p. 1022) on the JJLY Border Region government’s tax reform and currency stabilization programmes. See also Suzanne Pepper, Civil War in China: The Political Struggle 1945–1949 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1978), pp. 250–1, 373. 88. Zhang Wentian, ‘The Tasks of the Conference of CCP Delegates from the Soviet Regions’ (2 May 1937), in Tony Saich (ed.), The Rise to Power of the Chinese Communist Party: Documents and Analysis (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1996), p. 789. 89. On 4 March 1937 Liu’s ‘Letter to the Party Centre Concerning Past Work in the White Areas’ began plaintively: ‘I wrote three letters to you in the past week. You must have received them.’ His letter analysed and castigated the party for its generally ultraleftist line over the previous decade and related speciﬁcally to blind activist or leftist mistakes in four spheres of white area work: the relationship between open and secret operations; the strategy for mass struggle; propaganda and agitation work; and inner-party struggle. See Saich, The Rise to Power, op. cit., pp. 773–87. The Conference of CCP delegates from the Soviet Regions was held from 2–14 May and Liu’s opinions were discussed. The CCP leadership was prepared to admit that although mistakes had been made this did not constitute an overall incorrect and leftist line by the party over the previous decade and certainly not since the Jiangxi period from 1931. This was the message of Zhang Wentian’s concluding report. Immediately after this conference, a second one opened on party work in the white areas. Liu delivered a report in person on May 17, reiterating his critical views, though muting his criticism of the Jiangxi leadership and emphasizing work methods for the future. His controversial views were discussed at work sessions held on

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212 Notes and References

90.

91. 92. 93. 94.

95. 96.

97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103.

104. 105.

106. 107. 108. 109.

20–26 May. Participants felt that he was still exaggerating the ultraleftist issue. On 2 June Liu spoke before the Politburo. Those elements of his opinions which were deemed acceptable were incorporated into the concluding report to the conference, delivered by Zhang Wentian on 9–10 June. Liu Shaoqi Nianpu, op. cit., pp. 182–3. ‘Developing the Revolutionary Movement and Preventing Sabotage by Enemy Agents’ (1 October, 1936), Selected Works of Chen Yun (1926–1949), vol. 1 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1981), p. 49. Ibid., p. 47. Ibid. ‘Zhongyang zuzhibu guanyu suowei zishou fenzi de jueding’, in Liuda yilai dangnei mimi wenjian, vol. 1 (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1952), pp. 145–6. Kuo, Analytical History, vol. 4, op. cit., p. 126. (The article on ‘How to Handle the Cases of Arrested Communists and the Question of Morality’ was by Yang Jing.) Ibid., pp. 210–11. ‘Reorganizing Party Organizations in the Great Rear Area and Expanding Outside Activities Out There’ (December 1941), Selected Works of Chen Yun, op. cit., p. 158. Kuo, Analytical History, vol. 4, op. cit., pp. 76–7. For a discussion of the 100 Regiments Battle (in which Dong Tianzhi of the sixty-one was killed), see Van Slyke, ‘The Chinese’, op. cit., pp. 244–6. Ibid., p. 249. Kathleen Hartford and Stephen M. Goldstein (eds), Single Sparks: China’s Rural Revolutions (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1989), pp. 113, 118. Ibid., p. 119. Hu Hua, Zhonggong, pp. 106–7. Tetsuya Kataoka, Resistance and Revolution in China: The Communists and the Second United Front (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1974), pp. 280–1. Kuo, Analytical History, vol. 4, op. cit., pp. 204–5. See also Van Slyke, ‘The Chinese’, op. cit., p. 266. ‘Jianchi you cuo bi jiu de fangzen’ [Uphold the Policy that Mistakes Must be Rectiﬁed] (November 1978) in Chen Yun wenxuan, 1956–1985 (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1986), pp. 208–9 and notes 124–7, pp. 363–4. Ibid., p. 209. See Saich, The Rise to Power, op. cit., p. 667. See also pp. 1164–79 for a translation of the text of the resolution. Kuo, Analytical History, vol. 4, op. cit., p. 520. One of the sixty-one (who prefers to remain anonymous) informed me that their 1936 release experience was not raised for discussion during the campaign. While the sixty-one appear to have emerged unscathed from Kang Sheng’s ‘rescue’ operation, in which ‘spies’ and ‘agents’ were sought out among the party cadres from the early summer of 1942, not all ex-Caolanzi cadres were as lucky. At least one of the 61ers’ former colleagues, Liu Yaxiong, was severely victimized even though she had been amnestied out of Caolanzi: ‘during the “rescue movement”, she was groundlessly labelled as a traitor and was rehabilitated only two years later’. See Bo Yibo, ‘Preface to Collection’, op. cit., p. 28. One of the sixty-one, Liu Kerang, was

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Notes and References 213

110.

111.

112.

113.

114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119.

120.

121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128.

executed by the party before 1949, but it is not clear exactly when this took place. See Lowell Dittmer, Liu Shao-ch’i and the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1974), pp. 20–4. See also Frederick C. Teiwes, The Formation of the Maoist Leadership: From the Return of Wang Ming to the Seventh Party Congress (London: Contemporary China Institute, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1994), pp. 34–40. See John Byron and Robert Pack, The Claws of the Dragon: Kang Sheng (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992), pp. 178–84; Peter Seybolt, ‘Terror and Conformity: Counterespionage Campaigns, Rectiﬁcation, and Mass Movements, 1942–1943’, Modern China, vol. 12, no. 1 ( January 1986), pp. 39–73. For a study of Yan’an as the ‘moral centre of the revolution’, ‘a revolutionary simulacrum’ and Mao as the self-anointed cosmocratic ﬁgure’, see David E. Apter and Tony Saich, Revolutionary Discourse in Mao’s Republic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). ‘Looking Back at the Rectiﬁcation Movement of the Central Party School in Yan’an’, Renmin ribao, 27 July 1986, Joint Publication Research Service, 86070, pp. 46, 39. Seybolt, ‘Terror and Conformity’, op. cit., pp. 47–8. ‘The Biography of An Ziwen’, op. cit., pp. 27–8. History of the Chinese Communist Party, A Chronology of Events (1919–1990) (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1991), pp. 154–5. See ‘Decision of the CC Concerning the Investigation of Cadres’, in Saich, The Rise to Power, op. cit., p. 1155. Ibid., p. 1154. Mao apologized at least ﬁve times for the ‘excesses of the “rescue” movement’ and on the ﬁrst such occasion on 12 April 1944 at a Yan’an higher Party cadres conference, Mao bowed three times ‘until applause signiﬁed that the apology was accepted’. Teiwes, The Formation, op. cit., p. 57. Bo has referred to this meeting on a number of occasions. See for example, Bo Yibo, Qishi nian, op. cit., pp. 358–61; ‘Respect and Remembrance’, op. cit., pp. 99–100; ‘Preface to Report on Zhang’, op. cit., p. 30. Liu Lantao arrived in the winter of 1944 and Zhou Zhongying in January 1945. Both claimed to have reported immediately and had their prison release history entered in their dossiers. An Ziwen had spoken of it to prominent party comrades, including Huang Jing after An’s arrival in Beijing in late 1936, and to Zhu De, Yang Shangkun, and Peng Dehuai in south-east Shanxi in 1938. See Wu and Peng, Caolan chunqiu, op. cit., pp. 231–2. History of the Chinese Communist Party, op. cit., p. 151. Xiong Huaiji, Tiandi, op. cit., pp. 125–6. Wu and Peng, Caolan chunqiu, op. cit., p. 231. Bo Yibo, Qishi nian, op. cit., p. 375. Klein and Clark, Biographic Dictionary, op. cit., pp. 113–16. See for example ‘Inside Story’, in Classiﬁed Documents, op. cit., p. 143, and ‘Utterly Smash Liu Shaoqi’, op. cit., p. 3. Byron and Pack, The Claws of the Dragon, op. cit., pp. 188–90. Liu Shaoqi, On the Party (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1950), p. 70.

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214 Notes and References 129. 130. 131. 132. 133.

Hamrin and Cheek, China’s Establishment Intellectuals, op. cit., pp. 58–9. Hu Hua, Zhonggong, op. cit., pp. 112–13. ‘The Biography of An Ziwen’, op. cit., p. 33. History of the Chinese Communist Party, op. cit., p. 192. See Bo Yibo, Qishi nian, op. cit., pp. 380–460, for details of his role in land reform, taxation policies, and industrial and commercial reform during this period. 134. Ibid., pp. 461–524. Bo describes the shift of focus in party work from rural to urban and the policies implemented for political and economic stabilization. 135. ‘In Deep Memory of Hu Xikui’, op. cit., L. 9. 136. The ten who ‘sacriﬁced’ themselves before 1949 were Dong Tianzhi, Xian Weixun, Yi Mingdao, Zhang Youqing, Zhang Manping, Zhao Bo, Wang Yong, Xia Fuhai, Ma Yutang and Wang Zhenlin. See Bo Yibo, Qishi nian, op. cit., pp. 195–6.

3

Levels of Power: Careers 1949–1966

1. ‘Utterly Smash Liu Shaoqi’s Renegade Clique’, Chunlei, 13 April 1967; Survey of China Mainland Press, 3951 (2 June 1967), pp. 5–6. 2. A. Doak Barnett, Cadres, Bureaucracy, and Political Power in Communist China (New York: Columbia University Press, 1967), pp. 6–9, and Table 1, p. 456. 3. Frederick C. Teiwes, ‘Establishment and Consolidation of the New Regime’, The Cambridge History of China, vol. 14 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 57. 4. See Harry Harding, Organizing China: The Problem of Bureaucracy 1949–1976 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1981), in which Harding analyses four PRC approaches to bureaucratization: rationalizing, external remedial, internal remedial, and radical. 5. See Hong Yung Lee, From Revolutionary Cadres to Party Technocrats in Socialist China (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991), p. 334. 6. Ibid., p. 331. 7. See, for instance, ‘Inside Story’, in Classiﬁed Chinese Documents: A Selection (Taipei: Institute of International Relations, 1978), pp. 142–3. 8. Unless stated otherwise, discussion on the Control Commission is drawn from Paul Cocks, ‘The Role of the Party Control Committee in Communist China’, Papers on China, vol. 22B (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), pp. 49–96; Graham Young, ‘Control and Style: Discipline Inspection Commissions since the 11th Congress’, The China Quarterly, no. 97 (1984), especially pp. 24–30; Franz Schurmann, Ideology and Organization in Communist China (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1968), pp. 145, 156–62, 339–64; Peter R. Moody, The Politics of the Eighth Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (Hamden, CT: Shoestring Press, 1973), especially pp. 38–9. 9. A Great Trial In Chinese History (Beijing: New World Press, 1981), p. 157. 10. For a study of the Gao–Rao affair, see Frederick C. Teiwes, Politics at Mao’s Court: Gao Gang and Party Factionalism in the Early 1950s (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1990). In the early 1950s Gao Gang was the leading PRC

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Notes and References 215

11. 12. 13.

14.

15. 16. 17.

18.

19.

20.

21. 22.

ofﬁcial in the north-east and Rao Shushi in the east. Not long after their transfer to central posts in Beijing (Gao as head of the State Planning Commission in late 1952 and Rao as director of the Central Organization Department in early 1953) they were accused of forming an antiparty clique and of building independent power bases (‘kingdoms’) in the north-east and east. They were denounced in 1954. Gao committed suicide and was posthumously expelled from the party in 1955. Rao, also expelled, spent the next twenty years in prison or detention till his death in 1975. Schurmann, Ideology and Organization, op. cit., p. 158. Derek J. Waller, The Government and Politics of Communist China (New York: Doubleday, 1971), p. 99. Liu Xiwu and Liu Lantao were imprisoned in Caolanzi and Qian Ying in the Nanjing Gendarmeries between 1933 and 1937. Li Chuli and Liu Geping were in Caolanzi. Shuai Mengqi and Wang Weigang were imprisoned from 1932 to 1937. Ma Mingfang was imprisoned in Xinjiang between 1942 and 1946. Gong Zirong was a 1930s Shanxi prison cadre. The paucity of information on the lives of three members and one alternate member from the late 1920s to the mid 1930s is a likely indication that these were years spent in prison. (This also applies to deputy secretary Wang Congwu.) Only three members of the entire Commission appear to have had a clearly army and ‘red’ area past: Dong Biwu, Xiao Hua and Wang Weizhou. Cocks, ‘The Role of the Party’, op. cit., p. 55. There is a certain irony to this quote, in that the sixty-one were later to be accused of doing exactly this, blindly obeying orders. Ibid., p. 56. Ibid., p. 61. Including some more prison cadres – Liu Yaxiong, Zhang Jiafu, Wu Defeng, Qiu Jin, Yang Zhihua and Zhang Zhiyi – and three of the sixty-one – Liu Shenzhi, Wang Hefeng, Zhou Zhongying. Liu Lantao, ‘The Communist Party of China is the Supreme Commander of the Chinese People in Building Socialism’, in Ten Glorious Years (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press: 1959). Unless otherwise noted the information in this section is drawn from the following: Chen Yeping and Han Jingcao (eds), An Ziwen Zhuanlue (Taiyuan: Shanxi renmin chubanshe, 1985); Lawrence Sullivan (ed.) ‘The Biography of An Ziwen’; Frederick C. Teiwes, Politics at Mao’s Court: Gao Gang and Party Factionalism in the Early 1950s (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1990); Roberta Martin, Party Recruitment in China: Patterns and Prospects, Occasional Papers of the East Asian Institute (New York: Columbia University, 1981); Harold Hinton (ed.), The People’s Republic of China 1949–1979: A Documentary Survey, vol. 1: 1949–1957 (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1980). Michel Oksenberg, ‘Getting Ahead and Along in Communist China: The Ladder of Success on the Eve of the Cultural Revolution’, in John Wilson Lewis (ed.), Party Leadership and Revolutionary Power in China (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 315–16. Section 20 of the Special Procuratorate’s Indictment, A Great Trial, op. cit., pp. 168–9. Teiwes, ‘Establishment and Consolidation’, op. cit., pp. 71–2.

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216 Notes and References 23. An Ziwen, ‘The Consolidation of Party Organizations’, People’s China, 1 July 1953, pp. 7–8. 24. See for example ‘Chronology of Big Events Concerning the Counterrevolutionary Revisionist Line for Party-building Formulated and Pushed by Liu Shao-ch’i’, Ziliao zhuanji [Special Collection of Materials], November 1968, Survey of China Mainland Press, supplement 246 (12 March 1969), p. 12. 25. Martin, Party Recruitment, op. cit., p. 9. 26. An Ziwen, ‘The Consolidation of Party Organizations’, op. cit., p. 6. 27. ‘Chronology of Big Events’, op. cit., p. 12. 28. Michael Y. M. Kau and John K. Leung, The Writings of Mao Zedong 1949–1976, vol. 1 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1986), pp. 230–1. 29. Liu Shaoqi, ‘Eight Requirements for CPC Membership’, Hongqi, no. 24 (16 December 1985); Joint Publication Research Service, 86-003 (5 February 1986), p. 35. 30. Teiwes, Politics at Mao’s Court, op. cit., pp. 96–9, 164. 31. See Bo Yibo, Ruogan zhongda juece yu shijian de huigu [Reminiscences on Several Important Decisions and Events], vol. 1 (Beijing: Zhonggong zhongyang dangxiao chubanshe, 1991), p. 313. 32. Chen and Han, An Ziwen, op. cit., pp. 101–2; trans. in Teiwes, Politics at Mao’s Court, op. cit., p. 215. 33. Ibid., pp. 102–3; trans. in Teiwes, Politics at Mao’s Court, p. 216. 34. Harding, Organizing China, op. cit., pp. 73–5. 35. See for example ‘Utterly Smash’, op. cit., p. 4; ‘Chronology of Big Events’, op. cit., p. 13. 36. ‘Utterly Smash’, op. cit., p. 4; conﬁrmed by Chen and Han in An Ziwen, op. cit., pp. 124–5. 37. COD report, 1 August 1955; see ‘The Biography of An Ziwen’, op cit., pp. 62–4. 38. Chen and Han, An Ziwen, op. cit., pp. 125–8; ‘Inside Story’, in Classiﬁed Documents, op. cit., pp. 144–5. 39. ‘The Biography of An Ziwen’, op. cit., p. 69. 40. Ibid., p. 62. 41. Hua Zuping, ‘Completely Discredit Big Renegade An Ziwen’s Renegade Philosophy’, Wenhui renbao, 1 June 1968; Survey of China Mainland Press, 4206 (26 June 1968), p. 3. 42. ‘Inside Story’, in Classiﬁed Documents, op. cit., pp. 143–4; see also ibid., p. 5. 43. ‘Utterly Smash’, op. cit., p. 4. 44. Zhou Enlai, ‘Report on the Question of Intellectuals’, 29 January 1956, in Hinton, The People’s Republic, op. cit., pp. 285, 294. 45. ‘The Biography of An Ziwen’, op. cit., p. 78. 46. The term ‘readjusters’ is taken from the post-Great Leap slogan ‘Readjustment, consolidation and raising standards’. See Kenneth Lieberthal, ‘The Great Leap Forward and the Split in the Yenan Leadership’, in The Cambridge History of China, vol. 14, op. cit., p. 322. 47. History of the Chinese Communist Party, A Chronology of Events (1919–1990) (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1991), pp. 295–6. 48. ‘Chronology of Big Events’, op. cit., p. 15. 49. ‘The Biography of An Ziwen’, op. cit., p. 95.

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Notes and References 217 50. ‘Crimes of Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping in Opposing Chairman Mao Concerning the Cadre Line and Organizational Line,’ Liu Shaoqi zui xinglu [A Record of Liu Shao-ch’i’s Crimes], September 1967, in Selections from China Mainland Magazines, supplement 26 (27 June 1968), p. 20. Conﬁrmed by An Ziwen in ‘Build Up Our Party Successfully – In Memory of Comrade Liu Shaoqi’, Renmin ribao, 8 May 1980; Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 30 May 1980, L.16. 51. In June 1961 Mao had suggested this at the Central Committee Work Conference in Beijing; the Central Committee accordingly issued a directive in September 1961. 52. For example ‘Cultivate and Train Millions of Successors Who Will Carry on the Cause of Proletarian Revolution’, Renmin ribao, 3 August 1964, in Hinton, The People’s Republic, op. cit., pp. 212–13; ‘Revolution Must be Passed on from One Generation to Another’, Zhongguo qingnian [China Youth], no. 15 (1 August 1964; Selections from China Mainland Magazines, 436 (28 September 1964), pp. 22–7. 53. ‘To Cultivate and Train Successors is a Major, Thousand-year Project in the Cause of Revolution’, Hongqi, no. 14 (31 July 1964); Selections from China Mainland Magazines, 433 (8 September 1964), pp. 1–6; An Ziwen, ‘Cultivating and Training Revolutionary Successors is a Strategic Task of the Party’, Hongqi, nos 17–18 (23 September 1964); Selections from China Mainland Magazines, 438 (12 October 1964), pp. 1–12. 54. ‘To Cultivate and Train’, op. cit., p. 6. 55. Ibid., p. 4. 56. An Ziwen, ‘Cultivating and Training’, op. cit., pp. 8–9. 57. Ibid., p. 12. 58. ‘Chronology of Big Events’, op. cit., p. 17. 59. The information in this section is drawn from ‘Yang Xianzhen’s Philosophic Criminal Case’, edited by Carol Lee Hamrin, Chinese Law and Goverment, vol. 24, nos 1–2 (Spring–summer 1991), hereafter cited as Hamrin, CLG. The issue contains a translation of Yang Xianzhen’s Wode zhexue ‘zui’an’ [My Philosophic ‘Criminal Case’, a collection of Yang’s writings], published in 1981, and an introduction by Hamrin that complements her earlier essay, ‘Yang Xianzhen: Upholding Orthodox Leninist Theory’, in Carol Lee Hamrin and Timothy Cheek (eds), China’s Establishment Intellectuals (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1986), pp. 51–91; Yang Xianzhen zhuan [Biography of Yang Xianzhen] (Beijing: Zhonggong dangshi chubanshe, 1996); Michael Schoenhals, ‘Yang Xianzhen’s Critique of the Great Leap Forward’, Modern Asian Studies, vol. 26, no. 3 (1992), pp. 591–608. 60. See previous note. Donald J. Munro, ‘The Yang Hsien-chen Affair’, The China Quarterly, no. 22 (April–June 1965), pp. 75–82; Merle Goldman, China’s Intellectuals (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), pp. 95–101; Yang Xianzhen, ‘One Who Inspired and Guided the Party School – In Memory of Comrade Liu Shaoqi’, Hongqi, no. 7 (1 April 1980); Joint Publication Research Service, 75739 (21 May 1980), pp. 35–43; ‘The Socialist Economy Should be Planned Diversiﬁed and Flexible’, Guangming ribao, 23 May 1980, excerpts in Summary of World Broadcasts (BBC), FE/6431/B11, pp. 3–4; Yang Xianzhen, ‘A Sinister Conspirator who Butchered and Persecuted the Loyal and Innocent – Exposing Kang Sheng’s

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218 Notes and References

61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

78. 79.

80. 81.

Features of a Counter-revolutionary Double-dealer’, Hongqi, no. 1 (1 January 1981); Joint Publication Research Service, 77587 (13 March 1981), pp. 53–9. See Hamrin, CLG, op. cit., pp. 29–30, for translations of Yang’s essays (1953, 1955) on this issue. Hamrin and Cheek, China’s Establishment Intellectuals, op. cit., p. 65. Ibid., p. 67. Schoenhals, ‘Yang Xianzhen’s Critique’, op. cit., p. 595. ‘Talks at the Wuchang Conference’ (21–3 November 1958), in The Secret Speeches of Chairman Mao, edited by Roderick MacFarquhar, Timothy Cheek and Eugene Wu (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 481. Schoenhals, ‘Yang Xianzhen’s Critique’, op. cit., p. 601. Ibid., pp. 603–4. Hamrin, CLG, op. cit., p. 22, note 18. Schoenhals, ‘Yang Xianzhen’s Critique’, op. cit., p. 607. Yang Xianzhen, ‘A Sinister Conspirator’, op. cit., p. 57. Hamrin and Cheek, China’s Establishment Intellectuals, op. cit., p. 76. History of the Chinese Communist Party, op. cit., p. 304. Merle Goldman, ‘The Party and the Intellectuals: Phase Two’, The Cambridge History of China, op. cit., p. 469. The article, by Ai Hengwu and Lin Qingshan, appeared in Guangming ribao, 29 May 1964. Hamrin, CLG, op. cit., p. 15. Mao Zedong sixiang wansui [Long Live Mao Zedong Thought, 1949–1968], Joint Publication Research Service, 61269-1. See for example Yang’s ‘One Who Inspired’, op. cit., p. 41, and ‘Selected Edition on Liu Shaoqi’s Counter-Revolutionary Revisionist Crimes’, pamphlet by the Liaison Station . . . attached to the August 18 Red Rebel Regiment of Nankai University, April 1967; Selections from China Mainland Magazines, 651 (22 April 1969), p. 29. Yang Xianzhen, ‘One Who Inspired’, op. cit., p. 37. Sources for this section include Bo Yibo, Ruogan, op. cit.; David M. Bachman, Chen Yun and the Chinese Political System (Berkeley, CA: Institute of East Asian Studies, University of California, 1985); Parris H. Chang, Power and Policy in China (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University, 1978); Roderick MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, vols. 1–3 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974, 1983, 1997); Audrey Donnithorne, China’s Economic System (New York: Praeger, 1967); Frederick C. Teiwes with Warren Sun, China’s Road to Disaster (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1999); Teiwes, Politics at Mao’s Court, op. cit.; Nicholas R. Lardy, ‘Economic Recovery and the 1st Five-Year Plan’ and ‘The Chinese Economy under Stress 1958–1965’, in The Cambridge History of China, op. cit., pp. 144–84, 360–97. Bachman, Chen Yun, op. cit., p. 107. Bachman’s views on economic policy making in the 1950s – especially those expressed in his book Bureaucracy, Economy, and Leadership in China: The Institutional Origins of the Great Leap Forward (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991) – have provoked sharp critical comment. See for example Frederick C. Teiwes, ‘Leaders, Institutions, and the Origins of the Great Leap Forward’, Paciﬁc Affairs, vol. 66, no. 2 (Summer 1993), pp. 244–53; Alfred L. Chan, ‘Leaders, Coalition Politics, and Policy-Formulation

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Notes and References 219

82.

83.

84.

85.

86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92.

93.

94. 95. 96. 97. 98.

in China: The Great Leap Forward Revisited’, Journal of Contemporary China, no. 8 (Winter–Spring 1995), pp. 57–78. Both scholars criticize Bachman for de-emphasizing Mao’s and Chen Yun’s roles and stature in economic policy making, and for overemphasizing the role of institutional interests and oversimplifying the relationship between the ‘ﬁnancial coalition’ and the ‘planning and heavy industry coalition’ (as deﬁned by Bachman). See ‘Down with Three-Anti Element and Big Renegade Bo Yibo, Sinister Despot on the Industrial and Communications Front’, Dongfang hong [The East is Red], 15 February 1967; ‘Forty Charges against Bo Yibo’, Hongweibing bao [Red Guard Journal], 22 February 1967, in Current Background, 878 (28 April 1969), pp. 1–15, 16–19, respectively. For a discussion on broad and narrow, deep and shallow power bases, see Lowell Dittmer, ‘Bases of Power in Chinese Politics: A Theory and Analysis of the Fall of the Gang of Four’, World Politics, vol. 31, no. 1 (October 1978), p. 41. Former prison cadres and Bo associates appointed to institutions under Bo’s auspices include Liu Zijiu, Li Yu, Song Shaowen and Yang Fangzhi (to the Finance and Economic Committee in 1949); Kong Xiangzhen, Gu Mu, Wang Heshou, Liu Xiufeng, Liu Yumin, Fu Yutian and Li Yu (to the State Construction Commission in 1954); Gu Mu, Song Shaowen, Sun Zhiyuan, Liu Daifeng, Guo Hongtao and Zhou Zhongying (to the State Economic Commission in 1956); Ma Huizhi, Peng De, Kong Xiangzhen and Liang Yingyong (to the State Council Third Ofﬁce in 1961). Donald W. Klein and Anne B. Clark (eds), Biographic Dictionary of Chinese Communism 1921–1965, vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), p. 740. Teiwes, Politics at Mao’s Court, op. cit., p. 64. Kau and Leung, The Writings of Mao Zedong, op. cit., pp. 363–71. Mao spoke on 12 August 1953. Teiwes, Politics at Mao’s Court, op. cit., p. 66. Ibid., pp. 199–200. Ibid., p. 200. Kau and Leung, The Writings of Mao, op. cit., p. 365. Xiong Huaiji refers to a report written by Bo in 1953 which details his prison release experience. If so, this was likely to have been in the framework of a self-criticism. Xiong Huaiji, Tiandi you zhengqi: Caolanzi jianyu douzheng yu ‘liushi yi ren an’ (Beijing: Beijing dichu geming shi, Beijing chubanshe, 1982), p. 127. Bo Yibo attributes these words to Mao at a secretariat meeting to which Bo, Liu and An Ziwen were invited. See Bo’s ‘Comrade Chen Yun’s Achievements and Style Live Forever – Written to Mark the First Anniversary of the Death of Comrade Chen Yun’, Renmin ribao, 10 April 1996; Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 24 April 1996, p. 28. Lardy, ‘Economic Recovery’, op. cit., p. 158. Ibid., p. 159. Teiwes, ‘Establishment and Consolidation’, op. cit., p. 124. Bachman, Chen Yun, op. cit., p. 66. Bo Yibo, ‘Respect and Remembrance – Marking the 60th Anniversary of the Birth of the CCP’, Hongqi, no. 13 (1 July 1981) in Joint Publication Research Service, 78817 (24 August 1981), pp. 97–108.

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220 Notes and References 99. Jerome Ch’en (ed.), Mao (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1969), pp. 66–8. 100. Mao Zedong, On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1967), p. 165. 101. MacFarquhar, The Origins, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 297. 102. Teiwes and Sun, China’s Road to Disaster, op. cit., p. 61. 103. Donnithorne, China’s Economic System, op. cit., p. 462. 104. Teiwes and Sun, China’s Road to Disaster, op. cit., pp. 73–6. 105. See Frederick C. Teiwes, ‘Mao Texts and the Mao of the 1950s’, Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, no. 33 ( January 1995), p. 146; Chan, ‘Leaders’, op. cit., p. 75. 106. Chang, Power and Policy, op. cit., p. 106. 107. ‘Down with Three-Anti Element’, op. cit., p. 16. 108. Bo may have felt something of a personal vendetta against Peng Dehuai, who had apparently supported Gao Gang’s position on red military cadres versus white area cadres, and had particular antipathy towards Liu Shaoqi, Bo Yibo and An Ziwen. See Teiwes, Politics at Mao’s Court, op. cit., pp. 105–6. 109. Lardy, ‘Economic Recovery’, op. cit., p. 367. 110. Kjeld Erik Brodsgaard, ‘Paradigmatic Change: Readjustment and Reform in the Chinese Economy, 1953–1981’, Part 1, Modern China, vol. 9, no. 1 ( January 1983), pp. 49–53. 111. Bo Yibo, ‘Strive to Carry Out the Great Task of the Technical Transformation of Agriculture More Swiftly’, in Ten Glorious Years, (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1959), pp. 268–9. 112. Chang, Power and Policy, op. cit., p. 128. 113. MacFarquhar, The Origins, op. cit., vol. 3, pp. 86–9. 114. Chang, Power and Policy, op. cit., pp. 135–6. 115. Lardy, ‘Economic Recovery’, op. cit., p. 392. 116. ‘Down with Three-Anti Element’, op. cit., p. 2. 117. Brodsgaard, ‘Paradigmatic Change’, op. cit., pp. 48–53, 58, 72–3. 118. Ibid., p. 72. 119. Lucien Pye, The Dynamics of Chinese Politics (Santa Monica, CA: Rand Corporation, 1981), pp. 146–8, 197–219.

4

Prison Again – the CCP Version 1. ‘Celestial Troops Pound at the Liu Shao-ch’i Clique of Traitors’, Shanghai hongweibing zhanbao [Shanghai Red Guards Combat Bulletin], 15 August 1968, part 2; Selections from China Mainland Magazines, supplement 30 (30 October 1968) pp. 9–17. This is a reprint of a report by the ‘18 August’ Nankai University Red Guards, part 3 of which appears in Selections from China Mainland Magazines, supplement 31 (18 November 1968), pp. 23–30. See also Michael Schoenhals (ed.), China’s Cultural Revolution 1966–1969: Not a Dinner Party (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1996), pp. 95–101. 2. ‘Erecting a Monument in Bringing Order out of Chaos – A Posthumous Account of How Comrade Hu Yaobang Led in Rehabilitating Those in the “61-People Case” ’, Renmin ribao, 1 June 1989; Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 8 June 1989, p. 22.

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Notes and References 221 3. Unless noted otherwise, the data on and discussions of the Cultural Revolution are drawn mainly from Harry Harding, ‘The Chinese State in Crisis’, in Roderick MacFarquhar and John King Fairbank (eds), The Cambridge History of China, vol. 15 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 107–217; Stuart R. Schram, ‘Mao Tse-tung’s Thought from 1949–1976’, in The Cambridge History of China, op. cit., pp. 1–104; John Byron and Robert Pack, The Claws of the Dragon: Kang Sheng (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992); Lowell Dittmer, Liu Shao-ch’i and the Chinese Cultural Revolution (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1974); William A. Joseph, Christin P. W. Wong and David Zweig (eds), New Perspectives on the Cultural Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991); Yan Jiaqi and Gao Gao, Turbulent Decade: A History of the Cultural Revolution (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1996). 4. Information and comment on the Central Case Examination Groups (CCEG) are drawn from Schoenhals, ‘The Central Case Examination Group 1966–79’, The China Quarterly, no. 145 (March 1996), pp. 87–111. The CCEG started out in May 1966 as the Central Examination Committee (CEC) and included among its personnel Liu Shaoqi and An Ziwen. Initially the CEC designated ﬁve separate case groups to investigate the cases of Peng Zhen, Lu Dingyi, Luo Ruiqing, Yang Shangkun and Tian Jiaying (Mao’s secretary). Tian’s group was dissolved after his suicide. The Luo Ruiqing Group ‘was subordinate to the Central Military Commission’. The CEC became the CCEG, accountable not only to the Politburo but also directly to Mao. The personnel had rapidly changed, some of them, such as Liu and An, becoming objects of investigation. The CCEG became a radical elite stronghold. Subordinate to it were the ﬁrst, second and third ofﬁces, each heading a number of case groups. 5. See, for example, Yan and Gao, Turbulent Decade, op. cit., pp. 140–3. 6. Schoenhals (‘The Central Case Examination Group’, op. cit., pp. 110–11) raises the point that Cultural Revolution violence has until recently been perceived chieﬂy as the domain of mass Red Guard activity, whereas in fact state violence towards party cadres appears to have been no less serious and possibly more so. The latter was simply less public, and details of it have taken longer to emerge. 7. Dittmer, Liu Shao-ch’i, op. cit., p. 63. 8. ‘Bombard the Headquarters – My Big-Character Poster’, which without actually naming Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, criticized them for their work team efforts. See Jerome Ch’en, Mao Papers (London: Oxford University Press, 1970), p. 47. 9. Harding, ‘The Chinese State in Crisis’, op. cit., p. 111. 10. See Dittmer, Liu Shao-ch’i, op. cit., p. 95; Ch’en, Mao Papers, op. cit., p. 123. 11. Lawrence Sullivan (ed.), ‘The Biography of An Ziwen’, p. 97. 12. Byron and Pack, The Claws of the Dragon, op. cit., p. 344. 13. See ‘The Biography of An Ziwen’, op. cit., p. 97. 14. Byron and Pack, The Claws of the Dragon, op. cit., p. 345. Liu Shaoqi’s widow, Wang Guangmei, later conﬁrmed that ‘a report on the case about the formalities of the discharge of 61 persons from prison was suddenly circulated in August and September 1966’ (Wang Guangmei, ‘He Showed his Integrity’, Gongren ribao, 14 July 1980; Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 5 August 1980.

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222 Notes and References 15. See Kenneth Lieberthal, Central Documents and Politburo Politics in China (Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1978), p. 159. 16. See Schoenhals, China’s Cultural Revolution, op. cit., pp. 97–8. 17. ‘Celestial Troops’, op. cit., part 2, p. 10. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid. In December Xu Bing, who had been so instrumental in the 1936 release arrangements, wrote to Kang Sheng and Vice-Premier Li Fuchun reminding them of the Central Committee’s role at the time. But ‘His letter was like a rock tossed into the ocean’ (Yan and Gao, Turbulent Decade, op. cit., p. 140). 20. ‘Celestial Troops’, op. cit., part 2, p. 11. 21. Bo Yibo, ‘Cherish the Deep Memory of Esteemed and Beloved Comrade Zhou Enlai’, Renmin ribao, 8 January 1979; Summary of World Broadcasts (BBC), FE/6014/B11 (12 January 1979), pp. 2–5. 22. See Stuart Schram (ed.), Mao Tse-tung Unrehearsed (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1974), pp. 268, 274; Huang Zheng, ‘The Beginning and End of the “Liu Shaoqi Case Group” ’, in Michael Schoenhals (ed.), ‘Mao’s Great Inquisition: The Central Case Examination Group, 1966–1979’, Chinese Law and Government, vol. 29, no. 3 (May–June, 1996), pp. 7–9. 23. ‘Celestial Troops’, op. cit., part 2, p. 13. 24. Ibid. According to the NURGs, Zhou Rongxin and others had ‘suppressed’ the materials. Zhou had worked closely in the Northern Bureau and GACFEC with Bo Yibo. 25. In the chapter entitled ‘Annihilate Every Renegade’ (Schoenhals, China’s Cultural Revolution, op. cit., p. 99), 12 November is the date given for the ﬁrst dazibao unmasking of the 61, and 19 November as the date when the NURGs’ investigative report on the 61 was submitted. 26. Selected Works of Zhou Enlai, vol. 2 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1989), pp. 472–3. 27. Ibid. 28. See Dittmer, Liu Shao-ch’i, op. cit., pp. 145–6. 29. ‘Former Jilin CCP Leader Zhao Lin Rehabilitated’, Changchun, Jilin Provincial Service, 7 February 1979; Summary of World Broadcasts (BBC), FE/6039/BII (10 February 1979), p. 4. 30. Yan and Gao, Turbulent Decade, op. cit., p. 140. 31. See ‘A Document of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party Zhongfa (1980) No. 25’, Issues and Studies, vol. 16, no. 11 (November 1980), editor’s note, p. 70; Huang Zheng, ‘The Beginning and End’, Chinese Law and Government, vol. 29, no. 3 (May–June 1996), p. 12. 32. See for example Liu Ying, ‘Mourning Comrade Zhang Wentian with Profound Grief’, Xinhua, 26 August 1979; Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 29 August 1979, L. 8. 33. The January Power Seizure refers to the ousting of the Shanghai Municipal Committee by radical groups, heralding the exit of other local party authorities and their eventual replacement by three-in-one ‘Revolutionary Committees’ (composed of military, party/state and mass representatives). 34. ‘Celestial Troops’, op. cit., part 2, p. 16; part 3, pp. 27–8. 35. Hongqi Combat Group of the Ministry of Agriculture, ‘Thoroughly Reckon with Big Renegade Liao Lu-yen’s Towering Crimes in the Ministry of

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Notes and References 223

36.

37. 38.

39. 40.

41.

42.

43.

44.

45. 46.

Agriculture’, Survey of China Mainland Press, 4001 (15 August 1967), pp. 9–15. ‘Selected Edition on Liu Shaoqi’s Counter-Revolutionary Revisionist Crimes’, Selection from China Mainland Magazines, 651 (22 April 1964), p. 13. Yan and Gao, Turbulent Decade, op. cit., pp. 140–1. According to the NURGs’ account in ‘Celestial Troops’, op. cit., part 3, p. 26, their own ‘theoretical’ articles, such as ‘Angrily Denouncing the Traitors’ Philosophy’ and ‘Down With the Traitors’ Philosophy’, were published in the Renmin ribao, Guangming ribao and Wenhui ribao (no dates given). Harding, ‘The Chinese State in Crisis’, op. cit., pp. 175–6. Speech at a reception of representatives of the Jiangsu Revolutionary Rebel Committee for Seizure of Power, 8 February 1967, Survey of China Mainland Press, supplement 238 (8 November 1968), p. 28. See for example ‘A Great Struggle to Defend Party Principles – Revealing the True Nature of a Major Political Incident, the February Countercurrent Concocted by Lin Biao and the Gang of Four’, Renmin ribao, 26 February 1979; Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 28 February 1979, E.7–20. In earlier drafts of this chapter, Zhou was viewed in a somewhat more, but not totally, sympathetic light as having tried to steer the Cultural Revolution away from chaos. Michael Schoenhals’ comments and interpretation (especially in his article ‘The Central Case Examination Group, 1966–1979’, op. cit., pp. 87–111) of Zhou’s behaviour have done much to disabuse me of such a viewpoint. The US-based Chinese scholar, Song Yongyi, who on a recent visit to China was arrested and then deported for meddling with so-called ‘state secrets’, was researching the Cultural Revolution with speciﬁc interest in Zhou Enlai’s role. See Jonathan Mirsky, ‘Research on China’s Cultural Revolution is not Espionage’, International Herald Tribune, 7 January 2000. Harding (‘The Chinese State in Crisis’, op. cit., pp. 177–9) compares this to the Lushan conference of 1959 in that it had a similar political effect – the mass campaign, instead of being wound down as intended, was ‘reradicalized’ because of Mao’s pique at being criticized for his intent and handling of the campaign in question. ‘Some Decisions of the CCP Central Committee and the State Council on Ensuring Security of Conﬁdential Documents and Files’, Current Background, vol. 852 (6 May 1968). In early January, Qinghua University students ‘brought’ Bo Yibo back to Beijing. The report, ‘Initial Investigation into the Problem of the Voluntary Surrender [Recantation] and Betrayal by Bo Yibo, Liu Lantao, An Ziwen, Yang Xianzhen et al.’, was subsequently (and ofﬁcially) attached as an appendix to Zhongfa 96 (1967), ‘Zhonggong zhongyang guanyu yinfa Bo Yibo, Liu Lantao, An Ziwen, Yang Xianzhen deng chuyu wenti cailiao de pishi’ [Instruction of the CCP Central Committee Concerning the Printing and Distribution of Materials on the Problem of the Release from Prison of Bo Yibo, Liu Lantao, An Ziwen, Yang Xianzhen et al.]. Other appendices included a photocopy of the Huabei ribao announcement of 31 August 1936 with pseudonym signatures; the signatories of the 22 September issue; and

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47. 48.

49.

50.

51. 52. 53.

54.

55. 56.

57.

58.

59.

descriptions given by Liu Shenzhi and Liu Xiwu of the ignominious release procedure (see this volume, Chapter 2). ‘Overthrow Liu Shaoqi – Boss of a Big Clique of Renegades’, Hongqi, 8 March 1967; Selections from China Mainland Magazines, 182 (11 May 1967), p. 36. Bo Yibo, ‘Preface to “Report on Zhang Wentian’s Proposal for Opening up the Market” ’, Renmin ribao, 26 August 1995, in Foreign Broadcast Information Service, p. 31. Zhang and his wife were placed in ‘protective custody’ on 16 May 1968, separately but in the same building. In October the following year they were transferred together to Zhaoqing, Guangdong. Zhang was permitted to continue writing and studying. In May 1975 they were transferred to Wuxi. Zhang died in 1976. Until May 1968 the CCEG continued to exert pressure on Zhang Wentian to retract his statement that the Central Committee was involved and that the matter was entirely Liu’s responsibility; see Xiong Huaiji, Tiandi you zhengqi: Caolanzi jianyu douzheng yu ‘liushi yi ren an’ (Beijing: Beijing dichu geming shi, Beijing chubanshe, 1982), p. 132. History of the Chinese Communist Party, A Chronology of Events (1919–1990), (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1991), p. 336. Huang Zheng, ‘The Injustice Done to Liu Shaoqi’, Chinese Law and Government, vol. 32, no. 3 (May–June, 1999), pp. 49–51. ‘Chairman Mao and other Central Authorities’ Criticism of Liu Shaoqi’s Evil Book on “Self-cultivation” ’, Selections from China Mainland Magazines, 582 (3 July 1967), pp. 20–31. Qi Benyu, ‘Patriotism or National Betrayal – Comment on the Reactionary Film Inside Story of the Qing Court’, Hongqi, 31 March 1967; Summary of World Broadcasts (BBC), FE/2430/B (4 April 1967), pp. 37–52. Ibid., p. 51. Harold C. Hinton (ed.), The People’s Republic of China 1949–1979: A Documentary Survey, vol. 3 (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources), pp. 1703–4, 1707. Wang Hsueh-wen, ‘The Nature and Development of the Great Cultural Revolution’, Issues and Studies, vol. 5, no. 12 (September 1968), pp. 11–12. Wang Li later commented that there was no planned strategy to the Cultural Revolution and that ‘the Chairman made no strategic deployment at all . . . it was a process of groping ahead step by step’ (‘An Insider’s Account of the Cultural Revolution: Wang Li’s Memoirs’, in Michael Schoenhals (ed.), Chinese Law and Government, vol. 27, no. 6 (November–December 1994), p. 56. ‘Thoroughly Eradicate the Big Poisonous Weed “Self-Cultivation” ’, Beijing Home Service, 5 April 1967; Summary of World Broadcasts (BBC), FE/2434, p. 10. For further examples of ofﬁcial attacks on Liu. See ‘Bury the Slave Mentality Advocated by the Khrushchev of China’, Renmin ribao, 6 April 1967; Summary of World Broadcasts (BBC), FE/2435/B, pp. 1–6; ‘Condemnation of “Traitor’s Philosophy” ’, New China News Agency, 10 April 1967; Summary of World Broadcasts (BBC), FE/2436/B, pp. 20–21. ‘Betrayal of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat is the Essential Element in the Book on “Self-Cultivation” ’, Hongqi and Renmin ribao, 7 May 1967; Summary of World Broadcasts (BBC), FE/2460/B, pp. 12–19.

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Notes and References 225 60. ‘CCP Organization Department Director An Ziwen Tortured’, Sankei, 8 May 1967 (Beijing, 7 May 1967), Daily Summary of the Japanese Press, 9 May 1967, p. 4. 61. ‘Exposure of Traitor’s Clique’, Ceskoslovenska tiskova kancelar (Czechoslovak News Agency), 15 May 1967; Summary of World Broadcasts (BBC), FE/2467/C, pp. 1–2. 62. History of the Chinese Communist Party, op. cit., pp. 336–7. 63. See Yan and Gao, Turbulent Decade, op. cit., pp. 145–7; Wang Li, ‘The First Year of the “Cultural Revolution” ’, in Richard Siao (ed.), Chinese Law and Government, vol. 32, no. 4 (July–August 1999), pp. 89, 94. 64. ‘Lifting the Black Curtain of the Puppet “Kiangsu Reformatory” ’, Zhui qiongkou, 7 June 1967; Survey of China Mainland Press, 4030 (28 September 1967), pp. 4–9. 65. ‘Down With Peng Chen! Smash the Renegade Clique of the Former Peking Municipal Committee!’, Zhui qiongkou [Pursue the Tottering Foe], 7 June 1967; Survey of China Mainland Press, 4030 (28 September 1967), pp. 1–3. 66. ‘Strike Down Big Renegade Gu Mu’, Youdian zhanbao [Post & Telecommunications Combat Bulletin], 28 June 1967; Survey of China Mainland Press, supplement 210, pp. 20–21. 67. ‘Dig out the Economic Black Line of the ‘30s and its Backstage Boss – Liu Shaoqi, China’s Khrushchev’, Tianjin, Weidong, 15 June 1967; Survey of China Mainland Press, supplement 206, pp. 20–36. The article lists a number of people in the economic policy sphere who were imprisoned in Zhejiang in the 1930s, including Xue Muqiao and Sun Yefang. 68. Zhou Enlai had been directly involved in the release negotiations between the CCP and Zhang Zhichun, the GMD Xinjiang governor. 69. A Great Trial in Chinese History (Beijing: New World Press, 1981), p. 176. 70. Zhongfa 200 (67), ‘Notiﬁcation on Catching Traitors’, Current Background, 864 (16 October 1968), p. 6. 71. Liu’s third self-criticism in Chinese Law and Government, vol. 1, no. 1 (Spring 1968), pp. 75–80. 72. ‘Scheming to Betray the Party is Aiming to Usurp the Party,’ in Selections from China Mainland Magazines 592 (11 September 1967) p. 3. 73. Zhongfa 251 (67); Survey of China Mainland Press, 4057 (11 October 1967), pp. 6–7. 74. CRG ofﬁcials who had been sent to Wuhan to convey central support for radical organizations in conﬂict with local military forces were kidnapped by local ‘conservative’ groups with the support of the local PLA garrison. Zhou Enlai engineered their release. PLA forces intervened. Hundreds were killed, thousands wounded and violent radicalism escalated and spread to other provinces, and Beijing. 75. Classiﬁed Chinese Communist Documents: A Selection (Taipei: Institute of International Relations, 1978), pp. 34–40. See also Li Tien-min, ‘Examination Report on Liu Shao-ch’i’s Crimes’, Issues and Studies, vol. 5, no. 7 (April 1969), pp. 11–17. 76. Classiﬁed, op. cit., p. 39. 77. Wu Linquan and Peng Fei, Caolan chunqiu (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1988), pp. 270–94.

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226 Notes and References 78. Carol Lee Hamrin (ed.), ‘Yang Xianzhen’s Philosophic Criminal Case’, Chinese Law and Government, vol. 24, nos 1–2 (Spring–Summer 1991), p. 119. 79. ‘The Biography of An Ziwen’, op. cit., pp. 97–101. 80. Schoenhals, ‘The Central Case Examination Group’, op. cit., p. 95. 81. Ibid., p. 98. 82. Wu and Peng, Caolan chunqiu, op. cit., pp. 234–58. 83. Wu and Peng’s account of Bo Yibo’s horrendous experience (ibid., pp. 248–56) is translated as ‘Bo Yibo has an Attitude Problem’, in Schoenhals, China’s Cultural Revolution, op. cit., pp. 122–35. 84. ‘Summary of the Major Unjust, False and Wrong Verdicts Reversed Since the Third Plenary Session of the 11th CCPCC’, Dangshi yanjiu ziliao: neibu cankao ziliao [Party History Research Materials: For Internal Reference], vol. 4 (Chengdu: Party History Research Centre, Museum of the Chinese Revolution, 1983), trans. in Issues and Studies, vol. 21, no. 6 (June 1985), p. 156. 85. ‘The Biography of An Ziwen’, op. cit., p. 98; Richard Siao (ed.), ‘Deng Xiaoping (I)’, Chinese Law and Government, vol. 28, no. 2 (March–April 1995), p. 78. 86. Xiong Huaiji, Tiandi, op. cit., p. 143, quoting from Bo Yibo’s 28 000character appeal.

5

Rehabilitating the Sixty-One 1. Hong Yung Lee, From Revolutionary Cadres to Party Technocrats in Socialist China (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1991), p. 92. This chapter draws on Lee’s book and on the following for rehabilitation policy during and after the Cultural Revolution: History of the Chinese Communist Party, A Chronology of Events (1919–1990) (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1991); Victor Falkenheim (ed.), Chinese Politics From Mao To Deng (New York: Paragon House, 1989); Avery Goldstein, From Bandwagon to Balance-of-Power Politics (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991); Harry Harding, Organizing China: The Problem of Bureaucracy 1949–1976 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1981); Hsi-sheng Ch’i, Politics of Disillusionment: The Chinese Communist Party under Deng Xiaoping, 1978–1989 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1991), pp. 11–13; Roderick MacFarquhar, ‘The Succession to Mao and the End of Maoism’, in The Cambridge History of China, vol. 15 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), pp. 305–401. 2. Lee, From Revolutionary Cadres, op. cit., p. 93, ﬁg. 1. 3. See for example ‘Have Faith in the Majority’, Selected Works of Mao Zedong, vol. 5 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1977), pp. 505–6. 4. Roderick MacFarquhar, Timothy Cheek and Eugene Wu (eds), The Secret Speeches of Chairman Mao (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 140. 5. ‘Rectify the Party’s Style of Work’, Selected Works of Mao Zedong, vol. 3, op. cit., p. 50. 6. See for example Lee, From Revolutionary Cadres, op. cit., pp. 87–8; MacFarquhar, ‘The Succession to Mao’, op. cit., pp. 336–8. Harding,

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Notes and References 227

7. 8. 9. 10.

11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

16. 17. 18.

19.

20. 21.

22. 23.

24.

Organizing China, op. cit., p. 297, uses ‘leftist’ rather than ‘radical’ and ‘moderates’ for survivors and rehabilitated. See MacFarquhar, ‘The Succession to Mao’, op. cit., pp. 305–401; Harding, Organizing China, op. cit., ch. 10. Lee, From Revolutionary Cadres, op. cit., p. 133. Resolution on CPC History 1949–1981 (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1981), pp. 32–47. Lee, From Revolutionary Cadres, op. cit., pp. 130–1. The Renmin ribao editorial of 24 April 1972 was entitled ‘Punish for Future Use, and Cure the Disease to Save the Patient’. Harding, Organizing China, op. cit., p. 306. MacFarquhar, ‘The Succession to Mao’, op. cit., pp. 354–5. ‘Comrade Wang Hongwen’s Report at the Central Study Class’, Issues and Studies, vol. 11, no. 2 (February 1975), p. 101. Ibid., p. 102. See Wang Dongxing’s report to a Special Case Work Conference in ‘Taiwan Paper Publishes Mainland Rehabilitation Criteria’, Central Daily News (Taipei), 13 March 1974; Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 24 March 1975, E. 5–6. See for example History of the Chinese Communist Party, op. cit., p. 364. MacFarquhar, ‘The Succession to Mao’, op. cit., pp. 351–2. ‘ “Liushiyi ren an” pingfan zhaoxue de qianhou’ [Before and After the Rehabilitation of the Sixty-One Man Case], in Dangshi xinxi bao [Information on Party History], 1 March 1996, p. 2; see also Tan Zongji, ‘The Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee is a Major Turning Point in the History of the Party Since the Founding of the People’s Republic of China’, in ‘Deng Xiaoping (II)’, edited by Richard Siao, Chinese Law and Government, vol. 28, no. 3 (May–June 1995), pp. 21, 68. See, respectively, Lawrence Sullivan (ed.), ‘ The Biography of An Ziwen’, p. 99; Carol Lee Hamrin (ed.), ‘Yang Xianzhen’s Philosophic Criminal Case’, Chinese Law and Government, vol. 24, nos 1–2 (Spring–Summer 1991), p. 159; ‘Erecting a Monument in Bringing Order out of Chaos – a Posthumous Account of How Comrade Hu Yaobeng Led in Rehabilitating Those in the “61-People Case” ’, Renmin ribao, ‘June 1989; Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 8 June 1989, p. 25. See Wu Linquan and Peng Fei, Caolan chunqiu (Beijing Renmin chubanshe, 1988), pp. 258–9. Xiong Huaiji, Tiandi you zhengqi: Caolanzi jianyu douzheng yu ‘liushi yi ren an’ (Beijing: Beijing dichu geming shi, Beijing chubanshe, 1982), pp. 143–4. Ibid. Ibid. See also ‘Summary of the Major Unjust, False and Wrong Verdicts Reversed Since the Third Plenary Session of the 11th CCPCC’, Issues and Studies, vol. 21, no. 6 (June 1985), pp. 151, 154. Michael Schoenhals, ‘The Central Case Examination Group, 1966–1979’, The China Quarterly, no. 145 (March 1966), pp. 108–9. Other prominent Cultural Revolution victims whose verdicts were similarly reafﬁrmed included Yang Shangkun in November 1975 and Lu Dingyi the following month.

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228 Notes and References 25. History of the Chinese Communist Party, op. cit., p. 371. 26. Lee, From Revolutionary Cadres, op. cit., p. 146. 27. ‘Heroic and Combat-Worthy, Adamant and Unyielding – In Memory of Comrade Ye Ting’, Renmin ribao, 3 August 1977; Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 4 August 1977, E. 2–7. Ye Ting (commander of the New Fourth Army), Qin Bangxian, Deng Fa and Wang Ruofei were killed in a plane crash in April 1946 en route from Chongqing to Yan’an. 28. See for example ‘Mao’s Role in Chungking Negotiations Described’, New China News Agency, 18 September 1977; Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 19 September 1977, E. 13–15. 29. ‘Loyal and Indomitable Fighter’, New China News Agency, 6 August 1977; Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 10 August 1977, E. 9–11. 30. ‘Chairman Hua’s Political Report to the 11th National Congress of the CPC’, New China News Agency, 22 August 1977; Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 22 August 1977, D. 21. 31. ‘The Biography of An Ziwen’, op. cit., p. 100. 32. Renmin ribao, 28 September 1977; Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 30 September 1977, E. 2–11. 33. ‘Correct the Question of Right and Wrong in the Line on Cadres Upset By the Gang of Four’, Renmin ribao, 7 October 1977; Summary of World Broadcasts (BBC), FE/5637/B (11 October 1977), pp. 10–11. 34. History of the Chinese Communist Party, op. cit., p. 385. 35. ‘Correct the Question’, op. cit., p. 7. 36. Ibid., p. 10. 37. See ‘Erecting a Monument’, op. cit., p. 23. 38. Nanchang, Jiangxi Provincial Service, 24 November 1977; Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 29 November 1977, G. 6–7. 39. ‘Chairman Mao’s Cadre Policy Must Be Seriously Implemented’, Renmin ribao, 27 November 1977; Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 28 November 1977, E. 2. 40. See for example ‘Criticize the Counter-revolutionary Double-dealer Yao Wen-yuan’, Renmin ribao, 31 March 1977; Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 4 April 1977, E. 18–19; ‘A Sinister Gang Formed by New and Oldline Counter-revolutionaries’, Renmin ribao, Hongqi, New China News Agency, 26 April 1977; Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 27 April 1977, E. 3–7. 41. ‘ “Liushiyi ren an” pingfan zhaoxue de qianhou’, op. cit., p. 2. 42. ‘Erecting a Monument’, op. cit., p. 24. 43. Ibid. 44. Ibid., p. 25. 45. ‘ “Liushiyi ren an” pingfan zhaoxue de qianhou’, op. cit., p. 2. 46. See ‘Guanyu “liushiyi ren anjian” de diaocha baogao’ [Investigation Report on the Case of the Sixty-one], in Sanzhongquanhui yilai: zhongyao wenxian huibian [Since the Third Plenum: Collection of Important Documents], compiled by Zhonggong zhongyang wenxian yanjiu shibian [Documentation Institute of the CCP CC] (Renmin chubanshe, 1982), pp. 25–35. 47. Ibid., p. 28. 48. Ibid., pp. 31–3.

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Notes and References 229 49. Ibid., pp. 34–5. 50. Ibid. 51. ‘Jianchi you cuo bi jiu de fangzen’ [Uphold the Policy that Mistakes Must be Rectiﬁed] (November 1978) in Chen Yun wenxuan, 1956 –1985 (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1986), pp. 208–10. 52. Lee, From Revolutionary Cadres, op. cit., p. 157. 53. Beijing Review, no. 52 (29 December 1978). The original text of the 22 December communiqué appeared in the Renmin ribao, 24 December 1978. Hua Guofeng, who had tried so hard to avoid dealing with the ‘renegades’ case, apparently met Bo, Liu, An and Yang and tried to convince them that their rehabilitation was all his own doing. Bo Yibo is said to have remarked sceptically that ‘Hua was trying to claim even Heaven’s credits for his own’. See Tan Zongji, ‘The Third Plenum’, Chinese Law and Government, vol. 28, no. 3 (May–June 1995), p. 22. 54. Text of Deng’s speech at the 25 August 1979 memorial meeting, Xinhua, 25 August 1979; Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 27 August 1979, L. 2–4. 55. Yang Shangkun, ‘Holding Firmly to the Truth. He devoted his Loyalty and Mental Resources to the Fullest – Reminiscences of Comrade Zhang Wentian’, Renmin ribao, 9 August 1985; Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 20 August 1985, K. 5. See also Deng Liqun, ‘Be Persistently Loyal and Profoundly Affectionate Toward Communism – Marking the 85th Anniversary of the Birth of My Teacher, Comrade Wentian’, Hongqi, no. 16 (16 August 1985); Joint Publication Research Service, 85-021 (15 October 1985), pp. 30–42. 56. Liu Ying, ‘Mourning Comrade Zhang’, Xinhua, 26 August 1979; Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 29 August 1979, L. 7–15. 57. Zhongfa 25 (1980), in Issues and Studies, vol. 16, no. 11 (November 1980), pp. 70–93. 58. Lowell Dittmer, ‘Death and Transﬁguration: Liu Shaoqi’s Rehabilitation and Contemporary Chinese Politics’, Journal of Asian Studies, vol. 40, no. 3 (May 1981), p. 471. See also Summary of World Broadcasts (BBC), FE/6381 (27 March 1980), B. 3–18, for a collection of NCNA reports on Liu’s activities in 1925–29, refuting the renegade charges. 59. Dittmer, ‘Death and Transﬁguration’, op. cit., p. 467. 60. Ibid., p. 468. ‘Restore the True Qualities of Mao Zedong Thought’, Renmin ribao, 16 May 1980; Summary of World Broadcasts (BBC), FE/6423/B11 (19 May 1980), pp. 1–7. See also an earlier speech by Deng (16 September 1979) to the CCP CC Administrative Ofﬁce, Issues and Studies, vol. 16, no. 10 (October 1980), p. 82: ‘Of course, like everybody else Comrade Shaoqi was a human being and not a god. Therefore, it was unavoidable that he made mistakes and had defects.’ 61. ‘Restore the True Qualities’, op. cit., p. 3. 62. See for example ‘Inside Story’, in Classiﬁed Chinese Documents: A Selection (Taipei: Institute of International Relations, 1978), p. 136. 63. See for example ‘An Extremely Treacherous Man Assumed a Loyal Look – Ripping Off Kang Sheng’s Mask’, Xinhua, 21 December 1980; Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 24 December 1980, L. 16; ‘Xie Fuzhi Cannot Escape Trial By History’, Xinhua, 22 December 1980; Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 29 December 1980, L. 18. The Central Committee

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230 Notes and References

64.

65.

66.

67.

68. 69. 70.

71. 72. 73.

74.

75. 76. 77.

78. 79. 80. 81.

82.

posthumously expelled Kang and Xie in October 1980 and annulled their funeral eulogies. ‘Beijing Memorial Service held for Public Security Minister’, New China News Agency, 2 December 1978; Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 4 December 1978, E. 11–12. ‘Leaders at Memorial Service for Peng Dehuai and Tao Zhu’, Beijing Home Service, 24 December 1978; Summary of World Broadcasts (BBC), FE/6004/B11 (30 December 1978), p. 3. ‘Yang Xianzhen Talks about Marxist Theory’, Liaowang [Outlook], no. 44 (4 November 1985); Joint Publication Research Service, 86-009 (20 January 1986), p. 34. See ‘Former Jilin CCP Leader Zhao Lin Rehabilitated’, Changchun, Jilin Provincial Service, 7 February 1979; Summary of World Broadcasts (BBC), FE/6039/B11 (10 February 1979), pp. 3–5. Schoenhals, ‘The Central Case Examination Group’, op. cit., p. 109. Graham Young, ‘Control and Style: Discipline Inspection Commissions since the 11th Congress’, The China Quarterly, no. 97 (1984), p. 30. Hung-mao Tien, ‘The Communist Party of China: Party Powers and Group Politics from the Third Plenum to the Twelfth Party Congress’, ‘Occasional Papers/Reprint Series in Contemporary Asian Studies, 1984. Lucien Pye, ‘An Introductory Proﬁle: Deng Xiaoping and China’s Political Culture’, The China Quarterly, no. 135 (September 1993), p. 419. Tony Saich, ‘The Fourteenth Party Congress: A Programme for Authoritarian Rule’, The China Quarterly, no. 132 (December 1992), p. 1155. In July 1979 Bo was reinstated as vice-premier on the State Council and member of its Financial–Economic Committee under the chairmanship of Chen Yun. He also served as chairman of the 5th NPC Budget Committee. Bo was minister of the State Machine Building Ministry Commission from February 1980 until 1982, and from then until 1988 he was vice-minister at the State Commission for Restructuring the Economic System. Bo Yibo, Ruogan zhongda juece yu shijian de huigu, vols 1 and 2 (Beijing: Zhonggong Zhongyang dangxiao chubanshe, 1993); Bo Yibo wenxuan (1937–1992) [Selected Works of Bo Yibo, 1937–1992] (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe, 1992); Bo Yibo, Qishi nian fendou yu sikao, vol. 1 (Beijing: Zhonggong dangshi chubanshe, 1996). Interview in Liaowang, 20 October 1983; Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 25 October 1983, K. 3. Ibid. Su Shaozhi, ‘A Decade of Crises at the Institute of Marxism–Leninism– Mao Zedong Thought, 1979–1989’, The China Quarterly, no. 134 ( June 1993), pp. 335–51. Alan P. Liu, ‘Politics at the Party Center: From Autocracy to Oligarchy’, Issues and Studies, vol. 23, no. 12 (December 1987), p. 110. Su, ‘A Decade of Crises’, op. cit., p. 345. Ibid., p. 346. Bo Yibo, ‘A Basic Summary of Party Rectiﬁcation and Further Strengthening of Party Building’, Xinhua, 31 May 1987; Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 2 June 1987, K. 11. Ibid., K. 14.

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Notes and References 231 83. Ibid., K. 16. 84. Suisheng Zhao, ‘Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Tour: Elite Politics in PostTiananmen China’, Asian Survey, vol. 33, no. 8 (August 1993), p. 754. 85. Saich, ‘The Fourteenth Party Congress’, op. cit., p. 1141, refers to a 24 August 1992 session of the CAC in which Chen Yun delivered a critique of Deng’s economic programme, which Chen only conditionally endorsed – with very many reservations or suggestions for amendments. 86. South China Morning Post, 4 March 1993; Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 4 March 1993, p. 10. 87. See for example Bo quoting Deng’s speech of 24 December 1990: ‘Both a planned and a market economy are necessary’, in ‘Preface to “Report on Zhang Wentian’s Proposal on Opening up the Market” ’, Renmin ribao, 26 August 1995; Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 20 October 1995, p. 32; and Bo’s comments in ‘Beijing Political Situation’, Xinhua, 30 September 1994; Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 30 September 1994, pp. 26–7. 88. ‘CPC Sounds Alarm of its Doom’, Zhengming, 1 November 1994; Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 18 November 1994, pp. 14–16. See also ‘Bo Yibo Discusses Party Building Questions’, Xinhua, 10 November 1994; Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 28 November 1994, pp. 26–34. 89. ‘Li Xiannian Attends Memorial Meeting for Rehabilitated Ofﬁcials’, New China News Agency, 25 January 1979; Summary of World Broadcasts (BBC), FE/6033/B11 (3 February 1979), pp. 6–8. 90. See for instance ‘Memorial Service for Former Trade Union Leader Liu Wenwei Held in Xi’an’, Gongren ribao, 13 July 1979; Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 25 July 1979. 91. Lowell Dittmer, ‘Death and Transﬁguration’, op. cit., p. 477. 92. Bo Yibo, Liu Lantao, Cheng Zihua and Nie Zhen ‘In Deep Memory of Hu Xikui, Loyal Fighter of the Party’, Renmin ribao, 3 April 1980; Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 14 May 1980, L. 8–10. 93. ‘The Boat Sails in the Midst of Spring Breeze and Triumphant Music – Learn From Comrade Xu Zirong’, Renmin ribao, 5 April 1979; Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 1 May 1979, L. 14. 94. Ibid., L. 16. 95. Ibid., L. 17. 96. Bo Yibo et al., ‘In Deep Memory of Hu Xikui’, op. cit., L. 9. 97. ‘Cherishing the Memory of Comrade An Ziwen’, Renmin ribao, 15 June 1985; Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 21 June 1985, K. 9–10. 98. ‘Li Xiannian Attends Memorial Meeting’, op. cit., pp. 6–8. 99. ‘Be Good at Summing Up Experiences, Be Bold in Opening Up the Future’, speech by Bo Yibo at a national conference of party history research ofﬁcials, 3 April 1993, Qiushi, no. 17 (1 September 1993); Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 4 November 1993, p. 29.

6

A Prejudiced Conclusion 1. Bo Yibo, Qishi nian fendou yu sikao, vol. 1 (Beijing: Zhonggong dangshi chubanshe, 1996), p. 137.

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232 Notes and References 2. ‘Scheming to Betray the Party is Aiming to Usurp the Party’, Hongqi, no. 13 (17 August 1967); Selections from China Mainland Magazines, 592 (11 September 1967), p. 2. 3. ‘Speech to the Seventh Party Congress’ (24 April 1945), in Tony Saich (ed.), The Rise to Power of the Chinese Communist Party: Documents and Analysis (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1996), p. 1241. 4. Frederick C. Teiwes, Politics at Mao’s Court: Gao Gang and Party Factionalism in the Early 1950s (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1990), p. 6. 5. Ibid., p. 263: ‘Report on the Gao Gang, Rao Shushi Anti-Party Alliance’ (21 March 1955). 6. ‘How Should One Understand “Recruiting Deserters and Accepting Mutineers” ’, Gongren ribao, 1 November 1979; Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 20 November 1979, L. 3–4. 7. ‘The Twelfth CPC National Congress will Lead Construction to Victory – on Understanding and Mastery of the Laws’, Hongqi, no. 20 (16 October 1982); Joint Publication Research Service, 82391 (6 December 1982), p. 3. 8. Ibid., pp. 3–4.

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250 Bibliography Wang Ruowang (1991) Hunger Trilogy (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe). Wang Fanxi (1991) Memoirs of a Chinese Revolutionary (New York: Columbia University Press). Wang Guangmei (1980) ‘He Showed his Integrity in a Difﬁcult Time, the Spirit of Justice will be Preserved Eternally – in Memory of Comrade An Ziwen’, Gongren ribao, 14 July; Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 5 August 1980, L. 11–14. Wang Hsueh-wen (1968) ‘The Nature and Development of the Great Cultural Revolution’, Issues & Studies, vol. 12, no. 9 (September). Wang Li (1999) ‘The First Year of the “Cultural Revolution” ’ (edited by Richard Siao), Chinese Law and Government, vol. 32, no. 4 ( July–August). ‘Wang Tung-hsing’s Self-Criticism at the CCPCC Politburo Meeting’, Issues & Studies, vol. 16, no. 10 (October), pp. 90–7. ‘Wang Tung-hsing – the Head of Peiping’s Undercover Agents’, Issues & Studies, vol. 12, no. 8 (August), pp. 94–7. ‘What is Bo Yibo, Liu’s Faithful Running Dog?’, Jinggangshan [Jinggang Mountains], no. 46 (13 May 1967); Joint Publication Research Service, 41858 (17 July 1967), pp. 179–85. Who’s Who in Communist China (1969) (Hong Kong: Union Research Institute). Whyte, Martin King (1974) Small Groups and Political Rituals in China (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press). Wu Linquan and Peng Fei (1988) Caolan chunqiu [Caolan Annals] (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe). ‘Xie Fuzhi Cannot Escape Trial by History’, Xinhua, 22 December 1980; Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 29 December 1980, L. 14–20. Xie Xiaonai (1986) ‘On the Organization of Party Historiography’, Chinese Law & Government, vol. XIX, no. 3 (Autumn), pp. 107–111. Xiong Huaiji (1982) Tiandi you zhengqi: Caolanzi jianyu douzheng yu ‘liushi yi ren an’ [Heaven and Earth have Upright Spirit: The Struggle in Caolanzi and the ‘61-man Case’] (Beijing: Beijing dichu geming shi, Beijing chubanshe). Yakovlev, Alexander N. (ed.) (1991) Rehabilitatsiia: Politicheskie Protsessy 30–50 kh Godov (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Politicheskoi Literatury). Yan Jiaqi and Gao Gao (1986) Zhongguo wenhuadageming shinian shi [The TenYear History of the Chinese Cultural Revolution] (Tianjin: Tianjin renmin chubanshe). Yan Jiaqi and Gao Gao (1996) Turbulent Decade: A History of the Cultural Revolution (translated and edited by D.W.Y. Kwok) (Honoloulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1996). Yang, Benjamin (1990) From Revolution to Politics, Chinese Communists on the Long March (Boulder, CO.: Westview Press). Yang Shangkun (1980) ‘In Memory Of Comrade Liu Shaoqi’, Hongqi, no. 8 (16 April 1980); Joint Publication Research Service, 75921 (23 June 1980), pp. 2–15. Yang Shangkun (1985) ‘Holding Firmly to the Truth. He Devoted his Loyalty and Mental Resources to the Fullest – Reminiscences of Comrade Zhang Wentian’, Renmin ribao, 9 August 1985; Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 20 August 1985, K. 5–6. ‘Yang Shangkun Meets Shanxi Military Historians’, Xinhua, 29 October 1990; Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 1 November 1990, p. 35. ‘Yang Shangkun – New President of the People’s Republic of China’, Xinhua, 8 April 1988; Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 8 April 1988, pp. 12–13.

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Bibliography 251 Yang Xianzhen (1980a) ‘The Socialist Economy Should be Planned, Diversiﬁed and Flexible’, Guangming ribao, 23 May 1980; Summary of World Broadcasts (BBC), FE/6431/BII/3-4. Yang Xianzhen (1980b) ‘One who Inspired and Guided the Party School – in Memory of Comrade Liu Shaoqi’, Hongqi, no. 7 (1 April 1980); Joint Publication Research Service, 75379 (21 May 1980), pp. 35–43. Yang Xianzhen (1981) ‘A Sinister Conspirator who Butchered and Persecuted the Loyal and Innocent – Exposing Kang Sheng’s features of a Counterrevolutionary Doubledealer’, Hongqi, no. 1 (1 January 1981); Joint Publication Research Service, 77587 (13 March 1981), pp. 53–9. Yang Xianzhen (1983) ‘Advance Along the Path of Integrating Marxism–Leninism with the Reality of the Chinese Revolution – in Commemoration of the 90th anniversary of Comrade Mao Zedong’s Birth’, Renmin ribao, 23 December 1983; Joint Publication Research Service, 84008 (24 January 1984), pp. 7–17. Yang Xianzhen and Guan Shan (1980) ‘Ru Caolanzi jianyou qianhou’ [Before and After Entering Caolanzi Prison], Geming shi ziliao, October, pp. 6–22. ‘Yang Xianzhen Talks about Marxist Theory’, Liaowang, no. 44 (4 November 1985); Joint Publication Research Service, 86-009 (21 January 1986). Yang Xianzhen zhuan [Biography of Yang Xianzhen] (1996) (Beijing: Zhonggong dangshi chubanshe). Yegerov, K. (1982) ‘The Policy of Rehabilitation of Cadres and Certain Aspects of the Political Power Struggle in China’, Far Eastern Affairs, no. 1, pp. 87–97. Yick, Joseph K. S. (1995) Making Urban Revolution in China: The CCP–GMD Struggle for Beijing–Tianjin, 1945–1949 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe). Young, Graham (1984) ‘Control and Style: Discipline Inspection Commissions since the 11th Congress’, The China Quarterly, no. 97. Zhang Xueliang (1989) ‘Penitent Confession on the Xian Incident’, Chinese Studies in History, vol. 22, no. 3 (Spring). Zhang Zhuhong (1987) Zhongguo xiandai geming shi shiliaoxue [Historiography of China’s Modern Revolutionary History] (Beijing: Zhonggong dangshi ziliao chubanshe). Zhao, Suisheng (1993) ‘Deng Xiaoping’s Southern Tour: Elite Politics in PostTiananmen China’, Asian Survey, vol. XXXIII, no. 8 (August), pp. 739–86. ‘Zhao and Deng send Wreaths Mourning Liu Zijiu’, Foreign Broadcast Information Service, 13 September 1988, p. 33. Zhongfa 96 (1967), ‘Zhonggong Zhongyang guanyu yinfa Bo Yibo, Liu Lantao, An Ziwen, Yang Xianzhen deng chuyu wenti cailiao de pishi’ [Instruction of the CCP Central Committee Concerning the Printing and Distribution of Materials on the Problem of the Release from Prison of Bo Yibo, Liu Lantao, An Ziwen, Yang Xianzhen et al.] (from a collection of Cultural Revolution documents [title page missing] on ‘Cleansing the Class Ranks’ (1968) in the Fairbank Center Library, Harvard University). Zhongfa 200 (1967), ‘Notiﬁcation on Catching Traitors’, Current Background, 864 (16 October 1968), p. 6. Zhongfa 251 (1967), ‘Notice on the Question of Criticism and Repudiation by Name in Publications’, Survey of China Mainland Press, 4057 (11 October 1967), pp. 6–7. Zhongfa 75 (1978), ‘Zhonggong zhongyang zhuanfa zhongyang zuzhibu guanyu – “liushiyi ren anjian” de diaocha baogao – de tongzhi’ [Notice of the CCPCC

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252 Bibliography to transmit the COD investigative report concerning the ‘sixty-one man case’] in Sanzhongquanhui yilai: zhongyao wenxian huibian [Since the Third Plenum: Collection of Important Documents], compiled by the Documentation Institute of the CCPCC (Renmin chubanshe, 1982). Zhongfa 25 (1980), ‘Notice of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party to Conscientiously Transmit the Resolution on the Rehabilitation of Comrade Liu Shao-ch’i’ and ‘Resolution of the Fifth Plenum of the 11th Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party on the Rehabilitation of Comrade Liu Shaoqi’ (Adopted 29 February 1980), Issues and Studies, vol. 16, no. 11 (November 1980), pp. 71–93. Zhonggong zhongyang wenjian xuanbian (1992) [A Compilation of Selected CCP Documents] (Beijing: Dangxiao chubanshe). Zhou Enlai (1968) speech at a reception on 8 February 1967 for the Jiangsu Revolutionary Rebel Committee for Seizure of Power, Survey of China Mainland Press, supplement 238 (8 November). Zhou Enlai zhuan 1898–1949 (1989) [Biography of Zhou Enlai 1898–1949] (Beijing: Renmin chubanshe). Zhou Tiandu (1983) ‘The National Salvation Society and the “Seven Gentlemen” Case’, Renmin ribao, 25 February; Joint Publication Research Service, 83259 (14 April 1983), pp. 173–6.

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Index Note: the notes and references have not been indexed. Time-frames: –1936: historical background – the Japanese threat; the united front negotiations; the state of the CCP in northern China; the arrest, imprisonment and eventual release of the sixty-one from the GMD Caolanzi prison and the roles of Liu Shaoqi and Zhang Wentian in their release. 1936–49: from the release of the ﬁrst batch of the sixty-one until the establishment of the People’s Republic of China; Party work by the sixty-one in northern China following their release from Caolanzi; the rectiﬁcation campaign in Yan’an; the nomination of delegates to the CCP 7th Party Congress in 1945. 1949–66: from the establishment of the People’s Republic of China in October 1949 until the beginning of the Cultural Revolution; overall survey of careers of the sixty-one; dossier access; events and issues in the careers of Liu Lantao, An Ziwen, Yang Xianzhen and Bo Yibo. 1966–78: the Cultural Revolution experiences of the sixty-one until and including their rehabilitation in December 1978; ofﬁcial and unofﬁcial investigations into the 1936 release; ofﬁcial condemnation and public repudiation of the sixtyone; their arrest and imprisonment by the CCP; release into internal exile in May 1975; Hu Yaobang, the Central Organization Department and changes in rehabilitation policy. 1979–: the post-Cultural Revolution era; survivors among the sixty-one and the Central Discipline Inspection Commission and the Central Advisory Commission; Bo Yibo; eulogies for the deceased sixty-oners and the posthumous rehabilitation of Liu Shaoqi.

1st Army 77 2nd Army 77 4th Route Army 84 8th Route Army 76–7, 84 129th Division 76 13th Brigade 77 ‘18th August’ group 142 29th Army 46, 49, 76 51st Army 46 1949 Case Group 143 Academy of Sciences 122 action committees 35

Agricultural Producers’ Cooperatives 107, 112, 119, 128 Agriculture Ministry 143 Ai Qing 155 Ai Siqi 118–19, 121, 136 An Ziwen 2, 15–16, 20–1, 49, 100–6, 125, 127, 193–4 1930–36 35–6, 38–40, 44, 52, 56–8, 61, 65–7, 70 1936–49 49, 75–7, 83, 86–7, 88–91 1949–66 94–7, 106–18, 113–14, 120–1, 135 253

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254 Index 1966–78 141–4, 146, 148–9, 152–4, 156–9, 166–7, 170, 174 1979–80 179–80, 187–8 antirightist campaign 114–15 Armed Forces’ Military-Legal Department 44 Beijing Aeronautical Institute 152 Party 48 Party Municipal Committee 140 Political Affairs Council 45 Student Association 47 Beiping City Committee 29 Beiping Party 29 Bo Yibo 2, 15, 20–1, 26, 72, 98, 101, 118, 120, 187–90 1929–36 34–8, 43–4, 49, 51–2, 55–66, 69 1936–49 73–8, 87, 91–2 1949–66 94–8, 109–10, 123–36 1966–78 141–4, 146–9, 151–4, 157, 159, 166–7, 174–6 1979– 179–80, 182–6 Cadre Examination Ofﬁce 100, 111 cadre management 111–14 cadre screening 79–85 Cai Hesen 32–3 Cao Diqiu 155 Cao Yi’ou 119 Caolanzi (GMD) prison (Military Personnel Self-Examination Centre of Beiping) 27, 42–4, 49–50, 52–73, 75, 87–8, 92, 94, 96, 100–1, 107, 116, 123, 159, 174–5, 182, 186–8 amnesties 55 GMD re-education 53–4 Liu Shaoqi 67–9 living conditions 54, 57–8 party organization 56 prisoners’ debates 61–2 release arrangements 62–5 release procedures 65–7 study 58–60 Zhang Wentian 70–3 Central Advisory Commission (CAC) 181–5

Central Case Examination Group (CCEG) 2, 139–40, 142, 149, 152, 158–9, 166–7, 170, 172, 174, 181 Central Commission for Guiding Party Rectiﬁcation 181 Central Committee 1, 2, 5, 14–17, 195 1927–36 20, 31–8, 40–1 1936–49 51, 53, 55, 60–4, 67, 70, 88–91 1949–66 111, 113, 120, 125, 130 1966–78 139, 143, 146–7, 150–3, 157–8, 167–8, 170, 173 1979– 177, 179–80, 183 Central Control Commission 101 Central Organization Department 108, 114–15, 174, 176 General Ofﬁce 99–100 Qualiﬁcations Committee 88, 175 Work conference (1966) 144–5 see also Politburo Central Case Examination Group (CCEG) 139–40, 142, 149, 152, 158–9, 166–7, 172, 181 Central Control Commission (CCC) 100, 101–6, 181, 193 Central Discipline Inspection Commission (CDIC) 177, 181–2, 184 Central Examination Committee (CEC) 139, 143 Central Executive Committee 69 Central Higher Party School 94 see also Party School Central Organization Commission 88 Central Organization Department 18, 79–81, 83–4, 91, 94, 98–100, 103, 105–6, 121, 136, 142, 149, 163, 177, 181, 193 Hu Yaobang 171–6 investigation report on the sixtyone 174–6 see also Organization Department Central People’s Government Council 124 Central Political Bureau 94 Central South Bureau 148, 181

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Index Central State Organs Committee 99–100 Central Work Conference (1965) 118, (1966) 135, (1978) 176 Chang Ch’un-ch’iao 165 see Zhang Chunqiao Chen Boda 14, 17, 89, 136, 140, 157, 166 in Caolanzi 40, 55 Party School 118–19 Chen Bozhong 167 Chen Duxiu 32, 35 Chen Geng 41, 89 Chen Lifu 26 Chen Paichen 155 Chen Shaoyo see Wang Ming Ch’en Ts’ung 138 Chen Yuandao 36–8, 40–1, 44, 55–6 Chen Yun 79, 81–4, 88, 130, 133–4, 164, 170, 176, 179–82 and Bo Yibo 124, 128–9, 131, 183, 185 Chen Zaidao 164 Chiang Kai-shek 4, 22–8, 45–7, 50, 68–9, 73–4, 76, 89, 156, 194 Chinese National Liberation Vanguard 47–9 Comintern 25–6, 30–2, 36–7, 71 Seventh Congress 60 Commission for Guiding Party Consolidation 183 Communist Youth Corps 48 Communist Youth League 42 Confucianism 13, 18, 31, 81 Congress Seventh CCP Congress 90 Eighth CCP Congress 114 Construction and Engineering Ministry 127–8 Control Commission (Central) 15, 121, 178 Cultural Revolution 2, 13–18, 26, 34, 52–3, 55, 62–4, 67–8, 70, 80, 84, 86, 90, 92, 94–8, 108–9, 112–14, 116, 119, 122–4, 134, 136, 161–3, 169–73, 175, 181, 186–8, 193–5

255

arrest, imprisonment and further CCEG interrogation of the sixtyone 158–9 Bo Yibo: post-Cultural Revolution 182–6 dossier access 99, 101, 105, 107 CCEG and Red Guard investigations of the sixty-one 138–50 ofﬁcial condemnation of the sixtyone 151–4 public repudiation 157 release into internal exile 166–8 rehabilitation of the sixty-one 179–81 Cultural Revolution Group 140–1, 143, 145, 147–8, 150, 153–4, 157–8 Dare-to-Die 75–7, 123 December Ninth student movement 25, 47 ‘Decision on How to Handle So-called Confessants’ 80, 113, 176 ‘Decision on the Screening of Cadres’ 87 demilitarized zone (DMZ) 45, 46 Deng Fa 86, 88 Deng Wenyi 26 Deng Xiaoping 76, 110–11, 115–16, 133, 141, 159, 162, 164–6, 168, 170, 173–4, 177, 179, 182–6, 193 Deng Zihui 128 Department of Construction 77 Dimitrov, G. M. 60 Dittmer, L. 9, 177, 186 Dong Biwu 92, 101 Dong Tianzhi 56, 66, 74 Dong Yan 172 dossier access 98–101, 149 East China Bureau Coutrol Commission 148 East Hebei Anti-Communist Autonomous Council 46 East Hebei Autonomous AntiCommunist Zone 22 Education Ministry 155 ‘Eight Criteria’ 107–9

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256 Index Eighth (CCP) Central Committee 94, 119 Eighth Plenum (1959) 120 Tenth Plenum (1962) 115 Eleventh Plenum (1966) 135, 140–2 Twelfth Plenum (1968) 158 Eighth (CCP) Congress 104, 113–14, 119–20, 131, 146 Eleventh (CCP) Central Committee: First Plenum (1977) 169 Third Plenum (1978) 2, 18, 160, 174, 176 Fourth Plenum (1979) 179 Fifth Plenum (1980) 177 Eleventh (CCP) Congress (1977) 168, 170 Political Report 171 Emergency Committee (Hebei) 39–40, 56 Emergency Preparatory Committees 37 Engels, F. 59 Fairbank, J. K. 20 Fang Yizhi 122 Fang Zhimin 169 ‘February Adverse Current’ 150, 158, 179 Feng Jiping 55, 74, 100–1 Fifth Administrative District 76 Fifth Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference Standing Committee 180 Fifth National People’s Congress 180 Finance and Economic National Work Conference 109–10 Finance and Economic Small Group 134 Finance Ministry 126 Financial and Economic Committee (North China People’s Government) 91–2, 124 Government Adminstration Council 124, 127 First Administrative District 76 First Five Year Plan 127 First National Conference for Organization Work 108

First and Second Machine Building Ministry 128 ‘First Ten Points’ 121 Five Year Plans 127, 129, 134 Fourth Plenum (Sixth CCP Central Committee) 37–8 Fourteenth (CCP) Central Committee Fourth Plenum 185 Fourteenth (CCP) Congress 182, 185 Fu Ping 92 Fu Yutian 74, 88, 95, 148, 179–81 Fuel Ministry 127 Gang of Four 17, 101, 162, 165–6, 168, 170–1, 173, 178, 194 Gao Gang affair (Gao Gang-Rao Shushi affair, Kao-Jao group) 16, 88, 101–2, 109–11, 125–7, 193 Gao Tingkai 92 Gao Yangyun 142–4, 146 General Ofﬁce 99, 103, 181 General Political Department (People’s Liberation Army) 103 Gong Zirong 66, 100, 103 Government Administration Council (GAC) 124, 127 Financial and Economic Committee 124 Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (GPCR) 140 see also Cultural Revolution Great Leap Forward 16, 98, 104, 107, 114–15, 119–21, 130–1, 135–6, 179 Bo Yibo 124, 131–3 Gu Mu 147, 155 Gu Shunzhang 5, 41, 43–4 Guan Feng 140, 148–9 Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region 148 Guo Yaxian 41–4 Guo Yufeng 143, 149, 172 Guomindang (GMD) 1–2, 5–6, 13–15, 17, 19–20, 22–6, 32–4, 36–7, 39–40, 42, 44, 47, 51, 53–5, 82, 85, 89, 91, 95, 101, 103, 109–10, 153–5, 158, 168–9, 171–3, 175, 177, 181, 187, 190, 193–4

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Index Central Executive Committee 69 Military Police 3rd Corps 46 Second Central Committee Fifth Plenary Session 27 Fifth Central Committee Third Plenary Session 28 Hamrin, C. L. 121–2 Han Jun 74, 77, 92 Hangzhou conference 131 Hao Jinbo 92 Harding, H. 162 He Chang 35–8 He Mengxiong 35–8 He Yingqin 45–6, 55 He Zhiping 78, 92 He-Umezu agreement 22, 61–2, 68 Heavy Industry Ministry 127 Hebei -Chahar Council 49 -Chahar Political Council 22, 46 Committee 41 Emergency Committee 38 Provincial Committee 29, 40, 60 Provincial Mutual Assistance Committee 40 Henan Party 36 School 120 Hong Yung Lee 99 Hou Zhenya 74, 95, 107, 159, 186 ‘How to be a Good Communist’ 1, 116, 139, 152, 159 ‘How to Handle the Cases of Arrested Communists and the Question of Morality’ 81 Hu Egong 40–2 Hu Fu see Liu Shaoqi Hu Hua 70 Hu Jingyi 95, 100 Hu Xikui 21, 43, 56, 59, 64–5, 67, 78, 92, 95, 144, 157, 159, 186–8 Hu Yaobang 170–6, 181, 183–6, 188 Hua Guofeng 162, 169–71, 176 Huang Fu 45 Industry and Communications Staff Ofﬁce 124 Inner Mongolian Autonomous Government 22

257

Institute of Agricultural Science 144 Institute of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought in the Academy of Social Sciences 183 Interior Ministry 100 Internal Affairs Ofﬁce 100 ‘Internationalists’ 36 Isaacs, H. 57 Israel, J. 48 ‘January Power Seizure’ 147 Japan 1–2, 9, 20–8, 45–7, 49–50, 60–1, 69, 71–2, 74–5, 79, 83, 126 Jia Suping 138 Jiang Qing 14, 140, 147, 154–5, 166, 173, 195 Jiang Zemin 185 Jiangsu Provincial Committee 5 Jiangxi Provincial Party Committee 180 Jilin Party Provincial Committee 146 Jin-Cha-Ji ( JCJ) 77, 91 Jin-Ji-Lu-Yu ( JJLY) 76–8, 83, 89, 91, 174 Kang Sheng 14, 17, 86–91, 147, 155, 178 Central Case Examination Group 139–40 Central Organization Department 149 Central Organization Department investigation (1978) 174, 176 Cultural Revolution Group (CRG) 140–3, 145, 147 Eleventh Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee 140–1 incrimination of the sixty-one 142–5 ofﬁcial condemnation of the sixtyone 151–3 Yang Xianzhen 118–19, 122, 136, 180 Kao-Jao group see Gao Gang affair Ke Qingshi 62–3, 67, 153, 172, 175, 195 Kenye Company 39 Khrushchev, N. 153

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258 Index Klein, D. W. 48 Kong Xiangzhen 42–4, 52, 55–6, 63, 74, 92, 158, 166, 174, 179, 181 appeal for reinvestigation of 61 (1977) 171–2 Kuai Dafu 140 Labour Ministry 180 Lai De 40–2 Lenin, V. 59 Leninism 10–11, 19, 31, 48, 97 see also Marxism-Leninism Li Baohua 164, 174 Li Chuli 44, 56–7, 59, 75, 78, 88, 92, 95, 100, 103, 107, 111, 142, 159, 167, 179–82 Li Chun 36 Li Dazhao 29, 35 Li Degui 34 Li Fuchun 125, 129, 134 Li Jingquan 164 Li Jukui 44, 78 Li Liguo 74 Li Lisan 30, 33–8 Li Mengli 100, 107 Li Weihan 37 Li Xiannian 128, 131, 162, 179–80, 186 Liao Chengzhi 164 Liao Huaping 34, 43–4 Liao Luyan 59, 74, 77, 94–5, 143–4, 148, 159, 186, 188 Liao Mosha 155 Lin Biao 145, 154, 162–6, 172, 194 Gao Gang affair 110 ‘renegade’ cliques 157 Lin Feng 122, 147 Liu Bocheng 76 Liu Geping 56, 64–5, 103 Liu Kerang 92 Liu Lantao 2, 15–16, 20–1, 118, 120–1, 180 1929–36 42–4, 52, 56, 63, 66 1936–49 78, 88, 90, 92 1949–66 15, 94–8, 101–6, 110, 135–6, 142 1966–78 144, 146, 148–9, 152, 154, 157–9, 166–7, 174 1979– 179–80, 182, 187

Liu Ningyi 40 Liu Shaobai 41–2 Liu Shaoqi 1, 3, 7, 18, 76, 167, 173, 175–6, 178–9, 186, 193, 195 1928–36 9–12, 20, 29, 32–5, 45, 48, 50–3, 61–5, 67–73 1936–49 73–4, 77, 79, 82, 84–6, 88, 90–1, 93 1949–66 102, 108–10, 113–16, 119, 121–2, 128–9, 133 1966–69 17, 94, 96, 136, 140–5, 147–56, 158 posthumous rehabilitation 18, 163, 177–8 Liu Shenzhi 65, 75, 88, 95, 100, 148 Liu Taifeng 77 Liu Wenwei 186 Liu Xiwu 21, 44, 56, 65, 92, 95, 103, 144, 159, 186, 188 Liu Yaxiong 40–1, 55, 74 Liu Ying 68 Liu Youguang 74, 76, 95, 174, 179–80 Liu Zhao 49–51, 75 Liu Zhidan 73 Liu Zijiu 56, 59, 78, 88, 90, 92, 179–80 Liu Zunqi 57, 59 Long March 3, 8, 21, 24, 31, 165 Lu Dingyi 179 Lu Zhenyu 26 Luo Ruiqing 179, 187 Lushan conference 132 Ma Hong 132 Ma Huizhi 56, 66, 75, 88, 92, 95, 148, 174, 180–1 Ma Mingfang 103, 155–6 MacFarquhar, R. 162, 164–5 Mao Zedong 16–17, 19, 95, 98,107, 111, 166–8, 170–1, 174–5, 179–80, 190–3 1935–36 7–11, 24–5, 27, 41, 47, 60–1, 70–2 1936–49 74, 84–9, 91 1949–66 102, 104–5, 108–10, 116, 119–6, 128–36 1966–76 140–3, 145, 147, 149–52, 154–5, 157–9, 161–9

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Index ‘Mao Zedong Thought’ 105, 109 Mao Zemin 155 Maoism 3, 81, 103, 116 Marx, K. 59 Marxism 59 Yang Xianzhen 119–23 Marxism-Leninism 1, 7, 13, 19, 85, 105 Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought 185 Marxist-Leninist Institute 184 May Fourth Intellectual revolution 29 May Thirtieth movement 30 Mif, P. 36–7, 40 Military Affairs Commission (GMD) 46, (CCP) 88, 149, 152, 158, 164 Committee (Shunzhi Provincial) 34, 38 Police 3rd Corps (GMD) 46 Morgan, L. H. 59 Mukden incident 22 Municipal Committee (CCP Beijing) 75 Mutual Assistance Committee 42 Nan Hanchen 62 Nanjing Military Commission (GMD) 55 Nankai University Red Guards 143–6, 148–9, 155 Nanning conference 131 National Conference on Financial and Economic Work 109, 125 National Defence Science and Technology Commission 180 National Organization Work Conference 109–10, 115 National Salvation 20, 23, 27, 50, 75 National Salvation through Sacriﬁce League 49, 75–6 New Army 75, 77 Nie Rongzhen 91, 170 Ninth (CCP) Central Committee 164 Niu Yinguan 77 ‘non-anticommunist statement’ 27 see also ‘ordinary statement’

259

North China Army 50 North China Bureau 1, 9, 32–7, 35–6, 39, 44, 52, 55, 62–4, 68–9, 73–5, 77, 89, 92, 98–122, 101, 103, 123–4, 160, 174–5, 195 Liu Shaoqi 3, 35, 48, 50–1, 61, 79 North China People’s Government 91–2, 124 North China Revolutionary University 92 North Regional Committee 32 Northeast Bureau 156 ‘northeast renegades’ clique 154–5 Northeastern Army 46, 55 Northern China and the CCP 28–9, 32–9 Northern Military Committee 29 Northwest China Bureau 15, 96, 104, 144, 146 ‘Notice on the Question of Criticism and Repudiation by Name in Publications’ 157 ‘Notiﬁcation on Catching Traitors’ 156 ofﬁcial condemnation of 61 (March–May 1967) 151–4 ‘On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People’ 130 ‘On the Ten Great Relationships’ 129 ‘ordinary statement’ 27 see also ‘non-anticommunist statement’ Organization Department An Ziwen 15, 106–18 Central 100, 103, 123, 125, 148–9, 156, 178 Beijing Municipal Committee 75 Central South Bureau 148 Chen Yuandao (Temporary Hebei Provincial Committee) 38 Liu Lantao (North China Bureau) 92 North Bureau 35 see also Central Organization Department

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260 Index Pan Hannian 26 Party Central Archives 100 Party School 77, 86, 88–91, 116, 118–19, 121, 171–2, 180, 183 Committee 120–1 North Bureau 98 Yang Xianzhen 15, 118–23 Peng De 59, 88 Peng Dehuai 114, 121, 132, 151, 176, 179 Peng Fei 159 Peng Zhen 18, 33–4, 49, 86, 140, 143, 146–7, 179, 190, 192 Gao Gang affair 110 North Bureau Organization Department 77 rehabilitation 179 Special Case Group 151 People’s Bank of China 124 People’s Liberation Army 103–4, 106, 164 Personnel Bureau 100 Personnel Ministry 100 Po I-po 94, 158 see Bo Yibo Politburo 37, 77, 85, 90, 101, 105–6, 109–10, 113, 119–20, 125, 152, 166, 176, 179, 181, 193 Bo Yibo 94, 124, 129, 184–5 Standing Committee 70, 164 Political Affairs Council (GMD) 46 Political Bureau 71 Political Department 76 Presidium 90 Propaganda Department 118 Provincial Committee (Temporary Hebei) 39 Public Security Bureau and Ministry 100, 178, 187 Pye, L. 12, 182 Qi Benyu 140, 148, 153, 157 Qian Ying 103 Qiao Mingfu 66, 100, 107 Qin Bangxian (Bo Gu) 36, 70, 88 Qiu Shaoshang 92 Qu Qiubai 30, 32–3, 36–7 Qualiﬁcations Committee 88, 175

Rao Shushi 110, 125 recruitment policy 107–9 Rectiﬁcation Campaign 192 see also Yan’an Red Guards 2, 15, 17, 65–6, 68–9, 92, 94–5, 101, 107, 109, 111, 113–14, 123, 135, 139–7, 149, 151–5, 157, 159 Preparatory Committee for Smashing the Liu Shaoqi Renegade Clique 152 see also Nankai University Red Guards ‘Regulations on Industry Mines and Enterprises’ 133 rehabilitation 2, 16–18, 67, 87, 161–6, 168–70, 194 Central Organization Department investigation report 174–6 Hu Yaobang and the Central Organization Department 170–4 Liu Shaoqi 177–8 the sixty-one 176, 179–81 Ren Bishi 88–9, 91 ‘Report on the Organization Department on Improving the Education and Management of Party Members’ 115 reregistration of party members 111–14 Rescue Campaign 6, 192 ‘Resolution on Certain Historical Questions’ (1945) 84, 88 Resolution on Party History (1981) 178–9 ‘Returned Students’ 36 Revolutionary Committees 158 ‘revolutionary double-dealing policy’ see ‘white skin, red heart’ Sacriﬁce League see National Salvation through Sacriﬁce Saich, T. 8 Sanfan movement 96, 108, 125 Schoenhals, M. 17, 121, 140 Schurmann, F. 102 Second Central Committee Fifth Plenary session (GMD) 27

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Index Secretariat (CCP) 16, 70–1, 83, 88, 90, 94, 101, 103, 119–20, 152 Seventh (CCP) Central Committee Secretariat 90 Seventh (CCP) Congress 16, 41, 86, 88, 112, 146, 174, 192 Shandong Provincial Party Committee 181 Shanxi 73–9 Alliance for Sacriﬁce and National Salvation 75 -Chahar-Hebei area ( JCJ) 77 GMD Penitentiary 66 -Hebei-Henan-Shandong region ( JJLY) 76 Military and Administrative Training Committee 75 Workers’ Committee 75 Sheng Shicai 155 Shuai Mengqi 100, 103, 107, 181 Shunzhi Military Committee 43 Shunzhi Provincial Committee 32–3, 35, 37–8 ‘Six Articles’ 113–14 ‘sixteen-point decision’ 141 Sixth Administrative District 76 Sixth (CCP) Central Committee Fourth Plenum (1931) 37–8 Sixth (CCP) Congress (1928) 33–4, 180 Sixth Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference 180 Sixty-One (the Sixty-One ‘Renegades’) 2, 14–19, 21, 26–8, 40, 43, 191–2, 195 1931–36 52, 60, 65, 68 1936–49 74–6, 78–9, 83–5, 87–90, 92–3 1949–66 94–6, 100–1, 103, 112, 119, 136–7 1966–78 139, 142–4, 146–54, 156–9, 163, 165–8, 170–9 1979– 179–82, 186–8 Snow, E. 70 Socialist Education Movement 116, 134–5 Song Qingling 23

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Song Zheyuan 22, 44, 46–51, 62, 68–9, 75, 175 ‘South China renegades clique’ 154–5 Soviet Union 18, 22–3, 25, 31, 155, 184 Stalin, J. 59 State Construction Commission 127, 155 State Council (SC) 94, 100, 127, 130, 141, 143, 150, 157–8, 166 Industry and Communications Staff Ofﬁce 124 Internal Affairs Ofﬁce 100 Third Ofﬁce 134 Finance and Trade Ofﬁce 134 State Economic Commission (SEC) 94, 124, 129, 134, 180 State Planning Commission (SPC) 124–5, 127–9, 134 State Procuratorate Indictment 101 Stranahan, P. 31 student movement 47–9 Sun, Madame (Song Qingling) 27 Sun Yefang 132, 155 Supervision Ministry 100 Taiyuan Nationalist Army Prison 66 Taiyue District Committee 92 Military Area Command 76–7 Special Zone 77 Tan Zhenlin 164 Tang Fanglei 74, 174 Tanggu Truce 45 Tao Zhu 176, 179 Teiwes, F. 98, 193 Temporary Committee 39 Temporary Hebei Provincial Committee 38 Tenth (CCP) Central Committee Third Plenum (1977) 168 Tenth (CCP) Party Congress 164 Tenth Plenum (1962) 104 Third Administrative District 76 Third Military Police 55 Regiment 61 Third Ofﬁce 134

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262 Index Third Plenary Session of the Fifth Central Committee 28 Third Plenum 1930 Sixth CCP Central Committee 36 1978 Eleventh CCP Central Committee 179, 181 Third Staff Ofﬁce 127 Thirteenth (CCP) Party Congress (1987) 184–5 Tiananmen incident (1976) 176 Tianjin Security Bureau 40 Trade Union Federation 40 Twelfth CCP Central Committee Politburo 179 Twelfth (CCP) Central Committee Second Plenum (1983) 183 Fourth Plenum (1985) 184 Twelfth Party Congress (1982) 182 ‘twenty-eight Bolsheviks’ 36, 40 Ulanfu 164 Umezu, General 46 united front 1–2, 9, 15, 20–2, 24–31, 44, 51, 53, 57, 60–1, 69, 71, 73–6, 78, 92 United Front Work Department 144, 180 United Jinggangshan Regiment 147 Van Slyke, L. 72 Wang Caowen 34 Wang Congwu 103, 121–2, 174, 181 Wang De 56, 75, 88, 95, 100, 107, 148, 181 Wang Dongxing 165, 174, 181 Wang Guangmei 72, 147, 153, 156, 177–8 Wang Hefeng 44, 74, 77, 92, 95, 100, 179, 181 Wang Heshou 134, 174, 176, 181 Wang Hongwen 164–5 Wang Jiaxiang 36, 88, 164 Wang Kequan 40 Wang Li 140 Wang Ming (Chen Shaoyu) 36–7, 60, 71, 85

Wang Qimei 78, 95, 159, 174, 186, 188 Wang Ruofei 59, 66 Wang Ruoshi 118 Wang Weigang 103 Wang Xianmei 173–4 Wang Xinbo 78, 159 Wang Yongbin 44 Wang Zhen 164 Wayaobao Conference 61 Wayaobao report 47 Wei Wenbo 54–5, 181 white area (cadres and work) 2, 7–11, 14–15, 17–19, 34, 62, 68, 70–2, 78–9, 83–9, 97, 99, 105, 136, 146, 155, 172, 174, 181, 188, 190–5 Gao Gang affair 102–3, 110–11, 125–6 ‘white skin, red heart’ 11, 82–5 ‘white terror’ 4, 187–8 Wu Han 140 Wu Hao Incident 154, 190–1 Wu Linquan 159 Wu Yunpu 88, 159, 186 Wufan movement 108, 125, 127 Xi’an Incident 24 Xian Weixun 66 Xiang Ying 70 Xiang Zhongfa 33, 37–8, 41 Xiao Hua 103 Xie Fuzhi 147, 178 Ximenghui (Sacriﬁce League) 75 ‘Xinjiang renegades’ clique’ 154–5, 178 Xu Bing 52, 63, 67, 74, 144, 158, 172 Xu Haidong 73 Xu Lanzhi 38, 40 Xu Zirong 66, 75, 92, 94–5, 100, 159, 186–8 Yan Wenhai 62 Yan Xishan 24, 26, 50, 66, 69, 73–7, 92 Yan’an 3, 6–8, 10, 12, 19, 91, 191–2 Delegate qualiﬁcations for CCP Seventh Party Congress 88–90

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Index Rectiﬁcation Campaign 7, 58, 85–88 Rescue Campaign 6, 192 Yang Hucheng 24, 26–7, 48 Yang Jijing 179 Yang Shangkun 18, 88, 100, 176–7, 179, 185 Yang Shiren 55 Yang Xianzhen 2, 15–16, 20–1, 27 1927–36 40–2, 52, 56–60, 65–6 1936–49 74, 76–7, 89–91 1949–66 90–1, 94–8, 116, 118–123, 135–6 1966–78 143–4, 146–7, 152, 154, 159, 166–7 1979–96 CDIC and CAC 179–80, 182, 184 Yang Xiufeng 66, 78 Yang Yong 164 Yao Wenyuan 140 Ye Jianying 162, 170–1, 174, 180 Ye Ting 168–9, 172 ‘yellow’ unions 30 Yin Jian 21, 40, 41, 44, 56, 59, 63, 92, 172 Zeng San 100 Zeng Yanji 26 Zhang Chunqiao 140, 173 Zhang Guotao 32, 39–40, 71–2 Zhang Hanfu 155

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Zhang Jingren (aka Zhang Mutao) 37–8 Zhang Kaiyun 36, 40 Zhang Liangyun 64 Zhang Manping 78 Zhang Wentian 17–18, 52–53, 62, 68, 70–3, 80, 88, 147, 150–2, 157, 159, 166–7, 172, 174–5, 177, 195 Zhang Xi 78, 92, 94–5 Zhang Xueliang 24, 26–7, 33, 44–5, 48, 50, 55, 69–70, 156 Northeastern Army 46 Zhang Youqing 56, 75 Zhang Zhaofeng 35 Zhang Zhiyhi 181 Zhang Zuolin 29 Zhao Bo 56, 78 Zhao Lin 56, 74, 87, 95, 157, 179, 181–2 Zhao Mingxin 78, 88 Zheng Daiyun 164 Zhou Enlai 17, 26–7, 36–7, 44–5, 69, 70–2, 76, 88, 91, 125–6, 131, 133 1966–76 139–41, 143–52, 155, 157, 164–5, 168–9 Wu Hao incident 154, 190–1 Zhou Zhongying 39, 44, 54, 66, 74, 77, 88, 95, 167, 174, 179, 180–1 Zhu De 91, 110, 168, 179 Zhu Zemin 49, 75, 78, 92, 144, 174, 179

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