In 1966, Lin’s recompense for doing Mao’s dirty work was being named CCP vice chairman. Indeed, he became defense minister when his predecessor was removed for the temerity of publicly criticizing Mao’s policies. He had risen by supporting Mao despite privately recognizing that the Great Leap Forward had been a disaster. Anyone concerned about their own position, such as Lin Biao, joined in. The campaign was led by Mao’s wife, the former actress Jiang Qing. Many other top officials, including the then-young Xi Jinping’s father, also were purged in one fashion or another. Deng Xiaoping, who was later recalled by Mao and became “paramount leader” after the latter’s death, went through a time of rural exile. The paranoid Mao loosed the Red Guards on his party enemies, including Liu Shaoqi, China’s president, who died in prison. The English-speaking anglophile was accused of being a spy and jailed for seven years, while her daughter was beaten to death. One of the most vivid memoirs came from Nien Cheng’s Life and Death in Shanghai. Those who lived through the period - a friend of mine spent her childhood in violent chaos, eventually escaping to America - have horrid stories to report. No one, and nothing, was safe from Mao’s legions, who targeted the foreign, the ancient, the individual, and the private. Universities were closed, education was abandoned, students were sent into the countryside to work and “learn from the peasants.” Individuals with Western connections could be punished while their homes were ransacked. Anyone in authority could be dragged before a crazed mob. (It became a popular export as a high school student I bought a copy in London’s Hyde Park in the early 1970s.) Their “struggle sessions” were highlighted by coerced “self-criticism” and public humiliation of anyone deemed insufficiently radical. The infamous Red Guards spread across China, waving copies of the Little Red Book of Mao’s slogans. They were “to rebel” and “bombard the headquarters,” as well as most everywhere else. Mao called for the young to go forth and ferret out the people’s enemies. The ultimate objective was to again make “Mao Zedong thought,” which had already killed millions, the governing standard in the PRC. Which, conveniently, could be summed up as anyone who doubted his leadership after he had thrown the country into chaos, forced crackpot theories on more than a fifth of mankind, caused untold death and devastation, and treated the slightest criticism as disloyalty. Not one to subordinate his ambition to the welfare of his more than 700 million countrymen - he made light of the threat of nuclear war because he believed that China had more than enough people to replace any killed - Mao launched the Cultural Revolution in May 1966 to cleanse the party of capitalists, capitalist roaders, rightists, traditionalists, revisionists, bourgeois remnants, and anyone else lacking sufficient revolutionary fervor. Eventually he was pushed aside into a more ceremonial role. Even senior party officials feared telling him the truth about his bizarre directives, which ranged from backyard steel production to collective agricultural cultivation. Next came the disastrous Great Leap Forward, which lead to mass starvation and the deaths of tens of millions. He then led successive drives against those seen as adversaries, including the Sufan Movement, which aimed at supposed counter-revolutionaries, and Anti-Rightest Movement, which targeted any and all detractors, even on the far left. He briefly invited criticism of the party leadership, before turning on those who obliged. He was the dominant voice demanding the PRC’s entry in the Korean War, turning the imminent allied victory over North Korea into a bloody two-and-a-half-year stalemate. In the early years came consolidation of victory across his vast, populous nation: there were many class enemies and opponents of the revolution to neutralize and punish. However, even after the CCP’s victory he fueled conflict. On October 1, 1949, he announced the creation of the People’s Republic of China. The son of prosperous peasants, he joined the nascent communist party, rose within the ranks, and drove it to victory. Like many great historical figures, Mao had enormous skills and weaknesses.
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