The World

Successes abroad did not secure Mao at home. In April 1966, he unleashed Jiang Qing and her ‘kill culture’ manifesto, an ‘anti-Party clique’ were denounced and Lin Biao declared that anyone who criticized Mao should be ‘executed … the whole nation must call for their blood’. As Mao unlocked a seething resentment against Party barons, in private at the Politburo Lin Biao answered the poison-pen letters signed ‘Montecristo’ that accused his wife of sexual adventures by bizarrely reading out a declaration that Madame Lin ‘was a virgin when she married me’ and ‘had no sexual amorous relationship’. In May, once he had secured the backing of Premier Zhou, Mao orchestrated the Terror in detail through his Cultural Revolution Group,^* ordering students to punish any ‘bourgeois ideas’ among teachers and suspending lessons. Professors at Beijing University were beaten by gangs of so-called Red Guards.

In July, Mao signalled his power by swimming in the Yangzte. ‘I wanted to show off,’ he admitted afterwards, but if he had not been surreptitiously helped by his guard, ‘I’d have died.’ At Zhongnanhai, the reinvigorated septuagenarian moved into a new residence, the Poolside House, next to his own indoor pool. Within Zhongnanhai, when Mao summoned his courtiers, the guards would say, ‘You’re wanted at the swimming pool.’

That August, Mao himself wrote a letter to the nation’s students, attacking ‘poisonous’ Party leaders and ‘the arrogance of the bourgeoisie’ and ordering, ‘Bombard the headquarters.’ He then appeared with Lin at a parade holding his Little Red Book

. He instigated a public witch-hunt: the minister of coal was beaten, bent forward with his arms pulled back – the torture known as jet-planing – and then stabbed with knives. Across China, gangs of students and brigands attacked their bosses, from teachers to Party leaders, holding ‘struggle sessions’ in which the victims were beaten up but forced to incriminate themselves – a new template for leftist intolerance.

Mao, like Stalin, a maestro of Mass Age mobilisation, directed the terror, promoting Lin Biao as his heir apparent as both his wife and Lin’s joined the Politburo. He preserved those he might need later. The president, Liu, was dismissed as ‘No. 1 Capitalist Roader’, then he and his wife were jet-planed and beaten to the ground. Later Liu was left to die of cancer, refused all treatment. Yet Mao respected Deng Xiaoping, the tough, capable ex-favourite who was running China, nicknaming him Little Cannon. But now Deng was denounced as ‘No. 2 Capitalist Roader’, dismissed and dispatched to a tractor factory in Jiangxi; his son Pufang was tortured and thrown from the top of a building, surviving as a paraplegic.^* His ally, Xi Zhongxun, a vice-premier, was denounced by Kang Sheng, demoted to a tractor factory, then publicly tormented and imprisoned, while his ten-year-old son, Xi Jinping, raised in privilege, witnessed his father’s downfall, and Red Guards smashing his home. His wife Qi Xin was forced to denounce her husband in a terrifying struggle session. Their daughter committed suicide. Qi chose to accompany Xi into exile, where he read Adam Smith and Churchill, but he was embittered and damaged by the trauma and by more than ten years of disfavour. The boy was forced to join Mao’s Down to the Countryside Movement but escaped to Beijing, was arrested and sent back. He did not see his parents again until he was almost twenty. When he became China’s autocrat, he remembered the Terror. ‘I see the bullpens [Red Guard detention camps],’ he said fifty years later. ‘I understand politics on a deeper level.’ China was chaotic: three million killed, a hundred million sacked, seventeen million deported or rusticated for ‘re-education’, a billion

Little Red Books brandished.

Brezhnev was fascinated but bewildered by Mao. ‘What kind of person is he?’ he said wonderingly to Castro. ‘Is he a Communist or a Fascist? Or perhaps the new Chinese emperor?’ Eschewing Maoist lunacy, Brezhnev defended Stalin’s empire – ‘When forces hostile to socialism try to turn some socialist country towards capitalism, it becomes … the common problem of all socialist countries’ – but, after Cuba, he was keen to limit nuclear weapons with the USA while fighting the hot struggle through African proxies.

NASSER AND THE KING: SIX DAYS IN JUNE