Beijing banks on history, India on new confidence

In one voice?

My article Beijing banks on history, India on new confidence appeared in the Edit Page of The Pioneer.

Here is the link...

China appears to have miscalculated New Delhi’s response to its attempt to change the status quo at the tri-junction. It believed that a ‘weak’ New Delhi would back out of a confrontation
The best form of defence is attack, believed Sun Tzu, the ancient Chinese military strategist. This probably explains the new diplomatic offensive undertaken by China which would like to convince the foreign diplomatic community in Beijing that India was in the wrong to ‘occupy Chinese territory’ in the southern tip of the Chumbi Valley.
According to a national English daily, officials of China’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs had closed-door briefings, giving their version of the events to several foreign diplomats posted in Beijing. A diplomat from one of the P-5 (permanent members of the UN Security Council) told the daily, “They have told our colleagues in Beijing that the Indian side has trespassed into Chinese territory and changed the status quo.”
In actual fact, the opposite happened.  On June 30, the Ministry of External Affairs in Delhi clarified that, in 2012, it had mutually been decided that status quo would be maintained in the disputed area: “The two Governments had in 2012 reached an agreement that the tri-junction boundary points between India, China and third countries will be finalised in consultation with the concerned countries. Any attempt, therefore, to unilaterally determine tri-junction points, is in violation of this understanding”, explained South Block’s statement, which asserted that it was essential that “all parties concerned display utmost restraint and abide by their respective bilateral understandings not to change the status quo unilaterally”.

A blunder
This raises a serious question. Despite the noise emanating from Beijing, it does appear that, by starting a conflict which will take months or years to cool down, someone, somewhere, in China has serious blundered. Whether it is the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) or the civilian leadership which miscalculated India’s resolve to militarily defend Bhutan, is irrelevant; but it has triggered a vicious circle (though India had a measured and mature response).
Nevertheless, it is a huge intelligence blunder on the part of Beijing which took India for granted. Of course, the deciders in Beijing had previous historical cases, particularly that of Tibet in the early 1950s, when India refused to defend ‘small insects being eaten by big insects’, as the 13th Dalai Lama termed an earlier Chinese invasion in 1910. This time, India did not hesitate to defend Bhutanese interests, especially in an area which is so strategic for New Delhi.
Could have the central Chinese leadership have taken such a risky gamble without a green signal from the ground — their representation in India? Though nothing will immediately change, in the months to come, we may see some heads rolling. Did the Chinese Ambassador in Delhi report that the ‘weak’ Indians would not react to the construction of a road? We may never know. But there is no doubt that the preparations for building a road in the disputed area started several months ago, if not earlier.
One issue which is usually not mentioned by commentators on the current stand-off is the tense situation in China, before the Communist Party’s 19th Congress, which will witness a significant change of guard. Could serious differences within the party have influenced the situation at the tri-junction Sikkim-Tibet-Bhutan?
It is possible.

The case of Sun Zhengcai
Last Saturday, Sun Zhengcai, a member of the Communist Party’s Politburo, and a Xi Jinping heir-apparent, was removed from the scene. Sun was one of the top contenders for a seat in the Central Committee’s Standing Committee of the Politburo; serving as party boss of Chongqing megacity, Sun is apparently investigated by the anti-graft agency.
Quoting a source in Chongqing, The South China Morning Post wrote: “Sun Zhengcai, at 53, the youngest member of the party’s 25-strong Politburo, is suspected of serious violation of party discipline.”
After Sun lost his job, the Hong Kong newspaper commented: “The development could have a significant impact on the upcoming leadership reshuffle in the autumn... The internal briefing did not state whether he had been placed under official investigation.”
Sun was immediately replaced by Guizhou’s party chief, Chen Miner, a Xi Jinping protégé. Earlier in the day, on Saturday, a video footage on state-run CCTV showed Sun attending a high-level finance meeting in Beijing: Impermanence is the way of life in communist China.

The case of 1962
One can recall the deadly infighting during the first months of 1962. At a meeting known as the 7,000 Cadres’ Conference, in January 1962, President Lui Shaoqi stated: “…man-made disasters strike the whole country”. He was targeting Mao, who was sidelined for a few months. In the summer of 1962, Mao decided to stage a comeback against ‘Left adventurism’ and ‘capitalist roaders’.
One person stood up and supported Mao: This was Lin Biao, who had replaced Marshall Peng as Defence Minister. Lin, who would lead the attack on India a few months later, asserted: “The thoughts of Chairman Mao are always correct.” This new-found alliance between Mao and the PLA Chief was, no doubt, one of the most important factors in the 1962 conflict.
In September 1962, at the 10th Plenum of the party’s 8th Congress, Mao took back the fate of China into his hands, denouncing “the members of the bourgeoisie in the party ranks”. He even attacked his mild Premier Zhou Enlai and Foreign Minister Chen Yi, who were accused of trying to rehabilitate intellectuals and scientists: "The bourgeois spirit hangs over like a ghost over their heads.”
Nine years later, the heir-apparent, Lin Biao was ‘eliminated’ in mysterious circumstances in an air crash.

The present power struggle
There is no doubt that times have changed, and it is difficult to conceive today a full-fledged conflict between India and China, but the fact remains that the Chinese leadership tends to become irrational when there is an intense power struggle within the party.
Recently, when Xi Jinping visited Hong Kong, unprecedented security measures, including a last-minute decision of shifting hotels, was due to fierce in-fighting in the party, according to Apple Daily, Hong Kong’s second best selling newspaper: “The threat to Xi’s safety is, for sure, not from Hong Kong demonstrators, the non-existent Hong Kong separatists, or the overseas extreme religious or separatist forces. Rather, it is from the communist party’s power struggle.” It was at the last minute that Beijing decided to change hotels, creating utter chaos for the media and the Hong Kong police. “This arrangement let the outside world realise that the communist party’s power struggle has come to the point of life or death for its leaders” commented Apple Daily.
Presuming that the tension on the border will continue till after the 19th Congress (when the winter will set over Dokala), it may become more and more difficult for China to extricate itself from its own rhetoric, which is not based on facts. In any case, this makes the situation dangerous. Incidentally, China will celebrate the 90th anniversary of the PLA on August 1; other crucial date.

The two Xis and Tibet

This article of Reuters is interesting, though it misses several points about Xi Zhongxun.
As I mentioned in an earlier posting, Xi Jinping had a very traumatic youth. Xi Zhongxun, Xi Jinping's father was 'purged' by Mao in September 1962, mainly due to his closeness to Marshal Peng Dehuai who had dared criticizing Mao for his Great Leap Forward. 
The young Dalai Lama in 1954-55 was very close to Peng ('my favorite Chinese', he once told me), though at the end of the 1940s, Marshall Peng was the Commander of the First Field Army which invaded Amdo (Xi Senior was the Political Commissar of the same Army). 
Xi Zhongxun was probably closer to the late Panchen Lama than the Dalai Lama, as the First Field Army supported the Tashilhunpo monastery ('Back Tibet' in Chinese parlance).
Dr. Li Zhisui, Mao's Private Physician in its Private Life of Chairman Mao gave an  interesting account of Xi Zhongxun's fall during the 10th Plenum of the Party's 8th Central Committee of the CCP which was held in September 1962, in Beijing.  
In another posting, I mentioned the close relation of Xi Senior with Bapa Phuntsok Wangyal (Phunwang), the 'first' Tibetan Communist in the 1930’s. Phunwang was arrested and accused to be a ‘local nationalist’ in 1958 and rehabilitated at the end of the 1970’s. In 1980, he participated to the redrafting of the Chinese Constitution. Like Xi Senior, he spent 18 years in confinement. While in prison, Phuntsok Wangyal became knowledgeable about the issue of ‘Nationalities’ and suggested some amendments of the Constitution People Republic of China, favoring the status and role of 'nationalities'. Unfortunately, his report did not please everybody. He still lives in Beijing.
When the Reuters correspondent says that Xi Jinping's wife is a Buddhist, he does not mention how good (or bad) are Xi's relations with his wife. Many rumors circulated on the subject.
It is true that in the video posted in this blog, Maj. Gen. Peng Liyuan, Xi's wife is praising the beauty of Tibet.
Finally, it is not one person (the Party's Secretary-General) who can on its own, take decision on issue like Tibet. The Tibet Work Forum will continue to exist and Hu Jintao will be part of it, as a Senior Leader knowledgeable about the subject.  
A last thing, was it a Rolex or a Omega that the Dalai Lama gifted Old Xi? 
Some say it was a Rolex, another informant told me that it was an Omega. 
The make of the watch may not change the Fate of Tibet, but the promotion of Xi Jr. as Party boss may trigger some positive changes.

Does China's next leader have a soft spot for Tibet?
Reuters
By Benjamin Kang Lim and Frank Jack Daniel
BEIJING/DHARAMSALA (Reuters) - For decades, Beijing has maintained that the Dalai Lama is a separatist, but Tibet's exiled spiritual leader once had a special relationship with the father of Xi Jinping, the man in line to become China's next president.
Few people know what Xi, whose ascent to the leadership is likely to be approved at a Communist Party congress later this year, thinks of Tibet or the Dalai Lama.
But his late father, Xi Zhongxun, a liberal-minded former vice premier, had a close bond with the Tibetan leader who once gave the elder Xi an expensive watch in the 1950s, a gift that the senior party official was still wearing decades later.
The Dalai Lama, 77, recalls the elder Xi as "very friendly, comparatively more open-minded, very nice" and says he only gave watches back then to those Chinese officials he felt close to.
"We Tibetans, we get these different varieties of watch easily from India. So we take advantage of that, and brought some watches to some people when we feel some sort of close feeling, as a gift like that," the Dalai Lama said in an interview in Dharamsala, a capital for Tibetan exiles in the foothills of the Himalayas.
The Dalai Lama gave the watch to the elder Xi in 1954 during an extended visit to Beijing. Xi was one of the officials who spent time with the young Dalai Lama in the capital where he spent five to six months studying Chinese and Marxism.
The Dalai Lama fled to India five years later, after a failed uprising against Communist rule, but as late as 1979, Xi senior was still wearing the watch, the make and style of which the Dalai Lama can no longer remember.
Xi senior was a dove in the party, championing the rights of Tibetans, Uighurs and other ethnic minorities. He also opposed the army crackdown on the 1989 Tiananmen student protests and was alone in criticising the sacking of liberal party chief Hu Yaobang by the Old Guard in 1987. Xi senior died in 2002.
The Dalai Lama has never met Xi junior but his fondness for the father is, for some, a sign that China's next leader may adopt a more reformist approach to Tibet once he formally succeeds President Hu Jintao next March. Some expect him to be more tolerant of Muslim Uighurs in the western region of Xinjiang, and also of Taiwan, the independently ruled island that China has vowed to take back, by force if necessary.
"To understand what kind of leader Xi Jinping will be, one must study his father's (policies)," said Bao Tong, one-time top aide to purged party chief Zhao Ziyang. Bao was jailed for seven years for sympathising with student-led demonstrations for democracy centred on Beijing's Tiananmen Square in 1989.
"No (Chinese) Communist will betray his father," he added.

LIKE FATHER, LIKE SON?
Xi senior is looked on favourably by China's leaders with plans already made to commemorate his 100th birth anniversary in mid-October next year with a ceremony at the Great Hall of the People and editorials and commentaries in state media eulogising him, sources with ties to the leadership said.
But even if Xi junior wants to pursue a reform agenda, he is likely to bide his time.
"The key is whether Xi Jinping feels confident of his power consolidation," said Lin Chong-Pin, a former Taiwan defence minister and China policy-maker who now teaches at Taipei's Tamkang University.
Lin added, however: "There will be a more tolerant policy not only (towards) Tibet, but also Xinjiang."
Taiwan, the democratic island Beijing claims as its own, may be the model for reconciliation with Tibet.
"Every generation of (Chinese) leaders must resolve problems left over from the previous generation," a source with leadership ties said.
"For Hu, it was Taiwan," the source added, referring to Hu mending fences with the island after his predecessor, Jiang Zemin, threatened it with war games in the run-up to its first direct presidential elections in 1996.
"For Xi, it's Tibet," the source said.
Asked if Xi might take a different tack on Tibet, a retired party official who used to work in Tibet said: "There has to be new thinking ... He (Xi) is surely aware of the problems."
"More and more government spending, more and more security, is not going to buy enduring stability in Tibet," the official said, referring to China pouring billions of yuan to develop Tibet, including opening a railway in 2006 linking it with the rest of China, and a crackdown in the wake of the unrest.
"The high-pressure policies can't continue forever," the official said, asking not to be identified and adding that these were his personal views.

CARDS HELD CLOSE
Xi has played his cards close to his chest and little is publicly known about his policies. Like Hu, he will be no political strongman, and will have to rule by consensus as the first among equals.
If Hu stays on as military chief, Hu may continue to hold sway over major policies, but is unlikely to oppose detente.
"Hu will not be an obstacle to (any) reconciliation" moves, a second source with leadership ties said.
Initially, Hu sought to make up for his decision to crush riots in Tibet in 1989 by issuing a decree to "protect Tibetan culture" in the early 2000s, but was taken aback when the Dalai Lama accused China of "cultural genocide".
China has defended its iron-fisted rule in Tibet, saying the region suffered from dire poverty, brutal exploitation of serfs and economic stagnation until 1950 when Communist troops "peacefully liberated" it and introduced "democratic reforms" in 1959.
Tensions over the issue are at their highest in years after a spate of protests and self-immolations by Tibetan activists, which have led to an intensified security crackdown. Fifty-one Tibetans have set themselves alight since 2009.
In the event the Dalai Lama dies in exile, it could radicalise exiled Tibetan youth who have clamoured for independence and are frustrated with his "middle way" approach that advocates autonomy within China.
It could create a rallying point for Tibetans disgruntled with Communist rule and leave a destabilising leadership vacuum.
"They (Chinese government) hope Tibet's political problem can be basically resolved once the Dalai Lama passes away," said Wang Lixiong, an author and expert on Tibet who has met the Dalai Lama several times.
Instead, Wang added, "the Dalai Lama's death could spark massive protests and even rioting."

"NORMAL HEARTS"
The outbreak of rioting in Tibet in 2008 ahead of the Beijing Olympics and a subsequent crackdown, which in turn sparked the self-immolations, may have prevented Hu from carrying out any reversal of China's hardline policy on Tibet.
At the time of the riots, Xi commented: "We should have normal hearts" - a remark that was in stark contrast to insults rained on the Dalai Lama by the region's then Communist Party boss, Zhang Qingli, who called the 1989 Nobel Peace Prize winner a "jackal in Buddhist monk's robes" with "the face of a human and the heart of a beast".
Zhang was not alone. Many Chinese party, government and military officials and many ordinary Chinese are convinced the 2008 unrest was a Western plot to demonise Beijing before the Games and try to split Tibet from China.
But tempers appear to have cooled a bit.
Hu is manoeuvring to promote one of his closest allies - Inner Mongolia party boss Hu Chunhua who speaks Tibetan, a rarity among Chinese officials - to the party's inner sanctum, two independent sources said, in a bid to retain clout after retiring. The two Hus are not related.
In a sign the party may at times be willing to reverse bad decisions or policies, it backed down recently after liberal intellectuals slammed it for forcing Tibetan Buddhist monasteries to put up portraits of Mao and other leaders. Local officials now say this is voluntary.
Xi may have more to gain than lose from resuming talks with the Dalai Lama's envoys, but this may not happen anytime soon.
"They probably will take very small, incremental steps. They cannot take big steps," said Lin, the Taiwan-based academic.
Many challenges lie ahead.
"The talks process could start again at any point, we don't know. We shouldn't rule it out even though it looks very negative at the moment," Robbie Barnett, a Tibetologist at Columbia University, said in a telephone interview.
"He may have to prove that he's very tough ... so it could make it quite difficult for Xi. He could risk heavy attack from hardliners. It's quite complicated for him."
But Robert Lawrence Kuhn, author of "How China's Leaders Think", was more optimistic.
"He is a very practical, pragmatic, very down-to-earth kind of person," said Kuhn who has met Xi half a dozen times. "I don't think he has an overblown sense of his own person, which to me is very important. People could rally around him."
The Dalai Lama has said he hopes Xi will usher in a "realistic" and more open approach to Tibet, in the same way Deng Xiaoping introduced market reforms in the late 1970s that turned China into an economic powerhouse from a backwater.
After more than 50 years of confrontation with Beijing, the Dalai Lama is cautious but hopeful.
"I can't say for definite, but according to many Chinese friends, they say the new, coming leadership seems more lenient," he said in an interview in his audience room which was decorated with Bhuddist paintings and a bust of Mahatma Gandhi.
He said there had been a stream of visitors to Dharamsala from China, including people who told him they had connections with senior Communist Party leaders. "These are very, very encouraging signs," he said. "No formal talks, but there are sort of signs among the Chinese officials or top leaders."
To watch the Dalai Lama interview, click on: link.reuters.com/cub42t
Tibetan exiles see other small signs that Xi could take a softer line on Tibet - his wife is a Buddhist, and Xi went out of his way in 2006, while party boss of Zhejiang province, to host the first World Buddhist Forum in the provincial capital.
A batch of U.S. diplomatic cables obtained and published by WikiLeaks last year said the Dalai Lama had "great affection" for Xi senior, and that Xi junior was quite taken with Buddhist mysticism at one point early in his career.
In July last year, Xi visited Tibet and pledged to crack down on the separatist "Dalai clique" and "completely smash any plot to destroy stability in Tibet and jeopardise national unity".
But a Western diplomat in Beijing cautioned that this was standard language and should not be construed to be hardline. "No one wins prizes for saying the Dalai is ok," he said.
But many exiles are skeptical.
"I do not expect Xi junior to be like his father because he is facing a completely different situation, but I hope he can be different (from Hu Jintao)," said Khedroob Thondup, a nephew of the Dalai Lama who visited China more than 10 times with his father, Gyalo Thondup, as unofficial envoys of the Dalai Lama.
Another nephew, Tenzin Taklha, who is also a secretary to the Dalai Lama, said: "Even if it does happen it won't be substantial, just to show the world the door is open again."
The Dalai Lama, too, has yet to be convinced that Beijing will soften its stance on Tibet - even if Xi turns out to have the same moderate inclination as his father - and says political reformers sometimes do not last long in the Communist Party.
"These realistic people sometime live a very short life."
(Additional reporting by John Chalmers in DHARAMSALA and Chris Buckley in BEIJING; Editing by Raju Gopalakrishnan and Mark Bendeich)

Xi Jinping: a traumatic youth?

The Telegraph article posted below quotes Chinese Premier Wen Jiabao telling a group of students how his family was "constantly persecuted during the darkest years of Chairman Mao's rule". 
The Telegraph said that it may be "a warning to the hardline faction within the Communist party not to repeat the mistakes of history".
Another  leader who must have suffered a great deal during his youth, probably more than Wen, is China's future President, Xi Jinping.

While Wen's father was persecuted during the Hundred Flowers Bloom movement instigated by Mao, ('Letting a hundred flowers blossom and a hundred schools of thought contend'), Xi Zhongxun (Xi Jinping's father) was 'purged' by Mao in September 1962, mainly due to his closeness to Marshal Peng Dehuai who had dared criticizing Mao for his Great Leap Forward.

This was Mao's first act of vendetta before the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.

Interestingly, the Chinese press never mentions Xi Jinping's childhood.

In his The Origins of the Cultural Revolution (Volume 2), the great scholar
Roderick MacFarquhar recounts:

The sage of the eastern sea
...At the 10th plenum, Mao revealed that Peng Dehuai and the three men denounced with him at the Lushan conference were to be subjected to further investigation, by a special case review commission (zhuan'an shencha weiyuanhui). Deng Xiaoping announced that, as suggested by Kang Sheng, they would no longer be entitled to attend meetings of the party bodies of which they were still member, though this was almost certainly only a formal confirmation of the current situation. Mao was indicating to all and sundry that Peng could write as many letters at whatever length he pleased, but he would be rehabilitated only over his de ad body-which is what eventually happened. All and sundry suited their words to the Chairman's mood, and Peng was roundly denounced at the plenum for his latest missives which, among other things, were said to be in concert with China's enemies, labelled for convenient memorization as the 'three ni's and the one tie' that is, Kennedy (Ken-ni-di), Nikita Khrushchev (Ni-ji-ta He-lu-xiaa-fu), Nehru (Ni-he-lu), and Tito (Tie-tua).
Whether Mao's colleagues had any compunctions about colluding in his further act of vengeance against the already disgraced marshal is unknown. But they should have been more alarmed at the Chairman's announcement of the creation of a second special case review commission to investigate a totally new victim, for it exhibited Mao's readiness to believe in plots against him. The new 'anti-party' figure was a key vice-premier in Zhou Enlai's State Council, Xi Zhongxun, who sometimes acted as premier when both Zhou and Deng Xiaoping were absent from Beijing. The identity of his chief persecutor, Kang Sheng, and the grounds for and manner of Xi's disgrace provided a foretaste of the early months of the Cultural Revolution.
Kang Sheng was a sinister and shadowy figure even to his colleagues, sinister because of his activities in the Soviet Union and Yan'an prior to 1949, shadowy because for the first six years after the CCP's conquest of power he had been almost invisible, apparently ill. Nevertheless, he was evidently a man of considerable ability; Tian Jiaying regarded him with great respect, and referred to him as 'the sage of the eastern sea' (danghai shengren).
...By 1962, the reason for Kang Sheng's seat on the Politburo may have been a mystery to the 80 per cent of the CCP's 17 million plus members who joined after 1949. Kang had been almost invisible during the early years of the PRC.
…Kang Sheng immediately confirmed his value to Mao by using his ideological expertise to boost the Chairman's ideas and cult and by indiscriminately backing both his 'rightist' policies in 1957 and his leftist policies during the GLF. …But when Mao sounded the leftist tocsin at Beidaihe, Kang Sheng responded with alacrity, making an 180-degree turn. His stratagem was to attack the manuscript of a novel about a revolutionary martyr, Liu Zhidan.

The Liu Zhidan affair
Liu Zhidan was born in 1903 in the northwestem province of Shaanxi. In 1926, already a CCP member, he entered the fourth class (along with Lin Biao) at the Whampoa Military Academy, directed by Chiang Kai-shek with Soviet military advisers. After the CCP-KMT split in 1927, he had returned to his native province and set up a guerrilla group. For a time he was under attack by 'leftists' in the CCP leadership, but after Mao and the Long Marchers reached Shaanxi in 1935, he was rehabilitated. He died in battle against the KMT in 1936, still in his early thirties.
The origins of the novel about his life resembled that of the play about Hai Rui. Wu Han had no intention of writing a play about the Ming official, but did so after being importuned by a theatrical company. His reluctance stemmed from his not being a playwright. Li Jiantong, the author of Liu Zhidan, also had grave doubts about accepting the commission when approached in the mid-1950s. She thought she did not have the appropriate artistic or ideological talents. The matter was complicated because she was married to Liu Zhidan's younger brother, Liu Jingfan, a vice-minister of geology, and had had a complicated 'struggle relationship' with Liu Zhidan.
Li’s husband was against her accepting the commission. But the Workers' Publishing House had decided that Liu would make a good subject for a planned series of uplifting and edifying revolutionary sagas. By sponsoring fictionalized accounts, the publishers could hope to invoke artistic license as an excuse for either mistakes or gaps, and perhaps this was what persuaded Li Jiantong. Liu Zhidan’s most senior surviving comrade-in-arms, Vice-Premier Xi Zhongxun, warned her, when he learned of the project, that it would bring her grief because of all the intra-party disputes in which Liu had been involved, but she eventually decided to ignore his advice and, like Wu Han, took on an assignment for which she had little experience. After two years of collecting materials and interviewing many of Liu's one-time comrades-in-arms, she began to write in 1958 and submitted her third draft to the publishing house in 1959. The editors found it acceptable, but Li asked them to submit it to Xi Zhongxun for his approval.
Like Liu Zhidan, Xi hailed from Shaanxi. Born in 1913, he had joined the YCL in 1926 and the CCP in 1928. By 1932, still in his teens, he had set up a guerrilla force in the Shaanxi-Gansu border region. It was there that he became associated with Liu and Gao Gang, who were the two leading communists in the northwest prior to the arrival of Mao and the Long Marchers. During the civil war, as the PLA moved south, Xi remained in the northwest as the leading party official in the region, a role he maintained into the early 1950s, until he moved to the capital. After a brief spell as director of the CC's Propaganda Department, Xi took on a pivotal bureaucratic role as secretary-general of the State Council in 1954, a post which he still occupied in 1962.
Xi was unhappy with the manuscript, and it went through three more drafts, at which point he appears to been worn down by the persistent author, and he gave the project his blessing without reading any of the later drafts thoroughly. But Li Jiantong took the additional precaution of submitting the fifth draft to her old teacher Zhou Yang in the spring of 1962, and harried him into reading it. Zhou, whose position as the CC Propaganda Department's deputy director in charge of literature gave him the authority to issue an imprimatur, raised some issues, but did not forbid publication. At least one senior cadre, originally from Shaanxi, did take exception to the book. In a letter to the author in the summer of 1962, Yan Hongyan, an alternate CC member, a three-star general, the 1st secretary of Yunnan province, and a one-time companion-in-arms of Liu Zhidan, expressed the view that no writer could assume the responsibility for making historical judgements; that was up to the Cc. In view of Yan's objections, it was decided to publish a few chapters from the sixth draft in The Gongren Ribao (Workers' daily) and Zhongguo Qing-nian (China youth) in order to gauge public reactions. At Beidaihe, Yan immediately lobbied the AIl-China Federation of Trade Unions (ACFTU) and YCL leadership - Liu Ningyi and Hu Yaobang then headed those organizations-to have publication stopped. Yan also raised the matter in writing with the head of the CC's General Office, Yang Shangkun, and again on 8 September at a preparatory meeting for the 10th plenum. Unfortunately for Li Jiantong, Xi Zhongxun, and a number of senior CCP officials, Yan Hongyan took the further step of mentioning the matter to Kang Sheng, c1aiming that the aim of the novel was to reverse the verdict on Gao Gang.
Unlike Liu Zhidan, Gao Gang survived the warfare in the northwest, rising high in Mao's favour. But he overreached himself in 1953, when he attempted to supplant Liu Shaoqi as Mao's eventual successor and allegedly plotted with the head of the CC's Organization Department, Rao Shushi, to bring about a major reshuffle of the CCP's top leadership. Both men were purged; Gao was put under house arrest and later shot himself.

The day of the jackal
The Gao Gang affair was still alive issue in 1962. As we have seen, by the time of the Seven Thousand Cadres Conference, it was Peng Dehuai's alleged involvement in it that had to be used as the major justification for Mao's refusal to rehabilitate the marshal, since his trenchant criticisms of the GLF had been proved correct. Thus it was no wonder that Kang Sheng should prick up his ears at the mention of a new Gao Gang angle. ln the tense atmosphere of intra-party struggle revived at Beidaihe by Mao, here was a heaven-sent opportunity for Kang to prove again to the Chairman his indispensability in ferreting out traitors.
Among Kang's current positions was vice-head of the CC's Culture and Education Small Group and head of its theory section, and on that authority he ordered the Propaganda Department to stop any further publication of chapters from Liu Zhidan, even though at this point he had not even seen the manuscript. He ordered 300 copies of the third draft and 600 copies of the fifth draft to be printed and distributed for examination by the Beidaihe conferees. On 24 August, he wrote to the CC's General Office to say that this was not simply a literary issue but had political implications. He coined the phrase 'using novels to promote anti-party activities is a great invention, which Mao embraced with enthusiasm, and which indeed was subsequently attributed to the Chairman. But author Li Jiantong was small fry, and so Kang Sheng concocted the idea of a high-level plot masterminded by Xi Zhongxun.
Why did Mao seize on the Liu Zhidan affair and give Kang Sheng his head without really looking into the matter, or indeed believing the charges?200 Did he not have enough to do discouraging his leagues from pursuing revisionist policies in the countryside and abroad? One reason was probably that he welcomed a fresh case seemingly tailor-made to justify his warnings on the need for class struggle and eternal vigilance. Secondly, ever since the Hungarian revolt and the Hundred Flowers in China, he had been extremely wary of the ability of intellectuals to use their professional skill for nefarious political purposes, what might be called the Petofi Circle syndrome. Kang's new concept resonated with him, and as the 1960s progressed, Mao would increase the pressure on the intellectuals. Finally, as Kang Sheng doubtless intuited, attacking Liu Zhidan was an excellent way to demonstrate the continuing relevance of the Gao Gang affair, and thus provide additional justification for the refusal to rehabilitate Peng Dehuai.
For his own reasons, Liu Shaoqi had to fall in with this strategy vis-à-vis Peng Dehuai, but at the 10th plenum he also condemned Xi Zhongxun and Liu Zhidan in the same terms. There is no record of Zhou Enlai attempting to save a man he evidently regarded as a key member of his State Council team; with Mao's permission and  Chen Yi in attendance, the premier tried only to comfort Xi Zhongxun with an assurance that if the Liu Zhidan accusation was a mistake, it would be corrected. At the 10th-plenum, Kang Sheng was thus free to lead the attack on Xi, and thereafter to lead the second special case review commission in its investigation of the supposed 'anti-party group' led by Xi; Jia Tuofu, a one-time associate of Liu Zhidan and currently a CC member and a vice-chairman of the State Planning Commission; and the author's husband, Liu Zhidan's brother, Liu Jingfan. Kang Sheng alleged that a character in the novel named Luo Yan represented Gao Gang, just as three years later he would claim that Hai Rui was Peng Dehuai. Officials at the publishing house and throughout the northwest were investigated, and the case had still not been concluded when the Cultural Revolution broke out and it became public knowledge. Kang Sheng's reward was promotion to the CC's secretariat at the 10th plenum.
Two months later, he moved to the Diaoyutai guest complex in the capital to mastermind a team of ideologues for the campaign against Soviet revisionism. The most cynical hit-man of Mao's Cultural Revolution swat team was now an agent in place, helping to initiate the domestic and foreign policies that were the prelude to that cataclysm.

Wen Jiabao reveals his family was persecuted under Mao
The Telegraph
02 Nov 2011
Malcolm Moore, Shanghai

The speech, delivered in front of students at Mr Wen's alma mater, the Nankai high school in Tianjin, recalled the paranoia and fear of life in China at the end of the 1950s as a deeply divided Communist party hunted down its opponents.
"I was born into an intellectual family in Yixing, north Tianjin in 1942. My grandfather ran a school in the village. It was the first primary school to admit girls, against pressure from the local landlords. Many of the teachers were university graduates and some became professors after 1949," said Mr Wen, delving into his past for the first time publicly.
According to a transcript published in China's official state media, Mr Wen said he had carried his grandfather's body to hospital. "He died of a cerebral haemorrhage in 1960. The school he taught at had kept his files, filled with one self-criticism after another, written in small neat characters," he said.
At the time, the Communist party had forced intellectuals, many of whom had been educated abroad or had worked for the previous government, to "revise their thinking" through self-criticism until they became ideologically sound.
After inviting them to speak out about China's problems, Chairman Mao performed a u-turn and attacked those who were bold enough to voice their opinions publicly.
After I went to high school and university, my family suffered constant attacks in the successive political campaigns," added Mr Wen.
"In 1960, my father was also investigated for so-called 'historical problems'. He could no longer teach and was sent to work on a farm on the outskirts of the city tending pigs. My father was an honest man, hardworking and diligent throughout his life."
China's top leaders rarely, if ever, discuss their personal history or family lives. And the attacks by Chairman Mao on 550,000 intellectuals at the end of the 1950s remain a deeply sensitive, and strictly-censored, topic.
However, analysts said Mr Wen was sounding a warning to hardliners within the Communist party about the perils of maintaining an iron grip and refusing to reform the country.
The attacks on Mr Wen's family came at a time when the Communist party under Mao was split internally over how to set a path for the country, with liberal and hardline factions taking opposing views. In the end, liberal forces lost out, much to China's subsequent woe.
"My childhood was spent in war and hardship. The poverty, turmoil and famine left an indelible imprint on my young soul [ ...] I realised only science, truth-seeking, democracy and hard work can save China," said Mr Wen.
As the 69-year-old gets ready to step down next year and hand power over to a new generation of Chinese leaders he has made a flurry of speeches calling for "urgent" political reform and the loosening of the party's iron grip on the state.
However, there is little sign that reform is forthcoming. Some have suggested that Mr Wen is merely trying to paint himself on the right side of history, while others have noted that he lacks a broad enough power base within the party to effect any change.
Liu Shanying, a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, said Mr Wen's speech might be read as an attempt to warn China's future leaders not to repeat the mistakes of history.
"As far as I recall, this is the first time that Wen Jiabao has discussed the political persecution of his family. He had not mentioned it even in his memoirs. Of course politicians are different from normal people and every word they say has a meaning," he said.
"When he talks about his childhood suffering, I think he means that he does not want to see China return to that era. He, and many other Chinese are victims of that era, and he is expressing the desire for peace and stability to calm down some of the other elements in the party," he said.
"It also shows his discontent with the recent sixth plenum, about how to restructure China's culture and the continuing need for control over public opinion," he added. Mr Wen's speech was also read by some as a pledge that he would continue to push his reform agenda even in retirement.