Jottings from the Granite Studio

Update 10/18/06: Richard Spencer has a great post on his foreign correspondent’s blog for the Telegraph on press coverage of Wang’s death in Beijing as well as some more details and photos from Liu and Wang’s struggles during the GPCR.

Via CDT: Wang Guangmei, widow of former Chinese president Liu Shaoqi, passed away last week at her home in Beijing. Wang and her husband were two of the more tragic figures in the Cultural Revolution.

As the leader of the ‘pragmatists’ as well as the head of the government, Liu made an excellent lightning rod for the wrath of Mao. After the failure of the Great Leap Forward, Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, and the other grown-ups in the CCP suggested sweetly that Mao ‘retire’ and work on his memoirs. The new leadership then set about strengthening China’s economy and proposed a series of policies not unlike those Deng Xiaoping would put forward 25 years later. The Chairman actually did step aside (sort of) but as he found himself and his ideas increasingly irrelevant, Mao became agitated, claiming that if he was sidelined for too long he would do what he did best: raise up a peasant army and take to the hills to fight guerilla warfare against the government. He ended up doing one better.

In 1966, Mao replaced Liu with Lin Biao as Mao’s heir apparent (could be the most dangerous job in the world this side of crab fishing and Grateful Dead keyboardist). By the end of the year, the Cultural Revolution was in full flower and chaos threatened to overwhelm China’s major cities. Accused of being a traitor and a scab, Liu was placed under house arrest. By 1968, nobody knew where he was. In fact, the old man, sick with diabetes, had been trundled off to the provinces where he was beaten and tortured. Too sick to resist, Liu was denied medical treatment for his condition and was finally left to die naked and alone on a concrete floor in a locked and uninsulated outbuilding near Kaifeng.

During the GPCR, Wang Guangmei was also arrested (she was actually tricked into leaving her house and then grabbed) and tortured. Wang had often accompanied her husband on foreign trips and she was was accused of wearing short-sleeved dresses and necklaces and in general not dressing or behaving in a revolutionary manner. Her attitude, elegance (and the rumored attentions of the Helmsman himself) incurred the jealousy and anger of Mao’s own wife, the notorious Jiang Qing. After Wang’s arrest, the Red Guards dressed her as a prostitute, complete with thick pancake makeup, and then paraded the former first lady in front of a large crowd of spectators. She was beaten several times. Wang Guangmei remained in prison until 1979.

What I’ve always found fascinating about Liu is the big counter-historical “what if?” In 1962, Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping began experimenting with many of the same policies that would characterize the first phase of the Reform Era (1978-1984). Unfortunately, the first time through, those policies would not survive the challenge by Mao, and others within the party, who felt that what Deng and Liu really wanted to do was to take China down the “Capitalist Counter-Revolutionary Road.”

The critics were probably right and there’s little to suggest that Mao would be all tickles and berries with today’s go-go China. But it’s not impossible to suggest that Liu and Deng were simply ahead of their times in 1963 and their main mistake was to underestimate the depths of Mao’s commitment to permanent revolution. Given China’s reemergence in the last 25 years, one can only wonder what an additional 25 year head start (never mind skipping the Great Leap Backwards that was the Cultural Revolution) would have meant, not only for the Chinese people, but for the world as well.

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• picture top right: Wang Guangmei and Liu Shaoqi.
  
• picture middle left: cartoon satirizing the couple. Note Wang’s dress and jewelry and Liu riding in an old-style sedan chair. (Via Morning Sun: A Film and Website about the Cultural Revolution)
• picture middle right: Cultural Revolution poster calling for the downfall of the Liu-Deng clique. (Via Stefan Landsberger’s Chinese Propaganda Page)
• picture bottom left: Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, and Deng Xiaoping in happier times.