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- [00:01]
William Dalrymple
If you want access to bonus episodes, reading lists for every series of Empire, a chat community, discounts for all the books mentioned in the week's podcast ad, free listening, and a weekly newsletter. Sign up to empire club@www.empirepoduk.com. this episode is brought to you by Attio, the AICRM the larger an empire becomes, the harder it is to know what's happening across it. Modern organizations face the same sort of and Attio helps solve it. Attio is an AICRM designed for how teams really operate. Sync your email and calendar and you're up and running in minutes. From there, Attio brings your conversations and contacts together in one place so your team can see what is happening in real time. Ask Atio goes a step further. Simply ask questions about your pipeline, which deals are moving fastest, where the momentum is building, or what needs attention next, and get a clear answer in moments. With Attio, you can focus on the real work of building your empire from day one onwards. Try Attio for free@attio.com Empire.
- [01:29]
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- [01:59]
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- [02:23]
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- [02:40]
William Dalrymple
Hey, still got my hoodie?
- [02:42]
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- [03:00]
Anita Anand
Hello and welcome back to our series on Mao with me, Anita Anand, and me, William Durimple.
- [03:08]
William Dalrymple
And we have with us the incredibly patient Rana Mitter, who's now been sitting for about six hours in captivity. Poor man snowed in in Harvard while we extract from him the amazing details of a lifetime of research into this.
- [03:25]
Rana Mitter
Yeah, well, it's basically, it's like the Shining but with better back chat.
- [03:29]
Anita Anand
Oh, no. All work and no play makes Rana a very angry boy. Anyway, look, the last time we spoke about Mao's Great Leap Forward, we talked about how it resulted in the worst famine in history. And we left Mao plotting revenge against leaders that Rana was explaining, you know, tried to sideline Mao. In this episode, we're going to discuss the final incredibly violent chapter of Mao's reign, the Cultural Revolution.
- [03:59]
Rana Mitter
Yes.
- [03:59]
William Dalrymple
He didn't go quietly, did he, Rana? This was quite an impressive performance from a 70 year old who's already put his country through the extraordinary contortions over the previous 30 years.
- [04:11]
Rana Mitter
That's absolutely right. At the end of the disastrous Great Leap Forward, a famine which we didn't even have the full figures, but people say 20, 30 million or even more deaths caused by that famine is realistic to think about. His comrades in leadership didn't certainly, they certainly didn't want to sort of publicly humiliate him, but I think they were trying to find ways to put him out to what he called the second line. And he made it very clear that he was not going to a sort of gentle retirement. He was not going to take a sort of honorary chairmanship or kind of non executive directorship with the Communist Party. He wanted to be very much in charge of revitalizing it. And so he began to brew up the idea ideological reset, an attempt to try and bring back the fire and the fury of the original communist revolution, you know, a couple of decades after it actually happened, that would be his next goal.
- [05:00]
Anita Anand
And that there is this secret plan or the May 16 notification that he puts out. And is this sort of naming and shaming of people that he wants to get rid of? Is it as simple as that?
- [05:12]
Rana Mitter
There are several things going on. So this is the year 1966 we're talking about, which is the launch of, of what would become known as the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. I mean, again, it's a bit like, you know, Voltaire's famous comment on the Holy Roman Empire that, you know, the empire was not holy, it wasn't very Roman and it had there Wasn't property an empire. So with the gpcr, not so great, and the proletariat don't have so much to do with it. And if it's cultural, then it's not cultural in any sense that most of us know. But it was a revolution to be. To.
- [05:40]
William Dalrymple
To be fair, one out of four.
- [05:42]
Rana Mitter
Yeah. Well, I was going to say not bad, but actually it was pretty bad. Two things are going on, I think, here, and this is the difficulty, but I think the challenge, the important challenge in interpreting the Cultural Revolution. First, it was undoubtedly an attempt by Mao to get back against his. I was going to say enemies. They're really his opponents. They weren't his enemies, but he regarded them as enemies. And I think distinction is important.
- [06:03]
William Dalrymple
Rivals even, rather than.
- [06:04]
Rana Mitter
Yeah, rivals. Well, you have to put. I think what they wanted to do was they did want to sideline him, but they also want him to stay as a symbol of revolutionary success. You know, they weren't trying to humiliate him in public. They didn't want him in power, and he regarded that essentially as enemy action. So there were figures that he certainly wanted to push back against. The other part, though, which is, I think, also very important, is that Mao genuinely believed that the revolution was losing steam and that it needed to be revitalized. And that's one of the reasons, as we'll talk about, that he decided to mobilize China's youth, in particular to revitalize the revolution. So the purge against his enemies and ideological revitalization were both parts of the same mixture. I think it's not enough to say it was really one or really the other, even though analysts over time have tended to look to one or the other as being more important. I think they're both very, very important in terms of what he thought he was doing okay.
- [06:58]
Anita Anand
And he uses the Red Guards for this purge, the new bloodlet of the old blood. Who are the Red Guards? When we say Red Guards, who are we talking about?
- [07:10]
William Dalrymple
And who are the four olds, too?
- [07:12]
Rana Mitter
So the Red Guards are young men and women, teenagers in many cases, who are basically from schools and univers, and they form a sort of shock troops. In other words, they are there as defenders of Chairman Mao. So to step back for a minute to explain who and why they were there, this was basically Mao mobilizing the youth, the urban youth in particular, of China, to rise up against their elders. I won't say elders and betters, but certainly elders, to try and revitalize the revolution by bringing down the kind of ossified fossilized, bureaucratized, older generations, as he would have seen it. Remember the timing, remember the background. This is 1966. So the revolution happened in 1949. There's a whole bunch of people, you know, age 16, 17, 18, 19, who don't remember anything except Communist China. Some of them may have been just about alive during the Nationalist period, but they don't have any memories of it. And so what they see at that point is basically a version of the revolution that has sort of plateaued out, particularly in the cities. You know, it's now, you know, more of a system than it is a revolutionary machine, you might say. So Mao thought that what was needed was to get these youths to basically, basically kind of reset their revolutionary instincts. And he gave them therefore, the instruction that what they had to do was to revitalize the revolution. And in doing that, he was aided by Lin Biao, the Defense Minister, and others, again, you know, kind of very much promoting the Little Red Book of Mao's thoughts. For instance, to say that the way in which you, as let's say a 16 year old in high school should be seeking to renew the revolution is first of all by learning from Chairman Mao, by memorizing all these little kind of aphorisms. Revolution is not a dinner party. It cannot be so refined. Power grows out of the barrel of a gun, you know, whatever it might be. And at the same time also in particular, push back against the older generation. Going back to the May 4th movement, which we talked about in earlier episode of the podcast, remember that? One of the things that was so distinctive about Mao, but also about many of the revolutionary movements of the early 20th century, say 50 years before this, was that they had done a very un Confucian thing. They did not venerate age and experience and wisdom, which was very much the way in which Confucian thinking had operated in China for, you know, two and a half thousand years. They instead venerated youth and, you know, revolutionary enthusiasm over expertise. So once again, this is partly a rejection of the old Confucian norms, which Mao feared were creeping back and reinfecting society, however hard he tried to root them out. And that, of course, is one of the reasons that he gets to the idea of the four olds that you're talking about, Willi, which is the idea that culture in China is tied up, is fossilized by being linked to, you know, different aspects of old and decrepit ways of living. You know, old customs, old culture, old habits, these sorts of things. And so part of the aim of the Red Guard movement was to basically smash and destroy those old ways of thinking and create something new.
- [10:09]
William Dalrymple
So this runner leads to massive destruction of ancient monuments. There's a hecatomb of ancient manuscripts, burning of old, everything that's old, everything that's historic.
- [10:20]
Rana Mitter
Yes, this is taken very literally in the sense that if there are temples, if there are old buildings, all of this sort of thing, that they come under attack. There are some exceptions. Zhou Enlai, the, you know, the Prime Minister, it seems, does actually protect the Forbidden City to make sure that, you know, this priceless Ming dynasty, you know, house of power and art at the center of Beijing is not destroyed. And he basically makes sure that the Red Guards don't get in there. Someone once rather cynically observed that Zhou Enlai protected more monuments than he did people. And that's probably true. But elsewhere in China, the Red Guards basically turn up and destroy aspects of old culture, including some of the most beautiful buildings, artifacts, you know, porcelain, jade, whatever it might be.
- [11:06]
William Dalrymple
When I first arrived in China, you saw people beginning to rebuild these in the kind of 1985, 86 there was the kind of. They were still recovering from that then.
- [11:17]
Anita Anand
I just wanted to think a bit more about these kids who are doing this destruction, not just to monuments and artifacts, but also, you know, they're more or less a paramilitary force, a law unto themselves, in these sort of olive green uniforms, hunting, sent out to hunt class enemies. And I sort of look at my 16 year old and I sort of feel like there's an entire generation that's been groomed, really. You know, they have no way of thinking for themselves or thinking that this is wrong, that the entire moral compass has been completely rebuilt and it's all around, you know, the true Northwitch's Mao.
- [11:53]
Rana Mitter
Yes, essentially that. I mean, they would think of themselves as being exponents of the highest moral virtue, which is obeying and sacrificing everything to the thoughts of Chairman Mao. There's a extraordinary and terrifying. I think it's a diary or certainly it's a note written by a young man who goes to seek Chairman Mao. The Red Guards is famous. This is sort of still quite well known, but basically you get a million of them in Tiananmen Square, this huge open space with Mao at the front, you know, kind of speaking. And they seem almost as if he's kind of like a godlike figure. And one young man, I think probably about 16, 17, something like that, writes a note saying, I saw Chairman Mao today. It was the most extraordinary day of my life. I have redefined my birthday to make today my birthday. This is like a religious thing, like being born again, literally. So you can't underestimate the fervor that exists. Also here's something counterintuitive, but I'll give it two you. If you ask probably most middle class people in China today who would, you know, they're now in their 70s, say, but they have been teenagers at the time, what they remember the Cultural Revolution. They'll talk about the horror, the destruction, what an awful time it was. But you'll find some who actually seem very nostalgic about it. They have, you know, Internet sites and other things too. And you ask like, why? How could you possibly be. And they'll say a couple of things. One of them is because of something called Chuan Lian, which means literally interchange or interaction. All train fares were made free for youth in China at that time. So basically lots of these kids, age whatever, 14, 15, 16, so school was out, they closed down all the schools so you didn't have to go to school. And they hop on a train at wherever Beijing, Shanghai and just go and meet people and travel around. They have this extraordinary. It's like sort of Interrail from Interrailing. Yeah, exactly. Except, you know, for free. And some of them just had this sort of memory of this period, period of being one when they kind of had meetings and encounters they could never have thought of again in their lives. The other thing that some of the nostalgics put forward and you can find there are websites on Chinese media with names like Utopia about it, is that they feel that compared to the consumerist China of today, there was something principled about the idea that this was actually for a greater cause, idealistic. And when you point out that what about the sort of mass destruction of hundreds of thousands of lives and all of China's culture and so forth, they put up these alternative interpretations of their own. So I wouldn't say that it's sort of 50, 50 by any means in China, but I would say that you might be surprised by how many people of a certain age there are who sort of slightly embarrassedly would shrug their shoulders and say, but you know, I had a good time, but I've met
- [14:37]
William Dalrymple
people also with horror stories. I mean, anyone who's a teacher, anyone who is associated with the old world.
- [14:45]
Rana Mitter
Oh yes, the majority, I'm sure, is
- [14:47]
William Dalrymple
humiliated in public, lynched, sent off from the cities to remote rural stations. I mean, give an example of the sort of thing that might happen to you, if you're a provincial teacher.
- [15:01]
Rana Mitter
Well, I mean, some of the. I mean, you know, the majority of experiences of teachers and people who were regarded as being kind of Chojyo stinking 9th category, which refers to intellectuals, was sheer humiliation. So you'll find that, you know, one of the things that would happen quite often to teachers is that they would be paraded in front of their students and accused of essentially being, you know, bourgeois servants of capitalist power. So this might mean long periods in what was known as the jet plane position, in which you would have to sort of stand up with your arms stretched fully out like an airplane. You know, try doing it for more than a few minutes. It's immensely painful. So imagine doing it for hours and hours until you collapse. In addition, there's plenty of, you know, simple torture going on. You know, one of the most notorious events took place at actually one of the top high schools in Beijing, actually, for kind of, you know, the children of cadres, where at least one teacher famously was sort of, you know, persecuted to death right there. In addition, you get many, many examples of teachers and kind of intellectuals and others being forced to, you know, clean lavatories, you know, do other things which are just regarded as innately humiliating. The main purpose was to make people feel as if their expertise or their senior status was either of no value or actually of negative value. In other words, that they should not feel any sense of kind of privilege in society because of the qualifications or the time served that they had had, but instead would have to sort of sacrifice themselves to the belief that being young and red was much, much more meritorious than being older and expert. Better read than expert was an actual phrase frequently used at the time.
- [16:36]
Anita Anand
Well, I mean, this is something that Jung Chang, who is going to come onto our podcast for a very special BO episode, is going to talk about, because, you know, she went through it.
- [16:44]
William Dalrymple
Yeah.
- [16:45]
Anita Anand
The living testimony of people who remember this horrific time. And this is. This is what is known as the Red Terror, is that right? You know, this is the chapter which. Would they have called it the Red Terror at the time, or do we retrospectively call it the Red Terror?
- [16:59]
Rana Mitter
Nope. Nope, absolutely.
- [17:00]
Anita Anand
So they proudly wore it. Gosh, right, Absolutely, yes.
- [17:03]
Rana Mitter
If you look at, say, you know, Cultural Revolution documentary databases, which certainly exist, of, you know, kind of pamphlets and documents at the time. I remember one. I can't, off the top of my head, remember exactly what it's from, but let's say it's about 66, 67. We must undertake Red Terror wherever we go. We must make sure that we undertake the techniques of Red terror and the tactics of Red terror. No, no, no, they absolutely embrace this. Bearing in mind the use of this phrase, kung wol terror, again derives partly from Lenin. You know, Leninist tactics are very much tied around the idea of terror. And before that, that goes of course back to the French Revolution as well. The idea that by instilling fear you also instill political discipline. This is something that has a long history of revolutionary moment. And again, it has, I think it's fair to say, a very different vibe from the kind of Confucian idea that, you know, sort of harmony, working out what will be the kind of best balance of things is the best way to run a society. This is very much the opposite.
- [17:57]
William Dalrymple
Writing poetry in a tea house in the hill.
- [17:59]
Rana Mitter
Writing poetry in a tea house and all these sorts of things. Exactly. But more broadly speaking, the idea of the golden mean balance and so forth, Red terror is about lots of things, but it's definitely not about kind of a nice balance. People will use phrases like it is sometimes necessary to go too far to do the right thing. And that's something that you will find plenty of examples of.
- [18:16]
Anita Anand
And it's all these sort of cherubic faced young people who are doing these dreadful things. Just like, I think you mentioned it a little earlier, the death of Stalin, that fantastic Iannucci retelling of the death of Stalin and all the jockeying that went on afterwards to get into prime position. That's hilarious. But there are actual real life hilarious things that happen. Can I please draw your attention or beg you to tell us the story of the mangoes, Mao and the mangoes and the cult of the mango. Because this is such a delicious story, I can't tell you, I feel I
- [18:48]
William Dalrymple
live in a city that has a cult of the mango.
- [18:50]
Anita Anand
This is so different. This is bonkers. Go on, Rana, hit us with it because it's such a great story.
- [18:55]
Rana Mitter
Yeah, but this story comes from the fact that actually Mal didn't like mangoes.
- [18:59]
Anita Anand
No, because he's a wrong. And you can tell right from that that there is, there is something very wrong with him.
- [19:04]
Rana Mitter
No decent person dislikes mangoes. I think that's fair. Not that we're allowed tangents, but I would point out that the well known physicist and communist JBS Haldane, in his classic kids book my friend Mr. Leakey wrote about the mango in the 1930s as a kind of exotic fruit that most people in Britain would never have seen and suggested you should really eat it. In the bath to stop being stained. Now, I wasn't going to eat it in the bath or even in the swimming pool with Chris jogs.
- [19:24]
Anita Anand
He didn't like mangoes or anywhere. Never.
- [19:27]
Rana Mitter
He had been presented with a basket or casket, whatever it was, of mangoes. Which reminds me of one of the best lines ever in the film the Italian Job, where Michael Caine's girlfriend says to him, I only got out of there because the ambassador of Pakistan was a very nice man. If you want the context of that, go and see the film. Anyway, I'm back with Pakistan, but the foreign minister of Pakistan, I think, visited China and presented a case of mangoes to Mao. And Mao didn't want to eat them because he didn't like them. Not least because presumed by that stage he had filthy rotten teeth covered in kind of old tea leaves. And eating slightly tasty but acidic mangoes might not have gone down so well. So he sort of passed them on and said, we'll give them away. And they were given away to various one mango at a time, I guess, to different factories and work units in China. And because of course, the cult of personality was operating in, you know, the highest possible gear at that point. They weren't regarded just as sort of nice bits of fruit that someone, you know, might scoff after after work, but as holy sacred relics, because they were Mao's mangoes.
- [20:26]
Anita Anand
Behold, Mao has touched my mango. I mean, to the point, Rana, where it's so bonkers. You have like one worker who boils it so that. So that he could drink a spoonful of sacred juice and get it going for longer. One who puts it in a glass case and bows to it every morning. I mean, it is so mad. But it's because he has touched it. The great man has given unto us. The man goes, well, she hurts, because he wants to get rid of them. But you know, it's this, this extraordinary gift that has been given. It's a holy reliquary thing that's going on.
- [21:01]
Rana Mitter
That's exactly the point. It's a religious thing. It's not really a fruit oriented thing in that sense.
- [21:07]
Anita Anand
No.
- [21:07]
Rana Mitter
And you know, it's like a fragment or a relic, you know, almost like a saint having touched it. In this particular case, that the covers part of, you know, almost religious sweep that goes with the cult of personality.
- [21:21]
Anita Anand
I mean, that's funny, but in the background, really not funny things are happening at all. And in the targeting of, you know, the bourgeois, the intelligentsia and anyone who might remind him of this confucianist era that he wants to wipe out of history. He is also targeting party officials, isn't he? Can you tell us a bit about that?
- [21:37]
Rana Mitter
As I've said, there are two things going on. One is an ideological revolution, a renewal of the revolutionary fire of the original revolution, as Mao sees it. And the second thing thing is an attempt to basically knock out all of his enemies, which also, from his point of view, goes extremely well. So amongst those who find themselves on the wrong end of Mao's wrath are some of the most senior officials in the prc. Now, first of all, worth saying, pretty much every single one of all of those fellow leaders, including Zhou Enlai, heartily endorsed the Cultural Revolution. So if you get the impression any of them were kind of, you know, against it, at least in terms of speaking up, that was not the case. They all basically said, yeah, this is a great idea. Probably the most prominent person to end up, you know, at a sticky end was Liu Xiao, who was the president of China, as opposed to the chairman of the party. So this was still a. It's a state position, not a party position, but an important one. And Liu Xiaoqi was basically, I mean, kidnapped is the only word for it, really, and held in a basement in the city of Kaifeng, where essentially he died from lack of medical treatment. You know, this is one of the senior officials and the old comrade in arms of Mao's didn't matter. He was just, you know, wiped out. His wife, Wang Guangmei, was paraded in front of Red Guards. They made her wear a necklace made of table tennis balls. Ping pong, as you know, kind of ends up becoming a diplomatic tool between the US and China about 10 years later. But at this point, this was nothing to do with diplomacy. This was humiliation. They put this necklace of ping pong balls around her neck. Why? Because it was meant to be a sort of ironic reference to her wearing pearls at diplomatic gatherings. And the idea was that, you know, if you are supposedly a communist revolutionary's wife or communist revolutionary in your own right, but you're wearing pearls, you still have that petty bourgeois mentality, and we're going to humiliate you for it. Other leaders, Deng Xiaoping, who goes on, of course, to become the paramount leader of China after the death of Mao. So you might say from paranoid leader to paramount leader is the way that it goes. Mao's very, very paranoid about Deng Xiaoping. He thinks he's far too sharp and far too smart. So he doesn't kill him, but he gets some. He basically one of, I Think. I think it's the second of the third rise and fall. I mean, Deng Xiaoping keeps rising, falling, rising, falling, and gets sent out, I think to down south, to Sichuan or anyway. But he's sent out of the capital, certainly. Meanwhile, the Cultural Revolution is going absolutely bonkers. I mean, revolutionary youth, like teenagers are hijacking tanks in the streets of Chongqing as it is. Letting teenagers out on the streets with, you know, any kind of weapons is a pretty dangerous thing to do. Adolescent boys with no education taking over tanks. I mean, there's an awful lot of sort of random shooting going on at this stage. Even worse or better, I don't think it's ta. I think at this time it was actually genuine revolutionary interest up in Heilongjiang. Someone decides that a really good thing to do going one better than the great leap forward in the Cultural Revolution would be to not, not invent backyard steel. Steel turds, we put it in the last episode. But invent your own nuclear power plant now. What could possibly go wrong? Oh no.
- [24:33]
William Dalrymple
Teenagers in charge of.
- [24:34]
Anita Anand
Oh God, I have a teenager in the house. This is just a terrible, terrible, terrible, terrible vision.
- [24:40]
Rana Mitter
Yeah, well, basically create your own missiles in the backyard. Why? Why not? So basically, lots of things. At one point, Mal has, you know, given an account of quite a lot of this stuff going on. And he's said everything is chaos, the situation is excellent. Which give you an idea of how he felt about all this.
- [24:56]
Anita Anand
With all this chaos on the streets and the teenagers on the rampage. Surprise, surprise. Let us take a break. Join us after the break where we talk about the removal of one particular person who could possibly have been Mao's successor had some unfortunate incident not taken place.
- [25:22]
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- [25:27]
Rana Mitter
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- [25:32]
William Dalrymple
New habitats.
- [25:34]
Rana Mitter
Zootopia has a secret reptile population.
- [25:36]
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- [25:54]
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- [26:23]
Anita Anand
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- [26:46]
William Dalrymple
Welcome back. So we're now in 1971. The Cultural Revolution is at its peak. Teenagers are going crazy with driving tanks around military bases. But Mao is not yet secure. He is worried that the military has too much power. Tell us what he does, Rana.
- [27:02]
Rana Mitter
The Red Guard phase that we were talking about actually is quite a short part of the whole Cultural Revolution decade. It only lasts about 1969. And even Mao, who, as we were saying, was sort of cackling with glee at various points about basically China's, you know, unrestrained youth going around and smashing up all of their elders, began after about three years to think that maybe this was a bit much. So he basically sends in the army to shut that down. And by 1969, essentially the red Guard phase is, is over. But that doesn't mean the end of the Cultural Revolution. Instead, it turns much more towards the pla, the People's Liberation army, being in charge. And actually, although it's far less sort of violently exuberant than the period of the Red Guards, actually even more people die during the period when the PLA is much more dominant the next seven years or so.
- [27:48]
William Dalrymple
Really?
- [27:49]
Rana Mitter
Yeah, Just in terms of deaths. Again, fantastic information on this in probably the most comprehensive English language book on certainly the elite part of the Cultural Revolution, which is Mao's Last revolution, by Roderick MacFarquhen and Michael Schoenhals and well worth reading, although it's not an easy read, I would say. Anyway, so at that point, the army has a much bigger role and that's not surprising because Lin Biao, the foreign Minister, is at this stage really much pretty much regarded as being Mao's likely successor after, you know, as Mao put it, he would go to go to have a conversation with Marx that is to, you know, pop off and then something seems to go wrong. And even now, this remains one of the biggest mysteries in Chinese political history. We don't know exactly what went on. Maybe it was heated conversations in different directions in the top leadership about the event that would happen. You know, 1972, that would change the world, which was Nixon's visit to China. That didn't come out of nowhere, obviously. And on the Chinese side, there were people, not least the so called Gang of Four, Mao's wife and three other big ideological figures who are very much against the Americans being invited to China. And it seems that Lin Biao may have been in that grouping too, whereas people like Zhou Enlai, the Prime minister, very much in favor. So maybe the question about ideological correctness, of inviting the Americans might have been part of it, or just the kind of vicious infighting and purges that we know had been part of the Chinese Communist Party's rise to power over 50 years and more or both of them, these things are not incompatible with each other. Two things can be true. What we do know is the end result, which was just extraordinary, which was that this is 1971. A report was put out that Lin Biao, the, you know, Defense Minister, the supposed successor to Mao, had fled Beijing with his family in a plane, if I remember correctly. This may or not cause hearts to flutter with pride. British Trident jet, I think in fact is the days when Britain still used to make. Make jets.
- [29:41]
William Dalrymple
Oh, wave our, Wave our Union Jacks at this point, which had run out
- [29:45]
Rana Mitter
of fuel and crashed over Outer Mongolia while trying presumably flee for the Soviet Union. Now the question of how that happened. Was there a coup against Mao that Lyn and his family had been planning and had gone wrong and they tried to flee and they hadn't refueled the plane enough, or was this a setup of some sort? Very, very unclear. But one thing that certainly happened even in the highly controlled atmosphere of China and the Cultural Revolution, was that once they started propaganda saying that in fact Lin Biao had been a traitor and had been trying to assassinate Mao and all that stuff, that even ordinary people began to think, well, hang on, you were just telling us five minutes ago that he was the great successor and, you know, the second only to Mao, and now you're saying in fact he was a traitor from within the system. We're not sure we can believe anything that you say. Again, much of the disillusionment with the system, and there are many, many reasons, but I would say that that particular moment, the Lin Biao incident, if you want to call it that, is probably one of the reasons.
- [30:37]
Anita Anand
But did anyone actually point a finger and say we think Mao might have killed him or. Nobody dared to say anything like that because you know what happens? A bunch of, you know, rampaging teenagers going to turn up at your door.
- [30:47]
William Dalrymple
You're very worried, the rampaging teenagers.
- [30:50]
Rana Mitter
Well, yes, you met your teenagers, you'll know about that.
- [30:52]
Anita Anand
You just need to know their place. Let me tell you, it's a hard enough thing, you know. Yeah.
- [30:57]
Rana Mitter
I haven't heard certainly convincing explanations that Mao himself would have done that. Because if you think about it for a second, if you want to knock off Lin Biao, knock him off. But how would you be in a position to sort of make sure he got to an airport, got on a plane with his family, but didn't have enough fuel to make and, you know, how do you know that he wouldn't have, you know, that the pilot wouldn't have tried to land in the outermonger? There's a lot of contingencies there that make it a bit less likely. I think it seems like a very complex way to try and engineer an assassination.
- [31:32]
Anita Anand
No. Fair enough. And he's quite a direct man, generally speaking, isn't he?
- [31:35]
Rana Mitter
Yeah, he just sort of arrests you and have you taken away.
- [31:38]
William Dalrymple
We're heading now to 1972 and an event takes place which I saw first on the stage at the Edinburgh Festival. It's an opera, Nixon in Charles, the only opera I've ever seen with a jetliner wheeled onto the stage of the Festival theater. Tell us what led to this improbable moment when Nixon turns up in the middle of all this madness.
- [32:00]
Anita Anand
I mean, this is a ping pong, ping pong diplomacy chapter, isn't it?
- [32:04]
Rana Mitter
Yeah, amongst other things too. Indeed. Now I play clips from John Adams and Alice Goodman's wonderful opera Nixon in China to my class. So try and get them in the mood before we talk about the Nixon visit as a historical event. Essentially, I'm putting it as concisely as possible possible. The United States and Richard Nixon, who gets elected president in 1968 and takes office in 1969, are under pressure because the Vietnam War is tearing America apart and peace in Asia is desperately needed to try and bring a bit of calm to the world and certainly to the United States. And MA, for the reasons that we've been talking about, is in a very difficult situation. The Cultural Revolution is ongoing, but there's lots of awful after effects. You know, the economy doesn't do so well. You know, the country's in chaos. So both sides have a motivation to try and do something different. But there's one other fact that we have to bring in, and this is quite crucial. The Soviet Union. Both the United States and China are worried about what may happen if the Soviet Union becomes too powerful. And China's particularly worried, more perhaps than the Americans, because the Soviets and the Chinese fell out. You know, the Khrushchev MA bromance soured very quickly. And by 1960, essentially they never break off diplomatic relations.
- [33:07]
William Dalrymple
But the armed bands. In the swimming pool.
- [33:09]
Rana Mitter
Yeah, in the swimming pool thing didn't go down well. So basically by about 1960, all Soviet technical assistance is very suddenly withdrawn from China and China's left on its its own. And for much of the 60s, the only socialist country or country at all that sits as a kind of eternal comrade is the Great Socialist Republic of Albania, led by the unspeakable Enver Hodja. And Albania and China becoming eternal friends for all time is very much the vibe of the 60s. But by the early 70s they realized that, you know, the, the man in Tirana is probably not going to be quite enough to keep China's international position going. So there are sort of signals on both sides, including sort of secret talks in Warsaw. And then Henry Kissinger, by then the National Security Advisor, goes to dinner in Pakistan, a diplomatic dinner, no mention whether mangoes are served or not, and then pretends that he's sort of suddenly got food poisoning and has to be, you know, rushed, rushed to his hotel, but in fact he's not being rushed to a hotel and he hasn't got food poisoning. He's been taken on a secret flight to China to do secret negotiations about an American visit by President Nixon. And eventually the diplomacy works out. And in February 1972, in what Nixon, who never knowing the undersold, called the Week that Changed the World, Mao and Nixon met. Nixon arrived at the airport in Beijing, shook the hand of Zhou Enlai. In other words, although it wasn't the beginning of the diplomatic relations open again, that would take seven years, didn't happen until 1979. The beginning of the opening between America and China was essentially at that moment and as you say, there were sort of cultural ambassadors to, you know, ping pong games being played between American and Chinese table tennis players. In later periods there would also be kind of opera singers, you know, other, other cultural figures who were trying to provide a sort of alternative diplomatic track at the times when the top diplomats and politicians were not progressing as fast as possible. We know in practice now that the 70s was a period of slow but sure realignment between the two. But it would be after Mao's death, which happened in 1976, before the US and China finally reopened full diplomatic relations. But the process at that stage began with that meeting in February 1972, you've
- [35:16]
Anita Anand
opened the door to Mao's death. And so we might as well talk about it. Cause we are on the third slope to the end for Mao. His health is declining very seriously. And he's suffering. He's got a stutter. He can't speak properly, can't swallow properly. His muscles are wasting. Some people have suggested it might be ALS or some kind of neuron degenerating disease. He's in a bad way. Is he not seen in public? Is he completely sequestered while he's sort of wasting away?
- [35:40]
Rana Mitter
He's not seen that much in public. But I think that's probably par for the course after the Red Guard period. You know, he's still in 1969, 68, 69, doing these kind of big speeches in Tiananmen Square, where the Red Guards are coming to meet him. By the early 70s, that's, you know, he's pretty much retreating. I think it's fair to say it appears to have been some sort of motor neurone disease. We don't know exactly where. That seems pretty. Pretty likely. And certainly even with the Nixon visit, Nixon only actually saw Mao once. He saw Joe Enlai and others much more. And that was partly because it would appear that Mao really could say very little, that he, you know, managed to croak out a few aphorisms. Famously, he told Nixon, I voted for you in the last election. Which was a nice little line. Yeah, he said, I. He said, I tend to prefer right wingers. They're easy to deal with. Or something along those.
- [36:23]
Anita Anand
That's very funny, those lines.
- [36:24]
Rana Mitter
But essentially, by the last few years before Mao's death, so, you know, say the early 70s, there's a clear factional division within the leadership. The relatively moderate faction who are open to opening to America and the world. Zhou Enlai being probably the most notable member of that group. And then on the other side, the radical group known as the Gang of Four. This was a name that would only be used, of course, after they had fallen from power after Mao's death. They weren't called the Gang of Four at the time, but Zhang Fengqiao, Yao Wenyuan, Mao's wife Jiang Qing, and Wang Hongwen. These are four figures who are highly radical and basically want to take the Cultural Revolution and ramp it up even further.
- [37:04]
William Dalrymple
Yeah, we haven't had nearly enough teachers lynched or enough teenagers running off with tanks. We need more of that.
- [37:10]
Rana Mitter
And basically these two factions continue to contest for power. In the last years of Mao Zed Zhou Enlai actually dies just a few months before Mao in spring of 1976. And the gang of Four are furious because huge numbers of people come out into the streets in Beijing to lay wreaths for him. What became known as the Tiananmen Incident a long time before 1989, when, of course, the Tiananmen Square killings of that year become much more associated with it. But in 1976, the Tiananmen incident were people basically mourning the memory of Zhou Enlai, who they regarded as a more moderate, more humane figure than the Gang.
- [37:44]
William Dalrymple
And then Mao finally pops his clogs in 1976.
- [37:49]
Rana Mitter
Long life, he does.
- [37:51]
William Dalrymple
I mean, the incredible transformation of China that's taken place in that time.
- [37:55]
Rana Mitter
That's right. You know, when he finally dies, it is absolutely the end of an era. He'd been in power, you know, uninterrupted since 1949. That's more than a quarter of a century. And he had seen and in some ways been instrumental to the conversion of China, if that's the right word, from, you know, an empire in decay, to becoming one of the most powerful and important Cold War actors in the world.
- [38:21]
William Dalrymple
And is it actually a powerful. I mean, we've slightly given the impression in this pod, particularly this episode with the sort of craziness of the Red Guards and the Cultural Revolution, that the whole place is just sort of an anarchy. But quietly, the Chinese economy is sort of moving forward and it is genuinely becoming a powerful force again in the world.
- [38:40]
Rana Mitter
It is. And we can see that actually there are various things that. Particularly when Deng Xiaoping. Xiaoping comes in a couple of years later, Mao's immediate successor is a man named Hua Guofeng, who, amongst other things, eventually arrests the Gang of Four and puts them on trial. But when we talk about his legacy and his importance, I don't think. I mean, the economic element is significant in that there are certain actions taken that set the stage for what would then be economic growth. But I wouldn't put most of those down to Mao directly. I think it's almost despite him rather than because of him. No, I'd say it somewhere else. It's the legacy of Maoism. Maoism, I think, is probably the only ideological strain that comes from the non Western world that has had a really global impact during that period. And afterwards, students rioting in the streets in Berlin, Paris in the 1960s, Naxalites
- [39:30]
William Dalrymple
in India and Kathmandu.
- [39:33]
Rana Mitter
Yeah, they talk about Mao. Naxalites in India Inspired by Mao 20 years later, the Shining Path, a horrific murderous group in Peru The Sendero Luminoso. They call themselves Maoists. There's a line. I hope they'll get into copyright trouble on this. I think, think from John Lennon. You shouldn't go around carrying pictures of Chairman Mao. That's not going to help you anyhow. That's not quite. I think I've got the really slightly longer. But, you know, this is a cultural revenge you can have in a Beatles song. In other words, people are not going around singing songs about Xi Jinping or Jiang Zemin or Hu Jintao. Mao had, you know, despite being a man who never. He left China twice in his life, both times to the Soviet Union. Apart from he never left the country, he had a genuinely glad global impact. And these ideas, you know, the sort of glorification of violence, the, the idea of revolutionary change, the idea of sort of the peasantry guerrilla warfare. That's another one that, you know, he didn't invent it, but he certainly had plenty to say about it. And his views, even now his, his essay on protracted warfare is read in military academies around the world, in the west as well as. As, as in China. I think these are the things. And you can make your own judgment about whether it's. It's. It's good or ill. But in terms of sheer influence, Mao is still remembered as a figure who changed history.
- [40:48]
William Dalrymple
What I don't understand Runner, though, is that almost everything we've talked about is, you know, it's all kind of crazy, mad stuff. All these different moments of sort of souping up the revolution, purging colleagues, producing crazy amounts of steel for the sake of it. It all sounds nuts. And yet at the end of it, China, which has been in decline for, for 200 years, turns around at this period.
- [41:15]
Rana Mitter
So the wider transformation of China at this point is also because of Mao and the other members of leadership who are with him. I think we should be aware of this idea of saying that Mao himself was this sort of individual leader without whom nothing else could have happened. I think the revolution is certainly shaped very heavily by the fact that Mao is there and stays alive. So China's press for national sovereignty, the use of the People's Liberation army to basically create a powerful China whose borders will be secured, bearing in mind that China has 14 different countries bordering it. So border security was always a problem. That's one of the things that becomes a continued theme of Chinese political strategy and foreign strategy under Mao. The transformation of the economy, on the one hand, has lots, as you say, kind of mad stuff going on. Like the Great leap forward. On the other hand, things like the moving of large amounts of industrial capacity into the southwest of China, largely because they were worried about a nuclear attack from the Soviet Union. Union has provided in some ways the economic base for what became the kind of expansion of Western China into a much more industrialized powerhouse. So you can see the sort of effects of some of that happened at that time as well.
- [42:24]
William Dalrymple
As we speak, China is now, you know, poised possibly to topple America in our lifetime.
- [42:31]
Rana Mitter
Possibly, yeah.
- [42:32]
William Dalrymple
It's certainly the second power in the world. And when Mao is born, it is a divided, weak, bullied, Finnish culture. How do we reconcile the fact that, you know, that this crazy old man with the cult of mangoes and children running around in tanks turns this country around rather than destroys it?
- [42:53]
Rana Mitter
Well, he destroys large numbers of things in it. But I think it is fair to say that overall, the way in which Mao manages to create a sense of national identity is a large part of. Of what keeps China holding together and expanding and solidifying, even despite the huge destruction of his individual policies. That's the part. It is ideology. I think this is one of the things that sometimes is underestimated, that when Mao put out these messages early in his rule during the Korean War, saying, this is an anti American war and we must unite to resist America to make China Strong. During the 1950s and 1960s, the use of language to basically people into, you know, serving the national good for a country which had been, you know, invaded, occupied, where people still had vivid memories of the kind of horrific war against Japan, being told, you know, in this phrase that he used many times. But certainly it's become one of his most famous phrases that the Chinese people have stood up. This is a phrase that in some ways, despite all the horrors that he unleashed on the Chinese people over and over again, again, did seem to resonate. Does seem to resonate with many, many Chinese. You know, the idea that someone came along and finally took China from being on the back foot to being on the front foot in his own terms. That's what I think a lot of people, even those who can't stand Mao and what he did, would grudgingly admit he was able to articulate in a way that previous leaders perhaps were not.
- [44:27]
William Dalrymple
And that is recognized in China today, isn't it? It isn't just that people feel they have to be loyal to the party and speak lip service to Mao. There is a sense China still, particularly obviously the leadership, but. But in a wider sense, that Mao is the figure that was responsible for this turnaround?
- [44:43]
Rana Mitter
Yes. I mean, I think it's fair to say, you know, again, you'll get different views depending on who you talk to. And there are plenty of people, particularly those who survived through the Cultural Revolution, who are very negative towards. Towards Mao overall. The idea of him as someone who was, you know, founder of the country as it's, as it sits today, that is acknowledged and, yeah, I think it's probably fair to say, respected in the broader sense. We should remember that these days we live in a globally, perhaps more authoritarian time. I mean, again, for many of us, the level at which Stalin appears to be being rehabilitated in Russia is a rather worrying development too. But that is a reminder that it's not necessarily always the most liberal characters who remain most appealing in terms of their popular historical record.
- [45:22]
William Dalrymple
Yes. I mean, if you think of Ataturk, Nehru, they are both very unpopular figures now, while Mao is still very much there.
- [45:30]
Rana Mitter
Tiananmen Square, well, that speaks to changes in those places too. Although I think Ataturk was always more of a kind of hard, hard line, kind of iron fist guy than Nehru was. But maybe, you know, despite that, both of them now, I think the secularist agenda also, perhaps in both places, has been less popular in recent years than it used to be. But, yeah, you know, Mao's legacy in China today, I think there's no doubt about it, is complex and ambivalent because on the one hand, the horrors that Mao visited upon the Chinese people cannot be underestimated and they are not reported fully in China.
- [46:04]
William Dalrymple
Are they known? If you talk to teenagers in Beijing today, do they know all this stuff?
- [46:09]
Rana Mitter
Yeah, no, they know quite a lot. Partly because actually, you know, with the use of VPNs and so forth, people in Beijing know a lot more than they're often given credit for, I would say. The Cultural Revolution, you know, is better known, actually, and partly because it's an urban phenomenon, so educated people tend to know more about it and it's pretty widely condemned. But as I said, there are these sort of nostalgia groups on the Chinese Internet that talk about, about, well, let's, you know, remember that the Cultural Revolution
- [46:31]
William Dalrymple
was a time of interrail passes.
- [46:33]
Rana Mitter
Yeah, all of that. The Great New Forward, much less. So you get occasional sort of glancing references to it in films and reports elsewhere. But it is much less, much less well, well known. But, you know, plenty of Chinese travel around the world. They're perfectly able to access, you know, Western reading on these things elsewhere. And I think what many of them, not all, but many of them would still say in some cases is that we acknowledge all them of, of this and particularly the crimes committed by Mao and those around him. But at the same time, this was a moment at which China, which had been weak and forced into kind of humiliation from the foreign powers, a century of humiliation. Yeah, sensitive humiliation going up to the Second World War, was in a position to turn that round and actually say, we will have the capacity to decide our own fate, even if under Mao, much of that fate turned out to be horrific.
- [47:27]
William Dalrymple
Professor Ranamitta, we are now freeing you from your prison after six hours as our hostage. You are welcome to take your freedom, but you have been absolutely wonderful.
- [47:37]
Anita Anand
Thank you so much. I can't believe what a stretch of history you've taken us through. It's been an absolute privilege to walk with you through what is a mind blowing and often really harrowing story. Thank you very, very much.
- [47:51]
Rana Mitter
Well, Anita, it's such a pleasure to be with you and with Willy, to not only to have a chance to talk seriously about history, well, mostly serious anyway, but also to tell a story which, you know, whatever else is of absolutely global importance and being able to speak to you and to speak to all the members of the Empire Club and of the podcast on, you know, something just profoundly important that is a great privilege.
- [48:13]
Anita Anand
Have we just been talking about the Empire Pod Club so much that you. Well, I might as well tell you. Listen, you don't just get to listen to these miniseries in their entirety if you join the Empire Club since Rana's brought it up so very sweetly. But you also get a weekly newsletter. You get book discounts. You can listen to our writers of Empire bonus episodes as well. Just go to empirepod uk.com that's empirepoduk.com till the next time we meet, it's goodbye from me, Anita Anand and me, William Darrymple.
- [48:51]
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