Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
a woman with literary and cultural interests who had been Mao's wife
since Yan'an days, quickly caught on to this and urged Mao for years
to do something about it.
Mao made only one public appearance in 1962. During this year he
was angry and hurt about the way practical officials had more or less
shunted him aside and regarded him as a “dead ancestor.” He feared
that bureaucrats and governmental cogs were now in control of China
and that the country was slowly watering down Marxist-Leninist
dogma. In his youth he had accepted Marxism-Leninism and saw class
struggle as the driving force of history. Now, in the wake of attempts to
recover from the Great Leap, there was little evidence of continuing
class struggle, and this troubled him.
One segment of Chinese society that was not critical of Mao was the
People's Liberation Army (or PLA), led by Lin Biao. Lin knew that the
basis of his power and authority was his loyalty to Mao, and during
the early 1960s he flattered Mao and was obsequious in his behavior
to him. When others criticized Mao for the Great Leap catastrophe,
Lin praised it and glorified Mao for attempting it. Lin fostered a per-
sonality cult centered on Mao in the PLA, and he printed and circu-
lated among PLA troops the famous “Little Red Book,” or Quotations
from Chairman Mao Zedong, which he encouraged officers and men to
read and memorize reverentially. Mao was pleased with all this atten-
tiveness and by 1965 was encouraging China to learn from the PLA's
ideological zeal and personal dedication to him. Mao encouraged the
formation of a personality cult centered on himself, partly for his
own glorification but mainly for the mass dedication to his ideology
that it might produce.
By late 1965 Mao was once again confident enough in his own lead-
ership to fire a salvo at his critics and detractors. He finally unleashed
the fury of his wife Jiang Qing and her ultra-leftist cronies against
those they regarded as impeding class struggle in China, and in
November they had newspapers in Beijing and Shanghai publish a
tirade against the Hai Rui play. By the end of the year Mao had con-
vened a meeting with top Chinese officials about the play and lashed
out at his critics, questioning their devotion to the revolutionary cause.
In February 1966 he told Lin Biao and the PLA about his vision of a
“great socialist cultural revolution” that would fundamentally change
China's culture by rooting out the vestiges of old or feudal ways. With
this done, Mao believed, his critics would finally be silenced and
China could proceed farther and faster along the revolutionary path
toward the ultimate goal of pure communism.
