In the fall of 1954, Khrushchev visited China with Mao Zedong, Kim Il Sung, and other Chinese Communist leaders.
Mao Zedong hated him and Liu Shaoqi was persecuted to death as “China’s Khrushchev”, but what did Khrushchev himself think about the Cultural Revolution and Mao Zedong?
Q: During the Cultural Revolution, the name Khrushchev was heard most often, and even Liu Shaoqi was called China’s Khrushchev. The last program talked about the reason why Mao hated Khrushchev. Today, from a different perspective, please tell us how Khrushchev saw Mao and the Cultural Revolution.
A: Okay. But before I start this topic, I want to talk about another thing. The last Time we talked about it, what made Mao scary for Khrushchev was his claim at the World Communist and Workers’ Party Conference that the Chinese were not afraid to die with half their population, or 300 million people, to fight imperialism. This was basically dismissed as the rhetoric of a madman. But last week, we saw another person from mainland China named Ji Lianhai, who claims to be an academic, actually propose to go to war with the United States again and die a billion people and still be the second most populous country in the world. So you can understand that Mao’s legacy is still held as the greatest treasure by those impersonal and irrational Chinese people. Mao’s basic ideas are still to a large extent the basic policy of the CCP’s top authorities in domestic and foreign affairs at the moment. Therefore, I think it is very dangerous for China to go on like this, and it is a fatal threat to China, to the whole world, and to humanity. Therefore, I still think that the Deng-Hu-Zhao era was the best generation of leaders in the history of the CCP. Unfortunately, the Chinese are not lucky enough, and always get the worst results at every critical moment.
Q: After reading this report, according to some people’s accurate statistics, more than 90 percent of the follow-up posts after Ji Lianhai made the above remarks were denouncing such remarks.
A: However, the situation you described, even if it is true, does not reduce the danger, because public opinion is completely ineffective under the communist system. This brings me right into my topic today. The issue of the Cultural Revolution was discussed in the upper echelons of the Soviet Communist Party during the wildest years of the Cultural Revolution from ’66 to ’67. At that time, Khrushchev had already stepped down and became a pensioner, but he was still concerned about the Cultural Revolution. He recalled that some people said at that time that the Red Guards in China would not be victorious. But Khrushchev pointed out that the Maoists would, of course, win. He offered three reasons: 1) Mao had a powerful army behind him; 2) the Maoists were a group of “people who do not speak any morality”; and 3) China was a completely lawless country, which “does not recognize any law”. It can be said that these three points made by Khrushchev were accurate and hit the nail on the head. Mao’s promotion of the Cultural Revolution was mainly based on these three articles. He drew Lin Biao in and made his power in the army work for him. He played Liu Shaoqi with all kinds of intrigues. When he had already decided to put Liu Shaoqi to death, he asked Liu Shaoqi to meet him on January 13, ’67, and falsely asked him to read Diderot’s “Man is a Machine”. When Liu Shaoqi proposed to go back to his hometown to farm, he did not say a word, but only told Liu Shaoqi to “study hard and take care of your health“. In fact, his minions, such as Jiang Qing, had already started to arrange for the Red Guards to fight Liu Shaoqi brutally. When Liu Shaoqi took out the constitution and asked for habeas corpus, he was ridiculed, and the president realized that China was a country with no laws at all. Khrushchev must have hit the nail on the head because he had personally experienced the ferocity and insidiousness of Stalin and knew that the three methods worked well. He also used this method skillfully in his later seizure of power and removal of Beria.
Q: The fact that Khrushchev got out alive from under Stalin and was able to turn over his hand and liquidate Stalin must have made Mao extraordinarily concerned.
A: Yes, Mao hated Khrushchev so much that he would kill Liu Shaoqi because he decided in his heart that Liu Shaoqi was China’s Khrushchev, no matter how loyal Liu Shaoqi showed, he didn’t believe a single thing, and he was afraid he also knew that Khrushchev had good things to say about Stalin when he was alive. What’s more, Liu Shaoqi has already shown his dissatisfaction with him in some places. It is interesting that Khrushchev looked at the Cultural Revolution and also saw it as a Maoist Stalinist madness. He said, “The Chinese are killing each other. In our case, Stalin had shot hundreds of thousands of citizens, and that was an abuse of power by Stalin, and Mao is now repeating it with them. He concluded from his own personal experience of Stalin’s great terror, the purges, that another madman, without any moral bottom line, had raised the butcher’s knife against his own people.
Q: So it seems that in Khrushchev’s eyes, Mao was another Stalin, the Chinese Stalin?
A: You are very accurate, that is how Khrushchev saw it, and it was before China and the Soviet Union had torn each other apart. The reason is that at the congress of the Communist and Workers’ Parties in Moscow in ’57, when drafting the resolution, the Soviet Communist Party proposed that in view of the crimes of Stalin that were uncovered, such articles as the leadership of the Soviet Communist Party in the international communist movement should be deleted from the congress manifesto, otherwise it would again Otherwise it would go back to the old way of inequality between the communist parties of various countries during the Stalinist period. Khrushchev believed that the future communist movement should be conducted in such a way that national communist parties would cooperate on an equal footing and that no national communist party and its leaders would be above the communist parties of other countries. The national communist parties were in favor of this proposal, but the Chinese Communists suddenly raised objections. They said that “there must be a leader who coordinates the policy of the anti-imperialist struggle of the national communist parties and the workers’ parties”, and as a result the Communist Party of the Soviet Union insisted on not writing about the role of the leader, and Khrushchev became suspicious. It turned out that Mao was dissatisfied with Stalin’s all-embracing approach and talked about it privately to Khrushchev, so why did he suddenly insist on having a leading party? Khrushchev’s judgment was that Mao was making preparations in advance for himself to seek this leadership position. After Stalin, he was to be the leader of the world communist movement. It should be said that Khrushchev’s judgment was accurate, and that Mao, in his conversations with him, freely denied the leaders of the Communist Party, that this person was good, that person was bad, and whoever had opposed him in the past. It made Khrushchev wary, because he had been around Stalin for decades and knew him extremely well, so he said, “Stalin also gave bad comments to all those who were close to him in this way. I don’t know that he ever praised the merits of anyone. And he not only judged people with bad words, but also physically eliminated those with whom he had worked. Here one gets a vague sense that Mao and Stalin were in sympathy. I see here the similarity, though not identical, between the two men’s hearts. At that time I could not have imagined what colors Mao’s character would add later, what disasters he would lead his people to.”
Q: This is what Khrushchev perceived in ’57, he was very perceptive.
A: It’s no wonder. To survive decades beside Stalin is not something ordinary people can do. Later, when the Cultural Revolution began, he instantly confirmed his view from what Mao had done. First, like Stalin, Mao attributed all achievements to himself and all mistakes to others, and never really reflected on himself. Once he heard the slightest opposition, it must be a conspiracy against him, suspicious to the extreme, basically a persecuted paranoia. Second, turning himself into a god, Khrushchev said, “Mao knocked down everything in order to lead the country to the point of honoring him as a god. In doing so, he reminds me of the time when our country mentioned Stalin’s name in a meeting and all stood up and clapped their hands, just as people crossed their chests in church when God was mentioned”. He thought it was an insult to human intellect and a degradation of dignity for everyone in the country to memorize Mao’s quotations. In the twentieth century, when man had already landed on the moon, he actually made a nation believe in superstitious incantations. Third, Mao put his wife in charge of literature and art, as a result of which Chinese literary scholars and artists were subjected to “endless, unheard-of, and intolerable abuse. Fourth, the young people were allowed to use sticks to maintain order in schools and to determine how scientific principles should be taught. Khrushchev referred to the criminal law of tying people to poles and insulting them in the days of the Tsars, saying that Chernyshevsky had been subjected to this kind of punishment, and now in China it is done by young students.
Q: It seems that Khrushchev knew a lot about the Cultural Revolution, but at that time he was no longer the leader of the Soviet Communist Party.
A: Because of this, he was able to observe carefully and reflect on his judgment, and he even pointed out that “here is a sad law, that the dictatorship of the proletariat almost everywhere produces the dictatorship of individuals over the working class, over the party that achieves victory, and even over their own comrades in arms”. He asked, “Who exactly does the Communist Party serve? Its system of organization also allows a particular individual to use it to abuse power.” Communist Party officials often understand this only when they themselves are persecuted. Deng understood, but he couldn’t get out; Zhao Ziyang understood, but he had no way out.
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