ten years earlier, the party had been divided between those who believed that you could use the same techniques to run a nation state that you used when you seized power—mass campaigns of struggle and attack––and those who felt you needed more practical approaches. Tension between the “red” and the “expert” factions were the Yin and the Yang of Chinese politics.
The failure of the Great Leap—a huge mass political effort to force the Chinese economy to new heights, mobilizing the people to build blast furnaces in their backyards, and reorganizing the Chinese peasantry into agricultural communes—had discredited Mao and the “red” approach. Millions starved as agricultural production fell. The alliance between the Chinese and the Soviets fell apart, and the industrial economy suffered as Russian experts abruptly left the factories they had designed. Pragmatic elements in the party, led by Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, gained steadily in power and prestige throughout the first half of the sixties. Brooding, Mao came to the conclusion that his revolution was dying because two key elements of society were rotten through with bourgeois influence—the party and the youth. He decided to turn one against the other in one climactic purifying event—the Cultural Revolution.
A Different Job
The tools and techniques of China watching changed radically. Gone was the careful listening for sour notes in the daily symphony. The orchestra dissolved into bedlam, and musicians threw their instruments at each other and fought on stage. We paid attention to the central media, because the leftists still controlled it. But wall posters and Red Guard newspapers became the most sought after sources of information, always juicy and often wrong. Our demands for these were insatiable. Friends from foreign embassies in Beijing obliged, ripping posters from the walls and stuffing them, flakes of concrete still attached, into diplomatic pouches bound for Hong Kong.
The staid weekly dispatch I had produced became a daily telegram, approved in person by Consul General Edward Rice, in a vain effort to satisfy Washington’s voracious appetite for news and analysis. I was in the hottest of seats, and enjoying the temperature, but wondering whether I could maintain the pace.
Happily, help arrived in the form of Charles Hill, a fresh graduate of the language school in Taichung. He shared my fascination with China’s domestic politics, love of rowing, and unwillingness to take too seriously either himself or the momentous events we witnessed. Perhaps the highpoint of our collaboration occurred when the turmoil of the Cultural Revolution arrived in Hong Kong during the summer of 1967. We stood together on the roof of the Consulate General, transfixed by the absurd sight of local fat-cat communist officials leaping from their Mercedes cars to wave Mao’s Little Red Book at the Governor ’s Residence. Together we followed the tortuous course of the Cultural Revolution and formed a lasting partnership that took new shape decades later when we both served as special assistants to Secretary of State George Shultz.
The Violence Grows
In the summer and fall of 1966, the Red Guards were encouraged to travel throughout the entire country spreading the chaos originally focused on the capital. The results were often deadly, as the targets of mass criticism and humiliation cracked under pressure, killed themselves, or were beaten to death. The Red Guard generation, liberated from school, free as never before to rebel against their elders and to travel anywhere they wanted, were willing instruments of the Leftists during the early months of the movement. But by the turn of 1966, the party structure was still standing. Officials, driven from their office buildings, were performing their duties from garages and other makeshift headquarters.
Realizing that the youth were not capable of toppling the party structure by themselves, the Leftists pulled out the last stop in Shanghai, declaring the “January Revolution” of 1967, which empowered anyone, of any age or walk of life, to rebel against established authority. That blew the lid off. In city after city throughout China during the next nine months, party structures were swept away by the waves of warfare waged between rival factional organizations.
These factional entities formed very quickly after the lid came off. They were marvels of Chinese organizational skill, with their own propaganda arms, dance troupes, street combat units, and work and welfare brigades. As the weeks passed, they united into mass coalitions along “have” and “have not” lines. Those with something to lose––the children of party and government cadres, the established workforces of state-owned enterprises, the peasants from rich suburban communes––combined to defend themselves against the attacks of the dirt poor and the disenfranchised. Anyone with a grudge or a score to settle piled on. The factions outdid each other in adopting revolutionary nomenclature—East Is Red, Red Flag Fighting Corps—making it very difficult for observers to understand the underlying motivation of the struggle. And they killed each other in large numbers. Sailing our pleasure junks in Hong Kong waters, we would encounter bodies floating out from the Pearl River Estuary, casualties in the battle for Guangzhou (formerly known as Canton).
I learned about the “have–have not” cleavage from a young man who had served as a telephone operator for the big “have not” faction in Guangzhou. He had fled for his life when his side began to lose, swam to Hong Kong, evaded border patrols, and turned himself in to the central police. Under the Colony’s hide-and-seek immigration rules, he was accepted as a refugee and put through the intelligence screen. I hardly ever had the time to interview refugees, but dropped everything to spend eight hours with him, going over the table of organization of his faction and his opponents. He knew the whole structure and helped us understand why the fighting was so intense. His attitudes were also instructive. He had not the slightest interest in the freedom offered by Hong Kong. His escape was simply an act of survival. He despised Madame Mao, whom he described as shallow and uneducated, and adored Chairman Mao, to whom he felt he owed his life. It was the Chairman’s teaching to fear no enemies and overcome all obstacles that inspired him during his swim.5
This, in broad outline, was the stuff of my analytical work during our last years in Hong Kong. There was little certainty in our judgments and a lot of debate and argument at each stage of the process. The knowledge that the Chinese were just as confused as we were lent scant comfort.
Turmoil in Hong Kong
The Cultural Revolution finally spread to Hong Kong during the summer of 1967, bringing with it labor unrest, serious riots, and mass demonstrations. Leftist agents sought to sow terror by putting lethal explosives into ordinary items, even toys. Our upscale neighborhood was not spared. One morning we awoke to find a bomb squad outside our window, in full armor, gingerly inspecting a suspicious object in the middle of Old Peak Road. It was Sheila’s handbag, left there by a cat burglar, who had shinnied up the pipes outside our bathroom and taken the purse without disturbing our sleep.
In a June 1967 letter home, I described what was going on, as follows:
The situation now is quite favorable to our side. The communists are essentially weak, and have been forced to try to save face by showing what strength they have through a series of token strikes, each of which affects the ordinary citizen whose support they seek much more than the “imperialists” they are trying to protest against. They have threatened food, water, electricity, and gas supplies, and stopped ferry and transport services, not in any case long enough to cause lasting disruption, but just long enough to make everyone cross. It’s a stupid performance, which reflects clearly the lack of direction across the border. I was taught to respect the organizational ability of the communists (and still do as a sensible hedge to all bets), but thus far it’s the other tiger that turns out to be paper.
The local government, for its part, despite a few tactical blunders, has performed far better than any longtime observers of its pukka bumblings in the past would ever have dared hope. The younger officials, many of whom are in responsible jobs because their bosses are
