Behind the Scenes in China
TUNG, TIMOTHY
Behind the Scenes in China The New Emperors: China in the Era of Mao and Deng By Harrison E. Salisbury Little, Brown. 544 pp. $24.95. The Claws of the Dragon: Kang Sheng, the Evil Genius Behind...
...his mistreatment of Zhou Enlai...
...and how, after Mao's death, Deng managed with the help of Ye Jianying and other elders to topple Jiang Qing and her Gang of Four, then went on to inherit the emperor's mandate...
...Once again we are told about the birth of Communist China...
...Kang, the authors demonstrate, was a man of many contradictions...
...Born into a prosperous Shandong provincial family and educated at a Shanghai university, he nevertheless joined the Party in his youth and engaged in clandestine activities...
...SShanghai municipal police files that cast light on Kang's underground activities in the 1920s, also stored in the U.S...
...at the same time, Deng could brook no political deviation...
...Salisbury also has little to say about Kang Sheng, the head of Mao's secret police, except that among other responsibilities he served as a pimp and procurer of erotica for his "emperor...
...Mao's dealings with Joseph Stalin and hatred of Nikita S. Khrushchev...
...Working closely with Mao, he used Stalin's methods to destroy rivals and catch Kuomintang spies...
...It illustrates how such a revolution's leaders, in the authors' words, "may yield to corruption, greed and lust...
...The question of Zhou's uncritical support for his superior has always been intriguing...
...how he wronged Peng Dehuai and persecuted Liu Shaoqi...
...Less satisfying than his firsthand encounters is Salisbury's use of reminiscences that have appeared in Chinese publications, and not merely because they make portions of the book sound anecdotal or gossipy...
...National Archives...
...I cannot help marveling at its extraordinary sources...
...He deposed Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, two moderate proteges, without the blink of an eye, and he approved the armed suppression of students demonstrating in Tiananmen Square because, oddly, they reminded him of the Red Guards, at whose hands he had suffered humiliation...
...Some of the information gleaned from them first appeared in The Long March (1985), an account of the 7,200-mile trek Salisbury made through China's back-country to retrace the paths of Mao's Army...
...A superbly documented, well-written biography, The Claws of the Dragon is an exceptional contribution to the understanding of Mao's brand of Communism...
...It suggests that...
...Indeed, one wonders how the author went about selecting from his vast array of material...
...The following year, he was expelled posthumously from the Communist Party...
...Reviewed by Timothy Tung Former research professor, China specialist, the City University of New York Together, these two books paint a fairly comprehensive picture of what went on behind the scenes in the upper echelons of Communist China from the rise of Mao to the Tiananmen Square tragedy in 1989...
...It was Zhou Enlai, in prerevolutionary Shanghai, who helped Kang make the crucial transition from underground Party organizer to master of intelligence and assassination...
...It is thus somewhat surprising that in both substance and style, John Byron and Robert Pack have produced the more rewarding volume...
...Salisbury offers a possible explanation: "One school of thought suspects Zhou of playing Faust to Mao's Mephistopheles...
...The Claws of the Dragon is, in fact, the first full-length English biography on Mao's intimate aide...
...The idea may be fresh, but it is presented within a familiar framework...
...In a vain attempt to head off further criticism, Kang's family in 1979 removed his ashes from their place of honor at Beijing's Babaoshan Cemetery, the traditional burial ground for Communist martyrs...
...his manipulation of the intellectuals, first with the Hundred Flowers Movement, later through the Anti-Rightist Campaign...
...The source notes and bibliography list more than 400 books and articles...
...The trouble is that precisely because he has written so much on China, this work, except for a few passages, largely rehashes an old tale...
...While on the road he met and talked with a number of aged veterans and Mao's former bodyguards, who supplied a character study of the young Mao and a few sketches of Deng in his youth...
...On balance, his recent promotions of the younger leaders Zhu Rongji, Zou Jiahua and Li Ruihuai into positions of power appear to indicate that he intends to step up economic liberalization, though we need to know more about these figures than is given here...
...once had Mao reciprocated...
...560 pp...
...Never...
...The New Emperors comes from a widely respected journalist known for his passionate search for the truth about the Communist world...
...This opium-smoking womanizer was in charge, too, of enforcing the Communists' puritanical morality...
...A telling passage describes his relationship with Zhou Enlai: "[Zhou] had given him his full devotion...
...27.50...
...His four years there were spent watching Stalin carry out the Great Purge and absorbing techniques for liquidating the opposition...
...Examining the lives of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, especially their power-grabbing, authoritarian behavior, the author envisions the two modern-day Communist leaders as successors to the huang-ti, the emperors of China's past...
...He was sent to Moscow as deputy leader of the Chinese delegation to the Comintern...
...Most of the particulars here have been touched upon in Salisbury's previous books, all distinguished by his tireless pursuit of the undiscovered...
...The Claws of the Dragon is a joint effort by a pseudonymous former Western diplomat, whose only other volume is a minor one on erotic art of the Qing Dynasty, and a seasoned reporter...
...In this sense, he brings to mind Li Lianying, the chief court eunuch serving Empress Dowager Ci Xi...
...National Archives...
...Reputed to be a wordsmith, a talented painter and an elegant callig-rapher, he caused the death of tens of thousands during his reign of terror, and was known to dote on his pet terrier while personally supervising tortures...
...Ranked third in the Politburo at the time of his death (behind Mao and Zhou), he was even honored with a State funeral...
...BByron's personal interviews with Party historians, the sons and daughters of several of Kang's closest colleagues, as well as poets and artists whose company he enjoyed yet whose lives he devastated...
...the bungling of the Great Leap Forward program...
...To the Chinese people's eternal regret, Kang's intestinal cancer provided him with a timely exit in 1975, 10 months before the Gang of Four were arrested, and he could never be brought to account...
...Stalin needed Beria...
...The notion of picturing Mao and Deng as emperors must have been so appealing that he could not resist reorganizing the enormous amount of material he has dug up and presenting it in support of his latest thesis...
...in the midst of the Long March he gave Mao a written document pledging to back him as long as he lived...
...Throughout his long career, Kang double-crossed most of the senior leaders he came into close contact with, including Zhou Enlai, Jiang Qing and Deng Xiaoping...
...HHu Yaobang's secret speech, "Problems Concerning the Purge of Kang Sheng," delivered at the Party school in 1978, three years after Kang's death...
...His refined taste for art was incongruously matched by his love for inflicting pain...
...his launching of the Cultural Revolution...
...The Claws of the Dragon: Kang Sheng, the Evil Genius Behind Mao—and His Legacy of Terror in People's China By John Byron and Robert Pack Simon and Schuster...
...In his secret speech, Hu Yaobang called him the "black adviser and decapitator for the Gang of Four...
...He quickly worked his way into the Communist leader's confidence, and was instrumental in pairing him with Jiang Qing, a childhood acquaintance of Kang's in Shandong...
...Without the backing of Kang Sheng, whose black hand extended to every part of the country, the Gang of Four, merely four clowns, could not [have made] attempts at power-seizure, unless all good Party members had died...
...Mao emerges in these exchanges as arrogant, cruel and manipulating...
...Eloquent and knowledgeable, he writes with the aplomb of a true insider...
...Hu Yaobang, in condemning the secret police chief, quoted the dishonored Lin Biao as once having said, "Lenin needed Dzerzhinski...
...AA 60-page report detailing conversations that took place in 1948 between a disenchanted underling of Kang's and an American vice consul in Dalian, discovered by the authors two years ago in the U.S...
...So we also needed such a man as Kang Sheng to use the sword in his hand to behead others...
...Other notable interviewees in The New Emperors are Yang Shangkun, China's current President, and the widows of several of Mao's prominent victims, who included Liu Shaoqi, General He Long and Lao She, author of Rickshaw Boy...
...The New Emperors, as he tells us himself, "is the product of years of travels, interviews and research in China...
...That Kang was the most evil of the country's Communist leaders has long been acknowledged by the Chinese, yet he is hardly known in the West...
...Mao treated Zhou with the same imper-sonality as he treated a piece of furniture...
...Not until he returned to China in 1937 did Kang meet Mao...
...Of greatest interest are the interviews...
...Anyone who is still convinced that a Marxist revolution can break the shackles of poverty and oppression would do well to examine the life of Kang Sheng...
...That is not to disparage Harrison Salisbury's new effort...
...Nobody was surprised when he assumed the role of chief of the secret police, or when he aided Mao in unleashing the deadly 1942 Rectification Campaign...
...Only a fifth of The New Emperors is devoted to Deng, whose simple lifestyle and modest tastes contrast sharply with Mao's...
...Besides a long list of books and articles in English and Chinese, Byron and Pack rely heavily on the following: •AAn internal government document entitled Kang Sheng Pingzhuan (A Critical Biography of Kang Sheng), written solely for high-level Communists by a deputy editor of Red Flag, the Party's theoretical journal, and a senior Party historian who has produced several essays deflating Mao's reputation...
...By 1933 the city became too dangerous for him to operate in...
...Memoirs written for Chinese journals are often exaggerated, if not wholly unreliable...
...Mao never went out of his way to speak well of Zhou Enlai...
...Deng was truly a curious reformer: He could tolerate the company of such capitalists as Armand Hammer, an Amer-ican, and Rong Yiren, a prerevolution-ary Chinese industrialist now in charge of citic, the large government-financed investment trust...
...Kang Sheng was the godfather of the Cultural Revolution, too...
Vol. 75 • May 1992 • No. 6
