Volume 53, Number 14 · September 21, 2006
China's Great Terror
By Jonathan D. Spence
Mao's Last Revolution
by Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals
Belknap Press/Harvard University Press, 693 pp., $35.00
Long before August 1966, when immense chanting crowds of young Chinese Red Guards began to mass before Chairman Mao in Tiananmen Square, alerting those in the wider world to the onset of the Cultural Revolution, senior figures in the Chinese leadership began to seek their own solutions. On March 18, 1966, General Luo Ruiqing, a veteran revolutionary and then chief of staff of the People's Liberation Army, tried to commit suicide by jumping from the top of a three-story building. The attempt failed, though his legs were shattered and he ended up paralyzed, unable to walk. On May 17 Deng Tuo, the Beijing Party secretary for culture and education and former editor of the main Communist newspaper, People's Daily, took his own life in Beijing. Six days later Tian Jiaying, who for many years had been one of Mao's most effective and influential political secretaries, also committed suicide. On June 25, the director of the Beijing foreign affairs office took the same way out and he was followed on July 10 by the director of Beijing's municipal propaganda department, Li Qi, who took his own life after being denounced as an 'ultra-vanguard opponent of Mao Zedong Thought.' Two weeks after Li, another senior Communist bureaucrat hanged himself.
Review, 4650 words
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