Foreign Relations of the United States, 1964–1968, Volume XXX, China

232. Memorandum From the President’s Special Assistant (Rostow) to President Johnson¹

Washington, January 25, 1967.

Mr. President:

This is the best single reconstruction I have read of the inner politics of mainland China in this crisis.

It is written by Bill Wells, an imaginative, scholarly, bold CIA man in Hong Kong.

Walt

Attachment

Following is the text of a CIA report [less than 1 line of source text not declassified] dated January 19, 1967

SUBJECT

• China—The Three Kingdoms Revisited

[1 paragraph (3 lines of source text) not declassified]

Today’s events in China have a dynastic rather than communistic flavor. Politically, the period is that of the first great Chinese dynasty—the Han, but it is not clear whether we are watching its formation and the death agonies of the Ch’in or are seeing the end of the Han when the empire was swept with the rebellion of the Yellow Turbans, a rebellion which was in turn suppressed, but left the nation divided among a number of regional chieftains. A novel of this latter epoch begins, “Empires wax and wane, states fall apart and then reunite.” After seventeen years of unity China is beginning to feel again the shudders which foretell political change.

Between mid-December and mid-January the political turmoil spread by the cultural revolution churned in dozens of areas, leaving the onlooker dazed. Nevertheless the basic divisions become much clearer. [1–1/2 lines of source text not declassified] there is no longer doubt of the power struggle between Mao and Lin Piao on one hand and Liu Shao Ch’i and Teng Hsiao-P’ing on the other; we have learned of the Central Committee Meeting in October (which lasted 17 days) and to which Mao and Lin made two remarkable speeches. We have heard Lin compare Mao’s struggle to keep control of the Central Committee to Stalin’s struggle for power, and admit that the bourgeois advocates in the Central Committee remain in the dominant position in a number of fields. Mao in turn admits to great loss of control in the party, but makes it clear that he intends to grasp full power again whatever the cost. We heard that at Christmas time Lin Piao tried finally to crush the opposition and intrigued with T’Ao Chu to bring the great regional satraps, Li Ching-Ch’uan from the southwest, Liu Lan-T’ao from the northwest, and Sung Jen-Ch’iung from Manchuria to Peking, supposedly to reach a compromise. Accepting Tao’s pledge of safety they came. But Lin’s proposals were not accepted, and he then ordered their arrest. T’Ao Chu then made his choice. Standing behind his word, T’ao arranged the departure of the three from Peking secretly by air and Lin’s plot failed. T’ao, then ranked fourth in the party hierarchy, was excommunicated and immediately attacked. By mid-January he had apparently lost all his positions in the party.

Throughout early January the Mao-Lin position was increasingly attacked. To counter this, new “revolutionary rebel headquarters” have appeared in Shanghai, Foochow, Tsinan and Peking—all areas dominated by Army-controlled subordinates of Lin Piao from the days when he commanded the Fourth Field Army and its predecessor forces. These new rebel headquarters are set up to seize control of vital communication links, the post and telegraph services, the railways, radio and the newspapers. The magic name of Mao Tse-Tung still holds great strength, and in Shanghai two newspapers become the voice for these new cultural revolution vanguards. Hasty attempts were made to remove the party command of the all China Federation of Trade Unions and pack it with supporters of Mao and Lin. Liu Ning-I, long China’s No. 1 labor man (after Liu Shao-Ch’i) came under attack, and open clashes broke out in Shanghai between laborers and the new revolutionary rebels.

The new rebels are now added to the wandering, destructive Red Guards and to the organized workers teams of the Liu-Teng party apparat. Yet nothing seems to stay Mao’s drive to complete his revolution. On 9 December Chou En-Lai, who may yet become the mediator but who now seems clearly identified with Mao and Lin, announced in a speech before thousands at the Peking Workers’ Stadium that after 20 December the Red Guards would be given military training. In mid-January Chou reiterated his belief in the ultimate success of Mao’s cultural revolution.

Whether Mao will succeed in fully restoring his control will depend a great deal on whether or not he and Lin Piao can reestablish their control of the party apparatus. Gaining this control may rest in part on seizing and using the information in the work team personnel dossiers. On 8 September the Central Committee of the party and the State Council published a regulation concerning the handling of state and party secret documents generated during the cultural revolution. We have not seen this regulation, but it was obviously not obeyed, for it was supplemented by a directive on 5 October on the same subject issued by the Central Committee and a similar directive on 6 October issued by the Military Affairs Committee. By 16 November Party Central felt that a supplementary directive was required. The full purpose of these directives has simply been to force the party apparat to place the cultural revolution documents and probably the party personnel records in the hands of Mao and Lin Piao.

We have pondered in earlier studies why Lin Piao has not used the Army to force the party apparat to bend to his will. Since the capture of the famous “work papers” in 1961 it has been clear that he does not fully control the command officer corps, for many of these officers owe allegiance to senior marshals who do not accept Lin as their leader. It is now clear that Lin never even gained full control of the political department of the army. Cleverly opposed by the organizational elements of the party, probably through appointments made by Teng Hsiao-P’ing, the Secretary General, and Yang Shang-K’um, the Chief of the Party’s Administrative Office, the army political department remained under the direction of the party. Lin may have counted heavily on General Liu Chih-Chien, long a mainstay of the political department and until three weeks ago the principal army officer on Mao’s cultural revolution subcommittee of the Central Committee, who turned against Lin and Mao in late December and may now be under arrest. Liu’s defection, like that of T’Ao Chu, must have been a hard pill for Mao to accept, and cannot help but have set back the time schedule of the GPCR. Liu must have participated in the preparations for the third wave of the struggle against the party apparat—that is, the training of the Peoples Army (PLA) cadres to be Mao’s GPCR activists in establishing the revolutionary rebel headquarters now appearing in China. Although it is by no means clear, we believe this training has been conducted in many of the military regions and districts for some weeks.

On 26 November the Shanghai Wen Hui Pao, so often Mao’s GPCR mouthpiece, described the closing ceremonies at Tsinan of the 2nd Congress of activists of the Tsinan armed forces. This “Congress” for the study of the works of Mao was attended by 1,127 delegates. We speculate that from this group and many such others being trained throughout China, have come the hard core activists now seizing the newspapers and labor unions in many cities.

China at mid-January appeared to be two circles of political power. One circle is dominated by loyal subordinates of Lin Piao and the army, although there is great confusion at every level. In the other circle the party apparat reigns but barely rules. The strategy of the apparat is purely defensive. Like the Chinese heroes of the three kingdoms, each official is now thinking of alliance and of regional defense until the legitimate rule of the Communist Party is reestablished under Mao or any other leader who will reaffirm his predominance in his region. They have not reached the point in political time where separate states are thought possible. This spring, however, may bring a consideration of this possibility.

Historic parallels are never exact although this time events insist on historic comparison. Some things have changed forever. The grim fact of China’s huge contemporary population guarantees little time for the fun of political misadventure. Food prices are rising in Canton. We have no way of estimating how badly the transport of food within China has suffered under the vast movement of Red Guards, the forced transport stoppages of the recalcitrant work teams or their battles with the municipal Red Guards, and now through the onslaught of rebel revolutionaries. The tie-ups, however, must have been and must be massive. Today only one passenger train runs north from Canton City to Wuhan and the north. Without transport China would not merely suffer the ravages of 1961’s malnutrition, but the hell of starvation. Moreover, China at mid-month is bitterly cold. Hong Kong shivers in the worst cold of a decade. Human dislocation, rising prices, short rations and cold are Mao’s new enemies. The party apparat knows this. Throughout China local party units have been offering raises in wages and individual incentives to inspire loyalty; indeed a labor bureaucracy may have developed such incentives for years. Over and over they are accused by the Mao-Lin adherents of tempting the masses with sugar coated bullets.

It is, moreover, difficult to assess how long Mao and Lin can travel the same road. Lin must know that so many of the vital managers of the party have been arrested, insulted and ridiculed, that his power position is in jeopardy.

Modern China may deprecate “face” as a feudal characteristic, but self-confession has its limits and these have probably been reached. Mao’s recent accusations flick like a snake’s tongue; no one is immune—the reorganized propaganda department, the newspapers, his fellows on the cultural revolution subcommittee, even his most old and trusted ministers. Lin will have an increasingly difficult time organizing the cultural revolution while his mentor purges follower after follower.

In Chinese history the era of the three kingdoms is an interregnum, a period of warring anarchy despised by the classical Chinese historian, who prefers the established dynasty with its cultural grace. In our last analysis we suggested that China’s anarchical period would not last long for historic reasons. We still believe this. Nevertheless it is worthwhile to look back 1600 years to the time when China divided into the three great states of Shu, Wu and Wei, and when the art of political intrigue reached its height. As short-lived as the modern divisions may be, they will be with us in 1967 when a series of Chinese bravos will pass across the face of the nation until one, shrewder than the rest, assumes command.

1. Source: Johnson Library, National Security File, Country File, China, Vol. VIII. Confidential. A handwritten note on the source text indicates it was received at 10:55 a.m.