Despite having so many positive features, why did socialism fail? This question has intrigued almost all leftists around the world and they have tried to answer it according to their own understandings. Some have attributed it to the shenanigans of the capitalist powers, others have termed it a type of state capitalism, and some more have even refused to acknowledge that ‘true socialism’ was ever established.

Irrespective of the relevance of these causes, at least one stands out in almost all erstwhile and current socialist states -- absolute submission to a personality cult. From Stalin and Mao to Castro and Ceausescu; supreme socialist leaders in power hardly ever allowed open discussion on their ideas and if they ever encouraged self-criticism, it was only to pinpoint the dissenters to remove them from positions of authority.

The Cultural Revolution in China, initiated exactly 50 years ago in 1966, was an ultimate effort by Chairman Mao Zedong to reestablish his personality cult that had been shaken by the failure of the Great Leap Forward that resulted in the Great Famine of 1958-60. Discussing the events leading to the Cultural Revolution one cannot bypass four major figures of China in that period: Lin Biao, Liu Shaoqi, Peng Dehuai, and Zhou Enlai (not to be confused with the Gang of Four led by Mao’s wife). If Lin Biao was the right-hand man of Chairman Mao in launching the Cultural Revolution, Liu Shaoqi and Peng Dehuai were disgracefully removed as the president and defence minister of China; whereas Zhou Enlai was a passive prime minister who quietly towed the line of his chairman and retained his position throughout the upheavals.

Liu Shaoqi was the Chairman of the People’s Republic of China (1959-68) and chief theoretician of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and for almost 20 years he was considered the heir apparent of Mao Zedong until he was purged in the late 1960s.

The purge in China was much different from the purge in Indonesia that took place almost at the same time. In Indonesia, it was the purge of the communists initiated by an anticommunist army in cahoots with Islamist vigilantes. In China, the purge was initiated by the supreme leader of the CCP against its own members and senior most leaders who dared to differ from or criticise the foolhardy policies of the indisputable chairman who was increasingly paranoid and suspected his tried and trusted friends of decades.

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For years, the communist parties -- especially pro-Chinese -- around the world used seminal texts from Liu Shaoqi’s famous lecture series titled "How to be a good communist" and "On intra-party struggle" as a required reading for their members. Thanks to his impeccable record as one of the most well-read and articulate promoters of the Marxist canon, he had enjoyed tremendous respect and admiration in the CCP, rivaled only by Mao himself. As Mao kept committing one mistake after another, Liu enhanced his position in the eyes of his comrades with his more moderate and practical approach.

Since Liu had spent some time in the Soviet Union and studied there, he played an important role in negotiating Soviet help to industrialise post-revolution China. Liu’s cosmopolitan outlook and experience with the Soviet leadership gave him a central role to play in the first decade after revolution. He headed the Chinese-Soviet Friendship Association in 1949-54 and attended Soviet party congresses in Moscow. By 1956, he was clearly Mao Zedong’s heir apparent. Though initially he was with Mao in outlining the second five-year economic plan (called the Great Leap Forward), which was to lay the foundation of the rapid industrialisation of China, Liu soon realised that industrialisation could not be achieved as rapidly as hoped.

The apparent failure of the Great Leap prompted Mao to relinquish his position as the chairman of the People’s Republic in 1959 and he gave this position to Liu, but Mao retained the chairmanship of the party. In most communist countries, the party leader was the most powerful person irrespective of whoever became president or prime minister.

As Liu tried to roll back some of the strict policies of collectivisation and state control, Mao started to object to any such reversals. As head of the state, Liu had also begun to play a more prominent role in foreign affairs resulting in further resentment with Mao, especially with regards to the Chinese-Soviet relationship. Khrushchev’s policy of criticising Stalin had engendered a feeling of insecurity in Mao too who feared that a similar fate may be in store for him.

In all this mistrust, another personality starts annoying the all-powerful chairman. It was Peng Dehuai, defence minister and marshal of the Chinese army, who responded to Mao’s call for self-criticism. When Mao encouraged party members to criticise and offer opinions on the government’s mistakes and shortcomings -- with assurance that nobody would be victimised for his opinions -- Peng believed his chairman, and became the first to point out inaccurate reporting of statistics. He bluntly criticised the senior party members for their hesitation to disagree with the Party leadership and following orders that they knew were not in the best interest of the Chinese people.

Peng wrote a private letter to Mao outlining his criticism of wrong decisions, expecting that Mao would appreciate his ideas; instead Mao widely circulated his letter as a proof that Peng was not loyal to the party and was actually trying to undermine the party policies. Most of the senior party leaders including Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai who had encouraged Peng to speak out, suddenly realised that the chairman was getting annoyed at any questions raised about his actions. Mao attacked Peng and called him ‘imperialist’, ‘bourgeois’, and ‘rightist’. Mao threatened that if other senior members of the party supported Peng, the party would be split and Mao would retreat to countryside and lead a rebellion against ‘imperialists’ in China.

This threat dampened any hope within the party for disagreeing with Mao; even Prime Minister Zhou Enlai and President Liu Shaoqi sided with Mao in opposing Peng’s position. The party condemned Peng as the leader of an ‘antiparty clique’ and removed him from the position of defence minister. Peng was forced to admit that he had made grave mistakes by criticising the chairman and the party decisions.

Now, here comes a new defence minister, Lin Biao, effectively ending Peng’s military career in September, 1959. Thus began a new phase of Mao’s personality cult within the army, promoted and spearheaded by Lin Biao. If any person could be held responsible for unconditionally listening to every word Mao said and unscrupulously following every folly that Mao initiated, that would be the new defence minister Lin Biao who ultimately even devoured Liu Shaoqi and became Mao’s new heir apparent.

Under Lin’s leadership the army became more and more politicised at the cost of the CCP itself as Mao started distrusting his own party colleagues whom he suspected of being unreliable, who could turn against him anytime. Mao’s fears were further enhanced when the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) removed Khrushchev from party leadership and installed Brezhnev as the new leader in 1964.

In 1965, Mao initiated an extensive purge of the CCP that from 1966 was known as the Great Cultural Revolution, whose principal casualty was President Liu Shaoqi, the party organiser who had been Mao’s second in command for more than two decades. In 1966, Lin Biao replaced Liu Shaoqi as the future successor of Mao and in 1969 the new constitution endorsed him. The high time for the Cultural Revolution was from 1966 to 1971; in those five years the army effectively took over the role previously played by the party in ruling China.

During the Cultural Revolution, Mao criticised and then purged Liu and he disappeared from public life in 1968, after being labeled as the ‘commander of China’s bourgeois headquarters’, a traitor, and a capitalist roader. He died under harsh treatment in 1969 only to be posthumously rehabilitated by Deng Xiaoping in 1980.

To target the party seniors who could be a threat to Mao, he created and used a fanaticised student paramilitary movement -- Red Guards. It proclaimed itself to be an armed revolutionary youth organisation led by Red Commander-in-Chief i.e. Mao himself. The chairman ordered that the manifesto of the Red Guards be broadcast on national radio and published in the People’s Daily newspaper. One of the reasons Liu Shaoqi was purged was his attempt to use the Party teams to control the Red Guards. As the Communist Party tried to preserve the existing state government and apparatus, Mao ordered the removal of the Party teams, against the wishes of Liu Shaoqi and condemned him and his party friends. All over China, the Party was in retreat and the Red Guards were in command supported by the army led by Lin Biao.

Moa himself started addressing hundreds of thousands of the Red Guards encouraging them to eliminate the party members who opposed or questioned Mao’s policies. During the Cultural Revolution, not only that thousands of senior party members were criticised, purged, tortured, publicly humiliated, and killed, but also old books and art were destroyed, museums were ransacked, and old culture, old habits, and old ideas were targeted which meant that anything that Mao considered old was to be eliminated. Many top party officials such as Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, and Peng Dehuai were verbally and physically attacked.

Once the CCP was purged and fell in line, Lin Biao directed his army to suppress the Red Gauds. By 1970, Lin Biao had emerged as another threat to Mao. Then suddenly, Lin Biao was reportedly killed in a mysterious air crash in Mongolia, trying to flee to the Soviet Union after a failed coup attempt.

All along, Zhou Enlai kept his position intact as prime minister. After Zhou and Mao died their natural deaths in 1976, the new Chinese leadership termed the Cultural Revolution a grave mistake and a tragedy; Mao was held responsible for judgment errors he made during his chairmanship, but he was not maligned or attacked as the CPSU had done with Stalin. Mao still retains his respected position as the great leader of communist China.

In the final analysis, the Great Leap Forward, the Great Famine, and the Great Cultural Revolution had almost nothing that could be termed great apart from millions of lives they consumed. It was only when the next Chinese leader, Deng Xiaoping, introduced radical changes in the Chinese socialism that China emerged as a relatively prosperous and stable country.

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