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Mao’s Sealion: The Abortive Chinese Communist Plot To Invade Taiwan During World War III By Chris Oakley
Part 5 (based on the “Stop ‘Em At The 38th Parallel” series by the same author)
Summary: In the first four chapters of this series we reviewed the creation of Special Operation A-13, Mao Zedong’s strategy for invading Taiwan, right after the Korean conflict escalated into World War III; the circumstances leading up to A-13’s cancellation; the political and social turmoil leading to Mao Zedong’s 1958 assassination; the 1960 Tienanmen Square massacre; and the near-chaos that would plague the government of Mao’s successor Zhou Enlai during the mid-1960s. In this episode we’ll look back on the coup that toppled Zhou’s regime and the violence following his overthrow. ****** It was a nervous Alexei Kosygin who opened and read the cable from the Russian ambassador in Sweden about Zhou Enlai’s arrival in Stockholm to remove a blood clot near the Chinese premier’s brain. For months the Kosygin government’s top diplomats and intelligence personnel in the Far East had been keeping him abreast of the political turmoil racking China, and their reports painted an alarming picture of a country hanging by the slenderest of threads. Resolving the Sino-Russian border crisis, a highly difficult proposition to begin with, would be rendered all but impossible if the Chinese government collapsed. If things continued on their present course the Zhou government was likely to be thrown aside for a Red Guard cabal-- or worse, disappear into the black hole of anarchy. Of course, it was hard to tell the difference given the Red Guard’s tactics.... ****** The chief architect of the secret meeting that ultimately turned Zhou Enlai out of power was a man who until January of 1966 had been primarily known for his role as a member of the People’s National Congress, China’s central parliament during the Communist era. His name was Deng Xiaoping, and like many of his peers in the CPC’s upper ranks he was growing more and more concerned every day about the direction the People’s Republic of China was taking under Zhou’s rule. He also believed the key to China’s survival as a country lay in turning aside from the traditional hard-line Marxism that had been the hallmark of the Mao and Zhou regimes and going with a more liberal economic and political system. But in his efforts to foster such a system in post-World War III China Deng found himself faced with increasingly heavy pushback from the hardliners in the CPC elite; he realized that in order to achieve his ends, it would be necessary to oust Zhou from power before Zhou could crush his efforts at reform. So when two fellow dissidents approached him shortly after Zhou left for Stockholm, Deng proved highly receptive to their proposal to hold a secret meeting to remove Zhou as China’s premier. Using a series of coded messages and PLA couriers, Zhou and his fellow reformists arranged for a special session of the CPC Central Committee to be convened in Beijing on January 20th at which there would be only one item on the agenda: ousting Zhou Enlai as head of state and party. To further preserve the secrecy of the special conclave, Deng enlisted the aid of Ministry of Public Security agents sympathetic to his cause. The meeting began promptly at 8:00 AM Beijing time on January 21st, 1966 and lasted less than forty-five minutes. There was little debate among the men attendance, and most of it centered on when and how the news of Zhou’s removal from power should be released to the public. Some of those present argued the announcement should be made right away; others felt it would be better to hold off until the new government had solidified its power base. Once that question was settled, the vote to remove Zhou as Chinese premier was swift and unanimous. By 11:30 AM PLA commanders loyal to Deng had sent their troops out to secure China’s major cities against any attempt on the part of Zhou’s supporters to launch a countercoup; at 2:00 that afternoon, Deng’s most senior aide went on the radio to issue a brief radio statement announcing that Zhou had become “mentally unstable” and was being replaced as Chinese premier “for the common good of the people”. As Deng had anticipated, Zhou’s loyalists immediately moved to kick the new government out and put Zhou back in power. No sooner had the radio broadcast announcing Zhou’s dismissal from office concluded than squads of Zhou stalwarts in the ranks of the PLA and the Red Guard began to launch a counter-rebellion. For the next three days the streets of Beijing rang out with the crack of gunfire as the pro-Deng forces fought to stave off their pro-Zhou adversaries’ attempts to reinstate the old regime. It was one of the bloodiest moments of civil unrest China had seen since the end of the civil war that had overthrown Chiang Kai-Shek’s regime in 1949. Dozens of fires were started by Molotov cocktails as the anti-Deng forces attempted to compensate for the pro-Deng troops’ numerical superiority by making use of IEDs to disrupt the new regime’s strategy for quashing the revolt. ****** By late afternoon on January 24th most of the anti-Deng insurgents had either been killed or captured by pro-Deng troops, but there were still a considerable number of Zhou partisans who were continuing to fight in the face of overwhelming odds. A Polish journalist embedded with a PLA platoon fighting on the Deng regime’s side observed in one of his cable dispatches to his editors back home that the carnage going on in Beijing was in many ways reminiscent of what had happened during the Warsaw revolt against the Nazis in 1943. And there was certainly a grain of truth in that analogy-- the use of homemade weapons in the anti-Deng rebels’ stiff and ultimately losing fight to put Zhou back in power was similar in many respects to the Polish Home Army’s employment of improvised bombs and booby traps against German occupation troops in Warsaw. At sunset that evening government troops had eliminated all but one of the pro-Zhou insurgents’ positions in Beijing, and the lone surviving insurgent pocket was coming under heavy fire from government artillery. Zhou, still in Stockholm recovering from his surgery, fell into a deep funk as it began to sink in that he might have permanently lost his grip on power. An aide to the deposed Chinese ruler would later write in his memoirs that “a dark shroud” seemed to surround Zhou after the revolt to put him back in power had failed. The last remaining anti-Deng guerrillas surrendered to government troops just before 10:30 PM Beijing time on the night of January 24th, effectively cementing Deng’s hold on the levers of power in the Chinese central government. Deng went on the radio at 1:00 AM on the morning of January 25th to formally announce the end of the uprising and call on all citizens of the People’s Republic to support his government as it attempted to restore at least a semblance of domestic tranquility to China. He also declared his intention to seek Zhou Enlai’s extradition from Sweden for the purpose of putting him on trial for what Deng called “crimes against the nation.” In a fit of despair and panic at facing what Zhou rightly suspected would be his conviction for abuses of power followed by execution at the hands of his own countrymen, the deposed Chinese ruler committed suicide less than twelve hours after Deng's radio address. Zhou Enlai's suicide marked the beginning of the end for the Cultural Revolution; with his death the Red Guards lost much of the emotional drive which had kept them going for so long, and as Deng's government continued to solidify its hold on power many former Red Guard stalwarts gave up the movement's fanaticism and re-embraced mainstream Communist doctrines. Many of the same people who would become the most bitter condemners of the Red Guard in the post-Zhou era were, ironically, some of the very people who'd once been the group's most staunch advocates. In fact, before Zhou's body had even gotten cold, some disillusioned young Chinese had already turned their backs on the Red Guard crusade; in the most public disavowal of what the Guard had once stood for the leader of its Guangzhou civic branch took off his armband and burned it in the city's main square. By February of 1967, just over a year after Deng and his associates had overthrown Zhou Enlai's regime, the Red Guard had effectively ceased to exist in most urban sections of China; over the next two months most of the surviving rural Red Guard cells would also fold their tents. The last known arrest of a Red Guard member by Chinese security forces was made on April 23rd, 1967 at a remote village in the Sinkiang region. The last known trial of a Red Guard member ended four months later with a guilty verdict against the defendant and a sentence of twenty-five years' hard labor; he served just over ten years of this sentence before dying of a brain injury sustained in a fight with a fellow prisoner. As 1968 dawned China faced a host of political and social challenges at it strove to regain its footing as a nation in the aftermath of the Red Guard madness. Its future-- if not its very existence --hinged on whether it could meet those challenges successfully....
To Be Continued
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