Kang Sheng - Kang Sheng and The Cultural Revolution

Kang Sheng and The Cultural Revolution

As an important ally of Mao Zedong’s efforts to regain control of the Chinese Communist Party, Kang was an important enabler of and participant in the Cultural Revolution, later described by the Party Central Committee as having “lasted from May 1966 to October 1976” and as “responsible for the most severe setback and heaviest losses suffered by the Party, the state and the people since the founding of the People’s Republic.” The Central Committee resolution concluded that the Cultural Revolution “was initiated and led by Comrade Mao Zedong.” In outlining the “errors” that had been made by Mao and others in the run-up to the Cultural Revolution, the Central Committee noted that “areerists like Lin Biao, Jiang Qing and Kang Sheng, harbouring ulterior motives, made use of these errors and inflated them.”

Well before the start of the Cultural Revolution as such, Kang played his part in attacking rivals of Mao in the Party leadership, many of whom were unhappy with a range of policies including Mao's refusal to rehabilitate Peng Dehuai, the former Defense Minister and outspoken critic of the Great Leap Forward. In 1962, Kang used the publication of a novel about Liu Zhidan, a Party member killed in battle against the Kuomintang in 1936, as the basis for reviving the Gao Gang affair, successfully insinuating that the novels’ publication was an effort by Xi Zhongxun and others to reverse the Party's verdict on Gao. As a result of this, Kang was promoted to the secretariat of the Central Committee at the 10th Plenum in August 1962. As MacFarquar writes,

Two months later, moved to the Diaoyutai guest complex in the capital to mastermind a team of ideologues for the campaign against Soviet revisionism. The most cynical hit-man of Mao’s Cultural Revolution swat team was now an agent in place, helping to initiate the domestic and foreign policies that were the prelude to that cataclysm.

In January 1965, Mao suggested to the Party Politburo that the principal enemies of socialism in China were “those people in authority within the Party who are taking the capitalist road” and urged that the Party undertake a “cultural revolution.” The Politburo established a five-man group, chaired by Peng Zhen, its fifth-ranking member and head of the Beijing Party Organization and mayor of the capital city. Kang Sheng was named a member of the group, which remained dormant for most of the year.

In early 1965, Mao sent his wife Jiang Qing to Shanghai to light the first spark of what would become the Cultural Revolution, the campaign against Wu Han, the Vice Mayor of Beijing and the author of the 1961 play Hai Rui Dismissed from Office. The attack on Wu Han was an indirect attack on Beijing’s mayor, Peng Zhen, a pillar of the establishment that Mao wanted overthrown. Kang’s role in the subsequent purge of Peng was to co-lead with Chen Boda the prosecution of Mao’s charge that “Peng Zhen, the Propaganda Department, and the Beijing Party Committee had shielded bad people while suppressing leftists.” Following the purge of Peng Zhen in May 1966, the Central Committee later concluded, “Lin Biao, Jiang Qing, Kang Sheng, Zhang Chunqiao and others…exploited the situation to incite people to ‘overthrow everything and wage full-scale civil war.’”

In May 1966, Kang Sheng sent his wife, Cao Yi'ou, to Beijing University as part of a team designed to rally leftists against the university president, Lu Ping, and other officials aligned with Peng Zhen. Cao sought out Nie Yuanzi, a Party branch secretary in the Philosophy Department with whom Kang and Cao had become acquainted years earlier in Yan’an. With information from Cao Yi'ou that Lu Ping had lost high-level Party protection, Nie Yuanzi and her leftist allies launched a movement that over the next three months threw Beijing University into chaos. As Yue Daiyun wrote:

With no limits imposed, no guidance offered, no one assuming responsibility for what occurred, and the Red Guards merely following their impulses, the assault upon their elders and the destruction of property grew completely out of control.

During the Cultural Revolution, Kang Sheng was actively involved in controlling the CPC propaganda apparatus, being appointed head of the "Central Organization and Propaganda Leading Group", while Yao Wenyuan as head of another "Propaganda Leading Group". In November 1970, Kang was elevated to head of the Propaganda Department.

In 1968, Mao and other leaders finally began to rein in the Red Guards, with Kang Sheng playing a leading role. In January Kang denounced the Hunan shengwulian coalition of Red Guards as “anarchists” and “Trotskyists,” launching a campaign of brutal suppression over the following months by the army and secret police. By July, when Mao joked that with a group of Red Guard leaders that he himself was the “black hand” suppressing campus revolutionaries, the glory days of the movement were ending.

In the turbulent years of the Cultural Revolution, Kang remained close to the pinnacle of power and, as the “evil genius” within the Central Case Examination Group (the “CCEG”) established by the Politburo on May 24, 1966, was instrumental in Mao’s efforts to purge many senior Party officials, including his most senior rival within the Party, Liu Shaoqi. In the subsequent trial of the so-called “Gang of Four,” one of the accusations leveled against Jiang Qing was that she conspired “with Kang Sheng, Chen Boda, and others to take it upon themselves to convene the big meeting to apply struggle-and-criticism to Liu Shaoqi, and to carry out a search of his house, physically persecuting the Head of State of the People’s Republic of China.” Xiao Meng testified at the trial that “the slander and persecution of Wang Guangmei was plotted by Jiang Qing and Kang Sheng in person.”

Kang’s position on the CCEG gave him enormous, if invisible power. The very existence of the CCEG remained a secret, “et,” as MacFarquar and Schoenhals write,

During its thirteen-year existence, the CCEG had powers far exceeding not only those once exercised by the Party’s Discipline Inspection Commission and Organization Department, but even those of the central public security and procuratorial organs and the courts. The CCEG made the decision to “ferret out,” persecute, arrest, imprison and torture “revisionist” members and many lesser political enemies. Its privileged employees were the Cultural Revolution equivalent of Vladimir Lenin’s Cheka and Adolf Hitler’s Gestapo. Whereas the at least nominally dealt in “culture,” the CCEG dealt exclusively in violence. The CCEG was established as an ad hoc body but soon became a permanent institution with a staff of thousands that, at one point, was investing no fewer than 88 members and alternate members of the Party Central Committee for suspected “treachery,” “spying,” and/or “collusion with the enemy.”

During the Cultural Revolution, Kang abused his position to personal advantage. A gifted painter and calligrapher, he used his power to indulge his penchant for collecting antiques and works of art, notably inkstones. According to Byron & Pack, many of the Cultural Revolution leaders also used the lawlessness of the period to acquire for themselves objects seized from the homes of persons attacked by Red Guards. But Kang, in a series of visits to the Cultural Relics Bureau, “helped himself to 12,080 volumes of rare books – more than were taken by any other radical leader, and 34 percent of all the rare books removed – and 1,102 antiques, 20 percent of the total. Only Lin Biao, who, as Mao’s designated heir, ranked second in the land, appropriated more antiques than Kang.”

Kang Sheng was instrumental in supervising the drafting of the new Party Constitution, adopted at the Ninth Congress in April 1969, which reinstated “Mao Zedong Thought” alongside Marxism-Leninism as the theoretical basis for the Party. The Congress elected Kang as one of the five members of the Politburo Standing Committee, along with Mao, Lin Biao, Zhou Enlai and Chen Boda. At the Ninth Congress, Kang Sheng’s wife, Cao Yi'ou, was herself elected to the Central Committee.

The Constitution drafted under Kang’s supervision and adopted at the Nnth Congress stipulated that “Comrade Lin Biao is Comrade Mao Zedong’s close comrade-in-arms and successor.” Kang Sheng and Lin Biao were not close allies, although Kang had earlier assisted Lin in his successful efforts to remove Marshal He Long, a formidable rival to Lin’s wish to control the People’s Liberation Army. In the wake of Lin Biao’s aborted coup attempt and death in September 1971, Kang was careful to distance himself from Mao’s disgraced former heir and from Chen Boda, who had been closely aligned with Lin at the Central Committee meeting in Lushan in August 1970 and who was denounced after Lin’s fall at “China’s Trotsky.” Efforts to link Kang to Lin Biao’s plotting were unsuccessful and unsubstantiated.

Ill with the cancer that would eventually kill him, Kang last appeared in public at the Tenth Party Congress, in August 1973. The Tenth Congress adopted a new Constitution that removed the embarrassing reference to Lin Biao as Mao Zedong’s successor, but as a sign that his position had not been adversely affected, Kang Sheng was named one of five vice chairmen of the Party. In his final years, Kang became involved in the Criticize Lin, Criticize Confucius campaign that was created by the beneficiaries of the Cultural Revolution to oppose Zhou Enlai and other veteran officials in the struggle over who would succeed Mao Zedong. Kang was initially active in supporting Jiang Qing, perhaps seeing her as a successor through whom he would exercise power. Kang subsequently shifted tack when it became apparent that Jiang was out of favor with Mao, even going so far as to denounce her as having betrayed the Party to the Kuomintang during the mid-1930s, notwithstanding his support for her when the same charge had been leveled 30 years earlier in Yan’an. Kang’s final political act came only two months before his death, when he warned Mao Zedong that Deng Xiaoping opposed the Cultural Revolution and should be purged again, advice that Mao ignored.