The MacNeil/Lehrer Report; 2034; Madame Mao

ROBERT MACNEIL: Good evening. An incredible thing has happened in China. Only seven seeks after the death of Chairman Mao Tse-tung, the leader revered to the point of deification, his widow,

Chiang Ching, has been arrested. It`s almost as though Eleanor Roosevelt had been arrested by the FBI shortly after the death of FDR and charged with treason. Chiang Ching and three other members of the top Chinese leadership are reported under arrest, stripped of their high offices and party positions. Madame Mao is charged with everything from plotting a coup to nagging her husband to death. Why is this woman so important? What is her fate likely to be? That what we consider tonight. Jim?

JIM IEHRER: Madame Mao is not that well-known, except within China itself, of course, and outside only among China experts. The person in this country who probably knows more about her than anyone is Roxane Witke, Professor of Modern Chinese History at the State University of New York at Binghamton. Four years ago she spent the summer in China conducting over 60 hours of interviews with Madame Mao. She returned with an exhaustive knowledge of this powerful, mysterious woman as well as a lot of photographs and both have been combined into a book, entitled Comrade Chian Ching, to be published by Little, Brown this spring. She has also brought her knowledge and a few of those photographs with her tonight, and she`s now with Robin in New York. Robin?

McNEIL: Professor Witke, simply, why is she under arrest -what`s the simple explanation?

ROXANE WITKE: Well, the overt explanation is that. she plotted to seize power and caused the Chairman to die more quickly than he might have -- "nagged him to death." Of course, that`s not the only explanation. I think part of the explanation is that she possessed a great deal of power and the other people who were arrested with her did as well, particularly over the media -- over the press, over public opinion -- and that, through control of the performing arts, a very strong hand over literary policy, education policy: the realm of ideas, or what the Marxians call the "superstructure."

MacNEIL: Could you give us a kind of shorthand description which will help us through the rest of this conversation -- she represents a faction, sometimes called the radicals in China, and obviously the new Chairman, Hua, represents another faction, often called the moderates; what does this mean in terms we can understand?

WITKE: I think we have to start by saying that all of these leaders are committed to China`s material progress and modernization along certain lines; and I think that they`re all committed, basically, to Mao Tse-tung`s thinking, and to continuing the revolution -- no one wants to go back and restore the dynasty or restore the Republic or bring Chiang K`ai shek`s errors into the country or bring capitalism into the country, despite the language of the press. The differences lie, I think, in priorities. People like Hua Kuo-feng apparently are more interested in state management, in bureaucratic control, in normal pragmatic progress, in industrialization, in agriculture. I think that the so called ``ideologs," or radicals, are also interested in that; but they are to a degree that we cannot, in this country, comprehend, concerned with ideological purity, with good thinking and good imagery on the part of the proletarians.

MacNEIL: They`re worried about the souls of the people, are they?

WITKE: Oh, they don`t use that language -- not yet. No, they are concerned that people who were formerly poor, and still are basically poor, feel good; and that elitism on the part of any persons, whether they are more educated or more skilled in certain ways, does not make poor people, who are the 800,000,000 or so of the country, feel crummy -- feel inferior.

MacNEIL: I see. Is Chiang Ching, now arrested, the sort of woman or person capable of having done the things she`s charged with doing -- plotting a coup, hastening her aged husband`s death, and so on?

WITKE: Yes, well, it`s hard for me to know who would have leaked the story of her hastening her aged husband`s death; there`s something apocryphal about that. As for plotting a coup, many coups have been plotted in Chinese history, from imperial times on down -or on up -- to revolutionary history. She was the near-victim of a coup launched by Lin Piao in 1971 and managed to escape that, and was still suffering from that when .I met her in 1972 - - the physical and psychological effects. So I suppose that she might have plotted a coup, but none of us know precisely; but that is a way of Chinese politics.

MacNEIL: Jim?

LEHRER:. Yes, Professor Witke, let`s talk for a few minutes about Madame Mao, the person; first, some basic biography, beginning with her early life -- what was that like, as best as you could find out from her?

WITKE: The way she reconstructed it, she was born to a poor family; she was the daughter of a cartwright. She was the youngest of many children -- she didn`t care to talk about her family very much. She deplored her father; he was a wife-beater and a child-beater. She escaped home when she was 14 or 15, studied drama and acquired a profession of her own at a very early age, and managed herself from that time onward.

LEHRER: She worked in a library for a while, did she not?

WITKE: Yes, I don`t think that was terribly important -- she punched cards, or something like that. At the time, she was an auditor at a university and she was listening to lectures by significant intellectuals who turned her on to ideas and foreign literature, encouraged her to try her hand at writing short stories and plays.

LEHRER: When did she become a communist, while she was in college ?

WITKE: No, I don`t think we can say she was exactly in college. She was an auditor; she was too poor to go to college, and she takes pride in that, as Mao has, too, in having had very little formal education to have instead come up through the school of brigands that is, making your own way the hard way. She became & communist through the underground in Tsingtao, in Shantung province in 1933.

LEHRER: So how old would she have been then?

WITKE: She was about 19.

LEHRER: All right, then she went on to become an actress -she was already interested in drama -- of sorts.

WITKE: Yes.

LEHRER: What kind of career did she have, was she a big-name actress, small-name actress -- you tell me.

WITKE: She began doing acting of foreign-type dramas when she was very young, and also opera; then she went to Shanghai, which is like coming to New York and trying to make it on Broadway, and gradually she had some success in what were called "the great foreign bourgeois dramas," like dramas of Strindberg and Ibsen, and so forth. And that`s the kind of success she enjoyed; it was very good for her ego and for her career. But at the same time she was working in the underground as an actress in proletarian theater, people`s theater, a sort of street theater, experimental theater -- which was built around political messages. And she had other work at the same time, too, in the Party underground; she was working for the YWCA and the Communist Party at the same time one wonders whether each knew of her other employment.

LEHRER: I see. Well, that kind of speaks a little bit to what a lot of people have said, that she was a very devious, tough woman. Is that the impression that you got when you talked to her? Anybody who could be a member of the-Communist Party and the YWCA at the same time....

WITKE: (Laughing.) Yes, that was quite clever. Yes, I was impressed with her power, not in the abstract but the way in which she managed people around her; and I could see the evidence of her power in the country over the performing arts and fine arts, and the imagery of the people. There`s no advertising in China, but there`s political advertising, or propaganda; and the style and presence of people in posters and postcards -- practically anything -- is very much affected by her. It`s what I would call a Sino-Western style. The people are Chinese, their build has become Western; it`s a little more grandiose and substantial than an ordinary Chinese person -- or a Chinese person of the past -- and to that is added a certain glamour, and I think that this comes from her Hollywood experience; that is, experience of a great many Hollywood films and her own experience in film.

LEHRER: In, talking to her, did you get the impression that her marriage to Mao -- I think that was in 1939 -- was a most significant event in her life, or -- she`d been married twice before -- how did she talk about the marriage itself, or did she at all?

WITKE: She was not very interested in marriage; and of course, before one meets the wife of Mao Tse-tung you think about her marriage, or you think, perhaps, about previous marriages that she had. I used to think about that, and after being in her company for some time I forgot about the question. I asked one of her aides indirectly if she would care to talk about it, knowing that it might infuriate her, and I didn`t care to witness that, and she responded negatively to the question.

LEHRER: What did you ask her?

WITKE: I asked her if she would care to have the opportunity to speak about previous marriages.

LEHRER: Oh, I see.

WITKE: She didn`t care to have it.

LEHRER: Right. What about her marriage with Mao?

WITKE: Well, that happened; it certainly wasn`t the most significant event in her life -- on her bio, so to speak -- but without that link, she would have had a fairly ordinary career, I suppose. It`s hard to say.

LEHRER: Did she speak in personal terms, the way wives are supposed to speak of their husbands, about Mao?

WITKE: Well, occasionally she remarked on certain of his habits, or the way he joshed her-about certain things -.- her having had so much bourgeois experience. She is much more knowledgeable in the arts, and she`s read many more novels and modern literature, and Russian literature and American literature and so forth -- French literature -- than Mao ever had; and I think that she lorded it over him a bit on that point. But she knew far less about ancient history, and they used to joke about that -- she remarked about that, or other habits that he had. But he was not her major subject of interest was any impression.

LEHRER: All right. Robin?

MacNEIL: So you wouldn`t classify her, then, as the traditional consort of a great main, the kind of intellectual concubine, perhaps, who drew her power only from him and her association with him?

WITKE: No.

MaCNEIL: What gave you the feeling that she was her own person? That`s what I really want to know.

WITKE: She was quite imperious. When she spoke -- and she was unique in this respect among persons I spoke to in China -- I had the feeling that she had not asked anyone first whether it was all right to say that. She decided what was-correct, and she was not seeking permission from anywhere; of course, she was taking great risks in doing what she did.

MacNEIL: In giving you these interviews,. you mean.

WITKE: Yes; and saying so much about the past, but this was her only chance of getting this information out -- it had to go out of the country in order to get published. But her real interests, I think, were in controlling large numbers of people in power and in changing their lives -- not in Mao and his habits; certainly she respected his intellect very highly, and his method of revolution. She quoted no other revolutionary. leader so prolifically as she did Mao. But her real interest lies in using the arts to change people`s consciousness.

MacNEIL: Why was it so important to her to get certain information out of the country?

WITKE: It`s not possible, in China, to publish a biography. You cannot write an autobiography in China and you cannot commission one to be published. When Mao was in Yenan in the late 1930`8, Yen an was open to some foreign journalists -- a variety of foreign journalists -- and Mao did give his story to Edgar Snow. Chiang Ching was not on the scene for a couple of years, until a couple of years after that had happened; so she had missed her opportunity, it was very clear, and this was her last chance.

MacNEIL: And that would be discouraged so as not to encourage a cult of personality, or the egotistical satisfaction of having your own life story read by...

WITKE: Yes; the masses make history.

MacNEIL: I see. And what is significant in what she has told you, and you are going to publish, is just the details of her life story as she recounted them -- that`s the important thing, is it?

WITKE: Yes, I would say so; and struggles within the party, and how she`s had to fight for power, and how she won over cultural groups and how she taught herself music, for example, in order to write a symphony. She didn`t know how to play a clarinet or an oboe -- she learned. She taught herself, and people laughed at her. This was in the early 1960`x; she went to the Central Philharmonic Orchestra and told the conductor that she wanted to learn-the instrument so she could revolutionize his music. Of course, he was shocked:

MacNEIL: What was your relationship with her?

WITKE: I was her guest -- how also should I describe it? My relationship with her evolved...or I should say that my perception of it coalesced in the course of being with her two or three days before the interviews were over. I noticed, as she pointed out, she said that Mao used to criticize her for trying to do everything by herself. She should be more of a bureaucrat, he said, obviously joking, and she should learn how to delegate power. And so she pointed around the room to her various aides and doctors and so forth and said, "You see, I`ve surrounded myself with young people to whom I`ve delegated authority." And it was clear to me then that I was one of the people whom she had commissioned with a certain task.

MacNEIL: What do you suppose was her own personal motive in wanting to have this story told outside? How do you explain that to yourself?

WITKE: She has a strong sense of history. I think she was aware of the great risks she had taken in seeking such power as she possessed at that point and continued to possess, and there would be no other chance of her having her record set straight. And many of the people she had silenced or destroyed had published unfavorable stories about her past, and in the course of the cultural revolution a dossier was built up about her which was incriminating of her in many respects. And perhaps she thought that by having something published in a foreign country it would not be tampered with; it would be solid, in a sense. Of course, she didn`t make the task easy for me. She had to give me hints. She couldn`t say many things directly: If you read such an essay and see the point analogously, you`ll understand.

MacNEIL: I see. She`s often described, I`ve read, as "resolute," as a person capable of taking her own fate in her hands; how does she show that, or how did she show that, in person?

WITKE: I`ve called her willful -- resolute, yes; extremely autonomous in her ways. She didn`t converse, really, with anyone; she made statements and conducted a monologue for hours on end, until three, four in the morning, starting a six or seven at night, breaking for a meal or perhaps a promenade or a game of pool, or something like that. But she was the sole mistress of the timing she would ask me how we should proceed, and so forth. I don`t think she really expected me to make the decision -- I always threw back the initiative to her. She was used to that.

MacNEIL: Thank you. Jim?

LEHRER: You say that she wielded great power. What influence did she actually have, say, on society in China? Can you point to any particular things in the society there that changed as a result of her, specifically?

WITKE: Yes; well, let`s imagine that you were just an ordinary man on the street in Peking and you were in Peking in the early 1960`s. If that were the case, you could see a variety of movies on ancient and modern topics; you could see movies from foreign countries, you could see ancient and modern drama, you could see opera, you could listen to Chinese music. You might. even listen to some Western symphonies at the same time. If you were a ,woman you might curl your hair and wear a dress, or if you were a man you might wear your hair rather long -- maybe the early `60`s is too early for that. There was a considerable freedom and cultural liberalism. And you might write a story of a type that you thought was fairly useful for the Revolution. Since the cultural revolution, all that ended. There are no foreign films in China. All the filmmakers who built up careers in the `30`s and the `40`s were silenced -- what "silenced" means I`m not sure -- and the only films and dramas to appear were those that were constructed by Chiang Chin...and symphonies. The so-called "model operas" and "model ballets -- there are about three model ballets and five or six model operas -- and these were designed really to establish classics for a new era. The Chinese are very historically minded, as you know, and I think that they have conceived of this particular regime or dynasty, whatever you`d like to call it -- a founders` regime -- as starting afresh, with ideas, views of the past and views of the future in conception of human nature; and to do that a new literature and a new drama and a new language has been conceived.

LEHRER: And she, literally, was the judge of all this, right, as to what was acceptable?

WITKE: She was the major animist behind this.

LEHRER: Did she have any special problems rising to power, or getting all of this done that you just went through, because she was a woman?

WITKE: Yes, I would say of course she had. For one thing, never in Chinese history has a woman been an authority on culture; men have always been authorities on culture. She was formally an actress -- actresses were despised. Not until very recent years were actresses accepted, but it`s because they`ve been under very tight political control.

LEHRER: Are the women of China liberated, in whatever comparative way you can give us -- compared, say, with society here, women in American society or Western society?

WITKE: It`s so hard to compare -- the same with men, it`s hard to compare men`s lib in China and America.. I think that women benefit from the expectation that they are to work, and that their marriages shouldn`t be a burden on them and that their children shouldn`t be a burden. And in that respect, they are liberated from many of the drags and extra responsibilities that women have in other countries.

LEHRER: So you don`t believe -- not in a big way, at least -- that the fact that Madame Mao is a woman kept her from accomplishing what she wanted to accomplish. Obviously, it didn`t, be cause look at all she did accomplish.

WITKE: Yes. You see, that was a revolutionary act in itself. No one in China, however, has ever commended her for doing all of that and being a woman, too; but there is no other woman among the Chinese leaders with an equal, or even nearly-equal power, that she has held. And so she has been unique in that respect. I don`t think that we can call her a straw in the wind of women`s liberation in China, necessarily.

LEHRER: She was just one of a kind, and there aren`t any others there...

WITKE: She`s one of a kind. She was married to the right man at the right time, with the right particular temper that she`s had, and training in the arts and extreme great skills in managing and manipulating people.

LEHRER: All right. Robin?

MacNEIL: In her account of modern Chinese history, did she say anything that startled you, or gave you a very fresh view, a reinterpretation that gave you a different view of the developments since the success of the Communist Party and the rise of Mao -- the victory over the Kuomintang, and so on?

WITKE: I wish I had an easy answer to that. My answers, or my reactions, were gradual in formulating. I think that one impression is that of the extraordinary power that the individual leaders have held, and what a personal government it has always been. Until recent years -- the last few years -- the same people have been more or less in control of the country, and they`ve known each other very well and they`ve managed very informally at the top; their particular titles have not been terribly important. And the correct line -- or the truth -- has always laid with Mao. What the difference now, of course, is that Mao is not there to re-establish what is the correct line and who are the deviationists from that line, with the result now that we find, only a few months ago T`ung Hsiao-ping, for example, as was Liu Shao-ch`i before him, maligned as a capitalist roture. Now, Chiang Ching, who was thought to be so ultra-left and radical and so forth, and pure proletarian has been called a capitalist roture. Well, what does capitalist roture" mean? It`s like calling a cat a cur -- it`s just names now. So I suppose what I`m so impressed by is how the leaders who have wanted to sustain power have used language in kind of directional signals about political terminology to support some and suppress others, and this goes on and on.

MacNeil: There are those in this country who appear to applaud her downfall in the sense that the victory of the other faction -the moderates, if you like, under Chairman Hua -- would be good for China`s relations with the United States. Do you have a view on that, yourself?

WITKE:I think that`s rather hard to say. As I perceive the rivalry now, it`s mainly over men and women, it`s over power positions and it`s over priorities and ideas in domestic development. The foreign consequences, I think, are rather hard to read.

MacNEIL: You don`t think that the period since the cultural revolution -- the various phases of that, of keeping China`s feet to the fire, ideologically -- introduced an element of irrationalism in the country, which made it less a part of the world community, if you like?

WITKE: Yes, but of course it`s only since the cultural revolution that Americans were welcomed in such droves to observe the wonders of the cultural revolution -- the barefoot doctors, the egalitarian schools, the happy children, and so forth. And the cultural revolution made China extremely attractive, too. One of the things I think we should watch for in China -- and this is an area which I find extremely interesting -- is what happens in the arts and in intellectual dissent; will there be intellectual dissent, or will there be a thaw in China, as there was after Stalin`s death, some years afterwards?

MacNEIL: And will there be a thaw towards the Soviet Union? WITKE: Possibly, or just in terms of personal expression. The cultural revolution put wraps on that -- constrained people -- and Chiang Ching was as responsible as anyone for that. If she is overthrown, indeed overthrown, will her works and her policies be overthrown, and will there be more democratic expression in the country? It will be slight, whatever it is, but more.

MacNEIL: Do you have a view on that, or are you just in a position to ask the questions?

WITKE: I`m in a position to ask the questions.

MacNEIL: Jim?

LEHRER: Speaking of questions, I have one, too, about Madame Mao. What happens to her now? Assume that she`s overthrown, that she`s out of power - - what do the new Chinese leaders do with her?

Do they execute her? Do they send her to the United States A la Solzhenitsyn, or does she disappear and we never hear from her again?

WITKE: (Laughing.) San Clemente.

LEHRER: What do you think?

WITKE: I think if she were executed she might become a martyr; she has had a considerable following, though the following doesn`t control public opinion right now. She might be kept comfortably; I can`t her imagine her enjoying comforts, though. She might be poisoned, and her death might be attributed to natural causes; I doubt that she would be exiled.

LEHRER: Well, do you think it`s possible for her to ever -assuming they don`t execute her and they don`t give her poison -- do you think it`s ever possible for her to ever regain the power and influence that she once had, or has she had it?

WITKE: It wouldn`t be the same sort of thing. Of course, T`ung Hsiao-ping was criticized during the cultural revolution; he was banned from the environment -- abused -- and then he was submitted to some sort of thought reform and corrected, and brought out in Chou En-tai`s during the time he was ill. Chiang Ching told me that he was one of those who had received a pounding during the cultural revolution and that scar tissue was tougher than natural tissue, and persons like him were treasures to the people. Of course, his thought reform didn`t stick.

MacNEIL: And now he`s gone again.

WITKE: Yes, but one hears rumors of his being back in the capital, perhaps waiting for another appointment.

MacNEIL: Very quickly -- is the fact that they`re having to mount such a huge propaganda campaign against her and her colleagues` evidence that there are millions of Chinese who need persuading and re-education...

WITKE: Of course.

MacNEIL: ...and that she has considerable support still?

WITKE: If there is a movement, it`s in order to change mass opinion, and without the change of mass opinion, there`s no change of leadership.

MacNEIL: We have to leave it there. Thank you very much. Thank you, Jim. Jim Lehrer and I will be back tomorrow evening. I`m Robert MacNeil. Good night.