Kang Sheng - From Yan'an To The Cultural Revolution

From Yan'an To The Cultural Revolution

After his fall from the security posts, in December 1946 Kang was assigned by Mao, Zhu De and Liu Shaoqi to review the Party’s land reform project in Longdong, Gansu Province. He returned after five weeks with the view that land reform needed to be more severe and that there could be no compromise with landlords. “Kang whipped up hatred for the landlords and their retainers. In the name of social justice, he encouraged the peasants to settle scores by killing landlords and rich peasants.”

In March 1947, Kang put his methods into practice in Lin County, Shanxi Province. These methods included special scrutiny and persecution of landlords known to have Communist sympathies and investigation of the backgrounds of the Party’s land reform teams themselves. In April 1948, Mao singled out Kang for praise in his handling of land reform, with the result that

grarian reform cut a bloody swath through much of rural China. Squads of Communist enforcers were sent to the most remote villages to organize the local petty thieves and bandits into so-called land reform teams, which inflamed the poor peasants and hired laborers against the rich. When resentment reached fever pitch, peasants at staged “grievance meetings” were encouraged to relate the injustices and insults they had suffered, both real and imagined, at the hands of “the landlord bullies.” Often these meetings would end with the masses, led by the land reform teams, shouting “Shoot him! Shoot him!” or “Kill! Kill! Kill!” The cadre in charge of proceedings would rule that the landlords had committed serious crimes, sentence them to death, and order that they be taken away and eliminated immediately.

In November 1947, the Politburo assigned Kang to inspect land reform in his home province of Shandong. Early in 1948, he was appointed deputy chief of the Party’s East China Bureau, under Rao Shushi. Some commentators speculate that the private humiliation of being placed under a former subordinate may be one reason why Kang "fell ill" and largely disappeared from view until after Rao's fall in 1954. Of course, Kang may really have been ill. Mao’s personal physician, Li Zhisui, later recorded that doctors responsible for Kang’s treatment at Beijing Hospital told him that Kang was suffering from schizophrenia. Writing before Li's book was published, Byron and Pack offered other possible diagnoses based on symptoms Kang seems to have displayed, including manic-depressive psychosis and temporal lobe epilepsy.

Kang’s re-emergence on the political stage in the mid-1950s occurred at roughly at the same time as the Gao Gang-Rao Shushi Affair and the affair of Yu Bingbo. Faligot and Kauffer see these affairs as each showing signs of involvement by Kang Sheng, who they believe used them as means to return to power.

In January 1956, Kang made his first public appearance in years at a meeting of the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference in Beijing. As Byron and Pack write

The challenges that Kang faced during the early months of 1956 underscored the dangers he would have risked by continuing his retreat. As soon as he reappeared, Kang encountered serious problems that caused his position in the hierarchy to fluctuate dramatically. After the purge of Gao Gang and Rao Shushi in 1954, he had ranked sixth, below Chairman Mao, Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De and Chen Yun. But in February 1956, just weeks after his return to public life, he was listed below Peng Zhen. By the end of April he was reported in tenth place, even below Luo Fu, the only member of the 28 Bolsheviks who still held a Politburo seat. Yet on May Day of 1956 – the international socialist celebration – Kang was suddenly back in sixth place. His position, at least going by public reports and official bulletins, remained unchanged from then until the Eighth Congress four months later.

Kang suffered a severe reversal of fortune at the Central Committee plenum that followed the first session of the Eighth Congress, when he was demoted to alternate, nonvoting membership of the Politburo. Roderick MacFarquar writes

The reasons for Kang Sheng’s reduction to alternate membership of the Politburo are not clear. …he immediate reason for his demotion may have been the general revulsion against secret police within the communist bloc after Khrushchev’s Secret Speech. Kang Sheng’s emergence during the cultural revolution as one of the most important Maoist stalwarts suggests that…it is not unlikely that at the 8th Congress Mao save Kang from even greater humiliation.

Mao own position was weakening, as evidenced by the decision of the Eighth Congress to delete the phrase “guided by the thought of Mao Zedong” from the new Party constitution and by re-establishing the role of General Secretary, abolished in 1937. The dangers of a exalting a single leader and the desirability of collective leadership had been perhaps the most direct point of Nikita Khrushchev’s Secret Speech to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in February 1956, in which he condemned Stalin, Stalin’s methods and his cult of personality and which, according to Archie Brown, “was the beginning of the end of international Communism.”

While Kang remained a member of the Politburo, he had no concrete role and no power base, which led him to take on a series of diverse assignments and to align himself as closely as possible with Mao, who was devising his response to de-Stalinization and its effects within the leadership of the Chinese Communist Party. His responses, in the Hundred Flowers and the Anti-Rightist Campaign that followed, marked a profound turning point in the history of the People’s Republic. As Maurice Meisner wrote

The period of the Hundred Flowers was the time when the Chinese abandoned the Soviet model of development and embarked on a distinctively Chinese road to socialism. It was the time that China announced its ideological and social autonomy from the Soviet Union and its Stalinist heritage. It is a cruel and tragic irony that the break with the Stalinist pattern of socioeconomic development was not accompanied by a break with Stalinist methods in political and intellectual life. The latter was precluded by the suppression of the critics who had briefly “bloomed and contended” in May and June 1957.

As noted in connection with the Yan'an Rectification Movement launched 15 years earlier, Kang Sheng played an important role in bringing Stalinist methods of repression to China.

Kang was clearly a supporter of Mao during the period of the Great Leap Forward and its aftermath and, as MacFarquar writes, “e was the beneficiary of Mao’s practice of preserving and protecting those whom he trusted and relied upon, and for whom he saw a future use.” As a result, Kang received a number of important positions during the late 1950s, including in 1959 responsibility for the Central Party School.

Among Kang’s most important activities in this period were those related to the deepening split with the Soviet Union, about which Mao and others regarded him as something of an expert. Among his assignments from the Politburo was to draft a long article that appeared in The People’s Daily on December 29, 1956 under the title “More on the Historical Experience of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat” and which expressed the Party’s position that Stalin’s achievements overshadowed his mistakes.

Kang visited the Soviet Union and various socialist countries in Eastern Europe on several occasions between 1956 and 1964, expressing increasing disdain for the “revisionist” policies of Nikita Khrushchev and Josip Broz Tito. In February 1960, as the Chinese observer at the conference of the Political Consultative Conference of the Warsaw Pact, Kang made what Jacques Guillermaz described as “a violent attack on the leaders of the United States, their feigned pacifism, their dream of ‘peaceful evolution’ of the socialist countries, and their repeated sabotage of disarmament.” Byron and Pack describe the speech as “a subtle, almost sarcastic critique of Russian foreign policy that became a milestone in deteriorating Sino-Soviet relations.”

The following year, Kang was one of the Chinese delegates to the Twenty-Second Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union to leave their seats to avoid shaking hands with Khrushchev. Kang was also a member of the delegation that attended a meeting in Moscow in July 1963, which failed to bridge the growing gap between the Chinese and Soviet parties. Among the points of contention, raised in a letter issued by the Chinese Communist Party on June 14, 1963, had to do with de-Stalinization and the allegation that

nder the pretext of “combating the cult of the individual,” certain persons are crudely interfering in the internal affairs of other fraternal parties and fraternal countries and forcing other fraternal parties to change their leadership in order to impose their own wrong line on those parties.

As Jacques Guillermaz writes about this criticism, “ould the Chinese really have been thinking of Enver Hoxha?”

The Sino-Soviet rift and the obsession with Khruschev’s revisionism looms large in the coming of the Cultural Revolution, as Mao saw revisionism and de-Stalinization as a threat not only to his own position but also to the very survival of the Chinese Communist Party as a revolutionary force. Accordingly, an appreciation Kang’s role as a supporter of Mao’s line in this period helps explain his return to very near the pinnacle of power a few years later.