Кіріспе
Канг Шэнь (; 4 қараша 1898 - 16 желтоқсан 1975) – Қытай Коммунистік партиясының (ҚКП) шенеунігі, 1940 жылдардың басында және 1960 жылдардың соңы мен 1970 жылдардың басындағы Мәдени революцияның қақ жарық шағында ҚКП-ның ішкі қауіпсіздік және барлау жүйесінің жұмысын бақылауымен танымал. 1920 жылдардың басында ҚКП-ға мүше болған ол 1930 жылдардың басында Мәскеуде біраз уақыт өткізіп, Кеңес NKVD-сының әдістерін үйренді және ҚКП басшылығы үшін Ван Минді қолдады. 1930 жылдардың соңында Қытайға оралғаннан кейін Канг Шэнь Мао Цзэдунға адалдығын байлады және Екінші Қытай-жапон соғысы, Қытай Азамат соғысы және одан кейін Маоның жақын серігі болды. Ол Қытай Халық Республикасы құрылған 1949 жылдан бастап 1975 жылы қайтыс болғанға дейін биліктің төбесінде немесе оған жақын болды. Маоның қайтысынан және «Төрттік топтың» тұтқындалуынан кейін Канг Шэнь Мәдени революцияның артық әрекеттеріне жауапкершілікті бөліскен деп айыпталды және 1980 жылы ол қайтыс болғаннан кейін ҚКП-дан шығарылды.
Chinese politician (1898–1975)
Kang Sheng (; 4 November 1898 – 16 December 1975) was a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) official, best known for having overseen the work of the CCP's internal security and intelligence apparatus during the early 1940s and again at the height of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s and early 1970s. A member of the CCP from the early 1920s, he spent time in Moscow during the early 1930s, where he learned the methods of the Soviet NKVD and became a supporter of Wang Ming for leadership of the CCP. After returning to China in the late 1930s, Kang Sheng switched his allegiance to Mao Zedong and became a close associate of Mao during the Second Sino Japanese War, the Chinese Civil War, and after. He remained at or near the pinnacle of power in the People's Republic of China from its establishment in 1949 until his death in 1975. After the death of Mao and the subsequent arrest of the Gang of Four, Kang Sheng was accused of sharing responsibility with the Gang for the excesses of the Cultural Revolution and in 1980 he was expelled posthumously from the CCP.
Kang Sheng (; 4 November 1898 – 16 December 1975) was a Chinese Communist Party (CCP) official, best known for having overseen the work of the CCP's internal security and intelligence apparatus during the early 1940s and again at the height of the Cultural Revolution in the late 1960s and early 1970s. A member of the CCP from the early 1920s, he spent time in Moscow during the early 1930s, where he learned the methods of the Soviet NKVD and became a supporter of Wang Ming for leadership of the CCP. After returning to China in the late 1930s, Kang Sheng switched his allegiance to Mao Zedong and became a close associate of Mao during the Second Sino Japanese War, the Chinese Civil War, and after. He remained at or near the pinnacle of power in the People's Republic of China from its establishment in 1949 until his death in 1975. After the death of Mao and the subsequent arrest of the Gang of Four, Kang Sheng was accused of sharing responsibility with the Gang for the excesses of the Cultural Revolution and in 1980 he was expelled posthumously from the CCP.
Ерте өмір
Канг Шенг 1893 жылдан бастап 1903 жылға дейін әртүрлі жылдарда туған деп көрсетілген, Шандун провинциясының Чжученг округінде, Шыңдаудың солтүстік-батысындағы Датайчжуанда (大臺莊, 1946 жылдан бері Цзяонань округіне қарасты) жер иелері отбасында дүниеге келген. Оның әулеті Конфуцийдің ізбасарлары болған. Кангтың шын аты Чжан Цонкэ, бірақ ол 1930 жылдары Канг Шенг есімін қабылдағанға дейін бірнеше псевдонимдерді – ең белгілісі Чжао Жун, сондай-ақ (сурет салу үшін) Ли Цзюши – қолданған. Канг Гуанхай ұлдар мектебінде және кейін Циндаодағы неміс мектебінде оқыған. 1915 жылы ол Чэн Имен отбасылық келісім бойынша үйленді, олардан екі бала – қызы Чжан Юйин және ұлы Чжан Чжиши дүниеге келді. Неміс мектебін бітіргеннен кейін Канг 1920 жылдардың басында Шандоңның Жученг қаласындағы ауылдық мектепте сабақ берді, содан кейін Германия мен Францияға сапар шеккен болуы мүмкін, ал ақырында 1924 жылы Шанхайға келді.
Kang Sheng was born in Dataizhuang (大臺莊, administered under Jiaonan County since 1946), Zhucheng County to the northwest of Qingdao in Shandong Province to a landowning family, some of whom had been Confucian scholars. Kang was born Zhang Zongke but he adopted a number of pseudonyms—most notably Zhao Rong, but also (for his painting) Li Jushi—before settling on Kang Sheng in the 1930s. Some sources give his year of birth as being as early as 1893, but it has also been variously given as 1898, 1899 and 1903. Kang received his elementary education at the Guanhai school for boys and later at the German School in Qingdao. As a teenager, he entered into an arranged marriage with Chen Yi, in 1915, with whom he had two children, a daughter, Zhang Yuying, and a son, Zhang Zishi. After graduating from the German School, Kang taught in a rural school in Zhucheng, Shandong in the early 1920s before leaving, possibly for a sojourn in Germany and France, and ultimately for Shanghai, where he arrived in 1924.
Шанхай
Шанхайға келгеннен кейін Канг ҚКП-нің және Ку Цюбайдың зияткерлік басшылығының бақылауындағы Шанхай университетінде оқуға түсті. Университетте шамамен алты ай оқығаннан соң, ол Коммунистік партияның Жастар лигасына қосылды. Содан кейін Канг партияға мүше болды. Партияның тапсырмасымен Канг жер астында еңбек ұйымдастырушысы ретінде жұмыс істеді. Ол 1925 жылғы ақпанда жапон компанияларына қарсы ереуіл ұйымдастырып, 30 мамыр қозғалысына, коммунистер ұйымдастырған ірі демонстрацияға әкелді. Бұл Кангтің партия жетекшілері Лю Шаоци, Ли Лисан және Чжан Готаомен жақын байланысқа түсуіне себеп болды. Канг 1927 жылғы наурызда Гу Шуньчжанмен бірге Жао Шиян, Лоу Иньонг, Ван Шоухуа және Чжоу Энлайдың басшылығымен жұмысшылардың көтерілісіне қатысты. Көтеріліс 1927 жылғы 12 сәуірде Шанхай қырғынында Ду Юешенгтің «Жасыл бандасының» көмегімен Гоминьдан тарапынан басып тасталғаннан кейін Канг жасырынып қашуға үлкерді. Сондай-ақ 1927 жылы Канг Шанхай университетінің студенті және сонымен қатар Шаньдуннан шыққан Цао И'оу (шынайы аты Цао Шуцин) атты қызға үйленді, ол өмір бойы саяси одақтасы болды. Ол Куоминьданға жақын тұратын бай бизнесмен Ю Цяциннің жеке хатшысы болып жұмысқа орналасты. Сонымен қатар Канг партиялық ұйымдастырушы ретінде белсенді, бірақ құпия жұмысын жалғастырды және 1927 жылғы маусымда партияның жаңа Цзянсу провинциялық комитетіне тағайындалды. 1920 жылдардың соңында Канг 1928 жылдың ортасында қауіпсіздік мақсатында және Коминтерн конгресіне жақын болу үшін Мәскеуден тыс өткен ҚКП-нің алтыншы съезінде басшылық еткен Ли Лисанмен тығыз жұмыс істеді. Алтыншы съезден кейін бірнеше ай өткен соң Канг Цзянсу провинциялық комитетінің Ұйымдастыру бөлімінің директоры болып тағайындалды, ол кадрлық мәселелерді басқарды. 1930 жылы Шанхайда Канг бірнеше коммунистермен бірге, соның ішінде Дин Цзишимен тұтқындалды, бірақ кейін босатылды. Дингтің інісі Динг Вейфен Нанкиндегі Гоминьданның Орталық партия мектебінің басшысы болды, онда ол Гоминьданның құпия қызметінің басшысы Чэнь Лифумен бірге жұмыс істеді. Кейін Канг өзін тұтқындамағанын жоққа шығарды, өйткені оның босатылуының жағдайы Лу Футанның 1933 жылы айтқандай, ол өз бостандығын қамтамасыз ету үшін «жолдастарын сатқан» деген күдік тудырды. Алайда Байрон мен Пэк атап өткендей, «Кангтің тұтқындалуы оның тұтқындарымен айналдырылғанын немесе олармен ұзақ мерзімді ынтымақтастыққа мәжбүр болғанын дәлелдемейді. КМТ [Куоминьдан] түрмелері нашар басқарылған және жемқорлыққа толы болған». Ли Лисанның авантюризмнен туған қателіктері мен 1930 жылғы маусымдағы Чанша операциясының сәтсіз аяқталуынан кейін Ли партияның қолдауын жоғалтты, Канг Коммитеннің жаңа сүйіктісі Ван Минмен және Павел Мифтің Сунь Ятсен университетінің жас студенттерімен, кейін «28 большевик» деп аталғандармен байланыс жасауға шапшаңдық танытты. Олар 1931 жылғы 13 қаңтарда өткен Алтыншы Орталық Комитетінің төртінші пленумында партияның саяси бюросын бақылауға алды. Канг Ван Минге адалдығын көрсету үшін 1931 жылғы 17 қаңтарда Ли Лисанға қарсы болған және Павел Мифтің Қытай Коммунистік партиясы ішінде Ванның билігін нығайтудағы үстем рөліне наразы болған Хе Менгсионгтың өткізген жиналысын Гоминьданның құпия полициясына хабарлаған деген күдік туды. 1931 жылғы 7 ақпан күні түнде Хе Менгсионг және тағы 22 адам Шанхайдың Лонгхуа қаласында Гоминьдан полициясы тарапынан атылып өлтірілді. Қаза тапқандардың арасында Ху Епин, Динг Линнің жары және оның баласының әкесі сияқты бес жас жазушы мен ақын болды, кейін партия оны шейіт деп жариялады. 1931 жылғы сәуірде бұрынғы «Жасыл банда» мүшесі Гу Шуньчжанның тұтқындалуы және Гоминьданға өткені партияның қауіпсіздігіне елеулі нұқсан келтіріп, партияның бас хатшысы Сян Чжунфаның тұтқындалуына және өліміне әкелді. Оған жауап ретінде Чжоу Энлай партияның барлау және қауіпсіздік операцияларын бақылау үшін Арнайы жұмыс комитетін құрды. Чжоу жеке төрағалық еткен комитет құрамына Чэн Юн, Пан Ханнян, Гуан Хуань және Кан Шэн кірді. 1931 жылғы тамызда Чжоу Шанхайдан Цзянси провинциясындағы коммунистік базаға кеткенде, Кангқа Арнайы жұмыс комитетін басқаруды тапсырды, ол осы лауазымда екі жыл бойы болды. Бұл қызметте Канг «тек Шанхайда ғана емес, сонымен қатар КМТ Қытайының барлық коммунистік қауіпсіздік және тыңшылық аппаратын басқарды».
After arriving in Shanghai, Kang enrolled in Shanghai University, an institution under the control of the CCP and the intellectual leadership of Qu Qiubai. After about six months at the university, he joined the Communist Party Youth League. Kang then joined the Party itself. At the direction of the Party, Kang worked underground as a labor organizer. He helped organize the February 1925 strike against Japanese companies that culminated in the May 30th Movement, a huge Communist led demonstration, and brought Kang into close contact with Party leaders Liu Shaoqi, Li Lisan and Zhang Guotao. Kang participated in the March 1927 worker's insurrection alongside Gu Shunzhang and under the leadership of Zhao Shiyan, Luo Yinong, Wang Shouhua and Zhou Enlai. When the uprising was put down by the Kuomintang with the crucial assistance of Du Yuesheng's Green Gang in the Shanghai massacre of April 12, 1927, Kang was able to escape into hiding. Also in 1927, Kang married a Shanghai University student and fellow Shandong native, Cao Yi'ou [zh] (born Cao Shuqing), who was to become a lifelong political ally. He entered the employment of Yu Qiaqing, a wealthy businessman with strong Kuomintang sympathies, as Yu's personal secretary. At the same time, Kang remained an active but secret Party organizer, and was named to the Party's new Jiangsu Provincial Committee in June 1927. In the late 1920s, Kang worked closely with Li Lisan, who had been made head of the Propaganda Department at the CCP's Sixth Congress, which for security reasons and proximity to the Comintern's congress was held outside Moscow in mid 1928. Several months after the Sixth Congress, Kang was named director of the Organization Department of the Jiangsu Provincial Committee, which controlled personnel matters. In 1930, while in Shanghai, Kang was arrested along with several other Communists, including Ding Jishi, and later released. Ding's uncle Ding Weifen, was head of the Kuomintang Central Party School in Nanjing, where he worked with Chen Lifu, head of the Kuomintang's secret service. Kang later denied he had ever been arrested, as the circumstances of his release suggested that he had, as Lu Futan alleged in 1933, "sold out his comrades" in order to secure his freedom. As Byron and Pack note, however, "Kang's arrest in itself is no proof that he was turned by his captors or forced into long term cooperation with them. KMT [Kuomintang] prisons were notoriously chaotic and corrupt." After Li Lisan's adventurism and the failed Changsha operation of June 1930 lost Li the support of the Party, Kang moved adroitly to align himself with the Comintern's new favorite, Wang Ming, and Pavel Mif's young students from Sun Yat sen University, later known as the 28 Bolsheviks, who took control of the Party Politburo at the Fourth Plenum of the Sixth Central Committee on January 13, 1931. Kang allegedly demonstrated his loyalty to Wang Ming by betraying to the Kuomintang secret police a meeting convened on January 17, 1931, by He Mengxiong, who had been strongly opposed to Li Lisan and was disgruntled by Pavel Mif's high handed role in securing the ascendancy of Wang within the Chinese Communist Party. On the night of February 7, 1931, He Mengxiong and 22 others were executed by the Kuomintang police at Longhua, Shanghai. Among those murdered were five aspiring writers and poets, including Hu Yepin, lover of Ding Ling and father of her child, later canonized as a martyr by the Party. The April 1931 arrest and defection to the Kuomintang of Gu Shunzhang, former Green Gang gangster and member of the Party's Intelligence Cell, led to serious breaches in Party security and the arrest and execution of Xiang Zhongfa, the Party's General Secretary. In response, Zhou Enlai created a Special Work Committee to oversee the Party's intelligence and security operations. Chaired by Zhou personally, the committee included Chen Yun, Pan Hannian, Guang Huian and Kang Sheng. When Zhou left Shanghai for the Communist base in Jiangxi Province in August 1931, he left Kang in charge of the Special Work Committee, a position he held for two years. In this role, Kang was "in charge of the entire Communist security and espionage apparatus, not only in Shanghai but throughout KMT China."
Канг Шенг және Мәдени төңкеріс
Мао Цзэдунның ҚКП-ны қайтадан басқаруға күш салуының маңызды одақтасы ретінде Кан Мәдени революцияның маңызды қозғаушысы және қатысушысы болды, кейіннен ҚКП Орталық Комитеті оны "1966 жылдың мамыр айынан 1976 жылдың қазанына дейін созылып, партия, мемлекет және халық Қытай Халық Республикасы құрылғаннан бері ең ауыр сәтсіздікке ұшырап, ең ауыр зардаптарға ұшыраған" деп сипаттады. Орталық Комитет қаулысында Мәдени революция "Мао Цзэдун жолдас бастаған және басқарған" деген қорытынды жасалды. Мәдени революцияға дейін Мао және басқалар жасаған "қателіктерді" атап өткенде Орталық Комитет "Лин Бяо, Цзян Цин және Кан Шэн сияқты мансапқорлар жасырын ниетпен осы қателіктерді пайдаланып, оларды күшейтті" деп атап өтті. Әрине, Мәдени революция басталғанға дейін Кан партия басшылығындағы Маоның қарсыластарына шабуыл жасады. 1960 жылдардың басында бұл кадрлардың көбісі көптеген саясаттардан, сондай-ақ Маоның бұрынғы қорғаныс министрі және Ұлы секіріс қозғалысының алғашқы және ашық сыншысы Пэн Дехуайды қайта оңалтудан бас тартуынан наразы болды. Сонымен қатар, Ұлы Қытай ашаршылығы Ұлы секіріс қозғалысынан кейін Маоның ҚКП басшылығындағы әріптестері арасында Қытайды социализмге барудағы оның таңдауларының даналығына күмән тудырды, көптегендері Лю Шаоцидің бағытын ұнататын. Аштықтың хроникасын жазған Ян Цзишенгтің айтуынша:
As an important ally of Mao Zedong's efforts to regain control of the CCP, Kang was an important enabler of and participant in the Cultural Revolution, later described by the CCP's 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 "[c]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, of course, Kang played his part in attacking rivals of Mao in the Party leadership. In the early 1960s, many of these cadres were unhappy with a range of policies as well as Mao's refusal to rehabilitate Peng Dehuai, the former Defense Minister and an early as well as outspoken critic of the Great Leap Forward. In addition, the Great Chinese Famine that had followed the Great Leap Forward had aroused serious doubts among Mao's colleagues in the CCP leadership about the wisdom of his choices in leading China to socialism, with many preferring the direction set by Liu Shaoqi. As the chronicler of the famine Yang Jisheng has observed:
The three year Great Famine undoubtedly intensified the divisions between Mao and Liu. Unreconciled to the failure of the Three Red Banners, Mao blamed it on "revisionism" and "class enemies." Combatting and preventing "revisionism" was therefore the chief task of the Cultural Revolution, as Mao tried to clear the way for establishing his utopia. This meant attacking "capitalist road power holders" such as Liu Shaoqi, whose attempts to address the problems left over from the Great Famine by giving peasants more autonomy in growing crops and taking a softer line in international affairs were labeled a "counterrevolutionary revisionist line." Already in the late 1950s, Mao's position had weakened following Khrushchev's condemnation of Stalin's methods and cult of personality. Mao was further unsettled by subsequent developments in the Soviet Union, of which he became increasingly critical and accused of "revisionism" and abandoning the class standpoint, especially following the adoption by the 22nd congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in October 1961 of theories of "peaceful coexistence" that he regarded as anathema. As Yang Jisheng observes, "Under Mao's renewed emphasis on class struggle, 'revisionism,' 'right deviating opportunism,' and 'capitalist restoration' became interlinked concepts. From the 1960s onward, Mao treated fighting revisionism as a crucial political task." Kang may or may not have shared these views, but he adroitly exploited Mao's concerns about the threat to the chairman's vision for China's path to socialism presented by "rightists" and "revisionists" who did not entirely share that vision, especially those holding positions in the CCP hierarchy. At the 10th Plenum of the Eighth CCP Central Committee in September 1962, Kang persuaded Mao to use the publication of a novel about Liu Zhidan, a Party member killed in battle against the Kuomintang in 1936, successfully insinuating that the novel's publication was an effort by Xi Zhongxun, Jia Tuofu and Liu Jingfan to reverse the Party's verdict on their former associate Gao Gang and thus "anti Party." As a result of this, the Central Committee appointed Kang to head a special investigation committee to examine the cases of Xi, Jia and Liu. As MacFarquhar writes,
Two months later, [Kang] 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 July 1964, Kang, then chairman of the Central Committee's Theoretical Committee, was appointed to a five member Cultural Revolution Small Group under the Central Committee to lead criticism of revisionism in the cultural and academic domains. The group was chaired by Peng Zhen, a Party member since 1923 who was by 1964 the fifth ranking member of the CCP Central Committee as well as First Secretary of the Beijing Municipal Party Committee and mayor of the capital city. 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." In February 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. As Yang Jisheng observes:
As a leading Ming historian within the party, Wu Han used Marxism to interpret history and used history as a politically charged allusion to the present. Prior to the establishment of the PRC, Wu Han's works had castigated the founding Ming emperor, Zhu Yuanzhang, as a stand in for Chiang Kai shek, but after the PRC was established, Wu's book Zhu Yuanzhang served as a paean of praise to Mao. This double standard is typical of intellectuals who rise to fame under a totalitarian government. Mao had actually encouraged Wu Han to write the essay "Hai Rui Scolds the Emperor," published under a pen name in the People's Daily in June 1959. However, Yang Jisheng noted that when Wu Han later wrote the script for the play " the hypervigilant Jiang Qing and Kang decided [it] was 'related to the Lushan Conference and implicitly endorsed 'assigning output quotas to households' and the ongoing verdict reversal wind. Mao took their views seriously and instructed Jiang Qing to find a hit man to denounce the play." The attack on Wu Han was an indirect attack on 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." The process took some time, but in May 1966 Peng Zhen, along with Luo Ruiqing, Lu Dingyi and Yang Shangkun were stripped of all official positions. In its verdict on the event long afterwards, the CCP Central Committee 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.'". Yang Jisheng observes that:
Rather than say that the downfall of Peng, Luo, Lu and Yang was part of the Cultural Revolution, it would be more accurate to say that it was crucial preparation for Mao's comprehensive launch of the Cultural Revolution. Eliminating those four people made Mao feel safer. The Cultural Revolution was effectively launched when the CCP Central Committee passed a circular on May 16, 1966, the text of which Mao, with assistance from Kang, Chen Boda, Jiang Qing and others, had been instrumental in drafting. Kang became an adviser to the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group, chaired by Chen Boda, upon the group's formal establishment by the Central Committee in late May 1966. Earlier in 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 wrote an infamous big character poster attacking the university leadership and launching a movement that over the next three months threw Beijing University into chaos. More significantly for the rest of China, Mao approved the contents of Nie's poster and at the beginning of June wrote the following memorandum: "Comrades Kang Shen and Chen Boda: This text can be broadcast in full by the Xinhua News Agency and published in all the country's newspapers. It is essential. The smashing of that reactionary fortress, Beiing University, can now begin. Please handle as you see fit." Kang and Chen made certain that the full text of Nie's poster was nationally broadcast in full, along with Mao's praise of it as "China's first Marxist Leninist big character poster" on the day they received the chairman's memorandum. As Yue Daiyun wrote about the effects on society: "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." 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 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 CCP 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 [on July 18, 1967] 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 [Liu Shaoqi's wife] 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, "[y]et," as MacFarquhar 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" [Central Committee] 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 [Central Cultural Revolution Group] 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 investigating 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 also 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 CCP's 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 Ninth 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 as "China's Trotsky." Efforts to link Kang to Lin Biao's plotting were unsuccessful and unsubstantiated. For the remainder of his life, Kang Sheng was actively involved in controlling the CCP propaganda apparatus and in November 1970 was appointed chairman of the new Central Organization and Propaganda Leading Group ("COPG"), created under Mao's impetus. The COPG had oversight of the Central Committee Organisation Department, the Central Party School, the People's Daily, the Xinhua News Agency, Red Flag magazine, the Central Broadcasting Enterprise Bureau, the Guangming Daily, and the Central Compilation and Translation Bureau. Because the COPG was effectively under Mao's direct control, it supplanted the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group and became a rival organization to the Central Military Commission Administrative Group, established in 1967 to try to rein in those attacking the military. Ill with the cancer that would eventually kill him, Kang increasingly ceded control of the COPG to Jiang Qing and her close associates, who were always attentive to Mao's wishes. 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 last appeared in public at the Tenth Congress of the CCP, 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 was named one of five vice chairmen of the Party. His 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.
The three year Great Famine undoubtedly intensified the divisions between Mao and Liu. Unreconciled to the failure of the Three Red Banners, Mao blamed it on "revisionism" and "class enemies." Combatting and preventing "revisionism" was therefore the chief task of the Cultural Revolution, as Mao tried to clear the way for establishing his utopia. This meant attacking "capitalist road power holders" such as Liu Shaoqi, whose attempts to address the problems left over from the Great Famine by giving peasants more autonomy in growing crops and taking a softer line in international affairs were labeled a "counterrevolutionary revisionist line." Already in the late 1950s, Mao's position had weakened following Khrushchev's condemnation of Stalin's methods and cult of personality. Mao was further unsettled by subsequent developments in the Soviet Union, of which he became increasingly critical and accused of "revisionism" and abandoning the class standpoint, especially following the adoption by the 22nd congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in October 1961 of theories of "peaceful coexistence" that he regarded as anathema. As Yang Jisheng observes, "Under Mao's renewed emphasis on class struggle, 'revisionism,' 'right deviating opportunism,' and 'capitalist restoration' became interlinked concepts. From the 1960s onward, Mao treated fighting revisionism as a crucial political task." Kang may or may not have shared these views, but he adroitly exploited Mao's concerns about the threat to the chairman's vision for China's path to socialism presented by "rightists" and "revisionists" who did not entirely share that vision, especially those holding positions in the CCP hierarchy. At the 10th Plenum of the Eighth CCP Central Committee in September 1962, Kang persuaded Mao to use the publication of a novel about Liu Zhidan, a Party member killed in battle against the Kuomintang in 1936, successfully insinuating that the novel's publication was an effort by Xi Zhongxun, Jia Tuofu and Liu Jingfan to reverse the Party's verdict on their former associate Gao Gang and thus "anti Party." As a result of this, the Central Committee appointed Kang to head a special investigation committee to examine the cases of Xi, Jia and Liu. As MacFarquhar writes,
Two months later, [Kang] 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 July 1964, Kang, then chairman of the Central Committee's Theoretical Committee, was appointed to a five member Cultural Revolution Small Group under the Central Committee to lead criticism of revisionism in the cultural and academic domains. The group was chaired by Peng Zhen, a Party member since 1923 who was by 1964 the fifth ranking member of the CCP Central Committee as well as First Secretary of the Beijing Municipal Party Committee and mayor of the capital city. 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." In February 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. As Yang Jisheng observes:
As a leading Ming historian within the party, Wu Han used Marxism to interpret history and used history as a politically charged allusion to the present. Prior to the establishment of the PRC, Wu Han's works had castigated the founding Ming emperor, Zhu Yuanzhang, as a stand in for Chiang Kai shek, but after the PRC was established, Wu's book Zhu Yuanzhang served as a paean of praise to Mao. This double standard is typical of intellectuals who rise to fame under a totalitarian government. Mao had actually encouraged Wu Han to write the essay "Hai Rui Scolds the Emperor," published under a pen name in the People's Daily in June 1959. However, Yang Jisheng noted that when Wu Han later wrote the script for the play " the hypervigilant Jiang Qing and Kang decided [it] was 'related to the Lushan Conference and implicitly endorsed 'assigning output quotas to households' and the ongoing verdict reversal wind. Mao took their views seriously and instructed Jiang Qing to find a hit man to denounce the play." The attack on Wu Han was an indirect attack on 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." The process took some time, but in May 1966 Peng Zhen, along with Luo Ruiqing, Lu Dingyi and Yang Shangkun were stripped of all official positions. In its verdict on the event long afterwards, the CCP Central Committee 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.'". Yang Jisheng observes that:
Rather than say that the downfall of Peng, Luo, Lu and Yang was part of the Cultural Revolution, it would be more accurate to say that it was crucial preparation for Mao's comprehensive launch of the Cultural Revolution. Eliminating those four people made Mao feel safer. The Cultural Revolution was effectively launched when the CCP Central Committee passed a circular on May 16, 1966, the text of which Mao, with assistance from Kang, Chen Boda, Jiang Qing and others, had been instrumental in drafting. Kang became an adviser to the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group, chaired by Chen Boda, upon the group's formal establishment by the Central Committee in late May 1966. Earlier in 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 wrote an infamous big character poster attacking the university leadership and launching a movement that over the next three months threw Beijing University into chaos. More significantly for the rest of China, Mao approved the contents of Nie's poster and at the beginning of June wrote the following memorandum: "Comrades Kang Shen and Chen Boda: This text can be broadcast in full by the Xinhua News Agency and published in all the country's newspapers. It is essential. The smashing of that reactionary fortress, Beiing University, can now begin. Please handle as you see fit." Kang and Chen made certain that the full text of Nie's poster was nationally broadcast in full, along with Mao's praise of it as "China's first Marxist Leninist big character poster" on the day they received the chairman's memorandum. As Yue Daiyun wrote about the effects on society: "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." 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 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 CCP 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 [on July 18, 1967] 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 [Liu Shaoqi's wife] 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, "[y]et," as MacFarquhar 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" [Central Committee] 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 [Central Cultural Revolution Group] 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 investigating 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 also 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 CCP's 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 Ninth 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 as "China's Trotsky." Efforts to link Kang to Lin Biao's plotting were unsuccessful and unsubstantiated. For the remainder of his life, Kang Sheng was actively involved in controlling the CCP propaganda apparatus and in November 1970 was appointed chairman of the new Central Organization and Propaganda Leading Group ("COPG"), created under Mao's impetus. The COPG had oversight of the Central Committee Organisation Department, the Central Party School, the People's Daily, the Xinhua News Agency, Red Flag magazine, the Central Broadcasting Enterprise Bureau, the Guangming Daily, and the Central Compilation and Translation Bureau. Because the COPG was effectively under Mao's direct control, it supplanted the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group and became a rival organization to the Central Military Commission Administrative Group, established in 1967 to try to rein in those attacking the military. Ill with the cancer that would eventually kill him, Kang increasingly ceded control of the COPG to Jiang Qing and her close associates, who were always attentive to Mao's wishes. 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 last appeared in public at the Tenth Congress of the CCP, 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 was named one of five vice chairmen of the Party. His 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.
Үш жылдық Ұлы ашаршылық Мао мен Лю арасындағы келіспеушілікті күшейтті. Үш Қызыл Тудың сәтсіздігіне келіспеген Мао оны "ревизионизм" мен "сынып жауларына" кінәлады. Сондықтан "ревизионизмге" қарсы күрес және оның алдын алу Мәдени революцияның басты міндеті болды, өйткені Мао өзінің утопиясын орнатуға жол ашты. Бұл Лю Шаоци сияқты "капиталистік жол ұстанушыларға" шабуыл жасауды білдірді, оның Ұлы ашаршылықтан қалған проблемаларды шешу үшін шаруаларға егін өсіруде көбірек автономия беру және халықаралық істерде жұмсақ бағыт ұстануы "контрреволюциялық ревизионистік бағыт" деп танылды. 1950 жылдардың соңында Маоның позициясы Хрущевтің Сталиннің әдістерін және жеке басына табынушылықты айыптауынан кейін әлсіреп қалды. Мао Кеңес Одағындағы кейінгі оқиғаларға одан әрі алаңдады, оны барған сайын сынға алды және "ревизионизм" және сыныптық тұрғыдан бас тарту деп айыптады, әсіресе 1961 жылдың қазан айында Кеңес Одағы Коммунистік партиясының 22-ші съезі "бейбіт өмір сүру" теорияларын қабылдағаннан кейін, ол оны қабылдамайтын нәрсе деп қарады. Ян Цзишенгтің айтуынша, "Мао таптық күреске жаңаша басымдық берген кезде "ревизионизм", "оңшыл оппортунизм" және "капиталистік қалпына келтіру" бір-бірімен байланысты ұғымдар болды. 1960 жылдан бастап Мао ревизионизмге қарсы күресті маңызды саяси міндет ретінде қарастырды". Кан осы көзқарастармен келіскен немесе келіспеген болуы мүмкін, бірақ ол Маоның төрағаның Қытайдың социализмге бару жолына қауіп төндіретін "оңшылдар" мен "ревизионистер" ұсынған қауіп туралы алаңдаушылықтарын шеберлікпен пайдаланды, олар бұл көзқарасты толыққанды бөліспеді, әсіресе ҚКП иерархиясында лауазымдарды иеленетіндер. 1962 жылдың қыркүйек айында өткен ҚКП Орталық Комитетінің сегізінші пленумының 10-шы отырысында Кан Маоны 1936 жылы Гоминьданға қарсы шайқаста қаза тапқан партия мүшесі Лю Жидан туралы романның жарық көруін пайдалануға көндірді, сәтті түрде романның жарық көруі Си Чжун Чун, Цзя Тоуфу және Лю Цзинфанның партияның бұрынғы серіктесі Гао Гангқа қатысты үкімін қайта қарауға тырысқанын және осылайша "партияға қарсы" екенін көрсетті. Нәтижесінде Орталық Комитет Канға Си, Цзя және Лю істерін тексеру үшін арнайы тергеу комитетін басқаруды тапсырды. Макфаркхар жазғандай, екі айдан кейін [Кан] Диаоютай қонақ үй кешеніне көшті, Маоның Мәдени революция командасының ең циниктік мердігері енді сол жердегі агентке айналды, ол сол апаттың алғышарты болған ішкі және сыртқы саясатты бастауға көмектесті. 1964 жылдың шілдесінде Орталық Комитет Теориялық комитетінің төрағасы Кан Орталық Комитетке қарасты бес мүшелі Мәдени революция шағын тобының мүшесі болып тағайындалды. Топтың төрағасы 1923 жылдан бері партия мүшесі, 1964 жылы ҚКП Орталық Комитетінің бесінші орынды мүшесі, сондай-ақ Пекин қалалық партия комитетінің бірінші хатшысы және астананың мэрі болған Пэн Чжэн болды. 1965 жылдың қаңтарында Мао партияның саяси бюросына Қытайдағы социализмнің басты жаулары "партияның капиталистік жолға түскен биліктегі адамдары" екенін айтты және партияны "мәдени революция" жасауға шақырды. 1965 жылдың ақпанында Мао өзінің әйелі Цзян Цинды Шанхайға жіберді, ол болашақ Мәдени революцияның алғашқы ұшқынын тұтандырды, Пекиннің вице-мэрі және 1961 жылғы "Хай Жуй қызметтен босатылды" пьесасының авторы У Ханға қарсы науқан. Ян Цзишенгтің айтуынша:
As an important ally of Mao Zedong's efforts to regain control of the CCP, Kang was an important enabler of and participant in the Cultural Revolution, later described by the CCP's 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 "[c]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, of course, Kang played his part in attacking rivals of Mao in the Party leadership. In the early 1960s, many of these cadres were unhappy with a range of policies as well as Mao's refusal to rehabilitate Peng Dehuai, the former Defense Minister and an early as well as outspoken critic of the Great Leap Forward. In addition, the Great Chinese Famine that had followed the Great Leap Forward had aroused serious doubts among Mao's colleagues in the CCP leadership about the wisdom of his choices in leading China to socialism, with many preferring the direction set by Liu Shaoqi. As the chronicler of the famine Yang Jisheng has observed:
The three year Great Famine undoubtedly intensified the divisions between Mao and Liu. Unreconciled to the failure of the Three Red Banners, Mao blamed it on "revisionism" and "class enemies." Combatting and preventing "revisionism" was therefore the chief task of the Cultural Revolution, as Mao tried to clear the way for establishing his utopia. This meant attacking "capitalist road power holders" such as Liu Shaoqi, whose attempts to address the problems left over from the Great Famine by giving peasants more autonomy in growing crops and taking a softer line in international affairs were labeled a "counterrevolutionary revisionist line." Already in the late 1950s, Mao's position had weakened following Khrushchev's condemnation of Stalin's methods and cult of personality. Mao was further unsettled by subsequent developments in the Soviet Union, of which he became increasingly critical and accused of "revisionism" and abandoning the class standpoint, especially following the adoption by the 22nd congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in October 1961 of theories of "peaceful coexistence" that he regarded as anathema. As Yang Jisheng observes, "Under Mao's renewed emphasis on class struggle, 'revisionism,' 'right deviating opportunism,' and 'capitalist restoration' became interlinked concepts. From the 1960s onward, Mao treated fighting revisionism as a crucial political task." Kang may or may not have shared these views, but he adroitly exploited Mao's concerns about the threat to the chairman's vision for China's path to socialism presented by "rightists" and "revisionists" who did not entirely share that vision, especially those holding positions in the CCP hierarchy. At the 10th Plenum of the Eighth CCP Central Committee in September 1962, Kang persuaded Mao to use the publication of a novel about Liu Zhidan, a Party member killed in battle against the Kuomintang in 1936, successfully insinuating that the novel's publication was an effort by Xi Zhongxun, Jia Tuofu and Liu Jingfan to reverse the Party's verdict on their former associate Gao Gang and thus "anti Party." As a result of this, the Central Committee appointed Kang to head a special investigation committee to examine the cases of Xi, Jia and Liu. As MacFarquhar writes,
Two months later, [Kang] 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 July 1964, Kang, then chairman of the Central Committee's Theoretical Committee, was appointed to a five member Cultural Revolution Small Group under the Central Committee to lead criticism of revisionism in the cultural and academic domains. The group was chaired by Peng Zhen, a Party member since 1923 who was by 1964 the fifth ranking member of the CCP Central Committee as well as First Secretary of the Beijing Municipal Party Committee and mayor of the capital city. 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." In February 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. As Yang Jisheng observes:
As a leading Ming historian within the party, Wu Han used Marxism to interpret history and used history as a politically charged allusion to the present. Prior to the establishment of the PRC, Wu Han's works had castigated the founding Ming emperor, Zhu Yuanzhang, as a stand in for Chiang Kai shek, but after the PRC was established, Wu's book Zhu Yuanzhang served as a paean of praise to Mao. This double standard is typical of intellectuals who rise to fame under a totalitarian government. Mao had actually encouraged Wu Han to write the essay "Hai Rui Scolds the Emperor," published under a pen name in the People's Daily in June 1959. However, Yang Jisheng noted that when Wu Han later wrote the script for the play " the hypervigilant Jiang Qing and Kang decided [it] was 'related to the Lushan Conference and implicitly endorsed 'assigning output quotas to households' and the ongoing verdict reversal wind. Mao took their views seriously and instructed Jiang Qing to find a hit man to denounce the play." The attack on Wu Han was an indirect attack on 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." The process took some time, but in May 1966 Peng Zhen, along with Luo Ruiqing, Lu Dingyi and Yang Shangkun were stripped of all official positions. In its verdict on the event long afterwards, the CCP Central Committee 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.'". Yang Jisheng observes that:
Rather than say that the downfall of Peng, Luo, Lu and Yang was part of the Cultural Revolution, it would be more accurate to say that it was crucial preparation for Mao's comprehensive launch of the Cultural Revolution. Eliminating those four people made Mao feel safer. The Cultural Revolution was effectively launched when the CCP Central Committee passed a circular on May 16, 1966, the text of which Mao, with assistance from Kang, Chen Boda, Jiang Qing and others, had been instrumental in drafting. Kang became an adviser to the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group, chaired by Chen Boda, upon the group's formal establishment by the Central Committee in late May 1966. Earlier in 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 wrote an infamous big character poster attacking the university leadership and launching a movement that over the next three months threw Beijing University into chaos. More significantly for the rest of China, Mao approved the contents of Nie's poster and at the beginning of June wrote the following memorandum: "Comrades Kang Shen and Chen Boda: This text can be broadcast in full by the Xinhua News Agency and published in all the country's newspapers. It is essential. The smashing of that reactionary fortress, Beiing University, can now begin. Please handle as you see fit." Kang and Chen made certain that the full text of Nie's poster was nationally broadcast in full, along with Mao's praise of it as "China's first Marxist Leninist big character poster" on the day they received the chairman's memorandum. As Yue Daiyun wrote about the effects on society: "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." 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 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 CCP 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 [on July 18, 1967] 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 [Liu Shaoqi's wife] 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, "[y]et," as MacFarquhar 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" [Central Committee] 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 [Central Cultural Revolution Group] 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 investigating 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 also 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 CCP's 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 Ninth 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 as "China's Trotsky." Efforts to link Kang to Lin Biao's plotting were unsuccessful and unsubstantiated. For the remainder of his life, Kang Sheng was actively involved in controlling the CCP propaganda apparatus and in November 1970 was appointed chairman of the new Central Organization and Propaganda Leading Group ("COPG"), created under Mao's impetus. The COPG had oversight of the Central Committee Organisation Department, the Central Party School, the People's Daily, the Xinhua News Agency, Red Flag magazine, the Central Broadcasting Enterprise Bureau, the Guangming Daily, and the Central Compilation and Translation Bureau. Because the COPG was effectively under Mao's direct control, it supplanted the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group and became a rival organization to the Central Military Commission Administrative Group, established in 1967 to try to rein in those attacking the military. Ill with the cancer that would eventually kill him, Kang increasingly ceded control of the COPG to Jiang Qing and her close associates, who were always attentive to Mao's wishes. 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 last appeared in public at the Tenth Congress of the CCP, 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 was named one of five vice chairmen of the Party. His 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.
The three year Great Famine undoubtedly intensified the divisions between Mao and Liu. Unreconciled to the failure of the Three Red Banners, Mao blamed it on "revisionism" and "class enemies." Combatting and preventing "revisionism" was therefore the chief task of the Cultural Revolution, as Mao tried to clear the way for establishing his utopia. This meant attacking "capitalist road power holders" such as Liu Shaoqi, whose attempts to address the problems left over from the Great Famine by giving peasants more autonomy in growing crops and taking a softer line in international affairs were labeled a "counterrevolutionary revisionist line." Already in the late 1950s, Mao's position had weakened following Khrushchev's condemnation of Stalin's methods and cult of personality. Mao was further unsettled by subsequent developments in the Soviet Union, of which he became increasingly critical and accused of "revisionism" and abandoning the class standpoint, especially following the adoption by the 22nd congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in October 1961 of theories of "peaceful coexistence" that he regarded as anathema. As Yang Jisheng observes, "Under Mao's renewed emphasis on class struggle, 'revisionism,' 'right deviating opportunism,' and 'capitalist restoration' became interlinked concepts. From the 1960s onward, Mao treated fighting revisionism as a crucial political task." Kang may or may not have shared these views, but he adroitly exploited Mao's concerns about the threat to the chairman's vision for China's path to socialism presented by "rightists" and "revisionists" who did not entirely share that vision, especially those holding positions in the CCP hierarchy. At the 10th Plenum of the Eighth CCP Central Committee in September 1962, Kang persuaded Mao to use the publication of a novel about Liu Zhidan, a Party member killed in battle against the Kuomintang in 1936, successfully insinuating that the novel's publication was an effort by Xi Zhongxun, Jia Tuofu and Liu Jingfan to reverse the Party's verdict on their former associate Gao Gang and thus "anti Party." As a result of this, the Central Committee appointed Kang to head a special investigation committee to examine the cases of Xi, Jia and Liu. As MacFarquhar writes,
Two months later, [Kang] 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 July 1964, Kang, then chairman of the Central Committee's Theoretical Committee, was appointed to a five member Cultural Revolution Small Group under the Central Committee to lead criticism of revisionism in the cultural and academic domains. The group was chaired by Peng Zhen, a Party member since 1923 who was by 1964 the fifth ranking member of the CCP Central Committee as well as First Secretary of the Beijing Municipal Party Committee and mayor of the capital city. 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." In February 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. As Yang Jisheng observes:
As a leading Ming historian within the party, Wu Han used Marxism to interpret history and used history as a politically charged allusion to the present. Prior to the establishment of the PRC, Wu Han's works had castigated the founding Ming emperor, Zhu Yuanzhang, as a stand in for Chiang Kai shek, but after the PRC was established, Wu's book Zhu Yuanzhang served as a paean of praise to Mao. This double standard is typical of intellectuals who rise to fame under a totalitarian government. Mao had actually encouraged Wu Han to write the essay "Hai Rui Scolds the Emperor," published under a pen name in the People's Daily in June 1959. However, Yang Jisheng noted that when Wu Han later wrote the script for the play " the hypervigilant Jiang Qing and Kang decided [it] was 'related to the Lushan Conference and implicitly endorsed 'assigning output quotas to households' and the ongoing verdict reversal wind. Mao took their views seriously and instructed Jiang Qing to find a hit man to denounce the play." The attack on Wu Han was an indirect attack on 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." The process took some time, but in May 1966 Peng Zhen, along with Luo Ruiqing, Lu Dingyi and Yang Shangkun were stripped of all official positions. In its verdict on the event long afterwards, the CCP Central Committee 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.'". Yang Jisheng observes that:
Rather than say that the downfall of Peng, Luo, Lu and Yang was part of the Cultural Revolution, it would be more accurate to say that it was crucial preparation for Mao's comprehensive launch of the Cultural Revolution. Eliminating those four people made Mao feel safer. The Cultural Revolution was effectively launched when the CCP Central Committee passed a circular on May 16, 1966, the text of which Mao, with assistance from Kang, Chen Boda, Jiang Qing and others, had been instrumental in drafting. Kang became an adviser to the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group, chaired by Chen Boda, upon the group's formal establishment by the Central Committee in late May 1966. Earlier in 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 wrote an infamous big character poster attacking the university leadership and launching a movement that over the next three months threw Beijing University into chaos. More significantly for the rest of China, Mao approved the contents of Nie's poster and at the beginning of June wrote the following memorandum: "Comrades Kang Shen and Chen Boda: This text can be broadcast in full by the Xinhua News Agency and published in all the country's newspapers. It is essential. The smashing of that reactionary fortress, Beiing University, can now begin. Please handle as you see fit." Kang and Chen made certain that the full text of Nie's poster was nationally broadcast in full, along with Mao's praise of it as "China's first Marxist Leninist big character poster" on the day they received the chairman's memorandum. As Yue Daiyun wrote about the effects on society: "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." 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 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 CCP 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 [on July 18, 1967] 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 [Liu Shaoqi's wife] 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, "[y]et," as MacFarquhar 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" [Central Committee] 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 [Central Cultural Revolution Group] 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 investigating 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 also 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 CCP's 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 Ninth 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 as "China's Trotsky." Efforts to link Kang to Lin Biao's plotting were unsuccessful and unsubstantiated. For the remainder of his life, Kang Sheng was actively involved in controlling the CCP propaganda apparatus and in November 1970 was appointed chairman of the new Central Organization and Propaganda Leading Group ("COPG"), created under Mao's impetus. The COPG had oversight of the Central Committee Organisation Department, the Central Party School, the People's Daily, the Xinhua News Agency, Red Flag magazine, the Central Broadcasting Enterprise Bureau, the Guangming Daily, and the Central Compilation and Translation Bureau. Because the COPG was effectively under Mao's direct control, it supplanted the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group and became a rival organization to the Central Military Commission Administrative Group, established in 1967 to try to rein in those attacking the military. Ill with the cancer that would eventually kill him, Kang increasingly ceded control of the COPG to Jiang Qing and her close associates, who were always attentive to Mao's wishes. 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 last appeared in public at the Tenth Congress of the CCP, 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 was named one of five vice chairmen of the Party. His 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.
Партия ішіндегі жетекші Мин тарихшысы ретінде У Хан тарихты марксизм тұрғысынан түсіндірді және тарихты саяси маңызы бар қазіргі уақытқа сілтеме ретінде пайдаланды. ҚХР құрылғанға дейін У Ханның еңбектері Мин империясын құрған император Чжу Юаньчжанды Чжан Кайшидің орнына қойды, бірақ ҚХР құрылғаннан кейін У Ханның Чжу Юаньчжан туралы кітабы Маоға мақтау айту ретінде қызмет етті. Бұл екі стандарттың қарама-қайшылығы тоталитарлық үкіметте атаққа ие болған зиялыларға тән. Маоның өзі У Ханды 1959 жылдың маусымында "Халық газетінде" жарияланған "Хай Жуй императорды сөккені" мақаласын жазуға ынталандырды. Бірақ Ян Цзишенг атап өткендей, кейін У Хан "пьесаның сценарийін жазғанда, тым сақ У Хан мен Кан оны "Лушан конференциясымен байланысты және шаруаларға егін өсіруде көбірек автономия беруді және халықаралық істерде жұмсақ бағыт ұстануды мақұлдады" деп шешім қабылдады. Мао олардың пікірлерін қабылдады және Цзян Цинге пьесаны айыптау үшін мердігер табуды тапсырды". У Ханға жасалған шабуыл Пэн Чжэнге жасалған жанама шабуыл болды, ол Мао құлатуды қалаған белгілі бір құрылымның тірегі болды. Канның Пэнды тазалаудағы рөлі Маоның "Пэн Чжэн, Ұсыну бөлімі және Пекин партия комитеті жаман адамдарды қорғады және солшылдарды басып тастады" деген айыптауын бірлесіп қудалау болды. Процесс біраз уақыт алды, бірақ 1966 жылдың мамырында Пэн Чжэн, Ло Руйцин, Лу Динйи және Ян Шанкунның барлығы лауазымдарынан алынды. Оқиғаға қатысты шешімінде ҚКП Орталық Комитеті "Лин Бяо, Цзян Цин, Кан Шэн, Чжан Чунцяо және басқалар жағдайды пайдаланып, халықты "барлығын құлатуға және толыққанды азаматтық соғыс жүргізуге" шақырып алды" деген қорытынды жасады. Ян Цзишенгтің айтуынша:
As an important ally of Mao Zedong's efforts to regain control of the CCP, Kang was an important enabler of and participant in the Cultural Revolution, later described by the CCP's 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 "[c]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, of course, Kang played his part in attacking rivals of Mao in the Party leadership. In the early 1960s, many of these cadres were unhappy with a range of policies as well as Mao's refusal to rehabilitate Peng Dehuai, the former Defense Minister and an early as well as outspoken critic of the Great Leap Forward. In addition, the Great Chinese Famine that had followed the Great Leap Forward had aroused serious doubts among Mao's colleagues in the CCP leadership about the wisdom of his choices in leading China to socialism, with many preferring the direction set by Liu Shaoqi. As the chronicler of the famine Yang Jisheng has observed:
The three year Great Famine undoubtedly intensified the divisions between Mao and Liu. Unreconciled to the failure of the Three Red Banners, Mao blamed it on "revisionism" and "class enemies." Combatting and preventing "revisionism" was therefore the chief task of the Cultural Revolution, as Mao tried to clear the way for establishing his utopia. This meant attacking "capitalist road power holders" such as Liu Shaoqi, whose attempts to address the problems left over from the Great Famine by giving peasants more autonomy in growing crops and taking a softer line in international affairs were labeled a "counterrevolutionary revisionist line." Already in the late 1950s, Mao's position had weakened following Khrushchev's condemnation of Stalin's methods and cult of personality. Mao was further unsettled by subsequent developments in the Soviet Union, of which he became increasingly critical and accused of "revisionism" and abandoning the class standpoint, especially following the adoption by the 22nd congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in October 1961 of theories of "peaceful coexistence" that he regarded as anathema. As Yang Jisheng observes, "Under Mao's renewed emphasis on class struggle, 'revisionism,' 'right deviating opportunism,' and 'capitalist restoration' became interlinked concepts. From the 1960s onward, Mao treated fighting revisionism as a crucial political task." Kang may or may not have shared these views, but he adroitly exploited Mao's concerns about the threat to the chairman's vision for China's path to socialism presented by "rightists" and "revisionists" who did not entirely share that vision, especially those holding positions in the CCP hierarchy. At the 10th Plenum of the Eighth CCP Central Committee in September 1962, Kang persuaded Mao to use the publication of a novel about Liu Zhidan, a Party member killed in battle against the Kuomintang in 1936, successfully insinuating that the novel's publication was an effort by Xi Zhongxun, Jia Tuofu and Liu Jingfan to reverse the Party's verdict on their former associate Gao Gang and thus "anti Party." As a result of this, the Central Committee appointed Kang to head a special investigation committee to examine the cases of Xi, Jia and Liu. As MacFarquhar writes,
Two months later, [Kang] 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 July 1964, Kang, then chairman of the Central Committee's Theoretical Committee, was appointed to a five member Cultural Revolution Small Group under the Central Committee to lead criticism of revisionism in the cultural and academic domains. The group was chaired by Peng Zhen, a Party member since 1923 who was by 1964 the fifth ranking member of the CCP Central Committee as well as First Secretary of the Beijing Municipal Party Committee and mayor of the capital city. 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." In February 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. As Yang Jisheng observes:
As a leading Ming historian within the party, Wu Han used Marxism to interpret history and used history as a politically charged allusion to the present. Prior to the establishment of the PRC, Wu Han's works had castigated the founding Ming emperor, Zhu Yuanzhang, as a stand in for Chiang Kai shek, but after the PRC was established, Wu's book Zhu Yuanzhang served as a paean of praise to Mao. This double standard is typical of intellectuals who rise to fame under a totalitarian government. Mao had actually encouraged Wu Han to write the essay "Hai Rui Scolds the Emperor," published under a pen name in the People's Daily in June 1959. However, Yang Jisheng noted that when Wu Han later wrote the script for the play " the hypervigilant Jiang Qing and Kang decided [it] was 'related to the Lushan Conference and implicitly endorsed 'assigning output quotas to households' and the ongoing verdict reversal wind. Mao took their views seriously and instructed Jiang Qing to find a hit man to denounce the play." The attack on Wu Han was an indirect attack on 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." The process took some time, but in May 1966 Peng Zhen, along with Luo Ruiqing, Lu Dingyi and Yang Shangkun were stripped of all official positions. In its verdict on the event long afterwards, the CCP Central Committee 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.'". Yang Jisheng observes that:
Rather than say that the downfall of Peng, Luo, Lu and Yang was part of the Cultural Revolution, it would be more accurate to say that it was crucial preparation for Mao's comprehensive launch of the Cultural Revolution. Eliminating those four people made Mao feel safer. The Cultural Revolution was effectively launched when the CCP Central Committee passed a circular on May 16, 1966, the text of which Mao, with assistance from Kang, Chen Boda, Jiang Qing and others, had been instrumental in drafting. Kang became an adviser to the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group, chaired by Chen Boda, upon the group's formal establishment by the Central Committee in late May 1966. Earlier in 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 wrote an infamous big character poster attacking the university leadership and launching a movement that over the next three months threw Beijing University into chaos. More significantly for the rest of China, Mao approved the contents of Nie's poster and at the beginning of June wrote the following memorandum: "Comrades Kang Shen and Chen Boda: This text can be broadcast in full by the Xinhua News Agency and published in all the country's newspapers. It is essential. The smashing of that reactionary fortress, Beiing University, can now begin. Please handle as you see fit." Kang and Chen made certain that the full text of Nie's poster was nationally broadcast in full, along with Mao's praise of it as "China's first Marxist Leninist big character poster" on the day they received the chairman's memorandum. As Yue Daiyun wrote about the effects on society: "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." 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 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 CCP 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 [on July 18, 1967] 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 [Liu Shaoqi's wife] 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, "[y]et," as MacFarquhar 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" [Central Committee] 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 [Central Cultural Revolution Group] 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 investigating 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 also 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 CCP's 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 Ninth 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 as "China's Trotsky." Efforts to link Kang to Lin Biao's plotting were unsuccessful and unsubstantiated. For the remainder of his life, Kang Sheng was actively involved in controlling the CCP propaganda apparatus and in November 1970 was appointed chairman of the new Central Organization and Propaganda Leading Group ("COPG"), created under Mao's impetus. The COPG had oversight of the Central Committee Organisation Department, the Central Party School, the People's Daily, the Xinhua News Agency, Red Flag magazine, the Central Broadcasting Enterprise Bureau, the Guangming Daily, and the Central Compilation and Translation Bureau. Because the COPG was effectively under Mao's direct control, it supplanted the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group and became a rival organization to the Central Military Commission Administrative Group, established in 1967 to try to rein in those attacking the military. Ill with the cancer that would eventually kill him, Kang increasingly ceded control of the COPG to Jiang Qing and her close associates, who were always attentive to Mao's wishes. 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 last appeared in public at the Tenth Congress of the CCP, 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 was named one of five vice chairmen of the Party. His 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.
The three year Great Famine undoubtedly intensified the divisions between Mao and Liu. Unreconciled to the failure of the Three Red Banners, Mao blamed it on "revisionism" and "class enemies." Combatting and preventing "revisionism" was therefore the chief task of the Cultural Revolution, as Mao tried to clear the way for establishing his utopia. This meant attacking "capitalist road power holders" such as Liu Shaoqi, whose attempts to address the problems left over from the Great Famine by giving peasants more autonomy in growing crops and taking a softer line in international affairs were labeled a "counterrevolutionary revisionist line." Already in the late 1950s, Mao's position had weakened following Khrushchev's condemnation of Stalin's methods and cult of personality. Mao was further unsettled by subsequent developments in the Soviet Union, of which he became increasingly critical and accused of "revisionism" and abandoning the class standpoint, especially following the adoption by the 22nd congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in October 1961 of theories of "peaceful coexistence" that he regarded as anathema. As Yang Jisheng observes, "Under Mao's renewed emphasis on class struggle, 'revisionism,' 'right deviating opportunism,' and 'capitalist restoration' became interlinked concepts. From the 1960s onward, Mao treated fighting revisionism as a crucial political task." Kang may or may not have shared these views, but he adroitly exploited Mao's concerns about the threat to the chairman's vision for China's path to socialism presented by "rightists" and "revisionists" who did not entirely share that vision, especially those holding positions in the CCP hierarchy. At the 10th Plenum of the Eighth CCP Central Committee in September 1962, Kang persuaded Mao to use the publication of a novel about Liu Zhidan, a Party member killed in battle against the Kuomintang in 1936, successfully insinuating that the novel's publication was an effort by Xi Zhongxun, Jia Tuofu and Liu Jingfan to reverse the Party's verdict on their former associate Gao Gang and thus "anti Party." As a result of this, the Central Committee appointed Kang to head a special investigation committee to examine the cases of Xi, Jia and Liu. As MacFarquhar writes,
Two months later, [Kang] 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 July 1964, Kang, then chairman of the Central Committee's Theoretical Committee, was appointed to a five member Cultural Revolution Small Group under the Central Committee to lead criticism of revisionism in the cultural and academic domains. The group was chaired by Peng Zhen, a Party member since 1923 who was by 1964 the fifth ranking member of the CCP Central Committee as well as First Secretary of the Beijing Municipal Party Committee and mayor of the capital city. 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." In February 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. As Yang Jisheng observes:
As a leading Ming historian within the party, Wu Han used Marxism to interpret history and used history as a politically charged allusion to the present. Prior to the establishment of the PRC, Wu Han's works had castigated the founding Ming emperor, Zhu Yuanzhang, as a stand in for Chiang Kai shek, but after the PRC was established, Wu's book Zhu Yuanzhang served as a paean of praise to Mao. This double standard is typical of intellectuals who rise to fame under a totalitarian government. Mao had actually encouraged Wu Han to write the essay "Hai Rui Scolds the Emperor," published under a pen name in the People's Daily in June 1959. However, Yang Jisheng noted that when Wu Han later wrote the script for the play " the hypervigilant Jiang Qing and Kang decided [it] was 'related to the Lushan Conference and implicitly endorsed 'assigning output quotas to households' and the ongoing verdict reversal wind. Mao took their views seriously and instructed Jiang Qing to find a hit man to denounce the play." The attack on Wu Han was an indirect attack on 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." The process took some time, but in May 1966 Peng Zhen, along with Luo Ruiqing, Lu Dingyi and Yang Shangkun were stripped of all official positions. In its verdict on the event long afterwards, the CCP Central Committee 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.'". Yang Jisheng observes that:
Rather than say that the downfall of Peng, Luo, Lu and Yang was part of the Cultural Revolution, it would be more accurate to say that it was crucial preparation for Mao's comprehensive launch of the Cultural Revolution. Eliminating those four people made Mao feel safer. The Cultural Revolution was effectively launched when the CCP Central Committee passed a circular on May 16, 1966, the text of which Mao, with assistance from Kang, Chen Boda, Jiang Qing and others, had been instrumental in drafting. Kang became an adviser to the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group, chaired by Chen Boda, upon the group's formal establishment by the Central Committee in late May 1966. Earlier in 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 wrote an infamous big character poster attacking the university leadership and launching a movement that over the next three months threw Beijing University into chaos. More significantly for the rest of China, Mao approved the contents of Nie's poster and at the beginning of June wrote the following memorandum: "Comrades Kang Shen and Chen Boda: This text can be broadcast in full by the Xinhua News Agency and published in all the country's newspapers. It is essential. The smashing of that reactionary fortress, Beiing University, can now begin. Please handle as you see fit." Kang and Chen made certain that the full text of Nie's poster was nationally broadcast in full, along with Mao's praise of it as "China's first Marxist Leninist big character poster" on the day they received the chairman's memorandum. As Yue Daiyun wrote about the effects on society: "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." 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 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 CCP 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 [on July 18, 1967] 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 [Liu Shaoqi's wife] 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, "[y]et," as MacFarquhar 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" [Central Committee] 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 [Central Cultural Revolution Group] 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 investigating 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 also 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 CCP's 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 Ninth 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 as "China's Trotsky." Efforts to link Kang to Lin Biao's plotting were unsuccessful and unsubstantiated. For the remainder of his life, Kang Sheng was actively involved in controlling the CCP propaganda apparatus and in November 1970 was appointed chairman of the new Central Organization and Propaganda Leading Group ("COPG"), created under Mao's impetus. The COPG had oversight of the Central Committee Organisation Department, the Central Party School, the People's Daily, the Xinhua News Agency, Red Flag magazine, the Central Broadcasting Enterprise Bureau, the Guangming Daily, and the Central Compilation and Translation Bureau. Because the COPG was effectively under Mao's direct control, it supplanted the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group and became a rival organization to the Central Military Commission Administrative Group, established in 1967 to try to rein in those attacking the military. Ill with the cancer that would eventually kill him, Kang increasingly ceded control of the COPG to Jiang Qing and her close associates, who were always attentive to Mao's wishes. 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 last appeared in public at the Tenth Congress of the CCP, 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 was named one of five vice chairmen of the Party. His 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.
Пэн, Ло, Лу және Янның құлауы Мәдени революцияның бөлігі болғанын айтудың орнына, оның Маоның Мәдени революцияны толыққанды іске қосуға дайындығының маңызды бөлігі болғанын айту дұрыс болар еді. Бұл төрт адамды жою Маоға көбірек сенімділік сезімін берді. Мәдени революция тиімді түрде 1966 жылдың 16 мамырында ҚКП Орталық Комитеті қабылдаған айналымдық қағазбен басталды, ондағы мәтінді Мао, Кан, Чэнь Бода, Цзян Цин және басқалармен бірге жасауға көмектесті. Кан Чэнь Бода төрағалық еткен Орталық Мәдени революция шағын тобының кеңесшісі болды, бұл топ 1966 жылдың соңында Орталық Комитетпен ресми түрде құрылды. 1966 жылдың басында Кан Шэн өзінің әйелі Цао И'оуді Пекин университетіне партия президенті Лу Пин және Пэн Чжэнмен байланысты басқа шенеуніктерге қарсы солшылдарды біріктіру үшін жіберді. Цао Философия факультетіндегі партия ұясының хатшысы Ни Юаньцзыні іздеді, Кан мен Цао онымен Яньаньдағы жылдары танысқан. Цао И'оудың ақпараты бойынша Лу Пин...
As an important ally of Mao Zedong's efforts to regain control of the CCP, Kang was an important enabler of and participant in the Cultural Revolution, later described by the CCP's 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 "[c]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, of course, Kang played his part in attacking rivals of Mao in the Party leadership. In the early 1960s, many of these cadres were unhappy with a range of policies as well as Mao's refusal to rehabilitate Peng Dehuai, the former Defense Minister and an early as well as outspoken critic of the Great Leap Forward. In addition, the Great Chinese Famine that had followed the Great Leap Forward had aroused serious doubts among Mao's colleagues in the CCP leadership about the wisdom of his choices in leading China to socialism, with many preferring the direction set by Liu Shaoqi. As the chronicler of the famine Yang Jisheng has observed:
The three year Great Famine undoubtedly intensified the divisions between Mao and Liu. Unreconciled to the failure of the Three Red Banners, Mao blamed it on "revisionism" and "class enemies." Combatting and preventing "revisionism" was therefore the chief task of the Cultural Revolution, as Mao tried to clear the way for establishing his utopia. This meant attacking "capitalist road power holders" such as Liu Shaoqi, whose attempts to address the problems left over from the Great Famine by giving peasants more autonomy in growing crops and taking a softer line in international affairs were labeled a "counterrevolutionary revisionist line." Already in the late 1950s, Mao's position had weakened following Khrushchev's condemnation of Stalin's methods and cult of personality. Mao was further unsettled by subsequent developments in the Soviet Union, of which he became increasingly critical and accused of "revisionism" and abandoning the class standpoint, especially following the adoption by the 22nd congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in October 1961 of theories of "peaceful coexistence" that he regarded as anathema. As Yang Jisheng observes, "Under Mao's renewed emphasis on class struggle, 'revisionism,' 'right deviating opportunism,' and 'capitalist restoration' became interlinked concepts. From the 1960s onward, Mao treated fighting revisionism as a crucial political task." Kang may or may not have shared these views, but he adroitly exploited Mao's concerns about the threat to the chairman's vision for China's path to socialism presented by "rightists" and "revisionists" who did not entirely share that vision, especially those holding positions in the CCP hierarchy. At the 10th Plenum of the Eighth CCP Central Committee in September 1962, Kang persuaded Mao to use the publication of a novel about Liu Zhidan, a Party member killed in battle against the Kuomintang in 1936, successfully insinuating that the novel's publication was an effort by Xi Zhongxun, Jia Tuofu and Liu Jingfan to reverse the Party's verdict on their former associate Gao Gang and thus "anti Party." As a result of this, the Central Committee appointed Kang to head a special investigation committee to examine the cases of Xi, Jia and Liu. As MacFarquhar writes,
Two months later, [Kang] 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 July 1964, Kang, then chairman of the Central Committee's Theoretical Committee, was appointed to a five member Cultural Revolution Small Group under the Central Committee to lead criticism of revisionism in the cultural and academic domains. The group was chaired by Peng Zhen, a Party member since 1923 who was by 1964 the fifth ranking member of the CCP Central Committee as well as First Secretary of the Beijing Municipal Party Committee and mayor of the capital city. 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." In February 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. As Yang Jisheng observes:
As a leading Ming historian within the party, Wu Han used Marxism to interpret history and used history as a politically charged allusion to the present. Prior to the establishment of the PRC, Wu Han's works had castigated the founding Ming emperor, Zhu Yuanzhang, as a stand in for Chiang Kai shek, but after the PRC was established, Wu's book Zhu Yuanzhang served as a paean of praise to Mao. This double standard is typical of intellectuals who rise to fame under a totalitarian government. Mao had actually encouraged Wu Han to write the essay "Hai Rui Scolds the Emperor," published under a pen name in the People's Daily in June 1959. However, Yang Jisheng noted that when Wu Han later wrote the script for the play " the hypervigilant Jiang Qing and Kang decided [it] was 'related to the Lushan Conference and implicitly endorsed 'assigning output quotas to households' and the ongoing verdict reversal wind. Mao took their views seriously and instructed Jiang Qing to find a hit man to denounce the play." The attack on Wu Han was an indirect attack on 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." The process took some time, but in May 1966 Peng Zhen, along with Luo Ruiqing, Lu Dingyi and Yang Shangkun were stripped of all official positions. In its verdict on the event long afterwards, the CCP Central Committee 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.'". Yang Jisheng observes that:
Rather than say that the downfall of Peng, Luo, Lu and Yang was part of the Cultural Revolution, it would be more accurate to say that it was crucial preparation for Mao's comprehensive launch of the Cultural Revolution. Eliminating those four people made Mao feel safer. The Cultural Revolution was effectively launched when the CCP Central Committee passed a circular on May 16, 1966, the text of which Mao, with assistance from Kang, Chen Boda, Jiang Qing and others, had been instrumental in drafting. Kang became an adviser to the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group, chaired by Chen Boda, upon the group's formal establishment by the Central Committee in late May 1966. Earlier in 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 wrote an infamous big character poster attacking the university leadership and launching a movement that over the next three months threw Beijing University into chaos. More significantly for the rest of China, Mao approved the contents of Nie's poster and at the beginning of June wrote the following memorandum: "Comrades Kang Shen and Chen Boda: This text can be broadcast in full by the Xinhua News Agency and published in all the country's newspapers. It is essential. The smashing of that reactionary fortress, Beiing University, can now begin. Please handle as you see fit." Kang and Chen made certain that the full text of Nie's poster was nationally broadcast in full, along with Mao's praise of it as "China's first Marxist Leninist big character poster" on the day they received the chairman's memorandum. As Yue Daiyun wrote about the effects on society: "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." 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 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 CCP 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 [on July 18, 1967] 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 [Liu Shaoqi's wife] 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, "[y]et," as MacFarquhar 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" [Central Committee] 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 [Central Cultural Revolution Group] 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 investigating 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 also 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 CCP's 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 Ninth 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 as "China's Trotsky." Efforts to link Kang to Lin Biao's plotting were unsuccessful and unsubstantiated. For the remainder of his life, Kang Sheng was actively involved in controlling the CCP propaganda apparatus and in November 1970 was appointed chairman of the new Central Organization and Propaganda Leading Group ("COPG"), created under Mao's impetus. The COPG had oversight of the Central Committee Organisation Department, the Central Party School, the People's Daily, the Xinhua News Agency, Red Flag magazine, the Central Broadcasting Enterprise Bureau, the Guangming Daily, and the Central Compilation and Translation Bureau. Because the COPG was effectively under Mao's direct control, it supplanted the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group and became a rival organization to the Central Military Commission Administrative Group, established in 1967 to try to rein in those attacking the military. Ill with the cancer that would eventually kill him, Kang increasingly ceded control of the COPG to Jiang Qing and her close associates, who were always attentive to Mao's wishes. 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 last appeared in public at the Tenth Congress of the CCP, 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 was named one of five vice chairmen of the Party. His 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.
The three year Great Famine undoubtedly intensified the divisions between Mao and Liu. Unreconciled to the failure of the Three Red Banners, Mao blamed it on "revisionism" and "class enemies." Combatting and preventing "revisionism" was therefore the chief task of the Cultural Revolution, as Mao tried to clear the way for establishing his utopia. This meant attacking "capitalist road power holders" such as Liu Shaoqi, whose attempts to address the problems left over from the Great Famine by giving peasants more autonomy in growing crops and taking a softer line in international affairs were labeled a "counterrevolutionary revisionist line." Already in the late 1950s, Mao's position had weakened following Khrushchev's condemnation of Stalin's methods and cult of personality. Mao was further unsettled by subsequent developments in the Soviet Union, of which he became increasingly critical and accused of "revisionism" and abandoning the class standpoint, especially following the adoption by the 22nd congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in October 1961 of theories of "peaceful coexistence" that he regarded as anathema. As Yang Jisheng observes, "Under Mao's renewed emphasis on class struggle, 'revisionism,' 'right deviating opportunism,' and 'capitalist restoration' became interlinked concepts. From the 1960s onward, Mao treated fighting revisionism as a crucial political task." Kang may or may not have shared these views, but he adroitly exploited Mao's concerns about the threat to the chairman's vision for China's path to socialism presented by "rightists" and "revisionists" who did not entirely share that vision, especially those holding positions in the CCP hierarchy. At the 10th Plenum of the Eighth CCP Central Committee in September 1962, Kang persuaded Mao to use the publication of a novel about Liu Zhidan, a Party member killed in battle against the Kuomintang in 1936, successfully insinuating that the novel's publication was an effort by Xi Zhongxun, Jia Tuofu and Liu Jingfan to reverse the Party's verdict on their former associate Gao Gang and thus "anti Party." As a result of this, the Central Committee appointed Kang to head a special investigation committee to examine the cases of Xi, Jia and Liu. As MacFarquhar writes,
Two months later, [Kang] 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 July 1964, Kang, then chairman of the Central Committee's Theoretical Committee, was appointed to a five member Cultural Revolution Small Group under the Central Committee to lead criticism of revisionism in the cultural and academic domains. The group was chaired by Peng Zhen, a Party member since 1923 who was by 1964 the fifth ranking member of the CCP Central Committee as well as First Secretary of the Beijing Municipal Party Committee and mayor of the capital city. 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." In February 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. As Yang Jisheng observes:
As a leading Ming historian within the party, Wu Han used Marxism to interpret history and used history as a politically charged allusion to the present. Prior to the establishment of the PRC, Wu Han's works had castigated the founding Ming emperor, Zhu Yuanzhang, as a stand in for Chiang Kai shek, but after the PRC was established, Wu's book Zhu Yuanzhang served as a paean of praise to Mao. This double standard is typical of intellectuals who rise to fame under a totalitarian government. Mao had actually encouraged Wu Han to write the essay "Hai Rui Scolds the Emperor," published under a pen name in the People's Daily in June 1959. However, Yang Jisheng noted that when Wu Han later wrote the script for the play " the hypervigilant Jiang Qing and Kang decided [it] was 'related to the Lushan Conference and implicitly endorsed 'assigning output quotas to households' and the ongoing verdict reversal wind. Mao took their views seriously and instructed Jiang Qing to find a hit man to denounce the play." The attack on Wu Han was an indirect attack on 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." The process took some time, but in May 1966 Peng Zhen, along with Luo Ruiqing, Lu Dingyi and Yang Shangkun were stripped of all official positions. In its verdict on the event long afterwards, the CCP Central Committee 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.'". Yang Jisheng observes that:
Rather than say that the downfall of Peng, Luo, Lu and Yang was part of the Cultural Revolution, it would be more accurate to say that it was crucial preparation for Mao's comprehensive launch of the Cultural Revolution. Eliminating those four people made Mao feel safer. The Cultural Revolution was effectively launched when the CCP Central Committee passed a circular on May 16, 1966, the text of which Mao, with assistance from Kang, Chen Boda, Jiang Qing and others, had been instrumental in drafting. Kang became an adviser to the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group, chaired by Chen Boda, upon the group's formal establishment by the Central Committee in late May 1966. Earlier in 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 wrote an infamous big character poster attacking the university leadership and launching a movement that over the next three months threw Beijing University into chaos. More significantly for the rest of China, Mao approved the contents of Nie's poster and at the beginning of June wrote the following memorandum: "Comrades Kang Shen and Chen Boda: This text can be broadcast in full by the Xinhua News Agency and published in all the country's newspapers. It is essential. The smashing of that reactionary fortress, Beiing University, can now begin. Please handle as you see fit." Kang and Chen made certain that the full text of Nie's poster was nationally broadcast in full, along with Mao's praise of it as "China's first Marxist Leninist big character poster" on the day they received the chairman's memorandum. As Yue Daiyun wrote about the effects on society: "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." 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 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 CCP 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 [on July 18, 1967] 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 [Liu Shaoqi's wife] 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, "[y]et," as MacFarquhar 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" [Central Committee] 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 [Central Cultural Revolution Group] 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 investigating 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 also 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 CCP's 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 Ninth 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 as "China's Trotsky." Efforts to link Kang to Lin Biao's plotting were unsuccessful and unsubstantiated. For the remainder of his life, Kang Sheng was actively involved in controlling the CCP propaganda apparatus and in November 1970 was appointed chairman of the new Central Organization and Propaganda Leading Group ("COPG"), created under Mao's impetus. The COPG had oversight of the Central Committee Organisation Department, the Central Party School, the People's Daily, the Xinhua News Agency, Red Flag magazine, the Central Broadcasting Enterprise Bureau, the Guangming Daily, and the Central Compilation and Translation Bureau. Because the COPG was effectively under Mao's direct control, it supplanted the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group and became a rival organization to the Central Military Commission Administrative Group, established in 1967 to try to rein in those attacking the military. Ill with the cancer that would eventually kill him, Kang increasingly ceded control of the COPG to Jiang Qing and her close associates, who were always attentive to Mao's wishes. 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 last appeared in public at the Tenth Congress of the CCP, 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 was named one of five vice chairmen of the Party. His 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.
Қызыл кхмерлерді қолдау
Канг Қытайдың сыртқы саясатына да елеулі әсер етті. Макфаркхар жазғандай, "Канг Шенгтің Маоның ішкі және сыртқы ревизионизмге қарсы күресіндегі екі жақты рөлі Қытайдың ішкі және сыртқы саясатының тығыз байланысын көрсетеді". Кангтың сталинизмді сынау туралы Кеңес Одағымен болған дауға қосқан үлесі жоғарыда, Маомен жақын болуға және Мәдени революцияның идеологиялық бастауларын дамытуға жасаған тыранына байланысты сипатталған. Қытайдың сыртқы саясатына Кангтың ең маңызды ықпалы Мәдени революция кезінде болды, ол Камбоджадағы Қызыл Кхмер режимін қолдауға септігін тигізді. ҚКП басшылығының көп бөлігі Камбоджаның батысқа және империализмге қарсы көшбасшысы ретінде принц Нородом Сианукты қолдағанмен, Канг Оңтүстік-Шығыс Азиядағы нағыз революционер Пол Пот екенін айтты. Кангтың Пол Потты қолдауы – ҚКП ішіндегі өзінің мақсатына қол жеткізуге жасаған әрекеті болды, себебі Камбоджа революциясының нағыз дауысы ретінде Пол Потты дәріптеуі, көбінесе Қытай Сыртқы істер министрлігіне жасалған шабуыл еді, оның принц Сианук режимін прагматикалық түрде қолдауы керітартпалық деп көрсетілді. Осының нәтижесінде Пол Пот режимі билікке келді және Қызыл Кхмер көп жылдар бойы Қытайдан көмек алды.
Kang also left a lasting imprint on China's foreign policy. As MacFarquhar writes, "the dual role of Kang Sheng in Mao's campaign against revisionism at home and abroad symbolized the close relationship between Chinese domestic and foreign policy." Kang's contribution to the dispute with the Soviet Union about de Stalinization has been described above in connection with his efforts to insinuate himself with Mao and developing the ideological origins of the Cultural Revolution. Perhaps Kang's most important influence over Chinese foreign policy came during the Cultural Revolution itself, when he was instrumental in developing Chinese support for the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia. While the mainstream of the CCP leadership supported Prince Norodom Sihanouk as Cambodia's anti Western and anti imperialist leader, Kang argued that Khmer Rouge guerrilla leader Pol Pot was the real revolutionary leader in the Southeast Asian nation. Kang's backing of Pol Pot was an effort to back his own cause within the CCP, as his touting of Pol Pot as the true voice of the Cambodian revolution was in large part an attack on the Chinese Foreign Ministry, whose pragmatic support for Prince Sihanouk's regime was thereby presented as reactionary. As a result of his success in this, the Pol Pot regime came to power and the Khmer Rouge became the recipient of Chinese aid for years to come.
Өлім мен масқара
Канг Шенг 1975 жылғы 16 желтоқсанда бүйрек қатерлі ісігінен қайтыс болды. Оған ресми жерлеу рәсімі жасалды, оған Маодан басқа Политбюроның барлық мүшелері қатысты, ол осы кезеңде жерлеу рәсімдеріне қатыспады, ал Чжоу Энлай мен Чжу Дэ екеуі де қатысуға мүмкіндігі болмады. Маршал Е Цзяньин Кэнгті «пролетариат революционері, марксистік теоретик және ревизионизмге қарсы күрескен батыр» деп мақтады. 1978 жылғы қарашада Ху Яобанг Орталық партия мектебінде сөйлеген сөзінде Кангқа қатысты алғашқы ресми сын айтты. Руан Миннің мәлімдемесіне сәйкес, Ху Кангтың «ревизионизмге қарсы» төрт «қаламгеріне» былай деді:
Kang Sheng died of bladder cancer on December 16, 1975. He was given a formal funeral, attended by every member of the Politiburo except Mao, who did not attend funerals at this stage, and Zhou Enlai and Zhu De, who both were too weak to attend. Marshal Ye Jianying delivered a eulogy in which he praised Kang as "a proletarian revolutionary, a Marxist theoretician, and a glorious fighter against revisionism." In November 1978, Hu Yaobang voiced the first formal criticism of Kang in a speech to the Central Party School. Ruan Ming reports Hu as telling four of Kang's "anti revisionist scribblers" that:
«Сендер төртіншілдер ой-пікірді босатуда өте теріс рөл атқардыңдар, тоқтатушы күш болдыңдар. Менің ойымша, бұл сендердің Канг Шенг сияқты адамдардың ықпалына ілескендеріңнен туды. Канг Шен мақалалардың нақты мазмұны мен жалпы идеясын ескермей, «намектерді» іздеп, жолдар арасында оқып уақытын өткізді. Ол шабуыл жасауға болатын нақты бір тұс іздеуде шеберлік танытты. Ол мұны Сталинден, Андрей Ждановтан және КГБ-ден үйреніп, Яньань дәуірінен бастап осылай әрекет етті. Төрттік топтың тұтқындалуынан және Дэн Сяопиннің билікке оралуынан кейін Канг Шенге сын-ескертпелер көбейді және Кангтың өмірі мен қызметін зерттеу үшін арнайы топ құрылды. 1980 жылдың жазының соңында арнайы топ ҚКП Орталық Комитетіне есеп берді. 1980 жылдың қазан айында, Төрттік топтың сот процесі басталар алдында Канг Шенг өлімінен кейін ҚКП-дан шығарылды және Орталық Комитет маршал Е Цзяньиннің айтқан сөзін ресми түрде жойды. 1978 жылғы сөйлеген сөзінде Ху Яобанг оны Дзержинский немесе Берияның қытайлық нұсқасы деп атады, бұл пікірді көптеген хабардар қытайлармен бөлісті. Ресми жарияланған материалдардың көпшілігі оны «Лин Бяо және Цзян Циннің қарсы революциялық топтарының» құрамында көрсетеді, бірақ соңғы жылдары оның Коммунистік Интернационалдағы, Қытай Азамат соғысындағы және Яньань түзеу қозғалысындағы рөлін егжей-тегжейлі баяндайтын бірнеше оң өмірбаян жарық көрді. Болашақ Бас хатшы Си Цзиньпиннің әкесі Си Чжунсюнді қуғындауға қатысқандықтан, партия оны ресми түрде ақтауы екіталай. 2008 жылы АҚШ-та орналасқан China News Digest Кангтың жесірі Цао Иумен 1980 жылдары өткізілген бұрын жарияланбаған сұхбатын жариялады, онда ол Кангты қорғап, оған тағылған айыптарды жоққа шығарып, ҚКП-ні оны ақтауға шақырды. Мақала бастапқыда Қытайда бұғатталған еді, бірақ 2015 жылы ол Сина Вейбоның тарих бөлімінде қайта пайда болды. ҚХР құрылғаннан кейін партияның барлау және қауіпсіздік аппаратындағы оның қызметі туралы мәліметтер құпия болып сақталады және тарихшыларға жабық, ал ҚКП 1980 жылдан бері оның жайлы жаңа ақпарат жарияламады.
you four people have played an extremely negative role in the liberation of thought, the role of a brake. As far as I'm concerned, this is because you have come too much under the influence of people like Kang Sheng. Kang Sheng passed his time reading between the lines looking for "allusions" without taking account of the real subject of articles and the general idea. He made a sort of talent of looking for a particular point he could attack. He had learned this from Stalin, from Andrei Zhdanov and the KGB, and acted thus from the time of the Yan'an era. Following the arrest of the Gang of Four and the return to power of Deng Xiaoping, criticisms of Kang Sheng grew and a special case group was established to investigate Kang's career. In late summer 1980, the special case group reported to the CCP Central Committee. In October 1980, just in advance of commencing the trial of the Gang of Four, Kang Sheng was posthumously expelled from the CCP and the Central Committee formally rescinded Marshal Ye Jianying's eulogy. In his 1978 speech, Hu Yaobang labeled him as the Chinese equivalent of Dzerzhinsky or Beria, an opinion “shared by a majority of informed Chinese.” Most official published material characterizes him as part of "Lin Biao and Jiang Qing Counter Revolutionary Cliques", although some partially positive biographies have been released in recent years detailing his roles in Communist International, Chinese Civil War and the Yan'an Rectification Movement. Due to his role in the purging of Xi Zhongxun, the father of future General Secretary Xi Jinping, it is unlikely that the party will formally rehabilitate him. In 2008, The US Based China News Digest released a previously unpublished interview with Kang's widow Cao Yi'ou conducted in the 1980s where she defends Kang and refutes the charges against him, calling for the CCP to rehabilitate him. The article was initially blocked in mainland China, although in 2015 it re appeared on the history section of Sina Weibo. The details of his activities after the founding of the PRC in the Intelligence and Security Apparatus of the Party remain classified and closed off to historians, with no new information about him being disclosed by the CCP since the 1980s.