CONFIDENTIAL
7。
The eighteen years that followed the Great Leap Forward were unhappy ones for China. Intellectual freedom, which had briefly flourished in 1957 at the time of the Hundred Flowers, was suppressed. Intellectuals remain wry in consequence even today. The regime retained its general su ort because, even in the fine years which followed the Great Leap Forward, it succeeded in providing food, clothing, shelter and ork for the whole population an unprecedented achievement. But it was a pretty negative sort of support.
8.
•
Mao was for a time in retreat after the Great Leap Forward; the revolutionary romantic had to give ground to the party bureaucrats and pragmatists. But in 1966, ith the help
of Lin Piao and sections of the Army, he returned to the charge and launched his last great adventure, the Cultural Revolution. It was intended, inter alia, to prevent what he saw as the "embourgeoisement" of Chinese society, to recover the old revolutionary élan and once again to achieve the necessary economic miracles by political fervour alone. It rapidly degenerated into near anarchy. Had it not been for the heroic efforts of Chou En-lai, who somehow kept the machine running, the economic stagnation, which as is now admitted by Chinese
authorities, prevailed from the mid-50s to the mid-70s, would have turned into a real decline.
9.
But short of getting rid of Mao - which only Lin Piao. seems to have contemplated no resolution was possible. It was the death in 1976 of one who had become in old age a disaster for his country which gave the first opportunity for a decisive change of direction. It was then that Hua Kuo-feng emerged as Premier
CONFIDENTIAL
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