Hope you are all doing well. I know I am. Um, since we last spoke, oh my goodness, so much has gone on. Um, October, I must say, was one of the best months of my entire life so far. If not, dude, I might say it was the best month ever.

I went on this amazing road trip through Gansu, Qinghai, Inner Mongolia, and Ningxia. And it could only be described as nothing short of spectacular.

I saw so much natural beauty. I met so many amazing people from seven different ethnic groups. Had some amazing food. Uh, saw some great history. Uh I spent most of it like really kind of exploring like the Western Xia dynasty and learning more about the history of Islam in China.

However, it’s really unfortunate there just was not much enough time to do local research about the cultural revolution and everyone else that I was with just, you know, they weren't interested.

But, you know, I really wasn't there for research. I was having way too much fun to be honest and seeing just some sights and sounds of the frontiers and margins of China that just, you know, you most people will never get to see.

If you ever have the chance, I highly recommend if you ever can to just disappear into the Chinese countryside for a while. if you ever can do it, no matter what part of China, and just just really get to know the Chinese rural working class and the farmers and the minority nationalities because they are legitimately some of the most amazing people in the world.

Also, I am now officially married. Yes, that's right. I am now a happy hubby. Not just in spirit, but on paper. Guo Youkun and Andrew Smith are now officially in accordance with the laws of the People's Republic of China and Shaanxi Province, husband and wife.

Uh what a feeling I must say. I mean, I will say this, you know, it really hasn't changed that much because we've been cohabitating for so long and uh not much else has really changed materially just legally. You know, I've um you know, I've called her the misses for so long. Um and she's called me hubby for so long that you know, it's not not much really. It's it's just a it's now a matter of paperwork.

Um yeah, actually, I kind of take that back. I've noticed definitely a change in some ways. uh like I feel uh both of us feel like more uh initiative around certain things like household stuff, miscellaneous duties and uh we definitely I think there is a little bit of us that feels more secure in the relationship. I don't know y'all in the audience who are married y'all feel me, right? I can't really put it into words, but anybody who's listening who is married uh will understand what I mean.

Um I also got to have lunch and had tea with Fred Engst uh aka Yang Heping, nephew of William Hinton and son of Erwin Engst and Joan Hinton. Uh yeah, he was in town for the unveiling of a statue of his parents here in Xi’an. And guess what? he came and knocking on my door because he's a fan of the podcast.

So anyways, it was great to chop it up, hear his perspective on a lot of things and uh talk with him about the city of Xi’an, how it's changed since he was a kid because he and I both have a deep love for the city. And um he will be appearing on the podcast uh later onwards when we do our special episode about expats, uh defectors and tourists and other sorts of foreign friends in China during the cultural revolution. So look on out for that.

All right, my friends. So, with that out of the way, let's get into the year 1970. Yes, we're doing an entire year in this episode. Um, we're we're kind of switching to that format. Uh, so, uh, you know, for various reasons, but, uh, trust me, you guys are going to love this episode.

All right, so let's set the scene. It's a frigid, cold New Year's Day in Beijing. A new decade of hope and excitement where new possibilities seem to be endless after the consolidation of the victory of the 9th Party Congress and reconstitution of the party on several levels. All newspapers issued a joint New Year editorial usher in the great 1970s which trumpeted the quote volcanoes erupting and crowns falling and signals that capitalism was irretrievably in decline.

The editorial, which I honestly recommend uh all comrades study, said that Brezhnev is doing even worse than Khrushchev and had put the USSR on the road to total collapse, which you know, considering how the Soviet economy was grinding into a deep stagnation and was developing in a highly lopsided way, you know, it wasn't entirely false. It wasn't just propaganda. And indeed, 15 years later, the Kosygin reforms would come to their final fruition with the disastrous and ultimately Soviet Union ending in perestroika reforms.

So it was uh very uh you know a lot of people say that at that point the Chinese were uh just giving wishful thinking but it's pretty uh pretty much there's a lot of foreshadowing in what they say.

Um while it is definitely true that the Sino-Soviet border conflict had ended with a truce in autumn of 1969, the threat of Soviet invasion still called for a strengthening of the party building process by reconstituting party committees on all levels and reconsolidating the people's militia on a red leftist line so as to once again they love saying this drown the imperialists and socialist social imperialists in a sea of people's war in the event of an invasion.

Like I said, it's a slogan we hear again and again we hear it across the year 1970.

It also meant that unfortunately a lot of decision making on many levels disproportionately was left in the hands of the top brass of the People's Liberation Army and its Central Military Commission ostensibly in the name of national defense against American imperialism and Soviet revisionism.

Indeed, the next day, Soviet diplomats returned to Beijing ahead of the resumption of border negotiations. This time, their arrival did not set off any fear of a nuclear crisis. And indeed, there was even a cordial sense to the meeting with uh Soviet and Chinese attendees referring to each other once again as comrade and both paying tribute to Lenin together in the first significant way since the 1963 and 1965 polemics back and forth between the CPC and CPSU.

After a few days, progress was made. The ceasefire armistice was extended and the two sides agreed to meet once again at a later date at either a party level or national government level.

The last day of negotiations uh for the peace though were quite literally rattled. However, on the night of January 5th, a huge earthquake hit central Yunnan at 7.7 on the Richter scale, it destroyed 300,000 buildings and buried tens of thousands of people alive with over or uh 10,000 people confirmed dead immediately and hundreds of thousands more severely or permanently injured.

Help had to arrive from Kunming and Beijing with thousands of party cadres, revolutionary worker Congress activists, barefoot doctors and volunteer staff pouring into the affected counties with crucially needed supplies and medicines and mobile surgery stations. Waving the Little Red Book, these barefoot doctors and party members declared that it was Mao Zedong Thought that drove them to selflessly and tirelessly work to rescue the people and comfort grieving families without hesitation or want of extra compensation.

Again, like I like to say, just because the Red Guard and rebel movements were essentially over and the PLA was highly in control of society doesn't mean that, you know, there still wasn't a great revolution within the minds, actions, and cultures of everyday people. Um, it was still, you know, in some ways the Cultural Revolution was still a revolution of everyday culture and interpersonal relationships.

Well, anyways, after the mixed success of negotiations with the Soviets, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs decided to turn their attention to the Americans.

On 7th of January in Warsaw, PRC diplomats asked the US embassy for a meeting. The last talks were back in February of '69, but ultimately failed. China's chargé d'affaires in Warsaw arrived by limousine at the US embassy where a short amicable meeting set up formal talks for the 20th of the month.

On the morning of the 20th in Warsaw, top Chinese and American diplomats held their first bilateral meeting for over since 1969. They talked for about an hour, mostly about Taiwan, but eh no major breakthroughs came.

Then um on January 24th, Vice Chairman Lin Biao warned a meeting in the Great Hall of the People again of a nationwide conspiracy by a May 16th group and called for them to be exposed. Jiang Qing and Huang Yongsheng echoed Lin's fervor to once again defeat the new May 16th conspiracy.

Jiang claimed that she had not slept in 3 days working on the case. And all I got to ask, you know, I'm just going to be real. Are we really doing this again, guys? You know, I've already discussed the May 16th conspiracy in early episodes and showed that, you know, it was real. It happened, but there was a massive exaggeration of it and the party center greatly overestimated the size and influence of the original May 16th conspiracy. So like I'm kind of feeling like ‘we bringing this back for real? Come on y'all. Come on.’

Well, Mao took this time to really make a great point though. He said, quote, "We have won a great victory, but the defeated class will still struggle. These people are still around and this class still exists. Therefore, we cannot speak of final victory, not even for decades. We must not lose our vigilance."

This quote reminded the party in the masses that in the state that the revolutionary transformation of society and mass criticism of the capitalist roaders and the state apparatus was far from over and that the Cultural Revolution still had yet to achieve absolute and final victory.

Because of this, this quote was often repeated in local editorials and dazibao around factories and neighborhoods when debates around certain local policies or the decisions of certain politicians became points of contention, especially when there were claims like that the May 16th conspiracy was once again rearing its ugly head.

However, things got really intense on February 5th, 1970 when Zhou Enlai sent out a central directive that called for a massive fight against graft, embezzlement, profiteering and extravagance and waste by local revolutionary committees.

The campaign was to become the One Strike Three Anti campaign. Striking once against corruption and counterrevolutionary activity and striking three times against embezzlement, profiteering and extravagant waste.

Now this, uh, the One Strike Three Anti campaign is one of those things where one really divides into two. The thing is there was a legitimate mobilized mass movement around these things and there was also a lot of top-down brutal imprisonments and executions orchestrated by the PLA leaders of the revolutionary committees in order to settle scores against former Red Guard and rebel leaders or to execute people who no longer served them in some sort of way.

So before I get into the further narrative or chronological aspect of this episode, uh let's park things right here cuz this this campaign, this One Strike Three Anti campaign. We really need to address it in a critical but nuanced way. Things started on a local level with quite a bang. 6 days later in Ningxia province, uh, middle school math teacher Zhū Shǒuzhōng, who was very pro-Liu Shaoqi, but who had overall been neutralized on a political and social level, was arrested and summarily executed without trial.

Suicide spiked among academics especially especially in my research when I was going through uh some of the like university chronicles and archives at Fudan University in Shanghai, Xi’an Jaotong University in Xi’an and Shaanxi Normal University here in Xian as well as many teachers at high ranking middle schools and high schools in Beijing. Yeah, there was a lot of suicides across March.

Reports flowed from across the country that the campaign was causing waves in society. A mass public trial in Wǔtái Shān Stadium in Nanjing was a site where 11 people were sentenced to death and shot immediately for various crimes of corruption and other financial misgivings. A month later, a similar mass trial at the same stadium ended up with 12 more counterrevolutionaries publicly shot.

In Gansu province, authorities calculated that 225,000 people had been brought into police stations or in front of discipline committees by the Three Antis campaign, including 169,000 capitalist roaders.

Reports like this, however, did cause some concern in Beijing. No doubt a central directive told authorities to avoid forced confessions and rely on education and unity-struggle-unity when investigating the supposed May 16th group.

Um, one thing that really caught my eye and that didn't come across in my research for the uh, Guangzhou episode that I did a few months back was that on April 1st, Radio Guangdong announced a crackdown on a supposed anarchist organization, an anarchist organization calling itself the World Freedom Party made up of ex-Red Guards who had supposedly uh attacked at police stations with firebombings.

This really shocked me. Um, and I'd like to dig more into this and see if there was an actual organization or if this was a fabrication by revisionists who had been rehabilitated and elected into the provincial revolutionary committee. If anyone knows anything about this, please let me know.

This really like made me go whoa. Well, across its entire duration, the One Strike Three Antis campaign saw uh something like 284,800 arrests with many executed and 1.9 million people officially criticized for various crimes from February to November 1970.

The One Strike Three Antis campaign did not have a definitive end uh as it came to conclusions at various times across different provinces but it was generally over by the end of the year in the capital. The proceedings were largely over by summer of 1970 and had petered out by uh the time that the November 1st official report put an indefinite pause on the campaigns.

Although what's interesting is that the Shanghai Revolutionary Committee spearheaded by Wang Hongwen uh and the Revolutionary Workers Headquarters and the Shanghai Municipal People's Militia continued the campaign on a local level as a series of quote unquote ‘Red Typhoons’ in which militiamen teams of workers would take part in raids around the city looking for lumpenproletarian activity and corruption by workplace managers.

So, huh, how about that? And uh this is something that I want to make a point about when it comes to the One Strike Three Anti's campaign. It definitely had a brutal negative bureaucratic character that we see in mainstream scholarly works and in the archives, but I want to say we also see a positive mass character.

If you uh if any of you have read in uh Maria Macciocchi's uh work Daily Life in Revolutionary China or in other eyewitness testimonies such as the short book Philosophy is No Mystery, you'll see in these works that the people really did seriously take the calls to uncover wastefulness and extravagance and many debates on how to minimize uh such things in industry and commerce were very fierce.

In fact, I personally know an older Chinese gentleman who as a teenager joined a squadron of youth in Zhengzhou who were ordered to patrol business districts of the city wielding baseball bats and inspecting shops and markets to make sure that the shopkeepers and small business owners were not engaging in embezzlement or money laundering or wasting important materials.

If they uncovered evidence of such, they'd give the culprit a beatdown and then drag him to the local police station or people's militia garrison for them to be handled accordingly.

Uh so would I say the One Strike Three Antis campaign was an outright negative thing as say as like you know the cleansing of the class ranks campaign. Well, I can't say I would consider myself an enthusiastic supporter of it, but honestly, I don't I would say it wasn't as bad as the cleansing of the class ranks campaign. The death toll wasn't as high, and although the amount of people investigated and arrested was very high, a greater amount of people were absolved.

Um, a lot of people had their charges dropped compared to the CCRC of 68 and 69. And uh, there also seems to be a lot more of a democratic or mass character to it than the CCRC did. So, you know what they say, two things can be true at once. And you know, the laws of dialectics, one divides into two.

One thing that really advanced during 1970 was China's international relations. On February 2nd, Zhou Enlai chaired a Politburo meeting to set up Chinese positions for a second bilateral meeting with the US. Uh, as you know, they were planning for February 20th in Warsaw. On February 12th, Mao approved the Politburo's suggestion to tell the Americans that the Chinese government would be willing to receive a special envoy from Nixon.

On February 20th, the Chinese and American delegations flew into Warsaw where diplomat Lei Yang told US Ambassador Walter Stoessel that the PRC government would be willing to receive a high-level American visit. Lei Yang also warned that relations with the US would not fundamentally improve, however, until all American troops leave Taiwan and the Strait. The meeting due to this ended yet again in a deadlock impasse with Secretary of State Henry Kissinger saying to Nixon, "Don't hold any higher meetings with the PRC without further preconditions for Mao." But I'll get back to US-China relations in 1970 in just a few minutes. So let's get on with our chronology and get back to March 1970.

So on March 7th, Mao wrote to Zhou Enlai from Wuhan suggesting that it was time to convene a Fourth National People's Congress and therefore thereby revise a new state constitution. Mao had been eager to reestablish the National People's Congress and revise the national constitution of the People's Republic of China. But there was a major problem: the question of the head of state of the People's Republic of China.

Now before the Cultural Revolution, Liu Shaoqi had been president of the People's Republic of China while Chairman Mao was Chairman of the Communist Party and Chairman of the Central Military Commission. So, you know, and the president of the People's Republic of China was just technically a ceremonial head of state. After Liu's ouster, of course, the position had been vacant and its duties divided between Mao and Zhou.

Many in the government like Lin Biao and Chen Boda, however, wanted to bring back an official head of state position and referred to it as the state chairman. The state chairman would be a very powerful position. According to their plan, it would officially consolidate the office of president of the PRC, chairman of the Central Military Commission, chairman of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference and take on many of the duties that at that point were relegated to the office of premier. It would also expand the ability of the executive branch to be able to issue executive orders and official decrees much more easily than before 1966.

It would also make it so that the chairman of the party or the vice chairman of the party all but had to be the state chairman. Now, I don't know about you guys, but this sounds like a very autocratic position to me. One that if it were to fall into the wrong hands could cause a lot of trouble. Mao shared that sentiment. He completely opposed the idea of the creation of a state chairman even if it meant him being elected as such. Instead, Mao said that the chairman of the Standing Committee of the National People's Congress should act as ceremonial head of state.

On the 9th in Suzhou, Lin Biao learned that Mao was against the idea of the state chairmanship.

Uh Lin, although initially one of the biggest proponents of the idea, then automatically—I, you know, because Lin just did things like this—told General Huang Yongsheng that yes, he agreed with Mao. Uh yeah, 'I'm against that idea.' Uh yeah, Lin being Lin. 'I was against that idea all along. And what are you talking about? I was never for the state chairmanship, right?' Well, we'll see later on in this episode how that goes.

On March 15th, Mao set aside the debate about the state chairmanship and the new constitution and sent out an order to curb the factional fighting that, much to my shock, was still lingering in remote parts of the country since the 9th Congress had officially brought the rebels and conservatives into an uneasy alliance.

Andrew G. Walder states in his text, Agents of Disorder, quote, "The year 1970 marked the end of an era of violent warfare. Of the four clashes recorded in the annals for that year, two were in Xinjiang, one in Sichuan and one in Zhejiang. The last recorded factional battle, leaving five dead in August of 1970, occurred in a county that spanned a chain of islands populated by fishermen off the coast of Zhejiang."

So, huh, how about that? I had no idea there were any factional battles past 1969, but there turns out there were four factional battles during that year and there were no more after that. Um the next day the Politburo accepted a set of principles for a new state constitution drafted by a small group of four radicals and Jiang Qing. The following morning a work conference started the planning of the structure of the new National People's Congress and Mao once again refused to accept the role of state chairman.

The Chinese revolutionaries had a lot to juggle during the second half of March. Though this time also on the international side, foreign affairs are a fickle thing, especially when you're trying to maintain a socialist state that's in the midst of an internal revolutionary movement.

On March 18th, anti-communist military officers and politicians led by Lon Nol enacted a coup d'état in Phnom Penh, Cambodia with right-wing mobs being whipped up to destroy Vietnamese and Chinese families' homes. Prince Norodom Sihanouk fled to Beijing and declared over radio that he wanted a united front with the Khmer Rouge rebels waging protracted people's war in Cambodia. On March 21st, Zhou Enlai received a memo from the Pakistan government that US President Nixon and Secretary Kissinger were offering a secret direct telephone line to him.

Sadly, one week later, one of China's most steadfast American friends, Anna Louise Strong, whose 1946 interview of Mao is included in his Selected Works, died in a hospital in Beijing and was given a state funeral. She is currently buried in Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery in Beijing alongside many other great communist and patriotic Chinese revolutionaries.

On April 4th, Zhou Enlai arrived in Pyongyang, North Korea to mend relations, which had been, to say the least, strained since 1966 when Red Guards deemed the Workers' Party of Korea chairman Kim Il-sung a fat revisionist, and border skirmishes between the PLA and KPA troops occurred. Although, unlike the Soviet and Chinese ones, they didn't actually have any casualties. They just exchanged gunfire.

Um so that was during the Sino-Soviet border conflict of '69. At a rally of hundreds of thousands in Pyongyang, Zhou Enlai gave greetings to the Workers' Party and Korean People's Army and gave solidarity to South Koreans under the dire misery of fascist rule. After several days of hours-long meetings and solidarity conferences, Zhou Enlai flew home with DPRK-PRC relations once again friendly, at least ostensibly.

On April 4th, Mao left Wuhan for Changsha where he had a brief meeting with provincial revolutionary committee vice chairman and central committee representative for Changsha, Hua Guofeng. The meeting was cordial and Mao was optimistic about Hua's work for the people of Hunan and respected his ability to unite rebel, conservative, and ultra-leftist factions within the Hunan Provincial Revolutionary Committee.

But well, let me tell y'all something. Watch out for Hua later on in this series. He's not quite what he seems. And when Chairman Mao dies in 1976, a lot of good comrades learned that the hard way.

On the 11th, as Mao was touring Changsha with Hua, Lin Biao sent Mao a note begging him to accept the position of state chairman. I thought, wait, Lin, I thought you said you were against it all along. Well, whatever.

Well, anyways, Lin in his note said very strangely, if I add, that the psychology of the people requires that Chairman Mao become state chairman. Mao laughed at the note, calling it absurd and dogmatic, and promptly tossed it in the trash.

On April 22nd, 1970, a momentous occasion occurred for communists around the world. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin's 100th birthday.

Local and national papers around China carried a whole front-page image of Lenin with a quotation by Stalin to celebrate Lenin's centenary. And a huge anti-Soviet social imperialism parade was held in Tiananmen Square with people holding up massive portraits of Lenin, declaring that the Communist Party of China had reclaimed Lenin from the Soviets. Major newspapers carried joint editorials on how the Soviet Union had abandoned Leninism for revisionism and social imperialism.

2 days later on April 24th, the Chinese people made history. From his villa in Changsha, Mao telephoned a control room in Beijing filled with statues of the Chairman and told PLA technicians that it was time for liftoff. China would be launching its first satellite on a Long March One rocket. The satellite Dongfanghong I, or The East Is Red One, successfully launched into orbit. It broadcasted a loop of its namesake revolutionary song with a lullaby-like chime. In fact, let's listen to the historic sound right now.

And with that distant quiet anthem, the Chinese space program was born and China entered the space age alongside the USA and USSR.

Pretty amazing for a country that 21 years prior was one of the most war-ravaged, famine-ravaged, naturally devastated and poverty-stricken countries in the world.

On April 27th, Mao returned to Beijing for the first time in over 6 months when he and most senior leaders had dispersed in anticipation of a Soviet strike.

Mal received the pullet bureau in his bedroom and once again many of the Politburo begged him to assume the position of state chairman. Rolling his eyes he once again declined and told them to drop the matter and maintain the chairman of the standing committee of the national people's congress as China's official head of state and furthermore demanded that nobody nominate him for that position either.

Few days later, well, Mayday 1970, International Workers Day, one of my favorite holidays and the most sacred day in the calendar of the International Proletariat. The East is Red one satellite passed overhead while the usual annual Mayday crowd gathered in Tiananmen Square and Mao met with foreign dignitaries.

After the parade and during the afterparty banquet, Mao discussed with various heads of state, ambassadors, and leaders of various pro-Beijing anti-revisionist parties about the question of continuing possible negotiations with the USA.

However, two weeks later, the Chinese government decided to postpone the next round of Sino US talks, which had been scheduled for the 20th of that month on account of the American invasion of Cambodia and the escalation of aggression against Laos and Vietnam. And this I love. This I love right here.

In response, on May 20th, when the meeting was supposed to happen, the Communist Party of China held a massive rally against US imperialism in solidarity with the peoples of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Palestine. Almost 1 million people attended with Mao waving to the crowds on the rostrum, declaring, "People of the world, unite and defeat the US aggressors and all their running dogs." 3 days later he published an editorial of the same name in the People's Daily and Peking Review which was published in multiple languages and distributed around the world.

And what's interesting to me is that despite the anti-Soviet demonstration a month earlier and repeated almost daily denunciations of the Soviet Union in the Chinese press and the fact that the Soviet armed forces were continuing to build up troops and aircraft on the uh Sino Mongolian border, the Soviets actually sent a delegation to this rally and stood alongside Mao on the rostrum. I mean, I I guess since it was an anti-US pro-Vietnam rally, it kind of makes sense. And you know, the Chinese were hoping to uh you know, maybe by inviting the Soviets that to an anti-American event that that might ease tensions further.

Then in June, on June 5th to be exact, something very interesting happened. Now, a lot of you guys know that one of the constant criticisms of the cultural revolution was that the schools were closed, that there was no education during that time, and you know, nobody was allowed to go to college. Well, on June 5th, Mao reviewed a report on the prospect of fully reopening universities and rehabilitating academics, even those who he said were really impossible. The report stated that the old university system must be destroyed, but that does not mean losing the scientific advances made under it.

On the 27th, a central directive let Qinghua and Peking universities Qinghua and Beida start enrolling new students for the first time since the cultural revolution had begun. A pilot group of 40 4,100 students were selected by cadres taking in account to ability class and practical experience as well as dedication to Marxism Leninism. As per Mao's often repeated preferences, the courses taught were going to be shorter and peasants were going to return to their home units after graduating.

um you know as the um Marxist Leninist Maoist Revolutionary Study Group pointed out in their summation of the cultural revolution and I'm going to quote it at length because I think it's great. Um quote

“In study and work individual and collective creativity was encouraged. While it was understood that students had different abilities, creativity was not seen as only individual. Rather the view was that it comes from combined intelligence and cooperative efforts of many people. Discourse of study and work graduated middle school students ready to contribute to socialist society."

"Of the 1970 graduates of one Beijing middle school, 60% started working in factories, 30% went to the countryside to work in small factories and health clinics, schools or in the fields and 10% joined the army and some went into study at universities or technical universities."

"When Qinghua University in Beijing reopened in June 1970 under the worker peasant soldier student study program, 45% of the students were selected by factories, 40% by the rural communes and 15% by the PLA. Before the cultural revolution, 60% of students were of non-working class origin.”

And uh just an aside Drew's note, when Qinghua reopened that month, only seven, count them, seven students in the entire university were accepted from bourgeois, landlord, or petty bourgeois backgrounds.

So yeah, anyways, to continue the quote from the ML-MLM RSG, “it was expected that these worker-peasant-soldier students would be more mature, more motivated, and have greater knowledge of the pressing problems of Chinese society. For students who hadn't graduated from senior middle school, a special half-year course was provided before they began their regular program at Beijing University.”

So, as we can see, the new university system was going to be built on a completely new basis of actual Marxist pedagogy that would transform the people and the nation, not just, you know, replicating the western or even old Stalin era Soviet university systems.

On July 1st, all major newspapers shared an editorial to mark the Communist Party's 49th anniversary. Communists should be the advanced elements of the proletariat. It's a really interesting article and I think uh I really honestly think all communists should study it to be honest. It might be good for comrades to study it as part of like a study group or when uh doing research about party building in one's own country.

A month later on August 1st, you know, Army Day in China, Zhou Enlai and Chen Boda attended a Ministry of Defense reception marking the PLA's 43rd anniversary where, oddly enough, a Soviet armed forces delegation was also present, just like that at the May 20th anti-US imperialism rally.

Um the next day Zhou Enlai greeted a delegation from the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen, South Yemen, and accompanied them from the airport. Hundreds of thousands of Beijing lined the route to greet them.

Mao also met with them and told the delegation that the USSR was going to try to use economic aid to control them, but said that China's aid would be unconditional.

In the conversation with Mao, however, what's interesting is that the South Yemenis asked why, um you know they had defeated the British, why hadn't the Chinese defeated the British when it came to Hong Kong? And Mao simply said he lets them keep Hong Kong for now because it's useful as a trade and diplomatic outpost.

Then on August 13th, in a meeting about revising the state constitution, Air Force commander Wu Faxian tried to add a reference to Mao's genius guiding China. And Chen Boda agreed. Now notice this is interesting because we're talking not about the party constitution. We're talking about the country's constitution.

Wu Faxian obliquely accused Zhang Chunqiao, who opposed the change, of trying to use Mao's great humility to sideline Mao Zedong Thought. Chen Boda invited Wu Faxian to discuss their class with Zhang Chunqiao earlier uh and asked Huang Yongsheng to brief Ye Qun on what had happened.

The next day, Chen Boda and Huang Yongsheng arrived at the state constitution drafting committee armed with quotes to defend references to Chairman Mao's great genius. Zhang Chunqiao let the genius draft pass. Uh but Lin actually correctly predicted that this would be a big issue at the upcoming central committee plenum in Lushan.

August 18th, Edgar Snow, who had been invited to China for the first time since 1960 on Ma's initiative, met with Zhou Enlai and conducted an interview. In it, Zhou Enlai said that he felt that soon the time would be right for true friends of China to enter the country. And indeed, a year indeed a year later, a large amount of friendship tours of China began to be offered by Chinese travel agencies.

All right, now we're getting to the big part. Um we are going to be discussing probably the most important part of this of uh 1970. And uh this this event is why this episode is going to be a bit long. So uh you may want to get some snacks and a drink.

So, if you guys know where Lushan is, it's in Jiangxi Province. It's where the 1962 Lushan conference happened. Um, and on August 19th, Mao arrived at Lushan and ascended the mountain. On the 22nd, Zhou Enlai held an expanded politburo meeting in the evening during which he affirmed that yes, Mao did not want to serve as state chairman. Despite uh telling the leaders that he wouldn't, Lin Biao volunteered to address the central committee plenum's opening session on the 23rd.

So on August 23rd, 1970, Mao presiding over the plenum told Lin Bao not to criticize Zhang Chunqiao by name when speaking on the genius issue. As the plenum opened, top leaders followed Mao into the hall, waving the little red book. The plenum's agenda comprised mainly of the state constitution, the economy, and war preparedness. Mao had called for the meeting to be one of unity and victory.

In an hour-long speech, Lin Bao stood by enshrining Mao Zedong Thought in the state constitution as the nation's guiding principle. Lin continually labeled Mao a genius and navigated the state chairmanship issue with the formulation of head of the proletarian dictatorship. Kang then made the next speech along similar lines to Lin's. He explicitly stated that the people wanted Mao to be state chairman.

Then Lin Bao's wife Ye Qun and then of course Chen Boda visited Li Zuopeng, Wu Faxian and Qiu Huizuo to discuss pushing the genius of Mao rather than the state chairmanship. Chen Yi asked Wang Dongxing whether uh whether to self-criticize at the plenum and Wang told him no. Zhang Chunqiao will be in the firing line instead.

Wu Faxian got the politburo to agree to put the distribution and discussion of Lin Biao's unexpected speech at the top of the plenum agenda. And on Zhou Enlai's orders, Wang Dongxing checked with Mao whether to distribute Lin Biao's speech. Mao just shrugged and said, "I have no opinion, so print it."

The next day, on the 24th, Wang Dongxing printed a set of Engels, uh, Lenin and Mao quotes compiled overnight by Chen Boda as a Marxist basis for labeling Mao a genius. The central committee members listened twice to a tape of Lin Biao's speech from the day before before breaking into regional workshop sessions.

The North China group was led by Chen Boda and Chen obliquely attacked Lin Biao for denying the existence of Chairman Mao's genius and that he was supposedly insulting and debasing Mao.

Chen alleged that some counterrevolutionaries jumped for joy on hearing that Mao would not be state chairman and Guō Mòruò supported him on that. Chen Yi said that Mao was the best person to be state chairman and that his genius is a historical fact, which had some in the party had conspired to deny.

Wang Dongxing told the North China group also that his uh military unit 8341 wanted to wanted Mao to serve as state chairman.

In the Southwest group, Wu Faxian used Lin Biao's forward to the little red book to make his own defense of the theory of genius. And in the margins of the meeting, Wu Faxian told two delegates that he was criticizing Zhang and had discussed doing so with Ye Qun.

Li Zuopeng warned the South Central group of the existence of a wind against Marxism Leninism and against Mao and Lin Bao themselves. In Zhang Chunqiao's East China group Wang Hongwen sided with Zhang's uh critics actually and told that he supported the theory of genius.

One cadre in the East China group told Zhang Chunqiao that he should be sent for labor reform for denying Mao's genius. Zhang turned pale but said that he was simply opposing dogmatism, not opposing chairman Mao.

The next day, the North China group sent a briefing around the plenum calling the deniers of the genius theory reactionaries, traitors, and careerists just like Liu Shaoqi.

The briefing told central committee members to overcome the efforts of swindlers and make Mao state chairman and Lin Bao his deputy. Mao received the briefing and a petition from central committee members asking him to reconsider his decision not to serve as state chairman. Jiang Qing brought Zhang Chunqiao and Yao Wenyuan to visit Mao and complained about Chen Boda.

She accused Chen of trying to drag out Zhang. Mao scolded Wong Dongxing for failing to quash the state chairmanship issue, even after sending him to block it at the politburo way back in March.

Mao then summoned the politburo at short notice and told them all angrily that if they want him to die soon, well, that's the best that making him state chairman would be the best way to do it, accusing Chen Boda of launching a surprise attack when the state chairman issue was settled. Mao ironically proposed Chen take the job. “If you want a state chairmanship so much, why don't you take the job, Chen?”

Mao told the leaders to never raise the state chairmanship issue again. He froze distribution of Lin Biao's plenary speech and told everyone that that day's meeting was over. The next day, Mao suspended the regional groups. He called up Chen Boda into his office for criticism and told him to relay it to Wu Faxian, Li Zuopeng, and Qiu Huizuo.

Upon when meeting with the politburo, Mao resoundedly rejected the four great titles bestowed upon him by Lin Biao and Lin's slogan that his sentences are worth 10,000s from others.

Zhou Enlai and Kang Sheng oversaw Wu Faxian, Li Zuopeng, and Qiu Huizuo in self-criticism sessions later that day and as they did and then the next day generals Wu Faxian, Li Zuopeng, and Qiu Huizuo attended individual criticism sessions once again with Zhou Enlai and Kang Sheng.

Chen asked Wu if it was true that on the 8th uh on the 13th of August that he had accused Zhang Chunqiao of using uh Mao's great humility as an cover to attack Mao.

On August 29th, Lin Biao chaired the politburo. Zhou Enlai blamed Chen Boda for derailing the entire plenary meeting over the state chairmanship idea and the whole genius thing. Chen self-criticized saying that he realized now that it was against chairman Mao's wishes. Wu and Wang also self-criticized.

As the conference went on, tensions continued to grow and criticisms continued to fly. Mao annotated Chen Boda's genius briefing, repudiating the quotation's significance and called Chen's reputation as a theoretician "hollow." He said Chen Boda had never cooperated with him and even conspired with Peng Dehuai when he and Mao clashed at Lushan 11 years prior.

On the 31st, Huang Yongsheng arrived in Lushan. Having originally planned to miss the plenum, aware of his allies' gaff, he visited Mao and told him that he plans to study well. On September 1st, after deleting a perhaps slightly ironic reference to Lin Biao from yesterday's disquisition on Chen Boda, Mao discusses his next speech with Zhou Enlai.

Then Mao distributed the comments about Chen Boda's factionalism and theoretical ignorance to central committee members as simply "some views of mine." Later in the afternoon, Zhou met with Chen. Afterwards, the politburo, having read Ma's blistering "some views of mine," met to criticize Chen.

On the second, Lin Biao chaired a session for top leaders to self-criticize for their part in the Lushan Plenum's stark deviation from what Mao had attended.

On the fourth, Mao deferred that the Lushan plenum is not closed until the 6th. He barred Chen from remaining sessions, but said that he does not need to be purged.

On the 5th, Chen met with Mao and requests to quit politics and work as a simple farm laborer. Instead, Mao instructed him to just simply unite with colleagues. But as we can see, the damage was done.

On that same day, Ye Qun visited with Jiang Qing to make peace after Jiang had objected to Ye's associates attacking Zhang Chunqiao. Jiang accepted the apology and shook Ye's hand.

Jiang Qing said that Chen and Zhang are just literary people scorning each other and said that at the end of the day, she still respected Lin Biao. In a later meeting with Zhou Enlai, Kang Sheng and Huang Yongsheng, Mao said that leaders need to read more Marxist books to understand theory.

Mao also added a line about convening the National People's Congress again to a plenum communique draft then approved it for group discussion. Lin Biao chaired the next day on the 6.

Lin Bao chaired the close of the Lushan plenum. Leaders passed a communique which said that the whole party had achieved unprecedented unity.

When Lin Biao invited Mao to address the meeting, Mao declined and asked Zhou Enlai instead. Zhou uh simply uh repeated the points from the communique that had just passed. And with that, the Lushan conference ended.

But let me tell you, it was, as you guys can see, it was uh not exactly uh a great a great victory for party unity. Um, in fact, all historians pretty much say that this is the point, this is the point where Mao and Lin begin to fracture and become, you know, their differences become irreconcilable and this begins the slow buildup to the Lin Biao incident in September of 1971.

Um, Jin Qiu says in her book, the uh the culture of power, the Lin Biao incident and the cultural revolution, um, I'm going to quote from her. She says,

"According to the written record of Lin's speech at the opening session, Lin emphasized the importance of the new constitutions confirming Mao's position as a great leader, head of state, and supreme commander. "

"By saying that Lin revealed his opinion that there should be a state chairmanship and that Mao should hold the office. Lin also suggested that the constitution acknowledged that Mao Zedong Thought is at the guiding principle of the country. "

"Further he stated that it could not be denied that Mao was a genius” which was, as I said before, a reply to Zhang Chunqiao's previous speech at the constitution preparation meetings.

Lin however did not mention Zhang's name as Mao requested. delegates received Lin's speech favorably, especially those who knew of the conflict between Lin's group and the former cultural revolution group.

Most of the delegates had, and this is important y'all, most of the delegates had suffered during the red guard stage of the Cultural Revolution and still resented the treatment they had received.

When they learned that Zhang Chunqiao was the individual Lin was criticizing for opposing the idea that Mao was a genius, many of them took pleasure in Zhang's misfortune. So, a lot of uh a lot of these guys who uh had been toppled and then rehabilitated were like, "All right, if we dogmatically claim that Mao is a genius, if we all side with Lin Biao, this is our chance to get back at the Maoist left."

Um, another thing that Jin says is that uh Mao was uh actually really concerned about this point because military control of the governments seemed to have become an obstacle to rebuilding an effective civilian administrative system. It was time for the PLA to hand power back to the civilian administration.

And this may have affected Mao's decision to side with the cultural revolutionaries against Lin and the military. So I think that there is definitely some truth to that. I think that at that point um Mao was realizing how this - he had realized for a while but now it was like really right in front of his face how disproportionately powerful the PLA was within the government and within the party and he wanted to find some way to curtail that.

All right. Well, thankfully on a happier note, on National Day, October 1st, major newspapers carried a joint editorial, Advance from Victory to Victory, marking the 21st anniversary of the founding of the PRC.

While leaders and assorted dignitaries waited for the National Day rally and parade to start, Mao met with Edgar Snow inside the Tiananmen gate. Snow apologized for criticizing the cultural revolution in a book which he said he now realized was wrong.

Mao said, "Oh, I hadn't read that." Assuring Snow that his main critics were ultra-leftist and were now sidelined, Mao said that foreign friends should get some leeway anyway. Mao then told Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia that the best way to train his army is by fighting. American West Point graduates arrive in Vietnam ill-prepared.

And then after that, 10,000 balloons were released and a great grand speech by Lin Biao was given. The dignitaries watched a vast and spectacular parade through Tiananmen Square with giant portraits of Mao featured in many of the parade floats and a 100,000 strong crowd using bouquets to spell out long live chairman Mao. When the parade ended, the 100,000 strong crowd formed ranks and charged towards Mao to wave the little red book and chant 'long live chairman Mao. Long live chairman Mao.'

After nightfall, the leaders returned to the Tiananmen rostrum to watch revolutionary model opera numbers and of course the fireworks. And uh if you want to definitely you can actually watch this parade on YouTube. Just look up uh China October 1st, 1970 National Day Parade. The now defunct channel Revolutionary Front still has uh it up and it's it's pretty good. It's a It's a really good uh video and so definitely check that out. Definitely check that out.