During the Cultural Revolution, China's revered premier Zhou Enlai personally took charge of the persecution of all top-ranking members of the Communist Party, according to a new study based on interviews and documents obtained by Michael Schoenhals, associate professor at Stockholm University.
He dismisses many widely-held views not only on Zhou's role but also the supposedly spontaneous nature of political violence during the '10 years of chaos'.
'Chinese historians have long maintained that Zhou succeeded in sparing and protecting a small but significant number of senior officials by occasionally intervening in processes of political persecution managed by others . . . Now it is known that Zhou for many years after 1966 in fact conducted and led these processes himself,' Professor Schoenhals writes in the latest edition of China Quarterly, the prestigious academic journal published in London.
Articles commemorating the 30th anniversary of the start of the Cultural Revolution this month have routinely praised Zhou's role. Time magazine, for example, said he had done 'his best to limit the chaos' but Professor Schoenhals says he was in charge of a previously unknown but powerful body, the Central Case Examination Group (CCEG), which was directly under the Politburo.
According to one of its members, Wang Li, it was similar to Stalin's instrument of state terror, the Cheka, but had even greater powers. Professor Schoenhals argues that although some claim Stalin was more ruthless than Mao Zedong the difference is smaller than many Western historians have thought.
Zhou routinely chaired all meetings of the CCEG which, together with all its provincial and lower-level equivalents, supervised the persecution of two million Communist Party members. The vast majority were found guilty of what Zhou called 'opposing the Chairman'.