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At the Controls. By 1949, when Mao finally rode in triumph into Peking, Liu Shao-chi was firmly established as the man who sat at the control panel of the Chinese Communist Party. It was Liu who developed the subtle process that he calls "self-cultivation" but that Americans during the Korean war came to know as "brainwashing." It was Liu who in 1954 served as Mao's hatchetman in the great internal party fight that ended with the suicide of Kao Kang, the Red boss of Manchuria—an act described as "the ultimate betrayal of the party." Above all, it was Liu who trained the party's cadres, viewing them, says a leading U.S. expert on Communist China, South Carolina's Professor Richard L. Walker, "as just so many bodies to be transformed into parts of an organizational structure which will function automatically, yet with enthusiasm."
In pursuit of this ideal, Liu put his cadres through one "rectification" campaign after another, obliged luckless party members to admit to such sins as formalism ("holding meetings in a perfunctory way"), commandism ("the political disease of haste"), adventurism ("acting in an arbitrary fashion"), warlordism ("regarding the army as a special power standing outside or above the people"), subjectivism ("bourgeois liberal ideas"), sectarianism ("excessive use of party jargon"), or other misdeeds such as acting the hero, tailism, mountain-topism and closed-doorism. To Westerners such charges had an Alice-in-Wonderland ring. To Mao Tse-tung they were proof that Liu was on the job, honing the edges of the world's "purest" and -most massive Communist Party.
Not by Fervor Alone. Characteristically, when Mao last year decreed the big leap that was to enable Red China to "surpass Britain" as an industrial power, Liu was in the front rank shouting slogans. Government administrators and industrial managers protested that the method of "blindly advancing" was wasteful of manpower and resources. Liu sneered back that they were "failing to see the wood for the trees." And when Mao made his momentous decision to herd China's peasants into 26,000 military* style communes, Liu was right behind him once again. With the help of the communes, glowed Liu, "we shall realize true Communism very soon."
In fact, the creation of the communes was motivated less by ideology than by a desperate desire to harness China's greatest natural resource: people. In the dreams of the Red planners, the communes loomed as at least the beginning of an answer to all China's economic problems. Did China need more pig iron? It was smelted in backyard blast furnaces the length and breadth of the land. More coal? New mines were hastily dug. Shock brigades of peasants shuttled wearily from fields to furnaces and back again, working late into the night "fighting production battles."