The Lushan Letter

1959 · The Revolutionaries · Work 1040 of 1,871

A diptych in one square frame, divided by a single vertical seam. left half: a plain room in a stone hill-station villa at Guling on a summer morning, rough undressed stone walls, a timber floor, tall casement windows with green-painted frames filling the left wall and giving onto mist and pine outside, a plain ceiling with one bare bulb, rattan armchairs, seven Chinese officials in their fifties in open-necked white cotton shirts with sleeveless knitted wool waistcoats over them, seated close around a plain wooden table and seen from behind, and at the far head of the table facing the camera the man, a bare-headed Chinese man of about sixty with a broad plain face and short cropped hair, dressed as the others in an open-necked white cotton shirt and a sleeveless knitted wool waistcoat, his face fully visible, a small stack of loose duplicated sheets lying on the table in front of him. right half: a terraced hillside at the same hour, rice standing in the paddies, and at the edge of the terrace a crude abandoned backyard furnace, a squat tapering cylinder of rough red brick on a block-stone footing, about twice the height of a man and wide at the base, its top broken open and weathered, a charging opening and tap hole low on one side, and spilling from its foot a wide grey heap of fused slag and clinker, cracked and useless, spreading over the terrace edge into the field, three figures small and distant working in the paddy beyond. warm interior light on the left against cold overcast daylight on the right.

Who
Mao Zedong (1893–1976) led the Chinese Communist Party to power and proclaimed the People's Republic in Beijing on 1 October 1949. With the "Great Leap Forward" he set out from 1958 to turn a peasant country into an industrial power within a few years; crude furnaces went up in villages and backyards, and pots and tools were melted down. A famine followed in which, according to estimates based on census data, 15 to 32 million people died by 1962, according to the historian Frank Dikötter at least 45 million. In 1966 Mao launched the Cultural Revolution, which plunged China into a decade of terror and chaos. His body still lies in a mausoleum on Tiananmen Square. The recognisable face in the picture, however, belongs to Peng Dehuai (1898–1974), the author of the letter: a peasant's son from Hunan, a general of the Red Army, from 1950 commander of the Chinese forces in the Korean War, from 1954 Minister of Defence, a marshal from 1955. Because he contradicted Mao in 1959 he was brought down; arrested and abused in the Cultural Revolution, he died in Beijing in 1974. In 1978 the party reversed the verdict against him.
The moment
In July 1959 the party leadership met at Guling, a hill resort on Mount Lushan in Jiangxi province. Discussions took place in groups; Peng Dehuai sat in the Northwest Group and had spoken there several times. On the evening of 13 July he wrote Mao a personal letter and had it delivered the next morning. He praised the achievements of the Great Leap but also named its mistakes, among them the steel campaign: too many small blast furnaces had been built, wasting material, money and manpower, a rather big loss. On 16 July Mao gave the letter a title, "Comrade Peng Dehuai's Letter of Opinion", and had it duplicated for every participant. The picture shows both side by side: on the left Peng at the head of the table with the stack of copies in front of him, on the right an abandoned backyard furnace at the edge of a rice field, useless slag spilling from its foot.
The other side
The letter was given its title not by its author but by its recipient. Peng had written it for Mao alone and asked for the circulated copies to be withdrawn, in vain. On 23 July Mao declared the letter an anti-party programme. On 16 August the Central Committee passed a resolution against the "anti-party clique" headed by Peng, and on 17 September he lost his post as Minister of Defence. Anyone who had spoken critically, as he had, now faced persecution. The famine lasted until 1962.

What the sources leave open: No image or description of the July 1959 meeting rooms is known; the room follows the building style of the Guling villas and is typified, as are clothing and seating. Sources differ on whether participants received the letter on 16 or 17 July. The furnace stands for many, not for one in particular. Peng's face follows a photograph from 1950.

Further reading

Sources