Chen Boda is undoubtedly a geek.
With a pen, he became the fourth most important person in the party, once ranked fourth in the Politburo, the highest-ranking of Mao's more than 30 secretaries, but it did not take long for him to fall, becoming the heaviest and sentenced to prison, falling from the cloud of nine clouds to the ground.
Chen Boda's life is legendary.
His articles spread all over the world, and his life's work was to write for the text. His articles, all written on a commissioned basis, are so astonishing that some have called them fashion works. Indeed, for decades, his articles have been dragging the vane of the times, and they are all the rage, and they are more popular than any article written by any literati.
When the "Cultural Revolution" broke out in 1966, Chen Boda seized power in the People's Daily and wrote an article on the spot entitled "Sweeping Away All Cows, Ghosts, snakes, and gods." The article was published on the front page of the People's Daily on June 1 as an editorial. The article declares that the climax of a great proletarian cultural revolution is rising in socialist China, which accounts for a quarter of the world's population. Shocked the nation.
At the time, the People's Daily had a daily circulation of about 1.8 million copies, and the newspaper on that day added 137,000 copies to that number.
"Sweeping Away All Cows, Ghosts, Snakes, and Gods," the first emergency general mobilization order of the Cultural Revolution, a slogan that came to be known as "an atomic bomb that blew up the whole country" and affected China for a decade. Eventually, it also became one of the charges chen boda convicted and prosecuted.
However, Zeng Yanxiu, who worked with Chen Boda in Yan'an, said:
Chen Boda is not a politician, he does not want to be a politician...
Why?
Because this big pen is writing articles endlessly, the next pen is like a god, once he officially speaks on stage, it is difficult for him to speak for five minutes.
In early May 1951, the first national propaganda conference was held, followed by Tian Jiaying, Yu Guangyuan, Li Shu, Wang Zongyi, and Wang Huide. I know all these people very well. These people also have a characteristic, they all speak more casually. Chen Boda spoke on the stage for twenty or thirty minutes, and he knew that first of all, Wang Zong was attacking. Wang Zongyi's speech was quite sharp. He said, oh, oh, look at this guy, here it is again, here it is again. Several others followed with sarcasm. At that time, I felt that his prestige had plummeted, not by a few people, but by so many directors of the Propaganda Department who took him as a joke.
This shows how poor Chen Boda's eloquence is.
In fact, Chen Boda's eloquence is not bad, but he is on the stage and on the big scene. If you usually chat, he is better than anyone, the world is north and south, ancient and modern, Chinese and foreign, gushing, funny and humorous, people are eager to listen, long listening. The young people in Yan'an were loyal fans of his small talk every night. Someone recalled:
Chen Boda's influence on us is "personal teaching". In the evening, after dinner, we took the stools to his cave and listened to him talk.
Chen Boda lived in a cave with a small kang in it, and he lay on the kang. We're in our 20s, he's in his 40s, he's an old man, chubby, short, and casual. The cave could accommodate up to ten people, and we couldn't squeeze in, so we listened to him outside. He blows everything, in heaven, on earth, in everything.
The little caves can't be squeezed in" people, how hot Chen Boda is! Everyone would rather listen outside, "outside" is not comfortable, big winter, the north wind blows strongly, strangely cold. The fierce cold wind in northern Shaanxi could not drive away Chen Boda's fans, and how attractive his eloquence was!
How much magic chen Boda has in small talk and gossip is, people who have not experienced it cannot imagine it.
In Yan'an, not only ordinary young people loved to listen to Chen Boda's small talk, but even Supreme Leader Mao Zedong loved to listen. Zeng Yanxiu recalled:
In Yan'an, who were the guests of Mao Zedong's cave dwellings? There is probably only one thing that can be casually talked about outside of business, that is, Chen Boda, and I don't know of a second one. Zhou Enlai and Zhu De talked about official affairs, Chen Boda did not talk about official affairs, and Chen Boda went to listen to Mao's small talk. Mao also needs to be entertained and to find people to gossip about.
Mao Zedong's knowledge and speculation were almost unmatched inside and outside the party, and the only person who could chat with him privately was Chen Boda, so it is no wonder that he did not become Mao Zedong's secretary later.
Of course, Chen Boda became Mao Zedong's secretary, not by his ability to gossip and gossip, but by his magic pen like Ma Liang.
The Yan'an rectification began in 1941 with Mao Zedong's publication of Transforming Our Learning. Soon, Chen Boda wrote two articles that were very important to the rectification movement, "almost turning over the history of the party", one called "Reading the Report on the Investigation of the Peasant Movement in Hunan", and the other called "Revolution and Counter-Revolution in the Ten Years of Civil War" (later renamed "On the Ten Years of Civil War"). The titles of the two articles are plain and unobtrusive, but they played a very important and important role in building Mao's lofty prestige. Zeng Yanxiu said:
These two articles theoretically put forward for the first time that Mao Zedong was always correct in the practice of the Chinese revolution, and that he was the only correct leader. These two articles have played an incomparably important role in establishing this view. Therefore, Chen Boda rectified the situation in Yan'an, and he made great efforts to support Mao and say that Mao was the only correct and supreme leader of the Chinese Communist Party. These two articles were supported by everyone at the time, and in fact played a great role in our young people's resolute support for Mao.
You must know that those young people in Yan'an are not simple, most of them are college students and intellectuals. Those intellectuals are not easy to tame, such as Xiao Jun, such as Wang Shiwei, it is not easy to let intellectuals subdue a person! Chen Boda's pen did it, and he defeated Wang Shiwei's pen with his own pen. These two articles of his made the young people read them over and over again. Many people still remember and sigh many years later: "In fact, we read these two articles many times during the Yan'an period. And this kind of reading is unofficial, but voluntary, unconscious, and it is in this voluntary and unconscious that they have obeyed the great man, Mao Zedong!
Chen Boda's pen was sharp, and Yan'an was shocked.
And his pen soon surprised the world.
The name of this unknown Chen Boda let the whole Chinese know, that is, to make his pen holder famous for thousands of years, "Commenting on the Fate of China".
In 1943, Chiang Kai-shek published "The Destiny of China" by Tao Xisheng, saying that China's future should be reunified, to build a country, and to strengthen the country, but everything should be under the leadership of the Kuomintang and one party, and the fate of China was all in the hands of the sole leader, Chiang Kai-shek, and that nothing would happen without Chiang Kai-shek. After the article was published, it caused great repercussions in Yan'an, triggering a "decisive battle for the hearts and minds of the kuomintang" between the Kuomintang and the Communists. The main general of the decisive battle is Chen Boda.
After reading the article signed by Chiang Kai-shek, Mao Zedong said to Chen Boda and others: "Chiang Kai-shek has given you a title and asked you to make an article!" ”
Chen Boda began to write and comment on Chiang Kai-shek's book. He later said:
"I wrote for three days and three nights in one breath (of course, I had to eat and have a little rest), and I was so excited to write and cry at the same time, because of great indignation."
Chen Boda and Chiang Kai-shek shouted, and his article, titled "Commenting on the Fate of China," is full of revolutionary feelings, but it is not simply anti-Chiang Kai-shek and supports the Communist Party, but the tip of the pen is emotional and resonates with people.
On July 21, "Commenting on the Fate of China" was published in Yan'an, using three pages of "Liberation Daily".
After the article was published, Zhou Enlai immediately sent it to Chongqing with an internal telegram, and asked Xinhua Daily to print and distribute pamphlets in the Kuomintang area. When Chiang Kai-shek saw this, he was greatly annoyed, so he internally ordered a ban and called it "Chen Boda rebellion".
In Yan'an, it was a different story entirely. This newspaper became a best-selling newspaper read by everyone, and luoyang paper was expensive for a while. Yu Guangyuan, who has always looked down on Chen Boda, could not admit it after several decades: "Chen Boda's article was so sharply mentioned and refuted so forcefully, I had to admire it. ”
Those young people in Yan'an were even more touched. Decades later, some people still vividly remember how it felt to read this article:
Chen Boda talked about Chiang Kai-shek's massacre of the Communist Party in 1927, and said that chiang kai-shek massacred many revolutionaries, and used three sentences, decades later, and still remembers. He said: The blood shed by Chiang Kai-shek in killing people is "really too much, really too much, really too much." "It's really too much", it was used three times in a row, generally twice, and he used it three times, which was extremely painful. I still have to cry when I say it, which is called endless words and endless sorrow. The power of Chen Boda's article to move people is probably rare since the founding of the Communist Party.
This pen also brought Great Honor to Chen Boda, but also brought love — his second marriage. After the publication of "Commenting on the Fate of China", Yu Wenfei (niece of Lieutenant General Zhan Caifang) was impressed by his literary talent, and despite the difference of 14 years and the second marriage, she gladly fell in love with him and married.
It was such a skill of idle blowing in the south of the sea, such a sharp pen as a gun, that Chen Boda began to lay a position in Yan'an and even the whole party.
Generally speaking, Chen Boda's political status in Yan'an was not very high, not even a member of the Central Committee at that time, but his prestige was higher than that of all the cultural people in Yan'an, and far higher than that of Zhou Yang. At that time, there were probably hundreds of people in Yan'an who were inside and outside the party.
Before the Yan'an rectification, Chen Boda did not have a fixed position, but as a heavyweight cultural person living in Yan'an, he could chat with Mao Zedong, he could give personal lectures, he could write some battle essays, but his position was not high, and his work was not very heavy. However, at the Seventh Party Congress in 1945, he jumped into the leadership of the Party Central Committee in the election of the Congress, which surprised almost everyone.
At that time, the Party Central Committee was very refined, with 1.2 million party members in the country, only 44 members of the Central Committee and 23 alternate members, for a total of only 67 people. "The members of the Central Committee ... Most of them are the founders of the cause of the Communist Party of China... The political weight of the alternate members is also not light" (Yu Guangyuan), Chen Boda was actually ranked among the 67 people.
This is already strange!
Even more strange, among the 23 alternate members of the Central Committee, Chen Boda ranked third. Before him was Liao Chengzhi and Wang Jiaxiang, and after him were Huang Kecheng and Wang Shoudao... And this ranking is not artificially or arranged according to the stroke of the last name, but according to the number of votes obtained in the election.
No one in Chen Boda's literary talent does not sigh, and Chen Boda is also worthy of the reputation of "Yan'an's big pen pole".
Later, Chen Boda relied on this pen to write "The Four Great Families of China", "The People's Enemy Chiang Kai-shek", and became Mao Zedong's secretary. After the founding of New China, he has been by Mao Zedong's side, assisting Mao in his writing work, successively drafting the resolution on the co-operation of agriculture in New China, first proposing the "Controversy of a Hundred Schools of Thought," drafting the "Historical Experience of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat" of the Sino-Soviet Controversy, and drafting the "May 16 Circular" and "Sweeping Away All Cattle, Ghosts, snakes, and gods" that launched the "Cultural Revolution" movement. He also became the head of the Central Cultural Revolution Group, entered the Politburo, and in 1969 ranked behind Mao Zedong, Lin Biao, and Zhou Enlai in the Politburo Standing Committee at the Ninth Party Congress, and before Kangsheng, ranked fourth in the Fifth Standing Committee, becoming the fourth person in China.
This is Chen Boda.
His inexplicable pen is a miracle.
In the history of China's revolution and construction, Chen Boda's pen is unique, writing a glorious or painful history. It is used in the good aspect, such as the dagger, the tip of the gun, and the incomparably powerful heavy cannon, such as "Commenting on the Fate of China", "The Four Great Families of China", and "The Historical Experience of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat"; in the bad aspect, the destructive power is extremely huge, and it is an infinite scourge, such as "May 16 Notice" and "Sweeping Away All Cows, Ghosts, Snakes and Gods".
Chen Boda, a geek with both ghosts and ghosts.
Interestingly, Chen Boda started with the barrel of a pen, and in August 1970, at the Lushan Conference, Mao Zedong only wrote one article entitled "My Little Opinion", and also used the pen to easily overthrow him and sentence Chen Boda to political death.