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A Ghost of Maoist Fervor Lives On in Disgrace

For 10 years, Wang Li worked side by side with Mao and then became one of the most ardent firebrands of the early Cultural Revolution, helping to topple scores of Communist Party elders, some of whom survived to rule again.

Now at age 75, he lives impoverished in a tiny apartment in western Beijing, where he is ailing from stomach cancer. Since emerging in 1982 from prison, where he was held for 15 years, he has sent 104 petitions to the Chinese leadership seeking rehabilitation, but it has never come.

In the minds of current party leaders, Mr. Wang, one of the last surviving leaders of the Cultural Revolution, personifies some of the most violent excesses of the onset of China's most tumultuous political upheaval since Mao's Communists took power in Beijing in 1949.

Though he regards himself as a scapegoat for much of the chaos that Mao loosed from 1966 to 1976, he continues to praise the party that has shunned him for nearly 30 years.

"I have no regrets about my actions," Mr. Wang said in the only interview with a foreign journalist he has given since his release from prison. "I made mistakes. It was all right to make mistakes in those times, as long as you corrected them.

"But I became the scapegoat for the whole party. They said that I caused the chaos throughout the country."

Prison, he said, "was the most painful period for me."

"I was not allowed to use pen and paper until 1980," he said.

Like an old ghost from a bygone era, Mr. Wang seems weighted down by the chains he forged in life. The party has yet to forgive him, even though he asserts that luminaries like Deng Xiaoping, the country's paramount leader, and Wang Guangmei, the widow of former President Liu Shaoqi, have had nothing but good things to say about him. Liu and Deng were purged as China's two leading "capitalist roaders" during the Cultural Revolution.

But perhaps because Mr. Wang and his comrades incited so much violence by their calls to "bombard the headquarters" -- attack party leaders -- on Mao's behalf, some revolutionary elders who survived those years are unable to forget.

"Wang Li is a classic scapegoat of the extremism of the early Cultural Revolution," said Geremie R. Barme, a China scholar at the Australian National University. "This is not to say that he was not a willing participant and an opportunist, but you have to remember that Wang Li and people like him were empowered by full sessions of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, including Deng Xiaoping and others.

"We know that Wang Li was persecuted for crimes against numerous leaders, but we also know that lurking behind his excesses were instructions from Mao and Zhou Enlai, and these may surface if the party archives are ever opened."

For now, the party leaders feel "there is no need to rehabilitate him," Mr. Barme said, adding that Mr. Wang "can safely be blamed" for the "war crimes" of the Cultural Revolution.

In 1966, as a propagandist drafted by Mao from the Communist Party's Red Flag magazine, Mr. Wang rose to become a member of the Leading Group of the Cultural Revolution, a body at times more powerful than the party's Politburo.

To be known as a leader of the May 16th Brigade, as Mr. Wang was, inspired fear and awe among the millions of Red Guards roaming the country. It was a time when all of China seemed riveted on the unfolding events of the Cultural Revolution.

To Westerners, these episodes, if they were ever understood, have dimmed from memory, but for someone who was at the epicenter of history with Mao, they burn as if they occurred yesterday.

"I worked side by side with Mao Zedong for 10 years," from 1957 to 1967, "and Deng Xiaoping was there during that time, too," said Mr. Wang, as the wisps of his white hair caught the morning sunlight that splashed across his wooden desk littered with writings, calligraphy brushes and his pain.

"He was not a god," Mr. Wang said of Mao. "He was just an ordinary man and he made mistakes, and he had a bad temper sometimes."

The chaos of the Cultural Revolution included riots and mass rallies at which leaders, university presidents, teachers and literary figures were hauled out for political "struggle" that often turned into beatings and torture.

Countless thousands were killed or hounded into suicide, while museums, libraries and priceless cultural relics were sacked or destroyed.

Some of China's most revered leaders, like President Liu and Marshal Chen Yi, then the Foreign Minister, were thrown into prisons where they languished without medical attention and later died.

Mr. Wang, who delivered a fiery speech at the Foreign Ministry on Aug. 7, 1967, was blamed for inciting the violent takeover of the ministry building that month and the rampage of Red Guards through foreign embassy areas.

Today, Mr. Wang denies taking part in any of the violence at the ministry, but he admits that his speech was "somewhat excessive at certain points," and thus may have incited the violence. He adds that Mao read his speech in advance.

"I was one of the initiators of the so-called theory to 'continue the revolution under the proletarian dictatorship,' " Mr. Wang said. This call to unceasing class struggle was the call to anarchy that became the party's "basic line," which Mao exploited to purge his rivals from the party.

In that first year of the Cultural Revolution, from 1966 to 1967, Mr. Wang said, "I took part in almost all of the drafting of important decisions, circulars and commentaries from the party's Central Committee."

"Most of them, in today's point of view, are wrong," he continued, "and although I did these things according to Mao Zedong's instructions, I, as a writer of these documents, had major responsibilities for the mistakes."

Mr. Wang's meeting with a foreign reporter was arranged at the third-floor walk-up apartment that the Communist Party has assigned to him and his wife, Wang Bingquan.

Seated in his unheated study, where he has written his memoirs, he seemed a pale reflection of the firebrand who in July 1967 stood atop the Gate of Heavenly Peace overlooking a rally of one million Red Guards in Tiananmen Square as he was declared the "hero" who had stood up for Mao during the bloody confrontation in the central city of Wuhan earlier that month.

In Wuhan, competing revolutionary bands had declared war on each other, and hundreds died in the skirmishing. Mr. Wang himself was taken hostage by a band of 200 partisans armed with guns, knives and spears.

"Both of my legs were broken," he says. Mao was forced to flee the city, and Mr. Wang only escaped with the help of Zhou Enlai, the Prime Minister.

Mr. Wang sighed and chuckled as he remembered that "triumphant" return to Beijing. Mao's wife, Jiang Qing -- the top leader of the Cultural Revolution after Mao himself -- escorted him to the parapet of power overlooking Tiananmen Square.

"She told me, 'This whole show is not for you.' " In fact, Mr. Wang said, she added: "I don't care if you had been beaten to death in Wuhan. This show is for Mao, for his reputation."

Raising his delicate hands from the arms of his chair, Mr. Wang said, "That was when I was raised up to heaven, and it was not long before I was plunged into hell."

Referring to his arrest and imprisonment a month later for the excesses at the Foreign Ministry and the attack on the British Embassy, he said, "I realized then that I would have a short political life and, as the brightest star of China, I would soon disappear."

Never charged with specific crimes, the imprisoned Mr. Wang took a sizable share of the blame for inciting much of the violence of 1967.

If Mr. Wang wished he could rewrite any chapter in history, it would be the long estrangement between China and the United States.

And the greatest lesson of the Cultural Revolution, he said, was the abuse of power. "There should be the means to control personal power," he said, "to prevent any individual from abusing power and from making great mistakes."