by Philip Short
Edgar Snow remembered He Zizhen in Bao'an as a gentle, unassuming young woman, half Mao's age, who got on with the household chores, making compote from wild peaches, looking after their fifth, and by then only surviving, child – a daughter, Li Min, born a few months before Snow's arrival. On one occasion, he remembered, ‘both of them suddenly bent over and gave an exclamation of delight at a moth that had languished beside a candle, [a] … lovely thing with wings shaded a delicate apple-green and fringed in a soft rainbow of saffron and rose.’63 But the image of gentleness was deceptive. As Mao himself recognised, He Zizhen had an indomitable spirit, and a tough, unyielding character, rivalling his own. ‘We are like iron and steel,’ he told her after one spectacular row. ‘Unless we try to compromise with each other, both of us will suffer.’ In the event, it was always Mao who had to play the peacemaker. His young wife was too stubborn ever to make the first move.64
In the wilds of Jiangxi, and during the perils of the March, they were bound together by a common imperative of political and physical survival. He Zizhen's lack of education – she had left school at sixteen – hardly seemed to matter. She was intelligent, with a quick mind. She loved Mao. And he, in turn, had considerable affection for her.
In Shaanxi, it was different. Mao spent his nights reading philosophy and his days wrestling with Marxist theory. He was hungry for conversation with fellow intellectuals, and eagerly sought out the students who flocked to Yan'an to join the communist cause. He Zizhen felt excluded.
She was not alone in this. Edgar Snow's wife, Helen, who wrote under the pseudonym Nym Wales, recalled a ‘real crisis in Yan'an in the man–woman relationship’, as the women who had made the Long March found their positions threatened by an influx of talented, beautiful young people, bringing with them the loose morals and casual ways of the cosmopolitan cities of the coast. The feminist writer, Ding Ling, and the American, Agnes Smedley, were especially mistrusted for their anarchistic approach to marriage and advocacy of free love – doctrines that sat ill with the puritanical lifestyle the communists enforced in Yan'an. It was in Agnes Smedley's cave, one evening in late May 1937 that Mao's difficulties with He Zizhen came to a head. Wales, Smedley and her interpreter, a young actress named Lily Wu, were making supper when Mao dropped by. They stayed up until 1 a.m. playing rummy, a game which Snow had introduced to the communists in Bao'an a year earlier, and for which Mao, in particular, had developed a real passion. Helen Snow recorded in her diary:
He was in high spirits that evening … Agnes looked up at [him] worshipfully, with her large blue eyes, which at times had a fanatical gleam. Lily Wu was also looking at Mao with hero-worship. A bit later, I was stunned to see Lily walk over and sit beside Mao on the bench, putting her hand on his knee (very timidly). Lily announced that she had had too much wine … Mao also appeared startled, but he would have been something of a cad to push her away rudely, and he was obviously amused. He also announced that he had had too much wine. Lily then ventured to take hold of Mao's hand, which she repeated from time to time during the evening.65
At the time, no one paid much attention. Helen Snow accepted at face value Lily Wu's explanation that she had had too much to drink. Lily, she wrote, was ‘very pretty with long curls, recently arrived in Yan'an and cutting rather a wide swathe’, and she was unconventional enough – the only woman in Yan'an to wear lipstick – for Mao also to pass it off as of no consequence.III He Zizhen, however, to whose ears the story came next day, took a very different view. She bottled up her feelings, she wrote later, until they ate away her heart.66 When Mao was again late returning home, she stormed round to her young rival's cave. Smedley heard her push open the door:
A woman's shrill voice broke the silence. ‘You idiot! How dare you fool me and sneak into the home of this little bourgeois dance hall strumpet …’ There was Mao's wife standing beside [her husband] beating him with a long-handled flashlight. [She] kept hitting him and shouting until she was out of breath … Mao finally stood up. He looked tired and his voice was quietly severe. ‘Be quiet, Zizhen. There's nothing shameful in the relationship between Comrade Wu and myself. We were just talking. You're ruining yourself as a communist …’ Lily … was standing with her back against the wall like a terrified kitten before a tiger … Brandishing the flashlight she held in one hand, [He Zizhen] scratched Lily's face with the other and pulled her hair. Blood [was] flowing from her head.67
At that point He Zizhen turned on Smedley, who responded by giving her a black eye. She was then escorted home by three of Mao's bodyguards, still vituperating hysterically against her rival.
Shortly afterwards, He discovered that, yet again, she was pregnant. It was the final straw. She was still only twenty-seven years old. She wanted to have a life of her own – not just to go on bearing children for a man from whom she felt increasingly estranged. That summer she told Mao she had decided to leave him.68
Only then, it seems, did Mao realise that he had a problem on his hands.
He Zizhen recalled in her memoirs, published after his death, that he pleaded with her to stay, reminding her of how much they had been through together and telling her how much he cared for her. To prove his sincerity, he ordered both Lily Wu and Smedley to leave Yan'an. But to no avail. At the beginning of August, she set out for Xian, leaving the little girl, Li Min, then only twenty months old, in Mao's care.
He sent her a traditional wooden cosmetic box, which his bodyguards had made, together with a fruit-knife and other articles she had cherished. Again, he asked her to reconsider. Still she would not change her mind.
When Shanghai, her original destination, fell to the Japanese, she set out across Xinjiang to Urumqi, a thousand miles to the east. Thence, the following spring, ignoring a further plea from Mao and disobeying a direct order from the Party hierarchy to return at once to Yan'an, she travelled on to the Soviet Union, where at last she was able to get proper medical treatment for the shrapnel still lodged in her body.
Far from being a new beginning, He Zizhen's sojourn in Moscow dragged her deeper into despair. The baby boy, Mao's son, born soon after she arrived there, died of pneumonia ten months later. While she was still grieving for him, news came that Mao had remarried. She told friends she wished him well, and threw herself into studying. But the image of her dead son haunted her. She became morbidly depressed, and the local authorities eventually had her committed to a mental asylum. Mao arranged for her to return to China in 1947. She continued to receive psychiatric treatment, and for the rest of her life suffered from a persecution complex, convinced that her doctors were trying to poison her.69
Shortly after He's departure, Jiang Qing made her entrance.70
She was then twenty-three years old, a slender, sophisticated young woman, with a wide, sensual mouth, boyish figure and vivacious smile, who bore more than a passing resemblance to He Zizhen as she had looked as a teenager, at the time Mao had first met her, nearly ten years before.
Like the Party's security chief, Kang Sheng, Jiang Qing hailed from a small town in Shandong, about fifty miles from the former German treaty port of Qingdao. Her father was a carpenter; her mother worked for a time as a servant in the household of Kang's gentry parents, while moonlighting as a prostitute. By her own account, Jiang grew up amid crushing poverty. When she was still a small child, her mother fled with her from the family home to escape her husband's beatings. At the age of sixteen, she in turn ran away to join a theatre troupe. Three years later, in the spring of 1933, she reached Shanghai, where she became a minor star, eventually graduating to leading roles in leftist films, like Blood on Wolf Mountain, which urged resistance to Japan, and Western dramas, including Ibsen's The Doll's House. In the process, she was arrested by the Guomindang as a suspected communist and held for some months in prison before suddenly being released, supposedly on the intervention of a mysterious, anonymous foreigner. She had numerous well-publicised love-affairs, and married at least twice, the second time to a literary critic, Tang Na,
whom she so enraged that on several occasions he attempted suicide.
Her motives in travelling to Yan'an were mixed. In Shanghai, her acting career had stalled. Her marriage to the mercurial Tang Na was a liability. She was canny enough to work out that if the war with Japan continued, the city would be a prime target. Yan'an, since the Xian Incident, had been the destination of choice for fashionable young Chinese radicals. Her mentor in the Party (and one-time lover), Yu Qiwei, a young White Area communist underground leader who had been instrumental in bringing Edgar Snow to Bao'an, was also making his way there. On every count, it seemed the best place to be.
Like all new arrivals, she had to undergo a screening process. At first, this did not go well. She had no proof that she had joined the Party in 1932, as she claimed, and there were embarrassing questions (which were never entirely laid to rest) about exactly how she had managed to extricate herself from the clutches of her GMD jailers two years earlier. But in October 1937, Yu Qiwei finally arrived and vouched for her Party credentials, and the following month she was allowed to begin studying Marxism-Leninism at the Party School. Six months later, in April 1938, she moved to the Lu Xun Academy for Literature and Art as an administrative assistant.71
There, that summer, she contrived to catch Mao's eye. There are many stories, all more or less scurrilous, and all unverifiable, about how she did so. All that appears certain is that she, not he, took the initiative. They had been formally introduced soon after she arrived, but at that point Mao was still bent on repairing his relationship with He Zizhen. Now he encountered her again, probably at a theatrical performance, just as he was finally coming to accept that his wife had indeed left him, and that nothing he could do would bring her back.72 Helen Snow, reflecting on his dalliance with Lily Wu, had noted: ‘Mao was the type of man … who especially liked women … [He] liked modern-minded women …’73 Mao's bed was empty, and Jiang Qing fitted the bill.
In August, exactly a year after her arrival in Yan'an (and He Zizhen's departure), she was transferred to work as Mao's assistant, nominally attached to the Military Commission. That autumn they began living together openly, and in November Mao gave a series of dinners for fellow Politburo members at which Jiang Qing officiated as hostess.74 That was the sum of their ‘marriage’. There was no official ceremony, and still less any official divorce. Nor was there any truth to the story, widely circulated after Mao's death, that his peers had imposed three conditions before allowing him to ‘marry’ Jiang Qing: that she should hold no Party post and play no public role, instead occupying herself solely with his private affairs.75
Where there was real concern was over Jiang Qing's past. With her promiscuous Shanghai background; the lingering uncertainties over how she had joined the Party; and the persistent rumours that she had made a deal with the Guomindang to get out of jail – was she an appropriate partner for Mao? Xiang Ying, whose South-Eastern Bureau was responsible for Shanghai, was sufficiently alarmed to write to Mao's confidential secretary, Ye Zilong, warning him about the rumours of her conduct circulating in the city. He concluded bluntly: ‘This person is not suitable to marry the Chairman.’ Others were more circumspect, but entertained similar doubts.76
Mao's response came in two parts.
Officially, he maintained that Kang Sheng, as head of the Party's security apparatus, had conducted a thorough investigation, and found that Jiang Qing had no serious problems. Kang, of course, had his own agenda. Supporting his fellow townswoman was not only a way of ingratiating himself with Mao (and with Jiang Qing herself), but also promised him a privileged channel to the Chairman's ear through Mao's pillow companion.77
As further reassurance, therefore, Mao decided that his new wife should stay in the background, running his private secretariat, as He Zizhen and Yang Kaihui had before her, with no official responsibilities.78 Jiang Qing may have bridled at this arrangement, but it suited Mao very well. He was attracted by her youth and sexuality, just as he had been drawn to Lily Wu. But he wanted a helpmate, not a partner in histrionics. For all his intellectualising about the equal status of women, Mao did not brook rivals, least of all in his marriage-bed.
For a while, the doubters were silenced. Jiang Qing knitted Mao pullovers, and cooked for him the spicy Hunanese dishes he liked. His bodyguard at that time, Li Yinqiao, remembered:
She had jet-black hair, which she wore with a fringe and a hair-band, cut long at the back, delicate eyebrows and bright eyes, a nice nose and generous mouth … In Yan'an, we always thought of her as a star. Her calligraphy, especially in cursive script, was good, she liked horse-riding and playing cards … She could cut out clothes for herself, and look good … At that time she was close to the ordinary people. She cut the bodyguards’ hair and taught them how to sew. On the march, she encouraged them, and taught them guessing games … In the winter, everyone wore thick clothes. But she cut hers so they fitted her tightly, to show off her figure … She was very proud; she liked to be in the limelight. She really liked showing off.79
In August 1940, to Mao's delight, she gave birth to a baby daughter, Li Na (who took her surname, like He Zizhen's daughter, Li Min, from Mao's Party alias, Li Desheng; the girls’ given names came from an aphorism in the Confucian Analects – ‘A gentleman should be slow to speak and quick to act’ – na meaning slow, min quick).80 She was his ninth child, of whom four had survived. Child-bearing, however, was not to Jiang Qing's taste, and she made plain she would not submit to the constant pregnancies that He Zizhen had endured. A year later, when she conceived again, she insisted on having an abortion. The operation was botched. She developed a high fever, and soon afterwards found she was also suffering from tuberculosis. She then had herself sterilised.81
Mao, who, despite his progressive ideas in other spheres, conserved the traditional Chinese attitude equating numerous offspring with happiness, was not pleased.
Other differences arose, too. Mao frequently worked all night and slept during the day. He Zizhen had gone along with these arrangements. Jiang Qing refused. At Yangjialing, Mao had a bed made up in his study so that he could work in peace. After 1942, when they moved to Zaoyuan (Date Garden), another valley two miles further out from Yan'an, where Zhu De and the Red Army Command were based, Jiang Qing occupied separate quarters.82
To the outside world, she appeared a devoted young wife and mother. But, in private, her relationship with Mao was often turbulent. Her importunities that he intercede with the Party hierarchy to get her special treatment particularly enraged him. Then he would shout at her furiously, calling her a bitch and ordering her out of his presence.
Apart from Kang Sheng, Chen Boda and a handful of others, the rest of the Party elite never entirely accepted her. Mao's bodyguard, Li Yinqiao, recalled being at lunch with her one day when she suddenly screamed out: ‘Mother-fucking monsters!’ Seeing his stunned expression, she explained hastily that she meant not him but ‘those people in the Party’ who refused to accept her political bona fides.83 Twenty-five years later, when she became a power in her own right during the Cultural Revolution, she would have her revenge for these perceived humiliations.
It was to Li Yinqiao, too, that Mao confessed, one day in 1947, his own growing disenchantment with her. ‘I didn't marry very well,’ he said ruefully. ‘I rushed into it too lightly.’ Then he sighed. ‘Jiang Qing’, he said, ‘is my wife. If she were one of my staff, I'd get rid of her as soon as I could … But there's nothing I can do. I've just got to put up with her.’84 By then, Mao's son, Anying, and Li Min were both living in his household.IV He would have been less than human if these flesh-and-blood reminders of earlier, happier marriages had not led him to make mental comparisons that were not to Jiang Qing's advantage.85 Even without their presence, though, the relationship was turning sour. In public, appearances were maintained. But from the late 1940s on, Mao increasingly sought female companionship elsewhere.
While Mao was, by his own admission, making a mess of his personal life, his political cau
se prospered. The Party had acknowledged him as its leader. The united front with the Guomindang had given the communists legitimacy – and the potential to win a mass following outside the remote base areas where Chiang Kai-shek had until then confined them – that they had never had before.
Throughout 1938, whatever Mao's private reservations, he had insisted publicly that the GMD should be given the benefit of the doubt. ‘Love and Protect the Communist Party; make it develop and expand. Do the same for the Guomindang,’ he declared. The nationalist party had a ‘glorious history [and] a bright future’; it was ‘the backbone’ of the struggle against Japan, and Sun Yat-sen and Chiang Kai-shek were both 'great leaders’.86
In part, this was a cover to protect himself against Wang Ming's charges that he was too mistrustful of nationalist intentions. In part it was reassurance to Moscow that, despite the sidelining of the Returned Students, the Chinese communists had the Kremlin's interests at heart. But it also reflected an underlying truth. The Guomindang army had 1.7 million men at the outset of the war; the communists roughly 40,000. Chiang's troops had to bear the main burden of resistance to Japan because they alone had the strength to do so. From the Marco Polo bridge incident on, it was the nationalist armies which fought the big conventional battles to try to slow the Japanese advance, while Mao's forces engaged in guerrilla warfare behind Japanese lines. That would remain the pattern for the duration of the war.87
Until the winter of that year, relations between the CCP and the GMD were relatively smooth. But in January 1939, the same month that Chiang Kai-shek agreed to the setting up of a CCP Liaison Office in Chongqing, headed by Zhou Enlai, the GMD leaders approved a secret decision to ‘corrode, contain, restrict and combat’ the Communist Party.88 It was prompted by the belated realisation that Mao was using the communists’ newfound freedom of action not only to harass the enemy but to establish communist base areas in the spaces between the zones of Japanese occupation, procuring a dramatic expansion of communist military strength. By the end of 1938, the Eighth Route Army had grown five times, to 200,000 men. Two years later it would exceed half a million.89 Not all the recruits had weapons, or sufficient ammunition, and further growth would be slowed because the communist bases could not produce enough food to support such an enormous force. None the less, for Chiang, it was the stuff of nightmares. Both he and Mao were well aware that the alliance against their common enemy, Japan, would last only as long as the war and that the moment it was over, the fight to determine which of them would rule China would resume more fiercely then ever. Preventing the growth of communist strength was no less important to the nationalists than defeating Japan. That spring Chiang's forces launched an offensive to beat back communist expansion in the north-west and in neighbouring Shaanxi, provoking Mao to warn ‘We will not attack unless we are attacked ourselves. But if we are attacked, we will certainly counter-attack.’90 The following year 400,000 nationalist troops were detached from the war effort to blockade the area around Yan'an, known as the Shaanxi–Gansu–Ningxia Border Region, and Chiang cancelled a government subsidy to the communists of 180,000 US dollars a month.