by Philip Short
Poplar and willow soar to the highest heaven,
Wu Gang, asked what he has to offer,
Presents them humbly with cassia wine.
The lonely goddess in the moon spreads her ample sleeves
To dance for these good souls in the endless sky.
Of a sudden comes word of the Tiger's defeat on earth
Tears stream down like an upturned bowl of rain.141
The tears (at Chiang Kai-shek's defeat) were bitter-sweet, reflecting Mao's own mood that summer as he cast his mind back to earlier, simpler times.IV
Into the gap left by present loneliness and a past which could never be recaptured, Mao brought, first, a succession of mistresses, and then, in his sixties, the earthier, more anonymous pleasures of physical companionship with much younger women.
The tradition of Saturday-night dances in Yan'an had survived the move to Zhongnanhai. From the dance-floor, Mao and his young partners would gravitate to his study, where they would make love beside the piles of books stacked on his vast bed. The girls came from dance troupes organised by the cultural division of the PLA, chosen both for their looks and their political reliability. Mao's lovemaking, like his dancing, was clumsy, according to one former partner, but varied and indefatigable. The French politician, Maurice Faure, once remarked of François Mitterrand: ‘il a besoin des fluides feminines.’ Mao was the same.
Among the vast collection of historical and literary tomes lining his shelves were copies of the ancient Daoist manuals by which Chinese literati, since immemorial times, had initiated their male descendants into the arts of the bedchamber. They included a Han dynasty text, ‘The Secret Methods of the Plain Girl’, which had particular relevance for older men:
The union of man and woman is like the mating of Heaven and Earth. It is because of their correct mating that Heaven and Earth last forever. Man, however, has lost this secret. If a man could learn [it], he would obtain immortality … The principle of this method is to have frequent intercourse with young girls, but emit semen only on rare occasions. This method makes a man's body light and will expel all diseases … All those who seek to prolong their life must seek life's very source.142
The Chinese are a practical people, behind their outward prudery more tolerant of sexual licence than the Americans or the British. If Mao indulged himself, no one thought much the worse of him. Even Jiang Qing suffered his philandering in silence. The only real criticism of such behaviour in China, and that not voiced until long after his death, was over Mao's hypocrisy: in a country where illicit sex was grounds for sending an ordinary citizen to a labour camp, the Chairman could, and did, fill his bed with as many young women as he wished. The ‘Plain Girl’ and the other old texts offered a fig-leaf of classical authority, justifying his libertine ways as gathering yin, the female essence, to replenish his yang, in a millennial tradition of conserving male potency and health. His bodyguards had a simpler explanation: he had power, and it was his right.
The arrangement suited both sides. Mao's young women were not concubines in the old imperial sense. They were more like groupies, congregating around the Chairman as some young women in the West seek out racing drivers and pop singers. For a while, they basked in the reflected glory of his bed, proud beyond measure of their good fortune. Then Mao's aides ensured they were married off to good communist husbands.143
Among his entourage, some surmised that he was becoming obsessed with old age, fending off intimations of mortality.144 But Li Yinqiao probably had it best when he said Mao surrounded himself with young people to escape from solitude. Young women served that purpose. So did the young men who were his body-servants. In the last twenty years of his life, Mao himself acknowledged, they became his surrogate family.145 He saw far more of them than of his own daughters, who spent most of their time at boarding school. The bodyguards gave him his nightly sleeping pills and massaged away his insomnia; they helped him to dress; they served his meals; they watched his every move. But they were an impermanent family, whose members could be dismissed at a whim; a simulated family, involving no responsibilities, no worries and no binding ties.
Beyond this tight, small circle, Mao, in his years of untrammelled power, was cut off from all normal human contact. His relations with the rest of the Politburo were exclusively political. Where Stalin had caroused late into the night with his cronies, Mao withdrew further and further into the seclusion of his own thoughts. Friendship was ruled out. ‘The relationship between man and “god” is one of prayer, and of the answer to prayer,’ wrote Li Yinqiao, years later. ‘There can be no exchange between them on an equal footing.’146
Before, much of Mao's attention had been devoted to military affairs – civil war, war with Japan, civil war again and then war in Korea. After 1953, only politics remained.
The ‘Hundred Flowers’ movement had been Mao's first attempt to break away from the rigid top-down command system of Soviet communism, and to find a distinctive Chinese path for the state he now ruled. Khrushchev had disapproved.147 In private, Mao retorted that the Russians’ minds were petrified, they were abandoning Marxist-Leninist fundamentals.148
When the experiment came to a bruising end amid the anti-Rightist campaign, he began hankering once more after the old tried-and-tested strategy of mass mobilisation, used to such good purpose in the collectivisation movement.
He had attempted to apply this principle to the economy in the spring of 1956. But the so-called ‘Little Leap Forward’ had foundered, as local cadres set impossibly high targets, and peasants and disgruntled workers downed tools in protest. When Zhou Enlai had urged a slower pace, Mao had reluctantly agreed. An editorial in the People's Daily on the theme of ‘opposing rash advance’, which had been sent for his approval, was returned, marked in his handwriting with the two words: ‘Not read’.149
At the time he had explained away this setback by arguing that in economic construction, as in warfare, advance was never in a straight line, but came in successive waves. ‘There are ups and downs,’ he said, ‘with one wave chasing another … Things must develop and go forward in accordance with the laws of the waves.’ The ‘Little Leap’ had failed, he suggested, because it coincided with a ‘trough’ in China's economic advance; at a more propitious moment of the cycle, it might succeed far better.150
In the autumn of 1957, Mao decided that the moment had come to try again.
This time, most of the rest of the leadership agreed. The Soviet model was perceived to be failing. The co-operatives were not generating the agricultural surpluses necessary to finance a Soviet-style industrialisation programme; the intellectuals, needed to run it, had shown themselves unreliable; and Soviet financial aid, to help pay for it, was not available – because the Russians were using their money to shore up their client states in eastern Europe.151 A consensus was emerging that an alternative means would have to be found to jump-start China's economy, translating surplus rural labour power into industrial capital.
Alongside these practical imperatives, the political context had changed.
Throughout the ‘Hundred Flowers’ in the spring, Mao had repeated constantly the formula approved by the Eighth Congress, that class struggle was ‘basically over’.152 After the anti-Rightist campaign started in June, he argued that while ‘large-scale turbulent class struggle’ was ‘in the main at an end’, class struggle per se was very much alive.153 The principal contradiction in Chinese society, he now held, was not economic, as the Congress had wrongly claimed, but the old, elemental fault-line between ‘the socialist and capitalist roads’.154 In short, the stage had been set for a renewed upsurge of Leftism.
At a Central Committee plenum in October, Mao envisaged a radiant future based on economic revolution in the countryside. China, he said, would attain the highest crop yields in the world. Steel production would reach 20 million tons annually within fifteen years (four times the 1956 production level). More bizarrely, he also insisted that the ‘Four Pests’ must be eliminated,
making China ‘a country of the four “noes”: no rats, no sparrows, no flies and no mosquitoes’.155 Citizens everywhere rallied to his call. A visiting Russian expert recalled:
I was awakened in the early morning by a woman's blood-curdling screams. Rushing to my window, I saw that a young woman was running to and fro on the roof of the building next door, frantically waving a bamboo pole with a large sheet tied to it. Suddenly, the woman stopped … but a moment later, down in the street, a drum started beating, and she resumed her frightful screams and the mad waving of her peculiar flag … I realised that in all the upper stories of the hotel, white-clad females were waving sheets and towels that were supposed to keep the sparrows from alighting on the building.156
The plan worked. Hecatombs of sparrows fell dead from exhaustion. Another foreigner reported some months later that in four weeks he saw not a single sparrow, and flies, usually singly, on only fifteen occasions.157 Unfortunately, Mao had ignored warnings that sparrowcide158 would cause the crops to be infested with caterpillars (which the birds usually ate). The following year the target was changed to bedbugs instead.
Revolutionary élan at home was matched by events abroad. On October 4, while the CCP plenum was in session, the Soviet Union launched the first sputnik at a time when, as Mao put it, the United States ‘hadn't even launched a potato’.159
Shortly afterwards, Khrushchev spoke of surpassing Western levels of meat and dairy production, insisting that this was ‘not an arithmetical matter; it is a political issue’ – a phrase which was music to Mao's ears, for he had just told his own Central Committee that, in the duality of politics and technology, ‘politics is primary and [always] takes first place’.160 The following month, while Mao was visiting Moscow to take part in the Conference of World Communist Parties, the Soviet leader announced plans to overtake the United States in the production of iron, steel, coal, electric power, oil and many types of consumer goods, within fifteen years. Not a man to let pass a challenge, Mao promptly informed the assembled leaders of world communism that China would overtake Britain in fifteen years.161
Then he gave them his views on the current state of the world by referring to a saying from the novel, The Dream of the Red Chamber. ‘Either the East wind prevails over the West wind, or the West wind prevails over the East wind’:
At the moment I sense that the international situation has come to a turning-point … It is characterised by the East wind prevailing over the West wind. That is to say, the forces of socialism have become overwhelmingly superior to the forces of imperialism … I think we can [say] that we have left the Western world behind us. Are they far behind us? Or just a tiny bit behind us? As I see it – and maybe I am a bit adventurist in this – I say that we have left them behind us once and for all.162
In this overheated, not to say euphoric state of mind, Mao flew back to Beijing in late November to confront the economic challenges at home. The direction had been set. By promising to overtake Britain, Mao had committed China to producing 40 million tons of steel by the early 1970s (twice the already high figure approved at the CC plenum less than two months before), as well as surpassing British production of cement, coal, chemical fertiliser and machine tools.163 The only question was how.
To find the answer, Mao set off on a four-month-long tour of the provinces, which took him from south China to Manchuria; westward to Sichuan in March; then by Yangtse river-steamer to Wuhan; and finally to Hunan and Guangdong in April.
Ostensibly, he was ‘seeking truth from facts’ by carrying out grass-roots investigations before proceeding to formulate new policies, just as he had in Jiangxi in the 1930s. But there was a crucial difference. In the Chinese Soviet Republic, a quarter of a century before, he had been free to investigate as he wished. In the People's Republic, in 1958, his every move was choreographed days or weeks in advance. ‘Going to the grass roots’ now meant meeting provincial first secretaries and visiting carefully selected model farms where everyone had been briefed to tell Mao only what the provincial authorities wanted him to hear. He still got no accurate, first-hand information. Instead, he had the illusion of being well-informed, which was to prove far more dangerous than ignorance.
At each stage of Mao's peregrination, he summoned a leadership conference, at which the theoretical basis for the ‘Great Leap Forward’ was gradually put in place.
At Hangzhou, on January 4, 1958, he propounded for the first time his view of ‘uninterrupted revolution’ (a concept which, he was quick to explain, had nothing to do with the Trotskyite heresy), whereby the ‘socialist revolution’ (collectivisation of the means of production), which had now been completed in China, would be followed seamlessly by a ‘revolution in ideology and politics’ and by ‘technological revolution’. The latter term, he made clear, signified a new ‘high tide’ in production.164
Ten days later, in Nanning, he vented his rage against those who had persuaded him to abort the ‘Little Leap’, eighteen months before. ‘I am the “chief culprit” of rash advance,’ he announced defiantly. ‘You are against rash advance. Well, I am against opposing it!’165 Zhou Enlai made a humiliating self-criticism, confessing that he had ‘wavered about policy’ and had committed ‘right conservatist errors’, and offered to resign. For several months his fate hung in the balance. Only after several more self-abasing speeches did Mao relent and inform him that he was to continue as Premier. By then he had grovelled publicly about the ‘miraculous construction and revolutionary mettle’ which the Chairman's policies had achieved, declaring:
Chairman Mao is the representative of truth. Departing from or violating his leadership and directives results in error and loss of bearings and damages the interests of the Party and the people, as the errors I have repeatedly committed have amply proven. Conversely, doing things correctly and at the correct time are inseparable from Chairman Mao's correct leadership and leading ideology.166
In March, at a Politburo Standing Committee meeting in Chengdu, the Chairman castigated the planning ministries for adhering slavishly to Soviet practices, and the Party, for exhibiting a ‘slave mentality’ towards ‘experts’ in general and bourgeois experts in particular.167 A month later, in Hankou, he went further, declaring that bourgeois intellectuals constituted an exploiting class which must be struggled against, and that China should not be shackled by the economic laws they had devised:
We must break down superstition, believing in – yet also disbelieving – the scientists … Whenever a problem is discussed, we must also discuss ideology. When we study a problem, we must subdue the [facts] by [adopting] a viewpoint, and activate the affair at hand with politics … How can [anything be resolved] when only numbers are discussed, without politics? The relationship between politics and numbers is like that between officers and soldiers: Politics is the commander. (Emphasis supplied)168
The exaltation of political will was familiar enough, but Mao had rarely affirmed quite so brazenly that facts and figures could be ignored. In the late spring of 1958, he was on an adrenalin high, pumped up by the limitless vista of a bright communist future in which nothing would be able to withstand the concerted efforts of 600 million people.
His confidence had been fired by a nationwide irrigation movement launched the previous winter. In the space of four months, provincial leaders reported, 100 million peasants had dug ditches and reservoirs to water almost 20 million acres, far in excess of the initial target.169 Only much later did it emerge that those claims, like most of those made at that time, were vastly exaggerated. Mao was euphoric. It was only necessary to ‘lift the lid, break down superstition, and let the initiative and creativity of the labouring people explode’, he told the Second Session of the Eighth Congress, which officially launched the Great Leap in May, and miracles could be achieved. He added, almost as an afterthought, ‘No, we are not insane!’170
Insane or not, the targets set that year for both agricultural and industrial production rose exponentially.
At the C
hengdu meeting, in March, Mao had urged provincial leaders to stay within the realm of the possible. ‘Revolutionary romanticism is good,’ he told them, ‘but it's no use if there's no way to put it into practice.’171
By May, he had increased that year's steel target from six to eight million tons, and cut the length of time needed to overtake Britain by half (to seven years) and the United States to fifteen years, the same as Khrushchev had proposed for Russia. Indeed, China might get there first, Mao suggested, and ‘reach communism ahead of schedule’.172 After that, all restraint was cast to the winds. In the autumn, the 1958 steel estimate was raised to 10.7 million tons, and three weeks later to ‘11 or 12 million’. By then Mao envisaged annual steel output in 1959 of 30 million tons (surpassing Britain); in 1960, 60 million (surpassing Russia); in 1962, 100 million (surpassing the USA); and 700 million tons – several times the production of the whole of the rest of the world – by the early 1970s. The 1958 grain target rose in tandem, first to 300 million tons (half as much again as the previous record harvest), then to 350 million.173
The aim, as ever, was to make China great. Although we have a large population,’ Mao told the Politburo, ‘we have not yet demonstrated our strength. When we catch up with Britain and America, [even US Secretary of State] Dulles will respect us and acknowledge our existence as a nation.’174 Nor was that all. The new Communist China would also be elegant. ‘The French’, Mao noted, ‘have made their streets, houses and boulevards very beautiful: if capitalism can do it, why can't we?’175 It would be replete with creature comforts, too. Tan Zhenlin, once one of Mao's battalion commanders on the Jinggangshan, who had replaced his contemporary, the sober-minded Deng Zihui, as agricultural supremo, unveiled a vision of plenty which put Khrushchev's ‘goulash communism’ to shame:
After all, what does communism mean? … First, taking good food and not merely eating one's fill. At each meal one enjoys a meat diet, eating chicken, pork, fish or eggs … Delicacies like monkey's heads, swallow's nest and white fungus are served, ‘to each according to his needs’ … Second, clothing. Everything people want should be available. Clothing of various designs and styles, not [just] a mass of blue garments … After working hours, people will wear silk, satin … and overcoats lined with fox furs … Third, housing … Central heating will be provided in the north and air conditioning in the south. Everyone will live in high-rise buildings. Needless to say, there will be electric light, telephone, piped water [and] television … Fourth, communications … Air services will be opened in every direction and every county will have an airport … Fifth, higher education for everyone … The sum total of all these means communism.176