Mao Zedong

by Jonathan Spence

  Personal observation of social conditions was also a natural way to gather information about China, and as a youth Mao had excelled at this, compiling careful notes on the minutest gradations of economic strata and drawing bold conclusions from closely watched moments of violence and self-assertion by the poor. In the first few years after 1949 he enjoyed wandering around in the Chinese countryside and revisiting his home province of Hunan. The informal letters people sent from Shaoshan and Xiangtan in the earlier 1950s showed they were not yet overawed by their famous native son, and on the various swims Mao made in the Xiang River of Hunan, or the Yangtze just to the north, he seems to have had time for relaxed talks with villagers and a chance to get at least a nodding acquaintance with their concerns. But from the late 1950s onward, Mao traveled in his specially equipped train, with personal attendants and bodyguards always present, which further increased his isolation from the outside world. In the spring of 1956, when villagers living on the Xiang River near Changsha came to Mao with their problems, he told them to speak to the Hunan Communist cadres. At the same time he wrote a poem in classical meter extolling the joys of floating free with the current.

  In normal circumstances, a further source of information for Mao about the true situation might have been his current wife, Jiang Qing. She was twenty years younger than Mao, and with her Shandong upbringing and early adulthood acting in films and theater in Shanghai, in addition to her long years in Yan‘an and forced marches under extreme danger during the civil war period, she was certainly not without varied experience. But whereas in the early 1950s Mao would often mention her well-being casually in letters to friends, implying a reasonable level of intimacy, by 1956 the couple were growing estranged, though both were still living in Zhongnanhai. That same year Jiang Qing went to the Soviet Union for treatment of cervical cancer; according to later reminiscences by her Soviet physician, she told him that she and Mao were no longer sleeping together.

  It may have been this ending of his third long personal and sexual relationship that turned Mao’s thoughts back so incessantly to Yang Kaihui. In January 1958, a poem that Mao had written the previous year in memory of his former wife—dead now for almost twenty-eight years—was published in People’s Daily. Mao wrote it in response to a poem his friend Li Shuyi sent him about the death of her husband in a battle with the Guomindang in 1932, and both poems, especially his, were to receive over the next few months an outpouring of effusive critical acclaim in Chinese literary magazines. Mao’s is indeed a moving poem, especially the second stanza:Chang E in her loneliness

  Spreads her billowing sleeves,

  As through the vast emptiness of space

  She dances for these virtuous souls.

  Suddenly word comes that down on Earth,

  The Tiger has been subdued.

  And the tears that they shed

  Fall like a torrent of rain.

  According to Chinese legend, familiar to Mao’s readers, Chang E stole the elixir of immortality from her husband and fled to the moon with it. But once there, she had no one to share her gift of immortality with and found herself living in the most intense loneliness. After receiving the poem from Li Shuyi—in answer to which he penned his own—Mao asked her to visit Yang Kaihui’s grave at her birthplace in Banchang, outside Changsha, on his behalf. (He could, of course, have gone himself, but there is no record that he did.)

  Other family members probably could give little frank advice to their country’s chairman. His companion from the Jinggangshan and Jiangxi Soviet days, He Zizhen, was living on her own in Shanghai, and had had a breakdown in 1954 (according to one source, after hearing a broadcast made by Mao over the radio). Mao offered to pay for her neurologist from his publishing royalties, but his revolutionary comrade Chen Yi, then Shanghai’s mayor, said that he would pay out of city funds. Similarly, it would have been impossible for Mao’s children to voice unease over the political direction he was taking, though they were in touch with him in Beijing. The one surviving child of Mao and He, their daughter, Li Min, lived with Mao in Zhongnanhai and was attending Beijing Teachers College—she had already graduated from the attached girls’ secondary school. Li Na, Mao’s daughter with Jiang Qing, was also living in Zhongnanhai and attending school. (She entered Beijing University as a history major in 1961 and graduated in 1965.) Anqing, the surviving son from the marriage to Yang Kaihui, was hospitalized much of the time, and had not yet married. (In 1962 he wed the half sister of his late brother’s widow.) Mao’s brothers, his sisters, and his parents were all long since dead.

  A further source of information for Mao on current needs and politics might have been the press or the radio, but these were controlled and administered by the Communist Party, and all items included there had undergone careful prior scrutiny for their political correctness. Such battles as raged in the press were between competing factions outside the press arena, who sought maximum publicity for their own point of view. Being an editor was both a risky and a high-profile job, bringing handsome perks but the promise of a speedy fall if one gauged the political currents wrongly. One can see such pitfalls clearly in the relationship between Mao and Deng Tuo, who served as the editor of the official Communist Party newspaper, People’s Daily, in the crucial early years of the People’s Republic, from the fall of 1949 until February 1959.

  Deng Tuo’s education, background, and political experience would have made him an invaluable source of advice to Mao, had such a relationship been possible within the existing Party environment of the time. Deng Tuo was the son of a Qing official and received an intensive education in both classical Chinese scholarship—including art connoisseurship and calligraphy—and in the new Western subjects of study. Drawn to the radical currents of the day, he joined the Communist Party in 1930, while a student in Shanghai. When the Japanese routed the Chinese armies in late 1937, Deng Tuo made his way north to the Communist base area adjacent to Yan‘an known as the Shanxi-Chahar-Hebei region. Once there, he showed immense courage and ability in running a series of clandestine Communist newspapers, and in keeping a secret radio station on the air. Fluent in English, Deng Tuo frequently served as interpreter and publicist for Western journalists, doctors, or liaison personnel of various kinds, and his charm, immense learning, and dedication to the revolution deeply impressed his own superiors in the Party. No one can have been surprised when Deng Tuo was named editor of People’s Daily once the Communists came to power.

  Deng obviously was uneasy over many of Mao’s new policies, but as editor of the most authoritative public voice of the Party he could not control the content and ideological slant of what he published, nor could he express his worries openly. The only way he could express his views was to delay putting items in the newspaper, to juggle the placement of stories inside the paper, or to hint at hidden truths by the juxtapositions of items. Deng survived his early years as editor well, but the events of the Hundred Flowers and the Great Leap stretched his tact and evasiveness to the breaking point. The first colossal dilemma Deng faced as editor was how to handle criticism from senior Party members opposed to Mao on the agricultural and industrial policies of the “Little Leap.” In the summer of 1956, Deng printed the slogan announced by no less a dignitary than the finance minister himself that China should “oppose impetuosity and adventurism.” He followed this up with an editorial—drafted by him, revised by the director of the Communist Central Committee’s propaganda department, and reviewed by the senior Politburo member, Liu Shaoqi, in person—in which he repeated the call to “oppose impetuosity” and added that “in our actual work we should carefully and on the basis of facts consider what can be done more and more fast, and what cannot be done more and more fast.”

  For polemic, the words seemed muted enough, but the whole thrust against Mao’s thinking was clear. Mao’s reaction illustrated his own growing jumpiness about any challenges to his own ideological authority: he scrawled across his own copy of the editorial the three characters bu kan le
, meaning literally “not read,” though an alternative translation would be something like “not to read,” or “not worth reading.” The attempt to propagate the Hundred Flowers Movement also brought Mao into conflict with Deng, as did the newspaper’s dilatoriness in publishing any version of Mao’s February 1957 speech on contradictions. Even when Mao stumped Tianjin and Shanghai in late March and early April of 1957 to push the Hundred Flowers Movement, the paper gave his speeches minimal coverage.

  The result was a showdown between Mao and Deng Tuo on April 10, 1957. Recalled in detail by one of Deng’s colleagues present at the scene, it showed how far Mao now was from being willing to entertain alternate interpretations of policy. Deng and his staff were summoned after lunch to see Mao in his residence inside Zhongnanhai. When the editors entered the room, they found Mao sprawled on his bed, wearing just a pajama jacket, with a towel draped around his waist. The bed was piled with books, and he chain-smoked as he talked. Mao at once launched into a long diatribe against the People’s Daily editorial policy, accusing Deng of running a “factional paper,” not a “Party paper.” He continued: “In the past I said you people were pedants running the paper. Wrong, I should say you’re dead men running the paper.” Deng tried to explain the complex Party mechanisms that cleared material for publication in People’s Daily, but Mao snapped back, “Why make a secret of Party policy? ... If Party papers are passive, Party leadership also becomes passive. There is a ghost in this. Where is the ghost?”

  Turning to the other junior editors, who sat in a nervous semicircle around the bed, Mao asked them why they had all been so silent: “If you want to raise criticism with Deng Tuo, the most he can do is fire you. How come not even a breeze got through, how come not one of you wrote a letter to the Party Center reporting the situation?” When Deng responded by offering his resignation, stating that he had acted sincerely and in good faith, Mao erupted with the bathroom language that he employed often in his speeches now, as if to emphasize his rough-and-ready rustic background: “I don’t believe that sincerity and good faith of yours! You only know the comings and goings of limousines, you live in luxury. Now, shit or get off the pot.”

  In the long, almost-four-hour harangue that followed, Mao accused the paper of hiding the achievements of the Chinese people by lowering the figures reported of their good harvests. Mao was determined to make the intellectuals serve the proletarians, he said, just as he had already cowed the national capitalists. Any use of Marxism to dismiss his own ideas he rejected as “dogmatism.” He was going to resign the state chairmanship soon, said Mao (he actually did so in the spring of 1959), and he would then start writing his own regular column in the paper. When one of Mao’s confidential secretaries, who had been present throughout, reminded the chairman that he had personally approved many of the policies and procedures he was now attacking, Mao responded, “Well, if it was like that, I was confused.” Deng was dismissed as editor that June.

  The intervention of the confidential secretary highlights another of the groups that might have brought Mao detailed knowledge of what was going on around the country. These secretaries were a high-caliber group, with proven revolutionary credentials. Some of them did funnel information to Mao when they felt he needed it, but they could go on inspection tours only when specifically instructed to do so. The same was true of Mao’s elite guardsmen, many of them former peasants, who had a rough practicality and an absence of education that appealed to Mao. Many in Mao’s entourage were simply overwhelmed by his formidable reputation and his famous rages—the doctor Li Zhisui, for example, who wrote a long and apparently frank appraisal of Mao after the chairman’s death, makes it clear that he never risked alienating his master by raising unpleasant subjects. Thus the extraordinary and ultimately disastrous experiment of the Great Leap was continued across China.

  What is most bizarre about these years is that one side of Mao was deeply skeptical about the path onto which he had guided the country. When people he liked and trusted asked him to spare them the rigors of laboring in the countryside on Great Leap projects, he was willing to write letters in their behalf to have them excused. He did just that for the nanny who had looked after his three sons with Yang Kaihui back in the 1930s, when local cadres ordered her to report for a work assignment at the end of 1957. Yet his other side would not tolerate direct criticism of the Great Leap at any level. This profound and disastrous ambiguity was matched by his own senior colleagues, all veterans of the revolution and deeply experienced in social organization and economic planning, who had been nervous about the ventures of both the Hundred Flowers and the Great Leap, but in their eagerness to promote the country’s growth and to shelter their own careers, never took decisive action to check the headlong course of events.

  This can be seen in a transcript of Party meetings held in Wuchang, on the Yangtze, in November 1958. Here, in a self-contradictory maze of comments and responses, Mao showed he was fully aware of the incredible levels of violence in the mass campaigns, the dangers of famine sweeping the country, the need to send investigative teams out to check the reality of production, the impossibility of reaching the steel, grain, and earth-removal quotas, the falsified reporting at all levels that was riddling the entire venture with contradictions, and the faked compliance with which millions of peasants greeted the Party center’s impossible demands. As Mao told his assembled cadres, poetry was not the same as economic reality, and this was not a “dream” from which one would simply “wake up.” And yet when in the summer of 1959 the distinguished marshal of the Red Army and minister of defense Peng Dehuai made similar points at the Lushan meeting of the Central Committee, which had convened to discuss all aspects of the Great Leap, Mao exploded with rage.

  At the conference, Peng presented his critical views in a circumspect way, not by grandstanding but by submitting a personal letter to the chairman. In that letter, written during the night of July 12 and hand-delivered to Mao on the thirteenth, Peng pointed out that despite many increases in production during the Great Leap so far, it had been a story of both “losses and gains” (he reversed the normal phrase “gains and losses”). Exaggeration had run through the whole campaign, and in steel production especially there had been a host of mistakes. Slogans and projections had been faulty, and there were clearly many “leftist” mistakes—mistakes one could also describe as “petty-bourgeois fanaticism.”

  Peng had intended his letter to be private, but Mao determined to strike back. Mao’s entire reputation was at stake, for Peng was known to have traveled earlier in 1959 through many areas of China, checking things out for himself, including Mao’s own home village of Shaoshan. Mao had just fulsomely praised the Great Leap in Shaoshan in a poem that linked the heroic Hunan peasant uprisings of 1927 to what he saw as the equally heroic reality of the present:Cursed by the flow of memories,

  I am back in my native place thirty-two years ago.

  Red flags flutter from the spears of the enslaved peasants,

  As the landlords raise their whips in cruel hands.

  It took many sacrifices to make us so strong

  That we dared tell sun and moon to bring a new day.

  In delight I watch the waving rows of rice and beans,

  While all around the heroes return through the evening

  haze.

  By contrast, Peng, having been in the same village at almost the same time, had likened the Great Leap experiments in Hunan to “beating a gong with a cucumber.” And, though he had not put this in his letter, during one of the opening small group discussions at Lushan, Peng had reported on his own visit to Shaoshan (now converted into a commune), saying that though indeed production there had risen by 14 percent, this increase was achieved “with much assistance and large loans from the state. The Chairman has also visited this commune. I asked the Chairman what was his finding. He said that he had not talked about the matter. In my opinion, he had.”

  Mao’s response was tactically bold and totally successful.
He ordered his staff to make multiple copies of Peng’s letter, and had it distributed to the 150 senior cadres present. Then in a series of face-to-face meetings, he challenged them either to accept his version of events or to side publicly with Peng. If they did side with Peng, said Mao, he would raise another army, a truly red one this time, and would start the guerrilla wars in the hills all over again. Confronted by this stark choice, not a single cadre sided publicly with Peng, even though it is possible that some of them—in prior conversation—might actually have primed Peng to write some of the things that he had. At the close of the Lushan meetings, Mao dismissed Peng from all his posts and relegated him to political limbo.

  The result of the Lushan plenum was thus not only that Peng’s warnings were totally rejected but that the principles of the Great Leap were reaffirmed by Mao and by all his senior colleagues. They did this despite the knowledge that all the previous figures for production had indeed been gross exaggerations, pointing to totally unrealizable levels of achievement. By branding anyone who criticized the concept of the Leap as being a “right opportunist” (by implication in league with Peng Dehuai), Mao made it impossible for any of his Party colleagues—junior or senior—to publicly call the Leap into question. Mao himself ringingly endorsed the huge public dining halls: “The moral is that one must not capitulate in the face of difficulties. Things like people’s communes and collective mess halls have deep economic roots. They should not nor can they be blown away by a gust of wind.” The need for active support of the Leap ideology was given a new twist in an editorial in the now totally obedient People’s Daily of August 1959. The paper argued that a failure to identify and criticize the “rightists” would be tantamount to willing the failure of the Leap. By the end of the month, the paper editorialized that “the hostile forces within the country and abroad” and the “right opportunists within the party” had clearly failed to derail the Leap: “The people’s communes have not collapsed. We have therefore the right to say that the people’s communes will never collapse.”