Mao: The Unknown Story

by Jung Chang

  But although not one of the founders, Mao was in the immediate outer ring. Professor Chen gave him the assignment of opening a bookshop in Changsha to sell Party literature. The professor was in the middle of making his influential monthly, New Youth, the voice of the Party. The July issue carried write-ups about Lenin and the Soviet government. From that autumn the magazine was subsidized by the Comintern.

  Mao’s job was to distribute New Youth and other Communist publications (as well as selling other books and journals). Though not a committed Communist, Mao was a radical. He also loved books and welcomed a job. Soon after he returned to Changsha, an advertisement issued about the bookshop contained the bizarre declaration, penned by himself that: “There is no new culture in the entire world. Only a little flower of new culture has been discovered in Russia on the shores of the Arctic Ocean.” The bookshop immediately placed an order for 165 copies of the July issue of New Youth, by far its biggest order. Another large order, 130 copies, was for Labour World, a new Party journal for workers. Most other journals the bookshop ordered were radical and pro-Russia.

  Mao was not risking his neck by undertaking pro-Communist activities, which were not a crime. For now, Communist Russia was actually in vogue. In Changsha, a Russia Study Society was being founded, with no less a personage than the county chief as its head. Russia’s popularity was in large part due to a fraud perpetrated by the new Bolshevik government — the claim that it was renouncing the old Tsarist privileges and territory in China, when in fact it retained them. Russian-controlled territory covered over a quarter of a million acres, and constituted the largest foreign concession in the country.

  Mao was in charge of the bookshop, but he got a friend to run it. An important trait emerged at this time — he had a gift for delegating chores, and spotting the people to perform them. Mao gave himself the title of “special liaison man,” soliciting donations from the wealthy, and dealing with publishers, libraries, universities and leading intellectuals all over the country. Professor Chen and a number of luminaries were listed as guarantors for the bookshop, which hugely boosted Mao’s status, and helped him to win a creditable post as headmaster of the primary school attached to his old college.

  There is no evidence that Mao formally joined the Party now, although by November, thanks to the bookshop, he counted as “one of us.” When Moscow decided to set up an organization in Hunan called the Socialist Youth League, to create a pool of potential Party members, Mao was contacted to do the job. The following month, in a letter to friends in France, he declared that he “deeply agreed” with the idea of “using the Russian model to reform China and the world.” This was his first expression of Communist belief.

  APPROACHING TWENTY-SEVEN, Mao had become a Communist — not after an idealistic journey, or driven by passionate belief, but by being at the right place at the right time, and being given a job that was highly congenial to him. He had effectively been incorporated into an expanding organization.

  His best friend at the time, Siao-yu, thought the cost of the Russian way was too high and wrote to Mao from France saying what he and some others felt:

  We don’t think some human beings should be sacrificed for the welfare of the majority. We are in favor of a moderate revolution, through education, and seeking the welfare of all … We regard Russian-style — Marxist — revolutions as ethically wrong …

  Mao summed up their approach as “using peaceful means to seek the happiness of all.” He argued against it not on idealistic grounds but invoking sheer realism: “I have two comments …: All very well in theory; but can’t be done in practice.” “Ideals are important,” said Mao, “but reality is even more important.”

  Mao was no fervent believer. This absence of heartfelt commitment would result in a most unconventional and unusual relationship with his Party throughout his life, even when he was the head of that Party.

  This has been a delicate point for Mao and his successors, and as a result official history dates the founding of the Party to 1921, as that was the first time Mao could verifiably be located at a Party conclave, the 1st Congress. This is duly commemorated with a museum in Shanghai which enshrines the myth that Mao was a founding member of the Party. That the Party was founded in 1920, not 1921, is confirmed both by the official magazine of the Comintern and by one of the Moscow emissaries who organized the 1st Congress.

  3. LUKEWARM BELIEVER (1920–25 AGE 26–31)

  AT THE SAME TIME as Mao became involved with the Communist Party, he developed a relationship with the daughter of his former teacher Yang Chang-chi. Yang Kai-hui, eight years Mao’s junior, was to become his second wife.

  She was born in 1901 in an idyllic spot outside Changsha. A delicate and sensitive child, she was brought up by her mother, who came from a scholar’s family, while her father spent eleven years abroad, in Japan, Britain and Germany, studying ethics, logic and philosophy. When he returned to Changsha, in spring 1913, he brought back European ways, and encouraged his daughter to join him and his male students at meals, which was unheard-of in those days. Beautiful, elegant, wistful and articulate, she bowled over all the young men.

  Her father was impressed with Mao’s brains, and gave him high recommendations to influential people. “I am telling you seriously,” he wrote to one of them, “these two people [Mao and another student, Cai He-sen] are rare talents in China, and will have a great future … you cannot but pay serious attention to them.” When he became a professor of ethics at Peking University in 1918, he welcomed Mao to stay with his family during Mao’s first — and fruitless — venture to Peking. Kai-hui was then seventeen, and Mao was very keen on her, but she did not respond. She wrote years later:

  When I was about seventeen or eighteen, I began to have my own views about marriage. I was against any marriage that involved rituals. I also thought that to seek love deliberately would easily and inevitably lose true, sacred, incredible, the highest, the most beautiful and unsurpassable love!.. There is an expression which best expressed my thoughts: “Not to have if not perfect.”

  In January 1920, her father died. Mao was in Peking on his second trip, and spent a lot of time with the family. It was then that she fell in love with Mao. She was to write:

  Father died! My beloved father died! Of course I was very sad. But I felt death was also a relief for Father, and so I was not too sad.

  But I did not expect to be so lucky. I had a man I loved. I really loved him so much. I had been in love with him after I had heard a lot about him, and had read many of his articles and diaries … Although I loved him, I would not show it. I was convinced that love was in the hands of nature, and I must not presumptuously demand or pursue it …

  So she still held back. Then they were parted when Kai-hui escorted her father’s coffin back to Changsha, where she entered a missionary school. The distance only heightened her feelings. She later recalled:

  He wrote me many letters, expressing his love. Still I did not dare to believe I had such luck. If it had not been for a friend who knew his [Mao’s] feelings and told me about them — saying that he was very miserable because of me — I believe I would have remained single all my life. Ever since I came to know his true feelings towards me completely, from that day on, I had a new sense. I felt that apart from living for my mother, I was also living for him … I was imagining that if there were a day when he died, and when my mother was also no longer with me, I would definitely follow him and die with him!

  When Mao returned to Changsha later that year, they became lovers. Mao was living in the school where he was the headmaster, and Kai-hui would visit him there. But she would not stay the night. They were not married, and the year was 1920, when living together outside marriage was unthinkable for a lady. Nor did Mao want to be tied down. In a letter to a friend on 26 November, he inveighed: “I think that all men and women in the marriage system are in nothing but a ‘rape league’ … I refuse to join this rape league.” He broached the idea of forming a “Resis
ting Marriage Alliance,” saying: “Even if no one else agrees with me, I am my own ‘one-man alliance.’ ”

  One night, after she was gone, Mao was unable to sleep, and wrote a poem that opened with these lines:

  Sorrow, piled on my pillow, what is your shape?

  Like waves in rivers and seas, you endlessly churn.

  How long the night, how dark the sky, when will it be light?

  Restless, I sat up, gown thrown over my shoulders, in the cold.

  When dawn came at last, only ashes remained of my hundred thoughts …

  Helped by this poem, Mao managed to persuade Kai-hui to stay overnight. The walls were just thin boards, and some of the residents complained when the pair made passionate love. One neighbor cited a rule saying that teachers’ wives were forbidden to sleep in the school, but Mao was the headmaster: he changed the rule, and started a precedent that teachers’ wives could stay in schools.

  For Kai-hui, staying the night meant giving the whole of herself. “My willpower had long given way,” she was to write, “and I had allowed myself to live in romance. I had come to the conclusion: ‘Let Heaven collapse and Earth sink down! Let this be the end!’ What meaning would my life have if I didn’t live for my mother and for him? So I lived in a life of love …”

  Mao’s feelings were no match for Kai-hui’s, and he continued to see other girlfriends, in particular a widowed teacher called Si-yung, who was three years his junior. She helped a lot with raising funds for the bookshop, as some of her pupils came from rich families. She and Mao traveled as a couple.

  When Kai-hui found out, she was shattered: “Then suddenly one day, a bomb fell on my head. My feeble life was devastatingly hit, and was almost destroyed by this blow!” But she forgave Mao. “However, this was only how I felt when I first heard the news. After all, he is not an ordinary man. She [Si-yung] loved him so passionately she would give everything for him. He also loved her, but he would not betray me, and he did not betray me in the end.” Mao seems to have explained away his affair by claiming he felt unsure of Kai-hui’s love. She chose to believe him:

  … now the lid on his heart, and on my heart, were both lifted. I saw his heart, and he saw mine completely. (We both have proud temperaments, me more so at the time. I was doing everything to stop him from seeing my heart — my heart of love for him — so that he came to doubt me, and thought I didn’t love him. And because of his pride, he wouldn’t let any feelings show. Only now did we truly understand each other.) As a result, we were closer than ever.

  Kai-hui moved in with Mao, and they got married at the end of 1920. At the time, radicals shunned the old family rituals that cemented marriage, and a new registration system had yet to be adopted, so there was not even a formal certificate.

  On account of her marriage, Kai-hui was expelled from her missionary school. Mao’s affairs continued, and he actually started two new relationships soon after his marriage. A close friend of his at the time told us this, writing the characters bu-zhen, “unfaithful,” on the table with his finger. One of these liaisons was with a cousin of Kai-hui’s. When Kai-hui found out, she was so distraught that she hit her cousin, but she rarely made scenes, and stayed faithful to Mao. She was later to write with resignation:

  I learnt many more things, and gradually I came to understand him. Not just him, but human nature in all people. Anyone who has no physical handicap must have two attributes. One is sex drive, and the other is the emotional need for love. My attitude was to let him be, and let it be.

  Kai-hui was by no means a conventional Chinese wife bound by tradition to endure her husband’s misconduct. In fact she was a feminist, and later wrote an essay on women’s rights: “Women are human beings, just as men are … Sisters! We must fight for the equality of men and women, and must absolutely not allow people to treat us as an accessory.”

  AT THE TIME OF Mao’s second marriage, Moscow was stepping up its efforts to foment subversion in China. It began secretly training a Chinese army in Siberia, and explored armed intervention in China, as it had just attempted, unsuccessfully, in Poland. Simultaneously, it was building up one of its largest intelligence networks anywhere in the world, with a KGB station already established in Shanghai, and numerous agents, both civilian and military (GRU), in other key cities, including Canton, and, of course, Peking.

  On 3 June 1921, new top-level Moscow representatives arrived, both under pseudonyms — a Russian military intelligence man called Nikolsky and a Dutchman called Maring, who had been an agitator in the Dutch East Indies. These two agents told the CCP members in Shanghai to call a congress to formalize the Party. Letters went out to seven regions where contacts had been established, asking each to send two delegates and enclosing 200 yuan to each place to cover travel to Shanghai. One lot of invitations and money came to Mao in Changsha. Two hundred yuan was the equivalent of nearly two years’ salary from his teaching job, and far more than the trip could require. It was Mao’s first known cash payment from Moscow.

  He chose as his co-delegate a 45-year-old friend called Ho Shu-heng. They left quite secretively on the evening of 29 June in a small steamboat, under a stormy sky, declining the offers of friends to see them off. Although there was no law against Communist activities, they had reason to keep their heads down, as what they were engaged in was a conspiracy — collusion to establish an organization set up with foreign funding, with the aim of seizing power by illegal means.

  The CCP’s 1st Congress opened in Shanghai on 23 July 1921, attended by 13 people — all journalists, students or teachers — representing a total of 57 Communists, mostly in similar occupations. Not one was a worker. Neither of the Party’s two most prestigious members, Professors Li Ta-chao and Chen Tu-hsiu, was present, even though the latter had been designated the Party chief. The two Moscow emissaries ran the show.

  Maring, tall and mustachioed, made the opening speech in English, translated by one of the delegates. Participants seemed to recall its length — several hours — more than its content. Long speeches were rare in China at the time. Nikolsky was remembered as the one who made the short speech.

  The presence of the foreigners, and the control they exercised, at once became an issue. The chair was allotted to one Chang Kuo-tao (later Mao’s major challenger), because he had been to Russia and had links with the foreigners. One delegate recalled that Kuo-tao at one point proposed canceling the resolution of the previous evening. “I confronted him: how is it that a resolution passed by the meeting could be canceled just like that? He said it was the view of the Russian representatives. I was extremely angry … ‘So we don’t need to have meetings, we just have orders from the Russians.’ ” The protest was in vain. Another delegate suggested that before they went along with the Russian plans they should investigate whether Bolshevism actually worked, and proposed sending one mission to Russia and one to Germany — a proposal that alarmed Moscow’s men, and was duly rejected.

  Mao spoke little and made little impact. Compared with delegates from the larger cities, he was something of a provincial, clad in a traditional cotton gown and black cotton shoes, rather than a European-style suit, the attire of many young progressives. He did not strive to impress, and was content mainly to listen.

  The meeting had started in a house in the French Settlement, and the police in these enclaves, known as “Concessions,” were vigilant about Communist activities. On the evening of 30 July a stranger barged in, and Maring, smelling a police spy, ordered the delegates to leave. The Chinese participants adjourned to a small town outside Shanghai called Jiaxing, on a lake strewn with water chestnuts. Moscow’s men stayed away from this final session for fear of attracting attention.

  The wife of a Shanghai delegate hailed from the lakeside town, and she rented a pleasure boat, in which the delegates sat at a polished table where food, drinks and mahjong sets had been laid. A thick carved wooden screen separated this inner chamber from the open, but sheltered, front of the boat, where the delegate’s wife s
at with her back against the screen. She told us how, when other boats passed, she would tap on the screen with her fan, and inside the mahjong tiles would click loudly as they were shuffled. Soon it started to pour, and the boat was enveloped in rain. In this dramatic setting, the Chinese Communist Party was proclaimed — somewhat inconclusively, as without Moscow’s men present no program could be finalized. The congress did not even issue a manifesto or charter.

  The delegates were given another 50 yuan each as return fare. This enabled Mao to go off and do some sightseeing, in comfort, in Hangzhou and Nanjing, where he saw his girlfriend Si-yung again.

  DEPENDENCE ON MOSCOW and Moscow’s money remained a sore point for many in the Party. Professor Chen, who came to Shanghai in late August to take up the post of Secretary, informed his comrades: “If we take their money, we have to take their orders.” He proposed, in vain, that none of them should be full-time professional revolutionaries, but instead should have independent jobs, and use them to spread the ideas of revolution.

  Chen argued vehemently with Maring about the latter’s insistence that the CCP was automatically a branch of the Comintern, and particularly over the notion that Nikolsky had to supervise all their meetings. “Do we have to be controlled like this?” he would shout. “It simply isn’t worth it!” Often he would refuse to see Maring for weeks running. Chen would yell, bang his palm on the table, and even throw teacups around. Maring’s nickname for him was “the volcano.” On the frequent occasions when Chen exploded, Maring would go next door to have a smoke while Chen tried to simmer down.

  But without Moscow’s funding the CCP could not even begin to carry out any activities such as publishing Communist literature and organizing a labor movement. Over a nine-month period (October 1921–June 1922), out of its expenditure of 17,655 yuan, less than 6 percent was raised inside China, while over 94 percent came from the Russians, as Chen himself reported to Moscow. Indeed, there were many other Communist groups in China at the time — at least seven between 1920 and 1922, one claiming as many as 11,000 members. But without Russian funds, they all collapsed.