Mao: The Unknown Story

by Jung Chang

  As Gui-yuan could not bring Little Mao along on the evacuation, she entrusted the boy to her sister, who was married to Mao’s brother Tse-tan. The couple, as well as her brother and parents, were left behind. Gui-yuan wept bitterly at being parted from her son. (Her third child, a son, had died a few months earlier within days of being born.) Little Mao stayed with his wet nurse for a while. After the Nationalists took the Red territory, Tse-tan moved him secretly. But Tse-tan was killed in battle in April 1935 before he could tell his wife where.

  Once Mao came to power, Gui-yuan, who had by then long ceased to be Mao’s wife, tried desperately to find Little Mao, with tragic results. Her sister, who felt guilty about Little Mao being lost while in her care, was killed in a car accident in November 1949 as she set off one night to chase a lead, within days of the Reds taking the area. In 1952 a young man was found who might possibly have been Little Mao. Gui-yuan’s brother recalled that Gui-yuan “rushed to identify him. She mainly checked two things, whether the boy had oily ears, and whether he had armpit odour [uncommon for Chinese]. She was convinced her children all inherited these characteristics of Mao Tse-tung’s. After inspecting him, she was convinced it was her Little Mao.”

  But many other Communist women who had had to abandon their children had embarked on the same kind of quest, and one Red Army widow had already identified the boy as her son. The Party adjudicated that the boy belonged to this other woman. Gui-yuan’s brother went to see Mao, who had not been involved up to now, and showed him a photograph of the teenage boy, hinting that Gui-yuan would like Mao to intervene. But Mao declined, saying: “It’s awkward for me to interfere.” Mao told him to do what the Party decreed. Gui-yuan did not give up, and fought a painful — and tragic — battle for years. She and her brother kept in touch with the young man until his death from liver cancer in the 1970s, even taking care of his wedding arrangements.

  MAO SHOWED NO particular sadness about leaving Little Mao behind, and did not even say goodbye to his son. His sorrow was reserved for himself. Gong Chu, the commander of the Red Army at Yudu, left a telling account of the last weeks before Mao departed, when Mao was staked out in his HQ. In early September Gong was studying a map when

  suddenly my bodyguard came in and announced: “Chairman Mao is here!” I … ran to the front gate, and saw Mao Tse-tung with two bodyguards dismounting … He looked yellow and drained. I asked him: “Is the Chairman not well?” He answered: “You are right. I have recently been suffering from ill health, but more of a pain is that I feel extremely down …”

  After he washed his face, he lit a cigarette and said: “… I’ll be here for quite a while.”

  Mao said to Gong that as they were old friends from the outlaw land, “ ‘I hope you can come and have a chat whenever you have the time in the evenings.’ … Mao Tse-tung liked talking.” Gong took Mao up on his invitation, and after Gui-yuan joined Mao, she would “prepare delicious suppers. And the three of us would chat and drink and smoke, often … till midnight … From my observation, Mao’s place was not visited by other people except me … It really felt as if he was isolated and miserable.”

  One day Gong bought a hen and some pigs’ trotters for dinner. Mao was “cheerful, and drank a lot.” He complained about the leadership, but more as a heart-to-heart between old friends than as sabotage. When Gong mentioned he had been given a reprimand for something, Mao “said he had not been in agreement with the reprimand. It was all because Chou En-lai was too harsh … Also, he said, [his Party foes] wanted all power in their hands … He seemed deeply resentful of them.”

  Mao became doleful from drink, and recounted the various punishments visited on him. At one point, lamenting that he was no longer the big boss, “tears ran down his cheeks. He was coughing from time to time, and his face looked drawn and dried and sallow. Under the flicker of a tiny oil lamp, he was quite a picture of dejection.”

  Neither the collapse of the Communist state nor the separation from his son could wound Mao like his loss of personal power.

  Then, just when everything seemed set, Mao’s plans nearly fell apart. Days before the planned departure, his temperature shot up to 105.8°F and he grew delirious with malaria. It was the malaria season, and the mosquitoes in Yudu were so thick in the air that they flew right into people’s nostrils. Even quinine failed to do the trick. It was vital for him to recover — and recover fast, so that he could leave with the others. The best doctor in the Red area, Nelson Fu, who had looked after Mao in the missionary hospital in winter 1932–33, raced over from Ruijin and got him into good enough shape to travel. Patient and doctor both knew Fu had saved Mao’s life — and his political fortunes.

  Dr Fu became the overseer of Mao’s physicians for decades. In 1966, in Mao’s Great Purge, he wrote to Mao and brought up this episode in Yudu. “I saved your life,” he said, “I hope you can save mine now.” The then 72-year-old had been savagely beaten, his ribs broken and his skull fractured. Mao did lift a finger, but not very forcefully, by minuting on Fu’s letter: “This man … has not committed big crimes, perhaps he should be spared.” But then he heard that Fu had allegedly talked to other Party leaders about his (Mao’s) health, which was a big taboo for Mao. Mao let Fu be thrown into prison. The septuagenarian doctor did not last two weeks, and died on the floor of his cell.

  MEANWHILE THE RED ARMY kept up a fighting retreat as Chiang’s army advanced, while preparations for the evacuation went on in secret. The move was forced, but it enabled the Reds to carry out a strategic shift towards the northwest, with the ultimate goal of reaching Russian-controlled borders, in order to receive arms — an operation later known as “to link up with the Soviet Union.” It had been planned for years. Back in 1929 GRU chief Berzin had briefed Sorge that his mission was to try to get the Chinese Red Army to the Soviet border.

  In July, one unit of 6,000 men was sent out in the opposite direction as a decoy. It carried 1.6 million leaflets, which filled 300 shoulder-pole loads, and adopted the grandiose name of “Red Army Vanguard Northbound to Fight the Japanese.” Its movements were given maximum publicity, and the unit came to realize that it was a decoy, something that even its leaders had not been told. The men felt bitter, and doubly so because the task assigned was pointless: a small unit like theirs could not possibly fool the enemy or draw them away from Ruijin. Instead, they found themselves being relentlessly pursued by other Nationalist forces. Within a few months, virtually the entire decoy force was wiped out.

  Part of the preparation for the evacuation was screening all proposed evacuees, a process run by Chou En-lai. Those rated unreliable were executed. They totaled thousands. Among those killed were most of the teachers in army schools, who were often captured former Nationalist officers. The executions took place in a sealed-off mountain valley, where a huge pit was dug. The victims were hacked to death with knives, and their bodies kicked down into the pit. When this pit was full, the rest were made to dig their own holes in the ground, and were then hacked to death, or buried alive.

  The massacre was carried out by the state security system — although many security men had themselves by now lost faith in the regime and were being killed in their turn. One of those who had lost faith was the head of the team guarding the Military Council. In the confusion of leaving, he slipped away and hid in the hills. But the authorities found his hiding-place by arresting his girlfriend, a local peasant. After a gun battle, this expert marksman shot himself.

  IN OCTOBER 1934, the rule of this brutal regime came to an end. At Yudu, pontoon bridges were set up across the river. At the prow and stem of each boat hung a barn lantern, and more lanterns and torches shone on both banks, glowing in the water’s reflection. Families of the soldiers and organized peasants lined the banks to say goodbye. The badly wounded had been billeted on local families. As troops padded past on the cobblestone path underneath the city wall, down to the crossing point, in a corner house near the wall a twelve-year-old boy had his eyes glued to a crack in the
door, holding his breath. His father, a small shopkeeper, had been killed four years before, at the height of Mao’s AB slaughter, when people were being executed even for being “active shop-assistants.” Like many others, he was glad to see the back of the Reds, as he made abundantly clear when we met him sixty years later.

  At about 6:00 PM on 18 October, looking gaunt but composed, with his long hair combed back, Mao left the local Party HQ surrounded by bodyguards, crossed the street, passed the Sung-dynasty archway and stepped onto the pontoon bridge.

  This rickety bridge did not just carry Mao across the water, it bore him into legend. His murderous past and that of the CCP regime were about to be left behind. And Mao himself was about to create the most enduring myth in modern Chinese history, and one of the biggest myths of the twentieth century—“the Long March.”

  Moscow’s monthly subsidy to the CCP for 1934 was 7,418 “gold dollars.” The Russians tried to send in arms direct, but the Chinese Red Army was unable to fulfill Moscow’s recommendation to establish a foothold at a port, where “contraband munitions and medicine could be transported.”

  This sort of tragedy was by no means uncommon. The revolution brought much heartache to its adherents. Before they took power, Communists were expected not just to make sacrifices vis-à-vis their children, but literally to sacrifice them, and selling one’s children — or having them sold — to raise funds for the Party was not uncommon. The Party cell of Gui-yuan’s friend Zeng Zhi in Amoy sold her baby son for 100 yuan; the buyer paid in advance and the Party spent the money before presenting her with a fait accompli. More than half a century later, she said: “Of course, it was extremely painful. Before my son was delivered to [the buyer’s] house, my husband and I carried him to Sun Yat-sen Park to play. He was such a cute baby, over 40 days, he smiled all the time. We gave him the name Tie-niu (Iron Ox). He never cried without a good reason, and rarely passed stool or water on himself. So we carried him there to play. He was really really happy. Then he was gone. And it was just unbearable. I managed to overcome the hurt. But my baby died 26 days later … Our Party Secretary didn’t dare to tell me, although I had heard. He kept quiet as I didn’t say anything. Sometimes at night, it hurt so much I wept, but quietly, because it was embarrassing to let others know [that she was crying for her child]. Then one day, he saw I had been crying, and he guessed I knew, and he apologised to me.”

  Red leaders acknowledged later that the name was only for propaganda. “No one dreamed of a march north to fight the Japanese,” Braun observed.

  12. LONG MARCH I: CHIANG LETS THE REDS GO (1934 AGE 40)

  SOME 80,000 PEOPLE set off on the Long March in October 1934. The procession moved out over a ten-day period in three columns, with the two oldest and core units, under Lin Biao and Peng De-huai respectively, on each side of the HQ. The 5,000-strong HQ consisted of the handful of leaders and their staff, servants and guards. Mao was with the HQ.

  They moved slowly due west, burdened by heavy loads. Arsenal machinery, printing machines and Mao’s treasure were carried on shoulder-poles by thousands of porters, most of them recently press-ganged conscripts, watched over by security men. The chief of the administrators revealed that the heaviest burdens were carried by people “who had just been released from the hard labour teams, and they were very weak physically … some just collapsed and died while walking.” Numerous marchers fell sick. One remembered:

  The autumn rain went on and on, making our paths nothing but mud … and there was nowhere to escape the rain, and no good sleep to be had … some sick and weak fell asleep and never woke up. Many suffered infected feet, which had to be wrapped in rotten cloth and produced unbearable pain when stepping on the ground … As we left the base area further and further behind, some labourers deserted. The more obedient ones begged in tears to be let go …

  The bolder ones simply dropped their loads and fled when their minders were distracted. Soldiers, too, deserted in droves, as the vigilance of their increasingly exhausted bosses wavered.

  The marchers faced the daunting prospect of four lines of blockhouses — the same blockhouses that had doomed their Red base. Yet these turned out to be no obstacle at all — seemingly inexplicably.

  The first line was manned by Cantonese troops, whose warlord chief had been doing profitable business with the Reds and had promised to let them through. Which he did. This combat-free breakout, however, was not due just to the anti-Chiang Cantonese. The Generalissimo was well aware that the Reds intended to pull out by way of the Cantonese front, and moreover he knew that they were going to be let through. On 3 October, shortly before the breakout began, he had told his prime minister that the Cantonese were going to “open up one side of the net” to the Reds. And yet Chiang explicitly rejected the idea of sending forces loyal to himself to the breakout sector. A close aide argued with him that to get Canton “to carry out orders, we have to have our men on the spot.” Chiang told him not to worry.

  The marchers reached the second line of blockhouses at the beginning of November. Although the columns offered an easy target, extending over tens of kilometers, they were not attacked. The Cantonese again made no trouble. And neither did the other force defending part of this second line, which was under General Ho Chien, the fiercely anti-Communist Hunanese who had executed Mao’s ex-wife Kai-hui.

  It was the same story at the third fortified line; yet Chiang not only did not reprimand Ho Chien for his apparent dereliction, on 12 November he promoted him to commander-in-chief of operations against the marchers. So it was this fierce anti-Communist who manned the fourth fortification line, situated at an ideal place to wipe out the Reds, on the west bank of the Xiang, the largest river in Hunan (which had inspired Mao’s poetry in his youth). There were no bridges, and the Reds, who had no anti-aircraft guns, had to wade across the wide river, easy targets from land and air. But again they went completely unmolested while they took four days to trudge across, spread along a stretch of river 30 km long. The commanding points on the banks were unmanned, and the troops under Ho Chien just looked on. Chiang’s planes circled overhead, but only to reconnoiter, and there was no aerial bombing or even strafing. Mao and the HQ forded the river undisturbed on 30 November, and by the next day, 1 December, the 40,000-strong main Red force was over.

  Only now did Chiang, who had been monitoring the crossing “with total concentration,” his aides observed, seal off the river and order heavy bombing. Part of the Red rear guard was cut off on the east bank. The marchers who got across were down to half their original number, but included the main combat troops and the HQ. Chiang knew this. His commander Ho Chien wrote the following day: “The main force of the bandits have all [crossed the river], and are fleeing to the west.”

  There can be no doubt that Chiang let the CCP leadership and the main force of the Red Army escape.

  WHY SHOULD CHIANG have done this? Part of the reason soon emerged when, after the crossing of the Xiang, Chiang’s army drove the marchers farther westward towards the province of Guizhou, and then Sichuan. Chiang’s plan was to use the Red force for his own purposes. These two provinces, together with neighboring Yunnan, formed a vast southwestern region covering well over 1 million sq km, with a population of about 100 million; they were virtually independent of the central government, as they kept their own armies and paid little tax to Nanjing. Sichuan was particularly important, being the largest, richest and most populous, with some 50 million people. It was shielded on all sides by almost inaccessible mountains, which made access “more difficult than ascending to the blue sky,” in the words of the poet Li Po. Chiang envisaged it as “the base for national revival,” i.e., a safe rear for an eventual war against Japan.

  Chiang could effect control only if he had his own army actually in the provinces, but they had rejected his army, and if he were to try to force his way in, there would be war. Chiang did not want to have to declare war openly on the warlords. His nation-building design was more Machiavellian — and co
st-effective. He wanted to drive the Red Army into these hold-out provinces, so that their warlords would be so frightened of the Reds settling in their territory that they would allow Chiang’s army in to drive the Reds out. This way, Chiang figured, his army could march in and he could impose central government control. He wanted to preserve the main body of the Red Army so that it would still pose enough of a threat to the warlords.

  Chiang spelled out his plan to his closest secretary: “Now when the Communist army go into Guizhou, we can follow in. It is better than us starting a war to conquer Guizhou. Sichuan and Yunnan will have to welcome us, to save themselves … From now on, if we play our cards right … we can create a unified country.” On 27 November, the very day the Reds started crossing the Xiang River and headed for Guizhou, Chiang issued his blueprint for nation-building, a “Declaration on the division of powers between the central government and the provinces.”

  This agenda remained secret throughout Chiang’s life, and is still concealed by both Nationalist and Communist official histories. Both attribute the Communists’ escape to regional warlords, with Chiang blaming the warlords, and the Communists praising them. Both share the same concern: not to reveal that it was the Generalissimo himself who let the Reds go. For the Nationalists, Chiang’s methods for establishing his sway over the wayward provinces were too devious, and his miscalculation about using the Reds — which ultimately led to their triumph — too humiliating. For the Communists, it is embarrassing to acknowledge that the famed Long March was to a large extent steered by Chiang Kai-shek.

  LETTING THE REDS go was also a goodwill gesture on Chiang’s part towards Russia. He needed a harmonious relationship with the Kremlin because he was under threat from Japan. And the CCP was Moscow’s baby.

  But there was another, more secret and totally private reason. Chiang’s son Ching-kuo had been a hostage in Russia for nine years. Ching-kuo was Chiang Kai-shek’s sole blood descendant, not by the famous Mme Chiang, but by his first wife. After Ching-kuo was born, Chiang seems to have become sterile through contracting venereal disease several times, and he adopted another son, Weigo. But Ching-kuo, as the only blood heir, remained the closest to his heart. Chiang was steeped in Chinese tradition, in which the central concern was to have an heir. To fail to carry on the family line was regarded as the disgrace, the greatest hurt one could inflict on one’s parents and ancestors, whose dead souls could then never rest in peace. One of the worst curses in China was: “May you have no heir!” And respect for one’s parents and ancestors, filial piety, was the primary moral injunction dictated by tradition.