by Jung Chang
The Young Marshal’s only option was to stick with Chiang. That meant he had to set Chiang free. Moreover, he realized that the only way he himself could survive was to leave Xian with Chiang and place himself in Chiang’s hands. There were many in Nanjing who wanted him dead and who were sure to send assassins after him. Chiang’s custody was the only place where he could be safe. And by escorting Chiang out of captivity he could also hope to win the Generalissimo’s goodwill. His gamble that Chiang would not kill him turned out to be a good bet. After house arrest under Chiang and his successors for over half a century, when he was both detained and protected, he was released, and died in his bed in Hawaii, aged 100, in 2001, having outlived Chiang and Mao by over a quarter of a century.
On 14 December, the day Moscow publicly condemned the coup, the Young Marshal went to see Chiang, and stood in front of him in silence, weeping. Chiang registered that his captor showed “considerable remorse.” Later that day the Young Marshal told Chiang he realized that the kidnap was “a foolish and ill-considered action” and wanted to release him, secretly. Chiang gave him active cooperation by making sure Nanjing did not rock the boat. When Nanjing declared war on the Young Marshal on the 16th, Chiang got a message out at once telling Nanjing to hold its fire. Nanjing suspended military operations, and sent Chiang’s brother-in-law T. V. Soong (known as T.V.) “as a private citizen” to negotiate a deal, as Chiang himself could not be seen to be negotiating with his captors. T.V. arrived in Xian on the 20th, followed two days later by Mme Chiang.
On the 20th, Moscow repeated its cable to the CCP, which Mao had been suppressing, ordering a “peaceful resolution.” Now, Mao had to forward the cable to Chou En-lai, with instructions to help “restore Chiang Kai-shek’s freedom.”
MAO THUS BROUGHT his goals back into alignment with Stalin’s. The CCP demanded that Chiang promise to “stop the policy of ‘exterminating Communists.’ ” It also insisted that Chiang meet Chou, who was right there in Xian. For Chou to talk to Chiang would accord the CCP the status of a major player in national politics, an act whose modern-day equivalent would be for the top man in some notorious terrorist group suddenly to be received by the US president.
At a talk on the 23rd between T. V. Soong, the Young Marshal and Chou, T.V. said he personally agreed to what Chou asked, and would convey the CCP’s demands to the Generalissimo. But Chiang refused to talk to Chou directly, even though he was told he would not be released unless he saw Chou. The talks deadlocked.
Moscow knew what would get the Generalissimo to see Chou. Chiang’s most recent signal to Moscow had been just before the kidnap, in November, when the Chinese Red Army had its back to the wall after failing to reach the Russian arms supplies. On that occasion, Chiang’s ambassador in Moscow had asked for the return of Chiang’s son, Ching-kuo, and Moscow had said “No.” Now it was ready to respond. Late on 24 December the former Party leader, Po Ku, arrived in Xian, bearing special news. This piece of news got Chou into Chiang’s bedroom on Christmas Day. Chou told Chiang that his son Ching-kuo “would return.” It was only after receiving this promise from Stalin that Chiang agreed to the Reds’ demands, and invited Chou “to come to Nanjing for direct negotiations.” From this moment on, the CCP stopped being officially regarded as bandits, and was treated as a proper political party.
The Chiang — Chou meeting in Xian was brief, but it wrapped up the Reds-for-son deal that Chiang had been working on for years. This marked the end of the civil war between the CCP and the Nationalists.
THAT AFTERNOON the Chiangs left Xian. So did the Young Marshal, flying voluntarily into house arrest. Chiang was at the peak of his popularity. When his car drove into Nanjing, spontaneous crowds lined the streets to hail him. Fireworks crackled all night long. People who experienced those days say that Chiang’s prestige shone like the midday sun. Yet his triumph was short-lived, and the deal that regained his son rebounded against him. His calculation that he could contain Mao and outsmart Stalin was wishful thinking. Mao was uncontainable — and the small CCP had just been promoted to a major “opposition party.”
The Young Marshal’s bitterness against Moscow and the CCP flared briefly during our otherwise very friendly meeting with him fifty-six years later. When we asked him whether the Chinese Communists had told him about the real Soviet attitude towards him before the coup, he snapped back with sudden hostility: “Of course not. You ask a very strange question.”
Mao later tried to claim that the Comintern’s cable of 16 December “was garbled, and could not be decoded,” and that the CCP asked Moscow, on the 18th, to retransmit it. This has to be a fabrication. Radio operators at the core of CCP operations told us that the standard procedure was that if a cable was illegible, they would instantly ask Moscow to retransmit and would definitely not wait for two days — least of all at a time of crisis. Mao told his Politburo on the 19th: “Comintern instructions have not arrived.”
Since then, he has become one of the biggest legends in Chinese history, the subject of endless books and articles, and both admired and denounced. But even his adversaries hardly mention his machinations with the Russians, or that these were the result of personal ambition. To the end of his long life he claimed that the kidnapping was inspired by “pure motives.” To us in 1993, he said: “Mme Chiang understood me well … she said I didn’t want money, I didn’t want territory, I only wanted sacrifice [sic].”
18. NEW IMAGE, NEW LIFE AND NEW WIFE (1937–38 AGE 43–44)
AS SOON AS the dust from the kidnapping settled, in January 1937 Moscow told Mao exactly how it viewed the next stage. The CCP was to abandon its policy of trying to overthrow the government by violence, and stop confiscating land and robbing the rich; instead, it would in effect recognize Nanjing as the legitimate government, and put the Red territory and Red Army under Chiang. Mao accepted the shift as a purely tactical expedient, and the CCP made a public pledge to Nanjing that embodied the policy changes willed by Moscow. This opened a new phase for the Party.
As a quid pro quo, Chiang was to assign some territory to the Red Army, and fund the Communist administration and army. Mao naturally went all out to get the largest possible swath of territory and the highest level of funding. In the end, the Reds were allocated 129,600 square kilometers of ground, with a population of about 2 million, and Yenan as their capital. This settlement brought substantial government funding. Chiang also armed and paid for over 46,000 regular Red troops (the number he officially recognized).
In order to help Mao achieve these gains, Stalin held on to Chiang’s son. Not until he was satisfied about Chiang’s concessions did he deliver. On 3 March the Soviet Politburo decreed, in its peculiar crabbed idiom, “Not to oppose the return to China of Chiang Kai-shek’s son.” Ching-kuo returned to China on 19 April, and was reunited with his father after more than eleven years as a hostage.
During the week-long train journey across Siberia, Ching-kuo was in the custody of the future CCP intelligence chief, Kang Sheng. Only a few weeks before, Kang Sheng had brought Mao’s sons from Paris to Moscow. An-ying and An-ching, aged fourteen and twelve, had been waiting for Russian visas in Paris for months. The Russians had not wanted to admit the Young Marshal’s envoy, who was escorting them, but had not wanted to give a straightforward refusal, so they withheld visas for the whole group. After the Xian kidnap was over, the envoy was told he would not get a visa. The Mao boys arrived in Moscow at the beginning of 1937, and became boarders in the special school for children of foreign Communist leaders. They wrote to their father, sending photos. He rarely replied.
WHILE MAO’S ATTITUDE to his sons was one of indifference, Chiang Kai-shek’s amounted to obsession. In February 1937, when Stalin was still holding Ching-kuo, and Chiang was impatiently waiting for him to be returned, the Generalissimo did another favor to the CCP, which had far-reaching repercussions. He appointed the mole Shao Li-tzu (who had taken Chiang’s son to Russia in 1925) as head of the Nationalists’ Propaganda Department, in charge o
f the media. Shao’s job was to bring about a change of attitude in the press and in public opinion, which were both fiercely anti-Communist. It was an enormous gesture of good will to Moscow.
Soviet Russia henceforth received wide and enthusiastic coverage. A benign and positive image of the Chinese Communists began to emerge. By summer, Shao and Mao had concocted the idea of publishing a Mao autobiography portraying Mao as a good and kindly man, complete with an appendix of his pronouncements on war with Japan that depicted him as committed to fighting the Japanese. Mao wrote an inscription in the tone of an ardent patriot: “Fight the Japanese imperialists unwaveringly through to the end …” The book came out on 1 November and was a hit. It was this period that gave birth to the myth, which was vital to Mao’s success, that the CCP was the most dedicated anti-Japanese force. It was thanks to this myth that many tens of thousands joined the Communists, including many of those who were later to staff Mao’s regime.
The Mao Tse-tung Autobiography consisted largely of interviews Mao had done with the American journalist Edgar Snow in summer 1936—the only extensive account of his life Mao ever gave. Snow also produced his own book, Red Star Over China, which relied overwhelmingly on interviews with Mao and other Communists, and laid the foundation for the rehabilitation of the Reds, not least by brushing out their blood-soaked past.
The encounter with Snow was no accident. That spring, Mao had asked the Shanghai underground to find a foreign journalist who could publicize his story, plus a doctor. After careful vetting, Mao invited Snow, who combined all the necessary qualities: he was American, wrote for the influential Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald-Tribune, and was sympathetic. Snow arrived in the Red area in July, with a Lebanese-American doctor, George Hatem, who brought top-secret documents from the Comintern in his medicine case. Snow stayed for three months, while Hatem remained with the Reds for the rest of his life, becoming one of Mao’s doctors, and working in the CCP’s foreign intelligence apparatus.
Mao left nothing to chance, and dictated detailed instructions on handling Snow’s visit: “Security, secrecy, warmth and red carpet.” The Politburo carefully coordinated answers to a questionnaire Snow had to submit beforehand. Mao offered Snow a mixture of valuable information and colossal falsification, which Snow swallowed in toto, calling Mao and the CCP leadership “direct, frank, simple, undevious.” Mao covered up years of torture and murder, such as the AB purges, and invented battles and heroism like the crossing of the Dadu bridge in the trek across China, astutely now titled “the Long March.” He led Snow to believe that, except when he was ill, he had “walked most of the 6,000 miles of the Long March, like the rank and file.” Mao also completely suppressed his links with Moscow, and claimed he wanted friendship with America — a claim that fooled many.
Mao took the added precaution of checking everything Snow wrote afterwards, and amending and rewriting parts. On 26 July 1937 (before Red Star came out) Snow wrote to his wife Helen, who was then in Yenan: “Don’t send me any more notes about people reneging on their stories to me … As it is, with so many things cut out it begins to read like Childe Harold.” Snow omitted to mention this background in Red Star, and instead alleged that Mao “never imposed any censorship on me.” The Chinese edition even gilded Snow, and had him say that he found Mao’s words “honest and true.”
Red Star was published in English in winter 1937–38, and played a big role in swaying Western opinion in favor of Mao. The CCP organized its publication in Chinese, under the title Stories of a Journey to the West, to make it appear impartial. In addition to this book and the Mao Tse-tung Autobiography, a third book was produced out of the Snow material, under another neutral-sounding title, Impressions of Mao Tse-tung.
Red Star—and the two books of edited excerpts — profoundly influenced radical youth in China. Many, like one of the first Tibetan Communists, joined the Communists as a result of reading Snow. It was the beginning of the CCP’s renaissance. Mao was to say that its publication “had a merit no less than the Great Yu controlling floods.” The Great Yu was the mythical emperor who had brought floods under control, thus starting Chinese civilization.
As Chiang Kai-shek’s media chief, Shao played an indispensable role in assisting Snow and promoting Mao and the Reds. By the time Chiang removed Shao from the post after nearly a year, Mao and the Reds had sanitized their image.
FOR THE NEXT DECADE, Mao lived in Yenan, the capital of the territories Chiang assigned to the Reds. He moved into the city on New Year’s Day 1937, through a huge gate, which majestically and silently opened up to columns of Red Army soldiers, marching along the broad dirt road that stretched into the infinity of yellow earth. This ancient city (whose name means “extending peace”) was enclosed by high thick walls that mounted the chain of loess hills far above the city, with battlements exuding warrior stateliness. In dry, crisp air beneath a high blue sky, it was dominated by a nine-story pagoda, built 1,000 years before. Beneath the pagoda was a complex of temples, many appearing to be clinging to the cliffs. Further down, the heavily silted River Yan was joined by the Tu Fu River, named after the great eighth-century poet, who reputedly came here to admire the peonies, a local claim to fame.
Yenan was not only a cultural center, but also a hub of commercial activities. Oil had been discovered in the region. Living quarters built by Standard Oil were now taken over by the Reds, who also appropriated substantial buildings owned by the Spanish Franciscans, including a just-completed cathedral, in which many key Party meetings were to take place. The problem of housing was further eased by the fact that many locals had fled, particularly the relatively wealthy, leaving empty hundreds of houses, some large and beautiful. Mao occupied one such mansion in a place called Phoenix Village. The big courtyard was by local standards grand, with a decorated wall immediately inside, facing the gate, to ward off evil spirits — and for privacy. For the first time in over two years, he settled into some comfort.
One considerable luxury for its place and time was wall heating, which Mao had installed. The usual way of heating a house in northern China was to heat the brick bed, the kang, from underneath, but Mao preferred his proper wooden bed, and for heating, he selected this most deluxe form. Another indulgence was to have several residences. When he later moved to an area called Yang Hill, he kept the house in Phoenix Village, and he kept both when he settled in the compound of the Chinese KGB, the picturesque area known as the Date Garden. In addition to these publicly known residences, Mao had secret dwellings built in secluded valleys, one behind Yang Hill and another behind the Date Garden. Few knew of their existence, then or now.
The most public residence was Yang Hill, which was also the least grand, and closest to the local peasants. Ten households lived in the face of a ravine, against a hill thickly wooded in those days with elms, cypresses and redwood poplar. The houses were yao-dong, unique to this part of the country, which looked like caves hollowed out of the loess slopes. Mao had a row of yao-dong in a courtyard with a small gate surmounted by a tiled roof. One of his neighbors, a peasant family, did the laundry for him. Mao’s cook he had brought with him, for security — as well as culinary — reasons. He also declined to share the peasants’ stone roller for grinding his grain: “Chairman Mao considered things from a safety point of view,” the locals told us. He was surrounded by very tight security, some visible, some not.
For Mao, Yenan provided the first relatively stable and non-violent period for nearly a decade. With peace and a rather good life — and the sudden availability of glamorous, educated young women, who were beginning to trickle into Yenan to the lure of the Reds’ benign new image — Mao started to womanize more or less openly. He confided to a fellow-philanderer that he could only go without sex “for forty days at the most.”
ONE OF THE FIRST young women on the scene was a beautiful (and married) 26-year-old actress, Lily Wu, who arrived in early 1937 and became the star actress of Yenan. Her elegant clothes and manners turned heads in th
is back-country region, and her flowing, shoulder-length hair, in particular, was the symbol of desirability. Communist women mostly wore bulky uniforms and had shaved off their hair to get rid of lice. Mao started a relationship with her.
Lily struck up a friendship with a visiting American writer, Agnes Smedley, who was an outspoken radical feminist. Smedley had worked for the Comintern, but was something of a loose cannon, and Moscow had sent instructions “to isolate her.” Even so, and although she found that Mao had a “sinister quality,” both “feminine” and “physically repulsive,” Mao cultivated her, and gave her a long interview, because she was American. Mao sent a copy of the interview to Snow, asking him to give it “wide publicity.”
While Lily Wu’s good looks stirred Mao’s lust, the much less good-looking Smedley caused a tornado by organizing square-dancing, accompanied by phonograph records. The dances were swamped. At first, Smedley observed, “Pride prevented him [Mao] from trying to dance. He had no rhythm in his being.” He basically just “walked the floor,” the women who danced with him noted. But he soon came to see the advantage of the dances as a form of exercise — and as a way to pick up women. Weekly dances were organized, some in the open air, others in a former church. Yenan went wild about dancing.
Together with other Long March women, Mao’s wife, Gui-yuan, at first refused to attend. According to Snow, “The close embrace of bodies involved seemed positively indecent to the old guard.” Jealousy seems to have played a big — if unavowed — role. Also repressed was their secret fondness for this pleasure: Gui-yuan later came to love dancing and was good at it.