Mao: The Unknown Story

by Jung Chang

  At this time, Mao ordered other Red bases to start their spy-hunting, replicating the Yenan model. He specifically warned them not to get into examining individual cases just because Yenan was doing so. All must go through the full cycle of terrorization. To spur them to whip up the same kind of frenzy as in Yenan, Mao inflated his KGB’s estimate of the proportion of spy suspects from 1 percent to 10 percent, claiming, falsely, that Yenan had uncovered a plethora of spies through his method.

  It was not until another year elapsed, in spring 1945, that Mao ordered a wholesale rehabilitation of the victims. By then, he knew that Russia would be entering the war against Japan; soon he would be fighting for control of all of China, and he needed cadres fast.

  The young volunteers, who numbered many tens of thousands in Yenan alone, had been through a hell of mental confusion and anguish. There had been many breakdowns — some lifelong. People who lived through Yenan remembered seeing caves in valleys crammed with people “many of whom had gone mad. Some were laughing wildly, some crying,” producing “screams and howls like wolves every night.”

  The number who perished could be in the thousands. For many, suicide was the only way to end their ordeal. Some jumped off cliffs, others into wells. Those with children and spouses often killed them first. Repeat attempts were common: one physics teacher failed when he swallowed match heads (which were poisonous), then hanged himself, successfully. Survivors of suicide attempts were hounded mercilessly. One who had swallowed broken glass was brought back to life and immediately told to “write self-criticisms.”

  Suicide was sometimes also used as a way to stage a protest — in one case becoming a double protest. When one detainee killed himself by jumping off a cliff, his classmates buried him opposite the residence of his interrogators, one of whom registered the import of the gesture: the ghost will come back to haunt you!

  As one official put it in a letter to the leadership in March 1945, the young volunteers had been dealt “a heavy blow to their revolutionary enthusiasm … the wounds carved in their minds and hearts are very deep indeed.” All the same, Mao was confident he could rely on these people to serve him. However unhappy they might be, they were trapped in the Communist organization, and it was extraordinarily hard for them to leave, psychologically as well as physically. In the absence of options, many fell back on their faith, which made it easier for them to rationalize sacrifice. Mao adroitly exploited their idealism, convincing them to accept their maltreatment as part of “Serving the People” (a snappy expression he coined now, and which later acquired fame), and as a noble experience, soul-cleansing for the mission of saving China.

  To defuse the bitterness that clung on in many hearts, Mao performed a few public “apologies” in spring 1945 before he sent his victims to the front to battle Chiang Kai-shek. What he typically did was to take off his cap and bow or salute his audience. But he would carefully present his apology as generously taking responsibility for others (“On behalf of the Centre, I apologise …”), and spread the blame — even to the victims themselves. “The whole of Yenan committed mistakes,” he averred. “The intention was to give you a nice bath, but too much potassium permanganate [used to kill lice] was put in, and your delicate skin was hurt.” This last remark implied that the victims had been too pampered and were easily hurt. Sophistry flowed liberally from Mao’s lips: “We were fighting the enemy in the dark, and so wounded our own people.” Or even: “It was like a father beating his sons. So please don’t bear grudges.” “Please just get up, dust the mud off your clothes and fight on.”

  At such moments, the audiences were usually in tears, tears which were a mixture of resignation and of relief. Most went on fighting for a system that had cruelly wronged them. After they had helped Mao come to power, they would function as part of the machine that ground down the entire population of China. Mao built this machine not through inspiration or magnetism, but fundamentally through terror.

  During what can be called the Yenan Terror, the whole Party was worked over, even those members who did not become outright victims themselves. These were invariably coerced into denouncing others — colleagues, friends, even spouses — which caused lasting trauma to themselves as well as to the victims. Everyone who attended a rally witnessed haunting sights, involving people they knew, and lived with the fear that the next victim might be oneself. The relentless invasion of privacy, being forced to write endless “thought examinations,” brought further stress. Mao was to say over a decade later that he did not just stamp on 80 percent of the Party—“it was in fact 100 percent, and by force, too.”

  MAO NOW HAD in his hands a formidable tool for use against Chiang Kai-shek. One supreme accomplishment of the terror campaign was to squeeze out every drop of information about any link whatever with the Nationalists. Mao introduced a special “Social Relationship” form: “Tell everyone to write down every single social relationship of any kind [our italics].” At the end of the campaign, the regime compiled a dossier on every Party member. The result was that Mao knew every channel the Nationalists might use to infiltrate in the forthcoming showdown. Indeed, during the civil war, while the Nationalists were penetrated like sieves, they had virtually zero success infiltrating the Communists. Mao had forged a machine that was virtually watertight.

  Mao also prepared a “no-questions-asked” anti-Chiang force by fomenting hatred of Chiang. When most of the young volunteers joined up, the CCP was not at war with the Nationalists, and many did not hate Chiang the way Mao wanted them to. As Mao said, “Some people think the Nationalist Party is very good, very pretty.” One senior official noted at the time that “new cadres cherish extremely big illusions about Chiang, while old cadres have weakened their class hatred” for the Generalissimo. Chiang was the undisputed leader of China’s war against Japan. It was Chiang who got America and Britain to retrocede their territorial concessions (except Hong Kong) in 1943—an historic event for which even Mao felt obliged to order grand celebrations. And it was under Chiang that China was accepted as one of “the Big Four,” along with America, Russia and Britain. China’s permanent seat and veto on the UN Security Council, which Mao eventually inherited, were acquired thanks to Chiang.

  At the time, Chiang was generally regarded as the nation-builder of modern China, who had done away with the warlords and unified the country — and led the war against Japan. Mao had to smash this image. In the terror campaign, he ordered the Party to be “re-educated” on the question: “Who is the nation-builder of China: the Nationalists or the CCP?” The corollary of the drive to break Chiang’s image was to create the myth that Mao was the founder of modern China.

  Mao manufactured the fault-lines and hate-lines against Chiang through his “spy hunt” campaign, in which it was spying for the Nationalists, not for the Japanese, that was made the key issue, sometimes identifying the Nationalists with the Japanese by vague assimilation. It was via the terror campaign that Mao turned Chiang into the enemy of the average Communist.

  TO STIR UP anti-Chiang fervor in the CCP, Mao cogitated another “massacre” by the Nationalists like the one involving the New 4th Army HQ two years before. This time the sacrificial victims included his only surviving brother, Tse-min.

  Tse-min had been working in Xinjiang, in the far northwest, which had been a Russian satellite for years. In 1942 the warlord there turned against the Reds. Sensing that their lives were in danger, Tse-min and the other regional CCP leaders cabled Mao repeatedly asking to be evacuated. But they were told to stay put. In early 1943, Tse-min and more than 140 other Communists and their families, including his wife and son, and a girl Mao had called his “daughter,” Si-qi (Mao’s future daughter-in-law), were imprisoned.

  As the warlord had gone over to Chongqing, the obvious thing to do was for the CCP’s liaison, Chou En-lai, to ask for their release from the Nationalist government, which is what the Russians urged Chou to do. The CCP leadership collectively (in the name of the Secretariat) also asked Chou to do
this on 10 February. Two days later, on the 12th, Mao sent Chou a separate cable, signed only by him, with the agenda for talks with the Nationalists; the release of the Xinjiang group was not on it. Chou, by now taking orders from Mao alone, did not raise the matter of the Xinjiang group in his many meetings with the Nationalists.

  Lin Biao was in Chongqing at the time, and on 16 June he got to a meeting with Russian ambassador Panyushkin ahead of Chou, and told Panyushkin that Chou had not done anything, and that “orders” had come from “Yenan.” When Chou turned up, he started claiming he had written to Chiang some three months before, but had had no reply. At this point, Panyushkin reported to Moscow, Lin Biao “sat hanging his head.” Chou was obviously lying. In fact, Chou and Lin had seen Chiang only days before, on the 7th, when Chiang had been friendly and Chou had said nothing about his imprisoned comrades in Xinjiang.

  The upshot was that Mao’s brother Tse-min and two other senior CCP figures were executed on 27 September on charges of plotting a coup. But with so few deaths — only three — Mao was unable to cry “Massacre.” He did not make any announcement condemning the executions, either, as this might raise questions about whether the Communists were indeed guilty as charged. For years, Tse-min’s death remained a public non-event.

  Mao knew the German invasion was coming, and when, to within a matter of hours, and had alerted the Kremlin. Comintern chief Dimitrov records in his diary the tip-off from the CCP saying: “Germany will attack the USSR … the date—21 June 1941!” (bold in Dimitrov original). This is the only such warning singled out. This information had been acquired by CCP moles. When the Germans did invade on the 22nd, the Kremlin belatedly acknowledged the CCP’s help, although it seems it discounted the warning.

  This project is known as zheng-feng, usually translated as “Rectification Campaign.”

  Executions sometimes served other functions. Shi Zhe recounted visiting a hospital where he was shown a big basin: “inside was a male corpse, aged about thirty, soaked in formaldehyde.” Hospital staff told him they had needed corpses for dissection, and “Kang Sheng authorised us” to kill three “counter-revolutionaries” for medical purposes.

  Using exhausting meetings to bend — and break — people was to solidify into an integral part of Mao’s rule.

  The other detainees, including Tse-min’s wife and their son Yuan-xin, were released later, with the Generalissimo’s authorization.

  24. UNCOWED OPPONENT POISONED (1941–45 AGE 47–51)

  WHILE USING terror to turn ordinary Party members into cogs for his machine, Mao also went to work on his top colleagues. His aim was to break them and make them kowtow, with the ultimate goal of establishing himself as their undisputed leader, so that he would never have to rely on Moscow’s blessing again. He picked the time when Stalin was preoccupied with the war against Germany.

  In autumn 1941, Mao convened a series of Politburo meetings at which all those who had opposed him in the past in any way had to make groveling self-condemnations and pledge loyalty to him. Most did so meekly, including nominal Party chief Lo Fu, and former Party No. 1 Po Ku, the man who had reduced Mao to a figurehead before the Long March. (Chou En-lai was away in Chongqing.) But one top figure in Yenan refused to crawl: this was Wang Ming, the man who had been the main threat to Mao since his return from Moscow late in 1937.

  After the German invasion of Russia, Wang Ming figured that Stalin was bound to be displeased with Mao’s refusal to take action against Japan to help the Soviet Union. In October 1941 he caught sight of a cable from Comintern chief Dimitrov to Mao posing fifteen extremely stern questions, including: What measures is the CCP adopting to strike at the Japanese army so that Japan cannot open up a second front against the Soviet Union? Armed with this hard evidence of Moscow’s vexation with Mao, Wang Ming pounced on the chance to reverse his personal and political fortunes. He declined to perform self-flagellation, and criticized Mao’s policy vis-à-vis both Chiang and the Japanese. He also demanded that Mao debate with him in a large Party forum, declaring that he was prepared to take the issue all the way up to the Comintern.

  Mao’s original plan had been to nail down absolute and unconditional submission from his colleagues and then call the long-delayed Party congress and mount the Party throne. He had been de facto Party No. 1 for nearly seven years, but with no commensurate post or title. However, Wang Ming’s challenge wrecked Mao’s plan. If the stubborn challenger managed to open up a debate about Mao’s war policies at the congress, the conclave could well take his side. Mao had to shelve the congress.

  Mao was infuriated at this unexpected turn of events, and his wrath gushed forth from his pen. In this period, he wrote and rewrote nine ranting articles, cursing Wang Ming and his past allies, including Chou En-lai, even though Chou had since switched allegiance. These articles are still a closely guarded secret today. According to Mao’s secretary they were a “huge release of emotions, with much shrill excessive language.” One passage referred to his colleagues as “most pitiful little worms”; “inside these people, there is not even half a real Marx, living Marx, fragrant Marx … there is nothing but fake Marx, dead Marx, stinking Marx …”

  Mao reworked these articles repeatedly, and then put them away. He remained obsessively attached to them right up to the end of his life three and a half decades later. In June 1974, after Wang Ming had died in exile in Moscow, and while Chou En-lai had terminal cancer of the bladder, Mao had the articles taken out of the archives and had them read out to him (Mao then was almost blind). And only one month before he died in 1976, he had them read to him yet again.

  MEANWHILE, JUST AFTER he had challenged Mao in October 1941, Wang Ming collapsed from a sudden illness, and was hospitalized. He claimed he had been poisoned by Mao — which may or may not have been true on this occasion. What is certain is that Mao attempted to have him poisoned the following March, when Wang Ming was just about to be discharged from the hospital. Wang Ming remained defiant: “I will not bow my head even if all others are fawning,” he vowed. In private, he had written poems calling Mao “anti-the Soviet Union, and anti-the Chinese Communist Party.” Furthermore, he said, Mao was “setting up his personal dictatorship”; “Everything he does is for himself, and he does not care about anything else.” Mao could expect the highly articulate Wang Ming to speak out against him.

  The agent for Mao’s poisoning operation was a doctor called Jin Mao-yue, who had originally come to Yenan as part of a Nationalist medical team, at the height of the cooperation between the Nationalists and the CCP. He was a qualified gynecologist and obstetrician, and so the Communists kept him in Yenan. When Wang Ming was admitted to the hospital, Jin was assigned as his chief doctor. That he poisoned Wang Ming was established by an official inquiry involving Yenan’s leading doctors in mid-1943. Its findings, which we obtained, remain a well-kept secret.

  As of the beginning of March 1942, Wang Ming was described as “ready to be discharged.” Dr. Jin had been trying to keep him in the hospital by advocating a whole string of operations—“having his teeth taken out, piles excised and tonsils removed.” These operations were dropped after another doctor objected. The inquiry found that the operations for both the tonsils and the piles (which were “large”) “would have been dangerous.”

  But just as Wang Ming was about to leave the hospital on the 13th, Dr. Jin gave him some pills, after which Wang Ming collapsed. The inquiry recorded that: “On 13 March, after taking one pill, [Wang Ming] felt a headache. On 14 March, he took two, and started vomiting, his liver was in severe pain, his spleen was swollen, there was pain in the area of his heart.” After more pills from Dr. Jin, Wang Ming “was diagnosed as having acute cholecystitis [of the gallbladder] and … hepatomegaly [enlarged liver].”

  The inquiry never found out what the pills were, as there was no prescription. Under questioning, Dr. Jin gave “very vague answers” about the type of drug, and the amount. But the inquiry established that after taking the pills, Wang Ming showed
“symptoms of poisoning.”

  Dr. Jin then prescribed further pills: large doses of calomel and soda — two medicines which, when taken in combination, produce poison in the form of corrosive mercury chloride. The inquiry found that these prescriptions were “enough to kill several people.” The report detailed many “symptoms of mercury poisoning,” and concluded: “It is a fact that he was poisoned.”

  Wang Ming would have died if he had taken all Dr. Jin’s poisonous prescriptions. But he grew suspicious and stopped. In June, Dr. Jin halted his murderous treatment. The reason was that a new and very senior Russian liaison man, Pyotr Vladimirov, had just arrived in Yenan. Vladimirov, who held the rank of general, had worked in northwest China, spoke fluent Chinese and knew some of the CCP leaders personally. His reports went to Stalin. He also brought with him a GRU surgeon, Andrei Orlov, who also held the rank of general, plus an extra radio operator.

  On 16 July, shortly after Vladimirov and Orlov arrived, Moscow was informed, for the first time, that Wang Ming “after nine months of treatment is at death’s door.” At this stage it seems Wang Ming did not tell the Russians that he suspected he was being poisoned. Not only was he in Mao’s hands, but he had no proof. He first tried to drive a wedge between Stalin and Mao by telling Vladimirov that Mao had no intention of helping Russia out militarily. Wang Ming, Vladimirov recorded on 18 July, “says that if Japan attacks [Russia] … the Soviet Union ought not to count on the [CCP].”

  Vladimirov quickly became very critical of Mao. “Spies watch our every step,” he noted. “These last few days [Kang Sheng] has been foisting upon me a teacher of Russian whom I am supposed to accept as a pupil. I have never seen a Chinese girl of such striking beauty. The girl doesn’t give us a day’s peace …” Within weeks, Vladimirov had fired the cook who he was convinced was “a Kang Sheng informer.”