Mao: The Unknown Story

by Jung Chang

  THE LAST MAN Mao set out to de-fang was Peng De-huai, the acting commander of the 8th Route Army. Peng had opposed Mao in the 1930s. In 1940 he had defied Mao’s wishes and launched the only large-scale operation by the Reds against the Japanese during the entire Sino-Japanese War. And he had done something else equally infuriating to Mao — tried to implement some of the ideals which in Mao’s lexicon were to be brandished solely as propaganda. “Democracy, freedom, equality and fraternity,” Mao said, were concepts to be deployed only “for our political needs.” He berated Peng for “talking about them as genuine ideals.”

  Mao had tolerated Peng because Peng had played an extremely useful role in expanding the army and running the base areas. (The bases under Peng enjoyed a much better relationship with the local people, and a much less oppressive atmosphere than Yenan.) In autumn 1943, Mao brought him back to Yenan, although he did not put Peng on the hit list immediately because he did not want to have to deal with too many enemies all at the same time. Peng did not mince his words over the many things that galled him in Yenan, including Mao’s effort to build a cult of himself, which Peng called plain “wrong.” One day, talking to a young Party member who had just been released from Mao’s prison, he said pensively: “It is hard to stand alone honorably.”

  From early 1945 Mao set out to tarnish Peng’s credibility and reputation — and to unnerve him. In a series of long harassment meetings, Mao’s henchmen bombarded him with insults and accusations — an experience he described as “being fucked for forty days.” The sessions attacking Peng went on intermittently right up to the eve of the Japanese surrender, when they stopped because Mao needed commanders of Peng’s caliber to fight Chiang Kai-shek. By this point, Mao had systematically subdued all his opponents.

  Po Ku died in a plane crash in 1946.

  Dr. Jin remained particularly close to Mme Mao, on whom he had performed an induced abortion and oviduct ligation in summer 1942. When the Communists took power, he became head of the Peking Hospital, which catered for Party leaders and their families. On the night of 30 September 1950, Mao’s daughter-in-law was taken to this hospital with appendicitis. The signature of the next-of-kin was needed to okay the operation. As her husband, An-ying, was not present, it was Dr. Jin who authorized the operation.

  On 20 May 1943. This was largely a formality, to mollify Stalin’s Western allies, and it brought little change in the relationship between Moscow and Mao.

  This meant that Wang Ming’s explanation of the way he got out of prison was unsatisfactory, and therefore suspicious.

  In 1948, when Mao planned to go to Russia, he was concerned about what Wang Ming might get up to in his absence. So Wang Ming was given Lysol, ostensibly for his chronic constipation. Lysol was a powerful disinfectant used for cleaning urinals, and would wreck the intestines. Wang Ming survived because his wife immediately stopped administering it to him after he cried out in agony. No other top CCP leader had so many “medical accidents”—or indeed any serious accidents at all. The possibility of it being an accident can be ruled out by the fact that the doctor who prescribed the Lysol remained chief physician for Mao.

  A restricted official circular dated 7 July 1948 and other medical documents acknowledged this “medical accident,” but made the pharmacist the scapegoat. In September 1998, a friend of the pharmacist telephoned her for us. After greetings, the colleague said: “I have a writer here, and she would like to talk to you about the enema.” To this question out of the blue, we heard the pharmacist answer without a second of hesitation or bafflement: “I don’t know. I don’t know.”

  “What medicine did you give?”

  “I don’t know what medicine I gave. I’ve forgotten.”

  It seems that for the past fifty years, the matter had remained at the forefront of the pharmacist’s mind.

  25. SUPREME PARTY LEADER AT LAST (1942–45 AGE 48–51)

  MAO’S TERROR campaign made him so many enemies, from raw recruits to veteran Party leaders, that he came to feel more unsafe than ever, and redoubled his personal security. In autumn 1942 a special Praetorian Guard was inaugurated. Mao gave up his public residence at Yang Hill altogether and lived full-time in Date Garden, the isolated haunt of his KGB, several kilometers outside Yenan. Surrounded by high walls and heavily guarded, the estate was a place to stay away from. Anyone venturing near could easily draw suspicion as a spy. There Mao had a special residence built, designed to withstand the heaviest aerial bombing.

  But even Date Garden was not safe enough. Beyond it, shielded by willows, birch-leaf pears and red-trunk poplars, a path led through wild chrysanthemums into the depths of the hills — and an even more secret lair. There, in a place called the Back Ravine, a group of dwellings was prepared for Mao in a fastness in the hillside. The path was broadened so that Mao’s car could be driven virtually to his door. Only a handful of people knew he lived here.

  Mao’s main room here, as in most of his residences, had a second door, leading to a bolthole dug through to the other side of the hill. The secret passage also ran all the way up to the stage of a large auditorium, so that Mao could step onto it without having to go outside. The auditorium and Mao’s caves were so well camouflaged by the hills and woods that one would not suspect their existence until one virtually reached the doorstep. But from Mao’s place, it was easy to monitor the path leading up. The auditorium was designed, like most public buildings in Yenan, by a man who had studied architecture in Italy, and it looked like a Catholic church. But it was never used, except for a few gatherings of the security force. Mao wanted it kept ultra-secret, exclusively his own. Today Mao’s caves nestle in total seclusion, and the grand hall stands in ruins like a dilapidated cathedral, spectral, in a landscape of loess gullies extending as far as the eye can see.

  Mao’s security assistant Shi Zhe told us: “I controlled that entrance to the path. No one was allowed in just because they wanted to come.” Few leaders ever came. Any who did could take only one bodyguard in, but “not near where Mao Tse-tung lived.” Mao’s own men escorted the leader, alone, to Mao’s place.

  MAO’S CAMPAIGN terrorized even the terrorizers like his deputy and main hatchet man, Kang Sheng. Shi Zhe observed that Kang was living in a state of deep fear of Mao in this period. Though Kang had helped concoct the charge of a vast spy ring in the CCP, it could rebound, as Kang himself had a murky background. Where and when he had joined the CCP was a mystery: he had no witness to the event, and the sponsors he named denied his claim. Many letters had reached Mao casting doubts on Kang, some saying he had buckled when arrested by the Nationalists. Most damning of all, Dimitrov (i.e., Stalin) condemned Kang to Mao in December 1943 as “dubious,” saying that Kang was “helping the enemy.” In fact, back in 1940, the Russians had urged that Kang be kept out of the leadership.

  Far from being put off by Kang’s murky past, Mao positively relished it. Like Stalin, who employed ex-Mensheviks like Vyshinsky, Mao used people’s vulnerability as a way of giving himself a hold over subordinates. He kept Kang on as the chief of his KGB, in charge of vetting and condemning others. Kang remained in fear of Mao right up to his death in 1975; one of his last acts was to plead with Mao that he was “clean.”

  Mao made full use of Kang’s penchant for persecution and twisted personality. Kang had been in Moscow during the show trials and had participated in Stalin-type purging. He enjoyed watching people being stricken with terror at mass rallies, and liked to play with his victims’ anguish. Like Stalin, who sometimes invited victims to his study for a last talk, Kang savored the pleasure of watching the condemned fall into the abyss at the very moment they thought they were safe. He was a sadist. One story he particularly liked telling was about a landlord in his home district who thrashed his farmhands with a whip made from asses’ penises. Kang was also a voyeur. After one fifteen-year-old girl invented a story of how she had used her body for spying, he had her repeat it all over the region, while he listened again and again. One of Kang’s closes
t bonds with Mao came from supplying him with erotica, and swapping lewd tales.

  Kang later became a scapegoat for the Yenan Terror, but everything he did was on Mao’s orders. Actually, during the campaign, Mao limited his power by making Party bosses in each unit — rather than Kang’s KGB — responsible for designating and taking charge of most victims in their institution. In the future Communist China, there was to be no exact equivalent of the Soviet KGB.

  ANOTHER ASSOCIATE who was dealt a tremendous scare in the campaign was Liu Shao-chi. Not only did some of the organizations named as spy outfits come under his domain, but he had also been arrested by the Nationalists — in fact, several times, which qualified him to be a prime suspect as a possible turncoat. If he gave any cause for dissatisfaction, Mao could easily have him condemned as a spymaster. Liu had actually been against the terror campaign when he first came back to Yenan at the end of 1942; but after this brief flutter of distaste, Russian liaison Vladimirov described him as “changing his views rapidly,” and cozying up to Kang Sheng. Thereafter, Liu toed Mao’s line, and played an ignominious role in the campaign. As he was extremely able, Mao picked him to be his second-in-command, a position Liu held until his downfall in the Cultural Revolution in 1966.

  TWO WOMEN WHO were to become extremely powerful in the future entered the realm of persecution now: Mao’s wife and the wife of the man who was to be his deputy in the Cultural Revolution, Lin Biao. Both women had come to Yenan through Party organizations that were being condemned as spy centers. One day in 1943, while Lin Biao was in Chongqing, his wife, Ye Qun, was tied onto a horse and dragged off into detention. Luckily for her, Lin Biao was someone who enjoyed a most uncommon crony relationship with Mao. When Lin returned to Yenan in July, he marched into the Party office dealing with his wife’s case. “Fuck you!” he shouted, throwing his whip on the desk. “We fight wars at the front, and you screw my wife in the rear!” His wife was released, and given the all-clear. This brief experience of intense fear was the beginning of the sclerosis of the heart for Ye Qun. When she rose with her husband in the Cultural Revolution, she became a victimizer.

  The later notorious Mme Mao, Jiang Qing, also learned terror during the Yenan campaign. She had been arrested by the Nationalists years before, and had got out of prison by recanting, and entertaining her jailers — and, according to Kang Sheng (later), sleeping with them. Her past had been a big issue in 1938, when Mao wanted to marry her. Now, although no one dared to denounce her, because she was Mao’s wife, she lived in dread that somebody might, particularly as she too had to perform “self-examinations” and endure criticisms from others. She tried to hide by asking for sick leave, but unlike Lin Biao, who simply told his wife to stay at home, Mao ordered his wife to go back to her unit and experience the scare cycle. Although what she went through was nothing compared with the ordeal suffered by the vast majority, it was enough to make her live in fear about her past for the rest of her life. More than two decades later, when she acquired enormous power, this obsessive fear contributed to the imprisonment and death of many people who knew about her. Above all, Jiang Qing was afraid of her husband. Unlike her predecessor Gui-yuan, she never dared to make a scene about Mao’s womanizing, much less to contemplate leaving him. Whatever squalid jobs he assigned her, she would do.

  The terror campaign in Yenan also marked her debut at persecuting others, for which she developed a taste. Her first victim was her daughter’s nineteen-year-old nanny, whom she got thrown into prison, as the nanny revealed fifty-five years later.

  Mao and Jiang Qing had one child together, a daughter, Li Na, born on 3 August 1940. By the time Li Na was one and a half, she was on her third nanny, who came from a poor peasant family in Shanxi. The nanny’s father had died humping goods across the freezing Yellow River for the Reds. She herself started making shoes for the Red Army from a young age, and was promoted to her district Communist bureaucracy. She and some other “reliable” women were then selected to be nannies for the leaders.

  After a health check and some training, she was taken on as the Maos’ nanny and servant. One of her chores was to wash Mme Mao’s hair. She described how Mme Mao would lose her temper if her hair was not washed exactly the way she wanted. One day in 1943, the nanny was suddenly summoned to appear in front of Mme Mao and two staff members. “You have come here with poison! Confess!” screamed Mme Mao. That night the nanny was taken to the prison in the Back Ravine behind Date Garden.

  She was accused of poisoning the Maos’ milk, which came from their own specially guarded cow at the security apparatus’ compound. What had happened was that Mme Mao developed diarrhea. After grilling the chef and the orderly, she told Kang Sheng she wanted the nanny imprisoned and interrogated.

  In prison, the nanny shared a cave with a large number of other women. During the day, the main activity was spinning, with a very high quota, which she had to work flat out to fill. The regime had spotted that this was an ideal occupation for prisoners, as they were forced to be stationary, thus easy to guard, while being economically productive. The evenings were a time for interrogations, during which the nanny was copiously abused with remarks like: “Why don’t you simply confess and get it over with, you shit-making machine!” During the night, guards poked their heads into the cave to watch against suicide and escape. After nine months she was released, but the gut-wrenching fear she experienced stayed with her forever.

  IT WAS THROUGH the Yenan Terror that Mao accomplished another most important goal: building up his own personality cult. People who lived through this period all remembered it as a turning point when they “firmly established in our minds that Chairman Mao is our only wise leader.” Till then it had been possible to admire Mao while having reservations about him, and to gossip about his marriage to Jiang Qing while still supporting him as the leader. When they were first told to “study” a Mao speech, many had responded with an audible groan: “the same old thing,” “can’t be bothered to go over it again,” “too simplistic.” Quite a few had been reluctant to chant “Long live Chairman Mao.” One recalled thinking: “This was a slogan for emperors. Why are we doing this? I felt creepy and refused to shout it.” This kind of independent talk — and thinking — was killed off by the campaign, and the deification of Mao established. This worship had nothing to do with spontaneous popularity; it stemmed from terror.

  Every step in the construction of his cult was choreographed by Mao himself. He minutely controlled its main vehicle, Liberation Daily, using giant headlines like “Comrade Mao Tse-tung is the Saviour of the Chinese People!” And it was Mao who initiated the phenomenon of badges of his head, which he first issued to the elite during the campaign. In 1943 he got a huge head of himself carved in gold relief on the façade of a major auditorium. It was in that year that Mao’s portraits were first printed en masse and sold to private homes, and that the Mao anthem, “The East Is Red,” became a household song.

  It was also in 1943 that a later widely used expression, “Mao Tse-tung Thought,” first saw the light of day, in an article by the Red Prof, Wang Jia-xiang. Mao stage-managed this eulogy himself. The Red Prof’s wife described how Mao dropped in one sunny day when the dates were green on the trees. After some banter about mah-jong, Mao asked her husband to write an article to commemorate the twenty-second anniversary of the Party that July, dropping heavy hints as to what it should say. Mao checked the final text and made it obligatory reading for all.

  Every day, at the interminable meetings, Mao’s simplistic formula was hammered in: for everything wrong in the Party, blame others; for every success — himself. To achieve this end, history was rewritten, and indeed often stood on its head. The battle of Tucheng, the biggest disaster on the Long March, fought under Mao’s command, was now cited as an example of what happened when the army “violated Mao Tse-tung’s principles.” The first action against Japan, Pingxingguan, was credited to Mao, although it had been fought against his wishes. “Just make it clear to Party members a
nd cadres that the leadership headed by Comrade Mao Tse-tung is completely correct,” Mao instructed.

  IN EARLY 1945 Mao was ready to convene the long-delayed Party congress and have himself inaugurated as the supreme leader of the CCP. The 7th Party Congress opened in Yenan on 23 April, seventeen years after the 6th, in 1928. Mao had been postponing it for years, to make sure he had absolute control.

  Mao had not only weeded the list of delegates with a fine-tooth comb, he had held most of them in virtual imprisonment for five years, and put them through the grinder of his long-drawn-out terror campaign. Of the original 500 or so delegates, half were victimized as spy suspects and suffered appallingly, with some committing suicide and others having mental breakdowns. Many were then dropped. Hundreds of new delegates were appointed, guaranteed loyal to Mao.

  The congress hall was dominated by a huge slogan hung over the platform: “March Forward under the Banner of Mao Tse-tung!” Mao was voted chairman of all three top bodies: the Central Committee, the Politburo and the Secretariat. For the first time since the founding of the Party, Mao formally, and publicly, became its head. It had taken him twenty-four years. It was an emotional moment for Mao, and, as always when his emotions were in play, self-pity was never far off. As he raked over his tale of woes, he was on the verge of tears.

  Mao Tse-tung had become the Stalin of the CCP.

  Later, Liu encouraged some cadres to speak up against the terror, but not until it was over in 1945. In 1950 he told Soviet ambassador Nikolai Roshchin that its methods were “perversions which cost a great number of victims.”