Mao: The Unknown Story

by Jung Chang

  When Red troops were marched to Manchuria, mainly from Shandong, pep talks focused not on high ideals but on material enticements. Commissar Chen Yi told officers: “When I left Yenan, Chairman Mao asked me to tell you that you are going to a good place, a place of great fun. There are electric lights and high-rises, and gold and silver in plenty …” Others told their subordinates: “In Manchuria we’ll be eating rice and white flour [desirable foods] all the time,” and “everyone will be given a promotion.” Even so some officers found it impossible to motivate the soldiers, and kept the destination secret until the troops were safely on board ship en route to Manchuria.

  Communist officers who trekked to Manchuria remembered abysmal morale. One officer recalled:

  The thing that gave us the worst headache was desertions … Generally speaking, all of us Party members, squad commanders, combat team leaders had our own “wobblies” to watch. We would do everything — sentry duty, chores, and errands — together … When the wobblies wanted to take a leak, we would say “I want to have a piss, too” … Signs of depression, homesickness, complaints — all had to be dealt with instantly … After fighting, particularly defeats, we kept our eyes peeled.

  Most of those who ran away did so after camp was pitched, so … as well as normal sentries, we placed secret sentries … Some of us tied ourselves surreptitiously to our wobblies at night … Some of us were so desperate we adopted the method the Japanese used with their labourers — collected the men’s trousers and stowed them in the company HQ at night.

  Yet even some of these trusted cadres deserted.

  The commander of one division that had transferred from Shandong to Manchuria reported to Mao on 15 November that between “deserters, stragglers and the sick” he had lost 3,000 men out of the 32,500 he had set off with. Earlier, the commander of another unit reported: “Last night alone … over 80 escaped.” One unit suffered a desertion rate of over 50 percent, ending up with fewer than 2,000 out of its original 4,000-plus men. Local Manchurian recruits also defected in droves when they realized they would be fighting the national government. During a ten-day period in late December 1945 to early January 1946, over 40,000 went over to the Nationalists, according to the Reds’ own statistics. Although CCP troops in Manchuria far outnumbered the Nationalists, and were well armed with Japanese weapons, they were still unable to hold their own.

  MAO’S NO. 2, Liu Shao-chi, had foreseen that the Reds would not be able to shut Chiang out of Manchuria. He had a different strategy from Mao. While Mao was in Chongqing, Liu had instructed the CCP in Manchuria to focus on building a solid base on the borders with Russia and its satellites, where the troops could receive proper training in modern warfare. On 2 October 1945, he had sent an order: “Do not deploy the main forces at the gate to Manchuria to try to keep Chiang out, but at the borders with the USSR, Mongolia and Korea, and dig our heels in.” In addition, Liu had told the Reds to be ready to abandon big cities and go and build bases in the countryside surrounding the cities.

  But when Mao returned to Yenan from Chongqing, he overruled Liu. Concentrate the main forces at the pass into Manchuria and at big railway junctions, he ordered on 19 October. Mao could not wait to “possess the whole of Manchuria,” as another order put it. But his army was not up to the job.

  Mao’s relationship with his army was in many ways a remote one. He never tried to inspire his troops in person, never visited the front, nor went to meet the troops in the rear. He did not care about them. Many of the soldiers sent to Manchuria had malaria. In order to drag these feverish men the many hundreds of kilometers, each sick man was sandwiched between two able-bodied soldiers and pulled along by a rope around the waist. Mao’s preferred method for dealing with wounded soldiers was to leave them with local peasants, who were usually living on a knife-edge between subsistence and starvation, and had no access to medicine.

  His army’s performance showed that Mao had no prospect of victory anytime soon, and Stalin adjusted rapidly. On 17 November 1945, after Chiang’s army stormed into southern Manchuria, Chiang noted a “sudden change of attitude” in the Russians. They told the CCP it would have to vacate the cities, putting an end to Mao’s hopes of becoming immediate master of all Manchuria, and of a quick victory nationwide.

  Stalin knew this decision would be devastating for Mao, so he made a gesture to reassure him. On the 18th, a cable was dispatched from Russia: “MAO AN YIN[G] asks for your permission to go to ‘41’ [code name for Yenan].” Stalin was finally returning Mao’s son. This was good news for Mao, but no help in seizing Manchuria. Desperate entreaties to the Russians followed, and futile orders for his troops to hold out. When both failed, Mao collapsed with a nervous breakdown. On the 22nd he moved out of Date Garden into a special elite clinic (after all the patients had first been turfed out). For days on end, he was unable to rise from his bed, or to sleep a wink. He lay trembling all over, his hands and feet convulsing, pouring cold sweat.

  At his wits’ end, Mao’s assistant Shi Zhe suggested asking Stalin for help. Mao agreed, and Shi cabled Stalin, who replied at once, offering to send doctors. Mao accepted the offer, but two hours later he seems to have had second thoughts about laying himself so bare to Stalin’s eyes and asked Shi to hold the telegram. But it had already gone off.

  Only days before, Stalin had recalled Mao’s GRU doctor Orlov, together with the whole GRU mission in Yenan. Orlov had been in Yenan for three and a half years without a break, but the minute he arrived in Moscow, Stalin ordered him back to Mao. The hapless Orlov arrived back on 7 January 1946, accompanied by a second doctor called Melnikov from the KGB. They found nothing seriously wrong with Mao, except for mental exhaustion and nervous stress. Mao was advised to delegate work more, relax, take walks and get plenty of fresh air. Orlov, however, was soon pleading nervous tension himself and begging Moscow to recall him. In vain.

  On the plane with the doctors came Mao’s son, An-ying, to whom Stalin had personally presented an inscribed pistol before he left. It was over eighteen years since Mao had seen his son, then four years old, in 1927, when Mao had left his wife Kai-hui and three sons and begun his outlaw career. Now An-ying was a good-looking young man of twenty-three. At the airfield Mao hugged him, exclaiming: “How tall you have grown!” That evening, Mao wrote a thank-you letter to Stalin.

  Mao had moved out of the clinic by now and settled in the HQ of the military, a beautiful place known as Peony Pavilion. It was surrounded by a large garden of peonies, including some of China’s most gorgeous varieties. To this rich splendor the plant-loving nominal C-in-C, Zhu De, and his staff had added a delicate peach orchard, a fish pond and a basketball court. Mao spent a lot of time with An-ying, often sitting at a square stone table chatting outside his adobe house, which stood right next to his deep — and private — air-raid shelter. A frequent mah-jong and card partner of the Maos at the time noticed that Mao acted very affectionately towards his son. Mao’s health gradually improved. By spring, he had made a good recovery.

  The most comforting thing for Mao was that most of Manchuria was still in Communist hands. Stalin maintained overall control of the area, having hung on way beyond the three months he had promised, and had refused to allow anything but a skeleton Nationalist staff into the cities. Though the CCP had to move its organizations out of most cities, they entrenched in the vast countryside.

  THE RUSSIAN ARMY did not finally leave Manchuria until 3 May 1946, nearly ten months after it had entered. To maximize the CCP’s chances, they kept the Nationalists in the dark until the very last minute about the pull-out schedule, while coordinating their departure with the CCP so that it could take over the area’s assets, including major cities, which the Reds now re-entered. Mao ordered his army again to hold out in key cities on the railway line, which he insisted were to be defended “regardless of the sacrifice,” “like Madrid,” evoking the heroic image of defending the capital to the death in the Spanish civil war.

  Mao’s second in command, Li
u Shao-chi, again cautioned that the Reds were not up to stopping Chiang’s army, and that most cities would have to be abandoned. The Manchuria commander, Lin Biao, also warned Mao that “there is no great likelihood of holding on to [the cities],” and suggested their strategy should be “to eliminate enemy forces, not defend cities.” He agreed with Liu Shao-chi that the priority was to build up rural bases. Mao insisted that the cities must be defended “to the death.”

  But the next round of battles showed that his army was still no match for Chiang’s. Within weeks of the Russian withdrawal the Nationalists had seized every major city in Manchuria except Harbin, the nearest to Russia, and the Communist forces had been reduced to a state of collapse. They retreated north in chaos, under aerial bombardment, harried by Nationalist tanks and motorized troops. Lin Biao’s political commissar later admitted that “the whole army had disintegrated” and fallen into what he called “utter anarchy.” One officer recalled being chased northward non-stop for forty-two days: “It really looked as though we’d had it …”

  Not only were the Reds collapsing militarily, but they were at a huge disadvantage with the civilian population, which longed for national unity after fourteen years of brutal Japanese rule, and saw the Nationalists as representing the government. Lin Biao reported to Mao: “People are saying that the 8th Route Army shouldn’t be fighting the government army … They regard the Nationalists as the Central Government.”

  The CCP had a further disadvantage, that of being linked in people’s minds with the much-hated Russians. Russian troops plundered not only industrial equipment, but people’s homes; and rape by Russian soldiers was frequent. When the belated publication of the Yalta Agreement in February 1946 revealed the huge extraterritorial privileges Stalin had grabbed in Manchuria, anti-Soviet demonstrations erupted in many cities there, as well as in other parts of China. There was a widespread feeling that the CCP had got into Manchuria on the back of the Russians and was not working for the interests of China. When demonstrators shouted slogans like “The CCP should love our country,” onlookers applauded. Rumors circulated that the Party was offering the Russians women in exchange for weapons.

  The locals treated the Chinese Reds quite differently from the Nationalists. One Red officer recalled: “We were hungry and thirsty when we got to Jilin … There was not a soul in the street … But when the enemy entered the city; somehow the folks all appeared, waving little flags and cheering … Imagine our anger!”

  The Red troops were disheartened, and vented their fury even on their top brass. Lin Biao was once caught in his jeep in a crowd of retreating troops. When his guard asked the men to make way for “the chief,” he was greeted with yells like: “Ask that chief, are we retreating to the land of the Big Hairy Ones?” The sobriquet was the locals’ derogatory term for the Russians.

  At this point it looked as though the Chinese Reds might be driven across the border into Russia, or be scattered into small guerrilla units in the mountains, which Lin Biao anticipated. On 1 June, he asked Mao for permission to abandon Harbin, the last big city the Reds held, about 500 km from the Russian border. The CCP’s Manchuria Bureau gave Mao the same fatalistic message the next day: “We have told Brother Chen [code name for the Russians] that we are ready to leave [Harbin] …” Mao twice implored Stalin to intervene directly, in the form of either a “military umbrella” or “joint operations.” Stalin declined, as intervention would have international implications, although he allowed CCP units to cross into Russia. On 3 June, Mao had to endorse plans to abandon Harbin and go over to guerrilla warfare “on a long-term basis.”

  Mao was on the ropes. Then he was rescued — by the Americans.

  In the Yalta Declaration, these are presented as reparations due Russia by Japan, but the reality was that they were gouged out of China. Churchill welcomed this, on the grounds that “any claim by Russia for indemnity at the expense of China would be favorable to our resolve about Hong Kong.” Though the deals involved Chinese territory, the Chinese government was not even informed, much less consulted. Moreover, the US put itself at Stalin’s mercy by committing to wait for his permission before it told Chiang Kai-shek — and placed itself in the uniquely constrained position of then being responsible for obtaining Chiang’s compliance. As a result, the Generalissimo was not given a full account by the US until 15 June, over four months later. This was shabby treatment of an ally, and it stored up trouble.

  Stalin also had his own aggressive agenda: a tentative scheme to detach part of the Mongolian region of China adjacent to Outer Mongolia and merge it with the Soviet satellite. Russo — Mongolian occupation forces actually formed an Inner Mongolia provisional government, ready for the merger, but the scheme was then dropped.

  When two years later he urged sending large forces deep into Nationalist areas, the commanders asked what would happen to the wounded without a base area to fall back on. Mao’s airy response was: “It’s easy … leave the wounded and the sick to the masses.”

  Since then, a cultivated myth has credited Mao with the strategies of “surrounding the cities from the countryside” and of “aiming mainly to eliminate enemy forces, not to defend or capture cities.” In fact, the former idea came from Liu Shao-chi, and was vigorously opposed by Mao before practicality forced him to adopt it; and the latter was Lin Biao’s.

  28. SAVED BY WASHINGTON (1944–47 AGE 50–53)

  IT WAS NO secret that many US officials were decidedly unenthusiastic about Chiang, and so Mao acted to exploit this ambivalence in the hope that America would withhold support from the Generalissimo and perhaps take a friendlier line towards the Reds. Mao carefully fostered the delusion that the CCP was not a real Communist party, but one of moderate agrarian reformers, who wanted to cooperate with the US.

  In mid-1944 Roosevelt sent a mission to Yenan. Just after the first Americans arrived, Mao floated the idea of changing the Party’s name: “We’ve been thinking of renaming our Party,” he told the Russian liaison in Yenan, Vladimirov, on 12 August: “of calling it not ‘Communist’ but something else. Then the situation … will be more favorable, especially with the Americans …” The Russians immediately chimed in. Later that month, Molotov fed the same line to Roosevelt’s then special envoy to China, General Patrick Hurley, telling him that in China “some … people called themselves ‘Communists’ but they had no relation whatever to communism. They were merely expressing their dissatisfaction at their economic condition by calling themselves Communists. However, once their economic conditions had improved, they would forget this political inclination. The Soviet Government … [was not] associated with the ‘Communist elements.’ ”

  Red deception became especially important when Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman, sent America’s top general, George Marshall, to China in December 1945 to try to stop the civil war. Marshall, who had served in China in the 1920s, was already ill-disposed towards Chiang, mainly because of the corruption of Chiang’s relatives, and was susceptible to CCP claims that it and the US had a lot in common. At their first meeting, Chou En-lai soft-soaped Marshall by telling him how much the CCP “desired a democracy based … on the American style.” A month later, Chou egregiously suggested that Mao preferred America to Russia, telling Marshall “a small anecdote which might be of interest to you. It has been rumored recently, that Chairman Mao is going to pay a visit to Moscow. On learning this, Chairman Mao laughed and remarked half-jokingly that if ever he would take a furlough abroad … he would rather go to the United States …” Marshall relayed these remarks uncritically to Truman. Even years later, he was maintaining to Truman that the Reds had been more cooperative than the Nationalists.

  Marshall did not understand Mao, or Mao’s relationship with Stalin. On 26 December 1945 he told Chiang that “it was very important to determine whether or not the Russian Government was in contact with and was advising the Chinese Communist party”—as though this still needed verification. Later (in February 1948), he told the US Congress
that “in China we have no concrete evidence that [the Communist army] is supported by Communists from the outside.” This ignorance is particularly striking because the Americans, like the British, had been intercepting cables from Russia, some of them addressed to Yenan, clearly showing the relationship. Marshall was also given strong warnings by other American officials, including the head of the US mission in Yenan, who opened his final report with a three-word alarm: “Communism is International!”

  Marshall visited Yenan on 4–5 March 1946. For the occasion, Mao made doubly sure that everything was shipshape and watertight. One step was to pack his son An-ying off to a village. He told An-ying this was to help him to learn farm labor and Chinese ways, but the real reason was that Mao was vexed by the attention the Americans were paying his English-speaking son. Soon after An-ying had arrived from Russia, Mao had introduced him to the Associated Press correspondent John Roderick, who then interviewed An-ying on the edge of the dance floor at a Saturday night party. Afterwards Mao exploded. He “did not even read the interview through,” An-ying recalled, “before he crushed it into a ball, and then told me sternly: … How dare you give an interview to a foreign reporter just like that, off the top of your head, without instructions?” An-ying had been schooled in the hard world of Stalin’s Russia, but even that had not prepared him for the super-steely discipline of his father’s laager. While An-ying was banished to the sticks, the non-English-speaking Mme Mao was very much on hand for her debut as First Lady.

  Marshall’s report to Truman about Yenan oozed illusions: “I had a long talk with Mao Tze-tung, and I was frank to an extreme. He showed no resentment and gave me every assurance of cooperation.” Marshall informed Truman that Communist forces in Manchuria were “little more than loosely organized bands”; and, even more astonishingly, that: “It has been all but impossible for the Yenan headquarters to reach the leaders’ in Manchuria. This was after the Russians had flown CCP leaders to Manchuria from Yenan (in a DC-3) and when Yenan was in daily contact with CCP forces in the field that numbered hundreds of thousands.