Mao: The Unknown Story

by Jung Chang

  When Lin got up to Lushan, he attacked Peng venomously, and gave Mao his total and demonstrative support. There was nothing Peng or anyone else could do to defy Mao or to reason with him. Mao had also made it easier for people to go along with him by pretending to make some concessions — on food extraction levels, steel output targets, and expenditure on arms factories — and by expressing a willingness to put some money into agriculture. Mao had no intention of honoring any of these promises, and was soon to renege on them all.

  Mao labeled Peng and other critics, including Chief of Staff Huang Ke-cheng and former Party No. 1 Lo Fu, as an “anti-Party clique.” He now enlarged the conference to a plenum of the Central Committee, so that his critics could be condemned more formally. Mao read out the resolution himself, and simply announced that it was passed, without even going through the motions of asking the participants to raise their hands. After the obligatory degrading denunciation meetings, Peng was put under house arrest, and the others suffered various punishments. Their families became outcasts with them. Huang’s wife went out of her mind. The youngest and most junior of the group, Mao’s occasional secretary Li Rui, went through nearly 100 denunciation meetings, and was then sent to do forced labor in the Great Northern Wilderness. His wife divorced him, and under her influence his children disowned him with a frosty letter, turning down his request to have a photograph of them. He spent virtually all of the next two decades in and out of forced labor camps and solitary confinement in prison, narrowly escaping a death sentence. This bravest of men emerged with his sanity, intellect, and moral courage undiminished, and continued to speak out against injustice in the post-Mao years.

  AFTER LUSHAN, Peng was replaced as defense minister by Lin Biao, who immediately started to purge Peng’s sympathizers in the army. He also set about promoting Mao’s cult on an even grander scale. From January 1960 he ordered the armed forces to memorize quotations from Mao — a move that was to develop into the compendium known as “the Little Red Book.” Mao was overjoyed. He later told the Australian Maoist Edward Hill that Lin “has invented a new method, that is, to compile quotations … Confucius’s Analects is a collection of quotations. Buddhism also has collections of quotations.” Mao then mentioned the Bible. This was the company in which he thought his aphorisms belonged.

  Across the nation anyone resisting hyper-requisition and slave-driving was hounded down. Over the next couple of years, according to post-Mao leader Deng Xiao-ping later on, an “estimated 10 million” people were made victims in this drive, which in addition jeopardized the life of “several tens of millions” of their relations. Many of the 10 million victims were grassroots cadres. Their replacements were people willing to slave-drive as harshly as ordered.

  One other group particularly persecuted in this purge cycle was doctors, for the reason that they had so often identified starvation as the true cause of the tidal wave of illness and death. Mao wanted to ensure that the gigantic tragedy he had created remained a non-event. Even the names of diseases that suggested starvation were tabooed, like edema, which was just called “No. 2 Illness.” Years later, Mao was still flagellating doctors for doing their job professionally: “Why were there so many … hepatitis cases in [those days]? Weren’t they all you doctors’ doing? You went looking for them, didn’t you?”

  In the following year, 1960, 22 million people died of hunger. This was the largest number in one year in any country in the history of the world.

  LUSHAN ALSO SEALED the fate of Mao’s ex-wife, Gui-yuan. Twenty-two years before, unable to bear his blatant womanizing and general callousness towards her, she had left Mao and gone to Moscow. In Russia she had a mental breakdown, and spent two years in a provincial psychiatric hospital where she went through a nightmare regime. She got out in autumn 1946, stable, if a little slow, and was allowed to return to China. She was banned from Peking, and in 1959, at the time of Lushan, was living nearby, in Nanchang. She had made a good recovery, but her life was lonely, as she lived on her own. She had not set eyes on Mao for twenty-two years.

  On 7 July 1959, while Mao was watching Peng before pouncing, he was seized by a whim to see Gui-yuan. He sent the savvy wife of a local boss to fetch her, but specifically asked the woman not to tell Gui-yuan who it was that she was going to see, and just to say that she was invited to Lushan for a holiday — because, Mao told the intermediary, Gui-yuan “could well collapse mentally if she got too excited.” Mao was well aware that Gui-yuan was in a fragile emotional state, and the shock might be more than she could take. Their daughter had told him her mother had had a relapse at the unexpected sound of Mao’s voice on the radio in 1954 (one of the very rare occasions his voice was broadcast — for which the radio was reprimanded). He was prepared to risk her having a breakdown merely to gratify his whim.

  Mao’s selfishness cost Gui-yuan dearly. When she suddenly saw him standing in front of her, her nerves gave way. The damage was worsened by the fact that when Mao was saying goodbye he promised to see her again “tomorrow.” But the next morning she was forcibly taken back to Nanchang, on his orders. This time her breakdown was worse than ever. She did not even recognize her own daughter, and would not wash, or change her clothes. Every now and then she would escape to the gate of the provincial Party HQ, hair disheveled, drooling at the mouth, demanding to know who had schemed to prevent her from seeing Mao again. She never fully recovered.

  At the end of these sessions, Mao victimized a host of prominent generals, to make the point that the top brass must keep their distance from the Russians. Mao’s message was: The only thing you are to learn from the Russians is how to use modern weapons.

  Eastern Europe also allowed Peng to anticipate Mao’s gruesome mausoleum. “We have seen the corpses of the leaders: Lenin, Stalin, Gottwald, Dimitrov. Every country has one. The Asian countries probably will also have these in the future.”

  When Albania broke with Russia, control of the submarines there was at the core of the bust-up. In January 1961, Peking gave the Albanian leader, Enver Hoxha, the gigantic sum of 500m rubles, and when the Russians tried to pull their submarines out in early June that year, Hoxha used force to hold four of them back, and almost certainly gave Mao access to them.

  Electricity was installed for Mao the next time he was nearby, on 18 May 1960. This took 470 workers, who had to battle a force-8 gale. Even so, Mao did not drop in again.

  42. THE TIBETANS REBEL (1950–61 AGE 56–67)

  FROM THE TIME he conquered China, Mao was determined to take Tibet by force. When he saw Stalin on 22 January 1950, he asked if the Soviet air force could transport supplies to Chinese troops “currently preparing for an attack on Tibet.” Stalin’s reply was: “It’s good that you are preparing to attack. The Tibetans need to be subdued …” Stalin also advised flooding Tibet and other border regions with Han Chinese: “Since ethnic Chinese make up no more than 5 percent of Xinjiang’s population, the percentage of ethnic Chinese should be brought to 30 … In fact, all the border territories should be populated by Chinese …” This is exactly what the Chinese Communist regime then proceeded to do.

  During 1950–51, 20,00 °Chinese Communist troops forced their way into Tibet. But Mao realized he was unable to send in larger numbers to occupy the whole place. There were no proper roads to supply a large army, and Mao’s soldiers were not used to the altitude, while the Tibetan army was not a negligible force. So Mao played the negotiation game, pretending that he would allow the area virtual autonomy. Acting the benign moderate, he recognized the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual and governmental leader, as the head of Tibet, sent him gifts like a 16mm film projector, and said reassuring things to Tibetan delegations. Meanwhile he pressed ahead with building two roads into Tibet.

  In September 1954, the nineteen-year-old Dalai Lama went to Peking to attend the rubber-stamp National Assembly, of which he had been appointed a member. Mao met him at least a dozen times during his stay, which lasted half a year, and set out to charm — and disarm —
him. Mao knew about his interest in science: “I know you are a reform-minded man, like myself,” Mao said. “We have a lot of things in common,” citing education reform. “That was the danger with Mao,” the Dalai Lama told us, “everything he said—half true! Half true!” But along with the lulling, Mao was also patronizing and bullying, berating the Dalai Lama for not accepting that “religion is poison.”

  In an effort to do the best he could for his people, the Dalai Lama applied to join the CCP. His application was turned down. He tried to keep Mao in a good mood, and after returning to Lhasa, wrote to him in summer 1955 enclosing a Tibetan flower. Mao responded in almost sentimental language:

  Dear Dalai Lama, I was very happy to receive your letter … I often miss you, missing the happy times when you were in Peking. When can I see you again?… I was very happy to see the Tibetan flower which you enclosed … I’m here enclosing one flower to you …

  Early in 1956, once the two major roads had been completed into Tibet, Mao set about requisitioning food, attacking religion and confiscating arms in a region called Kham, adjacent to Tibet and inhabited by some half a million Tibetans. The people rebelled, and by the end of March had mustered an armed force of over 60,000 men with more than 50,000 guns. Rebellions spread like wildfire in other regions where Tibetans formed a majority. Mao found himself with major wars on his hands covering huge areas of the interior; he resorted to using heavy artillery and aerial bombardment.

  The mass participation and the combativeness of the rebels brought home to Mao what kind of resistance he would face in Tibet itself. In September he suspended his plans to “Maoise” Tibet.

  However, two years later, with the Great Leap in 1958, food requisitioning was drastically stepped up nationwide. This encountered tenacious resistance in Tibet and the four large provinces in Western China with sizable Tibetan populations — Gansu, Qinghai, Yunnan and Sichuan. Many Tibetans had managed to retain their firearms, which for herdsmen were essential for their livelihood. They also had horses, which gave them mobility. But above all they had their own separate identity, language and religion, which enabled them to organize in secret.

  In Qinghai, which is larger than France, the rebellion spread through the province. Mao gave instant orders to quell it, on 24 June. At the same time, he told his army chiefs to “be ready to deal with an all-out rebellion in Tibet” itself. He made it explicit that he positively wanted a violent, crushing solution. “In Tibet,” he wrote on 22 January the following year, “there has to be a general decisive war before we can solve the problem thoroughly. The Tibetan rulers … now have a 10,000-strong rebelling armed force with high morale, and they are our serious enemies. But this is … a good thing. Because this makes it possible to solve our problems through war.” Mao was saying: They have given me an excuse to start a war. A month later, he wrote: “The bigger the upheaval the better.”

  On 10 March 1959, an uprising broke out in Lhasa, after word spread that the Chinese planned to kidnap the Dalai Lama. Thousands paraded in front of his palace and through Lhasa, shouting “Chinese get out!” Next day, Mao cabled an order to let the Dalai Lama escape. His calculation was that if the Dalai Lama was killed it would inflame world opinion, particularly in the Buddhist countries and India, which Mao was courting. On the night of the 17th the Dalai Lama made his way out of Lhasa and set off for India. Once his escape was confirmed, Mao told his men: “Do all you can to hold the enemies in Lhasa … so when our main force arrives we can surround them and wipe them out.”

  THE PHYSICAL WAR had its propaganda chorus. On 7 April, Mao made inquiries about Tibetan practices. One thing he was particularly keen to know was whether the Tibetan ruling class used torture, and whether disobedient lamas were skinned alive and had their tendons severed. On the 29th, following Mao’s orders, a vigorous media campaign began, painting Tibet as a terrifying place, where gruesome tortures of the kinds Mao had mentioned, plus gouging out eyes, were everyday occurrences. Aided by age-old prejudices, this propaganda drive was effective, and Mao succeeded in planting the idea in people’s minds that Tibet was a land of barbarism.

  There had been a very dark side to the rule of the old Tibetan theocracy, but in terms of overall brutality and suffering, Mao’s rule was far worse. This is shown in a 70,000-word letter written to Chou En-lai by the second-ranking spiritual leader in Tibet, the Panchen Lama, in 1962, describing what happened in the years 1959–61. What gives the letter particular weight is that the Panchen Lama had initially welcomed Mao’s troops into Tibet, and even accepted the suppression of the Lhasa rebellion in 1959. Moreover, Chou himself acknowledged that the letter was accurate.

  Mao had imposed a level of requisitioning on the Tibetan economy far higher than it could possibly sustain. In the old days, the Panchen Lama wrote, “food was not that short … there was no death from starvation.” But in 1959 and 1960 “too much grain was collected, even the food and tsampa [barley flour, Tibetans’ staple food] in people’s offering bags were confiscated.” Requisitioning was brutal: “nearly all the reserve food, meat and butter were confiscated … There was no oil to light lamps, not even firewood …” “To survive, herdsmen had to eat many of their animals …” The population was herded into canteens, where they were fed “weeds, even inedible tree bark, leaves, grass roots and seeds.” Food traditionally fed to animals had “now become rare nutritious delicious foods.” People’s health declined dramatically: “A tiny infectious illness like a cold led to … masses of deaths. Quite a lot … also died directly of starvation … Death rate was really terrible … Such awful pain of hunger had never existed in Tibetan history.”

  While he was writing the letter, the Panchen Lama toured Tibetan regions. He found that in Qinghai, people did not even have food bowls. “In the old society, even beggars had bowls,” the Panchen Lama observed. Under Chiang Kai-shek and the Muslim warlord Ma Pu-fang, the Tibetans in Qinghai “were never so poor as not to be able to afford bowls!” Later, people even took to trying to break into labor camps and prisons to search for food.

  Large numbers of Tibetans were put through violent denunciation meetings, including the father and family of the Panchen Lama, who wrote: “People were beaten till they bled from eyes, ears, mouths, noses, they passed out, their arms or legs broken … others died on the spot.” For the first time in Tibet, suicide became a common practice.

  With so many Tibetans joining rebellions against Mao’s regime, Chinese troops treated most Tibetans as enemies, rounding up the majority of adult males in many places, leaving only “women, the old, the children and extremely few young and middle-aged men.” After Mao’s death, the Panchen Lama revealed what he had not dared put in his original letter: that a staggering 15 to 20 percent of all Tibetans — perhaps half of all adult males — were thrown into prison, where they were basically worked to death. They were treated like subhumans. Lama Palden Gyatso, a brave long-term prisoner, told us he and other prisoners were flogged with wire whips as they pulled heavy plows.

  The crushing of the rebellions produced atrocious behavior on the part of Chinese troops. In one place, the Panchen Lama described (speaking after Mao died) how “corpses were dragged down from the mountains” and buried in a big pit, and the relatives were then summoned and told: “ ‘We have wiped out the rebel bandits, and today is a day of festivity. You will all dance on the pit of the corpses.’ ”

  Atrocities went in parallel with cultural annihilation. This period witnessed a campaign officially called “Big Destruction,” in which the entire Tibetan way of life came under violent physical assault for being “backward, dirty and useless.” Mao was bent on destroying religion, the essence of most Tibetans’ lives. When he met the Dalai Lama in 1954–55 he told him there were too many monks in Tibet, which, he said, was bad for reproducing the labor force. Now lamas and nuns were forced to break their vows of celibacy and get married. “Holy Scriptures were used for manure, and pictures of the Buddha and sutras were deliberately used to make shoes,�
� the Panchen Lama wrote. The destruction was of a kind that “even lunatics would hardly carry out.” Most monasteries were destroyed, “the sites looking as if they had just been through a war and bombardments.” According to the Panchen Lama, the number of monasteries in Tibet fell from over 2,500 before 1959 to “only just over 70” in 1961, and the number of monks and nuns from over 110,000 to 7,000 (some 10,000 fled abroad).

  One particularly painful order for Tibetans was that Buddhist ceremonies for the dead were banned. “When a person dies,” the Panchen Lama wrote:

  if there is no ceremony to expiate his sins for his soul to be released from purgatory, this is to treat the dead with the utmost … cruelty … People were saying: “We die too late … Now when we die, we are going to be like a dog being tossed outside the door!”

  On his tours in the early 1960s, Tibetans came at great risk to see the Panchen Lama, crying out and weeping: “Don’t let us starve! Don’t let Buddhism be exterminated! Don’t let the people of the Land of Snows become extinct!” Mao was “greatly displeased” with the Panchen Lama’s letter, and visited much suffering on him, including ten years in prison.

  To Tibet, as to the whole of China, Mao’s rule brought unprecedented misery.

  43. MAOISM GOES GLOBAL (1959–64 AGE 65–70)

  IN FEBRUARY 1959, Russia signed an agreement to provide China with the means to make nuclear submarines. This marked the high point of the Kremlin’s cooperation on technology transfers. But even while the deal was being signed, Khrushchev was having second thoughts about endowing Mao with such enormous military power.