by Jung Chang
Over the decades, Mao had brought ill fortune to virtually every member of his family. His final betrayal was towards his fourth and last wife, Jiang Qing. After getting her to do much of his dirty work, and knowing how much she was loathed, he made no provision for safeguarding her after he died. On the contrary, he offered her up as a trade-off to the “opposition” that emerged near the end of his life. In return for guaranteeing his own safety while he was alive, they were told that after he died, they could do as they pleased with Mme Mao and her group of cronies, which included Mao’s nephew Yuan-xin. Less than a month after Mao’s death, the whole group ended up in prison. In 1991 Mme Mao committed suicide.
Today, Li Na has recovered, and leads a normal life. She appears to have “forgotten” her role in the Cultural Revolution.
57. ENFEEBLED MAO HEDGES HIS BETS (1973–76 AGE 79–82)
IN THE LAST two years of Mao’s life a formidable “opposition” to his policies emerged, in the shape of an alliance that centered on Deng Xiao-ping, the man who later dismantled much of Mao’s legacy after Mao died. Mao had purged Deng in 1966, at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, but brought him back to the top in 1973.
Born in Sichuan in 1904, and thus eleven years Mao’s junior, Deng went to France in 1920 on a work-and-study program at the age of sixteen, and there became a Communist, working under Chou En-lai. Five years in France left him with a lifelong fondness for many things French: wine, cheese, croissants, coffee and cafés — all, it would seem, to do with food. Late in life, he would often compare French cafés nostalgically with the teahouses in his home province of Sichuan, reminiscing about a little café he had frequented in the Place d’Italie in Paris.
His fellow Chinese in France remembered Deng, who was just over 5 feet tall, as a plump ball of energy, full of jokes. Since then, decades of life in the Party had caused him to metamorphose into a man of deep reserve and few words. One advantage of this reticence was that he kept meetings brief. The first session of the committee in charge of southwest China after the Communist takeover lasted a mere nine minutes, in contrast with those under the long-winded Chou En-lai, who once talked for nine hours. Deng was decisive, with the ability to cut straight through complicated matters, which he sometimes did while playing bridge, for which he developed a passion.
Deng had joined the Communists in France, but his grounding was in Russia, where he spent a year after being kicked out of France, and where he received Party training. When the Long March started in 1934, he was already chief secretary of the Party leadership, and he was a top army commander during the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–45. In the civil war after 1945 he became chief of the half of the Communist army which won the decisive Huai — Hai Campaign that clinched the Red victory and then took much of China south of the Yangtze. Afterwards, he was in charge of several provinces, including his native Sichuan, before Mao promoted him to the core leadership in Peking in the early 1950s.
He was deeply loyal to Mao, and during the suppression of intellectuals in the anti-Rightist campaign in 1957–58 he was Mao’s chief lieutenant. But he had a breaking-point, and supported Liu Shao-chi’s efforts to stop the famine in the early 1960s. He tried to keep at arm’s length from Mao — a fact that Mao took note of, remarking that Deng was “keeping a respectful distance from me as though I were a devil or a deity.”
When Mao launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966, he tried all kinds of inducements to keep Deng on board, but failed. Deng was branded “the second-biggest capitalist-roader,” after Liu, and put under house arrest in 1967, and his children and stepmother were evicted from their home. He was subjected to denunciation meetings, though with much less physical abuse than Liu. Mao calibrated the punishment of his foes meticulously. He did not hate Deng the way he hated Liu, so he ordered that Deng “must be denounced … but differentiate him from Liu.” Unlike Liu, Deng was not separated from his wife, which gave him the companionship that often made the difference between life and death.
But even Mao’s “better” treatment was hell. In May 1968, Deng’s eldest son and a daughter were taken, blindfolded, to Peking University, and told to “expose” their father. Over sixty other people who had been imprisoned there had committed suicide or been tortured to death. Deng’s 24-year-old son, Pu-fang, soon threw himself out of an upstairs window, and was permanently paralyzed from the chest down. Deng and his wife were not told about this until a year later, when they were briefly allowed to see their other children shortly before being exiled from Peking in October 1969. In exile, Deng worked on the factory floor in a tractor plant in Jiangxi province, living under house arrest, with armed guards.
Mrs. Deng wept for days when she heard about Pu-fang. She later told Deng’s stepmother that she almost lost the will to live. Deng was forbidden to see his paralyzed son, and was deeply affected by what happened to his children. Once, after his youngest son, who had turned up starving and in rags, had to leave for his own place of exile, Deng collapsed on the factory floor. In June 1971, when the paralyzed Pu-fang arrived, Deng was visibly shaken. His son had been a buoyant young man. Deng nursed Pu-fang devotedly, helping him to turn every two hours to prevent bedsores, which was no light work (Pu-fang was big), and wiping his body several times a day, as the climate in Jiangxi was hot and humid.
The Cultural Revolution years, Deng was to say later, were the most painful time of his life. The pressure crept into his sleep. One night he woke up the whole building, screaming during a nightmare. But those years also helped him rethink the system the CCP had imposed on China. As a result, he turned his back on the essence of Maoism and Stalinism, and after Mao died he changed the course of China. In exile, Deng kept his mouth shut, tried to stay healthy, and waited for a chance to return to the political center.
AFTER TWO YEARS, in September 1971, came a ray of hope. Deng’s son Pu-fang was an electronic whiz, and had fixed up a radio that could receive short-wave broadcasts. This he did with his parents’ acquiescence, even though listening to foreign radio stations was a prison offense (and, moreover, one his father had helped enforce). It was from these foreign broadcasts that the Dengs first surmised that Lin Biao was dead.
The regime carefully controlled the way it dribbled out information about Lin’s death. Deng heard the news officially two months later, when a document was read out to workers in his tractor factory. The document mentioned Lin’s “crimes of persecuting veteran comrades.” The official who was chairing the meeting said: “Chairman Mao would never have driven old cadres to death” (i.e., as Lin had done), and turned to Deng: “Old Deng is sitting here, he can vouch for this. Old Deng, wouldn’t you say so?” Deng stolidly declined the invitation to advertise Mao’s innocence, remaining totally silent, his expression not changing one flicker.
When he came home that day, Deng allowed himself to show excitement and condemned Lin explicitly, which for him was really letting rip, as he never talked politics with his family. Two days later, he wrote to Mao for the first time since his downfall five years before, asking for a job. With Mao’s major prop gone, he sensed that Mao might have to repeal the Cultural Revolution.
No reply came from Mao. To reinstate the man he had publicly condemned as “the second-biggest capitalist-roader” would be an admission of failure. Even when Chou En-lai was diagnosed with cancer in May 1972, and Mao had no one else but Deng with the caliber to run his vast kingdom, still he would not send for Deng.
Instead, Mao promoted Wang Hong-wen, the former Rebel leader in Shanghai, one of the products of the Cultural Revolution. Wang was a faceless good-looking 37-year-old, who had been a security man in a textile factory before the Purge. He was clever, and, like a lot of Rebel leaders, had a certain flair for inspiring gang allegiance. Mao brought him to Peking and began to train him up, and a year later, in August 1973, made him his No. 3, after Chou.
But the Protégé was not up to filling Chou’s shoes, especially when it came to dealing with foreigners. The Australian ambassador,
Stephen FitzGerald, who met him with Mao in November 1973, noted that he was extremely jumpy, and did not speak a word during the entire meeting, except at the end. The Australian prime minister, Whitlam, had mentioned the Communist “Nanchang Uprising” of 1927, and had observed that the youngish man could not have been born at the time. When the meeting was over, the Protégé piped up nervously: “Prime Minister, you said that at the time of the Nanchang Uprising I was not born. But I have been making revolution for a long time.” This was his only contribution.
Mao felt he had to have a standby. So, when Chou’s cancer worsened, Mao had Deng brought to Peking in February 1973, and made him a vice-premier, mainly to entertain visiting foreign statesmen. Although Deng lacked Chou’s polish, and spat constantly during meetings, which unsettled quite a few of his interlocutors, he had stature.
Late that year, Chou’s health deteriorated drastically. Mao made the momentous decision to put Deng in charge of the army (for which Deng was restored to the Politburo). Deng was the only person who could guarantee stability in the military, where Mao’s Protégé had zero influence. Marshal Yeh, the man Mao had appointed army chief after Lin Biao’s death, lacked the necessary gravitas.
Giving Deng this much power was a gamble, but it proved well judged. Deng never made a move against Mao’s person while Mao was alive, and even after Mao’s death, insisted that Mao must not be denounced personally, although he repealed much of Mao’s core legacy.
As soon as Deng assumed power, he started to push through his own program. Central to this was rolling back the Cultural Revolution. He tried to rehabilitate and re-employ more purged cadres en masse, to resurrect some culture, and to raise living standards, a concern that had been condemned as “revisionist.” Mao regarded the Cultural Revolution as his greatest achievement since taking power in 1949 and kept four remaining Cultural Revolution Rottweilers in place to counter Deng: Mme Mao, Zhang “the Cobra,” media chief Yao, and Protégé Wang — a group that Mao dubbed “the Gang of Four.” (Kang Sheng was out of action by now with terminal cancer, and was to die in 1975.) This was Mao’s own gang, who represented his true policy.
FOR HIS PART, Deng formed his own counter-alliance with army chief Marshal Yeh and premier Chou En-lai soon after he returned to Peking in spring 1973. Of this trio, Deng and Yeh had been on the receiving end of the Purge, while Chou had collaborated with Mao. Chou had even changed the name of his house to “Drawn to the Sun [i.e., Mao] Courtyard.” When Mao gave the word, Chou would send anyone to their death. Chou’s only adopted child, Sun Wei-shi, had been imprisoned because she had been a top-flight Russian interpreter, and met many Russian leaders, including Stalin; so Mao suspected her as he did most others who had such connections. Mme Mao also hated her because she was very beautiful, and because Mao had once taken a shine to her. Chou, who was widely thought to be in love with her, did not lift a finger to save her. She died in prison, and he kept an ignoble distance even in death.
Deng felt fairly cool towards Chou, and after Mao died said publicly that Chou had “done many things against his heart” during the Cultural Revolution, though Deng claimed that “the people forgave him.” However, Deng decided to set personal feelings aside and form an alliance with Chou. On 9 April, shortly after getting back to Peking, he went to see him — their first meeting in nearly seven years. At first, they just sat facing each other in silence. Finally, Chou spoke. The first thing he said was: “Zhang Chun-qiao betrayed the Party, but the Chairman forbids us to investigate it.” Zhang, “the Cobra,” was a major star of the Cultural Revolution. By saying this, Chou was not just condemning the Cobra, he was complaining about Mao. This was no indiscretion from the super-prudent Chou; it was his way of conveying that he was on Deng’s side, against the Cultural Revolution. This, plus the fact that Chou had become terminally ill thanks to Mao, melted the ice between him and Deng. From that moment on, the two were allies.
This was a milestone. The two most important colleagues of Mao had formed a league of a kind, which also incorporated army chief Marshal Yeh. Mao’s decades-long ability to enforce a ban on his colleagues forming alliances was broken. And with it, his awesome hold over them.
MAO WAS REDUCED to these straits because his health was ebbing fast as he entered his eighties. It was now that he had to kick his lifelong addiction to smoking. By early 1974 he was nearly blind. This, like his other ailments, was kept top-secret. Losing his sight made Mao extremely anxious about security, so his staff were given special instructions to “walk noisily to let him know someone was coming so that he would not be frightened.”
He was also depressed because he could not read. He had ordered some banned works of classical literature to be specially printed. Two print shops, one in Peking and one in Shanghai, were purpose-built to do the printing, and each print-run was five copies, all for Mao, plus a few extra copies, which were placed under lock and key, and even the people who had been involved in annotating the texts for him were forbidden to keep a copy. As his eyesight got worse, the characters grew larger, eventually reaching a height of 12 mm. When Mao finally found he could not read at all, even with a magnifying glass, he broke down and cried. Thenceforth, he had to rely on staff to read to him, and sometimes to sign documents for him.
Because of his condition, Mao did not want to appear at meetings and look vulnerable, so he left the capital on 17 July 1974 and went south. Soon he was told that the trouble was cataracts, and that they could be removed by a simple operation once they matured. The news came as a huge relief, even though it meant nearly a year of hardly being able to see. Meanwhile he stayed away from Peking — for nine months altogether, on what turned out to be his last trip.
There was another discovery made at the same time: that he was suffering from a rare and incurable motor neurone illness called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, sometimes known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. This gradually paralyzes the muscles in the arms, legs, throat and tongue, strangling speech, preventing food going down the right way, and finally causing death by respiratory failure. The diagnosis was that he had about two years to live.
The doctors did not tell Mao. Their reporting channel was to his chamberlain and chief of the Praetorian Guard, Wang Dong-xing, who told only Chou En-lai. It was now that Chou became much more daring.
Chou’s allies, Deng and Marshal Yeh, were put in the picture about Mao’s state of health. They decided not to tell the Gang of Four, even Mao’s wife, who was anyway a walking incentive for others to keep her out of the loop. Two years before, after Mao had passed out, she had accused medical staff of being “spies” and “counter-revolutionaries.” When Chou had discussed Mao’s illnesses with her, she had accused him of trying to force Mao to surrender power. But the decision to exclude her was determined by more than just the fact that she was trouble. It was politically motivated.
Mao himself was not informed. If Mao knew his days were numbered, there was no knowing what he might do. Instead, he was assured that he was in good health, and still had a long time to live. To make doubly sure he did not find out, none of his regular staff was told. One doctor who blurted out “I’m afraid the Chairman’s illness is hard to treat …” was instantly removed. Mao’s symptoms were passed off as harmless. This did not satisfy him, but there was nothing he could do.
With the knowledge of the time frame of Mao’s life, and with Chou himself in inexorable decline, the Deng-Chou-Yeh Alliance moved to press Mao to institutionalize Deng’s role as Chou’s stand-in and successor, and to restore to high office a large number of old cadres who had been ousted in the Purge. In December 1974, Chou left his hospital bed and flew to Changsha to see Mao with a slate of new appointments. Mao knew about the Alliance’s activities from the Gang of Four, who were keeping a look-out in Peking on his behalf. Mme Mao had written to say she was “shocked and aghast” at what was going on. But Mao was in no condition to veto the Chou — Deng list. He could not hand over the country to the Gang of Four, and neither could he try to
get rid of the Alliance — if he wanted to die in his bed. The Gang of Four were powerless in the army and Mao had nobody in the military who could take on the Alliance on his behalf. And he himself was physically too feeble to create a new force that could trump the Alliance.
Lou Gehrig’s disease had been nibbling away at his body. At the start of his trip to the south in summer 1974, Mao could still take walks in the garden; but within a few months, all he could do was drag one leg after the other for a short distance. On 5 December he found he had to say goodbye to swimming, his lifelong passion. He had taken a few dips in his indoor pool in Changsha, but that day he nearly choked in the water, and this was to be his last swim. His bodyguard of twenty-seven years heard Mao let out a long sigh of melancholy and resignation, something he had never heard, and could not imagine coming from Mao.
As his muscular coordination failed, Mao’s speech became increasingly slurred, and food kept getting into his lungs, causing choking and infection. He had to lie on his side to be fed. Life became excruciatingly uncomfortable.
In this condition, Mao had to endorse Chou’s slate, especially the promotion of Deng to first vice-premier and stand-in for Chou. But Mao promoted one of the Gang of Four, the Cobra, and made him second to Deng in the military and the government. He also insisted that the media remain in the hands of the Gang, so that only his message could reach the country at large.
The Alliance’s strategy was to dislodge the Cobra and Mme Mao, exploiting their less than spotless pasts. On 26 December, Mao’s eighty-first birthday, Chou told Mao that these two had had connections with Nationalist intelligence in the 1930s. Mao’s reply was that he had known about their pasts all along, and he effectively said that he could not care less.