Afterwards, they would be treated generously. Mao could afford to be generous. Millions of copies of his Little Red Book had been sold and Mao Tse-tung was one of the richest men in China. He had made over three million yuan (£500,000) from the sale of his Selected Works alone.
During high-level party meetings, a special room would be set aside in the Great Hall of the People. The political departments of the army and the Communist Party would supply beautiful girls of impeccable proletarian backgrounds. They were told that they had been recruited as ballroom dancing partners for the Great Leader. In fact, they were fodder for his bed. But many of the party officials saw this as so great an honour, they supplied their daughters and sisters.
Madame Mao was proud of her appearance and her sexual skills and when she heard about his womanizing, it hurt her deeply. She would try and sit in on his dance parties where he tried to pick up girls. She tried to vet his nurses, firing the pretty ones. When Mao’s physician questioned her actions, he was told: “Doctor, you don’t understand the Chairman.
He is very loose with his love life. His physical pleasure and his mental activity are separate, and there are always women willing to be his prey.
The doctor was also told that he would have to teach his nurses something about morality: “They should be polite to their leader, but careful in their contact with him.”
Madame Mao was not wrong. The Great Helmsman was already involved with the railroad nurse on his special train. She did sterling service as they travelled around the country. In Shanghai, he paraded her publicly, taking her to the exclusive Jinjaing Club which was the preserve of top Party officials. The Shanghai authorities knew of the Chairman’s passion for female companionship, so they laid on the city’s top actresses and singers. But they were too sophisticated and worldly for the proletarian Mao. The Shanghai authorities learnt quickly and began providing young dancers who were more to Mao’s taste.
At the time, the Cultural Work Troupe of the Twentieth Army were in the area. The young girls from the troupe would swarm around Mao, vying with each other for the privilege of a dance with the Great Leader. He would stay out dancing until two in the morning, then return to his train with his nurse.
Chiang Ch’ing’s suspicion of nurses was confirmed after his sixty-fifth birthday banquet, which was held in Guangzhou. That night, Madame Mao had trouble sleeping. She called for the nurse to get a sleeping pill and got no response. So she got up and went to look for her.
When she found the duty room empty, she stormed into Mao’s bedroom and found the nurse there. In the ensuing row, Chiang Ch’ing accused Mao of sleeping with a former servant who had visited recently. Mao had encouraged the woman to get her daughter an education and given her three thousand yuan to enroll in school. Madame Mao accused him of sleeping with the daughter too.
Mao’s response to these accusations was to head back to Peking, leaving his wife behind. Chiang Ch’ing quickly realized that she risked losing him. As an apology she sent him a quote from the famous Chinese folk story, Monkey. In it, a Chinese monk is travelling to India in search of a Buddhist scripture. But Monkey makes him angry and he leaves him behind in a cave behind a waterfall.
“My body is in the cave behind the waterfall,” Monkey says to the monk, “but my heart is following you.”
Mao accepted the apology — he realized that it meant he now had his wife’s tacit permission to sleep with whoever he chose.
On one trip into Chiangxi province, the director of a new hospital provided four energetic young nurses for one of Mao’s dance parties. A musical and dance troupe had also been laid on. Soon Mao was sleeping with a young nurse and a member of the dance troupe. He did little to hide the fact, but he was thoughtful enough to phone Madame Mao and advise her not to meet him there, as arranged. He would join her after his meetings were over.
As time went by, Mao grew careless and she caught him in flagrante delicto several times. There was nothing she could do about it. Once, Mao’s doctor found her crying on a park bench just outside Mao’s compound. She said through her tears that, just as no one, not even Stalin, could win a political battle against him, no one woman would win his heart completely.
Mao and Chiang Ch’ing eventually came to an understanding. In return for playing the public role of his wife, while tolerating his infidelities in private, Mao pledged not to leave her. As Madame Mao was more interested in power than sex, she agreed.
After that Mao made no attempt to hide his infidelities. At the Bureau of Confidential Matters, he met a young, white-skinned clerk, with delicately arched eyebrows and dark eyes. She told Mao that she had stuck up for him at primary school and been beaten up for her pains. Mao began a very public affair with the woman, spending night and day with her in Shanghai. Mao would dance with her until two in the morning, only stopping when his young companion was exhausted. The young woman was so proud of the affair that she tried to befriend Chiang Ch’ing. By this time, Chiang had accepted the situation, and she was warm and friendly in return.
* * *
In the 1960s, Madame Mao emerged as the power behind the Cultural Revolution and a threat to Mao. They became estranged — she even had to apply in writing to see him. Mao’s dance parties were stopped and his favourite opera, the decidedly counterrevolutionary The Emperor Seduces the Barmaid, was banned.
“I have become a monk,” Mao cried despondently.
But he soon found that even the Cultural Revolution had its perks. As chaos reigned throughout the country, three of Mao’s girlfriends turned up, claiming they had been denounced as imperialists and thrown out of their housing to wander the streets. Mao said: “If they don’t want you, you can stay with me. They say you’re imperialists? Well, I am the emperor.”
While the fanatical Red Guards tore China apart, Chairman Mao amused himself with these three pretty young women. One of them even became pregnant. Mao sent her to a hospital reserved for the highest cadres and she gave birth to a baby boy. Everyone was jubilant that Mao had a new son. Neither Mao, nor his doctor, mentioned that Mao was sterile.
His sterility did not bother him. What did concern him was potency. Already he was suffering bouts of impotence and he was determined to remain sexually active until the age of eighty. Like the old emperors of China, he believed that the more sexual partners you had the longer you lived. The first emperor of China, the father of the Han race from whom all the other Chinese are thought to be descended, is said to have made himself immortal by making love to a thousand virgins. The Emperor Qin Shihuangdi, founder of the Qin dynasty, sent a Taoist priest and five hundred virgin children across the sea in search of the elixir of immortality. According to the legend, the Japanese are their descendants. But of all the emperors, Mao thought that Sui Yangdui (AD 604-618), the architect of the Grand Canal, was the best. He lived a decadent, opulent life full of women. He would even have his pleasure boat pulled upstream by beautiful young girls attached by silken cords.
Doctors injected Mao with ground deer antlers — an old Chinese remedy for impotence. It did not work. A Romanian formula called H3 was also pumped into him for three months. That did not work either.
His physician then decided that the problem was more psychological than physical. He noticed that Mao’s sexual potency waxed and waned with his political power. During the Great Leap Forward, he was insatiable. One of his bedmates told his doctor: “He is great at everything — it’s simply intoxicating.”
His appetite also seemed to increase with age. So the doctor started giving him a placebo — a concoction of ginseng and glucose which he told Mao was a bodybuilding tonic.
During the late 1960s, when Mao was at the height of his power, although he was in his early seventies, he had no problem with the young women. As he grew older, they grew younger — it was a formula the emperors had used before him.
Mao would spend much of the day in one of the huge beds that he now favoured. He read voraciously and loved exotic literature. His great fav
ourite was The Dream of the Red Chamber, a Chinese classic set in feudal times. In it, a young man called Jia Baoyu falls in love with a woman, but his family refuse to let him marry her. Alienated from society, his rebellion takes the form of pleasure seeking and the seduction of young women. Mao saw himself as Jia Baoyu. Even his compound in the Forbidden City, which was called the Garden of Abundant Beneficence, was modelled on Jia’s family home.
Mao kept healthy by eating oily food, rinsing his mouth with tea and sleeping, mostly, with country girls. Like the ancient Han emperors, he sought to overcome death with the Taoist method of sex. He would often give new girls a copy of the Taoist sex manual classic of the Plain Girl’s Secret Way. According to Taoist. theory, for good health and longevity, a man must preserve the yang essence found in his semen. At that same time, he must absorb as much yin essence as possible from the yin shui, or virginal secretions of a woman. Consequently, he must have as much sex as possible, with as many partners as possible, without ejaculating.
Mao was happiest when several young women shared his bed simultaneously. He would often sleep with three, four or five women at the same time and encouraged his lovers to introduce him to other women.
Although there was no risk of the young girls who came to his bed getting pregnant, he did give them something to remember him by. With such fervid sexual activity going on, venereal disease was inevitable. One of Mao’s girlfriends caught trichomonas vaginalis. This is not strictly a venereal disease as it can be caught from infected underwear — the young girls in Cultural Work Troupes often shared their clothing. But it is an infection of the vagina and causes an unpleasant discharge. Men are not affected, but they act as carriers. So once one of Mao’s lovers got it, it spread like wildfire.
Ironically, the author of the problem was Mao himself. During the Great Leap Forward, Mao had decided to increase rice production by deep planting. This meant flooding the paddy fields to waist height, causing an epidemic of gynaecological infections among the women who worked in the fields.
While this condition would normally have been distressing, Mao’s young women soon saw it as a badge of honour conferred on them by the Great Leader.
Although he was the carrier of the infection, Mao, naturally, refused to be treated. If it was not hurting him, it did not matter.
“What if Chiang Ch’ing becomes infected?” asked his doctor.
Mao said that would never happen. The doctor insisted that Mao at least wash himself. Normally, he still did not bathe. He was wiped down as usual with damp towels every night and never washed his genitals.
Those around him knew of the problem and were careful with their towels and bedding. At home in Peking, Mao’s bedding was sterilized, but when they travelled, no amount of prodding would get the servants in the places Mao stayed to take that same simple precaution. They considered sterilizing his bedding an insult to the Great Leader.
In 1967, Mao contracted genital herpes. He was warned that the disease was highly contagious and passed on by sexual contact, but the Chairman did not think it was so bad and it did not noticeably limit the number of his sexual partners.
Although ballroom dancing had been banned as bourgeois and decadent during the
Cultural Revolution, Mao held dance parties once a week, behind the walls of the Forbidden City. Young girls from the Cultural Work Troupe of the Central Garrison Corps would surround him, flirting and begging him to dance. He would waltz, fox-trot or tango with each of the girls in turn.
Mao had one of his beds moved into a room beside the ballroom. He would go in there to “rest” several times during the evening, often taking one of the girls with him. Peng Dehuai, a member of the politburo, spoke out about this at a meeting. He criticized Chairman Mao, accusing him of behaving like an emperor with a harem of three thousand concubines. The Cultural Work Troupe was disbanded, but Mao continued to find willing young sexual partners from other cultural troupes, the air force, the Bureau of Confidential Matters, the special railway division, the Peking Military Region, the Second Artillery Corps and the provinces of Hubei and Zhejiang. Meanwhile, Peng Dehuai was purged. He died in prison in 1974.
The dance parties continued. Exposed to so many admiring young women, Mao could not go wrong. In the past, he had depended on underlings to procure for him, but it was better this way. Older women and the better educated often refused his advances, and some nurses thought it would violate their professional ethics to have sex with him. But the young women who came to the dance parties did not. They were from peasant stock, from families who owed their lives to the Communist Party and thought that Chairman Mao was their saviour.
As the cult of personality grew in post-revolutionary China, Mao became a figure of veneration. People would do anything to catch a glimpse of him on top of the Tiananmen addressing a huge crowd. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao would hand out mangoes. These would become hallowed objects, worshipped by all who beheld them. A drop of tea made from the tiniest piece of one of these mangoes was a divine elixir. For a young girl brought up in this ethos, simply being in the same room as Chairman Mao was bliss. To be called to his bedchamber to serve his pleasure was beyond ecstasy itself.
Mao surrounded himself with pretty young women. They would look after him, handle his business and sleep with him. His confidential secretary was Zhang Yufeng. Mao had met her at one of his dance parties when she was eighteen. She had big round eyes and white skin. Soon they were having a tumultuous affair. To keep her close at hand, he made her a stewardess on his official train, and finally his secretary. She stayed with him to the end, but one woman was never enough. During his final illness, Mao was fed and nursed by two young dancers.
When Mao died in 1976, Madame Mao came into her own. She was one of the “Gang of Four” who tried to take over. But publication of the details of her early promiscuity alienated her followers. She was arrested and expelled from the Communist Party in 1977. Charged with fomenting civil unrest during the Cultural Revolution, she refused to confess and used her trial in 1980-81 to denounce the current leadership. In 1981, she was sentenced to death, suspended for two years to see if she would repent. The sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in 1983. Her death in prison in 1991 was officially reported as suicide.
7. THE PLEASURE PENINSULA
North Korea’s “beloved leader” from the Communist take-over in 1945 to his death in 1995, Kim I1-sung, was a well-known womanizer even during his exile in Manchuria. His first wife was Kim Jong-suk. She had lived with her parents, slash-and-burn farmers in Jiande, China, until 1935. Then, at the age of sixteen, she was picked up by a Chinese Communist guerrilla unit. She was assigned to Kim Il-sung, who kept her barefoot, as a cook and seamstress. She also worked as one of his bodyguards. In 1942, she gave birth to his son and successor, Kim Chong-il, in a military base in Siberia.
When Kim Il-sung took over the Communist paradise of North Korea, he enjoyed intimate relations with innumerable women including movie actresses, dancers, professional models, his own secretaries, good-looking nurses and kisaeng girls — the Korean equivalent of geishas. Having absolute power in this secretive, closed country, he did not have to bother with seduction. He simply had his henchmen kidnap anyone he wanted.
When any North Korean was asked how many children Kim Il-sung had, the answer would always be: “We are all his children.”
Kim Jong-suk meekly accepted her husband’s womanizing. He also mistreated her. She died in 1949, at the age of thirty-two. The rumours at the time were that she shot herself or was poisoned. The official announcement was that she had died of a heart attack. Soon after her death, Kim Il-sung married Kim Song-ae, a beautiful woman twenty years his junior. She was already pregnant with their child, Kim Pyong-il.
Like father, like son — only more so. Kim Chong-il, who was groomed to take over from his father when he died in the first dynastic succession in the Communist world, inherited his father’s taste for women. While working in the General Bodyguard
Bureau, Kim Chong-il married Hong II-chon. She was the daughter of a revolutionary and studied literature at Kimilsung University. They had a daughter.
But Kim Chong-il was not faithful to her; and he beat her. They divorced in 1973. It was also in 1973 that Kim Il-sung named Kim Chong-il as his successor. He appointed his son to the politburo and made him Minister for Propaganda and Art. That same year Kim Chong-il married a typist. They went on to have a son and two daughters. His second wife remains his official consort, but she is far from being the only woman on the scene.
In the early 1970s, Kim Chong-il had sex with a nineteen-year-old movie star called Sun Hye-rim. She was the wife of Li Pyong, the brother of one of Kim Chong-il’s school friends. When Sun Hye-rim became pregnant, the Party intervened and Li Pyong was forced to divorce her. The relationship between Kim Chong-il and Sun Hye-rim continued, though Sun Hye-rim and their illegitimate son, Kim Jung-nam, went to live in Moscow. Kim Chong-il has at least seven other illegitimate children from similar encounters.
A singer from the Pyongyang Art Troupe drowned herself in the Daedong River after an affair with Kim Chong-il in the late 1970s. Several other women have committed suicide after he abandoned them.
He had an affair with Son Nui-rim, the sister of the North Korean ambassador to Russia. They had two daughters, but he discarded her when she became mentally ill in 1991. She was moved to Moscow, where she is cared for by her father.
Another long-term lover was Li Sang-jin, who was his classmate at Kimilsung University. She was married to a Foreign Ministry official, according to diplomatic sources.
Sex Lives of the Great Dictators Page 12