Read: 2025-07-20
Recommend: 10/10
I relearned a lot of things about Mao from this book.
Here are some text that I highlighted in the book:
But a grand name was also onerous and potentially tempted fate, so most children were given a pet name that was either lowly or tough, or both. Mao’s was “the Boy of Stone”—Shi san ya-zi. For this second “baptism” his mother took him to a rock about eight feet high, which was reputed to be enchanted, as there was a spring underneath. After Mao performed obeisance and kowtows, he was considered adopted by the rock. Mao was very fond of this name, and continued to use it as an adult. In 1959, when he returned to Shaoshan and met the villagers for the first—and only—time as supreme leader of China, he began the dinner for them with a quip: “So everyone is here, except my Stone Mother. Shall we wait for her?”
Mao’s early marriage turned him into a fierce opponent of arranged marriages. Nine years later he wrote a seething article against the practice: “In families in the West, parents acknowledge the free will of their children. But in China, orders from the parents are not at all compatible with the will of the children … This is a kind of ‘indirect rape.’ Chinese parents are all the time indirectly raping their children …”
Decades later, Mao talked about how, as a young man in Shaoshan, he cared about people starving. The record shows no such concern. In 1921 Mao was in Changsha during a famine. A friend of his wrote in his diary: “There are many beggars—must be over 100 a day … Most … look like skeletons wrapped in yellow skin, as if they could be blown over by a whiff of wind.” “I heard that so many people who had come here … to escape famine in their own regions had died—that those who had been giving away planks of wood [to make coffins] … can no longer afford to do so.” There is no mention of this event in Mao’s writings of the time, and no sign that he gave any thought to this issue at all. Mao’s peasant background did not imbue him with idealism about improving the lot of Chinese peasants.
In this and other conversations, Mao poured scorn on his fellow Chinese. “The nature of the people of the country is inertia,” he said. “They worship hypocrisy, are content with being slaves, and narrow-minded.” This was a common enough sentiment among the educated at the time, when people were casting around for explanations for why China had been so easily defeated by foreign powers and was trailing so badly in the modern world. But what Mao said next was uncommon extremism. “Mr. Mao also proposed burning all the collections of prose and poetry after the Tang and Sung dynasties in one go,” a friend wrote in his diary.
Mao’s attitude to morality consisted of one core, the self, “I,” above everything else: “I do not agree with the view that to be moral, the motive of one’s action has to be benefiting others. Morality does not have to be defined in relation to others … People like me want to … satisfy our hearts to the full, and in doing so we automatically have the most valuable moral codes. Of course there are people and objects in the world, but they are all there only for me.” Mao shunned all constraints of responsibility and duty. “People like me only have a duty to ourselves; we have no duty to other people.” “I am responsible only for the reality that I know,” he wrote, “and absolutely not responsible for anything else. I don’t know about the past, I don’t know about the future. They have nothing to do with the reality of my own self.” He explicitly rejected any responsibility towards future generations. “Some say one has a responsibility for history. I don’t believe it. I am only concerned about developing myself … I have my desire and act on it. I am responsible to no one.” Mao did not believe in anything unless he could benefit from it personally. A good name after death, he said, “cannot bring me any joy, because it belongs to the future and not to my own reality.” “People like me are not building achievements to leave for future generations.” Mao did not care what he left behind.
He argued that conscience could go to hell if it was in conflict with his impulses: These two should be one and the same. All our actions … are driven by impulse, and the conscience that is wise goes along with this in every instance. Sometimes … conscience restrains impulses such as overeating or over-indulgence in sex. But conscience is only there to restrain, not oppose. And the restraint is for better completion of the impulse. As conscience always implies some concern for other people, and is not a corollary of hedonism, Mao was rejecting the concept. His view was: “I do not think these [commands like ‘do not kill,’ ‘do not steal,’ and ‘do not slander’] have to do with conscience. I think they are only out of self-interest for self-preservation.” All considerations must “be purely calculation for oneself, and absolutely not for obeying external ethical codes, or for so-called feelings of responsibility …” Absolute selfishness and irresponsibility lay at the heart of Mao’s outlook.
The other central element in his character which Mao spelled out now was the joy he took in upheaval and destruction. “Giant wars,” he wrote, “will last as long as heaven and earth and will never become extinct … The ideal of a world of Great Equality and Harmony [da tong, Confucian ideal society] is mistaken.” This was not just the prediction that a pessimist might make; it was Mao’s desideratum, which he asserted was what the population at large wished. “Long-lasting peace,” he claimed: is unendurable to human beings, and tidal waves of disturbance have to be created in this state of peace … When we look at history, we adore the times of [war] when dramas happened one after another … which make reading about them great fun. When we get to the periods of peace and prosperity, we are bored … Human nature loves sudden swift changes. MAO SIMPLY COLLAPSED the distinction between reading about stirring events and actually living through cataclysm. He ignored the fact that, for the overwhelming majority, war meant misery. He even articulated a cavalier attitude towards death: Human beings are endowed with the sense of curiosity. Why should we treat death differently? Don’t we want to experience strange things? Death is the strangest thing, which you will never experience if you go on living … Some are afraid of it because the change comes too drastically. But I think this is the most wonderful thing: where else in this world can we find such a fantastic and drastic change?
He chose as his co-delegate a 45-year-old friend called Ho Shu-heng. They left quite secretively on the evening of 29 June in a small steamboat, under a stormy sky, declining the offers of friends to see them off. Although there was no law against Communist activities, they had reason to keep their heads down, as what they were engaged in was a conspiracy—collusion to establish an organization set up with foreign funding, with the aim of seizing power by illegal means.
At this time, warlords had been fighting sporadic wars for ten years, and there had been more than forty changes of the central government since the country had become a republic in 1912. But the warlords had always made sure that the social structure was preserved, and life went on as usual for civilians, as long as they were not caught in the crossfire. Now, because the Nationalists were following Russian instructions aimed at bringing about a Soviet-style revolution, social order broke down for the first time.
Public execution rallies had become a feature of local life since Mao’s arrival, and he had demonstrated a penchant for slow killing. At one rally, staged to celebrate a looting expedition at the time of the Chinese New Year 1928, he had written couplets on sheets of red paper, which were pasted onto wooden pillars on both sides of the stage. They read: Watch us kill the bad landlords today. Aren’t you afraid? It’s knife slicing upon knife. Mao addressed the rally, and a local landlord, Kuo Wei-chien, was then put to death in line with the prescriptions of Mao’s poetry. Mao did not invent public execution, but he added to this ghastly tradition a modern dimension, organized rallies, and in this way made killing compulsory viewing for a large part of the population. To be dragooned into a crowd, powerless to walk away, forced to watch people put to death in this bloody and agonizing way, hearing their screams, struck fear deep into those present. The traditional bandits could not match Mao and his orchestrated terror, which frightened even them. Yuan and Zuo submitted to Mao’s authority; soon after this they allowed themselves and their men to be formed into a regiment under him. Mao had out-bandited the bandits.
Government forces were in hot pursuit, and Mao’s army had to fight pitched battles, in one of which Zhu De’s wife was captured. Later she was executed and her head stuck on a pole in Changsha. It was during this low point in Zhu’s fortunes that Mao mounted a power grab against him. Within two weeks of leaving the outlaw land, Mao had abolished Zhu De’s post as military supremo, awarded by Shanghai, and concentrated all power in his own hands. As the Red force was being attacked by the Nationalists, Zhu did not retaliate. He was no match for Mao in exploiting a crisis. Mao did not inform Shanghai about his seizure of power. Instead he wrote to tell Shanghai how glad he was to submit to Party orders. “How should the Red Army proceed?” he wrote. “We particularly thirst for instructions. Please could you send them winging my way?” “The resolutions of the 6th Congress are extremely correct. We accept them jumping for joy.” “In the future, we hope the Centre gives us a letter every month.” Mao was currying favor with Shanghai hoping that when they got wind of his coup against Zhu De, they would be better disposed towards him. Still, Zhu De refrained from exposing Mao. Zhu had no craving for power, nor any gift for intrigue. And since reporting to Shanghai was the job of the chief, to write himself would amount to declaring war on Mao.
She recalled that at the age of six, she began to see the world as a sad place: I was born extremely weak, and would faint when I started crying … At the time, I sympathised with animals … Every night going to bed, horrible shadows such as the killing of chickens, of pigs, people dying, churned up and down in my head. That was so painful! I can still remember that taste vividly. My brother, not only my brother but many other children, I just couldn’t understand them at all. How was it they could bring themselves to catch little mice, or dragonflies, and play with them, treating them entirely as creatures foreign to pain? If it were not to spare my mother the pain—the pain of seeing me die—if it were not for this powerful hold, then I simply would not have lived on. I really wanted to have a faith!… I sympathized with people in the lower ranks of life. I hated those who wore luxurious clothes, who only thought of their own pleasure. In summer I looked just like people from lower ranks, wearing a baggy rough cotton top. This was me at about seventeen or eighteen … She wrote about how she fell in love with Mao, how totally she loved him, how she learned about his infidelities, and how she forgave him
Months later, she herself was dead. During his assault on Changsha, Mao made no effort to extricate her and their sons, or even to warn her. And he could easily have saved her: her house was on his route to the city, and Mao was there for three weeks. Yet he did not lift a finger.
Red Jiangxi was ravaged, as a later secret report revealed: “All work was stopped in order to slaughter AB.” “Everyone lived in fear … At the fiercest, two people talking together would be suspected of being AB … All those who were not demonic in striking AB were treated as AB …” Appalling torture was commonplace: “There were so many kinds … with strange names like … ‘sitting in a pleasure chair,’ ‘toads drinking,’ ‘monkeys holding a rope.’ Some had a red-hot gun-rod rammed into the anus … In Victory County alone, there were 120 kinds of torture.” In one, termed with sick inventiveness “angel plucking zither,” a wire was run through the penis and hung on the ear of the victim, and the torturer then plucked at the wire. There were also horrible forms of killing. “In all counties,” the report said, “there were cases of cutting open the stomach and scooping out the heart.” Altogether, tens of thousands died in Jiangxi. In the army alone, there were about 10,000 deaths—about a quarter of the entire Red Army under Mao at the time—as revealed by the secret report immediately afterwards. It was the first large-scale purge in the Party, and took place well before Stalin’s Great Purge. This critical episode—in many ways the formative moment of Maoism—is still covered up to this day. Mao’s personal responsibility and motives, and his extreme brutality, remain a taboo.
IN 1931, Japan stepped up its encroachment on Manchuria in northeast China. Faced with threats at opposite ends of his vast country, Chiang decided on a policy of “Domestic Stability First”—sort out the Reds before tackling Japan. But Tokyo torpedoed his timing. On 18 September Chiang boarded a ship from Nanjing to Jiangxi to give a big push to his drive against Mao’s shrunken base. That very night, at 10:00 PM, Japan invaded Manchuria, in effect starting the Pacific—and Second World—War. The Nationalist commander in Manchuria, Chang Hsueh-liang, known as the Young Marshal, did not fight back. Over sixty years later, he told us why: resistance would have been futile. “There was no way we could win,” he said. “We could only fight a guerrilla war, or have a shambolic go at it … The quality of the Chinese army could not compare with the Japanese … The Japanese army was really brilliant … ‘Non-resistance’ … was the only feasible policy.”
ONE OF MAO’S main contributions to the running of the Red state was to start a campaign in February 1933 to squeeze out more from the population. He told grassroots cadres to uncover “hidden landlords and kulaks.” As the Reds had been targeting these “class enemies” for years, it was inconceivable that any such species could have remained undetected. Mao was not a fanatic, searching for more enemies out of ideological fervor. His was a practical operation whose goal was to designate targets to be shaken down, and to create enemies who could be “legitimately,” according to Communist doctrine, dispossessed and worked to death—what Mao himself termed “to do limitless forced labour.” The other point was to scare the rest of the population into coughing up whatever the regime demanded. Mao’s order to cadres was to “confiscate every last single thing” from those picked out as victims. Often whole families were turned out of their homes, and had to go and live in buffalo sheds, niu-peng. It was during this era that the miserable dwellings into which outcasts were suddenly pitched came to receive this name. Over thirty years later, in the Cultural Revolution, the term was widely used for detention, even though at that time people were not usually detained in rural outhouses, but in places like toilets, classrooms and cinemas.
Chou thus allowed Mao to snatch back control of two-thirds of the army, against the wishes of most of the leadership. The most likely explanation for this extraordinary decision is that Chou felt it was better, probably vital, to placate Mao. He knew that Mao had threatened to frame both Peng De-huai and Zhu De (plus another Party leader who had opposed Mao, Xiang Ying) with accusations of being “AB.” Mao had not batted an eyelid about slaughtering tens of thousands of loyal Reds who had stood in his way. Mao, in fact, was quite capable of having planted the recantation notice himself. He had displayed a penchant for manipulating the press; for example, creating the rumor of his own death. And why did the fake recantation come right at the time when Chou had just supplanted Mao as the No. 1 in the Red state? Chou could not afford to make an enemy out of Mao. Chou’s fear of Mao dated from now and was never to leave him. Mao was repeatedly to dangle the planted recantation over Chou, right up to Chou’s death more than four decades later.
On 15 April the Communists issued a “declaration of war on Japan.” This was a pure propaganda stunt, and it was more than five years before the Red Army fired a shot at the Japanese (except in Manchuria, where the Party organization came under the control of Moscow, not Ruijin)—making this one of the longest “phoney wars” in history. In fact, the CCP’s proclamation was more a declaration of war on Chiang Kai-shek than on Japan, as it asserted that “in order to … fight the Japanese imperialists, it is necessary first of all to overthrow the rule of the Nationalists.” In secret intra-CCP communications, there was not a single reference to Japan as the enemy.
Chiang’s son Ching-kuo had been a hostage in Russia for nine years. Ching-kuo was Chiang Kai-shek’s sole blood descendant, not by the famous Mme Chiang, but by his first wife. After Ching-kuo was born, Chiang seems to have become sterile through contracting venereal disease several times, and he adopted another son, Weigo. But Ching-kuo, as the only blood heir, remained the closest to his heart. Chiang was steeped in Chinese tradition, in which the central concern was to have an heir. To fail to carry on the family line was regarded as the disgrace, the greatest hurt one could inflict on one’s parents and ancestors, whose dead souls could then never rest in peace. One of the worst curses in China was: “May you have no heir!” And respect for one’s parents and ancestors, filial piety, was the primary moral injunction dictated by tradition.
The fact that Ching-kuo was a hostage was spelled out to his father in late 1931—by none other than his own sister-in-law, Mme Sun Yat-sen (née Soong Ching-ling), who was another Soviet agent. Speaking for Moscow, she proposed swapping Ching-kuo for two top Russian agents who had recently been arrested in Shanghai. Chiang turned the swap down. The arrest of the two agents was a public affair, and they had been openly tried and imprisoned. But Moscow’s offer unleashed a torrent of anguish in Chiang, who thought his son might now be “cruelly put to death by Soviet Russians.” On 3 December 1931 the Generalissimo wrote in his diary: “In the past few days, I have been yearning for my son even more. How can I face my parents when I die [if Ching-kuo is killed]?” On the 14th: “I have committed a great crime by being unfilial [by risking the death of his heir] …”
A benign and positive image of the Chinese Communists began to emerge. By summer, Shao and Mao had concocted the idea of publishing a Mao autobiography portraying Mao as a good and kindly man, complete with an appendix of his pronouncements on war with Japan that depicted him as committed to fighting the Japanese. Mao wrote an inscription in the tone of an ardent patriot: “Fight the Japanese imperialists unwaveringly through to the end …” The book came out on 1 November and was a hit. It was this period that gave birth to the myth, which was vital to Mao’s success, that the CCP was the most dedicated anti-Japanese force. It was thanks to this myth that many tens of thousands joined the Communists, including many of those who were later to staff Mao’s regime. The Mao Tse-tung Autobiography consisted largely of interviews Mao had done with the American journalist Edgar Snow in summer 1936—the only extensive account of his life Mao ever gave. Snow also produced his own book, Red Star Over China, which relied overwhelmingly on interviews with Mao and other Communists, and laid the foundation for the rehabilitation of the Reds, not least by brushing out their blood-soaked past.
ON 7 JULY 1937, fighting broke out between Chinese and Japanese troops at a place just outside Peking called the Marco Polo Bridge. By the end of the month the Japanese had occupied the two main cities in northern China, Peking and Tianjin. Chiang did not declare war. He did not want a full-scale war—not yet, anyway. And neither did the Japanese.
Mao was furious about Pingxingguan. This fighting, he said, was “helping Chiang Kai-shek,” and had done nothing to advance his goal—which was to establish Red territory. But for propaganda purposes, Mao had Pingxingguan inflated out of all proportion in an effort to demonstrate that the CCP was more committed to fighting the Japanese than the Nationalists were. One reason the Communists kept citing it was because it was, literally, the only “battle” they had with the Japanese for years, one that killed a couple of hundred Japanese at the very most.
Confirmed by Lin Biao himself in his report for the Russians of February 1941. The CCP “to this day exploits this battle for agitational [propaganda] purposes. In all our documents this is the only important battle cited …
he new arrivals, he wrote, “really envied the stinking and dirty worn-out padded uniforms [of the veterans]. They found everything fresh, exciting and mysterious.” The newcomers were mostly enrolled in various “schools” and “institutes” to be trained—and indoctrinated. But most very soon became disillusioned. The biggest letdown was that equality, the core of their idealism, was not only completely absent, but manifestly rejected by the regime. Inequality and privilege were ubiquitous. Every organization had three different levels of kitchen. The lowliest got roughly half the amount of meat and cooking oil allotted to middle-rankers, while the elite got much more. The very top leaders received special nutritious foods. Likewise with clothes. The locally produced cotton was rough and uncomfortable, so softer cotton was imported for senior cadres. Mao, outwardly, dressed the same as the rest, but his underwear was made of fine material, as a servant who washed and mended for the Maos told us. The maid did not qualify for any underwear or socks at all, and kept getting colds as a result. Items like tobacco, candles and writing paper were similarly allocated by rank. Children of the topmost leaders were sent to Russia, or had nannies of their own. Wives of senior cadres could expect to give birth in a hospital, and then have a personal nurse for a while. Officials on the next rungs down could send their children to an elite nursery. The relatively small number of ordinary Communists who were married either tended not to have children, or had to struggle if they did.
Outside the interrogations and rallies, people were pounded flat at indoctrination meetings. All forms of relaxation, like singing and dancing, were stopped. The only moments alone afforded no peace either, consumed as they were in writing “thought examinations”—a practice hitherto known only in fascist Japan. “Get everybody to write their thought examination,” Mao ordered, “and write three times, five times, again and again … Tell everyone to spill out every single thing they have ever harboured that is not so good for the Party.” In addition, everybody was told to write down information passed unofficially by other people—termed “small broadcasts” by the regime. “You had to write down what X or Y had said,” one Yenan veteran told us, “as well as what you yourself had said which was supposed to be not so good. You had to dig into your memory endlessly and write endlessly. It was most loathsome.” The criteria for “not so good” were kept deliberately vague, so that out of fear, people would err on the side of including more.
The journalist felt “stifled” by “the air of nervous intensity.” “Most people,” he noticed, “had very earnest faces and serious expressions. Among the big chiefs, apart from Mr. Mao Tse-tung who often has a sense of humour, and Mr. Chou En-lai who is very good at chatting, the others rarely crack a joke.” Helen Snow, wife of Edgar Snow, told us that in 1937, when she was in Yenan, people could still say things like “There goes God” behind Mao’s back. But seven years on, no one dared to say anything remotely so flippant. Mao had not only banned irony and satire (officially, since spring 1942), but criminalized humor itself. The regime invented a new catch-all offense—“Speaking Weird Words”—under which anything from skepticism to complaining to simply wise-cracking could lead to being labeled a spy. Mao had decided that he did not want active, willing cooperation (willingness, after all, could be withdrawn). He did not want volunteers. He needed a machine, so that when he pressed the button, all its cogs would operate in unison. And he got it.
As one official put it in a letter to the leadership in March 1945, the young volunteers had been dealt “a heavy blow to their revolutionary enthusiasm … the wounds carved in their minds and hearts are very deep indeed.” All the same, Mao was confident he could rely on these people to serve him. However unhappy they might be, they were trapped in the Communist organization, and it was extraordinarily hard for them to leave, psychologically as well as physically. In the absence of options, many fell back on their faith, which made it easier for them to rationalize sacrifice. Mao adroitly exploited their idealism, convincing them to accept their maltreatment as part of “Serving the People” (a snappy expression he coined now, and which later acquired fame), and as a noble experience, soul-cleansing for the mission of saving China.
Everyone who attended a rally witnessed haunting sights, involving people they knew, and lived with the fear that the next victim might be oneself. The relentless invasion of privacy, being forced to write endless “thought examinations,” brought further stress. Mao was to say over a decade later that he did not just stamp on 80 percent of the Party—“it was in fact 100 percent, and by force, too.”
MAO NOW HAD in his hands a formidable tool for use against Chiang Kai-shek. One supreme accomplishment of the terror campaign was to squeeze out every drop of information about any link whatever with the Nationalists. Mao introduced a special “Social Relationship” form: “Tell everyone to write down every single social relationship of any kind [our italics].” At the end of the campaign, the regime compiled a dossier on every Party member. The result was that Mao knew every channel the Nationalists might use to infiltrate in the forthcoming showdown. Indeed, during the civil war, while the Nationalists were penetrated like sieves, they had virtually zero success infiltrating the Communists. Mao had forged a machine that was virtually watertight.
Chiang was the undisputed leader of China’s war against Japan. It was Chiang who got America and Britain to retrocede their territorial concessions (except Hong Kong) in 1943—an historic event for which even Mao felt obliged to order grand celebrations. And it was under Chiang that China was accepted as one of “the Big Four,” along with America, Russia and Britain. China’s permanent seat and veto on the UN Security Council, which Mao eventually inherited, were acquired thanks to Chiang. At the time, Chiang was generally regarded as the nation-builder of modern China, who had done away with the warlords and unified the country—and led the war against Japan. Mao had to smash this image. In the terror campaign, he ordered the Party to be “re-educated” on the question: “Who is the nation-builder of China: the Nationalists or the CCP?” The corollary of the drive to break Chiang’s image was to create the myth that Mao was the founder of modern China.
Using exhausting meetings to bend—and break—people was to solidify into an integral part of Mao’s rule.
To officials in the know, Mao met the widespread disquiet about opium-growing by calling it one of the Party’s “two mistakes,” but he went on to justify both in the same breath. One mistake, he said on 15 January 1945, “was that during the Long March we took people’s things”—“but,” he immediately added, “we couldn’t have survived if we hadn’t”; “the other,” he said, “was to grow a certain thing [mou-wu, i.e., opium]—but without growing this we couldn’t have got through our crisis.”
Stalin used the excuse of fighting Japan, at the very last minute, to invade China and create the conditions for Mao to seize power.
Mao did not want to go to Chongqing, and twice turned down Chiang’s invitation, mainly because he did not trust Chiang not to harm him. This would be Mao’s first venture out of his lair since he had started running his own military force in 1927. He told Chiang he was sending Chou En-lai instead. But Chiang insisted the summit must take place with Mao, and in the end Mao had to accept. Stalin had cabled him no fewer than three times to go. While secretly helping Mao to seize territory, Stalin wanted him to play the negotiations game. If Mao refused to show up, he would look as though he were rejecting peace, and America would be more likely to give its full commitment to Chiang. Mao resented this pressure from Stalin. It was to be his biggest grievance against Stalin, and one he would keep bringing up for the rest of his life. Stalin told Mao that his safety would be assured by both Russia and the US. The Founder of Chiang’s FBI, Chen Li-fu, told us that the Nationalists had no designs on Mao’s life “because the Americans guaranteed his safety.” Mao knew he would also have secret protection from his strategically placed moles, especially the Chongqing garrison chief, Chang Chen. Even so, he insisted on US ambassador Patrick Hurley coming to Yenan and escorting him to Chongqing as insurance against being bumped off in mid-air. With all these precautions in place, Mao at last flew off to Chongqing in an American plane on 28 August, leaving Liu Shao-chi in charge in Yenan. When the plane landed, Mao stuck close to Hurley, and got into Hurley’s car, shunning the one Chiang had sent for him.
Moscow’s arming of Mao accelerated. The Russians transferred some 900 Japanese aircraft, 700 tanks, more than 3,700 artillery pieces, mortars and grenade-launchers, nearly 12,000 machine-guns, plus the sizeable Sungari River flotilla, as well as numerous armored cars and anti-aircraft guns, and hundreds of thousands of rifles. More than 2,000 wagonloads of arms and war matériel came by rail from North Korea, which had housed major Japanese arsenals, and more captured Japanese weapons arrived from Outer Mongolia. Russian-made arms were also shipped in, plus captured German weapons with the markings chiseled out, which the Reds then pretended were captured American arms. In addition, the Russians secretly transferred tens of thousands of Japanese POWs to the CCP. These troops played a major role in turning the ragtag Communist army into a formidable battle machine, and were crucial in training Red forces to use the Japanese arms on which they chiefly depended, as well as for servicing and repairing these weapons. It was Japanese, too, who founded the CCP air force, with Japanese pilots serving as flight instructors. Thousands of well-trained Japanese medical staff brought the Red wounded a new level of professional and much-welcomed treatment. Some Japanese troops even took part in combat operations.
Mao told Lin Biao to delete mention of the fact that their base “was supported by Korea, the Soviet Union, Outer Mongolia” even from a secret inner-Party document. Moscow played its customary part by calling reports of Soviet assistance “fabrications from start to finish.” The real fabrication was Mao’s claim that the CCP was fighting with “only millet plus rifles.”
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.
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’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.
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 closest bonds with Mao came from supplying him with erotica, and swapping lewd tales.
Opium wealth, however, did not improve the locals’ standard of living, which remained far below that of the occupying Communists. The lowest-grade Communist’s annual meat ration was almost five times (12 kg) the average local’s (2.5 kg). While conserving its vast hoard of cash, the regime still lost no opportunity to milk the population. In June 1943, on the grounds that Chiang was about to attack Yenan (which he did not), civilians were made to “voluntarily donate” firewood, vegetables, pigs and sheep, and what little gold they had, which was often their life savings.
The Yenan region had considerable assets. The most important marketable one was salt. There were seven salt lakes, where all that had to be done, as one 1941 report noted, was “just to collect it.” In the first four years of their occupation, the Reds produced no new salt, and simply used up the reserve built up before they arrived. “The salt stock of decades has been sold out,” the 1941 report said, and the territory “is in a salt famine.” The regime was not only extremely slow to maximize this asset, it had no plan. This reflected the fact that Mao treated Yenan, like the other areas he occupied, as a stopover, inflicting an economic approach akin to slash and burn, with no attention to long-term output.
To a small circle, Mao dubbed his operation “the Revolutionary Opium War.” In Yenan, opium was known by the euphemism “te-huo,” “Special Product.” When we asked Mao’s old assistant, Shi Zhe, about growing opium, he answered: “It did happen,” and added: “If this thing gets known, it’s going to be very bad for us Communists.” He also told us that conventional crops, mainly sorghum, were planted around the opium to hide it. When a Russian liaison man asked Mao outright over a game of mah-jong in August 1942 how Communists could “openly engage in opium production,” Mao was silent. One of his hatchet men, Teng Fa, supplied the answer: opium, he said, “bring[s] back a caravan loaded with money … and with it we’ll whip the [Nationalists]!” That year a carefully researched study put the opium-growing area at 30,000 acres of the region’s best land.
In one year, opium solved Mao’s problems. On 9 February 1943 he told Chou that Yenan had “overcome its financial difficulties, and had accumulated savings … worth 250 million fabi.” Fabi was the currency used in the Nationalist areas, which Mao had been stockpiling, along with gold and silver, “for when we enter Nationalist areas,” i.e., once all-out war began against Chiang. This sum was six times the official Yenan region budget for 1942, and it represented pure saving. In 1943 the Russians estimated Mao’s opium sales at 44,760 kg, worth an astronomical 2.4 billion fabi (roughly US$60 million at then current exchange rates, or some US$640 million today).
Even the hard-hearted Lin recommended letting the refugees go. There was no reply from Mao. Lin, familiar with Mao’s tactic of veto by silence, then took it upon himself to issue an order on 11 September: “Release Changchun refugees … at once.” But the order was not carried out, which can only mean that Mao rescinded it. The only people allowed to leave were those with something useful to the Reds, which usually meant they were relatively rich. One survivor remembered that Communist soldiers “walked up and down announcing: ‘Anyone who has a gun, ammunition, a camera—hand it over and we’ll fill out a pass for you to leave.’ ” Nationalist deserters and their families were given preferential treatment. This survivor’s family got out on 16 September, thanks to the fact that her husband was a doctor, and useful to the Reds. After mid-September, Changchun’s mayor recorded a massive rise in deaths, when tree leaves, the last food, were falling. By the end of the five-month siege the civilian population had dropped from half a million to 170,000. The death toll was higher than the highest estimate for the Japanese massacre at Nanjing in 1937.
Kang invented a new—and very vague—yardstick: “how they are liked by the masses.” This meant that anyone could be turned into a target, so those who had incurred feelings of indignation or jealousy on the part of their fellow villagers, for behavior like having “illicit affairs,” became prime victims.
This acknowledgement of “mistakes” was kept strictly within the Party. The public knew nothing about it, as the Party remained a secret organization. There was no apology to the public. Mao’s calculation was that he did not need to placate the common people, because they did not count. This went for both the Red-held areas and the Nationalist-held areas.
“We’ve been through Japanese occupation, and survived. You can’t say the Communists are worse than the Japanese.”
Mao’s victory in the civil war was enormously helped by Chiang’s very poor judgment about people—although it was also not easy to detect and root out the Communist moles. Mao’s own policy was not to take the slightest chance. The terror campaigns in Yenan and the other Red areas had exposed and severed virtually every connection individual Communists had with the Nationalists, and the Communists’ total destruction of privacy meant there was no way those under their rule could contact the Nationalists even if they wanted to. And Mao never let up. Each time he acquired more territory and personnel, he took relentless steps to enforce control, requiring each new Party enlistee to write down all his or her family and social relations—and this was just for starters. He never stopped seeking, never stopped plugging, every conceivable loophole. Very few agents, Nationalist or foreign, survived his attention, certainly none who reached any position of importance.
The new regime ran into armed resistance in the countryside and dealt with it without mercy. Once the state was secure, Mao began systematic terrorization of the population, to induce long-term conformity and obedience. His methods were uniquely Maoist. Mao was viscerally hostile to law, and his subjects were utterly shorn of legal protection. He described himself to Edgar Snow in 1970 as “a man without law or limit” (which was mistranslated as him saying he was “a lone monk”). Instead of laws, the regime issued edicts, resolutions and press editorials. It accompanied these with “campaigns” conducted by the Party system. There was a paper facade of law, which formally allowed the “right of appeal,” but exercising it was treated as an offense, a “demand for further punishment,” as one ex-prisoner put it, which could result in one’s sentence being doubled, for daring to doubt the wisdom of “the people.”
But control became increasingly pervasive, and with it the loss of freedom on every front: of speech, movement, work, information. A nationwide system of concierges called Order-Keeping Committees was established in every factory, village and street, composed of members of the public, often the nosiest and most hyper-active busybodies, now made complicit with the regime’s repression. These committees kept an eye on everyone, not just political suspects and petty criminals. Above all, the regime nailed every person in China to a fixed, and usually immutable, job and place of residence through a registration system (hu-kou) begun in July 1951, which soon became iron-clad.
Linking the plot to Barrett helped whip up anti-American feeling, which was not as fervid as the regime wished. The trumped-up charge was also used to tarnish another major target of Mao’s—the Roman Catholic Church, whose leading foreign representative, an Italian Monsignor, was one of those arrested. China had about 3.3 million Catholics at the time. Mao was very interested in the Vatican, especially its ability to command allegiance beyond national boundaries, and his Italian visitors often found themselves being peppered with questions about the Pope’s authority. The tenacity and effectiveness of the Catholics perturbed the regime, which used the phony assassination case to accelerate the takeover of Catholic institutions, including schools, hospitals and orphanages. A high-decibel smear campaign accused Catholic priests and nuns of heinous actions ranging from plain murder to cannibalism and medical experiments on babies. Hundreds of Chinese Catholics were executed, and many foreign priests suffered physical abuse. In general, religious and quasi-religious organizations were either branded reactionary and suppressed, or brought under tight control. Almost all foreign clergy were expelled, along with most foreign businessmen, virtually clearing China of non-Communist foreigners by about 1953. Non-Communist foreign press and radio were, it goes without saying, banned.
In January 1952, shortly after the Three-Antis began, Mao ordered another campaign to run in tandem with it, this one called “the Five-Antis.” The offenses were: bribery, tax evasion, pilfering state property, cheating, and stealing economic information. It was aimed at private businessmen, whose property had not been confiscated, to force them to disgorge money, as well as to frighten them out of acts like bribery and tax evasion. One person involved at a high level put the number of suicides in these two campaigns as at least 200,000–300,000. In Shanghai so many people jumped from skyscrapers that they acquired the nickname “parachutes.” One eyewitness wondered why people jumped into the street rather than into the river. The reason, he discovered, was that they wanted to safeguard their families: “If you jumped into the Huangpu River and were swept away so the Communists didn’t have a corpse, they would accuse you of having escaped to Hong Kong, and your family would suffer. So the best way was to leap down to the street.”
Mao himself did not embezzle in the conventional way, like lesser dictators who kept Swiss bank accounts. But this was simply because he did not need to hedge against losing power. He just made absolutely sure such a day would never come. Rather than embezzling, he treated the funds of the state as his own, and used them however he wanted, disregarding the needs of the population and persecuting any who advocated different spending priorities from the ones he laid down. When it came to personal lifestyle, Mao’s was one of royal self-indulgence, practiced at tremendous cost to the country. This corrupt behavior emerged as soon as he conquered China. Mao lived behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy, so that very few knew anything about his life and his world, including where he lived, or where he was (he made few public appearances). Even up close, he did not give an obvious impression of high living. He had no taste for opulence, and positively shunned the sort of objects usually associated with luxury, such as gold taps, antiques, paintings, vast wardrobes, elegant furniture. But these absences involved no restraint of his desires. In fact, Mao indulged every whim in his daily life.
Mao liked villas. During his twenty-seven-year rule, well over fifty estates were created for him, no fewer than five in Peking. Many he never set foot in. These estates were set in enormous grounds, mostly in gorgeous locations. So, in many places of great beauty, the whole mountain (like Jade Spring Hills outside Peking), or long stretches of lakes (such as along the famed Western Lake in Hangzhou), were cordoned off for his exclusive use. There were often old villas on these spots, many of architectural splendor. These were torn down to make room for new buildings designed and constructed under the supervision of his security forces, with safety and comfort à la Mao as the priorities. These purpose-built edifices were bullet- and bomb-proof; some had deep nuclear shelters. Most were in the same style: a warehouse clone with identical wings, one for Mao and the other for his wife, with a huge sitting room in the middle. All were one-story, as Mao feared being trapped upstairs.
It was perhaps not unreasonable for a leader to enjoy villas and other luxuries, but Mao was gratifying himself while he was executing others for taking a fraction of what he was burning up. And doing so while preaching and imposing abstinence and having himself portrayed as “Serving the People.” Mao’s double standards had a comprehensive cynicism that put him in a league of his own. In no area of life did these double standards cause more misery than in the sphere of sexuality. Mao required his people to endure ultra-puritanical constraints. Married couples posted to different parts of China were given only twelve days a year to be together, so tens of millions were condemned to almost year-round sexual abstinence. Efforts to relieve sexual frustration privately could lead to public humiliation. One patriotic Chinese who had returned to “the Motherland” was made to put a sign up over his dormitory bed criticizing himself for masturbating. And all the while, Mao was indulging in every sexual caprice in well-guarded secrecy. On 9 July 1953 the army was ordered to select young women from their entertainment groups to form a special troupe in the Praetorian Guard. Everyone involved knew that its major function was to provide bed mates for Mao. Army chief Peng De-huai termed this “selecting imperial concubines”—a complaint that would cost him dear in time to come. But his objection had no effect on Mao, and more army entertainment groups were turned into procurement agencies. Apart from singers and dancers, nurses and maids were handpicked for Mao’s villas to provide a pool of women from which he could choose whoever he wanted to have sex with.
A Soviet diplomat who served ten years in both Nationalist and Red China, and witnessed Mao’s campaigns close up, later observed in a classified source that however cruel the Nationalists could be, it was never anything like as bad as under the Communists. He estimated that Mao killed more Chinese in these early campaigns alone than died in the civil war
The two sides finally signed a new treaty on 14 February 1950. The published text was a formality. The essence of the treaty was in secret annexes. The US$300 million loan China had requested was confirmed, although it was spread over five years, and of the first year’s tranche China actually got only one-third (US$20 million), on the grounds that the rest was owed for past “purchases.” The entire loan was allocated to military purchases from Russia (in Mao’s inner circle it was referred to as “a military loan”). Half of the total loan, US$150 million, was earmarked for the navy. Stalin gave the go-ahead for fifty large-scale industrial projects—far fewer than Mao had wanted. In return, Mao agreed that Manchuria and Xinjiang were to be designated Soviet spheres of influence, with Russia given exclusive access to their “industrial, financial, and commercial … activities.” As these two huge regions were the main areas with known rich and exploitable mineral resources, Mao was effectively signing away most of China’s tradable assets. To his inner circle he himself referred to the two provinces as “colonies.” To the Americans, decades later, he said that the Russians “grabbed half of Xinjiang. It was called a sphere of influence. And Manchukuo [sic] was also called their sphere of influence.” He gave Russia a monopoly on all China’s “surplus” tungsten, tin and antimony for fourteen years, thus depriving China of the chance to sell about 90 percent of its marketable raw materials on the world market into the mid-1960s. In 1989, the post-Mao leader Deng Xiao-ping told Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev: “Of all the foreign powers that invaded, bullied and enslaved China since the Opium War (in 1842), Japan inflicted the greatest damage; but in the end, the country that got most benefit out of China was Tsarist Russia, including [sic] the Soviet Union during a certain period …” Deng was certainly referring to this treaty.
Poverty-stricken, exhausted China was about to be thrown into war with the USA. It seems it was only now, at the beginning of October, that Mao convened the regime’s top body, the Politburo, to discuss this momentous issue. The Politburo was not a team to make important decisions, but to serve as a sounding-board for Mao. On this occasion, he specifically invited differing views, because of the colossal implications of war with America. Nearly all his colleagues were strongly against going into Korea, including his No. 2 Liu Shao-chi and nominal military chief Zhu De. Lin Biao was the most vocal opponent. Chou En-lai took a cautious and equivocal position. Mao said later that going into Korea was “decided by one man and a half”: himself the “one” and Chou the “half.” Among the huge problems voiced were: that the US had complete air supremacy, and artillery superiority of about 40:1; that if China got involved, America might bomb China’s big cities and destroy its industrial base; and that America might drop atomic bombs on China. Mao himself had been losing sleep over these questions. He needed a functioning China as the base for his wider ambitions. But Mao gambled that America would not expand the war to China. Chinese cities and industrial bases could be protected from US bombing by the Russian air force. And as for atomic bombs, his gut feeling was that America would be deterred by international public opinion, particularly as Truman had already dropped two—both on an Asian country. Mao took precautions for himself, though. During the Korean War, he mostly holed up in a top-secret military estate outside Peking in the Jade Spring Hills, well equipped with air-raid shelters.
Mao was convinced that America could not defeat him, because of his one fundamental asset—millions of expendable Chinese, including quite a few that he was pretty keen to get rid of. In fact, the war provided a perfect chance to consign former Nationalist troops to their deaths. These were men who had surrendered wholesale in the last stages of the civil war, and it was a deliberate decision on Mao’s part to send them into Korea, where they formed the bulk of the Chinese forces. In case UN troops should fail to do the job, there were special execution squads in the rear to take care of anyone hanging back. Mao knew that America just would not be able to compete in sacrificing men. He was ready to wager all because having Chinese troops fighting the USA was the only chance he had to claw out of Stalin what he needed to make China a world-class military power.
Ever since the first Bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, Mao had longed to possess one. One of his economic managers, Bo Yi-bo, recalled that all through the early 1950s, “at all meetings and on all occasions, Chairman Mao would talk about the fact that we had no atom bombs. He talked and talked. Chairman Mao was really anxious!” Mao successfully concealed this hankering from the public, affecting instead an image of nonchalant contempt for atomic weapons, and pretending that he preferred to rely on “the people,” a position made famous by his remark in 1946 that the atom bomb was “a paper tiger.” As soon as Eisenhower made his remarks about possibly using the Bomb, Mao dispatched his top nuclear scientist, Qian San-qiang, to Moscow. Mao’s message boiled down to this: Give me the Bomb, so that you will not be drawn into a nuclear war with America. This confronted Stalin with a serious dilemma, as Russia had a mutual defense pact with China. Stalin did not want to give Mao the Bomb, but he was worried about Eisenhower. It was under this unremitting pressure—from Mao as much as from the West—that Stalin, it seems, decided to end the Korean War.
The official claim is 152,000 deaths, but in private Deng Xiao-ping told Japanese Communist leaders that the number of Chinese killed was 400,000. The same figure was given by Kang Sheng to Albania’s Enver Hoxha. These sacrifices did not earn China much gratitude from North Korea. When we tried to gain access to the Chinese war memorial in Pyongyang, Korean officials refused permission. To the question, “How many Chinese died in the Korean War?,” the reply came, most grudgingly, after two refusals to answer: “Perhaps 10,000.”
MAO WAS IN a rush for his arsenal. In September 1952, when Chou En-lai gave Stalin Peking’s shopping list for its First Five-Year Plan (1953–57), Stalin’s reaction was: “This is a very unbalanced ratio. Even during wartime we didn’t have such high military expenses.” “The question here is … whether we will be able to produce this much equipment.” According to official statistics, spending during this period on the military, plus arms-related industries, took up 61 percent of the budget—although in reality the percentage was higher, and would rise as the years progressed. In contrast, spending on education, culture and health combined was a miserable 8.2 percent, and there was no private sector to fall back on when the state failed to provide. Education and health care were never free, except in the case of epidemics, and often not available, for either the peasants or the urban underclass. In order to save money on health, the regime resorted to schemes like hygiene drives, which called for killing not only flies and rats, but in some areas also cats and dogs, although, curiously, it never extended to cleaning up China’s stinking, and pestiferous, toilets, which survived uncleansed throughout Mao’s reign.
The Chinese people were told, vaguely but deliberately, that equipment from the USSR used in China’s industrialization was “Soviet aid,” implying that the “aid” was a gift. But it was not. Everything had to be paid for—and that meant mainly with food, a fact that was strictly concealed from the Chinese people, and still largely is. China in those days had little else to sell. Trade with Russia, Chou told a small circle, “boils down to us selling agricultural products to buy machines.” Throughout the 1950s, “the main exports were rice, soybeans, vegetable oil, pigs’ bristles, sausage skins, raw silk, pork, cashmere, tea and eggs,” according to today’s official statistics. In this period Mao told the Indonesian President Sukarno, almost flippantly: “Frankly speaking, we haven’t got a lot of things [for export] apart from some apples, peanuts, pig bristles, soybeans.” What China was exporting to Russia, and its satellites, consisted overwhelmingly of items that were basic essentials for its own people, and included all the main products on which China’s own population depended for protein: soybeans, vegetable oil, eggs and pork, which were always in extremely short supply. With only 7 percent of the world’s arable land, and 22 percent of its population, land was too precious to raise livestock in most places, so most Chinese had no dairy products and very little meat. Even grain, the staple, was on Mao’s export list, while China’s grain production was woefully inadequate, and the country had traditionally been a large importer of grain.
CHINESE PEASANTS were amongst the poorest in the world, as Mao knew very well. He knew equally well that peasants were starving under him. On 21 April 1953, on the eve of launching the Superpower Program, he noted on a report: “About 10 percent of agricultural households are going to suffer food scarcity in spring and summer … even out of food altogether.” This was happening “every year,” he wrote. How could the country’s limited stock of food pay for Mao’s vast ambitions? Elementary arithmetic alone would suggest there were going to be massive deaths from starvation if he went ahead sending food abroad at these levels. Mao did not care. He would make dismissive remarks like: “Having only tree leaves to eat? So be it.” All economic statistics and information were top-secret, and ordinary people were kept completely in the dark. They were also powerless to influence policies. But the men at the top were in the picture, and one of them, Mao’s No. 2, Liu Shao-chi, balked at the colossal consequences of Mao’s program. He was in favor of industrialization and superpower status, but he wanted to reach these goals at a more gradual tempo, by building a stronger economic foundation and raising living standards first.
But around the time the Communists took power, serious disagreements emerged between the two about whether to give priority to becoming a military superpower via a forced march, or to improving living standards. Mao constantly mocked Liu’s espousal of the latter, retorting: “ ‘Oh, peasants’ lives are so hard’—the end of the world! I have never thought so.”
Mao turned the screw even tighter from mid-1955 by forcing the entire countryside into collective farms. This was to make it easier to enforce requisitioning. Previously, peasants could harvest their own crops and bring them home before handing over the state’s “share.” To Mao, this left a loophole: peasants could underreport the harvest and hide some of it, and checking nearly a hundred million households was not easy. With collectivization, however, the whole harvest went straight from the fields into the state’s hands, giving the regime complete control over how it was allocated. As one peasant said: “Once you join the collective, you only get food the government doles out to you.”
This campaign was accompanied by a clampdown on literature and the arts. With his characteristic thoroughness, Mao had begun to strangle culture from the moment he took power. The cinema industry was almost shut down. In 1950, 39 feature films were produced; in 1952 the figure was 5. In 1954 he had started a drive to eradicate the influence of the great non-Communist writers, historians and scholars, some of whom had fled abroad, or to Taiwan. Now he turned to those who had stayed and who showed some independence. Mao picked on a well-known writer called Hu Feng, who had called for a more liberal artistic environment, and had a following. In May 1955, Hu was publicly denounced and thrown into prison, from which he only emerged, his mind destroyed, after Mao died more than two decades later. The Hu Feng case was headlined in the press. And it served another purpose—to scare people out of writing to each other about their views. Letters that Hu and his followers had exchanged were published, revealing thoughts critical of the regime, and these were presented as evidence against them. As a result, people became wary of putting any thoughts on paper. Not being able to write one’s thoughts down, on top of not being able to voice them, or having to censor them all the time, undermined people’s ability to form their own independent judgment.
Soon after Khrushchev left, Mao escalated the crisis by bombing and strafing more Nationalist-held islands. US President Eisenhower responded by agreeing to sign a mutual defense treaty with Taiwan. Mao pressed on, apparently intent on taking the offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu—and more. His calculation was to nudge America into threatening to use nuclear weapons. In March 1955 the US said it would use nuclear weapons under certain circumstances. Eisenhower very deliberately told a press conference on the 16th that he could see no reason why they should not be used “just exactly as you would use a bullet or anything else.” Mao had what he had aimed for—a situation in which China seemed to be in real danger of a US nuclear strike. Not wishing to be drawn into a nuclear confrontation with America, Khrushchev took the momentous decision to provide China with the technical assistance to make the Bomb.
On the 12th, Liu sent Mao a draft of an editorial he (Liu) had commissioned for People’s Daily. Its target, as its title stated, was “the mindset of impatience.” It criticized people who “plan actions beyond their means, and try to force things that cannot be achieved” and “want to achieve everything in one morning,” and “so create waste.” “This mindset of impatience,” it said, “exists first and foremost among the leading cadres,” who were “forcing” the country into it. As Mao was later to say, these strictures were plainly aimed at him. In a fury, he jotted three characters on it: “I won’t read.” But the editorial came out nonetheless.
Moscow responded extremely positively, saying that it was happy to help China build atom bombs, and missiles, as well as more advanced fighter planes. It turned out that Moscow needed even more support from Mao. The Communist world’s biggest-ever summit was set for 7 November, the fortieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. For this event to go smoothly, Moscow had to have Mao on board. Mao exploited this situation to the hilt. He said he would attend the summit only on condition that the Russians signed a prior agreement guaranteeing to hand over “the materials and the models for the production of an atomic weapon and the means to deliver it.” On 15 October, three weeks before the summit was to convene, Moscow signed a fateful deal agreeing to provide Mao with a sample A-bomb. Russian ministries were told “to supply the Chinese with everything they required to build their own Bomb.” So many missile experts were suddenly transferred to China that it caused “havoc” in Russia’s own program, according to one Russian expert. Russian experts also helped China choose missile and nuclear test sites deep in the interior. Although the “father of the Russian Bomb,” Igor Kurchatov, strongly objected, Khrushchev sent a top nuclear scientist, Yevgenii Vorobyov, to supervise the construction of Mao’s Bomb, and during Vorobyov’s stay in China the number of Chinese nuclear specialists increased from 60 to 6,000. Russia “is willing to let us have all the blueprints,” Chou told a small circle.
Mao then wrote to Khrushchev confirming that he would be only too happy for China to fight a nuclear war with America alone. “For our ultimate victory,” he offered, “for the total eradication of the imperialists, we [i.e., the Chinese people, who had not been consulted] are willing to endure the first [US nuclear] strike. All it is is a big pile of people dying [our italics].”
A particular example was made of three teachers in one county town in Hubei province who were executed for allegedly stirring up a demonstration by schoolchildren over education cuts. The effect of the cuts was that only one in twenty children would now be able to go on to high school. The demonstration was branded “a Little Hungary,” and a special point was made of publicizing the executions nationwide. It is almost certain that Mao personally ordered the death sentences, as he had just arrived in the province the day before they were passed, and up till that moment the authorities had been undecided about imposing the death penalty. The huge publicity was intended to instill fear in rural schools, which bore the brunt of the education cuts Mao had introduced to squeeze out more funds for the Superpower Program. Funding for education was already minuscule. Now it was to be cut back even further. Mao’s approach was not to raise the general standard of education in society as a whole, but to focus on a small elite, predominantly in science and other “useful” subjects, and leave the rest of the population to be illiterate or semi-illiterate slave-laborers. What funds were allotted to education went mainly to the cities; village schools received no funding, and schools in small towns very little. As a result, only tiny numbers of rural youth were able to go on to higher education.
Shoveling earth at the Ming Tomb Reservoir for those few minutes was the only physical labor Mao put in during his entire rule, although he made heavy labor compulsory and routine for nearly everyone in China, children included, on the grounds that it helped maintain their ideological purity.
For the Chinese population, the Great Leap was indeed an enormous jump—but in the amount of food extracted. This was calculated on the basis, not of what the peasants could afford, but of what was needed for Mao’s Program. Mao proceeded by simply asserting that there was going to be an enormous increase in the harvest, and got the provincial chiefs to proclaim that their area would produce an astronomical output. When harvest time came, the chiefs got selected lackeys down at the grassroots to declare that their areas had indeed produced fantastic crops. Mao’s propaganda machine then publicized these claims with great fanfare. The stratospheric harvests and other sky-high claims were called “sputniks,” reflecting Mao’s obsession with the Russian satellite. On 12 June People’s Daily reported that in Henan, Mao’s No. 1 model province, a “Sputnik Cooperative” had produced 1.8 tons of wheat on one mu (1/6th acre)—more than ten times the norm. Claims in this vein were not, as official Chinese history would have us believe, the result of spontaneous boasting by local cadres and peasants. The press was Mao’s voice, not the public’s. “Sputnik fields” mushroomed. They were usually created by transplanting ripe crops from a number of fields into a single artificial plot. These were the Maoist equivalent of Potemkin fields—with the key difference that Mao’s plots were not intended to fool the ruler, but instead produced by the ruler for the eyes of his distant underlings, grassroots cadres from other collective farms. These cadres were most important to Mao, as they were the people immediately in charge of physically handing over the harvests to the state. Mao wanted them to see these Sputnik fields and then go back and make similar claims, so that the state could say: since you’ve produced more, we can take more. Cadres who declined to go along were condemned and replaced with others who would. Charades of sky-high yields filled the press, though Peking eventually quietly stopped the transplanting theater, as it caused big losses.
This nationwide squeeze made it possible for Mao to export 4.74 million tons of grain, worth US$935 million, in 1959. Exports of other foods also soared, particularly of pork. The claim about China “having too much food” was trundled out to Khrushchev. When he came to Peking in summer 1958, Mao pressed him for help to make nuclear submarines, which were going to be extremely expensive. Khrushchev asked how China was going to pay. Mao’s response was that China had unlimited supplies of food. Food was also used as a raw material in the nuclear program, which required high-quality fuel. Grain was turned into the purest alcohol. On 8 September, having claimed that there was food to spare, Mao told the Supreme Council that “we have to find outlets for grain in industries, for example to produce ethyl alcohol for fuel.” Grain was therefore used for missile tests, each of which consumed 10 million kg of grain, enough to radically deplete the food intake of 1–2 million people for a whole year.
But the case for eliminating sparrows was not so clear-cut, as sparrows got rid of many pests, as well as eating grain—and, needless to say, many other birds died in the killing spree. Pests once kept down by sparrows and other birds now flourished, with catastrophic results. Pleas from scientists that the ecological balance would be upset were ignored. It was not long before a request from the Chinese government marked “Top Secret” reached the Soviet embassy in Peking. In the name of socialist internationalism, it read, please send us 200,000 sparrows from the Soviet Far East as soon as possible. Mao had to accept that his anti-sparrow drive was counter-productive, and it gradually petered out. The “Four Pests” campaign was a sort of Maoist DIY substitute for a health service, as it was labor-intensive and investment-free. Mao had wanted to get rid of dogs, which consumed food, but relented, when he was advised that peasants needed them to guard their houses when they were out at work.
Sitting by his swimming pool in Zhongnanhai on 19 June he said to the metallurgy minister: “Last year, steel output was 5.3 million tons. Can you double it this year?” The yes-man said: “All right.” And that was that. Steel mills and related industries like coal mines were ordered to go flat out to speed up production. Rules, and common sense, were cast aside. Equipment was overworked to the point of breakdown, and over 30,000 workers were killed in serious accidents alone within a few months. Experts who tried to talk sense were persecuted. Mao set the tone for discrediting rationality by saying that “bourgeois professors’ knowledge should be treated as dogs’ fart, worth nothing, deserving only disdain, scorn, contempt …”
Mao even toyed with getting rid of people’s names and replacing them with numbers. In Henan and other model areas, people worked in the fields with a number sewn on their backs. Mao’s aim was to dehumanize China’s 550 million peasants and turn them into the human equivalent of draft animals. As befitted the labor-camp culture, inmates had to eat in canteens. Peasants were not only banned from eating at home, their woks and stoves were smashed. Total control over food gave the state a terrifying weapon, and withholding food became a commonplace form of “light” punishment, which grassroots officials could deploy against anyone they felt like.
His ideal city was a purely industrial center. Standing on Tiananmen Gate and looking out over the gorgeous palaces and temples and pagodas which in those days decorated Peking’s skyline, he told the mayor: “In the future, I want to look around and see chimneys everywhere!” Worse, Mao wanted to destroy existing cities on a massive scale and build industrial centers on the ruins. In 1958 the regime did a survey of historic monuments in Peking. It listed 8,000—and decided to keep seventy-eight. Everyone who heard of the scheme, from the mayor down, pleaded against this level of destruction. Eventually, the order was not carried out so drastically—for a while. But at Mao’s insistence, the centuries-old city walls and gates were mostly razed to the ground, and the earth used to fill in a beautiful lake in the city. “I am delighted that city walls in Nanjing, Jinan, and so on, are [also] torn down,” Mao said. He was fond of mocking cultural figures who shed tears of anguish at such senseless destruction, and intellectuals were deliberately made to work on the wrecking crews. Many of the visible signs of Chinese civilization disappeared forever from the face of the earth.
This famine, which was nationwide, started in 1958 and lasted through 1961, peaking in 1960. That year, the regime’s own statistics recorded, average daily calorie intake fell to 1,534.8. According to a major apologist for the regime, Han Suyin, urban housewives were getting a maximum 1,200 calories a day in 1960. At Auschwitz, slave-laborers got between 1,300 and 1,700 calories per day. They were worked about eleven hours a day, and most who did not find extra food died within several months.
During the famine, some resorted to cannibalism. One post-Mao study (promptly suppressed), of Fengyang county in Anhui province, recorded sixty-three cases of cannibalism in the spring of 1960 alone, including that of a couple who strangled and ate their eight-year-old son. And Fengyang was probably not the worst. In one county in Gansu where one-third of the population died, cannibalism was rife. One village cadre, whose wife, sister and children all died then, later told journalists: “So many people in the village have eaten human flesh … See those people squatting outside the commune office sunning themselves? Some of them ate human flesh … People were just driven crazy by hunger.” While all this was happening, there was plenty of food in state granaries, which were guarded by the army. Some food was simply allowed to rot. A Polish student saw fruit “rotting by the ton” in southeast China in summer–autumn 1959. But the order from above was: “Absolutely no opening the granary door even if people are dying of starvation” (e-si bu-kai-cang).
Mao had actually allowed for many more deaths. Although slaughter was not his purpose with the Leap, he was more than ready for myriad deaths to result, and had hinted to his top echelon that they should not be too shocked if they happened. At the May 1958 congress that kicked off the Leap, he told his audience they should not only not fear, but should actively welcome, people dying as a result of their Party’s policy. “Wouldn’t it be disastrous if Confucius were still alive today?” he said. The Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu, he said, “was right to lounge and sing when his wife died. There should be celebration rallies when people die.” Death, said Mao, “is indeed to be rejoiced over … We believe in dialectics, and so we can’t not be in favor of death.”
North Korea’s Kim Il Sung turned out to be less stupid than Mao on this issue. Mao had pressed him to emulate China’s anti-sparrow campaign. To humor Mao, Kim drafted a “3-Year Plan for Punishing Sparrows,” but then did nothing while he watched to see how Mao’s campaign turned out.
Peng had crossed swords with Mao over the years. In the 1930s he had criticized Mao’s vicious treatment of other military commanders. On the Long March he had challenged Mao for the military leadership when Mao was dragging the Red Army to near-ruin for his personal goals. In the 1940s, when Mao began his personality cult during the Yenan Terror, Peng had raised objections to rituals like shouting “Long Live Chairman Mao!,” and singing the Mao anthem, “The East Is Red.” Once Khrushchev denounced Stalin in 1956, Peng spoke out more forcefully against the personality cult, and even advocated changing the oath that servicemen took, from one that pledged allegiance to Mao personally, to one that pledged allegiance to the nation, arguing that “Our army belongs to the nation.” This was guaranteed to rile Mao. Besides, Mao loathed the fact that Peng had not only expressed esteem for Khrushchev over de-Stalinization, but had also urged that spending on defense industries in peacetime “must be compatible with people’s standard of living.” Peng had often voiced independent, unorthodox views. He openly admired the concepts of “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity,” which Mao denounced as “anti-Marxist.” Peng also advocated observing traditional Chinese ethical codes like “A prince and the man in the street are equal before the law” and “Do not do to others what you don’t want done to yourself.” My “principle,” Mao said, “is exactly the opposite: Do to others precisely what I don’t want done to myself.”
The beady Mao guessed Peng was up to something. On 5 April, shortly before Peng’s scheduled departure, Mao exploded to a top Party gathering: “Is comrade Peng De-huai here?… you really hate me to death …” Mao then flew into a temper the like of which those close to him said they had never seen. “We have always been battling each other …” Mao exclaimed. “My principle is: You don’t mess with me and I won’t mess with you; but mess with me, and I sure as hell will mess with you!”
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.
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.
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.”
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!”
Mao made sure that no Chinese except a very carefully vetted elite could get out of the country. Among the few who could were diplomats, who became notorious for their leaden performances. They worked under straitjacket rules about exactly what they could say, the strictest orders to report every conversation, and permanent surveillance by each other. Communist China’s first ambassadors were mostly army generals. Before sending them off, Mao told them, only half-jokingly: “You don’t know any foreign language, and you are not [professional] diplomats; but I want you to be my diplomats—because in my view you won’t be able to flee.” And over half of these men were going to other Communist countries.
In the end, the Russians continued to provide assistance to keep construction work going on 66 of the 155 unfinished industrial projects. But Mao did not get what he coveted most—renewed collaboration on high-end military technology transfers. Scores of large-scale projects were canceled. Mao later blamed the famine that he himself had created on their cancellation, which he alleged had damaged China’s economy, and his claim is believed in China to this day. In fact, the cancellations should have eased the famine: China could now export less food. But instead of allowing the Chinese population to benefit from a respite, Mao found a new way to spend the food. He insisted on continuing to export it to repay Russian loans ahead of schedule—in the space of five years, instead of the sixteen that the agreements allowed. He did this because he knew Russia needed food, and Chinese food made up two-thirds of Russia’s food imports. By continuing to supply the same large amounts as before, he was encouraging Russia’s dependence on Chinese food, in the hope that Khrushchev would sell him more of what he wanted. Mao later fabricated the myth that Khrushchev had pressured China to pay back its debts during the famine, and that this was one major reason why the Chinese starved. In fact, as a briefing for China’s post-Mao leaders stated categorically, Russia “did not ask for the debt to be repaid” then, let alone try to “force” China to do so. It was Mao who insisted on repaying far ahead of schedule.
For the next two years Mao’s tactic was to keep one foot in the Kremlin door, in the hope of maintaining access to military technology, while taking a swipe at Khrushchev on every possible occasion—even over the Berlin Wall, the ultimate symbol of the Cold War. An East German diplomat then in Peking told us that when the Wall went up in summer 1961, Chou En-lai made it clear to the East Germans that Mao saw this as a sign of Khrushchev “capitulating to the US imperialists.”
It was at this point, more than three years after he had started pushing Maoism onto the world stage, that Mao gave the order to denounce Khrushchev by name as a “revisionist.” A public slanging match quickly escalated. For Mao, the polemic acted as a sort of international advertising campaign for Maoism, whose essence was summed up in one of the main accusations against Khrushchev: “In the eyes of the modern revisionists, to survive is everything. The philosophy of survival has replaced Marxism-Leninism.” It is hard now to cast oneself back to a time when anyone could think this approach might appeal. But to deny people’s desire—and right—to live was central to Maoism.
Everywhere he went Liu encountered heart-rending sights and tragic stories. He could sense how much people hated the Communists—and him. In his home village a twelve-year-old boy had written “Down with Liu Shao-chi” outside Liu’s old family house. This boy had seen six members of his family succumb to starvation-induced illness within one year, the last being his youngest brother, who had died in his arms; he had been carrying the baby around looking for someone to breast-feed him, as their mother had just died. Liu told the police not to punish the boy as a “counter-revolutionary,” which would normally have been the charge for such an act. He also stopped the local authorities punishing peasants for “stealing” food, making a striking admission to the villagers that it was the regime that was robbing them. “Commune members think this way,” Liu said. “Since you take from us, why can’t I take from you? Since you take a lot, why can’t I take a little?” Liu did something else unprecedented. He apologized to the peasants for the misrule the Communists had brought. After nearly forty years away, he said, “I am shocked to see my fellow-villagers are leading such a harsh life … I feel responsible for causing so much suffering to you, and I must apologise …” He started to sob, and bowed to the villagers. The trip marked Liu profoundly. After he returned to Peking, he told the top managers: “We cannot go on like this.”
Mao tried to deflect dissatisfaction by his usual method of designating scapegoats. The people he picked on were first of all village cadres, whom he blamed for “beating people up and beating them to death,” and for “causing grain harvests to drop and people not to have enough food to eat.” Next he blamed the Russians, and his third scapegoat was “extraordinarily big natural calamities.” As a matter of fact, meteorological records show that not only were there no natural calamities in the famine years, but the weather was better than average. But even if cadres had no general picture, and half believed Mao, hungry officials still felt that something must be terribly wrong with the way their Party was running the country if the entire population, including themselves, was brought to such a state of wretchedness. Mao also tried to win his cadres’ sympathy vote by announcing to Party members that he would “share weal and woe with the nation,” and give up eating meat. In fact, all he did, for a while, was to eat fish instead, which he loved anyway. Nor did his meatless regime last long. Indeed, it was right in the middle of the famine that he developed a fancy for meat-rich European cuisine. On 26 April 1961, a comprehensive set of European menus was presented to him, under seven headings: seafood, chicken, duck, pork, lamb, beef and soup—each with scores of dishes.
Mao went to the greatest lengths to keep his daily life completely secret. His daughter Li Na was boarding at the university, so she lived during the week on normal rations and was starving. After one weekend at home, she smuggled a few of her father’s usual luxuries out of the house. Mao ordered her never to do it again. Nothing must puncture the illusion that he was tightening his belt along with the rest of the nation. As a result, Li Na contracted edema in 1960 and she stopped menstruating. The following year she abandoned the university altogether and stayed at home. To his staff, who could see what Mao was eating, and who themselves were half-starved, like their families, Mao claimed that his food was a reward to him “from the People,” and that others had “no right” to it. When Mao’s housekeeper took some scraps home, he found himself exiled to the freezing Great Northern Wilderness and was never heard of again.
With this huge audience of all the 7,000 top officials in the country listening, Liu laid into Mao’s policies. “People do not have enough food, clothes or other essentials,” he said; “agricultural output, far from rising in 1959, 1960 and 1961, dropped, not a little, but tremendously … there is not only no Great Leap Forward, but a great deal of falling backward.” Liu dismissed the official explanation for the calamities, saying there was “no serious bad weather” in the areas he had visited, nor, he strongly hinted, anywhere. He called on delegates to question the new Leap that Mao had advocated, and raised the possibility of scrapping the communes and even the Mao-style industrialization program. Liu established beyond a glimmer of a doubt that past policies had been disastrous, and had to be discarded. He openly rejected a standard Mao formula that “Mistakes are only one finger whereas achievements are nine fingers.” This, he said flatly, was untrue.
To the 7,000, Lin Biao trotted out the kind of heartless clichés Mao loved to hear: disasters were inevitable “tuition fees”; Chairman Mao’s ideas were “always correct”; “in times of difficulty … we must all the more follow Chairman Mao.” When he finished, Mao was the first to clap, and praised Lin fulsomely to the audience. Only now did Mao feel safe enough to hint at his loathing for what Liu Shao-chi had done, using an ominous expression that amounted to “I’ll get you later.” Lin Biao had saved Mao’s bacon.
AS SOON AS the conference was over, on 7 February, Mao stormed off to Shanghai to be among his cronies, under local boss Ke Qing-shi. He had to take a back seat while Liu and his other colleagues, mainly Chou En-lai, Chen Yun and a rising star, Deng Xiao-ping, made major changes to his policies. Requisitioning was greatly lowered. Costly and unrealistic projects like nuclear submarines were suspended, although the basic nuclear program was unaffected. Spending on arms factories was enormously scaled down, while consumer goods industries received unprecedented funding. In a blow to the promotion of Maoism, overseas aid was slashed drastically—to virtually zero for the year. Mao’s extravagance had been extremely unpopular with officials who knew about it. The man who ran military aid later wrote: “Every time I saw foreigners’ smiling faces after signing yet another aid agreement, my heart would be filled with guilt towards my own people.”
Kennedy seriously considered air strikes on China’s nuclear facilities. He was advised that the Lanzhou gaseous diffusion plant could be destroyed in such a way as to make it look like an accident, but that nuclear strikes might be needed to destroy the plutonium plant at Baotou.
Celebrations were organized throughout the country. Among the population, who learned for the first time that evening that China had been making a Bomb, there was genuine exultation. To possess nuclear weapons was regarded as a sign of the nation’s achievement, and many felt tremendous pride—especially since they were told that China had produced the Bomb single-handed, with no foreign assistance. The decisive role that Russia played was strictly suppressed, and is little known today. With hunger only a couple of years behind, and painful memories raw, some among the elite wondered how much the Bomb had cost. The regime registered the import of the questions, and Chou made a point of telling a small audience that China had made the Bomb very cheaply, and had spent only a few billion yuan on it. In fact, the cost of China’s Bomb has been estimated at US$4.1 billion (in 1957 prices). This amount in hard currency could have bought enough wheat to provide an extra 300 calories per day for two years for the entire population—enough to save the lives of every single one of the nearly 38 million people who died in the famine. Mao’s Bomb caused 100 times as many deaths as both of the Bombs the Americans dropped on Japan.
He opened with novels, saying sarcastically to a Party audience in September 1962: “Aren’t there a lot of novels and publications at the moment? Using novels to carry out anti-Party activities is a big invention.” Mao later laid into all books: “The more books you read, the more stupid you become.” “You can read a little,” he would say, “but reading too much ruins you, really ruins you.” This was unashamedly cynical, as he himself was well-read, and loved reading. His beds were tailor-made to be extra large, with enough space for loads of books to be piled on one side (and sloping, so that the books would not topple over onto him), and his favorite hobby was reading in bed. But he wanted the Chinese people to be ignorant. He told his inner circle that “We need the policy of ‘keep people stupid.’ ”
What Mao had in mind was a completely arid society, devoid of civilization, deprived of representation of human feelings, inhabited by a herd with no sensibility, which would automatically obey his orders. He wanted the nation to be brain-dead in order to carry out his big purge—and to live in this state permanently. In this he was more extreme than Hitler or Stalin, as Hitler allowed apolitical entertainment, and Stalin preserved the classics. In fact, Mao criticized Stalin on this score; in February 1966, Mao said: “Stalin took over the so-called classics of Russia and Europe uncritically, and this caused grave consequences.”
Apart from symbolizing total loyalty to Mao, soldier Lei Feng exemplified another vital point: the idea that hate was good, which was drilled into the population, especially the young. Lei Feng had reportedly written: “Like spring, I treat my comrades warmly … And to class enemies, I am cruel and ruthless like harsh winter.” Hatred was dressed up as something necessary if one loved the people.
Ten days before the summit was due to open, Algeria’s President Ahmed Ben Bella was overthrown in a military coup. A short while before, Mao had called him “my dear brother.” Now he dropped Ben Bella like a hot potato, and ordered Chou to back the new military government and ensure the summit went ahead on schedule.
Mao and Lin Biao actually rarely met socially, but their collaboration went back nearly four decades—to 1929, when the two struck up an alliance to sabotage Zhu De, whom Lin Biao loathed and Mao was bent on dominating. From then on, a special crony relationship evolved between Mao and Lin. Mao tolerated an extraordinary degree of independence on Lin’s part. For example, when Lin was in Russia during the Sino-Japanese War, he had spoken his mind to the Russians about Mao’s unwillingness to fight the Japanese and how eager Mao was to turn on Chiang Kai-shek—an act Mao would never have swallowed from anyone else. During the Yenan Terror, Lin again did what no one else was allowed to: he simply removed his wife from detention and refused to let her be interrogated. Under Mao, everyone had to do humiliating “self-criticisms” in public, but not Lin. In return for giving Lin this degree of license, Mao expected him to come through for him in times of need, which Lin always did
As they passed by her, they turned round and fixed her with a look of such coldness and disdain that it nearly knocked her off her bicycle. They knew something which she did not—that her father was now an enemy. That look, chilling, cruel, intended to hurt and break, from people whom only yesterday one had assumed to be friends, was to become a hallmark of the forthcoming years.
Contrary to what is widely believed, the vast majority of the destruction was not spontaneous, but state-sponsored. Before Mao chided the Red Guards for being “too civilized” on 23 August, there had been no vandalism against historical monuments. It was on that day, only after Mao spoke, that the first statue was broken—a Buddha in the Summer Palace in Peking. From then on, when important sites were being wrecked, official specialists were present to pick out the most valuable objects for the state, while the rest were carted off and melted down, or pulped.
The Superpower Program, far from being paralyzed, as is often thought, was given unprecedented priority in the Cultural Revolution, and investment in it increased. Agriculture did no worse than before. What changed, apart from the bosses, was life outside work. Leisure disappeared. Instead, there were endless mind-numbing—but nerve-racking—meetings to read and reread Mao’s works and People’s Daily articles. People were herded into numerous violent denunciation rallies against “capitalist-roaders” and other appointed enemies. Public brutality became an inescapable part of daily life. Each institution ran its de facto prison, in which victims were tortured, some to death. Moreover, there were no ways to relax, as there were now virtually no books to read, or magazines, or films, plays, opera; no light music on the radio. For entertainment there were only Mao Thought Propaganda Teams, who sang Mao’s quotations set to raucous music, and danced militantly waving the Little Red Book. Not even Mme Mao’s eight “model shows” were performed for the public yet, as their staging had to be under draconian central control.
From the moment it was clear that Mao was coming after Liu, from the Conference of the Seven Thousand in January 1962, Guang-mei encouraged her husband to stand up to Mao. This was in vivid contrast to the behavior of many leaders’ wives, who urged their spouses to kowtow. In the ensuing years, she helped Liu to entrench his position. In June 1966, when Mao was fomenting violence in schools and universities, Liu made a last-ditch attempt to curb the mayhem by sending in “work teams,” and Guang-mei became a member of the one sent to Qinghua University in Peking. There she came into collision with a twenty-year-old militant called Kuai Da-fu. Kuai’s original interest in politics had been sparked by a sense of justice: as a boy of thirteen in a village during the famine, he had petitioned Peking about grassroots officials ill-treating peasants. But when, in summer 1966, the Cultural Revolution was presented by the media as a “struggle for power,” Kuai developed an appetite for power and led riotous actions to “seize power from the work team.” He was put under dormitory arrest by the work team for eighteen days, which Liu authorized.
This was on 6 January, when Kuai’s group seized the Lius’ teenage daughter, Ping-ping, and then telephoned Guang-mei to tell her that the girl had been hit by a car and was in a hospital, which needed consent to perform an amputation. Both parents raced to the hospital, which discomfited the Rebels. Kuai recounted: The students never thought Liu Shao-chi would come, and they were all frightened. They knew they couldn’t touch Liu Shao-chi … the Centre had given no instructions [about handling Liu in person]. We dared not be rash … We knew this kind of “Down with” in politics could well turn to “Up with” … Without clear and specific instructions from the Centre, when it came to blame, we would have had it. So my pals asked Liu to go back, and kept Wang Guang-mei. This is a good self-confession of how the Rebels really worked; they were tools, and cowards, and they knew it.
Unlike Liu, Peng was interrogated, some 260 times, as Mao genuinely feared he might have had some connection with Khrushchev. In solitary, Peng’s mind began to crack, but his redoubtable core never did. He wrote a lucid account of his life, refuting Mao’s accusations. The ending, written in September 1970, proclaimed: “I will still lift my head and shout a hundred times: my conscience is clear!” Peng was a man of rugged constitution, and his ordeal lasted even longer than Liu’s—eight years, until 29 November 1974, when he was finally felled by cancer of the rectum. Like Liu, he was cremated under a pseudonym, and his death, too, was never announced while Mao remained alive.
Mao had just endorsed Lin’s request to victimize yet another man who had Mao’s deep trust, the Party No. 7, Zhang Chun-qiao. The 53-year-old Zhang had been a middle-ranking functionary in Shanghai who had caught Mao’s eye with his ability to churn out articles that dressed up Mao’s self-serving deeds in Marxist garb. At the start of the Cultural Revolution, Mao had jumped him to the top to perform the crucial job of packaging the Purge in ideological phraseology. Zhang was the person largely responsible for the texts that caused many people in China and abroad to entertain illusions about the true nature of the Cultural Revolution.
In order to do good business in Hong Kong, Peking had to disrupt Taiwan’s intelligence network, which was helping the US identify Western companies breaking the embargo. Peking’s methods had at times been drastic. In April 1955, Chou En-lai was due to go to Indonesia for the first Afro-Asian conference in Bandung, and Peking chartered an Indian airliner, the Kashmir Princess, to fly to Indonesia from Hong Kong. Taiwan agents apparently thought that the plane was going to carry Chou, and concocted a plan to place a bomb on board at the Hong Kong airport. Peking had all the details well in advance, but let the operation go ahead, without telling either Air India, or the British mission in Peking, or the Hong Kong government—or the passengers, eleven relatively low-level officials and journalists (in a plane that seated over 100). The plane blew up in mid-air, killing all the passengers and five of the eight Indian crew.
Castro, who never visited China during Mao’s lifetime, described Mao as “a shit,” and then went public in front of a large international audience, on 2 January 1966, accusing Peking of applying economic pressure to try to lever him away from Moscow. One month later, he charged Peking with resorting to “brutal reprisals,” in particular trying to subvert the Cuban army. Mao called Castro “a jackal and a wolf.”
Mao clearly felt he could push Nixon quite far. At the end of the visit there was to be a joint communiqué. Mao dictated one in which he could denounce America. “Aren’t they talking peace, security … and what not?” he said to Chou. “We will do the opposite and talk revolution, talk liberating the oppressed nations and people all over the world …” So the communiqué took the form of each side stating its own position. The Chinese used their space for a tirade against America (though not by name). The American side did not say one word critical of Mao’s regime, going no further than a vague and much qualified platitude about supporting “individual freedom.”
This was not because the stifling repression was not visible. The political commentator William Buckley noticed how people had been cleared away everywhere they went. “Where are the people?” he asked a Chinese official. “What people?” the official replied. To which Buckley retorted: “The People, as in the People’s Republic of China!”
Mao knew what a monumental, time-consuming pain his wife was, as some people occasionally grumbled to him; and he knew that her behavior interfered with the smooth functioning of his regime. But for him it was worth it to keep everybody off balance and maintain a climate of insecurity and capriciousness, and to keep things on the paranoid track. With Mao himself, of course, she was as meek and quiet as a mouse. She feared him. Only he could do her harm.
Her lifestyle was the acme of extravagance. One of her hobbies was photography. For this she would get warships to cruise up and down, and anti-aircraft guns to fire salvos. Her swimming pools had to be kept permanently heated, and for one of them built exclusively for her, in Canton, mineral water was channeled from dozens of kilometers away. Roads were built specially for her to scenic mountain spots, often requiring extraordinary means. In one case, because her villa was nearby, the army engineers building the road were forbidden to use dynamite in case the explosions alarmed her, and they had to break the rocks manually. Planes were kept on tap for her every whim, even to fly a particular jacket that she suddenly felt like wearing from Peking to Canton, or a favorite chaise longue. Her special train, like Mao’s, would stop at will, snarling up the transport system. Far from feeling ashamed, she would say: “In order for me to have a good rest, and a good time, it is worth sacrificing some other people’s interests.” One such sacrifice was blood. Always on the lookout for methods to improve her health and looks, she learned about an unusual technique: blood transfusions from healthy young men. So scores of Praetorian Guards were put through a rigorous health check, and from a short list of four, blood was taken from two of them for her. Afterwards, she gave the two a dinner, telling them what a “glorious” deed they had done to “donate” their blood to her. “When you know your blood is circulating inside me … you must feel very proud,” she added—before warning them to keep their mouths shut. The transfusions did not become a routine, as she got so excited that she told Mao about them, and he advised against them on health grounds.
Heat and drafts also obsessed her. Her rooms had to be kept at exactly 21.5 degrees centigrade in winter, and 26 degrees in summer. But even when the thermostat showed that the temperature was exactly what she demanded, she would accuse her attendants: “You falsify temperature! You conspire to harm me!” Once she threw a big pair of scissors at a nurse, missing her by inches, because the nurse could not locate the source of a draft. “To serve me is to serve the people” was her constant refrain to her staff.
In the early years of the Cultural Revolution, when she was actively involved in running things, she could visit him freely. But as her political role grew less, he restricted her access, and often barred her from his house. The plain fact was that Mao could not stand his wife. But the more she was shunned, the more desperately she tried to get close. She could not afford to be discarded. She would beg Mao’s girlfriends to put in a word for her, giving them presents like pretty material for making clothes, even a Swiss watch. On one occasion she talked her way into Mao’s house, telling the guards she was there to check “hygiene.” Mao yelled at her to get out, and afterwards told the guards angrily: “Arrest her if she tries to barge in again!”
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.
Mao knew beyond a doubt how bad things were. He kept himself extremely well informed by reading (or having read to him) daily reports from a network of feedback channels he had installed. In September 1975 he told Le Duan, the Party chief of Vietnam, which had just been through thirty years of nonstop war, including devastating US bombing: “Now the poorest nation in the world is not you, but us.” And yet he directed the media to attack Deng’s efforts to raise living standards with absurd slogans like: “The weeds of socialism are better than the crops of capitalism.”
WHILE FEELING DEEPLY discontented at having failed to achieve his world ambition, Mao spared no thought for the mammoth human and material losses that his destructive quest had cost his people. Well over 70 million people had perished—in peacetime—as a result of his misrule, yet Mao felt sorry only for himself. He would cry as he talked about anything he could connect with his past glory and current failure, even watching his own regime’s propaganda films. His staff often saw tears flooding down his face, “like a spring” as one of them put it. Self-pity, to which Mao had always been prone, was the paramount emotion of the utterly unpitying Mao in his last days.