by Jung Chang
She found Mao’s womanizing intolerable. One night in June, Smedley heard Gui-yuan screaming from the adjacent cave, where Lily lived. “Son of a pig, turtle’s egg, whoremongering no-good! How dare you sneak in here to sleep with the little bourgeois bitch!” Smedley went next door and found Gui-yuan lashing out at Mao with a flashlight, while his bodyguard looked on. Mao’s protestations that he had only been talking to Lily cut no ice. Gui-yuan turned on Lily, scratching her face and pulling her hair, while Mao stood by.
Gui-yuan then rounded on Smedley. “Imperialist bitch!” she cried. “You who are the cause of it all, get out of here!” She hit Smedley, who hit her back. Gui-yuan was felled to her knees, and appealed to Mao: “What kind of man are you, what kind of husband and Communist? You let an imperialist whore beat me before your very eyes!” When Mao told his bodyguard to lift her up, Gui-yuan tripped the bodyguard and knocked him down, and in the end it took three bodyguards to carry her off, trailed by a silent Mao.
Smedley was soon sent packing. Lily was not simply banished from Yenan, but written out of Chinese Communist sources, and disappeared off the map forever.
Mao conducted other flirtations, including one with the writer Ding Ling. Though boyish and stout and not exactly a beauty, she had talent and character. Mao sent her a very complimentary poem which included the lines: “To what do I compare your slender pen? Three thousand Mausers and best men.” She recalled in later years how she often visited Mao. One day he half-jokingly compared Yenan to a small imperial court, and started writing down his colleagues’ names under the various imperial titles, which she shouted out to him. “After we finished this, he suddenly said to me: ‘Ding Ling, we have got the Hundred Civil and Military Courtiers sorted out. Now that we are a royal court, no matter how small, we’ve got to have the imperial concubines in Three Palaces and Six Courtyards! Come on, give me some names, and I will bestow titles on them.’ ”
For Gui-yuan, Mao’s flagrant womanizing was the last straw. Over their marriage of nearly ten years, she had had to live with her husband’s heartlessness. She was particularly hurt by his callousness towards her painful pregnancies and childbirth — including one on the Long March — and by his crack that she gave birth to babies “as easily as a hen dropping eggs.” And she was bitter that although he was indifferent to children, and had not cared when four of theirs had died or been abandoned, he repeatedly made her pregnant. Their fifth child, a daughter called Chiao-chiao, was born in 1936 in Baoan, where conditions were appalling, with scorpions and rats running all over the place. A year later, Gui-yuan was pregnant again, which plunged her into depression. Repeated child-bearing in harsh circumstances had severely damaged her health, without the compensation of family life. Now, on top of this, her husband was openly sleeping with other women.
After the Communists settled in Yenan, some senior Reds who had been wounded were able to go to Russia for treatment. Ostensibly to get rid of the painful shrapnel still lodged in her body, Gui-yuan left for Russia in early October 1937. Their one-year-old daughter remained in Yenan.
Gui-yuan reached Moscow in the depths of winter. She and the other new arrivals were immediately warned by fellow Chinese there not to get in touch with anyone they had known previously. A great purge was sweeping Soviet Russia, and many Chinese were being arrested. It was in this freezing world of isolation and fear that she gave birth to a boy, to whom she gave the Russian name Lyova. He died of pneumonia after only six months, and Gui-yuan sank into inconsolable grief. For days she sat on a bench facing the tiny mound where he was buried in the back garden, murmuring his name, weeping.
There was no warmth from her husband. When the baby was born, she had written to Mao to say that the boy looked just like him. Mao did not reply. No word either for his son’s death. Then, in summer 1939, nearly two years after they had parted, Gui-yuan learned by chance that Mao had remarried. She and a group of non-Russian-speaking Chinese met regularly to have items from the Soviet press read out to them in Chinese. On this occasion, the translator was reading an article by a famous Russian film-maker, Roman Karmen, about meeting Mao. Karmen mentioned that Mao and “his wife” had seen him off outside their cave in moonlight. The phrase “Mao’s wife,” so casually mentioned, set Gui-yuan’s stomach churning. In the following days, people who shared a room with her said she was tossing and turning all night. She was already suffering from severe insomnia. Now she came to the brink of a nervous breakdown. Her condition worsened further when she received a brief letter from Mao. It was dry stuff: hope you will study hard and make progress politically. In one lapidary sentence Mao announced the dissolution of their marriage: From now on, we are only comrades.
Because he had remarried, Mao did not want Gui-yuan back in China. When the friends with whom she had traveled to Russia were returning to China in 1939, a cable from Yenan specifically ordered her to stay behind. As a result, the infant daughter she had left in Yenan spent her first few years as a virtual orphan. Chiao-chiao had had to live as a boarder in the elite’s nursery. When the other children were taken home by their parents at the end of the day, nobody came for her. Later in life she recalled that there was also a boy who always stayed behind. He would cry and shout: “I want Papa! I want Mama! I want Home!” Chiao-chiao had no idea what these words meant. As a grown-up, she told a friend, quietly but not without an edge: “In those days, I was an ‘orphan’ who was not exactly an orphan!”
When she was four, Chiao-chiao was taken to Russia to join her mother. Gui-yuan hugged her daughter long and hard when they were reunited, in streams of tears, which made Chiao-chiao extremely happy. She was also fascinated by her mother’s permed hair, skirts, and leather shoes with heels, all very different from the women in Yenan, who wore baggy pants and un-smart cotton shoes, attire that even those who came to Yenan from Nationalist cities had to adopt. But Gui-yuan was already crushed by poor health, the result of frequent pregnancies, injuries suffered during the Long March, and painful memories of her dead and abandoned children, as well as years of grinding loneliness. The horrors she had experienced in the revolution may also have haunted her mind. Soon she had a breakdown, and the brunt of her rage was borne by her daughter; other children often heard Chiao-chiao screaming as her mother beat her. Gui-yuan was put in a mental institution, howling as she was torn away from her room and bundled into a car. Her terrified seven-year-old daughter ran away and hid in the woods, and grew into an introverted and silent girl.
IN SUMMER 1937, before Gui-yuan left for Russia, Mao had spotted a young actress called Jiang Qing, who was to become his fourth wife. Jiang Qing cut a stylish figure even in Communist garb, her belt tightly cinching her svelte waist, and her rakishly tilted army cap exposing waves of shining black hair. She exuded femininity and sexiness. She had a soft and pliant posture and a very sweet — to some an affected — voice.
Born in 1914, Jiang Qing was the daughter of a concubine to an alcoholic inn-owner. Her mother let her grow up willful, even allowing her to unbind her feet, after the bones had been broken when she was six. Jiang Qing was tough, and in the frequent fights between her parents she would help her mother by clinging to her father’s legs and biting his arms. In one of these fights she lost part of a front tooth. Her fellow pupils recalled her as a bully, and she was expelled from school at the age of twelve after she spat at a teacher. She ran away from home at fourteen to join a traveling opera troupe, fetching up in Shanghai, where she made her name as an actress. But acting was a precarious career, and in summer 1937, out of work and unable to stand her lover’s seven-year-old son, she came to Yenan, which also appealed to her radical chic side.
She knew how to get herself noticed, sitting in the front row at Mao’s lectures, and asking wide-eyed questions. One day, Mao came to a Peking opera — a genre he loved — in which she was starring. Afterwards, he went backstage and put his coat around her shoulders. Next day she went to Mao’s place to return the coat, and stayed the night.
The co
uple began to appear in public together. This caused a scandal, as she was a woman with a past. She had already been married to, or lived with, four men, and had left a trail in the Shanghai gossip columns. Her stormy relationship with one of her husbands had provided fodder for the tabloids, especially after he tried to commit suicide by gulping down a bottle of surgical spirit with crushed match heads in it.
If cosmopolitan Shanghai found her difficult to stomach, puritanical Yenan positively gagged. On top of that, there was also tremendous sympathy for the woman she supplanted. One of Gui-yuan’s former Long March companions recalled: “The students in my college were all upset. Some wrote to Mao openly, some wrote secretly … I wrote three letters. They went roughly like this: Chairman Mao, we hope you won’t marry Jiang Qing. [Gui-yuan] is in very poor health, and you have had five or six children together … Jiang Qing’s reputation is pretty bad.”
For the Party, there was a more serious concern. Jiang Qing had once been imprisoned by the Nationalists as a Communist suspect, and had got out by signing a recantation — an act that the Party considered as “betrayal.” Moreover, there were allegations that she had entertained her jailers by being their dinner — and even their bed — companion. Underground organizations in Shanghai and other areas wired Yenan with formal complaints that she was “unsuitable to marry Chairman Mao.” Nominal Party chief Lo Fu wrote to Mao with his own objections and those of many others. When Mao received the letter, he tore it up on the spot and announced to the messenger: “I will get married tomorrow. Everyone else can mind their own business!” Next day he gave a “wedding” banquet to two dozen of Yenan’s elite, to which Lo Fu was not invited.
Mao got security chief Kang Sheng to vouch for Jiang Qing. While working in Russia, Kang had been the escort for Mao’s sons to Moscow, and for Chiang Kai-shek’s son on his way out of Russia. He had come to Yenan in November 1937, and quickly attached himself to Mao, who made him the head of his KGB. In this world of yellow earth, Kang stood out as he was often dressed completely in black, from head (black cap) to toe (unusual leather riding boots). His horse was black, and he was frequently seen cuddling a black dog, which was about the only pet around. Although Kang had proof that Jiang Qing’s conduct while in prison had been dubious, he provided Mao with an official verdict which cleared her by saying that “her past is no problem politically.” In fact, Mao knew that the charges were true, as he acknowledged near his death. But he did not care. He wanted her.
Mrs. Mao number 4 was to become the notorious Mme Mao.
Before Ching-kuo left Russia, he was worked on by Stalin in person, as well as being subjected to a blitz of blandishments and threats by Dimitrov. Ching-kuo played along, cabling Dimitrov en route that: “All your instructions will be fulfillled.” When he reached Vladivostok he was taken to the KGB office, where he performed his last formal act of obeisance to Moscow, promising: “I will strictly follow Party discipline.”
19. RED MOLE TRIGGERS CHINA — JAPAN WAR (1937–38 AGE 43–44)
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.
At this point Japan did not aim to extend the fighting beyond northern China. Yet, within a matter of weeks, all-out war had broken out 1,000 km to the south, in Shanghai, a place where neither Chiang nor Japan wished, or planned, to have a war. Japan had only some 3,000 marines stationed near Shanghai, under the 1932 truce agreement. Tokyo’s plan until mid-August remained: “Army to North China only.” It added specifically: “There is no need to send the Army to Shanghai.”
The well-informed New York Times correspondent H. Abend wrote afterwards:
It was a commonplace … to declare that the Japanese attacked Shanghai. Nothing was further from their intentions or from the truth. The Japanese did not want and did not expect hostilities in the Yangtse Valley. They … had so small a force there even as late as August 13th … that they were nearly pushed into the river on the 18th and 19th.
ABEND REALIZED that there were “clever plans to upset the Japanese scheme for confining the hostilities entirely to North China.” He was right about there being “clever plans”—he was only wrong about one thing: the plans were not Chiang’s (as Abend thought), but almost certainly Stalin’s.
Japan’s swift occupation of northern China in July posed a very direct danger to Stalin. Tokyo’s huge armies were now in a position to turn north and attack Russia anywhere along a border many thousands of kilometers long. The year before, Stalin had publicly identified Japan as the principal menace. Now, we believe, he activated a long-term Communist agent in the heart of the Nationalist army, and detonated a full-scale war in Shanghai, which drew the Japanese inextricably into the vast heartland of China — and away from Russia.
The “sleeper” now wakened was a general called Zhang Zhi-zhong (whom we shall refer to as ZZZ), commander of the Shanghai — Nanjing garrison. In 1925 he had been a teacher at Whampoa, the Russian-funded and Russian-staffed military academy near Canton. From the day of its founding, Moscow made a determined effort to plant high-level agents in the Nationalist military. In his memoirs, ZZZ acknowledged that: “In summer 1925 I was completely in sympathy with the Communist Party, and … was called ‘red teacher,’ ‘red regiment commander’ … I wanted to join the CCP, and told Mr. Chou En-lai.” Chou told him to stay in the Nationalists and collaborate “covertly” with the CCP. During the mid-1930s, ZZZ kept in close contact with the Soviet embassy.
At the time of the Marco Polo Bridge clash, ZZZ held the pivotal job of chief of the Shanghai — Nanjing garrison. He tried to talk Chiang into launching a “first strike” against Japan — not in northern China, where the fighting was, but 1,000 kilometers to the south, in Shanghai, where the small Japanese garrison was not involved in any military action at this stage. Chiang did not reply to this proposal, even though ZZZ repeated it many times. Shanghai was the industrial and financial heart of China, an international metropolis, and Chiang did not want to see it turned into a battleground. Moreover, it was very close to his capital, Nanjing. He had even transferred troops and artillery away from the Shanghai area, to give Japan no excuse for war there.
At the end of July, right after the Japanese occupied Peking and Tianjin, ZZZ cabled Chiang again, arguing strongly for “taking the initiative” to start a war. After ZZZ said he would only do so if the Japanese showed unmistakable signs of attacking Shanghai, Chiang gave his conditional consent, stressing: “You must wait for orders about when this should happen.”
But on 9 August, at Shanghai airport, an army unit hand-picked by ZZZ killed a Japanese marine lieutenant and a private. A Chinese prisoner under sentence of death was then dressed in Chinese uniform and shot dead at the airport gate, to make it seem that the Japanese had fired first. The Japanese gave every sign of wishing to defuse the incident, but ZZZ still bombarded Chiang with requests to launch an offensive, which Chiang vetoed. On the morning of the 13th, the Generalissimo told ZZZ not to launch a war “on impulse,” but to “study and discuss” all the angles again, and then submit his plan. ZZZ pressed the next day: “This army is determined to start the offensive against the enemy at 5:00 PM today. Here is the plan …” On the 14th, Chinese planes bombed the Japanese flagship Izumo, as well as troops and navy planes on the ground, and ZZZ ordered a general offensive. But Chiang stopped him: “You must not attack this evening. Wait for order.”
When no order arrived, ZZZ outflanked Chiang by issuing a press release next day, claiming, falsely, that Japanese warships had shelled Shanghai and that Japanese troops had started attacking the Chinese. With anti-Japanese feeling running high, Chiang was put on the spot. The following day, 16 August, he finally gave the order: “General assault for dawn tomorrow.”
But a
fter one day’s fighting, Chiang ordered a halt, on the 18th. ZZZ simply ignored the order and expanded his offensives. All-out war became unstoppable as large Japanese reinforcements began to arrive on 22 August.
The Japanese inflicted tremendous casualties. In Shanghai, 73 of China’s 180 divisions — and the best one-third — over 400,000 men, were thrown in, and all but wiped out. The conflict here consumed virtually all of China’s nascent air force (which Chiang so treasured that he had not sent a single plane to the northern front), and the main warships. It significantly weakened the military force Chiang had been painstakingly building up since the early 1930s. The Japanese suffered much fewer, though still heavy, casualties: about 40,000.
Once Chiang was forced into all-out war, Stalin moved with alacrity to bolster Chiang’s capability to sustain a war. He signed a non-aggression treaty with Nanjing on 21 August, and started to supply Chiang with weapons. China could not manufacture any weapons except rifles. Stalin advanced Chiang US$250 million for arms purchases from Russia, which included some 1,000 planes, plus tanks and artillery, and committed a sizable Soviet air force contingent. Moscow sent hundreds of military advisers, headed for a time by the Chinese-speaking General Vasili Chuikov, later of Stalingrad fame. For the next four years, Russia was not only China’s main supplier of arms, but virtually its only source of heavy weapons, artillery and planes.
Moscow was exhilarated by the turn of events, as the Soviet foreign minister, Maksim Litvinov, admitted to French vice-premier Léon Blum. According to Blum, Litvinov told him that “he [Litvinov] and the Soviet Union were perfectly delighted that Japan had attacked China [adding] that the Soviet Union hoped that war between China and Japan would continue just as long as possible …” Both of the Russians who dealt with ZZZ, the military attaché Lepin and Ambassador Bogomolov, were immediately recalled and executed.
