Mao: The Unknown Story

by Jung Chang

  Many were extremely put out. One young volunteer saw Mao in the car in spring 1939, driving with his wife, who sported “a dark red spring outfit. She and Mao Tse-tung raced by, drawing a lot of attention, and the passersby looked askance at the couple.”

  Mao was well aware that his privileges were a sore point. One day an old devotee came to dine. Afterwards, Mao invited her to come back often, whereupon she blurted out: “So I”ll come to you every Sunday to treat myself to a good meal!” She noticed that “the Chairman’s smile froze, and he looked a bit awkward. I knew I had said the wrong thing …”

  The Party tried to make a case for privilege: “it is not the leading comrades who ask for privilege themselves,” one leading ideologue opined. “It is the order of the Party. Take Chairman Mao, for example: the Party can order him to eat a chicken a day.”

  This sophistry failed to dissipate the widespread discontent. One crack doing the rounds went: “In Yenan, only three things are equal to all — the sun, the air and the toilets.” The privilege system even extended to the group of Japanese Communists and POWs. The only one of them officially allowed to have sex was their leader, Sanzo Nosaka. “Mao wanted to keep him in a good mood,” a former Japanese POW in Yenan told us, “so he gave him a woman comrade to keep him company … we didn’t complain — not openly — people did have complaints, but they kept them to their own hearts.”

  NO MATTER HOW disillusioned they might feel, the young volunteers realized that they could not leave Yenan: trying to leave was treated as desertion, with execution a distinct likelihood. The Yenan region was run like a prison. The rest of China, including other Red bases, was called “the Outside.” One volunteer described a scene he witnessed in a hospital. “We are not ill, why send us here?” two men were shouting. Their accents showed they were Long Marchers from Jiangxi. They were struggling and being pinned down by armed men.

  “We’ve been asking for leave to go home to see our families, but we just don’t get the permission. They insisted we were crazy, and sent us here.”

  The men wore the Long March veterans’ medal. One cadre said: “Comrades, please remember your glorious revolutionary history!”

  “Fart of use this thing. We were dead and wounded plenty of times. All we get is others become officials, and have good things to eat and wear. What’s in it for us? It’s better to go home and work on the land.”

  “Ha, it seems you are not crazy. You are just wavering in your revolutionary stand.”

  The eyewitness noticed that “among cadres in Yenan, old and new, homesickness was common.” Cadres of peasant origin “often asked straight out to go home, and were stopped by their superiors. Some tried to run away, and once caught were immediately executed. The educated were much cleverer. They wouldn’t say they wanted to go home, they would make up some story and ask the Party to transfer them Out …”

  Escape was easier for army men on the border of the region — and the rate of desertion was colossal. The target of one brigade alone, as of 29 September 1943, was to catch one thousand of its own deserters. But in the heart of the Red area, escape was virtually impossible, and most young volunteers just willed themselves to settle down.

  THESE WERE THE people Mao had to depend on for his future power base. And to that end they were clearly poor material. They had come to Yenan for a dream. To make them fight for the real CCP, Mao would have to change them fundamentally, to remold them. This enormous human engineering project Mao began from early 1942. His first step was to strike at the champion of the young volunteers, a 35-year-old writer called Wang Shi-wei, a dedicated Communist who had translated Engels and Trotsky. An essay by him called “Wild Lilies,” which was published in the main newspaper in Yenan, Liberation Daily, caught Mao’s attention. In the first installment on 13 March, Shi-wei wrote:

  Young people in Yenan seem to have lost steam in their life lately, and seem to have discontent in their stomachs. Why? What do we lack in our life? Some might answer: we lack nutrition, we lack vitamins … Others say: the male — female ratio in Yenan is 18 to 1, and many young men cannot find a wife … Still others will say: life in Yenan is too monotonous, too drab …

  These answers are not unreasonable. But … young people … have come here to be in the revolution, and they are committed to self-sacrifice. They have not come to seek the satisfactions of food and sex or the pleasures of life.

  What had shattered their dreams, he said, was institutionalized privilege, accompanied by high-handedness and arrogance. He quoted a conversation he had overheard between two young women about their bosses:

  He’s always accusing you of petty bourgeois egalitarianism. Yet he himself … only looks out for his own privileges … and is completely indifferent to comrades under his charge …!

  All fine words — class friendship and warmth. And it all boils down to — fart! They don’t have even elementary human sympathy!.. There are just too damn few cadres who really care about us.

  In the second installment ten days later, Shi-wei sharpened his key points:

  Some say there is no system of hierarchy and privilege in Yenan. This is not true. It exists. Others say, yes, there is, but it is justified. This requires us to think with our heads.

  SHI-WEI WAS calling on people to think for themselves. Moreover, his arguments were reasonable and eloquent:

  I am no egalitarian. But I do not think it is necessary or justified to have multiple grades in food or clothing … If, while the sick can’t even have a sip of noodle soup … some quite healthy big shots are indulging in extremely unnecessary and unjustified perks, the lower ranks will be alienated …

  When Mao read this, he slammed the newspaper on his desk and demanded angrily: “Who is in charge here? Wang Shi-wei, or Marxism?” He picked up the phone and ordered a shake-up at Liberation Daily.

  Shi-wei put some even sharper thoughts in a wall poster. Mao had tolerated these as a safety-valve for the young intellectuals. Wall posters had the advantage (for him) of having a restricted audience — and were easily torn down or erased. Shi-wei’s poster proclaimed: “Justice must be established in the Party. Injustice must be done away with … Ask yourselves, comrades … Are you scared of telling the ‘big shots’ what’s on your mind …? Or are you the kind that is good at persecuting the ‘little men’ with trumped-up crimes?” Shi-wei went far beyond the issue of privilege, to the heart of darkness in the Party.

  The poster with Shi-wei’s words was hoisted outside the South Gate, the busiest place in the city. People flocked to read these few sentences, which articulated what many wanted to say but did not dare. Shi-wei became a hero.

  One night, Mao crossed the river to read the poster by the light of a barn lantern. There he saw the eager crowds and registered Shi-wei’s enormous popularity. He said at once: “I now have a target.” He later complained: “Many people rushed from far away to … read his article. But no one wants to read mine!” “Wang Shi-wei was the king and lord master … he was in command in Yenan … and we were defeated …”

  Mao decided to condemn Shi-wei as a way of scaring his sympathizers, the young volunteers. As he could not confront Shi-wei’s points head-on, he denounced him as a Trotskyist. Some remarks that Shi-wei had made in private about Trotsky and Stalin were made public. Trotsky, Shi-wei had said, was “a genius,” while Stalin was “an unloveable person” who had “created untold countless evils” in the purges. The Moscow Trials he described as “dubious.” Shi-wei was sent to prison. He spent the last years of his short life in solitary, where he was subjected to crushing pressure. In 1944, when some journalists from the Nationalist areas were allowed into Yenan, he was wheeled out to meet them and produced a robotic confession. “He said over and over again: ‘I’m a Trotskyite. I attacked Mao. I deserve to be executed … But Mao is so magnanimous … I am extremely grateful for his mercy.’ ” One reporter observed: “When he mentioned his past ‘mistakes,’ his expression was severe to the point of frightening … In my observatio
n, his mind had been badly disturbed …”

  His interrogator later revealed the background: “He said what he was told to say. Of course, he had no option. Afterwards, he lay in bed in great anguish. He clenched his fists and showed extreme bitterness.” When the Communists evacuated Yenan in 1947, he was taken along — and executed en route. One night he was hacked to death, and thrown into a dry well. He was forty-one.

  AFTER MAO DESIGNATED Shi-wei as his prime target, meetings were held throughout the rest of 1942, at which the young volunteers were told to denounce him. Mao noticed that they expressed a lot of resistance. They were not sufficiently scared. He had to find another way to terrorize them.

  So Mao and his KGB chief Kang Sheng devised a blanket accusation — that the vast majority of Communist organizations in the Nationalist areas were spy rings working for Chiang Kai-shek. This assertion turned virtually all the young volunteers into spy suspects, because they had either belonged to one of these organizations, or had come to Yenan under their auspices. To back this accusation there was one single piece of “evidence”—the confession of a nineteen-year-old volunteer who had been deprived of sleep and worked over by the security forces for seven days and nights, at the end of which he produced what he was told to say.

  By deploying this charge, Mao found a way to place all the young volunteers in Yenan in one form of confinement or another for “screening,” starting in April 1943. Thousands were arrested and thrown into prison-caves newly carved out of the loess hillsides. In one prison alone, in the ravine behind the Date Garden — the site of the Chinese KGB, where Mao also lived — cells were dug for over 3,000 prisoners. Most of the rest were detained in their own institutions, which now became virtual prisons, sealed off and patrolled by guards. Mao gave orders that every organization must “place sentries and impose a curfew. Ban visitors and freedom of movement in or out.” The roles of jailers and interrogators were filled by those in each institution who were not suspects. These were mainly people who had not come from Nationalist areas, who were often a minority of the personnel, sometimes as few as 10–20 percent in any given institution.

  Turning ordinary organizations into virtual prisons was a significant innovation of Mao’s, which he was to apply throughout his rule. Here he went far beyond anything either Hitler or Stalin achieved: he converted people’s colleagues into their jailers, with former colleagues, prisoners and jailers living in the same premises. (In Communist China, people’s workplaces and living quarters were often the same.) In this way, Mao not only drove a massive wedge between people working and living side by side, he greatly enlarged the number of people directly involved in repression, including torture, making the orbit significantly wider than either Stalin or Hitler, who mostly used secret elites (KGB, Gestapo) that held their victims in separate and unseen locales.

  In incarceration, the young volunteers came under tremendous pressure to confess to being spies, and to denounce others — not really in order to find spies, but for the sake of inducing terror. Genuine spy-hunting was conducted secretly all the time by the security forces, using conventional methods. Any real suspects were “taken care of without fuss,” Mao’s security assistant Shi Zhe told us, which often meant a speedy, secret and noiseless execution.

  The fake spy-hunting created the excuse for torture. Sleep deprivation was the standard technique, sometimes lasting as long as two weeks on end. There were also old-fashioned tortures like whipping, hanging by the wrists, and wrenching people’s knees to breaking point (the “tiger-bench”); as well as psychological torment — from the threat of having poisonous snakes put in one’s cave to mock execution. At night, amid the quiet of the hills, from inside the rows of caves screams of lacerating pain traveled far and wide, within earshot of most who lived in Yenan.

  Mao personally gave instructions about torture (which the regime euphemistically called bi-gong-xin, meaning use “force” to produce a “confession,” which then provides “reliable evidence”): “it is not good to correct it too early or too late,” he decreed on 15 August 1943. “Too early … the campaign cannot unfold properly; and too late … the damage [to torture victims] will be too profound. So the principle should be to watch meticulously and correct at the appropriate time.” Mao wanted his victims to be in good enough shape to serve his purposes.

  For month after month, life in Yenan centered on interrogations — and terrifying mass rallies, at which some young volunteers were forced to confess to being spies and to name others in front of large crowds who had been whipped into a frenzy. People who were named were then hoisted onto the platform and pressed to admit their guilt. Those who stuck to their innocence were trussed up on the spot and dragged away to prison, and some to mock execution, amidst hysterical slogan-screaming. The fear generated by these rallies was unbearable. A close colleague of Mao’s remarked at the time that the rallies were “an extremely grave war on nerves. To some people, they are more devastating than any kind of torture.”

  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.

  Many tried to resist. But any sign of doing so was considered “proof” that the person resisting was a spy, on the specious grounds that: “If you are innocent, there should be nothing that cannot be reported to the Party.” The concept of privacy could not be evoked, because a Communist was required to reject the private. One man at the Administration College, which was the place where aversion was most outspoken, took a small but brave step to protest by quipping: “Do we have to write down our pillow talk with our wives at night?” which aroused chuckles all round. Naturally, the man and most others there were “found” to be spies. “Apart from one [sic] person, all teachers and administration staff are spies” in this college, Mao announced on 8 August 1943, and “many of the students are spies, too, probably more than half.” Under this kind of pressure, one man wrote down no fewer than 800 items of conversation in a frantic attempt to get off the hook.

  Through forcing people to report “small broadcasts,” Mao succeeded to a very large extent in getting people to inform on each other. He thus broke trust between people, and scared them off exchanging views not just at the time in Yenan, but in the future too. By suppressing “small broadcasts,” he also plugged what was virtually the only unofficial source of information, in a context where he completely controlled all other channels. No outside press was available, and no one had access to a radio. Nor could letters be exchanged with the outside world, including one’s family: any communication from a Nationalist area was evidence of espionage. Information starvation gradually induced brain death — assisted vastly by the absence of any outlet for thinking, since one could not communicate with anyone, or put one’s thoughts on paper, even privately. During the campaign, people were put under pressure to hand in their diaries. In many a mind, there also lurked the fear of thinking, which appeared not only futile but also dangerous. Independent thinking withered away.

  Two years of this type of indoctrination and terror turned the lively young volunteers from passionate exponents of justice and equality into robots. When outs
ide journalists were allowed into Yenan for the first time after many years in June 1944, a Chongqing correspondent observed an eerie uniformity: “if you ask the same question of twenty or thirty people, from intellectuals to workers [on any topic] their replies are always more or less the same … Even questions about love, there seems to be a point of view that has been decided by meetings.” And, not surprisingly, “they unanimously and firmly deny the Party had any direct control over their thoughts.”

  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.

  BY EARLY 1944 Russia was on the offensive against Germany, and Mao could look to it entering the war against Japan. After Japan was defeated, Mao would need cadres to fight Chiang Kai-shek, so he now began to tone down the terror.

  The victims remained locked up, still living in uncertainty and torment, while the security forces began to examine their cases, to see whether there were any genuine spy suspects at all from among the mountains of coerced confessions — a process that was predictably long and slow. But one thing the apparatus was sure of from the start: that true spy suspects were far less than 1 percent of the young volunteers.