Mao: The Unknown Story

by Jung Chang

  That night, Peng was seen pacing up and down his office. When a secretary came to consult him about plans for the following day, Peng, who never mentioned private matters, astonished him by suddenly speaking with melancholy about how much he missed his former wife. His current wife was a scared and “correct” Party person, from whom he could not expect understanding or support for the course of action on which he was about to embark.

  On 20 April, just before leaving for Europe, Peng attended a reception given by ambassadors of the countries he was to visit. There he did something unprecedented. He took Soviet ambassador Yudin into a separate room and, with only a Russian embassy interpreter present, which was a major breach of the rules, initiated a conversation about the Great Leap Forward. According to the interpreter, Peng’s sounding was cautious: “Only by the character of his questions and the tone in which they were put was it possible to understand his negative attitude towards ‘the leap.’ ” The interpreter told us: “It seemed Peng wanted to see what the ambassador would say about the Great Leap — to get the ambassador’s opinion.” Yudin waffled about the “positive” aspects of the Leap. “What stuck in my mind,” the interpreter recalled, “were the Marshal’s mournful eyes, reflecting a gamut of feelings: from alarm for the fate of his country to firm determination to fight for its future.”

  Peng found no more sympathy when he got to Europe. East Germany’s leader, Ulbricht, said he knew that China was enjoying fantastic growth in agriculture, and could it send more meat so that they could match West Germany’s annual consumption of 80 kg per capita? In China, even in the cities, the meat ration for the whole year was only a few kilos.

  After Ulbricht spoke, Peng fell silent for a long time before telling his host that there was actually a tremendous food shortage. Ulbricht, an old Stalinist who had concocted a few claims himself, was unmoved. Whether Mao’s claims were true or not was immaterial to him. In fact, food imports from China had just allowed East Germany, with a standard of living incomparably higher than China’s, to end rationing, in May 1958. (Later, when tens of millions of Chinese had already died of starvation, Ulbricht asked Mao for more food, on 11 January 1961. When Chou told East European ambassadors that China could not deliver all the food it had contracted to send, and asked to postpone or cancel some contracts, Poland showed understanding, but East Germany flatly refused even to consider a postponement, and pressed for delivery on the dot. “Great Germany above all,” Chou remarked, but still sent 23,000 tons of soybeans.)

  After his conversation with Ulbricht, Peng burst out to his staff: “How would our people feel if they heard they were being asked to help others have 80 kg of meat a year?” His next stop was Czechoslovakia. When he told the Czechs about what was really happening in China, and said that anyone but the Chinese would be taking to the streets, he got little reaction. Peng realized that the East European regimes were a lost cause. They “all pay great attention to arms,” he noted. “They all have a privileged class trained by the Soviet Union.” The bottom line was that these regimes did not care what it cost the Chinese people to supply food to them, even if it meant Chinese dying; Eastern Europe’s imports of food from China reached their highest levels yet in 1958. Throughout the trip, Peng was downcast.

  Peng’s last stop in Europe was Albania. When he arrived there, on 28 May, he found that Khrushchev had just turned up, unexpectedly, for his first-ever visit. Any hopes Peng might have entertained about Khrushchev perhaps having come specially to meet him were dashed at once. Khrushchev had no Chinese-language interpreter with him.

  Khrushchev was in Albania for a very different reason. Albania provided Russia with a unique submarine base in the heart of the Mediterranean, on Sazan Island. Peng’s own mission, dictated by Mao, was also geared to this base. On his first full day in Albania, 29 May, Peng got up at 5:30 AM and headed straight there. The purpose of Khrushchev’s visit was to try to prevent the Albanians doing a deal with China over the base. Peng saw that he could not count on Khrushchev, or any of the Communist countries, for help.

  It seems that Peng then, in desperation, contemplated something akin to a military coup. When he returned to Peking on 13 June, the first thing he did was to try to move some military forces “to transport grain to famine-stricken areas,” he told the army chief of staff, Huang Ke-cheng, who was a close friend and a kindred spirit. Huang clearly understood what Peng wanted the troops for, as he expressed a degree of reluctance that he would not have shown if he had thought the proposal was really about transporting food. Mao seems to have got wind of this conversation, and had Peng grilled intensely about it later. As all troop movements had to have Mao’s authorization, Peng was unable to move any forces. All he could do was try to exert pressure on Mao by sending him annotated reports about the famine, and lobby others to do likewise. Seeing famished peasants from the train, he would say to his companions: “If China’s workers and peasants weren’t so nice, we would have had to invite in the Soviet Red Army [to prop up the Communist regime]!”

  Mao had followed Peng’s every step in Europe through spies in the delegation, and knew Peng had got nowhere. Mao was soon to remark complacently that Peng had gone abroad “to sniff around,” but had been unable to do any more than that. As soon as he was convinced that Peng had secured no foreign backing, Mao decided to pounce. Part of his calculation was to use the purge of Peng to kick off a wider terror campaign. Mao badly needed to keep up the great squeeze, as China was falling behind on payments to Russia. The trouble for Mao was that grassroots officials, out of pity, were often holding off taking food that the peasants needed to survive. Mao knew that much of his own machine, as well as the entire nation, was resisting his policies. In February and March 1959 he had said quite a few times: “Several hundred million peasants and production team leaders are united against the Party.” Even his provincial bosses now mostly kept an awkward silence when he pressed them to cough up more food. Mao needed his standby, terror, to steel his machine.

  ON 20 JUNE 1959, a week after Peng returned from Europe, Mao left Peking by train. It was ferociously hot, and the electric fan was switched off in case Mao caught cold. A big bowl of ice was placed in his carriage, to little avail. All the men, Mao included, stripped down to their underpants. (Immediately after this, an air-conditioned train was ordered for Mao from East Germany.) To cool himself off, Mao went swimming in the Yangtze and the Xiang River — which doubled up for him as baths. He had not taken a bath or a shower, or washed his hair, since 1949, almost a decade before, when he discovered the pleasure of being rubbed by a servant with a hot towel and having his hair and skull combed by his barber.

  Meanwhile, he began to make ready for his showdown. On the 24th, he told his secretary to telephone Peking to call a conference at Lushan, the mountain resort above the Yangtze. Mao dictated a list of the participants, but did not spell out that this was to be a forum to condemn Peng.

  Having decided on the highest-level purge since he took power, it seems that Mao felt he needed personal confirmation that he still held godlike status, and was invincible. He was staying at the time near his home village, Shaoshan. On the spur of the moment, he decided to go there to sniff the air.

  This was Mao’s first visit home in thirty-two years, even though he had passed by the area frequently. The local authorities had built a villa for him, at his express wish. Pine Hill No. 1, situated in pine woods, had been on standby for years. They had also evicted any “undesirable” families years before, to prevent them from getting near Mao — or bumping into visiting foreigners.

  Mao stayed two nights in Shaoshan. Having invited complaints, he got them aplenty. The harvests, the villagers told him, had been inflated. Those who had made objections had been put through denunciation meetings and beaten up. An old man inquired whether it was Mao’s idea that men and women should live segregated lives in barracks conditions (which had come with the communes in many parts of China). Above all, they were hungry, as they were getting only between
one-third and one-quarter of what was traditionally considered enough in this area. When Mao gave a meal to several dozen villagers, they wolfed it all down unceremoniously.

  There was not a word of support for Mao’s policies, even here in his home village, which was extremely privileged and was receiving large state subsidies. But Mao could also see that although the discontent was massive, no one dared to do more than grumble, and some complaints had to be dressed up as flattery. “Chairman,” one said, “if you hadn’t come to Shaoshan, soon we would all die of hunger.” When one young man complained more bitterly than others, Mao pulled a long face and snapped: “After all, it’s better than the old days.” Though this was a pathetic untruth (he himself had said in “the old days” that in Shaoshan “it is easy to get rich”), nobody called Mao’s bluff. Neither did anyone challenge his subsequent instruction, which was transparently irrelevant: “Eat more in busy seasons and eat less in slack seasons. And be thrifty with food …” When he turned to the provincial leaders and said unashamedly that the complaints were “appeals against you; it is your responsibility, write them down,” the scapegoats took it in silence.

  Mao’s personality cult had ensured that he was untouchable. A young servant at the guest house had spent three sleepless nights and days cleaning the place up. Decades later, she recounted how the manager had called her in. “ ‘Can I give you the best and most glorious task?’ I said: ‘Certainly …’ ” It turned out to be washing Mao’s dirty underwear.

  Wow, it was Chairman Mao’s clothes. This is really, really fantastic … They had been drenched in sweat. This color, yellow. One shirt, one pair of long underpants … I thought of Chairman Mao: he was the leader of the people of the world and yet he lived such a hard life. [!] The underwear felt so flimsy I didn’t dare to rub, so I stroked them gently. What was I to do if I messed them up?… I was afraid someone might see them [hanging out to dry], and might do something … so every few minutes I went out and felt them to see whether they were dry … There was no electricity and no electric iron. But I had to make the clothes look pretty. So before they were dry, I folded them and put them under the glass top of the desk to press them … When I delivered them to the director, he said: “Very good, very good.” But I was thinking: it won’t do if Chairman Mao doesn’t like my work …

  Mao left Shaoshan with no doubt that he would come out on top against Peng.

  RISING ALMOST 1,500 meters sheer out of the steamy Yangtze plain, Lushan had the air of a magic mountain divorced from life below. It was permanently veiled by swiftly massing and evaporating clouds. A great poet, Su Shi, has left an immortal poem about its mystery:

  Unable to see the true face of Lushan

  No surprise, as you are inside it.

  Clouds of the most fabulous shapes gushed from the gorges up the cliffs, swaying in front of pedestrians on the paved streets. Sometimes, as one sat chatting, clouds would imperceptibly envelop one’s interlocutors — only to unwrap them an instant later. One could even catch the surreal moment of a cloud curling and floating in through an open window, then turning and sailing out of another.

  Europeans turned Lushan into a summer resort in the late nineteenth century. Here, bamboo and pines, waterfalls and mossy rocks, offered blissful relief from the stifling heat of the lowlands. At its center, Kuling, there were over 800 villas in different European styles. It became Chiang Kai-shek’s summer capital for thirteen years. A villa originally built for an Englishman had been Chiang’s residence, and it now became Mao’s. During the Chiangs’ last stay, in August 1948, Chiang had named it “Villa of Beauty”—“Mei-lu” (the character “beauty” being part of Mme Chiang’s given name, Mei-ling). Knowing that his days on the Mainland were numbered, Chiang inscribed the name and had it carved into the rock at the villa entrance. When Mao saw masons trying to chisel it out, he stopped them.

  Chiang and earlier residents had ascended Lushan in sedan chairs if they did not fancy a steep walk up of 7–8 km. The Communists had built a road. When Mao’s motorcade was on it, no other cars were allowed from top to bottom. The whole mountain was sealed off during his stay; even residents outside the villa area were sent away. Mao’s security was immeasurably tighter than Chiang’s. In fact, after this one visit, Mao became dissatisfied with Chiang’s villa, as he was with all the old villas selected for him all over China. Here too he ordered one of his enormous bullet-and bomb-proof warehouse-style bunkers of cement, steel and stone. This new estate, Reeds Wood No. 1, which was completed two years later, was built beside a reservoir, so that Mao could go swimming at his leisure. This, like many other villas of Mao’s, was built during the worst years of the famine.

  In the face of raging mass starvation, Mao made a point of generating a holiday atmosphere at Lushan. Participants had been specially instructed to bring their wives and children. (For many of the children, this was their first experience inside European villas, whose flush toilets and stone walls mesmerized them.) The food was excellent; even the staff canteen served more than half a dozen dishes at each meal. In the evenings, there were local operas chosen by Mao, and dances in a former Catholic church, with dancing girls bussed in. At least one of the dancers and one of the resort nurses were summoned to Mao’s villa “for a chat.”

  Mao’s womanizing was now more brazen than ever. In Zhongnanhai, a new lounge was added to the dance hall, and a bed installed there. Mao would take one or several girls into it to engage in sexual play or orgies. The lounge was well insulated so the noise did not carry, and the thick floor-to-ceiling velvet curtain would be drawn behind them. It was obvious what Mao disappeared in there for, but he did not care.

  WHEN PENG arrived at Lushan for the conference, he was stopped as he entered the villa area by guards with little flags: “Group One”—code-name for Mao — was resting. Peng had to get out and walk. His villa, No. 176, was about 100 meters from Mao’s — so Mao’s security men could monitor him easily.

  The conference of over 100 top officials began on 2 July 1959. Mao’s first tactic was to split the participants into six groups, each chaired and controlled by a trusted provincial chief, who reported directly to Mao. Discussions were confined to these groups, so any unwanted views would have only a restricted audience. The rest of the participants could find out only what Mao wanted them to read in the conference bulletin, which was printed by his office.

  When Peng spoke to his group, the Northwest Group, he voiced his views about the Leap, raising the issue of the phantom harvest claims, and basically called Mao a liar: “The growth figure claimed by … Chairman Mao’s home place for last year was far higher than the real figure. I was there and asked around and learned that the increase was only 16 percent … and even that was because the state gave large subsidies and loans.”/“The Chairman has also been to this commune. I asked the Chairman: What was your information through your investigation? He said he didn’t talk about it. I think he did.”

  Peng spelled out Mao’s responsibility again the next day: “The 10.7 million [tons of steel, the 1958 target] was decided by Chairman Mao. You cannot say he didn’t have responsibility.” Over the following days, Peng called into question Mao’s role in the villa-building spree, and warned that Mao “must not abuse his prestige.” Peng also hit out at Mao’s policy of squeezing out food for export “at the cost of domestic consumption.”

  But, as Mao had made sure would be the case, Peng’s words did not percolate beyond his group. In frustration, on 14 July, Peng wrote a letter to Mao, criticizing the Great Leap Forward, using carefully phrased language. His hope was that this would set off a real debate about the Leap. Mao circulated the letter to the other participants, only to turn it into an excuse to purge Peng.

  Mao had been watching Peng like a cobra to see whether Peng was involved in any conspiracy, which was the only way Mao could really be threatened. He wanted to know who was coming to see Peng so he could round them all up.

  In fact, Peng had put out some feelers. He knew that
Lo Fu, the former Party No. 1, was opposed to Mao’s policies, and Peng had asked Lo to read the letter he was sending to Mao. But Lo declined; and when Peng tried to read it out to him, Lo jumped up and fled. Mao had instilled such fear about “plotting” that people were simply paralyzed when there was any whiff of it. Under Mao, as under Stalin, only one person was allowed to plot — and that, as Stalin’s sidekick Molotov observed, was the boss.

  Mao brought all the participants together for the first time on 23 July. He opened in a characteristically thuggish, and plaintive, manner: “You have talked so much. Now allow me to talk for an hour or so, will you? I have taken sleeping pills three times and still couldn’t sleep.” He made it sound as if someone had been preventing him speaking, and even sleeping. To create an atmosphere where rational debate would be smothered and he could evade the real issues, Mao worked himself into a rage, and belittled the catastrophe his policy had caused with remarks like: “All it means is a little less pork, fewer hairpins, and no soap for a while.” Then he unsheathed the ultimate deterrent. If I am opposed, he declared, “I will leave … to lead the peasants [!] to overthrow the government … If the army follows you, I will go up the mountains and start guerrilla warfare … But I think the army will follow me.” One general recalled: “We felt the atmosphere in the hall freeze.” Mao had polarized the issue into one of: Peng or me; and if you back Peng, I will fight you to the death.

  Everyone knew that Mao was unbeatable. He drove home the point about the army obeying him by arranging for his crony Marshal Lin Biao, whose prestige in the military was as high as Peng’s, to appear at the conference the next day. Up to this moment, Lin had not been in Lushan itself; he had been on hand, lurking at the foot of the mountain.