Mao: The Unknown Story

by Jung Chang

  He was more successful in one area, indoctrinating the population, for whom he created a role model: a safely dead soldier called Lei Feng. Lei Feng had most conveniently kept a diary in which he allegedly recorded how he was inspired by Mao to do good deeds, and swore that for Mao he was ready to “go up mountains of knives and down into seas of flames.” Total obedience to Mao, to be what the regime lauded as perfect “little cogs” in Mao’s machine, was elevated to the ultimate virtue. This cult of impersonality, the necessary obverse of the cult of Mao’s personality, was cloaked in a deceptive appeal to be selfless — for “our country” or “the people.”

  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.

  As a particular hate figure, Mao built up Khrushchev, on the grounds that he practiced “revisionism.” The Chinese press was flooded with polemics demonizing the Soviet leader, which the population was force-fed at weekly indoctrination sessions. It was thus drilled into people’s minds that Khrushchev and other “revisionists” were villains (like murderers in a normal society). Eventually, the other shoe would drop: Mao would condemn Liu Shao-chi as “China’s Khrushchev,” and disobedient Party officials as “revisionists.”

  The first time Mao raised the specter of a Chinese Khrushchev was to his top echelon on 8 June 1964. Liu knew that Mao was driving at him, and that the tornado was about to strike. His options were limited. All he could do was try to entrench his own position to make it harder for Mao to get him. Then, in October, something happened in Moscow that gave Liu an opening.

  ON 14 OCTOBER 1964, Khrushchev was ousted in a palace coup. Mao saw an opportunity to resuscitate Soviet assistance for his missile program, which had fallen far behind schedule. He found himself in the position of finally possessing the atomic bomb, but lacking the means to deliver it. For this, he needed foreign know-how, and he set his sights on improving relations with the new leadership in the Kremlin, now headed by Leonid Brezhnev. Within days, Chou was telling Soviet ambassador Chervonenko that it was Mao’s “utmost wish” to have a better relationship. Chou requested an invitation to the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in Moscow on 7 November.

  The new Soviet leadership was also interested in finding out whether a rapprochement was possible, and made sure that Mao was the first to hear about Khrushchev’s downfall, before it was made public. But the Kremlin quickly realized that the prospect was extremely dim as long as Mao remained in charge. Ambassador Chervonenko recalled what happened when he went to tell Mao. “It was about 11 pm when I entered Mao’s residence.” After hearing the news, Mao

  thought for a moment or two, and then said: “Nice move you have made, but this is not enough” … After the meeting, Mao … saw me off. The car wouldn’t start, so the driver took a bucket and went to the kitchen with Mao’s bodyguard. The moon was shining on the lake. Mao was standing beside my stalled car: “There are still a few things that need fixing,” he said, “and your Plenum hasn’t done them all.”

  Mao insisted that Moscow must repeal its Party program and, in effect, disown de-Stalinization. This was out of the question for the new Soviet leaders, and so it seems that they used Chou’s visit to test the water to see whether there was a possibility of the CCP dumping Mao.

  At the reception in the Kremlin on 7 November, the big day, Chou and his delegation were walking round toasting old acquaintances when Soviet defense minister Rodion Malinovsky approached Chou, bringing along Russia’s top Chinese-language interpreter. Out of the blue, Malinovsky said to Chou: “We don’t want any Mao, or any Khrushchev, to stand in the way of our relationship.” “I don’t understand what you are talking about,” Chou replied, and walked away at once. Malinovsky then turned to Marshal Ho Lung, China’s acting army chief: “We’ve got rid of our fool Khrushchev, now you get rid of yours, Mao. And then we can have friendly relations again.” Malinovsky used barrack-room language: “The marshal’s uniform I am wearing was Stalin’s dog-shit, and the marshal’s uniform you are wearing is Mao Tse-tung’s dog-shit …” Ho Lung argued with him, and then the Chinese delegation left the reception.

  Chou sat up all night composing a cable to Mao. The next morning, Brezhnev came with four senior colleagues (but not Malinovsky) to the Chinese delegation’s residence, where Chou made a formal protest. The Russians apologized, saying that Malinovsky’s words did not reflect their views, and that he was drunk. But, quite apart from the fact that Malinovsky was a man who could hold his liquor, such words could never be spoken lightly by the army chief of one country to the premier and an army chief of another country, particularly when the countries involved were totalitarian Russia and China. Moreover, the Soviet leadership did not censure Malinovsky, which they surely would have done had this been a genuine gaffe. All the evidence suggests that Malinovsky acted deliberately, in a way that could be disowned. A top Russian intelligence expert on China used a telling formulation to us: “We learned that we could not divide Chou and Mao.”

  This episode enormously stoked Mao’s suspicions that there might be a vast plot against him involving senior colleagues in cahoots with the Russians. Nothing could be more dangerous for him than the Kremlin expressing a serious wish to oust him. Neither the challenge by Peng De-huai in 1959, nor that by Liu in 1962, had shaken his position. But if the Kremlin really wanted to get rid of him, that would be a different story. Interest on the part of Russia might well embolden some of his colleagues to take drastic steps. The distance from the border of Russia’s satellite Outer Mongolia to Peking was only some 500 km, over mainly flat and open land, which Russian tanks could easily overrun, and China lacked effective anti-tank defenses. The very next month, December 1964, on Mao’s instructions, the army drew up a plan to construct artificial mountains, each like a giant military fortress, on the North China plain, as obstacles to Russian tanks — a huge project that was abandoned as useless after several years and immense cost.

  Chou managed to retain Mao’s favor, as Mao figured Chou was too shrewd to try anything rash. But Chou knew that a cloud of suspicion was hanging over his head. Before leaving Moscow, members of his entourage heard him say that he had visited Moscow ten times since the founding of Communist China, but that it was most unlikely that he would ever be returning. Indeed, this was his last visit — and none of Mao’s colleagues ever visited Moscow as long as Mao lived.

  Mao was chary about anyone in his top circle going to Russia in case they schemed with the Russians to overthrow him. Even being present at the same occasion as high-level Russians in a third country — i.e., outside Mao’s control — was to be avoided. In September 1969, Chou faced the possibility of bumping into some Soviet leader at the funeral of Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi, so he rushed to Hanoi ahead of the funeral, ignoring Vietnamese protests that they were not ready for visitors. And Chou left well before the ceremony itself, to which China sent a second-level delegation.

  In the forthcoming purge, any connection with Russia became a key issue, especially among the top echelon. Marshal Ho Lung and a huge number of his old subordinates were arrested and interrogated. Ho Lung himself died in detention in appalling conditions in 1969.

  So did Deputy Defense Minister General Xu Guang-da, who was brutally tortured over a period of eighteen months, being interrogated no fewer than 416 times. He had the misfortune to be the only senior military figure to visit Russia after Malinovsky’s remarks, and so was suspected of being a link between Mao’s domestic foes and Moscow. Xu had gone to Russia in May 1965 because at the time there was still some nuclear cooperation with Russia. Immediately after his trip, Mao withdrew all the Chinese at the Russian nuclear center at Dubna, shutting off nuclear collaboration completely.

 
; Thanks to the Malinovsky episode, Mao had absolutely no relationship with Brezhnev. China’s relations with the Soviet Union deteriorated to their worst ever under Brezhnev, who remained in power for the rest of Mao’s lifetime.

  But at the time of the Kremlin’s heavy-handed feeler in November 1964, Mao did not order Chou to leave. Chou stayed on in Moscow, and held meetings with a host of foreign delegates, whom Mao was keen for him to see. He returned to Peking on 14 November, according to schedule. Mao turned up to greet him at the airport with his whole team. The message was for the Russians: that the Chinese leadership was united. But the Russians drew mixed inferences. Soviet diplomats at the airport observed that Mao did not look at all well—“close to prostration,” they thought.

  THIS WAS AN exceptionally unsure time for Mao, and Liu Shao-chi exploited it. He made a bid to strengthen his position by having himself reconfirmed as state president. This would provide an opportunity for a huge burst of profile-building, as a sort of personality cult for himself. Reconfirmation of his tenure was long overdue. Mao had not allowed the body that “elected” the president, the National Assembly, to convene as it should have in 1963, because he only wanted it to meet when he was ready to purge Liu. But within weeks of Malinovsky’s remarks about getting rid of Mao, Liu convened the Assembly on extraordinarily short notice, calculating that Mao would feel too insecure either to veto this move or to purge him. Mao saw what Liu was up to, and erupted. “Let’s do the handover now,” he said sarcastically to Liu on 26 November: “You take over and be the chairman. You be Qinshihuang [the First Emperor] …”

  Mao could not prevent the Assembly meeting. All he could do was to withhold his blessing by not calling a Party plenum beforehand to set the agenda — the only time such an omission ever happened during his reign. In the Politburo the day before the Assembly opened, Mao snapped at Liu repeatedly: “I just won’t endorse [you].” At one point, he told Liu: “You’re no good.”

  Outside the meeting room, Mao exploded to a couple of his devotees: “Someone is shitting on my head!” Then, on his seventy-first birthday, on 26 December, he took the most unusual step of inviting Liu for dinner. Mao almost never socialized with Liu or his other colleagues, except for being on the dance floor at the same time. Beforehand, Mao said to his daughter Li Na: “You are not coming today, because your father is going to curse the mother-fucker.” Mao sat at one table with a few favorites, while Liu was put at a separate table. There was not an iota of birthday atmosphere. While everyone else sat in frigid silence, Mao ranted on with accusations about “revisionism,” and “running an independent kingdom,” transparently directed at Liu.

  No one said anything in support of Mao, not even the equivalent of “You’re right, Boss”—except his secretary, Chen Bo-da. Mao so appreciated this that afterwards he summoned Chen, drowsy with sleeping pills, in the small hours of the night, and confided to him that he intended to get Liu, making Chen one of the first people to be told this explicitly. (Mao was soon to catapult Chen to No. 4 in the Party.)

  On 3 January 1965, Liu was reappointed president, to a blaze of publicity, quite unlike the occasion of his original appointment in 1959, when there had been little fanfare. This time there were rallies and parades, with his portrait carried alongside Mao’s, and firecrackers, drums and gongs. Newspapers ran headlines like “Chairman Mao and Chairman Liu are both our most beloved leaders.” (The president is also called “chairman” in Chinese.) Liu plainly had many supporters rooting for him. He had earned a lot of credit with senior Party officials for extricating China from the famine. Even devoted Mao followers in the inner circle showed signs of switching allegiance. Most incredibly, the idea was mooted of hanging Liu’s portrait on Tiananmen Gate — alone, without Mao’s! — which Liu had to veto at once.

  On the day Liu was being re-elected, his wife was summoned, for the first time ever, to a meeting in Mao’s Suite 118 in the Great Hall. The Lius were very much in love, and Mao knew it. He chose this day to signal his intention to make them both suffer. When Liu walked in after the vote, he was taken aback when he saw his wife was present. Mao pounced, bellowing a long tirade. Mme Liu felt immense hatred radiating from Mao. She and Liu looked at each other in silence. Mao wanted Mme Liu to witness her husband being abused, and for Liu to register: I will make your wife pay too.

  Yet, even after such an overt display of hostility, no colleague took Mao’s side and denounced Liu. Most just expressed concern about the discord between “the two chairmen,” and urged Liu to adopt a more obsequious posture towards Mao. Liu eventually apologized to Mao for not being respectful enough. Mao’s response was as menacing as it was arbitrary: “This is not a matter of respect or disrespect. This is a question of Marxism versus Revisionism.”

  Echoing Stalin’s remark about Tito (“I will wag my little finger and there will be no more Tito”), Mao told Liu: “Who do you think you are? I can wag my little finger and there will be no more you!” But in fact, for now, there was a stand-off. Mao could not get Liu condemned just on his own say-so.

  AT THIS POINT Mao resorted to a potent symbolic gesture — a trip to the Jinggang Mountains, where he had set up his first base in 1927. Unlike his other trips, which were spur-of-the-moment, this one was publicized well in advance among his top circle, so all his colleagues knew he was going. Six years before, facing a rebellious Peng De-huai, Mao had threatened that if he were challenged he would “go up into the mountains and start guerrilla warfare.” Now he was actually going to the mountains, which made the message altogether louder, more actual and more powerful.

  A portable squat toilet was constructed. An advance team scouted the destination. “Class enemies” were detained and stashed well away from Mao’s route. Duplicate cars were prepared, and heavy machine-guns positioned on commanding points. The Praetorian Guard lurked in plain clothes, their weapons concealed, like Hollywood gangsters’, in musical instrument cases.

  Mao left Peking in late February 1965, moving slowly, feeling his way. En route, on 9 April, he learned of the death of a favorite retainer, the 63-year-old boss of Shanghai, Ke Qing-shi, of misdiagnosed pancreatitis. For such an invaluable acolyte to die by human error at this juncture was alarming, so Mao stayed put in Wuhan. There, he summoned his long-term accomplice, defense minister Marshal Lin Biao, for a tête-à-tête meeting on 22 April. The marshal, who had rescued Mao at the Conference of the Seven Thousand in January 1962, was in on Mao’s plans to purge President Liu. Mao told him to keep a particularly tight grip on the army and a sharp lookout in case the president, who was overseeing things in the capital, should try to gain support among the military.

  On 19 May, Lin Biao made a spectacular démarche in line with Mao’s request. On that day, in his capacity as president, Liu was receiving the participants at a high-level army meeting when the marshal turned up unexpectedly, having earlier declined the invitation on health grounds. At the end of the meeting, when the president announced that it had reached a satisfactory conclusion the marshal suddenly stood up and launched into a harangue that basically contradicted what Liu had said. He thus made it unmistakably clear to the top brass that he, not the president, was their boss, massively undermining Liu’s authority.

  While the marshal kept an eye on President Liu in Peking, Mao proceeded to his old outlaw stamping-ground on 21 May. He stayed there seven nights, going nowhere apart from short walks in the immediate vicinity of the guest house. A stop had been scheduled at his old residence, the Octagonal Pavilion, but as he got out of the car, Mao heard faint noises. These were actually hammers and chisels clanging from some masons at work on a distant slope, but here in the mountains noise traveled far. Just as his foot was touching the ground, Mao shrank back into the car, and ordered it to drive off at once.

  Mao did not see any local people until minutes before his departure, when organized crowds were brought to stand outside the guest house, and he waved at them and had photographs taken. His presence had been kept secret until the last
minute. During his stay, and for some time after he left, all communications with the outside world for the locals were cut off.

  The guest house where Mao stayed, which had been built during the famine, was not up to his standards, so work on another soon began, to the usual specifications: one-story and totally bomb-proof. But Mao never returned. He had come for one purpose only: to make a threat.

  WHILE MAO WAS in the mountains, Liu was busy building up his own profile. On 27 May an article appeared in People’s Daily, replete with vintage cult language: “The hills were extraordinarily green, and the water was exceptionally blue … the scenery of the Ming Tombs Reservoir displayed unprecedented splendour.” But instead of being just about Mao, it was about both Mao and Liu, and both of them were engaged in the quintessential Mao cult activity of swimming:

  After 3 in the afternoon, two cars stopped … Two towering, kindly-looking men stepped out of the cars, and with firm steps walked towards the water.

  … these were our most revered and beloved leaders, Chairman Mao and Chairman Liu. The crowd immediately burst into loud cheers:

  “Chairman Mao has come swimming!”

  “Chairman Liu has come swimming!”

  The youth saw that Chairman Mao and Chairman Liu were glowing with tremendous health and spirits, and felt a surge of happiness through their bodies …

  Chairman Mao and Chairman Liu … swam forward shoulder to shoulder …

  But this was not a “news” report at all. The swim had actually taken place the previous year, on 16 June 1964. That it was resurrected suggests that the story was inserted to promote Liu’s image, at a time when Mao’s absence from Peking meant People’s Daily did not have to clear it with Mao. For this and other acts of disobedience, Mao later visited ghastly punishment on his media chiefs.

  AFTER HIS TRIP to the Jinggang Mountains to make his threat, Mao did not act at once. It seems that the reason he held his fire was that he was waiting for a particular international event to take place. This was the second Afro-Asian summit, scheduled for June 1965 in Algiers. As president, Liu had had dealings with many heads of state who would be there, and to purge him just before the gathering would create a bad impression. The summit was crucial to Mao, who wanted to use it to establish a dominant role in the Third World. As he was not prepared to leave his home turf, for security reasons, he had to pull the strings from afar. His man for the job was Chou En-lai.