Mao: The Unknown Story

by Jung Chang

  Her paranoia had been flipped into overdrive by an incident that occurred just before the Lins fled. She had gone to Qingdao to photograph warships (she had ordered six of them to roam about at sea to pick the best angle), and found the lavatory in the local villa wanting. So she used a spittoon instead, which, she complained, was too hard for her bottom. So her staff rigged up a seat for it, using a rubber ring from the swimming pool. She had to be supported by her nurses while she relieved herself, but she was accustomed to this. One night, however, she used the spittoon-toilet without assistance after taking three lots of sleeping pills, and fell and broke her collarbone. After the Lins fled, she insisted that this accident had been part of the assassination plot, and that her sleeping pills had been poisoned. This caused a huge commotion, with all her medicines sealed up and carted away to be tested, and her entire medical staff detained and interrogated in front of Chou En-lai and the Politburo. Chou had to talk to her for a whole night, from 9:00 PM to 7:00 AM, trying to calm her down.

  The Nixons’ visit in February 1972 came as an enormous tonic. With them and with the subsequent stream of international visitors, she could indulge her craving to play the First Lady. There was also the chance to publicize herself to the world by having her biography written. In August that year, an American woman academic, Roxane Witke, was invited to write about her and hopefully turn her into a global celebrity, as Edgar Snow had done for Mao.

  Mme Mao talked to Witke for sixty hours. But her performance annoyed Mao, who had originally endorsed the project. True to form, she shot her mouth off. To the horror of her entourage, she confessed to a deep “love” and nostalgia for Shanghai in pre-Communist days, and even hummed to Witke a flirtatious song popular there in the 1930s. “My life was extremely romantic then … I had so many boyfriends, suitors who chased after me …” This was bad enough, but she nearly caused heart failure in the Chinese present by describing how an American marine had once tried to pick her up. “Perhaps he was drunk. He was staggering towards me along the Bund in Shanghai, and stood in front of me. He barred my way, clicked his heels and gave me a military salute … He put out his arms … I raised my hand and slapped him. He went on smiling, and gave me another salute, clicking his heels. He even said ‘Sorry.’ You Americans are so polite …”

  Mme Mao gushed that she “worshipped” Greta Garbo, and adored Gone with the Wind, which she said she had watched some ten times: “Each time I was very moved.” “Can China produce a film like this?” she asked, as though she and her husband had nothing to do with the suppression of Chinese cinema. Her adulation of Gone with the Wind seems to have made Mao’s press controller Yao Wen-yuan uneasy, as he started spouting Party clichés: “… the film has shortcomings. She [the writer] sympathized with slave-owners.” Mme Mao shut him up with a baffling observation: “But I didn’t see any praise in the film for the Ku Klux Klan.”

  In the end, on Mao’s orders, only some transcripts were shipped to Witke, who published a full-length biography. Jiang Qing continued to play the First Lady with foreigners, though her chances to do so were far fewer than she would have liked. As a result, she constantly tried to shoehorn her way in. When Danish prime minister Poul Hartling came in 1974, she accompanied him and his wife to a show, but was not included in the state banquet, so she barged in just beforehand and detained the Danes for half an hour, keeping 400 people waiting. She talked in what seemed to the Hartlings a “haughty” and “show-off” manner, and was embarrassing. When an American swimming team came, she lurked around the corner of a glass wall to eye them practising. “Oh, they were so beautiful!.. such beautiful movements,” she enthused afterwards. (She herself had earlier declined to take to the water with Witke on the grounds that “the masses would become too excited” if they saw their “First Lady” swimming.)

  MME MAO’S THIRST for contact with foreigners was matched only by her yearning for feminine clothes. In her husband’s China, women were only allowed shapeless jackets and trousers. Only on extremely rare occasions could she wear a dress or a skirt. In 1972, she longed to wear a dress to accompany the US president (who described her as “unpleasantly abrasive and aggressive”) and Mrs. Nixon to the ballet The Red Detachment of Women, one of her eight “model shows.” But after much agonizing, she abandoned the idea, since it would look too incongruous in front of large numbers of Chinese in the audience who, though specially invited, would all be wearing drab Mao-issue clothes. When Imelda Marcos of the Philippines visited China in September 1974 in her glorious national costume, Mme Mao had to appear in her shapeless uniform and cap, which showed her up most unfavorably next to the former beauty queen. Both the Chinese photographer and Mrs. Marcos noticed that she kept staring at Mrs. Marcos enviously out of the corner of her eye.

  Mme Mao set her heart on designing a “national costume” for Chinese women. Her design was a collarless top with a three-quarter-length pleated skirt. The ensemble was so unflattering that when pictures of China’s female athletes wearing it abroad were published in the newspapers, Chinese women, even though fashion starved, greeted it with universal derision. Still, although her design was a failure as fashion, Mme Mao’s love of clothes helped to lift the taboo on women wearing skirts and dresses, which cautiously returned after nearly a decade in 1975.

  Mme Mao tried to have her design made official “national costume.” This required a decision from the Politburo, which decided against, on budgetary grounds. A long pleated skirt would use a lot of material, and if it went into production as “national” garb, huge quantities would be needed. She tried to persuade Mao to reverse the decision by getting his favorite girlfriends to wear the dress for him. But when he heard it had come from her, he rejected it with annoyance, even disgust.

  MME MAO WAS now reduced to currying favor with Mao’s girlfriends to gain access to her husband. Since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, the couple had been living in separate residences even when they were both in Peking: she in the Imperial Fishing Villa, he in Zhongnanhai. 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!”

  On Mao’s eighty-second (and last) birthday on 26 December 1975, his wife was admitted, bringing two of his favorite dishes. Mao acted as though she did not exist, giving her no more than a vacant glance, and not addressing one word to her. She soon left, in a forlorn state, while five young women, mostly former girlfriends, joined Mao for his birthday dinner.

  These girlfriends were not treated like royal mistresses and showered with gifts and favors. Mao used them, as he did his wife. They provided him with sex, and served him as maids and nurses. In his final year, because he was afraid of assassination, only two people were allowed into his bedroom without his express permission; both were girlfriends-turned-nurses: Zhang Yu-feng, a former stewardess on his train, and Meng Jin-yun, a former actress from the air force song-and-dance troupe. They took turns to do all the work around Mao, on their feet for up to twenty hours a day, on standby around the clock, and usually having to sleep in their clothes. They had little family life, no holidays, no weekends. Mao refused to increase the nursing staff, as they were the only two people he trusted to be constantly near him.

  Meng, the former actress, longed to leave, and asked her fellow nurse Yu-feng to put in a plea for her, saying that she was nearly thirty years old and wanted to spend some time with her husband so that she could hav
e a child. “Wait till after I die and then she can have a child,” was Mao’s reply. Yu-feng herself had a baby daughter who needed her milk (there was no baby food in China in those days). As she was unable to go home every day, she tried to feed the baby by squeezing her milk into a bottle and putting it in a fridge at Mao’s, and taking it home when she had a moment to spare. But the baby became ill from the milk. She felt anxious all the time about her child. Sometimes, when she was reading to Mao in a state of utter exhaustion, she would start to mumble her daughter’s name. None of this moved Mao enough to lessen her workload.

  Few of the many women Mao had eyes for turned him down, but one does seem to have done so: his elegant English teacher and interpreter, Zhang Han-zhi. One day in late 1972, after she had been interpreting for Mao, he took her to a staff room down the corridor, and burst out in tremendous agitation: “You don’t have me in your heart! You just don’t have me in your heart!” Taken aback, she blurted out: “Chairman, how can I possibly not have you in my heart? Everyone in China has you in their heart.” He let her go. She continued to be his interpreter, and Mao even promoted the man she loved (and went on to marry) to be foreign minister. But Mao visited punishment on him by subjecting him to bouts of denunciation at the hands of Foreign Ministry staff.

  ONE PERSON WHO did love Mao was his youngest daughter, Li Na, his only child with Jiang Qing. Born in 1940, Li Na had grown up by his side, and as a child her patter had helped to relax him. She had worshipped her father, as is clear from a letter she wrote him when she was fourteen, on 8 February 1955:

  Dear Daddy,

  Are you asleep? You must be having a sweet, sweet sleep.

  You must be surprised why I’m writing to you all of a sudden. What happened was: when you were having your birthday, I wanted to give you a present, but before I finished embroidering a handkerchief, your birthday was gone. Also my embroidery was so bad, so I didn’t give it to you. Because I know you wouldn’t be angry with me, and you are my good Daddy, right? This time, Mummy’s birthday is coming, so I wanted to take this chance to make it up. You might not like the thing I’m giving you, but I made it myself. It’s small, but shows my feelings: I wish my dearest Little Daddy always young, kind and optimistic …

  It was signed “Kisses, Your daughter who passionately loves you.”

  Mao wanted his daughter to grow up to be useful politically, and steered her in that direction. Back in 1947, when the Communists were vacating Yenan, he insisted that she stay within earshot of the shelling and the shooting, even though she was only six years old. A tearful Mme Mao pleaded for her to be evacuated, but Mao shouted at his wife: “Get the hell out of here! The child is not going. I want her here to listen to gunfire!”

  Mao started to groom her as his assistant when the Cultural Revolution started in 1966. Aged twenty-six, she had just graduated from Peking University in modern Chinese history, a subject she said she did not particularly like, but accepted, because the Party wanted more children from elite families to become Party historians. Her father assigned her to the army’s main newspaper, where she started work as one of the special reporters, gathering information for him. Mao’s goal was for her to take control of the paper, which she accomplished in August 1967, while the editorial and management boards were carted off to prison. A cult was then fostered around her. The paper’s offices — and even staffers’ homes — were covered with posters “saluting” her, and slogans shouted at rallies proclaimed that whoever opposed her was a counter-revolutionary. An exhibition room was opened at the paper to display her “great merit,” showing things like her tea mug and her bicycle, implying that it was saintly of her not to be using fine china or a limousine.

  Her behavior changed at this time. Having at first seemed unpretentious, now she would scream at senior staff to stand to attention in front of her, shrieking: “I really wish I could have you shot!” She declared that she was going to impose “thug rule,” using an arcane expression that she had clearly learned from her father. Over 60 percent of the old staff at the newspaper suffered appalling persecution for allegedly opposing her. Among the many who were tortured was a former personal friend who had expressed disagreement with her over some minor matter.

  Early in 1968, because Mao was shutting down his personal channels in the army in order to please Lin Biao, Li Na was taken off the paper. Her next job was no less critical: director of the Small Group’s private office. The position was vacated for her by a simple expedient, typical of Mme Mao’s modus operandi. Mme Mao accused the existing director of being a spy and had him clapped in jail. Li Na then took over his job until the Small Group was dissolved in 1969.

  Mao had intended her for even higher office — controller of Peking. But in 1972 she had a nervous breakdown, and floated in and out of insanity for years, until after his death. It seems that, unlike her parents, Li Na did not thrive on persecution, and that after her early zealousness to enforce her father’s orders, she was driven out of her mind by the constant victimizations she was expected to carry out. On one occasion, she picked up a pile of documents about the purge and suicide of a man she knew, and threw them out of the window, shouting: “Don’t give me any more of this rubbish! I’ve been sick and tired of it for ages!”

  She longed for affection. Her mother, who had loved her when she was a child, now, like her father, narrowed their relationship down to one based exclusively on politics, and gave her no warmth or comfort. When she was heading for a nervous breakdown, reliant for short-term relief on more and more massive amounts of sleeping pills, Li Na had no one to turn to. As a young woman, she yearned for a love relationship, but with Mao for a father, and especially with Jiang Qing for a mother, no man dared to court her, and no match-making enthusiast fancied inviting trouble. It was only when she was thirty-one, in 1971, that she herself approached a young servant. When she wrote to her father for permission to marry, he only asked the messenger a few basic questions, and then wrote on the letter simply: “Agree.” Mao’s wedding present was a set of leaden tomes which he himself never read: the works of Marx and Engels.

  Neither of her parents came to her simple wedding, which Mme Mao had only grudgingly accepted, regarding the bridegroom as beneath her daughter, since he had been a servant. For a while after the marriage, Li Na seemed to be prone to colds and high temperatures, which Mme Mao blamed on her daughter having sex with the son-in-law, and insultingly ordered him to have a physical check-up. It did not take her long to have her son-in-law banished to another city, claiming that he “looks like a spy.” The marriage collapsed, and Li Na sank into a deep depression.

  In May 1972, Li Na gave birth to a son, which briefly brightened up her life. But Jiang Qing disliked the baby because she despised its father, and never once held it in her arms. Mao showed zero interest in this grandson, as in his other three grandchildren.

  With no love or joy in her life, Li Na lapsed into insanity. As far as Mao was concerned, she had run out of use. He saw less and less of her, and evinced no concern about her mental or physical condition.

  MAO HAD SIMILARLY lost interest in his other daughter, Chiao-chiao, who had no political flair. Years before, when she returned from Russia as a pretty twelve-year-old, exotic in her Russian wool skirt and leather shoes, with Russian manners, and speaking Russian, Mao had showered her with affection, and shown her off, calling her “my little foreigner.” And she had been deliriously happy. But when she lost the entertainment value she had had as a child, and turned out politically worthless as an adult, she found she had diminishing access to Mao. In the last few years of his life, she only very rarely got to see him. She went to the gate of Zhongnanhai several times, but he refused to let her in. She had a nervous breakdown, and was in and out of depression for years.

  Mao’s oldest son An-ying had been killed in the Korean War in 1950. The only surviving son, Anching, was mentally ill. Mao provided him with a comfortable life, but hardly ever saw him, and did not regard him as a member of the f
amily. Mao was wont to say that his family consisted of five members: himself and Mme Mao, the two daughters, and his only nephew, Yuan-xin.

  The nephew had spent much of his youth in Mao’s family. During the Cultural Revolution, when he was still in his early thirties, he was catapulted into the post of political commissar of the Shenyang Military Region, in which capacity he helped Mao control Manchuria, the critical area in the northeast bordering with Russia. One of his later best-known acts there was to order the execution of a brave female Party member called Zhang Zhi-xin, who had openly challenged Mme Mao and the Great Purge. Just before she was shot, she was pinned to the floor of her cell and her windpipe was slit, to prevent her from speaking out at the execution ground, even though it was a secret execution. This cruelty was gratuitous, as execution victims routinely had a cord put around their neck that could be yanked to choke them if they tried to speak.

  As well as being ruthless, Yuan-xin belonged to the family. Mao made him his liaison with the Politburo in the final year of his life, 1975–76. Actually, Yuan-xin’s own father, Mao’s brother Tse-min, had been killed partly as the result of Mao giving instructions not to try to save him when he was in prison in Xinjiang in the early 1940s — a fact carefully concealed from Yuan-xin, as from everyone else.

  Mao had been the cause of the death of his second wife too. After being abandoned by Mao, Kai-hui had been executed in 1930 as a direct result of his attacking Changsha, where she was living, for reasons that were entirely to do with his drive for personal power. And he was also largely responsible for the repeated and eventually irreversible mental breakdowns of his third wife, Gui-yuan (who died, aged seventy-five, in 1984).