Mao: The Unknown Story

by Jung Chang

  Telling Mao to his face that his wife and one of his top acolytes were suspected enemy agents was startling behavior on Chou’s part. Mao could see that battle had been well and truly joined, with himself and the Gang of Four pitted against the Deng — Chou — Yeh Alliance and the old cadres who were now being re-employed en masse.

  Mao tried to regain some ground by getting the Gang of Four to start a media campaign in March 1975 to smear the authority of the reinstated cadres. In April, after Mao returned to Peking, Deng gave Mao a piece of his mind and asked him to call a halt. Mao was forced to yield, and blamed the Gang of Four. On 3 May, in front of the Politburo, Mao ordered the campaign stopped and said he had “made a mistake.” This was an unprecedented climb-down, brought about by the fact that he was patently vulnerable. As everyone at the meeting could see, he was extremely frail, completely blind, and his speech was barely intelligible. It was his last appearance at a Politburo meeting.

  On this occasion, for the first time since he had come to power, Mao all but threw himself on the mercy of his colleagues by asking them not to contemplate a coup. Again and again, he implored them: “Don’t practice revisionism; don’t split; don’t plot.” The first point meant: Stick with the Cultural Revolution. The rest meant: Don’t plot against me. Several times during this period, he recounted a historical tale to Deng and his allies, whose implicit, but unmistakable, message was: If you are thinking of a coup, do it to my wife and the Gang, after I die.

  MAO HAD TO beg like this because he had virtually lost control of the army. The Alliance had rehabilitated many generals who had been victims of Mao’s, and put them in high office. If it came to a showdown, Mao would have no top men in the army on his side. He had tried to insert his own men, two members of the Gang of Four, into leading army jobs, but they had been frozen out.

  In June 1975 the army made a powerful gesture of defiance towards Mao. The occasion was the sixth anniversary of the death of Marshal Ho Lung, the man to whom Russian defense minister Malinovsky had said “get rid of Mao” a decade before. As a result of Mao’s suspicions, Marshal Ho had died in incarceration in appalling circumstances in 1969. The army now decided to hold a memorial service for him, which was both a sign of the changing times and a huge snub to Mao. Mao could not prevent the service taking place, but he ordered that it be extremely low-key — without even wreaths or speeches. With the support of the top brass, Ho’s family wrote to Mao, threatening to boycott the service if these restrictions were not lifted, and making a point of saying that Ho had many loyal comrades alive. Mao had to give in. The most he could salvage was to keep the news of the service out of the media.

  The service was dominated by bitter emotions, and the atmosphere was heightened by the extraordinarily demonstrative sorrow exhibited by Chou En-lai, who got up from what was manifestly his deathbed to attend, and delivered the eulogy. He entered the hall crying out the name of the marshal’s widow, sobbed loudly while hugging her shoulders, and told her he felt “very sorry” for “not having been able to protect” her husband.

  Chou had been in charge of the investigation into Ho during the Cultural Revolution, which had resulted in Ho’s death, and a host of Ho’s subordinates being imprisoned and tortured, some to death. There were strong feelings against Chou, which he was aware of, and his apology to Ho’s widow was partly an attempt to exonerate himself and put the blame on Mao. This, and the fact he turned up when he himself was dying — which he made a point of telling the congregation — dissipated much of the anger people felt towards him and redirected it towards Mao.

  Mao, who was used to passing the buck, did not like having the blame laid on himself, and he hit back at Chou — as soon as he recovered his eyesight. On 23 July, Mao had the cataract removed from his left eye. To accompany the seven-minute operation, he chose a piece of soaring music to give himself a boost. He was delighted by the ease of the operation, and asked the surgeon to perform it on his right eye the following year. In the meantime, he consented to have special glasses made. They were made in two pairs, one with only a left arm, the other with only a right arm, which were swapped around by an attendant when Mao turned over in bed, so that the side of his face would never be resting on an arm.

  Being able to see again gave Mao a renewed sense of confidence. Within two weeks he had initiated a new media campaign against Chou. Mao announced that one of the most famous classic Chinese novels, The Water Margin, was really all about “capitulationists,” who deserved to be condemned. “Capitulationists” was an allusion to the fake 1932 “recantation notice” that bore Chou’s name. Chou was so worried that Mao might blacken his name, particularly after his death, that at the very last moment before a big operation for his cancer, after he had been given the pre-op medication, just as he was about to be wheeled into the operating theater, he insisted on devoting an hour to go over his self-defense about the notice. He only got on the waiting trolley after he had signed the document, in a shaky hand, and passed it to his wife. Deng confronted Mao about the campaign the next time he saw him, and Mao had to back down, again. He tried to blame it on his wife, using his characteristic language: “Shit!” he said of her. “Barking up the wrong tree!” The campaign petered out.

  ALL THE WHILE, Deng was trying to undo the practices of the Cultural Revolution and improve standards of living. In this, the twenty-fifth year of Mao’s reign, most of the population were living in dire poverty and misery. In the urban areas, which were privileged, extremely severe rationing of food, clothing and virtually all daily essentials was still in force. Families of three generations were often crammed into one small room, as the urban population had increased by 100 million under Mao and yet very little housing had been built, and maintenance was nonexistent. Mao’s priorities — and the quality of life — may be gauged from the fact that total investment in urban upkeep (including water, electricity, transport, sewage, etc.) in the eleven years 1965–75 was less than 4 percent of that in arms-centered industries. Health and education were getting well under half of the already tiny percentage of investment that they had been receiving at the outset of Mao’s rule. In the countryside, most people were still living on the verge of starvation. In places, there were adult women who had no clothes to cover themselves and had to go stark naked. In Mao’s old capital, Yenan city, people were poorer than when the Communists had first arrived four decades before. The city was teeming with hungry beggars, who would be roped up and shoved into detention when foreigners came to admire Mao’s old base, and then deported back to their villages.

  Mao knew beyond a doubt how bad things were. He kept himself extremely well informed by reading (or having read to him) daily reports from a network of feedback channels he had installed. In September 1975 he told Le Duan, the Party chief of Vietnam, which had just been through thirty years of nonstop war, including devastating US bombing: “Now the poorest nation in the world is not you, but us.” And yet he directed the media to attack Deng’s efforts to raise living standards with absurd slogans like: “The weeds of socialism are better than the crops of capitalism.”

  Deng also tried to lift the virtual blanket ban on books, arts and entertainment that had lasted for nearly a decade. Most immediately, he tried to release a few feature films to give the population some entertainment. Though all of these kept well within the bounds of socialist realism, Mme Mao, acting on Mao’s behalf, tried to get them withdrawn, accusing them of “crimes” such as using pretty actresses.

  Mao himself had plenty of entertainment. One was to watch his favorite Peking operas in the comfort of his home. For this, opera stars were summoned back from their camps to be filmed in the now empty Peking TV Studio by crews who had also been recalled from exile. After years in the backwoods they were rusty, so they were first kept isolated for months and told to recover their lost art, and ask no questions. As no one would explain to them why they were to perform these still banned — and therefore extremely dangerous—“poisonous weeds,” most spent these
months in a state of great apprehension. The films were then broadcast for Mao from a TV van parked next to his house. He also watched films from pre-Communist days, from Hong Kong, and from the West.

  But Mao refused to let the population savor so much as a drop of what he himself enjoyed. Deng often fought with Mao’s wife, sometimes shouting at her and banging on the table — not treatment she was used to from anyone except her husband. Deng also denounced Jiang Qing’s action to Mao’s face, and encouraged people like film directors to write letters to Mao complaining about her. Mao wanted to stop Deng’s initiatives by getting him to put on paper a pledge to stick to Cultural Revolution practices. In November 1975 he demanded that Deng draw up a Party resolution that would set the Cultural Revolution in stone.

  Deng not only declined, he did so point-blank in front of some 130 senior cadres, thus defying Mao in no uncertain terms. Mao had to give up on the resolution. For him, this was the last straw. He made up his mind to discard Deng.

  Chou and Yeh had been urging Deng not to be too confrontational with Mao: just to pay lip-service and wait for him to die. But Deng would not wait. He calculated that he could force Mao to swallow what he was doing, provided that he did not harm Mao personally.

  Mao was fading fast. The muscular paralysis had invaded his vital organs, including his throat, severely affecting his ability to eat. But beneath this crumbling shell, he preserved his phenomenal determination not to be beaten.

  MAO’S MOMENT CAME on 8 January 1976, when Deng’s chief ally Chou En-lai died, at the age of seventy-eight. Mao moved at once. He fired Deng, put him under house arrest, and publicly denounced him by name. Simultaneously, he suspended Marshal Yeh, the third key member of the Alliance, claiming that Yeh was ill. To succeed Chou, Mao appointed a hitherto unknown middle-level disciple called Hua Guo-feng. An equally unknown low-ranking general called Chen Xi-lian was appointed to run the army. Mao chose these relatively neutral new faces, rather than members of the Gang of Four, to minimize adverse reactions from the Party and the army, most of whom loathed the Gang.

  However, Chou’s death detonated something that hitherto had not existed in Mao’s China: public opinion. In the previous year, under Deng, information about who stood for what at the top had been made available for the first time through the networks of reinstated Communist officials and their children, and had circulated around the country. The public came to have some idea that Chou had been persecuted (while learning nothing about his squalid role in the Cultural Revolution). The news of Chou’s death triggered off an unprecedented outpouring of public grief, especially as the media played it down. On the day when his body was taken from the hospital to the crematorium, over a million people lined the streets of Peking. This was the first time under Mao that anything remotely resembling this number of people had gathered without being organized. On the day of Chou’s memorial service, even Mao’s extremely prudent nurse-cum-secretary suggested that perhaps he should attend, an idea Mao rejected. People took Mao’s absence as a snub to Chou, and when firecrackers were set off some days later at Mao’s residence in Zhongnanhai for Chinese New Year, staff started whispering that he was celebrating Chou’s death.

  Popular protests broke out all over China, using the breach blown open by Chou’s death to express loathing for Mao’s policies. In early April the volcano erupted during the Tomb-Sweeping Festival, when the Chinese traditionally pay respects to their dead. Spontaneous crowds filled Tiananmen Square to mourn Chou with wreaths and poems and to denounce the Cultural Revolution. Even more amazing, in the heart of the capital crowds destroyed police vehicles broadcasting orders for them to clear the square, and set fire to the headquarters of the militia, who were organized by the Gang of Four and were trying to disperse the demonstrators violently. This defiance of Mao’s rule took place a stone’s throw from his house.

  The regime suppressed the protests with much bloodshed. Mme Mao toasted this as a victory, and Mao wrote: “Great morale-booster. Good. Good. Good.” A crackdown followed on across the country, but Mao was unable to crank up great terror like before.

  Although Deng had nothing to do with organizing the demonstrations, a single device announced his popularity: the assortment of little bottles that hung from the pine trees around Tiananmen Square. Deng’s given name, Xiao-ping, is pronounced the same as “little bottles.” Mao felt extremely threatened by this sign. For the public to join hands with his Party opponents was an act without precedent. Mao had Deng hauled off from house arrest at home to detention in another part of Peking.

  But instead of punishing Deng by the same cruel methods he had inflicted on other foes, Mao left him unharmed. This was not because he was fond of Deng. He simply could not take the risk of creating a situation where Deng’s many supporters in the army might feel forced to take action. Although Mao had had Deng’s ally Marshal Yeh suspended, Yeh continued to exercise virtual control over the military. At his home in the exclusive army compound in the Western Hills, he received a stream of generals and top officers, telling them defiantly that he was not ill at all, as Mao had been claiming. Among friends, Yeh now referred to Mao not as “the Chairman,” which was the de rigueur respectful norm, but as na-mo-wen, the Chinese transliteration of the English “number one,” which was irreverent. Army chiefs were discussing semi-openly what to do. One, nicknamed the “Bearded General,” urged Yeh to act at once and “simply grab” the Gang of Four. Not speaking out loud, for fear of bugs, Yeh stuck his thumb upwards, shook it a couple of times and then turned it downwards, meaning: Wait for Mao to die. The “Bearded General” then had a word with the head of the Praetorian Guard, Wang Dong-xing, who was a former subordinate of his, to say that Deng must be well protected.

  Mao knew what was going on in the Western Hills, but his new enforcers in the army were in no position to take on the veterans, and he himself was too ill to act. He had to lump it. It was in this frustrated state of mind that he had a massive heart attack at the beginning of June 1976, which left him at death’s door.

  THE POLITBURO AND Mao’s leading doctors were told. Another person who was instantly informed, by a sympathetic doctor, was Deng’s wife, who was in Hospital 301, a special hospital for top leaders, even those in disgrace. It was a sign of Mao’s slackening grip that top-secret news like this about his condition could leak to his political foes. Once Deng himself heard, he wrote to Mao on 10 June, asking to be allowed to go home; in effect, demanding to be released.

  Mao had to say “Yes,” which he did after his condition stabilized at the end of the month; but Deng’s release was delayed for some days because of another event that made Mao feel insecure. On 6 July, Marshal Zhu De, the most senior army leader, who enjoyed considerable respect, died, at the age of ninety. Mao feared that Zhu’s death might touch off mass protests similar to those that followed Chou’s death earlier in the year — and that Deng might get involved. Zhu had been Mao’s earliest opponent, back in the late 1920s. Mao had made him suffer in the Cultural Revolution, but had refrained from purging him. Eventually, as unrest did not materialize after Zhu’s death, Deng was allowed to go home on 19 July — driven through deserted streets in the dead of night.

  Deng’s detention had lasted only three months. Although he was still under house arrest, he was among his family. Mao had failed to destroy him, and Deng was very much around to fight another day.

  58. LAST DAYS (1974–76 AGE 80–82)

  HATRED, FRUSTRATION AND self-pity dominated Mao’s last days. Mao expressed these feelings, long prominent in his character, in unique ways. He was very fond of a sixth-century poem called “The Sere Trees,” which was a lamentation and elegy about a grove of sublime trees that ended up withered and lifeless. The poet, Yu Xin, attributed the trees’ ill fortune to their having been uprooted and transplanted, which echoed his own life as an exile. But on 29 May 1975, Mao told the scholars annotating poems specially for him that the fate of the trees had “nothing to do with being transplanted.” It was, he ass
erted, “the result of the trees being battered by harsh malevolent waves and hacked by human hands.” Mao was thinking of himself as someone who was being (in his wife’s words) “bullied” by Deng Xiao-ping and Deng’s allies. Days before, they had forced Mao into an unprecedented climb-down by having him cancel his media campaign against them, and concede that he had “made a mistake.”

  After he had to release Deng from detention in July 1976, which made him furious, Mao had the “The Sere Trees” read aloud to him twice. He then began reciting it himself, very slowly, in his strangulated voice, brimming with bitterness. After this, he never asked to hear, or read, another poem.

  Deng was only one of many old Party foes whom Mao took to scourging in his head in his last years. Another was Chou En-lai. In June 1974, Chou finally had the cancer operation that Mao had been blocking for two years. Mao had only finally consented because his own enfeebled physical condition had made him feel insecure himself. While Chou was in the hospital, Mao dug out some old diatribes he had written against Chou and other opponents back in 1941. They were full of insults, and Mao had never felt it was wise to publish them. Now, thirty-three years later, he spent a lot of time reading them, cursing Chou in his mind.

  Going over them was also a way for Mao to vent his hatred for another foe, Liu Shao-chi, who had died five years before, at Mao’s hands, but whose death Mao had still not dared to announce publicly. When Mao had originally written the articles, Liu had been his ally, and he had praised Liu in them. Now he made a point of crossing out each reference to Liu.

  There was yet another man whom Mao was flaying in his head, and that was his chief rival at the time the articles were written: Wang Ming, who had died in exile in Russia on 27 March 1974, two months before Mao reread his old tirades. Mao had tried to murder Wang Ming by poisoning him in the 1940s, but then had had to allow him to take refuge in Russia, where Wang had remained something of a time-bomb. Khrushchev and Wang Ming’s son both confirmed that Mao tried to poison Wang Ming in Russia. The attempt was unsuccessful, but only because the vigilant exile tested the food on his dog, Tek, which died. In Moscow, Wang Ming turned out anti-Mao material which was broadcast to China, and during the Cultural Revolution he started planning a return to China to set up a base in Xinjiang, near the Russian border, and then try a coup against Mao (a proposal that got short shrift from the Kremlin).