by Jung Chang
Wang Ming’s death had been long drawn-out, and came after decades of ruined health, the legacy of Mao’s attempts to kill him. He was bedridden in his final years, and it took him three hours to swallow enough tiny morsels of food to constitute a meal. But his painful death did not assuage Mao’s grievance, just as the similarly agonizing deaths of both Liu and Chou brought Mao little relief. A month before he himself died, Mao had his old tirades read to him again, to bring himself the temporary pleasure of savaging all these foes one more time.
By the end of Mao’s life, almost all his former close colleagues were dead, most of them thanks to him. Yet their deaths had somehow not quite satisfied him. Those of Liu and Peng De-huai, his two main victims in the Cultural Revolution, he had to keep secret for fear of public sympathy. Chou’s death had been made public, but the outcome was to rock Mao’s rule. Wang Ming had died in Russia, out of his reach. Zhu De he had been unable to purge. Lin Biao, Mao’s chief collaborator in setting up the Great Purge, had managed to flee the country before the plane that carried him across the border crashed; moreover, Lin had bequeathed a legacy that haunted Mao — a plot to assassinate him. Deng was alive, and more than just alive: Mao had had to give in and let him live in the comfort of his own home, among his family. On his deathbed, Mao’s thirst for revenge was unslaked.
DISSATISFACTION CONSUMED MAO. He had not risen to be a superpower, in spite of his decades of craving. Although he had the Bomb, he could not cash it, not least because the delivery system could barely loft it over China’s border. The country’s industrial bases were a shambles, turning out heaps of defective equipment — including fleets of planes that could not fly, even though an aircraft industry had topped his agenda from the very beginning of his rule, and the Korean War had been fought partly to acquire it. Nor was the navy much better. Mao’s last words to his navy chief in 1975, a year before his death, were: “Our navy is only like this!” sticking out his little finger, looking immensely disconsolate. That October, Mao remarked ruefully to Kissinger that he did not belong to the major league. “There are only two superpowers in the world … We are backward …” Counting on his fingers, he said: “We come last. America, Soviet Union, Europe, Japan, China — look!” When US president Ford came to China a few weeks later, Mao told him: “We can only fire … empty cannons” and “curse.”
Mao had made a last-ditch effort to promote himself as a world leader in 1974, by trying to capitalize on something that did not require military prowess, and was the one point where he could claim to lead the world: poverty. He proclaimed a new way of defining “Three Worlds,” announcing that the “Third World” meant countries that were poor, excluding Russia, and dropped heavy hints that he should be seen as the leader of the Third World. But although he was regarded, in a very general way, as a leader of the Third World, it did not take orders from him, and he provided no tangible leadership. Besides, as one hard-nosed American diplomat put it, “would it really make all that difference?”
Even his own creatures refused to acknowledge his authority. Mao had played a vital part in installing the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia in 1975. Pol Pot, its leader, under whom up to one quarter of the Cambodian people perished in the space of a few years, was a soul-mate of Mao’s. Immediately after Pol Pot took power, Mao congratulated him face to face on his slave-labor-camp state: “You have scored a splendid victory. Just a single blow and no more classes.” What Mao meant was that everyone had become a slave. And Mao sent Prince Sihanouk, who had been living in luxurious exile in China, back to Cambodia, where the prince was put under house arrest and his name was exploited by Pol Pot. But though Mao was Pol Pot’s sponsor and mentor, he got no gratitude. A colleague of Pol Pot’s called Keo Meas, who had referred to Mao in eulogistic terms, was tortured to death. Written on the dead man’s dossier were the words: “This contemptible Mao who got the horrible death he deserved was worthless. You shouldn’t think, you antique bastard, that the Kampuchean Party has been influenced by Mao.”
On the world stage, Mao had to cling to a vague halo. When Nixon’s daughter Julie turned up wearing a Mao badge, “he reacted with a childlike delight and impulsively clasped my hand,” she wrote. To sustain his profile, he continued to “receive” foreign statesmen until three months before his death. But he often rather spoiled the effect of these audiences. Thailand’s leaders found him “snoring” as they entered the room. Singapore’s premier Lee Kuan Yew, Mao’s penultimate foreign visitor, described an almost inarticulate Mao grunting, head lolling against the back of his armchair. Indeed, as the last photos of him confirm, Mao looked anything but a world leader. Dribbling saliva, waxen-faced and slack-jawed, he projected an image of senility and wretchedness. When he saw how bad he looked in photos with Pakistan’s prime minister Bhutto at the end of May 1976, Mao stopped meeting foreigners altogether.
WHILE FEELING DEEPLY discontented at having failed to achieve his world ambition, Mao spared no thought for the mammoth human and material losses that his destructive quest had cost his people. Well over 70 million people had perished — in peacetime — as a result of his misrule, yet Mao felt sorry only for himself. He would cry as he talked about anything he could connect with his past glory and current failure, even watching his own regime’s propaganda films. His staff often saw tears flooding down his face, “like a spring” as one of them put it. Self-pity, to which Mao had always been prone, was the paramount emotion of the utterly unpitying Mao in his last days.
Mao became very attached to some classical poems which convey a mood of great men brought down, kings fallen, and heroes’ brilliant prospects in ruins. He empathized with the unfulfillled heroes and kings.
This state of mind led him to an extraordinary sense of fraternity with those he regarded as “fallen kings” around the world. Top of the list was former US president Richard Nixon, who had been forced from office by Watergate in August 1974. Time and again Mao went out of his way to proclaim his fond feelings for Nixon. Weeks after Nixon had been ejected from the White House, Mao asked Imelda Marcos of the Philippines to pass on his good wishes and an invitation to Nixon to revisit China. Nixon’s daughter Julie and her husband, David Eisenhower, were given an astonishing welcome in December the following year. Mao told Julie: “Write to your father at once, tell him I miss him.” When Julie got back to America, Peking’s envoy told her that Mao “considers you part of his family”—a remark that was absolutely unique.
When the disgraced Nixon came, in February 1976, Mao sent a Boeing 707 to Los Angeles for him, complete with the protocol chief of the Foreign Ministry, another unheard-of gesture. The fact that the plane ran the risk of being seized as collateral against US assets expropriated in China was immaterial for Mao. When he saw Nixon again, Mao clinked teacups with him, and when Nixon took his leave, Mao struggled to the door, standing unaided, to see him off, looking melancholy. Mao had invited him to China for what was, in effect, a private farewell. He personally selected an evening’s entertainment for the former US president which included the singing of Mao’s favorite classical poems set to music, which conjured up the mood of the tragic ending of great men. The program meant nothing to Nixon, who showed he was tired — and bored. But Mao was expressing his own sentiments, for himself, even though he was not present at the performance.
Another even more unlikely recipient of Mao’s sentimental affinity was Chiang Kai-shek, the man he had deposed — and had slaughtered millions of Chinese to keep deposed. Chiang died in Taiwan on 5 April 1975 at the age of eighty-nine, leaving a will decreeing that his coffin was not to be buried in Taiwan, but kept in a shrine to await a return to the Mainland when communism collapsed. Around the time of Chiang’s funeral, Mao mourned the Generalissimo for an entire day, in private. On that day, Mao did not eat, or speak. He had an eight-minute tape of stirring music played over and over again all day long to create a funereal atmosphere, while he beat time on his bed, wearing a solemn expression. The music was set specially for Mao to a t
welfth-century poem, in which the writer bade farewell to a friend who bore an uncanny resemblance to Chiang — a patriotic high mandarin whose career ended tragically and unfulfillled, and who was being exiled to a remote part of China. The writer told his friend:
You and I are men of history
No little men chattering about minor affairs!
This was exactly how Mao felt towards Chiang.
Days later, Mao rewrote the last two lines of the poem so that they read:
Go, let go, my honored friend,
Do not look back.
This change turned the poem into an unmistakable valediction. Mao was writing his own envoi to a fellow thwarted giant. It was re-recorded to music, and was one of the poems sung to Nixon when Mao brought the former US president over to say his personal goodbye.
MAO SHOWED UNCOMMON sympathy in private for other ousted rulers. When the emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, whom he had met only once and very briefly, died in prison in 1975 after being dethroned by a military coup, Mao sank into melancholy. “The emperor was doing fine,” Mao kept saying. “Why did he have to come to this? Why did it have to end like this?!”
This new empathy with deposed rulers was an extension of Mao’s old fear of being toppled himself. In this final phase of his life, he was more obsessed than ever with a coup. It was to avert such a possibility that he intimated to Deng Xiao-ping and his allies in 1975 that they were welcome to crush Mme Mao and her Gang after his death.
It was partly for this same reason — fear of a coup — that Mao did not appoint a successor. He never bestowed that title on the head of his last coterie, Hua Guo-feng, as he had earlier on Lin Biao. He feared that an official heir apparent might be in too much haste to succeed, and would try to jump the gun. So, although Hua showed manifest loyalty (when Mao was fed through the nose for the first time, Hua took on Chou’s guinea-pig role and tested a tube on himself first), and although Mao obviously trusted Hua enough to put him in charge, he declined to confirm that Hua would take over after he died.
Mao did not care one iota what happened after his death. In fact, he had scant confidence in the staying power of his own “achievements.” On the only occasion he said a few words to his inner circle about the future, when he knew he was dying, he told them that there would be “upheaval,” indeed “blood rains and winds smelling of blood.” And then Mao said: “What’s going to happen to you, heaven only knows.”
So Mao did not leave a will, even though he had been expecting death for at least a year, and had had ample time to prepare one.
THE LAST FEW weeks of Mao’s life were spent in a nondescript building which had been specially built for him in Zhongnanhai, with all the usual security specifications, and was earthquake-proof. Characteristically, it only had a code-name, “202.” He was carried there at the end of July 1976, after Peking was shaken by a huge earthquake that measured 7.8 on the Richter scale and which flattened Tangshan, an industrial city 160 km to the east, where somewhere between 240,000 (official figure) and 600,000 (unofficial estimate) people were killed. In Peking and many other cities, tens of millions of people had to sleep out in the open. In true Mao style, the regime turned down foreign help, which could have greatly lowered the death toll. A media campaign was launched exhorting rescuers to “denounce Deng on the ruins.”
Mao was still giving orders. When Mme Mao wanted to go out of Peking on 2 September, she came to ask her husband for permission. He was peevish at being bothered, and refused the first time, but granted it when she persisted. Three days later, Mao suddenly lost consciousness, and she was summoned back by the new team headed by Hua. In the past weeks they had been taking turns to keep vigil by Mao’s bed, and when Mme Mao got back, she joined them, but stood behind the bed, as he had shown annoyance before when he woke up and set eyes on her. None of Mao’s children was present.
On 8 September an unintelligible croak came from Mao’s throat. His barber and servant of seventeen years tucked a pencil into his trembling hand, and Mao laboriously drew three shaky lines, and then feebly touched the wooden edge of his bed three times. The barber figured out that Mao wanted to know what was happening to the Japanese prime minister, Takeo Miki (whose name in Chinese means “Three Woods”). Mao had never met Miki, and had shown no special interest in him until now, when Miki was fighting to prevent being toppled by a coup within his own party.
One of Mao’s two girlfriends-turned-nurse, Meng, held up the news bulletin, and Mao read it for a few minutes. This report about yet another leader on the ropes was the very last thing he read.
Soon after this, Meng heard Mao say: “I feel very ill. Call the doctors.” These were the last words he spoke. Shortly afterwards, he slipped into unconsciousness. At ten minutes past midnight on the morning of 9 September 1976, Mao Tse-tung died. His mind remained lucid to the end, and in it stirred just one thought: himself and his power.
EPILOGUE
TODAY, MAO’S PORTRAIT and his corpse still dominate Tiananmen Square in the heart of the Chinese capital. The current Communist regime declares itself to be Mao’s heir and fiercely perpetuates the myth of Mao.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Our gratitude goes first to the several hundred interviewees, who provided us with vital information, as well as much color to bring Mao alive. None is responsible for any of the views expressed in the book.
The following people kindly sent us material, answered queries, effected introductions, or gave us other valuable help. To all of them we are most grateful. We regret that we have not been able to differentiate their contributions more distinctively. Our apologies for any omissions (including some titles), which we will be glad to correct in future editions. We feel very sad that those in Mainland China cannot be named, and hope that this situation will change one day.
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