Nixon and Mao (12 page)

Mao also never thought that China should blindly imitate other civilizations. Like the passionate Chinese nationalist he was, he always had a mixed reaction to the outside world. He recognized that China needed to learn, at the very least, modern technology from the West, but he also resented that fact. He once told a friend to stop wearing Western-style clothes. Mao hated what he saw as a fawning admiration of all things foreign. “If one of our foreign masters farts,” he wrote in 1923, “it is a lovely perfume.”
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On the other hand, like many other young Chinese nationalists, including Chou En-lai far to the north, he was impressed by Japan and its rapid success in modernizing. He also shared the nationalists’ despair at the ineptitude of the new republic and the continued pressures from foreign powers.

By now he was also developing his own ideas. He kept a journal for a time and started to write articles. Like many of his contemporaries, he was impressed by the Darwinian notion of the survival of the fittest, which held out both promise and threat for China. In 1917, in his first published article, he urged his fellow countrymen to take physical education seriously, lest China grow even weaker. “Our nation is wanting in strength. The military spirit has not been encouraged,” he wrote.
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The importance of military power was something that was to remain with Mao for the rest of his life.

Mao always prided himself on his toughness. As students, he and his friends would go on long walks in the winter, wading through icy streams. When he became ruler of China, Mao made highly publicized swims to demonstrate how fit he was and how self-controlled. In that same early article, he struck what was to become another favorite theme: that physical education helped to bring the emotions under control and strengthen the will. As he told his staff when he was ruler of China, “Sometimes I am so angry I feel my lungs are bursting. But I know I must control myself and not show anything.” The Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, who had a number of difficult conversations with Mao, compared him to a calm, slow-moving bear: “He would look at you for a long time, then lower his eyes and begin talking in a relaxed, quiet voice.”
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As he was to write later in an essay that became compulsory reading for the Chinese, the individual, if his will was strong enough, could move mountains. And for morality, he believed, the individual need refer only to himself. “Every act in life is for the purpose of fulfilling the individual,” he wrote as a young man, “and all morality serves [that end].”
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Although he later proclaimed himself a Marxist, subject therefore to the laws of history, he never gave up that belief in the individual, at least where he himself was concerned. He also discovered his own attraction to sheer power. In another article written in 1917, he talked about the hero whose actions were entirely the expression of his own impulses: “His force is like that of a powerful wind arising from a deep gorge, like the irresistible sexual desire for one’s lover, a force that will not stop, that cannot be stopped.”
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By the summer of 1918, Mao had finished at the normal school and qualified as a teacher. He was not yet ready to settle down, however, and spent much of the next year drifting between Beijing, Shanghai, and Changsha. It was an important period both for Mao and for China, a time of radical change and intellectual ferment. Mao shared the disgust that other young Chinese, such as Chou En-lai, felt when the victorious Allied powers assembled in Paris decided to award what had been German concessions in China to Japan. Chinese nationalists were appalled and deeply angry at what they saw as betrayal by the Western democracies. Some concluded that democracy itself was flawed and wrong for China and that the West would never be China’s friend. By now they had an alternative: Marxist ideas were already circulating in intellectual circles in China and, to the north, the Bolsheviks had seized power in Russia and appeared to be putting those ideas into action. When, in the spring of 1920, the new Communist regime in Russia repudiated the old unequal treaties between China and Russia and made statements (which, in the end, amounted to little but empty words) about handing back territory seized from China in czarist days, Chinese nationalists were deeply impressed. Russia was, Mao said at the time, “the number-one civilised country in the world.”
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Many Chinese radicals were to move toward Marxism and, after it was established in 1920, the Chinese Communist Party.

Mao was among them, and luck and perhaps his own talents brought him into contact with men who could help him. In Beijing, an unknown young man from the provinces, he found a friend in one of his former professors, who helped him find a modest job as an assistant in the library of Beijing University. There his superior was Li Dachao, one of the most prominent of China’s early Marxists and a founding co-chairman of the Communist Party. Mao met other Marxists and gradually started to read some of Marx’s works that had been translated into Chinese. By 1920, although he had toyed briefly with anarchism, he had decided that he too was a Marxist. By the autumn of that year, he had a job as principal of a primary school in Changsha, but he, like Chou, was spending much of his time and energy on radical politics.

In his personal life, Mao was experiencing much change as well. His much loved mother fell ill and finally died in the autumn of 1919. Although he had sent her medicine, he had not gone near her in the last months. “I told her,” he confided in one of his staff years later, “I could not bear to see her looking in agony. I wanted to keep a beautiful image of her, and told her I wanted to stay away for a while.” The death of his father a few months afterward does not seem to have caused him much grief.
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At the start of 1921, he married a bride of his own choosing. Yang Kaihui was the daughter of his old professor and patron. She was educated and, in the context of the day, something of a radical feminist. The marriage involved love on both sides, but Mao was not an easy husband. Politics increasingly took first place, and there were always other women.
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In the early 1920s, as the fortunes of the Communist Party rose, those of Mao rose with them. Following the advice of the Soviet Union (as Russia had become), the Chinese Communists formed a tactical alliance with the major nationalist party, the Guomindang, to unite China and expel the foreign powers. Mao enthusiastically supported the alliance, a fact ignored in the official biographies, and spent much time away from home working for the United Front.

The alliance led not, as promised by the Chinese Communists’ Soviet mentors and paymasters, to a Communist revolution but to a Guomindang supremacy under Chiang Kai-shek. The Guomindang at once turned on their former allies, and by the end of 1927 the Communist Party had been largely destroyed in the big cities and Communists were either dead, underground like Chou, or, like Mao, on the run in the countryside. Mao made his way into the mountains of south-central China and began, with others, to rebuild Communist strength.

In the next few years, as the Communists gradually developed armed forces and learned how to live among and use the peasants, Mao slowly climbed upward in the hierarchy. He was helped by an alliance with Zhu De, the Communists’ leading military commander, and by the fact that Moscow, which provided so much of the funding and weapons for the Chinese Communists, had spotted him as someone worth promoting. In what are still murky inner-party struggles, Mao picked off his rivals one by one. In 1935, he gained a key ally when Chou En-lai decided to accept his leadership.

By this time, the Communists had been forced to abandon their base in south-central China and were desperately searching for safety from the Guomindang. This, although they did not realize it at the time, was the start of the Long March, that great epic event in Communist mythology, when the Communists escaped from the Guomindang. Many of the legends that surround the march are just that—legends. Mao, for example, rarely marched but was instead carried on a litter, reading. Communist soldiers, according to a recent history, did not swing heroically arm over arm along the chains of a crucial bridge; they strolled over unopposed. Nevertheless, the Long March was key to the rise of Mao and the later success of the Communists. By the time it ended, in the autumn of 1936, the Communists were in the northwest, much closer to Soviet aid and farther from the Guomindang, and Mao was firmly entrenched in power.
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In 1937, the Japanese, who had already seized Manchuria, swept down into China. Although the Guomindang resisted, its forces were driven from one big city after another, finally retreating far up the Yangtze River to Chongqing. The invasion, which brought destruction and misery to much of China, weakened the Guomindang—as it turned out, mortally. The Guomindang lost its main tax base and much of its popular support. Its armies rotted from within, and the party and its bureaucracy grew increasingly corrupt. The Communists, in contrast, appeared as dedicated, clean-living patriots. Whether or not that was true—and there are still many questions about what they actually did in the war against the Japanese—the important thing is that outsiders and the Chinese themselves came to believe it. China’s war, which had been caught up in the much wider world war, ended with the surrender of Japan in 1945.

The Communists now had an army of over one million men and controlled much of the countryside north of the Yangtze. And within the party, Mao was now absolute ruler. When his colleagues disagreed, Mao would have the final word. In 1945, delegates at a special party congress confirmed Mao’s special status. A huge sign proclaimed, “March Forward Under the Banner of Mao Tse-tung!”
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Those who had known him for some years found that he was becoming more remote and godlike. Chou En-lai was still a comrade, said an American fellow traveler; “with Mao, I felt I was sitting next to history.”
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In 1945, as he was poised to seize power over the whole of China, Mao was in his prime. Agnes Smedley, an American Communist who got to know him during the war, was both attracted and disturbed when she met him for the first time in his temporary home of a cave: “His dark inscrutable face was long, the forehead broad and high, the mouth feminine. Whatever else he might be he was an aesthete. I was repelled by the feminine in him and the gloom of the setting. An instinctive hostility sprang up inside me and I became so occupied with trying to master it that I heard hardly a word of what followed.” His hands, she noted, were as “long and sensitive as a woman’s.” She later warmed toward him and decided that what she had seen in him was a deep spiritual aloofness. “I had the impression that there was a door to his being that had never been opened to anyone.”
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Perhaps it had been opened to his wives and to a few old comrades. Possibly to his children, although Mao’s attitude to his two surviving sons, from his first marriage, and his two daughters, from his two later ones, was ambivalent. He saw little of them when they were young, and he found them troublesome as adults.
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An-ching, his younger son, developed a mental illness, possibly schizophrenia, and both his daughters suffered severe depressions. His older son, An-ying, was killed in the Korean War. Mao sat silently for some moments when he heard the news and then said merely, “In any revolutionary war, you always pay a price. An-ying was one of thousands.”
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According to Mao’s daughter-in-law, Mao was in such agony when he broke the news to her that his hands turned as cold as ice.
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One of his bodyguards noticed that he lost his appetite for some time afterward.
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An-ying was perhaps the last person with whom Mao had a close, affectionate relationship. After his death, said one of the inner circle, “Mao gradually became ever more reclusive and ever more suspicious of almost all those around him.”
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From his earliest days in power, he subjected the party to repeated purges and inquisitions to hunt out those who were disloyal. And often disloyalty simply meant disagreeing with Mao. According to Lin Biao’s son, Mao preferred to eliminate those he suspected: “Every time he liquidates someone, he will put them to death before he desists; once he hurts you, he will hurt you all the way.”
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In the course of his life, Mao lost, pushed away, or betrayed many who had once been close to him. He made the revolution in the name of the peasants, yet they suffered more under his rule than they had under the Guomindang, as he forced them into collectives and squeezed resources out of the countryside. “Educate peasants to eat less, and have more thin gruel,” he ordered.
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He urged intellectuals to lend their talents to building the new China, but when they ventured to express their opinions he had them tortured and jailed, or sent to the countryside for reeducation.

Although he wrote one of his most lovely poems about her and in old age described her as the love of his life, Mao abandoned his first wife and their young sons in the turbulent days of the late 1920s without any apparent regret. Yang Kaihui moved back to Changsha to be near her family, and Mao made no attempt to keep in touch with her. In a series of letters that miraculously survived, she wrote with increasing desperation of her continuing love for Mao, her misery at being abandoned, and her fears for herself and her children as the Guomindang tightened its grip. In 1930, in retaliation for Communist attacks on Changsha, the local nationalist general had her executed. She was only twenty-nine.
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In 1928, while Yang was still alive, Mao got married again, to a young girl from the countryside, He Zizhen, who agreed, rather reluctantly, to become his “revolutionary companion.” She was to pay a heavy price, suffering through the Long March and repeated pregnancies and miscarriages until Mao, in turn, abandoned her for a younger, more glamorous woman. His last and final marriage was to the Shanghai actress Jiang Qing. When that marriage, in turn, soured, he preferred to avoid a divorce and simply took mistresses, sometimes several at once. It was easy enough for Mao to get them from among his nurses and assistants or from a special army company of dancers and singers. “Selecting imperial concubines” was how a senior general described it.
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Mao preferred young, simple girls who felt deeply honored to be chosen by the great man, even to the point of taking pride in catching a venereal disease from him. When his doctor suggested that the chairman might want to stop his sexual activities while the disease was being treated, Mao refused. “If it’s not hurting me,” he said airily, “then it doesn’t matter.” As far as hygiene was concerned, Mao’s solution was more sex: “I wash myself inside the bodies of my women.”
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