Mao: The Unknown Story

26. “REVOLUTIONARY OPIUM WAR” (1937–45 AGE 43–51)

YENAN, MAO’S HQ during the Sino-Japanese War, was run somewhat differently from former Red bases like Ruijin. With the policy changes the CCP introduced for the “United Front,” the practice of designating “class enemies” for slave labor and dispossession was drastically scaled down. But the maximum extraction went on, through taxation.

This was despite the fact that Yenan enjoyed two enormous external subsidies: substantial funding from the Nationalists (for the first few years), and massive clandestine sponsorship from Moscow, which Stalin personally set at US$300,000 per month in February 1940 (worth perhaps some US$45–50 million a year today).

The chief domestic source of revenue was grain tax, which rose steeply during the years of Communist occupation. Official figures for grain tax for the first five years of Red rule, for which records are available, were (in shi, equivalent to roughly 150 kg at the time):

1937: 13,859 1938: 15,972 1939: 52,250 1940: 97,354 1941: 200,000

The sharp increases from 1939 on were to fund Mao’s aggressive expansion of both territory and army. Coercion and violence were clearly rife, as the region’s Communist chief secretary, Xie Jue-zai, noted in his diary for 21 June 1939 that peasants were being “driven to death” by tax collectors. (Xie was one of the few to keep a diary, thanks to his high position and his long relationship with Mao, which went back to Mao’s youth.) In 1940, grain tax doubled in spite of severe bad weather and famine. And it doubled again in 1941, even though the harvest was 20–30 percent down on the previous year.

Mao was disliked by the locals — a fact he knew, but had no impact on his policy. He later told senior cadres a story about a peasant complaining about heavy taxation. After a county chief was struck dead by lightning, the peasant said: “Heaven has no eyes! Why didn’t it strike Mao dead?” Mao told the story as a way of saying he was responsive to discontent, and claimed he had had grain tax reduced as a result. As a matter of fact, the lightning and the peasant’s curse occurred on 3 June 1941, well before that year’s unprecedentedly high tax was announced, on 15 October. Mao doubled the tax after he heard about the peasant’s anger. And that November he added a new tax, on horse feed.

On another occasion, Mao revealed that someone who, according to him, “was feigning madness” lunged at him and tried to assault him — because of the heavy taxes. Mao did not quote other stories that went the rounds, including one about a peasant who cut the eyes out of a portrait of Mao. When interrogated, he said: “Chairman Mao has no eyes,” meaning: “There is no justice under his rule.” Mao’s response was simply to cook the figures. In 1942 and 1943, government announcements understated taxes by at least 20 percent.

The Communists claimed that taxation in Yenan was much lower than in Nationalist-ruled areas. But Chief Secretary Xie himself noted in his diary that grain tax per capita in 1943 was “high by the standards of the Big Rear [Nationalist area].” Sometimes, he recorded, grain tax “almost equals the entire year’s harvest”; the state took the astronomical figure of 92 percent in the case of one family he cited. For many, “there was no food left after paying the tax.” Large numbers tried to flee. According to the Communists’ own records, in 1943 over 1,000 families fled from Yenan County alone, which was no small feat, as the whole place was guarded around the clock, and the county was not on the border of the Red area, which was roughly the size of France.

THE REDS FOSTERED the myth that Yenan was under tight economic blockade by Chiang Kai-shek. In fact, there was plenty of trade with Nationalist areas, and the person Chiang selected to place on Yenan’s northern frontier, General Teng Pao-shan, was a man who had longstanding ties with the Communists. His daughter was a Party member, and actually lived in Yenan, which he sometimes visited; he also had a Communist secretary. He let the Reds take over two crucial border crossing points on the Yellow River, which gave them uninterrupted communications with their other bases. In addition, his men bought arms and ammunition for the Reds. Chiang tolerated this state of affairs because he did not want an all-out civil war, which Mao promised to start if he did not get his way.

The Yenan region had considerable assets. The most important marketable one was salt. There were seven salt lakes, where all that had to be done, as one 1941 report noted, was “just to collect it.” In the first four years of their occupation, the Reds produced no new salt, and simply used up the reserve built up before they arrived. “The salt stock of decades has been sold out,” the 1941 report said, and the territory “is in a salt famine.” The regime was not only extremely slow to maximize this asset, it had no plan. This reflected the fact that Mao treated Yenan, like the other areas he occupied, as a stopover, inflicting an economic approach akin to slash and burn, with no attention to long-term output.

By mid-1941, the regime had belatedly come to recognize salt as “the second-biggest source of [domestic] revenue” after the grain tax, and a key money-spinner, which soon came to account for over 90 percent of export earnings. The salt was in the northeast of the region, but the export market was over the southern border. As there was no railway or navigable river, let alone motor vehicles, it had to be carried some 700 km on steep, twisting paths. “Transporting salt is the harshest form of taxation,” one Yenan governor wrote to the emperor under the Manchu Dynasty; “those who are poor and cannot afford animals have to carry it on their backs and shoulders, and their hardship is untold …” “Today,” Chief Secretary Xie noted, “it is not much different from the old days.”

The regime imposed corvée labor (unpaid porterage) on innumerable peasant families. Xie and other moderates wrote to Mao many times arguing against this harsh method, but Mao told them flatly that the policy “is not only nothing to criticise, but is also completely correct.” Peasants, he said, must be “forced” to do it, and, he specifically enjoined, “in the slack season.” The underline was Mao’s, to stress that they must not neglect farm work.

THE LOCAL PEASANTS were having to support an administration that was both huge and inefficient. A British radio expert who was in Yenan in 1944–45, Michael Lindsay, was so frustrated by the inefficiency that he produced a document called “What’s Wrong with Yenan.” The system stifled initiative, Lindsay wrote, and made people frightened of proposing improvements, as any suggestion could be twisted into a lethal political accusation. “Technical people all [sic] run away at the first opportune moment.” A copy was given to Chou En-lai. Lindsay heard nothing more.

Others had raised their voices against the bloated bureaucracy earlier. In November 1941 a non-CCP member of the region’s dummy parliament had proposed cutting down on the army and administration, quoting a traditional adage that a good government should have “fewer but better troops, smaller and simpler administration.” For propaganda purposes, Mao made a public show of adopting the adage. But he was not interested in reducing the number of cadres, or soldiers. He wanted more of them, not fewer, in order to conquer China.

It is part of the founding myth of Communist China that in Yenan both the army and the administration were reduced, and that this relieved the burden on the population. In fact, what the regime did was to weed out the politically unreliable (termed “backward”), and the old and the sick, and reassign them to manual labor. The rules for relocating them said they “must be placed round the centre of the region to avoid the Nationalists enticing them away.” In other words, to prevent them fleeing. But even with these reductions, as a secret document of March 1943 noted, there was actually “an overall increase” in employees in the region’s administration, mainly at lower levels, in order to intensify control at the grassroots. Meanwhile, Mao used the drive to merge departments and carry out a reshuffle at the top to tighten his grip.

THE GERMAN INVASION of Russia in June 1941 made Mao look around for an alternative source of funding in case Moscow was unable to continue its subsidy. The answer was opium. Within a matter of weeks, Yenan brought in large quantities of opium seeds. In 1942, extensive opium-growing and trading began.

To a small circle, Mao dubbed his operation “the Revolutionary Opium War.” In Yenan, opium was known by the euphemism “te-huo,” “Special Product.” When we asked Mao’s old assistant, Shi Zhe, about growing opium, he answered: “It did happen,” and added: “If this thing gets known, it’s going to be very bad for us Communists.” He also told us that conventional crops, mainly sorghum, were planted around the opium to hide it. When a Russian liaison man asked Mao outright over a game of mah-jong in August 1942 how Communists could “openly engage in opium production,” Mao was silent. One of his hatchet men, Teng Fa, supplied the answer: opium, he said, “bring[s] back a caravan loaded with money … and with it we’ll whip the [Nationalists]!” That year a carefully researched study put the opium-growing area at 30,000 acres of the region’s best land.

The major opium-producing counties lay on the borders with the friendly Nationalist general to the north, Teng Pao-shan, who was actually known as “the Opium King.” Mao received invaluable collaboration from him, which he reciprocated by facilitating Teng’s own opium-trafficking. When Chiang Kai-shek was thinking of transferring Teng, Mao sprang into action to prevent this: “Ask Chiang to stop at once,” he told Chou in Chongqing, saying that he (Mao) was “determined to wipe out” the unit scheduled to replace Teng. Chiang canceled the transfer. Mao showed how much he appreciated Teng by mentioning him twice when he addressed the 7th Congress in 1945, once even in the same breath as Marx, leading the Russian liaison Vladimirov to ask: “What sort of man is this Teng Pao-shan whom Mao Tse-tung cited … alongside Marx?” Yet Mao never trusted his benefactor. After the Communist takeover in 1949, Teng remained on the Mainland and was rewarded with high nominal posts. But when he asked to travel abroad, the request was denied.

In one year, opium solved Mao’s problems. On 9 February 1943 he told Chou that Yenan had “overcome its financial difficulties, and had accumulated savings … worth 250 million fabi.” Fabi was the currency used in the Nationalist areas, which Mao had been stockpiling, along with gold and silver, “for when we enter Nationalist areas,” i.e., once all-out war began against Chiang. This sum was six times the official Yenan region budget for 1942, and it represented pure saving. In 1943 the Russians estimated Mao’s opium sales at 44,760 kg, worth an astronomical 2.4 billion fabi (roughly US$60 million at then current exchange rates, or some US$640 million today).

By early 1944 the Communists were “very rich,” according to Chief Secretary Xie. The huge fabi reserve “is without doubt thanks to the Special Product,” Xie wrote in his diary. The lives of Party members in Yenan improved dramatically too, especially for senior officials. Cadres arriving from other base areas marveled at how well they ate. One described a meal with “several dozen dishes,” and “every table left many dishes unfinished.”

Mao put on weight. When Opium King Teng met him in June 1943 after some time, his first words of greeting were: “Chairman Mao has grown fatter!” He meant it as a compliment.

FOR THE PEASANTS, the main benefit opium brought was that it lessened the impositions visited on them. Up till now, they had been liable to have their meager household possessions and vital farm tools commandeered. After he became opium-rich, Mao ordered steps to improve relations with the locals. The army began to return goods it had taken, and even to help peasants work the land. Mao himself later admitted that the locals’ attitude towards the Party until spring 1944 had been to “keep an awe-struck and fearful distance as if it were deity and devil,” i.e., to try to steer well clear of the Reds. And this was seven years after the Communists had occupied Yenan. Throughout, the Communists had little contact with the locals, except when their work required it, or on token New Year visits to villages to exchange ritual greetings. Intermarriage, and social relations, were rare.

Opium wealth, however, did not improve the locals’ standard of living, which remained far below that of the occupying Communists. The lowest-grade Communist’s annual meat ration was almost five times (12 kg) the average local’s (2.5 kg). While conserving its vast hoard of cash, the regime still lost no opportunity to milk the population. In June 1943, on the grounds that Chiang was about to attack Yenan (which he did not), civilians were made to “voluntarily donate” firewood, vegetables, pigs and sheep, and what little gold they had, which was often their life savings.

A mention of the CCP’s huge reserves in Xie’s diary on 12 October 1944 is sandwiched between dire descriptions of peasants’ lives: the mortality rate was not only rising, it was vastly outstripping the birth rate, in one district by nearly 5 to 1. The reasons, Xie noted, were “inadequate clothing, food and accommodation,” foul drinking water, and “no doctors.” The regime had introduced a major cause of mortality by banning firearms. Wolves sauntered into people’s front yards, and leopards roamed freely in the hills. So people had to bring their precious livestock into their dwellings, or risk losing them. The resulting abysmal hygiene led to many diseases. Access to game as food was also strangled by the firearms ban.

Mortality was highest among immigrants, who formed a sizable part of the population. They had been moving to the Yenan area because it had spare arable land. Mao encouraged them to keep coming, but then did little for them when they got there. Herded into mountain country and left to fend for themselves, they died like flies—31 percent within two years in one area. Mao knew that the mortality rate for children was 60 percent (and nearly all who survived grew up illiterate). And yet, as a top administrator recalled, “the massive death tolls in people and livestock were never given proper attention.” When pressed to do something, in April 1944, Mao said: Let’s discuss this in the winter. Public health did become the focus of discussion in November that year, for the first time since the Communists had arrived in the area nearly a decade before; but there was no mention of spending money on it.

FOR THE LOCALS, opium also brought astronomical inflation, much worse than in Nationalist areas. “We have caused great inflation,” Xie wrote in his diary on 6 March 1944, “not because we are poor, but because we are rich.”

Mao played a key role in this. In June 1941 he had personally ordered unrestrained printing of the local Communist currency, bianbi. The original plan had had a ceiling. After he saw the budget, Mao wrote: “don’t get fixated on the idea that bianbi should be kept within 10 million yuan … don’t tie our hands.” He urged spending “generously” on administration and the army, showing a total disregard for the local economy: “If in the future [the system] collapses, so be it.” In 1944 the price of salt was 2,131 times that in 1937, cooking oil 2,250 times, cotton 6,750 times, cloth 11,250 times, and matches 25,000 times, according to Chief Secretary Xie.

This hyper-inflation did not hurt those feeding at the state trough. Russian ambassador Panyushkin, who probably had a better picture than most, said it hurt the “toilers,” i.e., the peasants, who needed cash to buy basics like cloth, salt, matches, utensils and farm tools — and medical care, which was never free for non-state employees, if they could get it at all. A hospital official in one Red area revealed: “Only when we want wheat do we admit the lao-pai-shing [man-in-the-street].”

One practice where cash was needed, and the impact of inflation can be measured, was buying a bride. In 1939 a bride cost 64 yuan. By 1942 the prices were: seven-year-old girl: 700; adolescent: 1,300; widow: 3,000. By 1944 the price for a widow was 1.5 million.

Loan-sharking flourished, with average interest rates running at 30–50 percent monthly, according to Chief Secretary Xie, who also recorded the astronomical rate of 15–20 percent from one market day to the next — which was five days. These rates were as bad as the worst before the Communists. To raise cash, many peasants presold crops, which sometimes meant accepting as little as 5 percent of the harvest-time price.

“Reducing loan interest” was one of the Communists’ two main economic pledges at the time; the other was to lower land rent. But, whilst there were specific regulations about the latter (which actually meant little, as the peasants just had to hand over their harvest to the state instead of to landlords), the regime set no ceiling on loan interest. All it said was: “it should be left to the people themselves to fix … and the government should not fix too low an interest rate, in case lending dries up.” As the regime advanced virtually no loans, it had to find some other way to get credit floated. Some Red areas enforced low ceilings on interest rates, but in the Yenan region the regime let loose the most rapacious forces of the private sector on the most helpless of its subjects.

In March 1944 the regime stopped the runaway printing of money and started to call in bianbi. This was partly prompted by the imminent arrival of the first non-Russian outsiders for five years — an American mission, and some journalists. Hyper-inflation did not look good. But deflation was no boon to those in debt either, as Xie noted on 22 April: “No matter whether the currency goes down or up, those who suffer are always the poor … the debt they owed when prices were high now has to be paid back by selling more of their possessions. I heard that many are selling their draft animals.”

Opium-growing stopped at this point. Apart from not wanting the Americans to see, there was overproduction. In fact, the surplus had become a headache. Some hard-liners advocated dumping it on the population within Yenan, which Mao vetoed. A drug-addicted peasantry was no use to him. But some peasants had inevitably become hooked by growing the stuff. The regime ordered locals to kick the habit, with tough deadlines, promising to “assist addicts with medicine” and saying that “the poor” did not have to pay for treatment, clearly showing that one had to pay if one could remotely afford it.

To officials in the know, Mao met the widespread disquiet about opium-growing by calling it one of the Party’s “two mistakes,” but he went on to justify both in the same breath. One mistake, he said on 15 January 1945, “was that during the Long March we took people’s things”—“but,” he immediately added, “we couldn’t have survived if we hadn’t”; “the other,” he said, “was to grow a certain thing [mou-wu, i.e., opium] — but without growing this we couldn’t have got through our crisis.”

YENAN STAYED extremely poor even years after Mao had taken control of China. A visitor from Communist Hungary, itself by no means rich, commented on “indescribably squalid and poverty-stricken villages” near Yenan in 1954. In fact, all the Red bases remained among the poorest areas in China, and the reason was precisely that they had been Red bases. An exchange between Mao and a Swedish enthusiast in 1962 ran:

J. MYRDAL: I have just come back from a trip to the Yenan area.

MAO: That is a very poor, backward, underdeveloped … part of the country.

MYRDAL: I lived in a village … I wanted to study the change in the countryside …

MAO: Then I think it was a very bad idea that you went to Yenan … Yenan is only poor and backward. It was not a good idea that you went to a village there.

MYRDAL: But it has a great tradition — the revolution and the war — I mean, after all, Yenan is the beginning—

MAO [interrupting]: Traditions — [laughing]. Traditions — [laughing].

Control of guns was watertight. An Austrian doctor kidnapped by the Communists in the later 1940s observed that if you heard wolves, you knew you were in a Red area. No one we interviewed recalled hearing a shot in Yenan throughout the war. One night, when a Russian radio operator on the outskirts of Yenan shot a wolf that had killed one of their two guard dogs, Mao’s guards immediately appeared to complain that the sound of the shots had “very much unsettled” Mao. Another time, Russian liaison Vladimirov shot a rabid dog (rabies was common) that was attacking his guard dog. A group of Mao’s guards instantly descended, saying that Mao “was very agitated” and that the shooting “had interrupted his work.”

27. THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING! (1945–46 AGE 51–52)

IN FEBRUARY 1945, at Yalta in the Crimea, Stalin confirmed to Roosevelt and Churchill that Russia would enter the Pacific War two or three months after Germany’s defeat. This meant the Soviet army would enter China, and thus give Mao his long-awaited chance to take the country. Mao had made a shrewd assessment as far back as 1923: communism, he had said then, “had to be brought into China from the north by the Russian army.” Now, twenty-two years later, this was about to become reality.

Stalin did not have to persuade Roosevelt and Churchill to let him tail-end on the war against Japan. They wanted him involved. At the time, the US atomic bomb had not been tested, and the feeling was that Soviet entry would hasten the defeat of Japan and save Allied lives. The two Western leaders accepted Stalin’s demands for “compensation,” neither seeming to realize that Stalin needed no inducement at all to come in. They agreed not only to accept “the status quo” in Outer Mongolia (in effect, allowing Stalin to keep it), but to turn the clock back decades and restore the Tsarist privileges in China, including extraterritorial control over the Chinese Eastern Railway and two major ports in Manchuria.

Stalin used the excuse of fighting Japan, at the very last minute, to invade China and create the conditions for Mao to seize power. A hint came right after Yalta, on 18 February, when Russia’s governmental mouthpiece, Izvestia, wrote of Moscow’s “desire to solve the Far Eastern problem taking due account of the interests of the Chinese Communists.”

Mao was ecstatic, and his goodwill towards the Russians extended to their sex lives. Within days, he was trying to fix them up. “Haven’t you liked a single pretty woman here?” Mao asked Russian liaison Vladimirov on 26 February. “Don’t be shy …” He returned to the theme a week later: “Well, there are attractive girls, aren’t there? And extremely healthy. Don’t you think so? Maybe Orlov would like to look around for one? And maybe you, too, have an eye for someone?”

Vladimirov wrote:

towards evening a girl appeared … She shyly greeted me, saying she had come to tidy up the house …

I took out a stool, and placed it under our only tree, near the wall. She sat down, tense, but smiling. Then she amiably answered my questions, and was all the while waiting cautiously, her legs crossed, small slender legs in woven slippers …

She was a smashing girl, indeed!

… she told me she was a university student, just enrolled. How young she was …

On 5 April, Moscow told Tokyo it was breaking their Neutrality Pact. One month later Germany surrendered. This came right in the middle of the CCP congress that ratified Mao’s supremacy. Mao fired up the delegates with the sense that victory was imminent for the CCP as well. The Soviet army would definitely come to help them, he said, and then, with a big smile, he put the side of his hand to his neck like an ax head, and announced: “If not, you can chop my head off!” Mao delivered the most effusive comments he ever made about Stalin in his entire life. “Is Stalin the leader of the world revolution? Of course he is.” “Who is our leader? It is Stalin. Is there a second person? No.” “Every member of our Chinese Communist Party is Stalin’s pupil,” Mao intoned. “Stalin is the teacher to us all.”

AT TEN PAST MIDNIGHT on 9 August 1945, three days after America dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, over 1.5 million Soviet and Mongolian troops swept into China along a huge front stretching more than 4,600 km, from the shores of the Pacific to the province of Chahar — far wider than the European front from the Baltic to the Adriatic. In April, Mao had ordered those of his troops who were near the Russian points of entry to be ready to “fight in coordination with the Soviet Union.” As soon as the Russo-Mongolian army entered China, Mao went to work around the clock dispatching troops to link up with them and seize the territory they rolled over. He moved his office to an auditorium at Date Garden, where he received a stream of military commanders, drafting telegrams on a Ping-Pong table he used as a desk, pausing only to wolf down food.

Under the Yalta agreements, before entering China, Russia was supposed to sign a treaty with Chiang Kai-shek, but it stormed in anyway without one. A week after the Russians invaded, with their army driving hundreds of kilometers into China, Chiang’s foreign minister reluctantly put his signature on a Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Alliance, which formally severed Outer Mongolia from China. Chiang compromised in return for the Russians recognizing him as the sole legitimate government of China and promising to hand back all the territory they occupied to him and only to him.

In spite of his promise, Stalin found myriad ways to assist Mao. His first ploy was to refuse to commit to a timetable for withdrawal. He made a verbal promise to withdraw his troops within three months, but refused to incorporate this in the agreement; and it was attached only as a non-binding “minute.” In fact, Stalin was to stay much longer than three months, and was to use the period of occupation to thwart Chiang and secretly transfer territory and assets to Mao.

Japan surrendered on 15 August. The occasion was greeted in China with firecrackers and street parties, tears and toasts, drums and gongs. Most of China had been at war for eight years, and some regions for fourteen years. During that time at least one-third of the population had been occupied by the Japanese. Tens of millions of Chinese had died, untold millions had been crippled, and more than 95 million people — the largest number in history — had been made refugees. People yearned for peace.

What they got instead was an all-engulfing nationwide civil war, which broke out in earnest at once. In this, Stalin was right behind Mao; in fact, the Russians did not stop their drive south when Japan surrendered, but pressed on for several weeks afterwards. The area Russian troops moved into in northern China was larger than the entire territory they occupied in Eastern Europe. Russian paratroopers landed as far west as Baotou, the railhead due north of Mao’s base, some 750 km west of the Manchurian border. By the end of August, with Russian help, the CCP had occupied much of Chahar and Jehol provinces, including their capitals, Zhangjiakou and Chengde, both only some 150 km from Peking, to the northwest and northeast respectively. For a while Mao planned to move his capital to Kalgan, and camel trains carrying documents and luggage set off thither from Yenan.

The key prize was Manchuria, which contained China’s best deposits of coal, iron and gold, giant forests — and 70 percent of its heavy industry. Manchuria was bordered on three sides by Soviet-controlled territory — Siberia, Mongolia and North Korea. The border with Siberia alone was over two thousand kilometers long. “If we have Manchuria,” Mao had told his Party, “our victory will be guaranteed.”

Neither the Communists nor the Nationalists had armies in the region, which had been occupied by the Japanese, efficiently and ruthlessly, for fourteen years. But Red guerrillas were far closer than Chiang’s troops. The Russians immediately opened up Japanese arms depots to these Reds, including the biggest arsenal, in Shenyang, which alone contained about “100,000 guns, thousands of artillery pieces, and large quantities of ammunition, textiles and food,” according to a secret CCP circular. Only a few months earlier, the Communist 8th Route Army had had only 154 pieces of heavy artillery.

The bonanza was not just in weapons, but also in soldiers. The troops of the Japanese puppet Manchukuo regime, almost 200,000 strong, had surrendered en masse to the Soviet army, and were now made available by the Russians to be “re-enlisted” by the CCP. So were hundreds of thousands of men newly unemployed as a result of Russian depredations and outright destruction. The Soviet occupation forces carted off whole factories and machinery as “war booty,” and even demolished industrial installations. The equipment removed by the Russians was estimated to be worth US$858 million (US$2 billion at current replacement cost). Many local people were deprived of their livelihood. The CCP, which had originally dispatched 60,000 troops into Manchuria, saw its force snowball to well over 300,000.

THIS EMPOWERMENT of the CCP was carried out by the Russians in maximum secrecy, as it was in stark violation of the treaty Moscow had just signed with Chiang. The Generalissimo’s best, combat-hardened troops, who were American-trained and equipped, were stuck in South China and Burma, far away from the areas Russia held. To get them to Manchuria fast, he desperately needed American ships. America wanted him to talk with Mao about peace; so under American pressure, the Generalissimo invited Mao to come to Chongqing for talks. America’s China policy had been defined by the late President Roosevelt (who had died on 12 April 1945 and was succeeded by his vice-president, Harry Truman) as to “knock heads together,” and the US ambassador in China had earlier suggested the idea of bringing the Generalissimo and Mao to the White House together if the two Chinese leaders reached a deal.

Mao did not want to go to Chongqing, and twice turned down Chiang’s invitation, mainly because he did not trust Chiang not to harm him. This would be Mao’s first venture out of his lair since he had started running his own military force in 1927. He told Chiang he was sending Chou En-lai instead. But Chiang insisted the summit must take place with Mao, and in the end Mao had to accept. Stalin had cabled him no fewer than three times to go. While secretly helping Mao to seize territory, Stalin wanted him to play the negotiations game. If Mao refused to show up, he would look as though he were rejecting peace, and America would be more likely to give its full commitment to Chiang.

Mao resented this pressure from Stalin. It was to be his biggest grievance against Stalin, and one he would keep bringing up for the rest of his life.

Stalin told Mao that his safety would be assured by both Russia and the US. The Founder of Chiang’s FBI, Chen Li-fu, told us that the Nationalists had no designs on Mao’s life “because the Americans guaranteed his safety.” Mao knew he would also have secret protection from his strategically placed moles, especially the Chongqing garrison chief, Chang Chen. Even so, he insisted on US ambassador Patrick Hurley coming to Yenan and escorting him to Chongqing as insurance against being bumped off in mid-air.

With all these precautions in place, Mao at last flew off to Chongqing in an American plane on 28 August, leaving Liu Shao-chi in charge in Yenan. When the plane landed, Mao stuck close to Hurley, and got into Hurley’s car, shunning the one Chiang had sent for him.

Mao also took out insurance of the kind he knew best, by ordering an offensive against Nationalist forces while he was in Chongqing, which demonstrated that the Reds would escalate the civil war if anything happened to him. He told his top generals, who were about to be flown (by the Americans) to 8th Route Army HQ: Fight without any restraint. The better you fight, the safer I am. When his troops won the battle at a place called Shangdang, Mao beamed: “Very good! The bigger the battle, the bigger the victory, the more hope I will be able to return.”

Mao flew into one moment of panic in Chongqing, when Hurley left on 22 September, followed by Chiang on the 26th, and he feared he was being set up for a hit. Chou was dispatched to the Soviet embassy to ask if the Russians would let Mao stay there, but Ambassador Apollon Petrov was non-committal, and got no reply when he wired Moscow for instructions. Mao was furious.

Mao gained a lot by going to Chongqing. He talked to Chiang as an equal, “as though the convicts were negotiating with the warders,” one observer remarked. Foreign embassies invited him not as a rebel, but as a statesman, and he played the part, behaving diplomatically, and laughing off a pointed challenge from Churchill’s no-nonsense envoy General Carton de Wiart, who told Mao that he did “not consider that [the Reds] contributed much towards defeating the Japs,” and that Mao’s troops only “had a nuisance value, but no more.” Even when put on the spot in a tough face-to-face encounter with the US commander in China, General Albert Wedemeyer, about the murder and mutilation by the Reds of an American officer called John Birch, Mao showed aplomb. And he kept his cool when Wedemeyer told him, with more than a hint of a threat, that the US was planning to bring atomic bombs into China, as well as up to half a million troops. By appearing conciliatory, Mao scored a propaganda victory.

The peace talks lasted forty-five days, but the whole episode was theater. Mao went around exclaiming “Long live Generalissimo Chiang!” and saying he supported Chiang as the leader of China. But this meant nothing. Mao wanted China for himself, and he knew he could only get it through civil war.

Chiang also knew that war was inevitable, but he needed a peace agreement to satisfy the Americans. Although he had no intention of observing it, he endorsed an agreement that was signed on 10 October. And this behavior brought benefits, at least in the short term. While Mao was in Chongqing, US forces occupied the two main cities in northern China, Tianjin and Peking, and held them for Chiang, and started to ferry his troops to Manchuria.

After the treaty was signed, Chiang invited Mao to stay with him for the night; and the next day they had breakfast together before Mao departed for Yenan. The moment Mao’s back was turned, the Generalissimo gave vent to his true feelings in his diary: “The Communist Party is perfidious, base, and worse than beasts.”

WHEN MAO RETURNED to Yenan on 11 October he immediately started military operations to keep Chiang’s army out of Manchuria. Lin Biao was appointed commander of the Red forces there. Tens of thousands of cadres had already been dispatched, coming under a new Manchuria Bureau whose leaders the Russians flew secretly from Yenan to Shenyang in mid-September.

Mao ordered troops deployed around Shanhaiguan, at the eastern end of the Great Wall. His forces had occupied this strategic pass from China proper into Manchuria in cooperation with the Soviet army on 29 August. He asked the Russians to take care of the seaports and the airports. With Russian encouragement, CCP units posing as bandits fired on US ships trying to land Chiang’s troops, in one case shooting up the launch of the US commander, Admiral Daniel Barbey, and forcing him back out to sea.

The US 7th Fleet finally had to dock at Qinhuangdao, a port just south of Manchuria, and one of Chiang’s best armies disembarked. On the night of 15–16 November it stormed the Shanhaiguan pass. Mao had called for a “decisive battle” and told his troops to hold out at the pass, but Chiang’s divisions simply swept through them. Mao’s forces disintegrated so overwhelmingly that one Nationalist commander lamented proudly that “we don’t even have enough people to accept all the arms being surrendered.”

The Communist forces had no experience of trench warfare, or of any kind of modern warfare. As guerrillas, their first principle, as laid down by Mao himself, was “retreat when the enemy advances.” And that is what they did now. Chiang’s armies, on the other hand, had fought large-scale engagements with the Japanese: in Burma, they had put more Japanese out of action in one campaign than the entire Communist army had in eight years in the whole of China. The Nationalist supremo in Manchuria, General Tu Yu-ming, had been in command of major battles against the Japanese, whereas Mao’s commander, Lin Biao, had taken part in one single ambush in September 1937, eight years before, since when he had hardly smelled gunpowder. By studiously avoiding combat with the Japanese, Mao had ended up with an army that could not fight a modern war.

The Reds had been in some frontal engagements during the Japan war, but mostly against weak Nationalist units. They had not faced the cream of Chiang’s forces, who, as one top Red commander wrote to Mao, were fresh, well-trained, “US-style troops,” and battle-ready.

The CCP troops were not only badly trained, but also poorly motivated. After the Japanese war, many just wanted peace. The Reds had been using a propaganda song called “Defeat Japan so we can go home.” After Japan’s surrender, the song was quietly banned, but the sentiment — let’s go home — could not be quenched as easily as the song.

When Red troops were marched to Manchuria, mainly from Shandong, pep talks focused not on high ideals but on material enticements. Commissar Chen Yi told officers: “When I left Yenan, Chairman Mao asked me to tell you that you are going to a good place, a place of great fun. There are electric lights and high-rises, and gold and silver in plenty …” Others told their subordinates: “In Manchuria we’ll be eating rice and white flour [desirable foods] all the time,” and “everyone will be given a promotion.” Even so some officers found it impossible to motivate the soldiers, and kept the destination secret until the troops were safely on board ship en route to Manchuria.

Communist officers who trekked to Manchuria remembered abysmal morale. One officer recalled:

The thing that gave us the worst headache was desertions … Generally speaking, all of us Party members, squad commanders, combat team leaders had our own “wobblies” to watch. We would do everything — sentry duty, chores, and errands — together … When the wobblies wanted to take a leak, we would say “I want to have a piss, too” … Signs of depression, homesickness, complaints — all had to be dealt with instantly … After fighting, particularly defeats, we kept our eyes peeled.

Most of those who ran away did so after camp was pitched, so … as well as normal sentries, we placed secret sentries … Some of us tied ourselves surreptitiously to our wobblies at night … Some of us were so desperate we adopted the method the Japanese used with their labourers — collected the men’s trousers and stowed them in the company HQ at night.

Yet even some of these trusted cadres deserted.

The commander of one division that had transferred from Shandong to Manchuria reported to Mao on 15 November that between “deserters, stragglers and the sick” he had lost 3,000 men out of the 32,500 he had set off with. Earlier, the commander of another unit reported: “Last night alone … over 80 escaped.” One unit suffered a desertion rate of over 50 percent, ending up with fewer than 2,000 out of its original 4,000-plus men. Local Manchurian recruits also defected in droves when they realized they would be fighting the national government. During a ten-day period in late December 1945 to early January 1946, over 40,000 went over to the Nationalists, according to the Reds’ own statistics. Although CCP troops in Manchuria far outnumbered the Nationalists, and were well armed with Japanese weapons, they were still unable to hold their own.

MAO’S NO. 2, Liu Shao-chi, had foreseen that the Reds would not be able to shut Chiang out of Manchuria. He had a different strategy from Mao. While Mao was in Chongqing, Liu had instructed the CCP in Manchuria to focus on building a solid base on the borders with Russia and its satellites, where the troops could receive proper training in modern warfare. On 2 October 1945, he had sent an order: “Do not deploy the main forces at the gate to Manchuria to try to keep Chiang out, but at the borders with the USSR, Mongolia and Korea, and dig our heels in.” In addition, Liu had told the Reds to be ready to abandon big cities and go and build bases in the countryside surrounding the cities.

But when Mao returned to Yenan from Chongqing, he overruled Liu. Concentrate the main forces at the pass into Manchuria and at big railway junctions, he ordered on 19 October. Mao could not wait to “possess the whole of Manchuria,” as another order put it. But his army was not up to the job.

Mao’s relationship with his army was in many ways a remote one. He never tried to inspire his troops in person, never visited the front, nor went to meet the troops in the rear. He did not care about them. Many of the soldiers sent to Manchuria had malaria. In order to drag these feverish men the many hundreds of kilometers, each sick man was sandwiched between two able-bodied soldiers and pulled along by a rope around the waist. Mao’s preferred method for dealing with wounded soldiers was to leave them with local peasants, who were usually living on a knife-edge between subsistence and starvation, and had no access to medicine.

His army’s performance showed that Mao had no prospect of victory anytime soon, and Stalin adjusted rapidly. On 17 November 1945, after Chiang’s army stormed into southern Manchuria, Chiang noted a “sudden change of attitude” in the Russians. They told the CCP it would have to vacate the cities, putting an end to Mao’s hopes of becoming immediate master of all Manchuria, and of a quick victory nationwide.

Stalin knew this decision would be devastating for Mao, so he made a gesture to reassure him. On the 18th, a cable was dispatched from Russia: “MAO AN YIN[G] asks for your permission to go to ‘41’ [code name for Yenan].” Stalin was finally returning Mao’s son. This was good news for Mao, but no help in seizing Manchuria. Desperate entreaties to the Russians followed, and futile orders for his troops to hold out. When both failed, Mao collapsed with a nervous breakdown. On the 22nd he moved out of Date Garden into a special elite clinic (after all the patients had first been turfed out). For days on end, he was unable to rise from his bed, or to sleep a wink. He lay trembling all over, his hands and feet convulsing, pouring cold sweat.

At his wits’ end, Mao’s assistant Shi Zhe suggested asking Stalin for help. Mao agreed, and Shi cabled Stalin, who replied at once, offering to send doctors. Mao accepted the offer, but two hours later he seems to have had second thoughts about laying himself so bare to Stalin’s eyes and asked Shi to hold the telegram. But it had already gone off.

Only days before, Stalin had recalled Mao’s GRU doctor Orlov, together with the whole GRU mission in Yenan. Orlov had been in Yenan for three and a half years without a break, but the minute he arrived in Moscow, Stalin ordered him back to Mao. The hapless Orlov arrived back on 7 January 1946, accompanied by a second doctor called Melnikov from the KGB. They found nothing seriously wrong with Mao, except for mental exhaustion and nervous stress. Mao was advised to delegate work more, relax, take walks and get plenty of fresh air. Orlov, however, was soon pleading nervous tension himself and begging Moscow to recall him. In vain.

On the plane with the doctors came Mao’s son, An-ying, to whom Stalin had personally presented an inscribed pistol before he left. It was over eighteen years since Mao had seen his son, then four years old, in 1927, when Mao had left his wife Kai-hui and three sons and begun his outlaw career. Now An-ying was a good-looking young man of twenty-three. At the airfield Mao hugged him, exclaiming: “How tall you have grown!” That evening, Mao wrote a thank-you letter to Stalin.

Mao had moved out of the clinic by now and settled in the HQ of the military, a beautiful place known as Peony Pavilion. It was surrounded by a large garden of peonies, including some of China’s most gorgeous varieties. To this rich splendor the plant-loving nominal C-in-C, Zhu De, and his staff had added a delicate peach orchard, a fish pond and a basketball court. Mao spent a lot of time with An-ying, often sitting at a square stone table chatting outside his adobe house, which stood right next to his deep — and private — air-raid shelter. A frequent mah-jong and card partner of the Maos at the time noticed that Mao acted very affectionately towards his son. Mao’s health gradually improved. By spring, he had made a good recovery.

The most comforting thing for Mao was that most of Manchuria was still in Communist hands. Stalin maintained overall control of the area, having hung on way beyond the three months he had promised, and had refused to allow anything but a skeleton Nationalist staff into the cities. Though the CCP had to move its organizations out of most cities, they entrenched in the vast countryside.

THE RUSSIAN ARMY did not finally leave Manchuria until 3 May 1946, nearly ten months after it had entered. To maximize the CCP’s chances, they kept the Nationalists in the dark until the very last minute about the pull-out schedule, while coordinating their departure with the CCP so that it could take over the area’s assets, including major cities, which the Reds now re-entered. Mao ordered his army again to hold out in key cities on the railway line, which he insisted were to be defended “regardless of the sacrifice,” “like Madrid,” evoking the heroic image of defending the capital to the death in the Spanish civil war.

Mao’s second in command, Liu Shao-chi, again cautioned that the Reds were not up to stopping Chiang’s army, and that most cities would have to be abandoned. The Manchuria commander, Lin Biao, also warned Mao that “there is no great likelihood of holding on to [the cities],” and suggested their strategy should be “to eliminate enemy forces, not defend cities.” He agreed with Liu Shao-chi that the priority was to build up rural bases. Mao insisted that the cities must be defended “to the death.”

But the next round of battles showed that his army was still no match for Chiang’s. Within weeks of the Russian withdrawal the Nationalists had seized every major city in Manchuria except Harbin, the nearest to Russia, and the Communist forces had been reduced to a state of collapse. They retreated north in chaos, under aerial bombardment, harried by Nationalist tanks and motorized troops. Lin Biao’s political commissar later admitted that “the whole army had disintegrated” and fallen into what he called “utter anarchy.” One officer recalled being chased northward non-stop for forty-two days: “It really looked as though we’d had it …”

Not only were the Reds collapsing militarily, but they were at a huge disadvantage with the civilian population, which longed for national unity after fourteen years of brutal Japanese rule, and saw the Nationalists as representing the government. Lin Biao reported to Mao: “People are saying that the 8th Route Army shouldn’t be fighting the government army … They regard the Nationalists as the Central Government.”

The CCP had a further disadvantage, that of being linked in people’s minds with the much-hated Russians. Russian troops plundered not only industrial equipment, but people’s homes; and rape by Russian soldiers was frequent. When the belated publication of the Yalta Agreement in February 1946 revealed the huge extraterritorial privileges Stalin had grabbed in Manchuria, anti-Soviet demonstrations erupted in many cities there, as well as in other parts of China. There was a widespread feeling that the CCP had got into Manchuria on the back of the Russians and was not working for the interests of China. When demonstrators shouted slogans like “The CCP should love our country,” onlookers applauded. Rumors circulated that the Party was offering the Russians women in exchange for weapons.

The locals treated the Chinese Reds quite differently from the Nationalists. One Red officer recalled: “We were hungry and thirsty when we got to Jilin … There was not a soul in the street … But when the enemy entered the city; somehow the folks all appeared, waving little flags and cheering … Imagine our anger!”

The Red troops were disheartened, and vented their fury even on their top brass. Lin Biao was once caught in his jeep in a crowd of retreating troops. When his guard asked the men to make way for “the chief,” he was greeted with yells like: “Ask that chief, are we retreating to the land of the Big Hairy Ones?” The sobriquet was the locals’ derogatory term for the Russians.

At this point it looked as though the Chinese Reds might be driven across the border into Russia, or be scattered into small guerrilla units in the mountains, which Lin Biao anticipated. On 1 June, he asked Mao for permission to abandon Harbin, the last big city the Reds held, about 500 km from the Russian border. The CCP’s Manchuria Bureau gave Mao the same fatalistic message the next day: “We have told Brother Chen [code name for the Russians] that we are ready to leave [Harbin] …” Mao twice implored Stalin to intervene directly, in the form of either a “military umbrella” or “joint operations.” Stalin declined, as intervention would have international implications, although he allowed CCP units to cross into Russia. On 3 June, Mao had to endorse plans to abandon Harbin and go over to guerrilla warfare “on a long-term basis.”

Mao was on the ropes. Then he was rescued — by the Americans.

In the Yalta Declaration, these are presented as reparations due Russia by Japan, but the reality was that they were gouged out of China. Churchill welcomed this, on the grounds that “any claim by Russia for indemnity at the expense of China would be favorable to our resolve about Hong Kong.” Though the deals involved Chinese territory, the Chinese government was not even informed, much less consulted. Moreover, the US put itself at Stalin’s mercy by committing to wait for his permission before it told Chiang Kai-shek — and placed itself in the uniquely constrained position of then being responsible for obtaining Chiang’s compliance. As a result, the Generalissimo was not given a full account by the US until 15 June, over four months later. This was shabby treatment of an ally, and it stored up trouble.

Stalin also had his own aggressive agenda: a tentative scheme to detach part of the Mongolian region of China adjacent to Outer Mongolia and merge it with the Soviet satellite. Russo — Mongolian occupation forces actually formed an Inner Mongolia provisional government, ready for the merger, but the scheme was then dropped.

When two years later he urged sending large forces deep into Nationalist areas, the commanders asked what would happen to the wounded without a base area to fall back on. Mao’s airy response was: “It’s easy … leave the wounded and the sick to the masses.”

Since then, a cultivated myth has credited Mao with the strategies of “surrounding the cities from the countryside” and of “aiming mainly to eliminate enemy forces, not to defend or capture cities.” In fact, the former idea came from Liu Shao-chi, and was vigorously opposed by Mao before practicality forced him to adopt it; and the latter was Lin Biao’s.

28. SAVED BY WASHINGTON (1944–47 AGE 50–53)

IT WAS NO secret that many US officials were decidedly unenthusiastic about Chiang, and so Mao acted to exploit this ambivalence in the hope that America would withhold support from the Generalissimo and perhaps take a friendlier line towards the Reds. Mao carefully fostered the delusion that the CCP was not a real Communist party, but one of moderate agrarian reformers, who wanted to cooperate with the US.

In mid-1944 Roosevelt sent a mission to Yenan. Just after the first Americans arrived, Mao floated the idea of changing the Party’s name: “We’ve been thinking of renaming our Party,” he told the Russian liaison in Yenan, Vladimirov, on 12 August: “of calling it not ‘Communist’ but something else. Then the situation … will be more favorable, especially with the Americans …” The Russians immediately chimed in. Later that month, Molotov fed the same line to Roosevelt’s then special envoy to China, General Patrick Hurley, telling him that in China “some … people called themselves ‘Communists’ but they had no relation whatever to communism. They were merely expressing their dissatisfaction at their economic condition by calling themselves Communists. However, once their economic conditions had improved, they would forget this political inclination. The Soviet Government … [was not] associated with the ‘Communist elements.’ ”

Red deception became especially important when Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman, sent America’s top general, George Marshall, to China in December 1945 to try to stop the civil war. Marshall, who had served in China in the 1920s, was already ill-disposed towards Chiang, mainly because of the corruption of Chiang’s relatives, and was susceptible to CCP claims that it and the US had a lot in common. At their first meeting, Chou En-lai soft-soaped Marshall by telling him how much the CCP “desired a democracy based … on the American style.” A month later, Chou egregiously suggested that Mao preferred America to Russia, telling Marshall “a small anecdote which might be of interest to you. It has been rumored recently, that Chairman Mao is going to pay a visit to Moscow. On learning this, Chairman Mao laughed and remarked half-jokingly that if ever he would take a furlough abroad … he would rather go to the United States …” Marshall relayed these remarks uncritically to Truman. Even years later, he was maintaining to Truman that the Reds had been more cooperative than the Nationalists.

Marshall did not understand Mao, or Mao’s relationship with Stalin. On 26 December 1945 he told Chiang that “it was very important to determine whether or not the Russian Government was in contact with and was advising the Chinese Communist party”—as though this still needed verification. Later (in February 1948), he told the US Congress that “in China we have no concrete evidence that [the Communist army] is supported by Communists from the outside.” This ignorance is particularly striking because the Americans, like the British, had been intercepting cables from Russia, some of them addressed to Yenan, clearly showing the relationship. Marshall was also given strong warnings by other American officials, including the head of the US mission in Yenan, who opened his final report with a three-word alarm: “Communism is International!”

Marshall visited Yenan on 4–5 March 1946. For the occasion, Mao made doubly sure that everything was shipshape and watertight. One step was to pack his son An-ying off to a village. He told An-ying this was to help him to learn farm labor and Chinese ways, but the real reason was that Mao was vexed by the attention the Americans were paying his English-speaking son. Soon after An-ying had arrived from Russia, Mao had introduced him to the Associated Press correspondent John Roderick, who then interviewed An-ying on the edge of the dance floor at a Saturday night party. Afterwards Mao exploded. He “did not even read the interview through,” An-ying recalled, “before he crushed it into a ball, and then told me sternly: … How dare you give an interview to a foreign reporter just like that, off the top of your head, without instructions?” An-ying had been schooled in the hard world of Stalin’s Russia, but even that had not prepared him for the super-steely discipline of his father’s laager. While An-ying was banished to the sticks, the non-English-speaking Mme Mao was very much on hand for her debut as First Lady.

Marshall’s report to Truman about Yenan oozed illusions: “I had a long talk with Mao Tze-tung, and I was frank to an extreme. He showed no resentment and gave me every assurance of cooperation.” Marshall informed Truman that Communist forces in Manchuria were “little more than loosely organized bands”; and, even more astonishingly, that: “It has been all but impossible for the Yenan headquarters to reach the leaders’ in Manchuria. This was after the Russians had flown CCP leaders to Manchuria from Yenan (in a DC-3) and when Yenan was in daily contact with CCP forces in the field that numbered hundreds of thousands.

While Marshall was still in Yenan, Mao summoned the GRU liaison, Dr. Orlov, and briefed him on the talks.

MARSHALL WAS to perform a monumental service to Mao. When Mao had his back to the wall in what could be called his Dunkirk in late spring 1946, Marshall put heavy — and decisive — pressure on Chiang to stop pursuing the Communists into northern Manchuria, saying that the US would not help him if he pushed further, and threatening to stop ferrying Nationalist troops to Manchuria. On 31 May, Marshall wrote to Chiang, invoking his personal honor:

Under the circumstances of the continued advance of the Government troops in Manchuria, I must … repeat that … a point is being reached where the integrity of my position is open to serious question. Therefore I request you again to immediately issue an order terminating advances, attacks or pursuits by Government troops …

Chiang gave in and agreed to a fifteen-day ceasefire. This came at the very moment when Mao had become resigned to abandoning the last big Red-held city in Manchuria, Harbin, and dispersing his army into guerrilla units. In fact, he had issued the order on 3 June but on the 5th, when he learned about the ceasefire, he dashed off a new order: “Hang on … especially keep Harbin.” The tide had turned.

Marshall’s diktat was probably the single most important decision affecting the outcome of the civil war. The Reds who experienced that period, from Lin Biao to army veterans, concurred in private that this truce was a fatal mistake on Chiang’s part. Had he pressed on, then at the very least he might have prevented the Reds establishing a large and secure base on the Soviet border, with rail links with Russia, over which huge amounts of heavy artillery were brought in. Furthermore, having agreed to a truce of two weeks, Chiang then found Marshall proposing that it be extended to nearly four months and cover the whole of Manchuria — and that the Communists be allowed to keep northern Manchuria. For Chiang to press on would have meant a head-on collision with Marshall, who, Chiang noted, “was in an exceptionally violent fury” in this period.

The Generalissimo found pressure bearing down on him not only from Marshall, but from President Truman himself. In mid-July, two prominent anti-Nationalist intellectuals were gunned down in the Nationalist area. That month, a public opinion poll in the US showed that only 13 percent favored aiding Chiang, while 50 percent wanted to “Stay Out.” On 10 August, Truman wrote to Chiang using very tough language, citing the two assassinations and saying that the American people “view with violent repugnance” events in China. Truman threatened that he might have to “redefine” America’s position if there was no progress “toward a peaceful settlement.”

Under these circumstances, Chiang held his fire in Manchuria (although he pursued Mao’s forces elsewhere, with some success). One of Chiang’s closest colleagues, Chen Li-fu, disagreed with his restraint. “Be like Franco of Spain,” he told Chiang; “if you want to fight communism, fight it to the end.” A “stop-go” approach would not work, he told Chiang: “No good to fire and cease fire, cease fire and fire …” But Chiang needed American aid, which came to some US$3 billion for the whole civil war (almost $1.6 billion in outright grants, and about $850 million in de facto gifts of arms), and bowed to American pressure.

Mao thus gained a secure base in northern Manchuria some 1,000 km by 500 km, an area far bigger than Germany, with long land borders and railway links with Russia and its satellites. To his top brass, Mao compared this base to a comfortable armchair, with Russia as a solid back to lean on, and North Korea and Outer Mongolia on each side on which to rest his arms.

WITH FOUR MONTHS’ RESPITE, the Reds had the time to integrate the nearly 200,000-strong Manchukuo puppet army and the other new recruits, and to retrain and recondition the old troops. Any soldier the Communists could not control was “cleansed” (qing-xi), which often meant killed. Classified figures reveal that for the Red Army in this theater, the total for those “cleansed,” together with those who “escaped,” came to a staggering 150,000 in three years, almost as many as the total killed in action, assumed captured and invalided out (172,400).

Motivating the troops to fight Chiang was a key part of the reconditioning. This was mainly done through rallies at which soldiers were pushed to “speak bitterness.” Most had been poor peasants, and had histories of hunger and injustice. Bitter memories were stirred up, bringing out personal traumas. The crowds became febrile. A report to Mao said that one soldier had burst out at a rally with such a storm of grief and anger that “he passed out. And when he came to, he never recovered sanity and is now an idiot.” When the rallies reached their emotional climax, the Party would tell the inflamed crowds that they were now fighting to “take revenge on Chiang Kai-shek,” whose regime was the source of all their woes. The soldiers thus found personal motivation to fight. People who went through the process testify to its effectiveness, even though they find this hard to believe when they reflect in a calmer state of mind.

Many, however, declined to be psyched up, and some made skeptical remarks. They quickly found themselves condemned as members of “the exploiting classes,” and joined the ranks of those destined for “cleansing.”

The military training was as intensive as the political reorientation. Here, the Russians were indispensable. When the first Chinese Red units arrived in Manchuria, the Russians had taken some of them for bandits. They did not look like regular troops, and could not handle modern weapons. During the truce, the Russians opened at least sixteen major military institutions, including air force, artillery and engineering schools. Many Chinese officers went to Russia for training, and others to the Russian enclaves of Port Arthur and Dalian. These two ports that Stalin had acquired at Yalta now also served as sanctuaries for Mao’s shattered units and cadres in southern Manchuria; here they were given refuge, trained and rearmed.

Moscow’s arming of Mao accelerated. The Russians transferred some 900 Japanese aircraft, 700 tanks, more than 3,700 artillery pieces, mortars and grenade-launchers, nearly 12,000 machine-guns, plus the sizeable Sungari River flotilla, as well as numerous armored cars and anti-aircraft guns, and hundreds of thousands of rifles. More than 2,000 wagonloads of arms and war matériel came by rail from North Korea, which had housed major Japanese arsenals, and more captured Japanese weapons arrived from Outer Mongolia. Russian-made arms were also shipped in, plus captured German weapons with the markings chiseled out, which the Reds then pretended were captured American arms.

In addition, the Russians secretly transferred tens of thousands of Japanese POWs to the CCP. These troops played a major role in turning the ragtag Communist army into a formidable battle machine, and were crucial in training Red forces to use the Japanese arms on which they chiefly depended, as well as for servicing and repairing these weapons. It was Japanese, too, who founded the CCP air force, with Japanese pilots serving as flight instructors. Thousands of well-trained Japanese medical staff brought the Red wounded a new level of professional and much-welcomed treatment. Some Japanese troops even took part in combat operations.

Another vital factor was Soviet-occupied North Korea. From there the Russians supplied not only arms but also a Japanese-and Russian-trained contingent of 200,000 hardened Korean regulars. In addition, with its 800-km border with Manchuria, North Korea became what the CCP called “our clandestine rear” and bolthole. In June 1946, when they were on the run, the Chinese Reds moved troops, wounded and matériel there. As the Nationalists took much of central Manchuria, splitting the Red forces in two, the Communists were able to use North Korea as a link between their forces in north and south Manchuria, and between Manchuria and the east coast of China, particularly the vital province of Shandong. To supervise this vast transportation complex, the CCP set up offices in Pyongyang and four Korean ports.

By no means the least of the Russians’ contributions was to get the railway system running. Once the northern Manchuria base was consolidated, in late 1946, a team of Russian experts restored the extensive railway network in Mao’s territory and had it linked with Russia by spring 1947. In June 1948, when Mao’s army was preparing for its final push to take all Manchuria, Stalin sent his former railways minister, Ivan Kovalev, to oversee the work. Altogether, the Russians supervised the repair of more than 10,000 km of track and 120 major bridges. This railway system was critical in allowing the Communists to move vast numbers of troops, and heavy artillery, at speed, to attack the main cities that autumn.

The gigantic assistance from Russia, North Korea and Mongolia was carried out in the greatest secrecy — and is still little known today. The Reds went to great lengths to conceal it. Mao told Lin Biao to delete mention of the fact that their base “was supported by Korea, the Soviet Union, Outer Mongolia” even from a secret inner-Party document. Moscow played its customary part by calling reports of Soviet assistance “fabrications from start to finish.” The real fabrication was Mao’s claim that the CCP was fighting with “only millet plus rifles.”

This Russian help, however, came at a grievous price for those living under Mao’s rule. Mao did not want to be beholden to Stalin for this aid, and he wanted to feel free to ask for more. Twice, in August and October 1946, he offered to pay for it with food, an offer Russia’s trade representative in Harbin at first declined. So in November Mao sent one of his most dependable acolytes, Liu Ya-lou, to Moscow to insist. A secret agreement was reached for the CCP to send Russia one million tons of food every year.

The result was famine and deaths from starvation in some areas of China occupied by the Communists. In the Yenan region, according to Mao’s logistics manager, over 10,000 peasants died of starvation in 1947. Mao knew the situation very well, as he was traveling in the region that year, and saw village children hunting for stray peas in the stables of his entourage, and women scrabbling for the water in which his rice had been washed, for the sake of its driblets of nutrient. In the neighboring Red base in Shanxi, his guard chief told him after a visit home that people were starving, and that his own family was lucky to be alive — and this was soon after harvest time. In Manchuria itself, civilian deaths from starvation were in the hundreds of thousands in 1948, and even Communist troops were often half-starved.

Few knew that the famine in Red areas in those years was largely due to the fact that Mao was exporting food; the shortage was put down to “war.” Here was a foretaste of the future Great Famine, which was likewise Mao’s creation: again the result of his decision to export food to Russia.

AT THE TIME of the Marshall-dictated ceasefire, in June 1946, Chiang was militarily still far superior to Mao. The Nationalist army stood at 4.3 million, easily outnumbering Mao’s 1.27 million. For a while, the Generalissimo seemed to prevail. While he left the Reds in peace in Manchuria, he drove them out of most of their strongholds in China proper, including the only important city they still held, Zhangjiakou, in October. Farther south, the Reds were swept virtually completely out of the Yangtze area. In all theaters, Mao repeated his failed Manchuria approach, and urged his generals to seize big cities at any cost. His plan for eastern China on 22 June, for instance, called for closing in on Nanjing, where Chiang had just reinstalled his capital. Though Mao called this a “no-risk” undertaking, it had to be abandoned, like his other plans.

In spite of these substantial losses, Mao remained totally confident — because he had the north Manchuria base. When Chiang did begin to attack it, in October 1946, after the ceasefire had given the Reds more than four months to consolidate, he was unable to break their defenses. In that winter of 1946–47, the coldest in many people’s memory, the Nationalists found themselves fighting hard see-saw battles with the transformed Communist forces under Lin Biao, whose military talent came into its own in these harsh months. Mao summed up Lin’s style appreciatively as “merciless and devious.” One method of Lin’s was to make use of the cold weather. In temperatures as low as –40 °C, when passing water could cause frostbite on the penis, his troops lay in ambush in ice and snow for days on end. Red veterans estimated their own dead and crippled from frostbite at up to 100,000. The Nationalists suffered much less because they had better clothes — and less ruthless commanders.

By spring 1947, the Reds’ north Manchuria base had become unshakable. Marshall had left China in January, marking the end of US mediation efforts. The US later gave considerable aid to Chiang, but it made no difference. The goal the Communists had been secretly seeking for more than two decades, “linking up with the Soviet Union,” had been accomplished — with help from Washington, however unwitting. Mao’s victory nationwide was only a matter of time.

The Moscow — Mao double act deceived many into suggesting for decades that Mao could have been won over by the US, and that the US had lost the chance to detach Mao from the Soviet camp. In fact, in secret, Mao always told his Party that the friendliness towards America “is only a tactic of expedience in our struggle against Chiang.”

Washington’s savvy ambassador in Moscow, Averell Harriman, had been concerned about Marshall’s appointment precisely because he felt Marshall was not sufficiently aware of the “Russian danger.”

Lin was also told: “say we struggle for political, economic and military democracy … Do not put forward the slogan of class struggle.”

29. MOLES, BETRAYALS AND POOR LEADERSHIP DOOM CHIANG (1945–49 AGE 51–55)

BY EARLY 1947, when the Nationalists had failed to crack Mao’s vast base on the borders with Russia, Chiang knew he was in trouble. Many in the country knew, too. He badly needed a victory to boost morale. He came up with the idea of taking Yenan, Mao’s capital. Its capture would have “the greatest significance,” he wrote in his diary on 1 March. On that day, he gave this vital task to a man who enjoyed his unconditional trust. General Hu Tsung-nan was the guardian of his younger (and adopted) son, Weigo, and had stood proxy for Chiang at Weigo’s wedding.

Our investigations have convinced us that General Hu was a Red “sleeper.” He started his career at the Nationalists’ Whampoa Military Academy in 1924, which Moscow founded, bankrolled and staffed, at a time when Sun Yat-sen was trying to use Russian sponsorship to conquer China. Chiang Kai-shek was the head of the Academy, and Chou En-lai the director of its pivotal Political Department. Many secret Communist agents were planted there, and went on to become officers in the Nationalist military.

At Whampoa, Hu Tsung-nan was strongly suspected of being a secret Communist, but he had well-placed friends who vouched for him. He then struck up a friendship with Chiang’s intelligence chief, Tai Li, who match-made his marriage. The two became so close that Tai ordered his subordinates in Hu’s units to send copies of all their intelligence reports to Hu as well as to himself, the result of which was that none of them dared report any suspicions about Hu.

In 1947, Chiang assigned him to take Yenan. On the day he received the assignment, the message appeared on Mao’s desk. Mao ordered the city to be evacuated, and the local population was herded out into the hills by armed militia. The bulk of the Red administration went to the Red base east of the Yellow River.

On 18–19 March, Hu took Yenan, which the Nationalists trumpeted as a great victory. But all they acquired was a ghost town. On Mao’s orders, the evacuees and the locals had buried not only their food, but all their household goods, down to cooking utensils.

Mao himself had left only hours before, in an ostentatiously leisurely, even nonchalant manner, pausing awhile to gaze at the pagoda which was the symbol of Yenan, while his driver revved the engine of his American jeep (donated by the departing US mission) as a reminder that the Nationalists were nearby. Mao staged this performance to build confidence in people around him. A short time before, Mao’s top brass had been awe-struck when he sent most of the troops in Yenan away, keeping only 20,000 men with him for the whole of the region — less than one-tenth of the force Hu had at his disposal, which totaled some 250,000.

Mao set off north, riding with Chou En-lai, now his chief of staff, and Mme Mao. On the way, he and Chou chatted and laughed, as if, in the words of a bodyguard, “this was an outing.”

About 30 km northeast of Yenan, at a place called Qinghuabian, Mao asked the driver to slow down in a deep valley where the loess slopes had been scoured by rain and floods into deep canyons. His bodyguards were puzzled to see him pointing and nodding thoughtfully with Chou. It was only a week later that the explanation dawned on them, when Hu’s 31st Brigade HQ and 2,900 troops walked into an ambush at this exact spot on 25 March.

The brigade had been given the order to follow this road by Hu only the day before. But Mao’s men had started taking up positions days earlier — and Mao had committed his entire force of 20,000 to this one operation. Before the first shots were fired, the brigade spotted the ambushers, and radioed the information to Hu. General Hu told his force to press on, threatening court martial if they did not, and the 2,900 men were wiped out. Meanwhile, Hu had dispatched the bulk of his army in another direction, due west, making it impossible for it to come to the rescue of the trapped brigade.

Three weeks later, on 14 April, Mao scored another victory in exactly the same fashion at a place called Yangmahe, when one of Hu’s units marched straight into an ambush. Five thousand men were killed, wounded or captured. Just as before, Hu had moved his main force away, so the doomed brigade was cut off from it by impassable ravines.

On 4 May came a third pushover, when the Communists took Hu’s main forward depot, Panlong. Once again, Hu had sent his main force away on a wild goose chase, leaving the depot lightly defended. Both the defenders and the main force had reported Red units “lying in hiding” near the depot, but Hu said they were crying wolf. When the main force reached its target, it found an empty city.

The depot at Panlong handed the Reds vast stores of food, clothing, ammunition and medical supplies, while the Nationalists were left starving. Some were reduced to taking shoes from rotting Communist corpses. “No matter how we washed them,” one recalled, “we still couldn’t get rid of the horrible stench.” Many fell ill, but they had been cleaned out of medicine.

After these three victories within two months of the Nationalists taking Yenan, the Communists broadcast the news that Mao had remained in the Yenan region. The import was clear: even though he was not actually in the capital, the CCP supremo was able to survive and operate in the area, and was very much in control of events.

Mao remained within some 150 km of Hu’s HQ in Yenan city for a whole year, traveling with an entourage of 800 people, which eventually grew to 1,400, including a cavalry company. A sizable radio corps operated twenty-four hours a day, keeping contact with Red armies and bases all over China and with Russia.

Mao moved about from place to place for the first time since he had come to rule this region a decade before. A litter was kept at the ready, but Mao preferred walking and riding, unlike his custom on the Long March, and became very fit. His chef carried his favorite foods like chili and sausages. Mao almost never ate with the locals or in restaurants, for fear of poor hygiene, or poison. He slept so well that he even dispensed with sleeping pills, and was in marked high spirits. He did quite a bit of sightseeing, and posed for a newsreel crew who came from Manchuria to film him. Mme Mao acquired a stills camera, and took a lot of photographs, embarking on a hobby at which she later became quite accomplished. The Russian doctors came over frequently from the Red base east of the Yellow River to give Mao check-ups and report on his condition to Stalin.

During this year, most of the Yenan region remained under Communist control, and Hu’s vast army was sent into one large ambush after another, always following the same pattern: isolated units surrounded and overwhelmed by concentrated Communist forces while Hu’s main forces chased their own tails elsewhere. Hu’s superbly trained artillery battalion fell wholesale to the Reds, and came to form a significant part of Mao’s artillery. Yet another spectacular ambush buried one of Hu’s crack units when he ordered it back to Yenan, claiming that the city was under threat. It was trapped in a narrow mountain valley and shelled to smithereens. While Hu’s army was thus destroyed on a massive scale, Mao came across as a military genius who could pull spectacular victories out of a hat.

MAO HAD ONE CLOSE SHAVE. It came in June 1947, when he had lingered nearly two months in a village called Wangjiawan, staying with a peasant’s family, the first time he lived in intimate proximity to the locals. Here he took walks and went riding for pleasure. When the weather got hotter, he decided he wanted a shady place to read outdoors, so his bodyguards felled some trees to make pillars, weaving the twigs and leaves into a bower, where Mao read every day, studying English for relaxation.

On 8 June, one of Hu’s commanders, Liou Kan, suddenly appeared nearby with a large force. He had been tipped off about Mao’s presence by a local who had managed to escape from the Red area. Mao erupted with unprecedented rage, bellowing at Chou En-lai, and a heated discussion ensued about which way to run. The nearest safe haven was a Red base east of the Yellow River, where boats and cars were on constant standby at the crossing. But it was too far away, so Mao decided to go west, towards the Gobi Desert — after taking the precaution of rounding up a large group of villagers, who were forcibly evacuated in the opposite direction as decoys.

Mao made off through thunderstorms, carried on the backs of bodyguards along mountain paths too slippery for horses. Radio silence was imposed to minimize the chances of detection — except for one radio, which worked non-stop, almost certainly to contact Hu to call his troops off.

Which is exactly what happened. On 11 June, Liou Kan was so close on Mao’s heels that the Reds could hear his troops and see their torches. Mao’s guards said they felt their hair seemed to “stand on end.” As they were getting ready to defend him to the death, Mao emerged from a cave all smiles, predicting that the enemy would pass them by. At that instant, right in front of the guards’ astonished eyes, the Nationalist troops rushed by, and left them totally unmolested. Hu had ordered Liou Kan to drop everything and race on to his original destination, Baoan, Mao’s old capital.

This incident may well have triggered an urgent request to Stalin to get Mao out to Russia. A cable from Stalin on 15 June was clearly in reply to such a request. Stalin offered to send a plane to pick up Mao.

By then, Mao was safe. The day before Stalin’s telegram, Mao had wired a cheerful message to his colleagues in the Red base east of the Yellow River: “On 9–11 this month, Liou Kan’s 4 brigades held a parade where we were … Apart from a little loss to the population, no losses. Now the Liou [Kan] army is running to and fro between Yenan and Baoan.” Mao did not take up Stalin’s offer to evacuate him this time. All the same, he ordered an airstrip built at once just east of the Yellow River, in case.

Liou Kan soon met his death. In February 1948 he was ordered to reinforce the town of Yichuan, between Yenan and the Yellow River. There were three possible routes, and the one picked for him, by General Hu, ran through a narrow wooded valley. Scouts found a heavy concentration of Communist troops, clearly indicating an ambush. Liou Kan radioed Hu for permission to attack the ambushers and then change course. Hu flatly refused.

One of Liou Kan’s division commanders, Wang Ying-tsun, later wrote: “After this order, which completely ignored the real situation and our interests, officers and soldiers lost heart … everyone marched in silence, with their heads bowed …” They walked straight into the encirclement and were virtually annihilated. Half a dozen generals were killed, and Liou Kan committed suicide. The division commander managed to escape, and later saw General Hu. According to him, the general “hypocritically expressed his regret, and said why did you press on when you did not have enough troops? I thought: it was your order, and my men were pounded and killed …” The division commander testified: “After Liou Kan’s 29th Army was wiped out, it went without saying that Hu Tsung-nan’s troops had no morale to speak of. Moreover, the state of mind of the whole Chiang area was tremendously shaken …” This defeat sealed the Nationalists’ fate in the Yenan theater, and negated Chiang’s whole aim in capturing Yenan, which had been to boost morale and confidence in the country at large.

Chiang knew that Hu wrecked everything he touched. In his diary of 2 March 1948, the Generalissimo wrote: “This catastrophe cost over one third of the main force [under Hu],” and that Hu was “following the same fatal road again and again.” And yet, when Hu disingenuously offered his resignation, Chiang turned it down, with only a lamentation: “The loss of our troops at Yichuan is not only the biggest setback in the Nationalist Army’s campaign against the bandits, but also an entirely senseless sacrifice. Good generals killed, a whole army wiped out. Grief and anguish are consuming me …” A half-hearted investigation blamed the debacle on the dead Liou Kan. The Nationalist system followed its tradition of closing ranks, especially once others saw that Hu was so secure in Chiang’s favor.

The fact that the Generalissimo allowed Hu to get away with a whole year of incredible defeats, all clearly following the same pattern, says a lot about his leadership and judgment. He trusted people he liked, and would back them come what may, often sentimentally. He was also stubborn, and would stick by his own mistakes. Chiang even allowed Hu to siphon off troops from other vital theaters. The chief US military adviser, Major General David Barr, observed that Hu “prevailed on” Chiang “to reinforce his Xian garrison to an extent which was later to prove disastrous to the Nationalists in east central China”; key losses there were “a direct result of this shift of troops to the west,” where, Barr noted, they were either useless or destroyed.

When Mao finally left the Yenan region and headed east over the Yellow River to the Red base on 23 March 1948, he did so publicly, with organized crowds of peasants seeing him off at the river crossing. And he shook hands with local cadres before he boarded the boat. This unusual openness was to demonstrate that he was not running away furtively. And the general point that the Reds were riding high was reinforced a month later when Hu abandoned Yenan altogether. Over the past year he had lost 100,000 troops. Recovering Yenan was potentially a propaganda windfall for the Reds, but Mao adopted an extremely low-key position. His assistant, Shi Zhe, expected him to make the most of the occasion: “so I waited by his side … But nothing happened.” Mao did not want to attract more attention to Hu in case he was sacked.

Hu went on to cause even more spectacular catastrophes for Chiang, ultimately losing many hundreds of thousands of troops. When Chiang got to Taiwan, Hu went too. There he was immediately impeached, on the charge that he had “brought about the greatest damage to our army and country” of all the Nationalists. But the impeachment failed, thanks to Chiang’s protection. Chiang even put Hu in charge of operations to infiltrate the Mainland: they all came to grief. Hu died in Taiwan in 1962. Chiang may have come to doubt his judgment in his later years. His chief of guards (and subsequently prime minister of Taiwan), Hau Po-tsun, told us that Chiang showed an aversion to the mention of the Whampoa Academy, which is generally assumed to have been his base. Many moles had hailed from there.

MOLES CONTINUED to play a key role in the defeats Chiang suffered in the three military campaigns in 1948–49 that clinched the civil war. The first was in Manchuria, where Chiang picked as his supreme commander a general called Wei Li-huang. In this case, Chiang had not only been told that Wei was a Communist agent, but actually suspected this to be true. Even so, he put Wei in charge of all the 550,000 best troops in this critical theater in January 1948.

Wei had asked to join the CCP in 1938. Mao passed the news to Moscow in 1940, telling the Russians that the CCP had instructed Wei to stay undercover with the Nationalists. It seems that Wei decided on his betrayal out of a mighty grudge against Chiang for not promoting him as high as he felt he deserved. Wei had told cronies then: “I am going for the Communists … Yenan is nice to me … Let’s work with the Communists to bring him [Chiang] down.”

Chiang had been told about Wei’s secret liaisons by a Communist defector at the time, and so he passed Wei over again for a top army post after 1945, even though Wei had fought well in Burma against the Japanese, and earned the title “Hundred Victories Wei.” Wei became even more disgruntled, and went into self-imposed exile abroad.

The reason Wei was brought back in 1948 and given such a crucial job was that Chiang was frantically trying to woo the Americans, who thought highly of Wei’s performance in Burma and regarded him as an important “liberal.” The then US vice-consul in Shenyang, William Stokes, told us that Chiang appointed Wei “in a futile attempt to gain more American equipment and funding, because Wei was recognised by the Americans as a proven military leader.”

The moment Wei received the call from Chiang, he let the Russian embassy in Paris know, and thenceforth coordinated his every move with the CCP. First of all, he pulled his troops back into a few big cities, thus allowing the Communists to take control of 90 percent of Manchuria without a fight and then to surround these cities.

Mao wanted Wei to make sure that all the Nationalist troops under him stayed in Manchuria so that they could be wiped out there. Wei therefore ignored repeated orders from Chiang to move his troops to Jinzhou, the southernmost railway junction in Manchuria, preparatory to withdrawing from Manchuria completely (a move the chief US adviser, Major General Barr, had also recommended). Instead of sacking Wei, Chiang went on arguing with him for months — until the Communists took Jinzhou, on 15 October, trapping most of the hundreds of thousands of Nationalist troops in Manchuria. Mao’s troops then swiftly isolated Wei’s forces in the remaining Nationalist-held cities, and attacked them one by one. With the fall of Shenyang on 2 November, the whole of Manchuria was in Mao’s hands.

For his performance in Manchuria, Chiang put Wei under house arrest, and there were calls for him to be court-martialed. But the Generalissimo, who rarely executed, or even imprisoned, any of his top commanders or opponents, let Wei go, and he sailed off unmolested to Hong Kong. A year later, two days after the proclamation of Communist China, Wei cabled Mao, wagging his tail: “wise guidance … magnificent triumph … great leader … rejoice and cheer and whole-hearted support … Am leaping up ten thousand feet like a bird …” But he cynically declined to go and live under Mao, and tried to contact the CIA in 1951 to back him to lead a third force. He finally moved to the Mainland in 1955.

Mao spoke to his nephew about Wei in withering terms: “Wei Li-huang didn’t return until he went bankrupt doing business in Hong Kong. A man like Wei Li-huang is contemptible …” And Mao made sure his contempt was demonstrated. Wei’s old Communist contacts were told to turn down his invitations to dinner, and the snubbing lasted until Wei’s death in Peking in 1960. His critical help for Mao is still hushed up, as Mao’s military genius would look a lot less brilliant if it were known that the enemy’s top commander had offered up much of his force — and many of Chiang’s best troops — on a platter.

DURING THE WHOLE of the Manchuria campaign, Mao never went there. He was at his new HQ at Xibaipo, 240 km southwest of Peking. After Manchuria fell in early November 1948, he ordered the army there under Lin Biao to come south. This army now stood at upwards of 1.3 million strong, and its new mission was to tackle the 600,000-man Nationalist army in northern China led by Fu Tso-yi, a celebrated general who had fought China’s first winning battle against Japanese puppets in 1936. The encounter between Lin and Fu, known as the Peking — Tianjin Campaign, was the second of the three key campaigns that decided the civil war.

Unlike Wei, General Fu was not a secret Communist. But he was surrounded by people who were, not least his own daughter, who was assigned by the Party to stay with her father in this period and report his every move. Chiang had some idea about this situation, but took no action to remedy it.

By November, even before Lin was on his way south from Manchuria, Fu had made up his mind to surrender, without telling Chiang. He had lost faith in Chiang’s regime, and decided to try to save the area under him from pointless devastation — not least Peking itself, the nation’s cultural capital, where his HQ was located. He did not do this out of any illusions about Communist rule, which, he said publicly at the time, would bring “cruelty … terror and tyranny,” and the decision to surrender caused him great anguish. He began to fall to pieces, and was seen slapping his own face, and contemplating suicide.

Chiang knew what was happening to Fu. On 12 December he wrote in his diary that Fu was “deeply depressed … and seems to be going insane.” But he still refused to sack him, and when Fu offered to resign, Chiang turned him down with a maudlin “10,000 Nos.”

Mao kept close tabs on Fu’s mental condition through Fu’s daughter, and he decided he could extract more from the situation than just a surrender. He could establish himself in the public eye as a military genius who had beaten Fu, the renowned war hero. So, when Fu sued for surrender, Mao strung Fu’s envoys along for two months, not accepting the surrender but not saying “No” either, while all the time keeping up attacks on Fu’s army. By now Fu was quite unfit to command. One officer recalled how during one key battle, when asked for instructions, “Fu dithered and faltered and then said listlessly: ‘Play it by ear.’ At that moment, I thought, we are finished …” Predictably, Mao’s army took city after city, including Tianjin, the third largest in China, which fell on 15 January 1949. Only when he had created an image of himself as a military giant-killer did Mao accept Fu’s standing offer to surrender Peking. Mao was thus able to say that Fu had opted for peace only after being thoroughly defeated on the battlefield — by Mao himself. The truth is that the whole campaign, which cost tens of thousands of lives, did not have to be fought at all. A broken Fu collaborated with Mao until his death on the Mainland in 1974.

AT ABOUT THE SAME TIME as the sham Peking — Tianjin Campaign, a third huge, and more genuine, campaign was being fought in the heartland of China to the north of Chiang’s capital, Nanjing. Known as the Huai — Hai Campaign, this involved well over one million men, and lasted from November 1948 to January 1949. The chief commander on the Nationalist side here was not a Communist agent, or a mental wreck. But just below him there were strategically placed Red sleepers, including two generals who had been secret Party members for ten and twenty years respectively, who opened up the gateway to this battleground within forty-eight hours of the campaign starting.

The major saboteurs were two other men in Chiang’s own HQ called Liu Fei and Kuo Ju-kui, who were intimately involved in drawing up the battle plans for the campaign. They placed the Nationalists on the defensive in every move by deliberately making wrong deployments and recommendations, while passing the plans to the Communists.

Chiang was particularly dependent on Kuo, to whom he spoke on the phone almost every day, and whose ruinous advice he heeded. Kuo actually fell under suspicion at this time from field commanders, and was even denounced as a spy by no less a person than Chiang’s adopted son, Weigo. But the Generalissimo did nothing until it was too late, and even then he merely transferred Kuo to Sichuan — on the recommendation of the other key mole, Liu Fei. In Sichuan, Kuo would later surrender an entire army.

By mid-January 1949, Mao had wrapped up all three major campaigns triumphantly. The country north of the Yangtze, where 80 percent of Chiang’s troops had been stationed, was Mao’s. He now wanted moles to be posted to unconquered areas south of the river, to wait for his army to arrive and then surrender at the opportune moment. Nationalist bigwigs jumped ship in droves. On 7 January Mao informed Stalin that “many prominent” Chiang men, including former defense minister Pai, were seeking deals: “Pai Chung-hsi asked our people — whatever orders come from the CCP, I would fulfill them immediately …” (Pai in fact did not go with Mao.) Mao told supplicants to stay with Chiang, and in some cases even to put up resistance and wait for the right moment. Though the Yangtze was a formidable barrier, and Chiang had a sizable navy, these old and new betrayals made sure that the road was open to the capital, Nanjing, and the financial center, Shanghai — and to the rest of China. On 9–10 January, Mao confidently informed Stalin that his government “can be created in summer,” or “earlier.”

Mao’s victory in the civil war was enormously helped by Chiang’s very poor judgment about people — although it was also not easy to detect and root out the Communist moles. Mao’s own policy was not to take the slightest chance. The terror campaigns in Yenan and the other Red areas had exposed and severed virtually every connection individual Communists had with the Nationalists, and the Communists’ total destruction of privacy meant there was no way those under their rule could contact the Nationalists even if they wanted to.

And Mao never let up. Each time he acquired more territory and personnel, he took relentless steps to enforce control, requiring each new Party enlistee to write down all his or her family and social relations — and this was just for starters. He never stopped seeking, never stopped plugging, every conceivable loophole. Very few agents, Nationalist or foreign, survived his attention, certainly none who reached any position of importance.

CHIANG’S STRONG FEELINGS for his wife contributed heavily to him losing China. His first prime minister after the Sino-Japanese War was T.V. Soong, who was Mme Chiang’s brother. The Soongs and the family Mme Chiang’s elder sister had married into, the Kungs, grew fat on T.V.’s policies. After the Japanese surrender, T.V. set the exchange rate for the currency of the puppet government outside Manchuria at the absurd level of 1 to 200. This saw the family wealth swell, but impoverished the entire population in the former Japanese-occupied areas in China proper, which included the main cities like Shanghai and Nanjing, with the bulk of the nation’s middle class. Under T.V., takeover officials engaged in widespread extortion, shaking down the rich by designating them “collaborators.” Chiang himself acknowledged that his officials were “indulging in extreme extravagance, whoring wildly and gambling with no restraint … They brag, swagger and extort and stop at nothing …” “The Calamity of Victory” was how the influential Ta Kung Pao newspaper described the takeover.

At the time of the Japanese surrender, Chiang seemed to be a glorious victor, yet within a very short time he was plunging into decline. Hyper-inflation, food crises, hoarding and panic buying became endemic in the cities. Under T.V., the government managed to squander not only its own reserves, but also the sizable holdings of gold and foreign currency that it inherited from the puppet government.

The Soongs and the Kungs had access to China’s foreign currency reserves at preferential rates, which enabled them to sell US goods in China at a huge profit, causing the largest trade deficit in China’s history in 1946. This dumping bankrupted swaths of industry and commerce, and T.V. was forced to resign as prime minister on 1 March 1947, after being fiercely attacked in the National Assembly and the press. Chiang ordered an investigation, which concluded that Soong and Kung companies had illegally converted more than US$380 million.

But all the Generalissimo did was demote T.V., which outraged and alienated many devoted, and uncorrupt, followers. Demoralization accelerated throughout the population, while many denounced the regime as “a bunch of robbers” and “bloodsuckers.” Chiang’s failure to clean up, and especially to come to grips with the malfeasance of his wife’s family, also lost him support in America.

The report of the investigation into Chiang’s relatives was kept secret. Then the Nationalists’ own newspaper, the Central Daily, got hold of a copy and published it on 29 July, causing a sensation. Two days later, after irate phone calls from Mme Chiang to her husband, the paper had to carry a notice claiming it had got the decimal point wrong, and lowered the sum taken by the families from over US$300 million to US$3 million.

Chiang consistently let personal feelings dictate his political and military actions. He lost China to a man who had none of his weak spots.

This was partly on account of his close friendship with a man called Hu Kung-mien, who at the time was commonly assumed to be a secret Communist, and who has now been acknowledged by Peking as an agent. During the war against Japan, when Hu Tsung-nan was stationed south of Yenan, he made this man his representative to Mao.

Mao’s radios had been maintaining regular communication with Communist agents in Hu’s army, “so their action was entirely under our control,” one of Mao’s radio men told us, adding that “some of the identities of the underground are not disclosed even today” (1999).

30. CHINA CONQUERED (1946–49 AGE 52–55)

MAO’S MOST FORMIDABLE weapon was pitilessness. In 1948, when he moved on Changchun, in Manchuria, and a direct assault failed to take it, an order was given to starve it into surrender. The actual words used on 30 May by Mao’s commander on the spot, Lin Biao, were: “Turn Changchun into a city of death.”

The defending commander, General Cheng Tung-kuo, was a hero of the war against Japan, and refused to capitulate. As there was only enough food to see the 500,000 civilians through until the end of July, he tried to evacuate civilians.

Lin Biao’s response, endorsed by Mao, was: “Strictly ban civilians from leaving the city.” The Communists let people go who had arms or ammunition, so as to encourage Nationalist soldiers to defect, but specifically blocked civilians. Mao’s calculation was that General Cheng was “a nice sort of guy,” as he described him to Lin Biao, and could be pressured into surrendering by massive civilian deaths. Though completely without pity himself, Mao knew how to manipulate it in others. As it happened, Cheng stuck it out to the end, although he was very torn.

Three months after the city was sealed off, Lin Biao reported to Mao:

The blockade … has produced remarkable results, and has caused grave famine in the city … The civilian inhabitants are mainly living on tree leaves and grass, and many have died of starvation …

“Our main policy has been to forbid exit,” Lin wrote.

On the front line, we have placed one sentry every 50 metres, plus wire and ditches, and blocked all the gaps … Those who got out, we persuaded [sic] to return … When starvation got worse and worse, hungry people … flocked out; after we drove them back, they were pressed into No Man’s Land … Many died of starvation there. In [one place] alone, there were about 2,000 deaths …

This policy was so brutal that the troops balked at enforcing it. Lin told Mao:

The starving people knelt in front of our soldiers en masse, begging to be allowed to go. Some put their babies down in front of the troops and turned back themselves, some hanged themselves in the sentry posts. The sentries could not bear the sight of the misery. Some knelt with the starving people and wept with them … others secretly released refugees. After we corrected this, we discovered another tendency. Soldiers beat up, abused and tied up refugees [to push them back] and went as far as opening fire on refugees, causing deaths.

Even the hard-hearted Lin recommended letting the refugees go. There was no reply from Mao. Lin, familiar with Mao’s tactic of veto by silence, then took it upon himself to issue an order on 11 September: “Release Changchun refugees … at once.” But the order was not carried out, which can only mean that Mao rescinded it. The only people allowed to leave were those with something useful to the Reds, which usually meant they were relatively rich. One survivor remembered that Communist soldiers “walked up and down announcing: ‘Anyone who has a gun, ammunition, a camera — hand it over and we’ll fill out a pass for you to leave.’ ” Nationalist deserters and their families were given preferential treatment. This survivor’s family got out on 16 September, thanks to the fact that her husband was a doctor, and useful to the Reds.

After mid-September, Changchun’s mayor recorded a massive rise in deaths, when tree leaves, the last food, were falling. By the end of the five-month siege the civilian population had dropped from half a million to 170,000. The death toll was higher than the highest estimate for the Japanese massacre at Nanjing in 1937.

A Red veteran in the besieging army described how he and his comrades felt:

When we heard outside the city that so many people had died of hunger, we weren’t too shocked. We had been in and out of piles of corpses, and our hearts had been hardened. We were blasé. But when we entered the city and saw what it was like, we were devastated. Many of us wept. A lot of us said: We’re supposed to be fighting for the poor, but of all these dead here, how many are the rich? Which of them are Nationalists? Aren’t they all poor people?

News of this mammoth atrocity was suppressed. The few inhabitants who were let out had four “refugee rules” stamped on their passes, one of which was “no spreading rumors”—i.e., don’t talk. The Changchun model, based on starving civilians to death in order to force the defending troops to surrender was used in “quite a few cities,” according to the Communist general Su Yu, who was understandably unspecific.

CIVILIANS IN THE communist-held territories were also ruthlessly exploited. Most men of working age were either drafted into the Reds’ expanding army, or into hard, often dangerous labor at the front. The latter involved particularly large numbers. In Manchuria the Reds conscripted 1.6 million laborers, roughly two to each fighter. In the Peking — Tianjin campaign the figure was 1.5 million, and in the Huai — Hai Campaign, 5.43 million. This gigantic corvée performed numerous frontline tasks for which the Nationalists used regular troops, such as dismantling fortifications and transporting ammunition and wounded.

Women were left to do most of the farm work, along with children and men unfit for the front. They also had to care for the wounded, mend uniforms, make countless shoes for the army, and cook for the giant army of troops and laborers. Every household had to hand over a designated amount of food — which came to a staggering 225 million kg of grain alone in the Huai — Hai Campaign. In addition to feeding Red soldiers, food was also used in psychological warfare to entice Nationalist troops to defect.

The Nationalists were constantly short of food, as they relied heavily on supplies brought in by railway, and sporadic airlifts. One Nationalist veteran recalled how hundreds of thousands of men sat for a month in one pocket, starving and freezing in a temperature of –10 °C. Soldiers fought — and sometimes killed — each other to get to air-dropped food. Later on, tree bark “was a good meal,” and soldiers turned to eating their leather belts and shoe soles. The veteran remembered digging up a dead rat: “Delicious! It was meat.” At the end, he said, there was no need for the Reds even to shell them: “In an area no bigger than your bum, all you’d have to do was just throw stones at the 300,000 starving ghosts and they would have had it.” Some went over to the Communists as a result of being bombarded by loudspeakers shouting: “Hey, Chiang Kai-shek, we’ve got pancakes here, come on over and eat.” “No amount of politics was as good as food,” the vet remarked. “Everyone knew that stewed pork was better than shoe soles.”

Apart from enduring Red requisitioning and being drafted, many peasants also lost their houses, pulled down to provide fuel for cooking and materials for building bridges. The whole of Communist-held territory was turned into a giant war machine encompassing every aspect of every person’s life. The entire population was made to live and work flat out, night and day, for the war, and very often in the thick of it. Mao called this “People’s War.”

But “the People” did not volunteer this all-consuming type of support, much less with the zeal that Communist mythology proclaims. Only intense terrorization coerced them into providing services for the war “for a long time without getting tired,” as Mao put it. The process went under the misnomer “land reform.”

DURING THE WAR against Japan the Communists had suspended their policy of confiscating and redistributing land and replaced it with one of reducing land rent. When the war against Chiang started in earnest, they reverted to their earlier radical approach. But land redistribution was not the main aspect of Mao’s land reform. The part that really mattered was a practice called dou di-zhu, “struggle against the landlords,” which in reality meant violence against the relatively better-off. (In China, unlike pre-Communist Russia, there were very few large landowners.) When people recall the land reform, it is this practice that dominates their memories.

The violence typically took place at rallies, which all villagers had to attend. Those designated as targets were made to stand facing large crowds, and people were psyched up and organized to come forward and pour out their grievances against them. The crowds would be led to shout slogans while brandishing fists and farm tools. Village militants and thugs would then inflict physical abuse, which could range from making the victims kneel on broken tiles on their bare knees, to hanging them up by their wrists or feet, or to beating them, sometimes to death, often with farm implements. And there was often torture of even more ghastly kinds.

The Party’s orders to its cadres were not to try to stop the violence, the line being that these were legitimate acts of revenge by the downtrodden. Cadres were told they must “let the people do what they want” to those who had oppressed and exploited them. In fact, the Party wanted to encourage violence, and where there was no violence, local cadres were accused of obstructing the land reform movement, and promptly replaced.

A model was created between March and June 1947 by Mao’s terror expert, Kang Sheng. Cadres in all other Red areas were instructed to copy his methods. The fact that land reform was entrusted to a man who was an expert not in agrarian reform, but in terror (and who knew nothing about land issues), makes clear the nature of the program. Kang went to a village in northwest Shanxi called Haojiapo. After the first rally, he berated the local cadres and activists for being “far too polite.” “There must be abuse,” he said. “Educate the peasants to … have no mercy … There will be deaths. But let’s not be afraid of deaths.”

Kang told the cadres and activists to treat whole families as targets, even children. He stood by smiling when village children beat up “little landlords,” as children from the wrong families were called. These could be almost anybody, as Kang extended the criteria for condemning people far beyond the original “landlords” and “kulaks,” in order to create victims where there were no landed rich. (This was especially the case in areas that had been occupied by the Reds for years, where the relatively wealthy had been impoverished.) Kang invented a new — and very vague — yardstick: “how they are liked by the masses.” This meant that anyone could be turned into a target, so those who had incurred feelings of indignation or jealousy on the part of their fellow villagers, for behavior like having “illicit affairs,” became prime victims.

Appalling physical abuse swept the Red areas. One woman official described to us a rally where “four people were hanging in a row by their wrists from four ropes,” watched by “every man, woman, the old, young, even children” of the village. There was a “female landlord” at the end of one of the ropes. “It is very painful thinking about it,” the eyewitness told us.

As a matter of fact, she hadn’t got much land; she had only been short of labour and had hired a farmhand … They asked her where she had hidden the grain … I knew she did not have the grain. But they insisted she did and beat her … Her blouse was stripped off. She had just had a baby and her milk was dripping. The baby was crying and crawling on the ground, trying to lick up the milk. People lowered their heads and couldn’t bear to look … Many loathed all this, but they were forced to watch. If they objected, they would come to disaster, too. Some village cadres were really thugs. True honest peasants did not dare to offend them.

Public displays like these brought shivers for decades to people who witnessed them. In many places people were obliged to watch even more gruesome sights. In one place, one elderly member of the gentry whose surname was Niu, which means Ox, had a wire run through his nose and his son was forced to pull him through the village by the wire, like an ox, with blood streaming down his face. Elsewhere, “entire families from the youngest to the oldest were killed. Babies still on milk, grabbed and torn apart at the limbs or just thrown into a well.” Some grisly scenes took place right under Mao’s nose in Jiaxian county in the Yenan region, where he was staying from 16 August to 21 November 1947, doing quite a bit of sightseeing. Reports to Mao about this county included descriptions of how one person was drowned in a vat of salt water, and another was killed by having boiling oil poured over his head. One place actually had a rule that “anyone not active in denouncing landlords will be stoned to death.”

Mao saw violent scenes with his own eyes. His bodyguards described him going, in disguise, to watch a rally in the village where he was staying in late 1947, Yangjiagou, where dreadful things happened. Afterwards, he talked to the guards about the various forms of torture, and the fact that children had been severely beaten up.

The upshot was, as reports to Mao made clear: “Everyone is terrified.” Mao had achieved his goal.

BY THE BEGINNING of 1948 the Reds controlled some 160 million people. Peasants constituted the overwhelming majority, and they were all terrorized in traumatic ways. The Party dictated that 10 percent of the population qualified as families of “landlords” and “kulaks.” This means that in these categories alone (and more were created by Kang Sheng’s new criteria) at least some 16 million people were on the receiving end of some degree of physical abuse and humiliation. Hundreds of thousands, possibly as many as a million, were killed or driven to suicide.

In Yenan in 1942–43, Mao had built an efficient instrument by terrorizing his power base, the members of the Communist Party. Now he was terrorizing his economic and cannon-fodder base, the peasantry, in order to bring about total, unquestioning conformity. The result was that the peasants put up little resistance to Mao’s requisitioning of soldiers, laborers, food, and anything else he wanted for his goals.

Mao regarded this process of terrorization as indispensable for winning the war. So when he was preparing for the last decisive campaign, Huai — Hai, he sent Kang Sheng to Shandong province, which was going to bear most of the logistics burden, to carry out a second land reform at the end of 1947, having decided that the first had not been fearsome enough. Kang decreed hideous public torture and executions on a scale so large that the Shandong Party organization revolted. It was purged en masse. A sense of the scale of the violence can be derived from the fact that in one small town, where relations had been good up till then, 120 people were beaten to death, some simply designated as landlord “sympathisers.” Among them were two boys aged seven, who were killed by children in the Children’s Corps. It was this generalized terror in Shandong that built the foundation for the Huai — Hai victory.

IN THE LAND REFORM, the people who implemented Mao’s policy were Party cadres, who were also being terrorized and brutalized in the process. This was part of Mao’s design. Most new Party members were sent to villages to be “educated” in the ways of land reform. One person Mao made a point of hardening was his 25-year-old son An-ying, whom he placed under Kang Sheng’s tutelage in 1947–48, disguised as Mrs. Kang’s nephew. Less than ten days after arriving at Kang’s HQ, An-ying was already in torment. He was bombarded with criticisms and made to feel that his thoughts “smelled right-wing.” He lay awake at night, and was in a constant state of self-criticism for his “petty bourgeois feelings.” “I have not become proletarianised,” he wrote in his diary, which remains a secret to this day. “My character is so rotten.” He felt “extremely full of pain, so full of pain that I wept.”

An-ying was shocked by the public, mass brutality, which was something he had not experienced in Stalin’s Russia. This was exactly what his father wanted him to get used to, and to learn to incite, by being with Kang. After two months in Kang’s company, he wrote to his father (using Red jargon) that “my own proletarian stand is firmer now.” But he retained a sense of aversion, which emerges strongly from notes he wrote about mass rallies other people had described to him. In one case, 10,000 peasants had been herded to rallies that lasted for almost a week. “It was very cold that day,” An-ying wrote. “Everyone was saying: ‘How cold! There must be quite a few frozen to death today. What have we done to deserve this!’ ” He evinced palpable distaste about the rallies themselves: “After careful rehearsals, on the fifth day, denunciations began … all the masses were told to raise their weapons when the word was given and shout several times: ‘Kill, Kill, Kill’ … the rally site was in a chaotic storm, and ended in eight people being beaten to death.” An-ying also registered that the Party was often relying on the worst people in the land reform: “Some of the activists promoted were thugs and dregs, [former] Japanese puppet soldiers and lackeys.” Such people made up a sizable proportion of the Party’s new recruits in rural areas.

LIKE AN-YING, many Party members who had joined up during the Sino-Japanese War, and who tended to have been idealists, were repelled by the atrocities, and some petitioned the Party about it. A few top leaders also feared that this level of violence might cost the Party its chance to capture power. Mao was not worried. He knew his power did not depend on popularity. As he had done in Yenan, he let terror sink deep into everyone’s heart before he called a halt. This came in early 1948, when he circulated reports criticizing atrocities, which he pretended he was hearing about for the first time.

After the Yenan Terror, Mao had made some unapologetic apologies to pacify Party cadres. Now he designated a scapegoat for the violence and atrocities. On 6 March, he wrote to his No. 2, Liu Shao-chi, informing him that he was to be the fall guy: “I feel the many mistakes committed in all areas are mainly … the result of the leading body … not clearly demarcating what was permissible and what was not … Can you please do a critical review of yourselves.” Liu resisted at first, but then caved in: “most [mistakes] are my fault,” he told top cadres. “It was not until Chairman Mao made a systematic criticism … that these were corrected.” Thenceforth it was Liu, not Mao, whom Party officials tended to blame for the violence in the land reform. To rise high under Mao you had to carry the can for him.

This acknowledgement of “mistakes” was kept strictly within the Party. The public knew nothing about it, as the Party remained a secret organization. There was no apology to the public. Mao’s calculation was that he did not need to placate the common people, because they did not count. This went for both the Red-held areas and the Nationalist-held areas.

Although people in the White areas knew quite a lot about the brutality in the land reform, not least through the hundreds of thousands who escaped, they often attributed it to passing excesses by the oppressed. In any case, they had no way of doing anything to stop Mao’s advance, and having no great affection for the existing regime, often willed themselves to give Mao the benefit of the doubt.

Nationalist captain Hsu Chen had seen some terrors, which had made him strongly anti-Communist. In early 1948, when he came home to Ningbo, near Shanghai, he found that people did not want to listen to what he had to say, and saw him as a pain:

[M]any relatives and friends came to see me … I talked to every visitor, till my tongue dried up and my lips cracked … I told them about the heartless and bestial deeds of the Communist bandits … But I was unable to wake them up from their dreams, but rather aroused their aversion … I realized that most of them thought as follows:

“These words are Nationalist propaganda. How can you believe them all?”

“In a violent war like this, these are only transitional means …”

“We’ve been through Japanese occupation, and survived. You can’t say the Communists are worse than the Japanese.”

These views could be said to represent the way of thinking in the middle and lower echelons of society … People always have to learn from their own experience …

People were in denial — and helpless against Mao’s juggernaut. This fatalism was buttressed by disillusion with the Nationalists, who also committed atrocities, often against groups more visible to urban dwellers, and in a milieu far more open than under Mao — with public opinion, a much freer press, and where people could talk, gossip and complain. The Nationalists openly arrested large numbers of students and intellectuals, many of whom were tortured, and some killed. A Nationalist student wrote in April 1948 to the famous pro-Chiang intellectual leader, Hu Shih: “The government mustn’t be so stupid, and treat all students as Communists.” Four months later, he wrote again saying: “Now they are being slaughtered in great numbers.” Although Nationalist killings were a drop in the ocean compared with Mao’s, they raised strong feelings, and some even thought that the Reds were the lesser of two evils.

But however averse people were to the Nationalists, only a small number of radicals embraced communism. As late as January 1949, when the Reds were clearly on the verge of total victory, Mao told Stalin’s envoy Anastas Mikoyan that even among workers in Shanghai, who should have been the Communists’ core constituency, the Nationalists were much stronger than the Reds. Even right at the end, in Canton, a hotbed of radicals in the 1920s, the Russian consul noted that there was “practically no Communist underground … Therefore people did not go out to welcome the arrival” of the Communist army. In central China, Lin Biao told the Russians in January 1950: “the population is not evincing great joy at the change of power.” There was not a single uprising, urban or rural, in the CCP’s favor in the whole of China — unlike in Russia, Vietnam or Cuba during their revolutions. There were defections by Nationalist troops (as opposed to surrender on the battlefield), but these were not mutinies by the rank-and-file, but by top commanders, mostly prearranged “moles,” who brought their troops with them.

ON 20 APRIL 1949 a Communist army of 1.2 million men began pouring across the Yangtze. On the 23rd it took Chiang’s capital, Nanjing, in practice ending twenty-two years of Nationalist rule over the Mainland. On that day, Chiang flew to his ancestral home, Xikou. Knowing that this would probably be his last visit, he spent much of the time kneeling by his mother’s tomb, praying in tears. (Soon afterwards the victorious Mao issued an order to protect the tomb, Chiang’s family house and clan temple.) Then a ship carried Chiang away to Shanghai, and eventually he crossed the strait to the island of Taiwan.

A few months later, Mao asked Stalin for Soviet-crewed planes and submarines to help take Taiwan in 1950 or “even earlier,” telling Stalin that the CCP had a large number of well-placed moles who had “fled” there with Chiang. Stalin, however, was not prepared to risk a direct confrontation with America in such a high-visibility, high-tension area, and Mao had to shelve his plan, allowing Chiang to turn Taiwan into an island stronghold.

However much Chiang hated the Communists, he did not carry out a scorched-earth policy when he fled. He took most of China’s civil aviation — and many art treasures — but only tried to move a small number of factories, mainly electronics plants, to Taiwan. This attempt was blocked by a senior Nationalist official, and virtually all significant industrial facilities were preserved and taken over by the Communists, including sixty-eight ordnance factories. Chiang did far less damage in industrial terms in the entire Mainland than the Russians did just in Manchuria. Mao did not inherit a wasteland in 1949; in fact, he was bequeathed a relatively intact, albeit small, industrial structure, no fewer than 1,000 factories and mines — as well as a functioning state. Chiang was not nearly as ruthless as Mao. As a critic of both regimes observed, “Old Mr. Chiang was not like old Mr. Mao. Perhaps this was why Chiang was beaten by Mao.”

THAT SPRING, Mao floated into the outskirts of Peking amidst pear blossoms from Xibaipo, where he had been staying for the past year. Peking had been the capital of China for many dynasties from the twelfth century, and he had decided to make it his capital. In the heart of the city, a huge imperial compound called Zhongnanhai, Central-South Lake, with waterfalls, villas and pavilions, became the main official residence and workplace for him and the rest of the leaders, the equivalent of the Kremlin, which the Russians sometimes called it.

While Zhongnanhai was being prepared, Mao stayed for several months in a beauty spot on the western outskirts called the Fragrant Hills. The inhabitants were moved out, and the whole mountain cordoned off for the leaders, the Praetorian Guard, and some 6,000 staff. To preserve secrecy, a plaque was hung at the entrance bearing the words “Labour University,” but this drew so many young people wanting to enroll that another sign had to be put up saying: The Labor University is not ready; consult the newspapers for enrollment dates.

Mao moved into Zhongnanhai in September. There, and anywhere else he might set foot, the grounds were swept by Russian mine-detectors — and Chinese soldiers walking shoulder-to-shoulder as human minesweepers. An extraordinary but unobtrusive security system was installed, for which the watchword was wai-song nei-jin—“Outwardly relaxed, inwardly tight.” The system was so slick that even Stalin’s former interpreter, with extensive security experience, was unable to spot it.

And yet, with all his watertight security, on the eve of his inauguration as supreme leader of China, deep fear was lurking in the recesses of Mao’s mind. A friend from the past, Mrs. Lo Fu, described visiting him and Mme Mao at this time. Mao was “in high spirits … When I asked about his health, Jiang Qing said he was all right, except he would tremble when he saw strangers. At first I didn’t understand … and I said: But he looks all right today! Chairman Mao interjected with a smile: You are an old friend, not a stranger.” It seems Mao knew that his terrorization had produced not only mass conformity, but quite a few would-be assassins.

On 1 October 1949, Mao appeared standing on top of Tiananmen Gate, a stone’s throw from Zhongnanhai, in front of the Forbidden City, and inaugurated the People’s Republic of China (PRC). This was his first-ever public appearance before a large crowd of hundreds of thousands. The crowd was well organized, and very distant from the Gate high above. From now on Mao would ascend the Gate on special occasions, a practice he modeled on Soviet leaders mounting Lenin’s tomb in Red Square, which was far lower and less grand. On this occasion Mao made the only speech he ever delivered from the Gate in his entire reign of twenty-seven years. (On other occasions when he appeared there, he would at most mouth a slogan or two.) He cleared his throat every other sentence, in the manner of a nervous speaker rather than a rousing orator. Moreover, the content was extraordinarily flat, mainly a list of appointments. Its most salient feature was what he did not say. Mao did not outline any program to benefit “the people” in whose name the regime had been installed.

The crowd of over 100,000 cried “Long live Chairman Mao!” Mao appeared excited, waving as he walked from one end of the magnificent Gate to the other, and occasionally shouting into the microphone: “Long live the people!” He had that day established himself as the absolute ruler of some 550 million people.

Even the watered-down official CCP figure for civilian deaths from starvation in Changchun was 120,000.

The terror and the extraordinarily high level of killing were recorded on the spot in Hebei province by Jack Belden, an American reporter extremely sympathetic to the Reds, who told US diplomat John Melby about “the increasing use of terror against any form of opposition, and the extermination of large sections [sic] of the population.” The Reds, Belden said, have “create[d] in the peasants a terror and furtiveness he has never before seen in Communist areas …”

But Stalin responded eagerly to Mao’s request to help subdue the vast and remote northwestern deserts and annihilate a fierce anti-Communist Muslim army there. No problem, Stalin said. The Muslim horsemen “could be destroyed by artillery very easily. If you wish, we can give you 40 fighter planes which can rout … this cavalry very fast.” A senior Russian diplomat told us, with accompanying “rat-a-tat” of machine-guns and mowing-down hand gestures, that this is what Stalin’s air force had done, far from prying eyes, in the wastes of the Gobi.

This system fooled foreigners into thinking that security was light, from which many concluded, wrongly, that the regime was popular, and so did not need much protection. A not untypical reaction was that of a French journalist who watched Chou En-lai drive across Tiananmen Square with India’s Premier Nehru in October 1954: “Assassinating Chou En-lai … would have been child’s play,” he wrote.

31. TOTALITARIAN STATE, EXTRAVAGANT LIFESTYLE (1949–53 AGE 55–59)

THE TRANSITION FROM Nationalist to Communist rule was managed without great disruption. The advancing Communist army took over all civilian institutions, and recruited educated young urban men and women to staff them, in addition to seasoned Party cadres. This machine immediately assumed control of the country.

Many old administrators stayed on, under their new Party bosses, and for a time the economy ran much as before. Private businessmen were told that their property would not be touched for a long while and that they must keep their factories functioning and shops open. Industry and commerce were not nationalized for some years, and the collectivization of agriculture was not carried out until the mid-1950s.

In these few years, with much of the economy still in private hands, the country quickly recovered from well over a decade of war. Agriculture saw considerable growth, as the new government issued loans and invested in water works. In the cities, subsidies were doled out to alleviate starvation. Death rates dropped.

Some sectors were subjected to instant drastic change. One was the law, where courts were replaced by Party committees. Another was the media, on which tight censorship was imposed at once; public opinion was stamped out. Mao would digest the rest of society gradually.

Mao had an able team, headed by his No. 2 Liu Shao-chi, with Chou En-lai, the No. 3, as prime minister. In June 1949 Mao sent Liu to Russia to learn about the Soviet model in detail. Liu stayed there for nearly two months, and saw Stalin an unprecedented six times. He held meetings with a stream of top Soviet ministers and managers and visited a wide range of institutions. Hundreds of Soviet advisers were assigned to China, some returning with Liu on his train. A Stalinist state was being constructed even before Mao had formally assumed power.

The new regime ran into armed resistance in the countryside and dealt with it without mercy. Once the state was secure, Mao began systematic terrorization of the population, to induce long-term conformity and obedience. His methods were uniquely Maoist.

Mao was viscerally hostile to law, and his subjects were utterly shorn of legal protection. He described himself to Edgar Snow in 1970 as “a man without law or limit” (which was mistranslated as him saying he was “a lone monk”). Instead of laws, the regime issued edicts, resolutions and press editorials. It accompanied these with “campaigns” conducted by the Party system. There was a paper facade of law, which formally allowed the “right of appeal,” but exercising it was treated as an offense, a “demand for further punishment,” as one ex-prisoner put it, which could result in one’s sentence being doubled, for daring to doubt the wisdom of “the people.”

In October 1950 Mao launched a nationwide “campaign to suppress counter-revolutionaries,” and devoted much energy to this, his first major onslaught since taking power, ordering his police chief to “send reports directly to me.” The targets were what remained of the old Nationalist regime. They came under the general heading of “class enemies,” broken down into categories like “Bandits,” which referred to anyone involved in armed resistance: these alone ran into many millions. Another group was “Spies,” which meant not people actually spying, but anyone who had worked in Nationalist intelligence. Grassroots Nationalist chiefs also fell victim en bloc — although senior Nationalists were protected, as bait to entice others back from abroad. “We don’t kill a single one of those big Chiang Kai-sheks,” Mao said. “What we kill are small Chiang Kai-sheks.”

Mao issued order after order berating provincial cadres for being too soft, and urged more “massive arrests, massive killings.” On 23 January 1951, for instance, he criticized one province for “being much too lenient, and not killing [enough]”; when it raised its execution rate, he said this “improvement” made him feel “very delighted.”

This nationwide campaign went hand in hand with the land reform in the newly occupied areas, where some two-thirds of China’s population lived. Some 3 million perished either by execution, mob violence, or suicide. Mao wanted the killings performed with maximum impact, and that meant having them carried out in public. On 30 March 1951 he instructed: “Many places … don’t dare to kill counter-revolutionaries on a grand scale with big publicity. This situation must be changed.” In Peking alone, some 30,000 sentencing and execution rallies were held, attended by nearly 3.4 million people. A young half-Chinese woman from Britain witnessed one rally in the center of Peking, when some 200 people were paraded and then shot in the head so that their brains splattered out onto bystanders. Even those who managed to evade the rallies could not always avoid seeing horrific things, like trucks carrying corpses through the streets, dripping blood.

Mao intended most of the population — children and adults alike — to witness violence and killing. His aim was to scare and brutalize the entire population, in a way that went much further than either Stalin or Hitler, who largely kept their foulest crimes out of sight.

More might well have been killed if it had not been for their value as slave labor. Mao said as much in one order: some people had “committed crimes that deserve to be punished by death,” but they must not be killed, partly because “we would lose a large labour force.” So millions were spared to be shipped to labor camps. With advice from Russian gulag experts on deportation and camp management, Mao sowed a vast archipelago of camps, the official term for which was lao-gai: “reform through labour.” To be sent to lao-gai meant being condemned to back-breaking labor in the most hostile wastelands and down the most contaminating mines, while being hectored and harassed incessantly. Hidden away in these camps, the physically weaker, and the spiritually stronger, were worked to death. Many inmates were executed, while others committed suicide by any means, like diving into a wheat-chopper. In all, during Mao’s rule, the numbers who were executed, and met other premature deaths in prisons and labor camps, could well amount to 27 million.

In addition to execution and incarceration in prisons and camps, there was a third, and typically Maoist, form of punishment that was imposed on many tens of millions of people during Mao’s reign. It was called being placed “under surveillance” while the victim remained in society. What it meant was “doing time on the outside,” kept on a kind of permanent knife-edge parole, one of the usual suspects to be rounded up and tormented afresh with any new bout of suppression. It meant one’s whole family living like outcasts. The high-visibility stigma served as a warning to the general public never to cross the regime.^†

The terror worked. A report to Mao on 9 February 1951, only a few months into the campaign, said that after this first bout of killings, “rumor-mongering died down and social order stabilised.” What the state called “rumors” were often the only way people had to express their real sentiments. In one case, a seemingly bizarre alert spread not just from village to village, but from province to province: “Chairman Mao sends people to the villages to cut off [men’s] balls to give to the Soviet Union to make atom bombs.” (In Chinese, “balls” and “bombs” share the same pronunciation: dan.) In some places, when what looked like a tax collector appeared, the shout went up: “The ball-cutters are here!” and the whole village would run for cover. This story reflects the fact that Mao was already imposing extortionate food levies on the peasants, some of whom had clearly surmised that the food was being sent to Russia.

This campaign clamped the lid down hard on any such expression of dissent, but there were still a few cracks in the system in those early years. Victims could sometimes still hide. A small landowner from Anhui province managed to stay on the run with her son for 636 days, without ever being informed on, even by people sent to catch them. When the fugitives eventually returned to their village, “the overwhelming majority of people, particularly women … shed tears of pity,” the son recalled. As the campaign was over by then, they survived.

But control became increasingly pervasive, and with it the loss of freedom on every front: of speech, movement, work, information. A nationwide system of concierges called Order-Keeping Committees was established in every factory, village and street, composed of members of the public, often the nosiest and most hyper-active busybodies, now made complicit with the regime’s repression. These committees kept an eye on everyone, not just political suspects and petty criminals. Above all, the regime nailed every person in China to a fixed, and usually immutable, job and place of residence through a registration system (hu-kou) begun in July 1951, which soon became iron-clad.

The government also used the “suppression of counter-revolutionaries” campaign to move against all sorts of non-political offenses, such as ordinary banditry, gangsterism, murder, robbery, gambling, drug-dealing and prostitution (“liberated” prostitutes were organized to do manual labor). Thanks to phenomenal organization and ruthlessness, these actions were extremely successful. By the end of 1952, drug-dealing was virtually wiped out, as were brothels.

Mao repeatedly said that his killings “were extremely necessary.” “Only when this thing is properly done can our power be secure,” he pronounced.

WHILE NUMEROUS CHINESE were executed, only two foreigners are known to have suffered this fate — one Italian, Antonio Riva, and a Japanese called Ryuichi Yamaguchi. The charge was no minor one: planning to kill Mao with a mortar bomb as he stood on Tiananmen on 1 October 1950, National Day. The two men were arrested days before, together with several other foreigners. Ten months later, on 17 August 1951, these two were driven through central Peking standing up in jeeps, and then shot in public near the Bridge of Heaven. The news was splashed across next day’s People’s Daily under the headline “The Case of US Spies Plotting Armed Rebellion,” alleging that the assassination had been ordered by the former US assistant military attaché, Colonel David Barrett.

For anyone, let alone a foreigner, to contemplate assassinating Mao on a maximum-security occasion like National Day, amid a throng of hundreds of thousands of organized and hyper-vigilant Chinese, not to mention some 10,000 police and another 10,000 troops, was a very tall order. Actually, Barrett, the alleged ringleader, had left China many months before. Two decades later, Chou En-lai apologized, in a vague way, about implicating him, and invited him back to China. This was an indirect acknowledgment that the accusation was faked.

Linking the plot to Barrett helped whip up anti-American feeling, which was not as fervid as the regime wished. The trumped-up charge was also used to tarnish another major target of Mao’s — the Roman Catholic Church, whose leading foreign representative, an Italian Monsignor, was one of those arrested. China had about 3.3 million Catholics at the time. Mao was very interested in the Vatican, especially its ability to command allegiance beyond national boundaries, and his Italian visitors often found themselves being peppered with questions about the Pope’s authority. The tenacity and effectiveness of the Catholics perturbed the regime, which used the phony assassination case to accelerate the takeover of Catholic institutions, including schools, hospitals and orphanages. A high-decibel smear campaign accused Catholic priests and nuns of heinous actions ranging from plain murder to cannibalism and medical experiments on babies. Hundreds of Chinese Catholics were executed, and many foreign priests suffered physical abuse.

In general, religious and quasi-religious organizations were either branded reactionary and suppressed, or brought under tight control. Almost all foreign clergy were expelled, along with most foreign businessmen, virtually clearing China of non-Communist foreigners by about 1953. Non-Communist foreign press and radio were, it goes without saying, banned.

THE “CAMPAIGN to suppress counter-revolutionaries” lasted over a year though routine suppression continued unabated after that. Mao then focused his attention on securing watertight control of the state coffers, to make sure that the funds the state extracted from the people did not revert to private hands. In late 1951 he started a campaign known as “the Three-Antis,” targeting embezzlement, waste and “bureaucratism” (which meant slacking, not bureaucracy per se). The primary aim was to scare anyone with access to government money from pocketing it. Alleged embezzlers were called “tigers.” “Big Tigers,” involving cases over 10,000 yuan, qualified for death.

As corruption had been epidemic under the Nationalists, the campaign had genuine appeal. Many thought that the Communists were trying to root out corruption. What people did not realize was that while it was true that after this campaign few who had access to state money dared dip their hand in the till, the funds thus amassed in the state coffers were not going to be used for the interests of the people.

Mao was hands-on about what had now, in effect, become his money. He bombarded government ministers, and provincial and army leaders, with cables urging them to catch “Big Tigers,” and setting quotas: “We must probably execute 10,000 to several tens of thousands of embezzlers nationwide before we can solve our problem.” He whipped up a competition among the provinces, goading them on to higher targets, threatening: “Whoever disobeys is either a bureaucratist or an embezzler himself.”

The method for uncovering those deemed to be offenders was, as Mao enjoined, “confession and informing.” Using these techniques, some 3.83 million civilian officials were grilled and screened (and more in the army). Though torture was not encouraged as a public spectacle this time, it was nevertheless used in some places, and Mao was kept informed. Russians working on the railway in Manchuria reported hearing screams (“like from Japanese dungeons”) from nearby offices. These turned out to be coming from Chinese colleagues who were being “checked” by having their testicles crushed in bamboo pliers.

In the end, relatively few officials were found to have embezzled sums large enough to qualify them as “Big Tigers.” But Mao had achieved his goal, to instill fear. From now on, few dared to pilfer state funds.

As for its second target, waste, the campaign caused more loss than it prevented. By tying up skilled managers and technicians in sterile meetings for months on end, it deprived the economy of badly needed human assets. On 14 February 1952, Tianjin reported that wholesale trade was down by half, banks had stopped loans, and private businesses dared not buy goods. Industrial production was declining, tax income collapsing, and the economy was heading into recession. In Manchuria, production plummeted by half. In fact, the system of repression itself was a prime source of waste. One Belgian priest worked out that he was interrogated — to no effect — for more than 3,000 hours over three years, which involved at least three or four people full time (at least 10,000 man-hours), as well as vast amounts of scarce paper.

In January 1952, shortly after the Three-Antis began, Mao ordered another campaign to run in tandem with it, this one called “the Five-Antis.” The offenses were: bribery, tax evasion, pilfering state property, cheating, and stealing economic information. It was aimed at private businessmen, whose property had not been confiscated, to force them to disgorge money, as well as to frighten them out of acts like bribery and tax evasion. One person involved at a high level put the number of suicides in these two campaigns as at least 200,000–300,000. In Shanghai so many people jumped from skyscrapers that they acquired the nickname “parachutes.” One eyewitness wondered why people jumped into the street rather than into the river. The reason, he discovered, was that they wanted to safeguard their families: “If you jumped into the Huangpu River and were swept away so the Communists didn’t have a corpse, they would accuse you of having escaped to Hong Kong, and your family would suffer. So the best way was to leap down to the street.”

BY MAY 1953, when Mao brought the campaigns to an end, he had accomplished what he had set out to do, namely to scare people away from touching state money. Communist officialdom did become relatively uncorrupt in the conventional sense, such as not taking bribes, but it was granted a privileged standard of living, which was minutely graded hierarchically.

Mao himself did not embezzle in the conventional way, like lesser dictators who kept Swiss bank accounts. But this was simply because he did not need to hedge against losing power. He just made absolutely sure such a day would never come. Rather than embezzling, he treated the funds of the state as his own, and used them however he wanted, disregarding the needs of the population and persecuting any who advocated different spending priorities from the ones he laid down. When it came to personal lifestyle, Mao’s was one of royal self-indulgence, practiced at tremendous cost to the country. This corrupt behavior emerged as soon as he conquered China.

Mao lived behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy, so that very few knew anything about his life and his world, including where he lived, or where he was (he made few public appearances). Even up close, he did not give an obvious impression of high living. He had no taste for opulence, and positively shunned the sort of objects usually associated with luxury, such as gold taps, antiques, paintings, vast wardrobes, elegant furniture. But these absences involved no restraint of his desires. In fact, Mao indulged every whim in his daily life.

Mao liked villas. During his twenty-seven-year rule, well over fifty estates were created for him, no fewer than five in Peking. Many he never set foot in. These estates were set in enormous grounds, mostly in gorgeous locations. So, in many places of great beauty, the whole mountain (like Jade Spring Hills outside Peking), or long stretches of lakes (such as along the famed Western Lake in Hangzhou), were cordoned off for his exclusive use. There were often old villas on these spots, many of architectural splendor. These were torn down to make room for new buildings designed and constructed under the supervision of his security forces, with safety and comfort à la Mao as the priorities. These purpose-built edifices were bullet-and bomb-proof; some had deep nuclear shelters. Most were in the same style: a warehouse clone with identical wings, one for Mao and the other for his wife, with a huge sitting room in the middle. All were one-story, as Mao feared being trapped upstairs.

The one floor was very high, sometimes as high as a normal two-or three-story building, to cater for Mao’s sense of the grandiose. One villa built in the mid-1960s outside Nanchang was about 50 feet high, a single floor, like a monstrous gray hangar. When many of them were turned into guest houses after Mao died, their corridors were so enormous that, even after creating a row of sizable rooms inside them, there was space enough for a normal-width corridor.

Construction on his first new villas had started in 1949, the moment he entered Peking. These were followed by others, during the Three-Antis campaign. One, completed in 1954, was at Beidaihe on the east coast. This had been a seaside resort from the turn of the century, and had over 600 villas, many of them large and elegant, but none met Mao’s security specifications, so an enormous Mao-style identikit building was plonked down in an enclave with a spectacular view overlooking the beach, protected by lushly forested hills with bunkers and tunnels hollowed out inside them. The whole expanse of sea was placed out of bounds to all but an authorized few.

In 1952 Mao’s security chief sent word to Hunan indicating that a villa should be built in the provincial capital, Changsha, for Mao’s possible homecoming. The Hunan leaders were unsure whether this was really Mao’s wish. As this was at the height of the Three-Antis, it seemed too blatant to be true. So they vacated their own houses, and had them refurbished for Mao. But Mao did not come. Then it dawned on them that a new estate was indeed what he desired, and construction work began. It was not until it was completed that Mao deigned to come back for a visit. Later, a second villa was built only a stone’s throw away. More villas were built in his home village of Shaoshan. Other provinces, which naturally all wanted visits from Mao, would be told “But you have no place for the Chairman to stay,” and would then build the necessary mansions.

The houses were constantly upgraded for security and comfort. In his old age, an enclosed outer corridor was added so that Mao could take walks without risking catching cold. To minimize the risk of assassination, the outside windows in these corridors were staggered with those in Mao’s rooms, so that from either direction only a wall was visible. Another security refinement in the later villas was steel gates at both ends of the portico, which became incorporated into the house, so Mao’s car effectively drove right into the sitting room.

Sometimes, even Mao’s train drove into his villa — or strictly speaking, into the front garden, along a spur laid specially for him. In many places, an exclusive underground tunnel ran all the way from the villa to the local military airport. Mao frequently slept in his train parked at military airports, ready to make a quick getaway by train or plane, in case of emergency. Throughout his reign, he lived in his own country as if in a war zone.

Mao mostly traveled with three sets of transport — train, plane, and ship (when applicable). Even if he was using only one kind of transport, the other two would follow wherever possible, just in case. When he flew, every other plane in China was grounded. And when his special train moved, always setting off at a moment’s notice, the country’s railway system was thrown into chaos, as other trains were not allowed to be anywhere near his. These disruptions were not infrequent, as Mao was constantly on the move by train. The crew were on permanent standby, not allowed home sometimes for weeks, even months on end.

One particular extravagance was swimming pools, as Mao loved swimming. Pools were rare in those years, in what was a very poor country. (In Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, when a pool was built for Mao, the attendants did not know how much chlorine to put in the water. As a result, the few who had the privilege of swimming in the pool had red eyes. Mao suspected poison.) The first pool built for him was in Jade Spring Hills, right in the middle of the Three-Antis campaign. By Mao’s own account, the pool cost 50,000 yuan, which was five times the amount that would condemn an embezzler to the execution ground as a “Big Tiger.” In Zhongnanhai, his official residence in Peking, well hidden behind a large sign saying “Serve the People,” an indoor pool was built for him shortly after the campaign, even though there was already an exclusive outdoor pool, which until Mao came to power had been open to the public.

Keeping these pools warm for months on end, in case Mao should fancy a dip, cost a fortune. The water was heated by hot steam running through a pipe, and burned up large amounts of scarce fuel.

MAO DID NOT stint on any side of life that he enjoyed. He was a gourmet, and had his favorite foods shipped in from all over the country. (Mao and the top leaders rarely went out to restaurants, whose numbers dwindled under the Communists.) A special fish from Wuhan that he liked had to be couriered alive 1,000 km in a plastic bag filled with water and kept oxygenated. With his rice, Mao demanded that the membrane between the husk and the kernel be kept for its taste, which meant the husking had to be done manually and with great care. Once, he complained he could not taste the membrane, and told his housekeeper he had developed beriberi as a result. The housekeeper raced to the special farm at Jade Spring Hills and had some rice carefully husked the way Mao wanted.

This farm was specially set up to grow rice for Mao, as the water there was supposed to be the very best. In the olden days the spring had supplied drinking water for the imperial courts. Now it fed Mao’s rice paddies. The vegetables Mao liked, as well as poultry and milk, were produced in another special farm called Jushan. The tea Mao chose was the one renowned as the best in China, Dragon Well, and the very best leaves were picked for him, at the ideal time. All Mao’s food was put through a meticulous medical check, and the cooking was supervised by his housekeeper, who doubled as taster. Stir-fried dishes had to be served immediately, but as the kitchen was located at a distance, so that no smells would waft Mao’s way, servants would race all the way to his table with each dish.

Mao did not like getting into baths, or showers, and did not have a bath for a quarter of a century. Instead, his servants rubbed him every day with a hot towel. He enjoyed daily massages. He never went to a hospital. The hospital facilities, along with the top specialists, came to him. If he was not in the mood to see them, they would be kept hanging around, sometimes for weeks.

Mao never fancied smart clothes. What he loved was comfort. He wore the same shoes for years, because, as he said, old shoes were more comfortable; and he got bodyguards to wear in new shoes for him. His bathrobe, face towel and quilts were heavily patched — but no ordinary patching: they were taken specially to Shanghai and mended by the best craftsmen, costing immeasurably more than new ones. Far from being indications of asceticism, these were the quirks of the hedonistic super-powerful.

It was perhaps not unreasonable for a leader to enjoy villas and other luxuries, but Mao was gratifying himself while he was executing others for taking a fraction of what he was burning up. And doing so while preaching and imposing abstinence and having himself portrayed as “Serving the People.” Mao’s double standards had a comprehensive cynicism that put him in a league of his own.

In no area of life did these double standards cause more misery than in the sphere of sexuality. Mao required his people to endure ultra-puritanical constraints. Married couples posted to different parts of China were given only twelve days a year to be together, so tens of millions were condemned to almost year-round sexual abstinence. Efforts to relieve sexual frustration privately could lead to public humiliation. One patriotic Chinese who had returned to “the Motherland” was made to put a sign up over his dormitory bed criticizing himself for masturbating.

And all the while, Mao was indulging in every sexual caprice in well-guarded secrecy. On 9 July 1953 the army was ordered to select young women from their entertainment groups to form a special troupe in the Praetorian Guard. Everyone involved knew that its major function was to provide bed mates for Mao. Army chief Peng De-huai termed this “selecting imperial concubines”—a complaint that would cost him dear in time to come. But his objection had no effect on Mao, and more army entertainment groups were turned into procurement agencies. Apart from singers and dancers, nurses and maids were handpicked for Mao’s villas to provide a pool of women from which he could choose whoever he wanted to have sex with.

A few of these women received subsidies from Mao, as did some of his staff and relatives. The sums involved were petty cash, but he made a point of authorizing each transaction personally. Mao was very aware of the value of money, and for years checked his household accounts with a peasant’s beady eye.

Mao’s handouts came from a secret personal account, the Special Account. This was where he stashed the royalties from his writings, for on top of all his other privileges he cornered the book market by forcing the entire population to buy his own works, while preventing the vast majority of writers from being published. At its peak, this account held well over 2 million yuan, an astronomical sum. As a yardstick of what this was worth, Mao’s staff earned on average about 400 yuan a year. A peasant’s cash income, in a better year, could be a few yuan. Even privileged Chinese rarely had savings of more than a few hundred yuan.

Mao was the only millionaire created in Mao’s China.

Mao claimed that the total number executed was 700,000, but this did not include those beaten or tortured to death in the post-1949 land reform, which would at the very least be as many again. Then there were suicides, which, based on several local inquiries, were very probably about equal to the number of those killed.

The number of people in detention in any one year under Mao has been calculated at roughly 10 million. It is reasonable to estimate that on average 10 percent of these were executed or died of other causes.

^†A Soviet diplomat who served ten years in both Nationalist and Red China, and witnessed Mao’s campaigns close up, later observed in a classified source that however cruel the Nationalists could be, it was never anything like as bad as under the Communists. He estimated that Mao killed more Chinese in these early campaigns alone than died in the civil war.