Mao: The Unknown Story

47. A HORSE-TRADE SECURES THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION (1965–66 AGE 71–72)

IN NOVEMBER 1965, Mao was finally ready to launch the Great Purge he had long been planning, to “punish this Party of ours,” as he put it.

Mao proceeded in stages. He decided to fire his first shot at culture, and this is why the Great Purge was called the Cultural Revolution. Mme Mao spearheaded the assault. She was an ex-actress who actually loved culture, but cared nothing about denying it to other Chinese. And she enjoyed the chance to vent her venom, which she possessed in abundance. “Jiang Qing is as deadly poisonous as a scorpion,” Mao once observed to a family member, wiggling his little finger, like a scorpion’s tail. Mao knew exactly how to exploit her potential as a persecution zealot. In 1963 he had assigned her to the Ministry of Culture as his private supervisor to try to get operas and films condemned. Officials there had largely ignored her. She was already paranoid, and had been accusing her nurses of trying to poison her with sleeping pills and scald her when she took a bath. Now, she claimed that the officials she dealt with “suppressed and bullied” her — and she began revenging herself on them mercilessly. Mao made her his police chief for stamping out culture nationwide.

One of her tasks was to draw up a manifesto denouncing every form of culture, on the grounds that they had all been run by officials who were following a “black line opposed to Mao Tse-tung Thought.” Mao told her to do this in collaboration with Lin Biao, the army chief. On the night of 26 November, Mme Mao telephoned Mrs. Lin Biao, who usually took her husband’s calls, and acted as his chief assistant. Lin Biao pledged his help for the undertaking.

Mao and Lin Biao actually rarely met socially, but their collaboration went back nearly four decades — to 1929, when the two struck up an alliance to sabotage Zhu De, whom Lin Biao loathed and Mao was bent on dominating. From then on, a special crony relationship evolved between Mao and Lin. Mao tolerated an extraordinary degree of independence on Lin’s part. For example, when Lin was in Russia during the Sino-Japanese War, he had spoken his mind to the Russians about Mao’s unwillingness to fight the Japanese and how eager Mao was to turn on Chiang Kai-shek — an act Mao would never have swallowed from anyone else. During the Yenan Terror, Lin again did what no one else was allowed to: he simply removed his wife from detention and refused to let her be interrogated. Under Mao, everyone had to do humiliating “self-criticisms” in public, but not Lin. In return for giving Lin this degree of license, Mao expected him to come through for him in times of need, which Lin always did.

When Mao was launching the Great Leap Forward in 1958, he promoted Lin to be one of the Party’s vice-chairmen, as a counter-weight to his other colleagues. When former defense minister Peng De-huai challenged Mao over the famine in 1959, Lin’s staunch backing for Mao ensured that few dared to take Peng’s side. Mao then moved Lin in to replace Peng as defense minister. Throughout the famine, Lin propped up Mao’s image by promoting the cult of Mao’s personality, especially in the army. He invented the Little Red Book, a collection of very short quotations by Mao, as a mechanism of indoctrination. At the Conference of the Seven Thousand in 1962, Lin saved Mao’s skin by championing the equivalent of papal infallibility for him. Afterwards, when Mao was laying the ground for his Great Purge, Lin continued to build the army into the bastion of the cult of Mao.

Lin lauded Mao to the skies in public, although he felt no true devotion to Mao, and at home would often make disparaging and even disdainful remarks about him, some of which he entered in his diary. It was out of pure ambition that Lin stood by Mao and boosted him — the ambition to be Mao’s No. 2 and successor. He told his wife that he wanted to be “Engels to Marx, Stalin to Lenin, and Chiang Kai-shek to Sun Yat-sen.” With the Great Purge, which had Liu, the president, as its primary target, Lin Biao could expect his advancement.

The man who was about to rise to the top suffered from many phobias and looked like a drug addict. His most extreme phobias were about water and air. His hydrophobia was so acute that he had not taken a bath for years, and would only be wiped with a dry towel. He could not stand the sight of the sea, which kept his contact with the navy to zero. He had a villa by the seaside, but it was located among hills, so that he would not actually see the sea. His residences had numerous wind-sensitive devices hanging from the ceilings. One visitor was told by Mrs. Lin to walk slowly in Lin’s presence in case the stir of air when he moved triggered her husband’s breeze phobia.

Lin was a man, as his own wife observed in her diary, “who specialises in hate, in contempt (friendship, children, father and brother — all mean nothing to him), in thinking the worst and basest of people, in selfish calculation … and in scheming and doing other people down.”

The man Lin particularly hated as of 1965 was the army chief of staff, Luo Rui-qing, one of Mao’s long-time favorites, whom Mao fondly called Luo the Tall. Mao often routed his orders to the army via Luo the Tall, even orders to Lin himself, which was partly the result of Lin often being out of action nursing his phobias. Luo the Tall was super-energetic as well as able — and had incomparable access to Mao. He had been Mao’s top security man for years, and Mao had enormous confidence in him. “As soon as Luo the Tall steps closer, I feel very safe,” Mao said. These were words not spoken lightly. Lin felt overshadowed, and had been plotting to get rid of the chief of staff for some time. When he received Mme Mao’s call in November 1965, which signaled that Mao needed him for a major task, Lin Biao seized his chance. Four days later, he dispatched his wife to see Mao in Hangzhou (the Lins were staying nearby in the garden city of Suzhou), with a letter in his own hand, enclosing some extremely flimsy charges against Luo the Tall. Lin was asking Mao to sacrifice a highly valued retainer.

Mao had Lin Biao himself brought to Hangzhou, and on the night of 1 December the two men had an ultra-secret talk. Mao told Lin about his plans for the Great Purge, and promised to make Lin his No. 2 and successor. He told Lin he must make sure the army was fully under control — and be ready to assume a completely new role: to step in and take over the jobs of the huge number of Party officials Mao intended to purge.

Lin insisted that Luo the Tall must be purged as well. The fact that Lin drove such a hard bargain shows that both he and Mao understood his unique value. Without Lin, Mao could not bring off his Purge.

MAO HAD BEEN trying hard, without success, to have one particular period opera condemned. This was called Hai Rui Dismissed from Office, and was based on a traditional story of a mandarin who was punished by the emperor for having spoken up for the peasants. Mao accused it of being a veiled attack on what he (the “emperor”) had done to the purged defense minister Peng De-huai, and ordered it to be denounced, along with Marshal Peng himself. An article to this effect was written with Mao’s sponsorship, and published in Shanghai on 10 November 1965.

To Mao’s fury, the article was not carried anywhere else in China. Province after province, even the capital, Peking, ignored it. They were able to do this because the culture overlord at the time, Peng Zhen (no relative of Peng De-huai), blocked it from being reprinted. Peng Zhen was a loyal long-time follower, trusted enough to hold the vital strategic job of mayor of the capital, and few men were closer to Mao. But while his allegiance does not seem to have been in question, Mayor Peng, who had been made national overseer of culture in 1964, was strongly averse to Mao’s demands to annihilate culture. And being at the heart of things, he realized that this time Mao intended to use the field of culture to start a purge that would engulf the whole Party.

Mayor Peng cared about the Party. He was also gutsy. He even complained to foreigners about Mao, something quite amazing among the tight-lipped CCP leadership. When a Japanese Communist asked him about the Hai Rui opera, Mayor Peng replied that: “It is not a political issue, but a historical play. Chairman Mao says it is a political issue. How troublesome!” This was unbelievably outspoken language for someone in the inner circle to use to an outsider.

With Mayor Peng taking the responsibility for blocking the Mao-sponsored article, even the People’s Daily refused to reprint it. The editor, one Wu Leng-xi, knew that he was crossing Mao, as an eyewitness at a small meeting with him and Mao saw. Mao asked smokers to hold up cigarettes, and then said: “It seems on this point too I am in the minority.” “At that remark,” the witness recalled, “I saw Wu Leng-xi … turn chalky white, stop taking notes and go rigid. Something about what Mao had just said had frightened [him].”

And yet the editor held out for a week more, until Chou En-lai stepped in and ordered him to run the article, citing instructions from Mao. But the editor still managed to half-bury the article way back on page 5, in a section called “Academic Discussions,” which meant that it was not a Party order to start a persecution campaign. The editor ended up in prison. To his successor Mao said menacingly: “Wu Leng-xi disobeyed me. And I wonder how you would behave.” The successor was so panic-stricken that he could not stammer out what he wanted to say: “I will definitely obey Chairman Mao.”

The fact that an article so overtly sponsored by Mao was treated in this way showed the degree of resistance he was facing from very powerful forces in the Party. Mao needed a system to carry out his will, and that made Lin Biao’s instant help essential. Lin knew it, and he knew what he wanted in return: Chief of Staff Luo must suffer. So Mao conceded, even though Luo the Tall had been ultra-loyal, and Mao needed such men more than ever at this of all times. But Lin was the man he could not do without: there was no one with comparable clout who would do Mao’s bidding. Luo the Tall was able and loyal, but he was not a marshal, and did not have long-established prestige in the army, and so he was sacrificed.

On 8 December, Mrs. Lin Biao addressed a Politburo meeting chaired by Mao, and spoke for a full ten hours about the alleged crimes of Luo the Tall, accusing him of having “bottomless” ambitions, starting with coveting Lin’s job as defense minister. For Lin’s wife to play such a role at a Politburo meeting was unheard-of, as she was neither a Politburo member nor even a high official, and wives of the top leaders had till now been kept very much in the background.

Luo the Tall was not present at the meeting. When he learned about his downfall, his legs turned to jelly. This powerfully built man was unable to walk upstairs. He was put under house arrest.

For his family, a nightmare began. One day very soon after this, his daughter, who attended a boarding school and had not heard the news about her father, was cycling home across Beihai Bridge opposite Zhongnanhai. The arch was flanked by elegant carved white marble balustrades. Through the dense dust borne by the cold wind from Siberia, she noticed three boys riding after her, close friends whose parents were also friends with hers. As they passed by her, they turned round and fixed her with a look of such coldness and disdain that it nearly knocked her off her bicycle. They knew something which she did not — that her father was now an enemy. That look, chilling, cruel, intended to hurt and break, from people whom only yesterday one had assumed to be friends, was to become a hallmark of the forthcoming years.

But Lin Biao was still not satisfied with the level of pain inflicted on Luo the Tall. He asked Mao to have Luo condemned for the equivalent of high treason: “wanting to usurp the Party and state.” Mao was reluctant to allow this, as to do so would mean casting his old stalwart away irrevocably. So, for a few months, Luo the Tall was not charged with treason.

Lin therefore held back about helping Mao. When Mme Mao came to see him on 21 January 1966 about writing the planned “manifesto” against the arts in the name of the army, he made a show of willingness, and assigned a few writers from the army, but behind her back he told them: “Jiang Qing is sick … and paranoid … Just listen to what she says and say as little as you can … Don’t make any criticisms about how the arts are run …” As a result, when their draft was submitted to Mme Mao in February, she called it “totally useless.”

MEANWHILE, MAO WAS getting desperate. That same February, with the backing of Liu Shao-chi, Mayor Peng issued a national “guideline” forbidding the use of political accusations to trample on culture and the custodians of culture. Moreover, he went further, and actually suppressed Mao’s instructions aimed at starting a persecution campaign. The obstruction from the Party was being highly effective.

Nor was this all. As soon as he issued the guideline, Mayor Peng flew to Sichuan, ostensibly to inspect arms industries relocated in this mountainous province. There he did something truly astonishing. He had a secret tête-à-tête with Marshal Peng who had been banished there the previous November when Mao began clearing the decks for the Great Purge. What the two Pengs talked about has never been revealed, but judging from the timing, and the colossal risk Mayor Peng took in visiting a major foe of Mao’s, without permission, in secret, it is highly likely that they discussed the feasibility of using the army to stop Mao.

Although Marshal Peng was under virtual house arrest and was powerless, he still commanded great respect and loyalty in the army, especially among his old subordinates. While he was under house arrest in Peking, a few of them, including one man high up in Mao’s security apparatus, had risked a lot to see him.

News of the clandestine visit by Mayor Peng to the marshal may not have reached Mao’s ears, but he certainly suspected Mayor Peng was up to something in Sichuan, and his suspicions deepened when Marshal Ho Lung, the man to whom Soviet defense minister Malinovsky had said “Get rid of Mao,” soon also went to Sichuan, also in the name of inspecting the arms industries. Mao suspected a conspiracy was being cooked up down there, and soon accused his opponents of hatching a plot, dubbed “the February military coup.” Mao’s state of mind was shown by the dosage of sleeping pills he was now taking, which rose to ten times his normal, to a level that could kill an average man.

And there was more that was gnawing at Mao’s mind. It seems that Mayor Peng was contemplating getting in touch with the Russians, and may have thought of seeking Russian help to avert Mao’s Purge. The Kremlin had invited the CCP to attend the next Soviet Party congress (the 23rd) in April 1966. Mao’s colleagues knew that ever since Malinovsky’s remarks in November 1964, Mao did not want any of them to go to Russia, in case they colluded with the Kremlin against him, and so they had recommended declining the invitation.

But in early March 1966, after his secret meeting with Marshal Peng in Sichuan, Mayor Peng revised this position, with the agreement of President Liu Shao-chi, and suggested to Mao that the Party should consider accepting the invitation. This was an extraordinary shift, and undoubtedly deepened Mao’s suspicions. Mayor Peng was soon accused of trying to “liaise with a foreign country” and “attempt a coup.” Mao’s anxiety can hardly have been assuaged when the new Soviet ambassador, Sergei Lapin, with whom President Liu had earlier had an unusually frank talk, contrived an unscripted encounter with Liu on the tarmac at Peking airport on 24 February 1966 as they were awaiting the arrival of Ghana’s President Kwame Nkrumah (who had been overthrown in a coup that same day). Lapin said he had an invitation for the Chinese to the Soviet congress. “Give me the document,” Liu replied. Lapin said it was at the embassy; but all subsequent efforts to get it to Liu failed.

Mao was already suspicious that there might be a vast conspiracy between his colleagues and Moscow against him. The previous November, in the opening stage of the Purge, one of his first moves had been to fire the man who handled the leadership’s communications with Moscow, the Russian-speaking director of the Central Secretaries’ Office, Yang Shang-kun, and exile him to Canton, in the far south. Later, Yang was grilled intensely in prison about contacts with Moscow, as were the leadership’s Russian-language interpreters.

There was one thing in Yang’s past that especially roused Mao’s suspicion. Yang’s office had tape-recorded Mao. Mao did not want any record kept of what he said and did, unless it was carefully sanitized. In the old days, he would light a match to telegrams once they were sent. After he came to power, he would constantly ask his listeners not to take notes. But this caused insoluble problems, as Mao’s words were commands, and the absence of written records made it hard for subordinates to know what he had really said and thus, at times, to carry out his orders. So he had to allow some of what he said to be noted down or taped. With Mao’s approval, Yang’s office began installing recording systems in the late 1950s. But a couple of years later, the tape operator unwisely teased a girlfriend of Mao’s about overhearing her with Mao on his train. “I heard everything,” he claimed, though in fact he had not. The girlfriend told Mao, who instantly ordered the systems dismantled and the tapes destroyed. All Mao’s houses and cars were combed for bugs. Although none was found, Mao was not convinced. He suspected the taping was part of a plot linked with President Liu and the Russians. All those involved would in time be interrogated, quite a few meeting gruesome deaths.

In March 1966, all the strands of Mao’s suspicions meshed together. In January Brezhnev had visited Mongolia — the first Soviet leader ever to do so — and had been joined there by none other than defense minister Malinovsky, the man who had put out the feeler about ditching Mao. Brezhnev had never had dealings with Mao, but knew Liu Shao-chi, having been Liu’s host when he visited Russia for a summit of the world Communist parties in 1960. Brezhnev, then No. 2 to Khrushchev, had spent more than a week with Liu traveling in Russia and to the Soviet Far East on the Trans-Siberian train, and the two had got on well. Now Brezhnev signed a military treaty with Mongolian chief Yumjaagiyn Tsedenbal. Russian units were moved into Mongolia and stationed only about 500 km from Peking, across open country, accompanied by ground-to-ground missiles, apparently armed with nuclear warheads. Tsedenbal, who had been on the receiving end of Mao’s plots to overthrow him earlier in the 1960s, volunteered to carry the fight against “the Mao clique” into China itself.

This was a real crisis for Mao, and he needed forceful support from Lin Biao — at once. He consented to Lin’s demand to have Chief of Staff Luo condemned for “treason.” On 18 March, Luo threw himself off the roof of his house, in a failed attempt to kill himself. This was regarded, as always, as “betraying” the Party, and qualified him for the nastiest punishment. Later, he was subjected to mass denunciation meetings, and as he had broken both ankles when he jumped off the roof, he would be dragged up onto the stage in a big basket, his crippled feet dangling over the rim, oozing blood.

The day after Luo’s suicide attempt, Mme Mao wrote to Lin Biao asking him to endorse her “kill culture” manifesto, which Mao himself had meantime revised, writing Lin’s name into the heading (“Comrade Lin Biao Has Authorized Comrade Jiang Qing to …”) so as to highlight Lin’s backing. Lin endorsed it at once in writing, and before the end of the month he had presented a formal demand to the Party, in the name of the army, for a comprehensive purge.

THIS MOVE BY Lin propelled another crucial man into affirming his stand. This was Chou En-lai, who had so far managed to maintain an ambivalent position. Chou now told Mayor Peng that he, Chou, was with Mao. It was with Chou on board that the unbeatable trio of Mao, Marshal Lin and Chou was complete, thus dooming any hope of resistance.

On 14 April 1966, Mme Mao’s “kill culture” manifesto was made public. A month later, the Politburo met to rubber-stamp the first list of victims of the Great Purge, four big names described as an “anti-Party clique”: Mayor Peng, Chief of Staff Luo, Yang Shang-kun, the liaison with Russia and the tape-recording suspect, and old media chief Lu Ding-yi. Mao did not bother to come to the occasion, and just ordered it to pass a document he had had prepared condemning the four. A fatalistic atmosphere dominated the gathering, which included two of the four-man “clique” and was actually chaired by Liu Shao-chi, who knew he was chairing an event that was ultimately going to bring him to ruin, even though for now he was not named. For once, his steely Communist training failed him. With unwontedly visible anger, he made a protest aimed at Mao: “we are ordered to discuss this document, but no revision is allowed … Is this not dictatorial?” He then asked Mayor Peng, who was condemned by name in the document, whether he had “any complaints.” The mayor, who had acted so bravely up to now, answered: “No complaints.” Liu gave him another chance to say something by asking: “Are you for it or against it?” The mayor hung his head and was silent. Liu then asked all in favor to raise their hands. All did, including Mayor Peng and Liu himself.

The members of the “clique” were soon hauled off and incarcerated. Mao’s cynicism about his case is revealed in a conversation he had the following month with Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh. Mao claimed the four men “are with the Nationalists.” When Ho queried this absurd assertion, Mao replied, without batting an eyelid: “We still do not have firm evidence, but just a suspicion of sorts.”

At this May Politburo gathering it was Lin Biao who acted as Mao’s intimidator. Raising his clenched fist, he surveyed the audience threateningly, and announced that anyone opposing Mao must be “put to death … the whole country must call for their blood.” His speech was larded with coarse personal abuse, with foes referred to simply as “sons of bitches.”

Most unusually, in the speech Lin spoke explicitly about the possibility of a coup d’état, a subject which was normally taboo. Mao had him talk in this way in order to knock any lingering dreams of a palace coup on the head. Mao had been making preparations against a coup for years, Lin disclosed, and particularly “in recent months,” when Mao had “paid special attention to the adoption of many measures toward preventing a … coup.” Mao had “deployed troops and key personnel … and made arrangements in critical departments like radio stations, the army and the police. This is what Chairman Mao has been doing in the past few months …” He also divulged that Mao had taken the possibility of a coup so seriously that he (Mao) had “lost sleep for many days.”

Mao had indeed been making arrangements to forestall a coup. Army units officered by Lin men had been moved into the capital. “We transferred two more garrison divisions [into Peking],” Mao told Albania’s defense minister. “Now in Peking we have three infantry divisions and one mechanised division, altogether four divisions. It is only because of these that you can go anywhere, and we can go anywhere.” The Praetorian Guard was drastically purged, including three deputy chiefs, one dying a terrible death, two barely surviving. The only person left unscathed was its chief, Mao’s trusted chamberlain Wang Dong-xing. Likewise, in the only other organization with access to weapons, the police, chiefs of both the ministry and its Peking bureau were arrested, because they had had ties to President Liu in the past. Another victim of Mao’s precautions was the ethnic Mongolian chief of Inner Mongolia, Ulanhu. This province occupied a vital position bordering on Russia’s satellite Mongolia. Ulanhu was detained that fateful May.

WHILE SHORING UP Mao, Lin Biao also attended to some personal business. Apart from Chief of Staff Luo, there was another member of the four-man “clique” he hated: media chief Lu Ding-yi, and for a rather unusual reason. Lu Ding-yi’s wife was a schizophrenic who was fixated on Mrs. Lin, and had written the Lins over fifty scabrous anonymous letters claiming that Mrs. Lin had had a string of affairs, including one with Wang Shi-wei, the dissident leader of the young volunteers in Yenan, and that Lin might not be the father of their children. Some of the letters were addressed to the Lins’ children, with lewd descriptions of their mother’s alleged sex life, some signed with the name of Dumas’ avenger, “Monte Cristo.” Instead of receiving mental treatment, which was what she clearly needed, Mrs. Lu was arrested on 28 April 1966, and went through hell for the next twelve years.

At one session of the May Politburo gathering, Lin had a document placed in front of the participants. It read:

I solemnly declare:

1. Ye Qun [Mrs. Lin] was a pure virgin when she married me. Since then, she has always been proper;

2. Ye Qun had no love relationship whatsoever with Wang Shi-wei;

3. Tiger and Dodo are blood son and daughter of mine with Ye Qun;

4. Everything written in the counter-revolutionary letters by [Mrs. Lu] is rubbish.

Lin Biao

14 May 1966.

It was the first time such a colorful text had ever come before the Politburo.

Although this behavior seems ludicrous, it had a practical aim. Lin was clearing his wife’s name, as she was now to be a fixture on the political scene, acting as his representative. He himself disliked attending meetings, or seeing people.

Mrs. Lin was a rather batty woman, a bundle of energy who received little love from the marshal and lived in a state of unremitting sexual frustration. She grew to be erratic, and managed to drive her own daughter, Dodo, to attempt suicide more than once, the first time in 1964. Like Mme Mao, who was also hysterical from frustration, Mrs. Lin now sought compensation and fulfillment in political scheming and persecution, although she was less awful than Mme Mao. She acted as her husband’s assistant, and issued orders on his behalf.

Mao’s Great Purge was rolling thanks to a horse-trade with his crony Lin Biao.

This suspicion sealed the fate of Sichuan chief Li Jing-quan, who was supposed to be Peng De-huai’s minder. Li, who had been one of Mao’s favorites, suffered greatly in the years ahead, and his wife committed suicide.

Although most were kept, and the man in charge told us that he privately saw to it that the ones destroyed were first transcribed. This was accomplished with the approval of his superior, who, it so happened, was Mayor Peng Zhen, who said: “I’ll just tell the Chairman they are all destroyed.”

48. THE GREAT PURGE (1966–67 AGE 72–73)

AT THE END of May 1966, Mao set up a new office, the Cultural Revolution Small Group, to help run the Purge. Mme Mao headed it for him, with Mao’s former secretary, Chen Bo-da, its nominal director, and purge expert Kang Sheng its “adviser.” This office, in addition to Lin Biao and Chou En-lai, formed Mao’s latest inner circle.

Under the new cabal, the cult of Mao was escalated to fever pitch. Mao’s face dominated the front page of People’s Daily, which also ran a column of his quotations every day. Soon, badges started appearing with Mao’s head on them, of which, altogether, some 4.8 billion were manufactured. More copies of Mao’s Selected Works were printed — and more portraits of him (1.2 billion) — than China had inhabitants. It was this summer that the Little Red Book was handed out to everyone. It had to be carried and brandished on all public occasions, and its prescriptions recited daily.

In June, Mao intensified the terrorization of society. He picked as his first instrument of terror young people in schools and universities, the natural hotbeds for activists. These students were told to condemn their teachers and those in charge of education for poisoning their heads with “bourgeois ideas”—and for persecuting them with exams, which henceforth were abolished. The message was splashed in outsize characters on the front page of People’s Daily, and declaimed in strident voices on the radio, carried by loudspeakers that had been rigged up everywhere, creating an atmosphere that was both blood-boiling and blood-curdling. Teachers and administrators in education were selected as the first victims because they were the people instilling culture, and because they were the group most conveniently placed to offer up to the youthful mobs, being right there to hand.

The young were told that their role was to “safeguard” Mao, although how their teachers could possibly harm “the great Helmsman,” or what perils might beset him, was not disclosed. Nevertheless, many responded enthusiastically. Taking part in politics was something no one had been allowed to do under Mao, and the country was seething with frustrated activists who had been denied the normal outlets available in most societies, even to sit around and argue issues. Now, suddenly, there seemed to be a chance to get involved. To those interested in politics, the prospect was tremendously exciting. Young people began to form groups.

On 2 June, a group from a middle school in Peking put up a wall poster, which they signed with the snappy name of “Red Guards,” to show that they wanted to safeguard Mao. Their writing was full of remarks like: “Stuff ‘human feelings!’ ” “We will be brutal!” “We will strike you [Mao’s enemies] to the ground and trample you!” The seeds of hate that Mao had sown were ready for reaping. Now he was able to unleash the thuggery of these infected teenagers, the most malleable and violent element of society.

To make sure that students were fully available to carry out his wishes, Mao ordered schooling suspended from 13 June. “Now lessons are stopped,” he said, and young people “are given food. With food they have energy and they want to riot. What are they expected to do if not to riot?” Violence broke out within days. On 18 June, scores of teachers and cadres at Peking University were dragged in front of crowds and manhandled, their faces blackened, and dunces’ hats put on their heads. They were forced to kneel, some were beaten up, and women were sexually molested. Similar episodes happened all over China, producing a cascade of suicides.

MAO ORCHESTRATED THESE events from the provinces. He had left the capital the previous November as soon as he had set the Purge in motion. Peking was no longer safe: it was full of foes he wanted to purge, and uncomfortably close to Russian troops on the Outer Mongolia border. For more than eight months, Mao stayed way down south, travelling incessantly.

He was also relaxing and storing up energy for the coming tempest. He took walks in the misty hills along the lake at Hangzhou, and flirted at his twice-weekly dancing parties. That June, while mayhem was rising, he spent some time in a particularly serene villa that he had never been to, outside his home village of Shaoshan. He had ordered this villa built during his previous visit seven years before. While swimming in a reservoir there, he had been much taken by the secluded beauty of the surroundings, and said to the provincial boss: “Mm, this place is pretty quiet. Would you build a straw hut here for my retirement?” As the man was soon purged, nothing was done until Mao brought it up again a year later, in the depth of the famine. So began “Project 203,” the building of a giant steel and cement edifice called Dripping Grotto. The whole mountain range was sealed off, and the local peasants evicted. A helicopter pad and a special railway line were planned, and an earthquake-and atom bomb — proof building, with shock-absorbers, was later incorporated. Altogether, Mao stayed here for all of eleven days in that violent June, and never again.

This grey monstrosity was surrounded, incongruously, by soft green hills alive with blazing wildflowers, and the back abutted onto the Mao family’s ancestral burial ground. Its front door faced a peak called Dragon’s Head, auspicious in the view of geomancy. This delighted Mao, who chatted jovially with his entourage about the feng shui assets of the place.

Though he was just on the edge of his native village, Mao did not meet a single villager. On his way, a little girl had caught a glimpse of him in his car, and told her family. Police descended at once, and warned the family: “You didn’t see Chairman Mao! Don’t you dare to say that again!” Meetings were called to warn the villagers not to think that Mao was there. Mao spent most of his time reading and thinking. He did not even go swimming, although the reservoir was right on his doorstep.

By the end of June, he was ready to head back to Peking and start the next stage of his Purge. En route, he stopped at Wuhan, where on 16 July he swam for more than an hour in the Yangtze, watched by tens of thousands of people. Like his swim a decade before, this was to send the message to his foes that, at the age of seventy-two, he had the health, the strength and the will for a gigantic fight. And this time the symbolic gesture was also intended for the population at large, especially the young. The message was distilled into one slogan: “Follow Chairman Mao forward through high winds and waves!” Chanted repeatedly from the now ubiquitous loudspeakers, it fanned the flames in many restless heads. Having cranked up his media to ballyhoo this swim to the maximum, even making it famous abroad, Mao returned to Peking on 18 July. He immediately adopted a hands-on approach, frequently chairing meetings with the Small Group that ran the Purge, and meeting every day with Chou En-lai, who was in charge of day-to-day business.

Mao did not go back to his old house, claiming he did not like the way it had been redecorated. Instead, he moved into unexpected quarters in another part of Zhongnanhai — the changing-rooms of the swimming pools, which he made his main residence for the next ten years. He did not move there to swim. He was taking precautions against the possibility that bugging devices — or worse — had been installed during his absence.

IT WAS IN these nondescript changing-rooms that Mao created the terror of “Red August,” with the aim of frightening the whole nation into an even greater degree of conformity. On 1 August he wrote to the first group of Red Guards, who had vowed in their posters to “be brutal” and to “trample” Mao’s enemies, to announce his “fiery support.” He circulated this letter, together with the bellicose Red Guard posters, to the Central Committee, telling these high officials that they must promote the Red Guards. Many of these officials were actually on Mao’s hit list, but for now he used them to spread terror — one that would soon engulf themselves. Following Mao’s instructions, these officials encouraged their children to form Red Guard groups, and these children passed the word to their friends. Red Guard groups mushroomed as a result, invariably headed by the children of high officials.

Learning from their fathers and friends that Mao was encouraging violence, the Red Guards immediately embarked on atrocities. On 5 August, in a Peking girls’ school packed with high officials’ children (which Mao’s two daughters had attended), the first known death by torture took place. The headmistress, a fifty-year-old mother of four, was kicked and trampled by the girls, and boiling water was poured over her. She was ordered to carry heavy bricks back and forth; as she stumbled past, she was thrashed with leather army belts with brass buckles, and with wooden sticks studded with nails. She soon collapsed and died. Afterwards, leading activists reported to the new authority. They were not told to stop — which meant carry on.

A more explicit incitement to violence soon came from Mao himself. On 18 August, dressed in army uniform for the first time since 1949, he stood on Tiananmen Gate to review hundreds of thousands of Red Guards. This was when the Red Guards were written about in the national press and introduced to the nation, and the world. A leading perpetrator of atrocities in the girls’ school where the headmistress had just been killed was given the signal honor of putting a Red Guard armband on Mao. The dialogue that followed was made public: “Chairman Mao asked her: ‘What’s your name?’ She said ‘Song Bin-bin.’ Chairman Mao asked: ‘Is it the “Bin” as in “Educated and Gentle?” ’ She said: ‘Yes.’ Chairman Mao said: ‘Be violent!’ ”

Song Bin-bin changed her name to “Be Violent,” and her school changed its name to “The Red Violent School.” Atrocities now multiplied in schools and universities. They started in Peking, then spread across the country, as Peking Red Guards were sent all over China to demonstrate how to do things like thrash victims and make them lick their own blood off the ground. Provincial youngsters were encouraged to visit Peking to learn that Mao had given them enormous destructive license. To facilitate this process, Mao ordered that travel be made free, together with food and accommodation while traveling. Over the next four months, 11 million young people came to Peking and Mao made seven more appearances at Tiananmen Square, where they gathered in massive, frenzied, yet well-drilled crowds.

There was not one school in the whole of China where atrocities did not occur. And teachers were not the only victims. In his letter to the Red Guards on 1 August 1966, Mao singled out for praise some militant teenagers who had been dividing pupils by family background and abusing those from undesirable families, whom they labeled “Blacks.” Mao announced specifically that these militants had his “fiery support,” which was unequivocal endorsement for what they were doing. In the girls’ school where the headmistress was tortured to death, “Blacks” had ropes tied around their necks, were beaten up, and forced to say: “I’m the bastard of a bitch. I deserve to die.”

With models set up by Mao, this practice then spread to all schools, accompanied by a “theory of the bloodline,” summed up in a couplet as ridiculous as it was brutal: “The son of a hero father is always a great man; a reactionary father produces nothing but a bastard!” This was chanted by many children of officials’ families, who dominated the early Red Guards, little knowing that their “hero fathers” were Mao’s real targets. At this initial stage, Mao simply used these children as his tools, setting them upon other children. When the Sichuan boss returned from Peking, he told his son, who was organizing a Red Guard group: “The Cultural Revolution is the continuation of the Communists against the Nationalists … Now our sons and daughters must fight their [Nationalists’] sons and daughters.” This man could not possibly have given such an order unless it had come from Mao.

AFTER TERROR IN SCHOOLS, Mao directed his Red Guards to fan out into society at large. The targets at this stage were the custodians of culture, and culture itself. On 18 August, Mao stood next to Lin Biao on Tiananmen while Lin called on Red Guards throughout the country to “smash … old culture.” The youngsters first went for objects like traditional shop signs and street names, which they attacked with hammers, and renamed. As in many revolutions, puritans turned on the softer and more flamboyant. Long hair, skirts and shoes with any hint of high heels were pounced on in the streets, and sheared by scissors-wielding teenagers. From now on, only flat shoes, and uniform-like, ill-fitting jackets and trousers, in only a few colors, were available.

But Mao wanted something much more vicious. On 23 August he told the new authorities: “Peking is not chaotic enough … Peking is too civilised.” As Peking was the trail-blazer and the provinces all copied the capital, this was a way to pump up terror nationwide. That afternoon, groups of teenage Red Guards, many of them girls, descended on the countryard of the Peking Writers’ Association. By then, a “uniform” was firmly in fashion for the Red Guards: green army-style clothes, often ordinary clothes dyed army green, or sometimes real army uniforms handed down by parents, red armband on the left arm, Little Red Book in hand — and a leather belt with brass buckles. Thus attired, the Red Guards rained blows with their heavy belts on some two dozen of the country’s best-known writers. Large insulting wooden plaques were hung on thin wire from the writers’ necks, as they were thrashed in the scorching sun.

The victims were then trucked to an old Confucian temple, which housed Peking’s major library. There, opera costumes and props had been brought to make a bonfire. About thirty of the country’s leading writers, opera singers and other artists were made to kneel in front of the bonfire and were set upon again with kicks and punches, sticks and brass-buckled belts. One of the victims was the 69-year-old writer Lao She, who had been lauded by the regime as “the people’s artist.” The following day, he drowned himself in a lake.

The site, props and victims had all been chosen to symbolize “old culture.” The selection of the victims, all household names, was unquestionably done at the very top, since till now they had all been official stars. There can be no doubt that the whole event was staged by the authorities; the loosely-banded teenage Red Guards could not possibly have organized all this on their own.

Mao had also cleared the way for the atrocities to escalate by issuing explicit orders to the army and police on the 21st and 22nd, saying that they must “absolutely not intervene” against the youngsters, using uncommonly specific language such as “even firing blanks … is absolutely forbidden.”

To spread terror deeper and closer to home, Mao got the young thugs to make violent raids on victims selected by the state, which gave their names and addresses to the Red Guards. The boss of Sichuan, for instance, ordered the department in his province that looked after prominent cultural figures to hand out a list to his son’s Red Guard organization — something he could only have done if Mao had told him to.

On 24 August, national police chief Xie Fu-zhi told his subordinates to pass out such information. Clearly responding to questions like “What if the Red Guards kill these people?” Xie said: “If people are beaten to death … it’s none of our business.” “Don’t be bound by rules set in the past.” “If you detain those who beat people to death … you will be making a big mistake.” Xie assured his reluctant subordinates: “Premier Chou supports it.”

It was with the authorities’ blessing that Red Guards broke into homes where they burned books, cut up paintings, trampled phonograph records and musical instruments — generally wrecking anything to do with “culture.” They “confiscated” valuables, and beat up the owners. Bloody house raids swept across China, which People’s Daily hailed as “simply splendid.” Many of those raided were tortured to death in their own homes. Some were carted off to makeshift torture chambers in what had been cinemas, theaters and sports stadiums. Red Guards tramping down the street, the bonfires of destruction, and the screams of victims being set upon — these were the sights and sounds of the summer nights of 1966.

There was a short list of notables to be exempted, drawn up by Chou En-lai. This later brought Chou totally unmerited plaudits for allegedly “saving” people. In fact, it was Mao who got Chou to draw the list up, on 30 August, and the purpose was purely utilitarian. The only reason Chou had charge of it was because he was running the whole show, not because he stepped in to save people. The list comprised a few dozen names. By contrast, later official statistics show that in August — September, in Peking alone, 33,695 homes were raided (which invariably involved physical violence), and 1,772 people were tortured, or beaten, to death.

To cover himself, Mao had Chou En-lai announce to a Red Guard rally on Tiananmen on 31 August: “Denounce by words, and not by violence.” This announcement allowed most Red Guards to opt out of violence by saying that Mao was against it. Some victims were also able to protect themselves by quoting this back to their persecutors. But as perpetrators of atrocities went unpunished, violence raged on.

One of Mao’s aims with the house raids was to use the Red Guards as proxy bandits. They confiscated tons of gold, silver, platinum, jewelry, and millions of dollars in hard currency, which all went into the state coffers, as well as many priceless antiques, paintings and ancient books. The looting, along with mindless on-site destruction, cleaned virtually all valuable possessions out of private hands. Some of the plunder was exported to earn foreign currency.

The top few leaders were allowed to take their pick of the booty. Mme Mao selected an 18-carat gold French pendant watch, studded with pearls and diamonds, for which she paid the princely sum of 7 yuan. This was in line with the Maoist leadership’s “un-corrupt” practice of insisting on paying for paltry items like tea leaves at meetings, but paying nothing at all for their scores of villas and servants, and having the de facto private use of planes and trains and other expensive perks. Kang Sheng, an antiques lover, privatized some house raids by sending in his own personal looters disguised as Red Guards. Mao himself pilfered thousands of old books. Sterilized by ultraviolet rays, they lined the shelves of his enormous sitting room, forming the backdrop to photographs of him receiving world leaders and impressing foreign visitors. The room, Kissinger mused, looked like “the retreat of a scholar.” In fact, unknown to the American visitors, it had more in common with one of Goering’s mansions adorned with art seized from victims of Nazism.

The regime squeezed something else out of these raids: housing space. The housing shortage was acute, as virtually no new dwellings had been built for ordinary urban residents under the Communists. Now the battered families who had been raided were squeezed into one or two rooms, and neighbors were moved into the rest of the raided houses, often resulting, not surprisingly, in excruciatingly bitter relations.

Some families who had been raided were exiled to villages, escalating a process which Mao had already initiated in order to turn cities into “pure” industrial centers. In Peking, nearly 100,000 were expelled in less than a month from late August. One eyewitness saw the vast waiting room at Peking railway station crammed with children waiting to be exiled with their parents. Red Guards ordered the children to kneel down, and then walked around aiming blows at their heads with brass-buckled belts. Some even poured scalding hot water over them as a farewell souvenir, while other passengers tried to find a place to hide.

IN SUMMER 1966 Red Guards ravaged every city and town, and some areas in the countryside. “Home,” with books and anything associated with culture, became a dangerous place. Fearing that the Red Guards might burst in and torture them if “culture” was found in their possession, frightened citizens burned their own books or sold them as scrap paper, and destroyed their own art objects. Mao thus succeeded in wiping out culture from Chinese homes. Outside, he was also fulfillling his long-held goal of erasing China’s past from the minds of his subjects. A large number of historical monuments, the most visible manifestation of the nation’s civilization, which had so far survived Mao’s loathing, was demolished. In Peking, of 6,843 monuments still standing in 1958, 4,922 were now obliterated.

Like the list of people to be spared, the list of monuments to be preserved was a short one. Mao did want to keep some monuments, like Tiananmen Gate, where he could stand to be hailed by “the masses.” The Forbidden City and a number of other historical sites were put under protection and many were closed down, thus depriving the population of access even to the fraction of their cultural inheritance that survived. Not spared was China’s leading architect, Liang Si-cheng, who had described Mao’s wish to see “chimneys everywhere” in Peking as “too horrifying a picture to bear thinking about.” Now he was subjected to public humiliation and abuse, and brutal house raids. His collection of books was destroyed, and his family expelled to one small room, with broken windows and ice-covered floor and walls. Chronically ill, Liang died in 1972.

Contrary to what is widely believed, the vast majority of the destruction was not spontaneous, but state-sponsored. Before Mao chided the Red Guards for being “too civilized” on 23 August, there had been no vandalism against historical monuments. It was on that day, only after Mao spoke, that the first statue was broken — a Buddha in the Summer Palace in Peking. From then on, when important sites were being wrecked, official specialists were present to pick out the most valuable objects for the state, while the rest were carted off and melted down, or pulped.

It was Mao’s office, the Small Group, which ordered the desecration of the home of the man whose name was synonymous with Chinese culture, Confucius. The home, in Shandong, was a rich museum, as emperors and artists had come there to pay homage, commissioning monuments and donating their art. The locals had been ordered to wreck it, but had responded by going slow. So Red Guards were dispatched from Peking. In their pledge before setting off, they said that the sage was “the enemy rival to death of Mao Tse-tung Thought.” Mao did, indeed, hate Confucius, because Confucianism enjoined that a ruler must care for his subjects, and as Mao himself put it, “Confucius is humanism … that is to say, People-centred-ism.”

In the annihilation of culture, Mme Mao played a key role as her husband’s police chief for this field. And she made sure there was no resurrection of culture for the rest of Mao’s life. Partly thanks to her, for a decade, until Mao’s death in 1976, old books remained banned, and among the handful of new books of general interest that were published, all of them sported Mao’s quotations, in bold, on every other page. There were a few paintings and some songs around, but they all served propaganda purposes, and eulogized Mao. Virtually the only performing arts allowed were eight “revolutionary model shows” and a few films that Mme Mao had had a hand in producing. China became a cultural desert.

BY MID-SEPTEMBER 1966, the country was thoroughly terrorized and Mao felt confident enough to start stalking his real target: Party officials. On 15 September, Lin Biao instructed a Red Guards’ rally on Tiananmen Square that they were to shift their target and “focus on denouncing those power-holders inside the Party pursuing a capitalist road,” known as “capitalist-roaders.” What Lin — and Mao — really meant was the old enforcers who had shown distaste for Mao’s extremist policies. Mao aimed to get rid of them en masse, and the call went out to attack them right across China.

For this job, new groups were formed, who sometimes called themselves Red Guards but were generally known as “Rebels,” because they were taking on their bosses. And these Rebels were mostly adults. The original Red Guard groups, most of them made up of teenagers, now fell apart, as they had been organized around the children of those same high officials who now became targets. Mao had used the young Red Guards to terrorize society at large. Now he was moving against his real enemies, Party officials; and for this he used a broader, mainly older force.

With Mao’s explicit support, Rebels denounced their bosses in wall posters and at violent rallies. But anyone who thought the Party dictatorship might be weakened had their hopes dashed fast. People who tried to get access to their own files (which the regime held on everyone), or to rehabilitate those the Party had persecuted, were instantly blocked. Orders poured out from Peking making it clear that, although Party officials were under attack, the Party’s rule was not to be loosened one bit. Victims of past persecutions were banned from joining Rebel organizations.

After some months to generate momentum, in January 1967 Mao called on Rebels to “seize power” from their Party bosses. Mao did not differentiate between disaffected officials and those who were actually totally loyal to him and had not wavered even during the famine. In fact, there was no way he could tell who was which. So he resolved to overthrow them all first, and then have them investigated by his new enforcers. The population was told that the Party had been in the hands of villains (“the black line”) ever since the founding of the Communist regime. It was an index of how deeply fear had been embedded that no one dared to ask the obvious questions, like: “In that case, why should the Party go on ruling?” or “Where was Mao all these seventeen years?”

The Rebels’ basic assignment was to punish Party cadres, which is what Mao had been longing to do for years. Some Rebels hated their Party bosses, and jumped at the chance to take revenge. Others were hungry for power, and knew that the only way to rise was to be merciless towards “capitalist-roaders.” There were also plenty of thugs and sadists.

Stalin had carried out his purges using an elite, the KGB, who swiftly hustled their victims out of sight to prison, the gulag or death. Mao made sure that much violence and humiliation was carried out in public, and he vastly increased the number of persecutors by getting his victims tormented and tortured by their own direct subordinates.

A British engineer who was working in Lanzhou in 1967 caught a glimpse of life in one remote corner of the northwest. Two nights after being entertained at an official dinner, he saw a corpse strung up from a lamp-post. It was his host of two nights before. Later, he saw two men being deliberately deafened into unconsciousness by loudhailers—“so that no more reactionary remarks enter their ears,” his minder told him.

The first senior official tortured to death was the minister of coal, on 21 January 1967. Mao hated him because he had complained about the Great Leap Forward — and about Mao himself. He was exhibited in front of organized crowds, and had his arms twisted ferociously backwards in the form of torment known as being “jet-planed.” One day he was shoved onto a bench, bleeding, shirtless in a temperature well below freezing, while thugs rushed forward to cut him with small knives. Finally, a huge iron stove was hung around his neck, dragging his head down to the cement floor, where his skull was bashed in with heavy brass belt buckles. During all this, photographs were taken, which were later shown to Chou — and doubtless to Mao.

Photographing torture had hitherto been rare under Mao, but it was done extensively in the Cultural Revolution, especially where Mao’s personal enemies were concerned. As Mao’s usual practice was not to keep records for posterity, let alone proof of torture, the most likely explanation for this departure from his norm is that he took pleasure in viewing pictures of his foes in agony. Film cameras also recorded gruesome denunciation rallies, and Mao watched these displays in his villas. Selected films of this sort were shown on TV, accompanied by the soundtrack of Mme Mao’s “model shows,” and people were organized to watch. (Very few individuals had TV in those days.)

Mao was intimately acquainted with the types of ordeal visited on his former colleagues and subordinates. Vice-Premier Ji Deng-kui later recalled Mao doing an imitation for his entourage of the agonizing “jet-plane” posture which was routine at denunciation meetings, and Mao laughing heartily as Ji described what he had been through.

Eventually, after two or three years of suffering in this manner, millions of officials were exiled to de facto labor camps which went under the anodyne name of “May 7 Cadre Schools.” These camps also housed the custodians of culture — artists, writers, scholars, actors and journalists — who had become superfluous in Mao’s new order.

THE REPLACEMENTS FOR the ousted cadres came mainly from the army, which Mao ordered into every institution in January 1967. Altogether, over the next few years, 2.8 million army men became the new controllers, and of these, 50,000 took over the jobs of former medium-to high-ranking Party officials. These army men were assisted in their new roles by the Rebels and some veteran cadres who were kept on for continuity and expertise. But the army provided the core of the new enforcers — at the expense of doing its job of defending the country. When one army unit was moved away from the coast opposite Taiwan to take control of a province in the interior, its commander asked Chou En-lai what would happen if there was a war. Chou’s answer was: “There will be no war in the next ten years.” Mao did not believe Chiang would invade.

In March, with the new enforcers in place, pupils and students were ordered back to their schools — although, once there, they could only kick their heels, as the old textbooks, teaching methods and teachers had all been condemned, and nobody knew what to do. Normal schooling did not exist for most young people until after Mao’s death, a decade later.

In society at large, the economy ran much as usual, except for relatively minor disruptions caused by the personnel changes. People went to work as before. Shops were open, as were banks. Hospitals, factories, mines, the post, and, with some interruptions, transport, all operated fairly normally. The Superpower Program, far from being paralyzed, as is often thought, was given unprecedented priority in the Cultural Revolution, and investment in it increased. Agriculture did no worse than before.

What changed, apart from the bosses, was life outside work. Leisure disappeared. Instead, there were endless mind-numbing — but nerve-racking — meetings to read and reread Mao’s works and People’s Daily articles. People were herded into numerous violent denunciation rallies against “capitalist-roaders” and other appointed enemies. Public brutality became an inescapable part of daily life. Each institution ran its de facto prison, in which victims were tortured, some to death. Moreover, there were no ways to relax, as there were now virtually no books to read, or magazines, or films, plays, opera; no light music on the radio. For entertainment there were only Mao Thought Propaganda Teams, who sang Mao’s quotations set to raucous music, and danced militantly waving the Little Red Book. Not even Mme Mao’s eight “model shows” were performed for the public yet, as their staging had to be under draconian central control.

ONE TASK OF the new enforcers was to screen the old cadres to explore whether they had ever resisted Mao’s orders, even passively. Each of the millions of ousted officials had a “case team” combing through his or her past. At the very top was a Central Special Case Team, a highly secret group chaired by Chou En-lai, with Kang Sheng as his deputy, and staffed by middle-ranking army officers. This was the body that investigated people personally designated by Mao. Since he especially wanted to find out whether any of his top echelon had been plotting against him with the Russians, the key case in the military was that of Marshal Ho Lung, the unlucky recipient of Russian defense minister Malinovsky’s remarks about getting rid of Mao. All Ho’s old subordinates were implicated in this case, and Ho himself died as a result.

The Central Special Case Team had the power to arrest, interrogate — and torture. They also recommended what punishments should be meted out. Chou’s signature appeared on many arrest warrants and recommendations for punishment, including death sentences.

While suspects were being interrogated under torture, and while his old power base endured unprecedented suffering, Mao cavorted. The dancing still went on at Zhongnanhai with girls called in, some to share his large bed. To the tune of “The Pleasure-Seeking Dragon Flirts with the Phoenix,” which was deemed “pornographic” by his own regime, and long banned, Mao danced on. One by one, as the days went by, his colleagues disappeared from the dance floor, either purged, or simply having lost any appetite for fun. Eventually, Mao alone of the leaders still trod the floor.

Out of his remaining top echelon, there came only one burst of defiance. In February 1967, some of the Politburo members who had not fallen spoke up, voicing rage at what was happening to their fellow Party cadres. Mao’s old follower Tan Zhen-lin, who had been in charge of agriculture during the famine (showing how far he was prepared to go along with Mao), exploded to the Small Group: “Your purpose is to get rid of all the old cadres … They made revolution for decades, and end up with their families broken and themselves dying. It is the cruellest struggle in Party history, worse than any time before.” Next day, he wrote to Lin Biao: “I have come to the absolute end of my tether … I am ready to die … to stop them.” Foreign Minister Chen Yi called the Cultural Revolution “one big torture chamber.”

But these elite survivors were either devoted veteran followers of Mao’s, or men already broken by him. Faced with his wrath, they folded. With the critical duo of Lin Biao and Chou behind him, Mao had the dissenters harassed; then, when they had been suitably cowed, he extended them an olive branch. The mini-revolt was easily quelled.

Not cowed as easily as the Politburo members was a brigadier called Cai Tie-gen, who even contemplated organizing a guerrilla force, making him the only senior cadre known to have thought of trying to “do a Mao” to Mao. He was shot, the highest-ranking officer executed in the Purge. Saying farewell to a friend who was nearly shot with him, he encouraged him to continue the fight, and then went calmly to the execution ground.

There was other truly heroic resistance from ordinary people. One was a remarkable woman of nineteen, a student of German called Wang Rong-fen, who had attended the Tiananmen rally on 18 August 1966, and whose reaction to it showed astonishing freshness and independence of spirit, as well as courage. She thought that it was “just like Hitler’s,” and wrote to Mao posing a number of sharp questions: “What are you doing? Where are you leading China?” “The Cultural Revolution,” she told Mao, “is not a mass movement. It is one man with the gun manipulating the masses. I declare I resign from the Communist Youth League …”

One letter she wrote in German, and with that in her pocket she got hold of four bottles of insecticide and drank them outside the Soviet embassy, hoping the Russians would discover her corpse and publicize her protest to the world. Instead, she woke up in a police hospital. She was sentenced to life imprisonment. For months on end, her hands were tightly handcuffed behind her back and she had to roll herself along the floor to get her mouth to the food that was just tossed onto the floor of her cell. When the handcuffs were finally removed, they had to be sawn off, as the lock was jammed with rust. This extraordinary young woman survived prison — and Mao — with her spirit undimmed.

49. UNSWEET REVENGE (1966–74 AGE 72–80)

IN AUGUST 1966, Mao toppled Liu Shao-chi. On the 5th, after Liu met a delegation from Zambia in his capacity as president, Mao had Chou En-lai telephone Liu and tell him to stop meeting foreigners, or appearing in public, unless told to do so. That day, Mao wrote a tirade against Liu which he himself read out to the Central Committee two days later, in Liu’s presence, breaking the news of Liu’s downfall (the general population was not told). Just before this, on the 6th, Mao had had Lin Biao specially fetched to Peking to lend him weight, in case there was unmanageable opposition. Lin Biao formally replaced Liu as Mao’s No. 2.

Mao’s persecution of the man he hated most could now begin. He started with Liu’s wife, Wang Guang-mei. Mao knew that the two were devoted to each other, and that making Guang-mei suffer would hurt Liu greatly.

Guang-mei came from a distinguished cosmopolitan family: her father had been a government minister and diplomat, and her mother a well-known figure in education. Guang-mei had graduated in physics from an American missionary university, and had been about to take up an offer from Michigan University to study in America in 1946 when she decided to join the Communists, under the influence of her radical mother. People remembered how at dancing parties in the Communist base in those civil war days, Liu would cross the threshing-ground that served as a dance floor with his characteristic sure steps and, bowing, ask for a dance, in a manner unusual for a Party leader. Guang-mei had elegance and style, and Liu was smitten. They were married in 1948, and the marriage was an exceptionally happy one, particularly for Liu, who had had a string of unsuccessful relationships (and one wife executed by the Nationalists).

From the moment it was clear that Mao was coming after Liu, from the Conference of the Seven Thousand in January 1962, Guang-mei encouraged her husband to stand up to Mao. This was in vivid contrast to the behavior of many leaders’ wives, who urged their spouses to kowtow. In the ensuing years, she helped Liu to entrench his position. In June 1966, when Mao was fomenting violence in schools and universities, Liu made a last-ditch attempt to curb the mayhem by sending in “work teams,” and Guang-mei became a member of the one sent to Qinghua University in Peking. There she came into collision with a twenty-year-old militant called Kuai Da-fu. Kuai’s original interest in politics had been sparked by a sense of justice: as a boy of thirteen in a village during the famine, he had petitioned Peking about grassroots officials ill-treating peasants. But when, in summer 1966, the Cultural Revolution was presented by the media as a “struggle for power,” Kuai developed an appetite for power and led riotous actions to “seize power from the work team.” He was put under dormitory arrest by the work team for eighteen days, which Liu authorized.

In the small hours of 1 August, Kuai was woken up by cars screeching to a halt to find before him none other than Chou En-lai. Kuai was completely overwhelmed. He could not make himself sit properly on the sofa, but perched on the edge. Suavely putting him at his ease, Chou told him he had come on behalf of Mao, and quizzed him about the work team — and the role of Mme Liu. Even though he had a stenographer with him, Chou took notes himself. The session lasted three hours, until after 5:00 AM, when Chou invited Kuai to come to the Great Hall of the People that evening. There they talked for another three hours. Mao used Kuai’s complaints as ammunition, and from now on Kuai was Mao’s point man against the Lius.

On 25 December, the eve of Mao’s seventy-third birthday, on the orders of the Small Group, Kuai led 5,000 students in a parade through Peking with trucks fitted with loudspeakers blaring “Down with Liu Shao-chi!” This unusual demonstration was a step towards preparing people for the fact that the president of China was about to become an enemy, and even though it was not announced in the media, it made Liu’s fall known to the nation. Kuai and his “demonstration” also enabled Mao to make it seem that Liu’s downfall was by some sort of popular demand.

From here on, the Lius were tormented in countless ways. At dawn on New Year’s Day 1967, Mao sent New Year greetings to his old colleague by getting staff in Zhongnanhai to daub giant insults inside the Lius’ house. Similar menaces followed, all choreographed — except one.

This was on 6 January, when Kuai’s group seized the Lius’ teenage daughter, Ping-ping, and then telephoned Guang-mei to tell her that the girl had been hit by a car and was in a hospital, which needed consent to perform an amputation. Both parents raced to the hospital, which discomfited the Rebels. Kuai recounted:

The students never thought Liu Shao-chi would come, and they were all frightened. They knew they couldn’t touch Liu Shao-chi … the Centre had given no instructions [about handling Liu in person]. We dared not be rash … We knew this kind of “Down with” in politics could well turn to “Up with” … Without clear and specific instructions from the Centre, when it came to blame, we would have had it. So my pals asked Liu to go back, and kept Wang Guang-mei.

This is a good self-confession of how the Rebels really worked; they were tools, and cowards, and they knew it.

As this stunt had not been centrally orchestrated, soldiers descended on the hospital within minutes. The students scurried nervously through the motions of denouncing Guang-mei in just half an hour. While this was going on, Kuai was called to the phone, which, he remembered,

gave me a big fright when the voice on the line said. “This is Chou En-lai.” Chou told me to release Wang Guang-mei: “No beating, no humiliation. Do you understand?” I said: “I understand” … He hung up. Less than a minute later, another call came. It was from Jiang Qing — my only call ever from her. As I took the phone, I heard her giggling. She said: “You got Wang Guang-mei. What’s all this? Are you fooling around? Don’t beat her, don’t humiliate her.” She repeated Chou En-lai’s words and said: “The premier is anxious, and asked me to telephone you. As soon as you finish denouncing Wang Guang-mei, send her back.”

So ended the only spontaneous move by the Rebels against the Lius. Chou’s order to spare Guang-mei was not made out of the kindness of his heart. Kuai’s action was unauthorized, and did not fit in with Mao’s timetable.

Mao’s next step was to have Liu brought to Suite 118 in the Great Hall for a tête-à-tête in the middle of the night on 13 January. Mao showed he was well aware of the hoax played on the Lius by inquiring: “How are Ping-ping’s legs?” He then advised Liu to “read some books,” mentioning two titles both having the word “mechanical” in them, which Mao claimed were by Heidegger and Diderot. This was a way of advising Liu to be less stiff-necked, meaning he should do some kowtowing. Liu did not grovel, but repeated the offer he had made many times: to resign and go and work as a peasant. He asked Mao to stop the Cultural Revolution and punish only him, and not to harm anybody else. Mao waxed non-committal, and merely asked Liu to look after his health. With this he saw Liu, his closest colleague for nearly three decades, to the door for the last time — and to a slow and agonizing death.

WITHIN DAYS THE Lius’ telephones were cut off. House arrest was now total, with the walls covered with enormous insulting posters and slogans. On 1 April, Mao made Liu’s purge official to the general public by having him condemned as “the biggest capitalist-roader” in People’s Daily. Right after this, Kuai organized a rally 300,000 strong to humiliate and abuse Guang-mei. Chou discussed the details with Kuai beforehand, and on the day itself Chou’s office kept in constant contact by phone with Kuai’s group. Mme Mao added her personal touch by telling Kuai: “When Wang Guang-mei was in Indonesia, she lost all face for the Chinese. She even wore a necklace!” Mme Mao also accused Guang-mei of wearing traditional Chinese dresses “to make herself a whore with Sukarno in Indonesia,” and told Kuai: “You must find those things and make her wear them.” Mme Mao had been bitterly jealous of Guang-mei being able to wear glamorous clothes when she went abroad as the president’s wife, while she herself was cooped up in China, where these things were not allowed.

Kuai recalled that Mme Mao “was telling me explicitly, in effect, to humiliate Wang Guang-mei … We could insult her any way we wanted.” So a traditional Chinese tight dress was forced on to Guang-mei, over her padded clothing, making her body appear bulging and ugly. A string of ping-pong balls was hung around her neck to signify a pearl necklace. The whole rally was filmed by cameramen, undoubtedly for Mao, as it could not have been done without his authorization.

But the Maos failed to break Guang-mei. During the pre-rally interrogation, she showed extraordinary fearlessness — and a quick wit — and defended her husband eloquently. When she was hauled onto the stage to face the crowd’s blood-curdling screams and upthrust fists, her interrogators asked her: “Aren’t you scared?” Her calm answer impressed them: “No, I am not.”

Decades later, Kuai spoke with admiration about Guang-mei: “She was very strong … She stood straight, and refused to bow her head when ordered to. The students went at her with force, great force. She was pushed down to her knees … but instantly she stood up straight. Wang Guang-mei would not be cowed. She was full of bitterness against Mao Tse-tung, only she could not say it straight out.” Afterwards, she wrote to Mao to protest.

Liu did likewise, again and again. Mao’s response was to ratchet up the punishment, leaving detailed instructions with the Small Group before he left Peking on 13 July. The moment he was gone, several hundred thousand Rebels were summoned to camp outside Zhongnanhai, blasting insults like “pile of dog shit” at the Lius through scores of loudspeakers. Liu’s subordinates were dragged outside the walls of Zhongnanhai to be denounced in a sort of grotesque road show.

At the height of this, Liu was presented with a demand to “bow your head obediently and admit your crimes to Chairman Mao.” This was purportedly in the name of some Rebels, to pretend that it had come from “the masses.” But it was presented to Liu by Mao’s chamberlain and chief of the Praetorian Guard, Wang Dong-xing, which left no doubt who was the puppeteer. Liu turned the demand down flat. Anticipating the worst after this defiance, Guang-mei held up a bottle of sleeping pills in front of her husband, offering to commit suicide with him. Neither spoke a word for fear of bugging, which would almost certainly have led to the pills being confiscated. Liu shook his head.

Knowing how much Liu’s strength had come from his wife, Mao ordered the couple separated. On 18 July, they were told they would be denounced at separate meetings that evening. More than three decades later Guang-mei wrote about the moment:

I said: “It looks as if it really is goodbye this time!” I just couldn’t stop my tears falling …

… For the only time in our lives, Shao-chi did my packing for me, and he folded my clothes neatly. In the last few minutes, we sat gazing at each other … Then he who rarely cracked a joke said: “This is like waiting for a sedan-chair to come and carry you off [to be married]!” … We burst out laughing.

After brutal denunciation meetings, the Lius were put in separate virtual solitary confinement. They met again only once, when they were dragged in front of a kangaroo court as a couple, on 5 August, the first anniversary of Mao’s written tirade against Liu. Mao’s point man Kuai had prepared a big event at Tiananmen Square, where a stage had been specially constructed for the Lius to be paraded in front of an organized crowd of hundreds of thousands. In the end, Mao vetoed the idea. He could not risk this being seen by foreigners. If they were to witness the savagery towards his former closest colleague, here in the heart of Peking, i.e., clearly backed by him, the whole charade could easily backfire. Not least, this could affect foreign Maoists, many of whom had already been alienated by Mao’s Purge. Nor could Mao risk the Lius speaking. Mao could count on the Lius to produce sharp rebuttals, as they had done in letters to himself and in their retorts to Rebels. Mao did not dare risk a Stalin-type show trial. So the Lius ended up receiving their salvo of abuse only inside Zhongnanhai, from Praetorian Guards dressed in mufti and from Zhongnanhai staff.

On that day, 5 August, the “capitalist-roaders” Nos. 2 and 3, Deng Xiao-ping and Tao Zhu (Liu was the “No. 1”), were denounced outside their own houses too. They had both fallen into disgrace, like many other old Mao favorites, because they had declined to cooperate with Mao’s Great Purge. But as Mao did not hate them as much as he did Liu, they were treated less fiercely. Tao Zhu’s wife, Zeng Zhi, was an old friend of Mao’s, and was spared. She recounted a telling episode which reveals how precise Mao’s control was. While her husband was being beaten up, she was allowed to sit down. A militant woman was about to set upon her when Zeng Zhi noticed a man in the audience shaking his head at the woman, who promptly backed off.

Zeng Zhi knew that Mao’s “friendship” and protection could vanish as soon as she did anything that displeased the Great Helmsman. Later, when her terminally ill husband was sent into internal exile, she was given the option of accompanying him. Both she and her husband knew that if she did so she would lose Mao’s goodwill, which would ruin her and their only daughter. So the couple decided she should not go with him, and he died in exile alone.

At the kangaroo court inside Zhongnanhai on 5 August 1967, Liu stood his ground and gave succinct answers; but as soon as he tried to say more, Little Red Books rained down on his head, and he was shouted down by the crowd yelling mindless slogans. The Lius were punched, kicked, “jet-planed,” and had their hair pulled ferociously back to expose their faces for photographers and a film crew. At one moment, the meeting was adjourned and an order was given by a Mao point man to make it more ferocious for the cameras. The film shows Liu then being trampled on the ground. In a supreme act of sadism, the Lius’ six-year-old daughter and their other children were brought to watch their parents being assaulted. The whole vile episode was also attended by Mao’s special observer — his own daughter Li Na.

Mao may have derived satisfaction from the Lius’ ordeal, but he can hardly have failed to register that they were not crushed. At one point, Guang-mei tore free and clung to a corner of her husband’s clothes. For a few minutes, under a rain of kicks and punches, the couple held each other’s hands tight, struggling to stand up straight.

Guang-mei was to pay a hefty price for her courage. A little over a month later, she was charged with spying for America — plus, for good measure, Japan and Chiang Kai-shek. For twelve years, until after Mao’s death, she was locked up in the top-security prison, Qincheng, where for long periods she was not allowed even to walk, so that years later she still could not stand up straight. She remained undaunted. Her case team called for her execution. Mao said “No.” He did not want her put out of her misery so soon.

Guang-mei’s siblings were incarcerated, as was her septuagenarian mother, who died in prison a few years later. The Lius’ children became homeless, and were subjected to beatings and imprisonment. One son of Liu’s from a previous marriage committed suicide. Meanwhile, Liu’s house, a short walk from Mao’s, was turned into a uniquely Maoist slow-death cell.

LIU WAS NEARLY seventy, and his health deteriorated fast. One leg became paralyzed, and he was in a state of permanent sleep deprivation, as the sleeping pills on which he had been dependent were now withheld. He was kept alive, barely. On 20 December 1967, his jailers recorded that they were “only keeping him alive, just short of starvation.” “Tea has been stopped …” His life-threatening ailments, pneumonia and diabetes, were treated, although, in a further Maoist turn of the screw, the doctors would curse him while patching him up. But his mental health was deliberately allowed to collapse. On 19 May 1968, his jailers reported that he “brushed his teeth with a comb and soap, put his socks on over his shoes and his underpants outside his trousers …” And in the cruel style that was the order of the day, they wrote that Liu “plays the idiot, and makes one disgusting fool of himself after another.”

That summer, Mao twice gave orders through Wang Dong-xing to the doctors and the guards that they must “keep him [Liu] alive until after the 9th Congress,” when Mao planned to have Liu expelled from the Party. If Liu was dead, this rigmarole would not provide Mao with the same satisfaction. Once the congress was over, the clear implication was that Liu should be left to die.

By October 1968, Liu had to be drip-fed through the nose, and it seemed he might die any minute. Mao was not ready for the congress, so the Central Committee — in fact, a rump minority which contained only 47 percent of the original members, the rest having been purged — was hastily convened to expel Liu from the Party. It also removed him from the presidency, an act that did not even pretend to follow constitutional procedure.

Liu’s case team had signally failed to come up with a case. Mao had told it he wanted a spy charge, which was a way of avoiding any policy issues, and of steering the investigators away from Liu’s links with himself. In fact, Mao was so nervous about Liu speaking to anyone that the team investigating Liu was forbidden even to set eyes on him, let alone ask him any questions. Instead, a large number of other people were imprisoned and interrogated, to try to turn up evidence against him. It was partly to accommodate key detainees in the Liu case that Qincheng, the prison for the “elite,” which had been built with the help of Russian advisers in the 1950s, was expanded by 50 percent. Its first inmate in the Cultural Revolution was Shi Zhe, who had interpreted for Liu with Stalin and who was pressed to say that Liu was a Russian spy. Also imprisoned here was the American Sidney Rittenberg, who had known Mme Liu in the 1940s. Pressure was put on him to say that he had recruited her, and Liu, for American intelligence. (Rittenberg observed that the interrogators, while going through the required frenzied motions, did not seem to believe their own case.) Attempts were also made to get former Nationalist intelligence chiefs to say that Guang-mei had spied for them.

Most of those detained and called upon to tell blatant lies tried their hardest not to comply. Among those who paid dearly for sticking to their guns were two former Party chiefs, Li Li-san and Lo Fu. Their families were thrown into prison, and the two men themselves were both to meet their deaths. Li-san’s Russian wife, who had stood by him through the purges in Russia in the 1930s when he had been imprisoned there for two years, now spent eight years in Mao’s prison.

Even some of the members of the Lius’ case team declined to fabricate evidence. As a result, the team itself had to be purged three times, and two of its three chiefs ended up in prison. It found itself in a Catch-22 situation, as concocting evidence could be as dangerous as failing to unearth it. On one occasion, the team claimed that Liu had wanted American troops to invade China in 1946, and that Liu had wanted to see President Truman about this. “Making such a claim,” Mao said, “is … to treat us like fools. America sending in troops en masse: even the Nationalists did not want that.” In the end, the team just piled up a list of assertions, one being that Liu “married the American spy Wang Guang-mei who had been sent to Yenan by the American Strategic Intelligence.” Its report, which was delivered to the Central Committee by Mao’s faithful slave, Chou En-lai, called Liu a “traitor, enemy agent and scab,” and recommended the death sentence. But Mao rejected it, as he did for Mme Liu.

Mao was kept fully informed about Liu’s last sufferings. Photographs were taken showing Liu in such agony that he had squeezed two hard plastic bottles right out of shape. In April 1969, when the 9th Congress convened at last, Mao announced in a voice devoid of even a show of pity, that Liu was at death’s door.

In his lucid hours, Liu had maintained his dignity. On 11 February 1968 he had written a last self-defense, in which he even had a go at Mao about his dictatorial style from back in the early 1920s. After that, Liu went totally silent. Mao’s whole modus operandi depended on breaking people, but he had failed to make Liu crawl.

On a cold October night, half-naked under a quilt, Liu was put on a plane to the city of Kaifeng. There, local doctors’ requests for an X-ray or hospitalization were denied. Death came within weeks, on 12 November 1969. Altogether, Liu had endured three years of physical suffering and mental anguish. He was cremated under a pseudonym, his face wrapped in white cloth. The crematorium staff had been told to vacate the premises, on the grounds that the corpse had a deadly infectious disease.

The extraordinary coda to Liu’s story is that his death was never made public during Mao’s lifetime. This seemingly anomalous behavior (most dictators like to dance on their enemies’ graves) was an indication of how insecure Mao felt. He was afraid that if the news got out, it would arouse sympathy for the dead man. In fact, the vilification of Liu continued for the rest of Mao’s life, with never a hint to the public that Liu was dead. Mao had got his revenge by making Liu die a painful and lingering death. But it cannot have tasted very sweet.

NOR DID MAO emerge a victor vis-à-vis his second-biggest hate, Marshal Peng De-huai. The first Rebel leader sent to Sichuan in December 1966 to haul Peng back to detention in Peking was so moved by Peng after he talked to him that he started to appeal on Peng’s behalf. The Rebel ended up in prison, but said he had no regrets for having stuck his neck out. Another Rebel leader who manhandled Peng expressed deep remorse later for what he had done. There is no question where people’s feelings lay when they knew what Peng stood for, or met him.

In Peking, Peng was dragged to scores of denunciation meetings, on Mao’s orders, at each one of which he was kicked by Rebels wearing heavy leather boots and beaten ferociously with staves. His ribs were broken, and he passed out repeatedly.

Unlike Liu, Peng was interrogated, some 260 times, as Mao genuinely feared he might have had some connection with Khrushchev. In solitary, Peng’s mind began to crack, but his redoubtable core never did. He wrote a lucid account of his life, refuting Mao’s accusations. The ending, written in September 1970, proclaimed: “I will still lift my head and shout a hundred times: my conscience is clear!”

Peng was a man of rugged constitution, and his ordeal lasted even longer than Liu’s — eight years, until 29 November 1974, when he was finally felled by cancer of the rectum. Like Liu, he was cremated under a pseudonym, and his death, too, was never announced while Mao remained alive.

The Belgian Communist Jacques Grippa, the most senior Maoist in Western Europe and a man who had himself been tortured in a Nazi camp, now wrote to Liu, as president, in Zhongnanhai. The letter was returned marked “Does not live at this address.”

50. THE CHAIRMAN’S NEW OUTFIT (1967–70 AGE 73–76)

BY EARLY 1967, Mao had axed millions of Party officials and replaced them mainly with army men. But he immediately found himself facing problems with the replacements. Most lacked sufficient brutality, and often protected and even re-employed purged officials, a feat they achieved by enlisting Mao’s hypocritical remark that “most of the old cadres are all right.” This was bad enough, but there was an additional cause for concern on Mao’s part. He had to rely on army officers to choose Rebels to staff the new set-up. The trouble was that in every region and institution there were different, rival groups, all calling themselves Rebels, and the military tended to incorporate the more moderate ones, even though Mao told them to promote “the Left,” i.e., those harshest in persecuting “capitalist-roaders.”

If the army men were allowed to have their way, Mao’s revenge would be incomplete. More important, if these new army enforcers turned out to be like the old officials, he would be back where he started. He had intended the Great Purge to install much more merciless enforcers.

One place that was giving Mao a headache was the city of Wuhan, his favorite spot for symbolic swims in the Yangtze. The commander there, Chen Zai-dao, had joined the Red Army in 1927 as a poverty-stricken peasant of eighteen, and risen through the ranks. General Chen was deeply averse to the Cultural Revolution, and had even shown sympathy for Mao’s primary target, Liu Shao-chi. In the province under his control, he reinstated large numbers of old officials, disbanded the most militant Rebel groups and arrested their leaders. In May 1967, when the moderates united into a province-wide organization called “the Million Peerless Troops,” which boasted a membership of 1.2 million, he supported them.

In mid-July, Mao came to Wuhan in person to order General Chen to change his position. Assuming that General Chen would just cave in, Mao planned then to use Wuhan as an example to get army units all over the country to follow suit.

But Mao was in for a huge shock. When he told General Chen that the Peerless was a “Conservative” organization, and that the military had committed grave errors in backing it, Chen told Mao to his face: “We don’t admit that.”

Next came something equally unheard-of: rank-and-file members of the Peerless, together with sympathizers in the army, reacted to Mao’s verdict with defiance. On the night of 19–20 July, when the message was relayed to them by military and civilian grandees whom Mao had brought with him from Peking, outraged crowds took to the streets, with hundreds of trucks carrying nearly 1,000 soldiers with machine-guns, as well as tens of thousands of workers armed with iron bars. The demonstrators blasted protests through loudspeakers at Mao’s villa compound. Many knew that this ultra-mysterious, top-security lakeside estate was Mao’s, and, seeing the lights on, guessed that he was in residence. Though no one dared to attack Mao openly, giant posters in the streets carried slogans attacking the Small Group and its leader, Mme Mao, indirectly aiming at Mao himself: “Jiang Qing keep away from power!” “Chairman Mao is being hoodwinked!” General Chen received extraordinary letters; one even urged him to “use your power … to wipe off the face of the Earth those worst dictators in the world who want no history and no culture …”

Most scary for Mao, hundreds of demonstrators and armed soldiers broke into the grounds of his villa, and got within a stone’s throw of him, carrying off a key member of his entourage, Small Group member Wang Li, who took a fearsome beating.

Never in eighteen years of compulsive, all-inclusive, self-protection had Mao faced so concrete a threat, both to his personal safety and to his sense of total power.

Chou En-lai, who had come to Wuhan ahead of Mao to arrange his security, had just returned to Peking, but had to fly straight back with 200 fully armed Praetorian Guards. He reverted smoothly to his old underground style, though this time operating in the state whose prime minister he was: waiting until dark before proceeding to Mao’s place, changing clothes and donning dark glasses. At 2:00 AM on 21 July, Mao was whisked away through the back door of his villa. All his three forms of transportation were on standby — his special train, his plane, and warships. Mao gave the order to leave by train, but once he was on board he switched to a plane — though not his own. The pilot was not told the destination, Shanghai, until he was airborne.

This was Mao’s last flight ever — and it was a flight. Soldiers rampaging right inside his estate was something utterly unthinkable. So was a demonstration openly hostile to his orders — and moreover, one involving fully armed troops.

The regime acted swiftly to show that it would not tolerate Wuhan. Chou got Small Group member Wang Li released, and embraced him demonstratively, putting his unshaven cheek to his. Wang Li returned to Peking to a staged welcome the like of which the country had never seen. A crowd of tens of thousands greeted him at Peking airport, headed by a teary Chou. This was followed by a million-strong rally on Tiananmen Square, presided over by Lin Biao.

General Chen was purged, and replaced by a man of unquestioning loyalty to Lin Biao. Army units involved in the defiance were disbanded, and sent to do forced labor. The Peerless disintegrated, and those who tried to hold out were physically beaten into collapse. Over the next few months, as many as 184,000 ordinary citizens and cadres were injured, crippled or killed in the province. General Chen and his deputies were ordered to Peking. There something else extraordinary happened, probably a world “first.” The Wuhan generals were beaten up — and not in some squalid dungeon, but at a Politburo meeting chaired by Chou En-lai. The perpetrators were senior officers headed by air force commander-in-chief Wu Fa-xian. The scene in the Politburo chamber was just like a street denunciation meeting, with the victims made to stand bent double, their arms twisted back in the jet-plane position, while they were punched and kicked. General Chen was knocked down and trampled on. Even in Mao’s gangster world, for the Politburo to become the scene of physical violence was unprecedented.

THE UPRISING IN Wuhan led Mao to conclude that over 75 percent of army officers were unreliable. He had a stab at initiating a huge purge among the military, and started denouncing “capitalist-roaders within the army,” but he had to pull back almost immediately. Having sacked most civilian officials, he simply could not afford to create more enemies in what was now his only power base.

Mao had to placate the army, so he threw it a few sops, pretending that he was not responsible for having tried to purge it. One sop was Small Group member Wang Li, of the Wuhan episode. Mao now made him a scapegoat. On 30 August, Wang Li was arrested. Hardly a month before, he had stood on Tiananmen Gate being hailed by a million people as the hero of Wuhan, the only occasion when leaders ever lined up there without Mao. Actually, this prominence was his undoing. The sight of him on Tiananmen, Mao’s preserve, annoyed the Great Helmsman, who said Wang Li had “got too big for his boots, and must be cut down to size.”

Purging Wang Li, however, did not solve Mao’s problem. He still had to find a way to make sure the new army enforcers would be men who would do what they were told unconditionally. To select such men, he depended on Lin Biao, who had to dig into the second tier of the army to find them. Mao thus found that he had no alternative but to allow Lin to turn the army leadership into a personal fiefdom, run by Lin’s cronies and working on the basis of what amounted to gang loyalty. On 17 August 1967, Mao authorized Lin to form a new body called “the Administration Office” to run the army. This consisted of Lin’s wife and a few generals who owed their careers, and sometimes even their lives, to Lin.

Typical of these was General Qiu Hui-zuo, the head of Army Logistics. At the beginning of the Cultural Revolution he had been denounced and beaten up. One of his ribs was broken, and his shoulder joints and muscles severely torn. He passed out on stage and was brought around by cold water for more beatings. Just when he thought he was going to die, an order came from Lin Biao to release him. He wrote afterwards to the Lins: “Hour 0:40 on 25 Jan 1967 was the moment of my second life, the moment I, my wife and children will never forget …”

Qiu promoted a personal coterie and indulged in a vendetta against those who had made him suffer. In his old department alone, 462 subordinates were arrested and tortured; among their lesser torments were being forced to eat bread soaked in excrement, and being kicked in the genitals. Eight died.

Qiu was an example of a person who had become totally cynical, for reasons that went back much further than the Cultural Revolution, and related to the unscrupulous nature of the Party itself from the earliest days. On the eve of the Long March, he and several other Red Army youngsters, including one aged eleven, had been ordered to hide some Party documents, which they sealed and sank in a river tied to stones. As they were climbing back up the river bank, they found themselves staring into the gun-barrels of their own comrades who had been sent to eliminate them so that no trail would be left. Qiu only survived because of a chance intervention.

Lin let Qiu and his other cronies wage their vendettas and build their own gangs as long as they obeyed him. Mao did the same with Lin. For a while, Mao tried to keep his own men in the army, and appointed one of his acolytes, General Yang Cheng-wu, as acting chief of staff. But Lin did not want General Yang on his back, and eventually got Mao to clap him in prison in March 1968. Mao even suspended the Military Council, the old supreme authority which he himself chaired. Mao retained just one vital veto: moving any force from battalion-strength up required his direct authorization.

Lin installed a sidekick called Huang Yong-sheng to be army chief of staff. Huang was so junior that Mao could not even put a face to his name. A well-known womanizer, he soon became Mrs. Lin’s lover. Ye Qun was a woman of voracious sexual appetite, for which she had little outlet with the clearly impotent marshal, whom she described as “a frozen corpse.” The relationship between her and her lover is revealed in a three-hour telephone conversation that was bugged.

YE QUN [YQ]: I am so worried you might get into trouble for pursuing physical satisfaction. I can tell you, this life of mine is linked with you, political life and personal life … Don’t you know what 101 [Lin Biao’s code name] is like at home? I live with his abuse … I can sense you value feelings … The country is big. Our children can each take up one key position! Am I not right?

HUANG: Yes, you are absolutely right.

YQ: … Our children put together, there must be five of them. They will be like five generals and will get on. Each will take one key position, and they can all be your assistants.

HUANG: Oh? I am so grateful to you!

YQ: … I took that measure [implying contraceptive]. Just in case I have it and have to get rid of it [implying baby], I hope you will come and visit me once. [Sound of sobbing]

HUANG: I will come! I will come! Don’t be like this. This makes me very sad.

YQ: Another thing: you mustn’t be restricted by me. You can fool around … I’m not narrow-minded. You can have other women, and be hot with them. Don’t worry about me …

HUANG: … I’m faithful to you alone.

YQ: If you fancy other women, that’s all right. But just one thing. She must be absolutely tight-lipped. If she talks, and if I am implicated, there will be tragedy …

HUANG [speechless] …

YQ: I feel that if we handle it well, it will be good for you, good for me … Do you believe this?

HUANG: I do! I do! I do!

With this mixture of genuine personal feeling and bare-faced political calculation, the fate of the new chief of staff was bound up with that of the Lins.

Lin turned the air force into his main base. His lackey there made the Lins’ 24-year-old son “Tiger” deputy chief of its war department and told the air force it “must report everything to [Tiger], and take orders from [Tiger].” Lin’s daughter Dodo was made deputy editor of the air force paper.

IN SUMMER 1967, dissatisfied with the army, Mao contemplated forming a kind of “storm trooper” force, composed of those Rebels whom he called “the Left.” After the Wuhan scare in July, in a vengeful mood, Mao incited “the Left” to stage assaults on other groups that he termed “the Conservatives.” When Mao fled to Shanghai, he got “the Left” there to attack the rival group. The result was the biggest single factional battle in Shanghai during the Cultural Revolution, which took place two weeks after Mao arrived. That day, 4 August, over 100,000 “Left” militants, armed with spears and iron bars, surrounded some 25,000 of their rivals in a factory by the sea, with the exit sealed off by the navy — a deployment inconceivable without Mao’s orders. By the end of the day, over 900 people had been wounded, many of them crippled and some dying. Two helicopters filmed the scene — again impossible unless Mao gave the word — and a camera crew had set up in an ideal vantage point two days ahead. A 2½-hour documentary of the event was shown to organized crowds. Mao watched it in his villa. The man who led the attack, Wang Hong-wen, was subsequently promoted by Mao to be his national No. 3. “I’ve seen your film,” Mao told him, congratulating him on “winning a victory.”

On the day of the battle, Mao gave orders to form his “storm troopers.” “Arm the Left,” he wrote to his wife, the leader of the Small Group. “Why can’t we arm the Left? They [the Conservatives] beat us up, we can beat them up, too.”

But this order to distribute arms to civilians opened up a can of worms. While in some places, like Wuhan, the distinction between moderates and “the Left” was fairly clear, in many others even the most devoted Mao followers could not tell which group was more militant, as all the groups were vying to appear the most aggressive. Typical was Anhui province, where the two opposing blocs rejoiced in the ultra-political names of “Wonderful” and “Fart.” Because the former had got into the old government offices first, it declared that it had seized power from the capitalist-roaders, and proclaimed: “Our seizing power is wonderful.” The latter snorted: “ ‘Wonderful’? What a load of fart!”

Neither in fact was more militant than the other; both were just competing to be incorporated into the new power structure. Lacking any criterion more precise than the ill-defined “militancy” towards capitalist-roaders, army units handed out weapons to whichever faction they decided was “the Left.” Other factions then raided arsenals to seize weapons for themselves, often with the collusion of their own sympathizers in the army. As a result, guns became widely available. Factional fighting escalated into mini — civil wars across China, involving practically all urban areas. The regime began sliding into something close to anarchy for the first time since taking power nearly two decades before.

Mao quickly realized that his “storm troopers” notion would not work everywhere. So, while he continued to build up a force of them 1 million strong in Shanghai, where he had particularly strict control, elsewhere he had to rescind his decree to “arm the Left,” and on 5 September ordered that all guns must be returned. However, those who had acquired them were often reluctant to give them up. More than a year later, Mao told Albania’s defense minister that 360,000 weapons had been collected in Sichuan alone (a province of 70 million people), and a lot more were still out there. With guns now in unofficial hands, “bandits” appeared in remote areas.

Mao had unleashed a dynamic that was undermining his own power. He had to abandon his attempt to identify factions as Left and Conservative, and called for all groups to unite. But his orders were ignored. Claiming that they were crushing “Conservatives,” young men, mostly, carried on fighting, finding it more fun than doing boring jobs.

People stopped going to work. The economy was now seriously interrupted. Arms industries, even the nuclear program, were upset for the first time since the Cultural Revolution had started. An element of anarchy even crept into the Praetorian Guard. One of its members gave Mao’s travel schedule to a student who fancied himself as a detective, who was able to tail Mao covertly. Although both were soon arrested, such a lapse in security had never happened before.

A YEAR LATER, in 1968, factional clashes with firearms had shown little sign of abating, despite a flood of commands from Peking. One man who was being conspicuously unruly was Kuai Da-fu, the Qinghua University student whom Mao had used to torment Liu Shao-chi and his wife. Kuai had by now become the most famous “leftist” in the country, and he was determined to bring his opponents in the university to their knees. He ignored repeated orders to stop, as he claimed that his rivals were “Conservatives,” and therefore fair game to beat up, in accordance with Mao’s earlier directive. Mao had to step in personally to get him to toe the line, and simultaneously made an example of him to send a warning to the whole country that factional wars had to stop.

On 27 July, 40,000 unarmed workers were dispatched to Kuai’s university to disarm his group. Not knowing that the order came from Mao, Kuai resisted, and his group killed five workers and wounded more than 700. Next day Kuai was summoned to the Great Hall of the People. There he was astonished to see Mao, flanked by all the top leaders. Kuai threw himself into Mao’s arms — probably the only time an outsider ever did this — and sobbed his heart out. Mao, too, apparently cried, quite possibly out of frustration at his own inability to reconcile his impulses with his practical needs. The impulse side of Mao wanted the many “Conservatives” he knew were out there to be beaten to a pulp. But the practical side recognized that in his own interest he had to restore order. He told Kuai and the other top Rebel leaders present that he himself had been behind the disarming of Kuai’s faction, and that if they, or anyone else, went on fighting, the army would “eliminate” them. Kuai and his colleagues signed a record of this message, which was made public.

Kuai was packed off to a plant in far Ningxia. All university student organizations were now disbanded, and the students put to work in ordinary jobs, with many dispersed to the hinterland. This diaspora was followed by that of well over 10 million middle-school pupils, who were scattered to villages and state farms across China. In the following years, over 16 million urban youth were rusticated — which was also a way of dealing with unemployment. This ended the era of the student Red Guards.

But among non-student Rebel groups, sporadic mini — civil wars dragged on in many places. To stop them, a phantom conspiracy called “the May 16 Corps” was invented as a catch-all to condemn anyone who disobeyed orders. Kuai, who was nationally famous, was turned into its “chief” and detained. Altogether, under this rubric, a staggering 10 million Rebels were condemned, of whom 3.5 million were arrested.

STATE TERROR NOT ONLY hugely raised the level of violence, but was much more horrific than the factional fighting itself. The clearest illustration of this came in the southern province of Guangxi in summer 1968. There, one faction refused to recognize the authority of Mao’s point man, General Wei Guo-qing (who had helped direct the climactic battle against the French at Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam in 1954). Wei was determined to use any degree of force to crush his opponents.

This involved not only using machine-guns, mortars and artillery, but also inciting gruesome murders of large numbers of people designated by the regime as “class enemies.” As the boss of Binyang County, an army officer, told his subordinates: “I’m now going to reveal the bottom line to you: in this campaign, we must put to death about one-third or a quarter of the class enemies by bludgeoning or stoning.” Killing by straightforward execution was rated not frightening enough: “It’s OK to execute a few to start with, but we must guide people to use fists, stones and clubs. Only this way can we educate the masses.” Over a period of eleven days after the order was given, between 26 July and 6 August 1968, 3,681 people in this county were beaten to death, many in ghastly ways; by comparison, the death toll in the previous two years of the Cultural Revolution had been “only” 68. This bout of killing claimed some 100,000 lives in the province.

The authorities staged “model demonstrations of killing” to show people how to apply maximum cruelty, and in some cases police supervised the killings. In the general atmosphere of fostered cruelty, cannibalism broke out in many parts of the province, the best-known being the county of Wuxuan, where a post-Mao official investigation (in 1983, promptly halted and its findings suppressed) produced a list of 76 names of victims. The practice of cannibalism usually started with the Maoist staple, “denunciation rallies.” Victims were slaughtered immediately afterwards, and choice parts of their bodies — hearts, livers and sometimes penises — were excised, often before the victims were dead, and cooked on the spot to be eaten in what were called at the time “human flesh banquets.”

Guangxi is the region with perhaps the most picturesque landscape in China: exquisite hills rising and falling over crystal-clear waters in which the peaks look as real as they do above. It was against these heavenly double silhouettes, by the purest rivers, that these “human flesh banquets” were laid out.

An 86-year-old peasant who, in broad daylight, had slit open the chest of a boy whose only crime was to be the son of a former landlord, showed how people had no trouble finding justifications for their actions in Mao’s words. “Yes, I killed him,” he told an investigative writer later. “The person I killed is an enemy … Ha, ha! I make revolution, and my heart is red! Didn’t Chairman Mao say: It’s either we kill them, or they kill us? You die and I live, this is class struggle!”

STATE-SPONSORED KILLINGS reached their extreme in every province in 1968. That year was dominated by a mammoth campaign called “Sort Out Class Ranks.” The aim of this drive was to make an inventory of every single “class enemy” in the entire population, and to impose various punishments on them, including execution. So all the victims from both before and during the Cultural Revolution were dragged out and persecuted again. In addition, the regime set out to uncover new enemies by scrutinizing the history and conduct of every adult in the nation, and looking into every unsolved suspicion. The number of labels for official outcasts ran to as many as twenty-three, and the number of people persecuted amounted to many tens of millions — more than ever before.

An eyewitness described how the new boss of Anhui province, an army general, made decisions about executions. Flipping languidly through a list of “counter-revolutionaries” presented to him by the police, he paused every now and then, and raised his voice in a quintessentially official inflection (drawing on the end of a sentence in a pinched nasal tone, sounding rather bored): “Are you still keeping this one? Might as well kill him.” “What about this one? Mm — finish her off.” Then he asked how many people the provinces next to his planned to execute: “How many is Jiangsu killing this month? And how many is Zhejiang?” When told, he said: “Let’s take the average between the two.” People were executed accordingly.

One of the worst-ravaged provinces was Inner Mongolia, where Mao harbored suspicions about a plot to detach the province and link it up with Outer Mongolia and the Russians. The new boss there, General Teng Hai-qing, vigorously investigated this suspicion of Mao’s, using torture on a large scale. According to post-Mao revelations, cases included a Muslim woman having her teeth pulled out by pliers, then her nose and ears twisted off, before being hacked to death. Another woman was raped with a pole (she then committed suicide). One man had nails driven into his skull. Another had his tongue cut out and then his eyes gouged out. Another was beaten with clubs on the genitals before having gunpowder forced up his nostrils and set alight. Post-Mao official figures revealed that over 346,000 people were condemned and 16,222 died as a result in this one case. The number of people in the province who “suffered” in some way was later officially put at over 1 million — of whom 75 percent were ethnic Mongols.

Another province that went through great trauma was Yunnan, in the southwest, where (according to official figures) in one trumped-up case alone nearly 1,400,000 people were persecuted under the new provincial boss, General Tan Fu-ren. Seventeen thousand of them were either executed or beaten to death, or driven to suicide. In a rare dramatic example of how those who rule by the sword can be felled by the sword, General Tan himself was assassinated in December 1970, making him the highest official ever to have died this way in Mao’s China, where assassinations were extremely rare. The shooter was an HQ staff officer called Wang Zi-zheng, who actually held no personal grudge against General Tan. It was Mao’s regime he hated. Back in 1947, he had been involved with an anti-Communist force that had shot dead a Communist militia chief. He had then escaped. Now, over two decades later, his home village had started a manhunt for him. Even though he was more than a thousand miles away and had changed his name, he was found and detained in April 1970. Knowing what his fate was likely to be, he decided he would try to kill General Tan, who was not only the biggest VIP around, but was doing terrible things to Yunnan. One night, the staff officer escaped from detention, went home to say goodbye to his wife and son, stole two pistols and twenty bullets from the HQ, where they were locked in a safe (as always), climbed into General Tan’s house and shot him dead. When his pursuers came for him, this unique avenger shot and wounded two of them before turning the gun on himself.

BY EARLY 1969 Mao’s new power apparatus was secured. In April he convened a Party Congress, the 9th, to formalize his reconstructed regime. The previous congress had been in 1956. Although the Party charter stipulated one every five years, Mao had held off letting this one convene for thirteen years, until he felt that all opposition had been thoroughly purged.

The new delegates were selected exclusively for their loyalty to Mao, and the yardstick of loyalty was how cruel and harsh they had been to Mao’s enemies. Inside the congress hall, where no such enemies were present, they tried to demonstrate their fealty by jumping up incessantly, shouting slogans such as “Long live Chairman Mao!” while Mao was speaking. It took Mao twenty minutes to get through two pages of his opening address. This farce was not something he wanted from his top echelon, which was meant to be a practical machine. He looked irritated, and cut short his speech. After the session, he had the congress secretariat issue rules banning unscheduled slogan chanting.

The core leadership under Mao now consisted of Lin Biao, Chou En-lai and two chiefs of the Small Group: Chen Bo-da and Kang Sheng. The Small Group, Mao’s office dealing with the Cultural Revolution, was wound up. Mme Mao was brought into the Politburo. So were Lin Biao’s wife and his main cronies, such as army chief of staff (and Lin’s wife’s lover) Huang Yong-sheng. In the Central Committee, 81 percent of the members were new, and nearly half the new intake were army men, including the generals who had presided over the atrocities in Guangxi, Yunnan and Inner Mongolia. Lin himself collected the ultimate prize of being written into the Party charter as Mao’s No. 2 and successor, an unprecedented badge of power and glory.

Mao had completed his Great Purge, though this did not mean that killings ceased. In the ten years from when Mao started the Purge until his death in 1976, at least 3 million people died violent deaths, and post-Mao leaders acknowledged that 100 million people, one-ninth of the entire population, suffered in one way or another. The killings were sponsored by the state. Only a small percentage was at the hands of Red Guards. Most were the direct work of Mao’s reconstructed regime.

51. A WAR SCARE (1969–71 AGE 75–77)

MAO HAD PRESENTED the Cultural Revolution as a move to rid China of Soviet-style “revisionists.” So, when he was gearing up to declare victory and inaugurate his post-Purge regime at the 9th Congress in April 1969, he looked for a symbol of triumph over the Soviet Union. He set his mind on a small, controlled, armed engagement with Russia, a border clash.

There had been many clashes along the 7,000-kilometer Sino-Soviet border. For the site of his battle, Mao chose a small uninhabited island called Zhenbao (Damansky in Russian), in the Ussuri River on the northeast border. This was a clever choice, as Russia’s claim to the island was far from established.

On 2 March, using a specially trained and equipped elite unit, the Chinese laid an ambush that left 32 Russians dead and between 50 and 10 °Chinese wounded or killed. The Russians brought up heavy artillery and tanks, and on the night of 14–15 March a much bigger encounter ensued, in which the Russians fired missiles 20 kilometers into China. About 60 Russians and at least 80 °Chinese were killed. One CIA photo expert said that the Chinese side of the Ussuri was “so pockmarked by Soviet artillery that it looked like a ‘moonscape.’ ” The Russians were obviously serious.

The fierceness of the retaliation took Mao aback, and he became worried that the Russians might invade, which he described to his inner circle as a possibility. He urgently ordered his army to stop fighting, and to do nothing even when the Russians continued shelling.

A week later, the old hot line from Moscow unexpectedly came alive. It was the Soviet premier Aleksei Kosygin asking to speak to either Mao or Chou En-lai. By this time, China and Russia had had virtually no diplomatic contacts for some three years. The operator refused to put the call through, saying on the fourth attempt that they could not take a call for Chairman Mao from “that scoundrel revisionist Kosygin.” Next day, the Chinese detected Russian troop movements near the disputed island. Mao at once told the Foreign Ministry to inform Moscow that it was “ready to hold diplomatic negotiations”—meaning he did not want a war. Mao was especially scared that the Russians might target a surprise air strike on the 9th Congress, which was due to open in Peking in ten days’ time, and at which he himself had no choice but to make an appearance.

So the congress met in conditions of secrecy extraordinary even by the regime’s ultra-secretive standards. The event was not announced until it was already over, and the 2,000 delegates and staff were imprisoned in their hotels with the curtains closed, and banned from opening windows facing the streets. Instead of being driven direct from their hotel to the venue, the Great Hall of the People, delegates were bused by circuitous routes round Peking before being delivered to the Hall surreptitiously, at intervals. On the day of the opening, 1 April, when Mao was scheduled to attend, the Hall was made to look as if nothing was happening there at all. Thick curtains concealed the fact that the lights were on (the session did not open until 5:00 PM) and that the building was full of people.

Mao had grounds for alarm. A few months later, on 13 August 1969, the Russians attacked thousands of miles to the west, on the Kazakhstan — Xinjiang border, where they had overwhelming logistical advantages. Scores of Russian tanks and armored vehicles drove deep inside China, surrounding and destroying Chinese troops.

Mao had no effective defense against Soviet tanks, if they chose to target Peking. He had always banked on the size of China and its population as insurance against anyone wanting to invade. But ever since Malinovsky had sounded his close colleagues out about getting rid of him in late 1964, the idea of a quick Soviet thrust at his capital in coordination with his opponents had preyed on Mao’s mind. He had issued an order: “Pile up some mountains if there aren’t any,” and spent a fortune in money and labor building “mountains” to block Russian tanks. Each of these was designed to be 20–40 meters high, 250–400 meters wide, and 120–220 meters deep. Earth and rocks were moved from far away, and elaborate defense works were constructed inside, before the project was abandoned some years later. All who saw these “mountains” (among them former US defense secretary and ex-CIA chief James Schlesinger) concluded that they were completely useless.

Mao was also worried about a nuclear strike against his atomic installations. In fact, Moscow did envisage such an operation, and went as far as sounding out Washington. Mao got so nervous that he broke his rule about shunning all contact with the Kremlin, and agreed to Kosygin stopping over in Peking in September 1969 on his way back from the funeral of Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi. The Soviet premier was confined to the airport, where Chou En-lai met him in the lounge. The first point Chou raised was a Russian strike, but he failed to extract a commitment from Kosygin that Russia would not attack China. A week later, when Chou wrote asking Kosygin to confirm that both sides had agreed that neither would launch a nuclear attack on the other, Moscow declined to confirm Chou’s “understanding.”

In the meantime, an article was published in a London newspaper by a KGB-linked Russian journalist called Victor Louis (who had recently acted as Moscow’s first known emissary to Taiwan). Louis said the Kremlin was discussing bombing Mao’s nuclear test site, and planning to set up an “alternative leadership” for the CCP.

Mao was seriously unnerved. He had agreed to a Russian delegation coming to Peking for negotiations on the border dispute. This itself now became a source of anxiety. The delegation was due to fly in on 18 October. Mao and his cabal feared that the aircraft might be carrying atomic bombs rather than negotiators, so he and Lin Biao both left Peking for the south: Mao to Wuhan on the 15th, and Lin for Suzhou on the 17th. On the 18th the marshal forwent his regular siesta to follow the Russian plane’s flight path, and only went to lie down after the Russians had alighted from the plane.

Just before the Russians arrived, Chou En-lai decamped from his residence in Zhongnanhai and moved into the nuclear bunkers in the Western Hills, where he stayed until February 1970. Mme Mao holed up there too, most likely to keep an eye on Chou.

This war scare lasted nearly four months. The entire army was put on red alert, which involved moving 4,100 planes, 600 ships and 940,000 troops. The army now resumed serious military training, which had largely fallen into abeyance since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution.

Zhongnanhai was dug up in order to build a giant underground shelter, linked by tunnels wide enough for four cars abreast, running to Tiananmen, the Great Hall of the People, a major hospital (Hospital 305, specially built for Mao and the top leaders, with all his security requirements, although he never set foot in it), Lin Biao’s residence, and the secret underground military HQ in the Western Hills. Tens of millions of civilians were corvéed to build underground shelters and tunnels in every city, at punishing expense. This whole scare, started by Mao’s miscalculation, cost China dearly.

In the end, the scare remained only a scare, which restored Mao’s confidence in his old belief that no country, Russia included, would really want to invade China. To make doubly sure, he set out to mollify the Russians. On May Day 1970 he made a point of greeting the deputy chief Soviet delegate to the border talks, who was present on Tiananmen Gate, and told him he wanted to be a “friendly neighbor” with Russia, and did not want war. Relations were restored to ambassadorial level, with a new Russian ambassador arriving in Peking in October, making a Soviet strike still more unlikely.

THOUGH CONFIDENT THAT there would not be a war, Mao continued scare propaganda inside China, judging that a war atmosphere was advantageous to the Superpower Program.

Becoming a superpower had remained Mao’s dearest dream. This was partly why he had carried out the Purge — to install new enforcers who were more in tune with his demands. After this process was complete, he started to accelerate the Program. To this end, in August 1970 he opened a plenum in Lushan, the mountain of volatile clouds, where the Central Committee had met twice before, in 1959 and 1961, both times for the same goal of pushing the Program ahead, resulting in nearly 38 million deaths from starvation and overwork.

On both those occasions Mao had met with considerable resistance. This time his new enforcers showed few qualms about obliging him, even though his latest plans involved investing as much in the nuclear program for the five years 1971–75 as had been expended in all the previous fifteen years. This was at a time when per capita income in China was lower than in dirt-poor Somalia, and calorie intake less than it had been under the Nationalists in 1930. But Mao met no opposition. Lin Biao and his coterie actually advocated that the question of whether or not the country could afford this level of spending should not matter. The new boss of Jiangxi, General Cheng Shi-qing, offered to cough up more than seven times as much food annually to the central government as the province was currently contributing — when the people of Jiangxi were already on the margin of survival. The new slave-drivers were willing to dragoon the population more harshly then ever before.

Mao was in a satisfied mood. As he drove up the mountain from the steaming plain, he itched for a swim. As soon as he arrived, he tore off his clothes and dived into the reservoir, ignoring the bodyguards who cautioned that the water was too cold, and that he had sweated too much. Laughing and joking, he swam for nearly an hour in water that made the young men around him shiver. At seventy-six, he was in excellent shape. His appetite impressed his chef and his housekeeper. He still had boundless energy.

But at this point, events took an unexpected turn. Mao and Lin Biao fell out. The post-Purge set-up began to unravel.

52. FALLING OUT WITH LIN BIAO (1970–71 AGE 76–77)

UP TO NOW, August 1970, the Mao — Lin partnership had worked extremely well. For the past four years Lin Biao had delivered the support from the army that Mao needed to purge the Party and reconstruct his regime. And Mao had done the maximum to satisfy Lin Biao’s thirst for power, basically handing the army to him, and writing him into the Party charter as No. 2 and successor. Lin’s wife had been brought into the Politburo (making her one of only two women members, along with Mme Mao), breaking a long-standing taboo against wife-promotion. Mao even tolerated a Lin mini-cult. Each day, when the chant went up: “May the Great Helmsman [etc.] Chairman Mao live for ever and ever!” accompanied by the brandishing of the Little Red Book, the homage was followed by: “May Vice-Chairman Lin be very healthy, and for ever healthy!”

But at Lushan, it was brought home to Mao that he had let Lin grow too powerful, and that this now posed a threat to himself. It started with a seemingly innocuous dispute about the presidency, a post last occupied by Liu Shao-chi. Mao wanted the post abolished. Lin insisted that it should stay, and that Mao should be the president. The reason Lin stuck to his contrary position was because he wanted to be vice-president, which would make him the formal No. 2 in the state hierarchy. Among the top five (Mao, Lin, Chou, Kang Sheng and Chen Bo-da), the line-up was four in favor of Lin’s view, against Mao’s solitary one. This was an amazing sign of Lin’s power, as it showed that for Mao’s top colleagues, Lin’s interests overrode Mao’s wishes.

Mao was further enraged when Lin went ahead and announced his proposal to the conclave on 23 August without first clearing it with Mao. Immediately after Lin spoke, the head of the Praetorian Guard, Wang Dong-xing, backed him up, demanding in fevered language that Mao become president, and Lin vice-president—even though he, too, knew that this was diametrically opposed to what Mao wanted. The man on whom Mao relied for his life was also putting Lin’s wishes before Mao’s.

The reason the head of the Praetorian Guard acted this way was because he felt Lin’s patronage was essential. He had seen the fate that befell his de facto predecessor, Luo the Tall, who had been as close to Mao as it was possible to be, and yet whom Mao had sacrificed when Lin had demanded it. And now he saw Mao apparently making another similar sacrifice: Mao had just endorsed Lin’s request to victimize yet another man who had Mao’s deep trust, the Party No. 7, Zhang Chun-qiao.

The 53-year-old Zhang had been a middle-ranking functionary in Shanghai who had caught Mao’s eye with his ability to churn out articles that dressed up Mao’s self-serving deeds in Marxist garb. At the start of the Cultural Revolution, Mao had jumped him to the top to perform the crucial job of packaging the Purge in ideological phraseology. Zhang was the person largely responsible for the texts that caused many people in China and abroad to entertain illusions about the true nature of the Cultural Revolution.

Zhang was reticent and reserved, and wore a face that colleagues found hard to read. He had been dubbed “the Cobra” by Lin and his coterie, partly because he wore glasses, and partly because of his snakelike qualities. Lin Biao hated him because he was not one of his own cronies, and because Mao, ever one to sow discord among his underlings, had told Lin that the Cobra might one day succeed Lin when Lin got old. For some time, Lin had been trying to undermine the Cobra by sending Mao dirt on him. Just before delivering his speech at Lushan, Lin told Mao that he intended to condemn the Cobra in it, and Mao gave Lin the nod to proceed. After Lin’s speech, which was fierce, other participants piled in, demanding, in the brutal language of the day, that the Cobra be “put to the death of the thousand cuts.”

The lesson was clear: however close or important anyone was to Mao, that person had to have Lin’s blessing to survive. Mao’s favor on its own was not enough. This was a huge power shift. The thought that Lin’s patronage was now more critical than his own rocked Mao.

He set out at once to demonstrate that Lin was not omnipotent. He vetoed any possibility of having a presidency, and called a halt to attacks on the Cobra, and to any further discussion of Lin’s speech. Mao proceeded to show enormous displeasure towards Lin, and then condemned his old secretary Chen Bo-da, the Party No. 5, who had become too pally with Lin. As usual in such cases, Chen was put under house arrest, and then thrown into prison — an experience he described as like being “hit on the head by an atom bomb.”

Mao asked Lin to make a self-criticism in front of the top echelon and say that he had been “deceived” by Chen. Lin declined. Until now, thanks to his special relationship with Mao, he had always avoided having to subject himself to this humiliating ritual. Even though Mao insisted, Lin refused to budge. There was an impasse. After four decades, the Mao — Lin relationship began to fall apart.

AFTER LUSHAN, which ended inconclusively on 6 September, Mao moved to reduce Lin’s power — and also to ensure his personal safety. He summoned trusted generals who were not in Lin’s coterie to take over the military command of Peking, and inserted them into the army leadership. He also cleaned up his own household, by dismissing some of his favorite girlfriends who had come from the air force’s song and dance troupe, a procuring service for Mao, which had links to Lin.

Mao had to tread very gingerly so as not to make Lin feel personally threatened. He could ill afford to break with Lin completely. Virtually the entire regime was staffed with people selected by Lin and his personal network. Mao wanted to neutralize him as much as possible without purging him. The interminable machinations needed to achieve this sapped Mao’s energy, and that winter he fell ill with pneumonia. It was now, at seventy-seven, that old age suddenly set in, and he who had enjoyed extraordinary good health began to be besieged by illness.

Meanwhile, Lin Biao continued to refuse to perform the self-abasement that Mao demanded. Always a loner, he became even more withdrawn, and spent most of his time pacing his room, occasionally watching war films. He dictated a letter to Mao, making it clear that in the event of his being purged, Mao would have to restaff the entire machine that Lin had installed; the only possible replacements would have to be the old Party cadres, and that would mean repudiating the Cultural Revolution. But at his wife’s urging, Lin did not send the letter. Mao would not tolerate being threatened in such a way.

A more realistic option for Lin was to cut and run, as past foes of Mao’s had done: Chang Kuo-tao to the Nationalists in the 1930s, and Wang Ming to Moscow in the 1950s. With his control of the air force, Lin could escape overseas. The obvious choice was Russia. He had spent over four years there altogether, and his wife spoke workable Russian, having had a Russian officer lover. It was a sign of Lin Biao’s mistrust of Communist regimes that Russia was only his fallback choice, and his preferred destination was the British colony of Hong Kong.

Lin’s plan was to fly first to Canton, which is very close to Hong Kong, and where the military were exceptionally devoted to him. To secure this escape route, he relied on his only son, Li-guo, whom he called “Tiger,” who was in his mid-twenties. In November 1970, soon after Lin’s breach with Mao at Lushan, Tiger started to see people from the Canton military. His intimates made frequent secret visits to Canton, got hold of small arms, radios and cars, and learned to fly helicopters. During all these extensive activities, no one informed on Tiger, who inspired loyalty.

Tiger had been a physics student at Peking University when the Cultural Revolution started. Unusually for a young man of his background, he only joined the Red Guards reluctantly, and quickly left, showing no inclination for violence, or for persecuting people. He seems to have been a decent person. He was something of a playboy, and had many girlfriends. His parents worshipped him, and his mother had sent agents all over China to look for the most beautiful young woman to be his wife. Tiger chose a sexy fiancée who was intelligent, and a character. With her he listened to Western rock music, which he adored, and told her: “There will be a day when I will let the Chinese know there is such wonderful music in the world!”

Being able to enjoy Western music was only one of Tiger’s many rare privileges as the son of Lin Biao. Another was access to Western science magazines, which he devoured, often expressing admiration for the advances being made in the West. (He was an avid inventor of military equipment, with some effective ideas of his own.) But above all, he was able to read some top-secret documents, with the result that he was exceptionally well informed.

Tiger came to be sharply critical of Mao’s tyranny. In March 1971, he and three friends put their thoughts on paper:

Senior officials feel anger but dare not speak up;

Peasants lack food and clothing;

Educated youth rusticated: prison labour in disguise;

The Red Guards were deceived and used at the beginning … as cannon fodder [and then] scapegoats …

Workers’ … wages have been frozen: disguised exploitation.

These words were part of a document called “Outline of Project 571.” Tiger chose the name because “571”—wu-qi-yi—has the same pronunciation in Chinese as “armed uprising,” and a coup was what the friends had in mind. The Outline was a razor-sharp indictment of Mao, describing China under his rule as “state rich, people impoverished,” which they wanted to change to “people rich and state powerful.” Their aim was “to give the people enough food and clothing and a peaceful life”—the antithesis of Mao’s goals.

They described Mao as “the biggest promoter of violence,” who “sets … people against people,” “a paranoid and a sadist,” and “the biggest feudal tyrant in Chinese history.” They accused him of “turning the Chinese state machine into a meat grinder, slaughtering and crushing people.” These observations were truly remarkable for the times. Tiger dubbed Mao “B-52” after the US heavy bomber, referring to the fact that Mao, as he put it, had a big stomach full of evil thoughts, each one like a heavy bomb that would kill masses of people. Tiger’s attitude to Mao was completely different from that of Mao’s opponents among the old guard. He saw right through Mao, whom he regarded as evil, and unfit to run the country. He also realized that with him no dialogue or compromise was possible. In this sense, he was the nearest thing China produced to a Claus von Stauffenberg, the German officer who tried to assassinate Hitler in 1944.

Tiger and his friends began to talk about assassinating Mao when Tiger saw that Mao was coming after his parents. The friends mooted many ideas, but all in very general terms, like “using poison gas, germ weapons, bombing …,” and there is no sign that they ever got as far as actually preparing any of these. Mao had the most stringent rules on arms and troop movements, and phenomenal security. Moreover, as Tiger’s group themselves observed, “the blind faith of the masses in B-52 is very deep” (thanks partly, ironically, to Tiger’s father), and so they did not dare to reveal their project to most of their friends, or to Lin’s major cronies at the top of the military. Tiger left a copy with his parents, but Lin was non-committal.

IN MARCH 1971, some seven months after the rift with Lin erupted at Lushan, Mao decided to convene a conference for about a hundred of the elite to hear Lin’s wife and major army cronies perform their self-abasements. Mao sent Chou En-lai in person to ask Lin, in unusually strong terms, to appear and “say a few words.” Lin refused. This was a huge snub to Mao’s authority, and he went berserk. He ordered Chou to deliver a blistering denunciation of Lin on 29 April (though not naming him), saying that the army leadership had been “following a wrong political line.”

A furious Lin retaliated. Two days later was May Day, when the leadership traditionally gathered on Tiananmen Gate. Protocol was very important in the Communist world, and any absence could be interpreted as signifying discord at the top. On the night, however, there was no sign of Lin. Chou stared anxiously at the empty seat facing Mao and Prince Norodom Sihanouk of Cambodia, next to the prince’s wife, while frantic phone calls were made to Lin’s home. A dejected-looking Lin eventually appeared, long after the fireworks display had begun.

The official photographer, Du, described the scene to us:

When I saw Lin Biao sitting down, I snapped a shot. I didn’t intend it to be published at all. I wanted to wait for [Mao and Lin] to start talking … But they didn’t even look at each other … Then Lin Biao got up and left. I thought he had gone to the toilet, but half an hour later and he was still not back. I wondered how come Vice-Chairman Lin took so long in the toilet. In fact, he had left. We were all dumbfounded. As soon as the show was over, Premier Chou asked me: “Did you take a photo of Vice-Chairman Lin?” … I said: “One.” He said: “What about film and television?” I said I didn’t know. The premier had the crews fetched, and gave them a dressing-down those old guys remember today as if it had been yesterday.

Lin had stayed less than a minute, and had greeted no one, not the Sihanouks, not Mao.

Lin knew that Mao would not forgive him for what happened. After this, Tiger went to Canton to check out the Hong Kong escape route. He went right up to Lowu, the main crossing-point into Hong Kong, getting so close to the actual border that his entourage was worried the Hong Kong police might open fire.

Lin would soon defy Mao again, in June, when Romania’s tyrant duo, the Ceau?escus, came to town. Lin declined to come to a meeting with them, claiming that he was “sweating,” and Mrs. Lin had to go down on her knees to get him to go. Lin did finally show up, but left the room after Mao made a few digs at him, and went and sat outside the door in a slouching posture, his head lolling. Shortly afterwards, Tiger made another recce of the border with Hong Kong, by helicopter.

By mid-August, a year after Lushan, Mao was ready to purge Lin. On the 14th he left Peking to prepare provincial leaders. He had to make sure that these men, most of them Lin appointees, would not side with Lin in a showdown. During his tour, Mao made repeated damning remarks about Lin, like: “He wants to split the Party and can’t wait to seize power.” Although Mao told his audiences not to report to Lin on what he said, a few of Lin’s followers disobeyed. Mao’s words reached the Lins at the seaside resort of Beidaihe, east of Peking, on 6 September. The Lin villa occupied a whole hill, well shielded from the sea by luxuriant vegetation, as Lin could not stand the sight of water, though he liked the sea air. For kilometers there was not a soul around, except guards and staff.

Lin and his wife and Tiger decided to flee abroad at once. They planned to depart from the nearby airport at Shanhaiguan, where the Great Wall meets the sea. Tiger flew to Peking on the 8th to secure planes for the escape. He brought with him a handwritten note from his father: “Please follow the orders relayed by comrades Li-guo [Tiger] and Yu-chi [Tiger’s closest friend]. (Signed) Lin Biao 8 September.” The man in charge of dispatching planes at Peking military airport agreed to bypass regular channels to get Tiger the planes.

But Tiger did not want to flee without first making an attempt to assassinate Mao. At that moment Mao was in the Shanghai area, where officers loyal to Lin held key positions, and even had partial charge of Mao’s security in the outer ring. It seems that at the eleventh hour, Lin Biao agreed that Tiger could try. Mrs. Lin was all for having a go. When Tiger kissed his fiancée goodbye at Beidaihe, he said: “In case something happens to me, you don’t know anything; I won’t incriminate you.”

In Peking, Tiger asked the deputy chief of staff of the air force, Wang Fei, to mount an assault on the compound where Mme Mao and her coterie were living, the Imperial Fishing Villa. Tiger told him that simultaneous action would be taken “in the south,” where Mao was. Wang Fei was a good friend, but his reply was disappointing. He did not think he could persuade any troops to do what Tiger was asking. In any case, his troops were not allowed to carry weapons into Peking.

Next, Tiger met a senior air force officer called Jiang Teng-jiao, who was the youngest general in China, and who, for various reasons, hated Mao. Tiger asked him to try to kill Mao while Mao was still near Shanghai. Jiang agreed, and the two aired various ideas. One was to shoot up Mao’s train with flame-throwers and bazookas; another was to shell it; a third was for the Shanghai military chief, a man trusted by the Lins, to shoot Mao on his train. The fourth was to bomb Mao’s train from the air. But the man they approached to drop the bombs, a Korean War ace, replied that there were no bomber aircraft available. He took fright, and asked his wife, who was a doctor, to rub salt water and old aureomycin into his eyes so that they would swell up, and he thus got himself hospitalized. The other ideas also proved non-viable, as it was impossible to get lethal firepower anywhere near Mao’s closely guarded and heavily armor-plated train.

Over the next couple of days, tense discussions continued. “I just can’t stomach him any longer!” Tiger would shout, waving his fists. “OK,” he would say, “the fish dies, but it breaks the net!” indicating that he was ready to make a suicidal attack if that was what it took to bring down the Mao regime.

Fast running out of ideas, Tiger sent a friend back to Beidaihe on the 10th to get his father to write to Army Chief of Staff Huang Yong-sheng, asking him to cooperate with Tiger. Lin wrote the letter, but it was not delivered. The plotters could not trust Huang not to betray them.

It was also too late. Next day, news came that Mao had left Shanghai by train. Several of Tiger’s friends offered to fly helicopters on a suicide attack against Mao on Tiananmen Gate on National Day, 1 October. Tiger vetoed the idea, in tears. He had not anticipated any action of this magnitude.

All assassination plans were aborted, and Tiger decided to revert to the plan to flee to Canton, and then Hong Kong. On the evening of 12 September he flew back to Beidaihe in Lin’s plane, a Trident, intending to leave with his family next morning.

Mao had returned to Peking late that afternoon, completely unaware that an assassination plot had been afoot. His train stopped outside the capital at a station called Fengtai, where he was given a routine briefing by his newly appointed Peking commanders on what had been happening in the capital. The meeting opened with a report about an army delegation’s visit to Albania. Back in Zhongnanhai, it was like the end of any other trip. Mao’s security chiefs and the head of his guards, who lived outside the compound, went home. Some of them took sleeping pills. Mao, too, went to sleep.

AT THE TIME Mao and his entourage went to bed, the Lins were getting ready to decamp. Tiger had reached Beidaihe about 9:00 PM, and went over plans with his parents. The staff were told that the Lins were leaving at 6:00 AM for Dalian, a nearby port city, which was an old haunt of Lin’s, so this did not arouse suspicion. Then, fatally, Tiger asked his sister Dodo to be ready to leave in the morning.

Two years older than Tiger, Dodo was a very brainwashed young woman. Her parents had not wanted to let her in on their escape plans, in case she might turn them in. But Tiger was worried about what might happen to his sister after they fled, and had disclosed part of the plans to her a few days before. As their parents had foreseen, she got scared. Unlike her brother, Dodo was a product of the fear and twisted logic of Mao’s China. For her, attempting to flee abroad was defection, and therefore treason, even though she knew that her sick father, whom she loved, was not likely to survive long in prison under Mao. When Tiger told her they were leaving the following morning, she reported the news to the Praetorian Guards who were stationed in a separate building at the bottom of the drive. This action doomed her family.

The Guards phoned Chou En-lai, and he began to check on the movements of planes, particularly the Trident, which was Lin’s plane. Tiger’s friends immediately let him know that Chou was asking questions, and Lin Biao decided to leave at once rather than wait till morning. He also decided to fly not to Canton, but to their fallback destination, Russia, via Outer Mongolia, as this route would mean much less time in Chinese airspace, just over an hour.

Tiger rang his friends about the change of route, and phoned the captain of the Trident to get the plane ready. Unaware that Chou’s enquiry had been triggered by his sister’s betrayal, Tiger told Dodo they were taking off right away. She went straight back to the Praetorian Guards and stayed at their post.

Around 11:50 PM, Lin Biao, Mme Lin and Tiger, plus a friend of Tiger’s, sped off for the airport, accompanied by Lin’s butler. As the car raced out of the estate, the Praetorian Guards tried to stop it. At this point Lin’s butler surmised that they were going to flee the country. Thinking of the fate that awaited his family if he became a defector, he shouted “Stop the car!” and jumped out. Gunshots followed, one hitting his arm. The shot came from Tiger, the butler said; some suggest that it was self-inflicted, to protect himself.

The Praetorian Guards set off in hot pursuit, in several vehicles. About half an hour later the Lins’ car screeched to a halt beside the Trident at Shanhaiguan airport, with one pursuing jeep only 200 meters behind. Mrs. Lin hit the tarmac screaming that Lin was in danger, shouting: “We are leaving!” Tiger had a pistol in his hand. The group clambered frantically up the small ladder to the pilot’s cabin.

The Trident took off in a rush at 12:32 AM, carrying the three Lins, plus Tiger’s friend and Lin’s driver. Out of the full nine-man crew, only four, the captain and three mechanics, had had time to get on board. The mechanics had just readied the plane for departure, and were only beginning to refuel it when the Lins arrived and Mrs. Lin yelled for the fuel tanker to be moved away. As a result, the plane had only 12.5 tons of fuel on board, enough for between two and three hours in the air, depending on altitude and speed.

They had to fly low for most of the time to dodge radar, and this used up more fuel. Two hours later, over the Mongolian grassland, they would have had only about 2.5 tons of fuel left — at which point the fuel gauge would have been flashing for some time. At 2:30 AM on 13 September 1971, the plane crash-landed in a flat basin and exploded on impact, killing all nine people on board.

A HEAVILY SEDATED Mao had been woken up by Chou soon after Lin’s plane took off. Mao stayed in his bedroom, which was one of the former changing-rooms of the swimming pool in Zhongnanhai. The nearest telephone was in a room at the other end of the 50-meter pool. When the people monitoring Lin’s plane rang, the head of the Guard, Wang Dong-xing (whom Mao had forgiven for supporting Lin at Lushan a year before), would rush to the phone, then back to Mao, then to the phone again. The plane did not cross the border into Mongolia until 1:50 AM, so Mao had about an hour to act.

It seems Mao was only presented with one option if he wanted to strike: interception by fighter planes. China apparently had no usable ground-to-air missiles. Mao vetoed interception. The unspoken reason was that he could not trust the air force, which was honeycombed with Lin men. Instead, Mao had every plane in China grounded, while the land army took over all the airports, blocking the runways to prevent any planes taking off. The only planes allowed into the air were eight closely monitored fighters sent up later to force down a helicopter carrying three friends of Tiger’s. When the three men were brought back to the outskirts of Peking, they agreed to shoot themselves together. Two did. The third, who had said that his last bullet was “reserved for B-52,” meaning Mao, weakened at the last moment, and fired into the air.

Mao was moved to his Suite 118 in the Great Hall, where there was a lift to a nuclear-proof bunker and a tunnel to the Western Hills. His servants were told to be ready for war, and his guards went onto top alert, and started digging trenches around Mao’s residences. The head of Mao’s guards for twenty-seven years said he had never seen Mao look so strained, so exhausted and so furious.

Mao remained sleepless and wiped out until the afternoon of 14 September, when news came that the Lins had crashed in Mongolia. This was an ideal outcome from his point of view, and he swigged some mao-tai, the powerful liquor he did not normally touch, in celebration.

But Mao’s relief that Lin was dead was quickly overshadowed by the news that there had been a plot to assassinate him, which came to light right after he heard that Lin had crashed. This was the first assassination plot against Mao by his top echelon, and it came as a profound shock. Equally alarming was the fact that quite a few people had known about these plans, and not one had informed. For days Mao hardly slept, in spite of downing fistfuls of sleeping pills. He ran a temperature and coughed incessantly. Breathing problems made it impossible for him to lie down, so he sat on a sofa day and night for three weeks, developing bedsores on his bottom. Then a heart condition was discovered. On 8 October, when he met Ethiopia’s Emperor Haile Selassie, he barely spoke a word. One official present, who had last seen Mao the day before Lin fled, less than a month before, could not believe how washed-out Mao looked. Chou brought the meeting to an early close.

Mao had to struggle to deal with endless details in order to tighten his already incredibly tight security. Everybody near him had to report in detail on their every dealing with the Lins. A deputy chief of the Praetorian Guard, Zhang Yao-ci, owned up to having received some bamboo shoots “and two dead pheasants” from Mrs. Lin one New Year, and to having given her some tangerines. Mao’s warning to him tells a lot about the bleak world surrounding the Boss:

Don’t cultivate connections;

Don’t visit people;

Don’t give dinners or gifts;

Don’t invite people to operas [i.e. Mme Mao’s model shows] or films;

Don’t have photographs taken with people.

An altogether more monumental task was sorting out the armed forces, which were crammed with Lin men, especially at the top. Mao had no way of knowing who was involved in the assassination plot, or where anyone’s allegiance lay. One small but alarming incident came days later when senior air force officers were gathered to be briefed about the Lins. One of the men raced to the top of the building, shouted anti-Mao slogans and jumped to his death.

The only marshal Mao could trust to take over running the army was Yeh Jian-ying. He had been a faithful follower in the past, but had spoken his mind against the Cultural Revolution, and as a result had been cast into semi-disgrace, for a while living under virtual house arrest. At the time Mao brought him back to high office, several of his children and other close relatives were still languishing in prison.

But Mao had nobody else. He was also forced to reinstate purged Party officials, because they were the only alternative to the people installed by Lin’s network. These officials were mostly in camps. Now many were rehabilitated and re-employed. Mao loathed having to let this happen, and tried to limit the scale of the rehabilitations. He knew that these officials felt extremely bitter towards him after the appalling ordeals they had been put through. One former deputy chief of the Praetorian Guard spoke for many people when he told us how he felt then: “What Chairman Mao, what Party? I stopped caring about any of them …”

At this juncture, Marshal Chen Yi, one of the more outspoken opponents of the Great Purge, who had suffered much in it, died of cancer, on 6 January 1972. The memorial service was scheduled for the 10th, as a low-key affair, with limitations put on the size of his portrait, the number of wreaths, how many people could attend — and the number of stoves permitted to heat a big hall: just two. Mao had no wish to attend the funeral.

But in the days after Chen Yi’s death, although the news was not announced, word got out, and large numbers of old cadres gathered outside the hospital, demanding to be allowed to bid farewell to his corpse. The mood of the crowds was angry as well as mournful. And there was no doubt that the anger was directed against the Cultural Revolution — and against Mao himself. Mao felt tremendous pressure to make a gesture to placate the old power base which he had treated so abominably, and on which he now had to rely again.

On the day of the service, shortly before it was due to begin, Mao suddenly declared that he would attend. His staff observed that “his face was hung with dark clouds” and he looked “irritated and frustrated,” remaining totally silent. But he could see it was wise to go and use the occasion to put across the message to old cadres that he “cares for us.” He also did some scapegoating, telling Chen Yi’s family that it was Lin Biao who had “plotted … to get rid of all us old stagers.” Word went out that the persecutions in the Cultural Revolution were Lin Biao’s fault, and that Mao was coming to his senses. Afterwards, a photo was published of Mao at the service, looking suitably sad (though with his unshaven stubble airbrushed out), with Chen Yi’s grief-stricken widow clinging to his arm, and this did much to abate the bitterness among “capitalist-roaders.”

The day of Chen Yi’s funeral was bitterly cold, but Mao was in such a foul mood at having to go that he refused to put on a warm coat. His staff tried to get him to dress sensibly, but he pushed the clothes away. He ended up wearing only a thin coat over his pajamas, and that was all he had on for the whole service in the poorly heated hall. As a result he fell ill. He was seventy-eight, and he got sicker and sicker. On 12 February he passed out, and lay at the brink of death.

Physical and political vulnerability forced Mao to allow the rehabilitation of cadres to be speeded up, and the regime became markedly more moderate for the first time since the start of the Cultural Revolution nearly six years before. Abusive practices in prisons decreased greatly. Violent denunciation meetings were scrapped, even for Lin Biao’s men, who, although detained, suffered little physically compared with Mao’s previous routine. Incredibly, given that an attempted assassination — of Mao, no less — was involved, not a single person was executed.

After years of living surrounded by daily brutality, and with almost nothing constructive to see or do in the way of entertainment, tension in society had built up to an almost unbearable pitch. An Italian psychoanalyst who was in China just before this time observed to us that he had never seen anything like the number of facial tics and extreme tension in people’s faces. Now there was a let-up. A few old books and tunes, and some leisure activities, were allowed again. Some historical sites were reopened. Although relaxation stayed within very strict limits, still there was a lightness in the air when spring came in 1972.

A letter from Chou to Mao on the night of 13 September shows unequivocally that the plane was not shot down by the Chinese.

The Russians sent their top investigator, KGB general Aleksandr Zagvozdin, to Mongolia to make sure it really was Lin on the plane. Zagvozdin dug up the corpses. But, he told us, his report failed to satisfy his bosses, and he was sent back to exhume the bodies again from the now frozen ground. The corpses of Lin and his wife were boiled in a huge pot and the skeletons taken to Moscow, where Lin’s was checked against old Russian medical records and X-rays from his earlier visits, and a squeamish Yuri Andropov and Brezhnev were finally satisfied that it really was Lin.

Among those detained was Lin Biao’s daughter Dodo.

53. MAOISM FALLS FLAT ON THE WORLD STAGE (1966–70 AGE 72–76)

MAO’S ULTIMATE AMBITION was to dominate the world. In November 1968 he told the Australian Maoist leader Hill:

In my opinion, the world needs to be unified … In the past, many, including the Mongols, the Romans … Alexander the Great, Napoleon, and the British Empire, wanted to unify the world. Today, both the United States and the Soviet Union want to unify the world. Hitler wanted to unify the world … But they all failed. It seems to me that the possibility of unifying the world has not disappeared … In my view, the world can be unified.

Mao clearly felt that he was the man for the job, as he dismissed America and Russia as possible unifiers, using arguments that rested solely on China’s huge population. “But these two countries [America and Russia],” he went on, “have too small populations, and they will not have enough manpower if it is dispersed. Further, they are also afraid of fighting a nuclear war. They are not afraid of eliminating populations in other countries, but they are afraid of their own populations being eliminated.” It was hardly necessary to read between the lines to see that the ruler with the largest population — and the least fear of it being wiped out — was Mao himself. He saw China’s role as follows: “In another five years, our country … will be in a better position … In another five years …”

It was for the sake of this world ambition that Mao had embarked on his Superpower Program in 1953, insisting on breakneck speed, and taking hair-raising risks in the nuclear field. The most scary of these came on 27 October 1966, when a missile armed with an atomic warhead was fired 800 km across northwest China, over sizable towns — the only such test ever undertaken by any nation on earth, and with a missile known to be far from accurate, putting the lives of those in its flight path at risk. Three days beforehand, Mao told the man in charge to proceed, saying that he was prepared for the test to fail.

Almost all those involved in the test felt that a catastrophe was likely. The people in the launch control room expected to die. The commander of the target zone was so nervous that he moved his HQ to the top of a mountain, comforting himself and his colleagues with the argument that if the missile went off course, they might be able to shield themselves from the atomic blast by scrambling down the opposite side of the mountain.

As it happened, the test succeeded, an outcome that was attributed to Mao’s “Thought,” summed up in the slogan “The spiritual atomic bomb detonating the material atomic bomb.” In fact the success was a fluke. Subsequent tests of the same missile failed, as it began gyrating wildly shortly after lift-off.

The whole missile program suffered from insuperable problems. The regime blamed sabotage, and scientists were put through hideous persecutions, including mock executions, to extract “confessions.” Many died violent deaths. In this climate, not surprisingly, Mao never possessed an intercontinental missile in his lifetime. The first successful launch of a Chinese ICBM took place only in 1980, years after his death.

But in October 1966, thanks to the one nuclear-armed missile landing on target, Mao assumed that he would soon be able to deliver the Bomb wherever he liked. On 11 December, a decision was made that China must possess the entire missile arsenal, including intercontinental missiles, within four years.

Mao’s optimism was given a big boost when China’s first hydrogen bomb was detonated on 17 June 1967. Mao told its makers on 7 July: “Our new weaponry, missiles and atom bombs have gone really fast. We made our hydrogen bomb in just two years and eight months [since the first A-bomb]. Our speed has overtaken America, Britain, France and the Soviet Union. We are the No. 4 in the world.” Actually, much of this was due to assistance Russia had provided earlier (and which had only ended completely in 1965); without Soviet help, it would have been impossible to develop either the A-or the H-bomb nearly so soon. But Mao was not about to dwell on this aspect. His emphasis was rather on what he could do with the technology. Using the royal “we,” he declared to the Bomb-makers: “We are not only the political centre of the world revolution, we must become the centre of the world revolution militarily, and technologically. We must give them arms, Chinese arms engraved with our labels … We must openly support them. We must become the arsenal of the world revolution.”

It was now, between October 1966 and summer 1967, with the nuclear program seemingly riding high, that Mao vastly expanded the worldwide promotion of his cult. In the year before, 1965, he had suffered some major setbacks. Now “to propagate Mao Tse-tung Thought” was made the “central task” of foreign policy. Peking proclaimed that “the world has entered the new era of Mao,” and sweated blood to make sure that the Little Red Book got into over 100 countries. Supposedly this was “an event of immense joy for the people of the world,” who “love Chairman Mao’s books more than any other books,” and to whom the Little Red Book “is like the sweet rain to crops withering in a long drought, and the shining beacon to ships sailing in thick fog.” China’s entire diplomatic and clandestine machine was thrown into attempts to induce adulation of Mao in foreign countries.

Burma was not atypical of the countries where Peking had a foothold. A hard-sell campaign pressured the sizeable ethnic Chinese minority to wave the Little Red Book, wear Mao badges, sing songs of Mao quotes and salute Mao’s portrait. Regarding these practices as challenging its own authority, the Burmese government banned them in mid-1967. Peking then goaded ethnic Chinese to defy the ban and confront the government. The result was much bloodshed and many deaths, and severe retribution against ethnic Chinese.

Mao then unleashed the Burmese Communist Party, which was completely dependent on China for its survival, in a new wave of insurgency. On 7 July 1967, in the afterglow of the H-bomb test, he instructed in secret: “It is better that the Burmese government is against us. I hope they break off diplomatic relations with us, so we can more openly support the Burmese Communist Party.” Chou summoned the Burmese Communist officers being trained in China to the Great Hall of the People to inform them that they were to be sent home to start a war. They were accompanied to Burma by their Chinese wives, who had been selected in a distinctly unceremonious manner. Each Burmese man would go out into the street, with a Chinese officer, and pick a woman who caught his eye. If the woman and her family passed a security check, the authorities would work on her to marry the Burmese. Some women entered into marriage willingly, others were coerced.

The insurgency was geared around promoting Mao. When a victory was won, it was celebrated with a Mao Thought propaganda team dancing, waving the Little Red Book, and chanting “Long live the great leader of the peoples of the world Chairman Mao!”

To spread Maoism all over the world, secret training camps were set up in China. One was in the Western Hills just outside Peking, where many young people from the Third World and quite a few Westerners were instructed in the use of arms and explosives. Mao Thought was the unvarying and ineluctable staple of camp life.

HOWEVER, ON HIS doorstep the Great Leader of World Revolution was faced with an uncomfortable reality. Two portions of Chinese territory remained under colonial rule: Macau under the Portuguese and Hong Kong under the British. And taking them back would have been easy, as both depended on China for water and food. Khrushchev had taunted Mao that he was living next door to “the colonialists’ latrine.” After Mao accused him of climbing down in the Cuba missile crisis in 1962, Khrushchev had compared Mao’s inaction over the two colonies unfavorably with Nehru’s recent seizure of Portugal’s colonies in India: “The odour coming from [Hong Kong and Macau] is by no means sweeter than that which was released by colonialism in Goa.” Mao had clearly felt that he had to explain himself to those he was claiming to champion, so he made rather a point of telling the Somali prime minister, somewhat defensively, that Hong Kong “is a special case and we are not planning to touch it. You may not understand this.”

Mao chose not to recover Hong Kong and Macau for purely pragmatic reasons. Hong Kong was China’s biggest source of hard currency, and a vital channel for acquiring technology and equipment from the West, which fell under a strict US embargo. Mao knew that Hong Kong would no longer be of use for his Superpower Program if it reverted to Peking’s rule.

In order to do good business in Hong Kong, Peking had to disrupt Taiwan’s intelligence network, which was helping the US identify Western companies breaking the embargo. Peking’s methods had at times been drastic. In April 1955, Chou En-lai was due to go to Indonesia for the first Afro-Asian conference in Bandung, and Peking chartered an Indian airliner, the Kashmir Princess, to fly to Indonesia from Hong Kong. Taiwan agents apparently thought that the plane was going to carry Chou, and concocted a plan to place a bomb on board at the Hong Kong airport. Peking had all the details well in advance, but let the operation go ahead, without telling either Air India, or the British mission in Peking, or the Hong Kong government — or the passengers, eleven relatively low-level officials and journalists (in a plane that seated over 100). The plane blew up in mid-air, killing all the passengers and five of the eight Indian crew.

Peking immediately declared that Taiwan agents had planted a bomb, and Chou En-lai gave the British names of people Peking wanted expelled from Hong Kong. The British went along, and over the following year deported over forty key Nationalist agents on Chou’s list, even though there was not enough evidence to charge any of them with an offense in court. This put a sizable part of Chiang’s network in Hong Kong out of action, and it was after this that Peking secured a series of clandestine deals for its nuclear program via the colony; one purchase alone from Western Europe cost 150 tons of gold.

When the Cultural Revolution started and Mao revved up his campaign to be the leader of the world revolution, he wanted to show the world that he was the true master of the colony, by making the British “go down on their knees” and publicly offer “unconditional surrender,” in the words of Chinese diplomats at internal meetings. The only way this could be achieved was to put the British in the wrong — and that needed a massacre of Chinese.

So Peking seized on a labor dispute in May 1967, and urged Hong Kong radicals to escalate violence, especially to break the law in a confrontational manner. To spur them on, Peking hinted strongly and publicly that it might take the colony back before the lease expired in 1997, and activists there were given to understand that this was Peking’s intention.

Mao’s real line was the one he imparted to Chou En-lai, in secret: “Hong Kong remains the same”—i.e., it stays under British rule. Chou’s assignment was to stir up enough violence to provoke reprisals, and then a kowtow, from the British, but not so much violence that it “might lead to us having to take Hong Kong back ahead of time,” which Chou privately made clear would be disastrous.

In the riots that ensued, Hong Kong police killed some demonstrators; but the number of deaths fell short of a massacre and the colonial authorities refused to apologize. Peking then incited Hong Kong radicals to kill policemen. “Do to them [the police] as they have done to us,” urged People’s Daily. “Those who kill must pay with their lives.” As the Hong Kong rioters were unable to kill policemen, Chou had to infiltrate soldiers into the colony. These men slipped across the border on 8 July, dressed in mufti, and shot dead five police. Chou expressed his satisfaction with the results, but vetoed any more such operations in case the situation evolved to a point where Peking’s bluff might be openly called. Instead, Peking fostered an indiscriminate bombing campaign, and over the next two months there were about 160 bomb incidents, some fatal.

But the British refused to resort to a massacre, and focused on methodically rounding up activists, quietly, at night. Mao’s hope of getting Britain to kowtow collapsed. In frustration, he fell back on hooliganism on his own turf. On 22 August a crowd of over 10,000 torched the British Mission in Peking, trapping the staff inside and almost burning them alive, and subjecting women to gross sexual harassment.

THE MISSIONS OF a score of other countries also found themselves on the receiving end of Mao’s fury. In 1967, violent assaults were made on the Soviet embassy, followed by the embassies of Indonesia, India, Burma and Mongolia. These attacks had official sanction, with the Foreign Ministry telling the mobs which missions to assail, and how intensely. The “punishments” ranged from million-strong demonstrations besieging the missions, unfurling giant portraits of Mao, and blasting insults through loudhailers, to breaking in, setting fire to cars, manhandling diplomats and their spouses and terrorizing their children, while yelling slogans like “Beat to death, beat to death.”

This treatment was even meted out to North Korea, as Kim Il Sung had declined to submit to Mao’s tutelage. Mao had over the years tried to subvert Kim, for which he had once been obliged to apologize. At the Moscow Communist summit in November 1957 he waylaid Kim to mend fences, to forestall Kim spilling the beans to other Communist leaders. According to an official Korean report that was relayed to a large meeting in Pyongyang, Mao “repeatedly expressed his apologies [to Kim] for the Chinese Communist Party’s unjustified interference in the affairs of the Korean [Party].” Kim seized the chance to reduce Mao’s clout in Korea by demanding the withdrawal of all the Chinese troops still there, to which Mao had to accede.

Mao did not give up. In January 1967, his man in charge of clandestine missions abroad, Kang Sheng, told the Albanians: “Kim Il Sung should be overthrown, so that the situation in Korea can be changed.” Unable to fulfill this wish, Mao directed crowds to swamp the Korean embassy, denouncing “fat Kim.” Kim retaliated by renaming Mao Tse-tung Square in Pyongyang, closing the rooms commemorating China’s role in the Korean War Museum, “re-sizing” the Russian and Chinese war memorials in Pyongyang, and drawing much closer to Russia.

By the end of September 1967, China had become embroiled in rows with most of the forty-eight countries with which it had diplomatic or semi-diplomatic relations. Many of these countries lowered their level of representation, and some closed their embassies. National Day that year saw only a sprinkling of foreign government delegates on Tiananmen. Mao later blamed his debacles on “extreme leftists.” The truth is that China’s foreign policy was never out of his hands.

BY THE END of the 1960s, Mao’s self-promotion had been going on for a decade, and had raised his profile sky-high in the outside world. In the West, many were mesmerized by him. The Little Red Book was taken up by intellectuals and students. Mao was termed a philosopher. The influential French writer Jean-Paul Sartre praised the “revolutionary violence” of Mao as “profoundly moral.”

However, it was apparent that this general fascination had not translated into substance. No Maoist party in the West — even the largest one, in Portugal — ever gained more than a minuscule following. Most Western “Maoists” were fantasists, or freeloaders, and had no appetite for sustained action, least of all if it was physically uncomfortable or dangerous. When large-scale student unrest erupted in Western Europe in 1968, Mao hailed this as “a new phenomenon in European history,” and sent European Maoists who had been trained in sabotage back home to exploit the situation. But they generated no action of significance.

Nor were Maoist groups making much headway in the Third World. Africa, once full of promise, had proved a thorough disappointment, as a jingle by a Chinese diplomat summed up:

Big, big tribalism,

Small, small nationalism,

Much, much imperialism,

Little, little Mao Tse-tung Thought.

African radicals rather astutely took Mao’s money, as one Chinese diplomat put it, with a big smile, but his instructions with a deaf ear. Some years later, meeting one of the heads of state he had tried hardest to topple, Zaïre’s President Mobutu, Mao admitted failure, in the guise of a rueful quip. His opening sally was: “Is that really you, Mobutu? I’ve spent a lot of money trying to have you overthrown — even killed. But here you are.” “We gave them money and arms, but they just couldn’t fight. They just couldn’t win. What can I do then?”

Mao had even less success in the Middle East. When the Six-Day War broke out between Israel and the Arab states in June 1967, Mao offered Nasser US$10 million and 150,000 tons of wheat, as well as military “volunteers,” if Nasser would take his advice “to fight to the end.” He sent Nasser a battle plan for a Mao-style “people’s war,” telling him to “lure the enemy in deep,” by withdrawing into the Sinai Peninsula, even to Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. Nasser declined to follow the Maoist road, explaining to his distant adviser that Sinai “is a desert and we cannot conduct a people’s liberation war in Sinai because there are no people there.” Peking withdrew its offers of aid, and tried to promote opposition against Nasser. But Mao built up no groups of disciples in the Middle East. When he and Chou died in 1976, among the 104 parties from 51 countries — many of them tiny groupings — listed as sending condolences, there was not one in the Arab world.

One key factor behind this failure was Mao’s insistence that foreign radicals had to take sides with him against Russia. This lost him many potential sympathizers — not least in Latin America. There, Mao had disbursed money and food to try to swing Cuba against Moscow. This largesse produced few returns. In 1964 a delegation of nine Latin American Communist parties, headed by Cuban Party chief Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, came to China to ask Mao to halt public polemics with Russia, and “factional activities,” i.e., trying to split Communist parties. An infuriated Mao told them that his fight with Russia “will go on for 10,000 years,” and abused Castro. When the delegate from Uruguay (pop. 3 million) tried to get a word in, Mao rounded on him, saying that he, Mao, was “speaking in the name of 650 million people” and how many people did he represent?

Castro, who never visited China during Mao’s lifetime, described Mao as “a shit,” and then went public in front of a large international audience, on 2 January 1966, accusing Peking of applying economic pressure to try to lever him away from Moscow. One month later, he charged Peking with resorting to “brutal reprisals,” in particular trying to subvert the Cuban army. Mao called Castro “a jackal and a wolf.”

Mao had placed high hopes on Castro’s colleague Che Guevara. On Guevara’s first visit to China in 1960, Mao demonstrated uncommon intimacy with him, holding his hand while talking eagerly to him, and fulsomely praising a pamphlet of his. Guevara had reciprocated, recommending copying Mao’s methods in Cuba. And he had proved the closest in the Havana leadership to Mao’s position during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. But in the end, Mao could not get Guevara to take his side against the Russians. When Guevara returned to China in 1965, just before going off to try to launch guerrilla ventures in Africa, and then Bolivia, Mao did not see him, and a request from Guevara in Bolivia for China’s help to build a radio station that could broadcast worldwide was refused. When Guevara was killed in 1967, Peking privately expressed delight. Kang Sheng told Albania’s defense minister in October 1968: “The revolution in Latin America is going very well, especially after the defeat of Guevara; revisionism is being unmasked …” (italics added).

During Mao’s lifetime, there were no influential Maoist parties in Latin America. The only notable one, the “Shining Path” in Peru, was founded in 1980, four years after Mao’s death.

ON HIS OWN doorstep in Asia, Mao’s influence failed to spread, even against deadbeat regimes like that of Ne Win in Burma. But Mao’s biggest setback was “losing” Vietnam. In the 1950s and early 1960s, China had been Hanoi’s almost sole backer in its wars against first the French and then the Americans, ever since Stalin had allocated it to Mao in 1950. But the Vietnamese had developed suspicions about Mao from as early as 1954. That year, after he launched his Superpower Program, while doing everything to attract Russian assistance, Mao began trying to gain access to embargoed Western technology and equipment. One prime candidate for cracking the embargo was France.

At the time, France was bogged down in Indochina. Mao’s plan was to make the Vietnamese intensify the war “to increase the internal problems of France” (as Chou put it), and then, when France was on the ropes, to step in and broker a settlement. The idea was that France would then reciprocate by acceding to Mao’s embargo-breaking approaches.

Mao had been co-directing the war in Indochina. During the Korean War, he had halted large-scale offensives in Indochina to focus China’s resources on Korea. In May 1953, when he decided to end the Korean War, he sent Chinese officers straight from Korea to Indochina. In October that year, the Chinese got hold of a copy of the French strategic plan, the Navarre Plan, named after the French commander, General Henri Navarre. China’s chief military adviser to Vietnam, General Wei Guo-qing, carried this from Peking and delivered it to Ho Chi Minh in person. It was this vital intelligence coup that led to the decision by the Communist side to give battle at Dien Bien Phu, a French base in northwest Vietnam, where the Vietnamese, with massive Chinese military aid and advice, won a decisive victory in May 1954.

Dien Bien Phu was fought in the lead-up to, and during, the Geneva conference about Indochina (and Korea), which had opened on 26 April with Chou En-lai leading the Chinese delegation. Mao had decided well over a month before it opened that he “definitely must have a settlement,” but he did not inform the Vietnamese. The role he had in mind for them was to do the fighting, and escalate the war, at whatever cost, to create as big a crisis for Paris as possible. Mao wrote to chief military adviser Wei on 4 April, about an ostensible next stage: “Try to complete the Dien Bien Phu campaign by … early May … Begin attacking Luang Prabang and Vientiane in August or September and liberate them.” These were the twin capitals of Laos. Then, Mao went on: “actively make ready to attack Hanoi and Haiphong this coming winter and at the latest early spring next year, aiming to liberate the [Red River] Delta in 1955.” Mao specifically ordered Wei to discuss this plan with Vietnam’s defense minister General Vo Nguyen Giap, to give the Vietnamese the impression that he would sponsor them to expand the war well into the following year — when in fact he had secretly decided on a ceasefire in the coming months.

The Vietnamese took Dien Bien Phu on 7 May, and the French government fell on 17 June. This was China’s moment to step in. On the 23rd, Chou met the new French prime minister, Pierre Mendès-France, in Switzerland, without the Vietnamese, and worked out a deal.

Chou now put immense pressure on the Vietnamese Communists to settle for the terms he had negotiated with the French, which were far inferior to what the Vietnamese had hoped for. Vietnam’s later leader Le Duan said that Chou threatened “that if the Vietnamese continued to fight they would have to fend for themselves. He would not help any longer and pressured us to stop fighting.” (These remarks incidentally reveal how dependent the Vietnamese were on the Chinese.) Ho Chi Minh told his negotiator, Pham Van Dong, to concede, which Dong did, in tears. Le Duan was sent to break the news to Communist forces in the south. “I travelled by wagon to the south,” he recalled. “Along the way, compatriots came out to greet me, for they thought we had won a victory. It was so painful.” Seeds of anger and suspicion towards Peking took root among the Vietnamese.

Early in 1965 the new Brezhnev — Kosygin team in Moscow began stepping up military assistance to Hanoi, supplying the key heavy equipment it needed: anti-aircraft guns and ground-to-air missiles, some manned by Russians. Mao could not compete. So he tried to talk the Russians out of helping the Vietnamese. “The people of North Vietnam,” he told Russian premier Kosygin that February, “are fighting well without the help of the USSR … and they themselves will drive the Americans out.” “The Vietnamese can take care of themselves,” Mao said, adding (untruly) that “only a small number of people have been killed in the air raids, and it is not so terrible that some amount of people were killed …” Peking suggested that the Russians should take on the Americans elsewhere. Soviet ambassador Chervonenko was told that the best thing Russia could do was “exercise pressure on imperialist forces in a western direction”—i.e., in Europe.

At the same time, Mao tried to compel Hanoi to break with Moscow. He wooed Ho Chi Minh, who had intimate ties with China, where he spent much time. The CCP found him a Chinese wife, but the marriage was vetoed by the Vietnamese leadership, ostensibly on the grounds that it would be better for their cause if their leader remained self-sacrificingly celibate.

Ho and his colleagues were urged to reject Soviet assistance. “It will be better without Soviet aid,” Chou told Premier Pham Van Dong. “I do not support the idea of Soviet volunteers going to Vietnam, nor Soviet aid to Vietnam.” Chou even claimed to Ho that “The purpose of Soviet aid to Vietnam [is] … to improve Soviet — US relations.” Such arguments strained even Chou’s silver tongue. Mao’s only way to try to exert influence was to pour in more money, goods, and soldiers, but he could not prevent Hanoi moving close to the Russians.

Mao was equally powerless to dissuade it from opening talks with the US, which Hanoi announced on 3 April 1968. Arguing against this initiative, Chou even blamed Hanoi for the murder of US black civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. on 4 April. The assassination, he said, came “one day after your statement had been issued. Had your statement been issued one or two days later, the murder might have been stopped.” Claiming to represent “the world’s people,” Chou went on to say: “So many people don’t understand why [you] were so hurried in making this statement … It is the judgement of the world’s people. In the eyes of the world’s people, you have compromised twice.”

Hanoi just ignored Peking, and started negotiating with the US in May. Mao then tried to muscle in, with Chou telling the Vietnamese that the Chinese had more experience at negotiating than Hanoi did. This cut no ice. Mao was hopping mad. In early October, Chou told the Vietnamese that a delegation due to visit China for more aid need not come, saying Chinese leaders would be too busy to receive them. But Mao soon had to backtrack and continue splashing out aid. The Great Teacher of the World’s Revolutionary People could not afford not to play a part in the foremost revolutionary war on the planet.

More galling to Mao was that he had to stand by helplessly while the Vietnamese expanded their own sphere of influence at his expense. In spite of massive sponsorship from China, the Red guerrillas in Laos chose Vietnam as their patron, and by September 1968 had asked the Chinese advisers there to “take home leave” permanently, a request the Chinese had to comply with. The Laotians and the Vietnamese both aligned themselves with Moscow.

AFTER A DECADE of unremitting machinations and expenditure to promote Maoism as a serious international alternative to Moscow, Mao had failed. It was still Moscow, not Peking, that the world saw as the chief anti-American force. Mao’s tirades against Moscow for “helping the imperialists” were widely perceived as untrue, and listeners were frequently irritated, bored, even embarrassed. On at least one occasion, some Third World Communists simply asked the Chinese to shut up.

By the end of the 1960s, US officials considered that the Maoist model was no longer a threat in the Third World, a fact that Mao himself could see. He told his coterie in 1969: “Now we are isolated, nobody wants to have anything to do with us.” The foreign Maoists were useless, he said, and ordered their funding cut back.

Mao needed a solution. A chance cropped up when Cambodia’s neutralist leader, Prince Sihanouk, was deposed on 18 March 1970 in a coup that was widely perceived to be CIA-inspired. Mao decided to back Sihanouk if the prince was willing to fight America. His calculation was that the Vietnam War could now be turned into a pan-Indochina war, and by being Sihanouk’s sponsor, he could play a leading role in the whole of Indochina.

Not long before, in summer 1967, Mao had been plotting against Sihanouk. Peking, according to the prince, was “implicitly advocating my overthrow”—something that Chou En-lai later admitted was true, though he disowned responsibility, not very convincingly. In March 1968, Sihanouk had gone public about Peking’s patronage of a then little-known rebel group in Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge. “Below the surface,” he announced, the Communist nations were “playing a dirty game because the Khmer Reds are their offspring … The other day we seized a large quantity of arms of all sorts coming from China, in particular.”

But now, in March 1970, Mao latched on to Sihanouk. As it happened, the prince had been scheduled to visit China the day after the coup. The moment he stepped off the plane, Chou ascertained that he was determined to fight the US, and then declared total support for him. Chou contacted the Vietnamese at once, and proposed a pan-Indochina summit in Sihanouk’s name. The summit, which was held in China the following month, boiled down to forming a joint Indochina command.

Since Sihanouk was so vital to Mao, the Chinese catered to his princely tastes, providing him with seven cooks and seven pastry-chefs, and flew foie gras in for him from Paris. They gave him special trains, and two planes for his foreign trips, one of which was just to carry his gifts and his luggage. Mao told Sihanouk: “Tell us what you need. Just ask. We can do more for you. It’s nothing.” Mao waved away any question of repayment: “We’re not arms merchants.” When Sihanouk protested about the burden on China, Mao replied: “I ask you to burden us still more.” Mao’s Cambodian creature, Pol Pot, the leader of the Khmer Rouge, who was in China secretly at the time, was persuaded to give formal support to Sihanouk.

But the Vietnamese did not let Mao take over, and the world continued to perceive Vietnam as the leading player in Indochina. Sihanouk’s “return to power,” the London Times said, “depends on the goodwill of Hanoi.” US National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger talked about “Hanoi’s designs on Cambodia.”

Mao had tried to impress the Vietnamese by launching China’s first satellite on the day the Indochina summit opened, which Chou presented as a “gift” to the summit and “a victory for us all.” But it made no difference to the Vietnamese, or to the world.

The satellite was an ego-trip for Mao, as it orbited the globe warbling the Maoist anthem, “The East Is Red.” Mao was thrilled to bits about being hailed from space. On May Day on Tiananmen Gate he shook hands with each of the people who had worked on the satellite, with a big grin on his face, exclaiming “Amazing! Amazing!”; while they shouted slogans saying it had all been the product of Mao’s Thought.

Boosted by the satellite, Mao made yet another effort to advertise himself to the world as the leader of the Indochina war. On 20 May he issued a statement titled “People of the world, unite, and defeat American aggressors and all their running dogs!” Next day, he ascended Tiananmen Gate and had the text declaimed to a crowd of half a million, with Sihanouk by his side. As the title made clear, Mao was issuing a command. But the presentation was as farcical as the document’s pretensions. It was read out by Mao’s then No. 2, Lin Biao, who had to be specially injected with a stimulant beforehand. Sihanouk noticed that before the rally Lin “seemed … to be somewhat intoxicated. He would periodically interrupt Mao, gesticulating and loudly launching himself into anti-U.S. tirades.” When Lin started reading the statement, the words that came out were: “I am going to issue a speech! — I am going to talk about Vietnam — Two Vietnams — Half a Vietnam—” When he got to the written text, he misread it at several places, saying “Pakistan” instead of “Palestine.”

The statement condemned US president Richard Nixon by name. Nixon was incensed and, in a drunken rage, wanted ships moved into attack positions. Kissinger calmed him down by pointing out that Mao had “offered little to Hanoi except verbal encouragement.” Mao was ignored. In pique, he lashed out at Kissinger for failing to recognize him as a player, calling him “a stinking scholar,” “a university professor who does not know anything about diplomacy.” An exasperated and vexed Mao had this exchange with Vietnam’s premier Dong:

MAO: Why have the Americans not made a fuss about the fact that more than 100,00 °Chinese troops help you building railways, roads and airports although they knew about it?

DONG: Of course, they are afraid.

MAO: They should have made a fuss about it. Also, their estimate of the number of Chinese troops in Vietnam is less than their real number.

The promotion of Maoism had reached the end of the road, in Indochina as in the world at large. Ever resourceful, Mao came up with a new scheme that would hoist him into the limelight: to get the president of the United States to come to China.

The October 1966 success coincided with the presence in China of one of Hitler’s top rocket experts, Wolfgang Pilz, who was spotted in Peking by an Indian diplomat that month, along with three German colleagues. Pilz had previously been supervising Egypt’s missile program and had been lured away with offers of large sums of money and more exciting technical conditions. When China tried to attract other German scientists, the US offered them more money to entice them to America.

Not surprisingly, when even committed friends could find themselves at risk. When the Albanian premier Mehmet Shehu and his colleague Ramiz Alia returned to Peking after traveling around the country, Mao greeted them by asking: “Did anyone hit you?”

Its failed leader, Abimael Guzmán, called himself “Chairman of the World Revolution.” The year “Shining Path” was founded, it celebrated Mao’s birthday by hanging dogs from lamp-posts in Lima wrapped in slogans excoriating the post-Mao leader Deng Xiao-ping, whom it regarded as having betrayed Mao’s legacy, as “a son of a bitch.”

China had over 320,000 soldiers in Vietnam during the years 1965–68, including more than 150,000 anti-aircraft troops, some of whom stayed into late 1973. The presence of these troops in North Vietnam allowed Hanoi to send many more of its own forces into the South, where some Chinese accompanied them. In 1965 a Chinese general was present to watch US forces landing at Danang, on the coast of South Vietnam.

Chinese troops wore Chinese uniforms so the Americans would know they were there.

54. NIXON: THE RED-BAITER BAITED (1970–73 AGE 76–79)

WHEN HE FOUNDED his regime in 1949, Mao had deliberately made it impossible for the USA to recognize it, mainly so as to reassure Stalin, hoping that this would encourage Stalin to build up China’s military machine. After Stalin died in 1953, Mao began seeking relations with America, in order to gain access to Western technology for his Superpower Program. But memories of fighting the Chinese in the Korean War were too recent, and Washington snubbed Peking. Though the two countries established a diplomatic channel for discussing specific issues, overall, relations remained frozen. Mao hewed to an aggressively anti-US posture, and in 1960, when he was promoting Maoism, he made this bellicosity his hallmark, setting himself apart from the Kremlin, which he accused of going soft on America.

In 1969, the new US president, Nixon, publicly voiced interest in improving relations with China. Mao did not respond. Establishing a relationship with Washington would jeopardize his identity and image as a revolutionary leader. It was only in June 1970, after his anti-American manifesto of 20 May had flopped, and when it was inescapably clear that Maoism was getting nowhere in the world, that Mao decided to invite Nixon to China. The motive was not to have a reconciliation with America, but to relaunch himself on the international stage.

Mao did not want to be seen as courting the US president, and he went to considerable lengths to make the invitation deniable. In November, Chou sent a message through the Romanians, who had good relations with both China and America, saying that Nixon would be welcome in Peking. The invitation reached the White House on 11 January 1971. As Mao had feared might happen, Nixon “noted on it that we should not appear too eager to respond,” according to Kissinger. When Kissinger replied to Peking, on 29 January, he made “no reference to a Presidential visit,” regarding the idea as “premature and potentially embarrassing.”

Mao was not deterred. He soon found another way to tempt Nixon to China.

On 21 March, a Chinese table tennis team arrived in Japan for the world championships — one of the first sports teams to travel abroad since the start of the Cultural Revolution five years before. China was good at table tennis, and Mao personally authorized the trip. So as not to appear too outlandish, the players were exempted from having to wave the Little Red Book.

They were given precise instructions on how to behave with the Americans: no shaking hands; no initiating conversation. But on 4 April, an American player, Glenn Cowan, got on the Chinese bus, and the Chinese men’s champion Zhuang Ze-dong decided to talk to him. Photographs of the two shaking hands were front-page news in the Japanese papers. When Mao was informed, his eyes lit up and he called Zhuang “a good diplomat.” Nonetheless, when the American team expressed a desire to visit China, after other foreign teams had been invited, Mao endorsed a Foreign Ministry recommendation to turn down the request.

But he was clearly uneasy with this decision, and staff noticed that he seemed preoccupied for the rest of the day. That night at eleven o’clock he took a large dose of sleeping pills, and then had dinner with his female nurse-cum-assistant, Wu Xu-jun. Mao sometimes invited one or two members of his staff to dine with him. He seldom dined with his wife at this stage, and almost never with colleagues. His routine was to take sleeping pills before dinner, so he would fall asleep right after the meal, which he ate sitting on the edge of his bed. The pills were so powerful they would sometimes hit him while he was chewing, and his staff would have to pick food out of his mouth, so he never had fish for dinner, because of the bones. This time, Wu recalled,

after he finished eating, he slumped on the table … But suddenly he spoke, mumbling, and it took me a long time to work out that he wanted me to telephone the Foreign Ministry … “Invite the American team to China.” …

I was dumbstruck. I thought: this is just the opposite of what he had authorised during the day!

Mao’s standing orders were that:

his “words after taking sleeping pills don’t count.” Did they count now?

I was really in a dilemma … I must make him say it again.

… I pretended nothing was happening and went on eating … After a little while, Mao lifted his head and tried very hard to open his eyes and said to me:

“Little Wu … Why don’t you go and do what I asked you to do?”

Mao … only called me “Little Wu” when he was very serious.

I asked deliberately in a loud voice: “Chairman, what did you say to me? I was eating and didn’t hear you clearly. Please say it again.” So Mao repeated, word for word, haltingly, what he had said.

Wu then checked with Mao about the pills rule:

“You’ve taken sleeping pills. Do your words count?”

Mao waved at me: “Yes they do! Do it quickly. Otherwise there won’t be time.”

Mao kept himself awake until Wu returned with the news that she had done what he asked.

Mao’s change of mind changed his fortunes. The invitation, the first ever from Red China to an American group, caused a sensation. The fact that it was a sports team helped capture the world’s imagination. Chou En-lai switched on his charm, and his totalitarian regime’s meticulously orchestrated theater, to produce what Kissinger called “a dazzling welcome” for the Ping-Pong team. Glowing and fascinated reports littered the American and major Western press day after day. Mao the old newspaperman had hit exactly the right button. “Nixon,” wrote one commentator, “was truly amazed at how the story jumped off the sports pages and onto the front page.” With one move, Mao had created the climate in which a visit to China would be a political asset for Nixon in the runup to the 1972 presidential election.

“Nixon was excited to the point of euphoria,” Kissinger wrote, and “now wanted to skip the emissary stage lest it take the glow off his own journey.” By the end of May it was settled, in secret, that Nixon was going.

MAO HAD NOT only got Nixon, he had managed to conceal that this had been his objective. Nixon was coming thinking that he was the keener of the two. So when Kissinger made his first, secret, visit in July 1971 to pave the way for the president, he bore many and weighty gifts, and asked for nothing in return. The most startling offer concerned Taiwan, to which the US was bound by a mutual defense treaty. Nixon offered to drop Washington’s old ally, promising to accord full diplomatic recognition to Peking by January 1975, provided he was re-elected in 1972.

By the end of the trip Chou was talking as if Peking pocketing Taiwan was a matter of course. It was only at this point that Kissinger made a feeble gesture: “We hope very much that the Taiwan issue will be solved peacefully.” But he did not press Chou for a promise not to use force.

As part of the recognition package, Nixon offered to get Peking into the UN straight away: “you would get the China seat now,” Kissinger told Chou when proposing this behind-the-scenes fix, adding that “the President wanted me to discuss this matter with you before we adopted a position.”

And there was more, including an offer to tell the Chinese everything about America’s dealings with Russia. Kissinger: “Specially, I am prepared to give you any information you may wish to know regarding any bilateral negotiations we are having with the Soviet Union on such issues as SALT [Strategic Arms Limitation Talks].” A few months later Kissinger told the Chinese: “we tell you about our conversations with the Soviets; we do not tell the Soviets about our conversations with you.”

Along with this came top-level intelligence. Vice-President Nelson Rockefeller was reported as being “almost mesmerised at hearing … the amount of sensitive information that we had made available to the Chinese.” The intelligence included information about Soviet troop deployments on China’s border.

Kissinger also made two commitments on Indochina: to pull out all US forces, mentioning a twelve-month deadline; and to abandon the South Vietnamese regime, promising to withdraw “unilaterally” even if there were no negotiations — and that US troops would not return. “After a peace is made,” Kissinger said, “we will be 10,000 miles away, and [Hanoi] will still be there.” Kissinger even made a promise that “most, if not all, American troops” would be out of Korea before the end of Nixon’s next term, without even trying to extract any guarantee that Mao would not support another Communist invasion of South Korea.

Mao was being given a lot, and on a platter. Kissinger specifically said that he was not asking China to stop giving aid to Vietnam, and Mao was not even requested to soften his bellicose anti-American tone, either in the world at large or during the meetings. The minutes show that Chou was hectoring (“you should answer that question … you must answer that question”), and constantly referring to “your oppression, your subversion, and your intervention.” He in effect suggested that Nixon must make more and more concessions for the privilege of coming to China, and being allowed to recognize Peking. Kissinger did not ask for reciprocal concessions. Chou’s outlandish claim that China was not “aggressive”—“because of our new [Communist] system,” no less — went unchallenged. And Chou’s reference to American “cruelties” in Vietnam earned no reproof about Mao’s cruelties in China. On a different occasion, when North Vietnam’s negotiator had obliquely criticized the Nixon administration, Kissinger had shot back: “You are the representative of one of the most tyrannical governments on this planet …” Now, Kissinger described Chou’s presentation as “very moving.”

When Mao heard the report of the first day’s talks, his ego soared, and he remarked to his top diplomats that America was “changing from monkey to man, not quite man yet, the tail is still there … but it is no longer a monkey, it’s a chimpanzee, and its tail is not very long.” “America should start its life anew,” he proclaimed, expanding on his Darwinian approach, viewing America as a slowly evolving lower primate. “This is evolution!” Chou, for his part, compared Nixon to a loose woman “tarting herself up and offering herself at the door.” It was now, during this first Kissinger visit, that Mao drew the conclusion that Nixon could be manipulated, and that Peking could get a lot out of America without having to modify its tyranny, or its anti-American ranting.

IMMEDIATELY AFTER KISSINGER’S secret visit, it was announced that Nixon had been invited to China and had accepted. Kissinger returned to Peking in October 1971 to prepare for the president’s visit. His second trip coincided with the annual UN vote on China’s seat, which Taiwan held, and the public presence in Peking of the president’s top adviser turned the tide. On 25 October, Peking displaced Taipei in the UN, giving Mao a seat, and a veto, on the Security Council.

This was just over a month after the flight and death of Lin Biao. The news that there had been a plot to kill him had left Mao in a state of deep depression. Taiwan’s defeat and Nixon’s coming visit lifted his spirits immeasurably. Laughing broadly and joking, he talked for nearly three hours in full flow to his top diplomats. Looking at the UN vote, he declared that: “Britain, France, Holland, Belgium, Canada, Italy — they have all become Red Guards …”

Before China’s delegates left for the UN, Mao made a point of reminding them that they must continue to treat the USA as Public Enemy No. 1, and fiercely denounce it “by name, an absolute must.” He wanted to make his debut on the world stage as the anti-American champion, using the UN as a new platform.

Nine days before Nixon was scheduled to arrive in China on 21 February 1972, Mao passed out, and came very close to death. The prospect of Nixon’s imminent arrival helped to restore him. New shoes and clothes were made for him, as his body had become swollen. The sitting-room where he was to receive Nixon had been converted into a makeshift ward, with a large bed and medical facilities. Staff moved some of these out of the room, and screened off the bed and the other medical equipment. The vast room was lined with old books, which impressed the Americans, who did not know that many were loot from brutal house raids in the not-so-distant past.

On the morning when Nixon arrived, Mao was tremendously excited, and kept checking on the president’s progress. As soon as he heard that Nixon had reached the guest house, the Imperial Fishing Villa, Mao said he wanted to see him, straightaway. Nixon was getting ready to take a shower, when Chou, behaving “slightly impatiently,” Kissinger noted, hustled them to be on their way.

During the relatively brief 65-minute meeting (the only one between Nixon and Mao on this trip), Mao parried every attempt to engage him in serious issues. This was not because he had been ill, but because he did not want to leave a record of his positions in the hands of the Americans. Nothing must damage his claim to be the global anti-American leader. He had invited Nixon to Peking to promote that claim, not to waive it. So when Nixon proposed discussing “current issues like Taiwan, Vietnam and Korea,” Mao acted as if he were above such lesser chores. “Those questions are not questions to be discussed in my place,” he said, conveying an impression of lofty detachment. “They should be discussed with the Premier,” adding that: “All those troublesome problems I don’t want to get into very much.” Then he cut the Americans short by saying: “As a suggestion, may I suggest you do a little less briefing?” When Nixon persisted in talking about finding “common ground” and building a “world structure,” Mao ignored him, turned to Chou to ask what time it was, and said: “Haven’t we talked enough now?”

Mao was especially careful not to pay Nixon any compliments, while Nixon and Kissinger both flattered Mao fulsomely. Nixon told Mao: “The Chairman’s writings moved a nation and have changed the world.” Mao returned no thanks and made only one, condescending, comment on Nixon: “Your book, Six Crises, is not a bad book.”

Instead, Mao used banter to put Nixon and Kissinger down, exploring how much they would swallow. When Nixon said: “I have read the Chairman’s poems and speeches, and I knewhe was a professional philosopher,” Mao turned away to look at Kissinger, and started this exchange.

MAO: He is a doctor of philosophy?

NIXON: He is a doctor of brains.

MAO: What about asking him to be the main speaker today?

Mao kept disrupting his exchanges with Nixon to make remarks like: “We two must not monopolise the whole show. It won’t do if we don’t let Dr. Kissinger have a say.” This transgressed both protocol and common politeness, and was definitely slighting Nixon. Mao would never have dared to talk this way to Stalin. But, having upgraded Kissinger at Nixon’s expense, Mao did not really invite Kissinger’s views. He merely engaged in repartee about Kissinger using “pretty girls as a cover.”

Mao clearly felt he could push Nixon quite far. At the end of the visit there was to be a joint communiqué. Mao dictated one in which he could denounce America. “Aren’t they talking peace, security … and what not?” he said to Chou. “We will do the opposite and talk revolution, talk liberating the oppressed nations and people all over the world …” So the communiqué took the form of each side stating its own position. The Chinese used their space for a tirade against America (though not by name). The American side did not say one word critical of Mao’s regime, going no further than a vague and much qualified platitude about supporting “individual freedom.”

IN SPITE OF all his efforts to come across as the champion of anti-Americanism, Mao caught a lot of flak from his old allies. The fiercest came from Albania, which mattered to Mao because it was the only Eastern European regime he had detached from Russia’s orbit. Albania’s dictator, Hoxha, penned Mao a nineteen-page letter expressing his fury over what he called “this shitty business.” Actually, Hoxha cunningly used rhetoric to extract colossal amounts of extra aid, basically saying: You are consorting with the enemy, but you can buy our silence for more money. Mao paid up.

The biggest problem was Vietnam, which counted far more than Albania internationally. The Vietnamese were worried that Mao was trying to use them as a bargaining chip with the US. When Chou went to Hanoi immediately after Kissinger’s first visit, to explain Peking’s move, he got an earful from North Vietnam’s leader. “Vietnam is our country,” Le Duan protested; “you have no right to discuss the question of Vietnam with the United States.” After Nixon’s visit, Chou returned to Hanoi, and got an even worse reception. Prince Sihanouk was there at the time, having decamped from Peking in indignation during Nixon’s stay in China. He has left a rare picture of a flustered Chou, who, he records, “looked worn and still appeared heated by the discussion he just had with his North Vietnamese ‘comrades.’ He seemed irritated,” and “not himself.” Mao tried to salvage some influence by pouring in even more aid, which rose to unprecedented levels from 1971, peaking in 1974.

All these bribes to keep old allies quiet meant a tighter squeeze on the Chinese population. Nor did its extra burdens stop there. As more and more countries recognized Peking in the wake of Nixon’s visit, the number of states to which China sent aid jumped from 31 prior to 1970 to 66. On tiny and immeasurably more prosperous Malta (pop. c. 300,000), Mao lavished no less than US$25 million in April 1972. Its prime minister, Dom Mintoff, returned from China sporting a Mao badge.

Mao often had to pay over the odds to buy himself back into favor with states he had earlier tried to subvert. One former target, President Mobutu of Zaïre, told us how generously he was funded by Mao, who — unlike the IMF and the World Bank — let him defer loans indefinitely, or repay them in worthless Zaïrean currency. In the years 1971–75, foreign aid took up a staggering average of 5.88 percent of China’s entire expenditure, peaking at 6.92 percent in 1973—by far the highest percentage in the world, and at least seventy times the US level.

While Mao dished out money and food, and built expensive underground railway systems, shipyards and infrastructure for countries far richer than China, most of the 900 million Chinese hovered just above survival levels. In many areas, peasants recall that the hungriest years after the Great Famine of 1958–61 were those from 1973 to Mao’s death in 1976—the years immediately after Nixon’s visit.

Nixon has often been credited with opening the door to China. Inasmuch as a number of Western statesmen and businessmen, plus some press and tourists, were able to enter China, he did increase the Western presence in China. But he did not open the door of—much less from—China, and the increased Western presence did not have any appreciable impact on Chinese society while Mao was alive. Mao made sure that for the vast majority of its population, China remained a tightly sealed prison. The only people who benefited at all from the rapprochement were a small elite. Some of these were allowed to see relatives from abroad — under heavy supervision. And a tiny number could lay hands on the half-dozen or so contemporary Western books translated in classified editions, one of which was Nixon’s own Six Crises. From 1973 some foreign-language students were sent abroad, but the very few who were lucky enough to be allowed out had to be politically ultra-reliable, and lived and worked under the closest surveillance, forbidden even to step out of their residence unescorted.

The population as a whole remained rigidly quarantined from the few foreigners allowed into China, who were subject to rigorous control. Any unauthorized conversation with them could bring catastrophe to the locals involved. The lengths to which the regime would go were extraordinary. For Nixon’s one-day visit to Shanghai, which coincided with Chinese New Year, the traditional occasion for family reunions (like Christmas), thousands of rusticated youths who were visiting their families were expelled back to their villages of exile, as a precaution against the extremely remote possibility of any of them trying to complain to the president.

The real beneficiaries of Nixon’s visit were Mao himself, and his regime. For his own electoral ends, Nixon de-demonized Mao for mainstream opinion in the West. Briefing White House staff on his return, Nixon spoke of the “dedication” of Mao’s cynical coterie, whom Kissinger called “a group of monks … who have … kept their revolutionary purity.” Nixon’s men asserted, falsely, that “under Mao the lives of the Chinese masses have been greatly improved.” Nixon’s favorite evangelist, Billy Graham, lauded Mao’s virtues to British businessmen. Kissinger suggested that Mao’s callous crew would “challenge us in a moral way.” The result was an image of Mao a whole lot further from the truth than the one that Nixon himself had helped purvey as a fierce anti-Communist in the 1950s.

Mao became not merely a credible international figure, but one with incomparable allure. World statesmen beat a path to his door. A meeting with Mao was, and sometimes still is, regarded as the highlight of many a career, and life. When the call came for Mexico’s president Luis Echeverria, his entourage literally fought to join the audience group. The Australian ambassador told us that he did not dare go to the toilet, even though his bladder was bursting, in case the privileged few should suddenly leave without him. Japan’s prime minister Kakuei Tanaka, on the other hand, relieved himself at Mao’s place. Mao escorted him to the lavatory, and waited for him outside the door.

Statesmen put up with slights that they would never have condoned from other leaders. Not only were they not told in advance if they would see Mao, they were summoned peremptorily at the moment most convenient to the chairman, whatever they were doing, even in the middle of a meal. Canada’s prime minister Pierre Trudeau, who had not even asked to see Mao, suddenly found himself being bossed about by Chou—“Well, we have to adjourn now. I have other business and so do you”—without even telling him what for.

When Mao met foreigners, he flaunted his cynical and dictatorial views. “Napoleon’s methods were the best,” he told France’s president Georges Pompidou: “He dissolved all the assemblies and simply appointed those who were to govern with him.” When former British prime minister Edward Heath expressed surprise that Stalin’s portrait was still hanging in Tiananmen Square and brought up the fact that Stalin had slaughtered millions of people, Mao gave a dismissive flip of the hand to signal how little he cared, and answered: “But he is there because he was a Marxist.” Mao even managed to infect Western leaders with his own jargon. After Australian premier Gough Whitlam showed some uncertainty about the right answer to a question about Darwin, he wrote Mao what he calls in his memoirs “a self-criticism.” As recently as 1997, when much more was known about Mao, Kissinger described him as a “philosopher,” and claimed that Mao’s goal was a “quest for egalitarian virtue.”

Mao liked giving audiences to star-struck visitors, and continued to do so until his dying days, when oxygen tubing lay on his side table, concealed by a book or a newspaper. For him these audiences represented global glory.

NIXON’S VISIT ALSO opened up for Mao the possibility of laying his hands on advanced Western military technology and equipment. “The only objective of these relations,” he told the North Korean dictator Kim, “is to obtain developed technology.” Mao knew that he could only achieve his goal if America considered him an ally. To offer a plausible explanation for this shift from his long-standing anti-American posture, Mao claimed that he lived in fear of a Russian attack and desperately needed protection. Having laid the groundwork from the time of Kissinger’s first visit, Mao spoke explicitly about a military alliance in February 1973. “The Soviet Union dominated our conversations,” Kissinger reported to Nixon; as he put it in his memoirs, he was given to understand that “China’s conflict with the Soviet Union was both ineradicable and beyond its capacity to manage by itself.” Mao then told Kissinger: “we should draw a horizontal line [sc., alliance] — the US, Japan, China, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey and Europe.” All the places Mao cited except China were American allies.

To make the idea more attractive, Mao and Chou said that China would like the alliance to be led by America. Kissinger recorded that Chou “called on us to take the lead in organising an anti-Soviet coalition.”

Mao was not that frightened of a Soviet strike. Although he genuinely feared it, as he had shown in the 1969 scare, it had become obvious to him since then that the chances of such an event were extremely remote. The way he angled for American military secrets followed a pattern similar to his past approach with Moscow. Twice, in 1954 and 1958, he had exploited the fear of America using atom bombs in his staged confrontations with Taiwan to get Khrushchev to help him; in the first instance, to build his own Bomb, and in the second, to extract a deal that almost gave him an across-the-board modern arsenal. Now he was using the specter of war again to conjure a similar prize out of America.

At one point in February 1973, Mao revealed a glimpse of what he really thought about the “Soviet threat.” When Kissinger promised that the US would come to China’s rescue “if the Soviet Union overruns China,” Mao, who had earlier evoked this scenario himself, replied, laughing: “How will that happen? How could that be?… do you think they would feel good if they were bogged down in China?” Seeing that Kissinger was a little nonplussed, Mao quickly checked this line of reasoning, and reverted to crying wolf.

To persuade the US to think that he really wanted them as an ally, Mao hinted that he and Washington shared a mutual enemy: Hanoi. Kissinger came away feeling that “in Indochina, American and Chinese interests were nearly parallel. A united Communist Vietnam dominant in Indochina was a strategic nightmare for China …” Mao’s position not only double-crossed the Vietnamese, it was also a huge betrayal of the Chinese people, who had been starved of essentials for decades so as to aid the Vietnamese — against “US imperialism.”

Mao added a personal touch to soften up Kissinger, by alluding to Kissinger’s success with women. “There were some rumours that said that you were about to collapse. (laughter),” the meeting record runs. “And women folk seated here were all dissatisfied with that. (laughter, especially pronounced among the women) They said if the Doctor [Kissinger] is going to collapse, we would be out of work.” “Do you want our Chinese women? We can give you ten million. (laughter, particularly among the women).”

A few weeks later, on 16 March, Nixon wrote Mao a secret letter, stating that the territorial integrity of China was a “fundamental element” of US foreign policy, in language which suggested a commitment to come to China’s defense militarily if it was attacked. The Chinese wanted to know exactly what this meant.

Kissinger told the Chinese on 6 July that he had set up “a very secret group of four or five of the best officers I can find” to study what the US could do. Among scenarios considered was airlifting American nuclear artillery shells and battlefield nuclear missiles to Chinese forces in the event of war. The only practical option, the group recommended, was to ferry American tactical bombers into China loaded with nuclear weapons, and launch nuclear attacks on Soviet forces from Chinese airfields. This opened up the prospect of US nuclear weapons being stationed on Chinese soil.

To his close circle on 19 July, Kissinger spelled out how the White House was thinking: “All this talk about 25 years of mutual estrangement was crap. What the Chinese wanted was support in a military contingency.” The memo reveals that Kissinger was well aware that he and Nixon were contemplating doing something almost unimaginable: “We might not be able to pull it off, but at least [Kissinger] and the President understood this. Alex Eckstein and other chowder-headed liberals loved China but if you asked them about military actions in a contingency they’d have 600 heart attacks.”

Nixon and Kissinger knew that Mao had his eye on military know-how, and they agreed to fix substantial acquisitions for him. On 6 July, Kissinger told Mao’s envoy:

I have talked to the French Foreign Minister about our interest in strengthening the PRC [Communist China]. We will do what we can to encourage our allies to speed up requests they receive from you on items for Chinese defense.

In particular, you have asked for some Rolls-Royce [engine] technology. Under existing regulations we have to oppose this, but we have worked out a procedure with the British where they will go ahead anyway. We will take a formal position in opposition, but only that. Don’t be confused by what we do publicly …

This decision was vital for China’s aircraft industry, which was entirely military-oriented — and decrepit. In April 1972 Chou had warned the Albanians not to try to fly their Chinese-made MiG-19s. Six months later, a plane supplied to another country exploded in mid-air, after which all shipments of arms overseas were halted. Chou told Third World heads of state that he could not satisfy their pressing requests for Chinese helicopters, as they were unsafe.

Access to Western technology revolutionized China’s aircraft industry, and may also have boosted its flagging missile program, as rocket chiefs were deeply involved in the Rolls-Royce negotiations. In addition, Kissinger secretly encouraged Britain and France to sell strictly prohibited nuclear reactor technology to China. Mao had made a lot of headway towards getting what had always been his core objective.

The Russians were alarmed by Mao’s overtures towards the Americans. In June 1973 Brezhnev warned Nixon and Kissinger that (as Kissinger paraphrased it to China’s liaison): “if military arrangements were made between the US and the PRC, this would have the most serious consequences and would lead the Soviets to take drastic measures.” This conversation with Brezhnev, which concerned US national security, was promptly related to Mao’s envoy, who was present at the Western White House during Nixon’s talks with Brezhnev, but not to America’s allies — or to the US government itself. “We have told no one in our government of this conversation,” Kissinger confided to Mao’s envoy. “It must be kept totally secret.”

One ostensible purpose of Nixon’s journey to Peking had been to lessen the danger of war with Russia. Thanks to Mao, this danger had if anything increased.

The records of Kissinger’s 1971 visits were held back until 2002. In his memoirs Kissinger claimed Taiwan was “mentioned only briefly.” When confronted with the record in 2002, he said: “The way I expressed it was very unfortunate and I regret it.”

Mao made doubly sure of controlling the record by not allowing an American interpreter to be present. Nixon caved in to this diktat without demur.

This was not because the stifling repression was not visible. The political commentator William Buckley noticed how people had been cleared away everywhere they went. “Where are the people?” he asked a Chinese official. “What people?” the official replied. To which Buckley retorted: “The People, as in the People’s Republic of China!”

In the published minutes in English, which had been supplied by the Chinese, there is no mention of “China,” but the word is in the Chinese record.

Kissinger had made a sounding about how much the Chinese really wanted an alliance by suggesting “Chinese military help” against India during the Bangladesh crisis in December 1971.

55. THE BOSS DENIES CHOU CANCER TREATMENT (1972–74 AGE 78–80)

IN MID-MAY 1972, shortly after Nixon’s visit, it was discovered that Chou En-lai had cancer of the bladder. Under Mao, even a life-threatening illness was not just a medical matter. Mao controlled when and how his Politburo members could receive treatment. The doctors had to report first to Mao. They requested immediate surgery for Chou, stressing that the cancer was at an early stage, and that prompt action could cure it.

On 31 May, Mao decreed: “First: keep it secret, and don’t tell the premier or [his wife]. Second: no examination. Third: no surgery …”

Mao’s pretexts for vetoing treatment were that Chou was “old” (he was seventy-four), had “heart trouble,” and that surgery was “useless.” But Mao himself was seventy-eight, and had worse heart problems, yet surgeons and anesthetists were on stand-by for him.

One reason Mao did not want Chou to go to a hospital and be treated was in order for Chou to be available to work around the clock to deal with foreign statesmen, who were queuing at the gate after Nixon’s visit. Ever since the early 1940s, Chou had been Mao’s essential diplomat. During the war against Japan he was stationed for years in Chiang Kai-shek’s capital Chongqing, and, with his combination of charm, skill and attention to detail, had won the Communists many sympathizers among foreigners. When civil war started after the Japanese surrender, he ran rings around President Truman’s envoy George Marshall, whose decisions contributed significantly to Mao’s conquest of China. After the founding of Red China, Chou was the executor of Mao’s foreign policy, and his greatest diplomatic asset. After his first three days of talks in 1971, Kissinger gushed about Chou’s “heroic stature” in his report to Nixon:

my extensive discussions with Chou in particular, had all the flavor, texture, variety and delicacy of a Chinese banquet. Prepared from the long sweep of tradition and culture, meticulously cooked by hands of experience, and served in splendidly simple surroundings, our feast consisted of many courses, some sweet and some sour [etc., etc.] … and one went away, as after all good Chinese meals, very satisfied but not at all satiated.

Yet, though a star, Chou deferred slavishly to Mao in front of foreigners. In Mao’s presence, Kissinger commented, Chou “seemed a secondary figure.” Japan’s premier Tanaka went even further. “Chou is a nobody before Mao,” he said on returning from China in September 1972, when diplomatic relations were established (and Mao grandly waived all claims to war compensation). Chou’s motto in dealing with Mao was: “Always act as if treading on thin ice.”

But entertaining visiting statesmen was not the sole, or even the principal reason why Mao vetoed surgery for Chou. Mao wanted Chou around in the short term, but he did not want him cured, as he did not want Chou, four years his junior, to outlive him. This was miserable reward for decades of service, which had involved a care for his master’s health that reached far beyond the call of any duty. Chou had even tested some of Mao’s medicines on himself, and tried out Mao’s eye-drops—“to see whether this stings,” as he put it.

ALTHOUGH DOCTORS WERE under orders not to tell Chou that he had cancer, he sensed it from the frequent urine tests they asked him to take, and the evasive way they behaved. He resorted to reading medical books himself. Mao knew that Chou was extremely anxious to have treatment, and seized the chance to exercise a bit of blackmail. Ever since Lin Biao had fled to his death the previous September, Mao had been wary about the amount of power Chou held in his hands, as Chou was running everything — Party, government and army. Mao decided to exploit Chou’s anxiety to get him to do something that would weaken him to the maximum. He demanded that Chou make a detailed self-denunciation about his past “errors” in front of 300 top officials.

In addition, Mao ordered Chou to circulate to these 300 officials a highly self-incriminating document. Back in 1932, just after Chou had superseded Mao as Party boss of the Red state, Ruijin, a “recantation notice” had mysteriously appeared in the Shanghai press, bearing Chou’s then pseudonym, and averring that its author condemned the Communist Party and was renouncing it. Chou had taken fright at this smear, in particular fearing that it might have been planted by Mao, and had cozied up to Mao. From then on Mao knew that he had an effective blackmail weapon. When the Cultural Revolution started, more than three decades later, Mao dangled it over Chou’s head. Now, Mao dragged it out again.

Chou spent many days and nights composing the humiliating speech, which was so long that it took him three evenings to deliver. He was so harsh on himself, and so pathetic, that some of his listeners cringed with pain and embarrassment. At the end, he announced: “I have always thought, and will always think that I cannot be at the helm, and can only be an assistant.” This was a desperate attempt to pledge that he had no ambition to supplant Mao, and was no threat.

In this period, Chou lived an extraordinary double life, unique in the annals of modern politics. Hidden from outside eyes both in China and abroad, he was a blackmailed slave, living in dread of untreated cancer and of being purged; for the world at large, he was a virtuoso who dazzled visiting statesmen, many of whom regarded him as the most impressive political figure they had dealt with and the most attractive man they had ever met.

Yet even after Chou did what was required of him, Mao still refused him treatment. At the beginning of 1973, Chou’s urine contained a lot of blood, a sign that the tumor had worsened critically. It was only now that he was officially informed he had cancer. But when doctors pleaded to be allowed to conduct a full examination and give him treatment, Mao told them off through his chamberlain on 7 February, using words to the effect that Chou was quite old enough to die; adding: “What the hell do you want an examination for?”

Then, a week later, Chou performed a sterling service for Mao, which put the boss in a good mood. When Kissinger was in Peking that February and Mao pretended he wanted an alliance, Chou did an excellent job of making Mao’s pretense plausible. Mao finally agreed to let him have treatment, after Chou had humbly requested it. But Mao set conditions: he ordered it done “in two stages,” authorizing only an examination, and specifying that the surgeons must leave the removal of any tumor to a “second stage.” When it came to keeping Chou from being cured, Mao’s ingenuity and resourcefulness were infinite.

The chief surgeon realized that “there won’t be a second stage,” and decided to risk Mao’s displeasure and remove the cancer during the examination, which took place on 10 March.

Just beforehand, Mrs. Chou reminded the surgeons: “You do know that you must do it in two stages, don’t you?” The chief surgeon asked: “But if I see a little lump during the examination … should I leave it there …?” and she agreed he could remove it. When Chou regained consciousness and learned that the tumor had been removed, he adroitly performed a bit of Maoist theater and berated the doctors: “Weren’t you told to do it in two stages?” But he was visibly delighted, and invited the medical team to a Peking duck dinner.

The doctors had been nervous about how Mao would react to what they had done, and were relieved to receive a telephone message saying: “It’s good that the doctors combined two stages into one.” Though the praise was hypocritical, it signaled that Mao had accepted their fait accompli. But it was not a full-scale operation.

MAO’S BENIGN MOOD did not last long. On 22 June 1973, Brezhnev and Nixon signed an Agreement on the Prevention of Nuclear War. When Mao read a Foreign Ministry analysis which concluded that this showed that “the world is more than ever dominated by the two powers, the US and the USSR,” he flew into a monumental rage. Nixon’s visit to Peking had raised Mao’s hopes that (in Kissinger’s words) “The bipolarity of the postwar period was over.” But Mao saw that it was not, and that he had not tipped the scales of world power after all. And in the meantime his dalliance with America had cost him his international image. “My reputation has gone bad in the last couple of years,” Mao told acolytes. “The only Marx in the world, the only beacon, is now in Europe. Over there [he meant Albania, which had come down hard on him over Nixon’s visit], even their farts are considered fragrant and are treated as imperial edicts … And I have come to be regarded as a right-wing opportunist.”

Mao took it out on Chou. He had bottled up much resentment against Chou over the whole business with America. Though Mao had masterminded the US president’s visit and the end to Peking’s diplomatic isolation, it was mostly Chou who seemed to get the credit. (There are some parallels with Nixon’s jealousy towards Kissinger.) On 4 July, Mao sent word to the Politburo that Chou was a “revisionist,” and Chou was condemned to one more round of self-abasement.

Barely was this crisis over when another, far worse one came crashing down on Chou’s head. Kissinger returned to China in November (now as secretary of state), bringing a terminal blow to Mao’s ambitions. Nine months before, Kissinger had promised that Washington would move towards full diplomatic relations “after the 1974 [mid-term] elections.” Now he said that the US “domestic situation” precluded severing relations with Taiwan “immediately”—which Peking had insisted on as a prerequisite for diplomatic relations. Mao was never to rule in Taiwan, or to have diplomatic recognition from America.

Worse still for Mao, his dreams of enjoying military might by courtesy of the USA came to nothing. All Kissinger could offer was an “early warning” system to detect Soviet missile launches. “I will have to study it,” Chou replied, but Kissinger heard no more. The proposal held no interest for Mao, as he did not really believe in a Russian attack. The Chinese stopped talking about a military alliance with America.

Mao blamed these setbacks on the Watergate scandal, which was then threatening Nixon’s presidency, and made it impossible for Nixon to take any big risks. Mao spent some time talking to Kissinger about Watergate, saying that he was “not happy about it,” and could not understand what all the “farting” was about. And he railed tirelessly against Watergate to other foreign statesmen. To France’s president Pompidou he said he could not understand what all “the fuss” was about. “What’s wrong with having a tape recorder?” he asked Thailand’s prime minister. “Do rulers not have the right to rule?” he would demand. In May 1974, when Nixon was on the ropes, Mao asked former British prime minister Heath: “Can you lend him a hand to help him through?”

Because of Watergate, Nixon was forced to resign on 9 August 1974. Less known is that Watergate also helped finish off Mao’s dreams of becoming a superpower.

By now, Mao’s Superpower Program was in seriously bad shape, despite two decades spent consuming a huge proportion of the nation’s investment. The entire higher-tech end of the arsenal was producing defective and unusable equipment, and it desperately needed foreign input. With Russia now a lost cause, Mao had hoped that America would bestow the kiss of life. But Kissinger’s November 1973 trip, conducted under the shadow of Watergate, closed this door. Mao was unable to come up with any new strategy. Ace schemer though he was, even he had reached the bottom of the barrel.

MAO WAS NOW EIGHTY, and very ill. He finally resigned himself to the reality that he could not become a superpower in his lifetime. He could not dominate the world, or any part of it other than China.

Mao’s disenchantment immediately became apparent to the Americans. Meetings were canceled by the Chinese side, and cooperation sagged. Sino-US relations became “substantially frozen,” Kissinger noted, and his next trips to China “either were downright chilly or were holding actions.” He did not see Mao for two years, and, unbeknownst to Kissinger, Mao was constantly bad-mouthing him to his close circle, and even to ex-British prime minister Heath in 1974: “I think Henry Kissinger is just a funny little man. He is shuddering all over with nerves every time he comes to see me.” On 21 October 1975, when Kissinger saw Mao again, to negotiate a visit by Nixon’s successor, Gerald Ford, he offered American military assistance, clearly expecting that Mao was still interested. But Mao brushed the offer away: “As for military aspects, we should not discuss that now.” When Ford visited China later that year, Mao was amicable, but uninvolved.

MAO’S FURY AND disappointment were mainly vented on Chou. During Kissinger’s watershed visit, in November 1973, the secretary of state noticed that Chou “seemed uncharacteristically tentative”; “the old bite and sparkle were missing.” As soon as Kissinger left, Chou’s subordinates in the Foreign Ministry, including close associates who had worked with him for decades, were forced to attack him to his face for weeks on end, for alleged failings in dealing with the Americans. Chou’s cancer had just returned, and he was passing large quantities of blood in the midst of these sessions. Mao kept himself informed about Chou’s miserable state through two young female upstarts in the Foreign Ministry who enjoyed an intimate relationship with him: one was his niece, the other his English-language interpreter, Nancy Tang.

Mao also unleashed his wife, who accused Chou of “capitulating” to the Americans. When Chou tried to defend himself, she interrupted him: “You really are a blatherer!”

During these weeks of torment, Chou kept working. On 9 December he was present when Mao met Nepal’s king and queen. After the royal couple left, Mao said to Chou with a smirk: “Premier, haven’t you been having a tough time being done in?” “The premier is really pitiful. Done in so sorrily by these few hussies.” When Chou left, the “hussies”—Mao’s niece and Nancy Tang — berated Mao: “How can you possibly say this about us?” Mao acted coquettish: “But it’s true, it’s all your doing!” He was having fun tormenting Chou.

An official photograph was published of the meeting with the Nepalese, which shows Chou sitting on a hard chair normally reserved for a junior interpreter, on the edge of an arc of armchairs for the distinguished. This was more than petty humiliation. In the Communist world, placement was the most potent signal of a top leader’s rise or fall. People began to avoid Chou’s staff.

Eventually, Mao passed the word that Chou was not to be hounded further. Having played with Chou’s dignity and energy, Mao still wanted to have his services on call. Chou’s last major contribution to Mao’s foreign policy was to supervise the seizure from South Vietnam in January 1974, of the strategic Paracel (aka Xisha) Islands in the South China Sea, before they fell into the hands of Peking’s Vietnamese “comrades.”

At this time, Chou was losing so much blood that he needed twice-weekly transfusions. The blood often clogged his urethra so that he could not pass urine, and his doctors saw him jumping up and down and rolling from side to side in agony, trying to loosen the coagulated blood. Even in this state, he was still pursued. During one transfusion, a message came summoning him to a Politburo meeting at once. His physician asked for twenty minutes’ grace to finish the transfusion. Minutes later, another note appeared under the door, this time from Chou’s wife, saying: Please tell the premier to go. Chou showed only a flicker of anger as he said: Pull the needle out! As the doctors learned later, there was nothing urgent.

The doctors’ entreaty to Mao for proper surgery met with a brutal reply on 9 May 1974: “Operations are ruled out for now. Absolutely no room for argument.” Mao intended to let the tumor eat Chou to death unimpeded. Chou himself then practically begged, via the four top leaders designated by Mao to supervise his medical “care.” At this point, Mao reluctantly gave his consent: “Let him see Tun Razak and then we’ll talk about it.” Razak, the Malaysian prime minister, was due at the end of the month, and Chou went into the hospital on 1 June — after he had signed the communiqué establishing diplomatic relations with Malaysia. It was only now that he was allowed his first proper operation, two years after his cancer had been diagnosed. This delay made sure that he died nineteen months later, and before Mao.

Mao only finally granted Chou surgery because he was feeling highly vulnerable himself, as a result of a deterioration in his own physical condition. He was nearly blind, and, of more concern to him, was beginning to lose control over parts of his body. In this state, he did not want to drive Chou into a corner and make him feel he had nothing to lose and might as well take extreme measures.

Just over a month after his operation, Chou received a startling piece of news: Mao was suffering from a rare and incurable disease, and had only two years to live. Chou decided not to pass on the information to Mao.

This knowledge transformed the Chou — Mao relationship. Chou now became a much bolder man.

Kissinger later said (to the Russian ambassador in Washington) that he “had been wrong in basing his concepts on the inevitability of a Soviet attack against China.”

Mao could see that the whole process of technology transfer from the West was far too slow for him. The Rolls-Royce engine deal encouraged by Kissinger was not signed for another two years, and the first engines were not produced in China until well after Mao’s death. The first significant high-technology agreement with the US, for fast computers, was only signed in October 1976, after Mao was dead. Mao could not impose his own timetable on democratic countries, or on modern industry.

56. MME MAO IN THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION (1966–75 AGE 72–81)

MAO’S LAST WIFE, Jiang Qing, is often thought of as the evil woman who manipulated Mao. Evil she was, but she never originated policy, and she was always Mao’s obedient servant, from the time of their marriage in 1938. Their relationship was aptly described by herself after Mao died: “I was Chairman Mao’s dog. Whoever Chairman Mao asked me to bite, I bit.” In the first few years of the Great Purge, she headed the Small Group, Mao’s office that dealt with the Purge, and afterwards she was a member of the Politburo. In these posts, she played a big part in ruining the lives of tens of millions of people. She also helped Mao to destroy Chinese culture and keep China a cultural desert.

The only individual initiative that she took in the Purge was to use her position to engage in personal vendettas. One was against an actress called Wang Ying, who decades before had won a theatrical role Mme Mao herself had coveted, and who then spent glamorous years in America, even performing in the White House for the Roosevelts. Wang Ying died in prison.

Mme Mao had one vulnerable spot, her Shanghai past. She lived in constant dread that her scandals, and her behavior in prison under the Nationalists, would be exposed. So former colleagues, friends, a lover, lovers’ friends, and even a maid who had been devoted to her, were thrown into prison, many of them never to emerge alive.

Another obsession was to retrieve a letter she had once written after a row with Mao, back in 1958. In a fit of frenzy she had dashed off a letter to an old friend, a film director, asking for the address of a former husband, Tang Na, who was living in Paris. The potentially fatal consequences of this rash act had been nagging at her ever since. Eight years later, as soon as she had the power, she had the hapless film director and several other former mutual friends arrested and their houses ransacked. The director died from torture, pleading in vain that he had destroyed her letter.

With so much blood on her hands, Mme Mao was haunted by the specter of assassins. At the peak of her power, she developed an intense fear of strangers coming near her, as well as of unexpected sounds, just as Mao had on the eve of conquering China. When a new secretary joined her staff in 1967, his predecessor greeted him by saying: “Comrade Jiang Qing is not very well … She is particularly afraid of sounds, and of strangers. As soon as she hears a noise or sees a stranger, she … starts to sweat and flies into a temper. Whatever we do in this building — talking, walking, opening and closing windows and doors — we must take special care to be noiseless. Please do be very, very careful. Don’t see her for a while, and try your best to stay out of her way. If the worst comes to the worst and you can’t hide, don’t try to run …”

Her nurse also advised the new secretary that “she is particularly frightened of seeing strangers. If she sets eyes on you now, there will be big trouble.” For more than three months, the secretary lurked in his office. Then his predecessor left — in fact for prison. Next day, the new man was summoned: “I went into her office trembling with fear. I saw her reclining on a sofa, with her feet on a soft footstool, reading some documents in a languid manner.” After a few exchanges, “She raised her head, opened her eyes, and fixed me with a peevish, dissatisfied stare. She said: ‘You can’t talk to me standing. When you talk to me, your head can’t be higher than mine. I am sitting, so you should crouch down and talk to me. Didn’t they even tell you this rule?’ … So I crouched down …”

After the secretary answered one or two of her questions, Mme Mao snapped: “ ‘… You speak so loud, so fast, it’s like firing a machine-gun. It gives me a headache, and makes me sweat. If I fall ill because of your carelessness about the volume and rate of your speech, your responsibility will be too gigantic.’ She pointed at her forehead and said in a loud voice: ‘Look, you look, I’m sweating!’

“I lowered my voice and said: ‘Please forgive me. I will take care with my voice and speed.’

“Jiang Qing knitted her eyebrows … and shrieked loudly and impatiently: ‘What are you saying? I can’t hear you. Now your voice is too low. If I can’t hear you clearly, I will also become tense, and will also sweat …’ ” The secretary was waved away.

Life at close quarters with Mme Mao was a nightmare, as everyone around her whom we interviewed testified. She would send servants to jail at the drop of a hat for phantom crimes. When Chou En-lai went to her place, his entourage preferred to sit in their cars and freeze rather than go into her villa, in case they bumped into her, which could land them in disaster. Chou’s chief bodyguard, Cheng Yuan-gong, was in charge of security at a meeting she was coming to in 1968. Her staff asked him to have some food ready, so he invited her to eat first. He described what happened next: “She burst in on the premier and said: ‘Cheng Yuan-gong wanted to stop me from coming in. What’s going on here? What sort of meeting are you having?’ She yelled and screamed at the premier.” Chou had to spend hours straightening things out. Two days later she told Chou: “Cheng Yuan-gong is a scoundrel. He had a shady past. And he has always been trying to prevent me from seeing the premier …” The bodyguard had been with Chou for twenty-three years, but Chou had to get rid of him, and the man was packed off to detention, and then to a camp.

Mao knew what a monumental, time-consuming pain his wife was, as some people occasionally grumbled to him; and he knew that her behavior interfered with the smooth functioning of his regime. But for him it was worth it to keep everybody off balance and maintain a climate of insecurity and capriciousness, and to keep things on the paranoid track. With Mao himself, of course, she was as meek and quiet as a mouse. She feared him. Only he could do her harm.

IN 1969, WHEN Mao’s reconstructed regime was set up, Mao wound up the Small Group, keeping Mme Mao on as his attack dog. She had no administrative role. While on standby for Mao, she spent a lot of time playing cards, amusing herself with her pets, including a monkey (when pets were banned for everyone else), and riding in Beihai Park in the center of Peking, formerly a public park, now closed to the public. She watched foreign films practically every night — all, naturally, prohibited for ordinary Chinese.

Her lifestyle was the acme of extravagance. One of her hobbies was photography. For this she would get warships to cruise up and down, and anti-aircraft guns to fire salvos. Her swimming pools had to be kept permanently heated, and for one of them built exclusively for her, in Canton, mineral water was channeled from dozens of kilometers away. Roads were built specially for her to scenic mountain spots, often requiring extraordinary means. In one case, because her villa was nearby, the army engineers building the road were forbidden to use dynamite in case the explosions alarmed her, and they had to break the rocks manually. Planes were kept on tap for her every whim, even to fly a particular jacket that she suddenly felt like wearing from Peking to Canton, or a favorite chaise longue. Her special train, like Mao’s, would stop at will, snarling up the transport system. Far from feeling ashamed, she would say: “In order for me to have a good rest, and a good time, it is worth sacrificing some other people’s interests.”

One such sacrifice was blood. Always on the lookout for methods to improve her health and looks, she learned about an unusual technique: blood transfusions from healthy young men. So scores of Praetorian Guards were put through a rigorous health check, and from a short list of four, blood was taken from two of them for her. Afterwards, she gave the two a dinner, telling them what a “glorious” deed they had done to “donate” their blood to her. “When you know your blood is circulating inside me … you must feel very proud,” she added — before warning them to keep their mouths shut. The transfusions did not become a routine, as she got so excited that she told Mao about them, and he advised against them on health grounds.

In spite of her constant complaining, Mme Mao was in fact in very good health. But she was a nervous wreck. She had to down three lots of sleeping pills before she could drop off, which was usually about 4:00 AM, and she also took tranquillizers twice a day. When she was indoors in daytime, she had natural light shut out, just as Mao did, by three layers of curtains, and read by a lamp, with a black cloth draped over the shade, producing an atmosphere her secretary described as spooky.

Noise bothered her to an absurd degree. In her main residence in Peking, the Imperial Fishing Villa, staff were ordered to drive away birds and cicadas — and even, at times, not to wear shoes, and to walk with their arms aloft and legs apart, to prevent their clothes from rustling. Even though her villa sat in a garden of 420,000 square meters, she ordered the park next door, Yuyuantan, one of the few public parks left in the capital, closed down. A similar thing happened in Canton, where her villa lay beside the Pearl River, so traffic on this commercially important thoroughfare was suspended during her stays, and even a distant shipyard had to stop work.

Heat and drafts also obsessed her. Her rooms had to be kept at exactly 21.5 degrees centigrade in winter, and 26 degrees in summer. But even when the thermostat showed that the temperature was exactly what she demanded, she would accuse her attendants: “You falsify temperature! You conspire to harm me!” Once she threw a big pair of scissors at a nurse, missing her by inches, because the nurse could not locate the source of a draft.

“To serve me is to serve the people” was her constant refrain to her staff.

AFTER LIN BIAO crashed to his death, and the assassination plot against Mao — and herself — surfaced in late 1971, Mme Mao became plagued by nightmares about the Lins’ ghosts pursuing her. She confided to her secretary: “I have been feeling as if I am about to die any minute … as if some catastrophe is about to happen tomorrow. I feel full of terror all the time.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MME MAO WAS now reduced to currying favor with Mao’s girlfriends to gain access to her husband. Since the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, the couple had been living in separate residences even when they were both in Peking: she in the Imperial Fishing Villa, he in Zhongnanhai. In the early years of the Cultural Revolution, when she was actively involved in running things, she could visit him freely. But as her political role grew less, he restricted her access, and often barred her from his house. The plain fact was that Mao could not stand his wife. But the more she was shunned, the more desperately she tried to get close. She could not afford to be discarded. She would beg Mao’s girlfriends to put in a word for her, giving them presents like pretty material for making clothes, even a Swiss watch. On one occasion she talked her way into Mao’s house, telling the guards she was there to check “hygiene.” Mao yelled at her to get out, and afterwards told the guards angrily: “Arrest her if she tries to barge in again!”

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

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

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

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

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

Dear Daddy,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Over the decades, Mao had brought ill fortune to virtually every member of his family. His final betrayal was towards his fourth and last wife, Jiang Qing. After getting her to do much of his dirty work, and knowing how much she was loathed, he made no provision for safeguarding her after he died. On the contrary, he offered her up as a trade-off to the “opposition” that emerged near the end of his life. In return for guaranteeing his own safety while he was alive, they were told that after he died, they could do as they pleased with Mme Mao and her group of cronies, which included Mao’s nephew Yuan-xin. Less than a month after Mao’s death, the whole group ended up in prison. In 1991 Mme Mao committed suicide.

Today, Li Na has recovered, and leads a normal life. She appears to have “forgotten” her role in the Cultural Revolution.

57. ENFEEBLED MAO HEDGES HIS BETS (1973–76 AGE 79–82)

IN THE LAST two years of Mao’s life a formidable “opposition” to his policies emerged, in the shape of an alliance that centered on Deng Xiao-ping, the man who later dismantled much of Mao’s legacy after Mao died. Mao had purged Deng in 1966, at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, but brought him back to the top in 1973.

Born in Sichuan in 1904, and thus eleven years Mao’s junior, Deng went to France in 1920 on a work-and-study program at the age of sixteen, and there became a Communist, working under Chou En-lai. Five years in France left him with a lifelong fondness for many things French: wine, cheese, croissants, coffee and cafés — all, it would seem, to do with food. Late in life, he would often compare French cafés nostalgically with the teahouses in his home province of Sichuan, reminiscing about a little café he had frequented in the Place d’Italie in Paris.

His fellow Chinese in France remembered Deng, who was just over 5 feet tall, as a plump ball of energy, full of jokes. Since then, decades of life in the Party had caused him to metamorphose into a man of deep reserve and few words. One advantage of this reticence was that he kept meetings brief. The first session of the committee in charge of southwest China after the Communist takeover lasted a mere nine minutes, in contrast with those under the long-winded Chou En-lai, who once talked for nine hours. Deng was decisive, with the ability to cut straight through complicated matters, which he sometimes did while playing bridge, for which he developed a passion.

Deng had joined the Communists in France, but his grounding was in Russia, where he spent a year after being kicked out of France, and where he received Party training. When the Long March started in 1934, he was already chief secretary of the Party leadership, and he was a top army commander during the Sino-Japanese War of 1937–45. In the civil war after 1945 he became chief of the half of the Communist army which won the decisive Huai — Hai Campaign that clinched the Red victory and then took much of China south of the Yangtze. Afterwards, he was in charge of several provinces, including his native Sichuan, before Mao promoted him to the core leadership in Peking in the early 1950s.

He was deeply loyal to Mao, and during the suppression of intellectuals in the anti-Rightist campaign in 1957–58 he was Mao’s chief lieutenant. But he had a breaking-point, and supported Liu Shao-chi’s efforts to stop the famine in the early 1960s. He tried to keep at arm’s length from Mao — a fact that Mao took note of, remarking that Deng was “keeping a respectful distance from me as though I were a devil or a deity.”

When Mao launched the Cultural Revolution in 1966, he tried all kinds of inducements to keep Deng on board, but failed. Deng was branded “the second-biggest capitalist-roader,” after Liu, and put under house arrest in 1967, and his children and stepmother were evicted from their home. He was subjected to denunciation meetings, though with much less physical abuse than Liu. Mao calibrated the punishment of his foes meticulously. He did not hate Deng the way he hated Liu, so he ordered that Deng “must be denounced … but differentiate him from Liu.” Unlike Liu, Deng was not separated from his wife, which gave him the companionship that often made the difference between life and death.

But even Mao’s “better” treatment was hell. In May 1968, Deng’s eldest son and a daughter were taken, blindfolded, to Peking University, and told to “expose” their father. Over sixty other people who had been imprisoned there had committed suicide or been tortured to death. Deng’s 24-year-old son, Pu-fang, soon threw himself out of an upstairs window, and was permanently paralyzed from the chest down. Deng and his wife were not told about this until a year later, when they were briefly allowed to see their other children shortly before being exiled from Peking in October 1969. In exile, Deng worked on the factory floor in a tractor plant in Jiangxi province, living under house arrest, with armed guards.

Mrs. Deng wept for days when she heard about Pu-fang. She later told Deng’s stepmother that she almost lost the will to live. Deng was forbidden to see his paralyzed son, and was deeply affected by what happened to his children. Once, after his youngest son, who had turned up starving and in rags, had to leave for his own place of exile, Deng collapsed on the factory floor. In June 1971, when the paralyzed Pu-fang arrived, Deng was visibly shaken. His son had been a buoyant young man. Deng nursed Pu-fang devotedly, helping him to turn every two hours to prevent bedsores, which was no light work (Pu-fang was big), and wiping his body several times a day, as the climate in Jiangxi was hot and humid.

The Cultural Revolution years, Deng was to say later, were the most painful time of his life. The pressure crept into his sleep. One night he woke up the whole building, screaming during a nightmare. But those years also helped him rethink the system the CCP had imposed on China. As a result, he turned his back on the essence of Maoism and Stalinism, and after Mao died he changed the course of China. In exile, Deng kept his mouth shut, tried to stay healthy, and waited for a chance to return to the political center.

AFTER TWO YEARS, in September 1971, came a ray of hope. Deng’s son Pu-fang was an electronic whiz, and had fixed up a radio that could receive short-wave broadcasts. This he did with his parents’ acquiescence, even though listening to foreign radio stations was a prison offense (and, moreover, one his father had helped enforce). It was from these foreign broadcasts that the Dengs first surmised that Lin Biao was dead.

The regime carefully controlled the way it dribbled out information about Lin’s death. Deng heard the news officially two months later, when a document was read out to workers in his tractor factory. The document mentioned Lin’s “crimes of persecuting veteran comrades.” The official who was chairing the meeting said: “Chairman Mao would never have driven old cadres to death” (i.e., as Lin had done), and turned to Deng: “Old Deng is sitting here, he can vouch for this. Old Deng, wouldn’t you say so?” Deng stolidly declined the invitation to advertise Mao’s innocence, remaining totally silent, his expression not changing one flicker.

When he came home that day, Deng allowed himself to show excitement and condemned Lin explicitly, which for him was really letting rip, as he never talked politics with his family. Two days later, he wrote to Mao for the first time since his downfall five years before, asking for a job. With Mao’s major prop gone, he sensed that Mao might have to repeal the Cultural Revolution.

No reply came from Mao. To reinstate the man he had publicly condemned as “the second-biggest capitalist-roader” would be an admission of failure. Even when Chou En-lai was diagnosed with cancer in May 1972, and Mao had no one else but Deng with the caliber to run his vast kingdom, still he would not send for Deng.

Instead, Mao promoted Wang Hong-wen, the former Rebel leader in Shanghai, one of the products of the Cultural Revolution. Wang was a faceless good-looking 37-year-old, who had been a security man in a textile factory before the Purge. He was clever, and, like a lot of Rebel leaders, had a certain flair for inspiring gang allegiance. Mao brought him to Peking and began to train him up, and a year later, in August 1973, made him his No. 3, after Chou.

But the Protégé was not up to filling Chou’s shoes, especially when it came to dealing with foreigners. The Australian ambassador, Stephen FitzGerald, who met him with Mao in November 1973, noted that he was extremely jumpy, and did not speak a word during the entire meeting, except at the end. The Australian prime minister, Whitlam, had mentioned the Communist “Nanchang Uprising” of 1927, and had observed that the youngish man could not have been born at the time. When the meeting was over, the Protégé piped up nervously: “Prime Minister, you said that at the time of the Nanchang Uprising I was not born. But I have been making revolution for a long time.” This was his only contribution.

Mao felt he had to have a standby. So, when Chou’s cancer worsened, Mao had Deng brought to Peking in February 1973, and made him a vice-premier, mainly to entertain visiting foreign statesmen. Although Deng lacked Chou’s polish, and spat constantly during meetings, which unsettled quite a few of his interlocutors, he had stature.

Late that year, Chou’s health deteriorated drastically. Mao made the momentous decision to put Deng in charge of the army (for which Deng was restored to the Politburo). Deng was the only person who could guarantee stability in the military, where Mao’s Protégé had zero influence. Marshal Yeh, the man Mao had appointed army chief after Lin Biao’s death, lacked the necessary gravitas.

Giving Deng this much power was a gamble, but it proved well judged. Deng never made a move against Mao’s person while Mao was alive, and even after Mao’s death, insisted that Mao must not be denounced personally, although he repealed much of Mao’s core legacy.

As soon as Deng assumed power, he started to push through his own program. Central to this was rolling back the Cultural Revolution. He tried to rehabilitate and re-employ more purged cadres en masse, to resurrect some culture, and to raise living standards, a concern that had been condemned as “revisionist.” Mao regarded the Cultural Revolution as his greatest achievement since taking power in 1949 and kept four remaining Cultural Revolution Rottweilers in place to counter Deng: Mme Mao, Zhang “the Cobra,” media chief Yao, and Protégé Wang — a group that Mao dubbed “the Gang of Four.” (Kang Sheng was out of action by now with terminal cancer, and was to die in 1975.) This was Mao’s own gang, who represented his true policy.

FOR HIS PART, Deng formed his own counter-alliance with army chief Marshal Yeh and premier Chou En-lai soon after he returned to Peking in spring 1973. Of this trio, Deng and Yeh had been on the receiving end of the Purge, while Chou had collaborated with Mao. Chou had even changed the name of his house to “Drawn to the Sun [i.e., Mao] Courtyard.” When Mao gave the word, Chou would send anyone to their death. Chou’s only adopted child, Sun Wei-shi, had been imprisoned because she had been a top-flight Russian interpreter, and met many Russian leaders, including Stalin; so Mao suspected her as he did most others who had such connections. Mme Mao also hated her because she was very beautiful, and because Mao had once taken a shine to her. Chou, who was widely thought to be in love with her, did not lift a finger to save her. She died in prison, and he kept an ignoble distance even in death.

Deng felt fairly cool towards Chou, and after Mao died said publicly that Chou had “done many things against his heart” during the Cultural Revolution, though Deng claimed that “the people forgave him.” However, Deng decided to set personal feelings aside and form an alliance with Chou. On 9 April, shortly after getting back to Peking, he went to see him — their first meeting in nearly seven years. At first, they just sat facing each other in silence. Finally, Chou spoke. The first thing he said was: “Zhang Chun-qiao betrayed the Party, but the Chairman forbids us to investigate it.” Zhang, “the Cobra,” was a major star of the Cultural Revolution. By saying this, Chou was not just condemning the Cobra, he was complaining about Mao. This was no indiscretion from the super-prudent Chou; it was his way of conveying that he was on Deng’s side, against the Cultural Revolution. This, plus the fact that Chou had become terminally ill thanks to Mao, melted the ice between him and Deng. From that moment on, the two were allies.

This was a milestone. The two most important colleagues of Mao had formed a league of a kind, which also incorporated army chief Marshal Yeh. Mao’s decades-long ability to enforce a ban on his colleagues forming alliances was broken. And with it, his awesome hold over them.

MAO WAS REDUCED to these straits because his health was ebbing fast as he entered his eighties. It was now that he had to kick his lifelong addiction to smoking. By early 1974 he was nearly blind. This, like his other ailments, was kept top-secret. Losing his sight made Mao extremely anxious about security, so his staff were given special instructions to “walk noisily to let him know someone was coming so that he would not be frightened.”

He was also depressed because he could not read. He had ordered some banned works of classical literature to be specially printed. Two print shops, one in Peking and one in Shanghai, were purpose-built to do the printing, and each print-run was five copies, all for Mao, plus a few extra copies, which were placed under lock and key, and even the people who had been involved in annotating the texts for him were forbidden to keep a copy. As his eyesight got worse, the characters grew larger, eventually reaching a height of 12 mm. When Mao finally found he could not read at all, even with a magnifying glass, he broke down and cried. Thenceforth, he had to rely on staff to read to him, and sometimes to sign documents for him.

Because of his condition, Mao did not want to appear at meetings and look vulnerable, so he left the capital on 17 July 1974 and went south. Soon he was told that the trouble was cataracts, and that they could be removed by a simple operation once they matured. The news came as a huge relief, even though it meant nearly a year of hardly being able to see. Meanwhile he stayed away from Peking — for nine months altogether, on what turned out to be his last trip.

There was another discovery made at the same time: that he was suffering from a rare and incurable motor neurone illness called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, sometimes known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. This gradually paralyzes the muscles in the arms, legs, throat and tongue, strangling speech, preventing food going down the right way, and finally causing death by respiratory failure. The diagnosis was that he had about two years to live.

The doctors did not tell Mao. Their reporting channel was to his chamberlain and chief of the Praetorian Guard, Wang Dong-xing, who told only Chou En-lai. It was now that Chou became much more daring.

Chou’s allies, Deng and Marshal Yeh, were put in the picture about Mao’s state of health. They decided not to tell the Gang of Four, even Mao’s wife, who was anyway a walking incentive for others to keep her out of the loop. Two years before, after Mao had passed out, she had accused medical staff of being “spies” and “counter-revolutionaries.” When Chou had discussed Mao’s illnesses with her, she had accused him of trying to force Mao to surrender power. But the decision to exclude her was determined by more than just the fact that she was trouble. It was politically motivated.

Mao himself was not informed. If Mao knew his days were numbered, there was no knowing what he might do. Instead, he was assured that he was in good health, and still had a long time to live. To make doubly sure he did not find out, none of his regular staff was told. One doctor who blurted out “I’m afraid the Chairman’s illness is hard to treat …” was instantly removed. Mao’s symptoms were passed off as harmless. This did not satisfy him, but there was nothing he could do.

With the knowledge of the time frame of Mao’s life, and with Chou himself in inexorable decline, the Deng-Chou-Yeh Alliance moved to press Mao to institutionalize Deng’s role as Chou’s stand-in and successor, and to restore to high office a large number of old cadres who had been ousted in the Purge. In December 1974, Chou left his hospital bed and flew to Changsha to see Mao with a slate of new appointments. Mao knew about the Alliance’s activities from the Gang of Four, who were keeping a look-out in Peking on his behalf. Mme Mao had written to say she was “shocked and aghast” at what was going on. But Mao was in no condition to veto the Chou — Deng list. He could not hand over the country to the Gang of Four, and neither could he try to get rid of the Alliance — if he wanted to die in his bed. The Gang of Four were powerless in the army and Mao had nobody in the military who could take on the Alliance on his behalf. And he himself was physically too feeble to create a new force that could trump the Alliance.

Lou Gehrig’s disease had been nibbling away at his body. At the start of his trip to the south in summer 1974, Mao could still take walks in the garden; but within a few months, all he could do was drag one leg after the other for a short distance. On 5 December he found he had to say goodbye to swimming, his lifelong passion. He had taken a few dips in his indoor pool in Changsha, but that day he nearly choked in the water, and this was to be his last swim. His bodyguard of twenty-seven years heard Mao let out a long sigh of melancholy and resignation, something he had never heard, and could not imagine coming from Mao.

As his muscular coordination failed, Mao’s speech became increasingly slurred, and food kept getting into his lungs, causing choking and infection. He had to lie on his side to be fed. Life became excruciatingly uncomfortable.

In this condition, Mao had to endorse Chou’s slate, especially the promotion of Deng to first vice-premier and stand-in for Chou. But Mao promoted one of the Gang of Four, the Cobra, and made him second to Deng in the military and the government. He also insisted that the media remain in the hands of the Gang, so that only his message could reach the country at large.

The Alliance’s strategy was to dislodge the Cobra and Mme Mao, exploiting their less than spotless pasts. On 26 December, Mao’s eighty-first birthday, Chou told Mao that these two had had connections with Nationalist intelligence in the 1930s. Mao’s reply was that he had known about their pasts all along, and he effectively said that he could not care less.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

58. LAST DAYS (1974–76 AGE 80–82)

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

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

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

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

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

Wang Ming’s death had been long drawn-out, and came after decades of ruined health, the legacy of Mao’s attempts to kill him. He was bedridden in his final years, and it took him three hours to swallow enough tiny morsels of food to constitute a meal. But his painful death did not assuage Mao’s grievance, just as the similarly agonizing deaths of both Liu and Chou brought Mao little relief. A month before he himself died, Mao had his old tirades read to him again, to bring himself the temporary pleasure of savaging all these foes one more time.

By the end of Mao’s life, almost all his former close colleagues were dead, most of them thanks to him. Yet their deaths had somehow not quite satisfied him. Those of Liu and Peng De-huai, his two main victims in the Cultural Revolution, he had to keep secret for fear of public sympathy. Chou’s death had been made public, but the outcome was to rock Mao’s rule. Wang Ming had died in Russia, out of his reach. Zhu De he had been unable to purge. Lin Biao, Mao’s chief collaborator in setting up the Great Purge, had managed to flee the country before the plane that carried him across the border crashed; moreover, Lin had bequeathed a legacy that haunted Mao — a plot to assassinate him. Deng was alive, and more than just alive: Mao had had to give in and let him live in the comfort of his own home, among his family. On his deathbed, Mao’s thirst for revenge was unslaked.

DISSATISFACTION CONSUMED MAO. He had not risen to be a superpower, in spite of his decades of craving. Although he had the Bomb, he could not cash it, not least because the delivery system could barely loft it over China’s border. The country’s industrial bases were a shambles, turning out heaps of defective equipment — including fleets of planes that could not fly, even though an aircraft industry had topped his agenda from the very beginning of his rule, and the Korean War had been fought partly to acquire it. Nor was the navy much better. Mao’s last words to his navy chief in 1975, a year before his death, were: “Our navy is only like this!” sticking out his little finger, looking immensely disconsolate. That October, Mao remarked ruefully to Kissinger that he did not belong to the major league. “There are only two superpowers in the world … We are backward …” Counting on his fingers, he said: “We come last. America, Soviet Union, Europe, Japan, China — look!” When US president Ford came to China a few weeks later, Mao told him: “We can only fire … empty cannons” and “curse.”

Mao had made a last-ditch effort to promote himself as a world leader in 1974, by trying to capitalize on something that did not require military prowess, and was the one point where he could claim to lead the world: poverty. He proclaimed a new way of defining “Three Worlds,” announcing that the “Third World” meant countries that were poor, excluding Russia, and dropped heavy hints that he should be seen as the leader of the Third World. But although he was regarded, in a very general way, as a leader of the Third World, it did not take orders from him, and he provided no tangible leadership. Besides, as one hard-nosed American diplomat put it, “would it really make all that difference?”

Even his own creatures refused to acknowledge his authority. Mao had played a vital part in installing the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia in 1975. Pol Pot, its leader, under whom up to one quarter of the Cambodian people perished in the space of a few years, was a soul-mate of Mao’s. Immediately after Pol Pot took power, Mao congratulated him face to face on his slave-labor-camp state: “You have scored a splendid victory. Just a single blow and no more classes.” What Mao meant was that everyone had become a slave. And Mao sent Prince Sihanouk, who had been living in luxurious exile in China, back to Cambodia, where the prince was put under house arrest and his name was exploited by Pol Pot. But though Mao was Pol Pot’s sponsor and mentor, he got no gratitude. A colleague of Pol Pot’s called Keo Meas, who had referred to Mao in eulogistic terms, was tortured to death. Written on the dead man’s dossier were the words: “This contemptible Mao who got the horrible death he deserved was worthless. You shouldn’t think, you antique bastard, that the Kampuchean Party has been influenced by Mao.”

On the world stage, Mao had to cling to a vague halo. When Nixon’s daughter Julie turned up wearing a Mao badge, “he reacted with a childlike delight and impulsively clasped my hand,” she wrote. To sustain his profile, he continued to “receive” foreign statesmen until three months before his death. But he often rather spoiled the effect of these audiences. Thailand’s leaders found him “snoring” as they entered the room. Singapore’s premier Lee Kuan Yew, Mao’s penultimate foreign visitor, described an almost inarticulate Mao grunting, head lolling against the back of his armchair. Indeed, as the last photos of him confirm, Mao looked anything but a world leader. Dribbling saliva, waxen-faced and slack-jawed, he projected an image of senility and wretchedness. When he saw how bad he looked in photos with Pakistan’s prime minister Bhutto at the end of May 1976, Mao stopped meeting foreigners altogether.

WHILE FEELING DEEPLY discontented at having failed to achieve his world ambition, Mao spared no thought for the mammoth human and material losses that his destructive quest had cost his people. Well over 70 million people had perished — in peacetime — as a result of his misrule, yet Mao felt sorry only for himself. He would cry as he talked about anything he could connect with his past glory and current failure, even watching his own regime’s propaganda films. His staff often saw tears flooding down his face, “like a spring” as one of them put it. Self-pity, to which Mao had always been prone, was the paramount emotion of the utterly unpitying Mao in his last days.

Mao became very attached to some classical poems which convey a mood of great men brought down, kings fallen, and heroes’ brilliant prospects in ruins. He empathized with the unfulfillled heroes and kings.

This state of mind led him to an extraordinary sense of fraternity with those he regarded as “fallen kings” around the world. Top of the list was former US president Richard Nixon, who had been forced from office by Watergate in August 1974. Time and again Mao went out of his way to proclaim his fond feelings for Nixon. Weeks after Nixon had been ejected from the White House, Mao asked Imelda Marcos of the Philippines to pass on his good wishes and an invitation to Nixon to revisit China. Nixon’s daughter Julie and her husband, David Eisenhower, were given an astonishing welcome in December the following year. Mao told Julie: “Write to your father at once, tell him I miss him.” When Julie got back to America, Peking’s envoy told her that Mao “considers you part of his family”—a remark that was absolutely unique.

When the disgraced Nixon came, in February 1976, Mao sent a Boeing 707 to Los Angeles for him, complete with the protocol chief of the Foreign Ministry, another unheard-of gesture. The fact that the plane ran the risk of being seized as collateral against US assets expropriated in China was immaterial for Mao. When he saw Nixon again, Mao clinked teacups with him, and when Nixon took his leave, Mao struggled to the door, standing unaided, to see him off, looking melancholy. Mao had invited him to China for what was, in effect, a private farewell. He personally selected an evening’s entertainment for the former US president which included the singing of Mao’s favorite classical poems set to music, which conjured up the mood of the tragic ending of great men. The program meant nothing to Nixon, who showed he was tired — and bored. But Mao was expressing his own sentiments, for himself, even though he was not present at the performance.

Another even more unlikely recipient of Mao’s sentimental affinity was Chiang Kai-shek, the man he had deposed — and had slaughtered millions of Chinese to keep deposed. Chiang died in Taiwan on 5 April 1975 at the age of eighty-nine, leaving a will decreeing that his coffin was not to be buried in Taiwan, but kept in a shrine to await a return to the Mainland when communism collapsed. Around the time of Chiang’s funeral, Mao mourned the Generalissimo for an entire day, in private. On that day, Mao did not eat, or speak. He had an eight-minute tape of stirring music played over and over again all day long to create a funereal atmosphere, while he beat time on his bed, wearing a solemn expression. The music was set specially for Mao to a twelfth-century poem, in which the writer bade farewell to a friend who bore an uncanny resemblance to Chiang — a patriotic high mandarin whose career ended tragically and unfulfillled, and who was being exiled to a remote part of China. The writer told his friend:

You and I are men of history

No little men chattering about minor affairs!

This was exactly how Mao felt towards Chiang.

Days later, Mao rewrote the last two lines of the poem so that they read:

Go, let go, my honored friend,

Do not look back.

This change turned the poem into an unmistakable valediction. Mao was writing his own envoi to a fellow thwarted giant. It was re-recorded to music, and was one of the poems sung to Nixon when Mao brought the former US president over to say his personal goodbye.

MAO SHOWED UNCOMMON sympathy in private for other ousted rulers. When the emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, whom he had met only once and very briefly, died in prison in 1975 after being dethroned by a military coup, Mao sank into melancholy. “The emperor was doing fine,” Mao kept saying. “Why did he have to come to this? Why did it have to end like this?!”

This new empathy with deposed rulers was an extension of Mao’s old fear of being toppled himself. In this final phase of his life, he was more obsessed than ever with a coup. It was to avert such a possibility that he intimated to Deng Xiao-ping and his allies in 1975 that they were welcome to crush Mme Mao and her Gang after his death.

It was partly for this same reason — fear of a coup — that Mao did not appoint a successor. He never bestowed that title on the head of his last coterie, Hua Guo-feng, as he had earlier on Lin Biao. He feared that an official heir apparent might be in too much haste to succeed, and would try to jump the gun. So, although Hua showed manifest loyalty (when Mao was fed through the nose for the first time, Hua took on Chou’s guinea-pig role and tested a tube on himself first), and although Mao obviously trusted Hua enough to put him in charge, he declined to confirm that Hua would take over after he died.

Mao did not care one iota what happened after his death. In fact, he had scant confidence in the staying power of his own “achievements.” On the only occasion he said a few words to his inner circle about the future, when he knew he was dying, he told them that there would be “upheaval,” indeed “blood rains and winds smelling of blood.” And then Mao said: “What’s going to happen to you, heaven only knows.”

So Mao did not leave a will, even though he had been expecting death for at least a year, and had had ample time to prepare one.

THE LAST FEW weeks of Mao’s life were spent in a nondescript building which had been specially built for him in Zhongnanhai, with all the usual security specifications, and was earthquake-proof. Characteristically, it only had a code-name, “202.” He was carried there at the end of July 1976, after Peking was shaken by a huge earthquake that measured 7.8 on the Richter scale and which flattened Tangshan, an industrial city 160 km to the east, where somewhere between 240,000 (official figure) and 600,000 (unofficial estimate) people were killed. In Peking and many other cities, tens of millions of people had to sleep out in the open. In true Mao style, the regime turned down foreign help, which could have greatly lowered the death toll. A media campaign was launched exhorting rescuers to “denounce Deng on the ruins.”

Mao was still giving orders. When Mme Mao wanted to go out of Peking on 2 September, she came to ask her husband for permission. He was peevish at being bothered, and refused the first time, but granted it when she persisted. Three days later, Mao suddenly lost consciousness, and she was summoned back by the new team headed by Hua. In the past weeks they had been taking turns to keep vigil by Mao’s bed, and when Mme Mao got back, she joined them, but stood behind the bed, as he had shown annoyance before when he woke up and set eyes on her. None of Mao’s children was present.

On 8 September an unintelligible croak came from Mao’s throat. His barber and servant of seventeen years tucked a pencil into his trembling hand, and Mao laboriously drew three shaky lines, and then feebly touched the wooden edge of his bed three times. The barber figured out that Mao wanted to know what was happening to the Japanese prime minister, Takeo Miki (whose name in Chinese means “Three Woods”). Mao had never met Miki, and had shown no special interest in him until now, when Miki was fighting to prevent being toppled by a coup within his own party.

One of Mao’s two girlfriends-turned-nurse, Meng, held up the news bulletin, and Mao read it for a few minutes. This report about yet another leader on the ropes was the very last thing he read.

Soon after this, Meng heard Mao say: “I feel very ill. Call the doctors.” These were the last words he spoke. Shortly afterwards, he slipped into unconsciousness. At ten minutes past midnight on the morning of 9 September 1976, Mao Tse-tung died. His mind remained lucid to the end, and in it stirred just one thought: himself and his power.