Sex Lives of the Great Dictators

6. THE THOUGHTS OF CHAIRMAN MAO

Although Mao Tse-tung aspired to be an emperor, he remained a peasant. He cared little for his personal appearance or hygiene. He ate smelly food, which tainted his breath, and chainsmoked 555 State Express until his teeth went black. He liked to talk openly about his bowel movements and would unself-consciously remove his trousers in front of guests on a hot day. In later life, he stopped cleaning his teeth altogether and they became covered in a green film. He also stopped washing, considering it a waste of time. Servants would wipe him down with a wet towel each night while he attended to state papers, read or talked.

Also in later life, a medical examination revealed that his foreskin was tight and difficult to pull back. His left testicle was smaller than normal and his right one undescended. It had remained in the abdominal cavity since childhood. When this was pointed out to him, he was sixty. Up until then, he had never realized that most men have two balls.

Born in 1893 in the village of Shaoshan in Hunan province, the son of a peasant farmer, Mao’s first sexual experience occurred when he was still a teenager in his hometown. He had a youthful encounter with a twelve-year-old girl. In later years, Mao was fond of recalling this initiation. In 1962, Mao even arranged to meet her again, this woman to whom he had lost his virginity. By then, she was old and grey. He gave her two thousand yuan. When she left, he said wistfully: “How she’s changed.” What did he expect after more than fifty years.

However, the young Mao showed very little interest in sex. He was studious and introverted throughout his youth, and underwent long periods of sexual abstinence while he concentrated on the great political problems of the day. His father was worried about his dreamy, romantic son and decided to shake him out of it. In 1908, he arranged for the fifteen-year-old Mao to marry a woman six years his senior. For the first-and only- time in his life, he went through a full traditional wedding ceremony. Afterwards, although the woman was moved into the Mao family house, he refused to live with his bride. She died in 1910. Later, he maintained that he never laid a hand on her.

During his late teens and early twenties, Mao and his friends were too committed to politics to think about sex. There were women in their circle, such as Tsai Chang who went on to become a Communist leader, but shyness and inhibiting social tradition meant that Mao had little time for romance.

Mao devoted his energies to becoming a full-time revolutionary in Peking and probably remained celibate until he met Tao Szu-yung, a brilliant student. The romance withered when they disagreed about politics and they went their separate ways. Then he met another beautiful revolutionary comrade, Yang Kai-hui. He wrote love poems to her — as he did to his other lovers. She was the daughter of a university professor, white-skinned, with deep-set eyes They entered into a trial marriage before formalizing the situation in 1921, when she gave birth to their first child. This may seem conventional enough to us, but in China at that time for a couple to choose each other, without reference to their parents, was truly revolutionary.

The war against Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang nationalist (and vehemently anti-Communist) forces soon separated them. Mao left Yang and their children in Changsha for safety in 1927, while he established himself as a major revolutionary leader. Three years later, the Kuomintang seized Changsha. Yang was captured and executed when she refused to betray her husband. Their two boys fled to Shanghai where they had to fend for themselves on the streets. The younger son, Anqing, suffered from mental illness which was ascribed to the beatings he had suffered as a vagrant at the hands of the Shanghai police. The elder, Anying, was killed in an American air raid during the Korean war.

However, while Yang was sacrificing her life for her husband, Mao was already living with another beautiful revolutionary comrade, Ho Tzu-chen, a girl about half his age. She was eighteen; he was thirty-seven. When he first met his “revolutionary lovemate”, as he called her, he described her as “attractive and refined”. She spoke in a clear and measured way. Her eyes were a “pair of crystals”. Meeting her gave him a feeling “as sweet as honey”.

They married soon after Yang’s death — though some reports say that they had already wed in the safety of a Soviet base before Yang gave her life for her husband. When it came to marriage and divorce, Mao was always a bit sloppy about the paperwork.

Rumours were soon circulating, perhaps put about by Mao’s enemies, that Ho was sexually dissatisfied with Mao, because he was so much older than her and constantly busy. Mao wrote her a poem showing that he understood her frustration:

Ho was Mao’s companion on the Long March, which started in 1934. This was the two-year, 6,000-mile trek from their soviet in South-east China to the Shaanxi province in North-west China which the Communist forces undertook to escape the nationalist Kuomintang. Mao and Ho left their two children behind with a peasant family. They never discovered what happened to them. Ho gave birth to another two children during the Long March and conceived a third. She had six children in all. Only one was male and, as far as they knew, only one, a daughter, Lin Min, survived.

It was during the Long March that Mao began to exhibit his peculiar lavatorial habits. He refused the offer of a commode, preferring to go into the fields with his bodyguards and dig a hole. Mao believed that his bowel movements were an inspiration to his troops.

Lavatories and bowel movements were a big thing for Mao, even after he came to power. While many of his district leaders installed Western-style sit-down lavatories and soft Western mattresses in their residences, Mao preferred to travel with his hard wooden bed and a squat-style Chinese toilet. Even on a visit to Moscow, he would insist on squatting over a bedpan rather than use a decadent Russian sit-down loo.

After the end of the Long March, the Communist set up a base in ancient caves in Yanan and Mao started seeing other women. He had an affair with Ting Ling, a childhood friend of his second wife, Yang Kai-hui. Another lover was Lily Wu, an elegant actress said to be the “only girl in Yanan with a permanent wave”. He met her one night when he was having dinner in the cave where Agnes Smedley of the Manchester Guardian was sheltering. Lily was acting as interpreter and she kept putting her hand on Mao’s leg, saying that she had drunk too much.

He was a little startled at first, but then he took her hand and said that he too had drunk too much. Later they arranged a private meeting in another cave. When Ho found out about it, she was furious. She charged Lily formally with alienating her husband’s affections.

In 1938, Mao took up with a film actress with a less than savoury reputation, shocking the Communist hierarchy. Her name was Lan Ping — or Blue Apple. She changed it to Chiang Ch’ing — Azure River — though some called her Lang Ping Guo — Rotten Apple because of her early promiscuity.

Chiang Ch’ing had been born into a troubled family. Her father was violent and her mother’s work as a domestic servant bordered on prostitution. Chiang had a string of boyfriends before she married a man called Fei, the son of a merchant from Jinan, in 1930. The marriage lasted only a few months. Chiang fell out with Fei’s family who considered her lazy. They divorced.

Soon after, Chiang met Yu Qiwei, the leader of the local Communist underground. They fell in love and began living together in 1931. When the Japanese army seized Manchuria in September 1931, Chiang, already a budding actress, starred in several anti-imperialist plays. When the Nationalist government cracked down on the Communists, Yu Qiwei was arrested and Chiang took up with a student of physical education named Qiao. Soon she finished with him and headed for the bright lights of Shanghai, where she was determined to make it as an actress.

Chiang was poor but ambitious and quickly built herself a career on the casting couch. She was the mistress of movie director and Communist party official Chang Keny. She married actor and movie critic Tang Na, then moved in with leading theatre director, Zhang Min, a married man. Tang was so distraught that he tried to kill himself with an overdose of sleeping pills, but the owner of the inn where he was staying found him in time. Chiang had no pity and continued expanding her career with a series of other liaisons.

“Chiang Ch’ing was a licentious woman,” said the wife of a revolutionary leader in Yanan, where Chiang had gone accompanied by another ex-husband, David Yu. “She simply does not seem to be able to exist without a man.”

At that time, she said, Chiang was seeing an actor named Wang and they would use her husband’s office for sex sessions. It was in Yanan that Chiang met Mao.

As soon as Chiang arrived in Yanan, rumours spread about her. Mao immediately sought her out and gave her a ticket to the Marx-Leninist Institute where he was giving a lecture. She sat in the front row and got herself noticed by asking questions. He returned the compliment and went to see her in the theatre. He applauded her performance so loudly that Ho Tzuchen became jealous. They had a terrible row afterwards.

To Mao, Chiang was just another pretty girl, but Chiang was determined to get her man. She divorced Tang Na and abandoned their two children for Mao, explaining later: “Sex is engaging the first time around, but what sustains interest is power.”

When Chiang became pregnant, Mao announced that he was going to divorce Ho to marry Chiang. However, this was not just a matter for the individuals concerned. They had to ask permission from the Communist Party.

The party was naturally concerned about Chiang Ch’ing’s “colourful past” and refused Mao permission to divorce and remarry.

“Ho Tzu-chen has always been a good comrade to you,” the Central Committee explained. “She is a reliable and faithful companion and has shown her true worth in battle and in work. Why are you no longer able to live with a woman like this?”

Mao replied: “I esteem and respect Comrade Ho. But we should not think along feudalistic lines any more, where divorce is considered an injury to a woman’s reputation or position. Without Chiang Ch’ing I cannot go on with this revolution.”

The privations of the Long March had left Ho mentally unbalanced and the rejection by Mao pushed her over the edge. On these grounds, Mao eventually obtained permission to divorce in 1939. Many believed he was callously abandoning a valiant comrade and his divorce cost him a large number of followers. Mao also abandoned Lily Wu, who was despatched home to Szechuan.

Ho was sent to Moscow for psychiatric treatment, but there was no improvement in her condition. She spent the rest of her life in a comfortable house in Shanghai, paid for by the government, but she never fully recovered.

In 1961, Mao received a letter from Ho and decided that he wanted to see her. She was brought to his villa at Lushan. By this time, she was old and grey-haired. She was obviously delighted to see Mao, but her conversation was barely coherent. After she left, Mao sank into a deep depression.

As a condition of their marriage, Mao had to send Chiang Ch’ing to the Party School. The deputy head was Kang Sheng and, despite the fact that he was Mao’s right-hand man, Chiang had an affair with him during her four months there.

Chiang and Mao married in 1939. They did not bother with a wedding ceremony or a legal marriage certificate. A simple announcement was enough.

However, malicious gossip still pursued her and Chiang was forced to take a backseat in public. She became the perfect Communist housewife, but her hold on power remained through sex. She told one and all that Mao was a great lover and his whole entourage would know if they had made love the night before.

Mao was not a man to settle for one woman indefinitely and, by 1949, they were becoming distant. In March, he sent Chiang to Moscow while he went to the Fragrant Hills with an actress named Yu Shan. She was the sister of David Yu, Chiang’s ex-husband. David did not consider that Chiang Ch’ing had the right qualities to be the wife of Mao, who was by then effectively China’s new emperor. His sister was more: cultured, more cultivated, superior in every way. However, David Yu had misread the situation. Mao’s preference was for earthy peasant girls and, after six months, they broke up. Then, in November, Chiang returned from the Soviet Union and re-established her presence in Mao’s household.

It was also in 1949, when Mao was sixty, that his genital abnormalities were discovered, and his prostate was found to be small and soft. The doctor examining him discovered that Mao was infertile. He had fathered several children by three of his wives, but the youngest was now fifteen years old. So Mao must have become sterile after the age of forty-five.

When told, Mao said: “So I’ve become a eunuch, haven’t I?”

He seemed genuinely concerned. His doctor had to explain that the eunuchs in the old imperial court had their testicles, or often their entire genitals, cut off. Mao, it seemed, had little grasp of the workings of the reproductive system.

By this time, Mao had grown tired of Chiang sexually. He told her that, at sixty, he was too old for sex. But underlings, such as Kang Sheng, moved themselves up the party hierarchy by providing Mao with a constant supply of libidinous young women. Kang Sheng also maintained a library of pornographic material for Mao. No nation on earth had a richer tradition of the erotic arts than China, and Mao’s collection far surpassed that of any emperor.

During the Cultural Revolution, Kang Sheng looted the official museums to add to Mao’s collection.

Mao’s favourite topic of conversation was sex and the sex lives of others. In 1954, Mao crushed Gao Gang, who had amassed so much power that Stalin called him the King of Manchuria. Mao accused him of making an “anti-party alliance” and he committed suicide.

But it seemed that Mao was not interested in the details of the political threat Gao Gang represented. It was Gao’s sex life that fascinated him. Gao had had sex with more than a hundred different women, it was said.

“He had sex twice on the night he killed himself,” Mao marvelled. “Can you imagine such lust.”

Mao tried to match these excesses. He was famously interested in swimming and would fill the heated indoor swimming pool in the Forbidden City with hundreds of naked girls, then take a dip.

At first, Mao was discreet about his activities. His confidential secretary, Ye Zilong, would recruit women from the Cultural Work Troupe, the Central Garrison Corps and the Bureau of Confidential Matters. They had to be young, uneducated and fanatically devoted to Chairman Mao. They would stay in Ye’s house until Chiang Ch’ing was safely asleep. Then they would be led quietly across the compound, through the dining-room and into Mao’s bedchamber. In the morning, before Chiang Ch’ing awoke, they would be led out.

Afterwards, they would be treated generously. Mao could afford to be generous. Millions of copies of his Little Red Book had been sold and Mao Tse-tung was one of the richest men in China. He had made over three million yuan (£500,000) from the sale of his Selected Works alone.

During high-level party meetings, a special room would be set aside in the Great Hall of the People. The political departments of the army and the Communist Party would supply beautiful girls of impeccable proletarian backgrounds. They were told that they had been recruited as ballroom dancing partners for the Great Leader. In fact, they were fodder for his bed. But many of the party officials saw this as so great an honour, they supplied their daughters and sisters.

Madame Mao was proud of her appearance and her sexual skills and when she heard about his womanizing, it hurt her deeply. She would try and sit in on his dance parties where he tried to pick up girls. She tried to vet his nurses, firing the pretty ones. When Mao’s physician questioned her actions, he was told: “Doctor, you don’t understand the Chairman.

He is very loose with his love life. His physical pleasure and his mental activity are separate, and there are always women willing to be his prey.

The doctor was also told that he would have to teach his nurses something about morality: “They should be polite to their leader, but careful in their contact with him.”

Madame Mao was not wrong. The Great Helmsman was already involved with the railroad nurse on his special train. She did sterling service as they travelled around the country. In Shanghai, he paraded her publicly, taking her to the exclusive Jinjaing Club which was the preserve of top Party officials. The Shanghai authorities knew of the Chairman’s passion for female companionship, so they laid on the city’s top actresses and singers. But they were too sophisticated and worldly for the proletarian Mao. The Shanghai authorities learnt quickly and began providing young dancers who were more to Mao’s taste.

At the time, the Cultural Work Troupe of the Twentieth Army were in the area. The young girls from the troupe would swarm around Mao, vying with each other for the privilege of a dance with the Great Leader. He would stay out dancing until two in the morning, then return to his train with his nurse.

Chiang Ch’ing’s suspicion of nurses was confirmed after his sixty-fifth birthday banquet, which was held in Guangzhou. That night, Madame Mao had trouble sleeping. She called for the nurse to get a sleeping pill and got no response. So she got up and went to look for her.

When she found the duty room empty, she stormed into Mao’s bedroom and found the nurse there. In the ensuing row, Chiang Ch’ing accused Mao of sleeping with a former servant who had visited recently. Mao had encouraged the woman to get her daughter an education and given her three thousand yuan to enroll in school. Madame Mao accused him of sleeping with the daughter too.

Mao’s response to these accusations was to head back to Peking, leaving his wife behind. Chiang Ch’ing quickly realized that she risked losing him. As an apology she sent him a quote from the famous Chinese folk story, Monkey. In it, a Chinese monk is travelling to India in search of a Buddhist scripture. But Monkey makes him angry and he leaves him behind in a cave behind a waterfall.

“My body is in the cave behind the waterfall,” Monkey says to the monk, “but my heart is following you.”

Mao accepted the apology — he realized that it meant he now had his wife’s tacit permission to sleep with whoever he chose.

On one trip into Chiangxi province, the director of a new hospital provided four energetic young nurses for one of Mao’s dance parties. A musical and dance troupe had also been laid on. Soon Mao was sleeping with a young nurse and a member of the dance troupe. He did little to hide the fact, but he was thoughtful enough to phone Madame Mao and advise her not to meet him there, as arranged. He would join her after his meetings were over.

As time went by, Mao grew careless and she caught him in flagrante delicto several times. There was nothing she could do about it. Once, Mao’s doctor found her crying on a park bench just outside Mao’s compound. She said through her tears that, just as no one, not even Stalin, could win a political battle against him, no one woman would win his heart completely.

Mao and Chiang Ch’ing eventually came to an understanding. In return for playing the public role of his wife, while tolerating his infidelities in private, Mao pledged not to leave her. As Madame Mao was more interested in power than sex, she agreed.

After that Mao made no attempt to hide his infidelities. At the Bureau of Confidential Matters, he met a young, white-skinned clerk, with delicately arched eyebrows and dark eyes. She told Mao that she had stuck up for him at primary school and been beaten up for her pains. Mao began a very public affair with the woman, spending night and day with her in Shanghai. Mao would dance with her until two in the morning, only stopping when his young companion was exhausted. The young woman was so proud of the affair that she tried to befriend Chiang Ch’ing. By this time, Chiang had accepted the situation, and she was warm and friendly in return.

In the 1960s, Madame Mao emerged as the power behind the Cultural Revolution and a threat to Mao. They became estranged — she even had to apply in writing to see him. Mao’s dance parties were stopped and his favourite opera, the decidedly counterrevolutionary The Emperor Seduces the Barmaid, was banned.

“I have become a monk,” Mao cried despondently.

But he soon found that even the Cultural Revolution had its perks. As chaos reigned throughout the country, three of Mao’s girlfriends turned up, claiming they had been denounced as imperialists and thrown out of their housing to wander the streets. Mao said: “If they don’t want you, you can stay with me. They say you’re imperialists? Well, I am the emperor.”

While the fanatical Red Guards tore China apart, Chairman Mao amused himself with these three pretty young women. One of them even became pregnant. Mao sent her to a hospital reserved for the highest cadres and she gave birth to a baby boy. Everyone was jubilant that Mao had a new son. Neither Mao, nor his doctor, mentioned that Mao was sterile.

His sterility did not bother him. What did concern him was potency. Already he was suffering bouts of impotence and he was determined to remain sexually active until the age of eighty. Like the old emperors of China, he believed that the more sexual partners you had the longer you lived. The first emperor of China, the father of the Han race from whom all the other Chinese are thought to be descended, is said to have made himself immortal by making love to a thousand virgins. The Emperor Qin Shihuangdi, founder of the Qin dynasty, sent a Taoist priest and five hundred virgin children across the sea in search of the elixir of immortality. According to the legend, the Japanese are their descendants. But of all the emperors, Mao thought that Sui Yangdui (AD 604-618), the architect of the Grand Canal, was the best. He lived a decadent, opulent life full of women. He would even have his pleasure boat pulled upstream by beautiful young girls attached by silken cords.

Doctors injected Mao with ground deer antlers — an old Chinese remedy for impotence. It did not work. A Romanian formula called H3 was also pumped into him for three months. That did not work either.

His physician then decided that the problem was more psychological than physical. He noticed that Mao’s sexual potency waxed and waned with his political power. During the Great Leap Forward, he was insatiable. One of his bedmates told his doctor: “He is great at everything — it’s simply intoxicating.”

His appetite also seemed to increase with age. So the doctor started giving him a placebo — a concoction of ginseng and glucose which he told Mao was a bodybuilding tonic.

During the late 1960s, when Mao was at the height of his power, although he was in his early seventies, he had no problem with the young women. As he grew older, they grew younger — it was a formula the emperors had used before him.

Mao would spend much of the day in one of the huge beds that he now favoured. He read voraciously and loved exotic literature. His great favourite was The Dream of the Red Chamber, a Chinese classic set in feudal times. In it, a young man called Jia Baoyu falls in love with a woman, but his family refuse to let him marry her. Alienated from society, his rebellion takes the form of pleasure seeking and the seduction of young women. Mao saw himself as Jia Baoyu. Even his compound in the Forbidden City, which was called the Garden of Abundant Beneficence, was modelled on Jia’s family home.

Mao kept healthy by eating oily food, rinsing his mouth with tea and sleeping, mostly, with country girls. Like the ancient Han emperors, he sought to overcome death with the Taoist method of sex. He would often give new girls a copy of the Taoist sex manual classic of the Plain Girl’s Secret Way. According to Taoist. theory, for good health and longevity, a man must preserve the yang essence found in his semen. At that same time, he must absorb as much yin essence as possible from the yin shui, or virginal secretions of a woman. Consequently, he must have as much sex as possible, with as many partners as possible, without ejaculating.

Mao was happiest when several young women shared his bed simultaneously. He would often sleep with three, four or five women at the same time and encouraged his lovers to introduce him to other women.

Although there was no risk of the young girls who came to his bed getting pregnant, he did give them something to remember him by. With such fervid sexual activity going on, venereal disease was inevitable. One of Mao’s girlfriends caught trichomonas vaginalis. This is not strictly a venereal disease as it can be caught from infected underwear — the young girls in Cultural Work Troupes often shared their clothing. But it is an infection of the vagina and causes an unpleasant discharge. Men are not affected, but they act as carriers. So once one of Mao’s lovers got it, it spread like wildfire.

Ironically, the author of the problem was Mao himself. During the Great Leap Forward, Mao had decided to increase rice production by deep planting. This meant flooding the paddy fields to waist height, causing an epidemic of gynaecological infections among the women who worked in the fields.

While this condition would normally have been distressing, Mao’s young women soon saw it as a badge of honour conferred on them by the Great Leader.

Although he was the carrier of the infection, Mao, naturally, refused to be treated. If it was not hurting him, it did not matter.

“What if Chiang Ch’ing becomes infected?” asked his doctor.

Mao said that would never happen. The doctor insisted that Mao at least wash himself. Normally, he still did not bathe. He was wiped down as usual with damp towels every night and never washed his genitals.

Those around him knew of the problem and were careful with their towels and bedding. At home in Peking, Mao’s bedding was sterilized, but when they travelled, no amount of prodding would get the servants in the places Mao stayed to take that same simple precaution. They considered sterilizing his bedding an insult to the Great Leader.

In 1967, Mao contracted genital herpes. He was warned that the disease was highly contagious and passed on by sexual contact, but the Chairman did not think it was so bad and it did not noticeably limit the number of his sexual partners.

Although ballroom dancing had been banned as bourgeois and decadent during the

Cultural Revolution, Mao held dance parties once a week, behind the walls of the Forbidden City. Young girls from the Cultural Work Troupe of the Central Garrison Corps would surround him, flirting and begging him to dance. He would waltz, fox-trot or tango with each of the girls in turn.

Mao had one of his beds moved into a room beside the ballroom. He would go in there to “rest” several times during the evening, often taking one of the girls with him. Peng Dehuai, a member of the politburo, spoke out about this at a meeting. He criticized Chairman Mao, accusing him of behaving like an emperor with a harem of three thousand concubines. The Cultural Work Troupe was disbanded, but Mao continued to find willing young sexual partners from other cultural troupes, the air force, the Bureau of Confidential Matters, the special railway division, the Peking Military Region, the Second Artillery Corps and the provinces of Hubei and Zhejiang. Meanwhile, Peng Dehuai was purged. He died in prison in 1974.

The dance parties continued. Exposed to so many admiring young women, Mao could not go wrong. In the past, he had depended on underlings to procure for him, but it was better this way. Older women and the better educated often refused his advances, and some nurses thought it would violate their professional ethics to have sex with him. But the young women who came to the dance parties did not. They were from peasant stock, from families who owed their lives to the Communist Party and thought that Chairman Mao was their saviour.

As the cult of personality grew in post-revolutionary China, Mao became a figure of veneration. People would do anything to catch a glimpse of him on top of the Tiananmen addressing a huge crowd. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao would hand out mangoes. These would become hallowed objects, worshipped by all who beheld them. A drop of tea made from the tiniest piece of one of these mangoes was a divine elixir. For a young girl brought up in this ethos, simply being in the same room as Chairman Mao was bliss. To be called to his bedchamber to serve his pleasure was beyond ecstasy itself.

Mao surrounded himself with pretty young women. They would look after him, handle his business and sleep with him. His confidential secretary was Zhang Yufeng. Mao had met her at one of his dance parties when she was eighteen. She had big round eyes and white skin. Soon they were having a tumultuous affair. To keep her close at hand, he made her a stewardess on his official train, and finally his secretary. She stayed with him to the end, but one woman was never enough. During his final illness, Mao was fed and nursed by two young dancers.

When Mao died in 1976, Madame Mao came into her own. She was one of the “Gang of Four” who tried to take over. But publication of the details of her early promiscuity alienated her followers. She was arrested and expelled from the Communist Party in 1977. Charged with fomenting civil unrest during the Cultural Revolution, she refused to confess and used her trial in 1980-81 to denounce the current leadership. In 1981, she was sentenced to death, suspended for two years to see if she would repent. The sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in 1983. Her death in prison in 1991 was officially reported as suicide.