Mao Read online

  PHILIP SHORT was for thirty years a foreign correspondent for the BBC, based in Washington, Moscow, Paris, Tokyo and Beijing. He lived and worked in China in the 1970s and 1980s, and has returned regularly to the country ever since. He is the author of acclaimed biographies of François Mitterrand (A Study in Ambiguity, 2013) and Pol Pot (History of a Nightmare, 2004).

  ‘Beautifully written, grippingly readable… A formidable piece of research’

  TERRY EAGLETON, INDEPENDENT

  ‘Nowhere has the story of the late Chinese leader been told with greater authority’

  ANNE THURSTON, WASHINGTON POST

  ‘Short has a large canvas and he uses it brilliantly’

  NEW YORK TIMES

  ‘He tells the story superbly… An excellent account’

  GUARDIAN

  ‘Deserves to be the standard history. It is everything one could hope for: magisterial… and rich in material’

  JOHN SIMPSON, BBC

  ‘A fascinating account’

  IAN BURUMA, NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  ‘A ground-breaking biography’

  SUNDAY TIMES

  ‘Complete and unflinching’

  ECONOMIST

  Revised edition published in 2017 by

  I.B.Tauris & Co. Ltd

  London • New York

  www.ibtauris.com

  First published in Great Britain in 1999 by Hodder and Stoughton a division of Hodder Headline

  Copyright © 1999, 2017 Philip Short

  The right of Philip Short to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations in a review, this book, or any part thereof, may not be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

  Every attempt has been made to gain permission for the use of the images in this book. Any omissions will be rectified in future editions.

  References to websites were correct at the time of writing.

  ISBN: 978 1 78453 463 9

  eISBN: 978 1 78672 015 3

  ePDF: 978 1 78673 015 2

  A full CIP record for this book is available from the British Library

  A full CIP record is available from the Library of Congress

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: available

  For Christine

  Contents

  Acknowledgements

  List of Maps

  List of Illustrations

  Note on Spelling and Pronunciation

  Chinese Views of Mao: Preface to the New Revised Edition

  Prologue

  1. A Confucian Childhood

  2. Revolution

  3. Lords of Misrule

  4. A Ferment of ‘Isms’

  5. The Comintern Takes Charge

  6. Events Leading to the Horse Day Incident and its Bloody Aftermath

  7. Out of the Barrel of a Gun

  8. Futian: Loss of Innocence

  9. Chairman of the Republic

  10. In Search of the Grey Dragon: The Long March North

  11. Yan'an Interlude: The Philosopher is King

  12. Paper Tigers

  13. The Sorcerer's Apprentice

  14. Musings on Immortality

  15. Cataclysm

  16. Things Fall Apart

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Dramatis Personae

  Notes

  Acknowledgements

  A book of this kind is the cumulation of many people's goodwill. Some I am able to thank publicly here, including Zhang Yufeng, the companion of Mao's last years; Li Rui, Mao's one-time secretary and later a forceful advocate of social democracy for China, who, as these lines are written, is still fighting the good fight in his 100th year; the late Wang Ruoshui, courageous former deputy editor of the People's Daily; Pang Xianzhi, once Mao's librarian and today one of China's best-informed official historians; Zhou Enlai's niece, Zhou Bingde; Deng Xiaoping's son, Deng Pufang; and Liu Shaoqi's daughter, Liu Tingting.

  Many others contributed anonymously. When the first edition of this book was published in 1999, China was already a far more tolerant and liberal country than when I had made my home there, twenty years earlier, and its people took for granted freedoms which would have been unthinkable when Mao was alive. But it had yet to reach the stage where its citizens could be quoted on-the-record on sensitive political topics without fearing the wrath of their superiors or inquiries from the police. Today, another twenty years on, there is more latitude. Despite a systematic clampdown on anything which might be construed as threatening Party rule, most educated Chinese, especially the younger generation, feel able to voice their opinions on almost any subject. For the published word, however, red lines still exist which it is better not to cross.

  No one has a monopoly of wisdom about Mao. CCP officials, Party historians, Chinese academics and former members of the Chairman's household who shared with me their private insights disagreed on many key points. Sometimes I found all their views unpersuasive (as they did mine). But, together, they helped to illuminate areas of Mao's life that, until now, have remained artfully obscured, in the process demolishing much conventional mythology. To all of them I express my gratitude.

  In writing the first edition of this book, I was greatly aided by Judy Polumbaum and Karen Chappell at the University of Iowa, through whose good offices I was able to spend a year in scholarly retreat in the Midwest; by my editors, Roland Philipps in London and Jack Macrae in New York; and by my agent, Jacqueline Korn, who kept the faith when others began to doubt whether it would ever be finished. Since then, a huge amount of new research has been undertaken by both Chinese and Western historians, and episodes which were still opaque when this book was originally written are now much better understood. That has provided the rationale for this new, expanded and revised second edition, which owes its existence to Tomasz Hoskins, my editor at I.B.Tauris. To him and to Sara Magness, who oversaw its production, my thanks and appreciation.

  List of Maps

  China

  The Long March, 1934–1935

  The Autumn Harvest Uprising in Hunan, 1927

  The Central Soviet Base Area in Southern Jiangxi, 1931–1934

  List of Illustrations

  Photographs courtesy of Xinhua (New China News Agency) unless stated otherwise.

  SECTION 1

  1. The earliest known portrait of Mao, as a teenager around the time of the 1911 revolution.

  2. A soldier preparing to shear off a peasant’s queue after the overthrow of the Manchus. Harlingue-Viollet, Paris.

  3. One of the many forms of death by slow execution common in Mao’s youth. These prisoners are being slowly asphyxiated as the weight of their bodies stretches their necks. Joshua B. Powers Collection, Hoover Institution, Stanford University.

  4. The Mao family home at Shaoshan. Marc Riboud, Magnum Photo Agency.

  5. Mao at the age of 25, with his mother, Wen Qimei, and his brothers, Zemin, 22, and Zetan, 15, in Changsha in 1919.

  6. Mao’s father, Shunsheng, 1919.

  7. Mao’s close friend, Cai Hesen, who converted him to Marxism.

  8. Mao and other members of the Hunanese delegation in Beijing, petitioning for the removal of Governor Zhang Jingyao in January 1920.

  9. China’s first president, Sun Yat-sen.

  10 & 11. The spiritual fathers of the Chinese Communist Party. Left: Li Dazhao, of Beijing University, whose writings popularised Bolshevism in China. Right: Chen Duxiu, editor of New Youth and the CCP’s first General Secretary.

  12. Mao’s second wife,
Yang Kaihui, with their sons, Anying, 3, and Anqing, 2, in 1925.

  13. Mao’s third wife, He Zizhen. Courtesy of Maoping Revolutionary Museum, Jiangxi.

  14. From left: Ren Bishi; Red Army Commander-in-Chief, Zhu De; Political Security director, Deng Fa; Xiang Ying; Mao; and Wang Jiaxiang, on the eve of the proclamation of the Chinese Soviet Republic at Ruijin in November 1931.

  15. Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. Sygma, Paris.

  16. Zhou Enlai with Mao in north Shensi in 1937. Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology, Harvard University (Owen Lattimore Foundation).

  SECTION 2

  17. Yan’an in the late 1930s, with its distinctive Song dynasty pagoda. Edgar Snow’s China, by Lois Wheeler Snow, reprinted by permission of Random House.

  18. Zhang Guotao, whose challenge to Mao collapsed after the destruction of the Fourth Army in Gansu in 1937.

  19. Wang Shiwei, the gifted young writer whose persecution in the Yan’an Rectification Campaign set the pattern for all Mao’s subsequent efforts to crush intellectual dissent. Courtesy of China Youth Press.

  20. Mao’s fourth wife, Jiang Qing, as an actress in Shanghai.

  21. From left: Zhou Enlai, Mao and Zhu De, in Yan’an in 1946.

  22. Mao reviewing Lin Biao’s victorious army after the surrender of Beijing in March 1949.

  23. A landlord in North China, on trial before fellow villagers during the land reform after the communist takeover.

  24. Mao proclaiming the People’s Republic from Tiananmen on October 1, 1949.

  25. Gao Gang, Party boss of Manchuria, purged in 1954.

  26. From left: Mao, Bulganin, Stalin and the East German Party chief, Walter Ulbricht, celebrating the Soviet leader’s 70th birthday at the Kremlin in December 1949.

  27. Mao relaxing with his nephew, Yuanxin, and his daughters Li Min and Li Na at Lushan in 1951.

  28. From left: Jiang Qing; Li Na; Mao; his oldest son, Anying, soon to die in Korea; and Anying’s wife, Liu Songlin.

  29. Mao with the Dalai Lama (right) and the Panchen Lama in Beijing in 1954.

  30. A struggle meeting to criticise bourgeois intellectuals at the start of the anti-Rightist campaign in July 1957.

  31. The parting of the ways: Mao and Khrushchev meet for the last time in Beijing in October 1959. Courtesy of Du Xiuxian, Beijing.

  32. Peng Dehuai (second from left) talking to peasants in Hunan during the Great Leap Forward in 1959.

  SECTION 3

  33. Members of the Politburo Standing Committee in a rare, unposed shot at the ‘7,000-cadre big conference’ in January 1962. From left: Zhou Enlai, Chen Yun, Liu Shaoqi, Mao and Deng Xiaoping.

  34. Swimming in the Yangtse.

  35. Jiang Qing (centre), appearing with Mao in public for the first time in September 1962 to greet the wife of Indonesia’s President Sukarno.

  36. Mao’s propagandist, Yao Wenyuan.

  37. From left: Mao, with Lin Biao, Liu Shaoqi, Zhu De and Dong Biwu during the 1966 National Day celebrations.

  38. In Tiananmen Square, reviewing Red Guards at one of the ten gigantic rallies held at the outset of the Cultural Revolution to encourage China’s youth to rebel.

  39. Magic talisman: the ‘Little Red Book’. Paolo Koch, Rapho Agency.

  40. Red Guards giving the yin-yang haircut to the Governor of Heilongjiang at a struggle meeting in September 1966. The placard around his neck labels him ‘a member of the reactionary gang’.

  41. Smashing ancient stone carvings at the Confucian Temple in Qufu, during the campaign against the ‘Four Olds’.

  42 & 43. Top, from left: Lin Biao with Edgar Snow and Mao on Tiananmen during the 1970 National Day celebrations. Eighteen months later, US–China relations had progressed to a point where (below, from right) Henry Kissinger and President Richard Nixon would meet Mao, with interpreter Nancy Tang and Zhou Enlai, at the Chairman’s residence in Zhongnanhai.

  44. The Chairman’s inner sanctum, dominated by his vast bed, in the Study of Chrysanthemum Fragrance.

  45. Mao with his last companion, Zhang Yufeng, nine months before his death, in December 1975.

  46 & 47. The memorial meeting for Mao in Tiananmen Square on September 18, 1976. Above, from left: Marshal Ye Jianying; Hua Guofeng (reading the eulogy); Wang Hongwen; Zhang Chunqiao and Jiang Qing.

  Note on Spelling and Pronunciation

  Chinese names drive all who are unfamiliar with them to despair. Yet it is impossible to write about China and its leaders without identifying the protagonists. This book employs the pinyin transcription, which was officially adopted by Beijing in 1979 and has the merit of being simpler and more accessible than the older Wade-Giles romanisation. Nevertheless, a few basic rules need to be observed.

  The consonants C, Q and X are used to represent Chinese sounds which have no precise English equivalent. C is pronounced similarly to Ts [in Tsar]; Q like Ch; X like Sh [Hs in the Wade-Giles system]

  Vowels are trickier. Terminal –a rhymes with car; –ai with buy. –an [as in tan, fan, etc.] rhymes with man, except after –i and y [lian, xian, yan, etc.], when it rhymes with men; and after w [wan], when it is sounded as in ‘want’. –ang rhymes with sang, except after –u and w [huang, wang, etc.], when it rhymes with song. –ao rhymes with cow.

  Terminal –e [as in He Zizhen, Li De, Li Xuefeng, etc.] rhymes with her, except after –i and y [as in Ran Tie, Ye Jianying], when it rhymes with the American yeah. –ei rhymes with say. –en [as in Li Wenlin, Tianan men] rhymes with sun, except after ch and y [Chen, Yen] when it rhymes with men. –eng [as in Deng, Meng, etc.] rhymes with bung.

  Terminal –i [as in li, qi, di, etc.] rhymes with see, except after c–, ch–, r–, s–, z– and zh– [ci, chi, ri, si, zi, zhi] when it rhymes with sir; –iu rhymes with stew.

  Terminal –o [as in wo] and –uo [as in Luo] rhymes with war. –ong [dong, long] is similar to the –u in ‘full’. –ou rhymes with toe.

  Terminal –u rhymes with moo; –ui with sway; –un [dun, lun] with soon.

  In a very few cases, where the pinyin transliteration is so unfamiliar as to be unrecognisable for many readers, traditional forms have been retained. These are (with pinyin in parenthesis): Amoy [Xiamen]; Canton [Guangzhou]; Chiang Kai-shek [Jiang Jieshi]; Hong Kong [Xianggang]; Sun Yat-sen [Sun Zhongshan]; Soong Ching-ling [Song Qingling], her sister May-ling [Meiling] and brother, T. V. Soong [Song Ziwen]; Tibet [Xizang]; Whampoa [Huangpu]; Yangtse [Yangzi].

  Chinese Views of Mao: Preface to the New Revised Edition

  When China's President Xi Jinping and his Taiwanese counterpart, Ma Ying-jeou, met in Singapore in November 2015 at the Shangri-la Hotel – aptly named for such an encounter – it was more than just the first meeting at that level since 1949.

  Ninety years earlier, Mao Zedong and Chiang Kai-shek had met in Canton, shortly after the death of China's first President, Sun Yat-sen. The future Communist Party Chairman was then acting head of the Guomindang's Propaganda Department and an alternate member of its Central Executive Committee. Chiang, the nationalist army commander, was eying Sun's succession. Little is known for certain about their relationship at that time except that they were on the same side: the communists and the nationalists were allies against the northern warlords and Mao's relations with his own party, as often happened in the early part of his career, were at rock bottom. When the two next met, twenty years and a bloody civil war later, Mao was still the junior partner: contemporary photographs show him looking rather tense beside the urbane Generalissimo, as though painfully aware that he was in the lion's den. In 2015, the shoe was on the other foot. Xi was welcoming and expansive, with a grin like the Cheshire cat, while Ma, a slighter figure, locked into an interminable handshake for the benefit of the photographers, appeared torn between elation at the significance of the occasion and apprehension that he might be about to be eaten.

  Amid the parallels, there was an essential difference. In 1925 and again in 1945, Mao and Chiang were reluctant partners, working together whi
le contending for the right to rule China. The fact that they could be partners at all showed that accommodation was possible – a hopeful precedent for Xi's encounter with Ma. But on both occasions they met as Party officials. Xi Jinping and Ma Ying-jeou – despite efforts to blur the issue by referring to each other as ‘Mr’, rather than by their titles – met as Heads of State (albeit states which refuse to recognise each other). In this sense the meeting in Singapore was not merely a replay of previous contacts. It broke entirely new ground.

  For all Xi's boldness, however, he was following an agenda which Mao himself had set. At a meeting with Richard Nixon in 1972, the Chairman had said that Taiwan's fate was not a pressing matter: China was prepared to wait. Sooner or later reunification would occur. Unlike Chiang Kai-shek, who had been forced to recognise the independence of Mongolia under pressure from Stalin during the Pacific War, Mao ordained that Taiwanese independence was a red line that could not be crossed. Despite the talks in Singapore, that remains the case today.

  The underlying policy choices which Mao laid down continue to guide China, forty years after his death, in unsuspected ways. The famous ‘nine-dash line’, for instance, whereby Beijing claims sovereignty over most of the South China Sea, is not a recent invention: it was delimited by Zhou Enlai and approved by Mao in 1953 after the Korean War.1 The first steps towards making it a reality were taken under Mao's leadership, in January 1974, when Chinese forces occupied the Paracel Islands, 180 miles south of Hainan, after a naval battle against the Vietnamese. The Chairman might insist all he wished that China had no pretensions to superpower status, but that did not stop him affirming the country's suzerain rights as the region's leading power. Mao proceeded cautiously: the ‘nine-dash line’ was made public only after Stalin's death, and the conquest of the Paracels was delayed until the Kissinger–Le Duan peace agreement signalled US disengagement from Vietnam. In part this was because, in Mao's day, China lacked the power to do more. But even now, when the country is infinitely stronger, building artificial islands on reefs many hundreds of miles from its shores to try to turn the surrounding seas into a Chinese domain, Xi Jinping is also moving prudently. Like Mao, Xi and his colleagues take an exceptionally long-term view, which makes it hard for other countries with short political cycles, whether the United States or South East Asian nations like the Philippines, to respond effectively. Xi's calculation – analogous to Mao's over Taiwan – is that, whatever grousing Chinese expansion may provoke in the short term, eventually China's dominance of the region will lead to a pax Sinensis to replace the pax Americana, and in time the country's neighbours and rivals will have no choice but to get used to it. Given the mushy US response to Xi's probing, who is to say that he is wrong? The changing balance of economic power makes this a battle which the US and its Asian protégés cannot win – and deep down America knows it.