Mao: The Unknown Story

During the week-long train journey across Siberia, Ching-kuo was in the custody of the future CCP intelligence chief, Kang Sheng. Only a few weeks before, Kang Sheng had brought Mao’s sons from Paris to Moscow. An-ying and An-ching, aged fourteen and twelve, had been waiting for Russian visas in Paris for months. The Russians had not wanted to admit the Young Marshal’s envoy, who was escorting them, but had not wanted to give a straightforward refusal, so they withheld visas for the whole group. After the Xian kidnap was over, the envoy was told he would not get a visa. The Mao boys arrived in Moscow at the beginning of 1937, and became boarders in the special school for children of foreign Communist leaders. They wrote to their father, sending photos. He rarely replied.

WHILE MAO’S ATTITUDE to his sons was one of indifference, Chiang Kai-shek’s amounted to obsession. In February 1937, when Stalin was still holding Ching-kuo, and Chiang was impatiently waiting for him to be returned, the Generalissimo did another favor to the CCP, which had far-reaching repercussions. He appointed the mole Shao Li-tzu (who had taken Chiang’s son to Russia in 1925) as head of the Nationalists’ Propaganda Department, in charge of the media. Shao’s job was to bring about a change of attitude in the press and in public opinion, which were both fiercely anti-Communist. It was an enormous gesture of good will to Moscow.

Soviet Russia henceforth received wide and enthusiastic coverage. A benign and positive image of the Chinese Communists began to emerge. By summer, Shao and Mao had concocted the idea of publishing a Mao autobiography portraying Mao as a good and kindly man, complete with an appendix of his pronouncements on war with Japan that depicted him as committed to fighting the Japanese. Mao wrote an inscription in the tone of an ardent patriot: “Fight the Japanese imperialists unwaveringly through to the end …” The book came out on 1 November and was a hit. It was this period that gave birth to the myth, which was vital to Mao’s success, that the CCP was the most dedicated anti-Japanese force. It was thanks to this myth that many tens of thousands joined the Communists, including many of those who were later to staff Mao’s regime.

The Mao Tse-tung Autobiography consisted largely of interviews Mao had done with the American journalist Edgar Snow in summer 1936—the only extensive account of his life Mao ever gave. Snow also produced his own book, Red Star Over China, which relied overwhelmingly on interviews with Mao and other Communists, and laid the foundation for the rehabilitation of the Reds, not least by brushing out their blood-soaked past.

The encounter with Snow was no accident. That spring, Mao had asked the Shanghai underground to find a foreign journalist who could publicize his story, plus a doctor. After careful vetting, Mao invited Snow, who combined all the necessary qualities: he was American, wrote for the influential Saturday Evening Post and New York Herald-Tribune, and was sympathetic. Snow arrived in the Red area in July, with a Lebanese-American doctor, George Hatem, who brought top-secret documents from the Comintern in his medicine case. Snow stayed for three months, while Hatem remained with the Reds for the rest of his life, becoming one of Mao’s doctors, and working in the CCP’s foreign intelligence apparatus.

Mao left nothing to chance, and dictated detailed instructions on handling Snow’s visit: “Security, secrecy, warmth and red carpet.” The Politburo carefully coordinated answers to a questionnaire Snow had to submit beforehand. Mao offered Snow a mixture of valuable information and colossal falsification, which Snow swallowed in toto, calling Mao and the CCP leadership “direct, frank, simple, undevious.” Mao covered up years of torture and murder, such as the AB purges, and invented battles and heroism like the crossing of the Dadu bridge in the trek across China, astutely now titled “the Long March.” He led Snow to believe that, except when he was ill, he had “walked most of the 6,000 miles of the Long March, like the rank and file.” Mao also completely suppressed his links with Moscow, and claimed he wanted friendship with America — a claim that fooled many.

Mao took the added precaution of checking everything Snow wrote afterwards, and amending and rewriting parts. On 26 July 1937 (before Red Star came out) Snow wrote to his wife Helen, who was then in Yenan: “Don’t send me any more notes about people reneging on their stories to me … As it is, with so many things cut out it begins to read like Childe Harold.” Snow omitted to mention this background in Red Star, and instead alleged that Mao “never imposed any censorship on me.” The Chinese edition even gilded Snow, and had him say that he found Mao’s words “honest and true.”