Mao: The Unknown Story

Red Star was published in English in winter 1937–38, and played a big role in swaying Western opinion in favor of Mao. The CCP organized its publication in Chinese, under the title Stories of a Journey to the West, to make it appear impartial. In addition to this book and the Mao Tse-tung Autobiography, a third book was produced out of the Snow material, under another neutral-sounding title, Impressions of Mao Tse-tung.

Red Star—and the two books of edited excerpts — profoundly influenced radical youth in China. Many, like one of the first Tibetan Communists, joined the Communists as a result of reading Snow. It was the beginning of the CCP’s renaissance. Mao was to say that its publication “had a merit no less than the Great Yu controlling floods.” The Great Yu was the mythical emperor who had brought floods under control, thus starting Chinese civilization.

As Chiang Kai-shek’s media chief, Shao played an indispensable role in assisting Snow and promoting Mao and the Reds. By the time Chiang removed Shao from the post after nearly a year, Mao and the Reds had sanitized their image.

FOR THE NEXT DECADE, Mao lived in Yenan, the capital of the territories Chiang assigned to the Reds. He moved into the city on New Year’s Day 1937, through a huge gate, which majestically and silently opened up to columns of Red Army soldiers, marching along the broad dirt road that stretched into the infinity of yellow earth. This ancient city (whose name means “extending peace”) was enclosed by high thick walls that mounted the chain of loess hills far above the city, with battlements exuding warrior stateliness. In dry, crisp air beneath a high blue sky, it was dominated by a nine-story pagoda, built 1,000 years before. Beneath the pagoda was a complex of temples, many appearing to be clinging to the cliffs. Further down, the heavily silted River Yan was joined by the Tu Fu River, named after the great eighth-century poet, who reputedly came here to admire the peonies, a local claim to fame.

Yenan was not only a cultural center, but also a hub of commercial activities. Oil had been discovered in the region. Living quarters built by Standard Oil were now taken over by the Reds, who also appropriated substantial buildings owned by the Spanish Franciscans, including a just-completed cathedral, in which many key Party meetings were to take place. The problem of housing was further eased by the fact that many locals had fled, particularly the relatively wealthy, leaving empty hundreds of houses, some large and beautiful. Mao occupied one such mansion in a place called Phoenix Village. The big courtyard was by local standards grand, with a decorated wall immediately inside, facing the gate, to ward off evil spirits — and for privacy. For the first time in over two years, he settled into some comfort.

One considerable luxury for its place and time was wall heating, which Mao had installed. The usual way of heating a house in northern China was to heat the brick bed, the kang, from underneath, but Mao preferred his proper wooden bed, and for heating, he selected this most deluxe form. Another indulgence was to have several residences. When he later moved to an area called Yang Hill, he kept the house in Phoenix Village, and he kept both when he settled in the compound of the Chinese KGB, the picturesque area known as the Date Garden. In addition to these publicly known residences, Mao had secret dwellings built in secluded valleys, one behind Yang Hill and another behind the Date Garden. Few knew of their existence, then or now.

The most public residence was Yang Hill, which was also the least grand, and closest to the local peasants. Ten households lived in the face of a ravine, against a hill thickly wooded in those days with elms, cypresses and redwood poplar. The houses were yao-dong, unique to this part of the country, which looked like caves hollowed out of the loess slopes. Mao had a row of yao-dong in a courtyard with a small gate surmounted by a tiled roof. One of his neighbors, a peasant family, did the laundry for him. Mao’s cook he had brought with him, for security — as well as culinary — reasons. He also declined to share the peasants’ stone roller for grinding his grain: “Chairman Mao considered things from a safety point of view,” the locals told us. He was surrounded by very tight security, some visible, some not.

For Mao, Yenan provided the first relatively stable and non-violent period for nearly a decade. With peace and a rather good life — and the sudden availability of glamorous, educated young women, who were beginning to trickle into Yenan to the lure of the Reds’ benign new image — Mao started to womanize more or less openly. He confided to a fellow-philanderer that he could only go without sex “for forty days at the most.”