Mao: The Unknown Story

Mao had no answer to this question. Throughout his reign, peasants had to fend for themselves when it came to housing. The state provided no funds. Even in urban areas, other than apartments for the elite and residential blocks in industrial complexes, virtually no new dwellings were built.

Watching the thatched cottage turned to ashes, Mao eventually said to himself: “Um, Really clean if the earth has fallen to complete void and nothingness!”

This was a line of poetry from the classic Dream of the Red Chamber. But Mao was doing more than just reciting poetry. This was an echo of the attraction to destruction that he had alarmingly expressed as a young man. He continued: “This is called: ‘No destruction, no construction.’ ”

Construction for Mao was exclusively related to becoming a superpower. Here in Hangzhou, he began revising the draft of the first “Constitution,” something he had only just got around to after more than four years in power. Among the things he wanted revised was the promise that his regime “protects all citizens’ safety and legal rights …” Mao underlined the words “all citizens” and wrote in the margin: “What exactly is a citizen?”

Flatterers had suggested that the document should be named the “Mao Tse-tung Code,” clearly with the Napoleonic Code in mind. Mao rejected the idea. He was averse to law, and wanted there to be nothing that could bind him. Indeed, hopelessly feeble as it was, the Constitution was soon to be discarded altogether.

One day Mao toured a temple, which had, as usual, been emptied for security reasons, except for one blind monk. On the altar was a wooden holder with bamboo slips for divination, and Mao asked his photographer to pick a slip for him. She shook the holder, took out a slip, and went to a bookcase containing old poetry books to find the line referred to on the slip. It read: “No peace, either inside or outside home.” There could be no question of presenting this inauspicious line, so she quickly picked another. It had a cheery message, and brought laughter.

The divination was eerily accurate. Mme Mao had come with their daughter, Li Na, to spend Chinese New Year, the traditional time of family reunion. But the visit had ended with Mme Mao in tears, asking for a plane to take her away. Hangzhou, famed not only for its scenery but also for its women, had caught Mao’s sexual fancy. He was to return forty-one times, partly for this reason. He liked young and apparently innocent women, whom underlings procured as partners for the weekly dances and for subsequent fornication.

Mao no longer felt sexual interest in his wife. Even before 1949, his Russian doctor Orlov had been treating him “for sexual problems” with her (Orlov acidly referred to Mme Mao as “the Queen” in a cable to Stalin). Then Mme Mao had suffered serious gynecological problems, for which she was treated in Russia, under the pseudonym “Yusupova,” as she stayed in a palace in Yalta that had belonged to Prince Yusupov, the man who killed Rasputin. (Stalin himself had stayed in it during the Yalta conference.) Her illness almost certainly put Mao further off her. He became more and more brazen in his philandering. Mme Mao was once found weeping by the lake in Zhongnanhai. “Don’t tell anyone,” she said to the man who saw her, Mao’s doctor. “The Chairman is someone no one can beat in political fighting, not even Stalin; nor can anyone beat him in having women, either.” Mme Mao grew increasingly difficult and hysterical, and vented her fury and frustration on the staff, routinely accusing her nurses of “deliberately tormenting” her, striking them, and demanding they be punished.

Meanwhile, as the divination on the bamboo slip uncannily described, quite a few of Mao’s colleagues were going through turmoil and dread. For the nation as a whole, economic policy was about to become drastically harsher as the Superpower Program got under way.

Chou told Stalin in September 1952 that China could also “collect” up to £1.6 billion sterling plus US$200m over five years, “mostly” through what he called “contraband.”

The threat of rustication functioned as a powerful deterrent to urban-dwellers not to step out of line. Everyone knew that being cast into the peasantry would bring on themselves and their families not only back-breaking labor, but the loss of any certainty of earning a livelihood, and that this misfortune would extend to future generations as well.

That Gao said too much was indirectly confirmed by the top Soviet adviser in China, Arkhipov. When we pushed him on the subject, he threw us a steely stare and said in a different tone of voice: “Why do you want to know so much about Gao Gang?”

37. WAR ON PEASANTS (1953–56 AGE 59–62)