Mao: The Unknown Story

To stoke his cult, Mao took the most unwonted step of visiting places like factories and agricultural cooperatives, and these visits were reported with huge fanfare. Mao was filmed for newsreels that were shown nationwide, and featured in a painting aptly titled Chairman Mao Walks All Over China, which became a household image. After Mao visited a village outside Chengdu in Sichuan, huge publicity was given to the story that the excited villagers changed its name to “Happiness Cooperative.” When Mao lifted a few bits of earth on a shovel at the Ming Tomb Reservoir on the outskirts of Peking, People’s Daily wrote: “As soon as Chairman Mao put down the spade, a soldier named Yu Bing-sen wrapped the spade up in his clothes. He said with brimming emotions: ‘Whenever we see this spade we will think of Chairman Mao, and we will have greater energy.’ An agricultural co-op member wept and told the reporter …” These exaltations of Mao in the press were then force-fed to the entire population, the illiterate as well as the literate, at newspaper-study sessions that were a permanent fixture of life under Mao.

On 13 August, for the only time throughout his 27-year reign, Mao ate in a restaurant, in Tianjin. There he was sighted, undoubtedly as intended, as he not only got out of the car in front of the restaurant, but appeared at the window upstairs. “Chairman Mao! Chairman Mao!” people began to chant. Word spread fast, and soon a hysterical crowd of tens of thousands surrounded the restaurant for several blocks, jumping up and down and screaming “Long Live Chairman Mao!” One of Mao’s secretaries got worried about security, and suggested that Mao should leave while a bodyguard with a build similar to Mao’s drew the crowd off. But Mao vetoed it. He had come to the place to be seen, and he was not in any danger, as this was a surprise visit, and he was distant enough from the crowd, none of whom could possibly have a gun anyway. (One of his regime’s first acts had been to confiscate weapons.) And the people around the restaurant had almost certainly been preselected, as happened in other places where Mao appeared. Mao waved at the crowd, who replied with more frenzy and weeping. All of which was reported in great detail in the papers.

When Mao eventually left, after several hours, he described his departure to his inner circle in almost godlike language: “I gave one wave, and the crowd receded.” He reveled in the way his cult was thriving and told his coterie that he “was deeply impressed.” Years of force-feeding his personality cult had endowed him with awesome power.

This minister, Huang Jing, had been the second husband of Mme Mao. They married when he was a handsome twenty-year-old radical student and she an eighteen-year-old librarian in 1932, and she joined the Party under his influence. After she married Mao, she occasionally invited her ex-husband over “for a chat,” but he declined every time. The pressure on him now was nothing personal on Mao’s part, as Mao was never jealous. In fact, in Chongqing in 1945 Mao had made a point of inviting another of his wife’s former husbands, Tang Na, to a reception, and greeted him with a twinkle in his eye and a crack, as Tang Na had once attempted suicide over the future Mme Mao. Tang Na settled in Paris after Mao took power, and subsequently died there.

Shoveling earth at the Ming Tomb Reservoir for those few minutes was the only physical labor Mao put in during his entire rule, although he made heavy labor compulsory and routine for nearly everyone in China, children included, on the grounds that it helped maintain their ideological purity.

40. THE GREAT LEAP: “HALF OF CHINA MAY WELL HAVE TO DIE” (1958–61 AGE 64–67)

WITH HIS cult fed and watered among the population, his colleagues cowed into submission, and potential voices of dissent silenced through the “Anti-Rightist” campaign, Mao proceeded vastly to accelerate his Superpower Program, though he still concealed its military nature. The original 1953 schedule of completing “industrialisation” in “ten to fifteen years” was now shortened to eight, seven, or even five—or possibly three—years. Mao had been informed that acquisitions from Russia could enable him to break into the superpower league in five years. He fancied he could fulfill his ambition in one “big bang,” declaring that “Our nation is like an atom.” He called the process the “Great Leap Forward,” and launched it in May 1958.