Mao Zedong (13 page)

Mao’s own personal proclivities exacerbated the tensions with members of his own Party, which were never far below the surface. The cave life with He Zizhen and their baby girl, which to some outside observers seemed idyllic, had grown tense. In 1937 He Zizhen found that she was pregnant again, for the sixth time, and told Mao she wished to go to a good Shanghai hospital, to abort the fetus and also to have the shrapnel fragments removed from her body. When the Japanese occupation of Shanghai made that impossible, she decided to go to the Soviet Union instead. At the same time, she suspected that Mao was growing interested in other women. Unable to prevent her leaving—or perhaps not wanting to prevent it—Mao acquiesced in her decision to travel to the Soviet Union for medical treatment. In Moscow, she reversed her earlier decision and decided to keep the child, who was born early in 1938 but died a few months later of pneumonia. It was at this stage that Mao sent their daughter, Li Min, now two, to be with her mother in the Soviet Union. Earlier, in 1936, Mao’s two sons from his marriage to Yang Kaihui also were sent to the Soviet Union, allegedly for their safety, and for a time at least He Zizhen looked after all three of the children. Now that she and the children were gone, Mao set up house with a tweny four-year-old actress from Shandong named Jiang Qing, who had been one of the young people who made their way to Yan‘an as the war began. Their liaison was resented by several Communist leaders, who had liked and admired He Zizhen. Mao and Jiang Qing had one child, a daughter named Li Na, born in 1940. Li Na was raised in Yan’an and grew to adulthood, being the last of Mao’s four surviving children from three different women. Six of his other children died young or disappeared.

Few people dared to criticize Mao directly for such behavior, but we can see how he was moving on a trajectory that was pushing him more in the direction of dominance and power. He seemed less flexible and more determined to make all those around him conform to his own whims and beliefs. From living the simple life because he had to, Mao had moved to choosing to live the simple life, thence to boasting about living the simple life, and now to forcing others to live the simple life. At the same time, the fascination with the more complex sides of Chinese culture that had informed Mao’s youth were being replaced by a bitterness and irritation toward the educated people and the aesthetic traditions in China. Part of the cause may have come from the more highly educated students recently returned from the Soviet Union who were still trying to seize power back from him. Or the roots may have gone back far earlier, to slights in the library at Beijing University, or to mocking students in the Changsha normal school, when Mao was so dejected for a while that he even advertised for friends. Maybe Chen Boda showed him how to use an intellectual against an intellectual, how to open fissures and explore the wounds. Maybe he met too many people without integrity, or felt the fugitives from the big cities now arriving lacked the dignity and courage of simple country folk. Certainly the deliberate cultivation of a coarse manner was something he was now eager for visitors to see. In Yan‘an, Mao flaunted his country ways, opening his belt to hunt for lice in his groin as he talked, or pulling off his trousers in the midst of an interview as he lay on the bed, to cool himself down. People began to comment on Mao’s “intense and withering fury,” and one young Chinese critic, braver than most, wrote of a kind of “desolation” of spirit that was beginning to spread in Yan’an, and of forces of darkness that seemed to be pushing back the light.

One thing that power brought to Mao in Yan‘an was the liberty to lecture others at will, as often or as long as he liked. Perhaps that is the true obverse of honest pedagogy, of the teacher’s life that Mao as a youth always said that he wanted to pursue. Nor did Mao any longer make his own detailed surveys of the countryside and its problems—he had others to do it for him, so that he could develop theory based on their results. The long years of war were indeed a triumph for the Communist Party, which emerged strengthened and more numerous, with powerfully effective techniques of mass mobilization in the rural settings and genuine skill at the manipulation of belief through well-conceptualized propaganda—something Mao had learned from his days with the Guomindang.

When Mao lectured the intellectuals now, it was on
their
own history and culture from the conceptual insights of his revolutionary experiences. In a lecture to inaugurate the new Yan‘an Party school, given on February 1, 1942, Mao addressed the assembled cadres and intellectuals on the meaning of learning and knowledge. But his opening premise hardly encouraged frank debate: “It is a fact that the Party’s General Line is correct and unquestionable,” said Mao. From the Marxist-Leninist standpoint, said Mao, “a great many so-called intellectuals are actually exceedingly unlearned” and they must come to understand that “the knowledge of the workers and peasants is sometimes greater than theirs.” It was a sense of humility, Mao urged, that all his educated listeners must now cultivate. They had to understand that book knowledge in and for itself was worthless, and that only words born out of the world of experience had meaning. They should never forget that “books cannot walk, and you can open and close a book at will; this is the easiest thing in the world to do, a great deal easier than it is for the cook to prepare a meal, and much easier than it is for him to slaughter a pig.”

Mao was himself becoming fully confident that he knew what was “correct.” The Soviet returnees and his other intellectual opponents had been almost routed, and now it was time to complete the job. In another talk to the intellectuals in May 1942, Mao offered to “exchange opinions” with his listeners, but his was the dominant voice, as he instructed the intellectuals to identify themselves fully with the proletariat and the masses rather than—as in his own youth had been his goal—to instruct and uplift them. Turning away from his youthful writings and insights, Mao spoke now against those who believed in “love” being separable from class reality, and against those questing for some kind of “love in the abstract,” or those who felt “everything should proceed from love.” As love was tied to class, so was “popular life” alone the “sole source” for literature and art, and the “songs sung by the masses” the true source for professional musicians. The distance from the false to the true, from the old to the new, was at once as small and as vast as the distance from the “garrets of Shanghai” to the “revolutionary base areas” that so many of the listeners had just traveled. In the months following the talk, intellectuals were divided up into small groups, where they were compelled to criticize themselves and their shortcomings, to learn to understand the past in “Maoist” terms, and to follow the correct lines in the future. Those who balked were punished. Random violence became common, and the “struggles” became deadly for many in what was euphemistically known as the “rescue campaign,” supervised by Mao’s growing teams of security personnel.

Mao stayed in Yan‘an throughout the war, where he was sheltered from the direct force of the fighting. In the border region to the east, terrible conflicts raged, with whole swaths of countryside laid waste by the Japanese. The Communists there had to wage a constant struggle to protect the recruited peasantry from terrible reprisals. Other battles raged in the Yangtze valley, where the Communist armies were almost eliminated, not by the Japanese but by the Guomindang. When American advisory groups came to Yan’an and began to explore the possibilities of using the Communists more systematically against the Japanese, Mao was able to charm a new constituency with his earthy ways and his easy laugh. He also knew how to lobby skillfully for supplies and aid, posing his “democratic” peasant society against the landlord tyrannies of Chongqing. And always his reach and his mandate spread.

By 1943 there was emerging, in Yan‘an, what can for the first time be called a “cult” of Mao. It was in May that year that Mao received two new titles that no one had held before: he was to be “chairman” of the Communist Central Committee, and chairman of the Politburo at the same time. China had now, in Mao, a true leader who “has stood the test as a strong and great revolutionary,” announced the secretary-general of the Party. It could be seen that Mao stood “as the center” of all revolutionary history. In future, the people of China “should arm themselves with Comrade Mao Zedong’s thought, and use Comrade Mao Zedong’s system to liquidate [erroneous] thought in the Party.” Every Party leader followed with similar praise—it was as if all moderating voices had been stilled. The man who had most opposed Mao at Zunyi now called him “the helmsman of the Chinese revolution.” The new unanimity was matched by a concerted verbal assault on Chiang Kai-shek and any pretensions he might have to speak for China’s people, a critique guided and often written by Chen Boda. In late 1943, an inner core of Mao’s senior colleagues began to rewrite Chinese Party history so that Mao would be forever at the center. One by one the other rivals of the present and the past were denigrated, their “incorrect lines” exposed, and Mao’s own wisdom pushed ever further back in time.

The long-delayed Seventh Party Congress met at last in Yan‘an, from late April to mid-June 1945, as the war was moving to its close. Mao made a speech in which he spoke of the future for China, though he did also express regret for the violence to individual Party members, many of whom had been killed or driven to suicide. But his triumph was acknowledged in the new preamble to the Constitution of the Communist Party, presented at the congress. Totally new in all its senses and its language, it stated with absolute directness: “The Chinese Communist Party takes Mao Zedong’s thought—the thought that unites Marxist-Leninist theory and the practice of the Chinese revolution—as the guide for all its work, and opposes all dogmatic or empiricist deviations.” Marxism was now sinified: the leader was the sage.

IN THE MIDSUMMER OF 1945, no one in China guessed that the war with Japan was just about to end. Because security in Chongqing was so poor, and the Communists were politically suspect, the Chinese were not told about the American development of the atomic bomb. Besides which, even the Americans could not predict the precise effect of the atomic bombs they were to drop on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on the sixth and ninth of August, nor how soon after that the Japanese emperor would order his armies to lay down their arms, as he did on the fourteenth. Nationalists and Communists had contingency plans, of course: the Nationalists planned for a slow military advance to the east coast around Canton, spearheaded by their best American-trained divisions, to be followed by a drive north up to Shanghai and Nanjing (roughly parallel to the military advances of 1926 and 1927 in the first United Front); the Communists planned to deepen the extent of their sprawling base areas in the north, speed up land redistribution and mass mobilization, strengthen the Party organizations in the northern provinces of Shandong and Hebei, and endeavor to set up effective underground organizations in the major cities. Again, neither side could guess that Manchuria—where both Nationalists and Communists had weak or nonexistent military and political presences—would turn out to be the key to ultimate victory. When the Soviet Russian armies invaded Manchukuo on August 8, it was in response to promises they had made to Churchill and Roosevelt at Yalta that they would enter the China theater war three months after Germany’s surrender—which had happened on May 8, 1945. But neither Yan‘an nor Chongqing had been informed of the Yalta agreements, again for reasons of long-term strategic security.

It was a chance of geography as much as anything else that helped the Communists at this stage. From their Yan‘an base, their Shanxi-Chahar-Hebei border region, and their strong guerrilla units based in Shandong province, they could move troops into Manchuria far faster than the Nationalists could, and Mao decided to take the gamble and attempt to occupy the huge region, so rich in mineral and forestry resources, though sparsely inhabited compared with the heartland of China proper. And as soon as the Communists learned of the Japanese surrender, they began to do so. They were aided considerably by the Soviet armed forces, who allowed the Chinese to take over the gigantic Japanese stockpiles of arms and ammunition in the key railroad city of Kalgan, just south of the Great Wall in Chahar. In several Inner Mongolian cities the Soviet troops first subdued and disarmed the Japanese, and then retreated, allowing the Chinese to come in unopposed. In some areas the Russians gave Japanese arms and vehicles directly to the Chinese, and in at least one case, the Russians and Chinese fought side by side to seize a key border city. Russian logistical help was equally great, with as many as 100,000 Chinese Communist troops and 50,000 political workers being ferried into southern Manchuria from Shandong and northern Jiangsu provinces, and these forces were able to seize and hold several major cities.

From figures released later in Moscow it is possible to calculate the arms the Russians made available to the Communists at this time, and they totaled around 740,000 rifles, 18,000 machine guns, 800 aircraft, and 4,000 artillery pieces. This was roughly the same as the entire total that the Nationalist armies were able to seize from the Japanese inside China proper. The Soviet help took place, also, in the face of a massive air- and sea-lift of Nationalist troops to the north by the United States, which was anxious to prevent a Communist resurgence. Two divisions of U.S. Marines, totaling 53,000 men in all, were deployed on the north China coast by the end of September 1945, and in addition Japanese troops were left armed and in position at many points to prevent Communist takeovers.

Mao showed considerable personal courage, and a certain willingness to negotiate, by agreeing to accompany the American ambassador, Patrick Hurley, on a trip to Chongqing in late August, where he stayed until October. This must have been Mao’s first sight of Chiang Kai-shek since 1926 in Canton, on the eve of the northern expedition. The two men agreed to form a unified national army, though the date was left unspecified, and Mao agreed to pull any remaining Communist forces back from south China. The two sides also moved to reconvene the joint deliberative body known as the “Political Consultative Conference,” so as to discuss China’s long-range future.