Mao Zedong (22 page)

It had been an extraordinary shift in policy by Mao, to upend the strident attacks on United States imperialism that had flooded China’s airwaves and newspapers for decades, and it is proof of the extraordinary power that Mao knew he had over his own people. But it is one of the last times we can see that power being utilized to the full.

The last important example was Mao’s 1973 decision to allow the purged Deng Xiaoping to return to power. Deng had been ousted in the early years of the Cultural Revolution, but had never been mistreated as savagely as Liu Shaoqi or Peng Dehuai, and had spent the years of his disgrace living in Jiangxi and working—at least some of the time—in a tractor plant. Mao had even said that “if Lin Biao’s health should fail him, I will let Xiaoping come back.” Deng had laid the groundwork for his return by writing a correctly abject self-criticism, in which he admitted all the charges against him and announced that he would “sincerely and without any reservations accept the denunciations and accusations directed at me by the Party and the revolutionary masses.” Deng expressed a willingness to die for his misdeeds, but added that his greatest hope would be to have “a trivial task of some sort that will provide me with an opportunity to make up for my past mistakes and to turn over a new leaf.” Mao’s 1973 order that Deng Xioaping be recalled for active duty in Beijing deepened the rift—already long-standing—between Mao and his wife, Jiang Qing, for she and Deng loathed each other. By 1973 Mao was open about his dislike and distrust of Jiang Qing, and it is possible that Mao’s recall of Deng was done partly to infuriate her. Her attempt to stall Deng’s return could have been the trigger for a harsh letter Mao wrote her in 1974, which contained the sentences: “It would be better for us not to see each other. For years I have advised you about many things, but you have ignored most of it. So what use is there for us to see each other?”

Though Mao’s health had improved during 1973, and he seemed alert and even spritely at times, the debilitating symptoms that the Americans had noticed in 1972 were confirmed n July 1974 by medical tests that showed Mao had amyotro phic lateral sclerosis, the motor-neuron condition known as “Lou Gehrig’s disease.” By this time he was having great trouble reading, and sometimes eating and talking, since he could not fully close his mouth. Also, the muscles on the right side of his body began to atrophy. That fall and winter, Mao took extended trips in his special train, against his doctors’ objections: one to Wuhan and one to Changsha, scene of so many of his youthful revolutionary activities. There he tried for a last time to swim, but it turned out to be impossible. He took mainly liquid food and spent much of the time lying in bed on his left side. Yet he still followed political events enough to stop a new attempt to prevent Deng’s rise, for he knew that Zhou Enlai was dying of cancer and Deng would be the only major check to Jiang Qing and her inner circle. And Mao was able to sustain his end of the conversation when Kissinger returned to China with President Gerald Ford in 1975, even though Mao’s words were mumbled and indistinct, and he often wrote out his responses on a pad of paper held by his nurse.

But in the main, Mao was restricted to following the political dramas through intermediaries. One of his contacts with the Politburo was his nephew Mao Yuanxin, whom Mao trusted, even though the young man was close to Jiang Qing. For those seeking to communicate with Mao himself, the main route was now through his female confidant and attendant Zhang Yufeng, who could transform his murmured sounds into intelligible words for others, and was the one who read many of the policy documents aloud to him. Fifty years younger than Mao, Zhang had been born in Manchuria in 1944 while it was still the puppet Japanese state of Manchukuo, and after finishing high school she got a job in 1960 serving on the trains used by senior cadres and foreign dignitaries. In 1962 she was assigned to Mao’s private train, and by the end of that year, on a journey to Changsha, she became one of the young women who regularly joined Mao for dance parties. Although she had married a worker in the railway bureau in 1967, and bore him a daughter, Zhang Yufeng began to accompany Mao on all his long trips, including a three-month journey along the Yangtze in 1969. The following year she joined him as a personal attendant in his home in Zhongnanhai. They separated for a while, after an argument, but she was ordered to return. Thereafter she became Mao’s secretary and nurse, and as his sight failed, she read key documents to him. From 1972 onward, the two of them regularly ate together, and she began to control access to Mao by deciding how and when his health made it suitable for visitors to be with him. She had become Mao’s main conduit to the outside world.

A cataract operation in the summer of 1975 and the fitting of special glasses gave Mao back some reading ability, and he was even able to watch movies with Zhang Yufeng in his study. Invited members of his staff were allowed to watch the same movies in a special screening room nearby. But Mao sometimes needed oxygen to breathe, and his right side was virtually paralyzed. His doctors decided, over his objections, to give him amino acids intravenously. When Zhou Enlai was dying of cancer in the hospital in January 1976, Mao was considered too ill to visit him. Through his nephew Mao Yuanxin, Mao did receive news of the great crowds that assembled to mourn the dead premier in Tiananmen Square on the tomb-sweeping day of April 5. Through the same source he heard of the swift and violent military and police suppression of the demonstration. Though Mao had previously backed Deng Xiaoping’s return to power, he appears to have agreed with the argument made by some senior colleagues that Deng Xiaoping’s scheming lay behind the demonstrations, and that Deng should be again dismissed. It seems to have been Mao’s personal decision to appoint Hua Guofeng, formerly the Party secretary in Hunan province, to be the new premier, and Party first vice chairman. This remarkable promotion transformed the previously almost unknown Hua into Mao’s probable successor. Though an odd and risky decision, the appointment of Hua was a deliberate compromise, to balance off Deng Xiaoping supporters against those of Jiang Qing.

Mao suffered a major heart attack on May 11, 1976, and the Politburo decided—without informing him—that they would choose on a case-by-case basis whether to share their deliberations with him. At the same time they began to hold some of their meetings in the swimming-pool area next to Mao’s rooms, so they could be present swiftly in any emergency. On June 26, Mao had a second heart attack. A third came on September 2, more serious than the previous two, leaving him weakened and comatose. On September 8, he was alert enough to spend some short periods reading reports, but he dozed off repeatedly. Around 11:15
_P
.
_M
., he drifted into a coma. Ten minutes after midnight, on September 9, 1976, Mao died in the presence of the ranking members of the Politburo, who had been summoned to his room, and his attendant physicians.

The nearest thing that we have to Mao’s thoughts about his approaching death comes from notes of a meeting he held, with several members of the Politburo, in Zhongnanhai on June 15, shortly before his second heart attack. Mao told his colleagues that reaching the age of seventy was unusual, and passing eighty inevitably made one think about funeral arrangements. It was therefore time to implement the old Chinese saying that, when appropriate, one should “seal the coffin and pass the final verdict.” Mao had done two things that mattered, he said. He had battled Chiang Kai-shek for years and finally chased him off to “that little island” of Taiwan. And in the long war of resistance he had “asked the Japanese to return to their ancestral home” and had fought his way into the Forbidden City. Few people would argue that those were achievements. But what about the Cultural Revolution, where he had few supporters and “quite a few opponents”? That revolution remained unfinished, said Mao, and all he could do was pass the task on to the next generation. If he could not pass it on peacefully, then he would have to pass it on in turmoil. “What will happen to the next generation if it all fails?” he asked. “There may be a foul wind and a rain of blood. How will you cope? Heaven only knows!”

NOTES

The most important Western guide to the life and works of Mao Zedong is Stuart Schram, whose
The Political Thought of Mao Tsetung
was published in 1963 (Paris and New York), and was soon followed by his closely researched biography,
Mao Tse-tung,
(New York, 1966). Over the last few years, Schram has been occupied with an immense project to assemble and translate all the works that can reasonably and reliably be attributed to Mao, under the general title
Mao’s Road to Power: Revolutionary
Writings, 1912- 1949. To date, four volumes have appeared, all published by M. E. Sharpe, Armonk, N.Y.: vol. 1, The Pre-Marxist Period, 1912-1920 (1992); vol. 2,
National Revolution and Social Revolution, December
1920-June 1927 (1994); vol. 3,
From the Jinggangshan
to
the Establishment of the Jiangxi
Soviets,
July 1927-December
1930 (1995); and vol. 4, The
Rise and Fall of the Chinese Soviet Republic,
1931-1934
(1997). Many intriguing details, though one needs to sift through them with care, were provided by Mao himself in his celebrated 1936 interview with Edgar Snow, conducted after the Long March and published by Snow to great acclaim as Red
Star Over China
(New York, 1938). Another useful earlier study was Jerome Ch‘en, Mao
and the Chinese Revolution
(Oxford, 1965). A lively biography, based on wide reading but also with much reconstructed dialogue, is Ross Terrill, Mao: A
Biography
(New York, 1980, and subsequent revisions). In 1993 a group of scholars in China, under the general editor Pang Xianzhi, compiled a detailed chronological biography of Mao, Mao Zedong
nianpu,
1893-1949, 3 vols. (Beijing, 1993). Another immensely useful translation containing many of Mao’s personal letters, is Michael Y. M. Kau and John K. Leung, eds., The Writings
of Mao
Zedong,
1949-1976,
of which two volumes have appeared to date: vol.1, September
1949-December
1955 (Armonk, N.Y., 1986), and vol. 2, January
1956-December
1957 (Armonk, N.Y., 1992). Scores of volumes of reminiscences and anecdotes about Mao, and of memoirs by those who worked for him, have been appearing in China in recent years. Some are referred to below.

Mao’s account of his childhood to Snow in
Red Star Over China,
especially pp. 122-34, remains a basic source. Other invaluable backup sources from Mao’s early letters and writings are in Stuart Schram, Mao’s Road to Power, vol. 1,
The Pre-Marxist
Period, 1912-1920. Here, I draw especially on pp. 59-65 for two 1915 letters by Mao to friends, and for a reminiscence from his teacher, and on pp. 419-20 for Mao’s euology at his mother’s funeral. Details on the Luo family and Mao’s first wife are given by Xiao Feng, in Mao Zedong zhimi (Beijing, 1992), pp. 128-29. On the 1911 revolution and the events in Hunan, admirable background books are Mary C. Wright,
China in Revolution: The First Phase
(New Haven, 1968), and Joseph Esherick,
Reform and Revolution in China: The 1911 Revolution in Hunan and Hubei
(Berkeley, 1976), especially pp. 155-58 and 204-10 on Jiao and Chen.

On Mao’s formative school years, the information Mao gave to Snow in
Red Star Over China,
especially on pp. 139-50, can now be supplemented with a mass of newly available Chinese material, translated in Schram,
Mao’s Road to Power.
These include Mao’s earliest surviving schoolboy essay on Lord Shang (vol. 1, pp. 5-6), his 1913 reading notes on classical Chinese texts (vol. 1, pp. 40-43), a friend’s account of their outings and swims (vol. 1, pp. 137-40), and the complete run of Paulsen study notes (vol. 1, pp. 175-310). The Hunan study-group meetings and Ms. Tao’s comments are in Schram, vol. 2, especially pp. 18-19, 25, and 80-85.

A detailed study of Hunan in this period of Mao’s life is Angus W. McDonald,
The Urban Origins of Rural Revolution: Elites and the Masses in Hunan Province, China,
1911-1927 (Berkeley, 1978). The best study about “The May Fourth Movement” is still Chow Tse-tsung,
The May Fourth Movement, Intellectual Revolution in Modern China,
(Cambridge, Mass., 1960). Schram, Mao’s Road to
Power,
vol. 1, has key material on Mao’s mother’s illness (p. 317), the July 1919 manifesto (pp. 319-20), the critique of General Zhang (pp. 476-86), Mao’s Russian- and English-language forays (p. 518), and the Cultural Book Society (pp. 534-35). Schram, ibid., vol. 2, pp. 56-58, has the bookshop investors’ list. In Snow, Red Star Over China, the main details for Mao at this stage of his life are on pp. 148-51. Andrew Nathan,
Peking Politics,
1918- 1923:
Factionalism and the Failure of Constitutionalism
(New York, 1976), bravely tackles the tangled politics of the capital at this time.

For the detailed background history of the early Communist Party, an essential work is Tony Saich,
The Rise to Power of the Chinese Communist Party
(Armonk, N.Y., 1996), which gives the full texts of the documents mentioned here, and careful background on the First Congress. The same author’s
The Origins of the First United Front in China: The Role of Sneevliet
(alias Maring), 2 vols. (Lei den, 1991), gives meticulous details on the early Comintern in China. About the Chinese in France, many of them Mao’s friends from Changsha, the finest source is Marilyn A. Levine,
The Found
Generation: Chinese Communists in Europe During the Twenties (Seattle, 1993). Mao’s early strike activities are well covered in Lynda Shaffer, Mao and the Workers: The Hunan Labor Movement, 1920-1923 (Armonk, N.Y., 1982). For the details from Mao’s correspondence, see Schram, Mao’s Road to Power, vol.1, pp. 546-47, on the references to Lenin, and pp. 608-9 for the references to marriage and rape. The bookshop expansion is in ibid., vol. 2, pp. 46-53; the letters to France on Marxism are in vol. 2, pp. 7-8; the New People’s Study Society is explored in vol. 2, pp. 28-32 and pp. 68-70; and the Confucian Academy as a front in vol. 2, pp. 89-96.