PART V Three Women, Three Destinies (1949–2003)
19 ‘We must crush warm-feeling-ism': Being Mao's Vice Chairman
Days before the Communists seized Shanghai in May 1949, May-ling, in America at the time, sent Red Sister a letter that was full of concern. Ching-ling was constantly in her thoughts, she said; she so hoped that her sister would be safe and everything would go well. Little Sister was most anxious that she could not do much to help as the ocean now separated them; but please could Ching-ling write and tell her how she was. At this time May-ling was on the Communists' list of ‘war criminals', together with her husband, and she considerately avoided sending the letter just in her name. It was co-signed with brother T.L., whose daughter had received some books from Ching-ling.
Red Sister did not reply. Nor did she answer any of Ei-ling's letters. In the lead-up to the Communist takeover, while her exiled sisters wrote with constant expressions of love and affection, she sent not a word of good wishes to them. She was unmoved – or perhaps even offended, for they seemed to assume that her chosen future was one of hardship and trouble. Ever since she decided to throw in her lot with the Reds, Ching-ling had steeled herself to cut her sisters out of her life. Her earlier fond and intimate gestures towards them were more a mechanism to protect herself against possible harm from Chiang Kai-shek than a reflection of her deep feelings. She had long resolved to live without the family into which she was born.
Her adopted family were her comrades and close friends. With some of them she celebrated the Communist takeover of her city. ‘The day we have been fighting for has at last come!' They gathered in her house and told each other. Smiling excitedly, Ching-ling pushed a red rose into a visitor's buttonhole.
Mao chose Beijing to be his capital, and wrote to urge her to come and join his government. The language the Chairman used was courteous and respectful: please could Mme Sun come and ‘guide us on how to build a new China'.
Ching-ling thanked Mao profusely, but she declined to go to Beijing. She said she was suffering from high blood pressure and other ailments and needed treatment in Shanghai. The new prime minister, Zhou En-lai, tried to persuade her, so did some old friends. She politely said no to them all.
She was not playing hard to get. Apart from the fact that Shanghai was where she wanted to live, she wisely decided it was best to stay away from the centre of power, where she might be sucked into Party intrigues. Ching-ling had no illusions about the cruelty of her chosen system. She had witnessed Stalin's bloody power games first-hand and knew about Mao's brutal purges (in which even Zhou En-lai had been a victim and had had to grovel). At times, the future seems to have scared her, and she briefly contemplated going to live in Russia, ‘for medical treatment'. What she really wanted was just to run her small operation, now renamed China Welfare, in the company of her intimate friends in her home city.
Mao dispatched Zhou's wife, who knew Ching-ling well, to Shanghai to reissue the invitation in person. To keep saying no would be a snub. Ching-ling accepted the invitation from Mrs Zhou. Meanwhile, Zhou made arrangements for her future life with his trademark attention to detail. He inspected the house that had been readied for her, and informed her that it was more spacious than her residences in Chongqing and Shanghai and that it had two floors, which was rare for Beijing, where most houses were single-storey. The interior had been decorated under the supervision of her old friends, the prime minister added, not forgetting to suggest that she bring her own cook. Ching-ling had made some complaints, and they were all resolved to her satisfaction. An old servant of Sun Yat-sen's who had been arrested was released. The house of her favourite (and apolitical) brother, T.A., had been confiscated (like all her family's properties), and was given back to her for safekeeping on his behalf.
In late August, Ching-ling set off for Beijing. During the two-day train journey, she gazed out of the window at the changing landscape, of fields and villages and towns, from the south to the north, and she thought ‘how our homeland could become prosperous. We have all the conditions … . We have great resources … no success is beyond our capacity … .'
Mao came to the railway station to meet her. Children presented her with flowers – Soviet-style. At the age of fifty-six (eleven months older than Mao), Red Sister became the vice chairman of Mao's government. When Mao proclaimed the People's Republic on 1 October 1949, she walked right behind him onto Tiananmen Gate. While her sisters were living as exiles, she was at the pinnacle of her life.
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That life was singularly privileged. Red Sister had enviable houses in both Beijing and Shanghai. The one in Shanghai, confiscated from a prominent banker, was a European-style villa with a large well-groomed lawn lined with rare trees and exotic flowers. Her successive Beijing houses were even more magnificent. The final one was a palatial mansion that had belonged to a Manchu prince, and Pu Yi, the last emperor, had been born there. Among the favoured possessions of the royal household was a gnarled 140-year-old pomegranate tree which still bore several fruits a year. As her late husband was presented as the selfless leader of a great revolution that had overthrown the imperial family, the irony that she should move into this palace did not escape the many sceptics and idealists. Ching-ling felt uneasy and attempted a form of apology to friends: ‘I am really getting royal treatment, altho' am unhappy because others far more deserving [her emphasis] live in simple little houses.' Her houses were well staffed, and the servants addressed her in the pre-Communist style: Taitai (‘Ma'am').
She was not a member of the CCP, strictly speaking. In the 1930s she had enlisted in the Comintern, which was directly under Moscow authority; but Moscow had then decided that she should stay outside the organisation as a secret member. After the Comintern was dissolved in 1943, Red Sister had been treating the CCP, together with Moscow, as her ‘Organisation', even though formally she was not a member. In Communist China, she was not involved in policymaking, which suited her well. Having no personal political ambition and accepting her own limitations, she was satisfied just to be in charge of her own small outfit, China Welfare, now housed in her old family home, which she donated to the Communists, together with all her family's properties. China Welfare was allowed to run a hospital for women and children, a kindergarten and a Soviet-style ‘youth palace'. There was a playhouse for children. But it had to cease performing a major function: famine relief. Officially, there was no such thing as famine in Communist China. When Voice of America reported that she had been helping famine victims, she wrote to Zhou En-lai at once and offered to denounce this ‘shameless falsification of facts' publicly.
She published an English-language magazine, China Reconstructs, but Party censors carefully screened every issue. The Party inserted new men into China Welfare, while thoroughly vetting its old staff. Some close friends found the changes unbearable and left. But Ching-ling accepted them without demur. She adjusted quickly.
The adjustment included being surrounded by bodyguards who had been Communist soldiers. They often came from poor peasant families, and found much to disapprove of in her lifestyle. And they would make blunt comments to her in a way her old servants would not. The Communists made a particular thing about ‘equality' with the staff, making this a key part of its claim to be ‘democratic'. One day in 1951 she went to the East German embassy for a reception. Afterwards, some of her bodyguards criticised the women's long evening dresses for being wasteful: ‘All that good silk and textile unused!' Ching-ling spent a lot of time explaining to them that fashion and adornment were important in people's lives. Whether this convinced the young men or not she did not know.
A Christmas party was no longer a natural thing. When she invited her friends for Christmas Eve in 1951, she had to tell them to keep quiet and not to tell anyone it was a party. Celebration would cause ‘misunderstanding'. In later years, she celebrated New Year's Eve instead, although with a Christmas tree.
She learned to be cautious about things she did not used to have to worry about. When she forwarded a letter from her old American friend Edgar Snow to Mao at Snow's request, she felt it necessary to stress that ‘I do not know whether his recent thoughts are still correct, as I have not read his works for a long time.' Writing to friends, she often asked them to ‘burn' or ‘destroy' the letters after reading.
In 1951–2, Mao launched a campaign called ‘the Three Antis' (anti-corruption, waste and bureaucracy), targeting officials who handled money. People in China Welfare were told to denounce others as well as come clean themselves. Ching-ling found herself on the receiving end of unsavoury accusations. One referred to a building contractor who was a relative of hers, who had built and maintained houses for her family and friends, including the one that she donated to China Welfare. Just before Chiang Kai-shek lost Shanghai, there had been speculation that Chiang might kidnap Mme Sun and take her to Taiwan. This relative had stayed at Ching-ling's house and acted like a bodyguard for her. She felt grateful and close to him and every now and then they exchanged presents. Now rumours suggested that she was receiving bribes from him. She had to go through the indignity of arguing that the presents they had given each other were no more than cakes and biscuits, and that if his gifts were costly, such as two bottles of red wine, she would give him far more expensive gifts in return. She vowed that she could produce witnesses to back her up, and even tried to dissociate from him, demanding that he be subject to a thorough investigation and punished if found to be corrupt.
As more political campaigns followed and one friend after another got into trouble, Ching-ling ruminated that she had always been inclined to trust people rather than suspect them, and that this was now a quasi-crime: ‘the right-wing way of thinking'.
Nevertheless, in those initial years, Red Sister's equilibrium remained more or less intact. She went on giving parties for her core circle of friends, and they danced and listened to old Western gramophone records. Mao designated Zhou En-lai, the most urbane and charismatic face of the rigid regime, to keep in contact with her. Other high officials she dealt with, especially in Shanghai, were old friends who had been underground Communists. They formed a pleasant cocoon around her. All manner of honours were showered on her, not least the much trumpeted Stalin Peace Prize given by the Kremlin. Two renowned writers, Ilya Ehrenburg from the Soviet Union and Pablo Neruda of Chile, flew to Beijing to make the presentation. There were new pleasures. She travelled to many countries, feted as the gracious and illustrious representative of China. Life for Ching-ling was not at all bad, and she was reasonably contented.
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In 1956, Red Sister had her first – and quite possibly the last – direct confrontation with the Party. That year, a new executive committee was imposed on China Welfare, headed by the Party secretary of Shanghai, Ke Qing-shi, one of Mao's favourite cronies. Although Ching-ling was still the ‘chair', it was obvious that this was no more than an honorific title. She had lost her ‘baby' altogether, and was deeply upset. In private letters, she vented her vexation, referring to the Party as ‘they': ‘I was never consulted on anything & in fact … I had no idea they've decided to … '
In November she exploded. That month was the ninetieth anniversary of Sun Yat-sen's birth, and Beijing was planning a big commemoration. Ching-ling wrote articles about Sun for the People's Daily, the Party's mouthpiece. She portrayed Sun as China's Lenin, saying that the CCP ‘took over his mission' after he died.
As before, Ching-ling sent her draft to Beijing for approval. Normally, she communicated with Zhou En-lai, whom she respected. This time, Zhou was frantically preoccupied with something more urgent. The Communist world was in upheaval. The Hungarian Uprising was breaking out in Europe, following protests in Poland, and Mao was rattled. At the same time, he was trying to take advantage of the crisis and supplant Nikita Khrushchev as the leader of the Communist camp. (Stalin had died in 1953.) How to handle the situation consumed all the time and energy of Mao and his lieutenants. For days and nights, they were immersed in meetings.
Zhou En-lai had no time to read Ching-ling's articles, and the job fell on more junior censors. Without Zhou's tact, the officials asked Ching-ling straightforwardly to make changes and emphasise the guiding role of the CCP in Sun's career. Ching-ling was told that she should say: ‘Dr Sun's anti-imperialist work, etc. developed as an outcome of seeing Li Ta-chao and Chiu Chu-pak [two early CCP leaders].' Ching-ling was incensed. She wrote to a friend on 8 November that Sun had had his revolutionary ideas ‘early in life … before he met any CP'; ‘I am not belittling their contributions, only as we value truth and facts, we must record them truthfully even if the facts are not what some people wished to see.' As was by now her habit, she asked the recipient, ‘Please kindly destroy this note.'
She insisted on her version, and the lesser censors, having no authority to overrule her, let her articles be published as written. When they read her words, the Party leaders were annoyed and decided to teach her a lesson. On 11 November, when the commemoration of Sun was held – a grand affair attended by Mao himself, together with the whole of the CCP leadership – Sun's widow was nowhere to be seen.
Meanwhile, a rumour was flying around that Ching-ling was having an ‘illicit affair' with her chief bodyguard and could no longer be regarded as Mme Sun. A cousin of hers heard the rumour and wrote to tell her. Ching-ling was beside herself with rage and replied that if anyone said this again, ‘take him to the police!' The cousin asked why then did she not attend the commemoration. She had to say that she absented herself because she was worried she might not be able to control her grief and might lose her composure, which would not look good. The truth was that she was not invited, or even told about the occasion.
Ching-ling did cherish – and show – an uncommon fondness for her chief bodyguard, Sui Xue-fang. Sui was a handsome young man, a good shot, a skilled driver, a talented photographer and a gifted dancer. At Ching-ling's parties, when she occasionally danced, he was her partner. More often they played chess and billiards together. Ching-ling, who was generally kind and considerate to her staff,*1 perhaps treated Sui like the son she could never have. In fact, she was also affectionate to Sui's deputy, Jin Shan-wang, whom she fondly nicknamed ‘Cannon'. She taught Jin how to play the piano, and even deputised him to make informal speeches on her behalf. The two young men competed for her affection, sometimes in a petulant and wilful way. And she would act vivaciously and mischievously like a younger woman. The atmosphere in Ching-ling's household took on the semblance of a family, with affection and laughter, as well as sulks and rows.
Gossip was inevitable, but in this case, most unusually, it spread to the general public. The private lives of the country's leaders were normally kept under the thickest blanket of secrecy. Other top officials might have affairs but none ever reached the ears of anyone outside their guarded elite compounds. Ching-ling alone was widely talked about.
The rumour – and being excluded from the commemoration of Sun Yat-sen – alarmed Ching-ling. She realised that she could very well be deprived of the title of Mme Sun that was vital for her survival. There had been rumours like this before, under Chiang Kai-shek; but then she could always speak out and refute them. Some newspaper would publish her story, or else she could have it printed as leaflets and thrown from the rooftops of Shanghai's high-rises. Now she no longer had any outlet for her voice – even if she was the vice chairman of the country. She had no way to defend herself in public and was completely at the mercy of the Party. If the Party said she was no longer Mme Sun, she would no longer be Mme Sun – even if she remained his faithful widow.
This frightening realisation forced the headstrong Ching-ling to yield. She found a way to demonstrate her submission. In April 1957, Mao's number two, President Liu Shao-qi, was in Shanghai and visited Ching-ling with his wife. The intelligent and elegant Mrs Liu came from an eminent old family and had graduated in physics from the Catholic University in Beijing in the pre-Communist days. Ching-ling got on well with the couple. She saw the Lius' visit as a signal that the Party wanted to make up with her, and she seized on the opportunity. She told Liu that she wished to join the CCP. Mrs Liu noted the earnestness with which she made the application. Her husband was delighted but, weighing every word, he replied that he would report to Mao as this was ‘a very big thing'. Liu soon returned to Shanghai with Zhou En-lai, the number three, and told Ching-ling that the CCP felt she could help their common cause more effectively by staying outside the Party. The Party would inform her of all major issues and she would participate in decision-making. Ching-ling nodded; tears came to her eyes and she seemed very emotional.
Indeed, Mao and the leadership had no wish to alienate Ching-ling. Mao himself had a rather good personal relationship with her, calling her ‘Dear Elder Sister' and writing to her in a playful manner. Politically, she was priceless. China's non-Communist neighbours feared Red China, and Ching-ling could help the CCP win them over. President Sukarno of Indonesia, whom Mao particularly wanted to cultivate, was attracted by the good-looking and graceful Ching-ling and sang her praises – literally, in a song dedicated to her and sung by himself. Mao made a point of telling Red Sister that he was very pleased with the impact she made on Sukarno.
Ching-ling was even more valuable in Beijing's design to take Taiwan. US president Harry S. Truman had initially distanced himself from the Chiang regime; but after Mao backed North Korea to invade the South in June 1950, starting the Korean War, he dispatched the US Seventh Fleet to the Taiwan Strait to protect the island from any possible invasion. Mao's army was unable to conquer Taiwan by force. His only option was to lure Taiwan into capitulation. And who had more clout to sway the Nationalists than Mme Sun? Ching-ling dutifully wrote to Ei-ling in New York, urging her to come for a visit ‘at once', before they were both too old. Ei-ling had written Ching-ling several letters in the past few years without any reply. Tactfully, she explained that she had cataracts and was about to have an operation; she promised that once her eyesight recovered, she would come to see her dear sister as soon as possible. And of course she missed Ching-ling all the time and wished they could be together like before. She sent Ching-ling some cashmere garments. But she never went to Communist China.
Mao made another goodwill gesture to Ching-ling, to compensate for her humiliation. He took her as his deputy to Moscow in November 1957 for the celebration of the fortieth anniversary of the October Revolution. Ching-ling, for her part, signed up to the Party line on Sun Yat-sen wholesale before the trip, by writing that Sun had only developed ‘the correct view about the Chinese revolution after he met with the representatives of the CCP'.
Meanwhile, Sui, her chief bodyguard, married a factory worker. Ching-ling gave a dinner to celebrate their wedding and, as the newly-weds were not assigned a flat, offered them rooms in the staff quarters of her Shanghai mansion.
The episode was resolved adroitly on both sides. But the rumour about Ching-ling's relationship with Sui persisted. Like others growing up in China in the 1960s and 70s, I often heard that Ching-ling had secretly married her chief bodyguard, and that ‘Mme Sun Yat-sen' was only a facade, which the Party kept for her to save her face. People believed the rumour. Many still believe it today.
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The upshot of the whole event was that Ching-ling stopped acting independently altogether, and became a pure decoration for the Party, visiting foreign states and entertaining overseas visitors on its behalf. There were no more overt critical remarks, not even in private. In public, she echoed the Party's voice unfailingly. In 1957, during the ‘Anti-Rightist' campaign, hundreds of thousands of educated men and women who had accepted Mao's invitation and spoken up about the country's problems were condemned. (Mao's invitation was bait to lure out potential critics.) Among the victims were many of Ching-ling's old friends and acquaintances who had fought Chiang Kai-shek with her. They lost their jobs and were sent to do manual labour. Some were packed off to the gulag; others driven to suicide. This ruined far more lives than anything Chiang Kai-shek had done. But Red Sister was silent. (That year, she was struggling for her own survival.) Their misfortune did cause her pain, but she battled to harden her feelings. In an article, she quoted a Party slogan to advise her readers and herself, ‘We must crush warm-feeling-ism … '
In 1958, Mao launched the grandiose ‘Great Leap Forward', which in reality was his bid to build a whole range of military industries at breakneck speed. Steel was in demand and Mao, who was completely incompetent about economics, ordered the whole population to make steel. Backyard furnaces sprouted across China, and Ching-ling built her own with members of her staff in her garden. To make room for the monstrosity, she had to have some beautiful old trees cut down. The People's Daily announced that she held down a red-hot lump of steel for young men to hammer. She was unhappy, but did not protest.
The monumental waste of human and natural resources of the Leap played a big part in causing a nationwide famine, which lasted four years, 1958–1961.*2 Some 40 million people perished. Even in Ching-ling's privileged world, people were hungry. At one point, she gave the order to kill a pet goat to supplement her staff's diet. Facing misrule of such unthinkable dimensions, some old Communists rebelled – most noticeably Marshal Peng De-huai, the defence minister. Peng was denounced in July 1959. (He later died in incarceration.) Ching-ling, who had admired the marshal, was shaken. Writing to an old trusted friend, she revealed, ‘I feel very tense and am having nightmares.' The recipient was told to ‘burn the letter after reading'.
It was at this point that Red Sister might have contemplated leaving China, using health problems as a pretext. She had arthritis and had the best possible medical attention; but in a letter to her German friend Anna Wang on 27 July 1959, she claimed to have been informed that only by staying abroad could she get the right treatment and care. This looks like a hint to Anna to try and find a health-related way to get her out. It was more wishful thinking than a serious plan. But just to hint at it to a good friend made her nervous. Her letter was written as if she sensed some Big Brother looking over Anna's shoulder reading it. While making the sounding, she simultaneously retracted it by adding that she was in pain and it was hard for her to travel abroad – and that her problem seemed insurmountable.
Ching-ling's anxiety over her letters did not stop at expecting them to be read; she feared they might be intercepted, and would anxiously wait for her friends' confirmation that the letters had arrived. Only occasionally did she permit herself to voice some complaints. Loudspeakers (a feature of the Great Leap Forward) screaming ecstatically from dawn to nine o'clock at night were driving her crazy; social life of a pleasurable kind had disappeared, replaced by dreary official functions; and there was an acute shortage of daily necessities. To Anna she wrote that mothers with newborn babies had to beg others shame-facedly for used sheets to make nappies, and that she herself had given away her spare sheets and old clothes. She was in urgent need of materials to make shirts and trousers. Could Anna please send her some materials (from East Germany)? Anything would do, as ‘beggars can't be choosers'. Anna also sent her elastics for her underwear, socks, and a mirror with a stand for her dressing table.
Admirers of Mme Sun, wishing desperately to see some defiance from their heroine, often claim that she wrote to protest to the CCP leadership many times. There is no sign of this. But the evidence only shows her endorsing the Party line and pledging to stick to it.
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During the famine, something happened to Ching-ling so she was able to close her eyes and her mind to reality. When the 1950s turned to the 1960s, she informally adopted two daughters, who filled her life.
They were the children of Sui, her chief bodyguard and co-victim of the scandalous rumour. At the end of 1957 his first child, a girl, was born, and he brought her to show Ching-ling – something staff usually did to please her as she loved children. Ching-ling sat the baby on her knees and cradled her in her arms. The infant did not cry, but smiled at her. They looked each other in the eye. The baby then proceeded to relieve herself on Ching-ling's starched gown. Other members of staff, knowing that their mistress was fussy about cleanliness, lurched to try to snatch the baby away. But she stopped them: ‘Let her finish her pee, otherwise it would be bad for her.' The warm pee stirred to life a sensation inside Ching-ling, something she had not experienced and had been thirsting for: being a mother. From now on the dark shadows of politics began to recede, as Ching-ling, in her mid-sixties, became absorbed in motherhood.
*1 I interviewed two key long-term members of Ching-ling's staff: assistant Li Yun and deputy chief bodyguard Jin Shan-wang; both made a point of telling me how kind she was to her staff and asking me to mention this quality of hers. Such a request was unique among the staff of leaders whom I interviewed.
*2 The main cause was that Mao exported food to Russia to pay for military industries – food that the Chinese were dependent on for survival. See Jung Chang and Jon Halliday,?Mao, the Unknown Story, Chapter 40.