11
Mao described himself best. I am heshang dasan, he told Edgar Snow in 1970, literally meaning “a monk holding an umbrella.” But heshang dasan is only the first half of a couplet. The second, more important and meaningful, half, wufa wutian—is always left unsaid. The sound wufa wutian, meaning “without hair, without sky,” is the same as an expression that means “without law, without god”—a man subject to the laws of neither man nor god. Mao's interpreter that day was a young woman without a classical education, and she translated the Chairman's self-description as “a lonely monk walking the world with a leaky umbrella.” Edgar Snow and numerous scholars after him concluded that Mao had a tragic, lonely view of himself. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Mao was trying to tell Edgar Snow that he was a god and law unto himself, wufa wutian.
“I graduated from the University of Outlaws,” Mao used to tell me. He was a consummate rebel. He rebelled against all authority and had to be in control of every situation—from decisions at the highest reaches of political power to the most mundane details of his everyday life. Nothing that occurred within Zhongnanhai happened without his consent, not even the clothing chosen for his wife to wear, and he expected to be consulted on every major decision in China.
It is true, though, that Mao had no friends and was isolated from normal human contact. He spent little time with his wife and even less with his children. So far as I could tell, despite his initial friendliness at first meetings, Mao was devoid of human feeling, incapable of love, friendship, or warmth. Once, in Shanghai, I was sitting next to the Chairman during a performance when a young acrobat—a child—suddenly slipped and was seriously injured. The crowd was aghast, transfixed by the tragedy, and the child's mother was inconsolable. But Mao continued talking and laughing without concern, as though nothing had happened. Nor, to my knowledge, did he ever inquire about the fate of the young performer.
I never understood his apparent callousness. Perhaps he had seen so many people die that he had become inured to human suffering. His first wife, Yang Kaihui, had been executed by the Guomindang, and so had his two brothers. His elder son had been killed during the Korean War. Several other children had been lost during the Long March in the mid-1930s and never found. But I never saw him express any emotion over those losses. The fact that he had lived while so many others died seemed only to confirm his belief that his life would be long. As for those who had died, he would simply say that “lives have to be sacrificed for the cause of revolution.”
Mao was never isolated from information, however. While he spent much of his time in bed and often went days without dressing, he read constantly and was always soliciting reports, both written and oral, from everyone around him, seeking to know all that he could about what was going on everywhere in China and the world, from the petty machinations within his inner court to the remote areas of the country to the far-flung reaches of the globe.
He hated protocol and ritual. Shortly after becoming head of state in 1949, when his chief of protocol, Yu Xinqing, suggested that Mao follow international convention by wearing a dark-colored suit and black leather shoes when receiving foreign ambassadors, Mao rebelled. “We Chinese have our own customs,” he insisted. “Why should we follow others?” He began wearing what we then called the Sun Yat-sen suit and a pair of brown leather shoes. When other leaders imitated their Chairman, the name of the outfit changed. The gray “Mao suit” became the uniform of the day. The protocol chief who had had the temerity to suggest that Mao act in accordance with international protocol was fired. He committed suicide during the Cultural Revolution.
Mao saw schedule and routine, protocol and ritual, as a means to control him, and he refused to be subordinate to them. He reveled in his own unpredictability. When he went for a walk, he would always return by a different route. He never retraced his steps, never took the same path twice. He was always in search of the new, the untested, the untried, both in his private life and in the affairs of the nation.
What fascinated him most and absorbed much of his time was Chinese history. “We have to learn from the past to serve the present,” he often said. He had read the twenty-four dynastic histories—the series of official chronicles compiled by each new dynasty for the one it had just defeated and covering the years from 221 B.C. to A.D. 1644—numerous times.
But Mao's view of history was radically different from that of most Chinese. Morality had no place in Mao's politics. I was shocked to learn not only that Mao identified with China's emperors but that his greatest admiration was reserved for the most ruthless and cruel of our country's tyrants. He was willing to use the most brutal and tyrannical means to reach his goals.
One of the emperors Mao admired most was the Shang dynasty tyrant Emperor Zhou, who had reigned during the eleventh century B.C. The Chinese people have always regarded Emperor Zhou with revulsion, horrified by his cruelty. The lives of his subjects had meant nothing to Emperor Zhou, and he was in the habit of displaying the mutilated bodies of his victims as a warning to potential rebels. His swimming pool was filled with wine.
But Zhou's excesses were nothing compared to his contributions, Mao argued. Emperor Zhou, Mao pointed out, had greatly expanded China's territory, bringing the southeastern coastal area under his control and unifying many divergent tribes under a single rule. He had killed some loyal and able ministers, to be sure—the famous Bigan was the most notable example—but Bigan was killed because he had counseled against further expansion. Yes, Emperor Zhou had lived luxuriously. Of course he had had thousands of concubines, but what emperor had not?
Qin Shihuangdi (221–206 B.C.), the founding emperor of the Qin dynasty and of the imperial China that was to last for nearly two thousand years, the man credited with building the Great Wall, was another of Mao's favorites and the emperor with whom he was most often compared. Qin Shihuangdi, like Emperor Zhou, had expanded China's territory and consolidated a multitude of small countries into a single state. He had introduced unified measures and weights. He had constructed roads. But the Chinese people hated him because he had executed the Confucian scholars and burned the classic books. But Qin Shihuangdi killed the scholars, Mao argued, only because they got in the way of his efforts to unify China and build the Chinese empire. And he only killed 260 Confucian scholars. Where was the great tragedy in that? One ought not, in looking at Qin Shihuangdi, exaggerate the trivial and ignore the great.
Empress Wu Zetian (A.D. 627–705), one of the few women ever to attain supreme power in China, a rank to which Jiang Qing would later aspire, was also a favorite. When Mao asked my opinion of her, I responded honestly. “She was too suspicious, had too many informers, and killed too many people,” I told him.
“Well, Wu Zetian was a social reformer,” Mao said. “She promoted the interests of the medium and small landlords at the expense of the nobility and the big families. If she had not been suspicious, if she had not relied on informers, how could she have discovered the plots the nobles and the big families were hatching to overthrow her? And why shouldn't she execute the people who were plotting to kill her?”
Similarly with Emperor Sui Yangdi (A.D. 604–618). In the eyes of the Chinese people, Sui Yangdi was one of the worst. He liked women and drink and lived in decadent opulence, using beautiful young girls attached to silken cords to pull his pleasure boat upstream. Countless people died when Sui Yangdi ordered the building of the Grand Canal. But Mao ranked Sui Yangdi with the best. China's rivers all flow west to east. The Grand Canal linked the country north to south, serving as a belt to bind the country. Sui Yangdi was also a great unifier.
While Mao was most interested in Chinese history, he had also read something about the great leaders of the West. Napoleon was his favorite. Napoleon's concentrated use of cannon fire, in Mao's view, was a revolution in military strategy. The French general, moreover, combined military expansion with academic study, taking with him to Egypt not only soldiers but also scholars and scientists, who studied the origins of Western civilization. Mao wanted to organize similar studies in China and in 1964 planned a scholarly expedition to the source of the Yellow River, in remote Qinghai province. The Yellow River had long been considered the seat of Chinese civilization, and Mao wanted to trace that civilization back to its roots.
Wang Dongxing was put in charge of logistics and assembled a team of historians, geographers, geologists, water specialists, and engineers. He obtained horses from Inner Mongolia and supplies and equipment from the army, and Mao and I began practicing horseback riding together. Our trip, scheduled to begin on August 10, 1964, was canceled five days before that. Informed that the United States was sending more troops to Vietnam, Mao wanted to stay and monitor the situation, finally deciding to send Chinese soldiers—secretly, and wearing Vietnamese uniforms—to fight the United States.
Not only were Mao's views of history astonishing, they revealed a great deal about him. He used the stories of China's past both to understand and to manipulate the present and saw himself in terms of his own contributions to the country's ongoing history. I am convinced that the intrigues in China's ancient imperial courts were a far more powerful influence on his thought than Marxism-Leninism. True, Mao was a revolutionary. His aim was to transform China, to make it rich and powerful again. But he turned to the past for instruction on how to rule, for guidance on how to manipulate the conspiracies that plagued those in the highest reaches of power.
But Chinese history was little help in the type of transformation Mao sought. Chinese culture, Mao believed, was moribund and stagnant. His goal was to reinvigorate it, and this necessitated learning from abroad, adapting foreign ideas to the Chinese situation. He often said that the result would be “neither Chinese nor foreign, neither a donkey nor a horse, but a mule.”
Socialism was Mao's means to unleash the creative energies of the Chinese people and thus to recapture China's ancient glory. He had to turn to the Soviet Union for inspiration because the Soviet Union was the preeminent socialist state, and from the very establishment of the People's Republic, Mao insisted that China “lean to one side.” The Soviet Union was the model for China's new government to follow. But his vision of socialism was always socialism with Chinese characteristics, socialism for the wealth and glory of China, for the reawakening of Chinese culture, socialism creatively adapted to the Chinese case. Wholesale importation of foreign things without digestion and re-creation is no good, he often said. He never intended the Soviet model to be adapted uncritically, without modification.
Moreover he retained, from the first day I met him, an admiration for the technology, dynamism, and science of the United States and the West. His propensity to “lean to one side” was always tempered by a recognition that the Soviet Union was not the only potential source of lessons in revitalization.
Mao had grandiose ideas of his own place in history. He never had any doubt about his own role. He was the greatest leader, the greatest emperor, of them all—the man who had unified the country and would then transform it, the man who was restoring China to its original greatness. Mao never used the word modernization with me. He was not a modern man. Instead, he talked about making the country rich and returning it to its original glory. A rebel and iconoclast, he would dare to transform China and make it great. He would build his own Great Walls. His own greatness and China's were intertwined. All of China was Mao's to experiment with as he wished. Mao was China, and he was suspicious of anyone who might challenge his place or whose vision differed from his. He was ruthless in disposing of his enemies. The life of his subjects was cheap.
I did not immediately understand, because it was so hard to accept, how willing Mao was to sacrifice his own citizens in order to achieve his goals. I had known as early as October 1954, from a meeting with India's prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, that Mao considered the atom bomb a “paper tiger” and that he was willing that China lose millions of people in order to emerge victorious against the so-called imperialists. “The atom bomb is nothing to be afraid of,” Mao told Nehru. “China has many people. They cannot be bombed out of existence. If someone else can drop an atomic bomb, I can too. The deaths of ten or twenty million people is nothing to be afraid of.” Nehru was shocked.
In 1957, in a speech in Moscow, Mao said he was willing to lose 300 million people—half of China's population. Even if China lost half its population, Mao said, the country would suffer no great loss. We could produce more people.
It was not until the Great Leap Forward, when millions of Chinese began dying during the famine, that I became fully aware of how much Mao resembled the ruthless emperors he so admired. Mao knew that people were dying by the millions. He did not care.
During our early, shocking conversations about Chinese history, the lessons I drew were more immediate and personal. Mao's view of history held lessons for me as well. Mao was the center around which everyone else revolved. His will reigned supreme.
Loyalty, rather than principle, was the paramount virtue. From his subordinates—his wife and female companions, his household staff, the political leaders with whom he ostensibly shared power—he demanded total and indivisible loyalty.
That loyalty was based less on trust than on dependence. Incapable himself of affection for others, Mao expected no such feelings toward him. Repeatedly in my years with Mao I watched him win loyalty from others in the same way he had won it from me.
He would begin by charming people, winning their trust, getting them to open up, to confess their faults—just as Big Beard Wang confessed that he had plotted to murder Mao and Xu Shiyou admitted that he had once been loyal to Zhang Guotao and I had told him about my problematic bourgeois past. Mao would then forgive them, save them, and make them feel safe. Thus redeemed, they became loyal.
His loyalists, in turn, would become dependent on him, and the longer they depended on him, the more they had to depend on him, the more impossible life outside his circle became. From the outside looking in, it was inconceivable that anyone serving the Chairman would want to leave, so greatly was Mao worshiped, so glorious was working for him considered to be. Only those who were not absolutely loyal to Mao could want to leave his circle; only those who were not loyal would be expelled. No one anywhere in China would dare shelter anyone suspected of being less than loyal to the party chairman.
Some were genuinely loyal, both because Mao had personally saved them and made them feel secure and because they saw him as the savior of all of China. But others were mere sycophants. Mao basked in the flattery, even when he suspected it was not sincere, knowing that over time he would be able to distinguish the genuine political loyalists from the sycophants. Those could be discarded when their usefulness was gone.
The slogan “Serve the People” was Mao's, and the message called out from billboards everywhere in China—white characters, written in Mao's own hand, set against a bright red background. Behind the elaborate Xinhua (New China) Gate, which served as the southern entrance to Zhongnanhai, the characters were inscribed in gold, and the billboard blocked any glimpse ordinary Chinese might get into the modern-day Forbidden City, where China's highest leaders lived and worked. Within Zhongnanhai, at our periodic “political study” sessions, we too were reminded to serve the people and the party rather than ourselves. The message had always inspired me. It was one of the reasons I had wanted so fervently to join the Communist party.
But I had not worked long for Mao before realizing that he was the center around which everything revolved, a precious treasure that had to be protected and coddled and wooed. Everything was done for Mao. He never had to raise a hand, never put on his own socks or shoes or trousers, never combed his own hair. When I pointed out to Wang Dongxing that the energies of Group One were focused not on serving the people but exclusively on serving Mao, he pointed out that “Serve the People” is an abstract expression. “We must have a concrete person to serve,” he said. “To serve Mao, then, is to serve the people, isn't it? The party assigned you your work here. You are working for the party, aren't you?”
Young and naive as I was, I thought Wang Dongxing was right.
Later I would see that just as Mao condoned emperors who had been ruthless in dispensing with ministers who had not fully agreed with their views, so Mao could be ruthless in dispensing with those who did not fully agree with him. It is true that in the early years, top officials sometimes disagreed with Mao without being purged. But Mao harbored grudges, and when he convinced himself that an underling's loyalty had waned, when the political time was ripe, he could cast an old revolutionary aside without a second thought. Men like Zhou Enlai seemed to know this and were completely loyal to Mao. Others, like Liu Shaoqi and Lin Biao, did not and thus were cast aside. Whenever a leader became too independent of Mao, he was purged.
When Mao suspected that members of his staff were becoming too close to other leaders—whether Zhou Enlai, Lin Biao, or Liu Shaoqi—he would dismiss them immediately. “Disaster,” Mao warned me, “comes by way of the mouth.” Thus I knew that my survival depended on my silence. In the political campaigns that would sweep China over the next two decades, I took Mao's lessons to heart, confining myself to looking after the Chairman's health. I was his doctor. Even as I became aware of his ruthlessness, I protected myself by watching in silence. There was no independent will but his. I still worshiped Mao. He was China's guiding star, our country's savior, our tallest mountain, the leader of us all. I thought of China as one huge family and believed we needed a head. Chairman Mao was the chief. I would serve him and, through him, serve the Chinese people.