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The Soviet Union was celebrating the fortieth anniversary of its founding in November 1957, and Khrushchev had invited leaders of communist parties from all over the world to join the festivities. The Chairman was sixty-three then and had left China only once before—in late 1949, just after the founding of the People's Republic, when he had gone to Moscow to negotiate the treaty with Stalin.
Mao wanted to go to Moscow. In China, the anti-rightist campaign was still in full swing, and he was ebullient. The country was united and optimistic as never before. Socialism had been introduced to both city and countryside and the revolution was pushing rapidly forward. Mao could return to Moscow triumphant, the most senior foreign leader of the communist camp, head of a huge delegation, rival and challenger of Khrushchev.
We planned to leave on November 2.
I was in charge of medical preparations. Huang Shuze, the deputy director of the Central Bureau of Health, was to serve as doctor to the delegation, and I would go as Mao's personal physician.
Jiang Qing suggested that Liu Huimin, the doctor of traditional Chinese medicine who had treated Mao in Qingdao, come, too. It would be a way of honoring the doctor and repaying him for his treatment, and the doctor's presence on the delegation would send a message to Moscow that the Chairman really was an advocate of traditional Chinese medicine. Dr. Liu was thrilled with the invitation and deeply honored, but his enthusiasm quickly turned to anxiety. He was afraid of the Moscow cold, and nothing I said could convince him that the buildings would be so well heated that he would never feel the weather. Dr. Liu was several years younger than Mao, but his health and temperament were those of a considerably older man. He was afraid of losing face if he were to catch cold. What if the Chairman became ill and the doctor was too sick to treat him? The humiliation would be unbearable. Dr. Liu was worried that the standard heavy wool coat being provided each member of the delegation would not be enough. He wanted a fur coat and hat and relaxed considerably when Ye Zilong, in charge of logistical arrangements, agreed.
Dr. Liu's worries turned then to Mao's health. He had to prepare for every eventuality. The Soviet Union had none of the medicinal herbs Dr. Liu would need if Mao were to become ill. He would have to bring them with him. He had to have enough herbs to treat Mao for a whole range of possible maladies. Gathered together, Dr. Liu's herbs filled more than three huge trunks, and their pungent odor wafted through the sealed containers and lingered in the air. Dr. Liu wanted the trunks to accompany him on the plane.
We negotiated. A trainload of gifts would be going to Moscow ahead of the delegation. The doctor could take a week's supply of herbs on the plane, but the three trunks and the huge clay pot he would use to boil his concoctions would be packed in a specially made wooden crate and shipped ahead on the train.
Mao would also need a nurse to assist in case of medical emergency. I nominated the most capable and experienced nurse I knew—Xu Tao's wife, Wu Xujun, the head nurse at the Office of Health in Zhongnanhai. Ye Zilong, though, wanted one of the attendants who had accompanied Jiang Qing to the Soviet Union the year before. It would be a way of saving money. The party was paying for the winter wardrobes for the delegation, and Jiang Qing's attendant already had the right clothes. But the attendant had no medical training. For once, Jiang Qing supported me, intervening on my behalf to argue that having a good nurse to serve the Chairman was far more important than saving a little money. Wu Xujun was chosen to go.
The Soviets also assigned a doctor to Mao. His sole responsibility was to escort the Chairman to Moscow and to look out for the Chairman's health en route. I was responsible for entertaining the doctor during his short stay in Beijing. The head nurse and I, together with Lai Zhulie, the director of Zhongnanhai's Office of Special Accounts, introduced him to Beijing duck at the renowned Quanjude Restaurant, where the city's most famous delicacy was still considered the best. The doctor was ecstatic over the meal, as effusive in his praise of the powerful maotai liquor he imbibed without restraint as he was of the duck. He was happily intoxicated when I dropped him off at the Soviet embassy and even happier when I presented him another bottle of maotai.
The Soviets sent two of their own planes, TU-104s, to fly us to Moscow. Mao, Song Qingling, the Soviet doctor, and I traveled together on one plane, and the rest of the large Chinese delegation went on the other. The stewardesses kept us well supplied with caviar, fish and chips, and sandwiches, and we were given buffets of cold cuts at each of the several refueling stops we made en route. Mao did nothing to disguise his feeling about Russian food. “It's not to our liking,” he declared with disdain. The Russian doctor drank liberal quantities of vodka during the early stage of the journey, prattling on about the harmful effects of smoking and the benefits of drink. Intoxicated with the benefits of vodka, he spent the second leg of the journey sleeping it off.
Nikita Khrushchev greeted us at the airport, together with a group that included the bearded, somber, and dignified Nikolai Bulganin and my old friend Anastas Mikoyan. Mikoyan greeted me warmly in Russian, but I understood nothing he said, and we had no interpreter. I presumed he was saying something about the acupuncture treatments I had recommended. The only female among our official hosts was the minister of culture, Yekaterina Furtseva, an attractive woman in her fifties who kept herself busy scurrying here and there, over what I never could tell.
The Chinese delegation was the most senior of the sixty-four attending the conference, and Khrushchev was friendly and respectful to Mao, personally escorting him to the Kremlin palace where he was to stay and encouraging him to take a rest when the conference was over—either at a dacha in the suburbs or at the Black Sea coastal resort of Sochi. Mao demurred. From the beginning, he was reserved and even a bit cool with Khrushchev. He was still angry about the attack on Stalin. His private barbs against the Russian leader began almost immediately after we arrived. Driving in from the airport, Mao had noticed, as I had too, that the people in the streets seemed lackadaisical and unenthusiastic, even sullen. The contrast with China, still in the throes of post-revolutionary enthusiasm, was striking. “Khrushchev lost the support of the people when he started the campaign against Stalin,” Mao said. “No wonder they have lost their enthusiasm.”
The arrangements for Mao and his entourage had been made with the greatest of care. The palace where he stayed, a former residence of the empress Yekaterina, was an opulent maze of corridors and huge, spacious rooms filled with elegant antiques. The floors were covered with thick, lush carpets, and the high ceilings were hung with glittering chandeliers. Portraits still lined the walls. Yekaterina's bedchamber, Mao's private quarters, was huge and magnificently furnished, the most opulent room of all. Mao had not brought his own bed this time, but he insisted on using his own chamber pot in lieu of the flush-style sit toilet in the adjoining bathroom.
Ye Zilong, Wang Jingxian, Lin Ke, Li Yinqiao, bodyguard Zhang, two chefs, ten members of Mao's staff, including several interpreters, and I stayed in the palace near Mao. The delegation's ranking leaders from both the party and government—Song Qingling, Deng Xiaoping, Peng Zhen, Peng Dehuai, Lu Dingyi, Yang Shangkun, Chen Boda, and Hu Qiaomu—stayed in the palace, too. The rest of the staff stayed in various hotels or in the Chinese embassy, and I rarely saw them.
Lin Ke and I shared a room in the palace. Our surroundings were not as sumptuous as Mao's, but the accommodations were elegant indeed, and we were provided with a continual supply of apples, oranges, chocolates, orange juice, mineral water, and cigarettes. Liquor was plentiful, and the food was excellent.
Mao stayed in high spirits, feisty and combative. He never commented upon, or even seemed to notice, the luxury of his surroundings, but he did take note of the treatment he and the Chinese delegation were receiving, comparing it sarcastically to his reception in 1949 during the negotiations with Stalin. “Look how differently they're treating us now,” he snapped, his voice sharp, his lip curled in a smile of disdain. “Even in this communist land, they know who is powerful and who is weak. What snobs!” It was a biting, bitter remark, and I could hardly believe Mao was serious.
We visited the Lenin mausoleum to lay wreaths before the glass-covered caskets of Lenin and Stalin—a disquieting experience for me. The bodies of the two Soviet leaders were shrunken and dry, and I learned that their extremities had already rotted and been patched with wax. I had no idea that twenty years later I would head the team charged with preserving the body of Mao.
Mao evinced little curiosity about Russian culture. He ate alone, apart even from other members of the Chinese delegation. Each of his meals included a huge spread of both Russian and Chinese food—the Soviets had assigned him two Russian chefs, and one of his own cooks was a specialist in Western-style cuisine—but Mao ate only the Hunanese fare concocted by his favorite chef. I could appreciate his love of Chinese food. The heavy Russian fare, though excellent, was not to my taste either, and when Mao asked me to join him for dinner one evening, I devoured the meal with delight, even though I had just eaten my Russian-style meal. “It doesn't look to me as if you've just eaten,” Mao quipped.
Mao's one foray into Russian culture was an embarrassing failure. He agreed to accompany Khrushchev to a performance of Swan Lake. I went, too, sitting with them in Khrushchev's special box. We arrived late, after the second act had begun, and Mao was bored immediately. He had never seen Western ballet, and no one had prepared him for it. “I could never dance that way in my life,” he said to Khrushchev. “How about you?” The Soviet leader agreed that he, too, could not possibly dance on his toes. At the end of the second act, Mao announced that he was leaving. “Why did they dance that way, prancing around on their toes?” he asked me. “It made me uncomfortable. Why don't they just dance normally?” I suspected, though, that he was deliberately refusing to appreciate Russian culture. He enjoyed carping about Khrushchev and the shortcomings of the Soviet Union.
Only when we visited the Chinese students studying at Moscow University did Mao finally evince a flash of admiration. The food in the Soviet dining hall was much better than the meager rice and vegetables Chinese students were accustomed to eating, and the student dormitories at Moscow University were far better than those in China. At Moscow University, only two students shared a room. In China, the same size room was shared by eight. “We just cannot compare,” Mao said.
Mao ordinarily attended meetings during the day and spent the evenings alone in his room, leaving me and the other staff members with plenty of free time. Lin Ke and I spent one evening at an elaborately staged, extravagant song-and-dance performance, put on especially for the visiting delegations, enjoying ourselves thoroughly. Most evenings, however, we spent in the palace movie theater watching American films of World War Two vintage, of which the palace had an abundant supply. The Great Waltz was our favorite, and we were content to confine ourselves exclusively to American films. But Han Xu, from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, later to become China's ambassador to the United States, was afraid that our hosts might be insulted if we watched only American movies, so we occasionally tried to please them by requesting Soviet films as well. I started to watch the newly released And Quiet Flows the Don, based on Sholokhov's novel about the coming of World War One and the October Revolution, but there were no subtitles in either Chinese or English, and since I understood no Russian, my interest quickly flagged.
Our delegation was particularly popular with the Russian staff. We had brought huge quantities of gifts—a magnificent carved ivory boat, cloisonné vases, and a gold-leaf Comintern flag for our more distinguished Soviet hosts, and a large supply of Chinese cigarettes and maotai as more modest gifts for the staff. We began distributing our booty shortly after arriving. Soon we began getting late-night knocks on our doors from people requesting more. I suspect that it was the abundance of our gifts, coupled with a mistaken belief that Chinese doctors enjoyed both high status and pay, that motivated one of the room attendants to profess her devotion to me. Lin Ke had noticed the young woman expending special effort making my bed, and later she passed the word through our interpreter, Yan Mingfu, that not only was she interested in becoming my friend but was even willing to return with me to China. Yan Mingfu turned her down on my behalf, and our delegation had a good laugh.
Other cultural misunderstandings were less amusing, brought on by the venality and insensitivity of some of the Long Marchers Mao kept on his staff. In addition to the food and drink the attendants always placed in our rooms, they also put a full bottle of toilet water in our bathrooms each morning. But every day the bottles would disappear. Ye Zilong thought someone in our delegation was stealing the cologne and insisted on searching everyone's luggage. His attitude was terribly insulting, but I had little choice. My luggage was searched along with everyone else's. The investigation revealed nothing, though, and the toilet water continued to appear each morning and to disappear soon thereafter. Only after the routine had continued for several more days did we realize that the attendants themselves were taking the toilet water away. Mao was annoyed when he heard about Ye Zilong's pettiness and insisted that the matter be dropped. “What are you going to do when you prove that the attendants took it?” he asked. “If they're taking it behind your back, doesn't that mean they don't want you to know?”
Toward the end of our visit, Lai Zhulie, the director of special accounts in Zhongnanhai, suggested that he, I, and an interpreter from the Chinese embassy pay a visit to thank the doctor who had accompanied Mao to Moscow. We went to his apartment—a nice-sized, well-furnished place with carpets on the floor, a real rarity in China. The doctor was delighted to see us and a gracious host, but when we presented him our gifts—two bottles of maotai and a few trinkets—he became befuddled, pacing the floor in obvious confusion. Finally he took three 100-ruble notes from his pocket and gave us each a 100-ruble bill. I was embarrassed, declining the money, which Lai grabbed from my hand and pocketed. On the way back he told me that all gifts to the delegation became property of the Chinese government.
The parade celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the October Revolution was held on November 7, and we all went to Red Square to participate. Mao watched with Khrushchev from atop the Lenin mausoleum, and I stood next to the mausoleum with the head of the Estonian Communist party, a man who had lived in Great Britain for several years and spoke excellent English. He hoped to visit China someday, he said. It was such a faraway, mysterious place.
The May Day and October first parades in China had been modeled on the Soviet archetype, but by then I had already tired of the military displays and the extravagant waste. Even Red Square, with its cathedrals and palaces and its cobblestone walks, held no great allure. Two years later, when Tiananmen Square was enlarged in commemoration of the tenth anniversary of the Chinese revolution, I suspected that China was competing with the Soviet Union to build the biggest square on earth.
Despite his differences with Khrushchev, Mao was genuinely delighted with the outcome of the Moscow conference and with the joint declaration issued at its conclusion. “In 1848, Marx and Engels issued the Communist Manifesto and launched a worldwide communist movement,” he said. “Now, more than one hundred years later, the Moscow Declaration has summarized the experiences of that movement and charted our future.” Mao was optimistic about the future, exhilarated by the prediction he had made in his own speech. Within fifteen years, Mao said to the assembled delegates, the Soviet Union will overtake the United States in the production of steel and other major industrial products and China will overtake Great Britain. Within fifteen years, he asserted, the material conditions in the communist world will be transformed, their economies surpassing those of the capitalist West. With the transformation of the material base, the whole world would be ripe for the communist revolution.
Mao saw steel as the fundamental indicator of economic development and talked about the need to increase its production in China. “Our country produces too little steel,” he said. “We have to do everything we can to increase our material strength. Otherwise, people will look down on us.” He spoke positively of the Cold War and of Dulles's brinkmanship and of international tension. “Let there be tension in the world,” he said. “Tension is good for us. It keeps our country united. So long as others are sharpening their sabers, no one will find me asleep.”
Later, from his memoirs, I knew that Khrushchev had been appalled by the irresponsibility of Mao's speech in Moscow in November 1957. Mao was like a frog looking at the sky from the bottom of a well, thinking he was seeing the world. He had no basis for asserting that the communist world would overtake the capitalist one within fifteen years, no knowledge of what the capitalist world was like. To favor brinkmanship and the perpetuation of international tension in the nuclear age was foolhardy in the extreme. But Mao's speech, like his late-night conversations with me, was no idle chatter. A new strategy was germinating in his mind. The seeds of his Great Leap Forward—the most utopian and misguided of all his policies—had been sown.