Mao had been energized by the Moscow meetings, and when we left on November 20, 1957, he was gearing up to launch an all-out drive to increase production. The Communist party was the major impediment, and his first task was to whip up its support.

Shortly after our return from Moscow, we joined Jiang Qing for a couple of weeks in Hangzhou. Then we flew south to Nanning, in Guangxi Autonomous Region, for a party conference. Mao's pushing and goading began en route.

Hunan's first party secretary, Zhou Xiaozhou, came to pay his respects to Mao during a refueling stop in Changsha, and Mao began baiting the leader of his native province. “Why can't Hunan increase its agricultural production?” Mao wanted to know. “Why do the Hunan peasants still plant only one crop of rice a year?”

Zhou replied that the weather in Hunan permitted only a single crop of rice. Mao disagreed, pointing out that Zhejiang province, where Hangzhou is located, had essentially the same natural conditions and the peasants there still planted two crops of rice. Why not in Hunan? Mao insisted. The exchange was embarrassing to Zhou, and he did not know how to reply.

“You're not even studying other experiences. That's the trouble,” Mao argued.

“We will study the matter, then,” Zhou replied obediently.

“What do you mean study?” Mao demanded. “You won't get anywhere with your study. You can go now.” He picked up a book and began reading. Zhou was humiliated. He said goodbye to the others in the cabin and then turned back to Mao. “We'll try to start two plantings right away,” he promised.

When Zhou left, Mao tossed his book aside in exasperation. “He'll try to start two plantings!” he said sarcastically. “He doesn't even want to study others' experiences. What's the use?”

Over the next few months, this type of interchange between Mao and the more cautious provincial party leaders was repeated in both private meetings and party conferences as the Chairman gradually herded the less adventurous onto his own utopian path.

The Nanning meeting was his first big effort to get the party in line.

Nanning is a quaint, old-fashioned town, colorful and clean. The roadways are narrow, and the second-story balconies of the small shops overhang the street, protecting pedestrians from the frequent rains. The area is warm, wet, and lushly green year-round, and even in early January the temperature was a mild 78 degrees. The orange and grapefruit trees were covered with white blossoms, and the air was filled with their fragrance. The people were colorful, too. The area is populated by the Zhuang national minority, whose women dress in short swirling skirts and gaudy headpieces.

The people of Nanning are unsophisticated and honest, and the place is neither rich nor economically developed. Local officials took great pride hosting Mao and did the best they could. Official propaganda described Mao and his wife as simple and frugal themselves, and having taken that propaganda to heart, officials in Nanning were confident that their best would be welcomed by Mao. When we arrived in early January, several days before the conference began, Mao and his wife were housed in two separate buildings in the complex of the province's official guesthouse, located on a quiet, tree-covered hill. The spot was magnificent, the view superb. Mao had no complaints. Jiang Qing, though, found her accommodations impossible.

She sent for me a few days after our arrival. Her nurses were torturing her, she said, and she demanded that I call a meeting to criticize them. My responsibilities included supervising Jiang Qing's nursing staff, and when Jiang Qing was unhappy with them, I was expected to intervene.

The nurses, she said, were deliberately trying to make her catch cold. The guesthouse had no central heating, and when the temperature dropped in the evenings, Jiang Qing's attendants would hook up an electric space heater. But the heater had no thermostat. When it was on, Jiang Qing was too hot. When it was off, she was too cold. Local officials, frantically trying to find a solution, sent a team to Hong Kong to purchase a more modern space heater—a portable radiator, with heated water circulating through its internal tubing. The radiator provided steady heat, and Jiang Qing's temperature problem was solved.

But there were no showers in the Nanning guesthouse, and Jiang Qing was in the habit of bathing before she retired at night. Her nurses tried to manage by filling several containers with warm water and pouring the water over her, container by container. But the water from the last of the containers was always somewhat cooler, and Jiang Qing accused the nurses of deliberately trying to make her catch cold. When local officials learned of this problem, they dispatched another team to buy shower equipment in Hong Kong. But Jiang Qing would have to move out of the guesthouse temporarily in order to have the shower installed. She refused, preferring to blame her nurses instead. When I tried to mediate, she turned on me, accusing me of trying to force her to move to a hotel.

In exasperation, unable to reason with her, I raised the problem with Mao.

“Jiang Qing is a paper tiger,” he told me. “Some things you can just ignore. Try to stick it out. Tell the nurses not to be afraid of her, and let them know that I appreciate their work.”

Jiang Qing, equally exasperated, also took her problem to Mao. “You know the expression ‘A parent sick for one hundred days will have no filial sons,' ” one of the guards heard Mao say to his wife. “These people just work for pay. They have no spirit of service.” Mao criticized Jiang Qing and praised the nurses in front of me, but he criticized the nurses in conversations with her. Apparently, though, he encouraged his wife to seek a reconciliation with me.

“Do you know that I often try to accommodate you?” Jiang Qing asked me one day in the midst of the squabbles.

I assured her that I did not.

“Both your strengths and your shortcomings are striking,” she continued. “You are good at finding solutions, and you often act decisively. The Chairman also thinks you are imaginative. He thinks you have good judgment. But you are conceited, too. You put on airs. Once you've taken a position, nobody can change your mind. But since you have done such good work for the Chairman, I cannot criticize you. Do you know that?”

“No, I don't know what you mean,” I responded.

“Sometimes I just can't take you anymore,” she said in exasperation. “But the Chairman wants you. He is used to you now. You know, you and I are colleagues, both working for the Chairman. I have told you my opinion of you. What is your opinion of me?”

“I don't have any opinion,” I said. “But I feel that both my competence and my personal background make me unsuitable to work here. I still hope someone can replace me.”

Jiang Qing was becoming increasingly impatient and annoyed. “Whether you are suitable to work here is a question for the Chairman to decide,” she responded.

One of the guards had been eavesdropping on our conversation. “Dr. Li, from her perspective Jiang Qing really is trying to be nice to you,” he pointed out to me as I left her quarters. “The Chairman is also quite frustrated with her. Not long ago, just after she left his room, I heard him say to himself, ‘Even when we are so busy, you still make such a fuss. It's just not reasonable!' ”

But Jiang Qing continued to make a fuss. Her shower problem had not been solved. She continued haranguing the nurses, and the nurses kept running to me in tears. I could find no one to help. Mao's new security chief, Wang Jingxian, was a good man but said his job was confined to security. Ye Zilong also insisted that Jiang Qing's bathing problem was not his responsibility. I could only continue trying to persuade the Chairman's wife to move to a hotel for a day. Finally, she relented, and the shower was quickly installed.

Still, Jiang Qing was not satisfied. Now she said there was too much noise around her building. All the local officials and security people charged with catering to Mao and his wife were forced to move down the hill, and all traffic everywhere on the mountain was stopped—just to satisfy her whim.

The Nanning conference was attended by both national- and provincial-level party leaders. From the day it began, January 11, 1958, the atmosphere was tense. The majority of party planners did not share Mao's goal of catching up with England in fifteen years, and Mao spent much of the eleven days attacking the cautious leaders in charge of planning, development, and finance. Few escaped his whip. Even Zhou Enlai and Chen Yun were criticized.

Four days after the conference began, alternate politburo member Chen Boda called me to his hotel room. He had caught cold and wanted me to treat it. In fact, he wanted to return to Beijing, but Chen Boda had also been criticized by Mao and was afraid the Chairman would accuse him of running away if he left. Chen was having trouble sleeping. The person in the room just above his head had stayed awake the whole night before, pacing the floor. He wanted me to find out who it was and ask him not to pace. But whoever was pacing the floor had to be a high-ranking party leader. All the hotel guests were. I had no right to order party leaders not to pace the floor. I did find out, though, that the room just above Chen's was occupied by Bo Yibo, the chairman of the State Economic Commission. Bo was a leading economic planner, known for his caution. Also under Mao's gun, he too was under great psychological strain.

Huang Jing, the chairman of the State Technology Commission, responsible for encouraging technological development and Jiang Qing's former husband, cracked under the strain. Mao had attacked him severely, and as the meeting was drawing to a close, Shanghai mayor Ke Qingshi asked me to take a look at him. Huang was behaving strangely.

Huang Jing was lying in bed, staring at the ceiling, muttering incomprehensibly, when I entered. He was totally bewildered to see me. “Rao ming a; rao ming a—Save me, save me,” he kept begging me.

Yang Shangkun arranged for him to go to nearby Guangzhou for medical treatment, accompanied by Li Fuchun, a vice-premier and chairman of the State Planning Commission, and Xi Zhongxun, the secretary-general of the State Council. Huang's bizarre behavior continued on the plane. He knelt down before Li Fuchun and kowtowed, head to the floor, begging Li to free him and spare his life. He was put in a military hospital in Guangzhou, where he tried to escape by jumping from a window, and broke a leg in the process. I lost track of him after that. Later I learned that he died in November 1958.

Mao's mood contrasted sharply with the palpable tension his anger was engendering. Once he had lost his temper a few times, the Chairman began to relax. By the end of the conference, he broke his ordinary prohibition and joined the concluding banquet festivities, taking particular delight in the delicacy known as Dragon Battling Tiger—a dish consisting of poisonous snake (the dragon) and wildcat (the tiger). The “delicacy” was very fatty and difficult for me and many other participants to eat, but Mao consumed it with relish.

The next day he went swimming in the Yong River, just outside Nanning. The water temperature was now less than 70 degrees, and it seemed too cold to swim. But Mao insisted, and I had to join him. He floated on the river in his usual style for an hour. The next day he came down with a cold and a cough.

He refused my medicine until he was thoroughly miserable. Only then did he follow his doctor's advice. His cold quickly improved.

The Nanning conference was only the first of a series of meetings Mao called over the next several months. At each one he goaded, cajoled, and badgered the party into shape, accusing first this provincial leader and then that party planner of dragging his feet, being too slow, holding the country back. And at the end of each meeting, the targets for agricultural and industrial output had increased, and when the second session of the Eighth National Congress met in May 1958, the stage had been set for his Great Leap Forward.