It was in early 1958 that I first sensed a change in Mao, a new and often irrational suspicion that grew stronger over the years, until the Cultural Revolution. We had left Nanning and flown to Guangzhou and then back to Beijing, staying only a couple of weeks. Mao was keeping the pressure on. After suspending the rectification campaign to attack the rightists, he had begun it again in the fall. This time it was to be an internal affair, party member against party member.

In early March, we flew to Chengdu, the capital of Sichuan province, the rice bowl of China. Mao was calling another meeting.

We stayed at a place called Golden Ox Dam, about seven miles west of the city. The grounds were as lush and vast as a botanical garden, covered with bamboo trees, blue pines, and cypresses, and the paths were lined with palm, banana, and grapefruit trees. The camellias and azaleas were in bright red bloom. It rained often during our stay, and after the rains the tropical forest would be shrouded in a mysterious mist, like in a Chinese landscape painting. Some of Mao's poetry—about misty gardens and flowers splashing the mountainside—had come from scenes like this, he said.

I was happy to be there. It was my first visit to Chengdu since graduating from medical school some fourteen years before, and the city was my second home. I visited my old university as soon as I could.

The campus of West China Union University Medical School had also been a lush botanical garden, the biggest and prettiest in China, and when I was a student, it had been my paradise on earth. But everything had changed. A large road had been built through the old campus, and many buildings had been destroyed. Those left were in disrepair. The gardens had been neglected. The name of the university had changed to Sichuan Medical College; and the old liberal arts college had been amalgamated with Sichuan University. My visit with Sun Yuhua, the president of the medical college and my old friend, filled me with nostalgia, but I dared not meet with other friends. My work with Mao was too sensitive, and the upcoming party conference was secret. Seeing old friends would be too awkward.

Mao sympathized, pointing out that people always feel sentimental when they visit a place after a long absence. He recited an ancient poem from the fifth or sixth century:

The willows planted in years gone by

Are lovely hugging the Han River on the south.

Now leaves fall to the ground

And even the river is sad.

If nature can be so sentimental

How do I feel?

He thought I should meet my old friends.

But I stayed with Mao.

Not long after we arrived, Li Jingquan, the first party secretary of Sichuan, invited Mao to a Sichuan opera being held in an auditorium on the grounds of Mao's guesthouse. Mao had been skeptical about attending—he preferred Beijing opera—but was so carried away by the performance that at one point he put the lighted end of a cigarette into his mouth as he watched. After that, we attended Sichuan opera every night, and word of Mao's love of opera spread quickly to other provincial leaders. They were always curious about Mao's tastes because they all hoped to host Mao themselves someday and wanted to do it right. After 1958, all the new provincial villas included an auditorium for watching opera.

It was in Mao's attitude toward the indoor swimming pool at Golden Ox Dam that I sensed a new, irrational fear. The pool, constructed on orders from Li Jingquan, was supposed to be a replica of the indoor pool at Zhongnanhai and it was meant especially for Mao. Mao encouraged me and other members of his staff to swim there, but he was uneasy about it himself. He refused to swim there and asked me several times whether I thought the pool was different from the one in Beijing. He said he was afraid it was poisoned. None of us who swam in it suffered any ill effects, and Mao's attitude left me more curious than concerned. Only in retrospect, as the condition worsened, did I see in his suspicion the seeds of a deeper paranoia.

Mao was restless. He was still dissatisfied with the party leadership. He had tried whipping them into shape, coaxing them out of their lethargy, but had met with only partial success. He had called the conference to prod the party leadership some more.

The meetings, held from March 8 to 26, 1958, were a continuation of the Nanning conference, with Mao criticizing and goading the party leaders responsible for economic development. He was still trying to get them to come up with plans to catch up with Great Britain in fifteen years and thought that the output targets were too low and the party planners too cautious. Mao had brought the public criticisms of the party to a sudden halt with the anti-rightist campaign in the summer of 1957, but his confidence in the party had not been restored. During our talks in Chengdu, he complained about the country's lack of leadership and described the party elite as “a bunch of zombies with a slave mentality.” He wanted them to have more courage and determination.

It was their unoriginal copying of the Soviet Union and their mindless, superstitious recitation of Marx that bothered him most. “Marxism didn't just drop from heaven,” Mao would say. “We shouldn't do everything according to the books, slavishly copying every word.” He traced the party's slave mentality to China's Confucian past. So awed were Chinese by Confucius that they could not even call him by name, addressing him instead as Sage. Now the party was similarly awed by Marxism, taking it as dogma, refusing to deviate an inch from the texts. The effect was the same: Confucianism had stifled creativity in the past, and Marxist dogma was stifling it today. Marx was a new Confucius, crippling China, preventing the country from moving forward. Much as Mao disliked Stalin, he thought the Soviet leader had been right to criticize Marx. Stalin knew that Marx was not always right and had pushed ahead courageously to develop the theory and practice of socialism.

The party leaders, Mao thought, were similarly cowed by intellectuals, bowing humbly before them, convinced of their own inferiority. Thus he doubted that the Chinese Communist party could lead the transformation of China. “Our cadres' perspective is too narrow,” he said. They led the good life, eating their fill from morning to night, their energy diverted from their brains to their stomachs.

But he still had faith in the young and the unschooled. “The young and the uneducated have always been the ones to develop new ideas, create new schools, introduce new religions,” he said. “The young are capable of grasping new situations and of initiating change, brave enough to challenge the old fogies. Confucius started his new school of thought and began recruiting students when he was twenty-three. What learning did Jesus have? But hasn't the religion he created lasted to this day? Sakyamuni developed Buddhism when he was nineteen years old. Sun Yat-sen was not a man of learning. He had only a high school education when he began his revolution. Marx was also very young when he began developing his theory of dialectical materialism. His learning came later. When he was twenty-nine years old, he was writing books challenging the theories of well-established bourgeois scholars like Ricardo, Adam Smith, and Hegel. He was only thirty when he wrote the Communist Manifesto, and by then he had already created a new school.

“The great scholars have always been overthrown by the young and uneducated,” he said. “It didn't matter that they were young and not so knowledgeable. What is important is to seize the truth and move courageously forward.”

There was no irony in Mao's words. He never acknowledged that just as Confucius was never called by name, addressed only as Sage, so no one called Mao by name, referring to him only as Chairman. Soon his words, too, would become dogma. And Mao often distorted history for his own purposes. Sun Yat-sen had been a medical doctor, a member of a wealthy intellectual elite, when he launched the revolution of 1911.

Years later, in 1966, when Mao launched the Cultural Revolution—calling upon the country's youth to rise up in criticism against their professors and the Communist party—I would remember conversations like this. He had been mulling over the strategy for years.

In Chengdu, though, Mao still depended on the party to work his will. He was on the attack again, criticizing anyone who had preached caution, arguing, in terms they could accept, that to be against his insistence on “rapid advance” was to be against Marxism—and therefore to be a rightist. He whipped the economic planners like horses, trying to get them to go faster. It was in Chengdu that I first remember hearing the slogan “Go all-out, aim high, and build socialism with greater, faster, better, and more economical results.”

In Chengdu, I also became aware of a change in Mao's understanding of socialism. Even with the establishment of a socialist economic system, he argued, classes continue to exist. Workers and peasants belonged to the laboring class and thus were “good.” But the remnants of imperialism, of feudalism, and of bureaucratic capitalism still existed, and so did the rightist bourgeoisie. The national bourgeoisie, who had supported the communists in the struggle against the Guomindang, still existed, too, and could be expected to oppose the socialist transformation. And Mao put the intellectuals in the bourgeois camp. “Intellectuals are unstable,” he told me, “swinging with the wind. They read a lot of books, but they are ignorant of real life.” He was beginning to talk about class struggle.

From Mao's perspective, the Chengdu conference was a success. Production-output targets were going up. The conference produced thirty-seven new documents, each one revising upward the earlier—conservative, more realistic—targets for economic output.

But a change was coming over the party, and it was soon to have disastrous results for China. Mao's voice was so powerful, his point of view so strong, that it was becoming difficult for the cautious to disagree. To express skepticism about the unrealistically high output targets was to risk being labeled a rightist. The force of Mao's will gradually silenced those who disagreed, and those who pandered to him began to lie, agreeing to higher targets even when they knew those targets were impossible to obtain, claiming to have reached those targets even when they had fallen short. The party was beginning to lie, and Mao seemed to like best the most outrageous liars. Fear was setting in.