When the Seventh Plenum of the Eighth Party Central Committee met in Shanghai from April 2 to 5, 1959, Mao was still optimistic. His faith in the Great Leap Forward and the people's communes was apparently undiminished. Minor problems had developed, but they were manageable. The organization of the communes had to be perfected, and guidelines had to be laid down about how to allocate labor between the backyard steel furnaces and agricultural work. Too many strong laborers had been pulled from the fields. Payment procedures within the communes needed to be revised. Projections for economic output needed to be scaled back again, too. Output for 1958 had been grossly exaggerated, and the targets for 1959 had to be more realistic.

Mao's greatest fear was not that food was short or that targets were too high or that backyard steel furnaces were wasting labor and producing worthless iron. He was afraid that the creative energies of the masses, unleashed by the Leap, would somehow be dampened. If he knew the country was careening toward disaster, he gave no hint. I did not really know, either. Food was short in Beijing, and Tian Jiaying was warning that the crisis had only begun, but I still thought the problems were temporary, a result of misreporting at the lower levels. Inside Mao's circle, I remained oblivious to the world outside.

Mao stayed on his train during the Shanghai meetings, both because he was uncomfortable with the opulence of Hardoon's former residence and because he was still involved with the young railroad nurse on his special train. His boldness continued, and the young woman accompanied him every evening to the exclusive Jinjiang Club, formerly owned by the French and now an exclusive retreat for top-level leaders. Aware of Mao's penchant for female companions, the Shanghai public security authorities had arranged for the Chairman to meet Shanghai's most famous actresses and singers. But their choices did not interest Mao. The women were too old, too sophisticated, too worldly-wise for him. Mao preferred younger, less experienced women. They were easier to control. The Shanghai authorities then arranged for nightly performances by cultural troupes of younger, more innocent girls, who were capable of greater devotion.

There were movies, too, and local operas every evening. Ke Qingshi arranged the performance of another opera about Hai Rui, whose story had first captivated Mao in Changsha the year before. In the Shanghai performance, Hai Rui was imprisoned for remarking ironically that the emperor's name (Jiajing) had the same sound as the saying that meant the emperor had bankrupted the nation. At first, the Jiajing emperor threatens to kill Hai Rui. But after reading the official's memorial a second and third time, the emperor finally realizes that Hai Rui is a good and upright man, willing to sacrifice his own life for the good of the nation. Hai Rui remains in prison, but the emperor stays his execution. One day, when the prison guard presents Hai Rui with a lavish meal, the official assumes it is his last and that his execution is at hand. Only when he finishes eating does the guard congratulate Hai Rui and tell him that the emperor is dead. Hai Rui, genuinely loyal to the emperor, is so saddened and shocked to learn that the emperor's death and not his own is the occasion for the sumptuous repast that he vomits up the meal.

Again, Mao was enthusiastic about Hai Rui. Hai Rui was both courageous in chastising the emperor and genuinely loyal to him. Mao began to promote the Hai Rui spirit. Hai Rui's biography was reprinted and distributed to the meeting participants, and Mao urged them to follow Hai Rui's example. Later, Mao encouraged historians to do research on Hai Rui, and their articles were published in newspapers throughout the country. In Shanghai and Beijing, modern dramas about Hai Rui began to be staged. The Ming dynasty official was becoming a national folk hero.

At the same time, Mao's dissatisfaction with the party was returning. He was blaming the party leadership for the dislocations of the Great Leap Forward. False reports and inflated statistics were rampant. “There are so many lies,” he said to me. “When there is pressure from the top, there will be lies from the bottom.”

There was irony in Mao's promotion of Hai Rui. Because that Ming dynasty official later became such an important symbol of the party's dissatisfaction over the purge of Peng Dehuai and in how the Cultural Revolution started, I have often reflected on the meaning of Hai Rui for Mao. Mao was a complex and often contradictory man. As the emperor, he believed in his own infallibility. If wrong decisions were made, wrong policies introduced, the fault lay not with him but with the information provided him. The emperor could not be wrong, but he could be deceived.

Hai Rui's appeal to Mao was threefold. Hai Rui told the truth and was genuinely loyal to the emperor, so loyal that he was willing to die, even unjustly, without a word of blame—for the glory of the emperor and the good of the nation. And when things went wrong, Hai Rui blamed not the emperor but the emperor's deceitful and misguided ministers.

Mao did want to be told the truth. Even in my disillusionment, I still believe that had he fully understood the truth early in the Great Leap Forward, he would have brought a halt to the disaster long before he did. But the truth had to come to him on his own terms, from a modern-day Hai Rui. He could not accept it when it included criticisms of him or when it came from conspiring ministers who might be contenders for his power. The truth had to come from political innocents.

But few political innocents made it to the highest reaches of political power in China. There were few thoroughly selfless, disinterested top-level officials who put the welfare of the nation above all else. Immersed as he was in Chinese history, and thus in the power struggles and political intrigues that were part of every court, Mao expected political intrigue within his own imperial court, and he played the same games himself. Even if aspirants to power told Mao the objective truth, he could not accept it because he saw conspiracies everywhere.

Thus Mao's encouragement to study Hai Rui, like his call for the intellectuals to criticize the party, became part of his own conspiratorial strategy. While Mao did want to hear the truth from loyalists without political intent, his promotion of Hai Rui was also a ruse to bring his enemies out in the open, just as in 1957 he had spoken of coaxing snakes out of their holes. As the emperor, only Mao had the power to decide who were the genuine loyalists and who were the ones merely criticizing the emperor as a way of enhancing their power.

But there were flaws in Mao's logic. Just as the emperors the Chinese people most reviled—Qin Shihuangdi, Emperor Zhou, and Sui Yangdi—were the ones Mao most admired, so most people reading the story of Hai Rui saw the Jiajing emperor as vainglorious and unfair. Many of Mao's closest colleagues believed that they were as loyal to Mao as Hai Rui had been to the Jiajing emperor. Mao argued that under “pressure from the top,” those at the lower levels had lied, and he blamed his own high-level lieutenants for the pressure. But the real pressure had come from Mao. In 1957, he had declared his critics rightists and punished them without mercy, then goaded the party into action, whipping the leaders to set ever higher production targets. He himself had created the atmosphere that made it so difficult for party leaders to tell the truth, and the party leaders had followed his lead out of loyalty to—or fear of—Mao. Mao saw the fault not in himself but in other leaders, the evil ministers in the court of Jiajing. His promotion of Hai Rui was another attempt to deflect criticism from himself and blame others. But others, like Zhou Xiaozhou, read the story differently. They were Hai Rui, loyalists unjustly accused and punished, and Mao was the emperor who was no longer benign.

We returned to Beijing in mid-April 1959 for the first plenary session of the Second National People's Congress—the nominal Chinese legislature. Under instructions from the party Central Committee, which had just met, the National People's Congress finally accepted Mao's resignation as chairman of the republic and elected Liu Shaoqi in Mao's stead. Zhu De was made chairman of the standing committee of the National People's Congress, and Song Qingling and Dong Biwu were elected vice-chairmen of the republic.

Mao's resignation and the designation of Liu Shaoqi as the new chairman of the republic had been long in coming, and the official announcement was anticlimactic and passed without fanfare or great public note. Until then, the two posts that carried the title chairman (zhuxi)—chairman of the Chinese Communist party and chairman of the republic—were both held by Mao, and thus there was only one chairman. The English rendering of president to denote chairman of the republic misses what was a major problem for Mao. When Liu Shaoqi took over as chairman of the republic, there were two men with the title of chairman in China, where titles are important. This Mao would never accept.

That two men now held the title of chairman, when Mao wanted to reign supreme, had political implications that I, and most of China, could not have known at the time.

A subtle change began to come over Liu Shaoqi after 1959. Before he took over as chairman of the republic following Mao's resignation, we had all called him Comrade Shaoqi. Then suddenly he was being addressed only as Chairman Liu. The title carried with it great power, and Liu took his new title and power seriously, gradually expanding his control over the country's day-to-day affairs and often acting without consulting Mao. But Mao's struggle to reassert himself as China's only chairman had already begun, and would end with the purge of Liu Shaoqi, when the title of chairman of the republic would be struck down, together with the man.

We stayed in Beijing only a month, then set out by train, heading south, at the end of May.