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Mao became tense and irritable following his meeting with Peng Zhen and Lu Dingyi. The sleeping pills were of little use. He would stay awake twenty-four hours at a time, until he finally became too exhausted to continue. His eating was affected, too. He would take only one small meal a day. I upped the dosage of his sleep medicine a bit, but waited until I knew he was nearly exhausted before giving him the pills. I was anxious about the increased dosage but even more worried about the effect of so little sleep on a man his age. After a week, his eating and sleeping returned to normal, and I began to relax a bit.

Just as my immediate anxieties had eased, Zhang Yufeng came to me with a new problem. “The Chairman thinks someone was in the attic of his guesthouse last night,” she said. “He's heard noises there every night since we came.”

I nearly laughed. The idea was preposterous. How could anyone possibly sneak into Mao's attic? The security surrounding the Chairman was impenetrable. But Zhang Yufeng was serious. And so was Mao.

I knew no human being could possibly be hiding in the attic. But it was possible that an animal had managed to get in. Maybe the noise had come from a rat. When Mao's staff discussed the problem, one of the guards said he had noticed some footprints that might belong to a wildcat.

The guards set traps, using fish as bait, and within two days the contraptions had done their work. Two wildcats were caught—one the size of a tiny panther, the other no bigger than a large house cat. Mao's villa in Wuhan was nestled in the woods, and the house was reserved for his exclusive use and ordinarily unoccupied. The bobcats had moved in without anyone knowing.

With the dead bobcats outdoors on display for Mao and everyone in his entourage to see, I assumed the “bad guy” theory would be put to rest. But Mao's paranoia remained strong. He was still worried that someone was in the attic. He insisted we leave immediately.

Within hours after the wildcats were caught, we were on our way to Hangzhou.

Mao remained anxious even in Hangzhou, and I sensed, even in the absence of concrete information, that the political situation was tense. Shortly after we arrived, I learned that Lin Biao's wife, Ye Qun, had called from Suzhou, where she and her husband often stayed, and asked to see Mao immediately. She flew in the next day, met with Mao behind closed doors for three hours, and then flew back to Suzhou. No one else was present at their meeting, and neither Mao nor Ye Qun told anyone in Group One what they had talked about.

I had dinner with the Chairman that night. “I don't know what kind of central secretariat Deng Xiaoping thinks he is running,” Mao said while we were eating. “He had questionable characters there before and he's got questionable characters with him there now. Peng Zhen is number one. His control of the Beijing Municipal Party Committee is so tight you can't poke a hole in it with a needle or force a single drop of water through. Lu Dingyi controls the Department of Propaganda like the Palace of Hell, making sure that no leftist writings pass through. And there's Luo Ruiqing, who tried to prevent implementation of ‘Let politics take command' and who tries to propagate eclecticism—and Yang Shangkun, who is always so busy gathering information and passing it around.” Ever since he had found out about the bugging equipment, Mao had been convinced that Yang Shangkun was a spy. “This is Deng Xiaoping's central secretariat,” he concluded in exasperation.

A day or so later, Jiang Qing came to visit Mao. As she came in, I saw that the change I had noticed in 1962 was now almost complete. She walked briskly, her back straight, and I saw not the slightest sign of her old ailments. She barely acknowledged my presence, merely nodding arrogantly in my direction as she passed by. Her entourage had recently been reduced to a nurse, an attendant, and a single security guard from Shanghai. Her old complaints had completely disappeared, her nurse told me while we waited. She was no longer bothered by bright lights or noises or drafts. Her headaches were gone. There was no ringing in her ears. She no longer needed the services of a doctor.

Jiang Qing's visit with her husband was brief, and she returned to Shanghai immediately thereafter. Only after her second visit, several days later, in late February, did I learn what they had discussed.

Lin Biao and Jiang Qing were forging an alliance. The two had convened a meeting in Shanghai from February 2 to 20, 1966, to discuss the ideology of armed forces–supported literature and art. Jiang Qing had been consulting Mao about the report from that conference. Mao gave me the final document to read.

The report was pure Mao. It was an attack on Lu Dingyi, warning that since the founding of the People's Republic, “the literary field and most professors have stood as a black force trying to dominate our politics.” What surprised me was not the content of the document but the new relationship between Jiang Qing and Lin Biao: Lin Biao's route to power would be through the Chairman's wife. He would win Mao's support by first winning his wife's. The device had often been used in Chinese history, but it was devious and I never trusted people who used it. By calling upon Jiang Qing to serve as a publicist for her husband, Lin Biao was also deliberately catapulting the Chairman's wife into power. I was uneasy from the start. Jiang Qing with political power could be dangerous indeed.

I had never met Lin Biao. I had never even gotten a good look at him. Following liberation, Lin Biao had held several high-level posts, but he did not work and was such a recluse that he did not even go to Tiananmen to celebrate May Day and National Day. I had been sitting backstage when I heard him speak during the 7,000 cadres' conference, so I had only glimpsed him from the rear. But he was one of the country's ten marshals and reputed to be a brilliant leader—strong, decisive, and tough. Before meeting him, I shared the general admiration for his military genius. Lin's new alliance with Jiang Qing soon gave me the opportunity to meet him.

In March 1966, just after her visit with Mao, the Chairman's wife caught cold and asked me to go to Shanghai to treat her. Mao encouraged me. “I'll be in Shanghai pretty soon,” he said. “It's not good for me to stay in one place too long.” His paranoia persisted. After a few days anywhere, the anxiety set in and he had to be on his way. He did not feel safe in Hangzhou, either.

Transformed by her new involvement in politics, her neurasthenia largely cured, even Jiang Qing agreed that her cold was nothing serious. But the day after I arrived in Shanghai, Lin Biao suddenly showed up, too. He had learned that Jiang Qing was sick, he said, and wanted to pay his respects.

It was then that I first saw him. What struck me most was the army uniform he wore. It was so tight it might have been glued on. He arrived in the anteroom accompanied only by his secretary and took off his heavy wool coat. He was a slight man and short, with a pale gray face and a military cap that he wore even indoors to cover his spottily bald head. He was wearing thick leather boots. Lin barely nodded in my direction and never said a word. His eyes were so black the pupils and irises were indistinguishable, and they emitted an almost spiritual gleam.

Jiang Qing ordered that they not be disturbed, and the two met for three hours behind closed doors while I talked with Lin's secretary, Li Wenpu, and learned something of Lin's habits and his past. Lin Biao and Jiang Qing had much in common. Lin, too, had been a hypochondriac, suffering from neurasthenia, so afraid of light and drafts that he never went outside. Like Jiang Qing, his recent political involvement had also given him energy. His old neuroses had disappeared. Lin Biao was a changed man. His illness, too, I surmised, had been political.

But he still got sick. I discovered that several months later, in August 1966, just as the Cultural Revolution was reaching its first frenzy. Lin Biao was gaining more and more power and Wang Dongxing was trying to enter into his own alliance with the man Mao was about to choose as his successor. Lin Biao was sick, and Wang Dongxing wanted me to go with him to visit Lin at his residence at Maojiawan.

When we were escorted into his room, Lin Biao was in bed, curled in the arms of his wife, Ye Qun, his head nestled against her bosom. Lin Biao was crying, and Ye Qun was patting him and comforting him as though he were a baby. In that one moment, my view of Lin Biao changed—from bold and brilliant military commander to troubled soul unfit to lead. Two doctors, Xu Dianyi and Wu Jieping, arrived shortly after we did, and Wang Dongxing and I accompanied Ye Qun into an anteroom while the doctors conducted their examination. They found a kidney stone in Lin Biao's urinary tract and immediately administered medication. Lin Biao quickly calmed down, but my view of Lin did not change when I learned the cause of his illness. The passage of a kidney stone through the urinary tract is excruciatingly painful, but I expected a marshal like Lin to face such pain with courage.

While we were waiting, Ye Qun told me about her husband. Lin Biao had become addicted to opium in the 1940s and later to morphine. Late in 1949, he was sent to the Soviet Union to be cured of the addiction. It had not recurred, but his behavior continued to be strange. Lin Biao was still so afraid of wind and light that he rarely went outside, often missing meetings. His fear of water was so extreme that even the sound of it would give him instant diarrhea. He would not drink liquids at all. Ye Qun made sure he received liquid by dipping steamed buns in water and feeding them to her husband. That and the water in food were the only liquids he got.

Lin Biao never used a toilet. When moving his bowels, he would use a quilt, as if it were a tent, to cover himself and would squat over a bedpan that his wife would place on his bed.

I was astonished. Lin Biao was obviously mentally unsound, but Mao was promoting him to the highest reaches of power. Soon he would be hailed as Mao's “closest comrade in arms.” One day Lin Biao would be governing the entire nation.

Back at Zhongnanhai, I told Mao of Lin Biao's problems. He was expressionless, silent. But I never discussed Lin's problems with other leaders or with medical colleagues. To have revealed such privileged information about one of the country's highest leaders would have been a political crime.

I stayed in Shanghai that March after Jiang Qing recovered from her cold, and I witnessed her new political activity. One fellow leftist after another came to visit, and always the meetings took place behind closed doors, cloaked in an aura of mystery, intrigue, and conspiracy. Yao Wenyuan, the Shanghai propagandist who had written the original article attacking Wu Han's play about Hai Rui, came not long after Lin Biao, shutting himself up with the Chairman's wife. Qi Benyu, who would later become the director of the General Office's Bureau of Secretaries,¹ followed, and then Guan Feng, one of the ultraleft editors at Red Flag magazine.

Mao arrived in Shanghai on March 15. He convened an enlarged meeting of the politburo standing committee two days later, where he continued Jiang Qing's argument that the academic and educational circles were dominated by bourgeois intellectuals who had endeavored for years to quash all leftist opinion and thought. He singled out four men for particular rebuke—playwright Wu Han, the author of the increasingly controversial Hai Rui Dismissed from Office; Beijing history professor Jian Bozan; vice-mayor of Beijing Deng Tuo; and director of the United Front Work Department of Beijing municipality Liao Mosha. These leading intellectuals were Communist party members in appearance, Mao argued, but members of the Guomindang in thought and behavior. He proposed launching a “Cultural Revolution” in literature, history, law, and economics. I was naive enough to hope that this revolution would be confined to culture and that I could stay out of the storm.

At the end of March 1966, several days after the enlarged politburo meeting and while we were still in Shanghai, Mao met several times with Jiang Qing, Kang Sheng, and Zhang Chunqiao. He wanted to revoke Peng Zhen's February Outline Report, he told them. It confused the class line. He wanted the Beijing Municipal Party Committee, headed by Peng Zhen, the Propaganda Department, headed by Lu Dingyi, and the Five-Man Small Group of the Cultural Revolution—consisting of Peng Zhen, Lu Dingyi, Kang Sheng, Zhou Yang, and Wu Lengxi—abolished. There were too many dubious individuals in these three organizations, he said. And he wanted the thrust of the Cultural Revolution expanded.

Mao was pursuing a two-pronged attack. He was calling upon the politburo standing committee to criticize leading bourgeois intellectuals. At the same time, he was going outside the standing committee and the party hierarchy to foster a rival group centering around his closest allies—Jiang Qing and Kang Sheng in particular—whose task was to attack Mao's enemies within the standing committee and the central secretariat of the party. The move was unprecedented. Never before had Mao launched an all-out attack against such high-level officials.

But Mao persisted. In early April, we returned to Hangzhou. There, from April 16 to 20, he convened another meeting of the enlarged politburo standing committee. At this meeting he officially expanded his attacks to include Beijing party chief Peng Zhen. By refusing to read or comment on Peng Zhen's February Outline Report, which had tried to limit the cultural debate to academic issues, Mao had allowed Peng to dig his own grave. Now he openly accused him of taking an anti-party stand and demanded the dissolution of the Five-Man Small Group of the Cultural Revolution and the formation of a new one. The atmosphere at the April meeting was extraordinarily tense.

I felt unsafe. Group One was no longer the same, and I neither knew nor trusted the new arrivals. Mao had become inaccessible within the wall built by his new security man, Qu Qiyu. Wang Dongxing had still not returned to Group One, and I had not seen him since we parted in Nanchang just after New Year's Day. Without him to protect me, I was at sea.

I wanted to see Wang Dongxing at the Hangzhou meeting, to learn what he knew about the political situation and seek his advice. I wanted to encourage him to return to Group One.

Wang was meeting with Zhou Enlai when I arrived at the Xiling Hotel late one night. Zhou was tense and not happy to see me.

“Do you know what time it is?” the premier asked. “Why have you come?”

“I want to report to Comrade Wang Dongxing on the Chairman's health over the past several months,” I replied.

“Why do you have to make your report so late at night?” Zhou demanded.

Wang Dongxing interjected, trying to soothe Zhou's obviously jangled nerves. “I asked him to come, Premier,” he said.

“Then hurry,” Zhou said to Wang Dongxing. “Comrades Kang Sheng and Chen Boda are here. We can't keep them waiting.” He turned to me. “When you have finished, please return immediately to the Wangzhuang guesthouse.”

I had never known Zhou Enlai to be so tense and irritable, and interpreted his mood as a sign of serious political trouble. When I asked Wang what was wrong, he refused to say. “You know enough already,” he said. “It concerns the central authority. It's best for you not to ask anymore. Tell me about the Chairman's health.”

I was left to guess at the seriousness of the power struggle, and I was uneasy not knowing. I reported to Wang Dongxing on Mao's health and urged him to return to us at Group One. Zhang Yaoci, I explained, was a timid man who confined himself exclusively to matters of security. He was not doing much of a job. I would not feel safe until Wang Dongxing returned.

But Wang felt excluded from Group One. He wanted to return, but he could not do so until Mao asked. However, he promised to visit the Wangzhuang guesthouse to say hello when the meetings were over.

I was nervous about my visit to the Xiling Hotel. Zhou Enlai had been too tense, and there was too much I did not know. But I did know that he had an urgent meeting with Kang Sheng and Chen Boda, two leftists who liked to stir up trouble. As a precaution, I decided to report the whole episode to Mao. If he learned about my meeting from someone else, he might think I had been acting behind his back.

“So what are they doing over there?” Mao wanted to know, a faint smile on his lips, when I told him I had met with Wang Dongxing.

I told him Zhou Enlai had wanted me to leave quickly and seemed worried that I had some ulterior motive in being there.

“It was just a visit, nothing to get upset about,” Mao assured me.

My report to Mao later saved me. At the end of 1966, when the newly formed “Central Cultural Revolution Small Group” expanded the targets of the Cultural Revolution to include Wang Dongxing, an attempt was made to implicate me as well. At that time, every meeting was seen as conspiratorial and every friend, acquaintance, and colleague of an accused person was in danger of being implicated, too. A security guard remembered having seen me at the Xiling Hotel and wrote a letter to Kang Sheng, who was masterminding the attacks. He accused me of colluding with Wang Dongxing and Zhou Enlai in some sort of plot, passing some secret information on to them. Kang Sheng gave the letter to Mao.

Mao gave me the letter and asked me to pass it on to Wang Dongxing for safekeeping. “You told me about the visit,” he said. Mao protected both me and Wang Dongxing. The matter was dropped.

The enlarged standing committee of the politburo met again on April 24, 1966. Mao wanted the committee to discuss a new document that Chen Boda had drafted and Mao had revised, “A Circular of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party.” The main purpose of the circular was to revoke Peng Zhen's February Outline Report stressing the “academic” nature of the literary debate over Hai Rui and to disband the original Five-Man Small Group of the Cultural Revolution headed by Peng Zhen. This is when the new Central Cultural Revolution Small Group was formed, under the direct supervision of the politburo's standing committee. The focus of the Cultural Revolution was shifting. The movement was not about academic issues. Mao was launching what he called a “vigorous attack” on bourgeois elements within the party, the government, and the army.

The “Circular of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party” was submitted to an enlarged politburo meeting held the following month, from May 4 to 26. The circular was passed on May 16 and became the guiding light of the Cultural Revolution, known throughout China by the date on which it had been adopted—the May 16 Circular.

Mao did not attend the May meetings. We were still in Hangzhou. But when he showed me the list of members of the new Central Cultural Revolution Small Group, my heart sank. The leftist Chen Boda was the head, and Kang Sheng was adviser. Jiang Qing had been appointed first deputy director. The sycophantic Wang Renzhong and Shanghai leader Zhang Chunqiao were deputy directors. The members, Wang Li, Guan Feng, Qi Benyu, and Yao Wenyuan, were all radical leftists. The initial suggestions, Mao said, had been made by Lin Biao. Mao had added Wang Renzhong.

The appointment of Jiang Qing made me particularly uneasy. She would take great delight in finding “bourgeois elements” in the party, and now, with real power, she could use the political campaign as an excuse to do away with her many enemies. Our relationship had continued to deteriorate since 1960, and now she was in a position to make trouble for me and my family.

Mao knew Jiang Qing's vindictiveness might reverberate to me. He encouraged me to make my peace with his wife, as his nephew, Mao Yuanxin, had done. Mao Yuanxin had been locked into an ongoing battle with Jiang Qing since childhood and ordinarily did not even bother speaking when he returned to Zhongnanhai on his summer vacations. But when the Cultural Revolution began, he wrote Mao a letter of apology. He had finally realized, Yuanxin wrote, that Jiang Qing was Mao's most loyal student and he had come to regard her with deep respect.

Mao was pleased and showed the letter to Jiang Qing.

Yuanxin, then a student at the Harbin College of Military Engineering, in China's far northeast, was an astute politician. Jiang Qing responded well to her nephew's apology, taking him under her wing and molding him into her leading lieutenant. When Jiang Qing went to battle against her opponents, Mao Yuanxin would often lead the way, and he rose rapidly through the military ranks. Within a few years, he had been appointed political commissar of the Shenyang Military Region in Manchuria.

Mao was hinting that I, too, should try to win his wife's favor. But my differences with Jiang Qing were not so easily resolved. Mao Yuanxin was her husband's nephew, and Jiang Qing's own political career was furthered by forgiving him and welcoming him into her fold. But I could do nothing for her and did not want to foster the new power she had been granted. And I could never bring myself to kowtow before her. I knew it was only a matter of time before she moved against me, and I was filled with a sense of impending doom. Jiang Qing would try to do me in. I had to find protection.

¹ After Wang Dongxing became director of the General Office in 1966, the Office of Confidential Secretaries and the Office of Political Secretaries were combined to form the Bureau of Secretaries.