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In May 1966, right after he had stirred things up, Mao went into retreat.

“Let others stay busy with politics,” he said to me a few days after the May 16 Circular had been approved. “We're going to take a rest.”

This was a familiar strategy. Mao would retreat into inactivity, allowing the political movement to develop without him. It was a way of allowing the snakes—his enemies—to come out of their holes. We were going to stay in Hangzhou for a while, away from political trouble.

Mao's retreat did not sit well with the party leadership. The Cultural Revolution needed his leadership. Mao's real goals, I think, were still a mystery to most of the party elite. Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping came to Hangzhou in early June to report to Mao about the progress of the movement and to solicit his advice. “Let them handle the problems of the movement by themselves,” Mao said to me after the two leaders had left. “I need a rest.”

The implications of Mao's retreat were ominous. Without his direction, the party would be plunged into chaos.

Mao was in high spirits in Hangzhou and enjoyed his stay. The Zhejiang authorities organized dancing parties for him almost daily, and he often climbed the Dingjia Hill near his villa. But he was frequently pensive and taciturn, lost in his own thoughts. By mid-June he was on the move again. He wanted to go back to his native village of Shaoshan. We arrived there on June 18.

Since Mao had last visited Shaoshan, in June 1959, Tao Zhu, now first secretary of the Central-South Bureau, had constructed a new villa for the Chairman at a place called Dishui Cave. Mao had said that he wanted to retire in Shaoshan and live in a thatched-roof cottage. The villa was Tao Zhu's response.

Dishui Cave was nestled in foothills, surrounded by shrubbery and forest, and cut off from the world outside. Mao knew the area well. As a child, he had gathered firewood in the surrounding forest, and he reminisced about kowtowing before a huge rock—Grandmother Rock, he called it—on top of Big Drum Hill. He had often napped in the Tiger Resting Pavilion atop another hill.

Beijing seemed very far away from the peace and seclusion of Dishui Cave, and news was harder to come by. The confidential couriers delivered their documents only once every two or three days. I was anxious to find out what was happening in Beijing and encouraged the couriers to talk. The capital was descending into chaos. The schools had been closed, and the students had taken to the streets, rampaging through the city. No one, it seemed, could control the situation. I pressed the couriers for more details, but with the situation so tense, they were reluctant to say more.

I did learn that my old boss, Fu Lianzhang, who had urged me to return and sent me to work at “Labor University,” had already become a victim of the Cultural Revolution. Fu had been forced to retire in 1958. His habit of checking up on the political activities of the leaders through expressions of concern for their health had finally proven so irritating that all the leaders wanted him gone. I had heard little about him since, but the couriers had brought Mao a letter from his former doctor.

Fu had been called out of retirement to be “struggled against” and had made an unsuccessful attempt at suicide after the attacks against him began. He wanted Mao's help. “Fu Lianzhang is a good man,” Mao said to me. “He's retired, no longer involved in politics. There is no reason to struggle against him. I'll do something to protect him.”

But Mao's efforts were too little and too late. Toward the end of 1966, Fu was taken forcibly from his home by a group of rebels from the army's General Logistics Department. He was never heard from again. He died during the struggles against him, and his body was never recovered.

Ten days after our arrival in Shaoshan, the heat became unbearable. We were swimming daily in the Shaoshan reservoir, but the villa at Dishui Cave had no air-conditioning, and the electric fan was no help. Mao decided to move on. We left for Wuhan on June 28.

Our access to news from Beijing was much better in Wuhan. The confidential couriers came daily, with documents, magazines, and letters. I received my first letter from Lillian in months and realized with a start that I had not been in Beijing or seen my family for more than a year—since I had accompanied Wang Dongxing and the “four cleanups” campaign work team to Shixi village, Jiangxi, in July 1965.

Following the Cultural Revolution from Wuhan, Mao thoroughly enjoyed the upheaval his movement had unleashed in Beijing. With Mao withdrawn, his enemies were showing their hands, making it easier for him to strike them down. I sensed this not only from my meetings with Mao but from a letter he wrote on July 8, 1966, to Jiang Qing in Shanghai.

Mao never really had a plan for the Cultural Revolution. But the letter to his wife revealed what he thought about it then. As Mao's suspicions about so many others around him worsened, his political faith in Jiang Qing grew.

“Every day I read documents and other materials with great interest,” Mao wrote to her from our retreat in Wuhan. “Great chaos will lead to great order. The cycle appears every seven or eight years. The demons and monsters will come out by themselves. Their class character dictates it.”

Mao wrote, too, about the discomfort he felt over Lin Biao's campaign of adulation. “I don't believe the few pamphlets I wrote are as magical and powerful as he says,” Mao said. “It's like Old Wang saying his watermelon is sweet because he is selling it. But after he started exaggerating, the whole party and the whole nation have followed suit.” Mao claimed that Lin Biao's introduction of the cult of Mao was the first time in his life he had succumbed to an opinion contrary to his own on an issue of great importance. “A person with a great reputation will find difficulty living up to it in reality,” Mao wrote, quoting the Han dynasty's Li Gu. “These words apply to me exactly.” Mao claimed to have protested such adulation at the April standing committee meeting in Hangzhou. But Lin Biao had paid no attention, repeating his praise in May. “So newspapers and magazines have exaggerated the importance of my writings even more, as if they were the product of a superman. I have been forced to accept his argument. I guess his intention is to beat the devil [Mao's enemies in the party] by invoking my magic powers.”

Mao was neither certain that his Cultural Revolution would achieve its goal nor convinced that socialism had come to China for good. The “rightists,” he felt, might return to power, and Mao himself might be smashed to pieces. But he was convinced that his ideas would remain and that socialism would eventually be revived. No victory for the reactionaries could ever be permanent.

Mao also had a warning for Jiang Qing: “Don't let victory intoxicate you,” he cautioned. “Think often of your weaknesses, shortcomings, and mistakes. I don't know how many times I have told you this. You must remember it.”

Jiang Qing was so excited about the letter, despite its criticisms of her, that she wanted it printed and distributed for others to read. Mao had shared with her some of his innermost political thoughts, and she took this as a demonstration of her husband's trust. It enhanced her own legitimacy. She had already begun sharing the letter with members of the inner circle when Mao found out and had the copies recalled. I copied the letter into a notebook before returning it to the General Office's Office of Administration, and have it even now.

I have thought often of that letter in the quarter century since. To this day, even with all that has happened, I still see it as evidence that Mao was more politically prescient than even he knew. Lin Biao, whom Mao never fully trusted and whom he was using temporarily in his struggle against his other enemies in the party, did turn against him, and following Mao's death the “rightists” did return to power.

As long as Mao himself stayed away from the capital, watching the Cultural Revolution from afar, I was able to avoid involvement in the unfolding political struggle, so I was happy not to be in Beijing. Having stayed out of earlier political campaigns, I had every intention of sitting out the Cultural Revolution, too. Mao, though, was determined to have me participate.

By early July, Mao had been away from the capital for months. Beijing was in chaos. He was getting ready to return. “The situation in Beijing has become very lively,” he said to me one evening. “We can't rely only on documents to learn what is going on. We need to see the situation in person. Only then can we differentiate the good people from the bad. I have to stay here for now, but you return to Beijing first and have a look. Get ready and leave tomorrow.”

He wanted me to investigate the Cultural Revolution in Beijing and report my impressions to him. This was the “something” he had said he might want me to do for him when he refused to let me return to Shixi.

But the political situation in Beijing was much too complicated. Neither the politburo nor the central secretariat was in control any longer. Even Mao's closest lieutenants were under attack. How was I, a mere doctor, a man who had so studiously avoided all involvement, to distinguish enemy from friend? “I won't be able to tell the good persons from the bad,” I protested to Mao. “Whom should I talk to after I return?”

Mao instructed me to see Tao Zhu, whom I had first come to know while he was first party secretary in Guangdong province and whom Mao had just appointed adviser to the Central Cultural Revolution Small Group. He had also replaced Lu Dingyi as head of the Propaganda Department. Tao Zhu was a logical person for me to see. He was head of the Propaganda Department, and was also responsible for administering the State Council's Ministry of Public Health. “Tell him I sent you,” Mao said. “Let him make arrangements for you to see how the revolutionary rebel movement is doing and to take a look at the big character posters the masses have put up. Tell me what you think after I return to Beijing.”

I was skeptical. Under Mao's direct protection, I felt safe. Alone, called upon to investigate a movement I did not understand, I would be surrounded by danger. “A thousand people will die this time, I think,” Mao had said to me a few weeks earlier. “Everything is turning upside down. Wo xihuan tianxia da luan. I love great upheavals.”

I did not love great upheavals, and this one frightened me a lot. But I flew back to Beijing the following day, as Mao had ordered—the first time I had been there in more than a year.

Thus it was that I was in Beijing on July 16, 1966, when Mao took his celebrated swim in the Yangtze River. Having been swimming with Mao so many times before, I barely noticed the event. Nor did it occur to me that foreign skeptics might gasp in disbelief that a seventy-three-year-old man could swim faster and further than an Olympic champion. I knew how swiftly the Yangtze flows through Wuhan. Mao had only floated on his back, his giant belly buoying him like a balloon, carried down the river by the current. I also knew by then that Mao's swims were acts of defiance against the party leadership and a signal that the battle was about to begin.

For me, Mao's swim in the Yangtze meant that his self-enforced exile was over. He was returning to the political stage. Two days later, on July 18, he returned to Beijing. Henceforth, the Cultural Revolution would follow his direction.