When Stalin appeared at the Bolshoi Theatre to show himself to the cameras for his seventieth birthday gala, he stood between Mao Zedong and Nikita Khrushchev. Mao looked dour, awed by his counterpart in the Kremlin but resentful at the way he was being treated. He had expected to be welcomed as the leader of a great revolution that had brought a quarter of humanity into the communist orbit, but had been met at Yaroslavsky Station by two of Stalin’s underlings who did not even accompany him to his residence. Stalin had granted Mao a brief interview, praising him for his success in Asia, but for several months a shroud of silence had been placed in the Soviet Union over the victory of the Chinese Communist Party.
After the birthday celebrations Mao was whisked off to a dacha outside the capital and made to wait several weeks for a formal audience. Meetings were cancelled, phone calls never returned. Mao lost patience, ranting about how he was in Moscow to do more than ‘eat and shit’. With every passing day he was made to learn his humble place in a communist brotherhood which revolved entirely around Stalin.1
For the previous twenty-eight years the Chinese Communist Party had depended on Moscow for financial support. Mao, a tall, lean and handsome young man aged twenty-seven, had been handed his first cash payment of 200 yuan by a Comintern agent in 1921 to cover the cost of travelling to the founding meeting of the party in Shanghai. But the money came with strings attached. Lenin realised that the principles of Bolshevism had little popular appeal beyond the shores of Europe, and demanded that communist parties join their nationalist counterparts in a united front that would overthrow foreign powers. He had a point. After several years membership of the party lingered in the low hundreds in a country of more than 480 million people.
In 1924 the Chinese Communist Party joined the Nationalist Party, which also received military aid from Moscow. It was an uneasy alliance, but two years later the nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek launched a military campaign from their base in the south, attempting to seize power from local warlords and unify the country. In Mao’s home province of Hunan they followed instructions from Russian advisers and funded peasant associations in the hope of fomenting a revolution. Social order unravelled in the countryside, as poor villagers used the opportunity to turn the world upside down. They became the masters, assaulting the wealthy and powerful, creating a reign of terror. Some victims were stabbed with knives, a few even decapitated. Local pastors were paraded through the streets as ‘running dogs of imperialism’, their hands bound behind their backs with a rope around their necks. Churches were looted.2
It was a revelation for Mao, who was enthralled by the violence. ‘They strike the gentry to the ground,’ he wrote admiringly in his report on the peasant movement. He made a bold prediction, foreseeing how ‘Several hundred million peasants will rise like a mighty storm … They will smash all the trammels that bind them and rush forward along the road to liberation. They will sweep all the imperialists, warlords, corrupt officials, local tyrants and evil gentry into their graves.’3
For years Mao had tried to find his way. As a young man he had read voraciously, viewing himself as an intellectual who penned nationalist essays. He had worked as a librarian, a teacher, a publisher and a labour activist. In the countryside he finally discovered his calling: although he was still a lesser figure in the party, he would be the one to lead the peasants towards liberation.
The violence in the countryside repelled the nationalists, who soon turned away from the Soviet model. A year later, after his troops entered Shanghai in April 1927, Chiang Kai-shek launched a bloody purge in which hundreds of communists were executed. The Chinese Communist Party went underground. Mao led a motley army of 1,300 men into the mountains, in search of the peasants who would propel him to power.
Mao turned ideology on its head, abandoning the urban workers to espouse the very peasants despised by orthodox Marxism. Relegated to remote mountainous areas, he and his followers spent years learning how to mobilise the raw power of poor peasants to overthrow government posts, plunder local resources and control increasingly large tracts of land. They became experts at guerrilla warfare, using ambushes and raids to harass the less mobile troops of the nationalists, their arch-enemy.
All along there were ideological clashes with the Central Committee, which stayed underground in Shanghai, close to the factory workers. Some took a dim view of his unorthodox tactics. Zhou Enlai, a suave, educated young man in charge of the party’s military affairs, described Mao’s troops as ‘just bandits who roam here and there’. But by 1930 Mao began to attract the attention of Stalin. Mao knew how to deal with the ‘kulak scum’ in the countryside, and he knew how to fight off his competitors. He was single-minded in the pursuit of power, driven by a ferocious ambition that was served well by a manipulative personality and great political skills. It was also ruthless. In one incident that took place in a town called Futian, a hundred officers of a battalion that had mutinied against his leadership were confined to bamboo cages, stripped naked and tortured, many of them being finished off with bayonets.4
On 7 November 1931, the anniversary of the October Revolution, Mao proclaimed a Soviet Republic in a mountainous area of Jiangxi province, financed by Moscow. It was a state within the state, issuing its own coins, paper money and stamps. Mao was its head, lording over some three million subjects. But members of the Central Committee joined him from Shanghai, and they were critical of guerrilla warfare. They stripped Mao of his positions, handing command over the battlefront to Zhou Enlai instead. The result was a disaster, as Chiang Kai-shek mauled the Red Army, forcing the communists to flee in October 1934. What later became known as the Long March was an arduous trek of 9,000 kilometres through some of the country’s most forbidding terrain.
Mao used the Long March to claw his way back to power. On the way to Yan’an, a remote and isolated mountain area on a loess plateau in Shaanxi province, he exploited the defeat of the Jiangxi Soviet to isolate his rivals, dislodging Zhou Enlai to take back control of the Red Army.
The troops arrived in October 1935, reduced from some 86,000 to a mere 8,000, but they were loyal, dedicated followers. Always the demagogue, Mao turned the Long March into a manifesto: ‘The Long March has announced to some 200 million people in eleven provinces,’ he wrote, ‘that the road of the Red Army is their only road to liberation.’5
It was not all bravura. Mao was counting on a world war, hoping that it would ignite a global revolution. And he knew he had Stalin’s attention. Months earlier Moscow had shifted its foreign policy, increasingly apprehensive of an attack from either Germany or Japan. In 1931 Japan had invaded Manchuria, a vast region rich in natural resources that stretched from the Great Wall north of Beijing all the way to Siberia. There were endless border disputes with the Soviet Union, including air intrusions. By July 1935 the Comintern openly referred to Tokyo as a ‘fascist enemy’.6
Stalin, like his master Lenin more than a decade earlier, now encouraged communists abroad to seek a united front with those in power instead of trying to overthrow them. But this strategy demanded that the authority of communist party leaders be elevated. A full-blown campaign to exalt Mao began. The Comintern acclaimed him as one of the ‘standard-bearers’ of the world communist movement. Later that year Pravda published a long tribute entitled ‘Mao Zedong: Leader of the Chinese Working People’, followed by a pamphlet entitled ‘Leaders and Heroes of the Chinese People’. Mao was the vozhd, great leader, a title reserved for Lenin and Stalin alone.7
Mao took the cue. A few months later, after careful vetting, he invited Edgar Snow, a young, idealistic reporter from Missouri, to come to Yan’an. Every detail about how the journalist should be handled was dictated: ‘Security, secrecy, warmth and red carpet.’ Snow spent several months at the communist base, as Mao offered a mythical version of his own life, speaking about his childhood, youth and career as a revolutionary. Mao checked and amended every detail of what Snow wrote.8
Red Star over China, published in 1937, was an instant success. It introduced the mysterious leader of the Chinese Communist Party to the rest of the world, describing him as ‘an accomplished scholar of classical Chinese, an omnivorous reader, a deep student of philosophy and history, a good speaker, a man with an unusual memory and extraordinary powers of concentration, an able writer, careless in his personal habits and appearance but astonishingly meticulous about details of duty, a man of tireless energy and a military and political strategist of considerable genius’.9
Mao was the poor child of the soil who had pulled himself up through sheer willpower and pride, determined to fight for his humiliated compatriots. He was a man of simple habits, living in a loess cave, growing his own tobacco leaves. He was down to earth, a rebel with a lively, rustic sense of humour. He worked tirelessly. He was a poet. He was a philosopher. He was a great strategist. But most of all, he was a man of destiny, called upon by deep historical forces to regenerate his country. ‘He might very well,’ Edgar Snow announced, ‘become a very great man.’10
Red Star over China was a sensation, selling 12,000 copies in the United States within a month of publication. It was immediately translated into Chinese, turning Mao into a household name. The photograph on the cover of the book, showing Mao wearing a military cap with a single red star, became an iconic image.11
Stalin had asked for an alliance between the communists and the nationalists. Mao knew full well that Chiang Kai-shek had no intention of collaborating with him, and promptly declared his willingness to form a ‘broad revolutionary national united front’ against Japan. He also asked Stalin for an extra two million roubles in military aid.12
Mao’s offer made him look like the leader most concerned about the fate of the nation, as the threat of war with Japan loomed ever larger. On 12 December 1936 Chiang was kidnapped by members of his own alliance and forced to cease all hostilities against the communists. The truce was a blessing, giving Mao the time to build up his strength under a new united front.
More good fortune came in July 1937, when Japan crossed the border from Manchuria, capturing Beijing within weeks. Over the next few years the Japanese army would do what the communists would never have been able to achieve, namely attack, destroy or displace the nationalist troops from all major cities along the coast. One gruesome battle followed another, with the best of Chiang’s divisions in Shanghai sustaining a three-month assault by enemy tanks, naval gunfire and aircraft. Hundreds of thousands of people died in the Battle of Shanghai. The fate of Nanjing was even worse, as the Japanese systematically murdered and raped civilians in the nationalist capital during the winter of 1937–8.
All along, the communists remained safely ensconced in the hinterland. By January 1940, according to a report from Zhou Enlai himself, more than a million soldiers had been killed or wounded, although this figure included no more than 31,000 casualties from the Red Army. Chiang Kai-shek and his government were forced to retreat to the provisional capital of Chongqing in Sichuan. Some 3,000 tonnes of bombs were dropped on the city in hundreds of air raids until the United States entered the war after Pearl Harbor.13
Not a single bullet was ever fired at Yan’an. Mao’s strategy of guerrilla warfare far behind enemy lines had some outspoken critics, but Stalin stood by Mao. In the summer of 1938 Moscow demanded that party members unite behind their leader, crushing those who had hoped to prevail against him. A few months later the Kremlin described Mao as a ‘wise tactician’ and ‘brilliant theorist’. An abridged version of Red Star over China was rushed into print.14
For the very first time Mao was without a serious rival. He used the opportunity to rewrite the past. At a plenum held in the autumn of 1938 the first item on the agenda was his report on the history of the party since its foundation seventeen years earlier. At 150 pages, it lasted three days. Mao ticked off everyone who had crossed him in the past, describing them as ‘right opportunists’ or ‘left opportunists’. A few were accused of being Trotskyists. It was the first canonical version of the party’s history, one in which a long series of errors against the correct party line had been committed until Mao Zedong had finally triumphed, leading the Red Army to Yan’an with the Long March.15
Mao’s next step was to establish himself as a theoretician. In this task he was helped by Chen Boda, a bookish but ambitious young man trained in Moscow who would become his ghost writer. Together they penned On New Democracy, a pamphlet published in January 1940 that portrayed the communist party as a broad front striving to unite all ‘revolutionary classes’, including the national bourgeoisie. Mao promised a multi-party system, democratic freedoms and protection of private property. It was an entirely fictitious programme, but one that held broad popular appeal.16
Many thousands of students, teachers, artists, writers and journalists poured into Yan’an in the following years, attracted by the promise of a more democratic future. But Mao was suspicious of these free-thinkers and demanded absolute loyalty instead. In 1942 he launched a Rectification Campaign. In the words of historian Gao Hua, the aim was ‘to intimidate the whole party with violence and terror, to uproot any individual independent thought, to make the whole party subject to the single utmost authority of Mao’.17
Mao orchestrated the entire campaign, supervising everything down to the last detail, but he allowed his henchman Kang Sheng to take centre stage. A sinister man with a pencil moustache and thick spectacles, always dressed in black, Kang had been trained in Moscow, where he had helped the secret police eliminate hundreds of students from China during the Great Terror. Under his supervision endless witch-hunts were carried out in Yan’an, as people were forced to denounce each other. Thousands of suspects were locked up, investigated, tortured, purged and occasionally executed. The spine-chilling howls of people imprisoned in caves could be heard at night.18
When the campaign came to an end, more than 15,000 alleged enemy agents and spies had been unmasked. Mao had allowed the terror to run amok, assuming the role of a self-effacing, distant yet benevolent leader. Then he stepped in to curb the violence, letting Kang Sheng take the fall. Those who had managed to survive the horror turned to Mao as a saviour.19
Mao also set up a Central General Study Committee, which he packed with close allies, among them Liu Shaoqi, a dour, puritanical party member who would emerge as Number Two. The Study Committee ran everything in Yan’an, in effect converting the Communist Party into Mao’s personal dictatorship. Leading members who had crossed Mao in the past were humiliated, forced to write confessions and apologise publicly for their mistakes. Zhou Enlai was one of them, and he tried hard to redeem himself by proclaiming his undying support for Mao. This was deemed insufficient, as he was tested in a series of denunciation meetings in which he had to call himself a ‘political swindler’ who lacked principles. It was a gruelling exercise in self-abasement, but Zhou managed to emerge from the ordeal as Mao’s faithful assistant, determined never to oppose him again. Unlike Stalin, Mao rarely had his rivals shot, turning them instead into accomplices who were on permanent probation, having to work tirelessly to prove themselves.20
On 1 July 1943, the twenty-second anniversary of the founding of the party, Mao announced that the Rectification Campaign had ‘guaranteed ideological and political unanimity in the party’. This was the green light for an unlimited cult of personality. All had to acclaim Mao Zedong, and all had to study Mao Zedong Thought, a term coined four days later by Wang Jiaxiang, a Soviet-trained ideologist. Foremost among his hagiographers was Liu Shaoqi, who hailed Mao as a ‘great revolutionary leader’ and ‘master of Marxism Leninism’. Liu’s praise was the signal for others to rally around their leader, referring to him as the ‘great revolutionary helmsman’, a ‘saving star’, a ‘genius strategist’ and a ‘genius politician’. The panegyrics were ‘nauseatingly slavish’, observed Theodore White and Annalee Jacoby, two American journalists. When Mao spoke, hardened men tempered by years of guerrilla warfare would studiously take notes ‘as if drinking from the fountain of knowledge’.21
The party’s mouthpiece, Liberation Daily, overseen by Mao, used giant headlines proclaiming ‘Comrade Mao Zedong is the Saviour of the Chinese People!’ By the end of 1943 portraits of Mao were everywhere, prominently displayed next to those of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin. Badges bearing his head circulated among the party elite, while his profile appeared in gold relief on the façade of a huge auditorium. People sang to his glory: ‘The East is Red, the Sun is Rising; China has Brought Forth a Mao Zedong; He Seeks the People’s Happiness’.22
In April 1945, after a seventeen-year interval, a party congress was finally convened. Hundreds of the delegates had been persecuted during the Rectification Campaign, some of them replaced by men loyal to Mao. All of them hailed their leader, who was elected Chairman of the top organs of the party. Mao Zedong Thought was enshrined in the party constitution. In his opening report, Liu Shaoqi mentioned the Chairman’s name more than a hundred times, referring to him as ‘the greatest revolutionary and statesman in all of Chinese history’ as well as ‘the greatest theoretician and scientist in all of Chinese history’. Mao, at long last, had turned the party into an instrument of his own will.23
When Japan surrendered on 15 August 1945 Mao controlled 900,000 troops in rural pockets across the north of China. A few days earlier Stalin had declared war on Japan, sending close to a million troops across the Siberian border to occupy Manchuria and the north of Korea, where they waited for their Allied counterparts to join them on the 38th parallel. Mao had grandiose plans to incite a rebellion in faraway Shanghai, but Stalin’s immediate concern was to ensure the departure of the American troops from China and Korea. In order to achieve this goal, he recognised Chiang Kai-shek as the leader of a united China in a Sino-Soviet treaty.
Soviet troops in Manchuria, however, quietly handed over the countryside to the communists, who began pouring into the region from Yan’an. The Soviets helped Mao transform his ragtag army of guerrilla fighters into a formidable fighting machine, opening sixteen military institutions, including air force, artillery and engineering schools. Some Chinese officers went to the Soviet Union for advanced training. Logistical support also arrived by air and by rail. In North Korea alone a full 2,000 wagonloads were allocated to the task.24
The Americans, on the other hand, in September 1946 imposed an arms embargo on their wartime ally Chiang Kai-shek. Chiang, convinced that China would never be able to defend itself without control over Manchuria, the industrial powerhouse and strategic gateway of the country, kept on pouring his best troops into the region. Mao never let up, determined to wear down his enemy in a pitiless war of attrition, whatever the cost.
In 1948 the communists began laying siege to cities in Manchuria, starving them into surrender. Changchun fell after 160,000 civilians died of hunger. Unwilling to undergo the same fate, Beijing capitulated soon afterwards. Like dominoes, other cities fell one after the other, unable to resist the war machine built up by the communists. Chiang Kai-shek and his troops fled to Taiwan. By the end of 1949, after a long and bloody military conquest, the People’s Republic of China was proclaimed.25
The moment the red flag fluttered over Beijing, a hastily sketched portrait of Mao Zedong went up over the main gate of the Forbidden City. Over the following months portraits of the Chairman appeared in schools, factories and offices, often with precise instructions on how they should be displayed. His distinctive wart soon became a trademark and was affectionately touched in, like a Buddha figure. The study of Mao Zedong Thought became compulsory, as adults from all walks of life had to go back to class, poring over official textbooks to learn the new orthodoxy. Revolutionary songs, including ‘Mao Zedong is our Sun’ or ‘Hymn to Chairman Mao’ were belted out daily by schoolchildren, soldiers, prisoners and office workers. These tunes were also blasted from loudspeakers, installed on street corners, railway stations, dormitories, canteens and all major institutions. Carefully choreographed parades were held twice a year, as clockwork soldiers, mounted cavalry, tanks and armoured cars were reviewed by the Chairman on top of a rostrum in Tiananmen Square.26
With the cult of personality came a harsh regime modelled on the Soviet Union. ‘The Soviet Union’s Today is our Tomorrow’ was the slogan of the day. Mao emulated Stalin, seeing the key to wealth and power in the collectivisation of agriculture, the elimination of private property, all-pervasive control of the lives of ordinary people and huge expenditures on national defence.27
The promises made in On New Democracy were broken one by one. The regime’s first act was to overthrow the old order in the countryside. This was done in the guise of land reform, as villagers were forced to beat and dispossess their own leaders in collective denunciation meetings, accusing them of being ‘landlords’, ‘tyrants’ and ‘traitors’. Some did so with relish, but many had no choice as they risked being targeted themselves. Close to two million people were physically liquidated, many more stigmatised as ‘exploiters’ and ‘class enemies’. Their assets were distributed to the perpetrators, creating a pact sealed in blood between the poor and the party.28
In the cities every individual was given a class label (chengfen) based on their loyalty to the revolution: there were ‘good’, ‘wavering’ and ‘hostile’ people. A class label determined a person’s access to food, education, health care and employment. Those marked as ‘hostile’ were stigmatised for life and beyond, since the label was passed on to children.29
A Great Terror followed from October 1950 to October 1951, as the regime turned against ‘counter-revolutionaries’, ‘spies’, ‘bandits’ and others standing in the way of revolution. Mao fixed the killing quota at one per thousand, but in some regions two or three times as many were killed, often at random. The following year former government servants were subjected to a massive purge, while the business community was brought to heel. All organisations operating outside the party – religious communities, philanthropic societies, independent chambers of commerce, civil associations – were eliminated by 1953.30
A literary inquisition ensured artists and writers conformed to the dictates of the party. Books considered undesirable were burned in giant bonfires or pulped by the tonne. The Commercial Press, one of the largest in the country, had roughly 8,000 titles in print in the summer of 1950. A year later a mere 1,234 of these were considered acceptable for ‘the masses’. In every domain of the visual and literary arts the socialist realism devised by Stalin was imposed. The most prominent theme was Mao, not Stalin. His works, essays, poems, lectures, musings and mottos were churned out by the million, from cheap paperbacks to expensive gilded editions. A huge amount of propaganda work was published, telling the story of oppression and the road to liberation, sometimes in Mao’s own words and handwriting. Newspapers and magazines, too, spread his wisdom far and wide. Photographs of the Chairman dominated the front pages.31
In 1949 the Chairman handpicked a photographer named Hou Bo. She had joined the party at the age of fourteen, and her pictures were soon printed in the millions. ‘The Founding of the PRC’ (1949), ‘Mao Zedong Swimming Across the Yangzi’ (1955) and ‘Chairman Mao at Ease with the Masses’ (1959), some of them heavily touched up, were among the most widely distributed images of the twentieth century.32
No parks, streets or cities were named after Mao. The Chairman instead fashioned a more intangible monument to himself, as philosopher king of the East. At its heart was the idea that he had combined the theory of Marxism-Leninism with the concrete practice of the Chinese revolution. Instead of applying Marxism dogmatically to conditions very different from those in Russia, Mao had overseen the Sinification of Marxism. In December 1950 the Chairman published an article entitled ‘On Practice’, followed in April 1952 by ‘On Contradiction’. Both were hailed as philosophical developments of the dialectical materialism of Marx, Engels, Lenin and Stalin. Although these essays contained little that was original, the idea of the Sinification of Marxism captured the imagination of admirers at home and abroad.33
Mao also posed as a renaissance man, a philosopher, sage and poet wrapped in one, a calligrapher immersed in the literary traditions of his country. Even as traditional poetry vanished from the shelves, the Chairman’s own verses were widely distributed. A highpoint was the publication of Chairman Mao’s Nineteen Poems. The compendium actually contained twenty-one pieces, but Mao was keen to imitate a well-known classical anthology entitled Nineteen Ancient Poems. It immediately prompted a movement to study his work, as learned professors and party secretaries vied with each other to praise this ‘historic breakthrough in literary history’.34
While Mao’s poetry was only marginally better than that of Stalin, who also liked to dabble in rhyme, he did have a genuine gift for words. His pithy slogans found their way into every household, whether it was ‘Women Hold up Half the Sky’, ‘Revolution is Not a Dinner Party’, ‘Power Comes from the Barrel of a Gun’ or ‘Imperialism is a Paper Tiger’. His motto was ‘Serve the People’, proclaimed from posters and placards everywhere, the white characters written in a flamboyant hand against a red background. His mighty brush was used to name government buildings, grace public monuments and adorn mugs, vases and calendars. To this day his calligraphy dominates the masthead of the People’s Daily.35
Mao, like Stalin, was a remote, god-like figure, rarely seen, rarely heard, ensconced deep within the Forbidden City that was once occupied by emperors. But he excelled at corridor politics, constantly meeting members at all levels of the party hierarchy. His personal appearance was deceptive. He came across as gentle, humble and almost grandfatherly in his concern for others. He was a poor public speaker, hampered by a thick Hunanese accent, but a good conversationalist who knew how to put his audience at ease. He walked and spoke slowly, always with great gravitas. He smiled often and benevolently. ‘He seems so gentle that few people notice the cold, appraising eyes or are aware of the ceaselessly calculating mind within.’ When he entered a room for a meeting, those present were required to stand up and applaud.36
Mao emulated Stalin, but his mentor feared the emergence of a powerful neighbour that might threaten his dominance over the socialist camp. Stalin had made him wait for weeks on end before signing a Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance in 1950. He also whittled down funding for China’s first Five-Year Plan, warning Mao that he was moving too fast in collectivising the economy.
Stalin’s death in 1953 came as a liberation for Mao. The Chairman could finally crank up the pace of collectivisation, as he imposed a monopoly on grain by the end of the year that obliged farmers to sell their crops at prices fixed by the state. Two years later collectives resembling state farms in the Soviet Union were introduced. They took back the land from the farmers, transforming the villagers into bonded servants at the beck and call of the state. In the cities all commerce and industry became functions of the state, as the government expropriated small shops, private enterprises and large industries alike. But the Socialist High Tide, as the campaign of accelerated collectivisation was known, had devastating effects on the economy and caused widespread popular discontent.37
In 1956 Mao encountered a setback. On 25 February, the final day of the Twentieth Congress of the Soviet Communist Party, Nikita Khrushchev held an unscheduled secret session in the Great Kremlin Palace. In a four-hour speech delivered without interruption, he denounced the suspicion, fear and terror created by Stalin. In a devastating attack on his former master, Khrushchev accused him of being personally responsible for brutal purges, mass deportations, executions without trial and the torture of innocent party loyalists. Khrushchev further assailed Stalin for his ‘mania for greatness’ and the cult of personality he had fostered during his reign. Members in the audience listened in stunned silence. There was no applause at the end, as many of the delegates were dazed, leaving in a state of shock.38
Copies of the speech were sent to foreign communist parties, where it set off a chain reaction. In Beijing the Chairman was forced on the defensive. Mao was China’s Stalin, the great leader of the People’s Republic. The secret speech could only raise questions about his own leadership, in particular the adulation surrounding him. De-Stalinisation was nothing short of a challenge to Mao’s own authority. Just as Khrushchev pledged to return his country to the Politburo, Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, Zhou Enlai and others in Beijing spoke out in favour of the principles of collective leadership. They also used Khrushchev’s critique of state farms to slow down the pace of collectivisation. It looked as if the Chairman was being sidelined.39
At the Eighth Party Congress in September 1956, Mao Zedong Thought was removed from the party charter, while the cult of personality was decried. Hemmed in by Khrushchev, Mao had little choice but to put a brave face on these measures, even contributing to them in the months prior to the meeting. But in private the Chairman was seething, accusing Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping of taking control of the agenda and relegating him to the background.40
The Hungarian revolt gave Mao an opportunity to regain the upper hand. As Soviet troops crushed the rebels in Budapest in November 1956 the Chairman blamed the Hungarian Communist Party for having brought misfortune on itself by failing to listen to popular grievances and allowing them to fester and spiral out of control. Mao posed as a democrat, championing the ordinary man, demanding that non-party members be allowed to voice their discontent. In February 1957 he asked the party to ‘let a hundred flowers bloom, let a hundred schools contend’, urging ordinary people to overcome their hesitations and speak out.
Mao badly miscalculated. He had hoped for an outpouring of adulation in which his admirers would punish a party that had written Mao Zedong Thought out of the constitution. Instead, people wrote pithy slogans in favour of democracy and human rights, some even demanding that the communist party relinquish power. Students and workers took to the streets in the tens of thousands, clamouring for democracy and freedom of speech. Mao was stung by the extent of popular discontent. He put Deng Xiaoping in charge of a campaign that denounced half a million students and intellectuals as ‘rightists’ bent on destroying the party, shipping many off to labour camps established along the outer reaches of the empire.41
Mao’s gamble had backfired, but at least he and his comrades-in-arms were united again, determined to suppress the people. Back at the helm of the party, Mao was keen to push through the radical collectivisation of the countryside. In Moscow, where he and other communist party leaders from all over the world had been invited to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the October Revolution in November 1957, he gave his showpiece pledge of allegiance to Khrushchev by recognising him as the leader of the socialist camp.
Deep down Mao believed that it was he who should assume the mantle of leadership over all socialist countries. Even when Stalin was still alive, Mao viewed himself as a more determined revolutionary. It was Mao, after all, who had led a quarter of humanity to liberation. He was both the Lenin and the Stalin vof China. When Khrushchev announced that the Soviet Union would catch up with the United States in per capita production of meat, milk and butter, Mao took up the challenge and proclaimed that China would outstrip Britain – then still considered a major industrial power – in steel production within fifteen years. Mao was determined to outclass Khrushchev, pushing for a Great Leap Forward into communism that would upstage the Soviet Union.
The Great Leap Forward was the Chairman’s first attempt to steal the Soviet Union’s thunder, as people in the countryside were herded into giant collectives called people’s communes. By turning every man and woman in the countryside into a foot soldier in one giant army, to be deployed day and night to transform the economy, he thought that he could catapult his country past the Soviet Union. Mao was convinced that he had found the golden bridge to communism, making him the messiah leading humanity to a world of plenty for all.
Mao used the campaign to relaunch the cult of personality, battering his rivals into submission in a series of party meetings in the early months of 1958. ‘What is wrong with worship?’ he asked rhetorically. ‘The truth is in our hands, why should we not worship it?’ ‘Each group must worship its leader, it cannot but worship its leader,’ Mao observed, explaining that this was the ‘correct cult of personality’.42
His message was immediately picked up by loyal followers. Ke Qingshi, the mayor of Shanghai, quivered enthusiastically: ‘We must have blind faith in the Chairman! We must obey the Chairman with total abandon!’43 All ranking leaders, at one point or another, had to offer a self-criticism. Zhou Enlai was repeatedly demeaned and humiliated, forced to confess to his errors on three occasions before all the assembled party leaders. In the end he told the audience that Mao was the ‘personification of truth’ and that errors occurred only when the party became divorced from his great leadership.44
Zhou Enlai was allowed to stay on, but many inside the party ranks were less fortunate. The leadership of entire provinces was overthrown, as ‘anti-party’ cliques were removed almost everywhere. In Yunnan province alone, an inquisition purged thousands of members, including one in fifteen within the upper echelons of the party.45
Mao insisted on absolute loyalty, turning everyone into a flatterer. As a result, decisions were made on the basis of the Chairman’s whims, often without any concern for their impact. Already in the summer of 1959 it was clear that the Great Leap Forward was a disaster. But even a mild letter of criticism by Minister of Defence Peng Dehuai at a party gathering in Lushan was interpreted by the Chairman as a stab in the back. Peng was described as the leader of an ‘anti-party clique’ and removed from all influential positions. Liu Shaoqi stepped in, covering the Chairman with praise. ‘The leadership of Comrade Mao Zedong,’ Liu observed, ‘is in no way inferior to the leadership of Marx and Lenin. I am convinced that if Marx and Lenin lived in China, they would have guided the Chinese revolution in just the same way.’ As Mao’s doctor put it, the Chairman ‘craved affection and acclaim. As his disgrace within the party grew, so did his hunger for approval.’46
Most of all, Lin Biao rallied to the Chairman’s defence, accusing Peng Dehuai in his frail, squeaky voice of being ‘ambitious, conspiratorial and hypocritical’. Lin was widely considered one of the most brilliant strategists of the civil war and had personally ordered the siege of Changchun in 1948. A gaunt man with a chalky complexion, he suffered from a wide array of phobias about water, wind and cold. The mere sound of running water gave him diarrhoea. ‘Only Mao is a great hero, a role to which no one else should dare to aspire,’ he crowed, adding, ‘We are all very far behind him, so don’t even go there!’47
In private Lin was far more critical than Peng, confiding in his private diary that the Great Leap Forward was ‘based on fantasy and a total mess’. But he knew that the best way to maintain power was to shower the Chairman with flattery. Lin had realised long ago how crucial it was to exalt Mao: ‘He worships himself, he has blind faith in himself, adores himself, he will take credit for every achievement but blame others for his failures.’48
Anyone who had expressed reservations about the Great Leap Forward was hunted down, as some 3.6 million party members were purged as ‘rightists’ or ‘little Peng Dehuais’. They were replaced by hard, unscrupulous elements who trimmed their sails to benefit from the radical winds blowing from Beijing, using every means at their disposal to extract grain from the countryside.49
Instead of steering the economy past that of the Soviet Union, the Great Leap Forward turned into one of the greatest catastrophes of the twentieth century, as tens of millions of people were worked, beaten or starved to death. By October 1960 Mao was forced to retreat from his grandiose plan, although it took more than a year for the economy to begin recovering.50
In January 1962, as some 7,000 leading cadres from all over the country gathered to talk about the failure of the Great Leap Forward, Mao’s star was at its lowest. Rumours were circulating, accusing the Chairman of being deluded, innumerate and dangerous. Some of the delegates held him responsible for the mass starvation of ordinary people. Liu Shaoqi himself had been genuinely shocked by the disastrous state of the countryside. During the proceedings he even used the term ‘man-made disaster’, drawing gasps from the audience. Lin Biao, again, came to the rescue, hailing the Great Leap Forward as an unprecedented accomplishment in Chinese history: ‘The thoughts of Chairman Mao are always correct. He is never out of touch with reality.’ Zhou Enlai stepped forward, taking the blame for everything that had gone wrong.51
The Chairman was pleased with Lin, but suspicious of everyone else. His entire legacy was in jeopardy. Mao feared that he would meet the same fate as Stalin, denounced after his death by Khrushchev.
He went on the counter-attack as early as August 1962, laying the groundwork for the Cultural Revolution. Counter-revolutionary forces, he explained, were everywhere, and they were trying to lead the country back onto the road towards capitalism. He launched a Socialist Education Campaign with the motto ‘Never Forget Class Struggle’. A year later Mao exhorted the nation to learn from Lei Feng, a young soldier who had dedicated his life to serving the people. His posthumous diary, a record of his ideological progress, was published and studied across the country. Lei Feng explained how ‘the blood given by the party and Chairman Mao has penetrated every single cell of my body’. Mao even appeared to him in a vision: ‘Yesterday I had a dream. I dreamt of seeing Chairman Mao. Like a compassionate father, he stroked my head. With a smile, he spoke to me: “Do a good job in study; be forever loyal to the party, loyal to the people!” My joy was overwhelming; I tried to speak but could not.’52
Glowing testimonials from workers and villagers were published in letters to newspapers all over China. Tens of thousands of meetings were held, extolling Lei Feng as a model communist. Plays and movies were produced. Songs were composed, some of them running into dozens of verses. Storytellers roamed the villages to enthral illiterate villagers with Lei Feng’s love of the Chairman. A Lei Feng exhibition opened at the Beijing Army Museum, where a huge screen at the entrance inscribed with Mao Zedong’s calligraphy exhorted visitors to ‘Learn from Comrade Lei Feng!’ Lei Feng was the poor man’s Mao, a simplified Mao for the masses. He was meant to rouse people from the apathy caused by Mao’s Great Famine and heighten their hatred for class enemies.53
Lin Biao, who had been rewarded for his performance at Lushan with Peng Dehuai’s job as minister of defence, promoted the study of Mao Zedong Thought within the armed forces. Soldiers were asked to commit short passages from Mao’s collected writings to memory. In January 1964, a mimeographed compendium of these quotations was published, with a fuller version distributed to the People’s Liberation Army later that year. It came covered in gaudy red plastic, and was no bigger than the palm of a hand, easily fitting inside the pocket of a standard military uniform. Lin Biao provided an inscription, taken from Lei Feng’s diary: ‘Read Chairman Mao’s book, listen to Chairman Mao’s words, act according to Chairman Mao’s instructions and be a good fighter for Chairman Mao.’ By the time a new edition appeared in August 1965, millions of copies of the Quotations of Chairman Mao, also known as the Little Red Book, were being distributed far beyond the ranks of the army.54
Mao basked in the adulation and ordered the country to emulate Lin Biao and the People’s Liberation Army. ‘The merit of the Liberation Army,’ he said, ‘is that its political ideology is correct.’ In response, the army began to assume a more prominent role in civil life, setting up political departments in government units to promote Mao Zedong Thought. The army also fostered a more martial atmosphere, in tune with the Socialist Education Campaign. Military ‘summer camps’ for students and workers were organised in the countryside. In primary schools children were taught how to use airguns by shooting at portraits of Chiang Kai-shek and American imperialists. Military training camps were set up for older students from reliable backgrounds, where they learned how to throw grenades and shoot with live bullets. In the summer of 1965 more than 10,000 university and 50,000 middle-school students in Shanghai spent a week in camp.55
On 1 October 1964, to celebrate National Day, the army organised a monumental show on Tiananmen Square with several choirs and ballet dancers in military uniform. A colossal figure of Chairman Mao opened the procession, which edged forward to the tune of ‘Chairman Mao, the Sun in our Hearts’. ‘Armed with Mao Zedong Thought’, the nation was told, the people would be able to overcome ‘capitalist and feudal attempts at restoration as well as attacks by our enemies at home and abroad’. Two weeks later China exploded its first atom bomb, joining the world’s superpowers.56
By the spring of 1966 Mao was ready to launch the Cultural Revolution. It was his second attempt to become the historical pivot around which the socialist universe revolved. Instead of trying to transform the economy, which had resulted in the disaster of the Great Leap Forward, the Chairman focused on culture. Mao must have wondered how one man, Nikita Khrushchev, could have single-handedly engineered a complete reversal of policy in the mighty Soviet Union, attacking Stalin in 1956 and proposing ‘peaceful co-existence’ with the imperialist camp. The answer was that culture had been neglected. The capitalists were gone, their property confiscated, but capitalist culture still held sway, making it possible for a few people at the top to erode and finally subvert the entire system.
Lenin had carried out the Great October Socialist Revolution, setting a precedent for the proletariat of the whole world. But modern revisionists like Khrushchev had usurped the leadership of the party, leading the Soviet Union back onto the road to capitalist restoration. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution would be the second stage in the history of the international communist movement, safeguarding the dictatorship of the proletariat against revisionism. The foundation piles of the communist future were being driven in China, as the Chairman guided the oppressed and downtrodden people of the world towards freedom. Mao was the one who inherited, defended and developed Marxism-Leninism into a new stage, that of Marxism-Leninism-Mao Zedong Thought. There was no mention of Stalin.57
These were grandiose ideas, but Mao also used the Cultural Revolution to get rid of his real and imaginary enemies, in particular delegates who had discussed the Great Leap Forward in January 1962.
Ten years earlier Mao had miscalculated by allowing intellectuals to speak their minds during the Hundred Flowers. This time he was better prepared. First, he placed the country on alert by having four party leaders arrested in May 1966, accusing them of being part of an ‘anti-party clique’ that had been plotting a return to capitalism. Then, on 1 June, classes across the country were suspended as students were unleashed against their teachers.
Students at every level had undergone years of indoctrination during the Socialist Education Campaign. Encouraged by the party machine, they harassed, denounced, humiliated and even tortured suspected class enemies. But a few went too far, taking to task leading party members. They were punished for their activities by work teams sent by Deng Xiaoping and Liu Shaoqi, put in charge of the Cultural Revolution in the Chairman’s absence from Beijing. In mid-July Mao returned to the capital. Instead of supporting his two colleagues he accused them of suppressing the students and ‘running a dictatorship’. Both were sidelined, while Lin Biao took over from Liu Shaoqi as Number Two.
‘To Rebel is Justified’ became Mao’s battle cry, and rebel students did. Red Guards appeared in August 1966 donning improvised military uniforms, carrying the Little Red Book. They vowed to defend the Chairman and carry out the Cultural Revolution. In the early hours of 18 August, close to a million of them spilled out on Tiananmen Square, waiting to see the Chairman. As the sun began to rise over the eastern end of the square, Mao came down from the rostrum, wearing a baggy army uniform. The crowd erupted in cheers, brandishing the Little Red Book.58
Between August and November 1966 Mao reviewed some twelve million Red Guards at eight mass rallies. In the end, when even the giant square in front of the Forbidden City could no longer contain them, he rode through the city in an open jeep, reaching two million students in one fell swoop. Each rally was meticulously prepared, with Red Guards marched in groups or ferried by a fleet of 6,000 lorries to the square in the middle of the night, always unannounced for security reasons. They were ordered to sit in rows, waiting for hours on end. When the Chairman finally showed himself, they jumped up, craning their necks, surging forward, cheering ‘Long Live Chairman Mao!’59
Many were ecstatic at catching a glimpse of the Chairman; others were disappointed. A few were frightened. But all of them knew precisely what to do and what to say, as the key sentence had been publicised endlessly by press, radio and television after every mass rally in Beijing: ‘I am the happiest person in the world today. I have seen our Great Leader Chairman Mao!’60
At the end of the first rally on 18 September, Lin Biao made a lengthy speech, appealing to the excited youngsters to destroy ‘all the old ideas, old culture, old customs and old habits of the exploiting classes’.
This they did with gusto, as they burned books, overturned tombstones in cemeteries, tore down temples, vandalised churches, and more generally attacked all signs of the past, including street names and shop signs. They also carried out house raids. In Shanghai alone, a quarter of a million homes were visited, as all remnants of the past were seized, whether ordinary books, family photographs, antique bronzes or rare scrolls.61
As the old world came under attack, a new proletarian culture, Mao proclaimed, would be forged. All understood that the only acceptable alternative was the cult of Chairman Mao. The most visible aspect of this cult was a rash of slogans. They went up everywhere. As one close observer noted: ‘There have always been plenty of them in the past but all previous records have now been broken. Every stretch of clean wall must have its carefully inscribed quotation or tribute to Mao.’ Some of the favourite slogans were ‘Our Great Teacher, Great Leader, Great Commander, Great Helmsman’ or ‘Long Live Chairman Mao!’ Shops, factories and schools were plastered with them, a few stretching across the top of entire buildings. Quotations were painted on the outside of buses, lorries, cars and vans.62
In this new world drenched in red, all the senses were bombarded. Red Guards on temporary platforms called upon the people in shrill voices to join the revolution. Bystanders were harangued in fiery rhetoric peppered with quotations from the Chairman. High up in the skies, air hostesses on internal flights treated passengers to regular readings from the Little Red Book. But the most fearful weapon was the loudspeaker. Loudspeakers had long been used in propaganda campaigns, but now they were switched on permanently, spewing out the same quotations – always at full volume. Red Guards read from the Little Red Book in police boxes, connected to loudspeakers on the streets. Gangs of revolutionary youths paraded through the cities, belting out revolutionary songs praising the Chairman and his thought. The same songs were broadcast on radio, which in turn was connected to loudspeakers in courtyards, schools, factories and government offices. One favourite was ‘When Sailing the Seas, We Depend on the Helmsman’, another ‘The Thought of Mao Zedong Glitters with Golden Light’.63
Nobody wanted to fall behind in the cult of the leader. As the range of objects condemned as ‘feudal’ or ‘bourgeois’ expanded, ordinary people increasingly turned to the only politically safe commodities available. Mao photos, badges, posters and books became all the rage, as entire branches of industry were converted to produce cult objects.
In Shanghai alone seven new factories were built with a total surface of 16,400 square metres, the size of about three football fields, to keep up with demand for photos, portraits, posters and books. In Jiangsu province industrial plants were refitted to print the Little Red Book. Factories producing red ink worked around the clock but still ran dry.64
The books needed covers – shiny, bright and red. The quantity of plastic needed for the Little Red Book alone reached 4,000 tonnes by 1968. As early as August 1966 the Ministry of Trade curbed the production of plastic shoes, plastic slippers and plastic toys as factories around the country geared up to contribute to Mao Zedong Thought.65
The planned economy struggled to keep up with popular demand. When it came to Mao badges, for instance, the national output stood at more than fifty million badges per month in 1968, but it was not enough. A thriving black market emerged to compete with the state. Some government organisations produced badges for their own members, but also expanded their operations into a legal twilight zone, lured by the profit motive. Underground factories appeared, entirely devoted to feeding the black market. They competed with state enterprises for rare resources, stealing aluminium buckets, kettles, pots and pans. Such was the demand that in some factories even the protective layer of aluminium on expensive machinery was ripped away to feed the badge frenzy.66
There were thousands of different badges, a few fashioned crudely from acrylic glass, plastic or even bamboo, some carefully crafted with hand-coloured porcelain, the majority with an aluminium base and a profile image of Mao in gold or silver, invariably looking to the left. Like the Little Red Book, the badge became a symbol of loyalty to the Chairman, and was worn just above the heart. Badges were the most hotly traded pieces of private property during the first years of the Cultural Revolution, open to every form of capitalist speculation. The amount of aluminium diverted away from other industrial activities was so enormous that, in 1969, Mao ordered a halt: ‘Give me back my aeroplanes.’ The fad declined rapidly, and largely ceased after the death of Lin Biao in 1971.67
The first phase of the Cultural Revolution was marked by vicious factional fighting, as ordinary people, party cadres and military leaders were divided over the true aims of the Cultural Revolution. As different factions opposed each other, all of them equally certain that they represented the true voice of Mao Zedong, the country slid into civil war. Soon people were fighting each other in the streets with machine guns and anti-aircraft artillery. Still the Chairman prevailed. He improvised, destroying millions of lives along the way. Periodically he stepped in to rescue a loyal follower or throw a close colleague to the wolves. A mere utterance of his decided the fates of countless people, as he declared one or another faction to be ‘counter-revolutionary’. His verdict could change overnight, feeding a seemingly endless cycle of violence in which people scrambled to prove their loyalty to the Chairman.
As the violence spiralled out of control over the summer of 1967 the Chairman intervened. He toured the country, calling for a Great Alliance. On 1 October, in a great show of coordinated unity, half a million soldiers marched across Tiananmen Square, led by an enormous silver-coloured, plastic figure of Mao pointing the way forward. They were followed by hundreds of thousands of ordinary people, forced to march together, many in contingents with members from opposed factions.68
Everywhere study classes in Mao Zedong Thought were convened. The People’s Liberation Army had stood behind Mao Zedong Thought years earlier, and now it used the cult of their leader to impose order and discipline. The cult of personality, as Lin Biao phrased it, would unite ‘the entire party, the entire army, and the entire people’. A new campaign called the Three Loyalties and Four Boundless Loves was launched in March 1968. It brought the worship of Mao to new heights, requiring absolute loyalty to the Chairman, his thought and the ‘proletarian revolutionary line’. In schools, offices and factories, altars were set up to Chairman Mao. Large characters reading ‘The Red Sun in Our Hearts’ were cut out in bright, shiny red paper, forming an arc over a picture of the Great Helmsman. Sunrays emanated from his head. Everywhere people met the gaze of the Chairman the moment they woke up and reported back to him in the evening, bowing in front of his portrait.69
There was even a loyalty dance, consisting of a few simple moves with outstretched arms from the heart to the Chairman’s portrait. The dance was accompanied by the song ‘Beloved Chairman Mao’. On state television, entire evenings were devoted to ritual song and dance. A giant bust usually occupied the centre of the stage, producing rays that throbbed and flickered with electricity, as if light and energy poured forth from the godhead.70
Busts and statues of Mao sprouted like mushrooms after rain. More than 600,000 of them appeared in Shanghai alone, most made of death-white plaster, others using reinforced concrete, aluminium and tinplate. Some towered above pedestrians at a majestic fifteen metres, others stood at a more modest three metres. Scarce resources were expended in the informal competition, and in 1968 the city used 900 tonnes of tinplate alone. The Steel Institute turned to stainless steel to erect its monument at a cost of 100,000 yuan.71
The first phase of the Cultural Revolution came to an end in the summer of 1968 as new, so-called ‘revolutionary party committees’ took over the party and the state. They were heavily dominated by military officers, concentrating real power in the hands of the army. Over the next three years they turned the country into a garrison state, with soldiers overseeing schools, factories and government units. They also organised a series of purges, as all those who had spoken out at the height of the Cultural Revolution in 1966–7 were punished. At first millions of undesirable elements, including students and others who had taken the Chairman at his word, were banished to the countryside to be ‘re-educated by the peasants’. This was followed by a nationwide witch-hunt for ‘spies’, ‘traitors’ and ‘renegades’, as special committees were set up to examine the alleged enemy links of ordinary people and party members alike. A campaign against corruption further cowed the population into submission, as almost every act and every utterance – inadvertently tearing a poster of the Chairman, questioning the planned economy – became a potentially criminal act.72
Across the country people were forced to prove their devotion to the Chairman, denouncing colleagues, friends, neighbours and family members. In one senseless and unpredictable purge after another entire communities were ripped apart, producing docile, atomised individuals loyal to no one but the Chairman. And everywhere recalcitrant elements were forced to undergo re-education, whether study classes in Mao Zedong Thought for ordinary people or May Seventh Cadre Schools for party members.
In April 1969 the Ninth Party Congress passed a new constitution, establishing that ‘Marxism-Leninism Mao Zedong Thought’ was to be the theoretical basis of the party. Mao Zedong Thought was reaffirmed as the country’s guiding ideology. At long last the Chairman was able to reverse the decisions made by the Eighth Party Congress in September 1956. By now Liu Shaoqi had been expelled from the party and denounced, along with dozens of other elderly party leaders, as a ‘renegade, traitor and scab hiding in the party and a running dog of imperialism, modern revisionism and the nationalist reactionaries who has committed innumerable crimes’. He died in solitary detention six months later, covered in bedsores, his hair long and unkempt. A new Central Committee was elected in which less than one in five members were carryovers from 1956.73
Mao, however, was wary of the military, in particular Lin Biao, who had pioneered the study of Mao Zedong Thought in the army. Mao had used Lin Biao to launch and sustain the Cultural Revolution, but the marshal in turn exploited the turmoil to expand his own power base, placing his followers in key positions throughout the army. He died in a mysterious plane crash in September 1971, bringing to an end the grip of the military on civilian life, as the army was in turn purged, falling victim to the Cultural Revolution.
Mao’s cult, closely associated with Lin Biao and the People’s Liberation Army, was scaled back almost overnight. China moved even further away from the Soviet Union, turning instead towards the United States in 1972. Cities were spruced up for Nixon’s visit, with posters removed and anti-imperialist slogans toned down. Shanghai underwent a facelift. It took a small army of women to scrub out a huge slogan opposite the Peace Hotel proclaiming ‘Long Live the Invincible Thoughts of Chairman Mao’. New slogans appeared, welcoming the ‘Great Unity of the Peoples of the World’. All signs of the Chairman were removed from window displays. Thousands of statues were dismantled, discreetly sent off for recycling.74
The Chairman, too, was primped and preened. His meeting with Nixon was a huge propaganda coup. The news sent shock waves around the world, as the balance of the Cold War shifted away from the Soviet Union. In Beijing, Mao gloated that the United States was ‘changing from monkey to man, not quite a man yet, the tail is still there’. He had reduced Nixon, the leader of the most powerful nation on earth, to a mere emissary seeking an imperial audience. Leaders of countries from Europe, Latin America, Africa and Asia soon flocked to Beijing, all seeking recognition.75
During his final years in court the Chairman continued to play one faction against the other. When Zhou Enlai was diagnosed with cancer Mao refused to approve his treatment, allowing him to die in early 1976. His own death came a few minutes past midnight on 9 September 1976. In schools, factories and offices people were assembled to listen to the official announcement. Those who felt relief had to hide their feelings. This was the case with Chang Jung, a student from Sichuan who for a moment was numbed with sheer euphoria. All around her people wept. She had to display the correct emotion or risk being singled out, and buried her head in the shoulder of the woman in front of her, heaving and snivelling.76
She was hardly alone in putting on a performance. Traditionally, in China, weeping for dead relatives and even throwing oneself on the ground in front of the coffin was a required demonstration of filial piety. Absence of tears was a disgrace to the family. Sometimes actors were hired to wail loudly at the funerals of important dignitaries, thus encouraging other mourners to join in without feeling embarrassed. And much as people had mastered the art of effortlessly producing proletarian anger at denunciation meetings, many knew how to cry on demand.
People showed less contrition in private. In Kunming, the provincial capital of Yunnan, liquor sold out overnight. One young woman remembers how her father invited his best friend to their home, locked the door and opened the only bottle of wine they had. The following day they went to a public memorial service where people cried as if they were heartbroken. ‘As a little girl, I was confused by the adults’ expressions – everybody looked so sad in public, while my father was so happy the night before.’77
Some people felt genuine grief, especially those who had benefited from the Cultural Revolution. And plenty of true believers remained, especially among young people. Ai Xiaoming, a twenty-two-year-old girl eager to enter the party and contribute to socialism, was so heartbroken that she wept almost to the point of fainting.78
In the countryside, however, apparently few people sobbed. As one poor villager in Anhui recalled, ‘not a single person wept at the time’.79
Mao entered a mausoleum, like Stalin. Unlike Stalin, he remained there. His portrait still hangs high in Beijing, while his face beams from every banknote in the People’s Republic. Mao used the cult to turn others into adulators who enforced his every whim. He made party leaders accomplices to his crimes. And by becoming complicit they and their successors turned themselves into the custodians of his image, determined not to repeat the mistake Khrushchev had made in his secret speech.