Mao: The Unknown Story

Mao could not prevent the Assembly meeting. All he could do was to withhold his blessing by not calling a Party plenum beforehand to set the agenda — the only time such an omission ever happened during his reign. In the Politburo the day before the Assembly opened, Mao snapped at Liu repeatedly: “I just won’t endorse [you].” At one point, he told Liu: “You’re no good.”

Outside the meeting room, Mao exploded to a couple of his devotees: “Someone is shitting on my head!” Then, on his seventy-first birthday, on 26 December, he took the most unusual step of inviting Liu for dinner. Mao almost never socialized with Liu or his other colleagues, except for being on the dance floor at the same time. Beforehand, Mao said to his daughter Li Na: “You are not coming today, because your father is going to curse the mother-fucker.” Mao sat at one table with a few favorites, while Liu was put at a separate table. There was not an iota of birthday atmosphere. While everyone else sat in frigid silence, Mao ranted on with accusations about “revisionism,” and “running an independent kingdom,” transparently directed at Liu.

No one said anything in support of Mao, not even the equivalent of “You’re right, Boss”—except his secretary, Chen Bo-da. Mao so appreciated this that afterwards he summoned Chen, drowsy with sleeping pills, in the small hours of the night, and confided to him that he intended to get Liu, making Chen one of the first people to be told this explicitly. (Mao was soon to catapult Chen to No. 4 in the Party.)

On 3 January 1965, Liu was reappointed president, to a blaze of publicity, quite unlike the occasion of his original appointment in 1959, when there had been little fanfare. This time there were rallies and parades, with his portrait carried alongside Mao’s, and firecrackers, drums and gongs. Newspapers ran headlines like “Chairman Mao and Chairman Liu are both our most beloved leaders.” (The president is also called “chairman” in Chinese.) Liu plainly had many supporters rooting for him. He had earned a lot of credit with senior Party officials for extricating China from the famine. Even devoted Mao followers in the inner circle showed signs of switching allegiance. Most incredibly, the idea was mooted of hanging Liu’s portrait on Tiananmen Gate — alone, without Mao’s! — which Liu had to veto at once.

On the day Liu was being re-elected, his wife was summoned, for the first time ever, to a meeting in Mao’s Suite 118 in the Great Hall. The Lius were very much in love, and Mao knew it. He chose this day to signal his intention to make them both suffer. When Liu walked in after the vote, he was taken aback when he saw his wife was present. Mao pounced, bellowing a long tirade. Mme Liu felt immense hatred radiating from Mao. She and Liu looked at each other in silence. Mao wanted Mme Liu to witness her husband being abused, and for Liu to register: I will make your wife pay too.

Yet, even after such an overt display of hostility, no colleague took Mao’s side and denounced Liu. Most just expressed concern about the discord between “the two chairmen,” and urged Liu to adopt a more obsequious posture towards Mao. Liu eventually apologized to Mao for not being respectful enough. Mao’s response was as menacing as it was arbitrary: “This is not a matter of respect or disrespect. This is a question of Marxism versus Revisionism.”

Echoing Stalin’s remark about Tito (“I will wag my little finger and there will be no more Tito”), Mao told Liu: “Who do you think you are? I can wag my little finger and there will be no more you!” But in fact, for now, there was a stand-off. Mao could not get Liu condemned just on his own say-so.

AT THIS POINT Mao resorted to a potent symbolic gesture — a trip to the Jinggang Mountains, where he had set up his first base in 1927. Unlike his other trips, which were spur-of-the-moment, this one was publicized well in advance among his top circle, so all his colleagues knew he was going. Six years before, facing a rebellious Peng De-huai, Mao had threatened that if he were challenged he would “go up into the mountains and start guerrilla warfare.” Now he was actually going to the mountains, which made the message altogether louder, more actual and more powerful.

A portable squat toilet was constructed. An advance team scouted the destination. “Class enemies” were detained and stashed well away from Mao’s route. Duplicate cars were prepared, and heavy machine-guns positioned on commanding points. The Praetorian Guard lurked in plain clothes, their weapons concealed, like Hollywood gangsters’, in musical instrument cases.