Mao: The Unknown Story

To make sure that students were fully available to carry out his wishes, Mao ordered schooling suspended from 13 June. “Now lessons are stopped,” he said, and young people “are given food. With food they have energy and they want to riot. What are they expected to do if not to riot?” Violence broke out within days. On 18 June, scores of teachers and cadres at Peking University were dragged in front of crowds and manhandled, their faces blackened, and dunces’ hats put on their heads. They were forced to kneel, some were beaten up, and women were sexually molested. Similar episodes happened all over China, producing a cascade of suicides.

MAO ORCHESTRATED THESE events from the provinces. He had left the capital the previous November as soon as he had set the Purge in motion. Peking was no longer safe: it was full of foes he wanted to purge, and uncomfortably close to Russian troops on the Outer Mongolia border. For more than eight months, Mao stayed way down south, travelling incessantly.

He was also relaxing and storing up energy for the coming tempest. He took walks in the misty hills along the lake at Hangzhou, and flirted at his twice-weekly dancing parties. That June, while mayhem was rising, he spent some time in a particularly serene villa that he had never been to, outside his home village of Shaoshan. He had ordered this villa built during his previous visit seven years before. While swimming in a reservoir there, he had been much taken by the secluded beauty of the surroundings, and said to the provincial boss: “Mm, this place is pretty quiet. Would you build a straw hut here for my retirement?” As the man was soon purged, nothing was done until Mao brought it up again a year later, in the depth of the famine. So began “Project 203,” the building of a giant steel and cement edifice called Dripping Grotto. The whole mountain range was sealed off, and the local peasants evicted. A helicopter pad and a special railway line were planned, and an earthquake-and atom bomb — proof building, with shock-absorbers, was later incorporated. Altogether, Mao stayed here for all of eleven days in that violent June, and never again.

This grey monstrosity was surrounded, incongruously, by soft green hills alive with blazing wildflowers, and the back abutted onto the Mao family’s ancestral burial ground. Its front door faced a peak called Dragon’s Head, auspicious in the view of geomancy. This delighted Mao, who chatted jovially with his entourage about the feng shui assets of the place.

Though he was just on the edge of his native village, Mao did not meet a single villager. On his way, a little girl had caught a glimpse of him in his car, and told her family. Police descended at once, and warned the family: “You didn’t see Chairman Mao! Don’t you dare to say that again!” Meetings were called to warn the villagers not to think that Mao was there. Mao spent most of his time reading and thinking. He did not even go swimming, although the reservoir was right on his doorstep.

By the end of June, he was ready to head back to Peking and start the next stage of his Purge. En route, he stopped at Wuhan, where on 16 July he swam for more than an hour in the Yangtze, watched by tens of thousands of people. Like his swim a decade before, this was to send the message to his foes that, at the age of seventy-two, he had the health, the strength and the will for a gigantic fight. And this time the symbolic gesture was also intended for the population at large, especially the young. The message was distilled into one slogan: “Follow Chairman Mao forward through high winds and waves!” Chanted repeatedly from the now ubiquitous loudspeakers, it fanned the flames in many restless heads. Having cranked up his media to ballyhoo this swim to the maximum, even making it famous abroad, Mao returned to Peking on 18 July. He immediately adopted a hands-on approach, frequently chairing meetings with the Small Group that ran the Purge, and meeting every day with Chou En-lai, who was in charge of day-to-day business.

Mao did not go back to his old house, claiming he did not like the way it had been redecorated. Instead, he moved into unexpected quarters in another part of Zhongnanhai — the changing-rooms of the swimming pools, which he made his main residence for the next ten years. He did not move there to swim. He was taking precautions against the possibility that bugging devices — or worse — had been installed during his absence.