Mao: The Unknown Story

At this juncture, Marshal Chen Yi, one of the more outspoken opponents of the Great Purge, who had suffered much in it, died of cancer, on 6 January 1972. The memorial service was scheduled for the 10th, as a low-key affair, with limitations put on the size of his portrait, the number of wreaths, how many people could attend — and the number of stoves permitted to heat a big hall: just two. Mao had no wish to attend the funeral.

But in the days after Chen Yi’s death, although the news was not announced, word got out, and large numbers of old cadres gathered outside the hospital, demanding to be allowed to bid farewell to his corpse. The mood of the crowds was angry as well as mournful. And there was no doubt that the anger was directed against the Cultural Revolution — and against Mao himself. Mao felt tremendous pressure to make a gesture to placate the old power base which he had treated so abominably, and on which he now had to rely again.

On the day of the service, shortly before it was due to begin, Mao suddenly declared that he would attend. His staff observed that “his face was hung with dark clouds” and he looked “irritated and frustrated,” remaining totally silent. But he could see it was wise to go and use the occasion to put across the message to old cadres that he “cares for us.” He also did some scapegoating, telling Chen Yi’s family that it was Lin Biao who had “plotted … to get rid of all us old stagers.” Word went out that the persecutions in the Cultural Revolution were Lin Biao’s fault, and that Mao was coming to his senses. Afterwards, a photo was published of Mao at the service, looking suitably sad (though with his unshaven stubble airbrushed out), with Chen Yi’s grief-stricken widow clinging to his arm, and this did much to abate the bitterness among “capitalist-roaders.”

The day of Chen Yi’s funeral was bitterly cold, but Mao was in such a foul mood at having to go that he refused to put on a warm coat. His staff tried to get him to dress sensibly, but he pushed the clothes away. He ended up wearing only a thin coat over his pajamas, and that was all he had on for the whole service in the poorly heated hall. As a result he fell ill. He was seventy-eight, and he got sicker and sicker. On 12 February he passed out, and lay at the brink of death.

Physical and political vulnerability forced Mao to allow the rehabilitation of cadres to be speeded up, and the regime became markedly more moderate for the first time since the start of the Cultural Revolution nearly six years before. Abusive practices in prisons decreased greatly. Violent denunciation meetings were scrapped, even for Lin Biao’s men, who, although detained, suffered little physically compared with Mao’s previous routine. Incredibly, given that an attempted assassination — of Mao, no less — was involved, not a single person was executed.

After years of living surrounded by daily brutality, and with almost nothing constructive to see or do in the way of entertainment, tension in society had built up to an almost unbearable pitch. An Italian psychoanalyst who was in China just before this time observed to us that he had never seen anything like the number of facial tics and extreme tension in people’s faces. Now there was a let-up. A few old books and tunes, and some leisure activities, were allowed again. Some historical sites were reopened. Although relaxation stayed within very strict limits, still there was a lightness in the air when spring came in 1972.

A letter from Chou to Mao on the night of 13 September shows unequivocally that the plane was not shot down by the Chinese.

The Russians sent their top investigator, KGB general Aleksandr Zagvozdin, to Mongolia to make sure it really was Lin on the plane. Zagvozdin dug up the corpses. But, he told us, his report failed to satisfy his bosses, and he was sent back to exhume the bodies again from the now frozen ground. The corpses of Lin and his wife were boiled in a huge pot and the skeletons taken to Moscow, where Lin’s was checked against old Russian medical records and X-rays from his earlier visits, and a squeamish Yuri Andropov and Brezhnev were finally satisfied that it really was Lin.

Among those detained was Lin Biao’s daughter Dodo.

53. MAOISM FALLS FLAT ON THE WORLD STAGE (1966–70 AGE 72–76)

MAO’S ULTIMATE AMBITION was to dominate the world. In November 1968 he told the Australian Maoist leader Hill:

In my opinion, the world needs to be unified … In the past, many, including the Mongols, the Romans … Alexander the Great, Napoleon, and the British Empire, wanted to unify the world. Today, both the United States and the Soviet Union want to unify the world. Hitler wanted to unify the world … But they all failed. It seems to me that the possibility of unifying the world has not disappeared … In my view, the world can be unified.