Mao: The Unknown Story

Mao wanted his daughter to grow up to be useful politically, and steered her in that direction. Back in 1947, when the Communists were vacating Yenan, he insisted that she stay within earshot of the shelling and the shooting, even though she was only six years old. A tearful Mme Mao pleaded for her to be evacuated, but Mao shouted at his wife: “Get the hell out of here! The child is not going. I want her here to listen to gunfire!”

Mao started to groom her as his assistant when the Cultural Revolution started in 1966. Aged twenty-six, she had just graduated from Peking University in modern Chinese history, a subject she said she did not particularly like, but accepted, because the Party wanted more children from elite families to become Party historians. Her father assigned her to the army’s main newspaper, where she started work as one of the special reporters, gathering information for him. Mao’s goal was for her to take control of the paper, which she accomplished in August 1967, while the editorial and management boards were carted off to prison. A cult was then fostered around her. The paper’s offices — and even staffers’ homes — were covered with posters “saluting” her, and slogans shouted at rallies proclaimed that whoever opposed her was a counter-revolutionary. An exhibition room was opened at the paper to display her “great merit,” showing things like her tea mug and her bicycle, implying that it was saintly of her not to be using fine china or a limousine.

Her behavior changed at this time. Having at first seemed unpretentious, now she would scream at senior staff to stand to attention in front of her, shrieking: “I really wish I could have you shot!” She declared that she was going to impose “thug rule,” using an arcane expression that she had clearly learned from her father. Over 60 percent of the old staff at the newspaper suffered appalling persecution for allegedly opposing her. Among the many who were tortured was a former personal friend who had expressed disagreement with her over some minor matter.

Early in 1968, because Mao was shutting down his personal channels in the army in order to please Lin Biao, Li Na was taken off the paper. Her next job was no less critical: director of the Small Group’s private office. The position was vacated for her by a simple expedient, typical of Mme Mao’s modus operandi. Mme Mao accused the existing director of being a spy and had him clapped in jail. Li Na then took over his job until the Small Group was dissolved in 1969.

Mao had intended her for even higher office — controller of Peking. But in 1972 she had a nervous breakdown, and floated in and out of insanity for years, until after his death. It seems that, unlike her parents, Li Na did not thrive on persecution, and that after her early zealousness to enforce her father’s orders, she was driven out of her mind by the constant victimizations she was expected to carry out. On one occasion, she picked up a pile of documents about the purge and suicide of a man she knew, and threw them out of the window, shouting: “Don’t give me any more of this rubbish! I’ve been sick and tired of it for ages!”

She longed for affection. Her mother, who had loved her when she was a child, now, like her father, narrowed their relationship down to one based exclusively on politics, and gave her no warmth or comfort. When she was heading for a nervous breakdown, reliant for short-term relief on more and more massive amounts of sleeping pills, Li Na had no one to turn to. As a young woman, she yearned for a love relationship, but with Mao for a father, and especially with Jiang Qing for a mother, no man dared to court her, and no match-making enthusiast fancied inviting trouble. It was only when she was thirty-one, in 1971, that she herself approached a young servant. When she wrote to her father for permission to marry, he only asked the messenger a few basic questions, and then wrote on the letter simply: “Agree.” Mao’s wedding present was a set of leaden tomes which he himself never read: the works of Marx and Engels.

Neither of her parents came to her simple wedding, which Mme Mao had only grudgingly accepted, regarding the bridegroom as beneath her daughter, since he had been a servant. For a while after the marriage, Li Na seemed to be prone to colds and high temperatures, which Mme Mao blamed on her daughter having sex with the son-in-law, and insultingly ordered him to have a physical check-up. It did not take her long to have her son-in-law banished to another city, claiming that he “looks like a spy.” The marriage collapsed, and Li Na sank into a deep depression.

In May 1972, Li Na gave birth to a son, which briefly brightened up her life. But Jiang Qing disliked the baby because she despised its father, and never once held it in her arms. Mao showed zero interest in this grandson, as in his other three grandchildren.