Mao: The Unknown Story

With no love or joy in her life, Li Na lapsed into insanity. As far as Mao was concerned, she had run out of use. He saw less and less of her, and evinced no concern about her mental or physical condition.

MAO HAD SIMILARLY lost interest in his other daughter, Chiao-chiao, who had no political flair. Years before, when she returned from Russia as a pretty twelve-year-old, exotic in her Russian wool skirt and leather shoes, with Russian manners, and speaking Russian, Mao had showered her with affection, and shown her off, calling her “my little foreigner.” And she had been deliriously happy. But when she lost the entertainment value she had had as a child, and turned out politically worthless as an adult, she found she had diminishing access to Mao. In the last few years of his life, she only very rarely got to see him. She went to the gate of Zhongnanhai several times, but he refused to let her in. She had a nervous breakdown, and was in and out of depression for years.

Mao’s oldest son An-ying had been killed in the Korean War in 1950. The only surviving son, Anching, was mentally ill. Mao provided him with a comfortable life, but hardly ever saw him, and did not regard him as a member of the family. Mao was wont to say that his family consisted of five members: himself and Mme Mao, the two daughters, and his only nephew, Yuan-xin.

The nephew had spent much of his youth in Mao’s family. During the Cultural Revolution, when he was still in his early thirties, he was catapulted into the post of political commissar of the Shenyang Military Region, in which capacity he helped Mao control Manchuria, the critical area in the northeast bordering with Russia. One of his later best-known acts there was to order the execution of a brave female Party member called Zhang Zhi-xin, who had openly challenged Mme Mao and the Great Purge. Just before she was shot, she was pinned to the floor of her cell and her windpipe was slit, to prevent her from speaking out at the execution ground, even though it was a secret execution. This cruelty was gratuitous, as execution victims routinely had a cord put around their neck that could be yanked to choke them if they tried to speak.

As well as being ruthless, Yuan-xin belonged to the family. Mao made him his liaison with the Politburo in the final year of his life, 1975–76. Actually, Yuan-xin’s own father, Mao’s brother Tse-min, had been killed partly as the result of Mao giving instructions not to try to save him when he was in prison in Xinjiang in the early 1940s — a fact carefully concealed from Yuan-xin, as from everyone else.

Mao had been the cause of the death of his second wife too. After being abandoned by Mao, Kai-hui had been executed in 1930 as a direct result of his attacking Changsha, where she was living, for reasons that were entirely to do with his drive for personal power. And he was also largely responsible for the repeated and eventually irreversible mental breakdowns of his third wife, Gui-yuan (who died, aged seventy-five, in 1984).

Over the decades, Mao had brought ill fortune to virtually every member of his family. His final betrayal was towards his fourth and last wife, Jiang Qing. After getting her to do much of his dirty work, and knowing how much she was loathed, he made no provision for safeguarding her after he died. On the contrary, he offered her up as a trade-off to the “opposition” that emerged near the end of his life. In return for guaranteeing his own safety while he was alive, they were told that after he died, they could do as they pleased with Mme Mao and her group of cronies, which included Mao’s nephew Yuan-xin. Less than a month after Mao’s death, the whole group ended up in prison. In 1991 Mme Mao committed suicide.

Today, Li Na has recovered, and leads a normal life. She appears to have “forgotten” her role in the Cultural Revolution.

57. ENFEEBLED MAO HEDGES HIS BETS (1973–76 AGE 79–82)

IN THE LAST two years of Mao’s life a formidable “opposition” to his policies emerged, in the shape of an alliance that centered on Deng Xiao-ping, the man who later dismantled much of Mao’s legacy after Mao died. Mao had purged Deng in 1966, at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, but brought him back to the top in 1973.

Born in Sichuan in 1904, and thus eleven years Mao’s junior, Deng went to France in 1920 on a work-and-study program at the age of sixteen, and there became a Communist, working under Chou En-lai. Five years in France left him with a lifelong fondness for many things French: wine, cheese, croissants, coffee and cafés — all, it would seem, to do with food. Late in life, he would often compare French cafés nostalgically with the teahouses in his home province of Sichuan, reminiscing about a little café he had frequented in the Place d’Italie in Paris.