Mao: The Unknown Story

THE POLITBURO AND Mao’s leading doctors were told. Another person who was instantly informed, by a sympathetic doctor, was Deng’s wife, who was in Hospital 301, a special hospital for top leaders, even those in disgrace. It was a sign of Mao’s slackening grip that top-secret news like this about his condition could leak to his political foes. Once Deng himself heard, he wrote to Mao on 10 June, asking to be allowed to go home; in effect, demanding to be released.

Mao had to say “Yes,” which he did after his condition stabilized at the end of the month; but Deng’s release was delayed for some days because of another event that made Mao feel insecure. On 6 July, Marshal Zhu De, the most senior army leader, who enjoyed considerable respect, died, at the age of ninety. Mao feared that Zhu’s death might touch off mass protests similar to those that followed Chou’s death earlier in the year — and that Deng might get involved. Zhu had been Mao’s earliest opponent, back in the late 1920s. Mao had made him suffer in the Cultural Revolution, but had refrained from purging him. Eventually, as unrest did not materialize after Zhu’s death, Deng was allowed to go home on 19 July — driven through deserted streets in the dead of night.

Deng’s detention had lasted only three months. Although he was still under house arrest, he was among his family. Mao had failed to destroy him, and Deng was very much around to fight another day.

58. LAST DAYS (1974–76 AGE 80–82)

HATRED, FRUSTRATION AND self-pity dominated Mao’s last days. Mao expressed these feelings, long prominent in his character, in unique ways. He was very fond of a sixth-century poem called “The Sere Trees,” which was a lamentation and elegy about a grove of sublime trees that ended up withered and lifeless. The poet, Yu Xin, attributed the trees’ ill fortune to their having been uprooted and transplanted, which echoed his own life as an exile. But on 29 May 1975, Mao told the scholars annotating poems specially for him that the fate of the trees had “nothing to do with being transplanted.” It was, he asserted, “the result of the trees being battered by harsh malevolent waves and hacked by human hands.” Mao was thinking of himself as someone who was being (in his wife’s words) “bullied” by Deng Xiao-ping and Deng’s allies. Days before, they had forced Mao into an unprecedented climb-down by having him cancel his media campaign against them, and concede that he had “made a mistake.”

After he had to release Deng from detention in July 1976, which made him furious, Mao had the “The Sere Trees” read aloud to him twice. He then began reciting it himself, very slowly, in his strangulated voice, brimming with bitterness. After this, he never asked to hear, or read, another poem.

Deng was only one of many old Party foes whom Mao took to scourging in his head in his last years. Another was Chou En-lai. In June 1974, Chou finally had the cancer operation that Mao had been blocking for two years. Mao had only finally consented because his own enfeebled physical condition had made him feel insecure himself. While Chou was in the hospital, Mao dug out some old diatribes he had written against Chou and other opponents back in 1941. They were full of insults, and Mao had never felt it was wise to publish them. Now, thirty-three years later, he spent a lot of time reading them, cursing Chou in his mind.

Going over them was also a way for Mao to vent his hatred for another foe, Liu Shao-chi, who had died five years before, at Mao’s hands, but whose death Mao had still not dared to announce publicly. When Mao had originally written the articles, Liu had been his ally, and he had praised Liu in them. Now he made a point of crossing out each reference to Liu.

There was yet another man whom Mao was flaying in his head, and that was his chief rival at the time the articles were written: Wang Ming, who had died in exile in Russia on 27 March 1974, two months before Mao reread his old tirades. Mao had tried to murder Wang Ming by poisoning him in the 1940s, but then had had to allow him to take refuge in Russia, where Wang had remained something of a time-bomb. Khrushchev and Wang Ming’s son both confirmed that Mao tried to poison Wang Ming in Russia. The attempt was unsuccessful, but only because the vigilant exile tested the food on his dog, Tek, which died. In Moscow, Wang Ming turned out anti-Mao material which was broadcast to China, and during the Cultural Revolution he started planning a return to China to set up a base in Xinjiang, near the Russian border, and then try a coup against Mao (a proposal that got short shrift from the Kremlin).