Mao: The Unknown Story

On the world stage, Mao had to cling to a vague halo. When Nixon’s daughter Julie turned up wearing a Mao badge, “he reacted with a childlike delight and impulsively clasped my hand,” she wrote. To sustain his profile, he continued to “receive” foreign statesmen until three months before his death. But he often rather spoiled the effect of these audiences. Thailand’s leaders found him “snoring” as they entered the room. Singapore’s premier Lee Kuan Yew, Mao’s penultimate foreign visitor, described an almost inarticulate Mao grunting, head lolling against the back of his armchair. Indeed, as the last photos of him confirm, Mao looked anything but a world leader. Dribbling saliva, waxen-faced and slack-jawed, he projected an image of senility and wretchedness. When he saw how bad he looked in photos with Pakistan’s prime minister Bhutto at the end of May 1976, Mao stopped meeting foreigners altogether.

WHILE FEELING DEEPLY discontented at having failed to achieve his world ambition, Mao spared no thought for the mammoth human and material losses that his destructive quest had cost his people. Well over 70 million people had perished — in peacetime — as a result of his misrule, yet Mao felt sorry only for himself. He would cry as he talked about anything he could connect with his past glory and current failure, even watching his own regime’s propaganda films. His staff often saw tears flooding down his face, “like a spring” as one of them put it. Self-pity, to which Mao had always been prone, was the paramount emotion of the utterly unpitying Mao in his last days.

Mao became very attached to some classical poems which convey a mood of great men brought down, kings fallen, and heroes’ brilliant prospects in ruins. He empathized with the unfulfillled heroes and kings.

This state of mind led him to an extraordinary sense of fraternity with those he regarded as “fallen kings” around the world. Top of the list was former US president Richard Nixon, who had been forced from office by Watergate in August 1974. Time and again Mao went out of his way to proclaim his fond feelings for Nixon. Weeks after Nixon had been ejected from the White House, Mao asked Imelda Marcos of the Philippines to pass on his good wishes and an invitation to Nixon to revisit China. Nixon’s daughter Julie and her husband, David Eisenhower, were given an astonishing welcome in December the following year. Mao told Julie: “Write to your father at once, tell him I miss him.” When Julie got back to America, Peking’s envoy told her that Mao “considers you part of his family”—a remark that was absolutely unique.

When the disgraced Nixon came, in February 1976, Mao sent a Boeing 707 to Los Angeles for him, complete with the protocol chief of the Foreign Ministry, another unheard-of gesture. The fact that the plane ran the risk of being seized as collateral against US assets expropriated in China was immaterial for Mao. When he saw Nixon again, Mao clinked teacups with him, and when Nixon took his leave, Mao struggled to the door, standing unaided, to see him off, looking melancholy. Mao had invited him to China for what was, in effect, a private farewell. He personally selected an evening’s entertainment for the former US president which included the singing of Mao’s favorite classical poems set to music, which conjured up the mood of the tragic ending of great men. The program meant nothing to Nixon, who showed he was tired — and bored. But Mao was expressing his own sentiments, for himself, even though he was not present at the performance.

Another even more unlikely recipient of Mao’s sentimental affinity was Chiang Kai-shek, the man he had deposed — and had slaughtered millions of Chinese to keep deposed. Chiang died in Taiwan on 5 April 1975 at the age of eighty-nine, leaving a will decreeing that his coffin was not to be buried in Taiwan, but kept in a shrine to await a return to the Mainland when communism collapsed. Around the time of Chiang’s funeral, Mao mourned the Generalissimo for an entire day, in private. On that day, Mao did not eat, or speak. He had an eight-minute tape of stirring music played over and over again all day long to create a funereal atmosphere, while he beat time on his bed, wearing a solemn expression. The music was set specially for Mao to a twelfth-century poem, in which the writer bade farewell to a friend who bore an uncanny resemblance to Chiang — a patriotic high mandarin whose career ended tragically and unfulfillled, and who was being exiled to a remote part of China. The writer told his friend:

You and I are men of history

No little men chattering about minor affairs!

This was exactly how Mao felt towards Chiang.

Days later, Mao rewrote the last two lines of the poem so that they read:

Go, let go, my honored friend,

Do not look back.