Mao: The Unknown Story

This change turned the poem into an unmistakable valediction. Mao was writing his own envoi to a fellow thwarted giant. It was re-recorded to music, and was one of the poems sung to Nixon when Mao brought the former US president over to say his personal goodbye.

MAO SHOWED UNCOMMON sympathy in private for other ousted rulers. When the emperor of Ethiopia, Haile Selassie, whom he had met only once and very briefly, died in prison in 1975 after being dethroned by a military coup, Mao sank into melancholy. “The emperor was doing fine,” Mao kept saying. “Why did he have to come to this? Why did it have to end like this?!”

This new empathy with deposed rulers was an extension of Mao’s old fear of being toppled himself. In this final phase of his life, he was more obsessed than ever with a coup. It was to avert such a possibility that he intimated to Deng Xiao-ping and his allies in 1975 that they were welcome to crush Mme Mao and her Gang after his death.

It was partly for this same reason — fear of a coup — that Mao did not appoint a successor. He never bestowed that title on the head of his last coterie, Hua Guo-feng, as he had earlier on Lin Biao. He feared that an official heir apparent might be in too much haste to succeed, and would try to jump the gun. So, although Hua showed manifest loyalty (when Mao was fed through the nose for the first time, Hua took on Chou’s guinea-pig role and tested a tube on himself first), and although Mao obviously trusted Hua enough to put him in charge, he declined to confirm that Hua would take over after he died.

Mao did not care one iota what happened after his death. In fact, he had scant confidence in the staying power of his own “achievements.” On the only occasion he said a few words to his inner circle about the future, when he knew he was dying, he told them that there would be “upheaval,” indeed “blood rains and winds smelling of blood.” And then Mao said: “What’s going to happen to you, heaven only knows.”

So Mao did not leave a will, even though he had been expecting death for at least a year, and had had ample time to prepare one.

THE LAST FEW weeks of Mao’s life were spent in a nondescript building which had been specially built for him in Zhongnanhai, with all the usual security specifications, and was earthquake-proof. Characteristically, it only had a code-name, “202.” He was carried there at the end of July 1976, after Peking was shaken by a huge earthquake that measured 7.8 on the Richter scale and which flattened Tangshan, an industrial city 160 km to the east, where somewhere between 240,000 (official figure) and 600,000 (unofficial estimate) people were killed. In Peking and many other cities, tens of millions of people had to sleep out in the open. In true Mao style, the regime turned down foreign help, which could have greatly lowered the death toll. A media campaign was launched exhorting rescuers to “denounce Deng on the ruins.”

Mao was still giving orders. When Mme Mao wanted to go out of Peking on 2 September, she came to ask her husband for permission. He was peevish at being bothered, and refused the first time, but granted it when she persisted. Three days later, Mao suddenly lost consciousness, and she was summoned back by the new team headed by Hua. In the past weeks they had been taking turns to keep vigil by Mao’s bed, and when Mme Mao got back, she joined them, but stood behind the bed, as he had shown annoyance before when he woke up and set eyes on her. None of Mao’s children was present.

On 8 September an unintelligible croak came from Mao’s throat. His barber and servant of seventeen years tucked a pencil into his trembling hand, and Mao laboriously drew three shaky lines, and then feebly touched the wooden edge of his bed three times. The barber figured out that Mao wanted to know what was happening to the Japanese prime minister, Takeo Miki (whose name in Chinese means “Three Woods”). Mao had never met Miki, and had shown no special interest in him until now, when Miki was fighting to prevent being toppled by a coup within his own party.

One of Mao’s two girlfriends-turned-nurse, Meng, held up the news bulletin, and Mao read it for a few minutes. This report about yet another leader on the ropes was the very last thing he read.

Soon after this, Meng heard Mao say: “I feel very ill. Call the doctors.” These were the last words he spoke. Shortly afterwards, he slipped into unconsciousness. At ten minutes past midnight on the morning of 9 September 1976, Mao Tse-tung died. His mind remained lucid to the end, and in it stirred just one thought: himself and his power.

EPILOGUE

TODAY, MAO’S PORTRAIT and his corpse still dominate Tiananmen Square in the heart of the Chinese capital. The current Communist regime declares itself to be Mao’s heir and fiercely perpetuates the myth of Mao.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS