Mao: The Unknown Story

His health is really such that he can’t work. He racks his brains too much. Heaven protect me. I must work hard, hard. If I can make 60 yuan a month, I can call him back, and ask him not to work any more. In that case, with his ability, his intelligence, he may even achieve immortal success.

Another sleepless night.

I can’t endure this now. I am going to him.

My children, my poor children hold me back.

A heavy load hangs on my heart, one side is him, the other is my children. I can’t leave either.

I want to cry. I really want to cry.

No matter how hard I try, I just can’t stop loving him. I just can’t …

A person’s feeling is really strange. San Chun-he loves me so much, and yet I don’t even look at him.

How I love him [Mao]! Heaven, give me a perfect answer!

Shortly after these heart-rending words were written, her First Cousin was arrested and executed. He was buried behind her house.

Months later, she herself was dead. During his assault on Changsha, Mao made no effort to extricate her and their sons, or even to warn her. And he could easily have saved her: her house was on his route to the city, and Mao was there for three weeks. Yet he did not lift a finger.

What we call “Red Jiangxi” does not include the base in northeast Jiangxi under Fang Zhi-min.

^† One day, a Chinese was present at a talk in Moscow by a man who denounced Li Li-san ferociously. Afterwards he asked the speaker who he was, and was astonished to get the answer, “I am Li Li-san.” In February 1938 Li-san was arrested, and he spent nearly two years in prison.

One of the people kidnapped by Mao’s force was an American Catholic priest, Father Edward Young, whom the Reds tried to ransom for $20,000. Young escaped. His Chinese fellow hostages and prisoners were killed.

The following words were mostly recalled from memory after reading this document in an archive, and some may therefore not be exact. Ellipses represent parts that cannot be recalled; most other punctuation has been added for clarity.

8. BLOODY PURGE PAVES THE WAY FOR “CHAIRMAN MAO” (1929–31 AGE 35–37)

IN THE YEAR and a half since leaving the outlaw land at the beginning of 1929, Mao had seized total control over two major Red Armies, the Zhu — Mao Army and Peng De-huai’s, as well as one significant Red base, in Fujian. All along, he had also had another sizeable Red Army in his sights, this one in Jiangxi, the province between Fujian and Hunan.

Under a charismatic and relatively moderate leader called Lee Wen-lin, the Jiangxi Reds had carved out some quite secure pockets. They had been warm hosts to Mao when he had first descended on them straight from the outlaw land in February 1929. That stay had been brief, with Nationalist troops hot on Mao’s heels, but he had nonetheless promptly declared himself their boss, and when he departed had left behind his youngest brother, Tse-tan, as chief of Donggu District, the Jiangxi Reds’ center. Neither move was authorized by Shanghai, and the locals were not happy. But they did not resist Mao, as he was leaving.

Mao expected his brother to seize control for him, but Tse-tan lacked Mao’s aggressiveness and lust for power. A Party inspector described him as “working like someone suffering from malaria, suddenly hot and suddenly cold … rather childish, and afraid of making decisions.” So three months later Mao sent over a Hunanese crony, Lieu Shi-qi, with authority over his brother.

Lieu took away from Tse-tan not just his position but also his girlfriend, whom he himself married. The woman in question, Ho Yi, was the sister of Mao’s wife, Gui-yuan, so Lieu became Mao’s brother-in-law. Like Mao he was “foul-tempered and foul-mouthed,” according to his comrades, with as much elbow, and as few scruples, as Mao. By the time Mao returned to Red Jiangxi to try to consolidate his hold on it, in February 1930, Lieu had strong-armed himself into several leading posts.

Mao returned because he now had the military force to make a grab for power in Jiangxi, but once again he did so by chicanery. A grandly termed “joint conference,” supposedly comprising representatives of all the Reds in Jiangxi, was convened at a place called Pitou. Then at the last minute Mao juggled the timetable. Having announced that the conference was to open on the 10th of February, he suddenly advanced it to the 6th, so by the time key delegates arrived, including many locals who had been resisting Lieu’s power-grab, the conference was over.

The Pitou “joint conference” was in fact little more than a family affair between the two brothers-in-law, and it duly gave Mao the endorsement to be the overlord of Red Jiangxi, with Lieu as his man on the spot. The leader of the Jiangxi Reds, Lee Wen-lin, was demoted to a lowly office job.