Mao: The Unknown Story

Before he left Ruijin, Mao decided to hand over to the Party his treasure hoard, the gold, silver and jewelry he had kept hidden in a cave for the past two years. He told his bank-manager brother Tse-min to give it to Po Ku. By concealing his haul until the eleventh hour, Mao had displayed a major lack of commitment to the Party, and to Moscow, and this level of disloyalty might be held against him by the Kremlin. Mao had broken many rules, including all three of the cardinal principles he himself had codified: always obey orders, do not take a needle or thread from the masses (i.e., no unauthorized looting), and, particularly, hand in all captured goods. But “privatizing” loot was uniquely unacceptable, as it showed that he had contemplated splitting from Moscow.

As the Nationalists were coming, it made no sense to leave the haul buried in a cave. Now was the time to cash it in — for a ticket on the evacuation. The Party was desperate for funds for the journey, and had been begging Moscow to send more money. Mao delivered his cache and also promised Po Ku that he would behave. Po agreed to take him along. He may not have had much choice, as Mao had physically planted himself astride the departure point.

At the last minute Xiang Ying, the relatively moderate “vice-president” of the Red state, was designated to head the stay-behinds. Xiang was the only person in the leadership from a working-class background, and he accepted the job without demur, demonstrating a spirit of self-sacrifice rare among his peers. He did, however, express grave concern about Mao going with the leadership. Xiang had had ample experience of Mao’s character in the Red base, where he had arrived in 1931 at the height of Mao’s slaughter of the Jiangxi Communists, and was convinced that Mao would stop at nothing in his pursuit of personal power. Xiang had tried, unsuccessfully, to protect the Jiangxi Reds. Mao loathed him, and had forced torture victims to denounce him. Chou En-lai told the Comintern that “people arrested testified that [Xiang Ying] … belonged to AB.” Aleksandr Panyushkin, later the Russian ambassador to China, said straight out that Mao had tried to get rid of Xiang Ying by labeling him “AB”: “Only the intervention of the Politburo prevented Mao from doing away with Xiang Ying.” At Ningdu in 1932, Xiang had been one of those most insistent on having Mao sacked from his army command. Mao’s intense hatred was to lead to Xiang’s death ten years later.

Xiang argued strongly against taking Mao along. Otto Braun recalled that Xiang “made distinct allusions to the terrorist line of Mao Tse-tung and his persecution of loyal Party cadres in about 1930. He warned against underestimating the seriousness of Mao’s partisan struggle against the Party leadership. His [Mao’s] temporary restraint was due only to tactical considerations. He … would avail himself of the first opportunity to seize exclusive control of Army and Party.” But Po Ku, according to Braun, seemed optimistic: “He said … [he] had talked this over with Mao and was positive that he would not consider provoking a crisis of leadership …”

Mao had indeed begun to behave. Until July, when he was camping at the southern front, he had carped at the leadership’s instructions at every turn, telling officers to disobey orders and issuing his own, countermanding the Party’s. When one of Mao’s acolytes told him that he had been appointed land minister in one place, Mao told him to go to a quite different place and do a different job: “You are not going to be the land minister there. Go to Huichang County to be government chairman there.”

But, come September, everything changed. When Lin Biao, who had been used to Mao running down the leadership, paid him a visit, Lin’s companion noticed that far from “being engaged in factional activities on the sly,” Mao was “very disciplined.”

WHEN THE NEWS reached him in Yudu that he was definitely going to be taken along, Mao sent for his wife. No children could go, so their two-year-old son, Little Mao, had to be left behind. Mao never saw him again.

Little Mao had been born in November 1932, and was Mao’s second child with Gui-yuan. Their first child, a daughter, had been lost. She had been born in June 1929, in the city of Longyan in Fujian, in a particularly lovely house. When the baby was shown to him, Mao had produced one of his characteristic cracks: “Hey, this girl knows how to pick a good date: she wouldn’t come out till she found a nice place!” Less than a month after she was born, Gui-yuan had to leave the town with Mao, and the baby was left with a local wet nurse. Mao’s path then took the couple away from the city for nearly three years. When Gui-yuan finally returned, she was told the girl had died, but she could not bring herself to believe this, and after the Communists took power two decades later she began to look for her. The quest went on obsessively for decades until near the end of her life in 1984.