Mao

The Real Story

Alexander V. Pantsov,Steven I. Levine

• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781451654493
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Political Biographies
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This major new biography of Mao uses extensive Russian documents previously unavailable to biographers to reveal surprising details about Mao's rise to power and his leadership in China. Mao Zedong was one of the most important figures of the twentieth century, the most important in the history of modern China. A complex figure, he was champion of the poor and brutal tyrant, poet and despot. Pantsov and Levine show Mao's relentless drive to succeed, vividly describing his growing role in the nascent Communist Party of China. They disclose startling facts about his personal life, particularly regarding his health and his lifelong serial affairs with young women. They portray him as the loyal Stalinist that he was, who never broke with the Soviet Union until after Stalin's death. Mao brought his country from poverty and economic backwardness into the modern age and onto the world stage. But he was also responsible for an unprecedented loss of life. The disastrous Great Leap Forward with its accompanying famine and the bloody Cultural Revolution were Mao's creations. Internationally Mao began to distance China from the USSR under Khrushchev and shrewdly renewed relations with the U.S. as a counter to the Soviets. He lived and behaved as China's last emperor.

PART ONE

THE APPRENTICE

1

THE FOSTER CHILD OF THE BODHISATTVA

The South China village of Shaoshanchong, in Xiangtan county, Hunan province, sits in a narrow valley squeezed between hills covered with evergreen trees and rice paddies, the blue sky above. In the distance looms Shaoshan Mountain, which gave its name to the village and is particularly revered by Buddhists. A branch railroad runs from Changsha, the provincial capital, to the nearest town, which is also called Shaoshan. It takes the local train about three hours to traverse the hundred-mile distance. A line of buses parked in the broad square fronting the railway station awaits visitors. “Chairman Mao’s birthplace! Chairman Mao’s birthplace!” cry the conductors. A jolting, half-hour ride brings you to a village street, which takes you past flooded rice fields and lotus-filled ponds to a large, thirteen-room brick house cum museum. To the left and right are similar or slightly smaller typical peasant dwellings. The atmosphere is that of a typical rural community. A small village like so many others in Hunan, it is distinguished by being the birthplace of a man who changed the history of his country and whose influence is still felt throughout the world long after his death.

Many of the inhabitants of the village within this valley were surnamed Mao. This was where their clan had settled. All of the people named Mao traced their lineage back to the bold warrior Mao Taihua, a native of neighboring Jiangxi province who had left his native region in the mid-fourteenth century to take part in the campaign of the imperial army in Yunnan province against the Mongols, who had ruled China since the 1270s. The Mongols’ main force was defeated by the rebel army of the monk Zhu Yuanzhang, who in 1368 proclaimed himself the emperor of a new Chinese dynasty, the Ming. There in distant Yunnan, Mao Taihua married a local girl and in 1380 took her and their children to Huguang (now known as Hunan), where they settled in Xiangxiang county, south of Xiangtan. Some ten years later two of his sons moved north to Xiangtan county and made their homes in Shaoshanchong. They were the progenitors of the Mao clan in Shaoshan.¹

The future supreme leader of China was born into one such family, that of Mao Yichang, on the nineteenth day of the eleventh month of the Year of the Snake according to the lunar calendar. By the official dynastic reckoning, this was in the nineteenth year of the reign of Emperor Guangxu, of the Qing (Manchu) dynasty, which had ruled China since 1644. The Guangxu (Bright Beginning) era had begun in 1875, proclaimed in the name of the young emperor Zaitian, who was then four years old, by his maternal aunt, the Empress Dowager Ci Xi. According to the Western calendar, the birth of a son, a joyful event in any Chinese family, occurred in the family of Mao Yichang on December 26, 1893.

Mao’s father could hardly contain his happiness, but his mother was worried. The baby was very big, and she was afraid she might not be able to nurse him. She had already given birth to two sons who had died in infancy. Wrapping the newborn in swaddling clothes, she set off to see a Buddhist nun who was living in the mountains, and with tears in her eyes, asked her to look after the infant. But the nun refused. The baby looked very healthy, and there was no need to worry over him. The hermit nun, after recommending prayers to ensure the child’s well-being, advised the distraught mother to keep her son. Snatching up her baby, the mother rushed off to her father’s house in a neighboring district. There she stopped in front of a small temple perched atop a twelve-foot high rock dedicated to the Bodhisattva Guan Yin, the Goddess of Mercy. Prostrating herself, physically and emotionally exhausted, she prayed that the Bodhisattva would agree to become her son’s foster mother.²

In keeping with tradition, the parents of the birth mother were quickly informed of the birth of the boy and a rooster was presented to them. If it had been a girl, they would have been given a hen.

The Chinese considered the nine months spent in the womb as the first year of life, so a baby was considered to be one year old at birth. An ancient ritual required that the newborn be swaddled in cloths sewn from his father’s old trousers. More old trousers, supposed to absorb any kind of contagion, were hung above the cradle. The infant was bathed only on the third day, in the presence of guests who were allowed to view him for the first time. On the day of the infant’s first bath, the father presented sacrifices to the spirits of the ancestors, and put an onion and ginger into the infant’s hot bathwater, symbolizing mind and health. Picking up the infant, the mother handed him to the midwife who had assisted in the delivery. Holding the onion root to the baby’s head, the midwife intoned, “First, be smart, second, be wise, third, be cunning.” Afterward she pressed a lock or a bar against the infant’s mouth, arms, and legs, and said, “Be quiet.” A scale was placed on the infant’s chest so that he would weigh a lot, and boiled eggs were placed against his cheeks for happiness. A red string from which silver coins dangled was tied around the infant’s wrist. After a month the infant’s head would be shaved, leaving locks of hair at the temples and the nape of the neck. This was an important event at which the infant was given a name. Guests again gathered, bringing gifts of money, pork, fish, fruit, and decorated eggs.

From time immemorial, parents had chosen names for their newborns with the aid of Daoist fortune-tellers. In accordance with tradition, Mao Yichang consulted the local geomancer, who advised him of the need to use the “water” sign in his son’s name, because this was lacking in his horoscope.³ The wishes of the geomancer dovetailed with the imperatives of the clan’s genealogical chronicle. Each generation had specific Chinese characters allotted to it that were supposed to be used in the given names of all the males of that particular generation. The given names themselves could be quite different, but all of them had to contain these common characters that denoted membership in the generation to which they belonged. In the generation of Yichang’s newborn son (the twentieth generation of the Mao clan), this signifier was the character ze, the left side of which contains the three strokes of the “water” element. The character ze had a dual meaning: it signified moisture and to moisten as well as kindness, goodness, and beneficence. Mao Yichang chose dong, meaning “east,” as the second character of the infant’s given name. The name Zedong was unusually beautiful—“Benefactor of the East!” At the same time, again in accordance with tradition, the child was given a second, unofficial name to be used on special, ceremonial occasions: Runzhi, which means “Dewy Orchid.” Mao’s mother gave him yet another name, shi, or stone, which was supposed to protect him from all misfortunes and hint at his kinship with the Bodhisattva. Since Mao was the third son in the family, his mother called him shisanyazi, literally the Third Child Named Stone.

Mao Zedong was born into a small household. Besides his father and mother there was only his paternal grandfather. (Mao Zedong’s paternal grandmother, named Liu, had died nine years before his birth, on May 20, 1884, when she was thirty-seven years old.) The family occupied only half of the house, the eastern or left wing. Neighbors lived in the other half. In front of the house were a pond and rice paddy and in back, pine and bamboo groves. Almost everyone in the village of some six hundred households was poor. Hard and exhausting work on tiny plots of land yielded little income.

Mao Zedong’s paternal grandfather, Mao Enpu, had been poor his entire life, leaving his son debt-ridden. Mao Zedong’s father, Mao Yichang, however, was able to wrench himself loose from poverty. An only child, Yichang was born on October 15, 1870. At the age of ten he was betrothed to a girl three and a half years older than him, named Wen Qimei. They were married five years later. Soon afterward, on account of his father’s debts, Yichang was drafted into the local Xiang Army. (Xiang, the traditional name of Hunan, was named after the Xiang River, which flows through the province.) When Mao Yichang returned after a long absence, by spending his accumulated army pay he was able to redeem the land his father had lost, and became an independent cultivator. He was crude and irascible, but very hardworking and frugal. According to Mao Zedong’s daughter, who evidently heard this from her father, Mao Yichang often repeated, “Poverty is not the result of eating too much or spending too much. Poverty comes from an inability to do sums. Whoever can do sums will have enough to live by; whoever cannot will squander even mountains of gold!”⁴ Yichang’s wife, who was known in the village as Suqin (“Simple Toiler”)⁵ because of her industry and goodness, helped him make his way in the world. By the time Mao Zedong was ten, the year his grandfather died, Mao Yichang by dint of incredible exertions had managed to save up some money and acquire a bit more land.⁶ Eight years earlier, a younger brother, Zemin, was born, and a year after the grandfather’s death, a third son, named Zetan. In addition to these children and the two sons who had died prior to Mao Zedong’s birth, Mao’s parents also had two daughters, but both of them died during infancy.

Mao’s mother tried to imbue her sons with her own religious feelings. During his childhood and adolescence, Mao often accompanied his mother to a Buddhist temple, and she dreamed that her eldest son might become a monk. Mao’s father, however, did not share her wishes, but neither did he object very much. He treated Buddha with secret respect, although he gave no outward signs of this. It happened that once, not far from the village, he had encountered a tiger on the road. Mao’s father was terrified, but apparently so was the tiger. Man and tiger ran off in opposite directions. Mao’s father interpreted this as a warning from on high. Always a religious skeptic until then, he now began to fear excessive atheism.⁷

Although Mao Yichang respected and feared Buddha, he thought it more useful for his eldest son to grasp the wisdom of Confucianism, the traditional philosophy derived from the sayings of the ancient philosopher Confucius (551–479 BCE) and his followers. China’s political system was based on Confucian principles that demanded moral perfection from humanity. According to Confucius, people had to fulfill the sacred covenants (li) bestowed by Heaven, among which the most important were humanity (ren), filial piety (xiao), and virtue (de). Only by observing these Heavenly laws could one achieve the highest ethical ideal, the goal that Confucianism strived for.

Individual conscience determined whether one actually followed the teachings of Confucius, but as a practical matter it was impossible to have a career without knowledge of the sayings of the philosopher. An ability to juggle quotations from Confucius was necessary in order to receive an official post. Anyone who was unfamiliar with the Analects of Confucius and the other books of the classical canon, including the Mencius, the Great Learning, and the Golden Mean, was considered uneducated.

Therefore, not surprisingly, Mao’s father, who had only two years of schooling, was eager for his eldest son to master Confucian learning. Yichang had lost a lawsuit regarding a hilly parcel of land because he had been unable to bolster his case with citations from Confucius. The court instead ruled in favor of the defendant, who had demonstrated his deep knowledge of the classics. Mao’s daughter writes that her grandfather decided at that point, “Let my son become just such an educated man and stand in on my behalf.”⁸ Accordingly, Mao Zedong was sent to a private elementary school in Shaoshan, where he was required to memorize the Confucian classics.

Mao memorized the sayings of the revered philosopher for purely utilitarian reasons, to vanquish others in arguments by introducing an apt quotation at precisely the right moment, but the moral-ethical precepts of Confucius seem to have left not a trace in his soul. Mao’s daughter recounts how her father once bested his own teacher in an argument. “One hot day,” she writes,

when the teacher was absent from school, Father suggested to his classmates that they go swimming in a pond. When the teacher saw his students bathing in their birthday suits, he considered this extremely indecent and decided to punish them. But Father parried with a quotation from the Analects in which Confucius praised bathing in cold water. Father opened his book, located the needed quotation, and read the words of Confucius out loud. The teacher now remembered that Confucius really had said this, but he could not lose face. Infuriated, he went to complain to Grandfather.

“Your Runzhi is absolutely unbearable. Once he knows more than me, I will no longer teach him!”

Mao was equally adept at deploying quotations from Confucius in his private disputes with his father, who constantly cursed his son for being disrespectful and lazy. Sometimes Mao won out, but usually the disputes ended badly for him. His father, who prized filial piety above all other Confucian principles, would thrash his son when he dared to contradict him. “I’ll kill you, such a mongrel who respects no rules whatsoever,” he shouted at Mao.⁹ He also whipped his two other sons. Mao’s mother trembled over her darlings and tried to defend them, but usually failed.

The family conflicts, the cruelty of his father, and the defenselessness of his mother, whom he greatly loved and pitied, inevitably affected the character of Mao. He grew into a passionate and proud rebel no less stubborn than his father, whom he greatly resembled.¹⁰ Although irritated by his father’s stern temper, Mao himself became increasingly harsh, bitter, and headstrong.

His stubbornness may have had ethnopsychological as well as family roots. The Hunanese, who season their food with liberal doses of hot red pepper, are famous throughout China for their hotheaded temperament. “Hot like their food,” is the way they’re usually characterized.

Many years later Mao provided a semifacetious Marxist explanation for the conflicts within his family. In J...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Cast of Characters
• Note on the Spelling of Chinese Words
• Maps
• Introduction: Myths and Realities
• Part One: The Apprentice
• Part Two: The Revolutionary
• Part Three: The Dictator
• Epilogue
• Photographs
• Acknowledgments
• Illustration Credits
• Appendix 1: Mao Zedong’s Chronology
• Appendix 2: Mao Zedong’s Genealogy
• About Alexander V. Pantsov and Steven I. Levine
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright