Mao described himself best. Lam heshang dasan, he told Edgar Snow
in 1970, literally meaning “a monk holding an umbrella,” But heshang
“Hasan is only the first half of a couplet, The second, more important
find meaningful, half, wufe: wutian—is always left unsaid, The sound
rutian, meaning “without hair, without sky,” is the same as an
Teans “without law, without god”—a man subject to
i, Mao's interpreter that day was @
slated the
expression that
the laws of neither man nor £0
young woman without a classical education, and she tra
‘Chairman's self-description as “a lonely monk walking the world with
‘a leaky umbrella.” Edgar Snow and numerous scholars after him
Concluded that Mao had a tragic, lonely view of himself. Nothing
could have been further from the truth. Mao was trying to tel! Edgar
Snow that he was a god and law unto himself, wufa wutian
“| graduated from the University of Outlaws,” Mao used to tel
ate rebel. He rebelled against all authority and
had to be in control of every situation—from decisions at the highest
reaches of political power to the most mundane details of his everyday
fife. Nothing that occurred within Zbongnanhai happened without his
consent, not even the clothing chosen for his wife to wear, and he
expected to be consulted on every major decision in China
It is true, though, that Mao had no friends and was isolated from
‘normal human contact. He spent little time with his wife and even less
wwith his children, So far as I could tell, despite his initial friendliness
it first meetings, Mao was devoid of human feeling, incapable of ove,
me, He was 4 consumm
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wont1949-1987 / 121
friendship, or warmth, Onée, in Shanghai, 1 was sitting next to the
Chairman during a performance when a young acrobat—a child
suddenly slipped and was seriously injured. The crowd was aghast,
transfixed by the tragedy, and the child’s mother was inconsolable. But
Mao continued talking and laughing without concern, as though noth-
ing had happened. Nor, to my knowledge, did he ever inquire about
the fate of the young, performer.
I never understood his apparent callousness. Perhaps he had seen
so many people die that he had become inured to human suffering. His
first wife, Yang Kaihui, had been executed by the Guomindang, and
so had his two brothers. His elder son had been killed during the
Korean War. Several other children had been fost during the Long
March in the mid-1990s and never found. But I never saw him express
any emotion over those losses. The fact that he had lived while so many
others died seemed only ‘0 confirm his belief that his life would be
Jong. As for those who had died, te would simply say that “lives have
to be sacrificed for the cause of revolution.”
Mao was never isolated from information, however. While he
ent much of his time in bed and often went days without dressing,
he read constantly and was always soliciting reports, both written
oral, from everyone around him, seeking to know all that he could
about what was going on everywhere in China and the world, from the
petty machinations within his inner court to the remote areas of the
‘country to the far-flung reaches of the globe.
He hated protocol and ritual. Shortly after becoming head of state
in 1949, when bis chief of protocol, Yu Xinging, suggested that Mao
follow international convention by wearing a dark-colored suit and
black leather shoes when receiving foreign ambassadors, Mao rebelled.
“We Chinese have our own customs.” he insisted, “Why should we
.n wearing what we then called the Sun Yat-sen
follow others?” He be
suit and a pair of brown leather shoes. When other leaders imitated
their Chairman, the name of the outfit changed. The gray “Mao suit”
became the uniform of the day. The protocol chief who had had the
temerity to suggest that Mao act in accordance with intermational
protocol was fired. He committed suicide during the Cultural Revolu-
tion.
Mao saw schedule and routing, protocol and ritual, as a means to
control him, and he refused to be subordinate fo them. He reveled in
his own uapredictability. When he went for a walk, he would always
return by a different route, He never retraced his steps, never took the
same path twice. He was always in search of the new, the untested, the
untried, both in his private life and in the affairs of the nation.122.1 The Private Life of Chairman Mao
What fascinated him most and absorbed much of his time was
Chinese history. “We have to learn from the past to serve the present,”
he often said. He had read the twenty-four dynastic histories—the
scries of official chronicles compiled by each new dynasty for the one
it had just defeated and covering the years from 221 B.C. to AD.
1644—numerous times.
But Mao's view of history was radically different from that of
most Chinese, Morality had no place in Mao's politics. I was shocked
to learn not only that Mao identified with China's emperors but that
his greatest admiration was reserved for the most ruthless and cruel of
our country’s tyrants, He was willing to use the most brutal and
tyrannical means to reach his goals.
One of the emperors Mao admired most was the Shang dynasty
tyrant Emperor Zhou, who had reigned during the eleventh century
a.c. The Chinese people have always regarded Emperor Zhou with
revulsion, horrified by his cruelty. The lives of his subjects had meant
nothing to Emperor Zhou, and he was in the habit of displaying the
mutilated bodies of his victims as a warning to potential rebels. His
swimming pool was filled with wine.
But Zhou's excesses were nothing compared to his contributions,
Mao argued. Emperor Zhou, Mao pointed out, had greatly expanded
China's territory, bringing the southeastem coastal area under his
control and unifying many divergent tribes under a single rule. He had
kitled some loyal and able ministers, to be sure—the famous Bigan was
the most notable example—but Bigan was killed because he had coun-
seied against further expansion. Yes, Emperor Zhow had lived luxuri-
ously. Of course he had had thousands of concubines, but wat
emperor had not?
Qin Shihuangdi (221-206 v.c.), the founding emperor of the Qin
dynasty and of the imperial China that was to last for nearly two
thousand years, the man credited with building the Great Wall, was
another of Mao’s favorites and the emperor with whom he was most
often compared. Qin Shihuangdi, like Emperor Zhou, had expanded
China’s territory and consolidated « multitude of small countries into
single state. He had introduced unified measures and weights. He had
constructed roads, But the Chinese people hated him because he had
executed the Confucian scholars and burned the classic books. But Qin
Shihuangdi killed the scholars, Mao argued, only because they got in
the way of his efforts to unify China and build the Chinese empire, And
he only Killed 260 Confucian scholars. Whi
that? One ought not, in looking at Qin Shihuangdi, exaggerate the
trivial and ignore the great
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attain supreme power itvChina, a rank to which Jiang Qing would later
aspire, was also @ fivorite, When Mao asked my opinion of her, I
responded honestly. “She was too suspicious, had too many informers,
and killed too many people,” I told him.
“Well, Wu Zetian was a social reformer,” Mao said. “She pro-
moted the interests of the medium and smail landlords at the expense
of the nobility and the big families. If she had not been suspicious, if
she had not relied on informers, how could she have discovered the
plots the nobles and the big families were hatching to overthrow her?
‘And why shouldn't she execute the people who were plotting to kill
her?”
Similarly with Emperor Sui Yangdi (4.0. 604-618). In the eyes of
the Chinese people, Sui Yangdi was one of the worst. He liked women
and drink and lived in decadent opulence, using beautiful young girls
attached to silken cords to pull his pleasure boat upstream. Countless
people died when Sui Yangdi ordered the building of the Grand Canal.
But Mao ranked Sui Yangdi with the best. China’s rivers all flow west
to east. The Grand Canal linked the country north to south, serving as
a belt to bind the country, Sui Yangdi was also a great unifier.
While Mao was most interested in Chinese history, he had also
read something about the great leaders of the West, Napoleon was his
favorite, Napoleon's concentrated use of cannon fire, in Mao's view,
was a revolution in military strategy. The French general, morcover,
combined military expansion with academic study, taking with him to
Egypt not only soldiers but also scholars and scientists, who studied
the origins of Western civilization, Mao wanted (0 organize similar
studies in China and in 1964 planned a scholarly expedition to the
source of the Yellow River, in remote Qinghai province. The Yellow
River had long been considered the seat of Cliinese civilization, and
Mao wanted to trace that civilization back to its roots.
Wang Dongxing was put in charge of logistics and assembled a
team of historians, geographers, geologists, water specialists, and engi-
neers. He obtained horses from Inner Mongolia and supplies and
equipment from the army, and Mao and I began practicing horseback
riding together. Our trip, scheduled to begin on August 10, 1964, was
canceled five days before that, Informed that the United States was
sending more troops to Vietnam, Mao wanted to stay and monitor the
situation, finally deciding to send Chinese soldiers—seeretly, and wear-
ing Vietnamese uniforms—to fight the United States.124 (The Private Life of Chairman Mao
Not only were Mao's views of history astonishing, they revealed
1 great deal about him, He used the stories of China’s past both to
understand and to manipulate the present and saw himself in terms of
his own contributions to the country’s ongoing history. Lam convinced
that the intrigues in China’s ancient imperial courts were a far more
powerful influence on his thought than Marxism-Leninism. True, Mao
twas a revolutionary. His aim was to transform China, to make it rich
and powerful again. But he turned to the past for instruction on how
to cule, for guidance on how to manipulate the conspiracies that
plagued those in the highest reaches of power.
But Chinese history was little help in the type of transformation
Mao sought. Chinese culture, Mao believed, was moribund and sta
nant. His goal was to reinvigorate it, and this necessitated learning
from abroad, adapting foreign ideas to the Chinese situation. He often
said that the result would be “neither Chinese nor foreign, neither a
donkey nor a horse, but a mule.”
Socialism was Mao's means to unleash the ereat gies of the
Chinese people and thus to recapture China’s ancient glory. He had to
turn to the Soviet Union for inspiration because the Soviet Union was
the preeminent socialist state, and from the very establishment of the
People’s Republic, Muo insisted that China “lean to one side.” The
Soviet Union was the model for China's new government to follow
But his vision of socialism was always socialism with Chinese charac-
id glory of China, for the reawaken~
teristies, socialism For the wealth
ing of Chinese culture, socialism creatively adapted to the Chin
case, Wholesale importation of forcign things without digestion and
re-creation is no good, he often said. He never intended the Soviet
model to be adapted uneritically, without modification
Moreover he retained, from the first day I met him, an admiration
for the technology, dynamism, and science of the United States and the
West. His propensity to “lean to one side” was always tempered by a
recognition that the Soviet Union was not the only potential source of
lessons in revitalization.
Mao had grandiose ideas of his
any doubt about his own role. He was the greatest leader
empéror, of them all—the man who had unified the country and would
then transform it, the man who was restoring China to its original
greatness. Mao never used the word modernizarion with me. He was
not a modern man. Instead, he talked about making the country rich
and returning it to its original glory. A rebel and iconoclast, he would
dare to transform China and make it great, He would-build his own
Great Walls. His own greatness and China's were intertwined. All of
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thenChina. was Mao’s to experiment with as he wished. Mao was China,
‘and he was suspicious of: anyone who might challenge his place or
whose vision differed from his, He was ruthless in disposing of his
‘enemies. The life of his subjects was cheap.
I did not immediately understand, because it was so hard to
accépt, how willing Mao was to sacrifice his own citizens in order to
achieve his goals. I had known as eatly as October 1954, from a
‘meeting with India’s prime minister Jawaharlal Nehru, that Mao con-
Sidered the atom bomb a “paper tiger” and that he was willing that
China lose millions of people in order to emerge victorious against the
so-called imperialists. “The atom bomb is nothing to be afraid of,”
Mao told Nebru. “China has many people. They cannot be bombed
out of existence. If someone else can drop an atomic bomb, I can too.
‘The deaths of ten or twenty million people is nothing to be afraid of.”
Nehru was shocked.
In 1957, in a speech in Moscow, Mao said be was willing to lose
4300 million people -haif of China's population. Even if China Jost hall
its population, Mao said, the country would suffer so great loss. We
could produce more people.
it was not until the Great Leap Forward, when millions of Chi-
nese began dying during the famine, that I became fully aware of how
nich Mao resembled the ruthless emperors he so admired, Mao knew
that people were dying by the millions. He did not care
During our early, shocking conversations about Chinese history’
the lessons I drew were more immediate and personal. Mao's view of
history held lessons for me as well. Mao was the center around which
everyone else revolved. His will reigned supreme.
‘Loyalty, rather than principle, was the paramount virtue, From
his subordinates—his wife and female companions, his household
staff, the political leaders with whom he ostensibly shared power—he
demanded total and indivisible loyalty.
“That loyalty was based less om trust than on dependence, Incapa~
ble himself of affection for others, Mao expected no such feelings
toward him, Repeatedly in my years with Mao I watehed him win
loyalty from others in the same way he had won it from me
He would begin by charming people, winning theit trust getting
them to open up, to confess their faults—just as Big Beard Wang
confessed that he had plotted to murder Mao and Xu Shiyou admitted
that le had once been loyal to Zhang Guotao ané T had told bim about
my problematic bourgeois past. Mao would then forgive them, save
them, and make them feel safe. Thus redeemed, they became loyal126 1 The Privave Life of Chairman Mao
His loyalists, in turn, would become dependent on him, and the
longer they depended on him, the more they had to depend on him, the
more impossible life outside his circle became. From the outside look-
ing in, it was inconceivable that anyone serving the Chairman would
want to leave, so greatly was Mao worshiped, so glorious was working
for him considered to be. Only those who were not absolutely loyal to
Mao could want to leave bis circle; only those who were not loyal
would be expelied, No one anywhere in China would dare shelter
anyone suspected of being less than loyal to the party chairman,
‘Some were genuinely loyal, both because Mao had personally
saved them and made them feel secure and because they saw him as the
savior of all of China. But others were mere sycophants. Mao basked
in the flattery, even when he suspected it was not sincere, knowing that
over time he would be able to distinguish the genuine political loyalists
from the sycophants. Those could be discarded when their usefulness
was gone.
‘The slogan “Serve the People” was Mao's, and the message called
out from billboards everywhere in China—white characters, written in
Mao's own hand, set against a bright red background. Behind the
elaborate Xinhua (New China) Gate, which served as the southern
entrance to Zhongnanhai, the characters were inscribed in gold, and
the billboard blocked any glimpse ordinary Chinese might get into the
modern-day Forbidden City, where Cina’s highest leaders lived and
worked. Within Zhongnanhai, at our periodic, “political study” ses-
sions, we too were reminded to serve the people and the party rather
than ourselves, The message had always inspired me. It was one of the
reasons J had wanted so fervently to join the Communist party
But I had not worked long for Mao before realizing that he was
the center around which everything revolved, a precious treasure that
had to be protected and coddled and wooed. Everything was done for
Mao. He never had to raise a hand, never put on his own socks or
shoes or trousers, never combed his own hair, When I pointed out to
Wang Dongxing that the energies of Group One were focused not on
serving the people but exclusively on serving Mao, he pointed out that
“Serve the People” is an abstract expression, “We must have a con-
crete person to serve,” he said. “To serve Mao, then, is to serve the
people, isn’t it? The party assigned you your work here, You are
working for the party, aren’t you?”
Young and naive as I was, I thought Wang Dongxing was rig
Later 1 would see that just as Mao condoned emperors who had
been ruthless in dispensing with ministers who had sot fllly agreed
with their views, so Mao could be ruthless in dispensing with those who
did not
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did not fully agree with him. It is ruc that in the early years, top
ollicials sometimes disagreed with Mao without being purged. But
Mao harbored grudges, and when he convinced himself that an under
{ing’s loyalty had waned, when the political time was ripe, he could cast
an old revolutionary aside without a second thought. Men like Zhou
Enlai seemed to know this and were completely foyal to Mao, Others,
like Liu Shaogi and Lin Bino, did not and thus were cast aside. When-
ever a leader became too independent of Mao, he was purged
When Mao suspected that members of his staff were becoming too
close to other leaders —whether Zhou Enlai, Lin Biao, or Liv Shaogi
he would dismiss them immediately. “Disaster,” Mao warned me,
nes by way of the mouth.” Thus I knew that my survival depended
‘on my silence. In the political campaigns that would sweep China over
the next two decades, I took Mao’s lessons to heart, confining myself
to looking after the Chairman's health. 1 was bis doctor. Even as {
became aware of his ruthlessness, I protected myself’ by wal
silence, There was no independent will but his, I still worshiped Mao,
He was China’s guiding star, our country’s savior, our tallest moun-
tain, the leader of us all, I thought of China as one huge family and
believed we needed a head. Chairman Mao was the chief. [ would serve
him and, through him, serve the Chinese people.