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| English: Photo of Mao Zedong visiting with a family, from Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
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| President Nixon meets with China's Communist Party Leader, Mao Tse-Tung, 02/29/1972 (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
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| Pictured here is former Chinese Chairman Mao Zedong announcing the founding of the People's Republic of China on October 1 1949. Italiano: Immagine di Mao Tse-tung che proclama la nascita della Repubblica Popolare Cinese l'1 ottobre 1949 (Photo credit: Wikipedia) |
I have just finished reading an immense book, 638 pages, on The Private Life of Chairman Mao, written by a man who was his private doctor for 22 years, Dr Li Zhisui. The book was published in 1994, and has since gained a reputation as one of the most detailed and fascinating accounts ever written about the private life of one of that rare breed of man who is considered great, or a leader of men, during his lifetime and sometimes beyond.
That Mao
must be considered to have been a great man, I suppose, is incontestable, for,
coming from a peasant background, he clawed his way to the top position in the
government of the world’s most impoverished and largest nation, and set about
its transformation in a more thoroughgoing way than perhaps anyone had ever
attempted anywhere before. In that, he was certainly a man with remarkable
gifts of leadership, just as, I suppose were Napoleon, Stalin, Genghis Khan,
Alexander the Great, Hitler, and Julius Caesar. One of the conquerors. And, inevitably, one might
as well add, one of the tyrants. I remember thinking one day as I lined up in
Tiananmin Square to go in to take a look at Mao’s body, preserved somehow or
other and put on exhibition for ever, that the greater tyrant a man may have
been, apparently the greater is his attraction for the masses, who long after
he is gone, will line up for hours just to catch a glimpse of what is left of
him.
He
certainly looked more like a wax figure than a real person, and the book opens
with a grisly account of the problem of preserving him for display, for a mere
two weeks as first demanded, and then, by decision of the politbureau, the
decision-making body of the Communist government, for ever. The doctors,
conscious of the disasters that had befallen similar efforts made in the past
to preserve Lenin and Stalin --- Lenin’s nose and ears had rotted off and been
replaced by wax, and Stalin’s moustache had fallen off ---- frankly believed it
could not be done, especially since their Chinese knowledge of embalming techniques
were far below those of the Soviet Union.
At first they had dealt with the demand for two weeks by pumping his
body full of formaldehyde, and the only thing they could think to do for the
longer preservation was to double the dose. That had left Mao’s body so grossly
swollen that he was almost unrecognizable, so before he could be displayed they
had tried to at least reduce his face to more or less normal size by squeezing
the formaldehyde down into his lower body, which remained so huge that his clothes had to be cut down
the back to ensure he did not burst out of them. Dr. Li records that for insurance, they had
begun to prepare a wax version of Mao’s body, and certainly when I saw him he
looked more like a wax model than a real person. A grisly tale all round.
Dr Li was
a young man from a family of doctors, an elite Chinese family which in the past
had had some minor connection with the party opposing the Communists in the
battle for control of China --- a connection that haunted him throughout his
working life in the tumultuous events he lived through in China. He was working
in Australia when he was offered a job back in China in 1950, and in 1954,
although he dreamed of becoming a top surgeon, he was appointed medical
director of the health clinic in
Zhongnanhai, the place in Beijing where most of the top leaders lived and
worked. This made him personal physician to Chairman Mao, whom at first he adulated
and was happy to serve. After 22 years at the centre of the byzantine school of
back-stabbing, rumour-mongering and medieval-type manoeuvring for power which
he found the central leadership to be always engaged in, his admiration for the
leader had evaporated.
His
account of the amazing manoeuvring that went on between the various factions,
all of whom acknowledged Mao as the supreme leader who could dispose of any of them
on a whim, is really something unusual to read about the modern world. A friend
of mine who is vastly knowledgable about the history of China does not think
their behaviour was so extraordinary, but merely very Chinese, since emperors
of China in the past had been gotten rid of by their subordinates and even
their sons, in struggles for power in which no holds were barred.
The
Communist government did succeed in getting the country working, and
establishing a massive bureaucracy to keep it moving. But Chairman Mao, who Dr.
Li says never understood economics, was always restless, and he wanted to keep
the party under him restless. He would embark on amazing schemes, force them on
the party, and had the ruthlessness and the means to impose his schemes on the
nation.
Reading
the book, the revelation of his ruthless attitude towards politics and towards
the people under him did not surprise me. I had read Vol. V of his selected
writings in which he coolly --- coldly might be a more appropriate word ---
outlined his theory of politics, which acknowledged that maybe three per cent
of the people at the top were entirely with him, perhaps ten per cent were
supporters whose loyalty might be questionable (and who therefore had to be
unmasked, and gotten rid of), the vast majority were indifferent, and ten per
cent at the bottom were out and out opponents, and also had to be gotten rid
of.
The
troubles described in such detail and with such eloquence in this book really
began in 1957 when he decided the time had come to unmask the ten per cent of
lukewarm supporters. So, he launched his programme, “let 100 flowers bloom, 100
schools of thought contend,” and invited everyone to express honestly their
opinion of the work of the Communist government so far. People seized the opportunity to say what
they really thought, and gave expression in big character posters which
appeared everywhere. Eventually, Mao decided he had heard enough, cracked down
on any further expressions of negative opinions, and expelled those who had been
negative to twenty-five years of working in the nether regions as peasants. I remember, years later, meeting an
80-year-old woman writer, Ding Ling, on a tour of Canada, who had not long
before emerged from her twenty-five year exile among the peasants. She was a
woman of remarkable calm, apparently exhibiting not a trace of bitterness,
although perhaps this was just another Chinese characteristic which westerners like
me had difficulty in comprehending.
Anyway,
Mao’s ultimate objective --- apart from maintaining his own unchallenged power
--- was to keep his subordinates on the hop, and to establish the once-despised
nation of China on the world stage as a genuine power. So, he next launched
what was called The Great Leap Forward, in which the aim was for China to
overtake the United Kingdom in production and standard of living. To that end
he encouraged everyone to establish a backyard furnace in which they could make
their own steel, in this way overcoming the figures for UK steel production. According to Dr. Li, everyone in the country
jettisoned their knives and forks, plates and other household goods into
backyard furnaces which were fuelled by their wooden furniture, broken up and
burned, leaving them with nowhere to sleep except on their baked-mud
floors. While tending to this useless
occupation --- useless because the furnaces might have produced ingots of
steel, but these ingots were found to be useless for any purpose their creators
could think of --- all the able-bodied
peasants who should have been tending their crops were just allowing their
crops to wither on the vine, untended. Local bureaucrats, pressured to produce
more and more, declared impossible yields ---- at first maybe 10,000 pounds of
wheat per mu, a mu being .16 of an acre --- and later 20,000, 30,000 and so on,
totally impossible yields that were announced but never actually produced. A
vast famine spread throughout the land, but Mao and his functionaries and
subordinates, lounging in their own specially guarded enclaves, were isolated
from the worst effects of the famine, and scarcely acknowledged it. During this time Dr. Li was sent by Mao into
the countryside to work with the peasants, but with orders to report to the
leader about what he was seeing, and he discovered agonizingly terrible poverty
had seized hold of the peasantry, resulting at first in thousands, then
hundreds of thousands and eventually millions of deaths.
A few
brave functionaries did not toe the party line as required; they told the truth
about what was happening, but they were immediately dismissed from their posts
and banished to sinecure jobs in the
hinterland.
So long as
the Glorious Leader’s position was never challenged all was well.
Meantime,
ideological debate raged among the comrades, with Mao’s estranged wife, Jiang
Quin, a former actress, and by this time a dangerously deranged personality,
putting in her bid for power, gathering ultra-leftist followers, and denouncing
everyone to whom she took a dislike, or
who seemed to be standing in her way on her quest for power.
While all
this was going on, Mao himself was plunging increasingly into an almost
non-stop orgy of pleasure, surrounding himself with adoring young women, some
of whom became figures of authority because of their relationship with the
Leader, and whose arrogance could not safely be challenged even by other top
leaders of the party. Verily, Dr Li
reveals a truly Byzantine world, tinged with madness, it seems to me, although
one thing about Mao that remained functional as his body declined, was his
brain. He seemed to be able to keep
enough of a hold on commonsense to enable him to bring some of this madness to
a halt when he felt it had gone far enough.
The days
of the Cultural Revolution are described in agonizing detail. Trying to look at
it objectively, one can say that probably no other great leader in history had
ever before attempted to cleanse his court by calling out the people to destroy
its members, as Mao did during the Cultural Revolution. If it had not resulted
in so much injustice, so much terror, so much appalling cruelty, one might have
been able to praise it as an unprecedented act of political bravery.
The other
leaders come and go through the book: Liu Shaoqi, a veteran Communist, was
appointed head of the nation when Mao decided to relinquish that post and
confine himself to being Leader of the Party. But Liu proved to be too
independent, and became the convenient scapegoat for Mao in the search for
those responsible for every mistake. He was hounded out of office, fell ill
(and was denied treatment) and died in disgrace. Then Lin Biao, head of the Army, was named as Mao’s likely
successor, and formed an alliance with Jiang Quin, but when Mao decided to cut
him down, he tried to organize a coup, and when that failed, took off for the
Soviet Union with his wife in a plane that was inadequately supplied with fuel,
and crashed on the way, killing everyone on board.
Others,
like Zhou Enlai, a smooth diplomat, and the favourite Chinese Communist leader
in the West, was in and out of favour, but was never anything but a follower of
Mao, and a subservient follower at that, according to Dr. Li. Similarly Deng
Xiaoping, an independent-minded second-level official, was in, out, in again,
out again, of favour. He was not named
by Mao as his successor, but soon after Mao died he returned to power and
became the unchallenged ruler of the country --- although without any formal
post --- for some twelve years. He it was who set China on its new course that
has produced such spectacular results.
Mao chose a mild-mannered, reasonable man, Hua Guofeng to be
his successor, and within a month or so of the old man’s death he combined with
other survivors to arrest Jiang Quin and her clique who became known as the
Gang Of Four, and commit them to life imprisonment, they having been seized
just before they were ready to seize power in a coup d’etat.
The final days of
Mao’s life are described agonizingly by Dr. Li. At one point 24 nurses, working
in shifts of eight, and five full-time doctors, were assigned to his care. None
of them wanted to take decisions alone for fear that if things went wrong for
their patient, they could be accused of killing him. The so-called Doctor’s
Plot which had obsessed Stalin as he was dying hovered over all these people as
a grave warning of what might happen. At one point the doctors agreed on a
course of treatment and presented it to the young woman who was the only one
who had direct access to Mao in these last days of his life. But --- she had
been a railway employee when Mao met her some years before --- she announced
their proposed treatments were worthless, and she had decided he would need to
be fed glucose. The doctors were horrified, because they feared that Mao, who
at that point could not swallow, would be choked to death when trying to take
the glucose.
A high functionary named Wang Dongxing, who had been in and
out of Mao’s favour, had been Dr. Li’s most significant protector through most
of this experience, and he was a major influence in the arrest of the Gang of
Four. Through his influence Dr. Li managed to survive, and finally was allowed
to go off to a job as leader of a Beijing hospital. Eventually he took his
ailing wife to the United States, where his children already lived, for treatment. He stayed there after his
wife’s death, and he wrote his book “….for
everyone who cherishes freedom. I want it to serve as a reminder of the
terrible human consequences of Mao’s dictatorship and of how good and talented
people living under his regime were forced to violate their consciences and
sacrifice their ideals in order to survive.”
I went to China in 1978 as part of a National Film Board crew
which made three films. Even so short a time after the death of Mao and arrest
of the Gang of Four, the wheat-fields of the North China Plain were alive with
healthy crops, a measure, perhaps, of the remarkable recuperative abilities of
this great and ancient and still-multiplying people.
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