Mao Zedong (17 page)

Throughout his talk, Mao inserted the kinds of statistics that he had loved to gather in his youth. Though impressionistic, they reveal the sense he had of China’s continuing problems: the dissatisfaction rate of peasants with the co-ops was 2 to 5 percent; households lacking adequate food constituted 10 to 15 percent of the population; 40 percent of children in China had no schools to go to; state grain procurement was around 22 percent of the total produced; 7,000 students in twenty-nine schools demonstrated against the government during 1956; labor unions launched at least fifty strikes, some involving over a thousand workers. In such circumstances, why not “let a hundred flowers bloom, and a hundred schools of thought contend”? That would be an excellent aid to socialist transformation. As for the leaders, being misunderstood in one’s own time was no bad thing, said Mao: it had happened to Jesus and to Confucius, to Sakyamuni Buddha and to Charles Darwin, to Martin Luther and to Galileo.

This curious speech did indeed encourage intellectuals and critics to speak out with great frankness that summer in the spirit of “a hundred flowers,” just as the seeds Mao had sown in terms of adventurousness in agricultural policy were to germinate later in the year into the Great Leap Forward. Each was followed—as indeed dialectical thinking might have forewarned Mao—by its total negation. The intellectuals who spoke out boldly against abuses in the Party bureaucracy, against pointless constraints on creativity, and even against the relevance of Marxism itself to China’s needs became themselves the victims of a colossal countercritical campaign. Known as the “antirightist campaign” and orchestrated in its details by the newly appointed secretary-general of the Communist Party, Deng Xiaoping, this harsh counteroffensive destroyed hundreds of thousands of lives, leading those found guilty to lose their Party posts and writers’ jobs, and to be sent to remote rural areas or to “reform themselves through labor” in some form of detention center. In many cases they were not rehabilitated until the 1970s or later. The cost to China’s scientific and economic establishment was as high as it was to the creative arts, literature, and education generally. It was often foreign-educated scholars with advanced intellectual skills who had been lulled into speaking out the loudest, and their attempt to truly make a hundred flowers bloom led to their being condemned as “poisonous weeds” for life.

Though infinitely more complex in its origins than the Hundred Flowers Movement, and unfolding on a far greater scale across the whole of China, the Great Leap Forward ended in catastrophe and famine, a famine that between 1960 and 1961 cost at least 20 million lives. The Great Leap, in Mao’s mind, would combine the imperatives of large-scale cooperative agriculture with a close-to-utopian vision of the ending of distinctions between occupations, sexes, ages, and levels of education. By compressing the hundreds of thousands of existing cooperatives—the number had passed 700,000 by late 1957—into around 20,000 giant communes, with all land owned by the state and worked in common, Mao believed that China as a whole would reap the immense benefits of scale and of flexibility. Communal kitchens and laundries would release women from chores to perform more constructive agricultural tasks; rural laborers would learn to build backyard steel furnaces and supplement China’s iron and steel production in the urban factories; local militia would increase the combat effectiveness of the People’s Liberation Army by allowing them to concentrate on high-priority military matters; communal schools would end the literacy gap; barefoot doctors would bring health care within the reach of every peasant; and collections of people’s poems would swell the national cultural heritage. An organizational ladder, moving up from the individual and family to the work team, the team to the production brigade, and the brigade to the commune and thence to the county and provincial Party secretaries, would speed the flow of orders from the top to the bottom of society and bring the Party’s message effortlessly to all.

It was in the summer of 1958, at the seaside resort of Beidaihe—where the Communist leaders held an annual summer retreat in the beachside homes built long ago by the foreign imperialists—that Mao’s euphoria reached its pinnacle. The occasion was an enlarged meeting of the Politburo, the inner core of China’s leaders, and Mao’s remarks were scattered in separate speeches spread out over two weeks. In these musings, Mao shared with his senior colleagues a hope for China’s future that had little contact with current reality. Referring to the Great Leap as a continuation of the previous blooming and contending among the Hundred Flowers, Mao professed to see in it the promise of a China without hunger in which the Chinese themselves would no longer pay for food and the surplus would be given away free to the poorer people elsewhere in the world. An extra billion or so added to China’s population would make no difference. Deep plowing, close planting, reforestation, and the economies of scale made possible by enthusiastic massed labor power would produce this surplus, in which a third of China’s land would lie fallow every year. The sprouts of Communism were already present, said Mao. Hard work and discipline would bring better health to everyone, just as Mao had experienced it in the cave dwellings during the civil war, and physicians would have nothing left to do except research. Mental labor would fuse with manual labor, and education would be merged with production. Nobody would need to put on airs—clothes would be indistinguishable in cut and texture, and would be as free as food. Differentiated wage systems would vanish, as would any need for private housing. Morality would improve so much in the new society that no supervision would be required, and all would have the inspired and selfless spirit that had been such a force in the past revolution, when “people died without asking anything in return.” The whole of China would be a lush and landscaped park so that no one would even need to travel anymore to see the sights.

Whatever the listeners thought, none of them raised voices in protest, and the Great Leap, with all its wild visions, became the policy of the nation in late 1958 and well into 1959. The peasants and workers performed prodigies of labor, working with almost no respite in the fields. Mao suggested the peasants might take off two days in every month to avoid overwork; industrial workers should sleep at their work sites, next to their machines, to save time wasted in commuting. All this was possible, as Mao had said, because the Chinese “people are very disciplined; this has impressed me profoundly. During my visit to Tianjin, tens of thousands of people gathered around me, but at a single wave of my hand everybody dispersed.” Now, almost at a single wave of his hand, they had come together again. The future seemed to be Mao’s for the taking.

BOTH THE HUNDRED FLOWERS movement and the launching of the Great Leap show Mao more and more divorced from any true reality check. His scientific speculations, philosophical musings, and economic projections—when unmediated and unpolished by his own private secretaries and the outlying teams of party ideologues—seem in the raw to be extremely simple, if not simpleminded. And he himself seemed to care less and less for the consequences that might spring from his own erratic utterances.

For the strange fact was that Mao had created a world in which things could hardly be otherwise. With the world outside China, Mao had virtually no contact. In his conversations with Stalin in December 1949 and January 1950 there had been some fairly sharp exchanges, and there is no doubt that the Soviet leader had the domestic power and global prestige in the Communist movement to say whatever he liked to Mao. But Stalin died in 1953, and Mao made only one more trip to the Soviet Union, in late 1957. That was a formal occasion, to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, and Mao’s speeches gave nothing away about his true feelings. Mao was not close to Khrushchev, who had angered him by giving the Chinese no warning before his denunciations of Stalin; and though Mao was critical of Stalin, too, in several of his off-the-cuff talks to Chinese cadres, his relations with Khrushchev were never cordial, and the two countries drifted steadily apart until their cultural and political ties were totally severed in 1960.

Mao saw numerous other foreign leaders in Beijing, but the meetings were generally shrouded in protocol, and visitors were unlikely to point out his shortcomings. Mao had never been to any foreign country except the Soviet Union, and he never visited any other place outside China until he died. As he had said in his 1958 Beidaihe speech, “Why tour the four continents,” when China itself contains so much? Many of Mao’s senior Communist colleagues had lived and studied abroad for considerable periods, and spoke one or more foreign languages. Mao, by the late 1950s, seems to have given up on the study of Russian, though his surviving son, Anqing, and his eldest daughter, Li Min, because of the war years they spent in the Soviet Union, were as at home in Russian as in Chinese. Though he continued to struggle away at English lessons, Mao found them tiring and would use minor illnesses as an excuse to give up on his English reading. When he wanted to read Lenin—as he did with
What Is to Be Done,
at the time of the antirightist campaign—he specifically asked his secretary to get him a Chinese version, not one in Russian or English.

Personal observation of social conditions was also a natural way to gather information about China, and as a youth Mao had excelled at this, compiling careful notes on the minutest gradations of economic strata and drawing bold conclusions from closely watched moments of violence and self-assertion by the poor. In the first few years after 1949 he enjoyed wandering around in the Chinese countryside and revisiting his home province of Hunan. The informal letters people sent from Shaoshan and Xiangtan in the earlier 1950s showed they were not yet overawed by their famous native son, and on the various swims Mao made in the Xiang River of Hunan, or the Yangtze just to the north, he seems to have had time for relaxed talks with villagers and a chance to get at least a nodding acquaintance with their concerns. But from the late 1950s onward, Mao traveled in his specially equipped train, with personal attendants and bodyguards always present, which further increased his isolation from the outside world. In the spring of 1956, when villagers living on the Xiang River near Changsha came to Mao with their problems, he told them to speak to the Hunan Communist cadres. At the same time he wrote a poem in classical meter extolling the joys of floating free with the current.

In normal circumstances, a further source of information for Mao about the true situation might have been his current wife, Jiang Qing. She was twenty years younger than Mao, and with her Shandong upbringing and early adulthood acting in films and theater in Shanghai, in addition to her long years in Yan‘an and forced marches under extreme danger during the civil war period, she was certainly not without varied experience. But whereas in the early 1950s Mao would often mention her well-being casually in letters to friends, implying a reasonable level of intimacy, by 1956 the couple were growing estranged, though both were still living in Zhongnanhai. That same year Jiang Qing went to the Soviet Union for treatment of cervical cancer; according to later reminiscences by her Soviet physician, she told him that she and Mao were no longer sleeping together.

It may have been this ending of his third long personal and sexual relationship that turned Mao’s thoughts back so incessantly to Yang Kaihui. In January 1958, a poem that Mao had written the previous year in memory of his former wife—dead now for almost twenty-eight years—was published in People’s Daily. Mao wrote it in response to a poem his friend Li Shuyi sent him about the death of her husband in a battle with the Guomindang in 1932, and both poems, especially his, were to receive over the next few months an outpouring of effusive critical acclaim in Chinese literary magazines. Mao’s is indeed a moving poem, especially the second stanza:

According to Chinese legend, familiar to Mao’s readers, Chang E stole the elixir of immortality from her husband and fled to the moon with it. But once there, she had no one to share her gift of immortality with and found herself living in the most intense loneliness. After receiving the poem from Li Shuyi—in answer to which he penned his own—Mao asked her to visit Yang Kaihui’s grave at her birthplace in Banchang, outside Changsha, on his behalf. (He could, of course, have gone himself, but there is no record that he did.)

Other family members probably could give little frank advice to their country’s chairman. His companion from the Jinggangshan and Jiangxi Soviet days, He Zizhen, was living on her own in Shanghai, and had had a breakdown in 1954 (according to one source, after hearing a broadcast made by Mao over the radio). Mao offered to pay for her neurologist from his publishing royalties, but his revolutionary comrade Chen Yi, then Shanghai’s mayor, said that he would pay out of city funds. Similarly, it would have been impossible for Mao’s children to voice unease over the political direction he was taking, though they were in touch with him in Beijing. The one surviving child of Mao and He, their daughter, Li Min, lived with Mao in Zhongnanhai and was attending Beijing Teachers College—she had already graduated from the attached girls’ secondary school. Li Na, Mao’s daughter with Jiang Qing, was also living in Zhongnanhai and attending school. (She entered Beijing University as a history major in 1961 and graduated in 1965.) Anqing, the surviving son from the marriage to Yang Kaihui, was hospitalized much of the time, and had not yet married. (In 1962 he wed the half sister of his late brother’s widow.) Mao’s brothers, his sisters, and his parents were all long since dead.