*Reading Notes (Part One) ~ Mao: the Unknown Story 

by Jung Change and Jon Halliday

This is a tome, or a brick, depending on your level of book-love. 613 pages then another nearly 200 pages of chapter notes, bibliography and index. If I wrote down all the notes I wanted to, I’d be writing a novel myself—even still, there are so many I’ve divided them into two parts. The authors leave no stone unturned, no turn unstoned. If you’re not into reading, the synopsis is this: in his youth Mao Tse-tung was a lazy, lying, selfish, aimless boy who loved his mother and hated his father. Gradually, as he matured, he learned that he enjoyed abusing people. He was thrilled by extreme violence and torture; “Mao discovered in himself a love for bloodthirsty thuggery”. His power-hunger and slash-and-burn looting accelerated his ambitions and led him directly into Communist politics. He was driven by devious ambition; he used, manipulated and betrayed everyone who trusted him in order to get more for himself, including the despot Stalin. He stopped at nothing to get more power. He was universally loathed, even by his soldiers; on the Long March he would execute soldiers and hang them in trees along the road where his army marched, to dissuade deserters. He was, in the clearest sense, a raging psychopath. He did nothing good for the peasantry and brought great harms instead. If you’re thinking Communism could be an antidote to late capitalist rot, this book will shake that notion right out of you. The essential problem with all political/economic systems are the psychopathic personalities who inevitably get to positions of extreme power. And if ever a soul should rot in hell, it’s Mao Tse-tung’s. 

“This is a bombshell of a book.” ~ Chris Patten, last governor of Hong Kong

From late 1920, when he entered the Communist orbit, Mao began to use expressions like “workers and peasants” and “proletariat”. But they remained mere phrases, part of an obligatory vocabulary. Decades later, Mao talked about how, as a young man in Shaoshan, he cared about people starving. The record shows no such concern. Mao’s peasant background did not imbue him with idealism about improving the lot of Chinese peasants. (9) 

Mao’s attitude to morality consisted of one core, the self, “I”, above everything else. “I do not agree with the view that to be moral, the motive of one’s action has to be benefiting others. Morality does not have to be defined in relation to others….People like me want to…satisfy our hearts to the full, and in doing so we automatically have the most valuable moral codes. Of course there are people and objects in the world, but they are all there only for me.” (13) 

The other central element in his character which Mao spelt out now was the joy he took in upheaval and destruction. “Giant wars,” he wrote, “will last as long as heaven and earth and will never become extinct….The ideal of a world of Great Inequality and Harmony [da tong, Confucian ideal society] is mistaken.” This was not just the prediction that a pessimist might make; it was Mao’s desideratum, which he asserted was what the population at large wished. “Long-lasting peace,” he claimed, “is unendurable to human beings, and tidal waves of disturbance have to be created in this state of peace…When we look at history, we adore the times of [war] when dramas happened one after another…which make reading about them great fun. When we get to the periods of peace and prosperity, we are bored…Human nature loves sudden swift changes.” Mao simply collapsed the distinction between reading about stirring events and actually living through cataclysm. He ignored the fact that, for the overwhelming majority, war meant misery. (14) 

When he came to the question “How do we change [China]?,” Mao laid the utmost emphasis on destruction: “the country must be…destroyed and then re-formed.” He extended this line not just to China but to the whole world—and even the universe: “This applies to the country, to the nation, and to mankind…The destruction of the universe is the same…People like me long for its destruction, because when the universe is destroyed, a new universe will be formed. Isn’t that better!” These views, worded so clearly at the age of twenty-four, remained at the core of Mao’s thinking throughout his life. (15) 

In an article written on 21 November 1919, shortly after his mother’s death, and entitled “On Women’s Independence,” Mao claimed that “Women can do as much physical labour as men. It’s just that they can’t do such work during childbirth.” So his answer to “women’s independence” was that “women should prepare enough…before they marry to support themselves,” and even that “women should stockpile necessities for the period of childbirth themselves.” Evidently, as a man, Mao did not want to have to look after women. [Or his wives, or his children, as his life revealed.] When he came to power, the core of his approach to women was to put them to heavy manual labour. (18)  

In June 1920, Mao called on a Professor Ch’en Tu-hsiu, at the time China’s foremost Marxist intellectual. It was crucial encounter that would change his life. The professor was in the midst of forming a Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Mao had written a long article calling him “a bright star in the world of thought.” Aged forty, Chen was the undisputed leader of Chinese Marxists, a true believer, charismatic, with a volatile temper. The idea of forming the Communist Party did not stem from the professor, nor from any other Chinese. It originated in Moscow. In 1919, the new Soviet government had set up the Communist International, the Cominterm, to foment revolution and influence policy in Moscow’s interest around the world. In August, Moscow launched a huge secret programme of action and subversion for China, starting with a commitment of money, men and arms three decades long, which culminated in bringing the Communists under Mao to power in 1949—Soviet Russia’s most lasting triumph in foreign policy. (19) 

Approaching twenty-seven, Mao had become a Communist—not after an idealistic journey, or driven by passionate belief, but by being at the right place at the right time, and being given a job that was highly congenial to him. He had effectively been incorporated into an expanding organization. Mao was no fervent believer. This absence of heartfelt commitment would result in a most unconventional and unusual relationship with his Party throughout his life, even when he was head of that Party. (20) 

Without Moscow’s funding the CCP could not even begin to carry out any activities such as publishing Communist literature and organizing a labour movement. Over a nine-month period (October 1921—June 1922), out of its expenditure of 17, 655 yuan, less than 6 per cent was raised inside China, while over 94 per cent came from the Russians, as Ch’en himself reported to Moscow. Indeed, there were many other Communist groups in China at the time—at least seven between 1920 and 1922, one claiming as many as 11,000 members. But without Russian funds, they all collapsed. Unlike Ch’en, Mao showed no qualms about taking Moscow’s money. He was a realist. Russian funding also transformed his life. After the congress he began to receive 60-70 yuan a month from the Party for his Hunan branch, soon increased to 100, and then 160-170. This large and regular income made a tremendous difference. Mao had always been short of money. He had two jobs, headmaster and small-time journalist, and he dreaded having to depend on these two occupations to make his living. (27) 

It was only now, when he was thirty-two, that Mao—assumed by many to this day to have been the champion of poor peasants—took any interest in their affairs. Under Mao, the Peasant Institute churned out agitators who went into the villages, roused the poor against the rich and organized them into “peasant associations”. Now, because the Nationalists [rivals to the Communists headed by Chiang Kai-shek] were following Russian instructions aimed at bringing about a Soviet-style revolution, social order broke down for the first time. Violence erupted as poor peasants helped themselves to the food and money of the relatively rich, and took revenge. Thugs and sadists also indulged themselves. By December there was mayhem in the Hunan countryside. In this capacity as a leader of the peasant movement, Mao was invited back to his home province to give guidance. (40)

Though Mao did not address the issue of violence, his general approach was not militant. Shortly afterwards he went off on an inspection tour of the Hunan countryside. By the end of the tour, which lasted thirty-two days, he had undergone a dramatic change. Mao himself was to say that before this trip he had been taking a moderate line, and “not until I stayed in Hunan for over thirty days did I completely change my attitude.” What really happened was that Mao discovered in himself a love for bloodthirsty thuggery. This gut enjoyment, which verged on sadism, meshed with, but preceded, his affinity for Leninist violence. Mao did not come to violence via theory. The propensity sprang from his character, and was to have a profound impact on his future methods of rule. (41) 

Mao was very taken with one weapon, the suobiao, a sharp, twin-edged knife with a long handle like a lance: “it…makes all landed tyrants and bad gentry tremble at the sight of it. The Hunan revolutionary authorities should…make sure every young and middle-aged male has one. There should be no limit put on [the use of] it.” Mao saw and heard much about brutality, and he liked it. In the report he wrote afterwards, in March 1927, he said he felt “a kind of ecstasy never experienced before.” His descriptions of the brutality oozed with excitement,  and flowed with an adrenaline rush. “It is wonderful! It is wonderful!” he exulted. Mao did not once address the issue that concerned peasants most, which was land redistribution. What fascinated Mao was violence that smashed the social order. And it was this propensity that caught Moscow’s eye, as it fitted into the Soviet model of a social revolution. (42) 

At the time Chiang Kai-shek broke with the Communists in April 1927, Stalin had emerged as the No. 1 in the Kremlin and was personally dictating policy on China. His reaction to Chiang’s split was to order the CCP to form its own army without delay and occupy territory, with the long-term aim of conquering China with the gun. Mao agreed with the military approach. On 7 August 1927, he told an emergency Party meeting presided over by Lominadze [a Russian agent]: “power comes out of the barrel of a gun” (a saying that later acquired international fame). But within this broad design, Mao harbored his own agenda—to command both the gun and the Party. (50)

Mao did not invent public execution, but he added to his ghastly tradition a modern dimension, organised rallies, and in this way made killing compulsory viewing for a large part of the population. To be dragooned into a crowd, powerless to walk away, forced to watch people put to death in this bloody and agonising way, hearing their screams, struck fear deep into those present. The traditional bandits could not match Mao and his orchestrated terror, which frightened even them. Yuan and Zuo [two powerful bandit warlords] submitted to Mao’s authority; soon after this they allowed themselves and their men to be formed into a regiment under him. Mao had out-bandited the bandits. (54) 

This is what Moscow had intended: peasants must be coerced into doing things that left no way back into normal life. To “get them to join the revolution,” the Party had decreed, “there is only one way: use Red terror to prod them into doing things that leave them with no chance to make compromises later with the gentry and bourgeoisie.” One man from Leiyang recounted: “I had suppressed [i.e., killed] counter-revolutionaries, so I could not live peacefully now. I had to go all the way…So I burned my own house with my own hands…and left [with Zhu].” (60) 

At this time (1929), the mainstay of the Party leadership in Shanghai was Chou En-lai. The man who held the formal top post as general secretary, Hsiang Chung-fa, a sailor-dockworker, was a figurehead, appointed solely because of his proletarian background. But the real decision-makers were operatives sent by Moscow, who in those days were mainly non-Russians, mostly European Communists. The immediate bosses were a German called Gerhart Eisler (later Moscow’s intelligence chief in the U.S.) and a Pole known as Rylsky. These agents controlled the Party budget, down to the slightest detail, as well as communications with Moscow. They made all policy decisions, and monitored their outcome. Moscow’s advisers supervised military activities. Their Chinese colleagues referred to them as maozi, “Hairy Ones,” as they had more body hair than the Chinese. ‘German Hairy.” “Polish Hairy.” “American Hairy,” etc., frequently cropped up in conversations among the Chinese. One probably stooped agent was known as “Hunchback Hairy.” The “Hairies” gave orders through Chou En-lai, who later won international fame as prime minister for a quarter of a century under Mao. But the real Chou was not the suave diplomat foreigners saw, but a ruthless apparatchik, in thrall to his Communist faith. Throughout his life he served the Party with a dauntless lack of integrity. (70)

Mao was addicted to comfort, while Zhu lived like an ordinary soldier. Aversion to privilege was particularly strong in the army because many had originally been attracted to join by the lure of equality, which was the Party’s main appeal. To quell any protests about privilege, Mao now invented the term “absolute egalitarianism” to designate an offence, adding the word “absolute” to make it harder for opponents to disagree. It was from this time on [1930] that privilege was formally endorsed as an inalienable part of Chinese communism. (75)

1932. Most men of working age were drafted into the army or as conscript labour. After three years of Communist rule, there were hardly any men left in the villages aged between their early teens and fifty. Women became the main labour force. Traditionally, women had done only fairly light work in the fields, as their bound and crippled feet [a horrific practice that had been in place for 1000 years!] meant that heavy manual labour caused great pain. Now they had to do most of the farm work, as well as other chores for the Red Army, like carrying loads, looking after the wounded, washing and mending clothes, and making shoes, for which they had to pay for the material themselves—no small extra burden. Mao, who had thought since his youth that women were capable of doing as much heavy labour as men, was the strongest advocate of this policy. He decreed: “Rely overwhelmingly on women to do farm work.” (105) 

China’s first Red State was run by terror and guarded like a prison. A pass was needed to leave one’s village, and sentries were ubiquitous around the clock. In this prisonlike universe, suicide was common—an early wave of what was later to grow to a flood throughout Mao’s reign. The number of suicides was so staggering, even among officials, that the regime had to tackle it publicly, as proclaimed by the slogan: “Suicides are the most shameful elements in the revolutionary ranks.” (108) 

In early 1945, Mao was ready to convene the long-delayed [by Stalin] Party congress and have himself inaugurated as the supreme leader of the CCP. Mao had not only weeded the list of delegates with a fine-tooth comb, he had held most of them in virtual imprisonment for five years, and put them through the grinder of his long-drawn-out terror campaign. Of the original 500 or so delegates, half were victimized as spy suspects and suffered appallingly, with some committing suicide and others having mental breakdowns. Many were then dropped. Hundreds of new delegates were appointed, guaranteed loyal to Mao. Mao Tse-tung had become the Stalin of the CCP. (269) 

The German invasion of Russia in June 1941 made Mao look round for an alternative source of funding in case Moscow was unable to continue its subsidy. The answer was opium. Within a matter of weeks, Yenan bought in large quantities of opium seeds. In 1942, extensive opium-growing and trading had begun. To a small circle, Mao dubbed his operation “the Revolutionary Opium War.” In Yenan, opium was known by the euphemism “te huo,” “Special Product.” When a Russian liaison man asked Mao outright over a game of mah-jong in August 1942 how Communists could “openly engage in opium production,” Mao was silent. One of his hatchet men, Teng Fa, supplied the answer: opium, he said, “brings back a caravan loaded with money…and with it we’ll whip the [Nationalists]!” That year a carefully researched study put the opium-growing area at 30,000 acres of the region’s best land. The major opium-producing counties lay on the borders with the friendly Nationalist general to the north, Teng Pao-shan, who was actually known as “the Opium King.” Mao received invaluable collaboration from him, which he reciprocated by facilitating Teng’s own opium-trafficking. (276) 

In one year, opium solved Mao’s problems. On 9 February 1943 he told Chou that Yenan had “overcome its financial difficulties, and had accumulated savings….worth 250 million fabi.” Fabi was the currency used in Nationalist areas, which Mao had been stockpiling, along with gold and silver, “for when we enter Nationalist areas,” i.e. once all-out war began against Chiang. This sum was six times the official Yenan region budget for 1942, and it represented pure saving. In 1943 the Russians estimated Mao’s opium sales at 44,760 kilograms, worth an astronomical 2.4 billion fabi (roughly U.S. $60 million at then current exchange rates, or some U.S. $640 million in 2005, this book’s publishing date). (277)

The lives of Party members in Yenan improved dramatically too, especially for senior officials. Cadres arriving from other base areas marvelled at how well they ate. One described a meal with “several dozen dishes,” and “every table left many dishes unfinished.” For the peasants, the main benefit opium brought was that it lessened the impositions visited upon them. Up till now, they had been liable to have their meagre household possessions and vital farm tools commandeered. After he became opium-rich, Mao ordered steps to improve relations with the locals. Opium wealth, however, did not improve the locals’ standard of living, which remained far below that of the occupying Communists. (277) 

Moscow’s arming of Mao accelerated. The Russians transferred some 900 Japanese aircraft, 700 tanks, more than 3,700 artillery pieces, mortars and grenade-launchers, nearly 12,000 machine guns, plus the sizeable Sungari flotilla, as well as numerous armoured cars and anti-aircraft guns, and hundreds of thousands of rifles. More than 2,000 wagonloads of arms and war material came by rail from North Korea, which had housed major Japanese arsenals, and more captured Japanese weapons from Outer Mongolia. Russian-made arms were also shipped in, plus captured German weapons with the markings chiselled out, which the Reds pretended were captured American arms. (297) 

[Anybody else completely disgusted with this? To think that Japan completely decimated Nanjing in 1937 and committed the worst atrocities against the Chinese, then only years later the Japanese arsenal were used against them by their own people, Mao’s Reds. This makes it exceedingly clear that there’s a global brotherhood of psychotic warmongers.]

In addition, the Russians secretly transferred tens of thousands of Japanese POWs to the CCP. These troops played a major role in turning the ragtag Communist army into a formidable battle machine, and were crucial in training Red forces to use the Japanese arms on which they chiefly depended, as well as for servicing and repairing these weapons. It was Japanese, too, who founded the CCP air force, with Japanese pilots serving as flight instructors. Thousands of well-trained Japanese medical staff brought the Red wounded a new level of professional and much-welcomed treatment. Some Japanese troops even took part in combat operations. The gigantic assistance from Russia, North Korea and Mongolia was carried out in the greatest secrecy—and is still little known today. The Reds went to great lengths to conceal it. Moscow played its customary part by calling reports of Soviet assistance “fabrications from start to finish.” The real fabrication was Mao’s claim that the CCP was fighting with “only millet plus rifles.” (297)

This Russian help, however, came at a grievous price for those living under Mao’s rule. A secret agreement was reached for the CCP to send Russia one million tons of food every year. The result was famine and deaths from starvation in some areas of China occupied by the Communists. In the Yenan region, according to Mao’s logistics manager, over 10,000 peasants died of starvation in 1947. Mao knew the situation very well, as he was travelling in the region that year, and saw village children hunting for stray peas in the stables of his entourage, and women scrabbling for the water in which his rice had been washed, for the sake of its driblets of nutrient. In Manchuria itself, civilian deaths from starvation were in the hundreds of thousands in 1948, and even Communist troops were often half-starved. Few knew that the famine in Red areas in those years was largely due to the fact that Mao was exporting food; the shortage was put down to “war.” (299) 

The part that really mattered was a practice called dou dizhu, “struggle against the landlords,” which in reality meant meant violence against the relatively better-off. (In China, unlike pre-Communist Russia, there were very few large landowners.) When people recall the land reform, it is this practice that dominates their memories. The violence typically took place at rallies, which all villagers had to attend. Those designated as targets were made to stand facing large crowds, and people were psyched up and organized to come forward and pour out their grievances against them. The crowds would be led to shout slogans while brandishing fists and farm tools. Village militants and thugs would then inflict physical abuse, which could range from making victims kneel on broken tiles on their bare knees, to hanging them up by their wrists or feet, or to beating them, sometimes to death, often with farm implements. And there was often torture of even more ghastly kinds. (315) 

The Party’s orders to its cadres were not to try to stop the violence, the line being that these were legitimate acts of revenge by the downtrodden cadres were told they must “let the people do what they want” to those who had oppressed and exploited them. In fact, the Party wanted to encourage violence and where there was no violence, local cadres were accused of obstructing the land reform movement, and promptly replaced. A model was created between March and June 1947 by Mao’s terror expert, Kang Sheng. Cadres in all other Red areas were instructed to copy his methods. The fact that land reform was entrusted to a man who was an expert, not in agrarian reform but in terror (and who knew nothing about land issues), makes clear the nature of the programme. (315) 

Kang went to a village in northwest Shanxi called Haojiapo. After the first rally, he berated the local cadres and activists for being “far too polite.” “There must be abuse,” he said. “Educate the peasants…to have no mercy…There will be deaths. But let’s not be afraid of deaths.” Kang told the cadres and activists to treat whole families as targets, even children. He stood by smiling when village children beat up “little landlords,” as children from the wrong families were called. These could be almost anybody, as Kang extended the criteria for condemning people far beyond the original “landlords” and “kulaks”. Public displays like these brought shivers for decades to people who witnessed them. In many places people were obliged to watch even more gruesome sights. In one place, one elderly member of the gentry whose surname was Niu, which means Ox, had a wire run through his nose and his son was forced to pull him through the village by the wire, like an ox, with blood streaming down his face. Elsewhere, “entire families from the youngest to the oldest were killed. Babies still on milk, grabbed and torn apart at the limbs or just thrown into a well.” (316)

Mao saw violent scenes with his own eyes. His bodyguards described him going, in disguise, to watch a rally in the village where was staying in late 1947, Yangjiagou, where dreadful things happened. Afterwards, he talked to the guards about the various forms of torture, and the fact that children had been severely beaten up. The upshot was, as reports to Mao made clear: “Everyone is terrified.” Mao had achieved his goal. The terror and extraordinary high level of killing were recorded on the spot in Hebei province by Jack Belden, an American reporter extremely sympathetic to the Reds, who told U.S. diplomat John Melby about “the increasing use of terror against any form of opposition, and extermination of large sections of the population.” (317) 

On 1 October 1949. Mao appeared standing on top of Tiananmen Gate, a stone’s throw from Zhongnanhai, in front of the Forbidden City, and inaugurated the People’s Republic of China (PRC). This was his first-ever public appearance before a large crowd of hundreds of thousands. The crowd was well organized, and very distant from the Gate high above. On this occasion Mao made the only speech he ever delivered from the Gate in his entire reign of twenty-seven years. He cleared his throat every other sentence, in the manner of a nervous speaker rather than a rousing orator. The content was extraordinarily flat, mainly a list of appointments. Its most salient feature was what he did not say. Mao did not outline any programme to benefit “the people” in whose name the regime had been installed. The crowed of over 100,000 cried “Long live Chairman Mao!” He had established himself as the absolute ruler of some 550 million people. (322)

Stay tuned for Part Two.