Mao: The Unknown Story полностью

Every step in the construction of his cult was choreographed by Mao himself. He minutely controlled its main vehicle, Liberation Daily, using giant headlines like “Comrade Mao Tse-tung is the Saviour of the Chinese People!” And it was Mao who initiated the phenomenon of badges of his head, which he first issued to the elite during the campaign. In 1943 he got a huge head of himself carved in gold relief on the façade of a major auditorium. It was in that year that Mao’s portraits were first printed en masse and sold to private homes, and that the Mao anthem, “The East Is Red,” became a household song.

It was also in 1943 that a later widely used expression, “Mao Tse-tung Thought,” first saw the light of day, in an article by the Red Prof, Wang Jia-xiang. Mao stage-managed this eulogy himself. The Red Prof’s wife described how Mao dropped in one sunny day when the dates were green on the trees. After some banter about mah-jong, Mao asked her husband to write an article to commemorate the twenty-second anniversary of the Party that July, dropping heavy hints as to what it should say. Mao checked the final text and made it obligatory reading for all.

Every day, at the interminable meetings, Mao’s simplistic formula was hammered in: for everything wrong in the Party, blame others; for every success — himself. To achieve this end, history was rewritten, and indeed often stood on its head. The battle of Tucheng, the biggest disaster on the Long March, fought under Mao’s command, was now cited as an example of what happened when the army “violated Mao Tse-tung’s principles.” The first action against Japan, Pingxingguan, was credited to Mao, although it had been fought against his wishes. “Just make it clear to Party members and cadres that the leadership headed by Comrade Mao Tse-tung is completely correct,” Mao instructed.

IN EARLY 1945 Mao was ready to convene the long-delayed Party congress and have himself inaugurated as the supreme leader of the CCP. The 7th Party Congress opened in Yenan on 23 April, seventeen years after the 6th, in 1928. Mao had been postponing it for years, to make sure he had absolute control.

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.

The congress hall was dominated by a huge slogan hung over the platform: “March Forward under the Banner of Mao Tse-tung!” Mao was voted chairman of all three top bodies: the Central Committee, the Politburo and the Secretariat. For the first time since the founding of the Party, Mao formally, and publicly, became its head. It had taken him twenty-four years. It was an emotional moment for Mao, and, as always when his emotions were in play, self-pity was never far off. As he raked over his tale of woes, he was on the verge of tears.

Mao Tse-tung had become the Stalin of the CCP.

Later, Liu encouraged some cadres to speak up against the terror, but not until it was over in 1945. In 1950 he told Soviet ambassador Nikolai Roshchin that its methods were “perversions which cost a great number of victims.”

In 1943, a booklet was published in Yenan, entitled A Brief History of China’s Labour Movement, written by Deng Zhong-xia, a labor leader executed by the Nationalists. The original text had been published in 1930 in Russia, and contained no mention of Mao’s role. Now a passage was inserted: “In 1922, thanks to the leadership of comrade Mao Tse-tung, the workers’ movement in Hunan developed stormily …”

YENAN, MAO’S HQ during the Sino-Japanese War, was run somewhat differently from former Red bases like Ruijin. With the policy changes the CCP introduced for the “United Front,” the practice of designating “class enemies” for slave labor and dispossession was drastically scaled down. But the maximum extraction went on, through taxation.

This was despite the fact that Yenan enjoyed two enormous external subsidies: substantial funding from the Nationalists (for the first few years), and massive clandestine sponsorship from Moscow, which Stalin personally set at US$300,000 per month in February 1940 (worth perhaps some US$45–50 million a year today).

The chief domestic source of revenue was grain tax, which rose steeply during the years of Communist occupation. Official figures for grain tax for the first five years of Red rule, for which records are available, were (in shi, equivalent to roughly 150 kg at the time):