Stalin knew this decision would be devastating for Mao, so he made a gesture to reassure him. On the 18th, a cable was dispatched from Russia: “MAO AN YIN[G] asks for your permission to go to ‘41’ [code name for Yenan].” Stalin was finally returning Mao’s son. This was good news for Mao, but no help in seizing Manchuria. Desperate entreaties to the Russians followed, and futile orders for his troops to hold out. When both failed, Mao collapsed with a nervous breakdown. On the 22nd he moved out of Date Garden into a special elite clinic (after all the patients had first been turfed out). For days on end, he was unable to rise from his bed, or to sleep a wink. He lay trembling all over, his hands and feet convulsing, pouring cold sweat.
At his wits’ end, Mao’s assistant Shi Zhe suggested asking Stalin for help. Mao agreed, and Shi cabled Stalin, who replied at once, offering to send doctors. Mao accepted the offer, but two hours later he seems to have had second thoughts about laying himself so bare to Stalin’s eyes and asked Shi to hold the telegram. But it had already gone off.
Only days before, Stalin had recalled Mao’s GRU doctor Orlov, together with the whole GRU mission in Yenan. Orlov had been in Yenan for three and a half years without a break, but the minute he arrived in Moscow, Stalin ordered him back to Mao. The hapless Orlov arrived back on 7 January 1946, accompanied by a second doctor called Melnikov from the KGB. They found nothing seriously wrong with Mao, except for mental exhaustion and nervous stress. Mao was advised to delegate work more, relax, take walks and get plenty of fresh air. Orlov, however, was soon pleading nervous tension himself and begging Moscow to recall him. In vain.
On the plane with the doctors came Mao’s son, An-ying, to whom Stalin had personally presented an inscribed pistol before he left. It was over eighteen years since Mao had seen his son, then four years old, in 1927, when Mao had left his wife Kai-hui and three sons and begun his outlaw career. Now An-ying was a good-looking young man of twenty-three. At the airfield Mao hugged him, exclaiming: “How tall you have grown!” That evening, Mao wrote a thank-you letter to Stalin.
Mao had moved out of the clinic by now and settled in the HQ of the military, a beautiful place known as Peony Pavilion. It was surrounded by a large garden of peonies, including some of China’s most gorgeous varieties. To this rich splendor the plant-loving nominal C-in-C, Zhu De, and his staff had added a delicate peach orchard, a fish pond and a basketball court. Mao spent a lot of time with An-ying, often sitting at a square stone table chatting outside his adobe house, which stood right next to his deep — and private — air-raid shelter. A frequent mah-jong and card partner of the Maos at the time noticed that Mao acted very affectionately towards his son. Mao’s health gradually improved. By spring, he had made a good recovery.
The most comforting thing for Mao was that most of Manchuria was still in Communist hands. Stalin maintained overall control of the area, having hung on way beyond the three months he had promised, and had refused to allow anything but a skeleton Nationalist staff into the cities. Though the CCP had to move its organizations out of most cities, they entrenched in the vast countryside.
THE RUSSIAN ARMY did not finally leave Manchuria until 3 May 1946, nearly ten months after it had entered. To maximize the CCP’s chances, they kept the Nationalists in the dark until the very last minute about the pull-out schedule, while coordinating their departure with the CCP so that it could take over the area’s assets, including major cities, which the Reds now re-entered. Mao ordered his army again to hold out in key cities on the railway line, which he insisted were to be defended “regardless of the sacrifice,” “like Madrid,” evoking the heroic image of defending the capital to the death in the Spanish civil war.
Mao’s second in command, Liu Shao-chi, again cautioned that the Reds were not up to stopping Chiang’s army, and that most cities would have to be abandoned. The Manchuria commander, Lin Biao, also warned Mao that “there is no great likelihood of holding on to [the cities],” and suggested their strategy should be “to eliminate enemy forces, not defend cities.” He agreed with Liu Shao-chi that the priority was to build up rural bases. Mao insisted that the cities must be defended “to the death.”
