In January 1952, shortly after the Three-Antis began, Mao ordered another campaign to run in tandem with it, this one called “the Five-Antis.” The offenses were: bribery, tax evasion, pilfering state property, cheating, and stealing economic information. It was aimed at private businessmen, whose property had not been confiscated, to force them to disgorge money, as well as to frighten them out of acts like bribery and tax evasion. One person involved at a high level put the number of suicides in these two campaigns as at least 200,000–300,000. In Shanghai so many people jumped from skyscrapers that they acquired the nickname “parachutes.” One eyewitness wondered why people jumped into the street rather than into the river. The reason, he discovered, was that they wanted to safeguard their families: “If you jumped into the Huangpu River and were swept away so the Communists didn’t have a corpse, they would accuse you of having escaped to Hong Kong, and your family would suffer. So the best way was to leap down to the street.”
BY MAY 1953, when Mao brought the campaigns to an end, he had accomplished what he had set out to do, namely to scare people away from touching state money. Communist officialdom did become relatively uncorrupt in the conventional sense, such as not taking bribes, but it was granted a privileged standard of living, which was minutely graded hierarchically.
Mao himself did not embezzle in the conventional way, like lesser dictators who kept Swiss bank accounts. But this was simply because he did not need to hedge against losing power. He just made absolutely sure such a day would never come. Rather than embezzling, he treated the funds of the state as his own, and used them however he wanted, disregarding the needs of the population and persecuting any who advocated different spending priorities from the ones he laid down. When it came to personal lifestyle, Mao’s was one of royal self-indulgence, practiced at tremendous cost to the country. This corrupt behavior emerged as soon as he conquered China.
Mao lived behind an impenetrable wall of secrecy, so that very few knew anything about his life and his world, including where he lived, or where he was (he made few public appearances). Even up close, he did not give an obvious impression of high living. He had no taste for opulence, and positively shunned the sort of objects usually associated with luxury, such as gold taps, antiques, paintings, vast wardrobes, elegant furniture. But these absences involved no restraint of his desires. In fact, Mao indulged every whim in his daily life.
Mao liked villas. During his twenty-seven-year rule, well over fifty estates were created for him, no fewer than five in Peking. Many he never set foot in. These estates were set in enormous grounds, mostly in gorgeous locations. So, in many places of great beauty, the whole mountain (like Jade Spring Hills outside Peking), or long stretches of lakes (such as along the famed Western Lake in Hangzhou), were cordoned off for his exclusive use. There were often old villas on these spots, many of architectural splendor. These were torn down to make room for new buildings designed and constructed under the supervision of his security forces, with safety and comfort à la Mao as the priorities. These purpose-built edifices were bullet-and bomb-proof; some had deep nuclear shelters. Most were in the same style: a warehouse clone with identical wings, one for Mao and the other for his wife, with a huge sitting room in the middle. All were one-story, as Mao feared being trapped upstairs.
The one floor was very high, sometimes as high as a normal two-or three-story building, to cater for Mao’s sense of the grandiose. One villa built in the mid-1960s outside Nanchang was about 50 feet high, a single floor, like a monstrous gray hangar. When many of them were turned into guest houses after Mao died, their corridors were so enormous that, even after creating a row of sizable rooms inside them, there was space enough for a normal-width corridor.
Construction on his first new villas had started in 1949, the moment he entered Peking. These were followed by others, during the Three-Antis campaign. One, completed in 1954, was at Beidaihe on the east coast. This had been a seaside resort from the turn of the century, and had over 600 villas, many of them large and elegant, but none met Mao’s security specifications, so an enormous Mao-style identikit building was plonked down in an enclave with a spectacular view overlooking the beach, protected by lushly forested hills with bunkers and tunnels hollowed out inside them. The whole expanse of sea was placed out of bounds to all but an authorized few.
