The World полностью

On 21 January 1924, Lenin, just fifty-three, died, having ordered a plain burial. Stalin, the ex-seminarist, recited ‘We vow to you, Comrade Lenin’, a credo of devotions to ‘the greatest of geniuses of the proletariat’, and had Lenin embalmed and displayed as a Christlike Soviet tsar-batiushka – little father – in a red porphyry mausoleum. ‘We Communists are people of a special mould,’ said Stalin. ‘We’re made of a special stuff.’ That was already apparent. As he played off his Party rivals and promoted ‘socialism in one country’, he sent cash to Sun, enabling him to found the Whampoa Military Academy and train his military; in return Sun allowed him control of Mongolia and Xinjiang and folded the new Chinese Communist Party into his ruling KMT. Sun, advised by Qingling and her brother T. V. Song, armed by Stalin, planned to conquer warlord-infested northern China, in a campaign under thirty-seven-year-old Chiang Kai-shek. Among the Communists who now arrived at KMT headquarters was a tall, dishevelled figure with shaggy hair: Mao Zedong, aged thirty-one. Together with Sun, these two would decide the fate of China for the rest of the century.

Violent, irascible, skin-headed yet emotional, Chiang, a poor salt merchant’s son empowered by a worshipful mother whom he adored, had been trained in the Japanese army, before joining the Green Gang of Shanghai in 1911 and embracing Sun’s cause. Now Sun dispatched him to Moscow, where he developed a loathing for the arrogant Bolsheviks (particularly Trotsky), their dogma and their veiled ambitions in China. Concealing his misgivings, he sent his only son, by his first wife, Chiang Ching-kuo, to study at the newly created Sun Yat-sen University in Moscow. Although her brother was an enthusiastic capitalist, Qingling embraced Marxism.

Just as Sun, now fifty-eight, was preparing his Northern Expedition, he was diagnosed with liver cancer. As he lay dying, he backed the Soviet alliance and told Qingling, ‘I wish to follow the example of my friend Lenin in having my body embalmed,’ and insisted his tomb be built on the Purple Gold Mountain in Nanjing next to Zhu Yuanzhang, founder of the Ming. Sun was almost deified as Father of China and Liberator of the Nation, echoing Lenin’s cult – and Chiang emerged as a contender for the leadership. ‘I have position,’ Chiang told his wife, ‘but I lack prestige,’ adding, ‘I need to get close to the Song family.’ The Song family agreed.

In June 1926, the eldest sister Ailing – married to the wealthy banker H. H. Kung – invited Chiang to a dinner where he sat between the hostess and her youngest sister, Meiling, both glamorous in bright cheongsams. Meiling was surprised to find that the crude, short-tempered general was serious and sensitive, while Chiang saw the chance of marriage to the sister-in-law of Sun.

Soon afterwards Chiang, now commander-in-chief, led the Northern Expedition, pushing his power into the north, but his successes empowered the Communists within the government. Mao Zedong, both a radical Marxist and a nationalist, worked with the KMT as an alternate member of its Central Executive Committee: a group photograph shows him standing behind Qingling and T. V. Song. Son of a well-off peasant from Hunan – he never lost his accent – Mao had clashed with his father, but he admitted, ‘I worshipped my mother,’ a Buddhist with bound feet, ‘three-inch golden lilies’, a definition of beauty at that time. Bathing in her indulgence, he enjoyed a carefree youth, writing poetry, then joined a republican army, before training as a teacher and reading about history and struggle: ‘When Great Heroes give full play to their impulses they are magnificently powerful, stormy and invincible … like a hurricane from a gorge, a sex maniac on heat, prowling for a lover.’ The excitement of conflict and of power over life and death has never been better expressed. ‘Revolutionary war is an anti-toxin which not only eliminates the enemy’s poison,’ he argued, ‘but also purges us of our filth.’

When the Communist Party was founded in Shanghai, he attended its first meeting. Even while cooperating with the KMT, he focused on land reforms, his views and nature implacably radical. Impulsive and unscrupulous, a supreme manipulator of personalities with a fine turn of phrase, a relentless reader and history buff, with a superb memory, he possessed an unyielding will to dominate. Influenced like so many by social Darwinism, which dovetailed with Marxist class struggle, Mao believed that ‘Long-lasting peace is unendurable to humans’; rather ‘We love sailing on a sea of upheavals.’ China had to be ‘destroyed and reformed’ to rise again.