Mao: The Unknown Story

Mao also tried to win his cadres’ sympathy vote by announcing to Party members that he would “share weal and woe with the nation,” and give up eating meat. In fact, all he did, for a while, was to eat fish instead, which he loved anyway. Nor did his meatless regime last long. Indeed, it was right in the middle of the famine that he developed a fancy for meat-rich European cuisine. On 26 April 1961, a comprehensive set of European menus was presented to him, under seven headings: seafood, chicken, duck, pork, lamb, beef and soup — each with scores of dishes.

Mao went to the greatest lengths to keep his daily life completely secret. His daughter Li Na was boarding at the university, so she lived during the week on normal rations and was starving. After one weekend at home, she smuggled a few of her father’s usual luxuries out of the house. Mao ordered her never to do it again. Nothing must puncture the illusion that he was tightening his belt along with the rest of the nation. As a result, Li Na contracted edema in 1960 and she stopped menstruating. The following year she abandoned the university altogether and stayed at home.

To his staff, who could see what Mao was eating, and who themselves were half-starved, like their families, Mao claimed that his food was a reward to him “from the People,” and that others had “no right” to it. When Mao’s housekeeper took some scraps home, he found himself exiled to the freezing Great Northern Wilderness and was never heard of again.

Mao’s attempt to win the sympathy vote did not work; the deprivation was just too great. One of the things that had completely disappeared was soap, because Mao was exporting the fat required to make it. Mao wanted people to accept doing without soap, so he told the Party that he himself was forgoing the use of soap to wash his hands. “Of course he doesn’t use soap,” one official snapped, in private. “He doesn’t do any proper work!” Senior officials were saying other unthinkable things to one another such as: “Why doesn’t he just kick off!” Mao knew what bitter comments they were making. One remark that reached his ears was: “If what’s happening had happened in the past, the ruler would have had to resign long ago.”

When Mao’s daughter Chiao-chiao went to sweep the tomb of his late wife Kai-hui, she heard people cursing Mao, and reported it back to him. When the purged former defense minister Peng De-huai, who had been under house arrest since 1959, was allowed to visit his home area in October 1961, he got a very warm welcome from officials as well as ordinary villagers, as they had heard he had been purged for opposing Mao’s policies. Two thousand “pilgrims,” some of whom had walked up to 100 km on half-empty stomachs, poured into Peng’s old family home to thank him for speaking up. Peng talked till he lost his voice.

If the scheduled congress met and held a vote, there was a strong possibility that Mao would be voted out. His fears were spelled out later by one of his closest henchmen (Zhang Chun-qiao, one of the notorious “Gang of Four”): “If the old Party charter had been followed, and the 9th Congress had been held then … Liu Shao-chi would have become the Chairman …”

Many officials called for a congress to be convened to address the catastrophic situation. Mao vetoed the idea, and came up with the device of convening a conference that would not have voting powers, thus averting the threat of being removed. The conference would be attended by the top few people in each ministry, province, city, region, county and major industrial enterprise.

In January 1962, these officials—7,000 in all — came to Peking from all over China for the largest gathering in the Party’s history, known as the Conference of the Seven Thousand. It proved to be a landmark, because it was after this conference that famine was brought to a halt. But what is little known is that this victory was only secured by Liu Shao-chi ambushing Mao.

When he called the conference, Mao had had no intention of stopping his deadly policies. On the contrary, his aim had been to use the occasion to spur on his officials, so that they would go back home and turn the screws tighter. He had said then to his inner circle: “It’s not the case that we don’t have things [food]. True, there are not enough pigs, but there are plenty of other foods. We just don’t seem to be able to lay our hands on them. We need a spur.”

The method Mao used to lay down his line was to give the delegates the text of the keynote speech before it was delivered. The text glossed over past disasters, which were only vaguely and briefly referred to as “mistakes,” before announcing that “the most difficult time is over.” Most ominously, it not only claimed that “our domestic situation is on the whole good,” but also declared that there would be another Great Leap in the coming years.