Mao: The Unknown Story

FOR HIS PART, Deng formed his own counter-alliance with army chief Marshal Yeh and premier Chou En-lai soon after he returned to Peking in spring 1973. Of this trio, Deng and Yeh had been on the receiving end of the Purge, while Chou had collaborated with Mao. Chou had even changed the name of his house to “Drawn to the Sun [i.e., Mao] Courtyard.” When Mao gave the word, Chou would send anyone to their death. Chou’s only adopted child, Sun Wei-shi, had been imprisoned because she had been a top-flight Russian interpreter, and met many Russian leaders, including Stalin; so Mao suspected her as he did most others who had such connections. Mme Mao also hated her because she was very beautiful, and because Mao had once taken a shine to her. Chou, who was widely thought to be in love with her, did not lift a finger to save her. She died in prison, and he kept an ignoble distance even in death.

Deng felt fairly cool towards Chou, and after Mao died said publicly that Chou had “done many things against his heart” during the Cultural Revolution, though Deng claimed that “the people forgave him.” However, Deng decided to set personal feelings aside and form an alliance with Chou. On 9 April, shortly after getting back to Peking, he went to see him — their first meeting in nearly seven years. At first, they just sat facing each other in silence. Finally, Chou spoke. The first thing he said was: “Zhang Chun-qiao betrayed the Party, but the Chairman forbids us to investigate it.” Zhang, “the Cobra,” was a major star of the Cultural Revolution. By saying this, Chou was not just condemning the Cobra, he was complaining about Mao. This was no indiscretion from the super-prudent Chou; it was his way of conveying that he was on Deng’s side, against the Cultural Revolution. This, plus the fact that Chou had become terminally ill thanks to Mao, melted the ice between him and Deng. From that moment on, the two were allies.

This was a milestone. The two most important colleagues of Mao had formed a league of a kind, which also incorporated army chief Marshal Yeh. Mao’s decades-long ability to enforce a ban on his colleagues forming alliances was broken. And with it, his awesome hold over them.

MAO WAS REDUCED to these straits because his health was ebbing fast as he entered his eighties. It was now that he had to kick his lifelong addiction to smoking. By early 1974 he was nearly blind. This, like his other ailments, was kept top-secret. Losing his sight made Mao extremely anxious about security, so his staff were given special instructions to “walk noisily to let him know someone was coming so that he would not be frightened.”

He was also depressed because he could not read. He had ordered some banned works of classical literature to be specially printed. Two print shops, one in Peking and one in Shanghai, were purpose-built to do the printing, and each print-run was five copies, all for Mao, plus a few extra copies, which were placed under lock and key, and even the people who had been involved in annotating the texts for him were forbidden to keep a copy. As his eyesight got worse, the characters grew larger, eventually reaching a height of 12 mm. When Mao finally found he could not read at all, even with a magnifying glass, he broke down and cried. Thenceforth, he had to rely on staff to read to him, and sometimes to sign documents for him.

Because of his condition, Mao did not want to appear at meetings and look vulnerable, so he left the capital on 17 July 1974 and went south. Soon he was told that the trouble was cataracts, and that they could be removed by a simple operation once they matured. The news came as a huge relief, even though it meant nearly a year of hardly being able to see. Meanwhile he stayed away from Peking — for nine months altogether, on what turned out to be his last trip.

There was another discovery made at the same time: that he was suffering from a rare and incurable motor neurone illness called amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, sometimes known as Lou Gehrig’s disease. This gradually paralyzes the muscles in the arms, legs, throat and tongue, strangling speech, preventing food going down the right way, and finally causing death by respiratory failure. The diagnosis was that he had about two years to live.

The doctors did not tell Mao. Their reporting channel was to his chamberlain and chief of the Praetorian Guard, Wang Dong-xing, who told only Chou En-lai. It was now that Chou became much more daring.