It was only after I read his unpublished memoirs, compiled in a blog he set up himself, that I understood why he seems at peace with an era that left him with physical pain and emotional scars, and began to glimpse the gulf that separates my generation from his.
Grandpa Yao served as the principal of the No. Each day, he had to make three public confessions outside the school gate; he and his fellow prisoners would bend forward 90 degrees, confess, and ask for leniency. A wood board inscribed with his crimes hung around his neck by a razor-thin wire that cut into the back of his neck, leaving thin red scars. A slip of tongue during confessions would warrant a whipping from Red Guards. For Grandpa Yao, the physical abuse was harder to take than humiliation.
After Red Guards beat him in a hotel room, he saw stars and barely remained conscious. Later, when he was exiled to the countryside for hard labor, beatings were routine. His body was frequently covered in red and green bruises. Once he was hit so hard with a spade that the handle broke.
A Red Guard once even ordered the prisoners to beat each other up. Hard labor was not just physically trying but outright dangerous. Grandpa Yao worked on roofs without any protection, barely escaped a tractor accident, and toiled in a petroleum factory in the dead of winter during the Chinese New Year holiday, a time for celebration and family reunion. What I learned was that the Cultural Revolution was only one in a long series of national tragedies that Grandpa Yao personally experienced.
He was born in The next year, Manchuria fell to the Japanese. As Japanese forces swept into southern China Grandpa Yao was forced to flee his hometown of Hangzhou with his family, becoming war refugees.
They faced hazards almost unheard of in China today. He lost his mother to typhus and younger sister to fatigue, and buried them in unmarked graves. Even my grandfather almost succumbed to exhaustion on multiple occasions. By the time fighting ended in , 15 to 20 million of his countrymen had perished. The alliance between Chinese Communists and Nationalists soon fell apart, plunging the country once again into civil war, and Grandpa Yao took sides.
In July , at the height of the conflict, my grandfather went up north to Nationalist-controlled Beijing, where he enrolled in college but was soon expelled for repeatedly publishing anti-Nationalist propaganda and starting his own library with collections of Communist pamphlets. It would have been impossible to imagine then that, less than 20 years later, my grandfather would be again made to suffer. Many in my generation receive such good education in China that we are able to study in world-class universities abroad.
We lead lives my grandparents could scarcely have imagined. They feel not just fortunate to have survived; they are grateful for what China has become for their children and grandchildren. Those ideals inspired millions of Chinese like my grandparents to devote themselves to building a brighter future.
But Grandpa Yao, just like many other loyal party members who suffered under Mao, simply refuses to believe that the cause to which he committed so much turned out to be an illusion.
He believes, instead, that individuals — but not Mao — subverted communist ideals for personal power and gain. For decades, that series of lies underpinned all that Chinese and foreigners knew about Mao. Here is a startling example of what Chang and Halliday discovered during their decade's research. The central heroic narrative of Mao's life, indeed of the Communist Party's life, is the Long March, , long before Mao came to power in A Chinese Odyssey, it goes like this: the Red guerrillas escaped from the encirclement of President Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist forces and, over terrible terrain, often attacked by the Nationalists and hostile local people, and after almost 90 per cent losses, finally reached safety in the remote north-west.
From their guerrilla stronghold at Yanan they built up their reputation as land-reforming revolutionaries and went on to conquer China in For years Mao was given the credit - largely from what he told Snow, who thought him "Lincolnesque" - for commanding the Reds during that epochal ordeal.
And of all the ordeals along the way, the worst was crossing the Dadu River, by way of a bridge over the deep gorge. The Nationalists on the other side had set the bridge alight, the story goes, and if the Reds had stalled there, exhausted and diminished as they were, the Long March would have probably ended in annihilation.
But in the Mao legend, volunteer soldiers scrambled hand over hand along the suspension chains, through the flames, and although some fell to their deaths in the rapids below, the survivors got to the other side, drove off the enemy, the bridge was repaired, and the Reds got across and survived.
It didn't happen. Not didn't happen like that, but didn't happen at all. How do Chang and Halliday know this? They interviewed "a sprightly year-old" woman who ran a bean curd shop right next to the bridge in and saw the whole thing. They also read an interview with Peng Dehuai, a senior commander at the time, who could recall no fighting or a burning bridge.
The widow of Zhu De, Mao's closest comrade in arms on the March, mentioned no fighting at the Dadu gorge. As for Mao, the inspiring commander, he now emerges as nearly left behind by the March, disliked by almost everyone, wrong-headed in both tactics and strategy, and, most disgracefully for the legend, a survivor of the Long March only because President Chiang let the Reds go. At one point the Nationalists left a truck at the side of the road loaded with food and detailed maps of the route ahead.
Chang and Halliday maintain that Chiang spared the Reds partly because Stalin was holding his son hostage. Mao and the other leaders were carried in litters. A survivor told Chang and Halliday that the elite "lounged about in litters, like landlords".
Not a single high-ranking leader, no matter how ill or badly wounded, died along the March, although most of the soldiers perished. This was an early example, Chang and Halliday assert, of "the stony-hearted hierarchy and privilege under Mao's dominion". The final nail in the coffin of the guerrilla years is that Mao rarely fought either the Nationalists or the Japanese during that period, and when his commanders did fight Chiang's forces, just twice, Mao was furious.
For several years Mao oversaw the growing of opium poppies and the extremely lucrative sale of "the black product" in areas outside his control. He told Premier Chou En-lai that the business was worth six times the official Yanan budget. And there are many other well-documented assertions: Mao was not dragged into the Korean war by the Communist leader Kim Il Sung and the American assault on the north: he wanted the war and knew Chinese losses would be astronomical, but was willing to trade hundreds of thousands of soldiers' lives for Stalin's help - he didn't get it - in building a Chinese arms industry.
Later he lured President Nixon to China and persuaded, beguiled and dazzled the president and Kissinger into offering him secret intelligence on the Soviet Union. All this knocks big holes in the Mao legend. But the ultimate target of Chang and Halliday's onslaught on Mao is the cold heart that drove his pitiless behaviour.
Four times married, he abandoned, one way or another, all his wives and most of his many children. The three wives of his adult life seemed to have been crazy about him no matter what. His surviving children tended to go mad. For a man once famed among women's liberationists in the West, he exploited and devoured numbers of women right up to his final senile, unwashed, toothless days.
I knew one such woman, who as a teenage air force soldier attended Mao's dancing parties in the late Sixties where the great moment was being invited into the Chairman's bedroom to "make me some tea".
What about Mao the national leader? Actually, he cared little for peasants and during the worst famine ever, suggested they eat leaves while he sold their produce abroad, partly to give the impression that China was thriving. Of Premier Chou En-lai, famed among Western leaders for his courtly manners, and believed still by many Chinese to have saved certain people from Mao's wrath, Chang and Halliday write: "When Mao gave the word, Chou would send anyone to their death.
In the case of Chou, it seems, Mao remembered that in he had criticised the young Communist Party in a newspaper, and on the basis of this ancient document - which may not have been authentic - Mao was able to blackmail Chou into years of slavish obedience.
He instilled fear and obedience in ever wider circles until he achieved something Hitler and Stalin had never attempted: turning millions of his people against each other, by persuading them that spies, class enemies, counter-revolutionaries, and Mao-haters were everywhere. He had learnt early that rather than shipping victims off to camps or the Gulag, or torturing and murdering them in secret, what really terrified the masses was watching torture and execution and making such murderous acts a revolutionary virtue.
In short, he was a monster, and Chang is right to claim that Mao "was as evil as Hitler or Stalin, and did as much damage to mankind as they did". She also says - hence "the Unknown Story" subtitle - that "the world knows astonishingly little about him. This is untrue. Millions of Chinese know enough about Mao to be glad he is dead.
More than 20 years ago the Party itself held Mao chiefly responsible for the Cultural Revolution, "the greatest disaster" since , although it also insisted that his good points greatly outweighed the bad.
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