Mao's Unrelenting Influence In China

Thirty years after his death, if Mao Tse Tung miraculously woke up tomorrow, would he even recognize the capitalist colossus China has become? Would he recognize himself in the embalmed icon — the distant founding father figure — the Chinese Communist party has cast him as in the new China>

It seems rewriting history, where Mao is concerned, is nothing new: he did it himself, big time.

Most people always believed the official line that Mao was the man who transformed China — a heroic leader, even if he did some bad things. The real Mao, we discover, did horrendous things.

"Mao was responsible for well over 70 million deaths of the Chinese in peacetime, and he was as evil as Hitler or Stalin — he did as much damage to mankind as Hitler and Stalin," said Jung Chang, co-author of "Mao, The Unknown Story."

Jung wrote the book with her husband Jon Halliday and it has been described as a "bombshell of a book."

"In China we interviewed about 150 of Mao's inner circle, in Mao's family, relatives, friends, and many people talked for the first time," she said.

Even Jung and Halliday were shocked by what they learned.

"I did not realize how much of the misery and hardship he caused was done knowingly and so ruthlessly in terms of his own personal interests," Halliday said.

The Long March changed history. In order to win their war against the ruling nationalists, the Chinese Communists needed help from the Soviets. So between 1934 and 1935, 80,000 Communist soldiers and civilians walked 6,000 miles across China, so they would be in a secure position to receive arms and supplies. Mao, supposedly the hero of the long march, slogging along with everybody else, in fact, was carried.

"He even designed his own transport, a bamboo litter," Jung said. "He said, in his later life. 'I was lying in the litter. I had nothing to do, what did I do? I read. I read a lot.'"

Mao knew his political future depended on getting to the Russians first, so on the way, he schemed to outmaneuver his party rivals — even though that meant the calculated sacrifice of the lives of thousands of Red Army soldiers.

"Whoever linked up with Moscow had the communications with Moscow, and [who was] recognized by Moscow as the party leader, would be the boss," Jung said.

Until Halliday was given access to previously secret Soviet archives, it was widely thought that the Chinese Communist Party got started and grew on its own. Not so, Halliday confirmed. In the beginning more than 90 percent of its funds came from the Soviet Union. Not only that, Stalin engineered Mao's rise to the top even though he was hated and feared by other Chinese communists.

"Well, Stalin I think spotted Mao as probably the guy in the Chinese Communist Party was most like himself," Halliday said. "And of course Mao, also like Stalin, had long-range vision. I mean, Mao could think strategically. He was very, very smart."

Ultimately he outsmarted nationalist leader — and U.S. ally — Chiang Kai Shek. Defeated, the Nationalists retreated to the island of Formosa (now called Taiwan), where they remain to this day.

On Oct. 1, 1949, Mao declared himself leader of the renamed People's Republic of China. The crowd chanted: "Long live Chairman Mao," unaware of the horrific suffering his ambition would bring, beginning with a campaign, he claimed, to modernize China. He named it The Great Leap Forward.

"Thirty-eight million people died of starvation and overwork and Mao didn't want to stop," Jung said. "He said for all his projects to take off, half of China may well have to die."

Imagine half the population: and for what? In fact, it was to pay for the technology to build an atomic bomb. China eventually exploded one in 1964.

China's people starved, because Mao was selling what food they produced to Russia and Eastern Europe. Glowing reports to the outside world about agricultural and industrial production were propaganda.

"And when he was shown the report of food shortage, of peasants starving, Mao said, 'Educate the peasant to eat less.' And he even said, 'Death have benefit, they can fertilize the land,'" Jung said.

It was China's president, Liu Shao-Chi, who finally stood up to Mao and rallied top Communist Party officials to put an end to the famine. But Liu and the others soon paid. The infamous Cultural Revolution was Mao's revenge. It began in 1966.

"It brought trauma, misery, torture, death, to hundreds of millions of people," Jung said.

We've heard the name "Cultural Revolution." But who even knew what it was? Mao didn't just purge the party of anybody who could vaguely be called "the elite"; he literally stripped China of all culture, his Red Guards, violent vigilante student groups, pillaged homes, burned books and tortured party officials, including Jung's father. She tells the story in her hugely successful first book, "Wild Swans."

"My father was one of the few who stood up to Mao and opposed the Cultural Revolution, and as a result he was arrested, tortured, driven insane, and he was exiled to a camp and died very young," she said.

Her parents had been conscientious Communists, but even her mother was imprisoned and denounced.

"She went through over a hundred of those denunciation meetings, and she was made to kneel on broken glass, and she was paraded in the streets where children spat at her and threw stones at her," Jung said.

Jung was sent to a work camp and never saw her much-beloved grandmother again. She died in 1969.

While literally millions of families like Jung's were enduring the agonies of the Cultural Revolution, Mao had himself photographed swimming. He wanted his enemies to know he was well and in charge. Mao loved to swim, but he never bathed or brushed his teeth.

"Instead he would have his servants, his mistresses wiping him every day with a hot towel," Jung said. "He didn't like to wash his hair either, and he liked this slightly itchy feeling."

Mao was a serious womanizer, and he was famous for doing government business from his bed. His rare public appearances were all about the cult of personality. The party faithful would wave the little red book, the collection of Mao quotations everyone in China was ordered to carry ... and never to question.

"You know, we were told that Socialist China was paradise on Earth. But if this is paradise, what then is hell? I blamed people around Mao, I blamed Madame Mao, but I could never contemplate Mao," Jung said.

Madame Mao, Jiang Xing, Mao's fourth wife, was his attack dog. She was one of the so-called Gang of Four — enforcers who ultimately took the heat. Within a month of Mao's death the Gang of Four were arrested and tried. Madame Mao committed suicide in prison.

Mao died in September 1976, after 27 years in power. The world struggled to process his impact. Given China's secrecy, China-watchers had little to go on. What did it mean that in 1972 and again in 1976, President Nixon went to Mao — not the other way around?

The Cultural Revolution ended with Mao's death and in 1978, Jung was allowed to go to Britain to study. She's lived there ever since. She keeps with her one of the shoes her grandmother wore on bound feet. the arm band Jung herself wore as a Red Guard, some Mao badges — a little history of 20th century China in objects.

"Mao left a tattered China," Jung said. "The economic miracles happened because Mao died and people had had enough of living under Mao's kind of rule. I mean, they wanted a good life."

Jung is equally dismissive of claims that Mao liberated Chinese women.

"They became more equal in, basically, slave labor." Jung said.

Mao has been conveniently repackaged. The generation of Chinese born after his death know only the revisionist version.

"Young people don't know that's the myth. They think he is still the great hero," Jung said.

And they may never know. "Mao, the Unknown Story" has been published in Chinese, but the book is banned in China.