Chairman Mao

1893-1976
Chinese military and political leader

1. Introduction
2. Stories
3. Biographical summary
4. See also
5. Further reading
6. References

1. Introduction

Mao Zedong (formerly romanised as Mao Tse-tung) was a Chinese Marxist theorist, military leader and the founding father of the People’s Republic of China which he ruled from 1949 until his death in 1976. His Red Army defeated the Nationalists in a civil war and the latter withdrew to Taiwan. Two of Mao’s main reforms were known as the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution which resulted in the deaths of many millions by starvation and persecution. Churchill met Chiang Kai-shek of the Nationalists but not Mao. Mao died after a heart attack, aged 80, and his embalmed body is still on display.

2. Stories

• Much of Mao’s life was spent at war, initially fighting the Qing dynasty, then Chinese Nationalists and the Japanese army.
• Mao and Khrushchev established different approaches to Marxism, contributing to a serious split between China and the Soviet Union.
• Mao enjoyed reading, calligraphy and writing poetry.
• Churchill infuriated Mao by asking in the UK parliament why Britain did not have retaliatory capacity during the ‘Amethyst Incident’ of 1949.
• One of the heroes of the Amethyst Incident was Simon, the ship’s cat, who was awarded the Dickin Medal, the ‘animal Victoria Cross’.
• Zhisui Li was Mao’s physician for 22 years and published a memoir 18 years after Mao’s death.
• Despite wanting to be cremated, Mao was embalmed, with his inexperienced preservation team following guidance from library books.

Much of Mao’s life was spent at war, initially fighting the Qing dynasty, then Chinese Nationalists and the Japanese army.

Mao was born to relatively well-off peasant parents in Hunan, south-central China. He had an arranged marriage at age 14 which he refused to acknowledge and which ended two years later when his wife died from dysentery, aged 20. At 17, he joined the rebel army in the 1911 Revolution which ended the Qing dynasty and 2000 years of imperial rule, bringing about the Republic of China (‘ROC’).

After gaining a teaching qualification he became an assistant librarian in Beijing, then a teacher in Hunan where he founded a branch of the newly created Communist Party of China. He participated in a mass literacy campaign by the Young Men’s Christian Association (‘YMCA’), making use of it to encourage people to read revolutionary literature.

In 1924 he was elected to a senior committee of the Kuomintang (‘KMT’, the Chinese Nationalist Party), co-founded by Sun Yat-sen. Sun was succeeded by Chiang Kai-shek who opposed the KMT’s Communist faction and a split occurred. The Communists created the Red Army, led by Mao, and civil war began with the KMT’s National Revolutionary Army (‘NRA’).

Prompted by NRA assaults, Mao led the ‘Long March’ in 1934 to 1936 from Jiangxi in south-east China to Shaanxi in north-central China, a distance of 6000 miles (10,000 km) over 18 mountain ranges and 24 rivers. He began with 100,000 troops and supporters, arriving with only 8,000 survivors after attacks, illness and a factional split.

Now the head of the Communist Party, Mao rebuilt his military strength and formed a Communist-KMT alliance against Japan’s expansion into China. The Second Sino-Japanese War raged from 1937 until the end of World War II, taking at least 14 million lives. The end of hostilities in China was formalised by Japan surrendering to Western-sponsored Chiang Kai-shek at the ninth hour of the ninth day of the ninth month of 1945.

The Communists and the KMT turned on each other again, with Mao’s Red Army defeating the KMT, leading to Chiang Kai-shek fleeing with his ROC government to Taiwan. Mao proclaimed the establishment of the People’s Republic of China (‘PRC’) on 1 October 1949.

Mao and Khrushchev established different approaches to Marxism, contributing to a serious split between China and the Soviet Union.

Mao’s modification of orthodox Marxism was mainly in relation to the role of peasants who until then were typically viewed as being insufficiently enlightened to assist the early stages of revolution. Mao, on the other hand, concluded that revolution could begin in a rural setting in China after observing peasant opposition to landlords. Otherwise, Mao had an essentially Stalinist approach which included ‘socialism in one country’ (as opposed to the world communism of Leon Trotsky), totalitarian rule, a cult of personality and a confrontational attitude towards the West.

Stalin had played an important role in Mao’s rise in the Communist Party of China, endorsing him at an early stage. Stalin insisted that Mao suspend his fight against Chiang Kai-shek during World War II to concentrate on opposing Japan, after which Stalin provided Soviet support for Chinese post-war development.

The relationship became tense, however, particularly after Mao was treated condescendingly during a state visit to Moscow in 1949. There was little ceremony and he was made to wait days before meeting Stalin. He fumed over the delay, not realising that it was partly implemented so that the waste discharged from his toilet could be analysed by a laboratory to try to assess his state of mind. Low potassium, for example, was interpreted as indicating nervousness and lack of sleep.

After Stalin’s death in 1953, his successor Nikita Khrushchev denounced some of Stalin’s brutal methods, condemned his cult of personality and introduced a thawing of relations with the West. Mao’s horror at the latter was a key factor in the Sino-Soviet split of 1956, lasting a decade.

When Khrushchev visited Beijing in 1958, Mao forced him to hold a discussion in a swimming pool. Khrushchev could not swim and had to use a flotation device to try and keep up as Mao swam around, with translators pacing up and down on the poolside. Khrushchev’s aide Oleg Troyanovskii said, ‘It was an unforgettable picture: The appearance of two well-fed leaders in swimming trunks, discussing questions of great policy under splashes of water’.¹ Khrushchev was humiliated, as intended, and the split worsened.

Mao enjoyed reading, calligraphy and writing poetry.

Mao’s favourite books were classical Chinese novels but he also read history and western philosophy. He admired the military exploits of Chinese emperors, George Washington and Napoleon Bonaparte. He developed his own style of calligraphy which became widely known through slogans on public banners. He wrote poetry in the classical Chinese style and included observations on nature and accounts of his military ventures. A noted English translator of Chinese poetry, Arthur Waley, described Mao’s poems as ‘not as bad as Hitler’s paintings, but not as good as Churchill’s’.² Mao was prolific in producing political writings, extracts of which were published together with quotes from speeches in the ‘Little Red Book’, officially titled Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung (1965).*

Despite rarely bathing for hygiene, he enjoyed swimming, once floating down the Yangtze River for two hours, accompanied by around 40 staff. His favourite food was spicy Hunan dishes, particularly braised pork. When food shortages began, he extolled the advantages of the sweet potato which grows quickly in poorly fertilised soil. He created a brief mango cult after some workers helped to suppress a protest and Mao gave them a batch of mangos just received from Pakistan. They were admired as a curious novelty and wax duplicates were distributed as symbols of Mao’s favour.

He became particularly associated with the ‘Mao suit’, less well known as the ‘Zhongshan suit’ after Sun Zhongshan, another name for Sun Yat-sen. Time magazine included it in a 2012 list of top 10 political fashion statements (others include Jawaharlal Nehru’s jackets, Fidel Castro’s tracksuits and Kim Jong Il’s khaki safari suits and sunglasses).³ Sun derived the four pocket and five button design from a Japanese student uniform and introduced it as a form of national dress after the founding of the Republic of China. The ‘Mao cap’ is a soft peaked hat derived from a sailor’s hat, originally popularised as a left-wing political symbol by Bolshevists including Lenin and Trotsky.

Mao enjoyed walking, playing the Chinese board game Go, and ballroom dancing, a bourgeois activity banned for the general population. He had a large wooden custom-made bed which he would take everywhere with him. He would sometimes lie on it for days, suffering from depression or what his doctor called neurasthenia, ‘a peculiarly communist disease, the result of being trapped in a system with no escape’.⁴

* The ‘Little Red Book’ has around 33 themes and 427 quotations, with some variations over time. Its most famous quote was perhaps ‘Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun’ in an early version, but this was discontinued. The pocket-sized book, distributed to much of the population, was iconic in Mao’s time but has now become more of a collector’s item.

Churchill infuriated Mao by asking in the UK parliament why Britain did not have retaliatory capacity during the ‘Amethyst Incident’ of 1949.

Mao’s Communist army and Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalist army were lined up against each other on opposite sides of the Yangtze River when a British frigate, HMS Amethyst, was sent up the river from Shanghai to relieve HMS Consort which was guarding the British Embassy in Nanking (now Nanjing).

On 20 April 1949, HMS Amethyst was hit by over 50 shells from a Communist battery, killing 22, including the commander. It ran aground on a sand spit and managed to discharge some of the passengers to the south bank with the assistance of the Nationalists, although still under fire. HMS Consort tried to assist but abandoned efforts after also coming under fire. HMS Amethyst was lightened and refloated but was fired upon every time a move was attempted, so became static. Lieutenant Commander John Kerans, assistant British naval attaché from the British embassy, arrived to take command of the vessel.

On 26 April, Prime Minister Clement Attlee made a statement to the House of Commons. Churchill, then leader of the opposition, asked why Britain did not have in Chinese waters ‘one aircraft carrier, if not two […] capable of affording that protection in the only way which is understood by those who are attacking us, murdering us and insulting us, namely, by effective power of retaliation?’⁵

Mao wrote a furious response, delivered by an army spokesman. ‘We denounce the preposterous statement of the warmonger Churchill. […] What are you “retaliating” for, Mr. Churchill?’⁶ Mao claimed that Britain had trespassed on Chinese territory and that HMS Amethyst had fired first. He also attacked Attlee for saying that HMS Amethyst had permission to proceed to Nanking.

Protracted negotiations with the Communists began but Kerans refused to acknowledge that the vessel changeover was an invasion, instead being a periodic event allowed by the ruling Nationalist government. After over three months, in darkness and using a civilian vessel as cover, HMS Amethyst made its escape down the Yangtze past various gun batteries. It was met by HMS Concord, replenished and accompanied to the British naval base in Hong Kong to a tumultuous welcome.

One of the heroes of the Amethyst Incident was Simon, the ship’s cat, who was awarded the Dickin Medal, the ‘animal Victoria Cross’.

Kerans received the Distinguished Service Order military award and was portrayed in the lead role in the movie Yangtse Incident (1957), featuring the retired HMS Amethyst. He served briefly as a Conservative politician and is buried in Tandridge, Surrey, a few miles from Churchill’s home in Kent.

However, he was somewhat overshadowed by Simon the cat, a stray found in the Hong Kong docks by Ordinary Seaman George Hickinbottom in 1948. Simon was smuggled on board HMS Amethyst and became a mascot for his rat-catching skills and diversionary presence. He was badly wounded during the Communist shelling on the Yangtze but was patched up and soon returned to rat-catching duties during an infestation while HMS Amethyst was static, protecting valuable food supplies.

He became a celebrity after the vessel’s escape to Hong Kong. A lieutenant was designated as ‘cat officer’ to deal with his mail and gifts. The People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals (‘PDSA’), a UK veterinary charity, awarded Simon the Dickin Medal, founded in 1943 for military or civil defence animals displaying conspicuous gallantry or devotion to duty. Maria Dickin, PDSA’s founder, was going to present Simon’s medal herself after his return to the UK, but he died during quarantine from complications from his injuries.

He is the only cat to have received the award. The other 53 recipients between 1943 and 1949 were 32 pigeons, 18 dogs and three horses. The award recommenced in 2000, with recipients being mostly dogs, including Kuno, a Belgian Malinois, who wore night vision goggles to take down a gunman in Afghanistan, and two Labradors, Salty and Roselle, who led their blind owners down more than 70 flights of stairs to escape the burning Twin Towers in New York in 2001.

‘Able Seacat’ Simon was also awarded the Naval General Service Medal (Yangtze 1949 clasp) for stalking down and killing a particularly voracious rat, provocatively named Mao Tse-tung. Simon is buried in the PDSA Ilford Animal Cemetery in east London which contains 12 other Dickin Medal recipients. His large gravestone includes the words, ‘Throughout the Yangtse incident his behaviour was of the highest order’.

Li Zhisui was Mao’s physician for 22 years and published a memoir 18 years after Mao’s death.

The publication of Li Zhisui’s Private Life of Chairman Mao (1994) was controversial, more for political reasons than for breach of confidentiality. It was banned by the Chinese government and was assailed with accusations of being fabricated and inaccurate. He wrote it after emigrating to the USA in 1988, based on his memories, having burned his diaries during the Cultural Revolution for self-protection.

Mao’s main health issues as a young and middle-aged man were bouts of malaria, tuberculosis, stress symptoms and periodic bronchitis. In later life he suffered from chronic indigestion, bad teeth, insomnia, venereal diseases, increasingly frequent bronchitis, a life-threatening chest abscess, deafness, cataracts, three heart attacks and a form of motor neurone disease. Some of these were exacerbated by his habits and reluctance to be treated.

He rinsed his teeth with tea, saying, ‘A tiger never brushes his teeth’,⁷ but over time they turned black and green and many of them fell out. His insomnia was perhaps partly the result of his lack of routine. Instead of bathing, he was rubbed down with hot towels. He eventually agreed to one cataract being removed but died before treatment of the second. He did not drink much but was a heavy cigarette smoker. US president Richard Nixon gave him a ventilator for his breathing difficulties.

A prostate test ordered by Li showed that Mao had become infertile in mid-life. Now over sixty with 10 children, Mao was not so concerned about fertility but was worried about impotence. A belief held by many Chinese emperors and adopted by Mao was that the more sexual partners they had, they longer they would live, despite the dangers of disease.

In 1976, his third heart attack led to a complete disintegration of his health. He died four days later, surrounded by 16 doctors and 24 nurses, including two who were in fact dancers assigned to sponge him down. Li expected to be accused of murdering Mao but survived, dying of natural causes in Chicago, USA, in 1995, aged 75.

Despite wanting to be cremated, Mao was embalmed, with his inexperienced preservation team following guidance from library books.

Mao was the first of his Politburo to sign a wish to be cremated, to encourage land to be used for agriculture instead of burials. However, when he died, his doctor Li was informed that it had been decided that Mao’s body should be embalmed for long-term display. Li tried unsuccessfully to protest, saying that China did not have the know-how. Soviet experts were not available due to geopolitical tensions.

A thermodynamics expert was summoned to reduce the body temperature and decay, using cooled nitrogen gas. A doctor was dispatched to the library of the Academy of Medical Sciences to investigate any relevant textbooks, returning with the discovery that 12 to 16 litres of formaldehyde should be injected into the body until it oozed from the fingers. Already behind time under normal circumstances, the doctors decided to inject 22 litres to be on the safe side, which turned Mao’s corpse into a balloon, with his neck becoming the same width as his head and his ears swelling considerably.

Massage was undertaken to push the fluid from the head and neck down into the body, requiring larger clothes. A small part of Mao’s cheek came off in the process but managed to be repaired without visible damage.

Sufficient progress was made to be able to display Mao’s body to a million mourners, from a distance, while he lay in state. Over 50,000 workers then descended on Tiananmen Square in Beijing to construct a mausoleum which was opened a year later. His embalmed corpse remains there for public viewing, enclosed in a glass case with controlled temperature and humidity. The corpse is subjected to ongoing procedures including periodic moisturising.

Mao is one of five embalmed communist leaders currently on display, the others being the Soviet Union’s Vladimir Lenin (died 1924), Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh (1969), North Korea’s Kim Il Sung (1994) and his son Kim Jong Il (1911). Joseph Stalin (1953) was displayed for eight years next to Lenin, but was then removed and buried.

3. Biographical summary

Occupation	Marxist theorist, army leader, state leader
Country	People’s Republic of China
Career	Anti-Qing dynasty revolutionary soldier (1912). Librarian’s assistant, Peking University, Beijing (1919). Primary school principal (1920). Joined Nationalist Party (1923). Member, Nationalists’ Executive Bureau (1924). Began anti-Nationalist guerrilla warfare (1927). Chairman, Jiangxi Soviet (1931-34). Long March (1934-35). Leader of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) (1935-1976). Chairman (head of state), People’s Republic of China (1949-59). First five-year plan (1953-57). Great Leap Forward (1958-60). Cultural Revolution (1966-76).
Born	1893 in Shaoshan, Hunan, Qing empire (19 years younger than Churchill)
Father	Mao Yichang (1870-1920), farmer, grain merchant
Mother	Wen Qimei (1867-1919), daughter of a shoemaker
Siblings	Third of eight children (including one adopted); two elder brothers and two younger sisters died in youth. Four survived to adulthood: 1. Zedong (1893-1976) 2. Zemin (1895-1943) (brother); killed by a warlord 3. Zetan (1905-1935) (brother); killed by the KMT 4. Zejian (1905–1929) (adopted sister); killed by the KMT
Education	Hunan First Normal School, Changsha (provincial capital)
Spouses	1. Luo Yixiu (1889-1910), m. 1907 to her death in 1910; arranged marriage unacknowledged by Mao 2. Yang Kaihui (1901-1930), m. 1921 until her death; executed by the KMT in 1930; mother of sons Anying, Anqing and Anlong 3. He Zizhen (1910-1984), m. 1928 while still married to Yang Kaihui, div. 1937 4. Jiang Qing (1914-1991), m. 1939 until Mao’s death; Mao was her fourth husband; movie actress; leader of Gang of Four, a Chinese Communist Party faction; throat cancer; suicide, aged 77
Relationships	Numerous peasant women
Children	Ten children; 12 grandchildren; many great-grandchildren. By Yang Kaihui: 1. Anying (1922-1950), soldier; killed in Korean War, aged 28 2. Anqing (1923-2007), translator 3. Anlong (1927-1931); died of dysentery, aged three or four By He Zizhen: 4. to 9.: Three sons and three daughters By Jiang Qing: 10. Li Na (1940-); Li was Mao’s alias at the time; editor; Communist Party official
Died	1976 in Beijing, People’s Republic of China, aged 82 (11 years after Churchill); heart attack
Buried	Embalmed; displayed in Chairman Mao Memorial Hall (mausoleum), Beijing
Nickname	Chairman Mao; The Great Helmsman; Li Desheng (alias during civil war)
Height	5’9” (1.75 m)
Time magazine	Included in a list of the one hundred most important people of the Twentieth Century (1999). Front cover five times: 1949, 1950, 1958, 1967, 1976.

4. See also

Communist leaders

• Stalin, Joseph
• Trotsky, Leon

Asian leaders

• Tojo, Hideki

Dictators’ hobbies, habits and tastes

• Hitler, Adolf (Germany)
• Mussolini, Benito (Italy)
• Nasser, Gamal Abdel (Egypt)
• Stalin, Joseph (Soviet Union)

Churchill controversies

• Imperialism
• Warmongering

5. Further reading

Mao

• Chang, Jung, and John Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story (Random House, 2012)
• Davin, Delia, Mao: A Very Short Introduction (OUP Oxford, 2013)
• Lynch, Michael, Mao (Taylor & Francis, 2004)
• Short, Philip, Mao: A Life (John Murray, 2004)

Memoir by Mao’s physician

• Li, Zhisui, Private Life of Chairman Mao: The Memoirs of Mao’s Personal Physician, trans. by Hung-chao Professor Tai (Random House, 2010)

Mao’s revolution

• Dikötter, Frank, Mao’s Great Famine: The History of China’s Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958-62 (Bloomsbury USA, 2018)
• Kraus, Richard Curt, The Cultural Revolution: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford University Press, USA, 2012)

Chinese leaders

• Kayloe, Tjio, The Unfinished Revolution: Sun Yat-Sen and the Struggle for Modern China (Marshall Cavendish Editions, 2017)
• Fenby, Jonathan, Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-Shek and the China He Lost (Simon & Schuster UK, 2015)

Miscellaneous

• Holmes, Leslie, Communism: A Very Short Introduction (OUP Oxford, 2009)
• Izzard, Brian, Yangtze Showdown: China and the Ordeal of HMS Amethyst (Pen & Sword Books, 2015)
• People’s Dispensary for Sick Animals, ‘PDSA Dickin Medal’, PDSA
• Tse-Tung, Mao, Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-Tung (Read Books Limited, 2013)

6. References

1. Lorenz M. Lüthi, The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World, Princeton Studies in International History and Politics (Princeton University Press, 2010), p. 94.

2. Philip Short, Mao: A Life (John Murray, 2004), p. 360.

3. Erin Skarda, ‘Top 10 Political Fashion Statements: Mao Zedong’s Suits’, TIME, 2012.

4. Zhisui Li, Private Life of Chairman Mao: The Memoirs of Mao’s Personal Physician, trans. by Hung-chao Professor Tai (Random House, 2010), p. 109.

5. Hansard, ‘Attacks on H.M. Ships. China’, 1949.

6. Zedong Mao, ‘On the Outrages by British Warships’, Marxists.Org, 1949.

7. Li, p. 102.