Father, Son and Holy Spirit

I remember well September 9, 1976. I was in the bank and waiting at the counter when, unexpectedly, the serious voice of the announcer came from the speaker. I didn't understand anything, but it was clear to me what happened when everyone around me started to wipe their tears. The cashiers were pale and crying, passers-by stood under loudspeakers on the street, traffic was stopped, and several soldiers already had black bands around their sleeves.

photo: chen zheng-qing

The news was published 16 hours later. Chairman Mao has died.

The Xinhua Agency teleprinter types out the official announcement: The president died despite the efforts of doctors. Ten days of national mourning was declared.

In the correspondence, Mr. Si, the translator, could not speak, but I could read the question in his eyes: what will happen to him now? What will happen to China?

The great leader, or as he was called the Great Helmsman, died at the age of 83. There are few people in history who have had such an impact on the lives of hundreds of millions of people.

IN FRONT OF MAO'S BODIE

The sounds of the Internationale could be heard from all parts of Beijing. Mao Zedong's body was on display in the hall of the All-Chinese National Congress, and continuous columns of workers, soldiers, students and peasants passed silently by his bier. Marshal Sue Shiyu came in the kind of reed sneakers worn on the Long March. It was a warning sign, we didn't know what kind. He stood stiffly with a soldier's salute before the body of his commander until a wave of visitors pushed him out. Foreigners are also invited to pay their respects. I passed his body covered with a red flag. Hundreds of wreaths were already lined up in the next room. One attracted particular attention. Mao's widow Jiang Qing wrote on the tape: To the great teacher from his student and comrade in arms.

The farewell was in Tiananmen Square. At 15 p.m., the whole of China came to a standstill. Sirens echoed from factories, ships, cars for three full minutes. A million people looked at Mao's portrait at Tiananmen, and hundreds of millions across the country stood with their heads bowed in the direction of Beijing.

It was not known where Mao would be buried. The decision of the party congress that all leaders should be cremated was still valid. A few months earlier, the ashes of Marshal Chu De and Premier Chu Enlai were scattered over the Chinese mountains. Mao was something else. The decision of the Central Committee to build a mausoleum for the Great Teacher on Tiananmen was announced. Mao's body is still there today, and will remain for a long time. No one mentions that it should be moved. In Moscow, on Red Square, they preserved the "good Lenin" and threw the "bad Stalin" out of the mausoleum. But Mao was both Lenin and Stalin of the Chinese revolution. To remove the embalmed leader would be to topple the entire structure. The Chinese party and state cannot allow this.

photo: ap photo

RED SUN OF REVOLUTION

Mao was born in Hunan province, in the village of Shaoshan where almost everyone's surname is Mao. He comes from a well-to-do family. Life in the countryside in his childhood left a mark on his behavior, expression and thinking. Even his bodyguards later called him Lao Tu (old peasant), and he himself once said: "I am a peasant, I am too vulgar. I am the son of a peasant and I have peasant habits." His peasant vocabulary came to the fore even at the plenums of the Central Committee. ("Comrades, screw up or fart, you'll see, it will be easier for you then", he finished his famous speech in Lušan, at a meeting in front of 6000 of the most prominent politicians.)

There was deliberate playing of the peasant card. That "peasant" wrote excellent poems in traditional Chinese poetic styles, used calligraphy correctly, read Chinese classics and studied Confucius and Sun Tzu more than Lenin and Marx. After all, he came to "Capital" for the first time when he was 25 years old: Mao never dealt much with Marxism.

He did not travel to foreign countries, did not come into contact with other people's opportunities and ideas. He did not speak a single foreign language and crossed the Chinese border for the first time only in 1949 in order to travel to the USSR for a meeting with Stalin as president. For him, China was and remains - the whole world. Young Mao once worked in a library in Beijing. There he met Professor Chen Ducie and that meeting would play a turning point in Mao's life. Chen was later the first general secretary of the Communist Party of China, and among the twelve founders of the party in July 1921 was the name of Mao Zedong. In the museum in Shanghai, visitors can see a table with twelve cups of tea. Today, that party has 100 million members.

Its real rise begins in the episode of the Chinese revolution known as the Long March. At the head of the communists, peasant army and sympathizers, he traveled 12.000 kilometers in one year to Yenan in Shanxi province.

The caves in Jenan, where they lived for the next decade and more, today represent a tourist attraction. There, in a dugout, the foundations of the Chinese version of communism - Maoism - were created.

photo: wikipedia

HOW MAOISM WAS BORN

Maoism does not have many points of contact with Marxism. The Chinese translators of "Capital" had a problem explaining the term "proletariat" because there was no such class in China. That is why the Chinese introduced the term "propertyless class" into their version, which did not refer only to workers, but also to peasants and other layers of society. Instead of the proletariat, in Maoism the main class struggle is led by the peasant masses. The Chinese vision of communism thus got its roots and its own driving force.

Mao did not dwell only on theory. He started the revolution by dividing the land among the peasants. He wrote a marching song for his soldiers, which they sang as they passed through the villages. The march has an unusual name: "Three main rules for discipline and eight points to pay attention to", and it is still sung by Chinese soldiers today.

Mao introduced military discipline into the party. Life in Jenan was hard and cruel, but the revolutionaries later remembered it with nostalgia. They all ate from the same cauldron and were mostly equal.

There Mao found his third wife - Jiang Qing. She was a young actress from Shanghai who, not particularly successfully, played in second-rate films. Jiang Qing boasted one morning: I shared a bed with Chairman Mao. The Central Committee of the Party had a hard time agreeing to Mao remarrying, and banned his new wife from politics for the next twenty years.

During more than ten years, Mao left Yenan only once, when in August 1945, at the head of a communist delegation, he went to negotiate with Chiang Kai-shek. It was a meeting of old acquaintances. At one time, when the Communists and the Guomindang cooperated, Mao was in the government of Chiang Kai-shek. Then "peace on paper" was achieved, and history followed its well-known course: Chiang Kai-shek started a civil war against the communists, but was badly defeated and had to flee to Taiwan with the remaining army, ministers and other sympathizers.

On October 1, 1949, on Tiananmen Square in Beijing, Mao proclaimed the establishment of the People's Republic of China. "China has stood on its feet", he told his nation and the world. After the great disorder under the firmament, the time of seduction of the great order has come.

He was 55 years old, in good strength and health, and settled in Junanhai. He did not want to choose one of the imperial palaces in the Forbidden City as his residence, like Lenin, who, after the revolution, entered the Imperial Kremlin. Mao was superstitious: his foot never set foot in the Forbidden City even later. It's for the emperor, and he's just a peasant. They also say that he never took money in his hand: he had an aversion to wealth. In everyday life he was modest. But he did not forget that many peasants in China became emperors after the rebellion.

In Junanhai, Mao took a villa with a poetic name: Chrysanthemum Fragrance. He ordered that a pile of his books be brought to him, among which the classic Chinese works dominated: Confucius's "Annals", encyclopedias, history of the rule of various dynasties, advice on state management, books of poetry, etc. There was little Marxist literature.

When Mao proclaimed the People's Republic, China had a national income of only $27 per capita, exactly half that of the Soviet Union in 1928. Over 90 percent of the population lived in the countryside where they worked in the same way as their ancestors did thousands of years ago. More human labor was spent on rice production than on the construction of the Great Wall. There were only 2.000 tractors in the country. Thirty million people lived under feudal conditions, one million as in a slave society, and 600.000 at the level of the original community.

China's revolutionary transformation began more peacefully than October's in Russia. Two million Guomindang continued to manage local affairs and receive wages. There was no expropriation of private capital and many capitalists continued to work under the communists. The government devoted maximum attention to the fight against crime, prostitution, smuggling, opium use, and the privileges of foreign companies. Actions for mass literacy, eradication of chronic diseases, provision of food for the poorest classes began... All this was accepted and supported by the people. Those were the years when Mao enjoyed the greatest possible support.

MEETINGS WITH STALIN

Although he declaratively exalted the USSR and Stalin, Mao had a bad opinion of his great northern neighbor and felt the hegemonic politics on his skin. Even after the victory in the civil war, Moscow maintained relations with the government of Chiang Kai-shek. The Soviet ambassador was the last to accompany the defeated Chiang to Taiwan and did not attend the proclamation of the republic in Beijing.

Mao traveled to Stalin by train for ten days. He got there on his birthday. He had a cold and was grumpy. He was traveling on a train that had no heating. They advised him to take a modest gift to Stalin: a basket of Chinese vegetables. Stalin did not meet him at the station, he sent Molotov. Mao sensed that something was wrong. He soon became convinced of it. An attempt to negotiate the conclusion of a new treaty of friendship and cooperation was not successful. Stalin justified himself by saying that he had already signed such an agreement with Chiang Kai-shek and that the Americans would be upset if an agreement approved by the West was now terminated. For a time, Stalin kept Mao Zedong in a dacha near Moscow, completely isolated: no contact or conversation. "I just sleep, eat and shit," Mao complained. When Stalin invited him to dinner, he refused to eat fried fish. "I only eat live fish," he said.

Mao's visit and meetings with Stalin further deepened the gap between them. He had to call Zhou Enlai, the Premier and Foreign Minister of China, to come to Moscow urgently. Only then was China granted a loan of three hundred million dollars and an agreement was secured for Soviet experts to help rebuild the Chinese economy.

And then a hot war broke out in China's immediate neighborhood - the Korean War. The Korean War lasted three years and ended with an armistice and separation of forces at the 38th parallel, right where the conflict began. There was no winner. About two million Koreans and about half a million Chinese died. His son Anjing died in Korea. Mao did not allow his body to be transferred and buried in China - like other Chinese soldiers, Mao's son was buried in an unmarked mass grave.

At a party meeting

I had the exclusive opportunity to attend a party meeting of a cell of the Chinese Communist Party. It was before the visit of President Tito and the Chinese went out to meet Yugoslav correspondents as much as possible.

With an interpreter, Mr. Si, I was brought to a factory in Peking; they did not tell me the name of the factory or where it is located. There were about twenty members of the party in the modest room and I don't know who was more surprised - those seeing a foreign correspondent for the first time or me.

The meeting began when everyone stood up and turned to the photo of Mao Zedong and bowed deeply three times. The translator told me that the admission of new members will start now. I saw three workers sitting on a wooden bench. It was explained to me that comrades would talk about them. I expected praise, but instead the translator gave me a flood of all kinds of accusations and critical remarks. They reproached them for not putting in enough effort at work, one being late, the other not following the writing of "Zhenmin Zhibao" every day and the like. In short, I thought nothing would come of the reception. But then the candidates for the party stood up and spoke even more fiercely, self-critically, about their mistakes. This was met with the approval of those present. When it was decided to vote, everyone raised their hand "yes" and three workers were accepted into the party with congratulations and applause. The meeting ended as it began - by bowing before the picture of Mao Zedong.

In the car, Mr. Si asked me if I was interested. I replied that it was and added, carelessly, that I hoped they were not actors from the local theater.

Si turned his head and didn't speak to me again for the rest of the ride.

(continues)

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