After the end of the Long March, the Communist set up a base in ancient caves in Yanan and Mao started seeing other women. He had an affair with Ting Ling, a childhood friend of his second wife, Yang Kai-hui. Another lover was Lily Wu, an elegant actress said to be the
"only girl in Yanan with a permanent wave". He met her one night when he was having dinner in the cave where Agnes Smedley of the
Manchester Guardian
was sheltering. Lily was acting as interpreter and she kept putting her hand on Mao's leg, saying that she had drunk too much.
He was a little startled at first, but then he took her hand and said that he too had drunk too much. Later they arranged a private meeting in another cave. When Ho found out about it, she was furious. She charged Lily formally with alienating her husband's affections.
In 1938, Mao took up with a film actress with a less than savoury reputation, shocking the Communist hierarchy. Her name was Lan Ping - or Blue Apple. She changed it to Chiang Ch'ing - Azure River - though some called her Lang Ping Guo - Rotten Apple because of her early promiscuity.
Chiang Ch'ing had been born into a troubled family. Her father was violent and her mother's work as a domestic servant bordered on prostitution. Chiang had a string of boyfriends before she married a man called Fei, the son of a merchant from Jinan, in 1930.
The marriage lasted only a few months. Chiang fell out with Fei's family who considered her lazy. They divorced.
Soon after, Chiang met Yu Qiwei, the leader of the local Communist underground. They fell in love and began living together in 1931. When the Japanese army seized Manchuria in September 1931, Chiang, already a budding actress, starred in several anti-imperialist plays.
When the Nationalist government cracked down on the Communists, Yu Qiwei was arrested and Chiang took up with a student of physical education named Qiao. Soon she finished with him and headed for the bright lights of Shanghai, where she was determined to make it as an actress.
Chiang was poor but ambitious and quickly built herself a career on the casting couch.
She was the mistress of movie director and Communist party official Chang Keny. She married actor and movie critic Tang Na, then moved in with leading theatre director, Zhang Min, a married man. Tang was so distraught that he tried to kill himself with an overdose of sleeping pills, but the owner of the inn where he was staying found him in time. Chiang had no pity and continued expanding her career with a series of other liaisons.
"Chiang Ch'ing was a licentious woman," said the wife of a revolutionary leader in Yanan, where Chiang had gone accompanied by another ex-husband, David Yu. "She simply does not seem to be able to exist without a man."
At that time, she said, Chiang was seeing an actor named Wang and they would use her husband's office for sex sessions. It was in Yanan that Chiang met Mao.
As soon as Chiang arrived in Yanan, rumours spread about her. Mao immediately sought her out and gave her a ticket to the Marx-Leninist Institute where he was giving a lecture. She sat in the front row and got herself noticed by asking questions. He returned the compliment and went to see her in the theatre. He applauded her performance so loudly that Ho Tzuchen became jealous. They had a terrible row afterwards.
To Mao, Chiang was just another pretty girl, but Chiang was determined to get her man.
She divorced Tang Na and abandoned their two children for Mao, explaining later: "Sex is engaging the first time around, but what sustains interest is power."
When Chiang became pregnant, Mao announced that he was going to divorce Ho to
marry Chiang. However, this was not just a matter for the individuals concerned. They had to ask permission from the Communist Party.
The party was naturally concerned about Chiang Ch'ing's "colourful past" and refused Mao permission to divorce and remarry.
"Ho Tzu-chen has always been a good comrade to you," the Central Committee explained. "She is a reliable and faithful companion and has shown her true worth in battle and in work. Why are you no longer able to live with a woman like this?"
Mao replied: "I esteem and respect Comrade Ho. But we should not think along
feudalistic lines any more, where divorce is considered an injury to a woman's reputation or position. Without Chiang Ch'ing I cannot go on with this revolution."
The privations of the Long March had left Ho mentally unbalanced and the rejection by Mao pushed her over the edge. On these grounds, Mao eventually obtained permission to divorce in 1939. Many believed he was callously abandoning a valiant comrade and his divorce cost him a large number of followers. Mao also abandoned Lily Wu, who was
despatched home to Szechuan.
Ho was sent to Moscow for psychiatric treatment, but there was no improvement in her condition. She spent the rest of her life in a comfortable house in Shanghai, paid for by the government, but she never fully recovered.
In 1961, Mao received a letter from Ho and decided that he wanted to see her. She was brought to his villa at Lushan. By this time, she was old and grey-haired. She was obviously delighted to see Mao, but her conversation was barely coherent. After she left, Mao sank into a deep depression.
As a condition of their marriage, Mao had to send Chiang Ch'ing to the Party School. The deputy head was Kang Sheng and, despite the fact that he was Mao's right-hand man, Chiang had an affair with him during her four months there.
Chiang and Mao married in 1939. They did not bother with a wedding ceremony or a
legal marriage certificate. A simple announcement was enough.
However, malicious gossip still pursued her and Chiang was forced to take a backseat in public. She became the perfect Communist housewife, but her hold on power remained through sex. She told one and all that Mao was a great lover and his whole entourage would know if they had made love the night before.
Mao was not a man to settle for one woman indefinitely and, by 1949, they were
becoming distant. In March, he sent Chiang to Moscow while he went to the Fragrant Hills with an actress named Yu Shan. She was the sister of David Yu, Chiang's ex-husband. David did not consider that Chiang Ch'ing had the right qualities to be the wife of Mao, who was by then effectively China's new emperor. His sister was more: cultured, more cultivated, superior in every way. However, David Yu had misread the situation. Mao's preference was for earthy peasant girls and, after six months, they broke up. Then, in November, Chiang returned from the Soviet Union and re-established her presence in Mao's household.
It was also in 1949, when Mao was sixty, that his genital abnormalities were discovered, and his prostate was found to be small and soft. The doctor examining him discovered that Mao was infertile. He had fathered several children by three of his wives, but the youngest was now fifteen years old. So Mao must have become sterile after the age of forty-five.
When told, Mao said: "So I've become a eunuch, haven't I?"
He seemed genuinely concerned. His doctor had to explain that the eunuchs in the old imperial court had their testicles, or often their entire genitals, cut off. Mao, it seemed, had little grasp of the workings of the reproductive system.
By this time, Mao had grown tired of Chiang sexually. He told her that, at sixty, he was too old for sex. But underlings, such as Kang Sheng, moved themselves up the party hierarchy by providing Mao with a constant supply of libidinous young women. Kang Sheng also maintained a library of pornographic material for Mao. No nation on earth had a richer tradition of the erotic arts than China, and Mao's collection far surpassed that of any emperor.
During the Cultural Revolution, Kang Sheng looted the official museums to add to Mao's collection.
Mao's favourite topic of conversation was sex and the sex lives of others. In 1954, Mao crushed Gao Gang, who had amassed so much power that Stalin called him the King of Manchuria. Mao accused him of making an "anti-party alliance" and he committed suicide.
But it seemed that Mao was not interested in the details of the political threat Gao Gang represented. It was Gao's sex life that fascinated him. Gao had had sex with more than a hundred different women, it was said.
"He had sex twice on the night he killed himself," Mao marvelled. "Can you imagine such lust."
Mao tried to match these excesses. He was famously interested in swimming and would fill the heated indoor swimming pool in the Forbidden City with hundreds of naked girls, then take a dip.
At first, Mao was discreet about his activities. His confidential secretary, Ye Zilong, would recruit women from the Cultural Work Troupe, the Central Garrison Corps and the Bureau of Confidential Matters. They had to be young, uneducated and fanatically devoted to Chairman Mao. They would stay in Ye's house until Chiang Ch'ing was safely asleep. Then they would be led quietly across the compound, through the dining-room and into Mao's bedchamber. In the morning, before Chiang Ch'ing awoke, they would be led out.
Afterwards, they would be treated generously. Mao could afford to be generous. Millions of copies of his
Little Red Book
had been sold and Mao Tse-tung was one of the richest men in China. He had made over three million yuan (£500,000) from the sale of his
Selected
Works
alone.
During high-level party meetings, a special room would be set aside in the Great Hall of the People. The political departments of the army and the Communist Party would supply beautiful girls of impeccable proletarian backgrounds. They were told that they had been recruited as ballroom dancing partners for the Great Leader. In fact, they were fodder for his bed. But many of the party officials saw this as so great an honour, they supplied their daughters and sisters.
Madame Mao was proud of her appearance and her sexual skills and when she heard
about his womanizing, it hurt her deeply. She would try and sit in on his dance parties where he tried to pick up girls. She tried to vet his nurses, firing the pretty ones. When Mao's physician questioned her actions, he was told: "Doctor, you don't understand the Chairman.
He is very loose with his love life. His physical pleasure and his mental activity are separate, and there are always women willing to be his prey.
The doctor was also told that he would have to teach his nurses something about morality:
"They should be polite to their leader, but careful in their contact with him."
Madame Mao was not wrong. The Great Helmsman was already involved with the
railroad nurse on his special train. She did sterling service as they travelled around the country. In Shanghai, he paraded her publicly, taking her to the exclusive Jinjaing Club which was the preserve of top Party officials. The Shanghai authorities knew of the Chairman's passion for female companionship, so they laid on the city's top actresses and singers. But they were too sophisticated and worldly for the proletarian Mao. The Shanghai authorities learnt quickly and began providing young dancers who were more to Mao's taste.
At the time, the Cultural Work Troupe of the Twentieth Army were in the area. The
young girls from the troupe would swarm around Mao, vying with each other for the
privilege of a dance with the Great Leader. He would stay out dancing until two in the morning, then return to his train with his nurse.
Chiang Ch'ing's suspicion of nurses was confirmed after his sixty-fifth birthday banquet, which was held in Guangzhou. That night, Madame Mao had trouble sleeping. She called for the nurse to get a sleeping pill and got no response. So she got up and went to look for her.
When she found the duty room empty, she stormed into Mao's bedroom and found the nurse there. In the ensuing row, Chiang Ch'ing accused Mao of sleeping with a former servant who had visited recently. Mao had encouraged the woman to get her daughter an education and given her three thousand yuan to enroll in school. Madame Mao accused him of sleeping with the daughter too.
Mao's response to these accusations was to head back to Peking, leaving his wife behind.
Chiang Ch'ing quickly realized that she risked losing him. As an apology she sent him a quote from the famous Chinese folk story,
Monkey
. In it, a Chinese monk is travelling to India in search of a Buddhist scripture. But Monkey makes him angry and he leaves him behind in a cave behind a waterfall.
"My body is in the cave behind the waterfall," Monkey says to the monk, "but my heart is following you."
Mao accepted the apology - he realized that it meant he now had his wife's tacit
permission to sleep with whoever he chose.
On one trip into Chiangxi province, the director of a new hospital provided four energetic young nurses for one of Mao's dance parties. A musical and dance troupe had also been laid on. Soon Mao was sleeping with a young nurse and a member of the dance troupe. He did little to hide the fact, but he was thoughtful enough to phone Madame Mao and advise her not to meet him there, as arranged. He would join her after his meetings were over.
As time went by, Mao grew careless and she caught him
in flagrante delicto
several times. There was nothing she could do about it. Once, Mao's doctor found her crying on a park bench just outside Mao's compound. She said through her tears that, just as no one, not even Stalin, could win a political battle against him, no one woman would win his heart completely.
Mao and Chiang Ch'ing eventually came to an understanding. In return for playing the public role of his wife, while tolerating his infidelities in private, Mao pledged not to leave her. As Madame Mao was more interested in power than sex, she agreed.
After that Mao made no attempt to hide his infidelities. At the Bureau of Confidential Matters, he met a young, white-skinned clerk, with delicately arched eyebrows and dark eyes.
She told Mao that she had stuck up for him at primary school and been beaten up for her pains. Mao began a very public affair with the woman, spending night and day with her in Shanghai. Mao would dance with her until two in the morning, only stopping when his young companion was exhausted. The young woman was so proud of the affair that she tried to befriend Chiang Ch'ing. By this time, Chiang had accepted the situation, and she was warm and friendly in return.