Word: yanan
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...bedroom ? a sloven's room, the bed strewn with books, leaflets, reports. Cordoned off from the world, he became the prisoner of his palace entourage, of his wife and of the Shanghailanders who, with Jiang Qing, formed the Gang of Four. "In the old days in Yanan," said one friend, "he would listen first, then talk. Now he talked but would not listen." At the end he would mumble and grunt, interpreters had to bend close to Mao's lips to strain sense from the mumbling. But, by then, all those once close to him had been killed...
...impulse for speed was added the driving force of "struggle." In Yanan (see box), where the clean dry air is intoxicating and the heavens are close enough to touch, "struggle" had become doctrine. Nothing was impossible if his will could drive his people to "struggle against the mountains...
This political insanity was put in context during a talk I had with Hu Qiaomu. Slow in speech, broad of nose, gray of hair, Hu had been a Shanghai intellectual in the '30s who trekked north to Yanan and became Mao's private secretary, worked with Deng Xiaoping, rose until 1966 when he, too, was purged...
...Garden of Yanan ? how could he have let them be put to death? Pathetically, Hu ruminated, then slurred his reply. "No ... no ... Mao did not know. It was all so secret, you understand. Even the Politburo did not know. They put Peng into a hospital under a false name. Even the doctors did not know his real name." Chou tried to find out what was happening to Peng. "He couldn't. It was a secret even from Chou." Mao trusted nobody in the last days...
...also told of how Mao, who did not believe in torment but in "reeducation" of his enemies, heard about an old Yanan comrade being imprisoned and tortured. "But this is fascism, not Communism!" cried Mao, and ordered punishment relaxed to house arrest...