Mao: A Life in War Nerd Reading List

Jul 11, 2020 Cool_guy rated it it was amazing

At the outbreak of the Korean War, Mao’s son Anying insisted on joining the Chinese volunteer force which marched across the Yalu in 1951 to halt the advance of the Americans. His reasons were similar to those which had led Mao to order the intervention in the first place. Communistic fervor, of course, but also a sense of moral obligation. After all, during the Civil War, had not 100k Koreans fought and died with the Chinese in Manchuria?

Mao was reluctant. In addition to a child who died as a t At the outbreak of the Korean War, Mao’s son Anying insisted on joining the Chinese volunteer force which marched across the Yalu in 1951 to halt the advance of the Americans. His reasons were similar to those which had led Mao to order the intervention in the first place. Communistic fervor, of course, but also a sense of moral obligation. After all, during the Civil War, had not 100k Koreans fought and died with the Chinese in Manchuria?

Mao was reluctant. In addition to a child who died as a toddler, Mao had two sons, Anying and Anlong, with his second wife, Yang Kaihui. He’d loved her deeply, although he took her for granted and always chose the revolution over this love (it’s funny, writing that. It’s like how someone now would prioritize their nonprofit career over a loving relationship. But the stakes were much, much higher).

The pursuit of revolution had horrible consequences for his family. Anying and his brother, Anlong, were forced to scrounge an existence as homeless street children in Shanghai for many years. Anlong later developed schizophrenia and spent the rest of his life in a mental hospital in Dailin; it’s not hard to speculate that his mental illness was an outgrowth of the experience of abandonment.

Yang Kaihi’s fate was worst of all: she was executed by nationalist forces after being captured in the Jiangxi base area. All the while, Mao, separated by his family by the exegesis of revolution, had fallen in love with another woman, He Zizhen. Together they had five children. Three were abandoned as infants, given over to peasant families during the lean years of the Jiangxi base area and the Long March. Another died.

Less than a month after entering the front, Anying was killed in an American bombing run, and buried in a mass grave. Mao only found out three months later, told by the commander of Chinese troops in Korea. Mao began to shake so violently he was unable to light a cigarette.

After a few minutes of silence, he said “In revolutionary war, you always pay a price. Anying was one of thousands … You shouldn't take it as something special just because he was my son.”

In his biography, Philip Short never attempts to psychoanalyze the Chinese dictator. It is a methodical, precise book, working only with the available information, delving into speculation only on rare occasions. It’s an old style of popular journalistic or historical writing that seems to have all but faded away now. During it’s heyday, it was perfected by the British. For many years Short was a journalist for the British press.

Mao ultimately comes across as evil, but not because he was monster. It was Mao’s humanity that led him to make decisions which caused the death of millions and left millions of more lives ruined.

When I lived in China, more than one of my students told me that, for all of his problems, Mao was an incredible poet. I found this quite odd. At the time i knew nothing about poetry, let alone Chinese poetry. Now it makes sense. Mao approached politics with an artist’s sensibility. History was his canvass, and that canvass grew to an unmanageable size as he grew more powerful. It was this attitude that allowed him to believe that, contrary to all Marxist thought, the base could be temporarily exchanged for the superstructure, that through sheer will the Party could change China’s material reality. Reading about Mao’s approach to economics and the Great Leap Forward, I was reminded of D’Annunzio cheering on with moist eyes as if at the opera as he watched wave after wave of Italian peasant throw themselves on Austro-Hungarian lines during the First World War I. Just as a poet, or a philosopher, brings a new world into being with his work, so would Mao through politics. This megalomaniacal approach led to anywhere from 30 to 50 million dead. Never again would Mao grapple with economics.

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