Mao's forgotten son dies

Mao Anqing lived through the most tumultuous era in the history of modern China. But he spent his last years as an unknown recluse

Jonathan Fenby
Sunday March 25, 2007
The Observer

He was the reclusive, mentally ill son of one of the most powerful and feared figures of the 20th century, and his 84-year life echoed one of the deepest traumas of modern history.

Yesterday a brief notice in the China News Service recorded the death of Mao Anqing, who survived his father to live on into a new China that the dictator would not have recognised.

Mao Zedong's second child, who died on Friday, lived through civil war, the execution of his mother, street life in Shanghai, and a journey to Paris and to Moscow, where he studied under Stalin's surveillance. Eventually he returned to China, where he was largely ignored by his father.

Anqing was born in 1923, during a rare settled period in his father's life, one of three sons from the second of Mao's four marriages. Having left his first arranged marriage to a girl in his native village, the young librarian fell for Yang Kaihui, the daughter of an ethics professor. Though Mao's record as a womaniser was already established, his bride wrote that she was 'living for him' and, if he died, would die with him.

They set up house just outside the East Gate of Changsha, capital of their home province of Hunan. Three sons were born in the next seven years - Anqing was the second.

Mao was frequently away, working for the Communist Party, touring the countryside and participating in the United Front with Sun Yat-sen's Nationalists in Canton. His biographer, Philip Short, writes that 'perhaps for the only time in Mao's life, he had a truly happy family to come home to'.

Hunan was an unsettled place in which to grow up as warlords vied for power. In 1927 the Nationalist leader, Chiang Kai-shek, allied with one of the province's militarists and led a motley force north to the Yangzi. On their way, they took Changsha without trouble, workers' militias helping to chase out the warlord troops.

Chiang then launched a 'White Terror' against the Communists, first in Shanghai and then across the country. Abandoning his wife and sons for good, Mao began his long career as a guerrilla leader, sheltering with bandits in the rough mountain country on the eastern border of Hunan, and then setting up a bigger base in Jiangxi province, where he lived with the daughter of a local scholar.

Depressed by his faithlessness, Yang Kaihui considered suicide, but decided she could not do this to the sons. Poems that she wrote, which she hid in cracks in the walls of her house and which were seen by the author Jung Chang when she was researching her biography of Mao, vividly express her solitude and fears.

'You are now the beloved sweetheart,' one ran. 'Return, return...'

She appears to have had doubts about her Communist belief, and wrote in another poem: 'I want to flee. But I have these children. How can I?'

In 1930 tragedy struck the family that Mao had left behind. The Communist leadership ordered frontal attacks on cities the Nationalists held. The campaign was a disaster. In Changsha the attackers held ground in the city for nine days, but were then beaten off. Two months later the victorious Nationalist general ordered an anti-Communist purge.

Yang Kaihui was arrested, with her elder son, on his eighth birthday. Given a chance to save her life if she denounced her husband, she refused. She was taken to the execution ground and killed.

Learning of her death, Mao wrote that 'the death of Kaihui cannot be redeemed by a hundred deaths of mine!' Despite his infidelity, he always called her his true love. But that had not led him to try to rescue her and their sons during the battle for Changsha.

Later he would show similar lack of scruples in abandoning his third wife, who was badly wounded in the head on the Long March, for his best-known partner, the one-time Shanghai actress, Jiang Qing. She became one of the Gang of Four in the Cultural Revolution, and was imprisoned after Deng Xiaoping took power, dying in 1991, apparently having hanged herself in her bathroom.

After his mother's execution, Anying, the eldest son, was released and the three children were smuggled to Shanghai, where the youngest died of dysentery aged four. The two surviving brothers spent at least part of their time on the streets, scavenging for food and sleeping on pavements.

In 1936, after the Red Army had staged the Long March from Jiangxi to northern China, Stalin invited Mao to send his sons to Moscow, following a pattern of getting the children of prominent Chinese under Soviet control. After a delay in Paris waiting for visas, the Mao boys arrived in the Soviet Union and stayed until the 1940s. In a rare letter, their father advised them to study science and 'talk less politics'.

By this time Anqing's health was evidently poor. When his elder brother headed back to the Communist base area in China in 1943, he asked the head of the Communist School in Moscow to look after his younger brother. 'He is an honest person, only he has hearing ailments and his nerves are wrecked,' he added.

After his second son returned to China in 1947, Mao saw little of him, and he was reported to have spent much of his life in mental institutions. Mao met Anying more often, but he was killed in the Korean War in 1950.

Mao's other known offspring, two daughters Li Na and Li Min, have passed quiet lives, living in apartment buildings in Beijing, venerating their father but keeping out of the limelight. Other children born on the Long March were abandoned along the way; a woman turned up a few years ago along the route who claims to be one of the infants left behind by the Chairman.***

Jonathan Fenby is author of Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the China He Lost (Free Press).

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