Born in 1893 in the village of Shaoshan in Hunan province, the son of a peasant farmer, Mao’s first sexual experience occurred when he was still a teenager in his hometown. He had a youthful encounter with a twelve-year-old girl. In later years, Mao was fond of recalling this initiation. In 1962, Mao even arranged to meet her again, this woman to whom he had lost his virginity. By then, she was old and grey. He gave her two thousand yuan. When she left, he said wistfully: “How she’s changed.” What did he expect after more than fifty years.
However, the young Mao showed very little interest in sex. He was studious and introverted throughout his youth, and underwent long periods of sexual abstinence while he concentrated on the great political problems of the day. His father was worried about his dreamy, romantic son and decided to shake him out of it. In 1908, he arranged for the fifteen-year-old Mao to marry a woman six years his senior. For the first-and only- time in his life, he went through a full traditional wedding ceremony. Afterwards, although the woman was moved into the Mao family house, he refused to live with his bride. She died in 1910. Later, he maintained that he never laid a hand on her.
During his late teens and early twenties, Mao and his friends were too committed to politics to think about sex. There were women in their circle, such as Tsai Chang who went on to become a Communist leader, but shyness and inhibiting social tradition meant that Mao had little time for romance.
Mao devoted his energies to becoming a full-time revolutionary in Peking and probably remained celibate until he met Tao Szu-yung, a brilliant student. The romance withered when they disagreed about politics and they went their separate ways. Then he met another beautiful revolutionary comrade, Yang Kai-hui. He wrote love poems to her — as he did to his other lovers. She was the daughter of a university professor, white-skinned, with deep-set eyes They entered into a trial marriage before formalizing the situation in 1921, when she gave birth to their first child. This may seem conventional enough to us, but in China at that time for a couple to choose each other, without reference to their parents, was truly revolutionary.
The war against Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang nationalist (and vehemently anti-Communist) forces soon separated them. Mao left Yang and their children in Changsha for safety in 1927, while he established himself as a major revolutionary leader. Three years later, the Kuomintang seized Changsha. Yang was captured and executed when she refused to betray her husband. Their two boys fled to Shanghai where they had to fend for themselves on the streets. The younger son, Anqing, suffered from mental illness which was ascribed to the beatings he had suffered as a vagrant at the hands of the Shanghai police. The elder, Anying, was killed in an American air raid during the Korean war.
However, while Yang was sacrificing her life for her husband, Mao was already living with another beautiful revolutionary comrade, Ho Tzu-chen, a girl about half his age. She was eighteen; he was thirty-seven. When he first met his “revolutionary lovemate”, as he called her, he described her as “attractive and refined”. She spoke in a clear and measured way. Her eyes were a “pair of crystals”. Meeting her gave him a feeling “as sweet as honey”.
They married soon after Yang’s death — though some reports say that they had already wed in the safety of a Soviet base before Yang gave her life for her husband. When it came to marriage and divorce, Mao was always a bit sloppy about the paperwork.
Rumours were soon circulating, perhaps put about by Mao’s enemies, that Ho was sexually dissatisfied with Mao, because he was so much older than her and constantly busy. Mao wrote her a poem showing that he understood her frustration:
Ho was Mao’s companion on the Long March, which started in 1934. This was the two-year, 6,000-mile trek from their soviet in South-east China to the Shaanxi province in North-west China which the Communist forces undertook to escape the nationalist Kuomintang. Mao and Ho left their two children behind with a peasant family. They never discovered what happened to them. Ho gave birth to another two children during the Long March and conceived a third. She had six children in all. Only one was male and, as far as they knew, only one, a daughter, Lin Min, survived.
It was during the Long March that Mao began to exhibit his peculiar lavatorial habits. He refused the offer of a commode, preferring to go into the fields with his bodyguards and dig a hole. Mao believed that his bowel movements were an inspiration to his troops.
Lavatories and bowel movements were a big thing for Mao, even after he came to power. While many of his district leaders installed Western-style sit-down lavatories and soft Western mattresses in their residences, Mao preferred to travel with his hard wooden bed and a squat-style Chinese toilet. Even on a visit to Moscow, he would insist on squatting over a bedpan rather than use a decadent Russian sit-down loo.
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.