“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.”