Mao was happiest when several young women shared his bed simultaneously. He would often sleep with three, four or five women at the same time and encouraged his lovers to introduce him to other women.
Although there was no risk of the young girls who came to his bed getting pregnant, he did give them something to remember him by. With such fervid sexual activity going on, venereal disease was inevitable. One of Mao’s girlfriends caught trichomonas vaginalis. This is not strictly a venereal disease as it can be caught from infected underwear — the young girls in Cultural Work Troupes often shared their clothing. But it is an infection of the vagina and causes an unpleasant discharge. Men are not affected, but they act as carriers. So once one of Mao’s lovers got it, it spread like wildfire.
Ironically, the author of the problem was Mao himself. During the Great Leap Forward, Mao had decided to increase rice production by deep planting. This meant flooding the paddy fields to waist height, causing an epidemic of gynaecological infections among the women who worked in the fields.
While this condition would normally have been distressing, Mao’s young women soon saw it as a badge of honour conferred on them by the Great Leader.
Although he was the carrier of the infection, Mao, naturally, refused to be treated. If it was not hurting him, it did not matter.
“What if Chiang Ch’ing becomes infected?” asked his doctor.
Mao said that would never happen. The doctor insisted that Mao at least wash himself. Normally, he still did not bathe. He was wiped down as usual with damp towels every night and never washed his genitals.
Those around him knew of the problem and were careful with their towels and bedding. At home in Peking, Mao’s bedding was sterilized, but when they travelled, no amount of prodding would get the servants in the places Mao stayed to take that same simple precaution. They considered sterilizing his bedding an insult to the Great Leader.
In 1967, Mao contracted genital herpes. He was warned that the disease was highly contagious and passed on by sexual contact, but the Chairman did not think it was so bad and it did not noticeably limit the number of his sexual partners.
Although ballroom dancing had been banned as bourgeois and decadent during the
Cultural Revolution, Mao held dance parties once a week, behind the walls of the Forbidden City. Young girls from the Cultural Work Troupe of the Central Garrison Corps would surround him, flirting and begging him to dance. He would waltz, fox-trot or tango with each of the girls in turn.
Mao had one of his beds moved into a room beside the ballroom. He would go in there to “rest” several times during the evening, often taking one of the girls with him. Peng Dehuai, a member of the politburo, spoke out about this at a meeting. He criticized Chairman Mao, accusing him of behaving like an emperor with a harem of three thousand concubines. The Cultural Work Troupe was disbanded, but Mao continued to find willing young sexual partners from other cultural troupes, the air force, the Bureau of Confidential Matters, the special railway division, the Peking Military Region, the Second Artillery Corps and the provinces of Hubei and Zhejiang. Meanwhile, Peng Dehuai was purged. He died in prison in 1974.
The dance parties continued. Exposed to so many admiring young women, Mao could not go wrong. In the past, he had depended on underlings to procure for him, but it was better this way. Older women and the better educated often refused his advances, and some nurses thought it would violate their professional ethics to have sex with him. But the young women who came to the dance parties did not. They were from peasant stock, from families who owed their lives to the Communist Party and thought that Chairman Mao was their saviour.
As the cult of personality grew in post-revolutionary China, Mao became a figure of veneration. People would do anything to catch a glimpse of him on top of the Tiananmen addressing a huge crowd. During the Cultural Revolution, Mao would hand out mangoes. These would become hallowed objects, worshipped by all who beheld them. A drop of tea made from the tiniest piece of one of these mangoes was a divine elixir. For a young girl brought up in this ethos, simply being in the same room as Chairman Mao was bliss. To be called to his bedchamber to serve his pleasure was beyond ecstasy itself.
Mao surrounded himself with pretty young women. They would look after him, handle his business and sleep with him. His confidential secretary was Zhang Yufeng. Mao had met her at one of his dance parties when she was eighteen. She had big round eyes and white skin. Soon they were having a tumultuous affair. To keep her close at hand, he made her a stewardess on his official train, and finally his secretary. She stayed with him to the end, but one woman was never enough. During his final illness, Mao was fed and nursed by two young dancers.
When Mao died in 1976, Madame Mao came into her own. She was one of the “Gang of Four” who tried to take over. But publication of the details of her early promiscuity alienated her followers. She was arrested and expelled from the Communist Party in 1977. Charged with fomenting civil unrest during the Cultural Revolution, she refused to confess and used her trial in 1980-81 to denounce the current leadership. In 1981, she was sentenced to death, suspended for two years to see if she would repent. The sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in 1983. Her death in prison in 1991 was officially reported as suicide.
7. THE PLEASURE PENINSULA
North Korea’s “beloved leader” from the Communist take-over in 1945 to his death in 1995, Kim I1-sung, was a well-known womanizer even during his exile in Manchuria. His first wife was Kim Jong-suk. She had lived with her parents, slash-and-burn farmers in Jiande, China, until 1935. Then, at the age of sixteen, she was picked up by a Chinese Communist guerrilla unit. She was assigned to Kim Il-sung, who kept her barefoot, as a cook and seamstress. She also worked as one of his bodyguards. In 1942, she gave birth to his son and successor, Kim Chong-il, in a military base in Siberia.
When Kim Il-sung took over the Communist paradise of North Korea, he enjoyed intimate relations with innumerable women including movie actresses, dancers, professional models, his own secretaries, good-looking nurses and kisaeng girls — the Korean equivalent of geishas. Having absolute power in this secretive, closed country, he did not have to bother with seduction. He simply had his henchmen kidnap anyone he wanted.
When any North Korean was asked how many children Kim Il-sung had, the answer would always be: “We are all his children.”
Kim Jong-suk meekly accepted her husband’s womanizing. He also mistreated her. She died in 1949, at the age of thirty-two. The rumours at the time were that she shot herself or was poisoned. The official announcement was that she had died of a heart attack. Soon after her death, Kim Il-sung married Kim Song-ae, a beautiful woman twenty years his junior. She was already pregnant with their child, Kim Pyong-il.
Like father, like son — only more so. Kim Chong-il, who was groomed to take over from his father when he died in the first dynastic succession in the Communist world, inherited his father’s taste for women. While working in the General Bodyguard Bureau, Kim Chong-il married Hong II-chon. She was the daughter of a revolutionary and studied literature at Kimilsung University. They had a daughter.
But Kim Chong-il was not faithful to her; and he beat her. They divorced in 1973. It was also in 1973 that Kim Il-sung named Kim Chong-il as his successor. He appointed his son to the politburo and made him Minister for Propaganda and Art. That same year Kim Chong-il married a typist. They went on to have a son and two daughters. His second wife remains his official consort, but she is far from being the only woman on the scene.