Word: hu
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...pressures not only Mao's isolation but his growing distrust of the Soviet Union. "Mao's visits to Russia were not only very short but very unpleasant, " said Hu. Mao believed that the Soviets had bureaucratized their revolution, had betrayed Marxism, were traitors to Communism ? revisionists! If the Soviets had succumbed to bureaucracy, might not the same thing happen in China? Thus, a growing suspicion that revisionism and class enemies might be infecting even his own party. On went Hu, describing the paranoia growing. Mao had disliked intellectuals ever since he had been a $30-a-month librarian...
...tried to bring Hu to personalities. Peng had been too proud and stubborn, he said. Lin Biao had been too ambitious, a careerist, sucking up to Mao, then trying to kill him. Finally he came to Jiang Qing. Here Hu's anger burst. "If you were to write a biography of Mao, she would be the tragedy of his life." Then, an anecdote about Jiang Qing escorting Imelda Marcos, the First Lady of the Philippines, on a visit to Tianjin. The state cavalcade roared through the peasants, ran one down and killed him. Stop, said Imelda. No, said Jiang Qing...
...Garden of Yanan ? how could he have let them be put to death? Pathetically, Hu ruminated, then slurred his reply. "No ... no ... Mao did not know. It was all so secret, you understand. Even the Politburo did not know. They put Peng into a hospital under a false name. Even the doctors did not know his real name." Chou tried to find out what was happening to Peng. "He couldn't. It was a secret even from Chou." Mao trusted nobody in the last days...
...Hu also told of how Mao, who did not believe in torment but in "reeducation" of his enemies, heard about an old Yanan comrade being imprisoned and tortured. "But this is fascism, not Communism!" cried Mao, and ordered punishment relaxed to house arrest...
...complimented Hu on the official confession. "The problem," he said, "had been how to assign blame yet preserve Mao's merits, though flawed." After three sessions, the Central Committee came up with the compromise that now rules Chinese thinking: there is crime and there is error, and they are different. Mao was not a criminal, said Hu. Mao was guilty of error; he had betrayed Mao Thought, contradicting himself. His merits outweighed his mistakes. Thus, the official history of disaster, the dethronement...