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                                                                                BOOKS, Page 67

Sex, Drugs and Mao Zedong


Two new books show that Beijing's leaders were more ruthless --
and corrupt -- than even their enemies imagined

By BRUCE W. NELAN


    In Moscow the crimes of Stalin have been reported and
officially confirmed for years. The unrepentant Chinese
government is still much more secretive and reluctant to provide
ammunition for its critics. But two new books -- The New
Emperors: China in the Era of Mao and Deng by Harrison E.
Salisbury (Little, Brown; 544 pages; $24.95) and The Claws of
the Dragon: Kang Sheng by John Byron and Robert Pack (Simon &
Schuster; 560 pages; $27.50) -- indicate that glasnost is
coming, inexorably, to Beijing. They provide the most detailed
and personal accounts so far of the chaos, cruelty and
corruption that Mao Zedong's reign inflicted on the nation.

    Harrison Salisbury, the veteran New York Times
correspondent and popular historian, comes right out and calls
Mao an emperor -- and not the first one to take power through
a peasant rebellion. Precisely because Mao was a peasant, he was
unprepared to govern China and modernize it. A "pseudo-Marxist"
bored by statistics and budgets, Mao was interested mainly in
class warfare and "mobilization of the masses," who he was
convinced could do anything if properly exhorted.

    The New Emperors is based on dozens of interviews in China
and scores of documents and memoirs. The reporting is set out
so thoroughly that readers are prepared to believe its accounts
not only of how Mao turned on his closest comrades but also that
he was a satyr, pornography collector and drug addict.

    Salisbury writes soberly in staccato prose that "from the
mid-1960s to the early 1970s" -- the height of the bloody purges
of the Cultural Revolution -- "Mao's quarters sometimes swarmed
with young women." The Great Helmsman staged nude water ballets
in his swimming pool. "Art ensembles" and "dancing partners"
were standing by wherever he went. One of Mao's doctors
referred to him bluntly as "a sex maniac."

    The poet-guerrilla so idealized by "friends of China" had
other, more public failings, and Salisbury charts them in
detail. Impatient with the slow pace of economic development,
Mao launched the catastrophic Great Leap Forward in 1958. The
movement forced farmers into communes, abolished private
property and set up backyard steel mills to speed China into the
industrial age. By 1960 even seed grains were exhausted and
millions were starving to death.

    When his old comrade Defense Minister Peng Dehuai told him
the facts, Mao declared him an enemy, fired him and replaced
him with Marshal Lin Biao (also apparently a drug addict). The
country went bankrupt, and President Liu Shaoqi and Deng
Xiaoping, General Secretary of the Communist Party, took over
day-to-day control to restore the economy.

    Mao concluded that Liu and Deng planned to force him into
retirement -- and he may have been right. In 1965 Mao decided
Liu "had to go." The weapon he chose was the Cultural
Revolution, "a revolution against his own revolution." It was
conducted by his harridan wife Jiang Qing and plotted by his
favorite ideologist, security specialist and pimp, Kang Sheng.

    Jiang and Kang loosed the young Red Guards on a murderous
rampage that destroyed Liu's government and Deng's party.
Thousands, if not millions, were killed. Lin became Mao's heir,
but soon fell under suspicion of trying to turn Mao into a
powerless figurehead. To avoid his own arrest, Lin attempted a
putsch that failed. Premier Zhou Enlai was left in charge, but
he too ended up in Jiang's sights as she maneuvered to succeed
Mao.

    Deng, purged twice during the Cultural Revolution, was
finally returned to power in what Salisbury calls a military
coup. One of the most powerful old marshals, Ye Jianying,
brought his army colleagues together and decided that when Mao
died, they would arrest Jiang and her cohort. Kang died of
cancer in December 1975, and Zhou a month later. When Mao
finally died at 82 in September 1976, Ye clapped the venomous
widow into prison and summoned Deng from his rural exile.

    In The Claws of the Dragon, Byron and Pack focus on the
career of the sinister Kang Sheng, relying mainly on an official
Chinese biography that was prepared when Kang was posthumously
expelled from the Communist Party in 1980. Pack is an
investigative reporter, and Byron is the nom de plume of a
"Western diplomat" who is apparently an intelligence officer.
He picked up the internal document from a Chinese contact on a
dark street in Beijing.

    Also buttressed by interviews and Chinese publications,
The Claws of the Dragon describes Kang -- a Politburo member
and one of Mao's closest confidants -- as an opportunist
without principles, interested solely in power, and also as a
torturer, creator of China's gulag and a habitual opium user.
By the early 1940s, the head of the secret police had
consolidated his control over the party's social-affairs
department, which had a "liquidation" division: "So notorious
was Kang's taste for inflicting pain . . . it earned him a
title," the King of Hell. The authors compare him with Iago,
Rasputin and Stalin's secret-police chief, Lavrenti Beria. In
spite of the book's rather breathless style, the analogies seem
apt.

    If glasnost is coming to Beijing, can demokratizatsia be
far behind? Salisbury does not see it. Deng, a "moderate'' and
pragmatist, was willing to shed as much blood as necessary to
put down the Tiananmen Square democracy movement in 1989. His
position, like Mao's, was "if he saw himself challenged, he was
bound to destroy the challenger." The next emperor, Salisbury
predicts, will probably be as pragmatic as Deng. But like Deng
he will hold tightly to power and will be ready to order China,
as emperors did in dynasties past, "Obey -- and tremble."