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 Monday, Mar. 09, 1992

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    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."

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