At the end of their Long March, the Communists had been a battered band, barely controlling three small barren provinces. At the end of World War II, a Communist army of 1,000,000 men controlled some of China's richest lands--and 50 million people.
Idylls of a Comrade. In 1946, the U.S. began its is-fated attempt to mediate between Chiang and the Reds, giving the Communists further time to strengthen their position. Special U.S. Envoy Patrick Hurley personally brought the reluctant Mao to Chungking. Before the plane took off at Yenan airfield, he nervously kissed his small daughter goodbye as though he were being taken to the executioner.
After six weeks, Mao flew hurriedly back to Yenan. Communist bigwig Chou
En-lai, in charge of Yenan's public relations, remained in the big city as liaison officer until negotiations broke down. Chou is the smoothest, most urbane of the Communist leaders; in school he was famous for his female impersonations in theatricals, his most brilliant role being that of a sexy peasant wench in a play called One Dollar.
In Yenan, Mao Tse-tung enjoyed a starkly idyllic existence. In 1939 he had married his fourth wife, a pretty Chinese movie starlet. The Maos lived simply, in an adobe hut during the summer and during the winter in caves, which they kept changing regularly for fear of assassins. For many years, Mao's official vehicle was an ambulance donated by the American Chinese Hand Laundry Association. In the early mornings, U.S. visitors driving past Mao's residence would see him and General Chu Teh, like any Chinese peasants in the road with baskets and small shovels picking up animal droppings to fertilize the fields. Said Mao in a lecture to Communist writers: "Once I felt that only the intellectuals were clean, and that workers, soldiers and peasants were dirty . . . [Now I feel that] although the hands of workers and peasants may be black with dirt and their feet smeared with cow dung, they are still cleaner than the bourgeois and petty bourgeois."
U.S. visitors to Yenan described Mao as a heavy-set man (5 ft. 8 in., 200 lbs.) with the humor, the strength and often the manner of a Chinese peasant. He frequently sat with his feet propped on the table, and in warm weather he unceremoniously stripped to the waist. Once, in Yenan in the presence of General Lin Piao, president of the Red Academy, he took off his trousers for comfort while studying a military map. He smokes incessantly and tends his own tobacco patch. In 1938, the Party Central Committee gave him a $5 monthly raise so he could buy more cigarettes. Between noisy puffs, he chews melon seeds or peanuts. Until recently, when his doctors made him slow up, he used to wash down his heavy meals with kaoliang (grain liquor). Since then Mao has become something of a hypochondriac.
Mao was usually affable toward U.S. visitors. One U.S. authoress Agnes Smedley-reported this impression: "The tall forbidding figure lumbered toward us and a high-pitched voice greeted us. Then two hands grasped mine; they were as long and sensitive as a woman's ... Whatever else be might be, he was an esthete . . . He asked a thousand questions . . . We spoke of India; of literature; once he asked me if I had ever loved any man, and why, and what love meant to me . . ."
