One of the most controversial and mysterious personalities of the 20th century is considered to be the founder of the People's Republic of China, Mao Zedong, a talented politician and cruel ruler of a huge country, who managed to raise its people from their knees in order to then plunge them into the abyss of bloody repression.
Distant legends
According to some later biographical sources, several family traditions of miraculous signs were associated with the birth of little Mao. They directly pointed to the great future of the baby, who first saw the light of day on December 26, 1893 in the small Chinese village of Shaoshan in the Huan province in the family of a wealthy peasant. So, on the night before Mao's birth, his mother Wen Qimei had an unusual dream: in front of her, a huge golden dragon was crawling to the east towards the rising blinding eye of the sun. Wen grabs his tail and feels intense pain that burns her palm. The woman pulls back her hand in fright, and the dragon rushes into the sea spreading in front of him, turning into a huge orchid before our eyes …
According to biographers, waking up from a strange dream, Wen Qimei looked at her hand and cried out in horror: a fresh burn was reddening on her palm. And half an hour later, the future "great helmsman" was born.
Few people know that the meaning of the name that the parents gave to the newborn boy, the third child in the family, was predetermined by the mysterious dream of Mao's mother. The name Zedong by writing consisted of two hieroglyphs, the first of which had two meanings: "moisture" and "good deed", and the second - "dong" - "east". As a result, the whole name prophetically meant “the bountiful east”. At the same time, according to the old Chinese tradition, the baby was given a second - unofficial - name: Zhunzhi, which meant "orchid irrigated with water." With a slightly different spelling of the hieroglyph "zhi", the name Runzhi acquired another symbolic meaning: "who has benefited all living things."
The villagers were ironic about such sonorous and promising names that Wen gave to little Mao. Neither his domineering father, nor numerous relatives and neighbors at that time could even imagine that half a century later, hundreds of millions of their compatriots would call him “the great helmsman” and benefactor who brought the joy of thousand-year prosperity to the entire Chinese people.
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An unusual gift
After leaving his parental home at the age of 16, Mao plunged headlong into the turbulent political life of China, every year becoming more and more imbued with revolutionary communist ideas. He organizes a series of peasant uprisings, fights against the Chiang Kai-shek regime, creates the Chinese Soviet Republic in Central China, suffers a defeat, loses his wife and comrade-in-arms, Yang Kaihui. According to the recollections of people who knew Mao well in the 1930-1940s, the future head of the PRC was more than once in the balance of death. And only Mao's amazing, almost mystical intuition allowed him to avoid imminent death.
For example, Mao Zedong's second wife, activist He Zizhen, recalled how one day in the fall of 1934, while in a guerrilla camp not far from Jiangxi, Mao, incredibly tired after a long walk the day before, suddenly woke up at night and began to gather feverishly. To the perplexed question of Zizhen, her husband replied that it was necessary to save himself, since in a dream he heard the stomping of the enemy cavalry. That night, the Kuomintang cavalry detachment actually surrounded the camp and killed many partisans.
Another striking example of Mao's inexplicable foresight occurred in 1943, when the guerrilla army was preparing to fight the Japanese forces near the city of Yan'an. According to intelligence, the most vulnerable spot of the Japanese was the southeast direction. However, at the last moment, Mao unexpectedly, without any explanation, makes the sole decision to change the direction of the main blow, as a result of which a large group of samurai was defeated …
Beginning in 1963, an inexplicable strangeness appeared in the behavior of Mao - by that time already the sole owner of a huge state - that the leader of China was constantly traveling around the country, never staying overnight in one place twice. Only in the mid-1990s, when information from the intelligence services of Western countries leaked to the press, it became known that a series of assassination attempts were being prepared against the “great helmsman” by the leaders of the capitalist camp. As if he sensed danger next on his heels, Mao was quite successful in obscuring his tracks.
Without sleep and rest
There is no doubt that the long-term ordeals that befell Mao Zedong and associated with his political struggle and the long civil war left their indelible imprint on the personality of the "great helmsman" who proclaimed the establishment of the People's Republic of China on October 1, 1949. The head of the young state set about implementing numerous reforms aimed at solving urgent economic and social problems, raising industry and agriculture.
It was at this time that Mao, carried away by hard work, showed miracles of endurance. For days he could do without sleep and food, devoting rare moments of rest to exhausting swims. However, according to the memoirs of his personal doctor Li Zhisui, from the end of the 1950s, the head of the PRC began to suffer from debilitating insomnia, which he fought with the help of chloral hydrate and sekonal. This "explosive mixture" not only helped Mao fall asleep, but also whetted his appetite, and also acted like a drug, causing a state of euphoria in the leader of the Chinese revolution. It was at this time that Mao's astounding ability to anticipate danger, his rare foresight, was mingled with growing suspicion, which peaked at the beginning of the infamous Cultural Revolution.
So, in 1958, Mao Zedong suddenly began to suspect that the pool in which he loved to swim for hours was poisoned. A strange illness that happened to the "great helmsman" in 1960 during his visit to Nanchang, the leader attributed to the poison with which his enemies allegedly infiltrated the guest house. The head of the PRC could not stay in one place for more than three or four days and, tormented by a feeling of inexplicable anxiety, drove on.
The tragic consequences of wise government
The three-year participation of China in the Korean War, in which about a million volunteers died, a break with a loyal ally - the USSR, a confrontation with the United States, the failure of the Great Leap Forward policy, according to later researchers of Mao's biography, were the result of pathological changes in the mind of the “great helmsman”. fueled by his third wife Jiang Qing. All of this led to the fact that a significant part of the Chinese party leadership ceased to support Mao.
However, after completing his legendary swim across the Yangtze River in July 1966, which, according to some sources, was prepared by intensified Taoist practices, seventy-three-year-old Mao Zedong returned to leadership and launched an attack on party oppositionists. The six-year "cultural revolution" began with its unprecedented terror, destruction of priceless works of art, temples, monasteries, libraries.
After two severe heart attacks on September 9, 1976 at 0.10 hours Beijing time, Mao Zedong's heart stopped. According to both foreign and Chinese doctors, in the last years of his life, the "great helmsman" suffered from a pronounced personality disorder, which manifested itself in paranoid thoughts, changes in sexual and emotional behavior that led to such dramatic events …
Despite the fact that China has spent a lot of time to overcome the negative consequences of Mao's rule, his personality and ideas continue to arouse considerable interest throughout the world, both among historians and politicians, and among ordinary people.
Magazine: Secrets of the 20th century №50. Author: Sergey Kozhushko
