The Gang of Coors

Mao and Trump in the end times

Book indices are vastly underrated and often hold secrets. I’m in DC now, and the “DC read” of any nonfiction book is to flip to the index, look for your name (and those of your rivals), and compare your mentions. But indices have more value than merely serving as a quantitative metric to prove that you continue to best your nemesis.

Obviously I’m biased, but I think the index of my most recent book, Seeking Truth and Hiding Facts, shows the book to be a bit weirder than you might imagine. Ronald Reagan (pp. 209-210) is mentioned, but only as the windup for landing a punch at Jimmy Carter for holding more responsibility for launching neoliberalism than he’s usually given credit / demerits for. Chinese leaders are mentioned so much in the book that there are subsections, such as Hu Jintao, leadership style of (pp. 105-6) [“rarely seen as a charismatic politician”]. Which gets me to Mao Zedong. Specifically: Mao Zedong, death of (p. 12, 19, 44, 50, 60). The death of Mao receives this many mentions in the book because it is almost singularly momentous for Chinese politics. On p. 50 is where I actually paint a scene:

On September 9, 1976, Chinese around the country wept upon hearing the news that the Great Helmsman had “gone to meet Marx.” Mao had led the Party for forty-one years, from a conclave’s decision in 1935 in Zunyi until his death. At its height, his cult of personality included daily loyalty dances and inspired flights of fancy as ludicrous as venerating a mango that he had purportedly touched, as well as a belief that as a seventy-two-year-old he had broken records while swimming across the Yangzi. Mao’s words were definitive for political elites, intellectuals, and the people. His successor as Communist Party chairman, Hua Guofeng, had been appointed vice-chairman in April 1976 and was said to be blessed by Mao with the following refrain: “[W]ith you in charge, my heart is at ease” (你办事，我放心). On October 8, 1976, Hua orchestrated the arrest of the radical Gang of Four from their high positions within the regime, consolidating his authority, albeit temporarily.

I didn’t dwell on the most salacious bits of late Mao’s life because it was outside of the scope of the arguments even though the strange realities and palace intrigue clearly mattered to the top leaders.

There are endless stories, but let’s just go with the story of the Zhang Yufeng. From Wikipedia:

Zhang Yufeng with Mao Zedong in 1964

Early life

Zhang was born on 9 January 1945 into a poor family in Manchukuo. Her father was a trader, according to other sources, a railway employee. The family consisted of eight children, and Zhang was the fourth among them. She graduated from primary school after six grades. At the age of 14, she began working as a conductor on the Mudanjiang-Beijing railway. In 1963, she was assigned as a conductor on Mao Zedong’s personal train.^[1]

Personal secretary of Mao Zedong

According to Russian sinologist Alexander Pantsov, Mao’s acquaintance with Zhang happened at the end of 1962:^[2] “Naive and shy, like many young Chinese women, she at the same time had a very strong character, was quick-witted and sharp-tongued. And most importantly - amazingly beautiful!”

Zhang Yufeng was introduced to Mao by his personal bodyguard Wang Dongxing. After the first meeting, Wang asked Mao if he wanted Zhang to serve in his compartment. Mao agreed and after that, their rapprochement took place very quickly. Zhang Yufeng accompanied Mao on his travels around the country, and soon she became his trusted secretary and, as reported by many Western and Chinese media, began to play the role of his main companion.

What aging national leader doesn’t have a beautiful teenager around as “his main companion.” Totally normal.

With those alarm bells blaring, let’s go a bit deeper into Mao’s decline.

At the height of the Cultural Revolution in the mid-1960s, Mao spent his free time surrounded by numerous seventeen and eighteen-year-old girls from time to time, but always spent most of his time with Zhang Yufeng. According to the French sinologist Alain Roux, until 1970, Mao had suspicions of Zhang, as he learned that her real father was supposedly a Japanese dentist and not a Chinese railway worker, and assumed that she could turn out to be a Japanese spy. But in 1970, she was appointed as Mao's secretary of household affairs. From that moment on, she constantly accompanied Mao.

Oh, sure. Obviously red flags are good in Communist China.

By 1973, Zhang Yufeng had become the main go-between Mao and the rest of the world. Even Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, could not visit her husband without Zhang’s permission. There was an instance when Zhang did not let the Premier of China Zhou Enlai see Mao.^[9][10]

Mao’s health declined in his last years, probably aggravated by his heavy chain-smoking. He developed Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, known in the United States as Lou Gehrig‘s disease. At this time, the political weight of Zhang especially increased because Mao’s speech became completely unintelligible due to illness, and only Zhang understood him well. From 1972, Zhang Yufeng helped Mao Zedong to eat and decided if he was able to receive visitors or not. By the summer of 1974, Mao’s state of health had deteriorated so much that Zhang was able to understand him by the movement of his lips and gestures. At the end of 1974, Zhang was formally appointed Mao’s secretary for critical and confidential assignments. She strictly controlled and restricted access to Mao. Jiang Qing, who desperately needed Mao’s support in the internal party struggle, tried to appease Zhang, but failed.^[11]

In 1974, according to the sinologist Jonathan Spence:^[12] She [Zhang] literally becomes Mao’s interface with the world, in fact the latter can no longer speak and she deciphers Mao’s stammerings by reading his lips.

The ostensible leader of the Party and the Country, then populated by over nine hundred million souls (a number which would have been closer to one billion if his disastrous Great Leap Forward had not killed 30 to 40 million people, not to mention the millions of deaths from the Cultural Revolution itself), was uncommunicative except through “the interface” of his ‘secretary.’ The political radicals that would come to be remembered by history as the Gang of Four (all later put on trial), including Mao’s wife Jiang Qing, attempted to and often did claim support of Mao in their factional warfare with their rivals.

The Gang of Four on trial. November 1980. Left to right: Jiang Qing, Zhang Chunqiao, Yao Wenyuan, Wang Hongwen

Perhaps you can see where I’m heading here.

The war in Iran is not going well (for the United States, and Israel, and the GCC, and Lebanon, and the rest of the world). And despite arguably winning the war, it isn’t really going that well for Iran either. But the point I want to make here is the simply, silly one. The old leader that is ostensibly in charge of things is, increasingly it seems, becoming closer and closer to the end times Mao. While what came out of Mao’s lips was unintelligible, Trump can say words that everyone can hear make out as words. But they aren’t particularly intelligible. Now, this is “barely exaggerated:”

Trump is not staring at the complexities of this war. He is not going back and reading Daniel Yergin or listening to Odd Lots when it has Gregory Brew or Rory Johnston on. He’s watching a two-minute daily trailer for the war that mainly consists of the best explosions that the Department of War captured on video.

As ever Henry Farrell has a sharp version of a very related argument with his must read post, Gooning Towards the Führer.

"Gooning Towards the Führer" as policy coordination

I don’t disagree with anything in Henry’s post, but what I will emphasize is that the current situation points to Trump’s chaotic “policy process” devolving into something even less coherent, less Trump-led than actions taken by his underlings that they have long hoped for and having convinced the old man is a good thing to put online (and into reality). Hegseth wants to be in front of cameras and talk about the viciousness of American violence and offer no quarter, Rubio desperately wants to enact regime change in Cuba, etc. The Gang of Coors has some ideas about what they’d like to do to this country and this planet we all inhabit.

In Seeking Truth and Hiding Facts, I argue that political regimes (I’m explicitly discussing authoritarian regimes) have constructed and contested identities shaped mostly by the individuals atop them and that we can better assess authoritarian politics by thinking through the key questions of regime maintenance. Who? How? and Why?

Who rules, who is an insider and who is an outsider, who is up versus down, who is in the “inner circle” or “ruling coalition” and who remains outside of it. “The primary dimension of divergent interests between the dictator and elites is the dictator’s personalization of power.”

The methods of rule — the how — are the verbs that generate acceptance, or at least acquiescence, on the part of the population and elites: to coopt, to coerce, and to convince.

The crude tools of power, the coercive barrel of the gun or the coopting bag of money (or nubile teenager), are expensive. Any leader reliant solely on spending or shooting their way to hold the throne will quickly be relieved of it. So convincing is necessary and requires considering why the regime rules. Propaganda does not have to be believed to be powerful. As Lisa Wedeen writes, citizens acting “as if” they are credulous still shapes their collective realities. Andrew Little argues that propaganda can successfully influence mass behavior even without affecting most citizens’ beliefs.” Yet, especially in information environments where the regime’s view is dominant, people do tend to conform and comply.

In the wake of Mao’s death, Hua Guofeng takes power and quickly shivs the gang of four. Zhang Yufeng testifies against Jiang and the other radicals. But Hua himself is displaced by Deng Xiaoping, who pushes forward a political line that quotes Mao to upend much of the ideological extremes of Maoism: to seek truth from facts (pp. 38-9, 51-52n29, 53, 58).