![]() Extramarital sex at home and purges in the office were equal parts of an obsessive quest for rejuvenation, both personal and political. The link between philandering and disdain for trusted co-workers during the Great Leap Forward was Mao’s growing self-indulgence. A pivotal quarrel had Defense Minister Peng Dehuai criticize Mao both for the disaster of the Great Leap Forward (communes, back-yard steel furnaces) and for his emperor-like habit ofgoing with young females from military circles. Mao’s steps into promiscuity coincided with his growing isolation from longtime colleagues. The young female friends could fall as they may. Since both women were politically ambitious, their husband’s philandering could be seen as a secondary matter. Jiang saw a “capitalist-road conspiracy” undermining her husband. Hillary Clinton sees a “vast right-wing conspiracy” threatening her husband. A bonus for Mao was that Jiang fiercely pushed her husband’s interests and assailed his enemies. She would hold her tongue as he took other women to bed if he gave a nod to her left-wing politics. Her predecessor had been dispatched to a mental asylum in Moscow to make room for Jiang herself.īut Jiang did have one card to play: Mao’s philandering, deeply hurtful to Jiang in the 1950s, led to a quid pro quo between the two a decade later. ![]() She had to.” The wife of Mao had few cards to play in the last 25 years of their 38-year marriage. Jiang Qing always supported Mao in all that he did. Mao said to his doctor in reference to his wife, “Only Jiang Qing supports me.” Commented Dr. Mao had the man sent to prison, and no one at Mao’s court ever heard of him again. One day a male guard touched one of Mao’s mistresses on her buttocks. Sometimes, if a favored female told Mao she planned to marry, a loud quarrel ensued, which aides would overhear. He drew to his custom-built, sloping, wooden bed a number of nurses on duty in the Forbidden City. Mao recruited young military women at dance parties arranged in close proximity to his bedroom. “Jiang Qing could only make suggestions,” a bodyguard recalled, “not make decisions.” But what suggestions she made during the Red Guard turmoil of the Cultural Revolution! The structural ambiguity made Jiang the object of excessive fear, flattery and scapegoating.īoth Jiang and Hillary Clinton knew the pain of seeing power act like an aphrodisiac on their husband. ![]() Both women remained ambitious, but as their husbands rose to supreme power, both stood at a tangent to the lines of political authority. Jiang Qing, like Hillary Rodham Clinton, had a career (stage and screen) that she gave up for her husband’s sake. political systems, Mao’s conduct may provide some insights into President Bill Clinton’s alleged problem. Despite enormous differences in the Chinese and U.S. As sex and politics danced a pas de deux in the Beijing of Mao Tse-tung, the self-indulgence of the top leader spanned the personal and the political, and private excesses had consequences for bystanders and public policy. ![]()
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