The Vamp of Peking

It’s awfully easy to make fun of Chiang Ch’ing. A second-rate actress in Shanghai in the Thirties (melodramatic music, please), allegedly Communist but certainly involved politically and perhaps sexually with some sleazy characters, maybe even with the police, she fled from the Japanese invasion and wound up in Yenan, where the Communist guerrillas were then holed up, and vamped their leader, Mao Tse-tung, almost twice her age, who had already abandoned three wives. (Or did he seduce her? His first date was a ticket to one of his lectures at the Marxist-Leninist Institute, but, sorry, there’s nothing in this book about Mao in bed.) And she got him to marry her, to the disgust of his puritanical fellow Reds.

Just 11 years later, Mao finished conquering China and moved with her into adjacent imperial apartments in Peking. We all know what he did. She tried to break into high politics, but he didn’t help her, and his henchmen restricted her jealously to the domains of literature, drama, film, opera, and ballet, where for 25 years she did her level best to reduce the quite dismal enough culture of Communist China to superleftist, super-flat, super-cartoonish, godawful, kitsch jokes.

FR

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Francis B. Randall

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It’s awfully easy to make fun of Chiang Ch’ing. A second-rate actress in Shanghai in the Thirties (melodramatic music, please), allegedly Communist but certainly involved politically and perhaps sexually with some sleazy characters, maybe even with the police, she fled from the Japanese invasion and wound up in Yenan, where the Communist guerrillas were then holed up, and vamped their leader, Mao Tse-tung, almost twice her age, who had already abandoned three wives. (Or did he seduce her? His first date was a ticket to one of his lectures at the Marxist-Leninist Institute, but, sorry, there’s nothing in this book about Mao in bed.) And she got him to marry her, to the disgust of his puritanical fellow Reds.

Just 11 years later, Mao finished conquering China and moved with her into adjacent imperial apartments in Peking. We all know what he did. She tried to break into high politics, but he didn’t help her, and his henchmen restricted her jealously to the domains of literature, drama, film, opera, and ballet, where for 25 years she did her level best to reduce the quite dismal enough culture of Communist China to superleftist, super-flat, super-cartoonish, godawful, kitsch jokes.