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It sounds like film clothing: late in the evening, a woman hears steps shuffling towards her young neighbor, a man knocking on the door and being let in.
Then it's quiet again.
After a while, the woman also marches out the door and hits it.
She is let in and immediately goes for the man who is sitting next to a low table with a flashlight.
Then she pounces on the young woman who lives here, insults her drastically, pulls her hair and scratches her face.
And when the so vilified takes refuge behind the older neighbor, who has meanwhile come into the room curiously, she attacks them too.
He Zizhen (1910–1984) was pregnant when Mao sent her to Moscow
Source: picture alliance / CPA Media Co.
Only you get it bad.
After a strong counterstrike, she goes down with one black eye.
When the man asks his indifferent bodyguard to help his wife up, who made this scene for him, and to accompany her home, it is of little use.
Only two more bodyguards succeed in escorting the plaintive shivering earth home.
And when the group - the man behind at a certain distance - marches through the town, there is no shortage of spectators behind windows and doors.
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None of this would be special if it weren't for local, now world-famous celebrities.
The scene of the event was Yan'an, since 1937 the communists' refuge after the Long March in Northern China.
The man was Mao Tse-tung, 43, "Chairman of the Chinese Soviet Government," the No. 1 in the CCP.
The young woman, Lili Wu or Wu Guangwei, 26, an actress who worked as an interpreter for the American journalist and admirer of Maos, her neighbor Agnes Smedley, 44, helped with her interviews with Mao, Zhu De and the other great political figures.
The American Agnes Smedley (2nd from left; 1892–1950) was another lover
Source: Universal Images Group via Getty
And as an outraged He Zizhen, 28, joined Mao's third wife, who had come through the Long March and - like the wives of the other party leaders - did not believe in free love and the freedom of the sexes, the then popular theses and maxims of life Socialists as an expression of the liberation of women with reference to Friedrich Engels.
Instead, monogamy, the comradely community of men and women - in China deliberately also as an alternative to plural marriage and the concubines of the upper class - was regarded as a revolutionary ideal in the class struggle.
But Mao, although he preached the departure from the old ways, was not only a reader and poet writer an admirer of the traditional style.
In dealing with women, too, he claimed the ruler's prerogative not to have to be humble with one.
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That is why in Yan'an his visits to the caves of Smedley, Wu or the poet Ding Ling, 33, were not just clever chats about literature and the revolution, as Mao-friendly literature usually portrays.
The memories of Li Zhisui, Mao's personal physician for two decades, paint a completely different picture, characterized by the “use and consumption” of countless women who should be younger and younger the older Mao got.
The Yan'an affair was just an interlude.
Mao solved it in a high-handed way.
The day after, the Central Committee declared the matter, which had long since been all around, a state secret that could not be talked about.
Smedley had to leave Yan'an, and Wu and Ding were sent to a theater company to entertain the soldiers at the front.
They did not see Mao again.
This also applied to He, who, pregnant by Mao, ostensibly out of welfare, was to be given proper care in Moscow from now on.
The divorce soon followed in her absence.
Because Mao had now teamed up with the actress Lan Ping ("Azure Apple"), 23, who years later came to fame under the name Jiang Qing ("Blue River"), which he gave her, quite ambiguously.
Jiang Qing (1914–1991) became Mao's fourth wife and China's "first lady"
Source: picture alliance / CPA Media Co.
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Young she was considered very attractive and approachable.
She was told a number of stories in Shanghai.
Among them with Kang Shen, the feared security chief of the communists, who was behind the "purges" of 1942 in Yan'an and all others up to the "cultural revolution".
Through Kang, Jiang came to Yan'an, where he consciously linked her with Mao in order to secure his position at the top - and to learn a lot that Mao actually didn't want him to know.
Mao's new liaison with “the actress”, the scandal and his sovereign attitude aroused considerable resentment, however, so that he finally had to marry her in order to calm the spirits of the party puritans.
And she had to make a commitment not to interfere in politics.
But at the latest with the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, in which it played a particularly destructive role, that was no longer the case.
Jiang Qing made her grand entrance in the Cultural Revolution
Source: picture alliance / United Archive
At that time Mao had long since had nothing in mind with her, lived separately from her and no longer allowed her to come near him.
However, he was not celibate because of that, as Dr.
Li has recorded in detail.
However, he no longer married.
At least that had the benefit of making his fourth and final wife, Jiang Qing, a target of the anger and bills that had accumulated during the Cultural Revolution.
After Mao's death on September 9, 1976, she and some top officials tried to expand her influence in the CCP, but this met with fierce opposition from the cadres that Mao pushed back.
The "Gang of Four" were arrested a month later.
Jiang received the "death sentence" suspended, which was eventually commuted to life imprisonment.
Discharged in 1991 because of cancer, she is said to have hanged herself shortly afterwards.
Jiang Qing at the trial of the "Gang of Four" in November 1980
Source: picture alliance / dpa
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