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. Despite enormous differences in the Chinese and U. Both women remained ambitious, but as their husbands rose to supreme power, both stood at a tangent to the lines of political authority.
The structural ambiguity made Jiang the object of excessive fear, flattery and scapegoating. Both Jiang and Hillary Clinton knew the pain of seeing power act like an aphrodisiac on their husband. Mao recruited young military women at dance parties arranged in close proximity to his bedroom. He drew to his custom-built, sloping, wooden bed a number of nurses on duty in the Forbidden City. Sometimes, if a favored female told Mao she planned to marry, a loud quarrel ensued, which aides would overhear.
Jiang Qing always supported Mao in all that he did. She had to. Her predecessor had been dispatched to a mental asylum in Moscow to make room for Jiang herself. She would hold her tongue as he took other women to bed if he gave a nod to her left-wing politics.
Saving him was saving herself. The young female friends could fall as they may. 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.
Extramarital sex at home and purges in the office were equal parts of an obsessive quest for rejuvenation, both personal and political.
