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The Mao Zedong Family and the Origins of Red Privilege

This series begins with Mao Zedong's family not because the Maos are the richest. Quite the opposite: of the sixteen families checked in this series, the Mao family is the only one in which no business can be found. No companies, no equity, no offshore accounts; not even a plausible wealth rumor has a traceable source. Mao's two sons are both dead — one killed in war, the other ill for most of his life. His only grandson is a researcher at the Academy of Military Science whose research topic is, principally, his grandfather.

Yet the series must begin with the Mao family. Because the apparatus used by the families that follow — what school a child enters by birth, what grade of supply he eats, what rank he wears, and finally how a father's power is converted into a child's business — was invented by no single family. It consists of rules laid down one by one by Mao Zedong's generation as they conquered and then ruled the country. The Maos never used it to make money, but the apparatus was built for people like them; those who came later merely cashed it in. This installment sets out the verifiable record: first the three generations of the Mao family themselves, then the system behind them.

I. Three Generations of the Mao Family: Two Sons, One Grandson

Mao Anying (1922–1950), the eldest son, died at 28. Born on October 24, 1922, in Changsha. After his mother Yang Kaihui was killed in 1930 by the warlord He Jian, Anying and his two younger brothers were moved by the underground Party to Shanghai; the youngest brother, Mao Anlong, soon died of illness. In 1936 the two surviving brothers were sent to the Soviet Union. In October 1950, as the Korean War broke out, Mao Anying — married for one year — entered Korea with the Chinese People's Volunteers, serving at Volunteer Army headquarters as a Russian interpreter and confidential secretary; apart from Peng Dehuai and a few others at headquarters, most of his colleagues did not know who he was. On the morning of November 25, 1950, American aircraft overflew the Volunteer Army headquarters at Daeyudong, North Pyongan Province, and dropped dozens of napalm bombs; Mao Anying, working in the operations room, did not get out. He was 28. His remains are buried in the Chinese People's Volunteers Martyrs' Cemetery at Hoechang County, South Pyongan Province; the back of his gravestone reads: "Comrade Mao Anying, a native of Shaoshan Chong, Xiangtan County, Hunan Province, was the eldest son of Comrade Mao Zedong, leader of the Chinese people. On November 25, 1950, he heroically sacrificed his life in the War to Resist U.S. Aggression and Aid Korea." (Source 1)

This is the hardest piece of evidence in the official narrative of "no special treatment": the leader's eldest son did not stay in a rear-echelon office but died at a front-line headquarters. This installment does not set out to dismantle that account — the record is as stated. But readers should note the other side: Mao Anying's "lack of special treatment" rested on the father's personal will and cost the son his life; it was never an institution. What road the children of others traveled within the same system will be seen below.

Mao Anqing (1923–2007), the second son, ill for a lifetime. Born on November 23, 1923, in Changsha, the second son left by Yang Kaihui. According to China News Service's report at his death, when the brothers were living on the streets of Shanghai, Anqing was struck on the head by a patrolman and suffered a head injury that left him with a mental disorder, intermittent and lifelong. (Sources 2, 3) He went to the Soviet Union in 1936 and returned to China in 1947, joining the Chinese Communist Party on the introduction of Li Fuchun and Cai Chang; following his father's wish, he first went to Keshan County, Heilongjiang, to take part in a land-reform pilot. From July 1949 he worked as a Russian translator in the Marxist-Leninist Works Compilation Office of the CCP Central Propaganda Department, translating and publishing more than a dozen Marxist-Leninist classics and works of political theory over his life — the only formal occupation on his record. In 1960 he married Shao Hua in Dalian; on January 17, 1970, their only son, Mao Xinyu, was born at the PLA General Hospital in Beijing. The name was given by Mao Zedong, with the sense "may you be like the Kunlun Mountains splitting their cliffs, and like a typhoon sweeping the universe" (Source 6). Xinhua's obituary records that he died in Beijing in the early hours of March 23, 2007, aged 84, with the farewell ceremony at the Babaoshan Revolutionary Cemetery. (Source 2) No promotions, no business record, and no item of property information in any public source — he spent most of his life in convalescence and illness, supported by the system and placed by it far from power.

Anqing's wife Shao Hua (1938–2008) deserves a separate note, because she herself was a product of this system. Born in Yan'an in October 1938 to a Red Army cadre father, Chen Zhenya, she was imprisoned in Xinjiang by the warlord Sheng Shicai in 1939 while traveling with her parents toward the Soviet Union — an infant not yet one year old, held in prison until 1946, when the Party organization rescued her and brought her back to Yan'an. She married Mao Anqing in 1960, graduated from Peking University's Chinese department, and later worked at the Academy of Military Science. Xinhua's obituary lists her posts and treatment: deputy director of the Military Encyclopedia Research Department of the Academy of Military Science (zhengjun rank — corps-level), promoted to major general in 1995, member of the 7th through 10th National Committees of the Chinese People's Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC), chair of the China Photographers Association; she died in Beijing on June 24, 2008, aged 69. (Source 4) A daughter-in-law whose career was photography and commemorative writing received corps-level rank and a major general's stars. This is not corruption — no document has ever accused her of it; it is the first form of privilege: honors, grades, and treatment distributed by blood and marriage, bearing no proportion to the actual weight of the post itself.

Mao Xinyu (1970– ), the only grandson. The only son of Mao Anqing and Shao Hua, and by public reporting Mao Zedong's only grandson (male-line). His entire career is inside the system: graduated from Renmin University's history department in 1992, a master's degree from the Central Party School, entered the Academy of Military Science in 2000 for a doctorate researching Mao Zedong's military thought. In July 2008 he became deputy director of the Academy's Strategic Department (deputy corps-level). On July 20, 2010, at a promotion ceremony at the Academy, Hu Jintao, Chairman of the Central Military Commission, signed the promotion order; the officer who presented Mao Xinyu with his major general's commission was the Academy's then political commissar, Liu Yuan — the son of Liu Shaoqi. Liu Shaoqi died in custody in Kaifeng in 1969, the highest-ranking victim of the Cultural Revolution that Mao Zedong launched; forty-one years later, his son handed a major general's rank to Mao Zedong's grandson. The scene was fully reported in public sources (Source 5), and this series will return to it in the next installment, on the Liu Shaoqi family.

Promoted to major general at 40, Mao Xinyu was described by domestic media as the youngest major general in the entire military and the first major general born in the 1970s; a spokesman for the Academy of Military Science at the time did not confirm the "youngest" claim, saying only that the Academy did not have a picture of the whole military (Source 6). Outside questioning he answered frankly himself: in August 2010 the Associated Press reported his public acknowledgment that family background "indeed was" a factor in his rapid promotion; asked again in a 2016 interview with the Changsha Evening News, he still conceded that family background played a part (Sources 7, 8). The Academy's spokesman Bao Guojun said at the time that the promotion was "a matter of course," earned by years of achievement (Source 8). Both accounts are in the public record; this installment places them side by side and does not decide for the reader. Only one conclusion can be drawn: Mao Xinyu is now a researcher at the Academy of Military Science, and the only employer of his life has been a military research institution — in three generations, no member of the Mao family ever touched business. In the world of red families this is a unique point of contrast: the question was never the Mao family itself, but how, after the Mao family, the door came to be opened.

A single line for the two daughters: Mao Zedong's daughters Li Min and Li Na both attended the Yuying School described below in their early years; in the public investigations, obituaries, and business-registration materials checked for this series, neither they nor their children show any verifiable business footprint. Public reports exist of a grandchild running a cultural company, but the details lack the hard sourcing this series requires; this installment does not pursue the point and leaves it for the record after further checking — a material gap in this installment, noted as such.

II. The First Form of Privilege: Not Money, but Eligibility

In the early years of the People's Republic, CCP cadres lived under a supply system: food, clothing, housing, and daily necessities were allocated by the organization according to rank, with little or no monetary wage. After the wage system replaced it in 1955, rank did not disappear; it changed carriers — floor area of housing, grade of medical care, official cars, orderlies, and the circulation range of internal documents were all drawn line by line according to rank. Of what ordinary people could not touch, this installment gives one archivally documented example: food.

Yang Jisheng, a former Xinhua reporter, consulted the Central Archives and the archives of more than a dozen provinces for his book Tombstone: The True Story of China's Great Famine in the 1960s. The book records that in 1960 — the most lethal year of the famine — the CCP Central Committee circulated, for implementation by reference in all localities, a "Report on Giving Consideration to Senior Cadres and Senior Intellectuals in Beijing in the Supply of Non-Staple Foods," drafted by Qi Yanming, Deputy Secretary-General of the State Council; in November and December 1961 the Center issued two further documents on "special-needs supply" (texu gongying), setting non-staple food standards for three categories of covered persons — to take one category as an example: per person per month, 4 jin (2 kg) of meat, 2 jin (1 kg) of white sugar, 2 cartons of Class-A cigarettes, 3 jin (1.5 kg) of eggs, with senior cadres receiving an additional 5 jin (2.5 kg) of soybeans. The circulation note took special care to write: "Party cadres must be treated strictly" — but Yang Jisheng's research shows that in practice senior cadres remained the largest beneficiaries. The "special-needs stores" that handled these supplies were in mysterious locations unknown to ordinary citizens, and continued until before the Cultural Revolution; in Yang's account, they were "a symbol of China's privileged stratum at the time." (Source 9)

At the same time, the countryside was starving in whole regions. This installment does not cite a death toll here — estimates diverge enormously, and the figure is not this installment's subject. What must be remembered is the contrast itself: a nationwide system for allocating food by rank was put into writing and ran for years during the famine years. This is the starting form of privilege: it does not appear as a bank balance; it appears as eligibility — who you are, and whose child you are, decides what you eat, which hospital you enter, and what car you ride in.

At the children's end, eligibility began queuing from birth. On March 1, 1947, Nie Rongzhen, commander of the Jin-Cha-Ji Military Region, founded the Rongzhen Children's School at Fuping, Hebei, taking only children of military-region cadres; Nie Rongzhen's own daughter Nie Li was among its first students — Nie Li later rose to lieutenant general in the PLA. This school is today's Bayi School in Beijing (Source 10). On November 21, 1948, a boarding school created by decision of the Secretariat of the CCP Central Committee was established at Xibaipo under the full name "Yuying School of the Supply Department of Central Organs Directly under the CCP Central Committee" — note that even the school's name carried the words "Supply Department": its students were the school-age children of central-organ and headquarters personnel; Li Min and Li Na studied there; in 1949 the school moved to Beijing with the central organs and is today's Beijing Yuying School. In 1953 Zhou Enlai several times sent secretaries to Yuying to learn the situation and warned the students "to be plain and frugal, and not to make yourselves special" — the school was five years old, and the highest level already needed to send people specifically to hold down the word "special"; that fact itself shows that the nature of children's schools was well understood at the time (Source 11).

The original reason for founding children's schools was genuine: parents were at war or working underground, and children needed someone to look after them. But its consequence was equally genuine: from 1947, the children of this country's rulers began growing up inside a separate set of schools, a separate supply system, and separate medical care. They knew one another and shared the same upbringing and the same identity names — "revolutionary offspring," "cadre children." Before a stratum becomes a stratum, it first forms a circle. The circle is the social foundation of everything that came later.

III. 1966: Bloodline Spoken Aloud

What wrote this circle's sense of superiority into a public doctrine was the "bloodline theory" (xuetong lun) of the early Cultural Revolution.

At the end of July 1966 a couplet appeared in Beijing and spread rapidly across the country: the upper line, "If the father is a hero, the son is a good man"; the lower line, "If the father is a reactionary, the son is a bastard"; the horizontal scroll read "Basically so" (in later circulation the scroll was sharpened to "Absolutely so"). It originated in Beijing's cadre-children circles (authorship remains disputed; this installment does not settle it). The man who publicly defended it and pushed it toward policy was Tan Lifu — son of Senior General Tan Zheng and a student at Beijing Polytechnic University: on August 12, 1966, he and Liu Jing posted the big-character poster "Starting from the Couplet," arguing that the couplet's content should be carried out as the Party's class line, "raised into policy, elevated into written rules"; his speech at an August 20 debate spread nationwide. In Beijing's middle schools at the time, students of cadre-family origin called themselves "born red" (zilai hong) and treated the bloodline theory as a natural certificate of rank (Sources 12, 13). Curiously, the couplet was not uncontested at the very top: within days of its appearance Chen Boda named it "bloodline theory," and Mao Zedong himself said in October 1966, "Some students come from not-so-good backgrounds — but do we all come from good ones?" (Source 13) Criticism notwithstanding, the couplet and the hierarchy it represented spread across the country into countless classrooms and playgrounds — because those who said it was wrong never touched the hierarchy of origin on which it rested.

On August 18, 1966, Mao Zedong received Red Guards atop Tiananmen. Song Binbin, a student at the Girls' Middle School Attached to Beijing Normal University, put a Red Guard armband on Mao; Mao asked her name, and on hearing "Binbin" ("gentle and refined") replied, "Better be martial." Song Binbin was the daughter of the founding elder Song Renqiong; according to scholarly research in The China Quarterly, the moment was one of the emblematic scenes of the Red Guard movement (Source 14). The leader's grandchildren were still small; standing on the rostrum were the children of the elders — the first collective appearance of the "second red generation" at the center of the country's political stage.

The man who stood up to dismantle the bloodline theory was a 24-year-old Beijing worker, Yu Luoke. His father was a "Rightist," and he himself suffered deeply from his origins. On January 18, 1967, in the founding issue of Middle-School Cultural Revolution News, he published "On Family Background," systematically arguing that origins can influence a person but cannot determine him, and warning that the essence of the bloodline theory was to manufacture a new privileged stratum. The essay spread across the country. In April 1967 "On Family Background" was condemned as a "great poisonous weed"; on January 5, 1968, Yu Luoke was arrested; on March 5, 1970, he was executed on charges including "organizing a counterrevolutionary group," aged 27. In 1979 his case was rehabilitated (Sources 15, 16).

Set these three things side by side and the conclusion needs no rhetoric: in the China of 1966, "origins determine fate" was for the first time publicly stated as a doctrine; for the first time someone paid with his life for refuting it; and for the first time supreme power, from the rostrum, tacitly allowed and ignited it. After the Cultural Revolution the bloodline theory was officially criticized and repudiated, but what it attached to — cadre children as a group with common origins, common schools, and common networks — did not dissolve. When the Cultural Revolution ended, these people were in their thirties, returning to the cities and entering universities and government offices. When the door of the Deng Xiaoping era opened, they were the ones standing closest to it.

IV. After the Door Opened: What the Prohibition Documents Themselves Confess

For privilege to turn into business, one precondition was needed: a market with business to be done. That precondition appeared in the 1980s. And the speed at which power families reached into the market was such that the Center had to issue document after document to block it — documents that survive today and happen to be the hardest official evidence this installment can use, because they amount to the authorities' own admission: it had already happened.

On December 3, 1984, the CCP Central Committee and the State Council issued the "Decision on Strictly Prohibiting Party and Government Organs and Party and Government Cadres from Engaging in Business and Running Enterprises" (Source 17). It did not hold. In 1986 the Central Committee and the State Council issued the "Provisions on Further Stopping Party and Government Organs and Party and Government Cadres from Engaging in Business and Running Enterprises"; the preamble of this document itself admits that after the 1984 decision was handed down, the tendency "has not been completely checked," and names the fact that "some family members use the connections and influence of leading cadres to engage in business and run enterprises." Article 5 is written specifically for the families of leading cadres; its original text reads: "Children and spouses of leading cadres who work in Party and government organs and in public institutions within their authorized establishments shall in no case resign to engage in business or run enterprises; those who do not work in Party and government organs or such institutions shall not use the influence and connections of leading cadres to engage in business or run enterprises for illicit profit." (Source 18)

Read that article slowly. By 1986 a central document already needed to legislate specifically against leading cadres' children "using the influence and connections of leading cadres" to do business — the five words "influence and connections" are the engine of every story in the sixteen families that follow in this series. Thereafter the documents kept being issued year after year, and the business kept being done year after year. The history of the prohibitions is itself a side-view chronicle: no prohibition was ever written out of thin air.

As for the outcome, there is a rare quantitative record. On December 26, 2012, Bloomberg published its investigation "Heirs of Mao's Comrades Rise as New Capitalist Nobility," tracking 103 descendants and spouses of eight founding elders — Deng Xiaoping, Chen Yun, Yang Shangkun, Wang Zhen, Bo Yibo, Li Xiannian, Peng Zhen, and Song Renqiong: 26 of them served or had served as senior executives of state-owned enterprises, and 43 ran or worked in private enterprises; the state enterprises headed by Wang Zhen's son Wang Jun, Zhu De's grandson-in-law He Ping, and Chen Yun's son Chen Yuan held combined assets of about US$1.6 trillion in 2011 — it must be stated plainly that these are the assets of the institutions they headed, not the wealth of the three families; the difference between the two is beyond reckoning (Source 19). Bloomberg's headline used the words "New Capitalist Nobility." A regime founded under the banner of abolishing nobility saw its founders' grandchildren called nobility by international financial media — this is not this installment's rhetoric; it is a 2012 news headline.

One step further, and even foreign banks had turned this into a processed line of business. On November 17, 2016, the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission, the Department of Justice, and the Federal Reserve Board announced settlements with JPMorgan totaling more than US$264 million: from 2006, JPMorgan's Asia-Pacific operations maintained an internal referral-hiring channel known as the "Sons and Daughters Program"; between 2006 and 2013 it hired about one hundred relatives and friends at the request of foreign officials and client executives, and kept spreadsheets tracking the correspondence between "referral hires" and business revenue, thereby winning more than US$100 million in business. The settlement documents anonymized all hires and named no leading family — named versions come from separate media reporting, and the two must not be conflated (Source 20). But the facts the documents confirm are enough: by the second decade of the twenty-first century, "hire the leader's child" was, on Wall Street, a mature business line with budgets, spreadsheets, and a compliance cleanup plan.

From the children's primary school at Xibaipo in 1948 — its name bearing the words "Supply Department" — to the Wall Street settlement documents of 2016, sixty-eight years passed. The form changed four times: supply, schools, military rank, business. The only constant was the direction of transmission — starting from the father's post, landing on the children.

Conclusion

This installment has uncovered no money belonging to the Mao family, because there is none. Mao Zedong's eldest son died in Korea; his second son lived out his life in translation and illness; the highest things his daughter-in-law and grandson received were military ranks. In wealth terms this family is "clean" — measured by this series' standards, clean beyond dispute.

But to see only that layer would be to miss what this installment truly means to record: red privilege never began with corruption. It began with eligibility — with the 4 jin of meat allocated by rank, the primary school that took only central-organ children, and the couplet "If the father is a hero, the son is a good man." Mao Zedong's era established the political value of bloodline; Yu Luoke shouted out its name as early as 1967 and was shot for that shout. In the half-century since, that value was first preserved by schools and networks, then cashed in family by family in the market era: the children of Deng Xiaoping, the son of Wang Zhen, the son of Bo Yibo, the children of Li Peng, the family of Wen Jiabao, the family of Zhou Yongkang, the family of Xi Jinping — each cashed in differently, but against the same certificate.

In the installments that follow, this series will check each family one by one: where there is a court verdict, we cite the verdict; where there is a company announcement, we cite the announcement; where there is only a business registration, we write no further than the registration; and where there is nothing — as with the Mao family in this installment — we say plainly that there is nothing.

Material Gaps (stated candidly)

• The line of Mao Zedong's daughters (Li Min, Li Na) and the grandchildren by marriage: public obituaries, postings, and business-registration records are all thin. The matter of a grandchild running a cultural company rests only on general media reporting and lacks the primary documents this series requires; this installment records it in a single line without elaboration.
• The specific institutions and years of Mao Anqing's long convalescence are stated differently across sources (convalescence in Dalian, convalescent institutions of the General Staff system, etc.); there is no single authoritative record, and this installment writes only "long-term illness and convalescence" without settling on a location.
• The graded details of the supply system (the full table of allocation standards for cadres of each grade) appear in various memoirs and studies, but no single official text that can be cited line by line was found; this installment cites only the special-needs supply standards disclosed by Yang Jisheng from archival materials, and treats the rest in general terms.
• The original author of the "If the father is a hero, the son is a good man" couplet is stated differently across public sources; this installment does not settle the authorship, recording only its circulation in Beijing cadre-children circles and Tan Lifu's public defense of it — the latter surviving in the original text of his big-character poster.

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