March 13, 2003

SECTION: News; Pg. 6

HEADLINE: Woman wonders whether she is Mao's abandoned Long March daughter

BYLINE: Deutsche Press-Agentur in Beijing

Two British men retracing the 1934-35 Long March have discovered an ailing, illiterate 68-year-old woman who wonders if she is a child of the Great Helmsman, Mao Zedong. Xiong Huazhi grew up in an adoptive Miao minority family in Weixin county, a poor area of Yunnan province. Last year Ms Xiong's daughter and son-in-law told her they believed she might be the child that Mao and his third wife, He Zizhen, abandoned during the Long March in February 1935. Ms Xiong's adoptive father gave her the nickname Maomei, formed by the two characters for Mao Zedong and "little sister". But Ms Xiong says she and her family made no connection between her name and that of the communist leader. When her daughter, Yang Tingyu, and son-in-law Xiong Minghu told her of new research by a local party official, suggesting she could be Mao's daughter, Ms Xiong was shocked. Her chronic liver cirrhosis worsened dramatically. "Mao Zedong and He Zizhen are great people. We shouldn't say this without proper evidence," Ms Xiong told her family. Last June the family wrote to the county government asking it to help arrange a DNA test to establish if Ms Xiong was Mao's daughter. They were told only that the issue had been "passed up the line" and are yet to receive an official response. "We still hope the local government can help us solve this," Ms Yang said. The modern Long Marchers, Ed Jocelyn and Andy McEwen, visited Ms Xiong recently at the home she shares with the second of her three daughters in a mountain village 20 km from Weixin. A portrait of Mao hangs on the wall, but there is no picture of He. Mr Jocelyn and Mr McEwen are following the same 368-day, 9,000-km route as the 4,000 survivors of 80,000 communist troops who left Yudu, Jiangxi province, in October 1934. "It was an exciting meeting," Mr Jocelyn said after visiting Ms Xiong. "But it's entirely possible that we just sat down and had tea with a 68-year-old Miao peasant." Mao is known to have fathered at least nine children, five with He, who was just 18 when she married the 35-year-old leader. Three of Mao and He's children were lost or abandoned and a fourth died in infancy, according to Philip Short's biography Mao: a Life, leaving Li Min as their only known heir. He was among the few dozen women who left Jiangxi with the communists' central armies. Some accounts say the party ruled that women who became pregnant must give away their children to local peasants, though others say Mao decided to give away the child. "It is true that He Zizhen and Mao Zedong abandoned one child during the Long March," said historian Wang Zhangwei of the Communist Party School in Beijing. "But I've never heard the story of Xiong Huazhi. It's difficult to judge whether such a thing is true."