KEY POINTS:
Only a brief notice in the China News Service recorded the death of Mao Zedong's last surviving son.
Mao Anqing survived his father to live on into a new China that the dictator would not have recognised.
Mao's second child, who died at the weekend, lived through civil war, the execution of his mother, street life in Shanghai, and a journey to Paris and to Moscow, where he studied under Stalin's surveillance.
Eventually he returned to China, where he was largely ignored by his father.
Anqing was born in 1923, during a rare settled period in his father's life, one of three sons from the second of Mao's four marriages. Having left his first arranged marriage to a girl in his native village, the young librarian fell for Yang Kaihui, the daughter of an ethics professor.
They set up house just outside the East Gate of Changsha, capital of their home province of Hunan. Three sons were born in the next seven years - Anqing was the second.
Mao's biographer Philip Short writes that "perhaps for the only time in Mao's life, he had a truly happy family to come home to".
But shortly after Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek took control of Changsha, Mao abandoned his wife and sons for good, beginning his long career as a guerrilla leader, sheltering with bandits in the rough mountain country on the eastern border of Hunan, and then setting up a bigger base in Jiangxi province, where he lived with the daughter of a local scholar.
In 1930 tragedy struck the family that Mao had left behind. After the Nationalists repelled a communist attack on Changsha, Yang Kaihui was arrested, with her elder son, on his eighth birthday. Given a chance to save her life if she denounced her husband, she refused. She was taken to the execution ground and killed. Learning of her death, Mao wrote that "the death of Kaihui cannot be redeemed by a hundred deaths of mine".
Later he would abandon his third wife, who was wounded in the head on the Long March, for the one-time Shanghai actress, Jiang Qing, who was imprisoned after Deng Xiaoping took power, dying in 1991, apparently having hanged herself in her bathroom.
In 1936, after the Red Army had staged the Long March from Jiangxi to northern China, Stalin invited Mao to send his sons to Moscow. After a delay in Paris waiting for visas, the Mao boys arrived in the Soviet Union and stayed until the 1940s. In a rare letter, their father advised them to study science and "talk less politics".
By this time Anqing's health was poor. When his elder brother, Anying, headed back to the communist base area in China in 1943, he asked the head of the Communist School in Moscow to look after Anqing.
When Anqing returned to China in 1947, Mao saw little of him, and he was reported to have spent much of his life in mental institutions. Mao met Anying more often, but he was killed in the Korean War in 1950.
Mao's other known offspring, two daughters, Li Na and Li Min, have passed quiet lives, living in apartment buildings in Beijing, venerating their father but keeping out of the limelight.
Other children born on the Long March were abandoned along the way; a woman turned up a few years ago along the route who claims to be one of the infants left behind by the Chairman.
* Jonathan Fenby is author of Generalissimo: Chiang Kai-shek and the China He Lost.
- OBSERVER
