Mao Zedong’s ex-pilot reveals all about Chinese leader’s two left feet and love of a hard bed
- Cai Yanwei came from the sort of family that faced persecution during the Cultural Revolution, but his skill as a flier kept him alive
- As head of a hand-picked team, 92-year-old spent six years flying China’s ruling elite wherever they wanted to go
As the educated son of a wealthy Chinese merchant family, 92-year-old Cai Yanwei could easily have become a victim of Mao Zedong’s decade-long Cultural Revolution. But thanks to his skill as an airman, by the time those dark days dawned in 1966, Cai had established himself as the trusted head of a team of transport pilots tasked with keeping China’s most powerful leaders safe in the air.
And in his five years in the job, he learned more about Mao and other members of the ruling class, including Premier Zhou Enlai and Commander-in-chief of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) Zhu De, than most people ever would.
In an interview at his home in a retirement community in Beijing, where he lives with his wife, 13 years his junior, Cai said of Mao that for all his power and influence he was just “an ordinary person, a peasant” at heart.
“There was a bed with a soft mattress on the private jet, and all the leaders loved it, except Mao. He loved sleeping on a wooden bed, so we made one for him from five-layered plywood,” he said.
“When Mao was on board, the crew would move the mattress under the bed and put the plywood on top.”
Achieving such a trusted position was not always a given for Cai. Born into a Thai-Chinese family in south China’s Guangdong province in April 1926, he had a turbulent childhood. At the age of five, he moved with his parents to Bangkok where they ran a hospital and pharmacy business, but was sent back to China to study when he was 13.