The Chairman’s Opinion of Mahjong
“Well, don’t look down on mah-jongg,” Mao chastised me. “With a total of 136 tiles, every player has to watch not only over his own pieces but all the other pieces on the table.”
Diverting snippet for those of you with an interest in mahjong and/or China’s history.
Not the most exciting commentary you’ll ever read in your life but… I thought it curious.
I’ve been reading “The Private Life of Chairman Mao” by Zhisui Li. I’d highly recommend it so far as an interesting and readable biography. I was reading a few chapters this morning and came across this section:
(Copied out and as this is only a small extract it should be within fair use!)
The author relates one of his first conversations with chairman Mao (page 82-83):
‘[…] He wanted to know if I played mah-jongg.
Mah-jongg is a gambling game that four people play with a set of 136 small tiles, and for many Chinese the game becomes addictive. My family had always disapproved of gambling, and since middle school I had regarded mah-jongg and opium addiction as two cancers eating away at Chinese society. I had never learned to play.
“Well, don’t look down on mah-jongg,” Mao chastised me. “With a total of 136 tiles, every player has to watch not only over his own pieces but all the other pieces on the table. You have to observe how the others are playing and put all this complicated information together to calculate the possibility of winning and losing. If you knew how to play the game, you would also understand the relationship between the principle of probability and the principle of certainty.”
Mah-jongg is indeed a game of strategy, and Mao was both China’s great strategist and a superb mah-jongg player. But I think his strategic brilliance came from other sources – from Sun Zi’s ancient Art of War, from his reading of Chinese history, from the Romance of the Three Kingdoms. But sharpening his strategic wit was not the only reason he played mah-jongg. His partners, I learned later, were usually pretty young girls. While his hands were busy with the tiles, he was also flirting with his partners, using his feet to touch this one’s feet or that one’s legs under the table.’
I don’t think I’ve read mahjong strategy so well described before.
Although I find it curious that these were Mao Zedong’s words. As far as my mahjong history knowledge goes, I believe that mahjong was banned after the Communist revolution as a bourgeois pursuit. This ban wasn’t lifted until around 20 years later… So it seems odd that the great leader of Chinese communism would have such praise for the game! The world is indeed full of contradictions though.
Anyway, I hope you found it interesting.
[“The Private Life of Chairman Mao” – Zhisui Li published by Arrow Books]
