Mao: The Unknown Story

32. RIVALRY WITH STALIN (1947–49 AGE 53–55)

EVEN BEFORE he conquered China, Mao had set his sights on the wider world. He started to get active as soon as victory hove in sight in the civil war.

Mao hoped to repeat the huge PR success he had had with Edgar Snow and Red Star Over China, a success which was unique for the Communist world. But Snow had meanwhile been banned by Moscow, and so Mao had to fall back on a second-rate American journalist called Anna Louise Strong, who had nothing like Snow’s influence globally, and was generally perceived as a lackey.

In 1947, Mao sent Strong on a world tour to promote him. She was given documents that Mao told her to pass “to the world Communist parties.” He particularly wanted her to “show them to Party leaders in the United States and Eastern Europe,” adding pointedly that he “did not think it was necessary for her to take them to Moscow.”

Strong duly churned out an article called “The Thought of Mao Tse-tung,” and a book called Dawn Out of China. They contained encomia like the claim that Mao’s “great work has been to change Marxism from a European to an Asiatic form … On every kind of problem … in ways of which neither Marx nor Lenin could dream”; that “all Asia will learn from [China] more than they will learn from the USSR”; and that Mao’s works “highly likely influenced the later forms of government in parts of postwar Europe.” These claims trod hard on Stalin’s toes. Not surprisingly, publication of her book was stonewalled in Russia, and the US CP demanded that half the book be deleted. The full version came out in India and, more significantly, in several countries in Eastern Europe, including Yugoslavia.

To promote Mao internationally without Stalin’s endorsement, to suggest that Mao had improved on Stalin, and could offer more than Stalin, were red rags to the Kremlin. But Mao clearly understood that acquiring a sphere of influence needed elbow. And he now had real clout.

There were also signs that Stalin was prepared to cede some turf. In September 1947 he set up a new organization called the Communist Information Bureau (Cominform), which included only European parties. This left open the possibility of a separate Asian grouping. In November, within weeks of the Cominform being established, and while he was still wandering near Yenan, Mao had the name of his entourage changed to “Unit Asia.”

STALIN REMAINED totally committed to backing Mao, but he now took steps to contain him, and to remind him who was master.

On 30 November 1947, when Mao became confident that he would win the civil war soon, he proposed to Stalin that he should visit Russia. Stalin decided that the visit was the ideal vehicle to make Mao sweat. Stalin’s office cabled back a welcome on 16 December. Dr. Orlov, the recipient of the cable, was clearly under orders from Stalin to report in detail on Mao’s reactions. Next day he informed Stalin that Mao was “extremely pleased,” “rather animated” in fact, and “said immediately: ‘Very good, I can go there [in] 3 months …’ ”

Three months passed, with no sign of an invitation from Stalin. Mao brought it up again on 22 April 1948, the day after the CCP retook Yenan; he told Orlov he planned to depart on 4–5 May. This time Stalin said “Yes.” Mao asked to take both Russian doctors with him, on health grounds — but really to prevent any of his colleagues communicating with the Russians during his absence. Stalin agreed. Mao also wanted to visit Eastern Europe, a proposal Stalin pointedly did not endorse.

On 10 May, days after Mao’s self-appointed departure date, Stalin suddenly postponed the visit. And as spring slid into summer, there was no sign of him reviving his invitation. Mao was anxious to get going. He was with his colleagues at Party HQ at Xibaipo at the time, and they all knew he was going to Moscow to see Stalin. The impression was that he was leaving any minute. One sign was that nothing was done to the frogs that were disturbing Mao’s sleep. Ordinarily, any noisy animals like chickens and dogs were brought “under control” wherever Mao stayed. His bodyguards proposed using dynamite to silence the frogs, which were croaking away happily in a reedy pond. The plan was not carried out, because it was assumed that Mao’s stay at Xibaipo was going to be short. Mao felt the need to head off any negative impact of the delay, and arranged for his bête noire, Wang Ming, to suffer another medical “accident.” On 25 June Wang Ming was given the urinal cleaner Lysol as an enema, which wrecked his intestines.

On 4 July, Mao cabled Stalin: “I have decided to visit you in the near future.” He set his departure date for ten days ahead: “we shall leave anyway about the 15th of this month,” and told Stalin “it is necessary to send two transport (passenger) airplanes.”

On the 14th, the eve of the date he had told Stalin he would be leaving, instead of a plane, what came from Stalin was a cable to Dr. Orlov, putting off the visit until the winter:

Tell Mao Tse-tung the following: In view of the start of the grain harvest, top Party officials are leaving for the provinces in August, and will remain there until November. Therefore, the Central Committee requests Comrade Mao Tse-tung to delay his visit to Moscow until the end of November in order to have the opportunity to meet with all the top Party comrades.

This pretext was openly derisive. Orlov reported back that Mao “listened with a slight smile,” saying “fine, fine.” But he asked Orlov: “ ‘Can it be … that in the USSR they attach such great importance to the grain harvest that leading members of the Party … go off for it?’ ” “I have known Mao Tse-tung for more than six years,” Orlov reported, “and if I understand him right, his smile and the words hao, hao (fine, fine) … in no way indicate he was pleased …” “Melnikov [the other Russian doctor] told me that on July 15 Mao Tse-tung asked him a similar question about the harvest.” “He [Mao] was confident he would be leaving just now.” “Evidently, the visit has become necessary to him …” “[His] suitcases had already been packed, plus leather shoes had been bought … and a woolen coat made …”

It was clear to Mao that Stalin was annoyed with him, and was yo-yoing him over his trip. He scrambled to make amends, starting with his own personality cult. On 15 August, Mao vetoed the new North China University’s program “mainly to study Mao Tse-tung-ism,” saying: “There is no benefit, only harm.” He also changed the term “Mao Tse-tung Thought” to “Marxism-Leninism” in documents. Promoting his own formulations to a “Thought” had not gone down well with Stalin: Soviet media never mentioned Mao’s “Thought,” and red-penciled the expression when they published CCP documents containing it.

Finally, with autumn setting in, Mao sent an unusually ingratiating telegram on 28 September, in which he addressed Stalin by the sobriquet “the Master,” and begged: “it is essential to report personally to … the Master … I hope sincerely that they [the Soviet Party and Stalin] would give instructions to us.”

Stalin had shown who was boss. Mao had groveled. Having made his point, Stalin replied on 17 October, aloof yet reassuring, confirming Mao’s trip for “the end of November.” Mao was now confident enough to respond by requesting a brief postponement. The first round of Stalin’s punishment of Mao for harboring ambitions beyond China was over.

MAO HAD BLINKED first. But he also stood firm vis-à-vis Stalin when his fundamental interests were involved. In the last stage of the civil war, before Chiang Kai-shek fled to Taiwan, Nanjing sued for a ceasefire and peace on 9 January 1949. Stalin told Mao to respond and say the CCP “supports negotiations.” Mao was furious (“spoke more sharply,” Orlov reported to Stalin). Stalin most uncharacteristically sent another telegram the next day, attempting to reposition himself, and claiming that his proposal had been purely tactical, to make it seem that it was the Nationalists who were responsible for continuing the war: “our draft of your response … is designed to undermine the peace negotiations.”

Mao’s attitude was that the Nationalists should not be allowed a day’s peace, even for appearances’ sake. He told Stalin he wanted “the unconditional surrender of the Nanjing government … we no longer need to undertake any more political detours.” For the first time ever, Mao told Stalin what to say, telling the Master: “We think you should give the following answer …” to the Nationalists, who had requested Russian mediation. Mao had gained a definite edge over Stalin, which was noticed in the Kremlin: one of Stalin’s top China advisers confirmed to us that Stalin’s staff felt the Master had been “told off” by Mao in no uncertain terms.

Stalin fired back next day, 14 January, with a lengthy lecture, telling Mao that turning down talks was bad PR, and raising the specter of foreign intervention. Mao did not believe that this was likely, but he found a way to stick to his guns while also satisfying Stalin, by publishing a list of conditions for peace talks that were tantamount to demanding unconditional surrender. He then artfully quoted back to Stalin the latter’s own expressed position: “With regard to the basic line (to undermine the peace talks with the Nationalists, to continue the revolutionary war up to the end), we are absolutely unanimous with you.” Stalin folded the following day: “we have reached complete agreement … Hence, the issue is now closed.”

Stalin seems to have been impressed. It was just after this that he commented to Yugoslav and Bulgarian leaders that Mao was insubordinate, but successful. Mao had fought his corner fiercely — and effectively. So when on 14 January Stalin “insisted” that Mao postpone his trip to Moscowyet again, it seems that he genuinely meant it when he said “because your presence in China is essential.” Instead, Stalin offered to send an “authoritative” member of the Politburo to see Mao “immediately.”

Mao’s first reaction to this further postponement was irritation. His secretary remembered him throwing the telegram on the table, saying: “So be it!” But on second thoughts, he saw that Stalin was actually conveying an accolade. Stalin had never sent a member of his Politburo into a war zone to visit a Communist party involved in a civil war — and, moreover, a civil war against a government with which Moscow had diplomatic relations. On 17 January Mao responded “very much welcoming” a visit by Stalin’s envoy.

The envoy was Stalin’s old confidant, Anastas Mikoyan. He arrived at Mao’s HQ at Xibaipo on 30 January, bringing two specialists in neutralizing delayed-action bombs and bugging equipment. Mao “was extremely pleased,” Mikoyan reported, “and thanked comrade Stalin for his good care.” With Mikoyan came former railways minister Ivan Kovalev, who had been fixing the railroads in Manchuria, and who was now to be Stalin’s personal liaison with Mao.

Mao showed his self-confidence straightaway. The day after Mikoyan arrived, the Nationalist government moved from Nanjing to Canton. The only ambassador to accompany the Nationalists was the Soviet ambassador, Roshchin. On 1 and 2 February, Mao absented himself from meeting Mikoyan in a show of pique, and Chou En-lai was deputized to ask for an explanation. Describing it as “quite natural,” Mikoyan said it “would not at all cause detriment to our common cause, but on the contrary, would facilitate it.” Mao was not assuaged and Stalin knew it. Soon afterwards Stalin tried to explain to Mao’s No. 2, Liu Shao-chi, that the move had been made in order to gather intelligence. But Mao remained displeased, and took his displeasure out on Roshchin when Stalin sent him back to China as Russia’s first ambassador to Mao’s government. When Roshchin threw his first dinner for the Chinese Politburo, Mao sat through it without saying a word all evening, displaying what one Russian diplomat described as “a mocking-indifferent attitude.”

During Mikoyan’s visit Mao curbed his annoyance. To Mikoyan’s astonishment, Mao did not complain about Russia’s 1945 treaty with Chiang Kai-shek, under which Russia had regained extraterritorial concessions; he even went so far as to call it “patriotic.” Mao wanted a lot from Stalin. His shopping list started with a request for a US$300 million loan — exclusively for military purposes — and moved on to a vast range of arms, including heavy tanks and anti-aircraft guns, plus advisers on reorganizing the army. Even more important was long-term help for factories to produce his own aircraft, tanks and other heavy weapons. Mao wanted Stalin’s help to become a major military power.

Stalin had recently expelled Tito, the Yugoslav leader, from the Communist camp. Tito had shown too much independence and an inclination to carve out his own sphere of influence. In an earlier message to Stalin, Mao had referred to Tito’s experience, seemingly placing it alongside Russia’s as a possible model, and had been slapped down hard in return. Mao now made the right noises about Tito commending Stalin’s criticism of Yugoslav nationalism. This was Mao’s effort to reassure Stalin that he would not be another Tito.

Mao also made a point of stressing to Mikoyan how much he regarded himself as Stalin’s subordinate. Toasting Stalin’s health, Mao “emphasised that … Stalin was … the teacher of the Chinese people and the peoples of the whole world,” Mikoyan reported to Stalin. Mao “emphasised several times that he was a disciple of comrade Stalin,” and “was awaiting instructions … and deliberately downgraded his own role … as a leader and as a theoretician … [saying] that he … had made no new contribution to Marxism, etc.” But the astute Mikoyan was not taken in. “This,” he told Stalin, “does not correspond to what Mao Tse-tung is in reality, nor to what he thinks about himself.”

Indeed, when Mikoyan brought up the subject of “coordination” among Asian Communist parties, Mao was ready with his plan, which was to create an Asian Cominform, which he proposed starting to organize as soon as he had completed his conquest of China. He wanted the group to consist of “several” other Asian parties, listing the Koreans, the Indo-Chinese and the Filipinos, to begin with.

Mikoyan then produced Stalin’s offer, which restricted Mao to China’s immediate backyard, saying that Mao should “head” a bureau of East Asian parties, consisting initially of only three members: China, Japan and Korea. “Later on,” he said, others “could also be involved gradually.”

Stalin was conceding some ground. At the same time, he sent a signal for Mao not to push too hard. The day after the conversation about turf, Stalin sent Mikoyan a very strong cable telling him to order Mao to arrest an American working with the CCP called Sidney Rittenberg—“as a spy.” Stalin linked Rittenberg with Anna Louise Strong, the American whom Mao had sent abroad to promote himself; according to Stalin, Strong too was an American spy. (Mikoyan said Stalin had given him special orders to check for US and British “spies” in the entourage of the CCP leadership.) Rittenberg was duly arrested.

Strong herself was at that moment stranded in Moscow, denied an exit visa for China. On 13 February, the day after Mikoyan returned to Moscow and saw Stalin, she was thrown into the Lubyanka prison. Most unusually, her arrest, on a charge of “espionage,” was reported in Pravda the next day, which made the warning more emphatic for Mao, and for Communist satellite regimes. After Strong was deported shortly afterwards, she wrote to a CCP intermediary: “Please tell Chairman Mao … that, so far as I could learn, it was my too persistent search into the road to China [sic] that the Russians finally attacked as ‘spying.’ ”

One of Strong’s contacts in Moscow was Mikhail Borodin, Stalin’s main operative in China in the 1920s, who had been trying to help get her book promoting Mao published in Russia. Two weeks after Strong’s arrest, Borodin too was arrested and tortured for information about Mao.

Though these arrests were shots across Mao’s bows, he was unruffled. Stalin was saying: Don’t mess with America, or Europe. But Mikoyan had already promised him East Asia. Mao was now demarcating turf with Stalin. So it was in a cheerful mood that he thought out loud on this subject to a pre-victory Central Committee plenum on 13 March 1949.

At this meeting, his old challenger Wang Ming, who by now had conceded defeat, curried favor instead, declaiming that Mao’s Thought was “the … development of Marxism-Leninism in colonial and semi-colonial countries.” Not East Asia, or just Asia, but all “colonial and semi-colonial countries.”

Wang Ming had spelled out what Mao had in mind, and Mao was so delighted that he got rather carried away: “Comrade Wang Ming’s phrase gives off a smell of dividing a ‘market.’ Colonial and semi-colonial countries take up a very large part of the world. Once they come under us, doesn’t that mean Stalin only takes charge of the developed industrial regions, and [the rest of the world] is under our charge …?” Persisting with the royal “we,” Mao continued: “… we say colonial and semi-colonial countries belong to us. But what if one of them doesn’t buy our goods and goes straight to Moscow …?… Of course, let’s not be in a hurry to think too big; let’s fix China first.”

Mao had begun to dream about dividing the world with Stalin.

STALIN CLEARLY decided that if he allowed Mao stewardship over even a limited slice of turf his own power would be eroded. So when Liu Shao-chi visited Russia that summer and delicately broached the subject by asking Stalin whether China could join the Cominform, he got a taste of the Master at his slyest. “I think it is not really necessary,” Stalin replied. China should, instead, be “organising a union of Communist parties of East Asia.” But this seeming confirmation of his earlier offer was followed at once by: “Since the USSR is a country situated both in Europe and Asia, it will participate in [this] union.” The Master was not backing off at all.

As before, Stalin served up sharp warnings to Mao by arresting a whole string of operatives who had been in China. While Liu was in Moscow, many of the key Russian agents who had been with Mao followed Borodin into the torture cells: Mao’s GRU doctor, Orlov, was recalled and savagely tortured by KGB chief Viktor Abakumov in person. Orlov was accused of links with “the American and Japanese spy” Mao. Orlov’s arrest was signaled to Mao, as the Russians approached Shi Zhe, Liu’s interpreter and Mao’s assistant, and asked him to inform on Orlov. These were signals that Stalin was preparing the ground to denounce Mao as a spy or a Titoist if it became opportune to do so.

Stalin was baring his fangs. But Mao was not scared, and flexed his muscles on an issue of great importance to him: the first international Communist gathering scheduled to be held in his new capital, Peking. This was a huge trade union conference, which would be the springboard for putting Mao on the world map, as it covered not only the whole of Asia, but also Australasia, an advanced capitalist continent. It was also highly political, more like an international conference of Communist parties than a trade union gathering. Stalin tinkered with the idea of blocking it, or moving the venue, but Mao had Liu insist that it “should be held in China at the scheduled time.” Liu promised that it “would not carry out any work of organization,” meaning that Mao would not try to exploit it to set up his own international network.

When the conference opened, on 16 November 1949, Mao had just founded his regime, on 1 October. In his keynote speech, Liu proclaimed “the Mao Tse-tung road,” and did not mention Stalin, or the Russian model, once. The theme of the conference was seizing power via the “Mao Tse-tung road” throughout Asia — and beyond: “The road that the Chinese people have followed is the road that the peoples of many colonial and semi-colonial areas should traverse …” Liu was categorical: “It is impossible for the revolutionary … people in such areas to avoid taking [this] road … [and] it will be wrong if they do so.” “Armed struggles,” he said, “should be the principal form of struggle.”

This was strong stuff, and what followed showed how much headway Mao had made. When the Russian delegate complained that Liu’s speech was “ultra-left,” Stalin denounced his own man as “a turncoat.” The hapless delegate, Leonid Solovyov, was obliged to admit error at a meeting chaired by Mao. This was a first for Mao — a senior Russian apologizing to him in front of his colleagues. Mao then grandly asked Stalin to “pardon” Solovyov.

Even bolder, Mao reneged on his commitment that there would be no organizational follow-up to the conference. On 23 November, Liu Shao-chi announced that a Liaison Bureau would be set up, in Peking, through which the participating countries “can form their ties.” Mao was gearing up to give orders to foreign Reds. Stalin let it pass.

Mao knew the cMaster was not going to swallow all this lying down. Some punishment was sure to result. But he now owned China, and with it a quarter of the world’s population. He had significantly increased the scope and weight of the Communist camp as a whole. Stalin could not afford to disown him. Mao fully intended to force Stalin to help him advance his own global ambitions.

In America, the CCP had its own people operating inside the US Communist Party, and a powerful intelligence network with access to information unavailable to the Russians. When Moscow denounced US CP head Earl Browder, an old China hand, whose secret “China Bureau” had close links to Mao, Mao had very publicly continued to call him “comrade.”

Mao learned from Stalin’s duplicity about conducting an open, even apparently friendly relationship with a government while secretly trying to overthrow that same government. When he came to power, he was to copy Stalin in his dealings with other countries.

Many of Stalin’s agents with Mao were soon to die abnormal deaths. Orlov died shortly afterwards in a plane crash. Mao’s KGB doctor, Melnikov, vanished without trace after accompanying Mao on his trip in Russia in winter 1949–50. Borodin perished from torture in 1951. Vladimirov died at the age of forty-seven, in 1953—murdered by security overlord Lavrenti Beria with slow-acting poison, according to Vladimirov’s son, the post-Communist presidential candidate (and Olympic weight-lifting champion) Yuri Vlasov.

33. TWO TYRANTS WRESTLE (1949–50 AGE 55–56)

MAO’S PARAMOUNT requirement from Stalin was help to build a world-class war machine and turn China into a global power. The key to this was not how many weapons Stalin would provide, but the technology and infrastructure to manufacture armaments in China. At the time, China’s ordnance factories could only produce small arms. If Mao was to move at the tempo he desired — faster than Japan had done when building up an advanced arms industry from scratch in the nineteenth century — he needed foreign assistance. And Stalin was not just Mao’s best bet; he was his only bet. The Cold War had recently begun. There was no way the West could possibly help him achieve his goals without him changing the nature of his regime, which was out of the question.

But Mao had a problem: he needed to persuade Stalin that his ambitions were manageable from Stalin’s own perspective. So he made ostentatious demonstrations of loyalty, lavishing praise on Stalin to the Master’s top envoy Mikoyan, and putting on an act for his liaison man Kovalev. The latter reported to Stalin that Mao once “sprang up, raised his arms and cried out three times: ‘May Stalin live ten thousand years.’ ” Along with the froth, Mao offered something very substantial — to cut China’s ties with the West. “We would be glad if all the embassies of capitalist countries got out of China for good,” Mao told Kovalev.

This attitude was also motivated by domestic concerns. “Recognition would facilitate subversive activities [by] the USA and Britain,” Mao told Mikoyan on 31 January 1949. He feared that any Western presence at all would embolden liberals and give his opponents an opening, however slight. So he battened down the hatches, imposing a policy he called “cleaning house before inviting guests.” “Cleaning house” was a euphemism for drastic, bloody purges and the installation of an airtight control system nationwide, which included sealing off the whole country, banning Chinese from leaving, and expelling virtually all Westerners. Shutting out foreigners was also a way to ensure there were no outside observers to the purges. Only after he had “cleaned”—or rather cleansed — house, would Mao open the door a crack to admit a few closely controlled foreigners, who were always known as “guests,” not visitors.

Given the kind of regime he had in mind, Mao had cause to feel worried. Western influence was strong in China. “Many representatives of the Chinese intelligentsia received their education in America, Britain, Germany and Japan,” Mao told Mikoyan. Virtually all modern educational institutions were either founded by Westerners (often missionaries) or heavily influenced by the West. “In addition to newspapers, magazines and news agencies,” Liu wrote to Stalin in summer 1949, America and Britain alone had 31 universities and specialized schools, 32 religious educational institutions and 29 libraries in China, as well as 2,688 schools, 3,822 religious missions and organizations, and 147 hospitals.

China was short of educated people, especially skilled personnel, and Mao needed these people to get the country working, particularly the cities. Contrary to common assumption, it was the cities he cared about most. If we can’t run the cities, he told top officials in March 1949, “we won’t last.” His aim was to scare the educated class out of their liberal Western attitudes. This would be much easier to achieve if potential dissidents knew there were no Western representatives in the country to whom they could appeal, or any foreign media to tell their story.

Mao was also concerned about the appeal the West had inside his own Party. His army loved American weapons: his own bodyguards compared Soviet sub-machine-guns contemptuously with US-made carbines. “The [US] carbines are so light and accurate. Why can’t we have more carbines?” they pleaded with Mao. American cars positively inspired awe. One CCP official in the Russian-occupied port of Dalian had a shiny black 1946 Ford: “It was great to show off with,” he recalled, “and roused the interest of the highest command of the Soviet army,” who asked to borrow it for a day, which put him one up on the Russians. Mao’s aim was to nip in the bud any chance of the West exerting any influence on his Party, in any field, from ideas to consumer goods. In this Mao was more thorough even than Stalin.

Control was one key reason Mao decided to shun Western recognition. But his primary purpose was to show Stalin that the new China was committed 100 percent to the Communist bloc. This was the main reason Peking did not establish diplomatic relations with America and most Western countries when the regime was founded. It is widely thought that it was the US that refused to recognize Mao’s China. In fact, Mao went out of his way to make recognition impossible by engaging in overtly hostile acts. When the Communists captured Shenyang in November 1948, there were three Western consulates there (US, British and French), and the local CCP was friendly towards them at first. But orders soon came from Mao to “force [them] out.” Chou was explicit to Mikoyan: “We created intolerable conditions for them in order to get them to leave.” On 18 November, US consul general Ward and his staff were put under house arrest. Ward was later accused of spying and expelled. In the same aggressive spirit, Red troops broke into the residence of US ambassador J. Leighton Stuart in Nanjing in April 1949 when they took the Nationalist capital.

Mao was equally hostile to the British. When the Communists were crossing the Yangtze in late April, moving south, there were two British ships on that stretch of the river, HMS Amethyst and HMS Consort. Mao ordered that “all warships which get in the way of our crossing may be bombarded. Treat them as Nationalist ships.” Forty-two British sailors were killed, more than all other Western military deaths in the entire civil war. Consort got away, but Amethyst became grounded. Back in Britain, enraged sailors beat up CP chief Harry Pollitt, who landed up in the hospital. Winston Churchill, then leader of the Opposition, asked in Parliament why Britain did not have “in Chinese waters one aircraft carrier, if not two, capable of … effective power of retaliation.”

The incident greatly alarmed Stalin, who placed Soviet forces throughout the Far East on full alert — the only time this occurred in connection with the Chinese civil war. Stalin was worried that the West might intervene militarily and involve Russia, and he cabled Mao urgently to play down their relationship: “We do not think now is the right moment to publicise the friendship between the USSR and Democratic China.” Mao had to tone down his aggressiveness and issued new orders to “avoid clashes with foreign ships. No firing at [them] without the order of the Center. Extremely, extremely important.” He told his commanders to “protect … especially diplomats from America and Britain,” “or else big disaster could happen.” On 27 April he suspended the advance on Shanghai, which was the most important economic and financial center in the country, and the focus of Western interests — and therefore the most likely place where the West, which had sizable military forces there, might make a stand.

To lessen the risk of Western intervention, on 10 May Mao took diversionary steps by authorizing talks with US ambassador Stuart, who had stayed on in Nanjing after the Nationalist government had left. Stuart was an “old China hand” who wishfully thought he could bring Washington and Mao together. Decades later, Mao’s then negotiator and future foreign minister, Huang Hua, spelled out Mao’s intent: “Mao and Chou … were not looking for friendly relations. They had but one concern: to forestall a major American intervention which might rescue the Nationalists at the eleventh hour …”

As further insurance against a backlash from foreign powers, Mao spun a web of disinformation. On 30 May, Chou En-lai gave a verbal message to an intermediary to be passed to Truman. The message was carefully tailored to American hopes at the time. It said there was a split in the CCP between the pro-Western “liberals” headed by Chou himself, and pro-Soviet “radicals” headed by Liu Shao-chi, and that if America would back Chou he might be able to influence CCP foreign policy. This was a hoax, but it contributed to the delusion that the CCP might throw itself into the West’s embrace.

This flurry of pseudo-diplomacy, like the temporary lull on the battlefield, in no way implied any diminution in Mao’s resolve to shun the West. By mid-May, he had given the go-ahead for a general offensive against Shanghai, which fell by the end of the month. When foreign warships withdrew from Shanghai as the Reds approached, and US forces quickly left their last base on the Mainland, at Qingdao, Mao was more convinced than ever that Western powers would not invade China, where they would only get bogged down, as the Japanese experience had shown.

Mao now demonstrated all-out hostility towards the West. In a signed article in People’s Daily on 30 June, he stated that his foreign policy would be to “side exclusively with one camp”: yi-bian-dao. This did not just mean staying firmly in the Communist camp. It meant freezing relations with the West. A few days later the US vice-consul in Shanghai, William Olive, was arrested in the street, thrown in jail, and so badly beaten up that he soon died. The US recalled ambassador Stuart at once. At the end of July, when Amethyst tried to leave, Mao gave orders to “strike it hard.” Amethyst got away, but a Chinese passenger ship it had been hiding behind was sunk.

That same month, July, Mao spelled out to Stalin that his preferred policy was to “wait and not hurry to gain recognition from these [Western] states.” Stalin was delighted. “Yes! Better not to hurry,” he wrote in the margin, underlining Mao’s words.

SEVERING TIES with the West was Mao’s gift to Stalin before they met up. Mao was keen to visit him as soon as his regime was proclaimed in October 1949. Stalin was the boss of the Communist camp, and Mao had to have an audience with him. Mao also knew that the kind of deals he wanted to do had to be transacted face-to-face.

A visit had been pending for two years, but Stalin had been stringing Mao along, manipulating his patent desire for a meeting to punish him for ambitions beyond his borders. Even after Mao was inaugurated as supreme leader of China, there was still no invitation. By the end of October, Chou had to go to the Russian ambassador and tell him that Mao wanted to go to Moscow to pay his respects to Stalin on his seventieth birthday, on 21 December 1949. Stalin agreed, but he did not offer Mao the sort of state visit in his own right that someone who had just brought a quarter of the world’s population into the Communist camp might feel entitled to expect. Mao was coming merely as one of a flock of Party leaders from around the globe converging to pay court on Stalin’s birthday.

Mao set off by train on 6 December, on what was his first trip out of China. He did not bring a single senior colleague. The highest-ranking person in the delegation was a secretary. Stalin’s liaison, Kovalev, rightly surmised that this was so that when Stalin humiliated Mao, which was inevitable, it would be “without Chinese witnesses.” When Mao met Stalin the first time, he even excluded his ambassador from the session. Face was power. A snub from the Master could weaken his hold over his colleagues.

Mao got to see Stalin the day he arrived, and he reiterated that China was bound exclusively to Russia. “Several countries,” he told Stalin, “especially Britain, are actively campaigning to recognise the People’s Republic of China. However, we believe that we should not rush to be recognised.” He laid out his core requests: help in building a comprehensive military — industrial system, with emphasis on an aircraft industry, and a modern military, especially a navy.

In exchange, Mao was ready to make significant concessions. He had come to Moscow wanting to secure a new Sino-Soviet treaty to replace the Soviet Union’s old treaty with Chiang Kai-shek, but after learning that Stalin had “decided not to modify any of the points of this treaty for now,” on the grounds that discarding the old treaty would have complications involving the Yalta Agreement, Mao conceded at once. “We must act in a way that is best for the common cause … the treaty should not be modified at the present time.” The treaty with Chiang had given Russia territorial concessions. Mao enthusiastically offered to leave them in Russian hands. The status quo, he said, “corresponds well with Chinese interests …”

Mao’s readiness to make major concessions in the interests of achieving his goal — help towards furthering his global aspirations — was transparent. What Stalin had to gauge was how far those aspirations would affect his own position. A militarily powerful China would be very much a two-edged sword: a tremendous asset for the Communist camp — and for him; but also a potential threat. Stalin needed time to mull things over. Should he offer Mao anything at all, and if so, what, and how much?

Mao was packed off to his bugged residence, Stalin’s No. 2 dacha, 27 km outside Moscow. For days there was no follow-up meeting. Mao was left gazing out of the picture window at the snow-covered garden, and took out his anger on his staff. Stalin sent various underlings to see Mao, but they were not empowered to talk business. Rather, their job was, as Stalin put it to Molotov, “to find out what sort of type” Mao was, and to monitor him. When liaison man Kovalev reported to Stalin that Mao was “upset and anxious,” Stalin answered: “We have many foreign visitors here now. Comrade Mao should not be singled out” for exceptional treatment.

But, in fact, Mao was singled out for special treatment—ill-treatment — precisely in relation to these “visitors.” Mao was eager to meet Communist leaders from other countries, and they were equally keen to meet him — the man who had just brought off a triumph that could be called the second October Revolution. But Stalin blocked Mao from getting together with any of them, except for meaningless exchanges with the lackluster Hungarian, Mátyás Rákosi. Mao asked to meet the Italian Communist chief Palmiro Togliatti, “but,” Mao told an Italian Communist delegation (after Stalin died), “Stalin managed, with a thousand stratagems, to deny me that.”

For the actual birthday celebration itself, on 21 December, Mao donned the obligatory mask, and newsreels record him applauding Stalin expansively. Stalin, for his part, appeared solicitous to Mao, whom he seated on his right on the platform, and Pravda reported that Mao was the only foreign speaker for whom the audience stood at the end of his speech. At the show that followed, Mao was greeted with an ovation “the like of which the Bolshoi had undoubtedly never seen,” Rákosi observed, with the audience chanting “Stalin, Mao Tse-tung!” Mao shouted back: “Long live Stalin! Glory belongs to Stalin!”

As soon as that was over, the next day, Mao demanded a meeting with Stalin. “I’m not here just for the birthday,” he exploded to Kovalev. “I’m here to do business!” Colorful language was used: “Am I here just to eat, shit and sleep?”

Of this trio of bodily functions, none was problem-free. On the food front, Mao vented his discontent on the fact that his hosts were delivering frozen fish, which he hated. “I will only eat live fish,” he told his staff. “Throw these back at them!” Shitting was a major problem, as Mao not only suffered from constipation, but could not adapt to the pedestal toilet, preferring to squat. And he did not like the soft Russian mattress, or the pillows: “How can you sleep on this?” he said, poking at the down-filled pillows. “Your head will disappear!” He had them swapped for his own, filled with buckwheat husks, and had the mattress replaced by wooden planks.

Mao saw Stalin two days later, on the 24th, but the Master declined to discuss his requests about building up China’s military power, and would only talk about the issue they had not touched on at their first meeting: Mao’s role vis-à-vis other Communist parties such as those in Vietnam, Japan and India. After probing Mao’s appetite for turf, Stalin went silent again for days, during which time Mao’s own birthday, his fifty-sixth, came along on 26 December, but went unmarked. Mao spent all his time cooped up in the dacha, dealing with domestic matters by cable. He said later that he made “an attempt to phone him [Stalin] in his apartment, but they told me Stalin is not at home, and recommended that I meet with Mikoyan. All this offended me …” Stalin rang Mao a few times, but the calls were brief and neither here nor there. Mao declined invitations to go sightseeing, saying he was not interested, and that he was in Moscow to work. If there was no work to do, then he would rather stay in the dacha and sleep. Mao was frustrated and furious; at times, to his close assistants, he appeared “desolate.”

It seems that Mao now decided to play “the West card” to prod Stalin into action. He let it be known, not least by speaking out loud in his bugged residence, that he was “prepared to do business with … Britain, Japan and America.” And contrary to what he had told Stalin upon his arrival in Moscow (that he was not going to “rush to be recognised” by Britain), talks went ahead with Britain which led to London recognizing Mao’s regime on 6 January 1950. The British press, meanwhile, reported that Mao had been put under house arrest by Stalin, and this “leak” could well have been planted by Mao’s men. It was “possible,” Mao later said, that this shift in policy towards the West helped “in Stalin’s change of position,” noting that real negotiations “began right after this.”

BY NEW YEAR’S DAY 1950, Stalin had made up his mind. On 2 January, Pravda ran an “interview” with Mao, which, Mao said sarcastically years later, Stalin had “drafted for me, acting as my secretary.” The text prepared by Stalin made it clear that Stalin was willing to sign a new treaty; to Mao this meant that Stalin was ready to deal with the key issue of turning China into a major military power. Mao now summoned Chou En-lai from Peking, along with his main industry and trade managers, to do the detailed negotiations, specifying that Chou must travel by train, not by plane, for safety reasons. Chou would have had to come in a Russian plane, and Mao was hinting that he was taking precautions.

Mao, however, was not about to swallow his treatment without taking a kick at Stalin. An opportunity quickly presented itself when US Secretary of State Dean Acheson made a speech at the National Press Club in Washington on 12 January, timed to coincide with Mao’s protracted stay in Moscow, accusing Russia of “detaching the northern provinces of China … and … attaching them to the Soviet Union,” with the process “complete” in Outer Mongolia, “nearly complete” in Manchuria, and under way in Inner Mongolia and Xinjiang. Stalin sent his right-hand man, Molotov, to tell Mao he must rebut the speech in the name of the Chinese Foreign Ministry, and that Mongolia and Russia would do the same. Mao agreed to do so, but instead of a rebuttal by the Foreign Ministry, he wrote a text in the name of his press chief, a relatively low-level figure. The piece referred to the Soviet satellite of Outer Mongolia, which was formally independent, in the same breath as Chinese regions, which seemed to be saying that China did not accept Russia’s de facto annexation of the territory.

The evening this article appeared in Mao’s main newspaper, People’s Daily, on 21 January, Stalin hauled Mao into the Kremlin for a mighty dressing-down, which included the accusation that China’s “own Tito” was emerging. This was delivered mainly by his faithful lackey Molotov, in the presence of Beria. Stalin made a point of staging the tongue-lashing in front of Chou En-lai, who had just arrived the day before. Even though Chou for Mao was a kind of eunuch, and the one among all Mao’s senior colleagues that he least minded seeing him take a caning, Mao was livid.

Having chastised Mao, Stalin invited him and Chou to his dacha for dinner. Stalin knew that Mao was in no position to stake a claim to Outer Mongolia, as Peking had recognized it diplomatically in October 1949. Mao’s insubordinate behavior about rebutting Acheson was an expression of resentment rather than a statement of policy (though Stalin still demanded an official exchange of notes regarding the status of Mongolia). For the drive to dinner, Stalin and Shi Zhe, Mao’s interpreter, sat on the jump seats, while Mao and Chou were given the main seats. In the car, Shi Zhe recalled, everyone was silent, and the air was like lead:

To lighten the tension, I chatted a little with Stalin, and then asked him: “Didn’t you promise to visit our delegation?”

He answered at once: “I did, and I have not abandoned this wish.”

Before he finished, Chairman Mao asked me: “What are you talking to him about? Don’t invite him to visit us.”

I immediately admitted I had indeed just been talking about this with him.

Chairman Mao said: “Take it back. No more invitation.”

… Silence again. The air was heavy, as if new lead had been poured into it. We sat like this for thirty minutes.

… The atmosphere at the dinner was also cold and bored … The Chairman remained silent, not speaking a word …

To break the ice, Stalin got up to turn on the gramophone … Although three or four men took turns trying to pull Chairman Mao onto the floor to dance, they never succeeded … The whole thing ended in bad odour …”

The two sides finally signed a new treaty on 14 February 1950. The published text was a formality. The essence of the treaty was in secret annexes. The US$300 million loan China had requested was confirmed, although it was spread over five years, and of the first year’s tranche China actually got only one-third (US$20 million), on the grounds that the rest was owed for past “purchases.” The entire loan was allocated to military purchases from Russia (in Mao’s inner circle it was referred to as “a military loan”). Half of the total loan, US$150 million, was earmarked for the navy. Stalin gave the go-ahead for fifty large-scale industrial projects — far fewer than Mao had wanted.

In return, Mao agreed that Manchuria and Xinjiang were to be designated Soviet spheres of influence, with Russia given exclusive access to their “industrial, financial, and commercial … activities.” As these two huge regions were the main areas with known rich and exploitable mineral resources, Mao was effectively signing away most of China’s tradable assets. To his inner circle he himself referred to the two provinces as “colonies.” To the Americans, decades later, he said that the Russians “grabbed half of Xinjiang. It was called a sphere of influence. And Manchukuo [sic] was also called their sphere of influence.” He gave Russia a monopoly on all China’s “surplus” tungsten, tin and antimony for fourteen years, thus depriving China of the chance to sell about 90 percent of its marketable raw materials on the world market into the mid-1960s.

In 1989, the post-Mao leader Deng Xiao-ping told Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev: “Of all the foreign powers that invaded, bullied and enslaved China since the Opium War (in 1842), Japan inflicted the greatest damage; but in the end, the country that got most benefit out of China was Tsarist Russia, including [sic] the Soviet Union during a certain period …” Deng was certainly referring to this treaty.

Mao went to great lengths to conceal how much the treaty gave away. When he went over the draft of the announcement he carefully erased any phrases like “supplementary agreements,” and “appendix,” which might make people suspect the existence of these secret documents, marking his deletions: “Extremely crucial, extremely crucial!”

At Stalin’s insistence, China not only paid huge salaries to Soviet technicians in China, plus extensive benefits for them and their families, but had to pay compensation to Russian enterprises for the loss of the services of the technicians who came to China. But the concession Mao was most anxious to hide was that he had exempted Russians from Chinese jurisdiction. This had been the issue the CCP had always harped on as the embodiment of “imperialist humiliation.” Now Mao himself had secretly introduced it.

Mao wanted to end his trip on a high note, so he pleaded with Stalin, who did not go to parties outside the Kremlin, to attend a celebration he was throwing at the Metropol Hotel on the evening of the signing: “we do hope you can come for a minute. You can leave early any time …” Stalin decided to grant Mao this moment of glory. When Stalin showed up at 9:00 PM, bringing his own bottle, the flabbergasted guests went into a frenzy.

But Stalin did not come just to show good will. He had a message to send. In his toast he brought up Yugoslavia’s leader, Tito, whom he had recently cast out of the Communist camp. Any Communist country that went its own way, Stalin observed pointedly, would end up badly, and would only return to the fold under a different leader. The warning was clear — and would have been even more threatening if Stalin’s plans to assassinate Tito had been known.

None of this dampened Mao’s ambitions. Earlier that day, at the treaty-signing ceremony, when photographs were being taken, the diminutive Stalin had taken one step forward. To his staff afterwards, Mao remarked, with a smile: “So he will look as tall as I am!” (Mao was 1.8 meters tall.)

Mao was bent on pursuing his dream of making China, his base, a superpower. Stalin was equally determined to thwart this ambition — as Mao could tell from the fact that, in return for the huge concessions he had made, he got relatively little from Stalin. What Stalin let him have fell far short of even the skeleton basis for a world-class military machine. Mao was going to have to find other ways to squeeze more out of Stalin.

Chou used the expression “iron curtain” to describe what the CCP wanted: “to drive at having Manchuria covered by the iron curtain against foreign powers,” “except the USSR and people’s democracies.”

It was also a source of the lasting misconception that Liu Shao-chi was more hard-line than Chou.

British Communist leader John Gollan’s notes of what Mao said to him in 1957 (about 1949) read: “Not even freedom of meeting leaders. 70th birthday — Didn’t dare although there.”

When a news item in March 1950 mentioned joint companies, Liu Shao-chi noted that the news “has aroused tremendous waves among Peking students, who suspect these … might be damaging China’s sovereignty. Many Youth League members demanded an … explanation; some even charged out loud … that the people’s government had sold out the country.” And this was without knowing the half of it.

34. WHY MAO AND STALIN STARTED THE KOREAN WAR (1949–50 AGE 55–56)

STALIN RECOGNIZED that Mao had the drive and the resources, especially the human resources, to expand the frontiers of communism in Asia significantly. In order not to erode his own power, Stalin decided not to form an Asian Cominform, which would give the Chinese leader a formal pan-Asia set-up, but instead to dole out individual countries to Mao, in such a way that he, Stalin, remained the ultimate boss. At their second meeting, during Mao’s stay in Moscow, Stalin assigned him to supervise Vietnam.

Stalin had hitherto shown little interest in Vietnam. In 1945, when the Vietnamese Communist leader Ho Chi Minh led an uprising against French colonial rule and declared a provisional independent government, Moscow had not even bothered to answer his cables. But, even though he did not entirely trust Ho, Stalin changed his attitude radically once Mao took power and Chinese troops reached the border with Vietnam in late 1949. On 30 January 1950, while Mao was in Moscow, Stalin recognized Ho’s regime, some days after Mao did. The lack of a common frontier with Vietnam made it difficult for Stalin to command from afar, whereas China could supply arms, goods and training across its border with Vietnam (and Laos). By giving Mao custody of Vietnam, Stalin gave himself a way of reaching into Vietnam, and gratified Mao, while passing on to China the enormous expense of sustaining the Indochina insurgencies.

Mao had already been trying to bring the Vietnamese under his tutelage. Ho had lived in China for more than a decade, including a stretch in Yenan, and spoke fluent Chinese. Mao had been training, funding and arming the Vietnamese, but when he developed a plan to send in Chinese troops once he controlled the border with Vietnam, in late 1949, Stalin called him to heel. Stalin wanted to gather all the strings together in his own hands first.

Ho Chi Minh was brought to Moscow, via Peking, arriving in time to make a dramatic appearance at Stalin’s farewell dinner for Mao in the Kremlin on 16 February 1950. Stalin told Ho that aid to Vietnam was China’s responsibility — and cost. Ho was the only foreign Communist leader with whom Mao was allowed to have proper talks on this trip, and the two returned to China on the same train, in a convoy between one train carrying Soviet airmen going to protect Shanghai and China’s coastal cities, and one loaded with MiG-15s.

Mao now began to take personal charge of action in Vietnam, vetting both grand strategy and the minutiae of military operations. The first objective was to link up the Vietnamese Communists’ base with China, as the CCP had done with Russia in 1945–46. Inside China, a road-building blitz to the border was completed in August 1950. Within two months this enabled the Vietnamese to win a crucial series of battles known as the Border Campaign, as a result of which the French army lost control of the frontier with China. Thereafter, China poured in aid. On 19 August, Mao told Stalin’s emissary Pavel Yudin that he planned to train 60,000–70,000 Vietnamese soldiers. It was having China as a secure rear and supply depot that made it possible for the Vietnamese to fight for twenty-five years and beat first the French and then the Americans.

In most of these years, the huge logistics burden of the fighting in Indochina fell almost entirely on China. To Mao, the cost was irrelevant. When the French Party’s first emissary to Ho mentioned ways the French Communists could help the Vietnamese, he was told by Liu Shao-chi: “Don’t waste your time on this. Don’t get into things like medical aid. We can do that. After all there are 600 million Chinese …”

It was not long before Mao started trying to “Maoise” his client, imposing a much-hated land reform on Vietnam in the 1950s, in which Chinese advisers even presided over kangaroo tribunals that sentenced Vietnamese to death in their own country. Vietnam’s “poet laureate,” To Huu, hymned Mao’s role in surprisingly frank doggerel:

Kill, kill more …

For the farm, good rice, quick collection of taxes …

Worship Chairman Mao, Worship Stalin …

Even though some Vietnamese leaders raised strenuous objections to the Mao-style land reform, Ho Chi Minh put up only feeble and belated resistance to Mao’s attempt to turn the Vietnamese revolution into a clone of China’s.

IN SEPTEMBER to October 1950, Mao downgraded operations in Vietnam, in order to focus on a much larger war on another patch of turf that Stalin had decided to assign him. This was Korea.

At the end of World War II, Korea, which had been annexed by Japan early in the century, was divided across the middle, along the 38th Parallel, with Russia occupying the northern half and the US the South. After formal independence in 1948, the North came under a Communist dictator, Kim Il Sung. In March 1949, as Mao’s armies were rolling towards victory, Kim went to Moscow to try to persuade Stalin to help him seize the South. Stalin said “No,” as this might involve confronting America. Kim then turned to Mao, and one month later sent his deputy defense minister to China. Mao gave Kim a firm commitment, saying he would be glad to help Pyongyang attack the South, but could they wait until he had taken the whole of China: “It would be much better if the North Korean government launched an all-out attack against the South in the first half of 1950 …” Mao said, adding emphatically: “If necessary, we can stealthily put in Chinese soldiers for you.” Koreans and Chinese, he said, had black hair, and the Americans would not be able to tell the difference: “They will not notice.”

Mao encouraged Pyongyang to invade the South and take on the USA — and volunteered Chinese manpower — as early as May 1949. At this stage he was talking about sending in Chinese troops clandestinely, posing as Koreans, and not about China having an open collision with America. During his visit to Russia, however, Mao changed. He became determined to fight America openly — because only such a war would enable him to gouge out of Stalin what he needed to build his own world-class war machine. What Mao had in mind boiled down to a deal: Chinese soldiers would fight the Americans for Stalin in exchange for Soviet technology and equipment.

Stalin received reports from both his ambassador in Korea and his liaison with Mao about Mao’s eagerness to have a war in Korea. As a result of this new factor, Stalin began to reconsider his previous refusal to let Kim invade the South.

Stalin was given a push by Kim. On 19 January 1950, the Soviet ambassador to Pyongyang, Terentii Shtykov, reported that Kim had told him, “excitedly” that “now that China is completing its liberation,” South Korea’s was “next in line.” Kim “thinks that he needs to visit comrade Stalin again, in order to receive instructions and authorization to launch an offensive.” Kim added that “if it was not possible to meet comrade Stalin now, he will try to meet with Mao.” He stressed that Mao had “promised to render him assistance after the conclusion of the war in China.” Playing “the Mao card,” Kim told Shtykov that “he also has other questions for Mao Tse-tung, in particular the question of the possibility of setting up an Eastern bureau of the Cominform” (no mention of talking to Stalin about this). Mao, he said, “would have instructions on all issues.” Kim was telling Stalin that Mao was keen to give him military support, and that if Stalin would still not endorse an invasion, he (Kim) would go to Mao direct and place himself under Mao.

Eleven days later, on 30 January, Stalin wired Shtykov to tell Kim that he was “prepared to help him on this.” This is the first documented evidence of Stalin agreeing to start a war in Korea, and he shifted his position because of Mao, who possessed the critical asset — an inexhaustible supply of men. When Kim came to Moscow two months later, Stalin said that the international environment had “changed sufficiently to permit a more active stance on the unification of Korea.” He went on to make it explicit that this was because “the Chinese were now in a position to devote more attention to the Korean issue.” There was “one vital condition — Peking’s support” for the war. Kim “must rely on Mao, who understands Asian affairs beautifully.”

A war in Korea fought by Chinese and Koreans would give the Soviet Union incalculable advantages: it could field-test both its own new equipment, especially its MiG jets, and America’s technology, as well as acquiring some of this technology, along with valuable intelligence on America. Both China and Korea would be completely dependent on Russian arms, so Stalin could fine-tune the degree of Russia’s involvement. Moreover, he could test how far America would go in a war with the Communist camp.

But for Stalin, the greatest attraction of a war in Korea was that the Chinese, with their massive numbers, which Mao was eager to use, might be able to eliminate, and in any case tie down, so many American troops that the balance of power might tilt in Stalin’s favor and enable him to turn his schemes into reality. These schemes included seizing various European countries, among them Germany, Spain and Italy. One scenario Stalin discussed during the Korean War was an air attack on the US fleet on the high seas between Japan and Korea (en route to Inchon, in September 1950). In fact, Stalin told Mao on 5 October 1950 that the period provided a unique — and short-lived — window of opportunity because two of the major capitalist states, Germany and Japan, were out of action militarily. Discussing the possibility of what amounted to a Third World War, Stalin said: “Should we fear this? In my opinion, we should not … If a war is inevitable, then let it be waged now, and not in a few years’ time …”^†

Mao repeatedly spelled out this potential to Stalin, as a way of stressing his usefulness. On 1 July 1950, within a week of the North invading the South, and long before Chinese troops had gone in, he had Chou tell the Russian ambassador: “Now we must energetically build up our aviation and fleet,” adding pointedly for Stalin’s ears: “so as to deal a knockout blow … to the armed forces of the USA.” On 19 August Mao himself told Stalin’s emissary, Yudin, that America could send in thirty to forty divisions but that Chinese troops could “grind” these up. He reiterated this message to Yudin a week later. Then, on 1 March 1951, he summed up his overall plan for the Korean War to Stalin in chilling language: “to spend several years consuming several hundred thousand American lives.”

With Mao’s expendables on offer, Stalin positively desired a war with the West in Korea. When Kim invaded the South on 25 June 1950, the UN Security Council quickly passed a resolution committing troops to support South Korea. Stalin’s ambassador to the UN, Yakov Malik, had been boycotting proceedings since January, ostensibly over Taiwan continuing to occupy China’s seat. Everyone expected Malik, who remained in New York, to return to the chamber and veto the resolution, but he stayed away. Malik had in fact requested permission to return to the Security Council, but Stalin rang him up and told him to stay out. The Soviet failure to exercise its veto has perplexed observers ever since, as it seemed to throw away a golden opportunity to block the West’s involvement in Korea. But if Stalin decided not to use his veto, it can only have been for one reason: that he did not want to keep Western forces out. He wanted them in, where Mao’s sheer weight of numbers could grind them up.

IT WAS NOW very much in Stalin’s interest to make Mao the sub-chief over Kim, but this was a different case from Vietnam. Because of the enormous ramifications of taking on the USA, Stalin decided to keep an extra degree of control. He had to make absolutely sure that Kim understood that he, Stalin, was the ultimate boss before he put Kim in Mao’s hands. So even though Mao was in Moscow on 30 January, when Stalin gave Kim his consent to go to war, he did not breathe a word to Mao, and ordered Kim not to inform the Chinese. Stalin brought Kim to Moscow only at the end of March, after Mao had left. Stalin went over battle plans in detail with Kim, and at their last talk, in April 1950, he laid it on the line to Kim: “If you should get kicked in the teeth, I shall not lift a finger. You have to ask Mao for all the help.” With this comradely envoi, Kim was waved away to Mao’s care.

On 13 May a Russian plane flew Kim to Peking. He went straight to Mao to announce that Stalin had given the go-ahead. At 11:30 that night, Chou was dispatched to ask the Soviet ambassador, Roshchin, to get Moscow’s confirmation. Stalin’s stilted message came the next morning: “North Korea can move toward actions; however, this question should be discussed … personally with comrade Mao.” Next day (15 May), Mao gave Kim his full commitment, and on the most vital issue: “if the Americans were to take part … [China] would assist North Korea with its own troops.” He went out of his way to exclude the participation of Russian troops, saying that: “Since the Soviet Union is bound by a demarcation agreement on the 38th Parallel [dividing Korea] with America, it would be ‘inconvenient’ [for it] to take part in military actions [but as] China is not bound by any such obligations, it can therefore fully render assistance to the northerners.” Mao offered to deploy troops at once on the Korean border.

Mao endorsed the Kim — Stalin plan, and Stalin wired consent on the 16th. On 25 June the North Korean army smashed across the 38th Parallel. Mao, it seems, was not told the exact launch day. Kim wanted Chinese troops kept out until they were absolutely needed. Stalin, too, wanted them in only when America committed large numbers of troops for the Chinese to “consume.”

TRUMAN REACTED fast to the invasion. Within two days, on the 27th, he announced that he was sending troops into Korea, as well as upping aid to the French in Indochina. Furthermore, he now reversed the policy of “non-intervention” towards Taiwan. It was thanks to this new US commitment that neither Mao nor his successors were ever able to take Taiwan.

By early August, the North Koreans had occupied 90 percent of the South, but the US poured in well-armed reinforcements, and on 15 September landed troops at Inchon, just below the 38th Parallel, cutting off much of the North Korean army in the South, and positioning itself for a move into the North. On the 29th Kim sent an SOS to Stalin, in which he asked for “volunteer units” from China.

On 1 October, Stalin signaled to Mao that the moment had come for him to act, dissociating himself shamelessly from any responsibility for defeat: “I am far away from Moscow on vacation and somewhat detached from events in Korea …” After this barefaced lie came his real point: “I think that if … you consider it possible to send troops to assist the Koreans, then you should move at least five — six divisions towards the 38th Parallel … [These] could be called volunteers …”

Mao leapt into action. At 2:00 AM on 2 October he issued an order to the troops he had already moved up to the Korean border: “Stand by for order to go into [Korea] at any moment …”

Poverty-stricken, exhausted China was about to be thrown into war with the USA. It seems it was only now, at the beginning of October, that Mao convened the regime’s top body, the Politburo, to discuss this momentous issue. The Politburo was not a team to make important decisions, but to serve as a sounding-board for Mao. On this occasion, he specifically invited differing views, because of the colossal implications of war with America. Nearly all his colleagues were strongly against going into Korea, including his No. 2 Liu Shao-chi and nominal military chief Zhu De. Lin Biao was the most vocal opponent. Chou En-lai took a cautious and equivocal position. Mao said later that going into Korea was “decided by one man and a half”: himself the “one” and Chou the “half.” Among the huge problems voiced were: that the US had complete air supremacy, and artillery superiority of about 40:1; that if China got involved, America might bomb China’s big cities and destroy its industrial base; and that America might drop atomic bombs on China.

Mao himself had been losing sleep over these questions. He needed a functioning China as the base for his wider ambitions. But Mao gambled that America would not expand the war to China. Chinese cities and industrial bases could be protected from US bombing by the Russian air force. And as for atomic bombs, his gut feeling was that America would be deterred by international public opinion, particularly as Truman had already dropped two — both on an Asian country. Mao took precautions for himself, though. During the Korean War, he mostly holed up in a top-secret military estate outside Peking in the Jade Spring Hills, well equipped with air-raid shelters.

Mao was convinced that America could not defeat him, because of his one fundamental asset — millions of expendable Chinese, including quite a few that he was pretty keen to get rid of. In fact, the war provided a perfect chance to consign former Nationalist troops to their deaths. These were men who had surrendered wholesale in the last stages of the civil war, and it was a deliberate decision on Mao’s part to send them into Korea, where they formed the bulk of the Chinese forces. In case UN troops should fail to do the job, there were special execution squads in the rear to take care of anyone hanging back.

Mao knew that America just would not be able to compete in sacrificing men. He was ready to wager all because having Chinese troops fighting the USA was the only chance he had to claw out of Stalin what he needed to make China a world-class military power.

Mao hand-drafted a cable to Stalin on 2 October, committing to “sending Chinese army to Korea.” Then it seems he had second thoughts. In his eagerness to go in, he had not informed Stalin of any of his problems. Playing them up could raise his price. So he held back the cable committing Chinese forces, and sent a quite different one, saying that Chinese entry “may entail extremely serious consequences … Many comrades … judge that it is necessary to show caution … Therefore it is better to … refrain from advancing troops …” However, he left open the option of going in: “A final decision has not been taken,” he ended; “we wish to consult with you.”

AT THE SAME TIME, Mao prepared the ground for going into Korea by pretending to give America “fair warning.” For this purpose, Chou En-lai staged an elaborate charade, waking the Indian ambassador in the small hours of 3 October to tell him “we will intervene” if American troops crossed the 38th Parallel. Choosing this roundabout channel, using an ambassador whose credit in the West was minimal, when it would have been perfectly simple to make an official statement, suggests compellingly that Mao wanted his “warning” to be ignored: thus he could go into Korea claiming he was acting out of self-defense.

By the 5th of October, with UN forces already pushing into the North, Stalin was showing impatience. That day he replied to Mao’s cable of the 2nd which had suggested that Mao might hold back. He reminded Mao that he, Mao, had made a commitment:

I considered it possible to turn to You with the question of five — six Chinese volunteer divisions because I was well aware of a number of statements made by the leading Chinese comrades [i.e., you] regarding their readiness to move several armies in support of the Korean comrades …

Stalin referred ominously to what he called “a passive wait-and-see policy,” which, he said, would cost Mao Taiwan. Mao had been using Taiwan as an argument to persuade Stalin to help him build an air force and a navy. Stalin was now telling Mao he would get neither if he stalled about his mission in Korea.

But Mao was not really trying to opt out. He was raising his price. By the time he received Stalin’s reply, he had already appointed a commander-in-chief for the Chinese forces slated for Korea: Peng De-huai. Mao moved at his own pace. On 8 October, having ordered his troops to be redesignated as “Chinese People’s Volunteers,” he wired Kim that “we have decided to dispatch the Volunteers into Korea to help you.” He also sent Chou En-lai and Lin Biao to see Stalin about arms supplies. En route, Lin sent Mao a long cable urging him to abandon the idea of going in. The reason Mao sent Lin Biao to see Stalin when Lin was such a strong opponent of intervention, was to impress on Stalin the military difficulties facing the Chinese and thus extract the maximum out of the Master.

Chou and Lin got to Stalin’s villa on the Black Sea on the 10th, and talked through the night until 5 in the morning. Stalin promised them “planes, artillery, tanks and other equipment.” Chou did not even negotiate a price. But out of the blue Stalin reneged about the key requirement: air cover for Chinese troops. Stalin had promised this (“a division of jet fighter planes—124 pieces for covering [Chinese] troops”) on 13 July. Now he claimed that the planes would not be ready for another two months. Without air cover, Chinese troops would be sitting ducks. Chou and Lin Biao argued that Russian air cover was essential. An impasse was reached. Stalin then wired Mao to tell him that China did not have to join the war.

Stalin was calling Mao’s bluff by saying, as Mao put it later, “Forget it!” Mao climbed down at once. “With or without air cover from the Soviet Union,” he told Stalin, “we go in.” Mao needed the war. He wired Chou on 13 October: “We should enter the war. We must enter the war …” When Chou received the cable he buried his head in his hands. That same day Mao told the Russian ambassador that China was going in, only expressing the “hope” that Russian air cover would arrive “as soon as possible, but not later than in two months,” which was, in fact, Stalin’s own timetable.

So it was that out of the global ambitions of the two Communist tyrants, Stalin and Mao, as well as the more local ambition of Kim, China was hurled into the inferno of the Korean War on 19 October 1950.

Kim Il Sung later told the head of the Spanish Communist Party, Santiago Carrillo (who told us), that he had started the war — and that Mao had been far more strongly for launching it than Stalin.

^†In late 1950 a top French government adviser in Indochina (Jean Sainteny) summed up the thinking of the French commanding general there, Jean de Lattre de Tassigny, in these words: “that the Russians are looking for one billion human beings, human beings from Asia, a sort of human livestock, to get them to fight the West.” The same thought had occurred earlier to US Senator Henry Cabot Lodge. Questioning the head of the US Military Advisory Group to the Chinese Nationalists, Major General Barr, in March 1949, Lodge asked: “Do you think the Russians can regiment those Chinese … and make them a military asset outside the borders of China, and use them in Europe or … somewhere else?” After an interjection by Senator Alexander Wiley (“Genghis Khan was a Chinese, was he not?”), Barr replied: “… could the Russians organize a Chinese division and take it over to Germany or in that area … I am afraid that idea would appeal to some of the Chinese Communists.”

35. MAO MILKS THE KOREAN WAR (1950–53 AGE 56–59)

WHEN CHINESE troops went into Korea in October 1950, the North Koreans were on the run. Two months later, Mao’s army had pushed the UN out of North Korea and restored Kim Il Sung’s dictatorship. But Kim was now militarily powerless, with his depleted 75,000-man army outnumbered 6:1 by the 450,000 troops Mao had in Korea. On 7 December, the day after the Chinese recovered Kim’s capital, Pyongyang, Kim ceded command to the Chinese. The Chinese commander Peng De-huai cabled Mao that Kim had “agreed … not to intervene in the future in matters of military command.” Peng was made the head of a joint Chinese — Korean HQ. Mao had taken over Kim’s war.

Peng wanted to stop north of the 38th Parallel, the original boundary between North and South Korea, but Mao refused. Peng pleaded that his supply lines were over-extended, leaving them seriously exposed to US bombing: “our troops are unable to receive supplies of food, ammunition, shoes, oil or salt … The main problem is no air cover, and no guaranteed railway transport; the moment we repair them, they are bombed again …” Mao insisted. He was determined not to stop fighting until he had squeezed the utmost out of Stalin. “Must cross the 38th Parallel,” he ordered Peng on 13 December. Early in January 1951 the Chinese took Seoul, the Southern capital, eventually pushing about 100 km south of the Parallel.

Chinese military successes greatly boosted Mao’s standing with Stalin, who sent extraordinarily enthusiastic congratulations, which he had not done for Mao’s triumph in taking China. Stalin particularly remarked that the victories had been won “against American troops.”

Mao had dealt an enormous psychological blow to the USA. On 15 December 1950, Truman went on radio to declare a State of National Emergency, something that did not happen in either World War II or the Vietnam War. Using almost apocalyptic language, he told the American people: “Our homes, our Nation … are in great danger.” The Chinese by then had already driven the Americans back some 200 km in a matter of weeks, in appalling conditions, with sub-zero temperatures compounded by icy winds. Secretary of State Dean Acheson described the reverse as the “worst defeat” for US forces in a century.

The Chinese won their victories at horrendous cost to their own men. Peng told Mao on 19 December:

The temperature has dropped to minus 30 degrees centigrade. The troops are very run down, their feet are incapacitated by frostbite, and they have to sleep in the open … Most troops have not received coats and padded shoes. Their padded jackets and blankets have been burned out by napalm. Many soldiers are still wearing thin cotton shoes, and some are even bare-foot …

“Unimaginable losses may happen,” Peng warned. Mao’s logistics manager told the Russians on 2 January 1951 that whole units had died from cold. Many “Volunteers” developed night blindness from lack of nutrition. HQ’s answer was: Gather pine needles to make soup. Eat live tadpoles to provide some vitamins and protein.

The Chinese fought with “human wave tactics” (ren-hai zhan-shu), using the only advantage they had — superiority in numbers. The British actor Michael Caine, who was drafted into the war, told us he had gone into it feeling sympathetic to communism, coming as he did from a poor family. But the experience left him permanently repelled. Chinese soldiers charged in one wave after another, to exhaust Western bullets. He could not help thinking: If they don’t care about the lives of their own people, how can I expect them to care about me?

The Chinese advance was soon halted. On 25 January 1951 the UN launched a counter-offensive, and the tide began to turn. Chinese casualties were extremely heavy. Peng went back to Peking on 21 February to tell Mao to his face about the “grave difficulties” and the “massive unnecessary casualties.” From the airport he raced to Zhongnanhai, only to find that Mao was staying out at Jade Spring Hill in his bunker. When Peng got there he was told Mao was having a siesta, but he pushed his way past the bodyguards and burst into Mao’s bedroom (practically lèse-majesté). Mao let him say his piece, but brushed his concerns aside, and told him to expect the war to be a long one: “Don’t try to win a quick victory.”

Mao outlined his “overall strategy” to Stalin in a cable on 1 March, which opened with the sentence: “The enemy will not leave Korea without being eliminated in great masses …” He then told Stalin that his plan was to use his bottomless reserves of manpower to exhaust the Americans. The Chinese army, he reported (which was true), had already taken “more than 100,000 casualties … and is expecting another 300,000 this year and next.” But, he told Stalin, he was replenishing the losses with 120,000 more troops, and would send a further 300,000 to replenish future losses. “To sum up,” Mao said, he was “ready to persist in a long-term war, to spend several years consuming several hundred thousand American lives, so they will back down …” Mao was reminding Stalin that he could seriously weaken America, but Stalin must help him build a first-class army and arms industry.

MAO GOT MOVING on this fundamental objective from the moment China entered the war in October 1950. That very month, China’s navy chief was sent to Russia to ask for assistance to build up the navy. He was followed in December by a top-level air force mission, which had considerable success. On 19 February 1951, Moscow endorsed a draft agreement to start building factories in China to repair and service planes, as a large number were being damaged, and required advanced repair facilities in the theater. The Chinese plan was to convert these repair facilities to actually making aircraft. By the end of the war, China, a very poor country, had the third largest air force in the world, with more than 3,000 planes, including advanced MiGs. And factories were being built to churn out 3,600 fighter planes annually which, it was projected (over-optimistically, as it turned out), would come on stream in three to five years’ time. Discussions had even begun about manufacturing bombers.

Immediately after the aircraft deal in early 1951—and after Stalin endorsed Mao’s plan “to spend several years consuming several hundred thousand American lives”—Mao upped the ante by asking for the blueprints for all the weapons the Chinese were using in Korea, and for Russian help to build factories to produce them, as well as the arms to equip no fewer than sixty divisions. He sent his chief of staff to Russia in May to negotiate these requests.

Although Stalin wanted China to do his fighting for him, and was happy to sell Mao the weapons for the sixty divisions, he had no intention of endowing Mao with a full-blown arms industry, so the Chinese delegation was stonewalled in Russia for months. Mao told his chief of staff to keep on pushing, and in October the Russians reluctantly agreed to transfer the technology for producing seven kinds of small arms including machine-guns, but declined to divulge more.

By now the war had lasted for a year, during which North Korea had been pulverized by US bombing. Kim saw that he might end up ruling over a wasteland, and possibly a shrunken one at that. He wanted an end to the war. On 3 June 1951 he went to China in secret to discuss opening negotiations with the US. As Mao was nowhere near his goal, the last thing he was interested in was stopping the war. In fact, he had just ordered Chinese troops to draw UN forces deeper into North Korea: “the farther north the better,” he said, provided it was not too near the Chinese border. Mao had hijacked the war, and was using Korea regardless of Kim’s interests.

But, as his troops had been suffering heavy defeats, a breathing space was tactically useful for Mao, so he sent his Manchuria chief with Kim to consult with Stalin — and to press for more arms factories. Afterwards, Stalin cabled Mao, treating Kim as Mao’s satrap, to propitiate Mao, as he was turning him down on the arms factories. After talking “with your representatives from Manchuria and Korea” [sic], Stalin told Mao, “a truce is now advantageous.” This did not mean Stalin wanted to stop the war. He wanted Mao’s soldiers to inflict more damage on the US, but he saw that engaging in talks could be expedient, and seeming to show an interest in peace would help the Communists’ image. Interim ceasefire talks opened in Korea between UN and Chinese — Korean military teams on 10 July.

Most items were settled fairly swiftly, but Mao and Stalin turned one issue into a sticking point: the repatriation of POWs. America wanted voluntary, “non-forcible,” repatriation; Mao insisted it had to be wholesale. The UN held over 20,00 °Chinese, mainly former Nationalist troops, most of whom did not want to go back to Communist China. With the memory of handing back prisoners to Stalin at the end of World War II, many to their deaths, America rejected non-voluntary repatriation, for both humanitarian and political reasons. But Mao’s line to his negotiators was: “Not a single one is to get away!” Mao’s chilling mantra prolonged the war for a year and a half, during which hundreds of thousands of Chinese, and many more Koreans, died. Kim had been only too keen to concede, and argued that “there was no point in putting up a fight” to recover “politically unstable” ex-Nationalists. But this cut no ice with Mao, as that was not his point. Mao did not care about the POWs. He needed an issue to string out the war so that he could extract more from Stalin.

BY EARLY 1952, Kim was absolutely desperate to end the war. On 14 July 1952 he cabled Mao begging him to accept a compromise. American bombing was reducing his country to rubble. “There was nothing left to bomb,” US Assistant Secretary of State Dean Rusk observed. The population was declining to almost critical survival levels, with perhaps one-third of adult males killed.

Mao turned Kim down by return telegram, with the cold-blooded argument that “Rejecting the proposal of the enemy will bring only one harmful consequence — further losses for the Korean people and Chinese people’s volunteers. However …” Mao then proceeded to list the “advantages” in these human losses, such as the sufferers being “tempered and acquiring experience in the struggle against American imperialism.” He signed off menacingly by saying he would report to Stalin and then get back to Kim “upon receiving an answer.”

Without waiting for Mao to tell him what Stalin thought, Kim replied at once to say that Mao was, of course, “correct,” and that he, Kim, was determined to fight on. Kim simultaneously cabled Stalin, pathetically trying to explain his wavering.

Stalin wired Mao on the 17th with his verdict: “We consider your position in the negotiations on an armistice to be completely correct. Today we received a report from Pyongyang that comrade Kim Il Sung also agrees with your position.”

Kim was frantic, but he was powerless to stop the war in his own country. Moreover, his own fate was in peril. An ominous conversation between Stalin and Chou En-lai a month later shows that he had reason to feel insecure. After Chou said that China was preparing for “the possibility of another two to three years of war,” Stalin asked about the attitude of the Korean leaders. The meeting record runs as follows (our comments in brackets):

STALIN says that the American[s] have not frightened China. Could it be said that they have also failed to frighten Korea?

CHOU EN-LAI affirms that one could essentially say that.

STALIN: [obviously skeptically] If that is true, then it’s not too bad.

CHOU EN-LAI [picking up on Stalin’s skepticism] adds that Korea is wavering somewhat … Among certain elements of the Korean leadership one can detect a state of panic, even.

STALIN reminds that he has been already informed of these feelings through Kim Il Sung’s telegram to Mao Tse-tung.

CHOU EN-LAI confirms this.

Kim’s panic about America paled beside his fear of Mao and Stalin. American bombing could kill a large part of his population, but Stalin and Mao could depose him (something Mao in fact later plotted doing) — or worse.

So the war went on.

BY AUGUST 1952, Mao decided to push Stalin harder and nail down his twin key demands: turf and arms industries. He sent Chou to Moscow with these requests. Chou first established that Mao had done Stalin an invaluable service. At their first meeting, on 20 August, he told Stalin that Mao “believes that the continuation of the war is advantageous to us.” “Mao Tse-tung is right,” Stalin answered. “This war is getting on America’s nerves.” Echoing Mao’s dismissive comments about casualties on their own side, Stalin produced the bone-chilling remark: “The North Koreans have lost nothing, except for casualties.” “The war in Korea has shown America’s weakness,” he commented to Chou, and then said “jokingly”: “America’s primary weapons are stockings, cigarettes, and other merchandise. They want to subjugate the world, and yet they cannot subdue little Korea. No, Americans don’t know how to fight.” “Americans are not capable of waging a large-scale war at all, especially after the Korean War.”

It was Mao who had made it possible for Stalin to draw this conclusion. America was losing more aircraft than it could afford militarily, and more men than the public would accept. Altogether, the US lost well over 3,000 aircraft in Korea, and could not replenish these losses fast enough to feel safe about being able to fight a two-front war simultaneously in Asia and Europe. Equally important, the US lost some 37,000 dead.

Although the American death toll was only a small percentage of the Chinese, democratic America could not compete with totalitarian China when it came to body bags. As America headed into a presidential campaign in 1952, support in the US for continuing the war stood at only about 33 percent, and the Republican candidate, ex-General Dwight D. Eisenhower, campaigned on the slogan “I Will Go to Korea,” which was widely taken to mean ending the war.

China’s role in taking on the US gave Chou the cards to shoot for the moon, and he asked the Master for no fewer than 147 large military-related enterprises, including plants to produce warplanes and ships, 1,000 light tanks per year, with one factory for medium tanks to be ready within five years.

Stalin prevaricated, responding with platitudes (“China must be well armed, especially with air and naval forces”; “China must become the flagship of Asia”). But he never signed Chou’s list.

Then there was the question of turf. Stalin had been doling out parts of Asia to Mao since he had begun to think about the war in Korea. Mao had extruded tentacles into half a dozen Asian countries stretching from Japan (the Japanese Communists had come to Peking in spring 1950 to prepare for armed action in coordination with the Korean War) to the Philippines (where the US had strategic bases) and Malaya, where a sizable, and largely ethnic Chinese, insurgency was fighting British rule. In Southeast Asia, Burmese Communist insurgent forces had been moving towards the Chinese border to link up with China to receive supplies and training, just as Ho Chi Minh’s army had done in Vietnam. One evil harbinger who was soon to come to China for training was the future leader of the Cambodian Khmer Rouge, Pol Pot.

In September 1952, Chou talked to Stalin about Southeast Asia as if its fate were to be entirely decided by Peking, and the Chinese army could just walk in if Peking so wished. The minutes of their meeting on 3 September record that Chou: “says that in their relations with Southeast Asian countries they are maintaining a strategy of exerting peaceful influence without sending armed forces. He offers the example of Burma … The same in Tibet. Asks whether this is a good strategy.” Chou was treating Burma in the same vein as Tibet. Stalin replied wryly: “Tibet is part of China. There must be Chinese troops deployed in Tibet. As for Burma, you should proceed carefully.” But Stalin immediately added, confirming that Burma was Mao’s: “It would be good if there was a pro-China government in Burma.” (Stalin monitored Burma closely through his ambassador, the long-time liaison in Yenan, Vladimirov.)

Mao was now planning to form his regional conglomerate, using a “Peace Congress” of the Asia — Pacific region scheduled to convene in Peking. This was on Chou’s agenda for his talks with Stalin. Stalin was obliged to acknowledge that China should play “the principal role.” That he was not at all pleased can be seen from what followed. Chou asked “what specific actions” the Russian delegation would take, which was a subtle invitation for Stalin to confirm that the Russians would not grab leadership. Stalin replied sarcastically with one word: “Peace.”

Undeterred, Chou forged on to say that during the imminent Soviet Party Congress Liu Shao-chi would like to meet Asian Communist leaders. This was a way of trying to secure Stalin’s blessing for Mao to take charge of Asian parties, but dragging endorsements out of the Master was like getting water out of a stone. First mentioned were the Indonesians. The minutes record:

CHOU EN-LAI … asks whether it would be timely to discuss party issues in Moscow with them.

STALIN says that it is difficult to tell yet …

CHOU EN-LAI reports that the Japanese should arrive, and it is likely they will also want to discuss party issues.

STALIN answers that older brothers cannot refuse their younger brothers in such a matter. He says that this should be discussed with Liu Shao-chi …

CHOU EN-LAI points out that Liu Shao-chi intends to bring with him appropriate material, in order to discuss a number of questions.

STALIN notes that if the Chinese comrades want to discuss these issues, then of course we will have no objection, but if they do not want it, then we will not have to discuss anything.

CHOU EN-LAI answers that the Chinese comrades will definitely want to talk.

How forceful Chou En-lai was! Relentlessly pursuing the Master as he tried to evade. Two and a half years and a devastating war before, when Mao was in wintry Moscow, Stalin had blocked him from any such meetings. Now, Stalin was forced to concede: “in this case, we shall find the time.” Then, another little sarcasm when the smooth Chou, “ending the conversation, says they would like to receive instructions concerning all these issues.”

STALIN asks — instructions or suggestions?

CHOU EN-LAI answers that from comrade Stalin’s perspective this would be advice, but in their perception these would be instructions.

Chou’s tact masked a startling new degree of assertiveness on Mao’s part. In fact, Mao had even begun conspiratorial operations in the USSR itself.

CHOU’S MISSION in August — September 1952, transparently aimed at enabling Mao to become a major power and a rival to Stalin, drastically sharpened Stalin’s sense of the threat from Mao, and so he set about undermining Mao by exhibiting special intimacy towards Mao’s top colleagues. Stalin first cultivated army chief Peng De-huai, who came to Moscow in early September, with Kim, for the only tripartite Russo-Sino-Korean summit of the war. At the end of one meeting, most unusually, Stalin took Peng aside for a tête-à-tête, without Chou, which Chou reported to a furious Mao. Peng explained to Mao that Stalin had only talked about the way the North Koreans had been maltreating POWs (which had been causing problems for the Communists diplomatically). Mao remained suspicious, but seems to have concluded that this was just a ploy of Stalin’s to unsettle him.

Then came another attempt by Stalin to drive a wedge — this time between Mao and Liu Shao-chi, who came to Moscow for the Soviet Party Congress in October. Stalin was extraordinarily, and noticeably, attentive to Liu, demonstrating a degree of intimacy that amazed Liu’s entourage. “Stalin even mentioned his personal matters and moods,” Liu’s interpreter, Shi Zhe, observed. Shi had also interpreted for Mao, and saw the sharp contrast with the way that Stalin had treated Mao. Chou En-lai was to comment to a small circle that Stalin had given a far warmer welcome to Liu than to Mao.

Stalin then fired a salvo across Mao’s bows with an unprecedented gesture, unique in the annals of world communism. On 9 October, Pravda published Peking’s congratulations to the Congress, which Liu had delivered the previous day. In large type, Liu was billed as “General Secretary” of the CCP (the highest post in other parties). But, as Moscow well knew, the CCP did not have a general secretary. It was inconceivable that this was an accident. “Pravda in those days didn’t make mistakes,” one Russian ambassador to Britain commented to us. Stalin was saying to Mao: I could make your No. 2 the No. 1!

Liu had to clear himself, so he immediately wrote a note to Stalin’s No. 2, Georgi Malenkov, saying that he was not general secretary, and that the CCP was “all under the leadership of Comrade Mao Tse-tung [who] is the Chairman.” Clearly deciding that the wise thing to do was not to panic, he sent no frantic excuses home to Mao. After the congress, he stayed on as planned to talk to other Asian Communist leaders, including Ho Chi Minh, and together the two discussed not only Vietnam, but also Japan and Indonesia with Stalin. Stalin then kept Liu in Russia for months, until January 1953, to meet the people who were at the top of Mao’s list — the Indonesians. On the night of 6–7 January 1953 Liu finally joined Stalin and Russia’s top agent in Indonesia for an unusually long meeting with the Indonesian Communist leaders Aidit and Njoto, to discuss Peking “taking over” the Indonesian Party. Afterwards, Aidit celebrated by going out into the freezing night to throw snowballs, unaware that little more than a decade later, in 1965, Mao’s tutelage would condemn him and Njoto and hundreds of thousands of their followers to premature and ghastly deaths.

As soon as the meeting with the Indonesians was over, Liu left Moscow for home that same day. Altogether, he had stayed in Russia for three months. Mao could do nothing about Stalin’s machinations to needle him and stir up suspicion, nor was he able to take it out on Liu, which would play into Stalin’s hands. But he flashed a warning signal to Liu the moment Liu returned to Peking, which amounted to: Don’t get ideas!

Meanwhile, Mao kept on bombarding Stalin with requests relating to arms industries. A blockbuster eight-page cable on 17 December 1952 bluntly demanded of Stalin: “Please could the Soviet government satisfy our arms order for war in Korea in 1953, and our orders for arms industries.” Prefaced to this was Mao’s vision for the war: “in the next phase (suppose one year), it will become more intense.” As an added inducement to Stalin to cough up, Mao offered to carry Kim’s bankrupt state, informing Stalin that Peking would subsidize Pyongyang for three years — to the tune of US$60 million p.a., which happened to be exactly the amount Stalin had “lent” to Mao in February 1950; but, per capita, fifty times the amount Stalin had been willing to advance — and from a much poorer country. And, unlike Stalin’s loan, Mao’s to Kim carried no interest. A few weeks later, in January 1953, Mao put in another large request for his navy. Stalin said he would send the armaments requested, and approved Mao’s fleet taking part in naval operations on the high seas for the first time, but he firmly declined to meet Mao’s demands about arms industries.

AT THIS POINT, the armistice talks had long been in recess, while heavy fighting had continued. On 2 February 1953 the new US president, Eisenhower, suggested in his State of the Union address that he might use the atomic bomb on China. This threat was actually music to Mao’s ears, as he now had an excuse to ask Stalin for what he wanted most: nuclear weapons.

Ever since the first Bomb had been dropped on Hiroshima in 1945, Mao had longed to possess one. One of his economic managers, Bo Yi-bo, recalled that all through the early 1950s, “at all meetings and on all occasions, Chairman Mao would talk about the fact that we had no atom bombs. He talked and talked. Chairman Mao was really anxious!” Mao successfully concealed this hankering from the public, affecting instead an image of nonchalant contempt for atomic weapons, and pretending that he preferred to rely on “the people,” a position made famous by his remark in 1946 that the atom bomb was “a paper tiger.”

As soon as Eisenhower made his remarks about possibly using the Bomb, Mao dispatched his top nuclear scientist, Qian San-qiang, to Moscow. Mao’s message boiled down to this: Give me the Bomb, so that you will not be drawn into a nuclear war with America. This confronted Stalin with a serious dilemma, as Russia had a mutual defense pact with China.

Stalin did not want to give Mao the Bomb, but he was worried about Eisenhower. It was under this unremitting pressure — from Mao as much as from the West — that Stalin, it seems, decided to end the Korean War. According to Dmitri Volkogonov, the Russian general who had access to the highest-level secret archives, Stalin made the decision to end the war on 28 February, and told his colleagues he was planning to act the next day. That night Stalin was felled by a stroke, which killed him on 5 March. Mao may well have been a factor in the stroke. At the last dinner Stalin had talked about the Korean War, connecting the failure to keep Yugoslavia’s Tito in the camp with the Communists losing the chance to win in Korea. He also brought up the Comintern in the Far East, and how it had failed in Japan. After dinner, he read some documents, and the last was a report that his attempt to assassinate Tito had failed. Stalin had suspected Mao of being a Japanese spy in the past, and was viewing Mao as a potential Tito. His obsessive mind may have been revolving around Mao, reflecting that getting rid of Mao would be just as daunting a task as trying to finish off Tito. Mao may have helped cause Stalin’s stroke.

Mao went to the Soviet embassy to mark Stalin’s death. An embassy staffer claims that Mao had tears in his eyes and had trouble standing up straight, and that Chou wept. Actually, Stalin’s death was Mao’s moment of liberation.

On 9 March a giant memorial service was held in Tiananmen Square, with an organized crowd of hundreds of thousands. Strict orders were issued to the populace, including the injunction “Don’t laugh!” A huge portrait of Stalin was draped above the central archway, and the ceremony opened with Mao bowing before the portrait and laying a wreath. Many speeches were made, but none by Mao. Nor did he go to the funeral in Moscow, though Mme Mao, who was then in Russia, visited Stalin’s bier. Chou attended the funeral in Red Square, and was the only foreigner to march with the top Russian mourners, walking next to security chief Beria, in bitter cold (among Chou’s gifts was immunity to temperature).

Stalin’s death brought instant changes. During an all-night meeting on 21 March, the new Russian leaders, headed by premier Georgi Malenkov, told Chou they had decided to end the war in Korea. Stalin’s successors were keen to lessen tension with the West, and made it clear that if Mao cooperated over stopping the war he would be rewarded with a large number of arms enterprises — ninety-one — which Stalin had been delaying. Unlike Stalin, who saw Mao as his personal rival, the new Soviet leaders took the attitude that a militarily powerful China was good for the Communist camp.

But Mao insisted on keeping the Korean War going. He wanted one more thing: the Bomb. In fact, this was the main goal of Chou’s trip, along with arms industries. Chou tried hard to get the nuclear physicist Qian San-qiang’s group into Russian nuclear research institutes, but their repeated requests for the transfer of nuclear technology were turned down. Qian kept pushing for two months, a period that coincided exactly with Mao’s foot-dragging over ending the war. Then, in May, Moscow put its foot down.

The Communist camp had for some time been waging a huge campaign accusing the US of using germ warfare in Korea and China, and had vaguely claimed large numbers of deaths from germ attacks. Captured US airmen were made to confess to dropping germ bombs, sometimes on camera.

Mao used the issue to whip up hatred for the US inside China. But the accusations were concocted. When Stalin died, the Kremlin immediately decided to drop the charges, which, Beria wrote to Malenkov on 21 April 1953, had caused Russia to “suffer[ed] real political damage in the international arena.”

The accusation of fabricating the charges was now used to put pressure on Mao to end the war. Soviet foreign minister Molotov wrote to his colleagues that the Chinese had given the North Koreans “an intentionally false statement … about the use of bacteriological weapons by the Americans.” The Koreans, he said, were “presented with a fait accompli.” The Russians were laying the groundwork for throwing all the blame onto Mao.

On 2 May the Kremlin told its new ambassador in Peking, V. V. Kuznetsov, to deliver an unprecedentedly harsh message to Mao, which read:

The Soviet government and the Central Committee of the CPSU [Soviet Party] were misled. The dissemination in the press of information about the use by the Americans of bacteriological weapons in Korea was based on false information. The accusations against the Americans were fictitious.

The message “recommended” that Peking drop the accusations, and informed Mao menacingly that the Russians “responsible for participation in the fabrication … will receive severe punishment.” Indeed, the Soviet ambassador to Pyongyang, V. N. Razuvayev, had already been recalled, as Mao certainly knew, and tortured by Beria’s men.

Kuznetsov saw Mao and Chou at midnight on 11–12 May. Afterwards he reported to Moscow that Mao back-pedaled. According to Kuznetsov, Mao said “that the campaign was begun on the basis of reports from the [Chinese] command … It is difficult now to establish the authenticity of these reports … If falsification is discovered, then these reports from below should not be credited.” Kuznetsov was clearly under orders to give a detailed account of Mao’s reactions. He reported that: “some nervousness was noticed on the part of Mao Tse-tung; he … crushed cigarettes … Towards the end of the conversation he laughed and joked, and calmed down. Chou En-lai behaved with studied seriousness and some uneasiness.”

Mao had every reason to feel uneasy. Moscow’s language was uncommonly severe. It showed how determined the Kremlin was to end the war, and signaled a readiness to apply extreme pressure, and to disavow something that Stalin must have approved. Coming fast on the heels of the Kremlin disowning Stalin’s last fake conspiracy, the “Doctors’ Plot” (the first time any action of Stalin’s was publicly repudiated, which came as a bombshell to the Communist world), the new Kremlin was telling Mao it was determined to have its way. Mao was clearly taken aback, as he gave orders to end the war that very night.

Mao could see that getting the Bomb from Russia was out of the question for now, as the new Kremlin was bent on lowering tension with America. So he recalled his nuclear delegation from Moscow, and settled for the arms projects that the new Kremlin leaders had offered. He ordered his negotiators in Korea to accept voluntary repatriation of POWs, which had been on the table for over eighteen months.

Two-thirds of the 21,374 Chinese POWs refused to return to Communist China, and most went to Taiwan.^† The one-third who returned to the Mainland found themselves labeled as “traitors” for having surrendered, and suffered appallingly for the rest of Mao’s reign. One other dire, and little-known, contribution Mao made to the misery of the Korean nation was to help consign over 60,000 South Korean prisoners, who were illegally retained by the North at the time of the armistice, to a terrible fate. Mao told Kim to hold on to them. These unfortunate men were dispersed to the remotest corners of North Korea to conceal them from prying eyes and minimize their chances of escape, and this is where any survivors are probably held to this day.

AN ARMISTICE WAS finally signed on 27 July 1953. The Korean War, which had lasted three years and brought millions of deaths and numerous wounded, was over.

More than 3 million Chinese men were put into Korea, among whom at least 400,000 died. An official Russian document puts Chinese dead at 1 million.

Among those who died in Korea was Mao’s eldest son, An-ying, killed in an American air raid on Peng De-huai’s HQ, where he was working as Peng’s Russian translator. It was 25 November 1950, just over a month after he had entered Korea. He was twenty-eight.

He had married only a year before, on 15 October 1949. His wife, Si-qi, was a kind of adopted daughter to Mao, and she and An-ying had known each other for some years. When An-ying told his father in late 1948 that he wanted to marry her, Mao had flown into a ferocious rage and bellowed at him so terrifyingly that An-ying fainted, his hands going so cold they did not react even to a boiling hot water bottle, which left two big blisters. Mao’s furious reaction suggests sexual jealousy (the beautiful and elegant Si-qi had been around Mao for much of her teens). Mao withheld consent for many months, and then told the couple to delay getting married until his regime was formally proclaimed, on 1 October 1949. By the time of his first wedding anniversary, An-ying was gone. As was the rule, he did not tell his wife where, and she did not ask.

When Mao was given the news of his son’s death, he was silent for some time, and then murmured: “In a war, how can there be no deaths?” Mao’s secretary observed: “He really didn’t show any expression of great pain.” Even Mme Mao shed some tears, although she had not quite got on with her stepson.

Nobody informed An-ying’s young widow for over two and a half years. While the war was still going on, she accepted An-ying’s silence, as she was used to Party secrecy. But in summer 1953, after the signing of the armistice, she found his continued silence puzzling, and asked Mao, who told her that An-ying was dead. During those years she had been seeing Mao constantly, spending weekends and vacations with him, and he had not shown any sadness, not even a flicker to suggest that anything was wrong. He had even cracked jokes about An-ying as though he were alive.

Altogether, China put at least 3 million troops into Korea. The US committed roughly 1 million military personnel.

Mao did this by denouncing the head of the trade unions, Li Li-san, for advocating greater independence for unions. Those in the know were well aware that this was a line that Liu had strongly espoused.

The Korean War also boomeranged in spectacular fashion on its third instigator, Kim Il Sung. In 1994, forty-four years after he started it, Kim was found dead, sitting holding copies of the dossier the post-Communist Russian government was about to release revealing the inside story of the war and his role in starting it.

Peking is still sticking to the allegation, although its official claim now is a grand total of 81 deaths from 804 US germ attacks—45 Koreans from cholera and plague, and 36 Chinese of plague, meningitis, and “other diseases.” Two Russian generals who were in Korea, Valentin Sozinov, chief adviser to North Korean chief of staff Nam Il, and the chief medical adviser to the North Korean army, Igor Selivanov, both told us they had never seen any evidence of germ warfare, and Selivanov stressed that in his position he would have known about it if it had happened. Other leading Russian officers and diplomats involved concurred.

Kim’s regime was eager to put the boot into Mao. The Soviet chargé in Pyongyang, S. P. Suzdalev, reported to Moscow on 1 June that on hearing the Kremlin’s new “recommendations,” the Korean official to whom he conveyed the message, Pak Chang-ok, jumped at the chance to disown the Chinese, even suggesting “the possibility that the bombs and containers were thrown from Chinese planes.”

^†Twenty-one Americans and one Scot opted to go to China, where most soon became disillusioned and left, often after great difficulties. Their defection stoked fears in the West about “brainwashing,” as did captured airmen’s “confessions” about dropping germ bombs. While the top brass worried that some of those who “confessed” might spill hi-tech knowledge of great use to an enemy, FBI chief J. Edgar Hoover mounted a vast surveillance campaign on returned POWs, fearing “Manchurian Candidates,” the then US Attorney General Herbert Brownell told us.

The official claim is 152,000 deaths, but in private Deng Xiao-ping told Japanese Communist leaders that the number of Chinese killed was 400,000. The same figure was given by Kang Sheng to Albania’s Enver Hoxha. These sacrifices did not earn China much gratitude from North Korea. When we tried to gain access to the Chinese war memorial in Pyongyang, Korean officials refused permission. To the question, “How many Chinese died in the Korean War?” the reply came, most grudgingly, after two refusals to answer: “Perhaps 10,000.”

36. LAUNCHING THE SECRET SUPERPOWER PROGRAM (1953–54 AGE 59–60)

AFTER MAO had accepted an end to the Korean War, in May 1953, Stalin’s successors in the Kremlin agreed to sell China ninety-one large industrial enterprises. With these assured, on top of the fifty projects agreed to by Stalin, Mao was able to launch his blueprint for industrialization on 15 June. This focused exclusively on building up arms industries, to make China a superpower. It was in effect Mao’s Superpower Program. Its utterly military nature was concealed, and is little known in China today.

Mao wanted to channel every resource the nation had into this program. The whole “industrialisation” process had to be completed “in ten to fifteen years,” or at most a bit longer. Speed, he said over and over again, was everything—“the essence.” What he did not spell out was his real goal: to become a military power in his own lifetime, and have the world listen when he spoke.

Mao was approaching sixty, and he often referred to his own age and mortality when discussing this industrialization. Talking to a group of his guards on one occasion, he stressed: “We will make it in fifteen years,” then out of nowhere came the words: “Confucius died at seventy-three.” The subtext was: Surely I can live longer than Confucius, and thus be able to see results within fifteen years.

On another occasion he said that “we can overtake Britain … in fifteen years or slightly more,” and then added: “I myself also have a Five-Year Plan: to live … another fifteen years, then I will be satisfied; of course, it will be even better to over-fulfill”—i.e., live even longer.

Mao was not interested in posterity. Back in 1918 he had written: “Some say one has a responsibility for history. I don’t believe it … People like me are not building achievements to leave for future generations …” (our italics). These remained his views throughout his life. In 1950, after visiting Lenin’s mausoleum, Mao said to his entourage that the superb preservation of the corpse was only for the sake of others; it was irrelevant to Lenin. Once Lenin died, he felt nothing, and it did not matter to him how his corpse was kept.

When Mao died, he left neither a will nor an heir — and, in fact, unlike most Chinese parents, especially Chinese emperors, he was indifferent about having an heir, which was extremely unusual (in stark contrast to Chiang Kai-shek, who went to inordinate lengths to protect his heir). Mao’s eldest son, who died in the Korean War, had no offspring, as his wife did not want to have children while she was still studying. Mao put no pressure on him to produce an heir, even though he was the only one of Mao’s sons who was of sound mind, as the younger son was mentally handicapped.

For decades to come, Mao’s determination to preside over a military superpower in his own lifetime was the single most important factor affecting the fate of the Chinese population.

MAO WAS IN a rush for his arsenal. In September 1952, when Chou En-lai gave Stalin Peking’s shopping list for its First Five-Year Plan (1953–57), Stalin’s reaction was: “This is a very unbalanced ratio. Even during wartime we didn’t have such high military expenses.” “The question here is … whether we will be able to produce this much equipment.” According to official statistics, spending during this period on the military, plus arms-related industries, took up 61 percent of the budget — although in reality the percentage was higher, and would rise as the years progressed.

In contrast, spending on education, culture and health combined was a miserable 8.2 percent, and there was no private sector to fall back on when the state failed to provide. Education and health care were never free, except in the case of epidemics, and often not available, for either the peasants or the urban underclass. In order to save money on health, the regime resorted to schemes like hygiene drives, which called for killing not only flies and rats, but in some areas also cats and dogs, although, curiously, it never extended to cleaning up China’s stinking, and pestiferous, toilets, which survived uncleansed throughout Mao’s reign.

The Chinese people were told, vaguely but deliberately, that equipment from the USSR used in China’s industrialization was “Soviet aid,” implying that the “aid” was a gift. But it was not. Everything had to be paid for — and that meant mainly with food, a fact that was strictly concealed from the Chinese people, and still largely is. China in those days had little else to sell. Trade with Russia, Chou told a small circle, “boils down to us selling agricultural products to buy machines.” Throughout the 1950s, “the main exports were rice, soybeans, vegetable oil, pigs’ bristles, sausage skins, raw silk, pork, cashmere, tea and eggs,” according to today’s official statistics. In this period Mao told the Indonesian President Sukarno, almost flippantly: “Frankly speaking, we haven’t got a lot of things [for export] apart from some apples, peanuts, pig bristles, soybeans.”

What China was exporting to Russia, and its satellites, consisted overwhelmingly of items that were basic essentials for its own people, and included all the main products on which China’s own population depended for protein: soybeans, vegetable oil, eggs and pork, which were always in extremely short supply. With only 7 percent of the world’s arable land, and 22 percent of its population, land was too precious to raise livestock in most places, so most Chinese had no dairy products and very little meat. Even grain, the staple, was on Mao’s export list, while China’s grain production was woefully inadequate, and the country had traditionally been a large importer of grain.

Mao was ready to deprive his people of food so that he could export it. One instruction to the Foreign Trade Ministry in October 1953 read:

Regarding commodities that are crucial to the survival of the nation (e.g., grain, soybeans and vegetable oil), it is true we need to supply the Chinese population, but we cannot only stress this … We must think of every way to squeeze them out for export [our italics] … As for commodities (such as meats, peanuts) that are less essential to the survival of the population, we have all the more reason to cut down on consumption inside China, to satisfy the need for export.

Another order in July 1954 read:

For commodities like meats, the internal market should be reduced and shrunk to guarantee exports. Other commodities like fruits, teas … should be exported as much as possible, and should only supply the internal market if there is anything left … [our italics]

The main impact fell on the peasants. Policy was to guarantee basic food to the urban population, with strict rationing, and leave the peasants to starve when the inevitable food shortages struck. Anyone registered as a peasant at the time Mao took power was forbidden to move into urban areas or to change their status. Peasants were not even allowed to move to another village except with special permission (e.g., if they got married). Otherwise, they were nailed to their village for life. And so were their children and grandchildren. This total immobility was something new in China. Traditionally, peasants had always been able to move geographically as well as socially. They had been able to aspire to fame and fortune — as Mao had done. If there was a famine, they had been able to flee into towns or other regions and at least try their luck. Now, even at the best of times, they could never hope to improve their lot, except when the government enrolled them into the army, or into a factory. And when disaster struck, they would starve or die in their villages.

Once, as he was promising to send East Germany more soybeans, Chou En-lai told his German interlocutors: “If people starve here it will be in the countryside not in the cities, the way it is with you.” In other words: our starving won’t be seen.

The peasants had to produce the food for export with virtually no help from the state, a fact confirmed to the rubber-stamp Supreme Council on 27 February 1957 by Premier Chou when he said bluntly: “Nothing to agriculture.” For raising output, Mao’s agriculture chief spelled out to his staff, “we depend on the peasants” two shoulders and one bottom”—i.e., manual labor and excrement used as manure.

As well as having to produce food to pay for military imports from Russia and Eastern Europe, the peasants were having to part with precious produce to make up the massive donations Mao was dispensing to boost his turf aspirations. China not only provided food for poor countries like North Korea and North Vietnam, it gave liberally to very much richer European Communist regimes, especially after Stalin’s death, when Peking floated the idea of Mao becoming the head of the world Communist camp. When Romania staged a youth jamboree, Mao donated 3,000 tons of vegetable oil — while the peasants in China who produced the oil were getting about one kilogram per year, which had to do for both cooking and lighting, as electricity was non-existent in most of the countryside. After the 1956 uprising in immeasurably wealthier Hungary, Peking sent the regime 30 million rubles’ worth of goods and a £3.5 million “loan” in sterling; and loans, as Mao kept saying, did not have to be repaid.

When the first big revolt in Eastern Europe erupted in East Germany in June 1953, just after Stalin died, Mao jumped in to bolster the dictatorship there, immediately offering 50 million rubles’ worth of food. But the Germans wanted more, offering in exchange machines that China had no use for. Peking’s foreign trade managers had actually decided to turn the exchange down, but Mao intervened and ordered them to accept, with the ludicrous argument that “They are much harder-up than we are. We must make it our business to take care of them” (Mao’s emphasis). It was thanks to Chinese food that East Germany was able to lift food rationing in May 1958.

Ordinary Chinese not only had no say in Mao’s largesse, they had no idea they had made such generous donations. The pleasure was all Mao’s. When East Germany’s brutish leader, Walter Ulbricht, came to China in 1956 and paid Mao a ritual compliment, Mao responded grandly: “You must not copy us to the dot.” Mao was talking like a mentor. He also wanted to ascertain that Ulbricht was oppressive enough. “After the 17th of June [1953 uprising in East Berlin],” Mao asked, “did you take a large number of them prisoner?” He suggested one Chinese “model” the East Germans might consider copying: the Great Wall. A wall, he said, was a great help with keeping out people like “fascists.” A few years later the Berlin Wall went up.

The highest proportion of GNP the richest countries gave as foreign aid barely ever exceeded 0.5 percent, and the US figure at the turn of the millennium was far below 0.01 percent. Under Mao, China’s reached an unbelievable 6.92 percent (in 1973) — by far the highest the world has ever known.

CHINESE PEASANTS were amongst the poorest in the world, as Mao knew very well. He knew equally well that peasants were starving under him. On 21 April 1953, on the eve of launching the Superpower Program, he noted on a report: “About 10 percent of agricultural households are going to suffer food scarcity in spring and summer … even out of food altogether.” This was happening “every year,” he wrote. How could the country’s limited stock of food pay for Mao’s vast ambitions? Elementary arithmetic alone would suggest there were going to be massive deaths from starvation if he went ahead sending food abroad at these levels.

Mao did not care. He would make dismissive remarks like: “Having only tree leaves to eat? So be it.” All economic statistics and information were top-secret, and ordinary people were kept completely in the dark. They were also powerless to influence policies. But the men at the top were in the picture, and one of them, Mao’s No. 2, Liu Shao-chi, balked at the colossal consequences of Mao’s program. He was in favor of industrialization and superpower status, but he wanted to reach these goals at a more gradual tempo, by building a stronger economic foundation and raising living standards first.

“We cannot develop heavy industry first,” he told a small audience on 5 July 1951, because it “consumes a tremendous amount of money with no returns … and the only way available to us to raise the money is by depriving our people … Now people’s life is very miserable. We must raise people’s living standards first,” a process he suggested would take ten years. This, he said, should be the Party’s priority. “People are very poor,” he wrote. “They desperately need to lead a better life, a well-to-do and cultured life.” “The [Party’s] most basic task must be to fulfill this wish …” “Peasants,” he said on another occasion, “want to have new clothes, to buy socks, to wear shoes, to use … mirrors, soap and handkerchiefs … their children want to go to school.” This was the kind of language Mao never used.

Five years Mao’s junior, Liu also came from a village in Hunan, only a few kilometers away from Mao’s. He had gone to Moscow in 1921 and joined the Party there as a 23-year-old student. Enormously attractive to women, he was a very serious young man, with no hobbies except reading, and disliked idle chatter. He first met Mao when he returned to Hunan in 1922, but the two did not strike up any special relationship until the late 1930s, when Liu became Mao’s ally through sharing his cold vision of using the war with Japan to destroy Chiang Kai-shek. Mao promoted him to be his No. 2 in 1943. In 1945, when Mao had to go to Chongqing, and again in 1949–50, when he was in Moscow, he appointed Liu as his standin. Mao relied on him as his chief executive.

Liu was the most able all-round lieutenant Mao had found. He also combined total discretion with a willingness to be at Mao’s beck and call day and night. Mao slept during the day and worked at night, and Liu changed his routine to try to synchronize with Mao. But Mao was erratic, and would often summon Liu when the latter was heavily drugged from the very strong pills he, like almost all of Mao’s lieutenants, needed to sleep. One of Liu’s secretaries recalled: “Whenever Chairman Mao’s secretary rang, the message was always: ‘Come this minute.’ … As the sleeping pills were working, [Liu] would look very tired, in agony. He often didn’t even have time to take a sip of the strong tea his man-servant made him, and set off to Mao’s place at once.” Most importantly for Mao, Liu harbored no ambitions to supplant him.

But around the time the Communists took power, serious disagreements emerged between the two about whether to give priority to becoming a military superpower via a forced march, or to improving living standards. Mao constantly mocked Liu’s espousal of the latter, retorting: “ ‘Oh, peasants’ lives are so hard’—the end of the world! I have never thought so.”

While Stalin was still alive, Mao held his fire so as not to give the Master any pretext to muscle in and sabotage him. Stalin had been trying to undermine Mao by showering attention on Liu during Liu’s visits to Russia; and, not least, by taking the unprecedented step of having Pravda call Liu “the General Secretary” of the CCP.

As soon as Mao learned that Stalin was dying, at the beginning of March 1953, he leaped into action. First he sent out signals that Liu might be removed. At the time, Liu was in the hospital, having had an appendectomy in late February. Mao made sure he stayed there, even going as far as blocking the news of Stalin’s death from him. Mao went to the Soviet embassy twice in connection with Stalin’s illness and death, both times accompanied by other top leaders, but not Liu, although Liu was well enough to move around. When People’s Daily published a cable of good wishes for Stalin from the Sino-Soviet Friendship Association, the message was not signed by Liu, who was president of the Association, but by a subordinate, which was extraordinary in terms of protocol. And Liu was excluded from the memorial ceremony on Tiananmen Square.

In May Mao sent Liu a sharp, indeed menacing, letter saying: “all documents and telegrams issued in the name of the Center can only be issued after I have seen them. Otherwise, they are invalid [Mao’s emphasis]. Be careful.” Another told Liu (and Chou and army chief Peng) to “check all telegrams and documents issued in the name of the Center or the Military Council … to see whether there are any … that have not been seen by me … In the past, several decisions … have been issued unauthorized, without me having seen them. This is intolerably wrong, and is a sabotage of rules …” These were very strong words indeed, and they were designed to make Liu sweat all the more.

Next came a direct and open attack on Liu to a small but crucial audience. On 15 June, when the Politburo gathered to hear Mao announce his industrialization program, Mao sharply condemned Liu, calling him “right-wing.” Even though he did not name Liu, every listener knew whom he was driving at. Mao had taken precautions for the most unlikely eventuality of Liu using the Praetorian Guard, which also guarded Liu, to fight back. He had had a hush-hush investigation conducted beforehand to gauge individual members’ relationships with Liu. On the day of the meeting, some of the guards were rounded up and transferred out of Peking.

Over the following months, Mao denounced Liu by proxy to ever larger audiences, criticizing key Liu protégés like finance minister Bo Yi-bo, who had devised a tax system that would not produce anything like the revenue that Mao’s program demanded. Then in September Mao handpicked a lower-rank official to insinuate to a Party conference that Liu and his protégés had suspect pasts, and could be enemy agents. This was a frightening accusation. Liu was in danger of losing far more than just his job.

Mao let Liu stew for months, and then on 24 December 1953 he suddenly announced to the Politburo that he was going away on holiday, and was appointing Liu to stand in for him, which meant that Liu was still No. 2. The psychological effect of being thus pulled back from the precipice was considerable, and Liu caved in to Mao’s demands that he recant his old views to his top colleagues, which he did, groveling for three days and nights non-stop. Mao had what he wanted: a hyper-intimidated Liu.

MAO HAD BEEN threatening to replace Liu with another man called Gao Gang, the head of Manchuria. Gao was a hard-liner and supported Mao’s Superpower Program 100 percent. He had been the most vocal critic of Liu’s views in the top circle. Mao showed that he liked Gao and disliked Liu, and hinted to Gao that he was considering giving him Liu’s job. Gao talked to other top people about what Mao had said, and played the key role in attacking Liu. Many in the inner circle assumed that Gao was about to take Liu’s place.

Then, out of the blue, Mao reinstated Liu — and purged Gao, who was charged with “plotting to split the Party in order to usurp the power of the Party and the state.” This was the first top-level purge since the regime had come to power, and it spread an atmosphere of disquiet and dread. When the Dalai Lama arrived in Peking just after Gao was condemned, his entourage immediately alerted him to the purge as an ill omen. It was the first topic the Dalai Lama himself wanted to discuss with us when we interviewed him forty-five years later.

The real reason for the purge involved Soviet Russia. As boss of Manchuria, Gao had had a lot to do with the Russians, and he had shot his mouth off to them, even telling Stalin’s liaison Kovalev about disagreements in the Politburo, where he claimed that Liu headed a “pro-American faction.” Mao got to know about this when he was in Moscow in 1949, when Stalin gave him a report by Kovalev, partly based on talks with Gao. Gao told other Russians that Liu was too soft on the bourgeoisie. He complained about Chou, too, telling the Russians that he had had a “serious clash” with Chou over the Korean War in the Politburo.

That Gao was a talker had been noticed by a British couple in Yenan a decade before. Gao, they wrote, was “perhaps the most indiscreet of all the Communists whom we interviewed.” They must have been quite struck, as Gao was then a complete unknown.

For Mao, to have underlings talking about the inner workings of his regime to any outsider was an absolute taboo. By purging Gao he wanted to send a message: you can never be too tight-lipped, even — and especially — with the Russians. As the Superpower Program depended overwhelmingly on the Soviet Union, there was going to be a lot of contact with Russians. Mao feared that fraternization might lead to a loosening of his grip, and conceivably threaten his power. On this score, Mao never took the slightest chance. His vigilance in anticipating potential threats was the main reason he died in his bed. Mao could not ban all contacts with Russians, so he moved to put an invisible barrier between his men and “the brothers.” Gao provided a perfect vehicle for warning his underlings: Don’t get too fraternal with the Russians!

Soon, Mao used the Gao case explicitly to order his top echelon to disclose any relationships with any Russians, what he termed “illicit contacts with foreign countries”:

Do we have such people in China, who give information to foreigners behind the back of the Centre [i.e., me]? I think there are — Gao Gang for one … I hope those comrades will disgorge totally … Everything should go through the Centre [me again]. As for information, don’t pass it … Those who have passed information, own up and you won’t be pursued. If you don’t, we’ll check, and we will find out. You will be in trouble.

Mao did not define what counted as information, so the rule of thumb was simply not to talk to foreigners about anything.

Mao designated Chou En-lai chief “prosecutor” against Gao, while he absented himself. At the meeting in February 1954 when Chou delivered his onslaught on Gao (who was present), tea mugs were, unusually, filled beforehand, to prevent servants eavesdropping. But as the leaders were unable to proceed without more hot water, a tea boy was allowed in. He was stunned to see the usually suave Chou transformed, contorted into a picture of ferocity, a side that the outside world never got to see. Chou, the old assassin, had taken the precaution of getting two trusted subordinates to bring along pistols, something normally absolutely unthinkable at top-level meetings.

Gao was beside himself with shock about how Mao had set him up, and he tried to electrocute himself, unsuccessfully, on 17 February. For this he was forced to apologize, but his apology was rejected with the Party’s customary pitilessness; this act of despair was branded “an out-and-out traitor’s action against the Party.” He was kept under house arrest, and finally succeeded in ending his life six months later, after accumulating enough sleeping pills to do the trick.

In the Communist world a conspiracy was always preferred to a lone schemer. To make up a “conspiracy,” Mao picked on the head of the Organization Department, Rao Shu-shi, who was accused of forming an “anti-Party alliance” with Gao, although the two were not particularly close. Rao had been the head of the CCP intelligence network in America, inter alia, and this was very possibly why Mao wanted him behind bars, as Mao was gearing up for a purge in his intelligence system. Rao was arrested, and died in prison twenty years later, in March 1975.

ON 26 DECEMBER 1953, having lit the fuse for Gao’s demise, Mao merrily celebrated his sixtieth birthday with his staff, drinking more wine than usual, even eating peaches, a symbol of longevity, though normally he did not like fruit. During the meal he hummed along to records of Peking opera and beat time on his thigh. Stalin had died, and Mao had successfully completed two maneuvers that were key for his Superpower Program: hammering his chief executive, Liu, into shape; and inoculating his top subordinates against any possible Russian contagion that might endanger his power.

Next day, when he arrived in picturesque lakeside Hangzhou, near Shanghai, he was in such good spirits that he could hardly wait to settle in before he ordered a game of mah-jong. Mao had been in Hangzhou thirty-two years before, in summer 1921, after the 1st Congress of the Communist Party. Then he had been a hard-up provincial teacher travelling on a Russian allowance. Now he was the master of China. His coming had been suitably prepared. A famous turn-of-the-century estate called Water and Bamboo had been picked for him. It was adorned with ponds and bamboo groves, and vines and palm trees, and enjoyed a panoramic view over the Western Lake. Villas next to it, and the hills behind it, were all incorporated into a single enormous estate, covering 36 hectares. The hill behind was hollowed out to provide a nuclear shelter. Mao stayed in an exquisite building, combining classical Chinese and exotic foreign styles, with pillars, doors and decorations which had been lovingly shipped in piece by piece by the original owner. But shortly afterwards, Mao had it torn down and replaced with his usual nondescript identikit structure. The creaking of the old timber had rattled his nerves with thoughts about assassins. He only felt safe in a reinforced concrete bunker.

Mao fell in love with the view. Every day, even in drizzle, he climbed the nearby peaks, which were specially cordoned off for him. He lingered over plum blossoms, sniffing at the petals. He chatted and joked with his staff. His mood was captured by his photographer, in a picture of a beaming plump-cheeked Mao, bathed in sunshine.

Soon the biggest snowfall in decades descended. Mao got up at the, for him, outlandish hour of 7:00 AM, and stood transfixed by the snow-clad southern garden. He then walked along a path blanketed with snow, which he ordered left unswept, to marvel at the lake in white. He tinkered with a poem.

Spring came, alternating between misty drizzle and dazzling sunshine, each day unfolding its masses of blossoms. During one pleasure trip, his female photographer, Hou Bo, gathered a bunch of wildflowers and presented them to Mao. Nobody seemed to know what the flower was called, so Mao said: Let’s name it the Hou Bo Flower.

Mao fancied a visit to the home of his favorite tea, Dragon Well village, which was nearby. The peasants were duly removed “for a mass meeting”—in fact for his security. But occasional surprise drop-ins were deemed safe enough, and so, on another occasion, Mao called in on one peasant house. The couple could not understand a word of his Hunan dialect, nor he theirs. Curious villagers started to converge, so Mao’s guards whisked him away.

On one excursion to the top of a hill, Mao saw a thatched hut on fire in the distance. The inhabitants were standing outside, helpless as the flames swallowed their home. According to Mao’s photographer, Mao “turned to me with a glance, and said coolly: ‘Good fire. It’s good to burn down, good to burn down!’ ”

The photographer was astonished. Sensing this, Mao said:” ‘Without the fire, they will have to go on living in a thatched hut.’

“ ‘But now it’s burnt down, where are they going to live?…’

“He did not answer my question, as if he hadn’t heard …”

Mao had no answer to this question. Throughout his reign, peasants had to fend for themselves when it came to housing. The state provided no funds. Even in urban areas, other than apartments for the elite and residential blocks in industrial complexes, virtually no new dwellings were built.

Watching the thatched cottage turned to ashes, Mao eventually said to himself: “Um, Really clean if the earth has fallen to complete void and nothingness!”

This was a line of poetry from the classic Dream of the Red Chamber. But Mao was doing more than just reciting poetry. This was an echo of the attraction to destruction that he had alarmingly expressed as a young man. He continued: “This is called: ‘No destruction, no construction.’ ”

Construction for Mao was exclusively related to becoming a superpower. Here in Hangzhou, he began revising the draft of the first “Constitution,” something he had only just got around to after more than four years in power. Among the things he wanted revised was the promise that his regime “protects all citizens’ safety and legal rights …” Mao underlined the words “all citizens” and wrote in the margin: “What exactly is a citizen?”

Flatterers had suggested that the document should be named the “Mao Tse-tung Code,” clearly with the Napoleonic Code in mind. Mao rejected the idea. He was averse to law, and wanted there to be nothing that could bind him. Indeed, hopelessly feeble as it was, the Constitution was soon to be discarded altogether.

One day Mao toured a temple, which had, as usual, been emptied for security reasons, except for one blind monk. On the altar was a wooden holder with bamboo slips for divination, and Mao asked his photographer to pick a slip for him. She shook the holder, took out a slip, and went to a bookcase containing old poetry books to find the line referred to on the slip. It read: “No peace, either inside or outside home.” There could be no question of presenting this inauspicious line, so she quickly picked another. It had a cheery message, and brought laughter.

The divination was eerily accurate. Mme Mao had come with their daughter, Li Na, to spend Chinese New Year, the traditional time of family reunion. But the visit had ended with Mme Mao in tears, asking for a plane to take her away. Hangzhou, famed not only for its scenery but also for its women, had caught Mao’s sexual fancy. He was to return forty-one times, partly for this reason. He liked young and apparently innocent women, whom underlings procured as partners for the weekly dances and for subsequent fornication.

Mao no longer felt sexual interest in his wife. Even before 1949, his Russian doctor Orlov had been treating him “for sexual problems” with her (Orlov acidly referred to Mme Mao as “the Queen” in a cable to Stalin). Then Mme Mao had suffered serious gynecological problems, for which she was treated in Russia, under the pseudonym “Yusupova,” as she stayed in a palace in Yalta that had belonged to Prince Yusupov, the man who killed Rasputin. (Stalin himself had stayed in it during the Yalta conference.) Her illness almost certainly put Mao further off her. He became more and more brazen in his philandering. Mme Mao was once found weeping by the lake in Zhongnanhai. “Don’t tell anyone,” she said to the man who saw her, Mao’s doctor. “The Chairman is someone no one can beat in political fighting, not even Stalin; nor can anyone beat him in having women, either.” Mme Mao grew increasingly difficult and hysterical, and vented her fury and frustration on the staff, routinely accusing her nurses of “deliberately tormenting” her, striking them, and demanding they be punished.

Meanwhile, as the divination on the bamboo slip uncannily described, quite a few of Mao’s colleagues were going through turmoil and dread. For the nation as a whole, economic policy was about to become drastically harsher as the Superpower Program got under way.

Chou told Stalin in September 1952 that China could also “collect” up to £1.6 billion sterling plus US$200m over five years, “mostly” through what he called “contraband.”

The threat of rustication functioned as a powerful deterrent to urban-dwellers not to step out of line. Everyone knew that being cast into the peasantry would bring on themselves and their families not only back-breaking labor, but the loss of any certainty of earning a livelihood, and that this misfortune would extend to future generations as well.

That Gao said too much was indirectly confirmed by the top Soviet adviser in China, Arkhipov. When we pushed him on the subject, he threw us a steely stare and said in a different tone of voice: “Why do you want to know so much about Gao Gang?”

37. WAR ON PEASANTS (1953–56 AGE 59–62)

FROM AUTUMN 1953, nationwide requisitioning was imposed, in order to extract more food to pay for the Superpower Program. The system followed that of a labor camp: leave the population just enough to keep them alive, and take all the rest. The regime decided that what constituted subsistence was an amount of food equivalent to 200 kg of processed grain per year, and this was called “basic food.”

But this figure was rarely achieved under Mao. In 1976, the year he died, after twenty-seven years in power, the average figure nationwide was only 190 kg. As city-dwellers got more, the average peasant’s consumption was considerably lower than 190 kg.

Mao wanted the peasants to have far less than this. They “only need 140 kg of grain, and some only need 110,” he declared. This latter figure was barely half the amount needed for mere subsistence. Even though Mao’s chosen minimum was not enforced at this stage, the results of his “squeeze-all” approach were painfully spelled out by some peasants to a sympathetic official within a year of the introduction of requisitioning. “Not a family has enough to eat.” “I worked for a year, and in the end I have to starve for a few months … My neighbors are the same.” “The harvest isn’t bad, but what’s the use? No matter how much we get in we don’t have enough to eat anyway …” As for the “basic food,” “no one has had that much.” In theory, anyone starving was supposed to be able to buy some food back, but the amounts were never adequate, and Mao was constantly berating officials that “Too much grain is sold back!” and urging them to slash the amount “enormously.”

Mao’s answer to the peasants’ plight was pitiless. They should eat sweet potato leaves, which were traditionally used only to feed pigs. “Educate peasants to eat less, and have more thin gruel,” he instructed. “The State should try its hardest … to prevent peasants eating too much.”

One of Mao’s economic managers, Bo Yi-bo, later acknowledged that under the requisitioning policy, “Most of the food the peasants produced was taken away.” And “force,” he said, was commonplace; people were “driven to death.” This violence was specifically endorsed by Mao, who discussed the consequences of the requisitioning with its architect, Chen Yun, on 1 October 1953. Next day, Mao told the Politburo that they were “at war” with the whole population: “This is a war on food producers — as well as on food consumers,” meaning the urban population who were now subjected to unprecedentedly low rationing. To justify treating peasants as enemies, Mao’s fatuous rationale was that “Marx and Engels never said peasants were all good.” When, days later, Chen Yun conveyed Mao’s instructions to provincial leaders in charge of extracting food, he told them they must be prepared for deaths and riots in 100,000 villages — one-tenth of all the villages in China. But this would not jeopardize Communist rule, he assured them, making a comparison with Manchukuo, where the occupying Japanese had requisitioned large amounts of grain. “Manchukuo,” he said, “would not have fallen if the Soviet Red Army had not come.” In other words, brute force à la japonaise would guarantee that peasants could not endanger the regime, no matter how hard it was squeezing them.

BY EARLY 1955, requisitioning had brought utter misery. Numerous reports reached Mao about peasants having to eat tree bark, and abandoning their babies because they had no food. Mao had installed many channels for gathering feedback at the grassroots, as he needed to keep his ear to the ground to maintain control. One channel was his guards. When they went home for visits that year, he asked them to report back about their villages. The picture they painted was bleak. One wrote that 50 percent of households in his village were short of food, and had had to eat tree leaves that spring. Another reported that people were having to depend on wild herbs for food, and were dying of starvation.

From other channels Mao learned that people were saying things like “What’s so good about socialism? Even now when we’ve just begun we are not allowed cooking oil”; and “The Communist Party is driving people to death!” A then unknown official in Guangdong province called Zhao Zi-yang (who became Party chief in the post-Mao era) reported that cadres were searching houses, tying peasants up and beating them to force them to surrender food, and sealing the houses of those who said they had nothing left. He cited the case of an old woman who hanged herself after being imprisoned inside her house. In one not atypical county, Gaoyao, 110 people were driven to suicide. If this figure is extrapolated to China’s 2,000-plus counties, the number of suicides in rural areas in this short period would be approaching a quarter of a million.

Some courageous individuals petitioned Mao. One prominent fellow traveler wrote to Mao that he had received many letters saying that peasants did not have enough energy to work because they were left too little food. Mao summed up: “10,000 reports [‘10,000’ expresses hugeness] about deaths of humans, deaths of animals, about people raiding granaries: 10,000 reports of darkness …” But Mao was completely unmoved. He would punish the fellow traveler with what he disdainfully called “a good bit of persecution.” He was given to say airily that people were “not without food all the year round — only six … or four months” [sic]. Senior officials who invoked the traditional concept of conscience (liang-xin) to beg him to go easy found themselves being slapped down with remarks like: “You’d better have less conscience. Some of our comrades have too much mercy, not enough brutality, which means they are not so Marxist.” “On this matter,” Mao said, “we indeed have no conscience! Marxism is that brutal.”

Mao turned the screw even tighter from mid-1955 by forcing the entire countryside into collective farms. This was to make it easier to enforce requisitioning. Previously, peasants could harvest their own crops and bring them home before handing over the state’s “share.” To Mao, this left a loophole: peasants could underreport the harvest and hide some of it, and checking nearly a hundred million households was not easy. With collectivization, however, the whole harvest went straight from the fields into the state’s hands, giving the regime complete control over how it was allocated. As one peasant said: “Once you join the collective, you only get food the government doles out to you.”

The other huge advantage of collectivization for Mao was that it made it much easier to keep the peasants under surveillance when they were working. With collectivization came slave-driving. Henceforth, the state dictated what hours peasants worked, and how hard. A People’s Daily editorial on New Year’s Day 1956 made it clear that the aim was to get peasants to double their working hours. Mao especially targeted women; those who used not to work in the fields would do so now.

To stifle resistance to both requisitioning and collectivization, Mao wielded his old panacea: terror. In May 1955 he talked about another “Five-Year Plan,” this time for suppression: “We must arrest 1.5 million counter-revolutionaries in five years … I am all for more arrests … Our emphasis is: arrest in a big way, a giant way …” Using the scatological language of which he was enamored, Mao added: “My farts [i.e., orders] are socialist farts, they have to be fragrant,” i.e., obeyed. Anyone resisting food confiscation or collectivization, and any official sympathetic to them, was termed a criminal, and notices announcing their sentences were plastered up across the country.

Collectivization of agriculture marked a big stride towards making China even more totalitarian. At the same time, Mao ordered the nationalization of industry and commerce in urban areas, to channel every single resource into the Superpower Program. However, businessmen were not persecuted like rural landlords, for pragmatic reasons. “The bourgeoisie,” Mao said, “are much more useful than … landlords. They have technical know-how and management skills.” Though he then proceeded to squander these managerial and technical talents spectacularly. In addition, China’s glorious handicrafts withered over the coming years. Repair and maintenance shops would dwindle in number, greatly increasing the misery of everyday life. “We started socialism, and everything disappears,” Liu Shao-chi remarked pithily.

To scare state employees into conforming, Mao launched a purge campaign in which no fewer than 14.3 million men and women on the state payroll were put through terrifying vetting that involved “confessions and informing,” frequent public denunciation meetings, and physical abuse. Offices and residential buildings were turned into detention centers, as were sports halls and university dormitories. Mao decreed that “Counter-revolutionaries … make up … around 5 percent” of those vetted, which would mean that 715,000 people were condemned and received various punishments, including execution. In fact, Mao indicated that more people than this could be done in, as one of his instructions reads: “Whenever this figure [5 percent] is exceeded, authorization should be obtained.”

This campaign was accompanied by a clampdown on literature and the arts. With his characteristic thoroughness, Mao had begun to strangle culture from the moment he took power. The cinema industry was almost shut down. In 1950, 39 feature films were produced; in 1952 the figure was 5. In 1954 he had started a drive to eradicate the influence of the great non-Communist writers, historians and scholars, some of whom had fled abroad, or to Taiwan. Now he turned to those who had stayed and who showed some independence. Mao picked on a well-known writer called Hu Feng, who had called for a more liberal artistic environment, and had a following. In May 1955, Hu was publicly denounced and thrown into prison, from which he only emerged, his mind destroyed, after Mao died more than two decades later.

The Hu Feng case was headlined in the press. And it served another purpose — to scare people out of writing to each other about their views. Letters that Hu and his followers had exchanged were published, revealing thoughts critical of the regime, and these were presented as evidence against them. As a result, people became wary of putting any thoughts on paper. Not being able to write one’s thoughts down, on top of not being able to voice them, or having to censor them all the time, undermined people’s ability to form their own independent judgment.

Terror worked. At the beginning of 1956, Mao told the top echelon:

The first half of 1955 was simply foul … with black clouds all over the sky … There were curses against us everywhere. People said we were no good. All because [we took] a few bits of grain. In the latter half of the year, the curses disappeared. Some happy events emerged. A good harvest and collectivisation were two big happy events, and then there was the purge of counter-revolutionaries, another happy event.

Another “happy” event, which Mao kept quiet about, was in many ways the most significant of all. He had acquired the single thing dearest to his heart: the start-up technology to make the atomic bomb.

In 1953, Mao had failed to get the Bomb out of Moscow through the device of trying to prolong the Korean War. But he soon found another way — by starting another war, this one concerning Taiwan. In July 1954, Peking gave the appearance of seriously preparing to go to war over Taiwan. Chou En-lai went to Moscow and gave Mao’s message to the Kremlin: he must have a war to “liberate Taiwan.”

In fact, China’s military chiefs had told Mao there was little chance of a sea crossing succeeding, and he had actually decided not to make a move on Taiwan until he was ready. The point of this hullabaloo about attacking Taiwan was really to push the situation to the brink of nuclear confrontation with America, which would face Russia with the possibility of having to retaliate on China’s behalf unless it let Mao have the Bomb.

On 3 September, Mainland artillery opened fire on the Nationalist-held island of Quemoy, which lies only a few kilometers off the coast, and was considered the jumping-off point for any move on Taiwan. This detonated what became known as the “first Taiwan Strait crisis.” Washington perceived the crisis to be between itself and Peking, but in fact it was a ploy by Mao to exert pressure on Moscow.

Soon afterwards, Nikita Khrushchev, who had just established himself as No. 1 in the Kremlin, arrived in Peking for the fifth anniversary of the Communist regime on 1 October 1954, accompanied by an array of senior colleagues, something unimaginable under Stalin. Khrushchev came determined to establish the best possible relations. He wiped much of Stalin’s slate clean, offering to scrap the secret annexes in the 1950 treaty which infringed on China’s interests. He also agreed to supply more equipment for the 141 arms factories already under way, and to sell Mao another 15 enterprises, and extend a new loan of 520m rubles.

Mao immediately seized the initiative and requested help to build his own Bomb to deter the Americans. Asked by Khrushchev what might prompt a US attack, he cited the Taiwan crisis. Khrushchev attempted to talk him out of making his own Bomb by promising shelter under Russia’s nuclear umbrella, and guaranteeing to retaliate if China was attacked. Khrushchev also adduced the economic argument that making the Bomb was too expensive for China. Mao acted as though his national pride was offended. Though this irritated Khrushchev, the Soviet leader reluctantly promised to consider helping China build a nuclear reactor.

Soon after Khrushchev left, Mao escalated the crisis by bombing and strafing more Nationalist-held islands. US President Eisenhower responded by agreeing to sign a mutual defense treaty with Taiwan. Mao pressed on, apparently intent on taking the offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu — and more. His calculation was to nudge America into threatening to use nuclear weapons. In March 1955 the US said it would use nuclear weapons under certain circumstances. Eisenhower very deliberately told a press conference on the 16th that he could see no reason why they should not be used “just exactly as you would use a bullet or anything else.” Mao had what he had aimed for — a situation in which China seemed to be in real danger of a US nuclear strike.

Not wishing to be drawn into a nuclear confrontation with America, Khrushchev took the momentous decision to provide China with the technical assistance to make the Bomb.

At this time, substantial uranium deposits had just been confirmed in Guangxi province. Mao was extremely excited, and immediately ordered a demonstration on 14 January. Geology chief Liu Jie recalled:

I put the uranium ore on the table, and … waved a Geiger counter across it. The Geiger counter went “ga-ga-ga …” Chairman Mao looked so intrigued. He laughed like a child, and picked up the Geiger counter himself, waving it across the ore, listening to the “ga-ga” sounds again … When I said goodbye … Mao held my hand and said: “Liu Jie — ah! I want you to know that what you are doing is the thing that decides our destiny!”

Afterwards, there was a banquet. Mao’s toast was straight to the point: “Bottoms up … to having our own atom bombs as quickly as possible!”

In April, the Russians agreed to build China the two key items needed to make a Bomb: a cyclotron and a nuclear reactor. Mao was en route to becoming a nuclear power. Large groups of Chinese scientists set off to be trained in Russia. In December, news came that the Russians had committed to help build a comprehensive nuclear industry in China. Mao was ecstatic. On the advice of Russian scientists, a twelve-year nuclear plan was drawn up. As 1956 dawned, Mao told his aides he was in better spirits than when he had taken China six years before. He felt on top of the world, and announced grandly to his inner circle: “We must control the Earth!”

TO CORRESPOND WITH the twelve-year nuclear plan, in January 1956 Mao and a group of his cronies drafted a twelve-year plan for agriculture. This was really Mao’s scheme to extract much more food to fund his upgraded and expanded Superpower Program. It ordered peasants to produce the equivalent of 500 billion kg of grain per annum by the end of the twelve years, more than triple the highest-ever previous annual output (in 1936). And this tall order had to be achieved with virtually no investment, not even of fertilizer.

At this point, Mao met with new resistance — this time from virtually the whole Politburo, spearheaded by the usually doglike Chou En-lai, who was in charge of planning, and Chou was backed by Liu. They all knew that Mao’s astronomical output target was unattainable. Mao had set the figure by a process of “back-calculation,” starting not from reality, but from the amount of food that he would need to fund his purchases, and working back from there. The obvious conclusion was that Mao’s plan would involve extracting a much larger percentage of the harvest from the peasantry than before. As the peasants were already living on a knife-edge, millions, at a minimum, would be tipped over the edge into starvation and death.

Realizing the implications, in February 1956, Chou cut spending on industrial projects by over a quarter. He was just as keen as Mao for China to be a superpower, but he was willing to face up to the fact that the country did not have nearly enough resources to pay for everything Mao wanted, much less simultaneously. So he opted for focusing on the nuclear program and key projects, and cutting back on other projects, which was necessitated anyway by shortages of basic materials like steel, cement and timber.

Mao, however, wanted all the projects, and all at once. Quite apart from his devil-may-care attitude to his subjects’ welfare, Mao had no grasp of economics. According to Bo Yi-bo, Mao asked to read and listen to reports from the ministries at this time, but “he found it extremely taxing,” and complained that the reports contained “only dull lists and figures, and no stories.” Once, as he listened to a minister, he knitted his eyebrows, and said it was “worse than being in prison” (where he had never been). Chou En-lai found himself being admonished for “flooding Chairman Mao with boring materials and figures.” Mao had trouble even with basic numbers. Once, while he was talking about trade with Japan, his prepared notes contained a figure of US$280 million, but one line later he wrote this as US$380 million, throwing the whole calculation out by US$100 million. “Statistics and numbers were not in any way sacred to him,” Yugoslavia’s No. 2, Edvard Kardelj, observed after he met Mao in 1957. “He said, for example, ‘In two hundred years’ time, or perhaps in forty.’ ” The chief Soviet economic adviser in China, Ivan Arkhipov, told us, with a sigh of exasperation, that Mao “had no understanding, absolutely no understanding at all” of economics.

In April 1956, Mao told his colleagues that the cuts must be restored, but for once they dug their heels in. Mao dismissed the meeting in a fury. Afterwards, Chou went to see him and begged him to accept the cuts, saying, most extraordinarily, that his “conscience would not allow” him to obey Mao’s orders. This sent Mao into a mad rage, but he could not stop the cuts going through.

Mao’s colleagues stood up to him because, hard men though they were, the consequences — millions dying of starvation — were too appalling. They were also emboldened by an event that had just occurred in Moscow. There, on 24 February 1956, at the 20th Congress of the the Soviet Party, Khrushchev had denounced Stalin for his killings and tyrannical behavior — and for the costs of his forced-march industrialization, a process which in fact was a lot less extreme than Mao’s was to be. Mao’s colleagues now started criticizing Stalin on these same issues (always within the confines of the inner circle). Liu called Stalin’s peasant policy one of his “major mistakes.” Former Party No. 1 Lo Fu observed that Stalin “put too much emphasis on … heavy industry.” “When I was ambassador to Russia,” he noted, “I went to the shops and found almost nothing to buy. They are also always short of food … We should draw a big lesson.” “We will be making big mistakes if we ignore agriculture,” Chou told the State Council on 20 April. “The lessons in the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries all proved this.” The parallels with Mao’s practices hardly needed laboring.

Mao did not mind seeing Stalin denounced, but not over these issues, which were at the core of his own rule. He tried to hold the line with the crude formulation that Stalin was 70 percent correct and only 30 percent mistaken. The 30 percent was not to do with murder, torture and economic misrule, but mostly with how Stalin had treated Mao Tse-tung.

But Mao could not come out openly against Khrushchev, who carried the authority of the Soviet Union, the head of the Communist camp — and was giving Mao so many arms factories, plus the Bomb. What was more, Khrushchev’s sudden and drastic denunciation of Stalin had taken Mao by surprise and made him sit up and take notice of Khrushchev. As Mao observed, Khrushchev’s move had destabilized the whole Communist camp and “shaken the entire world.” It struck awe into Mao, and made him feel he was dealing with somebody unusually bold, unpredictable and not to be trifled with. He commented several times in a pensive mood: “Khrushchev really has guts, he dares to touch Stalin.” “This indeed needs courage.”

Mao felt he had to be careful. In this situation, he could not rebut his colleagues when they cited Khrushchev to oppose his policies. Frustrated and angry, he left Peking to ponder a solution in the provinces. The provincial bosses (known as first secretaries) were a special group selected for their blind devotion. They had to be 100 percent yes-men, as they were the on-the-spot enforcers who made sure that every corner of the vast country did what Mao said.

Sudden unscheduled departures were routine for Mao, but this time he left Peking in an unprecedented manner. He got on the phone himself to his trusted follower, air force chief Liu Ya-lou, out of the blue, in the deep of one night at the end of April, and told him to have planes standing by. Mao had never taken a plane, except in 1945, to Chongqing, under pressure from Stalin. Now he could not wait to be among his cronies.

Because this was Mao’s first flight with his own air fleet, inordinate measures were taken in the way of both comfort and security. A large wooden bed was installed in his plane, and the crew were only told who their passenger was at the last minute. To them, Mao appeared somewhat distracted; sitting in silence, he let his cigarette burn into a long column of ash before he suddenly seemed to wake up, and ordered the plane to take off. Mao landed first at Wuhan, where he was met by the local chief, an arch-devotee, who had installed a big statue of Mao in the airport waiting room — perhaps one of the first in China. Mao showed annoyance, as this was just after Khrushchev’s denunciation of the cult of personality, and told the devotee to get rid of it; but the man could not tell whether Mao really meant it or not, and the statue stayed.

Mao then flew on to the southern provincial capital of Canton, to be met by another major acolyte, as well as by Mme Mao. His vast estate here, “the Islet,” sat on the Pearl River, so river traffic was stopped and that stretch of the waterway was sealed off. Mao’s entourage was banned from receiving visitors or letters, or making telephone calls, much less going out. The weather was steamy, and even five giant barrels of ice in Mao’s room made little difference. The grounds, blooming with tropical shrubs, swarmed with mosquitoes and midges. DDT was bought from Hong Kong to kill them, without total success. Mao lost his temper with the servants, whom he blamed for doing too little swatting.

What was really getting to Mao was events in Peking, where his colleagues, particularly his Nos. 2 and 3, Liu and Chou, continued to defy his wishes, and even pressed harder to cut back on military — industrial projects. In thwarted fury, Mao decided to flash them a unique warning signal. At the end of May, he left Canton for Wuhan to swim in the Yangtze, the biggest river in China. He wanted to demonstrate his resolve to take on his opponents, and his stamina to see the battle through.

At Wuhan, the Yangtze spreads wide, and many of his entourage tried to dissuade him from plunging in. But Mao felt safe. As one of his chief guards remarked, he “would not do anything … that was risky.” Later, Mao wanted to swim in the Yangtze Gorges, but he dropped the idea the minute he learned that the water was seriously treacherous. In Wuhan, scores of officials, from the province chief downward, joined security men to test the eddies and undertows. When Mao actually got into the water, dozens of specially trained guards formed a cordon around him, followed by three boats.

Mao swam across the river on three occasions. There were high winds and big waves, but he was unperturbed, flaunting his strength. Before his first swim, he stood and posed for photographs at the prow of the boat, looking to his entourage “like an unshakeable mountain.” On the last day that he swam, in drizzle, several tens of thousands of people were organized to watch him from a distance, shouting “Long Live Chairman Mao!” This rare public appearance was Mao’s way to get his message out to his colleagues. He further showed his determination in a poem about the swims. Part of it read:

I don’t care — whether the winds thrash me or the waves pound me,

I meet them all, more leisurely than strolling in the garden-court.

Back in Peking, Mao’s colleagues stuck to their guns. On 4 June the Politburo endorsed further spending cuts, and canceled more industrial projects. Mao returned to Peking that afternoon, but his presence made no difference.

On the 12th, Liu sent Mao a draft of an editorial he (Liu) had commissioned for People’s Daily. Its target, as its title stated, was “the mindset of impatience.” It criticized people who “plan actions beyond their means, and try to force things that cannot be achieved” and “want to achieve everything in one morning,” and “so create waste.” “This mindset of impatience,” it said, “exists first and foremost among the leading cadres,” who were “forcing” the country into it. As Mao was later to say, these strictures were plainly aimed at him. In a fury, he jotted three characters on it: “I won’t read.” But the editorial came out nonetheless.

Mao’s problem was that this was a time of great uncertainty for him — in some ways even more uncertain than under Stalin, who had fundamentally been committed to Mao because Mao was a Stalinist. But Khrushchev had rejected Stalinism, and there was no telling if this bulldozer might not turn on Stalinist leaders — maybe even on Mao himself. Indeed, Khrushchev had just brought down the Stalinist Hungarian Party chief, Rákosi, the only European Communist leader Stalin had trusted to talk to the Chinese leader during Mao’s visit to Russia. Furthermore, in August, emboldened by Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin, a move had been made to try to vote North Korea’s seemingly well-entrenched dictator Kim Il Sung out of power at a Party plenum.

Mao, too, was facing a Party conclave: the first congress of his own Party since taking power, which was set for September. He could not delay it, as it had been widely publicized, and the new climate since Khrushchev’s exposure of Stalin was very much one of abiding by the rules. Mao’s concern was that if his colleagues felt cornered they might try something at the congress, like kicking him upstairs, or even voting him out, by exposing the full implications of the Superpower Program. Only a few weeks before, Khrushchev’s delegate to Mao’s congress, Anastas Mikoyan, had supervised the dethronement of Rákosi in Hungary.

Mao took a series of steps to make sure that the congress posed no threat. First he fired warning shots across his colleagues’ bows. A few days before the congress, on 10 September, he reminisced to them about how much opposition he had faced in the past, and how he had always prevailed. Most unusually, he volunteered that he had made “mistakes” in the past, mentioning the purge in the early 1930s, and the two biggest disasters on the Long March, Tucheng and Maotai, which he called “the real mistakes.” This was not, as it might seem, an apology, but a way of driving home the message: Nothing can topple me; none of these mistakes, however disastrous, made the slightest difference. So don’t even try.

But Mao’s main tactic was to appear conciliatory and willing to compromise. He allowed his own cult to be played down by letting the phrase “Mao Tse-tung Thought” be dropped from the Party Charter — although he made up for this with other forms of self-promotion, like having himself portrayed as the wise leader who had always rejected the cult. In the end he managed to turn the anti-personality cult tide to his advantage by having portraits of his colleagues taken down, and by getting rid of slogans like “Long live Commander-in-Chief Zhu De!” making himself the sole focus of worship.

Mao gave the impression that he was making other important concessions, not least by letting colleagues speak about the rule of law. Liu Shao-chi promised to stop massive killings and violence, and to set up a legal system: “We must … convince everyone … that as long as he does not violate the law, his citizen’s rights are guaranteed and he will not be violated …” Another report criticized “campaigns,” which were the essence of Mao’s rule. Mao had the last laugh, though. He let a criminal code be drafted, but then made sure it was never approved in his lifetime.

Mao’s most important concession was to relax the timetable for the Superpower Program. In the main report to the congress, he deleted his own pet slogan “More and Faster …,” and allowed the deadline of fifteen years to be replaced with “in a rather long time.” The report reprised Liu’s criticisms of over-hasty industrialization that “places too much burden on the people … and causes waste.” Mao endorsed lower levels of food requisitioning. The result was that in 1956 the average food allowance was 205 kg of grain (equivalent) — the highest amount there was ever to be under Mao. He accepted a further cut of 21 percent in investment in arms industries for 1957. As a result, 1957 was, like 1956, a relatively better year for ordinary people.

For Mao, however, these concessions were intolerable; they slowed down his Program. Within a year he found ways to roll them back and reassert his old master plan.

38. UNDERMINING KHRUSHCHEV (1956–59 AGE 62–65)

WITHIN MONTHS of denouncing Stalin, Khrushchev had run into trouble. In June 1956, protests erupted in Poland at a factory suitably named “the Stalin Works” in the city of Poznan, and more than fifty workers were killed. Wladyslaw Gomulka, a former Party leader who had been imprisoned under Stalin, returned to power, espousing a more independent relationship with Moscow. On 19 October the Russians told Mao that anti-Soviet feelings were running high in Poland, and that they were thinking of using force to keep control.

Mao saw this as an ideal opening to undermine Khrushchev by presenting himself as the champion of the Poles and the opponent of “Soviet military intervention.” As this might involve a clash with Khrushchev, Mao weighed the pros and cons long and carefully, lying in bed. He convened the Politburo on the afternoon of the 20th. None counseled caution. Then, clad in a toweling robe, he summoned Russian ambassador Yudin and told him: If the Soviet army uses force in Poland, we will condemn you publicly. He asked Yudin to phone Khrushchev straight away. By now, Mao had concluded that Khrushchev was something of a “blunderer,” who was “disaster-prone.” The awe he had felt for Khrushchev at the time when the Soviet leader denounced Stalin was rapidly fading, replaced by a confidence that he could turn Khrushchev’s vulnerability to his own advantage.

Before Yudin’s message reached the Kremlin, Khrushchev had already made the decision not to use troops. On the 21st he invited the CCP and four other ruling parties to Moscow to discuss the crisis. Mao sent Liu Shao-chi, with instructions to criticize Russia for its “great-power chauvinism” and for envisaging “military intervention.” In Moscow, Liu proposed that the Soviet leadership make “self-criticisms.” Mao was aiming to cut Khrushchev down to size as leader of the Communist bloc, and make his own bid for the leadership, which had been his dream since Stalin’s death. Now an opportunity had come.

At this juncture, another satellite, Hungary, exploded. The Hungarian Uprising was to be the biggest crisis to date for the Communist world — an attempt not just to gain more independence from Moscow (which was the aim in Poland), but to overthrow the Communist regime and break away completely from the bloc. On 29 October the Russians decided to withdraw their troops from Hungary, and informed Peking. Up till this point, Mao had been urging a pull-back of Soviet forces from Eastern Europe, but he now realized that the regime in Hungary would collapse if the Russians left. So the next day he strongly recommended that the Soviet army stay on in Hungary and crush the uprising. Keeping Eastern Europe under communism took priority over weakening Khrushchev. Mao’s bid to become the head of the Communist camp would be worthless if the camp ceased to exist.

On 1 November, Moscow reversed itself. Its army remained in Hungary, and put down the Uprising with much bloodshed. The realisation that Russian troops were essential to keep the European satellites under Communist rule was a blow to Mao’s designs to ease these countries out of Moscow’s clutches. But he did not give up. On 4 November, as Russian tanks were rolling into Budapest, he told his Politburo: The Hungarians have to find a new way to control their country — and we must help. What he meant was that Eastern European regimes should adopt his method of rule and do their own brutal repression: that way, they would not have to rely on Russian tanks. Back in 1954, Mao had dispensed his ideas on statecraft to the man who was to be Hungary’s prime minister when the Uprising started, András Hegedüs. Hegedüs told us that Mao had urged him to keep a total grip on the army, and all but told him that the Hungarian regime should make its power unchallengeable through killing. When Mao heard about the Yugoslav dictator Tito arresting his liberal opponent Milovan Djilas, he showed “such delight,” army chief Peng noticed, “that his face lit up.” Mao was to continue advocating his Stalinist ways to Eastern European countries, hoping they would emulate his model of repression and embrace his leadership.

IN JANUARY 1957, Mao sent Chou En-lai to Poland to try to pull Gomulka into his fold. “The key to all questions,” Chou told Gomulka, was “to attack right-wing forces and hidden counter-revolutionaries … targeting one particular group at a time.” This advice held no appeal for Gomulka, who had spent years in Stalin’s prisons. Chou’s résumé to Mao afterwards revealed both Peking’s patronizing designs and its failure: “Polish leadership is correct … but still has not grasped the key question.” Later that year, in Moscow, Mao tried again by repeatedly offering Gomulka advice on how to hang on to power, referring to Gomulka’s government as “your court” (our italics). Mao did not get very far. Gomulka did not aspire to be a tyrant.

Mao hoped to prod the Poles into proposing him as head of the Communist camp. His convoluted way of doing this was to keep telling Gomulka that the Communist camp had to be “headed by the Soviet Union.” By saying that the camp must have a head, Mao was trying to broach the issue of who that head should be, hoping the Poles would look his way. Gomulka simply frowned each time Chou used the formula.

What the Poles wanted was more freedom, not more Stalinism, or more poverty. A vivid illustration of the yawning gap between Mao’s vision and Polish reality came when a group of Polish visitors told Mao that their fellow countrymen were unhappy with their low living standards, and that their Party felt it had to do something to meet its people’s wishes. Mao replied: “I do not believe the standard of living in Poland is too low. On the contrary, I feel that it is relatively very high: the Poles are eating more than two or three thousand calories every day, while [about 1,500] could be sufficient. If the people feel that there are too few consumer goods available, the [regime] should increase their propaganda efforts.” After Mao’s “monologue,” a Polish diplomat wrote, the Poles “realized that Chinese assistance could not be substantial or long-lasting because their program was even more ‘anti-people’ than the Soviet one.”

When Chou En-lai saw that it was unlikely he could line up the Poles to propose Mao as the head of the Communist camp, Mao turned at once to the other most anti-Moscow Communist country, Yugoslavia. An envoy already there in January 1957 was instantly instructed to request an ultra-private meeting with Tito, at which he asked the Yugoslav president to co-sponsor a world Communist summit with Peking, using the argument that the Soviet Party was in such disrepute that no one would listen to it. At that very moment, Mao was trashing Tito to his inner circle as an enemy — just as he trashed Gomulka. Mao’s cultivation of these two Communist countries was completely opportunistic, based solely on the fact that they were the most anti-Soviet. After listening to Mao’s pitch, Tito not only declined to co-sponsor such a conference, but would not even commit to attend it.

At the same time, Mao was trying again to weaken the Kremlin by getting the Russians to humiliate themselves. In Moscow in January 1957 Chou demanded that the Soviet leaders make groveling “open self-criticisms” and re-evaluate Stalin along Mao’s lines. The Russians bristled, and rebuffed him on both scores. Mao’s reaction was a rant to Chou, as he told his provincial chiefs: “I told Comrade En-lai on the phone that these people have been turned into cretins by their material gains, and the best way to deal with them is to give them a good round of stinking curses. What do they actually have? No more than 50 million tons of steel, 400 million tons of coal, and 80 million tons of oil … Big deal!” Mao was blaming his failure to supplant Khrushchev on China’s lack of economic muscle.

MAO HAD OTHER sources of frustration. One was the Middle East, where a major crisis erupted at the same time as Hungary, over the Suez Canal, which Egypt had nationalized in July 1956. On 29 October Israel attacked Egypt, as the spearhead of a secretly coordinated Israeli-Anglo-French invasion.

Mao was itching to act as Egypt’s protector and teacher. He staged mammoth demonstrations against the British and the French, involving nearly 100 million people. To a visitor from Franco’s Spain attending one in Peking, it was: “Worse than fascist meeting. There are leaders in all stands who start to cheer and everybody shout when they shout. These are not true demonstrators … very boring.” Mao dispensed advice to Egypt’s ambassador, General Hassan Ragab, on everything from how to handle the exiled King Farouk to how Egypt’s President Gamal Abdel Nasser could avoid assassination, urging the ambassador to “study the experience of China,” which was “very much worth studying.” Voicing barely veiled rivalry with Russia, Mao pressed aid on Ragab: “The Soviet Union will be doing all it can to help Egypt. China also would like to do our best to help Egypt, and our help does not have any strings attached. Whatever you need, just name it … Our aid to you does not have to be paid back … if you insist on paying back … then pay back in a hundred years.” China gave Nasser 20 million Swiss francs in cash, and rigged the bilateral trade balance heavily in Egypt’s favor.

Mao was so keen to play a role that on 3 November he sent Nasser a war plan. True to form, he offered cannon-fodder: 250,00 °Chinese volunteers. An offer Nasser did not take up — fortunately for the “volunteers,” but also for Mao, as China had no way of transporting this number of people to the Middle East.

Nasser paid scant attention. Nasser’s top adviser Mohamed Heikal told us that the president left Mao’s war plan at the bottom of his pile of correspondence. What Nasser really wanted was arms. He had decided to recognize Peking that spring so that China, which was outside the UN, could serve as a conduit for Russian arms in case there was a UN arms embargo.

When Cairo asked for arms in December, China at once offered to donate whatever it produced, cost-free. But it could only make small arms such as rifles, and the offer was not taken up. Mao found himself left on the sidelines. All this made him more impatient to speed up his Superpower Program, and to possess the Bomb; otherwise, as he put it, “people just won’t listen to you.”

FOR THIS HE NEEDED Khrushchev. Luckily for Mao, Khrushchev needed him too. Hardly had the tumult in Poland and Hungary subsided than Khrushchev was faced with a domestic crisis. In June 1957, Molotov, Malenkov and a group of old Stalinists tried to overthrow him. Khrushchev thwarted the attempt, but felt he needed to get explicit support from foreign Communist parties. Other Communist leaders sent their endorsements promptly, but not Mao. So Khrushchev dispatched Mikoyan to see Mao, who was in the southern lake city of Hangzhou. “I think they wanted someone senior to come to them,” Mikoyan’s interpreter told us. Mao let Mikoyan talk for much of the night before gesturing languidly over his shoulder to his former ambassador to Moscow: “Old Wang [Jia-xiang], where’s our cable?” The telegram of support had been ready all the time. Mao would, of course, back Khrushchev, who was, after all, the power in the Kremlin. He just wanted to make Khrushchev plead, and to up his price. China immediately asked to renegotiate the technology transfer agreement.

Moscow responded extremely positively, saying that it was happy to help China build atom bombs, and missiles, as well as more advanced fighter planes. It turned out that Moscow needed even more support from Mao. The Communist world’s biggest-ever summit was set for 7 November, the fortieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. For this event to go smoothly, Moscow had to have Mao on board.

Mao exploited this situation to the hilt. He said he would attend the summit only on condition that the Russians signed a prior agreement guaranteeing to hand over “the materials and the models for the production of an atomic weapon and the means to deliver it.” On 15 October, three weeks before the summit was to convene, Moscow signed a fateful deal agreeing to provide Mao with a sample A-bomb. Russian ministries were told “to supply the Chinese with everything they required to build their own Bomb.” So many missile experts were suddenly transferred to China that it caused “havoc” in Russia’s own program, according to one Russian expert. Russian experts also helped China choose missile and nuclear test sites deep in the interior.

Although the “father of the Russian Bomb,” Igor Kurchatov, strongly objected, Khrushchev sent a top nuclear scientist, Yevgenii Vorobyov, to supervise the construction of Mao’s Bomb, and during Vorobyov’s stay in China the number of Chinese nuclear specialists increased from 60 to 6,000. Russia “is willing to let us have all the blueprints,” Chou told a small circle. “Whatever it has made, including atom bombs and missiles, it is willing to give us. This is maximum trust, maximum help.” When Khrushchev later said: “they received a lot from us …” Mikoyan chipped in: “We built [nuclear weapons] plants for the Chinese.”

Soviet know-how enabled the Chinese to copy every shortcut the Russians had made, secure in the knowledge that these shortcuts worked, thus greatly speeding up Mao’s Bomb. China was the only country in the world that had anything like this level of help to manufacture nuclear weapons. Mao was told by his delegation just before the signing of the new agreement that with this degree of Russian assistance, he could possess all the attributes of a military superpower by the end of 1962. The undertaking cost a fortune. An authoritative Western source estimated the cost to China of making the Bomb alone at US$4.1 billion (in 1957 prices). A large part of this was paid for by agricultural products.

And Mao wanted more than the Bomb and missiles. On 4 October 1957, Russia launched a satellite called Sputnik, the first man-made object in space — and the first time the Communist world had “overtaken” the West in any technical sphere. Mao wanted to get into the space race right away. “Whatever happens, we must have Sputniks,” he announced to his top echelon in May 1958. “Not the one-kilo, two-kilo kind … it has to be several tens of thousands of kilos … We won’t do ones the size of chicken eggs like America’s.” The first US satellite, launched in January 1958, had weighed 8.22 kg, compared with Sputnik’s 83.6 kg. Mao wanted his to be bigger than either America’s or Russia’s, and he wanted it launched in 1960.

MAO FLEW OFF to Moscow on 2 November 1957 for the Communist summit, having decided to be cooperative so as to get what he wanted out of Khrushchev, while at the same time to try to place himself on the map of the Communist camp as Khrushchev’s equal, even superior. The summit, the biggest of its kind ever, was attended by leaders of 64 Communist and friendly parties, among which 12 of the Communist parties were in power. Just before leaving Peking, Mao floated to the Russians the idea of the final declaration being signed only by himself and them.

Mao did not quite bring this off, but China was the sole co-drafter, with the Russians, of the final declaration, and Mao himself was accorded special treatment in Moscow, being the only foreign leader put up in the Kremlin, where everything was arranged to his taste, with a large wooden bed, and the toilet turned into a squat one, by making a platform on the seat. At the ceremony on the eve of the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, Mao and Khrushchev appeared hand in hand. At parades on Gorky Street and Red Square people waved Chinese flags, and shouted “Long live Mao and China!”

Mao’s great asset in his drive for equal status with Russia was China’s manpower. A Muscovite said to a top Finnish Communist at the time: “We don’t need to be afraid of America any more. The Chinese army and our friendship with China have altered the whole world situation, and America can’t do a thing about it.” And it was the asset Mao himself promoted while he was in Moscow. There, he totted up to Khrushchev how many army divisions each country could raise, based on its population. China outnumbered Russia and all its other allies combined by two to one. Immediately after returning from Moscow, Mao definitively rejected birth control for China, a policy on which the regime had earlier kept a fairly open mind.

As a way of showing that he was equal to his Russian host and above the rest of the participants, Mao brushed away the conference standing order that every speaker must provide an advance text, saying: “I have no text. I want to be able to speak freely.” He did indeed eschew a written text, but he had prepared his seemingly off-the-cuff speeches with intense care. Before entering the conference hall, Mao was in a state of super-concentration, so intensely focused that when his Chinese interpreter moved to button up his collar as they were waiting for the lift, Mao seemed totally oblivious of what his aide was doing.

Mao was also the only person to speak sitting down, from his seat. He said he had been “sick in the head.” This, as the Yugoslav ambassador wryly put it, “came as a surprise to the majority of those present.”

Mao talked about war and death with a gross, even flippant, indifference to human suffering:

Let’s contemplate this, how many people would die if war breaks out. There are 2.7 billion people in the world. One-third could be lost; or, a little more, it could be half … I say that, taking the extreme situation, half dies, half lives, but imperialism would be razed to the ground and the whole world would become socialist.

An Italian participant, Pietro Ingrao, told us the audience was “shocked” and “upset.” Mao gave the impression that not only did he not mind a nuclear war, he might actually welcome it. Yugoslavia’s chief delegate Kardelj came away with no doubt: “It was perfectly clear that Mao Tse-tung wanted a war …” Even the Stalinist French were appalled.

Mao dismissed concerns about improving living standards:

People say that poverty is bad, but in fact poverty is good. The poorer people are, the more revolutionary they are. It is dreadful to imagine a time when everyone will be rich … From a surplus of calories people will have two heads and four legs.

Mao’s views ran dead against the mood of the post-Stalin Communist regimes, which wanted to avoid war and raise living standards. He was not a success. Although he met plenty of Communist leaders this time, unlike on his previous visit, when Stalin had banned any such meetings, and although he missed no opportunity to dispense advice, few took his words seriously. Notes by Britain’s John Gollan of Mao’s advice to the tiny and irrelevant British Party read: “… wait for opportune moment — one day England will be yours. — when win victory don’t kill them, give them a house.” To the third-rate Bulgarian Todor Zhivkov, one of the youngest present, Mao remarked: “you are young and clever … When socialism is victorious in the whole world, we will propose you for president of the world community.” No one but Zhivkov himself thought Mao meant it. Mao fascinated some, but he did not command the kind of respect that translated into allegiance, or confidence.

Mao attributed this failure to China’s lack of economic and military muscle. “We are a short tree and the Soviet Union is a tall tree,” he told Poland’s Gomulka, citing steel output as the yardstick. He was determined to remedy this. In his final speech he announced: “Comrade Khrushchev told me that in fifteen years the Soviet Union can overtake America. I can also say that in fifteen years we may catch up or overtake Britain.” The subtext was that he was in the race, as much a player as Khrushchev.

To put Khrushchev down, Mao adopted a grand style, talking to the Soviet leader like a teacher: “You have a quick temper, which tends to make enemies … let people voice their different views, and talk to them slowly …” In the presence of a large audience, Mao sounded even more superior:

Everyone needs support. An able fellow needs the help of three other people, a fence needs three stakes to support it. These are Chinese proverbs. Still another Chinese proverb says that with all its beauty the lotus needs the green of its leaves to set it off. You, comrade Khrushchev, even though you are a beautiful lotus, you too need the leaves to set you off …

At this point, according to one participant, Khrushchev “hung his head and went very red.”

Worse, in front of delegates from all 64 countries, Mao brought up the attempt to oust Khrushchev a few months earlier, and described Molotov, the chief plotter, as “an old comrade with a long history of struggle,” saying that Khrushchev’s line was only “relatively correct”; at this point a deathly silence fell over the hall. Mao repeatedly said things to top Russians in private like “We loved Molotov very much.” (In 1955 the highly unlovable Molotov had called China the “co-leader” of the Communist camp.)

In his memoirs, Khrushchev wrote about Mao’s “megalomania”: “Mao thought of himself as a man sent by God to do God’s bidding. In fact, Mao probably thought God did Mao’s own bidding.” But Mao was not just being megalomaniac, he was also deliberately aiming to diminish Khrushchev’s stature, and elevate his own. Khrushchev put up with all this in the interests of preserving the unity of the Communist camp. This concern tied Khrushchev’s hands vis-à-vis Mao, and Mao exploited this weak spot to the full.

AFTER RETURNING from Moscow, Mao added to his shopping list another item dear to his heart: nuclear submarines, which Peking regarded as “the ace in the modern arsenal.” In June 1958 Chou wrote to ask Khrushchev for the technology and equipment to manufacture these, as well as aircraft-carriers and other large warships.

But this time Khrushchev did not just hand over what Mao asked for. Instead, he tried to secure a quid pro quo: use of China’s long coastline, which had easy access to the high seas, unlike Russia’s. Khrushchev suggested that China (and Vietnam) could co-crew ships with the Russians in return for these ships using Chinese (and Vietnamese) ports. Ambassador Yudin put this to Mao on 21 July.

Mao wanted a fleet of his own, and to build his own ships. In order to give himself an excuse to turn down the Russian proposal for cooperation, he staged a tantrum. Next day, on 22 July, he summoned Yudin back and told him: “You upset me so much that I didn’t sleep all night.” He then distorted Moscow’s proposal into an issue of sovereignty, accusing the Russians of “wanting to control us” through a “joint fleet.” “It boils down to you don’t trust the Chinese …” In among the bluster, Mao inserted his real demand: “You must help us to build a navy!.. We want to have two or three hundred [nuclear] submarines” (our italics).

Khrushchev was alarmed by Mao’s outburst, as Mao had hoped he would be, and rushed to Peking in secret on 31 July. Mao gave him an ostentatiously frosty welcome. As the leaders drove into their first talk, Khrushchev declared straightaway that: “There was no thought of a joint fleet.” After much bombast, Mao backed down and conceded that his interpretation of Khrushchev’s proposal was unfounded, that he had “lost sleep” for nothing, though he continued to act as if his national pride had been mortally wounded. But Mao’s theatrics had got Khrushchev to come more than halfway, and the Soviet leader offered to build China “a big plant … to manufacture a large number of nuclear submarines.” To keep the pressure on, Mao strongly hinted that otherwise the Russians might be drawn into a war: “Now that we don’t have a nuclear submarine fleet, we might as well hand our entire coast over to you, for you to fight for us.” Then, to hammer this point home, as soon as Khrushchev departed, Mao manufactured a war situation, once again using Taiwan.

The second Taiwan Strait crisis was very like the first in 1954–55, which Mao had staged to twist his ally’s arm for A-bomb technology. This time his target was nuclear submarines and other high-tech military know-how. On 23 August Mao opened up a huge artillery barrage against the island of Quemoy, the springboard to Taiwan, blanketing the tiny island with over 30,000 (mainly Russian-made) shells. Washington thought Mao might really be going for Taiwan. No one in the West suspected his true goal: to force the USA to threaten a nuclear war in order to scare his own ally — a ruse unique in the annals of statecraft.

The US moved a large fleet into the area, and on 4 September Secretary of State John Foster Dulles announced that the US was committed to defending not only Taiwan, but also Quemoy, and threatened to bomb the Mainland. The Kremlin got very nervous about an armed confrontation with the US, and sent foreign minister Andrei Gromyko secretly to Peking the next day. Gromyko brought the draft of a letter from Khrushchev to Eisenhower, which said that an attack on China “is an attack on the Soviet Union.” Khrushchev was inviting Mao’s comment, which he hoped would be a reassurance that things would not go that far. Mao obliged, telling Gromyko that “this time we are not going to strike Taiwan, nor are we going to fight the Americans, so there will not be a world war.” But he made it clear that a war over Taiwan was definitely on the cards “for the future,” and that it would most likely be a nuclear war.

Khrushchev thought Mao could well trigger off such a war, but he wrote in his memoirs: “We made no move to restrain our Chinese comrades because we thought they were absolutely right in trying to unify all the territories of China.” This was the beauty of Taiwan as an issue for Mao: even if it threatened to cause a third world war, Moscow could not fault him.

Having established this scenario of a future nuclear war with America over Taiwan, Mao scraped hard at the Russians’ nerves. He told Gromyko he would like to discuss with Khrushchev at some stage how to coordinate in such a war, and then raised the specter of Russia being wiped out. When the war was over, he asked, “Where shall we build the capital of the socialist world?” implying that Moscow would be gone. He proceeded to propose that the new capital be located on a man-made island in the Pacific. This remark so startled Gromyko that he wanted to exclude it from his telegram home; there the Kremlin “paid particular attention” to Mao’s sally, according to the aide who drafted the cable.

Having thus shaken up Gromyko, Mao then proceeded to mollify him by saying that China would take all the heat of the coming nuclear war. “Our policy is that we will take the full consequences of this war ourselves. We will deal with America, and … we will not drag the Soviet Union into this war.” Except, Mao said, “we have to make preparations to fight the war with America,” and that included “material preparations.” Chou En-lai spelled it out to the Russian chargé: “We have made plans to produce modern weapons with the help of the Soviet Union.” Mao had made his position clear: You can opt out, if you enable me to fight the war myself.

Khrushchev got the point. On 27 September he wrote to Mao: “Thank you for your willingness to take on yourselves a strike, without involving the Soviet Union,” and followed this up on 5 October by announcing that the Taiwan crisis was an “internal” matter and that Russia would not get involved in what he called this “civil war.” For Khrushchev to say that he would let Mao deal with a nuclear war with America on his own signaled his agreement to arm the Chinese to do so. The very next day, Mao wrote a statement in the name of his defense minister, suspending the shelling of Quemoy. This ended the second Taiwan Strait crisis.

Mao then wrote to Khrushchev confirming that he would be only too happy for China to fight a nuclear war with America alone. “For our ultimate victory,” he offered, “for the total eradication of the imperialists, we [i.e., the Chinese people, who had not been consulted] are willing to endure the first [US nuclear] strike. All it is is a big pile of people dying [our italics].”

To keep the Taiwan issue alight, Mao ordered the shelling of Quemoy to resume, eventually cutting it back to alternate days. This characteristically Maoist extravagance put tremendous strain on the economy. The army chief of staff, who was not let in on Mao’s intentions, protested: “There is little point in the shelling. It costs a lot of money … Why do it?” Mao could find nothing to say except to accuse the general of being “right-wing,” and he was soon purged. Firing expensive shells onto the rocky island went on for twenty years, and stopped only after Mao’s death, on New Year’s Day 1979, the day Peking and Washington established diplomatic relations.

Meanwhile, Khrushchev endorsed a number of high-end technology transfers, which led to an astonishing deal on 4 February 1959 under which Russia committed to helping China to make a whole range of advanced ships and weapons, including conventional-powered ballistic missile submarines and submarine-to-surface missiles. The first Taiwan Strait crisis had panicked the secrets of the Bomb out of Moscow; now, four years later, with the second Taiwan Strait crisis, Mao had prised out of Khrushchev an agreement to transfer no less than the whole range of equipment needed to deliver the Bomb.

Over the years from 1953 when Mao had first outlined his Superpower Program, its scale had grown prodigiously, but each expansion had only aggravated his fundamental problem: how to squeeze out enough food to pay for his purchases. In 1956, when the scope of the Program was much smaller, deaths from starvation had become so shocking that his usually docile Politburo had balked at the plan and forced him to slow down. Now a far worse death toll was in the offing. But this time Mao did not have to make concessions to his colleagues at home. In the course of 1957 he had altered one fundamental thing. Khrushchev no longer had any authority in Peking, and Mao no longer felt constrained by him.

A joke went the rounds in Budapest about a man buying tea. When asked: Which tea do you want — Russian or Chinese? he replied: I’ll have coffee instead!

Khrushchev handed over two R-2 short-range, ground-to-ground missiles, which China copied, though he declined to transfer rockets with a range of more than 2,900 km. The Russians also stationed a missile regiment outside Peking, with sixty-three R-1 and R-2 missiles, on which they trained the Chinese.

Mao decided to play the superior philosopher, and used a language full of Chinese metaphors, oblique for a non-Chinese audience, and almost impossible to translate. One of the Italian interpreters recalled: “From the Russian translation I heard, no one could understand what Mao said. I remember our translators put their heads in their hands.” In fact, even Chinese audiences had to guess what Mao was driving at when he employed this style.

Mao had said similar things before, in less overtly callous language. In 1955 he told the Finnish ambassador that “America’s atom bombs are too few to wipe out the Chinese. Even if the US atom bombs … were dropped on China, blasted a hole in the Earth or blew it to pieces, this might be a big thing for the solar system, but it would still be an insignificant matter as far as the universe as a whole is concerned.”

39. KILLING THE “HUNDRED FLOWERS” (1957–58 AGE 63–64)

TERRORIZATION HAD always been Mao’s panacea whenever he wanted to achieve anything. But in 1956, after Khrushchev condemned Stalin’s use of terror, Mao had to lower the rate of arrests and killings. On 29 February, as soon as he learned about Khrushchev’s secret speech, Mao had ordered his police chief to revise established plans: “This year the number of arrests must be greatly reduced from last year … The number of executions especially must be fewer …”

But when Khrushchev’s tanks rolled into Hungary later that year, Mao saw his chance to revive persecution. His colleagues were still saying that the troubles in Eastern Europe were the result of over-concentration on heavy industry and neglecting living standards. Liu Shao-chi argued that China should go “slower” with industrialization, so that “people won’t be going onto the streets to demonstrate … and moreover will be fairly happy.” Chou, too, wanted to scrap some arms factories. Although wholly in agreement with Mao over giving priority to nuclear weapons, he remarked pointedly: “We can’t eat cannons, or guns.”

Mao’s view of the “lessons from Eastern Europe” was completely different. “In Hungary,” he told his top echelon on 15 November, “it’s true the standard of living did not improve much, but it wasn’t too bad. And yet … there were great troubles there.” “The basic problem with some Eastern European countries,” he said, “is that they didn’t eliminate all those counter-revolutionaries … Now they are eating their own bitter fruit.” “Eastern Europe just didn’t kill on a grand scale.” “We must kill,” Mao declared. “And we say it’s good to kill.”

But with the trend in the Communist world blowing towards de-Stalinization, Mao decided it was not wise to be too blatant about launching a purge. To create a justification, he cooked up a devious plan. He did so mainly while lying in bed, where he spent most of his time that winter of 1956–57. He ate in bed, sitting on the edge, and only got up to go to the toilet.

ON 27 FEBRUARY 1957, Mao delivered a four-hour speech to the rubber-stamp Supreme Council announcing that he was inviting criticisms of the Communist Party. The Party, he said, needed to be accountable and “under supervision.” He sounded reasonable, criticizing Stalin for his “excessive” purges, and giving the impression there were going to be no more of these in China. In this context, he cited an adage, “Let a hundred flowers bloom.”

Few guessed that Mao was setting a trap, and that he was inviting people to speak out so that he could then use what they said as an excuse to victimize them. Mao’s targets were intellectuals and the educated, the people most likely to speak up. After taking power, Mao’s policy had been to give them a generally better standard of living than the average. Those who were well-known or “useful” were given special privileges. But Mao had them put through the grinder several times, not least with “thought reform,” which he himself described as brainwashing: “Some foreigners say our thought reform is brainwashing. I think that’s right, it is exactly brainwashing.” In fact, even the fearsome term “brainwashing” does not conjure up the mental anguish of the process, which bent and twisted people’s minds. Now Mao was planning to persecute the educated en masse.

Mao confided his scheme only to a very few special cronies like the boss of Shanghai, Ke Qing-shi, keeping even most of the Politburo in the dark. In early April, he told these few cronies that as a result of him soliciting criticisms, “intellectuals are beginning to … change their mood from cautious to more open … One day punishment will come down on their heads … We want to let them speak out. You must stiffen your scalps and let them attack!.. Let all those ox devils and snake demons … curse us for a few months.” To these same few cronies, Mao spelled out that he was “casting a long line to bait big fish.” He later described his ensnaring like this: “How can we catch the snakes if we don’t let them out of their lairs? We wanted those sons-of-turtles [bastards] to wriggle out and sing and fart … that way we can catch them.”

Mao’s trap was extremely successful. Once the lid was loosened just a fraction, a deluge of dissent burst out, mostly in wall posters and small-scale meetings called “seminars,” which were the only forums allowed.

One of the very first things to be challenged was the Communists’ monopoly of power, which one critic described as “the source of all ills.” One poster was entitled “Totalitarian power is peril!” The Communists’ exercise of power was compared to Hitler’s. One man said in a seminar that “in not protecting citizens’ rights, today’s government is worse than the feudal dynasties or Chiang Kai-shek.” One professor called the Constitution “toilet paper.” Another, an economist, went right to the core of Mao’s methods, and called for banning public denunciations, “which are much worse than being in prison”—“just the thought of them makes one tremble from heart to flesh.” Democracy was the popular demand.

So was the rule of law. One vice-minister called for the independence of the judiciary. Another administrator said he wanted to be able “just to follow the law, not the orders of the Party.” Referring to the CCP’s smothering methods of controlling everything, one well-known playwright asked: “Why is it necessary to have ‘leadership’ in the arts? Who led Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Beethoven, Molière?”

Foreign policy, too, came in for questioning by some of the elite who had access to partial information. The former Nationalist governor of Yunnan province, who had crossed over to the Communists, protested that “it is unfair that China should pay all the costs in the Korean War”—and called for reducing the level of aid being lavished on foreign countries.

The regime’s secretiveness also came under attack. “All absolute economic statistics are state secrets,” protested one critic, “even the output of alkali … What is this but an attempt to keep people in a state of stupidity?” He demanded information about the industrialization program. Another wrote: “I have indeed heard about peasants … dying from having just grass roots to eat, in areas so rich in produce that they are known as the land of fish and rice. But the newspapers say nothing about any of this …”

Many contrasted the harsh life of the peasants with that of the leaders (which they could only glimpse). People’s Daily had reported a banquet for the Russian president Kliment Voroshilov, attended by 1,000 people. “Why such grandeur?” one poster enquired, when “ ‘local Party emperors’ are using methods like abuse, torture and detention to gouge food out of the peasants …?” “We must know that dissatisfied peasants could throw Chairman Mao’s portrait into the toilet,” this daring author warned.

Most of this criticism never reached the general public, as Mao only allowed carefully selected snippets to appear in the press. The rest was confined to the two channels — seminars and wall posters — which were impermanent and easy to erase. And Mao made sure that these outlets were restricted to isolated campuses and individual institutions, to which the general public was not allowed access. Nor were these institutions permitted to contact each other, and people inside them were banned from going outside to spread their views. When some students tried to distribute handwritten journals, their samizdats were instantly confiscated, and they were punished as “counter-revolutionaries.” Dissent was thus kept rigidly fragmented, so a popular uprising was impossible.

ON 6 JUNE 1957, Mao read a mimeographed pamphlet which speculated that the leadership was split, with himself cast as the champion of dissent, ranged against “conservatives.” In the information void he had created, some had mistakenly come to think that he was a liberal, and appeals had been heard like: “Let us unite around Mao Tse-tung — Khrushchev!” Some even expressed concern for Mao: “It seems our dear comrade Mao Tse-tung is in a very difficult position.” This suggestion that Mao was a liberal was dangerous for him, because it could well embolden dissent.

The next day, Mao ordered an editorial for People’s Daily to be broadcast that evening, saying that challenging the Party was forbidden. Once he pressed this button, the persecution machine started rolling for what was called the “Anti-Rightist Campaign,” which lasted a year. The brief exciting moment of “a hundred flowers” was over.

On 12 June, Mao issued a circular to the Party, to be read to all members “except unreliable ones,” in which he made it explicit that he had set a trap. He did not want his Party to think he was a liberal — in case they themselves should turn liberal.

In this circular, Mao set a quota for victims: between 1 and 10 percent of “intellectuals” (which meant the better-educated), who numbered some 5 million at the time. As a result, at least 550,000-plus people were labeled as “Rightists.” While many had spoken out, some had not said anything against the regime, and were pulled in just to fill Mao’s quota.

To Mao, writers, artists and historians were superfluous. Scientists and technicians, however, were largely exempted from persecution—“especially those who have major achievements,” a September 1957 order decreed; these “must be absolutely protected.” Scientists who had returned from Europe and America, in particular, were to be “neither labelled nor denounced.” Nuclear physicists and rocket scientists were treated extra well. (Throughout Mao’s reign, top scientists were given privileges superior even to those enjoyed by very senior officials.)

As the ultimate aim of this crackdown was to create the atmosphere for harsher extraction to finance the Superpower Program, Mao made a particular point of hammering any challenge directed against his policies towards the peasantry. One People’s Daily headline screamed: “Rebuke the rubbish that ‘peasants’ lives are hard!’ ” To drive home his message, Mao personally arranged a piece of sadistic theater. One well-known figure had been saying that peasants were “on the verge of dying from starvation,” so a “fact-finding” tour was arranged for him. People’s Daily reported that wherever he went he was pursued by crowds up to 50,000 strong, “refuting his rubbish,” and was finally forced to flee, hidden under jute sacks in the boot of a car.

Parallel with theater came executions. Mao revealed later to his top echelon that one province, Hunan, “denounced 100,000, arrested 10,000 and killed 1,000. The other provinces did the same. So our problems were solved.”

A particular example was made of three teachers in one county town in Hubei province who were executed for allegedly stirring up a demonstration by schoolchildren over education cuts. The effect of the cuts was that only one in twenty children would now be able to go on to high school. The demonstration was branded “a Little Hungary,” and a special point was made of publicizing the executions nationwide. It is almost certain that Mao personally ordered the death sentences, as he had just arrived in the province the day before they were passed, and up till that moment the authorities had been undecided about imposing the death penalty. The huge publicity was intended to instill fear in rural schools, which bore the brunt of the education cuts Mao had introduced to squeeze out more funds for the Superpower Program.

Funding for education was already minuscule. Now it was to be cut back even further. Mao’s approach was not to raise the general standard of education in society as a whole, but to focus on a small elite, predominantly in science and other “useful” subjects, and leave the rest of the population to be illiterate or semi-illiterate slave-laborers. What funds were allotted to education went mainly to the cities; village schools received no funding, and schools in small towns very little. As a result, only tiny numbers of rural youth were able to go on to higher education.

Even in the cities, young people’s chances of education were drastically slashed in 1957, when 80 percent of the 5 million urban elementary school leavers (i.e., 4 million people) and 800,000 of 1 million middle-school leavers were told that they could not continue their education. There had been widespread discontent in the cities, and the executions of the teachers in the “Little Hungary” case were a warning to urbanites too.

Execution was not the only cause of death in this campaign: suicides were rife among those condemned as “Rightists.” In the Summer Palace in Peking, early morning exercise-takers frequently encountered corpses hanging from trees, and feet sticking out of the lake.

Most of those branded as “Rightists” were put through hellish, though largely non-violent, denunciation meetings. Their families became outcasts, their spouses were shunted to undesirable jobs, and their children lost all hope of a decent education. To protect their children — and themselves — many people divorced their spouses when they were labeled as Rightists. Numerous families were broken up, causing lifelong tragedy to children and parents alike.

After they were denounced, most Rightists were deported to do hard labor in remote areas. Mao needed labor, particularly to open up virgin lands. A journalist called Dai Huang described how deportees were just dumped in places like the far north of Manchuria, known as “the Great Northern Wilderness,” and had to rig up a shelter “in a hurry, using wheat stems to make a roof” in a temperature of–38 °C. Even with a fire, “it was still a dozen or so degrees below zero …”

The grass and beaten earth huts we lived in had wind coming in from all sides … there were hardly any vegetables or meat … We got up … just after 4 at dawn, and did not stop until 7 or 8 in the evening … In these 15–16 hours … we basically worked non-stop … in summer … We had to get up at 2 am … We had at most three hours’ sleep.

While being subjected to ceaseless, relentless harangues—“You’re here to redeem your crime! Don’t dare to make trouble, or look for ways to be lazy!”—the deportees had to work on less than subsistence-level rations. Many died from malnutrition, illness, cold, overwork and in accidents doing unfamiliar jobs like felling trees.

This journalist, Dai, had actually spoken up after he knew that Mao had set a trap. He wrote a petition to Mao, objecting to “the new ruling class” holding sumptuous “receptions and banquets,” while “tens of thousands of people … are chewing grass roots or tree bark.” He even took a swipe at Mao’s personality cult. “A chef cooking a good meal is said to be ‘thanks to Chairman Mao’s leadership.’ ” “Don’t think you are a wise god,” he warned Mao.

Dai Huang’s wife divorced him, and his relatives suffered discrimination. A schoolteacher nephew was denied funds for a life-saving operation because of the family connection. Dai himself barely survived the Northern Wilderness, from which many were never to return.

HAVING SUPPRESSED dissent among the educated in general, starting in 1958, immediately after returning from the Moscow summit, Mao moved to strike fear into his top echelon by threatening to label as “Rightists” any of them who opposed the relaunch of the Superpower Program. His main concern was with his Nos. 2 and 3, Liu Shao-chi and Chou En-lai, who had championed the cuts in the Program in 1956.

The tactic Mao chose this time was new — to abase his most senior colleagues in front of dozens of provincial chiefs. This was the first time that Mao involved these second-rank officials in directly attacking his top colleagues and their own superiors. It was a means both of humiliating Chou and Liu, and of putting pressure on them; especially as Mao personally delivered stinging assaults on his two colleagues in front of their subordinates. Bringing in these provincial chiefs to witness the working of power at the very top — and the humiliation of the regime’s Nos. 2 and 3—was also a way for Mao to empower the men responsible for supervising the actual collection of the food.

He focused on Chou, who was in charge of planning and administering the Program. Mao described Chou as being “only 50 metres away from being a Rightist”; Chou’s attempts to curb investment in arms industries in 1956, Mao said, were on a par with the Hungarian Uprising, and had “considerably influenced the Rightists.” These were ominous charges, carrying the direst potential consequences. To make things even more menacing, Mao removed Chou as foreign minister in February 1958, and senior diplomats close to Chou were encouraged to attack him.

The heat around Mao was unbearable, even by the usual nerve-racking standards of his regime. One minister who had been in the firing line had a fatal breakdown. When Mao’s doctor went to give the minister a check-up, he found him lying in bed, “muttering again and again: ‘Spare me! Please spare me!’ ” The minister was flown off to a hospital in Canton. In the plane, he suddenly sank to his knees and banged his head on the floor, begging: “Please spare me …” He died in Canton within weeks, aged forty-six.

As the climax of this process of intimidation and abasement, Mao ordered Chou to make a self-criticism that would imply that he was a quasi-Rightist in front of the 1,360 delegates to a special Party Congress in May 1958. Chou apologized for his previous efforts to hamper Mao’s desired rate of “industrialisation,” whose military nature was not revealed even to this high-level gathering, nor its catastrophic implications. This self-denunciation caused Chou a great deal of pain. It took him ten days to write his speech. The normally dapper premier spent days on end shut up in his room, unshaven and unkempt, not even getting dressed. The secretary taking his dictation recalled that Chou spoke extremely slowly, Chou then dictated, on the verge of tears. Chou had chosen his wife not out of love, but out of mutual devotion to the Communist cause, and she lived right up to that specification.

sometimes unable to say a word for five or six minutes … So I suggested I leave his office and let him compose quietly … It was midnight, and I returned to my room and lay in bed with my clothes on, waiting to be called.

At about 2 am [Mrs. Chou] summoned me. She said: “En-lai is sitting in the office staring blankly. How come you went to bed?…” So I followed [her] to [his] office, where she and comrade Chou En-lai argued for a long time …

Chou duly delivered his speech, to Mao’s satisfaction. The atmosphere at the congress was more frightening than usual, as reflected in the language of the press announcement, which said the meeting had “denounced Rightists who have wormed their way into the Party”—in Communist jargon, barely one step away from damning such people as enemy agents. Orchestrated by Mao, a host of provinces announced how they had uncovered Rightists among their own provincial leaders. The provincial chief of Henan was condemned and dismissed for saying the peasants could not afford to hand over too much to the state as they were “starving.” Henan, he said, had endured “endless floods, droughts and other natural disasters,” and its inhabitants were “having to pull ploughs, since many draft animals have died because of the shortage of food.”

Liu Shao-chi also came under bitter attack from Mao’s henchmen at the congress for his role in the 1956 cuts. Like Chou, he too capitulated fulsomely, as did everyone who had a managerial role in Mao’s Superpower Program. Mao’s notes show that he had been ready to charge anyone who refused to toe his line with what amounted to treason (“using illegal methods … to carry out opposition activities”). In the end he did not need to go this far, as all surrendered.

Liu stayed on as No. 2. Chou was so battered that he asked Mao “whether it is appropriate for me to go on being prime minister.” He was told to carry on, and he remained foreign affairs supremo, even though he was not reinstated as foreign minister. Mao was well aware that no one else could put so seductive a face on his regime. The man who took Chou’s place as foreign minister, Chen Yi, remarked ruefully that he found himself being “no more than a glorified entertainer.”

MAO MADE ONE most important personnel shift at the congress. He promoted his old crony Lin Biao to be one of the Party’s vice-chairmen (alongside Liu, Chou, Zhu De and Chen Yun). This gave Mao an ally-in-need in the core, one who also held a top army rank: a marshal. Formal military ranks had been introduced in 1955, when Lin and nine other generals were made marshals.

Along with these steps, Mao intensified his personality cult, which he had started to promote from the time of the Yenan Terror in 1942–43. In March 1958 he told his top echelon (colleagues, provincial chiefs and ministers): “There has to be a personality cult … It is absolutely necessary.” His henchmen vied to declare their “blind faith” in Mao, with Shanghai boss Ke actually advocating the herd instinct: “We must follow the Chairman like a blind herd.”

To stoke his cult, Mao took the most unwonted step of visiting places like factories and agricultural cooperatives, and these visits were reported with huge fanfare. Mao was filmed for newsreels that were shown nationwide, and featured in a painting aptly titled Chairman Mao Walks All Over China, which became a household image. After Mao visited a village outside Chengdu in Sichuan, huge publicity was given to the story that the excited villagers changed its name to “Happiness Cooperative.” When Mao lifted a few bits of earth on a shovel at the Ming Tomb Reservoir on the outskirts of Peking, People’s Daily wrote: “As soon as Chairman Mao put down the spade, a soldier named Yu Bing-sen wrapped the spade up in his clothes. He said with brimming emotions: ‘Whenever we see this spade we will think of Chairman Mao, and we will have greater energy.’ An agricultural co-op member wept and told the reporter …” These exaltations of Mao in the press were then force-fed to the entire population, the illiterate as well as the literate, at newspaper-study sessions that were a permanent fixture of life under Mao.

On 13 August, for the only time throughout his 27-year reign, Mao ate in a restaurant, in Tianjin. There he was sighted, undoubtedly as intended, as he not only got out of the car in front of the restaurant, but appeared at the window upstairs. “Chairman Mao! Chairman Mao!” people began to chant. Word spread fast, and soon a hysterical crowd of tens of thousands surrounded the restaurant for several blocks, jumping up and down and screaming “Long Live Chairman Mao!” One of Mao’s secretaries got worried about security, and suggested that Mao should leave while a bodyguard with a build similar to Mao’s drew the crowd off. But Mao vetoed it. He had come to the place to be seen, and he was not in any danger, as this was a surprise visit, and he was distant enough from the crowd, none of whom could possibly have a gun anyway. (One of his regime’s first acts had been to confiscate weapons.) And the people around the restaurant had almost certainly been preselected, as happened in other places where Mao appeared. Mao waved at the crowd, who replied with more frenzy and weeping. All of which was reported in great detail in the papers.

When Mao eventually left, after several hours, he described his departure to his inner circle in almost godlike language: “I gave one wave, and the crowd receded.” He reveled in the way his cult was thriving and told his coterie that he “was deeply impressed.” Years of force-feeding his personality cult had endowed him with awesome power.

This minister, Huang Jing, had been the second husband of Mme Mao. They married when he was a handsome twenty-year-old radical student and she an eighteen-year-old librarian in 1932, and she joined the Party under his influence. After she married Mao, she occasionally invited her ex-husband over “for a chat,” but he declined every time. The pressure on him now was nothing personal on Mao’s part, as Mao was never jealous. In fact, in Chongqing in 1945 Mao had made a point of inviting another of his wife’s former husbands, Tang Na, to a reception, and greeted him with a twinkle in his eye and a crack, as Tang Na had once attempted suicide over the future Mme Mao. Tang Na settled in Paris after Mao took power, and subsequently died there.

Shoveling earth at the Ming Tomb Reservoir for those few minutes was the only physical labor Mao put in during his entire rule, although he made heavy labor compulsory and routine for nearly everyone in China, children included, on the grounds that it helped maintain their ideological purity.

40. THE GREAT LEAP: “HALF OF CHINA MAY WELL HAVE TO DIE” (1958–61 AGE 64–67)

WITH HIS cult fed and watered among the population, his colleagues cowed into submission, and potential voices of dissent silenced through the “Anti-Rightist” campaign, Mao proceeded vastly to accelerate his Superpower Program, though he still concealed its military nature. The original 1953 schedule of completing “industrialisation” in “ten to fifteen years” was now shortened to eight, seven, or even five—or possibly three—years. Mao had been informed that acquisitions from Russia could enable him to break into the superpower league in five years. He fancied he could fulfill his ambition in one “big bang,” declaring that “Our nation is like an atom.” He called the process the “Great Leap Forward,” and launched it in May 1958.

While the nation was told, vaguely, that the goal of the Leap was for China to “overtake all capitalist countries in a fairly short time, and become one of the richest, most advanced and powerful countries in the world,” Mao spelled out to small audiences, and strictly confidentially, just what he meant to do once the Leap was completed. On 28 June, he told an elite army group: “Now the Pacific Ocean is not peaceful. It can only be peaceful when we take it over.” At this point Lin Biao interjected: “We must build big ships, and be prepared to land [sc. militarily] in Japan, the Philippines and San Francisco.” Mao continued: “How many years before we can build such ships? In 1962, when we have xx — xx tons of steel [figures concealed in original] …” On 19 August, Mao told select provincial chiefs: “In the future we will set up the Earth Control Committee, and make a uniform plan for the Earth.” Mao dominated China. He intended to dominate the world.

For the Chinese population, the Great Leap was indeed an enormous jump — but in the amount of food extracted. This was calculated on the basis, not of what the peasants could afford, but of what was needed for Mao’s Program. Mao proceeded by simply asserting that there was going to be an enormous increase in the harvest, and got the provincial chiefs to proclaim that their area would produce an astronomical output. When harvest time came, the chiefs got selected lackeys down at the grassroots to declare that their areas had indeed produced fantastic crops. Mao’s propaganda machine then publicized these claims with great fanfare. The stratospheric harvests and other sky-high claims were called “sputniks,” reflecting Mao’s obsession with the Russian satellite. On 12 June People’s Daily reported that in Henan, Mao’s No. 1 model province, a “Sputnik Cooperative” had produced 1.8 tons of wheat on one mu (1/6th acre) — more than ten times the norm. Claims in this vein were not, as official Chinese history would have us believe, the result of spontaneous boasting by local cadres and peasants. The press was Mao’s voice, not the public’s.

“Sputnik fields” mushroomed. They were usually created by transplanting ripe crops from a number of fields into a single artificial plot. These were the Maoist equivalent of Potemkin fields — with the key difference that Mao’s plots were not intended to fool the ruler, but instead produced by the ruler for the eyes of his distant underlings, grassroots cadres from other collective farms. These cadres were most important to Mao, as they were the people immediately in charge of physically handing over the harvests to the state. Mao wanted them to see these Sputnik fields and then go back and make similar claims, so that the state could say: since you’ve produced more, we can take more. Cadres who declined to go along were condemned and replaced with others who would. Charades of sky-high yields filled the press, though Peking eventually quietly stopped the transplanting theater, as it caused big losses.

By late July, People’s Daily was declaring that “we can produce as much food as we want,” setting the stage for Mao to assert publicly on 4 August: “We must consider what to do with all this surplus food.” This claim about there being surplus food was one that Mao himself could not possibly have believed. Barely six months before, on 28 January, he had acknowledged to the Supreme Council that there was a shortage of food: “What are we going to do as there isn’t enough food to eat?” he had asked. His solution was as follows: “No worse than eat less … Oriental style … It’s good for health. Westerners have a lot of fat in their food; the further west one goes the more fat they eat. I say that Western meat-eaters are contemptible.” “I think it is good to eat less. What’s the point of eating a lot and growing a big stomach, like the foreign capitalists in cartoons?” These airy remarks might well apply to Mao, who had a paunch, but they were irrelevant to famished peasants. In January, Mao had been saying: There isn’t enough food, but people can eat less. Six months later, he was saying: There is too much food. Both of these contradictory remarks had the same purpose: to gouge more food out of the peasants.

In September, People’s Daily reported that “the biggest rice sputnik” yet had produced over 70 tons from less than 1/5th of an acre, which was hundreds of times the norm. This sputnik field was faked by an ambitious new county boss in Guangxi. At the end of the year, his county reported a grain output that was over three times the true figure. The state then demanded an impossible 4.8 times what it had taken the year before.

Grassroots cadres often resorted to brute force. And if they were judged ineffective, armed police were sent in. On 19 August 1958, Mao instructed his provincial chiefs: “When you order things handed over and they are not handed over, back up your orders with force.” Under such pressure, state violence raged across the countryside.

To produce a “justification,” Mao repeatedly accused peasants and village cadres of hiding grain. On one occasion, on 27 February 1959, he told his top echelon: “All production teams hide their food to divide among themselves. They even hide it in deep secret cellars, and place guards and sentries …” Next day, he asserted again that peasants were “eating carrot leaves during the day, and rice at night …” By this he meant that peasants were pretending they had run out of proper food but in fact had good food, which they consumed in secret. Mao revealed his contempt for the peasantry to his inner circle: “Peasants are hiding food … and are very bad. There is no Communist spirit in them! Peasants are after all peasants. That’s the only way they can behave …”

Mao knew perfectly well that the peasants had no food to hide. He had an efficient reporting system, and was on top of what was happening daily around the country. On one batch of reports in April 1959 he noted that there was severe starvation in half the country: “a big problem: 15 provinces—25.17 million people no food to eat”; his response was to ask the provinces to “deal with it,” but he did not say how. A report that reached his desk from Yunnan province, dated 18 November 1958, described a wave of deaths from edema — swelling caused by severe malnutrition. Again, Mao’s response was to pass the buck: “This mistake is mainly the fault of county-level cadres.” Mao knew that in many places people were reduced to eating compounds of earth. In some cases, whole villages died as a result, when people’s intestines became blocked.

This nationwide squeeze made it possible for Mao to export 4.74 million tons of grain, worth US$935 million, in 1959. Exports of other foods also soared, particularly of pork.

The claim about China “having too much food” was trundled out to Khrushchev. When he came to Peking in summer 1958, Mao pressed him for help to make nuclear submarines, which were going to be extremely expensive. Khrushchev asked how China was going to pay. Mao’s response was that China had unlimited supplies of food.

Food was also used as a raw material in the nuclear program, which required high-quality fuel. Grain was turned into the purest alcohol. On 8 September, having claimed that there was food to spare, Mao told the Supreme Council that “we have to find outlets for grain in industries, for example to produce ethyl alcohol for fuel.” Grain was therefore used for missile tests, each of which consumed 10 million kg of grain, enough to radically deplete the food intake of 1–2 million people for a whole year.

THE PEASANTS WERE now having to work much harder, and much longer hours, than before. As Mao wanted to raise output without spending any money, he latched on to methods that depended on labor, not investment. It was for this reason that he ordered huge drives to build irrigation systems — dams, reservoirs, canals. Over the four years from 1958, about 100 million peasants were coerced into such projects, moving a quantity of earth and masonry equivalent to excavating 950 Suez Canals, mostly using only hammers, picks and shovels, and sometimes even doors and bed planks from their homes to improvise makeshift carts. Peasants corvéed for these projects often had to bring not only their own food but their own tools, and in many cases their own materials to put up shelters.

In the absence of safety measures and medical care, accidents were frequent, as were deaths, which Mao well knew. His talks with provincial chiefs about these waterworks are littered with mentions of death tolls. In April 1958 he observed that as Henan (his model) had promised to move 30 billion cubic meters that coming winter, “I think 30,000 people will die.” Anhui, another of Mao’s favorite provinces, “said 20 billion cubic metres, and I think 20,000 people will die …” When senior officials in Gansu province appealed against “destroying human lives” in these projects, Mao had them condemned and punished as a “Rightist anti-Party clique.”

Mao wanted instant results, so he promoted a typical slogan: “Survey, Design and Execute Simultaneously,” known as the “Three Simultaneouslys.” Geological surveying was therefore scanty, or non-existent, so a fourth “simultaneous” usually soon had to be added: Revision.

One well-known project was a canal 1,400 km long across the drought-plagued Yellow Earth Plateau in the northwest. It had to cross 800 mountains and valleys and the 170,000 laborers had to dig caves to sleep in, and forage for herbs to eke out their meager food. Months into the project, tunnels which they had already started digging, by hand, were abandoned in favor of culverts. After more months, this approach in turn was abandoned, and some of the tunnels reinstated. The project went on in this way for three years, during which at least 2,000 laborers died, and was then abandoned. The official account admitted that not one plot of land had benefited.

Most of the projects turned out to be a stupendous waste. Many had to be abandoned halfway: out of the over 500 large reservoirs (100 million cubic meters capacity or more), 200 had already been abandoned by late 1959. Many others collapsed during Mao’s lifetime. The worst dam disaster in human history happened in 1975 in Mao’s model province of Henan, when scores of reservoirs built during the Leap crumbled in a storm, drowning an estimated 230,000–240,000 people (official death toll: 85,600). Other Mao-era follies went on killing people long after his death, and as of 1999, no fewer than 33,000 were considered a risk to human life. The dams also uprooted untold millions from their homes, and more than two decades later there were still 10.2 million “reservoir displaced persons.”

MAO INFLICTED MANY other half-baked schemes on the peasants, like forcing them to dig up soil by hand to a depth of half a meter. “Use the human wave tactic, and turn every field over,” he ordered. Grossly excessive close planting was another. Close planting needed fertilizer, but Mao refused the requisite investments, and in late 1958 he actually ordered: “Reduce chemical fertiliser imports.” On another occasion he said: “Turn China into a country of pigs … so there will be lots of manure … and more than enough meat, which can be exported in exchange for iron and steel.” But he did not say where the feed was to come from for these pigs. In fact, under Mao’s stewardship the number of pigs fell by no less than 48 percent between 1957 and 1961.

Over the centuries, Chinese peasants had applied their ingenuity to find every possible substance that could be used as fertilizer. In urban areas, every spot where human waste was dumped was allocated to a particular village, and peasants coming in before dawn to collect this waste with their special oblong barrels on carts were a feature of life. Human waste was so precious that frequent fights broke out between people from different villages over poaching, using their long-handled ladles. Desperate to find new sources for fertilizer, people started to mix human and animal manure with the thatched roofs and earth walls of old houses, into which smoke and grease had seeped. Millions of peasant houses were torn down to feed into manure pits, known as “shit lakes and piss seas.”

One day it hit Mao that a good way to keep food safe would be to get rid of sparrows, as they ate grain. He designated sparrows as one of “Four Pests” to be eliminated, along with rats, mosquitoes and flies, and mobilized the entire population to wave sticks and brooms and make a giant din to scare sparrows off landing so that they would fall from fatigue and be caught and killed by the crowds. There was much to be said for eradicating the other three, which were genuine pests, though one side-effect was that whatever slight privacy people had once had in performing their bodily functions disappeared, as eager fly-collectors loitered in droves at public lavatories. But the case for eliminating sparrows was not so clear-cut, as sparrows got rid of many pests, as well as eating grain — and, needless to say, many other birds died in the killing spree. Pests once kept down by sparrows and other birds now flourished, with catastrophic results. Pleas from scientists that the ecological balance would be upset were ignored.

It was not long before a request from the Chinese government marked “Top Secret” reached the Soviet embassy in Peking. In the name of socialist internationalism, it read, please send us 200,000 sparrows from the Soviet Far East as soon as possible. Mao had to accept that his anti-sparrow drive was counter-productive, and it gradually petered out.

The “Four Pests” campaign was a sort of Maoist DIY substitute for a health service, as it was labor-intensive and investment-free. Mao had wanted to get rid of dogs, which consumed food, but relented, when he was advised that peasants needed them to guard their houses when they were out at work.

ANOTHER FIASCO that drained the peasants’ energy, and brought disaster, was an order from Mao that the entire nation had to “make steel.” The Superpower Program needed a lot of steel — and steel was also Mao’s yardstick for superpower status. When he boasted to Communist leaders in Moscow in 1957 that China would “overtake Britain in fifteen years” (which he later shortened to three) and when he told the Chinese he was fully confident that China could “overtake America” in ten years, steel output was what he had in mind. Mao set the 1958 target at 10.7 million tons. How this came about illustrates his broad-brush approach to economics. Sitting by his swimming pool in Zhongnanhai on 19 June he said to the metallurgy minister: “Last year, steel output was 5.3 million tons. Can you double it this year?” The yes-man said: “All right.” And that was that.

Steel mills and related industries like coal mines were ordered to go flat out to speed up production. Rules, and common sense, were cast aside. Equipment was overworked to the point of breakdown, and over 30,000 workers were killed in serious accidents alone within a few months. Experts who tried to talk sense were persecuted. Mao set the tone for discrediting rationality by saying that “bourgeois professors’ knowledge should be treated as dogs’ fart, worth nothing, deserving only disdain, scorn, contempt …”

Even going flat out, the existing steel mills could not fulfill Mao’s target. His response was to order the general population to build “backyard furnaces.” At least 90 million people were “forced,” as Mao said matter-of-factly, to construct such furnaces, which Khrushchev not unfairly dubbed “samovar” furnaces, and which produced not steel at all, but pig iron, if that.

To feed these furnaces, the population was coerced into donating virtually every piece of metal they had, regardless of whether this was being used in productive, even essential, objects. Farm tools, even water wagons, were carted off and melted down, as were cooking utensils, iron door handles and women’s hair-clips. The regime slogan was: “To hand in one pickaxe is to wipe out one imperialist, and to hide one nail is to hide one counter-revolutionary.”

Across China yet more peasant houses were torn down, and their occupants made homeless, so that the timber and thatch could be burned as fuel. Most accessible mountains and hillsides were stripped bare of trees. The resulting deforestation was still causing floods decades later.

The furnaces required constant attention, consuming vast amounts of labor time. Tens of millions of peasants, plus a large proportion of draft animals, were pulled out of agriculture, leaving only women and children to bring in the crops in many places. By the end of the year, some 10 billion work-days had been lost to agriculture, about one-third of the time that would normally have gone to producing grain. Though the total 1958 crop output was slightly up on 1957, there was no increase in the amount harvested.

As the year-end deadline approached for his steel output goal, every time Mao saw his managers he would use his fingers to count the days left, and urge them: “We must make it!” By 31 December, the 10.7 million tons figure was reached, but as Mao acknowledged to his top echelon, “only 40 percent is good steel”; and more than 3 million tons were completely useless. The “good” steel had been produced by proper steel mills; the useless stuff from the backyard furnaces, almost all of which were soon abandoned. The whole venture, a gigantic waste of resources and manpower, triggered further losses: in one place, local bosses hijacked shipments of high-quality Russian alloys and had them melted down so that they could claim a bumper output, called an “Iron and Steel Sputnik.” “No good at constructing, but super-good at destruction”: never was Mao’s own assessment of himself more accurate.

MAO WASTED MUCH of the technology and equipment bought from Russia, along with the skills of the accompanying specialists. Machinery often lay idle, as the gigantic industrial infrastructure they required was lacking. The equipment that was working was overworked, often twenty-four hours a day, while maintenance was neglected or dismissed as irrelevant. Mao encouraged ignoring regulations, and told those Chinese who were working with Russian advisers that they must not be “slaves” to Russian expertise. Russian pleas for common sense got nowhere. Even the very pro-Chinese chief adviser Arkhipov was rebuffed. In 1958, he told us, “I asked Chou and Chen Yun to try to persuade Mao to keep his ideas to himself, but Mao wouldn’t listen … They said to me: Very sorry; Mao didn’t agree with the Soviet side.” In June 1959, Soviet deputy premier Aleksandr Zasyadko, a metallurgy and missile silo expert, visited China and afterwards reported to Khrushchev that “They’ve let the whole thing go to pot.”

By the end of 1958, the number of large arms-centered industrial projects that were under construction had reached a staggering 1,639—yet only 28 had been completed and were producing anything at all. Many were never finished, because of a lack of basic materials like steel, cement, coal and electricity. The regime itself called these “greybeard projects.” Mao was the only ruler in history to produce a rust-bowl at the start of industrialization rather than at its end.

All this was destructive to Mao’s own dreams. The breakneck speed he imposed sabotaged quality and created a long-term problem that was to plague arms production throughout his reign. China ended up with planes that could not fly, tanks that would not go in a straight line (on one occasion a tank swerved round and charged at watching VIPs), and ships that were almost a greater hazard to those who sailed in them than to China’s enemies. When Mao decided to give Ho Chi Minh a helicopter, the manufacturers were so scared it might crash that they detained it at the border.

The four-year Leap was a monumental waste of both natural resources and human effort, unique in scale in the history of the world. One big difference between other wasteful and inefficient regimes and Mao’s is that most predatory regimes have robbed their populations after relatively low-intensity labor, and less systematically, but Mao first worked everyone to the bone unrelentingly, then took everything — and then squandered it.

Mao demanded a fever pitch of work, using non-stop “emulation” drives to make people vie with each other. Undernourished and exhausted men, women and children were made to move soil at the double, often having to run while carrying extremely heavy loads, and in all weathers, from blazing sun to freezing cold. They had to trot for kilometers along mountain paths carrying water for the fields, from dawn till dusk. They had to stay up all night to keep the useless “backyard furnaces” going. Mao called this way of working “Communist spirit.” In one of his many bits of theater, on 6 November 1958 he first asserted that peasants refused to take breaks (“even if you want them to rest, they won’t”), and then played magnanimous and codified his optimal day: “Change from 1 January next year: guarantee 8 hours sleep, 4 hours eating and breaks, 2 hours studies [i.e., indoctrination] … 8–4–2–10,” with the “10” referring to the hours of work. In the same generous tone, he bestowed a few days off: two a month, and five for women (up from the three he had originally contemplated).

In fact, these tiny concessions resulted in part from reports of epidemics, which Mao took seriously, not least because they affected the workforce. One account that startled Mao involved a typhoid epidemic near Peking. He called for “greatly reducing diseases” so that people “can go labouring every day.”

IN SUMMER 1958 Mao pitchforked the entire rural population into new and larger units called “People’s Communes.” The aim was to make slave-driving more efficient. He himself said that by concentrating the peasants into fewer units—26,000-plus in the whole of China—“it’s easier to control.” The first commune, “Chayashan Sputnik,” was set up in his model province, Henan. Its charter, which Mao edited, and touted as “a great treasure,” laid down that every aspect of its members’ lives was to be controlled by the commune. All the 9,369 households had to “hand over entirely their private plots … their houses, animals and trees.” They had to live in dormitories, “in accordance with the principles of benefiting production and control”; and the charter actually stipulated that their homes were to be “dismantled” “if the commune needs the bricks, tiles or timber.” Every peasant’s life must revolve around “labour.” All members were to be treated as though in the army, with a three-tier regimentation system: commune, brigade, production team (usually a village). Peasants were allowed negligible amounts of cash. The communes were de facto camps for slave-laborers.

Mao even toyed with getting rid of people’s names and replacing them with numbers. In Henan and other model areas, people worked in the fields with a number sewn on their backs. Mao’s aim was to dehumanize China’s 550 million peasants and turn them into the human equivalent of draft animals.

As befitted the labor-camp culture, inmates had to eat in canteens. Peasants were not only banned from eating at home, their woks and stoves were smashed. Total control over food gave the state a terrifying weapon, and withholding food became a commonplace form of “light” punishment, which grassroots officials could deploy against anyone they felt like.

As the canteens were sometimes hours’ walk away from where people lived or worked, many tended to move to the site of the canteen. There, men, women, children and old people lived like animals, crammed into whatever space was available, with no privacy or family life. This also hugely increased the incidence of disease. Meanwhile, many of their own homes, which were often made of mud and bamboo, collapsed from neglect, in addition to all those torn down to make fertilizer, or to feed the backyard furnaces as fuel. When Liu Shao-chi inspected one area near his home village in spring 1961, of the previous 1,415 abodes, only 621 decrepit huts remained.

Mao’s claim about there being “too much food” contributed in another way to increasing the peasants’ misery. When the canteens were first set up, many cadres allowed the hungry peasants to fill their stomachs. This spree only lasted a couple of months, but it hastened the onset of famine — and wholesale deaths — in many areas before the end of 1958. Three years later, Mao reluctantly agreed to abandon canteens. Yet closing down the canteens, though hugely popular in itself, was almost as painful as their opening had been, as the many peasants who had gone to live where the canteens were located now had no home to return to. Even when their dwellings had survived, their stoves and their woks had not.

UNDERNOURISHMENT and overwork quickly reduced tens of millions of peasants to a state where they were simply too enfeebled to work. When he found out that one county was doling out food to those too ill to work, Mao’s response was: “This won’t do. Give them this amount and they don’t work. Best halve the basic ration, so if they’re hungry they have to try harder.”

The people who drove the peasants on were the commune cadres, who were Party men. These were the resident slave-drivers. Knowing that if they failed to do their job, they and their families would swiftly join the ranks of the starving, many adopted the attitude articulated by one man: people were “slaves who have to be beaten, abused, or have their food suspended to get them to work.”

These cadres doubled as jailers, keeping the peasants penned inside their villages. On 19 August 1958, Mao clamped down even further on anyone moving without authorization, what he called “people roaming around uncontrolled.” The traditional possibility of escaping a famine by fleeing to a place where there was food, which had long been made illegal, was now blocked off. One peasant described the situation as worse than under the Japanese occupation: “Even when the Japanese came,” he said, “we could run away. This year [1960] … we are simply shut in to die at home. My family had six members and four have died …”

The cadres’ other job was to stop peasants “stealing” their own harvest. Horrific punishments were widespread: some people were buried alive, others strangled with ropes, others had their noses cut off. In one village, four terrorized young children were saved from being buried alive for taking some food only when the earth was at their waists, after desperate pleas from their parents. In another village, a child had four fingers chopped off for trying to steal a scrap of unripe food; in another, two children who tried to steal food had wires run through their ears, and were then hung up by the wire from a wall. Brutality of this kind crops up in virtually every account of this period, nationwide.

AS PART OF his Leap, in 1958 Mao also tried to turn the cities into slave-labor camps by organizing urban communes. His plan was to abolish wages and put the whole society on a non-cash barracks system. This did not work out, as the slave system could not be made to fit onto modern cities, where life had more complex dimensions.

But this failure did not mean that Mao left the cities unravaged. His guideline for them was “Production first, Life takes second place.” His ideal city was a purely industrial center. Standing on Tiananmen Gate and looking out over the gorgeous palaces and temples and pagodas which in those days decorated Peking’s skyline, he told the mayor: “In the future, I want to look around and see chimneys everywhere!”

Worse, Mao wanted to destroy existing cities on a massive scale and build industrial centers on the ruins. In 1958 the regime did a survey of historic monuments in Peking. It listed 8,000—and decided to keep seventy-eight. Everyone who heard of the scheme, from the mayor down, pleaded against this level of destruction. Eventually, the order was not carried out so drastically — for a while. But at Mao’s insistence, the centuries-old city walls and gates were mostly razed to the ground, and the earth used to fill in a beautiful lake in the city. “I am delighted that city walls in Nanjing, Jinan, and so on, are [also] torn down,” Mao said. He was fond of mocking cultural figures who shed tears of anguish at such senseless destruction, and intellectuals were deliberately made to work on the wrecking crews. Many of the visible signs of Chinese civilization disappeared forever from the face of the earth.

Time and again, Mao expressed his loathing for Chinese architecture, while praising European and Japanese buildings, which he saw as representing the achievements of militaristic states. “I can’t stand the houses in Peking and Kaifeng [old capitals]. I much prefer the ones in Qingdao and Changchun,” he remarked to his inner circle in January 1958. Qingdao was a former German colony, while Changchun had been built by the Japanese as the capital for the puppet state of Manchukuo. Mao repeatedly called these two cities “the best.”

Mao permitted few things with a Chinese character to be built. In the early years of his rule, some buildings in old Chinese style had been put up, but these were soon denounced for their traditional design. When new edifices were put up to mark the tenth anniversary of the regime in 1959, they were built in the Soviet style. They were actually the only Mao-era buildings with even a nod to aesthetics. The rest were factories and utilitarian, gray concrete matchbox blocks.

The best-known of the new buildings was the Great Hall of the People, in central Peking. This was where Mao intended to hold large prestigious meetings, and he specifically ordered the auditorium to be designed to hold as many as 10,000 people. The Great Hall itself, 171,800 square meters in area, was erected on one side of Tiananmen Square in front of the old imperial palace, the Forbidden City. Determined to outdo other totalitarian rulers in gigantism, Mao gave orders to make the Square into “the biggest square in the world, capable of holding a rally of one million people.” What had been a square of 11 hectares, with great character, was quadrupled in size, destroying large swaths of the old city. The result was a vast concrete space devoid of human warmth, the dehumanized heart of Mao’s regime.

PEOPLE STARVED in the cities too, although death tolls were much lower than in the countryside. Nonetheless, most urban dwellers could barely survive on the rations they got. “Life seemed to proceed in slow motion,” a Polish witness observed in Peking. “Rickshaw drivers barely able to pedal … tens of thousands of comatose cyclists … dejection stared out of the eyes of passersby.” The urban meat ration declined annually from 5.1 kg per person in 1957 to an all-time low of just over 1.5 kg in 1960. People were told to eat “food substitutes.” One was a green roe-like substance called chlorella, which grew in urine and contained some protein. After Chou En-lai tasted and approved this disgusting stuff, it soon provided a high proportion of the urban population’s protein.

This famine, which was nationwide, started in 1958 and lasted through 1961, peaking in 1960. That year, the regime’s own statistics recorded, average daily calorie intake fell to 1,534.8. According to a major apologist for the regime, Han Suyin, urban housewives were getting a maximum 1,200 calories a day in 1960. At Auschwitz, slave-laborers got between 1,300 and 1,700 calories per day. They were worked about eleven hours a day, and most who did not find extra food died within several months.

During the famine, some resorted to cannibalism. One post-Mao study (promptly suppressed), of Fengyang county in Anhui province, recorded sixty-three cases of cannibalism in the spring of 1960 alone, including that of a couple who strangled and ate their eight-year-old son. And Fengyang was probably not the worst. In one county in Gansu where one-third of the population died, cannibalism was rife. One village cadre, whose wife, sister and children all died then, later told journalists: “So many people in the village have eaten human flesh … See those people squatting outside the commune office sunning themselves? Some of them ate human flesh … People were just driven crazy by hunger.”

While all this was happening, there was plenty of food in state granaries, which were guarded by the army. Some food was simply allowed to rot. A Polish student saw fruit “rotting by the ton” in southeast China in summer — autumn 1959. But the order from above was: “Absolutely no opening the granary door even if people are dying of starvation” (e-si bu-kai-cang).

CLOSE TO 38 million people died of starvation and overwork in the Great Leap Forward and the famine, which lasted four years. The figure is confirmed by Mao’s No. 2, Liu Shao-chi himself. Even before the famine had ended, he told Soviet ambassador Stepan Chervonenko that 30 million had already died.

This was the greatest famine of the twentieth century — and of all recorded human history. Mao knowingly starved and worked these tens of millions of people to death. During the two critical years 1958–59, grain exports alone, almost exactly 7 million tons, would have provided the equivalent of over 840 calories per day for 38 million people — the difference between life and death. And this was only grain; it does not include the meat, cooking oil, eggs and other foodstuffs that were exported in very large quantities. Had this food not been exported (and instead distributed according to humane criteria), very probably not a single person in China would have had to die of hunger.

Mao had actually allowed for many more deaths. Although slaughter was not his purpose with the Leap, he was more than ready for myriad deaths to result, and had hinted to his top echelon that they should not be too shocked if they happened. At the May 1958 congress that kicked off the Leap, he told his audience they should not only not fear, but should actively welcome, people dying as a result of their Party’s policy. “Wouldn’t it be disastrous if Confucius were still alive today?” he said. The Taoist philosopher Chuang Tzu, he said, “was right to lounge and sing when his wife died. There should be celebration rallies when people die.” Death, said Mao, “is indeed to be rejoiced over … We believe in dialectics, and so we can’t not be in favor of death.”

This airy yet ghoulish “philosophy” was relayed down to grassroots officials. In Fengyang county in Anhui, when one cadre was shown the corpses of people who had died from starvation and overwork, he repeated almost word for word what Mao had said: “If people don’t die, the earth won’t be able to hold them! People live and people die. Who doesn’t die?” Even wearing mourning was forbidden; even shedding tears — since Mao said that death should be celebrated.

Mao saw practical advantage in massive deaths. “Deaths have benefits,” he told the top echelon on 9 December 1958. “They can fertilise the ground.” Peasants were therefore ordered to plant crops over burial plots, which caused intense anguish.

We can now say with assurance how many people Mao was ready to dispense with. When he was in Moscow in 1957, he had said: “We are prepared to sacrifice 300 million Chinese for the victory of the world revolution.” That was about half the population of China then. Indeed, Mao told the Party congress on 17 May 1958: “Don’t make a fuss about a world war. At most, people die … Half the population wiped out — this happened quite a few times in Chinese history … It’s best if half the population is left, next best one-third …”

Nor was Mao just thinking about a war situation. On 21 November 1958, talking to his inner circle about the labor-intensive projects like waterworks and making “steel,” and tacitly, almost casually, assuming a context where peasants had too little to eat and were being worked to exhaustion, Mao said: “Working like this, with all these projects, half of China may well have to die. If not half, one-third, or one-tenth—50 million — die.” Aware that these remarks might sound too shocking, he tried to shirk his own responsibility. “Fifty million deaths,” he went on, “I could be fired, and I might even lose my head … but if you insist, I’ll just have to let you do it, and you can’t blame me when people die.”

North Korea’s Kim Il Sung turned out to be less stupid than Mao on this issue. Mao had pressed him to emulate China’s anti-sparrow campaign. To humor Mao, Kim drafted a “3-Year Plan for Punishing Sparrows,” but then did nothing while he watched to see how Mao’s campaign turned out.

This figure is based on the following calculation. Chinese demographers have concluded that death rates in the four years 1958–61 were 1.20 percent, 1.45 percent, 4.34 percent and 2.83 percent, respectively. The average death rate in the three years immediately before and after the famine was 1.03 percent (1957: 1.08 percent; 1962: 1 percent; and 1963:1 percent). The death rates over and above this average could only have been caused by starvation and overwork during the famine. The “extra” death figure comes to 37.67 million, based on population figures of 646.53, 659.94, 666.71, and 651.71 million for 1957, 1958, 1959 and 1960. The official statistics published in 1983 are recognized as partly defective, because local policemen understated the number of deaths in the years 1959–61 after some were purged for “over-reporting deaths.”

41. DEFENSE MINISTER PENG’S LONELY BATTLE (1958–59 AGE 64–65)

IN THE FIRST two years of the Great Leap Forward, most of Mao’s colleagues went along with him. Only one man in the Politburo, Marshal Peng De-huai, the defense minister, had the courage to dissent.

Peng had stayed close to his poverty-stricken peasant roots. In an account of his life written later while imprisoned by Mao he recorded that he often reminded himself of his famished childhood to avoid “becoming corrupt, or callous about the lives of the poor.” In the 1950s he spoke up among the top echelon about Mao’s corrupt lifestyle: the villas all over China, and the procurement of pretty girls, which Peng described as “selecting imperial concubines.”

Peng had crossed swords with Mao over the years. In the 1930s he had criticized Mao’s vicious treatment of other military commanders. On the Long March he had challenged Mao for the military leadership when Mao was dragging the Red Army to near-ruin for his personal goals. In the 1940s, when Mao began his personality cult during the Yenan Terror, Peng had raised objections to rituals like shouting “Long Live Chairman Mao!” and singing the Mao anthem, “The East Is Red.” Once Khrushchev denounced Stalin in 1956, Peng spoke out more forcefully against the personality cult, and even advocated changing the oath that servicemen took, from one that pledged allegiance to Mao personally, to one that pledged allegiance to the nation, arguing that “Our army belongs to the nation.”

This was guaranteed to rile Mao. Besides, Mao loathed the fact that Peng had not only expressed esteem for Khrushchev over de-Stalinization, but had also urged that spending on defense industries in peacetime “must be compatible with people’s standard of living.”

Peng had often voiced independent, unorthodox views. He openly admired the concepts of “Liberty, Equality and Fraternity,” which Mao denounced as “anti-Marxist.” Peng also advocated observing traditional Chinese ethical codes like “A prince and the man in the street are equal before the law” and “Do not do to others what you don’t want done to yourself.” My “principle,” Mao said, “is exactly the opposite: Do to others precisely what I don’t want done to myself.”

Peng had been a thorn in Mao’s side for three decades, although he had also cooperated with Mao at certain key moments, like going into Korea in 1950. It was as a result of this that Mao made him defense minister in 1954—reluctantly, as Mao himself revealed later. Throughout Peng’s tenure, Mao undermined him by creating competing chains of command. Still, Peng retained a fearlessness vis-à-vis Mao that was unique among top leaders.

WHEN HE LAUNCHED the Leap in May 1958, Mao plunged Peng and some 1,500 senior army officers into daily “criticism and self-criticism” meetings, at which they were made to attack each other for weeks on end. Such sessions, which had become a Maoist staple since the Yenan Terror, were full of bitter character-assassination, and were emotionally utterly draining. Peng felt so demoralized that he offered to resign, an offer Mao rejected because he wanted to purge Peng. Meanwhile, he elevated his crony Marshal Lin Biao to be a vice-chairman of the Party, which put Lin above Peng, in the army as well as the Party.

These upheavals consumed Peng’s time and energy until late July, when the criticism meetings were brought to a close. Only then was he able to start taking stock of the fearsome panorama around him. He could see that Mao was fixated on acquiring an absolutely gigantic strike force — no fewer than 200–300 nuclear submarines, as Mao had insisted to the Russians, and every other state-of-the art weapon Russia possessed — and that Mao would go to any lengths to achieve this goal. One step towards this end was to shell the Nationalist-held island of Quemoy in August, with the aim of triggering nuclear threats from America in order to put pressure on Khrushchev. (Peng was deliberately excluded from this exercise, even though he was the army chief.) Then there was the flood of bogus harvest figures, which could only mean one thing: that Mao was aiming to squeeze out far greater quantities of food to pay for the enormous amount of hardware he was acquiring from Russia.

On the evening of 3 September, shortly after the shelling of Quemoy had started, Peng disappeared while at the seaside resort of Beidaihe for a round of meetings. Eventually, after a long search, the Praetorian Guard found him pacing a remote stretch of beach in the moonlight, alone. With a darkened face, he returned to his villa, where he lay awake all night.

Afterwards, he set off on an inspection tour of northern China, during which he learned that the crop figures were indeed inflated, and that peasants were dying of starvation. He saw for the first time the disastrous impact of Mao’s pet obsession, the backyard furnaces. Passing through Henan, Mao’s model province, he saw the furnaces getting denser, with crowds and carts and shovels and ladders and baskets, and flames stretching out like a blazing sea to the horizon. Gazing out of the train window, he turned to his aide-de-camp and shook his head: “These fires are going to burn up everything we have.”

At the beginning of December, at a conference in Wuhan, Peng heard Mao announce that the harvest figure for 1958 was more than double 1957’s, which had been a very good year. Peng said that this was impossible, but Mao’s agriculture chiefs shut him up with what amounted to “We know better than you.”

Peng decided to go back to his home area in Hunan, which was in the same county as Mao’s home village, to find out what was really happening. There, he got confirmation that the harvest figures were false. Peasants had had their homes torn down to feed the backyard furnaces; they were being worked to the point of collapse; and grassroots cadres were using violence to force them to work. “In some areas, it has become common practice to beat people up,” Peng wrote. “People are beaten up when they can’t fulfill their work quota, beaten up when they are late going out to work, beaten up even for saying things some don’t like.” Peng also registered the special misery that Mao’s slave-driving was inflicting on women: overwork, he noted, had caused “many women to suffer prolapses of the womb, or premature stoppage of menstruation.”

Peng’s childhood friends had famished, waxen faces. They showed him their canteen wok, which contained only vegetable leaves and a few grains of rice, with no oil. Their beds were just cold bamboo mats with flimsy quilts, in freezing December. As his coevals were sixty-ish, they were living in the commune’s quarters for the old, called the “Happiness Court.” “What sort of Happiness is this?” Peng exploded. The beds in the kindergarten had only thin rags. Many children were ill. Peng gave the kindergarten 200 yuan out of his own pocket, and left another 200 yuan to buy bedding for the old. A Red Army veteran who had been disabled in the 1930s tucked a piece of paper into his palm. It was an entreaty for Peng to “cry out for us.”

On 18 December, Peng met one of the top economic managers, Bo Yi-bo, and told him Mao’s figure for the grain harvest was unreal, and that they must not collect food on the basis of this exaggeration. Bo agreed with him. In fact, all Mao’s economic managers, as well as Politburo members, knew the truth. But when Peng suggested that he and Bo send a joint telegram to Mao, Bo declined. So Peng cabled Mao on his own, urging that food collection be reduced. There was no response.

Peng knew his report was not news to Mao, who had reprised his offhand views about death at Wuhan earlier that month: “A few children die in the kindergarten, a few old men die in the Happiness Court … If there’s no death, human beings can’t exist. From Confucius to now, it would be disastrous if people didn’t die.”

How could Mao be stopped? Even though he was defense minister, Peng had little power — nothing like the power which defense ministers had in other countries. The army was completely controlled by Mao, and Peng could not move troops without Mao’s explicit permission. Peng began to contemplate seeking help from the only possible source — abroad.

With no access to the West, Peng’s only hope was Eastern Europe, and Khrushchev. This was an extremely long shot. He decided, it seems, to try and make a sounding, on the off-chance.

PENG HAD long-standing invitations to visit Eastern Europe. Getting there meant passing through Moscow, and Mao had indicated that he was not keen on Peng taking up the invitations. But he agreed on 28 February 1959, after Peng had taken the uncharacteristic step of pressing him for his consent.

The beady Mao guessed Peng was up to something. On 5 April, shortly before Peng’s scheduled departure, Mao exploded to a top Party gathering: “Is comrade Peng De-huai here?… you really hate me to death …” Mao then flew into a temper the like of which those close to him said they had never seen. “We have always been battling each other …” Mao exclaimed. “My principle is: You don’t mess with me and I won’t mess with you; but mess with me, and I sure as hell will mess with you!”

That night, Peng was seen pacing up and down his office. When a secretary came to consult him about plans for the following day, Peng, who never mentioned private matters, astonished him by suddenly speaking with melancholy about how much he missed his former wife. His current wife was a scared and “correct” Party person, from whom he could not expect understanding or support for the course of action on which he was about to embark.

On 20 April, just before leaving for Europe, Peng attended a reception given by ambassadors of the countries he was to visit. There he did something unprecedented. He took Soviet ambassador Yudin into a separate room and, with only a Russian embassy interpreter present, which was a major breach of the rules, initiated a conversation about the Great Leap Forward. According to the interpreter, Peng’s sounding was cautious: “Only by the character of his questions and the tone in which they were put was it possible to understand his negative attitude towards ‘the leap.’ ” The interpreter told us: “It seemed Peng wanted to see what the ambassador would say about the Great Leap — to get the ambassador’s opinion.” Yudin waffled about the “positive” aspects of the Leap. “What stuck in my mind,” the interpreter recalled, “were the Marshal’s mournful eyes, reflecting a gamut of feelings: from alarm for the fate of his country to firm determination to fight for its future.”

Peng found no more sympathy when he got to Europe. East Germany’s leader, Ulbricht, said he knew that China was enjoying fantastic growth in agriculture, and could it send more meat so that they could match West Germany’s annual consumption of 80 kg per capita? In China, even in the cities, the meat ration for the whole year was only a few kilos.

After Ulbricht spoke, Peng fell silent for a long time before telling his host that there was actually a tremendous food shortage. Ulbricht, an old Stalinist who had concocted a few claims himself, was unmoved. Whether Mao’s claims were true or not was immaterial to him. In fact, food imports from China had just allowed East Germany, with a standard of living incomparably higher than China’s, to end rationing, in May 1958. (Later, when tens of millions of Chinese had already died of starvation, Ulbricht asked Mao for more food, on 11 January 1961. When Chou told East European ambassadors that China could not deliver all the food it had contracted to send, and asked to postpone or cancel some contracts, Poland showed understanding, but East Germany flatly refused even to consider a postponement, and pressed for delivery on the dot. “Great Germany above all,” Chou remarked, but still sent 23,000 tons of soybeans.)

After his conversation with Ulbricht, Peng burst out to his staff: “How would our people feel if they heard they were being asked to help others have 80 kg of meat a year?” His next stop was Czechoslovakia. When he told the Czechs about what was really happening in China, and said that anyone but the Chinese would be taking to the streets, he got little reaction. Peng realized that the East European regimes were a lost cause. They “all pay great attention to arms,” he noted. “They all have a privileged class trained by the Soviet Union.” The bottom line was that these regimes did not care what it cost the Chinese people to supply food to them, even if it meant Chinese dying; Eastern Europe’s imports of food from China reached their highest levels yet in 1958. Throughout the trip, Peng was downcast.

Peng’s last stop in Europe was Albania. When he arrived there, on 28 May, he found that Khrushchev had just turned up, unexpectedly, for his first-ever visit. Any hopes Peng might have entertained about Khrushchev perhaps having come specially to meet him were dashed at once. Khrushchev had no Chinese-language interpreter with him.

Khrushchev was in Albania for a very different reason. Albania provided Russia with a unique submarine base in the heart of the Mediterranean, on Sazan Island. Peng’s own mission, dictated by Mao, was also geared to this base. On his first full day in Albania, 29 May, Peng got up at 5:30 AM and headed straight there. The purpose of Khrushchev’s visit was to try to prevent the Albanians doing a deal with China over the base. Peng saw that he could not count on Khrushchev, or any of the Communist countries, for help.

It seems that Peng then, in desperation, contemplated something akin to a military coup. When he returned to Peking on 13 June, the first thing he did was to try to move some military forces “to transport grain to famine-stricken areas,” he told the army chief of staff, Huang Ke-cheng, who was a close friend and a kindred spirit. Huang clearly understood what Peng wanted the troops for, as he expressed a degree of reluctance that he would not have shown if he had thought the proposal was really about transporting food. Mao seems to have got wind of this conversation, and had Peng grilled intensely about it later. As all troop movements had to have Mao’s authorization, Peng was unable to move any forces. All he could do was try to exert pressure on Mao by sending him annotated reports about the famine, and lobby others to do likewise. Seeing famished peasants from the train, he would say to his companions: “If China’s workers and peasants weren’t so nice, we would have had to invite in the Soviet Red Army [to prop up the Communist regime]!”

Mao had followed Peng’s every step in Europe through spies in the delegation, and knew Peng had got nowhere. Mao was soon to remark complacently that Peng had gone abroad “to sniff around,” but had been unable to do any more than that. As soon as he was convinced that Peng had secured no foreign backing, Mao decided to pounce. Part of his calculation was to use the purge of Peng to kick off a wider terror campaign. Mao badly needed to keep up the great squeeze, as China was falling behind on payments to Russia. The trouble for Mao was that grassroots officials, out of pity, were often holding off taking food that the peasants needed to survive. Mao knew that much of his own machine, as well as the entire nation, was resisting his policies. In February and March 1959 he had said quite a few times: “Several hundred million peasants and production team leaders are united against the Party.” Even his provincial bosses now mostly kept an awkward silence when he pressed them to cough up more food. Mao needed his standby, terror, to steel his machine.

ON 20 JUNE 1959, a week after Peng returned from Europe, Mao left Peking by train. It was ferociously hot, and the electric fan was switched off in case Mao caught cold. A big bowl of ice was placed in his carriage, to little avail. All the men, Mao included, stripped down to their underpants. (Immediately after this, an air-conditioned train was ordered for Mao from East Germany.) To cool himself off, Mao went swimming in the Yangtze and the Xiang River — which doubled up for him as baths. He had not taken a bath or a shower, or washed his hair, since 1949, almost a decade before, when he discovered the pleasure of being rubbed by a servant with a hot towel and having his hair and skull combed by his barber.

Meanwhile, he began to make ready for his showdown. On the 24th, he told his secretary to telephone Peking to call a conference at Lushan, the mountain resort above the Yangtze. Mao dictated a list of the participants, but did not spell out that this was to be a forum to condemn Peng.

Having decided on the highest-level purge since he took power, it seems that Mao felt he needed personal confirmation that he still held godlike status, and was invincible. He was staying at the time near his home village, Shaoshan. On the spur of the moment, he decided to go there to sniff the air.

This was Mao’s first visit home in thirty-two years, even though he had passed by the area frequently. The local authorities had built a villa for him, at his express wish. Pine Hill No. 1, situated in pine woods, had been on standby for years. They had also evicted any “undesirable” families years before, to prevent them from getting near Mao — or bumping into visiting foreigners.

Mao stayed two nights in Shaoshan. Having invited complaints, he got them aplenty. The harvests, the villagers told him, had been inflated. Those who had made objections had been put through denunciation meetings and beaten up. An old man inquired whether it was Mao’s idea that men and women should live segregated lives in barracks conditions (which had come with the communes in many parts of China). Above all, they were hungry, as they were getting only between one-third and one-quarter of what was traditionally considered enough in this area. When Mao gave a meal to several dozen villagers, they wolfed it all down unceremoniously.

There was not a word of support for Mao’s policies, even here in his home village, which was extremely privileged and was receiving large state subsidies. But Mao could also see that although the discontent was massive, no one dared to do more than grumble, and some complaints had to be dressed up as flattery. “Chairman,” one said, “if you hadn’t come to Shaoshan, soon we would all die of hunger.” When one young man complained more bitterly than others, Mao pulled a long face and snapped: “After all, it’s better than the old days.” Though this was a pathetic untruth (he himself had said in “the old days” that in Shaoshan “it is easy to get rich”), nobody called Mao’s bluff. Neither did anyone challenge his subsequent instruction, which was transparently irrelevant: “Eat more in busy seasons and eat less in slack seasons. And be thrifty with food …” When he turned to the provincial leaders and said unashamedly that the complaints were “appeals against you; it is your responsibility, write them down,” the scapegoats took it in silence.

Mao’s personality cult had ensured that he was untouchable. A young servant at the guest house had spent three sleepless nights and days cleaning the place up. Decades later, she recounted how the manager had called her in. “ ‘Can I give you the best and most glorious task?’ I said: ‘Certainly …’ ” It turned out to be washing Mao’s dirty underwear.

Wow, it was Chairman Mao’s clothes. This is really, really fantastic … They had been drenched in sweat. This color, yellow. One shirt, one pair of long underpants … I thought of Chairman Mao: he was the leader of the people of the world and yet he lived such a hard life. [!] The underwear felt so flimsy I didn’t dare to rub, so I stroked them gently. What was I to do if I messed them up?… I was afraid someone might see them [hanging out to dry], and might do something … so every few minutes I went out and felt them to see whether they were dry … There was no electricity and no electric iron. But I had to make the clothes look pretty. So before they were dry, I folded them and put them under the glass top of the desk to press them … When I delivered them to the director, he said: “Very good, very good.” But I was thinking: it won’t do if Chairman Mao doesn’t like my work …

Mao left Shaoshan with no doubt that he would come out on top against Peng.

RISING ALMOST 1,500 meters sheer out of the steamy Yangtze plain, Lushan had the air of a magic mountain divorced from life below. It was permanently veiled by swiftly massing and evaporating clouds. A great poet, Su Shi, has left an immortal poem about its mystery:

Unable to see the true face of Lushan

No surprise, as you are inside it.

Clouds of the most fabulous shapes gushed from the gorges up the cliffs, swaying in front of pedestrians on the paved streets. Sometimes, as one sat chatting, clouds would imperceptibly envelop one’s interlocutors — only to unwrap them an instant later. One could even catch the surreal moment of a cloud curling and floating in through an open window, then turning and sailing out of another.

Europeans turned Lushan into a summer resort in the late nineteenth century. Here, bamboo and pines, waterfalls and mossy rocks, offered blissful relief from the stifling heat of the lowlands. At its center, Kuling, there were over 800 villas in different European styles. It became Chiang Kai-shek’s summer capital for thirteen years. A villa originally built for an Englishman had been Chiang’s residence, and it now became Mao’s. During the Chiangs’ last stay, in August 1948, Chiang had named it “Villa of Beauty”—“Mei-lu” (the character “beauty” being part of Mme Chiang’s given name, Mei-ling). Knowing that his days on the Mainland were numbered, Chiang inscribed the name and had it carved into the rock at the villa entrance. When Mao saw masons trying to chisel it out, he stopped them.

Chiang and earlier residents had ascended Lushan in sedan chairs if they did not fancy a steep walk up of 7–8 km. The Communists had built a road. When Mao’s motorcade was on it, no other cars were allowed from top to bottom. The whole mountain was sealed off during his stay; even residents outside the villa area were sent away. Mao’s security was immeasurably tighter than Chiang’s. In fact, after this one visit, Mao became dissatisfied with Chiang’s villa, as he was with all the old villas selected for him all over China. Here too he ordered one of his enormous bullet-and bomb-proof warehouse-style bunkers of cement, steel and stone. This new estate, Reeds Wood No. 1, which was completed two years later, was built beside a reservoir, so that Mao could go swimming at his leisure. This, like many other villas of Mao’s, was built during the worst years of the famine.

In the face of raging mass starvation, Mao made a point of generating a holiday atmosphere at Lushan. Participants had been specially instructed to bring their wives and children. (For many of the children, this was their first experience inside European villas, whose flush toilets and stone walls mesmerized them.) The food was excellent; even the staff canteen served more than half a dozen dishes at each meal. In the evenings, there were local operas chosen by Mao, and dances in a former Catholic church, with dancing girls bussed in. At least one of the dancers and one of the resort nurses were summoned to Mao’s villa “for a chat.”

Mao’s womanizing was now more brazen than ever. In Zhongnanhai, a new lounge was added to the dance hall, and a bed installed there. Mao would take one or several girls into it to engage in sexual play or orgies. The lounge was well insulated so the noise did not carry, and the thick floor-to-ceiling velvet curtain would be drawn behind them. It was obvious what Mao disappeared in there for, but he did not care.

WHEN PENG arrived at Lushan for the conference, he was stopped as he entered the villa area by guards with little flags: “Group One”—code-name for Mao — was resting. Peng had to get out and walk. His villa, No. 176, was about 100 meters from Mao’s — so Mao’s security men could monitor him easily.

The conference of over 100 top officials began on 2 July 1959. Mao’s first tactic was to split the participants into six groups, each chaired and controlled by a trusted provincial chief, who reported directly to Mao. Discussions were confined to these groups, so any unwanted views would have only a restricted audience. The rest of the participants could find out only what Mao wanted them to read in the conference bulletin, which was printed by his office.

When Peng spoke to his group, the Northwest Group, he voiced his views about the Leap, raising the issue of the phantom harvest claims, and basically called Mao a liar: “The growth figure claimed by … Chairman Mao’s home place for last year was far higher than the real figure. I was there and asked around and learned that the increase was only 16 percent … and even that was because the state gave large subsidies and loans.”/“The Chairman has also been to this commune. I asked the Chairman: What was your information through your investigation? He said he didn’t talk about it. I think he did.”

Peng spelled out Mao’s responsibility again the next day: “The 10.7 million [tons of steel, the 1958 target] was decided by Chairman Mao. You cannot say he didn’t have responsibility.” Over the following days, Peng called into question Mao’s role in the villa-building spree, and warned that Mao “must not abuse his prestige.” Peng also hit out at Mao’s policy of squeezing out food for export “at the cost of domestic consumption.”

But, as Mao had made sure would be the case, Peng’s words did not percolate beyond his group. In frustration, on 14 July, Peng wrote a letter to Mao, criticizing the Great Leap Forward, using carefully phrased language. His hope was that this would set off a real debate about the Leap. Mao circulated the letter to the other participants, only to turn it into an excuse to purge Peng.

Mao had been watching Peng like a cobra to see whether Peng was involved in any conspiracy, which was the only way Mao could really be threatened. He wanted to know who was coming to see Peng so he could round them all up.

In fact, Peng had put out some feelers. He knew that Lo Fu, the former Party No. 1, was opposed to Mao’s policies, and Peng had asked Lo to read the letter he was sending to Mao. But Lo declined; and when Peng tried to read it out to him, Lo jumped up and fled. Mao had instilled such fear about “plotting” that people were simply paralyzed when there was any whiff of it. Under Mao, as under Stalin, only one person was allowed to plot — and that, as Stalin’s sidekick Molotov observed, was the boss.

Mao brought all the participants together for the first time on 23 July. He opened in a characteristically thuggish, and plaintive, manner: “You have talked so much. Now allow me to talk for an hour or so, will you? I have taken sleeping pills three times and still couldn’t sleep.” He made it sound as if someone had been preventing him speaking, and even sleeping. To create an atmosphere where rational debate would be smothered and he could evade the real issues, Mao worked himself into a rage, and belittled the catastrophe his policy had caused with remarks like: “All it means is a little less pork, fewer hairpins, and no soap for a while.” Then he unsheathed the ultimate deterrent. If I am opposed, he declared, “I will leave … to lead the peasants [!] to overthrow the government … If the army follows you, I will go up the mountains and start guerrilla warfare … But I think the army will follow me.” One general recalled: “We felt the atmosphere in the hall freeze.” Mao had polarized the issue into one of: Peng or me; and if you back Peng, I will fight you to the death.

Everyone knew that Mao was unbeatable. He drove home the point about the army obeying him by arranging for his crony Marshal Lin Biao, whose prestige in the military was as high as Peng’s, to appear at the conference the next day. Up to this moment, Lin had not been in Lushan itself; he had been on hand, lurking at the foot of the mountain.

When Lin got up to Lushan, he attacked Peng venomously, and gave Mao his total and demonstrative support. There was nothing Peng or anyone else could do to defy Mao or to reason with him. Mao had also made it easier for people to go along with him by pretending to make some concessions — on food extraction levels, steel output targets, and expenditure on arms factories — and by expressing a willingness to put some money into agriculture. Mao had no intention of honoring any of these promises, and was soon to renege on them all.

Mao labeled Peng and other critics, including Chief of Staff Huang Ke-cheng and former Party No. 1 Lo Fu, as an “anti-Party clique.” He now enlarged the conference to a plenum of the Central Committee, so that his critics could be condemned more formally. Mao read out the resolution himself, and simply announced that it was passed, without even going through the motions of asking the participants to raise their hands. After the obligatory degrading denunciation meetings, Peng was put under house arrest, and the others suffered various punishments. Their families became outcasts with them. Huang’s wife went out of her mind. The youngest and most junior of the group, Mao’s occasional secretary Li Rui, went through nearly 100 denunciation meetings, and was then sent to do forced labor in the Great Northern Wilderness. His wife divorced him, and under her influence his children disowned him with a frosty letter, turning down his request to have a photograph of them. He spent virtually all of the next two decades in and out of forced labor camps and solitary confinement in prison, narrowly escaping a death sentence. This bravest of men emerged with his sanity, intellect, and moral courage undiminished, and continued to speak out against injustice in the post-Mao years.

AFTER LUSHAN, Peng was replaced as defense minister by Lin Biao, who immediately started to purge Peng’s sympathizers in the army. He also set about promoting Mao’s cult on an even grander scale. From January 1960 he ordered the armed forces to memorize quotations from Mao — a move that was to develop into the compendium known as “the Little Red Book.” Mao was overjoyed. He later told the Australian Maoist Edward Hill that Lin “has invented a new method, that is, to compile quotations … Confucius’s Analects is a collection of quotations. Buddhism also has collections of quotations.” Mao then mentioned the Bible. This was the company in which he thought his aphorisms belonged.

Across the nation anyone resisting hyper-requisition and slave-driving was hounded down. Over the next couple of years, according to post-Mao leader Deng Xiao-ping later on, an “estimated 10 million” people were made victims in this drive, which in addition jeopardized the life of “several tens of millions” of their relations. Many of the 10 million victims were grassroots cadres. Their replacements were people willing to slave-drive as harshly as ordered.

One other group particularly persecuted in this purge cycle was doctors, for the reason that they had so often identified starvation as the true cause of the tidal wave of illness and death. Mao wanted to ensure that the gigantic tragedy he had created remained a non-event. Even the names of diseases that suggested starvation were tabooed, like edema, which was just called “No. 2 Illness.” Years later, Mao was still flagellating doctors for doing their job professionally: “Why were there so many … hepatitis cases in [those days]? Weren’t they all you doctors’ doing? You went looking for them, didn’t you?”

In the following year, 1960, 22 million people died of hunger. This was the largest number in one year in any country in the history of the world.

LUSHAN ALSO SEALED the fate of Mao’s ex-wife, Gui-yuan. Twenty-two years before, unable to bear his blatant womanizing and general callousness towards her, she had left Mao and gone to Moscow. In Russia she had a mental breakdown, and spent two years in a provincial psychiatric hospital where she went through a nightmare regime. She got out in autumn 1946, stable, if a little slow, and was allowed to return to China. She was banned from Peking, and in 1959, at the time of Lushan, was living nearby, in Nanchang. She had made a good recovery, but her life was lonely, as she lived on her own. She had not set eyes on Mao for twenty-two years.

On 7 July 1959, while Mao was watching Peng before pouncing, he was seized by a whim to see Gui-yuan. He sent the savvy wife of a local boss to fetch her, but specifically asked the woman not to tell Gui-yuan who it was that she was going to see, and just to say that she was invited to Lushan for a holiday — because, Mao told the intermediary, Gui-yuan “could well collapse mentally if she got too excited.” Mao was well aware that Gui-yuan was in a fragile emotional state, and the shock might be more than she could take. Their daughter had told him her mother had had a relapse at the unexpected sound of Mao’s voice on the radio in 1954 (one of the very rare occasions his voice was broadcast — for which the radio was reprimanded). He was prepared to risk her having a breakdown merely to gratify his whim.

Mao’s selfishness cost Gui-yuan dearly. When she suddenly saw him standing in front of her, her nerves gave way. The damage was worsened by the fact that when Mao was saying goodbye he promised to see her again “tomorrow.” But the next morning she was forcibly taken back to Nanchang, on his orders. This time her breakdown was worse than ever. She did not even recognize her own daughter, and would not wash, or change her clothes. Every now and then she would escape to the gate of the provincial Party HQ, hair disheveled, drooling at the mouth, demanding to know who had schemed to prevent her from seeing Mao again. She never fully recovered.

At the end of these sessions, Mao victimized a host of prominent generals, to make the point that the top brass must keep their distance from the Russians. Mao’s message was: The only thing you are to learn from the Russians is how to use modern weapons.

Eastern Europe also allowed Peng to anticipate Mao’s gruesome mausoleum. “We have seen the corpses of the leaders: Lenin, Stalin, Gottwald, Dimitrov. Every country has one. The Asian countries probably will also have these in the future.”

When Albania broke with Russia, control of the submarines there was at the core of the bust-up. In January 1961, Peking gave the Albanian leader, Enver Hoxha, the gigantic sum of 500m rubles, and when the Russians tried to pull their submarines out in early June that year, Hoxha used force to hold four of them back, and almost certainly gave Mao access to them.

Electricity was installed for Mao the next time he was nearby, on 18 May 1960. This took 470 workers, who had to battle a force-8 gale. Even so, Mao did not drop in again.

42. THE TIBETANS REBEL (1950–61 AGE 56–67)

FROM THE TIME he conquered China, Mao was determined to take Tibet by force. When he saw Stalin on 22 January 1950, he asked if the Soviet air force could transport supplies to Chinese troops “currently preparing for an attack on Tibet.” Stalin’s reply was: “It’s good that you are preparing to attack. The Tibetans need to be subdued …” Stalin also advised flooding Tibet and other border regions with Han Chinese: “Since ethnic Chinese make up no more than 5 percent of Xinjiang’s population, the percentage of ethnic Chinese should be brought to 30 … In fact, all the border territories should be populated by Chinese …” This is exactly what the Chinese Communist regime then proceeded to do.

During 1950–51, 20,00 °Chinese Communist troops forced their way into Tibet. But Mao realized he was unable to send in larger numbers to occupy the whole place. There were no proper roads to supply a large army, and Mao’s soldiers were not used to the altitude, while the Tibetan army was not a negligible force. So Mao played the negotiation game, pretending that he would allow the area virtual autonomy. Acting the benign moderate, he recognized the Dalai Lama, Tibet’s spiritual and governmental leader, as the head of Tibet, sent him gifts like a 16mm film projector, and said reassuring things to Tibetan delegations. Meanwhile he pressed ahead with building two roads into Tibet.

In September 1954, the nineteen-year-old Dalai Lama went to Peking to attend the rubber-stamp National Assembly, of which he had been appointed a member. Mao met him at least a dozen times during his stay, which lasted half a year, and set out to charm — and disarm — him. Mao knew about his interest in science: “I know you are a reform-minded man, like myself,” Mao said. “We have a lot of things in common,” citing education reform. “That was the danger with Mao,” the Dalai Lama told us, “everything he said—half true! Half true!” But along with the lulling, Mao was also patronizing and bullying, berating the Dalai Lama for not accepting that “religion is poison.”

In an effort to do the best he could for his people, the Dalai Lama applied to join the CCP. His application was turned down. He tried to keep Mao in a good mood, and after returning to Lhasa, wrote to him in summer 1955 enclosing a Tibetan flower. Mao responded in almost sentimental language:

Dear Dalai Lama, I was very happy to receive your letter … I often miss you, missing the happy times when you were in Peking. When can I see you again?… I was very happy to see the Tibetan flower which you enclosed … I’m here enclosing one flower to you …

Early in 1956, once the two major roads had been completed into Tibet, Mao set about requisitioning food, attacking religion and confiscating arms in a region called Kham, adjacent to Tibet and inhabited by some half a million Tibetans. The people rebelled, and by the end of March had mustered an armed force of over 60,000 men with more than 50,000 guns. Rebellions spread like wildfire in other regions where Tibetans formed a majority. Mao found himself with major wars on his hands covering huge areas of the interior; he resorted to using heavy artillery and aerial bombardment.

The mass participation and the combativeness of the rebels brought home to Mao what kind of resistance he would face in Tibet itself. In September he suspended his plans to “Maoise” Tibet.

However, two years later, with the Great Leap in 1958, food requisitioning was drastically stepped up nationwide. This encountered tenacious resistance in Tibet and the four large provinces in Western China with sizable Tibetan populations — Gansu, Qinghai, Yunnan and Sichuan. Many Tibetans had managed to retain their firearms, which for herdsmen were essential for their livelihood. They also had horses, which gave them mobility. But above all they had their own separate identity, language and religion, which enabled them to organize in secret.

In Qinghai, which is larger than France, the rebellion spread through the province. Mao gave instant orders to quell it, on 24 June. At the same time, he told his army chiefs to “be ready to deal with an all-out rebellion in Tibet” itself. He made it explicit that he positively wanted a violent, crushing solution. “In Tibet,” he wrote on 22 January the following year, “there has to be a general decisive war before we can solve the problem thoroughly. The Tibetan rulers … now have a 10,000-strong rebelling armed force with high morale, and they are our serious enemies. But this is … a good thing. Because this makes it possible to solve our problems through war.” Mao was saying: They have given me an excuse to start a war. A month later, he wrote: “The bigger the upheaval the better.”

On 10 March 1959, an uprising broke out in Lhasa, after word spread that the Chinese planned to kidnap the Dalai Lama. Thousands paraded in front of his palace and through Lhasa, shouting “Chinese get out!” Next day, Mao cabled an order to let the Dalai Lama escape. His calculation was that if the Dalai Lama was killed it would inflame world opinion, particularly in the Buddhist countries and India, which Mao was courting. On the night of the 17th the Dalai Lama made his way out of Lhasa and set off for India. Once his escape was confirmed, Mao told his men: “Do all you can to hold the enemies in Lhasa … so when our main force arrives we can surround them and wipe them out.”

THE PHYSICAL WAR had its propaganda chorus. On 7 April, Mao made inquiries about Tibetan practices. One thing he was particularly keen to know was whether the Tibetan ruling class used torture, and whether disobedient lamas were skinned alive and had their tendons severed. On the 29th, following Mao’s orders, a vigorous media campaign began, painting Tibet as a terrifying place, where gruesome tortures of the kinds Mao had mentioned, plus gouging out eyes, were everyday occurrences. Aided by age-old prejudices, this propaganda drive was effective, and Mao succeeded in planting the idea in people’s minds that Tibet was a land of barbarism.

There had been a very dark side to the rule of the old Tibetan theocracy, but in terms of overall brutality and suffering, Mao’s rule was far worse. This is shown in a 70,000-word letter written to Chou En-lai by the second-ranking spiritual leader in Tibet, the Panchen Lama, in 1962, describing what happened in the years 1959–61. What gives the letter particular weight is that the Panchen Lama had initially welcomed Mao’s troops into Tibet, and even accepted the suppression of the Lhasa rebellion in 1959. Moreover, Chou himself acknowledged that the letter was accurate.

Mao had imposed a level of requisitioning on the Tibetan economy far higher than it could possibly sustain. In the old days, the Panchen Lama wrote, “food was not that short … there was no death from starvation.” But in 1959 and 1960 “too much grain was collected, even the food and tsampa [barley flour, Tibetans’ staple food] in people’s offering bags were confiscated.” Requisitioning was brutal: “nearly all the reserve food, meat and butter were confiscated … There was no oil to light lamps, not even firewood …” “To survive, herdsmen had to eat many of their animals …” The population was herded into canteens, where they were fed “weeds, even inedible tree bark, leaves, grass roots and seeds.” Food traditionally fed to animals had “now become rare nutritious delicious foods.” People’s health declined dramatically: “A tiny infectious illness like a cold led to … masses of deaths. Quite a lot … also died directly of starvation … Death rate was really terrible … Such awful pain of hunger had never existed in Tibetan history.”

While he was writing the letter, the Panchen Lama toured Tibetan regions. He found that in Qinghai, people did not even have food bowls. “In the old society, even beggars had bowls,” the Panchen Lama observed. Under Chiang Kai-shek and the Muslim warlord Ma Pu-fang, the Tibetans in Qinghai “were never so poor as not to be able to afford bowls!” Later, people even took to trying to break into labor camps and prisons to search for food.

Large numbers of Tibetans were put through violent denunciation meetings, including the father and family of the Panchen Lama, who wrote: “People were beaten till they bled from eyes, ears, mouths, noses, they passed out, their arms or legs broken … others died on the spot.” For the first time in Tibet, suicide became a common practice.

With so many Tibetans joining rebellions against Mao’s regime, Chinese troops treated most Tibetans as enemies, rounding up the majority of adult males in many places, leaving only “women, the old, the children and extremely few young and middle-aged men.” After Mao’s death, the Panchen Lama revealed what he had not dared put in his original letter: that a staggering 15 to 20 percent of all Tibetans — perhaps half of all adult males — were thrown into prison, where they were basically worked to death. They were treated like subhumans. Lama Palden Gyatso, a brave long-term prisoner, told us he and other prisoners were flogged with wire whips as they pulled heavy plows.

The crushing of the rebellions produced atrocious behavior on the part of Chinese troops. In one place, the Panchen Lama described (speaking after Mao died) how “corpses were dragged down from the mountains” and buried in a big pit, and the relatives were then summoned and told: “ ‘We have wiped out the rebel bandits, and today is a day of festivity. You will all dance on the pit of the corpses.’ ”

Atrocities went in parallel with cultural annihilation. This period witnessed a campaign officially called “Big Destruction,” in which the entire Tibetan way of life came under violent physical assault for being “backward, dirty and useless.” Mao was bent on destroying religion, the essence of most Tibetans’ lives. When he met the Dalai Lama in 1954–55 he told him there were too many monks in Tibet, which, he said, was bad for reproducing the labor force. Now lamas and nuns were forced to break their vows of celibacy and get married. “Holy Scriptures were used for manure, and pictures of the Buddha and sutras were deliberately used to make shoes,” the Panchen Lama wrote. The destruction was of a kind that “even lunatics would hardly carry out.” Most monasteries were destroyed, “the sites looking as if they had just been through a war and bombardments.” According to the Panchen Lama, the number of monasteries in Tibet fell from over 2,500 before 1959 to “only just over 70” in 1961, and the number of monks and nuns from over 110,000 to 7,000 (some 10,000 fled abroad).

One particularly painful order for Tibetans was that Buddhist ceremonies for the dead were banned. “When a person dies,” the Panchen Lama wrote:

if there is no ceremony to expiate his sins for his soul to be released from purgatory, this is to treat the dead with the utmost … cruelty … People were saying: “We die too late … Now when we die, we are going to be like a dog being tossed outside the door!”

On his tours in the early 1960s, Tibetans came at great risk to see the Panchen Lama, crying out and weeping: “Don’t let us starve! Don’t let Buddhism be exterminated! Don’t let the people of the Land of Snows become extinct!” Mao was “greatly displeased” with the Panchen Lama’s letter, and visited much suffering on him, including ten years in prison.

To Tibet, as to the whole of China, Mao’s rule brought unprecedented misery.

43. MAOISM GOES GLOBAL (1959–64 AGE 65–70)

IN FEBRUARY 1959, Russia signed an agreement to provide China with the means to make nuclear submarines. This marked the high point of the Kremlin’s cooperation on technology transfers. But even while the deal was being signed, Khrushchev was having second thoughts about endowing Mao with such enormous military power.

One incident in particular had prompted Khrushchev to rethink. In September 1958 a US air-to-air Sidewinder missile had come down over China unexploded from a Taiwanese plane. Urgent requests from Khrushchev to let the Russians examine this state-of-the-art windfall went unanswered. The Chinese then claimed they could not find it. Khrushchev’s son Sergei, a leading rocket scientist, recalled:

For the first time, Father sensed the deep fissures that had appeared in our “fraternal friendship.” For the first time he wondered whether it made sense to transfer the newest military technology and teach the Chinese how to build missiles and nuclear warheads.

… in February [1959], he decided to exert pressure for the first time … he held up transfer of instructions for the R-12 [missile]. It did the trick. The [Sidewinder] missile was immediately found.

The Chinese had dismantled the missile and the critical guidance system was missing. “This was offensive and insulting to us,” Khrushchev senior wrote in his memoirs. “Anybody in our place would have felt pain. We held no secrets back from China. We gave them everything … Yet when they got a trophy they refused to share it.” Khrushchev reached the conclusion that Mao was just using Russia for his own goals, and did not care about the interests of the Communist camp as a whole. Mao, he felt, “was bursting with an impatient desire to rule the world.” Khrushchev gave orders to go slow on transferring nuclear know-how, and on 20 June 1959 he suspended assistance on the Bomb.

This was not a fatal blow, as by now China had the basic know-how, and the key equipment, for a Bomb. But Mao could see that from here on it was going to be hard to tap Khrushchev for more.

In September, Khrushchev went to America on the first-ever visit by a Soviet leader. He believed there was a real possibility of peaceful coexistence with the West. Afterwards he went on to Peking for the tenth anniversary of Mao’s regime. Khrushchev urged Mao to be conciliatory towards the West, “to avoid anything that could be exploited … to drive the world back into the cold war ‘rut,’ ” as Russia’s chief ideologist put it.

Mao saw Khrushchev’s rapprochement with the West as a historic opportunity to put himself forward as the champion of all those around the world who saw peaceful coexistence as favoring — and possibly freezing — the status quo. The timing seemed particularly good, with decolonization in full swing. There were numerous anti-colonial movements in Africa that were keen on guerrilla war, of which Mao was perceived to be the advocate and expert in a way that Khrushchev was not. Communist parties, too, seemed soft targets, as they had little hope of getting into power except through violence. Mao envisaged a situation where “Communist parties all over the world will not believe in [Russia] but believe in us.” He saw a chance to establish his own “centre for world revolution.”

To have his own camp, and not have to play second fiddle to Khrushchev, had long been Mao’s dream. As Khrushchev had begun to dry up as a source of military hardware, Mao felt less concerned about annoying him. But nor did he want a split from him either, as Russia was still handing over a wealth of military technology, with no fewer than 1,010 blueprints transferred in 1960 alone — more even than in 1958. So Mao formulated a policy of “not to denounce” the Russians “for the time being,” and sought to milk them of everything he could as fast as he could. “China will become powerful in eight years,” he told his top echelon, and Khrushchev “will be completely bankrupt.”

The goal for now, he told his inner circle at the beginning of 1960, was “to propagate Mao Tse-tung Thought” around the world. At first, the drive should not be too aggressive, in order, as he put it, not to be seen to be trying to “export our fragrant intestines” (to which Mao compared his “Thought”). The resulting propaganda campaign brought the world “Maoism.”

THE IDEA OF promoting China’s experience as a model when the Chinese were dying of starvation in their millions might seem a tall order, but Mao was not perturbed: he had watertight filters on what foreigners could see and hear. As of February 1959, the CIA’s “preliminary judgement” about Chinese food output was that there were “remarkable increases in production.” Mao could easily pull the wool over most visitors’ eyes. When the French writer Simone de Beauvoir visited in 1955, even the French-speaking Chinese woman assigned to accompany her had to get special permission to speak to her directly without going through the interpreter. After her short visit, de Beauvoir pontificated that “the power he [Mao] exercises is no more dictatorial than, for example, Roosevelt’s was. New China’s Constitution renders impossible the concentration of authority in one man’s hands.” She wrote a lengthy book about the trip, titled The Long March. Its index has one entry for the word “violence,” which reads: “[Mao] on violence, avoidance of.”

Mao made sure that no Chinese except a very carefully vetted elite could get out of the country. Among the few who could were diplomats, who became notorious for their leaden performances. They worked under straitjacket rules about exactly what they could say, the strictest orders to report every conversation, and permanent surveillance by each other. Communist China’s first ambassadors were mostly army generals. Before sending them off, Mao told them, only half-jokingly: “You don’t know any foreign language, and you are not [professional] diplomats; but I want you to be my diplomats — because in my view you won’t be able to flee.” And over half of these men were going to other Communist countries.

The only people who got out and would talk were a small number of daring ordinary citizens who risked their lives and swam to Hong Kong. They broke the wall of silence around Mao’s famine and the dark realities of Red China in general. But their voices won little credence in the West.

Instead, when Mao told barefaced lies to France’s Socialist leader (and future president) François Mitterrand during the famine in 1961 (“I repeat it, in order to be heard: there is no famine in China”), he was widely believed. The future Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau came in 1960 and co-wrote a starry-eyed book, Two Innocents in Red China, which rejected reports of famine. Even the former chief of the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization, Lord Boyd-Orr, was duped. In May 1959, after a trip to China, he opined that food production had risen 50–100 percent over 1955–58 and that China “seems capable of feeding [its population] well.” Britain’s Field Marshal Montgomery, a much more gullible figure, asserted after visits in 1960 and 1961 that there had been “no large-scale famine, only shortages in certain areas,” and he certainly did not regard the “shortages” as Mao’s fault, as he urged Mao to hang on to power: “China … needs the chairman. You mustn’t abandon this ship.”

Mao had no problem covering up the famine, and was confident he could promote himself as a credible international leader. For this job he brought in three dependable writer-journalists: Edgar Snow, the half-Chinese Han Suyin, and Felix Greene, who did an interview with Chou on BBC TV during which Chou simply read out his answers from sheets of paper.

MAO’S SELF-PROMOTION abroad was fueled by vastly increased handouts of his usual trio: arms, money and food. On 21 January 1960 a new body called the Foreign Economic Liaison Bureau was formed, ranking on a par with the Foreign Trade Ministry and the Foreign Ministry, to handle the rise in foreign aid. Aid figures soared immediately. This spree of gifts by Mao coincided with the worst years of the greatest famine in world history. Over 22 million people died of starvation in 1960 alone.

China was not only the poorest country in the world to provide aid, but its aid was the highest ever given as a percentage of the donor country’s per capita income — and, moreover, often went to countries with a standard of living much higher than itself, like Hungary. And the cost of these handouts was not just the standard of living, but Chinese lives. Moreover, they were literally handouts, as Peking constantly said that loans should be treated as gifts, or that repayment should be deferred indefinitely. As for arms, the regime liked to say “We are not arms merchants”; but this did not mean it did not export arms, only that the arms did not have to be paid for.

Mao saw that his best chance was where there was a war, so the main donee on his list was Indochina, on which he lavished more than US$20 billion during his reign. In Africa he tried to latch on to the decolonization movement: there he showered cash, goods and arms on the Algerians, who were fighting the biggest anti-colonial war on the continent, against the French.

In Latin America, Peking made a beeline for Cuba after Fidel Castro took power in January 1959. When Castro’s colleague Che Guevara came to China in November 1960, Mao doled out US$60m as a “loan,” which Chou told Guevara “does not have to be repaid.”

In the Communist bloc itself, Mao worked on trying to acquire influence in every country, but only managed to detach one client from Russia’s sphere of influence: tiny poverty-stricken Albania. As early as 1958, its dictator, Enver Hoxha, had scrounged 50m rubles out of a willing Mao — a considerable sum for a country of fewer than 3 million people. Then, in January 1961, as the Peking — Moscow rift sharpened and Hoxha showed he could be relied on to spout venom against Khrushchev, Peking decupled this amount, lending Tirana 500 million rubles, and sent 2.2 million bushels of wheat, which China had bought from Canada for hard currency. Thanks to food donated by China, the Albanians did not even know what rationing was, while the Chinese were dying in their tens of millions. Albania’s chief negotiator with Peking, Pupo Shyti, told us that in China “you could see the famine.” But “the Chinese gave us everything.” “When we needed anything, we just asked the Chinese … I felt ashamed …” When Mao’s colleagues flinched he told them off.

Mao spent money trying to split Communist parties and to set up Maoist parties all over the world — a task he entrusted to his old intelligence chief, Kang Sheng. Spotting Peking’s crude criteria for allegiance, freeloaders jumped aboard the gravy train. Albanian archives reveal a tetchy Kang in Tirana griping about Venezuelan leftists walking off with US$300,000 of China’s money funneled through Albania. Dutch intelligence set up a bogus Maoist party, which was funded and feted by the Chinese. The CIA’s top China hand, James Lilley, told us they were delighted to discover how easy it was to infiltrate China: simply get a few people to chant hosannas to Mao and set up a Maoist party, which Peking would then rush to fund — and invite to China. (These spies, however, were useless, as all foreigners were rigidly segregated from the Chinese.)

TO LAUNCH “Maoism” on the world, Mao chose the ninetieth anniversary of Lenin’s birth, in April 1960, in the form of a manifesto entitled Long Live Leninism!, which said that advocating a peaceful road to socialism was unacceptable—“revisionism,” Peking called it — and that if Communists were to take power they would have to resort to violence. It did not attack Khrushchev by name, using Yugoslavia’s Tito as its whipping-boy instead. Mao’s calculation was that this way Khrushchev would have less excuse to punish him by withholding military know-how.

Simultaneously, Mao tried to move himself center-stage by inviting more than 700 sympathizers from the Third World for May Day. This was intended to be the founding moment of the Maoist camp. He received several groups of them himself, and the foreigners were reported “expressing adulation” for him and singing the Maoist anthem, “The East Is Red.” He ordered maximum publicity for these audiences, tinkering over the press reports himself phrase by phrase.

These encounters were timed to take place just before a major world event from which Mao was excluded — a summit of the Big Four (US, UK, France, Russia), which was due to open in Paris on 16 May, at which Khrushchev hoped to enshrine peaceful coexistence. Mao intended his to be a rival show, and for the world to see him as the champion of the disadvantaged. But his venture went virtually unnoticed, partly because his foreign followers were marginal figures. Mao did not inspire passionate faith, either, and acquired few fervent disciples. He was perceived as patronizing. A group of Africans heard him say that, to Westerners, “our race seems no better than you Africans.”

Mao’s hopes that Khrushchev would be seen as an appeaser, and himself as the antithesis, also received a blow from an unexpected quarter. Two weeks before the Paris summit, an American U-2 spy plane was shot down over Russia. When President Eisenhower refused to apologise, Khrushchev walked out and the summit collapsed. Peking had to praise Khrushchev for taking a tough stance.

Khrushchev’s bellicosity towards America risked taking the wind out of Mao’s sails, but he blasted ahead nonetheless, and a convenient occasion was to hand: a meeting of the World Federation of Trade Unions which opened in Peking on 5 June 1960. This was the most important international meeting to be held in China since Mao had taken power, with participants from some sixty countries combining delegates from ruling Communist parties and militant trade unionists from all five continents, some not subservient to Moscow. Mao mobilized all his top colleagues to lobby hard against Moscow, arguing that peaceful coexistence was a deception, and that “as long as capitalism exists, war cannot be avoided.” The French and the Italians, who were close to Khrushchev’s position, were singled out and called servants of imperialism. An Italian delegate, Vittorio Foa, told us that the hostility from the Chinese was so nerve-racking that the Italians feared for their physical safety and tried not to leave each other unaccompanied. The aggressiveness of the Chinese shocked even Albania’s delegate Gogo Nushi, who described them, in private, as “bandits.”

The Chinese were “spitting in our face,” remarked Khrushchev. Moscow perceived this event as the beginning of the Sino-Soviet split. So did the CIA. Its Acting Director, Charles Cabell, told the National Security Council two weeks later that Chinese behavior at the meeting had been “a challenge to USSR leadership of such a magnitude that Khrushchev has been compelled to meet it head-on.” Up to now, differences between Moscow and Peking had been tightly concealed by Communist secrecy, and many had doubted that there really was a Sino-Soviet rift.

On 21 June Khrushchev addressed Communist leaders from fifty-one countries gathered in Bucharest. He refuted Mao’s contention that war was needed to bring about socialism: “No world war is needed for the triumph of socialist ideas throughout the world,” he declared. “Only madmen and maniacs can now call for another world war,” in which, he said, using apocalyptic language, “millions of people might burn in the conflagration.” In contrast, “people of sound mind” were “in the majority even among the most deadly enemies of communism.” This was tantamount to saying that Mao was crazy, and suggesting that coexistence with the West was a better bet than continuing an alliance with Mao. “You want to dominate everyone, you want to dominate the world,” Khrushchev told Mao’s delegate, Peng Zhen, in private. Khrushchev also said to the Chinese: “Since you love Stalin so much, why don’t you take his corpse to Peking?” He told his colleagues: “When I look at Mao I see Stalin, a perfect copy.”

When Peng Zhen persisted with Mao’s line, he found himself alone. “We were isolated in Bucharest,” Mao noted. “There was not a single party that supported China. Not even … Albania.” This isolation, and the sharpness of Khrushchev’s attack, took Mao by surprise. A split under these circumstances was counterproductive, as he still needed Russian military technology. When Khrushchev refused to accept one word of Mao’s views for the communiqué, Mao backed down and told Peng Zhen to sign.

By now the scales had completely fallen from Khrushchev’s eyes. On his return from Bucharest, he immediately ordered the withdrawal of all the 1,000-plus Soviet advisers in China and halted assistance on the 155 industrial projects that were furthest from completion.

Mao had miscalculated. Russian retaliation came at a highly disadvantageous time. Although his scientists had secured the technology to make a Bomb, the Russians had not finished imparting their expertise in building the delivery system: the missiles. The Chinese scrambled, telling their scientists to seize every minute to dig things out of the Russians before they left, by hook or by crook. Song-and-dance girls were brought in to get Soviet minders drunk and detain them on the dance floor, while Russian scientists’ notebooks were photographed. Even so, the missile program, and indeed the entire Superpower Program, was thrown into disarray. Mao’s impatience to promote himself as a world leader, and rival to Khrushchev, had led him to shoot himself in the foot.

Mao had to backtrack. When eighty-one Communist parties met in Moscow in November, the Chinese appeared conciliatory. Mao himself showed up at the Soviet embassy in Peking for the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution, and sent Khrushchev fulsome personal greetings for New Year’s 1961. There was a reconciliation of sorts. In the end, the Russians continued to provide assistance to keep construction work going on 66 of the 155 unfinished industrial projects. But Mao did not get what he coveted most — renewed collaboration on high-end military technology transfers.

Scores of large-scale projects were canceled. Mao later blamed the famine that he himself had created on their cancellation, which he alleged had damaged China’s economy, and his claim is believed in China to this day. In fact, the cancellations should have eased the famine: China could now export less food.

But instead of allowing the Chinese population to benefit from a respite, Mao found a new way to spend the food. He insisted on continuing to export it to repay Russian loans ahead of schedule — in the space of five years, instead of the sixteen that the agreements allowed. He did this because he knew Russia needed food, and Chinese food made up two-thirds of Russia’s food imports. By continuing to supply the same large amounts as before, he was encouraging Russia’s dependence on Chinese food, in the hope that Khrushchev would sell him more of what he wanted. Mao later fabricated the myth that Khrushchev had pressured China to pay back its debts during the famine, and that this was one major reason why the Chinese starved. In fact, as a briefing for China’s post-Mao leaders stated categorically, Russia “did not ask for the debt to be repaid” then, let alone try to “force” China to do so. It was Mao who insisted on repaying far ahead of schedule.

Russia’s ambassador to Peking at the time, Chervonenko, told us that Moscow instructed him to try to refuse Chinese food exports, and that Russia had sometimes declined to accept shipments of grain. The Russians knew only too well about the famine. “You didn’t have to do any investigation,” Chervonenko said. “It was enough just to drive in from the airport. You could see there were no leaves on the trees.” On one occasion, when the Chinese said they were going to increase meat shipments, the Russians asked how. The answer was: “None of your business!”

Far from demanding accelerated repayment, Khrushchev was extraordinarily obliging, even revaluing the yuan: ruble exchange rate in China’s favor. According to a Russian source, this reduced China’s indebtedness to Russia by 77.5 percent. In February 1961, Khrushchev offered Mao one million tons of grain and half a million tons of Cuban sugar. Mao bought the sugar but rejected the grain. This was not out of pride. He had just grabbed at an offer from Khrushchev of technology and experts to manufacture MiG-21 fighters.

For the next two years Mao’s tactic was to keep one foot in the Kremlin door, in the hope of maintaining access to military technology, while taking a swipe at Khrushchev on every possible occasion — even over the Berlin Wall, the ultimate symbol of the Cold War. An East German diplomat then in Peking told us that when the Wall went up in summer 1961, Chou En-lai made it clear to the East Germans that Mao saw this as a sign of Khrushchev “capitulating to the US imperialists.”

WITH MAO SHOWING himself to be such a tricky customer, Khrushchev had to cover his back when he made any important move. In October 1962, Khrushchev was secretly deploying nuclear missiles in Cuba, the most adventurous act he undertook in his decade in power, and the peak of his “anti-imperialism.” Given the danger of a confrontation with the USA, he wanted to ensure that Mao would not stab him in the back. He decided to throw him a bone, a big one: the Kremlin’s blessing for China to attack India, even though this meant Russia betraying the interests of India, a major friendly state that Khrushchev had long been wooing.

Mao had been planning war with India on the border issue for some time. China had refused to recognize the boundary that had been delineated by the British in colonial times, and insisted it be renegotiated, or at least formalized by the two now sovereign states. India regarded the border as settled, and not negotiable, and the two sides were deadlocked. As border clashes worsened, Peking quietly prepared for war during May — June 1962. Chou later told the Americans that “Nehru was getting very cocky … and we tried to keep down his cockiness.” But Mao was chary of starting a war, as he was worried about the security of the nuclear test site at Lop Nor in northwest China, which was beyond the range of American U-2 spy planes flying from Taiwan, but lay within range from India. Part of the fallout from the war was that India allowed U-2s to fly from a base at Charbatia, from where they were able to photograph China’s first A-bomb test in 1964.

Mao was also concerned that he might have to fight on two fronts. Chiang Kai-shek was making his most active preparations since 1949 to invade the Mainland, fired by the hope that the population would rise up and welcome him because of the famine. Mao took the prospect of a Nationalist invasion seriously, moving large forces to the southeast coast opposite Taiwan, while he himself hunkered down in his secret shelter in the Western Hills outside Peking.

The Chinese had been holding regular ambassador-level talks with America in Warsaw since 1955. Mao now used this channel to sound out whether Washington would support an invasion by Chiang. And he got a very reassuring and direct answer. The Americans said they would not back Chiang to go to war against the Mainland, and that Chiang had promised not to attack without Washington’s consent.

But Mao still hesitated. The paramount factor was Russia, on which China was heavily dependent for oil. In China’s previous border clashes with India, Khrushchev had ostentatiously declined to back Peking. He had then agreed to sell India planes that could fly at high altitudes, and in summer 1962 signed an agreement not only to sell India MiGs, but for India to manufacture MiG-21s.

By early October, the Himalayan winter was approaching, and the window of opportunity narrowing. Mao sent out a feeler to the Russian ambassador about how Moscow would react if China attacked India. Khrushchev seized this chance to make a startling démarche. On the 14th he laid on a four-hour farewell banquet for the outgoing Chinese ambassador, at which the Soviet leader pledged that Moscow would stand by Peking if China got into a border war with India, and would delay the sale of MiG-21s to India. He revealed that he had been secretly installing nuclear missiles in Cuba and said he hoped the Chinese would give him their support.

This was a hefty horse-trade, one well concealed from the world. On the morning of 20 October, just as the Cuba crisis was about to break, Mao gave the go-ahead for crack troops to storm Indian positions along two widely separated sectors of the border. Five days later, with the Cuba crisis at fever pitch, Khrushchev came through with his support for Mao in the form of a statement in Pravda that mortified Nehru.

Chinese forces rapidly advanced more than 150 km into northeast India. Then, having demonstrated military superiority, Mao withdrew his forces, leaving each country holding some disputed territory, a situation that prevails to this day. Mao had achieved his objective: long-term stability on this border, leaving him free to focus on his broader ambitions. The war also dealt a lethal blow to Nehru, Mao’s rival for leadership in the developing world, who died eighteen months later from a stroke.

MEANWHILE, THE Cuban missile crisis was basically settled on 28 October, after Khrushchev agreed to withdraw the missiles in return for a promise by US president John F. Kennedy not to invade Cuba (and an unpublished promise to pull US missiles out of Turkey). Mao immediately jettisoned his deal not to make trouble for Khrushchev during the crisis, and tried to horn in on Havana’s resentment towards Khrushchev for failing to consult it about his settlement with the US. Gigantic “pro-Cuba” demonstrations were staged in China, accompanied by bellicose statements containing barely veiled accusations against Moscow for “selling out.” Mao bombarded the Cubans with messages, telling them that Moscow was an “untrustworthy ally,” and urging them to hold out against Khrushchev’s agreement to remove Russian missiles and planes. Mao tried to capitalize on the differences between Castro and Guevara, who was against the settlement. “Only one man got it right,” Mao said: “Che Guevara.”

Mao meddled and needled, but failed to get Havana to sign up to his anti-Soviet stance. However, he did benefit from Cuba’s bitter feelings towards the Russians. When an advanced US rocket, a Thor-Able-Star, landed accidentally in Cuba, instead of letting the Russians have it, as he would normally have done, Castro played them off against the Chinese by auctioning it. The result was that Peking got some crucial components, which played a big part in enabling it to upgrade its missiles.

Khrushchev, for his part, backtracked from his previous support for China even while fighting was still going on inside India. A Pravda editorial on 5 November conspicuously contained not one word endorsing Peking’s position. For him, as for Mao, the collaboration had been completely opportunistic, though he still wanted to keep the Communist camp together.

So did Mao, hoping that he could still finagle a few more nuclear secrets out of Khrushchev. These hopes were dashed definitively in July 1963, when Khrushchev signed a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with America and Britain, which embargoed the signatories helping others acquire a Bomb. This meant that Khrushchev was now virtually useless to Mao.

It was at this point, more than three years after he had started pushing Maoism onto the world stage, that Mao gave the order to denounce Khrushchev by name as a “revisionist.” A public slanging match quickly escalated. For Mao, the polemic acted as a sort of international advertising campaign for Maoism, whose essence was summed up in one of the main accusations against Khrushchev: “In the eyes of the modern revisionists, to survive is everything. The philosophy of survival has replaced Marxism-Leninism.” It is hard now to cast oneself back to a time when anyone could think this approach might appeal. But to deny people’s desire — and right — to live was central to Maoism.

Algeria showed how dependent Mao was on there being an armed conflict. Once Algeria gained its independence, in 1962, his influence evaporated.

At least one Chinese noticed how easily huge sums of money flooded into projects to do with promotion abroad and tried to take advantage. In March 1960 a clerk at the Foreign Trade Ministry walked off with the astronomical sum of 200,000 yuan, in the biggest known cash swindle to date, which he accomplished by forging just one letter, and faking one signature: Chou En-lai’s. The one-page letter claimed a telephone call had come from Mao’s staff to Chou’s office asking for cash to be allotted to repair a temple in Tibet so that some foreign journalists could take photographs of it. The clerk had four hungry children, and wanted to buy them some extra food, which special state shops sold outside the rationing network at exorbitant prices for those with the money, mainly people with relatives abroad. Needless to say, this enterprising bureaucrat was easily discovered.

An Albanian Politburo member, Liri Belishova, was in China at this time, and let the Russians know what was happening, for which she suffered thirty years in Hoxha’s gulag — not “strangled” or “eliminated,” as Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs. She emerged with remarkable bounce, as we saw in 1996.

When one participant (Thomas Kuchel) in Oval Office discussions on 22 October asked whether there was any indication that Russia’s move in Cuba was “associated with the Chinese operation against India,” CIA chief John McCone answered: “No, we have no information whatsoever with respect to that at all.”

Kennedy had in fact been trying to use the treaty to widen the rift between Moscow and Peking.

44. AMBUSHED BY THE PRESIDENT (1961–62 AGE 67–68)

WHEN MAO LAUNCHED the Great Leap Forward in 1958, his No. 2, Liu Shao-chi, went along with him, even though he disagreed with Mao’s position. And when defense minister Peng De-huai spoke up against Mao’s policies at Lushan in 1959, when the famine was well under way, Liu, who was now state president as well as Party No. 2, failed to take Peng’s side.

But Liu was deeply troubled by the famine, which he knew had consumed some 30 million lives by early 1961. He was particularly affected after he went back to his home area in Hunan in April — May that year, and saw at first hand the horrific suffering he had helped create. He made up his mind to find a way to stop Mao.

During the trip Liu visited his sister. She had married into the family of a “landlord,” who was categorized as a “class enemy.” When she had written to Liu at the beginning of Mao’s regime about their hardships during the land reform, he had written back giving her all the “correct” and comfortless advice. Now he came with food: 2.5 kg of rice, 1 kg of biscuits, 1 kg of sweets, 9 salted eggs and a jar of lard. His sister was lying in bed famished and extremely ill. She wept as she talked about her husband, who had died not long before in great agony after eating a bun made of unhusked grain, which their daughter had specially saved for him. His weakened stomach could not cope with the coarse food. There were no doctors to call, no hospitals to turn to.

This brother-in-law had written a letter to Liu in 1959, after Liu became president, to tell him about the starvation in the village. The letter was intercepted, and he was punished by being tied to a tree and left out to freeze in bitter winds until he was on the verge of passing out.

Everywhere he went Liu encountered heart-rending sights and tragic stories. He could sense how much people hated the Communists — and him. In his home village a twelve-year-old boy had written “Down with Liu Shao-chi” outside Liu’s old family house. This boy had seen six members of his family succumb to starvation-induced illness within one year, the last being his youngest brother, who had died in his arms; he had been carrying the baby around looking for someone to breast-feed him, as their mother had just died. Liu told the police not to punish the boy as a “counter-revolutionary,” which would normally have been the charge for such an act.

He also stopped the local authorities punishing peasants for “stealing” food, making a striking admission to the villagers that it was the regime that was robbing them. “Commune members think this way,” Liu said. “Since you take from us, why can’t I take from you? Since you take a lot, why can’t I take a little?”

Liu did something else unprecedented. He apologized to the peasants for the misrule the Communists had brought. After nearly forty years away, he said, “I am shocked to see my fellow-villagers are leading such a harsh life … I feel responsible for causing so much suffering to you, and I must apologise …” He started to sob, and bowed to the villagers.

The trip marked Liu profoundly. After he returned to Peking, he told the top managers: “We cannot go on like this.”

IN AUGUST 1961, as autumn harvest time approached, Mao once again gathered his managers under the clouds of Mount Lushan to fix the food extraction figures. Liu pressed him to set them lower. The two men had many arguments, and the tension in their relationship seeped through to their outward behavior, as the teenage son of a provincial boss observed. He was swimming in the reservoir with other children of high officials when Mao arrived. The children clambered excitedly onto the wooden platform where Mao was sitting with bodyguards and dancing girls. The boy told Mao he had swallowed some water while swimming. Mao said: “It’s nothing to be choked by thousands of mouthfuls of water when swimming, you have to be choked by ten thousand mouthfuls before you master it.” Choking when learning to swim was a metaphor for “learning comes at a price,” one that Mao often enlisted to explain away his repeated economic disasters. Soon Liu Shao-chi swam over with his bodyguards, and climbed onto the platform. He and Mao did not exchange so much as a nod. They just sat apart, in a space of about 30 square meters, smoking, not speaking a word. The boy remembered wondering: “How come they don’t greet each other?”

Mao’s other colleagues had also been trying to reason with him. After touring an old Red base area in Hebei, Chou En-lai told Mao that people “have only tree leaves, salted vegetables and wild herbs, and absolutely nothing else. There is genuinely no grain left.” Mao was mightily irritated, and once, while Chou was describing what he had seen, snapped: “What’s all the fuss about?”

Nevertheless, under intense pressure at Lushan, Mao accepted a cut in food requisitions of over 34 percent from the figure he had set at the beginning of the year. As a result, deaths from starvation in 1961 fell by nearly half from the year before — though they still approached 12 million.

Mao made this concession partly because a large number of big industrial projects were having to be closed down anyway as a result of the lack of essentials like steel, coal and electricity. Closing them down was a good idea, as they had caused stupendous waste, but the result was huge upheaval, in which over 26 million people lost their jobs. Most of these had been sucked into the cities in the past three years; now they were kicked back to their villages — the largest such yo-yo movement of population in human history. “How wonderful our Chinese people and our cadres are!” Mao exclaimed. “Twenty million people: we call and they come; we dismiss and they go.” He continued: “Which party can manage this except the Communist Party?” Once back in their villages, these people lost whatever borderline livelihood and welfare guaranteed them as factory workers. In addition, families were broken up if one spouse was accorded an urban job and did not wish to go and live as a peasant and face starvation. Such couples faced the prospect of living permanently apart, allowed only twelve days a year together.

But having conceded lower food levies in 1961, Mao warned his audience at Lushan: “We have retreated to the bottom of the valley,” meaning the only way requisitioning could go from there on was up. Next year, his managers were told, the levies would have to rise again.

To anyone in his court who might be contemplating drastic measures against him, Mao sent a warning signal through a somewhat unusual channel, the visiting retired British Field Marshal Montgomery. Quite unprompted, Mao told Montgomery: “I am prepared for destruction any time,” before launching into five possible ways he might be assassinated: “shooting to death by enemies, a plane crash, a train crash, drowning, and killing with germs. I have made preparations for all these five ways.” As it was standard procedure for Mao’s talks with foreigners to be circulated among top leaders, Mao was serving notice on his colleagues: Don’t try anything. I have taken precautions.

Mao had reason to worry. Even his Praetorian Guard, the people he relied on for his life, voiced bitter sentiments against him. “Where is all this grain that has been harvested?” one soldier said. “Is it Chairman Mao’s order that people should only eat grass?” asked another. “He can’t just take no notice of whether people live or die …” Yet another: “Now the folks in the villages don’t even have the food that dogs used to eat. In the old days, dogs had chaff and grain … And the commune members are saying: Does Chairman Mao want to starve us all to death?” The Guards were promptly purged.

A MORE URGENT CONCERN for Mao in September 1961 was the chance of losing power at a Party congress. Mao’s “biggest worry,” Lin Biao wrote in his diary, “is whether he can get the majority in a vote.” And a congress was due that very month. The previous one had been held in September 1956, and the Party charter stipulated one every five years. Mao had to fend off the threat of being deposed.

As far back as 1959, Mao had sensed profound discontent towards him among the top echelon. “If you don’t vote for me,” he had told a Party plenum then, “so be it.” Since then, officials had been shattered by the impact of the famine. At Party gatherings in the provinces, cadres would burst into tears when reporting what they had seen in the villages. Moreover, Mao’s policies had brought starvation to themselves and their families. Their monthly rations were about 10 kg of rice, a few ounces of cooking oil and a small lump of meat. In Zhongnanhai, officials like Liu’s staff grew wheat and vegetables outside their offices to supplement their inadequate rations. Hunger had made Mao’s officials almost universally yearn for a change of policy.

Mao tried to deflect dissatisfaction by his usual method of designating scapegoats. The people he picked on were first of all village cadres, whom he blamed for “beating people up and beating them to death,” and for “causing grain harvests to drop and people not to have enough food to eat.” Next he blamed the Russians, and his third scapegoat was “extraordinarily big natural calamities.” As a matter of fact, meteorological records show that not only were there no natural calamities in the famine years, but the weather was better than average. But even if cadres had no general picture, and half believed Mao, hungry officials still felt that something must be terribly wrong with the way their Party was running the country if the entire population, including themselves, was brought to such a state of wretchedness.

Mao also tried to win his cadres’ sympathy vote by announcing to Party members that he would “share weal and woe with the nation,” and give up eating meat. In fact, all he did, for a while, was to eat fish instead, which he loved anyway. Nor did his meatless regime last long. Indeed, it was right in the middle of the famine that he developed a fancy for meat-rich European cuisine. On 26 April 1961, a comprehensive set of European menus was presented to him, under seven headings: seafood, chicken, duck, pork, lamb, beef and soup — each with scores of dishes.

Mao went to the greatest lengths to keep his daily life completely secret. His daughter Li Na was boarding at the university, so she lived during the week on normal rations and was starving. After one weekend at home, she smuggled a few of her father’s usual luxuries out of the house. Mao ordered her never to do it again. Nothing must puncture the illusion that he was tightening his belt along with the rest of the nation. As a result, Li Na contracted edema in 1960 and she stopped menstruating. The following year she abandoned the university altogether and stayed at home.

To his staff, who could see what Mao was eating, and who themselves were half-starved, like their families, Mao claimed that his food was a reward to him “from the People,” and that others had “no right” to it. When Mao’s housekeeper took some scraps home, he found himself exiled to the freezing Great Northern Wilderness and was never heard of again.

Mao’s attempt to win the sympathy vote did not work; the deprivation was just too great. One of the things that had completely disappeared was soap, because Mao was exporting the fat required to make it. Mao wanted people to accept doing without soap, so he told the Party that he himself was forgoing the use of soap to wash his hands. “Of course he doesn’t use soap,” one official snapped, in private. “He doesn’t do any proper work!” Senior officials were saying other unthinkable things to one another such as: “Why doesn’t he just kick off!” Mao knew what bitter comments they were making. One remark that reached his ears was: “If what’s happening had happened in the past, the ruler would have had to resign long ago.”

When Mao’s daughter Chiao-chiao went to sweep the tomb of his late wife Kai-hui, she heard people cursing Mao, and reported it back to him. When the purged former defense minister Peng De-huai, who had been under house arrest since 1959, was allowed to visit his home area in October 1961, he got a very warm welcome from officials as well as ordinary villagers, as they had heard he had been purged for opposing Mao’s policies. Two thousand “pilgrims,” some of whom had walked up to 100 km on half-empty stomachs, poured into Peng’s old family home to thank him for speaking up. Peng talked till he lost his voice.

If the scheduled congress met and held a vote, there was a strong possibility that Mao would be voted out. His fears were spelled out later by one of his closest henchmen (Zhang Chun-qiao, one of the notorious “Gang of Four”): “If the old Party charter had been followed, and the 9th Congress had been held then … Liu Shao-chi would have become the Chairman …”

Many officials called for a congress to be convened to address the catastrophic situation. Mao vetoed the idea, and came up with the device of convening a conference that would not have voting powers, thus averting the threat of being removed. The conference would be attended by the top few people in each ministry, province, city, region, county and major industrial enterprise.

In January 1962, these officials—7,000 in all — came to Peking from all over China for the largest gathering in the Party’s history, known as the Conference of the Seven Thousand. It proved to be a landmark, because it was after this conference that famine was brought to a halt. But what is little known is that this victory was only secured by Liu Shao-chi ambushing Mao.

When he called the conference, Mao had had no intention of stopping his deadly policies. On the contrary, his aim had been to use the occasion to spur on his officials, so that they would go back home and turn the screws tighter. He had said then to his inner circle: “It’s not the case that we don’t have things [food]. True, there are not enough pigs, but there are plenty of other foods. We just don’t seem to be able to lay our hands on them. We need a spur.”

The method Mao used to lay down his line was to give the delegates the text of the keynote speech before it was delivered. The text glossed over past disasters, which were only vaguely and briefly referred to as “mistakes,” before announcing that “the most difficult time is over.” Most ominously, it not only claimed that “our domestic situation is on the whole good,” but also declared that there would be another Great Leap in the coming years.

The delegates were told to voice their views, and that their amendments would be taken into account before the speech was delivered. But Mao made sure it was extremely hard for anyone to speak up, by organizing the discussions in groups, each chaired by an intimidating henchman. Anyone who ventured sharper questions was instantly gagged with heavy-handed threats. As one brave delegate wrote in an anonymous letter to the leadership, the sessions were simply “for everyone to sit there and kill time.”

This went on for two weeks. Mao kept tabs on the delegates, and smugly read discussion bulletins while lounging in bed in his girlfriends’ arms. His plan was that Liu Shao-chi would deliver the finalized speech to the one and only plenary session on 27 January, and the conference would then close. His program would thus be set in stone, and Liu and all the participants would be co-responsible.

BUT MAO’S COZY PLAN fell apart. On the 27th, Liu did something that took Mao utterly by surprise. With Mao in the chair, Liu gave a different speech from the circulated keynote text he was supposed to deliver.

With this huge audience of all the 7,000 top officials in the country listening, Liu laid into Mao’s policies. “People do not have enough food, clothes or other essentials,” he said; “agricultural output, far from rising in 1959, 1960 and 1961, dropped, not a little, but tremendously … there is not only no Great Leap Forward, but a great deal of falling backward.” Liu dismissed the official explanation for the calamities, saying there was “no serious bad weather” in the areas he had visited, nor, he strongly hinted, anywhere. He called on delegates to question the new Leap that Mao had advocated, and raised the possibility of scrapping the communes and even the Mao-style industrialization program.

Liu established beyond a glimmer of a doubt that past policies had been disastrous, and had to be discarded. He openly rejected a standard Mao formula that “Mistakes are only one finger whereas achievements are nine fingers.” This, he said flatly, was untrue. When Mao cut in and insisted it was true in many places, Liu contradicted him.

Liu’s speech brought a torrential response from his audience, who could hardly wait to raise their voices. The discussions that day took on a totally different tone and mood. Now they knew that the president was behind them, delegates spoke their minds, condemning the old policies passionately, and insisting they absolutely must not be repeated.

Mao had not expected the normally ultra-prudent Liu to pull a fast one. Inwardly, he was black with rage, but he decided it was wise to hold his fire, as Liu clearly had the support of the 7,000 participants, and Mao could not afford to have a head-on collision with this vast body of officials, which included just about everybody who ran the country. So he had to pretend there were no differences between himself and them. His first move was to extend the conference, presenting this as a sympathetic response on his part to the delegates’ sentiments, telling them it was so they could “get their anger off their chest” (chu-qi). Privately he was fuming, and called it “letting their farts off” (fang-pi).

Mao plunged into damage control, to kill any idea that he was responsible for the famine. He designated some provincial bosses and agricultural chiefs and planners to make speeches taking responsibility for the disasters, thus implicitly exonerating him. But his most important maneuver was to wheel out his crony, Defense Minister Lin Biao, who was the first person to speak after the conference was extended, on 29 January. The marshal had started his collusion with Mao as far back as 1929, and he was someone Mao could rely on for support, however awful the cause.

To the 7,000, Lin Biao trotted out the kind of heartless clichés Mao loved to hear: disasters were inevitable “tuition fees”; Chairman Mao’s ideas were “always correct”; “in times of difficulty … we must all the more follow Chairman Mao.” When he finished, Mao was the first to clap, and praised Lin fulsomely to the audience. Only now did Mao feel safe enough to hint at his loathing for what Liu Shao-chi had done, using an ominous expression that amounted to “I’ll get you later.” Lin Biao had saved Mao’s bacon.

Once he saw Lin Biao appear, Liu Shao-chi’s heart sank. His widow told us that Liu murmured: “Lin Biao comes, and talks like this. Trouble.” This total solidarity with Mao from the army chief, expressed in the kind of peremptory language which signaled that there could be no rational debate, immediately cast a frightening shadow over the participants. In the following days, they toned down their language and the ways they expressed their anger, though continuing to criticize the disastrous economic policies. The result was that Mao’s policies did not get the scrutiny and forceful condemnation Liu had hoped for. And no one dared to criticize Mao directly, least of all by name.

Nonetheless, Mao could feel the force of the sentiment of the 7,000, and felt compelled to produce a “self-criticism” in front of them, on 30 January — his first ever since coming to power in 1949. Although he characteristically made it sound as if the disasters had been other people’s fault and that he was rather altruistically accepting the blame, using carefully slanted formulae like “I am responsible … because I am the Chairman,” he had to admit that there was much to be blamed for. Having made this admission, Mao had to swallow a policy change. He was forced to abandon the lethal scale of food levies planned for 1962 and onwards. As a result, tens of millions of people were spared death by starvation.

AS SOON AS the conference was over, on 7 February, Mao stormed off to Shanghai to be among his cronies, under local boss Ke Qing-shi. He had to take a back seat while Liu and his other colleagues, mainly Chou En-lai, Chen Yun and a rising star, Deng Xiao-ping, made major changes to his policies. Requisitioning was greatly lowered. Costly and unrealistic projects like nuclear submarines were suspended, although the basic nuclear program was unaffected. Spending on arms factories was enormously scaled down, while consumer goods industries received unprecedented funding. In a blow to the promotion of Maoism, overseas aid was slashed drastically — to virtually zero for the year. Mao’s extravagance had been extremely unpopular with officials who knew about it. The man who ran military aid later wrote: “Every time I saw foreigners’ smiling faces after signing yet another aid agreement, my heart would be filled with guilt towards my own people.”

Investment in agriculture rose sharply. In many places, peasants were allowed to lease land from the commune, and effectively were able to return to being individual farmers. This alleviated starvation and motivated productivity. It was in defense of this practice that Deng Xiao-ping quoted an old saying, which became his most famous remark: “It doesn’t matter whether it’s a yellow cat or a black cat, as long as it catches mice.” In the cities, working hours were reduced so that the malnourished population could recover some energy, and this also allowed more private time and family life. In less than a year people’s lives improved perceptibly. By and large, deaths from hunger stopped.

The regime even allowed a number of people to leave the country. Normally, people trying to escape abroad were sent to labor camps, but now the authorities opened the fence to Hong Kong for a few days to let some 50,000 people flee. Border guards even lent a hand to lift children over the barbed wire.

The year 1962 was to be one of the most liberal periods since Mao’s reign had begun. That spring, Liu and his colleagues rehabilitated wholesale those condemned following the purge of Peng De-huai in 1959, who totaled a staggering 10 million. Some “Rightists” (victimized in 1957–58) were also rehabilitated. In the arts and literature a host of creations burst forth. It had taken tens of millions of deaths to bring this degree of relief to the survivors. It was also in this year that the Panchen Lama felt able to write to Chou En-lai, chronicling the brutality the Tibetans had suffered. There was some relaxation in Tibet; some monasteries were restored and religious practices tolerated.

BEING FORCED TO change policy by his own Party — without the backing of Moscow — was the biggest setback Mao had suffered since taking power. First he had been outsmarted by the seemingly ultra-cautious Liu. Then he had effectively been given the thumbs-down by virtually all of the stratum that ran the country. From this moment on, Mao nurtured a volcanic hatred for Liu and the officials who had attended the conference — as well as for his Party, which these people obviously represented. He was out for revenge. The president of China and the backbone of his Party were his target. That is why, a few years later, he launched his Great Purge, the Cultural Revolution, in which Liu and most of the officials in that hall, and numerous others, were to be put through hell. As Mme Mao spelled out, Mao had “choked back this grievance at the Conference of the Seven Thousand, and was only able to avenge it in the Cultural Revolution.” Of course Mao was not just in quest of revenge, savage and devastating though that was. It was obvious to him that this set of officials was not prepared to run the country the way he wanted. He would purge them and install new enforcers.

Quite a few left the conference with a sense of foreboding for Liu. Liu himself knew that this was the biggest turning-point in his life, but he had decided that his priority was to fend off more tens of millions of deaths. During this period the normally reserved Liu was unusually passionate and vocal about the plight of the Chinese people, who had suffered so terribly at the hands of the regime of which he was a leading member.

Over the next few years, Liu and his like-minded colleagues worked at getting the economy back into shape — while Mao planned revenge.

45. THE BOMB (1962–64 AGE 68–70)

BY LATE 1962, famine had eased. In the following years, while tolerating food levies on a scale that allowed his subjects to subsist, Mao began to resuscitate the pet projects that had been shelved as the result of the famine, such as satellites and nuclear submarines. And new projects joined them. When Mao was told about lasers, at the time seen only as a deadly weapon, and translated into Chinese as “the Light of Death,” si-guang, he instantly decided on huge investments in laser research, giving a characteristic order: “The Light of Death: get some people to devote entirely to this. Feed them and don’t let them do anything else.”

For now, the focus of Mao’s attention was the atomic bomb. In November 1962, a special committee was formed, chaired by Chou En-lai, to coordinate the several hundred thousand people involved and pool the whole country’s resources to produce a Bomb within two years. The concentration of resources was on a scale that astonished even a top echelon accustomed to totalitarian organization. Each of the numerous preparatory tests would take up nearly half of all China’s telecommunication lines, and much of the country, including factories, would recurrently find itself without electricity or transport, because power had been diverted for these tests.

How to protect the Bomb, and indeed his entire nuclear complex, was Mao’s constant preoccupation; and not without reason. At the tripartite (US — UK — USSR) Nuclear Test Ban talks in Moscow in July 1963, President Kennedy told his negotiator, Averell Harriman, to sound out Khrushchev about destroying Mao’s nuclear facilities: “try to elicit K[hrushchev]’s view of means of limiting or preventing Chinese nuclear development and his willingness either to take Soviet action or to accept U.S. action aimed in this direction.” Khrushchev rebuffed the approach. But Kennedy told a press conference on 1 August that a nuclear China — which, he emphasized, was “Stalinist,” “with a government determined on war as a means of bringing about its ultimate success”—posed “potentially a more dangerous situation than any we faced since the end of the Second [World] War … and we would like to take some steps now which would lessen that prospect …”

Kennedy seriously considered air strikes on China’s nuclear facilities. He was advised that the Lanzhou gaseous diffusion plant could be destroyed in such a way as to make it look like an accident, but that nuclear strikes might be needed to destroy the plutonium plant at Baotou.

After Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963 (by an “oil king,” Mao told Albania’s defense minister) his successor, Lyndon Johnson, was soon toying with the idea of dropping Taiwan saboteurs to blow up the facilities at Lop Nor, China’s atomic test site.

Lop Nor and other nuclear sites deep in the Gobi Desert were sealed off by land, and everyone there, from top scientists to laborers, was completely isolated from their families and society for years, even decades. But the sites were exposed to America’s spy planes — and attack from the air, which Mao feared most.

In April 1964, Mao was told that the Bomb could be exploded that autumn. He moved at once on every front to minimize the danger of a strike on the nuclear facilities. He dealt with the Russian end by going public to remind Khrushchev that China was still a member of the Communist camp. On 12 April, the day after the test details were decided, he stepped in to rewrite a telegram to Khrushchev for the latter’s seventieth birthday. The original draft had reflected the acrimonious public relationship between the two states. Mao changed the text to make it ultra-friendly, adding a most unusual “Dear Comrade,” and stressing that their discord was “only temporary.” “In the event of a major world crisis,” he said, they would “undoubtedly stand together against our common enemy.” To conclude, he added a phrase evoking their past relationship: “Let the imperialists and reactionaries tremble before our unity …” The cable was given wide publicity in the Chinese media, and amazed everyone, as this was after months of fire-breathing public polemics targeting Khrushchev. On the eve of National Day that year, on 1 October, Mao stunned the Russians by greeting their delegate warmly, holding his hand, and repeating: “Everything will be fine; our peoples will be together.”

Mao’s main worry was America. To deter it he tried hard to deal himself some cards. His options for stirring up trouble in the US itself or in its immediate vicinity were limited. Shortly after the Test Ban Treaty, he had fired off a statement on 8 August 1963, to support the blacks in America. However, it only amounted to what he himself later called an “empty cannon.” The black American radical whom Mao credited with urging him to issue the statement, Robert Williams, told us that Mao “didn’t understand a lot of things about blacks in America.” Williams compared Mao unfavorably on this score with Ho Chi Minh. Mao issued more statements supporting anti-American movements in countries near the US, like those in Panama and the Dominican Republic. These were just words.

There was one spot, though, near China, where there were Americans, and that was Vietnam. By the end of 1963 there were some 15,000 American military advisers in South Vietnam. Mao’s plan was to create a situation whereby America would send more troops to South Vietnam, and even invade North Vietnam, which bordered with China. This way, if Washington were to strike his nuclear facilities, the Chinese army would pour into Vietnam and engulf the American troops as they had done in the Korean War. To try to make this happen, in 1964 Mao started pressing the Vietnamese hard to step up the war in Indochina. Their fighting, he told them, had “made no great impact and was just scratching the surface … Best turn it into a bigger war.” “I’m afraid you really ought to send more troops to the South.” “Don’t be afraid of US intervention,” he urged; “at most, it’s no worse than having another Korean War. The Chinese army is prepared, and if America takes the risk of attacking North Vietnam, the Chinese army will march in at once. Our troops want a war now.”

Mao asked the North Vietnamese to escalate fighting in other countries which were neighbors of China: “Better also send several thousand troops to Laos,” he said. Laos “has been fighting for several years; but nothing has come of it. You should think of a way: get 3,000 or 4,000 men and … train them so they stop believing in Buddhism and become tough combat troops …” He particularly urged the Vietnamese to help build up a guerrilla army in Thailand, where America had military bases.

Hanoi’s policy, in fact, was to get the USA to de-escalate, and the Vietnamese told Mao they did not want to “provoke” America. Mao nonetheless ordered 300,000–500,00 °Chinese troops deployed along the border with Vietnam, ready to pour in. Chou En-lai paid a visit to China’s South Sea fleet and told its commander to get ready to attack South Vietnam. Funds were allocated to move the fleet much closer to Vietnam, to the port of Zhanjiang.

Mao’s agenda, as Chou En-lai later spelled out to Egypt’s President Nasser, was to draw the maximum number of American troops into Vietnam as “an insurance policy” for China against a possible US nuclear attack,

because we will have a lot of their flesh close to our nails.

So the more troops they send to Vietnam, the happier we will be, for we feel that we will have them in our power, we can have their blood …

… They will be close to China … in our grasp. They … will be our hostages.

Chou also told Tanzania’s President Julius Nyerere that to protect its nuclear facilities, Peking would act in Vietnam regardless of what the Vietnamese themselves wanted. “Tell the US,” Chou said, that if America attacks China’s nuclear facilities, Peking will “respect no borders” and will go into North Vietnam “with or without the consent of the Vietnamese.”

MAO DID NOT worry only about air strikes on his nuclear facilities, he feared that all his arms-centered industries could be targets. As a lot of these were situated in coastal plains, he decided to move them to China’s mountainous hinterland.

In June 1964 he ordered this massive relocation, which he described to his inner circle as a nationwide “house-moving” of industries to cope with “the Era of the Bomb.” The undertaking went by the general name of the “Third Front” (coastal and border areas were “the First Front”; “the Second Front” was the rest of China). No fewer than some 1,100 large enterprises were dismantled and moved to remote areas, where major installations like steel and electricity plants had to be constructed. Some nuclear facilities were even duplicated. Mountains were hollowed out to make giant caves to accommodate them. The upheaval and cost were colossal. Over the decade the Third Front was being built, it cost an astronomical 200 billion-plus yuan, and at its peak it sucked in at least two-thirds of the entire nation’s investment. The waste it created was more than the total material losses caused by the Great Leap Forward.

From a strategic point of view, the whole project was nonsensical. The vast majority of plants in the Third Front were utterly dependent on road transport — sometimes even for water supplies — while the oil refineries were left exposed. China’s main oil field, which had just come on stream, lay on the Manchurian plain. The relocation did not give China any greater security from attack.

Characteristically, Mao insisted that everything be built at breakneck speed, usually without any proper surveying. Irrational siting alone at least doubled normal construction costs, and left the new factories, which were frequently jerry-built, at the mercy of floods, avalanches and rock-and mud-falls. Many expensive plants, including tank factories and shipyards, were never finished, or overran by years. “Perhaps the most colossal failure,” one study concluded, was the Jiuquan steel mill in Gansu, which took twenty-seven years to produce any steel at all.

The human costs were immeasurable. Over 4 million people were thrown into the mountains to build factories, lay railways and open mines, working and living in appalling conditions, in airless caves; water, often polluted, was in constant short supply. Many died. Countless families were torn apart for up to two decades. Only in 1984, long after Mao’s death, were separated couples allowed to be reunited — and then only if the one in the Third Front was over forty, and had worked for twenty years.

Liu Shao-chi and Mao’s other colleagues put up no resistance to this lunacy. Mao told them his mind was made up. To make it easier for them to swallow the idea, he gave the nearest thing in his lexicon to a commitment that people would not have to die from starvation, by telling his planners: “Be careful: Don’t do a 1958, 1959 and 1960.” In addition, although the Third Front was economic folly, it did not involve persecutions. For Mao to forgo deaths and political victimization seems to have been the best his colleagues thought they could expect — and enough to make them feel they might as well go along with him. It was, it seems, a good day if the boss waived a few million deaths.

CHINA’S FIRST BOMB was detonated on 16 October 1964 at Lop Nor in the Gobi Desert. The Silk Road had passed through here, linking central China with the shores of the Mediterranean Sea across the vast continents of Europe and Asia. Via this most barren and uninhabitable desert had flowed silk, spices, precious stones, art and culture with all their richness and splendor, exchanges that had excited ancient civilizations, and infused them with new life. Lop Nor had thus witnessed numerous life-enhancing impacts. Now, nearly two millennia later, it was the cradle of another “big bang,” that of destruction and death.

The nuclear test site had originally been chosen by the Russians. There, army engineers, scientists and workers had been living for years in mud huts and tents, and in total isolation, working through sandstorms, searing heat and freezing winds.

On the day itself, Mao was waiting for the big moment in his suite in the Great Hall — baptized “of the People,” although off limits to anyone uninvited. Situated on Tiananmen Square, a stone’s throw from Zhongnanhai, it was designed to withstand any kind of military assault, and had its own nuclear bunker. The suite tailor-made for Mao was code-named Suite 118, in line with his usual clandestine style. Mao could drive straight into it in his car. Inside, there was a lift down into an escape tunnel wide enough for two trucks abreast, which led to the underground military centers on the edge of Peking. The suite was adjacent to the stage of a giant auditorium, so that Mao could emerge, and leave, without any close contact with the audience.

On that day, waiting next to Mao’s suite were 3,000 performers involved in a musical extravaganza promoting his cult, The East Is Red, which Chou En-lai had staged. The title had been taken from the Mao “anthem”:

The East is red,

The sun rises,

China has produced a Mao Tse-tung.

He seeks happiness for the people,

He is the people’s great saviour.

Once the success of the test was confirmed, the music of the anthem started, bright lights came on, and a beaming Mao stepped out, flanked by his whole top Party team. Waving to the 3,000 performers, he signaled for Chou En-lai to speak. Chou stepped in front of the microphones: “Chairman Mao has asked me to give you some good news …” Then he announced that a Bomb had been detonated. The crowd was silent at first, not knowing how to react, having been given no prior instructions. Chou then provided a cue: “You can rejoice to your hearts’ content, just don’t jump through the floor!” Whereupon they started yelling and leaping up and down in an apparent frenzy. Mao was the only leader of any country to greet the birth of this monster of mass destruction with festivity. In private, he composed two lines of doggerel:

Atom bomb goes off when it is told.

Ah, what boundless joy!

Celebrations were organized throughout the country. Among the population, who learned for the first time that evening that China had been making a Bomb, there was genuine exultation. To possess nuclear weapons was regarded as a sign of the nation’s achievement, and many felt tremendous pride — especially since they were told that China had produced the Bomb single-handed, with no foreign assistance. The decisive role that Russia played was strictly suppressed, and is little known today.

With hunger only a couple of years behind, and painful memories raw, some among the elite wondered how much the Bomb had cost. The regime registered the import of the questions, and Chou made a point of telling a small audience that China had made the Bomb very cheaply, and had spent only a few billion yuan on it. In fact, the cost of China’s Bomb has been estimated at US$4.1 billion (in 1957 prices). This amount in hard currency could have bought enough wheat to provide an extra 300 calories per day for two years for the entire population — enough to save the lives of every single one of the nearly 38 million people who died in the famine. Mao’s Bomb caused 100 times as many deaths as both of the Bombs the Americans dropped on Japan.

46. A TIME OF UNCERTAINTY AND SETBACKS (1962–65 AGE 68–71)

IN THE YEARS after 1962, while China was recovering economically, Mao nursed his revenge. Liu Shao-chi, his normally circumspect and seemingly obliging No. 2, had ambushed and outsmarted him at the Conference of the Seven Thousand in January 1962. Under the collective pressure of virtually the whole Chinese establishment, Mao had been forced to abandon his lethal policies. Mao was not going to let Liu or anyone who sympathized with Liu get away with thwarting him.

Mao started clearing the ground for a big purge from the moment the famine abated. He put the brakes on liberal measures such as letting peasants lease some land, and rehabilitating political victims, and he steadily fueled his personality cult. Eulogies of Mao increasingly dominated school texts, publications, the media and every sphere that affected people’s minds, so that wherever anyone’s eye fell there were slogans hailing him, and whenever a song was heard it was in the vein of the one called “Father is close, Mother is close, but neither is as close as Chairman Mao.” Mao was making everything more thoroughly politicized than ever, in a context where only adulation of him was permitted to exist.

He opened with novels, saying sarcastically to a Party audience in September 1962: “Aren’t there a lot of novels and publications at the moment? Using novels to carry out anti-Party activities is a big invention.” Mao later laid into all books: “The more books you read, the more stupid you become.” “You can read a little,” he would say, “but reading too much ruins you, really ruins you.” This was unashamedly cynical, as he himself was well-read, and loved reading. His beds were tailor-made to be extra large, with enough space for loads of books to be piled on one side (and sloping, so that the books would not topple over onto him), and his favorite hobby was reading in bed. But he wanted the Chinese people to be ignorant. He told his inner circle that “We need the policy of ‘keep people stupid.’ ”

In spring 1963, Mao turned his attention to traditional Chinese opera. Unlike opera in the West, Chinese opera was popular entertainment. For hundreds of years, different regions had developed their own distinctive styles, performed in village markets as well as city theaters, danced in the northern mountains amidst winds and dust, and sung under moonlight and kerosene lamps on southern islets, listened to by fishermen on houseboats. Mao himself was a fan, indeed a connoisseur of regional operas. He had a collection of over 2,000 cassettes and records, and would discuss interpretations of arias knowledgeably with opera singers. The only time he let people see him wearing glasses was at operas. He was a very involved viewer as well, and once he became so engrossed that he not only sobbed and blew his nose loudly, but shot straight up from his seat, whereupon his trousers fell down, as his servant had loosened his belt to make him more comfortable. He had a particular taste for those operas his own regime deemed “pornographic.”

Mao’s passion for the opera did not prevent him suppressing a large number of them soon after his reign began. But when he embarked on this new purge he set out to get the old repertoires banned in toto, starting with a genre known as “Ghost Dramas,” in which dead victims’ spirits took revenge on those who had driven them to their death. Mao had the genre banned in March 1963; having just been the agent of tens of millions of deaths, he regarded these on-stage avengers as uncomfortably close to reality.

At the end of 1963, he accused “all art forms — operas, theater, folk arts (including ballad-singing, traditional story-telling and stage comics), music, the fine arts, dance, cinema, poetry and literature” of being “feudal or capitalist,” and “very murky.” Even works produced under his own regime to sing the praises of the Communists were condemned as “poisonous weeds.” Mao ordered artists to be sent down to villages to be “seriously reformed.” “Throw singers, poets, playwrights, and writers out of the cities,” he said in his quintessentially blunt style in February 1964. “Drive the whole lot of them down to the villages. No food for those who don’t go.”

Ancient monuments, the visible signs of China’s long civilization, fell victim too. Mao had started having city walls and commemorative arches knocked down indiscriminately soon after he came to power; by the end of the 1950s the vast majority were destroyed. He now added temples and old tombs to his hit list, and complained to one of his secretaries in December 1964 about the slow obedience to his order: “Only a few piles of rotten bones [i.e., tombs] have been dug out … You take the enemies [i.e., those resisting] too lightly. As for the temples, not one of them has been touched.”

Mao even pushed for the elimination of horticulture: “growing flowers is a hangover from the old society,” he said, “a pastime for the feudal scholar class, bourgeois class and other layabouts.” “We must change it now,” he ordered in July 1964. “Get rid of most gardeners.”

What Mao had in mind was a completely arid society, devoid of civilization, deprived of representation of human feelings, inhabited by a herd with no sensibility, which would automatically obey his orders. He wanted the nation to be brain-dead in order to carry out his big purge — and to live in this state permanently. In this he was more extreme than Hitler or Stalin, as Hitler allowed apolitical entertainment, and Stalin preserved the classics. In fact, Mao criticized Stalin on this score; in February 1966, Mao said: “Stalin took over the so-called classics of Russia and Europe uncritically, and this caused grave consequences.”

IN THE YEARS 1962–65 Mao made some headway in turning every facet of life into something “political” and killing culture, but the result was far from satisfactory for him. He had to rely on the Party machine to execute his orders, and virtually everyone had reservations about his policies, all the way from the Politburo downward. Few welcomed a life without entertainment or color. Mao found that almost everyone was dragging their feet, and that recreations patently harmless to the regime, like the classics and flowers, continued to exist. He was angry and frustrated, but was unable to have his way.

He was more successful in one area, indoctrinating the population, for whom he created a role model: a safely dead soldier called Lei Feng. Lei Feng had most conveniently kept a diary in which he allegedly recorded how he was inspired by Mao to do good deeds, and swore that for Mao he was ready to “go up mountains of knives and down into seas of flames.” Total obedience to Mao, to be what the regime lauded as perfect “little cogs” in Mao’s machine, was elevated to the ultimate virtue. This cult of impersonality, the necessary obverse of the cult of Mao’s personality, was cloaked in a deceptive appeal to be selfless — for “our country” or “the people.”

Apart from symbolizing total loyalty to Mao, soldier Lei Feng exemplified another vital point: the idea that hate was good, which was drilled into the population, especially the young. Lei Feng had reportedly written: “Like spring, I treat my comrades warmly … And to class enemies, I am cruel and ruthless like harsh winter.” Hatred was dressed up as something necessary if one loved the people.

As a particular hate figure, Mao built up Khrushchev, on the grounds that he practiced “revisionism.” The Chinese press was flooded with polemics demonizing the Soviet leader, which the population was force-fed at weekly indoctrination sessions. It was thus drilled into people’s minds that Khrushchev and other “revisionists” were villains (like murderers in a normal society). Eventually, the other shoe would drop: Mao would condemn Liu Shao-chi as “China’s Khrushchev,” and disobedient Party officials as “revisionists.”

The first time Mao raised the specter of a Chinese Khrushchev was to his top echelon on 8 June 1964. Liu knew that Mao was driving at him, and that the tornado was about to strike. His options were limited. All he could do was try to entrench his own position to make it harder for Mao to get him. Then, in October, something happened in Moscow that gave Liu an opening.

ON 14 OCTOBER 1964, Khrushchev was ousted in a palace coup. Mao saw an opportunity to resuscitate Soviet assistance for his missile program, which had fallen far behind schedule. He found himself in the position of finally possessing the atomic bomb, but lacking the means to deliver it. For this, he needed foreign know-how, and he set his sights on improving relations with the new leadership in the Kremlin, now headed by Leonid Brezhnev. Within days, Chou was telling Soviet ambassador Chervonenko that it was Mao’s “utmost wish” to have a better relationship. Chou requested an invitation to the anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in Moscow on 7 November.

The new Soviet leadership was also interested in finding out whether a rapprochement was possible, and made sure that Mao was the first to hear about Khrushchev’s downfall, before it was made public. But the Kremlin quickly realized that the prospect was extremely dim as long as Mao remained in charge. Ambassador Chervonenko recalled what happened when he went to tell Mao. “It was about 11 pm when I entered Mao’s residence.” After hearing the news, Mao

thought for a moment or two, and then said: “Nice move you have made, but this is not enough” … After the meeting, Mao … saw me off. The car wouldn’t start, so the driver took a bucket and went to the kitchen with Mao’s bodyguard. The moon was shining on the lake. Mao was standing beside my stalled car: “There are still a few things that need fixing,” he said, “and your Plenum hasn’t done them all.”

Mao insisted that Moscow must repeal its Party program and, in effect, disown de-Stalinization. This was out of the question for the new Soviet leaders, and so it seems that they used Chou’s visit to test the water to see whether there was a possibility of the CCP dumping Mao.

At the reception in the Kremlin on 7 November, the big day, Chou and his delegation were walking round toasting old acquaintances when Soviet defense minister Rodion Malinovsky approached Chou, bringing along Russia’s top Chinese-language interpreter. Out of the blue, Malinovsky said to Chou: “We don’t want any Mao, or any Khrushchev, to stand in the way of our relationship.” “I don’t understand what you are talking about,” Chou replied, and walked away at once. Malinovsky then turned to Marshal Ho Lung, China’s acting army chief: “We’ve got rid of our fool Khrushchev, now you get rid of yours, Mao. And then we can have friendly relations again.” Malinovsky used barrack-room language: “The marshal’s uniform I am wearing was Stalin’s dog-shit, and the marshal’s uniform you are wearing is Mao Tse-tung’s dog-shit …” Ho Lung argued with him, and then the Chinese delegation left the reception.

Chou sat up all night composing a cable to Mao. The next morning, Brezhnev came with four senior colleagues (but not Malinovsky) to the Chinese delegation’s residence, where Chou made a formal protest. The Russians apologized, saying that Malinovsky’s words did not reflect their views, and that he was drunk. But, quite apart from the fact that Malinovsky was a man who could hold his liquor, such words could never be spoken lightly by the army chief of one country to the premier and an army chief of another country, particularly when the countries involved were totalitarian Russia and China. Moreover, the Soviet leadership did not censure Malinovsky, which they surely would have done had this been a genuine gaffe. All the evidence suggests that Malinovsky acted deliberately, in a way that could be disowned. A top Russian intelligence expert on China used a telling formulation to us: “We learned that we could not divide Chou and Mao.”

This episode enormously stoked Mao’s suspicions that there might be a vast plot against him involving senior colleagues in cahoots with the Russians. Nothing could be more dangerous for him than the Kremlin expressing a serious wish to oust him. Neither the challenge by Peng De-huai in 1959, nor that by Liu in 1962, had shaken his position. But if the Kremlin really wanted to get rid of him, that would be a different story. Interest on the part of Russia might well embolden some of his colleagues to take drastic steps. The distance from the border of Russia’s satellite Outer Mongolia to Peking was only some 500 km, over mainly flat and open land, which Russian tanks could easily overrun, and China lacked effective anti-tank defenses. The very next month, December 1964, on Mao’s instructions, the army drew up a plan to construct artificial mountains, each like a giant military fortress, on the North China plain, as obstacles to Russian tanks — a huge project that was abandoned as useless after several years and immense cost.

Chou managed to retain Mao’s favor, as Mao figured Chou was too shrewd to try anything rash. But Chou knew that a cloud of suspicion was hanging over his head. Before leaving Moscow, members of his entourage heard him say that he had visited Moscow ten times since the founding of Communist China, but that it was most unlikely that he would ever be returning. Indeed, this was his last visit — and none of Mao’s colleagues ever visited Moscow as long as Mao lived.

Mao was chary about anyone in his top circle going to Russia in case they schemed with the Russians to overthrow him. Even being present at the same occasion as high-level Russians in a third country — i.e., outside Mao’s control — was to be avoided. In September 1969, Chou faced the possibility of bumping into some Soviet leader at the funeral of Ho Chi Minh in Hanoi, so he rushed to Hanoi ahead of the funeral, ignoring Vietnamese protests that they were not ready for visitors. And Chou left well before the ceremony itself, to which China sent a second-level delegation.

In the forthcoming purge, any connection with Russia became a key issue, especially among the top echelon. Marshal Ho Lung and a huge number of his old subordinates were arrested and interrogated. Ho Lung himself died in detention in appalling conditions in 1969.

So did Deputy Defense Minister General Xu Guang-da, who was brutally tortured over a period of eighteen months, being interrogated no fewer than 416 times. He had the misfortune to be the only senior military figure to visit Russia after Malinovsky’s remarks, and so was suspected of being a link between Mao’s domestic foes and Moscow. Xu had gone to Russia in May 1965 because at the time there was still some nuclear cooperation with Russia. Immediately after his trip, Mao withdrew all the Chinese at the Russian nuclear center at Dubna, shutting off nuclear collaboration completely.

Thanks to the Malinovsky episode, Mao had absolutely no relationship with Brezhnev. China’s relations with the Soviet Union deteriorated to their worst ever under Brezhnev, who remained in power for the rest of Mao’s lifetime.

But at the time of the Kremlin’s heavy-handed feeler in November 1964, Mao did not order Chou to leave. Chou stayed on in Moscow, and held meetings with a host of foreign delegates, whom Mao was keen for him to see. He returned to Peking on 14 November, according to schedule. Mao turned up to greet him at the airport with his whole team. The message was for the Russians: that the Chinese leadership was united. But the Russians drew mixed inferences. Soviet diplomats at the airport observed that Mao did not look at all well—“close to prostration,” they thought.

THIS WAS AN exceptionally unsure time for Mao, and Liu Shao-chi exploited it. He made a bid to strengthen his position by having himself reconfirmed as state president. This would provide an opportunity for a huge burst of profile-building, as a sort of personality cult for himself. Reconfirmation of his tenure was long overdue. Mao had not allowed the body that “elected” the president, the National Assembly, to convene as it should have in 1963, because he only wanted it to meet when he was ready to purge Liu. But within weeks of Malinovsky’s remarks about getting rid of Mao, Liu convened the Assembly on extraordinarily short notice, calculating that Mao would feel too insecure either to veto this move or to purge him. Mao saw what Liu was up to, and erupted. “Let’s do the handover now,” he said sarcastically to Liu on 26 November: “You take over and be the chairman. You be Qinshihuang [the First Emperor] …”

Mao could not prevent the Assembly meeting. All he could do was to withhold his blessing by not calling a Party plenum beforehand to set the agenda — the only time such an omission ever happened during his reign. In the Politburo the day before the Assembly opened, Mao snapped at Liu repeatedly: “I just won’t endorse [you].” At one point, he told Liu: “You’re no good.”

Outside the meeting room, Mao exploded to a couple of his devotees: “Someone is shitting on my head!” Then, on his seventy-first birthday, on 26 December, he took the most unusual step of inviting Liu for dinner. Mao almost never socialized with Liu or his other colleagues, except for being on the dance floor at the same time. Beforehand, Mao said to his daughter Li Na: “You are not coming today, because your father is going to curse the mother-fucker.” Mao sat at one table with a few favorites, while Liu was put at a separate table. There was not an iota of birthday atmosphere. While everyone else sat in frigid silence, Mao ranted on with accusations about “revisionism,” and “running an independent kingdom,” transparently directed at Liu.

No one said anything in support of Mao, not even the equivalent of “You’re right, Boss”—except his secretary, Chen Bo-da. Mao so appreciated this that afterwards he summoned Chen, drowsy with sleeping pills, in the small hours of the night, and confided to him that he intended to get Liu, making Chen one of the first people to be told this explicitly. (Mao was soon to catapult Chen to No. 4 in the Party.)

On 3 January 1965, Liu was reappointed president, to a blaze of publicity, quite unlike the occasion of his original appointment in 1959, when there had been little fanfare. This time there were rallies and parades, with his portrait carried alongside Mao’s, and firecrackers, drums and gongs. Newspapers ran headlines like “Chairman Mao and Chairman Liu are both our most beloved leaders.” (The president is also called “chairman” in Chinese.) Liu plainly had many supporters rooting for him. He had earned a lot of credit with senior Party officials for extricating China from the famine. Even devoted Mao followers in the inner circle showed signs of switching allegiance. Most incredibly, the idea was mooted of hanging Liu’s portrait on Tiananmen Gate — alone, without Mao’s! — which Liu had to veto at once.

On the day Liu was being re-elected, his wife was summoned, for the first time ever, to a meeting in Mao’s Suite 118 in the Great Hall. The Lius were very much in love, and Mao knew it. He chose this day to signal his intention to make them both suffer. When Liu walked in after the vote, he was taken aback when he saw his wife was present. Mao pounced, bellowing a long tirade. Mme Liu felt immense hatred radiating from Mao. She and Liu looked at each other in silence. Mao wanted Mme Liu to witness her husband being abused, and for Liu to register: I will make your wife pay too.

Yet, even after such an overt display of hostility, no colleague took Mao’s side and denounced Liu. Most just expressed concern about the discord between “the two chairmen,” and urged Liu to adopt a more obsequious posture towards Mao. Liu eventually apologized to Mao for not being respectful enough. Mao’s response was as menacing as it was arbitrary: “This is not a matter of respect or disrespect. This is a question of Marxism versus Revisionism.”

Echoing Stalin’s remark about Tito (“I will wag my little finger and there will be no more Tito”), Mao told Liu: “Who do you think you are? I can wag my little finger and there will be no more you!” But in fact, for now, there was a stand-off. Mao could not get Liu condemned just on his own say-so.

AT THIS POINT Mao resorted to a potent symbolic gesture — a trip to the Jinggang Mountains, where he had set up his first base in 1927. Unlike his other trips, which were spur-of-the-moment, this one was publicized well in advance among his top circle, so all his colleagues knew he was going. Six years before, facing a rebellious Peng De-huai, Mao had threatened that if he were challenged he would “go up into the mountains and start guerrilla warfare.” Now he was actually going to the mountains, which made the message altogether louder, more actual and more powerful.

A portable squat toilet was constructed. An advance team scouted the destination. “Class enemies” were detained and stashed well away from Mao’s route. Duplicate cars were prepared, and heavy machine-guns positioned on commanding points. The Praetorian Guard lurked in plain clothes, their weapons concealed, like Hollywood gangsters’, in musical instrument cases.

Mao left Peking in late February 1965, moving slowly, feeling his way. En route, on 9 April, he learned of the death of a favorite retainer, the 63-year-old boss of Shanghai, Ke Qing-shi, of misdiagnosed pancreatitis. For such an invaluable acolyte to die by human error at this juncture was alarming, so Mao stayed put in Wuhan. There, he summoned his long-term accomplice, defense minister Marshal Lin Biao, for a tête-à-tête meeting on 22 April. The marshal, who had rescued Mao at the Conference of the Seven Thousand in January 1962, was in on Mao’s plans to purge President Liu. Mao told him to keep a particularly tight grip on the army and a sharp lookout in case the president, who was overseeing things in the capital, should try to gain support among the military.

On 19 May, Lin Biao made a spectacular démarche in line with Mao’s request. On that day, in his capacity as president, Liu was receiving the participants at a high-level army meeting when the marshal turned up unexpectedly, having earlier declined the invitation on health grounds. At the end of the meeting, when the president announced that it had reached a satisfactory conclusion the marshal suddenly stood up and launched into a harangue that basically contradicted what Liu had said. He thus made it unmistakably clear to the top brass that he, not the president, was their boss, massively undermining Liu’s authority.

While the marshal kept an eye on President Liu in Peking, Mao proceeded to his old outlaw stamping-ground on 21 May. He stayed there seven nights, going nowhere apart from short walks in the immediate vicinity of the guest house. A stop had been scheduled at his old residence, the Octagonal Pavilion, but as he got out of the car, Mao heard faint noises. These were actually hammers and chisels clanging from some masons at work on a distant slope, but here in the mountains noise traveled far. Just as his foot was touching the ground, Mao shrank back into the car, and ordered it to drive off at once.

Mao did not see any local people until minutes before his departure, when organized crowds were brought to stand outside the guest house, and he waved at them and had photographs taken. His presence had been kept secret until the last minute. During his stay, and for some time after he left, all communications with the outside world for the locals were cut off.

The guest house where Mao stayed, which had been built during the famine, was not up to his standards, so work on another soon began, to the usual specifications: one-story and totally bomb-proof. But Mao never returned. He had come for one purpose only: to make a threat.

WHILE MAO WAS in the mountains, Liu was busy building up his own profile. On 27 May an article appeared in People’s Daily, replete with vintage cult language: “The hills were extraordinarily green, and the water was exceptionally blue … the scenery of the Ming Tombs Reservoir displayed unprecedented splendour.” But instead of being just about Mao, it was about both Mao and Liu, and both of them were engaged in the quintessential Mao cult activity of swimming:

After 3 in the afternoon, two cars stopped … Two towering, kindly-looking men stepped out of the cars, and with firm steps walked towards the water.

… these were our most revered and beloved leaders, Chairman Mao and Chairman Liu. The crowd immediately burst into loud cheers:

“Chairman Mao has come swimming!”

“Chairman Liu has come swimming!”

The youth saw that Chairman Mao and Chairman Liu were glowing with tremendous health and spirits, and felt a surge of happiness through their bodies …

Chairman Mao and Chairman Liu … swam forward shoulder to shoulder …

But this was not a “news” report at all. The swim had actually taken place the previous year, on 16 June 1964. That it was resurrected suggests that the story was inserted to promote Liu’s image, at a time when Mao’s absence from Peking meant People’s Daily did not have to clear it with Mao. For this and other acts of disobedience, Mao later visited ghastly punishment on his media chiefs.

AFTER HIS TRIP to the Jinggang Mountains to make his threat, Mao did not act at once. It seems that the reason he held his fire was that he was waiting for a particular international event to take place. This was the second Afro-Asian summit, scheduled for June 1965 in Algiers. As president, Liu had had dealings with many heads of state who would be there, and to purge him just before the gathering would create a bad impression. The summit was crucial to Mao, who wanted to use it to establish a dominant role in the Third World. As he was not prepared to leave his home turf, for security reasons, he had to pull the strings from afar. His man for the job was Chou En-lai.

The first Afro-Asian summit had taken place ten years before at Bandung in Indonesia, where Chou had had considerable success in wooing newly independent Third World countries. Since then, Peking’s influence had grown substantially, thanks, not least, to its extravagant aid. Nehru, the star at Bandung, was dead, and meanwhile China had acquired the Bomb. Mao entertained the idea that at this second summit he could be seen as the patron — if Russia did not take part. In the preparations for the Algiers summit Mao’s goal had been to keep the Russians out.

To this end, Peking courted Indonesia’s President Sukarno, as he was the man vetting the invitations, in his capacity as host of the first summit. China offered him lavish gifts, quite possibly including soldiers for a war he was waging against Malaysia. Top of the list of offers was to train Indonesian nuclear scientists, enabling Sukarno to announce that Indonesia would soon explode an atom bomb. China dangled the same lure of nuclear secrets in front of Egypt, another key Third World country, when in fact Mao had no intention of sharing his nuclear knowledge; when Nasser later asked Chou to deliver on his promise, Chou told him to be “self-reliant.”

To buy votes for the Algiers summit, Mao committed China to its biggest-ever overseas project — a railway nearly 2,000 km long from landlocked Zambia across Tanzania to the Indian Ocean. Informed that Tanzania’s President Julius Nyerere was interested in such a railway and could not get the West to put up the money, Chou said: “Chairman Mao said whatever the imperialists oppose, we support; the imperialists oppose this, so we sponsor it …” Mao was not concerned whether the railway was viable. When Nyerere expressed hesitation about accepting the offer, Chou pressed harder, claiming that Chinese railway-building materials and personnel would be going to waste if they were not used in Tanzania. The project cost about US$1 billion, which Mao dismissed as “No big deal.”

Ten days before the summit was due to open, Algeria’s President Ahmed Ben Bella was overthrown in a military coup. A short while before, Mao had called him “my dear brother.” Now he dropped Ben Bella like a hot potato, and ordered Chou to back the new military government and ensure the summit went ahead on schedule.

Peking’s diplomats started lobbying frantically, even though it was clear that the vast majority of governments due to attend favored a postponement. Even the very pro-Chinese Nyerere gave Peking’s lobbyist a piece of his mind: “Chou En-lai is my most respected statesman. But I don’t understand why he insists on the conference being held on schedule,” Ben Bella, Nyerere said, was an “anti-colonialist hero recognised all over Africa,” adding: “I must tell you [that China’s lobbying] has damaged the reputation of China and Premier Chou himself.”

The summit was postponed. Peking’s hustling boomeranged. Within weeks, Nasser, in many ways the decisive voice, was backing Russian participation. If the Russians attended, Mao would be unable to play the leading role. So the Chinese announced that they would not take part. The summit never convened.

AS HIS DREAM of playing the leader to Asian and African countries collapsed, in fury, Mao lashed out. Longing to score a victory somewhere, he went to the brink of war with India.

Three years before he had trounced India satisfactorily. But now, in autumn 1965, he could not guarantee success, as India was much better prepared. So he resorted to parasitizing on someone else’s conflict, always a risky undertaking. On 6 September, Pakistan got into a war with India. Over the previous years, Pakistan had grown much closer to China, and become one of the two biggest non-Communist recipients of Chinese aid.

Pakistan’s war with India seemed to Mao to offer a chance to score another victory over India, which would be forced to fight on two fronts if China intervened. He moved troops up to the border, and issued two ultimatums, demanding that India dismantle alleged outposts on some territory Peking claimed, within three days, by 22 September. When Delhi replied in a conciliatory vein, denying it had outposts there, but calling for a “joint investigation” and promising that if outposts were found, it “would not oppose dismantling them,” Peking answered thuggishly that “there is no need for investigation,” and that there just were outposts. Mao was bent on war.

But the scheme collapsed when Pakistan suddenly accepted a UN call for a ceasefire before China’s deadline had expired. The Pakistanis told Mao that the cost of continuing fighting was too high, both diplomatically and economically, but Mao pressed them to fight on, reportedly giving Pakistan’s President Ayub Khan the message: “If there is a nuclear war, it is Peking and not Rawalpindi that will be a target.” When the Pakistanis declined to oblige, Mao was left out on a limb, and Peking had to climb down in public, lamely alleging that India had secretly dismantled its outposts — when in fact India had not stirred. Mao ended up deeply frustrated.

IMPATIENT FOR A SUCCESS, Mao tried to ignite violent insurrections wherever he could. In Thailand, the Communist Party fostered by Mao (and composed overwhelmingly of ethnic Chinese) now launched into armed insurgency, clashing for the first time with government forces on 7 August 1965, thenceforth known as “Gun-Firing Day.” It got nowhere.

The biggest — and most tragic — fiasco came in Indonesia. The Communist Party there, the PKI, was the largest in the non-Communist world, with some 3.5 million members, and had the kind of secret intimate relationship with Peking which the Chinese Communists had had with Stalin before they conquered China.^† The head of the Japanese Communist Party at the time, Kenji Miyamoto, told us that Peking continually told the PKI, and the Japanese Party: “Whenever there is a chance to seize power, you must rise up in armed struggle.” In 1964, Miyamoto discussed this with Aidit. Whilst the Japanese Communists were cautious, Aidit, who had great faith in Mao, was very eager to swing into action. After the Algiers summit folded, in lashing-out mood, Mao set the PKI in motion to seize power.

In early August Aidit came to China, where he met Mao. Aidit then proceeded to Indonesia with a team of Chinese doctors, who within days reported that President Sukarno (who was pro-Peking) had terminal kidney problems, and did not have long to live; so if the PKI were going to act, now was the time.

The plan was to decapitate the anti-Communist top brass of the army, over which President Sukarno held very limited sway. Peking had been pressing Sukarno to overhaul the army radically, and with Sukarno’s support the PKI had been infiltrating the army with some success. The PKI believed, wildly over-optimistically, that it could secretly control over half the army, two-thirds of the airforce and one-third of the navy. According to the plan, once the generals were disposed of, Sukarno would step in and take over the army, while the Communists in the army kept the rank-and-file in line.

On 30 September a group of officers arrested and killed Indonesia’s army chief and five other generals. Speaking shortly afterwards to Japanese Communist Party chief Miyamoto, Mao referred to this coup as “the Communist Party of Indonesia’s … uprising.” But the PKI failed to cope with an unforeseen occurrence which derailed its whole plot. An informer had tipped off a then little-known general called Suharto, who was not on the arrest list. Thus prepared, Suharto waited for the arrests and killings of the other generals to be completed and then took immediate control of the army, unleashing a massacre of hundreds of thousands of Communists and sympathizers — and innocent people. Almost the entire PKI leadership was captured and executed. Only one member of the Politburo survived, Jusuf Adjitorop, who was in China at the time, and whom we met there, a disillusioned man, three decades later.

President Sukarno was forced out, and General Suharto established a military dictatorship that was fiercely anti-Peking and hostile to the large ethnic Chinese community at home.

Mao blamed the PKI for the failure. “The Indonesian party committed two errors,” he told the Japanese Communists. First, “they blindly believed in Sukarno, and overestimated the power of the Party in the army.” The second error, Mao said, was that the PKI “wavered without fighting it out.” In fact, the slaughter unleashed by Suharto was so ferocious, and so instantaneous, that it had been impossible for the PKI to fight back. Mao and his men had never experienced anything like this at the hands of Chiang Kai-shek, who was a kitten compared to Suharto. Mao, in any case, was to blame, as he had started the action for his own self-centered reasons. He just could not wait to have a victory after his pipedream of Afro-Asian leadership collapsed.

By the end of 1965, Mao’s global schemes had suffered one setback after another. In a dark and vehement state of mind, he turned to deal with his foes inside China.

Except for a stop-over by Deng Xiao-ping en route to a Party congress in Romania in July 1965, which shows Mao’s trust in Deng.

In 1965 China began talking about transferring nuclear know-how to Pakistan — or, more accurately, dangling the prospect. Pakistan had grown more and more useful to Mao as a staging post to the Middle East, and Peking aggressively backed Pakistan’s ambitions over Kashmir, training Kashmiri guerrillas for what China presented as a “national liberation” war.

^†In September 1963, Chou En-lai brought PKI chief Aidit to a secret summit at Conghua in South China with Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh and the head of the Laotian Communists, to coordinate military strategy in Indonesia with the war in Indochina. This summit placed Indonesia on a strategic par with Indochina, and linked developments in Indonesia with the much more advanced military conflict in Indochina.

These parts of Mao’s talks were withheld from the published version, and were made available to us by the Japanese Communist Party Central Committee.