by Philip Short
Mao was not completely blind. In October, one of the model communes which he and other leaders had visited, at Xushui, in Hebei, 100 miles south-west of Beijing – and which claimed to be on the verge of introducing a true communist system, with all property and produce held in common and each member able to take whatever he needed – had been exposed as a fraud.209 From other areas came reports of peasants being worked to death, given starvation rations, or tortured and killed when they were unable to meet the local leaders’ demands. That autumn the Chairman had begun urging a period of retrenchment. Cadres were ‘practicing coercion, telling lies, making false reports’ and paying too much attention to production at the expense of people's livelihood, he told the Central Committee.210 In a detailed instruction the following spring, conveyed to basic-level cadres throughout the country, he insisted:
In setting production quotas, state only how much you can actually produce and don't make false claims … On harvests, state how much you have actually harvested instead of falsely claiming a figure inconsistent with reality … Those who are honest and who dare to speak the truth are ultimately serving the best interests of the people and will not come to grief for it. Those who like to make false claims do harm to the people and to themselves and will ultimately suffer the consequences. It should be said that much of the falsehood has been prompted by the upper levels through boasting, pressure and reward, leaving little alternative to those below … We must have enthusiasm and drive, but lying is not allowed.211
Subsequent Central Committee directives reduced the scope of communal dining, and allowed the peasants to raise small amounts of livestock and to cultivate household plots.212 Although the problems were ‘temporary and localized’, Mao maintained, the peasants were feeling ‘great fear and anxiety’.213 It was necessary to give them a breathing space and to clamp down on abuses in order that the policies underlying the Great Leap might be fully realised.V
As 1958 drew to a close, Mao looked back with satisfaction on what had been achieved. ‘During this [past] year, there have been so many good things,’ he mused. ‘Trails have been blazed. Many things have been realised, about which we did not even dare to dream before.’214 His vision of China pioneering its own path to communism was beginning to come true. The Russians were being left behind.215
Two years earlier, at the start of the Little Leap, he had written of the Chinese people being ‘poor and blank’. This was an advantage, he declared, because ‘once a piece of paper has been written on, you cannot do much more with it’.216 Throughout the Great Leap Forward, poverty and ‘blankness’ remained a constant theme. As he put it in an article in April:
China's 600 million people have two remarkable peculiarities; they are, first of all, poor, and secondly blank. That may seem like a bad thing, but it is really a good thing. Poor people want change, want to do things, want revolution. A clean sheet of paper has no blotches, and so the newest and most beautiful words can be written on it, the newest and most beautiful pictures can be painted on it.217
That statement, with its stupendous arrogance, its megalomaniac ambition to mould, like putty, the lives and thoughts of almost a quarter of mankind, provided an alarming glimpse into Mao's mind as old age approached. Hubris on such a scale presaged catastrophe. It was not long in coming.
The Russians watched these developments with mounting disquiet. Already, in November 1957, Mao's visit to Moscow for the Conference of World Communist Parties had left a residue of unease. On his arrival there, Khrushchev had greeted him with an offer too good to refuse: a secret agreement to provide China with nuclear weapons technology, including a sample atom bomb, in return for Mao's support of the Soviet leader personally, and of Russia's leading role in the international communist movement.218 On both counts he had been happy to oblige. The ‘new’ Khrushchev, who wanted to surpass America, was better to his liking than the author of the Secret Speech; and Mao had never disputed that international communism needed a leader – his concern was simply that China's views be taken into account when Moscow and Beijing had differences. At the 1957 meeting, that position had been respected: Khrushchev had not only given Mao an advance draft of the final resolution, but had accepted Mao's proposed amendments – and then, at Mao's insistence, had circulated the amended draft for comments from all the sixty-eight parties taking part, instead of steamrollering through the Soviet version without discussion as had been the practice before.
Reassured by the Soviet leader's attitude, and buoyed up by his conviction that ‘the East wind prevails over the West’, Mao had given the leaders of world communism an apocalyptic vision of their future triumph. If peace could be maintained, he said, the socialist camp would become invincible. But there was also another possibility:
Let us speculate. If war broke out, how many people would die? There are 2.7 billion people in the entire world, and one-third of them may be lost … If the worst comes to the worst, perhaps one-half would die. But there would still be one-half left; imperialism would be razed to the ground and the whole world would become socialist. After a number of years, the world's population would once again reach 2.7 billion and certainly become even bigger.219
There was nothing particularly new in this: Mao had expressed the same view to Nehru in 1954, when tensions over Taiwan had led America to hint at possible nuclear weapons use, and he repeated it in even more cataclysmic terms to a Finnish diplomat a few months later. ‘If the US had atom bombs so powerful that … they would make a hole right through the earth,’ he told the astonished envoy, ‘that would hardly mean anything to the universe as a whole, though it might be a major event for the solar system.’220 Mao's point was that nuclear blackmail did not work against those who showed no fear of it. But it was one thing to philosophize in such terms in private conversation, quite another at a meeting attended by communist leaders from all over the world. To them, Mao's words were chilling. The Soviet leadership found itself wondering whether a man who spoke of nuclear armageddon with such total unconcern could really be trusted with an atomic arsenal of his own. But by then, the technology agreement had been signed.
The following spring, Mao plunged into the Great Leap Forward, secure in the knowledge that nuclear partnership with the USSR would spare China the need for a costly build-up of conventional forces.
Meanwhile, Khrushchev cast about for ways to increase Soviet leverage over Beijing's atomic weapons policy. To that end he proposed a further broadening of military co-operation, including an agreement to setup a jointly owned ultra-long-wave radio station to communicate with the Soviet submarine fleet in the Pacific (70 per cent of the cost to be met by Russia, the remainder by the Chinese side), and another for a joint Soviet–Chinese nuclear submarine flotilla.
To his amazement, Mao reacted very badly. At a meeting with the Russian Ambassador, Pavel Yudin, in late July, the Chairman poured out in venomous terms his accumulated resentment at what he portrayed as Moscow's high-handedness:
You never trust the Chinese! You only trust Russians. To you, Russians are first-class citizens, whereas Chinese are among those inferior peoples who are stupid and careless. That's why you came up with this question of joint ownership and operation. Well, if that's what you want, why don't you have it all – let's have joint ownership and operation of our army, navy, air force, industry, agriculture, culture, education! Would that be all right? Or you can have the whole of China's 10,000 kilometres of coastline, and we'll just keep a guerrilla force. Just because you have a few atomic bombs, you think you are in a position to control us by seeking leases. How else can you justify your behaviour? … These remarks of mine may not sound so pleasing to your ear … [But] you have extended Russian nationalism right up to the Chinese coast.221
To Mao, ‘joint ownership’ smacked of the unequal treaties imposed during China's humiliation at the hands of the Western powers, and of the Soviet Union's demands in 1950 for special privileges in Manchuria and Xinjiang. Khrushchev, he told Yudin, had had the goo
d sense to annul the accords which Stalin had imposed, yet now he was himself behaving in exactly the same way.
Khrushchev recalled in his memoirs that Yudin's report on this meeting came ‘like a thunderbolt out of a clear blue sky’,222 and there is no reason to disbelieve him. Less than ten days later, he flew secretly to Beijing, accompanied by the Defence Minister, Rodion Malinovsky, to try to sort out the mess.
He failed. Not only was Mao intransigent, refusing to countenance arrangements even for shore leave in China for Soviet submariners, but, in a mischievous symbolic snub, the naval talks were held beside an open-air swimming pool which Mao had had built at Zhongnanhai, where they sunned themselves, as Khrushchev remembered, ‘like seals on the warm sand’, and the Russian leader, who could not swim, was forced to suffer the indignity of wallowing about in the water buoyed up by a rubber float.223
Three weeks later, another major row blew up, this time concerning Taiwan.
In January 1958, preparations had begun for yet another Chinese attempt to occupy the islands of Quemoy and Matsu.224 That summer, a left-wing coup in Iraq, which led the United States and Britain to send troops to the Middle East, had given Mao the opportunity he had been waiting for. On July 17, he told the Politburo that an attack on the nationalist outposts would divert American attention from the Iraqi imbroglio and show the world that China was serious about supporting national liberation movements. An additional consideration, which he did not mention, was that a proxy conflict with the Americans over Taiwan would raise the political temperature at home, much as the Korean War had done, facilitating the mass mobilisation needed to make the Great Leap succeed. The initial plan was for the bombardment of Quemoy and Matsu to begin nine days later – shortly before Khrushchev's arrival – but in the event it was delayed until late August. By then, the Soviet leader had proposed a four-power summit with the Americans, British and French, to defuse Middle East tensions, which led the People's Daily to comment caustically on ‘the nonsensical idea that peace can be achieved only by currying favour and compromising with the aggressors’.
As it turned out, Mao had misjudged American resolve. After a disagreeable ten days, in which the US dropped heavy hints about the use of nuclear weapons, the Chinese were forced to back off. Khrushchev, having assured himself that Russia no longer risked being dragged in, promised China maximum assistance. Two months later, the crisis ended with the PLA announcing, in the best Beijing opera tradition, that it would continue the bombardment of the island, but only on even-numbered days.
The short-term effect of these disputes was to remind both China and the Soviet Union that it was in their national interests to maintain a normal working relationship. China cooled its rhetoric about an imminent leap into communism, which had exasperated the Russians; and Khrushchev approved a five-billion-rouble loan for Chinese industrial development projects.
But behind the façade of renewed amity, their mutual mistrust deepened. To Khrushchev, Mao's refusal to permit closer military co-operation despite Moscow's agreement to help China build atomic weapons, his cavalier attitude to nuclear destruction and his wild flights of doctrinal unorthodoxy, made him an erratic, ungrateful and unpredictable partner. To Mao, Khrushchev was weak. The priority he accorded to improving relations with the United States was a betrayal of the international communist movement and the revolutionary cause it was pledged to promote. The Russian leader's conversation that winter with a prominent American politician, Senator Hubert Humphrey, in which he poured scorn on the Chinese communes, was just one more example, in Mao's eyes, of Moscow's dereliction of basic socialist solidarity.225
Throughout the spring of 1959, the campaign to consolidate the Great Leap, which Mao had initiated at Wuhan in December, steadily continued. The backyard furnace movement was abandoned in recognition that much of what it produced was unusable – leaving the rural landscape pockmarked with rusting hulks of congealed metal, Byronesque monuments to a national folly. By early summer Mao had agreed that the 1959 steel target should be cut back again, from 20 to 13 million tons, and it was beginning to sink in that the previous year's grain production, while good, had been grossly exaggerated.226 ‘Just as a child plays with fire … and knows pain only when it is burnt,’ he acknowledged ruefully, ‘so, in economic construction, we declared war on nature, like an inexperienced child, unfamiliar with strategy and tactics.’227 Provincial leaders were ordered not to push the peasants too hard. Otherwise, Mao warned chillingly, the CCP might end up like the ancient Qin and Sui dynasties, which had succeeded in unifying China only to lose power a few decades later because of the harshness of their rule.228
It was still a matter of fine-tuning, not of changing basic principles; communism might not be realised tomorrow, Mao said, but it was achievable in fifteen to twenty years ‘or perhaps a little longer’.229 None the less, it seemed that some sense of reality was finally returning.
In this relatively sober frame of mind, the Central Committee gathered in July at the hill resort of Lushan, just south of the Yangtse. On the way, Mao visited his old home at Shaoshan for the first time since 1927.230 What he was shown there strengthened his conviction that the Leap was succeeding, but also that the adventurist notions of utopian Leftists in the provinces needed further damping down and soon after reaching Lushan he began to apply himself to that purpose.
Mao, however, was not the only Chinese leader to have returned to his roots that year. The Defence Minister, Peng Dehuai, had gone back several months earlier to his native village, Niaoshi, not far from Mao's birthplace in the same county, Xiangtan, also for the first time since the 1920s, but had come away with very different impressions.231
What had stayed in Peng's mind was the detritus of the steel campaign – lumps of pig-iron rusting uselessly in the fields; the shells of deserted houses, stripped of their timbers to feed the furnaces; and fruit trees cut down for the same purpose. At the so-called ‘Happiness Homes’ for the aged, he had found spindly old people, subsisting on minimal rations without even blankets to keep them warm. ‘The old can grit their teeth,’ one elderly man said, ‘but babies can only cry.’ The peasants were mutinous, Peng had concluded. They hated the militarisation of daily existence, the enforced communal eating in the mess halls, the destruction of family life. The cadres were under constant pressure to outdo rival communes, leading to systematic exaggeration of crop yields, often by a margin of ten or twenty times. The alternative, they had told him, was to be branded as Rightists.
Peng was not Mao's favourite colleague. They had clashed too often in the past – going back all the way to the winter of 1928, when Peng and his small army of fellow-Hunanese had been left behind on the Jinggangshan, and Mao had failed to execute a promised diversionary manoeuvre to allow them to break out. The Defence Minister's loyalties were to the Party, not to Mao as an individual.
In Shaoshan, the Chairman had been moved to write a poem, eulogising the ‘waves of growing rice and beans, and heroes everywhere going home in the smoky sunset’. Peng, too, had set his thoughts in verse on his last night in Hunan. But he had seen ‘scattered millet … and withered potato plants’, and had made a solemn vow to ‘speak out on behalf of the people’.
In fact, however, Peng did no such thing. In the first half of 1959, he uttered not so much as a word of criticism of the Great Leap. This may have been partly because his attention was taken up by the rebellion in Tibet, which broke out in March; and partly because Mao himself, by then, was preaching the virtues of moderation in a way that promised to correct the more egregious errors. But the main reason was the sheer difficulty, even for a man of Peng's stature, who had been at Mao's side for three decades, to call into question policies with which the Chairman was so intimately involved.
Five years earlier, Gao Gang had overstepped the bounds Mao had fixed and it had cost him his life. In 1955, Deng Zihui had opposed Mao – on technical, rather than political grounds – over the speed of collectivisation; Deng had survived but had lost
most of his power. The following year, Zhou Enlai questioned the Little Leap, only to find himself forced to make cringing self-criticisms eighteen months later. Nor was the fate of those who spoke out during the ‘Hundred Flowers’ an encouragement to candour.
By 1959, it had become obvious that the only person who could safely criticise Mao and his policies was Mao himself; others did so at their peril. Back in Beijing, Peng's enthusiasm for ‘speaking out’ waned. Like other leaders who had doubts, he kept them to himself.
At this point, a new factor came into play.
Food shortages had begun to affect the cities. Rice rations were reduced. Vegetables and cooking oil disappeared from the shops. The 1958 harvest had not been 430 million tons, nor even 260 million, which was the government's new best estimate, but actually (though it would not be admitted until after Mao's death) only 200 million tons, still a record but nowhere near the grandiose predictions of a few months earlier, when Mao had spoken airily of China having more grain than the country would know what to do with and every peasant being able to eat five meals a day.232
Peng was better informed than most about the true state of the harvest. Within the PLA there were already ominous rumblings as the overwhelmingly peasant recruits received news from home that their families were going hungry.
