Mao: The Unknown Story

by Jung Chang

  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 si
lent 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 earl
y 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.”