by Jung Chang
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 offi
cial 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 dislike
d 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.
