by Jung Chang
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 th
at 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 pr
opose 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.
