by Jung Chang
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.
