Mao: The Unknown Story

by Jung Chang

  In April 1964, Mao was told that the Bomb could be exploded that autumn. He moved at once on every front to minimize the danger of a strike on the nuclear facilities. He dealt with the Russian end by going public to remind Khrushchev that China was still a member of the Communist camp. On 12 April, the day after the test details were decided, he stepped in to rewrite a telegram to Khrushchev for the latter’s seventieth birthday. The original draft had reflected the acrimonious public relationship between the two states. Mao changed the text to make it ultra-friendly, adding a most unusual “Dear Comrade,” and stressing that their discord was “only temporary.” “In the event of a major world crisis,” he said, they would “undoubtedly stand together against our common enemy.” To conclude, he added a phrase evoking their past relationship: “Let the imperialists and reactionaries tremble before our unity …” The cable was given wide publicity in the Chinese media, and amazed everyone, as this was after months of fire-breathing public polemics targeting Khrushchev. On the eve of National Day that year, on 1 October, Mao stunned the Russians by greeting their delegate warmly, holding his hand, and repeating: “Everything will be fine; our peoples will be together.”

  Mao’s main worry was America. To deter it he tried hard to deal himself some cards. His options for stirring up trouble in the US itself or in its immediate vicinity were limited. Shortly after the Test Ban Treaty, he had fired off a statement on 8 August 1963, to support the blacks in America. However, it only amounted to what he himself later called an “empty cannon.” The black American radical whom Mao credited with urging him to issue the statement, Robert Williams, told us that Mao “didn’t understand a lot of things about blacks in America.” Williams compared Mao unfavorably on this score with Ho Chi Minh. Mao issued more statements supporting anti-American movements in countries near the US, like those in Panama and the Dominican Republic. These were just words.

  There was one spot, though, near China, where there were Americans, and that was Vietnam. By the end of 1963 there were some 15,000 American military advisers in South Vietnam. Mao’s plan was to create a situation whereby America would send more troops to South Vietnam, and even invade North Vietnam, which bordered with China. This way, if Washington were to strike his nuclear facilities, the Chinese army would pour into Vietnam and engulf the American troops as they had done in the Korean War. To try to make this happen, in 1964 Mao started pressing the Vietnamese hard to step up the war in Indochina. Their fighting, he told them, had “made no great impact and was just scratching the surface … Best turn it into a bigger war.” “I’m afraid you really ought to send more troops to the South.” “Don’t be afraid of US intervention,” he urged; “at most, it’s no worse than having another Korean War. The Chinese army is prepared, and if America takes the risk of attacking North Vietnam, the Chinese army will march in at once. Our troops want a war now.”

  Mao asked the North Vietnamese to escalate fighting in other countries which were neighbors of China: “Better also send several thousand troops to Laos,” he said. Laos “has been fighting for several years; but nothing has come of it. You should think of a way: get 3,000 or 4,000 men and … train them so they stop believing in Buddhism and become tough combat troops …” He particularly urged the Vietnamese to help build up a guerrilla army in Thailand, where America had military bases.

  Hanoi’s policy, in fact, was to get the USA to de-escalate, and the Vietnamese told Mao they did not want to “provoke” America. Mao nonetheless ordered 300,000–500,00 °Chinese troops deployed along the border with Vietnam, ready to pour in. Chou En-lai paid a visit to China’s South Sea fleet and told its commander to get ready to attack South Vietnam. Funds were allocated to move the fleet much closer to Vietnam, to the port of Zhanjiang.

  Mao’s agenda, as Chou En-lai later spelled out to Egypt’s President Nasser, was to draw the maximum number of American troops into Vietnam as “an insurance policy” for China against a possible US nuclear attack,

  because we will have a lot of their flesh close to our nails.

  So the more troops they send to Vietnam, the happier we will be, for we feel that we will have them in our power, we can have their blood …

  … They will be close to China … in our grasp. They … will be our hostages.

  Chou also told Tanzania’s President Julius Nyerere that to protect its nuclear facilities, Peking would act in Vietnam regardless of what the Vietnamese themselves wanted. “Tell the US,” Chou said, that if America attacks China’s nuclear facilities, Peking will “respect no borders” and will go into North Vietnam “with or without the consent of the Vietnamese.”

  MAO DID NOT worry only about air strikes on his nuclear facilities, he feared that all his arms-centered industries could be targets. As a lot of these were situated in coastal plains, he decided to move them to China’s mountainous hinterland.

  In June 1964 he ordered this massive relocation, which he described to his inner circle as a nationwide “house-moving” of industries to cope with “the Era of the Bomb.” The undertaking went by the general name of the “Third Front” (coastal and border areas were “the First Front”; “the Second Front” was the rest of China). No fewer than some 1,100 large enterprises were dismantled and moved to remote areas, where major installations like steel and electricity plants had to be constructed. Some nuclear facilities were even duplicated. Mountains were hollowed out to make giant caves to accommodate them. The upheaval and cost were colossal. Over the decade the Third Front was being built, it cost an astronomical 200 billion-plus yuan, and at its peak it sucked in at least two-thirds of the entire nation’s investment. The waste it created was more than the total material losses caused by the Great Leap Forward.

  From a strategic point of view, the whole project was nonsensical. The vast majority of plants in the Third Front were utterly dependent on road transport — sometimes even for water supplies — while the oil refineries were left exposed. China’s main oil field, which had just come on stream, lay on the Manchurian plain. The relocation did not give China any greater security from attack.

  Characteristically, Mao insisted that everything be built at breakneck speed, usually without any proper surveying. Irrational siting alone at least doubled normal construction costs, and left the new factories, which were frequently jerry-built, at the mercy of floods, avalanches and rock-and mud-falls. Many expensive plants, including tank factories and shipyards, were never finished, or overran by years. “Perhaps the most colossal failure,” one study concluded, was the Jiuquan steel mill in Gansu, which took twenty-seven years to produce any steel at all.

  The human costs were immeasurable. Over 4 million people were thrown into the mountains to build factories, lay railways and open mines, working and living in appalling conditions, in airless caves; water, often polluted, was in constant short supply. Many died. Countless families were torn apart for up to two decades. Only in 1984, long after Mao’s death, were separated couples allowed to be reunited — and then only if the one in the Third Front was over forty, and had worked for twenty years.

  Liu Shao-chi and Mao’s other colleagues put up no resistance to this lunacy. Mao told them his mind was made up. To make it easier for them to swallow the idea, he gave the nearest thing in his lexicon to a commitment that people would not have to die from starvation, by telling his planners: “Be careful: Don’t do a 1958, 1959 and 1960.” In addition, although the Third Front was economic folly, it did not involve persecutions. For Mao to forgo deaths and political victimization seems to have been the best his colleagues thought they could expect — and enough to make them feel they might as well go along with him. It was, it seems, a good day if the boss waived a few million deaths.

  CHINA’S FIRST BOMB was detonated on 16 October 1964 at Lop Nor in the Gobi Desert. The Silk Road had passed through here, linking central China with the shores of the Mediterranean Sea across the vast continents of Europe and Asia. Via this most barren and uninhabitable desert had flowed silk, spi
ces, precious stones, art and culture with all their richness and splendor, exchanges that had excited ancient civilizations, and infused them with new life. Lop Nor had thus witnessed numerous life-enhancing impacts. Now, nearly two millennia later, it was the cradle of another “big bang,” that of destruction and death.

  The nuclear test site had originally been chosen by the Russians. There, army engineers, scientists and workers had been living for years in mud huts and tents, and in total isolation, working through sandstorms, searing heat and freezing winds.

  On the day itself, Mao was waiting for the big moment in his suite in the Great Hall — baptized “of the People,” although off limits to anyone uninvited. Situated on Tiananmen Square, a stone’s throw from Zhongnanhai, it was designed to withstand any kind of military assault, and had its own nuclear bunker. The suite tailor-made for Mao was code-named Suite 118, in line with his usual clandestine style. Mao could drive straight into it in his car. Inside, there was a lift down into an escape tunnel wide enough for two trucks abreast, which led to the underground military centers on the edge of Peking. The suite was adjacent to the stage of a giant auditorium, so that Mao could emerge, and leave, without any close contact with the audience.

  On that day, waiting next to Mao’s suite were 3,000 performers involved in a musical extravaganza promoting his cult, The East Is Red, which Chou En-lai had staged. The title had been taken from the Mao “anthem”:

  The East is red,

  The sun rises,

  China has produced a Mao Tse-tung.

  He seeks happiness for the people,

  He is the people’s great saviour.

  Once the success of the test was confirmed, the music of the anthem started, bright lights came on, and a beaming Mao stepped out, flanked by his whole top Party team. Waving to the 3,000 performers, he signaled for Chou En-lai to speak. Chou stepped in front of the microphones: “Chairman Mao has asked me to give you some good news …” Then he announced that a Bomb had been detonated. The crowd was silent at first, not knowing how to react, having been given no prior instructions. Chou then provided a cue: “You can rejoice to your hearts’ content, just don’t jump through the floor!” Whereupon they started yelling and leaping up and down in an apparent frenzy. Mao was the only leader of any country to greet the birth of this monster of mass destruction with festivity. In private, he composed two lines of doggerel:

  Atom bomb goes off when it is told.

  Ah, what boundless joy!

  Celebrations were organized throughout the country. Among the population, who learned for the first time that evening that China had been making a Bomb, there was genuine exultation. To possess nuclear weapons was regarded as a sign of the nation’s achievement, and many felt tremendous pride — especially since they were told that China had produced the Bomb single-handed, with no foreign assistance. The decisive role that Russia played was strictly suppressed, and is little known today.

  With hunger only a couple of years behind, and painful memories raw, some among the elite wondered how much the Bomb had cost. The regime registered the import of the questions, and Chou made a point of telling a small audience that China had made the Bomb very cheaply, and had spent only a few billion yuan on it. In fact, the cost of China’s Bomb has been estimated at US$4.1 billion (in 1957 prices). This amount in hard currency could have bought enough wheat to provide an extra 300 calories per day for two years for the entire population — enough to save the lives of every single one of the nearly 38 million people who died in the famine. Mao’s Bomb caused 100 times as many deaths as both of the Bombs the Americans dropped on Japan.

  46. A TIME OF UNCERTAINTY AND SETBACKS (1962–65 AGE 68–71)

  IN THE YEARS after 1962, while China was recovering economically, Mao nursed his revenge. Liu Shao-chi, his normally circumspect and seemingly obliging No. 2, had ambushed and outsmarted him at the Conference of the Seven Thousand in January 1962. Under the collective pressure of virtually the whole Chinese establishment, Mao had been forced to abandon his lethal policies. Mao was not going to let Liu or anyone who sympathized with Liu get away with thwarting him.

  Mao started clearing the ground for a big purge from the moment the famine abated. He put the brakes on liberal measures such as letting peasants lease some land, and rehabilitating political victims, and he steadily fueled his personality cult. Eulogies of Mao increasingly dominated school texts, publications, the media and every sphere that affected people’s minds, so that wherever anyone’s eye fell there were slogans hailing him, and whenever a song was heard it was in the vein of the one called “Father is close, Mother is close, but neither is as close as Chairman Mao.” Mao was making everything more thoroughly politicized than ever, in a context where only adulation of him was permitted to exist.

  He opened with novels, saying sarcastically to a Party audience in September 1962: “Aren’t there a lot of novels and publications at the moment? Using novels to carry out anti-Party activities is a big invention.” Mao later laid into all books: “The more books you read, the more stupid you become.” “You can read a little,” he would say, “but reading too much ruins you, really ruins you.” This was unashamedly cynical, as he himself was well-read, and loved reading. His beds were tailor-made to be extra large, with enough space for loads of books to be piled on one side (and sloping, so that the books would not topple over onto him), and his favorite hobby was reading in bed. But he wanted the Chinese people to be ignorant. He told his inner circle that “We need the policy of ‘keep people stupid.’ ”

  In spring 1963, Mao turned his attention to traditional Chinese opera. Unlike opera in the West, Chinese opera was popular entertainment. For hundreds of years, different regions had developed their own distinctive styles, performed in village markets as well as city theaters, danced in the northern mountains amidst winds and dust, and sung under moonlight and kerosene lamps on southern islets, listened to by fishermen on houseboats. Mao himself was a fan, indeed a connoisseur of regional operas. He had a collection of over 2,000 cassettes and records, and would discuss interpretations of arias knowledgeably with opera singers. The only time he let people see him wearing glasses was at operas. He was a very involved viewer as well, and once he became so engrossed that he not only sobbed and blew his nose loudly, but shot straight up from his seat, whereupon his trousers fell down, as his servant had loosened his belt to make him more comfortable. He had a particular taste for those operas his own regime deemed “pornographic.”

  Mao’s passion for the opera did not prevent him suppressing a large number of them soon after his reign began. But when he embarked on this new purge he set out to get the old repertoires banned in toto, starting with a genre known as “Ghost Dramas,” in which dead victims’ spirits took revenge on those who had driven them to their death. Mao had the genre banned in March 1963; having just been the agent of tens of millions of deaths, he regarded these on-stage avengers as uncomfortably close to reality.

  At the end of 1963, he accused “all art forms — operas, theater, folk arts (including ballad-singing, traditional story-telling and stage comics), music, the fine arts, dance, cinema, poetry and literature” of being “feudal or capitalist,” and “very murky.” Even works produced under his own regime to sing the praises of the Communists were condemned as “poisonous weeds.” Mao ordered artists to be sent down to villages to be “seriously reformed.” “Throw singers, poets, playwrights, and writers out of the cities,” he said in his quintessentially blunt style in February 1964. “Drive the whole lot of them down to the villages. No food for those who don’t go.”

  Ancient monuments, the visible signs of China’s long civilization, fell victim too. Mao had started having city walls and commemorative arches knocked down indiscriminately soon after he came to power; by the end of the 1950s the vast majority were destroyed. He now added temples and old tombs to his hit list, and complained to one of his secretaries in December 1964 about the slow obedience to his order: “Only a fe
w piles of rotten bones [i.e., tombs] have been dug out … You take the enemies [i.e., those resisting] too lightly. As for the temples, not one of them has been touched.”

  Mao even pushed for the elimination of horticulture: “growing flowers is a hangover from the old society,” he said, “a pastime for the feudal scholar class, bourgeois class and other layabouts.” “We must change it now,” he ordered in July 1964. “Get rid of most gardeners.”

  What Mao had in mind was a completely arid society, devoid of civilization, deprived of representation of human feelings, inhabited by a herd with no sensibility, which would automatically obey his orders. He wanted the nation to be brain-dead in order to carry out his big purge — and to live in this state permanently. In this he was more extreme than Hitler or Stalin, as Hitler allowed apolitical entertainment, and Stalin preserved the classics. In fact, Mao criticized Stalin on this score; in February 1966, Mao said: “Stalin took over the so-called classics of Russia and Europe uncritically, and this caused grave consequences.”

  IN THE YEARS 1962–65 Mao made some headway in turning every facet of life into something “political” and killing culture, but the result was far from satisfactory for him. He had to rely on the Party machine to execute his orders, and virtually everyone had reservations about his policies, all the way from the Politburo downward. Few welcomed a life without entertainment or color. Mao found that almost everyone was dragging their feet, and that recreations patently harmless to the regime, like the classics and flowers, continued to exist. He was angry and frustrated, but was unable to have his way.