Mao: The Unknown Story

by Jung Chang

  The first Afro-Asian summit had taken place ten years before at Bandung in Indonesia, where Chou had had considerable success in wooing newly independent Third World countries. Since then, Peking’s influence had grown substantially, thanks, not least, to its extravagant aid. Nehru, the star at Bandung, was dead, and meanwhile China had acquired the Bomb. Mao entertained the idea that at this second summit he could be seen as the patron — if Russia did not take part. In the preparations for the Algiers summit Mao’s goal had been to keep the Russians out.

  To this end, Peking courted Indonesia’s President Sukarno, as he was the man vetting the invitations, in his capacity as host of the first summit. China offered him lavish gifts, quite possibly including soldiers for a war he was waging against Malaysia. Top of the list of offers was to train Indonesian nuclear scientists, enabling Sukarno to announce that Indonesia would soon explode an atom bomb. China dangled the same lure of nuclear secrets in front of Egypt, another key Third World country, when in fact Mao had no intention of sharing his nuclear knowledge; when Nasser later asked Chou to deliver on his promise, Chou told him to be “self-reliant.”

  To buy votes for the Algiers summit, Mao committed China to its biggest-ever overseas project — a railway nearly 2,000 km long from landlocked Zambia across Tanzania to the Indian Ocean. Informed that Tanzania’s President Julius Nyerere was interested in such a railway and could not get the West to put up the money, Chou said: “Chairman Mao said whatever the imperialists oppose, we support; the imperialists oppose this, so we sponsor it …” Mao was not concerned whether the railway was viable. When Nyerere expressed hesitation about accepting the offer, Chou pressed harder, claiming that Chinese railway-building materials and personnel would be going to waste if they were not used in Tanzania. The project cost about US$1 billion, which Mao dismissed as “No big deal.”

  Ten days before the summit was due to open, Algeria’s President Ahmed Ben Bella was overthrown in a military coup. A short while before, Mao had called him “my dear brother.” Now he dropped Ben Bella like a hot potato, and ordered Chou to back the new military government and ensure the summit went ahead on schedule.

  Peking’s diplomats started lobbying frantically, even though it was clear that the vast majority of governments due to attend favored a postponement. Even the very pro-Chinese Nyerere gave Peking’s lobbyist a piece of his mind: “Chou En-lai is my most respected statesman. But I don’t understand why he insists on the conference being held on schedule,” Ben Bella, Nyerere said, was an “anti-colonialist hero recognised all over Africa,” adding: “I must tell you [that China’s lobbying] has damaged the reputation of China and Premier Chou himself.”

  The summit was postponed. Peking’s hustling boomeranged. Within weeks, Nasser, in many ways the decisive voice, was backing Russian participation. If the Russians attended, Mao would be unable to play the leading role. So the Chinese announced that they would not take part. The summit never convened.

  AS HIS DREAM of playing the leader to Asian and African countries collapsed, in fury, Mao lashed out. Longing to score a victory somewhere, he went to the brink of war with India.

  Three years before he had trounced India satisfactorily. But now, in autumn 1965, he could not guarantee success, as India was much better prepared. So he resorted to parasitizing on someone else’s conflict, always a risky undertaking. On 6 September, Pakistan got into a war with India. Over the previous years, Pakistan had grown much closer to China, and become one of the two biggest non-Communist recipients of Chinese aid.

  Pakistan’s war with India seemed to Mao to offer a chance to score another victory over India, which would be forced to fight on two fronts if China intervened. He moved troops up to the border, and issued two ultimatums, demanding that India dismantle alleged outposts on some territory Peking claimed, within three days, by 22 September. When Delhi replied in a conciliatory vein, denying it had outposts there, but calling for a “joint investigation” and promising that if outposts were found, it “would not oppose dismantling them,” Peking answered thuggishly that “there is no need for investigation,” and that there just were outposts. Mao was bent on war.

  But the scheme collapsed when Pakistan suddenly accepted a UN call for a ceasefire before China’s deadline had expired. The Pakistanis told Mao that the cost of continuing fighting was too high, both diplomatically and economically, but Mao pressed them to fight on, reportedly giving Pakistan’s President Ayub Khan the message: “If there is a nuclear war, it is Peking and not Rawalpindi that will be a target.” When the Pakistanis declined to oblige, Mao was left out on a limb, and Peking had to climb down in public, lamely alleging that India had secretly dismantled its outposts — when in fact India had not stirred. Mao ended up deeply frustrated.

  IMPATIENT FOR A SUCCESS, Mao tried to ignite violent insurrections wherever he could. In Thailand, the Communist Party fostered by Mao (and composed overwhelmingly of ethnic Chinese) now launched into armed insurgency, clashing for the first time with government forces on 7 August 1965, thenceforth known as “Gun-Firing Day.” It got nowhere.

  The biggest — and most tragic — fiasco came in Indonesia. The Communist Party there, the PKI, was the largest in the non-Communist world, with some 3.5 million members, and had the kind of secret intimate relationship with Peking which the Chinese Communists had had with Stalin before they conquered China.† The head of the Japanese Communist Party at the time, Kenji Miyamoto, told us that Peking continually told the PKI, and the Japanese Party: “Whenever there is a chance to seize power, you must rise up in armed struggle.” In 1964, Miyamoto discussed this with Aidit. Whilst the Japanese Communists were cautious, Aidit, who had great faith in Mao, was very eager to swing into action. After the Algiers summit folded, in lashing-out mood, Mao set the PKI in motion to seize power.

  In early August Aidit came to China, where he met Mao. Aidit then proceeded to Indonesia with a team of Chinese doctors, who within days reported that President Sukarno (who was pro-Peking) had terminal kidney problems, and did not have long to live; so if the PKI were going to act, now was the time.

  The plan was to decapitate the anti-Communist top brass of the army, over which President Sukarno held very limited sway. Peking had been pressing Sukarno to overhaul the army radically, and with Sukarno’s support the PKI had been infiltrating the army with some success. The PKI believed, wildly over-optimistically, that it could secretly control over half the army, two-thirds of the airforce and one-third of the navy. According to the plan, once the generals were disposed of, Sukarno would step in and take over the army, while the Communists in the army kept the rank-and-file in line.

  On 30 September a group of officers arrested and killed Indonesia’s army chief and five other generals. Speaking shortly afterwards to Japanese Communist Party chief Miyamoto, Mao referred to this coup as “the Communist Party of Indonesia’s … uprising.” But the PKI failed to cope with an unforeseen occurrence which derailed its whole plot. An informer had tipped off a then little-known general called Suharto, who was not on the arrest list. Thus prepared, Suharto waited for the arrests and killings of the other generals to be completed and then took immediate control of the army, unleashing a massacre of hundreds of thousands of Communists and sympathizers — and innocent people. Almost the entire PKI leadership was captured and executed. Only one member of the Politburo survived, Jusuf Adjitorop, who was in China at the time, and whom we met there, a disillusioned man, three decades later.

  President Sukarno was forced out, and General Suharto established a military dictatorship that was fiercely anti-Peking and hostile to the large ethnic Chinese community at home.

  Mao blamed the PKI for the failure. “The Indonesian party committed two errors,” he told the Japanese Communists. First, “they blindly believed in Sukarno, and overestimated the power of the Party in the army.” The second error, Mao said, was that the PKI “wavered without fighting it out.” In fact, the slaughter unleashed by Suharto was so ferocious,
and so instantaneous, that it had been impossible for the PKI to fight back. Mao and his men had never experienced anything like this at the hands of Chiang Kai-shek, who was a kitten compared to Suharto. Mao, in any case, was to blame, as he had started the action for his own self-centered reasons. He just could not wait to have a victory after his pipedream of Afro-Asian leadership collapsed.

  By the end of 1965, Mao’s global schemes had suffered one setback after another. In a dark and vehement state of mind, he turned to deal with his foes inside China.

  Except for a stop-over by Deng Xiao-ping en route to a Party congress in Romania in July 1965, which shows Mao’s trust in Deng.

  In 1965 China began talking about transferring nuclear know-how to Pakistan — or, more accurately, dangling the prospect. Pakistan had grown more and more useful to Mao as a staging post to the Middle East, and Peking aggressively backed Pakistan’s ambitions over Kashmir, training Kashmiri guerrillas for what China presented as a “national liberation” war.

  †In September 1963, Chou En-lai brought PKI chief Aidit to a secret summit at Conghua in South China with Vietnam’s Ho Chi Minh and the head of the Laotian Communists, to coordinate military strategy in Indonesia with the war in Indochina. This summit placed Indonesia on a strategic par with Indochina, and linked developments in Indonesia with the much more advanced military conflict in Indochina.

  These parts of Mao’s talks were withheld from the published version, and were made available to us by the Japanese Communist Party Central Committee.

  PART SIX. UNSWEET REVENGE

  47. A HORSE-TRADE SECURES THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION (1965–66 AGE 71–72)

  IN NOVEMBER 1965, Mao was finally ready to launch the Great Purge he had long been planning, to “punish this Party of ours,” as he put it.

  Mao proceeded in stages. He decided to fire his first shot at culture, and this is why the Great Purge was called the Cultural Revolution. Mme Mao spearheaded the assault. She was an ex-actress who actually loved culture, but cared nothing about denying it to other Chinese. And she enjoyed the chance to vent her venom, which she possessed in abundance. “Jiang Qing is as deadly poisonous as a scorpion,” Mao once observed to a family member, wiggling his little finger, like a scorpion’s tail. Mao knew exactly how to exploit her potential as a persecution zealot. In 1963 he had assigned her to the Ministry of Culture as his private supervisor to try to get operas and films condemned. Officials there had largely ignored her. She was already paranoid, and had been accusing her nurses of trying to poison her with sleeping pills and scald her when she took a bath. Now, she claimed that the officials she dealt with “suppressed and bullied” her — and she began revenging herself on them mercilessly. Mao made her his police chief for stamping out culture nationwide.

  One of her tasks was to draw up a manifesto denouncing every form of culture, on the grounds that they had all been run by officials who were following a “black line opposed to Mao Tse-tung Thought.” Mao told her to do this in collaboration with Lin Biao, the army chief. On the night of 26 November, Mme Mao telephoned Mrs. Lin Biao, who usually took her husband’s calls, and acted as his chief assistant. Lin Biao pledged his help for the undertaking.

  Mao and Lin Biao actually rarely met socially, but their collaboration went back nearly four decades — to 1929, when the two struck up an alliance to sabotage Zhu De, whom Lin Biao loathed and Mao was bent on dominating. From then on, a special crony relationship evolved between Mao and Lin. Mao tolerated an extraordinary degree of independence on Lin’s part. For example, when Lin was in Russia during the Sino-Japanese War, he had spoken his mind to the Russians about Mao’s unwillingness to fight the Japanese and how eager Mao was to turn on Chiang Kai-shek — an act Mao would never have swallowed from anyone else. During the Yenan Terror, Lin again did what no one else was allowed to: he simply removed his wife from detention and refused to let her be interrogated. Under Mao, everyone had to do humiliating “self-criticisms” in public, but not Lin. In return for giving Lin this degree of license, Mao expected him to come through for him in times of need, which Lin always did.

  When Mao was launching the Great Leap Forward in 1958, he promoted Lin to be one of the Party’s vice-chairmen, as a counter-weight to his other colleagues. When former defense minister Peng De-huai challenged Mao over the famine in 1959, Lin’s staunch backing for Mao ensured that few dared to take Peng’s side. Mao then moved Lin in to replace Peng as defense minister. Throughout the famine, Lin propped up Mao’s image by promoting the cult of Mao’s personality, especially in the army. He invented the Little Red Book, a collection of very short quotations by Mao, as a mechanism of indoctrination. At the Conference of the Seven Thousand in 1962, Lin saved Mao’s skin by championing the equivalent of papal infallibility for him. Afterwards, when Mao was laying the ground for his Great Purge, Lin continued to build the army into the bastion of the cult of Mao.

  Lin lauded Mao to the skies in public, although he felt no true devotion to Mao, and at home would often make disparaging and even disdainful remarks about him, some of which he entered in his diary. It was out of pure ambition that Lin stood by Mao and boosted him — the ambition to be Mao’s No. 2 and successor. He told his wife that he wanted to be “Engels to Marx, Stalin to Lenin, and Chiang Kai-shek to Sun Yat-sen.” With the Great Purge, which had Liu, the president, as its primary target, Lin Biao could expect his advancement.

  The man who was about to rise to the top suffered from many phobias and looked like a drug addict. His most extreme phobias were about water and air. His hydrophobia was so acute that he had not taken a bath for years, and would only be wiped with a dry towel. He could not stand the sight of the sea, which kept his contact with the navy to zero. He had a villa by the seaside, but it was located among hills, so that he would not actually see the sea. His residences had numerous wind-sensitive devices hanging from the ceilings. One visitor was told by Mrs. Lin to walk slowly in Lin’s presence in case the stir of air when he moved triggered her husband’s breeze phobia.

  Lin was a man, as his own wife observed in her diary, “who specialises in hate, in contempt (friendship, children, father and brother — all mean nothing to him), in thinking the worst and basest of people, in selfish calculation … and in scheming and doing other people down.”

  The man Lin particularly hated as of 1965 was the army chief of staff, Luo Rui-qing, one of Mao’s long-time favorites, whom Mao fondly called Luo the Tall. Mao often routed his orders to the army via Luo the Tall, even orders to Lin himself, which was partly the result of Lin often being out of action nursing his phobias. Luo the Tall was super-energetic as well as able — and had incomparable access to Mao. He had been Mao’s top security man for years, and Mao had enormous confidence in him. “As soon as Luo the Tall steps closer, I feel very safe,” Mao said. These were words not spoken lightly. Lin felt overshadowed, and had been plotting to get rid of the chief of staff for some time. When he received Mme Mao’s call in November 1965, which signaled that Mao needed him for a major task, Lin Biao seized his chance. Four days later, he dispatched his wife to see Mao in Hangzhou (the Lins were staying nearby in the garden city of Suzhou), with a letter in his own hand, enclosing some extremely flimsy charges against Luo the Tall. Lin was asking Mao to sacrifice a highly valued retainer.

  Mao had Lin Biao himself brought to Hangzhou, and on the night of 1 December the two men had an ultra-secret talk. Mao told Lin about his plans for the Great Purge, and promised to make Lin his No. 2 and successor. He told Lin he must make sure the army was fully under control — and be ready to assume a completely new role: to step in and take over the jobs of the huge number of Party officials Mao intended to purge.

  Lin insisted that Luo the Tall must be purged as well. The fact that Lin drove such a hard bargain shows that both he and Mao understood his unique value. Without Lin, Mao could not bring off his Purge.

  MAO HAD BEEN trying hard, without success, to have one particular period opera condemned. This was call
ed Hai Rui Dismissed from Office, and was based on a traditional story of a mandarin who was punished by the emperor for having spoken up for the peasants. Mao accused it of being a veiled attack on what he (the “emperor”) had done to the purged defense minister Peng De-huai, and ordered it to be denounced, along with Marshal Peng himself. An article to this effect was written with Mao’s sponsorship, and published in Shanghai on 10 November 1965.

  To Mao’s fury, the article was not carried anywhere else in China. Province after province, even the capital, Peking, ignored it. They were able to do this because the culture overlord at the time, Peng Zhen (no relative of Peng De-huai), blocked it from being reprinted. Peng Zhen was a loyal long-time follower, trusted enough to hold the vital strategic job of mayor of the capital, and few men were closer to Mao. But while his allegiance does not seem to have been in question, Mayor Peng, who had been made national overseer of culture in 1964, was strongly averse to Mao’s demands to annihilate culture. And being at the heart of things, he realized that this time Mao intended to use the field of culture to start a purge that would engulf the whole Party.

  Mayor Peng cared about the Party. He was also gutsy. He even complained to foreigners about Mao, something quite amazing among the tight-lipped CCP leadership. When a Japanese Communist asked him about the Hai Rui opera, Mayor Peng replied that: “It is not a political issue, but a historical play. Chairman Mao says it is a political issue. How troublesome!” This was unbelievably outspoken language for someone in the inner circle to use to an outsider.