Mao: The Unknown Story

by Jung Chang

  Almost all those involved in the test felt that a catastrophe was likely. The people in the launch control room expected to die. The commander of the target zone was so nervous that he moved his HQ to the top of a mountain, comforting himself and his colleagues with the argument that if the missile went off course, they might be able to shield themselves from the atomic blast by scrambling down the opposite side of the mountain.

  As it happened, the test succeeded, an outcome that was attributed to Mao’s “Thought,” summed up in the slogan “The spiritual atomic bomb detonating the material atomic bomb.” In fact the success was a fluke. Subsequent tests of the same missile failed, as it began gyrating wildly shortly after lift-off.

  The whole missile program suffered from insuperable problems. The regime blamed sabotage, and scientists were put through hideous persecutions, including mock executions, to extract “confessions.” Many died violent deaths. In this climate, not surprisingly, Mao never possessed an intercontinental missile in his lifetime. The first successful launch of a Chinese ICBM took place only in 1980, years after his death.

  But in October 1966, thanks to the one nuclear-armed missile landing on target, Mao assumed that he would soon be able to deliver the Bomb wherever he liked. On 11 December, a decision was made that China must possess the entire missile arsenal, including intercontinental missiles, within four years.

  Mao’s optimism was given a big boost when China’s first hydrogen bomb was detonated on 17 June 1967. Mao told its makers on 7 July: “Our new weaponry, missiles and atom bombs have gone really fast. We made our hydrogen bomb in just two years and eight months [since the first A-bomb]. Our speed has overtaken America, Britain, France and the Soviet Union. We are the No. 4 in the world.” Actually, much of this was due to assistance Russia had provided earlier (and which had only ended completely in 1965); without Soviet help, it would have been impossible to develop either the A-or the H-bomb nearly so soon. But Mao was not about to dwell on this aspect. His emphasis was rather on what he could do with the technology. Using the royal “we,” he declared to the Bomb-makers: “We are not only the political centre of the world revolution, we must become the centre of the world revolution militarily, and technologically. We must give them arms, Chinese arms engraved with our labels … We must openly support them. We must become the arsenal of the world revolution.”

  It was now, between October 1966 and summer 1967, with the nuclear program seemingly riding high, that Mao vastly expanded the worldwide promotion of his cult. In the year before, 1965, he had suffered some major setbacks. Now “to propagate Mao Tse-tung Thought” was made the “central task” of foreign policy. Peking proclaimed that “the world has entered the new era of Mao,” and sweated blood to make sure that the Little Red Book got into over 100 countries. Supposedly this was “an event of immense joy for the people of the world,” who “love Chairman Mao’s books more than any other books,” and to whom the Little Red Book “is like the sweet rain to crops withering in a long drought, and the shining beacon to ships sailing in thick fog.” China’s entire diplomatic and clandestine machine was thrown into attempts to induce adulation of Mao in foreign countries.

  Burma was not atypical of the countries where Peking had a foothold. A hard-sell campaign pressured the sizeable ethnic Chinese minority to wave the Little Red Book, wear Mao badges, sing songs of Mao quotes and salute Mao’s portrait. Regarding these practices as challenging its own authority, the Burmese government banned them in mid-1967. Peking then goaded ethnic Chinese to defy the ban and confront the government. The result was much bloodshed and many deaths, and severe retribution against ethnic Chinese.

  Mao then unleashed the Burmese Communist Party, which was completely dependent on China for its survival, in a new wave of insurgency. On 7 July 1967, in the afterglow of the H-bomb test, he instructed in secret: “It is better that the Burmese government is against us. I hope they break off diplomatic relations with us, so we can more openly support the Burmese Communist Party.” Chou summoned the Burmese Communist officers being trained in China to the Great Hall of the People to inform them that they were to be sent home to start a war. They were accompanied to Burma by their Chinese wives, who had been selected in a distinctly unceremonious manner. Each Burmese man would go out into the street, with a Chinese officer, and pick a woman who caught his eye. If the woman and her family passed a security check, the authorities would work on her to marry the Burmese. Some women entered into marriage willingly, others were coerced.

  The insurgency was geared around promoting Mao. When a victory was won, it was celebrated with a Mao Thought propaganda team dancing, waving the Little Red Book, and chanting “Long live the great leader of the peoples of the world Chairman Mao!”

  To spread Maoism all over the world, secret training camps were set up in China. One was in the Western Hills just outside Peking, where many young people from the Third World and quite a few Westerners were instructed in the use of arms and explosives. Mao Thought was the unvarying and ineluctable staple of camp life.

  HOWEVER, ON HIS doorstep the Great Leader of World Revolution was faced with an uncomfortable reality. Two portions of Chinese territory remained under colonial rule: Macau under the Portuguese and Hong Kong under the British. And taking them back would have been easy, as both depended on China for water and food. Khrushchev had taunted Mao that he was living next door to “the colonialists’ latrine.” After Mao accused him of climbing down in the Cuba missile crisis in 1962, Khrushchev had compared Mao’s inaction over the two colonies unfavorably with Nehru’s recent seizure of Portugal’s colonies in India: “The odour coming from [Hong Kong and Macau] is by no means sweeter than that which was released by colonialism in Goa.” Mao had clearly felt that he had to explain himself to those he was claiming to champion, so he made rather a point of telling the Somali prime minister, somewhat defensively, that Hong Kong “is a special case and we are not planning to touch it. You may not understand this.”

  Mao chose not to recover Hong Kong and Macau for purely pragmatic reasons. Hong Kong was China’s biggest source of hard currency, and a vital channel for acquiring technology and equipment from the West, which fell under a strict US embargo. Mao knew that Hong Kong would no longer be of use for his Superpower Program if it reverted to Peking’s rule.

  In order to do good business in Hong Kong, Peking had to disrupt Taiwan’s intelligence network, which was helping the US identify Western companies breaking the embargo. Peking’s methods had at times been drastic. In April 1955, Chou En-lai was due to go to Indonesia for the first Afro-Asian conference in Bandung, and Peking chartered an Indian airliner, the Kashmir Princess, to fly to Indonesia from Hong Kong. Taiwan agents apparently thought that the plane was going to carry Chou, and concocted a plan to place a bomb on board at the Hong Kong airport. Peking had all the details well in advance, but let the operation go ahead, without telling either Air India, or the British mission in Peking, or the Hong Kong government — or the passengers, eleven relatively low-level officials and journalists (in a plane that seated over 100). The plane blew up in mid-air, killing all the passengers and five of the eight Indian crew.

  Peking immediately declared that Taiwan agents had planted a bomb, and Chou En-lai gave the British names of people Peking wanted expelled from Hong Kong. The British went along, and over the following year deported over forty key Nationalist agents on Chou’s list, even though there was not enough evidence to charge any of them with an offense in court. This put a sizable part of Chiang’s network in Hong Kong out of action, and it was after this that Peking secured a series of clandestine deals for its nuclear program via the colony; one purchase alone from Western Europe cost 150 tons of gold.

  When the Cultural Revolution started and Mao revved up his campaign to be the leader of the world revolution, he wanted to show the world that he was the true master of the colony, by making the British “go down on their knees” and publicly offer “unconditional surrender,” in the
words of Chinese diplomats at internal meetings. The only way this could be achieved was to put the British in the wrong — and that needed a massacre of Chinese.

  So Peking seized on a labor dispute in May 1967, and urged Hong Kong radicals to escalate violence, especially to break the law in a confrontational manner. To spur them on, Peking hinted strongly and publicly that it might take the colony back before the lease expired in 1997, and activists there were given to understand that this was Peking’s intention.

  Mao’s real line was the one he imparted to Chou En-lai, in secret: “Hong Kong remains the same”—i.e., it stays under British rule. Chou’s assignment was to stir up enough violence to provoke reprisals, and then a kowtow, from the British, but not so much violence that it “might lead to us having to take Hong Kong back ahead of time,” which Chou privately made clear would be disastrous.

  In the riots that ensued, Hong Kong police killed some demonstrators; but the number of deaths fell short of a massacre and the colonial authorities refused to apologize. Peking then incited Hong Kong radicals to kill policemen. “Do to them [the police] as they have done to us,” urged People’s Daily. “Those who kill must pay with their lives.” As the Hong Kong rioters were unable to kill policemen, Chou had to infiltrate soldiers into the colony. These men slipped across the border on 8 July, dressed in mufti, and shot dead five police. Chou expressed his satisfaction with the results, but vetoed any more such operations in case the situation evolved to a point where Peking’s bluff might be openly called. Instead, Peking fostered an indiscriminate bombing campaign, and over the next two months there were about 160 bomb incidents, some fatal.

  But the British refused to resort to a massacre, and focused on methodically rounding up activists, quietly, at night. Mao’s hope of getting Britain to kowtow collapsed. In frustration, he fell back on hooliganism on his own turf. On 22 August a crowd of over 10,000 torched the British Mission in Peking, trapping the staff inside and almost burning them alive, and subjecting women to gross sexual harassment.

  THE MISSIONS OF a score of other countries also found themselves on the receiving end of Mao’s fury. In 1967, violent assaults were made on the Soviet embassy, followed by the embassies of Indonesia, India, Burma and Mongolia. These attacks had official sanction, with the Foreign Ministry telling the mobs which missions to assail, and how intensely. The “punishments” ranged from million-strong demonstrations besieging the missions, unfurling giant portraits of Mao, and blasting insults through loudhailers, to breaking in, setting fire to cars, manhandling diplomats and their spouses and terrorizing their children, while yelling slogans like “Beat to death, beat to death.”

  This treatment was even meted out to North Korea, as Kim Il Sung had declined to submit to Mao’s tutelage. Mao had over the years tried to subvert Kim, for which he had once been obliged to apologize. At the Moscow Communist summit in November 1957 he waylaid Kim to mend fences, to forestall Kim spilling the beans to other Communist leaders. According to an official Korean report that was relayed to a large meeting in Pyongyang, Mao “repeatedly expressed his apologies [to Kim] for the Chinese Communist Party’s unjustified interference in the affairs of the Korean [Party].” Kim seized the chance to reduce Mao’s clout in Korea by demanding the withdrawal of all the Chinese troops still there, to which Mao had to accede.

  Mao did not give up. In January 1967, his man in charge of clandestine missions abroad, Kang Sheng, told the Albanians: “Kim Il Sung should be overthrown, so that the situation in Korea can be changed.” Unable to fulfill this wish, Mao directed crowds to swamp the Korean embassy, denouncing “fat Kim.” Kim retaliated by renaming Mao Tse-tung Square in Pyongyang, closing the rooms commemorating China’s role in the Korean War Museum, “re-sizing” the Russian and Chinese war memorials in Pyongyang, and drawing much closer to Russia.

  By the end of September 1967, China had become embroiled in rows with most of the forty-eight countries with which it had diplomatic or semi-diplomatic relations. Many of these countries lowered their level of representation, and some closed their embassies. National Day that year saw only a sprinkling of foreign government delegates on Tiananmen. Mao later blamed his debacles on “extreme leftists.” The truth is that China’s foreign policy was never out of his hands.

  BY THE END of the 1960s, Mao’s self-promotion had been going on for a decade, and had raised his profile sky-high in the outside world. In the West, many were mesmerized by him. The Little Red Book was taken up by intellectuals and students. Mao was termed a philosopher. The influential French writer Jean-Paul Sartre praised the “revolutionary violence” of Mao as “profoundly moral.”

  However, it was apparent that this general fascination had not translated into substance. No Maoist party in the West — even the largest one, in Portugal — ever gained more than a minuscule following. Most Western “Maoists” were fantasists, or freeloaders, and had no appetite for sustained action, least of all if it was physically uncomfortable or dangerous. When large-scale student unrest erupted in Western Europe in 1968, Mao hailed this as “a new phenomenon in European history,” and sent European Maoists who had been trained in sabotage back home to exploit the situation. But they generated no action of significance.

  Nor were Maoist groups making much headway in the Third World. Africa, once full of promise, had proved a thorough disappointment, as a jingle by a Chinese diplomat summed up:

  Big, big tribalism,

  Small, small nationalism,

  Much, much imperialism,

  Little, little Mao Tse-tung Thought.

  African radicals rather astutely took Mao’s money, as one Chinese diplomat put it, with a big smile, but his instructions with a deaf ear. Some years later, meeting one of the heads of state he had tried hardest to topple, Zaïre’s President Mobutu, Mao admitted failure, in the guise of a rueful quip. His opening sally was: “Is that really you, Mobutu? I’ve spent a lot of money trying to have you overthrown — even killed. But here you are.” “We gave them money and arms, but they just couldn’t fight. They just couldn’t win. What can I do then?”

  Mao had even less success in the Middle East. When the Six-Day War broke out between Israel and the Arab states in June 1967, Mao offered Nasser US$10 million and 150,000 tons of wheat, as well as military “volunteers,” if Nasser would take his advice “to fight to the end.” He sent Nasser a battle plan for a Mao-style “people’s war,” telling him to “lure the enemy in deep,” by withdrawing into the Sinai Peninsula, even to Khartoum, the capital of Sudan. Nasser declined to follow the Maoist road, explaining to his distant adviser that Sinai “is a desert and we cannot conduct a people’s liberation war in Sinai because there are no people there.” Peking withdrew its offers of aid, and tried to promote opposition against Nasser. But Mao built up no groups of disciples in the Middle East. When he and Chou died in 1976, among the 104 parties from 51 countries — many of them tiny groupings — listed as sending condolences, there was not one in the Arab world.

  One key factor behind this failure was Mao’s insistence that foreign radicals had to take sides with him against Russia. This lost him many potential sympathizers — not least in Latin America. There, Mao had disbursed money and food to try to swing Cuba against Moscow. This largesse produced few returns. In 1964 a delegation of nine Latin American Communist parties, headed by Cuban Party chief Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, came to China to ask Mao to halt public polemics with Russia, and “factional activities,” i.e., trying to split Communist parties. An infuriated Mao told them that his fight with Russia “will go on for 10,000 years,” and abused Castro. When the delegate from Uruguay (pop. 3 million) tried to get a word in, Mao rounded on him, saying that he, Mao, was “speaking in the name of 650 million people” and how many people did he represent?

  Castro, who never visited China during Mao’s lifetime, described Mao as “a shit,” and then went public in front of a large international audience, on 2 January 1966, accusing Peking of applying economic pressure t
o try to lever him away from Moscow. One month later, he charged Peking with resorting to “brutal reprisals,” in particular trying to subvert the Cuban army. Mao called Castro “a jackal and a wolf.”

  Mao had placed high hopes on Castro’s colleague Che Guevara. On Guevara’s first visit to China in 1960, Mao demonstrated uncommon intimacy with him, holding his hand while talking eagerly to him, and fulsomely praising a pamphlet of his. Guevara had reciprocated, recommending copying Mao’s methods in Cuba. And he had proved the closest in the Havana leadership to Mao’s position during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. But in the end, Mao could not get Guevara to take his side against the Russians. When Guevara returned to China in 1965, just before going off to try to launch guerrilla ventures in Africa, and then Bolivia, Mao did not see him, and a request from Guevara in Bolivia for China’s help to build a radio station that could broadcast worldwide was refused. When Guevara was killed in 1967, Peking privately expressed delight. Kang Sheng told Albania’s defense minister in October 1968: “The revolution in Latin America is going very well, especially after the defeat of Guevara; revisionism is being unmasked …” (italics added).

  During Mao’s lifetime, there were no influential Maoist parties in Latin America. The only notable one, the “Shining Path” in Peru, was founded in 1980, four years after Mao’s death.