by Jung Chang
ON HIS OWN doorstep in Asia, Mao’s influence failed to spread, even against deadbeat regimes like that of Ne Win in Burma. But Mao’s biggest setback was “losing” Vietnam. In the 1950s and early 1960s, China had been Hanoi’s almost sole backer in its wars against first the French and then the Americans, ever since Stalin had allocated it to Mao in 1950. But the Vietnamese had developed suspicions about Mao from as early as 1954. That year, after he launched his Superpower Program, while doing everything to attract Russian assistance, Mao began trying to gain access to embargoed Western technology and equipment. One prime candidate for cracking the embargo was France.
At the time, France was bogged down in Indochina. Mao’s plan was to make the Vietnamese intensify the war “to increase the internal problems of France” (as Chou put it), and then, when France was on the ropes, to step in and broker a settlement. The idea was that France would then reciprocate by acceding to Mao’s embargo-breaking approaches.
Mao had been co-directing the war in Indochina. During the Korean War, he had halted large-scale offensives in Indochina to focus China’s resources on Korea. In May 1953, when he decided to end the Korean War, he sent Chinese officers straight from Korea to Indochina. In October that year, the Chinese got hold of a copy of the French strategic plan, the Navarre Plan, named after the French commander, General Henri Navarre. China’s chief military adviser to Vietnam, General Wei Guo-qing, carried this from Peking and delivered it to Ho Chi Minh in person. It was this vital intelligence coup that led to the decision by the Communist side to give battle at Dien Bien Phu, a French base in northwest Vietnam, where the Vietnamese, with massive Chinese military aid and advice, won a decisive victory in May 1954.
Dien Bien Phu was fought in the lead-up to, and during, the Geneva conference about Indochina (and Korea), which had opened on 26 April with Chou En-lai leading the Chinese delegation. Mao had decided well over a month before it opened that he “definitely must have a settlement,” but he did not inform the Vietnamese. The role he had in mind for them was to do the fighting, and escalate the war, at whatever cost, to create as big a crisis for Paris as possible. Mao wrote to chief military adviser Wei on 4 April, about an ostensible next stage: “Try to complete the Dien Bien Phu campaign by … early May … Begin attacking Luang Prabang and Vientiane in August or September and liberate them.” These were the twin capitals of Laos. Then, Mao went on: “actively make ready to attack Hanoi and Haiphong this coming winter and at the latest early spring next year, aiming to liberate the [Red River] Delta in 1955.” Mao specifically ordered Wei to discuss this plan with Vietnam’s defense minister General Vo Nguyen Giap, to give the Vietnamese the impression that he would sponsor them to expand the war well into the following year — when in fact he had secretly decided on a ceasefire in the coming months.
The Vietnamese took Dien Bien Phu on 7 May, and the French government fell on 17 June. This was China’s moment to step in. On the 23rd, Chou met the new French prime minister, Pierre Mendès-France, in Switzerland, without the Vietnamese, and worked out a deal.
Chou now put immense pressure on the Vietnamese Communists to settle for the terms he had negotiated with the French, which were far inferior to what the Vietnamese had hoped for. Vietnam’s later leader Le Duan said that Chou threatened “that if the Vietnamese continued to fight they would have to fend for themselves. He would not help any longer and pressured us to stop fighting.” (These remarks incidentally reveal how dependent the Vietnamese were on the Chinese.) Ho Chi Minh told his negotiator, Pham Van Dong, to concede, which Dong did, in tears. Le Duan was sent to break the news to Communist forces in the south. “I travelled by wagon to the south,” he recalled. “Along the way, compatriots came out to greet me, for they thought we had won a victory. It was so painful.” Seeds of anger and suspicion towards Peking took root among the Vietnamese.
Early in 1965 the new Brezhnev — Kosygin team in Moscow began stepping up military assistance to Hanoi, supplying the key heavy equipment it needed: anti-aircraft guns and ground-to-air missiles, some manned by Russians. Mao could not compete. So he tried to talk the Russians out of helping the Vietnamese. “The people of North Vietnam,” he told Russian premier Kosygin that February, “are fighting well without the help of the USSR … and they themselves will drive the Americans out.” “The Vietnamese can take care of themselves,” Mao said, adding (untruly) that “only a small number of people have been killed in the air raids, and it is not so terrible that some amount of people were killed …” Peking suggested that the Russians should take on the Americans elsewhere. Soviet ambassador Chervonenko was told that the best thing Russia could do was “exercise pressure on imperialist forces in a western direction”—i.e., in Europe.
At the same time, Mao tried to compel Hanoi to break with Moscow. He wooed Ho Chi Minh, who had intimate ties with China, where he spent much time. The CCP found him a Chinese wife, but the marriage was vetoed by the Vietnamese leadership, ostensibly on the grounds that it would be better for their cause if their leader remained self-sacrificingly celibate.
Ho and his colleagues were urged to reject Soviet assistance. “It will be better without Soviet aid,” Chou told Premier Pham Van Dong. “I do not support the idea of Soviet volunteers going to Vietnam, nor Soviet aid to Vietnam.” Chou even claimed to Ho that “The purpose of Soviet aid to Vietnam [is] … to improve Soviet — US relations.” Such arguments strained even Chou’s silver tongue. Mao’s only way to try to exert influence was to pour in more money, goods, and soldiers, but he could not prevent Hanoi moving close to the Russians.
Mao was equally powerless to dissuade it from opening talks with the US, which Hanoi announced on 3 April 1968. Arguing against this initiative, Chou even blamed Hanoi for the murder of US black civil rights leader Martin Luther King, Jr. on 4 April. The assassination, he said, came “one day after your statement had been issued. Had your statement been issued one or two days later, the murder might have been stopped.” Claiming to represent “the world’s people,” Chou went on to say: “So many people don’t understand why [you] were so hurried in making this statement … It is the judgement of the world’s people. In the eyes of the world’s people, you have compromised twice.”
Hanoi just ignored Peking, and started negotiating with the US in May. Mao then tried to muscle in, with Chou telling the Vietnamese that the Chinese had more experience at negotiating than Hanoi did. This cut no ice. Mao was hopping mad. In early October, Chou told the Vietnamese that a delegation due to visit China for more aid need not come, saying Chinese leaders would be too busy to receive them. But Mao soon had to backtrack and continue splashing out aid. The Great Teacher of the World’s Revolutionary People could not afford not to play a part in the foremost revolutionary war on the planet.
More galling to Mao was that he had to stand by helplessly while the Vietnamese expanded their own sphere of influence at his expense. In spite of massive sponsorship from China, the Red guerrillas in Laos chose Vietnam as their patron, and by September 1968 had asked the Chinese advisers there to “take home leave” permanently, a request the Chinese had to comply with. The Laotians and the Vietnamese both aligned themselves with Moscow.
AFTER A DECADE of unremitting machinations and expenditure to promote Maoism as a serious international alternative to Moscow, Mao had failed. It was still Moscow, not Peking, that the world saw as the chief anti-American force. Mao’s tirades against Moscow for “helping the imperialists” were widely perceived as untrue, and listeners were frequently irritated, bored, even embarrassed. On at least one occasion, some Third World Communists simply asked the Chinese to shut up.
By the end of the 1960s, US officials considered that the Maoist model was no longer a threat in the Third World, a fact that Mao himself could see. He told his coterie in 1969: “Now we are isolated, nobody wants to have anything to do with us.” The foreign Maoists were useless, he said, and ordered their funding cut back.
Mao needed a solution. A chance cropp
ed up when Cambodia’s neutralist leader, Prince Sihanouk, was deposed on 18 March 1970 in a coup that was widely perceived to be CIA-inspired. Mao decided to back Sihanouk if the prince was willing to fight America. His calculation was that the Vietnam War could now be turned into a pan-Indochina war, and by being Sihanouk’s sponsor, he could play a leading role in the whole of Indochina.
Not long before, in summer 1967, Mao had been plotting against Sihanouk. Peking, according to the prince, was “implicitly advocating my overthrow”—something that Chou En-lai later admitted was true, though he disowned responsibility, not very convincingly. In March 1968, Sihanouk had gone public about Peking’s patronage of a then little-known rebel group in Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge. “Below the surface,” he announced, the Communist nations were “playing a dirty game because the Khmer Reds are their offspring … The other day we seized a large quantity of arms of all sorts coming from China, in particular.”
But now, in March 1970, Mao latched on to Sihanouk. As it happened, the prince had been scheduled to visit China the day after the coup. The moment he stepped off the plane, Chou ascertained that he was determined to fight the US, and then declared total support for him. Chou contacted the Vietnamese at once, and proposed a pan-Indochina summit in Sihanouk’s name. The summit, which was held in China the following month, boiled down to forming a joint Indochina command.
Since Sihanouk was so vital to Mao, the Chinese catered to his princely tastes, providing him with seven cooks and seven pastry-chefs, and flew foie gras in for him from Paris. They gave him special trains, and two planes for his foreign trips, one of which was just to carry his gifts and his luggage. Mao told Sihanouk: “Tell us what you need. Just ask. We can do more for you. It’s nothing.” Mao waved away any question of repayment: “We’re not arms merchants.” When Sihanouk protested about the burden on China, Mao replied: “I ask you to burden us still more.” Mao’s Cambodian creature, Pol Pot, the leader of the Khmer Rouge, who was in China secretly at the time, was persuaded to give formal support to Sihanouk.
But the Vietnamese did not let Mao take over, and the world continued to perceive Vietnam as the leading player in Indochina. Sihanouk’s “return to power,” the London Times said, “depends on the goodwill of Hanoi.” US National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger talked about “Hanoi’s designs on Cambodia.”
Mao had tried to impress the Vietnamese by launching China’s first satellite on the day the Indochina summit opened, which Chou presented as a “gift” to the summit and “a victory for us all.” But it made no difference to the Vietnamese, or to the world.
The satellite was an ego-trip for Mao, as it orbited the globe warbling the Maoist anthem, “The East Is Red.” Mao was thrilled to bits about being hailed from space. On May Day on Tiananmen Gate he shook hands with each of the people who had worked on the satellite, with a big grin on his face, exclaiming “Amazing! Amazing!”; while they shouted slogans saying it had all been the product of Mao’s Thought.
Boosted by the satellite, Mao made yet another effort to advertise himself to the world as the leader of the Indochina war. On 20 May he issued a statement titled “People of the world, unite, and defeat American aggressors and all their running dogs!” Next day, he ascended Tiananmen Gate and had the text declaimed to a crowd of half a million, with Sihanouk by his side. As the title made clear, Mao was issuing a command. But the presentation was as farcical as the document’s pretensions. It was read out by Mao’s then No. 2, Lin Biao, who had to be specially injected with a stimulant beforehand. Sihanouk noticed that before the rally Lin “seemed … to be somewhat intoxicated. He would periodically interrupt Mao, gesticulating and loudly launching himself into anti-U.S. tirades.” When Lin started reading the statement, the words that came out were: “I am going to issue a speech! — I am going to talk about Vietnam — Two Vietnams — Half a Vietnam—” When he got to the written text, he misread it at several places, saying “Pakistan” instead of “Palestine.”
The statement condemned US president Richard Nixon by name. Nixon was incensed and, in a drunken rage, wanted ships moved into attack positions. Kissinger calmed him down by pointing out that Mao had “offered little to Hanoi except verbal encouragement.” Mao was ignored. In pique, he lashed out at Kissinger for failing to recognize him as a player, calling him “a stinking scholar,” “a university professor who does not know anything about diplomacy.” An exasperated and vexed Mao had this exchange with Vietnam’s premier Dong:
MAO: Why have the Americans not made a fuss about the fact that more than 100,00 °Chinese troops help you building railways, roads and airports although they knew about it?
DONG: Of course, they are afraid.
MAO: They should have made a fuss about it. Also, their estimate of the number of Chinese troops in Vietnam is less than their real number.
The promotion of Maoism had reached the end of the road, in Indochina as in the world at large. Ever resourceful, Mao came up with a new scheme that would hoist him into the limelight: to get the president of the United States to come to China.
The October 1966 success coincided with the presence in China of one of Hitler’s top rocket experts, Wolfgang Pilz, who was spotted in Peking by an Indian diplomat that month, along with three German colleagues. Pilz had previously been supervising Egypt’s missile program and had been lured away with offers of large sums of money and more exciting technical conditions. When China tried to attract other German scientists, the US offered them more money to entice them to America.
Not surprisingly, when even committed friends could find themselves at risk. When the Albanian premier Mehmet Shehu and his colleague Ramiz Alia returned to Peking after traveling around the country, Mao greeted them by asking: “Did anyone hit you?”
Its failed leader, Abimael Guzmán, called himself “Chairman of the World Revolution.” The year “Shining Path” was founded, it celebrated Mao’s birthday by hanging dogs from lamp-posts in Lima wrapped in slogans excoriating the post-Mao leader Deng Xiao-ping, whom it regarded as having betrayed Mao’s legacy, as “a son of a bitch.”
China had over 320,000 soldiers in Vietnam during the years 1965–68, including more than 150,000 anti-aircraft troops, some of whom stayed into late 1973. The presence of these troops in North Vietnam allowed Hanoi to send many more of its own forces into the South, where some Chinese accompanied them. In 1965 a Chinese general was present to watch US forces landing at Danang, on the coast of South Vietnam.
Chinese troops wore Chinese uniforms so the Americans would know they were there.
54. NIXON: THE RED-BAITER BAITED (1970–73 AGE 76–79)
WHEN HE FOUNDED his regime in 1949, Mao had deliberately made it impossible for the USA to recognize it, mainly so as to reassure Stalin, hoping that this would encourage Stalin to build up China’s military machine. After Stalin died in 1953, Mao began seeking relations with America, in order to gain access to Western technology for his Superpower Program. But memories of fighting the Chinese in the Korean War were too recent, and Washington snubbed Peking. Though the two countries established a diplomatic channel for discussing specific issues, overall, relations remained frozen. Mao hewed to an aggressively anti-US posture, and in 1960, when he was promoting Maoism, he made this bellicosity his hallmark, setting himself apart from the Kremlin, which he accused of going soft on America.
In 1969, the new US president, Nixon, publicly voiced interest in improving relations with China. Mao did not respond. Establishing a relationship with Washington would jeopardize his identity and image as a revolutionary leader. It was only in June 1970, after his anti-American manifesto of 20 May had flopped, and when it was inescapably clear that Maoism was getting nowhere in the world, that Mao decided to invite Nixon to China. The motive was not to have a reconciliation with America, but to relaunch himself on the international stage.
Mao did not want to be seen as courting the US president, and he went to considerable lengths to make the invitation deniable. In N
ovember, Chou sent a message through the Romanians, who had good relations with both China and America, saying that Nixon would be welcome in Peking. The invitation reached the White House on 11 January 1971. As Mao had feared might happen, Nixon “noted on it that we should not appear too eager to respond,” according to Kissinger. When Kissinger replied to Peking, on 29 January, he made “no reference to a Presidential visit,” regarding the idea as “premature and potentially embarrassing.”
Mao was not deterred. He soon found another way to tempt Nixon to China.
On 21 March, a Chinese table tennis team arrived in Japan for the world championships — one of the first sports teams to travel abroad since the start of the Cultural Revolution five years before. China was good at table tennis, and Mao personally authorized the trip. So as not to appear too outlandish, the players were exempted from having to wave the Little Red Book.
They were given precise instructions on how to behave with the Americans: no shaking hands; no initiating conversation. But on 4 April, an American player, Glenn Cowan, got on the Chinese bus, and the Chinese men’s champion Zhuang Ze-dong decided to talk to him. Photographs of the two shaking hands were front-page news in the Japanese papers. When Mao was informed, his eyes lit up and he called Zhuang “a good diplomat.” Nonetheless, when the American team expressed a desire to visit China, after other foreign teams had been invited, Mao endorsed a Foreign Ministry recommendation to turn down the request.
But he was clearly uneasy with this decision, and staff noticed that he seemed preoccupied for the rest of the day. That night at eleven o’clock he took a large dose of sleeping pills, and then had dinner with his female nurse-cum-assistant, Wu Xu-jun. Mao sometimes invited one or two members of his staff to dine with him. He seldom dined with his wife at this stage, and almost never with colleagues. His routine was to take sleeping pills before dinner, so he would fall asleep right after the meal, which he ate sitting on the edge of his bed. The pills were so powerful they would sometimes hit him while he was chewing, and his staff would have to pick food out of his mouth, so he never had fish for dinner, because of the bones. This time, Wu recalled,
