Mao: The Unknown Story

Mao saw Khrushchev’s rapprochement with the West as a historic opportunity to put himself forward as the champion of all those around the world who saw peaceful coexistence as favoring — and possibly freezing — the status quo. The timing seemed particularly good, with decolonization in full swing. There were numerous anti-colonial movements in Africa that were keen on guerrilla war, of which Mao was perceived to be the advocate and expert in a way that Khrushchev was not. Communist parties, too, seemed soft targets, as they had little hope of getting into power except through violence. Mao envisaged a situation where “Communist parties all over the world will not believe in [Russia] but believe in us.” He saw a chance to establish his own “centre for world revolution.”

To have his own camp, and not have to play second fiddle to Khrushchev, had long been Mao’s dream. As Khrushchev had begun to dry up as a source of military hardware, Mao felt less concerned about annoying him. But nor did he want a split from him either, as Russia was still handing over a wealth of military technology, with no fewer than 1,010 blueprints transferred in 1960 alone — more even than in 1958. So Mao formulated a policy of “not to denounce” the Russians “for the time being,” and sought to milk them of everything he could as fast as he could. “China will become powerful in eight years,” he told his top echelon, and Khrushchev “will be completely bankrupt.”

The goal for now, he told his inner circle at the beginning of 1960, was “to propagate Mao Tse-tung Thought” around the world. At first, the drive should not be too aggressive, in order, as he put it, not to be seen to be trying to “export our fragrant intestines” (to which Mao compared his “Thought”). The resulting propaganda campaign brought the world “Maoism.”

THE IDEA OF promoting China’s experience as a model when the Chinese were dying of starvation in their millions might seem a tall order, but Mao was not perturbed: he had watertight filters on what foreigners could see and hear. As of February 1959, the CIA’s “preliminary judgement” about Chinese food output was that there were “remarkable increases in production.” Mao could easily pull the wool over most visitors’ eyes. When the French writer Simone de Beauvoir visited in 1955, even the French-speaking Chinese woman assigned to accompany her had to get special permission to speak to her directly without going through the interpreter. After her short visit, de Beauvoir pontificated that “the power he [Mao] exercises is no more dictatorial than, for example, Roosevelt’s was. New China’s Constitution renders impossible the concentration of authority in one man’s hands.” She wrote a lengthy book about the trip, titled The Long March. Its index has one entry for the word “violence,” which reads: “[Mao] on violence, avoidance of.”

Mao made sure that no Chinese except a very carefully vetted elite could get out of the country. Among the few who could were diplomats, who became notorious for their leaden performances. They worked under straitjacket rules about exactly what they could say, the strictest orders to report every conversation, and permanent surveillance by each other. Communist China’s first ambassadors were mostly army generals. Before sending them off, Mao told them, only half-jokingly: “You don’t know any foreign language, and you are not [professional] diplomats; but I want you to be my diplomats — because in my view you won’t be able to flee.” And over half of these men were going to other Communist countries.

The only people who got out and would talk were a small number of daring ordinary citizens who risked their lives and swam to Hong Kong. They broke the wall of silence around Mao’s famine and the dark realities of Red China in general. But their voices won little credence in the West.

Instead, when Mao told barefaced lies to France’s Socialist leader (and future president) François Mitterrand during the famine in 1961 (“I repeat it, in order to be heard: there is no famine in China”), he was widely believed. The future Canadian prime minister Pierre Trudeau came in 1960 and co-wrote a starry-eyed book, Two Innocents in Red China, which rejected reports of famine. Even the former chief of the UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization, Lord Boyd-Orr, was duped. In May 1959, after a trip to China, he opined that food production had risen 50–100 percent over 1955–58 and that China “seems capable of feeding [its population] well.” Britain’s Field Marshal Montgomery, a much more gullible figure, asserted after visits in 1960 and 1961 that there had been “no large-scale famine, only shortages in certain areas,” and he certainly did not regard the “shortages” as Mao’s fault, as he urged Mao to hang on to power: “China … needs the chairman. You mustn’t abandon this ship.”