Mao: The Unknown Story

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.