Mao: The Unknown Story

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 to 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.”