Mao: The Unknown Story

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.