Mao: The Unknown Story

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 cropped 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.”