Mao: The Unknown Story

The biggest problem was Vietnam, which counted far more than Albania internationally. The Vietnamese were worried that Mao was trying to use them as a bargaining chip with the US. When Chou went to Hanoi immediately after Kissinger’s first visit, to explain Peking’s move, he got an earful from North Vietnam’s leader. “Vietnam is our country,” Le Duan protested; “you have no right to discuss the question of Vietnam with the United States.” After Nixon’s visit, Chou returned to Hanoi, and got an even worse reception. Prince Sihanouk was there at the time, having decamped from Peking in indignation during Nixon’s stay in China. He has left a rare picture of a flustered Chou, who, he records, “looked worn and still appeared heated by the discussion he just had with his North Vietnamese ‘comrades.’ He seemed irritated,” and “not himself.” Mao tried to salvage some influence by pouring in even more aid, which rose to unprecedented levels from 1971, peaking in 1974.

All these bribes to keep old allies quiet meant a tighter squeeze on the Chinese population. Nor did its extra burdens stop there. As more and more countries recognized Peking in the wake of Nixon’s visit, the number of states to which China sent aid jumped from 31 prior to 1970 to 66. On tiny and immeasurably more prosperous Malta (pop. c. 300,000), Mao lavished no less than US$25 million in April 1972. Its prime minister, Dom Mintoff, returned from China sporting a Mao badge.

Mao often had to pay over the odds to buy himself back into favor with states he had earlier tried to subvert. One former target, President Mobutu of Zaïre, told us how generously he was funded by Mao, who — unlike the IMF and the World Bank — let him defer loans indefinitely, or repay them in worthless Zaïrean currency. In the years 1971–75, foreign aid took up a staggering average of 5.88 percent of China’s entire expenditure, peaking at 6.92 percent in 1973—by far the highest percentage in the world, and at least seventy times the US level.

While Mao dished out money and food, and built expensive underground railway systems, shipyards and infrastructure for countries far richer than China, most of the 900 million Chinese hovered just above survival levels. In many areas, peasants recall that the hungriest years after the Great Famine of 1958–61 were those from 1973 to Mao’s death in 1976—the years immediately after Nixon’s visit.

Nixon has often been credited with opening the door to China. Inasmuch as a number of Western statesmen and businessmen, plus some press and tourists, were able to enter China, he did increase the Western presence in China. But he did not open the door of—much less from—China, and the increased Western presence did not have any appreciable impact on Chinese society while Mao was alive. Mao made sure that for the vast majority of its population, China remained a tightly sealed prison. The only people who benefited at all from the rapprochement were a small elite. Some of these were allowed to see relatives from abroad — under heavy supervision. And a tiny number could lay hands on the half-dozen or so contemporary Western books translated in classified editions, one of which was Nixon’s own Six Crises. From 1973 some foreign-language students were sent abroad, but the very few who were lucky enough to be allowed out had to be politically ultra-reliable, and lived and worked under the closest surveillance, forbidden even to step out of their residence unescorted.

The population as a whole remained rigidly quarantined from the few foreigners allowed into China, who were subject to rigorous control. Any unauthorized conversation with them could bring catastrophe to the locals involved. The lengths to which the regime would go were extraordinary. For Nixon’s one-day visit to Shanghai, which coincided with Chinese New Year, the traditional occasion for family reunions (like Christmas), thousands of rusticated youths who were visiting their families were expelled back to their villages of exile, as a precaution against the extremely remote possibility of any of them trying to complain to the president.

The real beneficiaries of Nixon’s visit were Mao himself, and his regime. For his own electoral ends, Nixon de-demonized Mao for mainstream opinion in the West. Briefing White House staff on his return, Nixon spoke of the “dedication” of Mao’s cynical coterie, whom Kissinger called “a group of monks … who have … kept their revolutionary purity.” Nixon’s men asserted, falsely, that “under Mao the lives of the Chinese masses have been greatly improved.” Nixon’s favorite evangelist, Billy Graham, lauded Mao’s virtues to British businessmen. Kissinger suggested that Mao’s callous crew would “challenge us in a moral way.” The result was an image of Mao a whole lot further from the truth than the one that Nixon himself had helped purvey as a fierce anti-Communist in the 1950s.