Mao: The Unknown Story

Mao became not merely a credible international figure, but one with incomparable allure. World statesmen beat a path to his door. A meeting with Mao was, and sometimes still is, regarded as the highlight of many a career, and life. When the call came for Mexico’s president Luis Echeverria, his entourage literally fought to join the audience group. The Australian ambassador told us that he did not dare go to the toilet, even though his bladder was bursting, in case the privileged few should suddenly leave without him. Japan’s prime minister Kakuei Tanaka, on the other hand, relieved himself at Mao’s place. Mao escorted him to the lavatory, and waited for him outside the door.

Statesmen put up with slights that they would never have condoned from other leaders. Not only were they not told in advance if they would see Mao, they were summoned peremptorily at the moment most convenient to the chairman, whatever they were doing, even in the middle of a meal. Canada’s prime minister Pierre Trudeau, who had not even asked to see Mao, suddenly found himself being bossed about by Chou—“Well, we have to adjourn now. I have other business and so do you”—without even telling him what for.

When Mao met foreigners, he flaunted his cynical and dictatorial views. “Napoleon’s methods were the best,” he told France’s president Georges Pompidou: “He dissolved all the assemblies and simply appointed those who were to govern with him.” When former British prime minister Edward Heath expressed surprise that Stalin’s portrait was still hanging in Tiananmen Square and brought up the fact that Stalin had slaughtered millions of people, Mao gave a dismissive flip of the hand to signal how little he cared, and answered: “But he is there because he was a Marxist.” Mao even managed to infect Western leaders with his own jargon. After Australian premier Gough Whitlam showed some uncertainty about the right answer to a question about Darwin, he wrote Mao what he calls in his memoirs “a self-criticism.” As recently as 1997, when much more was known about Mao, Kissinger described him as a “philosopher,” and claimed that Mao’s goal was a “quest for egalitarian virtue.”

Mao liked giving audiences to star-struck visitors, and continued to do so until his dying days, when oxygen tubing lay on his side table, concealed by a book or a newspaper. For him these audiences represented global glory.

NIXON’S VISIT ALSO opened up for Mao the possibility of laying his hands on advanced Western military technology and equipment. “The only objective of these relations,” he told the North Korean dictator Kim, “is to obtain developed technology.” Mao knew that he could only achieve his goal if America considered him an ally. To offer a plausible explanation for this shift from his long-standing anti-American posture, Mao claimed that he lived in fear of a Russian attack and desperately needed protection. Having laid the groundwork from the time of Kissinger’s first visit, Mao spoke explicitly about a military alliance in February 1973. “The Soviet Union dominated our conversations,” Kissinger reported to Nixon; as he put it in his memoirs, he was given to understand that “China’s conflict with the Soviet Union was both ineradicable and beyond its capacity to manage by itself.” Mao then told Kissinger: “we should draw a horizontal line [sc., alliance] — the US, Japan, China, Pakistan, Iran, Turkey and Europe.” All the places Mao cited except China were American allies.

To make the idea more attractive, Mao and Chou said that China would like the alliance to be led by America. Kissinger recorded that Chou “called on us to take the lead in organising an anti-Soviet coalition.”

Mao was not that frightened of a Soviet strike. Although he genuinely feared it, as he had shown in the 1969 scare, it had become obvious to him since then that the chances of such an event were extremely remote. The way he angled for American military secrets followed a pattern similar to his past approach with Moscow. Twice, in 1954 and 1958, he had exploited the fear of America using atom bombs in his staged confrontations with Taiwan to get Khrushchev to help him; in the first instance, to build his own Bomb, and in the second, to extract a deal that almost gave him an across-the-board modern arsenal. Now he was using the specter of war again to conjure a similar prize out of America.

At one point in February 1973, Mao revealed a glimpse of what he really thought about the “Soviet threat.” When Kissinger promised that the US would come to China’s rescue “if the Soviet Union overruns China,” Mao, who had earlier evoked this scenario himself, replied, laughing: “How will that happen? How could that be?… do you think they would feel good if they were bogged down in China?” Seeing that Kissinger was a little nonplussed, Mao quickly checked this line of reasoning, and reverted to crying wolf.