Mao: The Unknown Story

Wang Ming’s death had been long drawn-out, and came after decades of ruined health, the legacy of Mao’s attempts to kill him. He was bedridden in his final years, and it took him three hours to swallow enough tiny morsels of food to constitute a meal. But his painful death did not assuage Mao’s grievance, just as the similarly agonizing deaths of both Liu and Chou brought Mao little relief. A month before he himself died, Mao had his old tirades read to him again, to bring himself the temporary pleasure of savaging all these foes one more time.

By the end of Mao’s life, almost all his former close colleagues were dead, most of them thanks to him. Yet their deaths had somehow not quite satisfied him. Those of Liu and Peng De-huai, his two main victims in the Cultural Revolution, he had to keep secret for fear of public sympathy. Chou’s death had been made public, but the outcome was to rock Mao’s rule. Wang Ming had died in Russia, out of his reach. Zhu De he had been unable to purge. Lin Biao, Mao’s chief collaborator in setting up the Great Purge, had managed to flee the country before the plane that carried him across the border crashed; moreover, Lin had bequeathed a legacy that haunted Mao — a plot to assassinate him. Deng was alive, and more than just alive: Mao had had to give in and let him live in the comfort of his own home, among his family. On his deathbed, Mao’s thirst for revenge was unslaked.

DISSATISFACTION CONSUMED MAO. He had not risen to be a superpower, in spite of his decades of craving. Although he had the Bomb, he could not cash it, not least because the delivery system could barely loft it over China’s border. The country’s industrial bases were a shambles, turning out heaps of defective equipment — including fleets of planes that could not fly, even though an aircraft industry had topped his agenda from the very beginning of his rule, and the Korean War had been fought partly to acquire it. Nor was the navy much better. Mao’s last words to his navy chief in 1975, a year before his death, were: “Our navy is only like this!” sticking out his little finger, looking immensely disconsolate. That October, Mao remarked ruefully to Kissinger that he did not belong to the major league. “There are only two superpowers in the world … We are backward …” Counting on his fingers, he said: “We come last. America, Soviet Union, Europe, Japan, China — look!” When US president Ford came to China a few weeks later, Mao told him: “We can only fire … empty cannons” and “curse.”

Mao had made a last-ditch effort to promote himself as a world leader in 1974, by trying to capitalize on something that did not require military prowess, and was the one point where he could claim to lead the world: poverty. He proclaimed a new way of defining “Three Worlds,” announcing that the “Third World” meant countries that were poor, excluding Russia, and dropped heavy hints that he should be seen as the leader of the Third World. But although he was regarded, in a very general way, as a leader of the Third World, it did not take orders from him, and he provided no tangible leadership. Besides, as one hard-nosed American diplomat put it, “would it really make all that difference?”

Even his own creatures refused to acknowledge his authority. Mao had played a vital part in installing the Khmer Rouge regime in Cambodia in 1975. Pol Pot, its leader, under whom up to one quarter of the Cambodian people perished in the space of a few years, was a soul-mate of Mao’s. Immediately after Pol Pot took power, Mao congratulated him face to face on his slave-labor-camp state: “You have scored a splendid victory. Just a single blow and no more classes.” What Mao meant was that everyone had become a slave. And Mao sent Prince Sihanouk, who had been living in luxurious exile in China, back to Cambodia, where the prince was put under house arrest and his name was exploited by Pol Pot. But though Mao was Pol Pot’s sponsor and mentor, he got no gratitude. A colleague of Pol Pot’s called Keo Meas, who had referred to Mao in eulogistic terms, was tortured to death. Written on the dead man’s dossier were the words: “This contemptible Mao who got the horrible death he deserved was worthless. You shouldn’t think, you antique bastard, that the Kampuchean Party has been influenced by Mao.”