Mao: The Unknown Story

Atrocities went in parallel with cultural annihilation. This period witnessed a campaign officially called “Big Destruction,” in which the entire Tibetan way of life came under violent physical assault for being “backward, dirty and useless.” Mao was bent on destroying religion, the essence of most Tibetans’ lives. When he met the Dalai Lama in 1954–55 he told him there were too many monks in Tibet, which, he said, was bad for reproducing the labor force. Now lamas and nuns were forced to break their vows of celibacy and get married. “Holy Scriptures were used for manure, and pictures of the Buddha and sutras were deliberately used to make shoes,” the Panchen Lama wrote. The destruction was of a kind that “even lunatics would hardly carry out.” Most monasteries were destroyed, “the sites looking as if they had just been through a war and bombardments.” According to the Panchen Lama, the number of monasteries in Tibet fell from over 2,500 before 1959 to “only just over 70” in 1961, and the number of monks and nuns from over 110,000 to 7,000 (some 10,000 fled abroad).

One particularly painful order for Tibetans was that Buddhist ceremonies for the dead were banned. “When a person dies,” the Panchen Lama wrote:

if there is no ceremony to expiate his sins for his soul to be released from purgatory, this is to treat the dead with the utmost … cruelty … People were saying: “We die too late … Now when we die, we are going to be like a dog being tossed outside the door!”

On his tours in the early 1960s, Tibetans came at great risk to see the Panchen Lama, crying out and weeping: “Don’t let us starve! Don’t let Buddhism be exterminated! Don’t let the people of the Land of Snows become extinct!” Mao was “greatly displeased” with the Panchen Lama’s letter, and visited much suffering on him, including ten years in prison.

To Tibet, as to the whole of China, Mao’s rule brought unprecedented misery.

43. MAOISM GOES GLOBAL (1959–64 AGE 65–70)

IN FEBRUARY 1959, Russia signed an agreement to provide China with the means to make nuclear submarines. This marked the high point of the Kremlin’s cooperation on technology transfers. But even while the deal was being signed, Khrushchev was having second thoughts about endowing Mao with such enormous military power.

One incident in particular had prompted Khrushchev to rethink. In September 1958 a US air-to-air Sidewinder missile had come down over China unexploded from a Taiwanese plane. Urgent requests from Khrushchev to let the Russians examine this state-of-the-art windfall went unanswered. The Chinese then claimed they could not find it. Khrushchev’s son Sergei, a leading rocket scientist, recalled:

For the first time, Father sensed the deep fissures that had appeared in our “fraternal friendship.” For the first time he wondered whether it made sense to transfer the newest military technology and teach the Chinese how to build missiles and nuclear warheads.

… in February [1959], he decided to exert pressure for the first time … he held up transfer of instructions for the R-12 [missile]. It did the trick. The [Sidewinder] missile was immediately found.

The Chinese had dismantled the missile and the critical guidance system was missing. “This was offensive and insulting to us,” Khrushchev senior wrote in his memoirs. “Anybody in our place would have felt pain. We held no secrets back from China. We gave them everything … Yet when they got a trophy they refused to share it.” Khrushchev reached the conclusion that Mao was just using Russia for his own goals, and did not care about the interests of the Communist camp as a whole. Mao, he felt, “was bursting with an impatient desire to rule the world.” Khrushchev gave orders to go slow on transferring nuclear know-how, and on 20 June 1959 he suspended assistance on the Bomb.

This was not a fatal blow, as by now China had the basic know-how, and the key equipment, for a Bomb. But Mao could see that from here on it was going to be hard to tap Khrushchev for more.

In September, Khrushchev went to America on the first-ever visit by a Soviet leader. He believed there was a real possibility of peaceful coexistence with the West. Afterwards he went on to Peking for the tenth anniversary of Mao’s regime. Khrushchev urged Mao to be conciliatory towards the West, “to avoid anything that could be exploited … to drive the world back into the cold war ‘rut,’ ” as Russia’s chief ideologist put it.