Mao: The Unknown Story

Mao had no problem covering up the famine, and was confident he could promote himself as a credible international leader. For this job he brought in three dependable writer-journalists: Edgar Snow, the half-Chinese Han Suyin, and Felix Greene, who did an interview with Chou on BBC TV during which Chou simply read out his answers from sheets of paper.

MAO’S SELF-PROMOTION abroad was fueled by vastly increased handouts of his usual trio: arms, money and food. On 21 January 1960 a new body called the Foreign Economic Liaison Bureau was formed, ranking on a par with the Foreign Trade Ministry and the Foreign Ministry, to handle the rise in foreign aid. Aid figures soared immediately. This spree of gifts by Mao coincided with the worst years of the greatest famine in world history. Over 22 million people died of starvation in 1960 alone.

China was not only the poorest country in the world to provide aid, but its aid was the highest ever given as a percentage of the donor country’s per capita income — and, moreover, often went to countries with a standard of living much higher than itself, like Hungary. And the cost of these handouts was not just the standard of living, but Chinese lives. Moreover, they were literally handouts, as Peking constantly said that loans should be treated as gifts, or that repayment should be deferred indefinitely. As for arms, the regime liked to say “We are not arms merchants”; but this did not mean it did not export arms, only that the arms did not have to be paid for.

Mao saw that his best chance was where there was a war, so the main donee on his list was Indochina, on which he lavished more than US$20 billion during his reign. In Africa he tried to latch on to the decolonization movement: there he showered cash, goods and arms on the Algerians, who were fighting the biggest anti-colonial war on the continent, against the French.

In Latin America, Peking made a beeline for Cuba after Fidel Castro took power in January 1959. When Castro’s colleague Che Guevara came to China in November 1960, Mao doled out US$60m as a “loan,” which Chou told Guevara “does not have to be repaid.”

In the Communist bloc itself, Mao worked on trying to acquire influence in every country, but only managed to detach one client from Russia’s sphere of influence: tiny poverty-stricken Albania. As early as 1958, its dictator, Enver Hoxha, had scrounged 50m rubles out of a willing Mao — a considerable sum for a country of fewer than 3 million people. Then, in January 1961, as the Peking — Moscow rift sharpened and Hoxha showed he could be relied on to spout venom against Khrushchev, Peking decupled this amount, lending Tirana 500 million rubles, and sent 2.2 million bushels of wheat, which China had bought from Canada for hard currency. Thanks to food donated by China, the Albanians did not even know what rationing was, while the Chinese were dying in their tens of millions. Albania’s chief negotiator with Peking, Pupo Shyti, told us that in China “you could see the famine.” But “the Chinese gave us everything.” “When we needed anything, we just asked the Chinese … I felt ashamed …” When Mao’s colleagues flinched he told them off.

Mao spent money trying to split Communist parties and to set up Maoist parties all over the world — a task he entrusted to his old intelligence chief, Kang Sheng. Spotting Peking’s crude criteria for allegiance, freeloaders jumped aboard the gravy train. Albanian archives reveal a tetchy Kang in Tirana griping about Venezuelan leftists walking off with US$300,000 of China’s money funneled through Albania. Dutch intelligence set up a bogus Maoist party, which was funded and feted by the Chinese. The CIA’s top China hand, James Lilley, told us they were delighted to discover how easy it was to infiltrate China: simply get a few people to chant hosannas to Mao and set up a Maoist party, which Peking would then rush to fund — and invite to China. (These spies, however, were useless, as all foreigners were rigidly segregated from the Chinese.)

TO LAUNCH “Maoism” on the world, Mao chose the ninetieth anniversary of Lenin’s birth, in April 1960, in the form of a manifesto entitled Long Live Leninism!, which said that advocating a peaceful road to socialism was unacceptable—“revisionism,” Peking called it — and that if Communists were to take power they would have to resort to violence. It did not attack Khrushchev by name, using Yugoslavia’s Tito as its whipping-boy instead. Mao’s calculation was that this way Khrushchev would have less excuse to punish him by withholding military know-how.