Mao: The Unknown Story

Simultaneously, Mao tried to move himself center-stage by inviting more than 700 sympathizers from the Third World for May Day. This was intended to be the founding moment of the Maoist camp. He received several groups of them himself, and the foreigners were reported “expressing adulation” for him and singing the Maoist anthem, “The East Is Red.” He ordered maximum publicity for these audiences, tinkering over the press reports himself phrase by phrase.

These encounters were timed to take place just before a major world event from which Mao was excluded — a summit of the Big Four (US, UK, France, Russia), which was due to open in Paris on 16 May, at which Khrushchev hoped to enshrine peaceful coexistence. Mao intended his to be a rival show, and for the world to see him as the champion of the disadvantaged. But his venture went virtually unnoticed, partly because his foreign followers were marginal figures. Mao did not inspire passionate faith, either, and acquired few fervent disciples. He was perceived as patronizing. A group of Africans heard him say that, to Westerners, “our race seems no better than you Africans.”

Mao’s hopes that Khrushchev would be seen as an appeaser, and himself as the antithesis, also received a blow from an unexpected quarter. Two weeks before the Paris summit, an American U-2 spy plane was shot down over Russia. When President Eisenhower refused to apologise, Khrushchev walked out and the summit collapsed. Peking had to praise Khrushchev for taking a tough stance.

Khrushchev’s bellicosity towards America risked taking the wind out of Mao’s sails, but he blasted ahead nonetheless, and a convenient occasion was to hand: a meeting of the World Federation of Trade Unions which opened in Peking on 5 June 1960. This was the most important international meeting to be held in China since Mao had taken power, with participants from some sixty countries combining delegates from ruling Communist parties and militant trade unionists from all five continents, some not subservient to Moscow. Mao mobilized all his top colleagues to lobby hard against Moscow, arguing that peaceful coexistence was a deception, and that “as long as capitalism exists, war cannot be avoided.” The French and the Italians, who were close to Khrushchev’s position, were singled out and called servants of imperialism. An Italian delegate, Vittorio Foa, told us that the hostility from the Chinese was so nerve-racking that the Italians feared for their physical safety and tried not to leave each other unaccompanied. The aggressiveness of the Chinese shocked even Albania’s delegate Gogo Nushi, who described them, in private, as “bandits.”

The Chinese were “spitting in our face,” remarked Khrushchev. Moscow perceived this event as the beginning of the Sino-Soviet split. So did the CIA. Its Acting Director, Charles Cabell, told the National Security Council two weeks later that Chinese behavior at the meeting had been “a challenge to USSR leadership of such a magnitude that Khrushchev has been compelled to meet it head-on.” Up to now, differences between Moscow and Peking had been tightly concealed by Communist secrecy, and many had doubted that there really was a Sino-Soviet rift.

On 21 June Khrushchev addressed Communist leaders from fifty-one countries gathered in Bucharest. He refuted Mao’s contention that war was needed to bring about socialism: “No world war is needed for the triumph of socialist ideas throughout the world,” he declared. “Only madmen and maniacs can now call for another world war,” in which, he said, using apocalyptic language, “millions of people might burn in the conflagration.” In contrast, “people of sound mind” were “in the majority even among the most deadly enemies of communism.” This was tantamount to saying that Mao was crazy, and suggesting that coexistence with the West was a better bet than continuing an alliance with Mao. “You want to dominate everyone, you want to dominate the world,” Khrushchev told Mao’s delegate, Peng Zhen, in private. Khrushchev also said to the Chinese: “Since you love Stalin so much, why don’t you take his corpse to Peking?” He told his colleagues: “When I look at Mao I see Stalin, a perfect copy.”

When Peng Zhen persisted with Mao’s line, he found himself alone. “We were isolated in Bucharest,” Mao noted. “There was not a single party that supported China. Not even … Albania.” This isolation, and the sharpness of Khrushchev’s attack, took Mao by surprise. A split under these circumstances was counterproductive, as he still needed Russian military technology. When Khrushchev refused to accept one word of Mao’s views for the communiqué, Mao backed down and told Peng Zhen to sign.

By now the scales had completely fallen from Khrushchev’s eyes. On his return from Bucharest, he immediately ordered the withdrawal of all the 1,000-plus Soviet advisers in China and halted assistance on the 155 industrial projects that were furthest from completion.