Mao: The Unknown Story

Mao meddled and needled, but failed to get Havana to sign up to his anti-Soviet stance. However, he did benefit from Cuba’s bitter feelings towards the Russians. When an advanced US rocket, a Thor-Able-Star, landed accidentally in Cuba, instead of letting the Russians have it, as he would normally have done, Castro played them off against the Chinese by auctioning it. The result was that Peking got some crucial components, which played a big part in enabling it to upgrade its missiles.

Khrushchev, for his part, backtracked from his previous support for China even while fighting was still going on inside India. A Pravda editorial on 5 November conspicuously contained not one word endorsing Peking’s position. For him, as for Mao, the collaboration had been completely opportunistic, though he still wanted to keep the Communist camp together.

So did Mao, hoping that he could still finagle a few more nuclear secrets out of Khrushchev. These hopes were dashed definitively in July 1963, when Khrushchev signed a Nuclear Test Ban Treaty with America and Britain, which embargoed the signatories helping others acquire a Bomb. This meant that Khrushchev was now virtually useless to Mao.

It was at this point, more than three years after he had started pushing Maoism onto the world stage, that Mao gave the order to denounce Khrushchev by name as a “revisionist.” A public slanging match quickly escalated. For Mao, the polemic acted as a sort of international advertising campaign for Maoism, whose essence was summed up in one of the main accusations against Khrushchev: “In the eyes of the modern revisionists, to survive is everything. The philosophy of survival has replaced Marxism-Leninism.” It is hard now to cast oneself back to a time when anyone could think this approach might appeal. But to deny people’s desire — and right — to live was central to Maoism.

Algeria showed how dependent Mao was on there being an armed conflict. Once Algeria gained its independence, in 1962, his influence evaporated.

At least one Chinese noticed how easily huge sums of money flooded into projects to do with promotion abroad and tried to take advantage. In March 1960 a clerk at the Foreign Trade Ministry walked off with the astronomical sum of 200,000 yuan, in the biggest known cash swindle to date, which he accomplished by forging just one letter, and faking one signature: Chou En-lai’s. The one-page letter claimed a telephone call had come from Mao’s staff to Chou’s office asking for cash to be allotted to repair a temple in Tibet so that some foreign journalists could take photographs of it. The clerk had four hungry children, and wanted to buy them some extra food, which special state shops sold outside the rationing network at exorbitant prices for those with the money, mainly people with relatives abroad. Needless to say, this enterprising bureaucrat was easily discovered.

An Albanian Politburo member, Liri Belishova, was in China at this time, and let the Russians know what was happening, for which she suffered thirty years in Hoxha’s gulag — not “strangled” or “eliminated,” as Khrushchev wrote in his memoirs. She emerged with remarkable bounce, as we saw in 1996.

When one participant (Thomas Kuchel) in Oval Office discussions on 22 October asked whether there was any indication that Russia’s move in Cuba was “associated with the Chinese operation against India,” CIA chief John McCone answered: “No, we have no information whatsoever with respect to that at all.”

Kennedy had in fact been trying to use the treaty to widen the rift between Moscow and Peking.

44. AMBUSHED BY THE PRESIDENT (1961–62 AGE 67–68)

WHEN MAO LAUNCHED the Great Leap Forward in 1958, his No. 2, Liu Shao-chi, went along with him, even though he disagreed with Mao’s position. And when defense minister Peng De-huai spoke up against Mao’s policies at Lushan in 1959, when the famine was well under way, Liu, who was now state president as well as Party No. 2, failed to take Peng’s side.

But Liu was deeply troubled by the famine, which he knew had consumed some 30 million lives by early 1961. He was particularly affected after he went back to his home area in Hunan in April — May that year, and saw at first hand the horrific suffering he had helped create. He made up his mind to find a way to stop Mao.