Mao: The Unknown Story

From a strategic point of view, the whole project was nonsensical. The vast majority of plants in the Third Front were utterly dependent on road transport — sometimes even for water supplies — while the oil refineries were left exposed. China’s main oil field, which had just come on stream, lay on the Manchurian plain. The relocation did not give China any greater security from attack.

Characteristically, Mao insisted that everything be built at breakneck speed, usually without any proper surveying. Irrational siting alone at least doubled normal construction costs, and left the new factories, which were frequently jerry-built, at the mercy of floods, avalanches and rock-and mud-falls. Many expensive plants, including tank factories and shipyards, were never finished, or overran by years. “Perhaps the most colossal failure,” one study concluded, was the Jiuquan steel mill in Gansu, which took twenty-seven years to produce any steel at all.

The human costs were immeasurable. Over 4 million people were thrown into the mountains to build factories, lay railways and open mines, working and living in appalling conditions, in airless caves; water, often polluted, was in constant short supply. Many died. Countless families were torn apart for up to two decades. Only in 1984, long after Mao’s death, were separated couples allowed to be reunited — and then only if the one in the Third Front was over forty, and had worked for twenty years.

Liu Shao-chi and Mao’s other colleagues put up no resistance to this lunacy. Mao told them his mind was made up. To make it easier for them to swallow the idea, he gave the nearest thing in his lexicon to a commitment that people would not have to die from starvation, by telling his planners: “Be careful: Don’t do a 1958, 1959 and 1960.” In addition, although the Third Front was economic folly, it did not involve persecutions. For Mao to forgo deaths and political victimization seems to have been the best his colleagues thought they could expect — and enough to make them feel they might as well go along with him. It was, it seems, a good day if the boss waived a few million deaths.

CHINA’S FIRST BOMB was detonated on 16 October 1964 at Lop Nor in the Gobi Desert. The Silk Road had passed through here, linking central China with the shores of the Mediterranean Sea across the vast continents of Europe and Asia. Via this most barren and uninhabitable desert had flowed silk, spices, precious stones, art and culture with all their richness and splendor, exchanges that had excited ancient civilizations, and infused them with new life. Lop Nor had thus witnessed numerous life-enhancing impacts. Now, nearly two millennia later, it was the cradle of another “big bang,” that of destruction and death.

The nuclear test site had originally been chosen by the Russians. There, army engineers, scientists and workers had been living for years in mud huts and tents, and in total isolation, working through sandstorms, searing heat and freezing winds.

On the day itself, Mao was waiting for the big moment in his suite in the Great Hall — baptized “of the People,” although off limits to anyone uninvited. Situated on Tiananmen Square, a stone’s throw from Zhongnanhai, it was designed to withstand any kind of military assault, and had its own nuclear bunker. The suite tailor-made for Mao was code-named Suite 118, in line with his usual clandestine style. Mao could drive straight into it in his car. Inside, there was a lift down into an escape tunnel wide enough for two trucks abreast, which led to the underground military centers on the edge of Peking. The suite was adjacent to the stage of a giant auditorium, so that Mao could emerge, and leave, without any close contact with the audience.

On that day, waiting next to Mao’s suite were 3,000 performers involved in a musical extravaganza promoting his cult, The East Is Red, which Chou En-lai had staged. The title had been taken from the Mao “anthem”:

The East is red,

The sun rises,

China has produced a Mao Tse-tung.

He seeks happiness for the people,

He is the people’s great saviour.