Mao: The Unknown Story

Once the success of the test was confirmed, the music of the anthem started, bright lights came on, and a beaming Mao stepped out, flanked by his whole top Party team. Waving to the 3,000 performers, he signaled for Chou En-lai to speak. Chou stepped in front of the microphones: “Chairman Mao has asked me to give you some good news …” Then he announced that a Bomb had been detonated. The crowd was silent at first, not knowing how to react, having been given no prior instructions. Chou then provided a cue: “You can rejoice to your hearts’ content, just don’t jump through the floor!” Whereupon they started yelling and leaping up and down in an apparent frenzy. Mao was the only leader of any country to greet the birth of this monster of mass destruction with festivity. In private, he composed two lines of doggerel:

Atom bomb goes off when it is told.

Ah, what boundless joy!

Celebrations were organized throughout the country. Among the population, who learned for the first time that evening that China had been making a Bomb, there was genuine exultation. To possess nuclear weapons was regarded as a sign of the nation’s achievement, and many felt tremendous pride — especially since they were told that China had produced the Bomb single-handed, with no foreign assistance. The decisive role that Russia played was strictly suppressed, and is little known today.

With hunger only a couple of years behind, and painful memories raw, some among the elite wondered how much the Bomb had cost. The regime registered the import of the questions, and Chou made a point of telling a small audience that China had made the Bomb very cheaply, and had spent only a few billion yuan on it. In fact, the cost of China’s Bomb has been estimated at US$4.1 billion (in 1957 prices). This amount in hard currency could have bought enough wheat to provide an extra 300 calories per day for two years for the entire population — enough to save the lives of every single one of the nearly 38 million people who died in the famine. Mao’s Bomb caused 100 times as many deaths as both of the Bombs the Americans dropped on Japan.

46. A TIME OF UNCERTAINTY AND SETBACKS (1962–65 AGE 68–71)

IN THE YEARS after 1962, while China was recovering economically, Mao nursed his revenge. Liu Shao-chi, his normally circumspect and seemingly obliging No. 2, had ambushed and outsmarted him at the Conference of the Seven Thousand in January 1962. Under the collective pressure of virtually the whole Chinese establishment, Mao had been forced to abandon his lethal policies. Mao was not going to let Liu or anyone who sympathized with Liu get away with thwarting him.

Mao started clearing the ground for a big purge from the moment the famine abated. He put the brakes on liberal measures such as letting peasants lease some land, and rehabilitating political victims, and he steadily fueled his personality cult. Eulogies of Mao increasingly dominated school texts, publications, the media and every sphere that affected people’s minds, so that wherever anyone’s eye fell there were slogans hailing him, and whenever a song was heard it was in the vein of the one called “Father is close, Mother is close, but neither is as close as Chairman Mao.” Mao was making everything more thoroughly politicized than ever, in a context where only adulation of him was permitted to exist.

He opened with novels, saying sarcastically to a Party audience in September 1962: “Aren’t there a lot of novels and publications at the moment? Using novels to carry out anti-Party activities is a big invention.” Mao later laid into all books: “The more books you read, the more stupid you become.” “You can read a little,” he would say, “but reading too much ruins you, really ruins you.” This was unashamedly cynical, as he himself was well-read, and loved reading. His beds were tailor-made to be extra large, with enough space for loads of books to be piled on one side (and sloping, so that the books would not topple over onto him), and his favorite hobby was reading in bed. But he wanted the Chinese people to be ignorant. He told his inner circle that “We need the policy of ‘keep people stupid.’ ”