Mao: The Unknown Story

But the scheme collapsed when Pakistan suddenly accepted a UN call for a ceasefire before China’s deadline had expired. The Pakistanis told Mao that the cost of continuing fighting was too high, both diplomatically and economically, but Mao pressed them to fight on, reportedly giving Pakistan’s President Ayub Khan the message: “If there is a nuclear war, it is Peking and not Rawalpindi that will be a target.” When the Pakistanis declined to oblige, Mao was left out on a limb, and Peking had to climb down in public, lamely alleging that India had secretly dismantled its outposts — when in fact India had not stirred. Mao ended up deeply frustrated.

IMPATIENT FOR A SUCCESS, Mao tried to ignite violent insurrections wherever he could. In Thailand, the Communist Party fostered by Mao (and composed overwhelmingly of ethnic Chinese) now launched into armed insurgency, clashing for the first time with government forces on 7 August 1965, thenceforth known as “Gun-Firing Day.” It got nowhere.

The biggest — and most tragic — fiasco came in Indonesia. The Communist Party there, the PKI, was the largest in the non-Communist world, with some 3.5 million members, and had the kind of secret intimate relationship with Peking which the Chinese Communists had had with Stalin before they conquered China.^† The head of the Japanese Communist Party at the time, Kenji Miyamoto, told us that Peking continually told the PKI, and the Japanese Party: “Whenever there is a chance to seize power, you must rise up in armed struggle.” In 1964, Miyamoto discussed this with Aidit. Whilst the Japanese Communists were cautious, Aidit, who had great faith in Mao, was very eager to swing into action. After the Algiers summit folded, in lashing-out mood, Mao set the PKI in motion to seize power.

In early August Aidit came to China, where he met Mao. Aidit then proceeded to Indonesia with a team of Chinese doctors, who within days reported that President Sukarno (who was pro-Peking) had terminal kidney problems, and did not have long to live; so if the PKI were going to act, now was the time.

The plan was to decapitate the anti-Communist top brass of the army, over which President Sukarno held very limited sway. Peking had been pressing Sukarno to overhaul the army radically, and with Sukarno’s support the PKI had been infiltrating the army with some success. The PKI believed, wildly over-optimistically, that it could secretly control over half the army, two-thirds of the airforce and one-third of the navy. According to the plan, once the generals were disposed of, Sukarno would step in and take over the army, while the Communists in the army kept the rank-and-file in line.

On 30 September a group of officers arrested and killed Indonesia’s army chief and five other generals. Speaking shortly afterwards to Japanese Communist Party chief Miyamoto, Mao referred to this coup as “the Communist Party of Indonesia’s … uprising.” But the PKI failed to cope with an unforeseen occurrence which derailed its whole plot. An informer had tipped off a then little-known general called Suharto, who was not on the arrest list. Thus prepared, Suharto waited for the arrests and killings of the other generals to be completed and then took immediate control of the army, unleashing a massacre of hundreds of thousands of Communists and sympathizers — and innocent people. Almost the entire PKI leadership was captured and executed. Only one member of the Politburo survived, Jusuf Adjitorop, who was in China at the time, and whom we met there, a disillusioned man, three decades later.

President Sukarno was forced out, and General Suharto established a military dictatorship that was fiercely anti-Peking and hostile to the large ethnic Chinese community at home.

Mao blamed the PKI for the failure. “The Indonesian party committed two errors,” he told the Japanese Communists. First, “they blindly believed in Sukarno, and overestimated the power of the Party in the army.” The second error, Mao said, was that the PKI “wavered without fighting it out.” In fact, the slaughter unleashed by Suharto was so ferocious, and so instantaneous, that it had been impossible for the PKI to fight back. Mao and his men had never experienced anything like this at the hands of Chiang Kai-shek, who was a kitten compared to Suharto. Mao, in any case, was to blame, as he had started the action for his own self-centered reasons. He just could not wait to have a victory after his pipedream of Afro-Asian leadership collapsed.

By the end of 1965, Mao’s global schemes had suffered one setback after another. In a dark and vehement state of mind, he turned to deal with his foes inside China.

Except for a stop-over by Deng Xiao-ping en route to a Party congress in Romania in July 1965, which shows Mao’s trust in Deng.