Mao: The Unknown Story

Mao had placed high hopes on Castro’s colleague Che Guevara. On Guevara’s first visit to China in 1960, Mao demonstrated uncommon intimacy with him, holding his hand while talking eagerly to him, and fulsomely praising a pamphlet of his. Guevara had reciprocated, recommending copying Mao’s methods in Cuba. And he had proved the closest in the Havana leadership to Mao’s position during the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. But in the end, Mao could not get Guevara to take his side against the Russians. When Guevara returned to China in 1965, just before going off to try to launch guerrilla ventures in Africa, and then Bolivia, Mao did not see him, and a request from Guevara in Bolivia for China’s help to build a radio station that could broadcast worldwide was refused. When Guevara was killed in 1967, Peking privately expressed delight. Kang Sheng told Albania’s defense minister in October 1968: “The revolution in Latin America is going very well, especially after the defeat of Guevara; revisionism is being unmasked …” (italics added).

During Mao’s lifetime, there were no influential Maoist parties in Latin America. The only notable one, the “Shining Path” in Peru, was founded in 1980, four years after Mao’s death.

ON HIS OWN doorstep in Asia, Mao’s influence failed to spread, even against deadbeat regimes like that of Ne Win in Burma. But Mao’s biggest setback was “losing” Vietnam. In the 1950s and early 1960s, China had been Hanoi’s almost sole backer in its wars against first the French and then the Americans, ever since Stalin had allocated it to Mao in 1950. But the Vietnamese had developed suspicions about Mao from as early as 1954. That year, after he launched his Superpower Program, while doing everything to attract Russian assistance, Mao began trying to gain access to embargoed Western technology and equipment. One prime candidate for cracking the embargo was France.

At the time, France was bogged down in Indochina. Mao’s plan was to make the Vietnamese intensify the war “to increase the internal problems of France” (as Chou put it), and then, when France was on the ropes, to step in and broker a settlement. The idea was that France would then reciprocate by acceding to Mao’s embargo-breaking approaches.

Mao had been co-directing the war in Indochina. During the Korean War, he had halted large-scale offensives in Indochina to focus China’s resources on Korea. In May 1953, when he decided to end the Korean War, he sent Chinese officers straight from Korea to Indochina. In October that year, the Chinese got hold of a copy of the French strategic plan, the Navarre Plan, named after the French commander, General Henri Navarre. China’s chief military adviser to Vietnam, General Wei Guo-qing, carried this from Peking and delivered it to Ho Chi Minh in person. It was this vital intelligence coup that led to the decision by the Communist side to give battle at Dien Bien Phu, a French base in northwest Vietnam, where the Vietnamese, with massive Chinese military aid and advice, won a decisive victory in May 1954.

Dien Bien Phu was fought in the lead-up to, and during, the Geneva conference about Indochina (and Korea), which had opened on 26 April with Chou En-lai leading the Chinese delegation. Mao had decided well over a month before it opened that he “definitely must have a settlement,” but he did not inform the Vietnamese. The role he had in mind for them was to do the fighting, and escalate the war, at whatever cost, to create as big a crisis for Paris as possible. Mao wrote to chief military adviser Wei on 4 April, about an ostensible next stage: “Try to complete the Dien Bien Phu campaign by … early May … Begin attacking Luang Prabang and Vientiane in August or September and liberate them.” These were the twin capitals of Laos. Then, Mao went on: “actively make ready to attack Hanoi and Haiphong this coming winter and at the latest early spring next year, aiming to liberate the [Red River] Delta in 1955.” Mao specifically ordered Wei to discuss this plan with Vietnam’s defense minister General Vo Nguyen Giap, to give the Vietnamese the impression that he would sponsor them to expand the war well into the following year — when in fact he had secretly decided on a ceasefire in the coming months.

The Vietnamese took Dien Bien Phu on 7 May, and the French government fell on 17 June. This was China’s moment to step in. On the 23rd, Chou met the new French prime minister, Pierre Mendès-France, in Switzerland, without the Vietnamese, and worked out a deal.