Restless Empire (47 page)

If worse came to worst and half of mankind died, the other half would remain. Imperialism would be destroyed, and the whole world would become socialist. In a number of years there would be 2.7 billion people again and definitely more. We Chinese have not yet completed our [socialist] construction, and we desire peace. However, if imperialism insists on fighting a war, we will have no alternative but to make up our minds and fight to the finish before proceeding with construction.
⁴⁰

The international meeting of Communist leaders whom Mao addressed sat in shocked silence as the Chairman’s remarks were translated. One young Russian delegate who was present in the hall that night later told me that to him it was as if Stalin had come alive again. He did not cherish the thought, or that of half the world’s population perishing.

After returning from his politically disastrous trip to the Soviet Union, Mao began considering how China could make a great leap forward, intensifying production in heavy industry and in agriculture at the same time. In Moscow, Mao had boasted that China’s economy would overtake Britain’s in fifteen years. As he began discussing new production aims with his colleagues in the spring of 1958, he pushed for increased quotas in most parts of the economy. Other leaders, cowed by Mao’s prestige, optimism, and revolutionary spirit, were eager to tell
him that China could outdo the British in steel production in seven years, some said five or even three years. Obsessed with steel as the constructor of modernity, Mao told them that China needed to make its great leap into the future, to show doubters within the country, the Soviets, and the imperialists, what socialist man was capable of. It was a world of struggle, the Chairman insisted, and China had to catch up quickly or be annihilated.

B
Y THE LATE
1950s, China and its foreign relations were transformed from what they had been a decade before. The Communists had introduced a new political and economic order, patterned on that of the Soviet Union. Most of the ties with the rest of the world that had been built cautiously and gradually over the previous century had been severed and those who represented them had been killed, sent to labor camps, or otherwise silenced. China’s isolation was going to get a lot worse as Mao began putting in place policies that would lead to a break with the socialist countries as well. But the foundation for China’s isolation was laid in the 1950s, when socialism was first constructed.

It is not difficult to understand why the CCP opted for a break with the international orientation of the late Qing and Republican eras. Its own foreign experience was limited, having spent twenty years fighting the GMD in the Chinese countryside. Based on its reading of history, the party saw past foreign involvement in China as purely negative. From more modern times, it copied the full break that USSR had had with the West since its founding. It did not understand that this break, from Lenin’s perspective, had been forced on the country by relentless Western hostility rather than actively sought. But most importantly the isolation of the PRC came from the sectarian aspect of CCP politics. The party was extremely disciplined, narrow-minded, and inward-looking, with Mao as an increasingly prophet-like leader for whom no constraints existed. Together with the continued ideological hostility shown by the United States, Japan, and Western Europe toward new
China, the CCP blend of isolationist policies and attitudes ensured that the new state would grow up outside any internatonal framework except the one created by its alliance with the USSR.

Many Chinese hoped for more interaction with the outside world in the future—reconnecting with relatives and friends outside the PRC, on Taiwan, in Hong Kong or Macao, in Southeast Asia or elsewhere in the Chinese diaspora. But they had enough pride in their country’s achievements to create mass support for the CCP’s hatred of foreign things and ideas. As the Chinese learned more about the CCP’s use of mass executions and labor camps, most simply hid the party’s excesses from outsiders. They believed that these methods, though terrible, could be justified in the building of a new and modern China, which, eventually, would be able to meet the rest of the world on equal terms. Some may even have believed that China was in the process of surpassing other countries in the competition for modernity. They were in for some big shocks in the decade that followed.

D
URING THE
1960s, China went through a period of isolation and increasing irrelevance in international affairs. Its break with the Soviet Union drove the country away from its few remaining international contacts. The radicalism and eccentricity of Mao’s policies at home and abroad made China look like what we today would call a failed state, a chaotic, self-referential, and extreme polity with few links to the outside world. Although there were small offshoot groups of so-called Maoists in industrialized countries (even in places such as New Zealand or Norway), they were more about social protest than Mao’s doctrines, and never got close to real political influence. And in the Third World those movements China supported became fewer and increasingly isolated. China’s leaders expected them to conform closely to their own domestic policy preferences whatever twist or turn Chinese politics took during these tumultous years. Even for those who sincerely wished to remain China’s allies, the task was not easy.

The self-centeredness of China during the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution—the campaign that Mao Zedong launched in 1966 to radicalize Chinese politics and destroy perceived enemies—knew almost no bounds. The Chinese were led to believe that only China possessed the right road to revolution and that the country therefore was the enviable center of all human development, that it carried the key
to the future. This key was the person of Mao Zedong and the political road he devised for China. Mao’s own obsession, after the failure of the Great Leap, was to create a new generation of Chinese who were not held back by what he saw as convention and conformity, including ethics, family, and friendship, and therefore could dedicate themselves fully to carrying out the revolution even after he himself was gone. They should be ruthless, strong, and brave, uncontaminated by foreign or bourgeois influence, and able to take losses on China’s road to full Communist development. Mao’s new dream was a China entirely purged of its past, its people a blank slate on which a superior form of modernity could be inscribed. He saw a road to a bright future, paved with the corpses of those who had erred or simply got in the way. Mao’s final ladder to paradise, his Cultural Revolution, rose among heaps of bodies, the way Stalin’s and Hitler’s had done in the past and Pol Pot’s would do in the future.

China’s isolation in the 1960s was largely self-imposed, but it did not have to be this way. After its break with the Soviets, China received considerable goodwill in the Third World, mainly for racial reasons. It was seen as a progressive anticolonial Asian power, and the break with the (European) Soviets initially made China more attractive as a partner for Third World radicals. The war with India in 1962—an unnecessary war, if ever there was one—held many of the more moderate Asian and African regimes back from working closely with the Chinese. But as late as 1964 or 1965 China could shine on the Third World stage, as it did through Premier Zhou Enlai’s visit to African countries or the agreement to help build a railway between Tanzania and Zambia. By the late 1960s, however, China had turned away from these achievements, and most of its Asian and Third World potential was gone. Formerly radical countries from Ghana to Indonesia turned to the right and expelled the Chinese representatives. Even North Korea sided firmly with the Soviets, though it continued to receive Chinese aid—with great
schadenfreude
, one must assume. By 1970 only one Chinese alliance was fully
intact, that with North Vietnam, and that would collapse, with a vengeance, as soon as Saigon collapsed in 1975. The PRC was dangerously isolated—mostly by choice, it should be added—and its increasingly frenzied regime reckoned that war, this time with the Soviets, was right around the corner.

H
OW DID REVOLUTIONARY
C
HINA
get to this pretty pass? The catastrophes were mainly due to Mao’s hubris, China’s ill-conceived development plans, and its international isolation. By the summer of 1958, the CCP center in Beijing had ordered massive improvements in production in all fields. Through a Great Leap Forward, China would rapidly enter a new stage of development, Mao believed, and his enthusiasm carried the day within the party, even among economic experts who knew better. In the countryside all private property was abolished and peasants grouped into people’s communes in order to improve production. Within the communes all services were collective, including child care and care for the elderly. In many provinces children spent six days a week in care, only returning to their parents on Sundays, so that men and women could dedicate their lives fully to production. Peasants were ordered to carry out gigantic land reclamation campaigns, while their own produce was sent to the cities and sometimes abroad. Lack of fertilizer was made up for by demolishing barns, outhouses, and latrines—and in the end the peasants’ own dwellings—for the building material to be ground up and spread on the fields.

Large numbers of people wanted to believe in Mao’s new revolution and worked themselves to exhaustion for its success. Rumors of production miracles abounded: Watermelons as big as houses had been produced in Shaanxi, there had been a 600 percent increase in potato growing in Henan. Worse, the government set quotas for agricultural produce that could be exported out of the provinces based on entirely inflated production figures. Local CCP leaders lied about output to curry favor with their bosses. In some parts of the country villagers were
led to believe that they could help steel production by setting up backyard furnaces where they melted their household goods and, in the end, their tools, to present to the Communist leadership. By the late autumn of 1958 it was already clear that parts of the country were going hungry as result of these excesses. In the winter of 1958–1959, peasants started dying. By the time the Great Leap campaign was over in 1961, an estimated 45 million people, mostly peasants, had died from hunger, illness, and exhaustion. It became the greatest man-made catastrophe in human history, mainly because Mao and the other leaders would not beat a retreat even when the results of their campaign were plainly visible.
¹

The Soviets had observed the beginning of the Great Leap with much concern. Even if some of their experts sympathized with the methods the CCP wanted to use to force a new modernity onto China, the more level-headed reporting to Moscow predicted in the spring of 1958 that the human toll of Mao’s methods would be considerable. In private, Soviets advisers began warning their CCP colleagues of the potential results from the Leap. The Soviet attitude infuriated Mao. He decided to use a Soviet request for greater military coordination, along the lines of what NATO was doing in Europe, to vent his anger and to make his policy a question of Chinese national interest. The long-suffering Soviet ambassador Pavel Iudin—a Marxist philosopher who had been sent to China at Mao’s request to be on hand to discuss theoretical questions with the Chairman—was called to Mao’s new residence in the CCP leadership compound in the middle of the night to listen to Mao’s outpourings. “You only trust the Russians,” the Chairman shouted.

You never trust the Chinese. [To you] Russians are first-class, while we Chinese are inferior people, who are stupid and careless. . . . You think you are in a position to control us [through having] a few nuclear bombs. . . . You have never had faith in the Chinese people. Stalin was among the worst. The Chinese [Communists] were regarded
as second Titos; [we] were considered a backward nation. You have often stated that the Europeans used to look down on the Russians. I think some Russians now are looking down on the Chinese.
²

In the summer of 1958, Mao tried to use foreign affairs to drive domestic mobilization for his Great Leap. When the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, rushed to Beijing to clear up the “misunderstanding” on military cooperation, Mao treated him gruffly and with visible contempt. The Chairman listed all of his complaints against the Soviets, from the 1920s on. Not commenting on the amount of assistance the Soviets were providing, Mao instead criticized the behavior of some Soviet advisers. “You can bring complaints about the follies of our specialists, and we do not have your specialists. Therefore, it turns out that only we commit follies,” an exasperated Khrushchev sighed. “History is to blame for this,” Mao responded. “And we have to answer for it?” “You made a revolution first.” “And should we be blamed for this?” “That,” Mao said, “is why you have to send specialists.” At their second meeting, Mao received the Soviet leader poolside, in his swimming costume, fully aware that Khrushchev could not swim. With his visitor struggling to stay afloat at the back of the pool, Mao calmly did laps while lecturing the Soviets on Communist strategy. Upon Khrushchev’s return to Moscow, many Soviet leaders started wondering, for the first time, whether their treasured alliance with China was going to last.

Immediately after Khrushchev left, Mao decided to again attack the GMD-held islands near China’s coast. This time the aim was not so much to put pressure on the United States and Chiang Kai-shek as to create an international crisis in order to strengthen support at home. The Soviets were not informed before the attacks began but still gave the Chinese full diplomatic support. The second Taiwan Straits crisis blew over, but by 1959 Mao still seems to have reached the conclusion that his domestic aims were simply incompatible with keeping the original version of his Soviet alliance in place for much longer. When
Khrushchev again went to Beijing in October 1959 to attempt to straighten things out in the wake of mounting Chinese criticism, Mao would have nothing of it. He attacked the Soviet leader for being capitulationist toward the United States, for supporting India and other non-Communist countries, and for refusing to fully share nuclear weapons technology with China. Khrushchev shot back that the Chinese were extremist, militarist, and unwilling to cooperate. Marshal Chen Yi, the Chinese foreign minister, called Khrushchev a time-server to his face. “If you consider us time-servers, comrade Chen Yi, then do not offer me your hand,” Khrushchev replied. “I will not accept it. . . .You should not spit from the height of your Marshal title. You do not have enough spit. We cannot be intimidated. What a pretty situation we have: On one side, you use the formula ‘headed by the Soviet Union’ [about the international Communist movement], on the other hand, you do not let me say a word.”
³
Khrushchev left in the middle of his official visit. Sino-Soviet relations were in tatters.