No history of modern China or the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), which celebrated its ninetieth birthday last week, can ever be written without Mao Zedong, who created a communist republic in 1949. It was the height of the Cold War and pursuit of independent policies was one of the most daunting challenges that faced him, especially because the US was backing his opponents- the Chinese nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek. On the other hand, Stalin was willing to help only if Mao accorded him the big brother status.
Any leader could have cracked under such pressure but it goes to the strength of Mao’s character that he refused to act as a handmaiden of either of the two superpowers. Being a communist, he was inclined towards the Soviets despite the cold shoulder given to him by Stalin, when he first visited Russia in December 1949. After putting up Mao in a dacha, Stalin first cancelled all official engagements with him and later refused to take even his phone calls. This really fretted Mao: “I have only three tasks here. The first is to eat; the second is to sleep; the third is to shit.” This was because unlike the communist leaders of Eastern Europe, he had refused to adopt a subservient attitude towards Stalin because he desired to be treated as an equal partner rather than a vassal.
This coolness with Moscow grew into an estrangement when Khrushchev described the US President Eisenhower as a man of peace. Disagreeing with the Soviet posture, Mao communicated to the Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko that “there should be no giving way to the Americans and that we should act on the principle of meeting force with force.” He was not afraid of the US might and often ridiculed America as a paper tiger. To mock Khrushchev for his chicken- hearted approach towards Eisenhower, Mao ordered a collection of tales entitled “Stories about not being afraid of ghosts.”
This was because Mao had a history of bitter experiences with the Americans, for which the latter were to be blamed. Instead of being friendly or neutral, the Americans had opposed the creation of communist China from the very beginning. The very Chinese nationalists against whom Mao was waging a struggle were assisted by the US. Tibet, too, remained a headache because the CIA was helping the anti-communists, there. In addition, the Americans continuously engaged him in a low intensity war from Taiwan, where they had created a secret group of pilots called ‘Black Bats’ that undertook 800 air missions up to 1967 to drop anti-communist agents in China.
The strategist in Mao could not rule out a nuclear attack from the US and so decided to sound out the Russians. Sketching a likely scenario, he told Gromyko that instead of capitulating, the Chinese armies would retreat into the depths of the country allowing the US forces to penetrate deep inside the Chinese heartland. Once the Americans would reach the middle provinces, the Chinese forces would grip them in a pincer move and then he expected the Soviets to bang the Americans with everything they had got. A flabbergasted Gromyko refused to commit any Soviet support. Such a weak-kneed response from the most powerful communist friend disappointed Mao, who decided to go nuclear in 1964.
In the next decade, he distributed about $2 billion to support the cause of the guerilla and national liberation movements, and thus emerged as the undisputed leader of the Third World. As Maoism became the new voice of the masses in a stark defiance to the superpowers, the US government responded by imposing a trade embargo; instructed CIA to mount operations in its frontier regions and its information agency (USIA) spent millions of dollars on overt and covert propaganda against China. The visibly irritated US secretary of state, Dean Rusk cried out that “Peking’s behavior is violent, irascible, unyielding and hostile”.
The long spell of this American negativity towards China was finally broken by President Nixon, whose January 1969 handwritten note read: “We do not want 800,000,000 [Chinese] living in angry isolation. We want contact.” When the Americans begged for contact, Mao was gracious enough to grant an audience in July 1971. Nixon felt so elated that he took his staff to a dinner and in the heat of excitement, ordered a $600 bottle of wine to celebrate the occasion, the price of which was bargained down to half by his aide, John Ehrlichman. While Nixon termed his visit to China as “the week that changed the world”; Mao felt that the United States was just beginning to evolve “from a monkey into a man, not quite man yet, the tail is still there.”
It may be a bit embarrassing for the Americans to know that the same Mao, who was accused of fomenting violence throughout the world by Johnson, was later humoured by their national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, when he told him that as a professor at Harvard, he had assigned Mao’s writings to his students because he had been able to move a nation and change the world. The down to earth Chinese Helmsman casually responded that there was nothing instructive in his writings and that he had “only been able to change a few places in the vicinity of Peking.”
Both the Americans were totally bowled over by Mao’s charisma: Nixon by his ‘remarkable sense of humour’ and ‘lightening’ mind, terming his handshake with the Chairman as ‘the most moving moment’ of his life. Kissinger was even more eulogising. Recalling his conversations with the Chinese Giant as ‘the most intense, important and far-reaching of my White House experience’, he concluded that with the possible exception of the French President Charles de Gaulle, he had never met anyone who “so distilled raw, concentrated will power.” On the other hand, Mao’s measure of these American statesmen was quite instructive: he was appreciative of Nixon but dismissed Kissinger as “a funny little man… shuddering with nerves.”
The writer is an academic and journalist. He can be reached at [email protected]
