by Philip Short
Ten days before, at a meeting to approve the new constitution, naming Beijing, the capital of the Ming and the Qing, as the new seat of government (in place of Nanjing), and Mao himself as Head of State, he had proclaimed:
The Chinese people, comprising one quarter of humanity, have now stood up. The Chinese have always been a great, courageous and industrious nation; it is only in modern times that they have fallen behind … [Today] we have closed ranks and defeated both domestic and foreign aggressors … Ours will no longer be a nation subject to insult and humiliation.36
Now, in the warm late autumn sunshine, with enormous red silk lanterns swinging in the breeze in front of the crimson walls of the Forbidden City, he repeated, in his high-pitched Hunanese brogue, to a crowd 100,000 strong, crammed into the narrow, walled plaza below: ‘We, the 475 million Chinese people, have stood up and our future is infinitely bright.’37
Beijing's new communist administrators had spent months preparing for this moment, when, as the locals put it, Mao's government would ‘put on new clothes’. The plaza itself had been enlarged. Groves of ancient silk trees had been cut down, concrete poured and flagstones laid, and floodlights erected on steel towers. A fading two-storey-high portrait of Chiang Kai-shek, painted on a steel sheet made by welding together flattened petrol cans, which had ornamented the Gate during the nationalists’ rule, had been replaced by an equally large portrait of Mao, hung from the ramparts to one side. The speech-making was followed by a military parade, led by PLA cavalry and long lines of captured American Army lorries and tanks. Then came civilian marchers, chanting, ‘Long live Chairman Mao! A long, long life to Chairman Mao!’, while Mao's answering voice floated down from the loudspeakers, giving the response: ‘Long live the People's Republic.’ As darkness fell, there was a spectacular fireworks display, which could be seen all over the city. Dancers carrying coloured paper lanterns, marked with the hammer-and-sickle and the red star, formed a frieze in the square below, depicting what one poetic soul described as ‘a huge fiery ship, the Chinese ship of state, riding on glowing blue-green waves’, while the noise of cymbals, trumpets and drums, mingled with the chanting of Mao's name, reverberated across the yellow-tiled roofs of the old imperial city.38
Next day the Soviet Union became the first country to recognise the new state.39 A motley group of minor communist parties and far left luminaries, ranging from the Work Committee of the Communist Party of Thailand to the British Labour Party MP, Connie Zilliacus, sent messages of congratulation.40 Mao began to prepare for his first visit abroad – to Moscow.
His readiness to leave China, even before the civil war had ended, testified both to his confidence in his colleagues and to the overriding importance he attached to this journey. As 1949 drew to a close, most of south-west China was still in nationalist hands, and an attempt by the PLA to take Jinmen Island (Quemoy), just off the coast of Fujian, had been beaten off with 9,000 communist casualties. In mid-November, Chiang Kai-shek flew back from Taiwan to Sichuan, where the GMD had established a temporary capital. He was still there on December 6, when Mao boarded a special train for Russia.41
It also spoke volumes about Mao's foreign policy priorities.
For the new communist government, there was no question of simply inheriting the diplomatic ties bequeathed by the nationalists. Mao wanted a rupture, a clean break, with the Western powers, to expunge the last remnants of a century of humiliation.42 Earlier that year he had explained to Anastas Mikoyan, a veteran member of the Soviet Politburo whom Stalin had sent on a fact-finding visit to China, that the policy of ‘leaning to one side’, which the government would follow, involved a degree of diplomatic isolation. Russian help would be welcomed, he said. But until China had ‘set its house in order’, others would be kept at arm's length. Only when China itself decided that the time was right would imperialist countries be permitted to establish diplomatic missions. Meanwhile their former representatives, and their citizens, would be put under strong pressure to leave.43
New China, the new ‘Middle Kingdom’, would make the barbarians wait at the gates, as old China had before it.
In a speech during the summer, Mao spelled out the implications of these decisions:
[The reactionaries say:] ‘You lean to one side.’ Precisely so … To sit on the fence is impossible … In the world, without exception, one either leans to the side of imperialism or to the side of socialism. Neutrality is mere camouflage and a third road does not exist … We belong to the anti-imperialist front headed by the USSR, and we can look for genuine friendly aid only from that front, not from the imperialist front.44
Yet there was an important nuance. Mao spoke of leaning, not becoming part of a monolithic block. China might belong to a Soviet-led ‘anti-imperialist front’ (just as the CCP had earlier belonged to a GMD-led ‘united front’), but in neither case did that mean that their policies were identical. To Mao, membership of a front included both unity and struggle.
Stalin's affronts and betrayals of CCP interests had not been forgotten.
Mao had asked three times to go to Moscow to meet the Soviet leader – in July 1947 and in January and July 1948 – and each time Stalin had fobbed him off.45 (A meeting was proposed the following November, but at that point the military situation made it impossible for Mao to leave China.) On two occasions the Russians had hinted – or at least, Mao had interpreted it that way – that communist forces should delay crossing the Yangtse and content themselves instead with controlling the northern half of the country. Caution was advisable, they explained, to avoid provoking the United States.46 But Mao knew, and Stalin knew, that a divided China was in Russia's, not in China's, interest. ‘There are real friends and false friends,’ Mao told Mikoyan pointedly. ‘False friends are friendly on the surface, but say one thing and mean another. They dupe you … We shall be on our guard against this.’47
Five months later, as the PLA pressed triumphantly southward amid a nationalist rout, Stalin made what amounted to an apology. He told Liu Shaoqi, then visiting Moscow to discuss Soviet aid: ‘Winners are always right. We feel that perhaps we hampered you in the past … We didn't know a lot about you, so it's possible that we made mistakes.’48
As the clock on the Spassky Tower struck noon, in bitterly cold weather on December 16, 1949, Mao's train pulled into the Yaroslavsky Station, near the Kremlin Wall, its stuccoed, gilt-and-gingerbread façade picked out in white and ochre paint, ablaze with red flags.
He was apprehensive. A few days earlier, in Sverdlovsk, while walking on the station platform, he had suddenly staggered, his face chalk-white and pouring sweat. After he had been helped to his carriage, the Russians were told he had a cold. It was an attack of neurasthenia.49 Stalin, for all his faults, was still to Mao the communist pontiff. The relationship they forged in the coming weeks would determine whether ‘leaning to one side’ could be translated into practical policy.
To the Soviet leaders, Mao was an enigma – the second most powerful communist leader in the world, and one of very few who had gained power without significant Russian help. Was he simply a communist original (who, in that case, would not fit easily into the Soviet scheme of things)? Or might he become another Tito whose defiance had led, a year earlier, to his excommunication from the communist camp?50 Stalin, too, wanted to put the relationship on a proper footing.
That night, at 6 p.m., the doors of the St Catherine's Hall in the Kremlin swung open, and Mao found Stalin and the entire Soviet Politburo drawn up to receive him. It was, and was intended to be, an exceptional gesture for an exceptional guest.51
The Russian leader greeted him effusively as ‘the good son of the Chinese people.’ But the underlying tensions surfaced moments later, when the Soviet leader, thinking that Mao was about to allude to their differences,I cut in with the same words he had used to Liu Shaoqi: ‘You're a winner now, and winners are always right. That's the rule.’52 A stilted conversation followed, in which Stalin asked Mao what he wanted his visit to a
chieve. ‘Something that doesn't [just] look good, but tastes good,’ Mao replied. The KGB chief, Lavrentii Beria, giggled when that was translated. Stalin insisted on knowing what it meant. Mao declined to be more explicit, and by the time the two-hour meeting ended, the Soviet leader was reduced to asking whether China had a meteorological service, and if Mao would agree to his works being translated into Russian.
In fact, Stalin knew full well exactly what Mao wanted. China expected Russia to abrogate the Sino-Soviet Friendship Treaty concluded with Chiang Kai-shek and to negotiate a new alliance, appropriate to the relationship between fraternal communist powers.
This Stalin was reluctant to do. The pretext was that the agreement with Chiang flowed from the Yalta accords with Britain and the US. Therefore, he told Mao, ‘a change in even one point could give England and America the legal grounds to raise questions about [other points]’, such as Soviet rights to former Japanese territory in the Kuriles and South Sakhalin. This was bunkum – and designedly so. It was Stalin's way of telling Mao that if he wanted a new relationship with Moscow it would have to be on Russia's terms. The existing treaty would remain formally in effect, and, in accepting it, Mao would be recognising Stalin's primacy. The most the Soviet leader would add, by way of sugaring the pill, was that there was nothing to stop the two governments informally modifying its contents.
Mao was familiar was that game.
In 1938, when Stalin had endorsed his leadership, the symbolic quid pro quo had been that Mao publicly acknowledge that Stalin had been correct in viewing the Xian Incident as a Japanese-inspired plot. Mao had paid the requisite lip-service. With Stalin, he said later, it was ‘a relationship between father and son, or between a cat and a mouse’.
But this time the stakes were far higher. Relations with Russia were the cornerstone of Mao's policies towards the rest of the world. If they continued to be based on Chinese subservience, what had the revolution achieved? If Russia insisted on perpetuating outdated treaty accords, why should capitalist countries agree to put their relations with China on a new footing?
Since the middle of 1946, when the Chinese communists had established themselves in Manchuria – and the Cold War had begun to transform the geopolitical map of East Asia – Stalin had paid close attention to developments in China. That year hundreds of Soviet advisers and medical personnel had been sent to work behind PLA lines in the north-east and a Soviet military intelligence unit was attached to Mao's headquarters. Military aid was at first parsimonious, but as trade with the Soviet Union developed across the Manchurian border, the PLA had been able to acquire substantial quantities of Soviet equipment, and by the time of Liu Shaoqi's visit to Moscow in June 1949, Stalin was ready to respond generously to their requests for assistance. ‘It is in the economy that we need your help,’ Mao had messaged him a few weeks earlier. ‘Without economic construction, we cannot realise the revolution.’ The Kremlin offered a 300 million US dollar loan, aid in ship-building, and the provision of naval artillery, fighter aircraft and training for Chinese pilots. When Liu returned home in August, he was accompanied by 220 Soviet experts in everything from finance and transportation to police work and cultural institutions. But Stalin continued to regard the Chinese communists as being at the stage of ‘bourgeois revolution’, and he repeatedly cautioned Mao against going too fast and trying to install a full-fledged communist regime like that in the Soviet Union itself.
Even in a period of warming relations there had been moments of grave tension. In January 1949, Mao had been infuriated when Stalin sent him detailed instructions on how to reply to a truce proposal from Chiang Kai-shek's acting successor, Li Zongren. In his telegram in response, he not only rejected the Soviet leader's advice, saying that if he followed it, ‘the broad popular masses … would find themselves in despair’, but, in an unprecedented act of defiance towards the leader of the communist world, went on to tell him how the CCP expected him to treat the issue at hand.
This time, too, Mao decided to dig in his heels.
In his usual elliptical fashion, he avoided confronting Stalin directly, focusing instead on a seemingly minor issue – whether or not Zhou Enlai should come to join him in Moscow. (If Zhou came, it would mean the Russians agreed to negotiate a new treaty; if he did not, the old treaty would continue.)
For the next two weeks, the talks were suspended.
Mao was left to stew, half prisoner, half cosseted guest, in the ponderous elegance of Stalin's personal dacha, in a birch forest a few miles west of Moscow. On December 21, he attended ceremonies marking the Soviet leader's seventieth birthday, where he was seated next to Stalin and made an appropriately fulsome speech. But this was a purely formal occasion and the Russians then abruptly cancelled talks which had been tentatively scheduled for the 23rd. Mao exploded in anger. ‘I have only three tasks here,’ he shouted at his Soviet minders, pounding the table. ‘The first is to eat, the second is to sleep, and the third is to shit’.53 Yet when Stalin telephoned him, two days later, Mao was evasive and refused to broach political issues. When he, in turn, telephoned Stalin, he was told the Soviet leader was out.
This byzantine battle of wills, as each man waited for the other to blink first, might have continued indefinitely had not Western journalists, puzzled by Mao's apparent disappearance, begun to speculate that he might be under house arrest. That prompted Stalin to send a Tass correspondent to interview him. Mao then indicated that he was ready to remain in Moscow for as long as it took to get an agreement. Soon afterwards, Stalin backed down. On January 2, 1950, Molotov was despatched to inform him that Zhou could come to Moscow: the old treaty would be scrapped, and a new one concluded in its place. ‘But what about Yalta?’ Mao enquired mischievously when he and Stalin next met. ‘The hell with that!’ the Soviet leader replied.54
Exactly what made him change his mind is unclear. Mao thought Britain's impending decision to recognise the Beijing government might have played the key role, by fuelling Stalin's paranoia that China might tilt to the West. But perhaps he simply recognised that, on this issue, Mao would not give way.
In any event, six weeks later, on February 14, the two foreign ministers, Zhou and Vyshinsky, signed the new ‘Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance’, with Stalin and Mao looking on. That night, in another break with precedent, the Soviet leader attended a reception Mao hosted in the ballroom of the Metropol Hotel. It was so unusual for him to leave the Kremlin that Russian security officials insisted on placing a bulletproof glass partition between the leaders and their guests, with the result that no one could hear the toasts until Mao asked that it be removed.
Appearances were again deceptive. The detailed negotiations had been painfully difficult. Stalin's interpreter, Nikolai Fedorenko, remembered the room where they were held as being like ‘a stage where a demonic show was being acted out’. Mao pressed for a cast-iron Soviet commitment to come to China's aid in the event of a US attack, only for Stalin to finagle by adding the condition that a state of war must have been declared. He was still more incensed by Stalin's demands for special privileges in Xinjiang and Manchuria. Stalin, for his part, remained convinced that Mao was an ersatz communist, a Chinese version of the eighteenth-century Russian peasant leader, Pugachev. ‘He mistrusted us,’ Mao complained later. ‘He thought our revolution was a fake.’55
None the less, a modus vivendi had been achieved. As Mao began the long rail journey home, he could take satisfaction in the fact that a solid foundation had been laid for China's new place in the world. With the civil war all but over, the government could now turn its attention to rebuilding the shattered economy, and taking the first, giddy steps on the road to socialism.
Four months later, at 4.40 a.m. on June 25, 1950, the Korean War broke out.56
Mao had been forewarned. The North Korean leader, Kim Il Sung, had flown to Beijing six weeks earlier to tell him that Moscow had approved a military offensive to reunify the peninsula. Stalin, wily as ever, had laid down a condit
ion: Kim must first get Mao's approval. ‘If you get kicked in the teeth,’ the Soviet leader had told him, ‘I shall not lift a finger.’ The implication was that Mao would then have to bail the Koreans out. In his discussions in China, Kim had omitted that part of the conversation.57
In Beijing, the war was deeply unwelcome. Not only was there uncertainty over how America would react, but the Chinese were themselves at that stage preparing to invade Taiwan.58 Mao had been suspicious enough of Kim's story to send a message to Stalin, asking him to confirm that he had approved the attack. This Stalin did, but took care in his reply to place the ball squarely in Mao's court: a final decision, he said, must be taken by ‘the Chinese and Korean comrades together’. If the Chinese disagreed, the decision should be postponed.59 That left Mao with no real choice. A hundred thousand Koreans had fought alongside Chinese troops in Manchuria. How could he now tell Kim that he must not try to ‘liberate’ his own land? The North Korean was informed that China acquiesced.60
But mistrust on both sides continued. Kim decreed that the Chinese should be kept in the dark about the date of the attack and excluded from the military planning.61
To Chiang Kai-shek, the war was a godsend. Six months earlier, Truman had made clear that the US would not intervene to protect the nationalists, should Taiwan be attacked. In April, Chinese troops had made a large-scale amphibious landing on the island of Hainan, off the coast of Guangdong, crushing nationalist resistance in two weeks and killing or wounding 33,000 GMD soldiers. It looked like, and was, a dress rehearsal for the invasion of Taiwan itself. The next step would be attacks on Quemoy and the other offshore islands, followed by the final assault, to take place a year later.62