Mao: The Unknown Story

by Jung Chang

  To officials in the know, Mao met the widespread disquiet about opium-growing by calling it one of the Party’s “two mistakes,” but he went on to justify both in the same breath. One mistake, he said on 15 January 1945, “was that during the Long March we took people’s things”—“but,” he immediately added, “we couldn’t have survived if we hadn’t”; “the other,” he said, “was to grow a certain thing [mou-wu, i.e., opium] — but without growing this we couldn’t have got through our crisis.”

  YENAN STAYED extremely poor even years after Mao had taken control of China. A visitor from Communist Hungary, itself by no means rich, commented on “indescribably squalid and poverty-stricken villages” near Yenan in 1954. In fact, all the Red bases remained among the poorest areas in China, and the reason was precisely that they had been Red bases. An exchange between Mao and a Swedish enthusiast in 1962 ran:

  J. MYRDAL: I have just come back from a trip to the Yenan area.

  MAO: That is a very poor, backward, underdeveloped … part of the country.

  MYRDAL: I lived in a village … I wanted to study the change in the countryside …

  MAO: Then I think it was a very bad idea that you went to Yenan … Yenan is only poor and backward. It was not a good idea that you went to a village there.

  MYRDAL: But it has a great tradition — the revolution and the war — I mean, after all, Yenan is the beginning—

  MAO [interrupting]: Traditions — [laughing]. Traditions — [laughing].

  Control of guns was watertight. An Austrian doctor kidnapped by the Communists in the later 1940s observed that if you heard wolves, you knew you were in a Red area. No one we interviewed recalled hearing a shot in Yenan throughout the war. One night, when a Russian radio operator on the outskirts of Yenan shot a wolf that had killed one of their two guard dogs, Mao’s guards immediately appeared to complain that the sound of the shots had “very much unsettled” Mao. Another time, Russian liaison Vladimirov shot a rabid dog (rabies was common) that was attacking his guard dog. A group of Mao’s guards instantly descended, saying that Mao “was very agitated” and that the shooting “had interrupted his work.”

  27. THE RUSSIANS ARE COMING! (1945–46 AGE 51–52)

  IN FEBRUARY 1945, at Yalta in the Crimea, Stalin confirmed to Roosevelt and Churchill that Russia would enter the Pacific War two or three months after Germany’s defeat. This meant the Soviet army would enter China, and thus give Mao his long-awaited chance to take the country. Mao had made a shrewd assessment as far back as 1923: communism, he had said then, “had to be brought into China from the north by the Russian army.” Now, twenty-two years later, this was about to become reality.

  Stalin did not have to persuade Roosevelt and Churchill to let him tail-end on the war against Japan. They wanted him involved. At the time, the US atomic bomb had not been tested, and the feeling was that Soviet entry would hasten the defeat of Japan and save Allied lives. The two Western leaders accepted Stalin’s demands for “compensation,” neither seeming to realize that Stalin needed no inducement at all to come in. They agreed not only to accept “the status quo” in Outer Mongolia (in effect, allowing Stalin to keep it), but to turn the clock back decades and restore the Tsarist privileges in China, including extraterritorial control over the Chinese Eastern Railway and two major ports in Manchuria.

  Stalin used the excuse of fighting Japan, at the very last minute, to invade China and create the conditions for Mao to seize power. A hint came right after Yalta, on 18 February, when Russia’s governmental mouthpiece, Izvestia, wrote of Moscow’s “desire to solve the Far Eastern problem taking due account of the interests of the Chinese Communists.”

  Mao was ecstatic, and his goodwill towards the Russians extended to their sex lives. Within days, he was trying to fix them up. “Haven’t you liked a single pretty woman here?” Mao asked Russian liaison Vladimirov on 26 February. “Don’t be shy …” He returned to the theme a week later: “Well, there are attractive girls, aren’t there? And extremely healthy. Don’t you think so? Maybe Orlov would like to look around for one? And maybe you, too, have an eye for someone?”

  Vladimirov wrote:

  towards evening a girl appeared … She shyly greeted me, saying she had come to tidy up the house …

  I took out a stool, and placed it under our only tree, near the wall. She sat down, tense, but smiling. Then she amiably answered my questions, and was all the while waiting cautiously, her legs crossed, small slender legs in woven slippers …

  She was a smashing girl, indeed!

  … she told me she was a university student, just enrolled. How young she was …

  On 5 April, Moscow told Tokyo it was breaking their Neutrality Pact. One month later Germany surrendered. This came right in the middle of the CCP congress that ratified Mao’s supremacy. Mao fired up the delegates with the sense that victory was imminent for the CCP as well. The Soviet army would definitely come to help them, he said, and then, with a big smile, he put the side of his hand to his neck like an ax head, and announced: “If not, you can chop my head off!” Mao delivered the most effusive comments he ever made about Stalin in his entire life. “Is Stalin the leader of the world revolution? Of course he is.” “Who is our leader? It is Stalin. Is there a second person? No.” “Every member of our Chinese Communist Party is Stalin’s pupil,” Mao intoned. “Stalin is the teacher to us all.”

  AT TEN PAST MIDNIGHT on 9 August 1945, three days after America dropped the first atomic bomb on Hiroshima, over 1.5 million Soviet and Mongolian troops swept into China along a huge front stretching more than 4,600 km, from the shores of the Pacific to the province of Chahar — far wider than the European front from the Baltic to the Adriatic. In April, Mao had ordered those of his troops who were near the Russian points of entry to be ready to “fight in coordination with the Soviet Union.” As soon as the Russo-Mongolian army entered China, Mao went to work around the clock dispatching troops to link up with them and seize the territory they rolled over. He moved his office to an auditorium at Date Garden, where he received a stream of military commanders, drafting telegrams on a Ping-Pong table he used as a desk, pausing only to wolf down food.

  Under the Yalta agreements, before entering China, Russia was supposed to sign a treaty with Chiang Kai-shek, but it stormed in anyway without one. A week after the Russians invaded, with their army driving hundreds of kilometers into China, Chiang’s foreign minister reluctantly put his signature on a Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Alliance, which formally severed Outer Mongolia from China. Chiang compromised in return for the Russians recognizing him as the sole legitimate government of China and promising to hand back all the territory they occupied to him and only to him.

  In spite of his promise, Stalin found myriad ways to assist Mao. His first ploy was to refuse to commit to a timetable for withdrawal. He made a verbal promise to withdraw his troops within three months, but refused to incorporate this in the agreement; and it was attached only as a non-binding “minute.” In fact, Stalin was to stay much longer than three months, and was to use the period of occupation to thwart Chiang and secretly transfer territory and assets to Mao.

  Japan surrendered on 15 August. The occasion was greeted in China with firecrackers and street parties, tears and toasts, drums and gongs. Most of China had been at war for eight years, and some regions for fourteen years. During that time at least one-third of the population had been occupied by the Japanese. Tens of millions of Chinese had died, untold millions had been crippled, and more than 95 million people — the largest number in history — had been made refugees. People yearned for peace.

  What they got instead was an all-engulfing nationwide civil war, which broke out in earnest at once. In this, Stalin was right behind Mao; in fact, the Russians did not stop their drive south when Japan surrendered, but pressed on for several weeks afterwards. The area Russian troops moved into in northern China was larger than the entire territory they occupied in Eastern Europe. Russian paratroopers
landed as far west as Baotou, the railhead due north of Mao’s base, some 750 km west of the Manchurian border. By the end of August, with Russian help, the CCP had occupied much of Chahar and Jehol provinces, including their capitals, Zhangjiakou and Chengde, both only some 150 km from Peking, to the northwest and northeast respectively. For a while Mao planned to move his capital to Kalgan, and camel trains carrying documents and luggage set off thither from Yenan.

  The key prize was Manchuria, which contained China’s best deposits of coal, iron and gold, giant forests — and 70 percent of its heavy industry. Manchuria was bordered on three sides by Soviet-controlled territory — Siberia, Mongolia and North Korea. The border with Siberia alone was over two thousand kilometers long. “If we have Manchuria,” Mao had told his Party, “our victory will be guaranteed.”

  Neither the Communists nor the Nationalists had armies in the region, which had been occupied by the Japanese, efficiently and ruthlessly, for fourteen years. But Red guerrillas were far closer than Chiang’s troops. The Russians immediately opened up Japanese arms depots to these Reds, including the biggest arsenal, in Shenyang, which alone contained about “100,000 guns, thousands of artillery pieces, and large quantities of ammunition, textiles and food,” according to a secret CCP circular. Only a few months earlier, the Communist 8th Route Army had had only 154 pieces of heavy artillery.

  The bonanza was not just in weapons, but also in soldiers. The troops of the Japanese puppet Manchukuo regime, almost 200,000 strong, had surrendered en masse to the Soviet army, and were now made available by the Russians to be “re-enlisted” by the CCP. So were hundreds of thousands of men newly unemployed as a result of Russian depredations and outright destruction. The Soviet occupation forces carted off whole factories and machinery as “war booty,” and even demolished industrial installations. The equipment removed by the Russians was estimated to be worth US$858 million (US$2 billion at current replacement cost). Many local people were deprived of their livelihood. The CCP, which had originally dispatched 60,000 troops into Manchuria, saw its force snowball to well over 300,000.

  THIS EMPOWERMENT of the CCP was carried out by the Russians in maximum secrecy, as it was in stark violation of the treaty Moscow had just signed with Chiang. The Generalissimo’s best, combat-hardened troops, who were American-trained and equipped, were stuck in South China and Burma, far away from the areas Russia held. To get them to Manchuria fast, he desperately needed American ships. America wanted him to talk with Mao about peace; so under American pressure, the Generalissimo invited Mao to come to Chongqing for talks. America’s China policy had been defined by the late President Roosevelt (who had died on 12 April 1945 and was succeeded by his vice-president, Harry Truman) as to “knock heads together,” and the US ambassador in China had earlier suggested the idea of bringing the Generalissimo and Mao to the White House together if the two Chinese leaders reached a deal.

  Mao did not want to go to Chongqing, and twice turned down Chiang’s invitation, mainly because he did not trust Chiang not to harm him. This would be Mao’s first venture out of his lair since he had started running his own military force in 1927. He told Chiang he was sending Chou En-lai instead. But Chiang insisted the summit must take place with Mao, and in the end Mao had to accept. Stalin had cabled him no fewer than three times to go. While secretly helping Mao to seize territory, Stalin wanted him to play the negotiations game. If Mao refused to show up, he would look as though he were rejecting peace, and America would be more likely to give its full commitment to Chiang.

  Mao resented this pressure from Stalin. It was to be his biggest grievance against Stalin, and one he would keep bringing up for the rest of his life.

  Stalin told Mao that his safety would be assured by both Russia and the US. The Founder of Chiang’s FBI, Chen Li-fu, told us that the Nationalists had no designs on Mao’s life “because the Americans guaranteed his safety.” Mao knew he would also have secret protection from his strategically placed moles, especially the Chongqing garrison chief, Chang Chen. Even so, he insisted on US ambassador Patrick Hurley coming to Yenan and escorting him to Chongqing as insurance against being bumped off in mid-air.

  With all these precautions in place, Mao at last flew off to Chongqing in an American plane on 28 August, leaving Liu Shao-chi in charge in Yenan. When the plane landed, Mao stuck close to Hurley, and got into Hurley’s car, shunning the one Chiang had sent for him.

  Mao also took out insurance of the kind he knew best, by ordering an offensive against Nationalist forces while he was in Chongqing, which demonstrated that the Reds would escalate the civil war if anything happened to him. He told his top generals, who were about to be flown (by the Americans) to 8th Route Army HQ: Fight without any restraint. The better you fight, the safer I am. When his troops won the battle at a place called Shangdang, Mao beamed: “Very good! The bigger the battle, the bigger the victory, the more hope I will be able to return.”

  Mao flew into one moment of panic in Chongqing, when Hurley left on 22 September, followed by Chiang on the 26th, and he feared he was being set up for a hit. Chou was dispatched to the Soviet embassy to ask if the Russians would let Mao stay there, but Ambassador Apollon Petrov was non-committal, and got no reply when he wired Moscow for instructions. Mao was furious.

  Mao gained a lot by going to Chongqing. He talked to Chiang as an equal, “as though the convicts were negotiating with the warders,” one observer remarked. Foreign embassies invited him not as a rebel, but as a statesman, and he played the part, behaving diplomatically, and laughing off a pointed challenge from Churchill’s no-nonsense envoy General Carton de Wiart, who told Mao that he did “not consider that [the Reds] contributed much towards defeating the Japs,” and that Mao’s troops only “had a nuisance value, but no more.” Even when put on the spot in a tough face-to-face encounter with the US commander in China, General Albert Wedemeyer, about the murder and mutilation by the Reds of an American officer called John Birch, Mao showed aplomb. And he kept his cool when Wedemeyer told him, with more than a hint of a threat, that the US was planning to bring atomic bombs into China, as well as up to half a million troops. By appearing conciliatory, Mao scored a propaganda victory.

  The peace talks lasted forty-five days, but the whole episode was theater. Mao went around exclaiming “Long live Generalissimo Chiang!” and saying he supported Chiang as the leader of China. But this meant nothing. Mao wanted China for himself, and he knew he could only get it through civil war.

  Chiang also knew that war was inevitable, but he needed a peace agreement to satisfy the Americans. Although he had no intention of observing it, he endorsed an agreement that was signed on 10 October. And this behavior brought benefits, at least in the short term. While Mao was in Chongqing, US forces occupied the two main cities in northern China, Tianjin and Peking, and held them for Chiang, and started to ferry his troops to Manchuria.

  After the treaty was signed, Chiang invited Mao to stay with him for the night; and the next day they had breakfast together before Mao departed for Yenan. The moment Mao’s back was turned, the Generalissimo gave vent to his true feelings in his diary: “The Communist Party is perfidious, base, and worse than beasts.”

  WHEN MAO RETURNED to Yenan on 11 October he immediately started military operations to keep Chiang’s army out of Manchuria. Lin Biao was appointed commander of the Red forces there. Tens of thousands of cadres had already been dispatched, coming under a new Manchuria Bureau whose leaders the Russians flew secretly from Yenan to Shenyang in mid-September.

  Mao ordered troops deployed around Shanhaiguan, at the eastern end of the Great Wall. His forces had occupied this strategic pass from China proper into Manchuria in cooperation with the Soviet army on 29 August. He asked the Russians to take care of the seaports and the airports. With Russian encouragement, CCP units posing as bandits fired on US ships trying to land Chiang’s troops, in one case shooting up the launch of the US commander, Admiral Daniel Barbey, and forcing him back out to sea.


  The US 7th Fleet finally had to dock at Qinhuangdao, a port just south of Manchuria, and one of Chiang’s best armies disembarked. On the night of 15–16 November it stormed the Shanhaiguan pass. Mao had called for a “decisive battle” and told his troops to hold out at the pass, but Chiang’s divisions simply swept through them. Mao’s forces disintegrated so overwhelmingly that one Nationalist commander lamented proudly that “we don’t even have enough people to accept all the arms being surrendered.”

  The Communist forces had no experience of trench warfare, or of any kind of modern warfare. As guerrillas, their first principle, as laid down by Mao himself, was “retreat when the enemy advances.” And that is what they did now. Chiang’s armies, on the other hand, had fought large-scale engagements with the Japanese: in Burma, they had put more Japanese out of action in one campaign than the entire Communist army had in eight years in the whole of China. The Nationalist supremo in Manchuria, General Tu Yu-ming, had been in command of major battles against the Japanese, whereas Mao’s commander, Lin Biao, had taken part in one single ambush in September 1937, eight years before, since when he had hardly smelled gunpowder. By studiously avoiding combat with the Japanese, Mao had ended up with an army that could not fight a modern war.

  The Reds had been in some frontal engagements during the Japan war, but mostly against weak Nationalist units. They had not faced the cream of Chiang’s forces, who, as one top Red commander wrote to Mao, were fresh, well-trained, “US-style troops,” and battle-ready.

  The CCP troops were not only badly trained, but also poorly motivated. After the Japanese war, many just wanted peace. The Reds had been using a propaganda song called “Defeat Japan so we can go home.” After Japan’s surrender, the song was quietly banned, but the sentiment — let’s go home — could not be quenched as easily as the song.