After that, in the single greatest American miscalculation of the war, MacArthur decided to go all the way to the Yalu because he was sure the Chinese would not come in, and so made his troops infinitely more vulnerable. Finally, Mao believed that the political purity and revolutionary spirit of his men greatly outweighed America’s superior weaponry (and its corrupt capitalist soul) and so, after an initial great triumph in the far North, had pushed his troops too far south, taking horrendous losses in the process. For a time it seemed like the only person who got what he wanted was Stalin, who, fearing Titoism on Mao’s part, and a possible Chinese connection to the Americans, was not unhappy when the Chinese decided to fight the Americans. But even he, so cold-blooded and calculating, miscalculated several times. He originally thought that the Americans would not enter the war, and then they did. If he was not at first unhappy with the idea of them fighting the Chinese (with the Russians sitting on the sidelines), then the long-range consequence for the Soviets would prove complicated indeed. The Chinese would remain bitter about what he did not do for them in those vital early months, and those feelings of resentment contributed to the Sino-Soviet split a few years later. But perhaps even more important, the Chinese entrance into the war had a profound and long-lasting effect on how Americans looked on the issue of national security. It gave the ultimate push forward to the vision embodied in NSC 68. It greatly increased the Pentagon’s influence and helped convert the country toward far more of a national security state than it had previously been, so increasing the forces driving that dynamic that in ten years Dwight Eisenhower, in his farewell speech as president, would warn of a “military-industrial complex.” It would help define the Communist world, in American eyes, for years—and quite incorrectly—as a monolith, and so diminish the political influence of men like George Kennan, who placed greater emphasis on nationalism and age-old historical imperatives. It would poison American politics, where the great fear would become—for domestic political reasons rather than for geopolitical ones—losing a country to the Communists. Because of that, American policy toward Asia became deeply flawed, and this would profoundly affect American policy toward a country barely on the American radar screen at the time, Vietnam.
Certainly Kim Il Sung miscalculated, not just that the Americans would not send their troops to defend South Korea but the myth of his own popularity and that of his revolution, convinced as he was that two hundred thousand Southern peasants would rise up as one when his troops moved south. He not only failed to make his country whole but encouraged the Americans to upgrade the importance of South Korea, not only defending it militarily but financing its growth in the postwar era into an infinitely more viable society than his North. Fifty years after the end of the war, there were still American troops garrisoned there, and the South had become something of an economic beacon to underdeveloped nations, its economy infinitely more vital than that of the Soviet Union itself in the late 1980s. Comparably the North remained a sad, grim backwater, as xenophobic as it was totalitarian and economically destitute.
FOR MANY AMERICANS, except perhaps a high percentage of those who had actually fought there, Korea became something of a black hole in terms of history. In the year following the cease-fire, it became a war they wanted to know less rather than more about. In China the reverse was true. For the Chinese it was a proud and successful undertaking, a rich part of an old nation’s new history. To them it represented not just a victory, but more important, a kind of emancipation for the new China from the old China, which had so long been subjugated by powerful Western nations. The new China had barely been born, and yet it had stalemated not merely America, the most powerful nation in the world, the recent conquerors of both Japan and Germany, but the entire UN as well, or by their more ideological scorekeeping, all the imperialist nations of the world and their lackeys and running dogs. In that sense it had been a victory of almost immeasurable proportions, and it had been, in their minds, theirs and theirs virtually alone. The Russians had committed some hardware, but had held back at the critical moment on manpower, men who had talked big and then had cheered from the sidelines. The North Koreans had been boastful, far too confident of their own abilities, and then had failed miserably at crucial moments, and it was the Chinese who had saved them. It was not out of character and hardly a surprise in the eyes of the Chinese that the North Koreans, in their historic accounts of the war, largely withheld credit from the Chinese. They were not, the feeling went, very good about being saved. If the Chinese at that moment had lacked the military hardware to chase the Americans off Taiwan, then they had instead used their abundant manpower, their ingenuity, and the courage of their ordinary soldiers to stalemate the Westerners on land. Afterward, the rest of the world had been forced to treat China as a rising world power.
More than that of anyone else it was Mao’s personal victory. He had pushed to go ahead when almost everyone else had wavered and had feared that their brand-new China, already financially and militarily exhausted by the sheer struggle of taking power after the civil war, might fail. Mao was the one who had seen the political benefits, both international and domestic, of making a stand in Korea. If the consequences had turned out to be far bloodier than he had imagined, if the Americans with their superior weaponry had eventually fought better than he had expected and inflicted greater damage on his armies, then he could accept that; he had a tolerance for gore as part of the price of revolution, and he headed a nation that might not be rich in material things, but was very rich in manpower, in the numbers of men it could sacrifice on the battlefield on its way to greatness. That was something he had always believed in when most of the others around him hesitated. It was not that he knew the demographics better than the others in the leadership group; it was that he was willing to make the calculations more cold-bloodedly than they did.
What had been at stake in the Korean War, and it was to hang over subsequent wars in Asia, was the ability to bear a cost in human life, the ability of an Asian nation to match the technological superiority of the West with the ability to pay the cost in manpower. During Korea and soon enough in Vietnam, American military commanders and theorists alike would talk about the fact that life in Asia was cheaper than it was in the West, and they would see their job as one in which they used vastly superior military technology to attain a more favorable battlefield balance, even as their Asian adversaries were determined to prove to them that in the end that was not doable, that there would always be a price and it would always be too high for an American undertaking so distant, and so geopolitically peripheral.
Because the Chinese viewed Korea as a great success, Mao became more than ever the dominant figure in Chinese politics. He had shrewdly understood the domestic political benefits of having his country at war with the Americans. As he had predicted, the war had been a defining moment between the old China and the new one, and it had helped isolate those supporters of the old China—those Chinese who had been connected to Westerners—and turned them into enemies of the state. Many were destroyed—either murdered or ruined economically—in the purges that accompanied and then followed the war. From then on there was no alternative political force to check Mao; he had been the great, all-powerful Mao before the war began, and now, more than ever, his greatness was assured in the eyes of his peers on the Central Committee, who were no longer, of course, his peers. Before the war he had been the dominant figure of the Central Committee, a man without equals; afterward he was the equivalent of a new kind of Chinese leader, a people’s emperor. He stood alone. No one had more houses, more privileges, more young women thrown at him, eager to pay him homage, more people to taste his food lest he be poisoned at one of his different residences. No one could have been contradicted less frequently. The cult of personality, which he had once been so critical of, soon came to please him, and in China his cult matched that of Stalin.
There was in all this a scenario not just for political miscalculation but for something darker, fo
r potential madness with so much power vested in one man, a man to whom so much damage had been done earlier in his life. That was always a critical element of what happened next: Mao as a young man, not unlike Stalin, had been hunted too long and too relentlessly, as it were, by so many enemies; the deepest, most unwavering kind of paranoia grew out of that past and was the most natural part of his emotional and political makeup. At the same time he had become the principal architect of an entirely new political economic-social system. He existed and operated in a nation without any personal limits on him and yet where everyone could be an enemy. Both his power and his paranoia were without limits. He who had been for so long the ultimate outsider now lived a life of imperial grandiosity. He no longer needed to listen to others; if the others differed from him on issues, it was because they did not hold China’s welfare as close to their hearts as he did, and were perhaps enemies of his and of China as well—the two he judged to be the same.
He was sure that he was right on all issues—his words as they escaped his mouth were worthy of being codified as laws. China, he had decided, his China, was ready to rush into modernity—the Great Leap Forward, it was called, and the burden of turning a poor agricultural society into a modern industrial state virtually overnight fell on the peasants. If he had once been uniquely sensitive to their needs, more tuned to them as a political force than anyone else in the leadership, he now seemed prepared to put the entire burden of modernization, brutal though it would be, on them for his larger purpose. His new China would, if need be, be built on their backs. It was their job to make his dreams, no matter how unlikely, come true. The Great Leap Forward was probably the first example of a turn toward madness: as it went on, the peasants suffered more and more, under growing pressure to produce more agriculturally than ever before, even as there were conflicting pressures for them to convert to a kind of primitive industrial base, as if there were to be a small foundry in every Chinese backyard. The Great Leap Forward was always more vision than reality. Figures on agricultural production were severely doctored to make the program look like a success. Almost everyone in the bureaucracy knew that it was largely a failure—the phrase that the distinguished Yale historian Jonathan Spence used was “catastrophic hardship”—but for a long time no one dared challenge Mao. The genuine independence of the rest of the Central Committee seemed in decline; the power and authority of Mao in a constant ascent. His will had become the national will; his truths were everyone’s truths. He was never wrong. If he said that night was day, then night had become day.
25. THE KOREAN PENINSULA AFTER THE CEASE-FIRE, JULY 27, 1953
Because his hold over the government was so complete, because his need to dominate every decision was so total, he forced anyone who was a potential critic or dissenter, no matter how essentially loyal, into the most dangerous role. Those who challenged him were not merely wrong, they could become, if the issue were serious enough, enemies of the people. Those who thought they were his friends and peers and old colleagues were, it turned out, badly mistaken; they were his friends and allies only as long as they agreed with him on all issues all the time. No one suffered more than one of his oldest allies, Marshal Peng. He was a simple man who had always known his limits and thus his place, a true Communist, a man who always deferred to Mao on politics. But Peng was also a proud man, every bit as confident of his sense of the peasants’ welfare. Peng became a dissenter almost involuntarily—almost, it seemed, as if Mao wanted a break with him, wanted to turn on him and make him an enemy. By 1959, the early results of the Great Leap Forward were in and China was in the midst of a terrible famine. Yet ever higher agricultural yields were being reported. Almost every senior official understood this—that the chairman’s Great Leap was buttressed by lies and falsified statistics, but no one dared take him on.
Finally Peng did. He was by then the minister of defense; as the Sino-Soviet split had become more serious, it was believed that he felt that it had gone too far. That in itself might have been a problem. But there had been no break with Mao. Peng’s very simplicity, his lack of political instincts, his hard-won old-soldier truths were what involuntarily turned him into a rebel. In 1959, he returned to his boyhood region around Hunan and spoke with the local peasants, who were quite candid with him about their plight, and he discovered that there was a vast Potemkin Village arising in China, that the truth as envisioned by the country’s highest officials and reported to them, and the truth as borne on the shoulders of its ordinary people, were completely different. Then, in the summer of 1959, six years after the end of the war, thinking he was a good member of the Party, almost surely not understanding the full consequences of what he was doing, thinking he would have some political allies because he had such powerful truths on his side, Peng went to a conference of the Party leadership at Lushan and there wrote a cautionary private letter to Mao about what he felt were some of the problems. The letter was filled with the obligatory references to all the successes they had gained, but it did contain a surprising number of cautionary warnings. Mao immediately reprinted it and made it available to everyone at the conference, changing the nature of the letter, and thereby casting Peng as an enemy of the government. With that, Peng had apparently played into Mao’s hands—he asked for his letter back, but did not get it. Mao turned the letter into a frontal political challenge. Though almost everyone at the meeting agreed with him and knew the larger truth of what he had written, no one supported him publicly. As Jonathan Spence noted, “Mao…[treated]…Peng’s well intentioned and confidential comments as tantamount to treason, but then when Mao circulated copies of the letter to the other senior members of the Communist Party, none of them came to Peng’s support, even though most of them knew that the Marshal’s analysis was correct. It was the ultimate act of political corruption. It meant that the Central Committee by then reflected the whims of Mao, no matter how mad, more than it did the needs and realities of China. Historians,” Spence added, “now see this period as a turning point in the collapse of moral courage at the heart of the Party apparatus.” In the next seven years, Spence noted, “more than 20 million Chinese died of famine.” The madness had been not just legitimized, but institutionalized.
With that, the chairman called on Marshal Lin Biao, a longtime rival of Peng’s, and asked him to appear at the conference and attack Peng. It was over for Peng—he was no longer defense minister; he was soon under house arrest; and as the Cultural Revolution eventually took place, starting in 1966, he became a familiar target, placed on stages in show-and-abuse theaters, where he was repeatedly attacked physically and verbally, humiliated as part of a vast national theater where he was supposed to confess his crimes. He was eventually beaten to death, a bitter payback for so many years of bravery and loyalty. One of the principal charges against him made by the Red Guards was that he had “opposed Chairman Mao all his life.” When the Red Guards attacked and beat him, crushing his ribs and his lungs, often knocking him unconscious, he never bent. “I fear nothing,” he would shout at his investigators. “You can shoot me. Your days are numbered. The more you interrogate, the firmer I’ll become.” By the time he died from his beatings, he had been interrogated 130 times. As Mao destroyed Peng, he destroyed much of what had been the best and most idealistic part of the Chinese revolution, turning his government in the process into one where only his own monomania could flourish.
BY THE BEGINNING of the twenty-first century, no society seemed more different from the South than North Korea. To the degree that there were successes in North Korea, they had been the very early ones, because it was from the start a completely totalitarian structure, imposed always from the top down, all done with a ruthless efficiency, enforced by a brutal security system imported from Moscow. That was a specialty of the Russians in those years: they might not do agriculture and housing or industrial development well, but they did state security extremely well; they were masters at creating authoritarian societies. Thus in the years immediately after World
War II, while the Americans and the government in the South had struggled, often ineptly, displaying incompetence and inefficiency rather than skill and mastery—the Americans being new at the old game of having client states—the Russians in the North had seemed singularly efficient: it was what they did best. What to do in Korea after the war was something Washington had thought very little about, and the government they had installed in the South was corrupt and often inept. By contrast, despite a lack of deeply rooted legitimacy or any great popularity, the North Koreans displayed from the start a sense of purpose and an ability to control their population that was unnervingly efficient. If the Russians had begun the process, then Kim Il Sung continued it; others might mock him, but to the surprise of some of his early handlers, he turned out in time to be a shrewd student of modern totalitarianism, expert in the suppression of other men and their ideas and thoughts.
He was also an almost perfect reflection of a certain kind of Korean paranoia, of what the past, the war, and his country’s colonial status had done to his generation and his country, made all the worse by his adaptation of the Soviet system. It was as if all possibilities for his people—political, economic, and social—were frozen by it. That paranoia would play as important a role in his own stewardship of the nation as any ideology—perhaps it was his true ideology, even though he would become one of Communism’s sole surviving true believers. That he was so deft a survivor and player in the international Communist world surprised others: as tensions mounted between the Russians and the Chinese in the late 1950s and early 1960s, Kim seemed able to promise his hand and his favors alternately to both sides, playing them off against each other while limiting their hold on him (and his own dependence on either).
The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War Page 85