Mao Zedong (14 page)

But there was little substantive effort to halt the escalating hostilities, and in a special report issued in December 1945, Mao outlined a general strategy for the occupation of all of Manchuria except the south during the year 1946, though he noted it would be a “hard and bitter struggle.” He thought rural base areas should be established across Manchuria, though away from major cities and communications routes, to stop possible Guomindang attacks. Mass ideological work would take place as a fundamental part of increasing the Party’s basic military strength. Land reform should be moderate initially, to develop a wide basis of support—limited to “struggles to settle accounts with traitors,” and to some campaigns “for rent-reduction and wage increases.” The Communists must at all costs bring “tangible material benefits to the people in the northeast,” who otherwise might “be taken in for a time by deceitful Guomindang propaganda, and may even turn against our party.” But Mao was firm about keeping options open in the rest of China. When General George Marshall came to China to speed negotiations, on President Truman’s orders, and when the Political Consultative Conference did in fact meet that same year, Mao warned his comrades not to let their hatred of the Guomindang push them to reject all chance of peaceful settlement: that would be “narrow closed-doorism.”

Fighting became fierce in Manchuria after the Marshall peace talks broke down, and the Communists lost several areas they had controlled in the southern part of the region; but they held on firmly in the north and successfully carried out their program of setting up isolated base areas with mass support, pursuing moderate land reform, and strengthening their military units. In north China, however, land reform in the areas the Communists controlled became increasingly violent, with mass killings of landlords, total seizures of their land and property, and redistribution of land on an egalitarian basis to all peasants and their family members. This “extremism” was widely debated by the Party leaders, but not effectively checked. At the same time, any incidents that could be used among the Chinese as a whole to strengthen the negative perceptions of the Guomindang and their American helpers were skillfully followed up by the pro-Communist propaganda organs. The murder of one of China’s most celebrated poets, Wen Yiduo, a great writer and scholar, was one such example. During the war, Wen had lived in Kunming, at the associated university, and had been a vocal critic of Chiang Kai-shek. His assassination was nationally attributed to Guomindang secret agents, for Wen had just given a passionate speech on behalf of a friend of his—also murdered for political reasons—when he himself was gunned down. And in Beijing, the rape by two American servicemen of a Chinese student returning from a nighttime movie, and clumsy government attempts to cover up the incident, were exploited in newspapers and at huge student rallies, to underline the Communist cause. The raped woman was presented as representative of a victimized China, helpless in the arms of aggressive capitalist and imperialist forces.

Despite their difficulties in Manchuria, the Nationalist armies were able to surround and eventually capture Yan‘an in March 1947. This was a major symbolic victory, but no more than that, for most of the Communist forces, and all their major leaders still in the region, withdrew in good time and moved to new bases farther to the north. At this point, Mao was with Jiang Qing and their daughter, Li Na, and spent some of the time with his oldest son by Yang Kaihui, Mao Anying, now aged twenty-four, who had returned from the Soviet Union in 1946 and joined his father in Yan’an. Anying was courting a young woman he met in Yan‘an whose father had been killed by warlords, as Anying’s mother had been. They married in 1949. Mao’s second son, Anqing, returned home, too, but to Harbin, where he arrived in 1947. He Zizhen also returned in 1947, with her daughter, Li Min; she did not see Mao at this time, and later made her own way to Shanghai.

It was from his northern retreat in Shaanxi, in September 1947, that Mao issued what came to be seen as one of his most important pronouncements on military strategy. He wrote in the context of the struggle in China as it was being waged at that time, with the idea of tracing essential military principles. He had already decided, within a week of Hiroshima, that the atomic bomb was not the crucial factor in ending the war with Japan that some people held it to be, and in August 1946 he told an American journalist that he considered the atomic bomb a “paper tiger,” looking more terrible than in fact it was. In his September 1947 statement, Mao announced that the Communist armies were now ready to launch a “nationwide counteroffensive,” to seize the initiative away from the Guomindang by moving from the “interior lines” of warfare to the “exterior lines.” Each time they smashed their way into a former Guomindang area, the Communists would set up bases there, from which in turn they would launch new campaigns. Despite the need for such base areas, destroying the enemy and capturing their weapons always took precedence over “holding and seizing a place.” Mao’s maxims were simple but by this time were the fruit of long experience: “Be sure to fight no battle unprepared, fight no battle you are not sure of winning,” and fight relentlessly, giving the enemy no time to recoup. Use at once all the arms and at least 80 to 90 percent of all captured troops (though not their officers); take supplies from the Guomindang-dominated areas, not from older Communist base areas; carry out land reform in both old and newly liberated areas.

The strategy was astonishingly successful. By the following year Communist troops had totally routed the Guomindang armies in Manchuria and were ready to move south. As Guomindang military morale collapsed, accompanied by civilian revulsion with the financial chaos caused by rampant inflation, and the continued harsh repression of all dissent, the Communists consolidated their gains and advanced with incredible rapidity, entering Beijing in January 1949, Nanjing in April, Shanghai in May, and Changsha in August. With Canton encircled, though not yet captured, on October 1, 1949, Mao and the senior leaders of the Communist Party then in the region of Beijing climbed to a reviewing stand on the Great Tiananmen gate, at the south of the Forbidden City; there, in front of a small bank of microphones, as a few planes of the Chinese air force circled overhead, Mao announced the formation of the People’s Republic of China.

Within weeks, Mao was planning a visit to the Soviet Union so that he could confer in person with the man who in so many ways had been his inspiration but also almost his nemesis, Joseph Stalin. When Mao set off for Moscow in December 1949, the Communists had won, but China was in a catastrophic state. Many areas of the country had endured close to forty years of almost incessant fighting or military occupation of one kind or another—local warlords, Communist guerrillas, Guomindang suppression forces, Japanese occupying armies—and had no effective administrative structures. The economy was in a shambles, there was no stable or unified currency, inflation was out of control, and communications networks were in disarray, with rail tracks destroyed and rivers and harbors clogged with sunken ships. Millions of people had been displaced by the wars, and the Communists’ own armies were bloated by hundreds of thousands of Nationalist soldiers who had been admitted to their ranks with virtually no scrutiny. Schools and universities had decaying buildings, few books, and many ineffective teachers whose only qualification had been political loyalty to the Guomindang. The hunt for Japanese collaborators had soured personal relations, and the carpetbagging nature of the Guomindang reoccupation of the formerly Japanese-occupied cities had been accompanied by corruption, looting, reprisals, and theft of assets.

On the borders, the situation was little better. To the far west, in Xinjiang, the Muslim population had fought for many years to gain autonomy from China, and the local warlord had shifted erratically between overreliance on the Soviet Union and uneasy alliance with the Guomindang. Mao Zedong’s last surviving sibling, his younger brother Mao Zemin, had been executed there as part of these political machinations, in 1943. Mongolia had become an independent republic, but was totally dominated by the Soviet Union. Tibet had also achieved considerable levels of autonomy in the 1930s and 1940s—in his own youthful writings Mao had regularly called for autonomy and self-rule for Mongols, Tibetans, and Muslims—and the Chinese now had to decide whether to launch an invasion or allow Tibetan independence to grow, under the young and ambitious new Dalai Lama. The French were re-strengthening their colonial empire in Southeast Asia, and though both they and the British had been forced to give up their concession areas in Shanghai during 1943, the British had reasserted their control over Hong Kong in 1945—with Guomindang acquiescence—and once more ruled it as a colony. Taiwan had been chosen by Chiang Kai-shek as the temporary base for his administration and his armies, pending his planned return to the mainland. It was strongly defended, and it would take a massive air- and seaborne assault to bring it into the Communist camp.

From the Russian transcripts of the personal talks between Mao and Stalin, preserved in Moscow, we are able to see-free of any possible Chinese re-editing—how the two world leaders of the Communists related to each other. Stalin must have been an intensely formidable figure to Mao—he was a founding father of the Soviet Revolution, a former close associate of Lenin‘s, the builder of the autocratic central power and police apparatus of the Soviet Union, the guide and inspiration to his people in the terrible years of the German invasion, and the architect of postwar Soviet expansion into Eastern Europe. His voluminous historical and analytical works were required reading for all Communists and fellow travelers—Mao, among countless other Chinese, had studied them in Yan’an, and tried to come to grips with many of their arguments in an attempt to gauge their relevance to China. To Stalin, Mao was an unknown entity, tenacious but self-educated and undisciplined, a pursuer of political lines that often ran in direct opposition to stated Soviet policies. But Mao had won against great odds, and that certainly commanded respect, as did the fact that he was now in control of the world’s second-largest—and most populous—Communist state.

Their first meeting was on December 16, 1949. After opening pleasantries, Mao observed to Stalin that what China needed was “three to five years of peace,” so as to “bring the economy back to pre-war levels, and stabilize the country in general.” Given this priority for China, Mao ventured to ask the Soviet leader what he thought of the chances for the preservation of peace internationally. Stalin’s reply was bland and elliptical: China wanted peace, Japan was not ready for another war, the United States was “afraid” of further war, as were the Europeans. Thus no one would fight the Chinese, unless the North Korean Kim Il Sung decided to invade China.

On the question of the Sino-Soviet treaty of 1945, which Stalin had signed with Chiang Kai-shek, both Mao and Stalin reached tacit agreement: the treaty would be allowed to stand for now, so as not to give any grounds to the British and Americans for modifying any of their own agreements with the Soviet Union. But the Russians would withdraw their troops from Port Arthur when the Chinese wished, and also yield up control of the trans-Manchurian railways. On other practical matters, Mao requested Soviet credits of 300 million U.S. dollars, as well as help developing domestic air transport routes and developing a navy, to all of which Stalin agreed. But when Mao asked for Soviet help in conquering Taiwan—specifically, “volunteer pilots or secret military detachments”—Stalin stalled, offering “headquarters staff and instructors” instead, and suggesting that Mao send his own propaganda forces to Taiwan to foment an insurrection. On the question of Hong Kong, Stalin ingeniously and deviously suggested that Mao encourage conflicts between Guangdong province and the British colony, and then step forward as “mediator” to resolve them, thus presumably increasing his international status as a statesman. Foreign business enterprises in China and foreign-run schools, both men agreed, should be carefully monitored. China should speed up its extraction of rare minerals—Stalin specifically mentioned tungsten and molybdenum—and build oil pipelines. Mao again reiterated that he needed to know the long-range prospects for peace if he was to undertake such projects, since it was on the chances for peace that hinged such key decisions as whether to concentrate on developing China’s coastal industry, or to move the industrial development to sites inland.

The final part of their talk hinged on Maoist ideology, and suggests that Stalin was fully aware of the claims to be a theoretical leader that Mao had been steadily developing since 1937. Stalin broached the subject abruptly by asking for a list of Mao’s works that Mao felt should be translated into Russian. Mao, apparently unprepared for the question, stalled. “I am currently reviewing my works which were published in various local publishing houses,” he countered, for they “contain a mass of errors and misrepresentations. I plan to complete this review by spring of 1950.” Mao wanted Soviet help, he continued, not only with the Russian translation, but also “in editing the Chinese original.” Now it was Stalin’s turn to be surprised: “You need your works edited?” “Yes,” Mao replied. “It can be arranged,” responded Stalin, “if indeed there is such a need.”

At this December 1949 meeting, Mao was the only Chinese present except for his own interpreter, so he had only his wits to rely on. At the subsequent meeting with Stalin on January 22, 1950—the only other one Mao ever had—a small but high-powered Chinese delegation was with Mao, which included Zhou Enlai and Chen Boda, Mao’s ideological assistant from Yan‘an. Along with a stream of polemical and historical works, Chen had just published a book on Stalin’s contributions to the Chinese Revolution. Clearly his presence in Moscow was partly to reassure Mao about ideological matters if the going got difficult, but also perhaps to temper Mao’s exuberance and make sure that he did not go out on any limbs that might later upset his powerful colleagues back in China. In the presence of such a delegation, the discussion remained at a technical level, about details of aid, its nature, and the interest to be paid. The most frank exchange was over Tibet. Mao asked Stalin directly to continue the loan of a Soviet air regiment to China, which had already helped move more than 10,000 troops inside China; the regiment was needed, said Mao, to help transport provisions to the Chinese troops “currently preparing for an attack on Tibet.” “It’s good that you are preparing to attack. The Tibetans need to be subdued,” was Stalin’s reply, though he added that he would have to talk the matter over with his military experts.