Mao: The Unknown Story

Control was one key reason Mao decided to shun Western recognition. But his primary purpose was to show Stalin that the new China was committed 100 percent to the Communist bloc. This was the main reason Peking did not establish diplomatic relations with America and most Western countries when the regime was founded. It is widely thought that it was the US that refused to recognize Mao’s China. In fact, Mao went out of his way to make recognition impossible by engaging in overtly hostile acts. When the Communists captured Shenyang in November 1948, there were three Western consulates there (US, British and French), and the local CCP was friendly towards them at first. But orders soon came from Mao to “force [them] out.” Chou was explicit to Mikoyan: “We created intolerable conditions for them in order to get them to leave.” On 18 November, US consul general Ward and his staff were put under house arrest. Ward was later accused of spying and expelled. In the same aggressive spirit, Red troops broke into the residence of US ambassador J. Leighton Stuart in Nanjing in April 1949 when they took the Nationalist capital.

Mao was equally hostile to the British. When the Communists were crossing the Yangtze in late April, moving south, there were two British ships on that stretch of the river, HMS Amethyst and HMS Consort. Mao ordered that “all warships which get in the way of our crossing may be bombarded. Treat them as Nationalist ships.” Forty-two British sailors were killed, more than all other Western military deaths in the entire civil war. Consort got away, but Amethyst became grounded. Back in Britain, enraged sailors beat up CP chief Harry Pollitt, who landed up in the hospital. Winston Churchill, then leader of the Opposition, asked in Parliament why Britain did not have “in Chinese waters one aircraft carrier, if not two, capable of … effective power of retaliation.”

The incident greatly alarmed Stalin, who placed Soviet forces throughout the Far East on full alert — the only time this occurred in connection with the Chinese civil war. Stalin was worried that the West might intervene militarily and involve Russia, and he cabled Mao urgently to play down their relationship: “We do not think now is the right moment to publicise the friendship between the USSR and Democratic China.” Mao had to tone down his aggressiveness and issued new orders to “avoid clashes with foreign ships. No firing at [them] without the order of the Center. Extremely, extremely important.” He told his commanders to “protect … especially diplomats from America and Britain,” “or else big disaster could happen.” On 27 April he suspended the advance on Shanghai, which was the most important economic and financial center in the country, and the focus of Western interests — and therefore the most likely place where the West, which had sizable military forces there, might make a stand.

To lessen the risk of Western intervention, on 10 May Mao took diversionary steps by authorizing talks with US ambassador Stuart, who had stayed on in Nanjing after the Nationalist government had left. Stuart was an “old China hand” who wishfully thought he could bring Washington and Mao together. Decades later, Mao’s then negotiator and future foreign minister, Huang Hua, spelled out Mao’s intent: “Mao and Chou … were not looking for friendly relations. They had but one concern: to forestall a major American intervention which might rescue the Nationalists at the eleventh hour …”

As further insurance against a backlash from foreign powers, Mao spun a web of disinformation. On 30 May, Chou En-lai gave a verbal message to an intermediary to be passed to Truman. The message was carefully tailored to American hopes at the time. It said there was a split in the CCP between the pro-Western “liberals” headed by Chou himself, and pro-Soviet “radicals” headed by Liu Shao-chi, and that if America would back Chou he might be able to influence CCP foreign policy. This was a hoax, but it contributed to the delusion that the CCP might throw itself into the West’s embrace.

This flurry of pseudo-diplomacy, like the temporary lull on the battlefield, in no way implied any diminution in Mao’s resolve to shun the West. By mid-May, he had given the go-ahead for a general offensive against Shanghai, which fell by the end of the month. When foreign warships withdrew from Shanghai as the Reds approached, and US forces quickly left their last base on the Mainland, at Qingdao, Mao was more convinced than ever that Western powers would not invade China, where they would only get bogged down, as the Japanese experience had shown.