Mao: The Unknown Story

Mao now demonstrated all-out hostility towards the West. In a signed article in People’s Daily on 30 June, he stated that his foreign policy would be to “side exclusively with one camp”: yi-bian-dao. This did not just mean staying firmly in the Communist camp. It meant freezing relations with the West. A few days later the US vice-consul in Shanghai, William Olive, was arrested in the street, thrown in jail, and so badly beaten up that he soon died. The US recalled ambassador Stuart at once. At the end of July, when Amethyst tried to leave, Mao gave orders to “strike it hard.” Amethyst got away, but a Chinese passenger ship it had been hiding behind was sunk.

That same month, July, Mao spelled out to Stalin that his preferred policy was to “wait and not hurry to gain recognition from these [Western] states.” Stalin was delighted. “Yes! Better not to hurry,” he wrote in the margin, underlining Mao’s words.

SEVERING TIES with the West was Mao’s gift to Stalin before they met up. Mao was keen to visit him as soon as his regime was proclaimed in October 1949. Stalin was the boss of the Communist camp, and Mao had to have an audience with him. Mao also knew that the kind of deals he wanted to do had to be transacted face-to-face.

A visit had been pending for two years, but Stalin had been stringing Mao along, manipulating his patent desire for a meeting to punish him for ambitions beyond his borders. Even after Mao was inaugurated as supreme leader of China, there was still no invitation. By the end of October, Chou had to go to the Russian ambassador and tell him that Mao wanted to go to Moscow to pay his respects to Stalin on his seventieth birthday, on 21 December 1949. Stalin agreed, but he did not offer Mao the sort of state visit in his own right that someone who had just brought a quarter of the world’s population into the Communist camp might feel entitled to expect. Mao was coming merely as one of a flock of Party leaders from around the globe converging to pay court on Stalin’s birthday.

Mao set off by train on 6 December, on what was his first trip out of China. He did not bring a single senior colleague. The highest-ranking person in the delegation was a secretary. Stalin’s liaison, Kovalev, rightly surmised that this was so that when Stalin humiliated Mao, which was inevitable, it would be “without Chinese witnesses.” When Mao met Stalin the first time, he even excluded his ambassador from the session. Face was power. A snub from the Master could weaken his hold over his colleagues.

Mao got to see Stalin the day he arrived, and he reiterated that China was bound exclusively to Russia. “Several countries,” he told Stalin, “especially Britain, are actively campaigning to recognise the People’s Republic of China. However, we believe that we should not rush to be recognised.” He laid out his core requests: help in building a comprehensive military — industrial system, with emphasis on an aircraft industry, and a modern military, especially a navy.

In exchange, Mao was ready to make significant concessions. He had come to Moscow wanting to secure a new Sino-Soviet treaty to replace the Soviet Union’s old treaty with Chiang Kai-shek, but after learning that Stalin had “decided not to modify any of the points of this treaty for now,” on the grounds that discarding the old treaty would have complications involving the Yalta Agreement, Mao conceded at once. “We must act in a way that is best for the common cause … the treaty should not be modified at the present time.” The treaty with Chiang had given Russia territorial concessions. Mao enthusiastically offered to leave them in Russian hands. The status quo, he said, “corresponds well with Chinese interests …”

Mao’s readiness to make major concessions in the interests of achieving his goal — help towards furthering his global aspirations — was transparent. What Stalin had to gauge was how far those aspirations would affect his own position. A militarily powerful China would be very much a two-edged sword: a tremendous asset for the Communist camp — and for him; but also a potential threat. Stalin needed time to mull things over. Should he offer Mao anything at all, and if so, what, and how much?

Mao was packed off to his bugged residence, Stalin’s No. 2 dacha, 27 km outside Moscow. For days there was no follow-up meeting. Mao was left gazing out of the picture window at the snow-covered garden, and took out his anger on his staff. Stalin sent various underlings to see Mao, but they were not empowered to talk business. Rather, their job was, as Stalin put it to Molotov, “to find out what sort of type” Mao was, and to monitor him. When liaison man Kovalev reported to Stalin that Mao was “upset and anxious,” Stalin answered: “We have many foreign visitors here now. Comrade Mao should not be singled out” for exceptional treatment.