Mao: The Unknown Story

In 1989, the post-Mao leader Deng Xiao-ping told Russian leader Mikhail Gorbachev: “Of all the foreign powers that invaded, bullied and enslaved China since the Opium War (in 1842), Japan inflicted the greatest damage; but in the end, the country that got most benefit out of China was Tsarist Russia, including [sic] the Soviet Union during a certain period …” Deng was certainly referring to this treaty.

Mao went to great lengths to conceal how much the treaty gave away. When he went over the draft of the announcement he carefully erased any phrases like “supplementary agreements,” and “appendix,” which might make people suspect the existence of these secret documents, marking his deletions: “Extremely crucial, extremely crucial!”

At Stalin’s insistence, China not only paid huge salaries to Soviet technicians in China, plus extensive benefits for them and their families, but had to pay compensation to Russian enterprises for the loss of the services of the technicians who came to China. But the concession Mao was most anxious to hide was that he had exempted Russians from Chinese jurisdiction. This had been the issue the CCP had always harped on as the embodiment of “imperialist humiliation.” Now Mao himself had secretly introduced it.

Mao wanted to end his trip on a high note, so he pleaded with Stalin, who did not go to parties outside the Kremlin, to attend a celebration he was throwing at the Metropol Hotel on the evening of the signing: “we do hope you can come for a minute. You can leave early any time …” Stalin decided to grant Mao this moment of glory. When Stalin showed up at 9:00 PM, bringing his own bottle, the flabbergasted guests went into a frenzy.

But Stalin did not come just to show good will. He had a message to send. In his toast he brought up Yugoslavia’s leader, Tito, whom he had recently cast out of the Communist camp. Any Communist country that went its own way, Stalin observed pointedly, would end up badly, and would only return to the fold under a different leader. The warning was clear — and would have been even more threatening if Stalin’s plans to assassinate Tito had been known.

None of this dampened Mao’s ambitions. Earlier that day, at the treaty-signing ceremony, when photographs were being taken, the diminutive Stalin had taken one step forward. To his staff afterwards, Mao remarked, with a smile: “So he will look as tall as I am!” (Mao was 1.8 meters tall.)

Mao was bent on pursuing his dream of making China, his base, a superpower. Stalin was equally determined to thwart this ambition — as Mao could tell from the fact that, in return for the huge concessions he had made, he got relatively little from Stalin. What Stalin let him have fell far short of even the skeleton basis for a world-class military machine. Mao was going to have to find other ways to squeeze more out of Stalin.

Chou used the expression “iron curtain” to describe what the CCP wanted: “to drive at having Manchuria covered by the iron curtain against foreign powers,” “except the USSR and people’s democracies.”

It was also a source of the lasting misconception that Liu Shao-chi was more hard-line than Chou.

British Communist leader John Gollan’s notes of what Mao said to him in 1957 (about 1949) read: “Not even freedom of meeting leaders. 70th birthday — Didn’t dare although there.”

When a news item in March 1950 mentioned joint companies, Liu Shao-chi noted that the news “has aroused tremendous waves among Peking students, who suspect these … might be damaging China’s sovereignty. Many Youth League members demanded an … explanation; some even charged out loud … that the people’s government had sold out the country.” And this was without knowing the half of it.

34. WHY MAO AND STALIN STARTED THE KOREAN WAR (1949–50 AGE 55–56)

STALIN RECOGNIZED that Mao had the drive and the resources, especially the human resources, to expand the frontiers of communism in Asia significantly. In order not to erode his own power, Stalin decided not to form an Asian Cominform, which would give the Chinese leader a formal pan-Asia set-up, but instead to dole out individual countries to Mao, in such a way that he, Stalin, remained the ultimate boss. At their second meeting, during Mao’s stay in Moscow, Stalin assigned him to supervise Vietnam.