Mao: The Unknown Story

Stalin had hitherto shown little interest in Vietnam. In 1945, when the Vietnamese Communist leader Ho Chi Minh led an uprising against French colonial rule and declared a provisional independent government, Moscow had not even bothered to answer his cables. But, even though he did not entirely trust Ho, Stalin changed his attitude radically once Mao took power and Chinese troops reached the border with Vietnam in late 1949. On 30 January 1950, while Mao was in Moscow, Stalin recognized Ho’s regime, some days after Mao did. The lack of a common frontier with Vietnam made it difficult for Stalin to command from afar, whereas China could supply arms, goods and training across its border with Vietnam (and Laos). By giving Mao custody of Vietnam, Stalin gave himself a way of reaching into Vietnam, and gratified Mao, while passing on to China the enormous expense of sustaining the Indochina insurgencies.

Mao had already been trying to bring the Vietnamese under his tutelage. Ho had lived in China for more than a decade, including a stretch in Yenan, and spoke fluent Chinese. Mao had been training, funding and arming the Vietnamese, but when he developed a plan to send in Chinese troops once he controlled the border with Vietnam, in late 1949, Stalin called him to heel. Stalin wanted to gather all the strings together in his own hands first.

Ho Chi Minh was brought to Moscow, via Peking, arriving in time to make a dramatic appearance at Stalin’s farewell dinner for Mao in the Kremlin on 16 February 1950. Stalin told Ho that aid to Vietnam was China’s responsibility — and cost. Ho was the only foreign Communist leader with whom Mao was allowed to have proper talks on this trip, and the two returned to China on the same train, in a convoy between one train carrying Soviet airmen going to protect Shanghai and China’s coastal cities, and one loaded with MiG-15s.

Mao now began to take personal charge of action in Vietnam, vetting both grand strategy and the minutiae of military operations. The first objective was to link up the Vietnamese Communists’ base with China, as the CCP had done with Russia in 1945–46. Inside China, a road-building blitz to the border was completed in August 1950. Within two months this enabled the Vietnamese to win a crucial series of battles known as the Border Campaign, as a result of which the French army lost control of the frontier with China. Thereafter, China poured in aid. On 19 August, Mao told Stalin’s emissary Pavel Yudin that he planned to train 60,000–70,000 Vietnamese soldiers. It was having China as a secure rear and supply depot that made it possible for the Vietnamese to fight for twenty-five years and beat first the French and then the Americans.

In most of these years, the huge logistics burden of the fighting in Indochina fell almost entirely on China. To Mao, the cost was irrelevant. When the French Party’s first emissary to Ho mentioned ways the French Communists could help the Vietnamese, he was told by Liu Shao-chi: “Don’t waste your time on this. Don’t get into things like medical aid. We can do that. After all there are 600 million Chinese …”

It was not long before Mao started trying to “Maoise” his client, imposing a much-hated land reform on Vietnam in the 1950s, in which Chinese advisers even presided over kangaroo tribunals that sentenced Vietnamese to death in their own country. Vietnam’s “poet laureate,” To Huu, hymned Mao’s role in surprisingly frank doggerel:

Kill, kill more …

For the farm, good rice, quick collection of taxes …

Worship Chairman Mao, Worship Stalin …

Even though some Vietnamese leaders raised strenuous objections to the Mao-style land reform, Ho Chi Minh put up only feeble and belated resistance to Mao’s attempt to turn the Vietnamese revolution into a clone of China’s.

IN SEPTEMBER to October 1950, Mao downgraded operations in Vietnam, in order to focus on a much larger war on another patch of turf that Stalin had decided to assign him. This was Korea.