Mao: The Unknown Story

The Chinese advance was soon halted. On 25 January 1951 the UN launched a counter-offensive, and the tide began to turn. Chinese casualties were extremely heavy. Peng went back to Peking on 21 February to tell Mao to his face about the “grave difficulties” and the “massive unnecessary casualties.” From the airport he raced to Zhongnanhai, only to find that Mao was staying out at Jade Spring Hill in his bunker. When Peng got there he was told Mao was having a siesta, but he pushed his way past the bodyguards and burst into Mao’s bedroom (practically lèse-majesté). Mao let him say his piece, but brushed his concerns aside, and told him to expect the war to be a long one: “Don’t try to win a quick victory.”

Mao outlined his “overall strategy” to Stalin in a cable on 1 March, which opened with the sentence: “The enemy will not leave Korea without being eliminated in great masses …” He then told Stalin that his plan was to use his bottomless reserves of manpower to exhaust the Americans. The Chinese army, he reported (which was true), had already taken “more than 100,000 casualties … and is expecting another 300,000 this year and next.” But, he told Stalin, he was replenishing the losses with 120,000 more troops, and would send a further 300,000 to replenish future losses. “To sum up,” Mao said, he was “ready to persist in a long-term war, to spend several years consuming several hundred thousand American lives, so they will back down …” Mao was reminding Stalin that he could seriously weaken America, but Stalin must help him build a first-class army and arms industry.

MAO GOT MOVING on this fundamental objective from the moment China entered the war in October 1950. That very month, China’s navy chief was sent to Russia to ask for assistance to build up the navy. He was followed in December by a top-level air force mission, which had considerable success. On 19 February 1951, Moscow endorsed a draft agreement to start building factories in China to repair and service planes, as a large number were being damaged, and required advanced repair facilities in the theater. The Chinese plan was to convert these repair facilities to actually making aircraft. By the end of the war, China, a very poor country, had the third largest air force in the world, with more than 3,000 planes, including advanced MiGs. And factories were being built to churn out 3,600 fighter planes annually which, it was projected (over-optimistically, as it turned out), would come on stream in three to five years’ time. Discussions had even begun about manufacturing bombers.

Immediately after the aircraft deal in early 1951—and after Stalin endorsed Mao’s plan “to spend several years consuming several hundred thousand American lives”—Mao upped the ante by asking for the blueprints for all the weapons the Chinese were using in Korea, and for Russian help to build factories to produce them, as well as the arms to equip no fewer than sixty divisions. He sent his chief of staff to Russia in May to negotiate these requests.

Although Stalin wanted China to do his fighting for him, and was happy to sell Mao the weapons for the sixty divisions, he had no intention of endowing Mao with a full-blown arms industry, so the Chinese delegation was stonewalled in Russia for months. Mao told his chief of staff to keep on pushing, and in October the Russians reluctantly agreed to transfer the technology for producing seven kinds of small arms including machine-guns, but declined to divulge more.

By now the war had lasted for a year, during which North Korea had been pulverized by US bombing. Kim saw that he might end up ruling over a wasteland, and possibly a shrunken one at that. He wanted an end to the war. On 3 June 1951 he went to China in secret to discuss opening negotiations with the US. As Mao was nowhere near his goal, the last thing he was interested in was stopping the war. In fact, he had just ordered Chinese troops to draw UN forces deeper into North Korea: “the farther north the better,” he said, provided it was not too near the Chinese border. Mao had hijacked the war, and was using Korea regardless of Kim’s interests.

But, as his troops had been suffering heavy defeats, a breathing space was tactically useful for Mao, so he sent his Manchuria chief with Kim to consult with Stalin — and to press for more arms factories. Afterwards, Stalin cabled Mao, treating Kim as Mao’s satrap, to propitiate Mao, as he was turning him down on the arms factories. After talking “with your representatives from Manchuria and Korea” [sic], Stalin told Mao, “a truce is now advantageous.” This did not mean Stalin wanted to stop the war. He wanted Mao’s soldiers to inflict more damage on the US, but he saw that engaging in talks could be expedient, and seeming to show an interest in peace would help the Communists’ image. Interim ceasefire talks opened in Korea between UN and Chinese — Korean military teams on 10 July.