Mao: The Unknown Story

Two-thirds of the 21,374 Chinese POWs refused to return to Communist China, and most went to Taiwan.^† The one-third who returned to the Mainland found themselves labeled as “traitors” for having surrendered, and suffered appallingly for the rest of Mao’s reign. One other dire, and little-known, contribution Mao made to the misery of the Korean nation was to help consign over 60,000 South Korean prisoners, who were illegally retained by the North at the time of the armistice, to a terrible fate. Mao told Kim to hold on to them. These unfortunate men were dispersed to the remotest corners of North Korea to conceal them from prying eyes and minimize their chances of escape, and this is where any survivors are probably held to this day.

AN ARMISTICE WAS finally signed on 27 July 1953. The Korean War, which had lasted three years and brought millions of deaths and numerous wounded, was over.

More than 3 million Chinese men were put into Korea, among whom at least 400,000 died. An official Russian document puts Chinese dead at 1 million.

Among those who died in Korea was Mao’s eldest son, An-ying, killed in an American air raid on Peng De-huai’s HQ, where he was working as Peng’s Russian translator. It was 25 November 1950, just over a month after he had entered Korea. He was twenty-eight.

He had married only a year before, on 15 October 1949. His wife, Si-qi, was a kind of adopted daughter to Mao, and she and An-ying had known each other for some years. When An-ying told his father in late 1948 that he wanted to marry her, Mao had flown into a ferocious rage and bellowed at him so terrifyingly that An-ying fainted, his hands going so cold they did not react even to a boiling hot water bottle, which left two big blisters. Mao’s furious reaction suggests sexual jealousy (the beautiful and elegant Si-qi had been around Mao for much of her teens). Mao withheld consent for many months, and then told the couple to delay getting married until his regime was formally proclaimed, on 1 October 1949. By the time of his first wedding anniversary, An-ying was gone. As was the rule, he did not tell his wife where, and she did not ask.

When Mao was given the news of his son’s death, he was silent for some time, and then murmured: “In a war, how can there be no deaths?” Mao’s secretary observed: “He really didn’t show any expression of great pain.” Even Mme Mao shed some tears, although she had not quite got on with her stepson.

Nobody informed An-ying’s young widow for over two and a half years. While the war was still going on, she accepted An-ying’s silence, as she was used to Party secrecy. But in summer 1953, after the signing of the armistice, she found his continued silence puzzling, and asked Mao, who told her that An-ying was dead. During those years she had been seeing Mao constantly, spending weekends and vacations with him, and he had not shown any sadness, not even a flicker to suggest that anything was wrong. He had even cracked jokes about An-ying as though he were alive.

Altogether, China put at least 3 million troops into Korea. The US committed roughly 1 million military personnel.

Mao did this by denouncing the head of the trade unions, Li Li-san, for advocating greater independence for unions. Those in the know were well aware that this was a line that Liu had strongly espoused.

The Korean War also boomeranged in spectacular fashion on its third instigator, Kim Il Sung. In 1994, forty-four years after he started it, Kim was found dead, sitting holding copies of the dossier the post-Communist Russian government was about to release revealing the inside story of the war and his role in starting it.

Peking is still sticking to the allegation, although its official claim now is a grand total of 81 deaths from 804 US germ attacks—45 Koreans from cholera and plague, and 36 Chinese of plague, meningitis, and “other diseases.” Two Russian generals who were in Korea, Valentin Sozinov, chief adviser to North Korean chief of staff Nam Il, and the chief medical adviser to the North Korean army, Igor Selivanov, both told us they had never seen any evidence of germ warfare, and Selivanov stressed that in his position he would have known about it if it had happened. Other leading Russian officers and diplomats involved concurred.

Kim’s regime was eager to put the boot into Mao. The Soviet chargé in Pyongyang, S. P. Suzdalev, reported to Moscow on 1 June that on hearing the Kremlin’s new “recommendations,” the Korean official to whom he conveyed the message, Pak Chang-ok, jumped at the chance to disown the Chinese, even suggesting “the possibility that the bombs and containers were thrown from Chinese planes.”