Mao: The Unknown Story

Mao, however, wanted all the projects, and all at once. Quite apart from his devil-may-care attitude to his subjects’ welfare, Mao had no grasp of economics. According to Bo Yi-bo, Mao asked to read and listen to reports from the ministries at this time, but “he found it extremely taxing,” and complained that the reports contained “only dull lists and figures, and no stories.” Once, as he listened to a minister, he knitted his eyebrows, and said it was “worse than being in prison” (where he had never been). Chou En-lai found himself being admonished for “flooding Chairman Mao with boring materials and figures.” Mao had trouble even with basic numbers. Once, while he was talking about trade with Japan, his prepared notes contained a figure of US$280 million, but one line later he wrote this as US$380 million, throwing the whole calculation out by US$100 million. “Statistics and numbers were not in any way sacred to him,” Yugoslavia’s No. 2, Edvard Kardelj, observed after he met Mao in 1957. “He said, for example, ‘In two hundred years’ time, or perhaps in forty.’ ” The chief Soviet economic adviser in China, Ivan Arkhipov, told us, with a sigh of exasperation, that Mao “had no understanding, absolutely no understanding at all” of economics.

In April 1956, Mao told his colleagues that the cuts must be restored, but for once they dug their heels in. Mao dismissed the meeting in a fury. Afterwards, Chou went to see him and begged him to accept the cuts, saying, most extraordinarily, that his “conscience would not allow” him to obey Mao’s orders. This sent Mao into a mad rage, but he could not stop the cuts going through.

Mao’s colleagues stood up to him because, hard men though they were, the consequences — millions dying of starvation — were too appalling. They were also emboldened by an event that had just occurred in Moscow. There, on 24 February 1956, at the 20th Congress of the the Soviet Party, Khrushchev had denounced Stalin for his killings and tyrannical behavior — and for the costs of his forced-march industrialization, a process which in fact was a lot less extreme than Mao’s was to be. Mao’s colleagues now started criticizing Stalin on these same issues (always within the confines of the inner circle). Liu called Stalin’s peasant policy one of his “major mistakes.” Former Party No. 1 Lo Fu observed that Stalin “put too much emphasis on … heavy industry.” “When I was ambassador to Russia,” he noted, “I went to the shops and found almost nothing to buy. They are also always short of food … We should draw a big lesson.” “We will be making big mistakes if we ignore agriculture,” Chou told the State Council on 20 April. “The lessons in the Soviet Union and Eastern European countries all proved this.” The parallels with Mao’s practices hardly needed laboring.

Mao did not mind seeing Stalin denounced, but not over these issues, which were at the core of his own rule. He tried to hold the line with the crude formulation that Stalin was 70 percent correct and only 30 percent mistaken. The 30 percent was not to do with murder, torture and economic misrule, but mostly with how Stalin had treated Mao Tse-tung.

But Mao could not come out openly against Khrushchev, who carried the authority of the Soviet Union, the head of the Communist camp — and was giving Mao so many arms factories, plus the Bomb. What was more, Khrushchev’s sudden and drastic denunciation of Stalin had taken Mao by surprise and made him sit up and take notice of Khrushchev. As Mao observed, Khrushchev’s move had destabilized the whole Communist camp and “shaken the entire world.” It struck awe into Mao, and made him feel he was dealing with somebody unusually bold, unpredictable and not to be trifled with. He commented several times in a pensive mood: “Khrushchev really has guts, he dares to touch Stalin.” “This indeed needs courage.”

Mao felt he had to be careful. In this situation, he could not rebut his colleagues when they cited Khrushchev to oppose his policies. Frustrated and angry, he left Peking to ponder a solution in the provinces. The provincial bosses (known as first secretaries) were a special group selected for their blind devotion. They had to be 100 percent yes-men, as they were the on-the-spot enforcers who made sure that every corner of the vast country did what Mao said.

Sudden unscheduled departures were routine for Mao, but this time he left Peking in an unprecedented manner. He got on the phone himself to his trusted follower, air force chief Liu Ya-lou, out of the blue, in the deep of one night at the end of April, and told him to have planes standing by. Mao had never taken a plane, except in 1945, to Chongqing, under pressure from Stalin. Now he could not wait to be among his cronies.