Mao: The Unknown Story

The second Taiwan Strait crisis was very like the first in 1954–55, which Mao had staged to twist his ally’s arm for A-bomb technology. This time his target was nuclear submarines and other high-tech military know-how. On 23 August Mao opened up a huge artillery barrage against the island of Quemoy, the springboard to Taiwan, blanketing the tiny island with over 30,000 (mainly Russian-made) shells. Washington thought Mao might really be going for Taiwan. No one in the West suspected his true goal: to force the USA to threaten a nuclear war in order to scare his own ally — a ruse unique in the annals of statecraft.

The US moved a large fleet into the area, and on 4 September Secretary of State John Foster Dulles announced that the US was committed to defending not only Taiwan, but also Quemoy, and threatened to bomb the Mainland. The Kremlin got very nervous about an armed confrontation with the US, and sent foreign minister Andrei Gromyko secretly to Peking the next day. Gromyko brought the draft of a letter from Khrushchev to Eisenhower, which said that an attack on China “is an attack on the Soviet Union.” Khrushchev was inviting Mao’s comment, which he hoped would be a reassurance that things would not go that far. Mao obliged, telling Gromyko that “this time we are not going to strike Taiwan, nor are we going to fight the Americans, so there will not be a world war.” But he made it clear that a war over Taiwan was definitely on the cards “for the future,” and that it would most likely be a nuclear war.

Khrushchev thought Mao could well trigger off such a war, but he wrote in his memoirs: “We made no move to restrain our Chinese comrades because we thought they were absolutely right in trying to unify all the territories of China.” This was the beauty of Taiwan as an issue for Mao: even if it threatened to cause a third world war, Moscow could not fault him.

Having established this scenario of a future nuclear war with America over Taiwan, Mao scraped hard at the Russians’ nerves. He told Gromyko he would like to discuss with Khrushchev at some stage how to coordinate in such a war, and then raised the specter of Russia being wiped out. When the war was over, he asked, “Where shall we build the capital of the socialist world?” implying that Moscow would be gone. He proceeded to propose that the new capital be located on a man-made island in the Pacific. This remark so startled Gromyko that he wanted to exclude it from his telegram home; there the Kremlin “paid particular attention” to Mao’s sally, according to the aide who drafted the cable.

Having thus shaken up Gromyko, Mao then proceeded to mollify him by saying that China would take all the heat of the coming nuclear war. “Our policy is that we will take the full consequences of this war ourselves. We will deal with America, and … we will not drag the Soviet Union into this war.” Except, Mao said, “we have to make preparations to fight the war with America,” and that included “material preparations.” Chou En-lai spelled it out to the Russian chargé: “We have made plans to produce modern weapons with the help of the Soviet Union.” Mao had made his position clear: You can opt out, if you enable me to fight the war myself.

Khrushchev got the point. On 27 September he wrote to Mao: “Thank you for your willingness to take on yourselves a strike, without involving the Soviet Union,” and followed this up on 5 October by announcing that the Taiwan crisis was an “internal” matter and that Russia would not get involved in what he called this “civil war.” For Khrushchev to say that he would let Mao deal with a nuclear war with America on his own signaled his agreement to arm the Chinese to do so. The very next day, Mao wrote a statement in the name of his defense minister, suspending the shelling of Quemoy. This ended the second Taiwan Strait crisis.

Mao then wrote to Khrushchev confirming that he would be only too happy for China to fight a nuclear war with America alone. “For our ultimate victory,” he offered, “for the total eradication of the imperialists, we [i.e., the Chinese people, who had not been consulted] are willing to endure the first [US nuclear] strike. All it is is a big pile of people dying [our italics].”

To keep the Taiwan issue alight, Mao ordered the shelling of Quemoy to resume, eventually cutting it back to alternate days. This characteristically Maoist extravagance put tremendous strain on the economy. The army chief of staff, who was not let in on Mao’s intentions, protested: “There is little point in the shelling. It costs a lot of money … Why do it?” Mao could find nothing to say except to accuse the general of being “right-wing,” and he was soon purged. Firing expensive shells onto the rocky island went on for twenty years, and stopped only after Mao’s death, on New Year’s Day 1979, the day Peking and Washington established diplomatic relations.