Mao: The Unknown Story

With no access to the West, Peng’s only hope was Eastern Europe, and Khrushchev. This was an extremely long shot. He decided, it seems, to try and make a sounding, on the off-chance.

PENG HAD long-standing invitations to visit Eastern Europe. Getting there meant passing through Moscow, and Mao had indicated that he was not keen on Peng taking up the invitations. But he agreed on 28 February 1959, after Peng had taken the uncharacteristic step of pressing him for his consent.

The beady Mao guessed Peng was up to something. On 5 April, shortly before Peng’s scheduled departure, Mao exploded to a top Party gathering: “Is comrade Peng De-huai here?… you really hate me to death …” Mao then flew into a temper the like of which those close to him said they had never seen. “We have always been battling each other …” Mao exclaimed. “My principle is: You don’t mess with me and I won’t mess with you; but mess with me, and I sure as hell will mess with you!”

That night, Peng was seen pacing up and down his office. When a secretary came to consult him about plans for the following day, Peng, who never mentioned private matters, astonished him by suddenly speaking with melancholy about how much he missed his former wife. His current wife was a scared and “correct” Party person, from whom he could not expect understanding or support for the course of action on which he was about to embark.

On 20 April, just before leaving for Europe, Peng attended a reception given by ambassadors of the countries he was to visit. There he did something unprecedented. He took Soviet ambassador Yudin into a separate room and, with only a Russian embassy interpreter present, which was a major breach of the rules, initiated a conversation about the Great Leap Forward. According to the interpreter, Peng’s sounding was cautious: “Only by the character of his questions and the tone in which they were put was it possible to understand his negative attitude towards ‘the leap.’ ” The interpreter told us: “It seemed Peng wanted to see what the ambassador would say about the Great Leap — to get the ambassador’s opinion.” Yudin waffled about the “positive” aspects of the Leap. “What stuck in my mind,” the interpreter recalled, “were the Marshal’s mournful eyes, reflecting a gamut of feelings: from alarm for the fate of his country to firm determination to fight for its future.”

Peng found no more sympathy when he got to Europe. East Germany’s leader, Ulbricht, said he knew that China was enjoying fantastic growth in agriculture, and could it send more meat so that they could match West Germany’s annual consumption of 80 kg per capita? In China, even in the cities, the meat ration for the whole year was only a few kilos.

After Ulbricht spoke, Peng fell silent for a long time before telling his host that there was actually a tremendous food shortage. Ulbricht, an old Stalinist who had concocted a few claims himself, was unmoved. Whether Mao’s claims were true or not was immaterial to him. In fact, food imports from China had just allowed East Germany, with a standard of living incomparably higher than China’s, to end rationing, in May 1958. (Later, when tens of millions of Chinese had already died of starvation, Ulbricht asked Mao for more food, on 11 January 1961. When Chou told East European ambassadors that China could not deliver all the food it had contracted to send, and asked to postpone or cancel some contracts, Poland showed understanding, but East Germany flatly refused even to consider a postponement, and pressed for delivery on the dot. “Great Germany above all,” Chou remarked, but still sent 23,000 tons of soybeans.)

After his conversation with Ulbricht, Peng burst out to his staff: “How would our people feel if they heard they were being asked to help others have 80 kg of meat a year?” His next stop was Czechoslovakia. When he told the Czechs about what was really happening in China, and said that anyone but the Chinese would be taking to the streets, he got little reaction. Peng realized that the East European regimes were a lost cause. They “all pay great attention to arms,” he noted. “They all have a privileged class trained by the Soviet Union.” The bottom line was that these regimes did not care what it cost the Chinese people to supply food to them, even if it meant Chinese dying; Eastern Europe’s imports of food from China reached their highest levels yet in 1958. Throughout the trip, Peng was downcast.

Peng’s last stop in Europe was Albania. When he arrived there, on 28 May, he found that Khrushchev had just turned up, unexpectedly, for his first-ever visit. Any hopes Peng might have entertained about Khrushchev perhaps having come specially to meet him were dashed at once. Khrushchev had no Chinese-language interpreter with him.