An essay in universal history

29. MAO’S WAR ON CHINA

While Soviet Communism proceeded relatively peacefully in this period, it was a completely different story in the Far East, where new nation-converts to Communism such as China and Vietnam were in a state of almost constant revolutionary turmoil. As we have noted, this was in part owing to important differences between Soviet and Far Eastern Communism. In particular, unlike Marx and Engels, but more like Lenin or Stalin in the 1930s, the Eastern Communist leaders did not believe that everything was determined by an economic base, but rather insisted on the primacy of faith in the triumph of the revolution and sheer willpower over all material obstacles, in despite of all political and economic theory. And the results, if possible, were even more horrific than those of “orthodox communism”. Thus Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” (1958-62) claimed, by conservative estimates, 45 million lives, and quite possibly – between 50 and 60 million.³⁷¹

As Maria Hsia Chang writes, “By the late 1950s, bolstered by the results of the socialist transformation of China, Mao thought that the transition to communism was imminent. Between 1953 and 1957, the Chinese economy registered an annual real rate of growth of 6.2 percent, the gross value of industrial output increased by 128 percent and agriculture by 24.8 percent. Mao was convinced that what was needed was a concerted effort to mobilize China’s human resources to accelerate the pace of economic development, so that production itself doubled in a single five-year period. With that, China would leapfrog over the Soviet Union by making ‘a great leap forward’ from socialism into utopian communism.
“The leap forward would be effected through the sheer will and enthusiasm of the masses. Notwithstanding its unskilled populace and backward technology, Mao believed that China could conquer its poverty if only the people had sufficient faith and commitment. Industrial development would not be confined to the urban centeres; instead, the peasants would produce steel in backyard furnaces. Impassioned by his vision, millions of Chinese were mobilized to undertake massive programs of excavation, construction, reforestation, and water control – a modern analogue of the corvée labor enterprises of dynastic China. To free men and women for this heroic purpose, peasant families were merged into gargantuan communes, each comprised of thousands of households. In anticipation of the imminent arrival of communism, private property ownership was totally abjured, including farm tools and draught animals.
“Rather than the realization of utopia, the Great Leap Forward ended in signal disaster. The ‘steel’ produced in backyard furnaces turned out to be entirely useless. To curry favor with Mao, commune cadres exaggerated their farm production figures, on the basis of which Beijing exacted its quote of grain harvest to feed China’s urban populace, leaving little for the peasants. The result was a famine that ended the 1950s in which at least 15 million starved to death – a direct consequence of misguided policies and wasted resources.
“In the cost accounting that followed, Mao relinquished his post as head of state to Lii Shaoqi (while retaining his chairmanship of the party) and retreated from active governing. Liu, with Deng Xiaoping as his assistant, took over the affairs of governance. The new leadership eschewed the more radical features of Maoism. Instead of ideological appeals, the party turned to capitalist measures to revive the economy: Peasants could own small private plots, and material incentives of differential wages were used to sput production.”³⁷²
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In 1959 China invaded Tibet. “Testimony by travelers returning from Tibet to Nepal, Bhutan and northern India indicates that, incredible as it may seem, up to 80 percent of the population remaining after the invasion died; in many cases, families of six children were left with only one survivor. Victims who were not murdered outright were felled by those other great pillars of communism: famine and forced labour. Of perhaps one thousand refugees who reached India and Nepal in 1981, more than half had served prison terms; some three hundred had been in prison uninterruptedly since 1959. Working conditions were so hard, both day and night, and food so scarce (a handful every twenty-four house of tsampa, the flour of grilled barley that is Tibet’s staple food) that there were always a few people who failed to reply at evening roll call in the camps; they had died, the fugitives said, of exhaustion.
“The massacres were particularly ferocious among Tibetan monks. Two hundred of them who remained in the Sechen monastery in eastern Tibet were slaughtered in one day, and this is merely one of many such examples. The Chinese tortured clerics and lay believers who refused to abjure their religion. If the victims moved their lips in prayer under torture, they were beaten to death. One witness told a relative of mine, who is an expert on Tibet and speaks the language fluently, that he had been assigned for a full months to the job of tossing bodies into a gigantic pit. Accused one day of having failed to stack the corpses correctly, which obviously required a certain level of Maoist training, he was forced to go down into the pit, where he sank into the heap of decomposing flesh. He was hauled out just in time to avoid asphyxiation.
“The obliteration of Tibet’s culture was carried out with almost insane violence, especially after the Cultural Revolution’s Red Guards arrived to lend a ‘spontaneous’ hand to the occupation army… More than thirty thousand of the country’s monasteries and temples were destroyed; hundreds of thousands of woodblocks for printing ancient Tibetan scriptures were used as firewood or to build army barracks. The great monasteries at Sechen, Zongsar, Kathog, Dzochen, to cite only the main ones, were razed; only plains are there now that give no hint that the greatest treasures of Tibetan architecture once stood on those sites. Of Ganden, Turphu, Mindroeing, Palpung, nothing but ruins remain. Gone, too, are the five-storey Riwotse monastery in the Kham and the thousands of old manuscripts it contained. Over one hundred thousand woodblocks at the great Dershe print shop were saved from burning by a popular uprising that Peking elected not to crus. The sole surviving monastery is the one the world knows, the Potala in Lhasa; damaging it would have been too noticeable…”³⁷³
Jonathan Mirsky writes: “Ceaseless repression has led to the self-immolation of thousands of monks and nuns as well as laypeople in recent times.”³⁷⁴
The next great stride in Mao’s revolution was the Cultural Revolution, which began in 1966, four years after the end of the Great Leap Forward. Frank Dikötter has put forward the interesting thesis that it was caused, first of all, by Mao’s fear that the revolution in China might adopt a revisionist course similar that adopted in the Soviet Union after Khruschev’s speech against Stalin. “In August 1963, Chairman Mao received a group of African guerilla fighters. One of the young visitors, a tall, square-shouldered man from Southern Rhodesia, had a question. He believed that the red star shining over the Kremlin had slipped away. The Soviets, who used to help the revolutionaries, now sold weapons to their enemies. ‘What I worry about is this,’ he said. ‘Will the red star over Tiananmen Square in China go out? Will you abandon us and sell arms to our oppressors as well?’ Mao became pensive, puffing on his cigarette. ‘I understand your question,’ he observed. ‘It is that the USSR has turned revisionist and has betrayed the revolution. Can I guarantee to you that China won’t betray the revolution? Right now I can’t give you that guarantee. We are searching very hard to find the way to keep China from becoming corrupt, bureaucratic and revisionist.’
“Three years later, on June 1^st, 1966, an incendiary editorial in the People’s Daily exhorted readers to ‘Sweep Away all Monsters and Demons’. It was the opening shot of the Cultural Revolution, urging people to denounce those representatives of the bourgeoisie who were trying to lead the country down the road to capitalism. As if this were not enough, it soon came to light that four of the top leaders in the party had been placed under arrest, accused of plotting against Mao. The mayor of Beijing was among them. He had tried, under the nose of the people, to turn the capital into a citadel of revisionism. Counter-revolutionaries had sneaked into the party, the government and the army. Now was the beginning of a new revolution in China, as the people were encouraged to stand up and flush out all those trying to transform the dictatorship of the proletariat into a dictatorship of the bourgeoisie.
“Who, precisely, these counter-revolutionaries were and how they had managed to worm their way into the party was unclear, but the leading representative of modern revisionism was the Soviet leader and party secretary, Nikita Khrushchev. In a secret speech in 195 6, which shook the socialist camp to its core, Khrushchev had demolished the reputation of his erstwhile master Joseph Stalin, detailing the horrors of his rule and attacking the cult of personality. Two years later, Khrushchev proposed ‘peaceful coexistence’ with the West, a concept that true believers around the world, including the young guerilla fight from Southern Rhodesia, viewed as a betrayal of the principles of revolutionary communism…
“…. In 1956, some of Mao’s closest allies, including Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, had used Khrushchev’s secret speech to delete all references to Mao Zedong Thought from the party constitution and criticize the cult of personality. Mao was seething, though he had little choice but to acquiesce. The biggest setback came in the wake of the Great Leap Forward, a catastrophe on an unprecedented scale directly caused by his own obstinate policies. At a conference held in 1962, as some 7,000 leading cadres from all over the country gathered to talk about the failure of the Great Leap Forward, Mao’s star was at its lowest. Rumours were circulating, accusing him of being deluded, innumerate and dangerous. Some of his colleagues may have wanted him to step down, holding him responsible for the mass starvation of ordinary people. His entire legacy was in jeopardy. Mao feared that he would meet the same fate as Stalin, who was denounced after his death. What would become China’s Khrushchev? The Cultural Revolution, then, was also a long and sustained effort by Mao to prevent any party leader from turning against him…”³⁷⁵
Chang continues: “Mao became increasingly troubled by the direction of the new leadership, convinced that the party under Liu had betrayed the revolution by conceding to selfish capitalist appetites and corroding the egalitarian ideal. Most alarmingly, Mao discerned in the apparatchik of the rapidly mushrooming government bureaucracies nothing less than the formation of a new ruling class. To stem the erosion, Mao emerged out of his sabbatical. When he failed to correct his errant colleagues through the customary method of a rectification campaign within the party, he resolved that the apparatchiks would have to be dislodged. In the gathering storm of what became the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution (1966-1969), he brought together his lieutenants: a small coterie composed of his wife, Jiang Qing, and Defense Minister Lin Biao. To dislodge the apparatchiks, Mao used his charismatic authority to mobilize the masses with the Red Guards, the naïve and impressionable youth of China, at the fore.
“In the hysteria that ensued, entire provinces were engulfed in a frenzy of recrimination and destruction. Bands of Red Guards roamed the country, laying waste to life and property. Schools and universities were closed and productivity declined in critical sectors of the economy. ‘Enemies of the people’ were subjected to public vilification and abuse: In some areas, the vengeful masses took to cannibalism against their presumed class enemies. Finally, even Mao thought the chaos and mayhem had exceeded all limits. The military was brought in to rein in the revolution. The Red Guards, for their part, who had only sought to do their revered Chairman’s bidding, were banished in permanent exile to the remote countryside.
“Costly though the Cultural Revolution was, Mao achieved his objective of removing his opponents in the party. Countless numbers of them, including ‘capitalist roader number one’ Liu Shaoqi, perished from the abuse. Others, like Deng Xiaoping, survived but were removed from public office. Once again ensconced in power, Mao seemed to lose active interest in politics. The affairs of state devolved to Jiang Qing and her cronies – collectively known as the Gang of Four – who went about reinstituting the substance of Maoist socialism. The Chairman himself sank into increasing senescence. The lone moderate in government was Zhou Enlai, veteran survivor of political campaigns and longtime premier of the State Council. He struggled to introduce some modicum of rationality into policy deliberations, particularly in the area of foreign relations where the impact of Mao’s radicalism had been as disastrous as in the domestic arena.
“Maoist foreign policy was predicated on the assumption that history ordained the certain triumph of the ‘proletarian’ less developed countries over the capitalist industrialized states. To foster this historical inevitability, China would aid and support revolutionary communist movements in the Third World – in Asia, Africa, and the Middle East. But that effort met with little success. In one case in particular, China’s complicity in the subversive activities of the Indonesian Communist Party resulted in a major policy debacle. Only in Vietnam, where China had contributed to the defeat of the United States, could Beijing claim success.
“More ominously, along the long Sino-Soviet border in the north, there were developments that threatened the very survival of China. Since the death of Stalin in 1953, relations between Beijing and Moscow had become increasingly strained. From the perspective of the Chinese, Nikita Khruschev’s denunciation of Stalin reflected badly on the cult of Mao. For their part, the Soviet leaders harbored increasing reservations regarding the direction of Mao’s foreign policy. At a time when Moscow began to entertain the possibilities of a peaceful coexistence with the preeminent capitalist power, the United States, Mao agitated instead for the active promotion of the ‘proletarian’ world revolution. He expected that nuclear war between the two superpowers was inevitable and that China, with its massive population, would survive the devastation and emerge the victor. While Moscow was ill-disposed toward adventurism, Mao sought every opportunity to provoke foreign confrontations. In 1958, the PLA fired at the ROC’s off-shore islands of Quenny and Marsu in the Taiwan Strait, inciting a crisis that almost engaged the United States. In 1961, border disputes between China and India erupted into open conflagration. Not surprisingly, Beijing received scant support form Moscow in both incidents. More than that, the Soviet Union so distrusted China that it decided it would not share nuclear weapons technology with its socialist brother.
“The already strained friendship between Moscow and Beijing was further attenuated durng the Cultural Revolution when a band of Red Guards, armed with the ‘mighty atom bomb’ of Mao Zedong thought, challenged Soviet troops along a contested sector of the border. In March 1969 a new phase of the simmering dispute erupted when Chinese irregulars ambushed a Soviet border patrol in Zhenbao Island and killed a number of Soviet troops. Two weeks later, Moscow responded by savaging Chinese border troops with massive artillery and rocket attacks that destroyed Chinese emplacements within PRC territory.” ³⁷⁶
According to Vasily Mitrokhin and Christopher Andrew, “Henry Kissinger, recently appointed as President Nixon’s National Security Advisor, was originally inclined to accept Soviet claims that these clashes were started by the Chinese. When he looked at a detailed map of the frontier region, however, he changed his mind. Since the clashes occurred close to Soviet railheads and several hundred miles from any Chinese railway, Kissinger concluded that ‘Chinese leaders would not have picked such an unpropitious spot to attack.’…
“In August and September Moscow began sounding out both Washington and European Communist parties on their reaction to the possibility of a Soviet pre-emptive strike against Chinese nuclear installations before they were able to threaten the Soviet Union. A series of articles in the Western press by a journalist co-opted by the KGB, Victor Louis (born Victor Yevgenyevich Lui), mentioned the possibility of a Soviet air strike against the Lop Nor nuclear test site in the XUAR [Xinkiang Uighur Autonomous Region]… In retrospect, the whole exercise looks more like an active-measures campaign. Though the Soviet Defence Minister, Marshal Andrei Grechko, appears to have proposed a plan to ‘get rid of the Chinese threat once and for all’, most of his Politburo colleagues were not prepared to take the risk…
“As a result of the lack of any high-level Soviet intelligence source in Beijing, Moscow seems to have been unaware of the dramatic secret response by Mao to its campaign of intimidation after the border clashes. Mao set up a study group of four marshals whom he instructed to undertake a radical review of Chinese relations with the Soviet Union and the United States. Marshals Chen Yi and Ye Jianying made the unprecedented proposal that the PRC respond to the Soviet threat by playing ‘the United States card’. Fear of a pre-emptive Soviet strike seems to have been a major reason for the Chinese decision to enter the secret talks with the United States which led to Nixon’s visit to Beijing in 1972 and a Sino-American rapprochement which only a few years earlier would have seemed inconceivable. During Nixon’s visit, Kissinger gave Marshal Ye Jianying an intelligence briefing on Soviet force deployments at the Chinese border which, he told him, was so highly classified that even many senior US intelligence officials had not had access to it.
“There was prolonged discussion in the Centre [of the KGB in Moscow] in the early 1970s as to whether the PRC now qualified for the title ‘Main Adversary’, hitherto applied exclusively to the United States. In the end it was relegated in official KGB jargon to the status of ‘Major Adversary’, with the United States retaining its unique ‘Main Adversary’ status. For China, by contrast, it was clear that the Soviet Union had become the Main Adversary…”³⁷⁷
Both Mao and Zhou died in 1976, bringing to an end the most horrific period in Chinese history. “Not intil 1976,” writes Revel, “did the West learn that Mao’s Great Leap Forward caused massive death and the death of at least sixty million Chinese and that the Cultural Revolution was precisely the explosion of bloody barbarity Mao had sought. But in 1976, the revelation came too late to expunge from Western minds the image formed in 1960-75 of a ‘progressive’ China, a model of an allegedly non-Stalinist breed of communism, a champion of development to be imitated by the whole Third World. Maoist ideology largely helped create the political climate in those years, the attitudes and sensibilities of the time, the fanatical criticism of capitalism prevailing then – even though working class living standards in the capitalist had never before climbed so high. The showdown among the ruling bureaucracy in Peking after Mao’s death left Western Maoists peering into a vast, black hole fully of wretchedness and stupidity where had thought to see a brilliant El Dorado, but this did not efface the past ravages wrought by the Chinese illusion. For fifteen years, a lie on a global scale had again distorted public debate, falsified thinking on the fate of humanity by faking the basis of discussion with non-existent ‘facts’: the supposed success of China’s socialist economy and the false legend of a highly civilized Chinese communism…”³⁷⁸