MAO

The conflict that raged across China from the summer of 1946 to the spring of 1950 was fundamentally different from any earlier war Mao had fought. On the Jinggangshan, in Jiangxi and in the north-west, the aim had been for the Red Army to secure and defend rural base areas. During the years at Yan'an, it had been, ‘70 per cent expanding our own forces, 20 per cent resisting the Guomindang and 10 per cent fighting Japan’. Now, for the first time, Mao's objective was not to dominate the countryside but to seize control of China's cities, the teeming proletarian centres from which the communists had been brutally excluded twenty years before.

For the first nine months, the People's Liberation Army steadily retreated.¹ In Manchuria, where Chiang had deployed the cream of his troops, the communists lost almost all their earlier gains, retaining only Harbin, close to the Soviet border. In east China, they were driven out of northern Jiangsu. The base areas that had been painstakingly reconstituted in the old E-Yu-Wan districts, north of Wuhan, were overrun, and nationalist forces took control of parts of the Shansi–Hebei–Shandong–Henan border region. By the end of 1946, the communist armies had ceded 174,000 square kilometres and 165 towns. The Generalissimo was convinced that he had them on the run and most foreign governments agreed with him. Even Stalin grew concerned that Mao's forces risked annihilation (though not to the point of increasing the still-meagre military aid that Moscow was providing). In December, Chiang told Marshall that the military threat from the communists would be neutralised by the following autumn, an assessment, which he repeated publicly, with great fanfare, after the fall of Yan'an. The American envoy's admonition that Mao's forces, while retreating, showed no inclination to surrender, fell on deaf ears.

Chiang's strategy was to recapture the main cities and railway lines, north of the Yangtse, and only after these had been secured to move out into the rural areas to occupy county towns, finally using landlord militias to regain control of the villages. Mao ordered his forces to avoid battle unless they were certain of victory, and then to seek the swift annihilation of the forces they attacked:

When we have encircled … one of the enemy detachments (a brigade or regiment), [we] should not attempt to wipe out all the encircled enemy simultaneously … and thus divide ourselves … making it hard to get results. Instead we should concentrate … a force six, five, four or at least three times [larger than] that of the enemy, concentrate the whole or the bulk of our artillery, select one (not two) of the weak spots in the enemy's positions, attack it fiercely and be sure to win … When we wipe out one regiment, [the enemy] will have one regiment less. When we wipe out one brigade, he will have one brigade less … Using this method we shall win. Acting counter to it we shall lose.²

By February 1947, more than fifty nationalist brigades (out of 218 taking part in the campaign) had been put out of action in this way.³ As in Jiangxi, fifteen years earlier, most GMD troops who surrendered were absorbed into communist units, becoming the PLA's main source of new manpower.

As a security precaution, after leaving Yan'an, the Party leaders divided into two groups. Mao headed what was known as the Front Line Committee, which remained in northern Shaanxi. Liu Shaoqi took charge of a CC Work Committee in the Jin-Cha-Ji base area, in present-day Hebei, 250 miles to the east.⁴ Sidney Rittenberg, who marched with Mao's column, marvelled at the Chairman's tactics but found them terrifying:

Mao [played] … a sardonic cat-and-mouse game with his adversary. [He] deliberately telegraphed his moves, and … made it a point never to be more than one day's march ahead of the GMD. He knew that the [nationalist commander] Hu Zongnan would be Chiang's hero if he were able to capture Mao Zedong in person, and Mao played that card for all it was worth. At every encampment he would wait until the scouts brought him the news that the enemy was only an hour's march away before he would methodically put on his coat, mount his horse and lead his little headquarters column off down the trail … [Then], when the GMD troops were exhausted … and sick of the whole campaign, Peng Dehuai selected the most vulnerable cul-de-sac … and hurled [his men] against them.⁵

The lore of Zhu the Deaf, which Mao had learned on the Jinggangshan, and which had served him so well on the Long March, still had its uses. In a telegram to Peng in April, he called it ‘the tactics of wear and tear’,⁶ designed to fatigue the enemy and deplete his food supplies.

By this time the nationalist offensive was beginning to bog down. Mao (and, quite separately, the Americans) had predicted as much the previous autumn.⁷ Chiang's forces were spread too thin, his communications lines were over-extended. The Generalissimo later acknowledged that sending his best troops to the north-east, without first securing the intermediate provinces in north and central China, had been a major strategic error.⁸ Matters were not helped by his distrust of native Manchurians. When the nationalists brought in outsiders to administer the region, they lost the support of the local elite.⁹ But the key factor in turning the tide was the ease with which the PLA adjusted from guerrilla tactics to the use of large mobile formations. The experience gained in the war with Japan, and the heightened discipline and ‘uniformity of purpose’ instilled during the Rectification Campaign, now paid off handsomely.

Lin Biao launched a three-pronged offensive which severed the rail-links between Manchuria's main cities and pushed back the nationalist front line 150 miles to the south. Liu Bocheng, the ‘One-eyed Dragon’, attacked across the Yellow River into Hebei, while Chen Yi did the same in Shandong. Further north, Nie Rongzhen seized Shijiazhuang, the first major nationalist-held city to fall in China proper, giving the communists control of the main north–south railway from Beijing to Wuhan.¹⁰ By December 1947, Mao was able to announce that 640,000 nationalist soldiers had been killed or wounded, and more than a million had surrendered.

The war, he exulted, had reached a turning-point. ‘[A year earlier] our enemies were jubilant … [and] the US imperialists, too, danced with joy … Now [they] are gripped by pessimism. They heave great sighs [and] wail about a crisis.’¹¹

All through the spring and summer of 1948, Mao's forces pressed home their advantage. By the end of March, most of Manchuria, apart from Changchun and Shenyang, was in Lin Biao's hands, and the nationalists were cut off both from reinforcement and from the possibility of withdrawal. Further south, PLA commanders recovered much of Shanxi and Hebei, all of Shandong and large parts of Henan and Anhui. In an important symbolic victory, Yan'an fell to communist forces on April 25.¹² Mao began to calculate the number of GMD brigades that would have to be eliminated before final victory could be won. In March 1948, he predicted that nationalist rule would be overthrown by mid-1951.¹³ Eight months later, he brought that forward to the autumn of 1949.¹⁴

One factor was the deterioration in the quality of the GMD armies in the last three years of the war against Japan.¹⁶ After America joined the conflict, nationalist generals became more interested in defending their own turf than in driving out the Japanese, figuring that, sooner or later, their allies would do it for them. In the words of one of Chiang's commanders: ‘Our troops … became soft and concerned only with pleasure … [They] lacked combat spirit and there was no willingness to sacrifice.’ Incompetent leadership made matters worse. The US commander in China, General Wedemeyer, called Chiang's officer corps ‘incapable, inept, untrained, petty [and] … altogether inefficient’. The head of the US Military Advisory Group, David Barr, found ‘a complete loss of will to fight’ under generals whom he considered ‘the world's worst’. The Generalissimo himself admitted: ‘I have to lie awake nights wondering what fool things they may do … They are so dumb … that you must imagine everything they can do that would be wrong and warn them against it.’ But Chiang's own constant interventions simply stripped his commanders of what little initiative they had.

Poor intelligence compounded the nationalists’ difficulties. Kang Sheng's campaigns against GMD special agents, grotesque though they were, made it impossible for Chiang's men to penetrate even low-level communist units. By contrast, the nationalist command was infiltrated by communist sympathisers at every level. Chiang's assistant Chief of Staff, General Liu Fei, to all outward appearances a typical GMD career soldier, pompous and bureaucratic, was a communist mole. So was Hu Zongnan's personal secretary, who had forewarned Mao of the plan to capture Yan'an. So was the head of the GMD's War Planning Board, Guo Rugui. In the major battles at the close of the civil war, the PLA commanders knew every nationalist move in advance.

Morale – or the lack of it – was equally important. Chiang's was a conscript army. Press gangs went out to the villages and carried men off from the fields, leaving their families to starve. At the reception centres, where they were supposed to receive basic training, they were held under heavy guard. In some places, even in midwinter, their clothes were taken away at night to try to stop them escaping. ‘The poor fellows slept naked,’ an American observer reported, ‘some 40 or 50 crowded together into a space approximately 10 by 15 feet. The sergeant told us they kept warmer and slept better … close together.’ After being enrolled, they were marched, roped together like prisoners, to their units, often hundreds of miles away at the front. Frequently they had no food or water, because their rations had been ‘squeezed’ by corrupt officers. In one march, from Fujian to Guizhou, a hundred recruits arrived out of the thousand that had set out; in another case, only seventeen were left alive out of seven hundred. Nor were these atypical cases. One year almost half of the 1.67 million new recruits perished or deserted before they reached their units. When the survivors did arrive at the front, many took the first opportunity to run away. It was not unusual for a nationalist unit to lose 6 per cent of its men through desertion each month. Those who remained were chronically malnourished, with no medical treatment available. Colonel Barrett of the Dixie Mission reported seeing nationalist soldiers ‘topple over and die after marching less than a mile’.¹⁷

Having been treated like wild beasts, the troops behaved accordingly. Another American officer reported:

I visited villages [in pro-communist areas] which Chiang's soldiers had occupied and looted. Whatever they could not haul away on stolen oxcarts and pack animals they rendered useless … They had mixed corn, wheat and millet with manure to render the grain inedible. Deep-water wells … were filled with earth … In a village school, the nationalist soldiers had defecated, as they had done elsewhere, and had splashed human excrement on the walls. A young woman … reported to me that she had been dragged from one blockhouse to another and raped for many days. An old woman, past 75, was the only one in a village evacuated by the nationalists just before we arrived. She was sitting, unable to walk, because she too had been raped many times.¹⁸

In some districts, the communists’ inability to protect the population from reprisals of this kind turned the peasants against them. The nationalists had used the same tactics, to similar effect, in Jiangxi in the early 1930s.

Mao responded by stepping up land reform, which had been put on hold during the war against Japan as a concession to the united front. ‘Local tyrants and evil gentry’ were hauled before mass meetings for summary judgement and execution. Class relations in the countryside were deliberately polarised, to give the poorest sections of the peasantry an incentive to commit themselves to the communist cause. But there was a balance to be struck. ‘The battle for China,’ Mao insisted, ‘is a battle for the hearts and minds of the peasants’. If land reform were too radical, middle peasants and other potential allies would be alienated. In the winter of 1947, the Chairman started putting on the brakes.¹⁹

In the cities, Chiang's regime had lost the trust of the population. It had started after Japan's defeat, when GMD carpetbaggers – ‘thieves, highway robbers (worse than socialists)’, as one Shanghai merchant described them – arrived from Chongqing to take over the municipal administration, ostracising the urban elite which had survived the occupation. Then came the civil war, which the middle classes blamed on Chiang's refusal to make peace, rather than on the communists. To cap it all, the tyranny of one-party rule, enforced by public executions and backed up by the secret police; the assassination of liberal dissenters; hyperinflation, eroding salaries, as the government printed money to finance the war; and pervasive corruption, making legitimate business impossible – all turned against the Guomindang the very groups that had previously been its core supporters.

But if these were the symptoms of the nationalist disease, the root lay in the system of rule Chiang Kai-shek had created. It was too weak and faction-ridden to impose itself by force, too corrupt and careless of public welfare to command broad-based support.

That did not make it a pushover. Alongside disaffected, half-starved regular troops, Chiang had well-trained, well-equipped elite units, which had served with courage against Japan and did so again against the communists. The United States poured in arms and equipment worth, by State Department calculations, some 420 billion dollars in present-day terms, more by the communists’ reckoning. Chiang himself declared in June 1947 that his forces had ‘absolute superiority’ over the PLA in battle techniques and experience, and were ‘10 times richer … in terms of military supplies’.

Against that, Mao relied on the ‘collective will of the masses’. It proved to be more than enough.

Two years earlier, at the Seventh Congress, he had recounted an ancient folk-tale about the Foolish Old Man of North Mountain, the view from whose door was obstructed by two great peaks to the south. He and his sons took their hoes, and began to dig them away. When another villager mocked him, the Foolish Old Man replied: ‘When I die my sons will carry on; when they die, there will be my grandsons, and then their sons and grandsons … High as they are, the mountains cannot grow any higher, and with every bit we dig, they will be that much lower. Why can't we dig them away?’ As he carried on digging, Mao said, God was moved by his faith and sent down two angels, who carried the mountains away on their backs:

Today, two big mountains lie like a dead weight on the Chinese people. One is imperialism, the other is feudalism. The Chinese Communist Party has long made up its mind to dig them up. We must persevere and work unceasingly, and we, too, will touch God's heart. Our God is none other than the masses of the Chinese people. If they stand up and dig together with us, why can't these two mountains be cleared away?²⁰

For the rest of Mao's life, the story of the Foolish Old Man would serve as a metaphor for his efforts to transform China. Japan's abrupt collapse in August 1945, like the nationalist collapse three-and-a-half years later, merely strengthened his conviction that, beside the power of the human will, all else was secondary. It was not the atom bomb that defeated the Japanese, Mao insisted, it was the struggle waged by the masses:

The atom bomb is a paper tiger which the US reactionaries use to scare people. It looks terrible, but in fact it isn't. Of course, the atom bomb is a weapon of mass slaughter, but the outcome of a war is decided by the people, not by one or two new types of weapon.

All reactionaries are paper tigers … Hitler … was a paper tiger. So was Mussolini, so was Japanese imperialism … Chiang Kai-shek and his supporters … are all paper tigers too … We have only millet plus rifles to rely on, but history will finally prove that our millet plus rifles is more powerful than Chiang Kai-shek's aeroplanes plus tanks … The reason is simply this: the reactionaries represent reaction, we represent progress.²¹

With this invincible certitude in the rightness of their cause, the communist armies began preparing, in the autumn of 1948, for the three climactic battles that would determine China's modern fate.

The overall plan of campaign was drafted by Mao early in September.²² Lin Biao struck first, at Jinzhou, a heavily fortified junction on the railway line into Manchuria from Beijing, with a force of 700,000 men. After a fierce battle, lasting thirty-one hours, the city fell on October 15. But then events developed in a way Mao had not foreseen. A nationalist relief column, 100,000-strong, set out from Shenyang. Feigning a march south, Lin sent his main force north. The entire column was wiped out. Changchun, which Lin's forces were also besieging, surrendered at the same time. Shenyang, left with half its garrison, followed suit on November 2. Not for nothing was Lin regarded as the communists’ greatest commander. In the space of seven weeks, Chiang had lost the whole of Manchuria, and half-a-million of his best troops. Overnight, the military situation was transformed. Not only were the nationalists in wholesale retreat, but, for the first time since the war had begun, the communists outnumbered them.

Zhu De then ordered Lin to make a 600-mile forced march to the south, to encircle Tianjin and Beijing. There his North-Eastern Army joined up with Nie Rongzhen's North China Field Army, giving him a combined force of almost a million men, the largest the communists had ever assembled. The nationalists had 600,000 troops.

Again, Mao drew up a plan of operations. Lin was told that the main task was to cut off the enemy's escape. The nationalists, Mao warned, were ‘like birds startled by the twang of a bowstring’. Only when the ring was complete should the attack commence, and then the target should be Tianjin, not Beijing as Chiang would expect.²³

Meanwhile, the Central Plains and East China Armies, commanded by Liu Bocheng and Chen Yi, had launched the third great battle, 400 miles to the south.

The Huaihai campaign, as it was called, was fought across four provinces – Anhui, Henan, Jiangsu and Shandong – in an area bounded by the Grand Canal in the east and the Huai River in the south. It lasted just over two months. Each side fielded approximately half-a-million troops, but the communists had the aid of two million peasant auxiliaries, directed by an ad hoc Front Committee, headed by Deng Xiaoping, to provide logistical support. As in Manchuria, the battle began with the destruction of one of Chiang's weaker units. Relief columns were blocked by communist guerrilla action, and when large-scale reinforcements set out, they marched into a gigantic trap which Liu Bocheng had set near Xuzhou. By January 10, when the Huaihai campaign ended, 200,000 nationalist soldiers were dead or wounded, and 300,000 had surrendered.

While Chiang was still reeling from that defeat, Lin Biao tightened the vice around the two northern cities. Tianjin fell on January 15. A week later, the nationalist commander in Beijing, General Fu Zuoyi, negotiated the capital's surrender, ostensibly to save it from communist bombardment. His 200,000 troops were integrated into the PLA, and he himself was later given a sinecure in the new communist government.

The day before Beijing surrendered, Chiang Kai-shek resigned the presidency (while remaining as party leader).²⁴

In four months he had lost 1.5 million men. The communists who, two-and-a-half years earlier, had been ready to accept a minor role in a coalition administration now demanded that he be punished as a war criminal, that the government resign, the constitution be abrogated and the remnants of the nationalist army be absorbed into the PLA. Peace talks opened with Chiang's acting successor, Li Zongren, but quickly collapsed. On April 21, Liu Bocheng's army began crossing the Yangtse. Nanjing fell three days later; Hangzhou on May 3; Shanghai on May 27. By then Chiang had already decided that he would have to abandon the mainland and transfer his headquarters to Taiwan. There, he would wait for the war that he was certain would one day come between America and Russia, at which point he and his pro-American army would return in triumph to China to reconquer their lost lands.

With the Generalissimo went the nationalist air force and navy, some of the best remaining army divisions and 300 million dollars in gold, silver and foreign currency reserves. Deprived of funds and ammunition, nationalist resistance slowly ebbed away. In the south-west fighting would continue for another year, in some places even longer. But to all intents and purposes, the battle for China was over.

The nationalist collapse faced Mao, and the Party as a whole, with the challenge of administering, not just a border region or a base area, but a country three times the size of western Europe, devastated by decades of war and containing nearly a quarter of the world's population. Foremost among his concerns was how to deal with the newly conquered cities.

Mao's wariness of urban life had its roots in the experiences of his youth in Beijing and Shanghai. He never quite threw off the feeling of being a country bumpkin, a peasant's son among city slickers.²⁵ He had studied in one great metropolis, Changsha, and had lived and worked, apparently happily, in two others, Canton and Wuhan. But he would always regard the city as a slightly alien place. Throughout the civil war, Mao's strategy had been to win control of the countryside; the move to the towns could come later. Apart from one moment of panic, in August 1945, when in a knee-jerk reaction at the end of the war, he had ordered ill-prepared urban uprisings in Japanese-occupied cities from Shanghai to Beijing (all of which, fortunately for him, were called off before any damage was done),²⁶ this gradualist approach was maintained until the end of 1948. The PLA was instructed to ‘take medium and small cities and extensive rural areas first; take big cities later.’²⁷

The following March, however, the question of ‘shifting the centre of gravity from the rural areas to the cities’ could no longer be postponed.²⁸

That month Mao embarked on a series of speeches, setting out before the Party hierarchy the economic and political programme the new regime would follow. Urban living standards must be raised, he said, to win the loyalty of the urban population. Major industries and foreign-owned companies would be nationalised, but other forms of capitalism would continue. China would be ruled by a coalition government, headed by the Communist Party but including a number of small progressive parties, mostly splinter groups formed by ex-GMD leftists, to represent sympathetic non-communists from the bourgeoisie and the liberal intelligentsia.²⁹ The new system was to be known as a ‘people's democratic dictatorship’, which, as in the Chinese Soviet Republic, twenty years before, signified that the fruits of democracy would not be shared by all:

[The reactionaries say:] ‘You are dictatorial.’ Dear Sirs, you are right, that is exactly what we are … Only the people are allowed the right to voice their opinions. Who are ‘the people’? At the present stage in China, they are the working class, the peasant class, the petty bourgeoisie and the national bourgeoisie. Under the leadership of the … Communist Party, these classes unite together to … carry out a dictatorship over the lackeys of imperialism – the landlord class, the bureaucratic capitalist class and the GMD reactionaries and their henchmen – to suppress them and [ensure] they behave properly … The democratic system is to be carried out within the ranks of the people … The right to vote is given only to the people and not to the reactionaries. These two aspects, namely, democracy among the people and dictatorship over the reactionaries, combine to form the people's democratic dictatorship.³⁰

For all those who happened to be on the wrong side of this class divide, these were sobering words. Mao insisted that people would be punished only if they broke the law. But he also described the judiciary as an instrument of class violence.

None the less, in 1949, the majority of China's citizens, and many foreign residents, too, looked to the advent of communist administration as bringing not repression but release from the graft and rottenness that had marked the final stages of nationalist rule.

Alan Winnington, a British journalist who was with the first PLA detachment to enter Beijing, found the streets lined by a mass of ‘shouting, laughing, cheering people’.³¹ Derk Bodde, then carrying out research at Qinghua University, wrote in his diary of ‘a new feeling of relief’ in the city. ‘There is no doubt in my mind’, he added, ‘that the communists come here with the bulk of the population on their side.’³² The foreign captain of a Hong Kong tramp steamer, one of the first ships into Tianjin after the communist takeover, was dumbfounded to find a port without ‘squeeze’. Not only were bribes refused, he reported, no one would accept even a cigarette.³³

The maintenance of this climate of probity, of hard work and plain living, in a country where, all through history, officialdom had been synonymous with corruption, was of great importance to Mao. The Party, he warned, was heading into uncharted territory where it would face new and unfamiliar dangers:

With victory, certain moods may grow within the Party – arrogance, putting on airs like a hero, wanting to rest on our laurels instead of striving to make further progress, pleasure-seeking and distaste for hardship … There may be some communists who were never conquered by enemies with guns, and were worthy of the name of heroes for standing up against them, but who cannot withstand the sugar-coated bullets [of the bourgeoisie] … We must guard against this. The achievement of nationwide victory is only the first step in a Long March of 10,000 li. It is silly to pride ourselves on this one step. What is more worthy of pride lies still ahead … The Chinese revolution is a great revolution, but the road beyond is longer and the work to come greater and more arduous … We should be capable not only of destroying the old world. We must also be capable of creating the new.³⁴

To that end, Mao said, cadres would have to put aside the things they knew well, and master the things they did not know. The Russians, he told them, had also been ignorant of economic construction when their revolution truimphed, but that had not stopped them building ‘a great and brilliant socialist state’. What Russia had done, China could do, too.

On the afternoon of October 1 1949, Mao mounted the Gate of Heavenly Peace, overlooking Tiananmen Square in Beijing, and, surrounded by the Communist Party establishment and its progressive allies, formally announced the founding of the People's Republic of China.³⁵

Ten days before, at a meeting to approve the new constitution, naming Beijing, the capital of the Ming and the Qing, as the new seat of government (in place of Nanjing), and Mao himself as Head of State, he had proclaimed:

The Chinese people, comprising one quarter of humanity, have now stood up. The Chinese have always been a great, courageous and industrious nation; it is only in modern times that they have fallen behind … [Today] we have closed ranks and defeated both domestic and foreign aggressors … Ours will no longer be a nation subject to insult and humiliation.³⁶

Now, in the warm late autumn sunshine, with enormous red silk lanterns swinging in the breeze in front of the crimson walls of the Forbidden City, he repeated, in his high-pitched Hunanese brogue, to a crowd 100,000 strong, crammed into the narrow, walled plaza below: ‘We, the 475 million Chinese people, have stood up and our future is infinitely bright.’³⁷

Beijing's new communist administrators had spent months preparing for this moment, when, as the locals put it, Mao's government would ‘put on new clothes’. The plaza itself had been enlarged. Groves of ancient silk trees had been cut down, concrete poured and flagstones laid, and floodlights erected on steel towers. A fading two-storey-high portrait of Chiang Kai-shek, painted on a steel sheet made by welding together flattened petrol cans, which had ornamented the Gate during the nationalists’ rule, had been replaced by an equally large portrait of Mao, hung from the ramparts to one side. The speech-making was followed by a military parade, led by PLA cavalry and long lines of captured American Army lorries and tanks. Then came civilian marchers, chanting, ‘Long live Chairman Mao! A long, long life to Chairman Mao!’, while Mao's answering voice floated down from the loudspeakers, giving the response: ‘Long live the People's Republic.’ As darkness fell, there was a spectacular fireworks display, which could be seen all over the city. Dancers carrying coloured paper lanterns, marked with the hammer-and-sickle and the red star, formed a frieze in the square below, depicting what one poetic soul described as ‘a huge fiery ship, the Chinese ship of state, riding on glowing blue-green waves’, while the noise of cymbals, trumpets and drums, mingled with the chanting of Mao's name, reverberated across the yellow-tiled roofs of the old imperial city.³⁸

Next day the Soviet Union became the first country to recognise the new state.³⁹ A motley group of minor communist parties and far left luminaries, ranging from the Work Committee of the Communist Party of Thailand to the British Labour Party MP, Connie Zilliacus, sent messages of congratulation.⁴⁰ Mao began to prepare for his first visit abroad – to Moscow.

His readiness to leave China, even before the civil war had ended, testified both to his confidence in his colleagues and to the overriding importance he attached to this journey. As 1949 drew to a close, most of south-west China was still in nationalist hands, and an attempt by the PLA to take Jinmen Island (Quemoy), just off the coast of Fujian, had been beaten off with 9,000 communist casualties. In mid-November, Chiang Kai-shek flew back from Taiwan to Sichuan, where the GMD had established a temporary capital. He was still there on December 6, when Mao boarded a special train for Russia.⁴¹

For the new communist government, there was no question of simply inheriting the diplomatic ties bequeathed by the nationalists. Mao wanted a rupture, a clean break, with the Western powers, to expunge the last remnants of a century of humiliation.⁴² Earlier that year he had explained to Anastas Mikoyan, a veteran member of the Soviet Politburo whom Stalin had sent on a fact-finding visit to China, that the policy of ‘leaning to one side’, which the government would follow, involved a degree of diplomatic isolation. Russian help would be welcomed, he said. But until China had ‘set its house in order’, others would be kept at arm's length. Only when China itself decided that the time was right would imperialist countries be permitted to establish diplomatic missions. Meanwhile their former representatives, and their citizens, would be put under strong pressure to leave.⁴³

New China, the new ‘Middle Kingdom’, would make the barbarians wait at the gates, as old China had before it.

In a speech during the summer, Mao spelled out the implications of these decisions:

[The reactionaries say:] ‘You lean to one side.’ Precisely so … To sit on the fence is impossible … In the world, without exception, one either leans to the side of imperialism or to the side of socialism. Neutrality is mere camouflage and a third road does not exist … We belong to the anti-imperialist front headed by the USSR, and we can look for genuine friendly aid only from that front, not from the imperialist front.⁴⁴

Yet there was an important nuance. Mao spoke of leaning, not becoming part of a monolithic block. China might belong to a Soviet-led ‘anti-imperialist front’ (just as the CCP had earlier belonged to a GMD-led ‘united front’), but in neither case did that mean that their policies were identical. To Mao, membership of a front included both unity and struggle.

Mao had asked three times to go to Moscow to meet the Soviet leader – in July 1947 and in January and July 1948 – and each time Stalin had fobbed him off.⁴⁵ (A meeting was proposed the following November, but at that point the military situation made it impossible for Mao to leave China.) On two occasions the Russians had hinted – or at least, Mao had interpreted it that way – that communist forces should delay crossing the Yangtse and content themselves instead with controlling the northern half of the country. Caution was advisable, they explained, to avoid provoking the United States.⁴⁶ But Mao knew, and Stalin knew, that a divided China was in Russia's, not in China's, interest. ‘There are real friends and false friends,’ Mao told Mikoyan pointedly. ‘False friends are friendly on the surface, but say one thing and mean another. They dupe you … We shall be on our guard against this.’⁴⁷

Five months later, as the PLA pressed triumphantly southward amid a nationalist rout, Stalin made what amounted to an apology. He told Liu Shaoqi, then visiting Moscow to discuss Soviet aid: ‘Winners are always right. We feel that perhaps we hampered you in the past … We didn't know a lot about you, so it's possible that we made mistakes.’⁴⁸

As the clock on the Spassky Tower struck noon, in bitterly cold weather on December 16, 1949, Mao's train pulled into the Yaroslavsky Station, near the Kremlin Wall, its stuccoed, gilt-and-gingerbread façade picked out in white and ochre paint, ablaze with red flags.

He was apprehensive. A few days earlier, in Sverdlovsk, while walking on the station platform, he had suddenly staggered, his face chalk-white and pouring sweat. After he had been helped to his carriage, the Russians were told he had a cold. It was an attack of neurasthenia.⁴⁹ Stalin, for all his faults, was still to Mao the communist pontiff. The relationship they forged in the coming weeks would determine whether ‘leaning to one side’ could be translated into practical policy.

To the Soviet leaders, Mao was an enigma – the second most powerful communist leader in the world, and one of very few who had gained power without significant Russian help. Was he simply a communist original (who, in that case, would not fit easily into the Soviet scheme of things)? Or might he become another Tito whose defiance had led, a year earlier, to his excommunication from the communist camp?⁵⁰ Stalin, too, wanted to put the relationship on a proper footing.

That night, at 6 p.m., the doors of the St Catherine's Hall in the Kremlin swung open, and Mao found Stalin and the entire Soviet Politburo drawn up to receive him. It was, and was intended to be, an exceptional gesture for an exceptional guest.⁵¹

The Russian leader greeted him effusively as ‘the good son of the Chinese people.’ But the underlying tensions surfaced moments later, when the Soviet leader, thinking that Mao was about to allude to their differences,^I cut in with the same words he had used to Liu Shaoqi: ‘You're a winner now, and winners are always right. That's the rule.’⁵² A stilted conversation followed, in which Stalin asked Mao what he wanted his visit to achieve. ‘Something that doesn't [just] look good, but tastes good,’ Mao replied. The KGB chief, Lavrentii Beria, giggled when that was translated. Stalin insisted on knowing what it meant. Mao declined to be more explicit, and by the time the two-hour meeting ended, the Soviet leader was reduced to asking whether China had a meteorological service, and if Mao would agree to his works being translated into Russian.

In fact, Stalin knew full well exactly what Mao wanted. China expected Russia to abrogate the Sino-Soviet Friendship Treaty concluded with Chiang Kai-shek and to negotiate a new alliance, appropriate to the relationship between fraternal communist powers.

This Stalin was reluctant to do. The pretext was that the agreement with Chiang flowed from the Yalta accords with Britain and the US. Therefore, he told Mao, ‘a change in even one point could give England and America the legal grounds to raise questions about [other points]’, such as Soviet rights to former Japanese territory in the Kuriles and South Sakhalin. This was bunkum – and designedly so. It was Stalin's way of telling Mao that if he wanted a new relationship with Moscow it would have to be on Russia's terms. The existing treaty would remain formally in effect, and, in accepting it, Mao would be recognising Stalin's primacy. The most the Soviet leader would add, by way of sugaring the pill, was that there was nothing to stop the two governments informally modifying its contents.

In 1938, when Stalin had endorsed his leadership, the symbolic quid pro quo had been that Mao publicly acknowledge that Stalin had been correct in viewing the Xian Incident as a Japanese-inspired plot. Mao had paid the requisite lip-service. With Stalin, he said later, it was ‘a relationship between father and son, or between a cat and a mouse’.

But this time the stakes were far higher. Relations with Russia were the cornerstone of Mao's policies towards the rest of the world. If they continued to be based on Chinese subservience, what had the revolution achieved? If Russia insisted on perpetuating outdated treaty accords, why should capitalist countries agree to put their relations with China on a new footing?

Since the middle of 1946, when the Chinese communists had established themselves in Manchuria – and the Cold War had begun to transform the geopolitical map of East Asia – Stalin had paid close attention to developments in China. That year hundreds of Soviet advisers and medical personnel had been sent to work behind PLA lines in the north-east and a Soviet military intelligence unit was attached to Mao's headquarters. Military aid was at first parsimonious, but as trade with the Soviet Union developed across the Manchurian border, the PLA had been able to acquire substantial quantities of Soviet equipment, and by the time of Liu Shaoqi's visit to Moscow in June 1949, Stalin was ready to respond generously to their requests for assistance. ‘It is in the economy that we need your help,’ Mao had messaged him a few weeks earlier. ‘Without economic construction, we cannot realise the revolution.’ The Kremlin offered a 300 million US dollar loan, aid in ship-building, and the provision of naval artillery, fighter aircraft and training for Chinese pilots. When Liu returned home in August, he was accompanied by 220 Soviet experts in everything from finance and transportation to police work and cultural institutions. But Stalin continued to regard the Chinese communists as being at the stage of ‘bourgeois revolution’, and he repeatedly cautioned Mao against going too fast and trying to install a full-fledged communist regime like that in the Soviet Union itself.

Even in a period of warming relations there had been moments of grave tension. In January 1949, Mao had been infuriated when Stalin sent him detailed instructions on how to reply to a truce proposal from Chiang Kai-shek's acting successor, Li Zongren. In his telegram in response, he not only rejected the Soviet leader's advice, saying that if he followed it, ‘the broad popular masses … would find themselves in despair’, but, in an unprecedented act of defiance towards the leader of the communist world, went on to tell him how the CCP expected him to treat the issue at hand.

In his usual elliptical fashion, he avoided confronting Stalin directly, focusing instead on a seemingly minor issue – whether or not Zhou Enlai should come to join him in Moscow. (If Zhou came, it would mean the Russians agreed to negotiate a new treaty; if he did not, the old treaty would continue.)

Mao was left to stew, half prisoner, half cosseted guest, in the ponderous elegance of Stalin's personal dacha, in a birch forest a few miles west of Moscow. On December 21, he attended ceremonies marking the Soviet leader's seventieth birthday, where he was seated next to Stalin and made an appropriately fulsome speech. But this was a purely formal occasion and the Russians then abruptly cancelled talks which had been tentatively scheduled for the 23rd. Mao exploded in anger. ‘I have only three tasks here,’ he shouted at his Soviet minders, pounding the table. ‘The first is to eat, the second is to sleep, and the third is to shit’.⁵³ Yet when Stalin telephoned him, two days later, Mao was evasive and refused to broach political issues. When he, in turn, telephoned Stalin, he was told the Soviet leader was out.

This byzantine battle of wills, as each man waited for the other to blink first, might have continued indefinitely had not Western journalists, puzzled by Mao's apparent disappearance, begun to speculate that he might be under house arrest. That prompted Stalin to send a Tass correspondent to interview him. Mao then indicated that he was ready to remain in Moscow for as long as it took to get an agreement. Soon afterwards, Stalin backed down. On January 2, 1950, Molotov was despatched to inform him that Zhou could come to Moscow: the old treaty would be scrapped, and a new one concluded in its place. ‘But what about Yalta?’ Mao enquired mischievously when he and Stalin next met. ‘The hell with that!’ the Soviet leader replied.⁵⁴

Exactly what made him change his mind is unclear. Mao thought Britain's impending decision to recognise the Beijing government might have played the key role, by fuelling Stalin's paranoia that China might tilt to the West. But perhaps he simply recognised that, on this issue, Mao would not give way.

In any event, six weeks later, on February 14, the two foreign ministers, Zhou and Vyshinsky, signed the new ‘Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance’, with Stalin and Mao looking on. That night, in another break with precedent, the Soviet leader attended a reception Mao hosted in the ballroom of the Metropol Hotel. It was so unusual for him to leave the Kremlin that Russian security officials insisted on placing a bulletproof glass partition between the leaders and their guests, with the result that no one could hear the toasts until Mao asked that it be removed.

Appearances were again deceptive. The detailed negotiations had been painfully difficult. Stalin's interpreter, Nikolai Fedorenko, remembered the room where they were held as being like ‘a stage where a demonic show was being acted out’. Mao pressed for a cast-iron Soviet commitment to come to China's aid in the event of a US attack, only for Stalin to finagle by adding the condition that a state of war must have been declared. He was still more incensed by Stalin's demands for special privileges in Xinjiang and Manchuria. Stalin, for his part, remained convinced that Mao was an ersatz communist, a Chinese version of the eighteenth-century Russian peasant leader, Pugachev. ‘He mistrusted us,’ Mao complained later. ‘He thought our revolution was a fake.’⁵⁵

None the less, a modus vivendi had been achieved. As Mao began the long rail journey home, he could take satisfaction in the fact that a solid foundation had been laid for China's new place in the world. With the civil war all but over, the government could now turn its attention to rebuilding the shattered economy, and taking the first, giddy steps on the road to socialism.

Four months later, at 4.40 a.m. on June 25, 1950, the Korean War broke out.⁵⁶

Mao had been forewarned. The North Korean leader, Kim Il Sung, had flown to Beijing six weeks earlier to tell him that Moscow had approved a military offensive to reunify the peninsula. Stalin, wily as ever, had laid down a condition: Kim must first get Mao's approval. ‘If you get kicked in the teeth,’ the Soviet leader had told him, ‘I shall not lift a finger.’ The implication was that Mao would then have to bail the Koreans out. In his discussions in China, Kim had omitted that part of the conversation.⁵⁷

In Beijing, the war was deeply unwelcome. Not only was there uncertainty over how America would react, but the Chinese were themselves at that stage preparing to invade Taiwan.⁵⁸ Mao had been suspicious enough of Kim's story to send a message to Stalin, asking him to confirm that he had approved the attack. This Stalin did, but took care in his reply to place the ball squarely in Mao's court: a final decision, he said, must be taken by ‘the Chinese and Korean comrades together’. If the Chinese disagreed, the decision should be postponed.⁵⁹ That left Mao with no real choice. A hundred thousand Koreans had fought alongside Chinese troops in Manchuria. How could he now tell Kim that he must not try to ‘liberate’ his own land? The North Korean was informed that China acquiesced.⁶⁰

But mistrust on both sides continued. Kim decreed that the Chinese should be kept in the dark about the date of the attack and excluded from the military planning.⁶¹

To Chiang Kai-shek, the war was a godsend. Six months earlier, Truman had made clear that the US would not intervene to protect the nationalists, should Taiwan be attacked. In April, Chinese troops had made a large-scale amphibious landing on the island of Hainan, off the coast of Guangdong, crushing nationalist resistance in two weeks and killing or wounding 33,000 GMD soldiers. It looked like, and was, a dress rehearsal for the invasion of Taiwan itself. The next step would be attacks on Quemoy and the other offshore islands, followed by the final assault, to take place a year later.⁶²

Korea changed all that. The US might turn a blind eye to what all sides agreed was a continuation of the Chinese civil war. It could hardly do the same when a Soviet client-state in the northern part of the Korean peninsula undertook armed aggression against what was in effect a US protectorate in the south.⁶³ On June 27, Washington announced that it would send troops to support South Korea's Syngman Rhee, and, for good measure, that the US Seventh Fleet would neutralise the Taiwan Straits.

Mao's initial response was limited. Chinese anti-aircraft units were moved to the North Korean side of the border to defend the bridges across the Yalu River, and reinforcements were sent from the south to Manchuria, on the grounds that, as one Chinese commander put it, ‘one must prepare an umbrella before it rains’. The plan to attack Quemoy was put on indefinite hold.⁶⁴

At the end of July, however, as the North Korean forces continued their triumphant march southward, Mao began to grow alarmed. He could see, as Kim Il Sung could not, that the Korean lines were becoming overextended and vulnerable to an American counter-attack. At a Politburo meeting on August 4, Mao raised for the first time the possibility that Chinese forces might have to intervene directly to help the North Koreans, even at the risk of US nuclear retaliation. The problem, he told his colleagues, was that if the Americans won, their appetite would grow with eating. China would face the threat of US air raids against Manchurian and east China coast cities; amphibious attacks by nationalist units across the Taiwan Straits; even, perhaps, a combined operation involving the French forces fighting Ho Chi Minh's armies across China's southern border in Vietnam.

Two weeks later, Mao's fears deepened. One of Zhou Enlai's military analysts was convinced that the US Commander, General Douglas MacArthur, would make his move at Inchon, on the narrow waist of Korea, just south of the 38th parallel, the nominal dividing line between North and South. When Mao looked at the map, the young analyst convinced him too. He ordered the PLA to deploy another half-million men along the Manchurian border, and to begin planning for a war lasting at least a year.

Strategically the United States was indeed a paper tiger, he said. But tactically ‘the United States is a real tiger and capable of eating human flesh’. The Koreans should regroup and prepare to beat off an amphibious assault: ‘From a tactical point of view, sometimes retreat is better than attack … Your enemy is not an easy one. Don't forget, you are fighting the chief imperialist. Be prepared for the worst.’

Kim ignored him. So did Stalin. On September 15, the Inchon landings began, and the North Korean army disintegrated. In Pyongyang, there was panic. Kim sent two of his top lieutenants to Beijing with a frantic plea for help. Stalin added his voice, offering Soviet air cover if Mao would send in ground forces to prevent a Korean collapse.

The next few weeks were the worst Mao had faced since the traumatic months following the Japanese surrender in 1945. He barely slept. On the one hand, he told Gao Gang, whom he had placed in charge of war-preparedness in Manchuria, there appeared to be no way to avoid intervention. On the other, China desperately needed peace for economic reconstruction. The country had been ravaged by war ever since the fall of the Qing dynasty, almost forty years earlier. The communists still had to recover Tibet and Taiwan and, within China proper, hundreds of thousands of bandits and remnant nationalist soldiers were roaming the countryside; industry was in ruins; there was massive unemployment in the cities, and famine in the central plains.

Even in Beijing, food was in short supply. The stock of goodwill the regime had acquired by ending nationalist corruption, stabilising the currency and restoring basic services had already been used up.

Mao's military planners estimated that China would lose 60,000 dead and 140,000 wounded in the first year. The Americans enjoyed superior weaponry; but the PLA was better motivated, had greater reserves of manpower, and was better at the ‘jigsaw warfare’ which would occur when there was no stable front. The Chinese armies should therefore adopt the traditional Maoist tactic of ‘concentrating superior forces against weaker ones’ and fighting battles of annihilation, to maximise US casualties and erode American public support for continuing the war. The optimum time for Chinese entry, they concluded, would be shortly after US units crossed the 38th parallel into the north, because at that point the American supply lines would be stretched to the maximum, Chinese forces would still be close to their rear base, and politically Chinese intervention would be easy to justify.

On September 30, the first South Korean units crossed into North Korea. Twenty-four hours later, as the Chinese leaders celebrated the first anniversary of the People's Republic, Kim sent a special plane to Beijing with a hand-carried message, admitting that he was on the verge of defeat. ‘If attacks north of the 38th parallel continue,’ he wrote grimly, ‘we shall not be able to survive relying merely on our own strength.’

The question now is not whether but how fast we should send troops to Korea. One day's difference will be crucial … Today we will discuss two urgent questions: when our troops should enter Korea, and who should be the commander.

But if, for Mao, intervention had become inevitable, it did not mean that the rest of the leadership immediately rallied to his views. When the full Politburo met, on October 4, the majority was against him, for the same mixture of economic and political reasons that he himself had weighed in August.

Lin Biao was particularly sceptical. If Kim were going to be defeated, he argued, China would do better to draw a defence line at the Yalu River, and let the North Koreans mount guerrilla actions from Manchuria to recover their lost land. Mao was unimpressed. That way, China would abandon the initiative, he replied. ‘We would have to wait [on the Yalu] year after year, never knowing when the enemy will attack.’ Lin had been Mao's first choice to command the Chinese intervention force, but had declined on grounds of ill-health. Now Mao proposed instead that the command should go to Peng Dehuai. Peng had arrived at the meeting late, having flown in from Xian. But he agreed with Mao's analysis that the United States would not be stopped by concessions, and when the discussion resumed, the following afternoon, his support helped secure a consensus in favour of military action.

Two days later, the first US troops – the American First Cavalry Division – crossed the 38th parallel, and Washington persuaded the UN to endorse Korean unification as its final goal. On Sunday, October 8, Mao issued the formal decree creating a Chinese expeditionary force to go to North Korea's aid. It would be known as the Chinese People's Volunteers, to underline that its mission was in the nature of a moral crusade, based on communist solidarity, and, more importantly, to maintain the fiction that Beijing's intervention was unofficial, and could not therefore justify American retaliation against Chinese cities. The force was to start crossing the Yalu River on October 15.

Then abruptly, three days before the expedition was to begin, Mao ordered all troop movements halted and summoned Peng back to Beijing ‘to reconsider the [intervention] decision’.

The problem, as ever, was Moscow. A crisis had erupted over Soviet military support. On October 1, Stalin had cabled Mao from his Black Sea villa at Sochi, where he was vacationing: ‘I see that the situation of our Korean friends is getting desperate … I think that you should move at least five or six divisions towards the 38th parallel at once.’ In Mao's mind, this tripped an alarm. The problem was not Stalin's request. What worried him was the Soviet leader's silence about the undertakings the Russians had given, in the panicky days after Inchon, to provide Soviet air cover and military supplies.

Mao decided to bluff. He replied that a majority of the Chinese Politburo opposed intervention, and that he was sending Zhou Enlai for urgent consultations.

They met in Sochi on October 10. On Mao's instructions, Zhou presented what amounted to an ultimatum. China, he told Stalin, would respect the Soviet Union's wishes. If the Russians were willing to provide air cover and a massive infusion of weaponry, the Chinese would intervene. Otherwise, Mao would defer to Stalin's judgement and call the whole thing off. Then he sat back to wait for the old dictator's response.

If the Chinese felt it was too difficult to intervene, he said in substance, North Korea would have to be abandoned. Kim Il Sung could resort to partisan warfare from bases in Manchuria.

Zhou's hand had been trumped. In the ten hours of talks that followed, ending with a drunken banquet that broke up at 5 a.m., he was able to obtain some fresh assurances, conveyed to Mao in a cable which both he and Stalin signed, that Russia would provide needed weaponry and air defence for Chinese cities. But there would be no Soviet air cover over Korea, at least for the first two months. Stalin's excuse was that the Soviet air force needed time to prepare. In fact he had got cold feet. If Soviet pilots took part, the risk of escalation leading to direct conflict with the Americans was too great. In any case, Soviet involvement had never been part of Stalin's game plan. From the outset, he had seen the war in Korea as an opportunity to get America bogged down in an exhausting conflict with the North Koreans and, if all went well, with the Chinese too. That was why he had refused to allow the Soviet Ambassador at the UN to veto the Security Council's decision to authorise military intervention. Allowing America to ‘commit new stupidities’, he had explained to the Czech President, Klement Gottwald, that August, would undermine the United States’ prestige and distract American attention from Europe, where Moscow would have a freer hand. ‘Does this help us out in terms of the balance of world forces?’ he asked. ‘Absolutely it does.’⁶⁵

For Mao, the Soviet leader's decision to renege on military commitments made only weeks earlier was the bitterest of all Moscow's betrayals.

At Xian in 1936 and in Manchuria in 1945, all that had been at stake were the political interests of a Chinese Party still struggling for power. But now China was a sovereign state, and Russia a treaty ally. ‘Lean to one side’ or not, the Soviet Union, Mao concluded, would never be a partner China could trust.

For 36 hours, Mao hesitated. On October 12, he drafted a telegram to Stalin, saying that China would not intervene, but ordered it not to be sent. Stalin took his silence to mean that anyway, and sent a message to Kim Il Sung, advising him to prepare to evacuate North Korea. But China was too deeply committed for there to be any real of changing course. Mao was forced to recognise that his bluff had been called. That night he sent word that the intervention would go ahead anyway. Stalin, despite himself, was impressed. ‘So the Chinese really are good comrades!’ he was quoted as saying.⁶⁶

Mao's troubles were still not over. The army commanders in the north-east were deeply alarmed by the prospect of exposing their men to American bombardment without air cover of any kind. On the 17th, they sent Peng Dehuai a joint message, proposing that China's entry into the war be postponed until the following spring. But with the South Koreans already at the gates of Pyongyang, that was not an option. Next day, after hearing Peng's report, Mao told his colleagues: ‘No matter what the difficulties, we should not change [our] decision … nor should we delay it.’ At Mao's proposal, it was agreed that the Volunteers should begin moving into Korea under cover of darkness on the 19th. Thirty hours later, at around midnight, the Chief of the General Staff, Nie Rongzhen, informed him that the troops were crossing the Yalu as planned. For the first time in weeks, Mao had a proper night's sleep.

After initial skirmishing at the front in late October and early November, Peng ordered a general retreat. MacArthur then launched an all-out offensive to reach the Yalu River, under the slogan, ‘Get the boys home by Christmas!’. As the Americans would soon discover, Mao was playing his old game of ‘luring the enemy in deep’. At dusk on November 25, the Chinese counter-attacked. Ten days and 36,000 enemy casualties later (including 24,000 US troops), Peng's forces retook Pyongyang.

It was not a perfect campaign. Chinese casualties were high, and the men suffered appallingly from the cold and from lack of food. None the less, seven weeks after entering the war Peng's ‘volunteers’ had recaptured virtually all of North Korea.

At this point, Peng proposed a halt until the following spring. Mao pressed for a further advance. The Russians had begun providing limited air cover and, with the campaign now succeeding, Stalin had promised improvements in military resupply. Peng dragged his feet, but, at Mao's urging, reluctantly ordered a new offensive to start on New Year's Eve, when there would be a full moon, facilitating night operations, and the Americans would be busy with year-end festivities. Five days later, Chinese and North Korean forces captured the South Korean capital, Seoul, now a deserted shell of burnt-out buildings and rubble-filled streets, and forced the Americans back a further eighty miles to the south. But then, again, Peng halted. Kim Il Sung was furious and complained to Stalin. The Soviet leader, however, supported Peng's decision. Stalin's goal was not victory but an indefinite war of attrition.

A month later, the Americans counter-attacked. Peng proposed a withdrawal, trading territory for time, following Mao's own hallowed precept which had served the communists so well against Chiang Kai-shek and Japan. But Mao forbade it. He wanted to hold on to Seoul and the 38th parallel, whose capture had become a powerful symbol, both at home and abroad, of Red China's newfound strength.

In cable after cable, Peng tried to explain why this was unrealistic. ‘Boots, food and munitions have not been provided,’ he told Mao. ‘The men cannot march barefoot in the snow.’ With temperatures falling to –30 centigrade, thousands died of exposure.

For the first time in Mao's long career, he had allowed political considerations to cloud his military judgement.

In the end, not only was Seoul abandoned, but with it the eastern part of the 38th parallel and a large swathe of territory further north. In little more than four months, the Chinese Volunteers lost 140,000 men. The Americans built a strongly fortified defence line along the 38th parallel, and the war settled into seesaw battles around the two sides’ existing positions. Truce talks opened in July 1951, but neither side was yet willing to admit that it had had enough. Not until two years later, after the death of Stalin and the election of Dwight D. Eisenhower, a Republican, as the new US President, were the Americans and the Chinese able, over the objections of both their Korean clients, to end the blood-letting and allow an armistice to be signed.⁶⁷

Peng and the other Chinese commanders, who had experienced at first hand the effects of advanced military technology, came away from Korea convinced that warfare had fundamentally changed. Peng would spend the next five years as Defence Minister trying to transform the PLA into a modern, professional force.⁶⁸

Not Mao. To him, the fact that poorly armed Chinese troops had fought the cream of the US Army to a standstill merely confirmed his belief that will-power, not weapons, decided the outcome of wars. ‘We have won a great victory,’ he exulted that autumn:

We have taken the measure of the US armed forces. If you have never taken them on, you are liable to be scared of them … [Now we know] US imperialism is not terrifying, nothing to make a fuss about … The Chinese people are now organised, they are not to be trifled with. Once they are provoked to anger, things can get very tough.⁶⁹

Mao's impatience in the early stages of the conflict for quick, dramatic results was part of a wider pattern. Now that China had ‘stood up’, he yearned for a renewal of its ancient grandeur. Korea, like Vietnam, had been for centuries a tributary state. In the autumn of 1950, China had gone to war not merely to prevent a hostile, pro-American government taking power just across the Yalu River. National security, in a deeper sense, required the restoration of that suzerain relationship. For the same reason, Mao had sent military advisers to work with Ho Chi Minh's armies. Vietnam, too, had to be brought back into the Chinese fold.⁷⁰

After the war in Korea, America was no longer the only ‘paper tiger’ in Mao's book. China's attitude to the Soviet Union underwent a sea change. By preventing a North Korean defeat, China had come to Russia's rescue. Stalin's successors viewed Mao's regime with new respect, tinged with some apprehension. If a weak China could act so boldly, what future for its partnership with Russia once it became strong? To Mao, on the other hand, Moscow's stock had fallen. Not only had the Russians been devious, by manoeuvring China into a conflict it would have preferred to avoid, but they had shown themselves undependable and, ultimately, weak.⁷¹

Outwardly, nothing changed. China needed Soviet aid to rebuild its economy. In the Cold War of the 1950s, there was nowhere else it could turn. But the seeds of contempt had been sown.

When the final tally was made, China had suffered at least half a million casualties in Korea, including 147,000 dead.⁷² Among the latter was Mao's eldest son, Anying.

Since returning from Moscow, five years earlier, Anying had worked among the peasantry – renewing his Chinese roots, as his father put it – and then at a Beijing factory, where he became Deputy Secretary of the Party branch. In the autumn of 1950, with Mao's reluctant acquiescence, he volunteered for duty in Korea. While in the Soviet Union, he had studied military science and in 1944 had spent four months as a cadet on the Byelorussian Front. However, Peng Dehuai turned down his request to serve with an infantry regiment, thinking that it was too dangerous, and named him instead to a post on his own staff as a Russian-speaking liaison officer. On November 24, 1950, less than five weeks after Chinese units crossed the border, Peng's headquarters, in an abandoned gold-mine, were attacked by US bombers. Peng himself and most of his staff took refuge in a tunnel. Anying and another officer were trapped in a wooden building on the surface. It was hit by an incendiary bomb. Both men were killed.

That afternoon, Peng sent Mao a telegram, announcing the young man's death and proposing that he be buried on the battlefield, like all Chinese soldiers in Korea. When Mao's secretary, Ye Zilong, received it, he telephoned Zhou Enlai, who contacted other leaders. They authorised the burial, but decided that, with the war at a critical juncture, Mao should not be told.

So it was that, three months later, when Peng next saw Mao in Beijing, and blurted out how ashamed he was at not having protected Anying better, Mao was brutally confronted with news for which he was totally unprepared – that his eldest son had died. He crumpled, Peng remembered, trembling so violently that he could not light his cigarette. For several minutes, they sat in complete silence. Then Mao lifted his head. ‘In revolutionary war,’ he said, ‘you always pay a price. Anying was one of thousands … You shouldn't take it as something special just because he was my son.’⁷³

The revolution had already taken Mao's siblings: his adopted sister, Zejian, had been executed the year before Yang Kaihui; his youngest brother, Zetan, had died in Jiangxi, in a clash with nationalist troops in 1935; the second brother, Zemin, had been tortured and strangled on the orders of the Xinjiang warlord, Sheng Shicai, in 1943. His younger son, Anqing, who had been extremely close to Anying and already suffered from mental illness, was devastated by his brother's death and soon afterwards was diagnosed with schizophrenia. Mao's daughters, Li Min and Li Na, were under Jiang Qing's influence, a connection he found increasingly distasteful.

Anying's relationship with his father had not been easy. Mao was a demanding man, who insisted that his children behave irreproachably and receive the same treatment as everyone else. His bodyguard, Li Yinqiao, remembered him telling them: ‘You're Mao Zedong's child, and that's hard luck for you!’⁷⁴ Yet, since the young man's return to China, despite occasional flare-ups,^III the two had grown close. When he died at the age of twenty-eight, the one remaining human bond capable of evoking in Mao a deep, personal loyalty, was severed.

The bloodshed that marked the birth of New China was not limited to the Korean War. The civilian death-toll in the political and economic movements that accompanied it was many times higher.

In the spring of 1950, Mao had begun to mobilise the Party for the immense effort necessary to install communist rule in the vast areas of central and southern China, with a population of more than 300 million, which the PLA had occupied in the course of the previous twelve months. The first step, he had decreed, was to ‘stabilise social order’. This required ‘resolutely eliminating bandits, spies, bullies and despots’, along with nationalist secret agents, who, he said, were spreading anti-communist rumours; sabotaging economic work; and murdering Party workers. There was a basis for these charges. That year, 3,000 officials had been killed in the countryside while trying to collect grain taxes.⁷⁵ 60,000 rebels were active in western Sichuan, and there and in adjoining provinces ‘large-scale armed rebellions’ had broken out. In Beijing, Tianjin and other cities, there had been incidents of arson and explosions attributed to nationalist sleeper networks.⁷⁶

The original intention was to proceed cautiously. ‘Chief culprits’ were to be punished; others might be shown leniency.⁷⁷

The Korean War changed all that.⁷⁸ All over China, hundreds of thousands of people marched in anti-American demonstrations. A huge hoarding was erected in the centre of Beijing, showing Truman and MacArthur, green-faced and unshaven, reaching out towards China with claws dripping blood, being repulsed by a stalwart Chinese Volunteer.⁷⁹ People were encouraged to send small gifts to the soldiers at the front, accompanied by inspirational messages, along the lines: ‘I saved this cake of soap for you so that you can clean off the enemy's blood, sprinkled on your clothes, and prepare for another battle.’ Workers gave part of their wages for the war effort; peasants pledged to increase production, and donate the extra harvest. To encourage activism, they were told that weapons bought in this way would be inscribed with the donors’ names.⁸⁰

Foreigners played their part, too, but as negative examples. An Italian, long resident in China, was accused of plotting to assassinate Mao at the October 1st parade. He was convicted of heading a US espionage network, aided by his neighbour, a Japanese. After a summary trial, the two men were driven, standing on the back of an open jeep, across the city to an execution ground by the Temple of Heaven. There they were shot. Two other foreigners, an Italian bishop and a French bookshop owner, were imprisoned as alleged accomplices. That the plot was a fabrication was immaterial. Blazoned across several pages of the Party newspaper, Renmin ribao (People's Daily), it helped to justify the imposition of ever harsher social controls.⁸¹

Subsequent Chinese claims that the US was using germ warfare in Korea, and that the American military were shipping Chinese prisoners of war to Nevada to test the effect of nuclear weapons, piled on further pressure.⁸² In every corner of the country, Chinese seethed with indignation at imperialist atrocities. Those who did not seethe were suspected of being disloyal.

In this superheated atmosphere, the campaign to suppress counter-revolutionaries burned white-hot. Over the next two years, more than 700,000 people, most of them linked in some way, however tenuous, with the departed Guomindang, were executed or driven to suicide.

At least a million-and-a-half more disappeared into the newly established ‘reform through labour’ camps, purpose-built to accommodate them.⁸³

Mao himself fine-tuned the operation, issuing a steady stream of directives from the winter of 1950 until the following autumn. Thus, in January 1951, when the campaign was apparently flagging, he insisted that death sentences be carried out, arguing: ‘If we are weak and indecisive, and excessively indulgent … of evil people, it will bring disaster.’ Two months later, he applied the brakes. ‘Rashness presents the major danger,’ he now warned. ‘It doesn't make much difference if a counter-revolutionary is executed a few days sooner or a few days later. But … making wrong arrests and executions will produce very bad effects.’ The following month, April, he proposed that 0.1 per cent of the population should be targeted: ‘Execute half of this figure first, and then wait and see how the situation develops.’ In May, he suggested suspended death sentences, because otherwise ‘it will deprive us of a large pool of [prison] labour power’. A month later, the movement needed to be encouraged again. ‘Persons who … have to be executed to assuage the people's anger,’ Mao declared, ‘must be put to death for this purpose.’⁸⁴

Mao laid down a new guideline of ‘not correcting excesses prematurely’. In almost every village, at least one and sometimes several landlords were dragged before mass meetings, organised by Party work teams, and either beaten to death on the spot by enraged peasants or reserved for public execution later. By the time the land reform was completed, at the end of 1952, upwards of a million landlords and members of their families had been killed. Even that figure is only a guess. The actual death-toll may have been two, possibly even three, times higher.⁸⁵ Within three years of the founding of New China, the landlords as a cohesive class, which had dominated rural society since Han times, had simply ceased to exist.

In contrast to Soviet practice, Mao insisted that the major role in these movements be played not by the public security organs but by ordinary people. The rationale was the same as it had been in Hunan in 1927 and in the soviet base areas in the 1930s: peasants who killed with their bare hands the landlords who oppressed them were wedded to the new revolutionary order in a way that passive spectators could never be.

The Party faced a still greater challenge in trying to bring about a comparable social transformation in the cities – to cleanse our society’, as Mao put it, ‘of all the filth and poison left over from the old regime.’⁸⁶

To that end, starting in the autumn of 1951, Mao launched in quick succession three more political campaigns: the ‘Three Antis’ (anti-corruption, anti-waste and anti-bureaucratism), the purpose of which, he explained, was to prevent ‘the corrosion of the cadres by the bourgeoisie’; the ‘Five Antis’ (anti-bribery, anti-tax evasion, anti-fraud, anti-embezzlement, anti-leakage of state secrets), aimed at the capitalist classes whose ‘sugar-coated bullets’ caused the corrosion in the first place; and a thought reform movement, modelled on the Yan'an Rectification Campaign, designed to remould urban intellectuals, especially those trained in the West, so as to enforce conformity and eradicate bourgeois ideas.⁸⁷

Again, the primary actors were not state or Party agencies but the men and women who were themselves the targets of each campaign and the ‘broad masses’ mobilised to judge them. In the ‘Three’ and ‘Five Antis’, workers denounced their bosses; cadres exposed each other; children were encouraged to inform on their parents; wives turned against their husbands. Activists set up ‘tiger-hunting teams’, to drag out actual and presumed offenders for humiliation before mass meetings.

A climate of raw terror developed. Minor offenders, Mao declared, should be criticised and reformed, or sent to labour camps, while ‘the worst among them should be shot’. For many, the psychological pressure became unbearable. The two campaigns together took several hundred thousand more lives, the great majority by suicide, while an estimated 2 billion US dollars, a staggering sum at that time, was collected from private companies in fines for illicit activities. Surviving cadres, private businessmen and the urban population as a whole, had received a memorable lesson in the limits of communist kindness.

The bourgeoisie, Mao explained in the summer of 1952, was no longer to be regarded as an ally of the proletariat. It was now the principal object of struggle waged by the working class.⁸⁸

Intellectuals were treated differently. They were to be cleansed of bourgeois ideology, especially individualism, pro-Americanism, objectivism (indifference to politics) and ‘contempt for the toiling masses’. These issues were discussed in small groups whose participants would make repeated self-criticisms, until, layer after layer, anything resembling independent thought, incompatible with Maoist orthodoxy, had been stripped away.⁸⁹

Sooner or later Mao would have moved to assert Party control over the urban population, whether or not war had broken out in Korea. The death-toll would not necessarily have been lower had he done so in peacetime. The power of the landlords would still have had to be broken; the functionaries, the capitalists and the intellectuals brought into line. The same pervasive system of compulsory registration with the police, of designated residence under the scrutiny of neighbourhood committees, of personnel dossiers held by security departments attached to every town-dweller's work unit, would have been enforced even without a foreign war.

None the less, for the Chinese communists, the Korean conflict did have a silver lining.⁹⁰

It produced a sense of regeneration and national pride which forced grudging respect even among those who otherwise had little sympathy for the new regime. The perception of heroic sacrifice on the battlefield helped to explain extreme measures at home. The external threat from America fuelled internal transformation. Above all, it allowed Mao to go faster. By the autumn of 1953, four years and at least two to three million deaths after the proclamation of the People's Republic,⁹¹ the Maoist state was more securely entrenched than had seemed imaginable when he and Zhou Enlai had set off from their temporary headquarters near Shijiazhuang to enter newly conquered Beijing, feeling, as Mao put it, ‘like students in the old days, going to the capital to take the [imperial] examinations’.⁹² By his own lights, Mao had passed the first test handsomely. After so many years of revolution and war, the cost in human suffering had become irrelevant.

I Mao had started telling the Soviet leader: ‘I was criticised and pushed aside for a long period, and had nowhere to express my views … ’ He probably intended to go on to thank him for the Comintern's support during those difficult years (and, in the process, subtly to remind him of the indignities he had suffered at the hands of Moscow's Chinese protégés). However, at this point, Stalin interrupted.

II The Secretariat, in 1950, also served as the Politburo Standing Committee. Besides Mao himself, it comprised Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai and Zhu De. The fifth member, Ren Bishi, had suffered a stroke and died later that autumn, being replaced by Chen Yun.

III The most spectacular of these occurred at Xibaipo in June 1948, when Anying reproached his father for the personality cult around him. He was made to write a self-criticism, in which he acknowledged that he had ‘undermined father's authority’ and was barred from visiting Mao without permission until the following February, shortly before the move to Beijing. By October, when he married Liu Songlin, the rift had been forgotten and the young couple were regular visitors to Mao's home at weekends.