Mao Tse-Tung

I recently finished reading a massive tome, Mao: The Unknown Story, by Jung Chang and Jon Halliday. I had actually received it for Christmas in 2010 and only completed it now.  Rather than go into detail about the Chinese leader, some of the book’s more pertinent facts and trends would make a decent summary.

 He was born in December 1893 and died in September 1976, of natural causes.  He married 4 times and cheated on all 4 wives.  The fourth was the infamous Jiang Qing, “Madame Mao” (above), who killed herself in 1991.

 He never brushed his teeth and didn’t bathe.  He denied medical treatment, operas, sex, culture, books, music, etc. to the people of China but fully indulged in all of these himself with no shame.  He had concrete, bomb-proof villas built for him to stay in across the country but rarely visited them in person.  Mao essentially wiped out Chinese culture but didn’t replace it with anything except a bland cult of personality devoted to himself. 

 The Long March was a hoax, as the Reds went wherever Chiang Kai Shek wanted them to go.  Mao’s success in the Civil War (1946-49) was mainly due to several Nationalist generals who were sleeper Reds and essentially delivered their armies to Mao on a silver platter.  George C. Marshall also deserves some blame for this, forcing Chiang to a cease fire which allowed the Reds to reorganize their Manchurian operations at a time when Chiang had been close to wiping them out.  While the book is obviously highly critical of Mao, it pulls no punches re: Chiang, explaining how poorly Chiang vetted his generals – keeping them in command long after their “incompetence” (really simply secret alliance to Mao) became obvious – and how he failed to rein in his corrupt brother-in-law, T.V. Soong.

 The dynamic between Stalin and Mao was especially interesting.  Stalin never trusted Mao, and Mao never liked Stalin.  They saw each other more as dangerous rivals than fellow travelers – they were never friends.  Even after WWII, Stalin insisted on keeping concessions in Manchuria which the Tsars had won decades earlier, e.g. Russians considered exempt from Chinese jurisdiction.  Stalin was also extremely stingy about releasing nuclear and military technology to Mao and only traded on terms extremely advantageous to the USSR, just like he sold tanks, planes and guns to the Spanish Republicans at full price. 

 The “Chinese volunteers” Mao sent to fight in Korea were mostly former Nationalist armies which Mao simply fed into the meat grinder to be slaughtered.  I recall so many “M*A*S*H” episodes where Hawkeye bitches and moans that the Korean War is going on forever, and he invariably blames MacArthur and the US brass, never mentioning the North Koreans or Mao.  The North Koreans wanted the war over – they knew it had been blown.  The US and its allies had no interest in continuing the slaughter.  Mao continued the war because he was angling to get concessions from Stalin, particularly nuclear weapons and military factories, essentially trading Chinese lives for technical know-how from the Soviets. 

 Likewise during the Vietnam War, Mao was willing to sell out the North Vietnamese if it meant getting favors from Nixon, since by that time the Russians had long stopped helping the Chinese.  The last thing Brezhnev wanted was to give Mao missiles he could use to nuke Moscow.  Having alienated Krushchev, then Brezhnev, Mao’s source of expertise dried up in the mid-60s.  The Chinese couldn’t build jets or helicopters that wouldn’t fall out of the sky.  Mao threw money at Third World countries (bought with Chinese lives starved to pay for the hard currency), who accepted the aid with a “big smile” but wouldn’t reciprocate with anything useful.  Albania was Mao’s lone ally and even Hoxha berated Mao for cozying up to Nixon. 

 I recall my high school history teacher laughing that “Let A Thousand Flowers Bloom”, a late 50’s campaign of openness (what Gorbachev would later call “glasnost”), resulted in an embarrassing explosion of gripes and complaints against the regime, but according to this book, Mao was well aware of his unpopularity and used the campaign as a way of luring his critics out into the open.

 Mao knew his Great Leap Forward in the early 60s was killing the Chinese peasants, but like Lenin before him, was indifferent to the millions of deaths by artificial famines.  The grain was shipped to Russia to pay for military factories, nuclear technology, and Mao was especially hoping for ICBM technology.  This much was evident for ages:  Mao was yet another dictator who did not care how many people died because of his policies and did whatever he wanted. 

 One son died in the Korean War, the other was mentally handicapped. With Kim Il Sung’s death in North Korea, it has been mentioned that “even Mao” did not favor hereditary succession, but he had no suitable male heirs to appoint anyway.  Even if he had, he probably wouldn’t have done so, out of paranoia that his son would probably dispatch him prematurely.  He told Deng Xiaoping, the man he guessed (correctly) would most likely succeed him, to consider open season on his wife.  What happened to China after his death was not his concern.

 In some ways Mao reminds me of George W. Bush and Warren Harding: politicians who had no genuine skills in any line of work or profession EXCEPT politics.   Mao was an indifferent student, never had a real job or legitimate skill, and his sole talent seemed to be getting himself into power and remaining there.  He was ruthless about sacrificing others to his ambitions: whether it was Red armies commanded by his political rivals thrown to Chiang in the 30s; Nationalists forced to fight the Japanese, with no help from existing Red armies, because Mao wanted Chiang to wipe himself out fighting the invaders; and during the Cultural Revolution, dozens of cadres sacrificed and disgraced, tortured, imprisoned, and executed, either because they had opposed his famine-inducing policies of prior years or simply because he considered them dangerous rivals.  Outwitting political opponents, all this “sausage-making” and behind-the-scenes intrigue, back-stabbing, manipulation, etc. were what Mao knew best, really the only thing he knew how to do.  None of this was motivated by any genuine affection for China or its people – for anyone except himself.