30 THE GREAT LEAP FORWARD
Throughout the winter of 1957–58 Mao was elated. The trip to Moscow had apparently revitalized him. He had no doubts that China would soon become the leading country in the world. He rushed around the country, urging on the laggards, venting his anger at the skeptical fence-sitters, and telling off those who blindly imitated the Soviet Union. Even before his trip to the USSR, he had begun writing an article, published in People's Daily on December 12, in which he called upon the party and the country to “boldly follow the course of ‘more, faster, better, and more economically.' ” It was imperative to catch up with and overtake England as well as other leading countries in the basic indicators of economic development. For whatever reason he focused on two: steel and grain.
He knew nothing of economics, but this did not bother him. He was not alone in his ignorance of economics. Many other world leaders had a poor grasp of economics, as did almost all the members of the Chinese Politburo. Aware of this, the Chairman even trumpeted his ignorance. “The majority of Politburo members,” he said at the Nanning Conference in January 1958, “are ‘red,' but ‘unqualified.' …… I am the most uneducated, I am unsuited to be a member of any committee.”1
Mao's deficiencies, however, were more than compensated for by his enormous enthusiasm, his belief in his own infallibility, his will, and his power. “Our method is to put politics in command,” he asserted. “Politics is the commanding force.”2 This was precisely how he had acted all his life in the party: by relying on political and, of course, military levers. At the very beginning of the year he provoked a confrontation with his fellow Hunanese Zhou Xiaozhou, first secretary of the Hunan party committee.
“Why can't Hunan increase its agricultural production[?]?…… Why do the Hunan peasants still plant only one crop of rice a year?” he asked, as if he himself did not know that in his native province anything more was impossible. “You're not even studying other experiences. That's the trouble.”
“We will study the matter, then,” replied Zhou, timidly.
“What do you mean study? …… You won't get anywhere with your study. You can go now,” the Chairman roared.3 He acted like this everywhere.
Mao's pressure and threats were effective. Zhou Enlai proposed to call Mao's new course the Great Leap, and Liu Shaoqi took part in preparing the Sixty Theses, drafting one of the sections of this important document articulating the principles of the Great Leap.4 Years later Deng Xiaoping, who also became excited about the Great Leap, recalled,
Comrade Mao got carried away when we launched the Great Leap Forward, but didn't the rest of us go along with him? Neither Comrade Liu Shaoqi nor Comrade Zhou Enlai nor I for that matter objected to it, and Comrade Chen Yun didn't say anything either. We must be fair on these questions and not give the impression that only one individual made mistakes while everybody else was correct, because it doesn't tally with the facts.5
In January 1958, Mao began to call for the implementation of a “permanent revolution” in the country. In simple terms, it meant that the people must advance to communism without the slightest pause, via an endless series of alternating revolutionary campaigns and reforms. Otherwise, Mao said, “People would …… be covered in mold.”6 There was the scent of fear in the air; permanent revolution meant the exacerbation of class conflict.
The entire party leadership became involved in the pursuit of this mirage. The leadership began feverishly searching for means to fulfill the plans. Communiqués flew into the center reporting an unusual upsurge of popular enthusiasm. At an enlarged meeting of the Politburo on February 18, with the support of all assembled Mao proclaimed the course of “more, faster, better, and more economically” as the party's new general line for socialist construction.7 The line would be officially adopted in May at the Second Session of the Eighth Congress of the CCP, in the following formulation: “Exerting all our efforts, advancing forward to build socialism more, faster, better, and more economically.”8
Mao had no concrete plans for the Great Leap. He did not know how to increase the production of steel and grain; therefore, at all the conferences all he did was repeat the incantation “We can catch up with England in fifteen years.” He demanded that leading officials engage in experimentation, try out various methods, including the most improbable. He promised there would be no punishment for leftism or subjectivism.9 He understood that China had an enormous advantage compared to other countries: a huge reservoir of cheap labor.
As early as the autumn of 1957, at the Third Plenum, Mao had proposed attracting the people with another campaign, the success of which, he thought, would substantially advance agricultural production. He envisioned a campaign against the so-called Four Pests—rats, mosquitoes, flies, and sparrows—which harmed not only the production of grain, but also the health of the producers. The task of destroying these “vermin” had been posed even earlier, in January 1956 in the special Program for Developing Agriculture in the PRC in 1956–57, but it had not taken hold.10 “I am very interested in the struggle against the ‘Four Pests,' but no one shares this interest,” the Chairman complained.11 He returned to this issue in early December, calling upon the Central Committee and the State Council to issue appropriate decrees and even composing a draft himself a month later. Ultimately, he succeeded in convincing everyone, and in mid-February 1958 such a decree was promulgated.12
Throughout the country a “hunt for pests” got under way in which both young and old took part. No one could dispute the need to struggle for cleanliness. Most Chinese paid little attention to hygiene. They lived amid horrendous filth and ignored the hordes of rats that roamed the courtyards and trash dumps and were just as oblivious to the clouds of flies. Rats, flies, and mosquitoes, of course, were carriers of infections that could engender epidemics. Sparrows made the list of pests because they liked to eat grain in the field. Thus the struggle against pests was justifiable; however, the executors of Mao's directives took things too far. An eyewitness provides a description of how the campaign proceeded:
I was awakened in the early morning by a woman's bloodcurdling screams. Rushing to my window I saw that a young woman was running to and fro on the roof of the building next door, frantically waving a bamboo pole with a large sheet attached to it. Suddenly, the woman stopped shouting, apparently to catch her breath, but a moment later, down below in the street, a drum started beating, and she resumed her frightful screams and the mad waving of her peculiar flag. This went on for several more minutes; then the drums stopped and the women fell silent. I realized that in all the upper stories of the hotel, white-clad females were waving sheets and towels that were supposed to keep the sparrows from alighting on the building…… During the whole day, it was drums, gun shots, screams, and waving bedclothes…… [T]he battle went on without abatement until noon, with all the manpower of the hotel mobilized and participating—bellboys, desk managers, interpreters, maids, and all…… The strategy behind this war on the sparrows boiled down to keeping the poor creature from coming to rest on a roof or tree…… [I]t was claimed that a sparrow kept in the air for more than four hours was bound to drop from exhaustion.13
The campaign against the other pests was similar. Aroused by the propaganda, people rushed about after the terrified rodents, striking at flies and mosquitoes with rags; someone might have supposed that the entire country had gone mad. Tens of millions of people participated in the campaign. In the city of Chongqing, Sichuan province, alone, over a period of several days more than 230,000 rodents were killed, more than two tons of fly larvae were destroyed, and six hundred tons of trash collected.14 The corpses of tens of thousands of tormented sparrows were presented to the state.
Mao insisted that the destruction of the Four Pests would strengthen the health of the nation:
We will be able to open schools in the hospitals, and doctors will go to cultivate the land: the numbers of sick people will decrease greatly, this will raise the moral spirit of the people, the percentage of those working will increase significantly…… On the day the Four Pests are eliminated in China, there can be a celebration. These events will be inscribed in the chronicles of history. Bourgeois governments are unable to cope with the Four Pests. They consider themselves civilized countries, yet they have huge numbers of flies and mosquitoes.15
The results of the campaign were horrendous. The extermination of sparrows as well as other “vermin” destroyed the ecological balance. At a certain point the boundary was crossed where a reasonable beginning turned into a calamity. Insects began to reproduce rapidly and destroy crops. As a result, the Chinese even had to import sparrows from the Soviet Union. To be sure, they did not import rats, flies, and mosquitoes, but they slowed their persecution.
During the Nanning Conference another plan emerged: to enlarge the cooperatives by expanding each one to embrace ten thousand households or more. This expansion would enable mobilizing the masses to construct irrigation projects, including reservoirs that were needed for agriculture. The idea of deep plowing and dense planting of grain to wrest multiple harvests from the land was also put forward. By these means the state could increase the amount of grain that it received in taxes and earn more hard currency through grain exports. (At this time China was one of the largest exporters of grain, mainly to the Eastern European countries.) The upsurge in agriculture would guarantee enormous industrial growth via constantly increasing investments in steel mills and the machine-building industry.
The idea of establishing very large cooperatives had been first expressed by Mao in 1955, but it failed to gain support. It was proposed again at Nanning in January 1958, but it was not until April that Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai came up with the name of “commune” for these giant complexes during an inspection tour in South China.16 Everyone liked it.
The first commune, Weixing (Sputnik), was established in April, near the district town of Suiping in southern Henan. It embraced twenty-seven cooperatives, or 43,000 people. The next one was organized in northern Henan in Xinxiang county. Its members, striving for originality, called it a people's commune.
Once more Mao tried to use practice as his point of departure; he was convinced that practice was the criterion of truth. This was why he spent eight of the twelve months of 1958 traveling around the country.17 He familiarized himself with “leading” practices, conversed with party officials as well as simple peasants, and inspected reservoirs and other projects. He “conducted investigations so as to have the right to speak.” But he failed to take into account that since he was now the “Great Leader,” local officials did everything possible to create a good impression on him. They knew very well what he wanted. Mao himself had told them repeatedly it was better to be too leftist than rightist.
Naturally, an upsurge of popular enthusiasm was evident throughout the country. Millions of people believed the communists, because much of what they had talked about had actually come to pass. The doors of universities and institutes had been opened to the children of peasants and workers, free medical care had been introduced, a large number of factories and mills had been constructed, and illiteracy was being wiped out. The poor were particularly happy; for the first time in their lives they felt they enjoyed equal rights. The rest of the population, too, demonstrated “fervent enthusiasm”; they understood very well the dangerous consequences of not participating in party campaigns. Nobody wanted to be branded a rightist.
Thus the “investigation” that the Chairman was conducting inevitably created an illusory picture that strengthened his belief in voluntarism. “In my view, we must resort to ‘blindly rushing forward,' ” Mao proclaimed after a routine inspection. “We must work energetically and joyfully, and not apathetically and sullenly…… Everything that can be done quickly, we must do as quickly as possible.”18 The phantom of the Great Leap drove him to make increasingly leftist adjustments in the plans and methods of socialist construction. It was as if all one had to do was mobilize the population of 600 million and any dream would become reality.
He was particularly interested in the experience of the communes. The Chinese “communards” began to organize production in new ways, shifting to the optimal division of labor. In order to maximize labor efficiency, Weixing Commune and other such cooperatives began to establish communal dining halls. Household kitchens were done away with. This freed up working women to work overtime in the fields, saved on fuel, and improved nutrition. Liu Shaoqi enthusiastically supported the “communards,” saying that their initiative created the opportunity to increase by one-third the number of working hands in the countryside. “If previously more than two-hundred [of every five hundred people] were engaged in preparing food, now no more than forty do so,” he said.19 The “communards” also promoted communist relations by doing away with wage labor and dowries, introducing free dining, and adopting the communist principle “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.” They socialized domestic poultry and even household utensils. “Why do we need bowls and cups now that we have communal dining halls where we can eat our fill?” they wondered, actually believing that free communal food signified the arrival of communism. They were so eager to escape from poverty.
Mao was ecstatic. On July 16, in the journal Hongqi (Red flag), the new theoretical organ of the CCP, editor in chief Chen Boda published a directive from the Chairman: “We must gradually transform industry, agriculture, trade, culture and education, as well as the militia, i.e. the people's armed forces, into one large commune that will form the basic unit of our society.”20 At the beginning of August, Mao visited a people's commune in Henan and could not conceal his delight. Communism was being built before his eyes! “This name, ‘people's commune,' is great!” Mao said. “French workers created the Paris commune when they seized power. Our farmers have created the people's commune as a political and economic organization in the march toward communism. The people's commune is great!”21 At once dozens of newspapers and magazines printed special editions to disseminate this “wonderful revelation,” following which a campaign to establish people's communes swept the country.
A little later Mao explained the significance of people's communes:
People's communes are distinguished, on the one hand, by their large size, and on the other by their degree of collectivization…… In both the countryside and the cities we must infuse communist ideas into the socialist order everywhere…… Now we are building socialism, but also have the shoots of communism. We can establish people's communes everywhere, in educational institutions, in factories, in urban neighborhoods. In just a few years everything will be united into one large commune.
Mao was attracted by the notion that such large complexes, with thousands of people, could become fully self-sufficient by virtue of their internal division of labor. “Such gigantic cooperatives,” he exulted, “can engage in industry as well as agriculture, trade, education, and military affairs, and this can be done in conjunction …… with forestry, cattle-breeding, and sideline fish farming.”22
Mao was happy that the people “grasped” his enthusiasm for the Great Leap. That is how it appeared on the surface, at least in the places to which he traveled. Increasingly, Mao was sensing his own greatness. With a wave of his hand, hundreds of millions of people rushed to execute his instructions, “put their brains in gear,” think up new forms of organization, toil indefatigably night and day. He could do whatever he wanted with these poor and uneducated people who were full of hope for the future. “[T]he 600 million people of China have one outstanding [advantage]: it is poverty and backwardness,” Mao said candidly. “At first glance this is bad, but actually it is good. Poverty arouses them to change, to action, to revolution. On a blank sheet of paper one can write the newest, most beautiful characters, one can create the newest, most beautiful pictures.”23
In 1958 Mao suddenly sensed that communism was not something for the distant future. “It will not take 100 years to build communism in China, 50 will suffice,” he declared. “The first condition of communism is an abundance of goods, the second is the existence of a communist spirit.” Although not everything was going well with respect to the first condition, the second was already at hand. “An era of perpetual happiness is approaching,” he argued at an enlarged Politburo meeting.
We will organize a world-wide committee and institute unified planning for the entire earth…… In about ten years there will be an abundance of goods and morale will rise to unprecedented heights…… In the future everything will be called a commune…… Every large commune will build a highway or a wide concrete or asphalt road. If trees are not planted along the sides, airplanes can use them as landing strips. Here is your airport. In the future every province will have 100–200 airplanes, each county will have an average of two airplanes.
“We are not crazy,” he added.24
The communist ideal was so good that even Mao could not fully believe in the capability of people to achieve it on their own without some prodding. For that reason he warmly welcomed the experience of those people's communes that supplemented their communist profile by introducing “a military organization of labor, a militarized work style, and a military discipline.” “The concept of ‘military' and the concept of ‘democracy' appear to be mutually exclusive,” he said, “but it is actually quite the opposite. Democracy arises in the army…… When everyone is a soldier, then people will become inspired and bolder.”
In response to the Leader's call the country began to transform itself into a military camp. Mao continually provided inspiration: “Control is indispensable. One cannot simply adhere to democracy. We need to combine Marx with Qin Shi Huangdi.” (The latter, it will be recalled, was the notoriously cruel ancient Chinese emperor whom Mao had loved to read about during his school years in Dongshan.) “Qin Shihuang buried alive 460 Confucian scholars,” he reminded people.
But he was nowhere near us…… We have acted like ten Qin Shihuangs. I assert that we are stronger than Qin Shihuang. He buried 460 people, but we have buried 46,000, a hundred times more. To kill someone, then dig a grave and bury them is the same as burying them alive! They curse us as partisans of Qin Shihuang, as usurpers. We admit all this and say that we still haven't done much along these lines; there's much more we can do…… Earlier during the revolution many people perished; this was a demonstration of the spirit of self-sacrifice. Why can't we proceed upon the same principles now?25
Therefore, enthusiasm was not the only basis on which the communes were organized. Mao himself knew that his “society of people's prosperity” very closely resembled war communism, which Lenin and Trotsky had instituted in the early days of the Bolshevik revolution.26 But he saw nothing wrong in this and, like the leaders of the October Revolution, he also insisted that all white-collar workers spend at least one month a year doing physical labor in order to assist the workers and peasants to carry out the Great Leap.27
With each passing day these tasks became more urgent. In May 1958, Mao suddenly declared that it was possible to overtake England in steel production in seven years rather than fifteen, and in coal production in just two or three years. In June he said that in the near future, specifically, in 1959, England would be left behind, and that in five years China would already draw close to the USSR in smelting steel. This meant that in 1958 the PRC had to double its steel production over 1957, to 10.7 million tons, and in 1959 reach 20–25 million, and 60 million tons in 1962. A while later he revisited these figures: now he wanted 30 million tons in 1959, 60 million in 1960, and 80–100 or even 120 million tons in 1962, which would overtake America. After fifteen years, that is, in the mid-1970s, Mao figured on annually producing 700 million tons, twice England's per capita production. At this time Liu Shaoqi developed plans that were no less absurd.28
If one considers that the draft Second Five-Year Plan of National Economic Development adopted by the Eighth Party Congress in September 1956 set the target for steel production in 1962 at 10.5–12 million tons, one can grasp what an enormous “leap” Mao and Liu wanted to make. The spurt in agriculture was to be no less dramatic: in 1958 the production of grain was supposed to double to 300–350 million tons, whereas the First Five-Year Plan had envisioned a 1962 target of barely 250 million tons.29
In August Mao declared, “Industry is the main line today. The entire party, the entire people must grasp industry.”30 People were enrolled in a campaign “for a larger number of open hearth furnaces.” A “battle for steel” was launched that assumed truly monstrous forms. Everywhere, in village and urban courtyards, in sports fields, in parks and city squares, primitive blast furnaces were erected. People lugged everything they could to these furnaces—scrap iron and steel, door handles, shovels, household utensils—entirely unaware that such pitifully small and primitive furnaces could not produce any real steel. Ignorance was exalted to a virtue.
Knowledgeable engineers kept quiet, and if they did object, no one paid them any heed. Mao had long found intellectuals irritating. Skeptical and conscientious, they aroused in him, as well as in other Bolshevik leaders, hatred and revulsion. Everything about them irritated Mao, not just their knowledge that he did not possess. After launching the Great Leap, he proclaimed, “Intellectuals must bow down before the working people. In some respects intellectuals are wholly illiterate.”31 After such talk how could the engineers object?
At Mao's request, Premier Zhou himself headed the campaign for steel smelting. By mid-September more than 20 million people had already smelted steel, and by October 90 million.n72 In a month the share of the metal smelted in backyard furnaces rose from 14 percent to 49 percent. Peasants, workers, teachers, students, elementary and middle school pupils, doctors and nurses, sales clerks and accountants all took part in the campaign. Columns of black smoke rose above cities and villages. The strains of the campaign song “We Will Overtake England and Catch Up to America” boomed out of loudspeakers.
Soon it became clear that the task assigned by the Great Helmsman would be fulfilled. By the end of the year China would produce 11 million tons of metal. Even Mao was astounded. “If these small backyard furnaces can really produce so much steel,” he said to his entourage, “why do foreigners build such gigantic steel mills? Are foreigners really so stupid?”32 He received an answer to this question very soon. The metal smelted in these backyard furnaces was useless. Even though Mao supposed that an “uneducated person was stronger than an educated one,”33 he could not deceive technology.
In pursuing the phantom of the Great Leap in industry, the Chinese leadership had slackened its attention to the grain problem. The harvesting of rice and other grains was thrust onto the shoulders of women, old men, and children. Although they worked without rest, they could not succeed in gathering the entire harvest. Meanwhile, leaders everywhere, fearing Mao's wrath, were reporting amazing growth in the quantity of agricultural products and sending inflated figures to their superiors. “[S]ome comrades said that the grain output was more than 500 million tons while others said that it was 450 million tons,” recalled Minister of Defense Peng Dehuai. “Later Chairman suggested 375 million tons as the figure to be released.”34 In reality, only 200 million tons were harvested, just 5 million more than in 1957.35 When the time came to settle accounts with the state, almost everything was taken from the peasants. As in 1955, the countryside again faced famine. Mao, however, refused to acknowledge there was a crisis and was in no hurry to ask for assistance. Therefore, all the contracts to export grain abroad were fulfilled so the “foreign devils” would have no reason to suspect he had erred. This had a serious effect on the domestic food supply.
Most of all, Mao did not want to ask help from Khrushchev. This would have been the most terrible “loss of face.” At the very height of the Great Leap, July 31, 1958, Khrushchev suddenly flew to Beijing on an unofficial visit and the Chairman had to receive him, making a special trip from the resort at Beidaihe for this purpose. This time Mao was not merely rude to Khrushchev; he positively radiated malice.
The reason was that ten days before Khrushchev's arrival, Ambassador Yudin had transmitted to Mao a proposal from the Soviet leadership to establish a joint Pacific naval fleet with the PRC. This was in response to a Chinese request for Soviet assistance in developing its own naval fleet. Mao had high hopes that Khrushchev would respond positively to his request, but he was mistaken. Instead, Khrushchev offered something else. Moreover, the Soviet leader did not even explain to Yudin the principles on which such a joint fleet would be organized. When Mao expressed interest in whether the fleet would be some sort of Soviet-Chinese “cooperative,” and who would control it, the ambassador did not know the answer. Mao was indignant, especially since four months earlier China had received a letter from Soviet defense minister Malinovsky containing another appeal from the Soviet government for China and the USSR to establish a joint radar station in China for communicating with the Soviet Pacific Fleet.36
Mao and other Chinese leaders viewed these proposals as violations of Chinese sovereignty. Mao, recalling all the insults he had suffered at Stalin's hands, told the ambassador that China would never again allow the establishment of foreign military bases like Port Arthur on its territory. When Yudin timidly noted that it would be “desirable” under the circumstances “in view of the importance” of these questions for Mao and Khrushchev to speak in person, Mao expressed doubts about such a meeting.37
This is why Khrushchev came to Beijing, along with Malinovsky and several leading officials in the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and the Central Committee of the CPSU. He was very upset and could not understand why Mao had suddenly flown into a rage. Khrushchev thought that a joint fleet and radar station would be in “the common interests” of the USSR and the PRC.38 But grasping what was at issue, Khrushchev immediately withdrew his proposals. He said, “It was a misunderstanding…… Let's write: there neither was, is, nor will be a question.”39 But Mao would not calm down for a long time and he expressed his indignation in the most capricious manner.
Characteristic of his rudeness toward Khrushchev, Mao, a chain smoker, smoked one cigarette after another during their conversations, and blew the smoke right into Khrushchev's face. Khrushchev could not stand tobacco smoke. Mao tried to stay calm, but periodically he lost self-control, poked his finger at his interlocutor's nose, started yelling, and during the breaks between sessions berated his interpreter for not conveying the whole gamut of the emotions that were gripping him. Then he shifted the negotiations to his swimming pool. Mao was an excellent swimmer while Khrushchev, hardly a swimmer at all, felt quite humiliated in the pool.40 The diaries of the famous film director Mikhail Romm contain an interesting entry regarding Khrushchev's revelations about his reception in the pool:
“Just where do you think Mao Zedong received me?” Khrushchev blurted out between sessions of a regular plenum of the Central Committee. “In a swimming pool. He received me in a swimming pool!”
There was nothing he could do. Mao was the host. The head of the Soviet government had to strip off his suit and hand it to his bodyguard, and clad in satin swimming trunks, quite contrary to protocol, flop into the water. Chairman Mao was swimming, and Khrushchev floundered after him—“I am a miner, and, just between us, not much of a swimmer, and I got tired”—with the interpreter between them. Mao Zedong, apparently intentionally, pretended not to notice how difficult it was for his distinguished guest to keep up with him, and deliberately expounded upon current politics, asked various questions, to which Khrushchev, having swallowed some water, could not respond clearly…… Nikita Sergeevich soon got fed up with this situation. “I swam and swam, and was thinking, to hell with you, I am getting out. I climbed onto the ledge and dangled my legs. Now I was above and he was swimming below. The interpreter did not know whether to swim with him or sit next to me. He was swimming, and I was above, looking down on him. He was looking up at me and saying something about communes, about their communes. I had already caught my breath and answered him about the communes. ‘Well, we shall see what comes out of your communes.' I felt much better once I had sat down. He was offended. Comrades, that's how we got started.”41
During their exchange Mao conveyed to Khrushchev a basket of complaints he had accumulated against the Soviet Union during the period of Stalin's leadership. The list was so long that Khrushchev lost his composure. “You defended Stalin. I have been attacked for criticizing Stalin. And now everything is reversed.” But he was unable to say anything particularly good about Stalin. He merely noted, “We speak of Stalin's achievements and we are also among those achievements.”42 Mao, of course, agreed with this. However, his meeting with Khrushchev left a very bad impression that he did not hide from his entourage. “Their real purpose,” Mao said, “is to control us. They're trying to tie our hands and feet, but they're full of wishful thinking, like idiots talking about their dreams.”43
Mao was displeased by Khrushchev's skeptical attitude toward the people's communes. Popular enthusiasm for the Great Leap was at its height, but his distinguished Soviet guest allowed himself to express doubts. Mao told Khrushchev that for the first time since the establishment of the PRC he felt happy, and proudly informed him of the unprecedented harvest of grain that was waiting to be gathered. Not bothering to restrain himself he even “taunted” Khrushchev. Knowing there was not enough grain in the USSR, he asked him, as if in passing, “We have accumulated a solid surplus of wheat, and we are now puzzled as to what to do with it. Can you give us some helpful advice?”
“We have never had a grain surplus,” Khrushchev shot back, and suddenly exploded, “The Chinese are not idiots. You will think of something to do with it.”44 For a moment Mao was dumbstruck, but then he composed himself and burst out laughing. When he soon encountered serious economic problems he could not help but remember Khrushchev's wicked joke.
Another of the Soviet leader's crude witticisms also stuck in Mao's throat. During one of their conversations Khrushchev laughed that Russian engineers in China called the Chinese workers who carried dirt from construction sites in woven baskets “walking excavator[s].” Mao roared with laughter, but he nursed yet another grievance.45
Soon, at the end of August, Mao ordered an artillery bombardment of the Nationalist-held offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu in the Taiwan Strait. Khrushchev immediately offered to send a “division of planes” to help the “Chinese brothers,” but Mao let Khrushchev know he found the offer “insulting.” “We can solve our own problems,” he explained to Khrushchev.
Mao did not intend to take the islands. The presence of Chiang Kai-shek's forces off the shores of the PRC was to Mao's advantage. It could help unite the Chinese people in the struggle to achieve the party's plans. The military action had a single goal: to demonstrate the martial spirit and growing power of the Chinese army to the whole world, including the leaders of the CPSU.n73
Not grasping any of this,46 Khrushchev warned the American president, Dwight Eisenhower, that if he had any desire to interfere in the conflict, the USSR would consider an attack against the PRC as an attack upon the Soviet Union. He even hinted that he might not refrain from launching a nuclear counterattack against the “aggressor.” He so informed Mao Zedong,n74 and this time Mao expressed his “sincere gratitude.”47
Meanwhile, in early November 1958, encountering initial economic difficulties, Mao gave the order to slow down the pace of the Great Leap. Later he added, “What's the hurry? So we can report to Marx and hear praise from his own lips?” Now the plan was to smelt not 30 million tons of steel in 1959 but 20 million (in May 1959 this target was further reduced to 13 million tons). Mao still wanted to harvest a great deal of grain, no less than 525 million tons, that is, two and a half times more than in 1958.48
At a regular plenum of the Central Committee held in late November to early December 1958, Mao submitted a request to retire from the post of chairman of the PRC. He could finally relieve himself of the ceremonial duties he had long found onerous. The plenum unanimously accepted his proposal that Liu Shaoqi replace him. Several months later, in April 1959, the National People's Congress officially confirmed this change of leadership. Mao retained only the main post of chairman of the Central Committee of the CCP.49
Meanwhile, a catastrophe was brewing in the country. Serious imbalances were arising in the development of the economy. From mid-December 1958, interruptions in the food supply began to occur everywhere. Meat disappeared even from the state dining room in Zhongnanhai. In cities everywhere people were standing in line for days. In Beijing the monthly ration of peanut oil was just 11.6 ounces (the norm for party officials was a little more than a pound) and, if you were really lucky, one pound of meat per person. The rice ration was thirty-one pounds. A family of three received a little more than a pound of sugar.50 In Anhui, Gansu, and Sichuan famine had already taken hold and it soon had several other provinces in its grip. According to several sources, 25 million people were starving.51 By the spring of 1959, Mao finally grasped that the Great Leap had failed to achieve its objectives. He angrily blamed the local cadres for all the misfortunes, for having misled him. “There are so many lies,” he said indignantly. “When there is pressure from the top, there will be lies from the bottom.”52
He now cursed the party cadres for “worrying only about production, not about the lives of the people.”53 He had no intention, however, of abandoning the people's communes. He simply wanted a time-out so that in the new year of 1959 an even greater leap could be accomplished. The economic targets for 1959 remained very high: steel smelting was slated to increase by 41 percent and coal by 62 percent.54
At the end of June 1959, Mao decided to visit his native place of Shaoshanchong. He had not been there for thirty-two years. He hoped that there, among his fellow countrymen, he would learn what was really going on. He was not mistaken. He passed two days there and saw and heard things that apparently profoundly disturbed him. The gravestone over his parents' grave was missing, and the small Buddhist temple where his mother used to pray was in ruins. “The tiny shrine, like the tombstone had disappeared, torn down only months before with the establishment of the commune,” wrote Mao's physician, who accompanied him on the journey. “The bricks were needed to build the backyard steel furnaces, and the wood had been used as fuel.” Dropping in on his relatives, Mao also saw ruin. The house was completely empty. There were no household utensils, no clay stove. He listened to the complaints of the local inhabitants, looked at the chunks of misshapen metal that had been smelted from saucepans and iron cooking vessels, sighed, and left. “If you can't fill your bellies at the public dining hall, then it's better just to disband it,” he concluded. “[I]t's a waste of food…… And if you cannot produce good steel, you might as well quit.”55
The only thing that made him happy was the new harvest. And so before departing he composed the following optimistic verses:
The past is a vague accursed dream,
thirty-two years gone by since I left home.
Under the red banner slaves and peasants rose,
weapons in blackened hands they smashed the landlords.
Their sacrifice tempered our iron will
as we lit the sun and moon in a newborn sky.
How I rejoice to see endless waves of grain.
Dusk falls, smoke curls up, labor heroes homeward bound.56
But Mao celebrated prematurely. The entire country and he himself soon faced new trials and tribulations. Quite innocent of this, he set out from Shaoshan to Wuhan and from there by boat to Jiujiang (in Jiangxi province). He decided to convene an enlarged meeting of the Politburo at the mountain resort of Lushan (a “convocation of the ‘saints,' ” as he jokingly called it).57
He arrived in Lushan on July 1 and settled into a two-story stone villa, Meilu (Beautiful hut), in the Gulin district (180 Hedong Street). This house had once belonged to Chiang Kai-shek's wife, Song Meiling, and she loved to go there on holiday. Mao strolled around the vicinity, happily swam in the small reservoir with its crystal waters, enjoyed the beautiful mountains, and inhaled the pure air with pleasure. But then unexpectedly he thought of He Zizhen. A long time ago, amid just such green mountains he had met her, youthful, willowy, like the stem of a lotus. Now more than thirty years had passed. How quickly time had flown by. He suddenly had a burning desire to see Zizhen again, but he restrained himself and only several days later did he order the wife of his bodyguard to go and fetch her and bring her to Lushan.
Jiang Qing was then in Beijing. For the past four years Mao had had only formal relations with her. They lived their own lives and did not bother each other. His previous attachment to his once-beloved wife had passed and all that remained was habit. Jiang was preoccupied with her health and spent several months a year in health resorts. In late 1956, it was discovered that she had cancer. After treatment in the Soviet Union and China she finally conquered the illness, but her ordeal had profoundly affected her character. She became irritable and nervous, was forever tangling with her doctors, nurses, and guards, and the only thing she would talk about was her illnesses.58 Mao tried not to cause her any stress. He satisfied his sexual needs with innumerable charming young women whom he encountered during his travels. Most of all he loved dancers from the People's Liberation Army Song and Dance Ensemble.
His desire to see Zizhen came to him suddenly under the influence of the Jiangxi scenery. His former wife was living in Nanchang, a four-hour ride from Lushan. She did not look well, and meeting with her Mao could not conceal his sadness. Zizhen was obviously not herself and from time to time spoke in a confused manner. It is not known what they spoke about, but when her visit was over Mao told his bodyguard, “He Zizhen is not quite in her right mind…… We need to pay attention to her condition and tomorrow send her back from Lushan…… Until she leaves stay by her side all the time. It would be unfortunate if she met somebody she knows.”59 They never saw each other again.
Several days later, at the conference, Mao experienced additional stress. On July 14, he received a letter from his minister of defense, Peng Dehuai, containing criticism of the Great Leap. Peng expressed himself very cautiously, did not deny the “great achievements,” and naturally did not directly attack the Chairman himself, but his obvious dissatisfaction with Mao Zedong's voluntarism showed through his entire argument. He wrote about “a certain confusion” with respect to ownership, about “rather large losses” from “the nation-wide smelting of steel” (almost two billion yuan), about the “epidemic of bragging” that had gripped the leading cadres, and of “petty bourgeois fanaticism.” Summing up, he said, “All of this was a kind of leftist deviation,” and he called for “drawing a clear line between truth and lies.”
Mao was enraged. A hidden enemy had come out into the open! The folk saying Lushan zhen mianmu (Lushan uncovers the true face) was correct. Of course, Mao himself understood that there were many problems in the country, but the tenor of Peng's letter was that the entire Great Leap had been mistaken. “We were thinking of entering a communist society in one stride,” Peng wrote. “So we banished from our minds the mass line and the working style of seeking truth from facts…… In the eyes of comrades …… everything could be done by putting politics in command…… [But] putting politics in command cannot replace economic laws, let alone concrete measures in economic work.”60 This criticism was certainly targeted at the Chairman. How could Peng have dared to write something like this? Mao's mood was ruined and he even lost his appetite.
Late on the evening of July 16, Mao convened a meeting of the Standing Committee of the Politburo and presented Peng's letter to its members. (In attendance were Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De, and Chen Yun.) Everyone was depressed, and Mao indignantly declared that if there was a split in the party, he would go off to the mountains and create a new communist party and a new Red Army from among the peasantry.61 A decision was made to punish the “splittist” severely. After writing “Comrade Peng Dehuai's opinion” on the letter, Mao had it delivered to the Office of the Central Committee to make copies and distribute them to participants in the conference.
Now it was Peng's turn to become exasperated with the Chairman's backstage maneuvering. He had written a confidential letter not intended for general discussion and had not always been careful in his choice of words. Now everyone had been informed of his tactlessness. On the morning of July 17, his closest associate, PLA chief of staff Huang Kecheng, to whom Peng had shown the letter, expressed his concern about its “sharp style,” but then added, “[However], you and the Chairman are bound together by long years of struggle, so that you probably understand each other very well.”62 That was way off the mark. The years of guerrilla “brotherhood” had long since passed, and was there really ever any brotherhood?
On July 18, despite protests from Peng, who had requested the Office of the Central Committee to withdraw the copies of the letter “written in haste” from circulation, the participants in the conference began discussing the missive to the Chairman. The overwhelming majority, foaming at the mouth, began to accuse the unfortunate Peng of all kinds of mortal sins. Everyone well understood what kind of mood the Great Helmsman was in.
A few voiced support for Peng, among them the first secretary of the Hunan Provincial Party Committee, Zhou Xiaozhou. Another was the former general secretary of the Central Committee, Luo Fu, who was serving as deputy foreign minister; a third was Huang Kecheng, and also the Chairman's new secretary, Li Rui. They were immediately included along with Peng in an “anti-party group,” and on the morning of July 23 Mao, as he put it, “turned up the heat”; he said that his whole life he had followed the principle of “If someone beats up on me I will answer in kind; if they beat up on me first, I will give as good as I get.”
He criticized Peng's letter as a “program of right opportunism,” which was also supposedly “purposeful in design and organization.” He called the group of “comrades” who supported Peng a choir that accompanied the lead singer. “I feel as if there are two tendencies,” he declared, and this sounded like he was pronouncing a sentence. Once again, but this time to everyone attending the conference, Mao proclaimed that “if ruin is inevitable” he would go off to the countryside and rally the peasantry to overthrow the government. “If the People's Liberation Army does not follow me,” he asserted, hinting at the fact that Peng was minister of defense, “then I will mobilize a Red Army. But in my opinion the PLA will follow me.” In this connection, to be sure, he acknowledged several errors of his own, the greatest of which was calling for the smelting of 10.7 million tons of steel, but at the same time he called upon everyone there to be conscious of their own responsibility.
“I can hardly find suitable words to describe my heavy feelings as I listened to the speech of the Chairman,” Peng recalled. “I could not be convinced at all. My resentment was very strong.”63
During a break in the session Mao came up to him.
“Minister Peng, let's have another talk,” he said offhandedly.
“There's nothing more to talk about,” replied Peng, crimson from anger and barely able to restrain himself. “Talk is useless.”64 Waving his arm, he headed for the door. All conversations with Mao were useless.
On August 2, a plenum of the Central Committee was convened in Lushan to examine “the matter of the anti-party group headed by Peng.” Mao spoke again, subjecting the “splittists” to an even more withering critique. “We are talking about a struggle …… against the rightists who have launched a pernicious attack against the party, against the victorious march toward socialism of 600 million people,” he summed up.65
After this everyone knew that the careers of Peng Dehuai, Luo Fu, Huang Kecheng, Zhou Xiaozhou, and Li Rui were finished. Peng offered a self-criticism in true Chinese communist style, but he was accused of being “dishonest, insincere, and deceitful.”66 The other members of the “group” also made self-criticisms, but also to no avail. “I advise you,” Mao said to Peng and his “confederates,” “that you learn to eat pepper, how else will you be able to understand that pepper is hot?”67
One month after the Lushan Plenum, Peng was relieved of his post as minister of defense. Mao appointed Lin Biao in his place. Luo Ruiqing, until then the minister of public security, was appointed chief of the general staff, in place of Huang Kecheng. All the other “conspirators” likewise lost their posts. Peng addressed a request to Mao to be sent somewhere to a people's commune, but the Chairman would not agree and advised him to engage in self-study. Mao could never forgive Peng and his supporters. After Peng's dismissal, the unfortunate marshal was ousted from Zhongnanhai, not just anywhere, but to the half-ruined house of the famous traitor Wu Sangui, who had surrendered China to the Manchus in 1644.68
For Mao, however, it was a Pyrrhic victory. He was entirely unaccustomed to criticism, and the thought that Peng might be correct gave him no peace. He clearly saw the results of the Great Leap, but he stubbornly continued to insist the general line was correct, the accomplishments enormous, and the prospects bright. Knowing there were people in the party and in the leadership who considered him an “ignoramus” gnawed at him. After Lushan he became particularly suspicious.
Conditions in the country did not help to strengthen his authority. Unlike in 1958, the harvests were bad everywhere in 1959. The single exception perhaps was Shaoshan, where waving fields made Mao happy. In August Mao urgently revised the plans. In the current year he would now be satisfied with 275 million tons of grain instead of 525 million, and 12 million tons of steel instead of 13 million.69
By now it was already too late. Famine had assumed the proportions of a national disaster. Something had to be done at once to avert a catastrophe, but Mao was now worrying only about saving face. The suffering of millions barely bothered him. He asserted, “When there is not enough to eat people starve to death. It is better to let half of the people die so that the other half can eat their fill.”70 He even found time for jokes: “Sometimes …… there are very few vegetables, there are no hairpins or very few hairpins, no soap, things are out of whack, markets are disturbed. Everyone is nervous and feels ill at ease, but I think there is no reason to get agitated…… If you are worried during the first half of the night, take a sleeping pill, and you'll be fine.”71
After the Lushan Plenum he decided to strengthen the cult of personality around him. “There are two kinds of personal reverence,” he believed. “One kind is proper, for example, reverence shown to Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin is quite proper. We cannot treat them with a lack of reverence. And why shouldn't we revere them since they had truth on their side…… The other kind is improper reverence, blind reverence without an analytic approach. That is unsuitable.”72 Naturally, he believed his cult was an example of the former.
A new outpouring of sycophantic emotions inundated China right after the Lushan Plenum. The loudest voices in the chorus of flatterers belonged to Liu Shaoqi and Lin Biao, who jump-started the unrestrained adoration of Mao at an enlarged session of the Military Affairs Council of the Central Committee in Beijing. “The leadership of Comrade Mao Zedong,” Liu declared, “is in no way inferior to the leadership of Marx and Lenin. I am convinced that if Marx and Lenin lived in China, they would have guided the Chinese revolution in just the same way…… The party needs an authority figure; the proletariat needs an authority figure. If we did not have a single figure as an authority, how could we accomplish our construction?”73 Lin Biao was so obsequious that he called contemporary Marxism-Leninism—not just in China but throughout the world—“Mao Zedong Thought.”74 These words acted like the finest balm for Mao's wounded psyche. He gradually regained his confidence.
Just then Khrushchev angered him again. In September 1959, the Soviet leader was intending to travel to the United States, where, in the spirit of his theory of peaceful coexistence, he was to hold talks with Eisenhower, whom Mao, quite logically, viewed as his main adversary. On the eve of his visit Khrushchev was trying to stabilize the world situation and to avoid damaging Soviet-American relations. Just then, as bad luck would have it, in late August an armed conflict erupted on the Sino-Indian border. The border, which ran through the mountains, was a fiction; it had been drawn a long time before by the British. The government of India did not consider it lawful, which is why Indian border troops crossed beyond it. Sino-Indian relations were already tense because of Chinese suppression in March 1959 of an uprising by Tibetans demanding independence. The spiritual leader of Tibet, the Dalai Lama, fled to India, disguised as a common soldier, and India's Prime Minister Nehru spoke out in his defense. The Sino-Indian border conflict was something that Khrushchev could have done without prior to his meeting with the American president. Nor did he wish to spend a lot of time on this complex problem. But since the U.S. government had come out on the side of Tibet and India he had to do something. He instructed the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to compose the text of a TASS statement regarding the situation on the Sino-Indian border. The text, edited by Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko himself, turned out to be completely unsatisfactory since Khrushchev wanted to please both sides. Thus the Foreign Ministry made it clear that the USSR was maintaining “neutrality.” As the Soviet diplomat Konstantin Krutikov recalls, “In Beijing the TASS statement was judged to be unfavorable to China. They believed that the USSR had shifted away from supporting its ally…… And, of course, they were irritated that Khrushchev had put pressure on China while cultivating relations with the United States.”75
It was obvious that the humiliation that had accumulated during his “swimming pool negotiations” had stretched Khrushchev's patience beyond the breaking point. He began to act so crudely with respect to China that Mao seethed with indignation. On the eve of the Lushan Plenum, June 20, 1959, Khrushchev suddenly declared that he was annulling the agreement to provide China the technology to produce a nuclear weapon.76 This agreement had been in force since October 1957, when a Soviet-Chinese protocol regarding this matter was signed in Moscow. According to its terms, the USSR promised to furnish China a working model of an atom bomb and assign Soviet scientists to instruct Chinese specialists in how to make one. In August 1958, right after he returned from Beijing, Khrushchev had dispatched a special delegation to the PRC to make preparations for transferring the bomb.77 Suddenly he backed off. Later he explained that this was an act of retaliation. “[T]hey were denouncing us so hard …… how could we at a time like that supply them with an atomic bomb, as though we were unthinking, obedient slaves?”78
Soon afterward, news reached Mao that on July 18, 1959, while in the Polish city of Poznan, Khrushchev sharply criticized the communes, saying that those who were playing with this idea “had a poor understanding of what Communism is and how it is to be built.”79 It is difficult to say what suddenly got into the Soviet leader at this time. He was often tipsy, especially during diplomatic receptions, and therefore often talked nonsense.80 He might have been drunk this time, too, but Mao was not about to forgive him. Nor did Khrushchev wish to apologize. He had just lost patience. Arriving in Beijing on September 30 for the tenth anniversary of the People's Republic of China, he no longer even tried to check his emotions. Following his lead, the other members of the Soviet delegation behaved just as crudely. Mao too began to display his hostility openly, as did the other Chinese leaders with him. The era of the Great Friendship rapidly drew to a close.81
There were two main issues during the negotiations on October 2: Soviet and Chinese relations with the United States, including the Taiwan question, and the Sino-Indian border conflict. Mao exploded when Khrushchev, who had just returned from America, suggested on Eisenhower's behalf that Mao demonstrate “goodwill” and return to the United States five Americans whom the Chinese army had taken captive during the Korean War. Mao concluded that for the sake of improving relations with the imperialists the Soviet leader was ready to betray the cause of socialism.
He reacted the same way to Khrushchev's assertion that the USSR could not allow a new world war to erupt over Taiwan.82 After all, it was only recently that Khrushchev had assured Mao that in a conflict between the PRC and the Chinese Nationalists he would not refrain from striking a nuclear counterattack against the “aggressor” (meaning the United States) if it dared to attack the People's Republic of China. Now he was suddenly going back on his word.n75 What was this if not treachery?
Khrushchev's statement regarding India and Tibet evoked even greater irritation on the part of Mao and the Chinese leadership. Khrushchev said bluntly, “If you will allow me to say what it is not permitted for a guest to say, the events in Tibet are your fault.” Then he made it clear that he did not believe the Chinese version of the border conflict with India. PRC minister of foreign affairs Chen Yi responded with unconcealed hostility that the policy of the USSR was one of “opportunism and time-serving.” Khrushchev flared up and began shouting at Chen, “If, as you say, we are time-servers, Comrade Chen Yi, then don't extend your hand to me. I will not shake it!” Little by little they got involved in a real verbal brawl. The Soviet guest lost his self-control and said something absurd, but very crude. “You,” he barked at Chen Yi, “don't spit at me from the heights of your marshal's baton! You don't have enough spittle. You can't scare us.”83 Chen Yi, according to Khrushchev's memoirs, “kept repeating over and over, as though he had been wound up like a machine: ‘Nehru, Nehru, Nehru!'”84
After the meeting the Soviet leader said to the members of his delegation, “Our road is one with that of the Chinese Communists. We consider them our friends. However, we cannot live with even our friends talking down to us.”85 Then he suddenly began to mock the Chinese cruelly, rhyming their names with unprintable Russian words and calling Mao himself an “old galosh.”86 The mudslinging match continued the next day at the airport prior to Khrushchev's departure. The Soviet leader had been in Beijing for a week, but after the difficult negotiations he decided to break off his visit. This time Mao did not get involved in the polemics. He had made up his mind that it was impossible to repair the broken thread. Three months later, looking back on this visit, he summed up:
Starting in March 1959 our friends [the Soviet leadership] began singing in a powerful anti-Chinese chorus along with the imperialists and the reactionary nationalists as well as with revisionists like Tito. On one hand, China will be isolated for a long time, but on the other hand it will garner support of many communist parties, countries, and peoples. And after eight years, surviving every test, China will become a very powerful country…… The darker the clouds, the brighter the dawn.87
Once more, as he had two years earlier, he called upon the Chinese people to carry out “permanent revolution.” The approaching economic catastrophe, however, caused problems for his ambitious plans.
1 Ibid., 120, 121.
2 Ibid., 112, 377; series 3 (Moscow: Progress, 1976), 40.
3 Quoted from Li, The Private Life of Chairman Mao, 226.
4 See Roderick M. MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, vol. 2, The Great Leap Forward 1958–1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 34, 347; Frederick C. Teiwes, Politics and Purges in China: Rectification and the Decline of Party Norms, 1950–1965, 2nd ed. (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 1993), 266; Mobo G. G. Gao, Gao Village: A Portrait of Rural Life in Modern China (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1999), 123.
5 Deng, Selected Works of Deng Xiaoping (1975–1982), 295. For more details about Deng's excitement in regard to the Great Leap, see Yang and Yan, Deng Xiaoping nianpu, 1904–1974 (Chronological Biography of Deng Xiaoping, 1904–1974), vol. 3, 1463–68.
6 Borisov and Titarenko, Vystupleniia Mao Tsze-duna, ranee ne publikovavshiesia v kitaiskoi pechati (Mao Zedong's Speeches Previously Unpublished in the Chinese Press), series 2, 111–12, 131; Mao Zedong, Jianguo yilai Mao Zedong wengao (Mao's Manuscripts), vol. 7 (Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 1998), 25–26.
7 Pang and Jin, Mao Zedong zhuan (1949–1976) (Biography of Mao Zedong [1949–1976]), vol. 1, 766.
8 Vtoraia sessiia VIII Vsekitaiskogo s”ezda Kommunisticheskoi partii Kitaia (Second Session of the Eighth Congress of the Communist Party of China) (Peking: Izdatel'stvo literatury na inostrannykh iazykakh, 1958), 68.
9 Borisov and Titarenko, Vystuplenia Mao Tsze-duna, ranee ne publikovavshiesia v kitaiskoi pechati (Mao Zedong's Speeches Previously Unpublished in the Chinese Press), series 2, 156, 158.
10 Ibid., 103; Bowie and Fairbank, Communist China 1955–1959: Policy Documents with Analysis, 125.
11 Borisov and Titarenko, Vystupleniia Mao Tsze-duna, ranee ne publikovavshiesia v kitaiskoi pechati (Mao Zedong's Speeches Previously Unpublished in the Chinese Press), series 2, 52.
12 Mao, Jianguo yilai Mao Zedong wengao (Mao's Manuscripts), vol. 6, 666–69; vol. 7, 4.
13 Mikhail A. Klochko, Soviet Scientist in Red China, trans. Andrew MacAndrew (New York: Praeger, 1964), 68–69.
14 See MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, vol. 2, 22–23.
15 Borisov and Titarenko, Vystupleniia Mao Tsze-duna, ranee ne publikovavshiesia v kitaiskoi pechati (Mao Zedong's Speeches Previously Unpublished in the Chinese Press), series 2, 125, 339.
16 See Huang Lingjun, “Liu Shaoqi yu dayuejin” (Liu Shaoqi and the Great Leap Forward), Zhongguo xiandaishi (Contemporary history of China), no. 7 (2003): 107.
17 See Ye, Ye Zilong huiyilu (Memoirs of Ye Zilong), 213.
18 Borisov and Titarenko, Vystupleniia Mao Tsze-duna, ranee ne publikovavshiesia v kitaiskoi pechati (Mao Zedong's Speeches Previously Unpublished in the Chinese Press), series 2, 158, 170.
19 Quoted from Huang, “Liu Shaoqi yu dayuejin” (Liu Shaoqi and the Great Leap Forward), 107.
20 Mao, Jianguo yilai Mao Zedong wengao (Mao's Manuscripts), vol. 7, 317.
21 Quoted from Li, The Private Life of Chairman Mao, 269.
22 Borisov and Titarenko, Vystupleniia Mao Tsze-duna, ranee ne publikovavshiesia v kitaiskoi pechati (Mao Zedong's Speeches Previously Unpublished in the Chinese Press), series 2, 310, 311, 315, 329.
23 Mao, Jianguo yilai Mao Zedong wengao (Mao's Manuscripts), vol. 7, 177–78.
24 Borisov and Titarenko, Vystupleniia Mao Tsze-duna, ranee ne publikovavshiesia v kitaiskoi pechati (Mao Zedong's Speeches Previously Unpublished in the Chinese Press), series 2, 201, 237, 238, 312, 314, 316, 319, 329.
25 Ibid., 241, 307, 319, 336.
26 See ibid., 327–28, 333–34.
27 For the Bolshevik perspective on war communism see “Pis'mo L. D. Trotskogo [V. I. Leninu] ot 19 dekabria 1919 g.” (Letter from L. D. Trotsky [to V. I. Lenin]. December 19, 1919), RGASPI, collection 5, inventory 1, file 1408, sheets 1–2.
28 See Huang, “Liu Shaoqi yu dayuejin” (Liu Shaoqi and the Great Leap Forward), 107–8.
29 See Borisov and Titarenko, Vystupleniia Mao Tsze-duna, ranee ne publikovavshiesia v kitaiskoi pechati (Mao Zedong's Speeches Previously Unpublished in the Chinese Press), series 2, 264, 275, 281; MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, vol. 2, 85, 90.
30 Borisov and Titarenko, Vystupleniia Mao Tsze-duna, ranee ne publikovavshiesia v kitaiskoi pechati (Mao Zedong's Speeches Previously Unpublished in the Chinese Press), series 2, 337.
31 Ibid., 317, 334.
32 Quoted from Li, The Private Life of Chairman Mao, 276.
33 Borisov and Titarenko, Vystupleniia Mao Tsze-duna, ranee ne publikovavshiesia v kitaiskoi pechati (Mao Zedong's Speeches Previously Unpublished in the Chinese Press), series 2, 266.
34 Peng Dehuai, Memuary marshala (Memoirs of a Marshal), trans. A. V. Pantsov, V. N. Usov, and K. V. Sheveliev (Moscow: Voenizdat, 1988), 486–87; see also Borisov and Titarenko, Vystupleniia Mao Tsze-duna, ranee ne publikovavshiesia v kitaiskoi pechati (Mao Zedong's Speeches Previously Unpublished in the Chinese Press), series 2, 360, 383, 403.
35 See MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, vol. 2, 328.
36 See Mao, Mao Zedong on Diplomacy, 247, 250–58; Zhang, “Sino-Soviet Economic Cooperation,” 207.
37 See Vereshchagin, V starom i novom Kitae (In Old and New China), 119–29.
38 Khrushchev, Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, vol. 3, 454–58.
39 Quoted from Wolff, “One Finger's Worth of Historical Events,” 54, 55; Zubok, “The Mao-Khrushchev Conversations,” 256.
40 See Lu and Liu, “Mao Zedong chong Heluxiaofu fahuo” (How Mao Zedong Got Angry at Khrushchev), 27; Li, Waijiao wutai shang de xin Zhongguo lingxiu (Leaders of New China in the Diplomatic Arena), 154–58; N. Fedorenko, “Vizit N. Khrushcheva v Pekin” (N. Khrushchev's Visit to Beijing), Problemy Dal'nego Vostoka (Far Eastern affairs), no. 1 (1990): 123; Taubman, Khrushchev, 390–92.
41 Quoted from Ogonek (Little light), no. 14 (1999): 28–29. See also M. Romm, Ustnye rasskazy (Oral Tales) (Moscow: “Kinotsentr,” 1991), 154; Khrushchev, Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, vol. 3, 456–62.
42 Quoted from Wolff, “One Finger's Worth of Historical Events,” 53; Zubok, “The Mao-Khrushchev Conversations,” 268.
43 Li, The Private Life of Chairman Mao, 261.
44 Quoted from Fedorenko, “Vizit N. Khrushcheva v Pekin” (N. Khrushchev's Visit to Beijing), 123; Vereshchagin, V starom i novom Kitae (In Old and New China), 130. See also Ye, Ye Zilong huiyilu (Memoirs of Ye Zilong), 215. Mao's translator Li Yueran, however, recalled that it was Liu Shaoqi who asked Khrushchev what to do with the surplus of grain in China. See Li, Waijiao wutai shang de xin Zhongguo lingxiu (Leaders of the New China in the Diplomatic Arena), 149–50.
45 See Khrushchev, Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, vol. 3, 441.
46 Ibid., 442–43.
47 CWIHP Bulletin, nos. 6–7 (1995/1996): 219, 226–27; Pang and Jin, Mao Zedong zhuan (1949–1976) (Biography of Mao Zedong [1949–1976]), vol. 1, 856–84; Liu Xiao, Chushi Sulian ba nian (Eight Years as Ambassador to the USSR) (Beijing: Zhonggong dangshi chubanshe, 1998), 74–78. See also Chen Jian, Mao's China and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 163–204.
48 Borisov and Titarenko, Vystupleniia Mao Tsze-duna, ranee ne publikovavshiesia v kitaiskoi pechati (Mao Zedong's Speeches Previously Unpublished in the Chinese Press), series 2, 414, 419–20; series 3, 164–65; MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, vol. 2, 247.
49 See Lichnoe delo Mao Tszeduna (Personal File of Mao Zedong), RGASPI, collection 495, inventory 225, file 71, vol. 1, sheets 117–18; Materialy 6-go plenuma Tsentral'nogo Komiteta Kommunisticheskoi partii Kitaia vos'mogo sozyva (Materials of the Sixth Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee) (Beijing: Izdatel'stvo literatury na inostrannykh iazykakh, 1959), 55.
50 Some of these statistics are presented in the survey “The contemporary economic situation in the PRC” (in Russian), prepared in early July 1959 by the State Committee on International Economic Relations of the USSR Council of Ministers. Excerpts from them are in Wolff, “One Finger's Worth of Historical Events,” 63–64. See also MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, vol. 2, 202.
51 See Becker, Hungry Ghosts, 85.
52 Quoted from Li, The Private Life of Chairman Mao, 295.
53 Borisov and Titarenko, Vystupleniia Mao Tsze-duna, ranee ne publikovavshiesia v kitaiskoi pechati (Mao Zedong's Speeches Previously Unpublished in the Chinese Press), series 2, 413.
54 See Wolff, “One Finger's Worth of Historical Events,” 63.
55 Li, The Private Life of Chairman Mao, 302, 304. For a different and radiant account of Mao's visit to Shaoshan, see the one written in 1965 by Zhou Lipo, head of the Hunan Federation of Writers, “A Visit to His Hometown,” in Mao Zedong: Biography—Assessment—Reminiscences, 233–38.
56 Mao, Oblaka v snegu (Clouds in the Snow), 75.
57 Borisov and Titarenko, Vystupleniia Mao Tsze-duna, ranee ne publikovavshiesia v kitaiskoi pechati (Mao Zedong's Speeches Previously Unpublished in the Chinese Press), series 3, 109.
58 See Li, The Private Life of Chairman Mao, 109, 142, 143, 349, 353, 401, 452; Kartunova, “Vstrechi v Moskve s Tszian Tsin, zhenoi Mao Tszedun” (Meetings in Moscow with Jiang Qing, the Wife of Mao Zedong), 127; Witke, Comrade Chiang Ch'ing, 30–31, 48, 124, 164, 169, 172–73, 225–26, 227–28, 241, 242, 254–56, 259, 260, 268–71, 303, 445.
59 Quoted from Li, Moi otets Mao Tszedun (My Father Mao Zedong), 189; see also the memoirs of Li Min's daughter, Kong, Ting waipo jiang neiguoqu de shiqing—Mao Zedong yu He Zizhen (Listening to Grandmother's Stories about Her Past—Mao Zedong and He Zizhen).
60 “Comrade Peng Dehuai's Letter to Chairman Mao (July 14, 1959),” in Peng, Memoirs of a Chinese Marshal, 517–18.
61 See Li, The Private Life of Chairman Mao, 315. See also Li and Ma, Zhou Enlai nianpu (1949–1976) (Chronological Biography of Zhou Enlai [1949–1976]), vol. 2, 243.
62 Huang Kecheng, “Lushan fengyun” (The Lushan Events), in Lu and Chen, Hongse jiyi (Red Reminiscences), 423–24.
63 Peng, Memoirs of a Chinese Marshal, 504.
64 Quoted from Li, The Private Life of Chairman Mao, 317.
65 Borisov and Titarenko, Vystupleniia Mao Tsze-duna, ranee ne publikovavshiesia v kitaiskoi pechati (Mao Zedong's Speeches Previously Unpublished in the Chinese Press), series 3, 111.
66 Peng, Memoirs of a Chinese Marshal, 508. See also Li Rui, Lushan huiyi shilu (The True Record of the Lushan Plenum) (Beijing: Chunqiu chubanshe/Hunan jiaoyu chubanshe, 1989); Pang and Jin, Mao Zedong zhuan (1949–1976) (Biography of Mao Zedong [1949–1976]), vol. 2, 953–1010; Zhang, Zhang Wentian nianpu (Chronological Biography of Zhang Wentian), vol. 2, 1147–56; Zhou Xiaozhou zhuan (Biography of Zhou Xiaozhou) (Changsha: Hunan renmin chubanshe, 1985), 58–71, 93–94; Yu. N. Galenovich, Peng Dehuai i Mao Tszedun: Politicheskie lidery Kitaia XX veka (Peng Dehuai and Mao Zedong: Political Leaders of 20th Century China) (Moscow: Ogni, 2005).
67 Quoted from Galenovich, Peng Dehuai i Mao Tszedun (Peng Dehuai and Mao Zedong), 101.
68 See Peng, Memuary marshala (Memoirs of a Marshal), 14.
69 See Dokumenty VIII Plenuma Tsentral'nogo Komiteta Kommunisticheskoi partii Kitaia vos'mogo sozyva (Documents of the Eighth Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee of the Communist Party of China) (Beijing: Izdatel'stvo literatury na inostrannykh iazykakh, 1959), 33.
70 Quoted from Frank Dik tter, Mao's Great Famine: The History of China's Most Devastating Catastrophe, 1958–1962 (New York: Walker, 2010), 88, 134.
71 Borisov and Titarenko, Vystupleniia Mao Tsze-duna, ranee ne publikovavshiesia v kitaiskoi pechati (Mao Zedong's Speeches Previously Unpublished in the Chinese Press), series 3, 92.
72 Ibid., series 2, 165.
73 Quoted from Huang, “Liu Shaoqi yu dayuejin” (Liu Shaoqi and the Great Leap Forward), 108.
74 See Hongqi (Red flag), no. 2 (1981): 33.
75 Krutikov, Na kitaiskom napravleniu (Pointed Toward China), 281. See also Khrushchev, Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, vol. 3, 464–69; Vereshchagin, V starom i novom Kitae (In Old and New China), 145–48; Kapitsa, Na raznykh parallelakh (On Various Parallels), 63–65; MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, vol. 2, 256–60.
76 See “Records of Meeting of the CPSU and CCP Delegations, Moscow, July 5–20, 1963,” 379; MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, vol. 2, 225–26; Shu Guang Zhang, “Between ‘Paper' and ‘Real Tigers': Mao's View of Nuclear Weapons,” in John Lewis Gaddis et al., eds., Cold War Statesmen Confront the Bomb: Nuclear Diplomacy Since 1945 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 208.
77 See Zhang, “Sino-Soviet Economic Cooperation,” 207; MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, vol. 2, 11–15; Wu, Shinian lunduan (The Ten-Year Debate), 205–8.
78 Khrushchev, Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, vol. 3, 480–81.
79 Quoted from MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, vol. 2, 226–27.
80 In May 1955, for example, during a visit to Yugoslavia, Khrushchev drank so much that he started to kiss everyone, especially Tito, and reeking of alcohol, said, “Iosya, quit being angry! What a thin skinned one you are! Let's drink up, and may whoever brings up the past lose his sight!” Quoted from Galina Vishnevskaia, Galina: Istoriia zhizni (Galina: A Life Story) (Moscow: Gorizont, 1991), 179. A year later at an air show in Tushino near Moscow, quite intoxicated, he began to bad-mouth all foreign countries, and did not even notice when several foreign diplomats got up from their seats and walked out. Taubman, Khrushchev, 348.
81 See Dong Wang, “The Quarreling Brothers: New Chinese Archives and a Reappraisal of the Sino-Soviet Split, 1959–1962,” CWIHP Working Paper, no. 36 (April 2002): 1–80.
82 For excerpts from the stenographic report of the negotiations between N. S. Khrushchev and Mao Zedong on October 2, 1959, as well as the report by M. A. Suslov, secretary of the Central Committee of the CPSU, see Wolff, “One Finger's Worth of Historical Events,” 64–72; also Zubok, “The Mao-Khrushchev Conversations,” 262–70.
83 Quoted from Wolff, “One Finger's Worth of Historical Events,” 65; Zubok, “The Mao-Khrushchev Conversations,” 266, 267, 269.
84 Khrushchev, Memoirs of Nikita Khrushchev, vol. 3, 468. See also Liu, Chushi Sulian ba nian (Eight Years as Ambassador to the USSR), 88–91; Li, Waijiao wutai shang de xin Zhongguo lingxiu (Leaders of the New China in the Diplomatic Arena), 159–64.
85 Quoted from Wolff, “One Finger's Worth of Historical Events,” 70. On the Sino-Soviet rift, see in detail Lorenz M. Lüthi, The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).
86 Taubman, Khrushchev, 394.
87 Mao Zedong, Jianguo yilai Mao Zedong wengao (Mao's Manuscripts), vol. 8 (Beijing: Zhongyang wenxian chubanshe, 1993), 600–601.
n72 The first primitive blast furnaces were established in China in the spring of 1958. By June there were 12,680. But the real epidemic of steel making began in August.
n73 The Chinese communists continued the bombardment on alternate days for the next twenty years.
n74 Khrushchev conveyed this information via China’s ambassador Liu Xiao, who was specially summoned to Yalta for four days where Khrushchev was resting.
n75 At that time the main advocate within the leadership of the CPSU of a hard line toward the PRC was Mikhail Andreevich Suslov, the secretary for ideology in the Central Committee. It was he who convinced Khrushchev that the Chinese should be harshly condemned for exacerbating tensions in the Taiwan Strait.