Chapter 16

In This Chapter

Tracing the rise of Mao Tse-tung

Watching (in disbelief) as China splits from Russia

Taking cover from Mao’s Cultural Revolution

Russia and China were the communist superpowers of the post-war world. Nothing could stop them turning the whole world communist if they wanted to it seemed, and they appeared to be planning just that. But by the sixties these two communist superpowers had fallen out and were preparing for war – with each other. Why did Russia and China follow such different paths? And why did Russia – but not China – collapse?

Comrades? (Maybe)

Communism was based on the ideas of the nineteenth-century German thinker Karl Marx (Chapter 4 has an outline of his thoughts). Central to communist thinking was the idea that workers were brothers and sisters, comrades, to use the usual communist term. Communist countries usually did away with titles like ‘Lord’ and ‘Lady’, even ‘Mr’ and ‘Mrs’ (they thought these terms too bourgeois and middle class), and referred to everyone as ‘comrade’ – much more egalitarian. Don’t get the idea, however, that these comrades were always comradely with each other. Communist comrades were just as capable of stabbing each other in the back as any bourgeois capitalist Mr or Mrs. The two leaders of the communist world, Russia’s Joseph Stalin and China’s Mao Tse-tung, smiled for the camera and kept up comradely appearances, but behind the smiles they and their countries were soon deadly rivals in the leadership of the communist world stakes.

Wicked Uncle Joe

Stalin had wormed his way into power in Russia in the 1920s by the simple method of appointing most of the membership of the Russian Communist Party and then keeping them loyal to him (Chapter 4 has all the details). He was utterly ruthless and had thousands of Russians, including some of his oldest Bolshevik comrades, arrested and shot. He shot so many army officers that the Red Army couldn’t resist the Germans when they invaded in 1941, and Stalin was very lucky that they didn’t take Moscow. But that minor detail didn’t stop him shamelessly presenting himself as the Wise Leader Who Guided Russia Through the War. The Western Allies helped in this charade by presenting him as cuddly ‘Uncle Joe’. (He could indeed be very friendly and cuddly to children, but he never let that stop him from having their parents shot.)

This white-washing of Stalin’s image and contributions was so successful, in fact, that if you’d asked a communist anywhere in the world immediately after the Second World War which country and which individual they most admired, you’d have got a very clear answer: The Soviet Union and its leader, Joseph Stalin. For communists, Stalin was the only true hero to emerge from the war. According to them, Russia, not the capitalist Western Allies, had broken the power of Hitler’s armies and had suffered most from his appalling rule. One communist partisan in Yugoslavia said he didn’t mind the Germans bombing his country because each bomb dropped meant there was one less dropped on Russia. Okay, he probably didn’t have many friends, but communists all around the world would have understood his point of view.

By 1945 Stalin was so powerful that the Western Allies could only stand by and watch as his troops took over the countries of eastern and central Europe, got rid of their pre-war governments, and put communist governments in their place. Stalin made sure that these governments obeyed orders from Moscow. He was the undisputed leader of the communist bloc and he loved it.

Stalin only had two challenges to his position to worry about:

Marshal Tito: Josip Broz (codename ‘Tito’) and his communist partisans had liberated Yugoslavia themselves and Tito wasn’t suddenly going to start taking orders from Stalin now that the war was over. Stalin was furious and declared that he only had to wag his little finger and Tito would fall (apparently he wagged the wrong finger because Tito was still in power long after Stalin had died).

The American atom bomb: President Truman had warned Stalin at the Potsdam Conference that the United States had the atom bomb (he didn’t actually add ‘So don’t try any funny business’ but that’s more or less what he meant). Stalin didn’t need to worry, though. Communist sympathisers in Britain and America were busy passing atomic secrets to the Russians, so that Stalin was soon able to catch up with the Americans.

Historians (and spies) have long wondered how the Soviet Union was able to build atomic weapons. Stalin’s agents were getting hold of Western atomic secrets, but Russia also had a first-class atomic weapons team, including Andrei Sakharov, Russia’s ‘father of the hydrogen bomb’. We now know, from material in the Soviet archives, that Stalin and Lavretii Beria, head of the secret police, simply didn’t trust Soviet scientists, and insisted they build Russia’s atom bomb the same way their spies were reporting that the Americans built theirs. Sakharov and his teams had more success pursuing their own ideas on the hydrogen bomb – the Soviet bomb was probably developed before the American one and certainly had a more efficient design – but the Russians liked to give the impression that they got all their atomic expertise from spies in the West, just so they could see the expressions on the CIAs’ faces.

The Soviet atomic programme took a terrible toll of human life. Safety measures for the workers were almost non-existent and thousands died from radiation sickness. Sakharov himself became so sickened by the nuclear arms race that he turned against nuclear weapons entirely and became one of the Soviet Union’s leading dissidents and peace campaigners.

Stalin may have been powerful but he was still paranoid about enemies. He had thousands of people rounded up and sent to the huge Soviet network of labour camps known as the gulag. His pet hates: Doctors, Jews, the city and people of Leningrad, people who looked at him in a funny way. Even high-ranking Soviet officials (in fact, especially high-ranking Soviet officials) were scared stiff of ‘the Boss’.

And then, in 1949, Stalin really did get a new and powerful rival when Mao Tse-tung seized power in Peking and set up the People’s Republic of China.

Mao Tse-tung – new kid on the bloc

China was enormous but it was also backward, corrupt, and weak. In the nineteenth century the Western powers had bullied China into accepting imports of opium (yes, back then drug smuggling was actually Western government policy!) and forced her to open up her ports to Western trade. During the Second World War the Allies pretended to treat the Chinese leader, Chiang Kai-shek, as an equal partner but China still had to do what the Western powers, especially the USA, told her to.

Once Mao and the communists had seized power in 1949, all that was going to change.

Translating Chinese characters and pronunciation can be difficult for westerners, and sometimes the ‘Western’ version of a Chinese name doesn’t sound much like the original. The Chinese capital always used to be called ‘Peking’ in the West, but ‘Beijing’ is much closer to the Chinese pronunciation and eventually came to be the version people use nowadays. Pronouncing people’s names is the same, except that not all the new versions are in wide use yet. Strictly speaking, Mao Tse-tung should be Mao Zedong, Chou En-lai should be Zhou Enlai, and Chiang Kai-shek should be Jiang Jieshih, but if you’re not used to the changes you could find the new versions confusing. I stick to the versions in use at the time of each event.

So who exactly was Mao?

Mao’s family were peasants, like millions of others in China, but the lad didn’t fancy pushing a plough all his life so he ran away to school. He did well and got a job in Peking University stamping books. There he picked up one on Marxist theory and started reading. He liked it.

Mao agreed with Marx’s analysis of capitalist society (Chapter 4 can fill you in on this) but he could see a major snag as far as China was concerned. Marx was writing in nineteenth-century Europe, which had a huge industrial working class. But China was an almost entirely agricultural country and its people weren’t industrial workers but peasants. Marxists saw peasants as class enemies who just wanted to make a tidy profit from their farms, but Mao thought he could turn China’s peasants into a revolutionary class. In 1921 Mao helped set up the Chinese Communist Party, though his peasants-are-revolutionaries-too ideas meant he was given a hard time by his more orthodox comrades.

The Long March

China had overthrown the emperor and become a republic in 1911, but the new Nationalist Chinese government led by Chiang Kai-shek had no time for communists. Neither did China’s warlords, local gangsters who ruled most of the Chinese countryside. The communists set up a soviet (a communist governing council) in Jianxi province in southern China, but Chiang Kai-shek closed in on it with his troops. In January 1935, the communists decided trying to defend Jianxi was hopeless: They had to break out and head north. Their objective: The northern province of Shaanxi, 5,000 miles away. They called this journey north The Long March.

The Long March to Shaanxi was the defining event in forming the Chinese Communist Party and in putting Mao in charge of it.

The communists had to fight all the way: Chiang’s Nationalists and local warlords attacked constantly and the communists lost thousands of men. The experience gave the ones who made it a strong sense of bonding.

The communists weren’t happy with their leaders and Soviet advisers: Instead they turned to Mao, because he had better ideas on how to fight off Nationalist attacks.

Mao enforced strict discipline to make sure his men treated the local peasants fairly: Chinese peasants were used to government troops making off with their food and animals without paying for them, so it came as a nice change when the communists arrived, asked nicely before they took anything, and paid for it too. Mao knew he had to win over the hearts and minds of China’s peasants, and the Long March was his chance to do it.

The Long March became an epic episode in the history of the Chinese Communist Party. At one point the Nationalists removed the planking from a river bridge, so the communists had to fight their way across it just using the bridge’s chains. Some 86,000 people set out from Jianxi in January 1935 and less than 20,000 made it to Shaanxi in October. But once they got there, Mao was able to set up a strong base and defy Chiang Kai-shek to bring it on.

All hands on deck! We can kill each other later

In 1937 the Japanese invaded China, so Mao and Chiang put their own war on hold while they both turned to fight against this new enemy. The communists concentrated on guerrilla fighting, which was just as well as the one time they tried a big offensive it was a disaster. Mao was also able to use the war to strengthen his personal hold on the communists:

Thousands of volunteers arrived to join the communists: They didn’t know much about communism, so Mao set up special classes where they could learn all about it. His version of communism, of course.

Mao trained a special class of combat leaders called ‘Cadres’: Cadres made a special study of Mao’s writings and they were utterly loyal to him. Mao took particular care to discourage cadres from thinking for themselves.

Mao took care of the peasants in his area: He imposed strict caps on rents to stop greedy landlords exploiting the war to get rich, and he reorganised schools to allow students time to work in the fields.

Meanwhile, things weren’t going quite so well for Chiang and the Nationalists:

Soaring inflation: The Japanese controlled the industrial cities so the Nationalists didn’t have any way of creating wealth. The government ended up deep in debt and with prices going through the roof.

Famine: The Nationalists took hold of the peasants’ food stocks, but they would only pay a fixed price for them. With inflation at over 200 per cent, many farms folded and the peasants went hungry.

Problems with the Allies: Chiang had a gift for alienating people who were meant to be on his side. The Americans sent General ‘Vinegar Joe’ Stilwell to work with him, but Chiang ignored Stilwell’s advice. He also refused to send any help to the British fighting the Japanese in Burma. In 1944, just when all the other Allies were finally beating the Japanese, Chiang took them on in a major campaign – and lost.

Combined, these factors meant that when the war was over, Chiang was dangerously short of friends both at home and abroad, which was bad news because he was soon going to need every friend he could get.

Made in Taiwan

In 1895, the Japanese annexed the Chinese island of Taiwan (also known as Formosa) and they held onto it until 1945. Taiwan seemed the perfect haven for Chiang Kai-shek and his followers after Mao won the civil war in 1949, and they headed there in huge numbers: Approximately one million mainland Chinese crossed over to Taiwan with Chiang. The communists did try attacking Taiwan, but they got badly beaten: This was one corner of China that would be forever Nationalist.

Chiang soon showed what he thought of the Taiwanese: He imposed martial law and banned all political parties other than his own Kuomintang. He wasn’t interested in Taiwan except as a base for getting back to the mainland. The United States recognised Taiwan as the only legitimate government of China until the 1970s, when President Nixon visited China and the US finally came round to recognising Peking.

Chiang kept up his tough grip on Taiwan until his death in 1975, but his son Chiang Ching-kuo loosened up and allowed a bit more freedom. Result: Taiwan took off as a major financial centre and manufacturer of cheap goods whose handles come off. Chiang Ching-kuo appointed Lee Teng-hui, a real live Taiwanese, as his vice president, and in 1988 the Taiwanese people elected him president in their first free elections. Just in time for the end of the century, the world had a little bit of democracy ‘Made in Taiwan’.

China in your hand

Right at the end of the war, the Soviet Union declared war on Japan. The Russians rushed troops into Manchuria, and in 1946 they handed the whole area over to Mao and the communists. US General Marshall arrived to try to arrange a peaceful settlement between the two sides but no one was interested. They were preparing for war.

Chiang attacked first. Nationalist forces tore through the communist heartlands in northern China and forced Mao’s men to retreat. But Mao had reorganised the army as the People’s Liberation Army (liberating China from Big Bad Chiang, that is) and his army commander Lin Biao proved very good at launching guerrilla raids every time Chiang thought he’d won. By 1948 the PLA was on the offensive and in January 1949 it finally took Peking. Chiang and his followers headed for Taiwan, and Mao announced that China was now the People’s Republic of China.

The Mao and Joe show

At first the Russians were delighted with Mao’s victory over Chiang Kai-shek, but the Americans were aghast. Washington had supported Chiang and China was an important base for American missionaries. The United States insisted that Chiang’s government on Taiwan was the only legal government of China and managed to persuade the UN to give China’s seats to Taiwan. The Russians were furious and walked out of the UN in protest. Not such a great idea: They weren’t there in 1950 to stop the UN sending troops to Korea (Chapter 10 has details on the Korean War).

Capitalist invaders – keep out or else!

When the Korean War started, Mao watched events closely: North Korea borders China, and he was worried that if the Americans won in the south they might follow it up by invading the north, and if they won there, what was to stop them deciding to get rid of the ‘illegal’ regime in Peking while they were at it? Quite. So Mao warned the UN that they could do what they liked in South Korea but the moment they stepped over the border into North Korea, the People’s Liberation Army would fall on them like a ton of bricks.

President Truman warned the UN commander, General Douglas MacArthur, that under no, repeat no, circumstances was he to cross into North Korea. MacArthur, who had full, repeat full, confidence in his own judgement, took no notice and charged into North Korea almost to the Chinese border. Result: Thousands of Chinese troops poured into Korea and drove the UN troops back. Mao claimed that the Chinese had risen up spontaneously in righteous anger at this capitalist threat to their land (no one actually believed him, but it sounded good).

Marxism the Maoist way

Mao knew that the key place for building communism in China wasn’t in the factories, as in Russia, but in the countryside. To do that, the Chinese would have to tick off a few items on their ‘Things To Do’ list:

Kill the landlords: Landowners were hauled before special People’s Courts and charged with exploiting the peasants for their own gain. Most of them were shot and their land was distributed to the peasants.

Give the peasants land: Peasants all got a share in the local landlords’ estates. Most of them promptly sold it and pocketed the profit. The Russians thought their behaviour confirmed all they’d ever thought about peasants.

Industrialise fast: Mao copied Stalin’s fast-track industrialisation scheme by planning everything centrally and imposing impossibly heavy production quotas. The Russians sent hundreds of technical experts to help the Chinese industrialise the Soviet way.

Collectivise the land: Having only just given land to the peasants, Mao then took it off them. China’s villages were reorganised into big collective farms which took their orders from Peking.

Mao also copied Stalin’s technique of having thousands of people killed. Mao turned on ‘counter-revolutionaries’, corrupt (= not communist enough) cadres within the army, and China’s remaining capitalists. Somewhere between 500,000 and 800,000 people were killed in these purges, though the rich capitalists usually had to pay crippling fines: Their money was much more useful to the regime than their deaths.

The Russians still weren’t convinced that Chinese peasants were a revolutionary class, but they were generally happy with the way Mao’s regime was shaping up. Mao, however, wasn’t at all thrilled by developments in Russia.

Breaking up is hard to do – the big split

Communist China and the Soviet Union should have been close allies, but by the 1960s they were deadly rivals, hardly speaking to each other except in threats. This section explains why.

All change at the top

The problems began when Stalin died in 1953. Immediately, the leading members of the Politburo, the ruling council of the Soviet Union, started manoeuvring to seize power. What they were all scared of was that Lavrentii Beria, the ruthless head of the NKVD, the Soviet secret police, would get the top post, so they plotted together and had him shot for treason. None of them trusted the others, so instead of having one man in charge they had two: Georgi Malenkov as prime minister and Nikolai Bulganin as his deputy. Within a couple of weeks, however, Nikita Khrushchev had used his position as General Secretary of the Party to force Malenkov to step down. From then on Khrushchev and Bulganin ruled together. Then, in 1956, at the twentieth congress of the Soviet Communist Party, Khrushchev did the unthinkable: He launched a savage attack on Stalin.

I always knew that Stalin was a bad ‘un

Khrushchev’s attack on Stalin was in a ‘secret’ speech to the congress (it was secret because no reporters were present, though news of the speech soon leaked out). He denounced Stalin for his personality cult and for ruling Russia by terror, having thousands of loyal communists shot or imprisoned simply because of his own paranoia. The delegates were stunned. They’d been brought up to look on Stalin as a sort of god. Like everyone else, they’d imagined that if Stalin only knew what the secret police were up to, he’d soon put things right. Learning that Stalin knew all about the NKVD’s actions perfectly well because he’d ordered them came as a profound shock. But if Khrushchev said Stalin knew, it must be true. Mustn’t it?

Suddenly, it was open season on Stalin. People started smashing his statues and pictures; they even removed his embalmed body from the Red Square mausoleum, where it had lain in the place of honour next to Lenin. Never again, the Russian leaders declared, would they allow anyone to create a personality cult as Stalin had.

Western leaders were delighted to hear of Khrushchev’s speech because they thought it meant Khrushchev was rejecting Stalin’s hardline attitude towards other countries. But when the Hungarians rose up in 1956 in protest against control from Moscow, Khrushchev sent tanks into Budapest to crush them. De-Stalinisation didn’t mean Russia had gone soft.

After his ‘secret’ speech, no one could challenge Khrushchev’s position as the leader of Russia. In 1958 he edged Bulganin out of the picture and took power on his own. But he didn’t set up his own personality cult and he had to treat his Politburo colleagues carefully. If he ever put a foot wrong they could get rid of him, and he knew it.

That’s what comes of too much free speech: Mao’s reaction

The rest of the world may have liked Khrushchev’s attack on Stalin’s posthumous reputation (see previous section) but Mao was appalled. He thought Krushchev was playing into the hands of the West and, in any case, Mao couldn’t see anything wrong in establishing a huge personality cult and having thousands of innocent people killed: These were some of his own favourite hobbies. Mao thought the de-Stalinisation programme that followed the speech showed that Khrushchev was removing the Soviet Union from the true path to socialism. From now on China would work out its own way to socialism, without Russian help.

These boots were made for banging on the table

Not every day does a major world leader slip off his shoe in the United Nations General Assembly and bang it on the desk shouting out ‘No! No! No!’ but that’s just what Khrushchev did in 1960 when the Philippine delegate accused the Soviet Union of imperialism in eastern Europe. Khrushchev wanted to make his rather different opinion clear, and he certainly did that. He always said he got his rough and ready manners from his peasant background and they could certainly make him a difficult guest. On his disastrous 1959 visit to America, he shouted angrily to his hosts, ‘We will bury you!’ He meant that Russia would out-perform the American economy, but the Americans thought he was threatening to blow them all up – perhaps because they wouldn’t let him visit Disneyland (for ‘security reasons’ they said). ‘Nyet’ (pronounced knee-yet) is the Russian word for ‘No’ and after his UN performance it became Khrushchev’s international nickname.

In 1957 Mao decided to broaden his ideas by encouraging China’s intellectuals to speak out. ‘Don’t be shy,’ he said, ‘let a hundred flowers bloom!’ Be careful what you wish for. In newspapers and on posters economists, writers, and journalists tore into Mao, denouncing him for not following orthodox Marxism and generally deciding he couldn’t lead the country out of a paper bag. Mao had never been much of a fan of intellectuals, and this confirmed his low opinion of them. He cancelled the hundred flowers campaign and had all the people who’d criticised him locked up.

At least you don’t have to worry about what to wear

One of the most striking features of communist China was that everyone wore plain blue overalls. Even the People’s Liberation Army had the same uniform for everyone, regardless of ranks. Mao himself wore a plain suit that buttoned up to the neck. The idea was to abolish all signs of individuality (that was, like, so bourgeois) in favour of reflecting the collective will of the Chinese people. Unfortunately, the collective will of the Chinese people was a trifle, er, boring.

China’s great leap backward

In 1958 Mao announced a bold new departure that would show the world that China had worked out the proper way to apply Marxist principles in practice. He called this plan the Great Leap Forward. It was a disaster.

Instead of a Soviet-style industrialisation programme, the Great Leap set up thousands of self-sufficient communes – rural villages with a bit of industry attached. No private property or family meals: Everything was to be done and held in common. Even sleep was rationed to six hours every two days, which is less than half what the body needs, especially for heavy outdoor work. Peasants had to plough in the new official ‘close planting, deep ploughing’ way dreamed up by some technocrat in Peking. Result: The grain harvest plummeted. The government was imposing massive grain quotas with terrible penalties for failing to meet them, so people just doctored the figures and hoped for the best.

Not content with ruining the harvest, Mao also forced peasants to undertake industrial steel production with little home-made (and completely useless) backyard blast furnaces, which meant chopping down every tree they could find to feed the wretched things. Result: The country’s natural irrigation was wrecked and created devastating floods. Peasants had to spend so much time trying to get their furnaces to work that they couldn’t look after the fields properly, so food production collapsed completely. Result: Famine. Something like thirty million people starved in Mao’s Great Leap Forward.

By 1961 even Mao recognised he had a disaster on his hands and he had to import grain from Canada and Australia while the Russians looked on saying ‘I told you so’. The other members of China’s Politburo began to think the time might be right for a change of leader.

World communism – now in two exciting varieties!

The Russians were furious about the Great Leap Forward (see the preceding section, ‘China’s great leap backwards’). They said Mao should have listened to them; Mao said he wasn’t going to take any lessons from Russia and anyway Khrushchev was too soft on the Americans.

‘Well, at least I’m not planning to provoke the Americans into nuclear war by attacking Taiwan,’ retorted Khrushchev.

‘Huh,’ said Mao, ‘The atom bomb’s a paper tiger. The Americans will never use it.’

So Khrushchev called Mao another Stalin and an ultra-leftist (which is a strange accusation to make against a communist leader!) and Mao called Khrushchev a bourgeois revisionist, which in communist circles was like calling into question the virtue of your mother. ‘That does it!’ said Khrushchev and he recalled all the economic experts Russia had sent to China. The Chinese clearly hadn’t been listening to them anyway.

The tragedy of Tibet

The remote mountain kingdom of Tibet had its own distinctive culture and identity. In 1913 Tibet’s spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama, took advantage of the overthrow of the Chinese emperor to declare the country independent, but the Chinese still regarded it as Chinese territory. In 1950 Chinese troops tore into the country to ‘liberate’ it – from the Tibetans, presumably. Nine years later the Tibetans staged a rising but the Chinese crushed them. The Dalai Lama had to flee to India and the Chinese were so furious with the Indian government for sheltering him that in 1962 they attacked and captured Indian territory along the border. Since then the Chinese government has continued to threaten any government that receives or helps the Dalai Lama. As China has become richer and more powerful, Western governments have started keeping the Dalai Lama at arm’s length.

Pulling out her economic experts was the equivalent of Russia withdrawing its ambassador: The action was a sign that goodwill between the two communist giants had broken down. The Sino(Chinese)–Soviet split was now complete. In the 1960s China and the Soviet Union stopped pretending they were friends and took very different paths towards establishing communism.

The split between Russia and China actually turned into a short war in 1969 over a disputed island, Zhen bao, in the Ussuri river. This situation was very dangerous, as both sides had nuclear weapons and China had no allies. The Russians started provoking trouble all along the border and the Chinese realised they’d have to negotiate a settlement. This negotiation was a sign that, big and strong though China was, she still needed friends.

Cultural Revolution in China

After the disaster of the Great Leap Forward (see the earlier section ‘China’s Great Leap Backwards’) Mao’s rivals on the Politburo decided he needed to retire. His main enemies were:

Liu Shaoqui

Deng Xiaoping

Liu and Deng encouraged a public campaign criticising Mao for leading China into economic disaster and for encouraging a huge personality cult saying how wonderful he was.

Mao’s allies were:

Lin Biao, an old comrade from the Long March

Chou En-lai, Mao’s right-hand man on the Long March – and Lin Biao’s greatest rival

Jiang Qing, a former film star and Mao’s ultra-loyal fourth wife

The two sides in Chinese politics were squaring up for a fight. They spent the first half of the sixties hurling insults at each other.

One of the forms of criticism that really got under Mao’s skin was a play called Hai Rui Dismissed From Office, written by the historian and deputy mayor of Peking, Wu Han. The play was based on an episode from Chinese history in which the hero, Hai Rui, protests to the emperor that the poor peasants are having their land taken off them and are being forced to live in communes and take orders from Peking. (Sound familiar?) The emperor is furious with Hai Rui and dismisses him from office, just as it says on the tin. Mao was furious too, as the play was clearly a not-very-subtle attack on his Great Leap Forward.

Mao got Wu Han’s play slated in a review and accused Wu of being a right-wing revisionist: A very serious accusation. Wu was forced to confess in public that his script stank and that Mao was right and he would never dare do anything like that again and could he go home now, please? But Mao and his allies hadn’t finished yet. They were going to unleash a storm over China so terrifying that no one would dare criticise Mao ever again. This policy was to be called the Cultural Revolution.

You’re just a number in my little red book

During Mao’s propaganda war with his enemies on the Politburo, he published a little pocket-sized, red-bound collection of his own memorable quotes and sayings. It was called The Thoughts of Chairman Mao, though everyone called it the ‘Little Red Book’. You could keep this handy book in your breast pocket and take in a thought or two at the bus stop or while taking a breather from beating up reactionary bourgeois revisionists in the street. The thoughts weren’t particularly profound: ‘If you don’t sweep in the corner, the dust won’t go away on its own’ or ‘Classes struggle. Some classes win and some classes lose’ (you don’t say?), but they fired up the young Red Guards of the Cultural Revolution, who seemed to consult the book about any decision they had to make, including what to eat tonight and how to find their way to the station.

Cultural terror and the Red Guard

In 1966 Mao’s wife Jiang Qing took over the Cultural Affairs Committee of the People’s Liberation Army, got her opponents sacked, and set in motion the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Mao and Jiang Qing declared that China was still riddled with bourgeois counter-revolutionaries and traitors (= people who didn’t agree with Mao), especially teachers, lecturers, and the educated professional classes. Lin Biao called on China’s young people, whether in school or in university, to rise up and hunt down the traitors.

Not every day do schoolchildren get the go-ahead to humiliate their teachers and China’s young people leapt at the chance. They formed themselves into the Red Guards, fanatically loyal to Mao, who arranged for them to have free rail passes to travel to Peking and stage massive parades in Tianenmen Square, brandishing his Little Red Book and calling for the destruction of China’s enemies.

When Mao unleashed his Red Guards on the country they tore China apart:

Teachers, lecturers, party officials, and even Politburo members were tortured and humiliated. The Red Guards forced them to parade in public wearing dunces’ caps with details of their ‘crimes’ written on them.

Works of art and historical relics were smashed and the Red Guards burned any books that didn’t follow the Maoist line, to ‘cleanse’ China of any trace of ‘bourgeois’ attitudes.

Ordinary people were encouraged to denounce their neighbours as class traitors and bourgeois revisionists. It was wise to denounce your neighbour before your neighbour denounced you.

The Red Guards were completely out of control. The country, especially the cities, fell into anarchy. Schools and universities were shut and the economy ground to a halt. The rest of the world looked on in horror as China descended into self-destructive chaos.

Chou En-lai urged Mao to rein the Red Guards in. Chou realised that the Cultural Revolution was doing appalling harm to China’s outside image and was creating bitterness that would take years to heal. Workers and peasants were already forming their own committees to oppose the Red Guards and restore order. Finally, in 1968 Mao gave in. He ordered the People’s Liberation Army to move in against the Red Guards.

The Cultural Revolution slowed right down after 1968, but it never quite ended until Mao’s death. Mao’s opponents, Liu Shaoqui and Deng Xiaoping, were both forced off the Politburo and Mao’s authority was complete. But somewhere between half a million and a million people were killed during the Cultural Revolution, and the scars it left in people’s minds lasted for years: Jung Chan’s memoir Wild Swans tells the story of its devastating effect on three generations of women in her family.

The Cultural Revolution showed that China wouldn’t be changing policy as long as Mao was alive. He regularly went swimming in public, even in China’s polluted rivers, to show that he was fit and strong and would be around for a good while yet.

An American president in Peking

In 1972 US President Richard Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger visited China and met Mao. Mao’s Cultural Revolution (see previous section) had only recently been denouncing everything Western, so this meeting with a pair of anti-communist American Republicans took the world by surprise, to say the least. But in fact the visit made perfect sense:

The US would soon be pulling out of Vietnam and badly needed a new friend in Asia. Who better than China?

China needed a friend in its long stand-off with the Soviet Union. Who better than the US?

The US had played China at ping pong and the Chinese wanted a return match.

Nixon’s visit was a great success. The US recognised Mao’s government, stopped pretending Taiwan was the legal government of China, and agreed to let the People’s Republic take China’s seat at the United Nations. The door was open for China to pursue closer links with the West if it chose to. But would it?

After Mao

Mao died in 1976 and immediately a bitter power struggle got going between the radical ‘Gang of Four’, led by Mao’s widow Jiang Qing, and the modernisers, led by Deng Xiaoping:

The modernisers (or, if you were one of the Gang of Four, the ‘pro-Western bourgeois revisionist traitors’) wanted to continue the links with the West that the Nixon visit had opened up.

The Gang of Four (or ‘dangerous lunatics who want to plunge us all into chaos again’ if you supported the modernisers) wanted to go back to the good old anarchy of the Cultural Revolution.

The modernisers won. The Gang of Four were arrested and sentenced to long terms in prison, where Jiang Qing eventually hanged herself. Not many wept.

China immediately began to import Western goods and to allow people to voice criticisms of Mao. In 1980 Deng finally made his way to the top and opened China to foreign investment. By the end of the century China was poised to become an economic superpower.

Hong Kong: One country; two systems

In 1987 Deng Xiaoping arranged with the British prime minister Margaret Thatcher that Britain would hand back Hong Kong in 1997, when its 99-year lease on the New Territories ran out. The British were concerned for the future of the Hong Kong Chinese under undemocratic Chinese rule and then realised that in 99 years they had never quite got around to introducing democracy into Hong Kong themselves. So the last British governor, Chris Patten, hurriedly set up a legislative assembly with free elections. The idea was to embed the assembly so that the Chinese would not be able to get rid of it later. The Chinese were furious with Patten and made it clear they would not tolerate democracy in Hong Kong after 1997. On the other hand, the Chinese had no intention of dismantling Hong Kong’s phenomenally successful capitalist system: China needed the money too much. ‘One country; two systems’ they called it, though for hardline Maoists ‘blatant hypocrisy’ would have been a better name.

Not everything in China had changed, though. In 1989, as the Soviet bloc began dismantling and the Berlin Wall came down (see the next section ‘Meanwhile, Back in the USSR . . .’), Chinese students set up a huge camp in Tianenmen Square in Beijing (as Peking was now known in the West). Excited about the prospect of communist countries becoming more free, they called for democracy in China. But Deng Xiaoping wasn’t about to tear down the communist regime he’d spent his life trying to set up. Before the horrified cameras of the world, he sent tanks into the square to destroy the students’ camp and had democracy campaigners arrested and imprisoned. The decadent Russians could do as they liked: China was staying communist.

Meanwhile, Back in the USSR . . .

The Soviet Union experienced a long period in the sixties and seventies when it suppressed free speech ruthlessly while its economy slowly disintegrated. But in the 1980s Mikhail Gorbachev forced some long-overdue reforms past the aged stick-in-the-muds of the Politburo – and brought the whole Soviet system crashing down.

Thank you, Mr Khrushchev, and good night

Nikita Khrushchev, who’d emerged as leader of the Soviet Union by 1960 (see the earlier section ‘I always knew that Stalin was a bad ‘un’), enjoyed taking a tough line with the United States. He broke off talks with the Americans when a U2 spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union in 1960, and he backed Cuba’s Fidel Castro when President Kennedy backed the disastrous Bay of Pigs invasion the following year (see Chapter 13). In 1961 he built the Berlin Wall to stop East Berliners slipping away to the decadently high wages and stable economy of West Berlin, and the following year he risked global destruction when he tried to put nuclear missiles on Cuba. The Cuban missile crisis brought the world closer than it had ever been to all-out nuclear war and at the end of it, Khrushchev had to withdraw his missiles and promise never to try such a thing again (Chapter 10 has the scary details of this event).

The Politburo in Moscow couldn’t decide which was worse: Losing to the Americans or Khrushchev’s folly in provoking the crisis in the first place. Khrushchev was losing friends fast. He tried sacking more ex-Stalinists, but that just turned the army and police top brass against him (they were all ex-Stalinists). Then he told Russia’s collective farms to drop what they were doing and grow maize, whether it was suitable for the land or not. Mostly, it wasn’t. ‘Enough!’ said the Politburo. In 1964 they went in to see Khrushchev and told him to clear his desk. He did and retired to write his memoirs. He was lucky: In Stalin’s day, he’d have been shot.

Mr Brezhnev’s doctrine

The man who took over from Khrushchev (see previous section) was Leonid Brezhnev, a steady-as-she-goes politician, less erratic than Khrushchev and less brutal than Stalin. He wasn’t weak, though: He enforced communist rule ruthlessly, clamping down on anyone, however eminent, who spoke out against the Soviet system. The Brezhnev Doctrine gave the Soviet Union the right to intervene in the internal affairs of other socialist countries if they seemed to be departing from the socialist line, and in 1968 he sent tanks into Prague to crush the attempt by the government of Czechoslovakia to allow more freedom of speech and give communism a human face.

The fate of dissidents, famous and otherwise

People who protested against Brezhnev’s, er, interesting approach to human rights were known as dissidents. They included some very eminent people:

Alexander Solzhenitsyn: Novelist who spent eight years in the gulag for criticising Stalin and wrote a book, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch, describing what it was like. In 1970 Solzhenitsyn won the Nobel Prize for Literature, but doing so cut no ice with Brezhnev, who had him arrested and exiled for writing The Gulag Archipelago, telling the history of the Soviet labour camp system.

Andrei Sakharov: Prominent nuclear physicist who helped develop the Soviet Union’s hydrogen bomb. But Sakharov spoke out against human rights abuses in the Soviet Union and in 1975 his work won him the Nobel Peace Prize. That international recognition didn’t stop Brezhnev sending Sakharov and his wife into internal exile in Gorky, a one-horse town deep in the sticks, where they were cut off from communication with the outside world.

Solzhenitsyn and Sakharov were lucky: Less well-known people were sent to labour camps up in the Arctic regions of Siberia, or were committed to mental asylums. The official line was that the system was so perfect that anyone who spoke out against it had to be crazy. If anyone protested that they were sane and the system was crazy, then it proved they were crazy and should be locked up. But anyone who agreed that they were crazy clearly was and needed to be locked up. So you lost either way.

What is dat samizdat?

Printing samizdat literature (the name is a rather complicated pun on Gosizdat, the state publishing house, meaning ‘DIY Publishing House’), which was secretly run off on little printing presses in garages and back rooms, was the only way to speak out against the regime. Samizdat literature was passed around among dissidents or left lying around for people to pick up and read. Doing so was a risky business, though, as the penalties for reading or even possessing samizdat literature were severe.

It’s the economy, Comrade Stupid!

Brezhnev put so much effort into controlling free speech that he didn’t keep his eye on the Soviet economy, which was rapidly going down the pan. The system was corrupt and inefficient. Shopping in Russia was a major undertaking: People queued for hours if they heard a rumour that a loaf of bread had been seen in the window. The shops were empty because food was left rotting beside the fields as no one had provided any transport to take it to the towns. Everyone was on the take and often the only way to get goods was on the black market. The Russian rouble was so weak that towns had special shops selling tourist tat, I mean beautiful souvenirs (mostly tuneless balalaikas and Russian dolls) simply to build up Russia’s reserves of foreign currency.

What, Russians wondered, was the government spending its money on? The answer was:

Space exploration: The Soviet Union had put the first satellites, dog, man, and woman into space (not all together, you understand) but all this heroic endeavour hadn’t actually benefited the Soviet people.

Arms: The Soviet Union was trying to keep pace with the Americans in the nuclear missile stakes, but the effort was driving the country towards bankruptcy.

Then in 1980 Brezhnev ordered the invasion of Afghanistan (Chapter 17 explains why). The Afghans fought a long guerrilla campaign and the war became a nightmare, killing thousands of young Russians and with no end in sight. Russia simply couldn’t go on like this.

Gorbachev’s Russian revolution

In 1985 Mikhail Gorbachev became Soviet leader and decided to tackle Russia’s problems head-on. He began by encouraging people to speak openly about what was wrong, both now and in the past. This glasnost (openness) meant Russians could at last find out from the archives exactly what crimes the regime had committed in the past. The bodies of many of Stalin’s victims were dug up and given a decent burial. The next stage of Gorbachev’s revolution, perestroika, was trickier.

Perestroika

Perestroika (restructuring) meant cutting State subsidies and opening the Soviet economy to the full effects of the market – free enterprise or, as it is also known, capitalism. Russians used to having jerry-built flats and useless cars provided by the State at knock-down prices were taken aback, and the changes certainly produced a lot of hardship at first. Gradually, however, as Western firms began opening branches in Russia and quality goods began appearing in the shops, Russians came round to the change, but they didn’t thank Gorbachev. The reason? Because Gorbachev’s policy of reform led to the collapse of the communist bloc and of the Soviet Union itself.

In 1985 Gorbachev met US President Ronald Reagan for the first of three meetings. The two men found, to their amazement (and everyone else’s) that they could agree to start destroying their stockpiles of weapons. The Cold War was coming to an end. In that case, though, why shouldn’t eastern Europe share in Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost and perestroika? People in Hungary and Czechoslovakia and East Germany started demanding an end to communist rule and instead of sending tanks to crush them, the Soviet government announced that each country could do as it wished. So, first Hungary opened its borders to the West, and then, in November 1989, the East German authorities opened the Berlin Wall. A wave of revolutions swept across eastern Europe, bringing the communist regimes crashing down. You can read more about these revolutions in Chapter 18.

Oops, THAT wasn’t supposed to happen

Gorbachev found himself caught between two rival groups:

Radical reformers led by Boris Yeltsin: They wanted a lot more change and they wanted it fast.

‘Old Guard’ communists in the army and Politburo: They wanted to stop Gorbachev bringing in any more changes before the whole country collapsed.

In 1991 the Old Guard struck. They arrested Gorbachev at his holiday home in the Crimea and announced they were staging a coup. But Boris Yeltsin got up on a tank and called on Russians to defend the government. The White House (not the Washington one, the Russian parliament building) became the symbolic place for all those who wanted change in Russia. The public supported Yeltsin, the coup collapsed, and Gorbachev came back to Moscow.

But the coup had shown that Gorbachev was no longer in charge. The different nationalities of the Soviet Union were demanding their own freedom and Yeltsin wanted to give it to them. The Soviet Union would have to go, to be replaced by a Commonwealth of Independent States. Gorbachev was horrified: He was a convinced communist and he hadn’t intended anything like this. The Ukrainians, Belorussians, Estonians, Latvians, Lithuanians, Armenians, Georgians, Azerbaijanis, and Uzbekistanis all began to go their own ways and set up their own independent (though not always very democratic) states (see Chapter 19 for more on this). On Christmas Day 1991, Gorbachev resigned. A week later the Soviet Union ceased to exist.