This restraint reflected a realistic appreciation of the real balance of forces. We cannot know what Mao might have decided if the equilibrium had been tilted in favor of the Communist power. But whether as a reflection of realism or philosophical motivation, revolutionary ideology was a means to transform the world by performance rather than war, much as the traditional emperors had perceived their role.

  A team of Chinese scholars with access to Beijing’s Central Archives has written a fascinating account of Mao’s ambivalence: dedicated to world revolution, ready to encourage it wherever possible, yet also protective of the necessities of China’s survival.17 This ambivalence came to expression in a conversation with the head of the Australian Communist Party, E. F. Hill, in 1969, while Mao was considering the opening with the United States, with which China had been locked in an adversarial relationship for two decades. He put a question to his interlocutor: Are we heading into a revolution that will prevent war?

  Or into a war that will produce revolution?18 If the former, the rapprochement with the United States would be improvident; if the latter, it would be imperative, to prevent an attack on China. In the end, after some hesitation, Mao chose the option of rapprochement with America. The prevention of war (which, by this point, would most likely involve a Soviet attack on China) was more important than the encouragement of global revolution.

  The Continuous Revolution and the Chinese People

  Mao’s opening to the United States was a major ideological as well as strategic decision. But it did not alter his commitment to the concept of continuous revolution at home. Even in 1972, the year of President Richard Nixon’s visit to China, he caused to be distributed nationwide a letter he had sent to his wife, Jiang Qing, at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution six years earlier:

  The situation changes from a great upheaval to a great peace once every seven or eight years. Ghosts and monsters jump out by themselves. . . . Our current task is to sweep out the Rightists in all the Party and throughout the country. We shall launch another movement for sweeping up the ghosts and monsters after seven or eight years, and will launch more of this movement later.19

  This call to ideological commitment also epitomized Mao’s dilemma as that of any victorious revolution: once revolutionaries seize power, they are obliged to govern hierarchically if they want to avoid either paralysis or chaos. The more sweeping the overthrow, the more hierarchy has to substitute for the consensus that holds a functioning society together. The more elaborate the hierarchy, the more likely it is to turn into another even more elaborate version of the replaced oppressive Establishment.

  Thus from the beginning Mao was engaged in a quest whose logical end could only be an attack on Communism’s own institutions, even those he had created himself. Where Leninism had asserted that the advent of Communism would solve the “contradictions” of society, Mao’s philosophy knew no resting place. It was not enough to industrialize the country as the Soviet Union had done. In the quest for the historic Chinese uniqueness, the social order needed to be in constant flux to prevent the sin of “revisionism,” of which Mao increasingly accused post-Stalin Russia. A Communist state, according to Mao, must not turn into a bureaucratic society; the motivating force must be ideology rather than hierarchy.

  In this manner, Mao generated a series of built-in contradictions. In pursuit of the Great Harmony, Mao launched the Hundred Flowers Campaign in 1956, which invited public debate and then turned on those intellectuals who practiced it; the Great Leap Forward in 1958, designed to catch up with the West industrially in a three-year period but which led to one of the most pervasive famines in modern history and produced a split in the Communist Party; and the Cultural Revolution in 1966, in which a generation of trained leaders, professors, diplomats, and experts were sent to the countryside to work on farms to learn from the masses.

  Millions died to implement the Chairman’s quest for egalitarian virtue. Yet in his rebellion against China’s pervasive bureaucracy, he kept coming up against the dilemma that the campaign to save his people from themselves generated ever larger bureaucracies. In the end, destroying his own disciples turned into Mao’s vast enterprise.

  Mao’s faith in the ultimate success of his continuous revolution had three sources: ideology, tradition, and Chinese nationalism. The single most important one was his faith in the resilience, capabilities, and cohesion of the Chinese people. And in truth, it is impossible to think of another people who could have sustained the relentless turmoil that Mao imposed on his society. Or whose leader could have made credible Mao’s oft-repeated threat that the Chinese people would prevail, even if it retreated from all its cities against a foreign invader or suffered tens of millions of casualties in a nuclear war. Mao could do so because of a profound faith in the Chinese people’s ability to retain its essence amidst all vicissitudes.

  This was a fundamental difference with the Russian Revolution a generation earlier. Lenin and Trotsky viewed their revolution as a triggering event for world revolution. Convinced that world revolution was imminent, they agreed to cede a third of European Russia to German control in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk of 1918. Whatever happened to Russia would be subsumed by the imminent revolution in the rest of Europe, which, Lenin and Trotsky assumed, would sweep away the existing political order.

  Such an approach would have been unthinkable for Mao, whose revolution was largely Sinocentric. China’s revolution might have an impact on world revolution but, if so, through the efforts and sacrifice and example of the Chinese people. With Mao, the greatness of the Chinese people was always the organizing principle. In an early essay in 1919, he stressed the unique qualities of the Chinese people:

  I venture to make a singular assertion: one day, the reform of the Chinese people will be more profound than that of any other people, and the society of the Chinese people will be more radiant than that of any other people. The great union of the Chinese people will be achieved earlier than that of any other place or people.20

  Twenty years later, amidst Japanese invasion and the Chinese civil war, Mao extolled the historic achievements of the Chinese nation in a way that the dynastic rulers could have shared:

  Throughout the history of Chinese civilization its agriculture and handicrafts have been renowned for their high level of development; there have been many great thinkers, scientists, inventors, statesmen, soldiers, men of letters and artists, and we have a rich store of classical works. The compass was invented in China very long ago. The art of paper-making was discovered as early as 1,800 years ago. Block-printing was invented 1,300 years ago, and movable type 800 years ago. The use of gunpowder was known in China before the Europeans. Thus China has one of the oldest civilizations in the world; she has a recorded history of nearly 4,000 years.21

  Mao kept circling back to a dilemma as ancient as China itself. Intrinsically universal, modern technology poses a threat to any society’s claims to uniqueness. And uniqueness had always been the distinctive claim of Chinese society. To preserve that uniqueness, China had refused to imitate the West in the nineteenth century, risking colonization and incurring humiliation. A century later, one objective of Mao’s Cultural Revolution—from which indeed it derived its name—had been to eradicate precisely those elements of modernization that threatened to involve China in a universal culture.

  By 1968, Mao had come full circle. Driven by a mixture of ideological fervor and a premonition of mortality, he had turned to the youth to cleanse the military and the Communist Party and bring into office a new generation of ideologically pure Communists. But reality disappointed the aging leader. It proved impossible to run a country by ideological exaltation. The youths who had heeded Mao’s instructions created chaos rather than commitment and were now in their turn sent to the remote countryside; some of the leaders initially targeted for purification were brought back to reestablish order—especially in the military. By April 1969, nearly half of the Party’s Central Committee—45 percent—were members of the military, compared with 19 percent in 1956; the average age of new members was sixty.22

  A poignant reminder of this dilemma came up in the first conversation between Mao and President Nixon in February 1972. Nixon complimented Mao on having transformed an ancient civilization, to which Mao replied: “I haven’t been able to change it. I’ve only been able to change a few places in the vicinity of Beijing.”23

  After a lifetime of titanic struggle to uproot Chinese society, there was not a little pathos in Mao’s resigned recognition of the pervasiveness of Chinese culture and the Chinese people. One of the historically most powerful Chinese rulers had run up against this paradoxical mass—at once obedient and independent, submissive and self-reliant, imposing limits less by direct challenges than by hesitance in executing orders they considered incompatible with the future of their family.

  Therefore, in the end, Mao appealed not so much to the material aspects of his Marxist revolution as to its faith. One of Mao’s favorite tales drawn from classical Chinese lore was the story of the “foolish old man” who believed he could move mountains with his bare hands. Mao related the story at a Communist Party conference as follows:

  There is an ancient Chinese fable called “The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains.” It tells of an old man who lived in northern China long, long ago and was known as the Foolish Old Man of North Mountain. His house faced south and beyond his doorway stood the two great peaks, Taihang and Wangwu, obstructing the way. He called his sons, and hoe in hand they began to dig up these mountains with great determination. Another greybeard, known as the Wise Old Man, saw them and said derisively, “How silly of you to do this! It is quite impossible for you to dig up these two huge mountains.” The Foolish Old Man replied, “When I die my sons will carry on; when they die, there will be my grandsons, and then their sons and grandsons, and so on to infinity. High as they are, the mountains cannot grow any higher and with every bit we dig, they will be that much lower. Why can’t we clear them away?” Having refuted the Wise Old Man’s wrong view, he went on digging every day, unshaken in his conviction. God was moved by this, and he sent down two angels, who carried the mountains away on their backs. Today, two big mountains lie like a dead weight on the Chinese people. One is imperialism, the other is feudalism. The Chinese Communist Party had long made up its mind to dig them up. We must persevere and work unceasingly, and we, too, will touch God’s heart.24

  An ambivalent combination of faith in the Chinese people and disdain for its traditions enabled Mao to carry out an astonishing tour de force: an impoverished society just emerging from a rending civil war tore itself apart at ever shorter intervals and, during that process, fought wars with the United States and India; challenged the Soviet Union; and restored the frontiers of the Chinese state to nearly their maximum historic extent.

  Emerging into a world of two nuclear superpowers, China managed, despite its insistent Communist propaganda, to conduct itself as essentially a geopolitical “free agent” of the Cold War. In the face of its relative weakness, it played a fully independent and highly influential role. China moved from hostility to near alliance with the United States and in the opposite direction with the Soviet Union—from alliance to confrontation. Perhaps most remarkably, China managed, in the end, to break free of the Soviet Union and come out on the “winning” side of the Cold War.

  Still, with all its achievements, Mao’s insistence on turning the ancient system upside down could not escape the eternal rhythm of Chinese life. Forty years after his death, after a journey violent, dramatic, and searing, his successors again described their now increasingly well-off society as Confucian. In 2011, a statue of Confucius was placed in Tiananmen Square within sight of Mao’s mausoleum—the only other personality so honored. Only a people as resilient and patient as the Chinese could emerge unified and dynamic after such a roller coaster ride through history.

  CHAPTER 5

  Triangular Diplomacy and the Korean War

  IN HIS FIRST MAJOR ACT of foreign policy, Mao Zedong traveled to Moscow on December 16, 1949, barely two months after having proclaimed the People’s Republic of China. It was his first trip outside China. His purpose was to form an alliance with the Communist superpower, the Soviet Union. Instead, the meeting inaugurated a series of moves that would culminate in transforming the hoped-for alliance into a triangular diplomacy by which the United States, China, and the Soviet Union maneuvered with and against each other.

  In his first meeting with Stalin, which took place on the day of his arrival, Mao stressed China’s need for “a period of 3–5 years of peace, which would be used to bring the economy back to pre-war levels and to stabilize the country in general.”1 Yet within less than a year of Mao’s trip, the United States and China would be at war with each other.

  It all came about through the machinations of a seemingly minor player: Kim Il-sung, the ambitious Soviet-installed ruler of North Korea, a state that had been created only two years earlier by agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union based on the zones of liberated Korea each had occupied at the end of the war against Japan.

  As it happened, Stalin had little interest in helping China recover. He had not forgotten the defection of Josip Broz Tito, the leader of Yugoslavia and the only European Communist leader to have achieved power by his own efforts and not as the result of Soviet occupation. Tito had broken with the Soviet Union during the preceding year. Stalin was determined to avoid a similar outcome in Asia. He understood the geopolitical significance of the Communist victory in China; his strategic goal was to manipulate its consequences and benefit from its impact.

  Stalin could have little doubt that, in Mao, he was dealing with a formidable figure. The Chinese Communists had prevailed in the Chinese civil war against Soviet expectations and by ignoring Soviet advice. Though Mao had announced China’s intent to “lean to one side”—Moscow’s—in international affairs, of all Communist leaders he was among the least beholden to Moscow for his position, and he now governed the most populous Communist country. Thus the encounter between the two Communist giants led to an intricate minuet culminating, six months later, with the Korean War, which involved China and the United States directly and the Soviet Union by proxy.

  Convinced that the raging American debate over who “lost” China augured an eventual American attempt to reverse the outcome—a view to which Communist ideology led him, in any event—Mao strove for the greatest possible material and military support from the Soviet Union. A formal alliance was his objective.

  But the two Communist autocrats were not destined to cooperate easily. Stalin had, by that time, been in power for nearly thirty years. He had triumphed over all domestic opposition and led his country to victory against the Nazi invaders at horrific cost in human life. The organizer of periodic purges involving millions of victims and, even then, in the process of starting a new set of purges, Stalin was by now beyond ideology. His leadership was instead marked by a ruthless, cynical Machiavellianism based on his brutal interpretation of Russian national history.

  During China’s long struggles with Japan in the 1930s and 1940s, Stalin had deprecated the potential of the Communist forces and disparaged Mao’s rural, peasant-based strategy. Throughout, Moscow had maintained official ties with the Nationalist government. At the end of the war against Japan in 1945, Stalin had obliged Chiang Kai-shek to grant the Soviet Union privileges in Manchuria and Xinjiang comparable to those achieved by the czarist regime, and to recognize Outer Mongolia as a nominally independent People’s Republic under Soviet control. Stalin actively encouraged separatist forces in Xinjiang.

  At Yalta that same year, Stalin insisted to his colleagues, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, on international recognition for Soviet special rights in Manchuria, including a naval base at Lushun (the old Port Arthur) and a harbor in Dalian, as a condition for entering the war against Japan. In August 1945, Moscow and the Nationalist authorities signed a treaty affirming the Yalta agreements.

  In these circumstances, the meeting of the two Communist titans in Moscow could not possibly be the warm embrace shared ideology called for. As Nikita Khrushchev, then a member of Stalin’s Politburo, recalled:

  Stalin loved to show off his hospitality to his esteemed guests, and he knew how to do it very well. But during Mao’s stay, Stalin would sometimes not lay eyes on him for days at a time—and since Stalin neither saw Mao nor ordered anyone else to entertain him, no one dared go see him. . . . Mao let it be known that if the situation continued, he would leave. When Stalin heard about Mao’s complaints, I think he had another dinner for him.2

  It was clear from the outset that Stalin did not consider the Communist victory a reason for giving up the gains he had made for the Soviet Union as a price for entering the war against Japan. Mao began the conversation by stressing his need for peace, telling Stalin: “Decisions on the most important questions in China hinge on the prospects for a peaceful future. With this in mind the [Central Committee of the Communist Party of China] entrusted me to ascertain from you, comr[ade] Stalin, in what way and for how long will international peace be preserved.”3