The Coldest Winter: America and the Korean War (54 page)

IF THERE WERE
historic forces working against a true alliance, the relationship was made much more difficult by Stalin’s megalomania and by the fact that both men ruled nations where there was no opposition party, and where sycophancy was something of an art form. By 1949, Stalin was already the Great Stalin, and the beneficiary, as it were, of a relentless, all-encompassing cult of personality, while Mao was a relative ingenue in the creation of such a cult: the Soviet cult of personality had already been in effect for at least twenty years. According to the historian Walter Laquer, it had started in December 1929, at the time of Stalin’s fiftieth birthday. Leonid Leonov, a prominent Russian writer of the time, typically wrote of the great man that “the day would come when all mankind would revere him and history would recognize him as the starting point of time, not Jesus Christ.”

But Mao would soon rival him in the art of totalitarian self-glorification. He might at the beginning have had his doubts about the cult of personality, but he soon came to understand the greatest truth of self-glorification: like so many other dictators, he discovered that what was good for the leader was good for the revolution as well. Besides, as he emerged ever more clearly as China’s sole leader, he came to see himself as nothing less than a modern Chinese emperor. His favorite among his imperial predecessors, according to his doctor, Li Zhisui, was Emperor Zhou, a mythical tyrant supposedly much despised by most Chinese because of his appalling cruelty, a man who liked to
mutilate and then display the bodies of potential rivals as a warning to other enemies. About his own special role in history and about his own greatness Mao was absolutely sure. It was something he spoke of constantly. “He was the greatest leader, the greatest emperor of them all—the man who had unified the country and would then transform it, the man who was restoring China to its original greatness,” as Dr. Li wrote.

In some ways he would prove to be very much like Stalin. The more he schemed against those around him, the more he came to believe that they were already scheming against him. He gradually got rid of all potential rivals, no matter their loyalty to him, to the Party, or to the revolution. As the cult grew, as the ordinary peasants of China came to revere Mao ever more, he became ever more distanced from them in lifestyle. No head of a capitalist society could have lived with more privilege or with more of his country’s resources diverted to him. Each province chief built a villa for him—he was always on the move, fearing he would become too much of a target for his enemies if he stayed in one place too long. No head of state in a free society could have lived as a comparable sexual predator, relentlessly devouring young peasant women, who were eager to serve their leader and thus their nation in whatever way he suggested. “Women were served to order, like food,” as Andrew Nathan, a Columbia University scholar, wrote in the introduction to Li Zhisui’s book. In time, his cult of personality grew to even more gothic proportions that Stalin’s. His swim in the Yangtze River, as Laquer wrote, was treated as a turning point in history. “He was,” Laquer wrote, “not only the greatest Marxist of all time, he was the greatest genius who ever lived. He had never been mistaken, everything he said was the truth, every sentence he uttered was worth 10,000 sentences [of everyone else].” One Chinese poem summed it all up: “Father is close/ Mother is close/ But neither is as close as Chairman Mao.”

His days as a supplicant had been difficult for Mao, and he came to hate Stalin for the way the Soviet leader had treated him. Mao was not a man to take second-class treatment lightly, or to forgive or forget, though when he finally evened the score, it was with Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev. He once held a summit meeting with Khrushchev in his swimming pool, forcing the Soviet leader, who did not swim, to wear a life preserver during the session. It had been his way, he told his doctor, “of sticking a needle up his ass.”

IN DECEMBER
1949, Mao finally made his trip to Moscow. Harrison Salisbury, of the
New York Times,
who won the Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from Moscow in those days, remembered the shroud of silence that Stalin had already placed in the preceding months over the news of Mao’s coming victory. There was virtually no mention of it in the controlled press; “a snippet on the
back page of Pravda, or a few paragraphs inside Izvestia. The word ‘China’ hardly appeared.” Now, with Mao on his way to Moscow, there was more open evidence of the cold Soviet shoulder. Stalin’s seventieth birthday was self-evidently a great moment of celebration in the Communist world and an occasion not to be shared with any other event or person. On December 6, Mao set out by train for the Soviet capital. The war was barely over and he was fearful of attacks by Nationalist dissidents. He traveled in an armored car, with sentries posted every hundred meters along the tracks. In Shenyang, the largest city in the northeast, Mao disembarked and checked to see if there were posters of him. There were very few, it turned out, and a great many of Stalin—the work of Gao Gang, whom Mao saw as a pro-Soviet dissident. Mao was furious and ordered that the car carrying gifts for Stalin from Gao be uncoupled from the tram and the gifts returned to him.

Mao’s arrival in Moscow on December 16 was an edgy one. He was treated not as the leader of a great revolution bringing into the Communist orbit one of the world’s great nations but rather, as the historian Adam Ulam has written, “as if he were, say, the head of the Bulgarian party.” V. M. Molotov and Nikolai Bulganin, both senior politburo members, came to the station to meet him. Mao had laid out a handsome luncheon buffet. He asked the two Soviet leaders to have a drink with him. They refused—based on protocol, Molotov said. They also refused to sit and share the food. Then Mao asked them to accompany him to the residence where he was scheduled to stay. Again they refused. There was no major celebration or festive party for him. It was as if Mao was now to learn his place in Stalin’s constellation, the real Communist universe; if he was a fraternal brother, then he should know that there would always be one Communist brother who was so much bigger than all the others. One of Khrushchev’s aides told his boss that someone named “Matsadoon” was in town. “Who?” the perplexed Khrushchev asked. “You know that Chinaman,” the aide answered. That was how they saw him: that Chinaman. And that was how they treated him. The main reception for the Chinese delegation was held not in the Main Hall of the Kremlin but in the old Metropole Hotel, “the usual place for entertaining visiting minor capitalist dignitaries,” in Ulam’s words.

Things did not get better after the first reception. For days on end Mao was isolated, waiting for Stalin to arrange meetings. No one else could meet with him until Stalin had, and Stalin was taking his time. When Mao first arrived in Moscow, he announced that China looked forward to a partnership with Russia, but he emphasized as well that he wanted to be treated as an equal. Instead he was being taught a lesson each day. He had become, in Ulam’s words, “as much captive as guest.” As such, he shouted at the walls, convinced that Stalin
had bugged the house: “I am here to do more than eat and shit.” He hated Russian food. At one point Kovalev, his contact man, dropped by to visit him. Mao pointed outside at Moscow and said, “Bad, bad!” What did he mean by that? Kovalev asked. Mao said he was angry at the Kremlin. Kovalev insisted he had no right to criticize “the Boss,” and that he, Kovalev, would now have to make a report.

When Stalin finally met Mao, they proved to have a remarkable mutual instinct for misunderstanding. “Why didn’t you seize Shanghai?” Stalin asked, for the Chinese had taken their time before entering the city. “Why should we have?” Mao answered. “If we’d captured the city, we would have had to take on the responsibility for feeding the six million inhabitants.” Stalin, already fearing that Mao favored peasants over workers, was appalled. Here was proof of it, workers in a city left to suffer.

The trip to Moscow was in all ways a disaster, and Mao would have a long memory for the way he had been treated. In economic and military aid, he got very little from his negotiations on that first trip—a paltry $300 million in Soviet arms over five years, or $60 million a year. To make matters worse, there were also some Chinese territorial concessions that had to be thrown in. The lack of Russian generosity staggered the Chinese. “Like taking meat from the mouth of a tiger,” Mao would say years later. For Mao, very much aware of the scale of his great triumph at home and what it meant in terms of history, the treatment by the Soviets had essentially been a humiliation, but one he had been forced to accept without complaint. “It is no wonder that Mao conceived, if he had not nurtured it before, an abiding hatred of the Soviet Union,” Adam Ulam wrote.

ON SEPTEMBER
30, 1950, Kim Il Sung, somewhat humbled by events in the South, and warned off by the Russians when he asked for troops, attended a reception at the Chinese embassy in Pyongyang celebrating the first anniversary of the creation of the Chinese People’s Republic. There he asked Beijing’s representatives to send the Thirteenth Chinese Army Corps to fight in Korea. The next day, along with Pak Hon Yong, ostensibly the South Korean Communist leader, he sent a letter to Mao asking for troops. To expedite the process, Pak flew to Beijing with the letter, which pointed out that the North would have won the war except for the action of the United States. Now their situation, he said, was “most grave.” “It is difficult for us to cope with the crisis with our own strength,” the letter said and ended with an urgent request for Chinese troops.

On October 2, Mao began to meet with the Standing Committee of the Politburo, an elite part of the whole. Even the delay of a day, he warned, could
be crucial to the future. The issue, he said, was not whether they would send troops, but when, and who would be the commander. Lin Biao, commander of the vaunted Fourth Field Army, who knew the general terrain quite well, was the logical choice. But Lin was ticketed for medical treatment in the Soviet Union, both as an end in itself and as a cover for
not
commanding the troops. So Mao decided on Peng Dehuai. Like Lin, he was an old and trusted comrade in arms. He and Mao had served together since 1928. Mao felt that Peng was exactly the right man because he would share Mao’s views politically, and would, despite any private doubts he harbored, accept the post when asked, whatever the terrible dangers in store for his men.

Mao was, some of the men around him thought, almost emotionally immune to the loss of life in a war like this. It was simply the price that had to be paid. China had millions of people, and was on its way to greatness; it could sacrifice far more of them than other countries. He could even accept the possible American use of a nuclear weapon. He once shocked Nehru by saying that the atomic bomb was a “paper tiger.” “The atomic bomb is nothing to be afraid of,” he told the Indian leader. “China has millions of people. They cannot be bombed out of existence. If someone else can drop an atomic bomb, I can too. The death of ten or twenty million people is nothing to be afraid of.” If his political vision demanded a war, then the next great question was: When should China enter the war? When would the forces still gathering along the Manchurian border be ready? The men at the October 2 meeting, led by Mao, chose October 15, two weeks away. By chance, it was also the date being selected by Truman and MacArthur for their first meeting, to be held on Wake Island.

After the October 2 meeting, Mao sent a long cable to Stalin telling the Soviet leader of the Chinese decision. The Chinese troops would be known as volunteers. That was a choice on his part to prevent an all-out war with the Americans. China, he told Stalin, would send twelve divisions at first. He hoped to have a numerical advantage of 4 to 1 in manpower on the battlefield, just enough to neutralize the American superiority in firepower. In addition, he hoped for a 1.5 or even 2 to 1 advantage in mortars, since they would have no heavy artillery. In the beginning, the Chinese troops would utilize a predominantly defensive strategy as they learned how to fight this new enemy. He told Stalin he did not envision a long war; nor did he think the Americans would try to invade mainland China. Mao also officially requested the already promised Soviet air cover for his troops.

At the same time, Mao continued to explain his plans to politburo members, listening to their dissent and gradually bringing his colleagues aboard. On October 4, the full politburo met. There, he asked those present to talk
about the disadvantages that went with intervention. A number of members had a great many reservations. They believed their country was exhausted economically and could ill afford another war. They spoke as well of the vulnerability of their troops to the superior weaponry of the Americans. Mao listened and did not try to dissuade them. “All you have said is not without ground,” he finally concluded. “But when other people are in a crisis, how can we stand aside with our arms folded? This will make me feel sad.” They decided to meet again the next day. For the second part of the politburo meeting, Mao had flown Peng in from his post on the Manchurian border. On the morning of October 5, Mao met with Peng and Deng Xiaoping, another old and trusted comrade, also a veteran of the Long March, a member of the Central Committee, and commander of the Communist forces at one of the final battles of the war, when Chongqing was captured on December 1, 1949. At that private meeting Mao spoke of the deepening crisis in Korea. Time was now a critical factor, Mao said. The Americans were advancing rapidly, virtually without opposition. It was vitally important to act before they reached the Yalu. He was aware, he said, of the dangers and risks involved. He was really speaking only to Peng, a hardened battlefield veteran who was admired by everyone as a soldier’s soldier, a man of the army rather than of politics. Typically, after Mao had summoned him from the Manchurian border and put him in one of Beijing’s best hotels, Peng had been uncomfortable with the softness of the bed. So he simply slept on the floor. That was what he was used to—the hardships of war. The joke among his peers was that his only marriage was to the revolution.