The World

On 1 October 1949, Mao, accompanied by Madame Sun, announced the people’s republic from the top of Tiananmen Gate to 100,000 people. The triumph of Mao combined with Stalin’s explosion of the Bomb that August shocked America, destabilized President Truman and unleashed a witch-hunt against secret Communist infiltration (so-called Un-American Activities), led by an alcoholic senator, Joseph McCarthy, who, backed by the omnipresent Joe Kennedy, hired Kennedy’s younger son, Bobby, as a lawyer on his committee. As Mao turned to Stalin to industrialize China, he launched a ferocious terror ‘to suppress counter-revolutionaries’, specifically ordering ‘massive arrests, massive killings’, criticizing his underlings ‘for being much too lenient and not killing enough’ and complaining that ‘Many places don’t dare kill counter-revolutionaries on a big scale with publicity. The situation must be changed.’ Many were shot in front of parades, the brains spattering the crowd. Although Mao boasted that 700,000 were shot, the real number was around three million, and a further ten million were sent to Laogai – Reform by Labour – camps, where unknown millions died during his reign. He also attacked kinship traditions, banning polygyny, concubinage and foot-binding.

^* No sooner was this campaign over than he devised a new purge known as the Three Antis (targeting bureaucratism, embezzlement, waste), telling his henchmen, ‘We must execute tens of thousands of embezzlers … Whoever disobeys is either a bureaucratist or an embezzler himself.’ Killing, said Mao, was ‘extremely necessary. Only when done properly can our power be secure.’

Always reading history, particularly about the First Emperor, with whom he identified, Mao’s real priority was to win great-power status for China, particularly possession of the Bomb. In December 1949, he travelled by train to Moscow for Stalin’s seventieth birthday. Here the fifty-six-year-old Mao courted the grizzled Stalin, calling him ‘the Master’. When Stalin kept him waiting for weeks, he grumbled, ‘Am I here just to eat, shit and sleep?’ Stalin kept his influence in Manchuria; Mao got industrial aid and overlordship of Asian Communists.^*

The meetings of these gifted, paranoic megalomaniacs were awkward, ending in a dinner at Stalin’s dacha where the Red Tsar tried to get the Red Emperor to dance to his gramophone. Mao refused; Stalin glowered; and the Bomb was out of the question – but Mao had a merciless plan to ensure that he got it.

In April 1950, Stalin received Kim Il-sung, who asked permission to attack American-backed South Korea.

TIGER KIM AND STALIN’S PROXY WAR

Kim was already expert at manipulating his titanic patrons: a year earlier he had asked Stalin to start the war; when Stalin refused, he went to Mao, who promised to back him. Then Kim probed Stalin, who again refused; Kim added that he would consult Mao. Stalin summoned him to Moscow and approved ‘a more active stance in the unification of Korea’ – war – provided he ‘rely on Mao who understands Asia beautifully’. But he warned him, ‘If you get kicked in the teeth, I shan’t lift a finger. You’d have to ask Mao for help.’ Stalin knew this might launch a world war – ‘Should we fear this? I should not’ – but more likely Kim would test America and ‘spend several years consuming several hundred thousand American lives’. Stalin was forging the Cold War template: the proxy war, locally lethal, safe from nuclear jeopardy.

On 25 June 1950, Kim’s 75,000 Koreans attacked the American-backed South Korea, quickly occupying most of the peninsula, but Truman, supported by the UN, poured in American troops, under the bombastic, Caesaresque MacArthur, who routed Kim’s army and took his capital, Pyongyang.

Kim begged for help from Stalin, who told Mao, ‘Move 5–6 divisions across the 38th Parallel … Call them volunteers.’ Mao refused to intervene; Stalin received Zhou and Lin at his Black Sea villa. Sitting up late in the hot Georgian night, Stalin teased Mao that the chairman did not have to fight, but promised air cover. Mao felt obliged to intervene.

‘With or without Soviet air cover, we go in!’ On 25 October, 450,000 Chinese attacked the bewildered Americans in human waves; the southern capital, Seoul, fell in January 1951.