The World

Mao ordered her to recruit Lin Biao, the vicious, hypochondriacal and cadaverous marshal recently promoted to vice-chairman, who had compiled a red book of Mao’s sayings. Now Mao promised to make him his successor. Lin and his equally neurotic wife, who was embittered by sexual gossip about her past, joined Mao’s cabal along with the black-clad security boss Kang Sheng. The wives were to be players; jealousies would play their part; vengeance was savoured.

Mao’s crisis was self-inflicted. In 1958, he had launched a Great Leap Forward, a frenzied, demented industrialization campaign designed to help China ‘overtake all capitalist countries’ at breakneck speed by forcing peasants and workers to produce surplus food to pay for more steel, more ships, overruling the advice of experts: ‘Bourgeois professors’ knowledge should be treated like dog farts.’ The food was sold to pay for new technology and weaponry. Ninety million Chinese were forced to build steel furnaces that produced worthless metal. Soon the peasants were starving: in three years, thirty-eight million perished, the worst famine of the century.^*

‘Working like this,’ said Mao in May 1958, ‘half of China may have to die.’ He added, ‘This happened before a few times in Chinese history.’ In 1959, the defence minister Peng criticized the Leap but was removed and replaced by Lin Biao. By 1962, even President Liu Shaoqi, Mao’s deputy, was attacking the Leap: ‘People don’t have enough food.’ Liu, Premier Zhou and the pragmatic vice-premier Deng Xiaoping, who would be the other key figure of the Chinese century, moderated the requisitioning of food.

Abroad, while jousting with the bewildered Russians, Mao was projecting power, the start of a new version of history in which China appears as a perpetual paramount power of east Asia – a role it had played for the climaxes of the Tang, Ming and Manchu interspersed with centuries of fragmentation. In 1959, Mao swallowed Tibet, driving out its young sacred king, the Dalai Lama, who was welcomed by Nehru in India. Mao decided to teach Nehru a lesson in Chinese power.

Nehru had presided over the world’s biggest democracy for a decade, pursuing socialistic planning projects and developing power and steel production, officially ‘non-aligned’ but effectively allied with the Soviets: he criticized the Anglo-French invasion of Egypt but simultaneously refused to criticize Khrushchev’s crushing of Hungary. His challenge was ‘creating a just state by just means’ and ‘creating a secular state in a religious country’, yet he did little to challenge poverty or the caste system, which he regarded as part of Hindu culture. His approach to the people was aristocratic. ‘I rather enjoy these fresh contacts with the Indian people,’ he told Edwina Mountbatten. ‘The effort to explain in simple language … and reach the minds of these simple folk is both exhausting and exhilarating.’ Yet his inherited British Raj was bedevilled by armed rebellions, all brutally suppressed, and by the ulcer of Kashmir. In 1961, he seized Goa from Portugal and in the next year received Pondicherry from France.

Nehru had started to procure the Bomb for India. ‘We must have the capability,’ he said. ‘We should first prove ourselves and then talk of Gandhi, non-violence and a world without nuclear weapons.’ Khrushchev had visited Delhi, but Nehru got on best with Zhou Enlai; he was fascinated by China, which he saw as India’s great partner in the coming Asian century. Yet now Mao challenged the Indian–Chinese border, ill defined by the Manchus and Victorians. ‘Not a yard of India is going out of India,’ responded Nehru, who appointed an inept Kashmiri crony as chief of staff and ordered him to remove Chinese troops.

In October 1962, Mao’s troops routed the Indians and advanced. Nehru, who had revelled in his Chinese alliance, desperately rang Washington and begged for US bombers. Indira’s forty-ninth birthday party the following month was miserable. When the family asked Nehru how he was, he just replied, ‘The Chinese have broken through the Sela Pass.’ Mao could have continued all the way to Kolkata, but he halted. ‘Nothing grieved me more,’ Nehru said. Indira noticed his decline: ‘The strain is tremendous.’ On 27 May 1964, Nehru, after eighteen years as prime minister, died of a heart attack aged seventy-four. Indira had lost her closest companion and even her home, for she had lived in Nehru’s residence since independence. As she considered leaving India and running a boarding house in London, Congress grandees chose Lal Shastri as prime minister, who appointed Indira information minister. Her time would come sooner than she expected.