Stalin’s Agent in China

Mao: The Real Story
by Alexander V. Pantsov & Steven I. Levine
Simon and Schuster, 2012, 784 pages, US$35

Reading Pantsov and Levine’s Mao: The Real Story I was transported back to endless China politics seminars at the ANU in the early seventies. Imagine yourself there. It’s the dying days of the Cultural Revolution. China is locked down solid. Nobody here has a clue as to what’s going on. We speculate. And speculate. “I think what Zhou Enlai would have said in this meeting was …” “No! He would have said …” And so on, ad infinitum.

Suddenly a somnolent figure in a shapeless navy suit at the back of the room stirs. “No. Vot he did say voz …” It appears that our large and previously mute economist had, in a previous life, been Russian interpreter to Zhou Enlai.

So it is with Pantsov and Levine. There have been books which have used Russian archive material to throw light on the relationship between the Chinese Communist Party and the CPSU. The most famous is Chang and Halliday’s Mao, controversial but to my mind the first book to smash the myth of the separation between the two parties and to demonstrate the firm grip that Stalin kept on his willing Chinese acolytes. But I don’t recall anybody getting quite the level of access to Russian secret files that Pantsov has been able to provide and I certainly don’t recall anybody actually getting into Comintern files. Try these source files out for size:

“Comintern Collection 495. Inventory 225. File 71. Dossier to the Personal File of Mao Zedong. 5 vols.”

“Comintern Collection 495. Inventory 225. Personal Files of 3327 Members of the Chinese Communist Party and the Guomindang.”

“Comintern Collection 530. Communist University of the Toilers of China.”

“Collection 558. Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin.”

I could go on. So you can imagine that I devoured this book. Goodbye forever to the idea that the Chinese communists were “agrarian reformers” with no connection to Stalin. This is the fiction that was purveyed by Washington’s State Department “China hands” and by “useful idiots” like the left-wing biographer of Mao, Edgar Snow. Not only is this revealed as untrue, it is clearly demonstrated that it was a fiction concocted by Stalin to further the “united front” policy. Admittedly there was a surprise for me here. I had expected to see Snow revealed as an agent of the Comintern, but no, the evidence says that Mao regarded Snow as a CIA agent and tried to use him during the 1970s to carry messages to Nixon. But there are no surprises regarding another American “journalist”, Agnes Smedley, whose Comintern credentials are fully revealed for inspection. The real surprise with Smedley is that this very mannish woman is shown in the communist base capital Yan’an flirting with men, including Mao.

As a devotee of 1930s history I rushed to the section on the Xi’an Incident of December 1936, when Chiang Kai-shek was captured by the head of the Manchurian army, the so-called Young Marshal Zhang Xueliang, and held hostage against a change in Guomindang policy away from fighting the communists towards an anti-Japanese alliance and united front. There is a strong rumour in academic circles in China that Zhang was a crypto-communist and that his actions were in response to communist orders.

The evidence as presented by Comintern files doesn’t support this. It appears that Mao was as surprised by these events as Chiang was and wanted to try Chiang in a communist “court” for the killings of thousands of communists. But Stalin, to Mao’s chagrin, was adamant about the united-front policy and vetoed any trial.

We do see evidence that Zhang had suggested joining the Communist Party but Stalin had overruled his application. Stalin had almost succeeded in ruling China in 1927 through his control of the Guomindang. He paid attention to such details.

My discussion of Pantsov and Levine’s treatment of the Xi’an Incident wouldn’t be complete without registering my disappointment at their omission of any reference to the other critical player in the incident, Chiang’s Australian adviser and chief negotiator, W.H. Donald. There is also a rumour in China that Donald, who was close to Zhang Xueliang, was a crypto-communist. Some inkling of what the Comintern had to say about Donald would have been fascinating.

Pantsov is Russian, the son of a previous biographer of Mao. A version of this book was published in Russian in 2007. Levine, one of those unusual American historians who read both Russian and Chinese, is largely his translator. But Levine has also contributed to this volume as a co-author. Of course, I played the game of who did what. My speculation based on style plus reliance on Chinese rather than Russian sources is that Levine provided the later post-Khrushchev sections of the book. I also think these are the weakest sections of the book. This is no reflection on Levine; even the more recent Chinese sources such as memoirs of participants in events are unreliable. I include Mao’s doctor, Li Zhisui, who is widely quoted.

Take the Lin Biao incident of 1971. Lin, Mao’s closest friend and designated heir, suddenly conceives a plot to assassinate the Great Helmsman. The plot is discovered. He steals an air force plane and attempts to flee to the Soviet Union, the enemy which he has been assiduous in fighting against, including military incidents in which hundreds of troops were killed only two years before. But, oops! he forgets a minor detail—putting enough gas in the plane—and crashes in Mongolia, incinerating himself and his family.

Now if you believe this, you also believe every piece of evidence put up at Stalin’s show trials that his old Bolshevik comrades were spies for capitalism. To give him his due, Levine concocts a scheme which at first I was almost prepared to swallow, namely that Lin was plotting against Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, and her confederates, and that she did an expedient deal with Zhou Enlai to eliminate Lin. The real answer probably lies in the internal politics of the military, which we all studiously ignore. Didn’t the Great Helmsman say that the Party rules the gun, not the gun the Party? If you’re interested, look at who it was who organised the ultimate coup (are we allowed to use that word in relation to China?) against the Gang of Four. It was Lin’s sworn enemy, Marshal Ye Jianying, who was also one of the great unsung heroes of the subsequent reforms.

Some reviewers from the right have criticised Pantsov and Levine for attempting to take a dispassionate historian’s viewpoint on Mao. Andrew Roberts, in the Wall Street Journal, described the book as “whitewashing Mao”. One wonders if they even read the book. Even I, an inured old hack, found myself horrified at the sheer terror, brutality, cynicism and violence with which Mao fought his way to the top. Read it and judge for yourself.