Since then, a cultivated myth has credited Mao with the strategies of “surrounding the cities from the countryside” and of “aiming mainly to eliminate enemy forces, not to defend or capture cities.” In fact, the former idea came from Liu Shao-chi, and was vigorously opposed by Mao before practicality forced him to adopt it; and the latter was Lin Biao’s.
IT WAS NO secret that many US officials were decidedly unenthusiastic about Chiang, and so Mao acted to exploit this ambivalence in the hope that America would withhold support from the Generalissimo and perhaps take a friendlier line towards the Reds. Mao carefully fostered the delusion that the CCP was not a real Communist party, but one of moderate agrarian reformers, who wanted to cooperate with the US.
In mid-1944 Roosevelt sent a mission to Yenan. Just after the first Americans arrived, Mao floated the idea of changing the Party’s name: “We’ve been thinking of renaming our Party,” he told the Russian liaison in Yenan, Vladimirov, on 12 August: “of calling it not ‘Communist’ but something else. Then the situation … will be more favorable, especially with the Americans …” The Russians immediately chimed in. Later that month, Molotov fed the same line to Roosevelt’s then special envoy to China, General Patrick Hurley, telling him that in China “some … people called themselves ‘Communists’ but they had no relation whatever to communism. They were merely expressing their dissatisfaction at their economic condition by calling themselves Communists. However, once their economic conditions had improved, they would forget this political inclination. The Soviet Government … [was not] associated with the ‘Communist elements.’ ”
Red deception became especially important when Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman, sent America’s top general, George Marshall, to China in December 1945 to try to stop the civil war. Marshall, who had served in China in the 1920s, was already ill-disposed towards Chiang, mainly because of the corruption of Chiang’s relatives, and was susceptible to CCP claims that it and the US had a lot in common. At their first meeting, Chou En-lai soft-soaped Marshall by telling him how much the CCP “desired a democracy based … on the American style.” A month later, Chou egregiously suggested that Mao preferred America to Russia, telling Marshall “a small anecdote which might be of interest to you. It has been rumored recently, that Chairman Mao is going to pay a visit to Moscow. On learning this, Chairman Mao laughed and remarked half-jokingly that if ever he would take a furlough abroad … he would rather go to the United States …” Marshall relayed these remarks uncritically to Truman. Even years later, he was maintaining to Truman that the Reds had been more cooperative than the Nationalists.
Marshall did not understand Mao, or Mao’s relationship with Stalin. On 26 December 1945 he told Chiang that “it was very important to determine whether or not the Russian Government was in contact with and was advising the Chinese Communist party”—as though this still needed verification. Later (in February 1948), he told the US Congress that “in China we have no concrete evidence that [the Communist army] is supported by Communists from the outside.” This ignorance is particularly striking because the Americans, like the British, had been intercepting cables from Russia, some of them addressed to Yenan, clearly showing the relationship. Marshall was also given strong warnings by other American officials, including the head of the US mission in Yenan, who opened his final report with a three-word alarm: “Communism is International!”
Marshall visited Yenan on 4–5 March 1946. For the occasion, Mao made doubly sure that everything was shipshape and watertight. One step was to pack his son An-ying off to a village. He told An-ying this was to help him to learn farm labor and Chinese ways, but the real reason was that Mao was vexed by the attention the Americans were paying his English-speaking son. Soon after An-ying had arrived from Russia, Mao had introduced him to the Associated Press correspondent John Roderick, who then interviewed An-ying on the edge of the dance floor at a Saturday night party. Afterwards Mao exploded. He “did not even read the interview through,” An-ying recalled, “before he crushed it into a ball, and then told me sternly: … How dare you give an interview to a foreign reporter just like that, off the top of your head, without instructions?” An-ying had been schooled in the hard world of Stalin’s Russia, but even that had not prepared him for the super-steely discipline of his father’s laager. While An-ying was banished to the sticks, the non-English-speaking Mme Mao was very much on hand for her debut as First Lady.
