The gigantic assistance from Russia, North Korea and Mongolia was carried out in the greatest secrecy — and is still little known today. The Reds went to great lengths to conceal it. Mao told Lin Biao to delete mention of the fact that their base “was supported by Korea, the Soviet Union, Outer Mongolia” even from a secret inner-Party document. Moscow played its customary part by calling reports of Soviet assistance “fabrications from start to finish.” The real fabrication was Mao’s claim that the CCP was fighting with “only millet plus rifles.”
This Russian help, however, came at a grievous price for those living under Mao’s rule. Mao did not want to be beholden to Stalin for this aid, and he wanted to feel free to ask for more. Twice, in August and October 1946, he offered to pay for it with food, an offer Russia’s trade representative in Harbin at first declined. So in November Mao sent one of his most dependable acolytes, Liu Ya-lou, to Moscow to insist. A secret agreement was reached for the CCP to send Russia one million tons of food every year.
The result was famine and deaths from starvation in some areas of China occupied by the Communists. In the Yenan region, according to Mao’s logistics manager, over 10,000 peasants died of starvation in 1947. Mao knew the situation very well, as he was traveling in the region that year, and saw village children hunting for stray peas in the stables of his entourage, and women scrabbling for the water in which his rice had been washed, for the sake of its driblets of nutrient. In the neighboring Red base in Shanxi, his guard chief told him after a visit home that people were starving, and that his own family was lucky to be alive — and this was soon after harvest time. In Manchuria itself, civilian deaths from starvation were in the hundreds of thousands in 1948, and even Communist troops were often half-starved.
Few knew that the famine in Red areas in those years was largely due to the fact that Mao was exporting food; the shortage was put down to “war.” Here was a foretaste of the future Great Famine, which was likewise Mao’s creation: again the result of his decision to export food to Russia.
AT THE TIME of the Marshall-dictated ceasefire, in June 1946, Chiang was militarily still far superior to Mao. The Nationalist army stood at 4.3 million, easily outnumbering Mao’s 1.27 million. For a while, the Generalissimo seemed to prevail. While he left the Reds in peace in Manchuria, he drove them out of most of their strongholds in China proper, including the only important city they still held, Zhangjiakou, in October. Farther south, the Reds were swept virtually completely out of the Yangtze area. In all theaters, Mao repeated his failed Manchuria approach, and urged his generals to seize big cities at any cost. His plan for eastern China on 22 June, for instance, called for closing in on Nanjing, where Chiang had just reinstalled his capital. Though Mao called this a “no-risk” undertaking, it had to be abandoned, like his other plans.
In spite of these substantial losses, Mao remained totally confident — because he had the north Manchuria base. When Chiang did begin to attack it, in October 1946, after the ceasefire had given the Reds more than four months to consolidate, he was unable to break their defenses. In that winter of 1946–47, the coldest in many people’s memory, the Nationalists found themselves fighting hard see-saw battles with the transformed Communist forces under Lin Biao, whose military talent came into its own in these harsh months. Mao summed up Lin’s style appreciatively as “merciless and devious.” One method of Lin’s was to make use of the cold weather. In temperatures as low as –40 °C, when passing water could cause frostbite on the penis, his troops lay in ambush in ice and snow for days on end. Red veterans estimated their own dead and crippled from frostbite at up to 100,000. The Nationalists suffered much less because they had better clothes — and less ruthless commanders.
By spring 1947, the Reds’ north Manchuria base had become unshakable. Marshall had left China in January, marking the end of US mediation efforts. The US later gave considerable aid to Chiang, but it made no difference. The goal the Communists had been secretly seeking for more than two decades, “linking up with the Soviet Union,” had been accomplished — with help from Washington, however unwitting. Mao’s victory nationwide was only a matter of time.
The Moscow — Mao double act deceived many into suggesting for decades that Mao could have been won over by the US, and that the US had lost the chance to detach Mao from the Soviet camp. In fact, in secret, Mao always told his Party that the friendliness towards America “is only a tactic of expedience in our struggle against Chiang.”
Washington’s savvy ambassador in Moscow, Averell Harriman, had been concerned about Marshall’s appointment precisely because he felt Marshall was not sufficiently aware of the “Russian danger.”
