Why Mao Was Mad

Among the reasons widely cited for the Sino-Soviet split is the case of Marshal Peng Teh-huai, Red China's former Minister of Defense. As reported by Sinologist David Charles in the China Quarterly of London, the story of the marshal's fall from grace is considered generally plausible by Western experts, if perhaps questionable in some details.

A tough old soldier who defected from the Kuomintang and fought alongside Mao Tse-tung during the famed Long March in the '30s, Peng was the leader of the conservative faction of the Chinese politburo. While on a trip to Albania in May 1959, he secretly told Nikita Khrushchev of his strong opposition to Mao's agricultural commune system. With Khrushchev's encouragement, Peng returned to China and denounced Mao's Great Leap Forward as "petty bourgeois fanaticism." At a meeting of the Chinese Communist Party's Central Committee in August 1959, Peng said that the communes had been set up without adequate preparation, scored the blunders of the system, criticized the use of soldiers for farm labor, and denounced the party's false claim to have raised the living standards of the masses. According to the Charles account (and this is one part that Western experts find improbable), Mao reacted emotionally to the suggestion that Peng's accusations might trigger a peasant revolution, with "tears in his eyes" said that if that happened he would go back to the villages to recruit another army.

Retribution was quick. Peng was arrested in a purge of "right-wing opportunists," charged with failing "to pass the bourgeois-democratic stage of the revolution" (meaning that he had never been a real Communist at all). As a former member of the Kuomintang, he was accused of joining the Communist Party only out of opportunism. Condemned to a period of intensive reindoctrination, Peng recanted, asked for the opportunity to rehabilitate himself by working as an ordinary peasant. Mao benevolently excused him from manual labor, exiled him to obscurity as a superintendent of a commune.

But if Mao was lenient toward Peng, he remained furious at Khrushchev and his furtive interference in China's internal affairs. Mao, according to the China Quarterly version, demanded an apology; Khrushchev refused. At the Bucharest Communist conference in June 1960, Khrushchev lashed out instead at the Chinese for "persecuting" any comrades who had contacts with the Soviet Union. All this aggravated the basic difference between Khrushchev's "coexistence" line as against Mao's rigidly revolutionary policy, and helped bring the fight into the open.

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