The Cultural Revolution } 285
Beijing and were distributed around the country, with Mao personally de-
ciding where each person should be sent.
Chinese sources assert that this activity was undertaken by Lin behind
Mao’s back and was not approved by Mao, and that these moves caused Mao
to start doubting Lin’s loyalty. Scholars doubt that Lin would have acted in this
fashion without Mao’s approval, and surmise that Mao must have endorsed
this mobilization. Mao may have genuinely feared Soviet attack, or he may
have generated a war crisis to mobilize the country for suppression of Red
Guard disorder and consolidation of the “revolutionary committees” being
put into place across the country. The episode may also reflect Mao’s fear that
Lin would use these sweeping moves to oust him from power. That, Mao soon
concluded, was Lin’s real objective.
The self-confidence of Mao Zedong during the 1969 crisis is breathtaking,
bordering on recklessness. From a position of distinct material inferiority,
Mao not only relied on China’s lesser but vast resources to virtually dare the
Soviet Union to attack China, but dared to strike first and hard at the Soviet
Union (at Zhenbao Island) to drive home his deterrent message. Mao dared to
“rub the [Soviet] tiger” while the PLA was still deeply enmeshed in running
the country, while China had minimal and hardly credible nuclear retaliatory
capability (at least by Soviet or American standards), while Soviet military
capabilities were vastly superior to China’s, and while China was without a
friend in the world among the major powers. US policy played a role in deter-
ring the Soviet Union, but, as discussed in the next chapter, Mao seemed not
to have been in a hurry to play the American card against Moscow. After
challenging Moscow’s leadership of the world communist movement, declar-
ing the USSR a capitalist country, permitting Red Guards to assault the Soviet
embassy and diplomats, and ordering a bloody ambush of a Soviet border pa-
trol, and then putting the whole country on a wartime basis, Mao faced down
Soviet threats, and did this from a position of marked vulnerability and weak-
ness. Underlying Mao’s self-confidence was a belief that no nation, not even
one or both of the superpowers, could defeat the Chinese people when led by
a determined, revolutionary Chinese Communist Party. Conversely, China
may have come very close to experiencing nuclear devastation in 1969. Had
Grechko’s argument prevailed in Moscow, Mao’s supreme self-confidence
would look a lot more like mad recklessness.