The Sino-Soviet Schism } 129
products.” Mao immediately took up the challenge and announced to the
conference that China would within fifteen years surpass Britain, then still
seen as a major industrial power:
Maybe I am bragging here, and maybe when we have another inter-
national meeting in future you will criticize me for being subjective,
but I speak with the strength of considerable evidence ... Comrade
Khrushchev tells us that the Soviet Union will overtake the United
States in fifteen years. I can tell you that in fifteen years we may well
catch up with and overtake Britain.^36
The race to communism and for leadership of the world communist
movement had begun. Idiosyncrasies of the psychologies of both Mao and
Khrushchev contributed to the growing competition between the two lead-
ers. Mao had long had difficulties with authority. In an essay written at the
time of Mao’s death, MIT professor Lucian Pye noted that at each stage of
his life, Mao came into conflict with those in authority over him: his father,
a school headmaster, other leaders of the CCP, Stalin, and Khrushchev.^37 In
each case, Mao drew his rival into conflict and focused his psychic energy on
defeating that enemy. While idealizing comradely love within revolutionary
ranks, Mao seems to have been incapable of such feelings, and was prone to
feel slights when he felt his voice was being ignored. Mao’s personal physician,
with many years of attending to Mao, also noted that Mao was subject to bouts
of “irrational suspicion” of plots directed against him, and that these bouts
coincided with insomnia, headaches, anxiety, depression, and bad temper.^38
Since adolescence Mao had dreamed of being recognized as a world-
historic person. He sought to achieve that by establishing himself in the
Marxist-Leninist pantheon of Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Stalin.^39 Mao viewed
the CCP’s 1949 victory as the historical equivalent of Lenin’s engineering of the
Bolshevik insurrection of 1917 or Stalin’s 1941–1945 defense of the Soviet state.
Mao also believed that the model of revolution he had invented—protracted
guerrilla war and a broad anti-imperialist united front led by a “proletarian
party”—should guide the revolutionary struggle in wide swaths of the devel-
oping world. What had Khrushchev accomplished that could compare with
these? There was little question in Mao’s mind that he was the true, genuine
successor to Lenin and Stalin. Mao soon concluded, probably at their very
first meeting in October 1954 on the occasion of the PRC’s Fifth National Day,
that Khrushchev simply lacked the gravitas and resolution to qualify as suc-
cessor to Lenin and Stalin. Khrushchev was simply not of the same caliber
as Lenin, Stalin, or himself, Mao concluded, and flip-flopped constantly on
issues.
Khrushchev, for his part, had survived in Stalin’s murderous inner circle
by playing a somewhat dim buffoon. This exterior guise hid a cunning mind,
and as Khrushchev emerged as the CPSU’s paramount leader he sought to