Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
him. In the wake of Khrushchev's visit to Beijing in 1958, he shocked
Dr. Li with the following tirade:
Khrushchev doesn't know what he's talking about.
...
He wants to
improve relations with the United States.
...
Let's get the United States
involved.
Maybe we can get the United States to drop an atom bomb
on Fujian. Maybe ten or twenty million people will be killed. Chiang
Kai-shek wants the United States to use the bomb against us. Let them
use it. Let's see what Khrushchev says then. (Li 1994, 262)
...
This was not mere blusterous rhetoric on Mao's part. The shelling of
the Nationalist-held island of Quemoy off the shore of Fujian in 1958
was carried out with this in mind and was an attempt to undermine
Khrushchev's quest for peace. “Mao was convinced that Chiang
Kai-shek wanted the United States to drop an atom bomb on Fujian
province,” Dr. Li informs us, “and Mao would not have minded if it
had. His shelling of Quemoy was a dare to see how far the United
States would go” (Li 1994, 125).
In late 1960 future Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Elliott Trudeau
traveled with one of his ideological confreres to China at the official
invitation of the Chinese government. For almost six weeks their Com-
munist minders took the two Canadians to carefully selected and pre-
pared industrial and agricultural sites to showcase the putative
accomplishments of Mao's Great Leap. They knew they were being
handed propaganda, but they endured it with grace and good humor.
The next year Trudeau and his friend published their travel diaries in
French as Deux innocents en Chine rouge. An English translation as
Two Innocents in Red China appeared in 1968 after Trudeau was elected
Prime Minister of Canada.
While the two innocents never really denied persistent contempo-
rary reports of famine in China, they did downplay them to some
extent and sidestepped the issue of the famine's severity:
Hold on a minute, please! Isn't famine raging in China at this very
moment?
Do you mean the famine in which the conservative press of the West
takes such delight? The famine of which the Formosan [Nationalist Chi-
nese] government speaks with such cheerful compassion? It is true that
dispatches from Hong Kong report a “shortage of provisions that in
some districts verges on famine.” It is true that during our journey peo-
ple mentioned to us droughts in the south and floods in the north.
All
the same, it has to be acknowledged: it would take more than that to
overturn the government of Mao Tse-tung [Mao Zedong]
...
...
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