Special Section: Dealing with a Matsadoon

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Obviously, Mao wanted to make us sorry we'd raised the question. At our next meeting I said, "Comrade Mao, we certainly had no intention of creating difficulties for you. We certainly don't insist on our proposition. If you feel it would damage China's national pride, then by all means forget we mentioned it. We'll make do with our workers."

[Later] the Chinese came back with a message to the effect that Mao was now willing to help us by accepting our original proposal.

We were sorry we'd ever suggested the idea, but since we'd been the first to propose the plan, we couldn't very well back down now that the Chinese had agreed. So, reluctantly, we decided to go through with a treaty and let the first batch of about 200,000 Chinese laborers come to work in Siberia. As soon as their time was up, we deliberately avoided initiating negotiations for any further treaties. However, the Chinese began pressing us to import more workers into Siberia, despite what Mao had said about resenting China's being used as a cheap labor pool.

At a later meeting with Mao, I apologized for having overestimated our need to import labor. We made sure that once the contracts for the Chinese in Siberia had expired, they weren't renewed; and the workers went home.

What had the Chinese been up to? I'll tell you: they wanted to occupy Siberia without war. They wanted to penetrate and take over the Siberian economy. They wanted to make sure the Chinese settlers in Siberia outnumbered Russians and people of other nationalities who lived there. In short, they wanted to make Siberia Chinese rather than Russian. It was a clever maneuver, but it didn't work.

Like Stalin, Mao never recognized his comrades as his equals. He treated the people around him like pieces of furniture, useful for the time being but expendable. When, in his opinion, a piece of furniture—or a comrade—became worn out, he would just throw it away and replace it.

As the preachers used to say, no one under the sun is immortal, and the hour will come when Mao Tse-tung will also have to depart from the political arena. A ray of sunshine will break through the clouds and show the Chinese people the way back to the path set for us by Marx and Lenin. Mao is too old to see that ray of sunshine himself, but no one lives forever. In the end, the time will come when China will return to a correct policy toward the U.S.S.R. and the other Socialist countries.