Mao set off by train on 6 December, on what was his first trip out of China. He did not bring a single senior colleague. The highest-ranking person in the delegation was a secretary. Stalin’s laison, Kovalev, rightly surmised that this was so that when Stalin humiliated Mao, which was inevitable, it would be “without Chinese witnesses.” When Mao met Stalin the first time, he even excluded his ambassador from the session. Face was power. A snub from the Master could weaken his hold over his colleagues.

The entire loan was allocated to military purchases from Russia. Stalin gave the go-ahead for 50 large-scale industrial projects — far fewer than Mao had wanted.

In return, Mao agreed that Manchuria and Xinjiang were to be designated Soviet spheres of influence, with Russia given exclusive access to their “industrial, financial, and commercial activities.” As these 2 huge regions were the main areas with known rich and exploitable mineral resources, Mao was effectively signing away most of China’s tradable assets. To his inner circle he himself referred to the 2 provinces as “colonies.”

And yet this was just the beginning of Mao’s gains from the Sino-Japanese War, which lasted 8 years and took some 20M Chinese lives. It ended up weakening Chiang’s state enormously, and enabling Mao to emerge in possession of a giant army of 1.3M. At the beginning of the war, the ratio of Chiang’s army to Mao’s was 60:1; at the end, it was 3:1.

“The nature of the people of the country is inertia. They worship hypocrisy, are content with being slaves, and narrow-minded.” This was a common enough sentiment among the educated at the time, when people were casting around for explanations for why China had been so easily defeated by foreign powers and was trailing so badly in the modern world. Mao also proposed burning all the collections of prose and poetry after the Tang and Sung dynasties in one go.

When we look at history, we adore the times of war when dramas happened one after another which make reading about them great fun. When we get to the periods of peace and prosperity, we are bored. Human nature loves sudden swift changes.

Peng was to rise to be Communist China’s first defense minister, and also Mao’s fiercest and bravest critic within the regime — for which he would pay a long-drawn-out and agonizing death.

This was Mao’s first taste of future glories when up to a million people would hail him on Tiananmen.

But here there was one vital difference: Mao in Ruijin was not the supreme leader. Although Moscow made him the “president” and the “prime minister,” it did not make him the dictator. Instead it surrounded him with other men whom it could trust to obey its orders. At the top of the army was Zhu De, who was appointed chief of the Military Council. Zhu had been trained in Russia, and the Russians knew him — and knew that he was loyal. Moscow had earlier considered Mao for the post, but had changed its mind. He eded up as only one of the Council’s 15 ordinary members.

Most importantly, Mao had a direct, on-the-spot Chinese boss: Chou En-lai, who was to arrive from Shanghai and take up the post of the Party chief. In the Communist system, Party boss was the highest authority, above the head of state.

People first got enmeshed in an organization from the age of 6, when they had to join the Children’s Corps. At the age of 15, they were automatically enrolled in the Youth Brigade. All adults except the very old and crippled were put into the Red Defense Army. In this way, the entire population was regimented, and a web of control was formed.

This machine was an eye-opener to Mao. Before Chou arrived, Mao had ruled the Red land in bandit style, with less regimentation of the population as a whole; but it did not take long for him to appreciate the advantages and potential of the new way. When he eventually took power nationwide, he inherited this totalitarian machine and made it even more seamless and intrusive than Ruin — or Stalin’s Russia.

Chiang’s son Ching-kuo had been a hostage in Russia for 9 years. After Ching-kuo was born, Chiang seems to have become sterile through contracting venereal disease several times.