JC: He was too optimistic, which partly explained why his nuclear industry didn’t go as well as he wanted. He had been told he’d got all the necessary things for the bomb. He didn’t know that his scientists were too optimistic about the missiles. He didn’t have the necessary missile technology.

When he split with Khrushchev, he wanted two incompatible things. One was to trash Khrushchev and establish his own camp in the world, and the other was to continue getting technology and equipment out of Khrushchev. He couldn’t have both. In the end when Khrushchev was deposed he sent Zhou Enlai to Russia to try to get the technology from Brezhnev. It was then that Malinovsky, the defence minister of Russia, said to Zhou Enlai and the acting defence minister of China, Ho Long: “Why don’t you get rid of Mao like we got rid of Khrushchev?” That was such an important moment in Chinese history because it played a big role in triggering the whole Cultural Revolution. Mao then, of course, refused to have anything to do with Russia, even though he badly wanted the missiles.

DJ: Why can’t China and Russia shake themselves free of these two great monsters?

JC: In China today Mao’s portrait is still in Tiananmen Square, on the Tiananmen Gate; his mummified corpse is still in the centre of the Chinese capital for people to worship, and he has been written into the Chinese constitution as the guiding force of China. Although the Chinese today feel much more free to criticise their current leaders, they are still inhibited in criticising Mao. Most people have a profound fear of Mao deeply embedded in their psyche. So the position of Mao is quite different from that of Stalin. The key thing is that Mao is still being propped up by a state. Of course the current regime has rejected most of Mao’s legacies but they have also kept some crucial ones. One is the control of the media, the freedom of expression, which in China is worse now than a hundred years ago.