SSM: But the self-image was the same.

JC: Yes, he wallowed in this feeling, reading Chinese poetry. He, of course, wrote poetry.

JH: My understanding is that actually Mao’s early poems are quite good, and the later stuff, once he got into power, is not so good. I think Moravia in Italy did an edition of Mao’s poems. In fact, his poetry was something that led people to think highly of him.

JC: Yes, lots of people say, “Oh, Mao was a good poet”, as if this was incompatible with him being a mass-murderer. But it is entirely compatible. He can be a good poet and also have murdered tens of millions of people.

SSM: Well, with Stalin my understanding is that the poems are exquisite but they are in Georgian which I can’t read. And a lot of people helped Stalin because of them. His big bank robbery in Tiflis in 1907, which sort of made him, his first great act that made headlines across the world — the inside-man in the robbery helped him because he so admired Stalin as a poet, which is sort of unbelievable.

DJ: How were these men seen in the West?

JC: One reason for Mao’s influence in the West is that he was a very good self-publicist. The benign image of him in the West started with Edgar Snow, whom Mao took trouble to select. It wasn’t by accident at all that Edgar Snow went to where Mao was and interviewed him. And Mao insisted on the careful editing of what Edgar Snow was going to say. When Snow’s book caused some sort of sensation in the West, Mao had it translated back into Chinese, and gave it the rather neutral title Journey to the West rather than Red Star Over China which sounded in Chinese too ... well ... Red. So Mao had it published in China in the late 1930s, and these books influenced one or two generations of radical Chinese youth, including my parents. Another big wave of self-promotion was in 1960, at the height of the famine. In that year alone more than 20 million people died of starvation. In that year Mao started to spend a lot of money overseas, giving it to Left-wing organisations to try to influence people. That, actually, is a huge area that needs careful study.

He started to promote himself that year, 1960, because he decided to break from Khrushchev. He had to do this because otherwise he couldn’t start his own camp. That was the year when he systematically began to promote his own personality-cult in the world.