As quoted in, "Mao's Last Revolution, " on the Great Prolatarian Cultural Revolution, just published by Harvard Univ. Press, Mao said, "Apart from their other characteristics, the outstanding thing about China's 600 million people is that they are "poor and blank". This may seem a bad thing, but in reality it is a good thing. Poverty gives rise to the desire for changes the desire for action and the desire for revolution. On a blank sheet of paper free from any mark, the freshest and most beautiful characters can be written; the freshest and most beautiful pictures can be painted." "Introducing a Co-operative" (April 15, 1958).
Mao, talking about Quemoy and Matsu and the possibility of a nuclear strike by the U.S. "So what if we lose 300 million people," Mao told Khrushchev. "Our women will make it up in a generation." http://www.policyreview.org/135/bering.html
Having failed to get the bomb through the Korean War, Mao soon started plotting again, seeking to engineer another confrontation with America, this time over Taiwan. He started shelling the small islands of Quemoy and Matsu in 1954, hoping that the U.S. would threaten with nuclear weapons, thereby prodding Moscow to give them to him. In his talks with the Soviets he displayed a rather casual attitude toward the bomb. On one occasion, he startled Soviet foreign minister Andrei Gromyko by asking where the new socialist capital should be built after a nuclear war, implying that Moscow would be history. On the other hand, China would be perfectly prepared to fight a nuclear war with America alone and endure a first strike: "All it is is a big pile of people dying." In his view, if half of China's population, then some 800 million, were wiped out in a nuclear confrontation, so be it. That would leave 400 million.
Rather than allowing Russia to get drawn into unplanned confrontations with the Americans by an unpredictable ally and having to retaliate on its behalf, Khrushchev decided to let Mao have the bomb. As the authors note, Mao's way of scaring the pants off an ally was a first in international statecraft. China's first bomb was tested in the Gobi desert in 1964. To commemorate the occasion, Mao celebrated with a poem: "Atom bomb goes off when it is told. Ah, what boundless joy." <SNIP>
-- Michael Pugliese