Read Brothers in Arms Online

Authors: Odd Arne Westad

Tags: #Political Science, #International Relations, #General, #test

Brothers in Arms (11 page)

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"We are not Yugoslavia," said Chen; "if you want to treat us as Yugoslavia, then we will not accept it."

88

The decision to withdraw the Soviet advisors was taken in haste, obviously as a result of Khrushchev's experiences in Bucharest. It was a policy mistake with far-reaching consequences: In one stroke Khrushchev had almost eliminated Soviet abilities to influence developments in China. Soviet Ambassador to Beijing Stepan Chervonenko later claimed that he tried to make Khrushchev change his mind, and supporters of Leonid Brezhnev in the 1964 leadership struggle saw the pull-out from China as one of the "impulsive foreign policy measures that damaged our own state interests." The Chinese had sown the storm and reaped the whirlwind.
89
True to form, Mao attempted to lessen the genuine shock many Chinese felt at the Soviet actions. Already in August, he sent Zhou Enlai to see the Soviet ambassador to iron out in which areas practical cooperation could continue. Mao seemed particularly eager not to cut all ties on defense and military production. China' s security needs and the possible political effects of the great disasters created by the "second wave" of the Great Leap made Mao send Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping to Moscow for the international conference of Communist parties in November 1960. After much haggling, Deng, who in the past had cooperated well with the Soviets and was critical of the excesses of the Leap, was able to reach a limited set of compromises at the conference. Liu went even further in his informal conversation with Leonid Brezhnev on the train between Leningrad and Minsk while touring the Soviet Union before his return to China. Both men looked forward to a time in which "ideological quibbles" could be resolved. Mao confirmed his support for the Moscow resolutions in a conversation with Ambassador Chervonenko in late December.
90
The lull in the Sino-Soviet dispute lasted for almost a year and a half a brief flare-up at the twenty-second Congress of the CPSU in October 1961 notwithstanding. In spite of continued polemics directed against "Yugoslavia" (by the Chinese) and "Albania" (by the Soviets), both sides made attempts to rescue parts of the bilateral relationship. In June 1961 the two countries signed a set of agreements on economic, scientific, and technical cooperation. Some Soviet leaders, both in the party and in the military, argued for a lessening of tension with China in order not to lose the strategic potential and the established economic interaction in the Chinese alliance. Inside the CCP, Mao had ''retreated to the Second Line" and left to Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, CCP Politburo member Chen Yun, and other leaders the thorny task of rescuing China from the famine created by the chairman's social and economic experiments.
91
The food shortages in the spring of 1961 made the Chinese leaders launch an

 

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all-out appeal to the socialist countries for help. In March Zhou Enlai described the desperate situation in the Chinese countryside in stark detail in a talk with the East European and Soviet ambassadors. The Soviets, who had predicted. large-scale starvation in the central and western provinces for almost a year, were ready and willing to provide emergency grain and other foodstuffs. Khrushchev had written to Mao on February 27 promising massive aid, and large amounts of supplies crossed the border from March to June 1961. Liu praised Moscow's effort, calling the Soviet aid "a manifestation of real support for China." In late March Foreign Minister Chen foresaw a new period of close Sino-Soviet cooperation.

92

The continuing military cooperation beyond 1960 is of specific interest to scholars, since most accounts written before the opening of the Russian archives assumed that the military relationship in effect ended
before
the withdrawal of Soviet experts.
93
Although we still do not know the full extent of Sino-Soviet military cooperation from 1960 to late 1962, it is obvious that in some areas it was alive and well as late as January 1963. Moscow agreed to continue aiding the construction of a Chinese air force, including sending groups of Soviet instructors, and assisting in the production of the advanced MiG-21 jet fighters in China.
94
The Soviets continued to provide the Chinese with intelligence on U.S. military exercises and defense planning.
95
The two sides cooperated in setting up military communication systems in northeastern China.
96
Finally, there is evidence that the Soviets provided the Chinese with advanced military technology, including air-to-ground missiles, as late as December 1962.
97
It was Mao's resurgence in Chinese politics in mid-1962 and the ensuing confrontation over foreign affairs that in the end laid the Sino-Soviet alliance to rest. At the CCP leaders' annual summer conference at Beidahe, Mao again went on the offensive, claiming that his associates had "capitulated to the bourgeoisie" with their "adjustments" over the past year and a half. He explicitly tied his criticism to Sino-Soviet relations by condemning Wang Jiaxiang, the former ambassador to Moscow who in the spring of 1962 had called for a reduction of tension with the Soviet Union (and the United States) "to try to win a long-term peaceful environment for the socialist construction of our country.''
98
Mao disagreed with Wang's fear of enemy attacks on an enfeebled China. The chairman saw the imperialist powers as increasingly at odds with each other and the Soviet Union as wishing to join the fray. China could therefore safely concentrate on intensifying the revolution at home and the criticism of revisionism abroad. To the chairman, events in the fall of 1962 confirmed his optimistic worldview. For Mao, the outcome of the crises in the Caribbean and the Himalayas showed China' s growing strength and the increasing weakness of the imperialist powers and the Soviet Union. At the end of 1962 he instructed the

 

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party that "the struggle against modern revisionism would become more acute for a period of time in the future."

99

Beijing viewed the Indian dispatching of border forces into the disputed areas of the Himalaya Mountains in early fall of 1962 as preparations for an attack on Chinese positions. Mao ordered the Chinese army to strike first. In two waves of attacks starting on October 20 and November 16 large Chinese forces routed the Indian units and advanced into Indian territory in the Northeast. During the first phase of the crisis, the Soviet Union reversed some of its earlier positions in favor of China while agreeing to sell MiG-21 fighters to India during the Chinese attack in mid-November. Mao later believed that the initial Soviet policy could be attributed to Khrushchev's opportunistic wish for Chinese support during the Cuban missile crisis that had taken place in the interim.
100
The Soviet-American confrontation over Moscow's deployment of nuclear missiles to Cuba in October 1962 was the second external event that fall that pushed Sino-Soviet relations back into the downward spiral. Ever since the victory of the Cuban revolutionaries in 1959, Beijing and Moscow had watched each other's policies toward the island with great care. Both wanted to recruit Cuba's leader, Fidel Castro, to their view of the Sino-Soviet controversies. When President John F. Kennedy challenged Khrushchev's nuclear ploy, the Chinese press supported the Soviet position, while Mao, privately, was telling his colleagues that there would be no war, because both Kennedy and Khrushchev feared the consequences of an all-out conflict. After Khrushchev capitulated on October 28, Mao decided to swing the CCP propaganda machine into action, praising the Cuban comrades and condemning those "who were frightened in the face of imperialist aggression," who "bartered with the freedom and independence of another people," and who believed in "juggling nuclear weapons as the solution to international arguments."
101
In spite of the open and direct polemics between the two sides that started in December 1962, Khrushchev made one last attempt at secret negotiations. Delegations from the two parties, headed by Deng Xiaoping and Mikhail Suslov, met in Moscow from July 5 to 20, 1963, but could not even agree on when to meet again. Immediately after the breakdown of the meeting, Khrushchev informed Mao that Moscow expected to sign a treaty on nuclear test bans and nonproliferation with the United States and Great Britain in spite of Chinese warnings. To Mao, this was final proof of Khrushchev's treason against the Communist movement and China, an undisguised attempt "at depriving the Chinese people of their right to resist the nuclear threats of U.S. imperialism."
102
As the polemics intensified that summer and fall, it became obvious both to foreign governments and to their own populations that the split between the two Communist giants was there to stay.
103

 

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The break with the Soviet Union and its allies left China in international isolation just as a new danger the U.S. intervention in Vietnam appeared at its borders. But to Mao, China's lack of state allies was a necessary by-product of the intensification of the class struggle inside China itself. The real allies of Mao's new revolution were "the peoples of the world" and especially "the oppressed nations and peoples of Asia, Africa, and Latin America."

104
"Peaceful coexistence between oppressed nations and imperialism is impossible," the chairman found. "Every Marxist knows that class struggle cannot be finally resolved except through war.''
105
As China descended into the final chaos of the Maoist era, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, Mao remade the leadership of his party in preparation for domestic and international confrontations.

Causes and Causalities
For Leonid Brezhnev and the Soviet leaders who ousted Nikita Khrushchev in October 1964, the final years of trouble in the Sino-Soviet alliance had left a legacy of mutual fear and distrust. What they saw as Mao's unpredictability and coarseness reminded them of Stalin, and they knew well what kind of damage Stalin had been capable of inflicting on domestic and foreign enemies. Chinese hints that they "had not yet presented the account" for czarist land acquisitions in East Asia during the nineteenth century, and, even more, China's testing of its first nuclear weapon the very month the new. leaders took over in Moscow, created a perceived threat against the Soviet state of which Brezhnev and his cohort were never able to rid themselves. In the minds of the Brezhnev Politburo, Mao's diatribes against them reawoke fears of the Mongol threat from the East to form images of Chinese hordes invading Soviet territory.
As Soviet leaders grew increasingly concerned with security along the Chinese border, they kept asking themselves whether nuclear deterrence could work in their new and antagonistic relationship with Beijing. The Brezhnev leadership believed that the strategic nuclear power of the Soviet Union had provided the nation with a cover against Western attack unprecedented in Soviet history. But Mao's rhetoric on the futility of nuclear armaments at the 1957 Moscow meeting and thereafter left Brezhnev and his associates with lingering doubts about whether strategic superiority was enough to deter a Chinese attack. Believing themselves to be rational policymakers and the Chinese to be heavily ideological and under the spell of Mao's apocalyptic visions, the Kremlin had to fight the remaining part of the Cold War always looking over its shoulder.
The Soviet fear of a Chinese attack was mirrored on the Chinese side in Mao's belief from 1964 on that the United States and the Soviet Union jointly might attack China. The frenzied building of defense works and the relocating of vital industries to the interior joined the dislocations of the Cultural Revolu-

 

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tion to weaken China's international position and ultimately defeat Mao's revolutionary project. But to Mao the vision of a growing external threat went well with his ideas of revolutionizing the party and Chinese society it proved the correctness of his second revolution, and it enabled him and his associates to label those who resisted them foreign agents.

106

Throughout the Cultural Revolution era there was opposition within the CCP to accepting the thatched-roof protection of the "solidarity of the world's peoples" and "revolutionary consciousness of the masses" as China's defense against foreign attack. As Mao's own belief in a speedy domestic revolutionary victory again foundered at the end of the 1960s, he turned for advice to the "old marshals" of the People's Liberation Army men such as Chen Yi and Nie Rongzhen who had been an important part of this opposition. In late 1969 he welcomed the marshals' suggestion that China should seek to reduce tension with the United States since the Soviet Union was the more dangerous enemy. Mao's own view of the Soviet Union had come full circle.
107
The chairman's American romance at the end of his life often has been taken as the ultimate example of realist politics in spite of a lifelong dedication to fighting Western imperialism, Mao turned to the United States when faced with a military crisis in his relations with a socialist neighbor. But to Mao, as indeed to most revolutionary leaders of the late twentieth century, ideology never contradicted the making of international alliances in defense of the revolution. His main aim was the survival and ultimate victory of communism in China, against which n Mao's view Soviet "social-imperialism," conducted by Brezhnev's "fascist dictatorship," had become the main threat.
108
In 1969, faced with what he saw as a new and particularly dangerous form of imperialism, he attempted to get support from the United States, just as he had done twenty-five years earlier when the Japanese threatened his movement with annihilation.
Although connected by common texts, language, symbols, and interpretations through the Chinese adaptation of Soviet Marxism, the CCP-CPSU relationship had shown visible evidence of strains from the very beginning. At times during the forty years of collaboration, the two parties had disagreed on organizational structure, military strategies, and class analysis; they had suspected each other of betrayal; and they had misunderstood each other's aims because of personal rivalries and cultural differences. Both sides had, at times, been led astray in their policymaking by their belief in a shared ideology.
The fact that ideology was crucial to both sides, while there was never a
common
ideology, is essential to understanding the rise and fall of the Sino-Soviet alliance. Without Marxism, there would be no alliance, no Chinese adoption of Soviet models in politics, economy, science, education, or the arts. Likewise,

 

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