Brothers in Arms (12 page)

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without Mao's dramatic turn to the left in the mid-1950s, there probably would not have been a collapse in the alliance around 1960.

Just as the differences in ideology presaged the breakdown of CCP-CPSU cooperation, the personalities of leaders on both sides contributed to the different stages of the alliance. Joseph Stalin's enormous prestige in the CCP was fundamental to the idea of Sino-Soviet friendship in the late 1940s, just as the real Stalin's rude and contemptuous treatment of Mao in 1949-1950 left wounds that the CCP leader never forgot. Khrushchev's ebullience and impulsivehess at first strengthened and then added to the weakening of the alliance. But at the core of the relationship was Mao, and when he started to focus on some of those elements in which Soviet and Chinese Marxism differed, the alliance was doomed.

¹⁰⁹

The explanations that emphasize
nationalism
as the foundation for conflict do have some connection to this interpretative framework. Both the Soviet and the Chinese party made frequent use of appeals to national cohesion when building their regimes. More important, both blamed foreign states for their countries' past miseries. But the
content
of Moscow's and Beijing's nationalisms was connected to Marxism and their revolutionary experiences, and without filling in this ideological content, the explicatory value of rival nationalisms seems very limited for Chinese and Soviet foreign policy during the 1950s.

Mao was right that the mid-twentieth century was a period of unprecedented global upheaval. The victories of national liberation movements in the Third World and the extraordinary doubt of purpose and achievement in Western Europe and the United States left a wide playing field for China and the Soviet Union. But while Moscow tried, at least to some extent, to exploit the comparative advantages it had been given in the competition with the West at the global level, Mao made Beijing turn inward, away from foreign commitments and toward the intensification of the Chinese revolution. In terms of legacies left by the fall of the Sino-Soviet alliance, the CCP's inward turn is of immense significance.

Of other legacies of the alliance, most are visible on the Chinese side. The transfer of Soviet models had a substantial impact on Chinese society, for instance in education, political organization, and the national economy. Although the Cultural Revolution was intended, at least in part, to remove the Soviet stamp from Chinese institutions and from ways of thinking within the party, many of the Soviet models still linger on, now besieged by the effects of the market revolution.

The most important effects of the alliance still cannot be evaluated in full. One such effect is the vital contribution of the Soviet Union to the socialist vic-

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tory in China, which destroyed traditional society (and paved the way for a new society that has not yet come into being). The other is the political cohesiveness and the will to intervene that the perception of a massive Sino-Soviet threat created among elites in the West. The international effects of these two legacies of the alliance will be with us well into the twenty-first century.

Notes

1. I discovered later that the painting, entitled
Vo imia mira
[In the Name of Peace], by the Soviet artist Viktor Vikhtinskii, is now owned by the Committee on Fine Arts, Ministry of Culture of the Russian Federation, Moscow.

2. A very useful way of getting a look into issues of mutual perceptions is by reading the magazines published during the 1950s by the friendship societies in Beijing and Moscow,
SuZhong youhao
[Soviet-Chinese friendship] and
Druzhba
[Friendship].

3. Good overviews of the Western debate on the essential issues of the alliance are Steven M. Goldstein, "Nationalism and Internationalism: Sino-Soviet Relations," in Thomas W. Robinson and David Shambaugh, eds.,
Chinese Foreign Policy: Theory and Practice
(Oxford: Clarendon, 1994), 224-65; Allen Whiting, "The Sino-Soviet Split," in Roderick MacFarquhar and John K. Fairbank, eds.,
The Cambridge History of China,
vol. 14 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 478-538.

4. Eisenhower notes, April 29, 1950,
The Papers of Dwight D. Eisenhower
edited by Alfred D. Chandler, (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981), vol. 11, 1092. See also John Gaddis, "The American 'Wedge' Strategy, 1949-1955," in Harry Harding and Yuan Ming, eds.,
Sino-American Relations, 1945-1955: A Joint Reassessment of a Critical Decade
(Wilmington: SR Books, 1989), 157-83; Jonathan D. Pollack, "The Korean War and Sino-American Relations," ibid., 213-37.

5. For two very influential and insightful works in the realist tradition, see John Gittings,
The World and China, 1922-1972
(New York: Harper and Row, 1974); Michael B. Yahuda,
China's Role in World Affairs
(New York: St. Martin's Press, 1978).

6. On Stalin's foreign policy beliefs, see Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov,
Inside the Kremlin's Cold War: From Stalin to Khrushchev
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), especially 9-77; Vojtech Mastny,
The Cold War and Soviet Insecurity: The Stalin Years
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1996). On Mao, see Michael H. Hunt,
The Genesis of Chinese Communist Foreign Policy
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), especially 125-202; Yang Kuisong,
Zhongjian didai

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Page 33

de geming: zhongguo geming zai guoji beijing xia de fazhan
[Revolution in the intermediate zone: The development of the Chinese Revolution in an international context] (Beijing: Zhonggong zhongyang dangxiao, 1992); and Niu Jun,
Cong Yan'an zouxiang shijie: Zhongguo gongchandang dui wai guanxi de qiyuan
[From Yan'an to the world: The development of the Chinese Communist Party's foreign relations] (Fuzhou: Fujian Renmin, 1992).

7. For an overview of the debate on culture and foreign policy, see Iver B. Neumann and Thomas Hylland Eriksen, "International Relations as a Cultural System: An Agenda for Research,"
Cooperation and Conflict
28, no. 3 (1993): 233-64.

8. Some fascinating glimpses of these mutual perceptions may be found in Marie-Luise Näth, ed.,
Communist China in Retrospect: East European Sinologists Remember the First Fifteen Years of the PRC
(Frankfurt-am-Main: Peter Lang, 1995).

9. For the International Relations literature, see Stephen M. Walt,
The Orgins of Alliances
(Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1987); for the classical realist view, see George Liska,
Nations in Alliance: The Limits of Interdependence
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1962); Arnold Wolfers, ed.,
Alliance Policy in the Cold War
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1959), especially pp. 1-15.

10. For instance, one contributor, the Russian scholar Constantine Pleshakov, does emphasize geopolitical concerns but interprets these preoccupations within a framework of ideology; see also his
Geo-ideologicheskaia paradigma: vzaimdeistve geopolitiki i ideologii na primere otnoshenii mezhdu SSSR, SShA i KNR v kontinentalnoi Vostochnoi Azii 1949-1991 gg.
[The geo-ideological paradigm: interaction of geopolitics and ideology in the primary relations between the USSR, USA, and the PRC in continental East Asia, 1949-1991] (Moscow: Rossiiskii nauchnii fond, 1994).

11. One of the first political positions of the young Mao Zedong was as secretary of the Russia Studies Society in his native Hunan; see Takeuchi Minoru, ed.,
Mao Zedong ji. Bujuan
[Mao Zedong works. Additional volumes] (Tokyo: Sososha, 1986), vol. 9, 101-2.

12. On the early years of the CCP, see Arif Dirlik,
The Origins of Chinese Communism
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Hans J. van de Ven,
From Friend to Comrade: The Founding of the Chinese Communist Party, 1920-1927
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991); Hung-Yok Ip, "The Origins of Chinese Communism: A New Interpretation,"
Modem China
20, no. 1 (1994): 34-63; on the Soviet/Comintern role, see Tony Saich, The
Origins of the United Front in China: The Role of Sneevliet

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