Read Brothers in Arms Online

Authors: Odd Arne Westad

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

Brothers in Arms (6 page)

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This is a difficult process in any alliance formation, and perhaps particularly difficult in an alliance in which the elites have varying images of purpose but very similar political language and concepts. Still, the realist interpretations of the 1970s and 1980s, in which the alliance was doomed from the outset, find little support in the vast archives in Moscow and Beijing on which the chapters in this volume are based. At the end of the Korean War, the Sino-Soviet alliance was well moored in common policies as well as common symbols, and there was vigorous debate in and between the capitals on how to develop the relationship further. Indeed, for most of its life span up to 1958 the alliance was more dynamic and purposeful than its chroniclers have so far accepted.

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The vitality of the alliance during its first years makes the totality and the relative suddenness of its breakdown that much more difficult to explain. All contributors to this volume agree that in spite of the alliance having its ups and downs from early 1957 onward, the process of breakdown was not irredeemable until around 1960. The different perceptions of the alliance's domestic and international significance played a fundamental part in this collapse, as did the whole specter of cultural differences between Russians and Chinese that complicated day-to-day cooperation.
The perceptions of the world held by the Soviet and Chinese leaders were rooted in their ideologies. In spite of their common roots and the inspiration that Soviet Marxism-Leninism (or Stalinism) had provided for the ideology of the leading members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), it is essential for our understanding of the growth and collapse of the alliance to be able to distinguish between the two. Where the system of beliefs of Stalin and his successors underlined state construction, social order, and Marxist laws of development, Mao's thinking always returned to issues of individual will, human capabilities, and mass action. Where the Soviets wanted a state that first of all provided equality and social justice, Mao sought to create social instruments in which the creative abilities of man were released, often prompted by anger at tradition or foreign oppression.
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The tricky concept of
culture
in international relations does have the advantage that it slips past
ideology
to form general patterns of behavior, texts, myths, and symbols with an intrinsic value to a social or ethnic group.
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The problem is, of course, to come to grips with how cultures play themselves out in specific international settings. There is no doubt that Soviets/Russians and Chinese, despite their long common border, have little in common in terms of cultural legacies. On the contrary, over the past three to four centuries negative stereotypes of the other have dominated the relationship, and negative opinions of the other's way of life from food, to personal hygiene, to ways of conversation continued to create trouble during the 1950s. But the October Revolution the Soviet "invention" of the kind of modernity that the Chinese Communists wanted for them-

 

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selves made it possible to transcend the negative images and stake out common ground.
Sulian lao dage,
Soviet elder brother, was not an ironic form of address in China in the mid-1950s; it symbolized the role of the northern neighbor within a Chinese cultural scheme in which the elder brother should be treated with reverence as long as he fulfills his obligations to the family.

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A better understanding of ideology and culture is not sufficient to explain the breakdown in Sino-Soviet relations. In order to understand what happened, we also need to look more closely at the directions of Soviet and Chinese domestic politics and even more important at how their leaders viewed the interaction between the two countries on a whole range of specific issues. The main issues in economy (loans, technology transfers, border areas), military affairs (bases, weapons, intelligence), and foreign policy (Taiwan, Korea, Indochina, India, the U.S. threat) define the progress, stagnation, and breakdown of the alliance, particularly if we can show how these issues influenced the overall perceptions of the main leaders. In analyzing policies, however, we need to watch out for the sometimes spurious connection between different issues: Some policies are strongly interconnected, while others are deliberately or accidentally kept separate. This imbalanced relationship between issues, which political scientists often refer to as
issue escalation,
is no less true for the Sino-Soviet alliance than for other alliance formations.
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The chapters in this volume have no common background in terms of schools of interpretation. The authors are all somewhere near the center of the scale between hard-core realism and discourse-bound, antistructural approaches; there is more awareness of the subjective parts of international affairs ideologies, perceptions, and personalities and less emphasis on interests, borders, and grand strategies than in previous accounts. Undoubtedly this implies a move
away
from the realist dominance in the study of the Sino-Soviet alliance, although the authors exploit many insights from the realist school.
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Social realism in art and realism as a school of thought in the study of international relations have something in common. Their best practitioners can show a structure or a situation with perfect clarity and provide an image that convinces and, in some cases, inspires. But neither of them can penetrate the surface of the image and make us wonder about the complex ideas that uphold it. This is why we, at least at this stage, should emphasize multidimensional interpretation in history as well as in art.
Writing the Alliance
This volume is a very early attempt to make use of the newly available Russian and Chinese documentary sources to enrich our picture of the Sino-Soviet

 

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alliance. The individual chapters vary in approach and method and there are clear disagreements on some issues of interpretation. The group who has been working to prepare the volume consider its metamorphic base an advantage "international" history needs heterogeneous approaches.
The authors in this volume come from four different countries, China, Russia, the United States, and Norway. The heterogeneity of the project undoubtedly has been helped by the diversity in traditions of historical writing. But more important in terms of conclusions has been the fact that although from different countries, all the authors come from the same generation. Born between 1950 and 1960, none of us has more than a fleeting recollection of the heyday of the alliance. We all have encountered it primarily as history, presented to us in widely divergent interpretative wrappings. Those conclusions on which we do generally agree may, at least in part, be attributed to all of us approaching the historical record intent on unwrapping those presentations that we have encountered.
This introduction provides a chronological overview of the period and brief looks into the main issues discussed in the individual chapters. The chronology that come out of the new Russian and Chinese sources is different from the periodization so far employed by Western scholars not only was the alliance effective for considerably longer than what has been believed so far, but the practical cooperation started earlier and was broader in scope than many of us thought. In some cases the conflicts that did emerge in the relationship had different backgrounds or even different content from what has been the general wisdom in the West. The new chronology shows a very complex set of connections between the two countries and shows how both domestic and international changes influenced the timing of their development.
The Past, 1917-1946
Images of the 1917 October Revolution the Communist seizure of power in Russia were at the core of the founding of the Chinese Communist Party in 1921.

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The leaders of the fledgling Chinese party adopted the language, the symbols, and important parts of the worldview of the Russian Communists. Internationalism which in practice meant subsumption under the political direction of the CPSU and the teachings of its first leader, Vladimir Lenin joined Chinese nationalism in an uneasy ideological marriage that lasted for over forty years. Soviet control of the CCP was always tenuous, even during the 1920s, when the party could operate legally and when both it and its rival, the Guomindang (GMD), received Soviet advisors.
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In 1927 the head of the GMD main faction, Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek), turned on his Communist allies and defeated them for control of the cities. The

 

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massacres of CCP members that followed marked a bloody turning point for the party and for Soviet China policies. The Chinese Communists who survived the 1927 defeats and did not defect in their wake had to start rebuilding the party almost from scratch. Some party members blamed the Soviet Union and the Communist International (Comintern) for having insisted on the CCP continuing its alliance with the GMD past the point when it served the interests of the Chinese Communists. In Moscow Joseph Stalin who had been among the main promoters of a united-front policy in China did his standing within the CPSU leadership no good by continuing to insist that his political "advice" had been "correct."

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During the 1930s, when the GMD pushed the CCP to the periphery of Chinese lands and politics, Soviet control over the party declined. Partly as a result of their fall in fortunes, the CCP went through a series of inner conflicts in which Moscow and the Comintern had only limited influence, and from which Mao Zedong emerged as the dominant leader around 1936. The party heads also started to have their own first experiences in directing protracted warfare and in civil administration, albeit in small areas in south or northwest China. In addition, Soviet preoccupation with East Asia declined dramatically as tensions in Europe grew during the early 1930s.
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The Japanese attack on China in 1937 rescued the CCP from political isolation and, probably, from territorial oblivion. Public opinion inside and outside the GMD forced Jiang Jieshi to make a temporary truce with the Communists in order to fight the invaders. Mao, while hailing the brittle truce as a Cominternstyle "united front," made good use of the anarchy that followed from the war to expand his party's influence in north and central China. Partly because of the breakdown in state authority, partly because of the appeal of the party's radical program in a time of crisis, the CCP suddenly found itself in control of large territories, with a potential to operate almost as an independent state actor.
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With this sudden change in the party's fortunes began a slow. and troubled reestablishment of Soviet interest in the CCP. On one hand, Mao ignored some key Comintern instructions regarding the conduct of the war against Japan, incurring the wrath of the secretary general of the Communist International, Georgi Dimitrov. On the other hand, Moscow was rather pleased with the party's "theoretical" development, seeing how Mao Zedong adopted the most recent Soviet and Comintern doctrines and slogans. The Comintern archives show that nearly all of Mao's concepts from the anti-Japanese war period "protracted war," "new democracy," "three-thirds system,'' "antileftism" were inspired and sanctioned by Moscow. But while there is little reason to question Mao's wish to implement Soviet theory in China, there are few grounds to doubt

 

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that he and other CCP leaders left their own mark on these concepts when they presented them to a Chinese audience.

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Mao regarded the 1943 dissolution of the Comintern, which Stalin carried out primarily as a tactical move to appease his wartime allies against Adolf Hitler, as a welcome sign that Moscow would agree to more independence for each party in the carrying out of Communist policies. The CCP chairman's main foreign policy aim at the end of World War II, however, was to encourage the Soviet Union to enter the war against Japan, defeating the enemy and supporting the CCP. Mao therefore tailored his party's policies to fit as closely as possible with Moscow's requirements, even in those cases when understanding Soviet motives was difficult, as in Stalin's negotiations with the Guomindang in the summer of 1945.
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Although Mao could accept Stalin's explanations of the August 1945 Soviet-GMD treaty as part of an international strategy that ultimately would benefit the Chinese Communists, the CCP leader still expected the Soviets to work closely with his party as soon as the Red Army entered Manchuria. Mao Zedong and other CCP leaders reacted with incredulity when Soviet forces offered no consistent support for CCP objectives in the Northeast, and, on the contrary, began blocking some of the party's alms. At the regional level, the confusion over Soviet actions was total. Peng Zhen, head of the CCP Northeastern Bureau, blasted the Soviets over their November 1945 order for the Chinese Communists to quit the Manchurian cities: "The army of one Communist Party using tanks to drive out the army of another Communist Party. . . . Can this kind of action be acceptable?"
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These first experiences of working with the Soviets taught the CCP leaders two important lessons. First was that the party had to work even harder to align its policies with those of the Soviet Union. Quite a few of the CCP leaders including Liu Shaoqi and Ren Bishi felt that their party had not been fully accepted by Moscow because they had been found wanting in terms of "socialist" and "internationalist" consciousness. But the other lesson learned from the events of the hard winter of 1945 was that the. party could not, under any circumstance, depend on Soviet support to attain its ultimate goal of political control of China. This lesson would stick with the party leadership until Mao threw it overboard in agreeing to Kim Il Sung's attack on South Korea in the spring of 1950.
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Origins, 1946-1950
By the early summer of 1946, as Mao decided to counterattack against the GMD offensives in Manchuria, Soviet attention was directed squarely at the

 

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