Brothers in Arms (54 page)

Read Brothers in Arms Online

Authors: Odd Arne Westad

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

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public if it is attacked from the outside. To be more precise, if the U.S. attacks the PRC."

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Chairman Mao's reply to the CPSU CC dated October 15 was mainly of an ideological nature. It said: "We are deeply touched by your endless devotion to Marxist-Leninist principles and internationalism. On behalf of all the comrades all CCP members I express cordial gratitude to you."
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Thus Mao secured inclusion of China in the group of countries protected by Moscow's nuclear umbrella. By his actions he had elicited a concrete Soviet commitment to China's defense and thereby strengthened his regime's regional position as well as his influence on Soviet actions. The crisis that he provoked also prompted China to increase its own nuclear program.
Given PRC policies on the Taiwan issue, the Soviet alliance provided the critical support that Mao needed to avert a conflict with the United States. To both Moscow and Beijing, the United States remained a strategic enemy, not least because of its verbal bellicosity on the issue of Taiwan and its support for the GMD. Leaders in both capitals long recalled American statements on "not ruling out" the possibility of using atomic weapons against China and indications that the United States might back GMD vows to recapture the mainland.
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Other American policies also forced the Chinese and the Soviets closer together. The embargo on all American exports to China, Hong Kong, and Macao (announced in 1950) and U.S. policies in Japan, Korea, and Indochina meant that the People's Republic found itself almost isolated internationally; thus it was forced to ask ideological allies and Communist countries for help.
Specific Issues of Military Cooperation
According to Russian archival documents, large-scale Sino-Soviet cooperation in building military industries began in early 1955. The Soviet embassy 1955 annual report states that at the end of 1955, the Chinese government officially requested that the Soviets increase and accelerate aid to the People's Republic in a number of industrial and defense construction issues. In a letter to Bulganin dated November 6, 1955, Zhou Enlai requested that 168 Soviet specialists be sent to China to help its defense and fuel industries.
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Chinese authorities quickly realized that Khrushchev was interested in the creation of a powerful military force in China, and they began to use Moscow's policy in their own interests.
According to Soviet experts, about half of all the equipment delivered from the Soviet Union to China was machinery for integrated enterprises and the defense industry; 95 percent of the total Soviet exports to China consisted of technical equipment, ferrous metals, means of transportation, and oil products the essentials for building a modem military industry.
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The military cooperation between the two countries in the 1950s was one-sided. The Soviet Union was the donor state, while China was the recipient of

 

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aid. As the base for China's heavy industry developed in the mid-and late 1950s, Chinese requests for Soviet aid to its military industries became more specific. For instance, in May 1958 Zhou asked Khrushchev to render China technical assistance in the construction of forty-eight projects included in the preliminary list of projects of the PRC's Second Five-Year Plan (all of which required Soviet assistance to complete). Zhou's letter included precise proposals regarding who would design the projects, and he stressed that the most important equipment and machinery for the industrial projects had to be delivered from the Soviet Union. Machinery and equipment set for 1959 delivery would exceed 400 million rubles.

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The list of projects included enterprises on which China's defense potential depended, among them the aluminium plant in Henan (production capacity of 100,000 tons of aluminium per year), a rare metals plant in Hunan and one in Baotou that processed fifteen rare metals, a special hardware plant with an annual production capacity of 30,000 to 50,000 tons of high-quality wire, a cable factory at a Jiantan military plant producing 50,000 kilometers of cable for defense purposes yearly, precision electrical appliances plants, and power rectifiers plants.
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Two months later the PRC government addressed the Soviet government through the Chinese embassy in Moscow with a request for assistance in the construction of several enterprises to produce guided missiles. The enterprises were to be put into operation between 1960 and 1963, along with a number of plants producing devices for those missiles. Actually, the Chinese sought Soviet help in setting up full-scale production of the new Soviet generation of missiles, the most advanced weapons in the Soviet arsenal.
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The speed with which defense enterprises in China were to be constructed was so fast that sometimes the Soviets could not keep up. This situation frequently led to failures in the work of Soviet experts. Likewise, the hastily conceived expert missions to China caused havoc in parts of Soviet defense industry, since the necessary staff had to be selected quickly from plants all over the Soviet Union. The Soviet embassy in Beijing collected and reported to Moscow on both Chinese and Soviet accounts on the work of Soviet experts in China. In accordance with the established practice, this information went to the Far East Department of the Foreign Ministry, which then circulated information to appropriate ministries. The Foreign Ministry also coordinated the responses and initiatives from the Soviet side, so that its records give a fairly complete picture even at the level of specific projects in China.
An example related to the military agreements is the correspondence of I. V. Arkhipov, deputy chairman of State Committee on Economic Cooperation, with V. N. Likhachev, deputy head of the Soviet Foreign Ministry's Far East Department in August 1958 on deliveries of "special equipment" (military equip-

 

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ment or weapon prototypes) for the Chinese plant 616, which was engaged in the production of tank engines. According to Arkhipov, difficulties encountered by Soviet designers of these engines caused delays in special equipment deliveries for that plant.

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Clearly the capacities of Soviet defense enterprises in the late 1950s could not keep up with the pace of China' s defense industry. In his report to the Soviet embassy to China on results of his visit to Soviet-sponsored construction projects in the cities of Baotou and Datong, V. Zharkov, the embassy's first secretary, listed interesting evidence. According to declarations made by Soviet experts, the Soviet Council of Ministers State Committee on Defense Industries was being careless regarding provision of technical documentation to the Chinese recipients. The Soviet diplomat pointed out that sometimes the artillery plant 447 in Baotou received low-quality documentation, which seemed to be collected hurriedly at Soviet plants.
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Sloppy transport routines often were reported. For instance, there was water inside some of the mixing machines delivered for Jilin's electrode plant, and while in Siberia some of them burst from the frost.
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Most hurt by these incidents obviously was the Chinese side, although they also made the work of Soviet experts much more difficult and in some cases caused considerable friction between them and their Chinese colleagues. Zhao Yang, chief engineer of the plant in Jilin, pleaded for the quick arrival of Soviet experts to his plant, telling the Soviets that they should arrive before the agreed date; he was especially insistent that the chief engineer from the Soviet Union arrive more quickly to help the Chinese organize the production after initial mishaps.
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In September 1958 the Soviet Council of Ministers adopted a decree on the volume of export of main types of equipment and materials for enterprises that were under construction and planned to be constructed abroad with the Soviet assistance between 1959 and 1965. The plan envisaged that according to the assumed obligations, export volume of equipment and materials for construction of enterprises in China would total 650 million rubles in 1958, 1.160 billion rubles in 1959, 1.082 billion in 1960, 672 million in 1961, 342 million in 1962, 157 million in 1963, and 19 million in 1964.
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While these plans were never implemented in full, the volumes and the gradual phasing out of this form of Soviet support seems noteworthy.
Soviet Technical Aid to China
A spring 1957 report from the head of the Far East Department of the Soviet Foreign Ministry, I. V. Kurdiukov, provides useful insights into Moscow's technological assistance to China in the 1950s. Kurdiukov pointed out that ac-

 

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cording to agreements signed between the two countries, it was envisaged that Soviet organizations would deliver engineering equipment for 211 enterprises and 27 separate shops and plants for the total sum of 9.6 billion rubles in export prices. Between 1951 and 1956, 26 enterprises were finished and put into operation in China, 31 enterprises were partially completed, and 17 separate shops and plants were put into operation. Soviet organizations delivered to China equipment costing 8.5 billion rubles; between 1950 and 1956, 5,092 Soviet specialists worked in China, including engineers, workers, and foremen.

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Enterprises built with Soviet assistance were sometimes equipped with state-of-the-art machinery not yet available at Soviet enterprises.
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PRC representatives to the talks with Soviet officials emphasized successes achieved in China with the help of enterprises built with Soviet assistance. In January 1958, for instance, Deputy Premier Bo Yibo said that by the end of 1959, 450 new enterprises would be put into operation, with 57 of them constructed with the help of the Soviet Union. Bo also stated that the number of Soviet-aided enterprises put into operation was in fact larger than indicated in Chinese published documents.
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At the same time, the CCP tried to limit the opportunities for any political influence that Soviet specialists might have on their Chinese counterparts. In a talk between Ambassador Iudin and Liu Shaoqi in October 1956, Liu pointed out that serious difficulties had occurred in the work of foreign advisers in the people's democracies, as they were "poorly acquainted with peculiarities of the country they work in. The political recommendations some of these advisers give sometimes lead to negative consequences." According to Liu, some Soviet specialists already had accomplished their tasks in training Chinese staff, and the time had come to discuss their return to the Soviet Union.
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By 1957 the number of Soviet specialists had been reduced by one-third by 947 persons in all.
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Missile technology was a particularly interesting field of cooperation from a Chinese viewpoint, probably connected to their plans for offensives against Taiwan. On October 7, 1959, a high-speed aircraft (RB-57 D) belonging to the Taiwanese army was shot down by three antiaircraft missiles over Beijing. The aircraft was downed by a Chinese military detachment from an antiaircraft missile complex (C-75). The weapons had been prepared and the personnel had been trained by Soviet military experts. Later, in the 1960s, C-75 complexes were used in Vietnam, and the U.S. Air Force lost many military aircraft because of these weapons.
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Several Soviet officers and experts in missile technology served in China in the 1950s. One of the heads of this group was Colonel Alexander Saveliev, a top Soviet specialist, who had been an expert in advanced artillery during the last

 

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phase of World War II. He spent almost a year in China in 1958-1959 as chief adviser on battle use of ground-to-ground missiles.
Saveliev headed an independent group of experts and was subordinate only to Army-General Pavel Batov, Chief Military Adviser of the Soviet Union in China. But even this command relationship functioned only in theory: Although he was formally subordinate to Batov, Saveliev's work was considered so important that he could ignore those of the general's orders that did not correspond with instructions received directly from Moscow. Saveliev and his group were supposed to prepare the Chinese as best they could for the use of advanced Soviet missiles,
but
Moscow also instructed him not to pass to China strategic and tactical missiles with an action radius exceeding 1,800 miles. Batov, who was not informed of the decision, kept asking for such weapons for the Chinese.
For most of his mission to China, Saveliev was under direct command of Marshal Nedelin, the deputy Soviet defense minister in charge of special armaments and rocket technology, who from December 1959 headed the new Strategic Missile Corps. It was Nedelin who instructed Saveliev to help the Chinese only regarding SS-2 and SS-1 missiles, the short-range missiles that had just been designed by the famous engineer Sergei Korolev.
The so-called missile group in Beijing was headed by Major Sukhodolskii, a test engineer from the rocket testing base Kapustin Yar. Officers of that group were engaged mainly in introducing the new technology to Chinese military representatives and in work on the testing area that was being constructed in northeast China, in the Gobi Desert. Colonel Saveliev guided that group's activity.
It is impossible to say if the Chinese knew that the Soviets were deliberately holding back some advanced missile technology. On the surface, at least, the PLA expressed gratitude to the Soviet Army for the aid of its specialists. "The USSR seeks to help our army with new, modem weapons. To render assistance in mastering it, the Soviet Army command has sent one of its best missile experts to China," said the PLA deputy chief of staff at a dinner given on the occasion of Colonel Saveliev's arrival.

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The Chinese experts carefully studied the Soviet experience with missiles and artillery, including troop structure; Soviet experts recommended that the Chinese take a regiment as the basis for the PLA structure. The Chinese followed that advice; as a result, in a year's time twenty regiments were formed in China with SS-2 and SS-1 missiles.
The Soviet aid was instrumental in equipping China with a fairly advanced system of missile defenses, far above what the Chinese could have managed on their own. But the Soviet Union had no intention of helping China create or deploy modem long-range offensive missile systems. Even during the heyday of

 

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