Brothers in Arms (59 page)

Read Brothers in Arms Online

Authors: Odd Arne Westad

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

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5.
The Sino-Soviet Alliance and the United States
Odd Arne Westad
For the Sino-Soviet alliance, the conflict with the United States was both a cohesive element and a point of contention. The war against American troops in Korea shaped and cemented the alliance in ways that neither the Soviets nor the Chinese had predicted in 1950. On the other hand, the failure to agree on strategy in the global confrontation with Washington fueled the disintegration of the alliance from 1958 on. In this way it makes sense to understand the content of Sino-Soviet friendship primarily as an anti-American alliance or, at the global level, as an antisystemic alliance directed against the postwar U.S. presence in Asia and the world capitalist system in which the United States was the dominant power.
Although both Soviet and Chinese leaders viewed themselves as locked in an enduring conflict with the United States, their perceptions of the substance of that conflict varied widely. For Mao Zedong and most members of the Chinese leadership, the conflict was about U.S. attempts to dominate their region and about the massive evidence they discovered about the aggressive nature of U.S. imperialism. For the post-Stalin Soviet leaders, the main issues were universal recognition of Moscow's global role and the search for a managed or at least structured conflict with Washington. These differing perceptions spilled over onto other foreign policy issues in the alliance, such as Taiwan, India, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East.

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The author wishes to thank Nancy Tucker and Gordon Chang for their helpful comments when this chapter was first presented at a conference in Hong Kong in January 1996.

 

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If we choose to regard Sino-Soviet cooperation primarily as an antisystemic alliance directed against the United States and its hegemony in global politics, we need to explain why the alliance broke down just as Washington was solidifying its control of the Asia-Pacific region. How much did U.S. pressure on China contribute to the breakdown? And how did the prospect of conflict with the United States influence the allies' perceptions of each other?
In answering these questions, we need to look more closely at the changing images of U.S. power and intentions within the Soviet and Chinese leaderships. Often these images were very different from Western depictions of its own position and capabilities, and frequently the dominant understandings in Moscow and Beijing were at odds with each other. Although both sets of leaders understood U.S. power within a Marxist framework, they frequently disagreed in their conclusions. Reading through their policy papers, we could easily argue that the limited amount of concrete evidence available in Beijing or Moscow on production, market, and class straggle in the United States, on intercapitalist rival-ties, and on the relationship between American capital and the capital of other imperialist countries contributed strongly to these differences.
But the narrow categories for understanding developments in the West did not prevent the two leaderships from constructing broad interpretations regarding the course of American power. On the Soviet side, the Khrushchev leadership from 1957 to 1958 on, under the impression of the integration of West Germany into Western markets and into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and the cautious American response to the 1956-1957 unrest in Eastern Europe, had come to believe that the United States was consolidating its position of dominance in Europe. Contrary to what some scholars have believed, the Soviet sense of its own achievements in the late 1950s was not accompanied by an increased sense of security. Although stressing the deepening impotence of U.S. power outside Europe, Nikita Khrushchev feared that as the domestic successes of socialism grew, American imperialism would become increasingly aggressive and concentrate its main efforts against the Soviet Union and its allies, and even threaten to obliterate the socialist achievements through war. His détente policies were the direct results of this perception.

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The Chinese leadership's views of the United States were also uncertain and fluctuating. But in contrast to Khrushchev, Mao Zedong in the late 1950s started to underline American vulnerability, even in military terms. The chairman's reading of the world, especially after the second Taiwan Straits crisis in mid-1958, was that the American position had been undermined by the other main capitalist countries and by nationalist regimes in Asia and Africa. Together with the reignited campaigns for socialism in China, the consolidation of the Communist regimes in Eastern Europe, and the perceived domestic economic prob-

 

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lems in the United States, Mao and his followers believed they witnessed a global "anticapitalist wave" that was challenging American hegemony.
The new evidence shows that these differing perceptions played a key role in the breakup of the Sino-Soviet alliance. Just as the parallel perceptions of the United States in the early phase of the alliance provided much of the glue to hold it together, changed perceptions in the later period became a wedge to drive it apart.
The United States and the Formation of the Alliance
During the Chinese civil war, Mao knew that he needed an international alliance of his own to counter the alliance between the Guomindang (GMD) and the United States. He also knew that the Soviet Union was his best choice for an alliance partner, both because of the Marxist-Leninist worldview that both sides professed to and because of the breakdown of Soviet-GMD relations in the spring of 1946. Mao had concluded from his troubled attempts at cooperating with the Soviets in Manchuria after the Japanese surrender that a similar worldview was not enough to keep an alliance between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Soviets together. He needed to offer Stalin something that Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) would not give: the hope for long-term Soviet influence in China
and
cooperation directed against the United States. These two elements ideology and availability together formed the fertile soil from which the alliance grew.

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But if the Sino-Soviet relationship during the civil war was the ground from which the alliance sprang, then resentment of the United States was the climate that shaped and nurtured it. To Mao, Washington had proven itself during the last phase of his party's battle with the GMD to be an implacable enemy of the revolution, an enemy that in its search for domination over China would threaten the existence of his government. For Stalin, the United States was the leading country in the imperialist camp and the director of the efforts to deny the Soviet Union its rightful share of global influence after World War II. To his surprise, China became an area in which Stalin could get back at the United States without risking war. The means for doing so was an alliance with the Chinese Communists, even if this was a party that had inconvenienced Stalin at several important junctures and that he therefore distrusted more than most other fraternal parties .
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In the final months leading up to the signing of the formal alliance in early 1950 a period that also saw the establishment of the People's Republic of China (PRC) both Chinese and Soviets for their own purposes stressed the aggressive intentions of the United States in East Asia. Moscow underlined what it saw as American plans for a rearmament of Japan and economic and military

 

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control of Southeast Asia. Mao and the Chinese leaders emphasized that the United States was still plotting to subvert the victory of the Chinese Revolution, by providing support for the GMD remnant on Taiwan and also and more important by organizing and funding counterrevolutionary groups on the mainland. To the Chinese, Washington's actions demonstrated the need for creating a formalized Sino-Soviet alliance as soon as possible.

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In the written report that the second-ranking leader of the Chinese Party Liu Shaoqi presented to the Soviet Politburo in Moscow on July 11, 1949, he repeatedly stressed the American threat:
We have always reckoned with the possibility of imperialist armed intervention against the Chinese Revolution. The instructions given to us in this matter by the Soviet Communist Party, which we have accepted in full, have alerted us to give more attention in this regard. . . . Quite possibly, the imperialists would dispatch 100,000 to 200,000 troops for seizing three or four Chinese ports or for committing various acts of sabotage.
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American designs to split Moscow and Beijing further underscored the urgency of a meeting between Stalin and Mao to sign a treaty that would powerfully demonstrate to the imperialists Soviet military support for the new Communist regime. Li Kenong the CCP head of intelligence who served as Mao's messenger to the Soviet ambassador during the first years of the People's Republic charged in a November 1949 conversation at the Soviet embassy that the Americans had a "plan of changing the CCP to echo the Tito clique" and had strengthened their "efforts in China to undermine Sino-Soviet friendship." Among the main points of imperialist propaganda were, according to Li, accusations that the Soviets were "stealing China's food and resources and attacks on the Sino-Soviet treaty of 1945, characterizing it as an unequal, imperialist treaty as a result of which China lost Guandong and all industrial equipment in Manchuria."
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The not-too-subtle duality of Mao's message was not lost on Ambassador Nikolai Roshchin nor on his Moscow superiors and must have been one of the reasons why Stalin was not too eager to see the treaty renegotiated. Yet Stalin probably realized that some changes to the treaty, accompanied by Soviet economic and military aid, were the price that had to be paid to cash in on the advantages a strong Soviet position in China would have in the international power game. There was something halfhearted in the Soviet efforts to postpone a Sino-Soviet summit in the last half of 1949, and when Premier Zhou Enlai made it plain that Mao insisted on being received in Moscow, Stalin did not risk turning

 

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