Brothers in Arms (60 page)

Read Brothers in Arms Online

Authors: Odd Arne Westad

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

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down the Chinese leader's self-invitation to the
Vozhd's
the "Boss's" seventieth birthday celebrations.

8

In the months after the founding of the People's Republic of China, its leaders were much preoccupied with how to meet the American threat. Their main concerns were with U.S.-sponsored domestic subversion, particularly in the cities, which the Chinese Communists, in spite of their military victory, felt unable to control, and with the construction of anti-Communist bases in areas bordering the People's Republic, particularly in Indochina. Mao wanted to reduce the risk of American support for counterrevolution by evicting all Americans diplomats, missionaries, and businessmen from China. He also wanted to send People's Liberation Army (PLA) units to Indochina to fight alongside the Vietminh against the French and those GMD remnants that Mao suspected of working for the French and U.S. governments. Indochina, Zhou Enlai explained to the Soviet ambassador, had the highest priority in terms of Chinese military preparations, even higher than the preparations for the liberation of Taiwan.
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Mao probably expected to discuss strategy on both these issues during his visit to Moscow. Stalin, however, did not wait for Mao's arrival to reject both proposals. He reiterated his advice from the spring of 1949 that China ought not to reject trade with the United States or other capitalist countries, nor should the new government turn down offers of diplomatic recognition. Stalin also objected strongly to sending PLA units to Vietnam, stressing that neither the timing nor circumstances for such an effort benefited the world Communist movement. It has later been suggested that Stalin's attitude was associated primarily with his view of the political potential of the French left wing in forthcoming elections. In any case, Mao had little of his own foreign policy agenda to discuss with Stalin when the Chinese leader arrived in Moscow on December 16.
10
What was on Mao's mind when he started his conversations was giving a new shape to Sino-Soviet relations. Mao wanted to formalize his alliance with the Soviet Union in order to secure support from Moscow in case of war with the United States. He also needed Soviet assistance in building China's economy and defense. But in addition to his practical needs, Mao also told Stalin that he wanted something "beautiful" that is, the abrogation of the 1945 Sino-Soviet treaty that Moscow had signed with Jiang Jieshi and that Mao and his associates regarded as a reminder of the unequal treaties of the past.
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Past accounts of the Moscow talks have pointed out that the United States became "the invisible third partner in the Stalin-Mao dialogue."
12
The problem has been
how
the issue of dealing with the invisible player influenced the talks. Some scholars stress Stalin's perfidious strategy of exacerbating Sino-Western tensions in order to increase Chinese dependence on the Soviet Union. It is dif-

 

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ficult to find much support for this thesis in the records. Quite to the contrary, Stalin's favorite role during his talks with Mao was that of the cautious statesman who could dictate strategy to his Chinese partners because of his superior understanding of the international situation.
The differing attitudes of Mao and Stalin on how to confront the American enemy were based on differing assumptions of the likelihood of a U.S. attack against their countries. Mao was convinced that an American assault on China would come he could just not say when it would happen. His chief of intelligence, Li Kenong, visited the Soviet chargé d'affaires, Shibaev on January 16 just as the two sides were starting serious negotiations in Moscow and informed the startled diplomat that the CCP "has information. . . that the Americans are going to unleash the new, third World War this June, starting with military actions in the Pacific and making use of Japan, Formosa, and South Korea."

13
Although neither Li nor Mao may have trusted this kind of information, in no way they did consider the prospects unlikely. By informing the Soviets, they prompted the apprehension of an American attack the very prospect that gave urgency to the Moscow negotiations.

Stalin's perspective was less dramatic with regard to war. The Soviet nuclear test in 1949 and American restraint with regard to Berlin and the Communist victory in China had convinced him that a Soviet-U.S. war could be avoided, at least for the forseeable future. Especially if he was to sign a mutual defense treaty with the People's Republic, he needed to see to it that his Chinese pro-tégées did not on their own provoke a war with Washington. In his first meeting with Mao on December 16, Stalin stressed that concerning Taiwan, the Chinese should not "give [the] Americans an excuse to interfere." "There is no need for you to create conflicts with the British and the Americans."
14
From his dealings with Mao since 1946, Stalin must have realized that he did not need to remind the Chinese of the American threat it was there already in a much more potent form than could ever be conveyed from abroad.
Initially Stalin was very hesitant to sign an alliance treaty with the People's Republic. He preferred to make revisions to the 1945 treaty that he had signed with the Jiang Jieshi regime, thereby both safeguarding the concessions he had wrested from the Guomindang five years earlier and avoiding unnecessarily provoking the United States by putting the public spotlight on an anti-American alliance. The two main reasons why Mao still got his alliance in the end were first, his increasingly desperate pleads to Andrei Vyshinskii, Vyacheslav Molotov, Anastas Mikoyan, and Ambassador Nikolai Roshchin over the New Year holidays. Many among the Soviet leadership believed that for Mao to leave Moscow without a new treaty would undermine his and his party's position in China. They felt that the Soviet Union needed to do its part to secure its new Commu-

 

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nist neighbor, and Mikoyan, among others, suggested to Stalin that there may be ways to set up a new treaty without negative repercussions for the Soviet Union.

15

Also, Stalin's reading of the signals that came out of Washington during the Sino-Soviet summit helped reduce his hesitancy to negotiate a new agreement. Stalin had Molotov read out aloud to Mao parts of the speech of U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson before the National Press Club on January 12. Molotov underlined that Washington wanted to stir up trouble with regard to Sino-Soviet friendship and that Acheson implied that the United States would concentrate on holding on to Taiwan. Mao commented that this was a challenge to which both China and the Soviet Union had to stand up.
16
The Korean War
The Korean War was a war that nobody but North Korean leader Kim II Sung and his Pyongyang associates really wanted, but which Stalin brought about as a result of his indecisiveness and precarious judgment. It became the first and only hot war between the United States and another Great Power during the Cold War era and brought with it periods of extraordinary tension and danger, particularly during the first six months. It devastated the Korean peninsula and solidified Mao's control of the Chinese Communist Party, a grip that in the long run would mean at least as much destruction and suffering as the war itself.
17
The war also anchored the Sino-Soviet alliance in a much more concrete image of the enemy than during the Moscow negotiations the United States had shown that it was willing to and capable of fighting a war on the Asian mainland. If the United States could intervene in Korea, it also could strike against China if its political leaders decided to do so. For Beijing the Korean War proved that the American threat was real and imminent, an awareness that stayed with the CCP leadership at least up to 1958, although the outcome of the war convinced Mao and most Chinese that China could successfully resist outside intervention in "its" region.
Mao also realized that Soviet aid had contributed to the Chinese ability to fight the United States, although the assistance, at least initially, was far below what the Chinese had hoped for. Since Mao misinterpreted Stalin's prewar diplomatic bungling for revolutionary fervor, he also believed that the war showed the Soviet Union to be "sincere" in its ideological commitments to defend East Asian revolutions. The real significance of Mao's conclusion was of course his realization that the Soviet Union with its nuclear capabilities was a powerful permanent deterrent against a direct American attack on China.
To Stalin War showed that the Chinese had stronger military capa-

 

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bilities than he had ever expected. This Chinese prowess allowed him to influence the war from the back stage rather than having to face the consequences of giving the go-ahead to Kim's attack. It is quite possible that Stalin was sufficiently impressed with the Chinese performance to plan an upgrading in terms of economic and technological cooperation of the alliance during 1952-1953, even though Mao's resistance against ending the war in 1951 had annoyed the Soviet leader.
In practical terms, to both Beijing and Moscow, the war against the United States worked rather well. Already during the first days after the North Korean attack, the two sides discussed how China could assist Kim Il Sung. In a meeting between Ambassador Roshchin and the Chinese head of intelligence, Zhou Dapeng, Zhou described how North Korean forces were being sent to South Korea via ports on the Shandong Peninsula and how Beijing had sent Chinese ''specialists" to South Korea to assist the advancing North Korean troops.

18

The main problem in the latter phase of the war was how to arrive at a cease-fire in a conflict that neither Stalin nor Mao any longer believed that their side could win. During his meetings with Zhou Enlai in Moscow in the summer of 1952, Stalin initially paid lip service to Mao's position from the year before, while underlining that the Chinese and North Koreans should not undertake any offensives and should postpone the prisoner-of-war issues until after an armistice agreement was signed. Stalin knew that the war was taxing China's economy and its resources, and probably had expected that Mao would come around to accept a cease-fire. When that did happen, Stalin's own insistence on controlling the negotiation processes prolonged the war, at least by several months.
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The High Point of Sino-Soviet Cooperation
Stalin's death in March 1953 brought with it both a general relaxation of international tension and the prospect for closer Sino-Soviet cooperation. The passing of the increasingly unpredictable dictator left the new Soviet leaders longing for some stability in their foreign relations and an improvement of contacts with the West interestingly,
all
major contenders for power in the Kremlin seem to have based their ideas on these premises. With Stalin gone, the association between the Soviet Union and China and between Mao and Stalin's successor could become more equal, stable, and mutually profitable. The conflict between the blocs seemed headed for a calmer period, one in which the need for inward integration, both East and West, replaced the outward battles of the early Cold War period.
20
The Geneva conference seemed to symbolize the new spirit of the mid-1950s. A war-weary China not only agreed to Soviet proposals for how to find a peaceful settlement to the Indochina conflict, but Mao also accepted putting Zhou En-

 

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lai's diplomatic skills to work in convincing the Vietnamese Communists that a temporary division of their country was in the best interests both of themselves and of world revolution. Moscow concluded that the CCP had lost its appetite for engaging the imperialists at any given chance and thought it a better ally for that.

21

Mao had three main concerns about the new international climate. First, as a nationalist, he worried that having forced the Vietnamese to accept a division of their country, he also may have to accept the separation of Taiwan from the motherland for a long time to come. Second, he still feared that the United States could launch a surprise attack on China in alliance with Chinese counterrevolutionaries. Third, at least by early 1955 he started to agonize over the fate of domestic social revolution as the CCP regime moved toward normalizing its internal and external state functions.
22
All these apprehensions may have contributed to Mao's decision in the late summer of 1954 to launch attacks on the small islands that the GMD occupied off the Chinese coast. What prompted the attacks, however, was the Eisenhower administration's negotiations with Jiang Jieshi over a mutual defense treaty. Such a treaty, Mao feared, would separate Taiwan from the mainland permanently and make it a base for U.S. preparations for war against China. It could not stand without challenge. However, the CCP Politburo was very careful in spelling out to its military leaders and to the Soviets that its aims were limited. The purpose of the attacks was to occupy the coastal islands and to "strike against" the U.S.-GMD treaty.
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The Soviet leaders did not protest Chinese strategy on the islands issue, although they were baffled by a CCP strategy that they found counterproductive with regard to both the United States and the GMD. In his meetings with Mao in Beijing on September 30 and October 3, 1954, the new Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, accepted Beijing's assurances that the People's Republic would avoid a direct confrontation with Washington at any cost. In January 1955, as the U.S. Seventh Fleet moved in position to defend GMD supply lines to the islands of Jinmen and Mazu, Mao deescalated the crisis by not attempting an assault on them in the wake of the GMD evacuation of the Dachen Islands. Then, in April, Zhou Enlai announced that China was prepared to stop its attacks if the United States was willing to discuss a cease-fire. Based on Soviet sources, it seems that Zhou's statement came just as Moscow was getting ready to tell Beijing to call it quits. The Soviets held back, although their faith in CCP foreign policy, so recently enhanced by the Geneva conference, had been badly shaken.
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The period from mid-1955 to mid-1958 was the high point of the Sino-Soviet alliance, a three-year period during which Soviet assistance increased substan-

 

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