Brothers in Arms (62 page)

Read Brothers in Arms Online

Authors: Odd Arne Westad

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

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mittee in July, in which he summed up the case against the CCP, Khrushchev's second in command, Frol Kozlov, saw a need to push the Chinese onboard if "socialism" was to succeed in its dual task: to expand abroad, especially in Europe and Asia, and to avoid an American nuclear attack while this "final shift in the global correlation of forces" took place. The Chinese, Kozlov claimed, seemed to turn away both from their international obligations and from Marxism-Leninism as a comprehensive way to understand world affairs.

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It is interesting that as the Sino-Soviet split deepened in 1960, Mao himself stayed out of view, instead pushing those of his associates who had been critical of his domestic policies and who may have been less inclined to heighten Sino-Soviet tension men such as Peng Zhen and Deng Xiaoping to deliver the harshest blows. In his only meeting with the Soviet ambassador that year a birthday visit on December 26 Mao tried to keep himself above the fray of the Sino-Soviet confrontation, possibly as an insurance policy in the internal struggle that he perceived existed within his own party. Mao stressed that he was not chairing Politburo meetings any more and that he "practically never speaks at the meetings of the Central Committee." He underlined his support for the compromise documents reached on some issues at a conference of Communist parties in Moscow that fall. "These documents caused a great deal of confusion in Western imperialist circles, among our common enemies," Mao said.
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As has been shown, the Sino-Soviet relationship went through a series of brief improvements followed by equally rapid descents in the period from mid-1960 to early 1963. The Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 was a hotly disputed topic between the two sides. The Soviet leaders interpreted the Chinese barrage of criticism first, for "adventurism" in deploying the missiles and then for "capitulationism" when withdrawing them as a sign that China would not be an ally of Moscow if war with the United States did break out. For the Chinese, the main lesson of October was that the Soviet leaders were still trying to dominate other socialist countries by deploying Soviet weapons and forces on their soil. "The missiles were absolutely not necessary for the defense of Cuba," Deng Xiaoping told the Soviet leaders. ''When you brought the missiles to Cuba, did you want to help [Cuba] or destroy it? We started to suspect that you wanted to bring this country under your control through deploying your missiles in Cuba."
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In terms of Chinese perceptions of Soviet policy, the controversy over international regulations on nuclear weapons proliferation and testing in 1962 and 1963 marked a dividing line. Ever since the Soviets first brought up the issue of a comprehensive agreement with the West on these issues in March 1962, the Chinese had been adamantly opposed to any treaties. In September, after Moscow had informed Beijing of its intention to negotiate a nonproliferation treaty with the United States, Chen Yi replied that the Soviet concern with pre-

 

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venting West Germany from getting nuclear weapons should not lead to preventing socialist countries from getting such weapons: "The defense capabilities of socialist countries should not be limited." On October 20 the Chinese repeated their warnings. The socialist world must seek nuclear superiority, the Chinese note said, not disarmament. "The Soviet comrades have lost their class position in the question of the threat of nuclear war." By refusing to provide China with nuclear weapons, "you betrayed the principle of proletarian internationalism." In the Chinese view, by signing the nonproliferation treaty with the United States in June 1963, Moscow joined Washington's campaign against Beijing.''

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During the July 1963 meetings between the Soviet and Chinese parties in Moscow, Deng Xiaoping ridiculed any form of cooperation with the United States.
The United States of America is an imperialist country the Soviet Union is a socialist country. How can these two countries, which belong to two fundamentally different social systems, coexist; how can they exercise general cooperation? The United States of America exercise deception and trickery toward other imperialist powers. How can one in such a case believe that there can be total unity between an imperialist country, the United States of America, and a socialist country, the Soviet Union? How can one believe that there can be harmonious coexistence between the United States of America and the Soviet Union? This is completely unthinkable and in this relationship one cannot submit to illusions.
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Revolutions and Antisystemlc Alliances
Having "common enemies" is as a general concept not enough to hold alliances together over time. What matters is the combination of individual policy priorities and perceptions of the enemy, entities that both are likely to change over time. Within the NATO alliance and the U.S.-Japan alliance, the policy priorities from all sides changed within a common framework, which was the economic integration brought on by the globalization of the market. This common framework stabilized these alliances, even at times when perceptions of an enemy threat were widely divergent.
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Antisystemic alliances such as the Sino-Soviet compact do not have these ties that bind and therefore are more dependent on a common perception of the enemy, of its capabilities, its intentions, and its determination. to win. They need a rather complete image of their opponent or opponents, an image created by a fairly synchronic development of perceptions. If they cannot agree on such an image, it will be very difficult to keep alliances of this kind together over time.
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This is exactly what happened to the Sino-Soviet alliance in the latter part of the 1950s. Moscow and Beijing could no longer agree on how to interpret American capabilities or intentions. Worldviews that shared many points of reference slowed the process of disintegration, at least up to the time when the dispute became public. In addition, both sides were hesitant to fully embrace their new perceptual positions: Khrushchev was as cautious in viewing détente as Mao was in viewing denunciation and confrontation. But after the second straits crisis in 1958, the divergent views became dogma, and the allies drifted apart.
What role did the conscious "wedge strategies" of the Eisenhower administration play in creating these perceptions? Some historians see Dulles by the mid-1950s as advocating a sophisticated strategy for exploiting Sino-Soviet differences. The gradual heightening of American pressure against the People's Republic led Beijing to make demands for military and economic assistance to which Moscow could not possibly agree. These researchers have concluded that when the Sino-Soviet alliance began to break up, it did so in very much the way Dulles had anticipated several years before.

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This, in my opinion, is where the real surprise of the Chinese and Soviet materials come up: The United States was not able to transmit to Beijing its projected image of increasing aggressiveness and determination. On the contrary, in the mid-to late 1950s starting with the first straits crisis and reaching its climax with the second Mao believed that the American threat was waning, not increasing, and that China was considerably more secure from an all-out U.S. attack than it had been during the first years of the People's Republic.
It was precisely this perception that enabled the Chinese leader to risk his Soviet alliance by stubbornly pushing for a more belligerent joint strategy against Washington. If Mao had believed that an American attack against his party and his regime was imminent a view that he held more or less continuously from 1946 until the first straits crisis in 1954-1955 then risking the alliance that he had fought so hard to get would have been foolhardy, out of style with Mao's strategic view.
But if Mao did not perceive the United States as an imminent threat, why then the need for confrontation? The main issue here was Taiwan and the U.S. blocking of the road to reunification. Mao could not accept a view of the United States that allowed for détente as long as Washington persisted in keeping Taiwan beyond his reach. Reunification had become his main aim in foreign policy, and he forced his views of both the Soviet Union and the United States to conform with his needs to obtain it.
It is interesting that the concrete foreign policy priorities of Mao and much of the Chinese leadership changed over time from voluntarily postponing the conquest of Taiwan for revolutionary gain elsewhere in 1949 to making reunifica-

 

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tion a vital part of their state-building project in the late 1950s. This instability in foreign policy priorities is common for revolutionary regimes and probably is connected to the leaders' perceptual changes, which occur when the needs of the state surmount those of a movement with international lineages or linkages as its main points of reference. For the People's Republic, the Taiwan issue has been the most powerful symbol of this ideological transformation, from Mao Zedong to Jiang Zemin and beyond.
Notes
1. Gordon Chang provides useful comments on Chinese and Soviet motives in his
Friends and Enemies: The United States, China, and the Soviet Union, 1948-1972
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990), although his main focus is on the United States. Constantine Pleshakov includes a skillful discussion of the different emphases in Soviet and Chinese perceptions in his paper for the January 1993 Cold War International History Project (CWIHP) conference in Moscow, "Khrushchev as Counter-Revolutionary: The Taiwan Straits Crisis of 1958 and the Sino-Soviet Schism."
2. For a similar view, see Odd Arne Westad, "Secrets of the Second World: Russian Archives and the Reinterpretation of Cold War History,"
Diplomatic History
21, no. 2 (Spring 1997): 259-72.
3. See Odd Arne Westad,
Cold War and Revolution: Soviet-American Rivalry and the Origins of the Chinese Civil War
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).
4. See Sergei Goncharov et al.,
Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao, and the Korean War
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993), 1-35; Chen Jian,
China's Road to the Korean War: The Making of the Sino-American Confrontation
(New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 9-63.
5. Memorandum of conversation, Roshchin-Zhou Enlai, October 31, 1949, Arkhiv vneshnei politiki Rossiiskoi Federatsii (AVPRF), fond (f.) 0100, opis (op.) 42, papka (pa.) 288, delo (d.) 19, pp. 74-7. See also Zhou Enlai's speech at the founding of the PRC foreign ministry, November 8, 1949,
Zhonggong dangshi jiaoxue cankao ziliao (ZDJCZ)
[Teaching reference materials on CCP history] (Beijing: np, nd), vol. 18, 590-2.
6. Liu Shaoqi to Stalin, July 4, 1949, Arkhiv prezidenta Rossiiskoi Federatsii (APRF), f. 45, op. 1, d. 328, quoted in Andrei Ledovsky, "The Moscow Visit of a Delegation of the Communist Party of China in June to August 1949,"
Far Eastern Affairs,
no. 4 (1996): 72.

 

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