Authors: Odd Westad
But the confrontation between Mao and Khrushchev was only the beginning of the Sino-Soviet split, not its conclusion. In the winter of 1959–1960 Mao began to prepare for an open polemic against Soviet views on international affairs and Communist doctrine. A small group, headed by Deng Xiaoping, was assembled to prepare a series of articles attacking Khrushchev’s views, thinly disguised as those of Marshal Tito and the Yugoslavs. In April 1960, on the ninetieth anniversary of Lenin’s birth, the CCP fired the first barrage. Placing themselves in the position of determining what modern-day Leninism amounted to, the Chinese exhorted Marxist-Leninists worldwide to “thoroughly expose the absurdities of the imperialists and modern revisionists on these questions, eradicate their influence among the masses, awaken those they have temporarily hoodwinked and further arouse the revolutionary will of the masses.”
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In June 1960 the two parties clashed openly at the congress of the Romanian Communist party, displaying to the world that all was not well in the Communist camp. In the wake of the congress
Khrushchev’s temper got the better of him, as Mao may have hoped for. On 18 July the Soviet leader ordered the majority of the 1,400 Soviet advisers in China to return home immediately, and most left within three weeks.
In just two years Mao and the CCP had created a massive economic disaster at home and come close to breaking with all of its allies abroad. Mao proclaimed that it was all good for China; his policies, according to the Chairman himself, ensured national independence and political purity, and therefore laid the foundation for China’s future transformation. But by the autumn of 1960 cooler heads began to prevail. Looking at the staggering death toll of the Great Leap, Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, on occasion helped by Premier Zhou Enlai (when he found the courage to do so), began to reverse some of the worst excesses of the party’s policies. The Chairman himself was happy to sit back and let others begin to clear up the mess he had created, though he kept close watch to avoid political deviations. He even allowed a reduction in tension with Moscow, permitting the Soviets to send new advisers in to complete ongoing projects and send food supplies to help alleviate the hunger in some provinces. Mao had no problem with receiving further assistance from Moscow. As late as the spring of 1962 it is doubtful whether he had envisaged a complete break with the Kremlin. He wanted to strengthen his own position in the world Communist movement and gain the freedom to take China in whatever direction he thought best. If the Soviets were willing to accept that, he might not break fully with Khrushchev even in the future, he told his subordinates.
Throughout the early 1960s, limited forms of cooperation between Beijing and Moscow continued. In April 1961, the two countries signed a new and comprehensive trade agreement, and in the international negotiations on the future of Laos, the Soviets and Chinese worked quite closely together, at least up to the spring of 1962. In some fields, such as intelligence sharing and acquisition of military technology, a bilateral relationship continued to exist up to mid-1964. By then, however, Mao
had decided to make the final break with the Soviet Union. To him and his closest supporters, the danger to the Maoist project was clear. The new forms of cooperation with the Soviets taken together with the consolidation in the Chinese economy implied an inherent criticism of the Great Leap Forward. In the summer of 1962, Liu Shaoqi, whom Mao a few years earlier had made president of the People’s Republic, openly castigated the Leap. “We had many flaws and mistakes in implementing the general line, organizing the people’s communes, and conducting the Great Leap Forward, even grave flaws and mistakes,” Liu told the party’s inner circle. “I think it is high time that we look back to examine and draw lessons. We can no longer continue to go on like this.”
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On foreign affairs, the head of CCP International Department Wang Jiaxiang, the Soviet-educated first PRC ambassador to Moscow and a key CCP intellectual, recommended a return to the principle of peaceful coexistence and a continuation of the Sino-Soviet alliance.
Mao was furious. At two meetings in late summer 1962 he struck back against those he saw as his opponents within the party. “I think that right-wing opportunism in China should be renamed: it should be called Chinese revisionism,” he told his shocked colleagues. The Chairman insisted that the Soviet case showed that class struggle continued under socialism, and that China was engaged, domestically and internationally, in a “struggle against bourgeois ideas, which is identical with the struggle between Marxism-Leninism and revisionism.” “On whether or not revisionism will emerge in our country, one [answer] is yes and the other is no. Now some cadres can be bribed with a pound of pork or a few packs of cigarettes.” Making doubts about the Great Leap a matter of class struggle was tantamount to taking methods earlier employed against the party’s class enemies and using them on party members. It meant that hereafter nobody was safe. Zhou Enlai, eager to please the Chairman and unable to understand the long-term consequences of Mao’s views, immediately fell into line. “The struggle against revisionism has entered a new stage,” the Premier now found,
in which “class struggle has become a fundamental issue in our relations with fraternal parties.” Zhou continued, “The truth of Marxism-Leninism and the center of the world revolution have moved from Moscow to Beijing. We should be brave and not shrink from our responsibilities.”
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Mao, as he often did, composed a poem about his own feelings of increasing megalomania:
On this tiny globe
A few flies dash themselves against the wall,
Humming without cease,
Sometimes shrilling,
Sometimes moaning. . . .
The world rolls on,
Time presses.
Ten thousand years are too long,
Seize the day, seize the hour!
The Four Seas are rising, clouds and waters raging,
The Five Continents are rocking, wind and thunder roaring.
Our force is irresistible,
Away with all pests!
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A
S THE
S
INO
-S
OVIET CONFLICT ESCALATED
, the search for allies in the Third World intensified. The mid-1950s saw a Soviet charm offensive toward non-Communist regimes such as India and Indonesia. In response, China established as a top priority the developing of good relations with its neighbors in Asia, India included. At the 1955 Afro-Asian conference in Bandung, Indian premier Nehru and Chinese premier Zhou embraced and promised eternal friendship between the two countries. By the end of the decade, however, the Sino-Indian relationship was in tatters. As China’s domestic priorities drifted toward the left, the CCP became less tolerant of the character of the Indian leaders,
whom the party saw as the bourgeois successors to British imperialism. China also became more security-minded about its border areas and regretted even the very limited form of de facto autonomy that had been given to Tibet in 1950. When the more radical Chinese policies in Lhasa led to a rebellion in Tibet in 1959 and to the flight of the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan religious leader, Mao Zedong concluded that India was behind the unrest and that New Delhi sought to benefit from it. By the early 1960s the relationship between the two countries was at the breaking point.
Both the Soviets and the CCP’s own nationalities experts had recommended that the new PRC government go easy on Tibet after Chinese soldiers entered Lhasa in 1950. While local CCP reports from Tibet from the beginning condemned the feudalism and oppression of peasants that they saw in Tibetan society, Mao Zedong and the leadership intially wanted to carry out reform in such a strategically important area gradually and carefully. When smaller uprisings against land reform broke out in the Tibetan borderlands in 1956, the PRC increased its security presence in Lhasa step by step. In the spring of 1959 a rumor that the Chinese were planning to kidnap the Dalai Lama brought hundreds of thousands of Tibetans onto the streets in Lhasa. The PLA crushed what they saw as a rebellion in the Tibetan capital with an iron fist, but in the mêlée that followed Dalai and some members of the Tibetan religious leadership managed to flee across the border into India. Before the Dalai Lama’s flight, the PRC authorities had been complaining to the Soviets for more than a year about what they saw (probably correctly) as Indian and CIA assistance to the Tibetan fighters. With the Tibetan refugees welcomed south of the border, the CCP leaders were certain that they faced an enemy in New Delhi that was intent on stirring up trouble along China’s frontiers.
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The conflict with India was made worse by Soviet unwillingness to condemn Delhi outright and by China’s increasingly hard-line domestic policies. By the summer of 1962, when Mao turned on those who had been trying to sweep up after the crash of his Great Leap, policy toward
India was pulled into the framework of isolation and siege. India choosing this precise time to begin forward patrolling into the disputed border areas of course contributed to the pressure on the authorities in Beijing. Even Mao did not want a war with India; on the contrary, he wanted to limit the border issue in order to concentrate on the Tibetan problem. But when Delhi turned down the Chinese appeal for negotiations, the Chairman saw a direct challenge and was ready to react:
We fought a war with old Chiang [Kai-shek]. We fought a war with Japan, and with America. We feared none of these. And in each case we won. Now the Indians want to fight a war with us. Naturally we are not afraid. We cannot give ground; if we give ground it would be the same as letting them seize a big piece of land equivalent to Fujian Province. . . . Since Nehru sticks his head out and insists on us fighting him, for us not to fight him would be discourteous. Courtesy means reciprocity.
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The Chinese attacked on 20 October 1962 along two fronts six hundred miles apart, east of Bhutan and in the western sector south of the Kunlun mountains, near the border with Pakistan. On both fronts the Indian forces were defeated, and when China declared a ceasefire a month later all of the disputed territory was under Chinese control. For India the outcome of the war was a profound shock: Not only were its forces routed, but the international sympathy and assistance that it had counted on had been of little help. The Soviets stayed neutral in practice, while rhetorically supporting the Chinese position. Mao was not impressed, believing that Khrushchev was simply trying to gain China’s help in the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was taking place at the same time. Most importantly, the war created a sense of enmity and confrontation between Asia’s two biggest countries, a situation that has lasted up to today.
B
Y
1963 M
AO
Z
EDONG HAD
, almost singlehandedly, managed to wreck the Sino-Soviet relationship. This had been his purpose, at least since the decade began, but it would have been much more difficult
if it had not been for the stupendous arrogance of the Soviet political leadership and the political blindness of his colleagues in Beijing. Mao wanted to destroy the relationship to Moscow because he needed to be free, in ideological terms, to take China further to the left, in what came to be called the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Always a wily operator, Mao made sure that the Chinese leaders he most suspected of disagreeing with his increasing radicalism should bear the brunt of the confrontation with the Soviets, and do so both on ideological and nationalist terms. Deng Xiaoping, who was one of these, was sent to Moscow as head of a CCP delegation in the summer of 1963, with the implicit purpose of attacking the Soviets. Deng was put in a hopeless situation: On the one hand he did not much care for the Soviets at the personal level, but on the other he knew how dependent China’s technology and its whole economic development were on collaborating with Moscow. Still, Deng fulfilled the Chairman’s instructions to the full, as he always did as long as Mao was alive. He told his Soviet hosts that they had created “a split in the ranks of the international Communist movement and, moreover, have done so in an increasingly sharp, increasingly extreme form, in an increasingly organized [way], on an increasingly large scale, trying, come what may, to crush [the CCP].” He added with a wry smile, “I would like to note that using such methods is a habitual affair for you.”
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Not surprisingly, there were no further meetings.
Instead there was an escalation of conflict between the two Communist giants bordering on war. From 1962 on, Chinese spokesmen had claimed that the Soviets were putting military pressure on their common border. The defection of large numbers of people from Xinjiang, China’s westernmost province, to the Soviet Union only confirmed to the CCP faithful that the Soviets were now their sworn enemies (even though it is more likely that it was a combination of Great Leap–induced hunger and Soviet blandishments that produced the mass decampment). In the summer of 1964 Mao said, “We cannot
only pay attention to the East [the United States] and not to the North, only pay attention to imperialism and not revisionism, we must prepare for war on both sides.” And at the same time he made his most ominous statement vis-à-vis the Soviets. “About a hundred years ago,” he told a visiting group of Japanese, “the area east of Baikal became Russian territory, and since then Vladivostok, Khabarovsk, Kamchatka, and other points have become territories of the Soviet Union. We have not yet presented the bill for this list.”
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Mao now took a major step in breaking with both superpowers. After the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviet Union and the United States had begun edging back from the brink. In August 1963, along with the United Kingdom, they signed the nuclear test ban treaty, lowering the temperature of the Cold War. Mao would have none of it. In October 1964 he took his country out of interaction with most of world society with the first successful Chinese nuclear test. Now China had its own nuclear capability, and the security that went with it, Mao believed. By the end of the year the Chairman began to speak darkly about enemies of the revolution and “capitalist roaders” within the Chinese Communist Party. During 1965 the preparations for a major purge were visibly underway. Mao criticized the CCP Secretariat and the Central State Planning Commission as independent kingdoms outside his control. Whenever there was an opportunity, he beat the drums of war—against the Americans in Vietnam, against the Soviets in the north, against all comers who wanted to destroy China. In October 1965 he told a startled group of party officials that “we must prepare for war. . . . Do not be afraid of mutiny or rebellion.” He added, “What will you do if revisionism emerges in the Central Committee? In that event, you must rebel. . . . Now you must remember, whatever one says, be it the Central Committee, its bureaus or the provincial party committees, you can refuse to implement it if it is not correct.”
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Very soon afterward Mao left Beijing for secret locations in the provinces, not to return until the summer of 1966, when the Great
Proletarian Cultural Revolution—as he called his new campaign—was washing all over China.