CHAPTER VI

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Peking’s Foreign Policy
and the Sino-Soviet Dispute

CHINA’S emergence since 1949 as a major Asian power, for the first time since the eighteenth century, has inevitably exerted a profound effect on the international politics of the region. The effect has perhaps been most powerful on the Soviet Union, which is linked to China by a uniquely long frontier and a common ideology, however differently it has come to be interpreted. Rarely has any country’s external behavior been so differently described by its supporters and by its opponents; Chinese foreign policy is either principled and defensive, or expansionist and adventurous, depending upon the point of view. There is considerable agreement that in either case it is mysterious. Actually, both of these value judgments are so oversimplified as to be misleading and almost meaningless, and the mysteriousness exists only for those who prefer to believe in it.

Peking’s External Objectives and Strategies

Like any other state, the People’s Republic of China is concerned to preserve its own security. Unlike some others, it has usually believed since 1949 that its security was being actively threatened. From 1950 to the mid- or late 1960s the threat was perceived as being the United States, and for the first half of that period the Sino-Soviet alliance was seriously counted on as a necessary and, it was hoped, an adequate shield. During the second half, Peking’s confidence in Soviet protection decreased rapidly as the Sino-Soviet dispute escalated, and it began to create its own nuclear deterrent with the help of substantial Soviet technical assistance. After the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968, Moscow was perceived by Peking as a serious threat to itself, and the United States, which was showing an interest in improving its relations with China, came to be regarded as an important source of political, although not military, support, to be supplemented by other political means and by accelerated modernization of Peking’s conventional and nuclear forces.

At a lower level of threat, Peking has been concerned when foreign forces it regarded as hostile approached its borders. The classic reaction of Mao Tse-tung to such a threat, since the guerrilla days of the early 1930s, has been to “lure the enemy in deep” and then destroy him on one’s own territory. Always objectionable in the eyes of Chinese Communist professional military commanders, this approach has never been applied since 1949, in spite of occasional bouts of Maoist propaganda (especially during the Vietnam War) claiming to welcome the idea of a foreign invasion of or attack on China. In two major cases (the Korean War, and the Sino-Indian border war of 1962), Chinese forces took preemptive, or forestalling, action against foreign forces perceived as both hostile and uncomfortably close to the Chinese border, although Peking’s aims in both cases included political ones as well. During the Vietnam War the problem never actually arose, because American forces kept well away from the Chinese frontier so as not to provoke Peking dangerously. The most serious problem to date has been the presence of massive, hostile, Soviet forces near Chinese territory since 1969, both in Soviet Asia and in the Mongolian People’s Republic. In view of Soviet strategic superiority and the absence of reliable American military support, the People’s Republic of China is obviously not in a position to do much about this situation by purely military means. Nor can Peking formally deny the right of the Soviet Union to maintain troops on its own soil, even if they are near the Chinese border, although Peking does demand openly that Soviet troops be withdrawn from the Mongolian People’s Republic. But in its private negotiations with Moscow since 1969, Peking has apparently indicated that a full normalization of Sino-Soviet relations would require, among other things, the removal of most Soviet forces from the Soviet Far East and the greater part of Siberia. The Chinese leadership, of course, remembers and resents the Japanese invasion of China between 1937 and 1945 and it is aware that Japan has the industrial strength to become a threat again, but (a loud burst of Chinese anti-Japanese propaganda in 1970-71 notwithstanding) it also knows that Japan is not a major military power and has no current plans to become one.

China is a divided country, since Taiwan is inhabited by people the vast majority of whom are ethnically Chinese, and yet Taiwan and the mainland of China are of course under two different political systems. Peking feels very strongly that Taiwan belongs to it by right and is only prevented from belonging to it in fact by American military protection. While that protection continues, and while Peking is, therefore, not in a position to “liberate” Taiwan by military means, the possibility of “liberation” by political means, or in other words through some sort of agreement with the Nationalist leadership, remains the only course realistically open to Peking. This has been tried, but without any visible success to date. The reunification of China as one of Peking’s external objectives is a concept that really applies only to Nationalist-held territory, notably Taiwan. Peking claims, usually with some basis in Chinese history, that various adjacent parts of Asia once formed part of the Chinese empire in some sense but were taken from the “Chinese people” by one “imperialist” power or another. But these statements have been made mainly for domestic effect and have not been used as the basis for serious claims on other countries’ territory, except in the case of fairly limited areas actively in dispute with neighboring states. Most of these disputes were settled in the early 1960s, usually on terms that were fairly reasonable from the standpoint of the other party, mainly in order to isolate on this question the two main adversaries, the Soviet Union and India, whose border disputes with China have not been settled on account of the bad general relations between China and those countries.

Although it rarely talks in these terms, Peking unquestionably aspires to a position of major influence in Asia. It knows that it cannot dominate Asia or exclude external powers from it, now or in the future, but it would like to exercise as much influence as can be acquired without undue risk or cost. China’s size, geographic location, population, cultural heritage, current dynamism, and growing power create a mystique and an ability to exert influence on Asian affairs that are very great and likely to increase. Peking’s main concern in Asia is to compete or cope with the other leading powers: the United States, the Soviet Union, and Japan. At present Peking apparently prefers a multilateral Asian balance involving all four of the major powers to a bipolar situation in which China confronted only one of the others, as it once did the United States, and as it fears it might some day have to confront the Soviet Union. One of the corollaries of this attitude is that Peking does not want further American military withdrawals from the region, except probably from Taiwan. The promotion of Peking’s policy toward Asia requires the full deployment of China’s formidable foreign policy resources, consisting mainly of a capacity for skillful diplomacy and intensive propaganda aimed primarily at the states of the region, which are the next most important objects of Peking’s concern. Last, but not insignificant if only because the commitment to it of the Maoists among the Chinese leadership, comes support (through propaganda, political guidance, arms, funds, etc.) of leftist armed revolutionary movements, or “people’s wars.” The one in Indochina is obviously the most important of these; other, lesser, ones in which Peking has been involved to varying degrees in recent years have occurred along the Sino-Burmese border, in northern Thailand, along the Thai-Malaysian border, and in Sarawak (in East Malaysia).

China has analogous aspirations for influence in the Third World in general, but the limitations on its resources and obvious problems of distance and cultural differences tend to render it considerably less effective outside Asia than in Asia. Apart from aid programs in carefully selected countries—at the present time the largest is in Tanzania—and propaganda, China’s main strategy has been to cultivate resentment toward the United States (and since the early 1960s toward the other superpower, the Soviet Union, as well) and portray Peking as a friend of the interests of the local peoples as against Washington and Moscow. In addition, Peking has in some cases given support (arms, etc.) to insurgencies of the “people’s war” variety, for example the Arab guerrilla movements.

Until about 1959 Mao Tse-tung tried to bring the Soviet leadership around to his way of thinking on the growing list of issues between them, which are discussed later in this chapter. He then gave this approach up as hopeless and began to conduct an open ideological and political struggle against the Soviet leadership, not only in the international Communist movement but in other areas as well. Mao and his colleagues realize that neither the Soviet party nor their own can dominate the international Communist movement, but they are determined to reduce Soviet influence on it and increase their own as much as possible; they have been only moderately successful, partly because some other aspects of their foreign policy (such as the recent accommodation with the United States) have tended to contradict the pose of ideological purity and lofty principle that Mao has chosen to adopt.

China aspires to be a major power (although not a superpower, a term that it interprets to include a tendency to oppress other states and peoples) and has already made significant strides in that direction. It acquired China’s permanent seat (with a veto) in the United Nations Security Council in 1971. It has made progress, especially since 1969, toward winning universal diplomatic recognition while allowing no other country to have full diplomatic relations with itself and with the Nationalists at the same time. It has played a role, or tried to, in an increasing number of international issues, crises, etc. It is creating a thermonuclear weapons capability complete with ICBMs. Economic and technological limitations, on the other hand, will probably prevent China from ever acquiring a level of power and influence equivalent to those of the United States and the Soviet Union.

Peking and “Peaceful Coexistence” in Asia

After 1951 Peking, and even Stalin, moved gradually away from the view that the independence and nonalignment in the Cold War of the new states of Asia were a fraud and that their governments could and should be overthrown in the fairly near future through armed Communist revolutions. The two most important reasons for this shift were that the revolutions of this kind that had actually been attempted were not doing well, except, of course, for the one in Vietnam, and that the tensions of the Korean War and the pressure of American containment of both the major Communist powers made the cultivation of the new states in the hope of diplomatic support seem more sensible than the continuation of unpromising efforts to subvert them.

From both the Soviet perspective and the Chinese, the key country among the Asian neutrals was India on account of its political and moral influence on the others. Nehru and his government accordingly became, after about 1953, the object of wooing by both Peking and Moscow, a wooing that contained the seeds of rivalry from the beginning. The rivalry was inevitable partly because the Soviet Union possessed three important advantages over China in seeking rapport with Nehru. It had no specific quarrel with the United States, in Asia at any rate, comparable to Peking’s grievance over Taiwan, and its views on international politics and the Cold War therefore tended to seem more compatible with the concept of “peaceful coexistence” than did Peking’s relative militancy where the United States was concerned. The Soviet Union obviously had a capacity superior to China’s for giving economic aid, and it began to do so on a large scale to Nehru’s government as early as 1954; Peking has never given such aid (as distinct from trade) to India, although it has to other smaller states. Moscow had no serious bilateral quarrels with Nehru once it stopped hoping for his imminent overthrow, whereas in China’s case, there were serious problems in the shape of the status of Tibet and a Sino-Indian boundary dispute. Consequently Khrushchev gave enthusiastic public approval to Nehru in 1955 as against both the Indian Communists and Pakistan, in the latter case by endorsing the Indian claim to Kashmir. Peking, on the other hand, showed greater reserve on both scores, by cultivating some segments of the Indian Communist movement and by preserving neutrality on the Kashmir issue. A major reason for the limited nature of Peking’s cultivation of Nehru was a belief that India was a serious rival of China’s for influence in Asia, and to some extent the Third World as a whole.

Nehru believed at first that proper handling could keep his problems with China manageable and that cooperation could be maintained between them instead of rivalry. Accordingly, he reached an agreement with Peking in the spring of 1954 under which India recognized China’s claim to Tibet, with the understanding that the Chinese would respect Tibetan autonomy, in return for a clear though implicit pledge (the so-called Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence) that Peking would not commit aggression in Asia and would not try to manipulate the overseas Chinese communities in Southeast Asia for subversive purposes. Nehru also went out of his way at the Bandung Conference to introduce Chou En-lai to non-Communist Third World statesmen.

By that time, however, Nehru was already aware that Peking took a more bellicose line toward the United States than he or Khrushchev did, that it was not keeping its pledge of more than token autonomy for Tibet, and that its version of the Sino-Indian border differed significantly from India’s. Peking was publishing maps, mainly although not exclusively for domestic consumption, indicating a version of several sections of the Chinese frontier, especially the southern frontier, that did not jibe with the versions of the other states concerned. These Sino-Indian issues simmered until 1958 and then began to come to a boil. In 1957-58, for reasons explained in the next section, Peking’s entire foreign policy veered in the direction of greater militancy, with inevitably adverse effects on its relationship with India. Furthermore, a revolt in Tibet, with which most Indians sympathized, gathered strength after the mid-1950s and in March 1959 became a crisis of such proportions that the Dalai Lama fled to India and thousands of insurgents took refuge in India and Nepal, from where they occasionally mounted raids back into Tibet. As Peking moved troops forward to seal the border and denounced Nehru publicly, for the first time, for his sympathy with the Tibetans and his general attitude, tension rose. There were Sino-Indian firelights, though not very large ones, in each of the two major areas in dispute between China and India. One of these was Aksai Chin, at the northeastern corner of Kashmir, across which the Chinese had built a military road to link western Tibet and western Sinkiang, and which Peking held. The other was the North East Frontier Agency, to the east of Bhutan, which Peking claimed but had left in Indian possession inasmuch as it lies to the south of the main Himalayan ridgeline. A reasonable outsider’s view of the merits of the dispute would be that neither side has a clearly superior claim to either of the contested areas.

For reasons already indicated, Chinese policy in the mid-1950s toward all the uncommitted Asian countries, and not toward India alone, had been predominantly one of conciliation. Even Thailand, which joined SEATO in 1954 out of fear of Chinese subversion, was treated in a way calculated to impress it with the advantages of neutrality and accommodation with Peking, and the neutrals were treated with still greater outward consideration (flattery, diplomatic support, economic aid in some cases, etc.). After 1957, the Chinese line hardened somewhat, for reasons just suggested, but it softened again in 1960 in an effort to avoid driving the smaller Asian neutrals into the arms of India or the Soviet Union. As part of this effort, Peking concluded boundary treaties on reasonable terms in 1960-63 with almost all of its neighbors with which it had border disputes, except for India and the Soviet Union—to be specific, with Burma, Nepal, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and the Mongolian People’s Republic. Conciliatory gestures of this kind, as well as Peking’s power to cause trouble if provoked, did help to prevent the other Asian states from following India and the Soviet Union into a state of confrontation with China. In fact, Indonesia under President Sukarno, who was moving to the left in both his domestic and his foreign policy, concluded what amounted to an informal alliance with China in 1960-61 on the basis of common and militant opposition to Western influence in Southeast Asia; Peking gave support in various forms to Sukarno in his struggle (successful in 1962) with the Netherlands over West Irian (Dutch New Guinea) and his unsuccessful “confrontation” with Britain and Malaysia after 1963.

In the spring of 1962 Peking felt its external security to be in a state of crisis requiring some sort of response, and Mao Tse-tung wanted to dramatize his effort to regain revolutionary momentum at home, after the collapse of the Great Leap Forward in 1960, through an external initiative. What Peking interpreted as crises in the Taiwan Strait, on the border between Sinkiang and Soviet Central Asia, and in Laos and Thailand more or less evaporated about the middle of the year, but a problem with India remained. Sino-Indian negotiations on the border question had broken down, and the Indian Army had begun to build outposts in parts of Aksai Chin in order to acquire control over the whole of it. When Chinese warnings to stop had no effect, Peking sent its forces into action on October 20, 1962, in both the disputed sectors of the border region. The Chinese were aware that their behavior on the territorial question had contributed to a closer relationship between India and the Soviet Union since about 1959, and Peking may very well have timed its border offensive to coincide approximately with the Cuban missile crisis, which would inevitably tend to distract Khrushchev from taking any effective role on India’s side in a Sino-Indian border war. In two brief bouts of sharp fighting (October 20-25, November 18-21) Chinese forces inflicted serious defeats on their Indian opponents. Peking then stopped fighting unilaterally, both because it had already achieved a strong and not entirely advantageous political effect and because continuation of the war would have created serious problems, including probable increasing Soviet and American involvement on the Indian side. To this day the Sino-Indian boundary dispute remains unresolved, and since the early 1960s China has had what amounts to an informal alliance with Pakistan on the basis of common hostility to India. Peking accordingly gave loud propaganda support to Pakistan during the Indo-Pakistani war of 1965 over Kashmir but for a number of reasons, including fear of possible American or Soviet action, was able to do little more, apart from initiating a program of substantial military aid to Pakistan after the war.

Peking and the Taiwan Question

Peking and its Nationalist adversaries agree that Taiwan is a part of China—a view for which a very strong case can be made—and that the Chinese civil war is not over as long as the Nationalists make their headquarters on the island. Since June 1950, when American military protection was extended to Taiwan, Peking has believed with much justification that it was prevented from “liberating” Taiwan, through some combination of political and military pressures leading to a conditional Nationalist surrender in exchange for some sort of “autonomous” status, solely by the United States. Its Taiwan policy, accordingly, has amounted to a search for leverage on both the United States and the Nationalists.

For a time after Peking intervened in the Korean War it hoped to use its intervention as a lever to compel the withdrawal of American protection from Taiwan, but its military setbacks frustrated this effort. In late 1954 and early 1955, it tried to gain leverage, as well as security from suspected Nationalist plans for offensive action against the mainland, through a military crisis in the Taiwan Strait. But the main result was to drive the United States to conclude a security treaty, or alliance, with the Nationalists that seemed to render the “liberation” of Taiwan by Peking more remote than ever. Khrushchev gave Peking no support during this crisis, and Chinese irritation at this was compounded in ensuing years as Moscow continued to show no enthusiasm for Peking’s pleas for increased political support in connection with its efforts to “liberate” Taiwan.

Peking’s next ploy was foreshadowed as early as April 1955 in Chou En-lai’s concluding speech to the Bandung Conference. Later that year, Sino-American talks at the ambassadorial level on Taiwan and other issues began at Geneva, but the results were unsatisfactory to Peking since the Chinese demand for the withdrawal of American protection from Taiwan was countered by American insistence on a “renunciation of force” by Peking with respect to Taiwan. Peking accordingly began to make propaganda appeals for a deal to the Nationalist leadership in 1956, but without visible result.

Discouraged by the failure of these approaches and all the more in need of an external success because of the unexpectedly severe criticism of the regime that greeted Mao’s Hundred Flowers campaign (for free public discussion) in the spring of 1957, the Chinese leadership decided in the following autumn to try to gain leverage from the Soviet Union, in the form of military aid, political support, and the like, in connection with the prospective “liberation” of Taiwan. The moment seemed favorable, because Khrushchev had just won a major victory over his leading political opponents, who tended to be more cautious in foreign policy than he and whose restraining influence was now removed. Furthermore, the Chinese leadership was in the process of launching a major, militant, domestic campaign, to be known as the Great Leap Forward, and in Mao’s view this called for a more activist foreign policy by way of accompaniment. Khrushchev, however, was not much impressed by Mao’s argument that, on account of recent Soviet successes in space and missile technology, notably the orbiting of the first earth satellite by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957, Moscow now had the opportunity and the obligation to apply increased pressure, short of war, to the United States on such issues as Taiwan. Khrushchev was so embarrassed by Mao’s arguments that he made an unparalleled commitment, in October-November 1957, to give China substantial aid with a nuclear weapons program, including MRBMs. This program, which was cancelled in 1959 on account of growing Sino-Soviet differences, provided the basis for China’s subsequent entry into the nuclear club.

For both domestic and external reasons, including a desire to stiffen Khrushchev’s spine or at least smoke him out on the Taiwan question, Mao decided in mid-1958 to initiate a politico-military crisis in the Taiwan Strait. He hoped to drive a wedge between the Nationalists and the United States by demonstrating the vulnerability of the Nationalist-held offshore islands just off the China coast (notably Quemoy, the largest of them) to Communist military pressures, as well as the presumed inability or unwillingness of the American “paper tigers” to render effective help to their allies in such situations. Brushing aside Khrushchev’s objections, which were reflected in the fact that his support for Peking in the ensuing crisis was purely verbal, Peking began to shell Quemoy on August 23, without attempting an amphibious landing. Both the Nationalists and the United States responded with reasonable firmness, and the crisis accordingly died away in October. The United States had made it clear that although it would defend Taiwan, and probably the offshore islands, from a Communist attack, it did not favor a Nationalist landing on the mainland.

The result was a continued stalemate. The Nationalist presence on the offshore islands was (and is) agreeable to both sides because it prevented them from being separated by the full width of the Taiwan Strait and therefore from being in effect “two Chinas,” an outcome that neither wants since each insists that there is only one China, of which it is the legitimate government.

In the spring of 1962, as the mainland was beginning to recover from the economic disaster inflicted by the Great Leap Forward, the Nationalists gave some signs of intending to attack the mainland at what must have seemed a favorable opportunity. Peking accordingly doubled its troop strength in the area opposite Taiwan in June and tried to smoke out American intentions by loudly accusing the United States of inciting a Nationalist attack on the mainland. The Kennedy administration, which was actually trying with little success to establish a less hostile relationship with Peking, denied the charge and insisted that it would not support a Nationalist attack if one should occur. This assurance relaxed Peking considerably but did little to advance the “liberation” of Taiwan, except perhaps indirectly by helping to undermine the Nationalists’ faith in an eventual triumphant “return to the mainland.”

Peking and Moscow:
The Accumulation of Issues (1953-59)

With Stalin’s death in early 1953, Mao Tse-tung began to consider himself the leading figure in the Communist world, far senior to Stalin’s quarreling successors. This posture irritated them increasingly, although Khrushchev was able to gain a degree of Chinese approval and support for his own position in 1954 by posing as more Stalinist at home and more militant in his foreign policy than his chief rival, Malenkov. As Khrushchev gained ascendancy over Malenkov in 1955-57, however, he increasingly moderated his views so that they came to resemble those of his defeated rival. Less geopolitically minded than Stalin, he placed less value on his Chinese neighbor and ally and liked to conduct his anti-American struggle by operating in a free-wheeling fashion through diplomatic maneuvers, aid programs, and the like in relatively remote non-Communist countries such as Egypt and India. As already indicated, he showed little enthusiasm for helping Peking to “liberate” Taiwan.

At his party’s Twentieth Congress (February 1956), from which Peking officially dates the beginning of the Sino-Soviet dispute, Khrushchev expounded in a public report two propositions that profoundly troubled the Chinese by implying Soviet unwillingness to risk a military confrontation with the United States, on behalf of the Chinese ally or for any other reason. One was that war was not “fatally inevitable,” meaning that another World War must be avoided at virtually any cost, because it might destroy all the gains and prospects of Communism. The other was that both local Communist Parties and Moscow itself must be cautious about promoting revolution in non-Communist countries by means more violent than political struggle, because the result of an attempt at armed revolution might be a Soviet-American confrontation. In his secret speech on Stalin, furthermore, Khrushchev outraged Mao by attacking Stalin, whom Mao respected, and by giving Mao’s own colleagues a lever with which to reduce his political position to a more modest scale, something that they proceeded to do later in that same year. Mao’s personal political initiatives of that period, notably the Hundred Flowers campaign and the Great Leap Forward, were in part efforts to regain lost ground and assert his own continuing creativity as a statesman.

These efforts, the Great Leap Forward above all, placed serious strains on his relationship with Khrushchev, whose growing reservations about Mao’s erratic behavior and whose general attitude led Mao increasingly to hold him guilty of “revisionism,” or ideological deviation in the direction of undue moderation. Mao’s conviction was strengthened by Khrushchev’s performance during the Taiwan Strait crisis of 1958, his withdrawal of nuclear aid to China in 1959, his sympathy for India during the Sino-Indian border crisis of the same year, and above all his quest for détente with the United States after the death of John Foster Dulles in the spring of 1959.

Whether as a result of a conscious decision or not, Mao embarked in the second half of 1059 on what can be called a dual adversary strategy, one of simultaneous ideological and political struggle, with military overtones but short of war, against both American “imperialism” and Soviet “revisionism.” This important shift coincided with, and was reflected in, the appointment of Mao’s principal military colleague Lin Piao as Defense Minister in September 1959. Lin succeeded P’eng Te-huai, who had been purged for his objections to the Great Leap Forward and to the harm inflicted by Mao’s policies on Sino-Soviet relations. Lin himself was a militant Maoist, whether out of conviction or opportunism or a mixture of the two, and he was a leading exponent of the dual adversary strategy. Shortly after taking over the Defense Ministry, he began to organize violations of the Soviet border by parties of Chinese military personnel, presumably as an expression of contempt and defiance of Soviet “revisionism,” which he evidently thought of as a paper bear. Although the Soviet response to these provocations was remarkably restrained at first, the effect on Sino-Soviet relations was bound to be serious sooner or later, inasmuch as Moscow is not in reality a paper bear.

Peking and Moscow:
The Surfacing of the Dispute (1960-64)

One of the last straws from Mao’s point of view was an indication by Khrushchev that he hoped not only to reduce his conventional forces, under cover of détente with the United States, but to reach an agreement with the United States that would tend to bind China to reduce its own conventional forces as well.

By the spring of 1960, Mao could no longer keep silent. He chose the ninetieth anniversary of Lenin’s birth (April 22) as the occasion for publishing a strong editorial denouncing Khrushchev, although not by name, for insufficient resolution in opposing the United States and promoting revolution on account of fear of another world war. Mao had maintained for several years that the Soviet-American strategic balance was sufficiently stable so that the likelihood of such a war was slight, and its consequences if it occurred could even be portrayed for propaganda purposes as beneficial to the Communist cause. Khrushchev regarded this attitude as irresponsible and bellicose.

Peking also denounced Khrushchev much more explicitly, at some private meetings held in the spring of 1960. His reaction, or rather overreaction, was to cancel all industrial and technical aid to China during the ensuing summer. The two sides agreed to submit their cases to an international meeting of Communist parties, which met at Moscow in November-December 1960. Before an astounded audience, the two sides stated their positions in vituperative language, along lines already indicated. Since the opposing positions could not really be compromised, the outcome was a published statement that incorporated some features of each while adopting consciously vague formulas on the really difficult issues.

The two sides then suspended the dispute in order to take the measure of the incoming Kennedy administration. Peking felt more concern than Moscow over that administration’s alleged tendency to practice “special warfare” (counterinsurgency) against leftist “national liberation movements,” because the area mainly affected was Indochina. In 1958-60, the United States had provoked a crisis in Laos by trying unsuccessfully to bring a pro-American government into existence; the result of this effort was an agreement of 1962 under which Laos was to remain neutral in the Cold War and governed by a coalition government with Communist participation. In the autumn of 1961, the Kennedy administration began to try to strengthen the non-Communist government of President Ngo Dinh Diem in South Vietnam, in the face of growing Communist insurgency directed from North Vietnam, through increased economic and military aid. These moves on the part of the United States were due in part to a belief that Peking, the more militantly anti-American party to the Sino-Soviet dispute, was inciting Hanoi to escalate the struggle in Indochina.

In 1961 Khrushchev developed an explosive quarrel with Albania, whose leaders had attitudes and policies comparable to the Chinese and sympathized with Peking in its confrontation with Moscow. Peking promptly stepped in with aid and political support for Albania and rejected Khrushchev’s public plea (at his party’s Twenty-second Congress in October 1961) to cease and desist. Khrushchev’s problem was seriously complicated by the fact that his leading domestic rival, Frol Kozlov, was less anti-Chinese than he and was accusing him of being too tough with Peking. Under this pressure, Khrushchev appears to have gone rather far in 1962 in trying to patch up his quarrel with Peking. During the summer he backed away, at Chinese insistence, from a nuclear test ban agreement with the United States that had seemed imminent (see Chapter III). There are reasons to believe that Khrushchev not only informed the Chinese in advance of his intent to install offensive missiles in Cuba but intended to use the leverage gained in this way partly to force a withdrawal of American protection from Taiwan and thereby promote the “liberation” of Taiwan and an improvement in Sino-Soviet relations.

But Khrushchev had underestimated the toughness of the Kennedy administration and had to agree on November 27, 1962 to withdraw his missiles and bombers from Cuba in the face of what amounted to an American ultimatum. His entire plan of course came unstuck at that point, and Peking began in early November to attack him for having perpetrated “another Munich” on Castro and the Cuban people. Infuriated, Khrushchev promptly shifted his support from China to India in the Sino-Indian border war of October-November 1962. Peking was trying to inflict a political humiliation on the Nehru government and to push its border troops back from the vicinity of the Chinese-controlled highway across Aksai Chin, toward which the Indians had begun to advance. China’s brilliant, although limited, military victory drove India closer to the Soviet Union than ever before, and Khrushchev’s sympathy for India combined with his fiasco in Cuba produced a sharp escalation of the Sino-Soviet dispute.

Early in 1963 Peking took a dangerous step by reminding the world that tsarist Russia had taken territory from China, and in June 1964 Mao aggravated the provocation by stating publicly that the Soviet Union had done the same from China and several other countries as well, during the Second World War. Since Peking was obviously about to acquire a nuclear weapons capability, Khrushchev became alarmed and by the time of his fall (in October 1964) may have been contemplating some form of military pressure on China. In the summer of 1963 he outraged the Chinese by signing a partial nuclear test ban treaty with the United States and Britain, which Peking regarded as almost the ultimate in Soviet betrayal of China and collusion with “imperialism.” Peking responded by a drastic escalation of the ideological polemic that it had been waging against Khrushchev. By this time Khrushchev was trying to organize another international meeting of Communist parties like the one of 1960, in the hope of maneuvering some kind of condemnation of the Chinese; this ploy failed, because it was resisted not only by the pro-Chinese parties but by others as well, such as the Romanian. Peking for its part was trying to bring pro-Chinese “Marxist-Leninist” splinter parties into existence in some of the countries (ultimately about thirty) where the orthodox Communist Party was firmly pro-Soviet.

By the time of Khrushchev’s fall in 1964, in short, Sino-Soviet relations were in a state of dangerous confrontation. Khrushchev’s heavyhandedness in bringing things to such an impasse was very probably a major although unannounced count against him in the eyes of those of his colleagues who overthrew him.

Chinese Foreign Policy after Khrushchev

Shortly after his overthrow, Khrushchev’s successors offered Peking a sweeping accommodation that was to include a suspension of ideological polemics, resumption of Soviet economic and possibly military aid to China, and “united action” on Vietnam. This offer was brought to Peking by Premier Kosygin in mid-February 1965, just after the United States began to bomb North Vietnam. The offer was rejected, evidently at Mao Tse-tung’s insistence and because he considered that his current militant domestic and foreign policy required the maintenance of an atmosphere of struggle against Soviet “revisionism.” This approach was made easier and more plausible by Soviet insistence on reviving Khrushchev’s plan for another international Communist Party conference like the one of 1960, which was anathema to the Chinese leadership.

The escalation of the Vietnam war in 1965 raised serious political and military problems for Peking and started a strategic debate that lasted for about six months and probably postponed for that length of time the onset of Mao’s favorite project, the Cultural Revolution (see Chapter VIII). The view that prevailed was that of Defense Minister Lin Piao, and presumably of Mao himself, that China should avoid both the risk of a clash with the United States that would be generated by direct Chinese intervention in Vietnam and the political humiliation of an accommodation with the Soviet Union; in effect, the dual adversary strategy was reaffirmed.

Mao and Lin had a tendency to assume that Chinese militancy, contrasted with the “imperialism” of the Americans as demonstrated anew in Vietnam and with the “revisionism” of the Soviets, would evoke a widespread positive response around the world. This happened to only a small extent, partly because the United States and the Soviet Union continued to be major sources of economic aid for Third World countries and the latter were therefore usually reluctant to antagonize them unnecessarily. In fact, Chinese militancy tended to be counterproductive. It contributed heavily to the collapse of the Afro-Asian Conference scheduled to meet in Algiers in June 1965 (see Chapter II). Chinese involvement in subversion in Africa contributed to a number of military coups that occurred south of the Sahara in 1965-66. Worse still for Peking were some setbacks suffered at that time in Asia. Chinese influence in Indonesia contributed to a radicalization of President Sukarno’s domestic and foreign policies and increasingly close cooperation between him and the Indonesian Communists. In this atmosphere, although not necessarily with direct Chinese incitement, Sukarno and the Chinese leadership attempted a coup against the anti-Communist army leadership at the end of September 1965. It was unsuccessful, and the result was a military takeover that deposed Sukarno, inflicted heavy casualties on the Communists, and reduced Chinese influence to zero. Chinese incitement probably contributed to Ayub Khan’s decision to use force in Kashmir in 1965 (see Chapter XII). When the effort began to fail, Peking tried without success to keep Pakistan in the war and to intimidate India by issuing a phoney ultimatum seeming to threaten another attack on India like the one of 1962. The outcome was a setback for Pakistan and a diplomatic triumph for the Soviet Union, which acted as a mediator in the conflict.

A sense of frustration in foreign policy probably contributed to Mao’s decision to launch the Cultural Revolution, on the theory that China’s international influence would increase in proportion as its domestic ideological and political stance became truly Maoist. It is interesting, however, that he did not launch the Cultural Revolution in earnest until Peking and the United States had reached a tacit understanding in March 1966 that seemed to guarantee against an American attack on China in the context of the Vietnam War (see Chapter V). Probably Mao and Lin, and perhaps others as well, were reluctant to push China into a major political unheaval as long as they perceived a genuine risk of war.

The main sources of the Cultural Revolution, however, were domestic rather than foreign. Mao was concerned about what he considered to be the influence of Soviet “revisionism” on some of his colleagues and on China’s youth. In the latter case, he was worried about the future of China’s revolutionary momentum. In the former case, he had been engaged in a gradually intensifying power struggle with the leaders of the Communist Party apparatus, whom he regarded as “revisionist” and bureaucratically inclined, since the mid-1950s. He was also uncomfortably conscious of considerable opposition among the intellectuals to his “cult of personality” and militant policies. He was determined to launch a mass movement that would sweep away “revisionist” tendencies and generate more or less permanent revolutionary momentum. Given the lack of enthusiasm of the party apparatus leadership for this idea, which turned to outright opposition under Mao’s pressures, this was a difficult task. Its accomplishment required the extreme measure of forming in the spring of 1966, with the cooperation of the Army, units composed of millions of Red Guards, the radical elements of the student population. They easily put the party apparatus at the national level out of action in the autumn of 1966 but were then stymied by the much more effective resistance offered by the regional and provincial elements of the party apparatus. Mao and Lin then ordered the Army to intervene in support of the Red Guards, in January 1967. There ensued a year and a half of difficulties between the radical Red Guards, whose activities often generated serious disorder, and the essentially stability-oriented provincial military commanders. Finally in July 1968 Mao reluctantly gave the Army a mandate to suppress the Red Guards, which it proceeded to do. The Cultural Revolution was over, after doing considerable damage to the fabric of normal Chinese life. But many radicals did not regard it as a failure and hoped to revive its spirit, if not its actual programs, at some future time. Meanwhile, the political system began to return to normal at the national level as bureaucratic tendencies reasserted themselves under the guidance of Premier Chou En-lai, while at the provincial level the military were effectively in power and engaged in a complex process of bargaining with the center.

The domestic militancy of the Cultural Revolution was accompanied by a comparable militancy in foreign relations. Red Guards and other militants besieged most of the foreign embassies in Peking and even staged demonstrations outside the country, in Hong Kong in particular. Chinese propaganda exhorted radicals everywhere to launch their own Cultural Revolutions. The impact of all this abroad was mostly negative. In fact, China’s international influence was reduced to a very low level. This was only a temporary situation, however. All that was required to end it was the termination of the Cultural Revolution and a diplomatic campaign by Chou En-lai to restore China’s international influence. Such a campaign got under way in 1969, under the stimulus of Soviet pressures.