CHAPTER VIII

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The Sino-Soviet
Confrontation

THERE are a number of reasons why the emergence of strategic parity between the United States and the Soviet Union is a sensible theme for an analysis of Asian international politics since 1969. The Soviet-American relationship is clearly the dominant one in international politics as a whole, in spite of the gap between the two superpowers’ enormous economic and military power and their much more limited ability to translate that power into concrete political influence on particular situations. Since about the time of the invasion of Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union has been considerably more assertive in world politics than it generally was before, although (as shown in Chapter X) this trend has been subject to fluctuations. This Soviet assertiveness has been displayed in Asia, where Moscow has sensed opportunities in the British withdrawal from “east of Suez/’ the American disengagement from Vietnam, and the weakening and destabilizing effects of the Cultural Revolution in China.

The cutting edge of Soviet assertiveness in Asia as elsewhere, however, is not local and possibly temporary situations, but the fact that for the first time in its history the Soviet Union no longer suffers from marked strategic (and therefore psychological) inferiority to its main adversary or potential adversary. Traumatized by the necessity for “blinking first” in the Cuban missile crisis, the Soviet leadership decided to avoid such experiences in the future by building up their strategic forces, at enormous cost to the civilian economy, to a level of approximate parity with those of the United States; this was achieved by the end of the 1960s. It is probably fortunate for the world that the current Soviet leadership is not as adventurous as Khrushchev showed himself to be when he tried to smuggle offensive missiles into Cuba in 1962, and that the United States retains a retaliatory capability against a possible Soviet nuclear attack.

China, of course, is in a much less favorable strategic position than is the United States. With the exception of the tendency toward American military withdrawal from Asia, no recent development has had a greater impact on the international politics of Asia than the confrontation that has arisen between the Soviet Union and China since the fall of Khrushchev. There is a great deal of irony in this situation, inasmuch as there is a strong possibility that Khrushchev was overthrown in part for the excesses of his China policy, and inasmuch as Moscow by its recent treatment of China has virtually made a self-fulfilling prophecy of its charges (since 1966) of Sino-American collusion against it.

Soviet Perception of a Chinese Threat

It was evidently in 1965-66 that Moscow began to perceive China, for the first time, as a possible military threat in the fairly near future. Among the aspects of Sino-Soviet relations that troubled Moscow at that time, two appear to have been particularly important. One is that China began to construct an ICBM testing range in 1965 and in this way gave notice that it intended to become a major nuclear power. The other is that Premier Sato announced in August 1965 that he intended to recover Okinawa in the reasonably near future, a move that would inevitably reduce the island’s utility as a key American base for regional containment of China and that might open the way to Chinese expansion in non-Communist Asia as the American presence declined sooner or later. Since most Soviet leaders had begun by that time to come to the conclusion that the Chinese were adventurous and expansionist, the outlook appeared ominous from their point of view.

There were other, less military, reasons for increased Soviet concern over China in the mid-1960s. In early February 1965, immediately after the United States began to bomb North Vietnam, Premier Kosygin proposed a campaign of “united action” on behalf of Hanoi and the Viet Cong. Mao rejected this proposal, both because of his belief that acceptance would be politically advantageous to Moscow and because of his ideological conviction that the Soviet leadership was incurably “revisionist,” a view strengthened by the Soviet revival in early March of Khrushchev’s plan for an international conference of Communist Parties. In addition, Kosygin proposed a suspension of public polemics and a normalization of Sino-Soviet intergovernmental relations to include an increase of trade and a resumption of Soviet economic aid to China; this was also rejected at Mao’s insistence. The Chinese turned down shortly afterward a Soviet request for overflight rights and for facilities in Southwest China to permit air supply of the North Vietnamese. Instead, Peking agreed at the end of April to cooperate in transshipment of Soviet equipment to North Vietnam by rail. This agreement was not very faithfully observed, but it is not clear to what extent the fault lay with decisions taken in Peking, disruption of the rail system by the Cultural Revolution, seizure of equipment from the trains by rival Red Guard units, or some combination of these.

The escalation of early 1965 in Vietnam, which resulted from the injection for the first time of regular North Vietnamese military units into the South being countered first by American bombing and then by the introduction of American ground forces, came as an even greater shock to Peking than to Moscow for obvious geographic reasons. Furthermore, Mao had gone on record in January with a prediction that the United States would not escalate, and he was apparently badly shaken by the subsequent realization of his error. He soon saw his current favorite project, the Cultural Revolution, postponed for several months while the Chinese leadership debated what the escalation in Vietnam meant for China and what should be done about it. Probably speaking for many of the professional military, Chief of Staff Lo Jui-ch’ing argued publicly in May that North Vietnam was acting correctly in sending its troops into South Vietnam, that China should give active logistical support (including full cooperation in transshipping Soviet equipment) to this step, that such a policy would create a serious risk of an American strategic attack on China, and that accordingly China should reestablish cooperation with the Soviet Union at least in the military field. Although he subsequently modified this position, which was stated so strongly as to be positively anti-Maoist, he was purged early in 1966, probably in part because his views on Vietnam were considered dangerously hawkish.

It was Defense Minister Lin Piao who put his name on the main statement of the Maoist position on Vietnam, a tract entitled Long Live the Victory of People’s War (September 3, 1965). In contradiction to Lo, he insisted that the war in South Vietnam should be fought primarily by the Viet Cong on a “self-reliant” basis, that Chinese support for North Vietnam should be kept at a correspondingly low level, that if there was an American threat to China it would take the form of an invasion that could be defeated in a “people’s war,” and that there was no need and no justification for “united action” of any kind with the “revisionist” Russians. Indeed, Lin made what is probably the classic statement of the dual adversary strategy. Projecting the experience of the Chinese revolution on a global scale, he also argued that the “world countryside” (the developing countries) would encircle and defeat the “world city” (the developed countries, especially the “imperialist” ones) by fighting “people’s wars” against their alleged tendency to invade the developing countries as the Japanese had invaded China. This last concept was especially irritating to the Soviets, who considered it a racist effort to promote antagonism between themselves, as well as others, and the countries of the Third World.

The Maoist view on Vietnam, as expressed by Lin, prevailed in Peking, especially after the purge of Lo Jui-ch’ing. Support for Hanoi was confined largely to logistical support of a kind unlikely to encourage escalation above the “people’s war” level. Peking gave North Vietnam and the Viet Cong loud propaganda support, urged them to fight a “people’s war” indefinitely and avoid negotiating with the “imperialist” adversary, and exhorted Hanoi unsuccessfully after 1966 to have a Cultural Revolution of its own as the indispensable means to victory. In addition, some 30-50,000 Chinese military railway personnel entered North Vietnam to help keep the rail lines to China open under American bombing.

In spite of this essentially cautious policy, Peking felt considerable nervousness over the possibility of a direct clash with the United States. This was fully reciprocated, since the United States government was convinced that Hanoi was acting as an agent of Peking. There was fear on both sides of another Sino-American war in Vietnam along the lines of the Korean War, although in fact there was little analogy between the two situations since North Vietnam did not need or want Chinese intervention, Peking’s logistical problems would have been much greater than in Korea, and the Sino-Soviet alliance had lost most of whatever vitality it had possessed in 1950. Furthermore, even assuming identical Chinese behavior in Korea and Vietnam, Peking would have sent troops into North Vietnam to set up a buffer zone next to the Chinese border if the United States had invaded North Vietnam, but would have actually fought only if American forces had moved far enough north to penetrate the buffer.

This common concern over the possibility of a Sino-American war, which was strongly felt by influential congressional and public figures in the United States, produced its own partial corrective. In mid-March 1966, at a Sino-American ambassadorial conversation in Warsaw, the two sides agreed in effect that neither would be the first to escalate the war in Vietnam to the direct disadvantage of the other. After that Peking’s nervousness subsided considerably, except for a brief interval in early 1967 when the United States began to base B-52S in Thailand for use in the Vietnam War.

From the spring of 1966, the Soviet leadership became extremely nervous over what it regarded as Sino-American “collusion” over Vietnam, which it thought was bound to be anti-Soviet in effect if not necessarily in purpose and was the exact opposite of the “united action” proposed earlier by Moscow to Peking. Although greatly exaggerated at first, this fear turned into a virtual self-fulfilling prophecy during the next few years, as Moscow built up its strategic forces to a level of approximate parity with the United States and put pressure on China in order to cope with the threat it was thought to present and to exert political influence on it. In the spring of 1966, the Soviet Union moved significant offensive forces into the Mongolian People’s Republic, where they were only a few hundred miles from Peking. It also appears that Moscow considered military intervention in China at that time, but if so it obviously decided to refrain, presumably because no adequate political justification, and no prospect of political cooperation from within China, existed.

The Cultural Revolution and Sino-Soviet Relations

Since the mid-1950s, and especially since the early 1960s, Mao Tse-tung had increasingly come to view some of his own colleagues as infected with Soviet “revisionism.” Mao believed profoundly that the youth of China needed to be rescued from and immunized against “revisionist” influences through a synthetic revolutionary experience as similar as possible to the genuine one that he and his colleagues had undergone. In this concept lay the germ of the Cultural Revolution and the Red Guard movement, in which militant youths were used in 1966-67 to destroy the power of the party apparatus. This extraordinary episode, which began only after Peking felt reasonably certain that it would not have to cope with an attack by the United States, aroused the profoundest concern in Moscow, coming as it did on the heels of the developments already discussed. The Soviet party apparatus, solidly in control of its own country and regarding this situation as the only one appropriate to a Communist state, was greatly upset at seeing its Chinese opposite number nearly put out of action by the Red Guards. The atmosphere on both sides was worsened by some events that occurred early in 1966: Mao vetoed a Japanese Communist Party proposal for a form of “united action” with the Soviet Union, Moscow addressed a “secret” letter complaining about Chinese behavior to some of the European parties, and Peking cited this letter as its reason for refusing an invitation to send a delegation to the Soviet party’s Twenty-third Congress.

During the Cultural Revolution, Peking’s external behavior was almost as obnoxious to Moscow as its domestic politics. The aspects that bore most directly on the Soviet Union were an intensification of anti-”revisionist” propaganda, extremely provocative incidents staged along the Sino-Soviet border, and a siege of the Soviet Embassy in Peking by Red Guards in January-February 1967. In December 1966, after the anti-”revisionist” mood of the Cultural Revolution had become clear and the Red Guards had begun to assault the party apparatus in the provinces, where it was more powerful than at the center, the Soviet party held a Central Committee meeting that appears to have been devoted in large part to the Chinese situation and to have discussed once more the pros and cons of intervention; again the decision was negative, presumably for the same reason as before. The injection of the Regional Forces (but not to any great extent the Main Forces, whose mission remained essentially military) of the Chinese Army into the Cultural Revolution in January 1967, in order to overcome the resistance of the Party apparatus to the Red Guards, did nothing to quiet Moscow’s apprehensions. Soviet propaganda began to picture China as an expansionist militant country run by a coalition of Maoists, military leaders, and bureaucrats typified by Chou En-lai; what was most distressing, obviously, was the absence of the Party apparatus from this lineup.

Czechoslovakia

In the spring of 1968, the Soviet ideological press (as distinct from the party and government propaganda organs) began a series of long and bitter attacks on the Chinese for their ideology, party history, political system, foreign policy, etc. Ideological matters in the Soviet Union are under the general supervision of Mikhail Suslov, the elder statesman of the Politburo, who appears to detest the Chinese not only as ideological deviants but as disrupters of the unity (under Soviet hegemony, by implication) of the international Communist movement, a unity which in the current era finds its main, if limited, expression in occasional international meetings. By contrast, Suslov appears to have been opposed to coercing the Dubcek regime in Czechoslovakia, whose “socialism with a human face” began to attract the unfavorable attention of a majority of the Soviet leadership in April 1968. One of the reasons for Suslov’s attitude was probably a correct perception that pressure on Czechoslovakia would disrupt his plans for another international conference by antagonizing most of the European Communist Parties, whereas pressure on the Chinese would produce less serious complications since most of the more or less pro-Chinese parties (the North Koreans and North Vietnamese, for example), as well as the Chinese themselves, would not attend the conference in any case.

It might be thought that under these circumstances Peking would be relieved at the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia on August 21, 1968; such was not the case, however. Except perhaps for militant Maoists like Lin Piao, any Chinese leader who had regarded the Soviet Union as a paper bear now felt compelled to change his mind and regard it as an imminent threat. One reason for this shift was the so-called Brezhnev Doctrine, which was announced in the months following the invasion and in effect claimed a right for the Soviet Union to intervene in any Communist country where it judged the cause of “socialism” to be in danger, and not merely in Czechoslovakia. The tension created in Peking by the invasion of Czechoslovakia probably accelerated the effective termination of the Cultural Revolution through the suppression of the Red Guards, although this important step had been decided on already for essentially domestic reasons. Chou En-lai, although no doubt genuinely alarmed at the implications for the rest of Eastern Europe (especially Albania) and for China of the invasion of Czechoslovakia, seems to have sensed an opportunity to begin moving away from the risky and untenable dual adversary strategy in the direction of a limited accommodation with the United States, to be rationalized on the basis of the threat (real or alleged) from the Soviet Union. The dual adversary strategy was still sacred to Lin Piao and other Maoists, if not necessarily to Mao himself, however, and Chou had to move carefully. He waited until Mao had gone on winter vacation and then, on November 25, invited the incoming Nixon administration to resume the currently suspended ambassadorial talks at Warsaw on February 20, 1969; this move, which was bound to be controversial, was rationalized by the republication of a tract written by Mao in 1945 and saying that on occasion negotiations with the adversary were justified and necessary.

Drums along the Ussuri

During the next several weeks, however, Mao was evidently influenced by some other colleagues, probably including Lin Piao, to cancel the invitation (on February 19), launch a propaganda campaign against the Nixon administration, and authorize a more or less parallel blow at the Soviet Union as seemingly required by the dual adversary strategy. This latter blow, which was designed like the first to help create an appropriate atmosphere for Lin’s proclamation as Mao’s heir at the forthcoming Ninth Party Congress, was probably struck in the incorrect belief that Moscow would be prevented from retaliating by a crisis over West Berlin in which it then appeared to be involved, but which turned out to be short-lived. Lin’s anti-Soviet move took the form of an ambush of a Soviet patrol on a disputed island in the Ussuri River (between Manchuria and the Soviet Far East) on March 2, 1969. The Soviet response, which was unexpectedly violent, included a massive anti-Chinese propaganda campaign, a demonstration against the Chinese Embassy in Moscow, an attempt to exploit the Chinese issue to rally the Warsaw Pact countries under Moscow’s leadership, and a larger and more devastating ambush of a Chinese unit on the same island on March 15. Peking postponed its party congress in alarm and did not open it until April 1, by which time dovish voices in Moscow, probably concerned over the possibility of driving the Chinese into the arms of the United States, had prevailed to the extent that Kosygin invited Peking on March 29 to negotiate the border dispute. Peking’s intensely anti-Soviet mood prevented acceptance of this offer. On the other hand, it was thought wise for Lin Piao to include in his report to the Ninth Party Congress a statement implying that Peking did not seriously claim any significant amount of Soviet Asian territory, provided a new boundary treaty were signed on a footing of equality and recognizing that the old tsarist treaties were “unequal” (i.e., unethical because imposed by force), and provided some minor adjustments of the border were made in China’s favor.

Moscow has never admitted publicly to a realization that this is Peking’s position, probably because to do so would hamper propaganda exploitation of the border issue. On the other hand, the Soviet attitude contains genuine, if exaggerated, elements of concern. These are based partly on racial feelings, but also on a belief that Peking is adventurous, and that as it becomes a major nuclear power it is likely either to expand into non-Communist Asia as the United States disengages, or to reach an understanding with the United States to facilitate an attempt at expansion into Soviet Asia. In either case, a strong Soviet military presence near the Chinese border is considered a necessary deterrent. Although this estimate of Peking’s expansionist propensities is unduly alarmist, it is true that Soviet pressures along the border have contributed to a less assertive Chinese policy toward Asia, as well as to Peking’s celebrated diplomatic approaches to the United States. The Soviet leadership also appears to be interested in being in a position to exert pressure on China, for political effect, probably after Mao’s death.

With these considerations, or something like them, in mind, the Soviet Union began a rapid buildup of its forces near the Chinese border in the spring of 1969, gave Peking a virtual ultimatum to begin negotiating the border dispute by September 13, and backed up this demand with a succession of warnings and threats. Early in September, at North Vietnam’s urgent request, the Chinese agreed to let Kosygin talk with Chou En-lai in Peking on September 11, and on October 7, after some further Soviet pressures had been applied, both sides agreed to hold negotiations in Peking in the near future. In this way the tension along the border was partly defused, although the Soviet military build-up continued at least into 1972 and rose to a level of some fifty divisions (including an estimated eight in the Mongolian People’s Republic) backed by nuclear weapons.

The Border Negotiations

The border talks began in Peking on October 20, 1969, and promptly became deadlocked, although they were not suspended. Neither side was in a position to make major concessions, if only for reasons of domestic politics, and neither was realistically speaking in a position to make war if its demands were not met or if no agreement were reached. On the Chinese side, strategic inferiority alone is a sufficient argument against starting a war. On the other side, in spite of Soviet strategic superiority there are powerful reasons why Moscow should and does hesitate to attack China. One is China’s formidable defensive potential and its growing retaliatory capabilities, nuclear and conventional; Chinese forces could probably cut the Trans-Siberian Railway and damage or destroy several Soviet cities with nuclear-armed missiles. The Soviet Union’s external relations with both Communist and non-Communist countries would be severely harmed if it attacked China; the United States, although it probably would not intervene militarily, has indicated strong opposition to such an attack and would presumably find some way short of war of punishing Moscow for it. Finally, the Soviet Union’s political and social systems, which suffer from serious internal tensions, would experience severe strains in the event of a war with China, or any other major power.

The Chinese position at the talks has been essentially that there should be a prompt agreement on a cease-fire and a mutual withdrawal of troops from the common border. Peking demands publicly that Moscow withdraw its forces from foreign territory (i.e., from the Mongolian People’s Republic, where they are closer to Peking than anywhere else), and privately that as part of a long-term accommodation the forces in Soviet Asia near the Chinese border be pulled back to Western Siberia. China still insists on a new boundary treaty that, while branding the previous treaties as “unequal,” does not necessarily make any changes in China’s favor in the existing border, except for minor ones in areas where Peking insists that the Soviet Union is in occupation of territory somewhat in excess of what was conceded under the “unequal” treaties.

The Soviet position amounts to a rejection of these demands, in the case of the first because acceptance would remove a major source of leverage on Peking. The exception is that there can be a new treaty that reaffirms the boundary established by the “unequal” treaties, which Moscow is unwilling to label as such, and that makes some minor adjustments in Peking’s favor.

The basic deadlock in the border negotiations has not prevented, and may even have stimulated, a limited improvement of Sino-Soviet intergovernmental relations in other fields. In October-November 1970, ambassadors were exchanged (their predecessors had been withdrawn in 1966), and a new trade agreement was signed.

Continued Tension

In mid-December 1969, Peking became worried that the Soviet Union might be about to break off the border negotiations and therefore began to show an interest in resuming Sino-American ambassadorial talks. Moscow resumed the negotiations in Peking early in 1970, however, and in the spring of 1970 the tentative trend toward an improvement in Sino-American relations was badly disrupted by the overthrow of Prince Sihanouk and the subsequent entry of American ground forces into Cambodia, which led Peking to break off the ambassadorial talks and denounce the United States loudly. About the middle of the year there occurred a major, although unpublicized, Sino-Soviet military clash in Central Asia. The responsibility is unclear; the Soviet side may have started it in the hope of pressuring Peking into concessions now that the latter seemingly had no American card to play, or the Chinese side may have started it as another validation of the dual adversary strategy (a slap for the “imperialists,” a slap for the “revisionists” or “social imperialists.”). Whatever the truth, Moscow approached the United States privately at.the SALT talks in early July with a proposal for joint action against aggressive third countries, obviously meaning China. Although the United States declined, Peking was certainly becoming worried by the situation in which it found itself and was impressed by President Nixon’s withdrawal of American troops from Cambodia at the end of June as he had originally promised and by his continued expressions of interest in an improved relationship with China, in part as a means of increasing American leverage on the Soviet Union.

There is little doubt that the resulting resumption of Sino-American contacts contributed to moderating Soviet policy toward China. It may have had something to do with the exchange of ambassadors already mentioned. It is even more likely to have contributed to Brezhnev’s private offer, made in February 1971, of a nonaggression pact with China. Peking, by then in a bolder mood and probably regarding the offer as meaningless as long as the other issues in Sino-Soviet relations were left unresolved, refused.

Peking’s conduct of its relations with Moscow continued to be strongly influenced by Maoist ideology and domestic politics. In spite of the suppression of the Red Guards by the Army and the effective end of the Cultural Revolution in late 1968, extreme Maoists like Lin Piao and Chiang Ching (Mme. Mao Tse-tung) still exercised considerable influence on Mao himself, and therefore on Chinese domestic politics and foreign policy. This remained true even though Lin’s personal political fortunes began to decline long before his fall in September 1971, and perhaps from as early as March 1969. Chou En-lai accordingly found it wise to avoid trouble by injecting some Maoist elements into his conduct of foreign relations. His statement of October 7, 1969, announcing the decision to open border negotiations with the Soviet Union, for example, contained a bow to the Maoists in the form of a statement that “irreconcilable differences of principle,” or in other words of ideology, separated the two sides, a proposition probably not of intense concern to Chou himself. Presumably to demonstrate to everyone, especially the Russians, that the opening of the border talks in October 1969 did not indicate any lessening of the Maoist faith in “people’s war” as the best deterrent to attack, an extensive campaign of “war preparations” (tunnel digging, etc.) was launched at about the same time. Also at that time, the texts of the famous Maoist “revolutionary operas” associated with the Cultural Revolution were revised somewhat, and the commentaries on the revised versions sometimes mentioned the Soviet Union among the adversaries against whom viewers of the operas should remember to struggle.

Over and above the genuine detestation of Soviet “revisionism” and “social imperialism” by the Maoists and the serious concern felt by Chou En-lai and others (probably including some Maoists) over the Soviet military threat, the Soviet demon image was consciously manipulated to some extent for political effect. In particular Chou appears to have been exploiting the Soviet threat, while trying not to provoke Moscow beyond endurance, in order to promote his military policy. Whereas Lin’s conception stressed loud publicity for the nuclear weapons program, rapid development of an ICBM, and training of the conventional forces for “people’s war,” Chou’s is both more rational and less assertive; it emphasizes IRBMs and MRBMs (which are useful as a deterrent to Soviet attack, but do not alarm the United States to the same degree as an ICBM would), minimal publicity for the nuclear weapons program, the gradual withdrawal of the Regional Forces from the dominant political role that they assumed in the provinces during the Cultural Revolution on the plea of military necessity created by Soviet pressures, and improvement of the capabilities of the entire People’s Liberation Army (both the Main Forces and the Regional Forces) for conventional warfare.

Complex political forces are at work on the Soviet side as well. Brezhnev has clearly committed himself to a strong anti-Chinese line and has been implicitly accused by one of his most important junior colleagues, Shelepin, who appears to be less anti-Chinese, of exploiting the China issue for personal political purposes. One reason for Brezhnev’s attitude is probably his close ties with the Soviet military, some elements of which still want revenge for the Ussuri clash of March 2, 1969, regard China as a threat, and might advocate an attack if favorable conditions should materialize. Suslov, although genuinely and strongly hostile to Chinese ideology and behavior, appears to find Peking useful as an adversary against whom to try to rally the essentially pro-Soviet Communist Parties under Moscow’s leadership, and he evidently does not favor the use of force against the Chinese or anyone else. To some extent, Soviet propaganda exploits the controversy with China in an effort to make Moscow more acceptable in Western eyes.

Thus the Sino-Soviet confrontation remains a process in which each adversary displays a concern that is partly real and partly exaggerated and seeks advantage over the other in a variety of ways. Among the latter are a number of Soviet gestures, informal and often covert, toward Taiwan since 1968; one of the most interesting was the passage of four Soviet naval vessels through the Taiwan Strait, apparently without advance notification to Taipei, on May 12, 1973, two days before the arrival of David Bruce in Peking as Chief of the United States Liaison Office there, as though to suggest that the developing relationship between the United States and the People’s Republic of China might be countered by one between the Soviet Union and the Republic of China. In spite of occasional reports of armed clashes along the Sino-Soviet frontier and suggestions from time to time in the Soviet press that the stability of Inner Asia requires the transfer of all territory north of the Great Wall from Chinese control to Soviet influence, Peking seems somewhat less nervous than it once did and apparently believes that its growing military strength and improving international position will be enough to deter a Soviet attack. On the Soviet side, anti-Chinese statements and moves are evidently designed in many cases to put Peking in the worst possible light in connection with an apparently projected international conference of Communist Parties, rather than as serious threats; on the other hand Soviet concern is growing, at least in some quarters, in proportion as the strength of Peking’s position increases.

The existence of apparent elements of gamesmanship in the Sino-Soviet confrontation does not cancel out a strong tendency for each side to regard the other as capable of extreme irrationality and therefore as requiring to be restrained by virtually any available means. In such a situation there is always the danger that the stronger party will take action to destroy the other, or at least to teach him an unforgettable lesson. There was an apparent increase of Sino-Soviet tension in the early months of 1974, probably as a reflection of Soviet concern over the approach of a Chinese capability of hitting Moscow with missiles emplaced near the Central Asian sector of the border, a Soviet belief that the Sino-American relationship had lost some of its vigor, and an effort by Chou En-lai to exploit an atmosphere of tension in Sino-Soviet relations as a means of helping to restore elite harmony in China after several months of political turmoil.

The Chinese and Soviet “Tilts” toward the United States

It is obvious that one of the most promising moves on the part of either adversary in the Sino-Soviet confrontation would be to improve its relations with the United States, ideally to the point of gaining effective American support against the other, and that the recent decline of Cold War attitudes in the United States has increased the apparent feasibility of such an approach.

On the Chinese side, even the Soviet threat was not considered as eliminating certain prerequisites for a detente with the United States. The two most important were that the United States must be perceived as no longer a serious threat to China, or at any rate as a significantly less serious threat than the Soviet Union, and that the United States must end its military involvement in Indochina, which Peking viewed as wrong in principle as well as dangerous to itself and others. The first of these conditions evidently began to materialize in 1966, when official American statements about China took on a more conciliatory tone and it became cleai to Peking that the United States was not likely to escalate the war in Vietnam to the level of an attack on China. The second began to materialize in 1968, when President Johnson halted the bombing of North Vietnam. In these ways the United States qualified itself in Peking’s eyes for Chou En-lai’s invitation of November 25, 1968, issued under the impact of the invasion of Czechoslovakia and the Brezhnev Doctrine, to the incoming Nixon administration to resume the Sino-American ambassadorial talks at Warsaw on February 20, 1969. As compared with the massive Soviet threat that arose in 1969, the Nixon administration appeared to Peking as no threat to itself and in fact as anxious to improve its relations with China. Furthermore, in spite of the American incursion into Cambodia in the spring of 1970 and occasional bombing offensives against North Vietnam, the Nixon administration appeared in Chinese eyes to be genuinely committed to ending direct American military involvement in the Indochina war, and in fact to reducing substantially the American military presence in the Far East and the Western Pacific.

Above and beyond these prerequisites, there was reason to believe that the Nixon administration could be maneuvered, by virtue of its felt need for a better relationship with Peking, into greater flexibility on the Taiwan question, although probably not into an outright abandonment of the Republic of China. It was unlikely that President Nixon’s desire for improved relations with Peking and his rather hostile attitude toward the Soviet Union (as indicated for example in a statement he made on July 1, 1970) would eventuate in actual American military support for China, but the mere possibility that they might would be a valuable, and perhaps decisive, deterrent to a Soviet attack. An interesting, although not necessarily very important, example of the benefits to Peking, in its confrontation with Moscow, of a better relationship with the United States is Brezhnev’s public acceptance in March 1972, after ten years of rejection, of the Chinese and Albanian contention that the vague concept of “peaceful coexistence” was applicable to relations among “socialist” (i.e., Communist) states; the reason was almost certainly the fact that in the Shanghai Communique, signed the previous month, the United States had endorsed the Chinese variant, the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence.

On the Soviet side, the need for improved relations with the United States, in the context of the Sino-Soviet confrontation, was less urgent, inasmuch as the Soviet Union was militarily far stronger than China. An improvement was also more difficult, in view of American concern over the build-up of Soviet strategic weapons and over occasional Soviet forward moves in the Middle East. Moscow was also inhibited by a reluctance to appear in the eyes of the international left as conciliatory toward the United States while bullying China; it is interesting that the Soviet Union did not begin the long-discussed SALT talks with the United States until November 1969, a month after it had initiated the border negotiations in Peking, the sequence suggesting an implicit denial that Moscow found it easier to deal with the “imperialist” Americans than with the Chinese. Such in fact was increasingly the case, however, and fortunately so for Moscow, since it would have been unwise and even dangerous for it to leave Soviet-American relations as they were while Sino-American relations improved. Other powerful considerations were the need to ease the heavy burden of the arms race on the Soviet economy and a desire to strengthen the latter through increased trade and technological contact with the United States and other advanced industrial countries.

The outcome was what amounted to a competitive wooing of the United States. To be effective, this had to include a more moderate policy on Indochina, the area of most acute concern to the United States. Both Moscow and Peking have considered since about 1971, when the reality of the Sino-American détente became apparent, that the United States was more important than the troublesome North Vietnamese ally, with the qualification that neither Moscow nor Peking has wanted to act on this priority so vigorously as to drive Hanoi into the arms of the other. Moscow demonstrated its sense of priorities in May 1972 by deciding to go ahead with the summit conference with President Nixon in spite of the U.S. bombing and mining campaign in North Vietnam, and Peking later that year by threatening to cut off aid if Hanoi did not sign an agreement with the United States. More generally, Peking’s relatively quiescent policy in Asia as a whole since 1969 and Brezhnev’s personal détente diplomacy with the United States have clearly been motivated to a high degree by the compulsions of competitive wooing.

The “tilt” toward the United States has not been universally popular in either Moscow or Peking. One of the hard-line Soviet opponents of American “imperialism,” the Ukrainian boss Pyotr Shelest, evidently favored cancelling the Moscow summit in May 1972 on account of the American bombing and mining of North Vietnam, only to be outvoted in the Politburo and demoted.

But it is on the Chinese, not the Soviet, side that the most serious objections to an improvement of relations with the United States have materialized, essentially because ideological and military fundamentalism are at a higher level in Peking than in Moscow. The radical Maoists have opposed, with decreasing effectiveness on the whole, the opening to the United States, which Chou En-lai favors and Mao himself considers unavoidable under present circumstances. In fact, the opening was not assured until after the fall of the most powerful and radical of the Maoists, Defense Minister Lin Piao. Peking’s official account of his fall, which is to the effect that he tried to assassinate Mao and was so pro-Soviet that he then tried to defect to the Soviet Union only to die in a plane crash in the Mongolian People’s Republic on the night of September 12-13, 1971, is almost certainly consciously misleading and designed to make a good impression on American (as well as Chinese) opinion by bracketing the Soviet adversary with a Chinese villain.

In reality, as far as his attitude on foreign affairs was concerned, Lin appears to have remained the convinced advocate of the dual adversary strategy that he had shown himself to be in 1965 (in Long Live the Victory of People’s War) and 1969 (on the Ussuri River). He probably interpreted Brezhnev’s offer of a non-aggression pact in February 1971 as showing that the Russians were paper bears after all and that there was therefore no need to “tilt” toward the United States in order to cope with the Soviet threat, as Chou En-lai insisted there was. His opposition to the opening to the United States made him a source of danger to his colleagues, as did his personal unacceptability in Moscow; he was especially disliked there not only as a radical Maoist but as a “Bonapartist” military man trying to succeed Mao as China’s leader, as the principal exponent of the allegedly racist concept of “people’s war” (the “world countryside” against the “world city”), and as the architect of the first of the two clashes on the Ussuri River.

The announcement on July 15, 1971 in Peking and Washington that Dr. Henry Kissinger had just visited China and that President Nixon had been invited to do the same set in motion an increase in the apparent Soviet threat to China that contributed powerfully to the purge of Lin Piao as, among other things, a particular target of Moscow’s wrath and an obstacle to the best available source of enhanced security against it, an improved relationship with the United States. The late summer of 1971 saw a series of especially strong anti-Chinese statements in the Soviet press and a number of important Soviet diplomatic moves. Among the latter, the two with the strongest impact on Peking were probably the Soviet-Indian friendship treaty of August 9, 1971 (Articles 8 and 9 of which say by clear implication that the Soviet Union will take any necessary military action against China if it should intervene in an Indo-Pakistani war), and the four-power agreement of September 3, 1971 on West Berlin (which had the effect of helping to free Moscow’s hands in Europe the better to cope with China and was all the more meaningful in Peking because signed on the anniversary of the publication of Lin Piao’s Long Live the Victory of People’s War). Accordingly, Lin was purged and killed on September 11 or September 12, quite possibly after attempting a coup against Chou En-lai; the crash of a Chinese aircraft in the Mongolian People’s Republic the following night was probably staged in order to discredit Lin by providing the basis for subsequent unproven and implausible charges that he had died while trying to flee to the country where his true loyalties lay.

Lin’s fall removed the most powerful Chinese opponent of the “tilt” toward the United States and opened the way to the announcement on October 5 of a second visit by Kissinger to Peking, which occurred later that month. After that the Nixon visit, and at least a considerable improvement in Sino-American relations, were probably irreversible, although they remained far from completely acceptable to many radical Maoists at all levels of the political system. During the months before the presidential visit, cadres were extensively briefed to the effect that Nixon had shown a friendly attitude toward China and asked to come, and that it therefore made sense to invite him and see what he had to say. At the higher levels, objections were kept under control only through personal action by Mao himself, notably his receiving Nixon on the first day of the presidential visit (February 22, 1972), probably at Chou En-lai’s strong request.

All this was immensely upsetting in Moscow, but fortunately from the Soviet viewpoint the Nixon administration claimed to be following a policy of “equidistance” with respect to the two major Communist powers. The implication was that, while discouraging a Soviet attack on China both directly and in various indirect ways, and while pursuing the normalization of its own relations with Peking, the United States was strongly interested in improving its relations with the Soviet Union as well. The major reasons included a desire to stabilize the Soviet strategic weapons build-up through an arms control agreement and a desire to increase the level of Soviet-American trade. Furthermore, it was obvious that President Nixon was determined for personal political reasons to visit both Peking and Moscow in 1972, an election year. This determination gave both Communist powers considerable leverage in dealing with him; it also meant that neither was, realistically speaking, in a position to cancel the summit or otherwise jeopardize its own détente with the United States while the other’s continued to progress.

The Asian “Collective Security” Issue

Brezhnev seems to have made his brief, vague proposal at the international conference of Communist Parties in June 1969 for a “collective security” system in Asia after failing in his maneuvers to get the conference to pass some sort of anti-Chinese resolution. Accordingly, as Peking perceived from the beginning, the proposal had an anti-Chinese flavor, even though subsequent Soviet comment indicated that Moscow hoped to see China included in the system. As in the case of the “united action” proposal of 1965, Peking sensed an effort to enhance Soviet influence at Chinese expense and denounced the idea accordingly.

Chinese opposition, expressed at a time when Peking was rapidly increasing its international influence through a diplomatic normalization campaign following the end of the Cultural Revolution, was one major reason why the Soviet “collective security” proposal was received without enthusiasm by the other Asian states, whose governments had no desire to become involved in the Sino-Soviet dispute. Many of them preached nonalignment, furthermore, and regarded the Soviet proposal as only doubtfully consistent with this principle. In any case, the Soviet Union has rather limited contacts, a poor image, and little influence to date in some parts of Asia, although many Asians realize with varying degrees of approval that Moscow is likely to play an increasing role in the affairs of the region in the future. China probably has greater influence, actual and potential, in Asia as a whole, for reasons that can be summed up in the obvious statement that it is not only a much more authentically Asian power than the Soviet Union but the largest of the Asian states. It appears that this will hold true as long as Peking refrains from asserting its desire for influence so aggressively as to drive other Asian states into the arms of a rival, such as the Soviet Union.

After two years of futility, the Soviet Union began to revive its “collective security” proposal in 1971. The most important reason was probably the striking success achieved by Peking in establishing its diplomatic opening to the United States. A second was very likely the appearance of a competing idea in the form of a proposal from Prime Minister Razak of Malaysia in July 1971 that Southeast Asia be neutralized (i.e., be without foreign troops, bases, and military ties) under the guarantee of the great powers, which he specified as China, the Soviet Union, and the United States (note the order, and the omission of Japan); this proposal was endorsed by ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations: Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Philippines) the following November. Since Moscow has tended to claim that its plan must operate without competition, Soviet comment on the Razak proposal has been only minimally polite; Peking has been considerably more cordial.

The Soviet proposal has become considerably more explicit in its revised form, as elaborated for example in an important speech by Brezhnev on March 20, 1972, than it was originally. It has obvious similarities with the standard Communist slogan of peaceful coexistence and with its Chinese variant, the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence. It specifies the nonuse of force among Asian nations (of which the Soviet Union, of course, claims to be one), the “inviolability” of frontiers (an obvious attempted defense against Chinese and Japanese territorial claims on the Soviet Union); noninterference in the internal affairs of other states (not a guarantee against revolutionary activity by local Communist Parties), and economic and political cooperation. The proposal is rationalized on the ground, sometimes very strongly put, that Asian security is currently threatened by China, the United States, and Japan. To date Iran is the only state to have endorsed the Soviet idea.

Soviet propaganda, nevertheless, often cites the Soviet-Indian friendship treaty of August 1971, which was signed at the time when Moscow was reviving its efforts to lend some reality to “collective security,” and Soviet-Indian relations in general as the major and exemplary achievement in the field of Asian “collective security” to date. The treaty and the relationship were certainly one of the factors that deterred Chinese intervention on Pakistan’s side in the Indo-Pakistani War of November-December 1971 over the Bangla Desh issue; the others were the six Indian divisions stationed along the Sino-Indian frontier and logistical problems (including snow-filled passes). The best that Peking felt it could do, apart from propaganda, was to give Pakistan more economic and military aid and to postpone recognizing Bangla Desh or improving relations with India at least until Pakistan should do so. Peking fears, fairly reasonably, that the Soviet Union may try to play the role of policeman in the Indian Ocean through an expanded naval presence, something in which China is no position to compete.

Logically enough, Soviet propaganda does not stress Soviet-Mongolian relations as an example of “collective security” in action even though the Mongols themselves praise that slogan in the course of their slowly increasing but still rather limited contacts with Asian countries. For the Mongolian People’s Republic is essentially a Soviet satellite, and has been one since the 1920s. Its pro-Soviet stand in the Sino-Soviet dispute, one manifestation of which is the presence on Mongolian soil of several Soviet divisions threatening China, is the result both of the massive Soviet presence in the country and of a fear of China heightened by the spectacle of the domination of the Mongols of Inner Mongolia by Peking’s officials and by Chinese colonists.

Historic and recent Soviet heavy-handedness toward Japan, as well as Soviet resentment of past Japanese behavior, have made Soviet-Japanese relations tense and difficult. Moscow greatly fears the possibility of a close Sino-Japanese relationship and tries to prevent it, but is prevented by its obsession with China, among other things, from conciliating Japan effectively. A Soviet-Japanese peace treaty is being delayed mainly by Moscow’s objections, on account of the possible effect on China and others of the Soviet Union’s neighbors, to giving back any of the Northern Territories (the Japanese terms for four small islands lying at the southern end of the Kuriles) as demanded by all political elements in Japan. Moscow has been more than normally difficult about giving effect to its desire for large-scale Japanese capital and technical assistance in the economic development of Siberia and the Soviet Far East and especially in the construction of a pipeline eastward from Irkutsk to Nakhodka on the Pacific to carry oil from the vast Tiumen fields in Western Siberia, apparently because of Soviet annoyance at Japan’s policy of improving its relations with China. Peking’s objections to the pipeline project, on the ground that it would serve Soviet forces in the Far East as well as the Japanese economy, have eased somewhat recently, probably on account of a realization that the project is not likely to be completed in the near future and that American as well as Japanese firms will probably be involved in it. Premier Tanaka’s visit to Moscow in October 1973 produced no perceptible progress on the Northern Territories, a peace treaty, or the pipeline. The Japanese government has shown no enthusiasm for the Soviet “collective security” proposal, largely because of its overriding concern for its security relationship with the United States.

Peking regards the Soviet proposal as aimed at “encircling” China and is extremely anxious that Japan not participate. Peking like Tokyo regards the Japanese-American security treaty as a vastly preferable alternative to the Soviet scheme and to unilateral Japanese rearmament and has therefore begun to indicate informally that it no longer has any serious objection to the former or to the modest Japanese military establishment, as currently maintained and projected. No matter how desirable an improvement in Sino-Japanese relations may have been from Peking’s viewpoint (as well as Tokyo’s), however, it was postponed until 1972 by two main obstacles. One was the survival in office until that year of Premier Eisaku Sato, whom Peking regarded as unacceptably pro-American and as likely to try to fill any power vacuum in Asia created by American military disengagement under the Nixon Doctrine. Peking’s unique psychological, cultural, and political leverage on Japanese elite opinion, which it maximized through a massive anti-Japanese propaganda campaign in 1970-71, is such that Peking was able to contribute to the selection of a relatively pro-Chinese successor to Sato—Kakuei Tanaka, as it turned out.

The other obstacle, and another apparent reason for the Chinese anti-Japanese propaganda campaign just mentioned, was the objections of some Chinese leaders, Lin Piao in particular, to the proposed opening to the United States. By portraying the familiar enemy Japan as the real threat to China and Asia, Chou En-lai tried to rationalize the invitation to President Nixon as the best means of splitting Japan from its main source of support, the United States, an especially promising plan in a year when Japanese-American relations were reeling under the impact of the “Nixon shocks.” A particularly loud aspect of the Chinese anti-Japanese propaganda offensive related to a dispute over a group of small islands (Tiao-yü-t’ai in Chinese, Senkaku in Japanese) located on the continental shelf about one hundred miles northeast of Taiwan and in an area that may be very rich in oil. The fall of Lin Piao in September 1971 removed the main obstacle to the Nixon visit and therefore also the main reason for the anti-Japanese propaganda campaign, and accordingly the latter, including the aspect relating to the islands, began to die away almost immediately. As soon as the Tanaka cabinet was formed in early July 1972, Chou invited Tanaka to visit China. He did so at the end of September 1972 and succeeded in initiating substantial normalization of Sino-Japanese relations, including the establishment of diplomatic relations at Taiwan’s expense. Even though the relationship has not progressed much since then, Peking apparently feels satisfied that Tokyo is not likely to “tilt” toward the Soviet Union.

For a variety of reasons including ideological ones, it would be a major triumph for the Soviet Union to bring North Vietnam into its “collective security” system. But Hanoi is too wary of Soviet ambitions, and too vulnerable to Chinese pressures by virtue of a common border, to antagonize Peking to that extent, at least under present conditions. On the other hand the Soviet Union has fewer basic serious disputes with the United States in Asia than China has and therefore is paradoxically in a somewhat better position to displease the United States by political support for Hanoi in its struggle for domination of Indochina. Furthermore, the Soviet Union is better able than China to provide North Vietnam with large-scale economic aid (neither appears to be providing much military aid since the signing of the January 27, 1973 agreement on Vietnam, and especially since the supplementary agreement of June 13, 1973).

In view of the unremarkable progress of its “collective security” proposal to date, Moscow has begun to supplement its formal diplomacy on this subject with parallel activity conducted through the leftist front organizations that it dominates, such as the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Organization. Another ploy is a call, such as Brezhnev gave while in India in November 1973, for an international conference on Asian security, analogous to Soviet overtures in recent years for a conference and an agreement on European security. The Soviet Union obviously has some claim to be regarded as an Asian as well as a European power. In Asia, as in Europe, its “security” campaign is in reality a campaign to increase its influence.

Sino-Soviet Competition outside Asia

Of the non-Asian areas in which Soviet and Chinese interests find themselves in rivalry or conflict, Europe is almost certainly the most important. This is mainly due to the fact that Europe is the principal area (apart from the Sino-Soviet border region) where Soviet troops are stationed or that is threatened by military dispositions on Soviet soil, and away from which Soviet forces could be transferred, if conditions there permitted, in order to strengthen the anti-Chinese build-up. Peking accordingly considers that it is emphatically in China’s interest that conditions in Europe be such that no such transfer is possible. But since the situations in Eastern and Western Europe obviously differ greatly from one another, so do Peking’s policies toward them. In Eastern Europe, China’s behavior is almost purely anti-Soviet; in Western Europe, it is also pro-American to an astonishing degree.

In the Northern Tier countries (Poland, East Germany, and Czechoslovakia) Soviet influence, actual and potential, is so great that there is little opportunity for Chinese activity, and Peking tends to estimate Soviet influence as being even greater than it is. Czechoslovakia has not only been dominated politically by the Soviet Union since the invasion of 1968, but has been subjected to Soviet military occupation; accordingly, Czechoslovakia was one of the last two Communist countries to be sent a Chinese ambassador after the end of the Cultural Revolution, the other being the Mongolian People’s Republic, which Peking also considers to be occupied by Soviet troops. Peking misinterpreted, at least in its propaganda, the Polish risings leading to the fall of the Gomulka regime in December 1970 as the result of Soviet intervention and accordingly is on chilly terms with the successor Gierek regime. The replacement of the aged Walter Ulbricht by Erich Honecker in May 1971 resulted in an East German regime even more dependably receptive to Soviet guidance than before.

Hungary, under Janos Kadar’s leadership, has been purchasing immunity from Soviet wrath at its rather experimental economic policy by closely following Moscow’s lead in its foreign policy. Farther south, however, the Communist countries of the Balkans all have quarrels with Moscow that have provided political openings for Peking to varying degrees. In the case of Albania, the quarrel goes back to 1960 and led to a very close Sino-Albanian relationship for about a decade. Perhaps the high point was Peking’s obvious nervousness when Albania defied the Soviet Union to the extent of withdrawing from the Warsaw Pact in September 1968, in response to the invasion of Czechoslovakia. Growing Chinese flexibility in foreign policy in recent years, however, and in particular Peking’s détente with the United States and its contacts with right-wing anti-Soviet Communist Parties, such as the Spanish, have cooled the Sino-Albanian relationship considerably. The invasion of Czechoslovakia led to a period of tension in Soviet-Yugoslav relations that led in turn to a warming trend between Belgrade and Peking, which for a decade had been loudly denouncing Tito as a “revisionist.” The main result, however, has been at least a temporary improvement of Soviet-Yugoslav relations; Moscow having few levers it can use against Belgrade, unless and until Tito’s death or retirement removes most of the cement holding his country together, conciliation has seemed the only effective Soviet response to Belgrade’s improvement of its relations with China. Romania and China have encouraged each other for the past decade in their pursuit of policies that have been independent of Moscow’s and in Peking’s case downright anti-Soviet. Romania is in a weaker position than China to maintain this independence of action, however. It has remained in the Warsaw Pact, even though it interprets its military obligations as not including one to fight China, as Moscow tries to insist its allies are bound to do if necessary under the revised versions of their bilateral security treaties with the Soviet Union. The Romanian economy occasionally develops a need for Soviet aid. Accordingly, when President Ceausescu was strongly rebuked by Moscow in 1971 after carrying a message from Peking to Washington (in October 1970) and another in the opposite direction (in June 1971), he relapsed into behavior that was considerably less independent of the Soviet Union. Peking is well aware that there are limits beyond which the Balkan countries cannot defy the Soviet Union, and that there is little China can do for them if they do; in August 1971, Chou En-lai told a Yugoslav journalist in this connection that “Distant water cannot quench fire.”

Peking’s activities in Western Europe are complicated, not of course by Soviet control, but by the generally positive response to Moscow’s overtures since 1967 for an agreement on European security, even though there is a widespread and justified suspicion that the Soviet Union’s main objective is the enhancement of its own influence. Chinese diplomacy and propaganda have been doing their best to encourage the United States to maintain a strong military presence in Western Europe and the countries of the region to take a strong pro-NATO and pro-Common Market line. Except perhaps in the last respect, Peking is obviously trying to swim upstream, and its efforts have been greeted in the capitals of Western Europe mainly with puzzlement and amusement.

Peking’s main success in Western Europe has not been in combatting Moscow’s efforts to secure its rear through a security agreement and then perhaps turn more forcefully against China, but simply in expanding its diplomatic relations; by now, it has them with every West European country but Portugal, which (at least until the change of government in 1974) has been ideologically unacceptable to Peking on account of its role in Africa. About half these relationships were established shortly after 1949, and the other half since the end of the Cultural Revolution. In the case of both groups the motives of the West European governments usually related more to expanding trade with China than to hampering or even irritating the Soviet Union. In the most important recent case, West Germany, which established diplomatic relations with Peking in October 1972, the Willy Brandt government had been so pro-Soviet that Moscow gave its consent in private, even though a few years earlier Soviet propaganda had been falsely alleging the existence of an anti-Soviet “Bonn-Peking axis.” Peking can count on some French sympathy for its public opposition to both “superpowers,” but not on any sort of French support that would be more than marginally effective in strengthening China’s hand against the Soviet Union.

In the Middle East, Peking has little direct influence or responsibility apart from its intermittent support for Arab guerrilla movements. It is in no position to buy Middle Eastern oil. Accordingly, its behavior is ideologically based to a high degree. Its propaganda curries favor with the Arabs by denouncing Israel and tries to convince them that the two superpowers, both of which have far greater influence in the region than China has, are their other principal enemies. Peking’s role during the Middle Eastern War of October 1973 was limited substantially to this sort of propaganda, which apparently reflected a sense that it had no handle on the situation and that no outcome would be particularly favorable to its interests. By its own encouragement of the Arab attack on Israel, the Soviet Union achieved among other things a setback for the developing Sino-American relationship; Peking was forced to take a loudly anti-American and anti-Israel line in order to avoid alienating the Arabs, and Secretary of State Kissinger was predictably compelled to postpone his scheduled visit to China until mid-November. One thing that Peking almost certainly does not want to see is an Arab-Israeli settlement sufficient to produce the reopening of the Suez Canal, which would help the Soviet Union to increase its naval strength in the Indian Ocean. In the non-Arab countries of the Middle East (apart from Israel), Peking’s problems have been simpler. Its recent success in establishing diplomatic relations with Turkey and Iran was due to a considerable extent to those countries’ interest in acquiring a counterweight to the Soviet Union, a traditional problem for them even when not an actual threat.

Sino-Soviet rivalry in Africa and Latin America is a rather amorphous subject. Both Moscow and Peking are of course active in these regions. Each tries to promote its own influence through diplomacy, aid, propaganda, and the like, and to denigrate the other whenever possible. But the stakes are not as high as in regions closer to the centers from which the Sino-Soviet dispute is conducted. The Communist Parties of Latin America are almost all bureaucratized and solidly pro-Soviet, and the radical movements tend to look to Cuba more than to China for guidance.

On the whole, the fact that the Soviet Union is a superpower and China is not, even by Peking’s standards, is reflected in greater Soviet overall influence in the world outside Asia. But Peking’s challenge to Moscow in this vast arena is impressive, even though it has not been truly successful to date and is not likely to succeed in the near future.