The Chinese people emerged from the ashes of the Korean War supremely confident. The war had imbued them with a sense of national pride for having fought the greatest superpower to a standstill and affirmed Mao’s promise that China would indeed overcome its “century of national humiliation.” Mao declared “a great victory in the war to resist U.S. aggression and aid Korea”1 Recognizing China’s new status, Khrushchev assumed a solicitous stance toward Mao and China by ending all unequal agreements between the two nations and by providing Beijing with the necessary economic and military assistance to help China get back on its feet. Khrushchev welcomed the emergence of a strong communist neighbor. The historian William Taubman noted that between 1953 and 1956, “the Soviets agreed to build, or aid, in the construction of 205 factories and plants valued at about $2 billion, with $727 million financed with Soviet credits, all at a time when the Russians themselves suffered shortages.”2 The scale of Soviet largesse was impressive: technological support to initiate or upgrade 156 industrial projects for the First Five-Year Plan; giving up the Soviet share in four Soviet-Sino joint ventures; a corps of experts to tutor the Chinese in everything from road construction to factory management; and blue prints of entire factories.3 In 1955, Moscow provided nuclear technology, purportedly for peaceful purposes.4 Moscow even offered to give Beijing a sample nuclear bomb in 1957.5 “We gave everything to China,” recalled Khrushchev. “We kept no secrets from the Chinese.”6
Besides helping China economically, Soviet leaders were also generous in offering diplomatic and military support. The Soviets insisted on Beijing’s participation in the 1954 Geneva Conference on Indochina and Korea. When Mao began shelling the offshore islands of Jinmen (Quemoy) and Mazu (Matsu) in late 1954, during the First Taiwan Strait Crisis, Khrushchev backed him, even though he was trying to improve relations with the West. The Chinese were also invited to attend the founding meeting of the Warsaw Pact in 1955.7 Khrushchev later wrote, “We considered the people of the Soviet Union and China to be brothers, and we felt this world was useful not only for us but also for the international communist movement.”8
But Khrushchev was disappointed with the outcome of Soviet generosity. Even when the Sino-Soviet relationship was at its most harmonious during the mid-1950s, growing tensions were becoming apparent. This happened because Mao was no longer willing to play second fiddle to Khrushchev as he had done with Stalin. He had never forgotten that Stalin had reneged on his promise to provide crucial air support at the start of China’s entry into the Korean War, leaving Mao’s forces to face the Americans alone. In Mao’s view, China had earned its newfound respect and international prestige from the Chinese blood spilled on the battlefields of Korea, and he sought to uphold the memory of these enormous sacrifices by asserting China’s equality, and indeed, superiority, with the Soviet Union. No amount of aid or solicitous treatment from Khrushchev would diminish Mao’s desire to show just who ruled the roost.9
Khrushchev’s memories of his first visit to Beijing in 1954 are replete with resentments. For example, when he offered to withdraw Soviet troops from Port Arthur and Dairen and restore the two ports to China, Mao insisted that the Soviets leave their heavy artillery behind. Surprised, Khrushchev refused to do so without payment.10 Khrushchev had also raised the question of Chinese guest workers coming to Siberia, to help with the cutting of timber. “We thought it was of mutual interest and to some degree would be of assistance to China,” wrote Khrushchev, but Mao’s reply angered him. “Everyone looks at China as a kind of reserve source of labor,” Mao said. “In China this attitude toward the Chinese people is considered insulting.” The matter was quickly dropped, though Khrushchev resented Mao’s haughtiness. “It seemed to me that Mao could not reconcile himself to the circumstances necessary for healthy relations among socialist countries, circumstances in which each country and each ruling party hold a position of equality with all the others,” Khrushchev later declared. “He was aspiring to hegemony of the world Communist movement!”11
It was the Polish and Hungarian crisis of 1956 that had brought these private tensions into public awareness. Khrushchev had not consulted the Chinese in advance about his secret speech at the Twentieth Congress in 1956 that denounced Stalin. While Mao had his own grievances against Stalin, he believed it was unwise to undermine the cult of personality. “Mao had an almost mythical faith in the role of the leader,” observed Mao’s personal physician, Li Zhisui. “He was China’s Stalin, and everyone knew it. He shared the popular perception that he was the country’s messiah.” Khrushchev’s attack against Stalin raised uncomfortable questions about Mao’s own leadership style and “cult of personality,” which was by then well orchestrated throughout the country. Li observed, “For Mao to agree to the attack against Stalin was to admit that attacks against himself were permissible as well.” Just as important, Mao saw foreign manipulation in the denunciation. “Mao saw Khrushchev’s attack as playing into the hands of the Americans, the imperialist camp,” Li later wrote. He also quoted Mao as saying that “[Khrushchev] is just handing the sword to others, helping the tigers harm us.”12
Khrushchev’s handling of the Polish and Hungarian crises of 1956 merely reconfirmed Mao’s view of the Soviet leader’s deficiencies. His vacillation in the face of the crises, and his apparent reliance on Chinese advice to use force to crush the Hungarian rebellion made it seem, at least to the Chinese, as if they were coaching the Soviets, in a stark reversal of roles.13 By the end of 1956, Mao began to harbor serious doubts about Khrushchev’s competence to lead the communist movement, as Mao had come to believe that the Polish and Hungarian crises had been the direct outcome of Khrushchev’s “foolish” denunciation of Stalin. “The sword of Stalin has now been discarded by the Russians,” he proclaimed in November 1956, “and some people in Hungary have picked it up to stab at the Soviet Union and to oppose so-called Stalinism.” Mao added that “we Chinese have not thrown it away.” Mao was becoming increasingly critical of Khrushchev’s principle of “peaceful coexistence” between the socialist and nonsocialist worlds. He accused Khrushchev of abandoning the class struggle. Mao asserted that “the Western world had simply used the Hungarian incident to mount an anti-Soviet, anti-communist tide,” and he, not Khrushchev, was the more qualified to lead the communist revolution and to dictate the principles underlying the relations between and among socialist countries since he was the true Marxist-Leninist.14 “Mao thought he was God,” Khrushchev complained. “Karl Marx and Lenin were both in their graves and Mao thought he had no equal on earth.”15
Mao could hardly hide his disdain for his Soviet hosts during his trip to Moscow in November 1957, the first since 1949–50. “The arrangements for Mao and his entourage had been made with the greatest care,” reported Li Zhisui. Yet Mao received the Russian hospitality with contempt. “Look how differently they’re treating us now,” he snapped. “Even in this communist land, they know who is powerful and who is weak. What snobs!” Although two Russian chefs were assigned to him, Mao refused to eat the food they prepared, preferring instead “the Hunanese fare concocted by his favorite chef.” Taken to see a performance of Swan Lake at the Bolshoi, Mao was immediately bored and announced at the end of the second act that he was leaving. He seemed, in the words of his physician, to be “deliberately refusing to appreciate Russian culture.”16 Khrushchev noticed Mao’s “aloof manner.” “You could already sense that he placed himself above the rest,” Khrushchev angrily recalled. “Sometimes he allowed himself to do things that in general were impermissible, and he did it all without paying the slightest attention to others.” The Soviet leader also complained that Mao flirted with his wife during the meetings, saying “indecent things to her laughing.” Khrushchev was appalled.17
Relations between the two leaders worsened in 1958. Following the harsh crackdown of the failed Hundred Flowers campaign, which had been introduced in 1956 to encourage open criticism of the government and its policies, Mao launched the Great Leap Forward campaign, a new mass mobilization movement to consolidate his power and maintain China’s revolutionary momentum.18 Sino-Soviet tensions escalated during this period as Mao sought to both radicalize China’s domestic policies and distance himself from Soviet economic practices. His realization of China’s economic backwardness coupled with a new confidence to claim authority in the world communist hierarchy led him to launch the movement, which was intended to turn China into an industrialized power in just a few years. Mao wanted to prove that he was the true successor of Marx and Lenin.
It was at this moment, when Mao decided to assert China’s independence from Moscow, that Khrushchev proposed a joint venture: establishment of a communication station on China’s coast to serve not only Soviet submarines in the Pacific but also a joint Soviet-Chinese submarine fleet. The Soviets would build the radio station themselves, but the technology would be “in the common interest of the entire socialist camp” since, as Khrushchev put it, “all military resources of the socialist countries were all serving one common cause, to be prepared to repel the imperialists if they unleashed a war against us.”19 Mao’s reaction was unexpected. He accused the Soviet Union of “big power chauvinism” and charged them with “looking down on the Chinese people.” Furthermore, “if the Soviets wanted joint ownership and operation of a submarine fleet,” Mao sarcastically told Soviet Ambassador Pavel Yudin, “then let us turn into joint ownership and operation of our army, navy, air force, industry, agriculture, culture, education.” Or better still, “[you] may have all of China’s more than ten thousand kilometers of coastline and let us only maintain a guerilla force.” Mao told Ambassador Yudin, “Please report all my comments to Comrade Khrushchev … You must tell him exactly what I have said without any polishing so as to make him uneasy. He has criticized Stalin’s [policy] lines but now adopts the same policies as Stalin did.”20
Alarmed by Yudin’s report, Khrushchev rushed to Beijing. Between July 31 and August 3, 1958, the two leaders met four times. Khrushchev was mistaken in thinking a personal visit would smooth Mao’s ruffled feathers, for Mao treated him shabbily if not with contempt. “Mao returned the extravagant hospitality given him in the Soviet Union [in 1957] with a slap in Khrushchev’s face,” observed Li Zhisui.21 After four days of intensive meetings, an agreement on the construction of the long-wave radio station was eventually signed, but it had been hard fought and revealed the growing discord between the two leaders. Mao would later recall that “the overturning [of our relations with] the Soviet Union occurred in 1958, and that was because they wanted to control China militarily.”22
Even more alarming than Mao’s boorish behavior during the 1958 meetings from Khrushchev’s point of view was his view of nuclear war. “Mao regarded as the top priority not the question of peaceful coexistence, but the question of preparing for war with the aim of crushing our enemies in a war, no matter how great the losses such a war might bring to the socialist countries.” Mao was not afraid of nuclear war: “The size of the population is decisive, as in the past, in deciding the balance of forces. We have plenty of people … There is no country that can succeed in defeating us.” Khrushchev was stunned by Mao’s bravado. Mao advised that if there was an attack on the Soviet Union, the Russians should offer no resistance. Instead, “you should withdraw gradually,” Mao told Khrushchev. “Retreat for a year or two or three. You would force the enemy to extend his lines of communication and thereby weaken him. Then, with our combined forces, we would attack him and crush him.” “But where would Soviet forces retreat to?” asked an astonished Khrushchev. “Didn’t you retreat as far as Stalingrad? For two whole years you retreated, so why can’t you retreat for three years to the Urals or Siberia?” Was Mao playing the fool simply to annoy the Soviet leader? Khrushchev couldn’t be sure. Mao’s wild rants about preparing for nuclear war worried Khrushchev: “If he [Mao] actually believed that his arguments made sense in terms of military strategy, it’s hard to believe that an intelligent person would be capable of thinking that way. To this day, it remains a total mystery to me. I still don’t know whether he was being provocative or was simply incapable of thinking clearly.”23
The talks ended abruptly. Khrushchev had originally planned to stay a week but left after only three days. Mao’s churlish behavior and his talk of Soviet forces retreating to the Urals in the event of a nuclear attack had angered and confused him. According to Li Zhisui, however, this had been Mao’s intention all along: “The chairman was deliberately playing the role of emperor, treating Khrushchev like the barbarian come to pay tribute. It was a way, Mao told me on the way back to Beidaihe, of ‘sticking a needle up his ass.’”24
If Khrushchev returned to Moscow believing that the worst of his troubles with Mao were over, he had been sorely mistaken. On August 23, 1958, the Chinese began bombarding the offshore Taiwanese islands of Jinmen and Mazu, initiating the Second Taiwan Strait Crisis without any advanced warning to Moscow. In response, the Americans mounted a massive show of force in the Taiwan Strait. Dulles announced Washington’s intention to defend the offshore islands. A Sino-American war would very likely draw in the Soviet Union. Khrushchev secretly sent Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko to Beijing to find out what Mao was up to. He was relieved by Gromyko’s report. Mao’s intention was not to provoke a war with the United States, but rather to draw the world’s attention to the Taiwan question and to divert American strength from the rest of the world. With these assurances, Khrushchev sent a letter to Eisenhower declaring his country’s solidarity with Beijing. The Soviet Union would abide by the Sino-Soviet Treaty of 1950 and would regard an attack on China as an attack on itself.25 Khrushchev thought as well that the show of solidarity would reduce the threat of war since he believed that Washington would not risk conflict, one that could go nuclear, over Taiwan. Still, Khrushchev was infuriated by Mao’s actions. It appeared that Mao’s intent was to derail Khrushchev’s pursuit of détente with the United States and to undermine his quest for “peaceful coexistence.” The shelling may have been Mao’s way of declaring war on Khrushchev’s “revisionism” and announcing his independence from the Soviet regime. These assumptions proved correct. Mao later confided to Li Zhisui: “The islands are two batons that keep Khrushchev and Eisenhower dancing, scurrying this way and that.” For Mao, “the shelling of Quemoy and Matsu was pure show, a game to demonstrate to both Khrushchev and Eisenhower that he could not be controlled, and to undermine Khrushchev in his new quest for peace.”26
More important than international considerations, however, was Mao’s main concern in the summer of 1958 on how to propel the Great Leap Forward movement into its most radical phase, the communization and militarization of the entire Chinese population.27 On August 17, at a meeting of the Politburo of the CCP, Mao discussed the idea of shelling Jinmen and Mazu. The crisis would help in the mobilization effort of the Great Leap Forward, Mao reasoned, for “tension can help increase steel as well as grain [production] … To have an enemy in front of us, to have tension, is to our advantage.”28 Wu Lengxi, the director of Xinhua (New China News Agency) and editor of People’s Daily, the two main propaganda organs, recalled, “Chairman Mao said that the bombardment of Jinmen, frankly speaking, was our turn to create international tension for a purpose.” That purpose was to mobilize the people and to re-create the revolutionary fervor of the civil war and Korean War days. “The shelling of Jinmen-Mazu was a continuation of the Chinese civil war,” Mao explained. “No foreign country or international organization should be allowed to interfere in China’s affairs.”29 By linking the 1958 Taiwan Strait crisis and the Great Leap Forward, Mao wanted to galvanize the people by evoking their nationalist pride and profound victim mentality. Jinmen and Mazu were part of China’s territory that had been “lost” as a result of imperialist aggression (by Japan and later by the United States), Mao explained. They therefore needed to be recovered. “Taiwan keeps the pressure up,” Mao told Li Zhisui. “It helps maintain our internal unity. Once the pressure is off, internal disputes might break out.”30 In the meantime, significant fissures had opened between Beijing and Moscow. Khrushchev departed Beijing after his visit in the summer of 1958, having grave doubts about Mao’s “methods for building socialism” and his capacity to deal with the capitalist world in “a rational, cooperative way.”31
The man who had led Chinese forces in Korea had never been shy about bringing bad news to Mao. Peng Dehuai had always been honest with Mao. When Mao pushed Peng to pursue and drive UN forces from the Korean peninsula during the winter of 1950–51, Peng protested, stating that doing so was foolhardy and would lead to certain defeat. He halted his army near the 38th parallel instead, insisting that his men needed to regroup and rest. Nine years later, Peng warned Mao that he was pushing his people too hard and too fast: grain targets were unrealistic; there was excessive reliance on production of steel of dubious quality from backyard furnaces; the people were exhausted. Peng’s conclusion that disaster was looming came from firsthand observations. In October 1958, Peng traveled to the northwestern province of Gansu, which he had liberated from Nationalist forces almost a decade earlier. What he saw shocked him. At an infantry school, classes and training had been canceled because all instructors and students were laboring at backyard furnaces, with “their clothes black as soot.” The school staff told him that houses and fruit trees were used for fuel. He saw fields with ripe crops ready for harvest and inquired why they were being left to rot. The reply he received was that there were not enough people to harvest because they had to work at the furnaces. At an iron and steel works, Peng saw “smashed cooking vessels being used as raw materials simply to produce more iron. Useless lumps of it were lying resting on the ground.” The whole operation was “futile,” Peng told the local cadre and “compared it to beating a gong with a cucumber.”32 Although they agreed, they told him their quota had to be filled.
Peng visited his home province, Hunan, where he met with old friends in his home village, Wushi, not far from Mao’s birthplace in the same county, Xiangtan. It was the first time he had visited since the 1920s. The mood of the people was somber. He met aged peasants who were angry, even mutinous. “The youth can tighten their belts; the old can grit their teeth,” said one farmer, “but babies? They can only cry.” They hated the daily militarized routine, the forced communal living, and the destruction of family life that had been the center of Chinese society for millennia. There was not enough food. He was shown a “dish of vegetables with a few grains of rice” as a typical meal. Peng could see from their physical condition that they were not deceiving him. The cadres, they explained, were under constant pressure to outdo rival communes, which led to chronic exaggeration of crop yields. A set percentage of the yield was taken for provisioning the cities, and when this was applied to the exaggerated yields, there was virtually nothing left for the farmers. The Great Leap was a huge lie. “The old folk indicated to Peng that they could cope with natural disasters, but man-made ones were another matter.”33
Assessing the success or failure of the Great Leap was not in Peng’s portfolio as defense minister, but so great was his distress, especially what he witnessed in his own home town, that Peng decided to write a private letter to Mao on his observations. “By the evening of July 12, I had formed the opinion that serious disproportions had now emerged in China,” he later wrote. “This became the burden of my letter dated July 14, 1959. In that letter, I merely set out in general terms several relatively important issues, but made no comment on the causes that had given rise to these problems, indeed, at that time I could not explain the causes.” The letter was hand-delivered to Mao at Lüshan, where the Central Committee, the highest authority of the party, was meeting to discuss the Great Leap.
Peng was not prepared for the fury of Mao’s response. Instead of handling the letter as a private communication from a trusted colleague, Mao copied and circulated it to the 150 senior cadres attending the meeting. Mao attacked Peng, “declaring that the letter constituted an ‘anti-Party program of right-wing opportunism’.”34 He presented a stark choice to the Central Committee: side with Peng and he, Mao, would “go away to the countryside, to lead the peasants and overthrow the government,” or side with Mao. He added a direct challenge to the leaders of the PLA. If they did not want to follow him, he would raise another army, a truly Red one this time, and continue the revolution.35 They sided with Mao, and Peng was censured. Virtually overnight, Peng had become persona non grata. He was forced to move out of his large home to a half-ruined house. For the next six years he lived under virtual house arrest cleaning sewers and collecting refuse.
On December 28, 1966, at the start of the Cultural Revolution, Peng was arrested. His niece said he was continuously beaten and tortured. “During the decade of trouble, uncle was subjected to harsh persecution,” she wrote. “After the CPC [Communist Party of China] Central Committee had reviewed uncle’s case, I came across one document … prepared for the group for the Cultural Revolution.” The document described Peng’s tragic demise:
Yesterday, at the Peking Aviation Institute, there was a meeting of struggle with Peng Dehuai attended by 30–40 people. Peng Dehuai was at the meeting and was beaten several times. He was wounded in the forehead, and there were internal injuries in the regions of the lungs: tomorrow there will be a new round … After the meeting of struggle on July 19, 1967, Peng lay on the bed to rest, he had chest pains and difficulty in breathing, groaned constantly and in the evening could not even spit. When he was ordered to write down material, he said: “I cannot write now.” On the 22nd—today—the pain in his chest expanded in every direction and became even more serious. He had difficulty getting up off the bed … and could not speak. The doctor diagnosed two broken ribs, a rapid pulse and high blood pressure, and there were internal injuries.36
By the time of his death on November 29, 1974, Peng was unable to speak and had to be fed intravenously.37 The old revolutionary and hero of the Korean War died of untreated pneumonia in an empty, unheated building at the Municipal Party Committee headquarters in Beijing.38
Meanwhile, Peng’s predictions about the Great Leap had come true. The Soviets had warned Mao of the coming disaster, but Mao did not want to listen. “They wanted to show us how to build communism,” Khrushchev later quipped. “Well, all they got was a stink, nothing else.”39 In 1957, the average annual amount of grain per person in the countryside was 450 pounds. The following year, it dropped to 443 pounds and then to 403 pounds in 1959, and in 1960, it was 348 pounds, a drop of 112 pounds per person in just three years.40 The result was famine on a grand scale. An estimated 45 million Chinese people starved to death between 1959 and 1962.41 In the wake of the crisis, the distrust between Moscow and Beijing deepened while the specter of a radical and hostile China increased the fear and loathing of Mao’s regime in Washington. From Mao’s perspective, however, his management of the crisis had been masterful. He had successfully promoted domestic mobilization by provoking international tensions. Mao’s handling of China’s domestic and external policies in the late 1950s was a foretaste of what was to come.42 That is, in the same way Mao used the Korean War to consolidate his power and spur on the revolution, he used succeeding international crises to further that revolution. The next “opportunity” came in Vietnam.
Khrushchev visited Mao in September 1959 immediately following his twelve-day visit to the United States. He and Eisenhower had agreed, in their meeting at Camp David, that “the question of general disarmament is the most important one facing the world today.”43 The visit had made a positive impression on Khrushchev, who later insisted to his skeptical colleagues that Eisenhower was a reasonable “good hearted” man who could be dealt with through personal diplomacy.44 Mao had not been consulted about the U.S. trip, and he wondered whether “peaceful co-existence” and talks about general disarmament concealed a secret agreement at China’s expense. In China, Khrushchev spoke of the “Camp David spirit” of cooperation between East and West, which Mao perceived as an insult since Khrushchev was visiting to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the founding of the PRC and to give homage to the Chinese Revolution and China’s victory over foreign imperialism.45 At Eisenhower’s request, Khrushchev asked Mao to release five U.S. citizens held on espionage charges. His awkward mediation further antagonized Mao. As the historian Sergey Radchenko noted, “The Soviet leader lacked the tact to understand that Mao needed no one, least of all Khrushchev, to deal with the West.”46
Khrushchev and other Soviet leaders became increasingly alarmed by what they considered Mao’s “Stalinist tendencies.” Mikhail Suslov, a powerful and influential member of the Soviet Politburo, reported on the 1959 meeting, with stinging criticism of Mao’s leadership style:
One should not omit the fact that … mistakes and shortcomings in the field of domestic and foreign policy of the Communist Party of China are largely explained by the atmosphere of the cult of personality of com. [comrade] Mao Zedong. Formally, the CC [Central Committee] of the Communist Party of China observes the norms of collective leadership, but in effect the most important decisions are made single-handedly, and thus are often touched by subjectivism, and in some instances are simply not well thought through. Glorification of com. Mao Zedong is visibly and unrestrainedly on the rise in China. In the party press one can increasingly find such statements as “we, the Chinese, live in the great epoch of Mao Zedong,” comrade Mao Zedong is portrayed as a great genius. They call him the beacon illuminating the path to communism, the embodiment of communist ideas. The name of com. Mao Zedong is equated with the party, etc. One presents the works of com. Mao Zedong in China as the last word of creative Marxism, of the same rank as the works of the classics of Marxism-Leninism. In effect, the works of com. Mao Zedong are at the foundation of all educational work in the party and in the last two–three years has been reduced to the study of Mao’s works. All this, unfortunately, pleases com. Mao Zedong, who, by all accounts, himself has come to believe in his own infallibility. This is reminiscent of the atmosphere that existed in our country during the last years of I.V. Stalin.47
Tensions in Sino-Indian relations complicated the situation between Mao and Khrushchev. Prime Minister Nehru’s accommodation of the Dalai Lama in the spring of 1959 after a failed Tibetan uprising against Chinese rule had led to a Sino-Indian clash along the Indo-Tibetan border. Khrushchev’s decision to maintain a neutral position in the dispute further infuriated Mao, for whom the neutrality indicated that Moscow “had virtually adopted a policy to support India’s position.”48 In February 1960, both sides publicly aired their differences at a Warsaw Pact meeting in Moscow. The purpose of the meeting had been to endorse Khrushchev’s policy of peaceful coexistence and disarmament proposals in advance of the Soviet leader’s big-four summit meeting with Eisenhower scheduled for that spring. Chinese delegates opposed peaceful coexistence, condemning it as being merely a “bourgeois pacifist notion.”49
The two sides were now on record with “diametrically opposed analysis of world affairs and prescriptions for bloc policies.”50 Two months later, on April 22, 1960, Mao publicly attacked the Soviet Union’s foreign policy, using the occasion of the ninetieth anniversary of Lenin’s birth to extrapolate on his themes of war and revolution. Citing Lenin, Mao declared that war was the “inevitable outcome of systems of exploitation and the source of modern wars is the imperialist system.” As long as imperialism existed, “wars of one kind or another will always occur.” Furthermore, “in the light of bloody facts both of the historical past and of the modern capitalist world,” peaceful coexistence between capitalist and socialist worlds was a chimera, a myth created by communist revisionists like Khrushchev.51 Lashing out against Soviet “revisionism,” he accused Khrushchev of pursuing policies that were ideologically incompatible with the teachings of Marx and Lenin. Moreover, unlike the Soviet Union, which was unwilling to support national liberation struggles in the Third World, China was the natural ally of the oppressed peoples.
An open clash followed as both sides began canvassing support among other communist parties. For the first time, Khrushchev publicly denounced Mao by name at the Romanian Party Congress in June 1960, calling him an “ultra-Leftist, ultra dogmatist and left wing revisionist who, like Stalin, had become oblivious to any interests but his own.”52 The next month, Khrushchev notified Mao that he would be withdrawing all Soviet advisors and experts from China. Ratified agreements on economic and technological aid were suspended, and hundreds of cooperative scientific and technological projects came to an abrupt halt mid-completion. Khrushchev also reneged on his promise to provide a sample atomic bomb. Mao was shocked and furious.53 Several weeks after the Soviets withdrew, the CCP leadership left Beijing to escape the summer heat at a seaside resort. Mao vented his anger to the Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh, who joined him there:
Khrushchev can cooperate with America, England and France. He can cooperate with India and Indonesia … He can even cooperate with Yugoslavia, but only with China is it impossible on the grounds that we have divergent opinions. Does that mean that his views are identical with America, England, France and India to allow whole-hearted cooperation? [He] withdraws the experts from China and doesn’t transfer technology, while sending experts to India and giving technology. So what if China doesn’t have experts? Will people die, I don’t believe it.54
Nikita Khrushchev, Mao Zedong, and Ho Chi Minh at a banquet in Beijing celebrating the tenth anniversary of communist rule in China, October 1, 1959. China’s support of Vietnam’s struggle began to take a radical turn in 1962 and early 1963 that further strained relations with the Soviet Union. Competition with Moscow for influence in Vietnam drove the two nations further apart but also made the situation difficult for Hanoi, which was now forced to navigate between two contending powers. Moreover, after the catastrophe of the Great Leap Forward, Mao saw an opportunity afforded by the crisis in Vietnam to strengthen his hold on power. In the same way that Mao used the crisis in Korea to instigate the Thought Reform Campaign and the Patriotic Hygiene Campaign to mobilize the masses and consolidate his hold on power, the Chinese leader used the tensions caused by the war in Vietnam to attack Soviet “revisionists” and launch the Cultural Revolution. (AP PHOTOS)
Ho had come to China hoping for assistance for the armed struggle in South Vietnam. Throughout the late 1950s, Mao had counseled Ho on the wisdom of adopting the Bandung line of peaceful coexistence, a policy first advocated by Zhou Enlai in Bandung, Indonesia, when Zhou and Ho met in April 1955. When in 1958 an increasingly frustrated Vietnamese Politburo formally requested China’s help in reviving a revolutionary war to bring about a communist victory in the South, Chinese leaders advised caution: “The realization of revolutionary transformation in the South was impossible at the current stage.”55 By the fall of 1959, however, Mao had softened his position because of increasing tensions with the Soviet Union, and agreed to provide the military aid Ho requested. Nevertheless, Chinese leaders were uneasy that Ho might prematurely escalate the conflict from guerilla war to conventional war. It would be better to wage a protracted guerilla war “for three to five years, even eight or ten years.”56 Chinese leaders were wary of provoking a wider war with the Americans in Vietnam. China’s policy toward Vietnam underwent a major shift in late 1962 and early 1963, owing to increased military support to Saigon from the Kennedy administration. The North Vietnamese feared that American forces would attack the North. Alarmed, Mao substantially increased military aid.57
In addition, China’s economy had begun to recover by the end of 1961, and Mao felt personally vulnerable. The myth of his “eternal correctness” had been called into question for the first time by the disaster of the Great Leap Forward. His colleagues favored more moderate policies by allowing family households to grow produce in their own private plots, offering more freedoms and status to intellectuals, and moderating China’s foreign policy toward its principle antagonists, namely, the Soviet Union, the United States, and India.58 Mao feared the influence of Soviet-style “revisionists” within his own ranks. Moreover, the abrupt withdrawal of Soviet aid in July 1960 had cast China into deep isolation from the rest of the world. Mao believed that his apocalyptic vision of the inevitable struggle between the forces of revolution and reaction was in the process of being fulfilled. He was not about to be marginalized on the eve of this fateful struggle.
Finally, the lessons of the Korean War had instructed Mao on the profound linkage between war and revolution. Renewed militancy abroad would serve his purpose by creating militancy at home. Throughout 1962–64, Mao repeatedly emphasized that the Chinese people were facing reactionary forces both from within and from outside their country. They needed to be prepared for the inevitable war. “In our country, we must … admit the possibility of the restoration of reactionary class,” Mao declared at the Central Committee’s Tenth Plenum in September 1962. “We must raise our vigilance and properly educate our youth … Otherwise, a country like ours may yet move toward its opposite. Therefore, from now on, we must talk about this every year, every month, every day … so that we have a more enlightened Marxist-Leninist line on the problem.”59
Although Mao’s emphasis on war and revolution played an important role in plotting his comeback, it was the debate over Vietnam policy where Mao attempted to gain an advantage in any challenge to his authority. Vietnam crystallized the essential tenets of Mao’s revolutionary ideology: his rejection of the possibility of peaceful coexistence and his view of China’s new and central role as supporter of Third World liberation movements. The contest between Mao’s revolutionary goals and the more moderate policies favored by so-called revisionists was brought to a head during the spring and summer of 1962, when Wang Jiaxiang, head of the CCP’s International Liaison Department, openly challenged Mao. Wang had been deeply affected by the failures of the Great Leap. While he was convalescing from an illness in Canton, he received a report about the mass starvation in Hunan Province and “became emotional and wept.” Believing that the CCP needed to concentrate on China’s domestic problems and adopt a more moderate line to reduce international tensions, Wang warned the party’s leadership against becoming involved in another war with the United States, this time in Vietnam. He criticized the tendency to overrate the dangers of world war and underestimate the benefits of peaceful coexistence. As for supporting revolutionary movements in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, Wang advocated reducing the costs of foreign entanglements. “At times like the present economic crisis, China had to consider very carefully what it spent overseas and not go overboard.”60
Wang Jiaxiang’s ideas came under heavy attack by Mao during a conference of party members held in Beidaihe in August 1962. The Chinese leader condemned Wang for promoting the policy of “three reconciliations and one reduction” as appeasement to imperialism, revisionism, and international reactionism, and reduction of assistance to support anti-imperialist forces in other countries.61 He rejected the idea that the “Soviet Union of today” would be “China’s tomorrow,” saying that he sought a different future for China.62 By the end of 1962, Mao was able to reassert his control over China’s foreign and domestic policies. His decision to censure Wang and other revisionists, including future leader Deng Xiaoping, came hand in hand with the adoption of a more radical policy toward Vietnam.63
However, when the United States launched its first air strike against North Vietnam in August 1964, Mao wanted to avoid the apparent mistake he had made in Korea by selecting the wrong channel to convey China’s warning. Mao did not want a direct Sino-American clash. The Chinese believed that one of the reasons why the Americans had ignored the warning in October 1950 against crossing the 38th parallel in Korea was because the Truman administration did not trust the messenger, Indian Ambassador Pannikar, who was thought to be anti-American and thus unreliable.64 This time Mao chose an American ally, Pakistan, through its president, Ayub Khan, who was scheduled to visit Washington the following spring, to deliver a warning. Zhou Enlai asked Khan to convey to President Lyndon Johnson that “if the United States expands the war, the war will gradually be expanded to China. We are prepared both materially and spiritually.”65 The Americans would not dismiss a message coming from their Pakistani ally so quickly.
But the visit was unexpectedly canceled. The Chinese attempted other channels. They sent the warning for Washington to Burmese leader Ne Win and Cambodia’s Prince Norodom Sihanouk. On April 20, Zhou himself delivered the message in a speech to leaders of the NAM in Bogor, Indonesia, at a gathering to mark the tenth anniversary of the Bandung Conference. He stated that “if the United States bombs China, that means bringing the war to China. The war has no boundary. This has two meanings. First, you cannot say that only an air war on your part is allowed, and the land war on my part is not allowed. Second, not only may you invade our territory, we may also fight a war abroad.” In order to emphasize the seriousness with which the Americans should take China’s warning, Zhou declared that “the Korean War can be taken as evidence.” On May 16, Zhou reassured a visiting Vietnamese National Liberation Front (Vietcong) delegation of China’s solidarity with their cause, telling them that “we will go to Vietnam if Vietnam is in need, as we did in Korea.” Finally, the British senior diplomat in China, chargé d’affaires Donald Hopson, was summoned to a rare meeting on May 31 with Foreign Minister Chen Yi. Chen told Hopson that he would be “grateful” if Hopson could pass on the warning to the Americans.66
The Korean analogy thus set the stage for escalating the war in Vietnam for the purpose of radicalizing the Chinese masses and leading them toward the Cultural Revolution. At the same time, warnings to the Americans not to expand the war to China were based on the lessons of Korea and were clear indications that Mao wanted to avoid another Korean-style confrontation.67 What Mao did not anticipate was how his Vietnam policy would lead to the complete breakdown of Sino-Soviet relations. Ironically, their joint support of North Vietnam contributed to the growing acrimony between them. As China plunged into the chaos of the Cultural Revolution, Mao faced the possibility of a war with the Soviet Union.