The third great clash in the battle for East Asia broke out in Indochina amid the crumbling edifice of the French Empire. Like China and Korea, Indochina had fallen under the control of imperial Japan during the Second World War. Though relatively short-lived, the Japanese occupation weakened many institutions of French colonial rule, exposed the vulnerability of Western control, and exacerbated existing social divisions inside Indochina. In short order, the occupation served as a rallying point for hundreds of resistance cells, many of which came under the control of Communist leaders. When French colonial authorities returned following Japan’s defeat, the anti-Japanese resistance directed its energies toward throwing off the yoke of Western imperialism. Mao’s victories in China and his example of guerrilla warfare inspired Vietnamese forces to wage a similar struggle. Yet the battle for Indochina, like the battle for Korea, played out in the midst of the superpower struggle. In the space of two generations, Indochina would become the bloodiest battleground of the post-1945 era. Desperate to recover their doomed empire, French leaders would play upon Washington’s Cold War fears to pull the United States deeper into involvement in yet another Communist revolution along the Pacific Rim. These pressures, combined with rising fears of a general Communist offensive in the East following Mao’s victory in China, convinced the United States to enter the fray. Through a succession of vicious wars, Indochina was to become the graveyard of French imperialism, the greatest challenge to American power in the Third World, and the site of the most violent confrontation between the U.S. military and the forces of communism. As in Korea, none of this seemed plausible at the close of World War II.
THE FRENCH INDOCHINA WAR
At 7:00 in the evening on March 9, 1945, the Vichy French governor-general of Indochina, Jean Decoux, received a visit from the Japanese ambassador, Shunichi Matsumoto, at his offices in Saigon. The ambassador presented Decoux with an ultimatum: in an effort to defend against an imminent American assault on Indochina, the Japanese Empire demanded that all French security forces in the colony be placed under Japanese control. At 9:15 p.m., Japanese forces arrested Decoux and began seizing French colonial offices throughout the city. French forces put up a brief resistance, and a number managed to escape to neighboring China, but the Japanese victory was never in any real doubt. As the Japanese consolidated control over the colony and prepared for the expected Allied attack, Vietnamese nationalists sensed their opportunity. “Thus the French imperialist wolf was finally devoured by the Japanese fascist hyena,” Ho Chi Minh later told American intelligence officers.1
Born in 1890, Ho was a veteran revolutionary who had journeyed to Versailles in 1919 to call upon President Woodrow Wilson to uphold the American leader’s appeals for self-determination in Vietnam. His slight frame, hollow cheeks, and searching eyes belied a fiery political will. Ho was the leader of the most powerful rebel group, the Viet Minh. Although he had spent much of his time as a political activist in exile, Ho would win the “race” to seize the mantle of revolutionary leadership as the bonds of empire began to slip free. Espousing a blend of anticolonial nationalism and revolutionary socialism, the Viet Minh rejected French colonialism, the Japanese occupation, and the peasant-landlord rural politics in Vietnam. During the five months of direct Japanese control (March–August 1945), Viet Minh fighters and the United States became allies. Agents from the Office of Strategic Services worked with the Viet Minh to coordinate resistance activities and rescue downed American pilots. Ho, assigned the name OSS Agent 19, struck them as “an awfully sweet guy.”2
Even as Ho organized his forces to challenge the Japanese, a larger tragedy gripped Vietnam in the form of a severe famine that had grown over 1944 and peaked in the spring of 1945. Between 1943 and 1945, the price of rice increased 1,400 percent as falling production and speculation made the staple increasingly hard to find. Any efforts to ship in rice surpluses from Cochinchina, in the South, were hampered by the ongoing war. As the famine grew worse in the countryside, some villagers had begun eating rice husks, roots, bark, and clover. Others took to the roads in search of food, and stories of cannibalism spread across the land. One survivor described the suffering in verse:
Along all highways famished bodies moaned,
lying curled up in sun, in dust and filth. . . .
And day by day, toward cities, toward Hanoi
more corpses, yet more corpses dragged themselves,
bringing the trail of flies, the stench of smells,
then crumbled down along some street or lane.
The Viet Minh responded to the famine by demanding the distribution of government food stores and the suspension of taxes on grain. Throughout the region, cadres encouraged villagers to seize grain storehouses and threatened local officials who refused to cooperate. All the while, the group continued to gain new recruits. By acting as a relief agency and providing a structure for organization at the local level, the Viet Minh was able to dramatically increase its standing in Vietnamese society. Hanoi’s casualty estimates of the famine ranged from one to two million (between 10 and 20 percent of the total population) and soon became a rallying cry for the Viet Minh, who blamed both the Japanese and the French colonial authorities for creating the disaster.3
Japan’s defeat ended the occupation, but the battle for Vietnam was just beginning. Even as the Viet Minh celebrated their independence from Japan, France (backed by the United States) prepared to restore its lost empire in Indochina. This decision came with reservations on the part of the Americans. As Franklin Roosevelt had explained to Stalin in 1943, the United States was no champion of the French Empire: “[A]fter 100 years of French rule in Indochina, the inhabitants were worse off than they had been before.” Following Japan’s surrender, however, Washington tilted in favor of supporting French claims. The nascent Cold War with the Soviet Union, the need to secure French participation in the Western Cold War alliance (what would become the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, or NATO), and concerns about the growing power of the Communist Party within France itself would all push the Truman administration toward the restoration of French rule in Indochina.4
On August 29, 1945, Ho Chi Minh entered Hanoi. The ancient capital of the medieval Dai Viet dynasty, Hanoi had been transformed into a modern city by the French—electric streetcars rattled along its tree-lined boulevards and in between its shimmering lakes. The streets teemed with thousands of recently arrived peasants, who had come to the city from the countryside in search of a new life in postwar Vietnam. Ho and his comrades arrived in Hanoi amid a flood of optimism. Japan had surrendered two weeks before, the French Empire was in ruins, and Vietnam stood on the brink of independence. Four days earlier, Emperor Bao Dai, a virtually powerless figurehead subject to the whims of both the French and Japanese rulers, had abdicated, and proclaimed his support for Ho as the next leader of the nation. On September 2, Ho addressed a crowd of thousands in Ba Dinh Square. “All men are created equal,” he intoned, borrowing the words of Thomas Jefferson. “They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness. . . . All the peoples on the earth are equal from birth, all the peoples have the right to live and to be happy and free.” As the festivities continued, the crowd watched as a small airplane circled the square. When it made a pass low enough that those on the ground could see the American flag on its wings, the crowd broke out in cheers.5
While the Vietnamese celebrated their independence in Ba Dinh Square, French authorities had moved to restore their power in Indochina. In late August, French colonial officials had begun parachuting into Tonkin, Annam, Cochinchina, and Cambodia while a military column prepared to reenter Tonkin from China. The following month, British troops arrived in Saigon to accept the surrender of Japanese forces and liberate imprisoned French forces—who were subsequently rearmed. News of the events in Saigon sparked a general strike in Hanoi on September 17. “If only there was a way to stop the inevitable onslaught,” Ho wrote. In March 1946, twelve hundred French troops arrived in Hanoi under the command of Gen. Jacques-Philippe Leclerc. While jubilant French colonists took to the streets to celebrate their return, Viet Minh leaders prepared for war. “They are weak,” Ho told his colleagues. “Colonialism is dying. The white man is finished in Asia.”6
The long-anticipated confrontation arrived in late 1946. On November 22, violent skirmishes broke out between French security forces and Viet Minh troops in the port city of Haiphong, killing 240 Vietnamese and 7 Frenchmen. Two days later, French officials decided to “teach a hard lesson to those who have so treacherously attacked us.” Just after 10:00 in the morning, French ships and planes began shelling the city. Large sections of Haiphong’s Vietnamese quarter were destroyed, and estimates of civilian casualties ranged from the hundreds into the thousands. The final countdown to full-scale war had begun. At 8:00 in the evening on December 19, lights flickered out along Hanoi’s streets as an explosion rocked the city. Viet Minh agents had attacked the city’s power plant, sending a signal for the general offensive to begin. In the following days, the fighting spread to other cities throughout the country. As Ho had told one American journalist, the conflict would be “a war between an elephant and a tiger. If the tiger ever stands still the elephant will crush him with his mighty tusks. But the tiger does not stand still. He lurks in the jungle by day and emerges only at night. He will leap upon the back of the elephant, tearing huge chunks from his hide, and then he will leap back into the dark jungle. And slowly the elephant will bleed to death. That will be the war of Indochina.” He was more direct with French officials: “If we have to fight, we will fight,” he warned. “You will kill ten of us, and we will kill one of you, and in the end it is you who will be exhausted.”7
As fighting raged on the streets of Hanoi, Viet Minh radio called for a people’s war of national liberation. The group would follow a strategy based on Mao’s three-stage model: defensive war, equilibrium, and final offensive, with a special emphasis on the growing influence of the Communist world in international affairs. Vietnamese revolutionaries recognized that their struggle was linked to currents in the Cold War.
Viet Minh fighters began a strategic withdrawal from the cities with the aim of reconsolidating their forces in guerrilla units in the countryside. Although French troops were able to kill a considerable number of guerrillas in the initial months of the war, the Viet Minh leadership remained intact. As the rebels’ recruitment efforts began to bear fruit, their ranks swelled.8 The principal architect of the Viet Minh strategy was Vo Nguyen Giap. Born in 1911 in the small village of An Xa, Giap was a promising student with a keen interest in history. He attended the University of Hanoi, graduating with a degree in politics and economics, and then took a position as a schoolteacher. He joined the Communist Party in 1931 and then fled to China during the Second World War, eventually settling in Yan’an. There, in the stronghold of the Chinese Communist Party, Giap would learn the art of guerrilla war from Mao’s commanders.9
Over the next seven years, Giap waged the war of the Vietnamese tiger against the French elephant in Indochina. Viet Minh forces would rely on guerrilla tactics as part of a larger strategy of attrition against the French. By avoiding open battles, using the cover of local terrain, laying ambushes, and striking at enemy forces where they were weak, Giap’s guerrillas sought to exhaust French resolve. Conversely, French commanders worked to draw the rebels into set-piece battles, engineering a series of pincer movements designed to trap and destroy the Viet Minh. At the same time, French officials scrambled to expand popular support for the friendly regime in Saigon under Emperor Bao Dai. To the French, this was la guerre sale, “the dirty war,” a frustrating, indecisive battle against a largely unseen foe. French forces controlled cities and major towns, but the surrounding countryside remained in the hands of the Viet Minh. “In outlying areas,” writes Duong Van Mai Elliott, “the pourriture, or rotting from within[,] would begin. . . . Military posts in these areas would become isolated. At night, the self-defense militiamen would become prisoners in their own reinforced posts, afraid to go out on patrol. Outside, the Viet Minh, masters of the night, would come and go as they pleased.”10
Having completed their withdrawal from the cities, the Viet Minh continued building their strength over the course of 1947. In January 1948, the party announced the start of the equilibrium stage of its struggle. The Viet Minh would now begin a counteroffensive against the colonial army. “If the enemy attacks us from above, we will attack him from below. If he attacks us in the North, we will respond in Central or South Vietnam, or in Cambodia and Laos. If the enemy penetrates one of our territorial bases, we will immediately strike hard at his belly and back . . . cut off his legs [and] destroy his roads.” It was a strategy of guerrilla war designed to sap French strength over a protracted struggle. As rebel attacks increased, the Viet Minh were able to seize new territory and recover areas lost in the previous year.
In 1950, General Giap launched a campaign to establish control over the northern border regions with the aim of opening new supply lines between Viet Minh bases and the newly established People’s Republic of China. Bolstered by this aid from China, the general calculated that the time had come to launch a final offensive in 1951. Viet Minh forces would engage French troops in open battle along the edge of the Red River Delta and then move to retake Hanoi. On January 13, twenty-one Viet Minh battalions attacked the French garrison at Vinh Yen. For four days, the French troops weathered the rebel onslaught as Giap employed human-wave attacks designed to overwhelm the defenses. Then, on January 17, Vietnamese forces were repulsed after suffering heavy casualties. In March, Giap would again try to win a set-piece battle against French units, in Mao Khe. For a second time, Viet Minh forces failed to achieve a breakthrough. Giap’s third attempt to crush French forces in a conventional battle came at Ninh Binh, in May. The fighting raged for over a week, but the French were able to withstand the attack and inflict massive losses on the Viet Minh. The staggering losses incurred in these attacks convinced Giap to revert to guerrilla tactics and ensured that the war would continue.11
DIEN BIEN PHU
It was now France’s turn to seek a way to end the bloody stalemate in Indochina that was draining French resources and creating increasing political controversy back home. In May 1953, Paris replaced Gen. Raoul Salan with Henri Navarre as the top military officer in Indochina. Revered as a brilliant strategist, Navarre arrived in Saigon charged with turning the tide of what many in France feared was a losing war. He hoped to retake the initiative in the conflict with the Viet Minh through a surge in the number of French troops while, at the same time, building up pro-Western Vietnamese forces. “We can conquer only by attacking,” he proclaimed.12 As part of this offensive strategy, Navarre would employ a system of “hedgehogs,” fortified outposts occupying strategic locations in hostile territory. He hoped to project French military power into Central Vietnam and into Northwest Vietnam in defense of Laos. He later admitted that the system “constituted a mediocre solution [but it] appeared as the only possible one. It would not prevent light enemy detachments from roaming through the countryside, but, leaving in our hands essential points, would prevent an [outright] invasion.” The general determined that the isolated outpost of Dien Bien Phu, located in the far northwestern corner of the country, would provide the best location in the area for an air base. The French base dominated the mountain passes to Laos in the west and China in the north. The base itself sat at the bottom of a valley surrounded by rugged highlands. Home to ethnic Tai minorities, the valley formed an important link in the opium trade routes through the region that helped fund the Viet Minh. An airstrip, built in 1939, had served anti-Japanese resistance activities and now functioned as a base aéro-terrestre for French counterinsurgency operations against the Viet Minh. Limestone mountains ringed the valley, their peaks overlooking the French fortifications and the neighboring village below. The surrounding heights were a sufficient distance from the airstrip so as to prevent the installation of enemy artillery in any but the most vulnerable positions on the hills facing the base. Navarre wrote that the “batteries would be in view of the [French] observation posts. . . . They would, therefore, be silenced by our counter-battery fire or by our bombers.” Dien Bien Phu, the general insisted, would be a “deep stab into the enemy’s rear areas.” The fortress formed the center of the French defense of Northwest Vietnam and “must be held at all costs.” “Victory,” Navarre bragged to his staff, “is a woman who gives herself to those who know how to take her.”13
General Giap reacted cautiously to the news of Navarre’s decision to occupy Dien Bien Phu. “This is an operation that works to our advantage,” he proclaimed, but he was wary of a potential trap. Giap had learned the painful lessons of frontal assaults on French positions in 1951, and he was not eager to repeat his mistakes. Furthermore, an attack on the French base presented monumental challenges. A three-hundred-mile march across forbidding terrain lay between Dien Bien Phu and his army in Laos. Equipment, food, men, ammunition, and supplies would all have to be moved vast distances (often on foot) over difficult terrain under constant threat from attack by French aircraft. But if Viet Minh forces could be placed in position, they would be able to encircle the isolated base and lay siege to the garrison inside. At the end of 1953, the two sides prepared for a showdown at Dien Bien Phu. As French troops under the command of Col. Christian de Castries prepared eight strongholds across the floor of the valley—allegedly named after Castries’s mistresses: Anne-Marie, Béatrice, Claudine, Dominique, Eliane, Françoise, Gabrielle, and Huguette—Giap’s soldiers moved into position on the surrounding heights. Giap’s forces toiled through February and into March 1954, reinforcing artillery positions and digging a network of trenches around the French defenses.14
At 5:00 on the evening of March 13, 1954, the Viet Minh attacked. As artillery shells screamed down around them, the defenders at strongpoint Béatrice watched enemy soldiers rise from trenches a mere two hundred meters from their lines. Ninety minutes later the Viet Minh scored a direct hit on Béatrice’s command bunker, killing most of the men inside. By 9:00 p.m., all the officers at Béatrice had been killed. Just after midnight, the strongpoint fell to the attackers. Meanwhile, French troops at Gabrielle, the northernmost strongpoint, withstood the initial assault, but their defenses began to crumble under the punishing artillery barrage. On the morning of the fifteenth, following a failed counterattack, Gabrielle fell to Giap’s forces. Two days later, the Viet Minh took Anne-Marie to the northwest, closing the circle around the remaining French defenders in the valley. With the fall of the three outlying posts, the French position became increasingly untenable. Giap’s antiaircraft batteries were now free to harass the airstrip, which would soon be destroyed by a Viet Minh commando unit, adding to the difficulty of resupplying the garrison. French forces were trapped inside a shrinking defensive perimeter and subject to devastating artillery fire from the surrounding heights.15
Over the next seven weeks, French and Viet Minh soldiers fought over the ruined ground of the valley floor. As the Viet Minh slowly tightened the lines around the garrison, French officers scrambled to gain control of airdropped supplies. Monsoon rains often shrouded the battlefield, preventing effective use of French aircraft and compounding the misery of the men fighting below. Despite launching a series of valiant counterattacks, the French saw their perimeter continue to contract. By the first of May, the battle lines cut through the French strongpoints at Huguette, Dominique, Eliane, and Françoise. On May 7, Giap ordered a final assault. Twenty-five thousand Viet Minh charged against the remaining 3,000 French defenders, overwhelming them. As Giap’s troops closed in, the French commander radioed his superiors in Hanoi to report that the battle was lost. At 5:30 in the evening, as Viet Minh troops seized the command bunker, a French sergeant radioed, “In five minutes, everything will be blowing up here. The Viets are only a few meters away. Greetings to everybody.” Ten minutes later, Vietnamese soldiers raised the red Viet Minh flag over the bunker. A total of 2,242 French soldiers had been killed, and nearly 12,000 had been taken prisoner. Estimates of Viet Minh casualties topped 20,000.16 Giap would reflect that the victory at Dien Bien Phu “had a far-reaching influence in the world. . . . [T]he news of the victories won by our army and people . . . have greatly inspired the progressive people the world over.”17
Dien Bien Phu sounded the death knell of the French Empire in Indochina. One day after Giap’s guns fell silent, diplomats from the United States, the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, the United Kingdom, France, and the Viet Minh took up the question of Indochina at the 1954 Geneva Conference, convened to resolve the conflicts in Korea and Indochina. Exhausted, bloodied, and humiliated, French leaders were ready to put an end to their nightmare in Indochina. Although they still controlled much of Indochina, the defeat at Dien Bien Phu proved to be the last straw. The Soviets and the Chinese also pushed for the war to end. Moscow needed time to consolidate the regime after Stalin’s death in 1953, and Beijing was ready for peace after the brutal fighting in Korea. Both Communist powers, moreover, feared the prospect of U.S. intervention in Indochina. The Geneva Accords called for the temporary division of Vietnam along the Seventeenth Parallel. In the North, Ho’s Democratic Republic of Vietnam (DRV) would assume power. In the South, the Bao Dai government would retain authority. The two Vietnams were to be reunified through a general election to be held in July 1956. This partial victory for the DRV was the result of Ho’s caution: better to consolidate the DRV gains and prepare for future reunification than to press for total victory and invite retaliation. Indeed, despite the defeat at Dien Bien Phu, nearly half a million French troops remained in Indochina. More worrisome was the fact that another, even greater power waited in the wings. The United States had taken a keen interest in the French war out of a desire both to contain Communist expansion and to strengthen France as a Cold War ally. By the end of the conflict, Washington was funding 80 percent of the French war effort and American pilots were flying support missions for French forces. The Americans feared that the same fires of revolutionary communism that had overwhelmed China and nearly taken Korea now threatened Southeast Asia. But President Eisenhower was reluctant to use U.S. military forces to save French colonialism and wary of provoking Chinese military intervention in the conflict. He therefore pulled back from the brink of intervention at Dien Bien Phu, a move that might have included a tactical nuclear strike on Giap’s forces. Nevertheless, American leaders were preparing to step into France’s role in the region and provide a bulwark against the further spread of communism. While the DRV celebrated its victory at Geneva, the seeds of another conflict took root.18
SINO-SOVIET SPLIT
As the representatives from Hanoi, Beijing, Moscow, Pyongyang, Seoul, Paris, London, and Washington sat down to sign the Geneva Accords on the morning of July 21, 1954, Communist forces in Asia could list a remarkable set of achievements. Seven years before, Mao’s troops had been written off by both Moscow and Washington, Korea sat divided and largely ignored, and Viet Minh forces struggled against an overwhelmingly superior French Army. But in the intervening years, East Asia had been transformed. Mao’s Communists had seized control of the world’s most populous nation; Beijing’s and Pyongyang’s armies had fought the United States to a standstill in Korea; and the Viet Minh were about to oust the French from Indochina and establish their own state in North Vietnam. Meanwhile, Western forces appeared to be in retreat. Chiang and the GMD nursed their wounds on their fortress island of Taiwan. The United States had refused to intervene in China and Indochina and had been bloodied in Korea, and French forces had surrendered at Dien Bien Phu. By most accounts, 1954 should have been a year of celebration for the forces of left-wing revolution around the developing world. Yet deep fissures in the Communist world were set to tear apart the seemingly ascendant Sino-Soviet alliance and, in doing so, transform the Cold War yet again.
While leaders in Hanoi hoped to continue their unfinished struggle to create a united, Communist Vietnam, Chinese and Soviet leaders were ready to sacrifice the Viet Minh’s aspirations for the sake of their own larger policy goals. For Moscow and Beijing, the Geneva Conference had offered an opportunity to gain added recognition from the Western powers and to consolidate the significant achievements of the East Asian offensive in China, Korea, and Southeast Asia. While Soviet leaders had little interest in Indochina, Mao and his comrades were convinced that the complete liberation of Vietnam would entail a long struggle. Worse, the escalation of a war in Southeast Asia would give an opening to Washington to stage a military intervention in Indochina. “We’ve already lost too many men in Korea,” Chinese premier Zhou Enlai told Nikita Khrushchev in the lead-up to the Geneva Conference. “We’re in no condition to get involved in another war at this time.” At Geneva, Soviet and Chinese leaders placed their own national interests above the goal of continuing the Communist offensive in Southeast Asia. The Sino-Soviet Alliance, then, served to restrain the more bellicose factions among the Vietnamese Communists.19
Yet this lull in fighting would last only as long as the alliance between the two Communist giants. And for all their triumphs, Beijing and Moscow could not overcome bitter differences rooted in both political and ideological concerns. Also, Mao Zedong would never forget Stalin’s lukewarm support during the Chinese Civil War. The Communists’ battlefield victories provided an immediate salve to these tensions, but resentments festered. Chinese leaders also remained skeptical of the Soviet model’s applicability to societies in the developing world. Over the course of the 1950s, a budding competition between the two Communist powers emerged for the leadership of the revolutionary movement in the Third World.20
Most observers in Washington seemed oblivious to the tensions between Beijing and Moscow. “Every act of communism in Asia has its inception in and takes meaning and direction from the Kremlin,” a 1954 CIA report insisted. The leaders of the CCP were nothing more than “puppets of world communism, i.e. of Moscow; they are entirely satisfied to be puppets.” Mao was, according to the report, “100 per cent puppet. . . . He will never change his present relationship with the USSR.” The same could be said for the entire leadership of the Chinese Communist Party: “The CCP will do exactly what the world revolutionary leadership, Moscow, tells them.” China would remain politically subservient, economically dependent, and militarily attached to the USSR. China would “never, under the CCP, make a heavy industry that will assure her independence.” The United States should not waste its time seeking to find points of disagreement between Moscow and Beijing, the paper argued. “There will be no split in the forseeable [sic] future.”21 This myth of a Communist monolith would prove difficult to shake. Indeed, another fifteen years would pass before U.S. leaders found the means to exploit the growing rift between Moscow and Beijing.
Meanwhile, the decade after Geneva transformed Sino-Soviet relations. Beijing and Moscow could hide their differences while war raged in Korea and Indochina, but peace brought new challenges. Although Stalin’s death in 1953 left Mao as the reigning patriarch of the global Communist movement, the Kremlin had no intention of surrendering leadership to Beijing. An even larger point of contention appeared in February 1956, when Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, delivered his now-famous “secret speech” to the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party in Moscow. In the address, Khrushchev denounced the repression of the Stalinist era, repudiated Stalin’s cult of personality, and set in motion a sweeping campaign to transform the institutions of the Soviet state. The speech shocked Chinese leaders, who accused Khrushchev of rejecting Leninism and Stalinism in favor of a new “revisionism” that threatened to derail the Communist project. Communist parties in China, North Korea, and North Vietnam had each constructed a cult of personality and used the Stalinist model as the basis for their organizations. While Khrushchev had targeted his address at the Soviet party, its implications spread far beyond the borders of the USSR. Khrushchev’s policy of peaceful coexistence with the Western powers, which was announced that same year and appeared to call for accommodation with the capitalist world, only made matters worse.22
Mao and his comrades balked at what they saw as Khrushchev’s moderate Cold War policies. The Kremlin’s calls for Chinese caution during the Taiwan Strait Crisis in 1958 further irritated Chinese leaders, as did the Soviet refusal to share nuclear weapons technology with the PRC. For a time, Mao’s decision to launch the Great Leap Forward masked the growing animosity between the Communist powers. A sweeping land reform campaign, the Great Leap envisioned the mass collectivization of agriculture drawing upon the nation’s massive labor resources. In the space of a generation, Mao hoped to catapult China’s economy ahead of that of Great Britain. The results were catastrophic. Poorly planned reforms combined with brutal repression to generate massive famines that, according to historian Frank Dikötter, led to as many as 45 million “unnecessary deaths.” Enormous projects to build canals and dams and to fell millions of acres of trees ravaged the countryside. Government forces executed an estimated 2.5 million people who resisted the reforms, leading one historian to place the Great Leap Forward alongside the Nazi Holocaust, the Soviet Great Terror under Stalin, and the Cambodian genocide.23
Four years and tens of millions of deaths later, Beijing abandoned the disastrous Great Leap Forward only to find itself embroiled in a border war with India in October 1962. While Chinese and Indian troops skirmished along the frontier, U.S. and Soviet leaders locked horns over Soviet missiles in Cuba. Khrushchev’s decision to remove the missiles from Cuba at the end of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis gave Beijing new ammunition in its propaganda war against Moscow. The Kremlin, Chinese leaders argued, had abandoned the heroic Cubans to the depredations of U.S. imperial power. Khrushchev’s refusal to back Beijing in the 1962 Sino-Indian War added yet another line to Mao’s list of grievances.24 Alone, none of these issues would have caused the split between the Communist powers. Put together, however, they ripped apart the Sino-Soviet axis and opened a new stage in the wars of containment.25