The rise and decline of the Sino-Soviet alliance

see Chapter 10

Sino-Soviet split

The process whereby China and the Soviet Union became alienated from each other in the late 1950s and early 1960s. It is often dated from 1956 and Khrushchev's speech to the twentieth congress of the CPSU, but this view has been challenged in recent years.

When the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) took power in 1949 it inherited a country that had been ravaged by more than a decade of war. It therefore faced an immense task in its intention to transform China into a modern socialist state that would raise the people’s standard of living and be treated as an equal by all within the international community. Moreover, it had to begin the construction of socialism in the knowledge that both domestic and foreign opponents still existed, for the Guomindang (GMD) had not been annihilated but had retreated to Taiwan, and the world’s leading capitalist power, the United States, was vociferously hostile to the idea of a communist China. In these conditions the CCP was naturally drawn towards an alignment with the Soviet Union which, as the unchallenged centre of the communist world, could obviously assist in the building of socialism and act as a guarantor of China’s national security.

The Sino-Soviet alliance was signed in February 1950 and first bore fruit later that year when China was able to risk intervening in the Korean War without provoking an American attack on its own soil. The alliance worked reasonably well during the Korean conflict, for the Soviet Union assisted China with the provision of air support and supplied a great deal of military materiel. However, the fly in the ointment was that Stalin demanded payment for the Soviet supplies. This naturally irritated the Chinese, who were after all fighting on behalf of world communism and who needed all the resources they could muster to fuel domestic economic growth.

Some scholars have been tempted to date the Sino-Soviet split from these early tensions, but that is a dangerouspost-facto reading of events. In reality these initial problems were overcome, in part because two linked events in 1953 promised a brighter future. The first of these was that March witnessed the death of Stalin, which was important because, while Stalin was alive, Mao had sometimes resented his bullying attitude and self-interested policies, but had not had the temerity to disobey Lenin's heir. Stalin's removal from the scene therefore allowed a more equal relationship between Russia and China to be constructed. In addition, his passing was significant because the new Soviet leadership, based around Georgi Malenkov and Nikita Khrushchev, was keen to introduce a thaw in the Cold War. Obviously one way of achieving this was to bring the Korean War to a speedy conclusion, which was a policy that also appealed to the PRC's leaders. Accordingly, in July 1953 the second key event of the year took place, namely the end of the conflict in Korea. With Stalin and the Korean War removed from the scene, the Sino- Soviet relationship was able to turn towards a more promising area of co­operation.

Now that the PRC was at peace, its main priority was to construct a socialist economy by adopting the Soviet five-year plan model of industrialization and moving towards state ownership of all property. To help it achieve these goals, the Soviet Union sent thousands of advisers and technicians to China to provide assistance across a broad range of state activities. Soviet aid also arrived in other forms, such as up-to-date weaponry, including jet fighters such as the MiG-15, and credits that allowed China to acquire the latest Russian industrial technology. In addition, by 1955 the Soviets started to assist with the development of a Chinese nuclear capability. Meanwhile, on the world stage the Soviet Union and China co-operated effectively at the Geneva Conference in 1954, with both benefiting from the neutralization of Indochina.

In retrospect the years between 1953 and 1957 can be seen as the highpoint of the alliance, but even so, this period did contain the germs of later problems. Most notably difficulties were created when, in February 1956, Khrushchev made his wide-ranging and controversial ‘de-Stalinization' speech, in which he sharply criticized the cruelties and failings of Stalin, called for a move towards peaceful co-existence with the West, and announced that there was more than one path to the goal of constructing a socialist society. The conventional view among scholars used to be that this new Soviet agenda was anathema to Mao and that accordingly the speech marked the start of the Sino-Soviet split. In fact the situation was more complex. It certainly does appear that Mao was not amused about the lack of forewarning, and that he felt that the attack on Stalin was tactically injudicious. However, in a number of ways the speech was important not because of the anger that it stirred but for the opportunities it provided for Mao, and ironically it was these aspects that paved the way for the split.

One positive aspect of the speech was that, by attacking Stalin, Khrushchev allowed the Chinese leadership to follow suit and to engage in criticism of the late Russian leader's ‘Great Power chauvinism' towards China. The implication of such a line was obvious: the Soviet Union should treat the PRC as an equal. Even more significant was Khrushchev's acknowledgement that other socialist states did not have to adhere rigidly to the Soviet model. This was important because by 1956 Mao was beginning to doubt whether economic development based on centrally planned heavy industrialization was suited to a country like China, which still possessed a relatively small industrial sector. Mao believed instead that the PRC could build socialism by concentrating on a massive increase in agricultural production, allied with the development of infrastructure projects and localized

see Chapter 12

de-Stalinization

The policy, pursued in most communist states and among most communist groups after 1956, of eradicating the memory or influence of Stalin and Stalinism.

peaceful co-existence

An expression coined originally by Trotsky to describe the condition when there are pacific relations between states with differing social systems and competition takes place in fields other than war. The idea was vital to Soviet diplomacy particularly after the death of Stalin.

Great Powers

Traditionally those states that were held capable of shared responsibility for the management of the international order by virtue of their military and economic influence.

Great Leap Forward

The movement initiated by the CCP in 1958 to achieve rapid modernization in China through the construction of communes and the utilization of the masses for large-scale infrastructure projects.

industrialization, such as the building of ‘backyard furnaces'. Essential to this rapid economic transformation of China, labelled the ‘Great Leap Forward', was the idea of devolving power from the centre to rural communes containing thousands of households.

Document 15.1

Mao’s conversation with the Soviet ambassador, Pavel Yudin,

31 March 1956

He [Mao] noted that Stalin, without a doubt, is a great Marxist. However, in his great work in the course of a long period of time he made a number of great and serious mistakes, the primary ones of which were listed in Khrushchev’s speech.... Mao... noted that Stalin’s mistakes accumulated gradually, from small ones growing to huge ones.... The spirit of criticism and self­criticism and the atmosphere which was created after the [twentieth CPSU] congress will help us, he said, to express our thoughts more freely on a range of issues. It is good that the CPSU has posed all these issues.

Source: Westad (ed.) (1999, document ix, pp. 341-42)

Third World

A collective term of French origin for those states that are part of neither the developed capitalist world nor the communist bloc. It includes the states of Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, South Asia and South-East Asia.

The Great Leap Forward was launched formally with many fanfares in 1958. In order to stir the Chinese people into action, a fervent domestic propaganda campaign was begun. Simultaneously, the state unleashed a new confrontational phase in Chinese diplomacy, with the intention of creating a pervading atmos­phere of crisis that would reinforce the people's revolutionary ardour. This was, however, only partly due to domestic factors, for in addition the desire to con­front Western interests was influenced by Mao's reading of current international affairs. By 1958 Mao was beginning to express doubts about Soviet policy towards the West, which appeared to centre upon its desire to establish peaceful co-existence, thus guaranteeing the security of its empire in Eastern Europe. Mao believed that, as a result of recent events in Asia and Africa and the technological advances symbolized by the launch of Sputnik, the communist bloc was now in a superior position to the West and did not need to pursue such a cautious line. He therefore argued that socialism should be more radical in its denunciations of imperialism and in the provision of support for revolutionary national libera­tion movements and newly independent states in the Third World. In addition, Mao still hungered for equality in the PRC's relationship with the USSR, and felt that China needed to assert itself by following a more independent line in foreign and security policy.

All of these goals came together in August 1958 when Mao initiated a propa­ganda campaign calling for the liberation of Taiwan and ordered the bombard­ment of Jinmen (Quemoy), an island off the coast of Fujian province which was still occupied by the GMD. The issue of Taiwan's control of various offshore islands had already sparked a crisis once before in 1954-55, which had led the United States to sign a mutual defence pact with Jiang's regime. This second ‘Taiwan Straits' crisis therefore immediately turned into a dangerous confronta­tion between the PRC and the United States.

The Soviet Union responded with dismay to Mao's brinkmanship, for, with its attention focused on Europe, it saw little value in heightened Cold War tensions in East Asia. However, as criticism of Mao might be counter-productive, it felt it necessary to give limited support to the PRC in the hope that this would allow some Soviet control over events. In September 1958 therefore Khrushchev warned the United States not to use nuclear weapons against the PRC. Mao, however, with the desire for independence as one of his key motives, was loath to co-ordinate China's activities with those of the Soviet Union, and continued to follow his own line.

Having achieved his initial purpose, Mao allowed the tensions with the United States to dissipate, but the crisis left a legacy of unease in Sino-Soviet relations. The Soviet leadership was greatly concerned by the belligerency and unpre­dictability of Chinese policy, and sought to restrict the PRC's ability to undermine international stability. In 1959 the Soviet Union therefore abruptly reneged on a promise to provide the PRC with a prototype atomic bomb and took a studiously neutral position when a border dispute developed between China and India, which Moscow had been courting with military and economic aid. For Mao, this behaviour confirmed his belief that the Soviets were temperamentally incapable of respecting China's independence and were sliding towards a ‘revisionist' foreign policy. However, arguably the greatest provocation was that it appeared to Mao that the Soviet Union was intervening in Chinese domestic politics.

The occasion for this intervention came when the CCP leadership gathered at Lushan in the summer of 1959 to discuss the future of the ‘Great Leap Forward'. China's bid to achieve socialism had begun promisingly, but by the spring of 1959 it was clear that too many people were being diverted into infrastructure projects and rural industrialization and that greater control needed to be exerted over agricultural production. Mao himself was aware of these difficulties and therefore convened the Lushan conference to assess the situation. However, the conference did not go according to plan, for during its proceedings the minister of defence, Peng Dehuai, wrote to Mao criticizing the ‘Great Leap'. Mao interpreted this as an act of lese-majeste and accused Peng, who had just visited Moscow, of hav­ing been put up to it by Khrushchev, who saw the ‘Great Leap' as a challenge to Russia's ideological predominance. The result was that Peng was purged, further poison entered into the Sino-Soviet relationship and the ‘Great Leap' continued for a further disastrous year. Moreover, adding insult to injury, in July 1960 the Soviet Union suddenly called home all its advisers, just when they were needed to rebuild China's stricken economy.

While clear ideological and geostrategic divisions had opened up by the start of the 1960s, the Sino-Soviet split was at this stage not irrevocable. Indeed, military co-operation continued and the polemical battle that erupted briefly in 1960 subsided in the following year. In part this arose from China's weakness after the failure of the Great Leap, which through arrogance, incompetence and indifference had led to more than twenty million deaths from starvation. In addition, the Great Leap's demise had the effect of forcing its main protagonist, Mao, to retreat from the political front line. This allowed the more moderate Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping to set to work to repair the damage at home, but also had the effect of reducing Sino-Soviet animosity.

However, the uneasy truce that developed in 1961 proved to be only tem­porary, for Mao had no intention of allowing his eclipse to become permanent. Indeed, he saw his re-emergence in 1962 as essential to the revolution, because in his view, if the PRC once again returned to a close relationship with Moscow,

Debating the Sino - Soviet split

The history of the foreign relations of the PRC is another field in which our know­ledge has been vastly increased by growing access to primary source material. This has been most valuable and enlightening in respect to the history of the Sino-Soviet split. Ever since the split first became apparent to the West in the 1960s, there has been an effort to understand how and why it took place. The problem initially, however, was that in the absence of archival sources the only documents available were the polemics issued by each side, decrying the other for past and present mistakes and provocations. Based largely on these polemics, the orthodox view, epitomized by writers such as John Gittings (1968) and Donald Zagoria (1962), was that the split began with Khrushchev's secret speech of February 1956 and that it was caused largely by his adoption of the policy of 'peaceful co-existence' with the West. Building on this foundation,the common assumption came to be that the split represented a classical example of divergent security concerns leading to the end of an alliance. However, not all scholars accepted this realist approach, for some, such as Stuart Schram (1989), continued to emphasize the importance of ideology as an influence on the PRC's foreign policy.

The newly available documents on the formulation of Chinese and Soviet foreign policy during the period of the alliance have opened up the study of this area enormously. A number of works, including most notably the essays in Odd Arne Westad (ed.), Brothers in Arms: The Rise and Fall of the Sino-Soviet Alliance, 1945­1963 (Stanford, CA, 1998) and Chen Jian, Mao's China and the Cold War (Chapel Hill, NC, 2001), have attempted to draw conclusions from this material. The consensus that has emerged has been that the split came later than previously assumed and that 1958 was the crucial turning point. Moreover, in line with Schram's reading of events, great emphasis has been put on the significance of ideological divisions in causing Sino-Soviet alienation. The documents have thus led us to a far more nuanced interpretation of the reasons for the split, which also adds considerably to our understanding of the Cold War in the 1950s and 1960s. it risked being itself infected by the revisionism that he saw as endemic in Khrushchev’s Russia. By the early 1960s Mao was convinced that the Soviet Union was turning into a bureaucratically controlled form of state capitalism and a status quo power. The ignominious withdrawal of Soviet missiles from Cuba in November 1962 and its agreement in the following year to sign the Limited Test Ban Treaty with the United States and Britain only confirmed him in his contempt. The result of Mao’s re-emergence was therefore that in 1963—64 the PRC unleashed an unrestrained polemical assault against its erstwhile ally, culminating in diatribes such as ‘On Khrushchev’s Phoney Communism’, and with this the split finally became irreversible.

In retrospect, the Sino-Soviet split can be seen as arising out of a number of issues that divided these two communist powers, such as ideological differences over the future evolution of socialism and their diverging national security interests as the nature of the Western threat changed. It is also important, however, to see that at the centre of the dispute lay the heightened sense of nationalism in communist China and the idea that it had not thrown off the shackles of Western imperialism just to be dominated by the Soviet Union. As such, China was never a compliant client within the Soviet Empire, and this fact lay at the core of its divisive relationship with Moscow.

Limited Test Ban Treaty An agreement signed by Britain, the Soviet Union and the United States in 1963, committing nations to halt atmospheric tests of nuclear weapons; by the end of 1963, ninety-six additional nations had signed the treaty.

see Chapter 11