Chapter 5
THE SINO-SOVIET SPLIT AND PROBLEMS FOR THE UNITED STATES IN ASIA, EUROPE, AND THE AMERICAS, 1956–64

Coordination and comity in the communist camp was unparalleled during 1953–57. In 1956, the Soviets and Chinese would demonstrate their high degree of cohesion by cooperating fairly actively in addressing problems within the communist camp in Eastern Europe and in North Korea. This period of alliance unity was, however, relatively short-lived as ideological differences, distrust, and jealous rivalries for international leadership between Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev, and Mao Zedong divided the communist alliance in the years leading up to escalation of the Vietnam War. One can date the true split in the Sino-Soviet alliance in various ways, but in the years 1958–59 relations between the two communist capitals were already quite poor. By 1960 the Soviets would suddenly withdraw all economic advisors from China. In the following years, Mao would launch an intense ideological campaign against the Soviets within the international communist movement.

The Sino-Soviet rivalry would carry real costs not only for Beijing and Moscow but also for the United States and its friends and allies in the region, who were attempting to contain the spread of communism there. Before the United States would escalate its involvement in Vietnam, Beijing was supporting military revisionism by its communist allies in Southeast Asia. Mao’s radicalism ran against the Soviet foreign policy line of peaceful coexistence and peaceful transformation at the time. Eventually, Beijing would catalyze the Soviets into a harder stance designed to compete for prestige within the communist camp with Mao’s party. The biggest beneficiaries of the dispute were third-party communists in Vietnam, Cuba, and Germany, who were able to manipulate the rivalry to gain increased Soviet and Chinese support for their revisionist causes and to reject advice from Moscow to adopt more accommodating policies toward the enemy bloc.

THE GATHERING IDEOLOGICAL STORM IN SINO-SOVIET RELATIONS

Peaceful Coexistence, Peaceful Transformation, and Eastern Europe

Mao had become increasingly concerned about the Sino-Soviet relationship since Khrushchev’s February 1956 de-Stalinization speech. In both form and content, the speech was unwelcome to Mao. The speech was made without prior consultation with Beijing, something Mao believed to be entitled to as the longest ruling Communist Party chief in the international communist movement. Mao had often praised Stalin in China publicly. Khrushchev’s criticism of Stalin’s “cult of personality” could easily be turned on Mao himself in the CCP context. Khrushchev’s push for peaceful transformation to socialism and peaceful coexistence with the West and his mismanagement (according to Mao) of his alliances in Eastern Europe, leading to crises and interventions in Hungary and Poland in 1956, all made Mao suspicious of Stalin’s successor.¹

Mao would publicly back Khrushchev on the international stage in 1956–57, thus somewhat extending what scholars have referred to as the “honeymoon period” in the alliance.² In 1956 CCP elites would also coordinate closely with Soviet officials to counsel Kim Il-sung on how to manage the prospect of severe factionalism within Kim’s party.³ Despite this outward coordination between the two parties there was trouble brewing as Mao was already privately quite frustrated with the Soviet leadership.⁴

These early misgivings between Mao and Khrushchev were reciprocal. According to one knowledgeable Chinese specialist on Russian affairs, when Mao offered to help the Soviet leader solve his Eastern European problem through Chinese mediation, Khrushchev was grateful but felt real jealousy (jidu) toward Mao. This jealousy would grow in November 1957 when Mao gained quite a bit of attention from third-country communists in Moscow during the celebrations of the fortieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in Moscow. According to this scholar, before the summer and fall of 1958, Mao did not challenge Khrushchev openly, but to the contrary supported him often against international challengers like the Hungarians and the Yugoslavians and domestic foes like the so-called anti-Party Group. In this account, rather than chastising Khrushchev, Mao saw him as an inexperienced “little brother” in the international communist movement who needed tutelage and assistance. Predictably, this condescending attitude did not win Khrushchev’s affections for the Chinese leader. ⁵

Khrushchev also apparently viewed the Chinese leadership with a similar mix of condescension, jealousy, and derision. The new authority of the Chinese Communist Party was demonstrated when, in early 1957, Zhou Enlai was sent as an emissary between Moscow and the East European capitals to smooth over remaining tensions.⁶ When Zhou discussed his findings in Eastern Europe with his Soviet comrades in a way that was somewhat critical of the Soviet Union, Khrushchev apparently bristled at what appeared to him to be insubordinate and impolite preaching.⁷

The mutually disrespectful and distrustful attitudes of the two leaderships and the perceptions they created also help explain the row in the summer of 1958 over Soviet proposals for a joint naval fleet and for Soviet-owned radio stations based in China for communication with Soviet submarines. What appeared like a helpful gesture and normal allied cooperation to Khrushchev seemed a “chauvinist” insult and a threat to Chinese national security by Mao. Mao’s bitter reaction was therefore surprising and worrisome to Khrushchev.⁸

A major sticking point in the relationship between Khrushchev and Mao was the former’s apparent commitment to peaceful transformation of noncommunist states to communism through legal and parliamentary methods, as well as his related policy of peaceful coexistence and cooperative arms control agreements with Cold War adversaries in the United States and Europe. Beijing did not challenge Moscow openly in the period 1956–57, and its own policy line in the region, outlined at the end of chapter 4, was largely consistent with the Soviet line. But Mao clearly saw such peaceful gestures to the West as temporary and tactical measures, while at least in Mao’s opinion, Khrushchev seemed wedded to these ideas in principle.⁹ Despite Zhou’s rhetoric about eventual peaceful unification with Taiwan in 1955–56, after the Korean War and Taiwan Strait crisis of 1954–55 Mao had trouble believing that the problems with Taiwan could really be resolved peacefully in the PRC’s favor. By 1957, peaceful unification seemed less and less likely.¹⁰

Communist parties in China and North Vietnam were involved in national unification struggles, and so their leaders naturally objected to Khrushchev’s notion of “peaceful transformation” to socialism. Saigon’s 1956 refusal to abide by the Geneva Accords and allow nation-wide elections suggested the naïveté of Khrushchev’s faith that parliamentarian socialist transformation was possible.¹¹ The enemies’ reversal on the election pledge was a bitter pill, but the more globally oriented Soviets were tone deaf to Vietnamese concerns, and continued to view Southeast Asia as an opportunity to promote further détente with the West. In fact, the Soviet leadership was so inconsiderate of the Vietnamese communists’ national unification concerns that in late 1956 and early 1957 Moscow briefly sponsored legislation at the UN that would allow both Vietnams to enter the organization. This move apparently was made without prior consultation with Hanoi and was one that Zhou Enlai would describe to his Vietnamese comrades as a “sell-out.”¹² Although the Soviets would quickly withdraw the proposal under pressure from allies, much of the damage to its relations with the Vietnamese was already done.¹³ Just before Mao decided to launch an artillery assault on Quemoy and Matsu in summer 1958, he expressed his frustration with Soviet moderation in international relations and the need to demonstrate to the Chinese people and the world that the PRC could stand up to the Americans. Vice Foreign Minister Zhang Wentian’s comments on Mao’s message to a small group of leading foreign policy elites on June 17 are revealing on this score. Zhang noted that Mao discussed the need for a policy of confrontation with the United States and the need to build up confidence at home in the long-term struggle against imperialism. Zhang’s chronicle reads as follows:

Frustration with Khrushchev’s moderation was not limited to Asian communists. The East Germans also disagreed with Khrushchev’s moderate policies on Berlin, requesting permission to close the border to West Berlin throughout the 1950s.¹⁵

The Great Leap Forward and the 1958 Taiwan Strait Crisis

On the domestic front, problems like the drying up of Soviet capital aid and the declining utility of Soviet advice in solving various bottlenecks in the more backward Chinese economy would also encourage Mao to reduce his dependence on Soviet advice and strategies. Only someone of Mao’s ideological ilk might have tried to solve his economic problems with a disastrous, radical, and largely utopian set of policies like the Great Leap Forward (1958–61). So we must recognize the ideological and psychological roots of the Great Leap Forward, which was hardly a rational response to objective factors. But one can, at least, fairly state that the reconsideration of economic policy during the First Five Year Plan that lay at the foundation of the Great Leap was itself rooted in some real problems.¹⁶ As I have argued in much more detail elsewhere, fears and suspicions regarding his relations with Moscow only made Mao even more radical at home and somewhat more aggressive abroad. The Great Leap itself had international dimensions as a way for Mao’s China to gain more independence from and strength in its relations with the Soviet Union and within the international communist movement. The Great Leap was also an early indication of Mao’s desire to assert his own model of revolutionary and social change as an alternative to the post-Stalin Soviet model. This would become more obvious during the 1960s, particularly during the Cultural Revolution, but the initial impetus can be found in the late 1950s, as Mao became increasingly disillusioned with Stalin’s successors and increasingly confident about his own rightful place as a co-equal or superior to his Soviet counterparts. In many senses, the Great Leap was Mao’s first attempt to market himself as a natural leader of the international communist movement.¹⁷

Internationally, the domestic requisites of the Great Leap made Mao more aggressive, rather than less so. Mao used conflict in the Taiwan Strait to mobilize his public around nationalist themes during the more radical phases of the Great Leap and demonstrate his independence from the Soviets internationally.¹⁸ In the late spring and early summer of 1958 in the earliest phases of the Great Leap policies and in the leadup to the Taiwan Strait crisis, Mao would attack revisionism in the socialist states’ foreign policy and call for a more aggressive foreign policy posture.¹⁹ So, even in its nascent stages the competition for leadership in a hierarchical revisionist alliance caused problems for the United States in its coercive diplomacy toward the communist camp.

No matter how quixotic it proved to be in the end, practical implementation of the Great Leap required great sacrifice from the vast majority of Chinese citizens. Mao’s need to sell the program to his population also encouraged him to escalate tensions with the United States and to manipulate a crisis in the Taiwan Strait for purposes of domestic mobilization. This logic was an element of the first Taiwan Strait crisis but was a much more important element in the 1958 crisis. Unlike 1954–55, before the latter crisis there were few new or pressing security concerns related to Taiwan’s behavior or U.S. alliance behavior in the region that might have motivated Mao to provoke a crisis with the KMT and its U.S. allies. But Mao believed that he needed tensions for domestic mobilization purposes, and he provided them in late August by ordering the shelling of the KMT-held offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu. Mao did this without first consulting with the Soviets, who almost certainly would have opposed such an action.²⁰ In this instance, there is little doubt that lack of coordination, disagreements, and a budding rivalry in the communist alliance made China more aggressive, not less so. The shelling produced a major nuclear crisis with the United States that lasted several weeks. So, we see again how a period of little intra-alliance coordination and a high degree of discord in the communist camp critically complicated U.S. containment strategies in East Asia. What was bad for the Soviets was not necessarily good for the United States, at least not in the near term.

As discussed in chapter 4, entrapment fears in the Eisenhower administration were real, and an unconditional commitment to Taiwan combined with Chiang’s own interests in provoking conflict with the mainland could have undercut the assurance side of the U.S. deterrence equation. The United States had no interest in provoking China into attacking the offshore islands. Many scholars assert that one contributing factor in Mao’s decision to attack the ROC forces on Quemoy and Matsu was his desire to send a signal about what he saw as dangerous trends in the U.S.-ROC alliance, in particular the stationing of nuclear-capable Matador missiles on Taiwan in 1957.²¹ Given that the attacks on Quemoy and Matsu occurred a full year after the Matador missiles were introduced and were timed perfectly for domestic mobilization purposes during the most radical phases of the Great Leap Forward and for demonstrating independence from Moscow at a time when relations with the Soviets were worsening, it is hard to sustain the argument that Mao’s concerns about trends in the U.S.-ROC alliance were the most important reason for the 1958 artillery attacks. That having been said, Mao’s more general concern about the U.S. and ROC getting too comfortable with one another militarily likely did factor into Mao’s decision to stir the pot in cross-Strait relations in 1958. By attacking the offshore islands Mao could remind the United States of the costs and dangers of its alliance with Taipei and test U.S. resolve toward the protection of the offshore islands in particular.²²

In 1958, Mao was careful to limit the nature and geographic location of his artillery attacks against Quemoy and Matsu to minimize the chance of escalation to war with the United States. Mao wanted a crisis, not a war. For example, he placed constraints on air operations in support of the artillery attacks and never attempted to take the islands by force.²³ But the artillery assaults on Quemoy and Matsu turned out to be riskier than Mao had originally expected, as the U.S. responded quite vigorously by deploying two aircraft carrier battle groups and running supplies to the islands by sea and air.²⁴ Mao had reason for his overconfident assessment that the U.S. response would likely be quite limited and that he could attack the islands in a limited fashion without much likelihood of escalation. After all, the U.S. commitment to the offshore islands’ defense had intentionally been left ambiguous in the U.S.-ROC Mutual Defense Treaty. As was discussed in chapter 4, in order to avoid entrapment, the Eisenhower administration decided not to make firm commitments to ROC-held islands other than Taiwan and Penghu (the Pescadores).²⁵ This ambiguity gave the United States more freedom of maneuver and put some constraints on Chiang Kai-shek’s ability to drag the United States into war, but it also helped undercut the credibility of U.S. deterrent threats against such limited coercive efforts aimed at the ROC by the PLA. So, in this sense as well, U.S. alliance politics and dilemmas contributed indirectly but significantly to the breakdown of coercive diplomacy in 1958.

This is not to say that the recipe for peace and stability from an American perspective was less ambiguity as well as clearer and less conditional alliance commitments to Chiang’s regime. At the broadest level, there was no simple way out of the alliance security dilemma for the United States. Many policies that might have increased the credibility of a deterrent threat could have undercut assurances, and policies in place that were designed to prevent entrapment and bolster assurances undercut the credibility of threat.²⁶

A second complicating factor related to lack of cohesion and coordination in the U.S.-ROC alliance was Washington’s inability to settle the crisis by encouraging the KMT to withdraw its overextended and highly exposed troops from the offshore islands. The KMT opposed this because of its long-term goal of returning to the mainland. The offshore islands provided notional bridges to the mainland because of their geographic location and, more abstractly, because they were universally recognized as part of the mainland province of Fujian. A second related and more immediate problem for the KMT was its domestic legitimacy on Taiwan. In the 1950s the KMT was fully dominated by mainland Chinese who had escaped to the island after the KMT’s defeat in the Chinese Civil War on the mainland. Without the argument that Taiwan was part of a unified China and the KMT government was the sole legitimate government of that larger Chinese nation of which Taiwan is a part, Chiang’s KMT would have had very little legitimacy on Taiwan itself. The United States was clearly worried about the damage to KMT morale and stability on Taiwan if the offshore islands and the more general offensive long-term mission that they represented were somehow lost under military pressure from the Chinese communists.²⁷

For their part, the CCP elites recognized this KMT position and appreciated it, as it prevented permanent Taiwan independence from the mainland, something Beijing correctly believed that Washington would have preferred in the 1950s if it could have had its druthers. For this reason, when late in the crisis Washington was urging Chiang to remove his forces from Quemoy and Matsu as part of a ceasefire in the crisis, Mao ordered the otherwise confusing policy of offering to bring supplies to the islands to feed the besieged garrisons there so that they would not leave under such U.S. pressure.²⁸ So, the domestic politics of the Chinese Civil War exacerbated greatly the U.S.-ROC alliance security dilemma and complicated efforts at crisis management and de-escalation.

On the communist side of the equation, mutual tensions and misgivings in Sino-Soviet relations were both a cause and effect of the 1958 crisis. The Soviets’ request earlier in the year for a joint naval fleet and a submarine radio station on Chinese soil triggered China’s postcolonial nationalist sensitivities and raised tensions to a fever pitch, as Mao berated the Soviet ambassador to China about Soviet colonial designs on China.²⁹ After this bitter encounter Khrushchev hurriedly planned a secret trip to Beijing to attempt to smooth relations a bit. At those tense summit meetings in late July and early August, Mao apparently never disclosed his plans for shelling of Quemoy and Matsu, which were well under way. As Khrushchev was preparing to return home from his secret mission to China, the CCP also publicly disclosed the Soviet leader’s visit. This fact made some Chinese scholars opine that Mao’s berating of the Soviet ambassador might have been a ruse to draw Khrushchev to Beijing. By then leaking the news of the secret meeting Mao could signal to the world Soviet support for Mao’s China. This disclosure then might have been seen as a useful deterrent against robust U.S. intervention following the planned attacks on the offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu. Mao launched those attacks just three weeks after Khrushchev’s departure.³⁰

The Chinese diplomatic historian Niu Jun argues that while it is not entirely clear if Mao manipulated Khrushchev to come to Beijing in the first place, “at a minimum after Khrushchev arrived he intentionally used [the situation] in order to facilitate the creation of an impression internationally that the Soviet Union supported the attack on Quemoy and Matsu.”³¹ If this is true, then Mao’s approach backfired. The Eisenhower administration indeed believed that the Soviets had approved of the attacks on Quemoy and Matsu for precisely this reason. But this only strengthened U.S. resolve to prevent the offshore islands from falling under military pressure. As Robert Accinelli points out in his study of Eisenhower administration policy, Dulles’s belief that the Soviets were behind the attacks meant that they were a broad test of U.S. resolve and could not have been based in particularistic Chinese concerns about U.S. behavior toward Taiwan or the offshore islands. This conclusion only stiffened Washington’s backbone.³² So, if one believes that Mao initially wanted to rid the island of KMT forces and only changed his strategy when the United States responded very vigorously to the Chinese challenge, as does Niu, then Mao’s manipulative alliance tactics sent the wrong kind of coercive signal, provoking a tough U.S. reaction rather than deterring one.

Chinese scholars may be correct that Mao leaked the news of the meeting with Khrushchev as part of a deterrence strategy aimed at the United States. But Mao’s concern about Soviet bullying and domination as expressed to the Soviet ambassador and later to Khrushchev himself was likely fully sincere. In any case, Sino-Soviet relations would get much worse within weeks of the summit. The large-scale artillery assault on the offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu were launched without prior consultation with Moscow. Moreover, the attack sparked a major nuclear crisis with the United States at a time when Moscow was pushing a line of peaceful coexistence. The crisis would last several weeks. In the first week or two of the crisis Mao would launch the most radical phases of the Great Leap Forward, a revolutionary economic plan that was already in ill repute in Moscow and would only gain more derision from Soviet leaders as it intensified. For their part, Beijing elites, however fairly, would come to view Soviet support during the crisis as limited and late in the offing. Moreover, in areas where the Soviets offered concrete support, Mao still treated these offers with suspicion. For example, the Soviets offered to send fighters and bombers with missiles to Fujian province weeks after the Taiwan Strait crisis broke out, but Mao refused because the Soviets would not yield command of the units over to China.³³ Mao’s ambassador in Moscow reported having warned Mao at the time that Khrushchev might try to use the occasion of the crisis to increase Soviet control over China and cross-Strait issues.³⁴

According to the historian Shen Zhihua, during the crisis Mao expressed his independence from the USSR in a manner that truly upset Khrushchev. In late September a U.S.-built “Sidewinder” air-to-air missile fell on Chinese territory. This was the U.S. military’s most advanced air-to-air missile and had been transferred to the ROC air force during the crisis. The Soviets naturally wanted to get their hands on the missile right away for research, but the Chinese demurred. After a delay of weeks they would eventually turn the system over to the Soviets but only after removing perhaps the most important component of interest to the Soviets, the infrared sensor.³⁵

In Mao’s eyes, what was perhaps more important still in 1958–59 than fears of Soviet chauvinism, was Soviet criticism in 1959 of his domestic “Great Leap” development plan. The Soviet leadership viewed the plan as unrealistic and as diverging from core Marxist principles. This criticism only reinforced Mao’s view that the Soviet leadership was domineering, overly bureaucratic, insufficiently revolutionary, and rife with Russian nationalist chauvinism.³⁶ At the July 1959 Lushan Plenum when he lashed out at domestic critics of the Great Leap Forward such as Peng Dehuai, Mao also focused his ire on Khrushchev’s criticism of the concept of people’s communes, a core component of the Great Leap. The Soviet leader had criticized the communes in July 1959 during a visit to Poland and, to add insult to injury, his speech was subsequently published in Pravda?³⁷When Mao purged Peng Dehuai, he accused him of being too closely linked to the USSR.³⁸

In a nutshell, by the late 1950s Mao deemed the current Soviet leaders unworthy of international leadership in the communist movement, thus setting the stage for the Sino-Soviet competition for leadership that would catalyze the revolutionary and belligerent tendencies of the movement overall for the next ten years. Of course, he saw himself and his own party as quite worthy of that leadership. As Shen argues, by the end of 1959 Mao clearly wanted “China to become the symbol (biaolü) and model (bangyang) of the international communist movement.”³⁹ He opines that Mao chose to launch his ideological conflict (lunzhan) with the Soviets on the issues of revolution and war, but his real goal was to have China take the lead in the international communist movement more generally, including responsibility for communicating theories of economic management and transitions from socialism to communism. Regarding the budding Sino-Soviet dispute in 1958–59, Chinese scholar Yang Kuisong writes,

Mao’s insistence on the superiority of his approach to class struggle and socialism obviously posed a major challenge to the Soviet Communist Party’s self-image as leaders of the international communist movement.

Toward the Break: The Collapse of Sino-Soviet Military and Economic Cooperation

Soviet military assistance would continue to flow to China, even in the nuclear field, after the 1958 Taiwan Strait crisis began. In fact, in response to the crisis, the Soviet Union increased its assistance to the Chinese Air Force in particular. The Soviets, however, began backing out of their earlier commitments to full nuclear cooperation, including the transfer of a test nuclear weapon. The Soviets saw the Chinese as adventuristic and unreliable in part because they launched the Taiwan Strait crisis without first informing the Soviet allies and in part because the Soviets were confused about the PRC’s apparent lack of desire to seize the islands once they were subject to an artillery blockade.⁴¹ In June 1959, the Soviets officially scrapped the nuclear agreement altogether, as relations between Mao and Khrushchev worsened further.⁴² Wu Lengxi, the head of the influential Xinhua News agency at the time, recalls that the cancellation of the agreement was a major event in Sino-Soviet relations as Chinese elites began to wonder if the Soviets were aligning with the West and the United States against China.⁴³ It was in this context that Khrushchev’s peace summitry with Eisenhower in September 1959 at Camp David and discussions of a nuclear-free Asia were viewed as a sell-out in China. The Soviet discussions about a nuclear-free Asia must have looked less worrisome to Mao in 1958 when Khrushchev was still actively and secretly supporting the Chinese nuclear weapons program. This might help explain why China publicly supported the concept in early 1958. But especially after the abrogation of the agreement to transfer a test weapon in mid-1959, Beijing had to worry more seriously about Soviet-American collusion to keep smaller powers under their control and about Soviet complacency and satisfaction with Moscow’s place as an international superpower following Sputnik and other Soviet technological achievements. Of particular concern was the progress achieved in Geneva by Soviet, Eastern Bloc, U.S., and Western European scientific delegations who were attempting to create a verifiable nuclear test ban treaty. On August 21, 1958, two days before the PRC launched the artillery barrage on Quemoy and Matsu, the scientists announced that they could design a system of verification that could cover the entire globe to police violations of a future test ban. Khrushchev, who helped organize the conference, did not invite Chinese representatives but included China explicitly in the areas that any treaty would cover.⁴⁴

Mao and Khrushchev then had a terribly tense summit in October 1959, setting the stage for a full-scale rift in the alliance and the withdrawal of Soviet advisors with their blueprints in July 1960.⁴⁵ At the October summit, one of the issues that aggravated bilateral relations was Khrushchev’s suggestion that China adjust its policy toward Taiwan so as to improve relations with the United States. Khrushchev’s apparent siding with the United States following the Camp David summit, particularly on an issue that the CCP considered one of domestic, not international, politics, led to a strong rebuke from both Zhou Enlai and Mao.⁴⁶

THE EFFECTS OF THE SINO-SOVIET DISPUTES ON THIRD-PARTY COMMUNISTS IN ASIA

In July 1964 relations between the Chinese and Soviets would become so poor that Mao began considering the possibility of armed conflict between the two communist states in discussions with the CCP Politburo.⁴⁷ It would take nearly five more years for Sino-Soviet relations to deteriorate to that degree and, when they did, the United States was a major beneficiary. But while the Sino-Soviet rivalry was escalating (1960–69) and the two communist nations’ competition for the hearts and minds of the Vietnamese was heating up (1964–69), the biggest beneficiaries would clearly be the Vietnamese communists. Until the early 1970s the big losers of this Sino-Soviet competition were Saigon and Washington, who were facing a determined group of Vietnamese enemies who were receiving much more material assistance from abroad and much more international political backing for the continued spread of revolution to the South than they received in the mid-1950s, when the Sino-Soviet house was in much better order and the movement as a whole was, therefore, more transparent, more willing to negotiate, and more moderate overall.

Vietnam 1959–61

Sino-Soviet tensions and the rebellion against Khrushchev’s policy line of peaceful coexistence and peaceful transformation perhaps affected Southeast Asia most dramatically. After months of consulting with Beijing and keeping Moscow in the dark, in May 1959 Hanoi would agree to assist the South Vietnamese communist cadres in national unification by all means necessary. The National Liberation Front (NLF) was born. North Vietnam’s secrecy and prevaricating toward Moscow and its relative openness with the CCP demonstrated how much more conservative Moscow was than Beijing about revolution in the South.⁴⁸When the Soviets discovered the North Vietnamese designs on the South, they were surprised and upset at the provocative behavior of their Vietnamese comrades. As Gaiduk writes, “[T]he Soviet Union, as a great power, had to take into account geopolitical considerations, not only ideological preferences.”⁴⁹

The Chinese Communists, on the other hand, promised political, economic, and military support for the NLF effort in 1959. It is notable that this backing occurred well before the United States began increasing the number of military advisors in South Vietnam in the early 1960s and almost six years before the United States would send in a large number of ground troops. In the late 1960s Beijing’s relatively active support for belligerence in Vietnam in comparison with the Soviets’ desire for restraint would be affected at least in part by national security concerns in Beijing about U.S. activity in Southeast Asia that were not fully shared in more distant Moscow. But it is very difficult to sustain an argument that Chinese support for the NLF in the period 1959–64 was driven by standard realpolitik concerns about friendly borders. After all, North Vietnam, the bordering state, was solidly under Ho’s control. U.S. military activity in South Vietnam was still very limited (with hundreds, not even thousands, of advisors on the ground). Moreover, the 17th parallel separating North and South Vietnam was distant from the Chinese border. All of these factors work against an argument suggesting that Chinese support for revolution in this period was driven primarily by defensive national security concerns.

In August 1959 the Vietnamese communists would announce to the Chinese communists that they were concerned about potential collusion at the upcoming Eisenhower-Khrushchev summit at Camp David and lack of international support for their revolutionary efforts. In one of the darkest moments in its economic history—the Great Leap disaster—China responded with a promise of $500 million dollars in military and other assistance.⁵⁰ In 1959 Beijing also supplied Vietnam with 57 million British pounds in preferential loan packages. This outstripped anything coming from a relatively indifferent though much richer Moscow.⁵¹ Ilya Gaiduk reports that, from 1956 to 1960, overall Chinese economic assistance to Vietnam was double that of the much wealthier Soviet Union.⁵²Meanwhile, Sino-Soviet relations were deteriorating further.

This picture of a cozy Hanoi-Beijing condominium and a distant USSR would apparently change briefly in early 1960 either because the Chinese would not or could not promptly carry through on their promises of aid. By early 1960 China was getting little press in Hanoi and the Soviets were clearly being wooed.⁵³From available evidence, it is unclear if this brief, public pro-Soviet tilt occurred because Hanoi was upset at China for failing to keep its word or whether Hanoi was trying to seduce the Soviets into adding Soviet aid to the pot of Chinese aid that it had already received.

The Chinese communists did not stand idly by in the face of Hanoi’s temporary tilt toward Moscow. Instead, they attempted to outbid their richer and more powerful Soviet rivals. In January 1960 the Chinese foreign ministry agreed to give Hanoi extensive loan packages. Moreover, Zhou Enlai wanted to insure that military aid to Vietnam was given unconditionally and gratis. He asked that Chinese diplomats never casually mention military aid when discussing economic loans. Beijing was clearly trying to avoid treating Vietnam the way that the Soviets had treated China after the Korean War. The Soviets had created great bitterness in Beijing by demanding repayment from China for military transfers during wartime.⁵⁴ By spring and summer 1960 the Chinese were very active again in the Indochina struggle. Zhou Enlai traveled to Phnom Penh in May. In July Sihanouk would reveal an informal offer of Chinese defense assistance in case of foreign violations of Cambodian territory.⁵⁵ Also, in May, Ho Chi Minh traveled to China, and Chinese and Vietnamese leadership entourages shuttled between Beijing and Hanoi. Beijing fully backed Hanoi’s plan for a protracted military and political struggle to “liberate” the South. Although the Soviets, like the Chinese, would offer economic aid packages at this time, the Soviets, unlike the Chinese, continued to push for a peaceful settlement of the Vietnamese Civil War.⁵⁶

In June 1960 Zhou Enlai briefed an expanded session of the CCP Politburo about China’s key foreign policy differences with the Soviets, including attitudes about: 1) the nature of imperialism and the causes of war; 2) arms reduction; 3) peaceful coexistence; 4) support for the revolutionary struggle of oppressed peoples, and so on.⁵⁷ In the same month CCP representatives criticized the Soviet Union strongly, albeit not directly by name, for the first time at an international communist conference (in Bucharest).⁵⁸ As discussed further in the pages that follow, initially indirect public attacks on proxy targets would escalate into direct attacks on the Soviet leadership in Chinese Communist Party publications, speeches, and in talks at international conferences. This would become a pattern over the next several years.⁵⁹ Clearly upping the ante in the global competition with the Soviets, in July 1960 Zhou Enlai agreed to increase grain transfers and related loans to distant Albania.⁶⁰ (Within weeks of this decision, all Soviet advisors would be withdrawn from China). In an internal speech in August 1960, Zhou Enlai argued that the best way for China to deal with the growing split within the movement was for it to try fostering international mobilization and solidarity of the socialist camp and guide it away from “revisionism” and “semi-revisionism.”⁶¹ In December 1960, Beijing was the first foreign government to recognize officially the Vietnamese National Liberation Front (NLF), designed to foment revolution in the South. Despite the terrible famine caused by the Great Leap Forward, in January 1961 China agreed to preferential loans to Hanoi worth 142 million RMB.⁶² In that same month, Zhou Enlai committed to long-term assistance to Albania on the basis of their common fight against “imperialism and revisionism.”⁶³ Playing to Chinese strategy, Albanian leaders would take explicitly negative positions toward Khrushchev in meetings with Chinese elites in 1961–62 and declare that Mao and his CCP should be the leader of the international communist movement. Vice-Premier Li Xiannian would not reject this goal for the CCP, stating only that Mao believed the process of securing CCP leadership of the international movement would take ten years.⁶⁴

For their part, Soviet officials seemed to understand the implications of the Chinese initiative to actively support revolution in the developing world. In a June 27, 1960, conversation with his Soviet counterpart Stepan Chervonenko, Albanian Ambassador to the PRC Mihal Prifti pointed out that “more and more Maoism is being touted as the Marxism of the 20th Century.” Chervonenko replied,

Prifti also reported to Tirana that “when I asked why China, facing such difficulties [at home], was [still] helping Mongolia and Vietnam with such large sums, he [Chervonenko] answered that this was due to the fact that China wanted to control these countries.⁶⁶

The Chinese strategy of supporting armed revolution in noncommunist former colonies began winning internationalist support as early as November 1960, especially in Asia.⁶⁷ This caused great consternation in Moscow and debate ensued in the Kremlin about how to answer the China challenge. Still, as James Richter argues, the split within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) on international affairs in late 1960 led more to paralysis in Moscow than it did to a concerted effort to reverse the peaceful coexistence line and increase support for revolution.⁶⁸ So in a high-level meeting with the Vietnamese in June 1961 the Chinese were enthusiastic about the Vietnamese desire to liberate the South by force, while two weeks later the same Vietnamese entourage would get only a lukewarm response from the Soviets.⁶⁹

The Soviets were not yet major players in Vietnam in the early 1960s despite Vietnamese efforts to change that. As Russian historian Ilya Gaiduk points out, the Chinese had supplied much more assistance than the Soviets to the Vietnamese communists in the 1950s and had maintained much closer relations with Hanoi than had the Soviets, who had weak connections in Hanoi and had provided only “negligible” military assistance. With some exceptions noted later, this trend continued into the early 1960s, even after the dispatch by the Kennedy administration of large number of U.S. military advisors to the South. Even as late as January 1964, when Vietnamese communist leaders, including General Secretary Le Duan, visited Moscow, the Soviets limited their support largely to rhetoric. By one estimate, from 1962 to the beginning of 1965 the Soviets provided only $100 million dollars worth of military aid to the Vietnamese communists. Instead of providing additional assistance up front, the Soviets complained about Chinese influence in Hanoi and insisted that further Soviet assistance would require a change of attitudes in Hanoi toward the Sino-Soviet split. Moreover, they consistently seemed much more eager than their Chinese counterparts to seek a negotiated settlement rather than escalation in Vietnam.⁷⁰

Laos 1959–64

The degree to which the Soviets could compete with the Chinese in supporting revolution was limited by geography and by Khrushchev’s efforts to improve relations with the new Kennedy administration and avoid escalation of problems in Laos and Vietnam. In late 1961 while the Soviets pushed for compromise in Laos to avoid escalation of that war to one that might involve the Americans, the Chinese pushed for a harder line by the leftist Pathet Lao against the Western-leaning Laotian conservatives. As late as 1957, in the period of relative Sino-Soviet harmony, Beijing had lined up with the Soviets to dissuade Vietnam from scuttling previous peace deals by infiltrating North Vietnamese forces into Laos. Beijing cited the danger of U.S. escalation.⁷¹ But beginning in 1959 Beijing would start to support armed resistance by Laotian leftists and China would turn a blind eye to North Vietnamese infiltration of areas just west of the 17th parallel dividing line between the North and South, asking only that the Laotians avoid providing evidence of such infiltration to international inspectors.⁷² In August and November 1960 in meetings with Ho Chi Minh, Mao would encourage armed struggle by the North Vietnamese in both Laos and South Vietnam. He said there was nothing wrong with killing people and urged his Vietnamese comrade not to fear reprisals from “the reactionaries” because their killing of people in response just mobilizes the people against the reactionaries. In these meetings Ho Chi Minh had expressed some reservations about the threat of escalating violence, and Mao and his colleagues were trying to encourage Ho’s belligerence. Mao’s approach therefore was in direct contrast with the Soviet strategy toward the region at the time.⁷³ In 1961–62, China would support a much more belligerent stand by the Pathet Lao than would Moscow, who, according to Gaiduk, “more than once assured the Americans of their desire to eliminate the Laotian problem as an obstacle on the way to agreement on more important international matters.”⁷⁴ Put succinctly, “the Chinese and the North Vietnamese were not as concerned as the Soviet Union about the danger of broadening the conflict.”⁷⁵

Unlike South Vietnam or Cambodia, Laos borders China, and since the late 1950s the United States had been actively supporting anticommunist forces in the civil strife there. For that reason, it is more difficult to parse out the factors of national security as opposed to revolutionary fervor in this case. In some senses this is a chicken and egg problem. U.S. support for anticommunists in Laos followed U.S. detection of direct and indirect North Vietnamese intervention there, an intervention that was fully backed by Beijing, but not by the Soviets. In any case, the Chinese feared that too much compromise by the Pathet Lao and sympathetic “neutralists” might allow for continued U.S. influence in Laos and thereby threaten not just the Chinese border but the plan for expanding revolutionary activities in South Vietnam, which required secure logistics lines through Laos to facilitate Hanoi’s support for communists in the South. In the early 1960s the Chinese would persuade both the Vietnamese communists and sympathetic Laotian forces to take a tougher stand against conservative forces in Laos, thereby complicating peace negotiations.⁷⁶ As one recent Chinese history of the period states, the Soviets in 1962 stated that they supported the moderate Laotian neutralists, and in fact they did. The Chinese on the other hand said in public that they supported the moderate neutralists but in reality they supported the revolutionary parties and urged a tough stand.⁷⁷ In discussions with the Albanians in 1962, Deng Xiaoping criticized the Soviets for considering “the agreement for the creation of a coalition government in Laos as an example of how to achieve agreements with Western powers through talks.” As an alternative, Deng clearly presented the Chinese strategy of supporting a coalition government as a temporary measure to keep the United States out of the country while the Pathet Lao strengthened its position there.⁷⁸

To assure peace and stability, the relatively conservative Soviets were willing to settle for an internationally enforced Austrian-style neutrality in Laos or even for a geographic division of the nation along the lines of Korea or Vietnam. In fact, one of the reasons why the Soviets saw a divided Laos as acceptable was that such a solution might shore up the unstable situation in the rest of Indochina, including in a divided Vietnam. But preserving stability in Vietnam was hardly a concern shared by Khrushchev’s increasingly radical Asian allies. The Chinese and the Vietnamese rejected these solutions and acted to undermine them at every step because they would harm revolutionary forces already in place in Laos, including those sympathetic to North Vietnamese efforts against the South and willing to assist and protect Hanoi’s logistic operations.⁷⁹ Gaiduk writes,

By January 1962, fighting had broken out again in Laos between the Pathet Lao–Neutralist forces and the royalist forces loyal to Vientiane. Moreover, North Vietnamese forces would join the fight in significant numbers for the first time since 1954.⁸¹ China supported the increased militancy of the Pathet Lao because it might result in increases in the relative strength of anti-American, pro-Hanoi forces in any future coalition government. Toward this end, China sent weapons to the Pathet Lao. At the same time, Beijing elites were privately critical of the Soviet position for being too accommodating to pro-American forces and insufficiently protective of the interests of revolutionary parties. Beijing also supported the dragging out of negotiations so as to allow the Pathet Lao to consolidate its hold over strategically important areas in the country.⁸²

Eventually a National Union would be formed in Laos according to U.S. and Soviet wishes. The Chinese would publicly support the July 1962 Geneva Accords on neutralization of Laos, but the hands of the Pathet Lao and the North Vietnamese had already been sufficiently strengthened to guarantee that Laos would be a conduit for support of revolution in South Vietnam. The Chinese communists knew that the North Vietnamese had no intention of honoring their end of the agreement by removing all of their forces from Laos. In fact, in November 1961 Mao encouraged Ho Chi Minh to continue fighting in Laos with North Vietnamese forces, but suggested that Hanoi should keep up the pretense that it had no forces in the country.⁸³ By January 1964 Mao was encouraging Hanoi to send several thousand more soldiers into Laos.⁸⁴ North Vietnamese violations of the 1962 Geneva Accords were quite consequential in the Indochina War. Robert McNamara reports that the Kennedy administration became so untrusting of Hanoi after those violations that hope for future peace agreements regarding South Vietnam were severely harmed.⁸⁵

Vietnam 1962–64

China’s foreign aid skyrocketed in the early 1960s, particularly aid to Vietnam, and this occurred at a time when the PRC was suffering from severe economic disasters at home. In 1961 Mao made further commitments to transfer enough weapons to equip 230 battalions of Vietnamese forces.⁸⁶ After backing the NLF in August 1959 with the promise of aid, including military aid, Beijing apparently had some difficulty fulfilling that promise with actual deliveries. But despite China’s domestic hardships, the aid began flowing in during the early 1960s. In 1962 China supplied 90,000 guns of various types to the “Southern Campaign.”⁸⁷In October 1962, Mao and Zhou met with a military entourage from North Vietnam led by General Giap. Zhou would promise “comprehensive” assistance to North Vietnam, including military, political, and economic aspects.⁸⁸ In late 1962 and early 1963, the Vietnamese communists argued in Beijing that the United States might respond to communist military action in the South with escalation and attacks on the North.⁸⁹ For a combination of ideological and national security concerns apparently not shared in Moscow, China responded impressively. According to an internal Party history, from 1962 to 1966 China supplied 270,000 guns, 5,400 cannon and artillery pieces, 200 million rounds of ammunition, 900,000 artillery shells, over 700 tons of TNT, 200,000 military uniforms, and 4 million meters of cloth.⁹⁰

The picture of China’s Vietnam strategy in 1962 appears to be a mix of ideological and national security concerns, but the former factor seems more important than the latter. In 1962 the United States increased the number of military personnel in Vietnam from 3,000 to 11,000. But China’s general support for the NLF and promises of military aid long preceded this escalation. Moreover, however large they had become, U.S. forces in Vietnam still had a training and advisory role and were not a combat force capable of invading North Vietnam, let alone China. Even if they had been so capable, it does not naturally follow that a logical Chinese defensive countermeasure would have been support for revolution in the South, rather than simply the bolstering of North Vietnamese defense. It is important to note that from a realpolitik point of view, Beijing already had a buffer in North Vietnam at the time. The spread of revolution to the South in the 1960s was not the same type of goal for China as was the eviction of the French from the North in the early 1950s. It can hardly be seen as a defensive measure or as one purely related to China’s parochial national interest.

It is true that Mao had already launched a study of the vulnerability of China’s coastal industries to enemy attack in spring 1964, a study that would eventually lead to the costly and radical “Third Front” program, in which large amounts of China’s defense industrial complex would be moved deep into the interior. In line with speeches he made in 1964 about the threat of U.S. aerial attack on China, Mao launched the study with the argument that one never knew when imperialists might attack. But Mao did not implement the study’s findings until August 12, 1964, after the alleged Gulf of Tonkin Incident and the launching of punitive strikes against the North by U.S. naval air power, which was then followed by the truly large-scale introduction of hundreds of thousands of ground forces beginning in 1965. ⁹¹ Most important, Mao was clearly surprised by the U.S. attacks and the responses that followed, demonstrating his relatively low threat assessment prior to U.S. escalation. According to Chinese Communist Party historian Li Danhui, one reason that Mao was surprised was that he had come to believe in the early 1960s that the United States was too reliant on its allies to directly intervene in regional conflicts in the near term. He thought that the most likely direct combatants in wars against enemies like China would be U.S. proxies such as Japan, not the United States itself.⁹² If this is correct, then the U.S. tightening of its relations with its allies in the 1950s unintentionally undercut deterrence by falsely signaling U.S. over-reliance on those allies.

The history of 1962 provides us with a good test of the thesis that Mao’s ideological leanings and his desire to compete for ideological leadership of the international communist movement, not China’s national interests in accord with more straightforward realpolitik calculations, was driving his radical policies toward the Soviets, relations with other communist parties, and Third World revolution. In the first half of 1962 Vice Foreign Minister Wang Jiaxiang put forward a proposal for reorientation of PRC foreign policy that would be in accord with almost any objective analysis of China’s needs. His program, often referred to as the “three reconciliations and one reduction” (sanhe yishao), called for a reduction of Chinese foreign aid for revolution abroad during China’s recovery period from the Great Leap disaster and reconciliation with at least some foreign governments. Arguably with good reason, Wang considered it very dangerous for the PRC to maintain poor relations with both the Soviet Union and the United States at the same time as it was trying to pull itself out of domestic disaster. He therefore wanted Beijing to improve relations with one superpower or the other.⁹³ For the first half of 1962, Wang’s moderate stance enjoyed tacit or explicit support from several top leaders, including Zhou Enlai and Peng Zhen. Sino-Soviet relations even appeared to be thawing a bit in those months after a bit of a truce in the nastiest interparty attacks during 1961.⁹⁴

In August 1962 Mao would harshly criticize Wang and demand that China stay on a revolutionary path that encouraged revolution abroad and criticized Soviet revisionism in the international communist movement. By early 1963 the CCP was fully devoted to a long-term ideological struggle with the Soviets, support for concepts of armed revolution, and opposition to the concepts of peaceful coexistence and peaceful transformation to socialism. At that time Beijing elites would berate their Vietnamese comrades for not siding more clearly with the Chinese in the growing Sino-Soviet dispute.⁹⁵

Given Mao’s relatively limited threat assessment regarding U.S. escalation in Southeast Asia, from 1959 through the first several months of 1964 the spread of revolution and the improvement of his own party’s position within the international communist movement was a much more important goal in Mao’s policy toward Indochina than bolstering the security of his own nation against attack by support of a local ally against a common enemy. In fact, Beijing had more than just revolution in Southeast Asia in mind at the time. As historian Chen Jian puts it, in Beijing’s broader ideological struggle with the Soviets, Vietnam had “become a litmus test for true communism.”⁹⁶

Obviously, Chinese assistance to the Vietnamese communists raised the costs of containing them for the United States and its local partners. In fact, it is very difficult to imagine that the Vietnamese communists could have carried out their revolutionary plans in the South without Chinese assistance, particularly prior to the U.S. escalation in 1964–65 and the Soviet assistance that followed it. In fact, a CCP Party history argues that basically all of the Vietnamese communist materiel, except weapons captured from the enemy, were supplied by China in the first half of the 1960s.⁹⁷

Also of great importance was Beijing’s direct and indirect encouragement of Vietnamese aggression in 1963–64. Several months before the alleged Gulf of Tonkin Incident and U.S. escalation of the war, Mao pushed the Vietnamese communists to increase military activities in the South, telling them not to fear U.S. intervention.⁹⁸ China offered its own territory as a strategic “rear area” if the United States were to invade the North, thus reducing the downside risks of Vietnamese communist aggression.⁹⁹ Even before the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution that authorized the expansion of U.S. military operations in Vietnam, Mao announced to the North Vietnamese chief of staff his intention to send “volunteers” into Vietnam.¹⁰⁰ In January, June, and July 1964, Mao promised his Vietnamese comrades that if their actions led to an attack on North Vietnam by the United States, China stood ready to enter the war as it had in North Korea.¹⁰¹ On July 10, 1964, just one month before the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution, Zhou Enlai bolstered Vietnamese communist spirits by making a clear commitment to assist North Vietnam if the United States invaded the country. He said, “If the United States is resolved to expand this war, by invading the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, or directly sending in forces, bringing the flames of war to China’s side, we cannot just stand idly by (zuo shi bu guan). That is to say, if they want to fight a Korean-style war, we will prepare for it.”¹⁰² Chinese insurance regarding backup of the North Vietnamese if their support for revolution in the South led to U.S. escalation involving a land invasion of North Vietnam could have served only to embolden the North Vietnamese in their revisionist activities in the South. The North Vietnamese leaders were not the only ones to consider the prospect of Chinese intervention in Vietnam. In a classic study, Allen Whiting, then an intelligence analyst at the State Department, notes that Washington took the possibility of large-scale Chinese intervention seriously and limited military activities accordingly.¹⁰³

CHINA’S FOREIGN POLICY ACTIVISM: INTERNATIONAL STRATEGY OR DOMESTIC POSTURING?

China’s policy toward Southeast Asia in the early 1960s cannot be seen as fully consistent with the expectations of realpolitik, but that does not necessarily mean that ideological purity in foreign policy in competition with the Soviet Union was driving China’s strategy. One could argue that all of this was simply a byproduct of domestic politics in China and not part of an ideologically driven grand strategy of sincere competition with the Soviets. In other words, CCP elites could have simply been putting on a public image of anti-Soviet ideology for domestic purposes, but might not have truly been engaged in an international struggle with the Soviets. The evidence suggests that, at the broadest level, domestic politics were important in this period—after all, Mao’s domestic ideology was clearly a driving force behind the Great Leap Forward in the late 1950s, the Socialist Education Campaign of 1963, and eventually the Cultural Revolution of the late 1960s, all of which damaged Sino-Soviet relations. But the evidence also suggests that the competition with the Soviet Union for leadership of the movement in the 1960s was quite sincere, as Mao and the CCP elites would take actions that were clearly not designed simply for domestic consumption.

There are certain things that we should expect to see if Chinese foreign policy in the early 1960s was driven in large part by Mao’s desire to compete with the Soviet leadership for the hearts and minds of revolutionaries around the world but that would be relatively unimportant if Mao was simply posturing for domestic audiences by appearing to compete with the “revisionist” Soviet Union. For example, we should expect Chinese communist officials to actively lobby third-country communists by lauding their own efforts and criticizing the Soviet Union in public international forums and in private meetings with those foreign communists. We should also find serious internal assessments of that global competition and we should expect concerted marketing efforts with third parties lauding Chinese revolutionary achievements and criticizing Soviet laxity. This is exactly what the record shows.

In order to compete with the Soviets, China clearly had three different strategies in the early 1960s. With communists in Asia, Cuba, and Albania, China argued for communist internationalism and revolutionary solidarity, implicitly criticizing Khrushchev’s credentials on this score. With noncommunist Third World leaders, Beijing attempted to appear moderate, self-absorbed, and nonbelligerent. With Eastern Bloc communists, Beijing tried to play up party independence and nationalism, probably in the hope of weakening the Soviet grip on these parties.¹⁰⁴

Ideological attacks on the Soviets began in earnest in spring 1960, several months after Khrushchev’s and Mao’s extremely contentious October 1959 summit. In April 1960 the People’s Daily published three articles on the ninetieth anniversary of Lenin’s birth. The articles took up the CCP’s various problems with the notions of peaceful coexistence with the West and peaceful transition to socialism. They explicitly focused on Yugoslavian “revisionism,” but the true target was obviously the Soviet Union. In late May 1960 Mao removed any remaining subtlety. In discussions with North Korean and Danish Communist Party leaders Mao criticized peaceful coexistence and peaceful transformation, accused the USSR and Eastern European states of abandoning class conflict, and attacked Khrushchev by name for his statements regarding the “Spirit of Camp David” and détente with the United States following the summit in September 1959. Mao reportedly said in a threatening fashion that he would have to “settle accounts” (suan suan zhang) with Khrushchev in the future.¹⁰⁵

According to Chinese scholar Yang Kuisong, who performed extensive research in Chinese government archives, from late 1959 to 1961, Mao would argue privately to visiting communists from Australia to Venezuela that the notion that the communists could peacefully coexist with the capitalists over the long term was “utter nonsense.”¹⁰⁶ In June 1960 Chinese leaders expressed important ideological differences with the Soviets before and during an international labor (Lian Gong) gathering in Beijing.¹⁰⁷ In the same month the Soviet and Chinese representatives at the international congress in Bucharest (Third Romanian Party Congress) would openly criticize one another over ideological issues.¹⁰⁸ In 1961 following Soviet criticisms of the CCP at the 22nd Congress of the CPSU, Beijing and Moscow exchanged polemical attacks, although they focused on proxy third targets (Albania representing China in Soviet attacks and Yugoslavia representing the Soviets in Chinese ones).¹⁰⁹

In September 1963, Mao presented the Sino-Soviet ideological dispute to the world public by running a series of commentary articles (pinglun) in the People’s Daily. Before launching the campaign, Mao first consulted with Kim Il-sung and Ho Chi Minh.¹¹⁰ This type of consultation demonstrated the importance of his international goals in this “ideology war,” rather than just domestic politics. In the early 1960s Mao spent a great deal of time meeting with Korean, Vietnamese, and Japanese communist parties, among others, to discuss Sino-Soviet ideological differences and China’s plan to take the ideological dispute public. In May 1963 he would discuss Sino-Soviet ideological disputes with Kim Il-sung, and do so again in June with a visiting Vietnamese entourage headed up by Le Duan.¹¹¹ In the latter meetings, the Chairman mocked the Soviets’ “so-called” assistance to its efforts during the Korean War, for which Beijing was required to repay Moscow. Mao accused the Soviets of “great power chauvinism” (daguo shawenzhuyi) and pointed out that China never asked for repayment for its military assistance to Vietnam in its struggle against the French and the Americans.¹¹² In meetings with the Vietnamese and third-country communists, Mao would go so far as to criticize himself for his advice to the Vietnamese communists during the Geneva Conference and in the years immediately following it.¹¹³

According to Yang Kuisong, the Vietnamese communists began leaning heavily toward the Chinese side in the Sino-Soviet dispute at the time of Le Duan’s June 1963 visit, as they were frustrated with Khrushchev’s continuing lack of assistance to their struggle in South Vietnam and Laos. Le Duan supported Mao’s plan to publish his critical treatise on Soviet revisionism later in the year.¹¹⁴ In February 1964, Beijing promised significant aid to the Vietnamese communists (two billion RMB). Then, rather abruptly, Chinese leaders asked the Vietnamese their position on the Sino-Soviet dispute.¹¹⁵ In meetings with Kim Il-sung later in the month, Mao did more than accuse the Soviets of being less than generous toward their Chinese brethren, he accused them of violating the Chinese border in Xinjiang and undertaking subversive acts in the region. In meetings with Romanian officials, Liu Shaoqi accused Moscow of allying with the United States against China. He differentiated this behavior from the intra-alliance squabbles that the Chinese had with Stalin. In its public line, Beijing criticized Moscow for being lethargic in supporting revolution.¹¹⁶

It was clear that the Chinese communists were working actively to court the Cuban communists in particular. For example, in a February 21, 1963 meeting with a Cuban entourage, Zhou Enlai flattered his guests by saying that the CCP could learn much from Castro’s revolution. He also played on Cuba’s Third World anticolonial nationalism. In the meantime, Zhou criticized the Soviets and defended China’s policy toward nonsocialist regimes, like Sihanouk’s government in Cambodia, by stating that Sihanouk’s statements are in many ways more advanced than those of capitalists and “revisionists” because they reflect the central importance of anti-imperialism.¹¹⁷ At five international conferences in late 1962 through early 1963, the Chinese took a tough international stand on the capitalist world and on revolution and either implicitly or explicitly criticized the Soviets for being too weak toward the United States, a charge that carried more punch after the recent Cuban Missile Crisis. Relations would devolve further in early 1963 and by late March China was publishing open attacks on the Soviets and questioning publicly whether the Soviet Union was still a socialist country.¹¹⁸Later in the spring Khrushchev would publicly blast the Chinese as adventurists, particularly on the issue of nuclear war.¹¹⁹ The period 1963–64 was very tense. In fall 1964, following Khrushchev’s ouster in Moscow, the two sides launched a half-hearted effort to patch up relations via a visit to Moscow by a CCP entourage. This trip went from bad to worse when one of the Soviet entourage, apparently in a drunken rampage, suggested to a Chinese representative that Mao be ousted just as Khrushchev was; then the two sides could improve relations.¹²⁰

As we would also expect if international goals as opposed to straightforward domestic politics were of primary importance in Mao’s campaign against Khrushchev, CCP elites performed internal net assessments of each communist power’s relative standing among third-nation communists. The Chinese communists assessed that the struggle against “Soviet revisionism” would be a long one and the Soviets clearly had the upper hand in the near term vis à vis the number of parties supporting them in the ideological battle (lunzhan) with the Chinese. But the CCP elites also believed that, in the early 1960s, momentum was on their side. At a work meeting of the Central Committee in February 1963, Deng Xiaoping reported that not all parties around the world were comfortable with backing Moscow against China. He argued that the number of countries backing the Soviets during the 22nd Party Congress in October 1961, while still a majority, was fewer than in 1960. Moreover, he pointed out that Khrushchev appeared nervous about losing the support of fence-sitters and had to craft his policies toward China and others to avoid losing their support for the Soviets. Deng pointed out that the CCP seemed to have a great deal of momentum in Asia in particular. He stated that the communist parties in North Korea, Malaysia, Indonesia, Japan, Vietnam, Burma, and Thailand, among others, either “oppose[ed] or [did] not support” Soviet attacks on China. For our purposes, it is important to note that Deng claimed that the Vietnamese communists in “most situations” (duoshu de qingkuangxia) remain consistent (yi zhi de, sometimes translated as “identical”) with the Chinese position.¹²¹ In 1962 in his own remarks at the Central Committee Conference that would launch the Socialist Education Campaign—an effort to rein in “rightist” thinking that he believed existed during the brief retrenchment from the Great Leap Forward—Mao also discussed how, by publishing its critiques of revisionism, the CCP could win converts over time. He boasted that many communists from capitalist countries had made contact with CCP representatives in Switzerland in order to read relevant CCP articles.¹²²

The Soviets, for their part, correctly assessed what Mao was attempting to do and did so very early in the CCP’s campaign. They did not see the Chinese ideological campaign as primarily aimed at domestic audiences. In September 1960 the Soviet ambassador to the PRC reported to Moscow that the CCP had increased its contacts with communist parties of all countries since 1959. The CCP was attempting to “elbow out (”paiji” in the Chinese-language version) the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and grab the leadership position (lingxiu diwei) of the international communist movement.”¹²³

The CCP’s international campaign regarding Soviet weakness apparently had some effect on third parties and, eventually, on the Soviets themselves. In spring 1964, the Vietnamese communists began publicly discussing the risk that “revisionism” posed to the communist camp. In July and August various parties sided with China in its negative views on international peace conferences being proposed by the Soviets. At the 15th PRC National Day, foreign communists criticized the Soviet Unions’ lack of revolutionary fervor. It is quite clear from the large number of parties that continued to line up with the Soviet Union in the international communist movement that Chinese gains at Soviet expense in a struggle for international leadership remained very limited at best.¹²⁴ But Mao and his colleagues apparently believed that long-term trends favored them in the struggle, especially in Asia and elsewhere in the developing world.¹²⁵ Moscow could not have been overly confident that Mao was wrong and, as various experts on Soviet foreign policy have reported, Khrushchev’s perceived need to compete with the Chinese communists for the hearts and minds of third countries had an important effect on Soviet foreign policy in Asia, Berlin, and Cuba in the early 1960s.¹²⁶

THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK: THE CATALYTIC EFFECT OF THE SINO-SOVIET SPLIT ON SOVIET FOREIGN POLICY

Gaiduk writes, “The Soviet-Chinese split had a powerful impact on Moscow’s considerations about Southeast Asia.”¹²⁷ In his account, what drove Soviet concerns over Vietnam in the early 1960s was not a desire to counter the United States’ efforts there or to spread revolution for its own sake. In fact, Khrushchev wanted détente with the West, especially after the Cuban Missile Crisis. Vietnam was a headache for him in this regard. To the degree that they were willing to support Vietnam at all, the Soviets were motivated by the fear that Chinese communist influence was growing in the region at the expense of Soviet influence. The timing of key Soviet decisions supports this argument.

Playing catchup with the Chinese, who had formally recognized the NLF the month before, Khrushchev dropped his language about peaceful coexistence and peaceful transformation in January 1961, deeming inevitable the armed struggles of national liberation against colonialism. This speech apparently made a deep impression on the incoming Kennedy administration about Soviet activism in the Third World. After the May 1961 Chinese offer of economic aid to Vietnam, in June the Soviets answered with a military package of its own of unknown value.¹²⁸ In December 1961 the Soviet air force began airlifting supplies to the Pathet Lao. According to historians Aleksander Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, Khrushchev adopted this policy largely to maintain leverage there in competition with the Chinese.¹²⁹

The effects of budding Sino-Soviet discord at this time were not only felt in Asia, but apparently also in Eastern Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. Competition with the Chinese communists for prestige catalyzed the Soviets’ move away from peaceful transformation and “the democratic national state” and toward political support and military assistance to irredentists and armed rebels around the world. In an excellent multi-case study of Soviet military assistance in Africa and the Middle East, an expert on Soviet security policy, Bruce Porter, wrote the following:

In 1964, Khrushchev’s final year in office, Chinese attacks on the Soviets for not supporting armed revolution in Vietnam, the Congo, and elsewhere took their toll on Khrushchev and his policies slowly began to harden in that year.¹³¹When détente began to collapse and U.S.-Soviet relations worsened, as scholar James Richter acknowledges, “the rivalry with China pushed him [Khrushchev] to take an even harsher stance against the United States to prove his revolutionary credentials.”¹³²

In Latin America, competition with the Chinese apparently made Khru-shchev extremely worried about Moscow’s standing in the eyes of Cuban revolutionaries, a movement whose success did not fit with his concepts of peaceful transformation to socialism and its logical offshoot the “national democratic state.” The Cuban revolution did, however match the model of rural Maoist rebellion led by a vanguard from the national bourgeoisie.¹³³ According to research on Soviet archives, his concern about potential Cuban leanings toward the PRC may have helped convince Khrushchev to offer Castro’s revolution a nuclear umbrella against direct U.S. attack and may have influenced his decision to transfer nuclear weapons to the island. Fursenko and Naftali write, “For four years before coming right out in the open in spring 1960, the Chinese had subtly criticized Khrushchev for endorsing the doctrine of peaceful coexistence. Now that Cuba was on the verge of becoming the first socialist state in the third world since North Vietnam, Khrushchev decided he had to acknowledge the ideological promise of armed national-liberation movements.”¹³⁴ Fursenko and Naftali also portray Khrushchev’s main concern in Cuba in early 1962 not as fear of a loss of communist control but of a move by Cuban communists toward the Chinese position in the international communist struggle. After falling out with Castro’s party, one leading Cuban communist reported in Moscow that there was a large pro-China streak in Cuban communism. Naftali and Fursenko argue that Khrushchev’s desire to maintain the mantle of international communist leadership “played a part” in Moscow’s May 1962 decision to transfer nuclear-capable missiles to Cuba, a decision that nearly precipitated World War III.¹³⁵

Hope Harrison reports that East German General Secretary Walter Ulbricht referred positively to the Chinese attack on Quemoy and Matsu in memoranda to the Soviets in late 1958, drawing direct analogies between the offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu and the “island” of West Berlin, itself surrounded on all sides by East Germany.¹³⁶ James Richter writes that Ulbricht in 1958–61 exploited “the deteriorating international conditions, as well as the pressure from China, to strengthen its [the DDR’s] leverage over Moscow.” In this process, East Germany was able to coax Khrushchev into taking a tougher position on West Berlin and to issue the first ultimatum that induced the Berlin crisis.¹³⁷ Harrison similarly emphasizes Khrushchev’s concerns about East Germany’s leanings toward the Chinese in 1961 as a major factor in Soviet support for Ulbricht’s closing of the border with West Berlin.¹³⁸ Khrushchev’s advisors recalled that he canceled the May 1960 Paris summit following the famous U-2 Incident, the shoot down of Gary Powers’ spy plane over Soviet territory, in part because he feared criticism from hardliners at home and in China if he were to appear soft toward the West at that time.¹³⁹ From the U.S. Cold War perspective, the Sino-Soviet split made the communist movement worse than a monolith not just in Asia, but also in the Western hemisphere, and it contributed to some of the most dangerous crises of the Cold War era.