H-Diplo ROUNDTABLE XXII-41

H-Diplo ROUNDTABLE XXII-41 Danhui Li and Yafeng Xia. Mao and the Sino-Soviet Split, 1959-1973: A New History. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2018. ISBN: 978-1-4985-1166-7 (hardback, $120.00); 978-1-4985-1168-1 (paperback, $42.99). 24 May 2021 | https://hdiplo.org/to/RT22-41 Editors: Thomas Maddux and Diane Labrosse | Production Editor: George Fujii Contents Introduction by Sergey Radchenko, Cardiff University ..................................................................................................... 2 Review by Jeremy Friedman, Harvard University .............................................................................................................. 6 Review by Austin Jersild, Old Dominion University ........................................................................................................... 8 Review by Niu Jun, Peking University ................................................................................................................................. 10 Review by Deborah Kaple, Princeton University .............................................................................................................. 15 Review by Steven I. Levine, Senior Mansfield Fellow, Maureen and Mike Mansfield Center, University of Montana ....................................................................................................................................................................................... 18 Review by David Wolff, Slavic-Eurasian Research Center, Hokkaido University ................................................... 23 Response by Danhui Li, East China Normal University and Yafeng Xia, Long Island University ...................... 27 H-Diplo Roundtable XXII-41 Introduction by Sergey Radchenko, Cardiff University This roundtable brings together some of the most prominent scholars of Sino-Soviet relations. These historians, alongside the authors of the book, have helped shape the field. It is interesting to read their contributions because they are more than just reviews. They are in many cases new instalments of old arguments that break out every so often, with every new book, to die away, to break out again. As a long-time observer, I am still not sure we are moving towards a consensus but that is okay. Who said consensus is the endpoint of this journey? Mao and the Sino-Soviet Split meets with a generally favourable reception. Deborah Kaple notes that the volume “will greatly assist scholars by providing not only the granular detail of Socialist Bloc relations for the years 1959-1973, but also by adding many fresh observations and conclusions.” Austin Jersild complements the authors for their excellent use of Chinese primary sources (including documents from the lately useless Chinese Foreign Ministry archive, and provincial archives) “to address some of the largest questions in Cold War history and history of state socialism.” Jeremy Friedman calls the book “a welcome addition to both the literature and the source-base.” Niu Jun argues the “accomplishment of these authors greatly exceeds that of other works in this field.” David Wolff points out that Danhui Li and Yafeng Xia have rescued the subject from the clutches of American, European, and Russian historians to give it a proper China-centred angle. Only Steven Levine finds the book “disappointing” in some respects, though he too concludes that the authors “have performed a signal service in presenting us a book that not only meticulously examines a crucial period of Sino-Soviet relations, but also stimulates us to reflect upon those years in comparative historical perspective.” Friedman finds a contradiction at the heart of the book. At one point, he notes, Li and Xia suggest that the struggle of ideology between Beijing and Moscow was just for “appearances’ sake,” but elsewhere the authors take ideology much more seriously, arguing how Moscow’s and Beijing’s “political lines and policies were in direct opposition to each other and proved to be incompatible.” Friedman concludes that ideology cannot be taken out of the picture: it mattered a great deal to this relationship: “it would have had to have played the central role.” When reading these comments, I was reminded of my own debate – ages ago it now seems – with Lorenz Lüthi.1 My brilliant opponent defended the centrality of ideology. I argued in favour of power struggle. Well-meaning colleagues suggested from the side-lines: why couldn’t it be both? It could be, of course: historians like multi-causality. We like it because the evidence is contradictory and can often be spun in all kinds of way in support of all kinds of known and unknown biases. The relative influence of specific factors can never be mapped out with precision, so when it comes to finding the ‘root cause’ of things, we tend to find whatever agrees with our deeply-held convictions, idealistic or cynical as the case may be. I find echoes of the same argument in Li and Xia, and in Friedman’s critique, with the difference that whereas Lüthi and I debated the relative importance of ideology versus power, scholarly attention has since shifted from “power” to a more complex sociological term: ‘leadership.’ And here, in my opinion, is the source of the contradiction that Friedman points to. Leadership cannot be based on power alone. Leadership must have an ideology that would rationalize the leader’s place at the top of a political hierarchy. But once this or that ideology is in place, it not only serves to rationalize the choices made but also prescribes the range of choices, so that it becomes difficult to distinguish these two uses of ideology, the rationalizing and the prescriptive. 1 See for example, Roundtable on Lorenz M. Lüth, The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World (Princeton,: Princeton University Press, 2008), H-Diplo, Volume IX, No. 25 (2008), https://lists.h-net.org/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=H- Diplo&month=0812&week=c&msg=iNWQessy6FDiqXBiVGyjLg&user=&pw= and Roundtable on Sergey Radchenko, Two Suns in the Heavens: The Sino-Soviet Struggle for Supremacy, 1962-1967 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009); H-Diplo, Volume XII, No. 13 (2011), https://lists.h-net.org/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl?trx=vx&list=h- diplo&month=1104&week=a&msg=i6cHKfiTtJa9DLMGr3OVxw&user=&pw=. © 2021 The Authors | CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 US 2 | Page H-Diplo Roundtable XXII-41 Complexities don’t end there because rationalization and prescription can both operate in the absence of coherent ideologies. To use a hypothetical example, A and B conclude an alliance. The alliance could actually be strategic or rationalized as strategic, or actually ideological, or merely rationalized in ideological terms. Or, indeed, it could be neither strategic nor ideological (but, say, a product of bureaucratic politics). What, then, is the conclusion to be drawn from this? The conclusion – and I say this as a veteran of these debates – is that the nature of phenomena like the Sino-Soviet alliance (and many other historical phenomena) is fundamentally unknowable. All we can do as historians is narrow down the range of potential explanations. The Sino-Soviet alliance emerged and crashed for at least one of a number of potential reasons, some of which are mutually contradictory but that is fine since reality itself is something like a scene from Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, with the important difference that, unlike Rashomon, reality doesn’t have a happy ending. One may object here by saying that truths I hold to be mystically unknownable are only such because I have not yet assigned numbers to causes in order to a run a statistical regression analysis. Well, if we did that and then still did not agree on the causes of the Sino-Soviet split, at least we would have some numbers to show for it. Numbers, at least, can be defined, whereas ideology, power, leadership – who knows what they actually mean? I don’t, and I’ve spent twenty years trying to figure it out. Speaking of definitions, I now turn to Steven Levine’s insightful critique. Where Friedman reads contradiction, Steven Levine sees “waffling” and “timidity” of the authors who, he notes, fail to “understand the interests involved, the stakes, and the motives and thinking of the leaders.” Levine posits that we cannot even begin to understand the underlying dynamic in Sino-Soviet relations unless we subject terms like “Marxist-Leninism” to unrelenting scrutiny. That latter he dismisses as mumbo-jumbo used hypocritically and opportunistically by leaders like Mao Zedong and Nikita Khrushchev to bolster their claims to power. I do not think that the gap between Li and Xia and Levine is in fact as deep as his critique may at first suggest. I agree with Levine that it is important to avoid the uncritical use of terms like ‘revisionism’ or ‘dogmatism.’ As historians we do it too often. I would say we are much more guilty of this compared to political scientists who – let’s admit it – are generally much better at explaining words we take for granted. Fundamentally, though, both Li and Xia, and Levine, and, indeed, this writer, seem to be in broad agreement that we cannot really take the Sino-Soviet ideological struggle for what the Chinese and the Soviets claimed it was. Levine is right, though: today, partly thanks to the work of historians like Li and Xia, we have a much bigger pile of evidence from which to draw in defence of our various hypotheses. I like Levine’s cataract analogy, although I would refine it somewhat. In the past, the underlying dynamic of Sino-Soviet relations was only

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