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=.

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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 partially discernible behind the cataract of propaganda. Now that the cataract has been removed, we can see this relationship for the pathetic shambles that it was, with all of its confusions and contradictions.

Niu Jun, in his review, highlights the role of contingency in Sino-Soviet relations. To use Yogi Berra’s famous insight, it wasn’t over until it was truly and finally over, and that took years. It is worth remembering that even as the Soviets and the Chinese were shooting at each other across the ice-bound Ussuri River, they were also bound by the treaty of alliance. Contingency is important insofar as it invariably defeats realism: immutable national interests turn out to be not so immutable on closer inspection; yesterday’s enemies become friends, only to become enemies again, though not necessarily. To cite an old Chinese adage, that which has long been united can divide, and that which has been divided can unite, or they can just stay united or divided as long as circumstances permit, and who knows how long that may be.

All the reviewers point to one important circumstance: Chairman Mao. “Mao Zedong, with his shifting fears and suspicious spawning new foreign policy concepts and new enemy images,” argues Wolff, “has causal power” in this relationship. His megalomania did not go well with the Soviet pretentions to leadership. Friedman rightfully poses the question of questions: what would have happened if Mao had dropped dead in 1962? It is interesting that this question is never posed about Khrushchev. We tend to assume that if Khrushchev dropped dead then his successors would just as tirelessly have clung to their mantle of leadership in the Communist bloc (as in fact they did after 1964). The real question is whether anyone else © 2021 The Authors | CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 US

3 | Page H-Diplo Roundtable XXII-41 other than Mao would have dared to try to dethrone them. This question by the way points to hidden assumptions behind our understanding of Soviet-bloc politics, and this is one issue that nicely aligns Li and Xia with all of their detractors and admirers.

Wolff notes in his review that the “line between policy decisions and improvisations can… be blurry.” This relates to the long-running debate as to what extent Mao’s shift towards an opening with the United States was a consequence of the escalation of border tensions with the USSR in March 1969. But it is not the only example. Nikita Khrushchev was given to improvisation, which certainly did not contribute to the stability of the alliance (just recall his infamous quarrel with the Chinese leaders in Bejing, in October 1959). It is tempting for historians to look back in search of a connecting line. Sometimes the line is not so obvious, because of the lack of evidence or because the evidence is contradictory. Out comes a pen and we connect the dots in whatever way that ‘makes sense.’ A part of me wishes that we wouldn’t: that there were more Quentin Tarantinos among historians. Reality is confusing but it doesn’t make it less enjoyable.

Wolff and Niu Jun go into some detail about how Li and Xia handle the subject of the Sino-Soviet competition in the Third World, in particular in Asia. Niu Jun echoes the authors’ conclusions that Beijing’s efforts were largely wasted. Their gains turned out to be illusory and temporary, as useless allies like North Korea and Vietnam shamelessly manipulated their Chinese patron. Wolff wishes for more coverage of China’s relationship with the Communist Party of Indonesia (PKI) and with the North Vietnamese, suggesting that Li and Xia could have provided more context or indeed more evidence from the vast treasure-trove of materials that they had access to. In any case, the rich, textured coverage of Beijing’s quest for allies in Asia is a distinguishing characteristic of the book that will be appreciated by readers worldwide, given especially the topic’s continued relevance.

One thing that none of the reviewers unfortunately mention is legitimacy. This may be because Chen Jian is not part of this roundtable, and his prior work that legitimacy is absolutely central to understanding the Sino-Soviet relationship and China’s foreign policy in the 1960s.2 Legitimacy helps connect the dots between leadership and power or how both the Chinese and the Soviets legitimized their hold on power through narratives of political leadership. Of course, by introducing such a loaded term as ‘legitimacy,’ we risk adding to what Levine calls mumbo-jumbo of terminology but the risk is worth running, especially if we try to draw historical lessons for understanding China’s contemporary foreign policy.

Participants:

Danhui Li is a Professor of History at Institute for Studies of China’s Neighboring Countries and Regions, East China Normal University, editor-in-chief of two academic journals: Lengzhan guojishi yanjiu (Cold War International History Studies), and Bianjiang yu zhoubian wenti yanjiu (Studies of Borderlands and Neighboring Regions). A leading authority on CCP’s external relations during the Cold War, she has published extensively on Sino-Soviet relations and Sino-Vietnamese relations during the Indochina War (in Chinese, Russian and English). Most recently, she is the co-author of After Leaning to One Side: China and Its Allies in the Cold War (2011).

Yafeng Xia is a Professor of History at Long Island University. A former Wilson Center fellow and public policy scholar, he is the author of Negotiating with the Enemy: U.S.-China Talks during the Cold War, 1949-72 (2006), and co-author of Mao and the Sino-Soviet Partnership, 1945-1959: A New History, with Zhihua Shen (2015), and A Misunderstood Friendship: Mao Zedong, Kim Il-sung and Sino-North Korean Relations, 1949-1976, with Zhihua Shen (Columbia University Press, September 2018). He has also published over 40 articles on Cold War history and Sino-American relations.

2 Most prominently, Chen Jian, Mao’s China and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

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Sergey Radchenko is Professor of International Relations at Cardiff University. His research interests include the Cold War and the history of Chinese and Soviet foreign relations. He is the author of Two Suns in the Heavens: the Sino-Soviet Struggle for Supremacy (Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Stanford University Press, 2009) and Unwanted Visionaries: the Soviet Failure in Asia at the End of the Cold War (Oxford University Press, 2014). His next book, The First Fiddle: a History of the Cold War and After, is forthcoming in 2021.

Jeremy Friedman is an Assistant Professor at Harvard Business School. He received his Ph.D. in History from Princeton in 2011. His first book, Shadow Cold War: The Sino-Soviet Competition for the Third World, was published by UNC Press in 2015. His current project is entitled “Ripe for Revolution: Building Socialism in the Third World.”

Austin Jersild is Professor and Chair of the Department of History at Old Dominion University. He co-edited, with Patryk Babiracki, Socialist Internationalism in the Cold War: Exploring the Second World (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016).

Niu Jun, Professor of International Studies, Peking University, received his Ph.D. at the People’s University of China (Renmin daxue) in 1988. His current research focuses on a project involving China-U.S. relations and the Cold War in East Asia. He teaches courses at Peking University including: The foreign relations of the People’s Republic of China since 1949, and China’s foreign policy-making process. Among his major publications is: Cong yan’an zouxiang shijie: Zhongguo gongchandang duiwai zhengce di qiyuan, which appeared in English translation as From Yan’an to the World: The Origin and Development of Chinese Communist Foreign Policy (EastBridge, 2005).

Deborah Kaple teaches in the Sociology Department at Princeton University. She is a member of Princeton’s Center on Contemporary China, as well as the Advisory Board of Princeton’s Slavic Department. She is the author of Dream of a Red Factory: The Legacy of High Stalinism in China (Oxford University Press, 1994) and Gulag Boss: A Soviet Memoir (Oxford University Press, 2012); the editor of Modern China Studies, Special Issue with 13 contributors, “The Forgotten Decade: A Retrospective Look at the 1950s,” 2015; and numerous articles.

Steven I. Levine is a Senior Mansfield Fellow at the Maureen and Mike Mansfield Center at the University of Montana and Research Faculty Associate in the Department of History. After receiving his Ph.D. from Harvard, he taught Chinese history and politics during a forty-year academic career. Among his books are Anvil of Victory: The Communist Revolution in Manchuria, 1945-1948 (Columbia University Press, 1987) and Arc of Empire: America’s Wars in Asia from the Philippines to Vietnam, co-authored with Michael H. Hunt (University of North Carolina Press, 2012). He translated (from Russian) and edited Alexander V. Pantsov’s authoritative biographies of Mao Zedong and Deng Xiaoping, Mao: The Real Story (Simon & Schuster, 2012) and Deng Xiaoping: A Revolutionary Life (Oxford University Press, 2015).

David Wolff is Professor of Eurasian History at the Slavic-Eurasian Research Center of Hokkaido University and a former director of the Cold War International History Project in Washington, DC. He is author of To the Harbin Station: The Liberal Alternative in Russian Manchuria, 1898-1914 (Stanford, 1999), (Kodansha, 2010), coeditor of the two-volume World War Zero: A Global History of the Russo-Japanese War (2005; 2008) and most recently Russia’s Great War and Revolution in the Far East (2018). He is the author/co-author of two CWIHP Working Papers, as well as several articles, on the Cold War in Northeast Asia.

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Review by Jeremy Friedman, Harvard University

At a moment in history when China’s leadership is again concerned with becoming enmeshed in a Great Power tussle that seems to result from a murky cocktail of a clash of personalities, conflicting national interests, and a broader struggle over ideas and the direction of history, Danhui Li and Yafeng Xia have provided us with an excellently researched work that captures the enduring complexity of the Sino-Soviet split. This book by two of the leading Chinese historians in the field of Cold War history is essential reading for scholars interested in the geopolitics of the second half of the twentieth century, particularly those who want to understand the relationship between Chinese domestic and foreign policy. The authors have added to our source-base at a time when conducting research in People’s Republic of China (PRC) archives has become increasingly difficult, and they employ these sources with a keen awareness for the institutional and personal relationships that provided context for the documents, helping others along the way to understand the nuances of China’s foreign policy process during the late Maoist period.

The structure of the book is primarily chronological, though the chronology is sliced in such a way as to make thematic chapters feasible, for example allowing the authors to separate the threads of domestic Chinese politics, competition for the loyalties of East Asian Communist Parties, and the battle within the broader international Communist movement during 1964-1965. This enables the authors to tell parallel stories in four arenas: Chinese domestic politics, Chinese Communist Party-Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CCP-CPSU) party relations, Sino-Soviet state-to-state relations, and within the international Communist movement. The structure is necessary in order to facilitate the interpretation of the Sino- Soviet split that the authors seek to advance. Unlike Lorenz Lüthi, whose interpretation is said to be “driven by ideology, dependent on domestic politics, and shaped by the personalities of the leaders,” and Sergey Radchenko, who “perceives a more traditional competition for power and influence,” Li and Xia place the central emphasis on the battle for leadership of the Communist movement (x). This fits in with their broader argument in the conclusion about why socialist alliances are more unstable than alliances between capitalist countries. They argue that the principle of proletarian internationalism created fundamental problems for states that also sought to pursue their, at times, discordant national interests, and that the ideological necessity for the Communist world to have a single leader was in perpetual tension with the principle of equality between states. It would seem to follow, therefore, that a split between any two large Communist countries with aspirations to leadership was inevitable, even if these two countries had been France and Germany, perhaps, or possibly even if they had had different leaders. The thematic structure of the chapters enables the authors to devote greater attention to the struggle within the international Communist movement, while narrating the consequences of that struggle particularly for party-to- party and state-to-state relations.

The implication of this argument that privileges what Li and Xia refer to as the “irrational factors” of the two countries’ foreign policy decision-making process is that the other elements of the conflict were derivative of this struggle for leadership (275). So, for example, the authors state that “The conflict of national interests was the result, not the cause, of the Sino- Soviet split,” a claim amply supported by evidence regarding Chairman Mao Zedong’s instrumental use of the border conflict for purposes other than gaining territory (45). Similarly, the authors assert that “We cannot explain this [the breakdown of socialist alliance relationships] solely based on the personalities of leaders” (276). This claim seems somewhat harder to sustain, since the emphasis the authors place on Mao’s abiding fear of ‘revisionism’ within China as a motivating factor for his policy towards the CPSU invites the reader to speculate on what would have happened had Mao died suddenly in 1962 and been replaced by Liu Shaoqi or another leading CCP figure.

The main difficulties for the argument, however, are evident in its treatment of ideology. In one place, the authors remark that “The Sino-Soviet struggle over ideology was only for appearances’ sake” (45). But in their conclusion, the authors present the role of ideology very differently. Detailing how the Chinese and Soviet leaders had fundamentally different interpretations of the nature of the current period, they write that “their political lines and policies were in direct opposition to each other and proved to be incompatible” (280). This would seem to indicate that the incompatibility was real and not merely superficial or manufactured. Furthermore, Li and Xia affirm that “The most important issue in leading the international Communist movement was ideological authority” (280). Putting these points together, it would seem therefore that the two sides had different ideological interpretations which were incompatible, and that this necessitated a © 2021 The Authors | CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 US

6 | Page H-Diplo Roundtable XXII-41 struggle for supremacy in a movement in which, as the authors explain, there was room for only one ideological leader. If the struggle for supremacy was not about national interests, and it was not about leaders’ egos, it would stand to reason that ideology would have had to have played the central role.

An interesting question that arises from the authors’ analysis regards the role of the United States. As Li and Xia explain, the Central Intelligence Agency saw a full, permanent break between the Soviet Union and PRC as unlikely because ultimately they needed each other to face down a common enemy, the United States (274). The authors argue that the CIA analysis was rational, at least as far as the calculation of interest would normally go in non-socialist states; the CIA merely failed to account for the ‘irrationality’ of the socialist state system. But perhaps what it missed was a shift in the estimation in either Beijing, Moscow, or both, about the actual danger represented by the United States? Li and Xia detail the surreptitious signaling that went on between Beijing and Washington in 1965 regarding each side’s intentions in Vietnam in order to avoid a direct clash, as well as Mao’s apparent shift in 1964 to regarding the Soviet Union as at least as much of a security threat as the United States (96). It is possible, therefore, that if this shifting evaluation of the relative threat posed by the United States can be pushed back to 1963 or even 1962, perhaps thus resulting from the lack of an American attack during the Cuban Missile Crisis, it might turn– out that China’s willingness to break with the Soviet Union, ostensibly in the name of a more militant anti-imperialist and anti-American foreign policy, was actually facilitated by a perception that the United States was not really as threatening as earlier feared. For now this is speculative, but it is possible that there are documents yet to be uncovered that would support such an explanation.

Overall, Mao and the Sino-Soviet Split, 1959-1973 adds to our understanding of the dynamics of Chinese foreign policy- making, relations between the Soviet Union and PRC, and relations between socialist states more broadly. It is a welcome addition to both the literature and the source-base, and it adds another balanced perspective to the debate about what divided the two greatest Communist powers of the twentieth century.

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Review by Austin Jersild, Old Dominion University

This second volume continues a tradition of productive team work, this time between Danhui Li and Yafeng Xia, who emphasize the central role and importance of China in some of the more significant strategic realignments of international history and the Cold War. The chronological dimensions of the story (1959-1973) take the reader from the Sino-Soviet split to the “quasi-alliance” that developed between the United States and China after President Richard Nixon’s trip to China in February 1972 (233). The subsequent entanglement of the American and Chinese economies that developed since that time is the subject of extensive public debate today. The authors remind us that the Soviet Union, or rather reactions to the Soviet Union and frustration with the Soviet Union, was key to this history. Even further, the Soviet impact and “the experience with the Soviet Union” was “central to the unfolding of the Cultural Revolution” (xiii).

China’s emotional engagement with the Soviet revolutionary experience was followed by the extended forms of economic, cultural, and institutional collaboration that took place in the 1950s.3 As the Sino-Soviet split unfolded, Chairman Mao Zedong and his supporters were threatened by this very history. The radical Great Leap Forward, the authors emphasize, was designed with the socialist bloc and the Soviet Union in mind. The criticism that emerged from figures such as Peng Dehuai, the defense minister throughout the 1950s who was dismissed at the Lushan Conference in the summer of 1959, was threatening to Mao and China’s leaders because these suspicions were common in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe (62). The efforts of Wang Jiaxiang, the director of the International Liaison Department, to promote moderation in foreign policy and potentially reconcile with the Soviet Union were seen as similarly threatening (78). Such figures of course collaborated extensively with their Soviet and East European counterparts through the 1950s. Mao claimed that “foreign and domestic revisionists were colluding,” and devised subsequent policies that reshaped Chinese domestic life, again with the Soviet Union in mind. The polemical attacks that contested Soviet “revisionism” internationally were accompanied by initiatives like the Socialist Education Movement that “guard[ed] against revisionism domestically.” The simultaneous efforts “were like the two wheels of the same bicycle, riding in concert to drag China into the abyss of the Cultural Revolution” (103).

The authors primarily use Chinese sources and emphasize Chinese perceptions, but at the same time offer extensive insight into the history of the Soviet Union. They speculate about the “negative effect of putting party-to-party relations above state-to-state relations,” and the consequences of conflict between the needs of the broader socialist community versus the demands of the nation (52-53). China learned the hard way about these problems, a product of daily experience within the bloc in the 1950s. The best archival material on struggles over planning and resource allocation that illustrated this tension, however, probably consists of the largely Russian documents in the Russian State Archive of the Economy in Moscow (Rossiiskii gosudarstvennyi arkhiv ekonomiki, RGAE).4

If the Soviet system was clearly inefficient and uninspiring to the Chinese, Soviet foreign policy was equally ineffective. The Soviets were clumsy in their efforts to promote the repatriation of Soviet nationals in Xinjiang, and prone to conflict along the long and heavily militarized border with China (56-58, 247-257). The conflict with China hindered their efforts to transport military equipment across China to support the North Vietnamese in the war against the Americans, and left them with a significant rival in efforts to court allies in the decolonizing Global South (209-215). Aggressive Soviet actions in 1969 left the Chinese fearful of a nuclear attack. Ultimately the Soviets drove their former socialist ‘friend’ and ally in the bloc into a close relationship with the Americans. Is there a volume three in the works, contrasting the development of

3 Elizabeth McGuire, Red at Heart: How Chinese Communists Fell in Love with the Russian Revolution (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017).

4 On intra-bloc exchange generally, see Randall W. Stone, Satellites and Commissars: Strategy and Conflict in the Politics of Soviet-Bloc Trade (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996). On the practical dilemmas of Sino-Soviet exchange, see Austin Jersild, The Sino-Soviet Alliance: An International History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Zhihua Shen, Sulian zhuanjia zai zhongguo (1948-1960) (Beijing: Zhongguo guoji guangbo chubanshe, 2003).

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China’s export-oriented economic model after 1973 with socialist bloc debt and collapse? In this excellent book the authors productively learn from provincial Chinese and MFA archival materials to address some of the largest questions in Cold War history and the history of state socialism.

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Review by Niu Jun, Peking University

Li Danhui and Xia Yafeng’s Mao and the Sino-Soviet Split, 1959-1973 is the sequel to Shen Zhihua and Xia Yafeng’s Mao and the Sino-Soviet Partnership, 1945-1959: A New History.5 The first common feature of both volumes is that both use the phrase “Mao and” in their titles. There are a number of ways in which to understand this usage, the first being that the Sino- Soviet relationship, from alliance to enmity, unfolded from 1949 to 1973 during the time when China was under the supreme leadership of Chairman Mao Zedong. The second is that, whether as allies or enemies, China and the Soviet Union were closely connected to the historical figure of Mao Zedong. One may even say that he was the key to the relationship, at least with regard to the policies of the Chinese side.

A third, extremely important point, is that the authors of these two works develop their narrative from the perspective of Chinese historical figures like Mao Zedong and his colleagues, and from China’s policy vis-à-vis the Soviet Union during this period. This narrative perspective required the authors to master an immense number of diplomatic archives and other relevant historical documents from the Chinese side. After reading these two books, one can confidently assert that in this respect the accomplishment of these authors greatly exceeds that of other works in this field. Going a step further to compare these two books, Mao and the Sino-Soviet Split is even more outstanding. Not only do the authors use an impressive number of Chinese central government diplomatic archives, but they also make use of many local archives maintained at the provincial level, materials gathered by persons involved in the management of Sino-Soviet relations, and so forth.

The authors chose the period from 1959 to 1973 as the temporal frame of their book. With regard to the issue of defining 1959 as the point when Sino-Soviet relations turned from alliance to enmity, even though there is a high degree of consensus among Chinese scholars, there still remains some controversy. But stipulating 1973 as the key year for the termination of this stage is a novel point of view. In their introduction, the authors offer two reasons for their chronological choice. In 1972, with U.S. President Nixon’s visit to China, the publication of the Shanghai Communique, and detente between China and the United States, the China-U.S.-Soviet triangular relationship came into being. Second, in 1973, after the end of the Vietnam War, Mao Zedong propounded a new strategy of “a horizontal line” and “a big terrain” (ix). This explanation further clarifies the main line and narrative of the authors’ viewpoint that this indeed marked an evolution in Chinese policy. Since I have recently been studying the history of Cold War-era Sino-American relations, and comparing it with the works of Chinese scholars, I have been able to discover many interesting points to consider.

In their works on the history of Sino-American relations, Chinese scholars generally use events in Chinese history to demarcate different periods in the evolution of Sino-American relations. For example, so called “the modern history of Sino-American relations” covers the period from 1840 to the end of the Qing dynasty, and coincides with Chinese modern history; Sino-American history during the Republican era indicates the period from the outbreak of the 1911 Revolution to 1949; this is followed by ‘Sino-American Relations during the Era of the People’s Republic of China,’ starting from the establishment of the new governing authority in October 1949. In addition, there are such books on subjects like ‘Sino- American Relations during the Era of Reform and Opening Up,’ etc. The common problem in these works on Sino- American relations is that some of them are irrelevant to the topic, and that they make very little use of historical archives and documents from the Chinese side to engage in profound analysis of relevant Chinese policies. The result is that the

5 Shen Zhihua and Xia Yafeng, Mao and the Sino-Soviet Partnership, 1945-1959: A New History (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2015).

10 | Page H-Diplo Roundtable XXII-41 history of Sino-American relations becomes a narrative of American policy toward China; Chinese policy is simply reduced to various reactions to American words and actions.6

After reading Mao and the Sino-Soviet Split, it is hard to suppress the following fundamental doubt: if, when dealing with the Soviet system, Chinese leaders were challengers who took the initiative, were proactive, and courageous, how could they merely have been passively reacting to the other side when dealing with the United States? The reasonable conclusion must be that in managing its relations with the United States, China was likewise proactive and acted the role of a challenger. The words and actions of Chinese leaders likewise influenced U.S. policy. The result was thus similar to that in Sino-Soviet relations, where the mutual interaction of the two countries’ policies created a vicious circle. From this perspective, the effort to collect and utilize as much material on Chinese diplomatic history as possible and the resulting achievements embodied in Mao and the Sino-Soviet Split are an extremely important inspiration as well as a caution sign for scholars studying the history of modern Sino-American relations. Readers can no longer be satisfied with histories of Sino-American relations that rely excessively on published American diplomatic archives and second-hand materials. This is very difficult for many scholars to accept.

Returning to the subject of Sino-Soviet relations, in comparing Mao and the Sino-Soviet Split to the works of other scholars, another outstanding contribution is that it sets forth more comprehensively the broad influences that placed China and the Soviet Union on the path to confrontation. The two authors have not limited their narrative to bilateral Sino-Soviet relations. They paint a much fuller picture. Most important is their emphasis on analyzing how the relations of other countries and Communist parties in the Chinese- and Soviet-led camps were influenced by the Sino-Soviet split, and, especially, how they in turn influenced the increasingly antagonistic policies and the resulting consequences of China and the Soviet Union, the two red colossi. In their introduction, the authors explain that one of the objectives of this book is to examine “how… the changes in Sino-Soviet relations affect[ed] and transform[ed] Asia and world politics during the Cold War” (xi).

One of the authors’ prime contentions is that Chinese Communist interactions with East European states revolved around Sino-Soviet relations. For example, Chapter Two sheds light on “Transient warmness in China’s relations with the Five East European Countries,” describing and analyzing how China’s relations with five Central and East European countries —Poland, the German Democratic Republic, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Bulgaria—were negatively influenced by the worsening of Sino-Soviet relations in the period before the Sino-Soviet split. These five countries were all members of the Soviet socialist camp. According to the authors, they “had no direct conflict of interest with China,” and “also depended on trade with China to different degrees,” but following the worsening of party and state relations between China and the Soviet Union, “China’s relations with the five East Europe countries turned tense and cold as well” (53, 56). In addition, Chapter Six addresses “China’s futile efforts to bring about a split in the Soviet Bloc,” and provides a rather detailed narrative of how the Chinese Communists tried to break up the relationships between several Central and East European states in the Soviet camp and the Soviet Communists themselves during the period when the Chinese and Soviet Communists were moving irreversibly toward a split (243-247). The authors’ judgment of the concrete results of this ‘futile effort’ concludes that in reality the Chinese Communist leaders overestimated their actual influence in the Communist camp.

The next, even more interesting topic is the interaction within the international Communist movement between the Chinese Communists and Asian Communist parties to defeat the Soviet Union. Chapter Four focuses on how the Chinese Communists sought to mobilize Asian Communists to take a stand with China and participate in the polemics and struggle against the Soviet Union, as well as on how these Asian Communist parties tried to position themselves more or less between the Chinese and Soviet parties in order to derive the most benefit, and how their strategies similarly influenced the policy choices of the Chinese Communists and the Soviet Communists (131-176). The authors focus upon the two ruling

6. A typical example of this is Tao Wenzhao’s three-volume history of Sino-American relations. (Shanghai: Shanghai remin chubanshe, 2016.)

11 | Page H-Diplo Roundtable XXII-41 communist parties of North Vietnam and North Korea – both Asian socialist countries – and the Japanese Communist Party and the Indonesian Communist Party, two non-ruling parties, and subject them to close scrutiny. According to their analysis, during the period when China and the Soviet Union were splitting apart, China’s relations with these four Communist parties experienced complicated turbulence; in order to win over the Asian Communist parties, China spared no efforts to come out on top in its struggle against the Soviet Union. Moreover, the price was enormous, especially with regard to China’s need to continuously increase aid to North Vietnam, North Korea, and the Indonesian Communist party.

Based upon the authors’ detailed analysis of the policies of the Chinese Communists toward Asian Communist parties and Sino-Soviet relations after the split, how should readers assess the efforts of the Chinese Communists? One can conclude that the Chinese Communists’ attempts to draw the Asian Communist parties to their side in the struggle against the Soviet Union did show some results. For example, at the second Moscow international conference of Communist parties in 1960, the Communist parties of ten countries expressed their support for China’s opposition to so-called ‘revisionism.’ Among them were seven Asian countries, including North Korea, North Vietnam, Japan, Indonesia, Malaysia, Burma, and Thailand. From the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) perspective, this sufficed to prove that the so-called ‘left-wing power’ in the international communist movement was already on the rise. This caused Mao Zedong and the CCP Central Committee to believe that conditions for the Chinese Communist Party “to assume the leading position in the international Communist movement were already in place, that the time was already ripe.”7 Since the Communist parties of China and of other Asian countries constituted the overwhelming majority of the ‘left-wing forces,’ their support of the decision of the Chinese Communist leaders to progress from polemics to an open break with the Soviet Communists played a significant role. Thus, in the confrontation with the Soviet Communists, this can also be considered a Chinese Communist achievement.

But if one views this from a different angle, although the Chinese Communists used every conceivable means at their disposal and provided a huge amount of aid to North Vietnam, Korea, and the Indonesian Communist parties to win them over to their own side in the struggle against the Soviet Union, the results were incommensurate with the efforts. For example, the assistance to North Vietnam dragged China into the middle of a military confrontation with the United States, and ultimately did not stop Vietnam from taking the Soviet side after the unification of the country. China’s assistance to the Communist Party of Indonesia, due to the occurrence of the September 30 Incident and Almost all of members of Indonesian Communist Party and its leaders were killed, , failed entirely and caused China to suffer a disastrous defeat in Southeast Asia (220).

The authors’ assessment of China’s relations with North Korea’s Kim Il-sung during this period offers a similar assessment. By 1964, “North Korea might have been closer to China ideologically, but in practice the DPRK would sooner or later have no choice but to swing back to the Soviet Union.” Soon thereafter, “The visit of Alexei Kosygin, chairman of the Council of Ministers of the USSR, to North Korea in February 1965 is regarded as a major turning point in Soviet-North Korean relations” (154-155). As for Kim Il-sung, his reason for making this change was extremely simple, namely, this way he could get even more aid. From his perspective, the optimal situation was one of “at the same time extracting considerable economic aid from each of them [both the USSR and China]” (174-175). As for China, in order to hold on to Kim Il-sung, it had to pay an even higher price; moreover Sino-Soviet relations were, moreover, quickly headed for a split. This is a classic example of the tail wagging the dog.

This is so not only with regard to Asia. A section of Chapter Five of Mao and the Sino-Soviet Split addresses the topic of Sino-Soviet Competition in the Third World. It summarizes the competition between China and the Soviet Union in several Third World countries. According to the authors, the intense struggle between the two red giants began in the mid- 1960s after “both Beijing and Moscow became the anti-imperialist centers of world revolution” (220), and “seized any opportunity to oppose and spar with the other” (221). But what degree of influence the Sino-Soviet contention for the

7 See in sheng Zhihua edited, Zhongsu Guanxi Shigang (History of China- Soviet Relations), vol.2, (Beijing: Sheke wenxian Press, 2016), 488.

12 | Page H-Diplo Roundtable XXII-41 leading position in the Third World revolutionary and revolutionary nationalist movements actually had is a subject deserving further consideration. Some movements succeeded; others failed, but on inspection it seems that none of these outcomes was the result of Chinese or Soviet leadership.

Regarding Chinese Communist relations with Asian Communist parties, of greater consequence was the fact that after the Sino-Soviet split ultimately led to military conflict between the two countries, Mao Zedong decided to employ a policy of reconciliation with the United States as a means for dealing with the so-called Soviet threat. The problem was how the Chinese Communists could explain this to the Asian Communist parties? Of what conceivable benefit was Sino-American reconciliation to them? After all, almost all of the Asian Communist parties, North Vietnam and North Korea in particular, had stipulated opposition to the United States as their leading task. They had taken the Chinese Communist side in the Sino-Soviet polemics because China had already expressed even more resolute opposition to the United States. One may more or less infer that since the Sino-American reconciliation caused the collapse of the Chinese Communist-Asian Communist parties’ united front against revisionism in the international communist movement, that it in fact is what led to the end of the leading position the CCP had held in the Asian Communist movement. Of course, with regard to China’s subsequent entry upon the path of reform and opening up, it goes without saying that this was tantamount to shedding a historical burden, but that is another story.

In terms of the breakup of the Sino-Soviet alliance, an ongoing controversy concerns what exactly led the self-styled ‘elder and younger brother’ allied socialist great countries to engage in mutual recriminations, and ultimately to the outbreak of war and a situation in which the two nations stood on the precipice of nuclear warfare. The dispute arose in part because the leaders of the two countries had solemnly vowed that Sino-Soviet unity was unbreakable; as Liu Shaoqi put it, the United States and other imperialist countries “would never see the two great Chinese and Soviet parties, the great countries, and the great peoples separate.” That would be “like seeing the sun rising in the west.”8 However, Sino-Soviet relations quickly entered upon a new path and no one could foretell where it would lead to; astounded by this development, people who observed that ‘the sun had risen in the west’ felt enormous curiosity while scholars proffered all kinds of expert explanations.

Prior to the publication of this book, another round of academic discussion occurred that centered on two recently published books: Lorenz Lüthi’s The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World and Sergey Radchenko’s Two Suns in the Heavens: The Sino-Soviet Struggle for Supremacy, 1962-1967.9 Making use of new historical materials, these two books propounded their own views on the reasons for the Sino-Soviet split. What is important for the purposes of this review is that the arguments in Mao and the Sino-Soviet Split differ from those of these two aforementioned books.

Mao and the Sino-Soviet Split obviously places greater emphasis on the evolution of Sino-Soviet relations. In this regard, the authors clearly indicate that in various stages and in innumerable arenas of the struggle, different factors were in play for the two sides of the Sino-Soviet split. Simply put, the authors do not think that there was a single major factor that connected the various phases of the Sino-Soviet split from beginning to end. One can arrive at this conclusion from the contents of the book as a whole as well as from every individual chapter in it. In chapter two, for example, the authors explain how the so- called theoretical divergence changed the Chinese Communist leaders’ understanding of their Soviet counterparts. A rather different matter was the spring 1962 incident in the Ili-Kazakh district of Xinjiang, when a large number of China’s border people fled to the Soviet Union. This had a great impact on the Chinese leaders’ views on border security with the result that they began to consider how to be on guard against Soviet military incursions (56-58). The authors also point out that the

8. Renmin ribao (People’s Daily), December 9, 1960.

9. Lorenz Lüthi, The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2008; Sergey Radchenko, Two Suns in the Heavens: The Sino-Soviet Struggle for Supremacy, 1962-1967 (Washington, D.C. and Stanford: Woodrow Wilson Center and Stanford University Press, 2009).

13 | Page H-Diplo Roundtable XXII-41 intra-party struggle in the CCP during this period and the resulting radical turn in Chinese foreign policy likewise profoundly influenced the attitude and inclinations of Chinese leaders in dealing with Sino-Soviet relations (59-63).

In discussing whether or not there was a ‘a single major cause,’ let us return to the beginning of this review and the important question of whether Mao Zedong was the key factor in the transformation of China and the Soviet Union from allies to enemies. In China, in comparison to other leaders there is an enormous amount of published materials on Mao Zedong, but there are still very few in-depth, multi-faceted studies. Naturally, this can impact our understanding of the fundamental causes of the Sino-Soviet split. Sino-Soviet relations in the period covered by Mao and the Sino-Soviet Split were intrinsically and extremely complicated. The topic involves multiple areas including state-to-state relations, relations between the two Communist parties, and relations within the military alliance. This poses difficulties for the authors’ analysis, in which the terms applied to Chinese and Soviet behavior are not uniform; terms such as ‘two parties,’ ‘two states,’ and so forth abound. What can now be said with some confidence, however, is that Mao Zedong, who stood at the pinnacle of power and whose words carried great weight, lacked both knowledge and experience with regard to how to manage this kind of relationship and had no mental preparation for it. Moreover, even if he had possessed knowledge and experience and undertaken the requisite preparations, he would still not necessarily have been able to resolve the contradictions between the Chinese and the Soviet Communists during this period. Here one may compare the thoughts and experiences many years later of another Chinese leader, namely Deng Xiaoping, with respect to Sino-Soviet relations. Under the leadership of Mao Zedong, Deng, as one of top leaders of CPC, was involved in most stages of the process of transforming the Sino-Soviet relationship from one of alliance to enmity. During the stage of Sino-Soviet polemics, he was one of the core Chinese decision makers, and fully understood all the key events and the complex reasons that were responsible for the shift to Sino-Soviet confrontation. What greatly distinguished him from Mao Zedong was that in the 1980s, when he was the top decision maker, he guided and controlled the process of restoring and normalizing relations between the two countries. His unusually rich accumulation of experience provided him with a more systematic and profound understanding of all the complex issues in Sino-Soviet relations than that of any other Chinese decision maker.

On May 16, 1989, Deng Xiaoping met with the visiting Soviet Communist Party General Secretary-cum-Soviet President Mikhail Gorbachev. Deng Xiaoping told the latter, “The Sino-Soviet ideological polemics of the 1960s were meaningless,” and led to China opposing the Soviet Union; “The essence of the issue was inequality.” This included the fact that from 1840 on, Tsarist Russia and Japan were the two countries that harmed China the most, and Tsarist Russia continuously interfered in Chinese affairs until after the October Revolution. The Soviet Union had also threatened China’s security. He stated that the prerequisites for normalizing relations were equitably resolving the questions left over from history, adhering to the universal norms of state-to-state relations, respecting mutual geopolitical security concerns, and so forth.10 In other words, ideology, the Soviet model, Cold War confrontations, and other elements that had led to the Sino-Soviet alliance and the split were no longer important. Returning to the story of the era covered in Mao and the Sino-Soviet Split, can it really be that all the Chinese Communist leaders, including Deng Xiaoping, thought that the aforementioned elements were really of primary importance?

Deng Xiaoping’s statement to Gorbachev was the product of three years of reflection. The contents of this statement on Sino-Soviet relations, under the title “Closing the Past, Opening the Future,” were included in volume three of Deng Xiaoping’s Selected Works, which was published in 1993.11 It is regrettable that afterwards there were still not a few persons in China who did not “close the past.” Their vision of the ‘future’ of Sino-Soviet relations was just like the past; they retained this misconception until the Soviet Union was dissolved and they even transferred this feeling to post-Soviet Russia. From this perspective, continuously deepening our study of Sino-Soviet relations has inestimable value.

10. Deng Xiaoping, “Jieshu guoqu, kaipi weilai,” [Closing the past, opening the future], Deng Xiaoping wenxuan [Selected works of Deng Xiaoping], (Beijing, Renmin chubanshe, 1993), vol. 3, 292-295.

11. Deng Xiaoping, “Jieshu guoqu, kaipi weilai,” vol. 3, 292-295.

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Review by Deborah Kaple, Princeton University

Mao and the Sino-Soviet Split, 1959-1973 by Danhui Li and Yafeng Xia is an important, interesting and highly detailed account of the last years of the Sino-Soviet Alliance.12 Li and Xia present an in-depth and thoughtful look at the events surrounding the Sino-Soviet split in the later years. This 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.

One important contribution is Li and Xia’s examination of the nuts and bolts of the socialist alliance’s norms and practices. It is incredibly useful to understand how this alliance differed from other alliances. They find that the socialist alliance’s relationships were never stable, the alliance lacked any mechanism for compromise between members, and that unfortunately, it often relied on the personal diplomacy of top leaders. These problems existed, they posit, because there were genuine structural defects in all Socialist Bloc alliance relations.

The first structural defect was the contradiction between internationalist ideals and nationalist aspirations, that is, the big and powerful countries in the Bloc mostly emphasized internationalism, while the smaller, weaker countries supported national interests. The second structural defect was that inter-party relationships were equal to and sometimes confused with state-to-state relationships, so instead of having normal relations between countries regardless of their relative size and strength, the Bloc was set up hierarchically. In 1919 when Lenin founded the Communist International (the Comintern) to promote revolutions around the world, it was largely understood that the Comintern, and hence, Moscow, was in charge of the Socialist Bloc and made all the rules. The member nations, no matter how big or small they were, had to follow the lead of the USSR. In other words, the USSR was the ‘Dad’ and all the member countries in the Bloc were stuck being the pliant ‘children.’ With these norms of subordination in place, the smaller countries felt their national aspirations diminished, for in truth they had to ensure that the USSR was the best it could be, meaning that there could be no real concept of ‘mutual relations.’

The authors correctly point out that within this defective alliance, there also existed a contest for leadership and authority based on ideological orthodoxy. Chairman Mao Zedong knew he could not contest Joseph Stalin while the Soviet leader was alive. However, after the new Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, denounced Stalin at the 1956 Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) Congress, Mao Zedong felt that he could challenge the USSR for leadership of the Bloc. The Chinese maintained that Khrushchev’s lack of proper self-criticism for his role in allowing Stalin’s crimes “significantly damaged Moscow’s prestige and undermined its leadership in the socialist world.” Li and Xia further state that “This put the [Chinese Communist Party] CCP in the ascendant,” meaning that Mao now felt he was more qualified than Khrushchev to lead the Bloc. The authors further write that “…after China had successfully achieved the goal of its First Five-Year Plan and assisted the Soviet Union in handling the crises in both Poland and Hungary, Mao felt that he could and should assume a greater responsibility for the future of all humanity” (280). While it is possible that Mao could have assumed the leadership of the Socialist Bloc at this moment, and it is also possible that he could have done a better job than Khrushchev, to the Soviets in 1956, his attempt to take over the leadership would have been seen as a gross violation of Bloc norms. Given the second structural defect of the socialist alliance, wherein the USSR was ‘elder brother’ in the Bloc and the other members were ‘younger brothers,’ how would ‘elder brother’ respond to one of his ‘younger brothers’ telling him that he should step aside and a ‘younger brother’ would now run the Bloc? Alliance rules were clearly understood, so it is not surprising that the Soviets reacted badly to Mao’s feelings of superiority at such an early stage in China’s Bloc membership.

The fact that Stalin’s rules of governing the Bloc were passed on to the new Soviet leaders explains why Khrushchev did not consult China when he decided to denounce Stalin. In hindsight, the Soviet leaders were naïve to assume that their changes only affected the USSR. However, in the context of internal Soviet politics, it made sense to the new leadership because the

12 This book is the companion volume to Zhihua Shen and Yafeng Xia’s earlier book Mao and the Sino-Soviet Partnership, 1945-1959: A New History (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2015).

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USSR had always set the rules, and Bloc members had to accept them; more importantly, within the USSR at that time, the Soviet people were pressuring the new leadership to answer for the crimes of Stalin. It appears that not even one of those leaders thought for a moment that Stalin’s crimes were a Bloc issue. For them, Stalin was their leader and his crimes had been perpetrated on Soviet people, so they handled it as if it were simply a domestic problem.

Once Stalin died in 1953, the Soviet people understood that the fear and terror they had lived with for three decades had ended. But what to do about Stalin’s victims? In March 1953 the regime issued an amnesty for those prisoners whose terms were fewer than five years and for all those who were held in the Gulag for small crimes.13 The pressure on the Soviet leaders mounted as 1.2 million falsely-arrested Gulag prisoners began to return from their far-flung camps to their former cities and towns. By end of 1955, thousands of political prisoners had returned, only to tell everyone the ugly truth about Stalin’s Gulag.14 These illegally-arrested, wasted, and sick Soviet citizens became an irrefutable, physical manifestation of Stalin’s terror, and the leadership knew that it needed to make a dramatic move in order to stay in power. The leaders were also disturbed by the thousands of letters sent to the CPSU Central Committee and to Khrushchev asking for retribution for Stalin’s crimes.15 At the same time, millions of Soviet citizens still adored Stalin, including thousands of Gulag bosses, executioners, jailers, and interrogators who worked in service of his mission. As the poet Anna Akhmatova famously said at the time: “Now those who were arrested will return and two Russias will look each other in the eye: the one that sent people to the camps and the one that was sent away.”16 There was a genuine sense of danger, an expectation that some kind of reckoning needed to take place.

Stalin’s dictatorship had seemed endless, he had appeared to be infallible, so there was no preparation for his death, and no provision for an orderly transmission of power. The post-Stalin leadership feared their own worn-down, angry people, they feared outsiders, they feared the hatred that had been drilled into them and all citizens by Stalin, and most of all, they feared each other.17 This is why Soviet leaders worked for months behind the scenes and in secret to build the case for denouncing Stalin. They needed to convince their population that the USSR would still be Communist, but that Stalinist terror would cease. They needed to somehow justify following in Stalin’s footsteps in leading the CPSU and assure people that they would remediate Stalin’s crimes. Otherwise, they understood, they would not stay in power.

In February 1956, Khrushchev denounced Stalin at a ‘secret’ CPSU meeting intended only for Soviet delegates. Since Moscow had not warned the Bloc that they were about to unmask the dead leader as the architect of terror, the news of this denunciation of Stalin hit the Bloc members like an ‘ideological bomb.’ Only after the speech did the Soviet leaders think to notify the socialist Bloc of the changes. At this point, the CCP understood that the CPSU often chose “the interests of the Soviet Communist Party ahead of their brotherly parties.”18 Chinese scholars rightfully feared that the swift unraveling of Stalin’s crimes would encourage people to “reconsider whether or not the socialist model was still viable.” They were correct

13 Marc Elie, “Khrushchev’s Gulag: The Soviet Penitentiary System after Stalin’s Death, 1953-1964,” in Denis Kozlov and Eleonory Gilburd, eds, The Thaw: Soviet Society and Culture during the 1950s and 1960s (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 112.

14 William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003), 276.

15 Nikolai Barsukov, “Zapiska Pospelova i doklad Khrushcheva,” in XX s”ezda: Materialy konferentsii k 40-letniiu XX s’ezda KPSS (Moscow: Aprel’-85, 1996).

16 L.K. Chukovskaya, Zapiski ob Anne Akhmatovoi, vol. 2, 1952-1962 (Paris: YMCA Press, 1980), 137.

17 Bertram D. Wolfe, Khrushchev and Stalin’s Ghost (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1957), 12.

18 Zhang Shu Guang and Chen Jian, “The Emerging Disputes between Beijing and Moscow: Ten Newly Available Chinese Documents, 1956-1958,” in CWIHP Bulletin 6-7, 153.

16 | Page H-Diplo Roundtable XXII-41 to believe that “the CPSU’s handling of the Stalin issue created ideological confusion in Soviet society and in the socialist camp.”19

A few years later, Khrushchev admitted to Chinese leader Zhou Enlai his fear of losing power. In his notes to Mao Zedong of January 24, 1957, Zhou explained that he had asked Khrushchev why he refused to make a public self-criticism to the CPSU. Khrushchev told Zhou that if he had tried to change Stalin’s mind about anything, he feared being killed. Zhou again pressed Khrushchev to simply make a public self-criticism, which he said would “enhance the Party’s credibility and prestige.” Khrushchev then told him that they [the Soviets] could not conduct the same kind of self-criticism as the Chinese do, because if they did, “their current leadership would be in trouble.”20

Finally, the authors correctly note that after 1956, the two countries’ “political lines and policies were in direct opposition to each other and proved to be incompatible” (157). It is clear that the two nations were out of sync with one another. Revolutionary fervor and hope were still strong in China, since the CCP takeover had only happened seven years earlier. In contrast, the USSR’s revolution had taken place almost four decades earlier, and in that time, the Soviet people had weathered Stalin’s criminal use of force and terror to get economic results, the lack of freedom of expression, illegal arrests, and purges, and by now, millions of Soviet citizens yearned for a more normal, predictable life. By 1956, China was ready for revolution, agitation and struggle, while the USSR was looking forward to peace and economic development.

19 Zhihua Shen and Yafeng Xia, Mao and the Sino-Soviet Partnership, 143.

20 Zhang and Chen, “The Emerging Disputes between Beijing and Moscow, 153.

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Review by Steven I. Levine, Senior Mansfield Fellow, Maureen and Mike Mansfield Center, University of Montana

A spectre is haunting Cold War historiography – the spectre of Communism. In particular, the spectre of the Sino-Soviet split. All the powers of historians from East to West have entered into a holy alliance to exorcise this spectre. Three leading Chinese historians – Danhui Li, Yafeng Xia, and Zhihua Shen – are prominent among them. Their works are essential reading for everyone interested in following the rise and fall of the Sino-Soviet alliance. The formation of the alliance struck terror into the hearts of leaders in the capitalist West; its collapse foreshadowed the end of Karl Marx’s dream of a world communist utopia. In their earlier volume, Mao and the Sino-Soviet Partnership, 1945-1959: A New History (2015), Shen and Xia undertook a painstaking autopsy of the “good times” in the doomed Sino-Soviet partnership.21 In this sequential volume under review, Li and Xia carefully chronicle the ‘bad times’ that followed as Moscow and Beijing transmogrified from Elder Brother and Younger Brother, bound by filial ties to Marx/Engels/Lenin/Stalin (MELS), the compound Founding Father of communism, into snarling rivals, each committed to destroying the other in pursuit of the ignis fatuus of leadership of the international Communist movement.

Before proceeding to review Mao and the Sino-Soviet Split, I would like to acknowledge a personal debt to the Sino-Soviet conflict. My own career trajectory, like not a few scholars of my generation, was facilitated by the opportunity the breakup of the Sino-Soviet alliance afforded to publish articles in scholarly journals, conference volumes, and elsewhere on the political soap opera that rived the Communist family. The principal characters in the cast of this enthralling, multi-season drama – including leading lights such as leaders Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Nikita Khrushchev, Zhou Enlai, Leonid Brezhnev, Deng Xiaoping – and a host of dimmer luminaries – Marxist-Leninist ‘theoreticians,’ propagandists, polemicists, etc. – provided endless material for the analyses, speculations, forecasts, and prognostications of academic, think tank, and government analysts. The Sino-Soviet rivalry had something of the transfixing power of classic sports rivalries like that in baseball between the New York Yankees and the Boston Red Sox or in world football between Barcelona and Real Madrid.

Half a century ago, when the Sino-Soviet ideological dispute was ripening toward an open rupture between Moscow and Beijing, practitioners of the occult arts of Kremlinology and Pekingology had limited materials on which to base their analyses and prognostications. They applied their acquired skills to parse the speeches, articles, manifestos, etc. of Communist party leaders and their claqueurs and scribblers to discern what was going on behind the scenes. Li and Xia, like other contemporary historians of the Sino-Soviet conflict, enjoy access to many more sources of information, although Chinese central party and state archives still remain largely closed. What strikes me in retrospect is that the pioneer analysts of the Sino-Soviet conflict, despite the handicaps under which they were working, got the big picture mostly right. From the much larger amount of information available to them, Li and Xia add considerable detail to what was earlier known about the Sino-Soviet conflict and its reverberations throughout the international communist movement. That is perhaps the most valuable contribution their book makes. But they do not significantly alter the picture we have already had for decades nor, of course, should they unless the new information disconfirmed what was previously thought. In a sense, the book is like cataract surgery which this reviewer underwent recently. It enables one to see things more clearly and in greater detail, but the objects one is looking at are still the same. This is true, for example, of Li and Xia’s detailed analysis in Chapter Four of the East Asian Communist Parties and the Sino-Soviet split. The twists and turns in Hanoi’s and Pyongyang’s stance vis- a-vis Moscow and Beijing have long been well-known to students of the Sino-Soviet conflict as have Moscow’s and Beijing’s attempts to nudge or lure the Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, and Indonesian communist parties closer to their own positions.

For the most part the authors are even-handed in their treatment of the contending Chinese and Soviet sides, noting instances of rigidity and misjudgment on both sides that impaired their ability to achieve their goals. Their treatment of the

21 Zhihua Shen and Yafeng Xia, Mao and the Sino-Soviet Partnership, 1945-1959: A New History, Harvard Cold War Studies Book Series (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2015).

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Sino-Soviet military conflict in March 1969, however, which quotes Chinese but not Soviet sources, implicitly accepts the Chinese version that China was responding to Soviet provocations. Yet their own rather sketchy account shows that Chairman Mao wanted to use the military clashes to prove his thesis about the nature of Soviet social imperialism, and that China spurned Soviet attempts to cool the atmosphere.

The fundamental problem I discern in the book, however, is not in its details, but in the weakness of its interpretations, its failure to interrogate the political, ideological, and linguistic assumptions embedded in the framework within which the Sino-Soviet conflict took place, its waffling over the relationship between ideology and power, and the timidity of its judgments about leading persons involved in the conflict, in particular Mao Zedong. I am well aware of the political constraints upon scholars in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), but if history is to be more than a play-by-play account of an epochal contest, historians must probe beneath the surface of events to understand the interests involved, the stakes, and the motives and thinking of the leaders guiding the action. From that perspective, I find this book disappointing except insofar as it provides an opportunity for critical readers to ponder the issues for themselves.

Let us first consider the issue of ideology. In the predecessor volume, Shen and Xia tended to dismiss ideology as little more than a cover for the clash of national interests they deemed fundamental to the origins of the Sino-Soviet dispute. Here Li and Xia take ideology more seriously, at least with respect to its place in party-to-party relations. They suggest that “... had the [Chinese Communist Party] CCP proved flexible rather than unyielding in the ideological struggle…had Sino-Soviet party relations stabilized, the Soviet Union and China might have continued to be partners rather than antagonists” (2). Subsequently, however, they ratchet down the importance of ideology by saying “The competition over interpretation of Marxism-Leninism actually was a struggle for the leadership in the international communist movement. Only when a party had authority to interpret Marxism-Leninism could it be the legitimate leader of the movement” (45-46). This formulation suggests that power, rather than concern over the principles, ideas, and goals embodied in what constituted ‘authentic Marxism-Leninism,’ was the driving force in the widening split. Later they write that “...winning the support of the East Asian Communist parties was critical to determine who would be considered the true Marxists – Mao’s CCP or Khrushchev’s [Communist Party of the Soviet Union] CPSU?” (132). This way of posing the question is, I think, nonsensical. It is impossible to determine who “the true Marxists” were because there is no such identifiable entity. Would we want to certify which among the many political tendencies that claimed to be “the true Marxists” deserve that imprimatur? It is even clearer in retrospect than it was at the time that both Mao and Khrushchev became embroiled in a rancorous dispute defending competing versions of a pretentious and noxious ideology that ill-served both their countries. The mediocrities who posed as learned theorists of so-called scientific socalism played fast and loose with the writings of the Founding Fathers of their creed in order to score political points against their opponents. Hypocrisy and opportunism rather than ideological consistency and fidelity were the hallmarks of both sides in the Sino-Soviet ideological dispute. Incidentally, it is amusing and instructive that Mao, whose followers trumpeted his supposed creative contributions to Marxism-Leninism, cleaved so closely to the views of long dead foreign communists like Lenin while dismissing Khrushchev’s own ‘creative contributions’ as ‘revisionist.’ The message conveyed is, ‘I can revise at will, but you cannot.’

In the Marxist-Leninist tradition, ideology is supposed to be a guide to action. Marx said that the task of philosophy was to change the world, not merely interpret it. But ideology is a poor and unreliable guide and of doubtful validity if it leads its followers in opposite directions. If Newton’s theory of gravity claimed to explain why apples fall up as well as fall down, it would have been useless as a gateway to the laws of physics. Whatever Marxism’s value in analyzing capitalism, in the hands of the feuding Soviet and Chinese ideologists it became just a form of mumbo-jumboism with respect to guiding the domestic and foreign policies of the Communist states and charting the strategy and tactics of the international communist movement.

The authors utilize the concepts of ‘revisionism’ and ‘dogmatism’ that played such an important role in the ideological jousting of the Soviets and their supporters and the Chinese and theirs as if these concepts had a discernible meaning outside the contexts in which they were deployed. Nor do they interrogate the concepts of ‘world revolution,’ ‘proletarian dictatorship,’ or ‘proletarian internationalism’ that were integral to the vocabulary of Marxism-Leninism and wielded as weapons in the Sino-Soviet polemics. This is unfortunate, I think, because all these terms were either arbitrary constructs or

19 | Page H-Diplo Roundtable XXII-41 merely phantasms without any real substance. Moscow and Beijing quarreled over which country should be the leader of the world revolution. But there never was a world revolution except in the fevered imaginations of Communists in various countries. Nor was there ever a proletarian dictatorship, only the dictatorships of Communist parties. And proletarian internationalism was another chimera. There was only a Soviet-led international Communist movement whose leadership Mao sought unsuccessfully to assume, an effort the Soviets successfully resisted for a while. The goal of maintaining leadership of the international Communist movement that Moscow pursued, or of wresting leadership from the Soviets to which Mao aspired, appears in retrospect as an ignis fatuus. The very competition between the two powers resulted in the destruction of the movement they aspired to lead. Given the vulgar polemics and crude political maneuvers of both side, it was like trying to capture a soap bubble with a pair of steel tongs. Perhaps the paradigm of the Thucydides trap is apposite here. The CCP was the ‘rising power’ challenging the hegemonic CPSU and the result was a war of words that eventually led to the collapse of world Communism. There was no winner. In any case, if one fails to cut through the Marxist-Leninist mumbo-jumbo to the political realities of power in the Communist world, no matter how much one knows, one understands nothing.

To extend our analysis of language, it is worth pointing out, as the authors refrain from doing, that at least from the time of Lenin – polemicist par excellence – vituperation, invective, nastiness, mudslinging, and ad hominem attacks were the norm in Communist discourse. This was true whether in intra-party disputes or in the international Communist meetings that were convened during the period of the Sino-Soviet conflict, ostensibly to resolve ideological and other points of dispute. Like their master, Lenin’s epigones bludgeoned their opponents with words. (Stalin, a less gifted polemicist, had his enemies killed. He sub-contracted verbal attacks to vicious cretins such as Andrei Vyshinsky. Mao employed the services of Kang Sheng in both capacities.) The debased discourse of international Communism brings to mind the snarling of mangy curs in a dog fight rather than reasoned arguments over ideology and policy among members of a political movement ostensibly sharing the same long-term goals. As relations between the CPSU and the CCP deteriorated, the poisonous language of intra-party discourse became the language of inter-party discourse, and soon enough of inter-state discourse in an international communist world that lacked conflict resolution mechanisms, in which compromise was a dirty word and each side asserted its own truth as universal. In other words, the rot started within and spread outward to the farthest branches of the continuously fragmenting, feuding, and quarreling parties that comprised world Communism.

And now we come to Mao Zedong. Li and Xia, who have very little to say about any of the other Chinese dramatis personae involved in the Sino-Soviet split, assert that “Mao was more concerned about his personal power and standing than ideology” (63). They argue that some of Mao’s international policy initiatives ended in failure and that greater flexibility on Beijing’s part might have enhanced China’s position in the politics of the strategic triangle that the Sino-Soviet conflict engendered. This is far from an adequate assessment of the damage Mao wreaked on the Sino-Soviet alliance and the international Communist movement. Mao’s self-conceit, megalomania, insatiable striving for personal power, and mixture of contempt for and fear of his real and imagined adversaries, made him, more than anyone else, responsible for the emergence and efflorescence of the Sino-Soviet conflict. He deserves major credit for the collapse of the Sino-Soviet alliance, the transformation of the USSR from ally to enemy poised on the brink of nuclear war, for splintering the international Communist movement, and for alienating most of the countries along China’s periphery. His achievements were indeed extraordinary and unparalleled.

Mao was known in China as the Great Helmsman (weida de duoshou). In truth, he was sooner the Great Bloviator or Great Windbag (weida de hua xiazi) issuing Delphic dicta on contemporary world affairs and future developments that both his countrymen and too many foreigners mistook for wisdom. (Khrushchev, too, albeit in a lesser register, was another murderous windbag.) Among the better known of Mao’s dicta was his portentous pronunciamento that the East Wind was prevailing over the West Wind. While tens of millions of Chinese were starving to death in the Great Leap Famine, he shipped 230,000 tons of grain to North Korea to lure Kim Il-sung to China’s side in the Sino-Soviet dispute. He basked in the adulation of the leaders of minuscule ultra-leftist pro-Maoist Communist parties while alienating all but the Albanian and Romanian Communist parties. He egged the Communist party of Indonesia (PKI) on to the disaster that befell it on September 30, 1965 by insisting that the Chinese Communist model of revolution was the universal path to victory. Both Moscow and Washington displayed a similar hubris in thinking that the Soviet model of state socialism and the American

20 | Page H-Diplo Roundtable XXII-41 model of democratic monopoly capitalism respectively were the beacons showing the way to stragglers along the path to modernity.

Li and Xia correctly assert that “from an ideological perspective, Mao was more hostile to revisionism than to imperialism. In his view, the danger of revisionist subversion was much graver than that of capitalist peaceful transformation” (99). Why? They do not provide a satisfactory answer to this important question, but the obvious answer returns us to the nexus between ideology and power. One must first ask the question, ‘To what or to whom was revisionism a graver danger?’ The answer is to Mao personally, that is, to his position atop the hierarchy of power in the party dictatorship misnamed the People’s Republic of China. By 1958, the vicious land reform, san fan and wu fan campaigns and the abolition of private commerce and industry in the early years of Communist rule had killed or neutralized the landlords and capitalists of pre- 1949 China. There was no chance for a capitalist restoration. Chiang Kaishek’s exiled government on Taiwan was not a serious threat to CCP control of mainland China, and despite the Eisenhower administration’s rhetoric of ‘unleashing’ Chiang, Washington was not looking for another war with China, not after the experience of Korea. But as the Sino-Soviet dispute erupted and developed, within the CCP itself there were other Communist leaders, including Mao’s current supporters who, if the opportunity arose, might challenge and even depose Mao in the name of Marxism-Leninism, particularly as he veered ever further from the Soviet-style state socialist policies that had guided the PRC in its early years. Mao’s opposition to ‘revisionism’ was not rooted in ideological aversion, but in the desire to protect, preserve, and augment his own personal power. Ideology and power were fused in the form of his own self-interest. When Mao warned that China might ‘change color’ (bian se), his fear was not a change from red to white, but to a different shade of red than he himself embodied. Mao’s paranoia was abundantly demonstrated, inter alia, in his attacks against Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping whom he smeared as the top capitalist roaders. It was not “ironic” (102) as Li and Xia contend, but only logical, that Mao targeted his closest associates and longtime supporters. They alone were in a position to cobble together a cabal of other leaders to oust Mao from power. This, of course, is what had happened to Khrushchev in October 1964, a lesson fresh in the mind of the Chairman. And if Khrushchev could rightly be criticized by his associates for his ‘hare-brained schemes,’ how much more serious would be the charges that Mao’s closest comrades-in-arms might level against the Great Bloviator? Mao wielded the club of anti-revisionism to bludgeon those leaders in the party who potentially, not in actuality, posed a threat to his dominance in the party and the country. Mao’s own disregard for the norms of Marxism-Leninism, his own flight into the realm of revisionism, was amply demonstrated during the Cultural Revolution when he attacked the foundation of Leninism – the vanguard party – and encouraged his sycophants, including the ever supple Zhou Enlai, to exalt his personal dictatorship.

With respect to Mao’s policies vis-à-vis the CPSU and the Soviet Union, the vague charge of ‘picking quarrels and provoking trouble,’ deployed promiscuously in contemporary China to imprison anyone who peacefully challenges Emperor Xi Jinping, perfectly encapsulates the Chairman’s modus operandi.

At the parallel peaks of the Cultural Revolution and the Sino-Soviet conflict, anti-Soviet rhetoric and outbursts of xenophobic violence punctuated the political scene in China. The authors do not note that the hysterical anti-Sovietism of the Cultural Revolution replicated the nativism, xenophobia, and violent outbursts of earlier anti-foreign movements in modern Chinese history from the anti-missionary movements of the late nineteenth century, culminating in the Boxer Rebellion, through the anti-Christian movements of the 1920s, the anti-American movements of the 1950s, and the anti- Japanese movements of more recent decades. Chinese society has long provided fertile ground for the growth of mass, anti- foreign hysteria that can be seeded and nurtured by Chinese political leaders for their personal and partisan purposes. Xi Jinping’s rejection of universal values and exaltation of Chinese exceptionalism is another, milder, manifestation of this mindset.

Finally, an observation linking the past to the present. The Maoist attempt to seize the leadership of the international Communist movement in the 1960s, not only failed, but accelerated the collapse of international Communism. Like so much of Mao’s domestic and international project, it was a case of overreaching, born of hubris, overconfidence, miscalculation, delusion, and fantasy. By overplaying his hand in the realm of foreign relations, Mao placed his country in serious jeopardy. Now, some sixty years later, another equally ambitious Chinese leader – Xi Jinping – is offering his © 2021 The Authors | CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 US

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Chinese model of a repressive Leninist system with a hybrid economy as a superior alternative to that of liberal democracy. He dismisses liberal democracy as an alien Western system even though it has taken root throughout Asia, including Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, India, Malaya and, ominously for his argument, in Taiwan, whose flourishing democracy gives the lie to the false proposition that liberal democracy and Chinese culture are incompatible. Xi Jinping, leading a country that, unlike Mao’s China, is now a world power, may, like Mao, be overestimating the assets he commands, the attractiveness of the model he has on offer, and how far he can go to attract and or compel others to bend to his will.

Danhui Li and Yafeng Xia 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.

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Review by David Wolff, Slavic-Eurasian Research Center, Hokkaido University

This really is a new history. It, and the previously released companion volume, Shen Zhihua and Xia Yafeng’s 2015 book on Mao and the Sino-Soviet Partnership, 1945-1959: A New History,22 cover 28 years in 700-some pages of non-stop revelations charting the rise and fall of the most important Leninist alliance ever. Its ratification made a world Communist future imaginable, either utopia or dystopia, depending on one’s politics. Its demise, conclude Li and Xia, “sapped Soviet resources and was an important contributing factor to the ultimate disintegration of the Soviet Union” (286). For the first time, Chinese scholars have had the means to deliver a full rewrite of the Sino-Soviet relationship during the years in which it fatally wounded world socialism. Of course, these are two separate volumes and the different authorial preferences shine through the prose, but the source base is largely similar, even if sometimes read through different lenses. East China Normal University must be congratulated on two of its professors producing a definitive research product based on the university’s prestigious Cold War Center. Given the present general direction of research openness in the People’s Republic of China (PRC), this version will remain authoritative for years to come. As such, it deserves our full attention.

But this book is not only a cause for congratulation to the authors. It shows China in a very positive light. It proves the importance of gaige kaifang in allowing Chinese scholars to reestablish the Chinese narrative of these events from the not so recent past. Before these volumes, the discussion of Sino-Soviet relations was dominated by scholars with names like Odd Arne Westad, Sergey Radchenko, Lorenz Lüthi and Jeremy Friedman, all of whom are much cited in Mao and the Sino- Soviet Split. But now they are joined in Anglophonic international research on Sino-Soviet ties by Chen Jian, Shen, Li and Xia. And the Chinese documentation has now almost ‘caught up’ with the declassification process in formerly Soviet archives. Just as important, a Chinese-materials driven narrative is also a China-driven narrative. If a historical narrative is a road (among many) through the past, then Li, Shen, and Xia have now given the steering wheel back to the PRC. And they have made the story relevant for a next generation by showing the tight linkage between anti-Soviet measures and the Cultural Revolution (235). Those who experienced the joys of Sino-Soviet fraternal friendship -- vodka and ‘Katyusha’ and a shared noble cause -- are now passing from the scene, but those for whom the Cultural Revolution was the turning point of a lifetime number in the hundreds of millions and are still politically active in the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) gerontocracy.

And the linkage is Chairman Mao Zedong, with his shifting fears and suspicions spawning new foreign policy concepts and new enemy images, both for foreign and domestic consumption. It is no surprise that with Mao in the titles of both volumes of The New History volumes, his personality has causal power. The authors do not overplay this card, driving world history into psychohistorical monocausality, but instead use a wide range of documents representing different perspectives on the Sino-Soviet relationship. This may be what the authors mean in their somewhat nebulous endorsement of Lüthi and Radchenko’s “multi-causal interpretations” (x). Taken more narrowly, both ideology and Realpolitik are present in this book, both flowing freely from Mao’s original vision of power and politics.

Thanks to this book two crucial moments in the destruction of the alliance, issues where the Chinese have long avoided accepting their own initiative, have now been placed clearly on Mao’s doorstep. The first is the single-handed “torpedoing” (108-9) of the Sino-Soviet border negotiations, in July 1964, because the Soviet Union refused to recognize the “principled” issue that the present border had been arrived at through “unequal treaties” forced on China by Russia during the nineteenth century (96). The Soviet side clearly recognized that any short-term gains they might make in exchange for agreeing to this historical ‘interpretation’ would come back to haunt them in the form of future Chinese claims. But Mao’s trap was too transparent and Soviet party leader Nikita Khrushchev, who was monitoring the negotiations closely, refused to

22 Zhihua Shen and Yafeng Xia, Mao and the Sino-Soviet Partnership, 1945-1959: A New History (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2015).

23 | Page H-Diplo Roundtable XXII-41 go in. And Mao’s statement to Japanese comrades on July 10 that the Soviet Union had “too much land” could only be interpreted as a threat to make common cause with the Japanese who also had territorial complaints against Moscow (108).

After a half year of hard work, the Soviet negotiating team went home empty-handed, leaving bad feelings that would haunt the border in the form of increased friction at ever more points, especially those areas in the Eastern sector that had been agreed upon during the 1964 negotiations as subject to transfer to the other side. Such was Damanskii/Zhenbao Island in the middle of the Ussuri River. It had been in Soviet hands since 1947, but was on the list of 400 riverine islands that the Soviets were prepared to return to China before Mao torpedoed the border negotiations. (107) Clearly, both sides had agreed that Zhenbao should be Chinese, so just as clearly it was an injustice to see Soviet troops regularly patrolling it. But the decision of when, where and how to put a stop to the literally thousands of border incidents with a “counteroffensive” was taken “under the strict control of the CCP [Central Committee] CC and the Central Military Commission” (249). Even as the “incident” escalated and the Soviets brought in tanks and multiple rocket launchers, Mao seemed nonchalant: “Let him in. And we then can mobilize the people. Let the enemy have an upper hand and occupy the Mudan River. Foreigners will know about it” (252).

And indeed Li and Xia provide ample evidence that the Zhenbao conflict in March 1969 led directly to better Sino- American relations, although it is a little unclear to what extent Mao planned it that way. This ambiguity is clear on page 252 where the four retired Chinese marshals are called to “restart joint study” “after the Ninth Party Congress (April),” but the book makes it clear that they actually had been called together and put to work analyzing the international political- military situation in anticipation of new realities since February, as the Zhenbao attack on the Russians was being prepared (268-69 fn.98). In reality, the line between policy decisions and improvisations can also be blurry. The authors also point out the ongoing disagreements, such as the number of casualties. Did the Soviets really not hit anything with those space- saturation multiple rocket launchers aimed at the location of the Chinese reserve troops? (250, 268fn.88). Recent Russian accounts have suggested that hundreds of Chinese died near the Ussuri River, but not on Damanskii.23

But the bottom line argue Li and Xia is that until 1963, despite all the disagreements and even the withdrawal of the Soviet advisors in July 1960, neither side wished to contemplate a definitive break. Only in 1964 and then 1969 as Mao took the initiatives described above would the Sino-Soviet split become permanent and definitive. Mao also negated opportunities for change in a positive direction, such as Khrushchev’s ouster. When both North Korea and North Vietnam cashed in on the Brezhnev-Kosygin peace offensive, China demonstratively did not.

This brings us to Chapter 4, the most exciting one in my opinion. Here Li and Xia analyze how the split affected relations with four Asian Communist parties, two of which were ruling parties in Vietnam and North Korea and two of which were out-of-power in Japan and Indonesia. Excellent coverage from the Chinese Foreign Ministry declassified files and chronological organization based on the Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping and Peng Zhen nianpu (day-by-day biographies assiduously prepared by CCP party-appointed committees using the Party Archives that mere scholars cannot even aspire to enter) make these valuable both for bilateral relations, but also for comparisons with the other cases. For the Japanese and Indonesian cases the Mao records of conversations with the top leaders, Miyamoto and Aidit, respectively, are even more authoritative. We, the readers, can only wish that Li and Xia had cited or quoted more extensively from these memcons to give us fuller context to understand these key relationships. This would add weight and evidence to such big claims, such as that “by 1965 the [Communist Party of Indonesia] PKI, with CCP support, was preparing to use violence to seize political

23 Dmitrii Riabushkin, “New Documents on the Sino-Soviet Ussuri Border Clashes of 1969” Eurasian Border Review 3S (Summer 2012), 163-164. Based on interviews with participants of both the battle and the debriefing, Riabushkin writes: “At 1700, as the light was fading, the Soviet artillery and, in particular, the first combat use of the rocket artillery ‘GRAD’ (‘Hail’), delivered a deafening and devastating blow to the Chinese side of the river ending the engagement of March 15…Officially, the Chinese only recognize that twelve men perished on 15 March 1969. Their names are marked on graves in Baoqing, just like those who died on March 2. But in 1970, a Chinese deserter crossed the Ussuri River and during debriefing testified that the Chinese who died on March 15 were secretly buried in three large mounds, each containing ‘several hundred bodies.’” http://src- h.slav.hokudai.ac.jp/publictn/eurasia_border_review/Vol3SI/ryabushkin.pdf

24 | Page H-Diplo Roundtable XXII-41 power” (174). “Support” sounds substantial, like the arms shipments that the Indonesian Army later claimed were sent to the PKI and Sukarno for a “Fifth Force” militia of workers and peasants. In fact, the evidence presented here seems more like ‘encouragement.’ In fact this is the word used to describe Mao’s views (229, fn.114).24

With regard to the Vietnamese case there are also evidentiary issues. Why are the famous 77 Conversations between Chinese and Foreign Leaders on the Wars in Indochina not made use of?25 The first thirteen conversations are definitely related to the period covered in Chapter 4. Given the shrouded provenance of the 77 Conversations, it would have been valuable to compare its contents with the materials from the Chinese Foreign Ministry and Mao memcon collection. It might also have been useful to contrast explicitly Politburo member Anastas Mikoyan’s visit to Indonesia in June-July 1964 with that of Zhou Enlai in April of that year. And why did the Russians not mount a charm and aid offensive toward the PKI after Khrushchev’s fall, as they did in the Vietnam and Korean cases? Why did not Soviet Premier Aleksei Kosygin follow in Mikoyan’s footsteps?

Finally, there is the issue of the linkages between the two books. There are many issues that flow from one period into the other, but have not been treated with necessary historical continuity, perhaps due to the break in authorial continuity. For example, the all-important posthumous evaluation of Soviet leader Joseph Stalin, which continues to be an important touchstone in contemporary politics, seems to be more central to Shen and Xia’s book, in which Stalin is a living actor, but nonetheless looms large in Li and Xia’s book as well. For example, at the time of the 22nd Congress of the CPSU, the Chinese and Indonesian delegations paid homage to Stalin’s mummy lying next to Lenin in the Red Square mausoleum. Zhou placed a wreath at the great dictator’s feet that bore the words: “To J.V. Stalin, a great Marxist-Leninist.” (49, 165) It is hard to resist the conclusion that this act of Chinese deviance/defiance and Zhou’s early departure for China on October 23 had something to do with the renewed attacks on Stalin from October 27, but only on the final day of delegate speeches, October 30, did the Leningrad delegation raise the issue of removing Stalin from Lenin’s tomb. The idea was quickly seconded by the Moscow and Georgian party organizations. Only then did “personal pensioner” Dora Abramovna Lazurkina, who had formerly been close to Lenin’s widow, Nadezhda Krupskaya, rise and add personal testimony to political claims. Her having served almost twenty years in jail and the GULAG gave her words weight as she channeled Lenin’s wishes from the other side of the grave:

My heart is always full of Lenin. Comrades, I could survive the most difficult moments only because I carried Lenin in my heart, and always consulted him on what to do. Yesterday I consulted him. He was standing there before me as if he were alive, and he said: “It is unpleasant to be next to Stalin, who did so much harm to the party.”26

The following speaker voiced Ukraine’s approval and presented the resolution, immediately and unanimously approved. On October 31 the conference closed and within hours Stalin’s remains had been removed from Lenin’s presence and left to the worms. His name was removed from the mausoleum’s lintel.

24 Even Zhou Taomo, who made similar use of Chinese Foreign Ministry and other Chinese materials to document PRC agreements with Indonesian visitors to send small arms, equip and train the Indonesian air force and to help build an Indonesian nuclear weapon, concludes that “The Chinese influence on the PKI should not be overestimated.” Zhou Taomo, “Ambivalent Alliance: Chinese Policy towards Indonesia, 1960-1965,” Cold War International History Project Working Paper Series 67 (2013), 17, https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/CWIHP_Working_Paper_67_Chinese_Policy_towards_Indonesia_1960-1965.pdf.

25 Odd Arne Westad, Chen Jian, Stein Tønnesson, Nguyen Vu Tung and James G. Hershberg, eds., “77 Conversations Between Chinese and Foreign Leaders on the Wars in Indochina, 1964-77,” Cold War International History Project Working Paper Series 22 (1998): 66-87, https://www.wilsoncenter.org/sites/default/files/ACFB39.pdf.

26 XXII S’ezd KPSS: Stenograficheskii otchet. 17-31 Oktiabria 1961 goda. Chast’ 3. (Moscow: GIPL, 1962), 114-123. English translation from Robert Payne, The Rise and Fall of Stalin (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1965), 712-713.

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The behaviors of the PKI and Japanese Communist Party (JCP) later in the Sino-Soviet split also echo their handling by Stalin a decade earlier. In short, it would be an additional and important contribution if the three authors of these two books would provide an account or accounts of how they see the continuities and discontinuities between the volumes. But this is just scholarly greed on my part to receive more new knowledge from authors who have already synthesized decades of document and collected them in a “New History” that will set the standard on this topic for decades to come. The press and its editors have also done an excellent job producing an almost error-free text.

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Response by Danhui Li, East China Normal University and Yafeng Xia, Long Island University

We want to thank Thomas Maddux and Diane Labrosse for organizing and editing the roundtable reviews, Sergey Radchenko for writing the introduction, and Jeremy Friedman, Austin Jersild, Deborah Kaple, Steven I. Levine, Jun Niu, and David Wolff for their very thoughtful responses to our book. We are honored to have the scholars involved in this roundtable engage so thoughtfully and generously with our book. In the following pages, we elaborate on four larger questions regarding the Sino-Soviet split, as raised by our distinguished reviewers.

The Role of Ideology in the Sino-Soviet Split

Jeremy Friedman believes that we are inconsistent in presenting the role of ideology. Steven I. Levine voices a similar sentiment, criticizing the book for “waffling over the relationship between ideology and power, and the timidity of its judgments about leading persons involved in the conflict, in particular Chairman Mao Zedong.” With the declassification of archival sources from various countries since the end of the Cold War, scholars have conducted extensive and in-depth research into the historical process of Sino-Soviet relations. Such studies include the reappraisal of the impact of foreign policies on Sino-Soviet relations,27 bilateral economic relations,28 border and frontier/nationality issues,29 the interaction between domestic and foreign policies,30 the personalities of leaders such as China’s Mao Zedong and the Soviet Union’s Nikita Khrushchev and their impact on Sino-Soviet relations,31 among others. We are now much closer to the historical truth about Sino-Soviet relations. In the process, scholars have proposed various insightful views on the Sino-Soviet rupture. On the determining factor for the Sino-Soviet split, there are two different schools of thought. The first, ‘ideological discord,’32 argues that the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) disagreed on de-Stalinization, the world revolutionary road, an economic development model, and interpretation of fundamental theories on Marxism-Leninism. These are understood to be the primary reasons for the Sino-Soviet split. The

27 Mikhail Iur'evich Prozumenshchikov, “The Sino-Indian Conflict, the Cuban Missile Crisis, and the Sino-Soviet Split, October 1962,” CWIHP Bulletin 8-9 (Winter 1996/1997): 251-257; Mercy Kuo, Contending with Contradictions:China’s Policy toward Soviet Eastern Europe and the Origins of the Sino-Soviet Split, 1953-1960 (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2001).

28 Shu Guang Zhang, Economic Cold War, America’s Embargo against China and the Sino-Soviet Alliance, 1949-1963 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001); William C. Kirby, “China’s Internationalization in the Early People’s Republic: Dreams of a Socialist World Economy,” The China Quarterly 188 (December 2006): 870-890.

29 Vladimir Stepanovich Miasnikov and Evgenii Dmitrievich Stepanov, Granitsy Kitaia: Istoriia formirovaniia (A History of the Formation of China’s Border) (Moscow: PIM, 2001)

30 Yang Kuisong, “Toward Split – How the CCP CC Coped with the Crises in Sino-Soviet Relations,” Dangdai Zhongguoshi yanjiu [Contemporary China History Studies], no. 3 (1998), 87-99; Chen Jian, Mao’s China and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001).

31 William Taubman, “Khrushchev vs Mao: A Preliminary Sketch of the Role of Personality in the Sino-Soviet Split,” CWIHP Bulletin 8-9 (Winter 1996/1997): 243-248; William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003).

32 Geoffrey F. Hudson, Richard Lowenthal and Roderick MacFarquhar, The Sino-Soviet Dispute (New York: Praeger, 1961); John Gittings, Survey of the Sino-Soviet Dispute (London: Royal Institute of International Affairs, 1968).

27 | Page H-Diplo Roundtable XXII-41 second interpretation points to Sino-Soviet ‘conflicts over national interests,’33 i.e., historical disputes over territories, which were the real cause for the rupture of the Sino-Soviet alliance. These explanations have not been able to break away from the framework of binary analysis: ‘ideological discord/conflicts in national interests’.

Mao and the Sino-Soviet Split concurs with the arguments in Mao and the Sino-Soviet Alliance, 1945-1959: A New History34 that both ‘ideological discord’ and ‘conflicts in national interests’ are insufficient to explain the true and underlying causes of the rupture of the Sino-Soviet alliance. We argue that Sino-Soviet clashes over national interests first emerged in the early 1960s and deepened by the late 1960s. Thus, conflicts over national interests were the outcome, not the causes of the Sino- Soviet rupture. Sino-Soviet ideological polemics were only an appearance which masked the true causes of the dispute. After Khrushchev’s fall in October 1964, the new Soviet leaders regressed to the Stalin era in terms of both ideology and political line. In other words, the CPSU reached a consensus with the CCP in ideology. Unfortunately, the Sino-Soviet relationship was not able to achieve a rapprochement based on shared ideology. On the contrary, it raced to the split. This demonstrates that ‘ideological discord’ is not the root cause of the collapse of the Sino-Soviet alliance.

From the perspective of Marxism-Leninism and throughout the history of the international Communist movement, the political criterion by which world Communist parties in handling party-to-party relations and state-to-state relations was proletarian internationalism. From the perspective of Soviet leaders Vladimir Lenin and Joseph Stalin, the strategy and tactics of world Communist parties were to launch the world proletarian revolution. The embodiment of the interests of world Communist parties was to submit to the interests of the Soviet Union. At the same time, the Soviet Union should support and aid the revolutionary struggles of world Communist parties. This was the political criterion of the Comintern (Third International). After the dissolution of the Comintern in 1943 and with the formation of the Information Bureau of Communist and Worker’s Parties (Cominform), Stalin demanded that all countries in the socialist bloc abide by this criterion in handling state-to-state relations. Since the CCP declared its ‘leaning-to-one-side’ policy on the eve of seizing national power, the evolution of Sino-Soviet relations could not cast off the logic of proletarian internationalism.

Our book explores the evolution of the process of the CCP-CPSU relationship and Sino-Soviet state-to-state relations from the political criterion socialist countries abided by in handling party-to-party relations and state-to-state relations. We propose the concept of ‘structural imbalance,’ which was comprised of two aspects. First, after the 1956 Polish-Hungarian Crises, the CCP aspired to be treated as equal with the CPSU and was competing for leadership with the CPSU in the socialist bloc. Competing for the discourse power in the Socialist bloc became the essential means in resolving the differences in political lines and policies between the two parties. The ultimate aim was to seize leadership in the international Communist movement. This became the root cause of the failure of the two parties to resolve their differences and internally achieve a compromise. Second, since socialist state-to-state relations were established on the basis of proletarian internationalism, it became an inevitable phenomenon that Communist party-to-party relations papered over and even replaced state-to-state relations after Communist parties came to power. The structure and political norms of this type of party-to-party relations were utterly different from modern state-to-state relations. Its structural defect manifested in its ideological uniformity, ignoring and rejecting different development roads and interests in socialist countries. In essence, it lacked sovereignty consciousness, ignoring the contradictions between internationalist ideas and national interests, using ideological uniformity to replace or conceal differences in national interests. It also lacked a sense of equality, ignoring the contradiction between the organizational principle of the leader/subordinate relationship within the bloc and the principle of equality among bloc nations. The centralized leadership in the socialist bloc rejected the principle of

33 Harrison Salisbury, War between Russia and China (New York: Norton, 1969); Tsien-hua Tsui, The Sino-Soviet Border Disputes in the 1970s (Ontario: Mosaic Press, 1983).

34 Zhihua Shen and Yafeng Xia, Mao and the Sino-Soviet Partnership, 1945-1959: A New History (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2015).

28 | Page H-Diplo Roundtable XXII-41 equality among socialist countries. This drawback in ‘structural imbalance’ led to constant turmoil and polarization in the socialist bloc. It thus became the underlying reason for the inevitable rupture of the Sino-Soviet alliance.

In a word, in the years of revolution and war, when the Soviet Union led the world revolution in its capacity as the only socialist state, internationalism was able to sustain party-to-party relations. But after other Communist parties had seized state power and the socialist bloc was formed, it became impossible to abide by the principles guiding party-to-party relations in handling state-to-state relations. This was an inextricable predicament of proletarian internationalism. While China and the Soviet Union were confronted with different international environments and had variant global status, it was only natural that they differed in their understanding of world politics. Because the CCP and the CPSU were at different historical stages, they had divergent views on how less-developed nation-states should achieve modernization. Once the oneness of the Socialist bloc led by the Soviet Union was used to reject the principle of equality among member states of the socialist bloc, the split in the Sino-Soviet alliance was preordained.

In our opinion, the Cold War was, first of all, a competition between capitalism and socialism. This competition, in essence, was ideological. Thus, ideology was the critical factor affecting the origins, development, and end of the Cold War. Second, proletarian internationalism, the political criterion by which socialist countries abided in their relationships, fell into the domain of ideology as well. Therefore, ideology was the most crucial factor affecting the evolution of the Sino-Soviet alliance. We propose using the concept of ‘structural imbalance’ as the prism for examining the role of ideology in the Sino- Soviet split. Indeed, during the Cold War, ideology served as a tool in social countries’ external relations, i.e., ideology was a norm in setting foreign and defense policies agenda, expounding and verifying the rationality and validity of specific foreign policy initiatives, and mobilizing and propagandizing for implementation of those policies. We argue that China’s international united front strategy in the 1950s and its strategy to align with the U.S. against the Soviet Union in the 1970s after the collapse of the Sino-Soviet alliance may be understood from the perspective of ideology. In the heyday of the Cold War, China was excluded from international society by America’s containment policy. It served China’s national security needs to establish an anti-U.S. United Front. Because the Soviet Union was one of the creators of the post-World War II international order, it served Soviet interests to cooperate and relax tensions with the Western bloc. But by the late 1960s, China accused the Soviet Union of ‘social imperialism,’ and the Soviet Union became China’s primary enemy. For China, aligning with ‘U.S. imperialism’ against ‘Soviet imperialism’ served China’s national security interests.

Was the Stalin Issue the key in the Sino-Soviet Ideological Polemics and the Sino-Soviet Split?

In our book, we argue that the Sino-Soviet ideological polemics during the Sino-Soviet split, including the Stalin issue, masked the real purpose, which was to grasp the discourse in interpreting Marxism-Leninism and to seize a legitimate position as the leader of the international Communist movement and world revolutionary movements. Here we add two points:

The first concerns Mao Zedong’s perception of and attitude toward Stalin. Mao had many grievances against Stalin, including the fact that the CCP was a branch of Communist International (Comintern). Due to the misguidance of so- called Left Opportunism and Right Opportunism policies, which had been dictated by the Comintern representatives, the CCP barely escaped from calamity and had to escape for its survival in the so-called Long March. When Japan surrendered in August 1945, CCP troops were deployed in north and central China as well as eastern China coastal areas. They were ready to accept the Japanese surrender in those areas and occupy major cities and transportation lines. But Stalin did not support Mao and the CCP in these endeavors. He forced the CCP to submit to the Nationalist government under Jiang Jieshi and ordered Mao to travel to Chongqing to negotiate with him.35 During the Chinese Civil War from 1946 to 1949, Stalin started to provide military support to the CCP in the summer of 1948, but only after the CCP had achieved

35 Ibid., 13-14.

29 | Page H-Diplo Roundtable XXII-41 significant battleground successes in its struggle with the Chinese Nationalist army.36 After the CCP seized national power in October 1949, Mao traveled to Moscow to meet with Stalin in late 1949 and early 1950. Stalin reluctantly signed the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance with Mao. Mao later complained “that he was slighted and treated unequally by Stalin.”37 After Khrushchev’s “Secret Speech” denouncing Stalin at the 20th Congress of the CPSU in February 1956, Mao proposed “his 3/7 formula in evaluating Stalin, stating that Stalin has been 30 percent wrong and 70 percent correct.”38 Mao publicly criticized Stalin’s national egoism, great-power chauvinism, and the acting of the CPSU as a father-party. After 1954, Khrushchev initiated a fundamental change in Soviet policy toward China, and Mao enjoyed an unprecedented feeling of equality in his relations with the Soviet Union. But the CCP did not support the CPSU’s total repudiation of Stalin.39 On 31 October 1961, the first day of the 22nd Congress of the CPSU, it adopted a resolution to remove Stalin’s remains from Lenin mausoleum in the Red Square. The CCP silently protested without publishing polemic articles. But in September 1963, when the Sino-Soviet Great Ideological Polemics were officially launched, the CCP defended Stalin’s in its polemical article, “On the Stalin Issue,” which was published on 13 September 1963 in Renmin ribao. It advocated “a more prudent approach” in evaluating Stalin, reiterating Mao’s “3/7 formula.” But the article held Stalin responsible for the “Left and Right Opportunistic Lines,” which had been carried out by the CCP in the late 1920s, 1930s and the early and mid-1940s.40

In the de-Stalinization campaign after the 20th CPSU Congress, the CCP had gained prestige and influence. Mao believed that he was much more theoretically refined than Khrushchev.41 He thus envisioned a prospect that the CCP could replace the CPSU as the leader of the international Communist movement.

Second, the core issue and essence of the Sino-Soviet ideological polemics: Concrete contents of the Sino-Soviet polemics include the Stalin issue, the issue of war and peace, and the issue of peaceful coexistence, peaceful transition, and peaceful competition. As we argue in the book, the fundamental issue leading to the Sino-Soviet polemics was the disagreement in understanding the nature of the current epoch, which was at the center of the Sino-Soviet ideological debate (280). Sino- Soviet disagreements over the nature of the current epoch determined their divergent foreign and domestic policies.

The CCP and the “September 30” Incident in Indonesia

In the book, we trace the CCP’s relations with the Partai Komunis Indonesia (PKI, Communist Party of Indonesia) from the late 1950s to late 1964 (164-174). The PKI sided with the CCP in the Sino-Soviet split. As we point out, “Mao and the CCP fervently hoped that the PKI would learn from the Chinese revolutionary experience and replicate the Chinese experience in Indonesia. The PKI, and in particular its leader [Dipa Nusantara] Aidit, leaned toward the Chinese strategy of seizing political power by armed revolution” (176). Due to the space limitations, we were only able to touch on the

36 Ibid., 14-15.

37 Ibid., 62.

38 Ibid., 147.

39 For details on Mao’s reaction to the issues of Stalin and personality cult, see Shen and Xia, Mao and the Sino-Soviet Partnership, 145-151.

40 See Renmin ribao and Hongqi editorial offices, “On the Stalin Issue: Second Commentary on the CPSU Open Letter,” Renmin ribao, 13 September 1963, 1.

41 Shen and Xia, Mao and the Sino-Soviet Partnership, 271-272.

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‘September 30’ Incident briefly. David Wolff asks in his review whether we could be more specific on China’s role in the ‘September 30’ Incident of Indonesia. For instance, did the CCP provide the PKI with arms?

By early 1965, it seems that Indonesian President Sukarno and the PKI Secretary General Aidit were in agreement with the CCP in terms of its anti-U.S. imperialism and anti-Soviet revisionism objectives. From the CCP’s perspective, the time was ripe for the CCP to aid the PKI in its armed revolution to seize political power. At the time, many PKI members were holding important positions in the Indonesian government, and the PKI was also able to infiltrate the Indonesian Armed Forces. In August, both the CCP and the PKI collaborated closely in fermenting an uprising. First, in early August, when the CCP and the PKI leaders met, they discussed at great length how the PKI could seize political power. Liu Shaoqi, Mao Zedong and other CCP leaders advised that if the PKI secured the support of peasants, and dared to lead the armed struggle, they would grasp the crux for achieving success in revolution. As such, they argued that the PKI Central Committee should consider what tactics and policies it should adopt after seizing political power. In order to prepare to deal with any emergency, the CCP suggested that PKI leaders remain in Indonesia, but not all reside in Jakarta, the capital, and should instead disperse to other islands and islets to establish revolutionary base areas. They should build up the strength of their forces, and prepare several routes of retreat when launching offensives. Aidit stated that the PKI had prepared for the advent of “the decisive moment,” noting that the PKI was establishing a military commission whose members were mainly the Leftists, including several middle-of-the-roaders, and that its leader was a PKI underground member. He further noted that after the establishment of the Central Military Commission, it would move forward with arming the workers and peasants. Mao Zedong thus gave a very optimistic estimate of the prospect of the PKI seizing political power: if 30% of the Indonesian Armed Forces were leftists, the PKI had chosen its policies correctly and could be able to win over the middle-of-the-roaders; victory would thus belong to the PKI.42 By the middle of August, Aidit reported to the CCP Central Committee via the Chinese Embassy in Indonesia on the PKI’s decision to launch an armed uprising. The CCP Central Committee affirmed Aidit’s plan, reminding them to be well-prepared given that once they had made up their minds, there would be no retreat. If they met with setbacks, they were advised to retreat to rural areas and continue the struggle. Chinese Premier Zhou Enlai even suggested that if the uprising be successful, the PKI should not prematurely declare that Sukarno was no longer the head of state, nor should it casually throw away the brand of “NANAKOM,” which would be of international use.43 With these preparations underway, the PKI faction in the Indonesian Armed Forces launched a military coup d’état on the night of September 30, which failed and led to the complete destruction of the PKI.

We have not been able to find documents that show any direct military assistance to the PKI by the CCP. As we write in the book, by late 1964 “Sukarno was dragged into the CCP-led anti-imperialist and anti-revisionist international leftist contingent, and as a result, Indonesia became China’s political ally in Southeast Asia” (173). China stepped up its effort to offer military as well as economic aid to Indonesia. The Chinese leaders paid special attention to the role of Indonesia’s Fifth Army, which comprised mainly PKI-trained militia members. In January 1965, upon Sukarno’s request, China supplied the Fifth Army with a large number of small arms. 44 The Chinese military also considered giving aid to the

42 Zhu Liang, “‘September 30’ Movement in 1965 – The Deadliest Massacre in the History of International Communist Movement,” Zhonggong duiwai guanxi shiliao (Historical Materials on the CCP’s External Relations), vol. 5 (2000), 142-144. From 1985 to 1993 Zhu Liang was director of the International Liaison Department, in the CCP Central Committee. His article is based on classified documents from the International Liaison Department; Records of Conversation between Mao Zedong and the PKI delegation headed by Aidit, in Zhonggong zhongyang duiwai lianluobu, ed. Mao Zedong yu waibin tanhua jilu huibian (A Collection of Records of Mao Zedong’s Conversations with Foreign Guests) (Beijing: unpublished internal edition, 1977), authors’ personal collection.

43 Zhu Liang, “‘September 30’ Movement in 1965,” 146. The Sukarno government established a NASAKOM cabinet, which was comprised of nationalist, religious, and Communist elements, which, according to Sukarno, represented the three pillars of the Indonesian revolution. See Sheldon W. Simon, The Broken Triangle: Peking, Djakarta, and the PKI (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), 75.

44 Records of Conversation between Luo Ruiqing, PLA’s Chief of the General Staff and Members of Military in the PKI Delegation, 24 January 1965, Chinese Foreign Ministry Archives (CFMA), No. 105-01910-07; Meeting between Ambassador Yao Chongming and Sukarno, 11 February 1965, No. 105-01319-05, cited from Li Yiping and Zeng Yuleng, “A Study on Chinese aid toward © 2021 The Authors | CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 US

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Indonesian Navy and Air Force. 45 According to Sino-Indonesian economic, technical and loan agreements, China provided around U.S. $ 215 million in aid to Indonesia from 1958 to 1965, which occupied the highest level of China’s aid to Afro- Asian nationalist states at the time. Among this amount of aid to Indonesia, $160 million was given in 1965. 46 At the time, the interests of the Sukarno government remained closely aligned with those of the PKI. In addition to the militia in the Fifth Army, the Leftists in the Indonesian Armed Forces and the PKI underground members, it was possible that the PKI’s army also received part of the Chinese military and economic aid to the Sukarno government. Anyone who has access to Indonesian archives should be able to provide a better account of this important historical event.

Mao’s Responsibility in the Sino-Soviet Border Clashes of 1969

Finally, we want to respond to Steven I. Levine’s criticism that, “Their treatment of the Sino-Soviet military conflict in March 1969, however, which quotes Chinese but not Soviet sources, implicitly accepts the Chinese version that China was responding to Soviet provocations.” Regarding Russian sources on the Sino-Soviet border clashes in 1969, we have collected 75 documents covering the period from 21 January to 15 December 1969. These documents mainly concern the CPSU and the Soviet military’s reactions to the border clashes, analyzing Soviet leaders’ strategic considerations. Several Russian scholars have published works on the evolution of Sino-Russian boundary demarcation in history.47 Utilizing Chinese and American sources, Dmitrii Sergeevich Riabushkin, focuses on reconstructing the actual clashes in March 1969 in addition to the process of the Sino-Russian boundary demarcation.48 Our book explores the Sino-Soviet border clashes primarily from the vantage point of China’s strategic adjustment. We hope that other scholars will be more effective in incorporating Russian documentation in future works on this subject.

We believe that Mao’s role in the Sino-Soviet border clashes should be traced to the Sino-Soviet border negotiations in 1964. From China’s perspective, this was a significant opportunity to resolve by peaceful means the Sino-Soviet border issue via consultation on the basis of the equality of both nations. But Mao’s insistence that the Soviet Union acknowledge ‘unequal treaties’ between the two countries jeopardized the prospect. In handling state-to-state relations and tackling complicated and sensitive border issues, the ideological criterion that guiding party-to-party relations ultimately hijacked the Chinese government’s policies. It thus blocked the ‘correct and effective way’ of resolving the Sino-Soviet border issue based on the principle of “peaceful negotiation, just and fair, consultation on the basis of equality, mutual understanding and

Indonesia during 1958-1965,” Nanyang wenti yanjiu (Southeast Asian Affairs), No.3, 2012, 35, 36; Taomo Zhou, “Ambivalent Alliance: Chinese Policy towards Indonesia, 1960-1965,” Cold War International History Project Working Paper 67 (August 2013), 19.

45 Records of the Conversation between Luo Ruiqing, PLA’s Chief of the General Staff and Members of Military in the PKI Delegation, 24 January 1965; Chinese Military Attaché in Indonesia to Defense Department and the 2nd Section of the General Staff: Requesting Instructions on External Activities, 5 February 1965, CFMA, No. 105-01694-01, 1.

46 Li and Zeng, “A Study on Chinese aid toward Indonesia during 1958-1965,” 28-30; The Issue of Our Economic Delegation’s Visit to Indonesia, 16 February 1965, CFMA No. 105-01693-02. According to Li Yiping and Zeng Yuleng, these two numbers do not include China’s aid to Indonesia for organizing the Games of Newly-emerging Forces in 1963 and 100,000 small arms to Indonesia in 1965.

47 Vladimir Stepanovich Miasnikov, Dogovornymi stat’iami utverdili, Diplamaticheskaia istoriia russko-kitaiskoi Granitsy XⅦ- XX vv. (An Analysis of Russian-Chinese Border Treaties: Russian-Chinese Border Diplomatic History from 17th to 20th Centuries) (Moscow: IDV RAN, 1996); Vladimir Stepanovich Miasnikov and Evgenii Dmitrievich Stepanov, Granitsy Kitaia: Istoriia formirovaniia (A History of the Formation of China’s Border). (Moscow: PIM, 2001); Boris Ivanovich Tkachenko, Rossiia-Kitai: vostochnaia granitsa v dokumentakh i faktakh (Russia-China: Eastern Border in Documents and Facts) (Vladivostok: Ussuri, 1999); Iurii Mikhailovich Galenovich, Rossiia i Kitai v XX veke: Granitsa (20th Century Russia and China: Border Issue) (Moscow: Izograf, 2001).

48 Dmitrii Sergeevich Riabushkin, Mify Damanskogo (Mystifying Damansky) (Moskva: Izdatel’stvo AST, 2004).

32 | Page H-Diplo Roundtable XXII-41 mutual accommodation, and a balance of interests.”49 Mao and the CCP leaders regarded the negotiation table as a battleground without the ‘smoke of gunpowder.’ The political struggle was dominant, and the resolution of the border issue was meant to serve political ends. This became a normality in China in the 1960s and 1970s. The breakdown of the first Sino-Soviet border negotiations became a hidden peril for Sino-Soviet state-to-state relations. It affected China’s political and economic situation, hastening Mao’s decision to launch the Great Cultural Revolution.

In the process of resolving the Sino-Soviet border-war crisis in 1969, the Soviet Union pressed on at every stage while China passively responded. During this period, Moscow applied pressure to China’s ‘soft spot,’ alternately threatening China with nuclear deterrence and regime change. This paradigm of ‘impact and response’ was a natural outcome between Mao’s intention to win time for him to adjust China’s diplomatic strategy and his fear of the Soviet Union launching a nuclear attack against China. In other words, China’s passive response had elements of positive strategy considerations. In the backdrop of the Sino-Soviet border clashes, Mao was able to make a critical decision to achieve a diplomatic rapprochement with the United States – ‘aligning with the United States to oppose the Soviet Union.’

Finally, although the title of the book is “Mao and the Sino-Soviet Split,” we also discuss other senior CCP leaders, such as Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, as well as Deng Xiaoping’s involvements in the Sino-Soviet split. In this regard, we disagree with Levine’s assertion that “Li and Xia…have very little to say about any of the other Chinese dramatis personae involved in the Sino-Soviet split.”

In conclusion, let us thank all participants for the attention they have given to our book. We do not expect our book to be the last word on the Sino-Soviet split. We are pleased that the book has provoked renewed debate on the topic and might be a ‘signal’ for future studies.

49 Sino-Russian Joint Declaration, Renmin ribao (People’s Daily), 15 October 2004, 1.

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