CHAPTER 3 CHINA CONFRONTS THE SOVIET UNION: WARFARE AND DIPLOMACY ON CHINA'S INNER ASIAN FRONTIERS During the "active phase" of the Cultural Revolution, up to 1969, China deliberately adopted a low profile in foreign policy, as the country was consumed by internal disorder. The conscious foreign policy of the Cul- tural Revolution was to have as little of it as possible. China purposely went into diplomatic isolation, kept foreigners out of the country, lowered the level of commercial intercourse with other countries, steered clear of international institutions, and substituted Maoist rhetoric for more tangible means of policy. For a while, China was not a factor of consequence in global politics or even in Asian international relations. Nevertheless, a chapter on this brief period can illustrate several verities of Chinese foreign policy. Among these are the interdependence and interpenetration of Chinese domestic developments and the interna- tional environment.1 Even though the Cultural Revolution was a period of almost exclusive Chinese attention to internal events, its causes were partly international, its initiation was delayed by occurrences outside China's borders, its effects were felt directly by China's neighbors and strongly even by nations and foreign offices at great distances from Peking, and its direction was abruptly altered by the threat of war in 1969 and after. Another verity is the dependence of Chinese internal policy and in- ternational actions on the policies and actions of the United States and the Soviet Union. American intervention in Vietnam precipitated the stra- tegic debate of 1965 that, in turn, helped divide the leadership along pro- and anti-Cultural Revolution lines; and Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968 caused the Chinese leadership to take fright over the Soviet military buildup along the Chinese border and to catch the Soviets 1 This follows Thomas W. Robinson, "Political and strategic aspects of Chinese foreign policy," in Donald C. Hellmann, ed., China and japan: a new balance of power, 197-268, and Thomas W. Robinson, "Restructuring Chinese foreign policy, 1959-1976: three episodes," in K[al] J. Holsti et al., Why nations realign: foreign policy restructuring in the postwar world, 134-171. 218 Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 CHINA CONFRONTS THE SOVIET UNION 219 off guard with the Chen-pao Island raids early the next year. The un- expectedly strong Russian reaction led to the end of the "active phase" of the Cultural Revolution. A third verity is that the Cultural Revolution affected the fate of lead- ing Chinese officials. Many of them chose to - or had to - comment on foreign policy issues merely in order to participate effectively in the highly charged, factionalized infighting that characterized Chinese poli- tics throughout the 1960s. Thereby they left themselves open to Maoist/ Red Guard attack once the purge stage was reached. Of scarcely less importance is that the foreign policy of the Cultural Revolution, and the dilemma in which the Chinese leadership found itself as a result, served as the foil against which Chinese foreign policy for the next decade and more reacted so severely. Not only was Peking's general opening to the world - economic and institutional as well as diplomatic - based on retreat from Cultural Revolution extremes, but the rapproche- ment with the United States (the foundation of Chinese policy during the 1970s) also had its roots in decisions taken during the Cultural Revolu- tion. So although the period stood as an exception to the flow of past and future foreign policies, it nonetheless served as the point of departure for subsequent events.2 Finally, it is possible to take a revisionist approach to Chinese foreign policy during the Cultural Revolution. It turns out that Peking's policy was more dynamic and participatory than was generally thought at the time. Not only was there much activity along the border with the Soviet Union (actions reflecting deliberate decisions in the Chinese capital) and continuing contact with the United States (over Vietnam and regarding the politics of the strategic triangle), but trade, foreign aid, and reception of high-level visitors continued, albeit at reduced levels. The period of self-imposed isolation was thus short. Added to that are the spillover effects of Cultural Revolution violence and ideological enthusiasm. Hong Kong suffered major disturbances and came close to anarchy, and Burma and Cambodia altered their policies toward China after Red Guard- induced violence in their capitals. The siege of the Soviet embassy in Peking, the mob violence directed against Russian diplomatic dependents during their evacuation, and anti-Soviet antics by Chinese Red Guards in Moscow and elsewhere — all induced a highly emotional reaction in the Kremlin. Though temporarily kept in restraint, from 1969 on these 2 See the companion chapter in the present volume by Jonathan Pollack; G[olam] W. Choudhury, China in world affairs: the foreign policy of the PRC since if 70; Thomas Fingar et al., eds., China's quest for independence: policy evolution in the /f/or, and Robert Sutter, Chinese foreign policy after the Cultural Revolution. Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 220 CHINA CONFRONTS THE SOVIET UNION events created a "never again" syndrome of military and diplomatic overreaction. On balance, then, the foreign policy of the active phase of the Cultural Revolution seems to have been less exceptional than it at first appeared. In fact, it was generally in line with Peking's policies before 1965 and after 1969, and came out of the same complex of determinants. The framework and the "driving variables" were the same. This chapter suggests that even with a near absence of foreign relations, in reality China was responding to the combined influence of well-understood domestic and international pressures. At the domestic level, those pressures took three forms:3 the influence of politics, personalities, and the political culture back of them; the weight of the Chinese past, recent and ancient, particularly of "lessons learned" during the Chinese Communist Party's formative pre-1949 era; and the influence of ideology, including both Marxism-Leninism-Maoism and the Chinese Weltanschauung. International pressures also took three forms: the policies of the United States and Soviet Union, the only two states that mattered criti- cally to Peking; the overall configuration of the global international sys- tem - political, economic, and security - the shape of the Asian regional system, and their respective operational "rules"; and the complex of Chinese national/ state interests relative to those of other relevant states and to the growth in Chinese national power. Chinese foreign policy during the Cultural Revolution showed what the costs were when the Party elected to run the risk of violating several of the cardinal principles of its own policy and of international systemic behavior. FOREIGN POLICY ORIGINS OF THE CULTURAL REVOLUTION Our approach combines a rough chronological sequence with an analytic bias. First, we specify the foreign policy origins of the Cultural Revo- lution under three aspects: the broadening, particularly in the mind of Mao Tse-tung, of the issue of ideological revisionism from Sino-Soviet relations to the Chinese domestic political and socioeconomic arena; the alleged delay of the Cultural Revolution necessitated by the American military intervention in Vietnam and the debate over the appropriate Chinese response; and the influence of these and other foreign policy issues on interpersonal relations among top Party leaders. Each are text- 3 This draws on the author's unpublished manuscipt "Explaining Chinese foreign policy: contribu- ting elements and levels of analysis." Cambridge Histories Online © Cambridge University Press, 2008 ORIGINS OF CULTURAL REVOLUTION 221 book examples of the complex intermingling of foreign and domestic factors. The long and tortuous path from the original Chinese criticism in the mid-1950s of the Kremlin's handling of the Stalin question to Mao Tse- tung's conclusion that China as well as the Soviet Union was following the path of ideological revisionism and capitalist restoration is reason- ably clear.4 Mao concluded that the reason Soviet foreign policy had gone so far astray — as evidenced by its combination of peaceful coexistence, adventurism, and capitulationism toward the United States and its policy of chauvinism, splittism, and all-around opposition toward China - was that the Soviet leadership under Khrushchev and, after him, Brezhnev had deliberately departed from the true Leninist path of revolution and socialist construction to restore capitalism within the Soviet Union. The Chinese series of nine polemics in the early 1960s catalogued these most clearly as the Kremlin's sins.5 The Sino-Soviet dispute would have remained purely a foreign policy matter if Mao had not drawn logical and empirical conclusions about the development of socialism after the Communist Party takes power. Logi- cally, there must be solid Marxist reasons if the Soviet Union had erred so greatly and consistently. Truly socialist countries are incapable of such departures, so the Soviet Union was no longer a socialist country and had, progressively, restored capitalism. The Soviet Communist Party was therefore a bourgeois capitalist institution, complete with all the attitu- dinal and political-organizational manifestations of the