Nixon and Mao (18 page)

Stalin’s death at the beginning of 1953 did not improve matters. The Chinese were annoyed by the Soviet assumption that the Soviet Union would continue to lead world Communism. Mao, it could be argued, was now the senior Communist statesman. Within China and throughout what was coming to be known as the Third World, those undeveloped countries emerging from foreign empires or attempting to free themselves from foreign domination, Mao’s thought and the Chinese way of making a revolution based on the peasantry were held up as examples to emulate. By implication, the Bolshevik revolution and the Soviet pattern of development were being downgraded as proper models. The Soviets did not like what they saw as Chinese pretensions. Khrushchev, who had emerged by 1956 as Stalin’s successor, felt that Mao was always putting the Soviets down.
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By the mid-1950s, both sides were increasingly prone to look for offense. When Khrushchev made his sensational secret speech in 1956 to denounce Stalin’s mistakes, even using the word “crimes,” the Chinese were annoyed, more because they had not been told in advance than because they cared about Stalin’s reputation. And Mao, whose own personality cult was already formidable, did not care for the idea of toppling great leaders from their pedestals.
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When the Chinese offered to send laborers to Siberia, Khrushchev said he smelled a rat: “They wanted to take over Siberia without war.”
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Then, in the late 1950s, when Khrushchev suggested that the Soviet Union and China establish a combined submarine fleet that would operate in the Pacific out of Chinese bases, it was the turn of the Chinese to be suspicious. “Better take the whole sea-coast of China,” said Mao sarcastically. He himself would go up to the hills and fight a guerrilla war again. If, he told Khrushchev, the Soviet Union “insisted on stopping China’s nostrils, what else could be done?”
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What particularly annoyed the Chinese was that the Soviet Union gave only lukewarm backing to the long-standing Chinese Communist goal of reuniting Taiwan with the mainland. In the late summer of 1958, when the People’s Republic suddenly started shelling Taiwan’s offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu, near the Chinese coast, the Soviets were alarmed that this might lead to a full-scale confrontation with the United States, which could drag the Soviet Union into a major war. Although Moscow eventually produced a statement of support for the People’s Republic, it was not as enthusiastic as Mao and his colleagues would have wished. In 1959, as China and India moved toward a confrontation over their borderlands, the Soviet Union tried to make peace and, if anything, showed itself to be sympathetic to the Indians.

By this point, the Chinese Communists were coming to the conclusion that the Soviets were generally rather indifferent allies and even worse revolutionaries.
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Within the Soviet Union, a new privileged class seemed to be emerging, and when China, under Mao’s prodding, embarked on the Great Leap Forward in 1958, the Soviets did not show the proper admiration for this utopian program of rapid development toward socialism. Indeed, Khrushchev described the Great Leap as “reactionary” and, to make his remarks even more insulting, did so to an American politician. Moreover, Khrushchev had been talking of “peaceful coexistence” with capitalist countries, arguing that the threat of nuclear annihilation meant that the struggle between Communism and capitalism would have to be carried on by means other than all-out war. Mao reacted with scorn. He had long believed that change in society, whether domestic or international, occurred only when there was struggle, violent struggle, between different classes. For the Soviet Union to advocate change through peaceful means meant that the Soviet leaders were prepared to accept an unfinished and imperfect revolution.
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Mao’s motive behind the shelling of Taiwan’s two little offshore islands, Quemoy and Matsu, in 1958 may have been in part to disrupt the growing thaw between the Soviet Union and the United States.
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Soviet leaders found him curiously unconcerned about the possibility of an escalation. “Russia will drop its atomic bombs on America and America will drop its atomic bombs on the Soviet Union,” said Mao. “You may both be wiped out. China too will suffer, but will have four hundred million people left over.”
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When the Soviet foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, dashed to Beijing to try to defuse the crisis, Mao talked airily of how the Chinese could retreat inland after an American nuclear attack. That would lure the Americans in, and then the Soviets could counterattack with their full force, including their nuclear weapons. Gromyko was “flabbergasted.”
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Mao’s attitude toward nuclear war was a mixture of bravado and fear. On the one hand, he described the bomb as a paper tiger and, in his more philosophic moods, downplayed its importance in the grand scheme of things. “If the worst came to the worst,” he told the Indian prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, “and half of mankind died, the other half would remain while imperialism would be razed to the ground and the whole world would become socialist; in a number of years there would be 2,700 million people again and definitely more.”
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As he told his nonplussed comrades at an international Communist meeting in Moscow in 1957, nuclear war would speed up the transition to socialism.
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On the other hand, Mao and his colleagues in the People’s Republic wanted their own bomb, although partly for its symbolism as a marker of China’s newly regained independence. As his foreign minister, Chen Yi, said, “Even if we would have to be destitute, we had to develop China’s own high-tech weaponry.” China saw the American-Soviet test-ban treaty of 1963 as “nuclear blackmail” and an attempt by the two superpowers to deny China its rightful place in the world.
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Here was yet another in the long list of humiliations that China was suffering at the hands of outside powers. As the Chinese government said in reply to a Soviet memorandum in 1963, “The Chinese people will never recognize the monopoly of nuclear forces by several powerful countries and their claim to be able to order other countries about.”
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Indeed, one of the grievances that led to the final, very public rupture between China and the Soviet Union was Khrushchev’s reluctance to hand over a sample bomb to China’s nuclear scientists. Then, in the early 1960s, the Soviets ended all assistance, including nuclear. When the Chinese successfully exploded their first bomb in the fall of 1964, Mao celebrated with a massive dance performance in the Great Hall of the People and wrote a brief poem: “Atom bomb goes off when it is told / Ah, what boundless joy!”
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Later, Mao denied that he had ever made light of nuclear war. “We have no atomic bomb,” he assured Edgar Snow, incorrectly, in 1965. “If some other country plans to launch a nuclear war, the whole world may suffer disaster.”
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By that time, he was starting to realize that the nuclear stalemate meant that war between the Soviet Union and the United States was unlikely. Indeed, if the Soviet Union was as reactionary as he suspected, it might join forces with the United States to attack China. “These two superpowers,” he told a visiting Australian Communist in 1968, “are nuclear powers. Our country, in a sense, is still a non-nuclear power.”
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He was also disappointed in the failure of revolutions around the world, in Latin America and, closer to home, in Asian countries, including Indonesia; he had counted on such movements to weaken and eventually topple the great powers.
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In his new mood of pessimism, Mao started to prepare China for a possible attack. In 1964, he ordered a huge movement of crucial industry inland to the mountains and high plateaus of western China. The Third Front, as it was called, involved dismantling hundreds of factories and uprooting thousands of workers. It harked back to the heroic early days of the Japanese invasion of 1937, when the Guomindang retreated from the coast, but it made little sense in the era of long-range bombers and rockets. The cost to China, and to the unfortunate workers and managers who found themselves in remote valleys and mountains, was enormous. Mao’s Third Front ate up funds that could otherwise have been used for development, at one point perhaps as much as two-thirds of the total invested in China. It left factories absurdly far from their supplies and their markets. Many were later quietly abandoned or moved.
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Toward the end of the 1960s, he made another of his sweeping decisions: China must prepare for invasion. Huge mounds of earth were thrown up outside major cities and military sites.
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In the cities themselves, the Chinese constructed a whole underground world. An American diplomat who was given a tour after Nixon’s visit reported, “They had air purifiers and everything. They had flour mills down there, hospitals, dormitories, workshops, all sorts of things. They were really quite large. Of course, it would not have stood up against nuclear warfare of the kind they had in mind, but it shows you how much labor was involved in all these places. Digging so many underground cities was unbelievable. They did it for fear of the Soviet Union.”
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By the end of the 1960s, Mao and, indeed, what was left of the foreign policy establishment in Beijing were convinced that the chief threat to China, greater even than the United States, was the Soviet Union. In August 1968, Soviet forces had rolled into Czechoslovakia to crush the moderate reform movement and to keep Czechoslovakia firmly under Soviet control. The reaction from Beijing was furious: “The most barefaced and typical specimen of fascist power politics played by the Soviet revisionist clique against its so-called allies.”
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The Chinese Communists had no sympathy for the reformers, but they were highly alarmed at the Soviet Union’s justification for its invasion. If Soviet forces could intervene in Czechoslovakia, why not in China?

This question occurred not only to the Chinese but to Soviet leaders as well. The Soviet Union had been highly critical of Mao since the early 1960s, and when he started the Cultural Revolution in 1966, Soviets saw this as final proof that he was not a proper Marxist at all but a fanatical adventurer who was destroying the Chinese Communist Party and weakening the cause of socialism worldwide. Soviet opinion was outraged by the activities of radical Maoist students in the Soviet Union and by the treatment of Soviet diplomats in China. Soviet radio called on the Chinese people to rise up, and in 1967 a leading Soviet military newspaper said that the Soviet Union stood ready to help the Chinese free themselves from Mao’s rule.
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As relations between the two great Communist powers worsened, the four-thousand-mile border between them, which had never been entirely settled, became increasingly tense. Adding to the tension was that the border, established over several centuries, was seen by the Chinese as a product of that long period of national humiliation when outside powers had stripped China of its territory and ignored its sovereignty. The czars had dictated unequal treaties, and the Soviet “imperialists” had continued the tradition.
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In 1951, at a time when the People’s Republic was heavily dependent on the Soviet Union, the Chinese had signed an agreement with the Soviets covering the rivers that formed much of the border. The Chinese were also obliged to accept Soviet military control of disputed areas; along the edge of Xinjiang Province in the west, for example, Chinese herdsmen had to get Soviet permission to use their traditional grazing lands. An even more sensitive area was in the northeast, where Manchuria met Soviet Siberia. The border here was formed by rivers, the Amur, which ran across the top of Manchuria, and the Ussuri, which marked off the long strip of Soviet territory running down the eastern border of Manchuria to the great Soviet port of Vladivostok. Much to the resentment of the Chinese, the Soviet Union remained in control of more than six hundred out of seven hundred river islands. Chinese fishermen had to get Soviet permission to use the rivers and the islands. In the late 1950s, the Chinese government repeatedly asked for the “unequal” border arrangements to be renegotiated, but the Soviets refused, partly because they did not want to admit that the old agreements were unequal. As relations between the two sides worsened, the number of incidents along the borders increased. In 1964, Khrushchev reluctantly agreed to open discussions. When the Chinese claimed huge tracts of Siberia and control of most of the islands, he suspended the talks.
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The Cultural Revolution brought a heating up in the rhetoric, and both sides also stepped up their patrols. The Chinese became increasingly aggressive: Chinese soldiers and fishermen demanded access to Soviet-controlled islands as a right. According to Chinese estimates, there were over four thousand incidents between 1964 and 1969. These seem to have been at a fairly low level, though, with patrols spraying each other with water or hitting out with sticks. The confrontations tended to follow a ritual: one side would send out a patrol; the other would protest the border violation; after some exchanges, both sides would withdraw. In late 1968, however, Soviet armored vehicles ran over and killed four Chinese on an island in the Ussuri River.
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In response to what they saw as Chinese provocations in this period, the Soviets had been increasing their forces in the Far East. Between 1965 and 1969, Soviet divisions in the area grew from about seventeen to twenty-seven. A new treaty with Outer Mongolia allowed the Soviet Union to station a couple of divisions there as well. The Soviets also kept some 225 bombers in the Far East and had deployed medium- and short-range rockets capable of carrying nuclear warheads. With a range of twelve hundred miles, their medium-range SS-4s could reach major cities in northern China. Although the People’s Republic did not yet have a comparable nuclear force, it probably had twice as many soldiers as the Soviet Union in the region by 1969.
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And Mao, or so he said, had great faith in the determination and will of the Chinese to fight, even if it meant going back to guerrilla warfare. In reality, both sides seem to have felt apprehensive. The Soviets thought themselves outnumbered and unprepared to fight a conventional war, while the Chinese, with reason, were concerned about the impact of the Cultural Revolution on the training and discipline of the People’s Liberation Army.
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