Restless Empire

by Odd Westad

  HOW DID REVOLUTIONARY CHINA get to this pretty pass? The catastrophes were mainly due to Mao’s hubris, China’s ill-conceived development plans, and its international isolation. By the summer of 1958, the CCP center in Beijing had ordered massive improvements in production in all fields. Through a Great Leap Forward, China would rapidly enter a new stage of development, Mao believed, and his enthusiasm carried the day within the party, even among economic experts who knew better. In the countryside all private property was abolished and peasants grouped into people’s communes in order to improve production. Within the communes all services were collective, including child care and care for the elderly. In many provinces children spent six days a week in care, only returning to their parents on Sundays, so that men and women could dedicate their lives fully to production. Peasants were ordered to carry out gigantic land reclamation campaigns, while their own produce was sent to the cities and sometimes abroad. Lack of fertilizer was made up for by demolishing barns, outhouses, and latrines—and in the end the peasants’ own dwellings—for the building material to be ground up and spread on the fields.

  Large numbers of people wanted to believe in Mao’s new revolution and worked themselves to exhaustion for its success. Rumors of production miracles abounded: Watermelons as big as houses had been produced in Shaanxi, there had been a 600 percent increase in potato growing in Henan. Worse, the government set quotas for agricultural produce that could be exported out of the provinces based on entirely inflated production figures. Local CCP leaders lied about output to curry favor with their bosses. In some parts of the country villagers were led to believe that they could help steel production by setting up backyard furnaces where they melted their household goods and, in the end, their tools, to present to the Communist leadership. By the late autumn of 1958 it was already clear that parts of the country were going hungry as result of these excesses. In the winter of 1958–1959, peasants started dying. By the time the Great Leap campaign was over in 1961, an estimated 45 million people, mostly peasants, had died from hunger, illness, and exhaustion. It became the greatest man-made catastrophe in human history, mainly because Mao and the other leaders would not beat a retreat even when the results of their campaign were plainly visible.1

  The Soviets had observed the beginning of the Great Leap with much concern. Even if some of their experts sympathized with the methods the CCP wanted to use to force a new modernity onto China, the more level-headed reporting to Moscow predicted in the spring of 1958 that the human toll of Mao’s methods would be considerable. In private, Soviets advisers began warning their CCP colleagues of the potential results from the Leap. The Soviet attitude infuriated Mao. He decided to use a Soviet request for greater military coordination, along the lines of what NATO was doing in Europe, to vent his anger and to make his policy a question of Chinese national interest. The long-suffering Soviet ambassador Pavel Iudin—a Marxist philosopher who had been sent to China at Mao’s request to be on hand to discuss theoretical questions with the Chairman—was called to Mao’s new residence in the CCP leadership compound in the middle of the night to listen to Mao’s outpourings. “You only trust the Russians,” the Chairman shouted.

  You never trust the Chinese. [To you] Russians are first-class, while we Chinese are inferior people, who are stupid and careless. . . . You think you are in a position to control us [through having] a few nuclear bombs. . . . You have never had faith in the Chinese people. Stalin was among the worst. The Chinese [Communists] were regarded as second Titos; [we] were considered a backward nation. You have often stated that the Europeans used to look down on the Russians. I think some Russians now are looking down on the Chinese.2

  In the summer of 1958, Mao tried to use foreign affairs to drive domestic mobilization for his Great Leap. When the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, rushed to Beijing to clear up the “misunderstanding” on military cooperation, Mao treated him gruffly and with visible contempt. The Chairman listed all of his complaints against the Soviets, from the 1920s on. Not commenting on the amount of assistance the Soviets were providing, Mao instead criticized the behavior of some Soviet advisers. “You can bring complaints about the follies of our specialists, and we do not have your specialists. Therefore, it turns out that only we commit follies,” an exasperated Khrushchev sighed. “History is to blame for this,” Mao responded. “And we have to answer for it?” “You made a revolution first.” “And should we be blamed for this?” “That,” Mao said, “is why you have to send specialists.” At their second meeting, Mao received the Soviet leader poolside, in his swimming costume, fully aware that Khrushchev could not swim. With his visitor struggling to stay afloat at the back of the pool, Mao calmly did laps while lecturing the Soviets on Communist strategy. Upon Khrushchev’s return to Moscow, many Soviet leaders started wondering, for the first time, whether their treasured alliance with China was going to last.

  Immediately after Khrushchev left, Mao decided to again attack the GMD-held islands near China’s coast. This time the aim was not so much to put pressure on the United States and Chiang Kai-shek as to create an international crisis in order to strengthen support at home. The Soviets were not informed before the attacks began but still gave the Chinese full diplomatic support. The second Taiwan Straits crisis blew over, but by 1959 Mao still seems to have reached the conclusion that his domestic aims were simply incompatible with keeping the original version of his Soviet alliance in place for much longer. When Khrushchev again went to Beijing in October 1959 to attempt to straighten things out in the wake of mounting Chinese criticism, Mao would have nothing of it. He attacked the Soviet leader for being capitulationist toward the United States, for supporting India and other non-Communist countries, and for refusing to fully share nuclear weapons technology with China. Khrushchev shot back that the Chinese were extremist, militarist, and unwilling to cooperate. Marshal Chen Yi, the Chinese foreign minister, called Khrushchev a time-server to his face. “If you consider us time-servers, comrade Chen Yi, then do not offer me your hand,” Khrushchev replied. “I will not accept it. . . .You should not spit from the height of your Marshal title. You do not have enough spit. We cannot be intimidated. What a pretty situation we have: On one side, you use the formula ‘headed by the Soviet Union’ [about the international Communist movement], on the other hand, you do not let me say a word.”3 Khrushchev left in the middle of his official visit. Sino-Soviet relations were in tatters.

  But the confrontation between Mao and Khrushchev was only the beginning of the Sino-Soviet split, not its conclusion. In the winter of 1959–1960 Mao began to prepare for an open polemic against Soviet views on international affairs and Communist doctrine. A small group, headed by Deng Xiaoping, was assembled to prepare a series of articles attacking Khrushchev’s views, thinly disguised as those of Marshal Tito and the Yugoslavs. In April 1960, on the ninetieth anniversary of Lenin’s birth, the CCP fired the first barrage. Placing themselves in the position of determining what modern-day Leninism amounted to, the Chinese exhorted Marxist-Leninists worldwide to “thoroughly expose the absurdities of the imperialists and modern revisionists on these questions, eradicate their influence among the masses, awaken those they have temporarily hoodwinked and further arouse the revolutionary will of the masses.”4 In June 1960 the two parties clashed openly at the congress of the Romanian Communist party, displaying to the world that all was not well in the Communist camp. In the wake of the congress Khrushchev’s temper got the better of him, as Mao may have hoped for. On 18 July the Soviet leader ordered the majority of the 1,400 Soviet advisers in China to return home immediately, and most left within three weeks.

  In just two years Mao and the CCP had created a massive economic disaster at home and come close to breaking with all of its allies abroad. Mao proclaimed that it was all good for China; his policies, according to the Chairman himself, ensured national independence and political purity, and therefore laid the foundation for China’s future transformation. But by the autumn
of 1960 cooler heads began to prevail. Looking at the staggering death toll of the Great Leap, Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping, on occasion helped by Premier Zhou Enlai (when he found the courage to do so), began to reverse some of the worst excesses of the party’s policies. The Chairman himself was happy to sit back and let others begin to clear up the mess he had created, though he kept close watch to avoid political deviations. He even allowed a reduction in tension with Moscow, permitting the Soviets to send new advisers in to complete ongoing projects and send food supplies to help alleviate the hunger in some provinces. Mao had no problem with receiving further assistance from Moscow. As late as the spring of 1962 it is doubtful whether he had envisaged a complete break with the Kremlin. He wanted to strengthen his own position in the world Communist movement and gain the freedom to take China in whatever direction he thought best. If the Soviets were willing to accept that, he might not break fully with Khrushchev even in the future, he told his subordinates.

  Throughout the early 1960s, limited forms of cooperation between Beijing and Moscow continued. In April 1961, the two countries signed a new and comprehensive trade agreement, and in the international negotiations on the future of Laos, the Soviets and Chinese worked quite closely together, at least up to the spring of 1962. In some fields, such as intelligence sharing and acquisition of military technology, a bilateral relationship continued to exist up to mid-1964. By then, however, Mao had decided to make the final break with the Soviet Union. To him and his closest supporters, the danger to the Maoist project was clear. The new forms of cooperation with the Soviets taken together with the consolidation in the Chinese economy implied an inherent criticism of the Great Leap Forward. In the summer of 1962, Liu Shaoqi, whom Mao a few years earlier had made president of the People’s Republic, openly castigated the Leap. “We had many flaws and mistakes in implementing the general line, organizing the people’s communes, and conducting the Great Leap Forward, even grave flaws and mistakes,” Liu told the party’s inner circle. “I think it is high time that we look back to examine and draw lessons. We can no longer continue to go on like this.”5 On foreign affairs, the head of CCP International Department Wang Jiaxiang, the Soviet-educated first PRC ambassador to Moscow and a key CCP intellectual, recommended a return to the principle of peaceful coexistence and a continuation of the Sino-Soviet alliance.

  Mao was furious. At two meetings in late summer 1962 he struck back against those he saw as his opponents within the party. “I think that right-wing opportunism in China should be renamed: it should be called Chinese revisionism,” he told his shocked colleagues. The Chairman insisted that the Soviet case showed that class struggle continued under socialism, and that China was engaged, domestically and internationally, in a “struggle against bourgeois ideas, which is identical with the struggle between Marxism-Leninism and revisionism.” “On whether or not revisionism will emerge in our country, one [answer] is yes and the other is no. Now some cadres can be bribed with a pound of pork or a few packs of cigarettes.” Making doubts about the Great Leap a matter of class struggle was tantamount to taking methods earlier employed against the party’s class enemies and using them on party members. It meant that hereafter nobody was safe. Zhou Enlai, eager to please the Chairman and unable to understand the long-term consequences of Mao’s views, immediately fell into line. “The struggle against revisionism has entered a new stage,” the Premier now found, in which “class struggle has become a fundamental issue in our relations with fraternal parties.” Zhou continued, “The truth of Marxism-Leninism and the center of the world revolution have moved from Moscow to Beijing. We should be brave and not shrink from our responsibilities.”6 Mao, as he often did, composed a poem about his own feelings of increasing megalomania:

  On this tiny globe

  A few flies dash themselves against the wall,

  Humming without cease,

  Sometimes shrilling,

  Sometimes moaning. . . .

  The world rolls on,

  Time presses.

  Ten thousand years are too long,

  Seize the day, seize the hour!

  The Four Seas are rising, clouds and waters raging,

  The Five Continents are rocking, wind and thunder roaring.

  Our force is irresistible,

  Away with all pests!7

  AS THE SINO-SOVIET CONFLICT ESCALATED, the search for allies in the Third World intensified. The mid-1950s saw a Soviet charm offensive toward non-Communist regimes such as India and Indonesia. In response, China established as a top priority the developing of good relations with its neighbors in Asia, India included. At the 1955 Afro-Asian conference in Bandung, Indian premier Nehru and Chinese premier Zhou embraced and promised eternal friendship between the two countries. By the end of the decade, however, the Sino-Indian relationship was in tatters. As China’s domestic priorities drifted toward the left, the CCP became less tolerant of the character of the Indian leaders, whom the party saw as the bourgeois successors to British imperialism. China also became more security-minded about its border areas and regretted even the very limited form of de facto autonomy that had been given to Tibet in 1950. When the more radical Chinese policies in Lhasa led to a rebellion in Tibet in 1959 and to the flight of the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan religious leader, Mao Zedong concluded that India was behind the unrest and that New Delhi sought to benefit from it. By the early 1960s the relationship between the two countries was at the breaking point.

  Both the Soviets and the CCP’s own nationalities experts had recommended that the new PRC government go easy on Tibet after Chinese soldiers entered Lhasa in 1950. While local CCP reports from Tibet from the beginning condemned the feudalism and oppression of peasants that they saw in Tibetan society, Mao Zedong and the leadership intially wanted to carry out reform in such a strategically important area gradually and carefully. When smaller uprisings against land reform broke out in the Tibetan borderlands in 1956, the PRC increased its security presence in Lhasa step by step. In the spring of 1959 a rumor that the Chinese were planning to kidnap the Dalai Lama brought hundreds of thousands of Tibetans onto the streets in Lhasa. The PLA crushed what they saw as a rebellion in the Tibetan capital with an iron fist, but in the mêlée that followed Dalai and some members of the Tibetan religious leadership managed to flee across the border into India. Before the Dalai Lama’s flight, the PRC authorities had been complaining to the Soviets for more than a year about what they saw (probably correctly) as Indian and CIA assistance to the Tibetan fighters. With the Tibetan refugees welcomed south of the border, the CCP leaders were certain that they faced an enemy in New Delhi that was intent on stirring up trouble along China’s frontiers.8

  The conflict with India was made worse by Soviet unwillingness to condemn Delhi outright and by China’s increasingly hard-line domestic policies. By the summer of 1962, when Mao turned on those who had been trying to sweep up after the crash of his Great Leap, policy toward India was pulled into the framework of isolation and siege. India choosing this precise time to begin forward patrolling into the disputed border areas of course contributed to the pressure on the authorities in Beijing. Even Mao did not want a war with India; on the contrary, he wanted to limit the border issue in order to concentrate on the Tibetan problem. But when Delhi turned down the Chinese appeal for negotiations, the Chairman saw a direct challenge and was ready to react:

  We fought a war with old Chiang [Kai-shek]. We fought a war with Japan, and with America. We feared none of these. And in each case we won. Now the Indians want to fight a war with us. Naturally we are not afraid. We cannot give ground; if we give ground it would be the same as letting them seize a big piece of land equivalent to Fujian Province. . . . Since Nehru sticks his head out and insists on us fighting him, for us not to fight him would be discourteous. Courtesy means reciprocity.9

  The Chinese attacked on 20 October 1962 along two fronts six hundred miles apart, east of Bhutan and in the western sector south of the Kunlun mountains, near the bo
rder with Pakistan. On both fronts the Indian forces were defeated, and when China declared a ceasefire a month later all of the disputed territory was under Chinese control. For India the outcome of the war was a profound shock: Not only were its forces routed, but the international sympathy and assistance that it had counted on had been of little help. The Soviets stayed neutral in practice, while rhetorically supporting the Chinese position. Mao was not impressed, believing that Khrushchev was simply trying to gain China’s help in the Cuban Missile Crisis, which was taking place at the same time. Most importantly, the war created a sense of enmity and confrontation between Asia’s two biggest countries, a situation that has lasted up to today.

  BY 1963 MAO ZEDONG HAD, almost singlehandedly, managed to wreck the Sino-Soviet relationship. This had been his purpose, at least since the decade began, but it would have been much more difficult if it had not been for the stupendous arrogance of the Soviet political leadership and the political blindness of his colleagues in Beijing. Mao wanted to destroy the relationship to Moscow because he needed to be free, in ideological terms, to take China further to the left, in what came to be called the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. Always a wily operator, Mao made sure that the Chinese leaders he most suspected of disagreeing with his increasing radicalism should bear the brunt of the confrontation with the Soviets, and do so both on ideological and nationalist terms. Deng Xiaoping, who was one of these, was sent to Moscow as head of a CCP delegation in the summer of 1963, with the implicit purpose of attacking the Soviets. Deng was put in a hopeless situation: On the one hand he did not much care for the Soviets at the personal level, but on the other he knew how dependent China’s technology and its whole economic development were on collaborating with Moscow. Still, Deng fulfilled the Chairman’s instructions to the full, as he always did as long as Mao was alive. He told his Soviet hosts that they had created “a split in the ranks of the international Communist movement and, moreover, have done so in an increasingly sharp, increasingly extreme form, in an increasingly organized [way], on an increasingly large scale, trying, come what may, to crush [the CCP].” He added with a wry smile, “I would like to note that using such methods is a habitual affair for you.”10 Not surprisingly, there were no further meetings.