Restless Empire

by Odd Westad

  Instead there was an escalation of conflict between the two Communist giants bordering on war. From 1962 on, Chinese spokesmen had claimed that the Soviets were putting military pressure on their common border. The defection of large numbers of people from Xinjiang, China’s westernmost province, to the Soviet Union only confirmed to the CCP faithful that the Soviets were now their sworn enemies (even though it is more likely that it was a combination of Great Leap–induced hunger and Soviet blandishments that produced the mass decampment). In the summer of 1964 Mao said, “We cannot only pay attention to the East [the United States] and not to the North, only pay attention to imperialism and not revisionism, we must prepare for war on both sides.” And at the same time he made his most ominous statement vis-à-vis the Soviets. “About a hundred years ago,” he told a visiting group of Japanese, “the area east of Baikal became Russian territory, and since then Vladivostok, Khabarovsk, Kamchatka, and other points have become territories of the Soviet Union. We have not yet presented the bill for this list.”11

  Mao now took a major step in breaking with both superpowers. After the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, the Soviet Union and the United States had begun edging back from the brink. In August 1963, along with the United Kingdom, they signed the nuclear test ban treaty, lowering the temperature of the Cold War. Mao would have none of it. In October 1964 he took his country out of interaction with most of world society with the first successful Chinese nuclear test. Now China had its own nuclear capability, and the security that went with it, Mao believed. By the end of the year the Chairman began to speak darkly about enemies of the revolution and “capitalist roaders” within the Chinese Communist Party. During 1965 the preparations for a major purge were visibly underway. Mao criticized the CCP Secretariat and the Central State Planning Commission as independent kingdoms outside his control. Whenever there was an opportunity, he beat the drums of war—against the Americans in Vietnam, against the Soviets in the north, against all comers who wanted to destroy China. In October 1965 he told a startled group of party officials that “we must prepare for war. . . . Do not be afraid of mutiny or rebellion.” He added, “What will you do if revisionism emerges in the Central Committee? In that event, you must rebel. . . . Now you must remember, whatever one says, be it the Central Committee, its bureaus or the provincial party committees, you can refuse to implement it if it is not correct.”12 Very soon afterward Mao left Beijing for secret locations in the provinces, not to return until the summer of 1966, when the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution—as he called his new campaign—was washing all over China.

  Mao had engineered China’s isolation so he could prepare for his great purge. But he also attempted to use his theories about people’s war to appeal to Third World countries and radical groups to align with China and create a new center in international affairs. Marshal Lin Biao, who had reemerged to become Mao’s chief henchman in the military, the most obsequious singer of the Chairman’s praise, and, eventually Mao’s chosen successor, had put his name to a text entitled “Long Live the Victory of People’s War” in September 1965. In it, he hailed Mao as a genius whose “great merit lies in the fact that he has succeeded in integrating the universal truth of Marxism-Leninism with the concrete practice of the Chinese revolution and has enriched and developed Marxism-Leninism by his masterly generalization and summation of the experience gained during the Chinese people’s protracted revolutionary struggle.” Lin reminded people around the world that Mao’s “theory of the establishment of rural revolutionary base areas and the encirclement of the cities from the countryside is of outstanding and universal practical importance for the present revolutionary struggles of all the oppressed nations and peoples, and particularly for the revolutionary struggles of the oppressed nations and peoples in Asia, Africa and Latin America against imperialism and its lackeys.”13 In other words, China would support revolutionary groups in other countries, but only if they recognized Mao’s strategic genius first.

  FOR THE REVOLUTIONARIES NEXT DOOR, China’s new turn to the extreme left could not have come at a worse time. Both North Vietnam and North Korea had learned to navigate the choppy waters created by the Sino-Soviet split and become quite accomplished at getting support from both. Now Mao insisted that they had to choose, just at the point when both were most in need of foreign assistance. US ground troops had landed in Vietnam in 1965, and the Vietnamese Communists had to design a strategy to defeat them to achieve their aim of reunifying their country under their party’s leadership. In North Korea, Kim Il-sung had been hoping that the American involvement in Vietnam would allow him to put more pressure on the South, but instead found himself facing a Chinese regime that insisted on total loyalty to its ideals.

  The leaders in North Vietnam and of the National Liberation Front in the South had used the widening ideological split between the Chinese and the Soviets to push a more aggressive strategy for reunifying the country. In the early 1960s, the Chinese had, in most respects, supported the Vietnamese policy, while the Soviets had called for patience and negotiations in order to avoid a further US involvement. Even Beijing, though, had advised the North Vietnamese to not move too fast, out of fear of dragging China into another direct confrontation with the United States similar to what had happened in Korea fifteen years earlier. Mao knew, of course, that without Soviet aid, China stood no chance in a war against the Americans. Instead China limited itself to sending advisers and limited amounts of materiel to support North Vietnam, while building a close political relationship with its leaders. By 1964 North Vietnam was close to joining China outright in its ideological attacks on the Soviet Union, in spite of still receiving Soviet aid. The Vietnamese, especially Ho Chi Minh and his successor Le Duan, were inspired by the Chinese road to socialism. They genuinely believed that the Chinese methods of great leaps and extreme collectivism were better suited for Vietnam’s modernization than what they saw as the more moderate Soviet ways. Linked to their ideological predilections were the cultural closeness with China and the long and intimate relations between their two Communist parties. Finally, they knew that theirs would be a long struggle, and that China was a next-door neighbor, the only likely candidate to furnish the support they needed over time. Though there were still Vietnamese Communists who, for historical reasons, feared China’s long-term influence, the relationship between the two in the first half of the 1960s was overwhelmingly positive.

  The US ground intervention in Vietnam in the spring of 1965, just as Chinese politics were moving toward the Cultural Revolution, changed the strategic picture both for Hanoi and Beijing. The North Vietnamese leaders now had to fight a rapidly escalating war directly against US forces, and were in desperate need of weapons and economic support. The Soviets, who had already reacted angrily against the US bombing of North Vietnam, which began in the autumn of 1964, started a large-scale program of supplying Hanoi with what they needed most: aircraft, tanks, and air defenses. Mao wanted China to take a more differentiated position. China’s military advisers and support troops, who were already in the North, should be augmented but not engage in the fighting. China should step up its material assistance to North Vietnam, but mainly in terms of basic supplies, thereby not depleting stocks that China would need for its own defense. Covertly, China should warn the Americans that an invasion of North Vietnam would mean war with the PRC (thereby avoiding a Korean War scenario, where Chinese troops first intervened when US troops were nearing their border). And—first and foremost—Chinese representatives should guard against Soviet perfidy and deceptions. Mao speculated that Moscow might be planning to attack China under the guise of bringing advanced weapons to Vietnam or might want to provoke a devastating Sino-American war.

  Mao’s instructions led to a Chinese foreign policy disaster in Vietnam. China managed to stay out of the war, but Mao’s policies destroyed the country’s close relationship to the Vietnamese leaders that had been carefully built over two generations. Le Duan, who had been a supporter
of Chinese views, could not understand why Beijing seemed to put all possible hindrances in the way of urgently needed Soviet aid reaching Vietnam through Chinese territory. He and the other Vietnamese leaders also resented Chinese beratings on tactics and strategy, which became increasingly shrill and Sino-centric as the Cultural Revolution progressed, attempting to push Hanoi to choose between Soviet or Chinese aid. As the Soviet program of increased military aid to the Vietnamese Communist forces got going in 1965, Zhou Enlai told the Vietnamese that Soviet help was “not sincere.” Such aid served US interests, he said, and Vietnam would be better off without it.14 In 1966, Deng Xiaoping, himself soon to be purged in the Cultural Revolution, yelled at Le Duan, who had mentioned concerns about Chinese propaganda inside Vietnam:

  What are you still afraid of? Why are you afraid of displeasing the Soviets, and what about China? I want to tell you frankly what I now feel: Vietnamese comrades have some other thoughts about our methods of assistance, but you have not yet told us. . . . It is not only the matters concerning our judgment on the Soviet aid. Are you suspicious that China helps Vietnam for our own intentions? We hope that you can tell us directly if you want us to help. The problem will easily be solved. We will withdraw our military men at once. We have a lot of things to do in China. And the military men stationed along the border will be ordered back to the mainland.15

  By 1969, the Communist Vietnamese leaders were convinced that China was not acting in their country’s best interests. They now believed that the PRC planned to dominate a future reunified Vietnam and that the Chinese wanted the war to go on for as long as possible to take strategic pressure off China itself. Some even suspected that by prolonging the war, China hoped to force the United States into some kind of modus vivendi with the PRC. In other words, China was willing to fight the Vietnam War to the last Vietnamese. It was a relationship in which something had to give.

  If things were bad in Vietnam, they were not much better across the border in comradely North Korea. Like his North Vietnamese comrades, Kim Il-sung had at first sided with the Chinese in their disputes with the Soviets. Mao Zedong, Kim believed, was much closer than the new Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev to the kind of socialism Kim wanted to create in Korea: authoritarian, intense, and rapidly progressing. But by 1966 Kim had begun to have his doubts. Having Chinese advisers and students in his own capital Pyongyang shout slogans about the greatness of Mao Zedong Thought and against the revisionists was a step too far, in his view. Having attempted and failed to rein them in through his “advice” to the Chinese embassy, Kim denounced Beijing for its “superpower chauvinism” and called Mao’s cherished Red Guards “kids who know nothing about politics.” Kim had hoped for a reinvigorated alliance that could help him stage an offensive against South Korea. But now he had suddenly a new security concern on his northern border. Over loudspeakers set up along the entire frontier with North Korea, China began agitation against the “Korean revisionists.” Drawing closer to the Soviets, Kim furiously condemned what he called the idiocy of the Cultural Revolution. In Beijing, the Red Guards warned “Kim Il-sung and his breed that those who collaborate with the U.S. or with revisionism, and continue with anti-Chinese policies, will come to a bad end. Sooner or later the Korean people will rise up and settle scores.”16

  BY THE MID-1960S, China had only one remaining foreign policy strategy. It was based on Mao’s insistence that his country was heading an undefined and unorganized Third World front against both American imperialism and Soviet revisionism. Countries such as Indonesia, Algeria, Ghana, and Cuba, Mao asserted, were part of the front and would, in the end, join with China in overcoming Western dominance. War was coming, the Chairman said, and the Third World, led by China, would be the victor. “The Soviet Union came out of the First World War,” Mao told an Indonesian visitor. “China and many other socialist countries came out of the Second World War; and imperialism will perish in a Third World War.”17 But the problem for Chinese policies was not only that difficulties abounded in its relations with putative Third World allies but also that the radical leaders in these countries seemed to be losing influence. By the late 1960s all of China’s Third World allies were gone, because their leaders had been overthrown, they had joined up with the Soviets, or simply because they had tired of China’s know-it-all attitude and self-centered militancy.

  Indonesia had been a top Chinese priority since the 1950s. By far the biggest country in Southeast Asia, Indonesia was led by Sukarno, a radical anti-imperialist and eclectic socialist with increasingly close relations to the local Communist party. As we have seen, Indonesia also has a large ethnic Chinese population, some of which was influential in the country’s trade and industry. The PRC was, in turn, embarrassed by the Sino-Indonesian petit bourgeoisie and motivated by the wish to be seen as the protector of all Chinese living abroad. Still, Mao’s main aim was to ally himself with Sukarno’s regime and with the Indonesian Communist Party as part of it. In his meeting with the Indonesian leader in June 1961, Mao hailed Sukarno as the leader of the nonaligned world, implying that the untrustworthy Nehru was trying to steal the crown off him. In January 1963, Liu Shaoqi proclaimed that Indonesia had replaced India as the fulcrum of Third World anti-imperialism and anticolonialism.18

  But as China’s own policies turned ever leftward, the leaders in Beijing became increasingly preoccupied with what they saw as the Indonesian regime’s bourgeois character. From 1962, Indonesia was involved in an undeclared jungle war against Malaysia in Borneo. China supported Indonesia, and its leaders were shocked when Sukarno in 1964 went to the negotiating table. The Chinese thought Sukarno had fallen under the influence of the Americans. US Attorney General Robert Kennedy, brother of the recently assassinated president, had just met with Sukarno to discuss peace. The Chinese saw the Indonesian decision as “instigated by Robert Kennedy” and reflecting “the dark side and the double-dealings of bourgeois nationalists.” China therefore increasingly prioritized its support for the Indonesian Communist Party and its militia, which they began to supply with arms and training from early 1965.19 There is little doubt that China’s support encouraged those Indonesian Communists and sympathizers who attempted to carry out a coup in October 1965 and thereby facilitated the army’s subsequent crushing of the left in Indonesia. The result was a new anti-Communist regime, as well as thousands of Indonesians of Chinese descent killed in the massacres the coup leaders instigated.

  In Africa the trajectory of China’s involvement was similar. In Ghana, the radical president Kwame Nkrumah had been happy to receive Chinese aid. But in 1964–1965, his country became a center for Chinese guerrilla training of various left-wing movements. The Chinese advice to set up a people’s militia helped trigger the army coup that overthrew Nkrumah. In Algeria, the relationship between the new revolutionary government of Ahmed Ben Bella and the Chinese had been very close immediately after Algerian independence in 1962. But by 1965 it had soured, in part because of Algeria’s increasing cooperation with the Soviet Union. According to the Chinese Foreign Ministry, Ben Bella’s anti-imperialism was just “tough talk, weak action.” The Chinese embassy in Algeria questioned whether he had the courage to use “revolutionary means” to overcome Algeria’s economic difficulties: “the Algerian ruling group is very arrogant and conceited, but its tiger’s ass can still be petted.”20 When Ben Bella was overthrown by a military coup in June 1965 the Chinese breathed a sigh of relief and immediately recognized the new government. It was the first of many Chinese recognitions of military regimes in the Third World in the 1970s and 1980s simply because they were seen (wrongly, in the Algerian case) to be anti-Soviet. China’s Third World policy was nearing both its intellectual and political bankruptcy.

  The slap that smarted most in Beijing was Cuba’s turn toward the Soviets. Although Fidel Castro and Che Guevara undoubtedly were closer to much of the fine print in the Chinese elaboration of socialism, the Soviet economic model was more manageable and Soviet assistance had fewer strings att
ached. China wanted Cuba to allow dissemination of Chinese propaganda on the island. It asked for a more balanced approach to themselves and the Soviets. When in 1966 the Chinese threatened reductions in Sino-Cuban trade, Castro exploded. He publicly charged China with committing “a criminal act of economic aggression against our country” and joining the US-led embargo of Cuba. China’s actions, Castro said,

  can be explained only as a display of absolute contempt toward our country, of total ignorance of the character and sense of dignity of our people. It was not simply a matter of more or less tons of rice, or more or less square meters of cloth, which were also involved, but of a much more important and fundamental questions for the peoples: whether in the world of tomorrow powerful nations can assume the right to blackmail, extort, pressure, attack, and strangle small peoples; whether in the world of tomorrow, which the revolutionaries are struggling to establish, there are to continue to prevail the worst methods of piracy, oppression, and filibusterism. . . . Our revolutionary state could not allow such an attempt to influence military and administrative cadres by acts that constitute a betrayal of the trust, friendship, and brotherhood with which our country receives the representatives of any socialist state.21