Nixon in China

by Margaret MacMillan

  By this point, the Chinese Communists were coming to the conclusion that the Soviets were generally rather indifferent allies and even worse revolutionaries. 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 programme of rapid development towards 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 was 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 other means 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.12

  Mao’s motive for shelling 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. 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. You may both be wiped out. China too will suffer, but will have four hundred million people left over.’ 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’.13

  Mao’s attitude to 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, Jawarhalal 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.’ As he told his nonplussed comrades at an international Communist meeting in Moscow in 1957, nuclear war would speed up the transition to socialism.14

  Meanwhile, Mao and his colleagues in the People’s Republic wanted their own bomb, partly for its symbolism as a marker of China’s newly regained independence. As his Foreign Minister, Chen Yi, said, ‘Even if it meant becoming 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. 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’. Indeed one of the grievances which 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, he ended all Soviet assistance, including nuclear. When the Chinese successfully exploded their first bomb in the autumn 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!’15

  Later, Mao denied that he had ever made light of nuclear war. ‘We have no atomic bomb,’ he assured Edgar Snow, untruthfully, in 1965. ‘If some other country plans to launch a nuclear war, the whole world may suffer disaster.’ 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 US 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.’ He was also disappointed in the failure of revolutions around the world, in Latin America and, closer to home, in Indonesia, for example, because he had counted on such movements to weaken and eventually topple the great powers.16

  In his new mood of pessimism, Mao started to prepare China for a possible attack. In 1964, he ordered a vast movement of crucial industry inland to the mountains and high plateaux of the west of 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 in 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 crushing. Mao’s Third Front ate up funds otherwise available 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 have been quietly abandoned or moved.17

  Towards the end of the 1960s, Mao made another of his sweeping decisions: China must prepare for invasion. Gigantic mounds of earth were thrown up outside major cities and military sites. In the cities themselves, the Chinese constructed a whole underground world. An American diplomat was given a tour after Nixon’s visit: ‘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.’18

  By the end of the 1960s, Mao and 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 that country 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.’19 The Chinese Communists had no sympathy for the reformers but they were highly alarmed by the Soviet Union’s justification for its invasion. If Soviet forces could intervene in Czechoslovakia, why not in China?

  It was a question that occurred not only to the Chinese but to the Soviet leaders as well. The Soviet Union had been highly critical of Mao since the early 1960s and saw the Cultural Revolution 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.20

  As relations between the two great Communist powers worsened, the 4,000-mile border between them, which had never been entirely settled, became increasingly tense. 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 only added to the tension. The tsars had dictated unequal treaties and the Soviet ‘imperialists’ had continued the tradition. 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 which formed much of the border. The Chinese were also obliged to accept Soviet military cont
rol 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 north-east, 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 600 of 700 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.21

  The Cultural Revolution heated up 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 4,000 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; and, after some exchanges, both sides would withdraw. In late 1968, however, Soviet armoured vehicles ran over and killed four Chinese on an island in the Ussuri River.22

  In response to what they saw as Chinese provocations in the period, the Soviets had been increasing their forces in the Far East. Between 1965 and 1969, Soviet divisions in the area increased from about seventeen to twenty-seven. A new treaty with Outer Mongolia allowed the Soviet Union to station a couple of divisions in that country as well. The Soviets also kept some 225 bombers in the Far East and deployed medium- and short-range rockets capable of carrying nuclear warheads. With a range of 2,000 kilometres, their SS4s 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. 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 felt 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 Army23

  The danger with wars of nerves is that they can lead to mistakes and, in early 1969, it looked as though the Soviet Union and China might find themselves in a major conflict. Trouble started over a mudflat called Zhenbao (or Damansky) Island in the Ussuri River. (It had been the scene of fighting many years earlier in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5.) In late December 1968, Soviet and Chinese soldiers fought with sticks. In the new year, the fighting went on, with growing casualties. Then on 2 March 1969 the Chinese sent in armed guards who refused to withdraw in the expected fashion when the Soviets challenged them. Instead the Chinese opened fire. According to the Chinese, more than fifty Soviets were killed. (Soviet sources said thirty.) Two weeks later, the two sides fought on Zhenbao a second time, now with heavy artillery and tanks, and there were even more dead – according to one source, sixty Soviets and twelve Chinese. Another source says there were over 800 dead Chinese. Both sides claimed victory. The Chinese scornfully described the Soviet soldiers as ‘politically degenerated and morally decadent’. Their own soldiers, they said, ‘armed with Mao Tse-tung Thought’, had easily dealt with even the Soviet tanks. The Americans, though, got intelligence that the Soviets had plastered the island with heavy artillery fire, leaving nothing but a pock-marked surface. The Chinese tried to deliver a note of protest to the Soviet ambassador in Beijing. He refused to receive it. The Chinese threw the note over the Soviet embassy wall; the Soviets threw it back out. The propaganda from both sides became highly emotional with much reference to heroic deaths and bloodstained last letters filled with patriotic sentiments. Soviet commentators now described Maoism as ‘a criminal racist theory’ and the Chinese responded with talk of wild beasts.24

  Much about the events of 1969 remains obscure, although both Chinese and Soviet scholars seem to agree that the Chinese did the most to provoke the exchanges. There has been much speculation since about what motives China might have had. Was Mao sending a signal to the Americans that the rupture between the People’s Republic and the Soviet Union was permanent? Perhaps the signal was rather a ‘bitter lesson’ to the Soviet Union, to show it that the Chinese would resist any aggression or an invasion like the recent one of Czechoslovakia. China had done something similar when it had attacked India in 1962 and then withdrawn after savaging Indian forces, and it was to do it again with Vietnam in 1978. Or, and this is a possibility given his preoccupation with making the Chinese properly revolutionary in their outlook, Mao wanted to create a situation which would rally the Chinese in resistance to the Soviets. As he told Chou En-lai after the second Zhenbao battle, ‘We should let them come in, which will help us in our mobilization’.25

  Whatever the causes of the clashes (and they continued throughout the next months), both sides were left in a highly agitated state, each wondering what the other was up to. The Soviets feared that the new Chinese aggressiveness might be a foretaste of something even worse. Members of the Politburo, said a high-ranking official who later defected to the West, were panicking. ‘A nightmare vision of invasion by millions of Chinese made the Soviet leaders almost frantic.’ Soviet hardliners, including the Defence Minister, disagreed: the time had come to deal with China once and for all. ‘Those squint-eyed bastards,’ the Soviet ambassador at the United Nations complained to American diplomats. ‘We’ll kill those yellow sons of bitches.’ Others, among them Alexei Kosygin, the Soviet Premier, urged that the Soviet Union should try to defuse a dangerous situation. Kosygin used a hotline for the first time in years to telephone Beijing, asking to speak to either Mao or Chou En-lai, but the Chinese operator refused to put through a call from a ‘scoundrel revisionist’. The next day, the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs sent a cool note to say that ‘in view of the present relations between China and the Soviet Union, it is unsuitable to communicate by telephone’. If the Soviet Union had anything to say, it could do so in writing. Yet, when the Soviets tried to initiate discussions through an exchange of memorandums, the Chinese at first refused to reply and then sent a patronizing admonition: ‘Please calm down, don’t get excited.’26

  To persuade the Chinese into a more accommodating frame of mind, Soviet hardliners gained government permission to carry out a limited military action in August on the borders of the Soviet Union and Xinjiang province in China’s far west. If their attack on Chinese positions resulted in full-scale war, so be it. Although Kosygin and the other moderates continued to hope for discussions with the Chinese, they also explored other options. The Soviet Union sent out a score of delegations to Asian countries to see about establishing an Asian Collective Security system which would clearly be directed against the People’s Republic. In June 1969, American intelligence picked up reports that Soviet bomber units had been sent to Outer Mongolia and were carrying out what looked like mock attacks on Chinese targets. In August, a Soviet diplomat in Washington had lunch with an official from the State Department. What, the diplomat asked, would be the US reaction if the Soviet Union were to bomb a Chinese nuclear facility? The Americans picked up reports of similar queries to Warsaw Pact countries in Eastern Europe. Late that month, Nixon and Kissinger were both briefed by Allen Whiting, a China specialist, who warned that the Soviet Union was getting itself into
a position where it could successfully attack. (This may have been the moment when Kissinger finally accepted that Nixon was right, that the time was favourable for an American move towards China.)27

  The Nixon administration was seriously concerned: it did not want either a general war or a Chinese defeat. It sent out signals to both sides. In late August, Richard Helms, Director of the CIA, gave diplomatic correspondents a confidential briefing which inevitably leaked to the press. He warned of a possible Soviet strike on China. A week later Elliot Richardson, the Under-Secretary of State, told a political science conference in New York that the United States had no intention of exploiting the hostility between the Soviet Union and the People’s Republic. ‘We could not fail to be deeply concerned, however, with an escalation of this quarrel into a massive breach of international peace and security.’28

  Opinion among the Chinese leadership after the March clashes had also been divided. A group led by Mao’s chosen successor, Lin Biao, believed that the Soviet Union was ready to take serious action against China, while men such as the former Foreign Minister Chen Yi argued for diplomacy to resolve the tensions. Mao himself, who was the final arbiter of China’s policy, seems to have had trouble making up his mind. He told Chou En-lai to stop the fighting after the second clash on Zhenbao Island in March, but he also gave orders that China should prepare to fight a war. Nothing much was actually done. Perhaps Mao thought that the Soviet Union had been taught its lesson. In any case, he assumed that its main interests lay in Europe, not the Far East.29