Nixon and Mao

by Margaret MacMillan

  The mutual mistrust was about much more than culture alone. From the Chinese side, it was about national humiliation. Russia had been one of the powers imposing unequal treaties and threatening to carve up China. When the Russians had expanded eastward to the Pacific in the nineteenth century, they had seized territory the Chinese regarded as theirs. At the turn of the century, there had been Russian moves into Manchuria, with Russian-built railways and a Russian port at Manchuria’s southern tip. When Japan challenged Russian control there, a weak China had been obliged to sit on the sidelines as the Russo-Japanese war of 1904–05 was fought to decide which outside power ran one of China’s richest provinces. After the Bolshevik revolution of 1917, the new Soviet rulers had promised to hand back to China the territory seized in the old czarist days but, somehow, the moment for doing so never arrived. In fact, in 1924, the Soviet Union blocked China’s hope of reestablishing control over territory the Chinese had long argued was theirs by recognizing the independence of Outer Mongolia. As the Second World War drew to a close, Stalin shocked the Chinese Communists by signing a treaty with their enemy Chiang Kai-shek. The treaty not only gave the Nationalists recognition as the legitimate government of China but gave the Soviet Union extensive concessions, including the use of the southern port of Dairen, in Manchuria. The Soviets were also active in China’s western province of Xinjiang, hoping, with the aid of local Communists, to turn it into another Outer Mongolia.

  Although representatives from the Soviet Union helped bring the Chinese Communist Party into existence and provided much essential funding, the Chinese Communists accumulated much to reproach their mentors with over the years. Soviet advice to work with the Guomindang in the 1920s in the hopes of overthrowing it later had produced instead the triumph of Chiang Kai-shek and the near annihilation of the Communist Party. That had led, in turn, to the long years when Mao and his colleagues stumbled about the countryside, trying to find a safe haven.

  Even when Chinese Communist fortunes improved after Japan invaded China, Stalin continued to put his faith in Chiang Kai-shek and the Guomindang as the natural rulers of China and to urge caution on the Chinese Communists. When the Second World War ended, the Soviet leader urged Mao to go to China’s wartime capital of Chongqing and have talks with Chiang Kai-shek rather than try to fight the Guomindang. In the spring of 1949, when Chinese Communist forces stood on the banks of the Yangtze, ready to continue their advance southward, Stalin told Mao he should be content to control the northern part of China. In 1950, when the Communist victory was complete, Stalin told Liu Shaoqi, “We feel that perhaps we hampered you in the past.” And he made what was, for Stalin, a highly uncharacteristic statement: “We did not know a lot about you, so it’s possible that we made mistakes.”6

  What the Soviets did know they did not much like. In 1941 and 1942, while the Soviet Union was fighting for its survival against Nazi Germany, Stalin had begged Mao in vain to attack Japanese forces in China in order to prevent them from attacking the Soviet Union itself.7 In the event, Japan had respected its nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union, and the Chinese Communists had launched a halfhearted attack only in 1943. In any case, Stalin always had trouble with foreign Communists who were too independent. In China, Stalin would have preferred someone educated in Moscow. The Soviets, as keepers of the revolutionary flame, also regarded the Chinese Communists as ideologically primitive. Mao, in Stalin’s words, was a “margarine Marxist.”8 It was particularly irritating, then, when the Chinese Communists lauded the greatness of Mao’s thought and held his ideas up as a model for the rest of the world.

  The years after 1949 saw much public rhetoric about the undying friendship between the Soviet and the Chinese peoples, and friendship associations sprang up in both countries, acquiring millions of members overnight. Underneath the surface, however, the mutual suspicions and old grievances festered. Stalin feared that the Chinese Communists would either make their peace with the Americans or recklessly provoke a military confrontation—in particular, one over Taiwan. In either case, from Stalin’s point of view, the Soviet Union would find an aggressive United States on its eastern doorstep. Although Mao made it clear that he was leaning to the Soviet side in world affairs, he was also determined to get Taiwan back. For that, however, he needed substantial Soviet military assistance. China as a whole needed whatever aid the Soviets could supply to start the long work of rebuilding and developing its economy. Mao knew that Stalin hoped to keep the People’s Republic as a junior partner in the Communist bloc, and he knew that the Soviets had allies within his own party. In Manchuria, the local Communist leader, Gao Gang, prominently displayed portraits of Stalin. There were none of Mao to be seen. (An emergency meeting in Beijing condemned Gao for shaming China in this way, and most of Stalin’s portraits came down.)9

  In December 1949, Mao went to Moscow by train to negotiate a new treaty between China and the Soviet Union and to obtain much-needed Soviet aid. This was at a time when the Chinese Communists were confronting the huge problems of establishing their new regime in a China badly damaged by years of war. The first meeting, when Mao’s train pulled into Moscow, gave a hint of what was to come. The Soviet welcome was formal but disdainful. Two senior Soviet officials, Vyacheslav Molotov and Nikolai Bulganin, greeted Mao but refused to have any of the elaborate lunch that the Chinese had prepared, not even a drink. That evening, when Mao finally met Stalin, the two Communist statesmen chatted politely but with reserve. Both circled around the issue of what sort of agreement should be made between their two countries, whether, as the Soviets wished, their existing treaty with the vanished Guomindang government should simply be updated or, as Mao wanted, a new, more favorable treaty for China should be implemented.10 Stalin simply stonewalled, keeping Mao hanging about for two months in comfortable seclusion at the Soviet leader’s own dacha outside Moscow. When Stalin abruptly canceled a day of talks, Mao shouted in a rage to his Soviet attendants that he was left with only three things to do: “The first is to eat, the second is to sleep, and the third is to shit.”11

  The two sides finally hammered out the new Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance by the middle of February1950. At the celebratory banquet, both Mao and Stalin appeared to be in bad moods. It did not help that Stalin chose the occasion to make a speech denouncing Tito of Yugoslavia.12 The treaty, as the Chinese Communists had wished, was a new one, but it contained several of the same provisions as the previous treaty with the Nationalists. Xinjiang Province and Manchuria were both effectively Soviet spheres of influence, with Soviet companies working there on very favorable terms. China and the Soviet Union would defend each other against Japan and its allies, which now included the United States. Stalin had made some minor concessions: Soviet control of two key Manchurian cities and a railway, for example, would end sooner than before. He had also promised financial aid, though less, as it turned out, than the Soviet Union was to provide to its satellite East Germany. In addition, the two sides had reached a tacit understanding that the Soviet Union would leave spreading revolution in Asia to the People’s Republic of China. From the United States’ perspective, the Sino-Soviet friendship and the alliance looked solid, and were deeply worrying, in the context of the loss of Eastern Europe to the Soviet Union, the explosion in August 1949 of the first Soviet atomic bomb, the discovery of extensive Soviet spy rings in the West, and then, of course, the Korean War.13

  Stalin might have hoped that the United States would not become involved and that a victorious North Korea would provide him with a united country firmly under his sway. Or, in the spirit of the gambler he was, he might have also seen an advantage in the United States entering the conflict because that would put pressure on the People’s Republic and force it closer to the Soviet Union.14 In either case, the needs of China were clearly of secondary importance to him. Although he encouraged the Chinese Communists to enter the war against the American-led forces, he proved surprisingly reluctant to provide them with
adequate military assistance. He would not, he said, be able to send units of the Soviet air force right away to give the Chinese air cover.15 In the end, the Soviet Union sent a significant number of planes (the Soviet pilots wore Chinese uniforms in case they were captured) and other military hardware. What we now know, of course, is that the war also added fresh strains to the relationship between the Chinese and the Soviets. The Chinese had to pay for everything they received, and China did not discharge the last of its debt until 1965.16 When relations between the two great Communist powers soured in later years, Chinese officials complained about the inferior guns and ammunition sent by the Soviet “merchants of death.”

  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.17

  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.18 When the Chinese offered to send laborers to Siberia, Khrushchev said he smelled a rat: “They wanted to take over Siberia without war.”19 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?”20 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.21 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.22

  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.23 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.”24 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.”25

  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.”26 As he told his nonplussed comrades at an international Communist meeting in Moscow in 1957, nuclear war would speed up the transition to socialism.27

  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.28 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.”29 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!”30

  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.”31 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.”32 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.33

  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.34

  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.35 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.”36