SOVIET STUDIES, vol. XXXV, no. 4, October 1983, pp. 457-470

SINO-SOVIET RELATIONS: AN INTERPRETATION

By WILLIAM V. WALLACE

THIS article is based on a paper read in Beijing in April 1982. The opening disclaimer madethen still holds. It is not easy to pass sound judgements on another country's foreign policy.It is even less easy to evaluate two foreign policies in dispute. And in the case ofSino-Soviet relations the task is made particularly difficult by the inadequacy of theevidence and the strength of the feelings involved.1 However, the importance of attempt-ing an examination has in no way declined; on the contrary, with the opening of talksbetween the People's Republic and the Soviet Union, it has increased. Hostility orrapprochement between the country with the largest population in the world and thecountry with the largest territory is of interest to every other country because it affectsthem all.

The Importance of History and Geography

Any serious discussion of relations between China and Russia must take account of bothhistory and geography. In spite of the fact that they are next-door neighbours andostensibly share the same ideology, in historical terms their contact has been relativelyslight and seldom friendly. There was a long gap between their first meeting, the treaty ofNipchu or Nerchinsk in 1689, when two rather weak states agreed on a common frontier,and the build-up of Russian eastwards expansion in the mid-nineteenth century whichculminated in the seizure of about 1.5 million square kilometres of Chinese territory in aseries of treaties, particularly that of Beijing in 1860. In between times, China decayedquietly within its frontiers, and Russia concerned itself with breaking into Europe andseeking naval outlets to the Atlantic and the Mediterranean. Their mutual trade wasrewarding, but not extensive.

Even after 1860 their peoples remained for the most part in ignorance of each other; andgiven the autocratic and xenophobic nature of the Chinese government in particular, therewas not much awareness among officials either. But serious damage had been done by theso-called 'unequal' treaties. As upsetting to the Chinese as the theft of territory were themethods used, alternately aggression and spurious protection, which put Russia in thesame category as other predatory powers approaching from the sea. And the misbehaviourcontinued. Indeed, in the period down to 1905 when it was checked by Japan, Russiaarguably outdid the other powers in acquiring a dominant role in Manchuria and assertingits influence over China.

Latterly, of course, resentment at Russia's role and satisfaction at its defeat fuelled theChinese national movement towards the destruction of the Qing dynasty in 1911, just asthe bankruptcy of Tsarist policy in China and elsewhere abroad swept Russia into theBolshevik Revolution in 1917 and the abrogation of its claims to Manchuria. For a while

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contact between the two states was minimal and friction nil. Yet as the new Soviet regimeasserted itself and pushed the Japanese out of Siberia, it rediscovered the value ofManchuria, at least for communication with the Pacific; and in the end it was only savedfrom a sharp conflict with China over railway rights by Japan's seizure of the whole ofManchuria in 1931. At the Yalta conference early in 1945, Japan's impending defeatprovided Stalin with a chance to reconsider Soviet policy. Yet what he came up with wasthe old Tsarist position of a pre-eminent interest in Manchuria itself and a lease on Lushun(Port Arthur) as a naval base at the head of the Yellow Sea.

But in the spring of 1946 he so far modified his policy as to yield to the ChineseCommunists some of the Manchurian area he had seized, but not before stripping it ofmost of its industrial equipment. And it was not until the autumn of 1954, five years afterthe establishment of the Chinese People's Republic, that the Soviet Union withdrew fromits last outpost at Lushun. There is now no Russian presence on Chinese territory.However the past is not forgotten, nor the significant fact that on this occasion it was Chinaitself that thwarted Russia. China has declared itself willing to accept the frontiersdelineated by the unequal treaties. But an important element in its breach with the SovietUnion in the 1960s was its refusal to agree completely to the Soviet interpretation of thetreaties and, more particularly, to tolerate the Soviet assertion of historical rights backedby military force with all that it appeared to imply in the way of a further revival ofpre-1905 policy. So long as China is not reassured on this issue, its contacts with the SovietUnion will be limited and hardly cordial. And since the breach, Soviet historians have beenhard at work reinterpreting the Russian-Chinese past in terms of the treaty of Nerchinskbeing 'unequal' against Russia and the treaty of Beijing providing only partial restitution,2

a view which reflects possible ambition as well as a certain understandable defensivenessand which, if it is maintained, will hold out little hope of closer and more amicablerelations.

Contact between China and Russia at the other end of their joint frontier has more oftenthan not also been hostile. Tsarist expansion into Central Asia during the nineteenthcentury brought Russia to the border of Chinese Xinjiang (Sinkiang); and it was only theneed for Britain's friendship after 1905 that prevented an incursion. When in the 1930sChina was weakened by civil strife and Japanese invasion, Stalin was tempted to establish aprotectorate in Xinjiang which he abandoned reluctantly only in face of Hitler's attack inthe west. Recovered from that, he several times dabbled in local Xinjiang revolts in themid-1940s; and he may even have been angling for an independent province when MaoZedong pre-empted the position neatly in 1949 by a rapid advance. It was still 1954 beforethe Soviet Union surrendered its proposed share in raw material exploitation in Xinjiang;and some saw a Soviet hand in further local revolts in the late 1950s. Recently, the regionhas not figured as an area of dispute. But the Uygur majority on the Chinese side of thefrontier has a minority on the Soviet side; and the same is true in reverse of the Kazakhs.China's non-Han peoples are mainly in the west, often close to the frontier. The SovietUnion's non-Russian peoples are more widely spread, but many are in the east, also nearthe frontier. And if China regards Russia's expansion into Central Asia as relativelyrecent, the Soviet Union can equally retort that China's incorporation of Xinjiang onlydates from 1878. If dying disputes were to be resurrected, they could have a newdimension.

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The stretch of frontier from Manchuria to Xinjiang is not between China and the SovietUnion, but between China and Outer Mongolia. But it is no less immersed in past conflict,and no less capable of promoting fresh tension with the Soviet Union. Russia firstnegotiated Mongol-inhabited territory from China in 1689 and still holds it, around LakeBaikal. The sovereignty over Outer Mongolia claimed by the Manchu dynasty was alsoasserted by their successors, Mao included. However, since 1911 the territory has beenmostly free of Chinese rule; and since 1921, though nominally autonomous, it has beenincreasingly under Soviet tutelage. At the Yalta conference Stalin insisted on recognisingits formal independence of China; and in 1950, unable to do anything else, Mao tooagreed. In 1962 Khrushchev admitted Outer Mongolia to Comecon, a clear extension of theSoviet position at a crucial moment and an act Chinese leaders still deeply resent.Formally, there the position rests. But there are at least as many Mongols in China'scarefully cultivated Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region as in cross-border Outer Mon-golia. Quite apart from what Mongol wishes in the matter may be, the past has left anunequal legacy which the Soviet Union seems set to defend and which China could chooseto contest in a number of ways. However, playing on minority feelings can be a game fortwo: there have been reports of Soviet support in the past for disaffected Mongols inChina.

In the broad sense, geography, too, does not help to make the Chinese-Soviet relation-ship closer or more cordial. In terms of communication the two capitals are a long distanceapart; but in military terms Beijing is incomparably much closer to the common frontier.Despite Vladivostok and, since 1945, Southern Sakhalin and the Kuriles taken fromJapan, the Soviet Union still feels obstructed from the Pacific. Because of these acquisi-tions, and in consequence of the Korean War, China feels outflanked—all the more sosince the Soviet Union established a presence in Vietnam in the years 1960-65. China'srepossession of Tibet in 1950 narrowed the Soviet Union's road to the Indian sub-continent; but the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 may have broadened it again. Depend-ing on the point of view, Siberia and the Soviet Far East are wastes exposed to a populationexploding from the south, or encampments bustling with northern invaders. The frontieritself is a long one on either side of which to provide security (the longest inter-statefrontier in the world). To the north and west, natural resources are beyond the presentpool of labour and transport to cope with; to the south and east, there is an abundance oflabour and an outlet to the Pacific. Yet taking the two countries as a whole, theireconomies are essentially exclusive, not complementary; and their lack of mutual trade isnot merely political in its origin, nor particularly likely to be a passing phenomenon.3

Lost opportunities and new differences

It could be argued that a history of much separation and some conflict should have beenovercome and that the problems of geography should have been sidestepped, though froma historical point of view these are very early days yet. The argument is strengthened, giventhe philosophy of Marxism that both the People's Republic and the Soviet Union claim toadhere to. Marxism is certainly authoritarian; the concept of the dictatorship of theproletariat is one example; the notion of democratic centralism as developed by Lenin isanother. But between states or ruling groups that are like-minded in their authoritarianism

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there ought to be sufficient sympathy or understanding to overcome differences, the moreso when their ultimate socio-economic objectives are the same. In theory, Marxism is aloose enough collection of ideas to enable different states to interpret them in divergentways and still live in peace together. But in practice, in Eastern Europe for instance, thesituation has been otherwise; the pacifying factor has been Soviet dominance.4 The fact isthat, whatever the validity or otherwise of his deductions and prognostications fromhistory, Marx did not produce a theory of post-revolutionary relations because he couldnot conceive of a post-revolutionary situation needing it. He simply assumed that, whenthe revolution came, it would be universal, so that there would be no call for conventionalinter-state relations. On the morrow of the Bolshevik Revolution, Trotsky made the samemistaken assumption. But the revolution was as neither of them expected. It came only inRussia. It did not materialise internationally; and to survive, Lenin and his successorsnationalised it. They adapted Marxist principles to suit isolated Russian conditions, butregarded them inevitably as universal in application. They got used to developing relationswith foreign capitalist governments as well as with communist movements anxious tooverthrow them.5 So when the Chinese Communist Party eventually came to power thirtyyears later, it found a Soviet Party whose precepts were often irrelevant to Chineseconditions and whose most extensive experience was of negotiating with the defeatedChiang Kai-shek, a Party which soon appeared in its eyes not even to be Marxist.Conversely, the Soviet leaders found a Chinese Party that was idiosyncratic and unwilling toaccept their obviously good advice and direction, and that therefore seemed in their eyesnot to be Marxist. This was a situation that Marx had not envisaged, and a split that acommon claim to Marxism was more likely to widen than to close.

At a time when Chinese leaders are reputedly seeking better relations with the SovietUnion at the level of party as well as of government, it is important to have someunderstanding of their debts as well as of their differences. The Chinese Communist Partythat was founded in 1921 was part and parcel of the Chinese revolutionary movement, butit also stemmed directly from the success and relevance of the Bolshevik Revolution and toa large extent depended on the continued existence and remarkable development of theSoviet Union for its own ability to survive and eventually to triumph, quite apart fromwhether or not it got good advice and support. Equally, the emergence of the Soviet Unionas a super-power in the post-war period was a natural consequence of the development ofRussia from Tsarist times, accelerated by Stalin's drive and the needs of war; but it owednot a little to the sudden rise of a second Communist giant in the Far East. And there aremany examples of their inter-dependence. On the other hand, their cooperation hasproduced its own differences, if not at the time, then frequently in retrospect. An outsideview might see things as follows.

In the early 1920s, Stalin and the Comintern took a defensible line in giving assistance tothe Guomindang and securing for the Chinese Communists a safe haven within it to buildup their numbers and gain influence. But in the mid-1920s his policy was disastrous. Hedoubted the Communists' strength; and he was in any case anxious to hedge his bets bykeeping on the best possible terms with Chiang Kai-shek in whom he placed excessivetrust. Distant from the scene and locked in a battle with Trotsky, he was both unable andunwilling to appreciate and accept that the Communists' strength lay, not in the towns, butin the countryside. He therefore advised them wrongly, first to persist too long in their

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cooperation with the Guomindang till they were betrayed and set upon, and then toinstigate an urban revolt that decimated them at the end of 1927. The remnants regroupedon the Jiangxi-Hunan border for some years before being driven north in 1934-35 on thefamous Long March to Ya'nan; and all that time, for plausible Soviet reasons of state,Stalin maintained very close relations with Chiang Kai-shek, their pursuer. On the otherhand, Mao welcomed the revolt in 1927 and, operating in the countryside, first made hisname through it. In the course of the Long March, too, he not only strengthened hispersonal position but got the opportunity to develop a Chinese road to communism, quitedifferent from the Soviet. Lenin rose to power on a peasant revolution, Mao created oneand, with it, a peasant-based political and military machine that could not be stopped. In aslightly perverse way he may even have been grateful to Stalin; then and later he was notparticularly abusive. But the retrospective Chinese view is somewhat embittered.

Stalin and the Chinese Communists remained in contact in the middle 1930s and early1940s. Stalin sent mostly advice; the Chinese rather sought supplies. Communicationswere a problem; so were communicators. It is easy to sympathise with Otto Braun who wasComintern agent in the Chinese interior from 1932 to 1939. Strange things were happen-ing behind him in Stalin's vendetta, and strange things before him in Mao's rise to power.But he was temperamentally unsuited to bridging the emerging ideological gap andprobably helped widen the personal gap. P. L. Vladimirov played a similar role from 1942 to1945 and certainly painted for Stalin a stark picture of an anti-Soviet Mao, some impres-sion of which must have got through to the Chinese and done little to raise their love forRussia. Nevertheless there was cooperation. Yet at the time there were vastly differingviewpoints, and not just on ideology. By 1937 Mao was fighting the Japanese, not theGuomindang, though from time to time the Guomindang showed more interest in fightinghim. In these circumstances it took some stretch of the imagination to understand Stalin'sunwillingness to go to war with Japan, even after 1941 when his Western allies were at warwith it, and equally to understand his preference for Chiang Kai-shek in terms of militaryaid. But from Stalin's angle, Mao's problem was a little local one. Both before and after1941 he himself was concerned with the defence of the world's one Communist state, theonly hope for revolution on the grand scale, and that required caution towards Japan. Maoand China could wait, especially Mao with his peasant soldiery. Oddly enough, Maoshowed imagination—by doing for China what Stalin was doing for Russia. He became itspatriotic defender as well as the architect of its revolution. And retrospectively there maybe more feeling on the Soviet side than on the Chinese, as the 1970s publication of Braun'smemoirs and Vladimirov's diaries shows.6

By the end of the war there was no technical problem of communication and noJapanese danger to circumvent. Yet Stalin chose to maintain his links with ChiangKai-shek in the ensuing civil war, and even lent him some support. It was less than theoutside world expected, and Mao too. With Japan's defeat and the Guomindang's lack ofauthority, and with Mao's national reputation and pertinent political programme, thestakes had been raised. Enthusiastically supported by the recent Seventh Party Congress,Mao was ready to seize power and impose his kind of Marxism. But Stalin was a cautiousman. He had enough to digest in Eastern Europe without adding the vastness of China.Minus an atomic bomb, a confrontation with the United States in Europe was already toomuch of a drain on his resources; a confrontation in the Far East as well would have been

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foolhardy. Fundamentally, too, he was a Europeanist. Bases in China were for defendingEuropean Russia, not for promoting Asian revolutions. In any case, he had burnt hisfingers once in the 1920s and had no wish to repeat the performance with another failedrevolution. His advisers had not inclined him to sympathise with Mao's personality or toexpect his declared policies to succeed. If his own brand of Marxism was right, and clearly itwas, then Mao's was wrong and would fail. Perhaps, as later with Tito, he disliked a mirrorimage, a national communist. But in 1949 Mao had a runaway victory, and the Chinesewere left not so much disgruntled at lack of support as convinced of their own rectitude.Recently it has been Soviet writers who have had to justify the past.7

1949 was a chance for a fresh start in Sino-Soviet relations. The Communist revolutionin China was no longer a matter of speculation or debate; and Mao paid Stalin thecompliment of emulating his domestic policy. He pushed through fundamental changes inChinese society and started a vast programme of economic development on classicalStalinist lines—nationalising enterprises, collectivising agriculture, and pouring invest-ment into heavy industrial projects. On the other hand, he did not immediately fall intoline on the international front. In the jargon of the present day, he was not a devotee ofbipolarity. He did not believe simplistically that the world was divided into two camps,headed by the Soviet Union and the United States, and that all relationships should besubordinated to this. As before 1949, he saw a more complicated world which China coulduse to its own advantage as well as for the general benefit of international communism. Hisbasic loyalty was to the Soviet Union, but he was nevertheless prepared to assume anintermediary role between the super-powers. How far he would 'lean' towards the Eastwould depend on the West. In the end, of course, he did not get a favourable response fromthe United States; and late in 1950 he felt forced to intervene in the Korean imbroglio.

Whether Stalin was aware of Mao's soundings is not known. The Chinese certainly wentout of their way several times to emphasise that they would not copy Yugoslavia. Whateverthe reason, Stalin ignored the opportunity for a fresh start. In fact, it was almost as if theissue had finally become personal. He kept Mao waiting in Moscow for ten weeks in thewinter of 1949-50 before yielding him a treaty of friendship. It was later that Mao was tocomplain of the 'struggle' for a treaty that guaranteed China against an unlikely Japaneseattack, but not against an American invasion spring-boarded from Japan—at any rate, notin so many words. But it must have wrankled at the time. So must the loan of $300 million,which was only a tenth of what he asked for, which was below what Poland, for example,received, and which was ultimately spent buying Soviet weapons for Korea. Yet, Stalin hadto eat humble pie in returning his Manchurian booty without compensation. He undertookto provide various other forms of economic and technical aid. And for a cautious man, hecommitted the Soviet Union rather heavily to assist China in the Far East. Yet when itcame to the bit in Korea, he left Mao to carry much of the burden.

1949 was not a fresh start and has subsequently been the focus of much bickering. Yet itdid not lead to a breach, and there was at least a basic understanding of the two powers'mutual interests in spite of their differing viewpoints. Mao was not cast out like Tito; andbut for the Korean conflict, the understanding might in time have grown more extensive.The Korean affair was probably expected to exclude America from the Asian mainland,not to bring it in to threaten China. China's involvement was almost inevitable and owedlittle to Soviet views; but it had a serious impact on the Soviet relationship. Mao was forced

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into a much closer dependence on the Soviet Union than he wished; and he came to resentthe low level of aid. But he also gained immensely in confidence and prestige by repulsingthe Americans. This Stalin did not relish; but he welcomed the continuing restraint that theAmerican danger would impose on Mao and, in possession of the atomic bomb, was happywith this Asiatic extension of the Soviet bloc. Mao might have his peculiar ways and wish tobe less dependent; but it was Stalin and the Soviet Union who were in charge, as was onlyright.

Open Conflict

More than three decades of developing Communism in Russia and emerging Commun-ism in China had not overcome old differences and had added some new ones. WithStalin's death and the end of the Korean War in 1953 there was theoretically anotheropportunity. Khrushchev's declared aim in his rise to power was to undo the gravermistakes of the Stalin era. Freed from active American hostility and close Soviet depen-dence, Mao could turn to new things. For a time there was actually an improvement inSino-Soviet relations.

With Soviet assistance the Chinese economy did rather well in the period of its firstfive-year plan down to 1957. Its export-import trade with the Soviet bloc grew to 75% ofits total, helped by Soviet credits. In 1954 Khrushchev and Bulganin visited Beijing andpromised additional industrial aid. Soviet advisers went to China in large numbers andChinese students to the Soviet Union. In 1957 Khrushchev even agreed to help Chinaproduce its own nuclear weapons. When Mao visited Moscow on that occasion, he washappy to join in the celebration of the first Sputnik and to declare proudly that the Eastwind prevailed over the West wind. Khrushchev, strengthened by his defeat of the'Anti-party Group',at home, presumably enjoyed this obvious compliment to the SovietUnion's standing abroad.

But the rapprochement was superficial. In 1954 Khrushchev and Bulganin agreed toabrogate their remaining privileges in China but refused to discuss Outer Mongolia. It wasa not unreasonable position, but it appears to have caused offence. In 1957 Mao failed todrum up further help for the second five-year plan. Whether this was taken badly is notcertain. Khrushchev had his own problems. Stalin had restored the Soviet economy afterthe ravages of war, but industry still had to be diversified to provide consumer goods tomeet popular demand and fertilisers to boost an unproductive agriculture. In the event,effective economic improvement eluded Khrushchev. Eastern Europe also demandedfurther investment; and the Soviet Union was already providing more aid to Third Worldcountries than to China. Yet, however this was taken, it left Mao with no option but toexperiment with alternatives. About the same time, in any case, he had come to realise thatthe Stalinist prescription for economic development was at the limit of its usefulness andthat a new one was required, not least for agriculture, if growth was not to slow down. Theresulting 'Great Leap', with its emphasis on vast rural food-supplying and manufacturingcommunes, put China on a course now doubly different from that on which Khrushchevhad launched the Soviet Union. The fact that Mao's divergent approach was increasinglyno more successful than Khrushchev's only added to their growing mutual dislike.

There may indeed have been a personal element. Khrushchev was an outspoken

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character. He was often as blunt in his comments as he was reckless in his acts. And Maogrew more determined and idiosyncratic with the passing years. But the heart of the matterwas that the two countries were at different stages of economic and social development.8 Ifthey had gone through their communist revolutions together, there would have been morechance of their basic internal policies being in phase. After 1953 their different needsbecame all too apparent, and so their different approaches.

The two most promising aspects of 1953 also contributed to the revival of ill-feeling.Mao's reaction to Khrushchev's succession was m'xed. Stalin had hardly been China's bestfriend, but he represented authority which, if exercised by the Chinese Communist Party,was exactly what China would need for some time ahead and which, of course, could bestbe wielded by Mao. Khrushchev's denigration of Stalin, delivered at the XX PartyCongress in 1956, foreshadowed the undermining of authority, and Mao made the pointstrongly at the time. How right he was in the case of Eastern Europe was quicklydemonstrated by the events in Poland and the Hungarian rising. The fateful consequencewas the need then for Soviet counter-action that in turn re-emphasised the unwelcomeSoviet tendency to dominate those who ought to be treated as equals. Mao's participationin the Moscow Declaration of 1957, attempting to govern relations within the communistcamp, was thus not a simple gesture of friendship, but a warning to maintain order, forexample in Hungary, and at the same time to respect the rights of others, for instance thePoles—and the Chinese. In a difficult Soviet and East European situation, to be sure,Khrushchev had been doing his best; and he was anxious to give some recognition to theidea of different roads to socialism. However, more than one of his good intentions wentawry, and there is little doubt that he took badly to Mao's double-edged strictures overEastern Europe. He was embarrassed to have revolts on his hands, and annoyed to becriticised for acting in what, like Stalin, he still looked upon as his own backyard.

The successful conclusion of the Korean War gave Mao the opportunity and theincentive to think expansively. He had been freed of immediate American pressure andnow had the chance to build up some kind of anti-American environment. China haddefeated imperialism in open war, so to speak, and was rapidly developing a just andeffective socialism in a once exploited peasant society. It therefore had strong appeal to thecountries of the Third World. So Mao could seek their friendship and serve the cause ofinternational revolution as well as of China's defence. Summoning a conference of Af-ro-Asian nations to Bandoeng in 1955 was not conceived as an anti-Soviet initiative. Butthe Soviet Union had so far shown minimal interest in the Third World and had almostfrustrated the Chinese revolution. So when no Soviet representatives were invited, theconference became the launching ceremony for China's emergence as the champion ofAsia and Africa. The Chinese Communists also emulated their Soviet colleagues inconducting world-wide propaganda and encouraging foreign visitors. It was as if they wereoffering their model as an alternative to European-based, Soviet-style communism.Khrushchev was quick to respond. He and Bulganin went off on an ostentatious visit toAfghanistan, Burma and India; they sold Czechoslovak arms to Egypt; and they commit-ted themselves to the kind of cheque-book diplomacy in the Third World that the Chinesecould not afford and that in fact cost them the increase they hoped for in their own Sovietaid. In short, the circumstances that offered Mao an international role threw him intodirect conflict with the Soviet Union for the hearts and minds of the Third World.

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Considered another way, the two powers were now saying to an international audiencewhat they were saying to each other, that each had the better socialist answer.

Their different stages of development also drove the two powers to adopt divergentstances on matters of war and peace. China had only recently emerged from civil war andtwo victorious international wars. It was still a relatively primitive society that was willing,even eager to fight. Everything in its recent experience seemed to substantiate its Marxistbelief in the inevitability of violence. It was not put off by nuclear weapons. It aspired tohave them, although it did not think they would be used in war. Even if they were, it couldsurvive them through its population size and revolutionary zeal. By contrast, the SovietUnion was losing sight of its Bolshevik youth and was all too conscious of the cost of theSecond World War and the likely cost of a Third. It was a more sophisticated society,anxious to improve its standard of living and to avoid the setback even simply of a nucleararms race. It could not abandon its revolutionary faith. But already one of the nuclear few,and matching the United States in missiles, it took easily to Khrushchev's declaration ofpeaceful co-existence as the path to victory over capitalism. The difference was no meredebating point. Khrushchev was prepared to enter into a dialogue with Eisenhower andKennedy with a view to removing disagreements and winning time and resources to catchup on capitalism. But even if Mao had wanted to do the same thing—which, in face of theAmerican advance into the Middle East and South-East Asia following the British andFrench retreat, he did not—he would not have been able. The Soviet-American 'frontier'in Europe and Asia was fairly stable in the late 1950s. However it was American militarymight that prevented the People's Republic from recovering Taiwan, its own territory. Itwas American political influence that denied it its rightful place in the United Nations.And as the 1950s wore on, United States hostility seemed to increase. China was lockedinto a confrontation with the United States which made peaceful co-existence a priorinonsense. The Soviet Union was escaping from its confrontation and could thereforeamend the master's teaching.

This further doctrinal disagreement became linked with the previous ones and led tocharges of revisionism against the Soviet Union. Circumstantial evidence accumulated.There was no dearth of Soviet-American disputes; but the more Khrushchev becameinvolved in discussions with Eisenhower and Kennedy, the more Mao became convincedthat he had joined the imperialist forces encircling China. During the shelling of Quemoyin 1958, Soviet reticence was already remarkable; a year later, Khrushchev's advocacy ofEisenhower's 'Two-China' idea seemed to carry disloyalty to the point of outrighttreachery. And in 1962 the nadir was reached when the Soviet Union supported India in itswar with China and when Khrushchev, having belatedly acted against the United States inCuba, crumbled meekly in face of opposition. Already in 1959 Khrushchev had renegedon his agreement to help China produce nuclear weapons; and in the same dishearteningyear of 1962 he ganged up with Kennedy to sign the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, as if toperpetuate China's military inferiority.

Khrushchev might think he had excuses. China was behaving recklessly at Quemoy, andaggressively towards India. Part of the reason for intervening in Cuba was to stop Chineseinfluence spreading to yet another underdeveloped area. Otherwise Cuba was an attemptto win missile equivalence on the cheap, a curious manifestation of the policy of peacefulco-existence, of which retreating rather than fighting, and signing a nuclear treaty were

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more normal examples. In any case, the Chinese Military Affairs Commission had decidedin 1958 to develop an independent military capacity and strategy. So China could be saidto have forfeited its right to support and might be thought to be challenging the SovietUnion's peaceful socialist policy. Yet the 1958 decision followed unreasonable demandsfor a Soviet presence inside China.

The opportunity apparently presented by a combination of circumstances in 1953 wastherefore lost; and long before Khrushchev was toppled from power, a deep bitternesscharacterised Chinese-Soviet relations. In 1960 Khrushchev withdrew all Soviet eco-nomic aid and technical advisers; the Chinese people felt the hard winter of 1960-61despite imports of grain from Australia and Canada. Also in 1960 the People's Dailypublished a group of articles, 'Long Live Leninism', which were a proxy attack on thetheory and practice of Soviet communism, and in 1961 Zhou Enlai ostentatiously walkedout of the Soviet Party Congress; condemnation of China became standard fare in thepages of Pravda. By 1963 there was virtually nothing exchanged except polemics; therewas little trade and less travel. At last, in 1964, it was a fitting comment that, as Khrush-chev was ousted, Mao set off his first nuclear explosion.

Revolutionary TransformationThe central issue in relations between China and the Soviet Union after 1964 was no

longer whether they could overcome differences old and new; it was whether they couldavoid a war. The abuse on both sides was intense. The Soviet Union was said to be notsimply revisionist, but counter-revolutionary. Mao was compared to Hitler and Maoism toNazism. The border clashes in the spring and summer of 1969, which started on thefrontier with Heilongjiang and spread to the frontier with Xinjiang, were serious inthemselves but even more so in their symbolism and the charges and counter-charges thatthey produced.

The Chinese army probably got the worse of the exchanges. For its part, the Chinesegovernment came in for fierce Soviet criticism as the aggressor and the instigator of theincidents. Whatever the truth or otherwise of such charges, there is little doubt that Maoadopted an unfriendly attitude to Khrushchev's successors from the start, refusing theirovertures and accusing them of capitulating to the United States. It was also Mao who, in1966, raised the level of the conflict from the inter-state to the inter-party by refusing tosend delegates to the XXIII Congress of the Soviet Party. Nor had the Soviet Union anydirect responsibility for the Cultural Revolution. This was largely internal in its objectives,aiming to revitalise the Chinese revolution, dispose of opponents, and accelerate socialchange and economic development. But originating partly in fury at Soviet behaviour, itfuelled public outbursts against all outsiders, but particularly the Russians. It also sweptMao himself to extremes of self-conceit and xenophobia: Chinese Communism was nowthe only acceptable form of Marxism-Leninism; Brezhnev and Kosygin were guilty ofapostasy. And if there were calmer voices within China, anxious to keep the peace with theSoviet Union, they were quickly silenced. The experts, too, who might have detected lightas well as shade in the Soviet scene, were pushed aside.

However, although Brezhnev dismantled some of Khrushchev's less stable policies, healso drew the conclusion from the debacle over Cuba that both naval expansion and missiledevelopment must be speeded up. Growing Soviet military power undoubtedly worried

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Mao. But Soviet responsibility for the border incidents—and for both what might havehappened and what did happen—stemmed from the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.Brezhnev may have taken time to decide on an invasion; but his intention was quiteclear—by whatever means might be necessary, to put an end to a socialist experiment thatwas thought to challenge Soviet supremacy in Eastern Europe and to threaten Partyauthority in Russia itself. This was exactly the kind of hegemonism, backed up by militaryforce, that Mao had long ascribed to the Soviet mind. It was given immediate ideologicalcover in the so-called Brezhnev Doctrine, which limited the sovereignty of socialist statesto the point at which their distinctive socialist characteristics did not constitute any kind ofthreat to other socialist states. The lesson was as clear for China as for Eastern Europe: theSoviet Union now had chapter and verse for intervention; and it already had the will andthe power. As if to emphasise the point, Soviet forces on the Chinese frontier were built uprapidly. Incidents were inevitable. So was the Chinese reaction.

That war did not result was partly due to the Soviet reaction. There were hotheads inMoscow as well as Beijing, but Brezhnev may well have been surprised at the outcome ofSoviet military growth and strategic deployment. Whether he wanted a German settle-ment to promote detente with the United States or to facilitate a showdown with China,1969 was not the moment to escalate a border war in the east. So Kosygin was authorisedto fly home from Ho Chi Minh's funeral via Beijing and to initiate border negotiations. Onthe Chinese side there appears to have been no taste for full-scale war, despite the generalhostility to the outside world promoted by the Cultural Revolution. In fact, in a Beijing inwhich there were still some cooler heads, the border incidents seem to have had onesobering effect. China's only friends were Albania and North Vietnam, hardly enough tocontain Russia. So Mao agreed to talks, although only on inter-state questions. However,that did not mean an end to hostility. Brezhnev had already proposed an Asian collectivesecurity system which Mao interpreted as half-way house to the complete encirclement ofthe People's Republic. Mao might not be ready to fight the Soviet Union. But the mainthing was that he had discovered an alternative way of disposing of border incursions bysecuring himself an additional, if unlikely friend, the United States.

One of the most worrying aspects of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia had been theacquiescence or, as Mao saw it, even the collusion of the United States. Progress towardsdetente was another example of collaboration between two equally menacing imperialistsuper-powers. But suddenly, even as observed from Beijing, the situation began to changeas the United States lost its taste for the Vietnamese war. Disheartened, separated by thePacific, anxious to talk, America emerged as the less immediate danger and as an essentialmakeweight to Soviet ambitions. As the Soviet Union expanded its own involvement inVietnam and made overtures to Japan, the need to win American friendship becameoverwhelming. So while the border talks foundered and the Red Army reinforced thefrontier, China and the United States began the negotiations that led to mutual recogni-tion. They were neither quick nor easy. There was internal Chinese opposition, partlyconnected with the need to wind down the disastrous Cultural Revolution. But Lin Biao'sabortive flight to the Soviet Union in 1971 did nothing for his cause of keeping bothsuper-powers at a distance. Parallel USSR-USA negotiations on arms did not cease, and in1974 the Brezhnev-Ford discussion of SALT in of all possible places, Vladivostok, addedinsult to the injury to the Chinese. In the mid-1970s the rapprochement was again

468 SINO-SOVIET RELA TIONS:

threatened from inside China by the decline and demise of Mao and the Gang of Four's bidfor power. But by 1978 it was complete.

Mao's timely recognition of the changing power situation was a crucial factor in prevent-ing outright war with the Soviet Union after 1969. But that did not mean the end of thethreat. The Soviet military build-up spilled over to establish a naval base in Vietnam.Soviet popular dislike of the Chinese seemed to receive official encouragement,9 and theacademic establishment analysed a China that was bureaucratic, militarist and historicallyimperialist. Indeed, Party Congresses assigned China to the imperialist camp. Of course,China was not the Soviet Union's only concern. Parallel with the success of SALT I and,even more, consequent on the failure of SALT II, Moscow was engaged in a battle withWashington for military superiority in general and for political supremacy in the MiddleEast, broadly defined. Despite efforts to refine the Brezhnev Doctrine to make it a morepalatable document for what was now called the Socialist Commonwealth, trouble wasscarcely beneath the surface in Eastern Europe, and Comecon lumbered towards minimalsuccess compared with the Common Market. Soviet industrial growth was slowing downand agriculture heading for crisis. Dissidence was minor but persistent. There were somedifferences of view at the top; but supported by the military, Brezhnev accumulated powerto execute unimaginative and inflexible policies. It was very difficult for the Soviet Unionto change course. And it was made no easier by Chinese successes and Soviet failures. Aself-confident Beijing rejected Moscow's overtures in 1976 just after Mao's death and afurther genuinely conciliatory approach in 1978. In addition to its American coup in thesame year, China also signed a friendship treaty with Japan, and Hua Guofeng touredEastern Europe. In mid-1979 the Chinese refused to renegotiate their 1950 treaty ofalliance and set unacceptably severe terms for other discussions. Perhaps despairing of anyother method of influencing China—as well as putting the Brezhnev Doctrine into practicein Asia—the Soviet Union resorted to the military intervention weapon in Afghanistan inlate 1979, merely to compound its difficulties.

By that stage, China had gone through its diplomatic revolution and was on course for apolitical and economic one. Recognition by the United States was of enormous impor-tance, well beyond splitting the anti-Chinese front. It meant that China was finally freedfrom the post-Korean bond tying it to the Soviet Union. It meant also that China couldtake its seat on the Security Council and gain world-wide acceptance as a major power, ifnot yet a super-power. China was now free, not only to have friends, but to choose them,and to play the diplomatic game, not just the revolutionary one. It could readily acceptgenuine peaceful co-existence, and it was no longer the isolated bastion of socialism, but agregarious and enlightened power that, though still self-reliant, could deal with Soviethegemonism and ideological intolerance with the support and respect of other states.Politically and economically it was also shaking itself free both of Soviet models and of itsown counter-models, a process accelerated by the successful arrest of the Gang of Four latein 1976. By the end of the 1970s, China was feeling its way towards a reformed socialismthat would retain the best features of Marxist-type politics but enable the economy toselect those practices and technologies of Western societies most likely to moderniseChina by the end of the twentieth century. War had been avoided, and China set upon arevolutionary path undreamt of by Mao—or by Brezhnev—and one still being assessed bythe Chinese themselves.10

AN INTERPRETA TION 469

Recognising RealitiesBrezhnev is now dead too. But several times before his death, he signalled Soviet

willingness to enter serious discussions with the Chinese. At Brezhnev's funeral,Andropov ostentatiously revealed his identity of view. The discussions go on at a desul-tory pace and may, from time to time, turn on such personal factors as Andropov's survivaland Deng Xiaoping's influence. But the basic historical and geographical factors stillcannot be ignored, nor the many disagreements and bitter exchanges that the last sixty orseventy years have witnessed. Yet the current situation is different again from the momentin 1969 when the two powers clashed.

In the first place, the world is neither bipolar, nor tripolar, but multipolar. The SovietUnion and China are not free to squabble alone with each other, or even only with theUnited States to consider. Japan, Western Europe and the Third World have to be takeninto account, in the way that Mao tried at his best. In the second place, there is no way thatthe Soviet Union can impose its will on China by force, military, political, economic, or anyother. The warning it gave China in 1979 during the brief Sino-Vietnamese conflict wasthe limit it could go to then; and it would be less now, given China's contribution to theinternational military balance. There would be even less chance at this stage of Chinatrying to do the same in reverse, though it has never shown any wish to. In the third place,whatever their differences, relative advantages and imperfections, the People's Republicand the Soviet Union are established societies of quite massive proportions, and developedand unified in ways that Imperial China and Tsarist Russia were not. If there ever was achance that one would dislodge or destroy the other, it went in the years 1917-21 or, moresurely, 1964-78. Their problem, through internal divisions and external opportunities, ismainly to recognise their mutual likelihood of surviving. In the fourth place, the two statesare now at somewhat similar stages of socialist development. This may be hard to accept,given the extent of Soviet stagnation after a long period of development and of Chineseexperimentation after a shorter period of recurring failures. But in the political andideological sense both have developed mature, if different systems, each of which is asmuch and as little a Marxist system as the other. However, their problem is again torecognise this, and each to let the other's socialism persist.

Pending recognition, of course, there may still be much bitter controversy. The lastSoviet Party Congress was less damnatory about China than its predecessors,11 and inMarch 1982 Brezhnev conceded in a speech at Tashkent that the People's Republic wasalso socialist. Hu Yaobang has been more positive, too, of late.12 Though not as badlystrained as Soviet-American relations, Sino-American have become a little cool. Butoutside factors tend to be uncontrollable, like Franco-British views on their own nuclearweapons, or Afghan tribesmen's attitudes to their own survival, or Third World reaction toSoviet or Chinese interest. And how, over the next twenty years, does the Soviet Unioncope with a declining labour force and, simultaneously, China with a 20% populationincrease? Finally, if China needs courage to accept a reassurance on its security againstSoviet aggression, it is the Soviet Union that has to go further to recognise the right ofanother state to be socialist—and equal. And all the while, Soviet inflexibility and Chinesepragmatism may further differentiate the two different socialisms.

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1 There is now quite an extensive literature on Sino-Soviet relations, though there are both gaps and areaswhere the work is of poor quality. The more important books consulted included:

I. M. B. Yahuda, China's Role in World Affairs, London, 1978.H. Kapur, The Awakening Giant: China's Ascension in World Politics, The Netherlands, 1981.Chiin-tu Hsüeh (ed.), China's Foreign Relations: New Perspectives, New York, 1982.I. Wilson (ed.), China and the World Community, Sydney, 1973.J. Gittings, The World and China 1922-1972, London, 1974.A. Lawrance, China's Foreign Relations Since 1949, London, 1975.G. O'Leary, The Shaping of Chinese Foreign Policy, London, 1980.M. Gurtov and Byong-Moo Hwang, China under Threat, Baltimore, 1980.R. G. Sutter, China-Watch: Sino-American Reconciliation, Baltimore, 1978.F. O. Wilcox (ed.), China and the Great Powers, New York, 1974.K. C. Chen, China and the Three Worlds, London, 1979.

II. A. B. Ulam, Expansion and Co-existence: Soviet Foreign Policy 1917-1973, New York, 1974.J. L. Nogee and R. H. Donaldson, Soviet Foreign Policy since World War 11, New York, 1981.A. A. Gromyko and B. N. Ponomarev, lstoriya vneshnei politiki SSSR, Moscow, 1976 (2 vols.).V. V. Aspaturian (ed.), Process and Power in Soviet Foreign Policy, Boston, 1971.J. M. Mackintosh, Strategy and Tactics of Soviet Foreign Policy, London, 1962.H. Hanak, Soviet Foreign Policy since the Death of Stalin, London, 1972.R. Edmonds, Soviet Foreign Policy 1962-73, London, 1975.G. Jukes, The Soviet Union in Asia, Sydney, 1973.R. H. Donaldson (ed.), The Soviet Union in the Third World: Successes and Failures, London, 1981.E. M. Zhukov, Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniya na dal'nem vostoke, Moscow, 1973 (2 vols.).E. M. Zhukov, Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniya na dal'nem vostoke v poslevoennye gody, Moscow, 1978 (2vols.).M. Rothenberg, Whither China: The View from the Kremlin, Miami, 1978.

III. H. J. Ellison (ed.), The Sino-Soviet Conflict: A Global Perspective, Seattle, 1982.A. D. Low, The Sino-Soviet Dispute: An Analysis of the Polemics, London, 1977.R. C. North, Moscow and the Chinese Communists, Stanford, 1963.K. Mehnert, Peking and Moscow, London, 1962.O. B. Borisov and B. T. Koloskov, Sovetsko-kitaiskie otnosheniya 1945-1977, Moscow, 1977.D. S. Zagoria, The Sino-Soviet Conflict 1956-1961, Princeton, 1962.W. E. Griffith, Sino-Soviet Relations 1964-1965, Cambridge, Mass., 1967.J. Gittings, Survey of the Sino—Soviet Dispute 1963-1967, London, 1968.M. H. Halperin, Sino-Soviet Relations and Arms Control, Cambridge, Mass., 1967.H. Kapur, The Embattled Triangle: Moscow, Peking, New Delhi, New Delhi, 1973.A. Z. Rubinstein (ed.), Soviet and Chinese Influence in the Third World, New York, 1975.R. Wich, Sino-Soviet Crisis Politics, Cambridge, Mass., 1980.

2 E. S. Kirby, Russian Studies of China, London, 1975, pp. 28-45.3 This crucial point has been well made by D. Perkins, 'The Economic Background and Implications for

China', in Ellison, op. cit., pp. 91-111. For the different earlier period see F.-H. Mah, The Foreign Trade ofMainland China, Edinburgh, 1972, passim.

4 Cf. P. Summerscale, 'The Continuing Validity of the Brezhnev Doctrine', in K. Dawisha and P. Hanson(eds.), Soviet—East European Dilemmas, London, 1981, pp. 26-40.

5 Cf. O. A. Narkiewicz, Marxism and the Reality of Power, London, 1981.6 O. Braun, A Comintern Agent in China 1932-1939, London, 1982; P. Vladimirov, The Vladimirov Diaries,

London, 1976.7 E.g., O. Borisov, Sovetskii Soyuz i manchurskaya revolyutsionnaya baza 1945-1949, Moscow, 1975.8 For an interesting comparison of the two communist revolutions see W. G. Rosenberg and M. B. Young,

Transforming Russia and China, Oxford, 1982.9 E.g., Kurs: khaos i borba, Moscow, 1978.

10 Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party, Resolution on CPC History 1949-81, Beijing, 1981.11 Documents and Resolutions of the XXV Conference of the CPSU, Moscow, 1976, pp. 14-15, and Documents

and Resolutions of the XXVI Congress of the CPSU, Moscow, 1981, pp. 15-16.12 The Twelfth National Congress of the CPC, Beijing, 1982, pp. 58-59, and Beijing Review, 23 May 1983.