Sino-Soviet Relations: An Interpretation

Introduction

The article is based on a paper delivered in Beijing in April 1982.
Evaluating foreign policies in dispute is challenging due to inadequate evidence and strong feelings.
The opening of talks between the People's Republic and the Soviet Union increases the importance of examining Sino-Soviet relations.
Hostility or rapprochement between China and the Soviet Union is of global interest due to their large populations and territories.

The Importance of History and Geography

Historical and geographical factors are crucial in understanding China-Russia relations.
Despite being neighbors with a shared ideology, their contact has been limited and often unfriendly.
The first meeting was the treaty of Nipchu or Nerchinsk in 1689 when two weak states agreed on a common frontier.
Russian eastward expansion in the mid-19th century led to the seizure of about 1.5 million square kilometers of Chinese territory through treaties like that of Beijing in 1860.
China decayed quietly, while Russia focused on breaking into Europe.
Mutual trade was rewarding but not extensive.
The 'unequal' treaties and methods used, such as aggression and spurious protection, upset the Chinese.
Russia acquired a dominant role in Manchuria until checked by Japan in 1905.
Resentment at Russia's role fueled the Chinese national movement, leading to the destruction of the Qing dynasty in 1911.
The Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 led to the abrogation of Russian claims to Manchuria.
The Soviet regime rediscovered the value of Manchuria for communication with the Pacific.
Japan's seizure of Manchuria in 1931 averted a conflict between China and the Soviet Union over railway rights.
At the Yalta conference in 1945, Stalin sought to restore the old Tsarist position of pre-eminent interest in Manchuria and secured a lease on Lushun (Port Arthur) as a naval base.
In 1946, Stalin yielded some of the Manchurian area to the Chinese Communists but stripped it of industrial equipment.
The Soviet Union withdrew from its last outpost at Lushun in 1954, five years after the establishment of the Chinese People's Republic.
China has declared its willingness to accept the frontiers delineated by the unequal treaties but refuses to agree completely to the Soviet interpretation.
China is not reassured by the Soviet assertion of historical rights backed by military force, which suggests a revival of pre-1905 policy.
Soviet historians have reinterpreted the Russian-Chinese past in terms of the treaty of Nerchinsk being 'unequal' against Russia and the treaty of Beijing providing only partial restitution.
Tsarist expansion into Central Asia in the 19th century brought Russia to the border of Chinese Xinjiang.
In the 1930s, Stalin was tempted to establish a protectorate in Xinjiang, but he abandoned it due to Hitler's attack.
Stalin dabbled in local Xinjiang revolts in the mid-1940s.
In 1949, Mao Zedong pre-empted the situation by a rapid advance.
The Soviet Union surrendered its proposed share in raw material exploitation in Xinjiang in 1954.
Some saw a Soviet hand in further local revolts in the late 1950s.
The Uygur majority resides in both the Chinese and Soviet sides of the frontier, the same applies to the Kazakhs.
China's non-Han peoples are mainly in the west, close to the frontier.
The Soviet Union's non-Russian peoples are widely spread, but many are in the east, near the frontier.
The Soviet Union can retort that China's incorporation of Xinjiang only dates from 1878.
The frontier from Manchuria to Xinjiang is between China and Outer Mongolia.
Russia negotiated Mongol-inhabited territory from China in 1689 and still holds it, around Lake Baikal.
Sovereignty over Outer Mongolia claimed by the Manchu dynasty was also asserted by their successors, Mao included.
Outer Mongolia has been mostly free of Chinese rule since 1911.
Since 1921, it has been increasingly under Soviet tutelage.
At the Yalta conference, Stalin insisted on recognising its formal independence of China.
In 1950, Mao agreed.
In 1962, Khrushchev admitted Outer Mongolia to Comecon.
There are at least as many Mongols in China's Inner Mongolian Autonomous Region as in Outer Mongolia.
The Soviet Union seems set to defend the unequal legacy, and China could choose to contest it.
Playing on minority feelings can be a game for two.
There have been reports of Soviet support in the past for disaffected Mongols in China.
Geography does not help to make the Chinese-Soviet relationship closer.
Beijing is incomparably closer to the common frontier in military terms.
The Soviet Union still feels obstructed from the Pacific.
China feels outflanked because of Soviet acquisitions and the Korean War.
China's repossession of Tibet in 1950 narrowed the Soviet Union's road to the Indian sub-continent; the invasion of Afghanistan in 1979 may have broadened it again.
The frontier itself is a long one on either side of which to provide security.
Natural resources are beyond the present pool of labor and transport to cope with in the north and west; there is an abundance of labor and an outlet to the Pacific in the south and east.
The two countries' economies are essentially exclusive, not complementary; their lack of mutual trade is not merely political in origin.

Lost Opportunities and New Differences

A history of much separation and some conflict should have been overcome.
The problems of geography should have been sidestepped.
Marxism is authoritarian, e.g., the concept of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the notion of democratic centralism as developed by Lenin.
There ought to be sufficient sympathy or understanding to overcome differences between states or ruling groups that are like-minded in their authoritarianism.
Marx did not produce a theory of post-revolutionary relations because he assumed the revolution would be universal.
On the morrow of the Bolshevik Revolution, Trotsky made the same mistaken assumption.
The revolution was as neither of them expected.
It came only in Russia.
Lenin and his successors nationalized it to survive.
They adapted Marxist principles to suit isolated Russian conditions but regarded them inevitably as universal in application.
They got used to developing relations with foreign capitalist governments and communist movements.
When the Chinese Communist Party came to power thirty years later, it found a Soviet Party whose precepts were often irrelevant to Chinese conditions.
Soviet leaders found a Chinese Party that was idiosyncratic and unwilling to accept their obviously good advice and direction.
The Chinese Communist Party was part and parcel of the Chinese revolutionary movement.
It stemmed directly from the success and relevance of the Bolshevik Revolution.
It depended on the continued existence and remarkable development of the Soviet Union for its own ability to survive and eventually to triumph.
The emergence of the Soviet Union as a super-power in the post-war period was a natural consequence of the development of Russia from Tsarist times, accelerated by Stalin's drive and the needs of war; but it owed not a little to the sudden rise of a second Communist giant in the Far East.
In the early 1920s, Stalin and the Comintern gave assistance to the Guomindang.
In the mid-1920s, Stalin's policy was disastrous.
He doubted the Communists' strength.
He was in any case anxious to hedge his bets by keeping on the best possible terms with Chiang Kai-shek in whom he placed excessive trust.
He was unable and unwilling to appreciate and accept that the Communists' strength lay, not in the towns, but in the countryside.
He advised them wrongly, first to persist too long in their cooperation with the Guomindang till they were betrayed and set upon, and then to instigate an urban revolt that decimated them at the end of 1927.
The remnants regrouped on the Jiangxi-Hunan border for some years before being driven north in 1934-35 on the Long March to Ya'nan.
All that time, Stalin maintained very close relations with Chiang Kai-shek, their pursuer.
Mao welcomed the revolt in 1927 and, operating in the countryside, first made his name through it.
Lenin rose to power on a peasant revolution, Mao created one and, with it, a peasant-based political and military machine that could not be stopped.
Stalin and the Chinese Communists remained in contact in the middle 1930s and early 1940s.
Stalin sent mostly advice; the Chinese rather sought supplies.
Communications were a problem; so were communicators.
By 1937 Mao was fighting the Japanese, not the Guomindang.
It took some stretch of the imagination to understand Stalin's unwillingness to go to war with Japan, even after 1941 when his Western allies were at war with it, and equally to understand his preference for Chiang Kai-shek in terms of military aid.
Both before and after 1941 he himself was concerned with the defense of the world's one Communist state, the only hope for revolution on the grand scale, and that required caution towards Japan.
Oddly enough, Mao showed imagination-by doing for China what Stalin was doing for Russia.
He became its patriotic defender as well as the architect of its revolution.
By the end of the war there was no technical problem of communication and no Japanese danger to circumvent.
Stalin chose to maintain his links with Chiang Kai-shek in the ensuing civil war, and even lent him some support.
Enthusiastically supported by the recent Seventh Party Congress, Mao was ready to seize power and impose his kind of Marxism.
Stalin was a cautious man.
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 too much of a drain on his resources; a confrontation in the Far East as well would have been foolhardy.
In 1949 Mao had a runaway victory, and the Chinese were left not so much disgruntled at lack of support as convinced of their own rectitude.
1949 was a chance for a fresh start in Sino-Soviet relations.
Mao paid Stalin the compliment of emulating his domestic policy.
He pushed through fundamental changes in Chinese society and started a vast programme of economic development on classical Stalinist lines-nationalising enterprises, collectivising agriculture, and pouring investment into heavy industrial projects.
He did not immediately fall into line on the international front.
He was not a devotee of bipolarity.
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 be subordinated to this.
His basic loyalty was to the Soviet Union, but he was nevertheless prepared to assume an intermediary role between the super-powers.
In the end, of course, he did not get a favorable response from the United States; and late in 1950 he felt forced to intervene in the Korean imbroglio.
The Chinese went out of their way several times to emphasize that they would not copy Yugoslavia.
Stalin ignored the opportunity for a fresh start.
He kept Mao waiting in Moscow for ten weeks in the winter of 1949-50 before yielding him a treaty of friendship.
Mao complained of the 'struggle' for a treaty that guaranteed China against an unlikely Japanese attack, but not against an American invasion spring-boarded from Japan.
The loan of $300$ million 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.
Stalin had to eat humble pie in returning his Manchurian booty without compensation.
He undertook to provide various other forms of economic and technical aid.
He heavily committed the Soviet Union to assist China in the Far East.
He left Mao to carry much of the burden in Korea.
Mao gained immensely in confidence and prestige by repulsing the Americans.
Stalin welcomed the continuing restraint that the American danger would impose on Mao and, in possession of the atomic bomb, was happy with this Asiatic extension of the Soviet bloc.
Mao might have his peculiar ways and wish to be less dependent; but it was Stalin and the Soviet Union who were in charge, as was only right.

Open Conflict

More than three decades of developing Communism in Russia and emerging Communism in China had not overcome old differences and had added some new ones.
With Stalin's death and the end of the Korean War in 1953 there was theoretically another opportunity.
Khrushchev's declared aim in his rise to power was to undo the graver mistakes of the Stalin era.
Freed from active American hostility and close Soviet dependence, Mao could turn to new things.
For a time there was actually an improvement in Sino-Soviet relations.
With Soviet assistance the Chinese economy did rather well in the period of its first five-year plan down to 1957.
Its export-import trade with the Soviet bloc grew to 75% of its total, helped by Soviet credits.
In 1954 Khrushchev and Bulganin visited Beijing and promised additional industrial aid.
Soviet advisers went to China in large numbers and Chinese students to the Soviet Union.
In 1957 Khrushchev even agreed to help China produce its own nuclear weapons.
Mao visited Moscow on that occasion, he was happy to join in the celebration of the first Sputnik and to declare proudly that the East wind prevailed over the West wind.
Khrushchev, strengthened by his defeat of the 'Anti-party Group' at home, presumably enjoyed this obvious compliment to the Soviet Union's standing abroad.
The rapprochement was superficial.
In 1954 Khrushchev and Bulganin agreed to abrogate their remaining privileges in China but refused to discuss Outer Mongolia.
In 1957 Mao failed to drum up further help for the second five-year plan.
Effective economic improvement eluded Khrushchev.
Eastern Europe also demanded further investment; and the Soviet Union was already providing more aid to Third World countries than to China.
Mao had no option but to experiment with alternatives.
He had come to realise that the Stalinist prescription for economic development was at the limit of its usefulness and that a new one was required, not least for agriculture, if growth was not to slow down.
The resulting 'Great Leap', with its emphasis on vast rural food-supplying and manufacturing communes, put China on a course now doubly different from that on which Khrushchev had launched the Soviet Union.
Mao's divergent approach was increasingly no more successful than Khrushchev's only added to their growing mutual dislike.
The two countries were at different stages of economic and social development.
After 1953 their different needs became all too apparent, and so their different approaches.
Mao's reaction to Khrushchev's succession was mixed.
Khrushchev's denigration of Stalin, delivered at the XX Party Congress in 1956, foreshadowed the undermining of authority, and Mao made the point strongly at the time.
The fateful consequence was the need then for Soviet counter-action that in turn re-emphasised the unwelcome Soviet tendency to dominate those who ought to be treated as equals.
Mao made the point to maintain order, for example in Hungary, and at the same time to respect the rights of others, for instance the Poles-and the Chinese.
Khrushchev had been doing his best in a difficult Soviet and East European situation and was anxious to give some recognition to the idea of different roads to socialism.
He took badly to Mao's double-edged strictures over Eastern Europe.
He was embarrassed to have revolts on his hands, and annoyed to be criticized 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 the incentive to think expansively.
He had been freed of immediate American pressure and now had the chance to build up some kind of anti-American environment.
China had defeated imperialism in open war, so to speak, and was rapidly developing a just and effective socialism in a once exploited peasant society.
It therefore had strong appeal to the countries of the Third World.
Mao could seek their friendship and serve the cause of international revolution as well as of China's defense.
The Soviet Union had so far shown minimal interest in the Third World and had almost frustrated the Chinese revolution.
When no Soviet representatives were invited, the conference became the launching ceremony for China's emergence as the champion of Asia and Africa.
The Chinese Communists also emulated their Soviet colleagues in conducting world-wide propaganda and encouraging foreign visitors.
They were offering their model as an alternative to European-based, Soviet-style communism.
They committed themselves to the kind of cheque-book diplomacy in the Third World that the Chinese could not afford and that in fact cost them the increase they hoped for in their own Soviet aid.
The circumstances that offered Mao an international role threw him into direct conflict with the Soviet Union for the hearts and minds of the Third World.
The two powers were now saying to an international audience what they were saying to each other, that each had the better socialist answer.
The two powers adopted divergent stances on matters of war and peace.
China had only recently emerged from civil war and two 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 Marxist belief in the inevitability of violence.
It was not put off by nuclear weapons.
It aspired to have them, although it did not think they would be used in war.
By contrast, the Soviet Union was losing sight of its Bolshevik youth and was all too conscious of the cost of the Second 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 nuclear arms race.
China was locked into a confrontation with the United States which made peaceful co-existence a priori nonsense.
The Soviet Union was escaping from its confrontation and could therefore amend the master's teaching.
This further doctrinal disagreement became linked with the previous ones and led to charges of revisionism against the Soviet Union.
During the shelling of Quemoy in 1958, Soviet reticence was already remarkable; a year later, Khrushchev's advocacy of Eisenhower's 'Two-China' idea seemed to carry disloyalty to the point of outright treachery.
In 1962 the nadir was reached when the Soviet Union supported India in its war with China and when Khrushchev, having belatedly acted against the United States in Cuba, crumbled meekly in face of opposition.
Already in 1959 Khrushchev had reneged on his agreement to help China produce nuclear weapons; and in the same disheartening year of 1962 he ganged up with Kennedy to sign the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, as if to perpetuate China's military inferiority.
The Chinese Military Affairs Commission had decided in 1958 to develop an independent military capacity and strategy.
The opportunity apparently presented by a combination of circumstances in 1953 was therefore lost; and long before Khrushchev was toppled from power, a deep bitterness characterised Chinese-Soviet relations.
In 1960 Khrushchev withdrew all Soviet economic aid and technical advisers.
In 1960 the People's Daily published a group of articles, 'Long Live Leninism', which were a proxy attack on the theory and practice of Soviet communism, and in 1961 Zhou Enlai ostentatiously walked out of the Soviet Party Congress; condemnation of China became standard fare in the pages of Pravda.
By 1963 there was virtually nothing exchanged except polemics; there was little trade and less travel.
In 1964, it was a fitting comment that, as Khrushchev was ousted, Mao set off his first nuclear explosion.

Revolutionary Transformation

The 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 could avoid a war.
The abuse on both sides was intense.
The Soviet Union was said to be not simply revisionist, but counter-revolutionary.
Mao was compared to Hitler and Maoism to Nazism.
The border clashes in the spring and summer of 1969, which started on the frontier with Heilongjiang and spread to the frontier with Xinjiang, were serious in themselves but even more so in their symbolism and the charges and counter-charges that they produced.
The Chinese army probably got the worse of the exchanges.
Whatever the truth or otherwise of such charges, there is little doubt that Mao adopted an unfriendly attitude to Khrushchev's successors from the start, refusing their overtures and accusing them of capitulating to the United States.
It was Mao who, in 1966, raised the level of the conflict from the inter-state to the inter-party by refusing to send delegates to the XXIII Congress of the Soviet Party.
The Cultural Revolution fuelled public outbursts against all outsiders, but particularly the Russians.
Chinese Communism was now the only acceptable form of Marxism-Leninism; Brezhnev and Kosygin were guilty of apostasy.
If there were calmer voices within China, anxious to keep the peace with the Soviet Union, they were quickly silenced.
Growing Soviet military power undoubtedly worried Mao.
Soviet responsibility for the border incidents stemmed from the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968.
Brezhnev Doctrine limited the sovereignty of socialist states to the point at which their distinctive socialist characteristics did not constitute any kind of threat to other socialist states.
The lesson was as clear for China as for Eastern Europe.
The Soviet Union now had chapter and verse for intervention; and it already had the will and the power.
Incidents were inevitable.
The reaction was the Chinese.
That war did not result was partly due to the Soviet reaction.
Brezhnev may well have been surprised at the outcome of Soviet military growth and strategic deployment.
Kosygin was authorized to fly home from Ho Chi Minh's funeral via Beijing and to initiate border negotiations.
On the Chinese side there appears to have been no taste for full-scale war, despite the general hostility to the outside world promoted by the Cultural Revolution.
Mao agreed to talks, although only on inter-state questions.
Mao interpreted an Asian collective security system as half-way house to the complete encirclement of the People's Republic.
He had discovered an alternative way of disposing of border incursions by securing himself an additional, if unlikely friend, the United States.
One of the most worrying aspects of the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia had been the acquiescence or, as Mao saw it, even the collusion of the United States.
As the Soviet Union expanded its own involvement in Vietnam and made overtures to Japan, the need to win American friendship became overwhelming.
China and the United States began the negotiations that led to mutual recognition.
Parallel USSR-USA negotiations on arms did not cease, and in 1974 the Brezhnev-Ford discussion of SALT in Vladivostok, added insult to the injury to the Chinese.
Mao's timely recognition of the changing power situation was a crucial factor in preventing outright war with the Soviet Union after 1969.
The Soviet military build-up spilled over to establish a naval base in Vietnam.
Soviet academic establishment analysed a China that was bureaucratic, militarist and historically imperialist.
Party Congresses assigned China to the imperialist camp.
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 with Washington for military superiority in general and for political supremacy in the Middle East, broadly defined.
There were some differences of view at the top; but supported by the military, Brezhnev accumulated power to execute unimaginative and inflexible policies.
It was very difficult for the Soviet Union to change course.
It was made no easier by Chinese successes and Soviet failures.
A self-confident Beijing rejected Moscow's overtures in 1976 just after Mao's death and a further genuinely conciliatory approach in 1978.
In addition to its American coup in the same year, China also signed a friendship treaty with Japan, and Hua Guofeng toured Eastern Europe.
In mid-1979 the Chinese refused to renegotiate their 1950 treaty of alliance and set unacceptably severe terms for other discussions.
The Soviet Union resorted to the military intervention weapon in Afghanistan in late 1979, merely to compound its difficulties.
China had gone through its diplomatic revolution and was on course for a political and economic one.
Recognition by the United States was of enormous importance, well beyond splitting the anti-Chinese front.
China was finally freed from the post-Korean bond tying it to the Soviet Union.
China could take its seat on the Security Council and gain world-wide acceptance as a major power, if not 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 accept genuine peaceful co-existence.
China was feeling its way towards a reformed socialism that would retain the best features of Marxist-type politics but enable the economy to select those practices and technologies of Western societies most likely to modernize China by the end of the twentieth century.
War had been avoided, and China set upon a revolutionary path undreamt of by Mao-or by Brezhnev-and one still being assessed by the Chinese themselves.

Recognizing Realities

Brezhnev is now dead too.
At Brezhnev's funeral, Andropov revealed his identity of view.
The discussions go on at a desultory pace and may, from time to time, turn on such personal factors as Andropov's survival and Deng Xiaoping's influence.
The basic historical and geographical factors still cannot be ignored, nor the many disagreements and bitter exchanges that the last sixty or seventy years have witnessed.
The current situation is different again from the moment in 1969 when the two powers clashed.
The world is neither bipolar, nor tripolar, but multipolar.
The Soviet Union and China are not free to squabble alone with each other, or even only with the United States to consider.
There is no way that the Soviet Union can impose its will on China by force, military, political, economic, or any other.
The warning it gave China in 1979 during the brief Sino-Vietnamese conflict was the limit it could go to then; and it would be less now, given China's contribution to the international military balance.
The People's Republic and the Soviet Union are established societies of quite massive proportions, and developed and unified in ways that Imperial China and Tsarist Russia were not.
If there ever was a chance that one would dislodge or destroy the other, it went in the years 1917-21 or, more surely, 1964-78.
The two states are now at somewhat similar stages of socialist development.
In the political and ideological sense both have developed mature, if different systems, each of which is as much and as little a Marxist system as the other.
Pending recognition, of course, there may still be much bitter controversy.
The last Soviet Party Congress was less damnatory about China than its predecessors.
Brezhnev conceded in a speech at Tashkent that the People's Republic was also socialist.
Hu Yaobang has been more positive, too, of late.
How, over the next twenty years, does the Soviet Union cope with a declining labor force and, simultaneously, China with a 20% population increase?
If China needs courage to accept a reassurance on its security against Soviet aggression, it is the Soviet Union that has to go further to recognize the right of another state to be socialist-and equal.
Soviet inflexibility and Chinese pragmatism may further differentiate the two different socialisms.