Chairman Mao Tse-tung has been quoted in the American Press as having told the twelfth plenum of the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party last November that the main threat to the country’s security now comes from the Soviet Union. Since the official text has not been published it is not possible for anyone either to vouchsafe for the accuracy of the report or to identify the context in which the statement was made.
But there is nothing incredible or implausible about the report. The recent armed clashes over the control of the Damansky island in the Ussuri and the massive deployment of armour and troops – allegedly 300,000 men on the Soviet and 500,000 on the Chinese side – make it only too obvious that this longest common frontier in the world has become fully alive. China is also said to have moved its navy northward from its previous position in the South China Sea.
The point regarding Russia being regarded as the principal threat by Mr. Mao Tse-tung is underscored if the two incidents on the Ussuri are placed in a proper historical perspective. Three factors deserve attention.
Unjust Pacts
First, the Chinese are convinced that Czarist Russia imposed “unequal treaties on their country in the period of its weakness in 1858 and I860 and seized nearly 600,000 sq. miles of territory from it. They are prepared to accept these treaties as the basis of a fresh bolder settlement provided that the Russians first concede that these pacts were unequal and unjust. The memory of “imperialist plunder” irks the Chinese and feeds their sense of grievance against the Russians. The territory actually in dispute now is around 23,000 sq. miles but a compromise settlement is made extremely difficult because Peking would not accept the status quo which, in its view, would amount to another “unequal” treaty.
Secondly, the population on both sides of the border is ethnically, culturally and linguistically different from the majority and it has not been assimilated into the mainstream of national life. Neither Moscow nor Peking therefore fully trusts it. Both are engaged in a struggle against national “deviationism”. The flight of something like 60,000 Uighars from Sinkiang to the Soviet Union in 1962 illustrates the nature of the competition for the loyalty of the local people.
Thirdly, both Russia and China are highly apprehensive of each other’s intentions. These apprehensions were not laid to rest even during the period of their honeymoon when both protested loudly their undying and eternal friendship and adherence to the principles of proletarian internationalism.
The Russian nightmare is that a vast area totalling almost four million sq. miles is very sparsely populated on their side of the far eastern border with China. The density of population in the Soviet Far East is three persons a square kilometre against 10.6 in the Soviet Union as a whole and 70 in China. Moscow cannot fill these empty spaces in the foreseeable future because its rate of growth of population has steadily fallen from 17.8 per thousand in 1960 to 9.8 in 1967 and because incentives have failed to persuade a sufficiently large number of young people to move to these regions.
As for the Chinese they are a people with a long memory. They remember the unhealthy interest which Stalin showed in Sinkiang and Manchuria. He forced Peking to accept joint exploitation of resources in Sinkiang and tried to set up a more or less autonomous regime under Kao Kang in Manchuria. Kao Kang, who was disgraced soon after Stalin’s death, was said to have committed suicide in 1954.
Mr. Khrushchev reversed Stalin’s policy towards China. He gave up the special rights that Stalin had acquired in Sinkiang, agreed to the liquidation of the joint companies, made over the Manchurian Railway to the Chinese and withdrew Soviet troops from Dairen. But if these concessions allayed Chinese fears for some time they could have been aroused again by what has happened since 1962.
As against this China has not faced a direct threat to its territorial integrity from the United States. The Chinese were alarmed at the prospect of America’s military power being installed in North Korea in the early ‘fifties and they risked a war with the United States to prevent that. It is equally possible that they would have intervened if Washington had invaded North Viet Nam and threatened to occupy it. But that contingency has not occurred.
Very Angry
The Chinese have been extremely angry at the US military presence in South Korea, Japan, Formosa, South Viet Nam and Thailand and the stationing of the Seventh Fleet in the South China Sea because they have thereby been thwarted in their ambition to dominate the region. But American and Chinese troops have not been involved in a direct confrontation or clash since the end of the Korean war in 1953. America’s power is not lodged at China’s doorstep.
Thus Mr. Mao Tse-tung can argue with a degree of plausibility that the Soviet Union has come to constitute the main threat to China’s security. But does it follow that Mr. Mao Tse-tung is willing to subordinate the struggle against American “imperialism” to the one against what he calls Soviet “revisionism” and “social imperialism”? To put it in Maoist terms, has the “great helmsman” come to the conclusion that the contradiction between “revisionism” and true socialism has superseded the one between imperialism and socialism?
If the issue is framed in these terms, the answer must clearly be in the negative. China just cannot afford to destroy its image as an anti-imperialist and revolutionary power because that would make nonsense of all its claims to the leadership of the Communist movement in Asia, Africa and Latin America on the one hand and of its anti-Soviet campaign on the other. If the Russian leadership is guilty of “revisionism” in the Chinese view it is at least partly because it has allegedly compromised with imperialism and has lost the zeal to promote revolutionary struggles. Mr Mao Tse-tung cannot justify the excesses of the so-called proletarian cultural revolution and the leap forward if at the end of it all he also decides to seek accommodation with imperialism.
No Gain
It can also be argued that Chairman Mao Tse-tung has nothing to gain by being reasonable towards the United States. It will not concede Formosa to him and it will not withdraw its military forces from the region. These are crucial issues because the integration of Formosa with the mainland and the elimination of American military power from the region, which includes the Far East, South Asia and South-East Asia, have been the two principal objectives of the Chinese foreign policy since 1949.
History too points in the same direction as the compulsions of ideology and foreign policy, in that China will not seek accommodation with either of the two super powers. In the nineteenth century the Manchus did not even try to use Russia as a counterweight to Britain, or to ally with Britain to check Russia’s advance and expansion. To seek an alliance with either should have commended itself to the Manchus because during the period when China was under pressure from these two great powers, they were themselves highly suspicious of and hostile to each other. The Manchus might not have succeeded in forging an alliance with either Britain or Russia against the other but the point is that they did not even try to do so. In fact at times they caused offence to both of them at the same time.
The Kuomintang also failed to learn the lesson that China cannot afford to quarrel at the same time with the great land power with which it shares a long common frontier and the dominant sea power in the Pacific and the South China Sea. Even after the Japanese invasion Marshal Chiang Kai-shek failed to befriend the Soviet Union which alone could counterbalance Japan’s sea powder. Even when Russia and Japan clashed along the Manchurian frontier in 1938 the Marshal made no attempt to seek an understanding with Moscow. Even the forging of the anti-Japan united front with the Communists did not change his outlook towards the Soviet Union.
When the Communists seized power in 1949 it appeared as if the leadership was aware of the compulsions of geography and power. Chairman Mao pronounced the doctrine of leaning on one side, that of the Soviet Union. He ignored Stalin’s lukewarm attitude towards him personally, his desire to keep China weak and divided, his designs on Sinkiang and Manchuria, his niggardliness in terms of economic aid and other similar acts in the interest of building and consolidating the alliance with the Soviet Union. But this did not last too long. Since 1956 he has pursued policies which have won for China Russia’s hostility. Simultaneously he has not made a single significant move towards reconciliation with the United States. Once again China finds itself at odds with the dominant land power and the dominant sea power.
The Chinese propaganda leaves little room for doubt that Chairman Mao and his supporters are aware that the present situation is unsatisfactory. Else, they would not be so worried over what they describe as the Russo-American collusion and the encirclement of China. But they have been behaving as if they have come to the conclusion that they have no option but continue the policy of unremitting hostility towards both American “imperialism” and Soviet “revisionism.”
New Nuance
These arguments could perhaps be regarded as being conclusive before the two fairly serious border clashes on the Ussuri and the revival of the China debate in the United States. But in the new framework it is no longer inconceivable that as Peking increases its deployment along the Soviet border its foreign policy begins to acquire a new nuance. Outwardly, nothing need change, not much in any case. The intensity of the propaganda campaign against the United States can be kept up. The Warsaw talks may or may not be resumed. The support to North Viet Nam and the Viet Cong can be maintained. The Americans are not likely to be unduly disturbed if the Chinese maintain a limited flow of arms and money to the rather ineffectual insurrectionary movements in South-East Asia. Washington certainly has the power to reinforce the already powerful trend in Chinese thinking which leads them to intensify their hatred of the Soviet Union. A number of China watchers have been saying that the withdrawal of the US fleet from the Formosa straits would be regarded as a conciliatory gesture in Peking.
Making predictions about China is a notoriously hazardous enterprise. But the need to keep an open mind and to keep the situation under constant review cannot be over-emphasised.
The Times of India 2 April 1969