It speaks for the continuing hold in the United States and elsewhere of the views formed during the early stages of the Cold War on the basis of patently wrong information that many Americans and others should be speculating on the “possibility” of China returning to the Soviet fold in the post-Mao period. No other explanation is possible for it.
To discerning men like Mr. Nehru it was clear even at the time of the Chinese revolution in 1949 that the new rulers in Peking were too nationalistic and too conscious of the humiliations of the previous century to wish to subordinate themselves to any external government or agency in the name of whatever principle. The Indian Prime Minister, therefore, did all he could to convince the American policy makers that they must not treat China as a Soviet satellite. At the time of the Korean war he infuriated them by arguing that they must not cross the 38th parallel and thus be seen to constitute a direct physical threat to Manchuria.
Since then so much has become known of the Chinese thinking in that and the earlier formative period that it does not require much perspicacity to grasp the fundamental fact of their intense nationalism. It has, for instance, been known for some years that Chairman Mao Tse-Tung and Mr. Chou En-lai expressed a desire to meet President Roosevelt in Washington so that they could remove the US misunderstanding about their objectives, that they had no hand in the outbreak of the Korean war and that Stalin made them pay for the military hardware he provided for enabling them to intervene effectively in that conflict.
Indeed, it has been common knowledge for years that Stalin was opposed to the Chinese Communist Party’s final bid to seize power and that in 1950 he imposed harsh terms for whatever economic assistance he was prepared to extend to Peking. Chairman Mao himself recalled in 1962 that the differences with the Soviet Union lay “deep in the past, in things which happened long ago.”
Civil War
He said: “Stalin wanted to prevent China from making revolution, saying that we should not have a civil war and should cooperate with Chiang Kai-Shek, otherwise the Chinese nation would perish… after the victory of the revolution he next suspected China of being a Yugoslavia and that I would become a second Tito.”
Similarly, Chairman Mao told his colleagues in 1958 that during his first visit, he had argued with Stalin for two months “about the treaty of mutual assistance and alliance, about the Chinese-Changchun railway, about the joint stock companies, about the border question.” Pertinent in this context is not only the length and, therefore, the toughness of the negotiations, but also the fact that Stalin insisted on a 50 per cent Soviet share in the joint stock companies which were to be set up for exploration and development of mineral resources in border areas and on continued Soviet control of the railway line and of Port Arthur till 1952 and of Port Dairen almost indefinitely.
These facts, exposing the fragile nature of Sino-Soviet ties in the late ‘forties and early ‘fifties, that is long before the ideological dispute began to shape and surface in the wake of Mr. Khrushchev’s denunciation of Stalin at the 20th congress of the Soviet Communist Party in February 1956, tend to be ignored even by students of these affairs because many of them have come to take the view that Stalin was unduly suspicious of the Chinese comrades, that he placed too much reliance on physical instruments of control like the Soviet presence in Dairen and the border areas and, above all, that Chairman Mao has represented a kind of intense and anti-Soviet nationalism which his other colleagues in the leadership have not shared.
There is clearly considerable merit in this view. This is evident from the fact that the post-Stalin Soviet leadership agreed fairly quickly to hand over Dairen to the Chinese and to liquidate the Soviet share in the joint companies and that several prominent Chinese leaders have from time to time incurred Chairman Mao’s displeasure by their advocacy of normal state-to-state relations with Moscow. Marshal Peng Teh-huai and Mr. Liu Shao-chi are best known among them.
Inequity
But it deserves to be noted that while Mr. Khrushchev was willing to end the obvious inequities imposed by Stalin on the Chinese and extend economic assistance to them on a more generous scale, he was not prepared to consult them either on the question of de-Stalinisation or on that of relations with the United States. He had, of course, good reasons to act the way he did. For, he could not possibly concede to the Chinese the right to be consulted on domestic problems, however grave the consequences for the world communist movement of his actions, and he was no less concerned with the promotion of Russia’s national interests.
On the other hand, it is not possible to demonstrate equally convincingly that the dispute with the Soviet Union has not been the handiwork primarily of Chairman Mao for the simple reason that he has dominated the scene since he seized the Communist Party’s leadership at the Tsunyi conference in 1935. If he has been strong enough to impose his unorthodox views, in terms of the Marxist-Leninist theory, on the country in respect of its economic growth, it is not easy to argue that he has not done so in regard to relations with the Soviet Union.
But, however deep the impress of Chairman Mao’s personality on the course of the Sino-Soviet dispute, it cannot be denied that the Chinese communists are profoundly nationalistic and that they could not, even in his absence, have interpreted the concept of “proletarian internationalism” in a manner that would have subordinated their country’s interests to that of the Soviet Union. Thus while the conflict could have taken a less volatile course, it could not have been prevented even if Mr. Mao has disappeared from the scene in the mid-’fifties.
In view of America’s policy of cordoning off their country through the establishment of bases around it and of strengthening the breakaway Kuomintang regime in Formosa, the Chinese leaders, including Chairman Mao, might have gone along with the Russians in the late ‘fifties if the latter had adopted a posture of relentless hostility towards the United States and assisted the former to become sufficiently strong, economically and militarily. But, by the same token, a Soviet policy of rapprochement with Washington would have brought to the fore the conflict of interests and provoked trouble between the two countries, irrespective of who was in command in Peking. And since it is inconceivable that any Soviet leader in his senses could have sought an aggravation of tensions with the United States and enabled China to become a formidable power in its own right, the conclusion is unavoidable that a parting of ways in some form was unavoidable.
Speculation
The speculation regarding the “possibility” of China returning to the fold is doubtless fed by the official Chinese charges against Marshal Lin Piao. For, these can be cited to prove that even after the Soviet military intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968, the armed clashes on the Ussuri in 1969 and the consequent deployment of heavily armed Soviet soldiers along the common border, an important Chinese leader was opposed to rapprochement with the United States and favoured a common anti-American front with the Soviet Union. But since we know only one side of the complicated Lin Piao affair, it is wholly inadvisable to draw any foreign policy conclusions from it. Indeed, it is possible that in this case, as in that of the Chairman’s conflict with Marshal Peng Teh-huai in 1959 and Mr. Liu Shao-chi in 1965, the differences related essentially to domestic problems. The two leaders fell out with him on the issue of the Great Leap Forward.
From all this it does not follow that the United States can develop a smoother relationship with China than the Soviet Union could in the ‘fifties or that Washington will do for Peking what Moscow was unwilling to do. That, too, is out of the question, however much the interests of the two countries may appear to coincide on the question of containing the Soviet Union. America also cannot jeopardise its detente with Russia for reasons which have been repeatedly stated by Mr Kissinger in recent weeks and it cannot be interested in helping to augment China’s economic and military strength beyond a point because that would disrupt the power balances which it must seek to see stabilised in the region. After all, the Soviet Union is not China’s only neighbour. This issue is obscured by Peking’s weakness, America’s concern over Russia’s growing military strength and Washington’s desire to strengthen its ties with the former, if necessary, through a limited supply of hardware. But it is there to stay.
The Times of India, 28 April 1976