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Authors: Odd Arne Westad

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Page 132
on 327 people who were teaching in higher education and technical schools, 24 doctors, 31 consultants and advisers to the Central Chinese ministries and administrations, 14 scientific workers, 17 working in literature and publishing, and 11 translators. The report stated that there had been so many problems with this group that the CPSU organization at the Soviet embassy in Beijing had decided to send many of them back home.
The report complained that the various Soviet ministries and administrations were not paying sufficient attention to the process and were sending poor-quality people to China. The latest arrivals were not at all well prepared, and many of them were doing a bad job. One even broke Chinese law.

47

Home control over the advisers was, in some cases, almost nonexistent. In reviewing the work of those sent to work in education and other science and technical areas, the same report to the Central Committee complained that the Soviets were sending people who were too old or weak to work in China. Several were sick for a long time, recovered by relaxing while there, and then were sent back to the Soviet Union. Another problem was with the timing. The report stated, with exasperation, that more than once a person had been sent to China to teach for a short period, such as three to six months, only to arrive exactly when the Chinese schools were having their holiday, making the adviser almost useless.
48
For some reason, the various ministries of the Soviet Union that were supposed to send specialists were dragging their feet, and the Chinese were left expecting people who did not arrive for a long time. A Soviet Council of Minister's decree of July 4 and 9, 1957, was designed to speed the process, but it seemed to accomplish little. In a letter from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs to the CPSU CC, I. Kurdiukov complained that thirty-nine people had been signed up to be sent to China but the cases of thirty-one of them were still stuck in the Committee for Going Abroad (
Komitet po vyezdom za granitsu
). And this occurred after the decree had been promulgated.
49
Especially surprising were the complaints that the Soviet Ministry of Education was sending advisers without sending supplies, such as books, so that unless the teacher himself thought to bring them, he had nothing to work with. While this complaint surfaced in Central Committee files in 1957,
50
this had been a problem for some years already. One respondent who had been in China in the early 1950s, a medical doctor, said that she remembered that she had very few supplies with which to work. "Mainly, I remember that books were too few. I brought a couple, but very little. We weren't allowed, generally. The problem was our border, not the Chinese border. The Chinese didn't even look at what we Soviets had at the border."
51
By 1957 a report filed by the Soviet embassy in China noted that overt problems were beginning to surface in the relationship. In an overview of the vari-

 

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ous political campaigns in China, the report focused on the one that was designed to correct the work style of party cadres. It charted the CCP's progress in its struggle against the "rightists." The report noted that this particular campaign was not organized well and that much damaging information about the Communist Party and about socialism in general had fallen into the hands of these "rightists." This was all by way of explaining why anti-Soviet attacks had been printed recently in the Chinese press. The report worried that although the CCP had increased its measures to educate the Chinese population on "the spirit of Chinese-Soviet friendship" and to teach them about the Soviet experience, still enemy propaganda that circulated news of the "Hungarian events" and the "anti-Soviet speeches of the rightists'' had had their influence among some sectors of the population, especially the intelligentsia and students.

52

The later in the decade that advisers worked in China, the more they felt the growing estrangement between the countries. One remembered that when his group arrived in China in September 1957, the Chinese citizens all stood around and applauded their train, yelling "Hurrah! The Soviet experts are here to help us!" At first, the friendship seemed genuine, for the Chinese were very careful to observe all Soviet holidays and even advisers' birthdays. But in the course of a year, relations had become so strained that the advisers' mail was being intercepted and read, both incoming and outgoing. His group left a year later, in September 1959, and by that time the relationship was at such a low that the Chinese would not even drive them to the train station; one of the Czech specialists drove them.
53
Of course, not all former advisers felt that external political events weakened the relationship. Some actually felt that there never had been a genuine friendship between the Soviets and the Chinese and that the Chinese had always held back. One ex-adviser said that the Chinese could never truly be friends with anybody, because of "the deeply ingrained habit of theirs to look down on all non-Han people as inferior." He also cited an example of how unappreciative the Chinese were for all that the Soviet Union did for them. He recalled how the Soviets had come in and built a plant for the canning of fruits, vegetables, meats, and fish. They handed hundreds of recipes to the Chinese comrades. Then, when the Chinese took over production, they began to add ingredients to the foods being preserved, and their products were clearly superior to the Soviet ones. When the Soviet side then asked for the improved recipes, the Chinese refused the request.
54
Most advisers who worked in China after 1956 blamed the internal Chinese political situation for disrupting their work and for mining the friendship. They felt they experienced unpleasant delays at work and postponements of routine services in their daily lives due to the endless Chinese political campaigns of that time.

 

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One, a teacher at an academy, remembered feeling very frustrated about this because the Chinese would hold long meetings after dinner that he was not allowed to attend. He knew that the officials running it "were working his Chinese colleagues over." He heard about spectacles where a deputy would curse himself in front of the crowd for fouling up work, for being a "semicapitalist," for demanding more than he deserved, and so on.

55
He also found that during his entire time in China, all decisions regarding ordinary issues, such as when to begin the semester, were considered political and could be decided only by the Communist Party committee. The administrators and the teachers had to wait while the CCP discussed everything for them. Because of such delays, sometimes they did not work for days.

The Advisors' Program Reevaluated
The Soviet Advisors' Program in China was indeed grand in its conception, in that it foresaw the complete rebuilding of one society into another in a matter of years. That it did not finish the job it started should be no surprise, for ultimately it was constrained by long-standing mistrust between the respective leaders, problems in coming to a fair and equitable agreement, and difficulties in execution.
The newly opened files of the Central Committee give a new perspective on the Sino-Soviet relationship as seen through the eyes of the CPSU. Clearly, China was not among the highest priorities for that organization until after Stalin's death, for only then did the Soviet Advisors' Program swing into high gear. The archives also reveal that the CC apparatus, which oversaw the Advisors' Program, managed its workers in China in the same way in which it managed Soviet society. This accounts for its style of issuing directives from above, for not always including the Chinese in its major decisions about their own country's development, for its obsession with security, and for its near lack of attention to details at the lowest level, which was exactly where most Soviet advisers worked.
Each of these tendencies runs through the relationship like a leitmotif. In the beginning of the official friendship, problems were ignored or simply not noted, but sometime after 1956, they came into focus as real annoyances and hindrances. The top-down management style became problematic after several incidents in which it was clear that the Soviet decision makers did not have a good idea of the situation in China. Related to this, major decisions were made about China, often without consulting with the Chinese side.
The Soviet proclivity for strict security measures also led to problems, in that advisers had to worry about revealing state secrets and therefore were less effective at communicating with their Chinese comrades than they might have

 

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been. And finally, the fact that the Central Committee paid so little attention to the work of Soviet advisers in China led to many uncomfortable predicaments. The CPSU did not seem to be aware that the advisers and technicians represented the Sino-Soviet relationship to the Chinese, so that the Chinese were observing carefully their performance and the interest (or lack thereof) in China of their home institutions.
The new willingness and ability of Russians to speak freely about their lives has added a new dimension to Soviet and Russian studies. In this case, the perspective of those who worked as advisers, technicians, and specialists in China enriches the formal CPSU record of that decade. It was from these people that we learned how the Communist Party's decentralized management style of the advisers in China contributed to difficulties between the two countries. Party membership was one of the most important qualifications for going to China, and all advisers were screened carefully, yet once there, often they were left alone to do as they wanted. The quality of their work seemed to depend on what kind of a person each was. Some gave their all while there, but there were reports of others who did little but relax and enjoy themselves.
The ex-advisers reported that the CPSU did very little to prepare them for their time in China, and as the relationship between the two countries became less friendly in the second half of the 1950s, this ignorance became awkward. The advisers were discouraged from fraternizing with their Chinese comrades, for this was not a relationship like the ones the Soviets had with other Communists, such as those from Poland or Czechoslovakia. According to the ex-advisers, close contact was discouraged officially. Further, they were always housed separately, in large complexes with restaurants, further hindering contacts with Chinese outside of work. Many of them remembered unpleasant incidents regarding those who did try to have a close Chinese friend. All of the advisers reported being followed by Chinese security forces, which also inhibited unmonitored contact.
Sometime after Khrushchev's speech denouncing Stalin in 1956, formerly latent problems in the relationship began to surface. The Central Committee's management style, its habit of neglecting to include the Chinese in major decisions, and its low level of supervision over its workers began to take a toll, and the Chinese began discussing the difficulties in public. And here, the official files illustrate very clearly how ill-equipped the Central Committee was to deal quickly and effectively with such problems. Even when Soviet embassy personnel wrote openly about difficulties, the responses were slow and cumbersome and not always realistic.
The advisers, technicians and experts, working at the lowest level of the alliance were always far removed from the decisions that affected them and usu-

 

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ally had little power to alter even their own working situations. The fact that they were all chosen and sent through the Communist Party may even have worked against the success of the friendship, for they all tended to believe that the party knew best. This, of course, discouraged even the most intelligent of them from questioning their government's policies in China.
Almost all Soviets who worked in China in the 1950s feel sympathy for the Chinese and remember their time there as a high point in their lives. Many felt that there was some sort of friendship between the Chinese and Russian people, but it was confined to the lowest level and, in the end, did not matter. Even if there were as many as 10,000 Soviets in China, the friendship could not survive on their good intentions alone. In some fundamental way, the Sino-Soviet friendship, like Soviet society, became an unwitting victim of the CPSU's inability to manage its assets well.
Notes
1. The archives I worked in are the Russian Center for Storage and Study of Documents of Contemporary History [
Rossiiskii tsentr khraneniya i izucheniya dokumentov noveishei istorii,
or RTsKhIDNI], the Storage Center for the Preservation of Contemporary Documents [
Tsentr khraneniia sovremennoi dokumentatsii,
or TsKhSD], and to a lesser extent, the Russian Foreign Ministry Archives [
Arkhiv vneshnei politiki Rossiskii Federatsii
]. Other important organizations, such as the State Committee on Foreign Economic Relations [
Goskomitet po ekonomicheskim sviaziam
], were very involved in China. However, I have tried on several occasions to get access to their files and failed.
2. TsKhSD, fond (f.) 5, opist (op.) 22, roll 4536, no. 969 (February-March 1953), pp. 97-100. See Deborah A. Kaple, "Four Myths about Soviet Involvement in China in the 1950s," paper presented at the Cold War International History Project conference, Moscow, January 12-15, 1993.
3. A more detailed account of new findings is in Kaple, "Four Myths."
4. For a discussion of developments in Chinese industrial management between the years of 1949 and 1953, see Deborah A. Kaple,
Dream of a Red Factory: The Legacy of High Stalinism in China
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1994).
5. For a discussion of the pact and its secret protocols, see Sergei N. Goncharov, John W. Lewis, and Xue Litai,
Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao and the Korean War
(Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993), 121-9.

 

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