Brothers in Arms (53 page)

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Authors: Odd Arne Westad

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shelled the islands in 1958 without consulting with the Soviet Union, in violation of the 1950 treaty. Moscow also accused China of attempting to torpedo relaxation of global tension by intentionally provoking the border clash with India. Khrushchev believed that China had undertaken these actions expecting Soviet support and that China was seeking to ruin Moscow's détente policy with the United States.

19

Taiwan and the Conflict with the United States
The military cooperation between the Soviet Union and China was strongly influenced by the war that was continuing between the People's Republic and the Guomindang regime on Taiwan. As the PRC government started to concentrate on the Taiwan issue after the end of the Korean War, Moscow had to decide how far to support Chinese objectives. As long as the United States kept providing security guarantees for the GMD, such Soviet assistance could have started a direct clash with the United States. Under the fragile peace established in Asia after the Korean War, a new outbreak of violence would have represented the Soviet Union in an unfavorable light before the international community. Moreover, at that time the new Soviet leadership loudly proclaimed its course of détente. The détente policy meant that military cooperation with China on this issue would be carried out only secretly, so as not to present the West an opportunity to accuse the Soviets of wishing to unleash a new war.
Throughout the Korean War and in its immediate aftermath, the Soviet Union did supply the Chinese army and its rudimentary navy with amphibious material, such as would be used for landings on the GMD-held offshore islands or on Taiwan itself. But the Soviet General Staff and its advisers in China did not believe that the People's Republic could launch a successful operation against the main islands without several years of preparation and the active involvement of specially assigned Soviet advisers in the planning stages. Even if these conditions were adhered to, the General Staff also realized that Soviet military technology for amphibious operations was still in its infancy and that the Soviet Union could supply little to the PRC that the United States could not easily match with the power it already had in the Taiwan Straits.
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The Soviet ambassadors, Iudin especially, kept underlining the international repercussions of a full-scale attack on Taiwan to the Chinese leadership. Chinese officials, on the other hand, felt that they had to reassure the Soviets that no such attacks would be undertaken, even if battles would take place on the smaller GMD-held islands along the Chinese coast. In a conversation with Ambassador Iudin on February 28, 1955, Liu Shaoqi said:
China's troops can shoot at these islands [Mazu and Jinmen] with our long-range guns, but they have not yet started firing in earnest

 

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upon the islands because in the vicinity of our guns, China does not have railways to deliver arms and ammunition nor airports from where aircraft may support the artillery fire at the islands. At present railroads and airports are being constructed. Let Jiang Jieshi's supporters sit on these islands for a while, and later we shall have them covered so that nobody will be able to run away. If the artillery fire is increased now, they might run away.
Cautious as always, Ambassador Iudin sent the record of the conversation to Moscow but refrained from making any comments of his own.

21

For Mao and the PRC leaders, the flight of the nationalists to Taiwan caused the struggle to reunify China to be incomplete. After the victory of the 1949 revolution in China, Beijing started to declare the necessity of uniting the country. The Soviets were aware that even though the slogan "Taiwan is an integral part of China" remained the essence of the Chinese approach, China's leaders used the question of Taiwan in different ways. In the mid-1950s it became an important means for tying China to the Soviet Union's nuclear umbrella.
In both Taiwan Straits crises, in 1954-1955 and in 1958, as the United States prepared to repel a PRC attack on Taiwan, the Soviet Union had to evaluate carefully its countermeasures. On both occasions Khrushchev was willing to support China militarily and, if need be, to respond with Soviet forces to an American attack on mainland China. Even though the Soviet leaders had their misgivings about Chinese tactics, they still viewed a credible Soviet nuclear guarantee as being of essential importance both vis-à-vis Washington and in the relationship with Beijing.
On September 19, 1958, Nikita Khrushchev sent a message to President Dwight D. Eisenhower calling on the United States to give up "its aggressive policy, that is constantly creating hot-beds of serious conflicts either in this or that region of the world, and that led to the establishment of an especially tense situation on the Far East at the present time." The message stressed that "nuclear blackmail toward the PRC will intimidate neither us nor the People's Republic of China." It also said that ''not only the United States, but our side also possesses nuclear and hydrogen weapons, as well as appropriate means of their delivery, and if the PRC is attacked with such weapons, the aggressor will instantly be repulsed by similar means."
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Khrushchev also found it necessary to stress that "attacking the PRC is attacking the USSR" and offered Moscow's version of conflict settlement, which in many ways looked like an ultimatum.
It's necessary to put an end to interference into China's internal affairs. The American navy should be recalled from the Taiwan Straits,

 

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and American soldiers should leave Taiwan and go home. There can be no stable peace in the Far East without it. If the U.S. does not do it now, People's China will have no other way out but to banish the armed forces hostile to it from its own territory where a springboard for an attack on the PRC is being created. We are completely on the side of the Chinese Government, the Chinese people. It's their policy that we support and will support.

23

On September 22, the Soviet position was confirmed in the speech made by the Soviet foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, at the United Nations General Assembly. Having called for support of India's proposal on the induction of the legitimate government of China into the United Nations, Gromyko said that "the U.S. Government should not treat so lightly the provocations that it started in the Far East, trying to expand aggression against China, including the region of coastal islands. Aggressors should leave Chinese territory, and go where they came from, and do it the sooner the better."
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Gromyko also said, "China was and still is in China, while the island of Taiwan with coastal islands is an integral part of Chinese territory illegaly captured by the United States and awaiting its liberation."
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The tension in the Taiwan straits and the international attention it attracted pushed Moscow to a more precise formulation of its position on the question of protecting the People's Republic. On September 27 the Central Committee (CC) of the CPSU directed a letter to the CC of CCP, which said that the Soviet Union was ready to render assistance to China in case of an attack of United States or Japan.
We cannot proceed from a situation in which our enemies can form the illusion that if the PRC is attacked by United States or Japan the most probable opponents or by any other state, the Soviet Union will remain as a passive observer. . . . It will be a serious calamity for the whole socialist camp, for the Communist movement, if the U.S.A. lets atomic bombs fall on the PRC and China pays with the lives of its sons and daughters, and, having a dangerous weapon that might not only stop but also defeat our common enemies, we would not render you assistance. . . . As for us, we can say that attacking China means attacking the Soviet Union.
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China's immediate reaction to this declaration, made along the channels of interparty communication, was positive, even though the official answer reached Moscow only in the middle of October 1958, after Khrushchev publicly announced that "the Soviet Union will come to the aid of the Chinese People' s Re-

 

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