Brothers in Arms (90 page)

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Authors: Odd Arne Westad

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Union and West Germany, the signing of a peace treaty with Austria, and the improvement of relations with Yugoslavia, Beijing provided Moscow with timely and firm support.

63

On important international issues, Chinese and Soviet leaders carefully consulted with each other to coordinate their strategies and policies. A revealing example in this regard was Beijing's and Moscow's management of the Geneva Conference of 1954. Before the conference, Zhou Enlai twice visited Moscow to hold a series of meetings with Soviet leaders, which resulted in well-coordinated Sino-Soviet strategies toward the Korean and Indochina questions that were to be discussed at the conference.
64
At Geneva, the Chinese and the Soviet delegations exchanged opinions and intelligence information on a daily basis. When the Vietnamese Communists hesitated before accepting the temporary division of their country along the seventeenth parallel, both the Chinese and the Soviets pressured their comrades, convincing them that such a solution was in the interests of both the Vietnamese revolution and the cause of world peace. In this sense it is fair to say that the conference's final settlement of the Indochina issue should be attributed to the cooperation between Zhou Enlai and Viacheslav Molotov.
65
The years of 1954 to 1955, in retrospect, should be regarded as a golden age of the Sino-Soviet alliance.
The continuous enhancement of the alliance during this period reflected, to some degree, Moscow's and Beijing's strategic concerns. From a Soviet perspective, these were the years that Khrushchev and his comrades slowly began to rid themselves of Stalin's shadow. Khrushchev, who had just emerged as top Soviet leader and needed time to consolidate the leadership role, certainly understood that the support from China was vital for him.
66
Beijing, on the other hand, also needed Moscow's assistance. The CCP leadership was adjusting China's domestic and international policies after the Korean War ended. Domestically, in 1953-1954 the Central Committee was contemplating the introduction of the First Five-Year Plan as well as liberating the GMD-controlled Taiwan either peacefully or, if necessary, by military means. Internationally, after five years of being excluded from the international community, Beijing's leaders (including Mao at that time) were eager to escape China's international isolation.
67
Under these circumstances, especially considering that China's socialist reconstruction had to learn from the Soviet model, political, military, and economic support from the Soviet Union became highly valuable. In other words, the specific needs of China's revolution at this stage were well served by the Sino-Soviet alliance.
A vague undercurrent of disagreement and distrust, however, continued to exist between Chinese and Soviet leaders. In retrospect, even during the heyday of Sino-Soviet solidarity, Mao and his comrades were never comfortable with the

 

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junior partner's role China had to play in its relations with the Soviet Union. As they would explain later, Mao and his comrades felt a deep sense of inequality in their dealings with the Soviets, and particularly with Stalin.

68
To make Beijing a real equal partner with Moscow was the constant aim of Mao and his fellow Beijing leaders. After Stalin's death, as we shall see, Beijing's pursuit of an elusive ''equality" would cause friction with the new Soviet leadership.
69

Related to the discomfort over "inequality" were the potential tensions between Moscow's dominance in the international Communist movement and Beijing's aspirations for recognition of its experience as a central part of the "world revolution." Such international recognition would have a positive effect on Mao's plans for the Chinese Revolution. When Stalin was alive, Mao and his comrades had to respect his authority and yield to his reputation; with Stalin gone, Mao became increasingly reluctant to acknowledge the authority of his much younger and, in Mao's eyes, less sophisticated successor, Nikita Khrushchev.
One outstanding example of the problems existing between Beijing and Moscow during this time could be found in Mao's management of the Gao Gang affair. Gao was a CCP Politburo member and the vice chairman of the PRC Central Government. Mao and other Politburo members believed Gao had been close to Moscow since his days as the CCP leader in the Northeast. Beginning in December 1953, Gao became the target of a series of escalating attacks within the CCP leadership. He was labeled a "conspirator who intended to split the Party" and was reported to have committed suicide in August 1954.
It is now believed that Gao Gang's purge was the result of a long-standing conflict between him and other top CCP leaders, especially Liu Shaoqi and Zhou Enlai, and probably was not directly related to his presumed close ties with the Soviets.
70
However, the timing of the purge was important and revealing. Although the tensions between Gao Gang and Liu Shaoqi had existed for years, Mao did not decide to take Liu's side to criticize Gao until after Stalin's death. Despite Gao's close relations with the Soviets, the CCP did not keep Moscow abreast of what was happening to him. Gao died two weeks before Mao informed the Soviet leaders officially that Gao had committed "serious crimes in trying to split the Party" on September 1, 1954.
71
Ignoring Moscow's "right to know" (if not "right to lead") in this way would have been inconceivable if Stalin had been alive, or if genuine trust had existed between the Chinese and Soviet leaders.
Accumulated Tension
A turning point came in February 1956, when the CPSU held its Twentieth Congress. Several Chinese sources claim that the CCP delegation attending the

 

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congress, headed by Zhu De and Deng Xiaoping, was not invited to the closed-door session at which Khrushchev made his secret speech attacking Stalin and that the Soviets did not provide the Chinese with a copy of it. Both assertions seem doubtful based on recent Russian archival evidence.

72
The main reason for the subsequent anger of Mao and his fellow CCP leaders was, in any case, that no attempt had been made to consult them
in advance of
Khrushchev's fateful speech. They felt deeply offended by their Soviet comrades' way of handling this matter.
73

From mid-March to early April 1956, Mao chaired several CCP Central Secretariat meetings to discuss Khrushchev's speech. At the first of such meetings, convened on the evening of March 17, Mao set the tone for the discussion, pointing out that Khrushchev's speech not only "exposed the problems"
(jie le gaizi)
but also "made a mess"
(tong le louzi
).
74
In accordance with these two fundamental points, Mao and his comrades discussed the messages contained in the Soviet leader's speech and reached several basic conclusions on how to assess them. They believed that Khrushchev's criticism of Stalin's mistakes had shattered the myth that Stalin and the Soviet Union had always been correct and would thus contribute to "correcting Stalin's mistakes as well as the erroneous tendency of treating other parties as inferiors within the international Communist movement."
Within this context, Mao Zedong summarized the mistakes Stalin had committed during the process of the Chinese Communist revolution. He mentioned that during the early stage of China's War of Resistance against Japan, Stalin supported Mao's chief rival Wang Ming's "rightist" policy of "putting the interests of the united front above the interests of the Communist Party," and that after the end of the War of Resistance, he forced the CCP not to fight against the Guomindang's anti-Communist civil war plot. The chairman also recalled that during his visit to the Soviet Union from December 1949 to February 1950, Stalin was reluctant to sign a new alliance treaty with the People's Republic. Not until after Chinese volunteers entered the Korean War, he observed, did Stalin begin to regard the CCP as a genuine Communist Party devoted to true proletarian internationalism.
75
Despite Stalin's mistakes, the CCP chairman emphasized, he should still be regarded as a "great Marxist-Leninist revolutionary leader." Mao told his comrades that Stalin should be evaluated on historical merit:
The realization of Communism is an extremely difficult task as there exists no example [for the Communists] to follow. . . . During the process of fulfilling this arduous task, it is impossible that mistakes would not be committed. This is because what we are doing is some-

 

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thing that no one has tried in the past. I thus always believe [the Communists would] inevitably commit mistakes. The fact that Stalin has committed many mistakes should not be taken as a surprise. Comrade Khrushchev will commit mistakes. The Soviet Union will commit mistakes. And we will also commit mistakes.

76

Therefore, Mao concluded, in making an overall assessment of Stalin as a historical figure, it was necessary to adopt a "seventy-thirty ratio" methodology that is, acknowledge that achievements should account for 70 percent of Stalin's career and mistakes for only 30 percent.
77
As a result of these discussions, Mao and his comrades decided to make public China's view on de-Stalinization, in order to clarify the confusion prompted by Khrushchev's speech. Considering that the Soviets had not formally published Khrushchev's speech and that de-Stalinization was still a developing process, the CCP leadership decided to promulgate the party' s official view through the editorial board of
Renmin ribao
(People's Daily). On April 5, 1956,
Renmin ribao
published a lengthy editorial entitled "On the Historical Experience of Proletarian Dictatorship," arguing that Stalin, in spite of all his "serious mistakes," still needed to be respected as a "great Marxist-Leninist."
78
Mao's dialectical or ambivalent initial response to de-Stalinization reflected his mixed feelings toward Stalin and the Soviet model of socialism. Since the early days of the People's Republic, the experience of Stalin's Soviet Union had been an example for the CCP's own designs for China's state-building, societal transformation, and economic reconstruction. While Mao and his comrades were unwilling to copy completely the "Stalin model," several basic elements of it such as the tight central control of economic planning, the emphasis on developing heavy industry and defense industry, the control of the rural population through collectivization processes, and the top leader's authority over the party and the government had penetrated into the CCP's own political philosophy.
In exploring a Chinese path of continuous revolution, Mao criticized the "Stalin model" in many respects, but he also found that the model offered him valuable grounds on which to establish basic understandings of several fundamental relationships with which he and his party had to deal in China.
79
Indeed, the Stalin model provided Mao and his comrades with an important reference for developing a "Chinese-style" socialist and Communist society. Thus Mao had reasons not to negate completely Stalin's historical role in the international Communist movement.
Mao's response to de-Stalinization also reflected China's changing political situation and his perception of it in the mid-1950s. In a sense, Mao's continuous revolution was his own great enterprise, which resulted from his views about

 

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