Khrushchev and China

NEARLY five years have gone by since first outlined in the pages of the Atlantic the reasons for my belief that all was not well between China and the Soviet Union. During 1960 the existence of a strained situation between the two great Communist powers was made apparent to all the world through press polemics between Moscow and Peiping and through various actions on both sides. The lirst climax in what was clearly a very tough conflict of ideas and policies was the Bucharest Conference in June of last year; the second was the Moscow Conference, of more than eighty Communist Parties, which started early in November and dragged on into December. This Moscow conference was so secret that the very fact that it had been convened was not announced until it was all over. Then there was published an 18,000-word declaration, a sort of mid-twentiethcentury Communist Manifesto, which was clearly the outcome of elaborate and protracted debate. This declaration was presented as proof of perfect unity of purpose and identity of views among all Communists everywhere. But what it actually proved was that Khrushchev had very largely got his way for the tune being, carrying his main points of substance at the cost of conceding to the Chinese an emphasis on the revolutionary dynamic, which, to judge by his past actions and utterances, he would have preferred to do without.

This document is referred to here only because of its relevance to the Sino-Soviet conflict. As a statement of Communist aims and strategy, it is full of interest, but of more immediate importance is the debate that lay behind it. It was possible to guess at the general lines of the debate because of the positions previously taken by the Chinese and the Soviet press: China and Russia were never mentioned by name in these press polemics, which on the Soviet side were directed against unnamed “dogmatists,” and on the Chinese side against unnamed “revisionists"; but everybody interested knew that for “dogmatists" should be read Chinese and for “revisionists,” Russians.

It was not until February of this year that this vague and generalized picture was suddenly brought into focus. It was brought into focus by a long and detailed account, not only of the proceedings in Moscow, but also of the June conference in Bucharest and of the secret correspondence between Moscow and Peiping which lay behind the two conferences and provided the basis of the opposing arguments. This account came into my hands from a satellite source, and I was able to publish a detailed summary of it in the London Observer of February 12 and February 19. It created a considerable stir, because it provided firsthand information — as distinct from deductions — of the reality of the struggle and its true nature. It also showed last year’s conflict to have been conducted with a personal bitterness and violence on both sides far greater than it would have been legitimate to deduce from the press polemics, bitter as these were. It confirmed, incidentally, the general accuracy of deductions already made, and added considerably to these.

The most immediately striking aspects of the story were, of course, the mutual recriminations. We are accustomed to Khrushchev’s using violent language about us: we have seen him indulging in fairly choice invective at Paris and at the United Nations. But it was something new to overhear him employing the same language toward his Chinese allies, accusing Mao Tse-tung of being like Stalin, of being oblivious of any interests but his own, of spinning theories detached from the realities of the modern world. It was even more new to overhear the Chinese spokesmen answering back in the same coin. Thus, at Bucharest, P’eng Chen went so far as to accuse Khrushchev personally of fixing the meeting for the sole purpose of attacking China and undermining Chinese prestige, of giving people wrong ideas about the true nature of imperialism and altogether underestimating its strength. The Chinese Party, he said, did not at all trust Khrushchev’s analysis of the general situation. Five months later, in Moscow, the Secretary General of the Chinese Communist Party, Teng Hsiao-ping, accused the Soviet Party of being opportunist and revisionist, of lacking any deep knowledge of Marxism, of propagating ideas about disarmament which were absurd, of perpetrating an “opportunistic mistake” in giving aid to Nehru and Nasser.

All this, quite naturally, caught the attention of the world. The general reader was far more interested in the Russians’ making fun of the “paper tiger” vocabulary of the Chinese, and in the Chinese claim that they and they alone had held back the Soviet Army when it had mobilized against Poland in 1956 and had prevented that same army from withdrawing from Hungary a few weeks later, than in the root causes of the quarrel and the arguments that illuminated these causes. Let us try to go deeper.

THE present differences between Moscow and Peiping cannot be understood without some knowledge of the historical background of the relations between prerevolutionary Russia and China and between the Bolsheviks and the Chinese Communists before the successful Chinese revolution in 1948. This background material is presented with beautiful economy and clarity by George Kennan in his article in this issue. It is impossible to read his piece without a lift of the intelligence; the human feeling behind so much of what seemed to many nothing but an arid doctrinal dispute comes flooding through.

Let me give an example.

Between the Chinese and the Russians there are a number of major differences. Let us take the one which connects immediately with Mr. Kennan’s article. The Russians argue that they are correct in giving aid not only to revolutionary movements dominated, or inspired, by Communists, but also to all anti-imperialist or nationalist struggles for liberation, even though these movements may be led by anti-Communists — for example, Nasser, Nehru, Nkrumah — always provided that there is no risk of their leading to war. It is correct to support these bourgeois nationalist leaders because, although they are anti-Communist, their immediate struggle is directed against the Western colonial powers, which are thereby weakened by the success of the nationalists. Lenin is quite effectively cited in support of this view.

Lenin, of course, was one of the greatest opportunists of all time. The Chinese, ignoring this fact about Lenin, bitterly attack the Russians for precisely their opportunism. For Communists to give aid to Nehru, they say, is to waste money, to squander valuable resources, to discourage genuine Marxist revolutionaries, and to strengthen the imperialist camp by enlarging the effective area of anti-Communism.

This is the sort of debate which people call an arid doctrinal dispute. Some months ago I was taken heavily to task for inferring from the press polemics that this particular difference was critical and vital. Who in his senses, my critic demanded, could conceivably imagine that two great powers could quarrel seriously about a thing like that? I for one could imagine it very well, though I have never been remotely a Marxist, still less a Leninist. It seems to me to offer a fine opportunity for unlimited debate. Indeed, it is somewhat similar to the very debate which has been for so long convulsing the West. The Americans, as a whole, were for a long time skeptical about giving Western aid to neutralists; they thought the money should be saved for those who could be relied on to fight Communism actively. The British, as a whole, were all for extending the area of neutrality, and for much the same reasons as Khrushchev.

But, to the Chinese argument is added something very strong and human, upon which a great light is thrown by Mr. Kennan. The Chinese have had it all before. There was a time, a long and bitter time, when Stalin actively backed not the Chinese Communists but the darling of the Americans, Chiang Kai-shek. The Communists were instructed to subordinate the immediate interests of the Party to the Kuomintang. As a result of this Moscow policy, they suffered greatly, and their march toward the Communist revolution was retarded. Stalin would have said that the overriding interests of the world revolution, which depended absolutely on the preservation and consolidation of the Soviet state, made it necessary for Communists to temporize and reach accommodations with anti-Communist forces, even to the point of sacrificing individual Comrades, individual Parties. But some of the sacrificed Comrades in China saw things differently; they were being betrayed, they thought, in the interest of Soviet ambitions to become a great power — as indeed they were.

And now, lo and behold, here is Stalin’s successor at it again, actively supporting the Chiang Kai-sheks of Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America; telling the genuine Communist revolutionaries in all these areas to keep quiet and come to terms with their opponents; doing his level best to hamper the triumphal onward march of China itself in a variety of ways — and all in the interests of what? Of the ultimate victory of Communism, says Khrushchev. No, of the immediate good of the U.S.S.R., says Mao Tse-tung. This is the feeling behind the Chinese charge that the Soviet Union has been seeking to isolate China in order to achieve an understanding with America. This is why, in opposition to the Russians, the Chinese are doing anything in their power to support the active Communist elements everywhere and to embarrass Khrushchev in his attempts to reach accommodations with nonCommunist nationalistic movements. They know the Russians too well.

And the Russians? Clearly they fear the outbreak of nuclear war more than anything else in the world, and it is this fear which, for the time being, is conditioning their policies in the international sphere. Clearly they wish to maintain effective leadership of the Communist world, but to encourage revolutionary dynamism as, and where, it may appear is to run the risk of sponsoring a local war which may all too quickly spread into a major war. It is a very grave dilemma. Soviet Party policy since the 20th Party Congress in 1956 (when Khrushchev made his denunciation of Stalin) has been predominately concerned with trying to escape from this dilemma.

FOR the outer world the most important thing that happened at the 20th Congress was the formal abandonment of what, until that time, had been an integral part of the Leninist canon. Lenin stated that the way to world revolution lay in a series of “bloody conflicts.”This did not mean necessarily that the Bolsheviks were to achieve global Communism by undertaking wars of conquest. What it meant, above all, was that wars and their aftermaths produced conditions which were favorable to the spread of Communism. War was inherent in the nature of capitalist imperialism, but the Comrades need not be distressed; on the contrary, wars were to be welcomed as a breeding ground for Communism.

Lenin did not mind how many capitalists were killed. He was writing before the atomic age, but for some years before 1956 it had been apparent that sooner or later, in view of the existence of the atom bomb, this grisly little doctrine would have to be amended. Future wars were not going to favor the growth of Communism; they were going to wipe out millions, capitalists and Communists alike. The Soviet Union announced its possession of the atomic bomb in 1949. There-

after, until 1952, its policies were bedeviled by the Party’s Leninist belief in the inevitability of war. It was not until the eve of the 19th Party Congress in October, 1952, that Stalin himself began to side-step. He announced that wars were still inevitable but that with good luck and good judgment the Soviet Union could keep out of them, while the imperialist powers tore each other to pieces in the battle for markets.

Soon after Stalin’s death, Malenkov hazarded the view that nuclear war would be a catastrophe for the Soviet Union as well as for the imperialist powers. This was sharply contradicted by Khrushchev, who said that the Soviet Union would survive a nuclear war, whereas the imperialist powers would not. There the matter rested until Khrushchev, at the 20th Party Congress in 1956, announced that some of Lenin’s views had been overtaken by history and that the “socialist camp" was now so strong that war was no longer “fatally inevitable.”

Very few people paid much attention to this doctrinal shift at the time; the world was much more interested in Khrushchev’s attack on Stalin. But for a Soviet Communist the most serious thing in the world is to tamper with holy writ. This amendment marked a major turning point—or, rather, formalized a turning point that had already been taken.

There was another amendment, scarcely less important. This was to the effect that in view of the great strength of the “socialist camp” and the altered balance of power, it would henceforth be possible for revolutions in other parts of the world to be achieved without violence.

These two amendments form the crux of the difference between the Russians and the Chinese. It is hard to tell precisely when the difference began to come to a head, and it does not much matter. It was already abundantly clear by the end of 1959 that the Chinese were very angry indeed with Khrushchev for what they took to be his too great eagerness to come to an accommodation with President Eisenhower. All through the first part of 1960, the Chinese press was developing its attack against “revisionism.” The Russians did not reply in public, but the documents upon which this article is based show that after the abortive Paris Summit meeting they sent several sharply critical letters to Peiping. Simultaneously, the Chinese committed a very serious offense against Party rules by using the meeting of the World Federation of Trade Unions in Peiping to develop their attack on Soviet policies and to proselytize their own.

IT WAS in this atmosphere that the Russian and Chinese delegates, led by P’eng Chen, came face to face with each other at the Bucharest Conference in June. At the last minute, Khrushchev decided to use the Bucharest forum to attack for the first time Chinese policies and attitudes in front of delegates from other Communist Parties. In the course of his attack he called Mao Tse-tung an “ultra-leftist, an ultra-dogmatist, a left revisionist.” He added, for good measure, that the Chinese, who for a long time had been taunting the Russians about their fear of atom bombs, knew nothing about modern war. P’eng Chen answered with some of the remarks quoted earlier in this article and added, as a parting shot, that the Chinese had already shown in Korea and against the Japanese that they knew more about war than most people. The meeting did not quite break up in disorder. A joint communique was agreed upon for the sake of presenting a unified front, and it was decided to prepare for a full-dress conference of all Communist Parties in Moscow in November.

Between June and November, things went from bad to worse. In August, it was widely reported in the world press that Soviet technicians had been withdrawn from China and that certain issues of the Chinese-Russian language magazine, circulating in the Soviet Union, had been suppressed. In Moscow, in November, the Chinese showed bitterness about the withdrawal of the Soviet technicians, which they said had done great harm to the Chinese economy. The Russians retorted that they had been driven to do this because the Chinese had been using the technicians in a way the Russians disapproved of, and because they were being doctrinally perverted by the Chinese. There were other causes of tension brought up at the Moscow meeting. For example, it emerged that the Soviet Union was showing reluctance at giving China the atom bomb; further, that a scheme for establishing a unified Pacific naval command had broken down because of Moscow’s fear that the Chinese might draw the Soviet Union into a war over Taiwan.

But these were only symptoms of the underlying conflict. And the main lines of that conflict were fully defined in two remarkable letters, one from the Soviet Party to Peiping, dated June 21, 1960; the other, Peiping’s reply, dated September 10.

The Soviet letter, which criticized in detail the policies and attitudes of Peiping, indicated with perfect clarity that the overriding fear in Moscow was that these policies might lead to war. War would be a total disaster and must be avoided. This was the main theme. The Communist Parties would not allow man’s progress to be thrown back centuries, nor would they permit the destruction of hundreds of millions of people. Coexistence was the only possible policy. The Soviet Comrades were firmly convinced that a decade of peace would be enough to guarantee the victory of Communism, and then the danger of war could be banished forever, even though capitalism still lingered on in some parts of the world. The letter went on to reproach Mao Tse-tung for changing his position. He himself, it said, had subscribed to this view in 1957; now the Chinese were questioning the very idea of coexistence.

This letter was tabled by the Chinese at the Bucharest Conference, and it was in the course of the violent discussion resulting from it that Khrushchev told the Chinese that they knew nothing about modern war. But the formal Chinese reply was not sent until September 10. And the general line of the reply was an attempt to discredit Khrushchev in the eyes of world Communism (copies were sent to fraternal Parties), first by the claims about the Polish and Hungarian revolts cited previously, then by ranging farther back with a strong criticism of the de-Stalinization campaign. The letter said bluntly that the Soviet Party had forgotten its responsibilities as the leading Party; that its attacks on the Chinese Party had severely damaged Soviet prestige in the eyes of all Communists; that the Russians were not merely failing to support struggles for liberation all over the world, but were actually opposing them; that although it might conceivably be necessary to negotiate with the imperialists, there was no need to glamourize this expedient; that China did not want war, neither did she want coexistence, but, rather, a third way, which she was quite content to call “Cold War.”

The raging quarrel about the inevitability of war still continued in Moscow. Neither the lessons of the Bucharest Conference in June nor the correspondence and the press debate that followed had brought the two positions any closer. Indeed, it was the callous disregard of the Chinese Secretary General, Teng Hsiao-ping, for the consequences of war which seems to have swung to Khrushchev’s side a number of foreign Communist Parties (but not the Albanians) which, until then, had been inclined to sympathize with the Chinese in their expressed view that the Soviet Party was guilty of “opportunism” and of being altogether too soft toward America. Teng Hsiao-ping went out of his way to repeat the old boast that there were 650 million Chinese, and if only half survived, socialism would triumph. It was under the impact of this speech that one Western Communist leader said he could not dream of telling his people on his return that the only way to socialism led through nuclear war; they simply would not have it.

But even more serious in Moscow was the totally unprecedented Chinese attitude toward the unspeakable sin of fractionalism. When the Russians accused the Chinese Party of trying to start a fraction, it marked the peak of the quarrel. It is the sort of accusation made only in the last resort, and when it is made the Comrades hold their breaths and the world, for a moment, stands still.

But what happened this time? Did the Chinese tremble? Did they in desperation deny the charge with all possible indignation? Not a bit of it. Teng Hsiao-ping declared coolly that China had a perfect right to form a fraction. Lenin, he said, when he was preparing to split the Social Democratic Party into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, had himself established a precedent by forming what was at first a minority fraction in order to win a majority successfully in the end. There was nothing to be said after that; it was a declaration of war. My own view is (but there is nothing in the document to confirm it) that one effect of this direct Chinese challenge was to rally around Khrushchev those of his Soviet colleagues who, until then, had been working to some extent against him, so that his position in the Soviet Union now is stronger than ever before.

What was the upshot of the whole affair? In the end, the Chinese signed, under protest, the celebrated Moscow Declaration, simply to present to the world an appearance of unity, and on the strict understanding that there would be another meeting within two years. The Russians agreed to send back their technicians under guarantees from the Chinese that they would not be interfered with. Khrushchev was able to carry his most important point about the noninevitability of war. But, in turn he had to accept a definition of coexistence, which by all accounts he would have preferred to leave undefined. In his arguments with the Chinese, he had found it necessary to lay every possible stress on the point that coexistence did not mean abandoning the revolutionary struggle; rather, that it meant a heightening of the class struggle. “Peaceful coexistence of countries with different social systems does not mean the conciliation of the socialist and bourgeois ideologies. On the contrary, it implies intensification of the struggle of the working class, of all Communist Parties, for the triumph of socialist ideas.” Only time can show how the Russians propose to interpret these fighting words.

Only time, too, will tell how the Chinese intend to modify their recent aggressive attitudes. A number of points remain unresolved. Thus, the Russians insisted that the danger of local wars developing into a general war is too acute to permit the toleration of local wars. The Chinese said this was nonsense. And they had a very good dig at the Russians when they argued that Russia herself had already stopped two local wars from developing dangerously — in Suez and in Cuba — by threatening long-range intervention! Again, the Russians insisted, as they have since 1956, that in certain circumstances revolution can be carried out without violence and that this should be the aim. The Chinese denied this hotly and said violence should be encouraged and supported.

Enough has been said to indicate not only the personal bitterness behind the great quarrel but also the immensity of the gulf between the two opposed conceptions. The Russians, with so much to lose, need time and peace to consolidate their own gains and to build up their country as a great and prosperous power. Although they may play with fire all over the place (How much are they driven by the need to prove themselves better Bolsheviks than the Chinese? How much by the traditional desire to weaken the Western camp?), any situation that might lead to a general war is anathema to them. The Chinese do not care. But for the time being they depend far too much on support from the Soviet Union to cut adrift entirely. How much of their attitude is due to simple resentment at the pretensions of Stalin’s successors, whom they regard as inferior? How much to profound ideological convictions? How much to an inborn conviction, self-evident to them, that they, the Chinese, are the greatest people in the world, and that to play second fiddle to a barbarian white people is a situation not to be endured a moment longer than necessary?

So much, anyway, for the Communist monolith. It is quite possible that before very long we shall find ourselves looking back to the cozy days of Russian domination of the Communist camp with the kind of nostalgia with which we sometimes look back on the Europe of 1815.