Embracing the polar bear?--Sino-Russian relations in the 1990s

Journal of Third World Studies, Fall 2002 by Deng, Peng

In their macro-management of global strategy, Russian leaders showed much less ideological motivation and were much more pragmatic than Mao. From Stalin to Khruchshev, the Soviet government never embraced Mao's radical analysis of world politics, as much as they liked his lean-to-one side strategy. Rather, in their effort to seek detente with the United States, Khruchshev and his successors often found Mao's ideas troublesome. Mao, on the other hand, saw the nationalists in Third World countries as natural allies of the international communist movement. Thus he was unhappy with Khruchshev's apparent reluctance to finance nationalist insurgents in Africa and Latin America. Difference between Beijing and Moscow in Third World affairs magnified the fissures in the Sino-Soviet relationship. In fact, the Soviet leaders were genuinely apprehensive of what they saw as Mao's desire to have a showdown with the West.

In the early 1960s, the Sino-Soviet split became an open secret. In February 1960, Khruchshev visited Indonesia in the midst of anti-Chinese riots in that country, hak:ding out a check of $254 million to the military regime in power. Around the same time when skirmishes were developing on the SinoIndian border, the Soviet government openly called the Chinese reaction a "demonstration of narrow nationalism." During the Sino-Indian border war in October-November, 1962, Chinese troops captured many Russian weapons from Indians. Chinese did not openly complain, but Zhou Enlai notified the Soviet ambassador in Beijing that India had used Russian-made airplanes against China. During the Cuban Missile Crisis the same year, the Chinese leaders found their chance to get even with Khruchshev. The Soviet leader, Beijing claimed, first committed the fallacy of adventurism and then, when confronted with a showdown with the United States, cowardly bowed out. Bad feelings between the two communist giants mounted when, in 1964, People's Daily and Red Flag in Beijing ostentatiously repudiated the so-called "modern revisionism" of Moscow in a series of editorials. In these articles, the Soviet leaders were compared to Eduard Bernstein and Karl Kautsky who directed socialist movement in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century toward unionism and parliamentary politics instead of the seizure of state power by the proletariat through revolutionary violence. The Great Cultural Revolution, starting in 1966, further aggravated the bilateral relationship when radicals in the CCP put China's foreign policy in great disarray. Moscow demonstrated unmistakable contempt toward Mao's "petty bourgeois fanaticism." But what really frightened the Chinese leaders was the Russian invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 and the Brezhnev Doctrine that justified the Russian aggression. To Mao and his colleagues, China may well become the next target of Soviet Social Imperialism. The border war between China and the USSR in 1969 put the last nail into the coffin of Sino-Soviet alliance. In retrospect, one can easily see that China's lean-to-one-side policy was not only entailed by the Cold War, but was ill-conceived thanks to the Chinese leaders' relative inexperience in foreign affairs.