The Penguin History of the World

The new China was soon a major international influence. Yet her real independence was long masked by the superficial unity of the Communist bloc and her continued exclusion from the United Nations at the insistence of the United States. The Sino-Soviet treaty in 1950 was interpreted – especially in the United States – as further evidence that China was entering the Cold War. Certainly, the regime was Communist and talked revolution and anti-colonialism, and its choices were bound to be confined by the parameters of the Cold War. Yet in a longer perspective much broader concerns now seem evident in Chinese Communist policy from the start. At a very early point, there was visible a primary concern to re-establish Chinese power within the area it had always tended to fill in past centuries.

The security of Manchuria and the long-standing links with Korean Communists are by themselves enough to explain Chinese military intervention in Korea, but that peninsula had also long been an area of dispute between imperial China and Japan. A Chinese occupation of Tibet in 1951 melted an area that had for centuries been under Chinese suzerainty into a new national state that was taking shape. But from the start the most vociferous demand made for gaining control of the Chinese periphery was for the eviction of the Guomindang government from Taiwan. The island had been occupied by the Qing in the seventeenth century, seized in 1895 by the Japanese and then only briefly restored in 1945 to control by the mainland; the control of Taiwan became a signal issue for the CCP. By 1955, the United States’ government was so deeply committed to the support of the Guomindang regime there that the president announced that the United States would protect not merely the island itself but also the smaller islands near the Chinese coast thought essential to its defence. About this issue, and against a psychological background provided by a sense of inexplicable rebuff from a China long patronized by American philanthropy and missionary effort, the views of Americans on Chinese affairs tended to crystallize for over a decade so obsessively that the Guomindang tail seemed at times to wag the American dog. Conversely, during the 1950s, both India and the USSR supported Beijing over Taiwan, insisting that the matter was one of Chinese internal affairs; it cost them nothing to do so. Astonishment was therefore all the greater when China was revealed to be in armed struggle with both countries.

The quarrel with India grew out of the Chinese occupation of Tibet. When the Chinese further tightened their grasp on that country in 1959, Indian policy still seemed basically sympathetic to China. An attempt by Tibetan exiles to set up a government on Indian soil was stifled. But territorial disputes had already begun and had led to clashes. The Chinese announced that they did not recognize a border with India along lines drawn by British-Tibetan negotiations in 1914 and never formally accepted by any Chinese government. Forty odd years’ usage was hardly significant in China’s millennial historical memory. As a result, there was much heavier fighting in the autumn of 1962 when Nehru sent in troops and demanded a Chinese withdrawal from the disputed zone. The Indians did badly, though fighting ceased at the end of the year on the initiative of the Chinese.

Almost at once, early in 1963, a startled world suddenly heard the Soviet Union bitterly denounced by the Chinese Communists, who alleged it had helped India, and had, in a hostile gesture, cut off economic and military aid to China three years earlier. The second charge suggested complex origins to this quarrel, and by no means went to the root of the matter. In reality the confrontation had begun years before, though few in the outside world had grasped its significance. There were Chinese Communists (Mao among them) who remembered all too well what had happened when Chinese interests had been subordinated to the international interest of Communism, as interpreted by Moscow, in the 1920s. Since that time there had always been a tension in the leadership of the Chinese party between Soviet and native forces. Mao himself admired the Soviet Union, and wanted to emulate it, but not to be controlled by the Soviets. But by the late 1950s Mao’s own policies had begun to drift to the Left. Disappointed with what he saw as the slow pace of China’s industrialization, Mao began a number of campaigns that intended to catapult China into the modernity he so desired. He feared that the Soviets would stand in the way of such radical initiatives.