The Penguin History of the World

Because Chinese resentment of Soviet policy had to be presented to the rest of the world in Marxist jargon, it was often difficult to see what the quarrel was about. But at the heart of it were Mao’s radicalism, and his need to make his own decisions, independent of the Soviet Union. He also resented what he saw as patronizing Soviet attitudes to China – a remnant of both Mao’s and China’s past, no doubt. In 1963, non-Chinese observers should also have recalled an even more remote past. Long before the foundation of the CCP, Chinese revolutionaries had formed a movement of national regeneration. One of its primary aims had been the recovery from the foreigners of China’s control over her own destiny. Now the Soviets too took their place among the foreigners who had sought to exploit China. To his amazement, given what the Soviets had done for China in the 1950s, the Soviet leader Khrushchev was reminded of the Soviet land-gains of the tsarist era. With something like 4,000 miles of shared frontier (if Mongolia is included), the potential for friction along its huge length was immense.

The Soviet authorities complained of 5,000 Chinese border violations in 1960. An area about one-fifth of the size of Canada was formally in dispute, and by 1969 (a year in which there was much fighting and scores were killed) the Chinese were talking of a ‘Fascist’ dictatorship in Moscow and ostentatiously making preparation for war. The Sino-Soviet quarrel that came in the end to entangle the whole Communist world was inflamed by Soviet tactlessness, too. Soviet leaders seem to have been as careless as any western imperialists of the feelings of Asian allies: one Soviet leader once revealingly remarked that, when touring in China, he and other Soviets ‘used to laugh at their primitive forms of organization’. The withdrawal of Soviet economic and technical help in 1960 had been a grave affront and one all the more wounding because of the moment at which it came, when China faced the first major domestic crisis of the new regime after the disastrous effects of Mao’s ‘Great Leap Forward’.

Mao Zedong’s personal experience must have counted for much in making this crisis. Although his main intellectual formation had been Marxist and although he found its categories helpful in explaining his country’s predicament, he appears always to have diluted them with pragmatism and sheer power-seeking. Mao was ruthless, but with a profound understanding of what constituted power in China; his judgment of political possibilities appears to have faltered only in the years of success, when megalomania, vanity and eventually age took their toll. Even as a young man, he had advocated a Sinicized Marxism, rejecting European dogma that had cost the CCP dear. The basis of Mao’s world view seems to have been a vision of society and politics as an arena of contending forces in which human willpower and brute force could be deployed to bring about morally desirable and creative change – defined, of course, by an all-knowing leader. His relations with his party had not always been untroubled, but his policy towards the peasantry provided a way ahead for it after disaster had overtaken urban Communism. After a temporary setback in the early 1930s he was from about 1935 virtually supreme within the party. Rural influences predominated. A new way also seemed to be open for Mao to sway international events; the notion of a protracted revolutionary war, waged from the countryside and carried into the towns, looked promising in other parts of the world where orthodox Marxist belief that industrial development was needed to create a revolutionary proletariat did not look persuasive.

After benefiting from the violent expropriations and the release of energy that marked the early 1950s, rural China had in fact been subjected in 1958 to a new upheaval. Hundreds of millions of country-dwellers were reorganized into ‘communes’, whose aim was the total collectivization of life. Private property was swallowed into them, new goals were set centrally for production and new agricultural methods were imposed. Some of the new methods did positive damage (campaigns for the extermination of birds that fed on crops, for example, released population explosions of insect predators, which the birds had kept in check), others merely stimulated inefficiency. The party cadres that ran the communes became more and more concerned with window-dressing to show that targets had been achieved rather than with simple food production. The outcome was disastrous; production fell catastrophically.