After his confrontation with Liu Shaoqi over the direction of the Socialist Education Movement, Mao began to prepare the ground for a showdown with his perceived enemies in China. These enemies were to be found in all positions of authority - among senior party officials, and among Mao’s long-time revolutionary comrades. Mao chose a circuitous way of achieving his objectives. He encouraged a radical attack on the party bureaucracy under the pretext of a struggle with revisionism in the ruling circles. The campaign had been in planning since at least February 1965, though the opening shots were fired in November when Shanghai-based radicals, incited by Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing (who was acting on Mao’s instructions), criticized Wu Han, a prominent historian and deputy mayor of Beijing, for revisionism. In the struggle that followed, the mayor of Beijing, Peng Zhen, tried to protect Wu Han but lost the battle to Mao whose real target was the party leadership. Peng Zhen was the first to find that nobody was safe when Mao orchestrated a full-scale purge of the Beijing Party Committee (including Peng) in May 1966. But as the movement, now called the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, gained momentum, Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping also felt the heat. Liu was branded "China’s Khrushchev" and deposed; he was to die fTom medical neglect in a prison in Kaifeng in 1969. Deng lost his position, but not his life. Countless officials were publicly humiliated, tortured, imprisoned, and sometimes killed. The party center disintegrated by late 1966. The radical "Cultural Revolution Group" assumed unprecedented powers with Mao’s blessing, and the country descended into chaos as millions of youths took to the streets to worship Chairman Mao and carry through their struggle against revisionism. Was the Cultural Revolution a struggle of ideas or a struggle for power? It was probably both: a complex interplay of Mao’s concern for the fate of the Chinese revolution and for his own political power. The Cultural Revolution was born of the same ingredients that fueled Mao’s previous anti-revisionist exploits in 1962 and 1964. Now the stakes were higher, and heads rolled on a far grander scale.
From the beginning, there was a clear anti-Soviet angle to the Cultural Revolution, since Mao made an explicit connection between Soviet "capitalist restoration" and Chinese revisionism. Radicals singled out Soviet-style revisionists in China as Moscow’s allies who tried to help the USSR "climb on China’s back" so as to again make China a "colony or semi-colony."523 But Moscow did not play any practical role in the power struggle; Soviet leaders, in fact, did not know what to make of events in China nor with whom to sympathize. By late 1965, the Chinese problem had lost its urgency for Moscow: rapprochement was nowhere in sight, but a turn for the worse was also not expected. The Soviet leaders eyed China with a new sense of confidence, in part because of their advances elsewhere in Asia. Soviet relations with Hanoi had improved substantially compared with those of the Khrushchev era (thanks, no doubt, to the persuasive power of Soviet aid). North Korea was not to be left behind: Kim Il Sung’s visit to Vladivostok for talks with Brezhnev in the spring of 1966 laid the groundwork for better relations between Moscow and Pyongyang. In January 1966, the Soviet Union and Mongolia signed a treaty, permitting the stationing of Soviet military forces in that country. The same month Kosygin mediated the Indo-Pakistani conflict in a bid to gain influence with both countries. These foreign-policy achievements compensated for the Soviet failure to mend fences with China.
The Cultural Revolution dealt a major blow to Soviet complacency. The most visible aspect of the chaos - massive rallies of the Red Guards - projected an image of aggressive xenophobia. The revolutionary mobs besieged the Soviet embassy for days at a time. Plans were in the making to burn it down, but in August 1967, Zhou Enlai personally persuaded the leader of the Red Guards besieging the embassy, a pig-tailed girl of sixteen, to call off the attack.524 To the Soviets, it was not clear whether they faced unsanctioned mob violence or state policy. Moreover, reports were trickling in to Moscow about the buildup of Chinese forces along the Sino-Soviet frontier, the construction of roads leading to the border, and militant propaganda among the troops.
Faced with these threatening developments, the Soviet Politburo decided to upgrade defense capabilities in the East. A resolution was passed on February 4, 1967, to station troops in Mongolia, strengthen the Soviet forces in the Far East, Zabaikal'e, and Eastern Kazakhstan, and build protected command centers.525 The timing of these decisions is telling: they came in the immediate aftermath of Red Guard violence around the Soviet Embassy. Xenophobic demonstrations agitated Soviet leaders, though otherwise Moscow exercised patience. For example, the request to station troops in Mongolia had first been made in 1965 by the Mongolian government, which was even more
Apprehensive of Chinese intentions than the Soviets.526 This request had been shelved for more than a year until the chaos of the Cultural Revolution made Soviet policymakers rethink their strategy toward China in the direction of more active military containment. Brezhnev summarized this strategy in one sentence: "we assume that the stronger the defense of our borders, the less danger there is of a really serious military confrontation on our eastern frontiers."527
This assumption worked against Moscow. The more forces the Soviet Union stationed along the frontier with China, the more Chinese leaders became convinced of aggressive Soviet intentions. The Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 deepened Beijing’s concerns. In response to the perceived Soviet threat, the Chinese military adopted the strategy of "active defense" that entailed a show of force to dissuade the opponent from hostile action. Active defense also helped Mao mobilize the Chinese population for his domestic agenda - revamping the power structure in the aftermath of the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. In the winter of 1968-69, the Central Military Commission approved a plan to create a border incident; in this context, on March 2, 1969, Chinese troops ambushed a Soviet border patrol near Zhenbao Island. The Soviets retaliated with force some days later; scores were killed on both sides. On August 13,1969, another armed incident occurred on the Sino-Soviet border in Xinjiang, and a few days later Moscow made veiled threats of a preemptive nuclear strike against China.
In a tense atmosphere, Kosygin and Zhou Enlai met in Beijing airport on September ii and assured each other that neither side wanted to go to war. They also agreed to reopen border talks in Beijing. But Mao was not convinced by the Soviet assurances and suspected that Moscow might launch a first strike on China, perhaps under the cover of the forthcoming border talks. In September-October, amid war fever, the People’s Liberation Army prepared for a Soviet invasion.528 The attack did not come, and it is unlikely that plans for it were ever seriously entertained by the Soviet leadership. But the experience of 1969 left Mao intensely insecure. In an effort to counterbalance the Soviet threat, Mao turned to China’s former enemy, the United
5. Sino-Soviet border clashes on the eastern and western sectors of the frontier, March and August 1969
States. The two countries mended fences in the early 1970s.529 In the meantime, border talks failed to bring about any substantial improvement in Sino-Soviet relations, which by 1970 had attained a degree of icy stability.
World History
