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Roberts, Levine, Vámos, Kaple, Friedman, Stiffler, and LüthiMao, Khrushchev, and China’s Split with the USSR
FORUM: Mao, Khrushchev, and China’s Split
with the USSR
Perspectives on The Sino-Soviet Split
✣ Commentaries by Priscilla Roberts, Steven I. Levine,
✣ Péter Vámos, Deborah Kaple, Jeremy Friedman, and
✣ Douglas A. Stifºer
✣ Reply by Lorenz Lüthi
Editor’s Note: This forum offers a range of perspectives on Lorenz Lüthi’s book
The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World, which reassesses the
sharp divide that emerged between the Soviet Union and China in the late
1950s and 1960s. Six scholars provide commentaries on the book, and Lüthi responds
to the commentaries.
Lorenz M. Lüthi, The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. xix ϩ 375 pp. $65.00 hardcover; $27.95 paper.
Priscilla Roberts, University of Hong Kong
Lorenz Lüthi has written the most detailed account to date of the genesis, development,
and entrenchment of the Sino-Soviet split. Based on exhaustive
research in a dazzling array of archival and printed sources from the former
Soviet Union, China, Eastern Europe, Italy, the United States, Britain, and
France, supplemented by reading of what appears to be every relevant secondary
work ever published, the book is a tour de force simply as an exercise in assembling
this complicated patchwork into a coherent and convincing narrative.
This is not to say that the book, masterly though it is, can be considered
the last word on the topic. In an illuminating “Essay on the Sources,” Lüthi
himself points out the serious limitations on what is currently accessible in
former Soviet and Chinese archives, a situation perhaps even more pronounced
in present-day Vietnam and numerous other Asian states. FortuJournal
of Cold War Studies
Vol. 12, No. 1, Winter 2010, pp. 120–165
© 2010 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute
of Technology
nately, the archives of former Communist-bloc countries in Eastern Europe
often contain copies of important documents from the Soviet Union. In an
exercise in cooperative scholarship under the broad auspices of the Cold War
International History Project and associated ventures, an appreciable number
of particularly signiªcant documents from Communist-bloc sources have
been translated and made widely available over the past two decades. Even so,
many of the most important documents remain off-limits, and the gates have
swung shut indeªnitely on some crucial collections in Russia that were open
for research from mid-1992 until April 1993.1
In the late 1940s and early 1950s, U.S. Secretary of State Dean Acheson
anticipated that escalating tensions between China and the Soviet Union
would eventually lead to a break between the two Communist great powers.2
Carrying this “wedge” strategy even further, John Foster Dulles, Acheson’s Republican
successor, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower believed that a policy
of forcing China into close association and proximity with the Soviet
Union would eventually generate debilitating frictions between the two.3
Yet
one must question whether, as Acheson’s stance seemed to imply, every alliance
necessarily contains the seeds of its own destruction. The history of
Anglo-American relations after Suez might serve as a case in point. In Mao’s
China and the Cold War, for example, Chen Jian recently argued that, far from
being inevitable, the Sino-Soviet split did not serve the interests of either
China or the Soviet Union. The split was immensely detrimental to both of
them and to the world Communist movement in their rivalry with the West.
Chen argued that Chinese foreign policymaking was driven by ideology, the
perceived need to mobilize support for radical domestic policies, and a pervasive
and deep-rooted sense that the country had long been a victim in interna-
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Mao, Khrushchev, and China’s Split with the USSR
1. For an explanation of how and why these collections were sealed, see Mark Kramer, “Archival Research
in Moscow: Progress and Pitfalls,” Cold War International History Project Bulletin, Issue No. 3
(Fall 1993), pp. 1, 18–39.
2. Nancy Bernkopf Tucker, Patterns in the Dust: Chinese-American Relations and the Recognition Controversy
1949–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), pp. 16–17, 193–194; Warren I.
Cohen, “Acheson, His Advisers, and China, 1949–1950,” in Dorothy Borg and Waldo Heinrichs,
eds., Uncertain Years: Chinese-American Relations, 1947–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press,
1980), pp. 49–50; Robert L. Beisner, Dean Acheson: A Life in the Cold War (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2006), pp. 175–176, 178, 197, 199–200; and Gordon Chang, Friends and Enemies: The
United States, China, and the Soviet Union, 1948–1972 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1990), pp. 16–21, 50–59, 63.
3. Chang, Friends and Enemies, chs. 3–5; David Mayers, “Eisenhower and Communism: Later Findings,”
in Richard A. Melanson and David Mayers, eds., Reevaluating Eisenhower: American Foreign Policy
in the 1950s (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), pp. 99–119; David Allan Mayers,
Cracking the Monolith: U.S. Policy against the Sino-Soviet Alliance, 1949–1955 (Baton Rouge: University
of Louisiana Press, 1986); and Richard H. Immerman, John Foster Dulles: Piety, Pragmatism, and
Power in U.S. Foreign Policy (Wilmington, DE: Scholarly Resources, 1999), pp. 118–120, 125, 130–
131.
tional affairs—concerns that, he argued, often trumped straightforward national
security interests.4
Lüthi’s work follows Chen in demonstrating that despite the optimistic
hopes of U.S. ofªcials, there was nothing preordained about the Sino-Soviet
split. The primary focus of Lüthi’s narrative is China and its policies—and
rightly so, because whatever tensions and rivalries may sometimes have divided
Soviet leaders from their Chinese counterparts, fundamentally the
breach arose from and was hardened by decisions taken in Beijing. Lüthi provides
a careful, insightful, and nuanced account of the evolution of the SinoSoviet
split. Despite earlier tensions between the Chinese Communist Party
and the Soviet Union both before and after the establishment of the People’s
Republic of China (PRC) in October 1949, he believes that the split was
rooted primarily in developments in the mid-1950s. Most signiªcant among
these was Mao Zedong’s decision to implement economic policies derived
from revolutionary, as opposed to subsequent bureaucratic, Stalinism, an approach
that soon led to the disastrous Great Leap Forward, an ideological divergence
from contemporaneous Soviet policies. Nikita Khrushchev’s repudiation
of Iosif Stalin in early 1956 intensiªed such divisions, as did disputes
over the Soviet espousal of peaceful coexistence with the United States and
over Chinese policies toward Taiwan and India. Ultimately, as Mao steered
China toward what would become the Cultural Revolution, Chinese and Soviet
rivalries over how best to handle the escalating conºict between North
and South Vietnam and the growing U.S. involvement in South Vietnam
from 1963 through 1966 set the seal on the alienation of the two great Communist
antagonists, the full bitterness of which did not become apparent to
the outside world until the 1969 border clashes.
What is striking is just how reluctant most Communists, the Chinese excepted,
were to accept the reality of the breach and how many attempts the
leaders of various Communist parties made to repair it. Lüthi’s study convincingly
demonstrates that within the international Communist camp scarcely
any group except the Chinese Communist Party welcomed the Sino-Soviet
split, and most deplored it. In the face of repeated provocations, when tensions
arose with the Chinese, Soviet leaders rarely sought to push disputes to
the point of an outright breach. Admittedly, in February 1960 Khrushchev, in
a comment that quickly became notorious and that even some Soviet ofªcials
thought went too far, described Mao as “a pair of old galoshes.” But such tactless
remarks were by then almost a standard and recognized feature of
Khrushchev’s personal style in conducting politics. Mao was often no more
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Roberts, Levine, Vámos, Kaple, Friedman, Stiffler, and Lüthi
4. Chen Jian, Mao’s China and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001),
p. 9.
polite. Even though the Soviet Union occasionally responded harshly to Chinese
behavior, most notably during assorted Communist party conferences
and trade union gatherings in 1959–1962 and even though Khrushchev decided
in 1960 to withdraw all Soviet experts from China, Soviet policy was
largely reactive. From the late 1950s to the mid-1960s Soviet leaders made
numerous conciliatory gestures toward China. In goodwill moves in 1961 and
1962, for example, the Soviet Union provided substantial food aid that
helped China to weather the ravages of the Great Leap Forward. In March
1961 at least one Chinese ofªcial privately apologized to his Soviet counterpart
for the Chinese “faults in the complications in Soviet-Chinese relations
in 1960” (p. 201).5
As late as March 1966, Soviet leader Leonid Brezhnev was
willing to try to improve relations with China. Those Western ofªcials who
for many years remained skeptical about just how genuine or long-lasting the
Sino-Soviet split might be had some justiªcation for their incredulity.
Many other national Communist movements, fearing the detrimental
impact of a continued Sino-Soviet breach on both their own countries’ interests
and those of the broader international Communist movement, sought to
mediate between the two rivals. Works by Ilya Gaiduk, Zhai Qiang, and Mari
Olsen have already given detailed accounts of several efforts by North Vietnamese
ofªcials in the ªrst half of the 1960s to reconcile their two patrons.
Although the rift between the Communist great powers did allow the North
Vietnamese to play one off against the other and reap the beneªts, the general
view in Hanoi was that a warmer, more cooperative Sino-Soviet relationship
would bring real advantages in the war against the United States by facilitating
the efªcient provision of Soviet military and economic aid to North Viet-
nam.6
The North Vietnamese Communists were exceptional only in that,
seeking both Chinese and Soviet assistance in their escalating campaign to destabilize
South Vietnam, they tried to remain on good terms with both antagonists.
Lüthi demonstrates that very few of the national Communist parties
were willing to support the Chinese in their attacks on the USSR. Albania,
which itself split with its Soviet patron in the early 1960s and badly needed
Chinese economic aid, aligned itself with Mao, even though Albanian president
Enver Hoxha considered some of Mao’s positions insufªciently radical.
Otherwise, among ruling Communist parties, only the North Koreans offered
support for China. By 1962–1963, the vitriolic Chinese polemics that had
123
Mao, Khrushchev, and China’s Split with the USSR
5. When quoting Lüthi’s book, I will put page numbers in parentheses.
6. Zhai Qiang, China and the Vietnam Wars, 1950–1975 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2000), pp. 86–88; Ilya V. Gaiduk, Confronting Vietnam: Soviet Policy toward the Indochina
Conºict, 1954–1963 (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2003); Ilya V. Gaiduk, The
Soviet Union and the Vietnam War (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996); and Mari Olsen, Soviet-Vietnam Relations
and the Role of China, 1949–64 (New York: Routledge, 2006).
become an almost routine feature of party congresses in the Soviet Union and
Eastern Europe could count on a vocal and hostile reception from most of the
assembled delegates. By 1963, most Communist assemblies had become so
inured to time-consuming and disruptive Chinese verbal assaults on Soviet
principles and policies that these were effectively discounted and ignored in
advance. Mao and his followers were treated almost as embarrassing relatives
who could not be entirely excluded from family gatherings but were not to be
taken seriously.
The major issue on which one might query Lüthi’s excellent account is
one of interpretation. According to Lüthi, differences over ideology were crucial
to the Sino-Soviet split. He differs somewhat from Chen and Vladislav
Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov—all of whom, when analyzing the break
between the two countries, stress Mao’s ideological commitment to continuous
revolution and his opposition to Soviet policies of peaceful coexistence
with the capitalist world—by arguing that most of these disputes can be
traced back to Mao Zedong’s determination to implement radical policies in
the economy and other spheres and to shore up his personal political position
when these radical steps went disastrously awry.7
Lüthi suggests that Nikita
Khrushchev’s 1956 denunciation of his predecessor, Stalin, threatened the
revolutionary Stalinist economic policies that Mao espoused from the mid-
1950s on, measures that were based on Stalin’s brutal collectivization of the
1930s and that ultimately resulted in the disastrous Great Leap Forward.
(Lüthi does, however, state on p. 107 that Mao did not begin reading economic
works by Karl Marx and Stalin until October 1958, which suggests
that he may have invoked the Stalin model ex post facto to support policies he
was already intent on pursuing.) Lüthi places considerable emphasis on Mao’s
determined efforts to preserve and enhance his dominance of internal policymaking
in China, no matter how great the cost to China’s international position,
but he does not take this aspect of his study quite far enough. Committed
though Mao may have been to radical ideological tenets even when
they resulted in devastating suffering for his own people, Lüthi’s Mao is ªrst
and foremost a ruthless, unscrupulous political operator whose most enduring
concern, to which all other principles and individuals could if necessary be
sacriªced, was to safeguard and reinforce his own power.
Central to this story is the role of Mao Zedong himself, a ªgure who
for 25 years bestrode the making of Chinese foreign policy like a colossus.
By 1963 Mao was determined to provoke a full-scale breach with the
Soviet Union, even though he sought to place the ostensible responsibility on
124
Roberts, Levine, Vámos, Kaple, Friedman, Stiffler, and Lüthi
7. Chen, Mao’s China, ch. 3; Vladislav Zubok and Constantine Pleshakov, Inside the Kremlin’s Cold
War: From Stalin to Khrushchev (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), ch. 7.
Khrushchev. Could this have been avoided? Lüthi argues that the personality
cult that Mao encouraged identiªed him so closely with the Chinese Revolution
that it was impossible for his colleagues to jettison him without calling
into question the Chinese Communist cause itself. Maybe so. Yet China’s
other top Communist leaders, despite being loyal to Mao, nonetheless displayed
a deªnite readiness to “seek truth from facts” and to moderate unsuccessful
economic and political measures. Zhou Enlai, Liu Shaoqi, Deng
Xiaoping, Wang Jiaxiang, and other leading Chinese Communists all at various
junctures sought to improve relations with the Soviet Union. They also
made several efforts to rein in Mao’s unchecked power. One need not subscribe
to the full array of charges lodged against Mao in the recent biography
by Jung Chang and Jon Holliday8
to feel that responsibility for the SinoSoviet
split must in the end be traced not to ideology but to Mao’s own megalomaniacal
personality and his brutal, unscrupulous maneuverings to maintain
himself in power. He succeeded in this quest, but at the price of at least
twenty million deaths in the Great Leap Forward and the catastrophic suffering
and chaos of the Cultural Revolution. Although Lüthi’s analysis frequently
implies the crucial role of Mao’s megalomania, his emphasis on ideology
dilutes the force of this argument.
Lüthi follows Chen Jian, Thomas J. Christensen, Yang Kuisong, and Li
Xiangqian in foregrounding the manner in which Mao provoked external crises
not just with the Soviet Union, but also over Korea, Taiwan, India, and
Vietnam in an effort to justify and facilitate domestic measures and political
arrangements that enhanced his own power and enabled him to dispose of potential
rivals.9
Lüthi provides detailed correlation of the close coordination between
Chinese foreign policy crises, many of them episodes that contributed
to the Sino-Soviet split, and Mao’s simultaneous embrace of particular domestic
initiatives or, at times, his efforts to discredit and bring down internal political
opponents. Reading this account, the cynic might even suppose that
amid all of Mao’s twists and turns the foremost objective of his policies was invariably
the protection of his own dominance of Chinese policymaking. Admittedly,
the grandiloquent Mao also sought to win global recognition as the
theorist of continuing revolution and people’s war, the greatest Communist
thinker of all time. Even so, many of his maneuvers, including the majority of
125
Mao, Khrushchev, and China’s Split with the USSR
8. Jung Chang and Jon Halliday, Mao: The Unknown Story (London: Jonathan Cape, 2005).
9. Chen, Mao’s China; Thomas J. Christensen, Useful Adversaries: Grand Strategy, Domestic Mobilization,
and Sino-American Conºict, 1947–1958 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996); Yang
Kuisong, “Mao Zedong and the Indochina Wars,” in Priscilla Roberts, ed., Behind the Bamboo Curtain:
China, Vietnam, and the World Beyond Asia (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press,
2006), pp. 72–73; and Li Xiangqian, “The Economic and Political Impact of the Vietnam War on
China,” in Roberts, ed., Behind the Bamboo Curtain, pp. 173–189.
his foreign policy moves, were closely related to his relentless determination to
retain control of his country’s domestic policy apparatus and to buttress his
own standing against all critics. Mao did not, for example, support the initial
North Vietnamese decision in 1959 to resume armed struggle to regain the
South. Only when assistance in this effort could be deployed as a lever in internal
Chinese political disputes did Mao swing his country behind the Vietnamese
campaign. For a quarter of a century, China’s policies, domestic and
external, were held hostage to the overwhelming and largely unchecked ambitions
of an idiosyncratic and power-obsessed leader.
These tactics had their own dangers. Mao tended rather cynically to
crank up international tensions in the belief that the dangers involved were
relatively minor, but such posturing had the potential to backªre and create
real threats. The Korean War was the last occasion on which Mao sought to
bring on full-scale war, evidence, perhaps, that in practice he was far more
cautious than his bellicose rhetoric suggested. Much of his overdone sound
and fury resembled the exaggerated posturing of Chinese opera. But on the
ground this did not necessarily translate into pragmatic crisis limitation. More
than once, notably during the Taiwan Strait crisis of 1958–1959, Mao was
forced to climb down, cutting back shelling to alternate days, a practice that
continued for close to two decades. By his own actions, he often provoked the
very crises he had warned against, bringing American and Soviet power unpleasantly
close to China’s borders in Taiwan, Korea, and Vietnam, and
thereby jeopardizing China’s security and curtailing his own freedom of action,
at least in international affairs.
Even as Mao encouraged North Vietnam to destabilize the South in 1963
and early 1964, he failed to anticipate any major U.S. escalation there. The
deepening U.S. commitments to South Vietnam after the Tonkin Gulf incident
took him by surprise. Although China continued its aid to Vietnam, it
also sought to open secret back channels to the U.S. government to ensure
that the U.S. war against the North remained limited.10
Mao also was dismayed
that from 1964 on the Soviet Union provided extensive aid to North
Vietnam, and he repeatedly though unsuccessfully sought to persuade the
North to reject Soviet aid and rely solely on the PRC for assistance. Rivalry
with China for inºuence over the world’s Communist parties may have been
one of the motives that in late 1964 persuaded the previously unenthusiastic
Soviet Union to endorse North Vietnam’s support for armed struggle in the
South. If only grudgingly, Chinese ofªcials were also forced to cooperate with
126
Roberts, Levine, Vámos, Kaple, Friedman, Stiffler, and Lüthi
10. See esp. James G. Hershberg and Chen Jian, “Informing the Enemy: Sino-American ‘Signaling’
and the Vietnam War, 1965,” in Roberts, ed., Behind the Bamboo Curtain, pp. 193–257.
the Soviet Union in facilitating the transport of Soviet supplies to Vietnam,
even as they dispatched Chinese support units to the North in order to prevent
the commitment of Soviet military forces to the conºict. Even so, North
Vietnamese leaders moved closer to the USSR, in part because Soviet ofªcials
were willing to accept North Vietnam’s readiness to entertain overtures—
admittedly often fruitless—regarding negotiations with the United States,
whereas the Chinese gave the impression that they would be happy to ªght to
the last Vietnamese.
Although competition in Vietnam exacerbated the frictions between
China and the Soviet Union, such tensions were not, Lüthi credibly argues,
decisive in pushing the split to an outright breach. Far more signiªcant was
Mao’s determination in 1965–1966 to launch a major movement, bypassing
existing governmental structures within China, to get rid of his opponents,
implement visionary radical policies, and render himself permanently supreme
in the power structure. Lüthi traces this initiative to Mao’s determination
to “forestall his own removal. The ªnal collapse of Sino-Soviet relations
in the spring of 1966 was thus a function of Chinese domestic politics. Without
the break in relations with the Soviet comrades, the Chairman would have
been politically unable to launch the party purge that set off the Cultural Revolution.”
(p. 274). Mao’s rhetoric therefore linked his internal political opponents,
many though not all of whom had at some stage spent time in the
USSR, to Soviet revisionism. Whether such charges were true was irrelevant.
Once the Cultural Revolution had taken hold, however, China’s international
position quickly fell victim to the excesses of Mao’s domestic imperatives.
Lüthi points out that no other Communist party supported the
Cultural Revolution, a movement that perhaps caught the imagination of
youthful Western leftists but that gravely compromised China’s ability to
wield any inºuence overseas. On numerous occasions, in capitalist, socialist,
and neutralist states alike, Chinese diplomats abroad embarrassed and annoyed
their hosts by conducting ostentatious public propaganda on behalf of
Cultural Revolution principles. The Soviet and British embassies in Beijing
were besieged by hordes of screaming Red Guards.
Such provocations and hubris could easily spiral out of control. In the
case of the Soviet Union, the border clashes along the two countries’ shared
frontier, which were initiated by China in March 1969, provoked such a ªerce
Soviet response, including threats to attack China using nuclear or conventional
weapons, that this became one of the major factors propelling a largely
isolated China to reconªgure its international relations by seeking a rapprochement
with the United States. As with most twists and turns in China’s
foreign policies in the quarter-century of Mao’s tenure at the helm, this rever-
127
Mao, Khrushchev, and China’s Split with the USSR
sal could not have occurred without his approval. But Mao had not genuinely
abandoned his preference for extreme forms of Communism. In 1975 he told
the visiting Pol Pot that China had by then become “a capitalist state without
capitalists,” but would “eventually return to the path of Marx and Lenin.”
Ominously, Mao advised the Cambodian leader, whose excesses in pursuit of
the perfect Communist state would inºict even more ghastly suffering on his
own country’s populace than the abuses to which Mao had subjected China’s
people, that he “should not completely copy China’s experience, and should
think for [himself].”11
‘The combination of Mao’s espousal of radicalism on
the domestic front and his quest for survival forced him in his ªnal years to
ªnd the ideological ºexibility to embrace the United States, once viewed as
Communist China’s most deadly antagonist, and to emulate Soviet policies of
coexistence in the international sphere.
✣ ✣ ✣
Lorenz M. Lüthi, The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. xix ϩ 375 pp. $65.00 hardcover; $27.95 paper.
Commentary by Steven I. Levine, The University of Montana
This meticulous study of the Sino-Soviet dispute is undoubtedly an important
contribution to Cold War historiography, but it is less than the book it
might have been. Displaying dazzling historical and linguistic virtuosity,
Lorenz Lüthi has delved into numerous archives, memoirs, documentary collections,
and newspapers from across the length and breadth of the former
Communist world to provide an intimate portrait of the conºict that divided
the Communist world and accelerated its eventual demise. Lüthi adds many
nuances and behind-the-scenes details to what was heretofore known. His
study largely conªrms the broad outlines of the best contemporary analyses
done in the early 1960s when the Sino-Soviet alliance was unraveling as well
as the later account offered in Roderick MacFarquhar’s epic trilogy, The Origins
of the Cultural Revolution.12
Thus, Lüthi’s study based on archival materials
retroactively validates the methodologies of Kremlinology and Pekingology
that Donald Zagoria employed nearly half a century ago in The Sino-
128
Roberts, Levine, Vámos, Kaple, Friedman, Stiffler, and Lüthi
11. Roberts, ed., Behind the Bamboo Curtain, p. 528.
12. Roderick MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, Vol. 1: Contradictions among the
People, 1956–1957 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974); Roderick MacFarquhar, The Origins
of the Cultural Revolution, Vol. 2: The Great Leap Forward, 1958–1960 (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1983); and Roderick MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, Vol. 3:
The Coming of the Cataclysm, 1961–1966 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
Soviet Conºict, 1956–1961.13
However, informed speculation is not the same
as archival proof, which is what Lüthi provides in abundance.
One of the several virtues of the book is that it circumscribes the origins
of the Sino-Soviet conºict in time; namely, the decade following Nikita
Khrushchev’s secret speech to the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of
the Soviet Union (CPSU) in February 1956. Another is that it discloses that
neither Soviet nor Chinese leaders actually viewed the world through the lens
of the so-called strategic triangle that American political scientists and international
relations specialists were so fond of employing. I would take this a
step further and say that such scholars, acting out American intellectual hegemonism
in the social sciences, imposed their own strategic thinking onto
Sino-Soviet relations without regard for the actual categories in which the
Communists in Beijing and Moscow thought.
This brings us to Lüthi’s central claim regarding the wellspring of the
Sino-Soviet split, his assertion that disagreement over ideology rather than nationalism,
national interest, domestic politics, personality clashes, or territorial
disputes was the prime factor that generated the conºict. As a ªlial acolyte
of Benjamin I. Schwartz (1917–1999), I cannot help but notice the omission
of my mentor’s name from Lüthi’s literature review. An intellectual historian
as well as an astute observer of Chinese politics, Schwartz took ideas seriously.
His writings on the subject underlined the importance of ideology as a factor
in the Sino-Soviet relationship and emphasized its continued salience even as
clashes between warring adherents of Marxism-Leninism over its “true” interpretation
eroded its power.
Lüthi’s treatment of the role of ideology in the Sino-Soviet conºict is idiosyncratic
and questionable. He provides a reasonable deªnition of ideology
as “a set of beliefs and dogmas that both construct general outlines . . . of a future
political order, and deªne speciªc methods . . . to achieve it” (p. 8). But
he then attempts to distinguish between “genuine” and “instrumental” uses of
ideology, the difference apparently hinging on his subjective judgment of the
“sincerity” of the actor (p. 79). Any such judgment strikes me as inherently
dubious. Ideology is not an abstract set of beliefs but by its very nature is oriented
toward action. Whether the power-hungry Mao Zedong was employing
ideology as a cudgel to attack his imagined domestic enemies or invoking ideology
to battle Nikita Khrushchev and “revisionism,” in both cases he was acting
both instrumentally and out of a sincere if deranged belief that the dogmas
of Marxism-Leninism and the Communist project itself were in jeopardy.
129
Mao, Khrushchev, and China’s Split with the USSR
13. Donald Zagoria, The Sino-Soviet Conºict, 1956–1961 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press,
1962).
Lüthi properly devotes considerable attention to Mao’s obsessive struggle
against both Soviet and domestic Chinese “revisionism” without, however,
deªning what this terrible “degenerative disease” of Communism actually
might have been. (One looks in vain for any discussion or even mention of
Vladimir Lenin’s favorite bêtes noires, the great German socialists Karl
Kautsky and Eduard Bernstein, who revised Karl Marx’s teachings in an attempt
to make them accord with a changing reality.) To view Mao as a great
Marxist philosopher, as some serious scholars were once inclined to do, is no
longer tenable. (Stalin’s brusque dismissal of Mao as a “caveman Marxist” was
probably closer to the truth.) In any case, Mao never felt bound by any dogmas,
including even his own. Throughout his career he played fast and loose
with Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy and savaged those whom he condemned as
scholastic Marxists. Yet, during the Sino-Soviet dispute, he posed as the
guardian of orthodox Communist ideology. Mao in the role of ªdei defensor
was both ludicrous and hypocritical. Yet by not pointing this out and uncritically
referring to “Soviet revisionism” as if this term is self-explanatory, Lüthi
unwittingly lends credence to Mao’s ideological claims. He also refers to Liu
Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping as exemplars of “domestic revisionism” in China,
whereas a neutral descriptor, appropriate to a scholarly work, would be that in
economic policy terms they were moderates or pragmatists compared to Mao.
Lüthi would have us believe—I confess that I do not—that “while Mao insisted
on ideological correctness regardless of its political utility, Khrushchev
was ªrm in his belief in the use of sheer power without principle” (p. 192).
Such an assessment is unfair to Khrushchev and far too generous toward Mao.
Both were power-maximizing politicians whose arsenals included ideology,
brute force, manipulation, cults of personality, and deceit.
The larger question, raised long ago by scholars like Schwartz but ignored
by Lüthi, is whether something in the very nature of Marxism-Leninism
tended to preclude compromise on what were taken to be questions of principle
such as the peaceful transition to socialism, peaceful coexistence with capitalism,
anti-imperialism, and so forth. The obvious answer, but one that bears
repeating nevertheless, is that the supposed scientiªc nature of the “truths” of
Marxism-Leninism precluded compromise. Galileo and Nicolas Copernicus
were either right or wrong; there was no in between. In philosophical terms,
the clashing Marxist dialectic of thesis and antithesis producing a new synthesis
is incompatible with the notion of reconciling different points of view.
This same point also applies to alliance politics in the Communist camp,
the Sino-Soviet alliance in particular. In the concluding chapter, Lüthi suggests
that the inequality of power between China and the Soviet Union and
the different positions they occupied in the international system—the former
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Roberts, Levine, Vámos, Kaple, Friedman, Stiffler, and Lüthi
at best an aspiring regional power, the latter an actual world power—constituted
a structural impediment to their long-term cooperation. As Lüthi indicates,the
alliance at its inception was more important to Beijing than to Moscow.
Yet, China’s adherence to the socialist camp was qualitatively different
from that of Hungary, Poland, East Germany (GDR), and the other EastCentral
European Communist states. Those countries had been conquered by
the Red Army and dragooned into Iosif Stalin’s empire. The Chinese Communist
Party (CCP) conquered China largely on its own, and China joined
the Communist camp of its own will—that is, if one is willing to equate
Mao’s will with China’s. China’s potential weight in the world balance of
power far exceeded that of all of Moscow’s minor allies, and the prospects for a
Chinese-style Communist revolution elsewhere in Asia seemed bright in
1950.
What augured badly for the Sino-Soviet alliance was not primarily the inequality
of power between the Soviet Union and China. Few alliances are between
equals. Rather, the ingrained Leninist practice of zero-sum politics
grounded in antagonism, suspicion, cynicism, manipulation, and coercion
easily trumped the rhetoric of proletarian internationalism and socialist solidarity.
Neither the Soviet nor the Chinese Communists were experienced in
the give-and-take of alliance politics in which the dominant partner, for the
good of the alliance, sometimes accommodates its junior partner or partners
rather than simply imposing its will. Khrushchev, to his credit, initially at
least tried, whereas Mao understood only domination or subordination. Cooperation
was at best a halfway house on the road to total control; parity
among partners a chimera. Seeking to become the new Stalin, Mao repeatedly
provoked the Soviet Union, overplayed his hand, and wound up virtually isolated
within the Communist camp. The two men at the apex of power within
their respective Communist parties were like two choleric chess players making
one clumsy move after another and ªnally resorting to upending the
board when their opponent made a move they could not match.
A telling incident in this connection was Mao’s explosive rejection of the
Soviet proposal in 1958 for a joint Sino-Soviet submarine ºeet based in China
along with the establishment of long-range radio transmission facilities on
Hainan. Mao’s reaction sooner manifested a knee-jerk xenophobia than a
justiªable fear of Soviet domination. He apparently viewed China’s military
alliance with the Soviet Union as a one-way street in which Moscow was supposed
to supply Beijing with modern military equipment, advisers, and technology,
and Beijing did not incur any reciprocal obligations on common security
objectives. Khrushchev acted similarly in precipitately withdrawing all
Soviet advisers from China in July 1960. Lüthi’s comment that “Soviet ac-
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Mao, Khrushchev, and China’s Split with the USSR
tions had given Beijing the moral high ground in the [ideological] debate”
strains credulity unless one thinks of the moral high ground as akin to a tussock
in a fetid swamp.
Lüthi correctly views China as the driving force in ªrst opening and then
widening the Sino-Soviet split to the point of irreconcilability. He ascribes
this to Mao’s post-Stalin radical turn from the bureaucratic Stalinism practiced
in the Soviet Union in the postwar period to the revolutionary Stalinism
that had prevailed in the 1930s and was later abandoned by Stalin himself. As
Alexander Pantsov argues in his recent Russian-language biography of Mao,
only after Stalin’s death did Mao dare to become a full-ºedged Stalinist.14
Before
and after 1949, Stalin had repeatedly cautioned the Chinese Communists
to avoid the mistakes the Soviet Union had earlier committed. Mao paid
lip service to this advice, but as soon as he came out from under Stalin’s
shadow, he not only repeated Soviet mistakes but far exceeded them in pursuing
lunatic development objectives via cruelly exploitative and murderous
means.
The personalization of politics in the Soviet Union and China via the cult
of personality, a euphemism for personalistic dictatorship, meant that no institutional
mechanisms, bureaucratic linkages, or societal connections were
able to buffer the increasing animosity between Mao and Khrushchev. Communist
interparty and interstate relations became the politics of whim, vanity,
and the pursuit of arbitrary power no matter how cloaked these might have
been in the discourse of Communism. Lüthi spends much more time analyzing
Chinese domestic politics than he does Soviet politics. He focuses, inter
alia, on how Mao’s pursuit of his radical domestic agenda inºuenced the evolution
of the Sino-Soviet split as well as Mao’s foreign policy more generally.
Mao’s campaign to crush or intimidate his alleged intraparty opponents was
rooted in his obsession with total power. His paranoid fantasy transmogriªed
men who had faithfully supported him for decades into enemies whom he
tarred with the label of revisionists and capitalist roaders.
So central was Mao to the emergence and climax of the Sino-Soviet
conºict that it might more accurately be called the Mao-Soviet split. Although
we cannot know whether, in the absence of Mao, any of the other
leaders of the CCP would have pushed so aggressively to bring Sino-Soviet relations
to the point of collapse, this seems highly unlikely. In fact, just a few
years after Mao’s death, his successors initiated the measured process of SinoSoviet
rapprochement, which culminated in Mikhail Gorbachev’s May 1989
summit meeting in Beijing with Deng Xiaoping. This process has been care-
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Roberts, Levine, Vámos, Kaple, Friedman, Stiffler, and Lüthi
14. Alexander Pantsov, Mao Tszedun (Moscow: Molodaiia Gvardiia, 2007).
fully analyzed in Elizabeth Wishnick’s Mending Fences, a book that nicely
complements Lüthi’s volume.15
The Sino-Soviet dispute that provided intellectual fodder and employment
for an older generation of analysts, including this reviewer, now belongs
to the historians. The passage of more than 50 years since Mao humiliated
Khrushchev in July 1958 by holding a summit meeting in his swimming pool
in Zhongnanhai is time enough to ponder the larger meanings and implications
of the Sino-Soviet split. Yet, Lüthi, immersed in the fascinating minutiae
of the conºict, provides too little, if any, reºection on such questions as
what role the Sino-Soviet split played in the demise of Communism in the
USSR and East-Central Europe, its near-abandonment in Asia except as a system
of authoritarian rule, and the devaluation of an ideology that once commanded
legions of faithful around the world. How did the Cold War in the
Communist world inºuence the Cold War more broadly? In this connection,
too, an assessment of Mao Zedong should grapple with the fact that “objectively,”
as the Marxist-Leninists were fond of saying, the avatar of world revolution
bore greater responsibility than anyone else for the disintegration of the
ideology that he upheld and the triumph of the “imperialist” forces he sought
to combat.
✣ ✣ ✣
Lorenz M. Lüthi, The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. xix ϩ 375 pp. $65.00 hardcover; $27.95 paper.
Reviewed by Péter Vámos, Institute of History, Hungarian Academy of Sciences
It is not a simple task to review a book that has a lot of merits but fails to draw
the right conclusions. Lorenz M. Lüthi has written ten excellent chapters on
the evolving drama of the Sino-Soviet split. The book is extremely well researched
with clear argumentation underpinned by ample archival resources
and references to secondary literature. Lüthi covers all the important Chinese
and Soviet domestic and international events from the 1956–1966 period and
analyzes their signiªcance to Sino-Soviet relations. Having spent years going
through Russian, Chinese, American, and East European archives, Lüthi is
able to shed new light on nearly every episode of the Sino-Soviet split. The
only point that can be formally criticized is the lack of a bibliography, for
which an essay on the sources is substituted. Lüthi explains that this step was
taken because of the lack of space, which is understandable and acceptable but
133
Mao, Khrushchev, and China’s Split with the USSR
15. Elizabeth Wishnick, Mending Fences: The Evolution of Moscow’s China Policy from Brezhnev to
Yeltsin (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2001).
nonetheless inconvenient for the reader who is forced to check the references
by logging onto the Internet and printing them out from the publisher’s
website, where the complete bibliography is available.
The book focuses on China and Mao Zedong, the dominant person in
the worsening Sino-Soviet relationship. Lüthi deals with a comprehensive set
of issues concerning China’s domestic and foreign politics from the point of
view of Mao’s domestic and international struggle for leadership, which determined
the process and outcome of Sino-Soviet debates. He investigates and
identiªes all major steps of the crystallization and radicalization of Mao’s position
vis-à-vis the Soviet Union and his domestic opponents. Because the pace
of the relationship’s deterioration and its eventual collapse was controlled by
China, it is acceptable that Lüthi devotes signiªcantly less attention to Soviet
domestic politics. Soviet internal power relations and foreign political developments,
such as U.S.-Soviet rapprochement or Soviet alliance policies, are
treated only in their relationship to China and in the mirror of China’s responses
to them. Greater analysis of the Soviet domestic situation might have
helped in understanding Moscow’s own motivations and actions.
The reason I did not praise the book as it is in the ªrst two sentences of
my review is that the conclusion is untenable. Lüthi identiªes ideology as the
ultimate cause for the split. I ªnd this conclusion problematic because, in my
reading, the book does not substantiate it. As Lüthi argues, the interplay of a
multitude of factors contributed to and ªnally resulted in the Sino-Soviet
split. These factors included internal developments, the Soviet-American rapprochement,
failures in Chinese diplomacy, misperceptions resulting from
lack of information, and communication problems. Mao instrumentalized
ideology for certain “basic” reasons. In 1956–1957, for example, Mao’s ideological
radicalization and vehement argumentation against de-Stalinization
resulted from his fear of losing absolute control over the leadership. Behind
this fear was the reality of Chinese domestic economic problems deriving
from his ignorance of economic and agricultural issues and the schematic use
of the Soviet Stalinist model. Lüthi writes about the Chinese “ideologically
distorted view of the world” (p. 348), but this was also the traditionally
China-centered worldview, which simply did not ªt into the Cold War logic
of two superpowers at the head of opposing camps.
For Mao—who had an extraordinary talent in using propaganda for his
own goals and had no other means, military or economic, in his possession to
exert pressure on his opponents—ideological warfare seemed to be the only
viable option to ªght for the achievement of his ultimate goal: leadership for
himself at home and leadership for China in the international arena. As Lüthi
demonstrates, Mao showed no willingness to compromise, invented crises
and enemies, and never hesitated to sacriªce lives to achieve a more favorable
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Roberts, Levine, Vámos, Kaple, Friedman, Stiffler, and Lüthi
negotiating position. The Sino-Soviet split was but one part of Mao’s ªght.
Sino-Soviet ideological debates were nothing but a function of Mao’s leadership
struggle at home and in the world.
Ideology of course did play a crucial role in Sino-Soviet disputes. But we
must distinguish, as Lüthi clearly does, between the genuine belief in ideology
and its manipulative use to achieve one’s speciªc aims. Lüthi is aware of the
fact that ideology was only a tool for Mao, practically the only tool he had at
his disposal against the Soviet Union and his domestic opponents. Mao’s instrumental
use of ideology in domestic and foreign politics contributed to the
worsening of Sino-Soviet relations. However, it was not simply “Mao’s ideological
radicalization . . . and Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization . . . that set a train
of events into motion which eventually undermined the alliance” (p. 45).
Mao’s radical views and de-Stalinization did not originate from the void but
had reasonable and traceable origins. The peculiarity of this book is that Lüthi
identiªes almost all major factors (including Chinese domestic economic
problems and leadership struggles, sovereignty issues, the unequal nature of
Sino-Soviet relations, and Mao’s leadership aims) that contributed to Mao’s
ideological radicalization, but turns reasoning upside down and claims that
changes in ideology were in and of themselves the cause of the split. He does
not treat ideological radicalization as the result of underlying domestic and international
causes.
Lüthi makes a clear distinction between ideology and the use of ideology
as a political tool that can be manipulated for short-term political, or even
personal, objectives. He does not evade the fundamental question of whether
the Chinese used ideology as a genuine belief system or as an instrumental device,
and his answer is that they did both. This answer is not satisfying. Lüthi
writes that leaders in both China and the Soviet Union were genuinely Marxist-Leninist
and that “there is no evidence that they were pure cynics who used
ideological claims in a deceitful manner to achieve goals contrary to larger
Marxist-Leninist postulates” (p. 347). As I see it, Mao and his fellow leaders
in Beijing wanted to achieve their own goals and to harmonize them with
those postulates. This in turn implies that ideology was an instrumental device
for the Chinese, just as it was for the Soviet Union and the East-Central
European Soviet satellites. The genuine belief in Marxism-Leninism does not
preclude its use as a means to achieve domestic and international aims that are
based on Chinese national interests and, in the case of Sino-Soviet relations,
that are against the interests of the USSR.
If we take the establishment of the Sino-Soviet alliance as an example, we
ªnd that Stalin had his own strategic, national security, and economic considerations
(“to exploit his allies economically,” p. 39) behind his willingness to
align himself with Mao. Lüthi writes that for Stalin the alliance was “a utilitar-
135
Mao, Khrushchev, and China’s Split with the USSR
ian tool to obtain those concessions he had tried to extract from the
Guomindang in 1945” (p. 31). Lüthi enumerates the advantages Stalin was
seeking to gain through economic “cooperation”: access to Chinese strategic
materials, agricultural products, and hard currency. The concessions Stalin
had tried to extract from the Guomindang and got instead from the Chinese
Communist Party (CCP) included the lease of Dalian and Lüshun, two harbors
and naval bases on the Liaodong Peninsula; mining, oil, and railroad
concessions in Manchuria and Xinjiang; and Chinese acceptance of the sovereignty
of Outer Mongolia, the People’s Republic of Mongolia. Strategic and
economic considerations played a crucial role in the Chinese decision as well.
Although for the PRC the concessions made to the Soviet Union resembled
the unequal treaties signed between the Manchu Qing Empire and the British,
French, and other imperialist powers, including Tsarist Russia in the
nineteenth century, the Sino-Soviet alliance served as a means to provide security
at China’s three potential points of conºict with the “American imperialists”:
the Korean Peninsula, Taiwan, and Vietnam. Furthermore, as China had
no major source of economic aid other than the Soviet Union, the alliance
provided security as well as assistance for economic reconstruction. For Beijing,
every aspect of the Sino-Soviet alliance, including party relations, military aid,
and economic cooperation, was designed to serve the modernization goals of
the newly established PRC and “to reestablish China as a world power”
(p. 45). The Chinese resistance toward “Soviet attempts at greater military integration
especially after the Warsaw Pact was founded in 1955” (p. 36) also
proves this attitude. In sum, although the establishment of the Sino-Soviet alliance
in 1949–1950 did not lack ideological motives, it was primarily motivated
by practical political and economic considerations from both sides. The
same is true for the temporary reconciliation in late 1960 and the
renormalization of relations in the 1980s. Why would it have been otherwise
in the case of the split?
Lüthi himself identiªes the structural crisis between agriculture and industry
in China (a crisis resulting from the Soviet economic development
model the PRC embraced) as “the seminal issue that triggered the deterioration
of Sino-Soviet relations in the mid-1950s” (p. 41.). Economic debates divided
the Chinese leadership as well, and different solutions for the economic
problems were at the root of confrontations between Mao and his fellow leaders,
including Peng Dehuai, Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, Zhou Enlai, and
others.
When discussing the ideological foundation of the disagreements, Lüthi
singles out the 20th Congress of the CPSU, arguing that genuine disagreements
over principles were later used as tools for Mao’s manipulative actions.
But in fact the manipulative nature of Mao’s “principal disagreement” with
136
Roberts, Levine, Vámos, Kaple, Friedman, Stiffler, and Lüthi
the Soviet Union existed from the moment he became the ultimate leader in
the Chinese Communist Party. The origin of the split goes back to the difference
between the two worldviews and to the clash between the two countries’
similar aims but unequal positions.
Lüthi mentions the “unequal positions of the two alliance partners within
the international system” only as an additional source of the split (p. 349).
One can more plausibly argue that the unequal nature of the relationship was
precisely what made Beijing uneasy about the Sino-Soviet alliance. Mao’s
aversion to being granted junior status constituted the real cause of differences
and determined the methods and character of Sino-Soviet debates as well as
the outcome. China, which was the center of the civilized world for centuries,
was humiliated by the imperialist powers in the mid-nineteenth century. In
1949, Mao’s slogan “The Chinese people have stood up!” underscored the
idea that the “great, courageous and industrious” Chinese nation should get
rid of foreign oppression. Inequality and the notion of inferiority contradicted
and were simply irreconcilable with the traditional Chinese Weltanschauung
based on centrality and cultural superiority. That is why Mao’s aim
in 1956–1957 was to “increase China’s inºuence in the socialist world”
(p. 65), why the PRC in late 1956 “wished for better foreign policy coordination,
an improved exchange of information, and more personal contacts between
Soviet and Chinese leaders” (p. 64), and why Mao insisted in 1964 that
the PRC had never surrendered and would not surrender to Soviet “greatpower
chauvinism” (p. 289).
The unequal nature of the relationship manifested itself in differences in
economic and military power, in strategic goals and international positions,
and in regional and global commitments. As Lüthi points out, throughout the
1950s the two states had never been on a par with each other in terms of military
power or global inºuence. Mao led a country that lagged far behind the
Soviet Union in military technology as well as economic performance. This
bitter reality hindered Mao’s leadership ambitions (“megalomania” as Lüthi
calls it) but did not prevent him from demanding a place at the top of the
ranks—alongside or even ahead of, not behind, the USSR.
Explaining the unequal nature of the relationship, Lüthi writes that
whereas for China the Sino-Soviet alliance was absolutely crucial, for the Soviet
Union it was just another foreign policy asset, albeit an important one. As
a result, when disagreements arose, Moscow failed to devote sufªcient attention
to the partnership, according to Lüthi (p. 12). But the evidence suggests
that the CPSU Politburo did in fact believe it was extremely beneªcial to have
China as an ally. All Soviet leaders, from Stalin through Mikhail Gorbachev,
hoped for cooperation with the PRC to strengthen the general struggle
against imperialism. The problem was that Soviet ofªcials conceived of
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Mao, Khrushchev, and China’s Split with the USSR
China’s participation in the anti-imperialist front only on Moscow’s own
terms, which became increasingly unacceptable to Beijing. Under such circumstances,
the Soviet authorities had to consider whether cooperation with
China was politically expedient when measured against their other commitments.
Later the Soviet Union had to consider whether the Chinese were willing
to engage in contacts at all. If we take the issue of Soviet assistance to
China during the period covered by Lüthi as an example, we see that the Soviet
attitude was supportive even after the “ideological” debate ºared into the
public in 1960.
In the late 1940s, Mao needed a great deal of Soviet assistance to defeat
the Guomindang and take power on the mainland. After the PRC was established,
the Chinese Communists requested and received Soviet scientiªc and
technological aid. In the early years of the PRC, without Soviet assistance
Mao would not have been able to realize his plans to control the country, to
restore national sovereignty, and ultimately to reestablish China as a central
power in the region and the world. As a result, the Chinese leader called for
unity with Moscow and asked for more Soviet advice and assistance. As Lüthi
writes, “Beijing chose cooperation when it needed Moscow’s support”
(p. 198). The Soviet Union provided support on the basis of internationalism
and friendship. By 1960, however, when the PRC had exhausted much of the
military and economic aid the Soviet Union had offered, and Soviet support
of the Chinese nuclear weapons program was coming to an end, and economic
relations were breaking down, Mao concluded that the anti-imperialist
alliance with the Soviet Union had run its course (p. 152). As Soviet economic,
military, and technological aid became less signiªcant for China’s development,
Mao’s hands were less bound by Soviet expectations to obey the
rules of cooperation devised by Moscow. Although Mao was still looking for
possible cooperation with the USSR, especially on defense and military production,
he kept challenging the boundaries of Soviet tolerance and injecting
more and more issues into the dispute. Although Beijing adopted a more confrontational
policy toward Moscow, the Soviet Union had not terminated its
support of Chinese industry. Soviet specialists continued to arrive in China
on short-term assignments even after Soviet advisers were withdrawn from the
PRC in August 1960, and they stopped traveling to China only when the
PRC unilaterally suspended all remaining supply contracts in October 1960.
Similarly, not until 1960 did the Soviet Union terminate all nuclear weapons
research collaboration in the PRC. Soviet military aid to China continued
even longer. The Soviet Union transferred designs of the MIG-21 ªghter
plane as late as 1962. The USSR, despite suffering food shortages at home, offered
grain and sugar on a loan basis to the Chinese until the summer of
1962. Moscow provided assistance until Soviet leaders concluded that vital
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Roberts, Levine, Vámos, Kaple, Friedman, Stiffler, and Lüthi
Soviet interests and other commitments were threatened by the support of the
“unreliable” Chinese.
In the 1950s China was dependent on Soviet aid and therefore had less
room for maneuver vis-à-vis its stronger ally. As a result, disagreements about
international relations did not yet roil Sino-Soviet relations. By the 1960s,
however, when Mao concluded that Soviet support no longer served his purposes,
he did not hesitate to sacriªce it and decided openly to proclaim his
country’s central position in the Communist world, protraying China as the
rightful leader of the socialist camp and the international Communist move-
ment.
Lüthi mentions peaceful coexistence with imperialism in general and
with the United States in particular as a basic element of the ideological foundation
for Sino-Soviet disagreements. Détente with the United States clearly
was more important for the Soviet Union than for China, but not only for
ideological reasons. Strategic and economic considerations are equally important
in explaining the differences between the Soviet and Chinese approaches
to peaceful coexistence. According to Lüthi, Soviet leaders were interested in a
rapprochement with the United States because “Cold War antagonism placed
a burden on Soviet resources” (p. 47). For China, on the other hand, the
United States constituted a security threat, including the threat of the prolonged
separation of Taiwan from the mainland. For the CCP, the achievement
of national sovereignty and territorial integrity were of foremost importance
because these factors underlay the ruling party’s legitimacy before the
Chinese people and the international community. With U.S. military forces
on Taiwan and deployed around China in the Asian-Paciªc region, Mao did
not yet even contemplate a rapprochement. The Soviet strategic goal of relaxing
tensions with the West thus contradicted Mao’s ambitions to regain sovereignty
over U.S.-supported Taiwan. The worsening of Sino-American relations
over Taiwan, a clearly strategic issue, sparked further Chinese unease
about the new Soviet policy of peaceful coexistence. Khrushchev’s “pursuit of
two essentially contradictory strategic goals” (p. 76)—partnership with the
increasingly unreliable, anti-imperialist Chinese and détente with the United
States, China’s main rival—and Mao’s conclusion that the Soviet-American
rapprochement had eroded the value of the Sino-Soviet alliance derived from
the differences in the two countries’ global positions.
The unequal positions of the two allies also caused them to have incongruent
military outlooks. The general radicalization of Chinese politics in
1958 was as much the cause as the result of different strategic considerations.
Soviet leaders did not care about making proposals that would hurt Chinese
sensitivities over sovereignty. For the USSR, the PRC seemed to be a secure
and subordinate partner, similar to those in Eastern Europe. But the PRC’s re-
139
Mao, Khrushchev, and China’s Split with the USSR
jection of the Soviet joint submarine proposal in 1958 was an obvious manifestation
of independent strategic considerations. As Lüthi writes, “joint ventures
of any kind did not ªt China’s emerging military doctrine. Mao opposed
any outside control over Chinese submarines destined for the liberation of
Taiwan” (p. 93). The international dimension of an independent Chinese
military doctrine can be illustrated by the controversies over Vietnam. Mao
used accusations against Moscow to prevent it “from what he feared was an attempt
to wrest control over the Vietnam War from Beijing” (p. 339).
The Vietnam War could have provided an excellent opportunity to prove
that the conºict of national interests (China’s aim “to exclude Soviet inºuence”;
p. 336) lay at the root of the Sino-Soviet conºict over Vietnam. Lüthi
writes that “as the largest country in that zone, China presented itself as a natural
leader” (p. 304), but he does not add that this natural leadership position
stemmed from centuries-old tradition. Vietnam had been part of the Chinese
sphere of interest and cultural inºuence for much of its history. The motivation
behind Chinese actions was the fear that the Soviet Union would use the
war for its own purposes and that Soviet involvement might provide Moscow
with control over Hanoi’s foreign policy. Had the Chinese cooperated with
the Soviet Union, their hands would have been tied, and their own agenda
could not have been realized independently, relatively free from external
inºuence. China’s traditional sphere of interest would have been subordinated
to the will of a militarily stronger partner. Ideological disputes were thus only
an excuse for China’s refusal to cooperate.
The treatment of the links between Mao’s domestic moves and his foreign
policy is a particularly strong aspect of Lüthi’s book. Lüthi describes the SinoSoviet
split as a logical chain of events that originated in Mao’s willingness to
risk a close Sino-Soviet military relationship in exchange for obtaining his domestic
goals (p. 86). After 1956, Mao played a two-front (domestic and international)
tactical game in which he gauged his tactical moves, disguised in
ideological garb, to secure for himself the leading position at home and in the
international Communist movement. This latter effort—that is, the power
struggle between Beijing and Moscow—led by the mid-1960s to the SinoSoviet
split. Because Mao by 1962 believed that “a well-managed collapse of
the partnership would be of much greater use than the renewal of the relationship
with Moscow” (p. 244) and because ideological victory abroad served as
a weapon for Mao to solve domestic political problems, Lüthi concludes that
“any attempts by the Soviets, or by outsiders such as the Romanians, to seek
an end to the ideological attacks were condemned to failure” (p. 300).
This story is not unknown in general terms, but by using newly available
sources Lüthi adds important details to the picture. He makes thoughtful
140
Roberts, Levine, Vámos, Kaple, Friedman, Stiffler, and Lüthi
linkages between Chinese foreign policy and domestic politics and vice versa.
He exposes not only the domestic background but also the domestic purpose
of Mao’s international moves. What evolves is a picture of a constant domestic
power struggle between Mao and his more moderate opponents in the top
leadership and Mao’s use of China’s antagonism toward the Soviet Union to
strenthen his hand in his domestic battles. Lüthi shows how Mao would seize
on international crises—such as the Hungarian Revolution in 1956, the second
Taiwan Strait crisis in 1958, and the acceleration of the Sino-Soviet split
in the early 1960s—to push his domestic agenda. Lüthi’s conclusion of chapter
7 is the key to his correct understanding of the Sino-Soviet split: “Mao instigated
the deterioration of Sino-Soviet relations precisely with domestic
aims in mind” (p. 244).
The torrent of anti-Soviet propaganda in China was not the only element
that served Mao’s domestic objectives. One of Mao’s tactics was to use external
crises for domestic purposes as well. The second Taiwan Strait crisis is the
best-known example of this connection. Lüthi also mentions that Mao exploited
the second Sino-Indian border war to launch the Socialist Education
Movement and that “the large rallies in support of revolutionary Cuba and
against the defeatist Soviet Union . . . were undoubtedly Mao’s attempts to instill
revolutionary consciousness against revisionism in China’s masses”
(p. 228). In several cases, criticism of the Soviet Union and its East European
allies was in fact aimed at Mao’s domestic critics. For Mao, the confrontation
with East-Central European parties at their congresses in 1962–1963 and the
anti-Soviet polemics in 1963–1964 also served the domestic purpose of exerting
pressure on his internal opponents “in order to secure the political supremacy
he feared was being threatened” (p. 300).
Mao’s constant ideological and political radicalization resulted from domestic
issues, such as his denial of personal responsibility for the deadly famines
in 1959–1961 (p. 159). The radicalization, in turn, had international repercussions,
including Tibet and the Sino-Indian and Sino-Soviet disputes
(p. 347). Mao’s unwillingness to compromise in international affairs had an
internal purpose as well: “[O]nce he had achieved international leadership,
who would dare oppose him at home?” (p. 285).
Lüthi shows that shifts of tone in the Chinese press—in one instance
stressing controversies, in another instance focusing on common features—
stemmed from changes in the domestic balance of power. Mao’s crucial role in
the deterioration of relations is proven by the fact that in 1961–1962, when
he was temporarily on the defensive at home, the other leaders realized that
China’s domestic needs required a decrease in foreign policy radicalism and
used a much more conciliatory tone. But Mao’s comeback in the summer of
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Mao, Khrushchev, and China’s Split with the USSR
1962 led to renewed ideological radicalism. Lüthi concludes that Mao’s “slogan
fanxiu fangxiu (oppose revisionism abroad, prevent revisionism at home)
connected for the ªrst time explicitly China’s foreign and domestic policies.
Mao thus employed his dissatisfaction with Khrushchev as a political and
ideological tool to attack the reformers Liu and Deng” (p. 244, emphasis in
original).
Lüthi argues that this setback for domestic reformers in 1962 proved to be
a crucial turning point that culminated in the Cultural Revolution (p. 222).
The most important Chinese domestic consequence of Khrushchev’s removal
in October 1964 was a purge of Mao’s opponents. After the Soviet leader’s fall,
Mao rhetorically linked his domestic adversaries to Soviet revisionism. Lüthi
writes that even “the ªnal collapse of Sino-Soviet party relations in March 1966
was primarily a function of [Mao’s] domestic politics” (p. 285). The increasingly
confrontational Chinese behavior in external affairs was related to the
rapid unfolding of the Cultural Revolution at home (p. 298).
Mao’s most readily available and favorite weapons were words. He enjoyed
ªghting with slogans, the weapons he could handle best. He conducted
psychological warfare against his domestic opponents as well as against the
Soviet leadership and Khrushchev personally. At home, Mao used ideological
arguments to protect his own position and to silence dissent within the CCP.
In most cases, such as in 1959 in Lushan or in 1962 in Beidaihe, he framed
his attacks against his opponents solely in rhetorical terms. Lüthi mentions
that with a slight terminological modiªcation, using Chinese revisionism instead
of right opportunism, Mao was able to place any domestic critic under
the category of revisionism (p. 222). Similarly, references to the restoration of
capitalism were “simply a rhetorical weapon to discredit those who promoted
ideas contrary to his own” (p. 211).
Lacking sufªcient military and economic means, Mao—who by 1949
had emerged as a revolutionary theoretician in China and who later wanted to
occupy the position of leading theoretician of the international Communist
movement—could ªght only with words against the Soviet Union. As Lüthi
writes, the two countries differed signiªcantly in the tools at their disposal to
exert pressure on the other. Khrushchev was һrm in his belief in the use of
sheer power,” whereas Mao “insisted on ideological correctness” (p. 192). Propaganda
was basically the only tool the Chinese had to ªght against a country
that, in Mao’s opinion, did not deserve the leadership of the socialist camp
and the international Communist movement. Mao’s bitter power struggle,
disguised in ideological garb, against Khrushchev began in 1957 as a “friendly
boasting contest” (p. 76) about the speed of economic development. As Mao
became aware that Khrushchev passed the peak of his power in 1960, he
wanted to use every possible tool at his disposal to speed up his fall. Mao him-
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Roberts, Levine, Vámos, Kaple, Friedman, Stiffler, and Lüthi
self admitted in 1964 that “all the hyperbole . . . was just idle talk in order to
make Khrushchev a little tense” (p. 277).
Given Mao’s basic attitude toward the Soviet Union, he had been waiting
for any opportunity to raise controversies and to increase tensions with Moscow.
The experience of Soviet strong-arm tactics and Moscow’s lack of sensitivity
toward Beijing’s concerns displeased all Chinese leaders and ultimately
united the CCP Politburo, including Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping. The
Chinese leaders picked up on elements of Soviet argumentation and integrated
them into their counterarguments and anti-Soviet propaganda. The
withdrawal of Soviet specialists from China in the summer of 1960 and the
rifts that had opened during the East European party congresses in 1962–
1963 were equally exploited for renewed propaganda strikes against the Soviet
Union. Even unrelated events in international affairs, such as the U-2 incident
in 1960 and the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, or conºicts initiated by
China, such as the Sino-Indian border war in 1962, provided Mao with the
political boost he needed. However, as Lüthi concludes, “had it not been for
Mao’s willingness to use them for his own needs, they would not have had
such a disproportionately negative effect on Sino-Soviet relations” (p. 350).
Debates over economic development theory were only a part of the Chinese
rhetorical arsenal. After the catastrophic outcome of the Great Leap Forward
in 1959, when China could not refer to its economic success and claim
that as a result of leap-like development it would attain Communism ahead of
the Soviet Union, Mao no longer used arguments over the economy in his ongoing
debate with Moscow. Instead, a shift occurred “in Mao’s challenge to
Khrushchev’s leadership of the socialist camp from arguments over economic
development theory and de-Stalinization . . . to debates over the correct
course of world revolution, which quickly grew to be a central point in the
Sino-Soviet disagreements until Mao’s death in 1976” (p. 157).
Lorenz Lüthi has written an essential book that will be a future point of
reference for students of this important period but will also be a subject of
heated debates among scholars of the Cold War.
✣ ✣ ✣
Lorenz M. Lüthi, The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. xix ϩ 375 pp. $65.00 hardcover; $27.95 paper.
Commentary by Deborah Kaple, Princeton University
Every now and then, a shockingly good book arrives on my desk. Lorenz
Lüthi’s book The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World is a re-
143
Mao, Khrushchev, and China’s Split with the USSR
minder of the kind of splendid contribution one person can make. It helps if
this person, like Lüthi, speaks and reads several languages, writes clearly, has
the perseverance to do extensive archival work, and focuses closely on one
story from start to ªnish.
Lüthi correctly begins his study with a look at the Sino-Soviet relationship
starting in 1921. It is important for his larger story to remember that the
initial years of cooperation made a deep impression on the Chinese. Very early
on, Vladimir Lenin sent Communist International (Comintern) agents to
China to help spark a socialist revolution. However, much of the Soviet Union’s
advice, such as urging the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to join the
United Front with the Guomindang in the 1920s, led not only to the decimation
of the ºedgling CCP but was oriented toward advancing Soviet over Chinese
aims. Mao Zedong never forgot these betrayals during the early decades
of the Sino-Soviet relationship, and they set the tone for the important years
of cooperation and eventual disintegration.
Lüthi argues that ideology played a critical role in the Sino-Soviet split.
In particular, he found by examining a mountain of sources that the Chinese
were more active than Soviet leaders in exploiting ideological conºict. Three
points of contention stand out, he says: the disagreement in 1955 about the
role of the Soviet model in China; the tension resulting from Nikita Khrushchev’s
1956 de-Stalinization speech; and disagreements about how to deal
with foreign imperialists, starting with the Soviet policy of peaceful coexistence.
Lüthi also argues that Mao was not only willing to manipulate foreign
crises in order to mobilize the Chinese people but was also ready to mobilize
domestic policies in order to inºuence international affairs.
The ªrst point of contention arose when the Chinese began having serious
ideological discussions about the model they had adopted. For years,
scholars have written about the “Soviet model,” its problems for China, its parameters,
and its emphasis on heavy industry. But what was the actual model
the Soviet Union exported to China? How was it deªned? What did it include
and not include? How relevant to Chinese conditions was this model, given
China’s level of development? What we do know, and what Lüthi recounts, is
that despite the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship, Alliance, and Mutual Assistance
signed in February 1950, real Soviet aid that would help China recover
and set it on its path to socialism did not begin until after Iosif Stalin died in
March 1953. Premier Zhou Enlai went to Stalin’s funeral in Moscow and then
stayed to press the new Soviet leaders for economic assistance. China’s ªrst
Five-Year Plan, ratiªed later that year, depended on the 141 new enterprises to
be built by the Soviet Union and the 3,000 Soviet experts who were to be dispatched
to China.
Here Lüthi’s characterizations of “Revolutionary Stalinism” and “Bureau-
144
Roberts, Levine, Vámos, Kaple, Friedman, Stiffler, and Lüthi
cratic Stalinism” become especially useful. “Revolutionary Stalinism” refers to
the development model followed in the USSR in the late 1920s and early
1930s, the “shock” policies of brutal forced collectivization of agriculture and
rapid industrialization. By 1933, when the second Five-Year Plan was
adopted, the Soviet Union turned to a more balanced development plan,
which Lüthi calls “Bureaucratic Stalinism.” From then on, all aspects of Soviet
life were run by a gigantic administrative system, with a multilevel, stratiªed
wage schedule that in reality ran contrary to the Marxist-Leninist precepts so
widely quoted. The Soviet Union exported the bureaucratic Stalinism model
to China in the early 1950s, and the PRC followed it until 1955.
By the mid-1950s, the Chinese found that the bureaucratic Stalinist
model, with its emphasis on developing heavy industry, had caused a structural
crisis between agriculture and industry. The immediate problem the
Chinese faced was that they had agreed to start paying back Soviet loans in
1956, and the repayment was to be in agricultural goods. But agricultural
production was not growing as fast as necessary to feed the country and to pay
off China’s debts. These problems weighed heavily on the Chinese Communists,
and they began to debate the model they had inherited.
As a result of these debates, Mso switched gears in 1955 and adopted the
earlier model of revolutionary Stalinism, which called for forced, ultra-rapid
collectivization of agriculture. This was Mao’s “High Tide” policy, which
failed to attain the results China needed. In the midst of this failure, Khrushchev
shocked the Chinese (and the world) with his famous de-Stalinization
speech. Mao rejected political and ideological de-Stalinization for China and
instead used the opportunity to embark on the even more radical Great Leap
Forward, which was an obvious throwback to the revolutionary Stalinist
model.
The question of the model is crucial because, as Lüthi points out, the theoretical
underpinnings of Marxism-Leninism were ambiguous about how a
society was to become Communist. This ambiguity left room for discussion
and proposals by the Chinese that leaders in Moscow neither anticipated nor
appreciated. In concentrating on the importance of ideology, Lüthi urges us
to see just how divisive these ideological discussions were and, in concrete
terms, how Mao’s solution to China’s agricultural problems in 1958 caused
the beginning of a genuine rift.
With the publication of The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist
World, the promise of area studies is handily realized in yielding a book that
gives us the fullest possible picture to date of the rancorous Sino-Soviet relationship.
Lüthi shows himself to be not only a ªrst-rate historian but also a
person steeped in the backgrounds and languages of several countries that
form an important part of the story. This book would be a great addition to a
145
Mao, Khrushchev, and China’s Split with the USSR
course on Communism, ideology, Chinese history, or Soviet history, or a
course covering Russia and China together. The bibliography (the complete
version is available only on the Princeton University Press website) is a valuable
resource for scholars because it catalogs material from archives in Bulgaria,
the Czech Republic, Germany, Hungary, Italy, Poland, Russia, and the
United States, as well as published material from China. Lüthi’s “Essay on the
Sources” is a welcome introduction to the availability and reliability of existing
sources for further work in this ªeld.
✣ ✣ ✣
Lorenz M. Lüthi, The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. xix ϩ 375 pp. $65.00 hardcover; $27.95 paper.
Commentary by Jeremy Friedman, Princeton University
At a conference in Shanghai in early 2009 a prominent Chinese scholar, Shen
Zhihua, noted that even though Marxism-Leninism stipulated that capitalist
alliances would inevitably break up because of conºicts over markets and
other forms of economic competition, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization—the
bedrock capitalist alliance—has survived for six decades, whereas
alliances between Communist states, supposedly based on much deeper
bonds between peoples ªghting for the liberation of mankind, in many cases
proved to be short-lived and brittle, often collapsing not merely into estrangement
but into outright hostility and sometimes violence. Even though the
Warsaw Pact linking the Soviet Union and the East European countries endured
for more than thirty years, the Sino-Soviet alliance, encompassing the
two largest Communist powers, survived less than a decade and dissolved into
bloody skirmishes. Was this an inevitable clash of titans with historically contradictory
interests? Was it merely a clash of personalities? Or did something
in the very architecture of Marxism-Leninism doom this alliance and, by extension,
others as well?
Prior to the end of the Cold War, numerous scholars followed and analyzed
the Sino-Soviet split in great detail. Over the past two decades, however,
the topic has received less attention. This is perhaps partly the result of the
continued difªculties gaining access to archival documents, the demands of
the languages required, and the greater interest, especially in the West, in
U.S.-Soviet crises in Europe and Cuba. In English, the primary books to appear
in recent years include the collection edited by Odd Arne Westad,
Brothers in Arms; Sergey Radchenko’s recently published book Two Suns in the
Heavens; and Lorenz Lüthi’s new book The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the
146
Roberts, Levine, Vámos, Kaple, Friedman, Stiffler, and Lüthi
Communist World.16
Tellingly, two of the most comprehensive books to come
out since 1992 on Sino-Soviet relations have yet to be translated into English:
Boris T. Kulik’s Sovietsko-Kitaiskii raskol (The Sino-Soviet Schism) and Shen
Zhihua’s Zhongsu Guanxi Shigang (Historical Outline of Sino-Soviet Rela-
tions).17
Kulik’s book, written by an old Soviet veteran of the anti-China
trenches, continues to press the lines of the old ideological struggle, whereas
Shen’s book takes a more realpolitik-centered view. Given the partial opening
of the Chinese Foreign Ministry Archive since 2004 and the increasing participation
of Chinese scholars, both in China and abroad, in the historiographical
conversation on the Cold War, one would anticipate that the next
twenty years will see a steady growth of scholarship on Sino-Soviet relations
and related topics—more scholarship than in the past twenty years.
The Sino-Soviet Split is an important step in the formation of an emerging
multidimensional history of the Cold War. Lüthi has meticulously reconstructed
the chronology of the early years of the split, in particular the period
from Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech at the 20th Soviet Party Congress to
the ºaring of an open dispute at the Romanian Party Congress in 1960. Using
a broad mix of recently published Chinese and Soviet memoirs, Soviet archival
sources, published Chinese document collections, press coverage, and secondary
sources, crucially supplemented at key points by information from
various East European archives, Lüthi provides a narrative that integrates domestic
Soviet and Chinese politics and economics with bilateral relations and
the broader geopolitical context. Lüthi uses this well-documented, integrated
narrative to buttress his evaluations of the various explanatory strategies that
he distills from the existing corpus of literature on the subject.
In the introduction, Lüthi surveys the existing scholarly literature and
identiªes four main approaches to interpreting the split. The ªrst and perhaps
most common interpretation revolves around the notion of conºicting national
interest, in particular that the Soviet Union and China, as large military
powers sharing a long, disputed frontier would inevitably come to see one another
as a security threat. The second and somewhat related view sees SinoSoviet
relations as a function of classic balancing in international relations in
the U.S.-Soviet-Chinese triangle, with the two weaker sides always attempting
to balance the stronger side. In this case, the break that occurred between
147
Mao, Khrushchev, and China’s Split with the USSR
16. Odd Arne Westad, ed., Brothers in Arms: The Rise and Fall of the Sino-Soviet Alliance, 1945–1963
(Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1998); and Sergey Radchenko, Two Suns in the
Heavens: The Sino-Soviet Struggle for Supremacy, 1962–1967 (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson
Center Press, 2009).
17. Boris T. Kulik, Sovetsko-kitaiskii raskol: Prichiny i posledstviia [The Sino-Soviet Split: Causes and
Consequences] (Moscow: IDV RAN, 2000); and Shen Zhihua, Zhongsu Guanxi Shigang, 1917–1991
(Beijing: Xinhua chubanshe, 2007).
the Soviet Union and China in the 1960s can be seen as a function of a supposed
power shift between the United States and the Soviet Union that left
the latter as the greater military power in the later 1960s and 1970s. The last
two interpretations are the ones Lüthi primarily invokes when constructing
his own thesis; namely, an emphasis on domestic political factors, speciªcally
in China; and the key role of ideological disputes in the failure of the alliance.
However, the chief defect of each of these interpretations is that they were
all cobbled together from published statements and polemics, occasional
leaked documents, off-the-record conversations with Soviet-bloc diplomats
and scholars, and a lot of educated guesswork. The increasing access to the archival
record, which Lüthi employs, ªnally allows for these interpretations to
be held against the light of evidence. As Lüthi argues, the ªrst two interpretations,
and especially the second, seem to have been largely the product of political
science theorizing and bear scant resemblance to the concerns and strategies
manifested in the Soviet and Chinese documents. Furthermore, Lüthi
asserts that national interest, or at least the perception thereof, is a product of
an ideologically-based worldview and therefore cannot be used on its own as
an explanatory mechanism. Rather it is ideology that emerges triumphant as
an overarching theme of contention, both substantively and instrumentally
and in both domestic and international politics. Lüthi contends that ideological
differences—ªrst over the speed and nature of economic progress toward
socialism and de-Stalinization, and later over international relations and the
proper methods of confronting imperialism, directly in Europe and Asia as
well as indirectly in the countries of the developing world—fueled the growing
split. These differences preceded such matters as the border dispute,
which would become the focus of so much Western scholarship in the 1970s.
Lüthi maintains that the border issue was an effect of the split rather than a
cause, an issue Mao created as a further wedge against the Soviet Union.
Lüthi’s interpretation owes much to the work of Chen Jian, who has emphasized
the impact of Chinese domestic politics on Chinese foreign policy.
In particular, Chen has pointed to Mao’s attempts to use foreign policy crises,
such as the Korean War and the subsequent crises in the Taiwan Strait, as
tools to mobilize the population on the eve of launching grand economic initiatives.
For Lüthi, Chinese domestic politics comes into play even more
prominently in terms of Mao’s attempts to use the growing Sino-Soviet rift to
defeat real or imagined domestic political rivals, in particular Liu Shaoqi and
Deng Xiaoping. Lüthi argues that after 1962 Mao actively promoted the split
in order to reestablish his political dominance. The road to the ªnal SinoSoviet
break was paved by China’s descent into the domestic chaos of the Cultural
Revolution.
Lüthi’s interpretation relies heavily on the person of Mao Zedong and his
148
Roberts, Levine, Vámos, Kaple, Friedman, Stiffler, and Lüthi
often idiosyncratic political beliefs and activities. Lüthi acknowledges this
when he points out in his conclusion that the most interesting counterfactual
in this story revolves around considering the possibility of Mao’s death or removal
from power at an earlier stage. This question cannot be fully answered,
however, without a deeper understanding of what prompted Mao’s particular
ideological convictions and thus how widely such convictions were truly
shared among the top Chinese leaders. What exactly prompted Mao’s sudden
“left turn” (p. 112) in 1957, and would another Chinese leader have tried to
follow a similar path to socialism? What caused Mao to “realize” that the declared
Soviet policy of “peaceful coexistence” would “subvert revolutionary action
in capitalist states” (p. 156)? Can something about the nature of Chinese
Communism, the trajectory of the Chinese Revolution, or Chinese history
and China’s place in the world offer some of the explanation for these seemingly
individual and idiosyncratic ideological and political judgments? If so,
how would that alter our understanding of Mao’s place in the process of the
deterioration of Sino-Soviet relations?
These questions point to a much deeper issue that relates to the nature of
ideology and its sources. For Lüthi, ideology is crucial to the story but often
seems to be a contingent factor of history, dependent on the personalities and
conjectures of political actors. This is not how Soviet and Chinese leaders
themselves discussed their ideological differences. For them, ideological differences
always had “objective” sources, be they in class origins or cultural and
historical legacies. Although applying this model to the exclusion of others
would be inadvisable, perhaps the idea that historical and contextual factors
necessarily form ideological conviction, and would consequently have an effect
on any leader in a similar situation, does have something to contribute to
our understanding of the place of ideology in history. Ideology, for Lüthi, also
seems to come in discrete parts. For example, he puts the initial weight of
Sino-Soviet ideological differences on economic issues and de-Stalinization,
but in the early 1960s the main emphasis shifts to questions of international
relations and the struggle against imperialism. What is the link, if any, between
economics and foreign policy in the context of Marxist-Leninist ideology?
Did any kind of necessary connection exist between economics and foreign
policy in the positions of either Moscow or Beijing? Interestingly, it
appears from Lüthi’s book that althought China in 1956–1966 endured wild
swings between “revolutionary Stalinist” economic initiatives and more stable
periods of less-radical economic growth, its foreign policy (or at least its rhetoric)
seemed to follow a fairly steady trend toward ever more militant anti-imperialism.
Meanwhile, in the Soviet Union the economy underwent only relatively
minor changes during this period, but Soviet foreign policy seemed
almost schizophrenically torn between the impulses of détente on the one
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Mao, Khrushchev, and China’s Split with the USSR
hand and revolutionary struggle on the other. Was this because of contingent,
external factors, the relative political priorities of one or the other regime, or
did it have some deeper basis in the nature of their respective revolutionary
projects?
In foreign policy, Lüthi does not go far beyond examining the bilateral relationship
and the more direct Soviet and Chinese confrontations with the
United States. Perhaps this was necessary because of the scope of the book and
the sources available. However, over the past few years, after the bulk of the
research for this book was conducted, the most dramatic improvement in the
source base has been the gradual opening of the Chinese Foreign Ministry archive.
Materials from this new source base might change the picture of Chinese
foreign policy presented in the book, which offers the date of 1962 for
Mao’s turn away from the socialist camp toward the Afro-Asian–Latin American
bloc as the chief agent of the struggle against international imperialism
(p. 347). For Lüthi, the causal sequence seems to ºow from the more direct issues
of bilateral relations, which led to a decrease in Chinese conªdence in the
Soviet Union’s willingness to confront the West and toward a more Third
World–oriented view. Some preliminary research in the Chinese Foreign
Ministry Archive, however, shows a much earlier Chinese preoccupation with
the decolonizing world, particularly in Africa, and a quite different causal
chain. Chinese unease about the seeming lack of Soviet revolutionary solidarity
with Africa spawned doubts about Moscow’s ultimate willingness to confront
the West or to stand by China in such a confrontation. The deeper understanding
of Chinese foreign policy in this period offered by the new source
base promises to challenge many of our current understandings of the dynamics
of Cold War international relations and could perhaps have repercussions
for the understanding of Chinese domestic politics as well. The availability of
documents written by political ªgures other than the top leaders and far from
the center will deepen our understanding of the nature of the Chinese political
bureaucratic structure.
Finally, though this is perhaps a question that touches on disciplines beyond
history, the narrative and arguments provided by Lüthi, especially in the
context of his emphasis on ideology as a primary explanatory factor in the sequence
of events described, demand a further examination of what exactly is
meant by belief in Marxism-Leninism. In the book, Lüthi avers that there is
no reason for doubting the “true believer” status of the main protagonists, but
he also argues that their actual understanding of Marxism-Leninism was uneven
at best and that ideology was often employed instrumentally, particularly
by Mao, against political enemies both internal and external. Given that the
primary charge leveled by both the Soviet Union and the PRC against each
other was heresy or even complete abandonment of Marxism-Leninism, the
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Roberts, Levine, Vámos, Kaple, Friedman, Stiffler, and Lüthi
topic of the Sino-Soviet dispute, perhaps more than any other, begs the question
of what in fact constitutes Marxist-Leninist belief, what it entails, and
how the nature of that belief changed over time. The Sino-Soviet Split provides
a new platform for research that will continue to move beyond the narrative
of Cold War–era superpower struggle toward a more complete picture of the
intertwined processes of revolution, decolonization, and development that
shaped the political world of the second half of the twentieth century.
✣ ✣ ✣
Lorenz M. Lüthi, The Sino-Soviet Split: Cold War in the Communist World. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008. xix ϩ 375 pp. $65.00 hardcover; $27.95 paper.
Commentary by Douglas A. Stifºer, Juniata College
Not a Monolith
To many Americans during the Cold War, the Sino-Soviet split made little
sense. From the late 1940s on, observers in the United States generally believed
that the main conºict in the world was between the capitalism and freedom
of the West and the socialism and collectivism of the East. The Cold
War, in this view, was the struggle between two ways of life, between two ways
of seeing the world, between—ultimately—Good and Evil. It would have
been helpful for the public understanding if the Communist bloc had obliged
by being permanently monolithic.18
But the Communist bloc did not remain
monolithic for long. As a result, a considerable degree of confusion was introduced
into the public discourse about the precise nature of the enemy. Some
observers even worried, at least initially, that the Sino-Soviet bickering was
merely a ªendishly clever smokescreen, a plot to lull the United States into
complacency as Communists went about their real work of undermining the
West.
Ofªcial Western appraisals of the Sino-Soviet alliance were more realistic,
and even prescient. In 1949 a report adopted by the U.S. National Security
Council (NSC) predicted that, given the differing natures of the two Communist
giants, the Sino-Soviet alliance would likely prove difªcult to maintain
over the long term.19
This report was prepared at a time when two Com-
151
Mao, Khrushchev, and China’s Split with the USSR
18. On U.S. policymakers’ conception of a “monolithic Communism,” see Chen Jian, China’s Road to
the Korean War: The Making of a Sino-American Confrontation (Columbia University Press, 1994),
p. 49.
19. NSC 34/2, “US Policy toward China,” 28 February 1949, in U.S. Department of State, Foreign
munist states, the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia, had fallen into a bitter
dispute. The notion that the same kind of schism awaited the Soviet Union
and China therefore did not seem to be mere wishful thinking. The secret
predictions of foreign policy experts, however, could hardly quell public alarm
in the West over the alliance of the two Communist giants.
Underlying these differing reactions to the Sino-Soviet alliance were two
differing interpretations. The public discourse was guided by a belief that
Communism was a powerful ideological threat. Many professional analysts,
however, saw the ideological dispute as simply a surface manifestation. In
their view, “real” security concerns, personality conºicts, and economic interests
lay behind a smokescreen of shifting ideology. Although some academic
analysts of the Sino-Soviet split such as Donald Zagoria emphasized “ideology”
as a critical factor in bringing about the split, most did not.20
This was
especially the case in the last two decades of the Cold War, as Marxist-Leninist
ideology ªnally became so bent-out-of-shape that it was almost unrecogniz-
able.
In the post–Cold War-period, academic analysts like Chen Jian, Odd
Arne Westad, and Lorenz Lüthi have largely eschewed the “realist” interpretations
espoused by their academic predecessors. Using a wealth of new documentary
evidence, they have argued that “ideology” was actually the key factor
in the Sino-Soviet split.21
Lüthi, in his new book The Sino-Soviet Split, is the
latest analyst to follow this scholarly trend of restoring primacy to the ideological
factor in the Cold War.
Explaining the Sino-Soviet Split
Why did the Soviet Union and China split? With a wealth of new sources,
masterfully used by Lüthi in this admirable survey of the split, we are now
152
Roberts, Levine, Vámos, Kaple, Friedman, Stiffler, and Lüthi
Relations of the United States, 1949, Vol. IX, pp. 491–495. On the State Department’s “wedge strategy,”
Chen Jian, China’s Road to the Korean War, pp. 49–50, 114; and Gordon H. Chang, Friends and
Enemies: The United States, China, and the Soviet Union (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press,
1990), pp. 16–17.
20. Of the early U.S. analysts of the Sino-Soviet conºict, only Zagoria, in his multifactoral analysis,
considered ideology to be a key factor in its own right. See Donald Zagoria, The Sino-Soviet Conºict,
1956–61 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962); William Grifªth, Sino-Soviet Relations,
1964 (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1967); Alfred D. Low, The Sino-Soviet Dispute: An Analysis of the
Polemics (London: Associated University Presses, 1976); David Floyd, Mao against Khrushchev: A Short
History of the Sino-Soviet Conºict (New York: Frederick Praeger, 1963); and John Gittings, Survey of the
Sino-Soviet Dispute: A Commentary and Extracts from the Recent Polemics (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1968).
21. Chinese domestic politics and Mao’s ideological aspirations are at the center of Chen Jian’s analysis
of the Sino-Soviet split: “China’s alliance policy toward the Soviet Union was always an integral part of
Mao Zedong’s grand continuous revolution plans designed to transform China’s state, society, and in-
much closer to satisfactory answers to this question and others concerning the
tumultuous Sino-Soviet relationship and its ultimate unraveling. Lüthi’s mastery
of the memoir and archival sources, from the archives of no fewer than
six East-Central European countries, is extremely impressive. In terms of documentation,
we still lack access to central Chinese Communist Party (CCP)
archives and therefore must rely largely on memoirs—Wu Lengxi’s is especially
important (albeit often unreliable) in recounting the Chinese side—and
summaries or transcripts of conversations from other archival sources. Lüthi
was also able to ªnd in the Jiangsu Provincial Archives some of the central
Chinese directives related to the split.
When analyzing the causes and timing of the Sino-Soviet split, analysts
have traditionally cited a number of factors, including national security interests,
rivalry for leadership of the international Communist movement, the
inºuence of domestic politics in China (and, to a lesser extent, in the Soviet
Union) on foreign policy, personal animosity between Mao Zedong and Nikita
Khrushchev, ideological disagreements, and territorial disputes, to name
the most important reasons usually advanced. Since the ªrst path-breaking
analysis of the split by Donald Zagoria in 1961, many scholars have tended to
proffer a multifactoral analysis. The Sino-Soviet split developed over many
years, after all, through a variety of crises and disagreements with diverse origins.
Scholars have found it difªcult to identify a single factor in order to
write a convincing “meta-narrative” of the Split.
Lüthi is unique in asserting that ideological disagreement was the key factor
underlying all (or nearly all) aspects of the dispute. That is a radical claim,
but it is one in accord with some recent tendencies in the scholarship—for example,
Chen Jian, especially, in his Mao’s China and the Cold War, asserts that
Mao’s international policies were frequently determined by his radicalism at
home. That is, Mao needed tension and struggle abroad to support his “continuous
revolution” at home.22
Lüthi notes that his ªndings are in line with
the arguments of some “New Cold War Historians” concerning the important
role of ideology in the Cold War.
Lüthi clearly has dug deep into the Western literature on the split. But it
is odd that he does not foreground the multifactoral arguments of the recent
Chinese scholarship23
or the recent analyses by ex-Soviet ofªcials who were in-
153
Mao, Khrushchev, and China’s Split with the USSR
ternational outlook.” See Chen Jian, Mao’s China and the Cold War (University of North Carolina
Press, 2001), p. 49.
22. Jian, Mao’s China and the Cold War.
23. Yang Kuisong, Mao Zedong yu Mosike de enen yuanyuan [Mao Zedong and Moscow: Amity and
Enmity] (Hong Kong: Sanlian chubanshe, 2000); Niu Jun, “1962: The Eve of the Left Turn in
China’s Foreign Policy,” CWIHP Working Paper No. 48, Cold War International History Project,
Washington, DC, October 2005; and Shen Zhihua, Zhong-Su tongmeng de jingji Beijing: 1948–1953
volved in the polemics with China.24
Lüthi focuses almost entirely on the
Western political science/international relations literature.
When reviewing the literature on the split, Lüthi identiªes four main
lines of explanation: national interest; “strategic triangle” maneuverings; Chinese
domestic leadership conºict; and ideology (p. 3). He rejects national or
security interests as primary factors. On the other hand, Lüthi, like Chen Jian
and others, holds Chinese domestic leadership conºict to have been very important
in bringing about the split.
Lüthi contends that Mao’s ideological radicalism—and thus ideology—
was the basic cause of the Sino-Soviet split. He deªnes ideology broadly “as a
set of beliefs and dogmas that both construct general outlines—rather than a
detailed blueprint—of a future political order, and deªne speciªc methods—
though no explicit pathways—to achieve it” (p. 8). That is, Mao and Khrushchev
both subscribed to the ideology of Marxism-Leninism, in which building
a Communist society was the goal and the Communist Party’s leadership
the means to achieve that goal.
Lüthi concedes, however, that ideology can be genuinely held or can be
manipulated for short-term political ends. In the latter guise, ideology is a
tool for achieving other ends. He notes that it is often difªcult to distinguish
between ideological “claims in principle” and the manipulation of ideological
claims for other purposes. (pp. 8–9). There’s the rub!
Lüthi holds that ideological conºict can be seen in three key areas of SinoSoviet
disagreement: ªrst, regarding the proper socioeconomic policies that
would pave the way for the future achievement of Communism; second, regarding
de-Stalinization; and third, regarding the proper policy for socialist
countries to adopt in dealing with the West (p. 2).
Some scholars have asserted that the power struggle and personality conºict
between Mao and Khrushchev were crucial, as were the territorial and
border conºicts between the two states. Lüthi holds that these factors were
secondary to ideological issues (p. 2). He writes, “personality conºicts contributed
to but did not cause the Sino-Soviet Split (pp. 12–13). For those who
might point to economic disagreements between Beijing and Moscow as a
critical factor, Lüthi states, “Economic disagreements had deep ideological
roots” (p. 11).
154
Roberts, Levine, Vámos, Kaple, Friedman, Stiffler, and Lüthi
[The Economic Background of the Sino-Soviet Alliance: 1948–1953] (Hong Kong: Zhongwen daxue
yatai yanjiusuo, 2000).
24. Radchenko, Two Suns in the Heavens, p. 19; Oleg Borisov and Boris Koloskov, Soviet-Chinese
Relations, 1945–1970 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970); Oleg Rakhmanin, K istorii
otnoshenii RSFSR, SSSR, RF s Kitaem 1917–1997: Obzor osnovnykh sobytii, otsenki ekspertov [On the
History of Relations of Soviet Russia, the USSR, and the Russian Federation with China, 1917–1997:
Review of Major Events and Expert Appraisals] (Moscow: IDV RAN, 1999); and Kulik, Sovetskokitaiskii
raskol.
Lüthi is surely correct in placing blame for the split ªrmly on the shoulders
of Mao Zedong. Making use of Wu Lengxi’s memoir, which, despite its
notable ºaws, is the best available source on the Chinese side, Lüthi shows
that Mao had decided on a split by late 1962, or early 1963 at the latest.25
Mao needed and wanted a split, most of all for domestic political purposes.
Attacks on “Soviet revisionism” were a club to use against those in the CCP
leadership—Liu, Deng, Zhou—who were trying to pursue more moderate
domestic economic policies (p. 244). Mao had been in domestic political
eclipse since the failure of the Great Leap Forward. By late 1962, Mao was
staging a comeback, and as so often was the case, his radical domestic policy
agenda was linked to a similarly radical foreign relations agenda (pp. 219–
245).
So, the split was of use to Mao at home. Going beyond this uncontroversial
argument, however, Lüthi argues that, in essence, Mao was a radical ideologue
who sincerely believed that socialism was destined to triumph over capitalism
and that the countries of the “intermediate zone”—led by Mao and
China—would ultimately be victorious in their struggle with imperialism.
Lüthi argues that Mao, while often inclined to use ideology instrumentally at
home, was often “sincere” and “genuine” in his ideological stance in foreign
policy (pp. 9, 155, 192, 347).
Mao may have been a radical ideologue in many respects, but Lüthi’s
contention about this matter offers only an incomplete and misleading explanation
of the dynamics of the Sino-Soviet split. The question is whether seeing
the Sino-Soviet split as fundamentally arising out of Sino-Soviet ideological
disagreements clariªes or obscures this complex phenomenon. Let us
answer this question by brieºy examining each of the main issues that Lüthi
claims were ideological in nature: de-Stalinization, socioeconomic issues (the
path to Communism), and the debate on “peaceful coexistence” with the
West.
De-Stalinization
Both sides in the split have written, and we have long known, that the fundamental
issues dividing the Soviet Union and China began with Khrushchev’s
secret speech at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet
155
Mao, Khrushchev, and China’s Split with the USSR
25. Wu Lengxi’s memoir emphasizes that Mao acted out of ideological motivations. Wu, as director of
the New China News Agency and editor-in-chief of the People’s Daily, was deeply involved in SinoSoviet
ideological polemics. Lüthi relies heavily on Wu’s memoir to justify an ideological interpretation
of the split. Wu Lengxi, Shinian lunzhan, 1956–1966: Zhong-Su guanxi huiyilu [The Ten-Year
War of Words, 1956–1966: A Memoir of Sino-Soviet Relations], 2 Vols. (Beijing: Zhongyang
wenxian chubanshe, 1999).
Union (CPSU) in April 1956. Both the speech itself and the way it was given
without prior consultation with allies offended the Chinese.26
Lüthi portrays
the issues raised as “ideological,” but actually the issues do not neatly fall under
this rubric. The issue of lack of timely notiªcation of the Chinese comrades
before the speech speaks to an issue of intra-bloc relations, and of leadership.
Despite Soviet leaders’ lip service to the principle of equality among
Communist countries, they in fact saw leadership of the bloc as their due, and
this proved a fundamental problem for Sino-Soviet relations. At base, this was
not an ideological issue at all but a question of power: who leads and who fol-
lows.
De-Stalinization itself raised the thorny issues of evaluation of Iosif Stalin
in the international socialist arena, and of personality cults in general. Who
had the right to determine the historical verdict on Stalin? As Lüthi correctly
observes, Chinese leaders took a major step toward an independent stance,
and a subsequent disordering of the socialist bloc, when they published “On
the Historical Experience of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat” and subsequent
articles on this topic (p. 51) It is also well-known that Khrushchev’s secret
speech created problems for Mao’s own personality cult, in place since
1945. As a result, Mao had to take steps to reverse the diminution of his
power that resulted from the secret speech.
In sum, de-Stalinization was surely an ideological issue in the socialist
bloc, but it was not exclusively an ideological issue. Issues of leadership in the
socialist bloc, personality cults, and Communist party political practice domestically
and internationally were all relevant.
The Correct Path to Communism
Lüthi is on the ªrmest ground when he views Mao’s radical socioeconomic
policies as ideologically motivated, although one could append a number of
factors here, such as Mao’s desire to regain the domestic policy initiative from
the Soviet-oriented technocrats in the party. Nowhere was Mao more ideological
than in his Great Leap Forward, inspired in part by the revolutionary Stalinism
of 1929–1931. (Lüthi helpfully divides the Soviet experience or Soviet
model into three experiences or models: the New Economic Plan, revolutionary
Stalinism, and bureaucratic Stalinism, each of which would be used by the
Chinese in their own way; pp. 19–23.) With one eye on the Soviet Union and
the bureaucratic model, Mao sought to transform himself into a revolutionary
thinker akin to Vladimir Lenin, Karl Marx, and Stalin by creating Commu-
156
Roberts, Levine, Vámos, Kaple, Friedman, Stiffler, and Lüthi
26. Radchenko, Two Suns in the Heavens, p. 10; and Floyd, Mao against Khrushchev, p. 37.
nism overnight through the medium of the people’s communes. Soviet ofªcials
were not amused.
The adverse Soviet reaction resulted more from the implicit Chinese
challenge that China would enter Communism ªrst than from any real feeling
of threat that the people’s communes would be successful. Soviet leaders
knew that Mao was heading down the wrong road because it was a road they
had traversed themselves (p. 133). Lüthi sees the challenge as ideological, but
one could just as well see it in the international context as being a challenge of
leadership, of who was to take the leading role in the international Communist
movement (pp. 83–84).
Policy toward the West: Peaceful Coexistence or Confrontation?
Lüthi notes that by the end of the 1950s de-Stalinization and debates about
the path to Communism were no longer the main issues in contention. They
were replaced by the third issue that Lüthi identiªes as ideological: the proper
attitude toward imperialism (p. 157). Khrushchev had ªrst raised the issue of
peaceful coexistence with the West in his secret speech. Lüthi shows that the
Chinese at ªrst went along with the idea (albeit with a notable lack of enthusiasm),
but after they found that “peaceful coexistence” seemingly meant no
progress with the United States on the Taiwan issue, they began voicing their
opposition to the “peaceful coexistence” formula directly to Soviet leaders
through intraparty channels (pp. 76–77).
Khrushchev’s (often inconsistent) advocacy of “peaceful coexistence” undermined
(or widened the cracks in) the Sino-Soviet relationship, as Lüthi
shows, and led to the heated polemics of the mid-1960s. By late 1962, however,
Mao found an anti-Soviet stance so domestically congenial that he probably
welcomed it when Soviet leaders stuck to their formula, enabling him to
attack them for it. Ofªcials in Moscow, for their part, were unnerved by Mao’s
view of the nuclear bomb as a “paper tiger”—openly stated at the Moscow
meeting in November 1957—and his view of a nuclear war as guaranteeing
the victory of socialism. This and other worrisome Chinese statements and
actions were enough to convince Soviet leaders, in 1958, to renege on their
promise of the previous year to furnish a sample nuclear bomb to the Chinese
(pp. 103–104).
A belligerent or accommodating attitude toward the imperialist West
might well be regarded as an ideological issue. That was indeed how Mao,
Khrushchev, and armies of pen-wielding polemicists in Moscow and Beijing
saw the issue. But it is less clear that we, as scholars, need to view it the same
way. Mao was making a bid for international leadership of the socialist camp
and for Third World revolutionary allies. Domestically he was using militancy
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Mao, Khrushchev, and China’s Split with the USSR
toward the West to undermine the power of more moderate CCP leaders.
The stage was being set for the Cultural Revolution. At issue, again, were
leadership and power. For Mao, ideas—that is, ideology—were inextricably
bound together with the quest for power both domestically and internation-
ally.
Lüthi musters great detail to show the close link between Chinese international
politics and domestic politics during the years of the split. His analysis
of the reasons for the post–Great Leap famine and its impact on Chinese
leadership politics is especially impressive (pp. 118–123, 158–160, 195–201).
He is also very good on other Chinese socioeconomic issues. Lüthi’s conclusion
that the precipitate withdrawal of Soviet advisers in 1960 probably had
minimal short-term economic impact on China is surely correct (pp. 158,
178). In one telling chapter, Lüthi shows Chen Yi telling the Soviet ambassador
quite frankly in 1960 that China was reorienting its international trade
toward the capitalist world (p. 180). In sum, Lüthi does an excellent job of
showing the close connection between Chinese socioeconomic issues, Chinese
politics, and China’s international relations.
Lüthi’s insistence in his introduction and conclusion that ideological divergences
were the fundamental cause of the split is the least satisfactory part
of the book. In fairness, though, I should note that in the rest of the book
Lüthi usually does not offer an exclusively ideological explanation of the SinoSoviet
disagreements. When he analyzes particular issues and incidents, he often
argues that ideology was used (usually by Mao) in an “instrumental” manner,
indicating that Mao had other purposes in mind (e.g., pp. 79, 154, 192,
211, 301, 347). It is also striking how often Lüthi refers, in the body of the
monograph, to the critical importance of extra-ideological factors, such as the
deep personal loathing that Mao and Khrushchev felt for each other (e.g.,
pp. 74–75, 78, 94–95, 116, 146–150, 286, 349) and Mao’s desire for independence
in foreign policy–making (p. 104). This is, in fact, good, oldfashioned
multifactoral analysis.
Mao as Radical Ideologue or Flexible Strategist?
This brings us to the nature of Mao himself. Most scholars would agree with
Lüthi that Mao caused the split and that Soviet leaders were usually in a reactive
stance; as Sergey Radchenko’s new book further conªrms.27
Lüthi believes
that Mao’s ideology was “genuine”—that is, not “instrumental” or a tool or
158
Roberts, Levine, Vámos, Kaple, Friedman, Stiffler, and Lüthi
27. Sergey Radchenko, Two Suns in the Heavens: The Sino-Soviet Struggle for Supremacy, 1962–1967
(Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 2009).
secondary to something else—especially when Mao was thinking about the
United States and Western capitalism more generally (p. 155). Lüthi claims
that Mao was a “genuine” Communist who “sincerely” believed that the
United States was going to lose the game in the long run and that the socialist
world/Third World was going to win.
Lüthi is able to identify certain cases in which Mao, in particular, seemed
to act out of genuine ideological motivations, notably when he launched the
Great Leap Forward (p. 80). Most of the time, however, Mao’s true motivations
either were complex (i.e., multifactoral) or were transparently aimed at
the enhancement of China’s and his domestic and international power and
prestige. It may, indeed, be futile to think of Mao’s or any other political
leader’s actions in terms of pure, genuine, or even entirely “sincere” ideological
motivations
As Lüthi himself acknowledges, there is no easy way to tell whether Mao
in any given circumstance was using ideology “instrumentally” or out of genuine
conviction (i.e., using ideology for its own sake). In fact, Lüthi’s assertions
about Mao are just that—assertions. We simply cannot know with any
certainty what Mao “genuinely” believed at any given time, though we can
advance suppositions based on the available evidence. While frequently acknowledging
Mao’s penchant for using ideology as a tool (Mao himself described
ideology as a “useful tool”), Lüthi goes out on a limb, writing that
there is no evidence that Mao and the Chinese leaders were “pure cynics who
used ideological claims in a deceitful manner to achieve goals contrary to
larger Marxist-Leninist postulates” (p. 347).
The construction of a supremely—and consistently—“ideological” Mao
belies much recent Chinese scholarly opinion on the political nature of Mao.
Many Chinese scholars, in particular, feel that Mao was a supremely ºexible
thinker, able to change his views 180 degrees overnight.28
There is a culturalist
argument, which I accept, that Mao was more Zhuge Liang or Sunzi (Sun Zu)
than the idealized, doctrine-defending pope. That is, Mao was a master political
tactician and strategist whose overriding goal was power: his own and his
country’s, in exactly that order (as John Lewis Gaddis would say). This is the
Mao who betrayed his main Marxist-Leninist ally, the Soviet Union, and received
the arch-anti-Communist Richard Nixon in his study in Beijing.
There is nothing pure in politics, neither pure ideologists, nor pure cynics.
Our task is to disentangle motives and to infer causes as best we can.
Lüthi’s book nonetheless stands as a major step forward in our understanding
159
Mao, Khrushchev, and China’s Split with the USSR
28. Zhang Baijia and Yang Kuisong recently expressed this view at the Cold War forum, Changchun,
China, Summer 2006, and the “Transforming the Cold War” conference, Shanghai, December 2006,
respectively. See also, Yang, Mao Zedong yu Mosike.
of the Sino-Soviet dispute. The Sino-Soviet Split will not be the ªnal word because
a major source of documentation (the CCP central archives) remains
inaccessible, but Lüthi’s impressive book will no doubt set the terms of the debate
for at least the next decade.
160
Roberts, Levine, Vámos, Kaple, Friedman, Stiffler, and Lüthi
Reply to the Commentaries
Lorenz Lüthi
I am grateful to Priscilla Roberts, Steven Levine, Péter Vámos, Deborah
Kaple, Jeremy Friedman, and Douglas Stifºer for the efforts they took in reviewing
my book in a comprehensive and critical manner. I also want to
thank the Journal of Cold War Studies for organizing this roundtable. Given
the range and details of the reviews, I fear I will not be able to respond adequately
to some points raised.
The Sino-Soviet Split is primarily an investigation into the reasons and the
course of the collapse of the greatest alliance in the Communist world during
the 1956–1966 period. I contend that disagreements over economic development,
de-Stalinization, and the correct method of dealing with the international
class enemy stood at the center of the split. I further claim that Chinese
domestic politics had an increasingly disproportionate inºuence on the collapse
of the alliance. Although I maintain that ideology was a major factor in
the split, my book is not primarily about the role of ideology. I consider a
whole array of factors that were crucial for the disintegration of the alliance.
One reviewer regrets that I did not offer any reºections on the inºuence of the
Sino-Soviet split on the demise of Communism in the Soviet Union, on East
Asian Communism, or on the Cold War. Although these topics are deªnitely
outside the conªnes of my book, they are important and worthy to be examined
in another book, or even several. Qiang Zhai, Jeremy Friedman, and
other scholars, including me, are currently exploring these and related questions
in various book projects.
When I wrote the book, I deliberately bypassed the earlier literature because
I did not want older debates, many of which were theoretical and speculative,
to spoil my view on the newly available evidence. My book conªrms
some of the earlier ªndings, something that happens in almost all historiographical
debates. Nevertheless, the notion that my book merely “retroactively
validates the methodologies of Kremlinology and Pekingology that
Donald Zagoria employed nearly half a century ago” seems to me a mischaracterization
not only of my own research but also of the work of the ªrst
chronicler of the Sino-Soviet split. Zagoria’s book covers only half the time
span of mine (1956–1961) and, more importantly, arrives at opposite conclusions.
Whereas Zagoria argued in 1961 that ideology was a cohesive force that
eventually would keep the alliance together despite all the then visible problems,
I argue, with the advantage of hindsight, that ideology was a divisive
force that split the alliance apart.
Both Péter Vámos and Douglas Stifºer read my book as an argument for
the primary role of ideology in the split. According to their understanding, I
161
Mao, Khrushchev, and China’s Split with the USSR
claim that ideology was “the ultimate cause” and “key factor underlying almost
all aspects of the dispute.” I fear that both have overread my interpretation (or
that I was not clear enough in the ªrst place). Throughout the book, I discuss
other factors in addition to ideology. In my conclusion, for example, I write
that there “is no doubt that personality issues contributed to the worsening of
the Sino-Soviet alliance” (p. 349), although I do not believe that they alone
would have caused the split (one need only remember Charles de Gaulle’s
difªcult relationship with several U.S. presidents). In the same vein, I contend
that the split, at least its bitter outcome, might not have taken place without
Mao Zedong at the helm of Communist China (p. 351). Yet, I am not willing
to go as far as Priscilla Roberts, who urges me to see Mao mainly as “a ruthless,
unscrupulous political operator whose most enduring concern . . . was to safeguard
and reinforce his power.” For me, too much evidence from the early
1920s to the last years of Mao’s life suggests that he was a Communist believer,
even if his theoretical understanding was not very sophisticated, to say the least.
I argue that during the period I cover in my book, Mao tended to become more
manipulative (or “instrumental” as I call it in my book) while still remaining a
Communist believer. I am still convinced that the roots of the Sino-Soviet
conºict lay in ideological disagreements but that Mao increasingly used them,
once they had occurred, for instrumental purposes.
When writing my book, I tried to establish a hierarchy of causes. I concluded
that, in this descending sequence, ideology (broadly deªned), domestic
politics, and personality issues were crucial factors, and I relegated territorial issues,
questions of national interest, and others to the background. Douglas
Stifºer raises the interesting issue of political culture and its inºuence on Mao’s
behavior. During the ten years I worked on the project, I frequently tried to
come to terms with this problem. To what degree was Chinese culture or the
nature of the Chinese Communist political system a source of the split? In the
end, I found it impossible to incorporate a clash-of-civilizations argument into
my book. Although there is evidence of cultural misunderstanding and bias on
both sides, it is difªcult for me to see how these factors affected the strategic or
tactical thinking of Mao or Khrushchev in speciªc cases.
Yet, in fairness to the original point Douglas Stifºer raised, he argued that
Mao was closer to how Priscilla Roberts portrays him, as a Chinese “master
political tactician and strategist” who, for the greater good of his own power
and his country’s might, betrayed his Marxist-Leninist ally and received the
arch imperialist in his bedroom. Stifºer maintains that, in this regard, Mao
was not different from other legendary leaders in Chinese history. Although
the debate on the Sino-American rapprochement is outside the limits of my
monograph, I agree with Stifºer that Mao was a political tactician in the early
1970s. But was he also a master strategist willing to abandon earlier convic-
162
Roberts, Levine, Vámos, Kaple, Friedman, Stiffler, and Lüthi
tions like used-up pieces of clothing? In my view, most of the literature on
Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit misrepresents the Sino-American rapprochement
as an ideological sell-out on Mao’s part. In fact, it was no such thing. The
ideological reversal happened only under his successor, Deng Xiaoping, in
1978–1979.
My deªnition of ideology has attracted the greatest attention and discussion
among the reviewers, which probably reºects the fact that historians of
the Cold War still have no good working deªnition for ideology. What is ideology?
How does it work in the political sphere? In my book, I deªne ideology
broadly as both a belief system (reºecting genuine convictions) and a political
instrument (which can be used instrumentally). Péter Vámos’s disagreement
with my deªnition of “instrumental” seems to me a semantic not a substantive
problem. I do not share his view that everybody—from Iosif Stalin to the
lowly party cadre to Stalin’s puppet rulers in East Europe—used ideology only
to achieve the state’s domestic and international goals, particularly because
Marxism-Leninism, and not any other conceivable political ideology, formulated
some of these goals in the ªrst place (e.g., the construction of a socialist
society, or proletarian internationalism). Ideology is always a tool for political
action (or, in Steven Levine’s words, “its very nature is oriented toward action”),
but my distinction rests on its use resulting from a genuine belief in its
postulates and its use as an instrument for goals that are not congruent with its
postulates (manipulation).
In a related point, Péter Vámos asserts that ideology was “practically the
only tool [Mao] had at his disposal against the Soviet Union and his domestic
opponents.” Implicitly, and later explicitly, Vámos claims that the realm of
ideology was the only sphere in which the split could develop, thus making
ideology a mere function of the split and not its cause, as I argue. Vámos’s
criticism, however, raises the question of why Mao needed to bolster his
power vis-à-vis Moscow and his internal rivals. Unlike Walter Ulbricht in East
Germany or Mátyás Rákosi in Hungary, Mao was the undisputed leader in
China—in the eyes of his party, of his country, of the socialist camp, and even
of Stalin. So, there must have been other reasons, which are, as I argue, related
to Mao’s political and ideological positions, as well as to his personality. Many
of Mao’s rivals, real or imagined, emerged as a result of his political mistakes—as,
for example, the Great Leap Forward—which often happened as a
consequence of his highly ideological thinking. Vámos’s criticism thus raises
the problem of the chicken and the egg: What was really ªrst?
I am not convinced that, as Vámos believes, Mao sought leadership in the
international arena in the early 1950s. At that time, Mao wanted to establish
China as an independent and respected country and as a regional power at
best—a goal Stalin in fact supported. By the mid-1950s, after Stalin’s death,
163
Mao, Khrushchev, and China’s Split with the USSR
Mao had begun seeking equality among the members in the socialist camp.
His pursuit of international leadership did not start until the end of the
1950s, after disputes with the Soviet Union had emerged. Thus, Mao’s international
pretensions were the result, rather than the cause, of China’s disputes
with the Soviet Union.
Douglas Stifºer argues that my deªnition of ideology as a belief system
and a political instrument is reºected in its dichotomous use abroad and at
home. I do not believe I made such a clear case in the book, although in chapter
4 (covering 1959) I do argue that Mao behaved aggressively in foreign policy
as a Communist believer while acting defensively at home as an ideological
manipulator. Given the nature of the available evidence for the whole period,
I repeatedly point out that it is difªcult to make a clear distinction between
the two (often I leave the judgment up to the reader). I also maintain that
during the ten years covered by my book, Mao tended to become more manipulative
in his use of ideology—both abroad and at home.
When discussing ideology, we should keep in mind the intellectual world
in which Mao rose to political preeminence. Before 1949, for half of his adult
life, and for almost his entire political career, he had lived in political exile,
was pursued by political enemies, and fought for leadership in his party. Mao
was not a man of letters, although he tried to give that impression starting in
the mid-1930s. His political education was limited at best, based on a few
translated and abridged texts of the Marxist-Leninist classics and some of Stalin’s
writings that had made their way to his various hideouts in the vast rural
spaces of China and that he had repeatedly read. In 1949, Mao arrived in
Beijing after a quarter century living in the wilderness—real and political. A
man of many survival skills, he nevertheless held on to a rather small body of
texts that he had read, internalized, and adapted to Chinese practice and that
had turned out to be crucial for the intellectual, political, and military victory
of the Chinese Communist cause. Thus, there is no good reason to believe
that the man who became China’s leader at the age of 56 suddenly underwent
an intellectual revolution that would radically change his political and ideological
views regarding China, Communism, or capitalism-imperialism.
This rather limited intellectual horizon provided the foundation for his
conºicts with the Soviet Union. Steven Levine correctly raises the question
whether “the very nature of Marxism-Leninism tend[ed] to preclude compromise
on what were taken to be questions of principle” that was at the heart of
the split. Although I did not mention Levine’s mentor, Benjamin Schwartz
(or, I should note, the names of many other distinguihed scholars who have
written about this), I fully agree with his point. This is also what I write on
pages 8–9 of the book but apparently in less elegant terms. The conºict
among different interpretations of the Marxist-Leninist texts is particularly
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Roberts, Levine, Vámos, Kaple, Friedman, Stiffler, and Lüthi
obvious in the development of different Soviet economic models as early as
the 1920s, which helped to spark Sino-Soviet disagreements in the mid-1950s
in the ªrst place. I am happy that Deborah Kaple singled out this issue, particularly
because it helps to put the split into a larger historical context of
ideological developments.
The only problem with Mao was that he made claims in principle without
any great understanding of the theory behind them—in this sense he was
not really that different from Khrushchev or Leonid Brezhnev. But the narrow-mindedness
and pettiness of his invective are unique and are reminiscent
of the animated discussions at the “regulars’ table” in a tavern. No observer
would doubt that the participants, impassioned and increasingly uninhibited
by the consumption of more and more alcohol, were not serious about their
claims in the heat of the debate, even if, with a view clear of liquor, what they
said was obviously both plainly silly and irrelevant to the world at large.
This last point provides a good transition to some speciªc criticisms
raised in some of the reviews. I do not believe that I “unwittingly” lend credence
to Mao’s claims of revisionism abroad and at home, as Steven Levine
maintains. There is no need to point out the insincerity of Mao’s numerous
pronouncements: Directly quoting them makes the Great Helmsman look
foolish enough. Furthermore, Levine may disagree with my characterization
that “Soviet actions had given Beijing the moral high ground in the [ideological]
debate,” but Khrushchev’s sudden withdrawal of the specialists was nonetheless
politically foolish, illegal, and heavily disputed among Soviet leaders
and within the Soviet bureaucracy. Providing the Chinese comrades with the
feeling that they were wronged—and in the narrow technical sense, they
were—was a major Soviet tactical mistake.
In his insightful review, Jeremy Friedman argues that recently opened
document collections from the Chinese Foreign Ministry Archive point to
Mao’s interest in decolonization even before 1962. I have no doubt that Mao
was interested in this topic even before the 1949 revolution. He saw Communist
China as a model for many of the colonized nations. Also, I agree with
Friedman that the Chinese archives will provide a lot of new evidence that
will enable us to write the history of China’s relations with the decolonizing
world anew. Yet, intellectual interest in fellow colonized nations and politicaleconomic
commitment to them are two different issues. Even after Mao proclaimed
his ideological dedication to the so-called intermediate zone in the
late summer of 1962, and even in comparison to the Soviet Union, China’s
aid to the decolonizing world remained minuscule for most of the 1960s.
Mao’s concern with Africa in the 1950s, including his worry over a lack of Soviet
commitment, was the consequence of his disagreements with Soviet
peaceful coexistence, which became a major issue of dispute in late 1957.
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