Admonitions from Comrade Mao

...But of course both sides are aware that there are judges to whom the case must ultimately be referred, and they are the 80 or more Communist parties of the world who collectively make up what is known as the international Communist movement...

...The conclusion he drew from these premises was that the time had come for the Communist bloc to adopt hard forward policies...

...The definition is very applicable to the Sino-Soviet dispute, which is essentially a matter of the Chinese telling the Russians what they ought to do and the Russians denying that they ought to do it...

...He is powerful not because Communist China is strong economically and militarily —which it is not—but because he can convincingly claim that he stands for the teaching of Lenin against policies and doctrinal adaptations of a definitely revisionist tendency...

...This, however contrary to any principles of genuine democracy, was also far removed from the hitherto established Leninist conception of the violent seizure of power, and involved a rejection of Lenin's teaching on the inevitability of civil war on the road to Socialism...

...To overthrow Khrushchev, the Chinese seek both to convert the international movement and to exert a disruptive influence within the cpsu itself...

...Secondly, the Russians saw no prospect of revolutions on the classic model of workers' insurrection in the industrialized Western world...

...The trouble is that Mao Tse-tung has become the keeper of the Marxist-Leninist conscience...

...In the Chinese view, this was how a Soviet leader ought to behave, and they gave the Soviet Union enthusiastic support during the Cuban crisis, as well as taking the opportunity to annihilate a division of the Indian Army while Western attention was diverted by dangers nearer home...

...Two such conferences have met since Stalin's death—that of 1957, which gathered primarily to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the October Revolution, and that of 1960, which was called to resolve the first great crisis in Sino-Soviet Party relations...

...The Chinese, however, were quite unconvinced by the demonstration...

...The Chinese anger was first plainly expressed in K'ang Sheng's speech at the meeting of the Warsaw Treaty Powers in Moscow in February 1960...

...But it is not enough in such a situation for the adherents of the true faith merely to denounce error...

...The International Organization of Journalists (IOJ), the Communist front organization run from Moscow, has now, therefore, a rival in the Afro-Asian Journalists' Association dominated by China...

...Khrushchev could not have concealed from Mao the fact that, whereas he had got what he thought was a hopeful start in negotiations on Berlin, there was nothing in the packet for China...

...And in a struggle in which publicity is of the greatest importance, this indicates how formidable a rival China has become for influence over the international movement...

...Having made the most of his rockets and Sputniks through a high-pressure advertising campaign, he did not blockade Berlin or move troops into Iran...

...Mao combined this conviction that there had been a decisive change in world power relations with his belief that "imperialists are paper tigers...

...In the first place, they had accepted the view that strategic nuclear war would be too destructive for both sides to be risked by a too provocative policy—and had probably also been told by their military advisers that if there were to be a nuclear showdown, America would still have the stronger hand for it...

...Mao Tse-tung did not then contradict him, but it was significant that he made no speech of welcome...

...Antony's College, Oxford...

...In April of the same year the dispute was raised to the ideological plane by articles in Red Flag, the Chinese Party's theoretical journal...

...there must be a political strategy for casting it out and bringing those who have been led astray back on to the right road...

...He is incorrigible...

...the United States turned out to be "a paper tiger with nuclear teeth...

...There was something in this contention...

...Now that their quarrel has again reached a point of crisis, the Chinese want a third world conference to deliberate on the issues, but the Soviet leaders have so far been unwilling, and offered bilateral talks instead...

...Khrushchev and his associates had in fact modified Leninist doctrine in two important respects...

...That the Kremlin is worried about the misgivings over its policy in some quarters inside the Soviet Union is indicated by its delay in publishing the Chinese Party's letter of lune 14—with its ominous assertion that true MarxistLeninists in each Party will remove leaders who substitute reformist for revolutionary policies—until it could formulate an answer for simultaneous publication...

...Internationally, the Chinese have not yet made any significant impression on the European Communist parties, which continue to follow Moscow's lead and show a kind of pan-European solidarity against the onslaught from Asia...

...He is strong also because undiluted Leninism appeals today most persuasively to the revolutionary militants in the underdeveloped countries of Asia and Africa, of which China is a more natural leader than European Russia...

...The Chinese hope, and the Russians fear, and not without reason, that a third world conference of Communist parties would be considerably more favorable to the Chinese than was that of 1960...

...In moving in a direction which diverges in a marked degree from the path mapped out by Lenin, the present leadership of the CPSU can suppress criticism—though not entirely critical thoughts—within the Soviet Union...

...For the rulers of the Soviet Union, this experience confirmed their apprehensions about the consequences of pursuing a hard policy...

...For in America Khrushchev had prudently not made the going harder on Berlin by raising in addition the vexed question of American policy toward Communist China...

...In the Asian and African parties, on the other hand, China has stirred up strong emotions in support of its Leninist militancy, and this has been shown not only in its lining up of North Korea and (with some qualifications) of North Vietnam, but in its triumph at the April conference of Afro-Asian journalists in Indonesia...

...Instead he began a campaign for a summit conference and the ingratiating approach to America which finally led to his conversations with President Eisenhower at Camp David...

...G. F. Hudson is Director of the Center for Far Eastern Studies at St...

...All this, according to the Chinese, has shown that Khrushchev is unfit to lead the international Communist movement...

...As conducted in Moscow, the bilateral talks between the two adversaries have been a debate between two teams of highly skilled ideological lawyers with no judges and jury present to give a verdict...

...The Chinese claimed that all this amounted to a betrayal of the international Communist movement...

...Khrushchev, however, quite failed to come up to expectations...

...It was now declared, though still without any direct personal attack on Khrushchev, that Soviet policy was going wrong because of doctrinal deviations...

...To some extent, Khrushchev himself encouraged the line which the Chinese have taken since 1957 by his inordinate boasting and propaganda exploitation of the first intercontinental ballistic missile and the first Sputnik, which were the great events of that year...

...From these successes of Soviet military-scientific technology—which were advertised all the more by the near-panic they produced in certain Western quarters at that time—the Chinese drew the inference that the "Socialist camp" was now stronger than "imperialism," or, in Mao's own meteorological metaphor, that "the east wind prevails over the west wind...

...The Chinese have agreed to hold them, though as a preliminary to the world conference which is their main objective and which the Russians cannot indefinitely postpone, unless they are willing to see a final split in the world movement...

...But, having been found out while his missile bases in Cuba were still not yet operational, and being faced with an American determination to eliminate them even at the risk of nuclear war, Khrushchev backed down and took his missiles back to Russia...

...Until Stalin dissolved the Comintern, the movement had a formal unified organization, but since then it can only utter its ecumenical voice when specially summoned for a world Communist conference...

...Clearly China, being herself without nuclear weapons and liable to American nuclear retaliation for any forward move, could not act on her own, since it was on Russian nuclear armaments and their supposed superiority that the proposed new strategy must depend...

...It was aggravated by the neutral position taken up by the Soviet Union with regard to China's border conflict with India: China, struggling with great economic difficulties, was already resentful at Russian economic aid to India (in receipt, additionally, as China was not, of economic aid from the West), and neutrality in a clash between a Communist and a bourgeois state seemed an unpardonable betrayal of Communist solidarity...

...The conference took the view, in opposition to the practice of the Afro-Asian Solidarity Council, that the Soviet Union is not an Asian country...

...they accused Khrushchev of two distinct Marxist-Leninist sins—of "adventurism" in putting missiles into Cuba without estimating the consequences, and of "capitulationism" by taking them out again when challenged by the United States...

...At the conference, despite the efforts of the Mongolian and Indian representatives to seat a Soviet delegation, the latter was only given observer status...

...The first crisis in Sino-Soviet relations developed rapidly from this point...

...Flying to Peking after his return from America, he informed the Chinese in a speech that "when I spoke with President Eisenhower I got the impression that the President of the United States, and not a few people support him, understands the need to relax international tension...

...They were more inclined to put their stake on parliamentary coalition tactics whereby Communist parties might wriggle into governments and take over power from within, more or less in line with the Czech coup d'état of 1948...

...The assumption was that the Western powers would probably not dare to wage full-scale (including nuclear) war, and that if they did, they would be beaten...

...But it cannot stifle voices of denunciation from Communist parties which are also sovereign governments, or from Communist party members in countries where CPSU censorship and discipline cannot be imposed...

...The Russians and Chinese might, however, agree to differ and go their own ways without scandalous public polemics, were it not for the fact that the Russian errors in theory and practice are in the Chinese view imperiling the whole cause of Communism by weakening the revolutionary impetus of the movement and disregarding opportunities which which may not recur...

...They therefore rejected Lenin's belief that wars were inevitable as long as imperialism existed...

...last year, instead of relying on the Camp David spirit to get West Berlin, he smuggled ballistic missiles into Cuba to exert a nuclear blackmail on the United States in the next round of negotiations...

...From the Chinese point of view this can now only be done by getting rid of Khrushchev...

...This was derived from his experience in the Korean War, when he fought the United States for three years without receiving a single bomb on Chinese territory...

...He appeared for a time to be mending his ways...