It is possible that the North Viet Namese leaders took the initiative in arranging the Kosygin-Chou meeting last week. In all probability they made the proposal to Mr. Chou En-lai when he went to Hanoi to mourn President Ho Chi Minh’s death. The Chinese Prime Minister apparently thought it necessary to discuss the issue with Chairman Mao Tse-tung before committing himself either way. This is one possible explanation for his departure from Hanoi before President Ho Chi Minh’s burial and Mr. Kosygin’s arrival.
But if the North Viet Namese arranged the meeting they would have done so primarily to reaffirm their independence of the two communist giants. They could not possibly have expected to bring about an improvement in Sino-Soviet relations. It need not even be taken for granted that they are interested in such a rapprochement. The Rumanians tried to play a similar mediatory role in the early ‘sixties with the same objective of increasing their own room for manoeuvre in dealing with the Soviet Union.
Whatever Hanoi’s calculations, the resumption of polemics by Peking immediately after the Kosygin-Chou meeting leaves no room for optimism. Russia and China are in fact caught in a paradoxical situation. While there is no dispute between them which is inherently incapable of resolution, the two powers cannot even begin to tackle them in the near future.
Volumes have been written on the Sino-Soviet ideological dispute. Yet it is difficult to pinpoint a single item on which the differences between the two parties are fundamental. Where they are genuine and not feigned, they are the result of conflicting national interests. And even in those cases the differences have been vastly and artificially exaggerated by both sides for propaganda advantage.
Absurd
It is, for instance, absurd for the Russians to allege that the Chinese do not mind a nuclear holocaust, that they reject the concept of peaceful co-existence between states with different social systems and that they want to promote insurrections and so-called wars of national liberation everywhere.
The Chinese rulers have in fact been extraordinarily cautious. They have not engaged in any rash adventure in the last two decades. Since their intervention in Korea they have taken every care not to provoke the United States to the point where it would resort to a pre-emptive strike against them. They not only profess but also practise peaceful co-existence with a number of non-socialist states. They have been helping the guerillas in other countries only on a modest scale. They are not even averse to normalisation of relations with America provided that it withdraws its forces from Taiwan which they regard as part of their country.
The Soviet Union, on its part, continues to pursue relentlessly its objective of destroying and replacing western, specially the US, influence throughout the world. Its aid to North Viet Nam has been many times greater than China’s. It has not stopped extending all manner of assistance to communist parties in various countries. Its military occupation of Czechoslovakia shows now far it can go in enforcing orthodoxy. Inside the Soviet Union itself the present leadership has put a stop to the campaign of de-Stalinisation, enforced fairly harsh measures to discipline and silence unorthodox and dissenting writers and intellectuals and slowed down the pace of economic reform.
The ideological differences between the Soviet and Chinese positions are thus of nuance and emphasis. Why then has Peking’s image suffered so badly? Why has it acquired the reputation of being intransigent, extremist and fanatical?
Bad Impression
Two factors are noteworthy in this connection. First, the Chinese propaganda is shrill and inevitably creates a bad impression. Secondly, since 1964 when it began to increase its military commitments in South Viet Nam, the United States has been as interested as the Soviet Union in making it appear that China constitutes the greatest threat to peace and international order. Washington could not have justified to its own people the deployment of 576,000 men in South Viet Nam, bombing raids on North Viet Nam, an expenditure of $25 billion and more a year and thousands of casualties, except on the plea that all this was intended to meet the ever growing Chinese menace. The effort failed but that is a different story.
As for the conflict of national interests between Russia and China, this has had two facets which should be considered separately in the interest of clarity.
First, from the time of Marshal Stalin’s death in March 1953 to the time of the Cuban missile crisis and the Chinese attack on India in 1962, Peking’s tactics were designed principally to influence Soviet foreign policy. China’s opposition to the Russo-American detente and Soviet economic and political support to the Nehru Government, its insistence on the inevitability of war between the “capitalist-imperialist” camp headed by the United States and the socialist bloc led by the Soviet Union, its ideological offensive on the question of the correct interpretation of Marxism-Leninism and its deliberate decision to provoke a military crisis with the Chiang Kai-Shek Government and its American ally on the issue of the offshore islands of Quemoy and Matsu all fall in this category. Peking then was not seeking a split with the Soviet Union and in the international communist movement but merely the right to influence Russian policy in conformity with its own national interests.
Mr. Khrushchev’s refusal to abandon the search for improved relations with the United States, provide a nuclear umbrella to China during the Quemoy-Matsu crisis and withdraw or even reduce economic aid to India, his insistence that talk of war in the nuclear age was a case of infantile adventurism and his decisions to withdraw Russian experts from China, terminate economic assistance and tear up the agreement on nuclear aid, fanned Peking’s suspicions of Moscow. But apparently the Chinese did not still abandon the hope of being able to influence Soviet foreign policy.
It is perhaps somewhat arbitrary to say that this phase in Sino-Soviet relations came to an end in 1962. Some experts think that the signing of the partial tests ban treaty between the United States, the USSR and Britain in Moscow in 1963 marked the end of China’s hope that it could acquire a say in the formulation of Soviet policy. Still others believe that it was only after Mr. Khrushchev’s successors continued to pursue the policies he had initiated that the Chinese were finally convinced that the situation was hopeless and began to work for a split in the international communist movement. But there can be no doubt that the phase in Sino-Soviet relations in which one country could hope to influence the other is finally over.
From the Soviet point of view the issue would have been greatly simplified if Moscow had succeeded in securing a declaration from fellow communist parties that the Chinese Communist Party had given up Marxism-Leninism and thus placed itself beyond the pale. But the failure to do so has not prevented the Soviet leadership from pronouncing that Mr. Mao Tse-tung has deliberately decimated the party, that the armed forces have seized power in Peking and that consequently China has ceased to be a socialist country and turned fascist instead.
Border Dispute
The second aspect of the Sino-Soviet conflict relates to the border dispute and the future of Outer Mongolia and of the Muslim minorities on both sides of the frontier.
None of these disputes is impossible to settle. The Chinese are, for example, willing to accept what they call “unequal treaties” as the basis of a border settlement. The actual dispute relates to only 29,000 square miles and not to over half a million square kilometres which the Chinese allege the Russians seized from them in the 19th century. Both accept, at least formally, the sovereignty of Outer Mongolia and neither has much to gain by arousing the expectations of the Muslim minorities on either side of the border in Central Asia. In spite of intense mutual suspicions, border clashes, mounting propaganda and a truly massive deployment of forces by the two sides, it is not inconceivable that the status quo will be preserved in respect of the Sino-Soviet border as well as Outer Mongolia. Why do not Moscow and Peking then agree to de-escalate the conflict?
The answer lies principally in China’s domestic political situation and long-term ambitions. Chairman Mao Tse-tung cannot possibly agree to a truce with the Soviet Union without gravely undermining his credibility and destroying his moral claim to the leadership of the Chinese people. His campaign against Mr. Liu Shao-chi and others who favoured a modus vivendi with Moscow and a moderate economic policy at home acquired a semblance of “legitimacy” only from his denunciation of Soviet foreign and domestic policies. He has to continue to press the charges of revisionism, restoration of capitalism, collusion with the United States and betrayal of the cause of revolution against the Soviet leadership if he wants to consolidate the partisan gains of the Cultural Revolution, maintain his claim to be the true inheritor of the mantle of Marx, Lenin and Stalin, arouse the patriotism of the Chinese people and justify the immense sacrifices that the regime is imposing on them. The impending US withdrawal from Viet Nam will, ironically enough, make it all the more necessary for the Maoists in Peking to whip up an anti-Soviet campaign.
The Chinese cannot but be aware that in the struggle for influence and support among the communist parties and Afro-Asian countries, they have been badly defeated by the Russians. The latter have in fact performed a near miracle. They were able to assemble representatives of 75 communist parties in Moscow last June in spite of their military occupation of Czechoslovakia. In Afro-Asia they have established enduring relations with middle class nationalist regimes which are tending increasingly to adopt the non-capitalist path to development.
Superpower
But Peking cannot afford to admit defeat for two reasons. First, as an ideological state China must compete with the Soviet Union which is the other leading communist nation. Secondly, China has no intention to give up its ambition to be treated as a superpower. Since Peking cannot match Moscow’s military and economic power for decades, it must emphasise Russia’s ideological “deviations” and its own ideological purity. That is why Peking goes to grotesque lengths to invent stories of victories for Mao’s thought in other countries.
The Russians feel secure by virtue of their material power, their ability to retain a measure of influence among the other communist parties and their growing prestige in Afro-Asia. They can well afford to propose an ideological truce to China. Peking feels isolated and is militarily and economically weak. It has therefore little choice but to seek compensation in shrill propaganda and intense nationalism. The continuing struggle for power in China further complicates the problem.
The Times of India, 17 September 1969