CHINA
Sino-Soviet relations: A new entente after thirty years of quarrels
THE REVOLUTIONARY mobilization of the Chinese students overshadowed another historic event - the meeting between Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev and the leaders of the
Chinese People's Republic, which marked the end of the conflict that started at the end of the 1950s. In view of the very serious economic and political problems confronting both regimes, an agreement is in the interests of both Moscow and Beijing.
Furthermore, this reconciliation is certain to have important international repercussions. But at a time when the "victorious march towards socialism" and the
"intransigent struggle against the paper tiger of imperialism" has given way to "liberal reforms"
, perestroika and "market economy", it is interesting to review the roots of this conflict and look again at the basic themes in the Sino-Soviet polemics of the 1960s and 1970s, which led to a deep split in the world
1280 прити manana Pin changed its policies and continued to prepare for military conflicts. In the second place, while the Soviets put the emphasis on the "fatal consequences" of a possible nuclear conflict, the Chinese struck a different note — a war would allow a new and decisive advance for the revolution, with the "rapid destruction of the imperialist monsters"
### Disagreement over
"peaceful road"
Thirdly, the Chinese accused the Soviets of sacrificing active support for the colonial revolution on the altar of detente. This divergence expressed itself, for example, in their respective attitudes towards the Algercommunist movement. LIVIO MAITAN VIO MATAN T HE DIFFERENCES between the
Chinese and Soviet leaderships first emerged in 1957, at the time of the Conference of Communist Parties in Moscow. They sharpened in the following years, culminating in a total break in relations in 1963-64. After that, the polemics continued unabated, but the criticisms raised by the Chinese leadership, even before Mao's death, began to develop in a new direction.
At the beginning the Chinese criticized the Soviets on four main points - the conception of peaceful coexistence, the consequences of a future war, the attitude towards the anti-colonial revolution and the conception of the peaceful and parliamentary road to socialism.
Starting from its 20th congress in 1956 the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) put forward the idea of the "noninevitability" of war. Subsequently, more and more stress was put on peaceful coexistence, and Khrushchev in particular theorized the possibility of a compromise with American imperialism. The Chinese Communist Party (CCP), while not rejecting the coexistence, insisted on the idea that war is inherent in capitalism and that imperialism had not changed, and could not change, its nature.
In fact American imperialism had not ian revolution. While China recognized the provisional government, the USSR did not, and expressed its support for the policy pursued by General de Gaulle. What is more, the Chinese, unlike the Soviets, made criticisms of certain leaders of the national bourgeoisie and, on the theoretical level, defended the idea of the uninterrupted revolution, referring to Lenin.
It is true that they sometimes they combined the "uninterrupted revolution" and revolution by stages. Nonetheless, they most often put the emphasis on the action of the working class and peasant masses, independent of bourgeois leaderships, and, in some cases, even against them.
The fourth difference was that the Chinese expressed their disagreement with the idea adopted by the CPSU after 1956 of the possibility of a peaceful and parliamentary road to socialism. The most systematic presentation of this critique appeared in 5 December 1962 in an article attacking the
CHINA opportunist policies of Palmiro Togliatti, the leader of the Italian Communist Party at that time.
As the polemic developed and became increasingly bitter, despite some periods of temporary calm, the Chinese came to put forward new themes, and the conflict became increasingly one between two states in areas of major importance. From the summer of 1960 the Soviet Union began pulling out its experts, and moved towards breaking off economic relations, which could only be extremely harmful to China. This went hand in hand with polemics on different economic alternatives. The Soviet Union criticized the idea of the Maoist leadership that China could rely on its own forces, and extolled the international division of labour in the "socialist camp". A "nuclear shield" for the whole "socialist camp"
In fact, while the Chinese were by no means free from autarchic errors, it is also true that Moscow demanded that the development of other "socialist" countries, including China, be subordinated to its own needs. In 1963 a polemic broke out concerning the signing of the Moscow Treaty on the halting of nuclear testing in the atmosphere, at sea and in space, with China refusing to sign. It should be added that an unwritten clause of this treaty involved an undertaking by the Soviet Union not to deliver nuclear arms and secrets to China. This was a violation of the agreement between China and the USSR made in 1957.
Moscow's argument, which was repeated by its partisans throughout the world, was that the USSR was the nuclear shield for the whole of the "socialist camp". The Chinese rejected this "theory," which implied recognition of the hegemony of Moscow over all workers states and thus the power of the Soviet bureaucracy to take all the major decisions by itself.
From here on, things escalated, even involving the relations between the two states. The culminating point came in
March 1969, when border incidents on the
Ossuri river led to armed confrontations between these two erstwhile "brother"
countries.
Quite quickly, thanks as much to the prestige of a recent revolution as to growing doubts about Moscow's policies, the
Chinese positions won a very broad audience in the ranks of certain Communist parties and anti-imperialist movements.
In the first period of the conflict, the
Chinese Communist Party was supported by the most important Asian Communist parties (in Vietnam, North Korea, Indonesia, Japan, and by the left CP in India, where a split took place). In Eastern
Europe, the Albanian CP took the Beijing 6 line for a period, before adopting an independent position, condemning both Soviet and Chinese "revisionism".
The other Eastern European parties, with the obvious exception of Yugoslavia, took the Moscow line, along with the overwhelming majority of the other Communist parties in capitalist Europe and Latin America (the Cuban CP has always been a distinct current). Splits took place in some countries — the most important in capitalist Europe was in Belgium. Aside from this small groups adhering to Maoism were formed, but they did not gain any real influence.
Maoist movements and organization — usually without official ties with Beijing — were formed, above all at the end of the 1960s, under the influence of the "cultural revolution" (in Italy, the Spanish state, Portugal, West Germany, Peru, Colombia, Morocco, Turkey and so on). For years, Maoism had a direct and considerable influence on other Asian CPs apart from those already mentioned, such as the Thai CP and the Philippine CP. Even today, Maoism retains an influence, even if much reduced, on certain currents.
At the time, our movement expressed its agreement with a series of criticisms made by the Chinese, without toning down our fundamental differences with them, as we tried to get to grips with the real reasons behind the conflict. The conflict was never one between bureaucrats and revolutionaries. It was a conflict between two bureaucratic leaderships, with different origins and which found themselves in different situations.
Finding a modus vivendi with imperialism
On the Soviet side the bureaucratic layer had had decades to consolidate its position, it enjoyed great power status and had achieved an economic level incomparably higher than China. Its main interests were to find a modus vivendi with imperialism that would enable it to avoid dangerous explosions at the international level, somewhat reduce military costs and make economic concessions to the masses at home.
It directed its foreign aid efforts towards the national bourgeoisies of the Third World, even at the expense of China. It envisaged competition with the capitalist countries as an economic competition. In those optimistic times it talked of catching up and overtaking the most industrialized countries in 15 or 20 years. This perspective was the core of Khrushchevism.
The Chinese leaders, whose power was the product of a very recent revolution, stood at the head of an economically very backward state. They were subject to many threats, attacks and forms of pressure from imperialism, which had not yet resigned itself to accepting the historic fact of the Chinese revolution. There was no way they could reasonably put their money on victory in economic competition in the short term.
International Viewpoint #165 • June 12, 1989
They decided therefore that their best defence would be the eruption of other revolutionary struggles, above all in the countries under imperialist domination. Furthermore, China, however backward, was too powerful to accept Moscow's hegemony without baulking, just as, at crucial moments during their revolution, they did not follow Stalin's advice when he suggested to Mao that he hold back from launching the struggle for power and look for a compromise with the Kuomintang.
USSR characterized as
"social-imperialist"
Throughout the "cultural revolution" (1966-69), the CCP intensified its attacks on the CPSU. From then on, the leitmotif was not only that of the revisionism of Moscow's ideology and political orientation. Now, the Soviet leaders were accused of having restored capitalism in the USSR, which was henceforth characterized as a "social-imperialist" country.
The start of the 1970s saw a turn in the direction of Chinese foreign policy. Under the pressure of its efforts to crush the struggle of the Vietnamese people by a barbarous war, the imperialist leadership of the United States made a wrenching turn in its Asia policy. An essential aspect of that revision was the recognition of the accomplished fact of the Chinese revolution and thus the establishment of normal relations with Beijing, hoping, among other things, to make the most of the Sino-Soviet conflict. President Nixon's visit to China was the most spectacular expression of this "new course"
Even before that visit, the Chinese leaders openly supported the Pakistani dictators, Ayub Khan and Yahya Khan, who suppressed every popular movement, and they refused any solidarity to the independence struggle of the people of Bangladesh. They also supported the government of Sri Lanka, at a time when it was massacring thousands of young rebels. At the same time they had praised the bourgeois governments of Western Europe on the grounds that the Common Market was an instrument of opposition to American imperialism. The turnaround in Washington pushed them further in the same direction.
The ideological outcome of this evolution was the adoption of the "three worlds"
theory. This theory was first sketched out by Mao himself in 1974 and was given a more systematic form in 1977. According to this theory, it was no longer useful to counterpose the category of the "socialist camp" to that of the capitalist camp. It had become necessary to recognize the new global reality, that of the emergence of three worlds — the "imperialist superpowers", the USSR and the United States; the socialist countries and the nations oppressed by imperialism (the camp in which China belonged); and those under-