Increasingly preoccupied with indoctrinating its heirs and harking back to revolutionary days, Beijing’s leaders closest in outlook to Mao Zedong and Lin Biao viewed the soldier-communist as the most suitable candidate for the second- and third-generation leadership. Army uniformity and discipline, it was seen, could transcend the divided classes, and all army men could be made to comply with the rigorous political standards set by Mao’s leadership.
Lin Biao developed a simplified and dogmatized version of Mao’s thought—eventually published in the form of the “Little Red Book,” Quotations from Chairman Mao—to popularize Maoist ideology among the relatively uneducated military recruits. As the military forces under Lin increasingly showed that they could combine ideological purity with technical virtuosity, Mao tried to expand the PLA’s organizational authority and its political role. Beginning in 1963, Mao called on all Chinese to “learn from the PLA.” Then, starting in 1964, Mao insisted that political departments modeled on those in the PLA be established in all major government bureaucracies. In many cases, political workers from the PLA itself staffed these new bodies, thus effectively penetrating the civilian government apparatus. Other efforts, such as a national propaganda campaign to learn from a purported army hero, Lei Feng, also contributed to enhancement of the PLA’s prestige.
Lin Biao holding a copy of Quotations from Chairman Mao, 1967.Eastfoto
The militancy of subsequent campaigns to learn from army heroes, or from the PLA as a whole, was echoed in international politics. In a tour of Africa in late 1963 and early 1964, Zhou Enlai startled his hosts by calling for revolution in newly independent states and openly challenging the Soviet Union for the leadership of the Third World. Simultaneously, China challenged the U.S. system of alliances by establishing formal relations with France and challenged the Soviet Union’s system by forming closer ties with Albania.
Beijing’s main target was Moscow. A Soviet-U.S. crisis in Cuba (October 1962) had coincided with the Sino-Indian struggle, and in both cases the Chinese believed the Soviet Union had acted unreliably and had become “capitulators” of the worst sort. For the next months, polemicists in Beijing and Moscow publicly engaged in barbed exchanges. When the Soviet Union signed the Nuclear Test-Ban Treaty with the United States and Great Britain in August 1963, Chinese articles accused the Soviets of joining an anti-Chinese conspiracy. Confronted by this new strategic situation, the Chinese shifted their priorities to support an antiforeign line and promote the country’s “self-reliance.” Mao’s calls for “revolutionization” acquired a more nationalistic aspect, and the PLA assumed an even larger place in Chinese political life.
These many-sided trends seemed to collide in 1963 and 1964. With the split in the international communist movement, the party in late 1963 called on intellectuals, including those in the cultural sphere, to undertake a major reformulation of their academic disciplines to support China’s new international role. The initial assignment for this reformulation fell to Zhou Yang, a party intellectual and deputy director of the Central Committee’s Propaganda Department, who tried to enlist China’s intellectuals in the ideological war against Soviet revisionism and in the struggle for rigidly pure political standards. (Less than three years later, however, Zhou Yang was purged as a revisionist, and many intellectuals were condemned as Mao Zedong’s opponents.)
Closely connected with the concerns of the intellectuals were those relating to the party and the Communist Youth League. A drive began to cultivate what one author called “newborn forces,” and by mid-1964 young urban intellectuals were embroiled in a major effort by the Central Committee to promote those forces within the party and league; meanwhile, their rural cousins were buffeted by moves to keep the socialist education campaign under the party’s organizational control through the use of “work teams” and a cadre-rectification movement.
In the summer of 1964, Mao wrote a document titled “On Khrushchev’s Phony Communism and Its Historical Lessons for the World,” which summarized most of Mao’s doctrinal principles on contradiction, class struggle, and political structure and operation. This summary provided the basis for the reeducation (“revolutionization”) of all youth hoping to succeed to the revolutionary cause. This high tide of revolutionization lasted until early August, when U.S. air strikes on North Vietnam raised the spectre of war on China’s southern border. A yearlong debate followed on the wisdom of conducting disruptive political campaigns during times of external threat.
This period of time has come to be interpreted as one of major decision within China. One ingredient of the debate was whether to prepare rapidly for conventional war against the United States or to continue the revolutionization of Chinese society, which in Mao’s view had fundamental, long-term importance for China’s security. Those who argued for a postponement of the internal political struggle supported more-conventional strategies for economic development and took seriously Soviet calls for “united action” in Vietnam and the establishment of closer Sino-Soviet ties. Their position, it was later alleged, received the backing of the general staff. With the dispatch of about 50,000 logistic personnel to Vietnam after February 1965, factional lines began to divide the military forces according to ideological or national security preferences.
Meanwhile, some members tried to restore rigid domestic controls. Where Mao in May 1963 had called for an upsurge in revolutionary struggle, by the following September other leaders were circumscribing the area of cadre initiative and permitting a free-market system and private ownership of rural plots to flourish. A stifling of the revolutionary upsurge was supposedly evident in regulations of June 1964 for the organization of poor and lower-middle-peasant associations, and by early 1965 Mao could point to bureaucratic tendencies throughout the rural areas. In a famous document on problems arising in the course of the socialist education campaign, usually referred to as the “Twenty-three Articles,” Mao in January 1965 stated for the first time that the principal enemy was to be found within the party, and he once more proclaimed the urgency of class struggle and mass-line politics.
It was in that period of emphasis on self-reliant struggle that China acquired nuclear weapons. Although the Soviet Union supported Chinese nuclear aims for a time, that effort was taken over completely by the Chinese after June 1959. By 1964 the costs of the program had forced a substantial reduction in other defense costs. China’s first atomic explosion (Oct. 16, 1964) affected the debate by appearing to support Mao’s contention that domestic revolutionization would in no way jeopardize long-term power aspirations and defense capabilities.
Mao’s military thinking, a product of his own civil war experiences and an essential component of his ideology, stressed the importance of military strength through sheer numbers (“people’s war”) during the transition to nuclear status. He felt that preparation for such a war could turn China’s weaknesses into military assets and reduce its vulnerability. Mao’s view of people’s war belittled the might of modern advanced weapons as “paper tigers” but recognized that China’s strategic inferiority subjected it to dangers largely beyond its control. His reasoning thus made a virtue out of necessity in the short run, when China would have to depend on its superior numbers and the morale of its people to defeat any invader. In the long run, however, he held that China would have to have nuclear weapons to deprive the superpowers of their blackmail potential and to deter their aggression against smaller states.