Although Mao Tse-tung signed this document, it was revealed later that in the discussion concerning it, he had taken an entirely different position. According to O. Edmund Clubb, “There appear to have been four main Chinese propositions, which may be summed up as follows: First, the Communist bloc should accept direct confrontation with imperialism. Second, bloc economic aid to nationalist bourgeois governments, soon to be overthrown in any event by proletarian internationalism, should cease. Third, all available Communist aid should be channeled to the needier members of the bloc. And fourth, the Communist bloc should be more tightly organized to the indicated ends, with Moscow no longer determining strategy, which should be formulated by the whole membership.”[22]
Clubb indicated the depth of Mao’s disagreement with the “peaceful coexistence” theme being pushed by the Soviet party leaders. He wrote, “Mao’s aims, although left unspecified, were plain to see. He proposed that the Soviet Union, given its presumed technological advantage over the United States (an advantage presumed by the Chinese, but not by the Soviets), should engage in Dullesian brinkmanship to advance the cause of Communism throughout the world even at the risk of nuclear war-which Mao disparaged. Six years later, Moscow would reveal that Mao on that November 1957 occasion had contemplated the possible annihilation of one-third to one-half of the world’s population in nuclear war—but with equanimity, since ‘imperialism would be destroyed entirely and there would be only socialism in all the world.’ There was a consideration that Mao left unspoken: of the three powers, the United States, the Soviet Union, and China, underdeveloped, poverty-stricken China in all probability had the least to lose from a nuclear war that would be fought, at least in its initial phases (and there might be no other), between the USSR and the United States.”[23]
China’s “Great Leap Forward”
Early in 1958, the First Five-Year Plan (modeled on those of Stalin) having come to an end, the Chinese leadership launched what they called the Great Leap Forward. This had both practical and ideological significance.
The Great Leap Forward centered on merging the collective farms, formed during the First Five-Year Plan, into massive “communes.” These were to combine agriculture with small-scale industry. At the same time, within the commune, much work that had hitherto been done within the household was to be done communally—providing food, doing laundry, and so on. Also, the commune was to become both the unit of local government and the basis for a vast militia system.
Donald Zagoria has noted that the objectives of these changes were “first to exploit the underemployed labor force of the cooperatives; second, to decentralize industry and thus to decrease the dependence of local industries on the larger industrial complexes of the northeast. … The common denominator of these calculations was the felt need to accelerate rapidly the pace of economic (particularly agricultural) development, and the fervent belief that this acceleration could be accomplished largely with human labor power and native ingenuity.”[24]
However, in addition to questions of the practicality of the commune as a way of furthering rapid economic development, the Great Leap Forward represented a major ideological challenge by the Chinese leaders to those of the USSR. They were asserting that they had discovered a much more rapid way to achieve Communism, that system under which the rule would be “from each according to his ability, to each according to his need.”
Donald Zagoria noted with regard to this Chinese ideological challenge to the Soviet Communist leaders: “The Chinese… made the unprecedented assertion that they had discovered in the commune the basic unit of the future Communist society, a unit for which the Russians were still groping. They asserted that some characteristics of the new Communist had already appeared in China. By moving toward the abolition of all private property, the Chinese seemed to be moving much closer to the classical Communist goal than was the Soviet Union, which still tolerated private garden plots, privately owned cows, and privately owned implements of production. By instituting a system of ‘free supply’ in the communes the Chinese created the impression of moving closer to the ultimate Marxist goal of distributing according to ‘need,’ a goal which the USSR disregarded even in theorizing about the future. Other unique Chinese programs seemed to be more in harmony with the egalitarian tradition of the Communist fathers than were those of the Soviet Union.”[25]
Zagoria noted another aspect of the ideological challenge to Khruschev and other Soviet leaders during the period of the Great Leap Forward, the “cult of Mao Tse-tung,” which began in 1958. Mao began to be referred to as “great,” and was saluted as “one of the most outstanding Marxist-Leninist revolutionaries, statesman and theoreticians of our age. By the end of 1959 and early 1960, Mao’s ideology was being increasingly equated with Marxism-Leninism and sometimes given priority over it.”[26]
The Soviet leadership was unhappy about both the practical and the ideological aspects of the Chinese drive to form communes. Zagoria wrote “A close examination of the Soviet reaction to the communes suggests, first that Khrushchev was not concerned so much about the Chinese adopting a different agrarian policy as about the unviable aspects of that policy. He probably… thought that the communes were premature and would do more harm than good, and perhaps he may have been concerned that if the commune program led to serious shortfalls in the Chinese economy, the Russians would have to do the bailing out.”[27]
The Washington Post, reporting on an interview between Khrushchev and Senator Hubert Humphrey, said that Khrushchev had told Humphrey that the communes were “reactionary” and not appropriate for the Soviet Union.[28]
In any case, the Great Leap Forward proved to be a major disaster. In December 1958 it led to the “resignation” of Mao as Chairman of the Chinese government, although he remained Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party.[29]
Khrushchev’s Visit to Peking in 1959
Shortly after Nikita Khrushchev’s 1959 visit to the United States, a trip the Chinese had opposed,[30] he went to Peking to help celebrate the tenth anniversary of the proclamation of the Chinese People’s Republic. That visit to the Chinese capital did little, if anything, to mitigate the mounting tensions between the Chinese and Soviet Communists.
O. Edmund Clubb has commented that at Peking, “Khrushchev made no concessions to the Maoist view that socialism had become invincible and, therefore, ‘the socialist countries headed by the Soviet Union’ should take the offensive in world affairs, in easy disregard of probable American reaction. Speaking upon his arrival September 30, he held that his talks in the United States had been ‘useful’ and would lead to a relaxation of international tensions. Everything had to be done to clear the atmosphere and create conditions for friendship among peoples.”[31]
Several years later, Khrushchev, in an interview broadcast with the NBC television network, said, “In 1959, Mao Tse-tung said to me: ‘You must provoke a war with the United States, and then I will send you as many divisions as you need: a hundred, two hundred, a thousand.’ I explained to Mao that, in the present era, two missiles would suffice to transform those divisions into radio-active offal. He told me that there was nothing to this. Apparently he took me for a coward.”[32]
24
Donald S. Zagoria,