Abstract
With the passage of time, Mao’s perceptions of domestic strife and foreign aggression began to change. The Sino-Soviet polemics resulted in an ideological and emotional rupture between the two parties, and the split in the organizational relationship was only a matter of time. China’s domestic and foreign policies turned further leftward. In 1964, Mao made several fatal decisions. In foreign policy, he regarded both the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) as China’s enemies. In domestic policy, he began to promote the ferment that led to the Cultural Revolution—a political revolution to oppose revisionism from abroad and to guard against revisionism in China. As China began to see the USSR as an enemy, the key to China’s national security strategy was to prepare defense against the Soviet Union.
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Notes
- 1.
Sarah Paine, Imperial Rivals: China, Russia, and Their Disputed Frontier, 1858–1924 (Armonk, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1996), pp. 3, 28–29, 96, 328, 352.
- 2.
Soviet troops had withdrawn from Mongolia in the 1950s.
- 3.
Sergey Radchenko disputes this point. He writes, “Mongolia’s leader Yumjaagiin Tsedenbal requested the presence of Soviet troops in December 1965, and the new Soviet-Mongolian Treaty, signed in January 1966, provided for such a contingency, but Moscow was not in a hurry to send troops to a foreign country and it was only after the threat of war with China increased considerably in February 1967 that the decision was taken to station what would become the 39th Soviet Army in Mongolia,” See Radchenko, Two Suns in the Heavens, pp. 189–90.
- 4.
On the Mongolian request to be admitted to the Warsaw Pact, see “Mongolian Request for Admission to the Warsaw Pact,” 15 July 1963, Parallel History Project on Cooperative Security (cited hereafter as PHP), at http://www.php.isn.ethz.ch/collections/
- 5.
“Polish Foreign Minister Memorandum Regarding Mongolia’s Possible Accession to the Warsaw Treaty,” 20 July 1963, in PHP, at http://www.php.isn.ethz.ch/collections/
- 6.
For detailed studies on the construction of the Third Front, see Barry Naughton, “The Third Front: Defence Industrialization in Chinese Interior,” The China Quarterly, no. 115 (September 1988), pp. 351–86; Lorenz Lüthi, “The Vietnam War and China’s Third-Line Defense Planning Before the Cultural Revolution, 1964–1966,” Journal of Cold War Studies, vol. 10, no. 1 (Winter
2008), pp. 26–51.
- 7.
Wang Zhongchun, “The Soviet Factor in Sino-American Normalization, 1969–1976,” in William C. Kirby, Robert Ross, and Gong Li, eds., Normalization of U.S.-China Relations (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2005).
- 8.
Mao had been referring to the disputed southern Kurile Islands between the USSR and Japan since the end of World War II. In Japan, this is known as the North Territories dispute.
- 9.
Asahi Shimbun, Yomiuri Shimbun, and Mainichi Shimbun, 13 July 1964.
- 10.
Dennis J. Doolin, Territorial Claims in the Sino-Soviet Conflict: Documents and Analysis (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution on War, Revolution, and Peace, 1965), pp. 47–57.
- 11.
Wang, “The Soviet Factor in Sino-American Normalization, 1969–1976.”
- 12.
James Hershberg and Chen Jian, “Informing the Enemy: Sino-American ‘Signaling’ and the Vietnam War, 1965,” in Priscilla Roberts, Behind the Bamboo Curtain: China, Vietnam, and the World Beyond Asia (Washington DC and Stanford CA: Woodrow Wilson Center Press and Stanford University Press, 2006), pp. 193–258.
- 13.
Wang, “The Soviet Factor in Sino-American Normalization, 1969–1976.”
- 14.
See Li and Xia, Mao and the Sino-Soviet Split, pp. 100–102.
- 15.
According to Chen Boda, who assisted Mao in drafting the document; by that time Mao had already decided to purge Liu Shaoqi.
- 16.
For detailed descriptions of Mao’s schemes to begin a political revolution, see Roderick MacFarquhar and Michael Schoenhals, Mao’s Last Revolution (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 14–31; Alexander V. Pantsov, with Steven I. Levine, Deng Xiaoping: A Revolutionary Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 237–45.
- 17.
Peking Review, no. 6 (7 February 1964), p. 10.
- 18.
Radchenko, Two Suns in the Heavens, pp. 95–96.
- 19.
Interview with Li Fenglin, former Chinese ambassador to the USSR, 24 March 2006.
- 20.
CIA Intelligence Report, “The Evolution of Soviet Policy in the Sino-Soviet Border Dispute,” ESAU XLV/70, 27 April 1970, at https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/esau-44.pdf
- 21.
He Fang, who was a Soviet specialist in the Foreign Ministry in the 1960s, confirmed this argument via an oral interview with the author. The author gratefully acknowledges his input.
- 22.
Li and Xia, Mao and the Sino-Soviet Split, pp. 103–10.
- 23.
In addition, when Chervonenko told Wu Xiuquan about Khrushchev’s fall, based on Wu’s response Chervonenko felt that the Chinese side had already received the information from another channel.
- 24.
The congratulatory letter stated that China “is pleased with each progress the Great Soviet Union has made in its development … wishes the continuous development of an unbreakable fraternal friendship between the Chinese and Soviet people.”
- 25.
Chervonenko reported to Moscow that Peng Zhen had said at the Beijing Municipal CCP Party Committee meeting of activists that Chinese leaders planned to take an initiative to improve relations with the USSR. Zhou Enlai expressed the same wish to the visiting Japanese socialists.
- 26.
Georgii Arbatov, The System: An Insider’s Life in Soviet Politics (New York: Times Books, 1992), p. 109.
- 27.
Ibid., pp. 109–10; Interview with Yan Mingfu by Li Danhui, 24 September 2007.
- 28.
Lüthi, The Sino-Soviet Split, pp. 291–92.
- 29.
While in Moscow, the Chinese delegation had met with numerous fraternal party delegations.
- 30.
For a detailed discussion, see Li and Xia, Mao and the Sino-Soviet Split, pp. 110–19.
- 31.
Lüthi, The Sino-Soviet Split, p. 300.
- 32.
Radchenko, Two Suns in the Heavens, p. 119.
- 33.
Ibid., pp. 162–63.
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Li, D. (2020). Mao’s Changing Perceptions of Internal Disturbances and External Threats, Mid-1963 to the End of 1964. In: Shen, Z. (eds) A Short History of Sino-Soviet Relations, 1917–1991. China Connections. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-8641-1_17
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