Abstract
In 1946 the Chinese communist leader Mao Zedong explained his party’s stance on nuclear weapons to the American journalist Anne Louise Strong: “The atom bomb is a paper tiger with which the American reactionaries try to terrify the people. It looks terrible, but in fact is not. Of course, the atom bomb is a weapon of mass annihilation: the outcome of a war is decided by the people, not by one or two new weapons.” The emphasis on the people as the ultimate determinant of victory or defeat was the foundation of Maoist doctrine. It emerged out of a series of successful wars against armies that enjoyed better equipment but lacked mass support, and from a leadership imbued with a revolutionary ideology that identified the aroused masses as the source of social change.
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Notes
- 1.
Quoted in Alice Langley Hsieh, Communist China’s Strategy in the Nuclear Age (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1962), p. 132.
- 2.
Ralph Powell, ‘Maoist military doctrine’, Asian Survey (April 1968).
- 3.
Lin Biao, ‘Long live the People’s War’, quoted in Raymond Garthoff ‘Politico-Military Issues in the Sino-Soviet Debate, 1963–65’, in Raymond Garthoff (ed.), Sino-Soviet Military Relations (New York: Praeger, 1966), p. 178.
- 4.
Ralph Powell, ‘Great powers and atomic bombs are “paper tigers”’, China Quarterly, No. 23 (July/September 1965).
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Quotes from Allen S. Whiting, China Crosses the Yalu: The Decision to Enter the Korean War (New York: Macmillan, 1960), pp. 142, 198.
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Zhihua Shen and Yafeng Xia, Between Aid and Restriction: Changing Soviet Policies toward China’s Nuclear Weapons Program: 1954–1960, NPIHP Working Paper #2, May 2012.
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John Thomas, ‘The limits of alliance: the Quemoy crisis of 1958’, in Garthoff (ed.), op. cit., pp. 114–49.
- 8.
Hsieh, ‘The Sino-Soviet nuclear dialogue’, in Garthoff (ed.), op. cit., pp. 160, 161.
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I. Yermashev, ‘The Peking version of “total strategy”’, reprinted in ibid., pp. 239–52.
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Stenographic Report, p. 90. ‘We have become suspicious that you, in shipping missiles to Cuba, were trying to place her under your control’. Stenogram: Meeting of the Delegations of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the Chinese Communist Party, Moscow, 5–20 July 1963. Bulletin, no. 10.
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Vladislav M. Zubok. ‘Deng-Xiaoping and the Sino-Soviet Split 1956–1963’. Cold War International History Project Bulletin 10 (1998). Appended to this article are relevant documents, including a transcript of some of the July consultations.
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- 18.
See for instance Lewis and Litai, p. 218.
- 19.
Ellis Joffe, ‘“People’s War under Modern Conditions”: A Doctrine for Modern War’, The China Quarterly, No. 112 (Dec., 1987), pp. 555–71.
- 20.
Gordon Chang, ‘JFK, China, and the Bomb’, Journal of American History (Spring 1988), It is for example hard to imagine a leader less receptive to the idea of pre-emptive attacks than Harold Macmillan, with whom Kennedy is alleged to have raised the matter. See also: Lyle J. Goldstein, ‘When China was a ‘rogue state’: the impact of China’s nuclear weapons program on US–China relations during the 1960s’, Journal of Contemporary China, 12: 37, 2003, pp. 739–64.
- 21.
Bundy, Danger and Survival, p. 532. Editorial note, FRUS, 1961–1963, Vol. XXII, Northeast Asia, Doc. 162.
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Kennedy to Harriman, 15 July 1961, FRUS, VII, p. 801; Seaborg, Kennedy, Khrushchev and Test Ban, p. 239.
- 23.
Seaborg, Kennedy, Khrushchev and Test Ban, p. 228; Kohler to the Department of State, Moscow, 18, 19, 27 July 1963, FRUS, VII, pp. 808, 814 and 858.
- 24.
Zubok and Harrison. “The Nuclear Education of Nikita Khrushchev.” in Gaddis et al., Cold War Statesmen Confront the Bomb, p. 164.
- 25.
Policy Planning Meeting, 15 October 1963, FRUS, XII, pp. 309–402; Komer to Bundy, 5 November 1963, FRUS, XII, pp. 404–5.
- 26.
“Implications of a Chinese Communist Nuclear Capability”, by Robert H. Johnson, State Department Policy Planning Staff, with forwarding memorandum to President Johnson by Policy Planning Council director Walt W. Rostow, 17 April 1964. In William Burr, ed., The United States, China, and the Bomb, National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 1 https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB1/nsaebb1.htm.
- 27.
Zaloga, p. 128; Kokoshin, p. 127.
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Lyle J. Goldstein, ‘Return to Zhenbao Island: Who Started Shooting and Why it Matters’. The China Quarterly, 168, 2001, pp. 985–97.
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John Lewis and Litai Xue, Imagined Enemies: China Prepares for Uncertain War (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006); Lyle Goldstein, ‘Do Nascent WMD Arsenals Deter? The Sino-Soviet Crisis of 1969’, Political Science Quarterly, 118: 1 (2003), 53–80.
- 30.
See for instance, “Soviet Concepts for Employment of Nuclear Weapons in a Conflict with NATO—Evidence from Warsaw Pact Military Exercises,” CIA/DI/OSR Blind Memorandum for Col. William Odom and Dr. Samuel Huntington, NSC, 24 March 1978.
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Freedman, L., Michaels, J. (2019). China’s Paper Tiger. In: The Evolution of Nuclear Strategy. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57350-6_26
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