Mao’s China · CHAPTER 11 ·
Sino-Soviet split and Nixon in China
Chapter 11 of The People’s Republic under Mao, 1949–1976: “From Soviet Ally to Nixon”
Between 1960 and 1972 China went from Soviet ally to enemy and from America’s enemy to partner. Moscow recalled all 1,390 of its experts in 1960, the two parties denounced each other in public by 1964, troops clashed at Zhenbao Island in 1969, and Mao welcomed Richard Nixon to Beijing in 1972.
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The map above is the world of China, September 1972 — Nixon, then Tanaka: the ring broken.
Every state on the map that year: The world in 1970 · Europe in 1970.
Part of IB History: The People’s Republic under Mao →
SHORT EXPLANATION
In 1956 China and the Soviet Union shared an alliance and a revolutionary creed. Mao and Khrushchev nevertheless disagreed about what revolution required. Mao saw Khrushchev’s attack on Stalin and “peaceful coexistence”—competition with the West without war—as betrayals; Khrushchev thought Mao’s Great Leap Forward, the 1958 drive for instant industrialization, reckless. Their dispute also concerned power. Moscow withdrew promised nuclear help in 1959 and recalled all 1,390 experts in 1960. By 1964 the parties denounced each other publicly, and from 1966 Soviet divisions were stationed in Mongolia.
The map shows what these disputes meant for China’s security. India became an enemy after the border war of 1962; the Soviet Union and Mongolia were hostile from 1964. Blue surrounded much of China’s land frontier by the mid-1960s. In 1969 troops fought on Zhenbao Island in the Ussuri River and on the Xinjiang border, while Moscow quietly asked how Washington would respond to a strike on Chinese nuclear sites.
Mao now regarded the Soviet Union, which had invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, as the greater danger. The United States could help contain it. A secret channel through Pakistan brought Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, to Beijing in July 1971, along the blue arrow from the west. Nixon met Mao in February 1972. Japan recognized the People’s Republic that September and turns parchment on the map. China had opened the ring by finding a partner in a power that shared its enemy.
The full story
Mao’s relationship with Stalin helps explain why the Soviet leader’s condemnation in 1956 was so unsettling. Mao had resented Stalin’s treatment of him, yet he defended Stalin’s legacy when Khrushchev attacked it in a secret speech. A personality cult—the official worship of a living leader, rather like the reverence owed a divine king—was also part of Mao’s own authority. If Stalin could be condemned for such a cult, Mao might face the same criticism.
The two governments also had different ideas about what an alliance allowed. Khrushchev proposed a joint naval fleet and a radio station on Chinese soil in 1958. Mao rejected what he saw as a return to foreign privileges, and that year shelled the Nationalist-held island of Kinmen without consulting Moscow. In June 1959 the Soviets withdrew their promise to provide a sample atomic bomb. Beijing accused the Soviet leadership of “revisionism” in 1960: abandoning revolution while keeping its name, a charge resembling heresy in a church. Khrushchev recalled every Soviet expert within weeks. Projects including the uranium works at Lanzhou were left unfinished. The parties still claimed the same faith, but disagreed over who was entitled to lead it.
China’s security problems extended beyond the Soviet alliance. In October 1962 the People’s Liberation Army, the army of China’s ruling Communist Party, attacked India in Ladakh and across the McMahon Line. Britain had drawn that Himalayan line in 1914, and China had never accepted it. Chinese forces routed the Indians, declared a ceasefire and withdrew from the northeast. They kept Aksai Chin, the plateau carrying China’s road between Xinjiang and Tibet.
On the map hostile borders were closing around China. In 1963–64 Chinese polemics called Soviet leaders traitors, while Mao spoke publicly of territories taken by the tsars. Soviet troops entered Mongolia under a 1966 treaty. The invasion of Czechoslovakia in August 1968 gave Beijing another reason for alarm: Moscow claimed a right to intervene in a socialist state, a claim that might also be applied to China.
In March 1969 Chinese troops ambushed a Soviet patrol on Zhenbao Island; Soviet tanks and rockets struck back. A Chinese patrol was destroyed at Tielieketi in Xinjiang in August, and China placed its army on war alert. It now faced a nuclear superpower along its longest border without a powerful ally. This was the danger that made an approach to Washington worth considering.
Neither side moved without reasons of its own. Richard Nixon had written in 1967 that China could not remain outside the family of nations forever, and he wanted Chinese help in leaving Vietnam on acceptable terms. Four marshals advised Mao in 1969 to play the American card against Moscow. Signals followed: an American journalist stood beside Mao on the Tiananmen rostrum in October 1970; an American table-tennis team received an invitation in April 1971; and Kissinger flew secretly to Beijing in July.
In October 1971 the United Nations gave China’s seat, previously held by the Nationalist government on Taiwan, to the People’s Republic. Nixon visited in February 1972. The resulting Shanghai Communiqué acknowledged the Chinese position that there is one China. After two decades of denouncing American imperialism, Mao had found a use for American power as a counterweight to Moscow.
FULL EXPLANATION
Why did the alliance break?
An alliance can break for more than one reason, and historians differ about which reason carried the greatest weight here. Lorenz Lüthi’s The Sino-Soviet Split, drawing on archives in Moscow, Beijing and Eastern Europe, places ideology first. Mao’s radical turn at home in 1958 made Soviet moderation objectionable; the dispute also helped him rally support for his own line in China. Sergey Radchenko’s Two Suns in the Heavens emphasizes status: Mao would not accept second place in the Communist world, and each leader saw the other’s actions as a bid for leadership. Shen Zhihua and others give national interests greater weight, pointing to the nuclear agreement withdrawn in 1959, the joint-fleet proposals, Soviet neutrality toward India and the tsarist border treaties Beijing called “unequal”. These accounts illuminate different parts of the same quarrel. Ideology framed it, national interests supplied material grievances, and personal pride made compromise impossible. Whatever the relative weight, the split ended the illusion of a single Communist bloc and opened the way to triangular diplomacy.
The war scare of 1969
The fighting in 1969 brought the Communist powers closer to full war than at any other time. Chinese troops planned the ambush on Zhenbao Island on 2 March. Lyle Goldstein, using Chinese military sources, argues that Beijing intended a limited blow to deter Soviet pressure along the border. The answer on 15 March was far heavier: Soviet forces used tanks and multiple rocket launchers. That summer Soviet diplomats sounded out American officials about a strike on China’s nuclear facilities, and Washington made clear that it would oppose one. Zhou Enlai met Soviet premier Alexei Kosygin at Beijing airport in September and border talks began. Yet Beijing evacuated senior leaders and put the army on alert in October. Mao’s order to dig tunnels and store grain came from a danger serious enough to alter Chinese strategy for a decade.
Who gained from the Nixon visit?
Margaret MacMillan’s Nixon and Mao shows how carefully both governments staged the February 1972 summit: Mao offered philosophy, while Zhou Enlai negotiated the details. Each side had something to gain, though the gains were unequal in kind. China obtained protection against the Soviet Union, recognition as a great power, its UN seat won in October 1971, and an American statement that Washington did not challenge the view that there is one China. The United States gained leverage over Moscow, which signed arms agreements with Nixon in May 1972. It also hoped for help ending the Vietnam War, but China supplied only part of what it wanted. Taiwan lost as governments shifted recognition to Beijing. The American account in its Foreign Relations series reveals how much was deliberately left vague; full diplomatic relations waited until 1979.
Key places on the map
On this day
Why it happened
Mao and Khrushchev read 1956 differently. Khrushchev’s condemnation of Stalin and peaceful coexistence with the West suggested to Mao that Moscow was retreating from revolution. The suspicion ran both ways. In a 1957 Moscow speech Mao said socialism would triumph even after a nuclear war killed half of humanity, alarming Soviet leaders. Later disagreements were judged against these doubts. Because both claimed Lenin’s doctrine, a dispute over policy became a contest over its rightful heir.
National interests collided. An alliance did not remove the two states’ different interests. Moscow sought naval facilities in China and influence over its defense; Beijing wanted the atomic bomb and independence. Mao rejected the joint fleet and shelled Kinmen without warning Moscow in 1958. In 1959 the Soviets withdrew their promise of a sample bomb and stayed neutral in China’s border dispute with India. Requests for cooperation looked like attempts at control, and the alliance ceased to serve either side well before it formally ended.
The Leap divided the comrades. The Great Leap brought domestic and foreign disagreements together. Khrushchev mocked the communes as a Soviet mistake already tried and abandoned, while Mao believed Soviet leaders had encouraged Peng Dehuai’s criticism at Lushan. Moscow withdrew its experts in July 1960, at the height of famine, leaving many Chinese convinced that an ally had deserted them at their weakest. Beijing later blamed the famine partly on Soviet “perfidy”; that explanation also spared its leaders some blame for their own decisions.
The Brezhnev Doctrine frightened Beijing. In August 1968 Soviet tanks crushed Czechoslovakia’s reform movement. Moscow claimed a right to intervene when a socialist country strayed, and Beijing knew that Soviet leaders considered China to have strayed far. Divisions massed on the border and in Mongolia turned the Cultural Revolution’s anti-Soviet rhetoric into a military fear. China had a small nuclear force and a vast but poorly equipped army, and could not meet that threat alone.
THE TURNING POINT
Zhenbao Island, March 1969. Beijing planned the 2 March ambush on Zhenbao Island as a warning. The Soviet response on 15 March was heavy; the August clash at Tielieketi and Soviet inquiries about a nuclear strike revealed the scale of force Moscow might use. The ideological quarrel had become a military danger Mao could not ignore. He judged the Soviet Union the greater enemy and looked toward Washington as a balance. Within two years Kissinger was in Beijing: the road to Nixon’s visit ran through a frozen island in the Ussuri.
What it changed
Nixon in Beijing. Nixon’s week in China in February 1972 ended two decades of American refusal to deal with the People’s Republic. The Shanghai Communiqué set out both sides’ views and found a formula on Taiwan. Liaison offices opened in 1973, followed by full diplomatic relations in January 1979 under Deng Xiaoping. American trade, technology and students became central to the reforms after Mao.
China takes its seat at the UN. The General Assembly voted 76 to 35 on 25 October 1971 to give the People’s Republic China’s UN seat, including its permanent Security Council place. The Republic of China’s representatives left. The vote showed how many governments had awaited an American signal. Beijing saw a formal end to two decades of isolation; Taipei faced the beginning of a long loss of recognition.
The ring opens. Japan established relations with Beijing in September 1972 and broke them with Taiwan. West Germany, Australia and many others followed within months; the Philippines and Thailand did so in 1975. The map’s blue ring of 1964 opens in the east, even though the Soviet border remains a front line. China had escaped encirclement without settling its dispute with Moscow.
A Cold War triangle. Washington, Moscow and Beijing could now each use relations with one of the others to influence the third. The Soviet Union hurried into arms agreements with the United States in May 1972. Vietnam resented China’s dealings with its enemy and drifted toward Moscow; the rift led to a China–Vietnam war in 1979. The triangle offered China more room to maneuver than either alliance or isolation.
DISCUSSION QUESTION — Why did Mao, the champion of world revolution, welcome Richard Nixon to Beijing in 1972?
The Soviet threat made the opening compelling. By 1969 Moscow had invaded Czechoslovakia under a doctrine that could be applied to China, massed dozens of divisions on the border, fought at Zhenbao and Tielieketi, and sounded out Washington about a nuclear strike. Mao’s four marshals advised using the United States as a counterweight. Nixon had his own reasons to respond: he wanted leverage over Moscow and help leaving Vietnam. Domestic politics also mattered. After Lin Biao died in 1971, Mao relied more on Zhou Enlai, who favored an opening; the visit restored prestige damaged by the Cultural Revolution. Mao presented the move in revolutionary terms, as exploiting contradictions among enemies, as he had during the Second World War. Lüthi and Radchenko stress this accommodation of realpolitik within revolutionary language. For authoritarian regimes, survival usually takes precedence when it conflicts with ideology, which can then be reinterpreted.
An interesting fact
The secret journey had the codename Polo, after Marco Polo. Pakistan’s president Yahya Khan arranged it. During a visit to Pakistan in July 1971, Henry Kissinger feigned a stomach complaint and disappeared for two days, supposedly to rest at a hill station. Before dawn on 9 July he boarded a Pakistani airliner at Chaklala airport near Islamabad and flew over the Himalaya to Beijing with Chinese navigators. When Nixon announced the trip on 15 July, almost nobody in the American government had known about it.
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