CHAPTER 4

Mao’s Continuous Revolution

T HE ADVENT OF a new dynasty in China had, over the millennia, developed a distinct rhythm. The old dynasty would begin to be perceived as failing in its mission of protecting the security of the Chinese population or fulfilling its fundamental aspirations. Rarely as the result of a single catastrophe, most frequently through the cumulative impact of a series of disasters, the ruling dynasty would, in the view of the Chinese people, lose the Mandate of Heaven. The new dynasty would be seen as having achieved it, in part by the mere fact of having established itself.

This kind of upheaval had happened many times in China’s dramatic history. But no new ruler had ever proposed to overthrow the value system of the entire society. Previous claimants to the Mandate of Heaven—even, and perhaps especially, foreign conquerors—had legitimized themselves by affirming the ancient values of the society they took over and governing by its maxims. They maintained the bureaucracy they inherited, if only to be able to govern a country more populous and richer than any other. This tradition was the mechanism of the process of Sinification. It established Confucianism as the governing doctrine of China.

At the head of the new dynasty that, in 1949, poured out of the countryside to take over the cities stood a colossus: Mao Zedong. Domineering and overwhelming in his influence, ruthless and aloof, poet and warrior, prophet and scourge, he unified China and launched it on a journey that nearly wrecked its civil society. By the end of this searing process, China stood as one of the world’s major powers and the only Communist country except Cuba, North Korea, and Vietnam whose political structure survived the collapse of Communism everywhere else.

Mao and the Great Harmony

Revolutionaries are, by their nature, powerful and single-minded personalities. Almost invariably they start from a position of weakness vis-à-vis the political environment and rely for their success on charisma and on an ability to mobilize resentment and to capitalize on the psychological weakness of adversaries in decline.

Most revolutions have been on behalf of a specific cause. Once successful, they have been institutionalized into a new system of order. Mao’s revolution had no final resting place; the ultimate goal of “Great Harmony” that he proclaimed was a vague vision, more akin to spiritual exaltation than political reconstruction. Cadres of the Communist Party were its priesthood, except their task was crusading, not fulfilling a defined program. Under Mao, cadres also led a life at the edge of perdition. For them, there was always the danger—over time the near certainty—of being engulfed in the very upheavals they were incited to promote. The roster of leaders of the second generation (that of Deng Xiaoping) had almost all suffered that fate, returning to power only after periods of great personal trial. Every close associate of Mao during the revolutionary period—including in the end his long-serving Premier and chief diplomat Zhou Enlai—was eventually purged.

It was no accident that the Chinese ruler whom Mao most admired was the founding Emperor Qin Shihuang, who ended the Period of the Warring States by triumphing over all other rivals and unifying them into a single polity in 221 B.C. Qin Shihuang is generally considered the founder of China as a unified state. Yet he has never been afforded ultimate respect in Chinese history because he burned books and persecuted traditional Confucian scholars (burying 460 of them alive). Mao once remarked that China’s governance required a combination of Marx’s methods and Qin Shihuang’s, and he eulogized the Emperor in a poem:

Please don’t slander Emperor Qin Shihuang, Sir

For the burning of the books should be thought through again.

Our ancestral dragon, though dead, lives on in spirit,

While Confucius, though renowned, was really no one.

The Qin order has survived from age to age. ¹

Mao’s China was, by design, a country in permanent crisis; from the earliest days of Communist governance, Mao unleashed wave after wave of struggle. The Chinese people would not be permitted ever to rest on their achievements. The destiny Mao prescribed for them was to purify their society and themselves through virtuous exertion.

Mao was the first ruler since the unification of China to tear apart Chinese traditions as a deliberate act of state policy. He conceived of himself as rejuvenating China by dismantling, at times violently, its ancient heritage. As he proclaimed to the French philosopher André Malraux in 1965:

The thought, culture, and customs which brought China to where we found her must disappear, and the thought, customs, and culture of proletarian China, which does not yet exist, must appear. . . . Thought, culture, customs must be born of struggle, and the struggle must continue for as long as there is still danger of a return to the past. ²

China, Mao once vowed, was to be “smashed” like an atom, in order to destroy the old order but, at the same time, produce an explosion of popular energy to lift it to ever greater heights of achievement:

Now our enthusiasm has been aroused. Ours is an ardent nation, now swept by a burning tide. There is a good metaphor for this: our nation is like an atom. . . . When this atom’s nucleus is smashed the thermal energy released will have really tremendous power. We shall be able to do things which we could not do before. ³

As part of this process, Mao generated a pervasive assault on traditional Chinese political thought: where the Confucian tradition prized universal harmony, Mao idealized upheaval and the clash of opposing forces, in both domestic and foreign affairs (and, indeed, he saw the two as connected—regularly pairing foreign crises with domestic purges or ideological campaigns). The Confucian tradition prized the doctrine of the mean and the cultivation of balance and moderation; when reform occurred, it was incremental and put forward as the “restoration” of previously held values. Mao, by contrast, sought radical and instant transformation and a total break with the past. Traditional Chinese political theory held military force in relative disesteem and insisted that Chinese rulers achieved stability at home and influence abroad through their virtue and compassion. Mao, driven by his ideology and his anguish over China’s century of humiliation, produced an unprecedented militarization of Chinese life. Where traditional China revered the past and cherished a rich literary culture, Mao declared war on China’s traditional art, culture, and modes of thought.

In many ways, however, Mao incarnated the dialectic contradictions that he claimed to be manipulating. He was passionately and publicly anti-Confucian, yet he read widely in Chinese classics and was wont to quote from the ancient texts. Mao enunciated the doctrine of “continuous revolution,” but when the Chinese national interest required it, he could be patient and take the long view. The manipulation of “contradictions” was his proclaimed strategy, yet it was in the service of an ultimate goal drawn from the Confucian concept of da tong, or the Great Harmony.

Maoist governance thus turned into a version of the Confucian tradition through the looking glass, proclaiming a total break with the past while relying on many of China’s traditional institutions, including an imperial style of governance; the state as an ethical project; and a mandarin bureaucracy that Mao loathed, periodically destroyed, and, in the end, equally periodically was obliged to re-create.

Mao’s ultimate objectives could not be expressed in a single organizational structure or be fulfilled by realizing a specific set of political objectives. His goal was to sustain the process of revolution itself, which he felt it was his special mission to carry on through ever greater upheavals, never permitting a resting point until his people emerged from the ordeal purified and transformed:

To be overthrown is painful and is unbearable to contemplate for those overthrown, for example, for the Kuomintang [Nationalist Party] reactionaries whom we are now overthrowing and for Japanese imperialism which we together with other peoples overthrew some time ago. But for the working class, the labouring people and the Communist Party the question is not one of being overthrown, but of working hard to create the conditions in which classes, state power and political parties will die out very naturally and mankind will enter the realm of Great Harmony. ⁴

In traditional China, the Emperor had been the linchpin of the Great Harmony of all living things. By his virtuous example, he was perceived to keep the existing cosmic order in joint and maintain the equilibrium between heaven, man, and nature. In the Chinese view, the Emperor “transformed” rebellious barbarians and brought them to heel; he was the pinnacle of the Confucian hierarchy, assigning to all people their proper place in society.

This is why, until the modern period, China did not pursue the ideal of “progress” in the Western sense. The Chinese impetus for public service was the concept of rectification—the bringing of order to a society that had been allowed to fall into dangerous imbalance. Confucius declared as his mission to try to recover profound truths that his society had neglected, thereby restoring it to a golden age.

Mao saw his role as diametrically the opposite. The Great Harmony came at the end of a painful process likely to claim as victims all who traversed it. In Mao’s interpretation of history, the Confucian order had kept China weak; its “harmony” was a form of subjugation. Progress would come only through a series of brutal tests pitting contradictory forces against each other both domestically as well as internationally. And if these contradictions did not appear by themselves, it was the obligation of the Communist Party and its leader to keep a permanent upheaval going, against itself if necessary.

In 1958, at the outset of the nationwide program of economic collectivization known as the Great Leap Forward, Mao outlined his vision of China in perpetual motion. Each wave of revolutionary exertion, he proclaimed, was organically a precursor to a new upheaval whose beginning needed to be hastened lest the revolutionaries became indolent and start resting on their laurels:

Our revolutions are like battles. After a victory, we must at once put forward a new task. In this way, cadres and the masses will forever be filled with revolutionary fervour, instead of conceit. Indeed, they will have no time for conceit, even if they like to feel conceited. With new tasks on their shoulders, they are totally preoccupied with the problems for their fulfillment. ⁵

The cadres of the revolution were to be tested by ever more difficult challenges at shorter and shorter intervals. “Disequilibrium is a general, objective rule,” wrote Mao:

The cycle, which is endless, evolves from disequilibrium to equilibrium and then to disequilibrium again. Each cycle, however, brings us to a higher level of development. Disequilibrium is normal and absolute whereas equilibrium is temporary and relative. ⁶

But how can a state in permanent upheaval participate in the international system? If it applies the doctrine of continuous revolution literally, it will be involved in constant turmoil and, likely, in war. The states that prize stability will unite against it. But if it tries to shape an international order open to others, a clash with the votaries of continuous revolution is inevitable. This dilemma beset Mao all his life and was never finally resolved.

Mao and International Relations: The Empty City Stratagem, Chinese Deterrence, and the Quest for Psychological Advantage

Mao proclaimed his basic attitude toward international affairs on the eve of taking power. Before the newly assembled People’s Political Consultative Conference, he summed up China’s attitude toward the prevailing international order in the phrase “The Chinese people have stood up”:

We have a common feeling that our work will be recorded in the history of mankind, and that it will clearly demonstrate that the Chinese, who comprise one quarter of humanity, have begun to stand up. The Chinese have always been a great, courageous and industrious people. It was only in modern times that they have fallen behind, and this was due solely to the oppression and exploitation of foreign imperialism and the domestic reactionary government. . . . Our predecessors instructed us to carry their work to completion. We are doing this now. We have united ourselves and defeated both our foreign and domestic oppressors by means of the people’s liberation war and the people’s great revolution, and we proclaim the establishment of the People’s Republic of China. ⁷

To stand up to the world was a daunting prospect for China in 1949. The country was underdeveloped, without the military capacity to impose its own preferences on a world that vastly outmatched it in resources and, above all, in technology. When the People’s Republic emerged on the world stage, the United States was the principal nuclear superpower (the Soviet Union having just exploded its first nuclear weapon). The United States had supported Chiang Kai-shek during the Chinese civil war, transporting Nationalist troops to northern Chinese cities after the Japanese surrender in World War II to preempt the Communist armies. Mao Zedong’s victory was greeted with dismay in Washington and triggered a debate over who had “lost” China. That implied, at least in Beijing, an eventual attempt to reverse the outcome—a conviction reinforced when in 1950, upon the North Korean invasion of the South, President Truman moved the Seventh Fleet into the Taiwan Strait, forestalling an attempt by the new government on the mainland to reconquer Taiwan.

The Soviet Union was an ideological ally and was needed initially as a strategic partner to balance the United States. But China’s leaders had not forgotten the series of “unequal treaties” extorted for a century to establish the Russian possession of its Far East maritime provinces and a zone of special influence in Manchuria and Xinjiang, nor that the Soviet Union was still claiming the validity of concessions in northern China extracted from Chiang Kai-shek in wartime agreements in 1945. Stalin took for granted Soviet dominance in the Communist world, a stance incompatible in the long run with Mao’s fierce nationalism and claim to ideological importance.

China was also involved in a border dispute with India in the Himalayas, over the territory known as Aksai Chin in the west and over the so-called McMahon Line in the east. The disputed region was no small matter: at roughly 125,000 square kilometers, the total contested area was approximately the size of Pennsylvania or, as Mao later noted to his top commanders, the Chinese province of Fujian. ⁸

Mao divided these challenges into two categories. At home, he proclaimed continuous revolution and was able to implement it because he increasingly exercised total control. Abroad, world revolution was a slogan, perhaps a long-range objective, but China’s leaders were sufficiently realistic to recognize that they lacked the means to challenge the prevailing international order except by ideological means. Within China, Mao recognized few objective limits to his philosophic visions other than the ingrained attitudes of the Chinese people, which he struggled to overwhelm. In the realm of foreign policy, he was substantially more circumspect.

When the Communist Party seized power in 1949, substantial regions had broken away from the historic Chinese Empire, notably Tibet, parts of Xinjiang, parts of Mongolia, and the border areas of Burma. The Soviet Union maintained a sphere of influence in the northeast, including an occupation force and a fleet in the strategically located Lushun harbor. Mao, like several founders of dynasties before him, claimed the frontiers of China that the empire had established at its maximum historic extent. To territories Mao considered part of that historic China—Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, Mongolia, border regions in the Himalayas or the north—he applied the maxim of domestic politics: he was implacable; he sought to impose China’s governance and generally succeeded. As soon as the civil war ended, Mao set out to reoccupy the secessionist regions, such as Xinjiang, Inner Mongolia, and eventually Tibet. In that context, Taiwan was not so much a test of Communist ideology as a demand to respect Chinese history. Even when he refrained from military measures, Mao would put forward claims to territories given up in the “unequal treaties” of the nineteenth century—for example, claims to territory lost in the Russian Far East in the settlements of 1860 and 1895.

With respect to the rest of the world, Mao introduced a special style that substituted ideological militancy and psychological perception for physical strength. It was composed of a Sinocentric view of the world, a touch of world revolution, and a diplomacy using the Chinese tradition of manipulating the barbarians, with great attention paid to meticulous planning and the psychological domination of the other side.

Mao eschewed what Western diplomats viewed as the commonsense dictum that to recover from the decades of upheaval China should conciliate the major powers. He refused to convey any appearance of weakness, chose defiance over accommodation, and avoided contact with Western countries after establishing the People’s Republic of China.

Zhou Enlai, the first Foreign Minister of the People’s Republic of China, summed up this attitude of aloofness in a series of aphorisms. The new China would not simply slip into existing diplomatic relationships. It would set up “a separate kitchen.” Relations with the new regime would have to be negotiated from case to case. The new China would “sweep the house clean before inviting the guests”—in other words, it would clean up lingering colonial influences before establishing diplomatic relations with Western “imperialist” countries. It would use its influence to “unite the world’s people”—in other words, encourage revolution in the developing world. ⁹

Diplomatic traditionalists would have rejected this attitude of aloof challenge as unfeasible. But Mao believed in the objective impact of ideological and, above all, psychological factors. He proposed to achieve psychological equivalence to the superpowers by calculated indifference to their military capabilities.

One of the classic tales of the Chinese strategic tradition was that of Zhuge Liang’s “Empty City Stratagem” from The Romance of the Three Kingdoms. In it, a commander notices an approaching army far superior to his own. Since resistance guarantees destruction, and surrender would bring about loss of control over the future, the commander opts for a stratagem. He opens the gates of his city, places himself there in a posture of repose, playing a lute, and behind him shows normal life without any sign of panic or concern. The general of the invading army interprets this sangfroid as a sign of the existence of hidden reserves, stops his advance, and withdraws.

Mao’s avowed indifference to the threat of nuclear war surely owed something to that tradition. From the very beginning, the People’s Republic of China had to maneuver in a triangular relationship with the two nuclear powers, each of which was individually capable of posing a great threat and, together, were in a position to overwhelm China. Mao dealt with this endemic state of affairs by pretending it did not exist. He claimed to be impervious to nuclear threats; indeed, he developed a public posture of being willing to accept hundreds of millions of casualties, even welcoming it as a guarantee for the more rapid victory of Communist ideology. Whether Mao believed his own pronouncements on nuclear war it is impossible to say. But he clearly succeeded in making much of the rest of the world believe that he meant it—an ultimate test of credibility. (Of course in China’s case, the city was not entirely “empty.” China eventually developed its own nuclear weapons capability, though on a much smaller scale than that of the Soviet Union or the United States.)

Mao was able to draw on a long tradition in Chinese statecraft of accomplishing long-term goals from a position of relative weakness. For centuries, Chinese statesmen enmeshed the “barbarians” in relationships that kept them at bay and studiously maintained the political fiction of superiority through diplomatic stagecraft. From the beginning of the People’s Republic, China played a world role surpassing its objective strength. By consequence of its fierce defense of its definition of its national patrimony, the People’s Republic of China became an influential force in the Non-Aligned Movement—the grouping of newly independent countries seeking to position themselves between the superpowers. China established itself as a great power not to be trifled with while conducting a redefinition of the Chinese identity at home and challenging the nuclear powers diplomatically, sometimes concurrently, sometimes sequentially.

In pursuit of this foreign policy agenda, Mao owed more to Sun Tzu than to Lenin. He drew inspiration from his reading of the Chinese classics and the tradition he outwardly disdained. In charting foreign policy initiatives he was less likely to refer to Marxist doctrine than to traditional Chinese works: Confucian texts; the canonical “24 Dynastic Histories” recounting the rise and fall of China’s imperial dynasties; Sun Tzu, The Romance of the Three Kingdoms, and other texts on warfare and strategy; tales of adventure and rebellion such as Outlaws of the Marsh ; and the novel of romance and courtly intrigue, Dream of the Red Chamber , which Mao claimed to have read five times. ¹⁰ In an echo of the traditional Confucian scholar-officials whom he denounced as oppressors and parasites, Mao wrote poetry and philosophical essays and took great pride in his unorthodox calligraphy. These literary and artistic elements were not a refuge from his political labors but an integral part of them. When Mao, after a thirty-two-year absence, returned to his native village in 1959, he wrote a poem not of Marxism or materialism but of romantic sweep: “It is the bitter sacrifices that strengthen our firm resolve, and which give us the courage to dare to change heavens and skies, to change the sun, and to make a new world.” ¹¹

So ingrained was this literary tradition that, in 1969, at a turning point in Mao’s foreign policy, four marshals assigned by Mao to outline his strategic options illustrated their recommendations of the need to open relations with the then archenemy America by citing The Romance of the Three Kingdoms , which was banned in China but which they could be certain Mao had read. So, too, even in the midst of his most sweeping assaults on China’s ancient heritage, Mao framed his foreign policy doctrines in terms of analogies with highly traditional Chinese games of the intellect. He described the opening maneuvers in the Sino-Indian War as “crossing the Han-Chu boundary,” an ancient metaphor drawn from the Chinese version of chess. ¹² He held up the traditional gambling game of mahjong as a school for strategic thought: “If you knew how to play the game,” he told his doctor, “you would also understand the relationship between the principle of probability and the principle of certainty.” ¹³ And in China’s conflicts with both the United States and the Soviet Union, Mao and his top associates conceived of the threat in terms of a wei qi concept—that of preventing strategic encirclement.

It was in precisely these most traditional aspects that the superpowers had the most difficulty comprehending Mao’s strategic motives. Through the lens of Western strategic analysis, most of Beijing’s military undertakings in the first three decades of the Cold War were improbable and, on paper at least, impossible affairs. Setting China against usually far stronger powers and occurring in territories previously deemed of secondary strategic importance—North Korea, the offshore islands of the Taiwan Strait, sparsely populated tracts of the Himalayas, frozen swatches of territory in the Ussuri River—these Chinese interventions and offensives caught almost all foreign observers—and each of the adversaries—by surprise. Mao was determined to prevent encirclement by any power or combination of powers, regardless of ideology, that he perceived as securing too many wei qi “stones” surrounding China, by disrupting their calculations.

This was the catalyst that led China into the Korean War despite its relative weakness—and that, in the aftermath of Mao’s death, would lead Beijing to war with Vietnam, a recent ally, in defiance of a mutual defense treaty between Hanoi and Moscow and while the Soviet Union maintained a million troops on China’s northern borders. Long-range calculations of the configuration of forces around China’s periphery were considered more significant than a literal calculus of the immediate balance of power. This combination of the long-range and the psychological also came to expression in Mao’s approach to deterring perceived military threats.

However much Mao absorbed from China’s history, no previous Chinese ruler combined traditional elements with the same mix of authority and ruthlessness and global sweep as Mao: ferocity in the face of challenge and skillful diplomacy when circumstances prevented his preference for drastic overpowering initiatives. His vast and daring foreign policy initiatives, however traditional his tactics, were carried out amidst a violent churning of Chinese society. The whole world, he promised, would be transformed, and things turned into their opposites:

Of all the classes in the world the proletariat is the one which is most eager to change its position, and next comes the semi-proletariat, for the former possesses nothing at all while the latter is hardly any better off. The United States now controls a majority in the United Nations and dominates many parts of the world—this state of affairs is temporary and will be changed one of these days. China’s position as a poor country denied its rights in international affairs will also be changed—the poor country will change into a rich one, the country denied its rights into one enjoying them—a transformation of things into their opposites. ¹⁴

Mao was too much of a realist, however, to pursue world revolution as a practical goal. As a result, the tangible impact of China on world revolution was largely ideological and consisted of intelligence support for local Communist parties. Mao explained this attitude in an interview with Edgar Snow, the first American journalist to describe the Chinese Communist base in Yan’an during the civil war, in 1965: “China supported revolutionary movements, but not by invading countries. Of course, whenever a liberation struggle existed China would publish statements and called demonstrations to support it.” ¹⁵

In the same vein, Long Live the Victory of People’s War, a 1965 pamphlet by Lin Biao, then Mao’s presumptive successor, argued that the countryside of the world (that is, the developing countries) would defeat the cities of the world (that is, the advanced countries) much as the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) had defeated Chiang Kai-shek. The administration of Lyndon Johnson read these lines as a Chinese blueprint for support for—and probably outright participation in—Communist subversion all around the world and especially in Indochina. Lin’s pamphlet was a contributing factor in the decision to send American forces to Vietnam. Contemporary scholarship, however, treats his document as a statement of the limits of Chinese military support for Vietnam and other revolutionary movements. For, in fact, Lin was proclaiming that “[t]he liberation of the masses is accomplished by the masses themselves—this is a basic principle of Marxism-Leninism. Revolution or people’s war in any country is the business of the masses in that country and should be carried out primarily by their own efforts; there is no other way.” ¹⁶

This restraint reflected a realistic appreciation of the real balance of forces. We cannot know what Mao might have decided if the equilibrium had been tilted in favor of the Communist power. But whether as a reflection of realism or philosophical motivation, revolutionary ideology was a means to transform the world by performance rather than war, much as the traditional emperors had perceived their role.

A team of Chinese scholars with access to Beijing’s Central Archives has written a fascinating account of Mao’s ambivalence: dedicated to world revolution, ready to encourage it wherever possible, yet also protective of the necessities of China’s survival. ¹⁷ This ambivalence came to expression in a conversation with the head of the Australian Communist Party, E. F. Hill, in 1969, while Mao was considering the opening with the United States, with which China had been locked in an adversarial relationship for two decades. He put a question to his interlocutor: Are we heading into a revolution that will prevent war?

Or into a war that will produce revolution? ¹⁸ If the former, the rapprochement with the United States would be improvident; if the latter, it would be imperative, to prevent an attack on China. In the end, after some hesitation, Mao chose the option of rapprochement with America. The prevention of war (which, by this point, would most likely involve a Soviet attack on China) was more important than the encouragement of global revolution.

The Continuous Revolution and the Chinese People

Mao’s opening to the United States was a major ideological as well as strategic decision. But it did not alter his commitment to the concept of continuous revolution at home. Even in 1972, the year of President Richard Nixon’s visit to China, he caused to be distributed nationwide a letter he had sent to his wife, Jiang Qing, at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution six years earlier:

The situation changes from a great upheaval to a great peace once every seven or eight years. Ghosts and monsters jump out by themselves. . . . Our current task is to sweep out the Rightists in all the Party and throughout the country. We shall launch another movement for sweeping up the ghosts and monsters after seven or eight years, and will launch more of this movement later. ¹⁹

This call to ideological commitment also epitomized Mao’s dilemma as that of any victorious revolution: once revolutionaries seize power, they are obliged to govern hierarchically if they want to avoid either paralysis or chaos. The more sweeping the overthrow, the more hierarchy has to substitute for the consensus that holds a functioning society together. The more elaborate the hierarchy, the more likely it is to turn into another even more elaborate version of the replaced oppressive Establishment.

Thus from the beginning Mao was engaged in a quest whose logical end could only be an attack on Communism’s own institutions, even those he had created himself. Where Leninism had asserted that the advent of Communism would solve the “contradictions” of society, Mao’s philosophy knew no resting place. It was not enough to industrialize the country as the Soviet Union had done. In the quest for the historic Chinese uniqueness, the social order needed to be in constant flux to prevent the sin of “revisionism,” of which Mao increasingly accused post-Stalin Russia. A Communist state, according to Mao, must not turn into a bureaucratic society; the motivating force must be ideology rather than hierarchy.

In this manner, Mao generated a series of built-in contradictions. In pursuit of the Great Harmony, Mao launched the Hundred Flowers Campaign in 1956, which invited public debate and then turned on those intellectuals who practiced it; the Great Leap Forward in 1958, designed to catch up with the West industrially in a three-year period but which led to one of the most pervasive famines in modern history and produced a split in the Communist Party; and the Cultural Revolution in 1966, in which a generation of trained leaders, professors, diplomats, and experts were sent to the countryside to work on farms to learn from the masses.

Millions died to implement the Chairman’s quest for egalitarian virtue. Yet in his rebellion against China’s pervasive bureaucracy, he kept coming up against the dilemma that the campaign to save his people from themselves generated ever larger bureaucracies. In the end, destroying his own disciples turned into Mao’s vast enterprise.

Mao’s faith in the ultimate success of his continuous revolution had three sources: ideology, tradition, and Chinese nationalism. The single most important one was his faith in the resilience, capabilities, and cohesion of the Chinese people. And in truth, it is impossible to think of another people who could have sustained the relentless turmoil that Mao imposed on his society. Or whose leader could have made credible Mao’s oft-repeated threat that the Chinese people would prevail, even if it retreated from all its cities against a foreign invader or suffered tens of millions of casualties in a nuclear war. Mao could do so because of a profound faith in the Chinese people’s ability to retain its essence amidst all vicissitudes.

This was a fundamental difference with the Russian Revolution a generation earlier. Lenin and Trotsky viewed their revolution as a triggering event for world revolution. Convinced that world revolution was imminent, they agreed to cede a third of European Russia to German control in the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk of 1918. Whatever happened to Russia would be subsumed by the imminent revolution in the rest of Europe, which, Lenin and Trotsky assumed, would sweep away the existing political order.

Such an approach would have been unthinkable for Mao, whose revolution was largely Sinocentric. China’s revolution might have an impact on world revolution but, if so, through the efforts and sacrifice and example of the Chinese people. With Mao, the greatness of the Chinese people was always the organizing principle. In an early essay in 1919, he stressed the unique qualities of the Chinese people:

I venture to make a singular assertion: one day, the reform of the Chinese people will be more profound than that of any other people, and the society of the Chinese people will be more radiant than that of any other people. The great union of the Chinese people will be achieved earlier than that of any other place or people. ²⁰

Twenty years later, amidst Japanese invasion and the Chinese civil war, Mao extolled the historic achievements of the Chinese nation in a way that the dynastic rulers could have shared:

Throughout the history of Chinese civilization its agriculture and handicrafts have been renowned for their high level of development; there have been many great thinkers, scientists, inventors, statesmen, soldiers, men of letters and artists, and we have a rich store of classical works. The compass was invented in China very long ago. The art of paper-making was discovered as early as 1,800 years ago. Block-printing was invented 1,300 years ago, and movable type 800 years ago. The use of gunpowder was known in China before the Europeans. Thus China has one of the oldest civilizations in the world; she has a recorded history of nearly 4,000 years. ²¹

Mao kept circling back to a dilemma as ancient as China itself. Intrinsically universal, modern technology poses a threat to any society’s claims to uniqueness. And uniqueness had always been the distinctive claim of Chinese society. To preserve that uniqueness, China had refused to imitate the West in the nineteenth century, risking colonization and incurring humiliation. A century later, one objective of Mao’s Cultural Revolution—from which indeed it derived its name—had been to eradicate precisely those elements of modernization that threatened to involve China in a universal culture.

By 1968, Mao had come full circle. Driven by a mixture of ideological fervor and a premonition of mortality, he had turned to the youth to cleanse the military and the Communist Party and bring into office a new generation of ideologically pure Communists. But reality disappointed the aging leader. It proved impossible to run a country by ideological exaltation. The youths who had heeded Mao’s instructions created chaos rather than commitment and were now in their turn sent to the remote countryside; some of the leaders initially targeted for purification were brought back to reestablish order—especially in the military. By April 1969, nearly half of the Party’s Central Committee—45 percent—were members of the military, compared with 19 percent in 1956; the average age of new members was sixty. ²²

A poignant reminder of this dilemma came up in the first conversation between Mao and President Nixon in February 1972. Nixon complimented Mao on having transformed an ancient civilization, to which Mao replied: “I haven’t been able to change it. I’ve only been able to change a few places in the vicinity of Beijing.” ²³

After a lifetime of titanic struggle to uproot Chinese society, there was not a little pathos in Mao’s resigned recognition of the pervasiveness of Chinese culture and the Chinese people. One of the historically most powerful Chinese rulers had run up against this paradoxical mass—at once obedient and independent, submissive and self-reliant, imposing limits less by direct challenges than by hesitance in executing orders they considered incompatible with the future of their family.

Therefore, in the end, Mao appealed not so much to the material aspects of his Marxist revolution as to its faith. One of Mao’s favorite tales drawn from classical Chinese lore was the story of the “foolish old man” who believed he could move mountains with his bare hands. Mao related the story at a Communist Party conference as follows:

There is an ancient Chinese fable called “The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains.” It tells of an old man who lived in northern China long, long ago and was known as the Foolish Old Man of North Mountain. His house faced south and beyond his doorway stood the two great peaks, Taihang and Wangwu, obstructing the way. He called his sons, and hoe in hand they began to dig up these mountains with great determination. Another greybeard, known as the Wise Old Man, saw them and said derisively, “How silly of you to do this! It is quite impossible for you to dig up these two huge mountains.” The Foolish Old Man replied, “When I die my sons will carry on; when they die, there will be my grandsons, and then their sons and grandsons, and so on to infinity. High as they are, the mountains cannot grow any higher and with every bit we dig, they will be that much lower. Why can’t we clear them away?” Having refuted the Wise Old Man’s wrong view, he went on digging every day, unshaken in his conviction. God was moved by this, and he sent down two angels, who carried the mountains away on their backs. Today, two big mountains lie like a dead weight on the Chinese people. One is imperialism, the other is feudalism. The Chinese Communist Party had long made up its mind to dig them up. We must persevere and work unceasingly, and we, too, will touch God’s heart. ²⁴

An ambivalent combination of faith in the Chinese people and disdain for its traditions enabled Mao to carry out an astonishing tour de force: an impoverished society just emerging from a rending civil war tore itself apart at ever shorter intervals and, during that process, fought wars with the United States and India; challenged the Soviet Union; and restored the frontiers of the Chinese state to nearly their maximum historic extent.

Emerging into a world of two nuclear superpowers, China managed, despite its insistent Communist propaganda, to conduct itself as essentially a geopolitical “free agent” of the Cold War. In the face of its relative weakness, it played a fully independent and highly influential role. China moved from hostility to near alliance with the United States and in the opposite direction with the Soviet Union—from alliance to confrontation. Perhaps most remarkably, China managed, in the end, to break free of the Soviet Union and come out on the “winning” side of the Cold War.

Still, with all its achievements, Mao’s insistence on turning the ancient system upside down could not escape the eternal rhythm of Chinese life. Forty years after his death, after a journey violent, dramatic, and searing, his successors again described their now increasingly well-off society as Confucian. In 2011, a statue of Confucius was placed in Tiananmen Square within sight of Mao’s mausoleum—the only other personality so honored. Only a people as resilient and patient as the Chinese could emerge unified and dynamic after such a roller coaster ride through history.

CHAPTER 5

Triangular Diplomacy and the Korean War

I N HIS FIRST MAJOR ACT of foreign policy, Mao Zedong traveled to Moscow on December 16, 1949, barely two months after having proclaimed the People’s Republic of China. It was his first trip outside China. His purpose was to form an alliance with the Communist superpower, the Soviet Union. Instead, the meeting inaugurated a series of moves that would culminate in transforming the hoped-for alliance into a triangular diplomacy by which the United States, China, and the Soviet Union maneuvered with and against each other.

In his first meeting with Stalin, which took place on the day of his arrival, Mao stressed China’s need for “a period of 3–5 years of peace, which would be used to bring the economy back to pre-war levels and to stabilize the country in general.” ¹ Yet within less than a year of Mao’s trip, the United States and China would be at war with each other.

It all came about through the machinations of a seemingly minor player: Kim Il-sung, the ambitious Soviet-installed ruler of North Korea, a state that had been created only two years earlier by agreement between the United States and the Soviet Union based on the zones of liberated Korea each had occupied at the end of the war against Japan.

As it happened, Stalin had little interest in helping China recover. He had not forgotten the defection of Josip Broz Tito, the leader of Yugoslavia and the only European Communist leader to have achieved power by his own efforts and not as the result of Soviet occupation. Tito had broken with the Soviet Union during the preceding year. Stalin was determined to avoid a similar outcome in Asia. He understood the geopolitical significance of the Communist victory in China; his strategic goal was to manipulate its consequences and benefit from its impact.

Stalin could have little doubt that, in Mao, he was dealing with a formidable figure. The Chinese Communists had prevailed in the Chinese civil war against Soviet expectations and by ignoring Soviet advice. Though Mao had announced China’s intent to “lean to one side”—Moscow’s—in international affairs, of all Communist leaders he was among the least beholden to Moscow for his position, and he now governed the most populous Communist country. Thus the encounter between the two Communist giants led to an intricate minuet culminating, six months later, with the Korean War, which involved China and the United States directly and the Soviet Union by proxy.

Convinced that the raging American debate over who “lost” China augured an eventual American attempt to reverse the outcome—a view to which Communist ideology led him, in any event—Mao strove for the greatest possible material and military support from the Soviet Union. A formal alliance was his objective.

But the two Communist autocrats were not destined to cooperate easily. Stalin had, by that time, been in power for nearly thirty years. He had triumphed over all domestic opposition and led his country to victory against the Nazi invaders at horrific cost in human life. The organizer of periodic purges involving millions of victims and, even then, in the process of starting a new set of purges, Stalin was by now beyond ideology. His leadership was instead marked by a ruthless, cynical Machiavellianism based on his brutal interpretation of Russian national history.

During China’s long struggles with Japan in the 1930s and 1940s, Stalin had deprecated the potential of the Communist forces and disparaged Mao’s rural, peasant-based strategy. Throughout, Moscow had maintained official ties with the Nationalist government. At the end of the war against Japan in 1945, Stalin had obliged Chiang Kai-shek to grant the Soviet Union privileges in Manchuria and Xinjiang comparable to those achieved by the czarist regime, and to recognize Outer Mongolia as a nominally independent People’s Republic under Soviet control. Stalin actively encouraged separatist forces in Xinjiang.

At Yalta that same year, Stalin insisted to his colleagues, Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill, on international recognition for Soviet special rights in Manchuria, including a naval base at Lushun (the old Port Arthur) and a harbor in Dalian, as a condition for entering the war against Japan. In August 1945, Moscow and the Nationalist authorities signed a treaty affirming the Yalta agreements.

In these circumstances, the meeting of the two Communist titans in Moscow could not possibly be the warm embrace shared ideology called for. As Nikita Khrushchev, then a member of Stalin’s Politburo, recalled:

Stalin loved to show off his hospitality to his esteemed guests, and he knew how to do it very well. But during Mao’s stay, Stalin would sometimes not lay eyes on him for days at a time—and since Stalin neither saw Mao nor ordered anyone else to entertain him, no one dared go see him. . . . Mao let it be known that if the situation continued, he would leave. When Stalin heard about Mao’s complaints, I think he had another dinner for him. ²

It was clear from the outset that Stalin did not consider the Communist victory a reason for giving up the gains he had made for the Soviet Union as a price for entering the war against Japan. Mao began the conversation by stressing his need for peace, telling Stalin: “Decisions on the most important questions in China hinge on the prospects for a peaceful future. With this in mind the [Central Committee of the Communist Party of China] entrusted me to ascertain from you, comr[ade] Stalin, in what way and for how long will international peace be preserved.” ³

Stalin was reassuring about prospects for peace, perhaps to slow down any request for emergency assistance and to minimize the urgency of rushing into an alliance:

The question of peace greatly occupies the Soviet Union as well, though we have already had peace for the past four years. With regards to China, there is no immediate threat at the present time: Japan has yet to stand up on its feet and is thus not ready for war; America, though it screams war, is actually afraid of war more than anything; Europe is afraid of war; in essence, there is no one to fight with China, not unless Kim Il Sung decides to invade China? Peace will depend on our efforts. If we continue to be friendly, peace can last not only 5–10 years, but 20—25 years and perhaps even longer. ⁴

If that was the case, a military alliance was really not needed. Stalin made his reserve explicit when Mao formally raised the issue. He made the stunning assertion that a new treaty of alliance was superfluous; the existing treaty, which had been signed with Chiang Kai-shek in quite different circumstances, would suffice. Stalin buttressed this argument with the claim that the Soviet position was designed to avoid giving “America and England the legal grounds to raise questions about modifying” the Yalta agreements. ⁵

In effect, Stalin was arguing that Communism in China was best protected by a Russian agreement made with the government Mao had just overthrown. Stalin liked this argument so much that he also applied it to the concessions the Soviet Union had extracted from Chiang Kai-shek with respect to Xinjiang and Manchuria, which, in his view, should now be continued at Mao’s request. Mao, ever the fervent nationalist, rejected these ideas by redefining Stalin’s request. The present arrangements along the Manchurian railroad, he argued, corresponded to “Chinese interests” insofar as they provided “a training school for the preparation of Chinese cadres in railroad and industry.” ⁶ Chinese personnel needed to take over as soon as they could be trained. Soviet advisors could stay until this training was completed.

Amidst protestations of amity and affirmations of ideological solidarity, two major Machiavellians were maneuvering over ultimate predominance (and over sizeable tracts of territory around China’s periphery). Stalin was the senior and, for a time, more powerful; Mao, in a geopolitical sense, the more self-confident. Both were superior strategists and therefore understood that, on the course they were formally charting, their interests were almost bound to clash eventually.

After a month of haggling, Stalin yielded and agreed to a treaty of alliance. However, he insisted Dalian and Lushun would remain Soviet bases until a peace treaty with Japan was signed. Moscow and Beijing finally concluded a Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance on February 14, 1950. It provided what Mao had sought and Stalin had tried to avoid: an obligation of mutual assistance in case of conflict with a third power. Theoretically, it obliged China to come to the assistance of the Soviet Union globally. Operationally, it gave Mao a safety net if the various looming crises around China’s borders were to escalate.

The price China had to pay was steep: mining, railroad, and other concessions in Manchuria and Xinjiang; the recognition of the independence of Outer Mongolia; Soviet use of Dalian harbor; and the use, until 1952, of the Lushun naval base. Years later, Mao would still complain bitterly to Khrushchev about Stalin’s attempt to establish “semi-colonies” in China by means of these concessions. ⁷

As for Stalin, the emergence of a potentially powerful eastern neighbor presented a geopolitical nightmare. No Russian ruler could ignore the extraordinary demographic disparity between China and Russia along a two-thousand-mile frontier: a Chinese population of over five hundred million adjoined a Russian total of less than forty million in Siberia. At what point in China’s development would numbers begin to matter? Seeming consensus on ideology emphasized, rather than diminished, the concern. Stalin was too cynical to doubt that when powerful men achieve eminence by what they consider their own efforts, they resist the claim of superior orthodoxy by an ally, however close. Stalin, having taken the measure of Mao, must have known that he would never concede doctrinal preeminence.

Acheson and the Lure of Chinese Titoism

An episode that occurred during Mao’s stay in Moscow was symptomatic of both the fraught relations within the Communist world as well as the potential and looming role of the United States in that emerging triangle. The occasion was an attempt by Secretary of State Dean Acheson to answer the chorus of domestic critics on who had “lost” China. Under his instructions, the State Department had issued a White Paper in August 1949 addressing the collapse of the Nationalists. Though the United States still recognized the Nationalists as the legitimate government for all of China, the White Paper described them as “corrupt, reactionary and inefficient.” ⁸ Acheson had therefore concluded, and he advised Truman in the White Paper’s letter of transmittal, that

[t]he unfortunate but inescapable fact is that the ominous result of the civil war in China was beyond the control of the government of the United States. Nothing that this country did or could have done within the reasonable limits of its capabilities could have changed that result. . . . It was the product of internal Chinese forces, forces which this country tried to influence but could not. ⁹

In a speech to the National Press Club on January 12, 1950, Acheson reinforced the White Paper’s message and put forward a sweeping new Asia policy. His speech contained three points of fundamental importance. The first was that Washington was washing its hands of the Chinese civil war. The Nationalists, Acheson proclaimed, had displayed both political inadequacy as well as “the grossest incompetence ever experienced by any military command.” The Communists, Acheson reasoned, “did not create this condition,” but had skillfully exploited the opening it provided. Chiang Kai-shek was now “a refugee on a small island off the coast of China with the remnants of his forces.” ¹⁰

Having conceded the mainland to Communist control and whatever geopolitical impact this might have, it made no sense to resist Communist attempts to occupy Taiwan. This was in fact the judgment of NSC-48/2, a document reflecting national policy prepared by the National Security Council staff and approved by the President. Adopted on December 30, 1949, it concluded that “the strategic importance of Formosa [Taiwan] does not justify overt military action.” Truman had made a similar point at a press conference on January 5: “The United States Government will not provide military aid or advice to Chinese forces on Formosa.” ¹¹

Second and even more significantly, Acheson left no doubt about who was threatening China’s independence in the long run:

This Communistic concept and techniques have armed Russian imperialism with a new and most insidious weapon of penetration. Armed with these new powers, what is happening in China is that the Soviet Union is detaching the northern provinces [areas] of China from China and is attaching them to the Soviet Union. This process is complete in outer Mongolia. It is nearly complete in Manchuria, and I am sure that in inner Mongolia and in Sinkiang there are very happy reports coming from Soviet agents to Moscow. This is what is going on. ¹²

The final new point in Acheson’s speech was even more profound in its implications for the future. For it did nothing less than suggest an explicit Titoist option for China. Proposing to base relations with China on national interest, Acheson asserted that the integrity of China was an American national interest regardless of China’s domestic ideology: “We must take the position we have always taken—that anyone who violates the integrity of China is the enemy of China and is acting contrary to our own interest.” ¹³

Acheson was laying out a prospect for a new Sino-American relationship based on national interest, not ideology:

[Today] is a day in which the old relationships between east and west are gone, relationships which at their worst were exploitation, and which at their best were paternalism. That relationship is over, and the relationship of east and west must now be in the Far East one of mutual respect and mutual helpfulness. ¹⁴

Such a view toward Communist China would not be put forward again by a senior American official for another two decades, when Richard Nixon advanced similar propositions to his Cabinet.

Acheson’s speech was brilliantly crafted to touch most of Stalin’s raw nerves. And Stalin was in fact lured into trying to do something about it. He dispatched his foreign minister, Andrey Vyshinsky, and his senior minister, Vyacheslav Molotov, to call on Mao, still in Moscow for the alliance negotiations, to warn him of the “slander” being spread by Acheson and, in effect, inviting reassurance. It was a somewhat frantic gesture, not in keeping with Stalin’s usual perspicacity. For the very request for reassurance defines the potential capacity for unreliability of the other side. If a partner is thought capable of desertion, why would reassurance be credible? If not, why would it be necessary? Moreover, both Mao and Stalin knew that Acheson’s “slander” was an accurate description of the current Sino-Soviet relationship. ¹⁵

The Soviet pair asked Mao to disavow Acheson’s accusations that the Soviet Union might seek to detach parts of China, or a dominant position in them, and recommended that he describe it as an insult to China. Mao did not comment to Stalin’s emissaries except to ask for a copy of the speech and inquire about Acheson’s possible motives. After a few days, Mao approved a statement sarcastically attacking Acheson—but in contrast to Moscow’s response, which was issued in the name of the Soviet foreign minister, Beijing left it to the head of the People’s Republic of China’s official news bureau to reject Acheson’s overtures. ¹⁶ The language of the statement decried Washington’s “slander” but its relatively low protocol level kept China’s options open. Mao chose not to address the full implications of his view while he was in Moscow, trying to construct a safety net for his still isolated country.

Mao revealed his true feelings about the possibility of separating from Moscow later, in December 1956, with characteristic complexity, in the guise of rejecting the option once again albeit in a more muted way:

China and the Soviet Union stand together. . . . [T]here are still people who have doubts about this policy. . . . They think China should take a middle course and be a bridge between the Soviet Union and the United States. . . . If China stands between the Soviet Union and the United States, she appears to be in a favorable position, and to be independent, but actually she cannot be independent. The United States is not reliable, she would give you a little something, but not much. How could imperialism give you a full meal? It won’t. ¹⁷

But what if the United States were ready to offer what Mao called “a full meal”? That question would not be answered until 1972, when President Nixon began his overtures to China.

Kim Il-sung and the Outbreak of War

Matters could have proceeded as a kind of shadowboxing for several, perhaps many, years as the two morbidly suspicious absolute rulers were calibrating each other by ascribing their own motives to their counterpart. Instead Kim Il-sung, the North Korean leader whom Stalin had ridiculed in his first meeting with Mao in December 1949, entered the geopolitical fray with startling results. In their Moscow meeting, Stalin had fended off a military alliance between China and the Soviet Union by mockingly suggesting that the only threat to peace would come from North Korea, if “Kim Il Sung decides to invade China.” ¹⁸

That is not what Kim Il-sung decided. Instead, he chose to invade South Korea and, in the process, brought the major countries to the edge of a global war and China and the United States into actual military confrontation.

Before the North Korean invasion of the South, it would have seemed inconceivable that a China barely emerging from civil war would go to war against a nuclear-armed America. That the war broke out is due to the suspicions the two Communist giants had of each other and to Kim Il-sung’s ability, though wholly dependent on his incomparably more powerful allies, to manipulate their mutual suspicions.

Korea had been incorporated into imperial Japan in 1910 and quickly became the jumping-off point for Japanese incursions into China. In 1945, after Japan’s defeat, Korea was occupied in the North by Soviet armies, in the South by American forces. The dividing line between them, the 38th parallel, was arbitrary. It simply reflected the limits their armies had reached at the end of the war. ¹⁹

When the occupying powers withdrew in 1949 and the hitherto occupied zones became fully sovereign states, neither felt comfortable within its boundaries. Their rulers, Kim Il-sung in the North and Syngman Rhee in the South, had spent their lives fighting for their national causes. They saw no reason to abandon them now, and both claimed the leadership for all of the country. Military clashes along the dividing line were frequent.

Starting with the withdrawal of American forces from South Korea in June 1949, Kim Il-sung had throughout 1949 and 1950 tried to convince both Stalin and Mao to acquiesce in a full-scale invasion of the South. Both at first rejected the proposal. During Mao’s visit to Moscow, Stalin asked Mao’s opinion of such an invasion, and Mao, though favorable to the objective, judged the risk of American intervention as too high. ²⁰ He thought any project to conquer South Korea should be deferred until the completion of the Chinese civil war through the conquest of Taiwan.

It was precisely this Chinese aim that provided one of the incentives for Kim Il-sung’s project. However ambiguous American statements, Kim Il-sung was convinced that the United States was unlikely to accept two Communist military conquests. He was therefore impatient to achieve his objectives in South Korea before Washington had second thoughts should China succeed in occupying Taiwan.

A few months later, in April 1950, Stalin reversed his previous position. During a visit by Kim Il-sung in Moscow, Stalin gave the green light to Kim’s request. Stalin stressed his conviction that the United States would not intervene. A Soviet diplomatic document recounted that

Comrade Stalin confirmed to Kim Il Sung that the international environment has sufficiently changed to permit a more active stance on the unification of Korea. . . . Now that China has signed a treaty of alliance with the USSR, Americans will be even more hesitant to challenge the Communists in Asia. According to information coming from the United States, it is really so. The prevailing mood is not to interfere. Such a mood is reinforced by the fact that the USSR now has the atomic bomb and that our positions are solidified in Pyongyang. ²¹

Thereafter there is no record of a direct Chinese-Soviet dialogue on the subject. Kim Il-sung and his envoys became the vehicle through which the two Communist giants communicated with each other on Korea. Both Stalin and Mao were maneuvering for dominant influence in Korea or, at a minimum, to keep the other partner from achieving it. During that process, Mao agreed to transfer up to fifty thousand ethnic Korean troops who served in the People’s Liberation Army units to North Korea with their weapons. Was his motive to encourage Kim Il-sung’s design or to prove his ideological support while limiting a final Chinese military commitment? Whatever Mao’s ultimate intentions, the practical result was to leave Pyongyang in a significantly strengthened military position.

In the American domestic debate about the Korean War, Dean Acheson’s speech on Asia policy in January 1950 came to be widely criticized for placing Korea outside the American “defensive perimeter” in the Pacific, thereby allegedly giving a “green light” to the North Korean invasion. In its account of American commitments in the Pacific, Acheson’s speech was not an innovation. General Douglas MacArthur, Commander-in-Chief of the U.S. Far East Command, had similarly placed Korea outside the American defense perimeter in a March 1949 interview in Tokyo:

Now the Pacific has become an Anglo-Saxon lake and our line of defense runs through the chain of islands fringing the coast of Asia.

It starts from the Philippines and continues through the Ryukyu Archipelago, which includes its main bastion, Okinawa. Then it bends back through Japan and the Aleutian Island chain to Alaska. ²²

Since then, the United States had withdrawn the majority of its forces from Korea. A Korean aid bill was currently before Congress, where it faced considerable resistance. Acheson was left to repeat MacArthur’s sketch, stating that the “military security of the Pacific area” involved a “defensive perimeter [that] runs along the Aleutians to Japan and then goes to the Ryukyus . . . [and] runs from the Ryukyus to the Philippine Islands.” ²³

On the specific question of Korea, Acheson presented an ambiguous account reflecting the current state of American indecision. Now that South Korea was “an independent and sovereign country recognized by nearly all the rest of the world,” Acheson reasoned that “our responsibilities are more direct and our opportunities more clear” (though what these responsibilities and opportunities were, Acheson did not explain—specifically whether they included defense against invasion). If an armed attack were to occur in an area of the Pacific not explicitly to the south or east of the American defensive perimeter, Acheson suggested that “[t]he initial reliance must be on the people attacked to resist it and then upon the commitments of the entire civilized world under the Charter of the United Nations.” ²⁴ To the extent deterrence requires clarity about a country’s intention, Acheson’s speech missed the mark.

No specific reference to this aspect of Acheson’s speech has so far emerged in any Chinese or Soviet documents. Recently available diplomatic documents do suggest, however, that Stalin based his reversal in part on access to NSC-48/2, which his spy network, probably through the British turncoat Donald Maclean, had uncovered. This report also specifically placed Korea outside the U.S. defense perimeter. Since it was highly classified, the document would have seemed particularly credible to Soviet analysts. ²⁵

Another element in Stalin’s reversal may have been his disenchantment with Mao stemming from the negotiations leading to the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship described earlier. Mao had made it abundantly clear that Russian special privileges in China would not last long. Russian control of the warm-water port of Dalian was bound to be temporary. Stalin may well have concluded that a unified Communist Korea might prove more accommodating to Soviet naval needs.

Ever devious and complex, Stalin urged Kim to speak about this subject with Mao, noting that he had “a good understanding of Oriental matters.” ²⁶ In reality, Stalin was shifting as much responsibility as he could to Chinese shoulders. He told Kim not to “expect great assistance and support from the Soviet Union,” explaining that Moscow was concerned and preoccupied with “the situation in the West.” ²⁷ And he warned Kim: “If you should get kicked in the teeth, I shall not lift a finger. You have to ask Mao for all the help.” ²⁸ It was authentically Stalin: haughty, long-range, manipulative, cautious, and crass, producing a geopolitical benefit for the Soviet Union while shifting the risks of the effort to China.

Stalin, who had encouraged the outbreak of the Second World War by freeing Hitler’s rear through the Nazi-Soviet pact, applied his practiced skill in hedging his bets. If the United States did intervene, the threat to China would increase as would China’s dependence on the Soviet Union. If China responded to the American challenge, it would require massive Soviet assistance, achieving the same result. If China stayed out, Moscow’s influence in a disillusioned North Korea would grow.

Kim next flew to Beijing for a secret visit with Mao on May 13–16, 1950. In a meeting on the night of his arrival, Kim recounted to Mao Stalin’s approval of the invasion plan and asked Mao to confirm his support.

To limit his risks even further, Stalin, shortly before the attack he had encouraged, added reinsurance by withdrawing all Soviet advisors from North Korean units. When that hamstrung the performance of the North Korean army, he returned Soviet advisors, albeit under the cover of their being correspondents from TASS, the Soviet press agency.

How a minor ally of both Communist giants unleashed a war of major global consequences was summed up by Mao’s translator Shi Zhe to the historian Chen Jian, who paraphrased the content of the key conversation between Mao and Kim Il-sung:

[Kim] told Mao that Stalin had approved his plans to attack the South. Mao solicited Kim’s opinions of possible American response if North Korea attacked the South, stressing that as the Syngman Rhee regime had been propped up by the United States and that as Korea was close to Japan the possibility of an American intervention could not be totally excluded. Kim, however, seemed confident that the United States would not commit its troops, or at least, it would have no time to dispatch them, because the North Koreans would be able to finish fighting in two to three weeks. Mao did ask Kim if North Korea needed China’s military support, and offered to deploy three Chinese armies along the Chinese-Korean border. Kim responded “arrogantly” (in Mao’s own words, according to Shi Zhe) that with the North Koreans’ own forces and the cooperation of Communist guerillas in the South, they could solve the problem by themselves, and China’s military involvement was therefore unnecessary. ²⁹

Kim’s presentation apparently shook Mao sufficiently that he ended the meeting early and ordered Zhou Enlai to cable Moscow requesting an “urgent answer” and “personal clarification” from Stalin. ³⁰ The next day the reply arrived from Moscow, with Stalin again shifting the onus back to Mao. The cable explained that

[i]n his talks with the Korean comrades, [Stalin] and his friends . . . agreed with the Koreans regarding the plan to move toward reunification. In this regard a qualification was made, that the issue should be decided finally by the Chinese and Korean comrades together, and in case of disagreement by the Chinese comrades the decision on the issue should be postponed pending further discussion. ³¹

This, of course, placed the blame for vetoing the project entirely on Mao. Further disassociating himself from the outcome (and providing Kim with an additional opportunity for exaggeration and misrepresentation), Stalin preempted a return telegram from Beijing by explaining that “[t]he Korean comrades can tell you the details of the conversation.” ³²

No records of Mao and Kim’s subsequent conversation have yet been made available. Kim returned to Pyongyang on May 16 with Mao’s blessing for an invasion of South Korea—or at least that is how he described it to Moscow. Mao may well have also calculated that acquiescence in the conquest of South Korea might establish a premise for Soviet military assistance for a subsequent Chinese attack on Taiwan. If so, it was a grievous miscalculation. Because even had the United States stood aloof from the conquest of South Korea, American public opinion would not have allowed the Truman administration to ignore another Communist military move in the Taiwan Strait.

Ten years later, Moscow and Beijing still could not agree on which side had actually given Kim the final green light to launch his invasion. Meeting in Bucharest in June 1960, Khrushchev, who was by then Soviet General Secretary, insisted to Chinese Politburo member Peng Zhen that “if Mao Zedong had not agreed, Stalin would not have done what he did.” Peng retorted that this was “totally wrong” and that “Mao Zedong was against the war. . . . [I]t was Stalin who agreed.” ³³

The two Communist giants thus slid into a war without addressing the global implications should Kim Il-sung’s and Stalin’s optimistic forecasts prove to be erroneous. Once the United States entered the war, they would be forced to consider them.

American Intervention: Resisting Aggression

The trouble with policy planning is that its analyses cannot foresee the mood of the moment when a decision has to be made. The various statements of Truman, Acheson, and MacArthur had correctly reflected American thinking when they were made. The nature of American commitment to international security was a subject of domestic controversy and had not ever considered the defense of Korea. NATO was still in the process of being formed. But when American policymakers came face-to-face with an actual Communist invasion, they ignored their policy papers.

The United States surprised the Communist leaders after Kim Il-sung’s attack on June 25, not only by intervening but by linking the Korean War to the Chinese civil war. American ground forces were sent to Korea to establish a defensive perimeter around Pusan, the port city in the south. That decision was supported by a U.N. Security Council resolution made possible because the Soviet Union absented itself from the vote in protest against the fact that the Chinese seat in the Security Council was still occupied by Taipei. Two days later, President Truman ordered the U.S. Pacific Fleet to “neutralize” the Taiwan Strait by preventing military attacks in either direction across it. The motive was to obtain the widest congressional and public support for the Korean War; there is no evidence that Washington considered that it was, in fact, expanding the war into a confrontation with China.

Until that decision, Mao had planned to attack Taiwan as his next military move and had assembled major forces in southeast China’s Fujian province to that end. The United States had conveyed in many statements—including a press conference by Truman on January 5—that it would not block such an effort.

Truman’s decision to send the Seventh Fleet to the Taiwan Strait was intended to placate public opinion and to limit American risk in Korea. In announcing the fleet’s dispatch, Truman cited the importance of Taiwan’s defense but also called on “the Chinese Government on Formosa to cease all air and sea operations against the mainland.” Truman further warned: “The Seventh Fleet will see that this is done.” ³⁴

To Mao, an evenhanded gesture was unimaginable; he interpreted the assurances as hypocrisy. As far as Mao was concerned, the United States was reentering the Chinese civil war. The day after Truman’s announcement, on June 28, 1950, Mao addressed the Eighth Session of the Central People’s Government Committee, during which he described the American moves as an invasion of Asia:

The U.S. invasion in Asia can only arouse broad and determined resistance among the people of Asia. Truman said on January 5 that the United States would not intervene in Taiwan. Now he himself has proved he was simply lying. He has also torn up all international agreements guaranteeing that the United States would not interfere in China’s internal affairs. ³⁵

In China, wei qi instincts sprang into action. By sending troops to Korea and the fleet to the Taiwan Strait, the United States had, in Chinese eyes, placed two stones on the wei qi board, both of which menaced China with the dreaded encirclement.

The United States had no military plan for Korea when the war broke out. The American purpose in the Korean War was declared to be to defeat “aggression,” a legal concept denoting the unauthorized use of force against a sovereign entity. How would success be defined? Was it a return to the status quo ante along the 38th parallel, in which case the aggressor would learn that the worst outcome was that he did not win—possibly encouraging another attempt? Or did it require the destruction of North Korea’s military capacity to undertake aggression? There is no evidence that this question was ever addressed in the early stages of America’s military commitment, partly because all governmental attention was needed to defend the perimeter around Pusan. The practical result was to let military operations determine political decisions.

After MacArthur’s stunning September 1950 victory at Inchon—where a surprise amphibious landing far from the Pusan front halted North Korean momentum and opened a route to the recapture of the South Korean capital of Seoul—the Truman administration opted for continuing military operations until Korea was reunified. It assumed that Beijing would accept the presence of American forces along the traditional invasion route into China.

The decision to press forward with operations inside North Korean territory was formally authorized by a United Nations resolution on October 7, this time by the General Assembly under a recently adopted parliamentary device, the Uniting for Peace Resolution, which allowed the General Assembly to make decisions on international security by a two-thirds vote. It authorized “[a]ll constituent acts” to bring about “a unified, independent and democratic government in the sovereign State of Korea.” ³⁶ Chinese intervention against U.S. forces was believed to be beyond Chinese capabilities.

None of these views remotely coincided with the way Beijing regarded international affairs. As soon as American forces intervened in the Taiwan Strait, Mao treated the Seventh Fleet’s deployment as an “invasion” of Asia. China and the United States were approaching a clash by misinterpreting each other’s strategic design. The United States strove to oblige China to accept its concept for international order, based on international organizations like the United Nations, to which it could not imagine an alternative. From the outset, Mao had no intention to accept an international system in the design of which China had no voice. As a result, the outcome of the American military strategy was inevitably going to be at best an armistice along whatever dividing line emerged—along the Yalu River, which denoted the border between North Korea and China, if the American design prevailed; along some other agreed line if China intervened or the United States stopped unilaterally short of Korea’s northern frontier (for example, at the 38th parallel or at a line, Pyongyang to Wonsan, which emerged later in a Mao message to Zhou).

What was most unlikely was Chinese acquiescence in an American presence at a border that was a traditional invasion route into China and specifically the base from which Japan had undertaken the occupation of Manchuria and the invasion of northern China. China was all the less likely to be passive when such a posture involved a strategic setback on two fronts: the Taiwan Strait and Korea—partly because Mao had, to some extent, lost control over events in the prelude to Korea. The misconceptions of both sides compounded each other. The United States did not expect the invasion; China did not expect the reaction. Each side reinforced the other’s misconceptions by its own actions. At the end of the process stood two years of war and twenty years of alienation.

Chinese Reactions: Another Approach to Deterrence

No student of military affairs would have thought it conceivable that the People’s Liberation Army, barely finished with the civil war and largely equipped with captured Nationalist weapons, would take on a modern army backed up by nuclear weapons. But Mao was not a conventional military strategist. Mao’s actions in the Korean War require an understanding of how he viewed what, in Western strategy, would be called deterrence or even preemption and which, in Chinese thinking, combines the long-range, strategic, and psychological elements.

In the West, the Cold War and the destructiveness of nuclear weapons have produced the concept of deterrence: to pose risks of destruction to a potential aggressor out of proportion to any possible gain. The efficacy of the threat is measured by things that do not happen, that is, the wars being avoided.

For Mao, the Western concept of deterrence was too passive. He rejected a posture in which China was obliged to wait for an attack. Wherever possible, he strove for the initiative. On one level, this was similar to the Western concept of preemption—anticipating an attack by launching the first blow. But in the Western doctrine, preemption seeks victory and a military advantage. Mao’s approach to preemption differed in the extraordinary attention he paid to psychological elements. His motivating force was less to inflict a decisive military first blow than to change the psychological balance, not so much to defeat the enemy as to alter his calculus of risks. As we shall see in the later chapters, Chinese actions in the Taiwan Strait Crises of 1954–58, the Indian border clash of 1962, the conflict with the Soviets along the Ussuri River in 1969–71, and the Sino-Vietnam War of 1979 all had the common feature of a sudden blow followed quickly by a political phase. Having restored the psychological equation, in Chinese eyes, genuine deterrence has been achieved. ³⁷

When the Chinese view of preemption encounters the Western concept of deterrence, a vicious circle can result: acts conceived as defensive in China may be treated as aggressive by the outside world; deterrent moves by the West may be interpreted in China as encirclement. The United States and China wrestled with this dilemma repeatedly during the Cold War; to some extent they have not yet found a way to transcend it.

Conventional wisdom has ascribed the Chinese decision to enter the Korean War to the American decision to cross the 38th parallel in early October 1950 and the advance of U.N. forces to the Yalu River, the Chinese-Korean border. Another theory was innate Communist aggressiveness on the model of the European dictators a decade earlier. Recent scholarship demonstrates that neither theory was correct. Mao and his colleagues had no strategic designs on Korea in the sense of challenging its sovereignty; before the war they were more concerned about balancing Russia there. Nor did they expect to challenge the United States militarily. They entered the war only after long deliberations and much hesitation as a kind of preemptive move.

The triggering event for planning was the initial dispatch of American troops to Korea coupled with the neutralization of the Taiwan Strait. From that moment, Mao ordered planning for Chinese entry into the Korean War for the purpose, at a minimum, of preventing the collapse of North Korea—and occasionally for the maximal revolutionary aim of expelling American forces from the peninsula entirely. ³⁸ He assumed—well before American or South Korean forces had moved north of the 38th parallel—that, unless China intervened, North Korea would be overwhelmed. Stopping the American advance to the Yalu was a subsidiary element. It created, in Mao’s mind, an opportunity for a surprise attack and a chance to mobilize public opinion; it was not the principal motivating factor. Once the United States repelled the initial North Korean advance in August 1950, Chinese intervention became highly probable; when it turned the tide of battle by outflanking the North Korean army at Inchon and then crossed the 38th parallel, it grew inevitable.

China’s strategy generally exhibits three characteristics: meticulous analysis of long-term trends, careful study of tactical options, and detached exploration of operational decisions. Zhou Enlai started that process by chairing conferences of Chinese leaders on July 7 and July 10—two weeks after the American deployment in Korea—to analyze the impact on China of American actions. The participants agreed to redeploy troops originally intended for the invasion of Taiwan to the Korean border and to constitute them as the Northeast Border Defense Army with the mission “to defend the borders of the Northeast, and to prepare to support the war operations of the Korean People’s Army if necessary.” By the end of July—or more than two months before U.S. forces crossed the 38th parallel—over 250,000 Chinese troops had been assembled on the Korean border. ³⁹

The Politburo and Central Military Commission meetings continued through August. On August 4, six weeks before the Inchon landing, when the military situation was still favorable to the invading North Korean forces and the front was still deep in South Korea around the city of Pusan, Mao, skeptical about North Korea’s capabilities, told the Politburo: “If the American imperialists are victorious, they will become dizzy with success, and then be in a position to threaten us. We have to help Korea; we have to assist them. This can be in the form of a volunteer force, and be at a time of our choosing, but we must start to prepare.” ⁴⁰ At the same meeting, Zhou made the same basic analysis: “If the American imperialists crush North Korea, they will be swollen with arrogance, and peace will be threatened. If we want to assure victory, we must increase the China factor; this may produce a change in the international situation. We must take a long-range view.” ⁴¹ In other words, it was the defeat of the still advancing North Korea, not the particular location of American forces, that China needed to resist. The next day, Mao ordered his top commanders to “complete their preparations within this month and be ready for orders to carry out war operations.” ⁴²

On August 13, China’s 13th Army Corps held a conference of senior military leaders to discuss this mission. Though expressing reservations about the August deadline, the conference participants concluded that China “should take the initiative, cooperate with the Korean People’s Army, march forward without reluctance, and break up the enemy’s dream of aggression.” ⁴³

In the meantime, staff analysis and map exercises were taking place. They led the Chinese to conclusions Westerners would have considered counterintuitive, to the effect that China could win a war against the American armed forces. American commitments around the world, so the argument ran, would limit U.S. deployment to a maximum of 500,000, while China had an army of four million to draw on. China’s proximity to the battlefield gave it a logistical advantage. Chinese planners thought they would have a psychological advantage too because most of the world’s people would support China. ⁴⁴

Not even the possibility of a nuclear strike daunted the Chinese planners—probably because they had no firsthand experience with nuclear weapons and no means of acquiring them. They concluded (though not without some prominent dissenters) that an American nuclear response was unlikely in the face of the Soviet nuclear capacity, as well as the risk, due to the “jigsaw pattern” of troops on the peninsula, that an American nuclear strike on Chinese troops advancing into Korea might destroy U.S. forces as well. ⁴⁵

On August 26, Zhou, in a talk to the Central Military Commission, summed up the Chinese strategy. Beijing should “not treat the Korean problem merely as one of concerning a brother country or as one related to the interests of the Northeast.” Instead Korea “should be regarded as an important international issue.” Korea, Zhou argued, “is indeed the focus of the struggles in the world. . . . After conquering Korea, the United States will certainly turn to Vietnam and other colonial countries. Therefore the Korean problem is at least the key to the East.” ⁴⁶ Zhou concluded that due to recent North Korean reversals, “Our duty is now much heavier . . . and we should prepare for the worst and prepare quickly.” Zhou stressed the need for secrecy, so that “we could enter the war and give the enemy a sudden blow.” ⁴⁷

All of this was taking place weeks before MacArthur’s amphibious landing at Inchon (which a Chinese study group had predicted) and well over a month before U.N. forces crossed the 38th parallel. In short, China entered the war based on a carefully considered assessment of strategic trends, not as a reaction to an American tactical maneuver—nor out of a legalistic determination to defend the sanctity of the 38th parallel. A Chinese offensive was a preemptive strategy against dangers that had not yet materialized and based on judgments about ultimate American purposes toward China that were misapprehended. It was also an expression of the crucial role Korea played in China’s long-range calculations—a condition perhaps even more relevant in the contemporary world. Mao’s insistence on his course was also probably influenced by a belief that it was the only way to remedy his acquiescence in the Kim Il-sung and Stalin strategy of invasion. Otherwise he might have been blamed by other leaders for the worsening of China’s strategic situation by the presence of the Seventh Fleet in the Taiwan Strait and of American forces on China’s borders.

The obstacles to Chinese intervention were so daunting that all of Mao’s leadership was needed to achieve the approval of his colleagues. Two major commanders, including Lin Biao, refused the command of the Northeast Border Defense Army on various pretexts before Mao found in Peng Dehuai a commander prepared to undertake the assignment.

Mao prevailed, as he had in all key decisions, and preparations for the entry of Chinese forces into Korea went inexorably forward. October saw American and allied forces moving toward the Yalu, determined to unify Korea and to shelter it under a U.N. resolution. Their purpose was to defend the new status quo with these forces, technically constituting a U.N. command. The movement of the two armies toward each other thus acquired a foreordained quality about it; the Chinese were preparing a blow while the Americans and their allies remained oblivious to the challenge waiting for them at the end of their march north.

Zhou was careful to set the diplomatic stage. On September 24 he protested to the United Nations what he characterized as American efforts to “extend the war of aggression against Korea, to carry out armed aggression on Taiwan, and to extend further its aggression against China.” ⁴⁸ On October 3, he warned the Indian Ambassador K. M. Panikkar, that U.S. troops would cross the 38th parallel and that “[i]f the U.S. troops really do so, we cannot sit by idly and remain indifferent. We will intervene. Please report this to the Prime Minister of your country.” ⁴⁹ Panikkar replied that he expected the crossing to occur within the next twelve hours, but that the Indian government would “not be able to take any effective action” until eighteen hours after the receipt of his cable. ⁵⁰ Zhou responded: “That is the Americans’ business. The purpose of this evening’s talk is to let you know our attitude toward one of the questions raised by Prime Minister Nehru in his letter.” ⁵¹ The talk was more making a record for what was already decided than a last plea for peace, as it is so often treated.

At that point, Stalin reentered the scene as the deus ex machina for the continuation of the conflict he had encouraged and which he did not want to see ended. The North Korean army was collapsing, and another American landing on the opposite coast was expected by Soviet intelligence near Wonsan (wrongly). Chinese preparations for intervention were far advanced but as yet not irrevocable. Stalin therefore decided, in a message on October 1 to Mao, to demand Chinese intervention. After Mao deferred a decision, citing the danger of American intervention, Stalin sent a follow-up telegram. He was prepared, he insisted, to pledge Soviet military support in an all-out war should the United States react to Chinese intervention:

Of course, I took into account also [the possibility] that the USA, despite its unreadiness for a big war, could still be drawn into a big war out of [considerations of] prestige, which, in turn, would drag China into the war, and along with this draw into the war the USSR, which is bound with China by the Mutual Assistance Pact. Should we fear this? In my opinion, we should not, because together we will be stronger than the USA and England, while the other European capitalist states (with the exception of Germany which is unable to provide any assistance to the United States now) do not present serious military forces. If a war is inevitable, then let it be waged now, and not in a few years when Japanese militarism will be restored as an ally of the USA and when the USA and Japan will have a ready-made bridgehead on the continent in a form of the entire Korea run by Syngman Rhee. ⁵²

At its face value, this extraordinary communication seemed to assert that Stalin was ready to go to war with the United States to prevent Korea from becoming part of America’s strategic sphere. A united, pro-American Korea—to which, in Stalin’s eyes, sooner or later a resurgent Japan would become a partner—presented, in that analysis, the same threat in Asia as the emerging NATO in Europe. The two together might be more than the Soviet Union could handle.

In the event, when put to the test, Stalin proved unwilling to undertake the all-out commitment he had pledged to Mao—or even any aspect of direct confrontation with the United States. He knew that the balance of power was too unfavorable for a showdown, much less a two-front war. He sought to tie down the American military potential in Asia and to involve China in enterprises that magnified its dependence on Soviet support. What Stalin’s letter does demonstrate is how seriously Soviet and Chinese strategists assessed the strategic importance of Korea, if for quite different reasons.

Stalin’s letter placed Mao in a predicament. It was one thing to plan intervention in the abstract partly as an exercise in revolutionary solidarity. It was another actually to carry it out, especially when the North Korean army was on the verge of disintegrating. Chinese intervention made imperative Soviet supplies and, above all, Soviet air cover, since the PLA had no modern air force to speak of. Thus when the issue of intervention was put before the Politburo, Mao received an unusually ambivalent response, causing him to pause before giving the final answer. Instead, Mao dispatched Lin Biao (who had refused the command of the Chinese forces, citing health problems) and Zhou to Russia to discuss the prospects of Soviet assistance. Stalin was in the Caucasus on vacation but saw no reason to alter his schedule. He obliged Zhou to come to his retreat even though (or, perhaps, because) Zhou would have no means of communication with Beijing from Stalin’s dacha except through Soviet channels.

Zhou and Lin Biao had been instructed to warn Stalin that, without assurances of guaranteed supplies, China might not, in the end, carry out what it had been preparing for two months. For China would be the principal theater of the conflict Stalin was promoting. Its prospects would depend on the supplies and direct support Stalin would make available. When faced with this reality, Mao’s colleagues reacted ambivalently. Some opponents even went so far as to argue that priority should be given to domestic development. For once Mao seemed to hesitate, if only for a moment. Was it a maneuver to obtain a guarantee of support from Stalin before Chinese forces were irrevocably committed? Or was he truly undecided?

A symptom of internal Chinese divisions is the mysterious case of a telegram from Mao to Stalin sent on the night of October 2, of which two contradictory versions are held in the archives of Beijing and Moscow.

In one version of Mao’s telegram—drafted in Mao’s handwriting, filed in the archives in Beijing, published in a neibu (“internal circulation only”) Chinese collection of Mao’s manuscripts, but likely never actually dispatched to Moscow—Mao wrote that Beijing had “decided to send some of our troops to Korea under the name of [Chinese People’s] Volunteers to fight the United States and its lackey Syngman Rhee and to aid our Korean comrades.” ⁵³ Mao cited the danger that absent Chinese intervention, “the Korean revolutionary force will meet with a fundamental defeat, and the American aggressors will rampage unchecked once they occupy the whole of Korea. This will be unfavorable to the entire East.” ⁵⁴ Mao noted that “we must be prepared for a declaration of war by the United States and for the subsequent use of the U.S. air force to bomb many of China’s main cities and industrial bases, as well as an attack by the U.S. navy on [our] coastal areas.” The Chinese plan was to send twelve divisions from south Manchuria on October 15. “At the initial stage,” Mao wrote, they would deploy north of the 38th parallel and “will merely engage in defensive warfare” against enemy troops that cross the parallel. In the meantime, “they will wait for the delivery of Soviet weapons. Once they are [well] equipped, they will cooperate with the Korean comrades in counterattacks to annihilate American aggressor troops.” ⁵⁵

In a different version of Mao’s October 2 telegram—sent via the Soviet ambassador in Beijing, received in Moscow, and filed in the Russian presidential archives—Mao informed Stalin that Beijing was not prepared to send troops. He held out the possibility that after further consultations with Moscow (and, he implied, pledges of additional Soviet military support), Beijing would be willing to join the conflict.

For years, scholars analyzed the first version of the telegram as if it were the sole operative version; when the second version emerged, some wondered whether one of the documents might be a fabrication. Most plausible is the explanation put forth by the Chinese scholar Shen Zhihua: that Mao drafted the first version of the telegram intending to send it, but that the Chinese leadership was so divided that a more equivocal telegram was substituted. The discrepancy suggests that even as Chinese troops advanced toward Korea, the Chinese leadership was still debating about how long to hold out for a definitive commitment of support from its Soviet ally before taking the last irrevocable step. ⁵⁶

The two Communist autocrats had been trained in a hard school of power politics, which they were now applying to each other. In this case, Stalin proved the quintessential hardball player. He coolly informed Mao (via a joint telegram with Zhou) that, in view of China’s hesitation, the best option would be to withdraw the remnants of the North Korean forces into China, where Kim Il-sung could form a provisional government-in-exile. The sick and disabled could go to the Soviet Union. He did not mind Americans on his Asian border, said Stalin, since he already faced them along the European dividing lines.

Stalin knew that the only outcome Mao wanted less than American forces at China’s borders was a provisional Korean government in Manchuria in contact with the Korean minority living there, claiming some kind of sovereignty and constantly pressing military adventures into Korea. And he must have sensed that Mao had passed the point of no return. China’s choice, at this point, was between an American army on the Yalu, directly threatening the half of Chinese industry within easy reach, and a disgruntled Soviet Union, holding back on supplies, perhaps reinvoking its “rights” in Manchuria. Or else China would proceed along the course Mao had continued to pursue even while bargaining with Stalin. He was in a position where he had to intervene, paradoxically in part to protect himself against Soviet designs.

On October 19, after several days of delay to await a guarantee of Soviet supplies, Mao ordered the army to cross into Korea. Stalin pledged substantial logistical support, provided only that it involved no direct confrontation with the United States (for example, air cover over Manchuria but not over Korea).

Mutual suspicion was so rampant that Zhou had no sooner returned to Moscow, from where he could communicate with Beijing, than Stalin seemingly reversed himself. To prevent Mao from maneuvering the Soviet Union into bearing the brunt of equipping the PLA without getting the benefit of its tying down American forces in combat in Korea, Stalin informed Zhou that no supplies would start moving until Chinese forces had, in fact, entered Korea. Mao issued the order on October 19, in effect without an assurance of Soviet support. After that, the originally promised Soviet support was reinstated, though the ever cautious Stalin confined Soviet air support to Chinese territory. So much for the readiness expressed in his earlier letter to Mao to risk a general war over Korea.

Both Communist leaders had exploited each other’s necessities and insecurities. Mao had succeeded in obtaining Soviet military supplies to modernize his army—some Chinese sources claim that during the Korean War he received equipment for sixty-four infantry divisions and twenty-two air divisions ⁵⁷ —and Stalin had tied down China into a conflict with the United States in Korea.

Sino-American Confrontation

The United States was a passive observer to these internal Communist machinations. It explored no middle ground between stopping at the 38th parallel and the unification of Korea, and ignored the series of Chinese warnings about the consequences of crossing that line. Acheson puzzlingly did not consider them official communications and thought they could be ignored. He probably thought he could face Mao down.

None of the many documents published to date by all sides reveals any serious discussion of a diplomatic option by any of the parties. The many meetings of Zhou with the Central Military Commission or the Politburo reveal no such intent. Contrary to popular perception, Beijing’s “warning” to Washington not to cross the 38th parallel was almost certainly a diversionary tactic. By that point, Mao had already sent ethnic-Korean PLA troops from Manchuria to Korea to assist the North Koreans, moved a significant military force away from Taiwan and toward the Korean border, and promised Chinese support to Stalin and Kim.

The only chance that might have existed to avoid immediate U.S.-China combat can be found in instructions Mao sent in a message to Zhou, still in Moscow, about his strategic design on October 14, as Chinese troops were preparing to cross the Korean border:

Our troops will continue improving [their] defense works if they have enough time. If the enemy tenaciously defends Pyongyang and Wonsan and does not advance [north] in the next six months, our troops will not attack Pyongyang and Wonsan. Our troops will attack Pyongyang and Wonsan only when they are well equipped and trained, and have clear superiority over the enemy in both air and ground forces. In short, we will not talk about waging offensives for six months. ⁵⁸

There was no chance, of course, that in six months China could have achieved clear superiority in either category.

Had American forces stopped at the line, from Pyongyang to Wonsan (the narrow neck of the Korean Peninsula), would that have created a buffer zone to meet Mao’s strategic concern? Would some American diplomatic move toward Beijing have made any difference? Would Mao have been satisfied with using his presence in Korea to reequip his forces? Perhaps the six-month pause Mao mentioned to Zhou would have provided an occasion for diplomatic contact, for military warnings, or for Mao or Stalin to change his mind. On the other hand, a buffer zone on hitherto Communist territory was almost certainly not Mao’s idea of his revolutionary or strategic duty. Still he was enough of a Sun Tzu disciple to pursue seemingly contradictory strategies simultaneously. The United States, in any event, had no such capacity. It opted for a U.N.-endorsed demarcation line along the Yalu over what it could protect with its own forces and its own diplomacy along the narrow neck of the Korean Peninsula.

In this manner, each side of the triangular relationship moved toward a war with the makings of a global conflict. The battle lines moved back and forth. Chinese forces took Seoul but were driven back until a military stalemate settled over the combat zone within the framework of armistice negotiations lasting nearly two years, during which American forces refrained from offensive operations—the almost ideal outcome from the Soviet point of view. The Soviet advice throughout was to drag out the negotiations, and therefore the war, as long as possible. An armistice agreement emerged on July 27, 1953, settling essentially along the prewar line of the 38th parallel.

None of the participants achieved all of its aims. For the United States, the armistice agreement realized the purpose for which it had entered the war: it denied success to the North Korean aggression; but it had, at the same time, enabled China, at a moment of great weakness, to fight the nuclear superpower to a standstill and oblige it to retreat from its furthest advance. It preserved American credibility in protecting allies but at the cost of incipient allied revolt and domestic discord. Observers could not fail to remember the debate that had developed in the United States over war aims. General MacArthur, applying traditional maxims, sought victory; the administration, interpreting the war as a feint to lure America into Asia—which was surely Stalin’s strategy—was prepared to settle for a military draw (and probably a long-term political setback), the first such outcome in a war fought by America. The inability to harmonize political and military goals may have tempted other Asian challengers to believe in America’s domestic vulnerability to wars without clear-cut military outcomes—a dilemma that reappeared with a vengeance in the vortex of Vietnam a decade later.

Nor can Beijing be said to have achieved all its objectives, at least in conventional military terms. Mao did not succeed in liberating all of Korea from “American imperialism,” as Chinese propaganda claimed initially. But he had gone to war for larger and in some ways more abstract, even romantic, aims: to test the “New China” with a trial by fire and to purge what Mao perceived as China’s historic softness and passivity; to prove to the West (and, to some extent, the Soviet Union) that China was now a military power and would use force to vindicate its interests; to secure China’s leadership of the Communist movement in Asia; and to strike at the United States (which Mao believed was planning an eventual invasion of China) at a moment he perceived as opportune. The principal contribution of the new ideology was not its strategic concepts so much as the willpower to defy the strongest nations and to chart its own course.

In that broader sense, the Korean War was something more than a draw. It established the newly founded People’s Republic of China as a military power and center of Asian revolution. It also built up military credibility that China, as an adversary worthy of fear and respect, would draw on through the next several decades. The memory of Chinese intervention in Korea would later restrain U.S. strategy significantly in Vietnam. Beijing succeeded in using the war and the accompanying “Resist America, Aid Korea” propaganda and purge campaign to accomplish two central aims of Mao’s: to eliminate domestic opposition to Party rule, and to instill “revolutionary enthusiasm” and national pride in the population. Nourishing resentment of Western exploitation, Mao framed the war as a struggle to “defeat American arrogance”; battlefield accomplishments were treated as a form of spiritual rejuvenation after decades of Chinese weakness and abuse. China emerged from the war exhausted but redefined in both its own eyes and the world’s.

Ironically, the biggest loser in the Korean War was Stalin, who had given the green light to Kim Il-sung to start and had urged, even blackmailed, Mao to intervene massively. Encouraged by America’s acquiescence in the Communist victory in China, he had calculated that Kim Il-sung could repeat the pattern in Korea. The American intervention thwarted that objective. He urged Mao to intervene, expecting that such an act would create a lasting hostility between China and the United States and increase China’s dependence on Moscow.

Stalin was right in his strategic prediction but erred grievously in assessing the consequences. Chinese dependence on the Soviet Union was double-edged. The rearmament of China that the Soviet Union undertook, in the end, shortened the time until China would be able to act on its own. The Sino-American schism Stalin was promoting did not lead to an improvement of Sino-Soviet relations, nor did it reduce China’s Titoist option. On the contrary, Mao calculated that he could defy both superpowers simultaneously. American conflicts with the Soviet Union were so profound that Mao judged he needed to pay no price for Soviet backing in the Cold War, indeed that he could use it as a threat even without its approval, as he did in a number of subsequent crises. Starting with the end of the Korean War, Soviet relations with China deteriorated, caused in no small part by the opaqueness with which Stalin had encouraged Kim Il-sung’s adventure, the brutality with which he had pressed China toward intervention, and, above all, the grudging manner of Soviet support, all of which was in the form of repayable loans. Within a decade, the Soviet Union would become China’s principal adversary. And before another decade had passed, another reversal of alliance would take place.

CHAPTER 6

China Confronts Both Superpowers

O TTO VON BISMARCK, probably the greatest diplomat of the second half of the nineteenth century, once said that in a world order of five states, it is always desirable to be part of a group of three. Applied to the interplay of three countries, one would therefore think that it is always desirable to be in a group of two.

That truth escaped the chief actors of the China-Soviet-U.S. triangle for a decade and a half—partly because of the unprecedented maneuvers of Mao. In foreign policy, statesmen often serve their objectives by bringing about a confluence of interests. Mao’s policy was based on the opposite. He learned to exploit overlapping hostilities. The conflict between Moscow and Washington was the strategic essence of the Cold War; the hostility between Washington and Beijing dominated Asian diplomacy. But the two Communist states could never merge their respective hostility toward the United States—except briefly and incompletely in the Korean War—because of Mao’s evolving rivalry with Moscow over ideological primacy and geostrategic analysis.

From the point of view of traditional power politics, Mao, of course, was in no position to act as an equal member of the triangular relationship. He was by far the weakest and most vulnerable. But by playing on the mutual hostility of the nuclear superpowers and creating the impression of being impervious to nuclear devastation, he managed to bring about a kind of diplomatic sanctuary for China. Mao added a novel dimension to power politics, one for which I know of no precedent. Far from seeking the support of either superpower—as traditional balance-of-power theory would have counseled—he exploited the Soviet-U.S. fear of each other by challenging each of the rivals simultaneously.

Within a year of the end of the Korean War, Mao confronted America militarily in a crisis in the Taiwan Strait. Almost simultaneously, he began to confront the Soviet Union ideologically. He felt confident in pursuing both courses because he calculated that neither superpower would permit his defeat by the other. It was a brilliant application of the Zhuge Liang Empty City Stratagem described in an earlier chapter, which turns material weakness into a psychological asset.

At the end of the Korean War, traditional students of international affairs—especially Western scholars—expected that Mao would seek a period of respite. Since the victory of the Communists, there had been nary a month of even apparent tranquility. Land reform, the implementation of the Soviet economic model, and the destruction of the domestic opposition had constituted a packed and dramatic domestic agenda. Simultaneously the still quite underdeveloped country was engaged in a war with a nuclear superpower in possession of advanced military technology.

Mao had no intention to enter history for the respites he availed to his society. Instead, he launched China into a set of new upheavals: two conflicts with the United States in the Taiwan Strait, the beginning of conflict with India, and a growing ideological and geopolitical controversy with the Soviet Union.

For the United States, by contrast, the end of the Korean War and the advent of the administration of Dwight Eisenhower marked the return to domestic “normalcy” that would last for the rest of the decade. Internationally, the Korean War became a template for Communism’s commitment to expansion by political subversion or military aggression wherever possible. Other parts of Asia supplied corroborating evidence: the guerrilla war in Malaysia; the violent bid for power by leftists in Singapore; and, increasingly, in the wars in Indochina. Where the American perception went partially awry was in thinking of Communism as a monolith and failing to understand the depth of suspicion, even at this early stage, between the two Communist giants.

The Eisenhower administration dealt with the threat of aggression by methods borrowed from America’s European experience. It tried to shore up the viability of countries bordering the Communist world following the example of the Marshall Plan, and it constructed military alliances in the style of NATO, such as the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) between the new nations bordering China in Southeast Asia. It did not fully consider the essential difference between European conditions and those at the fringe of Asia. The postwar European countries were established states with elaborated institutions. Their viability depended on closing the gap between expectation and reality, caused by the depredations of the Second World War—an expansive project that proved manageable, however, in a relatively brief period of time as history is measured. With domestic stability substantially assured, the security problem turned into defense against a potential military attack across established international frontiers.

In Asia around the rim of China, however, the states were still in the process of formation. The challenge was to create political institutions and a political consensus out of ethnic and religious divisions. This was less a military, more a conceptual, task; the security threat was domestic insurrection or guerrilla warfare rather than organized units crossing military frontiers. This was a particular challenge in Indochina, where the end of the French colonial project left four countries (North Vietnam, South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos) with contested borders and weak independent national traditions. These conflicts had their own dynamism not controllable in detail from Beijing or Moscow or Washington, yet influenced by the policies of the strategic triangle. In Asia, therefore, there were very few, if any, purely military challenges. Military strategy and political and social reform were inextricably linked.

The First Taiwan Strait Crisis

Beijing and Taipei proclaimed what amounted to two competing versions of the same Chinese national identity. In the Nationalist view, Taiwan was not an independent state: it was the home of the Republic of China’s government-in-exile, which had been temporarily displaced by Communist usurpers, but which—as Nationalist propaganda insistently proclaimed—would return to assume its rightful place on the mainland. In Beijing’s conception, Taiwan was a renegade province whose separation from the mainland and alliance with foreign powers represented the last vestige of China’s “century of humiliation.” Both Chinese sides agreed that Taiwan and the mainland were part of the same political entity. The disagreement was about which Chinese government was the rightful ruler.

Washington and its allies periodically floated the idea of recognizing the Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China as separate states—the so-called two China solution. Both Chinese sides vociferously rejected this proposal on the ground that it would prevent them from fulfilling a sacred national obligation to liberate the other. Against its initial judgment, Washington affirmed Taipei’s stance that the Republic of China was the “real” Chinese government, entitled to China’s seat in the United Nations and other international institutions. Assistant Secretary of State for Eastern Affairs Dean Rusk—later to become Secretary of State—articulated this stance for the Truman administration in 1951, stating that, despite appearances to the contrary, “The Peiping [then the Nationalist appellation for Beijing] . . . regime is not the Government of China. . . . It is not Chinese. It is not entitled to speak for China in the community of nations.” ¹ The People’s Republic of China with its capital in Beijing was, for Washington, a legal and diplomatic nonentity, despite its actual control over the world’s largest population. This would remain, with only minor variations, the official American position for the next two decades.

The unintended consequence was American involvement in the Chinese civil war. It cast the United States, in Beijing’s conception of international affairs, as the latest in a string of foreign powers perceived as conspiring for a century to divide and dominate China. In Beijing’s view, so long as Taiwan remained under a separate administrative authority receiving foreign political and military assistance, the project of founding a “New China” would remain incomplete.

The United States, Chiang’s primary ally, had little appetite for a Nationalist reconquest of the mainland. Though Taipei’s supporters in Congress periodically called on the White House to “unleash Chiang,” no American President seriously considered a campaign to reverse the Communist victory in the Chinese civil war—a source of profound misapprehension on the Communist side.

The first direct Taiwan crisis erupted in August 1954, little more than a year after the end of active hostilities in the Korean War. The pretext for it was a territorial quirk of the Nationalist retreat from the mainland: the remaining presence of Nationalist forces on several heavily fortified islands hugging the Chinese coast. These offshore islands, which were much closer to the mainland than to Taiwan, included Quemoy, Matsu, and several smaller outcroppings of land. ² Depending on one’s view, the offshore islands were either Taiwan’s first line of defense or, as Nationalist propaganda proclaimed, its forward operating base for an eventual reconquest of the mainland.

The offshore islands were an odd location for what turned into two major crises within a decade in which, at one point, both the Soviet Union and the United States implied a readiness to use nuclear weapons. Neither the Soviet Union nor the United States had any strategic interest in the offshore islands. Neither, as it turned out, did China. Instead, Mao used them to make a general point about international relations: as part of his grand strategy against the United States in the first crisis and against the Soviet Union—especially Khrushchev—in the second.

At the closest point, Quemoy was roughly two miles from the major Chinese port city of Xiamen; Matsu was similarly close to the city of Fuzhou. ³ The islands were visible with the naked eye from the mainland and within easy artillery range. Taiwan was well over a hundred miles away. PLA forays against the offshore islands in 1949 were turned back by strong Nationalist resistance. Truman’s dispatch of the Seventh Fleet to the Taiwan Strait at the outset of the Korean War forced Mao to postpone the planned invasion of Taiwan indefinitely and Beijing’s appeals to Moscow for support in the full “liberation” of Taiwan were met by evasions—a first stage toward the ultimate estrangement.

The situation grew more complex when Eisenhower succeeded Truman as President. In his first State of the Union address on February 2, 1953, Eisenhower announced an end to the Seventh Fleet’s patrol in the Taiwan Strait. Because the fleet had prevented attacks in both directions, Eisenhower reasoned that the mission had “meant, in effect, that the U.S. Navy was required to serve as a defensive arm of Communist China” even while Chinese forces were killing American troops in Korea. Now he was ordering it out of the strait, since Americans “certainly have no obligation to protect a nation fighting us in Korea.” ⁴

In China, the Seventh Fleet’s deployment to the strait had been seen as a major American offensive move. Now, paradoxically, its redeployment set the stage for a new crisis. Taipei began reinforcing Quemoy and Matsu with thousands of additional troops and a significant store of military hardware.

Both sides now faced a dilemma. China would never abandon its commitment to the return of Taiwan, but it could postpone its implementation in the face of overwhelming obstacles such as the presence of the Seventh Fleet. After the fleet’s withdrawal, it faced no comparable obstacle vis-à-vis the offshore islands. For its part, America had committed itself to the defense of Taiwan, but a war over offshore islands that Secretary of State John Foster Dulles described as “a bunch of rocks” was another matter. ⁵ The confrontation became more acute when the Eisenhower administration began negotiating a formal mutual defense treaty with Taiwan, followed by the creation of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization.

When faced with a challenge, Mao generally took the most unexpected and most intricate course. While Secretary of State John Dulles was flying to Manila for the formation of SEATO Mao ordered a massive shelling of Quemoy and Matsu—a shot across the bow of Taiwan’s increasing autonomy and a test of Washington’s commitment to multilateral defense of Asia.

The initial artillery barrage on Quemoy claimed the lives of two American military officers and prompted the immediate redeployment of three U.S. carrier battle groups to the vicinity of the Taiwan Strait. Keeping to its pledge to no longer serve as a “defensive arm” of the People’s Republic of China, Washington now approved retaliatory artillery and aircraft strikes by Nationalist forces against the mainland. ⁶ In the meantime, members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff began developing plans for the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons should the crisis escalate. Eisenhower demurred for the moment at least, and approved a plan to seek a cease-fire resolution at the U.N. Security Council. The crisis over territory nobody wanted had become global.

The crisis had, however, no obvious political objective. China was not threatening Taiwan directly; the United States did not want a change in the status of the strait. The crisis became less a rush to confrontation—as the media presented it—than a subtle exercise in crisis management. Both sides maneuvered toward intricate rules designed to prevent the military confrontation they were proclaiming on the political level. Sun Tzu was alive and well in the diplomacy of the Taiwan Strait.

The outcome was “combative coexistence,” not war. To deter an attack caused by a misapprehension as to American resolve—as in Korea—Dulles and the Taiwanese ambassador in Washington, on November 23, 1954, initialed the text of the long-planned defense treaty between the United States and Taiwan. However, on the matter of the territory that had just come under actual attack, the American commitment was ambiguous: the treaty applied specifically only to Taiwan and the Pescadores Islands (a larger group of islands about twenty-five miles from Taiwan). It made no mention of Quemoy, Matsu, and other territories close to the Chinese mainland, leaving them to be defined later, “as may be determined by mutual consent.” ⁷

For his part, Mao prohibited his commanders from attacking American forces, while laying down a marker to blunt America’s most intimidating weapon. China, he proclaimed, in the incongruous setting of a meeting with the new Finnish ambassador in Beijing, was impervious to the threat of nuclear war:

The Chinese people are not to be cowed by U.S. atomic blackmail. Our country has a population of 600 million and an area of 9,600,000 square kilometres. The United States cannot annihilate the Chinese nation with its small stack of atom bombs. Even if the U.S. atom bombs were so powerful that, when dropped on China, they would make a hole right through the earth, or even blow it up, that would hardly mean anything to the universe as a whole, though it might be a major event for the solar system . . . if the United States with its planes plus the A-bomb is to launch a war of aggression against China, then China with its millet plus rifles is sure to emerge the victor. The people of the whole world will support us. ⁸

Since both Chinese sides were playing by wei qi rules, the mainland began moving into the gap left by the treaty’s omissions. On January 18, it invaded the Dachen and Yijiangshan Islands, two smaller island groups not specifically covered by the treaty. Both sides continued to carefully define their limits. The United States did not attempt to defend the small islands; the Seventh Fleet, in fact, assisted with the evacuation of Nationalist forces. PLA forces were prohibited to fire on American armed forces.

As it turned out, Mao’s rhetoric had a greater impact on his Soviet allies than on the United States. For it confronted Khrushchev with the dilemma of supporting his ally for a cause that reflected no Russian strategic interest but involved risks of nuclear war, which Khrushchev increasingly described as unacceptable. The Soviet Union’s European allies with their tiny populations were even more terrified of Mao’s utterances about China’s capacity to lose half its population in a war and eventually prevail.

As for the United States, Eisenhower and Dulles matched Mao’s dexterity. They had no intention to test Mao’s endurance with respect to nuclear warfare. But neither were they prepared to abandon the option of defending the national interest. In the last week of January, they arranged for the passage of a resolution of both houses of the United States Congress authorizing Eisenhower to use U.S. forces to defend Taiwan, the Pescadores Islands, and “related positions and territories” in the Taiwan Strait. ⁹ The art of crisis management is to raise the stakes to where the adversary will not follow, but in a manner that avoids a tit for tat. On that principle Dulles, at a press conference on March 15, 1955, announced that the United States was prepared to meet any major new Communist offensive with tactical nuclear weapons, which China did not have. The next day, Eisenhower confirmed the warning, observing that so long as civilians were not in harm’s way, he saw no reason the United States could not use tactical nuclear weapons “just exactly as you would use a bullet or anything else.” ¹⁰ It was the first time the United States had made a specific nuclear threat in an ongoing crisis.

Mao proved more willing to announce China’s imperviousness to nuclear war than to practice it. He ordered Zhou Enlai, then at the Asian-African Conference of Non-Aligned countries in Bandung, Indonesia, to sound the retreat. On April 23, 1955, Zhou extended the olive branch: “[T]he Chinese people do not want to have a war with the United States of America. The Chinese government is willing to sit down and enter into negotiations with the U.S. government to discuss the question of relaxing tension in the Far East, and especially the question of relaxing tension in the Taiwan area.” ¹¹ The next week China ended the shelling campaign in the Taiwan Strait.

The outcome, like that of the Korean War, was a draw, in which each side achieved its short-term objectives. The United States faced down a military threat. Mao, aware that mainland forces did not have the capacity to occupy Quemoy and Matsu in the face of concerted opposition, later explained his strategy as having been much more complex. Far from seeking to occupy the offshore islands, he told Khrushchev that he had used the threat against them to keep Taiwan from breaking its link to the mainland:

All we wanted to do was show our potential. We don’t want Chiang to be too far away from us. We want to keep him within our reach. Having him [on Quemoy and Matsu] means we can get at him with our shore batteries as well as our air force. If we’d occupied the islands, we would have lost the ability to cause him discomfort any time we want. ¹²

In that version, Beijing shelled Quemoy to reaffirm its claim to “one China” but restrained its action to prevent a “two China solution” from emerging.

Moscow, with a more literal approach to strategy and actual knowledge of nuclear weapons, found it incomprehensible that a leader might go to the brink of nuclear war to make a largely symbolic point. As Khrushchev complained to Mao: “If you shoot, then you ought to capture these islands, and if you do not consider necessary capturing these islands, then there is no use in firing. I do not understand this policy of yours.” ¹³ It has even been claimed, in a one-sided but often thought-provoking biography of Mao, that Mao’s real motive in the crisis had been to create a risk of nuclear war so acute that Moscow would be obliged to assist Beijing’s fledgling nuclear weapons program to ease the pressure for Soviet assistance. ¹⁴ Among the many counter-intuitive aspects of the crisis was the apparent Soviet decision—later revoked as a result of the second offshore islands crisis—to help Beijing’s nuclear program in order to put a distance between itself and its troublesome ally in any future crisis by leaving the nuclear defense of China in China’s hands.

Diplomatic Interlude with the United States

One result of the crisis was the resumption of a formal dialogue between the United States and China. At the Geneva Conference of 1954 to settle the first Vietnam War between France and the Communist-led independence movement, Beijing and Washington had grudgingly agreed to maintain contacts through consular-level officials based in Geneva.

The arrangement provided a framework for a kind of safety net to avoid confrontations because of misapprehensions. But neither side did so with any conviction. Or rather, their convictions ran in opposite directions. The Korean War had put an end to all diplomatic initiatives toward China in the Truman administration. The Eisenhower administration—coming into office with the war in Korea not yet ended—considered China the most intransigent and revolutionary of the Communist powers. Hence its primary strategic goal was the construction of a security system in Asia to contain potential Chinese aggression. Diplomatic overtures to China were avoided lest they jeopardize still fragile security systems such as SEATO and the emerging alliances with Japan and South Korea. Dulles’s refusal to shake hands with Zhou Enlai at the Geneva Conference reflected both moral rejection and strategic design.

Mao’s attitude was the mirror image of Dulles’s and Eisenhower’s. The Taiwan issue created a permanent cause of confrontation especially so long as the United States treated the Taiwan authorities as the legitimate government of all of China. Deadlock was inherent in Sino-U. S. diplomacy because China would discuss no other subject until the United States agreed to withdraw from Taiwan, and the United States would not talk about withdrawing from Taiwan until China had renounced the use of force to solve the Taiwan question.

By the same token, the Sino-U.S. dialogue, after the first Taiwan Strait Crisis, ran into the ground because so long as each side maintained its basic position, there was nothing to talk about. The United States reiterated that the status of Taiwan should be settled through negotiations between Beijing and Taipei, which should also involve the United States and Japan. Beijing interpreted this proposal as an attempt to reopen the Cairo Conference decision that, during the Second World War, declared Taiwan part of China. It refused as well to renounce the use of force as an infringement of China’s sovereign right to establish control over its own national territory. Ambassador Wang Bingnan, the principal Chinese negotiator for a decade, summed up the deadlock in his memoirs: “In retrospect, it was impossible for the US to change its China policy at the time. Under the circumstances, we went directly at the Taiwan question, which was the most difficult, least likely to be resolved, and most emotional. It was only natural that talks could not get anywhere.” ¹⁵

Only two agreements resulted from these discussions. The first was procedural: to upgrade existing contacts at Geneva, which had been held at the consular level, to ambassadorial rank. (The significance of the ambassadorial designation is that ambassadors are technically personal representatives of their head of state and presumably have somewhat greater latitude and influence.) This only served to institutionalize paralysis. One hundred thirty-six meetings were held over a period of sixteen years from 1955 until 1971 between the local U.S. and Chinese ambassadors (most of them in Warsaw, which became the venue for the talks in 1958). The only substantive agreement reached was in September 1955, when China and the United States permitted citizens trapped in each country by the civil war to return home. ¹⁶

Thereafter, for a decade and a half, American policy remained focused on eliciting a formal renunciation of the use of force from China. “We have searched year after year,” Secretary of State Dean Rusk testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee in March 1966, “for some sign that Communist China was ready to renounce the use of force to resolve disputes. We have also searched for some indication that it was ready to abandon its premise that the United States is its prime enemy. The Chinese Communist attitudes and actions have been hostile and rigid.” ¹⁷

American foreign policy toward no other country had ever been submitted to such a stringent precondition for negotiation as a blanket renunciation of the use of force. Rusk did take note of the gap between the fierce Chinese rhetoric and its relatively restrained international performance in the 1960s. Still, he argued that American policy, in effect, should be based on the rhetoric—that ideology was more significant than conduct:

Some say we should ignore what the Chinese Communist leaders say and judge them only by what they do. It is true that they have been more cautious in action than in words—more cautious in what they do themselves than in what they have urged the Soviet Union to do. . . . But it does not follow that we should disregard the intentions and plans for the future which they have proclaimed. ¹⁸

Based on these attitudes, in 1957, using the Chinese refusal to renounce the use of force over Taiwan as a pretext, the United States downgraded the Geneva talks from the ambassador to the first secretary level. China withdrew its delegation, and the talks were suspended. The second Taiwan Strait Crisis followed soon after—though ostensibly for another reason.

Mao, Khrushchev, and the Sino-Soviet Split

In 1953, Stalin died after more than three decades in power. His successor—after a brief transitional period—was Nikita Khrushchev. The terror of Stalin’s rule had left its mark on Khrushchev’s generation. They had made their big step up the ladder in the purges of the 1930s when an entire generation of leaders was wiped out. They had purchased the sudden rise to eminence at the cost of permanent emotional insecurity. They had witnessed—and participated in—the wholesale decapitation of a ruling group, and they knew that the same fate might await them; indeed Stalin was in the process of beginning another purge as he was dying. They were not yet ready to modify the system that had generated institutionalized terror. Rather they attempted to alter some of its practices while reaffirming the core beliefs to which they had devoted their lives, blaming the failures on the abuse of power by Stalin. (This was the psychological basis of what came to be known as Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, to be discussed below.)

With all their posturing, the new leaders knew deep down that the Soviet Union was not competitive in an ultimate sense. Much of Khrushchev’s foreign policy can be described as a quest to achieve a “quick fix”: the explosion of a super-high-yield thermonuclear device in 1961; the succession of Berlin ultimatums; the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. With the perspective of the intervening decades, these steps can be considered a quest for a kind of psychological equilibrium permitting a negotiation with a country that Khrushchev deep down understood was considerably stronger.

Toward China, Khrushchev’s posture was condescension tinged with frustration that the self-confident Chinese leaders presumed to challenge Moscow’s ideological predominance. He grasped the strategic benefit of the Chinese alliance, but he feared the implications of the Chinese version of ideology. He tried to impress Mao but never learned the grammar of what Mao might have taken seriously. Mao used the Soviet threat without paying attention to Soviet priorities. In the end, Khrushchev withdrew from his initial commitment to the alliance with China into a sulky aloofness while gradually increasing Soviet military strength along the Chinese frontier, tempting his successor, Leonid Brezhnev, into exploring the prospects of preemptive action against China.

Ideology had brought Beijing and Moscow together, and ideology drove them apart again. There was too much shared history raising question marks. Chinese leaders could not forget the territorial exactions of the Czars nor Stalin’s willingness, during the Second World War, to settle with Chiang Kai-shek at the expense of the Chinese Communist Party. The first meeting between Stalin and Mao had not gone well. When Mao came to put himself under Moscow’s security umbrella, it took him two months to convince Stalin, and he had to pay for the alliance with major economic concessions in Manchuria and Xinjiang impairing the unity of China.

History was the starting point, but contemporary experience supplied seemingly endless frictions. The Soviet Union regarded the Communist world as a single strategic entity whose leadership was in Moscow. It had established satellite regimes in Eastern Europe that were dependent on Soviet military and, to some extent, economic support. It seemed natural to the Soviet Politburo that the same pattern of dominance should prevail in Asia.

In terms of Chinese history, his own Sinocentric view, and his own definition of Communist ideology, nothing could have been more repugnant to Mao. Cultural differences exacerbated latent tensions—especially since the Soviet leaders were generally oblivious of Chinese historic sensitivities. A good example is Khrushchev’s request that China supply workers for logging projects in Siberia. He struck a raw nerve in Mao, who told him in 1958:

You know, Comrade Khrushchev, for years it’s been a widely held view that because China is an underdeveloped and overpopulated country, with widespread unemployment, it represents a good source of cheap labor. But you know, we Chinese find this attitude very offensive. Coming from you, it’s rather embarrassing. If we were to accept your proposal, others . . . might think that the Soviet Union has the same image of China that the capitalist West has. ¹⁹

Mao’s passionate Sinocentrism prevented him from participating in the basic premises of the Moscow-run Soviet empire. The focal point of that empire’s security and political efforts was in Europe, which was of secondary concern to Mao. When, in 1955, the Soviet Union created the Warsaw Pact of Communist countries as a counterweight to NATO, Mao refused to join. China would not subordinate the defense of its national interests to a coalition.

Instead, Zhou Enlai was sent to the 1955 Asian-African Conference in Bandung. The conference created a novel and paradoxical grouping: the alignment of the Non-Aligned. Mao had sought Soviet support as a counterweight to potential American pressure on China in pursuit of American hegemony in Asia. But concurrently he tried to organize the Non-Aligned into a safety net against Soviet hegemony. In that sense, almost from the beginning, the two Communist giants were competing with each other.

The fundamental differences went to the essence of the two societies’ images of themselves. Russia, salvaged from foreign invaders by brute force and endurance, had never claimed to be a universal inspiration to other societies. A significant part of its population was non-Russian. Its greatest rulers, like Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, had brought foreign thinkers and experts to their courts to learn from more advanced foreigners—an unthinkable concept in the Chinese imperial court. Russian rulers appealed to their people on the basis of their endurance, not their greatness. Russian diplomacy relied, to an extraordinary extent, on superior power. Russia rarely had allies among countries where it had not stationed military forces. Russian diplomacy tended to be power-oriented, tenaciously holding on to fixed positions and transforming foreign policy into trench warfare.

Mao represented a society that, over the centuries, had been the largest, best-organized, and, in the Chinese view at least, most beneficent political institution in the world. That its performance would have a vast international impact was received wisdom. When a Chinese ruler appealed to his people to work hard so that they could become the greatest people in the world, he was exhorting them to reclaim a preeminence that, in the Chinese interpretation of history, had been only recently and temporarily misplaced. Such a country inevitably found it impossible to play the role of junior partner.

In societies based on ideology, the right to define legitimacy becomes crucial. Mao, who described himself as a teacher to the journalist Edgar Snow and thought of himself as a significant philosopher, would never concede intellectual leadership of the Communist world. China’s claim to a right to define orthodoxy threatened the cohesion of Moscow’s empire and opened the door to other largely national interpretations of Marxism. What started as irritations over nuances of interpretation transformed into disputes over practice and theory and eventually turned into actual military clashes.

The People’s Republic began by modeling its economy on Soviet economic policies of the 1930s and 1940s. In 1952, Zhou went so far as to visit Moscow for advice regarding the first Chinese Five-Year Plan. Stalin sent his comments in early 1953, urging Beijing to adopt a more balanced approach and temper its planned rate of economic growth to no more than 13–14 percent annually. ²⁰

But by December 1955, Mao openly distinguished the Chinese economy from its Soviet counterpart and enumerated the “unique” and “great” challenges that the Chinese had faced and overcome in contrast to their Soviet allies:

We had twenty years’ experience in the base areas, and were trained in three revolutionary wars; our experience [on coming to power] was exceedingly rich. . . . Therefore, we were able to set up a state very quickly, and complete the tasks of the revolution. (The Soviet Union was a newly established state; at the time of the October Revolution, ²¹ they had neither army nor government apparatus, and there were very few party members.) . . . Our population is very numerous, and our position is excellent. [Our people] work industriously and bear much hardship. . . . Consequently, we can reach socialism more, better, and faster. ²²

In an April 1956 speech on economic policy, Mao transformed a practical difference into a philosophical one. He defined China’s path to socialism as unique and superior to that of the Soviet Union:

We have done better than the Soviet Union and a number of Eastern European countries. The prolonged failure of the Soviet Union to reach the highest pre-October Revolution level in grain output, the grave problems arising from the glaring disequilibrium between the development of heavy industry and that of light industry in some Eastern European countries—such problems do not exist in our country. ²³

Differences between Chinese and Soviet conceptions of their practical imperatives turned into an ideological clash when, in February 1956, Khrushchev addressed the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and denounced Stalin for a series of crimes, several of which he detailed. Khrushchev’s speech convulsed the Communist world. Decades of experience had been based on ritualistic affirmations of Stalin’s infallibility, including in China, where, whatever qualms Mao may have had about Stalin’s conduct as an ally, he formally acknowledged his special ideological contribution. Deepening the insult, non-Soviet delegates—including Chinese delegates—were not permitted in the hall when Khrushchev delivered his speech, and Moscow declined to provide even its fraternal allies with an authoritative text. Beijing cobbled together its initial response based on Chinese delegates’ incomplete notes of a secondhand version of Khrushchev’s remarks; eventually the Chinese leadership was forced to rely on Chinese translations of reports from the New York Times . ²⁴

Beijing lost little time in assailing Moscow for having “discarded” the “sword of Stalin.” The Chinese Titoism that Stalin had feared from the beginning raised its head in the form of a Chinese defense of the ideological importance of Stalin’s legacy. Mao branded Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization initiative a form of “revisionism”—a new ideological insult—which implied that the Soviet Union was moving away from Communism and back toward its bourgeois past. ²⁵

To restore a measure of unity, Khrushchev assembled a conference of socialist countries in Moscow in 1957. Mao attended; it was only the second time that he had left China, and it was to be his last sojourn abroad. The Soviet Union had just launched Sputnik—the first orbiting satellite—and the meeting was dominated by the belief, shared then by many in the West, that Soviet technology and power were ascendant. Mao adopted this notion, declaring pungently that the “East Wind” now prevailed over the “West Wind.” But he drew from the apparent relative decline of American power a conclusion uncomfortable for his Soviet allies, namely that China was in an increasingly strong position to assert its autonomy: “Their real purpose,” Mao later told his doctor, “is to control us. They’re trying to tie our hands and feet. But they’re full of wishful thinking, like idiots talking about their dreams.” ²⁶

In the meantime, the 1957 conference in Moscow reaffirmed Khrushchev’s call for the socialist bloc to strive for “peaceful coexistence” with the capitalist world, a goal first adopted at the same 1956 congress at which Khrushchev delivered his Secret Speech criticizing Stalin. In a startling rebuke to Khrushchev’s policy, Mao used the occasion to call his socialist colleagues to arms in the struggle against imperialism, including his standard speech on China’s imperviousness to nuclear destruction. “We shouldn’t fear war,” he declared:

We shouldn’t be afraid of atomic bombs and missiles. No matter what kind of war breaks out—conventional or thermonuclear—we’ll win. As for China, if the imperialists unleash war on us, we may lose more than three hundred million people. So what? War is war. The years will pass, and we’ll get to work producing more babies than ever before. ²⁷

Khrushchev found the speech “deeply disturbing,” and he recalled the audience’s strained and nervous laughter as Mao described nuclear Armageddon in whimsical and earthy language. After the speech, the Czechoslovak Communist leader Antonin Novotny complained, “What about us? We have only twelve million people in Czechoslovakia. We’d lose every last soul in a war. There wouldn’t be anyone left to start over again.” ²⁸

China and the Soviet Union now were engaged in constant, frequently public controversies, yet they were also still formal allies. Khrushchev seemed convinced that the restoration of comradely relations awaited only some new Soviet initiative. He did not understand—or, if he did, would not admit to himself—that his policy of peaceful coexistence—especially when coupled with pronouncements of the fear of nuclear war—was, in Mao’s eyes, incompatible with the Sino-Soviet alliance. For Mao was convinced that, in a crisis, fear of nuclear war would trump loyalty to the ally.

In these circumstances, Mao missed no opportunity to assert Chinese autonomy. In 1958, Khrushchev proposed, via the Soviet ambassador in Beijing, the building of a radio station in China to communicate with Soviet submarines, and to help build submarines for China in return for the use of Chinese ports by the Soviet navy. Since China was a formal ally, and the Soviet Union had supplied it with much of the technology to improve its own military capacities, Khrushchev apparently thought Mao would welcome the offer. He was proved disastrously wrong. Mao reacted furiously to the initial Soviet proposals, berating the Soviet ambassador in Beijing and causing such alarm in Moscow that Khrushchev traveled to Beijing to assuage his ally’s wounded pride.

Once in Beijing, however, Khrushchev made an even less appealing follow-up proposal, which was to offer China special access to Soviet submarine bases in the Arctic Ocean—in exchange for Soviet use of China’s warm-water ports in the Pacific. “No,” Mao replied, “we won’t agree to that either. Every country should keep its armed forces on its own territory and on no one else’s.” ²⁹ As the Chairman recalled, “We’ve had the British and other foreigners on our territory for years now, and we’re not ever going to let anyone use our land for their own purposes again.” ³⁰

In a normal alliance, disagreements on a specific issue would usually lead to increased efforts to settle differences on the remaining agenda. During Khrushchev’s calamitous 1958 visit to Beijing, it provided an occasion for a seemingly endless catalogue of complaints by both sides.

Khrushchev put himself at a disadvantage to begin with by blaming the dispute about naval bases on an unauthorized demarche by his ambassador. Mao, only too familiar with the way Communist states were organized, with a strict separation of military and civilian channels, easily saw through the utter inconceivability of that proposition. The recital of the sequence of events led to an extended dialogue in which Mao lured Khrushchev into ever more humiliating and absurd propositions—the point probably being made to demonstrate for Chinese cadres the unreliability of the leader who had presumed to challenge Stalin’s image.

It also provided Mao with an opportunity to convey how deeply Moscow’s overbearing conduct had cut. Mao complained about Stalin’s condescending behavior during his visit to Moscow in the winter of 1949–50:

M AO : . . . After the victory of our Revolution, Stalin had doubts about its character. He believed that China was another Yugoslavia.

KHRUSHCHEV: Yes, he considered it possible.

MAO: When I came to Moscow [in December 1949], he did not want to conclude a treaty of friendship with us and did not want to annul the old treaty with the Guomindang. ³¹ I recall that [Soviet interpreter Nikolai] Fedorenko and [Stalin’s emissary to the People’s Republic Ivan] Kovalev passed me his [Stalin’s] advice to take a trip around the country, to look around. But I told them that I have only three tasks: eat, sleep and shit. I did not come to Moscow only to congratulate Stalin on his birthday. Therefore I said that if you do not want to conclude a treaty of friendship, so be it.

I will fulfill my three tasks. ³²

The mutual needling quickly went beyond history into contemporary disputes. When Khrushchev asked Mao if the Chinese really considered the Soviets “red imperialists,” Mao made clear how much the quid pro quo for the alliance had rankled: “It is not a matter of red or white imperialists. There was a man by the name of Stalin, who took Port Arthur and turned Xinjiang and Manchuria into semi-colonies, and he also created four joint companies. These were all his good deeds.” ³³

Still, whatever Mao’s complaints on a national basis, he respected Stalin’s ideological contribution:

KHRUSHCHEV: You defended Stalin. And you criticized me for criticizing Stalin. And now vice versa.

MAO: You criticized [him] for different matters.

KHRUSHCHEV: At the Party Congress I spoke about this as well.

MAO: I always said, now, and then in Moscow, that the criticism of Stalin’s mistakes is justified. We only disagree with the lack of strict limits to criticism. We believe that out of Stalin’s 10 fingers, 3 were rotten ones. ³⁴

Mao set the tone of the next day’s meeting by receiving Khrushchev not in a ceremonial room but in his swimming pool. Khrushchev, who could not swim, was obliged to wear water wings. The two statesmen conversed while swimming, with the interpreters following them up and down the side of the pool. Khrushchev would later complain: “It was Mao’s way of putting himself in an advantageous position. Well, I got sick of it. . . . I crawled out, sat on the edge, and dangled my legs in the pool. Now I was on top and he was swimming below.” ³⁵

Relations had deteriorated even further a year later when Khrushchev stopped in Beijing, on his return trip from the United States, to brief his fractious ally on October 3, 1959, on his summit with Eisenhower. The Chinese leaders, already highly suspicious about Khrushchev’s American sojourn, were further agitated when Khrushchev took the side of India with respect to the first border clashes in the Himalayas between Indian and Chinese forces that had just occurred.

Khrushchev, whose strong suit was not diplomacy, managed to raise the sensitive issue of the Dalai Lama; few topics could generate a more hair-trigger Chinese response. He criticized Mao for not having been tough enough during the uprisings in Tibet earlier that year, which had culminated in the Dalai Lama’s flight to northern India: “I will tell you what a guest should not say[:] the events in Tibet are your fault. You ruled in Tibet, you should have had your intelligence there and should have known about the plans and intentions of the Dalai Lama.” ³⁶ After Mao objected, Khrushchev insisted on pursuing the subject by suggesting that the Chinese should have eliminated the Dalai Lama rather than let him escape:

KHRUSHCHEV: . . . As to the escape of the Dalai Lama from Tibet, if we had been in your place, we would not have let him escape. It would be better if he was in a coffin. And now he is in India, and perhaps will go to the USA. Is this to the advantage of the socialist countries?

MAO: This is impossible; we could not arrest him then. We could not bar him from leaving, since the border with India is very extended, and he could cross it at any point.

KHRUSHCHEV: It’s not a matter of arrest; I am just saying that you were wrong to let him go. If you allow him an opportunity to flee to India, then what has Nehru to do with it? We believe that the events in Tibet are the fault of the Communist Party of China, not Nehru’s fault. ³⁷

It was the last time Mao and Khrushchev were to meet. What is amazing is that for another ten years the world treated Sino-Soviet tensions as a kind of family quarrel between the two Communist giants rather than the existential battle into which it was turning. Amidst these mounting tensions with the Soviet Union, Mao initiated another crisis with the United States.

The Second Taiwan Strait Crisis

On August 23, 1958, the People’s Liberation Army began another massive shelling campaign of the offshore islands, accompanying its bombardment with propaganda salvos calling for the liberation of Taiwan. After two weeks, it paused, and then resumed the shelling for a further twenty-nine days. Finally, it settled into an almost whimsical pattern of shelling the islands on odd-numbered days of the month, with explicit warnings to their inhabitants and often avoiding sites of military significance—a maneuver Mao described to his senior associates as an act of “political battle” rather than conventional military strategy. ³⁸

Some of the factors at work in this crisis were familiar. Beijing again sought to test the limits of the American commitment to defend Taiwan. The shelling was also partly a reaction to American downgrading of the U.S.-China talks that had resumed after the last offshore island crisis. But the dominant impetus seems to have been a desire to stake a global role for China. Mao explained to his colleagues at a leadership retreat held at the outset of the crisis that the shelling of Quemoy and Matsu was China’s reaction to American intervention in Lebanon, where American and British troops had been landed during the summer:

[T]he bombardment of Jinmen [Quemoy], frankly speaking, was our turn to create international tension for a purpose. We intended to teach the Americans a lesson. America had bullied us for many years, so now that we had a chance, why not give it a hard time? . . . Americans started a fire in the Middle East, and we started another in the Far East. We would see what they would do with it. ³⁹

In that sense the shelling of the offshore islands was a blow in the contest with the Soviet Union. Soviet quiescence in the face of a strategic American move in the Middle East was being contrasted with Chinese ideological and strategic vigilance.

Having demonstrated its military resolve, Mao explained, China would now rejoin the talks with the United States and have available “both an action arena and a talk arena” ⁴⁰ —an application of the Sun Tzu principle of combative coexistence in its modern version of offensive deterrence.

The most significant dimension of the shelling was not the taunting of the American superpower so much as the challenge to China’s formal ally, the Soviet Union. Khrushchev’s policy of peaceful coexistence had made the Soviet Union, in Mao’s eyes, a problematical ally and perhaps even a potential adversary. Thus, Mao seems to have reasoned, if the Taiwan Strait Crisis were pushed to the brink of war, Khrushchev might have to choose between his new policy of peaceful coexistence and his alliance with China.

In a sense Mao succeeded. What conferred a special edge to Mao’s maneuvers was that the Chinese policy in the Strait was being carried out ostensibly with the blessing of Moscow so far as the world was concerned. For Khrushchev had visited Beijing three weeks before the second Taiwan Strait Crisis—for the disastrous encounters over the submarine base issues—much as he had been there in the opening weeks of the first crisis four years earlier. In neither case had Mao revealed his intentions to the Soviets either before or during the visit. In each instance Washington assumed—and Eisenhower alleged as much in a letter to Khrushchev—that Mao was acting not only with Moscow’s support but at its behest. Beijing was adding its Soviet ally to its diplomatic lineup against its will and indeed without Moscow realizing that it was being used. (A school of thought even holds that Mao invented the “submarine base crisis” to induce Khrushchev to come to Beijing to play his assigned role in that design.)

The second Taiwan Strait Crisis paralleled the first with the principal difference being that the Soviet Union participated in issuing nuclear threats on behalf of an ally that was in the process of humiliating it.

Roughly one thousand people were killed or wounded in the 1958 bombardment. As in the first Taiwan Strait Crisis, Beijing combined provocative evocations of nuclear war with a carefully calibrated operational strategy. Mao initially asked his commanders to conduct the shelling in such a way as to avoid American fatalities. When they responded that no such guarantee was possible, he ordered them not to cross into the airspace over the offshore islands, to fire only on Nationalist vessels, and not to return fire even if fired on by U.S. ships. ⁴¹ Both before and during the crisis, PRC propaganda trumpeted the slogan “We must liberate Taiwan.” But when the PLA’s radio station undertook a broadcast announcing that a Chinese landing was “imminent” and inviting Nationalist forces to change sides and “join the great cause of liberating Taiwan,” Mao declared it a “serious mistake.” ⁴²

In John Foster Dulles, Mao met an adversary who knew how to play the game of combative coexistence. On September 4, 1958, Dulles reiterated the U.S. commitment to the defense of Taiwan, including “related positions such as Quemoy and Matsu.” Dulles intuited China’s limited aims and in effect signaled American willingness to keep the crisis limited: “Despite, however, what the Chinese Communists say, and so far have done, it is not yet certain that their purpose is in fact to make an all-out effort to conquer by force Taiwan (Formosa) and the offshore islands.” ⁴³ On September 5, Zhou Enlai confirmed China’s limited aims when he announced that Beijing’s goal in the conflict was the resumption of U.S.-China talks at the ambassadorial level. On September 6, the White House released a statement taking note of Zhou’s remarks and indicating that the United States ambassador at Warsaw stood ready to represent the United States at resumed talks.

With this exchange, the crisis should have been over. As if they were rehearsing a by-now familiar play, the two sides had repeated timeworn threats and had arrived at a familiar deus ex machina, the resumption of ambassadorial talks.

The only party in the triangular relationship who did not grasp what was taking place was Khrushchev. Having heard Mao proclaim his imperviousness to nuclear war in Moscow the year previously and recently in Beijing, he was torn between contradictory fears of nuclear war and of the potential loss of an important ally if he failed to stand by China. His dedicated Marxism made it impossible for him to understand that his ideological ally had become a strategic adversary, yet his knowledge of nuclear weapons was too great to integrate them comfortably into a diplomacy that constantly relied on threatening their use.

When a rattled statesman confronts a dilemma, he is sometimes tempted to pursue every course of action simultaneously. Khrushchev sent his foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, to Beijing to urge restraint, which he knew would not be well received, and, to balance it, to show the Chinese leaders a draft letter he proposed to send Eisenhower, threatening full support—implying nuclear support—for China should the Taiwan Strait Crisis escalate. The letter stressed that “an attack on the Chinese People’s Republic, which is a great friend, ally and neighbor of our country, is an attack on the Soviet Union” and warned that the Soviet Union “will do everything . . . to defend the security of both states.” ⁴⁴

The initiative failed with both addressees. Khrushchev’s letter was politely rejected by Eisenhower on September 12. Welcoming the Chinese willingness to rejoin ambassadorial talks and repeating Washington’s insistence that Beijing renounce the use of force over Taiwan, Eisenhower urged Khrushchev to recommend restraint to Beijing. Oblivious to the reality that Khrushchev was an actor in a play written by others, Eisenhower implied collusion between Moscow and Beijing, noting that “[t]his intense military activity was begun on August twenty-third—some three weeks after your visit to Peiping.” ⁴⁵

In a public address delivered roughly simultaneously on September 11, 1958, Eisenhower justified American involvement in the offshore islands in sweeping terms. The shelling of Quemoy and Matsu, he warned, was analogous to Hitler’s occupation of the Rhineland, Mussolini’s occupation of Ethiopia, or (in a comparison that must have particularly vexed the Chinese) the Japanese conquest of Manchuria in the 1930s.

Gromyko fared no better in Beijing. Mao responded to the draft letter by speaking openly of the possibility of nuclear war and the conditions under which the Soviets should retaliate with nuclear weapons against America. The threats were all the safer to make because Mao knew the danger of war had already passed. In his memoirs, Gromyko recounts being “flabbergasted” by Mao’s bravado and quoted the Chinese leader as telling him:

I suppose the Americans might go so far as to unleash a war against China. China must reckon with this possibility, and we do. But we have no intention of capitulating! If the USA attacks China with nuclear weapons, the Chinese armies must retreat from the border regions into the depths of the country. They must draw the enemy in deep so as to grip US forces in a pincer inside China. . . . Only when the Americans are right in the central provinces should you give them everything you’ve got. ⁴⁶

Mao was not asking for Soviet help until American forces had been drawn deep into China—which he knew was not going to happen in the already completed scenario. Gromyko’s report from Beijing seems to have shocked Khrushchev. Though ambassadorial talks had already been agreed between Washington and Beijing, Khrushchev undertook two more steps to prevent nuclear war. To calm what he understood to be Beijing’s fear of American invasion, he offered to send Soviet antiaircraft units to Fujian. ⁴⁷ Beijing delayed a response and then accepted when the crisis was already over, provided that Soviet troops were placed under Chinese command—an improbable outcome. ⁴⁸ In a further demonstration of his nervousness, Khrushchev sent another letter to Eisenhower on September 19, urging restraint but warning of the imminence of nuclear war. ⁴⁹ Except that China and the United States had, in fact, already settled the issue before Khrushchev’s second letter arrived.

In their meeting on October 3, 1959, Khrushchev had summed up the Soviet attitude during the Taiwan crises to Mao:

Between us, in a confidential way, we say that we will not fight over Taiwan, but for outside consumption, so to say, we state on the contrary, that in case of an aggravation of the situation because of Taiwan the USSR will defend the PRC. In its turn, the US declare that they will defend Taiwan. Therefore, a kind of pre-war situation emerges. ⁵⁰

Khrushchev had enabled Mao to lure him into so futile a course by trying to be both clever and cynical. Especially when ultimate decisions of peace and war are involved, a strategist must be aware that bluffs may be called and must take into account the impact on his future credibility of an empty threat. On Taiwan, Mao used Khrushchev’s ambivalence to entice him into making a nuclear threat that he had admitted he had no intention of carrying out, straining Moscow’s relationship with the United States on behalf of an issue Khrushchev considered unimportant and of an allied leader who despised him.

One can only imagine Mao’s bemusement: he had goaded Moscow and Washington into threatening nuclear war against each other over some of the world’s least vital geopolitical real estate in what was an essentially nonmilitary piece of Chinese political theater. Moreover, Mao had done so at a time of his choosing, while China remained vastly weaker than the United States or the USSR, and in a manner that allowed him to claim a significant propaganda victory and rejoin Sino-U.S. ambassadorial talks from what his propaganda would claim was a position of strength.

Having triggered the crisis and brought it to a close, Mao asserted that he had achieved his objectives:

We fought this campaign, which made the United States willing to talk. The United States has opened the door. The situation seems to be no good for them, and they will feel nervous day in and day out if they don’t hold talks with us now. OK, then let’s talk. For the overall situation, it is better to settle disputes with the United States through talks, or peaceful means, because we are all peace-loving people. ⁵¹

Zhou Enlai offered an even more complicated assessment. He saw the second Taiwan Strait Crisis as a demonstration of the ability of the two Chinese parties to engage in tacit bargaining with each other across the barriers of opposing ideologies and even while the nuclear powers were fencing about nuclear war. Nearly fifteen years later, Zhou recounted Beijing’s strategy to Richard Nixon during the President’s 1972 visit to Beijing:

In 1958, then Secretary Dulles wanted Chiang Kai-shek to give up the islands of Quemoy and Matsu so as to completely sever Taiwan and the mainland and draw a line there. Chiang Kai-shek was not willing to do this. ⁵² We also advised him not to withdraw from Quemoy and Matsu. We advised him not to withdraw by firing artillery shells at them—that is, on odd days we would shell them, and not shell them on even days, and on holidays we would not shell them. So they understood our intentions and didn’t withdraw. No other means or messages were required; just by this method of shelling they understood.” ⁵³

These brilliant achievements must be balanced against the global impact of the crisis, however. The ambassadorial talks deadlocked almost as soon as they resumed. Mao’s ambiguous maneuvers, in fact, froze Sino-American relations into an adversarial posture from which they did not recover for over a decade. The notion that China was determined to eject the United States from the Western Pacific grew into an article of faith in Washington that deprived both sides of options for a more flexible diplomacy.

The impact on the Soviet leadership was the opposite of what Mao had intended. Far from abandoning the policy of peaceful coexistence, Moscow was panicked by Mao’s rhetoric and unsettled by his nuclear brinkmanship, his repeated musing on the likely positive effects of nuclear war for world socialism, and his failure to consult Moscow. In the aftermath of the crisis, Moscow suspended nuclear cooperation with Beijing, and in June of 1959 withdrew its commitment to provide China with a model atomic bomb. In 1960, Khrushchev withdrew Russian technicians from China and canceled all aid projects, claiming that “[we] couldn’t simply stand by, allowing some of our best-qualified specialists—people who’d been trained in our own agriculture and industry—to receive nothing but harassment in exchange for their help.” ⁵⁴

Internationally Mao achieved another demonstration of China’s hair-trigger response to perceived threats to its national security or territorial integrity. This would discourage attempts by China’s neighbors to exploit the domestic upheaval into which Mao was about to plunge his society. But it also started a process of progressive isolation that would cause Mao to rethink his foreign policy a decade later.