FOOTNOTES:

1. N. S. Khrushchev, Vospominaniya, 6 vols. (Moscow: typescript, 1966-1970), Vol. 5 (“Vzaimootnosheniya s sotsialisticheskimi stranami”), Part G (“Vzaimootnosheniya s Kitaem”), pp. 77-78.

2. “Vnutripoliticheskoe, ekonomicheskoe i mezhdunarodnoe polozhenie KNR,” Fond (F.) 5, Opis’ (Op.) 30, Delo (D.) 307, Listy (Ll.) 49-79, TsKhSD.

3. The section, entitled “Sovetsko-kitaiskie otnosheniya,” is on Ll. 71-79.

4. For two quite different versions of this theme, see Donald S. Zagoria, The Sino-Soviet Conflict, 1956-1961 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1962); and Steven M. Goldstein, “Nationalism and Internationalism: Sino-Soviet Relations,” in Thomas W. Robinson and David Shambaugh, eds., Chinese Foreign Policy: Theory and Practice (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 224-265, esp. 224-248. Zagoria argues that China’s policy vis-a-vis other countries (including the Soviet Union) was largely determined by the shifting fortunes of “left” and “right” factions within the Chinese leadership. Goldstein attributes the collapse of Sino-Soviet cooperation to a “fundamental change in [Mao’s own] domestic political priorities,” which elevated “national” over “internationalist” concerns. Although Goldstein does not dismiss factional politics altogether, he argues that “Mao was able to set the tone and the agenda of Chinese politics” himself, and that China’s relations with the Soviet Union were therefore “decisively altered” when “Mao’s thought about China’s domestic condition underwent a sea change in the years 1956-9” (emphasis added). For an opposing view, see John Gittings, The World and China, 1922-1972 (New York: Harper and Row, 1974). Unlike Zagoria and Goldstein (and many others), Gittings avers that changes in the external climate led to shifts in Chinese domestic politics, rather than the other way around. For a similar, though more qualified, assessment, see Michael B. Yahuda, China’s Role in World Affairs (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978), esp. 11-42 and 102-129. Curiously, very few Western scholars have attempted to connect shifts in Soviet domestic politics with changes in Soviet policy toward China (or vice versa). Alexander Dallin outlined a general framework in “The Domestic Sources of Soviet Foreign Policy,” in Seweryn Bialer, ed., The Domestic Context of Soviet Foreign Policy (Boulder, Col.: Westview Press, 1981), 335-408, but he made no specific application to Soviet ties with China. Carl A. Linden offered a few comments about the effect of Soviet leadership politics on Khrushchev’s stance vis-a-vis China in Khrushchev and the Soviet Leadership, 1957-1964 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1966), and Victor Baras discussed the impact of China on Soviet leadership politics (1953-1956) in a brief research note, “China and the Rise of Khrushchev,” Studies in Comparative Communism 8:1-2 (Spring-Summer 1975), 183-191; but most of Baras’s and Linden’s observations are speculative and (particularly in Linden’s case) not wholly convincing. Even the illuminating book by James G. Richter, Khrushchev’s Double Bind: International Pressures and Domestic Coalition Politics (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), which focuses on the connection between Soviet domestic politics and foreign relations, barely mentions Soviet policy toward China. It may well be that domestic-external linkages in Sino-Soviet relations, to the extent they existed for either China or the USSR, were weaker in the Soviet case, but that remains a fitting topic for study.

5. The phrase “reluctant and suspicious ally” comes from two recent essays by Steven M. Goldstein which debunk the notion that China was “forced” into an alliance with the Soviet Union in 1949-50 because of hostility on the part of the United States. See Goldstein’s “Nationalism and Internationalism,” 231 ff. and “The Sino-Soviet Alliance, 1937 to 1962: Ideology and Unity,” forthcoming in Harry Harding, ed., Patterns of Cooperation in the Foreign Relations of China.

6. For further comments by Khrushchev on Stalin’s treatment of the PRC, see Vospominaniya, Vol. 6, Part G, pp. 5-13. See also Andrei Gromyko’s remarks on the same subject in A. A. Gromyko, Pamyatnoe, 2 vols. (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1988), Vol. 2, pp. 127-130.

7. Memorandum from Secretary of State Dean Acheson to the U.S. Embassy in Paris, 11 February 1950, in U.S. Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), 1950, Vol. 6/China (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1976), p. 309.

8. Memorandum of Eisenhower-Churchill-Bidault meeting, 7 December 1953 (Secret), in U.S. Department of State, FRUS, 1952-54, Vol. 5/China, pp. 1808-1818.

9. See, e.g., “The Origin and Development of the Differences Between the Leadership of the CPSU and Ourselves: Comment on the Open Letter of the Central Committee of the CPSU by the Editorial Departments of People’s Daily and Red Flag,” 6 September 1963, in Peking Review 6:37 (13 September 1963), 6-23.

10. Among countless studies citing 1956 as the start of the conflict are Zagoria, The Sino-Soviet Conflict; William E. Griffith, The Sino-Soviet Rift (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1964); Francois Fejto, Chine-URSS, de l’alliance au conflit, 1950-1972 (Paris: Editions due Seuil, 1973); Zbigniew K. Brzezinski, The Soviet Bloc: Unity and Conflict, rev. and enlarged ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1967), esp. 271-308 and 357-432; Jean Baby, La grande controverse sino-sovietique, 1956-66 (Paris: Grasset, 1966); G. F. Hudson, “Introduction,” in G. F. Hudson, Richard Lowenthal, and Roderick MacFarquhar, eds., The Sino-Soviet Dispute (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1961), 1-8; and Thomas G. Hart, Sino-Soviet Relations: Re-Examining the Prospects for Normalization (Aldershot: Gower, 1987). For a variant of this point, see Goldstein, “Nationalism and Internationalism,” 224-242, which claims that Mao’s rethinking of Chinese domestic priorities, rather than Khrushchev’s secret speech, was the watershed event in 1956. Among those who cite 1958 as the beginning of the dispute are Yahuda, China’s Role in World Affairs, esp. 102-129; Allen S. Whiting, “The Sino-Soviet Split,” in Roderick MacFarquhar and John K. Fairbank, eds., The Cambridge History of China, Vol. 14: The People’s Republic, Part I: The Emergence of Revolutionary China 1949-1965 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 478-538; and Roderick MacFarquhar, The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, Vol. 2: The Great Leap Forward 1958-1960 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), esp. 36-40 and 255-292.

11. For documentation and analysis of these territorial issues, see Dennis J. Doolin, comp., Territorial Claims in the Sino-Soviet Conflict: Documents and Analysis (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1965); George Ginsburg and Carl F. Pinkeles, The Sino-Soviet Territorial Dispute, 1949-64 (New York: Praeger, 1978); W. A. Douglas Jackson, Russo-Chinese Borderlands: Zone of Peaceful Contact or Potential Conflict?, rev. ed. (New York: D. Van Nostrand, 1968); Tai Sung An, The Sino-Soviet Territorial Dispute (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1973), 13-73; and Luke T. Chang, China’s Boundary Treaties and Frontier Disputes (New York: Oceana Publications, 1982), 9-38 and 107-197. For an intriguing argument that territorial issues were not at the heart of the Sino-Soviet rift, see Klaus Mehnert, China nach dem Sturm: Bericht und Kommentar (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1971), esp. 228-234. Although Mehnert’s case is generally persuasive, Zimyanin’s report as well as other new evidence (see below) suggests that China’s territorial claims were a more serious irritant (at least from the Soviet perspective) than Mehnert implied.

12. Khrushchev, Vospominaniya, Vol. 5, Part G, pp. 6-7.

13. Gromyko, Pamyatnoe, Vol. 2, pp. 128-129.

14. Shi Zhe, “‘Soprovozhdaya Predsedatelya Mao’,” and N. Fedorenko, “Stalin i Mao: besedy v Moskve,” Problemy Dal’nego vostoka 2 (1989), 139-148 and 149-164, respectively. A slightly abridged version of Fedorenko’s article appeared as “Nochnye besedy: Stranitsy istorii,” Pravda (Moscow), 23 October 1988, 4.

15. “Zapis’ besedy tovarishcha Stalina I. V. s Predsedatelem Tsentral’nogo Narodnogo Pravitel’stva Kitaiskoi Narodnoi Respubliki Mao Tsze-dunom 16 dekabrya 1949 g.,” Arkhiv Prezidenta Rossiiskoi Federatsii (APRF), f. 45, op. 1, d. 329, ll. 9-17; and “Zapis’ besedy I. V. Stalina s Predsedatelem Tsentral’nogo Narodnogo Pravitel’stva Kitaiskoi Narodnoi Respubliki Mao-Tsze-Dunom, 22 yanvarya 1950 g.,” APRF, f. 45, op. 1, d. 329, ll. 29-38.

16. Among many examples of gaps in official transcripts are the exchanges deleted from the Polish record of the five-power meeting in Warsaw in July 1968 (“Protokol ze spotkania przywodcow partii i rzadow krajow socjalistycznych: Bulgarii, NRD, Polski, Wegier, i ZSRR,” in Archiwum Akt Nowych, Arch. KC PZPR, Paczka 193, Tom 24, Dokument 4) and the Czechoslovak account of the Soviet-Czechoslovak meeting in Cierna nad Tisou in July-August 1968 (“Zaznam jednani predsednictva UV KSC a UV KSSS v Cierna n. T., 29.7.-1.8.1968,” in Archiv Ustredniho Vyboru Komunisticke Strany Ceskoslovenska, Prague, F. 07/15, Archivna jednotka 274.). In the former case, discussions held during a formal recess in the talks (as recorded verbatim in the diaries of a key participant, Pyotr Shelest’) were not included in the final transcript. This omission was important because the discussions pertained to military options vis-a-vis Czechoslovakia. In the latter case, Shelest’s anti-Semitic slurs about a Czechoslovak official, Frantisek Kriegel, were omitted from the transcript. Fortunately, these derogatory comments were recorded by several participants, including (fittingly enough) Shelest’ himself in his diaries.

17. On the need for caution in using memoirs, see Mark Kramer, “Remembering the Cuban Missile Crisis: Should We Swallow Oral History?” International Security 15:1 (Summer 1990), 212-218; and Mark Kramer, “Archival Research in Moscow: Progress and Pitfalls,” Cold War International History Bulletin 3 (Fall 1993), 1, 14-37.

18. The transcripts reveal that, in addition to Stalin, the Soviet participants in the talks included Vyacheslav Molotov, Georgii Malenkov, and Andrei Vyshinskii, plus Anastas Mikoyan and Nikolai Bulganin at some of the meetings.

19. F. Chuev, ed., Sto sorok besed s Molotovym: Iz dnevnika F. Chueva (Moscow: Terra, 1991), 114.

20. “Istoriya i sovremennost’: Dialog Stalina s Mao Tszedunom,” Problemy Dal’nego vostoka (Moscow) 1/2 (1992), 109. This comes from the second part of a fascinating interview with Kovalev by the historian Sergei N. Goncharov. For the first part of the interview, as well as background on Kovalev’s career, see Problemy Dal’nego vostoka 6 (1991), 77-91.

21. “Istoriya i sovremennost’,” 110.

22. “Zapis’ besedy s tov. Mao Tsze-dunom, 31 marta 1956 g.,” Report No. 209 (TOP SECRET) by P. F. Yudin, Soviet ambassador in China, 5 April 1956, in TsKhSD, F. 5, Op. 30, D. 163, Ll. 93-94. Fedorenko’s article referred to the meeting that he and Kovalev had with Mao, but Fedorenko gave no intimation that Mao had found anything “unpleasant” about it.

23. Mao’s three speeches at the Chengdu conference were first published in 1969 in a CCP collection, Mao Zedong sixiang wansui (“Long Live Mao Zedong Thought”), pp. 159-172, the text of which was later spirited to the West. The speech cited here is the one delivered on 10 March 1958. An English translation of the speech first appeared as “Address on March 10,” in Issues & Studies (Taipei) 10:2 (November 1973), 95-98.

24. Mao also discussed this point at length in his March 1956 meeting with Yudin, remarking that Dongbei and Xinjiang had “become a mere zone of Soviet influence.” See “Zapis’ besedy s tov. Mao Tsze-dunom, 31 marta 1956 g.,” L. 93.

25. For a useful list of collections of Mao’s secret speeches, see Timothy Cheek, “Textually Speaking: An Assessment of Newly Available Mao Texts,” in Roderick MacFarquhar, Timothy Cheek, and Eugene Wu, eds., The Secret Speeches of Chairman Mao: From the Hundred Flowers to the Great Leap Forward, Harvard Contemporary China Series No. 6 (Cambridge, MA: Council on East Asian Studies/Harvard University Press, 1989), 78-81.

26. A good deal of valuable documentation has been emerging about Soviet policy toward China from the 1920s through the late 1940s, permitting a far more nuanced appraisal of Stalin’s policy. Among many items worth mentioning is the multi-volume collection of documents being compiled under the auspices of the Russian Center for the Storage and Study of Documents from Recent History (RTsKhIDNI): Kommunisticheskaya partiya (Bol’sheviki), Komintern, i Narodno-revolyutsionnoe dvizhenie v Kitae. The first volume, covering the years 1920-1925, was published in 1994. Important documents on this topic from the Russian Presidential Archive (APRF) also have been published in several recent issues of the journal Problemy Dal’nego vostoka. Perhaps the most intriguing of these is the lengthy memorandum from Anastas Mikoyan to the CPSU Presidium after his trip to China in January-February 1949, which is presented along with supporting documentation by Andrei Ledovskii in issues No. 2 and 3 for 1995, pp. 70-94 and 74-90, respectively. Another set of crucial documents from early 1949, which are a splendid complement to Mikoyan’s report, were compiled by the prominent Russian scholar Sergei Tikhvinskii and published as “Iz Arkhiva Prezidenta RF: Perepiska I. V. Stalina s Mao Tszedunom v yanvare 1949 g.,” Novaya i noveisha istoriya (Moscow) 4-5 (July-October 1994), 132-140. These include six telegrams exchanged by Stalin and Mao in January 1949, which are now stored in APRF, F. 45, Op. 1, Ll. 95-118.

27. “Address on March 10,” 98. For Mao’s extended comments on this point during his March 1956 meeting, see “Zapis’ besedy s tov. Mao Tsze-dunom, 31 marta 1956 g.,” Ll. 88-92.

28. Khrushchev, Vospominaniya, Vol. 5, Part C (“O Vengrii”), pp. 17-19 and Part G, pp. 37-40. Khrushchev’s version of events is borne out by a close reading of the Chinese press in October-November 1956. The Chinese media spoke positively about the events in Hungary until November 2, the day after Nagy announced Hungary’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact and two days after the Soviet Presidium decided to invade Hungary. On November 2, Chinese newspapers suddenly began condemning the “counterrevolution” in Hungary. This point was emphasized by the East German authorities in a secret memorandum on Chinese reactions to the Hungarian uprising: see “Bericht uber die Haltung der VR China zu den Ereignissen in Ungarn,” 30 November 1956, in Stiftung Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganisationen der DDR im Bundesarchiv, IV 2/20, No. 212/02. Other evidence, including the memoir by the then-Yugoslav ambassador in the USSR, also tends to corroborate Khrushchev’s account. (Veljko Micunovic, Moscow Diary, trans. by David Floyd (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1980), 131-141.) Moreover, Khrushchev’s version is not inconsistent with the official Chinese statement of 6 September 1963 (cited in note 9 supra), despite the way that statement has often been interpreted. Khrushchev’s account and the Chinese statement both indicate that the Soviet leadership hesitated about what to do vis-a-vis Hungary. The Chinese statement does not mention that Chinese officials, too, were initially hesitant, but that omission is hardly surprising and in no way contradicts Khrushchev’s account. The September 1963 statement goes on to claim that Chinese leaders “insisted on the adoption of all necessary measures to smash the counterrevolutionary rebellion in Hungary and firmly opposed the abandonment of socialist Hungary.” This assertion, too, is compatible with Khrushchev’s claim that Mao strongly supported the invasion after the Soviet Presidium had arrived at its final decision on October 31. (Because the Chinese statement omits any chronology, it creates the impression that Mao’s backing for an invasion preceded the Soviet decision, but the statement would hold up equally well if, as appears likely, Mao’s support for an invasion followed rather than preceded the Soviet decision.) In short, even if the Chinese statement is accurate in all respects, it does not necessarily contravene anything in Khrushchev’s account.

29. “Vypiska iz protokola No. 49 zasedaniya Prezidiuma TsK ot 31 oktyabrya 1956 g.: O polozhenii v Vengrii,” No. P49/VI (STRICTLY SECRET), 31 October 1956, in Arkhiv Prezidenta Rossiiskoi Federatsii (APRF), F. 3, Op. 64, D. 484, L. 41.

30. Of the myriad Western analyses of this topic, see in particular Peter Van Ness, Revolution and Chinese Foreign Policy: Peking’s Support for Wars of National Liberation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1970).

31. Far too many Western analysts have overstated the supposed contrast between Soviet and Chinese approaches to the Third World in the 1950s, mistaking rhetorical flourishes for actual policy.

32. See Mark Kramer, “Soviet Arms Transfers and Military Aid to the Third World,” in S. Neil MacFarlane and Kurt M. Campbell, eds., Gorbachev’s Third World Dilemmas (London: Routledge, 1989), 66-110, esp. 68-70.

33. “Osnovnye napravleniya vneshnepoliticheskoi propagandy i kul’turnykh svyazei KNR s zarubezhnymi stranami,” Stenographic Transcript No. 17238 (SECRET) of a speech by Zhan Zhisyan, chairman of the PRC’s Committee on Cultural Ties Abroad, 24 April 1959, in TsKhSD, F. 5, Op. 30, D. 307, L. 26.

34. Khrushchev, Vospominaniya, Vol. 6 (“Otnosheniya s kapitalisticheskimi i razvivayushchimisya stranami”), Part H (“Otnosheniya s arabskimi stranami”), pp. 57-58.

35. “Kommyunike o vstreche N. S. Khrushcheva i Mao Tsze-duna,” Pravda (Moscow), 4 August 1958, 1-2. This point was confirmed in an interview on 6 October 1995 with Oleg Troyanovskii, former Soviet ambassador in China and foreign policy adviser to Khrushchev during the 1958 trip.

36. In Peking und Moskau (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlags-Anstalt, 1962), 388-392, Klaus Mehnert argues that Sino-Soviet differences during the Middle Eastern crisis were negligible, but his analysis applies only to the period after July 23 (i.e., some ten days after the crisis began). Mehnert’s comments have no bearing on the initial stage of the crisis, when, as the discussion here has shown, Soviet and Chinese leaders genuinely differed in their views about how to respond.

37. See Allen S. Whiting, “Quemoy 1958: Mao’s Miscalculations,” The China Quarterly 62 (June 1975), 263-270. The various post-hoc rationalizations that Mao offered (so that he could avoid admitting what a failure the whole venture had been) should not be allowed to obscure the real purpose of the operation, as revealed in Mao’s secret speeches in September 1958.

38. Khrushchev, Vospominaniya, Vol. 5, Part G, pp. 72-73. The present author confirmed this point in an interview on 6 October 1995 with Oleg Troyanovskii, the former Soviet ambassador to China and foreign policy adviser to Khrushchev who accompanied the Soviet leader during this trip to Beijing.

39. Ibid., 73.

40. Dwight D. Eisenhower, The White House Years: Waging Peace, 1956-1961 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1965), 293-294, 691-693.

41. Richard M. Bueschel, Communist Chinese Air Power (New York: Praeger, 1968), 54-55.

42. See, e.g., Mao’s speech on 9 November 1958 at the First Zhengzhou Conference, translated in MacFarquhar, Cheek, and Wu, eds., The Secret Speeches of Chairman Mao, esp. 460-461.

43. For a cogent assessment of Sino-Soviet dynamics during the crisis, see Morton H. Halperin and Tang Tsou, “The 1958 Quemoy Crisis,” in Morton H. Halperin, ed., Sino-Soviet Relations and Arms Control (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1967), 265-303. Halperin’s and Tsou’s conclusions differ markedly from standard Western interpretations of the crisis, which posited it as a case of Chinese aggressiveness and Soviet timidity. For a typical example of this view (which, unlike Halperin’s and Tsou’s analysis, does not fare well in light of new evidence), see John R. Thomas, “The Limits of Alliance: The Quemoy Crisis of 1958,” Orbis 6:1 (Spring 1962), 38-64. John Lewis Gaddis has noted that U.S. officials at the time “interpreted [the bombardment of Quemoy] as a joint Sino-Soviet probe intended to test Western resolve.” See “Dividing Adversaries: The United States and International Communism, 1945-1958,” in The Long Peace: Inquiries Into the History of the Cold War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 186-187. Gaddis seems to believe that this perception was not quite accurate, but in fact the evidence amply bears out the views of President Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles.

44. Mao Zedong sixiang wansui (1969), 233. Mao’s reference to “a few rounds of artillery” is disingenuous to say the least, since the Chinese leader himself acknowledged in a secret speech in April 1959 (ibid., 290) that some 19,000 shells had been fired at Quemoy on 23 August 1958 alone. The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency estimated that the number of shells fired on the first day was closer to 41,000, but whichever figure may be correct, it is clear that far more than “a few rounds of artillery” were fired.

45. As Allen Whiting points out (“Quemoy 1958,” 266-267), there is little evidence that Mao intended at this point to attack Taiwan. Instead, he was hoping merely to destabilize the Guomintang government.

46. Mao Zedong sixiang wansui (1969), 255. See also Whiting, “Quemoy 1958,” 266-267.

47. Gromyko, Pamyatnoe, Vol. 2, p. 132-133.

48. Full citations for Khrushchev’s two major statements, as mentioned here and in the next sentence, are provided below in my annotations to Zimyanin’s report.

49. On this point, see John Wilson Lewis and Xue Litai, China’s Strategic Seapower: The Politics of Force Modernization in the Nuclear Age (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 16.

50. Khrushchev, Vospominaniya, Vol. 5, Part G, pp. 73-74.

51. This also was a theme in official Chinese polemics beginning in 1963. Reliable documentation from 1958 undercuts these post-hoc Chinese accusations.

52. For a slightly different interpretation, see Whiting, “The Sino-
Soviet Split,” 499-500.

53. Ibid. and “Zapis’ besedy N. S. Khrushcheva v Pekine 2 oktyabrya 1959 g.,” Osobaya papka (STRICTLY SECRET), APRF, F. 45, Op. 1, D. 331, Ll. 12-15.

54. For a brief but reliable overview of Sino-Soviet nuclear weapons cooperation, see the highly acclaimed book by John Wilson Lewis and Xue Litai, China Builds the Bomb (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1988), 39-46, 60-65, 71-72, and 221-222. Additional valuable details, especially about cooperation in delivery vehicle technology, are provided by Lewis and Xue in their subsequent study, China’s Strategic Seapower, 2-4, 10-18, 47-49, and 130-134. See also Robert S. Norris, Andrew S. Burrows, and Richard W. Fieldhouse, Nuclear Weapons Databook, vol. 5: British, French, and Chinese Nuclear Weapons (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1994), 324-356. For a sample of earlier accounts, see Harold P. Ford, “The Eruption of Sino-Soviet Politico-Military Problems, 1957-60,” in Raymond L. Garthoff, ed., Sino-Soviet Military Relations (New York: Praeger, 1966), 100-113; Thomas W. Wolfe, Soviet Strategy at the Crossroads (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1964), 216-224; Alice Langley Hsieh, “The Sino-Soviet Nuclear Dialogue: 1963,” Journal of Conflict Resolution 8:2 (June 1964), 99-115 (Hsieh uses the Sino-Soviet exchanges of 1963 to look back at the earlier period of nuclear cooperation as well as the subsequent disputes); Alice Langley Hsieh, Communist China’s Strategy in the Nuclear Era (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962), 70-109; Morton H. Halperin, “Sino-Soviet Nuclear Relations, 1957-1960,” in Halperin, ed., Sino-Soviet Relations and Arms Control, 117-143; and Morton H. Halperin, China and the Bomb (New York: Praeger, 1965), 78-82.

55. The information here was first revealed by the former head of the Soviet “missile group” in China, Major-General Aleksandr Savel’ev, in Aleksandr Dolinin, “Kak nashi raketchiki kitaitsev obuchali,” Krasnaya zvezda (Moscow), 13 May 1995, 6.

56. Lewis and Xue, China’s Strategic Seapower, 131-132. For more on the R-11FM, see Mikhail Turetsky, The Introduction of Missile Systems Into the Soviet Navy (1945-1962), Monograph Series on Soviet Union No. 8 (Falls Church, VA: Delphic Associates, February 1983), 65-72.

57. This is discussed by Khrushchev in Vospominaniya, Vol. 5, Part G, pp. 98-99.

58. Ibid., p. 98. Details of the NDTA and the June 1959 letter were first publicly revealed in a Chinese broadcast on 15 August 1963, which claimed that Khrushchev had reneged on the agreement so that he would have “a gift to take to Eisenhower when visiting the USA in September.” A very similar formulation was used in the official Chinese statement cited in note 9 supra.

59. “Zapis’ besedy N. S. Khrushcheva 2 oktyabrya 1959 g. v Pekine,” Osobaya papka (STRICTLY SECRET), 2 October 1959, in APRF, F. 45, Op. 1, D. 331, Ll. 12-15. For an assessment of the Chinese leadership’s perspective on this matter, see Lewis and Xue, China’s Strategic Seapower, 17-18, 133.

60. Khrushchev deals with this point at length in his memoirs; see Vospominaniya, Vol. 5, Part G, pp. 71-76. See also Gromyko, Pamyatnoe, vol. 2, pp. 133-134.

61. On this point, see Lewis and Xue, China Builds the Bomb, 64-65 and Walter C. Clemens, Jr., “The Nuclear Test Ban and Sino-Soviet Relations,” in Halperin, ed., Sino-Soviet Relations and Arms Control, 146-147. See also three official Chinese statements released in 1963: “Statement of the Chinese Government Advocating the Complete, Thorough, Total, and Resolute Prohibition and Destruction of Nuclear Weapons,” Peking Review 6:31 (2 August 1963), 7-8; “Statement by the Spokesman of the Chinese Government: A Comment on the Soviet Government’s Statement of 3 August,” Peking Review 6:33 (16 August 1963), 7-15, esp. 8-10; and “Statement by the Spokesman of the Chinese Government: A Comment on the Soviet Government’s Statement of 21 August,” Peking Review 6:36 (6 September 1963), 7-16. These formed the basis of a booklet published in late 1963 by the Foreign Languages Press in Beijing, People of the World, Unite for the Complete, Thorough, Total, and Resolute Prohibition and Destruction of Nuclear Weapons!

62. On 21 January 1960 the Chinese National People’s Congress adopted a resolution stipulating that China would not be bound by any arms control agreement unless it had participated in the negotiations and had given its express consent.

63. For background and widely differing perspectives on these matters, see Steven A. Hoffmann, India and the China Crisis (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 9-74; Wilhelm von Pochhammer, Die Auseinandersetzung um Tibets Grenzen (Frankfurt am Main: A. Metzner, 1962); Alastair Lamb, The China-India Border: The Origins of the Disputed Boundaries (London: Oxford University Press, 1964); Alastair Lamb, The Sino-Indian Border in Ladakh (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1975); W. F. Van Eekelen, Indian Foreign Policy and the Border Dispute with China, rev. ed. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1967); Neville Maxwell, India’s China War (New York: Pantheon, 1970), esp. 47-134; Allen S. Whiting, The Chinese Calculus of Deterrence: India and Indochina (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1975), 1-41; R. K. Jain, ed., China-South Asian Relations, 1947-1980, 2 vols. (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1981), Vol. 1: India, pp. 97-151; Chang, China’s Boundary Treaties and Frontier Disputes, esp. 61-78; Margaret W. Fisher, Leo E. Rose, and Robert A. Huttenback, Himalayan Battleground: Sino-Indian Rivalry in Ladakh (New York: Praeger, 1963); G. V. Ambekar and V. D. Divekar, eds., Documents on China’s Relations with South and South-East Asia (1949-1962) (New York: Paragon, 1964), 111-186, esp. 111-151; and Yaacov Y. I. Vertzberger, Misperceptions in Foreign Policymaking: The Sino-Indian Conflict, 1959-1962 (Boulder: Westview Press, 1984).

64. “Osnovnye napravleniya vneshnepoliticheskoi propagandy v kul’turnykh svyazei KNR s zarubezhnymi stranami,” Stenographic Transcript No. 17238 (SECRET), 24 April 1959, by Zhan Zhisyan, chairman of the PRC’s Committee on Cultural Ties Abroad, in TsKhSD, F. 5, Op. 30, D. 307, Ll. 18, 27.

65. “Zayavlenie TASS,” Pravda (Moscow), 10 September 1959, 3.

66. MacFarquhar, The Great Leap Forward, 258-260.

67. Cited in O. B. Borisov (pseud.) and B. T. Koloskov, Sovetsko-kitaiskie otnosheniya 1945-1970: Kratkii ocherk (Moscow: Mysl’, 1972), 155.

68. A more serious incident occurred in late October, two-and-a-half weeks after Khrushchev’s visit to China. Nine Indian policemen were killed or wounded and ten were taken prisoner after they clashed with Chinese troops near Kongka Pass in Ladakh (northeastern Kashmir, along the Tibetan border). The Soviet authorities again maintained a policy of strict neutrality in their coverage of this incident, further antagonizing the Chinese.

69. For the effect on Khrushchev’s trip, see his Vospominaniya, Vol. 5, Part G, pp. 78-82. For the official Chinese perspective, see The Truth About How the Leaders of the CPSU Have Allied Themselves with India Against China (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1963).

70. CPSU CC General Department, “Otdel TsK KPSS po svyazyam s inostrannymi kompartiyami, mart 1953-fevral’ 1957 g.,” 1958 (Secret), in TsKhSD, F. 5, Op. 28, “Predislovie,” L. 2.

71. Gromyko, Pamyatnoe, Vol. 2, pp. 132-135. According to Gromyko, the talks focused almost exclusively on recent developments in the Taiwan Straits, and were largely unproductive. He said he was “astounded” when Mao nonchalantly proposed that American troops be allowed to penetrate deep into China so that they could be wiped out by a Soviet nuclear strike (p. 133). Gromyko’s retrospective assertions about this particular matter have been controversial from the time they appeared in 1988. A leading Western expert on political-military affairs in China, John Wilson Lewis, has discounted Gromyko’s report (see Lewis and Xue, China’s Strategic Seapower, 16 and 258), but has adduced no specific evidence to contradict it. What is known about China’s cautious policy during the Quemoy crisis (see above) does raise doubts about Gromyko’s claim, but it seems likely that Mao said something reasonably close, and that Gromyko may have somewhat misinterpreted it. After all, on 5 September 1958 Mao told a closed gathering of the PRC’s Supreme State Conference that China should be ready, if necessary, for a “war in which hydrogen bombs” would be used: “If we must fight, we will fight. If half the people die, there is still nothing to fear.” (See Mao Zedong sixiang wansui, 1969, p. 237.) Assuming that Mao said roughly the same thing to Gromyko, it is plausible that the Chinese leader also made comments similar to what Gromyko alleged. This is the view of Oleg Troyanovskii, the former Soviet ambassador and foreign policy adviser to Khrushchev, who accompanied the Soviet leader during his trip to China in 1958, a few weeks before Gromyko’s visit. In an interview in Cambridge, Massachusetts on 6 October 1995, Troyanovskii said, “I recall hearing something about this at the time, after the crisis began. It fits in with what Mao said during the Moscow conference in November 1957, which shocked us all.”

72. For background, see A. M. Aleksandrov-Agentov, Ot Kollontai do Gorbacheva: Vospominaniya diplomata, sovetnika A. A. Gromyko, pomoshchnika L. I. Brezhneva, Yu. V. Andropova, K. U. Chernenko i M. S. Gorbacheva (Moscow: Mezhdunarodnye otnosheniya, 1994), 71-72; and O. Grinevskii, “Na Smolenskoi Ploshchadi v 1950-kh godakh,” Mezhdunarodnaya zhizn’ (Moscow) 11 (November 1994), 120-126, esp. 124.

73. “Pribytie N. S. Khrushcheva v kitaiskuyu stolitsu: Vstrecha na aerodrome Shoudu,” Pravda (Moscow), 1 October 1959, 1.

74. A very useful account of Khrushchev’s interactions with Gromyko during the trip is in Khrushchev’s Vospominaniya, Vol. 6, Part E (“O poezdke v SShA”), pp. 7-25. Khrushchev notes that he “greatly respected Gromyko as foreign minister both during this time and afterwards” (p. 8).

75. A cover note on Zimyanin’s report alludes to a one-page update, but the text has not yet been located. No doubt, the update cited the announcement on 17 September 1959 that the Chinese defense minister, Marshal Peng Dehuai, was being replaced by Marshal Lin Biao. Numerous other top military officials also were removed at this time: the chief of the Chinese General Staff, General Huang Kecheng (who was replaced by the public security minister, General Luo Ruiching); two other deputy defense ministers, General Xiao Ke and General Li Da; and a half dozen lower-ranking generals. These officers and two deputy foreign ministers were all removed because of their purported links with Peng Dehuai, who was accused in mid-1959 of “rightist opportunism” and forming an “anti-Party clique.” These charges, approved by the CCP Central Committee at its plenum in Lushan in the first half of August, stemmed from a secret “letter of opinion” that Peng sent to Mao in mid-July, which strongly criticized the “confusion,” “shortcomings,” “extravagance,” and “waste” of Mao’s economic policies. The letter was disclosed to other senior officials at an expanded session of the CCP Politburo in Lushan in the latter half of July. Mao regarded the document as a grave threat to his authority, and he responded with a furious counterattack, forcing members of the Politburo to side either with him or with Peng. Although several top officials undoubtedly shared Peng’s misgivings about recent policies, they were unwilling to take a stand against Mao. By the time the enlarged Politburo session in Lushan adjourned at the end of July and the Central Committee plenum convened a few days later, Peng’s fate was sealed. For solid analyses of the Peng Dehuai affair, see Jurgen Domes, Peng Te-huai: The Man and the Image (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1985), esp. 77-106; MacFarquhar, The Great Leap Forward, 187-237; J. D. Simmonds, “P’eng Teh-huai: A Chronological Re-Examination,” The China Quarterly 37 (January-March 1969), 120-138; and Frederick C. Teiwes, Politics and Purges in China: Rectification and Decline of Party Norms 1950-1965 (White Plains, NY: M. E. Sharpe, 1979), ch. 9. Another invaluable source on the affair is the “memoir” by Peng Dehuai himself, which was compiled posthumously on the basis of autobiographical notes Peng wrote in response to interrogators during the Cultural Revolution. An English version is now available: Memoirs of a Chinese Marshal: The Autobiographical Notes of Peng Dehuai (1898-1974), trans. by Zheng Longpu (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1984). The book includes a whole chapter on the Lushan plenum (pp. 485-509) and an appendix with the full text of the letter that Peng sent to Mao in July 1959. For additional documentation, see The Case of Peng Teh-huai, 1959-1968 (Kowloon: Union Research Institute, 1968). Contrary to much speculation in the West, there is no reason tobelieve that Peng’s challenge to Mao revolved around military issues per se or had anything to do with the Soviet Union. Peng undoubtedly was troubled by the growing frictions with Moscow because he knew how dependent China still was on the USSR for military technology, but he never raised this issue in his confrontation with Mao. Nor is there any evidence to substantiate claims about a “Soviet connection” made in David A. Charles (pseud.), “The Dismissal of Marshal P’eng Teh-Huai,” The China Quarterly 8 (October-December 1961), 63-76. Charles’s article alleges that Peng’s letter to Mao was prepared with Moscow’s knowledge, and that “Khrushchev’s refusal to apologize for this intervention in Chinese domestic affairs perhaps precipitated the acute phase of the Sino-Soviet dispute.” These assertions are no more than dubious speculation.

76. On the role of senior MFA officials during the trip, see, inter alia, “Uzhin u Mao Tsze-duna” and “Prebyvanie v Pekine sovetskoi partiino-pravitel’stvennoi delegatsii,” both in Pravda (Moscow), 3 October 1959, 1; and “Kitai teplo provozhaet sovetskikh gostei: Ot”ezd iz Pekina partiino-pravitel’stvennoi delegatsii SSSR,” Pravda (Moscow), 5 October 1959, 1. The MFA Collegium was a group of 12-15 of the most senior officials in the ministry, including the minister, all the first deputy and deputy ministers, and about a half dozen others, among them Zimyanin.

77. See “Zapis’ besedy N. S. Khrushcheva 2 oktyabrya 1959 g. v Pekine,” Osobaya papka (STRICTLY SECRET), 2 October 1959, in APRF, F. 45, Op. 1, D. 331, L. 1; and “Beseda N. S. Khrushcheva i Mao Tsze-duna,” Pravda (Moscow), 1 October 1959, 1.

78. This is documented in Nie Rongzhen, Inside the Red Star: The Memoirs of Marshal Nie Rongzhen, trans. by (Beijing: New World Press, 1988), 572-573. Nie Rongzhen was the long-time head of China’s strategic weapons program; his memoirs were first published in Chinese (Nie Rongzhen Huiyilu) in 1984.

79. “Long Live Leninism!” was first published in Hongqi 8 (16 April 1960), and then republished in translation in Peking Review 3:17 (April 1960), 14-22. This statement and many others from 1959 and 1960 are available in well-annotated translation in Hudson, Lowenthal, and MacFarquhar, eds., The Sino-Soviet Dispute and as appendices in John Gittings, ed., Survey of the Sino-Soviet Dispute, 1963-1967 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 287-394. The Gittings book also includes key statements from 1963-1967 organized thematically to shed light on events from the 1950s and early 1960s.

80. See, e.g., Dolinin, “Kak nashi raketchiki kitaitsev obuchali,” 6.

81. For a lively account of the Bucharest session, which includes details omitted from the official transcript, see Edward Crankshaw, The New Cold War: Moscow v. Peking (Baltimore: Penguin, 1963), 97-110.

82. For a useful account of this process by a participant, see Mikhail A. Klochko, Soviet Scientist in Red China (Montreal: International Publishers Representatives, 1964), esp. 164-188. See also Dolinin, “Kak nashi raketchiki kitaitsev obuchali,” 6.

83. For a good indication of Rakhmanin’s views at the time, see his pseudonymously written book, O. B. Borisov, Iz istorii sovetsko-kitaiskikh otnoshenii v 50-kh godakh (Moscow: Politizdat, 1981). Although the book was written much later, his views were remarkably constant over the years. Rakhmanin wrote numerous other books about China (also under the pseudonym of O. B. Borisov), which are also worth consulting. See in particular O. B. Borisov and B. T. Koloskov, Sovetsko-kitaiskie otnosheniya 1945-1970: Kratkii ocherk (Moscow: Mysl’, 1972).

84. For background on Kapitsa and his dealings with Rakhmanin, see Gilbert Rozman, A Mirror for Socialism: Soviet Criticisms of China (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985), 51-53.

85. All other Southeast Asian countries came within the purview of the MFA’s Southeast Asian Department, which remained a unified entity.

86. The provisions excluding foreigners from Manchuria and Xinjiang were not made public in February 1950 and indeed had not been publicly disclosed at the time Zimyanin was drafting his report. The existence of these agreements first came to light in 1969 when a secret speech delivered by Mao in March 1958 was published in a collection entitled Mao Zedong sixiang wansui (“Long Live Mao Zedong Thought”), 159-172. An English translation of the speech was published in Issues & Studies (Taipei) 10:2 (November 1973), 95-98. Mao emphasized that these provisions relegated Manchuria and Xinjiang to the status of “colonies.” For other documents cited here by Zimyanin, see “Soglashenie mezhdu Soyuzom Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik i Kitaiskoi Narodnoi Respublikoi o Kitaiskoi Chanchun’skoi zheleznoi doroge, Port-Arture i Dalnem,” 14 February 1950; “Soobshchenie o podpisanii soglasheniya mezhdu SSSR i Kitaiskoi Narodnoi Respublikoi ob uchrezhdenii dvukh Sovetsko-kitaiskikh aktsionernikh obshchestv,” 29 March 1950; and “Soobshchenie o podpisanii soglasheniya mezhdu SSSR i Kitaiskoi Narodnoi Respublikoi ob uchrezhdenii Sovetsko-kitaiskogo aktsionernogo obshchestva grazhdanskoi aviatsii,” 2 April 1950, all in I. F. Kurdyukov, V. N. Nikiforov, and A. S. Perevertailo, eds., Sovetsko-kitaiskie otnosheniya, 1917-1957: Sbornik dokumentov (Moscow: Izdatel’stvo Vostochnoi literatury, 1959), 221-222, 227-228 and 228-229, respectively. For further commentary on these agreements, see Chang, China’s Boundary Treaties and Frontier Disputes, 9-38, and for a detailed contemporary assessment of the inequitable nature of the joint stock companies, see the top-secret memorandum “O nedostatkakh deyatel’nosti Sovetsko-kitaiskikh obshchestv Sovkitmetall i Sovkitneft’ v Sintszyane,” from N.V. Vazhnov, secretary of theCPSU branch at the Soviet Embassy in Beijing, 25 February 1954, in TsKhSD, F. 4, Op. 9, D. 1933, Ll. 18-38.

87. For Khrushchev’s version of these efforts, see Vospominaniya, Vol. 5, Part G, pp. 25-31.

88. “Sovmestnaya deklaratsiya pravitel’stva Soyuza Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik i pravitel’stva Kitaiskoi Narodnoi Respubliki,” 12 October 1954, and “Sovmestnaya deklaratsiya pravitel’stva Soyuza Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik i pravitel’stva Kitaiskoi Narodnoi Respubliki ob otnosheniyakh s Yaponiei,” 12 October 1954, both in Kurdyukov, Nikiforov, and Perevertailo, eds., Sovetsko-kitaiskie otnosheniya, 299-301 and 301-302, respectively

89. “Sovetsko-Kitaiskoe kommyunike o peredache Kitaiskoi Narodnoi Respublike sovetskoi doli uchastiya v smeshannykh obshchestvakh,” 12 October 1954, “Sovetsko-Kitaiskoe kommyunike o stroitel’stve zheleznoi dorogi Lan’chzhou-Urumchi-Alma Alta,” 12 October 1954, “Sovmestnoe kommyunike pravitel’stv Soyuza Sovetskikh Sotsialisticheskikh Respublik, Kitaiskoi Narodnoi Respubliki i Mongol’skoi Narodnoi Respubliki o stroitel’stve zheleznoi dorogi ot Tsenina do Ulan-Batora i organizatsii pryamogo soobshcheniya v 1955 g.,” 12 October 1955, ibid., 303-304, 305, and 305-306, respectively.

90. Zimyanin’s chronology here is slightly amiss. In private discussions with Soviet officials as early as March 1956 (a few weeks after Khrushchev’s secret speech), Mao began condemning the “great and serious mistakes committed by Stalin,” including his “erroneous and ill-considered” actions vis-a-vis China. See “Zapis’ besedy s tov. Mao Tsze-dunom, 31 marta 1956 g.,” Report No. 209 (TOP SECRET) by P. F. Yudin, Soviet ambassador in China, 5 April 1956, in TsKhSD, F. 5, Op. 30, D. 163, Ll. 88-99. Only after the upheavals in Eastern Europe in October-November 1956 did Chinese leaders express strong reservations about the de-Stalinization campaign. Zimyanin is right, however, that Mao had been uneasy about Khrushchev’s secret speech from the very start. For reasons discussed above, it is unlikely that Mao’s aversion to the reassessment of Stalin stemmed from any great feeling of personal warmth toward the late Soviet dictator. The more probable reasons for Mao’s hostility toward the de-Stalinization campaign were threefold: (1) his irritation that Khrushchev had not consulted with him before delivering the secret speech; (2) his concern that attacks on the “cult of personality” could affect his own status as the supreme, all-wise leader of China; and (3) his belief that the chief features of Stalinism, especially the crash industrialization program of the 1930s, were still relevant, indeed essential, for China. Later on, after the Sino-Soviet split emerged, Chinese support for Stalin was largely rekindled, no doubt to retaliate against Khrushchev. For a lengthy Chinese statement from 1963 defending Stalin (while acknowledging that he made a few “mistakes”), see “On the Question of Stalin: Comment on the Open Letter of the Central Committee of the CPSU (2) by the Editorial Departments of People’s Daily and Red Flag,” 13 September 1963, in Peking Review 6:38 (20 September 1963), 8-15.

91. The reference here is to Mao’s trip in November 1957, his first visit to Moscow (and indeed his first trip outside China) since early 1950. On the point discussed in the next sentence, see Khrushchev, Vospominaniya, Vol. 5, Part G, p. 105.

92. In May 1956 the Chinese authorities promulgated the slogan “Let a Hundred Flowers Bloom, Let a Hundred Schools of Thought Contend”; and in the spring of 1957, after the CCP Central Committee published a directive inviting public criticism, many Chinese intellectuals took advantage of the opportunity to express remarkably bold and pointed critiques of the Communist regime, far exceeding what Mao had anticipated. After six weeks of growing ferment, the authorities launched a vehement crackdown under the new slogan “the extermination of poisonous weeds.” Hundreds of thousands of “rightists” and “counterrevolutionaries” were arrested, and more than 300,000 eventually were sentenced to forced labor or other punitive conditions. For a valuable overview of this episode, see Roderick MacFarquhar, ed., The Hundred Flowers Campaign and the Chinese Intellectuals (New York: Praeger, 1960), which includes extensive documentation as well a lengthy narrative and critical commentaries. For a perceptive analysis of the fundamental differences between the Hundred Flowers campaign in China and the post-Stalin “Thaw” in the Soviet Union, see S. H. Chen, “Artificial Flowers During a Natural ‘Thaw’,” in Donald W. Treadgold, ed., Soviet and Chinese Communism: Similarities and Differences (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1967), 220-254. Useful insights into Mao’s own goals for the Hundred Flowers campaign can be gained from 14 secret speeches he delivered between mid-February and late April 1957, collected in MacFarquhar, Cheek, and Wu, eds., The Secret Speeches of Chairman Mao, 113-372.

93. These particular complaints were expressed by a high-ranking Chinese military officer, General Lung Yun, the vice chairman of the PRC National Defense Council, in the newspaper Xinhua on 18 June 1957, at the very end of the Hundred Flowers campaign. He declared that it was “totally unfair that the People’s Republic of China had to bear all the expenses of the Korean War,” noting (accurately) that China had been forced to pay for all the military equipment it received from the Soviet Union. Lung contrasted Moscow’s position with the “more suitable” policy of the United States during World War I and World War II, when Allied debts were written off. He also emphasized that China’s debt to the Soviet Union should be reduced in any case as compensation for the large amount of industry that the Soviet Union extracted from Manchuria in 1945-46. Lung’s appeals went unheeded, and the Chinese government continued to pay off the bills it had accumulated, equivalent to nearly $2 billion. The debt was not fully repaid until 1965. During the “anti-rightist” crackdown after the Hundred Flowers campaign, Lung was punished for his remarks, but he managed to regain his spot on the National Defense Council in December 1958. See MacFarquhar, The Hundred Flowers Campaign and the Chinese Intellectuals, 50. See also Mineo Nakajima, “Foreign Relations: From the Korean War to the Bandung Line,” in MacFarquhar and Fairbank, eds., The People’s Republic, Part I, 270, 277.

94. See “Deklaratsiya o printsipakh razvitiya i dal’neishem ukreplenii druzhby i sotrudnichestva mezhdu SSSR i drugimi sotsialisticheskimi stranami,” Pravda (Moscow), 31 October 1956, 1. For the CPSU Presidium decision to issue the declaration, see “Vypiska iz protokola No. 49 zasedaniya Prezidiuma TsK ot 30 oktyabrya 1956 g.: O polozhenii v Vengrii,” No. P49/1 (STRICTLY SECRET), 30 October 1956, in APRF, F.3, Op. 64, D.484, Ll. 25-30. Zimyanin’s description of Chinese policy is accurate. The Chinese authorities immediately hailed the Soviet statement and cited it approvingly on many occasions later on. During a trip to Moscow, Warsaw, and Budapest in January 1957, for example, Chinese prime minister Zhou Enlai repeatedly praised the October 30 statement as evidence of Moscow’s “determination to eliminate certain abnormal features of its relations with other socialist states.”

95. “Sovmestnoe Sovetsko-Kitaiskoe Zayavlenie,” 18 January 1957, in Kurdyukov, Nikiforov, and Perevertailo, eds., Sovetsko-kitaiskie otnosheniya, 330-335. Zimyanin’s characterization of this declaration (see next sentence) is accurate.

96. The reference here is to a two-part conference in Moscow on 14-19 November 1957 marking the 40th anniversary of the Bolshevik takeover. The leaders of all 13 ruling Communist parties were invited to the first session on 14-16 November, but at the outset Yugoslavia declined to take any further part. As Zimyanin accurately observes below, China joined the other participants in issuing a statement that reaffirmed the CPSU’s preeminent role in the world Communist movement. See “Deklaratsiya Soveshchaniya predstavitelei kommunisticheskikh i rabochikh partii sotsialisticheskikh stran, sostoyavshegosya v Moskve 14-16 noyabrya 1957 goda,” Pravda (Moscow), 22 November 1957, 1-2. Yugoslav officials refused to endorse the 12-party statement, but they agreed to participate in the second phase of the conference, which was held immediately afterwards, on 16-19 November. A total of 64 Communist parties from around the world took part in that session, which culminated in the adoption of a so-called Peace Manifesto.

97. “Rech’ rukovoditelya delegatsii Kitaiskoi Narodnoi Respubliki Mao Tsze-duna na yubileinoi sessii Verkhovnogo Soveta SSSR,” Pravda (Moscow), 7 November 1957, 2. See also Khrushchev, Vospominaniya, Vol. 5, Part G, pp. 42-46.

98. This is a paraphrase of what Mao said in a speech at the 64-party conference on 18 November 1957, the only time he is known to have offered direct support for Khrushchev against the Anti-Party Group. Excerpts from the speech were later published in Renmin Ribao, but all references to Khrushchev and the “Molotov clique” were omitted. As a result, until the mid-1980s Western scholars assumed that Mao had never spoken out against the Anti-Party Group. Fortunately, in 1985 the full text of Mao’s 18 November 1957 speech was published, along with the texts of two other other unpublished speeches he gave during the November 1957 conference, in a collection entitled Mao Zedong sixiang wansui (“Long Live Mao Zedong Thought,” the same title used for eight earlier compilations of secret speeches by Mao). All three speeches were translated into English, introduced, and annotated by Michael Schoenhals in “Mao Zedong: Speeches at the 1957 ‘Moscow Conference’,” The Journal of Communist Studies 2:2 (June 1986), 109-126. Mao’s comments about the Anti-Party Group were as follows: “I endorse the CPSU Central Committee’s resolution of the Molotov question. That was a struggle of opposites. The facts show that unity could not be achieved and that the two sides were mutually exclusive. The Molotov clique took the opportunity to attack when Comrade Khrushchev was abroad and unprepared. However, even though they launched a surprise attack, our Comrade Khrushchev is no fool; he is a smart man who immediately mobilized his forces and launched a victorious counterattack. That struggle was one between two lines: one erroneous and one relatively correct. In the four or five years since Stalin’s death the situation in the Soviet Union has improved considerably in the sphere of both domestic policy and foreign policy. This shows that the line represented by Comrade Khrushchev is more correct and that opposition to this line is incorrect. Comrade Molotov is an old comrade with a long fighting history, but this time he made a mistake. The struggle between the two lines within the CPSU was of an antagonistic variety because the two sides could not accommodate each other and each side excluded the other. When this is the case, there need not be any trouble if everything is handled well, but there is the danger of trouble if things are not handled well.”

99. “Vstrecha Predsedatelya Mao Tsze-duna s kitaiskimi studentami i praktikantami v Moskve,” Pravda (Moscow), 22 November 1957, 3.

100. “Kommyunike o vstreche N. S. Khrushcheva i Mao Tsze-duna,” 3 August 1958, in Kurdyukov, Nikiforov, and Perevertailo, eds., Sovetsko-kitaiskie otnosheniya, 403-406.

101. The “questions of military cooperation” discussed at this meeting were essentially fivefold. First, China sought new weapons and broader military backing from Moscow for a possible operation against Taiwan (see above). Second, Khrushchev sought, once again, to persuade China to permit a long-wave military communications center to be established on Chinese territory by 1962 for Soviet submarines operating in the Pacific. This idea was first broached to the Chinese by Soviet defense minister Marshal Rodion Malinovskii in April 1958, and over the next few months the two sides haggled over the funding and operation rights. At the summit, Khrushchev and Mao concurred that China would build and operate the station with Soviet funding and technical assistance, and a formal agreement to that effect was signed. (The withdrawal of Soviet personnel from China in mid-1960 left the communications center only half-completed, but the Chinese eventually completed it on their own.) Third, Chinese prime minister Zhou Enlai requested Soviet aid in the development of nuclear-powered submarines, a proposal that Khrushchev quickly brushed aside, as he had in the past. Fourth, Khrushchev renewed an earlier proposal for a joint submarine flotilla, which effectively would have been a reciprocal basing arrangement for Soviet submarines at Chinese ports and Chinese submarines at Soviet Arctic ports. Mao summarily rejected this idea, just as he did when it was first raised via the Soviet ambassador in China, Pavel Yudin, ten days before Khrushchev’s visit. Fifth, the question of nuclear weapons cooperation came up. In accordance with the NDTA, the Soviet Union at the time was training Chinese nuclear weapons scientists and was providing information needed to build nuclear weapons. But unbeknownst to Chinese officials, Soviet leaders had decided in early 1958 not to transfer a prototype nuclear bomb to China, despite having made a pledge to that effect in the October 1957 agreement. Mao raised this matter during the talks with Khrushchev, but got a non-committal response. Information here is derived from: (1) an interview with Oleg Troyanovskii, the former Soviet ambassador and foreign policy adviser to Khrushchev, who accompanied the Soviet leader during this trip to China, in Cambridge, Massachusetts on 6 October 1995; (2) Lewis and Xue, China’s Strategic Seapower, 14-15; and (3) Khrushchev, Vospominaniya, Vol. 5, Part G, pp. 76-78.

102. Khrushchev declared that “an attack against the Chinese People’s Republic, which is a great friend, ally, and neighbor of our country, would be an attack against the USSR itself. True to its duty, our country will do everything necessary, in conjunction with People’s China, to defend the security of both states.” This statement was repeated, in more or less identical phrasing, in numerous high-level Soviet statements. See, e.g., “Poslanie Predsedatelya Soveta Ministrov SSSR N. S. Khrushcheva Prezidentu SShA D. Eizenkhaueru po voprosu o polozhenii v raione Taivanya,” 7 September 1958, in Kurdyukov, Nikiforov, and Perevertailo, eds., Sovetsko-kitaiskie otnosheniya, 411. According to Khrushchev’s memoirs, as soon as this statement was issued, Mao expressed doubt that the Soviet Union had any intention of fulfilling it; see Vospominaniya, Vol. 5, Part F (“Mao Tsze-dun”), pp. 4-5. This assertion is problematic, but there is not yet (and perhaps cannot be) any direct evidence to contravene it.

103. The clearest statement to this effect came in a letter Khrushchev sent to President Eisenhower during the Quemoy crisis, warning that “those who are concocting plans for an atomic attack against the PRC should not forget that it is not only the USA, but the other side as well that possesses atomic and hydrogen weapons and the means of delivering them, and that if such an attack is carried out against the PRC, the aggressor will be dealt a swift and automatic rebuff in kind.” See “Poslanie Predsedatelya Soveta Ministrov SSSR N. S. Khrushcheva Prezidentu SShA D. Eizenkhaueru o polozhenii v raione Taivanya,” 19 September 1958, in Kurdyukov, Nikiforov, and Perevertailo, eds., Sovetsko-kitaiskie otnosheniya, 417. At the time, the Chinese authorities warmly praised Khrushchev’s statement, describing it as “a lofty expression of our fraternal relations.” See “Sotsialisticheskii lager v sovremennoi mezhdunarodnoi obstanovke,” Pravda (Moscow), 10 November 1958, 3. Mao himself said he was “deeply touched by [the Soviet Union’s] boundless devotion to the principles of Marxism-Leninism and internationalism” and wanted to “convey heartfelt gratitude” to Khrushchev for his support during the Taiwan Straits crisis. Several years later, however, Chinese leaders shifted their view (in accordance with the polemics of the time) and expressed contempt for Khrushchev’s pledge, arguing that “Soviet leaders declared their support for China only when they were certain there was no possibility that a nuclear war would break out and there was no longer any need for the Soviet Union to support China with its nuclear weapons.” See “Statement by the Spokesman of the Chinese Government: A Comment on the Soviet Government’s Statement of 21 August,” 1 September 1963, in Peking Review 6:36 (6 September 1963), 9. New evidence suggests that these accusations were unfounded, and that Khrushchev’s pledge was far more meaningful than the Chinese authorities later claimed; see Lewis and Xue, China’s Strategic Seapower, 15-17 and Whiting, “The Sino-Soviet Split,” 499-500. For an earlier study reaching the same conclusion, see Halperin and Tsou, “The 1958 Quemoy Crisis,” 265-303.

104. “Vneocherednoi XXI S”ezd Kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo Soyuza: O kontrol’nykh tsifrakh razvitiya narodnogo khozyaistvo SSSR na 1959-1965 gody — Doklad tovarishcha N. S. Khrushcheva,” Pravda (Moscow), 28 January 1959, 2-10; and “Vneocherednoi XXI S”ezd Kommunisticheskoi partii Sovetskogo Soyuza: Zaklyuchitel’noe slovo tovarishcha N. S. Khrushcheva,” Pravda (Moscow), 6 February 1959, 1-3. These speeches and other materials from the Congress were republished in XXII S”ezd Kommunisticheskoi Partii Sovetskogo Soyuza (Moscow: Gosudarstvennoe izdatel’stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1962).

105. Zimyanin’s characterization of the Chinese response to Khrushchev’s report (especially the section on “The New Stage in Communist Construction and Certain Problems of Marxist-Leninist Theory”) is accurate. Beijing’s tepid initial response appeared in the main daily Renmin Ribao on 5 February 1959, and a much more extended commentary was published in the theoretical journal Hongqi on 16 February.

106. Zimyanin is referring here to the momentous Second Session of the CPC’s 8th Congress, which adopted a “General Line” of drastically accelerated economic development and ideological fervor. The hallmarks of the new line, as it evolved over the next few months, were: (1) the Great Leap Forward, a crash program of industrialization relying primarily on China’s own resources; (2) the establishment of huge “people’s communes” (the “basic social units of a Communist society”), which were intended to replace collective farms and to combine agriculture with industry (including “backyard” steel furnaces) all around the country; (3) the elimination of virtually all remaining forms of private property; (4) the further leveling of social classes and systematic deprecation of expertise; (5) the abandonment of earlier birth control efforts; and (6) the conversion of the army into a full-fledged people’s militia (via the communes) and the establishment of an “Everyone a Soldier” campaign requiring Chinese military officers to spend at least one month a year performing the duties of a common soldier. Chinese leaders’ hopes of achieving immediate, rapid growth via the Great Leap Forward were evident from the goals they set for steel output (to cite a typical case). In 1957 steel production in China had been 5.9 million tons, whereas the target for 1958 was nearly twice that, at 10.7 million tons, and the targets for subsequent years were even more ambitious. Not surprisingly, these goals proved unattainable, and the whole effort turned out to be a debilitating failure. The communes (which became smaller but more numerous after 1958) produced equally disastrous results, causing widespread food shortages and starvation in the early 1960s. The Chinese armed forces also suffered immense damage from both the demoralization of the officer corps and the disarray within the military-industrial complex. Of the many Western analyses of Chinese politics and society during this period, see in particular MacFarquhar, The Great Leap Forward.

107. This was indeed the thrust of China’s campaign against “blind faith in foreigners” (quoted by Zimyanin in the previous sentence), as formulated in the spring and summer of 1958. Although Chinese officials and military commanders at this point were still hoping for an increase in Soviet military-technical aid, they wanted to limit the political and doctrinal effects of Soviet assistance. (In other words, they wanted to receive Soviet weaponry and sensitive technology, but to use these in accordance with China’s own doctrine, strategy, and political goals.) At Mao’s behest, Chinese officials began speaking against the “mechanical imitation of foreign technology” and “excessive reliance on assistance from the Soviet Union and other fraternal countries,” and warned that “there is no possibility for us to make wholesale use of the existing experiences of other countries.” They emphasized that China “must carry out advanced research itself” instead of “simply hoping for outside aid.” For more on this point, see Ford, “The Eruption of Sino-Soviet Politico-Military Problems, 1957-60,” esp. 102-104; Lewis and Xue, China’s Strategic Seapower, 3-4, and MacFarquhar, The Great Leap Forward, 36-40, passim. For a good example of Mao’s own thoughts on the topic, see his secret “Address on March 10” at the Chengdu Conference, published in Issues & Studies 10:2
(November 1973), 95-98.

108. For Soviet officials’ views of these ideological disputes, see the voluminous files in TsKhSD, F. 5, Op. 30, Dd. 247, 301, 398, and 399.

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Second Taiwan Straits Crisis Background:

Taiwan Straits Crisis 1958: Four MIAs Sacrificed to Secrecy

Historical Overview - Foreign Relations of the United States 1958-1960

The Federation of American Scientists - Quemoy and Matsu Islands Defense

The USSR Foreign Ministry's ppraisal Of Sino- Soviet Relations On The Eve Of The Split,
September 1959 by Mark Kramer

A Conversation with Mao, 1959 - From the Cold War International History Project