Typical of the tone of the Chinese side in these polemics was an editorial carried in both People’s Daily and Red Flag on July 14, 1964. It commented, “At the 22nd Congress of the CPSU, the revisionist Khrushchov [sic] clique developed their revisionism into a complete system not only by rounding off their antirevolutionary theories of ‘peaceful coexistence,’ ‘peaceful competition,’ and ‘peaceful transition’ but also by declaring that the dictatorship of the proletariat is no longer necessary in the Soviet Union and advancing the absurd theories of the ‘state of the whole people’ and the ‘party of the entire people.’ The Programme put forward by the revisionist Khrushchov clique at the 22nd Congress as a program of the CPSU is a programme of phoney communism, a revisionist programme against proletarian revolution and for the abolition of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the proletarian party.”[43]
In 1964, the Chinese raised another issue with regard to the proposed world conference of Communist parties. This was the question of the participation in such a meeting of the Maoist parties that had developed in various countries.
In a letter to the Central Committee (CC) of the CPSU, the CC of the Chinese party wrote on this issue, “On the question of new participants in the international meeting, you have put forward in your letter a most absurd criterion, according to which only those Parties supporting your revisionist ‘general line’ should participate, while the Marxist-Leninist Parties which have been rebuilt after breaking with revisionism would not participate. We tell you frankly, this will never do. If the international meeting of the fraternal Parties is to be a meeting of unity on the basis of Marxism-Leninism, these Marxist-Leninist Parties will of course be entitled to participate, and no one has any right to exclude them.”[44]
After the fall of Khrushchev there was a short “truce” in the struggle between the Soviet and Chinese Communist parties, but it lasted at best a few months.
The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution
Starting in 1966, the internal situation in China and its international ramifications provided a fertile new source of controversy between the Chinese Communists and the Soviet party and its allies within International Communism. In the second half of the year, Mao Tse-tung launched the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. The Cultural Revolution was in part an attack on Mao Tse-tung’s opponents within the Chinese party leadership, and was undoubtedly also an expression of Mao’s “utopianism,” his belief in the possibility of attaining objectives, of even the most intricate and scientific sort, through the willpower of the common man, without the use of specialists or experts. It was also an effort on Mao’s part to unseat what he saw as a new ruling class in China, one like the one he undoubtedly was convinced had taken power in the Soviet Union.
Under Mao’s inspiration and patronage, “Red Guards” were recruited from the country’s youth, particularly high school and university students. They proceeded to challenge, ridicule, dislodge from power, and in some cases kill people in authority, whether in the schools and universities, the Communist Party leadership, local and provincial governments, or factories and other economic institutions. Only the armed forces, which under Lin Piao’s leadership supported the Cultural Revolution, at least for a couple of years, were more or less exempt from this unseating of established authority.
This was also a period in which Mao and his allies virtually cut China off from the outside world. Almost all Chinese ambassadors were withdrawn from the countries to which they had been assigned (although formal diplomatic relations were not ended), all Chinese students studying abroad were ordered home, and visits to China by foreigners (with the exception of some of the leaders of Maoist parties) were terminated.[45]
Understandably, this upheaval did not have the support of the Soviet party or others associated with it. Furthermore, in many cases the destructive energies of the Red Guards were turned against Soviet citizens and diplomats in China, and even against Soviet merchant vessels in Chinese ports. The Soviet Embassy in Peking was ransacked, and Chinese students en route home through the USSR rioted in Moscow’s Red Square.[46]
Undoubtedly, the Cultural Revolution intensified the antipathy toward the parties that were loyal to Moscow. Typical, perhaps, was the attitude of one of the principal leaders of Vanguardia Popular, the pro-Soviet Communist Party of Costa Rica, with whom I had an occasion to talk in the summer of 1967. In discussing the Chinese Cultural Revolution, he shook his head and commented that the things the Chinese were doing were so absurd that no one with any intelligence could support them.[47]
Another leader of a pro-Soviet party, R. Palme Dutt, long doyen of the Communist Party of Great Britain, spelled out his indictment of what was transpiring in China. He wrote in 1967, “A strange new trend began to manifest itself increasingly in the declarations and actions of the Chinese Communist Party and Government. No new Congress has been held since that Eighth Congress expressed in the Second Five-Year Plan, was jettisoned, and replaced by the fantastic targets of the so-called Great Leap Forward, with disastrous economic consequences, and subsequent cessation of publication of economic statistics. In the political field similar wild tendencies have revealed themselves during recent years, with increasingly manifest divergences from the teachings of Marxism-Leninism, the cult of Mao Tse-tung, as the supposed infallible sole source of wisdom and leadership. … Today this abnormal phase has erupted in a fever of internal conflict and violence. The storm of denunciations has extended to the majority of the best known leaders of the Chinese Party and revolution. There have been senseless official reports of clashes, strikes and armed collisions on a considerable scale… A reckless campaign of anti-Soviet abuse has been accompanied by provocative acts against Soviet representatives.”[48]
While the Cultural Revolution was in full swing, the invasion of Czechoslovakia by the troops of the USSR and four other members of the Warsaw Pact took place. Chou En-lai expressed the opinion of the Chinese toward this event, calling it an “abominable crime against the Czechoslovakian people,” but also denounced “the revisionist Czechoslovakia governing clique.”[49]
Their Albanian allies joined the Chinese in denouncing the Czechoslovakian invasion. They professed to see it as part of a concerted campaign by the Soviet Union and the United States to destroy the Chinese regime and its supporters.
An article in the May 23, 1969, issue of the Albanian party daily, Zeri i Populit, entitled “Soviet-U.S. Alliance at Work Against the Czechoslovakian People,” began: “Today, there is nothing so antipopular and detestable to the peoples of the world as the aggressive U.S. imperialists acting in collusion with the Soviet revisionists against the freedom and independence of peoples, against revolution, and efforts of mankind to advance. In Vietnam or in Czechoslovakia, in the Middle East or on the Banks of the Ussuri river, in the Mediterranean Sea and in that of Japan, wherever there are conflicts and tense situations, there are also felt the predatory clutches of the sinister ultra-reactionary alliance.”[50]
43
44
45
See Stanley Karnow,
47
Interview with Eduardo Mora, Assistant Secretary-General of Vanguardia Popular Party, in San José, Costa Rica, July 4, 1967.
50