Further on, this article asserted, “By these crazy and very dangerous acts, the Soviet revisionists can scare themselves rather than others. The 700 million strong Chinese people, who are armed with Mao Tse-tung’s thought and tempered in the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, have never been scared and will never allow themselves to be scared by the war cries and sabre-rattling of the U.S. imperialists and the Soviet revisionists. Should they dare launch an aggressive war against China, the Chinese people are determined, as Chairman Mao Tse-tung has said, so decisively, fully, entirely and completely annihilate all aggressors, individually and collectively.”[51]
O. Edmund Clubb has indicated the way in which the Cultural Revolution prevented the Chinese from capitalizing on the Czechoslovakian invasion to strengthen its bid for leadership of world Communism. He wrote “the strong condemnation of the Soviet action by not only the Yugoslav, but also the French, Italian and other parties in the Occident had opened up the possibility that Communists outside the bloc would become alienated from Moscow and organize themselves as a separate force with a new power center. Had there existed a liberal-minded leadership in Peking at this juncture, it would have been the CCP’s opportunity, but liberalism had always been anathema to Mao Tse-tung, being one of the evil ‘bourgeois’ elements that he saw in revisionism. In the GPCR [Cultural Revolution] he was engaged in pursuing antiliberalism to the extreme.”[52]
Even the Vietnam War, in which both the USSR and China were giving substantial military and other aid to North Vietnam, against the South Vietnamese government and the United States, proved a subject of recriminations between the Chinese and Soviet Communists. An article by “Observer” in People’s Daily on February 20, 1967, commented on meetings between Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin and British Prime Minister Harold Wilson concerning a possible conference to end the war: “Throughout the London talks between Kosygin and Wilson, Johnson exercised remote control from the other side of the Atlantic and kept in close touch with them. The Soviet-British talks were actually a triple U.S.-Soviet-British intrigue to extinguish the revolutionary flames in Vietnam and promote the U.S. ‘peace talks’ fraud. These facts have once again proved that the Soviet revisionist ruling clique is a group of shameless renegades betraying the Vietnamese revolution, the number one accomplice in encouraging U.S. expansion of its aggression and the most sinister enemy of the Vietnamese people’s cause of resisting U.S. aggression and saving their country.”[53]
Soviet-Chinese Military Clashes
During the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution there developed the greatest danger of major military conflict between the Soviet Union and China. As early as 1963, the Soviets and Chinese had accused one another of military penetration of one another’s borders.[54]
In March 1966, Mao Tse-tung, in conversation with a visiting group from the Japanese Communist Party, predicted war with the Soviet Union—and simultaneously with the United States; it was “inevitable,” he said, and would come perhaps in 1966 “or within two years at the latest.” And as the United States attacked across the Vietnamese and Korean frontiers and from Okinawa and Formosa, the Soviet Union, with the “Sino-Russian pact as its pretext,” would advance from Siberia and through Outer Mongolia to occupy Manchuria and Inner Mongolia—and “there would be a confrontation between the Soviet forces and the People’s Liberation Army across the Yangtze River.”[55]
Although Mao’s apocalyptic vision did not come to pass, there did continue to be minor military confrontations along the Sino-Soviet border. The most serious of these took place in March 1969 concerning sovereignty over Damansky (Champao) Island on the Ussuri River border between Manchuria and the Soviet Far East. Several thousand soldiers on each side seem to have been involved in fighting there on two occasions, one of the clashes lasting most of one day.[56]
Both countries pulled back from further armed confrontation. However, the danger of war between them did not by any means disappear. For several years after the 1969 conflict, for example, the Chinese built a complicated system of underground tunnels in Peking as places of refuge in case of Soviet attack.[57]
Establishment of a Maoist Current in International Communism
As their quarrel with the CPSU intensified, the Chinese Communists set out to establish their own Maoist parties in the ranks of International Communism. This effort involved two tactics. One was to win over to their side as many established Communist parties as possible, in which they were successful only in a handful of countries bordering China, and in the case of New Zealand, whose Communist Party was the only onetime member of the Communist International to join the ranks of International Maoism. The other tactic was to split those parties that remained loyal to Moscow and form rival “Marxist-Leninist” Communist parties.
Sometime in 1963, the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party decided to encourage splits in those Communist parties in which its supporters were not in control. In September of that year, a pro-Maoist Italian paper, Ritorniamo a Lenin, proclaimed: “The Chinese comrades, preparing to set up a new trade-union center, a new Cominform, and new Communist parties in all the world, have put themselves decisively on the road to founding in a short time a new Communist International on revolutionary Marxist positions.”[58]
In February 1964, both People’s Daily and Red Flag published an editorial indicating the Chinese party’s intention of supporting pro-Maoist minorities that split away from pro-Soviet parties. It proclaimed, “In essence, the struggle within these Communist Parties turns on whether to follow the Marxist-Leninist line or the revisionist line, and whether to make the Communist Party a genuine vanguard of the proletariat and a genuine revolutionary proletarian party or to convert it into a servant of the bourgeoisie and a variant of the Social-Democratic Party.”
The editorial went on to say, “In the open letter, the leaders of the CPSU present a distorted picture of the struggles within the Communist Parties of the United States of America, Brazil, Italy, Belgium, Australia and India. They vilify in the most malicious language those Marxist-Leninists who have been attacked and ostracized by the revisionist group in their own parties.”
The editorial then proclaimed the Chinese intention of supporting the “Marxist-Leninist groups who organized rivals to existing parties. It said, “The Chinese Communist Party has never concealed its position. We support all revolutionary comrades who adhere to Marxism-Leninism. In the international Communist movement, we have contacts with revisionists; why then can we not have contacts with Marxist-Leninists? The leaders of the CPSU describe our support for Marxist-Leninists in other countries as a divisive act. In our opinion, it is simply a proletarian internationalist obligation which it is our duty to discharge.”[59]
A few months later, in reply to a letter from the Central Committee of the CPSU, that of the CCP wrote, “The splits that have occurred in the Communist Parties of Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Ceylon and many other countries are the result of your own pursuit of a revisionist and divisive line and of your own frenzied subversive and factional activities. It is you yourselves who, by waving the baton, have forced the revisionist leaders arbitrarily to push aside and persecute Marxist-Leninists and even to expel them, and thus precipitated the splits in these Parties.”