CHAPTER 7: WHOSE IDENTITY, WHOSE CONSTRUCTS AND WHOSE INTEREST? THE SYNTHESIS OF PRIMARY AND SECONDARY DATA IN
1.11 Structure of Dissertation
2.2.2 The Sino-Soviet Split
At the time when Mao Zedong and his acolytes were agitating for a communist takeover of China, and shortly after succeeding, the Chinese communists deferred to the Soviet Union as the
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leader of global communism. Mao admitted that “the Communist Party of China is a party built on the model of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union” (Mao 1961:284). However, after the death of Stalin, his successors wilfully wanted to drift from his mode of rule. At the1956 20th Party Congress Nikita Khrushchev gave a scathing criticism of “Stalin’s purges” (FitzGerald 1976:94) or excesses, his cult of personality, his obsessive despotism and antipathy to collective governance. The Polish-Hungarian crisis of 1956 compounded the already palpable division between China and the Soviet Union that followed the 20th Congress of the CPSU (Shen and Xia 2010).
Post-Stalin leaders started entertaining the possibility that apart from revolutionary means, parliamentary methods could also be used to replace capitalism with socialism/communism (MacFarquhar 1983:8). This change in Soviet leadership and political outlook ruptured Sino- Soviet concord. Mao was publicly enamoured of Stalin and he was a doctrinaire Marxist who could not brook the possibility of a parliamentary victory of socialism/communism over capitalism; neither could he accept peaceful coexistence between the socialist /Eastern bloc and the capitalist/Western bloc. In China’s mind-set, war was an inevitable presage of the communist defeat of capitalism. China accused the new Soviet leadership of revisionism when it allowed for other modes of achieving a communist triumph (Hunter and Sexton 1999).
The accusation of revisionism was an indictment that post-Stalin Soviet Union was an apostate of socialism and China was a credible custodian of socialist doctrine (Singh 1968). Goldman and Ou-Fang Lee (2002:448) assert that China, from the time of the Cold War, always nursed the desire to be recognised as a commensurate player to the superpowers. This assertion implies that by attacking the Soviet Union, China had lofty ideas of not only discrediting the Soviet Union, but of being recognised as a superpower too. As Taylor (2006) puts it, China has always entertained the thought that it has been cheated of its real and prestigious status in international affairs, and that its rich history of civilization and its unparalleled population create justification for a bigger status in global affairs. Mao’s speech that will be referred to in the fourth chapter will demonstrate Mao’s dissatisfaction of the lowly place that China occupied at the time of the People’s Republic’s establishment; he attributed this lowly status to imperialism, outside force, and the reactionary leaderships from China. The Sino-Soviet rift, then, though ideological, was arguably a fraction of a complex Chinese mindset.
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From the foregoing, though, it would seem that ideological variances were significant in deepening the Sino-Soviet rift. However, Jones and Kevill (1985: ix) argue that “the underlying causes” of Sino-Soviet discord had “much more to do with realpolitik” issues than with competition on who was a “true fount of communist wisdom.” Attributing Sino-Soviet animosity to realpolitik matters could partly be explained by how China and the Soviet Union tried to curtail each other’s power and simultaneously augment their influence in the Third World and Africa in particular. Daan S. Prinsloo (1978) actually asserts that “it is not exaggerated to state that most of China’s activities in Africa can be attributed to its conflict with the Soviet Union, rather than a belief in or a commitment to any African cause.” The Sino-Soviet split had a devastating effect on Sino-African relations (Martin and Johnson 1985; Cajee 2016). China considered Soviet imperialism i.e. imperialism of Soviet provenance, as similar to, (Friedman 2010) if not more sinister than, Western imperialism. To this end China started working more towards curtailing Soviet influence in Africa (Brautigam 2009). On the other hand, the Soviets also wanted to present China as having imperialist designs over Africa (Legum 1982:204).
Colin Legum argues that during this period, albeit maintaining its anti-Western rhetoric and stance, China “concentrated more on attacking the Russians” (1982:202). This did not bode well with African liberation movements that benefited from the USSR’s largesse. The South African Communist Party (SACP) was particularly scathing in its attack on China. The SACP accused China of disingenuously renouncing its anti-imperialist stance because it assailed the Soviet Union which was the “rock on which the whole anti-imperialist structure of the world rests”
(African Communist 1979:7).
In their defence, the Chinese branded African liberation movements that maintained ties with the Soviet Union as revisionists (Anshan 2007). While China committed itself to fight against what it perceived as revisionism, some writers described China’s actions and its intent to change the status quo as revisionist (see for example Qin 2009). The Sino-Soviet split proved costly for China because it started supporting any movement, defunct or otherwise, that was not under Soviet auspices. Alan Hutchison (1975:233) puts this succinctly by asserting that during this period “with very few exceptions, China’s choice of movements to support, and her actions towards these and to other groups, have been dictated by the need to challenge, surpass or embarrass the Soviet Union.” Rubinstein (1975: v) qualifies this statement by arguing that by the
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early 1960s, the West realised that the two most influential communist players were more of rivals than partners and that their activities in the Third World were more tailored towards
“parrying the moves of the other than with undermining the Western position.” This must have come as a relief to Western powers that feared the communist influence on the newly liberated and impressionable African states.
Liberation movements that were not on China’s side during this discord found China’s dogmatic adherence to the nature of communist revolutions unsavoury. China was regarded as a war monger, determinedly bent on defeating its political and ideological foes “through the barrel of the gun” (Kasrils 2004). Scalapino (1964:640) describes China’s and the Soviet Union’s fight for
“African affections” as “a titanic struggle.” This assertion came in the aftermath of Khrushchev’s visit to Africa where he reaffirmed Russia’s antipathy to imperialism and its determination to see it ended in Africa. This meant that the Soviet Union would continue to support African liberation struggles. By arguing for a more progressive brand of Marxism, Khrushchev was essentially daring China to abandon its Marxist zealotry (The New York Times, May 29, 1964).
The Khrushchev visit could also be read as a countervailing initiative to Chou Enlai’s
“whirlwind” African trip that began in December 1963 and lasted almost two months when he declared Africa “ripe for revolution” (Legum 1982:202; Singh 1968:4). Furthermore, conceding that Africa and China had different ideological persuasions and cultures, he emphasized the unifying factors which were “the struggle for full independence and … the fight against imperialism, colonialism and neo-colonialism” (Scalapino 1964:641). Scalapino (1964) concludes that Chou had a complex mission of challenging the perception of China’s detractors;
this was because on the one hand Chou had to convince Africans of China’s commitment to revolution and hence the total eradication of imperialism but also on the other hand had to present China’s image as that of a peace-loving and non-interfering power sensitive to the internal and specific dynamics of African states. Thus China had to present a “dual image”
(Scalapino 1964:642) in its mission to court Africa and discredit the USSR.
Mao considered post-Stalin Soviet Union as revisionist. Among his own people, however, there were those, sceptical of Mao’s cult of personality and mode of rule – redolent of Stalin’s style – whom he considered revisionists or “capitalist-roaders” (Short 1982:172); it was thus the fear of
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revisionism, capitalist inclinations among his colleagues, and the erosion of his immense authority that Mao embarked on the Cultural Revolution to cleanse communist China of elements that he considered inimical to his political philosophy (Payne 2014).