China, the Warsaw Pact, and Sino-Soviet Relations under Khrushchev
by Vojtech Mastny
When the Soviet Union in 1955 created the Warsaw Pact, giving China observer status in the alliance, the anti-Western solidarity of the two communist powers was at its peak. While their priorities differed, their goals were compatible and complementary. By associating China with the new military grouping without extending to it full membership, Soviet leader Nikita S. Khrushchev added to the Warsaw Pact's political weight that he hoped would compel the West to acquiesce in a new European security system he wanted, dominated by the Soviet Union. For its part, Beijing aimed to use its affiliation with the Moscow-led alliance to bolster its own strategic position in East Asia against what it perceived to be a continued Western threat.
The person representing China at the founding ceremonies in the Polish capital was Minister of Defense Marshal Peng Dehuai - formerly the commander of the Chinese expeditionary force that had inflicted defeats on the American enemy during the Korean War. In his fiery speech, Peng dwelt on persisting US menace, pledging his country's unqualified support for the Warsaw Pact in the event of war. He used the opportunity to travel to Moscow to convey Beijing's desire to reinforce the 1950 Sino-Soviet alliance. Although Khrushchev was not prepared to oblige at a time he was making gains by pursuing a diplomacy of détente, the solidarity between the two countries remained firm.
At the first meeting of the Warsaw Pact's political consultative committee on 28 January 1956, the speech delivered by the Chinese observer, Marshal Nie Rongzhen, toed the Soviet line. As required by the line, he praised East-West détente and urged rapprochement between the two German states. Less than ten months later, however, when Moscow was facing a revolutionary upheaval in Poland and Hungary, the roles became reversed. Now the Chinese communists took it upon themselves to advise their Soviet comrades about how to handle a situation that threatened the integrity of the Warsaw Pact. And the Kremlin, uncharacteristically, was prepared to heed the advice.
During high-level meetings in Moscow, Mao Zedong's second in command, Liu Shaoqi, encouraged the Soviet leaders to consult with their East European dependents about the future of the alliance and consider the advisability of withdrawing Soviet troops from their countries. Prodded by the Chinese, Moscow on 30 October 1956 declared a readiness to conduct its relations with its allies according to the principles of equality and mutual respect. As the crisis unfolded, the Chinese influenced the Kremlin's decisions both not to intervene in Poland and to intervene in Hungary.[1] In the end, the Warsaw Pact was saved by disregarding the principles of the October declaration in Soviet-East European relations; in Soviet relations with Beijing, however, respect for the Chinese ally temporarily prevailed.
The respect was not reciprocal. The flowering of Sino-Soviet amity at the November 1957 conference of communist parties in Moscow was soon followed by Beijing's expressions of contempt for Khrushchev's policies as not militant enough. At the May 1958 meeting of the political consultative committee, Chinese representative Chen Yun nagged the Soviet Union for not pressing hard enough the political advantages that followed from its recent technological and economic accomplishments. Pronouncing the capitalist world to be "approaching the end of its days" and describing the United States as a "paper tiger," Chen lectured his audience that "to overestimate imperialist war power and to underestimate peaceful and socialist power is extremely wrong and baleful." He called for a strengthening of the Warsaw Pact.
The turn toward Sino-Soviet hostility has been variously attributed to Mao's ambition and Khrushchev's insensitivity. Shen Zhihua's essay on the two countries' military cooperation examines the controversy surrounding Soviet proposals to establish a long-range radio facility on Chinese territory and a joint submarine flotilla. Utilizing evidence from Chinese archives and memoir literature, Shen's account differs from most previous Chinese interpretations by assigning the main responsibility for the avoidable deterioration of relations to Mao's deliberate overreaction to proposals that had not been meant to insult China or diminish its sovereignty. The Chinese leader was mainly motivated by a desire to shore up his domestic position in the wake of his disastrous "Great Leap Forward" policy.
Substantive evidence from the Soviet side to determine the extent of military cooperation with China under Khrushchev is still scarce.[2] On the key question of Moscow's assistance to China's nuclear weapons program, the article by Evgeni Negin and Yuri Smirnov includes recollections by Soviet participants rather than archival documents. Contrary to standard Chinese assertions, it attributes to the assistance a crucial role in developing the program. On 20 June 1959, Moscow abruptly terminated its aid, with predictably dire consequences for its relations with Beijing. The first notable casualty was Peng Dehuai, one of the Warsaw Pact's "founding fathers" who as minister of defense held the main responsibility for military relations with the Soviet Union. A month later, he lost his job amid charges of "antiparty" scheming supported from abroad.
According to the explanation Moscow offered to Beijing to justify its ending nuclear cooperation, "the efforts by socialist countries to strive for peace and the relaxation of international tensions would be jeopardized" if the cooperation became known. [3] The issue became topical once Khrushchev concluded that his Camp David conversations with President Dwight D. Eisenhower in September 1959 had been so successful that they warranted a major unilateral reduction of Soviet conventional forces - a course of action China opposed. The Soviet leader proceeded to convene, in February 1960, a meeting of the Warsaw Pact's political consultative committee to press forward negotiations on his recent proposal for general and complete disarmament as well as his earlier project of a nonaggression treaty between the Warsaw Pact and NATO. As usual, the Soviet stage managers prepared the meeting in the expectation that their desiderata would be endorsed without substantive discussion.
Chinese observer Kang Sheng defied the expectation. Wary of a Soviet-American rapprochement, Mao had instructed him to undercut Khrushchev's disarmament proposal by serving notice that China would not abide by any agreement reached without its participation. In addressing the Warsaw Pact gathering, Kang praised Soviet promotion of détente in general but obliquely criticized its implementation by urging a harder rather than softer line against the United States, now that "the Eastern wind was prevailing over the Western wind." The publication of Kang's statement by Beijing while other speeches delivered at the meeting were kept secret infuriated Moscow, prompting it to lodge an oral protest with the Chinese.[4]
The issue of disarmament bedeviled Sino-Soviet relations even as both sides sought averting a slide into open hostility while the Soviet-American confrontation over Berlin was mounting in 1960 and 1961. Not only did the Chinese urge more militancy in dealing with Washington than Khrushchev considered prudent but also the Soviet leader was increasingly worried about the implications of China's forthcoming nuclear capability for his own country's security. The climax of the Berlin crisis that followed the construction in August 1961 of the Berlin Wall provided the setting for his new disarmament initiative, which attempted to impress the West from a position of strength while preventively containing China's nuclear power as well.
In anticipation of Khrushchev's renewed proposal for "general and complete disarmament," which was to be presented at the UN General Assembly, the Soviet party central committee on September 15 addressed a letter to its Chinese counterpart, ostensibly designed to force the acceptance of Beijing's membership in the United Nations. This was to be accomplished by including China in a UN disarmament committee consisting of the USSR, the United States, six allies of each, and additional neutral countries. The project would presumably benefit China by generating pressure for its international recognition even in the likely case the United States would refuse to cooperate. More to the point, the proposed inclusion of China in the committee would increase pressure on Beijing to cooperate with the Soviet Union and its allies in disarmament matters, thus providing them with a leverage to influence its nuclear program.
Not surprisingly, the Chinese turned down the invitation. They refused to mix what they regarded the primary question of their membership in the UN with the supposedly secondary disarmament question, especially since the chances of achieving general and complete disarmament were negligible. Faced with Beijing recalcitrance, five weeks later Moscow resorted to a maneuver calculated to exclude China from participation in the Warsaw Pact as a potentially subversive influence. This was the gist of a letter sent by the central committees of the European member states of the alliance (except Albania) to the four Asian parties - Chinese, North Korean, Vietnamese, and Mongolian - on 31 October.
Moscow's control of its military grouping became an issue as its dispute with Albania, the Warsaw Pact's full member, climaxed in August 1961, prompting the Balkan country to align itself with China. Having ejected Soviet personnel from the submarine base at Vlorë earlier in the year, Albania ostentatiously snubbed the alliance by sending a low-ranking delegation to the meeting of party secretaries where such crucial items as the building of the Berlin Wall and subsequent strategy in the German question were on the agenda. Albania's conduct contrasted with that of at least one Asian observer, Mongolia. Its party chief, Yumjaagiyn Tsedenbal, had attended the Warsaw Pact summit the year before, and the country's high-level representation at the 1961 meetings underscored its growing geopolitical importance in the evolving Sino-Soviet split.
The letter to the Asian parties asserted that "from the existing experience, we cannot say with any certainty that all observers have always informed the central committees of their parties fully and with sufficient accuracy about the substance of the questions discussed at the meetings of the political consultative committee." There followed the insidious suggestion that, if the observer countries could not be represented at the same high level as the member countries of the alliance - which might "obviously be difficult to do in all instances nor would it always be necessary" - then they would just be kept informed.
While Soviet subaltern Tsedenbal complied readily and Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh did not object either,[5] the Chinese were outraged. They expressed astonishment at the Warsaw Pact members' questioning the right of the "fraternal parties of the socialist countries of Asia to decide on their own at what level they send their observers" and at casting any doubt on the ability of their observers to report accurately. Affirming China's right to send whomever it wanted, Beijing nevertheless acquiesced in the exclusion of its observers. It maintained that since it no longer had an opportunity to send them, it would use the information that it would henceforth be receiving to express its own views on matters of policy "in an appropriate way." Having distanced themselves from the Soviet alliance, the Chinese thus positioned themselves to censure Moscow's conduct without inhibitions.
Mao's emissary Deng Xiaoping did so with a vengeance, though still out of public sight, at the confrontational March 1963 encounter with high Soviet party officials during which he lambasted Moscow for its intention to conclude a nuclear test ban treaty with Washington. He berated the Soviet Union for "pursuing an unseemly goal in coming to such an agreement, namely: to bind China by the hands and feet through an agreement with the USA."[6] The treaty became the catalyst of Sino-Soviet break. On 14 July 1963, the publication in Pravda of the anti-Khrushchev broadside Beijing had sent to Moscow a month earlier, as well as the Soviet leader's vigorous riposte to it, marked the first open acknowledgment of the rift. On the next day, the Soviet Union resumed test ban talks with the United States, leading two weeks later to a treaty China roundly condemned as a superpower conspiracy aimed at blocking its acquisition of a nuclear bomb and perpetuating their own nuclear supremacy.
Four days before his revelation of the Sino-Soviet rift, Khrushchev on 10 July notified the East European party leaders about Mongolia's desire to join the Warsaw Pact. He warmly recommended the applicant and called for immediate consultations "about this important question." Tsedenbal's own message to the East Europeans duly followed in another five days, by which time the Pravda news had made the requisite impact. In justifying his country's membership application, the Mongolian leader alluded darkly to "the course of events in different parts of the globe, particularly the Far East." He did not mention China by name; instead, he dressed the looming threat in the guise of imaginary weapons of mass destruction that the "American imperialists" had been supposedly supplying to Japan.
The proposal to bring Mongolia into the Warsaw Pact, thus extending its mutual assistance clause to the potential battlefield with China, prompted Polish foreign minister Adam Rapacki to compose a memorandum in which he used all his powers of persuasion to block the admission.He argued that it would bring no military advantages to either Mongolia or the alliance while being politically risky in both the short and the long run. The enlargement would be seen as being directed against China and could be exploited by it for accusations that the Sino-Soviet dispute was being expanded into the military arena. The Romanian party politburo, which discussed the Mongolian membership on 18 July, also opposed it on the grounds that it would antagonize China, thus further widening the split within international communism.
Rapacki pointed out that it would be inconsistent extending military guarantees to Mongolia and not to North Korea, Vietnam, or China, all of which were presumably more exposed to Western threat. Besides, since the Warsaw Pact was limited to Europe, its article four which provided for automatic mutual assistance by its signatories, would have to be changed, thus weakening the alliance in Europe without strengthening it in Asia. Finally, since the admission of new members required unanimity, raising the issue would open the question of Albania's vote while Romania's was not be taken for granted. The resulting discussion would exacerbate discord within the alliance.
When the Warsaw Pact Political Consultative Committee, urgently summoned by Khrushchev for 26 July, discussed the Mongolian membership application, only the Romanians vaguely objected. All the other Eastern European countries agreed. It was the Soviets themselves who killed the idea they had originally supported, pointing out a contradiction between the Warsaw Pact's enlargement as a signal of threat and the limited nuclear test ban treaty just concluded with the United States and Great Britain as a harbinger of détente. When Tsedenbal proposed to postpone decision the alliance's members disposed of the Mongolian application by agreeing not to discuss it any further.
With the Sino-Soviet dispute out in the open, China's participation in the Warsaw Pact was over. Beijing would still keep a close eye on the alliance that it now regarded as an extended arm of Soviet imperialism and cultivate bilateral relations with its members to Moscow's growing discomfort. Eventually, the circle would be closed as the Kremlin came to regard China as an effective ally of NATO, the United States, and Japan. The PHP will address these later developments in its future publications.
Notes
[1] Chen Jian, Mao's China and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), pp. 150-62.
[2] Cf. Sergei Goncharenko, "Sino-Soviet Military Cooperation," in Brothers in Arms: The Rise and Fall of the Sino-Soviet Alliance, 1945-1963, ed. Odd Arne Westad (Washington: Woodrow Wilson Center Press, 1998), pp. 141-64.
[3] Chen Jian, Mao's China, p. 78.
[4] Zhang Yu, "The Evolution of Mao's Views on the Soviets, 1949-1959," paper presented at the conference "New Evidence on the Cold War in Asia," Hong Kong, 9-12 January 1996, pp. 8-9.
[5] Ho Chi Minh to Ulbricht, 3 October 1961, ZK SED, J IV 2/202-245 Bd 2, Stiftung Archiv der Parteien und Massenorganisationen der DDR im Bundesarchiv, Berlin.
[6] Statement at meeting of Soviet and Chinese party delegations in Moscow, 8 July 1963, Cold War International History Project Bulletin 10 (1998): 178.
