In 1960, fifteen years after Davies’s memo, Mao led China into a furiously angry break from its erstwhile ally and socialist brother, the Soviet Union, accusing it of crimes of ideology and aggression, using the stilted bombast that China’s Communists always use against their foes, even today. In addition to the war of words, there were armed clashes in 1969 over a disputed island in the Ussuri River (Wusulijiang in Chinese) on the border between Chinese Manchuria and Soviet Siberia. This new rivalry paved the way, after an interval of more than another decade, for the historic rapprochement between China and the United States, which began in the early 1970s.
China’s anti-Soviet animosity and its balance-of-power détente with America have given great credibility to the idea that China under the Communists would always have been amenable to the “American overtures” of which Davies spoke, and that at least non-hostile relations with the United States would have come about if only the Americans had not persisted in their blind and self-defeating support of Chiang.
Behind this perception is a historical interpretation, namely that the Chinese Communists never really trusted the Russians, never got much real aid from them, sometimes felt betrayed by them, and always yearned, as Mao repeatedly told the Dixie Mission representatives, to benefit from a normal and friendly cooperation with the United States. Mao, after all, was a “radish Communist” or a “margarine” one, not a real one, this line of thinking posits. He wanted to adapt Marxism to China’s purposes, and in so doing to preserve China’s independence from the USSR, which loomed gigantic and threatening on the northern border, practically shouting at China to engage in a strategic balancing act with the distant United States. Hurley himself, in the one area of agreement between him and the China hands, believed this. The supreme authorities on the topic, Stalin and Molotov, had personally assured him that Mao and his followers were not real Communists.
Some historians have concluded that when Mao did, for the first decade of his rule, allow China to be a “creature of Russian foreign policy,” it was because the United States had pushed him in that direction. Many times during the Japanese war he had been furious at Stalin for the Soviet leader’s unapologetic pursuit of his own interest at the expense of the Chinese Communists’. Later, Mao spoke of Stalin’s “treason.” He called him “this hypocritical foreign devil.” He felt humiliated by Russia’s semi-colonial exercise of power in Manchuria as well as in Xinjiang in western China, and by Stalin’s haughty treatment of him. He would have wanted, this argument goes, to keep his country free of Soviet domination.
This view is supported by any number of what have become accepted facts. Mao was almost from the beginning—certainly ever since the KMT’s bloody anti-Communist coup of 1927—an unorthodox revolutionary. After the massacre of Communists in Shanghai, Mao led the party to the countryside, where he believed the revolution could be based on the oppressed peasantry, an idea that would have seemed ridiculous to Marx, whose ideas about what he called “the idiocy of rural life” precluded any such Maoist possibility. Mao built up a network of rural soviets in Jiangxi province in south central China—modeled on the powerful workers’ soviets, or councils, that helped pave the way for the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917.
Mao’s biggest rivals for power inside the CCP were for years a group of what were called the “returned students” or the “28 Bolsheviks,” led by the proud and ambitious early party member Wang Ming. Wang had been sent to study in Moscow in the mid-1920s, and there he remained, except for a couple of years in China, until 1937. He missed all the action in Shanghai and in Mao’s rural soviets. He was not on the Long March and therefore didn’t have the prestige attached to that myth-making event. But he had tremendous stature from his association with the center of the world revolution, where he had frequent contacts with Stalin and Stalin’s agents, and he was seen to represent the Comintern, the Communist International, which was founded in the wake of the Bolshevik revolution and was pledged to fight “by all available means including armed force for the overthrow of the international bourgeoisie and for the creation of an international Soviet republic as a transition stage to the complete abolition of the state.”
Using the orthodox language of Marxism-Leninism, Wang criticized Mao for his “nationalist deviation,” and this added to the perception of Mao as a Chinese patriot first and only secondarily as an international revolutionary. His triumph over Wang in a series of power struggles, culminating in the early 1940s, appeared to be a triumph of his independent pragmatism over Stalinist orthodoxy, a point that Mao stressed in his own writings. “Marxism apart from Chinese peculiarities … is merely an empty abstraction,” he said. “We must discard our dogmatism and replace it with a new and vital Chinese style and manner.”
Then there was the actual experience of World War II. For the entire war, Mao had gotten what Davies called “shabby treatment” from the Soviets, who formally recognized Chiang Kai-shek’s government as the only legitimate government of China, never openly supported the Communists in their struggle against Chiang, never recognized them as an alternative government (as it did the Polish Communists), never even gave them much in the way of arms. In 1937 at the very beginning of the Sino-Japanese war, Stalin and Chiang signed a non-aggression pact, after which the Soviets, seeking to bolster their resistance to the common Japanese enemy, provided weaponry to the Nationalists, including what was to become the main fighter plane of the Chinese air force. Even after Yalta, the Soviets’ public pledge was to continue to support the Chiang government, to the point that during the subsequent civil war, the Soviet ambassador to China, in contrast to his American colleague, accompanied the Nationalists as they retreated to the south. Even a figure like Walter Judd, the ardently pro-Chiang congressman who believed that Mao would put Russian interests ahead of China’s, found that Stalin himself had been entirely “correct and circumspect” in his relations with China. Judd said he had found no evidence “that Moscow has been backing or supplying, either with materials or with guidance, the Communist government in China during the last seven years.”
Judd was far away, but the Americans on the scene, particularly the members of the Dixie Mission who were in Yenan for a year and a half, saw no evidence of any strong Soviet influence or even presence at Chinese Communist headquarters. The acutely observant Service supposed there was probably “some contact between the Chinese Communists and Moscow,” most likely between CCP members in the Soviet Union using a “radio at Yenan.” But he believed this contact was minimal. At the time of Service’s final visit to Yenan in March 1945, there had been very little travel between Yenan and Moscow for years, perhaps one or two planes a year, and those planes were thoroughly searched by agents of the central government during refueling stops in Lanzhou in western China. The last duly searched plane from Moscow had landed in Yenan the previous November. In all of Yenan, by Service’s count, there were a grand total of three Russians in early 1945, one surgeon and two reporters for the Tass news agency. More important perhaps, and supporting Judd’s assertion, in all the considerable contact that the Dixie Mission observers had had with the Chinese Communist armies, including months spent accompanying their guerrilla fighters, “there have been found no Russian arms or equipment.”
This perception that Mao’s contacts with Stalin seemed very occasional and unimportant supported the conviction of the China hands, including Stilwell, Davies, and Service, that the Chinese Communists might welcome friendly ties with the United States, in part because it would make them less dependent on the Soviet Union and therefore, once they took power, as they were inevitably going to do, less likely to be part of a monolithic anti-western Communist bloc in Asia. Under the circumstances, it made perfect sense to predict that China under Communist Party rule could be lured out of the Soviet embrace.
The preponderance of the evidence indicates, however, that these American China experts, so right about so many things, so shrewd and realistic in most of their judgments, were mistaken
in this. Years later, Davies acknowledged his mistake, writing in his memoirs that it had been “unrealistic” to think there was much chance of “politically capturing” the CCP.
Davies attributed his mistake to an “underestimation of the Communists’ commitment to ideology,” and this is true. But another analytical fault of the China hands was to take the balance of power as the operating principle in international relations. It made sense to them that China would want to balance the awesome power of the Soviet Union with the less threatening power of the United States, and, indeed, China did do that a couple of decades later. What they underestimated was the Chinese Communists’ membership in the international club of revolutionaries as the essential and ineradicable essence of their character and identity. Being straightforward men of integrity themselves, Service and Davies didn’t detect the breathtaking deceit that was practiced on them by Mao and Stalin, two of the greatest masters of deception that the world has ever known. Nor did they entirely appreciate the extent to which Mao acknowledged not only Stalin’s position as the leader of the worldwide proletarian revolution but also the extent to which he needed him; once the Cold War began, he would have little choice but to side with the Soviets. Logic and experience told the Americans that it would not be in China’s interest to submerge itself in a bloc of states subordinate to Moscow. Logic and experience said that Mao would see Soviet domination in Eastern Europe, and he would avoid it for himself by creating a strategic balance with the United States.
But in 1945—and earlier and later too—Mao didn’t see Eastern Europe the way Americans did, as satellite states deprived of their freedom and independence. He saw Soviet domination there—though he would not have called it that—as part of a grand, futuristic plan for an international revolution. By now, the idea of a proletarian world revolution seems so quaint that it’s hard to believe that anybody in the United States or in China actually believed in it. But for much of the twentieth century, it was an idea that fired the aspirations of millions like Mao, who saw the world divided between exploited semi-sovereign or entirely colonized have-nots like China and the rich and powerful forces of imperialism. Mao in this sense saw very little conflict or, as he would have put it, “contradiction” between his interests and Soviet goals. The scholars Alexander V. Pantsov and Steven I. Levine, whose biography of Mao draws extensively on Pantsov’s access to previously unavailable Soviet archives on this point, conclude that as the war wound down Stalin saw a chance in Asia “to radically alter the correlation of forces in the world arena in favor of the USSR.” And a key to that reordering was a triumph of the Communists in China.
Mao believed in this as well, and he therefore knew that his ultimate goal and Stalin’s were the same. His eventual seizure of power in China would, as he was famously to put it later, enable the east wind to prevail over the west wind, or, in less metaphorical language, for the global proletarian revolution to triumph over bourgeois capitalism, especially as represented by the United States.
“The principal and fundamental experience the Chinese people have gained is twofold,” Mao said in a speech on June 22, 1949, just before taking control of all of China, summing up the forty years since the overthrow of the Manchu dynasty and the twenty-eight years since the founding of the Chinese Communist Party. Internally, we have learned to “arouse the masses,” Mao said. “Externally,” he continued, we must “ally ourselves with the Soviet Union, with the people’s democracies, and with the proletariat and the broad masses of the people in all other countries, and form an international united front.”
This is the context in which both Mao and Stalin engaged in wartime relations with the western allies. The goal was not friendship with the United States. It was to sustain a necessary arrangement until conditions changed. The Communists of both the Soviet and Chinese variety understood the natural anti-Communist impulses of the United States, and they therefore strove to neutralize those impulses. They strove to persuade the Americans to support the CCP’s wartime aims, namely by pressuring the Kuomintang to accept a coalition government and giving the Communists arms to use in its guerrilla war against Japan. If the United States could do those two things, then afterward, as Pantsov and Levine have written, “the CCP would be able to ‘squeeze’ Chiang Kai-shek and his supporters out of positions of power and next, by maneuvering among the Kuomintang left and the liberals, ultimately seize power.”
Mao’s moderate policy, including his amicable outreach to the United States, was in this way entirely consistent with his and with Stalin’s long-term revolutionary goals. His friendly talks with the members of the Dixie Mission, his moderate, pro-democratic statements to journalists, his offer to support an American landing on Chinese soil—all of this was undertaken not just with Stalin’s approval but also on his orders. These orders, moreover, were identical to the orders that Stalin gave to Communist parties elsewhere in the world—to take the kind of “progressive” stands that would attract the support of liberal intellectuals and induce western leaders to believe in their non-threatening moderation. This explains Mao’s public championship of China’s small democratic parties and the CCP’s demand for the release of political prisoners and an end to KMT spying on Chinese citizens. This masquerade as the party of human rights and democracy in China was part of the longer-term scheme, and it was convincing.
Of course, Mao had no intention of establishing a regime of civil rights and democratic institutions once he came to power, nor did Stalin intend to keep his promise of turning Manchuria over to central government forces. In every case in the world where Communist parties took power, the mask was soon dropped and the real totalitarian face of the Stalin-nurtured regimes was revealed. Davies was right to say that the CCP had started out as an instrument of Moscow’s policy of world revolution; where he was wrong was to assume that this policy had been permanently abandoned as a result of the war.
In a way, the CCP’s efforts to portray itself as moderate and democratic recapitulated a famous episode from the past. During the first United Front, between 1923 and 1927, Stalin’s plan, as he put it in a secret speech to party members, was for Chiang to be “squeezed like a lemon and then thrown away.” Chiang’s preemptive strike against the Communists in 1927 foiled that plan. Now, in 1945, the plan was operational again, and this time it was going to succeed.
The influence of the Soviet Union on China’s Communists dates to the very origins of the Chinese Communist Party, when a group of leftist Chinese intellectuals, Mao among them, founded it in 1921. Comintern advisers were dispatched to China to supervise and to provide funds. They schooled the fledgling Chinese Communists in the style of discourse, the tone of propaganda, and the mode of analysis that went by the name Marxism-Leninism. They also provided it with its main source of money. The Kuomintang, which had formed only a few years earlier, was also organized along Marxist-Leninist lines and with the guidance of Soviet advisers, but when Chiang Kai-shek violently parted company with the CCP in 1927, he also parted company with Moscow. He sent its advisers packing and turned elsewhere for money and support, leaving the CCP as the only party in China to be closely supervised and funded by the Comintern.
The relationship between the Russians and the Chinese Communists from then on involved something far broader and deeper than mere advice, money, and moral support. It was an entire cultural and political transmission. It was a vocabulary, a manner of analysis known as dialectical reasoning, a set of practices, and a grand, preoccupying, thrilling political vision involving the triumph of the progressive forces of history over exploitation and reaction. Mao never departed from that vision from the time he became a charter member of the party in 1921 until his death fifty-five years later. When he made his lean-to-one-side speech in June 1949, Mao attributed his imminent success to what he regarded as the superior tools of Marxism-Leninism, the brilliance and promise of which had burst on the world with the Bolshevik revolution of 1917. “Communists the world over are wiser than the bourgeoisie,
” he said, celebrating the twenty-eighth anniversary of the CCP’s founding. “They understand the laws governing the existence and the development of things. They understand dialectics and they can see farther.”
Many of the early Communists, though not Mao himself, studied in Moscow at the Communist University of Toilers of the East, which was set up by the Comintern in 1925 to instruct revolutionaries from the colonized countries—and semi-colonized countries like China—in the theory and practice of Marxist revolution. One alumnus of this university was Liu Shaoqi, who was, until Mao cruelly jettisoned him in 1966, Mao’s right-hand man, in charge of the Communist Party organization and one of the masterminds of the Rectification Campaign of 1942 to 1944. Deng Xiaoping, later China’s paramount leader, attended briefly in 1926 before he moved to a sister school, half an hour’s walk from the Kremlin, created also by the Comintern, in 1921, specifically to educate a corps of future Chinese revolutionaries. During his years in Europe in the early twenties, Zhou Enlai, who was on the executive committee of the Chinese Communist Party European branch, recruited Chinese youths on work-study programs in France to go to Moscow to attend these two universities. In this way and others, Moscow had the attributes of a practical training ground and a spiritual mecca for Chinese Communists as it was for other Communists, from Poland, Germany, Bulgaria, and Korea.
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