The outcome was “combative coexistence,” not war. To deter an attack caused by a misapprehension as to American resolve—as in Korea—Dulles and the Taiwanese ambassador in Washington, on November 23, 1954, initialed the text of the long-planned defense treaty between the United States and Taiwan. However, on the matter of the territory that had just come under actual attack, the American commitment was ambiguous: the treaty applied specifically only to Taiwan and the Pescadores Islands (a larger group of islands about twenty-five miles from Taiwan). It made no mention of Quemoy, Matsu, and other territories close to the Chinese mainland, leaving them to be defined later, “as may be determined by mutual consent.”7

  For his part, Mao prohibited his commanders from attacking American forces, while laying down a marker to blunt America’s most intimidating weapon. China, he proclaimed, in the incongruous setting of a meeting with the new Finnish ambassador in Beijing, was impervious to the threat of nuclear war:

  The Chinese people are not to be cowed by U.S. atomic blackmail. Our country has a population of 600 million and an area of 9,600,000 square kilometres. The United States cannot annihilate the Chinese nation with its small stack of atom bombs. Even if the U.S. atom bombs were so powerful that, when dropped on China, they would make a hole right through the earth, or even blow it up, that would hardly mean anything to the universe as a whole, though it might be a major event for the solar system . . . if the United States with its planes plus the A-bomb is to launch a war of aggression against China, then China with its millet plus rifles is sure to emerge the victor. The people of the whole world will support us.8

  Since both Chinese sides were playing by wei qi rules, the mainland began moving into the gap left by the treaty’s omissions. On January 18, it invaded the Dachen and Yijiangshan Islands, two smaller island groups not specifically covered by the treaty. Both sides continued to carefully define their limits. The United States did not attempt to defend the small islands; the Seventh Fleet, in fact, assisted with the evacuation of Nationalist forces. PLA forces were prohibited to fire on American armed forces.

  As it turned out, Mao’s rhetoric had a greater impact on his Soviet allies than on the United States. For it confronted Khrushchev with the dilemma of supporting his ally for a cause that reflected no Russian strategic interest but involved risks of nuclear war, which Khrushchev increasingly described as unacceptable. The Soviet Union’s European allies with their tiny populations were even more terrified of Mao’s utterances about China’s capacity to lose half its population in a war and eventually prevail.

  As for the United States, Eisenhower and Dulles matched Mao’s dexterity. They had no intention to test Mao’s endurance with respect to nuclear warfare. But neither were they prepared to abandon the option of defending the national interest. In the last week of January, they arranged for the passage of a resolution of both houses of the United States Congress authorizing Eisenhower to use U.S. forces to defend Taiwan, the Pescadores Islands, and “related positions and territories” in the Taiwan Strait.9 The art of crisis management is to raise the stakes to where the adversary will not follow, but in a manner that avoids a tit for tat. On that principle Dulles, at a press conference on March 15, 1955, announced that the United States was prepared to meet any major new Communist offensive with tactical nuclear weapons, which China did not have. The next day, Eisenhower confirmed the warning, observing that so long as civilians were not in harm’s way, he saw no reason the United States could not use tactical nuclear weapons “just exactly as you would use a bullet or anything else.”10 It was the first time the United States had made a specific nuclear threat in an ongoing crisis.

  Mao proved more willing to announce China’s imperviousness to nuclear war than to practice it. He ordered Zhou Enlai, then at the Asian-African Conference of Non-Aligned countries in Bandung, Indonesia, to sound the retreat. On April 23, 1955, Zhou extended the olive branch: “[T]he Chinese people do not want to have a war with the United States of America. The Chinese government is willing to sit down and enter into negotiations with the U.S. government to discuss the question of relaxing tension in the Far East, and especially the question of relaxing tension in the Taiwan area.”11 The next week China ended the shelling campaign in the Taiwan Strait.

  The outcome, like that of the Korean War, was a draw, in which each side achieved its short-term objectives. The United States faced down a military threat. Mao, aware that mainland forces did not have the capacity to occupy Quemoy and Matsu in the face of concerted opposition, later explained his strategy as having been much more complex. Far from seeking to occupy the offshore islands, he told Khrushchev that he had used the threat against them to keep Taiwan from breaking its link to the mainland:

  All we wanted to do was show our potential. We don’t want Chiang to be too far away from us. We want to keep him within our reach. Having him [on Quemoy and Matsu] means we can get at him with our shore batteries as well as our air force. If we’d occupied the islands, we would have lost the ability to cause him discomfort any time we want.12

  In that version, Beijing shelled Quemoy to reaffirm its claim to “one China” but restrained its action to prevent a “two China solution” from emerging.

  Moscow, with a more literal approach to strategy and actual knowledge of nuclear weapons, found it incomprehensible that a leader might go to the brink of nuclear war to make a largely symbolic point. As Khrushchev complained to Mao: “If you shoot, then you ought to capture these islands, and if you do not consider necessary capturing these islands, then there is no use in firing. I do not understand this policy of yours.”13 It has even been claimed, in a one-sided but often thought-provoking biography of Mao, that Mao’s real motive in the crisis had been to create a risk of nuclear war so acute that Moscow would be obliged to assist Beijing’s fledgling nuclear weapons program to ease the pressure for Soviet assistance.14 Among the many counter-intuitive aspects of the crisis was the apparent Soviet decision—later revoked as a result of the second offshore islands crisis—to help Beijing’s nuclear program in order to put a distance between itself and its troublesome ally in any future crisis by leaving the nuclear defense of China in China’s hands.

  Diplomatic Interlude with the United States

  One result of the crisis was the resumption of a formal dialogue between the United States and China. At the Geneva Conference of 1954 to settle the first Vietnam War between France and the Communist-led independence movement, Beijing and Washington had grudgingly agreed to maintain contacts through consular-level officials based in Geneva.

  The arrangement provided a framework for a kind of safety net to avoid confrontations because of misapprehensions. But neither side did so with any conviction. Or rather, their convictions ran in opposite directions. The Korean War had put an end to all diplomatic initiatives toward China in the Truman administration. The Eisenhower administration—coming into office with the war in Korea not yet ended—considered China the most intransigent and revolutionary of the Communist powers. Hence its primary strategic goal was the construction of a security system in Asia to contain potential Chinese aggression. Diplomatic overtures to China were avoided lest they jeopardize still fragile security systems such as SEATO and the emerging alliances with Japan and South Korea. Dulles’s refusal to shake hands with Zhou Enlai at the Geneva Conference reflected both moral rejection and strategic design.

  Mao’s attitude was the mirror image of Dulles’s and Eisenhower’s. The Taiwan issue created a permanent cause of confrontation especially so long as the United States treated the Taiwan authorities as the legitimate government of all of China. Deadlock was inherent in Sino-U. S. diplomacy because China would discuss no other subject until the United States agreed to withdraw from Taiwan, and the United States would not talk about withdrawing from Taiwan until China had renounced the use of force to solve the Taiwan question.

  By the same token, the Sino-U.S. dialogue, after the first Taiwan Strait Crisis, ran into the ground because so long as each side maintained its basic position, there was nothing to talk about. The United States reiterated that the status of Taiwan should be settled through negotiations between Beijing and Taipei, which should also involve the United States and Japan. Beijing interpreted this proposal as an attempt to reopen the Cairo Conference decision that, during the Second World War, declared Taiwan part of China. It refused as well to renounce the use of force as an infringement of China’s sovereign right to establish control over its own national territory. Ambassador Wang Bingnan, the principal Chinese negotiator for a decade, summed up the deadlock in his memoirs: “In retrospect, it was impossible for the US to change its China policy at the time. Under the circumstances, we went directly at the Taiwan question, which was the most difficult, least likely to be resolved, and most emotional. It was only natural that talks could not get anywhere.”15

  Only two agreements resulted from these discussions. The first was procedural: to upgrade existing contacts at Geneva, which had been held at the consular level, to ambassadorial rank. (The significance of the ambassadorial designation is that ambassadors are technically personal representatives of their head of state and presumably have somewhat greater latitude and influence.) This only served to institutionalize paralysis. One hundred thirty-six meetings were held over a period of sixteen years from 1955 until 1971 between the local U.S. and Chinese ambassadors (most of them in Warsaw, which became the venue for the talks in 1958). The only substantive agreement reached was in September 1955, when China and the United States permitted citizens trapped in each country by the civil war to return home.16

  Thereafter, for a decade and a half, American policy remained focused on eliciting a formal renunciation of the use of force from China. “We have searched year after year,” Secretary of State Dean Rusk testified before the House Foreign Affairs Committee in March 1966, “for some sign that Communist China was ready to renounce the use of force to resolve disputes. We have also searched for some indication that it was ready to abandon its premise that the United States is its prime enemy. The Chinese Communist attitudes and actions have been hostile and rigid.”17

  American foreign policy toward no other country had ever been submitted to such a stringent precondition for negotiation as a blanket renunciation of the use of force. Rusk did take note of the gap between the fierce Chinese rhetoric and its relatively restrained international performance in the 1960s. Still, he argued that American policy, in effect, should be based on the rhetoric—that ideology was more significant than conduct:

  Some say we should ignore what the Chinese Communist leaders say and judge them only by what they do. It is true that they have been more cautious in action than in words—more cautious in what they do themselves than in what they have urged the Soviet Union to do. . . . But it does not follow that we should disregard the intentions and plans for the future which they have proclaimed.18

  Based on these attitudes, in 1957, using the Chinese refusal to renounce the use of force over Taiwan as a pretext, the United States downgraded the Geneva talks from the ambassador to the first secretary level. China withdrew its delegation, and the talks were suspended. The second Taiwan Strait Crisis followed soon after—though ostensibly for another reason.

  Mao, Khrushchev, and the Sino-Soviet Split

  In 1953, Stalin died after more than three decades in power. His successor—after a brief transitional period—was Nikita Khrushchev. The terror of Stalin’s rule had left its mark on Khrushchev’s generation. They had made their big step up the ladder in the purges of the 1930s when an entire generation of leaders was wiped out. They had purchased the sudden rise to eminence at the cost of permanent emotional insecurity. They had witnessed—and participated in—the wholesale decapitation of a ruling group, and they knew that the same fate might await them; indeed Stalin was in the process of beginning another purge as he was dying. They were not yet ready to modify the system that had generated institutionalized terror. Rather they attempted to alter some of its practices while reaffirming the core beliefs to which they had devoted their lives, blaming the failures on the abuse of power by Stalin. (This was the psychological basis of what came to be known as Khrushchev’s Secret Speech, to be discussed below.)

  With all their posturing, the new leaders knew deep down that the Soviet Union was not competitive in an ultimate sense. Much of Khrushchev’s foreign policy can be described as a quest to achieve a “quick fix”: the explosion of a super-high-yield thermonuclear device in 1961; the succession of Berlin ultimatums; the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962. With the perspective of the intervening decades, these steps can be considered a quest for a kind of psychological equilibrium permitting a negotiation with a country that Khrushchev deep down understood was considerably stronger.

  Toward China, Khrushchev’s posture was condescension tinged with frustration that the self-confident Chinese leaders presumed to challenge Moscow’s ideological predominance. He grasped the strategic benefit of the Chinese alliance, but he feared the implications of the Chinese version of ideology. He tried to impress Mao but never learned the grammar of what Mao might have taken seriously. Mao used the Soviet threat without paying attention to Soviet priorities. In the end, Khrushchev withdrew from his initial commitment to the alliance with China into a sulky aloofness while gradually increasing Soviet military strength along the Chinese frontier, tempting his successor, Leonid Brezhnev, into exploring the prospects of preemptive action against China.

  Ideology had brought Beijing and Moscow together, and ideology drove them apart again. There was too much shared history raising question marks. Chinese leaders could not forget the territorial exactions of the Czars nor Stalin’s willingness, during the Second World War, to settle with Chiang Kai-shek at the expense of the Chinese Communist Party. The first meeting between Stalin and Mao had not gone well. When Mao came to put himself under Moscow’s security umbrella, it took him two months to convince Stalin, and he had to pay for the alliance with major economic concessions in Manchuria and Xinjiang impairing the unity of China.

  History was the starting point, but contemporary experience supplied seemingly endless frictions. The Soviet Union regarded the Communist world as a single strategic entity whose leadership was in Moscow. It had established satellite regimes in Eastern Europe that were dependent on Soviet military and, to some extent, economic support. It seemed natural to the Soviet Politburo that the same pattern of dominance should prevail in Asia.

  In terms of Chinese history, his own Sinocentric view, and his own definition of Communist ideology, nothing could have been more repugnant to Mao. Cultural differences exacerbated latent tensions—especially since the Soviet leaders were generally oblivious of Chinese historic sensitivities. A good example is Khrushchev’s request that China supply workers for logging projects in Siberia. He struck a raw nerve in Mao, who told him in 1958:

  You know, Comrade Khrushchev, for years it’s been a widely held view that because China is an underdeveloped and overpopulated country, with widespread unemployment, it represents a good source of cheap labor. But you know, we Chinese find this attitude very offensive. Coming from you, it’s rather embarrassing. If we were to accept your proposal, others . . . might think that the Soviet Union has the same image of China that the capitalist West has.19

  Mao’s passionate Sinocentrism prevented him from participating in the basic premises of the Moscow-run Soviet empire. The focal point of that empire’s security and political efforts was in Europe, which was of secondary concern to Mao. When, in 1955, the Soviet Union created the Warsaw Pact of Communist countries as a counterweight to NATO, Mao refused to join. China would not subordinate the defense of its national interests to a coalition.

  Instead, Zhou Enlai was sent to the 1955 Asian-African Conference in Bandung. The conference created a novel and paradoxical grouping: the alignment of the Non-Aligned. Mao had sought Soviet support as a counterweight to potential American pressure on China in pursuit of American hegemony in Asia. But concurrently he tried to organize the Non-Aligned into a safety net against Soviet hegemony. In that sense, almost from the beginning, the two Communist giants were competing with each other.

  The fundamental differences went to the essence of the two societies’ images of themselves. Russia, salvaged from foreign invaders by brute force and endurance, had never claimed to be a universal inspiration to other societies. A significant part of its population was non-Russian. Its greatest rulers, like Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, had brought foreign thinkers and experts to their courts to learn from more advanced foreigners—an unthinkable concept in the Chinese imperial court. Russian rulers appealed to their people on the basis of their endurance, not their greatness. Russian diplomacy relied, to an extraordinary extent, on superior power. Russia rarely had allies among countries where it had not stationed military forces. Russian diplomacy tended to be power-oriented, tenaciously holding on to fixed positions and transforming foreign policy into trench warfare.

  Mao represented a society that, over the centuries, had been the largest, best-organized, and, in the Chinese view at least, most beneficent political institution in the world. That its performance would have a vast international impact was received wisdom. When a Chinese ruler appealed to his people to work hard so that they could become the greatest people in the world, he was exhorting them to reclaim a preeminence that, in the Chinese interpretation of history, had been only recently and temporarily misplaced. Such a country inevitably found it impossible to play the role of junior partner.

  In societies based on ideology, the right to define legitimacy becomes crucial. Mao, who described himself as a teacher to the journalist Edgar Snow and thought of himself as a significant philosopher, would never concede intellectual leadership of the Communist world. China’s claim to a right to define orthodoxy threatened the cohesion of Moscow’s empire and opened the door to other largely national interpretations of Marxism. What started as irritations over nuances of interpretation transformed into disputes over practice and theory and eventually turned into actual military clashes.