The People’s Republic began by modeling its economy on Soviet economic policies of the 1930s and 1940s. In 1952, Zhou went so far as to visit Moscow for advice regarding the first Chinese Five-Year Plan. Stalin sent his comments in early 1953, urging Beijing to adopt a more balanced approach and temper its planned rate of economic growth to no more than 13–14 percent annually.20

  But by December 1955, Mao openly distinguished the Chinese economy from its Soviet counterpart and enumerated the “unique” and “great” challenges that the Chinese had faced and overcome in contrast to their Soviet allies:

  We had twenty years’ experience in the base areas, and were trained in three revolutionary wars; our experience [on coming to power] was exceedingly rich. . . . Therefore, we were able to set up a state very quickly, and complete the tasks of the revolution. (The Soviet Union was a newly established state; at the time of the October Revolution,21 they had neither army nor government apparatus, and there were very few party members.) . . . Our population is very numerous, and our position is excellent. [Our people] work industriously and bear much hardship. . . . Consequently, we can reach socialism more, better, and faster.22

  In an April 1956 speech on economic policy, Mao transformed a practical difference into a philosophical one. He defined China’s path to socialism as unique and superior to that of the Soviet Union:

  We have done better than the Soviet Union and a number of Eastern European countries. The prolonged failure of the Soviet Union to reach the highest pre-October Revolution level in grain output, the grave problems arising from the glaring disequilibrium between the development of heavy industry and that of light industry in some Eastern European countries—such problems do not exist in our country.23

  Differences between Chinese and Soviet conceptions of their practical imperatives turned into an ideological clash when, in February 1956, Khrushchev addressed the Twentieth Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and denounced Stalin for a series of crimes, several of which he detailed. Khrushchev’s speech convulsed the Communist world. Decades of experience had been based on ritualistic affirmations of Stalin’s infallibility, including in China, where, whatever qualms Mao may have had about Stalin’s conduct as an ally, he formally acknowledged his special ideological contribution. Deepening the insult, non-Soviet delegates—including Chinese delegates—were not permitted in the hall when Khrushchev delivered his speech, and Moscow declined to provide even its fraternal allies with an authoritative text. Beijing cobbled together its initial response based on Chinese delegates’ incomplete notes of a secondhand version of Khrushchev’s remarks; eventually the Chinese leadership was forced to rely on Chinese translations of reports from the New York Times.24

  Beijing lost little time in assailing Moscow for having “discarded” the “sword of Stalin.” The Chinese Titoism that Stalin had feared from the beginning raised its head in the form of a Chinese defense of the ideological importance of Stalin’s legacy. Mao branded Khrushchev’s de-Stalinization initiative a form of “revisionism”—a new ideological insult—which implied that the Soviet Union was moving away from Communism and back toward its bourgeois past.25

  To restore a measure of unity, Khrushchev assembled a conference of socialist countries in Moscow in 1957. Mao attended; it was only the second time that he had left China, and it was to be his last sojourn abroad. The Soviet Union had just launched Sputnik—the first orbiting satellite—and the meeting was dominated by the belief, shared then by many in the West, that Soviet technology and power were ascendant. Mao adopted this notion, declaring pungently that the “East Wind” now prevailed over the “West Wind.” But he drew from the apparent relative decline of American power a conclusion uncomfortable for his Soviet allies, namely that China was in an increasingly strong position to assert its autonomy: “Their real purpose,” Mao later told his doctor, “is to control us. They’re trying to tie our hands and feet. But they’re full of wishful thinking, like idiots talking about their dreams.”26

  In the meantime, the 1957 conference in Moscow reaffirmed Khrushchev’s call for the socialist bloc to strive for “peaceful coexistence” with the capitalist world, a goal first adopted at the same 1956 congress at which Khrushchev delivered his Secret Speech criticizing Stalin. In a startling rebuke to Khrushchev’s policy, Mao used the occasion to call his socialist colleagues to arms in the struggle against imperialism, including his standard speech on China’s imperviousness to nuclear destruction. “We shouldn’t fear war,” he declared:

  We shouldn’t be afraid of atomic bombs and missiles. No matter what kind of war breaks out—conventional or thermonuclear—we’ll win. As for China, if the imperialists unleash war on us, we may lose more than three hundred million people. So what? War is war. The years will pass, and we’ll get to work producing more babies than ever before.27

  Khrushchev found the speech “deeply disturbing,” and he recalled the audience’s strained and nervous laughter as Mao described nuclear Armageddon in whimsical and earthy language. After the speech, the Czechoslovak Communist leader Antonin Novotny complained, “What about us? We have only twelve million people in Czechoslovakia. We’d lose every last soul in a war. There wouldn’t be anyone left to start over again.”28

  China and the Soviet Union now were engaged in constant, frequently public controversies, yet they were also still formal allies. Khrushchev seemed convinced that the restoration of comradely relations awaited only some new Soviet initiative. He did not understand—or, if he did, would not admit to himself—that his policy of peaceful coexistence—especially when coupled with pronouncements of the fear of nuclear war—was, in Mao’s eyes, incompatible with the Sino-Soviet alliance. For Mao was convinced that, in a crisis, fear of nuclear war would trump loyalty to the ally.

  In these circumstances, Mao missed no opportunity to assert Chinese autonomy. In 1958, Khrushchev proposed, via the Soviet ambassador in Beijing, the building of a radio station in China to communicate with Soviet submarines, and to help build submarines for China in return for the use of Chinese ports by the Soviet navy. Since China was a formal ally, and the Soviet Union had supplied it with much of the technology to improve its own military capacities, Khrushchev apparently thought Mao would welcome the offer. He was proved disastrously wrong. Mao reacted furiously to the initial Soviet proposals, berating the Soviet ambassador in Beijing and causing such alarm in Moscow that Khrushchev traveled to Beijing to assuage his ally’s wounded pride.

  Once in Beijing, however, Khrushchev made an even less appealing follow-up proposal, which was to offer China special access to Soviet submarine bases in the Arctic Ocean—in exchange for Soviet use of China’s warm-water ports in the Pacific. “No,” Mao replied, “we won’t agree to that either. Every country should keep its armed forces on its own territory and on no one else’s.”29 As the Chairman recalled, “We’ve had the British and other foreigners on our territory for years now, and we’re not ever going to let anyone use our land for their own purposes again.”30

  In a normal alliance, disagreements on a specific issue would usually lead to increased efforts to settle differences on the remaining agenda. During Khrushchev’s calamitous 1958 visit to Beijing, it provided an occasion for a seemingly endless catalogue of complaints by both sides.

  Khrushchev put himself at a disadvantage to begin with by blaming the dispute about naval bases on an unauthorized demarche by his ambassador. Mao, only too familiar with the way Communist states were organized, with a strict separation of military and civilian channels, easily saw through the utter inconceivability of that proposition. The recital of the sequence of events led to an extended dialogue in which Mao lured Khrushchev into ever more humiliating and absurd propositions—the point probably being made to demonstrate for Chinese cadres the unreliability of the leader who had presumed to challenge Stalin’s image.

  It also provided Mao with an opportunity to convey how deeply Moscow’s overbearing conduct had cut. Mao complained about Stalin’s condescending behavior during his visit to Moscow in the winter of 1949–50:

  M AO : . . . After the victory of our Revolution, Stalin had doubts about its character. He believed that China was another Yugoslavia.

  KHRUSHCHEV: Yes, he considered it possible.

  MAO: When I came to Moscow [in December 1949], he did not want to conclude a treaty of friendship with us and did not want to annul the old treaty with the Guomindang.31 I recall that [Soviet interpreter Nikolai] Fedorenko and [Stalin’s emissary to the People’s Republic Ivan] Kovalev passed me his [Stalin’s] advice to take a trip around the country, to look around. But I told them that I have only three tasks: eat, sleep and shit. I did not come to Moscow only to congratulate Stalin on his birthday. Therefore I said that if you do not want to conclude a treaty of friendship, so be it.

  I will fulfill my three tasks.32

  The mutual needling quickly went beyond history into contemporary disputes. When Khrushchev asked Mao if the Chinese really considered the Soviets “red imperialists,” Mao made clear how much the quid pro quo for the alliance had rankled: “It is not a matter of red or white imperialists. There was a man by the name of Stalin, who took Port Arthur and turned Xinjiang and Manchuria into semi-colonies, and he also created four joint companies. These were all his good deeds.”33

  Still, whatever Mao’s complaints on a national basis, he respected Stalin’s ideological contribution:

  KHRUSHCHEV: You defended Stalin. And you criticized me for criticizing Stalin. And now vice versa.

  MAO: You criticized [him] for different matters.

  KHRUSHCHEV: At the Party Congress I spoke about this as well.

  MAO: I always said, now, and then in Moscow, that the criticism of Stalin’s mistakes is justified. We only disagree with the lack of strict limits to criticism. We believe that out of Stalin’s 10 fingers, 3 were rotten ones.34

  Mao set the tone of the next day’s meeting by receiving Khrushchev not in a ceremonial room but in his swimming pool. Khrushchev, who could not swim, was obliged to wear water wings. The two statesmen conversed while swimming, with the interpreters following them up and down the side of the pool. Khrushchev would later complain: “It was Mao’s way of putting himself in an advantageous position. Well, I got sick of it. . . . I crawled out, sat on the edge, and dangled my legs in the pool. Now I was on top and he was swimming below.”35

  Relations had deteriorated even further a year later when Khrushchev stopped in Beijing, on his return trip from the United States, to brief his fractious ally on October 3, 1959, on his summit with Eisenhower. The Chinese leaders, already highly suspicious about Khrushchev’s American sojourn, were further agitated when Khrushchev took the side of India with respect to the first border clashes in the Himalayas between Indian and Chinese forces that had just occurred.

  Khrushchev, whose strong suit was not diplomacy, managed to raise the sensitive issue of the Dalai Lama; few topics could generate a more hair-trigger Chinese response. He criticized Mao for not having been tough enough during the uprisings in Tibet earlier that year, which had culminated in the Dalai Lama’s flight to northern India: “I will tell you what a guest should not say[:] the events in Tibet are your fault. You ruled in Tibet, you should have had your intelligence there and should have known about the plans and intentions of the Dalai Lama.”36 After Mao objected, Khrushchev insisted on pursuing the subject by suggesting that the Chinese should have eliminated the Dalai Lama rather than let him escape:

  KHRUSHCHEV: . . . As to the escape of the Dalai Lama from Tibet, if we had been in your place, we would not have let him escape. It would be better if he was in a coffin. And now he is in India, and perhaps will go to the USA. Is this to the advantage of the socialist countries?

  MAO: This is impossible; we could not arrest him then. We could not bar him from leaving, since the border with India is very extended, and he could cross it at any point.

  KHRUSHCHEV: It’s not a matter of arrest; I am just saying that you were wrong to let him go. If you allow him an opportunity to flee to India, then what has Nehru to do with it? We believe that the events in Tibet are the fault of the Communist Party of China, not Nehru’s fault.37

  It was the last time Mao and Khrushchev were to meet. What is amazing is that for another ten years the world treated Sino-Soviet tensions as a kind of family quarrel between the two Communist giants rather than the existential battle into which it was turning. Amidst these mounting tensions with the Soviet Union, Mao initiated another crisis with the United States.

  The Second Taiwan Strait Crisis

  On August 23, 1958, the People’s Liberation Army began another massive shelling campaign of the offshore islands, accompanying its bombardment with propaganda salvos calling for the liberation of Taiwan. After two weeks, it paused, and then resumed the shelling for a further twenty-nine days. Finally, it settled into an almost whimsical pattern of shelling the islands on odd-numbered days of the month, with explicit warnings to their inhabitants and often avoiding sites of military significance—a maneuver Mao described to his senior associates as an act of “political battle” rather than conventional military strategy.38

  Some of the factors at work in this crisis were familiar. Beijing again sought to test the limits of the American commitment to defend Taiwan. The shelling was also partly a reaction to American downgrading of the U.S.-China talks that had resumed after the last offshore island crisis. But the dominant impetus seems to have been a desire to stake a global role for China. Mao explained to his colleagues at a leadership retreat held at the outset of the crisis that the shelling of Quemoy and Matsu was China’s reaction to American intervention in Lebanon, where American and British troops had been landed during the summer:

  [T]he bombardment of Jinmen [Quemoy], frankly speaking, was our turn to create international tension for a purpose. We intended to teach the Americans a lesson. America had bullied us for many years, so now that we had a chance, why not give it a hard time? . . . Americans started a fire in the Middle East, and we started another in the Far East. We would see what they would do with it.39

  In that sense the shelling of the offshore islands was a blow in the contest with the Soviet Union. Soviet quiescence in the face of a strategic American move in the Middle East was being contrasted with Chinese ideological and strategic vigilance.

  Having demonstrated its military resolve, Mao explained, China would now rejoin the talks with the United States and have available “both an action arena and a talk arena”40—an application of the Sun Tzu principle of combative coexistence in its modern version of offensive deterrence.

  The most significant dimension of the shelling was not the taunting of the American superpower so much as the challenge to China’s formal ally, the Soviet Union. Khrushchev’s policy of peaceful coexistence had made the Soviet Union, in Mao’s eyes, a problematical ally and perhaps even a potential adversary. Thus, Mao seems to have reasoned, if the Taiwan Strait Crisis were pushed to the brink of war, Khrushchev might have to choose between his new policy of peaceful coexistence and his alliance with China.

  In a sense Mao succeeded. What conferred a special edge to Mao’s maneuvers was that the Chinese policy in the Strait was being carried out ostensibly with the blessing of Moscow so far as the world was concerned. For Khrushchev had visited Beijing three weeks before the second Taiwan Strait Crisis—for the disastrous encounters over the submarine base issues—much as he had been there in the opening weeks of the first crisis four years earlier. In neither case had Mao revealed his intentions to the Soviets either before or during the visit. In each instance Washington assumed—and Eisenhower alleged as much in a letter to Khrushchev—that Mao was acting not only with Moscow’s support but at its behest. Beijing was adding its Soviet ally to its diplomatic lineup against its will and indeed without Moscow realizing that it was being used. (A school of thought even holds that Mao invented the “submarine base crisis” to induce Khrushchev to come to Beijing to play his assigned role in that design.)

  The second Taiwan Strait Crisis paralleled the first with the principal difference being that the Soviet Union participated in issuing nuclear threats on behalf of an ally that was in the process of humiliating it.

  Roughly one thousand people were killed or wounded in the 1958 bombardment. As in the first Taiwan Strait Crisis, Beijing combined provocative evocations of nuclear war with a carefully calibrated operational strategy. Mao initially asked his commanders to conduct the shelling in such a way as to avoid American fatalities. When they responded that no such guarantee was possible, he ordered them not to cross into the airspace over the offshore islands, to fire only on Nationalist vessels, and not to return fire even if fired on by U.S. ships.41 Both before and during the crisis, PRC propaganda trumpeted the slogan “We must liberate Taiwan.” But when the PLA’s radio station undertook a broadcast announcing that a Chinese landing was “imminent” and inviting Nationalist forces to change sides and “join the great cause of liberating Taiwan,” Mao declared it a “serious mistake.”42

  In John Foster Dulles, Mao met an adversary who knew how to play the game of combative coexistence. On September 4, 1958, Dulles reiterated the U.S. commitment to the defense of Taiwan, including “related positions such as Quemoy and Matsu.” Dulles intuited China’s limited aims and in effect signaled American willingness to keep the crisis limited: “Despite, however, what the Chinese Communists say, and so far have done, it is not yet certain that their purpose is in fact to make an all-out effort to conquer by force Taiwan (Formosa) and the offshore islands.”43 On September 5, Zhou Enlai confirmed China’s limited aims when he announced that Beijing’s goal in the conflict was the resumption of U.S.-China talks at the ambassadorial level. On September 6, the White House released a statement taking note of Zhou’s remarks and indicating that the United States ambassador at Warsaw stood ready to represent the United States at resumed talks.