Carroll Quigley - Tragedy and Hope - A History of the World in Our Time

Some of these changes were undoubtedly steps in the right direction, but they were lost to view under the general failure of agricultural production in 1958-1961. This failure reacted on industrial production by curtailing both investment and labor, so that output from this sector of the economy may have fallen by half. At the same time, China’s reduced ability to export raw materials and agricultural products (simply because they could not be spared) and the need to make bulk purchases of food, especially grain, in Australia, Canada, or elsewhere, brought China face to face with a great shortage of foreign exchange and made it almost impossible for China to purchase necessary equipment abroad. China received little help from the Soviet Union during these difficult years. The repayment of loans to Russia continued and was, if anything, speeded up in spite of the terrible burden they placed on the Chinese economy. Soviet imports from China were 793 million rubles in 1958 and 990 million in 1959, but fell to 496 million in 1961; Soviet exports to China, which were 859 million rubles in 1959, were down to 331 million in 1961. As a result, Sino-Soviet trade as a whole had a total balance favorable to China (in the sense that China received more than it gave to Russia) of 984 million rubles over six years, 1950-1955, but had a total balance unfavorable to China of—750 million rubles over six years, 1956-1961. The Soviet Union advanced no development credits to China in these difficult years (as it was doing to Mongolia, North Korea, and North Vietnam at the time), but collected payment on China’s debts to it exactly as if no Chinese food crisis were occurring. The Soviet Union exported 6.8 million tons of grain to other countries in 1960 and 7.5 million tons in 1961, but none to China. On the contrary, China’s debt obligations made it necessary for it to ship over $250 million in agricultural exports to Russia in 1960 at the same time that it was paying out over $300 million of hard-earned foreign exchange for grain from Western countries. The Soviet attitude was: Business is business; an agreement is an agreement; and the economic development of the Soviet Union itself cannot be sacrificed for the sake of a heretical member of the Communist bloc. In 1961 the Soviet Union made some minor concessions to China’s difficulties, including release of 500,000 tons of Cuban sugar to China from the total due to Russia, to be repaid in sugar later, and the sale of 300,000 tons of Soviet grain to China (only about 5 percent of China’s foreign grain purchases that year). The withdrawal of almost all Soviet technical and military advisers in China during the summer of 1960 could not be defended solely on the basis of “good business practice,” and marked one of the major steps in the continued deterioration of Sino-Soviet relations. It also established the almost complete dependence of China on its own resources, supplemented by whatever it could get wherever it could get it, for building up its economic system. As one symbol of that changed situation, it might be noted that trade with the Communist bloc had, at its peak, accounted for over 80 percent of China’s total foreign trade, but by 1962 it had fallen below 50 percent.

The food crisis in Red China is, apparently, chronic, as it is, to a lesser degree, in all Communist countries. For example, in May 1962, not a year in which the crisis was generally acute, 70,000 hungry Chinese pushed across the barricaded border of China into the booming British colony of Hong Kong during the month. This intrusion was apparently caused by some local food maldistribution within China. It is not clear why the Chinese border guards permitted this worldwide revelation of its agricultural failure, although it might have been part of an effort to overwhelm and suffocate Hong Kong’s booming prosperity, which must be as unacceptable on China’s border as the prosperity of West Germany or West Berlin is to Communist East Germany.

Although the Soviet Union did not take advantage of China’s food crisis in 1958-1962 to wage direct economic warfare on its fellow Communist regime, its businesslike indifference to all appeals of fellowship or even humanitarian considerations undoubtedly intensified the alienation of the two countries, which had begun much earlier and on quite different grounds.

This alienation of the world’s two greatest areas of Communist rule began in the earliest days of the Red Chinese regime and was bound to become an open schism sooner or later. From the simple fact of balance of power, the one political event the Soviet Union had to fear was the appearance of a new Superpower adjacent to the Soviet Union on the land mass of Eurasia. The only possibilities for such a development would be a unified western Europe or a powerful China, with India as a much more remote and unlikely possibility.

In the second place, Communist China’s needs for technical and economic assistance were inevitably so great that they directly compete with the Soviet Union’s need for its own resources for its own development. Whatever China obtained of this nature from Russia could hardly fail, in the long run, to become a source of bitter feelings.

In the third place, from the beginning, a fissure between the two was inevitable, because, to the Soviet Union, Europe was the primary area of concern, while to China the Far East was primary. Each Power inevitably felt that the other should support it in its primary area and ease off pressures in the area of its own primary concern, an assumption about as unrealistic as any could be. Thus Red China resented the Soviet Union’s attempts to work up crises over Berlin as deeply as Moscow resented Peking’s efforts to work up crises over Taiwan. As we shall see in a moment, China’s aggressive foreign policy in the Far East extended far beyond Taiwan, to all of the border areas that had once been tributary to Peking.

A fourth source of discord arose from the fact that the two Communist Powers were at quite different stages on the road to Socialism. The basic question in the allotment of economic resources in any state is concerned with the division of such resources among the three sectors of (1) governmental, especially defense; (2) investment in capital equipment; and (3) consumers’ goods for rising standards of living. In Stalin’s day the Soviet Union placed major emphasis on (1) and (2) at the expense of (3), but under Khrushchev there have been increasing pressures to shift the allotment of resources toward (3). Red China, which is at least forty years behind the Soviet Union in the development process, must emphasize the first two sectors, and can obtain the resources to do this only from curtailed consumption. Thus it must look at its problems from a point of view much closer to Stalin than to Khrushchev, a difference that led to alienation when Khrushchev began to attack Stalinism in 1956.

Closely related to this fourth source of friction was a fifth, the monolithic quality of the Marxist-Leninist states. By 1960 the Soviet Union’s experiences in Europe, especially with Yugoslavia, Hungary, and Poland, clearly demonstrated that Communist states had their individual characteristics and rhythms of development and could not all be ruled from one center. This necessity by 1960 was being hailed in Moscow under the name “Socialist polycentrism,” but was unacceptable in Peking under any name. At first Peking wanted the monolithic solidarity for which it yearned to be operated from Moscow after discussion by all Communist states, but by 1960 it was clear that if a Communist monolith were to be created it would have to be done by Peking itself.

A sixth source of alienation between Moscow and Peking is rather difficult to document but may well be more important than the others. It is concerned with a growing recognition, by China if not by the Soviet Union, that the Kremlin was being driven, under a multitude of pressures, toward a policy of peaceful co-existence with the United States, not as a temporary tactical maneuver (which would have been acceptable to China) but as a semipermanent policy. Part of this policy involved the Soviet attitude toward the fundamental theories of Marxist-Leninism, especially on the Leninist side. These theories had envisioned the advanced capitalist states as approaching a condition of economic collapse from “the internal contraditions of capitalism itself.” According to the theory, this crisis would be reflected in two aspects: the continued impoverishment of the working class in advanced industrial countries, with consequent growth of the violence of the class struggle in such countries and increasing violence of the imperialist aggressions of such countries toward each other in struggles to control more backward areas as markets for the industrial products that the continued impoverishment of their own workers made impossible to sell in the domestic market. The falseness of these theories was fully evident in the rising standards of living of the advanced industrial countries, and especially in the ones, such as West Germany or the United States, which were most capitalistic in their orientation; it was also evident in the willingness of Britain, the United States, and others to see the end of colonialism in Asia and Africa.