World: PEKING: Reasons for the Long Quarrel

BACK in Peking last week was Chinese Communist Premier Chou Enlai, who had walked out of the Party Congress in Moscow over Khrushchev’s scarcely veiled attack on Red China. Peking’s leaders, Khrushchev suggested, were “hopeless dogmatists” who had turned “their eyes from life.” Chou’s huffy departure disclosed a new rift in an uneasy partnership between Soviet and Chinese Communists that had been ripped, patched over, torn and repapered for the last 40 years.

Early Discord. The alliance cracked at the outset in 1924 when Stalin ordered the fledgling Chinese Communists to merge with Chiang Kai-shek to further Russia’s long-range aim of ousting the West from China. Only three years later, Chiang abruptly turned on his local Communist allies.

Even after World War II, Moscow had such scant respect for the Chinese Communists that they dismantled $2 billion worth of Manchurian industry, reassembled it in Soviet territory. And in straight trade deals with the new rulers of the Chinese mainland, the Russians forced their comrades to pay top prices for Soviet and satellite products, ranging from trucks to saccharin, when the same Western-made goods were available in Hong Kong at a fraction of the cost.

Other economic quarrels reflect deeper ideological differences, though to many Westerners they may sound far less “real.” Khrushchev told visiting Senator Hubert Humphrey that the Chinese-cherished farming communes were “oldfashioned and reactionary.” Not until after December 1958, when the Chinese “modified” the commune system, did the Russians agree to help the Reds build 78 new industrial projects. Today, Red China owes Russia more than $300 million on last year’s trade pact alone, and depends on Moscow for half its oil, machine parts and heavy industrial equipment.

The “Coexistence” Quarrel. From the time of Khrushchev’s posthumous assassination of Stalin at the 20th Party Congress in 1956—a move about which Peking had received no forewarning—other serious disagreements developed. For one thing, the Chinese were opposed (as they said last week) to washing Marxist dirty linen in public; they also feared, reported British Historian G. F. Hudson, the restoration of “the exclusive supreme authority which had belonged to the Kremlin under Stalin and which Khrushchev, in spite of his repudiation of ‘Stalinism,’ was in practice trying to preserve.”

Believing themselves entitled to a voice in Communism’s world policy, the Chinese defended Poland’s right to follow its own “road to socialism,” urged quick suppression of the Hungarian revolt, refused to make peace with Tito. Peking fumed when Khrushchev, in 1958, suggested a summit meeting without inviting the Red Chinese. Peking’s much-publicized opposition to Khrushchev’s “peaceful coexistence” line has several facets. At home, this almost middle-class slogan threatens to dampen the revolutionary ardor Peking needs to justify the sacrifices of its own people. On the world scene, Red China would presumably like to provoke more local wars with the “capitalist-imperialist” enemy, even at the risk of a major conflict—since in Peking’s view, war is inevitable anyway.

Even more important than this sort of Red brinkmanship is Peking’s militant theory of how to bring about revolution in the underdeveloped nations. Moscow has been courting these nations, including such neutralists as Nehru and Sukarno, with loans often relatively bigger than those granted Peking, while neglecting the Communist parties in their countries. Peking advocates more revolutionary help to Communist parties in Asia and Africa. Often, Peking has itself provided that help, has infuriated Moscow by appearing as a kind of rival Marxist mentor. Example: Peking eagerly aids the Algerian rebels, while Moscow, playing international politics with De Gaulle, remains relatively reserved; in Ghana, Morocco and Cambodia, Peking agents work in silent though determined competition with their Moscow counterparts. In race-conscious Asia and Africa, the nonwhite skin of the Chinese evidently is an asset.

The Albania Issue. By midsummer 1960, the Russians pulled most of their technicians out of Red China; Red Chinese students came home. Last December the estrangement was temporarily softened when, after a month-long meeting in Moscow of Communist Party leaders from 81 nations, the Chinese agreed to a final communiqué that paid lip service to the Soviet Union as the “vanguard” of world. Communism but denied the Kremlin supremacy.

The compromise did not last long. At the present Party Congress, when Khrushchev demanded subservience from little Albania, to whom China had already lent $155 million and diverted three badly needed wheat shipments, the Chinese well knew that the real target was Peking itself. At the moment, they can ill afford to quarrel with Russia, and there are signs that Chou En-lai came to Moscow prepared to smooth things over but that Khrushchev’s attack left him no choice but to hit back. So far there are no indications that the Chinese are willing to retreat from their own view of how best to defeat the common capitalist enemy. In Moscow last year, Red Chinese Foreign Minister Chen Yi said: “Out of Communist soil, two flowers have grown: the Soviet and the Chinese. They have different colors.” While the differences may be immensely important, for the West, both flowers remain Red.