126 { China’s Quest
the defensive character of the war.^25 Mao also suggested to Khrushchev that
in the event of a war with the United States, Soviet forces should withdraw
eastward to the Urals in a fashion similar to the Soviet withdrawal before
German armies in 1941–1943. When Khrushchev explained that that earlier
withdrawal had not been voluntary but compelled by German power, Mao
objected. “I don’t agree,” Mao said. “If you fell back to the Urals, then we
Chinese could enter the war.” “I looked at him closely,” Khrushchev recalled,
“but I couldn’t tell from his face whether he was joking or not.”^26 In what
became the most famous portion of his prepared speech, Mao asserted that
the east wind in the world now prevailed over the west wind:
Who is stronger, the underdeveloped or advanced countries? Who is
stronger, India or Britain, Indonesia or Holland, Algeria or France? To
my mind all the imperialist countries are in a position which is like
the position of the sun at 6 p.m., but ours is at the position of the sun
at 6 a.m. Thus the tide has turned. And this means that the Western
countries have been left behind, that we have outdistanced them con-
siderably. Undoubtedly, it is not the Western wind that prevails over the
Eastern wind, but the wind from the West is so weak. Undoubtedly, the
Eastern wind prevails over the Western wind, for we are strong.^27
This was Mao’s call for the socialist camp to go on the offensive against
imperialism across the intermediate zone. According to Wu Lengxi, Mao
meant by these formulations that the strength of the socialist camp now
exceeded the strength of the imperialist camp.^28 History had reached a
turning point. The Red Army’s destruction of German and Japanese fas-
cism plus the “liberation” of Eastern Europe and establishment of socialist
countries there, the collapse of the West European colonial empires and the
victory of national liberation movements, the victory of the Chinese revolu-
tion, China’s victory in the Korean War, France’s defeat in Indochina, the
British-French defeat by Egypt, the Soviet development of nuclear weap-
ons and missiles like that which had just launched Sputnik (on October 14,
1957)—all indicated that the global correlation of forces now favored the
socialist camp. The anti-imperialist camp was definitely stronger than the
imperialist camp.
Given this, the socialist camp should adopt a militant approach toward
US imperialism, maintain an intention to struggle, fight, and defeat it one
piece at a time (yi bufen yi bufen de xiaomie diren).^29 As for US nuclear weap-
ons, they were “paper tigers,” Mao said, used to scare and intimidate people.
If the United States decided to use nuclear weapons, there was nothing the
socialist camp could do about it, Mao told Khrushchev, but it should not fear
this possibility. If worse came to worst and US imperialism unleashed a nu-
clear war, perhaps half the world’s population would be wiped out. But the
remaining half would carry out revolutions overthrowing the imperialists