128 { China’s Quest
Yugoslav, and Italian parties objected, the CCP agreed to compromise.^34
The final declaration condemned “aggressive imperialist circles in the US”
and used several similar circumlocutions, but eschewed the formulation
“US imperialism.”
Thus Mao maneuvered Khrushchev into taking responsibility for the en-
tire revolutionary movement, which was to undertake militant confrontation
with US imperialism, not fearing even nuclear war, but for which the CPSU
was no longer to set policy. The line of the international revolutionary move-
ment, of which the CPSU was the clear center, would now be set by the major-
ity, with the CCP having a strong voice. In Khrushchev’s words:
As we listened to Mao pay recognition to [the leading role of] the Soviet
Union and the CPSU, we couldn’t help suspecting that his thoughts
were probably very different from his words. We had the unsettling
feeling that sooner or later, friction was bound to develop between our
countries and our Parties. ... there were some telltale indications of
what form that friction might take. When the more than eighty del-
egations present turned to the possibility of thermonuclear war, Mao
gave a speech [saying].... We shouldn’t be afraid of atomic bombs and
missiles.”^35
Stripped of ambiguity, Khrushchev was beginning to wonder if Mao was
not trying to maneuver the USSR into a thermonuclear war with the United
States. Both of those highly urbanized countries would be utterly destroyed
by such a war, while still-rural and more populous China would survive to
rebuild—and seize Siberia. We will never know if such maneuvers entered
Mao’s mind. It is perhaps enough to say that Khrushchev suspected they did.
Mao for his part was dismayed at the lukewarm reception at the Moscow con-
ference given to his ideas about war and peace. Mao saw this as further con-
firmation of the apostasy from principles of Lenin and Stalin corrupting the
world revolutionary movement under the misleadership of the CPSU. Mao
was not yet ready to openly criticize those erroneous tendencies, because to
do so would reveal “contradictions” within the anti-imperialist camp, weak-
ening that camp in the struggle against imperialism. Besides, it was apparent
that—for the time being, until China industrialized—only the Soviet Union
had the capabilities to give the world revolutionary movement practical assis-
tance in such distant regions as East Europe and the Middle East, as well as in
industrializing socialist China.
One final aspect of the Moscow conference was Mao’s open declaration of
a race with the Soviet Union to superpower status. In May 1957, Khrushchev
had declared that the Soviet Union would soon catch up with the United States
in per capita agricultural production. At the Moscow conference the Soviet
leader upped his claim, asserting that the Soviet Union “will ... not only
catch up with but also surpass the present [US] volume of output of important