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campaigns led by political cadres, “reds,” rather than by technically compe-
tent people, “experts”; greatly intensified labor with minimal material reward;
and great increases in investment in industry and capital construction.
During the Great Leap Forward, these policies were implemented across the
country. Mao was convinced these policies would direct China on the correct
path to an industrialized, technologically advanced, socialist power in the
process of transition to communism, all within a few years. Implicitly, with
China and the CCP following a correct path while the USSR was increasingly
in the grasp of incorrect, revisionist policies, the PRC would reach the com-
munist stage of development before the USSR.
Mao chose policy toward the United States as the key basis on which to chal-
lenge Khrushchev’s leadership of the international communist movement.
Inspired by a desire to ease the heavy burden of Soviet defense spending and
shift budgetary funds to raising the standards of living of the Soviet people,
Khrushchev, rather like Mikhail Gorbachev thirty years later, moved to re-
duce tension with the United States. Khrushchev called that policy “peaceful
coexistence.” Khrushchev also feared that war with the United States would
lead to a nuclear exchange that would destroy both the USSR and the United
States. Mao saw Khrushchev’s push for détente with the United States as un-
principled abandonment of the militant anti-imperialist principles followed
by Lenin and Stalin.
The “Joint Fleet” Proposal and the First
Mao-Khrushchev Confrontation
In October 1957, as part of Khrushchev’s effort to make China feel com-
fortable in the Soviet camp and in the lead-up to the Moscow conference
scheduled for the next month, Moscow signed with Beijing an agreement on
comprehensive weapons technology transfer. One provision of that agree-
ment dealt with nuclear weapons: Moscow was to supply full technical details
for the manufacture of atomic bombs along with a prototype bomb.^40 The
next month Defense Minister Peng Dehuai led a delegation to Moscow to
discuss implementation of the agreement. Peng’s shopping list included
missiles, jet aircraft, submarines, and nuclear weapons. Again Khrushchev
agreed to the Chinese requests. In this context the two sides also discussed
possible increased military cooperation in the Far East.^41 Then, early in 1958,
Soviet naval officers provided their PLA-navy counterparts with information
about recent advances in Soviet submarine design and suggested that the PRC
might consider requesting assistance in this area too.^42 In April 1958, during
another visit by Peng Dehuai to Moscow, Soviet Defense Minister Rodion
Malinovsky gave substance to the idea of expanded military cooperation
by proposing joint USSR-PRC construction of a long-wave radio station on