248 { China’s Quest
support for wars of national liberation. With the deepening of the DRV-US
confrontation in 1964, Hanoi’s anti-US struggle became a cause célèbre among
progressive circles around the world, and the new Soviet leadership attempted
to burnish its credentials as supporter of revolutionary causes by stepping up
support for Hanoi. They also saw in Vietnam an opportunity to impose on the
United States a war on China’s flank but far from the USSR and from the stra-
tegically vital Central European front. Consequently, in February 1965 Soviet
Premier Alexei Kosygin visited Beijing to propose an end to polemics between
Beijing and Moscow and cooperation in support of Vietnam. Two months later,
Moscow proposed convocation of a USSR-DRV-PRC summit conference to so-
lidify support for Hanoi. Mao rejected both proposals. A year later, in March
1966, the general secretary of the Japan Communist Party, Kenji Miyamoto,
launched a final effort to arrange joint CCP-CPSU support for the DRV. In
talks with Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping in Beijing, Miyamoto worked out an
arrangement for revolutionary solidarity in support of Hanoi. Mao intervened
to squelch the deal. Liu and Deng had not been authorized to speak for China,
Mao declared; the Soviet Union was the most dangerous enemy of the people
of the world, and entering into united action with Moscow would only facili-
tate its sabotage of Vietnam’s victorious revolutionary war.^33
Mao’s unstated but primary objective in rejecting “united action” with
Moscow was to prepare for intensified struggle against revisionists within
the CCP who, he believed, wanted to direct China’s revolution along lines of
“Khrushchev’s phony communism.” A key weapon in Mao’s anti-revisionist
struggle would be holding up the Soviet Union, its leaders, and its “phony
communism” as negative examples from which the Chinese people were to
learn. Suspension of polemics against the CPSU, affirmation that the CPSU
was still communist by agreeing to cooperate with it in support of Hanoi, and
reduction of tension with Moscow were exactly what Mao did not need in his
effort to promote the struggle against “hidden revisionists” within the CCP.
China would aid Hanoi, but on its own terms. Subsequently, Beijing agreed to
transport Soviet and East European goods by rail across China to the DRV.
Still later, in early 1967, Beijing agreed that DRV personnel would meet arriv-
ing cargo at the PRC’s northern borders and accompany it across China to the
DRV. As factional fighting escalated in China, Red Guard seizure of military
cargos bound for the DRV became a serious problem.
VWP leaders were dismayed by Mao’s rejection of a united front with
Moscow in support of Vietnam. Hanoi’s struggle against a vastly more pow-
erful United States was a desperate one, representing, they firmly believed,
the vanguard of the whole world’s struggle against the common enemy, US
imperialism. It was thus incumbent on all genuine revolutionaries to do
whatever they could to assist Hanoi. From the perspective of Le Duan, Le
Duc Tho, and other VWP leaders, Mao’s narrow sectarianism, dogmatism,
and left-wing extremism weakened Vietnam’s struggle and helped the United