The Cultural Revolution } 263
internal security forces, and when necessary by the PLA under the control of
Mao loyalist Lin Biao.
Creation of a sense of global revolutionary uprising, a sense that a tide of
revolution was sweeping the world, with China the vanguard of that process,
inspired and helped justify China’s Red Guard uprising. Stalin in the 1930s
had propagated via show trials and other means the belief that Soviet institu-
tions were infiltrated by spies of Germany, Japan, Britain, tsarists, or Leon
Trotsky. That mass psychology had paralleled the arrest and disappearance
of very large numbers of people Stalin deemed of questionable loyalty. Mao’s
use of zealous and idealistic youth to purge his opponents required a different
psychology: a sense that the world could be and was being remade in a great
and beautiful manner by the brave rebellion of the noble Red Guards. Setting
the world ablaze with revolution, or at least making it seem so to Chinese,
inspired Chinese youth to dare to attack the powerful “hidden revisionists”
seeking to take China “down the path to restoration of capitalism.” To a very
significant degree, the radicalism of China’s foreign relations during the
period 1966–1970 was an attempt to encourage and legitimize Mao’s domestic
policies of “continuing the revolution under the dictatorship of the prole-
tariat”—which is how the Maoists characterized the upheaval of these years.^5
Soviet leaders watched with dismay while the CCP’s development-minded
“hidden revisionists” were purged by Red Guards. From the standpoint of
the CPSU, the Cultural Revolution was nothing less than a counterrevolu-
tionary, anticommunist rebellion, an uprising against the Leninist prole-
tarian vanguard state at the instigation of Mao and backed by the military.
Moscow had been convinced since the onset of the Great Leap Forward that
Mao’s “unscientific” domestic policies were undermining socialism in China.
Now came the Cultural Revolution, an uprising by ordinary people against
long-established leaders appointed by the Chinese Communist Party organ-
izational system. In the Soviet view, Mao’s policies were clearly undermining
communist rule and socialist economy in China. On the other hand, there ap-
parently were large numbers of CCP cadres who believed Mao’s policies were
unwise. Might the Soviet Union be able to intervene in support of China’s
anti-Maoist “healthy Marxist-Leninist” forces? Fighting for their political
and even their physical lives, would not China’s anti-Maoist forces welcome
Soviet support in the form of intervention?
The Ideological Offensive
For a period of perhaps three years during the Cultural Revolution, propagat-
ing the revolutionary ideology of Mao Zedong became China’s highest foreign
policy objective, outranking even national security. During the 1966–1969
period, China took a number of moves that significantly diminished its security