288 { China’s Quest
KMT to power was laughable by 1969. The prospect of a Soviet intervention to
return the CCP’s “healthy Marxist-Leninist forces” to power was not.The Restoration of Capitalism in the USSRThe cognitive precondition for Chinese attempts to align with the United
States against the USSR was a belief that the Soviet Union was no longer
a socialist country but had become a capitalist country. Mao’s deep iden-
tification with Lenin and Stalin and their ideology made it cognitively
impossible for him to align with “capitalist imperialist” America against
“socialist” Soviet Union. It was necessary for Mao to first decide that the
Soviet Union was no longer a socialist state but a capitalist and imperialist
one. Once this shift in labels and their associated normative evaluations
had been accomplished, whether China aligned with one or the other “im-
perialist capitalist” power was a matter of mere expedience. Mao’s beliefs
in the verities of the ideology to which he had devoted his life was no
longer involved.^3 One of the core precepts of Leninism is that imperialism
grows out of capitalism; imperialism is the highest stage of capitalism. The
equation “capitalism = imperialism” is the very core of Leninism. Until
Mao could convince himself that the USSR was not socialist, aligning with
the United States against the socialist USSR was cognitively impossible.
It would require that Mao discard or ignore the ideology to which he had
devoted his life.
Mao achieved cognitive harmony by embracing the proposition that
capitalism had been restored in the Soviet Union. Under the tutelage of
Khrushchev in the 1950s, for all intents and purposes, private ownership of
the means of production had been restored, Mao concluded. Drawing on the
influential work of Yugoslav Marxist theorist Milovan Djilas’s book The New
Class, published in 1955, Mao concluded that the USSR had restored de facto
private control over the means of production. A “red bourgeoisie” constitut-
ing the CPSU elite used its control over those means of production to pro-
vide themselves, the new red capitalist “ruling class,” with luxury (at least
when compared to Soviet laborers). The transformation of the Soviet Union
in Mao’s cognitive system from of socialist to a capitalist country made it
possible to square Moscow’s “class character” with Lenin’s theory of impe-
rialism, opening the way to alignment with US imperialism against Soviet
“social imperialism.” Since the Soviet Union was now a “red capitalist” state,
it was entirely in line with Lenin’s theory that its foreign policy would degen-
erate to the social imperialism that threatened revolutionary China. Once the
normative content of the Soviet Union had been accomplished, it was a matter
of tactical expediency, and not of Leninist ideology, whether China tilted to-
ward one or the other imperialist power.