Countering Soviet Encirclement } 345
multidimensional, and substantial expenditure of national wealth and leader-
ship attention. It seems safe to say that there was only a very small handful of
states able and willing to undertake such global efforts as the PRC undertook
in the 1960s and 1970s. In other words, even while young and relatively weak,
the PRC tried repeatedly to shape the world to comport with its values and
perceived interests. Even when weak, the PRC thought and acted like a great
and global power.
With both the 1960s and 1970s pushes, there were strong links between
China’s domestic politics and its international policies. With the PRC’s first,
revolutionary, push, the key purpose was to create a rising wave of global
anti-capitalist revolution that would help push China’s revolution in the cor-
rect direction. With the its second, 1970s push, the key purpose was to foil
the threat posed by Soviet revisionist social imperialism to the correct direc-
tion of the Chinese revolution achieved by the Cultural Revolution. Implicit
in Mao’s deep fear of Soviet power in the 1970s was the idea that the CPSU
might, still, connive with hidden revisionists within China to reverse ver-
dicts on the Cultural Revolution and on Mao himself, much as Khrushchev
had done with Stalin, and move China once again in a revisionist direction.
Outright Soviet military intervention was one possibility raised by Mao. Of
greater concern, according to Gao Wenqian, was Mao’s fear that focus on
economic development would occur at the expense of “continuing the revolu-
tion,” as Mao finally concluded would be the case if either Zhou Enlai or Deng
Xiaoping succeeded him as the CCP’s paramount leader. Such a development
would naturally win Soviet support, and the revolutionary gains achieved via
the Cultural Revolution would be washed away, China would become revi-
sionist, and capitalism would be restored.
Another comparison between the PRC’s first and second global strate-
gic pushes is that the first, revolutionary thrust was premised on confron-
tation with the United States. The second, anti-Soviet-hegemony thrust was
premised on cooperation with the United States. By the late 1970s, US ana-
lysts referred to China as a “quasi-ally.” By that point, parallel Chinese and
American policies in a wide range of geographic areas effectively countered
Soviet moves. This writer would be so bold as to assert that the Sino-American
anti-hegemony partnership of 1975 to 1982 was the second Sino-American
alliance of the twentieth century, the first being the 1941–1945 alliance against
Japan. Both partnerships were ultimately successful. When CPSU leaders de-
cided circa 1984 to move the Soviet Union in a new direction under the lead-
ership of the young reformist Michael Gorbachev, the fact that the USSR now
faced a relatively firm and rearming coalition of China, NATO, Japan, and the
United States, and could not hope to prevail over that coalition, was a major
reason for that decision. All of this is to say that when China and the United
States have cooperated, they have, together, been able to change the course of
world history.