18 { China’s Quest
its own independent road to socialism and communism. A struggle against
Soviet “revisionism” emerged as a corollary to Mao’s struggle to move Chinese
socialism away from the path being trod by Soviet socialism toward what
Mao concluded was “phony communism.”^22 In Mao’s thinking, making revo-
lution in China was linked to making revolution abroad. The Soviet Union’s
post-Stalin (de-Stalinized) socialism became the definition of what China’s
socialism was not, and struggling against the “negative example” of CPSU
“revisionism” became central to Mao’s upholding of Stalinized socialism in
the PRC.
When a number of top CCP leaders broke with Mao’s utopian policies after
the catastrophe of the Great Leap Forward, Mao needed to crush that oppo-
sition too. Intensification of struggle against the Soviet Union was linked to
Mao’s efforts to speed China toward the communist utopia along with great
international power. In sum, Mao needed to mobilize support in order to
crush resistance to his radical restructuring of Chinese society. This imper-
ative often and deeply influenced PRC foreign relations while Mao lived. By
the early 1970s, the CCP state faced a combination of a severe threat of Soviet
intervention combined with the existence of an embittered and only recently
purged alternate CCP elite who doubted Mao’s leadership and utopian poli-
cies, and most of whom remained alive. To protect the new, purified antirevi-
sionist CCP elite Mao had just empowered via the Cultural Revolution, Mao
engineered a rapprochement with the United States. The threat of Soviet at-
tack in 1969–1970 was quite real, and it was exacerbated by Mao’s awareness of
a large cohort of CCP ex-leaders anxious to return China to more Soviet-like,
development-oriented socialism.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, many Chinese enthusiastically antici-
pated the new communist era promised by Mao and the CCP, and supported
policies that promised the arrival of that era. Many Chinese anticipated the
swift arrival of economic prosperity and national power. It is quite possible
that this revolutionary enthusiasm outweighed opposition and resentment
well into the 1970s. But sustaining this revolutionary enthusiasm (including
repressing the opposition) also benefited from an atmosphere of crisis and
confrontation. A large portion of China’s foreign relations under Mao must
be understood as an effort to fan enthusiasm for China’s domestic revolu-
tionary advance, to convince China’s people and skeptical leaders within
the Politburo that the workers and peasants of the whole world stood beside
China and its revolutionary struggle, and that internal doubters of the revolu-
tion were linked in various ways to hostile great powers who wished to abort
China’s bringing forth of a new order that would liberate mankind.
Act II of PRC foreign relations began after Mao’s death, following a brief
interregnum of neo-Maoism led by Hua Guofeng, with Deng Xiaoping’s suc-
cession as paramount leader of the CCP. Deng and his reform-minded com-
rades understood that the regime faced an existential crisis. If it was to survive,