China’s difficulties were compounded by its inter-
national isolation. Khrushchev’s destalinisation in
the Soviet Union led to a breach with Mao, who
accused him of revisionism and of leading the
Soviet Union back on to the capitalist road. He
condemned him for betraying the revolution
while exhibiting great-power chauvinism by sup-
pressing nationalism in Eastern Europe. Mao
vehemently rejected the Soviet leader’s attempts
to use the assistance given to China to control its
policies. In 1959 Khrushchev first withdrew
Soviet help from the programme to build China’s
own atomic weapons. Faced with America’s
nuclear threat, China would have to construct
nuclear weapons by itself, and it succeeded in
doing so. In 1960 Khrushchev dealt a heavy blow
to the Chinese economy, stopping all aid and
recalling some 30,000 Soviet engineers and tech-
nicians from China. Mao discerned ominous signs
of Soviet–American collusion after the Soviet
failure in Cuba, and the Test Ban Treaty in 1963
was a clear indication to him that the US and the
Soviet Union were joining one great-power camp.
Mao placed China in opposition to this sup-
posed collusion, calling on the Third World coun-
tries in Asia, Africa and Latin America not to be
afraid but to struggle for their independence:
‘People of the world, unite and defeat US aggres-
sors and their running dogs... Monsters of all
kinds shall be destroyed.’ Nuclear weapons need
not strike fear in the hearts of peoples struggling
against imperialism, Mao declared, using a
colourful metaphor, for the nuclear powers were
just ‘paper tigers’. But when in 1962 he con-
ceived the fear that America would back a Chiang
Kai-shek invasion, he allowed himself to be reas-
sured by a hastily arranged contact between the
Chinese and American embassies in Warsaw.
Mao took care not to involve China again
directly in any fighting against a stronger enemy.
His diatribes against the Soviet Union and the US
remained rhetorical. He was opposed to any mili-
tary confrontation with the US, even when he was
urged to intervene in Vietnam, where the
Americans were stepping up their support for the
anti-communist southern republic. The case of
India was different. Earlier good relations with
Nehru deteriorated when the Indians expressed
their sympathy for the subjugated Tibetans and
welcomed the Dalai Lama and Tibetan refugees
after the revolt of 1959. When the Indians occu-
pied some Chinese border posts on the ill-defined
Sino-Indian frontier, Mao reacted forcefully.
Launching a major military offensive in October
1962, he routed the inferior Indian forces. But,
having taught India a painful lesson, he declared a
unilateral ceasefire in November and withdrew to
a rectified frontier line which India later accepted.
Thus, the early 1960s were years of danger and
crisis as perceived by Mao; his response to the
US, the Soviet Union and Taiwan was not
appeasement but independence, a determination
to defend China. But he was also cautious, avoid-
ing direct military engagement except on the
Indian frontier, where it was strictly limited.As Mao contemplated Khrushchev’s errors in the
1960s, he feared that leading party members in
China might well be tempted to emulate him and
take the capitalist road. So his condemnation of
Khrushchev was intended also to serve as a warn-
ing at home to the party. One of the roots of the
Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution was cer-
tainly Mao’s concern that the revolution was
being betrayed by the ‘bourgeois’ ideas of Deng
and Liu.
Mao sought to revive the revolutionary spirit
by unleashing a conflict between the masses on
the one hand, and the party functionaries, the
bureaucracy and all those who had a stake in pre-
serving the status quo in China, on the other. To
Westerners one of the most curious features of
Chinese politics is the oblique way a new policy
is signalled by a development that might seem
quite trivial. Mao preferred this approach. He
began his assault in 1965 by criticising the writer
Wu Han, one of whose plays some years earlier
he had interpreted as an attack on himself. This
seemed innocuous. But Wu was the protégé of
Deng Xiaoping, the party general secretary. Mao
then left the capital and manoeuvred to gain
support among the various factions within the
widespread Chinese power structure. In February
1966, with his wife Jiang Quing now playing a
prominent role, he declared his intention to
launch the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.