162 { China’s Quest
Soviet leader’s early-August visit to Beijing shook Soviet confidence in Mao.
Some Soviet leaders, including Khrushchev, began to suspect that Mao was
trying to maneuver the USSR into confrontation with the United States.
A less conspiratorial conclusion—that Mao was simply reckless—was hardly
more benign. Mao’s calculation that Moscow would not respond with “open
split” to the April 1960 polemic was also egregiously inaccurate. Moscow
responded to “Long Live Leninism” by recalling Soviet advisors.
Mao’s errors and miscalculations contributed significantly to the collapse
of the Sino-Soviet alliance. Although tension would escalate much further
during the 1960s, and although Beijing would not formally abrogate the treaty
until 1979, for all intents and purposes the alliance died when Soviet advi-
sors withdrew in mid-1960. Had Mao intended to free himself and China
from the burden of alliance with the USSR, his choices might be redeemed.
But Mao’s repeated references to “unity, struggle, unity” in dealing with the
Soviet Union suggest that dissolving the alliance with Moscow was not Mao’s
objective. Mao romantically expected that the world communist movement,
including the CPSU, would embrace his “correct” line and the entire revolu-
tionary camp would struggle with greater effectiveness against US imperi-
alism. The actual result of Mao’s policies was something other than this. The
schism in the communist camp created a structure of power far more favor-
able to the US than a relatively united Sino-Soviet camp.
Mao’s rupture with Moscow also slowed the pace of China’s industrial,
scientific, and military development. By the end of 1962, the previously large
flow of modern capital goods and military and industrial technology from the
Soviet bloc to China had ended.^31 Even though Mao dressed this up in nation-
alist resentment, it was not at all what he had intended. For the next twenty
years, China would advance slowly via an autarkic path. Not until the early
1980s would China, by then under Deng Xiaoping, find a way to again create
the large-scale inflow of advanced capital goods and technology into China.
The intense if artificially generated fear of US invasion, combined with
intensified struggle against moderate communism, called “revisionism,” did,
however, help accomplish one of Mao’s key goals: moving China toward the
collectivist and equalitarian order that Mao envisioned as the end goal of
the Chinese revolution. China’s farmers became serfs of collectivized agri-
culture, while the industrial workers labored long and hard for little material
recompense.