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facilitated struggle against domestic revisionists, especially those in power-
ful positions within the CCP. Conversely, exposing and rooting out domes-
tic revisionists undermined the ability of the international revisionists,
the CPSU, to push China’s off its correct nonrevisionist socialist path to
communism.
Aside from China’s peasantry, who Mao realized had a strong propensity
to abandon collective farming, the groups in China that genuinely opposed
socialism and CCP dictatorship—China’s capitalists, large and small, and the
intelligentsia—had been thoroughly crushed in the 1950s. By the early 1960s,
those groups no longer posed much of a threat to Mao’s revolution. There
was, however, a truly powerful social group in China who favored abandon-
ing the harsh course prescribed by Mao—the powerful people within the
CCP who now doubted Mao’s quest for utopia. These “hidden revisionists,”
as Mao called them, favored policies focused on carefully designed economic
development, guided by expert managers in accord with plans worked out
by experts. In many ways, their approach to development coincided with the
approach of the USSR. Should the CCP’s “hidden revisionists” succeed in
gaining paramount power, displacing Mao one way or the other, their policies
would take China down the path of Soviet-style development. Mao dubbed
the economic attractiveness of this Soviet-style, revisionism “sugar-coated
bullets.” They posed a much greater danger to the success of the Chinese rev-
olution than did the openly counterrevolutionary forces of Chiang Kai-shek
and the United States. The revisionists, domestic and international, could
“wave the red flag to oppose the red flag.” Keeping China’s revolution on the
“correct” course, Mao believed by 1962, required intensifying the struggle
against both the hidden revisionists within the CCP, who favored Soviet-like
development policies, and the CPSU revisionists, who sympathized with the
CCP’s hidden revisionists and hoped someday to help them take control of
China’s revolutionary path.
The Wang-Wu-Liu Letter
In February 1962, a letter from the head of the CCP’s International Liaison
Department (ILD), Wang Jiaxiang, and signed by ILD deputy heads Wu
Xiuquan and Liu Ningyi was sent to Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, and
Chen Yi, then premier, secretary general, and foreign minister respectively
and together having responsibility for foreign affairs.^4 Wang had trained
in the USSR from 1925 to 1930 and was one of a group of Soviet-trained
leaders (“the 28 Bolsheviks”) foisted on the CCP by the Comintern in the
early 1930s. Moscow’s efforts at that earlier juncture failed; Wang had been
won over by Mao and became one of Mao’s main supporters in battles
with Moscow-trained CCP would-be leaders. Wang then served as PRC