168 { China’s Quest
thinking and lead them forward to socialism. Mao unveiled his program at
a plenary session of the Central Committee in August 1962. As Mao made
clear his will, other CCP leaders fell into line behind him and his proposed
ideological rejuvenation among China’s farmers.^8
The CPSU’s letter of attempted reconciliation arrived while yet another
CC work conference focusing on the rural Socialist Education Movement
was underway in Beijing. The critical issue under discussion was the use of
family farming to increase production, versus collectivized farming to move
China toward socialism. Mao had already become convinced that this was
a matter of “class stance” when the CPSU inadvertently injected itself into
the debate with its letter. With the arrival of Moscow’s letter, the focus of the
conference abruptly shifted to consideration of the conflict with the CPSU.
Struggle against international revisionism, the conference concluded, would
be advantageous to the struggle against domestic revisionism.^9 As the work
conference turned to address the Soviet letter, leading pragmatic leaders one
after the other stood up to second Mao’s vehement condemnation of the letter.
Scholar Sergey Radchenko suggests that Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping cal-
culated that by supporting Mao on foreign policy issues, they could secure
Mao’s support on domestic policy. Liu stressed the need to struggle against
international revisionism. But while Liu spoke, Mao interrupted several times
to link Liu’s criticism of Soviet foreign policy to China’s domestic situation.
When Liu asserted that Moscow’s “modern revisionism” concerned the revo-
lutionary movements of all countries, Mao interjected that it also concerned
the movement in China. Mao added:
As to whether or not revisionism emerges [in China], there is a possi-
bility that it will and there is a possibility that it will not. [B] y carrying
out socialist education in the countryside, relying on the poor and lower
middle peasants, and then uniting the upper middle class peasants, one
can dig out the roots of revisionism.^10
In other words, the failure to mobilize the rural poor to attack the “rich
peasants” that were emerging under Liu and Deng’s pragmatic policies would
lead China down the same sort of “revisionist” road being followed by the
Soviet Union. Conversely, exposing the errors of Soviet revisionism would
create an atmosphere for exposing China’s own revisionists. Deng Xiaoping
followed Liu in denouncing the Soviet letter.
Suspension of open polemics as proposed by the CPSU’s February 1963
letter was exactly what Mao did not want. His intensifying struggle against
revisionism within China required a major fight against Soviet revision-
ism. Mao wanted to avoid responsibility for initiating that fight, however.
Strong sentiment within the international communist movement in favor
of pan-communist unity meant that whoever was assigned responsibil-
ity for a “split” would pay heavily in terms of stature within the world of