The Cultural Revolution } 275
with hope to the armies of monarchical Austria and Prussia assembling in
nearby Belgium. When French resistance to the foreign royalist advance
faltered, fear of domestic counterrevolutionary plots swept Paris. The once
formidable French army had been weakened by the emigration of many of
its officers, a number of whom had joined the foreign counterrevolutionary
forces marshaling in Belgium. After initial battlefield setbacks, one aris-
tocratic officer remaining in service to revolutionary France, Marquis de
Lafayette of American fame, sent an envoy to the Austrian camp offering to
march on Paris and restore order if the Austrians would call off their inva-
sion.^22 The Jacobin solution for this link-up of foreign and domestic counter-
revolutionaries was the Terror, intended to ferret out and strike down hidden
internal enemies of the revolution. A similar logic was at work in China
during 1966–1969.
Soviet military forces deployed along China’s borders grew steadily
throughout the Cultural Revolution. Large units of those forces were organ-
ized and deployed for offensive operation.^23 Soviet media threatened inter-
vention. Mao and other Chinese leaders took those threats quite seriously.
This would be a major consideration inspiring China to decide to use US
power to check Soviet power circa 1971. But during the period up to and in-
cluding 1969, using the United States to check the Soviet Union was not part
of Mao’s arsenal. Instead, Mao relied on China’s own inherent strength to
deter the Soviet Union.
In January 1966, the Soviet Union and Mongolia signed a mutual defense
pact that provided for the stationing of Soviet troops in Mongolia. Under
that agreement, Soviet troops moved into Mongolia, putting them only about
500 kilometers of open terrain from Beijing. In January 1967, as Red Guards
“seized power” from the established CCP apparatus in institutions across
China, Wang Ming, one-time leader of pro-Soviet anti-Maoist forces in the
CCP who had long since taken up residence in the Soviet Union, told officials
of the CPSU Central Committee responsible for relations with socialist coun-
tries that armed intervention in support of the CCP’s anti-Mao forces was
imperative:
The current situation in China is more dangerous for the socialist
camp and the international communist movement than the events in
Hungary in 1956 ... We cannot let the opportunity pass by ... we [must]
provide them [the healthy forces in the CCP] not only political, but also
material support via arms and possibly by sending a force composed of
the proper nationalities from Central Asia and the Mongolian People’s
Republic.^24
Wang proposed talks with leaders from Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia to
explore possibilities for cooperation against Mao’s objectively anticommu-
nist forces. Of course, Wang did this from the safety of exile in Moscow.