276 { China’s Quest
PRC intelligence may not have known of Wang Ming’s proposal, but similar
inferences could be drawn from the abundant and vehement denunciations
by Soviet media of Mao’s “anticommunist,” “ultra-leftist,” “petti-bourgeois
adventurist,” and (starting in 1969, as the PLA moved in to restore order and
suppress the Red Guards) “Bonapartist” forces. Parallel to these propaganda
denunciations, Soviet armed forces marshaled on China’s northern and west-
ern borders in configurations that suggested preparation not for border skir-
mishes but for deep thrusts into Chinese territory.
The mounting threat from the Soviet Union interacted with Red Guard
struggle against hidden revisionists in China’s structures of power. Probably
very few of the CCP cadres being purged by the Red Guards sympathized
with the Soviet Union or questioned the anti-revisionist campaign against
the CPSU that Mao had initiated. But the policy preferences of many of the
CCP leaders being purged in the Cultural Revolution were, in fact, similar
to the policies of the USSR: concentration on rapid industrialization, avoid-
ance of political campaigns that disrupted the industrialization drive, mate-
rial incentives, expert and bureaucratic leadership, and so on. Many of the
aspects of Mao’s policies criticized by CCP “hidden revisionists” Liu Shaoqi
and Deng Xiaoping were criticized equally by the Soviet Union. Moreover,
the Soviet model of socialism had been extolled and inculcated in China up to
about 1957. Many CCP cadres hunted by the Red Guard probably did, secretly,
sympathize with Soviet-style socialism.
Some of Mao’s critics, like Peng Dehuai, Wang Jiaxiang, and Chen Yun,
did have considerable contact with Soviet leaders, and those contacts may in
some cases have helped inspire opposition to Mao’s policies during and after
the Great Leap. There is convincing evidence that Peng’s outspoken criticism
of the Great Leap was motivated by concern for the suffering of China’s citi-
zens, and Peng certainly never imagined he was aligning with Moscow against
Mao Zedong. Mao, on the other hand, probably believed his own charges that
the Soviets were behind Peng’s opposition to his Great Leap Forward policies.
Moreover, in situations in which Mao’s opponents, imagined and real, were
struggling for their political and sometimes their natural lives, they might
well welcome Soviet assistance. Lin Biao, to cite the most famous example,
attempted to flee to the USSR once he fell out with Mao in 1971, even though
there is no evidence of prior contact or coordination between Lin and the
Soviet Union.
In Mao’s mind, the congruent policy preferences of the Soviet “revision-
ists” and CCP “hidden revisionists” trumped the nonexistence of actual
links between the two. There was little danger that “US imperialism” could
infiltrate China, let alone the CCP. The social groups that supported capital-
ism and liberal democracy had been rooted out and liquidated in the early
1950s. There was no social base for an attempt to restore capitalism and estab-
lish liberal democracy in China. But there was a powerful social basis for a