278 { China’s Quest
fought out with firearms. Red Guards sometimes armed themselves from
trains carrying Soviet arms across China for North Vietnam. Rebels who had
recently “seized power” formed armed militias to defend their hold on power.
Those ousted, or threatened by being ousted, fought back in kind. PLA units
increasingly took sides in these conflicts.
The crisis in relations with the USSR created a climate conducive to a purge
of CCP “hidden revisionists.” With Soviet armies perched on China’s borders
and Soviet broadcasts calling on China’s “healthy Marxist-Leninist forces”
to rise against Mao, it became imperative to ferret out and crush hidden re-
visionist elements still lurking in the CCP. The Soviet threat became a major
justification for Red Guards to continue and expand the struggles against
“hidden revisionists.” Tarring Mao’s opponents with association with the
Soviet Union helped justify their removal. Thus Liu Shaoqi became “China’s
K h r ushchev.”
As Soviet forces took up positions on China’s borders, Soviet propaganda
began calling for Chinese to oppose Mao’s rule.^27 In February 1967, Pravda
condemned Mao and encouraged his opponents within China to “halt his er-
roneous course.” For three consecutive days, Pravda and the army paper Red
Star carried editorials saying that the Soviet Union was prepared to take any
action, offensive or defensive, to help the Chinese people liberate themselves
from Mao’s rule. The same month, during a visit to London, Premier Kosygin
said that the Soviet Union sympathized with people in the CCP struggling
against “the dictatorial regime of Mao Zedong.” Mandarin-language broad-
casts by Soviet radio into China carried inflammatory appeals to “genuine
communists” to rise up and overthrow Mao. Broadcasts in the Uighur lan-
guage into Xinjiang insinuated Soviet assistance if that region’s Uighurs rose
in rebellion. In midyear, a series of articles in the leading Soviet papers called
for opposition to Mao and implied the possibility of Soviet intervention if the
situation required such action. Similar incitement and promises of support
continued throughout 1967 and 1968.
The Soviet-organized Warsaw Pact military intervention in Czechoslovakia
in August 1968 to oust a liberal, national communist government fur-
ther exacerbated Chinese fears of Soviet intervention. The intervention in
Czechoslovakia was accompanied by promulgation of a statement proclaim-
ing the “duty” of the USSR to intervene militarily in any socialist country
where the proletariat’s gains of socialism were threatened by forces of coun-
terrevolution. That was exactly what was happening in China, in the Soviet
view. Moscow’s new doctrine could well justify, at least in Soviet eyes, inter-
vention in China. The Soviet position in Eastern Europe was vastly different
than in China. Nonetheless, the promulgation of the Brezhnev Doctrine, as it
became known, deepened Mao’s apprehension of possible Soviet action. And
then came a clash on the Sino-Soviet border.