32 { China’s Quest
the new PRC government included democratic parties and “elements,” and
this, according to Wu Xiuquan, head of the PRC’s Soviet desk who accom-
panied Zhou Enlai to Moscow in January 1950 to negotiate the terms of the
new PRC-Soviet relation, roused Soviet misgivings that China might follow
the pro-US and pro-Britain rather than the pro-Soviet path. “For these rea-
sons,” according to Wu, “the Soviet leadership was initially “indifferent and
skeptical” toward the CCP.^6 The danger facing the CCP in 1948–1950 was
that Stalin’s struggle against Tito’s “betrayal” might combine with the Soviet
leader’s doubts about Mao and the CCP, to be stirred by the new US policy
of courting Chinese Titoism, and convince Stalin that it was best to keep the
new CCP-led China at arm’s length. This could mean only limited Soviet
assistance to China’s socialist transformation and construction.
These considerations led Mao to find ways of demonstrating CCP loyalty to
the Soviet Union and negating Washington’s efforts to open ties with China’s
emerging communist government. The CCP declared its support of Moscow’s
condemnation of Tito’s ideological apostasy, and launched a campaign to
educate the entire party about the need for close alignment with the Soviet
Union and for Soviet leadership of the entire socialist camp. In July 1948, as
part of the campaign to oppose Yugoslav-style “bourgeois nationalism” and
strengthen “proletarian internationalism,” the CCP recognized the leader-
ship of the Soviet Union. A Central Committee resolution demanded that the
entire party
clearly recognize that the Soviet Union is the main force and leader of
the world anti-imperialist democratic peace front, the Chinese people
must form a solid fraternal alliance with the Soviet Union. Only then
can the Chinese revolution achieve complete victory. Any sort of blind,
anti-Soviet thinking and vestigial feelings must be eliminated and
prevented.^7
Four days after the establishment of the PRC on October 1, 1949, Liu Shaoqi
declared:
The reason we particularly emphasize and value friendly cooperation
between China and the Soviet Union is that the path already traversed
by the Soviet people is exactly the path we should follow. The experi-
ence of the Soviet people in national reconstruction deserves our very
careful study. In the past, our Chinese people’s revolution was carried
on with Russia as our teacher, and that is why it could attain today’s suc-
cess. From now on, in our national reconstruction, we must similarly
proceed with Russia as our teacher and learn from the Soviet people’s
experience of national reconstruction.^8
As a popular slogan advanced by the CCP had it: “The Soviet Union of
today is the China of tomorrow.”