36 { China’s Quest
Korean war). The requirement that a “state of war” exist to activate the treaty’s
mutual defense obligation worked to limit the degree of Soviet commitment
under the treaty.
A secret protocol to the 1950 treaty, not revealed until 1993 after ex-Soviet
archives were opened, stipulated that China would not allow third-country
nationals to settle or conduct business in China’s Northeast and Xinjiang. For
purposes of legal equality, Moscow accepted a similar obligation regarding
Russian Siberia and Central Asia, but the real purpose of this agreement was
to underline that China’s northeast and northwest were spheres of special
Soviet security interest.^20 Separate agreements signed at the same time as the
treaty of alliance provided for the broad continuation of Soviet privileges in
China’s Northeast—special rights tracing to the ROC-Soviet treaty of friend-
ship of August 1945 and which Moscow and Washington had agreed at Yalta
to force on China. Special privileges for Soviet shipping through Dalian were
to continue for thirty years or until a peace treaty with Japan was signed.
(No such treaty was ever signed between Japan and the USSR.) The new 1950
dispensation did provide, however, that Moscow was to relinquish its railway
rights and its military basing right at Port Arthur (Lüshun in Chinese) “not
later than the end of 1952.”
After Stalin’s death, Mao would condemn all these Soviet special rights
as “big power national chauvinist errors” by Stalin and demand, success-
fully, that the post-Stalin Soviet leadership cancel most of them. Wu Xiuquan
expressed in his memoir China’s resentment of Stalin’s niggling attitude:
The Soviet Union should have handed [these] right[s] over to China,
without any reservations. ... but we bore in mind the overall situation and
did not argue with them about such details. Stalin and the other leaders
of the Soviet Communist Party seemed fairly warm toward us and they
could be a potential source of help in our national construction.^21
By swallowing Stalin’s “big power chauvinist errors,” Mao got what he
wanted most from the Soviet Union: Soviet military protection against the
United States and a commitment to large-scale and comprehensive Soviet
assistance in consolidating CCP control over China and then industrializing
China and modernizing the PLA. Moscow agreed to provide US$300 million
of Soviet credit to finance five years’ purchases of Soviet industrial machinery
and equipment. The credit carried 1 percent interest and was to be repaid by
shipments of Chinese raw materials, tea, gold, or US dollars over a period
of ten years from 1954 to 1963. Soviet assistance would permit China’s rapid
socialist industrialization.
The February 1950 treaty of PRC-USSR alliance had a deep impact on US
pol ic y.
As noted earlier, from late 1948 through June 1950 Washington sought
to woo Chinese communism away from Moscow. The February treaty