Joining the Socialist Camp } 37
represented the failure of that policy. As Wu Xiuquan put it: “The sign-
ing of the treaty was tantamount to the complete failure of the imperialists
headed by the United States to sow dissention between China and the Soviet
Union.”^22 The United States did not immediately shift policy, but when it did,
after North Korea’s June 25, 1950, attack on South Korea, the new US policy
would focus on containing the Sino-Soviet bloc by building a political and
military system around China’s periphery.
The 1950 treaty continued the historic role of China’s northeast as a plat-
form for Soviet military power, a role tracing to 1896, when the Russian gov-
ernment formed a secret alliance with a declining Qing government the year
after China’s defeat by Japan. China’s obligation to “immediately render mil-
itary and other assistance with all means at its disposal” under the February
1950 treaty meant that in the event of an East-West war, US positions in
Japan and the Okinawa Islands would confront Soviet forces operating from
bases in China’s Northeast—or at least so US war planners had to assume.
Throughout the 1950s, Chinese propaganda stressed the importance of the
Sino-Soviet alliance to strengthening and defending the whole socialist camp,
including Eastern Europe.
The 1950 treaty also profoundly altered the military significance of the
island of Taiwan. If Taiwan were to be at Beijing’s “disposal” following that
island’s conquest by the PLA, bases there would be available to Soviet air and
naval forces under the provisions of the 1950 treaty. While China did not have
a navy that could threaten the United States in the Pacific, the Soviet Union
did. In the final days of World War II, the Soviet Union had acquired the Nazi
submarine program in a fashion similar to the US acquisition of the Nazi
missile program. That superior German technology was incorporated into
new classes of Soviet submarines that were putting to sea by the late 1940s.
In the event of a Soviet-US war, Soviet submarines in the Pacific would at-
tempt to interdict US ships deploying US men and war matériel forward to
bases in Japan, Okinawa, and the Philippines. Soviet submarine operations
in the Pacific were greatly hampered, however, by the need for those boats to
transit relatively narrow and US-monitored straits exiting the Sea of Japan
before they could reach the high Pacific Ocean where their American ship-
ping targets would be. Submarine operations based on Taiwan would face no
dangerous straits. Soviet boats operating from Taiwan could quickly reach
deep water off the continental shelf under the protection of Soviet aircraft
based on Taiwan.^23 If used by the PLA, Taiwan would not be militarily signif-
icant to the United States. If used by Soviet armed forces, however, it would
pose a major threat to the United States in the event of a war against the
Soviet Union. Beijing’s close military alliance with Moscow transformed for
the United States the significance of potential control of Taiwan by Beijing.
One other important element negotiated during the formation of the
PRC-Soviet alliance had to do with Mongolia. Mongolia was a sovereign state