CHAPTER 5
Triangular Diplomacy and the Korean War
IN HIS FIRST MAJOR ACT of foreign policy, Mao Zedong
traveled to Moscow on December 16, 1949, barely two months after
having proclaimed the People’s Republic of China. It was his first
trip outside China. His purpose was to form an alliance with the
Communist superpower, the Soviet Union. Instead, the meeting
inaugurated a series of moves that would culminate in transforming
the hoped-for alliance into a triangular diplomacy by which the
United States, China, and the Soviet Union maneuvered with and
against each other.
In his first meeting
with Stalin, which took place on the day of his arrival, Mao
stressed China’s need for “a period of 3–5 years of peace, which
would be used to bring the economy back to pre-war levels and to
stabilize the country in general.”1 Yet within less than a year of Mao’s trip,
the United States and China would be at war with each
other.
It all came about
through the machinations of a seemingly minor player: Kim Il-sung,
the ambitious Soviet-installed ruler of North Korea, a state that
had been created only two years earlier by agreement between the
United States and the Soviet Union based on the zones of liberated
Korea each had occupied at the end of the war against
Japan.
As it happened,
Stalin had little interest in helping China recover. He had not
forgotten the defection of Josip Broz Tito, the leader of
Yugoslavia and the only European Communist leader to have achieved
power by his own efforts and not as the result of Soviet
occupation. Tito had broken with the Soviet Union during the
preceding year. Stalin was determined to avoid a similar outcome in
Asia. He understood the geopolitical significance of the Communist
victory in China; his strategic goal was to manipulate its
consequences and benefit from its impact.
Stalin could have
little doubt that, in Mao, he was dealing with a formidable figure.
The Chinese Communists had prevailed in the Chinese civil war
against Soviet expectations and by ignoring Soviet advice. Though
Mao had announced China’s intent to “lean to one side”—Moscow’s—in
international affairs, of all Communist leaders he was among the
least beholden to Moscow for his position, and he now governed the
most populous Communist country. Thus the encounter between the two
Communist giants led to an intricate minuet culminating, six months
later, with the Korean War, which involved China and the United
States directly and the Soviet Union by proxy.
Convinced that the
raging American debate over who “lost” China augured an eventual
American attempt to reverse the outcome—a view to which Communist
ideology led him, in any event—Mao strove for the greatest possible
material and military support from the Soviet Union. A formal
alliance was his objective.
But the two Communist
autocrats were not destined to cooperate easily. Stalin had, by
that time, been in power for nearly thirty years. He had triumphed
over all domestic opposition and led his country to victory against
the Nazi invaders at horrific cost in human life. The organizer of
periodic purges involving millions of victims and, even then, in
the process of starting a new set of purges, Stalin was by now
beyond ideology. His leadership was instead marked by a ruthless,
cynical Machiavellianism based on his brutal interpretation of
Russian national history.
During China’s long
struggles with Japan in the 1930s and 1940s, Stalin had deprecated
the potential of the Communist forces and disparaged Mao’s rural,
peasant-based strategy. Throughout, Moscow had maintained official
ties with the Nationalist government. At the end of the war against
Japan in 1945, Stalin had obliged Chiang Kai-shek to grant the
Soviet Union privileges in Manchuria and Xinjiang comparable to
those achieved by the czarist regime, and to recognize Outer
Mongolia as a nominally independent People’s Republic under Soviet
control. Stalin actively encouraged separatist forces in
Xinjiang.
At Yalta that same
year, Stalin insisted to his colleagues, Franklin D. Roosevelt and
Winston Churchill, on international recognition for Soviet special
rights in Manchuria, including a naval base at Lushun (the old Port
Arthur) and a harbor in Dalian, as a condition for entering the war
against Japan. In August 1945, Moscow and the Nationalist
authorities signed a treaty affirming the Yalta
agreements.
In these
circumstances, the meeting of the two Communist titans in Moscow
could not possibly be the warm embrace shared ideology called for.
As Nikita Khrushchev, then a member of Stalin’s Politburo,
recalled:
Stalin loved to show off his hospitality to his esteemed guests, and he knew how to do it very well. But during Mao’s stay, Stalin would sometimes not lay eyes on him for days at a time—and since Stalin neither saw Mao nor ordered anyone else to entertain him, no one dared go see him. . . . Mao let it be known that if the situation continued, he would leave. When Stalin heard about Mao’s complaints, I think he had another dinner for him.2
It was clear from the
outset that Stalin did not consider the Communist victory a reason
for giving up the gains he had made for the Soviet Union as a price
for entering the war against Japan. Mao began the conversation by
stressing his need for peace, telling Stalin: “Decisions on the
most important questions in China hinge on the prospects for a
peaceful future. With this in mind the [Central Committee of the
Communist Party of China] entrusted me to ascertain from you,
comr[ade] Stalin, in what way and for how long will international
peace be preserved.”3
Stalin was reassuring
about prospects for peace, perhaps to slow down any request for
emergency assistance and to minimize the urgency of rushing into an
alliance:
The question of peace greatly occupies the Soviet Union as well, though we have already had peace for the past four years. With regards to China, there is no immediate threat at the present time: Japan has yet to stand up on its feet and is thus not ready for war; America, though it screams war, is actually afraid of war more than anything; Europe is afraid of war; in essence, there is no one to fight with China, not unless Kim Il Sung decides to invade China? Peace will depend on our efforts. If we continue to be friendly, peace can last not only 5–10 years, but 20—25 years and perhaps even longer.4
If that was the case,
a military alliance was really not needed. Stalin made his reserve
explicit when Mao formally raised the issue. He made the stunning
assertion that a new treaty of alliance was superfluous; the
existing treaty, which had been signed with Chiang Kai-shek in
quite different circumstances, would suffice. Stalin buttressed
this argument with the claim that the Soviet position was designed
to avoid giving “America and England the legal grounds to raise
questions about modifying” the Yalta agreements.5
In effect, Stalin was
arguing that Communism in China was best protected by a Russian
agreement made with the government Mao had just overthrown. Stalin
liked this argument so much that he also applied it to the
concessions the Soviet Union had extracted from Chiang Kai-shek
with respect to Xinjiang and Manchuria, which, in his view, should
now be continued at Mao’s request. Mao, ever the fervent
nationalist, rejected these ideas by redefining Stalin’s request.
The present arrangements along the Manchurian railroad, he argued,
corresponded to “Chinese interests” insofar as they provided “a
training school for the preparation of Chinese cadres in railroad
and industry.”6 Chinese personnel needed to take over as
soon as they could be trained. Soviet advisors could stay until
this training was completed.
Amidst protestations
of amity and affirmations of ideological solidarity, two major
Machiavellians were maneuvering over ultimate predominance (and
over sizeable tracts of territory around China’s periphery). Stalin
was the senior and, for a time, more powerful; Mao, in a
geopolitical sense, the more self-confident. Both were superior
strategists and therefore understood that, on the course they were
formally charting, their interests were almost bound to clash
eventually.
After a month of
haggling, Stalin yielded and agreed to a treaty of alliance.
However, he insisted Dalian and Lushun would remain Soviet bases
until a peace treaty with Japan was signed. Moscow and Beijing
finally concluded a Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual
Assistance on February 14, 1950. It provided what Mao had sought
and Stalin had tried to avoid: an obligation of mutual assistance
in case of conflict with a third power. Theoretically, it obliged
China to come to the assistance of the Soviet Union globally.
Operationally, it gave Mao a safety net if the various looming
crises around China’s borders were to escalate.
The price China had
to pay was steep: mining, railroad, and other concessions in
Manchuria and Xinjiang; the recognition of the independence of
Outer Mongolia; Soviet use of Dalian harbor; and the use, until
1952, of the Lushun naval base. Years later, Mao would still
complain bitterly to Khrushchev about Stalin’s attempt to establish
“semi-colonies” in China by means of these concessions.7
As for Stalin, the
emergence of a potentially powerful eastern neighbor presented a
geopolitical nightmare. No Russian ruler could ignore the
extraordinary demographic disparity between China and Russia along
a two-thousand-mile frontier: a Chinese population of over five
hundred million adjoined a Russian total of less than forty million
in Siberia. At what point in China’s development would numbers
begin to matter? Seeming consensus on ideology emphasized, rather
than diminished, the concern. Stalin was too cynical to doubt that
when powerful men achieve eminence by what they consider their own
efforts, they resist the claim of superior orthodoxy by an ally,
however close. Stalin, having taken the measure of Mao, must have
known that he would never concede doctrinal
preeminence.