In the second half of the 1950s, Mao gradually turned his back on peaceful coexistence and returned to a more radical vision of international politics based on class struggle. As recent historical scholarship on China’s foreign relations shows, Beijing’s support for peaceful coexistence was both conditional and short-lived.
After Khrushchev denounced Stalin’s crimes at the Twentieth Party Congress on 25 February 1956, Mao and CCP leadership began casting doubts on his leadership, displaying an increasing readiness (albeit still behind closed doors) to criticise the Soviet premier’s support for peaceful coexistence. For instance, at an international gathering of communist and workers’ parties in Moscow in November 1957, the Chinese delegation, led by Mao, handed their Soviet counterparts a secret memorandum detailing Beijing’s disagreements with the doctrine of peaceful coexistence.
Despite refraining from launching a frontal attack on Khrushchev, Mao told him that the communist movement should no longer fear confrontation with the West. Believing that ‘the forces of socialism [were] overwhelmingly superior to the forces of imperialism’ and that ‘the east wind [was] prevailing over the west wind,’ Mao professed to be upbeat about the future of the international communist movement’s struggle with the capitalist West. On his return to Beijing, he also contended that respect for the principles of peaceful coexistence should not inhibit the communist bloc’s support for national liberation movements and revolutions in the Third World.
By 1958, however, the Chinese leader had well and truly put peaceful coexistence behind him, choosing instead to ‘persist in a struggle with the United States’ and abandon Beijing’s ‘smile diplomacy’ in favour of a more militant foreign policy. By then, he had also embarked on the Great Leap Forward, a radical attempt to fast-forward China’s socialist transformation. No longer willing to conform to the Soviet industrialisation model, which centred on prioritising heavy industry, Mao dispensed with Moscow’s economic leadership to experiment with an alternative, albeit flawed, path to socialism.
In early 1958, Zhou, China’s public face of peaceful coexistence, stepped down as the PRC’s foreign minister following Mao’s stinging attack on his supposedly rightist-leaning tendencies. Although he remained premier, Zhou was careful not to challenge Mao’s growing radicalism in domestic and international affairs. ‘Mao and his comrades,’ Chen Jian argues, ‘were eager to reclaim China’s central position in the world by promoting an Eastern, or even global, revolution.’ The catastrophic failure of the Great Leap Forward in the early 1960s temporarily stalled Mao’s efforts to fast- track China’s transformation into a communist society, thus resulting in a less strident foreign policy.
With Mao adopting a lower profile and pulling back from the day-to-day running of government after 1960–61, leaders such as Liu Shaoqi and Deng Xiaoping stepped in to reverse Mao’s ruinous Great Leap policies. However, as soon as the economic emergency was over, Mao moved to reaffirm his commitment to class struggle. By 1962, he was again pressing for a more radical approach to domestic and foreign affairs, which eventually led to the Cultural Revolution.
As a result, pronouncements coming out of Beijing increasingly focused on China’s role in promoting revolutionary change in the developing world. At the same time, he came to see India as a major ideological rival in both Asia and the Third World.’ If, in 1956, Beijing still viewed India as its ‘best non-communist friend,’ praised its anti-imperialist stance and accepted its neutralist orientation as the best that could be hoped for from a non-communist Afro- Asian nation, that perception was soon to change. As Chinese historian Xiaoyuan Liu notes, within less than 3 years, ‘the image of Nehru and the meaning of India to the PRC went through a sea change in Beijing’s foreign policy analyses.’
Beijing’s generally positive view of India gave way to a much more critical assessment of its internal and external policies—a shift in perception largely attributable to Mao’s return to a more openly revolutionary course in domestic politics and international affairs. In other words, Mao ceased to depict Nehru’s India as ‘an oppressed nation and a state led by patriotic groups or parties,’ as he briefly had during the mid- 1950s, and returned to a class-based understanding of India as a ‘reactionary nationalist state.’ For instance, not only did Beijing criticise Nehru’s alleged growing collaboration with the American imperialists and his more moderate approach to colonial issues, it also found faults with India’s economic policies. In this context of shifting perceptions, Mao and other CCP leaders began questioning India’s utility to the cause of the communist camp, and to China, in particular. By 1962, Mao’s view of India had become ‘a casualty of an aggressive Chinese turn in Chinese foreign policy.’ As we shall see in the next section, Beijing’s increasingly shrill support for Third World liberation movements was to heighten the competition between China and India for leadership of the Third World, thus driving New Delhi and Beijing further apart.
Also read: Not just Nehru, China’s 1962 war on India also a counter to Mao’s secrets
Sino-Indian Relations Worsen
As Mao put China through a new revolutionary phase, policymakers in New Delhi gradually took stock of the changed circumstances. It is true that as late as 1958 Nehru was still prepared to consider Zhou an ‘honourable man’ he could trust. But Zhou’s four visits to India between November 1956 and January 1957 had revealed disagreements between the two leaders on matters such as Tibetan autonomy and Soviet behaviour in Hungary.
According to American sources, ‘with Chou unwilling to include Sino-Indian differences in a communique and Nehru unwilling to settle for platitudes alone,’ no final joint statement was issued. On the subject of Tibet, Zhou warned Nehru that Indian cooperation was critical if Tibetan autonomy was to be maintained. 1956 saw a wave of unrest engulf Inner (eastern) Tibet in response to Beijing’s attempts to tighten its grip on the region and transform it into a communist society through the implementation of so-called ‘democratic reforms.’ As such, the CCP leadership was extremely sensitive to further instability in Tibet and feared interference from India. As Zhou put it bluntly, espionage activities ‘were carried out in the open in Kalimpong.’ Hence, the Indian government ‘should intervene because these activities will interfere with religious contacts and exchange.’ For his part, Nehru sought to reassure Zhou that India had no intention of interfering. However, he somewhat acerbically noted that ‘if an assurance [from China] was given that Tibet would have full internal autonomy, then there was no reason why there should be any trouble.’
On the Hungarian issue, Nehru strongly criticised Soviet behaviour, saying that he was ‘very much distressed’ and found it ‘difficult to justify what has happened’ there. According to him, it was ‘mainly a national uprising of the workers, students and the youth … to get rid of foreign domination, namely, that of the Soviet Union.’ For his part, Zhou stood firmly behind the Soviet intervention, arguing that Moscow ‘had no choice but to send troops at the Kádár government’s request to save Hungary’s socialist system’ against ‘Hungarian reactionary forces aided by West countries.’
In his view, ‘there were only two roads for Hungary: either the West would take it, or the Soviet Union would send troops [in] … There was no other way.’ Although, at the end of his second visit to India, Zhou reiterated the Chinese view that the Five Principles (as well as Bandung’s Ten Principles) continued to govern relations between socialist and non-aligned countries, Nehru must, nonetheless, have felt perplexed by Zhou’s full support for the Soviet invasion, which he regarded as opposed to the Five Principles.’ Nehru’s and Zhou’s rapport had ‘remained largely intact,’ but these disagreements had taken some shine off their relationship.
In the summer of 1957, the Indian ambassador in Beijing and the consul-general in Shanghai alerted New Delhi that ‘a coolness was growing on the part of the Chinese authorities’ in relation to India. At the same time, the Indian government was becoming increasingly uneasy about Chinese activity near the India-Tibet frontier, involving the construction of a truck road connecting Kashgar in western Xinjiang to Lhasa in Tibet. The road—which was intended to provide all-year-round access to Tibet and thus held significant strategic value for China— ran through Aksai Chin, a remote, barren, uninhabited high plateau at the junction of Kashmiri Ladakh, Tibet and Xinjiang, which India claimed as its own.
This excerpt from Andrea Benvenuti’s ‘Nehru’s Bandung’ has been published with permission from Speaking Tiger.