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International Socialist Review, Winter 1962

 

Bert Deck

Moscow-Peking: The Debate Documented

 

From International Socialist Review, Vol.23 No.1, Winter 1962, p.27.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.

 

The Sino-Soviet Dispute
by G.F. Hudson, Richard Lowenthal and Roderick MacFarquhar
Frederick A. Praeger, New York, N. Y. 1961. 227 pp. Paperback edition $1.75.

It has become fashionable in some circles to dismiss the position of the Chinese Communist Party as infantile leftism which will pass away as the power of Revolutionary China increases. (See Monthly Review, Dec. 1961)

Such an opinion ignores the fact that the Stalin-Khrushchev concept of peaceful coexistence took root and developed in an epoch of the isolation of a single backward workers state, numerous defeats of revolutionary struggles around the world, “the cult of the personality,” etc. On the other hand, the Chinese position, reviving Lenin’s precepts on war and peace, develops against the background of a phenomenal growth of revolutionary forces internationally. A continued expansion of revolutionary power would seem in this case to imply a further undercutting of the Kremlin’s ability to maintain the sway of a theory which has its ultimate source in a previous epoch.

Obviously, profound social forces must be at work to drag such reluctant combatants as Moscow and Peking into the arena of public debate. It is only by rigorous research and deduction that one is able to establish the existence of the deep conflict which occurred between Mao Tse-tung and Stalin during the final stages of the struggle to overthrow the bourgeois Kuomintang. That dispute, which was of immediate life and death import to the Chinese CP, was never aired in public.

Yet, today, both Moscow and Peking, while proclaiming the need of unity against their common foe, are inelegantly drawn into an open battle over seemingly abstract, long range theoretical questions.

Still, each side resists the struggle; the protagonists diplomatically protect each other’s anonymity and periodically attempt reconciliation; but the attempts fail and the successive terminological compromises merely provide the forms for new conflicts. Their reluctance to pursue the debate discloses that, more than they fear each other, they dread that the ranks of the Communist parties will enter the dispute as an independent force.

All of which indicates that the Chinese-Russian debate and its international reverberations will occupy a key spot in world politics for some time to come. In this regard the publication of the Sino-Soviet Dispute is most welcome.

“The object of this book,” according to the publisher, “originally prepared as a special issue of The China Quarterly, is to document and analyze the dispute and to assess the current status of Sino-Soviet relations. All the pertinent documents are here: Khrushchev’s ‘secret speech’; editorials from Pravda and the Chinese People’s Daily; the Chinese attack on Soviet diplomacy at the World Federation of Trade Unions meeting in Peking; Khrushchev’s speech, P’eng Chin’s reply, and the official communique of the Bucharest conference; the 1960 Moscow statement and Soviet and Chinese comments on it.”

In addition to assembling in a single volume some of the key documents, the three editors have provided, in their brief commentaries, a number of perceptive observations.

For example, Richard Lowenthal sets the record straight on the Soviet slander of the Chinese position as being one of “inevitability of war.” (Incidentally, it should be noted how this purposeful misrepresentation of the Chinese position is gratefully accepted in the West.)

Lowenthal claims, and the included documents confirm him, that the Chinese complaint against Khrushchev is that his application of the slogan of peaceful coexistence tends to sow illusions in the revolutionary camp concerning the peaceful intentions of such men as Eisenhower, DeGaulle and MacMillan, thus disarming the real forces for peace. Peking, not banking on such so-called realistic statesmen of the West, asserts that only the increasing strength and final victory of the socialist camp can guarantee the preservation of peace. Rather than accepting the inevitability of war, the Chinese say that it is now possible to prevent World War III by mobilizing the masses for all-out support to the international class struggle.

While one might consider it unfortunate that the authors have restricted themselves to the 1956-60 period, even this narrow scope will be useful to those readers who have had to depend on third hand comments and rumors about the real positions of the leaders of the two most powerful Communist parties.

 
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