For more than a decade the Maoists have accompanied their territorial claims against liberated peoples of the Soviet Union with intermittent military provocations at the border between the Soviet Union and the Chinese People’s Republic. And these provocations have been politically synchronized with the global Strategy of U.S. imperialism—objectively giving a green light to U.S. intervention in Vietnam from the beginning of the barbaric aggression. Year after year, the U.S. escalated its aggression in direct proportion to the Maoists’ anti-Soviet provocations—their claims on Soviet territory, their rejection of unity with the Soviet Union and the camp, and with all the world’s anti-imperialist forces in support of the peoples’ right to self-determination in Vietnam, Africa, Latin America, etc.
The “border” dispute initiated by the Maoists goes even deeper than the issues of territorial integrity and sovereignty of borders between states. At stake also is the inviolable right of self-determination for the peoples of the former Czarist empire.
The peoples on both sides of the 4,500 mile border between the Soviet Union and the Chinese People’s Republic have always been non Chinese. Most of the area north of the Great Wall has always been the home of several distinct peoples, none of whom is Chinese. This is an historic reality, notwithstanding the Maoist Han Chinese great power chauvinism that is forcing millions of Han Chinese, against their will, to flood these areas with the aim of erasing the historic existence of the non-Han peoples.
The Maoists’ forced Sinicization of the non-Chinese areas between the Great Wall and the border, is a denial of the right to national existence of the peoples of Sinkiang, Inner Mongolia and Manchuria. And the “border” dispute is a Maoist denial of the right of the non-Chinese Asian peoples on the Soviet side of the border to self-determination—which they have enjoyed for over 55 years. During these years, the Russians have accepted their internationalist responsibility to the peoples who suffered under Russian Czarist racism and national oppression. Soviet policy has made inequality between Russian and non-Russian a thing of the past.
In a talk with a Japanese Socialist Party delegation in 1964, Mao Tse-tung declared:
The Soviet Union has an area of 22 million square kilometers and its population is only 220 million. It is about time to put an end to this allotment. Japan occupies an area of 370,000 kilometers and its population is 100 million. About a hundred years ago, the area east of (Lake) Baikal became Russian territory, and since then Vladivostok, Khabarovsk, Kamchatka, and other areas have been Soviet territory. We have not yet presented our account for this list. (Quoted in Sino-Soviet Relations, 1964-1965, by William E. Griffith. The M.I.T. press, Cambridge, Mass. 1967. Page 366.)
It is impossible to overlook the strategic relationship of this statement to the struggle between imperialism and the countries and all the world’s anti-imperialist forces. In addition to its direct threat to the peoples of the Soviet Union, Mao’s suggestion to Japanese imperialism that China and Japan should consider their mutual interests in Mao’s claim to Soviet territory, has even wider significance:
Mao’s declaration was timed with expansion of U.S. aggression in Indo-China, and U.S.-NATO support of new levels of Portuguese and South African violence against the liberation movements, as well as stepped-up neo-colonialist penetration of the newly liberated African countries. This statement put China on the side of imperialism against the national liberation struggles of Africa, Asia and Latin America.
No amount of Maoist “revolutionary” rhetoric can erase the reality of Mao’s anti-Soviet suggestions to Japanese imperialism, and his open threat to the territorial integrity of the Soviet Union at the very time the Soviet Union was urging—as it has never ceased to urge—Chinese-Soviet unity against U.S. aggression in Vietnam. The Maoist and U.S. imperialist pretense of a “Soviet threat” to China evaporates in face of the reality of Mao’s threats against Soviet territory.
In a statement issued in 1969, the Chinese People’s Republic continued to assert territorial claims against the U.S.S.R.:
. . . the Soviet Government even described tsarist Russian imperialist aggression against semi-colonial China after the mid-19th century, as disputes between ’Chinese emperors and tsars,’ in which there was no question of who was the aggressor and who the victim of aggression, nor was there any question of whether the treaties concluded between them are equal or not. This is a gangster logic in defense of tsarist Russian imperialist aggression. (Quoted in The Foreign Relations of The People’s Republic of China. Edited by Winberg Chai. G. P. Putman’s New York. Page 315.)
The statement continued:
In his time the great Lenin warmly supported China and all other oppressed countries in opposing aggression by tsarist Russian imperialism and all other imperialists. He said that . . . “if tomorrow, Morocco were to declare war on France, or India on Britain, Or Persia or China on Russia, and so on, would be ’just,’ and ’defensive’ wars, irrespective of who would be the first to attack; any socialist would wish the oppressed, dependent and unequal states victory over the oppressor, slave-holding and predatory ’Great’ powers.” Today when people review these teachings of Lenin’s, they can only come to one conclusion: such energetic propagation of the imperialist gangster logic by the Soviet Government is not only alien to the Leninist policy but is also a most shameful betrayal of Leninism. (Ibid., page 315.)
One must ask: is not this statement—which quotes Lenin out of context and distorts his meaning—designed to promote war against the Soviet Union in the name of Leninist principles?
This Maoist declaration ignores the historic distinction between the epoch of imperialism and the earlier period in which the vast areas north of China and west of Russia were the scene of the competing aggressions of Czarism and the Chinese empire. In the course of these struggles between these two colonial empires, various treaties were signed. The Maoists’ statement notwithstanding, whether the treaties favored the Russian or Chinese side in settling these 19th Century disputes, they always perpetuated inequality of the peoples left under control of either Russia or China. The treaties represented only the status of the struggle between aggressors.
The Soviet Government is true to Leninist principles in insisting that one cannot take sides between Russian czars and Chinese emperors! Both were aggressors.
By refusing to acknowledge that Chinese emperors were also aggressors—even if often the weaker ones—Maoism tries to divert attention from the real inequality in the border-fixing between the Chinese and Russian empires—the fact that the competition between these aggressors in the last half of the 19th Century for domination over the oppressed peoples on both sides of the border aided reaction in both China and Russia—and weakened China’s ability to prevent British and French occupation of key areas in China.
Inequality was inherent then in the oppression of non-Russian and non-Chinese peoples on both sides of the border, regardless of where the border was fixed by the Sino-Russian treaties. And the struggle between the Chinese emperors and Russian czars to control non-Chinese and non-Russian peoples opened the way for Japanese imperialism’s defeat of what was to be the last of the Russian czars and Chinese emperors.
When the Maoists claim a principled difference between the aggressions of Russian czars and Chinese emperors, when they deny that both sides oppressed their “own” and other peoples, when they protest the “inequality” allegedly imposed by Russian czars on Chinese emperors, they simply reveal their chauvinist indifference to the real inequality that existed—the inequality suffered by peoples within both Chinese and Russian czarist empires.
Only by replacing Leninist principles of the right of self-determination with Han great power nationalism could Maoists callously ignore the fact that when this right is denied, oppressed nations and nationalities will continue to be oppressed—whether or not treaties result in a greater advantage to one or another of their oppressors.
In their claim to Soviet territory, Maoists try to conceal this fundamental Marxist-Leninist principle in every way they can—including a seemingly unlimited distortion of Lenin’s writings to camouflage Han nationalism. This is what was involved when, for example, Mao quoted Lenin’s, “if tomorrow Morocco were to declare war on France, or India on Britain, or Persia or China on Russia, and so on, these would be ’just’ defensive wars, irrespective of who would be the first to attack . . . ”
By putting this statement in its true context, one discovers for instance, that the Maoists have “neglected” to differentiate between the period of the rise of capitalism and that of monopoly imperialist decline of capitalism. Lenin made these comments at a time when the bourgeois democratic revolution was taking place in China with the declared aim of upholding the right of self-determination. Certainly, if the Chinese Republic, headed by Sun Yat-sen—which defeated the last of the Chinese emperors—had also struck a blow at czarism, it would have speeded the victory of the first Socialist revolution. But things turned out in quite a different way:
The Chinese Revolution did not strike the external blows that would have hastened the end of Czarism. Instead, the October Revolution led by Lenin struck the decisive blows providing the solidarity and material support which brought victory over internal reaction and world imperialism for China in 1949.
By now, there is all too much evidence that Maoism seeks to reverse the meaning of Leninism. Through its policy of forced Sinicization, which forecloses the right of self-determination, Maoism denies the special claim non-Hans have upon Hans to overcome the heritage of inequality. But Maoism does not stop even there. The Maoists would also forcibly Sinicize the many Asian peoples who have established their own republics within the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Territorial claims against the U.S.S.R. are being the Maoists who have violated Leninist principles on the national question through their great power Han chauvinist policies—while the Russian working class, which led the struggle to defeat its own bourgeoisie, has remained true to the Leninist principles of equality and self-determination. What has taken place in the U.S.S.R. is not the Russification but the liberation of nationalities—all the way from the eastern end of the former czarist empire to the western shores of that vast continent.
Next: ASIAN NATIONS ON THE SOVIET SIDE OF THE BORDER