Workers World, Vol. 20, No. 3
January 17 – It becomes more and more difficult to explain China’s foreign policy on the basis of almost any plausible theory of international relations. Certainly it is virtually impossible to understand it in the light of China’s standing as a socialist state. It is even less comprehensible in the light of the leadership’s current ideological position.
For a considerable period the Chinses leaders have cast the Soviet Union in the role of “Hitlerite Germany” while they present the imperialist camp as somewhat paralyzed, stricken with a case of appeasement and bent on making concession after concession to the advancing might of what they call the “social-imperialist” regime in the USSR.
In the Peking Review, No. 50, dated Dec. 9, 1977, this theory is taken a considerable distance further. The article presumes to present, if not the longest, certainly one of the most comprehensive views on China’s so-called Munich theory as applied to the current international situation.
Unfortunately for the Peking leadership, it comes at a most inappropriate time, precisely because this is in such flagrant contradiction to the real relations that exist in the world today. Far from showing weakness and being bent on appeasement, the Carter administration has gone to extreme lengths to outdo the former Ford-Kissinger administration in its blatant anti-communism and anti-Sovietism. Alongside its counter-revolutionary “human rights” attacks against all the socialist countries, including China, it has launched its fiercest blows against the oppressed people of the Middle East and has virtually tried to establish itself as the new Caesar-like power not only in the Red Sea and the Mediterranean, but in the Atlantic, Pacific, and Indian oceans as well.
Nowhere has in given ground except in palaver – in deceitful words calculated to hoodwink world public opinion and cast the U.S. in the role of “guardian of the peace.” As against its predecessor administration, it has thus far gone all the way on such matters as the cruise missile and has resorted to naked neutron bomb diplomacy – a giant escalation in war preparations. Finally, the Carter administration has so flagrantly and ostentatiously intervened in European affairs (witness its virtual ultimatum to Italy and France against “permitting” Communists to hold office) that even some right-wing capitalist politicians in the U.S. are beginning to wonder whether the Carter administration is not going too far.
Of course all these moves are a response to the continuing disintegration of the imperialist system and the inability of the bourgeoisie to arrest this development. Nonetheless, each and every move by the Carter administration is made in the spirit of new and more ominous aggressiveness and adventures in foreign affairs. Even the more reactionary imperialist elements in Europe fear that Carter’s efforts to bolster them by these extreme measures in themselves present a great danger to the very existence of the bourgeois system there.
Nonetheless, Carter has announced another increase in the military budget and has promised more U.S. troops to add to the more than 300,000 stationed in Europe. And the withdrawal of troops from south Korea now seems a long way off. As a matter of fact, they have really increased if we are to believe the U.S. News & World Report of Dec. 26, 1977.
So that casting the USSR in the role of the “Hitlerite aggressors” requires a special Orwellian frame of mind, the product of an overworked imagination.
Yet China, the great People’s Republic of China, is a socialist state, a state in which the super-structural elements are out of kilter with its socialist foundations and in which the leadership is in disarray and in a quandary.
The Munich analysis of “contemporary appeasement,” as it is called in the Peking Review article referred to above, bears all the earmarks not merely of confusion of mind but even of having been written, or “corrected,” but two writers with divergent views.
Their Munich theory has at least two aspects to it. The first is that Soviet strategy is calculated toward “making a feint to the east while [really aiming] to attack the west.” This theory was stated officially by China’s Foreign Minister during the September 1976 session of the UN General Assembly, and repeated ad nauseam long before and longer after.
It is supposed to convey the impression that the USSR is about to gobble up Western Europe in its alleged drive to dominate the world. The Munich analogy is meant to warn and alert Western imperialism. It is also meant to convey the impression that China itself is not in danger of attack by the USSR. Since this theory is calculated to both a political as well as diplomatic exposition of China’s stand, it is only natural that Western imperialism, if it judged Chinese foreign policy merely by its pronouncements, would regard this as a possible clue that China is really pursuing a double aim: one, it hopes to aggravate relations between the USSR and the West, and also, that China itself will stay out of any such “conflict between the two superpowers.”
But the vitriolic character of the attacks against the USSR and the constant reference to the “greater danger” of “social-imperialism” would make it plain that the real target the Chinese leaders are aiming at is not the imperialists but the Soviet Union.
In any case, Western imperialism cannot but view Chinese foreign policy as ambivalent rather than consistent. This flows from the class approach of the imperialists, something lacking in the approach of the Chinese CP leaders. To the imperialists, the class character of China is of the same sociological fabric as the USSR, and this carries more weight than a thousand anti-Soviet polemics. For that reason, the imperialist press has not for a moment lost sight of the possibility of a renewal or full normalization of the relationship between China and the USSR as socialist states bound together against imperialism and political reaction.
In its presentation of the Munich appeasement in Peking Review, No. 50, China’s leadership tries to deepen the analogy between Munich of 1938 and the present period in such a way that it not only does violence to history but also to any Marxist-Leninist conception of the period in question. The polemic descends into an eclectic mish-mash of the bourgeois imperialist conception of Munich and tacks onto it as though in passing that Chamberlain’s policy towards Hitler’s aggression and expansion was based on the Briton’s hope of turning Hitler’s “spearhead eastward against the Soviet Union so that Britain could ‘sit out the tigers’ fight from afar,’ maintain its position as the overlord in Europe and preserve its colonial interests in Asia, Africa and Oceania.”
However, says the Peking Review article, “Hitler saw through the game Chamberlain and company were playing and waving an anti-Bolshevik banner, pursued a strategy of making a feint to the east while attacking the west. He first pounced on Poland, the Soviet Union’s next-door neighbor, and then made a blitz attack westward on the weak-willed Britain and France. This threw Chamberlain, the chief advocate of appeasement, into consternation. He lamented, ‘Everything that I have worked for, everything that I had hoped for, everything that I have believed in during my public life, has crashed in ruins.’” (Our emphasis.)
This is not telling it as it was. This is telling it as the imperialist bourgeoisie wants to tell it, with a few revolutionary phrases tacked on here and there. It is the bourgeois geopolitical explanation of inter-imperialist antagonism and not a historical presentation of the epoch of the 1930s or the significance of the rise of Hitler.
Hitler was not “feinting to the east while attacking the west.” That was a monstrous distortion of the historical record. As defined in Wester’s dictionary and as understood in military language, the term “feint” means: “a mock blow or attack on one part when another is intended, as in fencing, boxing, or war.” Hitler did not intend a mock blow at the USSR, but a real blow. Only communists who have completely lost their bearings because of their morbid hatred of the Soviet Union could say that.
Hitler was not merely “waving an anti-Bolshevik banner.” How could real communists get themselves to say that?
He had established himself as the chief executioner of the Western proletariat, as the enemy of the socialist revolution. He had exterminated the revolutionary vanguard of Germany and Austria to the cheers and applause of the world bourgeoisie and all the reactionaries. He lit the flames of counter-revolution all over Europe. He had proclaimed that he would end the historical period of proletarian revolution and colonial uprising and promised to demolish bourgeois democracy which had shown “weakness” before a rising proletariat. This is why the bourgeoisie hailed him, not only in Europe but in America and Asia.
His strategy was to destroy the Soviet Union. He did not make a mere “feint” in that direction, as the Peking Review says. That was his supreme objective, and also the objective of the entire imperialist bourgeoisie.
His miscalculation was that the USSR would be a pushover, that he could grab the bread basket of the Ukraine, the oil fields of Baku, and the nearby steel plants and industrial complexes that the workers had built up in the years of socialist construction, and use them, after overturning the Soviet government in a blitzkrieg attack to unify imperialist Europe under the exclusive domination of Nazi imperialism.
That was the strategy of Hitler. The strategy foundered when he was unable to vanquish the Soviet Union.
What the Daladiers, the Chamberlains, and the others held against Hitler was not his thrust against the Soviet Union, but that he would victimize them as well after defeating the Soviet Union. But they nevertheless continue to hope to turn Hitler towards the East. On that objective the imperialists were united. It was only when he infringed on the Western imperialist interests that they broke with him.
The fact that the Chinese leaders, who consider themselves Marxist-Leninists, inheritors of the mantle of Marx and Lenin, can get themselves to say that Hitler was merely “feinting” in his attitude towards the USSR, shows what a long, long way they have gone in their bitter hatred of the Soviet Union. They would even rewrite the history of the Nazi attitude towards the Soviet Union – in the interest of what? Of persuading the West to turn on the Soviet Union? It scarcely needs persuading from the Chinese leaders, if one is to judge by the character of the weapons systems continually being conjured up and developed.
Since the Peking Review Munich analysis pretends to be so sweeping and comprehensive, with five solid pages of print discussing the Munich period on the 1930s, one wonders how it can omit any mention of the Stalin-Hitler Pact, or the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact as it was called when it was signed in 1939.
Contrary to bourgeois imperialist interpretations, for Stalin to sign the pact with Hitler was not wrong in principle, and there is no need to hide the fact that he did. What was wrong with Stalin’s policy was that earlier during the course of the Popular Front period he had so embellished the imperialist democracies as against the imperialist fascists that he had virtually obliterated the class bonds between the two. Hence there was tremendous shock and panic in the communist movement when Molotov and Ribbentrop signed the first initial agreement.
Since, however, the Munich analysis in the Peking Review, if it is to be taken seriously at all, must also be understood as a message to the Western imperialists, leaving out any reference to the Soviet-German Non-Aggression Pact can easily induce one to believe that this is precisely what the Chinese leaders have in mind now. Since they accuse the West, in this article, of trying to “divert” the USSR towards the East, is it not appropriate for the Chinese leadership to make the same kind of rapprochement with “Hitler” (that is, with the USSR) as Stalin did in his day?
Once again, it should be abundantly clear for anyone who has followed the course of China’s foreign policy in the last decade or so that the policy is not anchored to a solid position.
While the Peking Review article calls attention, rather strikingly we think, to the fact that the imperialists are trying to divert the USSR towards the east, doesn’t it only prove that the imperialists are burning both ends of the candle, since they are trying even harder to incite China against the USSR?
Indeed, the basic strategy of imperialism towards the socialist countries, as we have said in these pages over and over again, is calculated not merely to split and envenom their relationship but to set them up in a military conflict against each other where the imperialists can pick up the pieces after a ruinous war of destruction.
If there is any lesson at all to be learned from this article in the Peking Review, it is not the so-called “lessons of Munich” which are false to the core and the product of an inflamed imagination but it is the need for China to set upon a new course in foreign policy, away from the ruinous fratricidal struggle in the socialist camp and towards socialist solidarity.
Last updated: 11 May 2026