¹ Edgar Snow, “Interview with Chairman Mao,” published 14 February 1965 in the Asahi Shimbun.

² On 23 October 1966 at the Party Central Work Conference Mao said: “It was when the 23 Articles were enacted that I suspected for the first time those whom I had trusted” (from 7 January 1967, in the Yomiuri Shimbun). There is much political flavour in Mao's choice of the words “for the first time,” because as early as June or July 1964 there had been evidence of his Cultural Revolution which was to attack the leaders of the Party Central Committee. This evidence was: (i) the modern opera competition meeting in Peking; (ii) Mao's advance notification of the Cultural Revolution on a nation-wide scale; (iii) a series of articles criticising Soviet Russia ended abruptly with the ninth instalment and emphasis was shifted instead to the fight against internal revisionism; (iv) phrases from the Thoughts of Mao were inserted in the rules of the Ninth National Congress of the Young Communist Youth League; (v) the draft regulations of the Poor and Lower-middle Peasants' Association were announced; (vi) the anti-Mao essay “Three Villages' Note” was banned.

³ Representatives of the Japan Communist Party, led by Kenji Miyamoto, met Mao (who was accompanied by Teng Hsaio-p'ing, K'ang Sheng and T'ao Chu' at the Ts'unghua hot spring resort outside Canton on 28 March 1966. Mao objected to the joint communiqué containing only points agreed between the Japanese and the Chinese delegates such as Chou En-Iai, Teng Hsiao-p'ing, P'eng Chen, Liao Ch'engchih and Liu Ning-yi (Liu Shao-ch'i was in Pakistan) and in front of the Japanese shouted at Teng and others: “You weak-kneed people in Peking!” Because of Mao's objection the joint communiqué was cancelled. The disagreement between the two delegations was centred on the advisability of united Sino-Russian action in support of Vietnam. After the conference and on the same day Mao gave orders on these lines to K'ang Sheng: “The ‘February Programme’ compiled by P'eng Chen and the Five-man Cultural Revolution Group is to protect a scoundrel who suppressed the people, so it must be criticised accordingly. Give orders to dissolve the Party Central Propaganda Department, the Party Peking Committee and the Five-man Cultural Revolution Group. “This meeting is particularly important because it took place on the day that Mao ordered the attack on P'eng Chen. To the Japanese representatives Mao appeared to be old but not ill. Mao appeared to have very definite ideas about a possible war between Russia and America, but Chou, Teng, Chu Teh and other leaders did not appear to be as serious as Mao when they used the same phrases and words. To the Japanese, Mao was a reminder of Stalin in his later days; important plans or questions were always put to him. They were given the impression that the other leaders were not altogether opposed to Mao's ideas, but they more or less followed him because they could see no alternative. Mao did not seem to know much about Russian aid to Vietnam. The Japanese suspected that Teng Hsiao-p'ing and others knew about it, but were not telling him the facts in the hope that he would become so dogmatic as to dig his own grave (From the special issue of Rodo Mondai (Labour Problems) of October 1966).In September 1967, the Shao Shan Editorial Board published Mao's “Talk on Strategic Deployment,” in which he said: “Yao Wen-yuan's writing was significant, but my wish to have it printed in a little book was frustrated by P'eng Chen's opposition. I had to take part in drafting the May 16 announcement. Many people thought I was then acting too late. …”

⁴ Liu Shao-ch'i, “Comments on the Struggle within the Party” (July 1941). Liu listed various examples of extreme power struggles within the Party and pointed out the error of dealing with one's comrades with the same techniques employed against enemies or outsiders. He also said that “those who fight the internal struggle with the help of outside power and so blackmail the Party have already cut themselves off from the Party and have become Party enemies.”

⁵ Ninth criticism of the CPSU, July 1964: “Khrushchev's Phoney Communism.”

⁶ Po-ta, Ch'en, in commemoration of the 25th anniversary of publication of The Chinese Revolution by Stalin (04 1952)Google Scholar: “Whether the bourgeois class defeats the proletariat or not depends, as Comrade Stalin has pointed out, on whether the leadership belongs to the bourgeoisie or to the proletariat. Since the Chinese proletariat appeared on the political scene, this struggle for the leadership has continued for more than 30 years.” “Comrade Mao pointed out in March 1949 that for a fairly long time after a revolutionary victory, the positivism of private capitalism in the cities must be utilised for development of the national economy. At the same time Comrade Mao warned of the possibility of corruption of weak-minded revolutionaries, who might be influenced by the sugar-coated cannon-balls of the bourgeois.”

⁷ Tse-tung, Mao, “On the Correct Handling of Contradiction among the People” (02 1957)Google Scholar.

⁸ Mao Tse-tung, ibid., and “Talk at the National Propaganda Work Conference” (March 1957).

It appears that there was much happening behind the scenes since the above two items were published a long time afterwards, having been much corrected and revised.

⁹ Johnson, Chalmers A., Peasant Nationalism and Communist Power, pp 7Google Scholar, 19, 69, 70, 176–187.

¹⁰ Shao Shan Editorial Department, “Mao's Talk on Strategic Deployment” (September 1967).

¹¹ At the interview with the delegation from the Japan Communist Party on 28 March 966 (note 3) Mao said the following about China's relations with the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R.: “A war between China and America is inevitable. This year at the earliest or within two years at the latest such a war will occur. America will attack us from four points, namely, the Vietnam frontier, the Korean frontier, and through Japan by way of Taiwan and Okinawa. On such an occasion, Russia, with the Sino-Russian defence pact as its pretext, will cross the frontier from Siberia and Mongolia to occupy China, starting at Inner Mongolia and North-east China. The result will be a confrontation across the Yangtse of the Chinese Liberation Army and the Russian Army. … It is a mistake to say that in the world today there are war powers and peace powers confronting one another; there only exist revolutionary war powers and anti-revolutionary war powers. World revolution cannot come about by the evasion of war.” Later the Japanese delegates said: “We got the impression that Mao was a bit neurotic about it all: he even seemed to be suffering from America-phobia and persecution mania about a Russian occupation of China.” The delegates at the time wondered why the Chinese Communists took Mao so seriously and studied his theories with such enthusiasm (from the special issue of Rodo Mondai of October 1966). Before this meeting with the Japanese, however, Mao told Edgar Snow (1965) the following: “It is correct to say that there will be no war for the time being. Unless America attacks China there will be no war. China will never send an army to fight America. So it is unlikely there will be a war” (“Interview with Mao,” by Edgar Snow). It is not known whether this difference in the points of view expressed by Mao was caused by the intervening escalation of the war in Vietnam or was the result of talking to different persons. Atsuyoshi Niijima, assistant Professor of Waseda University, who is reputed to be pro-Mao, argues in his book in this fashion: “Liu Shao-ch'i and his followers, considering that Chiang Kai-shek's military attack on the mainland was very close at hand, tried to provide more ‘material incentives’ to keep the peasant on the side of socialism. Mao's idea was quite the opposite. He began the Cultural Revolution, which could be estimated to take three to five years to complete, solely on his judgement that a Sino-America war was not near” (The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, 1968).

In February 1966, at the Sino-America conference in Warsaw, the two countries were trying to obtain each other's “agreement” not to fight over Vietnam. China put forward three conditions for its non-intervention: (1) no American forces to invade North Vietnam; (2) no attack should be made on or near the Chinese frontier; (3) no measures should be taken to destroy dams in the north or fight inside Hanoi city. To this America replied with a warning that should China intervene, tactical nuclear weapons would be used in the Vietnam war. On these points the two sides reached agreement (Alexis Johnson, Chalmers C. Johnson, etc.). As if to substantiate this, on 6 September 1966, Ch'en Yi, the Foreign Minister, told a delegation of Japanese Liberal-Democrats, who visited China: “A Sino-American conflict is not unavoidable. Neither we nor they want to fight. It is, however, necessary for both of us to tidy up any internal problems. In China's case we have the Cultural Revolution, of which the first aim is to prepare for the worst possible development.” The general opinion in those days was summed up by a certain Chinese diplomat, who said that in the event of a Sino-America war, Russia's moves would be the big question but claimed that the present leaders of the U.S.S.R., however, would not launch a joint attack on China with the U.S.A.

From all this it appears that the real purposes of Mao's theory that a Sino-American war was inevitable were (i) to hasten the Cultural Revolution; (ii) to appeal to progressive forces of other countries; (iii) to warn America and Russia.

¹² Niijima, Atsuyoshi, The Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution (1968), p. 93Google Scholar.

¹³ There are many ways of dividing the Cultural Revolution into phases according to different points of view, but Mao's “Talk on Strategic Deployment” divided the Cultural Revolution into the following stages (note that the talk was given during the stage of August-September 1967): “The first year of the Cultural Revolution [presumably this means from the Yao Wen-yuan criticism until the 11th Plenum] was for laying the foundation stones; the second year [presumably between the tlth Plenum and September 1967, when Mao's policy changed] was to win a victory, set up a temporary power structure and revolutionise the people's thoughts; the third year [presumably from September 1967 to the present] is for tidying up. The most important thing now is to carry out ‘criticism on a very wide scale’ and to realise the great union and the triple alliance. From the strategic point of view, the Cultural Revolution can also be divided into four stages: (i) until the 11th Plenum (bringing forward problems); (ii) until the ‘January typhoon’ of 1967 (criticism of reactionary bourgeoisie); (iii) until publication of ‘Patriotism or Betrayal of Country’ (People's Daily, 1 April 1967) and ‘Purpose of Training is to Disobey Dictatorship of the Proletariat’ (People's Daily, 8 May 1967), both by Ch'i Pen-yii (recovery of power, the great union and the triple alliance–the pace of the great union was slackened because each class wanted to have its own way); (iv) after publication of Ch'i Penyii's articles. The fourth stage is the most important in the struggle of the two classes. Anti-revolutionary revisionists opposed the red flag, hoisting red flags of their own. Since they use the same flag as the Party, peasants, workers and soldiers are easily deceived by them. The intellectuals, including the youth and the students, have been given an education for the past few decades, which basically belongs to the bourgeois class; so in their veins there beats a strongly bourgeois way of thinking. During this most important stage of the struggle, emphasis should be laid on reconstructing the individual's view of life and the world.”

^* Translator's note: because they were accused of sending material unfavourable to China and consequently had their freedom as reporters much limited.