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A New China, the Old Politics

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 September 2018

O. Edmund Clubb
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Extract

An occurrence in 1968 far from China's borders may have contributed substantially to bringing about a change in Peking's foreign policy. On August 20-21, there was the startling intervention in Czechoslovakia by the USSR and four other Warsaw Pact powers. A warning letter the five had sent previously to the Czechoslovak Communist Party set forth a significant rationale: “… we cannot agree to have hostile forces push your country away from the road of socialism and create the danger of Czechoslovakia being severed from the socialist community… . The frontiers of the socialist world have moved … to the Elbe and the Bohemian Forest. We shall never agree to these historic gains of socialism … being placed in jeopardy.” The Brezhnev Doctrine of “limited sovereignty” had been born, and if it were judged warrant for taking action against unorthodoxy in Czechoslovakia, it was in logic equally applicable to China. In any event, Moscow's military action against the deviant Communist state was by itself an indication that, in some circumstances, the Soviet Union might be prepared to employ its armed forces elsewhere outside its borders.

Type
Research Article
Information
Worldview , Volume 15 , Issue 3 , March 1972 , pp. 10 - 15
Copyright
Copyright © Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs 1972

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References

* There is a piquant interest in the fact that the fledgling Communist regime in Kiangsi, in its 1932 "declaration of war" on Japan, charged that the Nationalist regime hoped to foment world war in order to gain, in a clash of the great imperialist powers, a solution for China's problem of division. See Wang Chien-min, Chung-kuo kung-ch'an-tang shih-kao [Draft History of the Chinese Communist Party] (Taipei: 1965), Vol. Ill, pp. 24-25, for text.

1. Keesings Contemporary Archives, p. 22887.

2. For the process see Tillman Durdin, New York Times (March 4, April 5, 1970), and Takashi Oka, New York Times (April 8, 1970).

3. Le Monde (April 7, 1970).

4. Charles Mohr, New York Times (December 28, 1989); for earlier signs of warning see Tillman Durdin, New York Times (September 29, 1969).

5. Henry Kamm, New York Times (August 31, 1970).

6. Le Monde (August 8-9, 1971).

7. “Japan-USSR Economic Ties Expanding; Financial Circles Seek Interchanges,” The Japan Economic Review (September 15, 1971), p. 11. n

8. John Finney, New York Times (March 29, 1970).

9. New York Times (October 21, 1971). See also Chou, to the same effect, when talking to a group of visiting American graduate students, New York Times (July 21, 1971).

10. James Reston, New York Times (August 2, 1971).

11. Edgar Snow, “A Conversation With Mao-Tsetung,” Life (April 30, 1971), pp. 46-48.

12. Ross Terrill, “The 800,000,000,” The Atlantic, (Part III, January, 1972), p. 43; for Chou En-lai's observations to this point see his interview with writer Neville Maxwell, “Midnight Thoughts of Premier Chou,” Sunday Times of London (December 5, 1971).