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George Walden: How Chairman Mao led China to humiliation

[George Walden's book China: A Wolf in the World? is published this month.]

The small dramas of the Olympics are tending to overshadow the historic event they symbolise: China's emergence from Maoist autarky and austerity to a great power, active in the world. How did we get here, in three short decades?

Everyone knows about the 1962 Cuba crisis, but it was another near-nuclear war seven years later that did more to change the world, as I have particular reason to remember. In the spring of 1969, at the height of the Cultural Revolution, I was strolling along the hutongs (city lanes) of Beijing, a six-foot, long-nosed imperialist trying to look inconspicuous at a time of raging chauvinism. I was there to check out reports the British mission had received that the Chinese were building a network of shelters and tunnels, Vietnam-style, against a possible Soviet attack. Peering into courtyards I found that, sure enough, they were.

Tensions with Moscow had been high ever since the launch of the Cultural Revolution three years earlier. “The New Disciples of Goebbels” was a typical headline on one of the many anti-Soviet articles in The People's Daily, and Pravda was hitting back in style. To outsiders it all seemed to be so much ideological steam - till the lid blew off.

Suddenly the Sino-Soviet frontier, the longest in the world, erupted in clashes on Damansky island, a disputed stretch of the Ussuri river. According to newly released Russian military reports, 61 Soviet soldiers died in a Chinese ambush, and their corpses were mutilated. The Russians hit back so hard that, in the words of Robert Gates, CIA Director at the time, from American satellite pictures the Chinese side of the river bank was pockmarked like a moonscape.

It is a measure of the fury that the Russians felt towards Mao that Soviet reinforcements (we later learnt) had been armed with tactical nuclear weapons. And that was not all. “How would the United States react if the Soviets solved one nuclear proliferation problem by attacking China's nuclear weapon facilities?” The question was put over lunch by a Soviet GRU (military intelligence) operative to a senior American official in Washington.

The installations in question were in China's northwestern Xinjiang province, handily close to the Soviet frontier. Ironically it was Nikita Khrushchev - the biggest Russian villain in the Cultural Revolutionary canon - who had somewhat thoughtlessly supplied Mao with a nuclear capability in 1957.

Henry Kissinger took the Soviet inquiry seriously. For all the attractions of seeing China's nuclear potential eliminated (China had exploded her first device in 1964), he and President Nixon concluded that the risks of escalating nuclear exchanges outweighed the gains, and declined to give Moscow the nod. In the face of the overwhelming Soviet response Mao in any case backed down, leaving some of his Politburo members concerned about his handling of the crisis, and many a Russian general dismayed, one suspects, by the loss of a chance to hit China where it would hurt.

Still, Mao had received a reality check. “Paper tigers,” he had called nuclear weapons, but the risk of seeing his own tiger go up in flames helped to persuade him to back off smartly.

A Sino-Russian war with a nuclear dimension was averted, but the aftermath was momentous. When Zhou Enlai confirmed two years later that the Chinese were ready to welcome Richard Nixon in Beijing, the White House believed that it was fear of a Russo-American accommodation that was driving China. “They're scared of the Russians. That's got to be it,” Nixon told Kissinger. And he was right...

Read entire article at Times