On China (24 page)

It also provided Mao with an opportunity to convey how deeply Moscow’s overbearing conduct had cut. Mao complained about Stalin’s condescending behavior during his visit to Moscow in the winter of 1949–50:

The mutual needling quickly went beyond history into contemporary disputes. When Khrushchev asked Mao if the Chinese really considered the Soviets “red imperialists,” Mao made clear how much the quid pro quo for the alliance had rankled: “It is not a matter of red or white imperialists. There was a man by the name of Stalin, who took Port Arthur and turned Xinjiang and Manchuria into semi-colonies, and he also created four joint companies. These were all his good deeds.”
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Still, whatever Mao’s complaints on a national basis, he respected Stalin’s ideological contribution:

Mao set the tone of the next day’s meeting by receiving Khrushchev not in a ceremonial room but in his swimming pool. Khrushchev, who could not swim, was obliged to wear water wings. The two statesmen conversed while swimming, with the interpreters following them up and down the side of the pool. Khrushchev would later complain: “It was Mao’s way of putting himself in an advantageous position. Well, I got sick of it. . . . I crawled out, sat on the edge, and dangled my legs in the pool. Now I was on top and he was swimming below.”
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Relations had deteriorated even further a year later when Khrushchev stopped in Beijing, on his return trip from the United States, to brief his fractious ally on October 3, 1959, on his summit with Eisenhower. The Chinese leaders, already highly suspicious about Khrushchev’s American sojourn, were further agitated when Khrushchev took the side of India with respect to the first border clashes in the Himalayas between Indian and Chinese forces that had just occurred.

Khrushchev, whose strong suit was not diplomacy, managed to raise the sensitive issue of the Dalai Lama; few topics could generate a more hair-trigger Chinese response. He criticized Mao for not having been tough enough during the uprisings in Tibet earlier that year, which had culminated in the Dalai Lama’s flight to northern India: “I will tell you what a guest should not say[:] the events in Tibet are your fault. You ruled in Tibet, you should have had your intelligence there and should have known about the plans and intentions of the Dalai Lama.”
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After Mao objected, Khrushchev insisted on pursuing the subject by suggesting that the Chinese should have eliminated the Dalai Lama rather than let him escape:

It was the last time Mao and Khrushchev were to meet. What is amazing is that for another ten years the world treated Sino-Soviet tensions as a kind of family quarrel between the two Communist giants rather than the existential battle into which it was turning. Amidst these mounting tensions with the Soviet Union, Mao initiated another crisis with the United States.

On August 23, 1958, the People’s Liberation Army began another massive shelling campaign of the offshore islands, accompanying its bombardment with propaganda salvos calling for the liberation of Taiwan. After two weeks, it paused, and then resumed the shelling for a further twenty-nine days. Finally, it settled into an almost whimsical pattern of shelling the islands on odd-numbered days of the month, with explicit warnings to their inhabitants and often avoiding sites of military significance—a maneuver Mao described to his senior associates as an act of “political battle” rather than conventional military strategy.
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Some of the factors at work in this crisis were familiar. Beijing again sought to test the limits of the American commitment to defend Taiwan. The shelling was also partly a reaction to American downgrading of the U.S.-China talks that had resumed after the last offshore island crisis. But the dominant impetus seems to have been a desire to stake a global role for China. Mao explained to his colleagues at a leadership retreat held at the outset of the crisis that the shelling of Quemoy and Matsu was China’s reaction to American intervention in Lebanon, where American and British troops had been landed during the summer:

In that sense the shelling of the offshore islands was a blow in the contest with the Soviet Union. Soviet quiescence in the face of a strategic American move in the Middle East was being contrasted with Chinese ideological and strategic vigilance.

Having demonstrated its military resolve, Mao explained, China would now rejoin the talks with the United States and have available “both an action arena and a talk arena”
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—an application of the Sun Tzu principle of combative coexistence in its modern version of offensive deterrence.

The most significant dimension of the shelling was not the taunting of the American superpower so much as the challenge to China’s formal ally, the Soviet Union. Khrushchev’s policy of peaceful coexistence had made the Soviet Union, in Mao’s eyes, a problematical ally and perhaps even a potential adversary. Thus, Mao seems to have reasoned, if the Taiwan Strait Crisis were pushed to the brink of war, Khrushchev might have to choose between his new policy of peaceful coexistence and his alliance with China.

In a sense Mao succeeded. What conferred a special edge to Mao’s maneuvers was that the Chinese policy in the Strait was being carried out ostensibly with the blessing of Moscow so far as the world was concerned. For Khrushchev had visited Beijing three weeks before the second Taiwan Strait Crisis—for the disastrous encounters over the submarine base issues—much as he had been there in the opening weeks of the first crisis four years earlier. In neither case had Mao revealed his intentions to the Soviets either before or during the visit. In each instance Washington assumed—and Eisenhower alleged as much in a letter to Khrushchev—that Mao was acting not only with Moscow’s support but at its behest. Beijing was adding its Soviet ally to its diplomatic lineup against its will and indeed without Moscow realizing that it was being used. (A school of thought even holds that Mao invented the “submarine base crisis” to induce Khrushchev to come to Beijing to play his assigned role in that design.)

The second Taiwan Strait Crisis paralleled the first with the principal difference being that the Soviet Union participated in issuing nuclear threats on behalf of an ally that was in the process of humiliating it.

Roughly one thousand people were killed or wounded in the 1958 bombardment. As in the first Taiwan Strait Crisis, Beijing combined provocative evocations of nuclear war with a carefully calibrated operational strategy. Mao initially asked his commanders to conduct the shelling in such a way as to avoid American fatalities. When they responded that no such guarantee was possible, he ordered them not to cross into the airspace over the offshore islands, to fire only on Nationalist vessels, and not to return fire even if fired on by U.S. ships.
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Both before and during the crisis, PRC propaganda trumpeted the slogan “We must liberate Taiwan.” But when the PLA’s radio station undertook a broadcast announcing that a Chinese landing was “imminent” and inviting Nationalist forces to change sides and “join the great cause of liberating Taiwan,” Mao declared it a “serious mistake.”
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In John Foster Dulles, Mao met an adversary who knew how to play the game of combative coexistence. On September 4, 1958, Dulles reiterated the U.S. commitment to the defense of Taiwan, including “related positions such as Quemoy and Matsu.” Dulles intuited China’s limited aims and in effect signaled American willingness to keep the crisis limited: “Despite, however, what the Chinese Communists say, and so far have done, it is not yet certain that their purpose is in fact to make an all-out effort to conquer by force Taiwan (Formosa) and the offshore islands.”
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On September 5, Zhou Enlai confirmed China’s limited aims when he announced that Beijing’s goal in the conflict was the resumption of U.S.-China talks at the ambassadorial level. On September 6, the White House released a statement taking note of Zhou’s remarks and indicating that the United States ambassador at Warsaw stood ready to represent the United States at resumed talks.

With this exchange, the crisis should have been over. As if they were rehearsing a by-now familiar play, the two sides had repeated timeworn threats and had arrived at a familiar deus ex machina, the resumption of ambassadorial talks.

The only party in the triangular relationship who did not grasp what was taking place was Khrushchev. Having heard Mao proclaim his imperviousness to nuclear war in Moscow the year previously and recently in Beijing, he was torn between contradictory fears of nuclear war and of the potential loss of an important ally if he failed to stand by China. His dedicated Marxism made it impossible for him to understand that his ideological ally had become a strategic adversary, yet his knowledge of nuclear weapons was too great to integrate them comfortably into a diplomacy that constantly relied on threatening their use.

When a rattled statesman confronts a dilemma, he is sometimes tempted to pursue every course of action simultaneously. Khrushchev sent his foreign minister, Andrei Gromyko, to Beijing to urge restraint, which he knew would not be well received, and, to balance it, to show the Chinese leaders a draft letter he proposed to send Eisenhower, threatening full support—implying nuclear support—for China should the Taiwan Strait Crisis escalate. The letter stressed that “an attack on the Chinese People’s Republic, which is a great friend, ally and neighbor of our country, is an attack on the Soviet Union” and warned that the Soviet Union “will do everything . . . to defend the security of both states.”
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The initiative failed with both addressees. Khrushchev’s letter was politely rejected by Eisenhower on September 12. Welcoming the Chinese willingness to rejoin ambassadorial talks and repeating Washington’s insistence that Beijing renounce the use of force over Taiwan, Eisenhower urged Khrushchev to recommend restraint to Beijing. Oblivious to the reality that Khrushchev was an actor in a play written by others, Eisenhower implied collusion between Moscow and Beijing, noting that “[t]his intense military activity was begun on August twenty-third—some three weeks after your visit to Peiping.”
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In a public address delivered roughly simultaneously on September 11, 1958, Eisenhower justified American involvement in the offshore islands in sweeping terms. The shelling of Quemoy and Matsu, he warned, was analogous to Hitler’s occupation of the Rhineland, Mussolini’s occupation of Ethiopia, or (in a comparison that must have particularly vexed the Chinese) the Japanese conquest of Manchuria in the 1930s.

Gromyko fared no better in Beijing. Mao responded to the draft letter by speaking openly of the possibility of nuclear war and the conditions under which the Soviets should retaliate with nuclear weapons against America. The threats were all the safer to make because Mao knew the danger of war had already passed. In his memoirs, Gromyko recounts being “flabbergasted” by Mao’s bravado and quoted the Chinese leader as telling him: