Moscow-Beijing Split Reshaped World Affairs : Rivalry Affected Ties With U.S., Africa, Asia

The Sino-Soviet conflict might have begun in the 1950s as a quarrel between China’s Chairman Mao Tse-tung and Nikita S. Khrushchev, then the Soviet leader, but over three decades it drew in dozens of other countries, big and small, the entire Communist movement and many other bystanders who had little interest in the original issues.

Nations, some in faraway Africa, were partially shaped by the feuding of the two Communist giants as they aided different liberation movements and political parties in the newly independent countries of the Third World in their quest for allies.

As Beijing and Moscow feuded, the international Communist movement--which saw bright prospects for itself after the 1949 Communist victory in China--was slowly torn apart, losing not only its cohesion but also most of its momentum and allure,

Each of the great Communist powers insisted that its ideology was the only correct road to communism, and each pronounced anathemas on any party that deviated from it.

Dozens of small Maoist parties, most inspired by the Chinese Cultural Revolution, sprang up around the world in developing and industrialized countries alike, and their radicalism in turn encouraged the surge of urban terrorism in Western Europe and Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s.

Major Powers Involved

Even the major powers, notably the United States and Japan, found themselves pulled into the conflict, sometimes searching for political advantage for themselves, sometimes forced into taking positions in order to develop relations with one of the antagonists.

The worldwide impact of the prolonged feud between China and the Soviet Union will increase the international importance of this week’s summit between Soviet President Mikhail S. Gorbachev and the Chinese leaders in Beijing.

“The poor relations that the Soviet Union and China had for so many years undeniably contributed to world tensions, and the evidence of this is quite abundant,” Vladimir S. Myasnikov, deputy director of the Soviet Institute of Far Eastern Studies, said in an interview here. “We hope that the improvement of our bilateral relations will now help reduce international tensions. That is certainly one of our goals and, I believe, one of China’s, too. . . .

“We can already see a new situation emerging in Asia in better relations between China and India, between India and Pakistan, in the withdrawal of Soviet forces from Afghanistan, in the search for a solution in Kampuchea (Cambodia), even to some extent in relations between China and Vietnam.”

Relations between the two Communist giants, however, had in fact changed world politics from the outset of their formal alliance in February, 1950.

Korean, Indochina Wars

Fears of a further Communist push in Asia brought the United States and its allies into the Korean War less than five months later and led to the Truman Administration’s twin decisions to commit U.S. forces to the defense of the Chinese Nationalists on Taiwan and to assist France in fighting Communist-led nationalists in Vietnam.

In their rivalry, Beijing and Moscow initially sought to assert their primacy in the Communist movement, but the conflict grew quickly into an effort to contain the influence of the other, to outflank it in terms of alliances and to thwart countermoves, and this struggle made the Sino-Soviet conflict a political factor almost everywhere.

“You had to have a position, and that position determined who your friends were and who your enemies were, regardless of everything else,” the late Maurice Nyagumbo, former minister for political affairs in Zimbabwe, recalled in an interview two years ago as the conflict began to abate.

“For us, fighting in the bush for independence, the issues were often crazy--how to interpret Marx on this small point of class struggle in Germany or some historical footnote in Lenin on the Russian peasantry--but we would be asked, ‘Comrade, where do you stand?’ ”

Nyagumbo’s Zimbabwe African National Union, for what he called “a variety of purely accidental reasons,” stood very firmly with China, which armed the movement’s guerrillas and underwrote its long struggle. The rival Zimbabwe African People’s Union stood with the Soviet Union, which armed and trained its guerrilla army.

And when the Zimbabwe African National Union, led by Robert Mugabe, now Zimbabwe’s president, won the country’s first wholly democratic elections in 1980, China’s international standing increased immeasurably for having backed the winner through its years as a resistance organization.

The two Zimbabwean parties, now merged, had their own serious and longstanding political differences on how to end minority white rule in what was then Rhodesia and on how to shape a democratic future for the country, and they were divided as well along ethnic lines. But the temper of the times was such that through the long struggle for majority rule in Rhodesia, they were identified as pro-Chinese or pro-Soviet.

Trip to Beijing

After his election victory, Mugabe made an early trip to Beijing and delayed establishing full ties with the Soviet Union for many months. “We owed the Chinese no debts, and they certainly made no claims on us after our victory,” Nyagumbo said. “But we remembered very well their faith in us and their encouragement at our most critical times as well their material assistance through the years. . . .

“Today, we are independent and nonaligned and far from being proteges of Mao Tse-tung, but were it not for Chinese assistance--and I underscore that it was Chinese, not Soviet, assistance--where would we be today?” Nyagumbo asked. “I am sure that minority rule would have been defeated in Zimbabwe, but how? And what kind of state would have been created?

“We are talking about the forces of history, and the Sino-Soviet conflict, whatever its origins and whatever the merits of each side’s arguments, shaped much of the second half of our century.”

In West Africa, there was a similar rivalry among the liberation movements fighting for Angola’s independence from Portugal in the early 1970s.

The Soviet Union backed the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, which took power after the Portuguese withdrawal in late 1975, and Moscow has continued to support it through a long civil war with Jonas Savimbi’s National Union for the Total Independence of Angola--whose guerrillas China had armed and trained for many years.

Savimbi now gets most of his money and guns from South Africa and the United States, but he keeps a silver-framed picture of himself with Mao in his study at Jamba, his bush headquarters in southeastern Angola.

“He was an inspiration, a truly brilliant leader, and we still hold to many of his ideas,” Savimbi remarked in an interview in Jamba. “With Mao, we had no problems; the current crowd in Beijing are another matter. . . . You could even call us the last of the Maoists.”

The competition between Beijing and Moscow for allies and proteges, usually underwritten by economic, military or technical assistance, became an important part of the pattern of Third World politics in the 1960s and 1970s.

“The Russians would build a fish meal factory, and the Chinese would give us an Olympic sports stadium,” a veteran African ambassador, whose country has received substantial aid from both Beijing and Moscow, commented here recently. “The Chinese would put up a textile mill and train the personnel for it. Then the Russians would give us a tank regiment and train the soldiers for that. Some things we paid for, others were free. And so it went, on and on, for nearly 20 years. . . .

“One-upmanship was always more at play than rational planning, yet we took what we could get and thanked them with declarations of loyalty that I always assumed neither they nor we believed,” the ambassador continued. “Through it all, I have never understood this game--what they thought they got out of it, why it mattered who we thought was right. Our political-economic orientation is socialist, but it was never going to be either the socialism of Beijing or of Moscow.”

Lasting Impact in Indochina

The Sino-Soviet conflict had its biggest and most lasting Third World impact in Indochina, which China regarded as its sphere of influence, where the Soviet leadership sought allies and where Vietnam became a regional power after the 1975 Communist victories in then-South Vietnam and in neighboring Cambodia and Laos.

“You cannot untangle the conflict in Kampuchea today without reference to Sino-Soviet relations,” Lev Delyusin, a leading China specialist at the Soviet Institute of Oriental Studies, commented in an interview. “Of course, there are many other factors--first of all, the politics of Kampucheans themselves, the country’s present and historical relationship with Vietnam and its other neighbors, its level of economic and social development and so forth.

“Although it was rooted in much different issues--to this day, we really don’t fully know the origins--the Sino-Soviet conflict has influenced many, many other things, and the greatest sore spot now is probably Indochina.”

There, the rival efforts to find allies and to contain each other’s influence by exploiting local politics led to a proxy war in which the Khmer Rouge, as the Cambodian Communists were known, began a series of border raids on Vietnam. Hanoi eventually retaliated by invading and occupying Cambodia in late 1978; China then “punished” Vietnam with a monthlong border war in early 1979, and Cambodia then sank into a prolonged civil war between the Khmer Rouge, still backed by Beijing, and the present administration of Premier Hun Sen, backed by Hanoi and Moscow.

In the long struggle to unify Vietnam and to bring neighboring Cambodia and Laos under their leadership as well, the Vietnamese Communists had assistance from both Beijing and Moscow, but in the end they formed a close alliance with the Soviet Union rather than fall under what they believed would be control by China, which was not only a historic adversary but in the throes of the Cultural Revolution.

Whatever thoughts Hanoi might have had about remaining on good terms with both Beijing and Moscow were ended, according to East European diplomats, when China’s radical “Gang of Four” intervened in a leadership struggle within the Khmer Rouge and succeeded in installing radicals led by Pol Pot, Khieu Samphan and Ieng Sary in key positions over a pro-Vietnamese faction.

“For the ‘Gang of Four,’ Kampuchea was to be China’s biggest victory in the Sino-Soviet feud, for the Khmer Rouge were going to demonstrate the applicability of Maoist doctrines to other countries,” said a senior East European diplomat who followed developments from Hanoi, Phnom Penh and later Beijing and Moscow. “In fact, the genocidal policies of the Khmer Rouge and China’s continued support for them were as severe a setback for Beijing as Moscow’s invasion of Afghanistan proved to be for it.”

The rivalry between China and the Soviet Union was reflected across Asia as Moscow forged a de facto alliance with India and the Chinese offset this with a humiliating defeat of India in a 1962 border war and then through close ties with neighboring Pakistan.

When Soviet troops moved into Afghanistan in late 1979, neighboring Iran strengthened its relations with China, which later supplied it with arms, including Silkworm missiles, throughout the Persian Gulf War with Iraq, which had been armed by the Soviet Union.

With Vietnam, a firm Soviet ally, emerging as a regional power, some other Southeast Asian countries, although strongly non-Communist and concerned about the loyalties of their Chinese minorities, moved closer to China.

Only Indonesia held back, remembering Beijing’s instigation of an abortive 1965 Communist coup d’etat-- an early Chinese attempt to demonstrate its ability to foster revolution and to build support among smaller Communist parties and liberation movements.

The country that perhaps benefited the most from the rivalry was North Korea, whose leader, President Kim Il Sung, has for three decades played Beijing and Moscow against one another to secure assistance from both without giving either leverage over Pyongyang.

Noting that both Beijing and Moscow now trade actively with South Korea and that a Soviet trade mission opened in Seoul last month, a senior Soviet official commented last month: “Kim’s game is over. Neither we nor the Chinese are playing any longer.”

Moscow was forever promoting an “Asian collective security system,” which Beijing saw as a thinly disguised effort to encircle it with hostile neighbors but which gathered little support.

Chinese policy was little different. Beijing actively wooed allies around the Soviet Union and its traditional sphere of influence--in the Balkans, among dissident emigre groups from the Soviet Baltic republics and the Ukraine, among the Communist parties of Western Europe and even around the periphery of the Middle East.

Into the late 1970s, a steady stream of self-proclaimed Maoists, many of them members of small splinter parties, liberation movements and the “New Left” in the United States and Western Europe, went to Beijing for discussions that were marked as much by denunciations of Soviet policy as for their promotion of world revolution.

Western Europe’s Communist parties, which wanted for electoral as well as for ideological reasons to assert their independence from Moscow, found space between the two rivals and were able to proclaim “unity in diversity,” as the Italian Communist Party put it.

If the Chinese Communist Party’s break from Soviet orthodoxy sapped the energy of the international Communist movement and led leftists generally into seemingly endless disputes, it also established the right--now acknowledged by Moscow--of each party to choose its own path to communism.

Deng Begins Retreat

Under Deng Xiaoping, China’s senior leader for a decade now, Beijing began to retreat from this ideological confrontation with the Soviet Union, declaring in 1979 its readiness to establish friendly relations with “all Marxist-Leninist parties and all revolutionary political parties fighting for national liberation.”

That brought the step-by-step re-establishment of party-to-party relations with all of the Soviet Union’s socialist allies in Eastern Europe, with Cuba and with most of the other parties that had condemned Chinese “extremism” under Mao. Even the small U.S. Communist Party, regarded here as almost Stalinist, has restored party-to-party relations with China.

The Sino-Soviet rapprochement will mean changes for Japan, the United States and other Western powers that found considerable diplomatic leverage in the prolonged rivalry.

The United States, which had difficulty in accepting that Moscow’s declared desire for “peaceful coexistence” with it was a major difference between Mao and Khrushchev at the start of the Sino-Soviet conflict, used the triangular relationship among itself, China and the Soviet Union to advantage for more than a decade.

Playing on Soviet fears of China after the outset of the Cultural Revolution in 1966, Washington promoted its relations first with Moscow in the late 1960s, then with Beijing in the early 1970s, then with Moscow and again with Beijing, all the time keeping itself at the apex of that triangle and largely determining the relationship with the other members.

“We had a very geometric approach to foreign policy through the 1970s largely because of the Sino-Soviet conflict,” a senior U.S. diplomat commented recently, asking not to be quoted by name. “There are always dozens of factors--domestic political concerns, continuing national interests, relations with allies--in every major decision, but the Sino-Soviet angle was new and almost always present. We had very little interest in the dispute itself, but we found that it increased the leverage we could exert on the two principals.”

Japan, however, for a time found itself trapped in the hostility between China and the Soviet Union.

When Tokyo signed a peace treaty with China, formally establishing relations and settling the issues left from World War II, the Soviet Union strongly objected to clauses denouncing “hegemony,” a term Beijing used in denouncing Moscow. And when Japanese businessmen were negotiating contracts to develop Siberia and the Soviet Far East, China virtually vetoed the deals, warning there would be no trade with it if Japanese companies assisted its rival.

“We were in a situation where ‘a friend of my enemy is my enemy,’ ” recalled a senior Japanese diplomat who was involved in trying to find a comfortable place for Tokyo in those days. “In the end, we reassessed and decided that China had to be our priority. . . . It was more complicated than that, of course, but the Soviet Union’s own actions made our decision almost inevitable.”

SPHERES OF INFLUENCE

VIETNAM

Hanoi, a firm Soviet ally, invaded Cambodia in late 1978 and ousted the Khmer Rouge regime. Cambodia’s Vietnamese-backed government--headed by Hun Sen--has fought a 10-year guerrilla war with the Chinese-supported Khmer Rouge and two non-communist resistance groups.

ZIMBABWE REBELS

Led by Joshua Nkomo, the Soviet-supported Zimbabwe African People’s Union failed to win control in the newly independent country’s first election. Nkomo eventually joined the new government.

CAMBODIA

China’s backing of the genocidal Pol Pot regime, now a guerrilla force, is seen by some as being as severe a setback for the Beijing government as Moscow’s invasion of Afghanistan proved to be for the Soviet Union.

ZIMBABWE

Led by Robert Mugabe, the Zimbabwe African National Union won the first completely open elections in 1980. China had backed the winner through its years as a guerrilla force fighting what was then the white-minority government of Rhodesia.

NORTH KOREA

For three decades, President Kim Il Sung has played Beijing and Moscow against one another to secure assistance from both without giving either leverage over his government.

ANGOLA

The Soviet Union backed the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola, which took power after the Portuguese withdrawal in late 1975. It still supports the government of Jose Eduardo dos Santos.

AFGHANISTAN

Moscow, which backs President Najibullah, pulled the last of its 115,000 troops from Afghanistan in February after a 9-year intervention.

ANGOLAN REBELS

Before Jonas Savimbi’s break with China, Beijing supplied and trained guerrillas for Savimbi’s National Union for the Total Independence of Angola.

IRAN

When the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in 1979, the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini strengthen Iran’s relationship with China, which supplied it with arms, including Silkworm missiles that it used in its war with Iraq.