The Sino-Soviet Alliance: An International History by Austin Jersild

Austin Jersild's monograph approaches the Sino-Soviet alliance from below. How did it work on the ground? How did Soviet and East-Central European diplomats, advisers and specialists perceive the People's Republic of China (PRC)? How did Chinese cadres experience the contacts with these foreigners? Drawing on archival sources from the PRC, the former Soviet Union, the defunct German Democratic Republic (GDR), the late Czechoslovakia, and the United States, Jersild pieces together a rich texture of daily interactions, from friendships to illicit love affairs, conflicts, and misunderstandings. The book is an important corrective to general misconceptions about China's relations with the Communist world, particularly with the Soviet Union, in the 1950s and 1960s. Previous scholars, who were influenced by politics or hampered by incomplete archival access, tended to disregard these multilayered relations or portray them in the mutually exclusive shades of black and white. Avoiding many of the inherent methodological and evidentiary traps, Jersild often goes against the grain of received wisdom.The book is particularly rich in insights and findings that reveal structural and unintended sources of conflict. Jersild clearly shows that conflict on all levels existed long before the Sino-Soviet rift began to emerge in the mid-1950s. He convincingly argues that the Soviet Communist Party, government, bureaucracy, and managerial personnel treated the PRC the way they did the Communist states in East Central Europe—basically, as an extension of the existing command system of the Stalinist national economy. As Jersild shows, Chinese revolutionaries were not willing to be pliable recipients of orders, like factory managers in Siberia, Central Asia, or some other part of the USSR. Given their historical experience of a long anti-colonial struggle and a civil war, the Chinese Communists, unsurprisingly, considered this kind of treatment overbearing and a new form of imperialism (p. 210). Conversely, the leaders and bureaucrats in the PRC lacked sensitivity toward the needs and capabilities of the USSR and its allies in East-Central Europe. Beijing's ever-changing wishes and requests for economic and technological support more often than not created economic and planning difficulties for many bureaucrats in the Soviet bloc (p. 72).Frequently, the relationship between the provider of economic and technological aid and the recipient within the Communist world was calculating and self-serving on both sides. The commitment to proletarian internationalism and socialist brotherhood customarily, though not always, remained a rhetorical device. Aware of the USSR's relative technological backwardness, the Soviet leader Joseph Stalin had been interested in both East-Central Europe after 1945 and the PRC after 1949 as potential conduits of Western technology. Both ends of the Soviet empire had been linked to the so-called capitalist world economy longer than the Soviet Union itself had (pp. 61--62, 77). Soviet leaders wanted to develop and deploy their own technology, but East European and Chinese party cadres at the same time understood, despite official propaganda to the contrary, that Soviet technology was not the most advanced available in the world. Moreover, even though the Soviet Union and the East Europeans were able to offer a lot in terms of economic and technological aid (albeit not at the most advanced level), the PRC had little to offer in return (p. 75). Often, the Chinese Communists did not even voluntarily provide advanced technology they had inherited from their Nationalist predecessors in 1949 or had received from Western suppliers afterward (p. 76).The book, despite its richness of sources and insights, poses several riddles for the attentive reader. Its title is somewhat of a misnomer insofar as the Sino-Soviet alliance is not the main focus. As alluded to in the subtitle, it deals with China's relationship to the Communist world as a whole. Unfortunately, the reader will not get a sense of the overall development of the story from 1949 to the mid-1960s. Although the book is divided into two large parts, each of which supposedly follows one of Mao Zedong's two visits to Moscow (one in 1949--1950 and the other in 1957), it hardly explores these trips at all. Moreover, almost all the chapters in both parts extensively cover similar events before and after 1957, which makes the division meaningless. In addition, the focus of the chapters is not always clear. For example, chapter 6 (titled “China's Outreach to the World”) starts with PRC policy toward the decolonizing world, but then switches to the Soviet withdrawal of advisers in 1960 and ends with Nikita Khrushchev's ouster four years later.Although Jersild tenaciously tracked down evidence in five different countries, the nature of the sources used also has a major impact on the overall interpretation. In the absence of access to high-level sources in Beijing and Moscow, Jersild relies on documents from the mid- and low-level, as well as evidence from archives in Berlin and Prague. This provides a unique view from below, but it cannot supply any information about high-level thinking and decision-making. At the same time, Jersild too quickly dismisses Chinese memoirs as unreliable. By eschewing such sources, he at times advances questionable interpretations. Based on embassy and press reporting, Jersild argues that the PRC did not support the Polish October in 1956 (pp. 118--119). From the more recent literature on Chinese foreign relations, it is clear that Mao Zedong was the ultimate arbiter in foreign relations; he imposed his will on his reluctant fellow leaders in 1950 during the Korean War. Hence, routine reports from the ground cannot replace the analysis of decision-making at the top. Jersild's aversion to drawing on memoirs of those who worked closely with Mao is therefore problematic. In this case, Wu Lengxi's account (despite its inaccuracies and probably intended misrepresentations) is based both on materials still inaccessible to most historians and on his personal participation in the relevant meetings of the highest leaders in Beijing, some of which occurred in Mao's bedroom.The nature of the sources also poses some methodological questions. On the one hand, the sheer quantity of documentation is a rich hunting ground for every historian; on the other hand, this situation forces scholars to choose from an overly rich buffet in order to make their points succinctly. Occasionally, Jersild leaves the impression that he chose his sources mainly to serve the overall argument. For example, he portrays Mao as a supporter of de-Stalinization from the very beginning, although the sources he cites date from March 1957, a year after Khrushchev made his Secret Speech denouncing Stalin (p. 112). There is abundant Chinese evidence about Mao's criticism of de-Stalinization during the previous year; moreover, in the spring of 1957, he tried to encourage criticism at home to avoid the sorts of upheavals that occurred in Poland and Hungary in the fall of 1956. Thus Mao's support for de-Stalinization in early 1957 is understandable within a distinct historical context, but cannot be projected backward onto the past.Jersild argues that East-Central Europeans were highly critical of Mao's Great Leap Forward (pp. 139 ff). Although this is correct in some cases, leaders in both Bulgaria and East Germany took inspiration from the initial economic surge in China. The Bulgarian regime launched its own Great Leap Forward in late 1958 (which collapsed much earlier than the Chinese original), and the East Germans touted Chinese commune formation as a model for the GDR's own rural policies (and even sent Otto Grotewohl on an “inspection” tour to Beijing in early 1959) until Moscow ordered East German leaders to adopt the USSR's own positions in mid-1959.Jersild's division of the story into Russian imperialism, Chinese ambition and East Central European pragmatism (see subtitle of conclusion, p. 208) also is a little bit too essentialist. Certainly, Soviet behavior was overbearing, but which colonial state in the past has ever dispatched a massive development program to its domain? Of course, there was Maoist ambition, but there were a sufficient number of Chinese leaders and highly placed cadres who did not share Mao's plans to compete with the Soviet Union for leadership in the socialist camp. East-Central European pragmatism might have come from advisers sent to China, but leaders in East Berlin and Prague were often ill-informed and occasionally blinded by their own ideology.The Sino-Soviet Alliance is a great addition to the emerging literature on multilateral relations within the Communist world. For the reader familiar with the outlines of Chinese relations with the Soviet Union, it provides a plethora of information and great insights. Jersild even raises new questions, particularly with regard to Communist economic systems and the nature of interactions among the members states of Stalin's and Khrushchev's domain. Yet, for many a new comer to the dinner table, the book will remain a second (though tasty) course.