New Communist Split CHINA ACCUSED OF BREAKING FAITH

Press, Volume C, Issue 29556, 4 July 1961, Page 14

New Communist Split CHINA ACCUSED OF BREAKING FAITH

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London. June 23.—While the world’s attention is turning to the crisis brewing in Berlin and while East and West have been pondering the consequences of the Vienna Summit, a new and momentous quarrel has broken out between Russia find China, and Nikita Khrushchev is directing a hurricane fire of accusations against Mao Tse-tung He charges the leader of Chinese Communism with "disloyalty.” "subversive agitation,” and nothing less than “incitement to world war.” He also threatens Mao that he will at last bring into the open their protracted and hitherto secret or semi-secret dispute.

The charges and the threat are contained in an indictment of Mao's policy which has just been sent out from Khrushchev's offices in Moscow to the headquarters of several foreign Communist Parties. This still secret document claims that Mao and his comrades have "violated the Agreement of the Eighty-one Communist Parties,” concluded in Moscow only last November. That agreement, it should be recalled, had been worked out after intense bargaining behind closed doors and was supposed to make 1 ideological peace between Moscow and Peking. The Declaration of the Conference of the Eightyone Parties embodied a compromise between conflicting viewpoints. At Khrushchev's insistence, it spoke in favour of “peaceful co-existence" and against the "export of revolution" by any Communist government. But. in accordance with Chinese wishes, the Declaration also committed the Soviet bloc to fight resolutely against "the export of counter-revolution by western imperialism.” Pledges Exchanged

In return, the Chinese promised not to obstruct Khrushchev’s diplom a ti c efforts and to stop charging him with “weakness” and with “appeasing" the United States; while Khrushchev pledged himself not to “sell out" any Communist interest to the West.

It was in part under Chinese pressure that Khrushchev then adopted his tougher policy, renewing demands over Berlin, foreshadowing a separate peace treaty between Russia and East Germany, and refusing an East-West agreement over the nuclear test ban. The Moscow Declaration was hailed as an epoch-mak-ing event; and it was to be binding on all Communist Parties. The Chinese, it then seemed, had definitely accepted Soviet leadership, which meant that they would not seek to spread their own influence to other Communist Parties. They obliged themselves to submit anyi new difference they might have with the Russians to a sort of comradely court. The conference of the Eighty-one Parties set up a special body to deal with such disputes. Russian Charges

Moscow now claims that the Chinese have violated almost every point of this agreement. These are the charges:— 1. "The Chinese comrades have conducted a surreptitious agitation against the principles of the Moscow Declaration," in the first instance against “peaceful coexistence."

2. They "have not used the machinery for conciliation which the Moscow Conference has set up.” 3. They have continued to •’discredit the leadership of the Soviet Communist Party and have sought to extend their influence to other Communist Parties.” They have sent emissaries abroad who are building up "Chinese factions" in foreign Communist Parties. thereby "grossly violating the Leninist principles of party organisation."

4 They have set up special centres in Europe. Asia, and Africa from which they have been conducting their "subversive intrigue” against Moscow.

Surveying the course of Russo-Chinese disputes over the years, Moscow now makes several sensational disclosures, which throw new light on some important yet obscure events of post-war history. Khrushchev blames Mao for “being obsessed with. Formosa” and bent on “liberating Formosa" even at the risk of world war. These are the actual terms of the charge:— Brest-Lltovsk Comparison

“The Chinese Communist Party did not know liow to treat problems in the order of their real importance; and it placed Formosa at the centre of all its preoccupations, without bothering about the development of the international situation. In this respect the behaviour of the Chinese Communists has been quite different from that of the Communists of the U.S.S.R. after the Peace of Brest-Litovsk. which deprived the U.SS.R. of part of its territories."

Under the Brest-Litovsk Peace, which Lenin's government signed with Germany in 1918, Russia lost her former Baltic possessions for the whole period between the two world want By invoking this example, Khrushchev tells Mao that he should have sought reconciliation with the United States and agreed to Formosa's formal detachment from Red China, instead of making the “liberation of Formosa” the condition for any agreement with the United States “When our interests . . ~" Moscow goes on to say. “more than ever demanded from us a determined policy of coexistence with the countries hostile to socialisi'. the leadership of the Chinese Communist Parties de-

nounced every hour initiative in this direction as treason, as appeasing the invaders of Formosa, or as a sacrifice of the interests of the people of China to those of the U.S.S.R.” ” Preventive War”

Moscow’s most startling accusation and disclosure is that Mao has ever since 1949 preached "preventive war” against the West. The document from which I am quoting refers ironically to a secret speech made by Mao as early as July, 1949. in which "he used beautiful but outdated and irrelevant Chinese legends and proverbs to advocate preventive war.” What this implies is that the Communists fought the Korean War. which followed next year, on Mao’s rather than on Stalin’s initiative. The root of the trouble, the document says, lies in the "one-sided military character of the Chinese Party.” Because of peculiar conditions the Chinese Party “has grown up as an army and not as a civilian organisation like any other Communist Party” A military organisation the Chinese Party essentially still is. Mao a Bonaparte? In the Communist idiom, this amounts to a charge that Mao exercises a kind of Bonapartist military dictatorship. Here the indictment comes to its most dramatic point: "One can understand that in 1949-50 the leaders of •the Chinese Communist Party had to make allowance for the state of mind of their soldier-comrades still permeated by the experience of those terrible years (years of armed struggle against the Japanese and against the Kuomintang) and maintained such an attitude.” But what is shocking is that "twelve years later” (that is in 1961!) "the position of the Chinese leaders has remained the same, while international developments have changed the basic elements of the situation.”

Moscow thus states that even today Mao stands for preventive war. This is the first time that Moscow has advanced this accusation so explicitly. I cannot say whether this charge is a polemical exaggeration or whether it is based bn facts. Moscow refers to these Chinese arguments in favour of preventive war:

(a) “An armed conflict between capitalism and communism is ultimately inevitable”;

(b) Consequently, “the Soviet Union should use its present overwhelming superiority in missiles, rockets, and nuclear weapons" and dictate its terms to the United States, even if this means war. The Chinese want Khrushchev not only to "go to the brink” but. if need be, to go beyond it. Russian Superiority What is probably implied in their argument is that if Russia does not use her "military superiority" now, or very soon, she may lose it, because the United States may catch up with her in rocketry and space flight The Russians appear to take a more cautious and. at the same time, a more selfconfident view. They counter-argue that (a) “World war between communism and capitalism is not inevitable—it can and should be avoided”; <b> Soviet superiority in rocketry and space flight may not be as decisive a guarantee of victory as the Chinese assume: and (c) The United States is not tn a position to catch up with the U.S.S.R. in rocketry and space flight; and so the U.S.S.R. has nothing to lose but much to gain by playing for time instead of heading for war. Khrushchev is determined to use Russia’s military advantages as bargaining counters in negotiation and even to go. “to the brink.” But he will not go beyond it, unless (as he put it on another occasion) "Western Imperialism takes upon itself the odium of aggression.” unless. for instance, NA.T.O. armies or airfleets cross the frontier of Eastern Germany.—(World Copyright reserved by Isaac Deutscher ) (To be Concluded.)