"The Logic of Survival is the Logic of Slaves": China Squares Off Ideologically Against the Soviet Union and Literally Against India Over Himalayan Border Claims in 1962
It's October 1962.
Two large countries are fighting over a very small part of the world.
The Cuban Missile Crisis comes immediately to mind but there was a simultaneous clash over 8,000 miles away at an elevation of nearly 10,000 feet, on the border between India and China.
Are these conflicts unrelated? They are not.
The argument can be made that the Soviet Union was in Cuba in 1962, in part, as a deterrent to growing Chinese influence there, while China's pressing of its interests on the Indian border was a test of Mao Zedong's thesis that the USSR was weak and "revisionist" in propagating socialism—a test that Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev failed with regard both to India and to Cuba.
For 20th century world history relating to the Cold War, Readex has three essential collections: BBC Monitoring: Summary of World Broadcasts, Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) Daily Reports, 1941-1996, and Joint Publications Research Service (JPRS) Reports, 1957-1995. The latter two collections are drawn from U.S. government monitoring of global media. The resulting content was translated into English and supplied to key agencies, committees, and the executive branch.
We'll supplement our use of these three collections with the U.S. Congressional Serial Set, 1817-1994, which is the official record of everything the U.S. Congress did or considered from 1817-1994. It includes reports from numerous executive departments and agencies. Additionally, the Serial Set has a suite of maps, available separately.
We'll use the four collections noted above with Readex Text Explorer which created the word-cloud above. Readex Text Explorer, integrated with nearly all Readex collections, provides Voyant Tools and robust, customizable workflows for scholars seeking hidden themes through text and data analysis. In a few clicks it distilled the essence of over four hundred pages of Congressional examinations and testimony into a thought-provoking graphic.
A Great Schism of World History
The Cold War was not just one thing; as in most wars it had a number of fronts. It was as much about influence and ideology as it was about territory and armaments. Those armaments weren't necessarily nuclear weapons.
And the influence and ideology didn't break down on clean lines. Witness the notion of "communism." It's too easy to accept communism as monolithic. In the 1960s there was a pronounced schism between the Soviet Union and China over the trajectory of international communism.
The U.S. Congress took notice of this and issued a report on it in 1965, published in the U.S. Congressional Serial Set. The authors of this report found the situation sufficiently compelling to devote over 400 pages to it and hold public hearings. Here are the opening paragraphs of page 1:
In the appendix, the report lists eleven points of disagreement between the USSR and China. As a beginning we're going to focus on the second one, "peaceful coexistence."
In the excerpt below, the left column presents the viewpoint of the Soviet Union while the right column describes China's stance:
For all his haranguing of the West at the United Nations in October 1960, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev had proposed the notion of "peaceful coexistence" with the West as early as 1956. In his estimation, the foregoing nuclear Armageddon did not preclude victory through class struggle.
In the selection below, Mr. Dallin is Dr. Alexander Dallin, Professor at Columbia University's Russian Institute, offering his testimony before Congress:
So, "there has been a tendency in the Soviet Union internally to associate improvement in the standards of living, and general relaxation of conditions with an improvement in relations with the United States and the West more generally."
The implication to the Chinese was that the Soviet leadership preferred bourgeois comfort to ideological purity. By contrast, China's Mao Zedong took a harder line and viewed Khrushchev's concessions as a cop-out on an orthodox Marxist devotion to revolutionary change:
Since we're talking about Cuba (and in a moment, India) in 1962, one can see where this is going: China supports "wars of liberation," is against "a complete surrender" to imperialism, associates Russians with privileged Europeans rather than the oppressed masses and is "less concerned" about the use of nuclear weapons.
Mao's attitude aligned with those of many small, developing nations including Cuba, where Fidel Castro and Che Guevara also sought confrontation rather than accommodation with the West, especially the United States.
Remember, the colossal failure of America's Bay of Pigs operation had only just happened in April 1961. Revolutionary struggle was having a moment, and in 1962 its champion in Cuba was China, not the USSR:
The above excerpts support the interpretation that Cuba and Latin America generally were more aligned with China than they were with the USSR despite the latter's larger presence on the world stage.
When Khrushchev withdrew Soviet missiles from Cuba, regardless of whether that gesture was matched by America's lower profile withdrawal of missiles from Turkey, Mao seized upon the concession as proof that the USSR was not serious about its commitment to communism.
The excerpt below is taken from Readex's BBC Monitoring: Summary of World Broadcasts, where a translation of a January 1963 editorial in the Chinese newspaper Hung Chi (Red Flag) makes very clear the contempt that the Chinese Communist Party held towards the Soviet "modern revisionists":
In the eyes of the modern revisionists, any revolution and any action that supports revolution runs counter to "the logic of survival," now that atomic and nuclear weapons and similar military techniques exist. In fact, what they call the "logic of survival" is the logic of slaves, a logic that would paralyse the revolutionary will of the people of all countries, bind them up hand and foot and make them the submissive slaves of imperialism and the reactionaries of various countries. The Marxist-Leninists are firmly against this slave logic and maintain that the people should emancipate themselves and build a happy, new life as their own masters. This is the law of social development which no one can go against.
The modern revisionists believe that, under present historical conditions, it would be good enough just to muddle along, so what point is there in differentiating classes, differentiating the proletariat from the bourgeoisie, imperialism from the oppressed nations, capitalism from socialism, just wars from unjust wars, and revolution from counter-revolution? To them, all these differentiations have lost their significance for the present "epoch" and are "dogmatist." In short, they have actually thrown to the winds all the teachings of Marxism, all the teachings of Leninism.
So here we have the spectacle of Khrushchev getting pilloried by his fellow communists for coming to terms with American President John F. Kennedy to save the world from nuclear annihilation. One need not imagine how this went over in Moscow for we can go to the texts themselves.
Again, from BBC Monitoring: Summary of World Broadcasts, we can read Khrushchev's statement of his position given in a speech in East Germany on January 16, 1963:
We are told that when we removed the rockets from Cuba it would be said that we yielded. That however can only be thought by people who do not grasp all the complications of the political struggle of our time, a struggle which calls for flexibility and manoeuvre. Yes, it was a concession on our side—based on a concession from the other side. It was a mutual concession. The imperialists were forced to make the concession and had to abstain from invading Cuba. We however had set up our (?rocket bases) so as to protect Cuba against an invasion by the imperialists. Our [indistinct word] have thus played their part.
-----
But if one starts from the point of view of the people who think that we stationed the rockets in Cuba in order to undertake a thermonuclear attack on the USA and thus to unleash a thermonuclear world war, but renounced this objective and took the rockets away from Cuba, then it may seem that we have turned away from our objective. In reality however the (?Soviet Union) never had such aims; it never pursued such aims. We stationed our rockets in Cuba with the only objective of stopping aggression against Cuba by US imperialism. It may be objected that under the influence of the most unrestrained incitement the US imperialists will not keep their promise and again turn their arms against Cuba. But the forces which protected Cuba are in existence and are growing in might every day. It does not matter where the rockets are located, in Cuba or elsewhere. They can be used with equal success against any particular aggression [applause].When we stationed rockets in Cuba, it was not our intention to hasten the outbreak of a war between the socialist countries and imperialism. We were pursuing a different aim, namely to prevent an invasion of Cuba by the imperialists, not to permit the unleashing of a new world war. If one looks at the events from this point of view, then we have won. This is a victory of the forces of peace, a victory of the forces of socialism, the forces building communism [applause].
But Khrushchev was not yet off the ideological hook. On October 20, in the midst of the Cuban Missile Crisis, China invaded nominally Indian territory on two fronts along the countries' long-disputed border.
The USSR found itself torn between solidarity with Communist China versus upholding a strategic alliance it had struck with a newly independent India under Jawaharlal Nehru.
Here nuclear weapons were not the issue—but fighter aircraft were.
Border Disputes, Soviet MIG Jet Fighters, and the Dalai Lama
In 1959, India had provided the Dalai Lama with political asylum when the Chinese People's Liberation Army put down the Lhasa Uprising in Tibet. This had angered the Chinese and recalled to their attention competing border claims in the Jammu-Kashmir region and further east in what is today the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh.
The following excerpt is from the New China News Agency (NCNA):
In light of its own deteriorating relationship with China, the USSR had cultivated good relations with India and in June 1962 was negotiating a deal to provide it with MIG-21 fighter aircraft—a weapon system that it had denied China.
When India went to war with China, suddenly the MIG-21 deal became untenable. In the following article from Joint Publications Research Service (JPRS) Reports, Indonesian leader D.N. Aidit is "overwhelmed" at Khrushchev's "wisdom" in annulling the agreement to supply India with MIG-21s:
"A Maximum of Confusion"
So, what's the leader of India, a (formerly) neutral country to do when one communist neighbor is advancing on his northern borders while another backs out of an arms deal?
Western imperialists to the rescue! The United States stepped into the breech with weapons and the dispatch of the aircraft carrier USS Kitty Hawk to the Bay of Bengal. China was not pleased.
And what of the border conflict itself?
It lasted about a month, with the active phase extending from October 20 to November 21, roughly coinciding with the discovery and withdrawal of Soviet missiles from Cuba.
To a great degree it was self-limiting as winter conditions in those high, remote regions make offensive operations difficult from November at least until March. China was far better prepared than India to prosecute a border war, took the initiative, seized the most territory, and inflicted the greatest casualties.
But then China abruptly declared a ceasefire and retreated to boundaries dating to 1959. What was accomplished?
In the following article from Joint Publications Research Service (JPRS) Reports, a commentator in Israel speculated that China's goal in the conflict had less to do with enforcing its boundaries than it did with curtailing Soviet influence in India. Then the author extends the analogy to the Cuban crisis:
One of the major problems presently faced by the Soviet Union is the attitude to adopt in the Sino-Indian conflict. Mr. Khrushchev, especially after the unilateral armistice proclaimed by Peking, finds himself facing the following dilemma: either disengage himself from his obligations undertaken towards India, which would result in destroying the results of a laborious policy of rapprochement pursued for some years, or maintain, and even intensify, his good relationship with India at the risk of enlarging the gulf between his country and People's China.
-----
It is known that Peking regards the party of Mr. Nehru as a "reactionary nationalist" party. The sense of these declarations is therefore quite clear. The Chinese are asking the Soviets to make their choice. And it is without doubt to reinforce their demand that they have tried to exploit the Cuban affair against Mr. Khrushchev to the greatest extent possible by encouraging Fidel Castro to oppose the Soviet-American compromise, and by speaking almost openly, with regard to the concessions of Khrushchev, of a "new Munich," and "treason to the revolutionary cause:"
A similar perspective comes from a socialist journal in Paris that casts shade on Mao's ideological purity and suggests that China's justification for the war is perhaps itself imperialist:
What is the war purpose of China? Peking furnishes no explanation. Long-winded and confused statements continue to refer to revision of the "Mac Mahon line," whereas in at least four different areas this line is far behind the Chinese battalions provided with heavy materiel and brought to Indian territory over roads specially built in the last few years. Peking also blames India for "warlike provocation," and refers to an alleged offense constituted by Indian's sulking disapproval of the complete annexation and regimentation of Tibet.
In all this verbosity there is not a single trace of revolutionary justification. Mao Tse-tung's communism is acting in the name of a conquering Chinese nationalism. Is this a war for the sake of prestige? Is it a matter for Peking of affirming its power as number one in Asia? Is there a broader motivation of lending forceful arguments to the ideological controversy with the USSR and imposing on Khrushchev a reversal of the new course aimed at international relaxation? Those questions are raised with weapons, that is to say with a maximum of confusion.
The conflict undeniably shifted India's identity from nonviolent resistance to alignment with the West.
Both Nehru and Khrushchev were weakened politically as a result of their actions in India and Cuba.
American prestige increased although Kennedy would not live to see the benefits beyond the following year.
Mao gained credibility in the international arena, and in 1964 China would become the world's fifth nuclear state. It would be another ten years before India achieved that grim milestone.
China and India's border tensions persist, but thankfully, neither was a nuclear power in 1962.
Learn more about text analysis tool Readex Text Explorer, U.S. Congressional Serial Set, 1817-1994, and Readex open-source intelligence collections:
