Nuclear fantasies haunted Sino-Soviet clash

• Source: Global Times
• [23:04 May 19 2010]
• Comments

GT: Xu Yan, a major general and a professor of military history, has said that there were no signs that China and the Soviets were ever planning to attack each other. Instead, he argues, they were each preparing for an attack by the other. He also argued that the US used the issue to push its relationship with China forward. What do you think of his opinions?

Li: Mao's estimate that the Soviets might launch large-scale attacks on China was wrong, and resulted in vast amounts of resources being wasted on defensive preparations.

When Leonid Brezhnev became the Soviet Union's leader in 1964 and then invaded Czechoslovakia in 1968, the danger of an attack on China seemed more real. The border conflicts in 1969 also made China worried.

On the Soviet side, after the first border negotiations broke up, the Soviets deployed more forces along the Sino- Soviet border. But they couldn't make a clear judgment as to whether there would be an attack.

So the two sides both prepared for an ultimately imaginary war. It's certainly possible that the US might have helped poison Sino-Soviet relations by leaking information on Soviet plans to China, since they always saw the Soviet Union as the bigger enemy and wanted to ally with China against them.

GT: The Russian newspaper Pravda has claimed that such an article published in an official magazine might indicate that some political forces in China are trying to improve Sino-US relations. Is this correct?

Li: The foreign media have overreacted to this article, since this is not a new story and the facts have been known for some time. The History Reference magazine is part of the People's Daily group, but I don't think this represents any government opinions on either Sino-US relations or Sino-Russian relations. Times have changed, and China has regular diplomatic contact with the US and Russia. There's no need to use obscure channels to signal changes.

The magazine is very market-orientated and sensationalistic nowadays. You can see that it used bold headlines to describe Vladimir Lenin in the same issue as this article, such as "Lenin was crueler than the Tsar."