Brothers in Arms by Odd Arne Westad

CPSU in October 1961 notwithstanding. In spite of continued polemics directed against "Yugoslavia" (by the Chinese) and "Albania" (by the Soviets), both sides made attempts to rescue parts of the bilateral relationship. In June 1961 the two countries signed a set of agreements on economic, scientific, and technical cooperation. Some Soviet leaders, both in the party and in the military, argued for a lessening of tension with China in order not to lose the strategic potential and the established economic interaction in the Chinese alliance. Inside the CCP, Mao had ''retreated to the Second Line" and left to Liu Shaoqi, Deng Xiaoping, CCP Politburo member Chen Yun, and other leaders the thorny task of rescuing China from the famine created by the chairman's social and economic experiments. 91
The food shortages in the spring of 1961 made the Chinese leaders launch an

     

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all-out appeal to the socialist countries for help. In March Zhou Enlai described the desperate situation in the Chinese countryside in stark detail in a talk with the East European and Soviet ambassadors. The Soviets, who had predicted. large-scale starvation in the central and western provinces for almost a year, were ready and willing to provide emergency grain and other foodstuffs. Khrushchev had written to Mao on February 27 promising massive aid, and large amounts of supplies crossed the border from March to June 1961. Liu praised Moscow's effort, calling the Soviet aid "a manifestation of real support for China." In late March Foreign Minister Chen foresaw a new period of close Sino-Soviet cooperation.
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The continuing military cooperation beyond 1960 is of specific interest to scholars, since most accounts written before the opening of the Russian archives assumed that the military relationship in effect ended before the withdrawal of Soviet experts. 93 Although we still do not know the full extent of Sino-Soviet military cooperation from 1960 to late 1962, it is obvious that in some areas it was alive and well as late as January 1963. Moscow agreed to continue aiding the construction of a Chinese air force, including sending groups of Soviet instructors, and assisting in the production of the advanced MiG-21 jet fighters in China. 94 The Soviets continued to provide the Chinese with intelligence on U.S. military exercises and defense planning. 95 The two sides cooperated in setting up military communication systems in northeastern China. 96 Finally, there is evidence that the Soviets provided the Chinese with advanced military technology, including air-to-ground missiles, as late as December 1962. 97
It was Mao's resurgence in Chinese politics in mid-1962 and the ensuing confrontation over foreign affairs that in the end laid the Sino-Soviet alliance to rest. At the CCP leaders' annual summer conference at Beidahe, Mao again went on the offensive, claiming that his associates had "capitulated to the bourgeoisie" with their "adjustments" over the past year and a half. He explicitly tied his criticism to Sino-Soviet relations by condemning Wang Jiaxiang, the former ambassador to Moscow who in the spring of 1962 had called for a reduction of tension with the Soviet Union (and the United States) "to try to win a long-term peaceful environment for the socialist construction of our country.'' 98
Mao disagreed with Wang's fear of enemy attacks on an enfeebled China. The chairman saw the imperialist powers as increasingly at odds with each other and the Soviet Union as wishing to join the fray. China could therefore safely concentrate on intensifying the revolution at home and the criticism of revisionism abroad. To the chairman, events in the fall of 1962 confirmed his optimistic worldview. For Mao, the outcome of the crises in the Caribbean and the Himalayas showed China' s growing strength and the increasing weakness of the imperialist powers and the Soviet Union. At the end of 1962 he instructed the

     

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party that "the