Brothers in Arms Read Online Free PDF

breakdown that much more difficult to explain. All contributors to this volume agree that in spite of the alliance having its ups and downs from early 1957 onward, the process of breakdown was not irredeemable until around 1960. The different perceptions of the alliance's domestic and international significance played a fundamental part in this collapse, as did the whole specter of cultural differences between Russians and Chinese that complicated day-to-day cooperation.
The perceptions of the world held by the Soviet and Chinese leaders were rooted in their ideologies. In spite of their common roots and the inspiration that Soviet Marxism-Leninism (or Stalinism) had provided for the ideology of the leading members of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), it is essential for our understanding of the growth and collapse of the alliance to be able to distinguish between the two. Where the system of beliefs of Stalin and his successors underlined state construction, social order, and Marxist laws of development, Mao's thinking always returned to issues of individual will, human capabilities, and mass action. Where the Soviets wanted a state that first of all provided equality and social justice, Mao sought to create social instruments in which the creative abilities of man were released, often prompted by anger at tradition or foreign oppression. 6
The tricky concept of culture in international relations does have the advantage that it slips past ideology to form general patterns of behavior, texts, myths, and symbols with an intrinsic value to a social or ethnic group. 7 The problem is, of course, to come to grips with how cultures play themselves out in specific international settings. There is no doubt that Soviets/Russians and Chinese, despite their long common border, have little in common in terms of cultural legacies. On the contrary, over the past three to four centuries negative stereotypes of the other have dominated the relationship, and negative opinions of the other's way of life from food, to personal hygiene, to ways of conversation continued to create trouble during the 1950s. But the October Revolution the Soviet "invention" of the kind of modernity that the Chinese Communists wanted for them-

     

page_4
Page 4
selves made it possible to transcend the negative images and stake out common ground. Sulian lao dage, Soviet elder brother, was not an ironic form of address in China in the mid-1950s; it symbolized the role of the northern neighbor within a Chinese cultural scheme in which the elder brother should be treated with reverence as long as he fulfills his obligations to the family.
    8
A better understanding of ideology and culture is not sufficient to explain the breakdown in Sino-Soviet relations. In order to understand what happened, we also need to look more closely at the directions of Soviet and Chinese domestic politics and even more important at how their leaders viewed the interaction between the two countries on a whole range of specific issues. The main issues in economy (loans, technology transfers, border areas), military affairs (bases, weapons, intelligence), and foreign policy (Taiwan, Korea, Indochina, India, the U.S. threat) define the progress, stagnation, and breakdown of the alliance, particularly if we can show how these issues influenced the overall perceptions of the main leaders. In analyzing policies, however, we need to watch out for the sometimes spurious connection between different issues: Some policies are strongly interconnected, while others are deliberately or accidentally kept separate. This imbalanced relationship between issues, which political scientists often refer to as issue escalation, is no less true for the Sino-Soviet alliance than for other alliance formations. 9
The chapters in this volume have no common background in terms of schools of interpretation. The authors are all somewhere near the center of the scale between hard-core realism and discourse-bound,