This Week in China's History: Khrushchev's Secret Trip to Beijing

July 31, 1958

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When the People's Republic of China was founded, the new state had few allies. By the end of 1949, only ten countries had recognized the PRC. All of them had communist governments, and the first to do so, even before Mao made his declaration, was the Soviet Union.

But in midsummer 1958 — less than a decade after the new Chinese state was founded — Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev was flying with an entourage from Moscow to Beijing. The trip was a last-minute attempt to rescue Sino-Soviet relations, which were in the process of toppling over a cliff.

Many at the time took Sino-Soviet friendship to be an axiom of post-war international relations. To many outside observers, especially the United States and its allies, communism was an undifferentiated bloc, moving in lockstep and speaking with one voice. But the so-called “communist bloc” was fractured, and in the summer of 1958, the fissure was widening beyond repair.

Not long before, the public face of the relationships might best be described as ecstatic. In his new book China and Russia, Philip Snow describes Mao's 1950 visit to the Kremlin — his first and one of only two times Mao ever traveled outside China — when a hymn was debuted in his honor: “A Russian and a Chinese Are Brothers Forever!” 

The 1950s were indeed the peak of Soviet-Chinese cooperation on many fronts. Thousands of Soviet advisers lived and worked in the new People’s Republic, and even more Chinese students studied at Soviet universities. Hospitals, factories, language institutes, laboratories, and a host of other joint projects were the manifestations of a relationship that was remaking the world.

And yet, though there was a lot of real collaboration, there was also window-dressing that obscured underlying tensions. Mao had, from that first visit to Moscow (if not before), felt slighted by Stalin. Mao was no one’s junior partner, and he bristled at suggestions that China was a tool — or even an extension — of the USSR, a view American diplomats expressed regularly. Chinese often perceived Soviet advisors and investment to smack of colonialism, a sense exacerbated by the way Soviets tended to withhold technical and strategic information from their allies.

But the tension stayed largely beneath the surface as long as Stalin lived.

Stalin’s successor, Nikita Khrushchev had a different approach. In his famous “secret speech” of February 1956, Khruschev laid into Stalin’s abuses and mistakes, to the shock of the Soviet Congress and invited observers, including Zhu De. Khrushchev denounced Stalin not only for specific crimes, but also for a “personality cult” that enabled dictatorship. 

For Mao, Khrushchev’s speech was a weapon he both coveted and feared. As Snow writes, “The Chairman jumped at the chance to vent all the pent-up grievances he had nursed against Stalin for the past thirty years,” ranging from personal slights to bad advice to misguided decisions and strategy. But while Mao happily aired his grievances, he also had worries about the critique of Stalin. As Snow writes, “In the Chinese context, Mao was Stalin. He, too, was all-powerful: he, too, was the object of a luxuriant personality cult. And if Khrushchev and his allies could turn  on Stalin with impunity, what might not Mao’s successors do to him?”

Moreover, Mao now gained seniority among global communist leaders. He was certainly able to attack or criticize Khrushchev in ways that he would not do to Stalin.

All of these factors came to a boil in 1958, despite outward appearances that suggested all was well. In July, Soviet leaders directed their ambassador to China — Pavel Yudin, then on leave in Moscow — to engage Mao on a number of issues surrounding China’s foreign policy. These included discouraging a Chinese move against Taiwan, possible exchanges of submarine bases between China and the USSR, and considerations for developing a joint Soviet-Chinese fleet. The message was partially in response to a message from Chinese premier Zhou Enlai, who had cabled Moscow earlier that spring seeking Soviet assistance for China’s nascent nuclear submarine program.

Yudin’s meeting with Mao — along with Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai, Zhu De, Chen Yun, Deng Xiaoping, Peng Dehuai, and Chen Yi — is described by historians Alexander Pantsov and Nikita Pivovarov (and translated by Steven I. Levine and Gary Goldberg) in the China Working Papers series of the Wilson Center’s Cold War International History Project. After a cordial opening, the mood darkened when Yudin mentioned a “joint fleet.” 

“You are no different than Stalin.” Mao ranted. “You think that Chinese are savages covered with hair who are unable to accomplish modernization themselves and can only listen to you.” Mao continued, “We must resolve the principal question: are we in charge and you are helping us, or perhaps it is only a joint venture, and if we do not agree to joint management, then you will not help us, that is, you will shamelessly force us to accept it?”  Mao concluded by suggesting that Khrushchev come to China to personally discuss their differences.

Ten days later, Khrushchev flew to Beijing.

What followed was several days of high-level meetings that were equal parts bullying and hazing. According to Pantsov and Pivorarov, this began at the airport as soon as Khrushchev arrived, where “judging by the reminiscences of eyewitnesses, Mao began to humiliate Khrushchev right away.” (Ironically, Mao initially taunted Khrushchev over the contrast between the USSR’s grain shortages and China’s record crop yields — yields that were bogusly inflated as China careened into the famine of the Great Leap Forward). 

The matter ostensibly at the heart of this dispute — Moscow’s proposed joint fleet — was resolved quickly: Khrushchev asserted that the ambassador had misunderstood or at least misstated the Soviet position, which “never had and does not have in mind creating a joint fleet.” This did little to assuage Mao, though. The second meeting found Mao “chain-smoking and blowing smoke in Khrushchev’s face. He continually lost his self-control, jabbing his finger in front of his interlocutor’s nose and shouting.”

Mao abused the visiting Soviets with the meeting’s itinerary, shifting scheduled afternoon meetings to morning at the last minute — leaning into the Russians’ jet lag and canceling meals. The strangest scene of all was on the second day when Mao moved the scheduled formal meeting to his personal swimming pool, where Mao (by all accounts an excellent swimmer) mocked Khrushchev's lack of ability in the water (the scene compounded by the fact that Khrushchev had, understandably, not brought swimming trunks to the meeting and was swimming in “satin undershorts.”)

Despite the tensions, the joint communiqué issued as the meetings ended was predictably celebratory: “In an atmosphere of exceptional cordiality and warmth, the sides thoroughly discussed and established complete unity of views on current and important problems of the present international situation, questions of further strengthening friendship, alliance, and mutual assistance….” Yet, the message was clear. Khruschev spent the flight home venting about his mistreatment by the Chinese, and although he maintained the Soviet-Chinese relationship with lip service, the relationship was in clear decline: PRC-USSR trade began to slip; the number of Soviet advisers to China fell sharply.

Within a year, the “Sino-Soviet split” would be in full view when the USSR cut off assistance for the Chinese nuclear weapons program. Certainly, many factors went into the fragmenting of the so-called Communist bloc, but one wonders if the camel’s back was broken, not in the conference rooms of the Kremlin or Zhongnanhai, but in Mao’s swimming pool.