Mao's Second Visit in Moscow 1957

Mao's Second Visit in Moscow 1957 heralded the Great Leap Forward as well as the coming of the Sino-Soviet split.

In November 1957, Mao travelled to Moscow to participate in the celebrations for the 40th anniversary of the October Revolution and participate in the International Meeting of Communist and Workers Parties (Ch. Gongchandang he gongren dang guoji huiyi 共产党和工人党国际会议). The event was particularly meaningful for the Communist bloc to demonstrate unity after the successful suppression of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956.

The relationship between Mao and Khrushchev was throughly different than that between Mao and Stalin. Stalin had treated Mao with arrogance and "false politeness" and never spoke good of him, despising the Chinese leader as a primitive "caveman Marxist" (Tauber 2003: 336). Krushchev tried everything to make good for what Stalin had nearly ruined, played the benevolent tutor and treated Mao and his delegation with greatest favours. He had reconfirmed Soviet economic, financial and advisory support to China, backed China in the 1954 Taiwan Strait crisis, rendered back Port Arthur and Dalian, and in 1955 even promised to help China develop nuclear technology. But after the 20th Congress of the CPSU and the quelling of the Polish and Hungarian uprisings in 1956, Mao and the Chinese leadership, too, were convinced that Khrushchev was "not mature enough" to lead a country as large as Russia. During his 1957 visit in Moscow, Mao ostentatively displayed dissatisfaction and disinterest.

In spite of the public demonstration of unity, there were differences between China's approach to the global balance of power with its two ideological systems and the question whether communist revolutions should be peaceful or violent. Finally, the rightfulness of Khrushchev's critique of the personal cult of Stalin had not yet been discussed thoroughly.

Concerning the Stalin question, Mao acknowledged that the criticism of the personal cult by Khrushchev made in his secret speech during the 20th Congress of the CPSU in 1956 was right, and expressed his gladness about the Soviet leader's victory in his fight against the conservative Anti-Party Group of Georgij M. Malenkov (1902-1988), Lazar M. Kaganovich (1893-1991) and Vyacheslav M. Molotov (1890-1986) in summer 1957. On the other hand, Mao's mentioning of the disunity in Soviet leadership can also be interpreted as a kind of hidden criticism of the instability and unreliability of the Russians.

The Chinese nonetheless insisted that the common Moscow Declaration (Mosike xuanyan 莫斯科宣言) included a statement asserting that the transition to socialism might be non-peaceful. The Soviet leader argued that Lenin's proposition that wars were inevitable as long as imperialism existed were outdated. Yet the Chinese opinion on that question was influenced by the unresolved Taiwan question, as the US continued to support Chiang Kai-shek's regime on the island. China (and others, too) also criticized Khrushchev's rapprochement to the apostate Tito of Yugoslavia who did not participate in the meeting, and were confirmed by Tito's adamant refusal to acknowledge the leading role of the Soviet Union.

The outcome of the international meeting was the perception that in fact, each socialist party had an idea of their own which way to pursue. A centralised leadership of socialist movements, as proposed by Mao, was not effected.

Most famous is Mao's statement during a speech of 18 November that the "east wind was prevailing over the west wind". While this statement could be underlined by some participants – even if most communist leaders were aware that the advance to the US in military technology was nearly zero –, most of them were appalled by Mao's assumption in a statement on 6 November that in a global nuclear war, the imperialist countries would be destroyed and the communist ones be victorious, even if half of the mankind would be killed. Mao's frivolous assessment of the atomic bomb as a "paper tiger" (1946 interview with Anna Louise Strong, 1956 talk with two Latin-American public figures) seemed to most participants a woeful misjudgement.

Both countries, China and the Soviet Union, were convinced that Eastern rocket technology with its intercontinental ballistic missiles was superior to the American one, as could be seen in the launch of the two Sputnik satellites on October 4 and November 3, 1957, respectively, a technological event that shocked the Western world because it demonstrated that the US was within the reach of Soviet missiles. The Sputnik crisis led to the creation of the NASA in July 1958. The first US earth satellite, Explorer 1, was launched on January 31, 1958.

Regardless of all ideological differences, Khrushchev signed with China on 15 October 1957 the secret Sino-Soviet Agreement on New Technologies for National Defense which included assistance for the development of a nuclear programme like the transfer of scientific know-how in relevant fields and help with missile technology. What is interesting is that Mao, even if denouncing the nuclear threat as a "paper tiger", he had planned to get nuclear technology as early as 1946. This stands in contrast to Minister of Defense, Marshal Peng Dehuai, who preferred the strengthening and modernization of China's conventional forces (MacFarquhar 1983: 14).

Another outcome of the international meeting in Moscow was the economic race ignited by Khrushchev's call in May 1957 to overtake the United States in the per-capita production of meat, butter, and milk until the early 1960s. On 6 November, he expanded these agricultural targets to the field of industrial production and announced that in the next 15 years, the Soviet Union would surpass the United States in the per-capita and absolute output of "important products", namely iron ore, pig iron, steel, coal, petroleum, cement, electric power, sugar, woollen textiles and footwear.

This plan met with the consideration of the Chinese leadership which had agreed on the revival of the Twelv-Year Agricultural Programme under the slogan "more, faster, better and more economically" in order to propel China's stagnating economy. This new drive – actually the first outline of the Great Leap Forward – was first pronounced during the 3rd Plenum of the 8th Central Committee from 20 September to 9 October 1957. Now, inspired and affirmed by Khrushchev's adventurist course, Mao declared that it was not time to follow the conservative and cautious track of the Central Planning Commission and the Ministry of Finance.