Book Review
Die Sowjetunion und das kommunistische China
1945-1950:
Der beschwerliche Weg zum Bündnis
Dieter Heinzig, Die Sowjetunion und das kommunistische China 1945-1950: Der
beschwerliche Weg zum Bündnis. Baden-Baden: Nomos Verlagsgesselschaft, 1998. xix, 710
pp. 148.00 Deutschmarks.
After the Soviet Union collapsed at the end of 1991, the Russian government opened some of the
former Soviet archives for scholarly research. The status of those archives has been a constant
source of frustration ever since. The most important repositories of documents on the Cold War-the Presidential Archive, the foreign intelligence archive, the state security (KGB) archive, and the
main archive of the Ministry of Defense--have remained sealed. A handful of other repositories
have been relatively open and accommodating, but, even at those archives, nettlesome problems
have arisen. Although the partial opening of archives in Moscow has been a welcome change
from the complete lack of access during the Communist era, scholars who were hoping that the
archives would be fully opened after the demise of the Soviet Union have been sorely
disappointed.
For a few select topics, however, the situation has been much more auspicious. The Russian
authorities have been willing to release unusually large amounts of sensitive documentation
about the Korean War, the Cuban missile crisis, Sino-Soviet relations in the first several years
after World War II, and one or two other topics. Scholars focusing on these events have been
able to draw on a much greater volume of high-level documentation than is available for other
subjects. Many valuable books and articles on the "favored" topics have already been produced,
and more are likely to be published soon. Perhaps the best of the studies to appear thus far is
Dieter Heinzig's comprehensive survey of Soviet relations with the Chinese Communist Party
(CCP) from 1945 to 1950. Heinzig's book will remain the definitive treatment of the subject for
many years to come.
Heinzig has consulted a vast array of declassified Soviet archival materials, published Soviet
records, and retrospective accounts by former Soviet officials in both memoirs and interviews. He
has benefited greatly from documents released by Sergei Tikhvinskii and Andrei Ledovskii, two
long-standing "China hands" in Moscow who were influential advisers during the Soviet era and
enjoyed privileged access to closed archives in the 1990s. In addition to relying on new sources
from Russia, Heinzig has [End Page 107] made extensive use of available Chinese sources and
of many Western sources. Although the archives in Beijing are still sealed to foreign and most
Chinese researchers, a large number of important first-hand accounts by former Chinese
diplomats and party functionaries have appeared, and some official collections of declassified
documents have been published. Moreover, some useful documents have surfaced from Chinese
regional archives, which have been more accessible (at least for Chinese researchers) than the
repositories in Beijing. Heinzig is well aware of the limits as well as the value of the Soviet and
Chinese sources, and he makes judicious use of them, indicating where uncertainty and gaps
remain. In writing his book, he has built on and gone well beyond recent works by Chen Jian,
Michael Sheng, John Garver, Xue Litai, Sergei Goncharov, Yang Kuisong, Roderick
MacFarquhar, Michael Hunt, and others who have drawn on newly available sources. Heinzig
carefully points out where and why his own findings and conclusions differ from theirs, and he
also takes due account of the secondary literature published in earlier decades, before the East-
bloc archives were (partly) opened. The exhaustive research and meticulous weighing of
evidence that went into Heinzig's book are truly impressive.
This massive volume--a 653-page text with more than 2,300 footnotes, a twenty-page
documentary appendix, and a lengthy bibliography of sources in English, German, Russian, and
Chinese--is the capstone to a long and productive scholarly career, which began in the late 1950s.
In the late 1960s Heinzig edited the two-volume autobiography of Zhang Kuotao, a senior
Chinese Communist official in the 1920s and 1930s who was ousted from the party by Mao
Zedong. In the 1970s Heinzig completed an authoritative, detailed study of Soviet military
advisers to the Kuomintang in the 1920s, Sowjetische Militärberater bei der Kuomintang, 19231927, which was published in 1978 by the same press that has put out his latest book. In addition
to these seminal works, Heinzig has produced many other analyses of Chinese politics, SinoSoviet relations, Chinese foreign policy, and regional security problems in the Pacific Ocean and
East Asia.
Die Sowjetunion und das kommunistische China draws on some of Heinzig's earlier research, but
it is more sweeping and ambitious than what he has attemped before. Heinzig sets out to trace
the "difficult road" (beschwerliche Weg) that led from the Soviet treaty of alliance and friendship
with Republican China in August 1945 to the new Soviet treaty of friendship, alliance, and mutual
assistance with Communist China in February 1950. To set the scene, Heinzig provides a
concise but thorough overview of the emergence of the CCP in the early 1920s (when it was
purely a creation of the Soviet Union), the subsequent evolution of the party (a process of
"Sinoization," though with pronounced Soviet leanings), the development of Soviet-Kuomintang
relations in the 1920s and 1930s, the dual Soviet policy in China during the Japanese occupation
and World War II (when the CCP's posture toward Moscow was one of "obedience with
reservations"), and the brief "flirtation" between the CCP and the United States in 1944-1945
(when the Chinese Communists were trying to minimize American involvement in China). Heinzig
then recounts the civil war that engulfed China after World War II, providing 120 dense pages on
the events of 1945-1948. This preliminary material alone is enough to make for a very useful
book, but [End Page 108] the analysis becomes even more exhaustive when Heinzig turns to the
central focus of his study--namely, the decisive events of 1949 and early 1950, when the Chinese
Communists achieved final victory in the civil war and, after considerable delay, signed a security
treaty with the Soviet Union. Heinzig's fascinating account of this brief but momentous period,
which he divides into two chapters totaling some 420 pages, is remarkable in its breadth,
circumspection, attentiveness to detail, and eloquence.
Heinzig's findings and conclusions, buttressed by reams of evidence, are in some instances fully
compatible with those of previous studies. Like Chen Jian, Michael Sheng, and a number of other
scholars, Heinzig persuasively debunks the "revisionist" claim that the United States had a "lost
chance" to win the CCP over to its side in 1944, 1947, or 1949. Mao and other Chinese
Communist leaders, as Heinzig shows, were never interested in alignment or friendship with the
United States and wanted only to undercut (or at least offset) American support for the
Kuomintang. Heinzig's analysis of the Chinese civil war confirms the findings of recent studies
that have highlighted the importance of Soviet backing for the CCP, contrary to Mao's later
assertions. Although the Soviet Union in 1945 established a formal alliance with the Kuomintang
and strongly advised the CCP not to resume its drive for all-out power, Heinzig refutes Mao's
subsequent claim that Moscow neglected and impeded the Chinese Communists during the civil
war. Josif Stalin's "double game" in China was obviously not what Mao would have liked, but it
made eminent sense from Moscow's perspective. Stalin had planned all along to facilitate the
CCP's rise to power in Manchuria, and he steadily expanded the level of Soviet aid to the CCP as
the war in China progressed and it became clear that the Kuomintang government was more
vulnerable than Stalin initially assumed. During the decisive stages of the fighting, Soviet military
supplies to the CCP--as Heinzig shows--proved crucial. Heinzig also puts to rest another myth
purveyed in later years by Mao, who alleged that Stalin had urged the CCP to "stop at the
Yangzi" in early 1949 rather than pressing on to gain control over the whole of China. Heinzig
finds no credible evidence to support Mao's post-hoc contention, and he marshals a plethora of
evidence that contravenes it.
On many other issues as well, Heinzig breaks valuable new ground. He shows, even more
convincingly than others have, that Soviet policy toward China was strongly influenced by Stalin's
assessment of U.S. intentions and motives. The Soviet leader was determined to avoid any steps
vis-à-vis China that would provoke a direct military clash with the United States. According to
Heinzig, Stalin's disinclination to risk war with the United States largely accounted for his
unwillingness to invite Mao to Moscow during the civil war, despite Mao's persistent requests.
Only after it became clear in 1949 that the United States would not intervene to prevent the CCP
from coming to power was Stalin willing to contemplate such a visit. Heinzig's account of the
secret missions by high-ranking Soviet and CCP officials in the first half of 1949--the talks held by
Anastas Mikoyan at the CCP's headquarters in Xibaipo in February and the visit by Liu Shaoqi to
Moscow five months later--draws on a wealth of largely untapped materials. New documentation
also enriches Heinzig's discussion [End Page 109] of events that followed the establishment of
the People's Republic of China (PRC) in October 1949. Of particular note is his 200-page chapter
on Mao's long-awaited sojourn in Moscow from mid-December 1949 through mid-February 1950
and the tortured negotiations that produced the Sino-Soviet security treaty, the main text of which
was finally signed on 14 February 1950. (Secret protocols to the treaty were signed in March and
April 1950.) Heinzig meticulously sifts through huge amounts of archival material and first-hand
accounts to reconstruct what happened. He shows that many of the issues in dispute between
Moscow and Beijing in 1950 were the same ones that arose during the Soviet-Kuomintang treaty
negotiations in 1945.
In contrast to scholars who have played up the ideological bonds between the Soviet Union and
Communist China, Heinzig finds that the evidence is more conducive to a power politics
interpretation. He maintains that the "traditional national interests" of the two sides ultimately
shaped their behavior. In support of this claim Heinzig emphasizes the points of contention
between Moscow and the CCP from the 1920s on, and he argues in his concluding chapter that
the roots of the Sino- Soviet split of the 1960s lay in the differences that emerged during the
Stalin era. Perhaps this is so, but Heinzig may well overstate his case here. In retrospect, the link
between the earlier differences and the bitter rift of the 1960s may seem stronger than it actually
was. It would have been impossible to achieve identical views on all issues in the 1930s and
1940s. Heinzig tends to exaggerate the importance of some of the divergences. (He is not alone
in this regard. In recent years a number of Western scholars have been surprised when archival
materials revealed that the Soviet Union and its allies did not always view things identically and
did not necessarily approach every issue the same way. Why anyone would find this surprising is
unclear.)
It has long been known--well before the archives opened--that Soviet and CCP leaders did not
always see eye-to-eye, but what is striking is that the lingering disagreements did not inhibit the
PRC from staunchly allying itself with the Soviet Union from 1949 through the early to mid-1950s.
So determined was Mao to consolidate the alliance that he not only stayed in Moscow for two
months and put up with Stalin's rude treatment, but also accepted what from China's standpoint
was a less than ideal treaty. (Later on, some former Chinese officials insisted that the PRC had
achieved all it wanted in the Moscow negotiations. Heinzig conclusively rebuts these assertions
by analyzing and reproducing the relevant documents, which indicate that important concessions
were made by both sides, particularly by the Chinese.) Heinzig is undoubtedly justified in arguing
that a Sino-Soviet alliance was not a foregone conclusion (the same is true of most things in life),
and he rightly eschews the excessive emphasis that some scholars have accorded to ideology.
Nonetheless, he is wont to underestimate the role of ideological affinity in Mao's decision to ally
China so closely with the Soviet Union for several years.
These minor problems in no way detract from the richness of Heinzig's elaborately documented
volume, which sets a standard for all future studies of Sino-Soviet relations and the Cold War in
general. Despite the formidable obstacles to archival research [End Page 110] in Moscow and
Beijing, this book demonstrates the magnitude of what can be accomplished with the materials
now available.
Reviewed by Mark Kramer, Harvard University