Deng Xiaoping and how China forced the Soviet Union to leave Afghanistan

“The first round of talks to reestablish relations between China and the Soviet Union were held in Moscow between September 25 and November 30, 1979, but no progress was made due to differences of principle between the two. parts. Due to the Soviet aggression against Afghanistan, the talks were postponed for more than two years.

This is how the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs currently explains on its website the difficulties that Beijing encountered in normalizing its relationship with Moscow when Deng Xiaoping, who had become supreme leader of the People’s Republic of China less than a year earlier, established himself as one of His first mandate objectives to recover the Treaty of Friendship, Alliance and Mutual Assistance that both countries had signed in 1950 and that a conflicting vision of Marxism-Leninism and the world revolution, with Maoism as a new proclamation, led to the ruin.

In fact, Afghanistan was not then the only international dispute between the two regimes. At the beginning of that same 1979 China had invaded North Vietnam as a result of Hanoi’s occupation of Pol Pot’s Democratic Kampuchea. Precisely, the Mekong region became the first scenario in which both visions of socialism clashed after the triumph of their respective revolutions, with Vietnam and Laos alienated with the Soviet Union and Cambodia with China. Maoism would also permeate the movements of the revolutionary left in half the world and would divide the Latin American liberation and guerrilla movements.

As if the tension was not already enough, the Soviet Union reinforced the militarization of its entire border with China after an initial reinforcement in the 1960s. And it also sent troops to defend the Mongolian border with China. All this to guarantee border limits established first in an agreement between Russia, the tsars, and the Chinese Qing dynasty, and later between the Soviet government and Kuomintang China following the Yalta Agreements at the end of World War II. Always, according to Beijing, to the detriment of China.

After two years of conflicting positions, Beijing and Moscow resumed bilateral negotiations in October 1982. The borders were maintained, but the Soviet Union took three important steps in search of an agreement that was closed in 1988 after a dozen intense summits: it began its military withdrawal from Afghanistan and Mongolia and urged Vietnam to do the same from Cambodia. Moves that Moscow probably would have made sooner rather than later, but that Beijing considered a diplomatic victory of its own.

The agreement entailed the visit of the Soviet president, Mikhail Gorbachev, to Beijing between May 15 and 18, 1989. The first and last visit by a Soviet leader to China since the last border conflict in 1969. Deng Xiaoping received him with the speech that we offer extracted. The collapse of the Soviet Union two years later and the independence of the Soviet republics in Central Asia served Beijing to extend its influence to the region and consider it a strategic area for its security.

In 1996, China, Russia, Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan signed the agreement known as the Shanghai Five to demilitarize their borders and resolve territorial disputes. From there the Shanghai Cooperation Organization was born in 2001 with the incorporation of Uzbekistan, which was later joined by India and Pakistan. An agreement of geopolitical interests that, to this day, China and Russia share, despite the fact that Beijing continues to be suspicious of Moscow and of what, from Deng and above the regimes that the northern neighbor has had, it considers a historical arrogance .

“The Chinese people sincerely hope that Sino-Soviet relations will improve. I suggest that we take this opportunity to declare that henceforth our relations will return to normal.

”For many years there has been the question of how to understand Marxism and socialism. From the first Moscow talks in 1957 to the first half of the 1960s, there were bitter disputes between our two parties. I was one of the people involved and played no small part in those disputes.

”Now, looking back on more than 20 years of practice, we can see that there were many empty talks on both sides. No one was clear exactly what changes had taken place in the century since Marx’s death or how to understand and develop Marxism in light of those changes.

“We cannot expect Marx to provide quick answers to questions that arise a hundred or several hundred years after his death, nor can we ask Lenin to provide answers to questions that arise fifty or a hundred years after his death.

The world changes every day, and modern science and technology in particular are developing rapidly. A year today is the equivalent of several decades, a century or even a longer period in Antiquity. Anyone who does not carry Marxism forward with a new thought and a new point of view is not a true Marxist.

”Lenin was a true and great Marxist because it was not books that allowed him to find the revolutionary path and carry out the October socialist revolution in backward Russia, but realities, logic, philosophical thought and communist ideals. It was not by reading the works of Marx and Lenin that the great Marxist-Leninist Mao Zedong learned how to carry out the new-democratic revolution in backward China.

”Could Marx predict that the October Revolution would take place in backward Russia? Could Lenin have foreseen that the Chinese revolutionaries would win by besieging the cities from the countryside? So the question was how to make the revolution. But the same is true when the question is how to build a country. After a successful revolution, each country must build socialism according to its own conditions. There are not and cannot be fixed models. Complying with conventions can only lead to backwardness or even failure.

”The purpose of our meeting is to leave the past behind and open a new era. By leaving the past behind, I mean stop talking about it and focus on the future. However, I am afraid that it is not good for us to keep silent about the past. We have to make our opinions clear.

”I would like to tell you what the Chinese people and the Chinese Communist Party think about the past. They do not have to respond to these points of view or debate them. Let each of us speak of his own. That will help us move on more solid foundations. I will only briefly mention two things. First, how China suffered oppression from the great powers before liberation; Second, where, as the Chinese see it, have the threats come from in the last decades, specifically, during the last 30 years.

”On the first question. Since the Opium War, due to the corruption of the Qing dynasty, China has been subjected to aggression and enslavement by foreign powers and has been reduced to a semi-colonial and semi-feudal state. In all, around a dozen powers bullied China, chief among them being the UK. And earlier, Portugal had forced China to lease its territory from Macau. The countries that took advantage of China the most were Japan and Czarist Russia, and at certain times and on certain issues, the Soviet Union.

”At various times Japan occupied many parts of our country; for 50 years it occupied Taiwan. He built spheres of influence outside of China. In the north in particular, there were Japanese concessions in many large cities. In 1931 Japan launched a war of aggression against China and in 1932 established the Manchukuo regime in the northeast. In 1937 he launched a full-scale war that lasted eight years.

“Thanks to the resistance of China, the joint struggle of the anti-fascist allies and the sending of Soviet troops to the Northeast, Japan was finally totally defeated. Japan had inflicted untold damage on China. Tens of millions of Chinese had died in the war, not to mention other losses. If we had to settle historical scores, it would be Japan who owed China the most.

”Since Japan was defeated, China regained all the places that had been occupied. The only pending issue is Diaoyu, a small, uninhabited island. When I visited Japan, journalists asked me about it. I replied that the problem could be set aside and if our generation couldn’t solve it, the next generation would be wiser and eventually find a way to do it.

”To resolve similar disputes, we later proposed that such sites be jointly exploited. The other country that took advantage of China the most was Czarist Russia and later the Soviet Union. Through unequal treaties, Russia seized more than 1.5 million square kilometers of Chinese territory.

”China was also invaded after the October Revolution. For example, in 1929 the Soviet Union seized the Heixiazi Islands. With victory in World War II in sight, the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union signed a secret agreement at Yalta dividing up spheres of influence among themselves, to the great detriment of China’s interests. That was the period under Stalin. At that time, the Kuomintang government signed a pact with the Soviet Union recognizing the arrangements of the Yalta agreement.

”Then the People’s Republic of China signed a new treaty with the Soviet Union. It established diplomatic relations with the Mongolian People’s Republic and reached an agreement on the boundaries between the two countries. Later, China held border negotiations with the Soviet Union, asking it to acknowledge the historical fact that the treaties between Czarist Russia and the Qing Dynasty rulers were unequal and had allowed Russia to invade Chinese territory.

”However, given that more than 1.5 million square kilometers were seized under the treaties, and in view of past and present realities, we are still willing to resolve border disputes on the basis of those treaties. That was the first question. Expressing our points of view can help solve the problems left by history and clarify what I mean by the opening of a new era. So it was worth mentioning.

”Now about the second question. Where do the threats come from in the last decades? Shortly after the end of World War II, the Chinese revolution triumphed and the People’s Republic was founded. China did not invade other countries and did not pose a threat to them, but other countries threatened China. Our country was poor and weak, but independent. Where did the main threats come from? As soon as it was founded, the PRC was faced with this question. At that time, the threat came from the United States.

”Obvious examples were the Korean War and then the Vietnam War. In the first, China sent volunteers to fight the United States. The Soviet Union supplied us with weapons, but asked us to pay for them, albeit at half price. In the following years, Sino-Soviet relations deteriorated, and China was beset by economic difficulties. But as dire as our difficulties were, we were determined to pay that bill, and we paid it two years in advance.

”In the 1960s, the Soviet Union strengthened its military presence along the borders between China and the Soviet Union and Mongolia. The number of missiles was increased to a third of the Soviet Union’s total and troops were increased to one million, including those sent to Mongolia. Where did the threat come from? Naturally, China drew its conclusions.

”In 1963 I headed a delegation to Moscow. Negotiations broke down. I must say that beginning in the mid-1960s our relations deteriorated to the point of practically breaking up. I do not want to say that it was because of the ideological disputes; we no longer think that everything we said at the time was correct. The basic problem was that the Chinese were not treated as equals and felt humiliated.

”If I have spoken at length about these issues, it is to leave the past behind. We want the Soviet comrades to understand our vision of the past and to know what was on our minds then. Now that we’ve gone over the story, we should forget about it. That is something that has already been achieved with our meeting.

“Now that I’ve said what I had to say, it’s over. The past is the past. More contacts are being made between our two countries. Once bilateral relations are normalized, our exchanges will increase in depth and scope. I have an important suggestion to make in this regard: we should make things more practical and allow ourselves to talk less about empty things.

”There is only one thing that I will have left undone in my life: the resolution of the Taiwan question. I’m afraid I won’t live to see it. In foreign affairs, I have been involved in achieving the following: we have readjusted our relations with Japan, the United States and the Soviet Union, and we have decided to take back Hong Kong and reached an agreement with the United Kingdom to that effect.

“In internal affairs, I have participated in defining the Party’s basic line, deciding to focus on modernization, adopting China’s reform and opening up policies to the rest of the world, and upholding the Four Cardinal Principles. What I have not achieved is to abolish the lifetime system in office; that is a major problem related to the leadership system.”