Cornell East Asia Series, 170. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University East Asia Program, 2013. vi, 310 pp. US$39.00, paper. ISBN 978-1-933947-70-9.
The Hungarian uprising of 1956 and its bloody suppression by the Soviet Red Army was a key event in the history of the Cold War. Less well known are the Chinese contributions to the debates in Moscow in response to the crisis, and the repercussions of the events in Eastern Europe in the young People’s Republic of China (PRC). Yet, as this new, meticulously researched study shows, the dual crises in Poland and Hungary had direct bearing on the tumultuous events sweeping China in 1956 and 1957, and beyond.
Zhu’s study builds on an impressive body of recent research, mostly by Chinese scholars, on the PRC’s interactions with its partners in the socialist world, and on substantial archival research in the Chinese Foreign Ministry archives and Hungarian archives. Soviet archival sources are quoted in Chinese and English translations, illustrating how much source material has become accessible to researchers over the past two decades.
The introduction and the first two chapters provide the setting for the events of October 1956. Zhu traces the dynamics of East bloc politics in the early and mid-1950s, when, after Stalin’s death in 1953 and the successful completion of the early stages of China’s socialist transformation, Mao saw an opportunity for a more proactive Chinese participation in intra-bloc diplomacy. Khrushchev’s denouncement of Stalin at the XXth Communist Party of the Soviet Union congress in February 1956 put Mao in a quandary; while it freed the PRC to pursue a more active policy in Eastern Europe, the Chinese political and economic systems were essentially Stalinist, and thus vulnerable to criticism. The socialist regimes in Eastern Europe faced the same dilemma; more fragile than the PRC, Poland and Hungary were the first to buckle under stress. With Poland, under the new, nationalistic leadership of Gomulka, near collapse, Khrushchev ordered the Red Army to intervene. Last-ditch diplomacy helped to avert a military confrontation, but Khrushchev’s intervention presented Mao with an opportunity to denounce what he called Soviet “great-power chauvinism” and offer to mediate.
Chinese diplomats were soon enough called on to show their skills. Just after the arrival of a high-level delegation led by Liu Shaoqi, called to Moscow for an emergency meeting over Poland, the situation in Hungary suddenly exploded. As Zhu shows in great detail in chapter 3, the Chinese delegation unexpectedly found itself at the frontlines of diplomatic containment efforts. Struggling to formulate a position, the Chinese side conferred with Mao and initially decided to stick to the “anti-chauvinist” line—or, as Zhu proposes, to use the Polish and Hungarian crises as bargaining chips, “a rare good chance to manipulate the weakening Soviets to abdicate the leading position [in the socialist world] and give room to what he saw as better men,” that is, the Chinese (164). However, Chinese efforts to keep abreast of the rapidly evolving situation in Budapest were hampered by poor communication and coordination—delayed telegrams and a virtual shutdown of the Chinese embassy there—that eventually necessitated an embarrassing about-face in early November. The Chinese side had initially called for a withdrawal of Soviet troops and counseled Khrushchev to seek a compromise with Imre Nagy, the new Hungarian leader. When Nagy announced the restoration of a multi-party system on October 31, and, a day later, Hungary’s withdrawal from the Warsaw Pact, however, the Chinese had to put aside their reservations and back the full-scale military suppression of the Hungarian revolution that began on November 4. In summing up her findings, Zhu dismisses the suggestion, put forward by scholars such as Shen Zhihua, that the PRC had decisive influence on Soviet policy making at this critical juncture. Rather, she shows that Mao had to abandon his effort to promote more equal relations among the nations of the socialist bloc in order to preserve bloc unity, a goal that was clearly more important, even if that meant a perpetuation of the hierarchical structure of the East bloc.
Zhu’s detailed account and her nuanced assessment of the events of October and early November 1956 shed crucial new light on the international relations of the early PRC. Yet the author does not end her account here; fortunately, she dives deeply into the field of domestic Chinese politics to probe the impact of the Hungarian crisis and its fallout for China’s own tumultuous 1957. In chapter 4, Zhu reassesses the Hundred Flowers campaign and the CCP’s subsequent sharp reversal in early June. How did the CCP evaluate the crisis in Eastern Europe, and what lessons were to be learned? Zhu convincingly demonstrates that Mao, on the one hand, and Liu Shaoqi, Zhou Enlai and Chen Yun, on the other, drew sharply different conclusions from the events in Eastern Europe. While the latter pointed to the socio-economic problems caused by the Stalinist economic approach, Mao interpreted the crises primarily in political and ideological terms, finding no fault with the Stalinist system per se, which he had introduced in the PRC. Rather than adjustments in the economic realm, the chairman advocated political liberalization and a determined fight against bureaucratism as the means to prevent a similar crisis in China. Zhu debunks the discredited “luring the snakes from their hole” theory that presents Mao as a cynic. Instead, she shows how Mao tried to apply the lessons from Eastern Europe; yet as a seasoned leader, he was conscious of the risks he took when allowing criticism of the Party. Once this criticism got out of hand in mid-May, Mao was quick to reverse course and launch the anti-Rightist campaign. As this summary makes clear, the events of 1956 and 1957, both international and domestic, are highly complex, but their understanding is crucial for the long-term historical trajectory of the PRC. Zhu’s meticulous study sheds light on one of the crucial junctures in modern Chinese history and world history.
1956: Mao’s China and the Hungarian Crisis will be essential reading for a specialist audience and graduate students in Chinese history, Cold War studies and international relations. It is unfortunate, though, that the books suffers from a lack of proper editing. Convoluted passages abound; the Hungarian party is variously referred to as HWP, HWUP, HCP and MSP—the acronym-rich book has no list of abbreviations. The Soviet ambassador to China appears as (Pavel) Iudin and Yudin within the same footnote. Such carelessness on behalf of the publisher distracts attention from an excellent study.
Nicolai Volland
Pennsylvania State University, University Park, USA