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Mao’s Sealion:

The Abortive Chinese Communist Plot To Invade Taiwan During World War III

By Chris Oakley Part 4 (based on the “Stop ‘Em At The 38th Parallel” series by the same author)

Summary: In the first three chapters of this series we reviewed the creation of Special Operation A-13, Mao Zedong’s strategy for invading Taiwan, right after the Korean conflict escalated into World War III; the circumstances leading up to A-13’s cancellation; the political and social turmoil leading to Mao Zedong’s 1958 assassination; and the 1960 Tienanmen Square massacre. In this installment, we’ll examine how Zhou Enlai’s political fortunes began to take a sharp turn for the worse in the mid-1960s.

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Relations between Russia and China had been on the decline even before the Tienanmen Square massacre, but it was in the aftermath of that tragedy when ties between the two rival powers truly started to fray. When the Communist regime in Russia collapsed after the end of World War III the Chinese government had been quick to denounce the new provisional administration of Alexei Kosygin as “imperialists” and “counterrevolutionary deviationists”; Kosygin in turn had criticized what he viewed as the “fanatical” tendencies of the Zhou Enlai regime as well as those of the Mao Zedong oligarchy which had preceded it. Newspapers in the Western world were regularly carrying stories about each country denouncing the other as the greatest threat to humanity since the Nazis. Every night on TV people could see and hear Kosygin fire verbal salvos at Mao(and vice versa). The briefing rooms of every Western capital from Sydney to Brussels were buzzing with activity as defense and intelligence experts tried to anticipating when and how a Sino-Russian war might break out.

     In Washington, the Johnson Administration was confronted with the tricky task of trying to pull off a diplomatic balancing act between these rival giant powers who, either single-handed or together, could drag the human race into a Fourth World War. And while the Republicans might have disputed him on a lot of other things, they wholeheartedly endorsed his sentiment that three world wars in one century was three too many. This encouraged bipartisan support in Congress for Johnson’s diplomatic initiatives to keep a lid on Sino-Russian antagonisms. At the United Nations General Assembly Johnson’s U.N. ambassador, Arthur Goldberg, was the point man for a massive international effort to get the Kosygin and Zhou governments to work out things at the conference table instead of confronting each other on the battlefield. Unluckily for the Johnson White House, Goldberg’s mediation efforts fell on deaf ears as far as Beijing was concerned.

     If anything, Zhou only seemed that much more determined to go to war with Kosygin after Goldberg’s attempts to convince the Chinese to open a dialogue with Moscow about the multiple antagonisms between the Russian Federation and the People’s Republic of China. Proof positive of this attitude came in April of 1965, when the main Chinese delegate at an Asian economic summit in Jakarta walked out rather than listen to his Russian counterpart talk about the two countries’ mutual need to find a method short of war to resolve their disagreements with each other. The same week that the walkout occurred, a Russian air defense radar station on the Siberian border picked up an unidentified object passing through Chinese airspace on a course that seemed to be taking it towards the Pacific naval base at Vladivostok; although at first it was thought to be a missile, the bogey was subsequently identified as a Chinese reconnaissance aircraft on an apparent mission to photograph Russian naval activity in the area.

     An infuriated Kosygin accused Beijing of plotting an invasion of Russia’s Siberian provinces and threatened to cut all diplomatic ties between Russia and China. Incensed by what he deemed an unforgivable insult against his country, Zhou beat Kosygin to the punch by ordering all Chinese diplomats recalled from Russia and all Russian diplomats kicked out of China. This didn’t do much to ease Kosygin’s fears of an imminent Chinese invasion of Siberia. Nor did it encourages hopes of a peaceful resolution of the Sino-Russian border standoff when a Chinese submarine was caught cruising the waters off the Polyyarny inlet on an apparent signals intercept mission monitoring Russian naval radio and telephone traffic.

      If anything the prospects for avoiding war were getting slimmer with every passing day. The rhetoric of the respective governments got increasingly bellicose and the propaganda battle between them became a crusade by each nation to incite the other’s citizens to stage revolts against their leadership. The Johnson Administration, fearing that if a shooting war did break out on the Sino-Russian border America might very well get drawn into it sooner or later, redoubled its efforts to bring about a diplomatic solution to the mounting crisis. It was about this time that a certain Harvard professor, whose magazine articles on post-World War III ideological debates in the Far East had earned him considerable public attention before the Sino-Russian crisis started, began to make his mark in Washington and attract LBJ’s interest.

      In early May of 1965 Dr. Kissinger accepted an invitation to the White House to meet with President Johnson and Johnson’s Secretary of State, Dean Rusk, to discuss Kissinger’s viewpoint on the Sino-Russian standoff and pick his brain for possible solutions to it. It was from this meeting that the initial framework emerged for the world-changing conference between Kissinger, UN secretary general U Thant, and scores of junior Russian and Chinese diplomats in Vienna two weeks later. But while Kissinger might have derived considerable prestige from his work in arranging the Vienna meeting, Zhou took a lot of internal heat from his cabinet for what one of his more vocal internal critics viewed as “mishandling” the border dispute to the point where if a war did break out between China and Russia it would be the Chinese who were seen as the aggressors even though it was largely the Russian government that had assumed the more confrontational stance in the matter. It was at the peak of the border crisis that the earliest seeds were planted for what would eventually become the ouster of Zhou as general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party and Chinese head of state; fed up with what they regarded as his “recklessness”(in the words of a top foreign ministry official), many of Zhou’s senior deputies began making plans to oust him and replace him with someone more level-headed.

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   Ironically, at about the same time much of the CPC hierarchy feared Zhou was too reckless, many younger Chinese began to speak out against him for just the opposite reason: they considered him too cautions and timid, lacking in the proper revolutionary spirit. The most radical of these young anti-Zhou activists called for what one of them labeled “a cultural revolution in the People’s Republic”. They passed out leaflets urging their fellow Chinese to take to the streets and overthrow Zhou’s regime in favor of a new government that would restore the traditional Maoist ideology to China; some of the more violent ones among them were even advocating armed revolt. In nearly every large Chinese city-- and many of the smaller ones too --these young radicals organized so-called “cleansing committees” for the purpose of exposing what they viewed as corruption and deviationism among their elders.

   Invoking the famous quote about “(a) revolution (being) a mother who eats her own children”, the radicals turned on the establishment in a series of street battles that recalled the bitter showdowns between the Communists and the Nationalists at the peak of the Chinese civil war in the late 1940s. The worst such clashes happened in Beijing-- sometimes within sight of the CPC central committee headquarters. By July of 1965 more than 100,000 people had been killed in the Chinese capital alone as a result of the violence, and the body count would climb still further in the months ahead as the turmoil continued to escalate. Many Chinese cities and towns became virtual siege areas as more and more residents chose to barricade themselves in their homes rather than risk becoming casualties of the unrest.

   A Swedish diplomat’s cable to his superiors in Stockholm in August of 1965 spelled out in grim detail just how catastrophic things had become for the citizens of the People’s Republic. The diplomat, then serving as a cultural attaché to the Swedish embassy in Beijing, warned that China was in a state of political disarray if not anarchy and that the Chinese national food distribution system had broken down to the point where the beleaguered Zhou regime was being confronted with rumors of cannibalism. There were even ominous hints in the attaché’s report of possible mutiny among some of the PLA troops stationed in the area.

   Within just a month of that cable’s transmission, the Zhou regime’s already dire situation became that much worse. A food riot broke out in Port Arthur-Dairen and reduced half the city to rubble; at the peak of the violence most of the local CPC leadership was killed along with at least a dozen PLA soldiers among the units sent to quash the uprising. Even though there was little evidence Zhou had played significant role in the Port Arthur tragedy, the radicals held him chiefly if not solely responsible for the devastation and loss of life in that city. Almost at once Zhou, who for years had been second only to the late Mao Zedong in the affections of Chinese Communists, became the most hated man in China and the target for the radicals’ darkest impulses. An organization made up of students and calling itself “the Red Guard”, began attacking those people still loyal to Zhou and instigating riots directed at pushing the regime to the brink of final collapse.

    The stress of fighting the Red Guard and the normal difficulties of advancing age combined to take a serious toll on Zhou’s health; by late October of 1965 he was seldom seen in public without at least one doctor close by his side. In January of 1966 he was flown to Sweden for surgery to relieve a blood clot in his brain-- which gave his political foes the ideal opportunity to advance their plans to remove him from power. While he was recuperating from the operation, anti-Zhou elements in the CPC’s Central Committee convened a secret emergency meeting whose consequences would be felt far beyond Beijing...

 

 

To Be Continued

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