Abstract
An occurrence in 1968 far from China's borders may have contributed substantially to bringing about a change in Peking's foreign policy. On August 20-21, there was the startling intervention in Czechoslovakia by the USSR and four other Warsaw Pact powers. A warning letter the five had sent previously to the Czechoslovak Communist Party set forth a significant rationale: “… we cannot agree to have hostile forces push your country away from the road of socialism and create the danger of Czechoslovakia being severed from the socialist community… . The frontiers of the socialist world have moved … to the Elbe and the Bohemian Forest. We shall never agree to these historic gains of socialism … being placed in jeopardy.” The Brezhnev Doctrine of “limited sovereignty” had been born, and if it were judged warrant for taking action against unorthodoxy in Czechoslovakia, it was in logic equally applicable to China. In any event, Moscow's military action against the deviant Communist state was by itself an indication that, in some circumstances, the Soviet Union might be prepared to employ its armed forces elsewhere outside its borders.
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