Mao's World Outlook: Vietnam and the Revolution in China

Abstract

Mao Tse-tung believes that the Cultural Revolution he has conceived for China will ultimately affect the destiny of mankind and the future of the universe. The Peking press has proclaimed that Mao's new concepts insure the creation of new world, guided by the lights of Marx, Lenin, and Mao. As Marx discovered the laws of class struggle and Lenin first showed the way for the seizure of power by the proletariat, so Mao has now elaborated the principles and new organization which enable society to retain its revolutionary purity and permit the transition to According to the Chinese, the Cultural Revolution has fundamentally defeated the U.S. global strategy of encouraging moderation of militancy in the Communist camp, and it has reopened the channel leading to Communism. In short, the contest in China is seen by Mao not only as one between internal forces of good and evil but also as a gigantic struggle of strategic importance between the revolutionary and the counter-revolutionary forces of the world. Thus, it is apparent that foreign policy, or more correctly Mao's world outlook, played an important role in the shaping of the Cultural Revolution. Although the background and dynamics of the Peking power struggle which began in 1965 are not yet fully apparent, it is possible to draw some tentative conclusions about the foreign policy issues and concepts involved and the role of the Vietnam war. The external and internal aspects of Mao's world outlook are of course intertwined, and it is difficult to say on which side the influences first began that led to the remarkable events of 1966-67. But the major turning point on the path to the Cultural Revolution seems to have been Mao's decision, probably in 1959, that the Soviets were hopeless renegades of the Socialist revolution, and that China would therefore have to take the helm and build its might for future struggle. Mao's obsession with the alleged, growing bourgeois nature of the Soviet leaders is the thread that runs through both the ideological and national security elements of the internal struggle in China. Through fear of the Soviet revisionist pattern repeating itself in China, Mao has become preoccupied with the task of preparing revolutionary successors or pushing through radical reorganization of Chinese society. At the same time, his suspicion of Soviet policy-his rejection of the revisionist peaceful coexistence line-has prevented him from accepting detente or rapprochement with the Soviet Union in the interests of joint action against the