The Sino-Soviet Tangle

Abstract

The emergence of an open and serious quarrel between the U.S.S.R. and the People's Republic of China is very likely the most important new in world affairs in the last ten years, and it may therefore be considered a prime challenge to the science of international relations. How well have the numerous and sometimes well-financed experts in this branch of knowledge responded to the challenge? First it may be observed that the international affairs specialists in the Communist world have been and remain almost totally paralyzed in the face of this new phenomenon. Despite the sources of information that are available to official Communist scholarly institutions, Communist writers have been almost wholly unable to analyze the conflict. This is partly a question of security requirements and the need to work out an official line in each party before discussion within the framework of that line can be permitted. But it is also a matter of conceptual limitations traditional in Marxism-Leninism. As the constant reiteration of the adjective fraternal suggests, Marxist-Leninists are committed to the assumption that international relations within the Communist community are essentially different than those within Without a brutally competitive and exploitive economic system, international conflicts are not supposed to reach major proportions, and the current quarrel presumably should never have happened. Apparently this very assumption of fraternity has aggravated the Sino-Soviet dispute, because both sides tend to see this quarrel not as something more or less normal in the context of national interest and great power rivalry, but instead as some kind of weird perversion of natural law, explicable only as wilful nastiness on the part of the opponent. Of course, it is not impossible for Marxist-Leninists to adapt their methods of analysis to the new situation. In his book Socialism and War1 the Yugoslav Communist Edvard Kardelj asserts that the errors of the Chinese regime stems from the law of uneven development, by which he means that the Chinese are at a low state of development and are affected by the residuum of the old order and state-administrative methods. But to suggest that such disparities among Communist countries must lead to sharp international disagreement is too discomfitting a line for even the Yugoslav Communists to advance much less the Soviets, who for years recognized that Communist was uneven among various countries, but never concluded that political conflict would be the expected result. Another theoretical explanation of the rift is suggested in the Chinese and Soviet charges that, respectively, Yugoslavia and Albania have become agents of imperialism. If this ultimate anathema is pronounced between the great powers themselves, recalling Stalin's theoretical characterization of his opponents, the disputants would be able