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with the commentaries, to the members attending the meeting.

The three speeches by Dulles all contained the theme of promoting a "peaceful evolution" inside socialist countries. The three commentaries based on Chairman Mao's talks highlighted the key points in Dulles's remarks and warned of the danger of the American "peaceful evolution" strategy. The first commentary pointed out: "The United States not only has no intention to give up its policy of force, but also wants, as an addition to its policy of force, to pursue a 'peaceful conquest strategy' of infiltration and subversion in order to avoid the prospect of its 'being surrounded.' The U.S. desires to achieve the ambition of preserving itself (capitalism) and gradually defeating the enemy (socialism)." After noting the main theme of Dulles's testimony, the second commentary contended: Dulles's words "demonstrate that U.S. imperialists are attempting to restore capitalism in the Soviet Union by the method of corrupting it so as to realize their aggressive goal, which they have failed to achieve through war." The third commentary first took note of Dulles's insistence on "the substitution of justice and law for force" and his contention that the abandonment of force did not mean the "maintenance of the status quo," but meant a peaceful "change." Then it went on to argue that "Dulles's words showed that because of the growing strength of the socialist force throughout the world and because of the increasing isolation and difficulties of the international imperialist force, the United States does not dare to start a world war at the moment. Therefore, the United States has adopted a more deceptive tactic to pursue its aggression and expansion. While advocating peace, the United States is at the same time speeding up the implementation of its plots of infiltration, corruption, and subversion in order to reverse the decline of imperialism and to fulfill its objective of aggression."

At the meeting on November 12, Chairman Mao further analyzed and elaborated on Dulles's speeches and the commentaries. He said:

Comrade Lin Ke has prepared for me three documents-three speeches by Dulles during 19581959. All three documents have to do with Dulles's talks about en

couraging a "peaceful evolution" inside socialist countries. For example, at his testimony before the House Foreign Affairs Committee on January 28 Dulles remarked that basically the U.S. hoped to encourage changes within the Soviet world. By the Soviet world, Dulles did not mean just the Soviet Union. He was referring to the whole socialist camp. He was hoping to see changes in our camp so that the Soviet world would no longer be a threat to freedom on the globe and would mind its own business instead of thinking about realizing the goal and ambition of communizing the world....

In commenting on Dulles's statement of January 31, 1959, Chairman Mao asserted:

Dulles said that justice and law should replace violence and that war should be abandoned, and law and justice should be emphasized. Dulles also argued that the abandonment of force under the circumstances did not mean the "maintenance of the status quo," but meant a peaceful "change." (laughter) Change whom peacefully? Dulles wants to change countries like ours. He wants to subvert and change us to follow his ideas.... Therefore, the United States is attempting to carry out its aggression and expansion with a much more deceptive tactic.... In other words, it wants to keep its order and change our system. It wants to corrupt us by a peaceful evolution.

Chairman Mao believed that Khrushchev's speeches reflected the "peaceful evolution" advocated by Dulles and that our principle should be:

Under the existing complex international conditions, our policy is to resist the pressures head-on-pressures from two directions, Khrushchev and Eisenhower. We will resist for five to ten years. Toward the United States, we should do our best to expose it with facts and we should do so persuasively. We will not criticize Khrushchev, nor will we attack him through im

plication. We will only expose the American deception and lay bare the nature of the so-called "peace" by the United States.

This is the first time that Chairman Mao clearly raised and insightfully elaborated on the issue of preventing a "peaceful evolution." From that time on, he would pay more and more attention to the matter. In a series of meetings that followed, he would repeatedly alert the whole party on the issue and gradually unfold the struggle against the socalled revisionism both at home and abroad.

From 1960 forward, differences between the Chinese and Soviet Parties increased. On April 22, an editorial titled "Long Live Leninism" published by the journal Hongqi13 denounced Comrade Tito of Yugoslavia by name and criticized Khrushchev of the Soviet Union without mentioning his name. On internal occasions, we unequivocally pointed out that the Soviet Union had become revisionist and that we should learn the Soviet lesson. We also felt that "revisionists" already existed in China and that Peng Dehuai and some other comrades were examples. We warned against the emergence of revisionism in order to prevent a "peaceful evolution." In his meeting with Jespersen, 14 Chairman of the Danish Communist Party, on May 28, 1960, Chairman Mao said: "There are also revisionists in our country. Led by Peng Dehuai, a Politburo member, they launched an attack on the Party last summer. We condemned and defeated him. Seven full and alternate members of our Central Committee followed Peng. Including Peng, there are eight revisionists. The total number of full and alternate members in our Central Committee is 192. Eight people are merely a minority.”

At the "Seven Thousand Cadres Conference"15 held in January 1962, Comrade [Liu] Shaoqi delivered a "written report" on behalf of the Party Central Committee. He made a special reference to the question of opposing contemporary revisionism. In his remarks concerning the issue of practicing democratic centralism, Chairman Mao stated: "Without a highly developed democracy, there cannot be a high level of centralism. Without a high level of centralism, we cannot establish a socialist economy. What will happen then to our country if we cannot create a socialist economy? China will become a revisionist country, a bourgeois coun

try in fact. The proletarian dictatorship will become not only a bourgeois dictatorship but also a reactionary and fascist dictatorship. This is an issue that deserves full attention. I hope our comrades will consider it carefully." (Selected Readings of Chairman Mao's Works, Vol. II, pp. 822-823.) Here Chairman Mao officially sounded an alarm bell for the whole party. In his meeting with Kapo16 and Balluku 17 of Albania on February 3, 1967, Mao contended: At the "Seven Thousand Cadres Conference" in 1962, "I made a speech. I said that revisionism wanted to overthrow us. If we paid no attention and conducted no struggle, China would become a fascist dictatorship in either a few or a dozen years at the earliest or in several decades at the latest. This address was not published openly. It was circulated internally. We wanted to watch subsequent developments to see whether any words in the speech required revision. But at that time we already detected the problem."

At the Beidaihe Meeting and the Tenth Plenum of the Eighth Central Committee during August and September, 1962, Chairman Mao reemphasized class struggle in order to prevent the emergence of revisionism. On August 9, he clearly pointed out the necessity of educating cadres and training them in rotation. Otherwise, he feared that he had devoted his whole life to revolution, only to produce capitalism and revisionism. On September 24, he again urged the party to heighten vigilance to prevent the country from going "the opposite direction." The communiqué of the Tenth Plenum published on September 27 reiterated the gist of Chairman Mao's remarks and stressed that "whether at present or in the future, our Party must always heighten its vigilance and correctly carry out the struggle on two fronts: against both revisionism and dogmatism."

From the end of 1962 to the spring of 1963, our Party published seven articles in succession, condemning such so-called "contemporary revisionists" as Togliatti of Italy, 18 Thorez of France, 19 and the American Communist Party. On June 14, 1963, the CCP Central Committee issued "A Proposal for a General Line of the International Communist Movement." On July 14, the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) published "An Open Letter to Party Units at All Levels and to All Members of the CPSU," bringing the SinoSoviet dispute to the open. From September

last to July 1964, our Party used the name of the editorial boards of the Renmin ribao and Hongqi to issue nine articles, refuting the Soviet open letter and condemning "Khrushchev Revisionism" by name. Thus the Sino-Soviet polemics reached a high point. In the meantime, the struggle to oppose "revisionism" and to prevent a "peaceful evolution" was accelerated at home.

1. The Resolution on Certain Questions in the History of Our Party since the Founding of the People's Republic of China was adopted by the Sixth Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee in June 1981. While affirming the historical role of Mao Zedong, the resolution also blames him for the Cultural Revolution. After an analysis of all the crimes and errors in the Cultural Revolution the resolution describes it as, after all, "the error of a proletarian revolutionary." It concludes that although Mao has made "gross mistakes" during the Cultural Revolution, "if we judge his activities as a whole, his contribution to the Chinese revolution far outweighs his mistakes." For the text of the resolution, see Resolution on CPC History (1949-1981) (Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1981).

2. I have previously translated the chapter in the first volume concerning Mao's decision to make an alliance with the Soviet Union in 1949-1950. It was first published in Chinese Historians 5 (Spring 1992), 57-62, and later in Thomas G. Paterson and Dennis Merrill, eds., Major Problems in American Foreign Relations: Volume II: Since 1914, 4th ed. (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath, 1995), 332-34.

3. Bo does not mention precisely when and where Dulles made those remarks about Chinese communism. I have not been able to identify Dulles's speech to which Bo is referring.

4. The "Three Red Flags" refer to the General Line of Socialism, the Great Leap Forward, and the People's Commune.

5. Jinman (Quemoy).

6. These refer to the economic cooperation regions established during the Great Leap Forward. China was divided into seven such regions.

7. Cankao ziliao (Reference Material) is an internally circulated reading material, which provided Party leaders with translations and summaries of international news from foreign news agencies and press.

8. According to the U.S records of the Camp David talks, in his discussions with President Eisenhower, Khrushchev actually defended China's position on Taiwan. See memorandum of conversation between Eisenhower and Khrushchev, 26 and 27 September 1959, in Foreign Relations of the United States, 19581960, Vol. X, Part I: Eastern Europe Region; Soviet Union; Cyprus (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1993), 477-482.

9. Peng Dehuai, Defense Minister and a Politburo member.

10. Peng Zhen, Party Secretary of Beijing and a Politburo member.

11. Wang Jiaxiang, Director of the CCP International Liaison Department and a Secretary of the CCP Central Committee Secretariat.

12. Hu Qiaomu, Mao's political secretary and an Alternate Secretary of the CCP Central Committee Secre

tariat.

13. Hongqi (Red Flag) is the official journal of the CCP Central Committee.

14. Knud Jespersen, leader of the Danish communist Party.

15. The conference was held between January and February, 1962 to review methods of Party leadership and examine problems caused by the Great Leap Forward.

16. Hysni Kapo, a leader of the Albanian Labor (Communist) Party.

17. Bequir Balluku, Defense Minister and a Politburo member of the Albanian Communist Party.

18. Palmiro Togliatti, leader of the Italian Communist Party.

19. Maurice Thorez, leader of the French Communist Party.

Qiang Zhai teaches history at Auburn University at Montgomery (Alabama) and is the author of The Dragon, the Lion, and the Eagle: Chinese-British-American Relations, 1949-1958 (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1994).

THE VIETNAM WAR AND SOVIETAMERICAN RELATIONS, 1964-1973: NEW RUSSIAN EVIDENCE

by Ilya V. Gaiduk

The Vietnam War stands out among Cold War crises for its scale, length, intensity, and global repercussions. The literature on the war and the American role in it encompasses thousands of volumes, from political memoirs to soldiers' eyewitness accounts to historical and journalistic studies, to novels and political science treatises.1 With the passage of time, ever more documents have been declassified, enabling more thorough and comprehensive analyses. Now that there is substantial access to

archives in the former USSR, researchers have at their disposal a whole set of previously unavailable materials which shed new light on unresolved issues as well as on problems which have either escaped the attention of Western scholars or have not yet been analyzed in detail.

One of those problems relates to the Soviet Union's participation in the Vietnam conflict, particularly the nature of SovietAmerican relations during the war and Moscow's role as a potential mediator. Although many U.S. researchers have studied these problems and, on the basis of the documents analyzed, drawn certain conclusions, their analyses of the subject were far from exhaustive and quite often insufficiently corroborated by the necessary archival sources.

The present article assesses Soviet policy toward Vietnam and the war's impact on U.S.-Soviet relations from 1964 to the early 1970s on the basis of materials bearing on this subject in the archive of the former Communist Party of the Soviet Union Central Committee (CPSU CC)—a repository now known as the Storage Center for Contemporary Documents (SCCD, or TsKhSD, in its Russian acronym)-located in the CC's former headquarters in Staraya Ploschad' (Old Square) in Moscow. This report was originally prepared for presentation at the January 1993 Moscow Conference on New Evidence on Cold War History, organized by the Cold War International History Project (CWIHP) in cooperation with the Institute of General History of the Russian Academy of Sciences and SCCD. Subsequently, the author expanded

his research into a far broader study of Soviet involvement in the Vietnam conflict, utilizing sources in both Russian and American archives (the latter during a CWIHP fellowship for research in the United States); that study, The Soviet Union and the Vietnam War, is scheduled for publication by Ivan R. Dee (Chicago) in Spring 1996.

The SCCD archives contain materials related to a broad range of the former CPSU CC's work, primarily correspondence with a wide range of Soviet organizations and establishments dealing with various socio-economic, domestic, and foreign policy issues. The archive collections (fondy) include a considerable number of documents on the subject of the Vietnam War and SovietAmerican relations which were sent to the

CPSU CC-mostly to the CC International Department and the CC Socialist Countries' Communist and Workers' Parties Department by the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Defense Ministry, and Committee of State Security (KGB). Considerably less frequently encountered, alas, is documentation illuminating recommendations, draft decisions, and top-level decision-making. Thus, the top leadership's decisions and the mechanism of decision-making on this level are only indirectly reflected in the SCCD materials. This unfortunate gap, naturally, creates problems for historians trying to determine how policy was actually made by the top Soviet leadership on important foreign policy questions, and necessitates continued efforts to increase access to materials in Russian archives that remain off-limits, particularly the so-called Kremlin or Presidential Archives, known officially as the Archive of the President of the Russian Federation (APRF).

At the same time, the SCCD materials enable historians not only to reconstruct many events related to the Vietnam War during the period in question, and to present matters which were previously interpreted only inferentially, but also to assess the development of U.S.-Soviet relations in close inter

connection with the conflict in Southeast

Asia. This last factor is of obvious import, for one can hardly study U.S.-Soviet relations during the Vietnam War in isolation from an understanding of relations between the Soviet Union and North Vietnam (the Democratic Republic of Vietnam, or DRV), between the Soviet Union and the People's Republic of China (PRC), and between the

DRV and PRC. All those interconnected relations crucially influenced the relevant Soviet policies.

The escalation of the conflict in Vietnam after the Tonkin Gulf incident in August 1964 and the February 1965 attack by armed units of the National Front for the Liberation of South Vietnam (NFLSV, also known as the NLF) on the base of American military advisers in Pleiku (triggering U.S. aerial bombardment of North Vietnam in retaliation), coincided with a certain cooling in Soviet-North Vietnamese relations. This chill between Moscow and Hanoi, in turn,

This section of the Bulletin presents new evidence from Russian, Chinese, and Polish sources on one of the Cold War's most costly conflicts: the Vietnam War, which consumed more than 58,000 American lives and, according to recent estimates, more than 3.2 million Vietnamese lives. Presented here are articles by Ilya V. Gaiduk (Institute of Universal History, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow), who employs documents from the CPSU Central Committee archives to illuminate Soviet policy toward the Vietnam conflict (in a foretaste of his soon-to-be published book on the subject), and by Zhai Qiang (Auburn University at Montgomery), who uses newly released Chinese sources to explore Beijing's handling of the escalation of the war in 1964-65; and a precis of a secretly-prepared memoir by Jerzy Michalowski, a Polish diplomat who was deeply involved in secret mediation efforts between the United States and North

Vietnam in the mid-1960s.

However, recognizing that the most important "other side" for Americans during the Vietnam War was, of course, the Vietnamese themselves, the Cold War International History Project has launched an

was partly attributable to the growing differences between the USSR and the PRC, the

two chief patrons and supporters of the Vietnamese struggle against the Saigon regime.2 Besides the impact of the Sino-Soviet split,

the tension in Soviet-North Vietnamese relations during this stretch was also tied to the relatively moderate stand adopted by the then Soviet government, under the leadership of Nikita S. Khrushchev prior to his downfall in October 1964. Owing to the

continued on page 250

BEIJING AND THE VIETNAM

CONFLICT, 1964-1965: NEW CHINESE EVIDENCE

by Qiang Zhai

The years 1964-1965 marked a crucial period in the Vietnam War. The Gulf of Tonkin Incident and subsequent U.S. escalation of war against North Vietnam represented a major turning point in the American approach to Indochina, as the Johnson Administration shifted its focus from Saigon to Hanoi as the best way to reverse the deterio

effort to organize collaborative research with Vietnamese scholars and to collect Vietnamese sources on the international history of the Vietnam and Indochina conflicts. To this end, CWIHP has begun contacts with the Institute of International Relations (IIR) in Hanoi on the possibility of organizing an international scholarly conference on the history of U.S.-Vietnam relations since World War II. CWIHP, along with the National Security Archive at George Washington University, is also collecting declassified archival evidence from Vietnamese, American, and other sources in connection with an oral history conference of senior former Vietnamese and American decision-makers (including Kennedy and Johnson Administration Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara), to be organized by the Council on Foreign Relations, the Center for Foreign Policy at Brown University, and the IIR. (Agreement in principle to hold the conference was reached during discussions in Hanoi in November 1995.)

CWIHP also plans to devote a special issue of the Bulletin to new evidence on the war, primarily from Vietnamese sources.

--Jim Hershberg, Editor

rating trend in South Vietnam and to persuade the North Vietnamese leadership to desist from their increasing involvement in the South. How did Beijing react to Washington's escalation of the conflict in Vietnam? How did Mao Zedong perceive U.S. intentions? Was there a "strategic debate" within the Chinese leadership over the American threat and over strategies that China should adopt in dealing with the United

States? What was in Mao's mind when he decided to commit China's resources to

Hanoi? How and why did a close relationship between Beijing and Hanoi turn sour during the fight against a common foe? Drawing upon recently available Chinese materials, this paper will address these questions.1 The first half of the article is primarily narrative, while the second half provides an analysis of the factors that contributed to China's decision to commit itself to Hanoi, placing Chinese actions in their domestic and international context.

China's Role in Vietnam, 1954-1963

China played an important role in helping Ho Chi Minh win the Anti-French War and in concluding the Geneva Accords in 1954.2 In the decade after the Geneva Conference, Beijing continued to exert influence over developments in Vietnam. At the time of the Geneva Conference, the Vietnamese Communists asked the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) to help them consolidate peace in the North, build the army, conduct land reform, rectify the Party, strengthen diplomatic work, administer cities, and restore the economy.3 Accordingly, Beijing sent Fang Yi to head a team of Chinese economic experts to North Vietnam.4

According to the official history of the Chinese Military Advisory Group (CMAG), on 27 June 1955, Vo Nguyen Giap headed a Vietnamese military delegation on a secret visit to Beijing accompanied by Wei Guoqing, head of the CMAG in Vietnam.

The Vietnamese visitors held discussions with Chinese Defense Minister Peng Dehuai, and General Petroshevskii, a senior Soviet military advisor in China, regarding the Democratic Republic of Vietnam's reconstruction of the army and the war plan for the future. The DRV delegation visited the Chinese North Sea Fleet before returning to Hanoi in mid-July. That fall, on 15 October 1955, Vo Nguyen Giap led another secret military delegation to China, where he talked with Peng Dehuai and Soviet General Gushev again about the DRV's military develop The Vietnamese ment and war planning. The Vietnamese inspected Chinese military facilities and academies and watched a Chinese military exercise before traveling back to North Viet

nam on December 11.5

The official CMAG history states that during both of Giap's journeys to Beijing, he "reached agreement" with the Chinese and the Russians “on principal issues." But it

does not explain why Giap had to make a second visit to China shortly after his first tour and why the Soviet participants at the talks changed. Perhaps disagreement emerged during the discussions of Giap's first trip, leaving some issues unresolved. In fact, according to the study by the researchers at the Guangxi Academy of Social Sciences, the Chinese and the Russians differed over strategies to reunify Vietnam. The Soviet advisors favored peaceful coexistence between North and South Vietnam, urging Hanoi to "reunify the country through peaceful means on the basis of independence and democracy." The Chinese Communists, conversely, contended that because of imperialist sabotage it was impossible to reunify Vietnam through a general election in accordance with the Geneva Accords, and that consequently North Vietnam should prepare for a protracted struggle.6

On 24 December 1955, the Chinese government decided to withdraw the CMAG from Vietnam; Peng Dehuai notified Vo Nguyen Giap of this decision. By mid

March 1956, the last members of the CMAG

had left the DRV. To replace the formal CMAG, Beijing appointed a smaller team of military experts headed by Wang Yanquan to assist the Vietnamese.7

These developments coincided with a major debate within the Vietnamese Communist leadership in 1956 over who should bear responsibility for mistakes committed during a land reform campaign which had

been instituted since 1953 in an imitation of the Chinese model. Truong Chinh, General Secretary of the Vietnamese Workers' Party (VWP), who was in charge of the land reform program, was removed from his position at a Central Committee Plenum held in September. Le Duan, who became General Secretary later in the year, accused Truong Chinh of applying China's land reform experience in Vietnam without considering the Vietnamese reality.8

The failure of the land-reform program in the DRV dovetailed with a growing real

ization that the reunification of the whole of Vietnam, as promised by the Geneva Ac

cords, would not materialize, primarily as a result of U.S. support for the anti-Communist South Vietnamese regime of Ngo Dinh Diem, who refused to hold elections in 1956. As hopes for an early reunification dimmed,

the DRV had to face its own economic difficulties. The rice supply became a major

problem as Hanoi, no longer able to count on incorporating the rice-producing South into its economy, was forced to seek alternative food sources for the North and to prepare the groundwork for a self-supporting economy. In this regard, leaders in Hanoi continued to seek Chinese advice despite the memory of the poorly-implemented landreform program. There are indications that the Chinese themselves had drawn lessons from the debacle of the Vietnamese land reform and had become more sensitive to Vietnamese realities when offering suggestions. In April 1956, Deputy Premier Chen Yun, an economic specialist within the CCP, paid an unpublicized visit to Hanoi. At the request of Ho Chi Minh, Chen proposed the principle of “agriculture preceding industry and light industry ahead of heavy industry" in developing the Vietnamese economy. The Vietnamese leadership adopted Chen's advice. Given the fact that the CCP was putting a high premium on the development of heavy industry at home during its First Five-Year Plan at this time, Chen's emphasis on agriculture and light industry was very unusual, and demonstrated that the Chinese were paying more attention to Vietnamese conditions in their assistance to the DRV. Zhou Enlai echoed Chen's counsel of caution in economic planning during his tour of Hanoi on 18-22 November 1956, when he told Ho Chi Minh to refrain from haste in collectivizing agriculture: "Such changes must come step by step."10

11

Donald S. Zagoria argues in his book Vietnam Triangle that between 1957 and 1960, the DRV shifted its loyalties from Beijing to Moscow in order to obtain Soviet assistance for its economic development.1 In reality, the Hanoi leadership continued to consult the CCP closely on such major issues as economic consolidation in the North and the revolutionary struggle in the South. With the completion of its economic recovery in 1958, the VWP began to pay more attention to strengthening the revolutionary movement in the South. It sought Chinese advice. In the summer of 1958, the VWP presented to the CCP for comment two documents entitled "Our View on the Basic Tasks for Vietnam during the New Stage" and "Certain Opinions Concerning the Unification Line and the Revolutionary Line in the South." After a careful study, the Chinese leadership responded with a written reply, which pointed out that "the most

fundamental, the most crucial, and the most urgent task” for the Vietnamese revolution was to carry out socialist revolution and socialist construction in the North. As to the South, the Chinese reply continued, Hanoi's task should be to promote "a national and democratic revolution." But since it was impossible to realize such a revolution at the moment, the Chinese concluded, the VWP should "conduct a long-term underground work, accumulate strength, establish contact with the masses, and wait for opportunities."12 Clearly, Beijing did not wish to see the situation in Vietnam escalate into a major confrontation with the United States. Judging by subsequent developments, the VWP did not ignore the Chinese advice, for between 1958 and 1960 Hanoi concentrated on economic construction in the North, impleeconomic construction in the North, implementing the "Three-Year Plan" of a socialist transformation of the economy and society.

The policy of returning to revolutionary war adopted by the VWP Central Committee in May 1959 did not outline any specific strategy to follow. The resolution had merely mentioned that a blend of political and military struggle would be required. During the next two years, debates over strategy and tactics continued within the Hanoi leadership. 13 Ho Chi Minh continued to consult the Chinese. In May 1960, North Vietnamese and Chinese leaders held discussions in both Hanoi and Beijing over strategies to pursue in South Vietnam. Zhou Enlai and Deng Xiaoping argued that in general political struggle should be combined with armed conflict and that since specific conditions varied between the city and the countryside in South Vietnam, a flexible strategy of struggle should be adopted. In the city, the Chinese advised, political struggle would generally be recommended, but to deliver a final blow on the Diem regime, armed force would be necessary. Since there was an extensive mass base in the countryside, military struggle should be conducted there, but military struggle should include political struggle. 14 The Chinese policymakers, preoccupied with recovery from the economic disasters caused by the Great Leap Forward, clearly did not encourage a major commitment of resources from the North in support of a general offensive in the South at this juncture.

In September 1960, the VWP convened its Third National Congress, which made no major recommendations affecting existing

strategy but simply stated that disintegration was replacing stability in the South. To take advantage of this new situation, the Congress urged the party to carry out both political and military struggle in the South and called for an increase of support from the North. 15 This emphasis on a combination of political and military struggle in the South reflected to some degree the Chinese suggestion of caution.

In the spring of 1961, U.S President John F. Kennedy approved an increase in the Military Assistance and Advisory Group (MAAG) of 100 advisers and sent to Vietnam 400 Special Forces troops to train the South Vietnamese in counterinsurgency techniques. This escalation of U.S. involvement in Indochina aroused Chinese leaders' concern. During DRV Premier Pham Van Dong's visit to Beijing in June 1961, Mao expressed a general support for the waging of an armed struggle by the South Vietnamese people while Zhou Enlai continued to stress flexibility in tactics and the importance of “blending legal and illegal struggle and combining political and military approaches."16

1962 saw a major turning point in both U.S. involvement in Vietnam and in Chinese attitudes toward the conflict. In February, Washington established in Saigon the Military Assistance Command, Vietnam (MAC,V), to replace the MAAG. The Kennedy Administration coupled this move with a drastic increase in the number of American "advisers" and the amount of military hardware it was sending to the Diem regime, marking a new level of U.S. intervention in Vietnam.

That spring, an important debate broke out within the Chinese leadership over the estimation of a world war, the possibility of peaceful coexistence with capitalist countries, and the degree of China's support for national liberation movements. On February 27, Wang Jiaxiang, Director of the CCP Foreign Liaison Department, sent a letter to Zhou Enlai, Deng Xiaoping, and Chen Yi (the three PRC officials directly in charge of foreign policy), in which he criticized the tendency to overrate the danger of world war and to underestimate the possibility of peaceful coexistence with imperialism. In terms of support for national liberation movements, Wang emphasized restraint, calling attention to China's own economic problems and limitations in resources. On the issue of

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