The Quarrelling Brothers: New Chinese Archives and a ... - CiteSeerX

The Bucharest Conference 1960: Tit for TatBelieving that putting more pressure on Beijing might exploit the differencesbetween Mao and his colleagues and force Mao to change his domestic and internationalpolicies, Khrushchev took steps to try to bring China into submission. 112 The Sovietleader soon prepared two “surprise attacks:” to use the forthcoming Bucharest conferenceto organize a siege against China, and to withdraw Soviet experts from China.On 2 June, Beijing received a letter from the CC CPSU that suggested using theThird Congress of the Romanian Communist Party as an occasion to hold a conference ofcommunist parties in Bucharest to exchange opinions about the international situation.Deng Xiaoping presided over a meeting of the central secretariat on June 4 to discuss theCC CPSU letter. Deng and his colleagues concluded that the CPSU’s intention in holdinga conference was to support (baojia) Khrushchev in view of the difficulties he faced atthis time. “We can give him such support,” the central secretariat stated in its opinionsummarizing the meeting, because “if Khrushchev collapses at present, Soviet societymight fall into chaos, and this will be of no benefit to the whole situation (daju).” “Weconsider him to be a half-revisionist, not yet a full-fledged revisionist, and the possibilityof [his] changing in a good direction cannot be ruled out,” the opinion stated. The centralsecretariat, however, did not neglect another possibility, that is, Khrushchev might havebelieved China to be causing trouble and disrupting his effort to reach a compromise withthe West. “[We] have to recognize that there is the possibility that they are going to try topunish us in order to protect Khrushchev,” the central secretariat stated. 113Deng then flew to Shanghai to brief Mao about the central secretariat’s appraisal.112 Chen Jian, Mao’s China and the Cold War, p. 82.113 Wu Lengxi, Shinian lunzhan, p. 273-274.37