ABSTRACT
China was to ‘unite’ with the Soviet Union; it should have an ‘equal relationship’ with the Soviet Union; it should ‘compare’ its experiences with those of the Soviet Union; it should ‘learn from’ the Soviet Union. The first foreign policy crisis of the new People’s Republic was brought about not by the United States but by the Soviet Union, and in later years Mao Zedong frequently harked back to his lengthy negotiations with Stalin in the winter of 1949–1950. Even the Korean war was a form of ‘struggle’ by proxy with the Soviet Union through which a measure of ‘unity’ – unattainable since the civil war had begun in 1946-was finally achieved: The Chinese revolution succeeded against the wishes of Stalin. In China as in the Soviet Union the central problem was how to raise the level of ownership in the countryside from the collective to that of the whole people.
