This is not a book so much as a brief for the prosecution. A Policy of Provocation and Expansion is a dossier — "a collection of documents and articles, published in the Soviet press," in its own front matter's words — assembled by the Novosti Press Agency Publishing House, the Soviet state's export-propaganda arm, and shipped abroad in English to make one case against one defendant. The defendant is Maoist China; the charge is that its foreign policy is expansionist, chauvinist, and in league with imperialism. It is worth saying at the outset that a good deal of the charge is true, and that the anti-Stalinist left brought the same charge, in some places harder. What the reader has to watch is not whether the accusations land — several of them do — but whether the standard the book applies to Peking is ever, once, turned on Moscow. It is not. And in 1975 that omission is not a small one, because the accuser was, at that very moment, doing its own version of the thing.
Begin with what the book is, because the imprint and the date have both been mislabelled. This is a Novosti book, not a Progress one — "Novosti Press Agency Publishing House" on the title page and again in the copyright line, "Progress Publishers" nowhere in it. Novosti (APN) was the Soviet state news agency, and its publishing house turned out exactly this kind of thing: cheaply bound, quickly assembled, aimed at foreign opinion. There is no single author. The introduction is signed "B. Pavlov"; the pieces are a mixture of unsigned editorials from Pravda, Izvestia and the digest weekly Za rubezhom, official notes and statements of the Soviet Foreign Ministry, and signed articles by Soviet journalists and area specialists — Y. Kostikov, G. Apalin, M. Tisoyan, D. Volsky, V. Yaroslavtsev, F. Nikolayev, O. Borisov — with the writer Konstantin Simonov contributing an "on-the-spot" border report. Two Polish contributors (A. Galimarski, A. Wysocki) and one Mongolian (B. Dashtseren) supply the multinational veneer that this genre always wants: the quarrel is to look like the verdict of a camp, not of a single capital.
The date needs the same care the series has learned to give every Progress and Novosti spine. The copyright page reads 1975, and adds a line most of these books do not: "Editing completed on June 27, 1975." But the date of the contents is earlier. The freshest event anywhere in the book is the Chinese seizure of the Paracel Islands from Saigon in January 1974; the article-by-article count of Peking's anti-Soviet press runs to February 1974; the centrepiece is a Pravda editorial of 2 September 1964, answering Mao Tse-tung's July 1964 talk with a group of Japanese Socialists. This is a dossier of 1964–1974 material bound in mid-1975. That matters for what one is entitled to make of its silences.
It matters first for the book's own main target. The theory it sets out to demolish is not Mao's "theory of the three worlds" — Teng Hsiao-p'ing had announced that at the United Nations only in April 1974, and the phrase "three worlds" does not occur in the book at all. What the book attacks is the ancestor of that doctrine: the "theory of the intermediate zone," which it correctly dates to 1946 and traces through Mao's 1964 revision, in which "the USSR has entered into a plot with the United States to struggle for world domination" and the world is thereby resolved into a "Soviet–American" bloc and an "intermediate zone" of Asia, Africa, Latin America and most of the capitalist West. Against this the book restates the orthodox schema of "opposing social systems." That the book fights the 1946/1964 form rather than the 1974 one is a fossil of its real vintage; it is answering the China of the mid-sixties with clippings, and the reader should hold the actual calendar in mind.
It matters second — and here I have to correct the expectation this volume was commissioned against — for Angola. It would be tempting to convict the book of silence about the case that, within months of its appearance, became the definitive proof of everything it charges: China's training of Holden Roberto's FNLA in Zaire, its alignment with Mobutu, and its de facto collaboration with the CIA and, on the ground, the South African army. But the book closed in June 1975, before the Angolan war internationalised in the autumn. Angola, Zaire, Mobutu, the FNLA and UNITA are all absent, and their absence is chronology, not evasion — the house rule against banking a non-finding applies exactly here. The Angolan case belongs at the end of this essay, as the thing the book foretold and could not yet name, not in the middle as a suppression.
Section 3 of this series' brief — rescue what is usable — is not a formality in this volume, because the usable part is large. On China's conduct, the book is substantially correct, and its correctness is not Soviet special pleading: the Fourth International, reading the same events, reached the same judgements and printed them.
The single strongest passage is O. Borisov's closing catalogue of where the Maoist doctrine of the "two superpowers" had actually led China by 1974. Peking, he writes, "prevented the socialist countries from taking joint action in support of the Vietnamese people's struggle"; it "supported those who launched the bloody reprisals against the Sudanese Communist Party in 1971"; it "unconditionally sided with the Yahya Khan military regime of Pakistan when it tried to suppress the liberation movement of the people of Bangladesh"; and it "openly and defiantly supports the military-fascist junta in Chile and is developing economic relations with it." Every one of those is true. China did obstruct a united front on Vietnam; it did stand with Numeiri after the crushing of the Sudanese Communists; it did back Islamabad against the Bengalis in 1971; and after September 1973 it recognised and cultivated Pinochet's Chile while the left was being murdered in the stadiums. The Maoist doctrine that made the Soviet Union the "main enemy" had carried Peking, by the middle of the decade, into open alignment with reaction against national-liberation movements — and this was the Fourth International's charge too. Livio Maitan and Intercontinental Press had been documenting it for years; the seizure of the Paracels from a fellow Vietnamese state, which the book treats at length and rightly regards as naked, was condemned across the anti-Stalinist left as well.
The book's negotiations section — A. Wysocki's long piece and Borisov's finale — also holds up on its own terms, and a critic should concede it. The Soviet Union did repeatedly propose, through the late sixties and early seventies, a non-aggression treaty, a treaty on the non-use of force, and a top-level meeting; China did stall the border talks that had been running in Peking since October 1969. On the legal merits the Soviet position was the stronger: the Sino-Soviet frontier was fixed by treaty, and — the book's best documentary point — the Chinese leadership had itself said so, Mao telling the Seventh Congress of the CPC in 1945 that "the Soviet Union was the first to renounce the unequal treaties and to conclude new, equal treaties with China," and repeating it in Moscow in 1949. A territorial claim advanced in the 1960s against borders one endorsed in the 1940s is a claim of convenience, and the book is entitled to say so.
Give it, too, its correct calls of detail. The book is right that Peking had for years circulated schoolbook maps — Liu Pei-hua's Short History of Modern China (1954), the Peking World Atlas (1972) — colouring vast tracts of the USSR, Mongolia, India and South-East Asia as "age-old Chinese territory." It is right that Mao's 1964 talk laid explicit claim to some 1.5 million square kilometres of Soviet land, and it quotes him doing it: "About a hundred years ago the area to the east of Baikal became the territory of Russia … We have not yet presented a bill for this list!" And it is right, against Maoist rhetoric, to defend the independence of the Mongolian People's Republic, which Peking would have folded back into China — a genuinely anti-annexationist stand, and one of the few places the book's professed principle and its object coincide.
Now the reflexivity test this series applies to every foreign-policy volume, in its sharpened form: error is admissible; the category is not. A book may concede that its own side blundered on a date or a policy and still never let the classification cross the border. This one keeps that rule perfectly.
The whole vocabulary of the indictment — "great-power chauvinism," "expansion," "hegemony," "provocation," "interference in the domestic affairs" of neighbours, "violation of sovereignty" — is spent on China and never on the USSR. That would be unremarkable in a book with no comparison to hand. But the comparison is not merely to hand; it is in the same twelve months as the book's central event. The border clashes on the Ussuri that the volume dwells on happened in March 1969. The Warsaw Pact invasion of Czechoslovakia — five armies crossing a socialist neighbour's frontier to reverse its internal course — had happened in August 1968, seven months earlier. In a book whose subject is precisely one great power's armed interference in the affairs of its neighbours, the word Czechoslovakia occurs zero times. Hungary occurs zero times. The phrase "limited sovereignty" — the doctrine actually proclaimed to justify the 1968 invasion, and then, as we shall see, floated against China — occurs zero times. These are not anachronistic absences: the invasion was recent, notorious, and squarely on the book's own theme. The author had the fact and every reason to weigh it, and left it out.
The affirmative side of the same blindness is on open display in the territorial argument. The book concedes, disarmingly, that "the tsarist government carried out a predatory policy just as the Chinese emperors themselves did to the extent of their abilities." Predation is admissible — safely, because it is dead. But the Soviet state that inherited the tsars' Amur, Ussuri and Central Asian frontiers is declared "an absolutely new state formation" whose borders were formed "as a result of the voluntary expression of the will of the peoples on the basis of the principle of free self-determination of nations." The same border the tsars drew by conquest becomes, under new management, an expression of the popular will — while it is China that is chauvinist for questioning it. The move is completed over the Kuril Islands, which the USSR took at the end of the Second World War: the book defends the acquisition frankly, on grounds of security against a future Japanese threat, and concludes that "there are no, nor can there be, any legal or moral grounds for claims to the Kuril Islands." Security necessity, historic right, the needs of a great power in a dangerous neighbourhood — every justification the book denies to Peking, it grants to Moscow, in the same pages.
The border narrative itself is a one-sided dossier. The volume presents the Ussuri fighting of March 1969, and the August 1969 clash at Zhalanashkol in Kazakhstan, as premeditated and unprovoked Chinese aggression, and only that. The historiography has since moved and the picture is now two-sided: the ambush of 2 March at Zhenbao/Damansky is generally attributed to a Chinese plan, but the far heavier engagement of 15 March was a Soviet armoured and artillery counter-blow, and the August fighting in Kazakhstan is now read as Soviet-initiated. A reader is entitled to the Soviet account; this book offers no other, and its documents are chosen to close the question rather than open it.
Then there is the sharpest single contradiction, and it is exactly contemporaneous with the book's material. Borisov assures the reader that "the Soviet Union does not deal in threats and territorial expansion," and the volume states flatly that "in the Soviet Union warmongering is prohibited by law." Yet in the summer and autumn of 1969 — the very crisis the book documents — Soviet channels were making precisely a threat of the gravest kind. The Soviet journalist Victor Louis, long used for unattributable messages, floated in the Western press the extension of the Czechoslovak doctrine to China and open speculation about a strike on Lop Nor, China's nuclear centre. The Fourth International caught it as it happened. Pierre Frank, in "Concerning 'Limited Sovereignty'" (Intercontinental Press, 17 November 1969), quoted the Louis dispatch on whether Moscow "will dare to attack Lop Nor, China's nuclear center," and set it beside the doctrine used over Prague. A book insisting that its state does not deal in threats had, in the year of its own central event, a nuclear threat to account for and did not.
The book even supplies its own tell. It reports, as the summit of Maoist absurdity, that Mao "'wrote off' the Soviet Union as a socialist state and transferred it to a category of 'social-imperialist' powers," and it lists "social-imperialism" among the "propaganda clichés" that Peking's atlas shares with "the radio stations and press of the imperialist states." The Maoist label — which implied capitalism restored — was wrong, and our tradition never accepted it. But the reflex is instructive: the book's own counter-charge against China is "social-chauvinism" and "hegemonism," the mirror epithets, and the two bureaucracies spent the decade trading the same words. The one thing neither could do was ask the question of itself.
A smaller confirmation, for the record, since this series now tests for it: "peaceful co-existence" appears five times and not once inside a quotation from Lenin — the doctrine is asserted in the CPSU's voice and attributed to Congress resolutions, as in every foreign-policy volume the series has measured. More telling than the missing pedigree is the use to which the phrase is put here: the book reports that the USSR offered to conduct relations with China "on the basis of peaceful co-existence" if Peking "did not consider it possible to go further" — that is, it proposed to place its dealings with a fellow socialist state on the footing doctrinally reserved for relations between opposing systems. Beneath the polemic, the socialist camp the book invokes has already ceased to exist.
The Fourth International answered these arguments as they appeared, and the answer is not that China was innocent. It is that the charge was true of both parties and that only one of them could say so. When the Soviet Union cut off all aid to China in 1960, in the middle of near-famine, the FI's Ninth World Congress called it "a stab in the back of the Chinese revolution and the Chinese people," and laid "the historic responsibility for breaking up the Sino-Soviet alliance … at the door of the Kremlin" (Intercontinental Press, vol. 7 no. 26, 14 July 1969). It condemned Peking's alignments with reaction — Chile, Pakistan, the retreat from Vietnam — and it condemned Moscow's invasion of Czechoslovakia and its nuclear sabre-rattling over Lop Nor, from the same tradition, in the same years.
The cleanest model of what this book cannot do is the Fourth International's own African review, Africa in Struggle, and Intercontinental Press, writing on Angola in 1975–76 — the case the Novosti volume closed too early to reach. There the FI documented, in detail, exactly the Chinese collusion with imperialism that this book charges in the abstract: Peking's dispatch of military instructors to Kinshasa from the summer of 1974 to train Holden Roberto's FNLA, its embrace of Mobutu, its objective partnership with the CIA and the South African intervention. It gave the book's thesis chapter and verse. And in the same breath — this is the whole difference — it refused to spare its own side. "It is clear," Intercontinental Press wrote, "that a revolutionary-Marxist position in the Angolan civil war cannot be automatically derived from the Soviet and Cuban intervention in behalf of the MPLA, or from the Chinese and North Korean intervention in behalf of the UNITA or the FNLA" (vol. 14 no. 3, 26 January 1976). That is a category that turns on the speaker. The Novosti book, published as the USSR prepared to airlift Cuban troops into Angola and to arm the Ethiopian Derg — great-power intervention on a scale that dwarfed anything it attributes to Peking — could level "expansion" and "hegemonism" at China precisely because those words, in its hands, could never come home.
So read the book for its dossier, which is real. China's territorial cartography, its wrecking of united action on Vietnam, its seizure of the Paracels, its friendships with Yahya Khan and Pinochet, its stalling of the border talks — these are facts, and the volume marshals them competently. The Maoist foreign policy of the mid-1970s deserved most of what it got here, and got worse, deservedly, from the left the book would never quote. What the volume cannot do is the one thing that would make its indictment a principle rather than a weapon: apply its own words — chauvinism, expansion, interference, the threat of force against a neighbour — to the state whose press agency printed them. The two questions this series puts to every such book are whether the accusation is cashed into an act that could be shown not to have happened, and whether the category could ever apply to the author's own side. On the first the book scores well, better than most of its neighbours on the shelf. On the second the answer is the one that convicts it. Czechoslovakia was eleven months in the past, Lop Nor a live threat, Angola a season away, and none of them could be named.