Abstract
We know many more details today about the Cold War era of the Sino-Soviet conflict than we did at the time. But despite its pretensions to general empirical theory, the discipline of political science remains focused largely on current events, and the conflict, when it is considered at all, is largely within the province of historians. The study by Mingjiang Li redresses the balance, viewing the dispute in the context of a general empirical theory.
Li’s theoretical prism is the concept of the two-level game. A country’s rulers must both secure the state’s interest against foreigners and simultaneously preserve their position against domestic rivals. In the case of the Sino-Soviet relationship, this produced an ‘ideological dilemma’ (presumably analogous to the security dilemma). Li discusses this mainly from the Chinese perspective, although he postulates a similar process on the Soviet side. Mao Zedong folded his critique of Soviet ‘revisionism’ into his campaign against what he considered ‘capitalist roaders’ in the Party, resulting in a bumptious, contentious foreign policy, with Mao thwarting any attempt to moderate relations either with the United States or the Soviet Union. Periods of radicalism in domestic policy coincided with militancy in foreign policy, often to the detriment of what an outsider might consider the national interest.
At the time, much commentary characterized the dispute as ideological, and especially until around 1970, the main substance of the argument centred on how correctly to interpret various pronouncements of Lenin on the international system. Some realists may be inclined to look at the ideological themes as so much froth, a mere matter of style. It would seem, however, that without the ideological affinity the Sino-Soviet alliance would not have formed in the first place, and certainly would not have taken the form that it did; and the claims of each side to have the correct understanding of the laws of historical development built upon shared assumptions and methods of analysis must have exacerbated the bitterness of the conflict. Li’s analysis of the function of ideology is elegant and convincing. Indeed it is reminiscent of the reflections of the early reform era on where relations with the Soviet Union went wrong, with the post-Mao leadership asserting that while there were valid issues of principle at stake in the criticism of revisionism, not to speak of Soviet great-power arrogance, the overheated ‘leftist’ domestic atmosphere raised the conflict to a dangerous and unreasonable level.
Li would not claim that ideology was a sufficient condition for the conflict. His book does not, by design, go deeply into possible structural reasons for the conflict. The most basic realistic factor is probably that expounded by Franz Schurmann in the 1970s, that the bipolar confrontation of powers armed with nuclear weapons would leave each power inclined to give less priority to the interests of its allies than to avoiding major war with the other (with the result that China would be left vulnerable to US pressure). Li’s analysis, then, may not give sufficient attention to the impact of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis and the subsequent efforts by the Americans and Russians to defuse the nuclear confrontation – all of which could be taken to vindicate the Maoist position that the Soviet rulers were indeed, fools and cowards: revisionists.
Li’s book is much more than an exercise in theory. It has a wealth of information on the conduct of the ideological debate and of the decision-making process on the Chinese side. Li dates the onset of the friction rather later than most authorities would have it; but, be that as it may, trouble between the two sides had been building up for a long time.
Li says his work responds to criticisms of political scientists about the neglect of general theory in the work of area specialists. Area studies, to be sure, are not in good odour these days; and area-specific studies certainly require a general framework (such as the two-person game) to order the data and generate compelling explanations. Yet one still wonders whether, beyond a certain point, the search for theoretical rigour amounts to a spinning of wheels, and how much the elaboration of abstract theory will ever contribute to our understanding of politics. Li’s book is one more confirmation that while general theory holds the academic sceptre, area studies continue to supply the intellectual meat.