I’m finishing the last episode of S5 now, and I’ll be fully caught up on this series. Between Afghanistan and Cambodia, China’s willingness to play ball with the US and its agenda is frustrating to learn.
It leaves me wanting to learn more about the Sino/Soviet split. The way this division manifested really aligned China with some dark forces, it would seem.
I also imagine the process of “normalization” with the US plays a huge role in the way this history unfolds as well.
It makes me wonder what they knew about The Khmer Rouge’s operations. I was left with the impression, based on how the history was laid out, that China was aware of just how aggressive and bloody the Khmer Rouge’s policies were.
Something about that stretch of time between 79 and 89 seems to have resulted in a bunch of weird geopolitical stuff.
Need to finish this episode, I guess.
I do actually think that the PRC can’t legitimately claim to be opposed to revisionism and support the Khmer Rouge and the United States against other communists. I just don’t accept that their opposition to revisionism was legitimate in that context. Whatever issues they had with revisionism were clearly secondary to other concerns and one of those concerns was clearly just spiting the Soviets. I, in a way, am claiming that at least one of the stated motivations given by representatives of the PRC was a lie.
But you’re right that I don’t think they were lying about their problem with being viewed essentially as secondary to the “Real” soviet revolution, and I do think this was a legitimate complaint to have. But as you say, I find their actions in response to this to be deeply unjustified.
I think the chauvinism is ultimately much, much more important and frankly deserves more blame for the collapse of the Soviet Bloc than it is given in discussions. The USSR was the lynch pin of the socialist world. Every other country leaned on it intensely, and they were all burned horribly by it when the CPSU internally capitulated (which happened before the USSR actually fell). What are you supposed to do in the face of the USSR just abandoning their mission if you’re an aligned socialist government that depends on them? Both economically and politically, the USSR’s allies were leaned precariously against what they thought was a stable base, a superpower that held itself up as the headquarters of the revolution and an alternative to the west.
The post-WW2 European socialist states followed Gorbachev’s lead in capitulating. Parties in post-colonial states with actual revolutions were faced with economic devastation, ideological abandonment by the superpower that was their beacon, and inevitably had to liberalize and integrate with the global system since there was no longer a Soviet-led alternative.
I would also say that the post-Stalin Soviet union’s unequal attitude towards its allies was in part a result of the party losing ideological focus and getting too deep into the realpolitik of the cold war, but engaging in similar realpolitik after splitting didn’t do Mao any favors. I would actually put forward a sort of “two revisionisms” theory, that post-split China, Albania, and other “anti-revisionists” are fundamentally a second type of revisionist, who has retooled the ideology to center defeating revisionism.