Response to Michael Sheng's Review of The Soviet Union and Communist China, 1945-1950

The reviewer likes schools of thought. This observation, among other things, can be derived from the fact that he devotes nearly one fourth of his review to the description of schools that, directly or indirectly, have to do with the topic of my book: the "lost China" school, the revisionist "lost chance in China" school, and—last but not least—his own "anti-revisionist" school (my term), which he created together with the others. I would not say that schools of thought are useless. They can help to organize the often contradictory thoughts resulting from the study of the enormous amount of often inconsistent sources that the historian has to go through when writing a book.

But schools of thought can, on the other hand, hinder the cognitive process. This may happen when, for instance, the instrumental character of such schools is neglected, when the ideas derived from such schools are made absolute, or when one does not make it clear for which historical periods the theories of the respective schools should be valid. To make a long story short: hypotheses, theses, theories, and schools of thought are simply methodological tools that can, if wisely and cautiously used, help us to come closer to the historical truth.

My impression is that the reviewer is not always aware of the dangers connected with thinking in terms of his school. This is evident, just to give one example, when it comes to the question of whether, for Stalin and Mao, communist ideology or national interests were the motive in dealing with each other. Obviously the reviewer expects me to choose one or the other (see his comments on chapter 2). He does so, although before that he had agreed to my thesis that there existed a common Marxist-Leninist ideology and conflicting policy interests, and that both of these influenced the decision making of the two sides. I cannot explain the reviewer's inconsistency. Anyhow, if he believes that Stalin and Mao, due to their common ideological ideals, pursued more or less the same political goals, then this is possibly a result of making the "anti-revisionist" school of thought absolute. This approach would be simplistic, one-dimensional.

I am not too familiar with the "anti-revisionist" school. I did not read most of the books of its protagonists that the reviewer quotes in his note 4. After twenty-five years of research and having finished the manuscript for the German edition of my book in 1997, I left the field of Sino-Soviet relations and switched to other topics. So the American edition is just the translation of the German book. But whether or not the reviewer's critical remarks about some of my conclusions are an inevitable outcome of his strict thinking in terms of the school, they do not convince me.

The reviewer tends to believe that "Stalin saw a CCP-controlled China as the best scenario for Soviet security interests." He gives us the impression that he thinks that this was always so, from the beginning to the end. I, however, maintain that, from the 1920s up to the second half of the 1950s, it was Stalin's idea that the KMT, as the strongest progressive political force in the country, would best be able to defeat the reactionary warlords, unify China, remove it from any (non-Soviet) influence, and thus prepare it, if unintentionally, for the Communist seizure of power, which the CCP would carry out under Soviet direction (my book, p. 4). The reviewer, however, fails to make the distinction between a short-term and a long-term Soviet strategy and thus comes to a wrong conclusion. Moreover, it goes without saying that Stalin intended to control China, after the victory of the CCP, as he came to control the Eastern European satellite states of the Soviet Union. Mao foresaw this danger already in 1936 when he said that the CCP was certainly not fighting for an emancipated China in order to turn the country over to Moscow (book, p. 8).

The evidence supporting my...