alternatehistory.com

While reading John Garver's "Protracted Contest: Sino-Indian Rivalry
in the Twentieth Century," I caught this excerpt on a little known
chapter (to me at least) of Maoist foreign policy. It's one time high-
level of support to the Burmese communist party.

China and the Communist Party of Burma


From 1949 until 1989 Beijing followed a dual-track approach in its
relations with Burma. One track was normal state-to-state relations
with the government of Burma. A second track was fraternal relations
between the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) ruling China and the
Communist Party of Burma, which was in insurrection against the
government of Burma from 1948 until 1989—a record making it the
longest-lived communist insurgency in the world. The particular
balance between these two tracks at any point in time was a major
characteristic of Chinese policy toward Burma. Following a military
takeover in Burma in 1962, the CCP began actively supporting the CPB
insurgency, and during the late 1960s and early 1970s its assistance
to the CPB became quite substantial. Ultimately, the Burmese
revolution would rank only behind the Korean and Vietnamese
revolutions in terms of levels of Chinese assistance. By the 1980s,
however, Beijing was trying to shut down the CPB insurgency and
ultimately played an important role in that process. By 1990 the
insurgency was over, its leaders comfortably retired in China.
Considering the scope and underlying logic of China’s links to the CPB
is thus essential to understanding Chinese policy toward Burma.


Substantial CCP support for the CPB insurgency did not begin until
1962 military coup. Although close links between the two parties
began in the early 1950s, with most of the top leadership of the CPB
living in safe sanctuary in China, it was not until the 1962 coup that
the CCP concluded propitious conditions mandated support for the
Burmese revolution. Having decided to supportthe CPB’s insurgency,
the CCP adopted a multifaceted and long-term plan. In August 1962 the
CPB was allowed to begin printing revolutionary propaganda in Beijing
for distribution inside Burma. A new CPB leadership group was set up
in Beijing at the end of 1963 that to provide leadership for the
revolutionary offensive. The paramount leader was Thakin Ba Thein
Tin, a half-Chinese man who had joined the CPB in 1939, fled to China
in 1953, and resided there until 1978. A group was also established
to survey possible infiltration routes from Yunnan into northeast
Burma. China was then constructing a network of asphalt-surfaced
roads into the border regions of Yunnan, and PLA trucks would soon be
able to deliver supplies over those roads to forward logistics
depots. The CCP also recruited a hardened military core for the new
CPB drive, including several hundred Kachin former insurgents who had
fled to China in the early 1950s to take up farming in Guizhou
province. In early 1963 this group of former peasant soldiers, who
were used to the hardships of a guerrilla’s life and had practical
military skills, was recruited, armed, retrained and given a political
education by CPB cadre. Inside Burma small cells of ethnic Chinese
communists were put in touch with the CPB for the first time, further
broadening the scope of the CPB organization. During 1967 the CPB
army was further strengthened by the assignment of PLA advisors,
called “volunteers,” to all major CPB units. These advisors served in
Burma with the CPB forces until 1979. In 1967 several thousand young
Chinese Red Guards were also recruited to fight for the CPB. These
young Chinese men provided the bulk of the CPB fighting forces from
1968 until about 1973. By the end of 1967 a CPB invasion force was
concentrated in southwestern Yunnan, well armed with Chinese weapons
and equipment.


Political conditions for the launching of the carefully prepared CPB
offensive were created in 1967. In the middle of that year Chinese
diplomatic personnel in Rangoon became involved in encouraging Maoist
activity among ethnic Chinese students. A backlash soon developed,
and Burmese mobs launched pogroms against Burma’s ethnic Chinese
minority. Beijing reacted strongly, and diplomatic relations
ruptured. Beijing began calling openly for the overthrow of the
Rangoon government.


The CPB offensive began in January 1968 with a thrust down the Burma
road from Yunnan by a powerful, conventionally organized military
force. The objective was seizure of Mandalay, which was to serve as
the capital of a liberated base area in northern Burma. The CPB
invasion army was well armed with modern weapons, including field
artillery and antiaircraft guns pulled by tractors, and field
communications systems operated by Chinese volunteers. Hospital care
for wounded soldiers was provided inside China. The CPB invasion army
had initial success. For the first time in Burma’s civil wars the
Burmese army found itself outgunned and sometimes even outnumbered.
The CPB force soon came into conflict, however, with Kachin rebel
forces under the command of the Kachin Independence army (KIA). Heavy
fighting developed between the KIA and CPB, which forced the latter to
halt its advance on Mandalay. The Burmese army was too weak to push
the powerful CPB back into China and adopted a policy of strategic
defense along the Salween River.


After five years of heavy fighting (1968-72) the CPB had established a
20,000-square kilometer base area stretching along the border with
China, from the Burmese-Laotian frontier northward to where the Burma
road crosses into Burma. The CPB tried again to push west of the
Salween in late 1973 but was defeated by Burmese army forces in a
pitched battle that raged for forty-two days and in which the CPB
employed human wave assaults. Had Mandalay been taken and Chinese
arms been provided to new armies raised from the area between that
city and the Chinese border, Rangoon’s forces in north Burma would
have been isolated. Such a scenario does not account, of course, for
the tenacious ethnic insurgencies of that region. Various analysts of
the CPB conclude that its leaders did not adequately comprehend the
depth of ethnic loyalties in Burma. Presumably, the CPB’s CCP comrades
shared these misunderstandings. Although it was apparent by the
mid-1970s that the CPB was not going to secure control of upper Burma,
it remained the most powerful armed challenge to Rangoon into the
1980s. Beijing gave the CPB a monopoly franchise on trade with China
and license to purchase weapons in China. It remained the best-armed
and – supplied of Burma’s insurgencies. During the 1970s some 67
percent of the CPB’s annual budget came from its monopoly on border
trade with China.


From 1962 through 1989 China pursued a two-track policy toward Burma,
except for three years—
From mid-1967 through 1970—when it abandoned the government-to-
government track. Normal diplomatic relations were restored by
mid-1971, however, when Ne Win visited Beijing for talks. Two months
later Beijing extended the repayment period for a 1961 loan.


Chinese support for the CPB quickly declined as Deng Xiaoping
consolidated power in the late 1970s. Deng had a much more jaundiced
view than Mao of the utility of foreign revolutionary movements to
China.Deng also placed far greater emphasis on government-to-
government cooperation as a wayof creating international conditions
favorable to China’s efforts to enter the world economy. Moreover,
during the intense struggle between Maoist radicals and radicals and
moderates in China in 1976-78, the PB made the mistake of aligning
with the radicals. Once Deng consolidated power in late 1978 the CPB
quickly fell silent about developments in China. Peking Review also
ceased reporting on CPB advances in side Burma. Ne Win was quick to
exploit the rift between Beijing and the CPB, twice hosting visits by
Deng Xiaoping to Burma in 1978. During the course of that year China
shut down the CPB radio station that had been broadcasting from Yunnan
since 1971, closed the Beijing office of the CPB, forced the entire
leadership of the CPB to move to Panghsang just inside Burma, and
recalled the Chinese “volunteers” still serving with the CPB. Ne Win
reciprocated Beijing’s moves in September 1979, when Burma withdrew
from the nonaligned movement as Vietnam and Cuba began pushing that
movement to accept the USSR as the “natural ally” of the developing
countries. Burma also voted with Beijing in the United Nations in
favor of seating the Pol Pot regime of Cambodia and against the
Vietnam-installed of Kampuchea. Of course, this latter move was also
a reflection of Rangoon’s traditional aversion to stronger nations
imposing their will on weaker ones.


What were the broad objectives of the two tracks of China’s Burma
policy? The key objective of the state-to-state track seems to have
been to exclude from Burma the presence of any power hostile to China.
The key to this, Beijing concluded, was carefully avoiding any
pressure or threat to Rangoon. On issue after issue Beijing carefully
demonstrated to Rangoon that China posed no threat to Burma. The
implicit quid pro quo on the Kuomintang (KMT) remnant issue and CIA
covert operations against China from the Shan states; on the overseas
Chinese issue; with Beijing’s generous approach toward the resolution
of the border issue; and with China’s fairly substantial aid program
to Burma. The implicit quid pro quo from Burma for this Chinese
friendship was exclusion of a hostile third-power presence from Burma.
Rangoon seems to have understood quite well the implicit terms of this
relationship and to have respected China’s basic security interests
with care. Rangoon abstained from actions that might challenge China’s
security.


Why did CCP decide to support the CPB insurgency? We must view Mao’s
1962 decision to support the CPB in the context of the intensifying
struggle between the Chinese and Soviet communist parties over the
direction of the world communist movement. By supporting the CPB—
along with many other revolutionary movements in the early 1960s—Mao
was putting into practice his “correct revolutionary line,” whose
success, he anticpated, would demonstrate the “incorrectness” of the
Soviet “revisionist” line while strengthening the global struggle
against U.S. imperialism. Korea, Vietnam and Burma, the three major
recipients of CCP “fraternal support” were all traditional Chinese
tributaries that happened to lie on sensitive approaches to China’s
territory. By rendering strong fraternal support to the revolutionary
movements of these three countries, Mao hoped to establish fraternal
states in these areas, bound to the PRC by similar political systems
and ideologies, grateful to China for its support, and looking to
China for protection. Chinese-supported revolutionary movements in
Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia were making substantial advances during the
1960s and early 1970s. Presumably, part or all of Burma was to be
added to the belt of the communist-ruled, China-friendly states being
constructed along China’s southern borders.
To come back to India-Chinese relations, and assuming that this
reconstruction of mao’s objectives is correct, had Mao succeeded and
the CPB taken over a large part or all of Burma, that new state might
have come into close alignment with China.
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