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In the summer of 1949, Mao Zedong announced the principle of new Chinese foreign policy - "leaning to one side." China would seek an alliance with the Soviet Union and fight against the US and its Western allies. At a first look, this announcement came as little surprise since the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) shared the same ideology as the Soviet government, and the latter had expressed its moral support, if not direct military support, for the CCP since it was founded in 1921. However, was ideology the main factor bringing China and the Soviet Union together?
Based on newly released documents detailing negotiations between Mao and Stalin for the alliance in 1949 and 1950, Sergei Goncharov, John Lewis and Litai Xue note that:
On balance, a striking feature of Mao and Stalin in camera is that neither was motivated by the ideology that so characterized their public declarations of the period... Their private communications mostly carried a message of naked military-political interests and a priority for national security.12
Differences between Mao and Stalin had existed long before the 1950s. The problem was partly concerned with the application of Marx-Leninist theory to China's particular situation, but it was also because Mao did not want the CCP to be a puppet of the Soviet Union. Mao was a Chinese nationalist first and foremost. Chen Jian notes "Mao's concept of revolution reflected his generation's emotional commitment to China's national liberation as well as of its longing for China to take a central position in world politics."13 As early as the Yan'an period (the mid-1930s to the mid-1940s), Mao had urged those cadres and students trained in the Soviet Union to have "Chinese style and attitude."14
Only five years before the "leaning to one side" principle was announced, Mao had quite a different idea about the future direction of the CCP's foreign policy. In 1944, Mao told a visiting American official that "China must industrialize. This can be done - in China - only by free enterprise and with the aid of foreign capital. Chinese and American interests are correlated and similar. They fit together economically and politically. We can and must work together."15 In January 1945 Mao even expressed a desire to...