TNAG-2702-FCO40-3908-Memoirs-of-Sir-Percy-Cradock--diplomat-and-sinologist-1993 — Page 101

Enlai's charm offensive at the Afro-Asian Conference at

Bandung in 1955, did not survive policy changes inside China.

Mao Zedong, who had seemed to encourage freer political

comment with his slogan "Let a hundred flowers bloom, a

hundred schools of thought contend", was, as is usual with

Communist leaders in like circumstances, shocked and alarmed

at the response he evoked. He reacted with a fierce anti-

rightist campaign in 1957. The Chinese intellectual, again as

is usual, was caught by the rapid alternation of warm and cold

winds blowing from the centre. Chinese policies at home and

abroad grew more militant.

At the same time fissures began to appear in the monolith

of Sino-Soviet unity. Mao had come to acquire greater self-

confidence with the death of Stalin. He probably felt he had

Khruschev's measure, though he was disturbed by the content,

and the implications, of Khruschev's secret

denouncing

Stalin, in 1956. He claimed that

speech,

Soviet

achievements in space and rocketry meant, as he put it, that

now "the East wind prevails over the West". His tone with the

Russians grew more assertive and there were Chinese demands

for Soviet assistance with the creation of a Chinese fleet and

the provision of nuclear weapons. Khruschev was given no

warning of Chinese plans to bombard the off-shore island of

Quemoy (still garrisoned by Nationalists) in 1958. The

strains in the relationship, always latent, began to show,

even to the outside world. And at home Mao pushed on,

regardless of his colleagues and of Soviet displeasure, into

the adventure, and disaster, of the People's Communes and the

Great Leap Forward.