KENNEDY’S AGGRESSION IS MEETING WITH GROWING REVULSION: 1962 POSTER
AUGUST 22, 2014 SCOTT D. SELIGMAN
by Scott D. Seligman
China didn’t have a lot of friends in 1962. For a host of reasons, it had already split with the Soviet Union, which had drifted away from Stalinist orthodoxy under Premier Nikita Khrushchev and had begun to advocate peaceful coexistence with capitalist countries. Chairman Mao Zedong had condemned “Soviet revisionism” and challenged Russia’s traditional leadership of the world communist movement, reaching out to emerging countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America and attempting to position the PRC as their champion.
Nor did China have any use for the capitalist West. “On the question of how to deal with imperialism and all reactionaries,” the People’s Daily asserted in that year, “the Chinese Communist Party has always maintained that one should despise them strategically but take full account of them tactically.” And by the early 1960s, Beijing was taking full account of a litany of American transgressions, some of which were hitting quite close to home.
The PRC had clashed with the United States in the Taiwan Strait in 1958, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent the Seventh Fleet to aid the Nationalist government in its defense of the offshore islands of Quemoy (Jinmen) and Matsu (Mazu). And when President John F. Kennedy escalated American involvement in the Vietnam War, China began arming the North Vietnamese. Everywhere Mao looked, America seemed to be pursuing interests antithetical to those espoused by China.