The year 1956 marks a turning point in the relations between the socialist world and China. In February, at the 20th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, Khrushchev destroyed Stalin's cult by condemning his crimes. De-Stalinization was initiated in the Soviet Union, but in a matter of months it shook the unity of the socialist camp. By autumn, discontent grew and Stalin's empire was threatened with collapse. In China, Mao Zedong's position also weakened, but by mid-1957 the Chinese leader was able to regain control and consolidate his power at home and increase China's influence within the socialist camp.
In 1956, the Chinese leadership followed the events in Eastern Europe with great attention. The Hungarian revolution clearly demonstrated for Mao the importance and necessity of a strong grip on the people, which could bring about not only success or failure of socialist reconstruction, but could also influence the maintenance of the Party's power. In September, the Communist Party of China's Eighth Congress declared that it was time to turn “from revolution to reconstruction,” that the revolutionary period was basically over, and that the country faced the new period of socialist reconstruction. Zhu Dandan argues that it was under the influence of the Hungarian Revolution and the fear of Hungarian-style revolts in China that Mao returned to the line of class struggle in 1957.
The present volume, which has grown out of the author's PhD dissertation, consists of four chapters. First, Zhu gives an overview of how the Chinese Communist leadership transplanted the Stalinist model to China and how Mao's radical programme of state reconstruction gained dominance within the Chinese Communists' policies between the establishment of the PRC in 1949 and 1956. In chapter two, she outlines Sino-Soviet bloc relations before and after the CPSU's 20th Congress, the domestic developments in Poland and Hungary, and China's reactions to the Polish events in the course of the year. For Mao, Zhu argues, developments in the Soviet Union and in Eastern Europe provided an opportunity to strengthen China's position within the international communist movement. Chapter three deals with China's political and diplomatic involvement on the Hungarian crisis, focusing on the Chinese delegation's activities in Moscow between 23 and 31 October 1956. She reinforces the conclusion of earlier studies that China played an important role in the Soviet decision to issue a declaration on 30 October in which Moscow assured its allies that it would respect the principles of full equality, their territorial integrity and state sovereignty, as well as non-interference in one another's domestic affairs. Zhu claims that although Mao still did not feel his country “was ready to displace Moscow as the strategic center of the world proletarian revolution by October 1956” (pp. 190–191), the declaration represented “a significant step forward in the Chinese quest for equality of standing with the Soviet party, a goal it had pursued since the establishment of the PRC” (p. 168). Nevertheless, she agrees with those, including this reviewer, who argue that the “Chinese side did not overall play a significant role” (p. 192) in changing the Soviet attitude on 31 October in favour of an armed intervention.
Chapter four describes Chinese domestic developments in the months following the Hungarian Revolution, including the re-launch of the Hundred Flowers campaign in the spring of 1957 followed by the Anti-Rightist campaign which resulted in the persecution of over half a million people, about one-tenth of the Chinese intelligentsia. The author argues that the 1956 Hungarian events had a profound impact on China's international policies, but more importantly, they led to dramatic changes in Chinese domestic politics orchestrated by Mao. As she puts it, “the most important lesson that the Chairman and his successors learned from Hungary was the risks of surrendering any measure of political and ideological control, however limited, over popular conceptions of the regimes legitimacy” (p. 273). She concludes that “after Budapest, the CCP's political centralization became impregnable” (p. 274).
The author makes extensive use of the existing literature in Chinese and English, as well as recently declassified Chinese archival documents primarily from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs Archives in Beijing. Zhu also refers to Hungarian archival documents, but includes letters and numbers that are not part of the original archival references. This points to the fact that she gained access to Hungarian archival documents from a private collection – shared by this reviewer with the Center for Cold War International History Studies at East China Normal University in Shanghai. In general, the author makes extensive use of the Center's director Shen Zhihua's Chinese writings and sources, and relies heavily on his arguments and conclusions.
Although there is no note on transliteration, it seems that in the case of languages using Latin alphabet the author's original idea was to keep diacritical marks. However, apart from obvious typographical errors, the only system that shows itself is that she uses the forms used in her sources, be they correct or erroneous, without paying attention to the original forms of names and words. In general, more attention to the orthography of foreign names and words would have been desirable. As in most of the problematic cases the author used publications and documents in their Chinese translation, the problems point to a methodological challenge faced by Chinese scholars when they use foreign sources translated into Chinese.
Editorial shortcomings notwithstanding, the present volume is a welcome contribution to our existing knowledge and the most comprehensive account written in English of the inner connection between China's political and diplomatic involvement in the Hungarian events and the influence of the crisis on Chinese domestic policy shifts in 1956–57.
