Workers World, Vol. 20, No. 4
January 24 – China’s Munich theory, which propounds that Western imperialism, particularly the U.S., is appeasing and buckling under to the advancing might of the USSR, is part of a larger theme: that of the inevitability, if not the imminence, of war between the U.S. and the USSR.
The inevitability of capitalist wars as long as imperialism exists is of course a Leninist thesis derived from the existence of the monopoly stage of capitalism. The Chinese leadership, beginning in the late 1950s and continuing throughout practically the entire Khrushchev era, vigorously and assiduously pursued, promoted, and expounded the Leninist these on the inevitability of imperialist war and berated the Soviet Union for not heeding it.
During the Khrushchev era the Chinese leadership was constantly attacking the Soviet leadership for appeasing, placating, and groveling at the feet of imperialism. (Khrushchev’s policies, however, did not inhibit the Soviet leadership from going as far as the very brink of a nuclear holocaust in its defense of socialist Cuba during the dangerous situation created by U.S. imperialism’s efforts to destroy the Cuban Revolution.) The Chinese accused them of being blind to the reality and nature of imperialism, and of U.S. imperialism in particular. Again and again the Chinese correctly attacked U.S. imperialism as the “worst enemy of mankind.”
Now, however, Peking is accusing the USSR of being the “worst enemy of mankind.” It goes to extremes in characterizing the USSR as Hitlerite and lambastes Western imperialism as buckling under to alleged Soviet threats and advances.
The Brezhnev leadership which succeeded Khrushchev is not distinguished by a single foreign policy act which could even remotely be considered aggressive, in the sense of going beyond the agreed geographical boundaries in defense of the socialist countries. There is not a foot of territory occupied by the USSR which goes beyond the Warsaw Pact nations.
However, this is not to state that there is not a continuing, unremitting struggle and rivalry between imperialism and the USSR. But it is not, as the Peking Review of Dec. 9, 1977, states in expounding its Munich thesis, “the rivalry between the superpowers determined by the law of uneven development of capitalism.” This is not what the rivalry is about. The rivalry is between two diametrically opposed social systems based on two different class structures, between two different modes of production – the capitalist mode of production and the socialist mode of production. This determines the context of the struggle. This is precisely what Lenin predicted would be the character of the struggle and the Chinese party adhered to this thesis even during the Khrushchev period.
It was not so many years ago that the Chinese leadership was able to state this thesis in even sharper form and with clarity, as it did in its letter of June 14, 1963 (published in that year by Foreign Language Press, Peking), to the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union:
“The contradiction between the socialist camp and the imperialist camp is a contradiction between two fundamentally different social systems, socialism and capitalism. It is undoubtedly very sharp, but Marxist-Leninists must not regard the contradictions in the world as consisting solely and simply of the contradiction between the socialist camp and the imperialist camp.”
The letter lists the other contradictions: the contradiction between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie in the capitalist countries; the contradiction between the oppressed nations and imperialism; and the contradictions among the imperialist countries and the monopoly capitalist groups.
The Munich analysis in Peking Review completely obliterates all these contradictions and creates a fantastic constellation of global forces utterly devoid of any class content.
In case there is any misunderstanding as to what the Chinese leadership meant by the socialist camp, the letter referred to goes on to list the socialist countries: “Albania, Bulgaria, China, Cuba, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea, Mongolia, Poland, Romania, the Soviet Union, and the Democratic Republic of Vietnam.” And that was the way it was understood in 1963, ten years after Stalin’s death.
It’s significant that of the countries named, only Yugoslavia was left out, being regarded by the Chinese leadership as having become revisionist renegades. Strangely enough, practically half the countries listed then are now no longer regarded as socialist by China, but when Tito visited China last year he received a virtual hero’s welcome!
Behind it all is the fact that Yugoslavia could tilt over completely to the anti-Soviet camp and thereby bolster the fortunes of European and American imperialism against the USSR.
In the Munich thesis, which is full of generalizations, there is not a single, concrete fact to demonstrate that the USSR is anywhere involved in the kind of rivalry with imperialism which involves grabbing markets, annexing territories, pursuing a ruthless struggle for sources of raw materials and export markets at the expense of smaller nations, or of Third World countries in particular.
Indeed, the struggle on the part of the Soviet Union is to win influence in national liberation movements of the world and to give them aid and assistance of a material, political, and military character as has been demonstrated in Cuba, Vietnam, Angola, and most recently in Ethiopia, where a life-and-death struggle is going on in the face of a concerted imperialist attempt to topple the revolutionary government.
This is what China should have been doing, too, contributing its share, even if of necessity on a more modest scale. To abandon such “rivalry” with imperialism would mean the abandonment of the progressive role by the USSR in relationship to the national liberation movements and would be a boon to imperialism. What should not be done, however, by any of the socialist countries, is to bolster bourgeois governments at the expense of proletarian class independence in those countries and the revolutionary national liberation forces.
This used to be ABC in Chinese Communist politics. However, now the Chinese leadership sees appeasement by the West in all these struggles, and the Peking Review article sounds the alarm more than all the others.
There is reason for alarm, but the peril is not from the Soviet Union. The peril lied in the increasing aggressiveness of the Pentagon.
The Munich article in the Peking Review speaks with two voices. In one voice it almost hysterically calls upon the West to shore up NATO and virtually calls upon it to attack the USSR. But in another voice in the very same article it sees another peril. This time it is that “the core of the appeasement policy championed by Chamberlain and his like in the 1930s was to maneuver to divert the peril to the East.” [Our emphasis.] But this is an altogether different problem. In reality, if carefully studied, it is antithetical to the main thesis.
The real peril here that the Chinese leaders fear, is that the Western imperialists are trying to maneuver the Soviet Union towards the east, against China. Lest this generalized statement be regarded as too ambiguous to apply by analogy to the current situation, the article makes it abundantly clear precisely what is means. “Like their precursors [of the 1930s, meaning Chamberlain and Daladier – SM], the advocates of appeasement tried to divert the Soviet peril to the east, to China.”
To fortify its argument, Peking Review goes on to say, “Helmut Sonnenfeldt, the former U.S. State Department official, frightened the Soviet Union with the groundless prediction of ‘the arrival of a third superpower, China, in 20 years or so. Not only can we balance it (the Soviet power) in the traditional sense,’ he asserted, ‘but we can affect its usage – and that is what détente is all about.’ The Soviet Union, he clearly implied, should shift its focus of aggression from Western Europe to the east. Only too glad to oblige, the Soviet Union steps up its anti-China clamour as it pursues its strategy of making a feint to the east while attacking in the west.”
First of all, the Sonnenfeldt doctrine stood for the proposition that the U.S. should not try to provoke another round of counter-revolutionary uprisings in Eastern Europe, as in 1956 in Poland and Hungary, because the USSR would strike back with all the force necessary to crush them, which in turn might provoke a nuclear holocaust.
The second part of the Sonnenfeldt doctrine was that the USSR should be incited into a struggle with China. Conversely, China should be encouraged in its attacks against the USSR.
This is the full Sonnenfeldt doctrine, of which the Peking Review gives only half. But the whole Sonnenfeldt doctrine is not new, is not Sonnenfeldt’s, Kissinger’s, Nixon’s, Ford’s, or Carter’s. It dates back to John Foster Dulles. It dates back to the days when the Chinese Revolution triumphed and when the Sino-Soviet Friendship Treaty was signed and envisaged to be a bulwark of socialist solidarity against imperialist aggression.
But if, as the Peking Review alleges, the U.S. is trying to divert, that is to incite, mutual struggle between the USSR and China, the answer to that is not a polemic which would in no way persuade Washington to modify its policy and can only widen the distance between the USSR and China. Nor does the answer lie in appealing to the imperialists, as Peking Review does, not to “behave selfishly at the expense of others,” meaning China. Nor is the answer an “international anti-hegemonist united front” against the USSR and (presumably but not really) the U.S. Such a united front could only be counter-revolutionary, and calling upon a “joint struggle” for such a united front is a complete renunciation of the revolutionary struggle of the working class and oppressed people.
Enough has been said in the hundreds of polemics between China and the USSR to completely discredit any ideological basis for the continuation of the fratricidal struggle. There is only one way to get out of the impasse in which the two socialist countries are involved and that is to renew the effort to strengthen the anti-imperialist bonds between the USSR and China. This is the only answer the planners in the Pentagon and the architects of neutron bomb diplomacy are likely to heed.
Last updated: 11 May 2026