Shen Zhihua is China's leading historian of China's relations with other socialist nations, and a number of his works are available in English. Two, counting this one, are co-written with Yafeng Xia. In this work, they have culled Russian/Soviet, Albanian, Bulgarian, German, Hungarian, South Korean, US, and Chinese archives and carried out interviews with some key participants and knowledgeable insiders, including former general secretary Jiang Zemin, to tell what is likely to stand for a long-time as the definitive work on Chinese–North Korean relations during Mao's reign.
One could argue that the book is mistitled. (Indeed, the publicity materials provided by Columbia University Press state the subtitle of the book is Mao, Kim and the Myth of Sino-North Korean Relations.) What Shen and Xia reveal is that there was very little friendship between China and North Korea and between Mao and Kim. There were some periods of comradely respect and relations, but overall the relationship was characterized by miscommunications and opportunistic uses of each other. Expectations of what the other would provide were often unfilled, yet perceived necessity drove the two together regularly. Much of the tenor of the Chinese–North Korean relationship was in fact informed by what each wanted from a third party, often the Soviet Union, but also the US in the 1970s. In this, Shen and Xia definitely refute the view of the “lips to teeth” close relationship between the two communist states and parties. Arguably the period of closest relations between the two was the period between 1945 and the start of the 1950s. From the Korean War on, tensions would regularly appear in the relationship, which would often be smoothed over, usually with China extending various kinds of aid to North Korea.
The book is organized chronologically, with chapters on 1945 to 1950: Victory and Expansion of the Revolution, 1950 to 1953: Sharp Contradictions, 1953 to 1956: Chinese Aid and Juche, 1957–1960: Mao's policy of Mollification, 1961–1965: North Korea's Balancing Act, 1966–1969: Lowest Ebb, and 1970–1976: China's Last Ally. There is an epilogue covering China and North Korea during the heyday of Deng Xiaoping. And while the book is based on multi-archive research, it is a quite traditional diplomatic history, focusing on Mao (and to a lesser extent Zhou Enlai and Peng Dehuai) on the Chinese side and Kim Il-sung on the North Korean side. Some of the elements of the relationship have appeared in other works by Shen, and Shen and Xia in English, but in less detail than found here. This is particularly true of the material on the Korean War period, and to a lesser extent the North Korean power struggle which forced many of the pro-Chinese members of the Korean Workers Party (KWP) to flee to China.
Yet, also in conjunction with the 1956 North Korean power struggle, Shen and Xia shed new light on the joint Sino-Soviet delegation, led by Anastas Mikoyan and Peng Dehuai, which was sent to North Korea to try to force Kim to embrace Khrushchev's secret speech, acknowledge his own personality cult, and rectify the KWP. Contrary to the view put forward by Andrei Lankov, in Crisis in North Korea, Shen and Xia argue that China and the Soviet Union never aimed or planned to force Kim out; their joint goal was to soften Kim's personal dominance of the KWP. Shen and Xia are persuasive on this, but they also show that Kim deeply resented the joint intervention, and that he seems to have blamed the Chinese (and Peng Dehuai) more than the Soviet side. Consequently, China spent much of the next three years trying to assuage Kim's hostility. The 1959 purge of Peng certainly helped in this regard. Kim was piqued also by Red Guard criticisms of him, but Shen and Xia note that what was left of the official Chinese government and Party never criticized Kim or broke with North Korea.
While demolishing the myth of sustained close friendship between China and North Korea, Shen and Xia confirm the view that Kim craftily navigated North Korea between China and the Soviet Union. While North Korea clearly supported China in many ways in the early 1960s, the Chinese could never get the North Koreans to denounce Soviet revisionism definitively. But when the Soviets didn't want to be played, Kim tried to use the Chinese to advance the North's position both on the Korean peninsula and with the US. China paid lip service to Kim's requests—publicly supporting North Korea in the United Nations, and then in private meetings with top US officials, indicating their pro forma stance.
Shen and Xia do discuss economic, and to a lesser extent, military aid, and in many years, even in the years of the famine, China was doing more trade and providing more aid to North Korea than were the Soviets. But this is discussed in passing; this is not an all-round consideration of Sino-North Korean relations (no real mention of educational exchanges, scientific and technical exchanges for example). Data on trade and aid is not presented systematically. We learn little about the policy process and the role of institutions in the making and implementation of the bilateral relationship, and even less on inter-societal relations.
However, at the state-to-state level there are many fascinating and new revelations. There is a very interesting discussion of the Chinese military units deployed in Korea from the Korean Armistice to 1958, and how these figured in Mao's and Kim's calculations. While a little confusing in spots (the relevant map doesn't have a scale, and seems not to clearly correspond with the story told in the text), the negotiations leading to the delimitation of the Sino-North Korean boundary are a major addition to understanding. Perhaps the most surprising development is the view expressed in 1964 that China's Northeast would be North Korea's great hinterland, and that it was possible that Kim Il-sung could be in charge of it. The reference with the Northeast as hinterland resonates with the contemporaneous development of the Third Front in China, though this parallel isn't mentioned. This last development is overwhelmingly based on an interview with the former director of the Chinese Communist Party's International Liaison Office, and one has to wonder if it was a serious offer. As Roderick MacFarquhar revealed in the third volume of The Origins of the Cultural Revolution, Mao also offered to let Liu Shaoqi be Party Chairman. Could Mao have been testing Kim, or appealing to Kim's ego?
Shen and Xia have given us what is likely to be the definitive work on high level foreign relations between China and North Korea from 1949–1976. Until North Korea archives become available, there is little possibility than any other scholars will be able to surpass the wealth of materials that went into this study, nor the care with which those materials were approached.
