Sino-North Korean Relations During the Cultural Revolution

As audacious and bold as the former North Korean leader sounded in public, Kim Il Sung felt deeply threatened by the Cultural Revolution unleashed by China in 1966.

So said Bernd Schaefer in his article North Korean "Adventurism" and China's Long Shadow, 1966-1972 (Working Paper #44, October 2004, Cold War International History Project, Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars).

Archival records of the DPRK's former ally, the German Democratic Republic, revealed that the challenges and opportunities Kim faced as a result of the Cultural Revolution, and the effect on Pyongyang's foreign policy, were greater than previously realized.

The Cultural Revolution was also said to be the most serious external threat to Kim's hold on power since the fallout from Khrushchev's de-Stalinization campaign in 1956. Schaefer argued that Kim managed to survive the years between 1966 and 1969 by treading cautiously, "avoiding provoking the Chinese by swallowing their slander and remaining passive in the face of their aggressive postures."

But despite that, the two neighbors were almost brought to the brink of armed conflict. On the part of China, Beijing had agitated against the "Korean revisionists" over loudspeakers set up along the entire Sino-Korean border. Beijing also derided Kim for having a "bourgeois" lifestyle and earning ten times as much as the average worker in his country.

North Korean officials, on the other hand, reportedly cracked jokes about China and even Mao, saying that Mao had become senile and that perhaps the only remedy was Korean ginseng root.

In the fall of 1966, the Korean People's Party (KWP) portrayed the Cultural Revolution as incomprehensible and the Red Guards as "just kids who know nothing about politics." Kim reportedly told Leonid Brezhnev in 1966 that the Cultural Revolution was "massive idiocy." Other North Korean officials described Mao's government as a "government dictatorship" that was pursuing "a policy that was much more disastrous for the worldwide communist movement than Khrushchev's had been."

As China began propagating the Cultural Revolution across Asia, the North Korean and Chinese brand of communism came into direct competition. The Chinese were eager to maintain the upper hand in every ideological struggle, which became obvious in their intervention in the various factional conflicts within the Japan Communist Party and among citizens of North Korean descent in Japan.

To make things worse, the anti-intellectualism displayed so prominently in China during the Cultural Revolution was especially problematic for Pyongyang as it hampered North Korean efforts in gaining support among intellectuals in South Korea and Japan.

Kim's first response to the Cultural Revolution was to seek rapprochement with Moscow. Officially, Pyongyang attributed the deterioration of relations with Moscow after 1961 exclusively to the wrong-headed policy of Khrushchev. The latter's overthrow in 1964 therefore allegedly paved the way for a smoother relationship, but actually it was Mao's decision to launch the Cultural Revolution that was said to be the decisive factor.

But as Schaefer pointed out: "Even under conditions of outright hostility, however, the PRC never lost its position as the most important foreign partner of the Democratic People's Republic of Korea. Pyongyang's move toward closer ties to the Soviet Union was undertaken mainly for economic and military advantage. Moscow willingly misread the shift as an overture from an ally in the Sino/Soviet conflict."

Despite the ill-effects of the Cultural Revolution, Kim attempted to use the event as an opportunity to seek a larger role as leader of Asian communism. Following the Vietnamese model of fighting the Americans to achieve national reunification, Kim tried to unify the two Koreas by plotting unrests in the South in order to provide a pretext for reunification. By keeping tensions high at the Demilitarized Zone, Kim asserted that Pyongyang was supporting the Vietnamese people by tying down US forces in Korea and distracting them from Vietnam.

"The seizure of the USS Pueblo in January 1968 was one step along this path - a daring game of brinkmanship in which Korean adventurism was joined with militant anti-Americanism."

It was only when China's foreign policy became more moderate in late 1969 did North Korea embrace its giant neighbor as an old friend and alter its strategy towards unification. Part of this embrace was due to Pyongyang's need to counter US military threat.