ABSTRACT
In several senses, 1968 marked the beginning of a great transformative age for the whole world, not least of all China. A critical trigger for the coming of this age was the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. For Mao Zedong and the Beijing leadership, this was an event with multiple meanings. The most obvious was that it compelled Mao and his comrades to pay attention to the danger involved in China’s confrontational relations with the Soviet Union in security terms. Indeed, as the Chairman and his fellow Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leaders saw it, if the Kremlin’s leaders, to sustain Soviet dominance in East Europe, were allowed to use force to invade a “fraternal country,” why wouldn’t they apply the same means to dealing with other communist countries, including China?
