In this critical situation, it was as if the Communist Party, with Mao as its “helmsman,” lost its sense of direction. The harsh critique of the Soviet Union went from a debate on how to continue the construction of socialism in a post-revolutionary society to a theory of the principal contradiction in the world, the so-called “Three World Theory.” In 1974, Mao defined the three worlds as follows:
I hold that the U.S. and the Soviet Union belong to the First World. The middle elements, such as Japan, Europe, Australia and Canada, belong to the Second World. We are the Third World…The U.S. and the Soviet Union have a lot of atomic bombs, and they are richer. Europe, Japan, Australia and Canada, of the Second World, do not possess so many atomic bombs and are not so rich as the First World, but richer than the Third World…All Asian countries, except Japan, belong to the Third World. All of Africa and also Latin America belong to the Third World.
According to Mao’s theory, there are two superpowers, the United States and the Soviet Union, which constitute “The First World,” fighting each other to obtain world domination. In this makeup, China regarded the Soviet Union as the aggressive party. The Soviet Union was no longer just a revisionist bureaucratic state. The Soviet Union had not only restored capitalism, but it had also become “the most dangerous and aggressive social-imperialist power in the world;” so dangerous that the “Third World” had to ally with the “Second World”—Western Europe, Japan, and even the United States—to neutralize “Soviet imperialism” and avoid a nuclear war.
Based on the reasoning that “my enemy’s enemy is my friend,” China supported anti-Soviet forces worldwide, often in cooperation with the U.S. and reactionary forces. China was one of the first to recognize the government of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet following the coup against the Socialist Allende government. China, together with the CIA, supported Mobutu in Zaire, and Jonas Savimbi’s National Union for the Total Independence of Angola in the civil war against the People’s Movement for the Liberation of Angola, which was backed by Cuba.
However, there was no evidence that the Soviet Union was the most aggressive power in the confrontation with the U.S. in the mid-1970s. Already at this point, the Soviet Union was under economic, political, and military pressure from the United States, trying to keep up in the arms race. China made its national conflict with the Soviet Union into the global principal contradiction. Claiming that the Soviet Union was richer than the countries in the “second world” was incorrect—the Soviet Union belonged to the semi-periphery of the world-system. Neither was the Soviet Union an imperialist power in its relationship with Eastern Europe and the Third World, at least not in any economic significance. The Soviet Union was already in a defensive mode in the mid-1970s, culminating in its collapse 15 years later.
-Torkil Lauesen, The Long Transition Towards Socialism And The End Of Capitalism Pgs. 222-224
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