Kennedy’s Aggression is Meeting with Growing Revulsion: 1962 Poster
Kennedy’s Aggression is Meeting with Growing Revulsion: 1962
by Scott D. Seligman
China didn’t have a lot of friends in 1962. For a host of reasons, it had already split with the Soviet Union, which had drifted away from Stalinist orthodoxy under Premier Nikita Khrushchev and had begun to advocate peaceful coexistence with capitalist countries. Chairman Mao Zedong had condemned “Soviet revisionism” and challenged Russia’s traditional leadership of the world communist movement, reaching out to emerging countries in Africa, Asia and Latin America and attempting to position the PRC as their champion.
Nor did China have any use for the capitalist West. “On the question of how to deal with imperialism and all reactionaries,” the People’s Daily asserted in that year, “the Chinese Communist Party has always maintained that one should despise them strategically but take full account of them tactically.” And by the early 1960s, Beijing was taking full account of a litany of American transgressions, some of which were hitting quite close to home.
The PRC had clashed with the United States in the Taiwan Strait in 1958, when President Dwight D. Eisenhower sent the Seventh Fleet to aid the Nationalist government in its defense of the offshore islands of Quemoy (Jinmen) and Matsu (Mazu). And when President John F. Kennedy escalated American involvement in the Vietnam War, China began arming the North Vietnamese. Everywhere Mao looked, America seemed to be pursuing interests antithetical to those espoused by China.
China’s gripes with the Kennedy Administration as of March, 1962 were neatly catalogued in a vintage Xinhua News Agency poster I found in a Beijing open-air market.
1962 poster published by Xinhua entitled, “A Look at John F. Kennedy After a Year in Office.”
A simple line drawing entitled, “A Look at John F. Kennedy After a Year in Office,” it depicts JFK as a sort of human scale, balancing a stack of documents labeled “empty talk of peace,” “peace” and “disarmament” in one hand against a plateful of missiles labeled “military buildup” and “more military buildup” in the other. Here’s my translation of this relic from a bygone era:
“The Kennedy administration took office a year ago, and in military, political and economic affairs it has done what the Eisenhower administration did not dare to do. In the United States, the Kennedy administration has built up the military to its highest count in peacetime. In Latin America, Asia and Africa, it has actively pursued aggressive, warlike policies and neo-colonialism, igniting conflict everywhere. The Kennedy administration has attempted to overthrow the Cuban Revolution, expanded the civil war in Laos, caused the collapse of patriotic nationalist forces in the Congo, continued the ongoing war in West Berlin and is currently stepping up its offensive in South Vietnam.
“However, Kennedy’s aggression is meeting with growing revulsion. As people around the world understand the Kennedy administration more clearly, ferocious opposition to its imperialistic policies of aggression and warmongering is breaking out all over.”
Although the PRC and the United States had no formal diplomatic ties in the 1960s, the two sides did communicate through bilateral, ambassadorial-level talks in Geneva and Warsaw throughout the decade. But tensions remained high until ping pong diplomacy and President Richard M. Nixon’s historic 1972 visit to China signaled willingness on the part of both nations to put ideology aside and launch a new era of normalized relations.
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Scott D. Seligman is a writer, a historian and a retired corporate executive. He is the author of The First Chinese American: The Remarkable Life of Wong Chin Foo, Three Tough Chinamen and Chinese Business Etiquette, and co-author of the best-selling Cultural Revolution Cookbook and Now You’re Talking Mandarin Chinese. He lives in Washington, DC.