To use the term grand strategy is not to imply that there was a meticulous written master plan, threshed out to the finest detail and then followed as best as possible. These were not men of the staff colleges of Ivy League; theirs was a peasant wisdom, honed in combat and despair. What they had was a set of instincts, a sense of where they want to wind up and how. As with all national security plan, these instincts sometimes failed them and failed them badly. But they were no less powerful for that. And in gearing military power, diplomacy, economic planning, and domestic policy toward what were seen as long-term interests, these instincts did indeed constitute grand strategy.
They all saw China as a brittle entity, in a world that was fundamentally dangerous. Their main task was to protect it. (This might sound platitudinous, but when one considers some of the other grand strategies the world had seen — containment, world revolution, global jihad — one realizes that the platitudinous is not always what grand strategist pursue. Nor was basic security as simple a goal as it might seem. All that China had experienced in its past showed that statehood was something fragile, easily lost; to the people studied here, it was never something that could be taken for granted, even in times of peace.)
Of all the great powers, China is perhaps the one that has seen the fewest changes in its basic philosophy of international r elations between the Cold War and post-Cold War eras. For China, in a way, the Cold War never really happened.
Such obvious trappings of power were for other men: Deng would work from behind the scenes, moving his acolytes into office as his power grew, content to be, at most, a vice premier and chairman of the central military commissions for party and state.
Like Mao, Xi rules by force of personality; like Mao, he sees in his own person the best guarantee for party and national security. Whether or not that works remains to be seen. It is a grand strategy fraught with risks. Structural forces beyond Xi’s control — rising seas and vanishing ice, an aging population — could rob him of success too. And success itself does not guarantee happiness; that so many Chinese are parking their assets abroad suggests something is absent, even if Xi’s grand strategy is working.
4000-year-old great China, Mao Zedong observed in 1920, was mere form, not reality. It had no foundation. To construct a large country, one first needed to build up smaller regions. This, China had not done. The sole way forward, Mao said, was to “smash this baseless great China and build many small Chinas.”
The republic that emerged in the dynasty’s place was a myth; China was a mix of warring states and alien powers. It was not the revolving cast of premiers in Beijing who determined how things went but the warlords — men like Zhang Zuolin and Feng Yuxiang, seeking foreign money and arms, their forces dueling back and forth across a suffering country. Xinjiang and Tibet, those farther outposts of the empire, had long bene going their own way; with the fall of the Qing, a large part of Mongolia would be torn from Chinese sovereignty too. In the wake of WW1, the foreigners would preach self-determination, but this, it became clear at Versailles, was a hollow promise. Instead of returning the enclaves of defeated Germany to China, the Western victors awarded them to Japan instead.
Within Chinese territory, the soviet leaders declared, there were now two “absolutely different countries”: the Republic of China, a state of warlords and landlords which oppressed the people, and the Chinese Soviet Republic, a state which belonged to the exploited and oppressed. It was the creation of an order where once there had been none, a way of being that was different, more dignified, less chaotic than what had existed before.
Mao’s overarching goal from this point on was simple: to keep his state alive. There would be no compromise on CCP sovereignty, no giving it away in the name of greater good.
The CCP could not accept this: being a state means having the right not to be subsumed by another. True, they did not have much international recognition. But they have a political philosophy and land where they could practice that philosophy, even if they were on the move. And they had arms to defend the new country they represented.
The CCP stood for self-determination; different minority groups, Mao promised, could either join an eventual Chinese federation or form their own countries. One needed these people on one’s side. It was a line that was self-serving — it aimed at alleviating fear among possible enemies — but Mao was probably sincere; he was young at this point, and young idealistic revolutionaries have a way of making promises that they later cannot keep.
But there was an understanding too that the Guomindang was far from monolithic, that there were people within it who thought Chiang’s policies harmful, whom the Communists might reach.
The CCP, Mao would assure Guomindang negotiators, had no intention of overthrowing the Guomindang government, of expanding beyond its current borders. All that was needed was for the Guomindang to recognize the CCP’s right to develop behind enemy lines, recognize the current defense sector and the border district. In short, although it was not phrased quite this way, the Guomindang was to treat the CCP as a sovereign state.
There was nothing to be gained by shutting off the possibility of an understanding with Japan; if the CCP could reach such an understanding, it would strengthen its hand in the struggle against the Nationalists. One wanted to be closer to both Japan and the Guomindang than they were to each other. It did not matter that the Japanese were imperialists tearing China apart. It mattered only whether they were hindrance or help to the survival of Mao’s China.
In 1940, the CCP would mull the tricky, sometimes elusive balance to be struck: rent and debt needed to be cut but not so much as to create larger problems. Cut interest by too much, and the peasants might find themselves unable to get loans. It had to be made clear that the peasants had a duty to pay rent and interest; it would not do to disrupt the economy too much. Now was not the time to conduct serious land reform. Ideology was philosophizing, but statecraft sometimes had to concern itself with prosaic questions. What does the state produce and what must it import? One had to monitor expenses, be aware the state could get too heavy for its own good and that state jobs might then have to be cut.
Peng was being too ideological; he was emphasizing the role of democracy in opposing feudalism, rather than the Japanese. There was a war on, and Peng was targeting the wrong enemy.
Mao’s good was the good of the party, which was the good of the state. It was, like most truly dangerous beliefs, at once self-serving and sincere.
Marshall seemed so reasonable, so understanding of the CCP’s concerns. Mao did not fully grasp, as Chiang did, that America was larger than Marshall, that regardless of what the secretary of state saw as practical policy, American domestic politics could and would override his preferences. It was a woeful misunderstanding of the nature of American politics — and one that hobbles the PRC to this day.
For a guerrilla to work, one needed to win the people, not the territory which was one of the reasons, despite the early loss of those big northeastern cities, the CPP was able to prevail.
The way to do so, of course, harkened back to the older civil war. The warring state was to remain on the move: holding territory did not matter as much as doing damage to the enemy. Let the Nationalists disperse to occupy Communist-held territory, Mao thought; it would make it easier to destroy the enemy. He knew that although Chiang held territory, his grip on it was far from secure, that much of it was protected only by public security groups rather than proper soldiers, that people’s livelihoods were suffering, leaving room for instigating a people’s struggle. If one waited Chiang out, staying on the run, the generalissimo would sink deeper into a mire of his own making and eventually down.
China too needed to develop capitalism, he declared in May 1945. But whereas Chiang had developed a capitalism that was half fascist and half feudal, what the Communists would develop would be the capitalism of new democracy. The capitalism of new democracy was revolutionary, useful, conducive to socialism. Ideology was flexible; words could mean whatever one wanted them to. The important thing was to get the economy to function.
When people carped that the economy had become capitalist, Mao fired back that it was not; it was a “new democratic economy.” Agriculture would be socialized in good time, but this was not the moment; to socialize it now would only hurt production. He was trying to have it both ways: to be ideologically proper while doing what reality demanded. It was not that ideology was irrelevant; it was that there were other considerations that could trump ideology.
Trade dependence on the US had shot up. In 1936, 19.7% of China’s imports came from the US; by 1947, that figure was at 51.7%. If the emerging new China were to survive, it would need solid relations with the capitalists.
With growing strength came a broader definition of what it took to stay safe. Success fuels insecurity and ambition.
But there would be no rush to glory this time. War at sea, as Mao had cautioned, was entirely different from what the Communists had experienced. It required paying attention to the tides and the winds; it meant having to transport an entire army in one fell swoop. It meant fighting with what one had, without counting on reinforcements.
Mao’s first concern was the preservation of peace. There had been too much warfare; China needed breathing space in which to pull itself together. Stalin felt that peace was possible; it could last, he suggested, not just for 5 to 10 years, but 20 to 25, perhaps more. The Sino-Soviet relationship would move to a more equitable footing.
But Deng Liqun’s concerns were powerful too; they cut to the heart of what it meant to stand up and be sovereign, of whether or not China was master in its own territory. The Sino-Soviet relationship was one of mutual convenience and some ideological affinity. But it was rarely comfortable. Mao was working with Stalin principally because it was in his interests at the time.
China would retain control over military and foreign affairs, but religion and culture were to be left untouched. Religion was to be respected in Xinjiang too; although communists were atheists, the argument went, they were also supposed to be respectful of the religious freedom of those within the country.
Private enterprise in the hands of men with guns could be dangerous; it could carve out a space where they would profit at the expense of the people, becoming unjust, a source of resentment. T/here would have to be order to the PLA’s dealings; they would have to fit within the planning of the local government.
Diplomacy required carefully probing for schisms in the enemy’s loose-built coalition of warlords and seeking closer relations with other players than they had with one another.
This would have left the PRC almost perfectly poised, leaning toward the Soviet Union but not estranged completely from the other Cold War superpower. Thus happily situated, it could have focused on nothing more than economic recovery.
That, at least, was the plan. But those 3 to 5 years of peace it had assumed were about to be shattered — by Korea.
And Truman did more: he sent the US Seventh Fleet to neutralize the Taiwan Strait. Truman, Mao grumbled, had said the Americans would not interfere in Taiwan; here was proof that that statement was false. There were signs, too, that they wanted to interfere “in the internal politics of Korea, the Philippines, and Vietnam.” None of this meant that a military clash between the PRC and the US was certain, but it would be foolish in Mao, unrecognized and communist, to be unprepared.
“The American government,” he continued, “has forgotten its own history. Did not Washington oppose the British invasion? Did not Lincoln fight a war to liberate the slaves? Was this not a civil war? Now they don’t let others be Lincoln.”
There were some things that the PRC would not compromise on, and it was important that the Americans know what those were.
Korea might be geostrategically significant, but there were Chinese leaders who were deeply opposed to going to war for it, hostile forces north of the 38th parallel or not. China had been fighting for so long. There were still Guomindang agents scattered across the land who had to be dealt with; the economy was a wreck; the PLA was ill equipped, and China did not have control of the skies. It was, in sum, both too hard and unnecessary to go to war with the Americans.
“If American troops are stationed on the banks of the Yalu River and on Taiwan,” Peng argued, “if they want to launch a war of invasion, they can find a pretext any time.”
Korea was just part of a larger problem for the China Mao had put together. There was war on every front. And meanwhile there was still the basic work of governance to do. There were people to feed, far-flung regions to consolidate, an economy to heal, weapons to be modernized, trade links to be forged. As it fended off danger across its vast perimeter, Mao’s China would have to find a way of completing those tasks too.
There is, in all client-patron relationships, a mixture of dependence and resentment at having to be dependent, and this one was no different. Stalin had channeled massive amounts of money into the PRC, although he had insisted that they pay for the arms used in the Korean War.
But there was something galling about such dependence. Peng and Zhou had had to listen respectfully while Stalin grumbled about Chinese pilots. This while China’s young men, who had upped and gone to Korea from far away, were fighting the Americans, dying in a foreign land, while Stalin only sent aircraft to battle and loftily directed Mao on how to fight. Soviet support being crucial to national security, China would stomach the insult. But it rankled.
Khrushchev was bumptious, over-energetic, but he was also eager to prove that he was better than Stalin, a gentler ruler of the communist world.
Mao was incensed. It was not that there was any great love lost between him and Stalin; rather, it was that Khrushchev had, without warning, attacked one of the communism’s holy saints, a saint who had been used to sanctify communism in China. If Stalin could be criticized today, Mao could be criticized tomorrow. The speech threatened the new order he had worked so hard to create. He could attempt to limit the damage. Hence the attempts to point out that to err was human, that “Khrushchev will similarly make mistakes… and we too will make mistakes,” that Stalin’s mistakes were severe, but he “also had great achievements.” But that damage had been done was obvious. Khrushchev had opened a dangerous door, and there was no knowing where it could lead.
Liu Shaoqi was dispatched to convey a message from Mao to Moscow: that the five principles of peaceful coexistence could be realized among socialist countries. The principles were simple: mutual respect for territorial integrity and sovereignty, mutual noninterference, mutual equality and benefit, nonaggression, and peaceful coexistence.
Mao himself had been willing to go against the Soviet leader’s wishes when necessary, declining, for example, to make too much trouble for the British in Hong Kong, but he had understood that if he wanted the aid and weaponry the Soviets could provide, some show of deference would be necessary.
Stalin had done many great things, but he was, it could not be denied, a big country chauvinist. It was a theme Mao returned to in Moscow when visiting in 1957 to commemorate the October Revolution. He was happy that contradictions between socialist countries could be discussed; in Stalin’s time, nobody would have dared speak of this. “‘Fraternal parties’ — this was a sweet-sounding phrase,” he mused, “but in reality it [the relationship between the Soviets and other socialist countries] was unequal. I now feel a sort of equal atmosphere.” In that insistence on equality, one can hear the undertones of China’s feelings toward the Soviet Union. It was an intimate relationship — and like so many intimate relationships, it came with the need to assert independence every now and then.
Vietnamese forces were to withdraw from Cambodia and Laos. Ho Chi Minh did not like this, but he, like Mao, understood patronage and its impositions. He had received money and weapons from China throughout the first Indochina war, and he could accept, if reluctantly, a temporary setback in the name of survival. Mao, for his part, was seeing a bigger picture: Ho might be a brother in arms, but his struggle was just one piece on a larger chessboard. The PRC needed hostile forces to keep their distance from Chinese borders, and it could use the moral standing that a successful peace agreement would confer. Compromises on Ho’s part would help to achieve those goals. The Vietnamese, therefore, would be pressed to make them.
“Nothing good comes of foreign interference.” Which was why, he went on, China could not understand why Pakistan had joined SEATO. SEATO was directed against China: how could the Pakistanis, toward whom China had been friendly, be part of it?
The explanation was simple. Small country that it was, the begum explained, Pakistan felt that the growing intimacy between China and India might leave it friendless on the Kashmir issue; it was only natural, therefore, to seek outside protection. The pact, she assured Zhou, would never become a vehicle for attacking China. Pakistan had signed it only to protect itself. Beijing’s problem was that what Pakistan did for defense had the capacity to threaten China.
The shelling, carefully calibrated, was meant to convince the Americans not to sign the defense pact. Its effect was quite the opposite. Eisenhower had had no intention of signing the treaty, but found himself forced to do so to maintain credibility as a defender of the ROC and, by extension, of the noncommunist world.
Because he had the prickly pride of a wounded nationalist, the memory of having to plead with Stalin, the bitterness of fighting a war in Korea without Soviet comrades fighting by him, and because there was an uncontrollable part of him that delighted in being cruel, he had expressed himself more intemperately than necessary. But he had highlighted the differences in the relationship without letting the relationship be destroyed; he had stayed close enough to the Soviet Union without becoming too close. It was the same policy that marked relations with Pakistan or Japan, and it was the same policy that would subsequently mark relations with the US. The tone different, not the substance.
But despite all the hectoring and the heat, they ended on an amicable note. “Our basic line is the same,” Mao said, “we only have divisions over specific problems.” This, he continued, should not affect unity. It was how Beijing saw relationships: people can agree to disagree about specifics, as long as there is a reservoir of goodwill underneath.
Dulles aimed to change the Soviet world (which Mao interpreted as not just the Soviet Union, but the entire socialist world) from within. One could see in Khrushchev’s diplomacy not just the fumbling of an inexperienced leader, but the success of a malevolent American grand strategy designed to bring the communist world and great China down.
He believed in the rationality of other countries, in their ability to perceive their interests clearly and act accordingly.
Chinese diplomacy, therefore, sought a balance between letting a revisionist Moscow advance the imperialist line and alienating the Soviets altogether.
In retrospect, the fears might seem overblown, and yet, if you were stationed in the Yili valley at the time, the gathering of Soviet troops and the muttering Kazakh herdsmen could only inspire fear. The PRC could no longer count on Soviet protection. The main threat to its national security might come from the Soviet themselves.
The nuances of Chinese policy were little comfort to those who relied on both Soviet and Chinese support. For HCM and North Korea’s Kim Il Sung, the tensions between Moscow and Beijing raised serious questions. Would they have to take sides? Would the fallout affect the aid given to them? How far would their two sparring patrons go?
In 1963, the North Koreans would inform Beijing that China was completely right and the Soviet Union utterly wrong; proof lay in the weakness of Soviet support for North Korea at the UN and Moscow’s desire to establish diplomatic relations with South Korea.
One could, of course, turn the interpretation around, and speculate that whatever the Vietnamese might say in private, their reluctance to denounce Moscow openly suggested that they might yet abandon China. Mao was not a man to extend trust lightly, and such trust as he extended was easily withdrawn. One could not count on Vietnam forever — which was probably why the Chinese began courting Cambodia. Beijing needed a favorable balance of power in Southeast Asia, and having good relations with both Phnom Penh and Hanoi was the surest way of attaining that balance.
American invasion showed why Cambodia mattered to the PRC. The regional balance of power was important. Beijing would try to remain closer to both Phnom Penh and Hanoi than they were to one another — and it would do so to keep the Americans at bay, in order to protect is on national security.
The same cool-headed approach to the balance of power marked China’s dealing with South Asia. The Sino-Indian relationship, based on the five principles, had been the touchstone of third world unity. In some ways, its unraveling was remarkably similar to that of the Sino-Soviet relationship. In each case, a border had long been left blissfully unresolved; in each case, fourth world movement across that border became problematic once there was cause for mutual suspicion.
Not that leaders on either side, for all their rhetoric, saw it as anything other than a practical relationship. Beijing was highlighting its credentials as a responsible Asian power and buying support in the region. Friendship with Pakistan was expensive; Mohammad Khan liked the Chinese aid he received because it came without interest, and he would freely ask for more. The Chinese were not very happy with this, but it was the cost of finding friends in South Asia.
These countries mattered, and China would not neglect them: as with Southeast Asia, it would remain closer to all of them than they were to one another. Perhaps because of its own relationship with the Soviets, China could understand, better than India could, how sensitive they were to the power of their larger neighbors, how desperately they need reassurance, and how their resentments could best be used.
The PRC would diversify its friendships, court favor in places where it had not had to in the early fifties. It would do this by spending money and manpower — often to its detriment. The underlying strategic precept, however, was the same: careful diplomacy to foster a balance of power that kept China safe. There was room for compromise, even disagreement. Such room was not infinite; the PRC would not yield to threats to its territorial integrity. But that such room existed went a long way in ensuring that China was not utterly friendless. One might not always be able to reach an understanding with another country, but there was no point in giving up on the prospect. There was no harm in continuing a conversation.
It was all very well to try to reason with people, but one never knew when or where one would have to fight.
First, by the time the rapprochement actually happened, the crisis with the Soviets had been averted. Beijing had been careful to keep trying to negotiate with Moscow even after the first message of interest from Washington arrived. There was no reason to place much faith in the idea that things would work out with Washington; protecting the PRC required being prepared for all contingencies.
Novel as the Shanghai communique was to Kissinger, with its blunt statement of the differences between the two sides, it was typical of Chinese statecraft. All along, the PRC had believed that the specific points at issue between two countries could be overcome if the goodwill was sufficient. Beijing would not compromise on core interests, but barring an infringement of those, it could live amicably with those it disagreed with.
Isolated as he was, he had reason to be afraid. What if the Gang of Four turned against him? Jiang Qing was reckless, unwilling to stop at anything; if he came out in full force against the Gang, he might lose. And the technocrats might find they no longer needed him; perhaps there was such a thing as giving them too much independence. The fears might seem exaggerated, but to and old, ill man who had been criticized by his own party before, who had been deposed from power and had had to fight his way back, they would have been powerful indeed. So Mao sought to play a balancing role, letting the factions fight on and warning them not to get carried away. It was a policy that sought to maintain his own primacy, and it threatened all that China had gained.
Mao could talk of the need for trade and getting support from the huaqiao (overseas Chinese), but these ideas would compel Deng’s imagination with a force only direct experience can generate.
There was, too, a shrewd sense of politics. As a young man doing intelligence work for the CCP, he knew the value of secrecy and silence.
He was, even at this early stage, coming to the idea that political unity did not have to mean a uniform socioeconomic system, that one could do things differently in different parts of the empire.
It was one more lesson in the dangers of anarchy, of letting young people do as they wished without proper supervision. The chaos the Red Guards had unleashed had destroyed his son’s life and wrecked the country he had worked so hard for. For Deng Xiaoping, the political and the personal went hand in hand.
He had waited a long time, and he was done waiting now; in Mao’s last years, he was a veritable dynamo, going everywhere, meeting everyone, doing everything, trying desperately to drag this vast, chaotic country that had been bent on self-destruction into the modern world.
Hua would remain insecure about Deng — how could he have felt otherwise? — and Deng would take care, especially in his early days back, to appear as unthreatening as possible. Hua was confirmed as chairman; Deng made clear he would not be competing for the post. He understood — perhaps it was the experience with Jiang Qing that had driven the point home — that tremendous influence could be exercised without the chairmanship. One could perhaps achieve even more working in the shadow of a chairman, refusing to take credit for good deeds, explaining that decisions were collective, that someone else was in charge when things went wrong. It was not the title that counted, not the trappings of office, but power — and power was a function of support within the party, of having allies in the right places and minimizing enmities.
To interpret Mao too literally, Deng told Hu Qiaomu — hitherto custodian of ideological rectitude — was to destroy the entire system of Mao thought. It was the essence of the thought that one had to follow — and this could not be done by focusing myopically on what Mao actually said.
Mao had been the party made flesh. To criticize him to roundly, as Deng would admit to President Bush in a moment of candor in early 1989, would be to deny an important part of the country’s history; it could lead to ideological chaos and political instability. And instability was the one thing Deng wished to avoid above all else; instability could tip into chaos, at which point all hopes of modernization could die. Seeking truth from facts and condemning past errors could go only so far. People need something to believe in. This the party would provide; it would merely add economic modernization to the canon.
Lost in the celebration is the fact that the plenum only formalized ideas that China had, by 1978, been pursuing for a while and that it would have to work hard to continue to pursue. It was not that Deng waved a magic wand at the plenum to cast China on the road to economic growth; rather, he used the plenum as a forum at which to declare victory and intent. Growth had a purpose: strengthening the country, sustaining the great China that had been so painstakingly put together. As such, the party would pursue growth in its quest for national security.
Aid recipients would have to be warned that China would be less generous than in the past. Mao had given aid as much as a matter of prestige as of grand strategy; it had won friends in a world where China needed them, but it had also become a matter of face — he would export grain even as China starved. Deng’s approach was blunter: China was still a developing country, and till such time as it had developed, it would have to limit its obligations to others.
So there would have to be cuts. Part of carrying these out was instituting a proper retirement system; aged military cadres would have to go. There they sat, these famed heroes of battles of yore, their salaries and perks draining China’s economy of its lifeblood. The youngest of them, Deng noted caustically, was 64 or 65. Most of the officials at headquarters were already over 65; in 5 more years they would be over 70. This was no way to run a country.
“First: use. Second: criticize. Third: fix. Fourth: create.” — this was the path Deng saw for China — it had worked well for Japan. When Japanese scholars advised China to not focus exclusively on growth rates, but to develop infrastructure and energy, Deng paid attention.
The difference between Deng and Mao on political economy was tactical, not strategic. Mao too had grasped the idea that the economy was the final guarantor of national security; it was only that having understood as much, he had little idea of what to do. He would veer into the Great Leap Forward, suggest expanding the self-tilled land, but never expand it as much as needed; he would seek trade, but only in his final years did he allow Deng to exhibit a fervent commitment to it — and he was too proud and too insecure to relinquish full control of economic planning to someone who understood it better.
The point was the unity of the Chinese people. (He would be wary of using this rhetoric though: it was all right for the diaspora to use it but better, perhaps, for the PRC to tone it down. Deng was alive to the idea that smaller countries, even the Chinese people within them, might be suspicious of the PRC’s intentions; his country was too large to appear unthreatening.)
On a clear day on Little Jinmen, you can still see the words “One country, two systems” winking at you from the mainland: a blandishment, a promise still unfulfilled.
“One country, two systems,” Deng would explain to the Burmese, was a form of peaceful coexistence.
China, he would explained to the Italians, could insist on recovering the territories that had historically belonged to it, or it could pursue joint development. The latter approach was one that could be used elsewhere: the British and Argentines could try it on the Falkland Islands.
One gained nothing by shutting talks down. And one gained nothing by assuming that negotiations with one country closed off negotiations with another; despite the talks with the India, he would continue to celebrate the Sino-Pakistani friendship, telling the Pakistani PM that China remained concerned about Pakistan’s stability. You needed as many cards as you could get to maintain a favorable balance of power.
Taiwan was, however sensitive, however emotional, just one strand in a larger web of interests. China and America had their differences, but those differences had to be judged in a larger context — in which context, nurturing the Sino-American relationship was of key importance.
From the Soviet Union to Korea, Japan to Vietnam, Chinese interests demanded a decent working relationship with the US. To sacrifice those interests purely because of continued disagreements on Taiwan would have been folly.
The same thinking underpinned Chinese relations with Japan and the Soviet Union. The aid, investment, and trade with Japan were simply far too valuable to jeopardize; one could agree to disagree.
Hu would reassure the Japanese about China’s own intentions: it educated its people, he said, that they should not seek revenge on Japan. He hoped that the Japanese would educate their citizens against militarism. This would be in the interests not just of the two peoples, but of the entire world.
The textbooks troubled Deng. They were, he explained, things that would poison the next generation; they could thus kill the hope of Sino-Japanese relations improving with the passage of time.
Li Peng met Gorbachev in Moscow and laid out what it would take for Sino-Soviet relations to improve. The Soviets would have to abandon the idea that the Chinese were a younger brother in one big family. China was an independent country. The significant thing, as ever, was that the two sides were talking to one another. They were willing to make the relationship work.
But it would need to modernize its forces to remain secure. He would tread carefully here; men with guns can be unpredictable, and there were pockets within the troops who remained fervent fans of the Gang of Four. But he would not stop: there had to be reform. The PLA would have to rid itself of factionalism, undergo political training. It would have to be reminded that it was the party — Deng’s party — that exercised authority over it.
Deng Xiaoping did not like young people. He was wary of the dangers of youth protest: it was a group of protesting students, after all, young, innocent, asserting their rights to participate in the political process, who had rendered his son paraplegic and driven him into exile. There were things young people did not understand about the history of the party, of the revolution, of the bitter suffering that been life under the Gang of Four; they had not been through what he and his cohort had been through; they could not know the complexities of life. They need to be educated, trained to see that their interests and difficulties had to be judged in the context of what suited the country as a whole. Of course one wanted democracy. But democracy without centralized control at the top was useless. There had to be an organizing power with paramount authority — and this, it had to be made clear to the young malcontents, was the party. It was an old man’s grumble, but it was a heartfelt one; he would put all the resources at his disposal into making sure that youth did not run wild again.
So the troops went out, killing the young. In the aftermath, there were two things Deng would do extraordinarily well. The first was standing firm in the face of all the criticism he was receiving from foreign quarters. What China did to govern China was none of the outside world’s business.
Standing down foreign critics was the easy part. There remained, within the party, a faction that believed that the protests could be attributed to reform and opening; the abandonment of Marxist-Maoist orthodoxy had led to the student protests. The case being proved, surely the party could now proceed to undo reform and opening. Here too, Deng would prove a formidable fighter.
A strange void had opened up in China with reform and opening, a nagging, spiritual hunger. Deng Xiaoping had opened the path to riches. There would be no more mass starvation. People could live in growing comfort; indeed, if they were enterprising, they could dream of making fortunes. But the price, whatever Deng’s claims to the contrary, had been faith in the old verities of Maoism: of equality and heroic struggle, of the Chinese people standing up to fight a common foe. Chen Yun had fretted about the ideological weakening of the party back in the Deng years, but it had been an abstract problem, not easily addressed; besides, China was too busy getting rich to grapple with the matter. Now Jiang found himself with a party confused about what it stood for and with a population that might well lose trust in its leadership.
And there were, beyond the party members and the patriotic students, the ranks of China’s faithful: men with long beards who could get guns from Pakistan, women wearing turquoise beads who kept alive the hope that the Dalai Lama would return, lost souls searching for meaning, drawn to house churches or the Falun Gong. More than Mao or Deng, Jiang understood that this was an expression of the deepest needs of the human soul.
Jiang was doing nothing less than constructing a communist canon for China. There were great thinkers, holy books — Marx and Engels, Mao and Deng — around which the country could congregate. In a sense, it did not matter that belief in Maoism had worn thin, that these were tired shibboleths that held no meaning for a tired people; it mattered only that they be repeated, be given lip service. Belief was something performed, rather than felt, a test of political fealty. Jiang himself was an agnostic on such matters; Joseph Prueher, commander of the US Pacific Command and later ambassador to China, would recall Jiang telling him that he would be glad to use any system of government that allowed him to maintain stability in his country of 1.24B.
Most people had a hard time remembering just what three represents were, so mind-numbingly dull was the idea that the party represented “the development trends of advanced productive forces,” “the orientations of an advanced culture,” and “the fundamental interests of the overwhelming majority of the Chinese people”.
The tacit bargain being offered was the same that which the CCP had struck with the majority Han: economic benefits, if uneven, in exchange for political obedience. Later, when violence flared in Xinjiang, Hu’s response would reflect the official mind’s basic understanding of how to keep the country together: he would call to suppress the violence ruthlessly but also speak of the need to guarantee the standard of living there. Functioning markets, water, electricity, heat: these are as much part of counterinsurgency as police work and brute force.
The stories of small entrepreneurs finding success and fortune that had been the life force of the eighties gave way to a different tale: that of large, well-connected firms using their ties to government officials to squash competition. Income inequality grew; the Chinese economy became one afflicted by crony capitalism. Both Jiang and Hu recognized the problem, and they knew it was existential. Corruption could eat away at the ties holding governed in loyalty to government; it could, if left unaddressed, bring the party down. The government would have to take effective measures to remedy the situation. There would have to be law, and the cadres would have to be schooled in it.
But the sheer size of the party made it tough to police all impropriety; besides, if they were serious about moving against corruption, Jiang and Hu might well have had to move against party members whose support they needed to stay in power. For all the considerable effort they would pour into the task, there was one central conundrum they could not overcome: how to devise a system of law to govern the party when the party itself was the ultimate arbiter of what the law said.
Tellingly, he spoke of Africa. That mantle of protector of the third world was not to be abandoned lightly.
To Jiang, this talk of democracy was nothing but a pretext for meddling in the internal affairs of other states and imposing the West’s political and economic model on other countries. (It was astonishing how accurate this reading was: there were Western policymakers and intellectuals who thought that democracy would soon take over the entire world, simply because it was better. It was just that the rest of the world did not necessarily see it that way.)
The trouble with the Americans was that one never knew what they would do. They would preach realpolitik one day and human rights the next; they did not act rationally, consistently. That they had gone ahead with the Taiwan Relations Act while recognizing the PRC was proof of this — and yet, somehow, China never gave up on the idea that there was a readability, a logic to American actions. When the Americans failed to live up to these high standards, Beijing would get angry. Then, the anger would die down, and China’s leaders would try, once more, to find common ground with the Americans in pursuit of larger mutual interests. Nothing illustrated the point as well as the third Taiwan Strait crisis.
It was terrifying how swift and uncompromising the American response was; what was even more terrifying, perhaps, was that it was utterly unpredictable. Having tested a few missiles, the PRC stopped.
Emotion, not grand strategy, informed the PRC’s behavior here. Responding to Lee’s invitation by recalling the PRC ambassador to the US was out of the proportion to the problem. Lee’s visit had, of course, been provocative, but it could have been dismissed as just a man giving a speech at a university. The willingness to recall an ambassador suggested the PRC was not keeping Taiwan in perspective, as it had long been hectoring the US to do: as one point in a larger strategic picture.
A pattern had emerged. A crisis with the Americans — and such crises were the result of misperception more than ill intent — would provoke anger, fierce recrimination; then there would be a return to prudence and a calm pursuit of long-term objectives.
That this did not happen owed something to the American willingness to climb down without climbing down; it also owed something to China’s willingness to keep the issue in perspective. The same was true of the embassy bombing and the Taiwan Strait crisis. Beijing could have opted to refuse the American apology for what had happened in Yugoslavia; it could, had it wanted to see just how dangerous things could get, have continued to test missiles in the Taiwan Strait, perhaps even engaged the Americans militarily. (This would have been suicidal, but it is astonishing how often governments and people in the throes of nationalistic fervor make suicidal decisions. Nationalistic sentiment in the Chinese population, certainly, was running high: a government more responsive to public pressure might well have felt obliged to do something violent and stupid.)
China did not trust the US, but it wanted decent relations with it.
Bush’s administration had been talking of the China threat, talk that would diminish, although not entirely disappear, as the focus shifted to terrorism.
The PRC’s task, as ever, was to stay calm, watchful, not aspire to leadership. A balance would have to be struck between fighting terrorism — which China wanted — and keeping hegemony — meaning the US — at bay.
Both Russia and China were members of the UNSC; as such they could cooperate to make sure that international relations remained democratic (which is to say, not unilaterally decided by the Americans) and that global issues were addressed in a manner consistent with their interests.
Friendship is something ritualistic, performed; you must go through the ceremonies and motions to create it. Proclaim friendship often enough, and it just might be forced into existence.
The forum could also, Jiang said, promote multipolarization — by which he meant the dilution of American influence.
It was in the natural order of things that smaller countries would be suspicious of a behemoth like China; Beijing’s task, therefore, was to work to eliminate the idea of a China threat.
Even before Xi Jinping, China maintained that it would negotiate with Southeast Asian countries bilaterally, not en masse at the ASEAN.
He promised all-weather friendship between China and Africa, and he promised mutual noninterference: it was not for Beijing to tell African officials what to do, to set political conditions on aid. (There was a touch of empathy here: Jiang’s country knew what it was like to be lectured on its internal affairs, and it was something that he would instinctively avoid in his dealings with smaller countries.)
They were harkening back to Mao’s tradition of statecraft, one that gave smaller countries due importance. (As in the Mao era, high policy was one thing; it was another, harder task to get everyone from across China’s diplomatic and business communities to avoid big country chauvinism.)
“But for there to be trust there must first be understanding, and for there to be understanding there must first be communication,” said Jiang. It was vintage Jiang and it was perfectly true — and yet behind the whole questioning, there was a nagging anxiety: his troops communicating with the Americans, without the party, without him as organizing channel. The Americans were used to such exchanges; Jiang, coming from a place where keeping the state whole was a challenge, where soldiers grown too powerful had turned into warlords and thus broken the country, was not. It was important to remember and remind all necessary that the party was paramount over the military. Western enemies, bent on westernizing and splitting the PRC, were testing the PLA: they whispered temptingly of the troops’ “departification” and “depoliticization.” China would have to strengthen political training in the troops, make sure the men with guns were properly versed in ideology.
It did not matter that war seemed unlikely in the here and now. The attitudes of other powers were changeable, and although they were reasonably well disposed to China today, one wanted the capacities to make sure one could deal with them if that changed tomorrow. No responsible Chinese government could have done otherwise.
Active defense sounded good, but to a smaller country, the risk of it becoming offensive could never be discounted.
Part of what kept the problem manageable during their time was their sheer blandness of tone. Jiang and Hu had gone about grand strategy quietly, not altering much, trying, when possible, to be conciliatory. They sought simply to keep China on the course Deng had set — continue with reform and opening, seek a balance of power in a multipolar world, modernize the military, and keep China whole. There was something dull and uninspiring about their ways. But dullness can be a virtue — and it was a virtue that would shine all the brighter in the days of Xi Jinping.
Xi, ripped from a comfortable existence and plunged into criticism and loss (his half-sister died during those years), seems to have come away with the insight that stability was both important and ephemeral, dependent on the whims of the strong. To make certain that life stayed stable, one could not rely on others; the only guarantee of stability was to protect it oneself. Until such time as one was in a position of power, it was important to maintain a low profile — this was crucial to surviving. But once one had attained power, it was important to assert oneself, to make sure that potential sources of danger did not survive. Governance could not rely forever on compromise between different, competing factions, for compromise can come unraveled. One must act resolutely to quell competition.
He rose through the ranks of the Communist Party, seemingly as quiet as Jiang or Hu. (He would express a liking for The Godfather: perhaps there was something of Don Vito and Michael Corleone to him, hiding his strength, encouraging potential foes to underestimate him — until the time was right to strike.) He worked in Fujian and Zhejiang: coastal provinces, booming thanks to reform and opening. He saw firsthand the benefits trade and openness brought; he saw too the corruption that came with wealth. Every now and then, one would have to make peace with corrupt dealings, but it was a cancer to be fought.
The risk, of course, is blowback. Xi has identified himself so deeply with the anticorruption campaign that officials uncertain of their future might move to block him. It is particularly dangerous to target soldiers; these are armed men and women who could lash out violently, perhaps even seize power in a coup. So Xi seeks to inspire loyalty to himself, by creating as formidable a cult of personality as China has seen since Mao’s day. He drops into pork bun restaurants unannounced, to huddle with the masses. He and his wife are immortalized in songs, adoring if a touch saccharine. Young soldiers, who might follow the siren call of their superiors in revolt, are to remind that there is the law — and Xi is the embodiment of it. He mingles with the people, as he did during the Cultural Revolution, because he wishes only to serve them; he will fight on their behalf against the powerful who have robbed their wealth, as tirelessly as he carried those loads in Shaanxi. He is protector and defender of the law, of the people, of China; he is Xi Jinping.
Xi’s China is not just a rising power inspiring fear in an established one, nor one whose sole ultimate power is the revival of lost glory. It is a country uncertain of how durable its power and integrity will prove; it will do all it can to make certain of them. The grand strategy it pursues is, at heart, defensive — and all the more implacable for that. And because it is a massive country, that defensive policy can look suspiciously aggressive.
In trying to defend the state he is in charge of, Xi Jinping will use all the tools at his disposal. The first is diplomacy: an attempt to reason with both the Americans and those who seek their support against China. Second, there is money; one can offer it and deny it to get states to modify their behavior. And finally there is the use of force, for one cannot shy away from doing what is necessary.
The most basic task is to communicate what China will and will not put up with. China is bent on peaceful development, Xi promises; it, like the rest of the world, needs peace to develop. But no country, he warns, should hope that the PRC is going to barter away its core interests. Sovereign rights and security, development interests — these are not going to be compromised on. If the rest of the world wants peace, it will have to be as reasonable as the PRC. In reaching out to the Americans, therefore, he has suggested a “new model of great power relations.” As Xi first outlined the model, it is trite enough: mutual respect, cooperation on areas of common interest, and enriching the people of both countries, as well as those of the world as a whole.
And potential successors to Kim backed by Beijing have a way of being found assassinated. It is astonishing how limited the leverage one has over a client state can be. Let the client state figure out what it is needed, and it will do as it pleases, regardless of its patron’s imprecations to prudence and decency.
In his last desperate attempt to keep the Guomindang in power, Xi Jinping met with Ma Ying-jeou — and in that attempt demonstrated just how poor China’s understanding of Taiwan remained. Xi had thought that meeting Ma would give the latter face, credibility, which he could campaign on. Here, Ma’s electorate would realize, was a serious man, who could meet another serious man and thus deliver good governance. What Taiwanese saw instead was a leader suspected of being too close to Beijing proving he was too close to Beijing as he tried to rescue himself from a raft of failed policies.
Xi Jinping cared deeply about Taiwan — so deeply that he did not understand it.
China had been incensed; this was none of the World Court’s business. The verdict came in favor of the Philippines — and then something remarkable happened. Even as the Americans were gloating about the triumph of a liberal world order and international law (this was particularly ironic: Washington had never ratified the UNCLOS, the treaty that lay at the heart of the dispute; both Beijing and Manila were parties), the Philippines’ president Rodrigo Duterte announced his own pivot to China.
Simply put, Beijing cared more about the theater than Washington did, cared in ways Washington could not fathom. China needs a place to break through the islands that confine it to the near seas. For it is beyond the seas that markets lie, the minerals that sustain the Chinese economy, the lands where China gets food from now and will get food from in the future. The US might say it guarantees freedom of navigation, but Xi knows better than to reply on such promises. Goodwill can change tomorrow; to rely on it for access to the high seas is a risk he is unwilling to take.
The Pakistanis are not easy to deal with. Money invested there has a way of paying badly; they are always asking for more, and the security they provide for workers is appalling. But a country cannot choose its neighbors; cursed as it is by geography, China has to placate the North Koreans and Pakistans of the world to remain secure.
They look grand; they buy friends of sorts, it is true, but over time they add to the strain on the state’s finances. There was a reason Deng pruned the PRC’s foreign aid budget: every little bit helps, and his stance was China first. Xi Jinping has reversed that policy. The reversal brings China to a position of leadership, but leadership can be an expensive pastime.
There can be few jobs more difficult than that of paramount leader of China: the surrounding would invariably alive with danger, the extent of the state, its integrity, and its stability forever uncertain. For an outsider, it is easy to observe that the PRC is far more secure now than it used to be. To a Chinese leader, that is far from sufficient as reassurance. The Korean War and the tussle with the Soviet Union, the Cultural Revolution and Tiananmen Square, the Taiwan crises, the American flights going by that vulnerable coast — they are all burned in on the Chinese official mind. And behind them are the lessons of a farther past, of Opium Wars and the warlord era, reminders of how complacency in a dangerous world can lead to dismemberment and despair. National security cannot be taken for granted. That the PRC was cobbled together is remarkable. That it has endured, both self-inflicted damage and hostility from abroad, is even more so. Luck has played a role, of course, but so too has grand strategy — often unarticulated, but usually there to shaped decisions. We should see the policies pursued by the PRC’s paramount leaders in the round, with all their virtues and their faults.
Taiwan today is an entity unto itself — and one more useful to China in that capacity than as yet another province in which it must suppress rebellion. In purely grand strategic terms, the easiest way of gaining a pliable Taiwan is to offer its independence and treat it like the Philippines — incline it to China’s will with suitable economic offerings and the occasional threat. In the failure to consider such a policy or in the heavy-handedness with which Xi approaches Hong Kong, Xinjiang, and Tibet, the blind spots of Chinese grand strategy become evident.
Dealing with multiple actors is better than dealing with a bloc. One can play them off against one another, shore up little bits of support and understanding that add up over time. The search for further friendships — in Africa, the Middle East, Latin America — reflects not the type of ideological contest that animated the Soviet Union and the US, but a deceptively simple insight: it helps to have all the friends you can get.
Because attitudes change and friends are unreliable, it was only responsible to back diplomacy with force. It was always going to be hard in China, with its outlaw bands and citizens’ militias, its revolutionary leaders who were guerrilla warriors, to demarcate the civil and military spheres cleanly. The party would have to be perpetually vigilant, always ready to assert its leadership over the PLA. This would involve allowing the army a certain role in the political and economic life of the country; it would also involve defining the limits of that role. Education would be crucial: soldiers would be reminded over and over again that they were subordinate to the party. The relationship between the party and the military remains a difficult one. It will require maintenance and unceasing attention by Xi and his successors.
The PRC would be far more active globally, not least because it felt that growing portions of the world were vital to its own survival. With great power comes great insecurity.
There was, throughout this, an unwavering belief that the economy was one plank in the larger architecture of national security and that it would have to be treated as such. The economy, like everything else, was meant to keep China safe. This was the idea that lay at the heart of Mao’s misguided Great Leap Forward: the only way of ensuring the China could stand up against the larger superpowers was by outstripping them economically. And this was the idea that lay at the heart of Deng’s reform and opening: one needed to get China’s economy functioning in order to keep it secure. The fruits of that policy would ripen in the Jiang and Hu eras. China’s astonishing growth brought in a new tool of statecraft: economic diplomacy. Beijing could offer loans to win friends, or threaten to cease business if a foreign country’s policy ran counter to its interests.
Problems were inevitable. No grand strategy is perfect — and China’s geopolitical circumstances were such that life was always going to be difficult. Some of the problems were intrinsic to getting rich. To get rich is glorious, but in a capitalist system (and for that matter, in a communist one), there are winners and there are losers. There is incentive to cheat, exploit, steal — and one is better equipped to do that the closer one is to power. The state was bound to get entangled in the economy; since its officials were only human, they would take advantage of that entanglement. The insistence that there was only one legitimate institution of power would make it virtually impossible to tackle graft, for the party would have to be cop, judge, and enforcer all in one. Income inequality and corruption represented the dark side of the success.
Abroad too, success came with the seeds of failure. As with corruption, these failures were, to an extent, inevitable. If China succeeded in becoming powerful enough to be secure, its sheer size would terrify its neighbors, who would seek support from abroad.
The capital controls hint at a broader problem: a lack of faith in China. How Xi and his successors will address this remains unclear. But if PRC grand strategy is to serve the ultimate goal — satisfying its citizens — it needs, perhaps, to pay a little less attention to security and a little more to compassion.