Yet the rise and fall of previous world orders based on many states — from the Peace of Westphalia to our time — is the only experience on which one can draw in trying to understand the challenges facing contemporary statesmen. The study of history offers no manual of instructions that can be applied automatically; history teaches by analogy, shedding light on the likely consequences of comparable situations. But each generation must determine for itself which circumstances are in fact comparable.
Intellectuals analyze the operations of international systems; statesmen build them. And there is a vast difference between the perspective of an analyst and that of a statesman. The analyst can choose which problem he wishes to study, whereas the statesman’s problems are imposed on him. The analyst can allot whatever time is necessary to come to a clear conclusion; the overwhelming challenge to the statesman is the pressure of time. The analyst runs no risk. If his conclusions prove wrong, he can write another treatise. The statesman is permitted only one guess; his mistakes are irretrievable.
The French leader who made the sale, Napoleon Bonaparte, advanced an Old Wold explanation for such one-sided transaction: “This accession of territory affirms forever the power of the US, and I have just given England a maritime rival that sooner or later lay low her pride.”
Over two-year period in 1869-71, he was catapulted between southwest China, where French representatives had raised a protest over anti-Christian riots; to the north, where a new set of riots had broken out; back to the far southwest, where a minority tribe on the Vietnamese border was in revolt; then to the northwest to address to a major Muslim rebellion; from there to the port of Tianjin in the northeast, where a massacre of Christians had drawn French warships and a threat of military intervention; and finally to the southeast, where a new crisis was brewing on the island of Taiwan (then known in the West as Formosa).
Almost all of these qualities — especially the devotion to unity and discipline — had been criticized at the Politburo meeting of December 1973, after which Zhou’s powers were removed (though he kept a title). Deng’s eulogy was thus an act of considerable courage. After the demonstrations in memory of Zhou, Deng was purged again from all his offices. He avoided being arrested only because the PLA protected him on military bases, first in Beijing, then in southern China.
China as the present-day economic superpower is the legacy of Deng Xiaoping. It is not that he designed specific programs to accomplish his ends. Rather, he fulfilled the ultimate task of a leader — of taking his society from where it is to where it has never been. Societies operate by standards of average performance. They sustain themselves by practicing the familiar. But they progress through leaders with a vision of the necessary and the courage to understand a course whose benefits at first reside largely in their vision.
One of the obstacles to continuity in America’s foreign policy is the sweeping nature of its periodic changes of government. As a result of term limits, every presidential appointment down to the level of Deputy Assistant Secretary is replaced at least every eight years — a change of personnel involving as many as five thousand key positions. The successors have to undergo a prolonged vetting process. In practice, a vacuum exists for the first nine months or so of the incoming administration, in which it is obliged to act by improvisation or on the recommendations of holdover personnel, as it gradually adjusts to exercising its own authority. The inevitable learning period is complicated by the desire of the new administration to legitimize its rise to office by alleging that all inherited problems are the policy faults of its predecessor and not inherent problems; they are deemed soluble and in a finite time. Continuity of policy becomes a secondary consideration if not an invidious claim. Since new Presidents have just won an election campaign, they may also overestimated the range of flexibility that objective circumstances permit of rely excessively on their persuasive power.
This is not the place to examine the events that led to the tragedy at Tiananmen Square; each side has different perceptions depending on the various, often conflicting, origins of their participation in the crisis. The student unrest started as a demand for remedies to specific grievances. But the occupation of the main square of a country’s capital, even when completely peaceful, is also a tactic to demonstrate the impotence of the government, to weaken it, and to tempt it into rash acts, putting it a disadvantage.
Ever since Deng’s call to “reform and open up,” China had seen the West as a model of economic prowess and financial expertise. It was assumed that whatever the Western countries’ ideological or political shortcomings, they knew how to manage their economies and the world’s financial system in a unique productive manner. While China refused to acquire this knowledge at the cost of Western political tutelage, the implicit assumption among many Chinese elites was that the West had a kind of knowledge worthy of diligent study and adaptation.
The collapse of American and European financial markets in 2008 — and the spectacle of Western disarray and miscalculation contrasted with Chinese success — seriously undermined the mystique of Western economic prowess. It prompted a new tide of opinion in China — among the vocal younger generation of students and Internet users and quite possibly in portions of the political and military leadership — to the effect that a fundamental shift in the structure of the international system was taking place.
Societies and nations tend to think of themselves as eternal. They also cherish a tale of their origin. A special feature of Chinese civilization is that it seems to have no beginning. It appears in history less as a conventional nation-state than a permanent natural phenomenon. In the tale of the Yellow Emperor, revered by many Chinese as the legendary founding ruler, China seems already to exist.
The Yellow Emperor has gone down in history as a founding hero; yet in the founding myth, he is reestablishing, not creating, an empire. China predated him; it strides into the historical consciousness as an established state requiring only restoration, not creation. This paradox of Chinese history recurs with the ancient sage Confucius: again, he is seen as the “founder” of a culture although he stressed that he had invented nothing, that he was merely trying to reinvigorate the principles of harmony which had one existed in the golden age but had been lost in Confucius’s own era of political chaos.
“The empire, long divided, must unite; long united, must divide. Thus it has ever been.” Each period of disunity was viewed as an aberration. Each new dynasty reached back to the previous dynasty’s principles of governance in order to reestablish continuity. The fundamental precepts of Chinese culture endured, tested by the strain of periodic calamity.
The culmination was 2.5 centuries of turmoil recorded in history as the Warring States period. Its European equivalent would be the interregnum between the Treaty of Westphalia and the end of WW2, when a multiplicity of European states was struggling for preeminence within the framework of the balance of power.
At the time of Zheng’s voyages, the European age of exploration had not yet begun. China’s fleet possessed what would have seemed an unbridgeable technological advantage: in the size, sophistication, and number of its vessels, it dwarfed the Spanish Armanda (which was still 150 years away).
There, they were to acknowledge their place in the Sinocentric world order by performing the ritual “kowtow” to acknowledge the Emperor’s superiority.
China’s splendid isolation nurtured a particular Chinese self-perception. Chinese elites grew accustomed to the notion that China was unique — not just “a great civilization” among others, but civilization itself.
The exclusion of foreigners and confinement to their own country has, by depriving them of all opportunities of making comparisons, sadly circumscribed their ideas; they are thus totally unable to free themselves from the dominion of association, and judge everything by rules of purely Chinese convention.
The Emperor seems to treated these catastrophes as similar to other barbarian invasions that were overcome, in the end, by China’s endurance and superior culture.
No one can deny that this state is the most beautiful in the world, the most densely populated, and the most flourishing kingdom known. Such an empire as that of China is equal to all Europe would be if the latter were united under a single sovereign.
Almost all empires were created by force, but none can be sustained by it. Universal rule, to last, needs to translate force into obligation. Otherwise, the energies of the rulers will be exhausted in maintaining their dominance at the expense of their ability to shape the future, which is the ultimate task of statesmanship. Empires persist if repression gives way to consensus.
But unlike Machiavelli, Confucius was concerned more with the cultivation of social harmony than with the machinations of power. His themes were the principles of compassionate rule, the performance of correct rituals, and the inculcation of filial piety. Perhaps because he offered his prospective employers with no short-term route to wealth or power, Confucius died without achieving his goal: he never found a prince to implement his maxims, and China continued its slide toward political collapse and war.
Confucius preached a hierarchical social creed: the fundamental duty was to “Know thy place.” To its adherence the Confucian order offered the inspiration of service in pursuit of a greater harmony. Unlike the prophets of monotheistic religions, Confucius preached no teleology of history pointing mankind to personal redemption. His philosophy sought the redemption of the state through righteous individual behavior. Oriented toward this world, his thinking affirmed a code of social conduct, not a roadmap to the afterlife.
Balance-of-power diplomacy was less a choice than an inevitability. No state was strong enough to impose its will; no religion retained sufficient authority to sustain universality. The concept of sovereignty and the legal equality of states became the basis of international law and diplomacy.
China, by contrast, was never engaged in sustained contact with another country on the basis of equality for the simple reason that it never encountered societies of comparable culture or magnitude. That the Chinese Empire should tower over its geographical sphere was taken virtually as a law of nature, an expression of the Mandate of Heaven. For Chinese Emperors, the mandate did not necessarily imply an adversarial relationship with neighboring peoples; preferably it did not. Like the US, China thought of itself as playing a special role.
The Emperor did not hold “summit meetings” with other heads of state,; instead, audiences with him represented the “tender cherishing of men from afar,” who brought tribute to recognize his overlordship. When the Chinese court deigned to send envoys abroad, they were not diplomats, but “Heavenly Envoys” from the Celestial Court.
The organization of the Chinese government reflected the hierarchical approach to world order. China handled ties with tribute-paying states such as Korea, Thailand, and Vietnam through the Ministry of Rituals, implying that diplomacy with these peoples was but one aspect of the larger metaphysical task of administering the Great Harmony. With less Sinicized mounted tribes to the north and west, China came to rely on a “Court of Dependencies,” analogous to a colonial office, whose mission was to invest vassal princes with titles and maintain peace on the frontier.
In its imperial role, China offered surrounding foreign peoples impartially, not equality: it would treat them humanely and compassionately in proportion to their attainment of Chinese culture and their observance of rituals connoting submission to China.
What was most remarkable about the Chinese approach to international affairs was less its monumental formal pretension than its underlying strategic acumen and longevity. For during most of Chinese history, the numerous “lesser” peoples along China’s long and shifting frontiers were often better armed and more mobile than the Chinese.
To China’s south and east were peoples who, though nominally subordinate in the Chinese cosmology, possessed significant martial traditions and national identities. The most tenacious of them, the Vietnamese, had fiercely resisted Chinese claims of superiority and could claim to have bested China in battle.
China’s vaunted centrality and material wealth would turn on itself and into an invitation for invasion from all sides.
The Great Wall, so prominent in Western iconography of China, was a reflection of this basic vulnerability, though rarely a successful solution to it. Instead, Chinese statesmen relied on a rich array of diplomatic and economic instruments to draw potentially hostile foreigners into relationships the Chinese could manage. The highest aspiration was less to conquer than to deter invasion and prevent the formation of barbarian coalitions.
The Chinese court practiced what in other contexts would be considered appeasement, albeit through an elaborate filter of protocol that allowed the Chinese elites to claim it was an assertion of benevolent superiority. Thus a Han Dynasty minister described the “five baits” with which he proposed to manage the mounted Xiongnu tribes to China’s northwestern frontier:
To give them elaborate clothes and carriages in order to corrupt their eyes; to give them fine food in order to corrupt their mouth; to give them music and women in order to corrupt their ears; to provide them with lofty buildings, granaries and slaves in order to corrupt their stomach and, as for those who come to surrender, the emperor should show them favor by honoring them with an imperial reception party in which the emperor should personally serve them wine and food so as to corrupt their mind. These are what may be called the five baits.
In periods of strength, the diplomacy of the Middle Kingdom was an ideological rationalization for imperial power. During periods of decline, it served to mask weakness and helped China manipulate contending forces.
When foreign dynasts prevailed in battle, the Chinese bureaucratic elite would offer their services and appeal to their conquerors on the premise that so vast and unique a land as they had just overrun could be ruled only by use of Chinese methods, Chinese language, and the existing Chinese bureaucracy. With each generation, the conquerors would find themselves increasingly assimilated into the order they had sought to dominate. Eventually their own home territories — the launching point of their invasions — would come to be regarded as part of China itself. They would find themselves pursuing traditional Chinese national interests, with the project of conquest effectively turned on its head.
A turbulent history has taught Chinese leaders that not every problem has a solution and that too great an emphasis on total mastery over specific events could upset the harmony of the universe. There were too many potential enemies for the empire ever to live in total security. If China’s fat was relative security, it also implied relative insecurity — the need to learn the grammar of over a dozen neighboring states with significantly different histories and aspirations. Rarely did Chinese statesmen risk the outcome of a conflict on a single all-or-nothing clash; elaborate multiyear maneuvers were closer to their style. Where the Western tradition prized the decisive clash of forces emphasizing feats of heroism, the Chinese ideal stressed subtlety, indirection, and the patient accumulation of relative advantage.
At the end of a well-played game, the board is filled by partially interlocking areas of strength. The margin of advantage is often slim, and to the untrained eyes, the identity of the winner is not always immediately obvious.
Chess, on the other hand, is about total victory. The purpose of the game is checkmate, to put the opposing king into a position where he cannot move without being destroyed. The vast majority of games end in total victory achieved by attrition or, more rarely, a dramatic, skillful maneuver. The only other possible outcome is a draw, meaning the abandonment of the hope for victory by both parties.
Where the skillful chess player aims to eliminate his opponent’s pieces in a series of head-on clashes, a talented wei qi player moves into “empty” spaces on the board, gradually mitigating the strategic potential of his opponent’s pieces. Chess produces single-mindedness; wei qi generates strategic flexibility.
A similar contrast exists in the case of China’s distinctive military theory. Its foundations were laid during a period of upheaval, when ruthless struggles between rival kingdoms decimated China’s population. Reacting to this slaughter (and seeking to emerge victorious from it), Chinese thinkers developed strategic thought that placed a premium on victory through psychological advantage and preached the avoidance of direct conflict.
What distinguishes Sun Tzu from Western writers on strategy is the emphasis on the psychological and political elements over the purely military. The great European military theorists Clausewitz and Jomini treat strategy as an activity in its own right, separate from politics. Even Clausewitz’s famous dictum that war is the continuation of politics by other means implies that with war the statesman enters a new and distinct phase.
Sun Tzu merges the two fields. Where Western strategists reflects on the means to assemble superior power at the decisive point, Sun Tzu addresses the means of building a dominant political and psychological position, such that the outcome of a conflict becomes a foregone conclusion. Western strategists test their maxims by victories in battles; Sun Tzu tests by victories where battles have become unnecessary.
A ruler must never mobilize his men out of anger. A general must never engage in battle out of spite.
Far better than challenging the enemy on the field of battle is undermining an enemy’s morale or maneuvering him into an unfavorable position from which escape is impossible. Because war is a desperate and complex enterprise, self-knowledge is crucial. Strategy resolves itself into a psychological contest.
The lowest form of war is to attack cities. Siege warfare is a last resort.
The victorious army is victorious first and seeks battle latter. The defeated army does battle first and seeks victory later.
Perhaps Sun Tzu’s most important insight was that in a military or strategy contest, everything is relevant and connected: weather, terrain, diplomacy, the reports of spies and double agents, supplies and logistics, the balance of forces, historic perceptions, the intangibles of surprise and morale. Each factor influences the others, giving rise to subtle shifts in momentum and relative advantage. There are no isolated events.
Hence the task of a strategist is less to analyze a particular situation than to determine its relationship to the context in which it occurs. No particular constellation is ever static; any pattern is temporary and in essence evolving. The strategist must capture the direction of that evolution and make it serve his ends. Sun Tzu uses the word “shi” for that quality, a concept with no direct Western counterpart. In the military context, shi connotes the strategic trend and “potential energy” of a developing situation, “the power inherent in the particular arrangement of elements and its developmental tendency.” In The Art of War, the word connotes the ever-changing configuration of forces as well as their general trend.
To Sun Tzu, the strategist mastering shi is akin to water flowing downhill, automatically finding the swiftest and easiest course. A successful commander waits before charging headlong into battle. He shies away from an enemy’s strength; he spends his time observing and cultivating changes in the strategic landscape. He studies the enemy’s preparations and his morale, husbands resources and define them carefully, and plays on his opponent’s psychological weaknesses — until at least he perceives the opportune moment to strike the enemy at his weakest point. Then he deploy his resources swiftly and suddenly, rushing “downhill” along the path of least resistance, in an assertion of superiority that careful timing and preparation have rendered a fait accompli. The Art of War articulates a doctrine less of territorial conquest than of psychological dominance; it was the way the North Vietnamese fought America.
For China’s classical sages, the world could never be conquered; wise rulers could hope only to harmonize with its trends. There was no New World to populate, no redemption awaiting mankind on distant shores. The promised land was China, and the Chinese were already there.
For the first time in its history, China faced “barbarians” who no longer sought to displace the Chinese dynasty and claim the Mandate of Heaven for themselves; instead, they proposed to replace the Sinocentric system with an entirely new vision of world order — with free trade rather than tribute, resident embassies in the Chinese capital, and a system of diplomatic exchange that did not refer to non-Chinese heads of state as “honorable barbarians” pledging fealty to their Emperor in Beijing.
On the latter point, Dundas charged Macartney to draw attention to the “discouraging” and “arbitrary” system of regulations at Guangzhou that prevented British merchants from engaging in the “fair competition of the Market” (a concept with no direct counterpart in Confucius China). He was, Dundas stressed, to disclaim any territorial ambitions in China — an assurance bound to be considered as an insult by the recipient because it implied that Britain had the option to entertain such ambitions.
All of this took place within the intricate framework of Chinese protocol, which showed Macartney the most considerate treatment in foiling and rejecting his proposals. Enveloped in all-encompassing protocol and assured that each aspect had a cosmically ordained and unalterable purpose, Macartney found himself scarcely able to begin his negotiations. Meanwhile he noted with a mixture of respect and unease the efficiency of China’s vast bureaucracy, assessing that “every circumstance concerning us and every word that falls from our lips is minutely reported and remembered.”
The Emperor, clearly unfamiliar with the capacity of the Western leaders for violent rapaciousness, was playing with fire, though he did not know it.
A couple of English frigates would be an overmatch for the whole naval force of their empire. In half a summer they could totally destroy all the navigation of their coasts and reduce the inhabitants of the maritime provinces, who subsist chiefly on chief, to absolute famine.
The blessing of trade with the West were far from self-evident: since China’s GDP was still roughly 7 times that of Britain’s, the Emperor could perhaps be forgiven for thinking that it was London that needed Beijing’s assistance and not the other way around.
If China remained closed, then the doors would have to be battered down.
For their part, the Chinese were willing to make limited concessions to Western’s merchants’ appetite for “profit” (a vaguely immoral concept in Confucian thought); but they were appalled by the Western’s envoys’ suggestions that China might be simply one state among many, or that it should have to live with permanent daily contact with barbarian envoys in the Chinese capital.
Since the European concept of sovereignty was unknown, however, in China extraterritoriality came to be a symbol at the time, not so much of the violation of a legal norm as of declining imperial power. The resulting diminution of the Mandate of Heaven led to the eruption of a flurry of domestic rebellion.
Most Chinese did not at first appreciate the lasting repercussions of the Opium War. They treated the concessions as an application of the traditional method of absorbing the barbarians and wearing them down.
Following the British treaty, US President John Tyler promptly sent a mission to China to gain similar concessions for the Americans, the forerunner of the later “Open Door” policy. The French negotiated their own treaty with analogous terms. Each of these countries in turn included a “Most Favored Nation” clause that stipulated that any concession offered by China to other countries must also be given to the signatory. (Chinese diplomacy later used this clause to limit exactions by stimulating competition between the various claimants for special privilege.)
The leaders on both sides understood that this was a dispute about far more than protocol or opium. The Qing court was willing to appease avaricious foreigners with money and trade; but if the principle of barbarian political equality to the Son of Heaven was established, the entire Chinese world order would be threatened; the dynasty risked the loss of the Mandate of Heaven.
Defeat was not unknown in the course of China’s long history. China’s rulers had dealt with it by applying the 5 baits. They saw the common characteristic of these invaders as being their desire to partake of Chinese culture; they wished to settle on Chinese soil and partake of its civilization. They could therefore gradually be tamed by some of the psychological methods and, in time, become part of Chinese life.
But the European invaders had no such aspiration nor limited goals. Deeming themselves more advanced societies, their goal was to exploit China for economic gain, not to join its way of life. Their demands were therefore limited only by their resources and their greed. Personal relationships could not be decisive, because the chiefs of the invaders were not neighbors but lived thousands of miles away, where they were governed by motivations obtuse to the subtleness and indirection of the Qing type of strategy.
Poised between two eras and two different conceptions of international relations, China strove for a new identity, and above all, to reconcile the values that marked its greatness with the technology and commerce on which it would have to base its security.
As the 19th century progressed, China experienced almost every imaginable shock to its historic image of itself. Before the Opium War, it conceived of diplomacy and international trade mainly as forms of recognition of China’s preeminence. Now, even as it entered a period of domestic turmoil, it faced 3 foreign challenges, any of which could be enough to overturn a dynasty. These threats came from every direction and in heretofore barely conceivable incarnations.
From across the oceans in the West came the European nations. From the north and west, an expansionist and militarily dominant Russia sought to pry loose China’s vast hinterland. Still, neither the Western powers nor Russia had any ambition to displace the Qing and claim the Mandate of Heaven; ultimately they reached the conclusion that they had much to lose from the Qing’s fall. Japan, by contrast, had no vested interest in the survival of China’s ancient institutions or the Sinocentric world order.
In light of the contrast between China’s military near impotence and its expansively articulated vision of its world role, the rearguard defense to maintain an independent Chinese government was a remarkable achievement. No victory celebration attended this accomplishment; it was an incomplete, decades-long endeavor marked by numerous reversals and internal opponents, outlasting and occasionally ruining its proponents. This struggle came at considerable cost to the Chinese people — whose patience and endurance served, for neither the first nor the last time, as the ultimate line of defense. But it preserved the ideal of China as a continental reality in charge of its own destiny. With great discipline and self-confidence, it kept the door open for the later era of Chinese resurgence.
In other words, China should offer concessions to all rapacious nations rather than let Britain exact them and benefit itself by offering to share the spoils with other countries. The mechanism for achieving this objective was the MFN principle — that any privilege granted one power should be automatically extended to all others.
To act as allies without forming an alliance was pushing realism to extremes. If all leaders were competent strategists and thought deeply and systematically about strategy, they would all come to the same conclusions. Alliances would be unnecessary; the logic of their analysis would impel parallel directions.
But differences of history and geography apart, even similarly situated leaders do not necessarily come to identical conclusions — especially under stress. Analysis depends on interpretation; judgments differ as to what constitutes a fact, even more about its significance. Countries have therefore made alliances — formal instruments that insulate the common interest, to the extent possible, from extraneous circumstances or domestic pressures. They create an additional obligation to calculation of national interest. They also provide a legal obligation to justify common defense, which can be appealed to in a crisis. Finally, alliances reduce — to the extent that they are seriously pursued — the danger of miscalculation by the potential adversary and thereby inject an element of calculability into the conduct of foreign policy.
How would success be define? There is no evidence that this question was ever addressed in the early stages of America’s military commitment, partly because all governmental attention was needed to defend the perimeter around Pusan. The practical result was to let military operations determine political decisions.
None of these views remotely coincided with the way Beijing regarded international affairs. As soon as American forces intervened in the Taiwan Strait, Mao treated the Seventh Fleet’s deployment as an “invasion” of Asia. China and the US were approaching a clash by misinterpreting each other’s strategic design. The US strove to oblige China to accept its concept for international order, based on international organizations like the UN, to which it could not imagine an alternative. From the outset, Mao had no intention to accept an international system in the design of which China had no voice.
No student of military affairs would have thought it conceivable that the PLA, barely finished with the civil war and largely equipped with captured Nationalist weapons, would take on a modern army backed up by nuclear weapons. But Mao was not a conventional military strategist. Mao’s actions in the Korean War require an understanding of how he viewed what, in Western strategy, would be called deterrence or even preemption and which, in Chinese thinking, combines the long-range, strategic, and psychological elements.
China’s strategy generally exhibits 3 characteristics: meticulous analysis of long-term trends, careful study of tactical options, and detached exploration of operational decisions.
In short, China entered the war based on a carefully considered assessment of strategic trends, not as a reaction to an American tactical maneuver — nor out of a legalistic determination to defend the sanctity of the 38th parallel. A Chinese offensive was a preemptive strategy against dangers that had not yet materialized and based on judgments about ultimate American purposes toward China that were misapprehended. It was also an expression of the crucial role Korea played in China’s long-range calculations — a condition perhaps even more relevant in the contemporary world.
Observers could not fail to remember the debate that had developed in the US over war aims. General MacArthur, applying traditional maxims, sought victory; the administration, interpreting the war as a feint to lure America into Asia — which was surely Stalin’s strategy — was prepared to settle for a military draw (and probably a long-term political setback), the first such outcome in a war fought by America. The inability to harmonize political and military goals may have tempted other Asian challengers to believe in America’s domestic vulnerability to wars without clear-cut military outcome.
Mao did not succeed in liberating all of Korea from “American imperialism,” as Chinese propaganda claimed initially. But he had gone to war for larger and in some ways more abstract, even romantic, aims: to test the “New China” with a trial by fire and to purge what Mao perceived as China’s historic softness and passivity; to prove to the West (and, to some extent, the Soviet Union) that China was now a military power and would use force to vindicate its interests; to secure China’s leadership of the Communist movement in Asia; and to strike at the US (which Mao believed was planning an eventual invasion of China) at a moment he perceived as opportune. The principal contribution of the new ideology was not its strategic concepts so much as the willpower to defy the strongest nations and to chart its own course.
Ironically, the biggest loser in the Korean War was Stalin, who had given the green light to Kim Il-sung to start and had urged, even blackmailed, Mao to intervene massively. Encouraged by America’s acquiescence in the Communist victory in China, he had calculated that Kim Il-sung could repeat the pattern in Korea. The American intervention thwarted that objective. He urged Mao to intervene, expecting that such an act would create a lasting hostility between China and the US and increase China’s dependence on Moscow.
Stalin was right in his strategic prediction but erred grievously in assessing the consequences. Chinese dependence on the Soviet Union was double-edged. The rearmament of China that the Soviet Union undertook, in the end, shortened the time until China would be able to act on its own. The Sino-American schism Stalin was promoting did not lead to an improvement of Sino-Soviet relations, nor did it reduce China’s Titoist option. On the contrary, Mao calculated that he could defy both superpowers simultaneously. American conflicts with the Soviet Union were so profound that Mao judged he needed to pay no price for Soviet backing in the Cold War, indeed that he could use it as a threat even without its approval, as he did in a number of subsequent crises. Starting with the end of Korean War, Soviet relations with China deteriorated, caused in no small part by the opaqueness with which Stalin had encouraged Kim Il-sung’s adventure, the brutality with which he had pressed China toward intervention, and, above all, the grudging manner of Soviet support, all of which was in the form of repayable loans. Within a decade, the Soviet Union would become China’s principal adversary. And before another decade had passed, another reversal of alliance would take place.
In foreign policy, statesmen often serve their objectives by bringing about a confluence of interests. Mao’s policy was based on the opposite. He learned to exploit overlapping hostilities. The conflict between Moscow and Washington was the strategic essence of the Cold War; the hostility between Washington and Beijing dominated Asian diplomacy. But the two Communist states could never merge their respective hostility toward the US — except briefly and incompletely in the Korean War — because of Mao’s evolving rivalry with Moscow over ideological primacy and geostrategic analysis.
From the point of view of traditional power politics, Mao, of course, was in no position to act as an equal member of the triangular relationship. He was by far the weakest and most vulnerable. But by playing on the mutual hostility of the nuclear superpowers and creating the impression of being impervious to nuclear devastation, he managed to bring about a kind of diplomatic sanctuary for China. Mao added a novel dimension to power politics, one for which I know of no precedent. Far from seeking the support of either superpower — as traditional balance-of-power theory would have counseled — he exploited the Soviet-US fear of each other by challenging each of the rivals simultaneously.
Within a year of the end of the Korean War, Mao confronted America militarily in a crisis in the Taiwan Strait. Almost simultaneously, he began to confront the Soviet Union ideologically. He felt confident in pursuing both courses because he calculated that neither superpower would permit his defeat by the other. It was a brilliant application of the Zhuge Liang Empty City Stratagem described in an earlier chapter, which turns material weakness into a psychological asset.
The crisis had, however, no obvious political objective. China was not threatening Taiwan directly; the US did not want a change in the status of the strait. The crisis became less a rush to confrontation — as the media presented it — than a subtle exercise in crisis management. Both sides maneuvered toward intricate rules designed to prevent the military confrontation they were proclaiming on the political level. Sun Tzu was alive and well in the diplomacy of the Taiwan Strait.
The outcome was “combative coexistence,” not war.
The art of crisis management is to raise the stakes to where the adversary will not follow, but in a manner that avoids a tit for tat.
The first agreement procedural: to upgrade existing contacts at Geneva, which had been held at the consular level, to ambassadorial rank. (The significance of the ambassadorial designation is that ambassadors are technically personal representatives of their head of state and presumably have somewhat greater latitude and influence.) This only served to institutionalize paralysis.
The terror of Stalin’s rule had left its mark on Khrushchev’s generation. They had made their big step up the ladder in the purges of the 1930s when an entire generation of leaders was wiped out. They had purchased the sudden rise to eminence at the cost of permanent emotional insecurity. They had witnessed — and participated in — the wholesale decapitation of a ruling group, and they knew that the same fat might await them; indeed Stalin was in the process of beginning another purge as he was dying. They were not yet ready to modify the system that had generated institutionalized terror. Rather they attempted to alter some of its practices while reaffirming the core beliefs to which they had devoted their lives, blaming the failures on the on the abuse of power by Stalin.
When Mao came to put himself under Moscow’s security umbrella, it took him 2 months to convince Stalin, and he had to pay for the alliance with major economic concessions in Manchuria and Xinjiang impairing the unity of China.
You know, Comrade Khrushchev, for years it’s been a widely held view that because China is an underdeveloped and overpopulated country, with widespread unemployment, it represents a good source of cheat labor. But you know, we Chinese find this attitude very offensive. Coming from you, it’s rather embarrassing. If we were to accept your proposal, others might think that the Soviet Union has the same image of China as the capitalist West has.
When, in 1955, the Soviet Union created the Warsaw Pact of Communist countries as a counterweight to NATO, Mao refused to join. China would not subordinate the defense of its national interests to a coalition.
Instead, Zhou Enlai was sent to the 1955 Asian-African Conference in Bandung. The conference created a novel and paradoxical grouping: the alignment of the Non-Aligned.
The fundamental differences went to the essence of the two societies’ images of themselves. Russia, salvaged from foreign invaders by brute force and endurance, had never claimed to be a universal inspiration to other societies. A significant part of its population was non-Russian. Its greatest rulers, like Peter the Great and Catherine the Great, had brought foreign thinkers and experts to their courts to learn from more advanced foreigners — an unthinkable concept in the Chinese imperial court. Russian rulers appealed to their people on the basis of their endurance, not their greatness. Russian diplomacy relied, to an extraordinary extent, on superior power. Russia rarely had allies among countries where it had not stationed military forces. Russian diplomacy tended to be power-oriented, tenaciously holding on to fixed positions and transforming foreign policy into trench warfare.
Mao represented a society that, over the centuries, had been the largest, best-organized, and, in the Chinese view at least, most beneficent political institution in the world. That its performance would have a vast international impact was received wisdom. When a Chinese ruler appealed to his people to work hard so that they could become the greatest people in the world, he was exhorting them to reclaim a preeminence that, in the Chinese interpretation of history, had been only recently and temporarily misplaced. Such a country inevitably found it impossible to play the role of junior partner.
We intended to teach the Americans a lesson. America had bullied us for many years, so now that we had a chance, why not give it a hard time? Americans started a fire in the Middle East, and we started another in the Far East. We would see what they would do with it.
Khrushchev had enabled Mao to lure him into so futile a course by trying to be both clever and cynical. Especially when ultimate decisions of peace and war are involved, a strategist must be aware that bluffs may be called and must take into account the impact on his future credibility of an empty threat. On Taiwan, Mao used Khrushchev’s ambivalence to entice him into making a nuclear threat that he had admitted he had no intention of carrying out, straining Moscow’s relationship with the US on behalf of an issue Khrushchev considered unimportant and of an allied leader who despised him.
Almost all postcolonial countries have insisted on the borders within which they achieved independence. To throw them open to negotiations invites unending controversies and domestic pressure. On the principle that he was not elected to bargain away territory that he considered indisputably Indian, Nehru rejected the Chinese proposal by not answering it.
“Lack of forbearance in small matters upsets great plans. We must pay attention to the situation.” It was not yet an order for military confrontation; rather a kind of alert to prepare a strategic plan. As such, it triggered the familiar Chinese style of dealing with strategic decisions: thorough analysis; careful preparation; attention to psychological and political factors; quest for surprise; and rapid conclusion.
Before the final decision to order the offensive, word was received from Khrushchev that, in case of war, the Soviet Union would back China under the provisions of the Treaty of Friendship and Alliance of 1950. It was a decision totally out of keeping with Soviet-Chinese relations in the previous years and the neutrality heretofore practiced by the Kremlin on the issue of Indian relations over Soviet deployment of nuclear weapons to Cuba, wanted to assure himself of Chinese support in the Caribbean crisis. He never returned to the offer once the Cuban crisis was over.
China, having barely overcome a vast famine, how had declared adversaries on all frontiers.
“To rebel is justified.” “Bombard the headquarters.” He approved their violent attacks on the existing Communist Party bureaucracy and traditional social mores and encouraged them not to fear “disorder” as they fought to eradicate the dreaded “Four Olds” — old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits — that, in Maoist thinking, had kept China weak. The People’s Daily fanned the flames by editorializing “In Praises of Lawlessness” — an explicit, government-sanctioned rebuke to China’s millennial tradition of harmony and order.
A challenge of the modern period is that issues have become so complex that the legal framework is increasingly impenetrable. The political system issues directives but the execution is left, to an ever larger degree, to bureaucracies separated from both the political process and the public, whose only control is periodic election, if that. Even in the US, major legislative acts often comprises thousands of pages that, to put it mildly, on the the fewest legislators have read in detail. Especially in the Communist states, bureaucracies operate in self-contained units with their own rules in pursuance of procedures they often define for themselves. Fissures open up between the political and the bureaucratic classes and between both of those and the general public. In this manner, a new mandarin class risk emerging by bureaucratic momentum. Mao’s attempt to solve the problem in one grand assault nearly wrecked Chinese society.
In the end, as the 1960s progressed, even Mao began to recognize that potential perils to China were multiplying. Along its vast border, China faced a potential enemy in the Soviet Union; a humiliated adversary in India; a massive American deployment and an escalating war in Vietnam; self-proclaimed government-in-exile in Taipei and the Tibetan enclave of northern India; a historic opponent in Japan; and, cross the Pacific, an American that viewed China as an implacable adversary. Only the rivalries between these countries had prevented a common challenge so far. But no prudent statesman could gamble forever that this self-restraint would last — especially as the Soviet Union seemed to be preparing to put an end to the mounting challenges from Beijing. The Chairman would soon be obliged to prove that he knew how to be prudent as well as daring.
By any sober strategic calculations, Mao had maneuvered China into great peril. If either the US or the USSR attacked China, the other might stand aside. Logistics favored India in the two countries’s border dispute, sine the Himalayas were far from China’s centers of strength. The US was establishing a military presence in Vietnam. Japan, with all its historical baggage, was unfriendly and economically resurgent.
Mao seemed concerned that since a longer period had passed since the end of WW2 than in the interwar period between the first two world wars, some global catastrophe might be imminent.
Mao treated the rapprochement as a strategic imperative, Nixon as an opportunity to redefine the American approach to foreign policy and international leadership. He sought to use the opening to China to demonstrate to the American public that, even in the midst of a debilitating war, the US was in a position to bring about a design for long-term peace. He and his associates strove to reestablish contact with one-fifth of the world’s population to place in context and ease the pain of an inevitably imperfect withdrawal from a corner of Southeast Asia.
Mao was convinced that vision and willpower would overcome all obstacles. Nixon was committed to careful planning, though ridden by the fear that even the best-laid plans would go awry as a result of fate intervening in an unforeseen and unforeseeable manner. But he carried out his plans anyway. Mao and Nixon shared one overriding trait: a willingness to follow the global logic of their reflections and instincts to ultimate conclusions. Nixon tended to be the more pragmatic. One of his frequently expressed maxims was “You pay the same price for doing something halfway as for doing it completely. So you might as well do it completely.” What Mao carried out with elemental vitality, Nixon pursued as a resigned recognition of the workings and obligations of fate. But once launched on a course, he followed it with comparable determination.
That China and the US would find a way to come together was inevitable given the necessities of the time. It would have happened sooner or later whatever the leadership in either country. That it took place with such decisiveness and proceeded without so few detours is a tribute to the leadership that brought it about. Leaders cannot create the context in which they operate. Their distinctive contribution consists in operating at the limit of what the given situation permits. If they exceed these limits, they crash; if they fall short of what is necessary, their policies stagnate. If they build soundly, they may create a new set of relationships that sustain itself over a historical period because all parties consider it in their own interest.
The clash might not have attracted the WH’s attention so quickly had the Soviet Ambassador not come to my office repeatedly to brief me on the Soviet version of what had happened. It was unheard of in that cold period of the Cold War for the Soviet Union to brief us on an event so remote from our usual dialogue — or on any event on that matter. We drew the conclusion that the Soviet Union was the probable aggressor and that the briefing, less than a year after the occupation of Czechoslovakia, hid a larger design.
But Nixon was determined to define policy by geopolitical considerations, and in these terms, any fundamental change in the balance of power had to evoke at least an American attitude, and, if significant, a policy. Even if we decided to stay aloof, it should be by conscious decision, not by default.
How to communicate this decision? The Warsaw ambassadorial talks had not been convened for months and would have been too low-level to present a view of such magnitude. The administration therefore decided to go to the other extreme and go public with the American decision to view a conflict between the two Communist giants as a matter affecting the American national interest.
Chinese negotiators use diplomacy to weave together political, military, and psychological elements into an overall strategic design. Diplomacy to them is the elaboration of a strategic principle. They ascribe no particular significance to the process of negotiation as such; nor do they consider the opening of a particular negotiation a transformational event. They do not think that personal relations can affect their judgments, though they invoke personal ties to facilitate their own efforts. They have no emotional difficulty with deadlocks; they consider them the inevitable mechanism of diplomacy. They prize gestures of goodwill only if they serve a definable objective or tactic. And they patiently take the long view against impatient interlocutors, making time their ally.
The attitude of the American diplomat varies substantially. The prevalent view within the American body politics sees military force and diplomacy as distinct, in essence separate, phases of action. Military action is viewed as occasionally creating the conditions for negotiations, but once the negotiations begin, they are seen as being propelled by their own internal logic. American diplomacy generally prefers the specific over the general, the practical over the abstract. It is urged to be “flexible”; it feels an obligation to break deadlocks with new proposals — unintentionally inviting new deadlocks to elicit new proposals. These tactics often can be sued by determined adversaries in the service of a strategy of procrastination.
Mao, as Snow reported, now deplored the cult of personality built around his person: “It was hard, the chairman said, for people to overcome the habits of 3K years of emperor-worshipping tradition.” The titles ascribed to him such as “Great Helmsman would all be eliminated sooner or later.” The sole title he wished to retain was “teacher.”
They had never conceived their security to reside in the legal arrangement of a community of sovereign states. Americans to this day often treat the opening to China as ushering in a static condition of friendship. But the Chinese leaders were brought up on the concept of shi — the art of understanding matters in flux.
When Zhou wrote about reestablishing friendship between the Chinese and American peoples, he described an attitude needed to foster a new international equilibrium, not a final state of the relationships between peoples. In Chinese writings, the hallowed words of the American vocabulary of a legal international order are rarely to be found. What was sought, rather, was a world in which China could find security and progress through a kind of combative coexistence, in which readiness to fight was given equal pride of place to the concept of coexistence.
Nothing now seemed to disturb the serene aplomb of our hosts, who acted as if welcoming the special emissary of the American President for the first time in the history of the PRC was the most natural occurrence.
Chinese statesmen historically have excelled at using hospitality, ceremony, and carefully cultivated personal relationships as tools of statecraft. It was a diplomacy well suited to China’s traditional security challenge — the preservation of a sedentary and agricultural civilization surrounded by peoples who, if they combined, wielded potentially superior military capacity. China survived, and generally prevailed, by mastering the art of fostering a calibrated combination of rewards and punishments and majestic cultural performance. In this context, hospitality becomes an aspect of strategy.
In some 60 years of public life, I have encountered no more compelling figure than Zhou Enlai. Short, elegant, with an expressive face framing luminous eyes, he dominated by exceptional intelligence and capacity to intuit the intangibles of the psychology of his opposite number. When I met him, he had been Premier for nearly 22 years and an associate of Mao for 40. He had made himself indispensable as the crucial mediator between Mao and the people who formed the raw material for the Chairman’s vast agenda, translating Mao’s sweeping visions into concrete programs. At the same time, he had earned the gratitude of many Chinese for moderating the excesses of these visions, at least wherever Mao’s fervor gave scope for moderation.
The differences between the leaders was reflected in their personalities. Mao dominated any gathering; Zhou suffused it. Mao’s passion strove to overwhelm opposition; Zhou’s intellect would seek to persuade or outmaneuver it. Mao was sardonic, Zhou penetrating. Mao thought of himself as a philosopher; Zhou saw his role as an administrator or a negotiator. Mao was eager to accelerate history; Zhou was content to exploit its currents. A saying he often repeated was “The helmsman must ride with the waves.” When they were together, there was no question of the hierarchy, not simply in the formal sense but in the deeper aspect of Zhou’s extraordinarily deferential conduct.
The advisor to the prince occasionally faces the dilemma of balancing the benefits of the ability to alter events against the possibility of exclusion, should he bring his objections to any one policy to a head. How does the ability to modify the prince’s prevailing conduct weigh against the moral onus of participation in his policies? How does one measure the element of nuance over time against the claims of absolutes in the immediate? What is the balance between the cumulative impact of moderating trends against that of a grand (and probably doomed) gesture?
Deng Xiaoping cut to the heart of these dilemmas in his subsequent assessment of Zhou’s role in the Cultural Revolution, in which Deng and his family suffered considerably: “Without the premier the CR would have been much worse. And without the premier the CR wouldn’t have dragged on for such a long time.” Publicly at least, Deng resolved these issues on behalf of Zhou.
Premier Zhou was a man who worked hard and uncomplainingly all his life. He worked 12 hours a day, and sometimes 16 hours or more, throughout his life. He was in an extremely difficult position then, and he said and did many things that he would have wished not to. But the people forgave him because, had he not done and said those things, he himself would not have been able to survive and play the neutralizing role he did, which reduced losses. He succeeded in protecting quite a number of people.
Neither of us had any illusion of changing the basic convictions of the other. It was precisely the absence of any such illusion that facilitate our dialogue. But we articulated common purposes that survived both our periods in office — one of the highest rewards to which statesmen can lay claim.
It was, however, a hardheaded, unsentimental perception of friendship. The Chinese Communist leadership retained some of the traditional approach to barbarian management. In it, the other side is flattered by being admitted to the Chinese “club” as an “old friend,” a posture that makes disagreement more complicated and confrontations painful. When they conduct Middle Kingdom diplomacy, Chinese diplomats maneuver to induce their opposite numbers to propose the Chinese preference so that acquiescence can appear as the granting of a personal favor to the interlocutor.
At the same time, the emphasis on personal relationships goes beyond the tactical. Chinese diplomacy has learned from millennia of experience that, in international issues, each apparent solution is generally an admission ticket to a new set of related problems. Hence Chinese diplomats consider continuity of relationships an important task and perhaps more important than formal documents. By comparison, American diplomacy tends to segment issues into self-contained units to be dealt with on their own merits. In this task, American diplomats also prize good personal relations. The difference is that Chinese leaders relate the “friendship” less to personal qualities and more to long-term cultural, national, or historic ties; Americans stress the individual qualities of their counterparts. Chinese protestations of friendship seek durability for long-term relationships through the cultivation of intangibles; American equivalents attempt to facilitate ongoing activities by emphasis on social contact. And Chinese leaders will pay some (though not unlimited) price for the reputation of standing by their friends — for example, Mao’s invitation to Nixon shortly after his resignation, when he was being widely ostracized. The same gesture was made to former PM Kakuei Tanaka of Japan, when he retired due to a scandal in 1974.
A good illustration of the Chinese emphasis on intangibles is an exchange I had with Zhou during my October 1971 visit. I presented the proposals of our advance team for the presidential visit with the assurance that, since we had so many substantive issues to deal with, technical problems would not be permitted to stand in the way. Zhou replied by turning my operational point into a cultural paradigm: “Right. Mutual trust and mutual respect. These two points.” I had emphasized functionality; Zhou stressed context.
One cultural trait regularly invoked by Chinese leaders was their historic perspective — the ability, indeed the necessity, to think of time in categories different from the West’s. Whatever an individual Chinese leader achieves is brought about in a time frame that represents a smaller faction of his society’s total experience than any other leader in the world. The duration and scale of the Chinese past allow Chinese leaders to use the mantle of an almost limitless history to evoke a certain modesty in their opposite numbers. The foreign interlocutor can be made to feel that he is standing against the way of nature and that his actions are already destined to be written as a footnoted aberration in the grand sweep of Chinese history.
Rather than treat that setbacks as a failure, Mao argued it should spur renewed efforts. The impending strategic design overrode all other concerns — even deadlock over Taiwan. Mao advised both sides not to stake too much on one set of negotiations.
For such an approach, candor was the precondition of genuine cooperation. As Nixon told Zhou: “It is important that we develop complete candor and recognize that neither of us would do anything unless we consider it was in our interests.” Nixon’s critics often decried these and similar statements as a version of selfishness. Yet Chinese leaders reverted to them frequently as guarantors of American reliability — because they were precise, calculable, and reciprocal.
Zhou mentioned as if in passing that we should observe China’s actions, not its “empty cannons” of rhetoric.
He instructed Zhou to produce a communique that would restate Communist orthodoxies as the Chinese position. Americans could state their view as they chose. Mao had based his life on the proposition that peace could emerged only out of struggle, not as an end in itself. China was not afraid to avow its differences with America. Zhou’s draft (and mine) was the sort of banality the Soviets would sign but neither mean nor implement.
As Mao never tired of stressing, the world would not remain static; contradiction and disequilibrium were a law of nature. Reflecting this view, the CCP’s Central Committee issued a document describing Nixon’s visit as an instance of China “utilizing contradictions, dividing up enemies, and enhancing ourselves.”
Alliances have existed as long as history records international affairs. They have been formed for many reasons: to pool the strength of individual allies; to provide an obligation of mutual assistance; to supply an element of deterrence beyond the tactical considerations of the moment. The special aspect of Sino-American relations was that the partners sought to coordinate their actions without creating a formal obligation to do so.
American leaders were treated by their Chinese counterparts to private seminars on Soviet intentions — often in uncharacteristically blunt language, as if the Chinese feared this topic was too important to be left to their customary subtlety and indirection. The US reciprocated with extensive briefings about its strategic design.
The banter was designed to clear the way for the dominant theme, which was a militant application of the containment theory of George Kennan to the effect that the Soviet system, if prevented from expanding, would collapse as a result of its internal tensions.
The bond would be common convictions, not formal obligations. A policy of determined global containment of the Soviets, Mao argued, was bound to prevail because Soviet ambitions were beyond their capacities.
It may also have been a wry comment on how allies would eventually tire of Moscow’s overbearing treatment, as China had.
How would global coordination between the US and China be implemented? Mao suggested that each side develop a clear concept of its national interest and cooperate out of its own necessity.
In other words, each side could arm itself with whatever ideological slogans fulfilled its own domestic necessities, so long as it did not let them interfere with the need for cooperation against the Soviet danger. Ideology would be relegated to domestic management; it took a leave from foreign policy.
We agreed with the substance of the analysis. But the differences between the Chinese and American domestic systems that it sought to skirt reemerged over issues of implementation. How were two such different political systems to carry out the same policy? For Mao, conception and execution were identical. For the US, the difficulty lay in building a supportive consensus among our public and among our allies at a time when the Watergate scandal threatened the authority of the President.
But what if some partners calculated differently — especially in the absence of formal obligations? What if, as the Chinese feared, some partners concluded that the best means to create a balance was for the US or Europe or Japan, instead of confronting the Soviet Union, to conciliate it? What if one of the components of the triangular relationship perceived an opportunity to alter the nature of the triangle rather than stabilize it? What, in short, might other countries do if they applied the Chinese principle of aloof self-reliance to themselves? China’s concept of self-reliance had the paradoxical consequence of making it difficult for Chinese leaders to believe in the willingness of their partners to run the same risks they were.
Cooperation depended on a merging of independent analyses. If they all coincided with China’s, there was no problem. But in the event of disagreement between parties, China’s suspicions would become sui generis and grow difficult to overcome.
Mao had assumed that America’s opening to China would multiply Soviet suspicions and magnify tensions between the US and the Soviet Union. The former happened; the latter did not. After the opening to China, Moscow started to compete for Washington’s favor.
But Western leaders, more attuned and responsive to their populations, were not prepared to offer them in so categorical a manner (though they did it indirectly via their strategic doctrine). For them, nuclear war had to be a demonstrated last resort, not a standard operating procedure.
The Chinese of course noticed that we were closer to Moscow and Beijing than they were to each other. It elicited caustic comments about detente from Chinese leaders.
Even at the high point of Sino-US relations, Mao and Zhou would occasionally express their concern about how the US might implement its strategic flexibility. Was the intention of the US to “reach out to the Soviet Union by standing on Chinese shoulders?”
Mao, ever carrying ideas to their ultimate conclusion, sometimes ascribed to the US a dialectical strategy as he might have practiced it. He argued that America might think of solving the problem of Communism once and for all by applying the lesson of Vietnam: that involvement in local wars drain the big power participant. In that interpretation, the horizontal line theory or the Western concept of collective security might turn into a trap for China.
Mao had a point. This was a theoretically feasible strategy for the US. All it lacked was a leader to conceive it or a public to support it. Its abstract manipulation was not attainable in the US, nor was it desirable; American foreign policy can never be based on power politics alone.
Beijing had entered the relationship looking to Washington as a bulwark against Soviet expansionism. Now Mao and Zhou began to hint that what looked like feebleness in Washington was in reality a deep game — trying to set the Soviets and Chinese against each other in a war designed to destroy them both. Increasingly, however, the Chinese accused the US of something worse than treachery: ineffectualness.
Instead of choosing a new successor, Mao attempted to institutionalize his own ambivalence. He bequeathed to China an extraordinarily complex set of political rivalries by promoting officials from both sides of his vision of China’s destiny. With characteristic convolution, he fostered each camp and then set them against each other — all while fomenting “contradictions” with each faction (such as between Zhou and Deng) to make sure no one person became dominant enough to emerge with authority approaching his own.)
Though Zhou himself was a dedicated Communist with decades of devoted service to Mao, for many Chinese he had come to represent order and moderation. Both to his critics and to his admirers, Zhou was a symbol of China’s long tradition of mandarin gentleman-officials — urbane, highly educated, restrained in his personal habits and, within the spectrum of Chinese Communism, his political preferences.
Political survival for the second man in an autocracy is inherently difficult. It requires being close enough to the leader to leave no space for a competitor but no so close as to make the leader feel threatened. None of Mao’s number twos had managed that tightrope act.
I made the observation that China seemed to me to have remained essentially Confucian in its belief in a single, universal, generally applicable truth as the standard of individual conduct and social cohesion. What Communism had done, I suggested, was to establish Marxism as the content of that truth.
“Your position is just one step from the Chairman. To others, the Chairmanship is within sight, but beyond reach. To you, however, it is within sight and within reach. I hope you will always keep that in mind.” Zhou was, in effect, accused of overreaching.
He had survived because he was indispensable and, in an ultimate sense, loyal — too loyal, his critics argued. Now he was removed from authority when the storms seemed to be subsiding and with the reassuring shore within sight.
Technical convenience had been allowed to override common sense.
When I replied that we agreed about the coming of the storm but maneuvered to be in the best position to survive it, Mao answered with a lapidary word: “Dunkirk.”
At any rate, added the Chairman, it did not matter, because in neither case would China rely on the decisions of other countries.
We adopt the Dunkirk strategy, that is we will allow them to occupy Beijing, Tianjin, Wuhan, and Shanghai, and in that way through such tactics we will become victorious and the enemy will be defeated. Both world wars were conducted in that way and victory was obtained only later.
Part of the difficulty was a problem of perspective. Mao was aware that he did not have long to live and was anxious to ensure that his vision would prevail afterward. He spoke with the melancholy of old age, intellectually aware of limits, not yet fully prepared to face that, for him, the range of choices was fading and the means to implement them disappearing.
I guarantee you that if we do go into confrontation with the Soviet Union, they will attack us and the Soviet Union and draw the Third World around them. Good relations with the Soviet Union are the best for our Chinese relations — and vice versa. Our weakness is the problem — they see us in trouble with SALT and detente. That plays into their hands.
Ford, who obscured his shrewdness behind a facade of Midwestern simplicity and directness, chose to ignore the signs of division. Instead, he conducted himself as if the premises of the Zhou era of Sino-US relations were still valid and launched himself into a case-by-case discussion of issues around the world.
On September 9, 1976, Mao succumbed to his illness, leaving his successors with his achievements and premonitions, with the legacy of his grandiosity and brutality, of great vision distorted by self-absorption. He left behind a China unified as it had not been for centuries, with most vestiges of the original regime eliminated, clearing away the underbrush for reforms never intended by the Chairman.
There was the revolutionary thrust that saw China as a moral and political force, insisting on dispensing its unique precepts by example to an awestruck world. There was the geopolitical China coolly assessing trends and manipulating them to its own advantage. There was a China seeking coalitions for the first time in its history but also the one defiantly challenging the entire world.
Approaching the end of his life, Mao was edging toward a challenge to the American design of world order, insisting on defining tactics and not only strategy. His successors shared his belief in Chinese strengths, but they did not think China capable of achieving its unique potential by willpower and ideological commitment alone. They sought self-reliance but knew that inspiration was not enough, and so they devoted their energies to domestic reform.
Mao destroyed traditional China and left its rubble as building blocks for ultimate modernization. Deng had the courage to base modernization on the initiative and resilience of the individual Chinese.
Deng had struck themes that were to become his trademark. China was a poor country, he had said, in need of scientific exchanges and learning from advanced countries such as Australia — the sort of admission China’s leaders had never made heretofore. Deng advised the Australian visitors to look at the backward side of China in their travels and not only at its achievements, another unprecedented comment for a Chinese leader.
Among the many extraordinary aspects of the Chinese people is the manner in which many of them have retained a commitment to their society regardless of how much agony and injustice it may have inflicted on them. None of the victims of the CR I have known has ever volunteered his suffering to me or responded to queries with more than minimal information. The CR is treated, sometimes wryly, as a kind of natural catastrophe that had to be endured but is not dwelt on as defining the person’s life afterward.
Compact and wiry, he entered a room as if propelled by some invisible force, ready for business. Deng rarely wasted time on pleasantries, nor did he feel it necessary to soften his remarks by swaddling them in parables as Mao was wont to do. He did not envelop one with solicitude as Zhou did, nor did he treat me, as Mao had, as a fellow philosopher from among whose ranks only a select few were worthy of his personal attention. Deng’s attitude was that we were both there to do our nations’ business and adult enough to handle the rough patches without taking them personally.
What Hua lacked was political constituency. He had been projected into power because he belonged to neither of the principal contending factions. But once Mao had disappeared, Hua fell over the supreme contradiction of attempting to combine uncritical adherence to Maoist precepts of collectivization and class struggle with Deng’s ideas of economic and technological modernization.
Deng started from a position that in a bureaucratic sense could not have been more disadvantageous. Hua held all the key offices, which he had inherited from Mao and Zhou: he was Chairman of the CCP, Premier, and Chairman of the CMC. He had the benefit of Mao’s explicit endorsement. Deng was restored to his former posts in the political and military establishment, but in every aspect of formal hierarchy he was Hua’s subordinate.
We have to get it right. We have made too many mistakes already.
Deng prevailed because he had over the decades built connections within the Party and especially in the PLA, and operated with far greater political dexterity than Hua. As a veteran of decades of internal Party struggles, he had learned how to make ideological arguments serve political purposes. Deng’s speeches during this period were masterpieces of ideological flexibility and political ambiguity. His main tactic was to elevate the concepts of “seeking truth from facts” and “integrating theory with practice” to “the fundamental principle of Mao Zedong Thought” — a proposition seldom advanced before Mao’s death.
Many cultures, and surely all Western ones, buttress the authority of the ruler by demonstrative contact of some kind with the ruled. This is why in Athens, Rome, and most Western pluralistic states, oratory was considered an asset in government. There is no general tradition of oratory in China. Chinese leaders traditionally have not based their authority on rhetorical skills or physical contact with the masses. In the mandarin tradition, they operate essentially out of sight, legitimized by performance. Deng held no major office; he refused all honorific titles; he almost never appeared on TV, and practiced politics almost entirely behind the scenes. He ruled not like an emperor but as the principal mandarin.
Mao had governed by counting on the endurance of the Chinese people to sustain the suffering his personal visions would impose on them. Deng governed by liberating the creativeness of the Chinese people to bring about their own vision of the future.
Vietnamese national identity came to reflect the legacy of 2 somewhat contradictory forces: on the one hand, absorption of Chinese culture; on the other, opposition to Chinese political and military domination. Resistance to China helped produce a passionate pride in Vietnamese independence and a formidable military tradition. Absorption of Chinese culture provided Vietnam with a Chinese-style Confucian elite who possessed something of a regional Middle Kingdom complex vis-a-vis their neighbors.
For a while, Beijing seemed to believe that Communist ideology would trump a thousand-year history of Vietnamese opposition to Chinese predominance. Or else it did not think it possible that the US could be brought to total defeat. In the aftermath of the fall of Saigon, Beijing was obliged to face the implications of its own policy. And it recoiled before them. The outcome in Indochina merged with the permanent Chinese fear of encirclement. Preventing an Indochina bloc linked to the Soviet Union became the dominant preoccupation of Chinese foreign policy under Deng and a link to increased cooperation with the US.
A principal difference between Chinese and Western diplomatic strategy is the reaction to perceived vulnerability. American and Western diplomats conclude that they should move carefully to avoid provocation; Chinese response is more likely to magnify defiance. Western diplomats tend to conclude from an unfavorable balance of forces an imperative for a diplomatic solution; they urge diplomatic initiatives to place the other side in the “wrong” to isolate it morally but to desist from the use of force — this was essentially the American advice to Deng after Vietnam invaded Cambodia and occupied it. Chinese strategists are more likely to increase their commitment to substitute courage and psychological pressure against the material advantage of the adversary. They believe in deterrence in the form of preemption. When Chinese planners conclude that their opponent is gaining unacceptable advantage and that the strategic trend is turning against them, they respond by seeking to undermine the enemy’s confidence and allow China to reclaim the psychological, if not material, upper hand.
Huang summed up the situation by invoking an old Chinese proverb: “appeasement” of Moscow was “like giving wings to a tiger to strengthen it.” But a policy of coordinated pressure would prevail, since the Soviet Union was “only outwardly strong but inwardly weak. It bullies the weak and fears the strong.”
Deng followed up the Huang Hua critique later that day. Concessions and agreements had never produced Soviet restraint, he warned Zbig. 15 years of arms control agreement had allowed the Soviet Union to achieve strategic parity with the US. Trade with the Soviet Union meant that the US is helping the Soviet Union overcome its weaknesses. Deng offered a mocking assessment of American responses to Soviet adventurism in the Third World and chided Washington for trying to “please” Moscow.
It was an extraordinary performance. The country which was the principal target of the Soviet Union was proposing joint action as a conceptual obligation, not a bargain between nations, much less as a request. At a moment of great national danger — which its own analysis demonstrated — China nevertheless acted as an instructor on strategy, not as a passive consumer of American prescriptions, as America’s European allies frequently did.
The first thing is one should make preparations. If one is prepared and once a war breaks out, one will not find himself in a disadvantageous position. The second thing is that it is imperative to try to upset the strategic deployment of Soviet aggression.
Throughout the visit, Deng stressed China’s need to acquire foreign technology and develop its economy. At his request, his toured manufacturing and technology facilities. On his arrival in Houston, Deng avowed his desire to “learn about your advanced experience in the petroleum industry and other fields.”
He called attention to the favorable moral position that Beijing would forfeit by attacking Vietnam. China, now widely considered a peaceful country, would run the risk of being accused of aggression.
Deng insisted that strategic analysis overrode Carter’s invocation of world opinion. Above all, China must not be thought of as pliable: “China must still teach Vietnam a lesson. The PRC is approaching this issue from a position of strength. The action will be very limited. If Vietnam thought the PRC soft, the situation will get worse.”
The target of China’s military was a fellow Communist country, recent ally, and longtime beneficiary of Chinese economic and military support. The goal was to preserve the strategic equilibrium in Asia, as China saw it. Further, China undertook the campaign with the moral support, diplomatic backing, and intelligence cooperation of the US — the same “imperialist power” that Beijing had helped eject from Indochina 5 years earlier.
The stated Chinese war aim was to “put a restraint on the wild ambitions of the Vietnamese and to give them an appropriate limited lesson.” “Appropriate” meant to inflict sufficient damage to affect Vietnamese options and calculations for the future; “limited” implied that it would be ended before outside intervention or other factors drove it out of control. It was also a direct challenge to the Soviet Union.
Now, the Chinese leaders warned, Moscow was “beginning to get bases” in Indochina, Africa, and the Middle East. If it consolidated its position in these areas, it would control vital energy resources and be able to block key sea lanes — most notably the Malaca Strait. This would give Moscow the strategic initiative in any future conflict. In a broader sense, the war resulted from Beijing’s analysis of Sun Tzu’s concept of shi — the trend and “potential energy” of the strategic landscape. Deng aimed to arrest and, if possible, reverse what he saw as unacceptable momentum of Soviet strategy.
American ideals had encountered the imperatives of geopolitical reality. It was not cynicism, even less hypocrisy, that forged this attitude: the Carter administration had to choose between strategic necessities and moral convictions. They decided that for their moral convictions to be implemented ultimately they needed first to prevail in the geopolitical struggle. The American leaders faced the dilemma of statesmanship. Leaders cannot choose the options history affords them, even less that they be unambiguous.
Ultimately over a time period more difficult to sustain for democratic societies, China achieved a considerable part of its strategic objectives in Southeast Asia. Deng achieved sufficient maneuvering room to meet his objective of thwarting Soviet dominance of Southeast Asia and the Malacca Strait.
Moscow’s relative passivity in the Third Vietnam War can be seen as the first symptom of the decline of the Soviet Union. One wonders whether the Soviet’s decision a year later to intervene in Afghanistan was prompted in part by an attempt to compensate for their ineffectuality in supporting Vietnam against the Chinese attack. In either case, the Soviets’ miscalculation in both situations was in not realizing the extent to which the correlation of global forces had shifted against them. The Third Vietnam War may thus be counted as another example in which Chinese statesmen succeeded in achieving long-term, big-picture strategic objectives without the benefit of a military establishment comparable to that of their adversaries.
Equanimity in the face of materially superior forces has been deeply ingrained in Chinese strategic thinking — as is apparent from the parallels with China’s decision to intervene in the Korean War. Both Chinese decisions were directed against what Beijing perceived to be a gathering danger — a hostile power’s consolidation of bases at multiple points along the Chinese periphery. In both cases, Beijing believed that if the hostile power were allowed to complete its design, China would be encircled and thus remain in a permanent state of vulnerability. The adversary would be in a position to launch a war at a time of its choosing, and knowledge of this advantage would allow it to act “without scruples.”
These were not elegant affairs: China threw troops into immensely costly battles and sustained casualties on a scale that would have been unacceptable in the Western world.
LKY has summed up the ultimate result of the war: “The Western press wrote off the Chinese punitive action as a failure. I believe it changed the history of East Asia.”
The inevitable learning period is complicated by the desire of the new administration to legitimize its rise to office by alleging that all inherited problems are the policy faults of its predecessor and not inherent problems; they are deemed soluble and in a finite time. Continuity of policy becomes a secondary consideration if not an invidious claim. Since new Presidents have just own an election campaign, they may also overestimate the range of flexibility that objective circumstances permit or rely excessively on their persuasive power. For countries relying on American policy, the perpetual psychodrama of democratic transitions is a constant invitation to hedge their bets.
In his 1980 presidential campaign against Carter, he pledged that under a Reagan administration there would be “no more Vietnams,” “no more Taiwans,” and “no more betrayals.”
The administration also proceeded to give a liberal interpretation to the Third Communique’s concept of “reducing” “arms sales” to Taiwan. Through technology transfers (technically not “arms sales”) and an inventive interpretation of the “level” of various weapons programs, Washington extended a program of military support to Taiwan whose duration and substance Beijing seems not to have anticipated.
After Shultz took over the State Department in 1982, despite some uncomfortable conversations and bruised egos, the US, the PRC, and Taiwan all emerged from the early 1980s with their core interests generally fulfilled.
In assessing China’s policy, one contingency can generally be excluded: that Chinese policymakers overlooked a set of discoverable facts. So when China went along with the ambiguous language and the flexible interpretation of the Taiwan clause in the Third Communique, it can only have been because it thought cooperation with the US would fulfill its other national purposes.
In the US, Western Europe, and East Asia, a loose coalition of nearly all the industrial countries had formed against the Soviet Union. In the developed world, the Soviet Union’s only remaining allies were the Eastern European satellites in which it stationed troops. Meanwhile, the developing world had proven skeptical about the benefits of popular “liberation” under Soviet and Cuban arms.
At this high point in Sino-American cooperation, the Reagan WH and the top Chinese leadership had roughly congruent assessments of Soviet weakness; but they drew significantly different conclusions about the policy implications of this new state of affairs. Reagan and his top officials perceived Soviet disarray as an opportunity to go on the offensive. Pairing a major military buildup with a new ideological assertiveness, they sought to pressure the Soviet Union both financially and geopolitically and drive for what amounted to victory in the Cold War.
The Chinese leaders had a similar conception of Soviet weakness, but they drew the opposite lesson: they saw it as an invitation to recalibrate the global equilibrium. Beginning in 1969, they had tacked toward Washington to redress China’s precarious geopolitical position; they had no interest in the global triumph of American values and Western liberal democracy that Reagan proclaimed as his ultimate goal. Having “touched the buttocks of the tiger” in Vietnam, Beijing concluded that it had withstood the high point of the Soviet threat. It now behooved China to back back toward an enhanced freedom of maneuver.
Over a period of time, prices established by administrative fiat lose their relationship to costs. The pricing system becomes a means of extorting resources from the population and establishing political priorities. As terror by which authority was established eases, prices turn into subsidies and are transformed into a method of gaining public support for the Communist Party.
Reform Communism proved unable to abolish the laws of economics. Somebody had to pay for real costs. The penalty of central planning and subsidized pricing was poor maintenance, lack of innovation, and over-employment — in other words, stagnation and falling per capita income.
Central planning, moreover, provided few incentives to emphasize quality or innovation. Since all a manager produced would be bought by a relevant ministry, quality was not a consideration. And innovation was, in effect, discouraged lest it throw the whole planning edifice out of kilter.
In the absence of markets that balanced preferences, the planner was obliged to impose more or less arbitrary judgments. As a result, the goods that were wanted were not produced, and the goods that were produced were not wanted.
Above all, the centrally planned state, far from creating a classless society, ended up by enshrining class stratification. Where goods were allocated rather than bought, the real rewards were perquisites of office: special stores, hospitals, educational opportunities for cadres. Enormous discretion in the hands of officials inevitably led to corruption. Jobs, education, and most perquisites depended on some kind of personal relationship. It is one of history’s ironies that Communism, advertised as bringing in a classless society, tended to breed a privileged class of feudal proportions. It proved impossible to run a modern economy by central planning, but no Communist state had ever been run without central planning.
The Chinese leadership would not let ideological constrain their reforms; they would instead redefine “socialism with Chinese characteristics” so that “Chinese characteristics” were whatever brought greater prosperity to China.
What Deng was proposing had no precedent in Communist experience. The Communist Party, he seemed to suggest, would maintain an overall supervisory role in the nation’s economy and political structure. But it would steadily withdraw from its previous position of controlling the detailed aspects of Chinese daily life. The initiatives of individual Chinese would be given wide scope.
The early stages of the reform process tended to merge the problems of planning with those of the market. The attempt to make prices reflect real costs inevitably led to price increases, at least in the short term. Price reform caused a run on savings to buy up goods before prices went even higher, creating a vicious cycle of hoarding and greater inflation.
Many central institutions in China would have to be dismantled and the functions of others redefined. To facilitate this process, a review of Party membership and a streamlining of the bureaucracy was ordered. Since this involved 30M individuals and was carried out by the very people whose activities needed to be modified, the review faced many obstacles.
The relative success of economic reform produced constituencies at the core of the later discontent. And the government would face declining loyalty from the political cadres whose jobs the reforms threatened.
Administering a two-price system opened many avenues for corruption and nepotism. The shift to market economics actually increased opportunities for corruption, at least for an interim period. The fact that two economic sectors coexisted — a shrinking but still very large public sector and a growing market economy — produced two sets of prices. Unscrupulous bureaucrats and entrepreneurs were thus in a position to shift commodities back and forth between the two sectors for personal gain.
In all Chinese societies, ultimate reliance is placed on family members, who in turn benefit in ways determined by family criteria rather than abstract market forces.
While Zhou’s mourners in 1976 had veiled their criticism of Mao and Jiang Qing in allegorical references to ancient dynastic court politics, the demonstrators over Hu in 1989 named their targets.
In Tiananmen Square, students declared a hunger strike, attracting widespread attention from both local and international observers and other nonstudent groups, which began to join the protesters. Chinese leaders were obliged to move Gorbachev’s welcoming ceremony from Tiananmen Square. Humiliatingly, a muted ceremony was held at the Beijing airport without public attendance. Some reports held that elements of the PLA defied orders to deploy to the capital and quell the demonstrations, and hat government employees were marching with the protesters in the street. The political challenge was underscored by developments in China’s far west, where Tibetans and members of China’s Uighur Muslim minority had begun to agitate based on their own cultural issues.
Uprisings generally develop their own momentum as developments slide out of control of the principal actors, who became characters in a play whose script they no longer know.
The students did not set out to pose a mortal challenge to what they knew was dangerous regime. Nor did the regime relish the use of force against the students. The two sides shared many goals and much common language. Through miscommunication and misjudgment, they pushed one another into positions in which options for compromise became less and less available. Several times a solution seemed just within reach, only to dissolve at the last moment. The slide to calamity seemed slow at first but then accelerated as divisions deepened on both sides. Knowing the outcome, we read the story with a sense of horror that we receive from true tragedy.
Bush had enough experience to understand that the leaders who had been on the Long March, survived in the caves of Yan’an, and confronted both the US and the Soviet Union simultaneously in the 1960s would not submit to foreign pressures or the threat of isolation. And what was the objective? To overthrow the Chinese government? To change its structure to what alternative? How could the process of intervention be ended once it was started? And what would be the costs?
Before Tiananmen, America had become familiar with the debate about the role of its diplomacy in promoting democracy. In simplified form, the debate pitted idealists against realists — idealists insisting that domestic system affect foreign policy and are therefore legitimate items on the diplomatic agenda, realists arguing that such agenda is beyond any country’s capacity and that diplomacy should therefore focus primarily on external policies. The absolutes of moral precept were weighed against the contingencies of deducing foreign policy from the balancing of national interests. The actual distinctions are more subtle. Idealists, when they seek to apply their values, will be driven to consider the world of specific circumstance. Thoughtful realists understand that values are an important component of reality. When decisions are made, the distinction is rarely absolute; often it comes down to a question of nuance.
With respect to China, the issue was not whether America preferred democratic values to prevail. By a vast majority, the American public would have answered in the affirmative, as would have all the participants in the debate on China policy. The issue was what price they would be prepared to pay in concrete terms over what period of time and what their capacity was, in any circumstances, to bring about their desired outcome.
I ask you as well to remember the principles on which my young country was founded. Those principles are democracy and freedom — freedom of speech, freedom of assemblage, freedom from arbitrary authority. It is reverence for those principles which inevitably affects the way Americans view and react to events in other countries. It is not a reaction of arrogance or of a desire to force others to our beliefs but of simple faith in the enduring value of those principles and their universal applicability.
The Chinese government’s treatment of demonstrators was, Scowcroft coceded, a “wholly internal affair of China.” Yet it was “an obvious fact” that such treatment produce an American popular reaction, “which is real and with which the President must cope.” Bush believed in the importance of preserving the long-term relationship between the US and China. But he was obliged to respect “the feelings of the American people,” which demands some concrete expression of disapproval from its government. Sensitivity by both sides would be required to navigate the impasse.
The difficulty was that both sides were right. Deng felt his regime under siege; Bush and Scowcroft considered America’s deepest values challenged.
Scowcroft explained the impasse, as diplomats often do to explain deadlock, as a successful enterprise in keeping one lines of communication: “Both sides had been frank and open. We had aired our differences and listened to each other, but we still had a distance to go before we bridge the gap.”
Neither government wanted a break, but neither seemed in a position to avoid it. A break, once it occurred, could develop its own momentum, much as the Sino-Soviet controversy evolved from a series of tactical disputes into a strategic confrontation.
The China I saw on this occasion had lost the self-assurance of my previous visits. In the Mao period, Chinese leaders represented by Zhou had acted with the self-confidence conferred by ideology and a judgment on international affairs seasoned by a historical memory extending over millennia. The China of the early Deng period exhibited an almost naive faith that overcoming the memory of the suffering of the CR would provide the guide toward economic and political progress based on individual initiative. But in the decade since Deng had first promulgated his reform program in 1978, China had experienced, together with the exhilaration of success, some of its penalties. The movement from central planning to more decentralized decision making turned out to be in constant jeopardy from two directions: the resistance of an entrenched bureaucracy with a vested interest in the status quo; and the pressures from impatient reformers for whom the process was taking too long. Economic decentralization led to demands for pluralism in political decision making. In that sense, the Chinese upheaval reflected the intractable dilemmas of reform Communism.
My opposite numbers had a genuine difficulty; they could not understand why the US took umbrage at an event that had injured no American material interests and for which China claimed no validity outside its own territory. Explanations of America’s historic commitment to human rights were dismissed, either as a form of Western “bullying” or as a sign of the unwarranted righteousness of a country that had its own human rights problems.
The obstacle, according to Li Ruihuan (Party ideologist and considered by analysts as among the liberal element) was that “Americans think they understand China better than the Chinese people themselves.” What China could not accept was dictation from abroad.
When WW1 started, most governments in Europe were governed by essentially democratic institutions. Nevertheless, WW1 — a catastrophe from which Europe has never fully recovered — was enthusiastically approved by all elected parliaments.
But neither is the calculation of national interest self-evident. National power or national interest may be the most complicated elements of international relations to calculate precisely. Most wars occur as the result of a combination of misjudgment of the power relationships and domestic pressures. In the period under discussion, different American administrations have come up with varying solutions to the conundrum of balancing a commitment to American political ideals with the pursuit of peaceful and productive US-China relations. The administration of Bush 41 chose to advance American preferences through engagement; that of Bill Clinton, in its first term, would attempt pressure. Both had to face the reality that in foreign policy, a nation’s highest aspirations tend to be fulfilled only in imperfect stages.
The basic direction of a society is shaped by its values, which define its ultimate goals. At the same time, accepting the limits of one’s capacities is one of the test of statesmanship; it implies a judgment of the possible. Philosophers are responsible to their intuition. Statesman are judged by their ability to sustain their concepts over time.
The attempt to alter the domestic structure of a country of the magnitude of China from the outside is likely to involve vast unintended consequences. American society should never abandon its commitment to human dignity. It does not diminish the importance of that commitment to acknowledge that Western concepts of human rights and individual liberties may not be directly translatable, in a finite period of time geared to Western political and news cycles, to a civilization for millennia ordered around different concepts. Nor can the traditional Chinese fear of political chaos be dismissed as an anachronistic irrelevancy needing only “correction” by Western enlightenment. Chinese history, especially in the last 2 centuries, provides numerous examples in which a splintering of political authority — sometimes inaugurated with high expectations of increased liberty — tempted social and ethnic upheaval; frequently it was the most militant, not the most liberal, elements that prevailed.
By the same principle, countries dealing with America need to understand that the basic values of our country include an inalienable concept of human rights and that American judgments can never be separated from America’s perceptions of the practice of democracy. There are abuses bound to evoke an American reaction, even at the cost of an overall relationship. Such events can drive American foreign policy beyond national interest calculations.
Beyond all these strategic principles loomed a crucial intangible. Calculation of national interest was not simply a mathematical formula. Attention had to be paid to national dignity and self-respect. Deng urged me to convey to Bush his desire to come to an agreement with the US, which, as the stronger country, should make the first move.
The subject now was no longer the military menace of the USSR, but its growing weakness. Qian Qichen predicted the disintegration of the Soviet Union and described Beijing’s surprise when Gorbachev, on his visit in May, at the height of the Tiananmen demonstrations, asked China for economic assistance.
The Soviets did not grasp the economy very well and Gorbachev often did not grasp what he was asking of it. Qian predicted the collapsing economy and the nationalities problems would result in turmoil.
Observe carefully; secure our position; cope with affairs calmly; hide our capacities and bide our time; be good at maintaining a low profile; and never claim leadership.
Enemy troops are outside the walls. They are stronger than we. We should be mainly on the defensive.
After every social and political upheaval, the most serious challenge for governance is how to restore a sense of cohesion. But in the name of what principle? The domestic reaction to the crisis was more threatening to reform in China than the sanctions from abroad.
The heir of Mao’s China was advocating market principles, risk taking, private initiative, and the importance of productivity and entrepreneurship. The profit principle, according to Deng, reflected not an alternative theory to Marxism but an observation of human nature.
In a sign of how far China has come in less than 20 years since the Southern tour, Den, in 1992, extolled the “four big items” it was essential to make available to consumers in the countryside: a bicycle, a sewing machine, a radio, and a wristwatch.
The reason I insisted on retiring was that I didn’t want to make mistakes in my old age. Old people have strengths but also great weaknesses — they tend to be stubborn, for example — and they should be aware of that. The older they are, the more modest they should be and the more careful not to make mistakes in their later years. We should go on selecting younger comrades for promotion and helping train them. Don’t put your trust only in old age. When they reach maturity, we shall rest easy. Right now we are still worried.
But as General Secretary, he was widely assumed to be a transitional figure — and may well have been a compromise candidate halfway between the relatively liberal element and the conservative group. He lacked a significant power base of his own, and, in contrast to his predecessors, he did not radiate an aura of command. He was the first Chinese Communist leader without revolutionary or military credentials. His leadership, like that of his successors, arose from bureaucratic and economic performance. It was not absolute and required a measure of consensus in the Politburo. He did not, for example, establish his dominance in foreign policy until 1997, eight years after he became General Secretary.
Many outsiders underestimate Jiang, mistaking his avuncular style for lack of seriousness. The opposite was true. Jiang’s bonhomie was designed to define the line, when the drew it, that much more definitively. When he believed his country’s vital interests were involved, he could be determined in the mold of his titanic predecessors.
In his international goals, Jiang was blessed with one of the most skillful foreign ministers I have known, Qian Qichen, and a chief economic policymaker of exceptional intelligence and tenacity, Zhu Rongji. Both men were unapologetic proponents of the notion that China’s prevailing political institutions best served its interests. Both also believed that China’s continued development required deepening its links to international institutions and the world economy — including a Western world often vocal in its criticism of Chinese domestic political practices.
We are ready to react to any positive gesture by the US. We have many common interests. But reform would have to be voluntary; it could not be dictated from the outside. Chinese history proves that greater pressure only leads to greater resistance.
Lately a pejorative adjective has been entered into the debate, dismissing traditional diplomacy as “transactional.” In that view, a constructive long-term relationship with nondemocratic states is not sustainable almost by definition. The advocates of this course start from the premise that true and lasting peace presupposes a community of democratic states.
These moves, in Jiang’s view, had not been reciprocated. Beijing had fulfilled its side of Deng’s proposed package deal but had been met by escalating demands from Congress.
Democratic values and human rights are the core of America’s belief in itself. But like all values they have an absolute character, and this challenges the element of nuance by which foreign policy is generally obliged to operate. If adoption of American principles of governance is made the central condition for progress in all other areas of the relationship, deadlock is inevitable.
There was no little irony in the fact that Mao’s heir would lecture me about the nature of an international system based on sovereign states about which I, after all, had written several decades earlier.
What Jiang asked me to convey was that China had conceded enough, and now the onus was on Washington to improve the relations.
Gorbachev’s dilemmas were even more vexing than Beijing’s. The Chinese controversies were about how the Communist Party should govern. The Soviet disputes were about whether the Communist Party should govern at all.
Chinese leaders no longer made any claim to represent a unique revolutionary truth available for export. Instead, they espoused the essentially defensive aim of working toward a world not overtly hostile to their system of governance or territorial integrity and buying time to develop their economy and work out their domestic problems at their own pace. It was a foreign policy posture arguably closer to Bismarck’s than Mao’s: incremental, defensive, and based on building dams against unfavorable historical tides. But even as tides were shifting, Chinese leaders projected a fiery sense of independence. They masked their concern by missing no opportunity to proclaim that they would resist outside pressure to the utmost. As Jiang insisted to me in 1991: “We never submit to pressure. This is very important. It is a philosophical principle.”
“Most Favored Nation” is a somewhat misleading phrase: since a significant majority of countries enjoy the status, it is less a special mark of favor than an affirmation that a country enjoys normal trade privileges. The concept of MFN conditionality presented its moral purpose as a typically American pragmatic concept of rewards and penalties.
But to the Chinese, conditionality was a matter of principle — just as it had been for the Soviet Union when they rejected the Jackson-Vanik Amendment, Beijing objected to the fact of conditions, not their content.
All of these incidents, each of which had its own rationale, were analyzed in China in terms of the Chinese style of Sun Tzu strategy, which knows no single events, only patterns reflecting an overall design.
Shortly after Christopher’s return, and with the self-imposed deadline for MFN renewal at hand, the administration quietly abandoned its policy of conditionality. Clinton announced that the policy’s usefulness had been exhausted and that China’s MFN status would be extended for another year essentially without conditions. He pledged to pursue human rights progress by other means, such as support for NGOs in China and encouraging best business practices.
“There is no need for some people to worry about the rapid development. China will take 30 years to catch up with the medium level countries. Our population is too big.” The US, in turn, made regular pledges that it had not changed its policy to containment. The implication of both insurances was that each side had the capability of implementing what it reassured the other about and was in part restraining itself. Reassurance thus merged with threat.
Relations with China had reached a point where the weapon of choice of both the US and China was the suspension of high-level contacts, creating the paradox that both sides were depriving themselves of the mechanism for dealing with a crisis when it was most needed.
Approaching the precipice, both Washington and Beijing recoiled, realizing that they had no war aims over which to fight or terms to impose which would alter the overriding reality, which was that China “is in its own category — too big to ignore, too repressive to embrace, difficult to influence, and very, very proud.” For its part, America was too powerful to be coerced and too committed to constructive relations with China to need to be. A superpower America, a dynamic China, a globalized world, and the gradual shift of the center of gravity of world affairs from the Atlantic Ocean to the Pacific required a peaceful and cooperative relationship.
In the 1980s, China’s “Reform and Opening Up” had remained partly a vision: its effects were noticeable, but their depth and longevity were open to debate. Within China itself the direction was still contested; in the wake of Tiananmen some of the country’s academic and political elites advocated an inward turn and a scaling back of China’s economic links with the West. When Jiang assumed national office, a largely unreformed sector of SOEs on the Soviet model still constituted over 50% of the economy. China’s links to the world trade system were tentative and partial. Foreign companies still were skeptical about investing in China; Chinese companies rarely ventured abroad.
By the end of the decade, what had once seemed an improbably prospect had become a reality. Throughout the decade China grew at a rate of no lower than 7% per year, and often in the double digits, continuing an increase in per capita GDP that ranks as one of the most sustained and powerful in history. By the end of the 1990s average income was approximately 3 times what it had been in 1978; in urban areas the income level rose even more dramatically, to roughly 5 times the 1978 level.
As it turned out, that superpower, the US, also lacked the experience for such a design — if indeed it had the inclination for it. A new international order was bound to emerge, whether by design or by default. Its nature and the measures for bringing it about were the unresolved challenges for both countries. They would interact, either as partners or as adversaries. Their contemporary leaders professed partnership, but neither had yet managed to define it or build shelters against the possible storms ahead.
I felt obliged to reply to this threat of force, however regretfully and indirectly formulated:
If the discussion concerns the use of force it will strengthen all the forces that want to use Taiwan to harm our relationship. In a military confrontation between the US and China, even though those of us who would be heartbroken would be obliged to support our own country.
Both Hu and Wen had close personal experience with China’s 1989 unrest — Hu in Tibet, where he arrived in December 1988, just as a major Tibetan uprising was unfolding; Wen in Beijing, where as deputy to Zhao Ziyang he was at the General Secretary’s side during his last forlorn expedition among the students in Tiananmen Square.
Hu and Wen presided over a country that no longer felt constrained by the sense of apprenticeship to Western technology and institutions. The China they governed was confident enough to reject, and even on occasion subtly mock, American lectures on reform. It was now in a position to conduct its foreign policy not based on its long-term potential or its ultimate strategic role but in terms of its actual power.
The new American administration signified a comparable change of generation. Both Hu and Bush were the first Presidents who had been bystanders at their nation’s traumatic experiences of the 1960s: for China, the CR; for the US, the Vietnam War. Hu drew the conclusion that social harmony should be a guideline of his presidency. Bush came into office in the aftermath of the collapse of the Soviet Union amidst an American triumphalism that believed America capable or reshaping the world in its image. The younger Bush did not hesitate to conduct foreign policy under the banner of America’s deepest values.
Beijing retained its characteristic willingness to adjust to changes in alignments of power and in the composition of foreign governments without passing a moral judgment. Its main concerns were continued access to oil from the Middle East and protection of Chinese investments in Afghanistan’s mineral resources. With these interests generally fulfilled, China did not contest American efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan (and may well have welcomed them in part because they represented a diversion of American military capabilities from East Asia).
In the Chinese view, the pursuit of a currency policy that favors domestic manufacturers is not an economic policy so much as an expression of China’s need for political stability. Thus in explaining to an American audience in September 2010 why China would not drastically revalue its currency, Wen Jiabao used social, not financial arguments: “You don’t know how many Chinese companies would go bankrupt. There would be major disturbances. Only the Chinese premier has such pressure on his shoulders. This is the reality.”
In a separate passage, Liu comments favorably on the role of traditional Chinese Emperors, whom he describes as acting as a kind of benevolent “elder brother” to smaller and weaker countries’ kings.
These “earthshaking” changes require that China abandon the vestiges of Mao’s doctrine of absolute self-reliance, which would isolate China. If China fails to correctly analyze the situation and, as Dai insists, “very satisfactorily manage our relations with the external world,” then the chances offered by the current strategic opportunity period “may likely be lost.”
Can strategic trust replace a system of strategic threats? Strategic trust is treated by many as a contradiction in terms. Strategists rely on the intentions of the presumed adversary only to a limited extent. For intentions are subject to change. And the essence of sovereignty is the right to make decisions not subject to another authority. A certain amount of threat based on capabilities is therefore inseparable from the relations of sovereign states.
It is possible — though it rarely happens — that relations grow so close that strategic threats are excluded. In relations between the states bordering the North Atlantic, strategic confrontations are not conceivable. The military establishments are not directed against each other. Strategic threats are perceived as arising outside the Atlantic region, to be dealt with in an alliance framework.
In Asia, by contrast, the states consider themselves in potential confrontation with their neighbors. It is not that they necessarily plan on war; they simply do not exclude it. If they are too weak for self-defense, they seek to make themselves part of an alliance system that provides additional protection, as in the case with ASEAN. Sovereignty, in many cases regained relatively recently after periods of foreign colonization, has an absolute character. The principles of the Westphalian system prevail, more so than on their continent of origin. The concept of sovereignty is considered paramount. Aggression is defined as the movement of organized military units across borders. Noninterference in domestic affairs is taken as a fundamental principle of interstate relations. In a state system so organized, diplomacy seeks to preserve the key elements of the balance of power.
An international system is relatively stable if the level of assurance required by its members is achievable by diplomacy. When diplomacy no longer functions, relationships become increasingly concentrated on military strategy — first in the form of arms races, then as a maneuvering for strategic advantage even at the risk of confrontation, and, finally, in war itself.
By 2nd half of the 19th century, Europe had been without a major war since the Napoleonic period had ended in 1815. The European states were in rough strategic equilibrium; the conflicts between them did not involve their existence. No state consider another an irreconcilable enemy. This made shifting alliances feasible. No state was considered powerful enough to establish hegemony over the others. Any such effort triggered a coalition against it.
Crowe concluded that it made no difference what goal Germany avowed. Whichever course Germany was pushing, “Germany would clearly be wise to build as powerful a navy as she can afford.” And once Germany achieved naval supremacy, Crowe assessed, this in itself — regardless of German intentions — would be an objective threat to Britain, and “incompatible with the existence of the British Empire.”
Under those conditions, formal assurance were meaningless. No matter what the German government’s professions were, the result would be “as formidable a menace to the rest of the world as would be presented by any deliberate conquest of a similar position by “malice aforethought.” Even if moderate German statesmen were to demonstrate their bona fides, moderate German foreign policy could “at any stage merge into” a conscious scheme for hegemony.
The structural elements, in Crowe’s analysis, precluded cooperation or even trust. As Crowe wryly observed: “It would not be unjust to say that ambitious designs against one’s neighbors are not as a rule openly proclaimed, and that therefore the absence of such proclamation, and even the profession of unlimited and universal political benevolence, are not in themselves conclusive evidence for or against the existence of unpublished intentions.” And since the stakes were so high, it was “not a matter in which England can safely run any risks.” London was obliged to assume the worst, and act on the basis of its assumptions — at least so long as Germany was building a large and challenging navy.
In other words, already in 1907 there was no longer any scope for diplomacy; the issue had become who would back down in a crisis, and whenever that condition was not fulfilled, war was nearly inevitable. It took 7 years to reach the point of world war.
Neither the American version of the Crowe Memorandum nor the more triumphalist Chinese analyses have been endorsed by either government, but they provide a subtext of much current thought. If the assumptions of these views were applied to either side — and it would take only one side to make it unavoidable — China and the US could easily fall into the kind of escalating tension described earlier in this epilogue.
The reader of the Crowe Memorandum cannot fail to noice that the specific examples of mutual hostility being cited were relatively trivial compared to the conclusions drawn from them: incidents of colonial rivalry in Southern Africa, disputes about the conduct of civil servants. It was not what either side had already done that drove the rivalry. It was what it might do. Events had turned into symbols, symbols developed their own momentum. There was nothing left to settle because the system of alliances confronting each other had no margin of adjustment.
This will not be an easy task. For, as the Crowe Memorandum has shown, mere assurances will not arrest the underlying dynamism. For were any nation determined to achieve dominance, would it not be offering assurances of peaceful intent? A serious joint effort involving the continuous attention of top leaders is needed to develop a sense of genuine strategic trust and cooperation.
A country facing such large domestic tasks is not going to throw itself easily, much less automatically, into strategic confrontation or a quest for world domination.
An aspect of strategic tension in the current world situation resides in the Chinese fear that America is seeking to contain China — paralleled by the American concern that China is seeking to expel the US from Asia. The concept of a Pacific Community — a region to which the US, China, and other states all belong and in whose peaceful development all participate — could ease both fears. It would make the US and China part of a common enterprise. Shared purposes — and the elaboration of them — would replace strategic uneasiness to some extent. It would enable other major countries such as Japan, Indonesia, Vietnam, India, and Australia to participate in the construction of a system perceived as joint rather than polarized between “Chinese” and “American” blocs. Such an effort could be meaningful only if it engaged the full attention, and above all the conviction, of the leaders concerned.
It is important to understand what one means by the term “containment.” Countries on China’s borders with substantial resources, such as India, Japan, Vietnam, and Russia, represent realities not created by American policy. China has lived with these countries throughout its history.
When China and the US first restored relations 40 years ago, the most significant contribution of the leaders of the time was their willingness to raise their sights beyond the immediate issues of the day. In a way, they were fortunate in that their long isolation from each other meant that there were no short-term day-to-day issues between them. This enabled the leaders of a generation ago to deal with their future, not their immediate pressures, and to lay the basis of a world unimaginable then but unachievable without Sino-American cooperation.
On the other hand, were history confined to the mechanical repetition of the past, no transformation would ever have occurred. Every great achievement was a vision before it became a reality. In that sense, it arose from commitment, not resignation to the inevitable.
Once China became a “normal” state, it would lose its historic unique moral authority; it would simply be another weak country beset by invaders. In this context, seemingly minor disputes over diplomatic and economic prerogatives turned into a major clash.
Now the Nian rebellion is ablaze in the north and the Taiping in the south, our military supplies are exhausted and our troops are worn out. The barbarians take advantage of our weak position and try to control us. If we do not restraint our rage but continues the hostilities, we are liable to sudden catastrophe. On the other hand, if we overlook the way they have harmed us and do not make any preparations against them, then we shall be bequeathing a source of grief to our sons and grandsons.
It was the classic dilemma of the defeated: can a society maintain its cohesion while seeming to adapt to the conqueror — and how to build up the capacity to reverse the unfavorable balance of forces? Prince gong invoked an ancient Chinese saying: “Resort to peace and friendship when temporarily obliged to do so; use war and defense as your actual policy.”
Despite the imminent and actual threat from Britain, the Gong memorial put Britain last in the order of the long-range danger to the cohesion of the Chinese state and Russia first.
The old dynasty would begin to be perceived as failing in its mission of protecting the security of the Chinese population or fulfilling its fundamental aspirations. Rarely as the result of a single catastrophe, most frequently through the cumulative impact of a series of disasters, the ruling dynasty would, in the view of the Chinese people, lose the Mandate of Heaven. The new dynasty would be seen as having achieved it, in part by the mere fact of having established itself.
Revolutionaries are, by their nature, powerful and single-minded personalities. Almost invariably they start from a position of weakness vis-a-vis the political environment and rely for their success on charisma and on an ability to mobilize resentment and to capitalize on the psychological weakness of adversaries in decline.
Mao’s China was, by design, a country in permanent crisis; from the earliest days of Communist governance, Mao unleashed wave after wave of struggle. The Chinese people would not be permitted ever to rest on their achievements. The destiny Mao prescribed for them was to purify their society and themselves through virtuous exertion.
Where the Confucian tradition prized universal harmony, Mao idealized upheaval and the clash of opposing forces, in both domestic and foreign affairs (and, indeed, he saw the two as connected — regularly pairing foreign crises with domestic purges or ideological campaigns).
His goal was to sustain the process of revolution itself, which he felt was his special mission to carry on through ever greater upheavals, never permitting a resting point until his people emerged from the ordeal purified and transformed.
Our revolutions are like battles. After a victory, we must at once put forward a new task. In this way, cadres and the masses will forever be filled with revolutionary fervor, instead of conceit. Indeed, they will have no time for conceit, even if they like to feel conceited. With new tasks on their shoulders, they are totally preoccupied with the problems for their fulfillment.
To stand up to the world was a daunting prospect for China in 1949. The country was underdeveloped, without the military capacity to impose its own preferences on a world that vastly outmatched it in resources and, above all, in technology.
As he warned the Emperor in a bluntly worded 1872 policy memorial: “To live today and still say ‘reject the barbarians’ and ‘drive them out of our territory’ is certainly superficial and absurd talk. They are daily producing their weapons to strive with us for supremacy and victory, pitting their superior techniques against our inadequacies.”
This would have been a heroic task had the Chinese court been unified behind Prince Gong’s foreign policy concept and Li Hongzhang’s execution of it. In fact, a vast gulf separated these more outward-looking officials from the more insular traditionalist faction. The latter adhered to the classical view that China had nothing to learn from foreigners.
The Chinese sense of uniqueness asserted that China was the one true civilization, and invited barbarians to the Middle Kingdom to “come and be transformed.” The Japanese attitude assumed a unique Japanese radical and cultural purity, and declined to extend its benefits or even explain itself to those born outside its sacred ancestral bonds.
Japanese foreign policy thus alternated, at times with startling suddenness, between aloofness from the Asian mainland and audacious attempts at conquest geared toward supplanting the Sinocentric order.
In 1868, the Meiji Emperor, in his charter oath, announced Japan’s resolve: “Knowledge shall be sought from all over the world, and thereby the foundations of the imperial rule shall be strengthened.”
If we take the initiative, we can dominate; if we do not, we will be dominated.
The side that has the upper hand in war often has an incentive to delay a settlement, especially if every passing day improves its bargaining position. This is why Japan had deepened China’s humiliation by rejecting a string of proposed Chinese negotiators as having insufficient protocol rank — a deliberate insult to an empire that had heretofore presented its diplomats as embodiments of heavenly prerogatives and therefore outranking all others, whatever their Chinese rank.
Inevitably, once the railway was constructed, Moscow insisted that the territory adjoining it would require Russian forces to protect the investment. Within a few years, Russia had acquired control over the area Japan had been forced to relinquish, and significantly more.
Such a policy grated at the dignity of a proud society. Nevertheless, it enabled China to preserve the elements of sovereignty, however attenuated, through a century of colonial expansion in which every other targeted country lost its independence altogether. It transcended humiliation by seeming to adapt to it.
After a century of vacillating between haughty disdain, defiance, and anguished conciliation, China now entered a state of war against all of the foreign powers simultaneously.
Exhausted by their exertions in the war and in a world influenced by Wilsonian principles of self-determination, the Western powers were no longer in a position to extend their spheres of influence in China; they were barely able to sustain them. Russia was consolidating its internal revolution and in no position to undertake further expansion. Germany was deprived of its colonies altogether.
Mao eschewed what Western diplomats viewed as the commonsense dictum that to recover from the decades of upheaval China should conciliate the major powers. He refused to convey any appearance of weakness, chose defiance over accommodation, and avoided contact with Western countries after establishing the PRC.
Whether Mao believed his own pronouncements on nuclear war it is impossible to say. But he clearly succeeded in making much of the rest of the world believe that he meant it — an ultimate test of credibility.
Mao was able to draw on a long tradition in Chinese statecraft of accomplishing long-term goals from a position of relative weakness. For centuries, Chinese statesmen enmeshed the “barbarians” in relationships that kept them at bay and studiously maintained the political fiction of superiority through diplomatic stagecraft.
It is the bitter sacrifices that strengthen our firm resolve, and which give us the courage to dare to change heavens and skies, to change the sun, and to make a new world.
Mao was determined to prevent encirclement by any power or combination of powers, regardless of ideology, that he perceived as securing too many wei qi “stones” surrounding China, by disrupting their calculations.
Millions died to implement the Chairman’s quest for egalitarian virtue. Yet in his rebellion against China’s pervasive bureaucracy, he kept coming up against the dilemma that the campaign to save his people from themselves generated ever larger bureaucracies. In the end, destroying his own disciples turned into Mao’s vast enterprise.
As it happened, Stalin had little interest in helping China recover. He had not forgotten the defection of Tito, the leader of Yugoslavia and the only European Communist leader to have achieved power by his own efforts and not as the result of Soviet occupation.
Stalin was too cynical to doubt that when powerful men achieve eminence by that they consider their own efforts, they resist the claim of superior orthodoxy by an ally, however close.
Acheson was laying out a prospect for a new Sino-American relationship based on national interest, not ideology:
Today is a day in which the old relationships between east and west are gone, relationships which at their worst were exploitation, and which at their best were paternalism. That relationship is over, and the relationship of east and west must now be in the Far East one of mutual respect and mutual helpfulness.
It was a somewhat frantic gesture, not in keeping with Stalin’s usual perspicacity. For the very request for reassurance defines the potential capacity for unreliability of the other side. If a partner is thought capable of desertion, why would reassurance be credible? If not, why would it be necessary? Moreover, both Mao and Stalin knew that Acheson’s “slander” was an accurate description of the current Sino-Soviet relationship.