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During two separate Asian border incidents in the late 1960s, Soviet border guards and Red Chinese soldiers renounced modern weaponry to assail each other with makeshift clubs. How far back must one go to learn what caused the fear and hatred mirrored in these disturbing photographs? Back to Peiping in the 1940s, or Shanghai in the 1920s? Back 200 years to the fixing of the present Soviet frontiers, or 2,000 years to the fixing of China’s?
hat exactly is the nature of the confrontation between those two colossi, the Russian Bear and the Chinese Dragon? Is it the normal pulling and hauling inherent in adapting a new political philosophy to practical multinational application? Or is it the preliminary rumble of emerging nationalism? Whatever the answer, it is of profound interest to the United States, because the Sino-Soviet conflict is producing the most important change in world balance of power since the Communist victory in China in 1949.
Webster says that nationalism is “a devotion to national interests and independence”—in effect, a collective extension of the simple individual human will to survive. By following policies of primary national interest, some nations have preserved theif identities and purposes as long as a millennium. Fesv
nations in the world’s history have voluntarily surrendered rights or prerogatives which they considered 'rnportant to their own ultimate best interests.
One may take Britain as a prime example of the foregoing philosophy. That nation has rarely bothered to camouflage the facts with ideological rnishmash whenever national interests have been involved. “England has no eternal friends nor enemies; only eternal interests!” declared Lord Henry J. T. Palmerston, Queen Victoria’s great foreign minister, ffe thus pragmatically expressed in a few words the Policy by which a small nation had risen to command a Worldwide empire. It was in exercise of the policy °f nationalism that between 1812 and 1915, Great °titain went to war against—and as an ally of—every niajor power in Europe\
The principle involved is obviously neither a
British patent nor has it been a British monopoly. Since the time man first assembled in groups, alliances have been made and smashed. Diplomatic marriages such as those forged at the Congress of Vienna, the Triple Alliance, the Entente Cordiale, NATO—have all been accepted by the general public with happy acclaim and with no more forebodings of divorce than a young couple at the altar rail. It is a lamentable fact, however, that while the chance of the marriage of the two humans crashing on the rocks is (in the United States) 50%, that of the “eternal” alliance is closer to 100%. One may thus conclude that all things being equal, the prognosis was never good for an eternal marriage between the Bear and the Dragon.
Fundamentally, Chinese nationalism is an age-old superiority complex based on racism. “Their [the for-
eigners in China] mentality really is inscrutable, wrote a 19th century Chinese viceroy. “The nature of dogs and sheep is difficult to analyze.”
Conveniently close to the surface in many Chinese intellectuals is still the ancient condescension felt for outsiders. An educated Chinese told a U. S. naval attache in 1942 that the prominence enjoyed by white people in Asia was based solely on the respect for them as fighters. The Chinese had nothing but disdain, he said, for western culture and religion, which they did not regard as superior.
By mid-19th century, practical considerations connected with foreign warships, as described by the educated Chinese gentleman, had tempered the viceroy’s excessive disdain. The past glories of the Inner Kingdom had long since become dim memories. Mongol threats to Europe were dead history. Against the far-ranging forces of the new Europe, the Man- chus, inheritors of the ancient Eastern might, were moribund. Chinese nationalism as such had become an empty word. An assessment by the English soldier of fortune, General Francis A. ( One-Arm ) Sutton, the Warlord of Manchuria’s chief of staff, summed up in 1931 the low estate to which the citizens of the Celestial Empire had sunk after 100 years of foreign degradation and domestic corruption:
“. . . The Chinese have no racial unity of spirit, no community interest, no national pride or ambition. A Chinese adorns his own dwelling; behind his garden wall there is beauty and harmony; but he will not clean the street before his gate. He steps through refuse to get to his own door. . - They seem to care nothing for death, for poverty, for suffering. It is as if they did not register these images. They feel the poetic and wistful pain of unrequited love, the gentle woe of poets and maidens, and yet witness a gruesome execution without a qualm.”1
The basic turn in China’s long road back was its betrayal at Versailles after World War I. This cynical performance on the part of China’s allies, plus the collective insult of the unequal treaties forced upon the nation during the preceding century, inflamed the growing wave of national sentiment that was soon to transform and eventually to destroy the West’s position in China. By 1920, Chinese nationalism, sparked by the great revolutionary Sun Yat-sen, was resurging with a will but with little sense of direction. It was on this shaky stage that Gregory Voitinsky, agent of the Far Eastern Bureau of Moscow’s Comintern, made his appearance. In June 1920, Voitinsky found in Shanghai a small, thoroughly mixed bag of Chinese intellectuals and students. They had boundless enthusiasm but no effective organization. Anarchists, Marxists, anti- Confucianists—all were ready to ride off in any or all directions which might promise to improve the abject semicolonial status of a wholly chaotic China, lying helpless before the twin wolves of domestic militarism and foreign exploitation.
With the finesse of the professional conspirator and organizer, Voitinsky rubbed the magic lamp W|th Soviet gold, and a small but tough genie appeared, the original hard core of the Chinese Communist party. It is supremely ironic that the nation which furnished the Dragon’s teeth would one day suffer a major confrontation with the monster.
By the mid-1920s, conditions in China invited increased Western and Japanese penetration. The Soviet Union clearly saw the danger inherent for it in such a development. Feeling secure enough domestically by this juncture to risk a foreign adventure deigned to protect their own ultimate interests, the Soviets offered assistance to the only militant, apparently nationalistic Chinese group, the Kuomintang.
pian was t0 furnish competent advisers in numbers sufficient and positions appropriate to control the course of events, assisted in this by an indigenous Communist party under close observation and control.
One of the wiliest political advisers in Moscow’s stable, Michael Borodin (ne Michael Grusenberg) was soon sitting high up in the newly established KMT 0feign office. The young military leader of the KMT, Chiang Kai-shek, had as his chief of staff the Soviet 8eneral Victor P. Rogachev, who was assisted by a Ctack military team including Comrade “Galen,” ater to become Marshal of the Soviet Union Vassilii wucher. The still relatively few but by now well- mdoctrinated Chinese Communists held instructions rom Moscow not to organize their own military 0rces but to assume an ambivalent character by swearing dual allegiance to both the KMT and their own party, the latter for the moment to rank, in the Orwellian manner, “with, but after,” the KMT.
The plan worked well. Warlord opposition crumbled as the crusading KMT armies swept north to the rich Yangtze valley. The Soviets now felt their position sufficiently secure to carry out the next step; they challenged the leadership of Chiang Kai-shek. Their optimistic enthusiasm dimmed their judgment in the basic premise that when dealing with Chinese they were in exceedingly fast company.
The sequel is short. In almost less time than it takes to say, “workers of the world, unite!” the Russians were bundled over the border, happy to find themselves still alive, while those of the Chinese comrades who had not already been summarily shot in the back of the head were hotfooting it for the hills.
During the endless provincial wars which prevailed after the 1912 collapse of the Chinese Empire, the classic military maneuver was always to provide a face-saving escape gap in any encircling ring which might have been set up around an “enemy.” (After all, one might find one’s self in the same predicament at a later date!) This cautious Chinese attitude toward serious bloodletting tended to carry on even into the Sino-Japanese hostilities which erupted in 1937. One such incident was reported by an American military attache, who was observing a Chinese army corps which had surrounded a Japanese division. In spite of great numerical superiority, the Chinese kept postponing what promised to be an easy kill. After several days of bored tea drinking in the surrounding hills, the attache made a suggestion which caused him to be sent packing. “You can wipe out that Japanese division without firing a shot!” he told the Chinese general. “Just have all your troops empty their bladders simultaneously and the Japanese down in the valley will be drowned!”
It was such experiences over the long past which perhaps had led General Douglas MacArthur to conclude contemptuously that the Chinese Communist forces massing along the Yalu posed no threat. He believed that they would not intervene even though the power supply to their Manchurian industrial complex was threatened, and even if they did, they could be easily taken care of. We very soon learned that in Korea the Chinese had come a long, long way since “One-Arm” Sutton and the escape of the Japanese division from drowning. Nationalism in the fullest sense had become a watchword of the People’s Republic of China.
The strong nationalistic tendencies of Mother Rus-
damental for Peking to flirt with the leaders of the new African oligarchies or to struggle with the U.S.S.R. over winning a smile from a demagogue in Indonesia.
sia scarcely need be enlarged upon. Few people of any consequence in history other than Napoleon Bonaparte or Adolf Hitler have ever doubted either the capacity or the will of the Bear to use its claws in defense of a sometimes beautiful but often bleak and melancholy land. Almost 100 years ago, the great French historian Alfred Rambaud said that, “What the Tsar wills, all classes will; the result being that no year passes that does not bring some gain to the great empire, great in extent, great in ambitions and greatly served.”
The felt helmets of Trotsky’s new Red Army took the shape of the pointed steel casques of the day of the legendary Alexander Nevsky, savior of a more youthful Mother Russia from the Teutonic knights. Today’s Soviet Navy guard (elite) unit crews wear cap bands patterned on the ribbon of the Tzarist St. George’s Cross. Many of their ships are named for naval heroes who reach back to the era of Mother Russia’s earliest seagoing days. World War II is known as “The Great Fatherland War.”
It is thus not surprising to find that Britain’s key, the formula of national interest first, is being used by the newest empire builders, China and the U.S.S.R. It was not surprising to see the Soviets help Egypt and damn Albania, while Egypt jails its Communists and Albania, reddest of Reds, defies the Communists’ one-time holy oracle. Nor is it any less fun-
In passing from the discussion of nationalism to politics, one can usefully paraphrase the aphorism concerning Britain and the United States, two countries divided by a common language,” by saying that the Soviet Union and China are two countries divided by a common political philosophy.
An appeal to the deity generally has been a standard feature of national projection. "Gott AVit Uns appeared on the belt buckles of the Kaiser’s troops in World War I at the same time the Allies proclaimed that God clearly was on their side. In the same vein> both the Soviets and the Chinese claim suzerain rights in the case of the Jew Karl Marx and the internationalist, part-Mongol V. I. Lenin, each coun try interpreting the gospel in its own way without loss of “face.”
This nebulous quality of “face,” important to both Chinese and Russians, is described by General Sutton as:
“. . .A religion. A philosophy. A national cowardice. Either you had face, in which case you wefe solvent and respectable, or you hadn’t it, and wen- mud. To lose face was to lose hope. . . . You paI for face. You bribed face. You stole for it, murdere for it, pretended, aped, tipped, whispered, prevafi cated. Face was God. Face was wrath. Face waS Solvency. Or it was Power. . . . ”2
"Face” most assuredly complicates the confrontation of the Bear and the Dragon.
The fundamentalism which generally makes a convert to a faith more orthodox than those born to it has in some respects been manifest in the earlier Chinese enthusiasm for the Soviet brand of Marxism, which for a time bound the Chinese to Moscow in a form of religious concert not unlike the popular idea of the crusades of the Middle Ages. Those crusades became gigantic looting expeditions in which European monarchs temporarily collaborated in emptying the jails and gathering the riffraff of a continent to march under a holy banner. The earlier pious expressions of Moscow and Peking of undying mutual love are an interesting parallel in the cynical and materialistic exploitation of the masses by the Communist leaders.
Almost from the beginning, the Chinese Communist movement has not only been independent by choice, but by Soviet disinterest or even obstruction. Liu Shao-chi, then a top ranking party member, said m 1943, long^before any hint of the present schism: ‘‘Our party has witnessed more important changes and accumulated more experiences of revolutionary struggle in various complicated forms—whether it be armed struggle or mass struggle, civil war or international war, legal struggle or illegal struggle, inside the party or outside the party—than any other communist party in the world!”
Three years later, Liu cut ex-Big Brother in on s°me more jolting facts of life. “Mao’s great accomplishment,” he explained in a somewhat patronizing manner, “has been to change Marxism- Leninism from a European to an Asian form, more aPplicable to the semi-feudal, semi-colonial lands in Southeast Asia as well as China.”
In the Taiping Rebellion of the last century, the Chinese found Christianity to be a very convenient temporary horse to ride. Their Trinity, however, consisted of God, the Divine Elder Brother Jesus, and the Divine Younger Brother—the Taiping EmPeror himself, Hung Hsiu-chuan. It is hardly surprising to find the inheritors of such a tradition being less than reluctant to make improvements on ^other’s holy writ.
The beautiful music once made together by the ®ear and the Dragon is now diminuendo. It is indeed a Wonder that a romance between two with such Stfiking differences in temperament and configura- tlQn should have lasted as long as it did.
The differences between the Soviet Union and L-hina, says old Asian hand Edgar Snow, “. . . may be defined as rooted in the geographical, historical, economic, and psychological or cultural environments which determine the behavior of two large, multinational states.”3 Snow points out that these fundamental differences are the basis of, and in an overall sense are more significant than,. the ideological disputes that separate the two nations.
In the purely physical confrontation, we find much to widen the rift. China reached its present frontiers 1,000-2,000 years ago; Russia a mere 100200. The Soviet maritime provinces were grabbed from China as late as the mid-19th century. Outer Mongolia has been weaned away since the Soviet advent to power. In many places the Sinkiang (Chinese Turkestan) border is ill-defined. Both sides are peopled partly by Turkomen whose ethnic roots are on the Soviet side and who have for centuries been antagonistic toward the Chinese, whose culture, religion, and language are anathema to them. That these cultural differences exist would normally be of interest only to a sociologist or another Turkoman. That these people live in an area lately discovered to hold valuable raw materials lifts the question into the purview of power politics.
Sun Yat-sen, “father of the Chinese revolution,” made it clear in writings and maps that he wanted the return of the Chinese lands taken by Russia. Peking has adopted Sun’s “China irredenta” theory in its entirety, plus large Communist extensions, and Madame Sun Yat-sen became an honored elder stateswoman in Red Peking.
The dying Lenin wrote that “. . . in the last analysis, the outcome of the struggle will be determined by the fact that Russia, India and China account for the overwhelming majority of the population of the globe.” But even the demigod Lenin himself would scarcely have dreamed that by 1979 there would be more than twice as many Chinese under 14 years old as the entire population of the U.S.S.R.!
Lenin felt that semicolonial countries could revolt successfully only with the direct help of an established Communist dictatorship. Clearly, Stalin made no sustained effort to implement this theory in China. His material assistance to the struggling Chinese Communists was negligible. There were times, in fact, when he supported the Chinese Communists enemies. One suspects that Stalin was attempting to maintain a balance of power between the two major Chinese factions.
Soviet theory behind this policy is suggested by Milovan Djilas, who from the establishment of the present Yugoslav government until 1955 was second only to Tito. In his 1962 book, Conversations With Stalin, Djilas says:
“Because Moscow abstained, always in decisive moments, from supporting the Chinese, Spanish, and in many ways even the Yugoslav revolutions, the view prevailed, not without reason, that Stalin was generally against revolutions. This is, however, not entirely correct. He was opposed only conditionally, that is, to the degree to which the revolution went beyond interests of the Soviet state. He felt instinctively that the creation of revolutionary centers outside of Moscow could endanger its supremacy in world communism, and of course that is what actually happened. That is why he helped revolutions only up to a certain point—up to where he could control them. ... I maintain that not even today is there any essential change in this respect in the policy of the Soviet Government.”4
The pattern continues more or less unbroken to 1945. Djilas quotes Stalin as saying:
“. . . when the war with Japan ended, we invited the Chinese comrades to reach an agreement as to how a modus vivendi with Chiang Kai-shek might be found. They agreed with us in word, but in deed they did it their own way when they got home: they mustered their forces and struck.”0 Furthermore, Stalin plainly was advancing Soviet national interests in the peace agreements hammered out at Yalta. These agreements guaranteed a Russian protectorate over Outer Mongolia, the restoration of Russian control over railways in Manchuria, and the lease of the old Tsarist territory of Port Arthur.
Available evidence, of which there is far too much to cover here, strongly suggests that there was no Soviet expectation of—or desire for—a complete Chinese Communist takeover. It is quite likely that a division of power at the Yangtze would have suited the Soviets admirably.
In 1958, we saw the first overt indication of a slight loosening of the fraternal handclasp across the steppes; Nikita Khrushchev gratuitously tipped off the United States that Mao would not have the benefit of Soviet atomic bombs if he followed through his attack on Matsu and Quemoy with one on Taiwan. The distinct lack of family solidarity in China’s exploratory attack on India clinched the fact that Moscow and Peking do not represent a monolithic duopower, the parts in close collaboration on plans and action. Since I960, the Soviets have stopped furnishing China with technical assistance and military hardware, while China and Pakistan have meanwhile built a land and air bridge which cuts across any possible land axis between the Soviet Union and India.
The current period is for China one of transition of vast and vital scope. Powerful positive action is demanded if the revolution is to be saved at home and if China is to ensure its position as a great power. It sees in the newly established ex-colonial nations conditions favorable to a complete turn of the wheel, wherein native oligarchs will make such accommodations with the imperialists that they are, in effect, colonials once more. This it must stop by a substitution of its own magnificent apparatus for control, the vast overseas Chinese reservoir of brains, money and mercantile influence.
For an appreciation of the basic Chinese viewpoint, one has only to heed the words of the prophet himself, Chairman Mao. His super-realism and probable intentions were nakedly and most succintly revealed in his statement that “All political power grows out of the barrel of a gun!” adding for Moscow’s special benefit the old Chinese proverb to the effect that nothing grows under a big tree.
As for the U.S.S.R., it is confronted by a Manchuria with a rapidly industrializing population bigger than that of West Germany—against an almost empty eastern Siberia; with atomic-tipped rockets zeroed in on targets as far west as the Ural mountains, and by the year 2000, a thousand million yellow faces across the longest border. For the erstwhile absolute monarch of world Communism, let us lift a line from the tuneful lyrics of the musical comedy “Camelot:” “I wonder what the King is doing tonight?” “He’s scared!" And, let us add, he damned well should be: those Chinese chickens of Comrade Voitinsky have come home to roost!
ERear Admiral Tolley, a 1929 graduate of the Naval Academy, spent eight years in pre-Worl War II China, including service on board the gunboats Mindanao (PR-8), Tutuila (PR-4), and Wake (PR-3). During the war, he was for two years assistant naval attache in Moscow. Subsequently, he served in the Office of Naval Intelligence in Washington; as Director of Intelligence, Armed Forces Staff College; and as Commander Fleet Activities, Yokosuka, Ja pan. A frequent contributor to the Proceedings in years past, Ad miral Tolley is the author of the Naval Institute Press books Yangtze Patrol and Cruise of the Lanikai. He lives in Monkton, Maryland.
'F. A. Sutton, "One-Arm" Sutton (New York: Viking Press, 1933), PP 191-92.
2Ibi<J., pp. 141-42.
3Edgar Snow, The Other Side of the River (New York: Random H'u-:
1961) , p. 647. .
4Milovan Djilas, Conversations uith Stalin (New York: World, InC''
1962) , p. 132.
5Ibid., p. 187.