Friedman puts the current foreign policy questions regarding China in a historical context. The historical record suggests that China's vision for the future could have disastrous results.
In mid-January the Chinese government arrested Song Yongbi, a librarian and historian at Dickinson College, in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He had been collecting historical materials about the Great Cultural Revolution, which tore through China in the 1960s. Song was charged with the "illegal purchase and provision of intelligence to bodies outside China," for which he could have been imprisoned for three to ten years, or even executed. Song was to have become an American citizen in September 2000, and the U.S. government protested. He has since been released.
The incident may seem bizarre, and entirely unrelated to future Chinese military policy, but unfortunately that is not the case. Song's real crime was to have discovered contemporary newspaper and pamphlet material which showed that Zhou En-Lai had supported the Cultural Revolution. The Revolution, which had been touched off by the then Chinese dictator, Mao Tse-Tung, proved extremely destructive. Much of current Chinese ideology seeks to show that the Cultural Revolution was no more than an anomaly due to Mao's own advancing age and to the evil advice given by his wife and her associates, the "Gang of Four." In this context Mao's associate, Zhou, is presented as a saint. Zhou was seen as largely responsible for the elevation of Deng Xia-Ping, who created the current Chinese state, with its mixture of communism and capitalism.
In some important ways, Mao could be compared to Josef Stalin. The great question for post-Stalin reformers was whether Stalin had been an inevitable product of communism, or whether he had been an aberration. During Mikhail Gorbachev's attempt at reform, there was much interest in Mikhail Bukharin, one of Stalin's victims, who was generally presented as the supporter of a kinder, gentler sort of Soviet state, the kind Gorbachev claimed he was erecting. If that were valid, then Gorbachev could claim that Communism had a future if it could avoid the Stalinist excesses. If it were not valid, then one might reasonably say that communism had no future at all, that Gorbachev was merely fooling himself.
Gorbachev's failure to save communism and the Soviet Union undoubtedly interests the current Chinese leadership, which has no interest in Suffering a similar fate. So how should Mao be presented? In a way, he is both Lenin and Stalin for the Chinese, since he had a central role in winning the Chinese Civil War and in creating the Communist Chinese state. He also had a central role in some really disastrous policies quite comparable to Stalin's collectivization of farms—which killed off about ten million Ukrainians—and the mass purges of the 1930s and later. Zhou, the gentlemanly companion to the somewhat boorish Mao, thus has a central role. He represents communist success, or humanity. If, however, Zhou turns out to have been just as bloodthirsty as Mao, one might reasonably conclude that Mao was the norm, and that Deng was the exception- and that the leadership's guarantees of future freedom of enterprise (both for peasants and for entrepreneurs) are just so much cant. Ironically, it is entirely possible that the material uncovered by Mr. Song indicates no more than that Zhou went along with the party line in a very dangerous time, rather than that he was really an enthusiastic supporter of the Cultural Revolution. Many historians have discovered that published source material misses important points, but of course the Communist Chinese have not allowed any outsider the access to their archives which might show Zhou's real influence on events in the 1960s and early 1970s. Zhou's current importance makes the history of the Cultural Revolution very dangerous intellectual territory, as Mr. Song has just discovered.
So what does all of this mean for the world of navies and missiles? First, the Song case is another illustration of just how weak the current Chinese regime feels. It comes after the suppression of the Falun Gang Buddhist sect, which had (as far as Westerners can tell) no political power at all). The Chinese have also just promulgated a strict new law on passing sensitive material via the Internet. Mr. Song's arrest shows just how wide the definition of sensitive material can be. Secrets may not have anything like their Western connotation. Filters, like those developed in the West to keep pornography out of childrens' hands, may be usable to detect those disseminating the sort of historical material Mr. Song unearthed.
It would seem to be a good possibility that the Chinese government will see nationalism as its best shield against the sort of questions Mr. Song's work (and others like it) inevitably raises. The Chinese Communist Party already tells the public that it is the only way to keep the country unified and strong, and strength is important to the extent that China must resist the humiliations of the past. That the regime has recovered Hong Kong and Macau stands to its credit. That leaves Taiwan as a reminder of the past. Past agreements not to use force to resolve the issue may not be particularly meaningful. Of course, it is also possible that the Chinese military is significantly less competent than its masters imagine. It did not do particularly well in Vietnam in 1979. The Chinese may do well to ponder the Russian example in Chechnya.
One other point is worth making, if only because it is so rarely taken into account. The European power that took the bulk of Imperial Chinese territory was not Britain, but Russia. At one time China owned Siberia, and the modem Chinese must wonder whether they, rather than a thin population of Russians, should hold title to its mineral wealth. It is true that Russia and China now seem to be settling into a strategic partnership directed against the West, but such arrangements are often tactical. Thoughtful Russians may remember that after World War II the Soviet Union provided the Germans with secret factories and proving grounds on which were developed many of the weapons used against the Soviet Union after Hitler broke up the relationship and invaded. Is it any wiser to feed modem military technology to the Chinese, who have had hundreds of years to nurse their grudge against the Russians?
Certainly the Chinese currently say that they have no outstanding claims against the Russians, but they also have published maps showing the territory lost under the "unequal treaties." They have the much more recent experience of a serious Soviet attempt to detach Sinkiang inl944, and of the deal which Stalin extracted from Mao and Zhou, under which the Soviets received rights much like those held by the hated Western colonial powers, which Mao had just ejected. It is also 50 years since the Korean War, and the loss of hundreds of thousands of Chinese lives in a war Stalin seems to have precipitated. Current Chinese accounts, for example, show that Stalin in effect forced China to keep fighting after the Chinese decided to seek a truce in 1951. This history is considered less incendiary, but it might cause considerable trouble to a Chinese government bent on reviving some sort of alliance with the Russians.
There is yet another possibility. The Chinese regime may decide that the real problem is all that unruly free enterprise, which gives people a way to get rich without the Communist Party's consent or support. Communists always say that economics is inseparable from politics, yet Deng's policy of opening up to free enterprise was practically a declaration that the opposite was true. Maybe Song's research, which suggests that the Cultural Revolution was no aberration and that Zhou cannot be separated from it, really implies that the Party will return to its roots and terminate all the free enterprise in China. Maybe Song's arrest was the beginning of a new crackdown, which is only in its earliest and least visible stages. There are some reports that Chinese entrepreneurs are leaving while that is still possible, that they fear some sort of political disaster.
There is, after all, a precedent. After World War I, Lenin sanctioned a degree of free enterprise (the New Economic Plan) to revive the Soviet economy. It worked, but Stalin realized that it might undermine party authority. He shut it down, despite the unfortunate economic consequences. Indeed, collectivization and the horrific Ukrainian famine were consequences of that decision. Was Deng's support of free enterprise no more than a Chinese New Economic Plan? Is a new dark age coming there?
Deng's motivation seems to have been to build an economy strong enough to stand up militarily to the Soviets'. Now the Soviets are gone, and it seems unlikely that there will be a serious Russian military threat to China for decades to come. Perhaps it is time for Deng's successors to concentrate on party control rather than on economic strength. Perhaps a crackdown is coming. The question for the West, then, will be whether those who have benefited from the economic liberalization, including many in the Chinese military, will allow the crackdown to happen. If the current leadership sees them as potentially obstructive, then it has a precedent for dealing with them, Stalin's purges of his own society, including his military.
We already know some of the consequences of such a purge. The Cultural Revolution sapped Chinese military technology. Chinese accounts of weapon developments generally show gross delays traceable to the loss of technicians and staff during the Cultural Revolution—when political loyalty was far more important than competence.
The great question for us is whether the Chinese leadership sees its choices just this way: nationalism and expansion, using the current system to produce the military leaders and the weapons versus political crackdown, accepting poor military performance. The historical record, both in the Soviet Union and in China, suggests that the leadership will try to combine enforced political loyalty with military expansionism, with potentially disastrous results.