How might the current Sino-American conflict appear to a veteran of the “Long March,” a dedicated Communist leader whose ascendancy to power has been unique? His country, and his countrymen have baffled Western minds for centuries; for what the Americans might consider logical and reasonable, the Chinese often consider completely illogical and unreasonable.
Still, we must at least try to understand how the Chinese look at us if we are to develop a successful strategy for dealing with the ' ever-increasing threat that they represent to the world.
Let us, then, assume that a correspondent for an American newspaper has been permitted to write a letter to a top official in Peking. The correspondent seizes his opportunity to ask: “How does a non-industrialized country like China, with limited military potential, plan to contend with the United States in the world arena?”
Here is the probable reply from the Chinese Communist leader. This imaginary letter is based both on Chinese actions in the world today, and on Chinese statements of their objectives and policies. Except for direct quotes, these statements have been stripped of their turgid prose, stilted phraseology, and, above all, their repetitious Marxist dialectics.
Dear Mr. American Correspondent:
In 1945, Western strategists assumed we had only limited power because we controlled no cities of consequence. We were poorly armed, had few material resources, little money, and no allies. Even the Soviet Union recognized Chiang Kai-shek’s government as the legal government of China. Nationalist armies were trained, equipped, and backed by the United States, which was then un- disputedly the world’s strongest military power. Yet, in four years, without benefit of outside aid, our outnumbered, supposedly inferior forces completely routed Chiang’s armies.
Now, 20 years later, Western strategists again assume that we have only limited power because we do not possess the material resources of the United States. We can prove them wrong again—if we pursue the proper tactics. It may take 40 years or even 400 years, but correct policies will enable us to prevail. As Chairman Mao has said, “From a long term point of view it is not the reactionaries but the people who are really powerful.”
It is quite apparent that our basic national objectives will cause us to have repeated tests of strength and of will with the United States, because that country is the major obstacle to the attainment of our goals. But we are presently unable to project our military strength directly against the United States, and our capacity for applying economic pressure is negligible. In fact, trade between our countries is vital to neither of us. Similarly, we have been unable to bring any direct political pressure to bear. In other words, we cannot strike directly at American power. How then can we hope to achieve our objectives?
Minister of Defense Lin Piao indicated the nature of the tactics we must adopt when, in September 1965, he said to the Americans:
You rely on modern weapons and we rely on highly conscious revolutionary people: you give full play to your superiority and we give full play to ours; you have your way of fighting and we have ours.
Obviously, we are forced to use the indirect approach. Militarily we must conquer from within by the use of subversive insurgency or people’s war. And we reinforce this with political, economic, psychological, and cultural subversion. We must be careful, however, not to overplay our hand. After all, there are limits to the extent that clever maneuvering, political skill, or even grim determination can overcome an adverse power balance. But, as time renders the balance of power more favorable, we can gradually step up our pressure.
There are numerous places in the developing areas of the world today that have vulnerable regimes and are susceptible to subversive insurgency. It is to our great advantage to keep the United States involved in peripheral engagements which it cannot win, yet feels that it cannot afford to lose. Any multiplication of armed conflict in distant places reduces our direct jeopardy because it causes the United States to disperse its strength; consequently, we must be willing to promote such conflicts by every means at our disposal.
This is a low intensity, protracted type of program. We must take care that we do not present enough of a threat at any given time to encourage the United States to use all of its potential strength, in particular its nuclear weapons. As long as we do this, the United States will find it extremely difficult to develop a successful political-military counter-strategy to people’s war. As Marshal Lin Piao has clearly pointed out:
. . . the greatest fear of U. S. imperialism is that people’s wars will be launched in different parts of the world, and particularly in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and that is why it regards people’s war as a mortal danger.
The risk of U. S. retaliation directly against us for supporting revolutionary warfare in another country is not really very high. As long as we can keep the situation reasonably ambiguous, the Americans are too irresolute deliberately to start a war with us. They require great provocation.
From our viewpoint, another great advantage of people’s war is that it does not require modern weapons or vast financial resources, which, of course, we do not have at this time. Our relative national weakness in those areas is not much of a handicap. The primary requirement is popular support. Since we so recently drove the imperialists from our own country, we have a good understanding of the needs of the people and the forces that motivate them. What we have to do is to encourage and assist the liberation of the masses by the masses themselves. Other than providing them with small arms, our primary effort is in training local leaders to organize their own people.
Students, intellectuals, and leftists are our most fertile source for revolutionary leadership, but we must not overlook communal or even tribal leaders, because no outsiders can lead a people’s war of national liberation. Only the people can gain freedom for themselves. Our objective is merely to create the proper conditions for the seizure of power by people friendly to us, or even willing to tolerate us. This can be accomplished most readily by promoting instability, by exploiting the vulnerability of these developing societies to dissidence, and by violence.
Unfortunately, one cannot turn on people’s wars like one turns on a water faucet. In some developing areas, the people are either unable or unwilling to make a serious effort to liberate themselves. Here is where we must resort to subversive measures designed to undermine the U. S. position. It is relatively easy to turn the strong nationalism and anti-white feelings of most colonial, anti-colonial, and newly independent countries against the United States. In addition, we can exploit the grievances of the oppressed classes and any political, economic, or social instability. But we must always remember that the exploitation of these negative emotions is a double-edged sword. To avoid any unfavorable reaction of the local population, we must be careful to keep our actual involvement as inconspicuous as possible.
In giving foreign aid, the United States imposes on the recipient countries a number of conditions which are exacting and of an aggressive and oppressive nature. We cannot hope to equal the U. S. foreign aid effort. Nevertheless, we should provide small amounts of economic assistance to selected countries, primarily to discredit U. S. aid and motives. Depending on the circumstances in the country, our aid should be outright grants, provision of raw materials, or long term credit at little or no interest. There should be no strings attached. At the same time, we should clearly point out that the object of U. S. aid is not to help the people but to keep reactionary regimes in power. U. S. aid is merely a tool of neo-colonialism, a means of penetrating and controlling weak countries. Food is a particularly sensitive subject. We should make it clear that the United States uses food for political purposes, that food has become one of the most important weapons available to the United States for gaining economic and political control and influencing the policies of poor countries.
To discourage Asian, African, and Latin American countries from leaning toward the United States, we should stress the theme that the United States is the source of their misery in the first place. As Bertrand Russell points out, the United States has only 6 per cent of the world’s population yet it owns or controls more than 60 per cent of the world’s natural resources. This can be emphasized as the basic reason for the starvation level of existence in much of the remainder of the world. The United States has gotten rich at the expense of the people of the world. And that is why the United States needs such a mighty war machine—to protect its system of plunder.
As a final means of penetration, we must organize and indoctrinate a political leadership in these developing countries that will look to China as a model to follow. Our rise from weakness to strength in less than a generation is certainly worthy of emulation. As Vice Premier Chen Yi noted:
The people of Asia, Africa, and Latin America will overtake the industrially advanced countries within a few decades, once they shake off the control of imperialism and old and new colonialism and start to build their countries by relying on their own efforts. The history of New China over the past 16 years provides most vivid evidence.
The stronger China becomes, the more desirable our system will appear to the countries of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and the future of the world may very well depend on the political orientation of this vast intermediate zone.
Premier Chou En-lai recently emphasized that “an international united front against U. S. imperialist policies of aggression and war is growing and expanding throughout the world.” As a logical follow-on step to our penetration of individual countries of the developing world, our goal should be to establish and head just such a world-wide anti-U. S. front. It should be a loose alliance of the primarily non-white nations of Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and it should have an avowed purpose of driving U. S. influence from those three continents, especially from Asia. According to Prince Sihanouk of Cambodia, “If there were some 15 countries in the world that followed the line of non-cooperation toward U. S. imperialism, and refused to provide it with military bases, and forbade its aircraft and ships to use their airfields and ports, this would be enough to force United States imperialism to retreat.” In this manner, the United States, which is too strong to be dislodged by force, can be driven from the continent of Asia.
Then, to show that we understand American history and foreign policy and that we would like to apply the lessons learned therefrom, we should proclaim our own version of a “Monroe Doctrine” for Asia. Simply stated, this would mean no Western colonies in Asia, and no interference by non-Asian powers in the internal affairs of Asian states.
In our campaign against the United States, we must also be alert to any opportunity to split them from their allies and disrupt Western unity. For the industrialized countries, trade can be a powerful lure. Since selective trade can serve to strengthen our economy, we can afford to promote commercial relations with Japan, the United Kingdom, France, Canada, West Germany, and any other U. S. ally who will deal with us. Business interests in these capitalist countries exert a considerable amount of political influence, and, when profit is involved, these interests resent American pressure against trade with China.
We have made excellent progress recently with the French, who have sent many diplomats, traders, and cultural emissaries to China. The French were extremely active at our trade fair in Canton in the spring of 1965, and their government sponsored an industrial exhibition in Peking which commenced in November 1965. At the opening of that exhibition, Nan Han-chen, Chairman of the China Council for the Promotion of International Trade, wisely kept politics foremost when he remarked that U. S. imperialism is unwilling to see us develop friendly relations with countries like France, and at the same time is trying unsuccessfully to blockade and embargo mainland China.
Japan is the strongest U. S. ally in Asia. We must spare no effort to break up this alliance. Here again, we can use trade as a political tool, but we can also exploit resurgent Japanese nationalism by such means as condemning the Japanese-U. S. Security Treaty as ill-disguised colonialism, and denouncing U. S. military bases in Japan as an infringement on Japanese sovereignty and a threat to her independence and peace. It would be to our great advantage to create some crisis in U. S.-Japanese relations shortly before 1970, which is when the Security Treaty will be up for renewal.
Various types of exchange programs can be used to promote an anti-U. S. theme. For example, when 140 Japanese youths recently came to China for the China-Japan Youth Friendship Festival, workers from one of our machine tool plants presented the Japanese visitors with a banner which read, “Chinese and Japanese youth unite and oppose the common enemy, U. S. imperialism.” This type of cultural exchange is so important that Chairman Mao, himself, received our Japanese friends.
The Japanese are particularly sensitive to anything concerning nuclear weapons; therefore, we can use visits of nuclear submarines to Japan to stir up anti-U. S. sentiment. The charge that the United States is trying to turn Japan into a nuclear base is always sure to incite an angry wave of protests by Japanese leftist elements.
France and Japan have merely been used as examples to illustrate the methods we must use to split the United States from its allies. Every country is different, and each has its vulnerabilities. We must continuously strive for just the right balance of diplomacy, psychology, and pressure to achieve our ends.
As noted previously, we are unable to exert direct pressure on the United States, but we can attempt to manipulate public feelings in that country. We can also encourage causes which, knowingly or not, promote our interests. There are some leftist groups, but there are many others that are merely liberal or just hostile to war in general. Our objective is to convince such people that the United States has no business being in Asia, particularly on the mainland. There have been grave doubts for many years, even in official circles, about the wisdom of U. S. foreign policy in Asia. More than ten years ago a member of the U. S. Congress made the following very interesting statement:
We have to make up our minds, it seems to me, at some point whether the United States, way over here 6,000 miles away, can remain a dominant factor on the western rim of the Pacific lake. I think that it is a very important question because we have become so deeply involved in this thing that we ought to measure the possibilities and probabilities before we get in too far.
This is the type of thinking that we must continue to encourage.
Although we must maintain the utmost hostility toward the American government, lest U. S. leaders be encouraged to be more aggressive towards us, we should always claim friendship with the American people. Those groups that are particularly susceptible to being influenced are workers, students, revolutionary intellectuals, and certain minority groups, particularly the Negroes. As Chairman Mao recently noted:
The speedy development of the struggle of the American Negroes is a manifestation of the sharpening of class struggle and national struggle within the United States; it has been causing increasing anxiety to U. S. ruling circles,
In the United States, real or imagined grievances are not as acute as in the developing countries, but they do exist and can be similarly exploited. Our avowed goal is to establish ties between the American people and the revolutionary people of the world.
To help establish these ties, Chairman Mao Tse-tung and other Chinese leaders have always made a point of meeting and entertaining distinguished American guests. On 24 November 1965, Chairman Mao and his wife Chiang Ching received the noted writer Anna Louise Strong and several other American friends, and later gave a banquet in honor of Miss Strong’s 80th birthday.
Our program is carried on in conjunction with a much broader campaign to mobilize and manipulate world opinion against the United States. The subversion of the American people is an important part of establishing our international anti-U. S. front.
The first sentence of an August 1946 statement of Chairman Mao Tse-tung is often quoted by Western analysts in an attempt to show that we Chinese do not understand the implications of nuclear weapons and are, therefore, indifferent to them. This, of course, is nonsense. The second and third sentences are not without meaning:
The atom bomb is a paper tiger with which the American reactionaries try to terrify the people. It looks terrible, but in fact is not. Of course, the atom bomb is a weapon of mass annihilation; the outcome of a war is decided by the people, not by one or two new weapons.
We certainly would not have diverted such a large portion of our scientific and economic resources to nuclear weapons development if we considered them unimportant. What is important is that weapons of mass annihilation are unlikely to be used in people’s wars of national liberation, and that basically wars are won by the morale and resolution of the people, not by weapons alone. These are not new thoughts and are generally recognized by reasonable men.
But, since we now possess nuclear weapons ourselves, we can use them as a political tool to achieve our ends. It is futile for us in the foreseeable future to attempt to match the technologically superior United States in numbers of nuclear weapons or delivery systems. Our problem is to gain maximum advantage from a relatively small number of weapons. To do this, the first step is to establish a credible threat.
We have already laid the groundwork in that we present an aggressive, militant attitude towards the United States. We say that in order to oppose U. S. imperialism it is imperative to wage a serious struggle and to take risks. Only in this way will we be able to win. We also make it clear that we take the long view of history, and thus do not fear nuclear war.
Militancy is not enough, however, and at present we cannot deter U. S. military power by directly threatening the United States with land-based ballistic missiles. Until we develop such a threat, we must rely on other means. We do have submarines with a guided missile capability that could be adapted to fire nuclear warheads. They could position themselves off the west coast of Mexico or Central America, and fire at major western U. S. coastal cities. If we could establish close relations and penetrate some coastal country in South America or Africa, we could station submarine tenders along their coast; and if we had sufficient trade so that it became normal for our ships to go back and forth, we might even introduce guided missile ships disguised as merchant ships.
The point of all of this is not to establish a capability for a surprise attack on the United States, because she would certainly destroy China in retaliation. Our objective is merely to have the capability to annihilate a few U. S. cities, and to have the Americans well aware of this fact. Then, in some future confrontation, the U. S. president would be faced with the agonizing decision as to whether some distant problem, perhaps vital to China but not really vital to the United States, was worth a threat to millions of American lives. He would undoubtedly be under tremendous popular pressure to withdraw. Another advantage would be that our nuclear threat would certainly deter the Americans from using their nuclear weapons lightly in some local war.
Of course, our primary policy regarding nuclear weapons must be to press for complete nuclear disarmament. This would relieve us of the greatest threat to the attainment of our goals, namely U. S. nuclear power. The United States, however, is unlikely to consider such a proposal seriously unless we are able to apply some sort of pressure. How can we do this?
It is basic U. S. policy to inhibit the proliferation of nuclear weapons. But there are many countries in the world today that have a capability to produce such weapons, and some of these countries are potentially antagonistic to the United States. Vice Premier and Foreign Minister Chen Yi recently stated:
China hopes that Afro-Asian countries will be able to make atom bombs themselves, and it would be better for a greater number of countries to come into possession of atom bombs.
Our policy should be that the development of nuclear weapons by peace-loving socialist states should not be opposed as long as the United States is unwilling to reach agreement on the banning of nuclear weapons. We might even imply that we will aid countries particularly friendly to China in the development of such weapons. The specter of widespread nuclear proliferation could very well pressure the United States into serious discussion of general nuclear disarmament. After all, they have far more to lose in the nuclear game than we do.
The foregoing strategies for weakening the United States are not new. Our leaders have been advocating most of them for years, but the Americans either do not listen or else do not take China seriously.
What might be called “hostile coexistence” is not a quick and easy solution; it is a doctrine of protracted struggle. There will be ups and downs. We will undoubtedly be forced to disengage from situations which are rendered disadvantageous or untenable by U. S. pressure, but if we assiduously pursue this program we will emerge victorious in the end.
Above all, we must remember that hostile coexistence is not a strategy of confrontation with the United States merely for its own sake. It is the best means of attaining our ultimate goal, the restoration of China to its ancient glory.
Your respectful servant,
Comrade Me Tu