Communist China and the United States—The First Step
By Lieutenant Colonel H. G. Summers, Jr., U. S. Army
For the first time in over 20 years, the United States is moving away from the rigid containment policy that grew out of the Korean war. For the first time, attempts are being made to establish normal relations with Peking. Trade restrictions have been relaxed, travel restrictions have been eased, and the Warsaw talks have been resumed (albeit postponed by the Chinese since the Cambodian incident of 1970). “We are prepared to establish a dialogue with Peking,” said President Nixon on 25 February 1971 in his annual State of the World message to Congress.
“Dialogue” implies an exchange of ideas or opinions, but there are impediments to such an exchange that are not readily apparent. There is more than a little truth in the assessment of Richard Harris, the Far East expert for The Times (London), who, in his book America and East Asia: A New Thirty Years War (New York: Braziller, 1969), stated that the clash in East Asia since World War II has been the clash of two self-centered, ethnocentric, ideologically motivated civilizations, each blind to the other’s faults and virtues.
We have begun to strike some of the scales from our eyes. What about the scales on the Chinese eyes?
“Chinese foreign policy reflects the complexity of China’s historical relationships with the outside world . . .” said President Nixon on 18 February 1970:
“Predominant in Asia for many centuries, these gifted and cultured people saw their society as the center of the world. Their tradition of self-imposed cultural isolation ended abruptly in the 19th Century, however, when an internally weak China fell prey to exploitation by technologically superior foreign powers . . .
“The history inherited by the Chinese Communists, therefore, was a complicated mixture of isolation and incursion, of pride and humiliation. We must recall this unique past when we attempt to define a new relationship for the future.”
China has always seen itself as Chung Kuo—the Middle Kingdom. Not only did it see itself as the geographic center of East Asia, but more importantly as the cultural and philosophical center of the world, surrounded by varying tribes of barbarians.
Some years ago, an American diplomat, returning from China, said that he now knew what it must be like to be a man of color in a segregated society—no matter who you were, no matter what your intellectual attainments, no matter how many university degrees you had, the lowest rickshaw driver in the streets knew that he was superior to you. He knew simply because he was Chinese and you were not.
Going placidly on its way while the West suffered the Renaissance, the Reformation, the Thirty Years War and the growth of nation states, the American Revolution, the French Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution, China was contemptuous of “foreign” learning. Until the 19th century, it reigned supreme.
This, then, is one picture the Chinese carry in their minds—China as T’ien Hsia, “All Under Heaven”. Built around the nucleus of the expanded family, the Chinese cosmotology [sic] was all-encompassing. Every one had a place in this social order, all were subordinate to the Celestial Emperor, and he was subordinate only to heaven. Foreign nations were also assigned a subordinate status in the Chinese world order. There was no concept of the sovereign equality of nations. Take, for example, the Emperor Ch’ien Lung’s memorial to King George III of England in 1787:
“Our dynasty’s majestic virtue has penetrated unto every country under Heaven, and Kings of all nations have offered their costly tribute by land and sea. As your Ambassador can see for himself, we possess all things. I set no value on objects strange or ingenious and have no use for your country’s manufactures . . .
“It behooves you, O King, to respect my sentiments and to display even greater devotion and loyalty in future, so that by perpetual submission to our Throne, you may secure peace and prosperity for your country hereafter.”
As Bertrand Russell, the British philosopher said, “No one understands China until this document has ceased to seem absurd.”
Alongside this picture of China at its zenith is a picture of China at its nadir—Kuo Ch’ih, the “Era of National Humiliation.”
In the West we tend to think of this “humiliation” in physical terms—the defeat of Chinese forces in the Opium wars of the 1840s, the defeat of the Chinese in Indochina in the 1880s, the defeat of the Chinese by Japan in the 1890s. This was certainly a traumatic shock to the Chinese people, as they saw their land' conquered by foreign soldiers. But China had lost its lands before—to the Mongols in the 14th century, to the Manchus in the 17th century. Both of these conquerors had respected and retained Chinese culture and tradition.
Now, in the 19th century, the whole cosmotology [sic], the whole world order collapsed. Chinese philosophy, Chinese social organization, Chinese values were defiled and disrespected. Chinese civilization collapsed on impact with the West.
It is impossible to overestimate the terrible effect of this cataclysm. From being supreme in its world for millenniums, Chinese civilization crumbled and fell apart almost overnight.
Mao Tse-tung told how these events made lasting impressions in his young mind when he was a student in normal school at about the turn of the century:
“I began to have a certain amount of political consciousness, especially after I read a pamphlet telling of the dismemberment of China. I remember even now that this pamphlet opened with the sentence, ‘Alas, China will be subjugated!’ It told Japan’s occupation of Korea and Formosa, of the loss of suzerainty in Indochina, Burma, and elsewhere. After I read this I felt depressed about the future of my country and began to realize it was the duty of all the people to help save it.”[1]
China has largely recovered from its physical humiliation. Foreigners have been expelled from China, in Mao Tse-tung’s words “China has stood up!” China still has not recovered from its cultural and psychological humiliation. It is the attempt to find new values with which to challenge the insidious and pervasive “cultural” invasion of the West that still plagues China. Ironically, this aspect of “humiliation” which weighs so heavily on Chinese minds is almost incomprehensible to the West.
The United States today is cast in the devil’s role precisely because we are seen as the embodiment of this cultural threat. We are the antithesis of Chinese civilization. We exalt individualism, they honor group loyalty. We prize materialism, they prize spirituality. We champion technology, they champion ideology.
This is not to deny the physical threat of the United States as perceived by Communist China—this is to emphasize that even if the physical threat were removed, the spiritual, the moral, the psychological threat would remain. Without realizing it, the United States has spawned a revolution in the world—the revolution of rising expectations—a revolution which the Chinese see is a threat to their very existence.
To put this cultural struggle in better perspective, let us look at how China has attempted to cope with this threat to its civilization over the past 150 years.
Military actions to defeat the invaders and repel their ideas were defeated in the Opium wars of the 1840s. The infallibility of Chinese methods began to be questioned. Perhaps—just perhaps—Western technology, especially Western military technology, was superior to Chinese technology.
The Chinese next tried to capture the essence of Western strength by adopting what they perceived as Western philosophy. In 1851, Hung Hsiu-ch’uan raised the banner of revolt against the decaying Manchu Dynasty with the T’ai P’ing Rebellion. Claiming that he was the younger brother of Jesus Christ, he brought a new religion to renew and rejuvenate China. After considerable early success the T’ai P’ing rebels were defeated in 1864. It is interesting to note that the Chinese Communists, who have also used a Western philosophy, Marxism-Leninism, in order to cope with the West, honor the T’ai P’ing rebels as the forerunner of their revolution.
From 1861 to 1895, a movement known as the Tzu-ch’iang or “Self-Strengthening Movement” was launched with the purpose of “learning the superior techniques of the barbarians to control the barbarians.” The innovators had considerable opposition from court conservatives who thought Western methods dirty and vulgar. There was no need for Western technology, the Conservatives believed; what was needed was more emphasis on the Confucian classics. Contrary to popular opinion, however, the current argument in Communist China over ideology versus technology did not spring full-blown from the brow of Lin Piao in 1965.
Confucian reformers, such as K’ang Yu-wei, attempted to reform the Empire from within by modernizing Confucianism. Their attempts collapsed with the failure of the “Hundred Days of Reform” in 1898, but, interestingly, the ideas contained in K’ang Yu-wei’s book, Ta Tung Shu, for the construction of a perfect state surfaced again in China during the Great Leap Forward in 1958.
In 1900, the I-ho ch’uan, the “Society of Righteous and Harmonious Fists”—or the Boxers, as they were known in the West—again attempted to expel the West by force but they were put down by a combined foreign expeditionary force of Japanese, American, and European troops.
Frustrated in their attempts to reform China by changes within the traditional system, the Chinese now turned to revolutionaries who plotted to destroy the system. Most successful of these rebels was Sun Yat-sen and his Kuomintang Party. Basing his revolution on the San Min Chu-i, the Three People’s Principles of Nationalism, Democracy, and National Livelihood, Sun Yat-sen overthrew the Imperial order that had ruled his country for over 4,000 years and proclaimed the Republic of China on 10 October 1911.
But the revolution was frustrated. Warlords, such as Yuan Shih-kai, seized power throughout the country, and China remained weak and disunited. The Chinese looked around for means to overcome these difficulties and, when some saw the success of the Russian Revolution of 1917 as offering a model to rebuild China, Marxism-Leninism entered China.
The Western models, based largely on the United States, of “Mr. Science” and “Mr. Democracy” suffered a severe blow in 1919. The Chinese people believed in President Wilson’s Fourteen Points, especially the points on national self-determination. The Versailles Treaty, however, took Shantung Peninsula, the birthplace of Confucius, from the control of the Germans and instead of returning it to China, placed it under Japanese control.
A student revolt, known as the May Fourth Movement, swept China in 1919. One of the people who came to national prominence during this revolt was the editor of a local newspaper, the Hsiang River Review, in Hunan Province—Mao Tse-tung. He was invited to Peking to confer with Marxist leaders in the University and, in 1921, became one of the founding members of the Chinese Communist Party.
The eclipse of the Western model for development, and the concurrent rise of Marxism-Leninism to guide the future is an example of the dangers of idealism not backed by pragmatic, practical action. Without the willingness to apply power to gain desired ends, idealism creates aspirations that are not capable of attainment in the real world. Frustration ensues and resentment may well be directed against those who have provided only empty promises. It has been argued that Chinese Communism, therefore, is a monster of our own creation.
From 1921 to 1935, the Chinese Communist Party was very much under control of the Comintern and the “returned-student” faction of Chinese scholars who had studied abroad—such men as Chou En-lai and Liu Shao-ch’i. The failure of this faction to cope with the military actions of the Kuomintang led to the emergence of Mao Tse-tung as chairman of the party at Tsun-yi in 1935 during the Long March. This split between the more doctrinaire urban-oriented “returned-student” faction and the rural “peasant-oriented” faction of Mao Tse-tung was to resurface during the Cultural Revolution in 1965.
Meanwhile, the Kuomintang, the leadership of which had passed to Chiang Kai-shek after the death of Sun Yat-sen, was attempting to rebuild China. United with the Communists in a common action against the warlords from 1922 to 1927, the two groups split into contending power blocs. Although ostensibly united again from 1937 to 1946 against the common enemy of Japan, the civil war in China between the Communists and the Nationalists continued at varying levels of intensity throughout the entire period. Weakened by the long struggle against Japan, torn apart by internal dissension, the Nationalists were driven from the mainland in 1949 and the People’s Republic of China was proclaimed.
In 1949, Mao Tse-tung made the conscious decision to “lean to one side,” that is, to favor the Soviet Union—a decision reinforced by the Korean War of 1950-1953. From 1949 to 1958, Communist China prospered under the Soviet model of industrial development. Aided with loans and technical assistance from the Soviet Union, she appeared to be making rapid strides. But the price was high—i.e., reliance on a foreign model, the model of the Soviet Union. “Humiliation” continued. This tacit admission of Chinese inferiority was too much for Mao Tse-tung, and in 1958, he announced the Great Leap Forward, the Chinese model for development.
But the Great Leap was a disaster. From 1959 to 1966, under pragmatic leadership such as that of then President Liu Shao-ch’i, China recovered from the excesses of the Great Leap and again began to move forward in economic development.
In 1966, the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution ousted these “revisionist” leaders who were “taking China down the capitalist road” and announced that ideology, not technology, was paramount.
In 1967, the People’s Liberation Army itself purged by this time of its anti-Maoist elements, stepped in and halted the excesses of the Cultural Revolution. It now appears that the Army is very much in command, from the local districts to the provincial committees to the central committee itself.
While the causes of the late-1971 political crisis are not clear, it appears that one factor was an attempt to lessen the political influence of the PLA. At last reports, however, the military influence remains strong, although somewhat weakened at the center by the apparent removal of Lin Piao.
Military governments, by their very nature, are caretaker governments. The real question of what direction China will take will not be answered until the emergence of new leadership after the death of Mao Tse-Tung.
The basic problem, how to deal with the West, still has not been answered satisfactorily. It is this problem that complicates and frustrates Chinese relations with the outside world, and especially relations with the United States. “We recognize that China’s long historical experience weighs heavily on contemporary Chinese foreign policy,” says President Nixon.
There are other factors as well. As the President points out:
“Another factor determining Communist Chinese conduct is the intense and dangerous conflict with the U.S.S.R. It has its roots in the historical development of the vast border areas between these two countries. It is aggravated by contemporary ideological hostility, by power rivalry and nationalist antagonisms.”
The Soviet Union, the “social-imperialists” or “New Tsars” as they are now called by the Chinese, is even more of a threat to Communist China than the United States. The border areas, both in the Maritimes and in Central Asia, have been the scene of armed clashes. In 1969, there were serious rumors of a Soviet “surgical nuclear strike” against China. Aside from this physical threat, the Russians also pose an ideological threat. They are, according to the Chinese, the heretics, the apostates of the true faith of Marxism-Leninism. They have sold out to the West, they are “taking the capitalist road.” Even more serious is the announced Brezhnev Doctrine, applied to Czechoslovakia in 1968, that the Soviet Union reserves to itself the right to limit the sovereignty of socialist states. At the International Communist Conference at Moscow on 7 June 1969, Brezhnev stated that “We think that the course of events also places on the agenda the task of creating a system of collective security in Asia.”
There are signs that this was more than rhetoric, as the Soviet Union begins to increase both political and military activity in South and Southeast Asia.
The Soviet Union is not only an external threat to China, but is also an internal threat. Sponsoring such critics of Mao Tse-tung as Wang Ming (Mao’s predecessor as Chairman of the Chinese Communist Party) Moscow champions the cause of the doctrinaire Marxists, such as Liu Shao-ch’i, who are now deposed from power. This support could be critical in the power struggle likely to emerge after Mao’s death.
Another actor on the stage is India. India was the acknowledged spokesman for the “Third World” during the Cold War confrontation between Communism and the West. As the Communist world began to fragment in the early 1960s, and Communist China saw itself outside the protective sphere of the Soviet Union, it began actively to compete with India for leadership of these “Third World” countries. India was discredited and deposed by the Sino-Indian border war of 1962—a war that made little “strategic” sense in the West at the time. Now, Communist China claims to be the spokesman for the have-not nations of the world, and to be the leader of revolutionary people everywhere.
China’s recent support for the West Pakistan “establishment” in the Indo-Pakistan War—rather than, as would appear logical from Chinese revolutionary rhetoric, the Bangla Desh guerrilla-revolutionaries—is another indication that China does not let ideology blind it to strategic (i.e., anti-Indian) realities.
Note that in their dealings with these “revolutionary people,” the Chinese presaged the Nixon Doctrine by almost four years. In September 1965, Lin Piao announced:
“Revolution or people’s war in any country is the business of the masses in that country and should be carried out primarily by their own efforts; there is no other way.
“. . . foreign aid can only play a supplementary role.”
“In order to make a revolution and to fight a people’s war and be victorious, it is imperative to adhere to the policy of self-reliance . . . If one . . . leans wholly on foreign aid—even though this be aid from socialist countries . . . no victory can be won, or be consolidated even if it is won.”
Yet another actor on the stage is Japan. Japan will play a decisive role in Asia in the future. What will this role be? Will it remain allied with the United States? Will it assume an independent stance? Will it ally itself with Communist China to combine the industrial might of Japan with the natural resources and manpower recources [sic] of China? This is a major question for American foreign policy.
According to Professor Hans Morgenthau, the real thrust of American foreign policy in Asia has been to prevent any one country, be it Japan as in World War II or Communist China today, from becoming predominant in Asia.
It is interesting to note that almost 70 years ago, President Theodore Roosevelt said:
“While . . . Russia’s triumph [in the Russo-Japanese War] would have been a blow to civilization, her destruction as an eastern Asiatic power would also in my opinion be unfortunate. It is best that she be left face to face with Japan so that each may have a moderating action on the other.”
Many scholars see a more stable era emerging in Asia. A. Doak Barnett, of Columbia University, one of America’s leading China scholars, sees a new multipolar balance emerging in Asia—the United States, Japan, Communist China and the Soviet Union—which will tend to stabilize and defuse the area.
As Secretary of State William P. Rogers said on 26 March 1971, “We have moved from a post-World War II situation of two super powers to one where numerous power centers affect East Asia . . . These developments—an emerging, dynamic Asia and a shifting balance of power—demanded a new approach from us.”
We are not alone in noting the shifting balance of power in Asia. It is interesting to note the remarks of President Chiang Kai-Shek, in an interview with Mims Thomason, President of United Press International on 11 March 1971. President Chiang commented that, in the event the Chinese Communists attacked Taiwan, not only would he depend on aid from his allies such as the United States, but also “some others who are not necessarily our friends but are the enemies of the Chinese Communists would take the opportunity to move in on them.”
One fact is certain. The United States alone will not determine the future in Asia. It will be remembered that one answer to the question, “Who lost China? was “China was never ours to lose!” As Barbara Tuchman says in the closing sentences of her masterful book on General Stilwell, “China was a problem for which there was no American solution . . . In the end China went her own way as if the Americans had never come. Can we live in peace? It appears that the prospects are better today than they have been for the past 20 years.
As the ancient Chinese proverb states, “A journey of a thousand miles begins with but a single step.” After over 20 years of hostility, we are taking that step.
__________
Lieutenant Colonel Summers, now on the China desk of the Army General Staff, was the East Asian specialist for the Army Command and General Staff College at Leavenworth, Kansas, for three years. He holds a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in military science, and has served a total of seven years in East Asia.
[1] See H. H. McCracken, “Japan’s View of Korea,” U.S. Naval Proceedings, February 1972, pp. 89-93. See also J. Z. Reday, “Japan’s Taiwan Dilemma,” U.S. Naval Proceedings, March 1972, pp. 76-85.