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Long on fervor and short on firepower, the Navy of the People’s Republic of China may have to "throw away the book” should the Soviet Navy choose to use the sea to torment and humiliate the Peking regime.
THIRD HONORABLE MENTION
A master historian of Communism has written that men in power often intend one thing, do another, and then are understood by history to have brought about a third. President Richard Nixon’s opening toward China and his concurrent try at detente with the Soviet Union were done under the rubric, "an era of negotiation, not confrontation.” Save for the few who see no good from supping with either power, not many have carped at Mr. Nixon’s moves. The failure to trust allies has been criticized, and rightfully so, but little criticism has been heard about liquidation of two decades of sterile China policy or about recognition that in nuclear war the Soviet Union is for practical purposes as much master of our fate as we are of its. For purposes of analysis, any political advantage these two moves have brought Mr. Nixon’s party is irrelevant, welcome though it has been to him.
AM*’/I***#
20 U. S. Naval Institute Proceedings, September 1973
"Negotiation, not confrontation” as a policy was made possible by the Sino-Soviet split. In the early years of the split, the United States denied any split existed; "monolithic Communism” and witticisms about a Slavic Manchukuo were the key words to be repeated. Later, as evidence of the split began to include casualty lists from both sides, one American reaction was to seek no overt advantage from the split. This was thought prudent in that neither disputant would want to mend the split because he felt greater danger from U. S. pressure. Others argued that if one were prepared to consider the proposition that the Cold War could be ended, then the Sino-Soviet split gave the United States many chances to improve its relations with each of the major Communist powers in turn. A more activist reaction urged that the split ought to be treated as an insurance policy against hostile reactions from the Communist powers while victory, or a semblance of it, was sought in Vietnam through wider bombing, invasion of Cambodia and Laos, mining, blockading, etc. Theretofore, these had been thought to involve too high a risk of Chinese or Soviet retaliation. Still others from the activist camp urged upon Mr. Nixon that the split gave a new chance to redeem 1952 Republican pledges about "liberation” and "rollback.” With the exception of that last, some form of all these approaches was tried. None was tried to its limit.
The United States was not completely aloof from the split, yet its attempts to improve its relations had odd limits ("create on both sides so many vested interests . . . that apart from . . . policy considerations there would henceforth be a different attitude . . .” was the way Dr. Henry Kissinger tried to explain the Moscow Declaration of Principles); the China venture has shown results confined largely to ending unilateral U. S. trade, travel, financial, and shipping controls, although some sales of U. S. agricultural products have been made. At the same time the stronger military power thrust at North Vietnam stopped quite a bit short of the "parking lots” or "mud-puddles” that had been threatened by the American activists. Certainly, "victory” was not won.
An alternative explanation of this policy of fitful nonconfrontation is that the United States had begun to realize, from the military and domestic toll of the Vietnam War, that it had been put in the position of the Western democracies in 1939. It could not reasonably hope to defeat either of its totalitarian opponents without the help of the other. The cost in political terms of enlisting either the U.S.S.R. or China would be, like the cost of Stalin’s help in World War II, more than a prudent leader would undertake to pay in advance. If the United States were prepared to go
to all-out nuclear war at the outset against both China and the U.S.S.R., it might ensure that an undamaged totalitarian nation would not be presented with a jackal’s victory. Yet even in its death throes, the U.S.S.R.—and eventually China, also—would be able to strike so hard at the United States that no one could confidently predict what the American government and society would look like in the aftermath. Thus, initially, the Sino-Soviet split presented a chance to remove the United States as a factor in the struggle between the two Eastern giants. If the terms of such removal were agreeable to these, then the United States could have the advantages almost immediately of a more flexible policy in Vietnam and later in East Asia generally (the Nixon Doctrine). In Europe it would mean eventual ratification by a European security conference that the postwar spoils of Eastern Europe were to stay with the victor there, no matter how indigestible some of those spoils had become. This could please Western European allies who had grown weary of defense burdens, and who were turning more toward themselves in pursuit of the Common Market. The ancillary benefits to the United States, of increased trade, some degree of nuclear arms limitation which promised possible, if far-off, budgetary relief and a general lowering of international tensions which might also some day promise lower conventional defense budgets were difficult to cavil against. In the case of China, a certain euphoria in the American public was present almost immediately in reaction to 20 years of vituperation and hostility.
There is no intent here to argue that this alternative explanation is solely what was intended; most men’s and all politicians’ motives include different levels of awareness often extending to the wishful—"If I do thus, then so-and-so might be one of the results; but, if it isn’t, I can always say that wasn’t what I meant at all.” The negotiations of 1938-1939 in Europe were often at levels of awareness no less murky. British and French diplomats maneuvered fecklessly to try to throw Hitler and Stalin against each other. The morality of such a try bothered some, others saw such a war as a disaster for European society no matter how luckily France and England might escape; and others wondered about the eventual price to be paid to whichever dictator was victorious. All these doubts came together in a memorably limp sentence of Lord Halifax, then British Foreign Secretary: "It was desirable not to estrange Russia, but always to keep her in play.” But in the consciousness of many Western diplomats was the hope that somehow the two giants would battle each other, no matter how unrealistic might be the hope that eventual good would come of it for the West. Such a policy had chances for success earlier in
The Red Navy’s Role in the Sino-Soviet Split 21
the 1930s, but it was left until it was too late. The dictators, each in his own right, had become too strong.
In the 1960s, American extrication from a bad balance of power situation was much less difficult. The nuclear deterrent was there and both Chinese and Russians were aware of it. Also, the depth of ideological antipathy between the other two gave American protestations of peaceful intentions a usefully sincere ring to both Peking and Moscow. There was no immediate crisis as with Poland or Czechoslovakia in 1938- 1939. In conventional war, the American homeland was absolutely secure. Finally, though U. S. power was in decline relatively, it had still an awesome offensive potentiality in isolated but important situations where Soviet and Chinese power could not hope to reach. None of these could obscure that the United States was no longer able or willing to confront the two potential enemies in a non-nuclear war—and nuclear war was now unacceptable. Therefore, rapprochement with China and detente with the U.S.S.R., meanwhile convincing both that the United States sided with neither in their own quarrel, were the routes of escape.
So skillful has been the diplomacy of this escape (save for the failure with allies) that in America no serious public attention has been given to what the Soviets and the Chinese are doing with their respites. Our foreign policy attention has been focused on the Vietnam denouement and on the generally improved international atmosphere, all the while accepting gratefully the heady figures of wheat sold, trade promised, and the like. These interest the Chinese and the Russians, too. To them, though, the important fact is the massive military confrontation of possibly 2,000,000 men in the Sino-Soviet borderlands capable of action without further reinforcement or mobilization. Rarely in peacetime military history have such large troop dispositions been made. Rarely in modern history have such major dispositions not led to war. This, then, is what this paper says Mr. Nixon has really accomplished by escaping from the problem of the inability of the United States and its allies to match Soviet and/or Chinese conventional continental power.
No one can pretend that militarization of the Sino- Soviet border came about suddenly in the wake of Mr. Nixon’s new China course. The U.S.S.R. continually has had significant forces in what it considers its Far East (from Lake Baikal); in 1965 when Chinese Foreign Minister Chen Yi spoke at a press conference of the possibility of a Sino-Soviet war, the Soviet Army was believed to have 17 divisions in the Far East, 12 combat-ready. Only three of the 17, however, were near the Chinese border and none was in Mongolia. The Soviets, cautious from history about their long line of
communications, began to shift forces soon after the fall of 1965. In the renewal of the U.S.S.R.-Mongolia alliance in January 1966, provision was made for increased numbers of Soviet troops to be stationed in Mongolia, a fact quickly protested by Peking. A measured build-up of Soviet forces in the Far East continued until, by the first serious military action with the Chinese along the Ussuri River in March 1969, there were 21 divisions, two of which were in Mongolia. This Soviet build-up from 1965-1969 was modest, particularly when compared to an American build-up to over 500,000 troops in Vietnam during these same years.
The Chinese army in 1965 was fairly evenly divided among the then 13 military districts, and its dispositions along the Soviet frontier (about 22 divisions) seemed to have stayed much the same well into 1968- 1969, at which time the army was used throughout China to suppress the Red Guards, in effect becoming the one cement the regime had in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution. Some additional armored and artillery units were moved to the north before 1969.
After the 1969 clashes at Damansky Island in the Ussuri River the build-up was marked on both sides. Other border fights followed. Tass charged the Chinese with 488 border violations between June and August 1969. There was a serious fight near Khabarovsk in July 1969 when the Chinese seemed to have had the worst of it. By the time of Mr. Nixon’s visits to Peking and Moscow, there were probably 33 regular divisions on each side, plus several equivalent divisions of border troops on the Chinese side. The Soviet forces included 10 tank divisions.
Therefore, as said above, to pretend that Washington’s policies precipitated the Sino-Soviet military build-up in the Far East not only would be to defy facts but also to fall into a fallacy in logic.
The political content of differences between the Soviets and the Chinese People’s Republic is immense. It includes a territorial dispute over what may be as much as 900,000 square miles of Soviet territory. The origins of this dispute are in "unequal treaties” between Manchu China and Tsarist Russia, the youngest of which is more than a century old. More serious is the ideological dispute. The Soviets see it as being over the role of the Communist Party in a socialist state (the essential ground for the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1968). The primacy of the party was clearly denied in China during the Cultural Revolution. The Chinese hold that the question is the primacy of Maoism in the world revolution. The details of these rival theologies are manifold and often esoteric; the virulence with which they are supported is manifest. Over both the national and ideological arguments
22 U. S. Naval Institute Proceedings, September 1973
hangs nuclear capability, assured from the Soviet side, nascent on the Chinese, and the temptations it gives for pre-emptive strike or for blackmail.
When American policy is seen against this background, the historian’s observation on the difference between intent and accomplishment becomes intelligible. Once the Chinese were protected from the American threat they had perceived so long and with some reason, and once the Soviets saw that their European flank could be protected diplomatically with little risk to client states, and that the United States could accept through SALT a nuclear stand-off at a really unspecified level, both Communist states could set themselves for the contest neither could afford to lose if its theology were to survive. It is not clear that the Chinese appreciate fully the way Communist theology has been often the servant of Russian national interests or the survival of the bureaucratic party of the U.S.S.R. For the Chinese, come lately and perhaps imperfectly to an understanding of the crimes modern men will do in the name of the nation-state, this misperception may hurt. It was, after all, a fatuous theological belief in the Central Kingdom that helped allow 19th century China to fall prey to Europeans who, whatever their professed belief in a theology, had a very clear-eyed view of what they wanted when push came to shove.
But, for the present, the fact is that these two nations face each other over a 5,000-mile border with over a million Soviet troops on one side—Premier Chou En-lai’s estimate; American experts’ estimate is now 49 divisions compared to 33 in 1971 and 15 in 1961 —facing at least a half million Chinese troops in the military regions bordering the Soviet Union and Mongolia. Some estimates of the total number of troops involved reach 2,000,000.
The Soviets have come to stay. Barracks, supply depots, training grounds, etc., have been built for the huge army. The cost to the Soviet economy must have been serious. More serious to the Soviet planners must have been the threat of Chinese rockets zeroed in on the tenuous lines and junctions of the Trans-Siberian Railroad. There may indeed be more Soviet fire power facing the Chinese than facing NATO. If the Far Eastern army is to pursue the Soviet case, it must be prepared to do so on its own without the promise of immediate help from European Russia. The Chinese army is not so handicapped. Though clearly inferior to the Red Army in offensive power, its doctrine, unlike the Red Army’s, doesn’t call for the offensive. The Chinese, confident in manpower and a secure home base, count on time and distance to tell against the Russians.
The spectacle of these two armies arrayed against each other in the heart of continental Asia recalls the language an American magazine used to describe the
clash of mass armies and fanatic ideologies on the Western frontier of the Soviet Union in June 1941:
"Like two vast prehistoric monsters lifting themselves out of the swamp, half blind and savage, the two great totalitarian powers of the world now tore at each other’s throats.”
The argument now must turn to the third stage. How may history read the result of this Far Eastern confrontation of mass armies?
Certainly much will depend on the life spans of Chairman Mao Tse-tung and Premier Chou. Given the instability of China in recent years, their deaths or removals from power in anything close to quick succession could unbalance any Far Eastern power equation. Yet it is well to remember that State interests often survive leaders’ deaths—Russia after Stalin, France after De Gaulle both suggest a tempered conclusion about the catalyctic effect of a leader’s death. Armies stay in place, ideologies and national interests change slowly.
Much of the future may depend also on the willingness of the two giants to accept indefinitely the wounds of border fights. Both Chinese and Russian histories have precedent for protracted and indecisive fighting on their marches. In modern times, the Soviet-Japanese battles of the late 1930s along the Manchurian and Mongolian borders (the first of which were also over possession of riverine islands, that time in the Amur) were examples of actions up to corps level that did not lead to all-out war. Today, battles of such scope carry a new danger in the potential for nuclear reaction. At what point in border war (skirmishing is too light and too trite a term) does someone pull the nuclear trigger? Chinese polemicists were contemptuous of Khrushchev’s correct observation some years ago about paper tigers having nuclear teeth; have the successes at Lop Nor shown the Chinese the truth about nuclear war? On the Soviet side, can one assume that those who whispered to selected Westerners in 1969 that a surgical nuclear strike against China was being contemplated now have been brought back from that particular brink by their masters’ growing sophistication about what really is involved in nuclear war?
Finally, restraint is possible because for the moment the Soviets are reasonably secure in defense both militarily and politically (they hold all the disputed territory). The Chinese have a strong factor for restraint in their need to have the army available for countrywide duty and not concentrated on a frontier they had never really counted on having to defend against a "fraternal Socialist state.”
Today, the situation may well be that the two face each other over that long frontier, neither one confident of where trial tests might lead. But both are
now fairly sure that in most cases, if not all, American military power is not a direct threat to either.
At such a point the problem of how to win advantages becomes important. Advantages in the context of this dispute may often be a semantic victory (the adoption of the phrase "social imperialism” by an obscure Communist apparatus in Africa would be greeted with joy in Peking, for example); any recondite victory in Marxist-Leninist philosophy would be welcomed by either side; an equally "real” victory to either might be a switch in allegiance by a Communist Party in Latin America; even a victory in terms of a U.N. vote on a matter involving the two ideologists would not be despised. More importantly, though, a victory would be a concrete demonstration of the foe’s military incompetence or impotence, much as the Chinese used the Soviet backdown in Cuba in 1962 as evidence to other Communist parties that the Soviets were not capable of protecting their own interests, much less those of the world revolution. In this last case, Soviet seapower may be a real weapon. The use of this weapon may be the third stage of the historian’s progression.
China’s failure as empire or republic to develop modern seapower is one of history’s mysteries. This failure is a leading clue to the downfall of Manchu China and to the confused state of China from the 1911 revolution until the Communists completed their triumph in 1950. Although some progress has been made toward a naval force by the People’s Republic (including a submarine with nuclear missile tubes) China still does not possess seapower worthy of the name.
The Russians have faced Chinese over land borders since the first treaty between the two at Nerchinsk in
The Red Navy’s Role in the Sino-Soviet Split 23
A Russian cruiser steaming through the South China Sea is a bitter reminder to Peking of the number of gambits open to Soviet seapower, not the least of which are port visits to Japan and Taiwan, or routine "patrolling” of the Taiwan Straits by Soviet warships.
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1689, the first treaty that China made with a European nation. Beginning in mid-19th century, Russia tried to get the same treaty port privileges which the British, American, and other sea powers were winning from China. The Chinese, however, wanted to make a distinction between Russia as a land power and the others as sea powers. The distinction broke down after the Russians were free of the Crimean War, but they were never able to muster the seapower necessary to cow the Chinese into granting them the same rights as the maritime states.
However, the Russians did use seapower against the Chinese in much the same way as the West did. By the treaty of 1858, the Russians won trade and navigation rights on the Sungari comparable to what the British, American, and others had less formally won on the Yangtze and West Rivers. Gunboat diplomacy at seaports was also practiced; by the time of the Sino- Japanese war in 1894, an American missionary, presumably unconscious of the irony wrote home:
"It is a time of uncertainty, anxiety, danger in some localities and we can only fall back on our sure Refuge—'the Lord reigneth; in this is your trust.’ We have three gunboats now—British, French and German and may have more—U. S. and Russian.”
After the Sino-Japanese war, the Russians reinforced their bribes of the Chinese government for a lease on the Liaotung Peninsula by sending a cruiser into a Chinese port at the critical moment of the negotiations. Even though the Soviets renounced their extraterritorial rights and concessions after the 1917 revolution, the Soviets employed gunboats against the Chinese Nationalist on the Sungari in 1929 when the Liebknecht, Lenin and other revolutionary-named river craft of the Soviet Far Eastern fleet attacked Chinese gunboats during the dispute over the Chinese Eastern Railway; several Chinese gunboats were sunk, including the Lichieh which had been an ex-German vessel (river gunboats in China had careers as checkered as journeymen baseball players—today, the People’s Republic Navy includes a gunboat, the ex-USS Wake, ex-USS Guam, ex-IJN Tartara, ex-Chinese Nationalist Tai Yuan). In 1969, Soviet propaganda toward China made
24 U. S. Naval Institute Proceedings, September 1973
pointed note of the 40th anniversary of this Chinese defeat. Thus, though Russia and China are two land rivals, there is a history of successful Russian use of naval power against China. Today, with the second largest navy in the world, the U.S.S.R. is capable of tormenting the Chinese from the sea as a fairly low risk way of prosecuting the Sino-Soviet split.
How can the Soviets do this? The days are over for bombarding Taku ports, landing troops at Foochow, or patrolling China’s rivers. But, open to the Soviet Navy is a variety of gambits against which China has little recourse. First are port visits. Hong Kong is probably not open to the Soviet Navy, particularly after Foreign Secretary Sir Alec Douglas-Home’s recent talks with the Chinese leadership. But Japan is open, and more importantly, Taiwan might be. Nothing could dramatize more strongly China’s impotence in the Taiwan situation than a port call at Keelung by the Soviet Navy. Given some of the rumors that came out of Soviet journalist Victor Louis’ visit to Taiwan in 1972, one cannot dismiss out of hand the possibility that the Chinese Nationalist leadership might be receptive to this sort of psychological harassment of the Peking regime.
One other minor but telling annoyance might be Soviet naval "patrolling” of the Taiwan Straits. This requires no one’s permission. It would underline the end of the U. S. Navy’s "patrol” in 1969 (ostensibly for economy reasons). The Soviets have used this type of symbolic patrolling before. A Soviet ship was stationed off Conakry to prevent a second "invasion attempt” by alleged Portuguese/C.I.A. mercenaries. A Soviet "guard ship” is often stationed off the Malmo entrance to the Baltic. A similar ship off Taku Bar or Shanghai would annoy the Chinese out of all proportion to the real importance of such a deployment.
The Soviets have the ability to conduct naval exercises off the China coast. At one time the Soviets had scheduled firing exercises off the Japanese island of Shikoku; these were cancelled, but the message they were to transmit was read loud and clear by the Japanese. The Chinese would be even quicker to resent such maneuvers.
Obviously, there are a whole range of more direct and more dangerous harassments which the Soviets can use against the Chinese at sea. China’s seaborne foreign trade is neither extensive nor vital to China now, but it can be expected to grow. The Chinese have a small merchant marine, and they charter a number of foreign ships. The Soviets have the capability of playing "chicken” with these. More importantly, there is a continuous trade in Japanese ships; over 1,500 Japanese vessels touched at Chinese ports in 1971. If, as expected,
China’s role in world trade increases, it will probably be reflected in increased Japanese trade. No one can predict what Japanese reaction would be to Soviet naval interference in the China trade. China’s fishing fleet is vulnerable.
The Soviets have, of course, other capabilities by sea, including overt acts of violence. Presumably these would be used only in crisis situations. One should not overlook the Soviet need for some sort of demonstration of naval power in East Asia to counterbalance the clear impression of powerlessness that the world gained from the Red Navy’s failure to react to the mining of Haiphong.
What of the Chinese reaction to this use of Soviet naval power? Historically, the Chinese have relied on a passive defense against foreign seapower. At one time in the Ming dynasty, Peking ordered the coastal areas cleared of all inhabitants rather than give Japanese and Taiwanese pirates raiding targets. It is difficult to imagine the present Chinese government accepting Soviet naval harassment supinely; but, on the other hand, the relative naval power of the two rivals is such that Chinese inferiority is marked. Airpower redresses the balance somewhat, but the Soviet command of the initiative would make the Chinese task difficult.
The U. S. Navy would also be faced with a problem. As long as American-flag vessels were not harassed, there would be little basis for intervention. The So- viet-U. S. agreement on incidents at sea would cover the ship-to-ship relations of the two navies. But it would be hard to disguise the fact that the U. S. Navy would suffer a psychological blow in having to watch the Soviet Navy carry out an active policy in East Asian waters. In 1949-1950, when the Chinese Nationalist Navy tried to close the port of Communist-held Shanghai, the U. S. Navy was passive, even when American flag vessels were fired upon and holed by the Nationalist navy. The situation envisioned in a Soviet-Chinese maritime incident is not strictly analogous to the 1949-1950 Shanghai problem, but there are elements of similarity.
Thus, one returns to the historian’s sequence. An active Soviet naval policy in East Asian waters against the Chinese Communists could well be the unexpected last stage of a progression that began with a ping-pong match.
Mr. Holloway was a Naval Reserve Officer in World War II, taking par1 in the Normandy and Okinawa operations. He entered the Foreign Service in 1947. Besides serving in the Department of State, he has been assigned to Rangoon, Shanghai, Bremen, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Fukuoka, and Stock' holm. Academic assignments have been to the University of Michigan, Japanese language school at Tokyo and Harvard University. Since September 1970, he has been Consul General at Osaka-Kobe.