New Thinking About China

FOR more than a decade we have avoided looking at our China problem, hoping it would go away. But it is still there, waiting to be faced. To understand it, we need historical perspective on China, on ourselves, and on our relations.

In the dozen years since McCarthy tried to turn the lights out, academic study of China has gone ahead, but the State Department has groped along without the help of those purged Foreign Service officers whose firsthand experience in China would have provided useful insight. New talent is emerging, but it is still junior and never knew Peking.

The new American look at China, now under way seventeen years after the Communist takeover, begins with several facts. Contrary to John Foster Dulles’ official hopes of 1959, Chairman Mao’s revolution will not soon pass away, even though Mao will. We are preparing to live with it, as we now live with the Soviet revolution. Our cold-war policy of “containment and isolation” of China is shifting, in Professor A. Doak Barnett’s phrase, to one of “containment but not isolation,” toward a better balance.

Yet it takes two to de-isolate. Peking’s price for an end of fighting in Asia seems likely to be exorbitant; contact will come only slowly and with pain: and a return of anything like SinoAmerican “friendship” seems quite out of the question.

Now that the blinders are off and our China policy is back under public scrutiny, we see new actors in a new confrontation. Peking is no longer part of Moscow’s monolith. Nuclear-armed China is becoming a great power, a maker or destroyer of world stability. The Chinese, while verbally bellicose and threatening the world with revolutionary take-over, have in fact kept almost all their troops at home, while the generous Americans, seeking international stability, have sent large forces to fight close to China in Vietnam. We need to apply fresh perspective to both sides.

Down to the nineteenth century, China was its own world, an enormous, ancient, isolated, unified, and self-sufficient empire stretching from the latitude of Hudson Bay to Cuba, or from the Baltic Sea to the Sahara Desert. It had a great deal of domestic commerce to meet its needs, but was cut off from West Asia by the high mountains and deserts of Central Asia and thus remained isolated throughout most of its history. So it preserved a continuity of development in the same area over some three or four thousand years, and had a strong tendency to look inward; China was the center of the known world and of civilization. Non-Chinese were peripheral and inferior. China was superior to all foreign regions.

The Chinese did not believe in the equality of all men, which was obviously untrue. They believed in selecting an elite of talent, training these men in the classical orthodoxy, and promoting them as officials to keep the populace under control and maintain the system. We need not labor the point that China today still has a ruling class of people selected for their abilities, who propagate a true teaching under a sage ruler and strive to keep the various social classes in order.

China’s message for mankind was summed up in a great Confucian political fiction, the myth of rule by virtue. According to this, the right conduct of a superior man, acting according to the correct principles, set an example which moved others and commanded their respect and allegiance. In particular, the emperor’s right conduct, the most perfect example among mankind, was thought to exert an influence over all beholders. His virtuous conduct commanded their loyalty, provided that they also understood the correct principles of conduct as laid down in the classics. Persons too uneducated to be so moved could, of course, be dealt with by rewards and punishments.

This national myth of rule by virtue fills the Chinese historical record. It corresponded in political life, I suppose, to the Western concept of the supremacy of law and the natural rights of the individual and his civil liberties under law, including the idea of self-determination for nations.

In their foreign relations the Chinese rulers down to 1912 extended their domestic doctrines abroad and applied the national myth of rule by virtue across their frontiers. Foreign rulers could have contact with the Peking monarch only by sending tribute to him and having their envoys perform the three kneelings and nine prostrations of the kowtow ritual. This elaborate and prolonged ceremony was absolutely insisted upon by the court to preserve the image of China’s superiority and show the foreigner his proper place in the world hierarchy.

When China was weak, it could still protect the fiction of supremacy by maintaining the rituals and the written records. For example, three thousand Mongol warriors might ride down to Peking on a so-called “annual tribute mission,” being royally entertained and given expensive gifts at great cost to the government, having as much fun as at a Shriners’ convention, and letting the Chinese court call it “tribute just to keep its fictions intact. In short, the tribute system was sometimes maintained by giving gifts.

The long record of Chinese foreign relations shows the importance attached to the political myths of China’s superiority and rule by virtue. Maintaining this ideological orthodoxy in written form helped the emperor keep power in fact, because the recorded “facts” always sustained the theory. It was like the advertisement for paint — “Save the surface [or the record] and you save all.”

The emperors were constantly spelling out the true doctrines, having them read in the Confucian temples and studied by all scholars. Heterodoxy and deviation could not be permitted, or if they did exist, could not be acknowledged to exist. The emperor’s asserted supremacy over all mankind was the foundation of state power. Consequently, the monarchy’s gradual failure and eventual extinction in 1912 were an epochal calamity.

Even when the foreigners became more powerful, the myth of China’s superiority had to be solemnly recorded and preserved in ritual. This stress on orthodoxy strikes one today, when Peking is continuing its nationwide indoctrination in Chairman Mao’s true teachings. Orthodoxy seems more necessary than ever to keep in order the world’s most numerous citizenry, more people than have ever before been governed by a single regime.

THE disaster that hit China in the nineteenth century is one of the most comprehensive any people has ever experienced. The ancient tradition of China’s superiority, plus this modern phase of disaster, undoubtedly produced one first-class case of frustration. It could not seem right that a civilization once at the top should be brought so low. The nineteenth-century disaster began with a great population increase during the peaceful eighteenth century, a consequent weakening of administrative efficiency, and maybe some popular demoralization, evident in the beginning of opium smoking. In the Opium War of 1840 the Chinese were fighting against the opium trade, conducted by both foreigners and Chinese, while the British were fighting, in the broad sense, against the tribute system, demanding that China drop its claim to superiority and join the modern international trading world, the same thing we are waiting for today more than a century later.

The Opium War and the “unequal treaties" of the 1840s gave our merchants and missionaries a privileged status as agents of Westernization in the Chinese treaty ports. Throughout the following century, Western influence gradually disintegrated the old Chinese civilization. As the disaster gained momentum, Western gunboats proved that China had to acquire modern arms and scientific technology, and then had to have Western industries, for which it was necessary to have Western learning, and eventually Western institutions and even a Western type of government. The omnipotent monarchy was humbled. The prestige of the Confucian classics evaporated. The Confucian type of family structure began to crack. China’s superiority vanished, even culturally.

The generation of Chinese that lived through this long-continued upheaval, which happened in our grandfathers’ time, experienced a deepening crisis. The sacred values of proper conduct and social order proved useless. The ancient faith in China’s superiority as a civilization was slowly strangled. The privileged foreigners came in everywhere and gradually stirred up a Chinese nationalism.

So complete was the disaster that in the twentieth century a new order has had to be built from the ground up. Western doctrines of all kinds were tried out between the 1890s and the 1930s. The thing that proved effective was the Leninist type of party dictatorship, an elite recruited under discipline according to a new orthodoxy, organized something like an old Chinese secret society, united in the effort to seize power and re-create a strong state. This nationalistic aim, represented first by the Kuomintang, overrode every other consideration. The kind of Western individualism propagated by our missionaries had little chance in the midst of the political struggle to rebuild a strong state, and even less chance alter Japanese aggression began in 1931.

In their retrospective humiliation and sense of grievance over the enormous disaster of the nineteenth century, modern Chinese have generally felt that their country was victimized. So it was -by fate. Circumstance has made China the worst accident case in history.

But the Chinese view of history for reasons mentioned above has always been very personal, seeing rulers rise or fall by their good or bad conduct. To attribute China’s modern fate to a historical abstraction like “cultural homeostasis" (that is, China had developed so much self-equilibrating stability that it did not respond quickly to the Western threat) is not emotionally satisfying to Chinese patriots. It is like asking a man run over by a truck to blame it on a congested traffic pattern. He will say, No, it was a truck. Consequently, Chinese of all camps have united in denouncing the obvious aggressions of the foreign powers. Marxism-Leninism caught on in the 1920s, even though the proletariat was miniscule and class struggle minimal, by offering its deviltheory to explain China’s modern foreign relations: “Capitalist imperialism" from abroad combined with “feudal reaction” at home to attack, betray, and exploit the Chinese people and distort their otherwise normal development toward “capitalism” and “socialism.” Thus a great Communist myth of imperialist victimization has become the new national myth of a revived central power at Peking.

Those who see Communist ideology as an allconquering virus may prefer to discount history and omit it from their diagnosis. But to understand China without history, to divorce this most historical-minded of all cultures from its past, is quite impossible. The Chinese Communists themselves use history to “prove” their anti-imperialist doctrine. Communist ideology and China’s historical record thus overlap.

One can easily see the utility of having “American imperialism” (as distinct from the American “people,” who are somehow “exploited” by Wall Street) as China’s national enemy: our eternal menace justifies Peking’s draconian rule. One wonders if the Chinese Communist Party could survive without us; our role as enemy seems essential to Chairman Mao’s morality play. Yet we must recognize there is more to it than theory and propaganda. Lenin’s picture of economic imperialism has been broadened by Mao to include all foreign contact. Even missionary good works are now seen to have been “cultural imperialism.”The latent feeling is one of resentment against the whole great fact of China’s having fallen behind the modern outside world.

IF WE now turn to look at ourselves, we can see where American self-esteem and resentment come into play, for we are generally conscious of having long befriended China and recently been kicked in the teeth for it. We can only dimly imagine how the proud Chinese elite have suffered from being on the receiving end of modernization.

Being on the giving end of modernization ourselves. in the privileged status thrust upon us by the treaty system, most of us enjoyed our contact with China. We could be upper-class foreigners commanding servants and riding in rickshaws while still remaining egalitarian grass-roots democrats tn our own conscience. The Chinese were polite, and countless Americans made warm friends among them. The American people built up a genuine, though sometimes patronizing, fondness for “China.” Unfortunately, this now turns out to have been an unrealistic and naive attitude. The Americans were conscious of their own good intentions and less conscious of the humiliation that their superior circumstances often inflicted upon their Chinese friends.

When Britain and others fought their colonial wars, the Americans enjoyed the fruits of aggression without the moral responsibility. By 1900 the British, the French, and the Japanese had fought wars with China; the Russians had seized territory; and all of them, as well as the Germans, had seized special privileges in spheres of influence.

The Americans had done none of these things and came up instead with the open-door doctrine, which soon expanded to include not only the open door for trade but also the idea of China’s integrity as a nation. Thus we Americans could pride ourselves on championing China’s modernization and self-determination. We considered ourselves above the nasty imperialism and power politics of the Europeans. We developed a self-image of moral superiority. The open door and benevolence toward Chinese nationalism became the basis of our Far Eastern policy until war with Japan brought us up against the realities of power politics. Then we began to realize, for almost the first time, that the power structure of East Asian politics had been held together by the British Navy in the nineteenth century, and by the British and Japanese navies under the Anglo-Japanese Alliance from 1902 to 1922.

Today we find ourselves in an onerous situation trying to maintain the power balance in East Asia. Vietnam is reminiscent in some ways of the colonial wars of the nineteenth century, a type of situation that we generally succeeded in avoiding in that era. I do not contend that we today are simply nineteenth-century imperialists come back to life, but I don’t believe we can escape our historical heritage entirely, any more than Mao can. We have been part and parcel of the long-term Western approach to Asia and ought to see ourselves in that perspective. The Western powers have played major roles in East and Southeast Asia for four hundred years even if we have not. The West has made its contribution while also precipitating the nationalist revolutions. American merchants and missionaries joined in making this Western contribution. We cannot now condemn and disown the old British Empire, for instance, just because we let the British fight the dirty colonial wars while we got the benefits. We were and are involved in East Asian power politics at least as much as in those of Europe. But Vietnam today gives us a more severe crisis of moral conscience partly because during most of our history we have felt morally superior to the imperialist powers.

Stuck in a dirty war today, we would do well to lower our self-esteem, not be so proud, acknowledge our Western inheritance of both good and evil, and see ourselves as hardly more noble and not much smarter than the British and french in their day. We cannot take East Asia or ourselves out of power politics.

Once we see ourselves as an integral part, and now the major representative, of the Western world that was the nineteenth-century agent of traditional China’s downfall, perhaps we can reduce our own resentment at Mao’s resentment.

GIvEN these cognate Sino-American resentments on either side — and each has a long list of grievances, too long even to suggest here — what can we expect in our future relations? First, we can be sure that a resumption of American generosity to China will not cure but only worsen our mutual enmity. “Let us recognize them and get it over with,” as some put it, is not a psychologically feasible approach. Neither is giving them grain, like the famine relief of old, for it puts China back on the short end of things, receiving our beneficence. Instead, we should take the long way around and expect our own relations with China to improve only after Sino—third-party relations have done so. We should lower the level of polemics if we can, but not anticipate a direct reconciliation.

This suggests, in the second place, that we can hardly take the lead, but instead should acquiesce in the effort to get Peking to participate in the international order rather than try to subvert and destroy it. This is primarily a psychological problem for the international community to deal with. Therapy for Peking’s present almost paranoid state of mind must follow the usual lines of therapy: it must lead the rulers of China gradually into different channels of experience until by degrees they reshape their picture of the world and their place in it. This program should get Peking into a multitude of activities abroad. China should be included in all international conferences, as on disarmament, and in international associations, both professional and functional; in international sports, not just ping-pong; and in exchange of news, technology, persons, and trade with everyone, including ourselves, except for strategic goods. One thinks naturally of the UN agencies and participation in the Security Council as well as the Assembly. Yet all this can come only step by step, with altercation all along the way — not an easy process but at least a political one, more constructive than warfare.

The remolding of Chairman Mao, the greatest remolder of others in history, is not something outsiders can attempt. But he and his colleagues are great believers in tactical shifts to meet changing circumstances. Their militant ideals may remain out of reach, but changed tactics can lead them into that great coolant of expansionism: coexistence.

In accepting the international world as an alternative to trying to subvert it, Chinese behavior can meet China’s needs. One of these is the craving for greater prestige in the world to redress the balance of the last century’s humiliations. For China to be in the center of the world’s councils seems to any Chinese patriot only right and proper. The Peking government also needs prestige to maintain itself domestically. In addition, like all developing countries, China needs certain kinds of aid through exchanges of technology, of persons, and of goods.

The international community can also expect Peking to respond sooner or later to the opportunity to manipulate foreigners against one another. This traditional way of dealing with outsiders can be attempted in any conclave like the United Nations. But others also play the game; in fact, it is the essence of diplomacy. As all these motives come into play, Peking will become more involved in bilateral relationships and be influenced by others whose desire is for peace rather than violence. In the end, after much travail, all this may make coexistence more attractive. Yet in the meantime, Peking’s subversive efforts to foment “people’s wars of liberation” may be expected to continue and will have to be countered,

Thus a new American attitude can catalyze rather than obstruct the stabilizing of Peking’s relations with the international world. It is time to shift from trying to isolate Peking, which only worsens our problem, to a less exposed position where we can acquiesce in the growth of contact between Peking and other countries and let them suffer the impact of Peking’s abrasiveness.

Similarly, concerning Taiwan, we cannot demand that our sovereign ally Chiang Kai-shek pension off his aging Nationalist government echelons and build up the elected Taiwan provincial government to run the island, thus acknowledging defeat in China’s civil war. Such steps must be left for his successors. But meantime, the Seventh Fleet can continue to quarantine the Formosa Straits, and we can advocate “selfdetermination” though we cannot enforce it. In the end we shall have to let Taipei and Peking work out their respective UN relationships. We cannot do it for them.

But this helping to open the door for China’s participation in the world scene is only one part of an American policy. The other part is to hold the line, for the Chinese are no more amenable to pure sweetness and light than other revolutionaries. Encouraging them to participate in the UN and other parts of the growing international order has to be combined with a cognate attitude of firmness backed by force. Military containment on the Korean border, in the Formosa Straits, and somehow in Vietnam cannot soon be abandoned.

Indeed, the new effort at nonmilitary contact with Peking, here advocated, is feasible in American policy precisely because we are being so active militarily in Vietnam. Contact and negotiation, far from being an either-or alternative to fighting, are essential to balance our continued military presence and keep it within a larger, political framework. If military containment not to trigger major war, it must be explicitly and credibly limited, not subject to open-ended escalation. “Containment” should aim simply contain, not to terrify, confuse, or, least of provoke. Recognition of military strength on both sides, and also its limitations on both sides, is an inducement to stabilizing relations — particularly if it is recognized that China is a land animal, unconquerable at home, while the United States is a sea-and-air animal, able to frustrate the Maoist type of revolutionary take-over abroad but not to take over itself.

Containment alone is a dead-end street, but a policy of contact works in both directions. Both sides give and both get. Who can doubt that our own militancy was defused, from the level of unreasoning fear down to the level of political competition, when Nikita Khrushchev became American TV personality? What might not Chou En-iai’s black eyebrows accomplish? The Chinese instinct for diplomacy will soon find that in the United States there is some sort of audience responsive to every view, but our major sentiments of goodwill respond less to dogma and bombast than to reasoned self-interest and give-and-take. Thus a program of contact is a two-way street.

The first step is the hardest, for it must be taken in our own thinking — to abandon both the fear of Chinese military menace and the hope of Chinese friendliness. China will not fight us unless we get too close to its frontiers and ask for trouble. The Chinese will not respond to friendly overtures except to repeat “Get out of Taiwan,” which our own principles we will not do unless genuinely asked by the people there. Peking will continue to damn us for crimes we did not commit and evil aims we do not have.

In short, my reading of history is that Peking’s rulers now shout aggressively out of manifold frustrations, that isolation intensifies their ailment and makes it self-perpetuating, and that international contact with China on many fronts can open a less warlike chapter in its foreign relations. But we are dealing with revolutionists who face enormous domestic difficulties, labor under serious emotional problems themselves, and have warped understanding of the outside world. In facing reality, to avoid disaster we must understand their dilemma as well as ours.

We should be sanguine about the probable outcome. For the short term, the results will seem discouraging, and hard on our patience. But over the long haul, we have no other course.