For without friends no one would wish to live, though he had all other goods. . . . Friendship seems also to hold states together, and lawgivers care more for it than for justice; for unanimity seems to be something like friendship, and this they aim at most of all. . . .

. . . if there is a great interval in respect of virtue or vice or wealth or anything else between the parties, then they are no longer friends, and they do not even expect to be so.

—Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (1155^a, 1158^b).

In these next years, a grave political and moral problem for the United States, in its relations with other countries, will be the absence of an equal—an equal in wealth, military power, and worldwide commitment.¹

By these measures, China today is a small country. Her people still live close by hunger. Even in East Asia alone, China does not have anything like the relative military capacity which was possessed, a quarter century ago, by imperial Japan. Culturally and morally, she seems also—especially in recent months—to be again turning inward. And, at the beginning of 1967, China is politically isolated. No government accords her first friendship, except the government of primitive Albania. No foreign Communist party (as distinguished from a splinter group) stands firm to the Maoist allegiance, except the tiny party of New Zealand. What a falling off this is from the high expectations with which the Communist leadership, on October 1, 1949, proclaimed the People’s Republic of China!

The USSR of 1967, while of greatly higher material capability than China, is still too remotely second to be named equal to the U.S. except by diplomatic amenity. Fifty years after the October Revolution, the Soviet Union (with nearly one-fifth more people than the United States) will have an aggregate national product only something like half the American. Each can work great nuclear military destruction—enough to make the initiation of total war a self-destroying act. But, in capacity for limited application of force, elsewhere than in the central Eurasian land mass, the USSR does not begin to approach the U.S. Moreover, wealth and force aside, it was once thought that the USSR might draw strength from the attraction of its model of a Communist society. But, in these latter years, the less advanced peoples have shown great aptitude for establishing their own unaffiliated authoritarianisms. And, among more advanced nations, the Leninist model of a socialism without guaranteed personal liberties and without competitive political parties is increasingly rejected, as a form of government unworthy of civilized men.

Looking back to 1945, and with the wisdom of retrospect, it seems clear that only one region of the world possessed most of the material and cultural foundations to become an equal to the U.S. This was Western Europe. But Western Europe has not made itself such an equal. Instead, it has combined major reliance on the U.S. for defense with steadily widening abstention from worldwide responsibilities. Today, a voice from Paris calls out the meretricious slogan of “Europe from the Atlantic to the Urals” and therewith sponsors a Europe of the political structure of the 19th century. And, even after de Gaulle has passed away, it seems unlikely that Western European association will soon develop beyond some further commercial affiliations. In the best case, this fragmented and abstentionist little Europe will not be an equal for a world power.

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A distinguished British scholar (and one who knows the United States well) found it appropriate, some years ago, to characterize dominant American outlooks on world affairs as affected by “the illusion of American omnipotence.” It is a catchy phrase. I doubt, however, that the phrase conveys a correct description. I suspect that few Americans have held the conviction of American omnipotence for any considerable period during the past thirty years. Surely no such idea has ever been dominant in that place of mythical horrors—the Pentagon—at any time since the building was put up. (It was Mr. Bertrand Russell, not Lieutenant General Puffedhead, who in 1948 urged that the United States employ the Western nuclear monopoly to take over the government of the earth.) True, in popular American thinking, the evil in the world is sometimes greatly simplified and captiously personalized. Let only Hitler or Ho Chi Minh be put down, and all will be well! But, precisely in the popular mind, this faith in the simple uprooting of evil is quickly displaced by a more profoundly-held conviction of the impenetrability and unmalleability of all foreign situations. And, in this more deep-seated conviction—“We do not know what makes these foreign people tick; we cannot seriously influence them”—American popular opinion is largely at one with the Congress and frequently at one with the State Department and the White House.

Confident of its power to destroy, dubious of its ability to construct, Washington has entered few—if any—recent foreign involvements in a conviction of omnipotence. In Vietnam, more than a decade of efforts to limit responsibilities preceded the 1965 decision for heavy commitment. Characteristically, during the Eisenhower administration, the U.S. government urged Saigon to carry out land reform but refused to finance the program, fearing too much responsibility in Vietnamese socio-political affairs—though Washington was quite aware that closer American involvement might yield a larger and better performance. Today, it is true, in Vietnam, such reticence is quite gone. On December 4, 1966, Ambassador Lodge stated that pacification would require “. . . city and village governments that can support the police function, and you won’t get this until we’ve rebuilt the whole political, social, and economic structure in this country.” It requires either mindless arrogance or settled desperation for “we” to determine to rebuild “the whole political, social, and economic structure” of any country—including one’s own. (Deprived of every traditional cement, such a total rebuilder is likely to wind up with no material but human sand, and only too probably he will then be reduced to trying to glue the sand together by force.) The Vietnam case is one of desperation.

Washington is full of sad stories of the Vietnam “adviser” who—outraged by seeing an important job badly done—became a doer himself and won abiding ill-will for his pains. All such advisers have read the manual which says that one must work through the local leadership. But what if the native elite is no good—morally indifferent, intellectually inadequate, personally lazy? There will always be advisers who will then decide, against every tired wisdom, that it is not right to turn one’s back and go away. These fanatic hearts will maneuver, with varying skill and fortune, to “intervene.” They will be the despair of their clan—and much of its salt.

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II

One of our most valuable books on the China of the 1940’s bears the strained title America’s Failure in China.² After China’s disasters of 1959-61, many popular writers shifted the attribution: it became Communism’s failure in China. Both views put triviality where there is tragedy. It is mankind which has failed in China. And no one today knows the way out.

I recall again C. P. Snow—not in pointless personal criticism but because he has so perfectly spoken the mind of the pretendedly-scientific optimism which fancies it knows the straight way to Asian development. “But for the task of totally industrializing a major country, as in China today,” Snow wrote in the summer of 1959, “it only takes will to train enough scientists and engineers and technicians—will, and a few years time.” In 1958, the Chinese leadership also held to the sufficiency of “will,” advanced training, and “a few years time.” Then it was their official doctrine that China’s industry would equal Britain’s in 1967. After 1959, however, when their “Great Leap Forward” had ended in a great fall, the same Maoist leadership found it necessary to tell its people quite other things. That, in China, enough food to sustain life was not yet assured. That agriculture must be put first, though a modern agriculture might still be fifty years away. That an advanced industry, the basis for full Communism, might be a century off. In human affairs, who says maybe fifty years, says he does not know when; who says perhaps a century, says perhaps never.

And the Chinese leadership now tells its people another fundamental thing—a thing not to the credit of any of the sons of man. No country helps China. True, in the 1950’s, the USSR made loans to China, including loans for military supplies, totaling perhaps $1,325 million. (This amount is greatly less than the foreign aid which India received in the single year 1966.) Before the end of 1965, this debt had been entirely repaid. To pay, China shipped food to the USSR even in 1960-61 when, as we now know, some of her own people starved. And today, says the Chinese leadership, the USSR and the U.S. join in threatening China and in plotting to invade China. The Chinese people must rely only on themselves—their own asceticism, comradeship, discipline, strength, and skill. They must retreat before the invading enemy, lure him on, absorb him, and cut him to pieces.

China is again a closed society. Even before 1960, a gifted and alert engineer from Eastern Europe—a party member in his own country—could report that he had lived and worked in China for a year and not had a single significant human contact with a Chinese person. The usual travelers’ books tell us nearly nothing. Fortunately, two recent books of photographs are exceptions, and warmly to be recommended on that account.³ Neither author, however, reports learning anything important in China from personal acquaintances.

One indeed writes:

In every other country, human contacts help. . . . This is not possible in China. . . . For the foreigner . . . direct and spontaneous communication is practically non-existent. . . . The replies . . . are usually ready-made formulas, recitals of the official viewpoint. . . . Dialogue . . ., in which the personality of those talking comes across, is almost unknown.

What cannot be learned from persons certainly cannot be learned from statistics. In 1958, Chinese statistics became propaganda. Since 1959, almost no comprehensive statistics are published. Perhaps few are collected. One of our most discriminating authorities writes, with a candor which deserves wider emulation:⁴

. . . because there is no reliable data, the basic dimensions of Chinese society have not been adequately measured and cannot be known. . . . China is probably the only country in modern times which has first embraced and then repudiated statistical accountability as the basis of national planning.

In this statistical blackout, one can only guess the total population of mainland China. My guess, for the beginning of 1967, is about 775 million, plus or minus 10 per cent. Apparently, more than two-fifths of this population is under age fifteen’, and more than 80 per cent earns its livelihood principally in agriculture.

We shall probably not be greatly misled if we count that Chinese families containing over 600 million persons—fifty times as many as in the U.S.—work primarily at farming. Minimally, these Chinese families contain 250 million farm workers. On a national average, after including multiple cropping, each such farm worker harvests annually a crop area of under 1.7 acres (U.S.: about 50 acres). Since 1957, perhaps since 1955, the total national harvest is, at best, stagnant.⁵ By accepted convention, “grain” in China includes not only rice, wheat, and other grains but even beans and potatoes. On this basis, total “grain” production was about 185 million metric tons in 1957, and it has apparently fluctuated between 175 and 180 million since the recovery from the exceptionally bad harvests of 1960 and 1961. The Chinese authorities purchased abroad (net) an annual average of some 4.9 million tons of grains in the years 1962-65 and perhaps 5.7 million tons in 1966. Yet Chinese grain supply for consumption in 1965-66 is estimated (by the U.S. Department of Agriculture) to have been about 16 per cent lower per capita than in 1957-58. The total present diet is estimated to supply about 85 per cent of the 2,300 calories per day calculated as the “minimum” requirement for China by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Without giving full faith and credence either to such minima or to such calculations, we may recognize that this diet probably involves some malnutrition, that it comes close to hunger, and that serious crop failures would push China over to catastrophe.

Mechanization is not the remedy; short-run, China has no employment for displaced labor that would pay for the machine. Irrigation and drainage are part of the remedy; but they involve much skill, capital, and time. Chemical fertilizers are also part of the remedy; but China lacks capital to produce fertilizers or foreign exchange to import adequate supplies. Better seed varieties might make the greatest single contribution; but such varieties have to be found, and they also characteristically require more fertilizer and water. Greater incentives to the farmer might help; but China is turning her back on that path. In sum, the requisites for improving Chinese agriculture—whether of capital, science, skills, or incentives—are lacking. And there is no evidence that, in the past decade, China has made progress in overcoming these deficiencies.

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In industry, China entered the 1960’s with a crisis and recession which can be compared only with the Western experience of the Great Depression of the 1930’s. Having first reported a peak civilian non-agricultural employment of 56.9 million persons in 1958, the Chinese authorities also reported (in fragments) that in 1959-61, more than half were returned to agriculture. Only in December 1964 did Prime Minister Chou En-lai announce that the industrial production level of 1957 had been regained. One may hope that by now the peaks of 1958 have also been surpassed, and that in 1967 China’s aggregate industrial output will be the highest ever. But meanwhile, the population has also increased by perhaps one-fifth.

In 1966, China’s workers were urged to create “Taching-type” enterprises—modeled after the Taching oil field—and China proudly announced basic self-sufficiency in crude petroleum; this self-sufficiency, however, was apparently at the tiny consumption level of about 200,000 barrels per day (U.S.: 12,000,000). Indeed, China has now produced more rare things than petroleum—plutonium and even uranium 235. Yet in 1965, when China’s exports regained the $2.2 billion level of 1959, they were still less than the exports of Denmark. Moreover, China’s exports are those of an undeveloped economy—agricultural products, textiles, a few specialties (tin, tungsten), and simple consumers’ goods.⁶

Such countries as France, West Germany, the United Kingdom, and Japan—with populations 7 per cent to 13 per cent of the Chinese—each have an industrial output between two and four times the output of China. Each has also accomplished an industrial expansion, in the past ten years, much larger than China’s. Less developed countries—Taiwan, Greece, Israel, Mexico—have also been moving ahead much more rapidly than China. Indolent minds do sometimes still repeat the slogan that China will be a model of industrialization to other poor countries. But general emulation of China’s industrial accomplishment would make no sense.

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III

What the Communist regime has undeniably accomplished is to make China a functioning centralized state. Everything in this state is authoritatively organized—farm, factory, office, school, residence area. There is no private place. The governing hierarchy requires of everyone both conformity and active assent. Who errs will be patiently corrected. Who denies—or affirms another truth—will be reshaped or squashed.⁷

Very little about this government of China is known to those not members of its inner circle. Our best document⁸ does not come from a high echelon; it is no substitute for a set of minutes of the Politburo. But it is impossible for an alert mind to study this document without noticing one controlling feature—the drastic divergence from Stalinism. For Stalinite authoritarianism, the sequence of public activity is first the leader’s determination, then decree, order, propaganda, and obedience—or else prison, labor camp, or firing squad. For Maoist authoritarianism, the sequence is the same through propaganda, but then comes the new stage of persuasion—coercive persuasion it may be, but still persuasion. One must deal patiently with the masses. In the end there is no give and take, no right to dissent, to advance one’s own considerations, to reason, and to finish by disagreeing. But the Maoist official must follow “the mass-line”: he must not command but persuade. And all persons must be persuaded; they must either be persuaded or die. And those who live must demonstrate their persuasion daily, actively, militantly. Admittedly, when all is done, it is probably the Maoist authoritarianism which is the more destructive of spiritual freedom and intellectual spontaneity. Admittedly also, Stalin never exacted such servile adulation as Mao now receives. But the psyche of the society which Maoism creates is not to be identified with the psyche of Stalinism.

To its own officers, in 1960-61, the Chinese government acknowledged that the condition of the country was catastrophic. Many people were starving. Peasants had been in armed revolt. Simple soldiers asked for guns, to kill Communists. The militia was widely regarded as “rabid dogs, whippers, and bandits.” Military officers had been guilty of extreme cruelty to starving civilians. Nevertheless, along with these miseries, officers were invited to share large horizons. The revolution was conquering in all the world; soon it would embrace the entire continent of Africa. And, to prepare for its role in these great events, the army was instructed to rely on the trained, devoted common man, soldier or guerrilla, fighting the enemy face-to-face or at a distance of a few meters, best at night. The army must separate itself from the error of Marshal Peng Teh-huai (Minister of Defense, dismissed in September 1959) and General Huang Ko-cheng (the army’s simultaneously dismissed Chief of Staff) who had followed the “bourgeois” line of emphasizing military professionalism and advanced military equipment: “. . . if there is a war within three to five years, we will have to rely on hand weapons.”

Late in 1965 or early in 1966, the government of China dismissed another army Chief of Staff. The newly fallen was that very General Lo Jui-ching who had been appointed in 1959 to “rectify” the army in accord with “the thought of Mao Tsetung.” Nevertheless, he and several of his senior associates—many veterans of the Long March—were again found, in 1965-66, to be “taking the bourgeois, capitalist line.” (Perhaps they had advocated a better-equipped, more professional military force. Perhaps they were even indulgent of military collaboration with the USSR.) In May 1965, General Lo had publicly espoused a military doctrine of “. . . pursuit to destroy the enemy at his starting point, to destroy him in his nest.” And Lo had reminded his auditors that, by such pursuit, Stalin had seized the ground for the establishment of Communist states in Eastern Europe. To General Lo, as well as to scores of others of the Yenan generation who were purged in 1965-66, their accusers addressed the following admonition:

To devote oneself to revolution for a whole life, one must reform all one’s life. Even the “old guard” officers who suffered long and hard can let non-proletarian ideas enter their heads.

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The great party schism emerged suddenly. In January 1965, the National People’s Congress re-elected all the old comrades (with minor exceptions). Then outsiders could still wonder at the cohesion of this senior leadership, which had stood together through three decades, with only minor exclusions of high-ranking figures in 1937-38 and 1954-55 and 1958-59. By early 1966, however, the leadership was visibly split. The faction around Mao speaks loudest, and raises him to godhead—apparently because it could not stand were his authority once to become questionable. Marshal Lin Piao, the Minister of Defense, now holds the highest eminence after Chairman Mao, but this eminence is apparently not acceptable to many of the Marshal’s recent equals. The opponents of the Mao-Lin leadership—some denounced, some dismissed, some arrested—obviously continue to resist. Failing Mao’s support, however, it seems unlikely that these opponents can come to power during his life.

Of the highest governing body, the seven man Standing Committee of the Politburo, as it was in January 1965 (Mao Tse-tung, Liu Shao-chi, Chou En-lai, Chuh Teh, Chen Yun, Lin Piao, and Teng Hsiao-ping), only the three whose names are italicized remain in position at the beginning of 1967. Of the large Central Committee of the party, the majority has also, it seems, had to be dismissed or overridden. In China’s government, there was no way to proceed against such opposition by judicial process. And it was impossible to proceed against this opposition through the party or the ordinary executive machinery of state: the opposition controlled the apparatus of both party and government. A special Sturmabteilung of youthful Red Guards was therefore created, under the sponsorship of the Ministry of Defense, to root out the counterrevolution.

These stormtroopers were sent out to administer revolutionary justice to the enemy—to “those within the party who are in authority and are taking the capitalist road,” and to “reactionary bourgeois scholar despots,” and to those who favor “putting economics first, putting technique first, putting one’s work first, and putting specialists first,” and to “a handful of anti-party, anti-socialist, and counterrevolutionary intellectuals.” In time, they were given names to go with these formulas. And so they found that the highest enemies of socialism were the Head of State and the General Secretary of the Party, Liu Shao-chi and Teng Hsiao-ping. So also they found that comrade Peng Chen (yesterday a leading member of the Politburo and mayor of Peking) and comrade Lu Ting-yi (propaganda chief of the party since Yenan and yesterday Minister of Culture) were in fact “demons and monsters” who had long held up “a big red umbrella” to shield innumerable smaller scoundrels and counterrevolutionaries.

The new Mao-Lin leadership includes several personalist elements. Mao’s wife (utilizing the name Chiang Ching), not previously active in politics, has emerged now to give authoritative speeches and to be a cultural adviser to the army. Also from Mao’s entourage, now added to the standing committee of the Politburo, is Chen Po-ta, formerly Mao’s personal political secretary. Two other new members of the Standing Committee, Tao Chu and Kang Sheng (respectively from the regional administration in the South and the secret police), were said to reflect Marshal Lin’s friendships and influence. Yet Tao was being denounced as an associate of Liu Shao-chi’s “black command” before the year was out. Li Hsuehfeng, who replaced Peng Chen in June, was also already being denounced by the Mao-Lin faction in December. Clearly, if we have here a conspiracy for an inside coup d’état, the Mao-Lin conspirators are short of talent and cannot count on their chosen subordinates.⁹

Through the mouth of Chiang Ching, the Mao-Lin leadership has indeed indicated (Nov. 28, 1966) that it is not a majority or was not until it “rectified” the count. The lady explained she would rather not count votes but weigh them. She reprobated talk

. . . about minority or majority views independent of the class viewpoint. . . . It is necessary to see who has grasped the truth of Marxism-Leninism and of Mao Tse-tung’s thought, who is ready to maintain the proletarian revolutionary stand, who is genuinely carrying out the correct line of Chairman Mao.

And six days later, the lady spoke out against the municipal authorities of Peking, whom she found—even after the disgrace of Peng Chen—“as rotten as ever.” And she added:

They are reactionary, two-faced. They insult Chairman Mao. They attack us. They must be wiped out, once and for all.

It was this Mao-Lin leadership which set its Red Guard stormtroopers—all over China—to holding kangaroo courts, beating up “wolves in sheep’s clothing,” sacking homes, arresting whomever they were told to arrest, smashing temples, burning books, and generally doing revolutionary justice.

Though we hear shouts of accusation and witness the self-abasement of the accused, no one in the West has cogent evidence of the substance of this struggle. We do not know the issues. We do not know the strengths of the contenders. How much is a genuine difference of policy? How much is mere contest for power? If the Mao-Lin leadership does put forward a distinctive skein of thought for “mass-line” indoctrination, this skein is made of self-abnegation, esteem for manual labor, a model worker-soldier, cultural primitivism, Sinicism insofar as compatible with primitivism, emphasis on non-specialization, and rejection of all social distinctions based on training and skill. But we do not know whether a skein thus spun is unacceptable to the Liu-Teng opposition, and—if unacceptable—with what nuances of differentiation they would design its replacement. It is silly to classify one side (say Mao-Lin) as “hard-line” and the other (Liu-Teng) as “soft-line.” If, in favoring income incentives for civilians and insignia of rank for army officers, Liu is closer to Stalin than is Mao, does this greater closeness make Liu a libertarian? Are we to forget that it was Peng Chen who, in 1951, led a public execution meeting in the Central Park of Peking, repeatedly calling upon the crowd to second him alternately in the sentences “Kill these men!” and the invocation “Hail Chairman Mao”? In August 1966, the Central Committee announced that “. . . the situation is one of a new all-round leap forward emerging”; does this reminiscence of the 1958-9 economic lunacy delight the “hard” Chou En-lai more than the “soft” Teng Hsiao-ping? In foreign policy generally, who is more “hard” than comrades Liu, Teng, and Peng? And which side emphasizes the importance of a capacity for frontier counterattack and offensive warfare?

“We want to liquidate entirely, by this great cultural revolution,” said Chou En-lai in June 1966, at Bucharest, “all the old ideas, the entire old culture, all the old habits and customs . . . [We want] to build socialism and prevent the restoration of capitalism.” Primitivism apart, such statements tell us almost nothing. Of course, the accusers will say they are more socialist and their opponents more capitalist. Of course, the accusers will also say their opponents wished “. . . to usurp the leadership of the party, the army, and the government.” But what does it mean to “usurp” in a Maoist society where there is no rule of law, no procedurally legitimate way to win the highest offices of state, and where legitimacy resides in possessing “correct thought”?

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IV

While the red Guard proceeds with rectifying China’s culture and administering revolutionary justice, the rest of the world can perhaps reasonably do little but look on, with compassion. There is, I suspect, for the immediate years, little ground for new, self-concerned fear. China is rending herself. She has not increased capacity for external aggression, and it may be that she has less mind for it. For the present, the Mao-Lin rhetoric of daring puts its accent rather on how resolutely the foe will be repelled when he attacks. And today the young Mao-Lin stormtroopers are not being taught that they are the deprived sons of a Volk ohne Raum.

In any case, China is not in 1967 a considerable military power, beyond her own frontiers.¹⁰ Let us provisionally set aside nuclear weapons. Then, on the Eastern and Southern rim of Asia, China makes a distant second in military capacity: the U.S. is first. And, on its inner Asian frontier, China again is only second: the USSR is first. What a Chinese military force of lightly-armed, poorly-supplied infantry can do, General Lin Piao demonstrated in November-December 1950, when his armies outmaneuvered and outfought those of General Mac-Arthur. What such an armed force cannot do was demonstrated in February 1951, when General Lin’s “third phase” offensive was stopped dead, and in May-June 1951 when the Chinese armies were monstrously bled by the superior firepower and mobility of General Van Fleet’s forces. In the intervening years, China’s relative military inferiority has become more pronounced—and further so since the 1959-60 break with the USSR.

During the next few years, China’s nuclear weapons will, I think, be unequivocally “counterproductive” to China’s own purposes. In war, these nuclear capabilities are still too meager to give her equality, but they may already be sufficient to do considerable damage to a reachable opponent. China’s initiative of participation in a war, where the U.S. or USSR was associated with the other side, would therefore today probably be a signal for immediate destruction of her nuclear production facilities, her missile bases, her airfields, and her harbors (which might house submarine-carrying nuclear missiles). In such a destructive strike against China, I have no reason to assume that tactical nuclear weapons would be withheld. Quite naturally, therefore, even if we set aside the wisdom of Mr. Bertrand Russell, the possession by China of a few nuclear weapons must make her—both in the U.S. and the USSR—the standard staff college model for the exploration of the idea of a preventive “first strike.” China has become a more urgent target.

When the Chinese archives of the past decade are one day opened, it will probably be demonstrable that there was an important shift in Peking’s foreign policy already during 1958-59. This was a shift toward greater international militancy and away from collaboration with the USSR. However, it is not as early as 1958-59 but rather some years later, indeed after 1962, that there seems to have emerged the truly profound breach between the two great states which profess Communisms. In 1958, certainly, the Maoist leadership still held that China, like the USSR, was making spectacular economic progress. But, in the subsequent years, the Chinese leaders—or some of them—seem to have come to understand, that, with respect to China’s economic advance, they had been quite deluded. Going it alone, China could go ahead, at best, only very slowly. Then these leaders—or some of them—seem to have broken not only with the USSR but perhaps also with the very foundations of Marxist utopianism: they apparently broke with the conviction that Communism—such Communism as is attainable in this life—must rest on elimination of material scarcity. They also broke with the Russian slogan that Communism should attempt to displace other socio-political systems through competition in yielding greater material welfare. In place of the Marxist ideology of a Communism of abundance and freedom, the Maoists then began to put a radically different Communism—a Communism ascetic, primitivist, and puritan, a Communism of prolonged equalitarian poverty and pervasive authoritarian discipline. In these latter years (and here, perhaps, Marshal Lin’s ambitions are a factor), the dominant slogan became that all Chinese should model themselves on the soldiers of the People’s Liberation Army—in simplicity, in effort, in discipline, in performing all kinds of work, and in saturation with “the thought of Mao Tse-tung.” To this morality, the calling of man is “not to be afraid of hardship, not to be afraid of death.” Certainly by 1965-66, it was to such an equal sharing in a devoted and hard life, unmoved by material incentives, that the Maoist voice from Peking called out its invitation—to all the wretched of the earth.

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We shall not grasp the essence of the world politics of these present years unless we make clear to ourselves how totally this Chinese call has now failed. It has failed with the USSR, failed with the lesser Communist states, failed miserably in “the third world.” Among Communist states, only North Vietnam—always most influenced by the Chinese example—responds with some show of respect to Peking’s doctrine. Even Albania reportedly now gives China obeisance without doctrinal concurrence. Elsewhere, even in those countries of Asia and Africa where Peking still has conventional diplomatic standing, the new voice of China is found absurd. The Mao-Lin leadership now speaks for a China which is isolated morally in greater degree than at any time since Communism took power.

So far as we know, China’s general foreign policy objectives remain unchanged, not only since 1958-59 but even since 1949.¹¹ These objectives are to affirm China’s place in the world, and to do so in the context of support for the world revolution. This affirmation and support are not envisaged as manifesting themselves in one surge toward victory, but from time to time—as opportunity and strength permit. China’s natural allies are conceived to be the other faithful Communist states, the peoples of less-developed countries, and progressives in the advanced countries. China’s natural enemy is correspondingly “world imperialism, led by the U.S.,” or sometimes simply “U.S. imperialism.” One may parley with the imperialist camp, and arrange truces, with the purpose of disorienting the enemy the better to divide and destroy him; but one recognizes “peaceful-co-existence” as a mere shamming tactic on the road to world victory. The essential bases for the achievement of this victory are the leadership of the party and the support of the people. The instrument is combat: “Political power comes out of the barrel of a gun.” The tactic of combat is the subject of endless aphoristic wisdom: to be ingenious and daring; to train well and concentrate one’s strength; above all, to fight only the engagements one wins!

The over-arching Maoist style is one of revolutionary optimism, courage, and militancy:

Our cause is the revolutionary cause, and what we most need is revolutionary optimism. . . . We ride with the wind and march forward. Let us ride with the East wind which has overpowered the West wind, ride with the wind of Communism which has overthrown the Rightists. . . .

This Maoist spirit finds itself, however, increasingly frustrated by the emergence of false comrades, modern revisionists, who have lost confidence in revolution. Deprived of this confidence, they become broken men—like Khrushchev and his successors, “outwardly tough as bulls, but inwardly cowardly as mice.” They are afraid to “make revolution,” afraid to make war. They are afraid that even the most just, most indispensable wars of national liberation will escalate to wide nuclear destruction. Actually, they are no better than Social Democrats, professing (in Italy, in France) to believe in a peaceful parliamentary transition to socialism and (in the USSR) a peaceful worldwide victory of socialism through economic competition. Quite consequentially, these revisionists neglect the central duty of progressive man in this era—to engage in a militant, “tit-for-tat” struggle against U.S. imperialism, “the most ferocious enemy of all the peoples of the world.”

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The Mao Tse-tung leadership never had solid reasons for gratitude to the USSR. Stalin did not support this leadership before 1935, when it made its way to power within Chinese Communism. Stalin did not believe it could defeat the Kuomintang; he correspondingly gave it almost no help from 1935 to 1945 and only minor, episodic aid from 1945 to 1949. The USSR-whether under Stalin, Malenkov, or Khrushchev—extended to Communist China only modest assistance from 1949 to 1957. Nevertheless, in late 1957, the two great Communist states appeared to be in fundamental accord. In November 1957, at the great Moscow gathering to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, Mao is reported to have stated:

Every organization must have a head, and the Communist party of the Soviet Union is best fitted to be head of the international Communist movement.

But this concord was transient. Some would say that by the end of 1959, surely by the end of 1960, it was quite dead. By then, the Chinese had been profoundly disappointed with Soviet unmilitancy in the Middle East (July 1958) and still more in the Taiwan straits (September-October 1958). They had been pained to find the USSR neutral between them and India (September 1959), seriously injured by Russia’s termination of assistance to China’s military development (June 1959), and greatly damaged by Soviet withdrawal from assistance to China’s economic development (July 1960). They had borne insult as well as injury. Khrushchev came to them, to Peking, fresh from Camp David, and lectured them against “testing by force the stability of the capitalist system.” He separated Russians from Chinese and announced, “. . . we Communists of the Soviet Union consider it our sacred duty, our primary task . . . to utilize all possibilities to liquidate the cold war.” To the Chinese, this was revisionist betrayal and stupidity. Yet they allowed four years to elapse before proclaiming formal divorce; it took the nuclear test-ban treaty to bring that. Then the Chinese party stated, in an open letter (September 6, 1963):

The leadership of the Communist party of the Soviet Union has allied itself with U.S. imperialism, the Indian reactionaries, and the renegade Tito clique against socialist China and against all Marxist-Leninist parties, in open betrayal of Marxism-Leninism and proletarian internationalism. . . .

Even before the removal of Khrushchev (October 14, 1964), Sino-Soviet polemics had acquired a rigid pattern. The Russians named the Chinese rash, romantic, and “adventurist.” The Chinese called the Russians timid, opportunist, and “capitulationist.” The Russians charged: the Chinese build Communism with romantic illusions; neglect the proletariat of the advanced countries; are adventurist on war and peace; rash in the face of nuclear destructiveness; pursue great power “special aims and interest . . . which cannot be supported by the military strength of the socialist camp”; engage in racist propaganda against whites. The Chinese countercharged: the USSR is restoring capitalism; diverts the proletarian masses in advanced countries from the true road of “smashing the old state machinery [chiefly the armed forces] and establishing a new state machinery [chiefly the armed forces]”; abandons the revolutionary national liberation struggles; propagates “nuclear fetishism,” in denial of the importance of the soldier’s spirit; spreads the slogan of a Yellow Peril. Mao personally (July 10, 1964) challenged the territorial extent of the USSR, though he also suggested, three days later, that China might wait long for rectification: the Chinese transition to Communism would still require “anywhere from one to several centuries.”

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Charge and countercharge vied in astringency of insult—with the Chinese sustaining a consistent superiority. On July 28, 1964, Mao wrote Khrushchev¹² (in response to Khrushchev’s effort to assemble a meeting of parties to condemn the Chinese):

You are falling into a trap of your own making and will end by losing your skin. . . . We firmly believe that the day your so-called meeting takes place will be the day you step into your grave. . . . Once again we sincerely advise you to rein in on the brink of the precipice. . . . But if you refuse to listen and are determined to take the road to doom, well, suit yourselves! Then we will only be able to say: “Flowers fall off, do what one may;/Swallows return, no strangers they.” With fraternal greetings.

Khrushchev’s removal made only a transient and trivial change. According to the Chinese, already on November 14, 1964, the new Soviet leadership

. . . told the members of the Chinese party and government delegation to their faces that there was not a shade of difference between themselves and Khrushchev on the question of the international Communist movement or of relations with China.

The leadership which succeeded Khrushchev has shown no more willingness to help China become a modern great power and no greater indulgence of Chinese ideas of how to help “make revolution.” Though, after Khrushchev’s fall as before, the Russians have suggested some enlargements of collaboration, both economic and political, the Chinese have uniformly rejected these advances as made in bad faith, accusing the Russians of trying “to sell horsemeat as beefsteak.” Particularly after the Soviet-American cooperation in ending the Indian-Pakistani hostilities (September 1965), the Chinese rage observed no limits. Sometimes Chinese spokesmen described the USSR as worse than the U.S. because more tricky. The Russians, for their part, accused the Chinese of trying to precipitate war between the USSR and the U.S., while the Chinese, in their own expression, would sit quietly on a mountain, to watch the battle of the tigers.

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But it would be great error to believe that there is some uniqueness in China’s separation in sympathies from the USSR. On the contrary, with few qualified exceptions, China is similarly separated from other Communists and non-Communists, from Asians and Africans and Latin Americans, as well as Europeans and Americans. Characteristically, in the Middle East, where the great powers, including the USSR, have recently used their influence to discourage grand confrontations, Mao has personally urged the Arabs to destroy Israel: imperialism, he said, has created two bases of oppression in Asia—Formosa in the East and Israel in the West. (Ahmed Shukeiry, leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, boasted in Cairo on January 4, 1967, that it was in China that his officers were being trained and from China that his weapons were coming.) The lesser Communisms reject the idea of a world meeting to condemn the Chinese not because (with the partial exceptions of the parties of Albania, North Vietnam, and New Zealand) they share Chinese views, but because the shrewdest and most independent among them (Italians, Yugoslavs, Rumanians) do not wish to create the precedent of any excommunication. Even Albania has desisted from approving the Red Guard and the “Great Cultural Revoltion.” North Korea has drawn closer to the USSR. The party in Japan has broken with the Chinese. The Indonesian party—after a senseless, horrible massacre—is no more. In Africa, the Chinese have retained diplomatic relations with only fourteen out of thirty-eight independent states; their rejection (except in Congo, Brazzaville, where their friends rule) has grown out of a fantastic record of “making revolution” by supporting plots and putsches. Even Castro has had a bitter public quarrel with them. Elsewhere in Latin America, the Chinese voice brings affirmative response only where a few desperate men assemble, having been turned away by all others.

Peking is increasingly talking to itself.

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[The four sections printed above constitute the first portion of a longer essay on the subject, “China, Russia & the U.S.” A second installment, centering on the “Russia” portion of the essay, will appear in an early issue—Ed.]

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¹ I have dealt with aspects of these questions which will not be repeated here in “German Unification” [COMMENTARY, July 1965, pp. 25-27 and 34]; “Britain under Socialism” [COMMENTARY, Feb. 1966, pp. 70-72]; and especially in “The World Politics of Responsibility” [COMMENTARY, Dec. 1965].

² Tang Tsou, University of Chicago Press, 1963. This is our best narrative of the diplomatic-political side of the demise of Kuomintang China, but the Chinese hardly appear.

³ Because of its superb photographs, I put first China, by Emil Schulthess, Viking, 1966. Perhaps even better, as photographic history, is Marc Riboud, The Three Banners of China, Macmillan, 1966. Quotation from page 12.

⁴ John S. Aird, “The Population Count—‘Reds’ Versus Experts,” in Diplomat, Sept. 1966, a first-quality essay. On related topics, see also Nonagricultural Employment in Mainland China, by J. E. Emerson, Washington, 1965.

⁵ Recent U.S. Department of Agriculture views are well stated by Marion R. Larsen in Foreign Agriculture, Aug. 8, 1966, and The Far East . . . Agricultural Situation, March 1966. Some elements of the background are analyzed in Food and Agriculture in Communist China, by J. L. Buck and others, Praeger, 1966; the two essays by Owen L. Dawson have particular current relevance.

⁶ Our best analysis of China's international economic relations, through 1963, is Alexander Eckstein's Communist China's Economic Growth and Foreign Trade, McGraw Hill, 1966.

⁷ The reaction of a sensitive Chinese of the older generation to this totalitarian intensity is well conveyed in Mu Fusheng, The Wilting of the Hundred Flowers, Praeger, 1962, especially pages 116 ff., 128 ff., and chapters 4 and 6. See also “From Friendship to Comradeship,” by Ezra Vogel, in China Quarterly, January-March 1965.

⁸ This consists of 29 issues of the secret “Bulletin of Activities” of the Chinese army for 1960-61, issued as The Politics of the Chinese Red Army, ed. by J. C. Cheng, Stanford, 1966.

⁹ Perhaps the most valuable single guide for following current Chinese affairs is the little weekly bulletin, China News Analysis, published since 1953 in Hong Kong.

¹⁰ A reasoned evaluation is “Communist China's Capacity to Make War,” by Brigadier-General S. B. Griffith, II, in Foreign Affairs, January 1965. One important strand is ably treated in Sino-Soviet Military Relations, edited by R. L. Garthoff, Praeger, 1966.

¹¹ On these themes, a learned, thoughtful essay, with which I do not entirely agree, is China in the Postwar World, by A. M. Halpern, in the China Quarterly, January-March 1965.

¹² I so personalize the letter of July 28, 1964, from the CCP to the CPSU, despite the Red Guard assertion that Mao claims to have been treated like a dead father after 1958. The best guides through the conflict are Donald S. Zagoria, The Sino-Soviet Conflict, 1956-61, Princeton, 1962; William E. Griffith, The Sino-Soviet Rift [1962-63] and Sino-Soviet Relations 1964-65, M.I.T. Press, 1964 and 1967.