China’s highly idiosyncratic view of the world is epitomized—even if not wholly clarified—by a quip making the rounds of the underemployed Peking diplomatic community after two American state visits in a period of less than two months. “Of course,” they say over their cocktails, “there are major differences between the Americans and the Chinese. Gerald Ford and Henry Kissinger feel the fall of South Vietnam was disastrous. The Chinese know it was catastrophic.”
To anyone except those diplomats and the small group of men and women elsewhere who have been condemned to near-obsession with the People’s Republic of China because of linguistic proficiency or other defects, the Chinese reaction to the total failure of the American enterprise in South Vietnam must appear heavily paradoxical. Everyone knows that the Chinese were for decades the standard-bearers of “people’s wars of liberation,” the movement presumably typified by Hanoi’s fight against Saigon. Non-specialists may not know that the Chinese consistently described that struggle as the “focus of the worldwide liberation movement,” or that Peking predicted confidently more than fifteen years ago that a Communist victory in Vietnam would “force imperialism back to its lair,” precipitate the “inevitable collapse” of the capitalist world, and insure the “victory of socialism.” But most non-specialists certainly believed that the Communist Chinese were sincerely cheering for a victory by the Communist Vietnamese. Yet far from celebrating since the cruellest April of all Aprils encompassed the collapse of the Saigon regime and threw American foreign policy into disarray, the Chinese have on the contrary intensified their efforts to bolster the resolution of the hated “capitalist exploiters.”
Thus Peking has been laboring mightily to shore up the North Atlantic Treaty Organization and to accelerate the unlikely transformation of the European Economic Community into a true supranational community, rather than a conglomeration of intermittently antipathetic nation-states. Peking has further striven to impress upon Japan the acute danger to its national existence posed by the Russians—Japan, which emerged as a power by destroying the imperial Russian fleet in the Straits of Tsushima in 1905 and, thereafter, clashed regularly with the forces of Muscovy, whatever the color of their banners, until the folly of the Great War in the Pacific. Peking has, mirabile dictu, actually been trying to breathe life into the moribund Southeast Asia Treaty Organization, which officially pronounced itself dead a few months ago. Above all, Peking has sought by various inducements to encourage a powerful American military presence in both Asia and Europe. All those actions of the quondam champion of world revolution on behalf of the status quo were either intensified or initiated by the Vietnam debacle.
After even brief consideration, the reason for the superficially paradoxical and unmistakably frenetic activity of the People’s Republic of China is readily apparent. The Soviet Union benefited even more substantially from Hanoi’s victory, won with Soviet arms, than even the blackest pessimists had feared. Moscow increased its power in Southeast Asia manyfold—and Moscow is Peking’s bête noire, while Southeast Asia is Peking’s backyard.
Peking itself lies only thirty-five miles from the Great Wall of China, a stupendously long and surprisingly low fortification cobbled together in the 3rd century before the birth of Christ by China’s first emperor, who linked the many shorter walls feudal princes had built in the preceding centuries to keep out the marauding barbarians of the northern steppes. Despite the Great Wall, the Chinese fought a running battle for more than two thousand years with these nomadic warriors, winning most battles, but losing almost as many and, often, surrendering the northern tier of China itself to the barbarians’ sway. Twice, powerful barbarian forces swept over all China and established their own dynasties—one relatively short-lived, the other enduring for more than two-and-a-half centuries.
Since conquerors from the north have absorbed China, the national memory of the Chinese counsels a prudent concern with the activities of any heavily armed, militant group north of the Great Wall. Today that group is not merely a congeries of tribes in arms like the Huns and the Mongols, but the second most powerful nation in the world. The Soviet Union is, moreover, a nation inclined to expansionism by its history, its present ideology, and its domestic defects, both political and economic. And that nation has displayed an unseemly interest in internal Chinese affairs, an intrusiveness fully understood by a Chinese regime that came to power with the assistance of Moscow.
For both tactical and semantic reasons, the Chinese are stridently alerting other nations to the threat Soviet expansionism poses to their existence. The Peking administration cites with wry relish two apposite maxims from the vast storehouse of Chinese epigrams accumulated over the centuries: “[The Soviets are making] a feint to the East, and an attack on the West,” and “Do not be distracted by the [American] wolf at the front door from the [Soviet] tiger at the back door.”
But a senior official proposes that the proverb be recast to warn: “Beware of the bear—the polar bear!”
A clerk in a Peking curio shop explains the purpose of a painted earthenware cylinder with a large round spout protruding from its side. It is a replica of a Han Dynasty (207 B.C.E.-220 C.E.) early-warning system. An officer would place the cylinder on the ground and his ear to the spout to magnify the hoofbeats of a distant enemy, the better to estimate the enemy’s strength and mark his position.
Two millennia later, China possesses more effective early-warning systems. But the magnitude of the threat has also been enlarged by technology. Moreover, the enemy is not coming only from the north and the northwest, as he did when the Great Wall was China’s main line of resistance. The enemy of today has established major footholds in Vietnam and Laos on China’s southern borders. He is also implacably drawing a ring of steel ships around China by his campaign to dominate the oceans. The Chinese fear that Soviet use of the spacious, American-built naval and air facilities at Camranh Bay, from which the Czarist fleet sailed for its fatal rendezvous with Admiral Togo in the Tsushima Straits, will virtually close the ring. The Soviets already possess a major base in their closed city of Vladivostock, and they are pressing North Korea to grant them base rights, as the Chinese did, to their great regret, at Port Arthur and Dairen in the 1950’s. The two arms of the pincer are drawing closer.
Peking is not primarily concerned about a formal agreement between the Vietnamese and the Soviets. Singapore is not an American base as such, but the U.S. Seventh Fleet uses the small island republic’s facilities for repairs, recreation, and resupply. Similar concessions to the Soviets at Camranh Bay are merely a matter of time—if they have not already been granted. Haunted by the specter of encirclement, the Chinese are by no means content to rely upon the Seventh Fleet as an adequate deterrent to Soviet naval ambitions in Far Eastern, Southeast Asian, and South Asian waters. They view with dismay shrinking American capability and declining American resolution.
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The prudent counsels of the national memory, the apprehensive perception of Soviet intentions, and the fear of isolation—all were galvanized by two events in the first half of 1975: the fall of Vietnam on April 30 largely because of American acts of omission; and the reopening of the Suez Canal on June 5 by an act of American purpose. The Chinese were, of course, aware of the long planned reopening of the Canal, which has already doubled or quadrupled Soviet naval capability in the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean. But Peking did not anticipate the abrupt disintegration of the Republic of Vietnam when the corrupt inefficiency of the regime of President Nguyen Van Thieu reached critical mass and American military supplies to Saigon’s armed forces were sharply reduced by the United States Congress, the same agency that had removed the greatest factor restraining Hanoi, fear of American retaliation.
Peking could hardly have anticipated the immediate debacle and its consequences when even a professional alarmist like General George S. Brown, Chief of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff, wrote with complacency only a month or so earlier: “The probability of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam’s causing the Republic of Vietnam’s collapse through political and clandestine warfare is decreasing. . . .” In his presentations to the Congress regarding the military budget, General Brown did note “the North Vietnamese constant attacks, steady buildup of war materials in the south, and generally increasing offensive. . . .” He further warned: “The alternative to sufficient military and economic aid is the eventual collapse of the Republic of Vietnam” (emphasis added). But no one publicly anticipated the full-scale, conventional offensive mounted by Hanoi that precipitated the immediate collapse of the morally and materially depleted Republic of Vietnam. Nor, it appears, did even the hypersensitive Chinese appreciate the full extent of Soviet supplies of arms and Soviet moral encouragement that enabled Hanoi to mount its offensive and arrive at a final solution of the Vietnam problem.
The Chinese now aver that they did, indeed, expect Saigon to crumble abruptly. But at the time, they expressed shocked surprise at the sudden fall of the nation which had ironically become a major element in China’s strategy to limit the expansion of Soviet influence and the extension of Soviet military power. Despite their constant warnings regarding Soviet intentions, it further appears that the Chinese had not fully appreciated how immediately and comprehensively the Soviets would benefit from the major American defeat. Even pessimists in Peking could hardly have expected that the Russians would, almost instantaneously, freeze them out of all but a small corner of Laos. They could not have anticipated that Soviet influence would become so predominant in Hanoi that the Chinese voice is unheeded in any important respect; the Democratic Republic of Vietnam has aligned itself with the USSR on every major international issue, a cheap but important payoff; the Hanoi-Moscow axis is addressing itself to the extension of its joint offensive throughout Southeast Asia; and Peking-Hanoi relations have deteriorated so radically that the Chinese recently warned the Vietnamese they would risk war if they interfered with Chinese occupation of a scattering of islets off the Vietnamese coast in the South China Sea.
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If the Chinese were, at best, complacent in their dependence on American resolution or, at worst, deafened by their own rhetoric to the consequences of the “liberation” of South Vietnam, they have been vigorously attempting to repair their errors since the debacle. Despite their ritual denunciations of American imperialism and their recurring public demands that the U.S. withdraw its forces from South Korea, the Chinese have clearly signaled that they want a continuing American military presence in Asia—and Europe as well. In recent years, every visiting foreign minister, premier, or president whose country possesses military ties with the U.S. has been urged to maintain those ties. The list includes such diverse nations as Japan, France, Britain, Thailand, Germany, and the Philippines. After the briefest ceremonial bow to the convention that they are seeking American withdrawal from overseas bases, senior Chinese officials acknowledge their concern that the U.S. will withdraw precipitately. They are, today, far less confident that “aggressive American imperialism” will maintain the strong posture they so ardently desire than they were before the fall of South Vietnam. The Chinese are disturbed not only by the increasing isolationist sentiment of the United States Congress; they fear that Secretary of State Henry Kissinger may be so infatuated personally with maintaining détente that he will go to dangerous extremes to placate the Soviet Union.
The Chinese are not notably reassured by their knowledge that Kissinger himself considers détente not an ideal policy, but the only possible policy. They are not cheered by the fact that Kissinger, unlike some enthusiasts, does not look upon détente as a total reconciliation leading to warm friendship between the U.S. and the USSR, but a minimal agreement between hostile powers to avoid the use of force. Because of their particular frame of reference, the Chinese have difficulties in comprehending Kissinger’s understanding of détente. The Secretary’s precise position is an even greater conundrum to them than it is to Western observers because they are more concerned with Kissinger’s actions than his words, and they discern in his actions an overcommitment to a policy they feel has already failed. A nation of born showmen, the Chinese also exaggerate grandly for effect.
The world is therefore treated to the deliriously incongruous spectacle of Chinese revolutionaries chiding the American Metternich for failing to maintain the status quo, and for erring in both his assessment of the Soviets and his actions toward them. If Soviet-American relations were rolling merrily along the tracks, the Chinese might be less condemnatory and aggressive. Their purpose, after all, is not to exasperate the Americans to the point where Washington feels it cannot do business with Peking and, therefore, draws closer to Moscow. Their purpose is to divide the two superpowers—by exacerbating existing difficulties and differences.
The Chinese attitude is, therefore, unquestionably overstated. Peking has indulged in grandiose histrionics to dramatize its fears that the U.S. may be an unreliable ally. These tactics have, at the least, provoked Kissinger into public declarations that the U.S. will continue to resist “hegemonism,” Peking’s word of art for Soviet expansionism. They have also elicited from the President of the United States the six-point formula he called the New Pacific Doctrine reaffirming those American “commitments” to Asia—military, political, and economic—which the Chinese consider an absolute necessity to counteract Soviet expansionism there. But eliciting such declarations is no great achievement. American policy-planners do not, after all, consider the Soviet Union a thoroughly reformed character that has cast aside its ambitions to exercise predominant influence throughout the world.
The constant shifting of positions, as well as the interplay between divergent schools of unofficial thought in the United States, is confusing to the Chinese. What the Chinese do not understand is that public differences between the Department of State and the Department of Defense arise naturally from the different missions of those two major branches of the federal government. The State Department is, by its nature, directed toward keeping the peace and limiting Soviet expansionism through negotiations and the delicate balancing of many forces. The Pentagon is charged to keep the peace and thwart Soviet expansionism by armed force and the threat of armed force. The two departments’ analyses and policy recommendations are, therefore, bound to diverge, even when they start from a reasonably similar appreciation of the fundamental situation. In practice, that means the State Department is prepared to take risks and make concessions the Pentagon considers, at best, ill-advised and, at worst, hazardous. Nonetheless, their fundamental assessment of Soviet intentions is much the same—except, of course, where commitment to certain policies subsequently impels the two departments to adjust their assessments in order to justify their policies.
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Allowing for the distortions produced by virtually total conformity on the one hand and near anarchy on the other, we can read fairly clearly the essential differences between Peking and Washington on both the assessment of Soviet intentions and the methods necessary to deal with the Soviet threat. The Chinese discern an implacable dedication to expanding Moscow’s power to the utmost limits, which are, presumably, predominant influence throughout the world. The Americans, by and large, believe, in the first place, that the Soviet Union, whatever its purposes, is as susceptible of diversion by outside influences, random or deliberate, as any other nation and, in the second, that the evolution of Soviet society will effect significant changes in Soviet actions abroad.
Evidence for either view is readily available. Joseph Stalin died in 1953, and the slow evolution of Soviet society away from absolutist repression began. Moreover, Moscow has dispatched no expeditionary forces; no Soviet troops have, as far as outsiders know, been committed to combat outside Eastern Europe. But two changes of regime since Stalin’s death have not halted Soviet expansionism. Moreover, the American Joint Chiefs of Staff have noted that the Soviet Union is “pressing forward vigorously with massive programs for near-term deployments involving every facet of offensive strategic power” (emphasis added).
The Chinese are obviously more at home with the Pentagon view than with the more complex assessments of the Soviet threat that originate in the State Department. Peking and Washington’s divergent views on coping with that threat can be described with reasonable simplicity. Washington believes that a combination of pressure, backed by military deterrents, and cajoling, sweetened with economic lagniappe, can contain Soviet ambitions. Peking believes that only constant confrontation on all fronts can halt the Soviets and avert war. Kissinger is seeking “equilibrium,” a dynamic balance of power, and he is willing to make substantial concessions to the Russians to preserve that state. His quarrel with dismissed Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, who has all the sympathy of the Chinese, primarily concerned the extent to which the U.S. could go in such continuing “trade-offs.” First Vice Premier Teng Hsiao-ping, the de facto head of government, wants to face the Soviets down. His position is more straightforward, in good part because he possesses neither the military power to prevent Moscow’s expansion nor the material resources to strike deals with the Soviets.
Exasperated American officials sometimes complain that the Chinese approach to Russo-American relations is simply, “Let’s you and him fight.” The Chinese deny that they want, as their old saying has it, to “Sit on the mountainside and watch two tigers maul each other.” To charge the Chinese with wishing for the delights of a tertium gaudens is not totally unjustified, but it is a bit unfair.
The present Chinese leadership is aware that no one—including China—would benefit from nuclear war between the superpowers. China has begun to acquire an economic stake in the future and has, simultaneously, lost much of its earlier enthusiasm for a global conflict that would, like its two predecessors in this century, “greatly advance the socialist cause.” A conventional war might be more attractive to Peking. Still, the Chinese are also aware that such a Russo-American clash could escalate into nuclear conflict and would, besides, devastate any major theater of operations the antagonists considered worth the struggle. The Chinese think primarily of Western Europe, whose emergence as an alternate center of world power they envision. Peking not only cherishes that particular illusion, but is working as diligently as its limited resources allow to further its realization.
Besides, the Chinese are enjoying the wry satisfaction of watching their warnings become reality. Events since the Helsinki Conference on European Security, even more than events prior to that mass summit meeting, have demonstrated that the Chinese view of the Soviets and their intentions is closer to reality than the American view—as may well be the Chinese prescription for dealing with the Soviets.
Having secured the imprimatur of the West to present frontiers in Europe, the Soviets have begun to act more like themselves. They have not only stalled further progress in the SALT talks, but have displayed a generalized surliness that recalls, however faintly, the era of Stalin himself. Both the French and West German Presidents have been given chilly receptions in Moscow, while the promised reduction of barriers to the free exchange of men and ideas between Eastern Europe and the outside world is notable for its non-realization. The barricades have neither come down nor, even, been lowered slightly.
Granting Western correspondents in Moscow multiple entry and exit visas is a ridiculously low price to pay for the legitimation—almost beatification—of the illiberal regimes of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Compared to the inevitable softening of Western European resolution, the area’s new vulnerability to Soviet psychological offensives, and the broad encouragement of subversion compounded at Helsinki, those visas, which can be cancelled at any time, are no price at all. Yet the Soviets have delivered very little else, despite their pious professions at the conference. They have hardly troubled to conceal either their satisfaction at having hoodwinked the West or their contempt of the West for having been so easily hoodwinked.
The Chinese are, of course, deeply concerned with such immediate events, though their chief concern is the long run. They reacted with profuse indignation to the Soviets’ introduction of modern arms and “advisers” into Angola to supplement Cuban units supporting the Moscow-oriented Marxist Popular Movement against its rivals. If those advisers are compelled to fight, even in self-defense, it will be the first time that Soviet units have fought outside Soviet territory since the suppression of the Hungarian revolt of 1956—and the first time they have fought in a territory not geographically contiguous with the Soviet Union. The Soviet role in Angola cannot be described as defensive by the most liberal interpretation of Soviet interests. The relatively bloodless Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia in 1968 alarmed the Chinese because they saw that the Brezhnev Doctrine, justifying such invasions to “safeguard socialism,” could equally be applied to themselves. But, at least, Hungary and Czechoslovakia lay well within Moscow’s latter-day empire. Besides, the Chinese might conceivably act in much the same way if their own direct interests were threatened on their own borders.
But the Angola adventure can only be interpreted as an extreme example of far-reaching Soviet offensive designs. The factional struggle in the Portuguese colony so abruptly pitched into independence lacks even the partial justification for Soviet intervention inherent in the complexity of the seemingly irreconcilable clash in the Middle East. There the Soviets, disappointed in their Egyptian protégés, have signed a fifteen-year treaty of mutual defense with Syria and, reportedly, stationed a squadron of Mig-25’s of the Soviet air force in that country. But the Middle East, unlike Angola, is, in the first place, a cockpit of great-power and lesser-power confrontation and, in the second, an area of direct Soviet interest close to Soviet borders.
As the Chinese see it, the basic text of Soviet foreign policy was expressed by Andrei Gromyko at the 24th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union: “There is not a single question of any importance in the international arena that could at present be solved without the Soviet Union or against its will” (emphasis added). Even John Foster Dulles at the height of his hubris was not more positive or more assertive.
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Today, the chief instrument of the Soviet worldwide power is the Soviet navy, which has expanded geometrically since 1964. Only sea power can extend Russia’s reach throughout the world. The acquisition of overseas bases amplifies that power, which, in turn, makes necessary the acquisition of additional bases in the ever-rising spiral. The Chinese know that the Soviets have carefully read the original apostle of expansionism through sea power, Alfred Thayer Mahan, for Moscow’s policies during the past decade bear the unmistakable mark of the man who wrote in 1899: “Sea power is . . . the handmaid of expansion, its begetter and preserver. . . .” In mid-1974, the Soviet Union, for the first time, exceeded the United States in the number of major operational surface warships.
In mid-1975, the Soviet Union possessed approximately 220 such craft, while the U.S. navy had only 180. Moreover, the Soviet warships are, by and large, newer and more advanced in design than the American ships. Playing the numbers game can be misleading, since types of ships and their missions vary so widely. One man’s major operational surface warship is another man’s auxiliary. But there is a more relevant guideline.
Most significantly, the Soviet Union committed itself in the late 1960’s to a program of aircraft-carrier construction. That commitment evidenced a major strategic decision that necessitated a substantial reallotment of Soviet resources. Building aircraft carriers required the development of an entire new technology and the allocation of at least $10 billion, by American standards and estimates, for ships, hardware, aircraft, and training. Yet the USSR is, essentially, a land power; Moscow is dependent upon far-ranging naval forces and, above all, naval air power for defense of neither its territory nor its commerce.
When the 35,000-ton Kiev joins the Soviet fleet in 1976, Moscow’s power will acquire an entirely new cast—and two more Kiev-class carriers are under construction, each capable of mothering either 35 short-take-off-and-landing aircraft or 35 offensive, troop-carrying helicopters—or a mixture of the two. The carriers will give the Soviets a capability for amphibious operations and controlling seaborne commerce they previously lacked. Their chief purpose must, logically, be extension of Soviet power to areas like the African littoral, the Indian Ocean, the South China Sea, and Far Eastern waters. The Soviets cannot yet challenge American ship- and land-based air power in the Atlantic or the broad reaches of the Pacific, while they do not require seaborne warplanes in the Mediterranean or the Baltic. Tactically identical, Soviet aircraft carriers are different in strategic purpose from American carriers, whatever the intent behind their construction. The U.S., which is dependent on the sea lanes for its commerce and security, in any event already possessed a large aircraft-carrier force when the cold war began. Having long enjoyed command of the seas, the U.S. navy is now directly challenged by the Soviets.
It would, therefore, most strongly appear that the Chinese are correct. Deténte may be a devious, hazardous road to rapprochement for the United States. For the Soviets it is a way of spinning out a period of apparent peace while building up formidable offensive forces and acquiring a worldwide network of distant bases. Already markedly superior to the U.S. and its allies in conventional land and air forces, the Soviets are now making a play for control of the oceans.
The possession of preponderant power at sea, as Mahan pointed out, makes it unnecessary to use that power. If Soviet naval strength, backed by a vast fishing fleet and an expanding merchant marine, continues to expand, while U.S. sea power continues to decline, the Soviets will have won the battle by default. No force need be used, just the tremendous advantages—psychological, economic, and political—that derive from a commanding naval posture. If, for example, Japan knew that the Soviets could cut off its oil from the Persian Gulf at will, it would be forced to placate Moscow by all means at its disposal. And intimidating Japan is just one of numerous examples of the potency of sea power, which the Soviets, on their past record, will not hesitate to use.
The prospect of Soviet control of the seas is particularly painful to Peking just when the People’s Republic of China is breaking out of its former isolation to essay a major role in the world’s commercial and diplomatic affairs. Soviet sea power could thwart or even block China’s new outward reaching. It could obviously hamper China’s economic development. Though committed to “self-reliance” (in Chinese, tze-li, keng-sheng, literally, ever more vigorous through our own strength), China is importing large quantities of foreign technology, including entire steel, plastics, and fertilizer plants. Peking plans to pay for those imports by exporting the yield of the large new oil fields it is now developing. If Chinese ships or ships sailing to and from China were subject to harassment, China’s economic growth could be slowed significantly.
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Those fears are, of course, long-range and, in part, speculative. For the short run, the Chinese are striving to retain an effective American military, economic, and political presence in Asia and Europe to balance and deter Soviet expansionism. In the long run, China’s doctrine holds, the Americans will go under, relinquishing their worldwide power bit by bit to a resurgent Soviet Union. At the level of practical experience, American behavior impels the Chinese to the same conclusion. Peking will therefore not place great reliance upon the U.S. in the long run. Instead, the Chinese are seeking to foster an entirely new structure of economic and military power throughout the world. The enterprise is undeniably visionary. It is also highly audacious. But it is the only viable alternative the Chinese see to conceding world domination to the Soviet Union—and resigning themselves to Soviet over-lordship. Their campaign, conducted with the fervor of a crusade, marches under the banner of “anti-hegemonism.”
The word is important in itself. The Chinese charge that the Soviet Union is seeking to “exercise hegemony” over the entire world. The Chinese word is pa-chüan, which literally means tyrannical power immorally attained and oppressively exercised. Even before Confucius, who lived in the 6th century before Christ, Chinese political thinkers drew a sharp distinction between wangtao, the way of the legitimate king, who sought the good of his people, and pa-tao, the way of the usurper-tyrant, who exploited and oppressed the people. Resisting hegemony, pa-chüan, the rule of a tyrant, means not only preventing the imposition of oppressive, illicit authority, but, implicitly, taking the path of virtue.
That rationale is directly linked with another Chinese preoccupation that originated in antiquity. All Chinese regimes have striven to create Ta Tung, the Great Commonwealth of all peoples under Chinese inspiration and guidance. China, after all, was Tien-hsia, “all that lies under Heaven,” and the Chinese for millennia acknowledged the existence of no equal civilization, much less a civilization superior to their own in any respect. The grand design of creating a new international order characterized by universal social justice and guided by Chinese example is certainly visionary. But it is by no means as fantastic or presumptuous as it may at first reading appear, since, aside from the Soviets, the Chinese are the only ones who actually know precisely what they seek in a world where indecision, rather than certainty of purpose, prevails.
Resisting hegemonism in order to lay the foundations for a new Utopia may appear far-fetched. But one must, after all, begin somewhere.
The Chinese are beginning by attempting to create a consensus among divergent nations that Soviet ambitions threaten all and must, therefore, be withstood by all possible means. The Chinese have, moreover, pondered their grand design thoroughly and determined that it could best be realized by concomitant military and economic measures that lead in time to a completely new social order. Those visionary aspects should, however, not detract from serious consideration of the immediate, practical purposes Chinese foreign policy is presently pursuing.
Peking’s strategists divide the world into zones: the “true socialist” zone that, at present, includes only China and its minuscule European ally, Albania; the two superpowers, the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, both “contending and, simultaneously, colluding to attain supreme power . . . though the Soviets are far more dangerous and their actions most likely to provoke war”; the developed world of Western Europe, Japan, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand; the underdeveloped nations of Africa, Asia, and Latin America; and, finally, in a kind of limbo, the tributaries of the Soviet Union, including not only Eastern Europe, but Vietnam, North Korea, Cuba, and Outer Mongolia. Peking is, at the moment, chiefly concerned about Western Europe, Japan, and the underdeveloped nations. But it gives particular attention to the nations of Southeast Asia, China’s neighbors and natural commercial sphere, which are directly threatened by the Moscow-Hanoi axis; and Japan, the highly industrialized and highly vulnerable nation only 550 miles off China’s shores, with which the Chinese have maintained a literal love-hate relationship for centuries.
The first move toward creating the new order is building a new structure of security amid the post-Vietnam confusion, and the cornerstone of that structure is avowed determination to resist hegemony. Peking has already secured declarations of such determination from all the former members of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization except Great Britain, which will probably take the pledge in the near future. The list now comprises: the United States, France, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Thailand, and Pakistan. Peking has also won adherence from Malaysia and Burma. Among non-Communist Asian nations, only Singapore and Indonesia, each reluctant for its own reasons to draw too close to China, have not taken the pledge.
None of the old or new Communist-dominated countries of Asia has been invited to subscribe to the anti-hegemony pledge. Peking knows that they could not do so without severely imperiling—perhaps destroying—their relations with the Soviet Union. The effort to secure their adherence is, at this moment, not yet worth the effort. India and Bangladesh are also outside the pale, in large part because their relations with China are troubled. The net effect has been to bind Peking, however loosely, to precisely those nations of Southeast Asia that formerly adhered to an avowedly anti-Communist alliance or fought their own internal Communist insurgencies. Communist China has thus become the doyenne of an avowedly anti-Soviet grouping, which is also inherently anti-Communist, whatever that word may mean amid the present ideological confusion of nations.
The confusion is compounded because a number of those nations, notably Malaysia, Burma, and Thailand, are troubled by resurgent Communist guerrilla movements, which, in theory at least, derive their inspiration from Peking. In the short run, Peking can blame Thailand’s problems on the Moscow-Hanoi axis, operating through Laos, while keeping its options open by tacit encouragement of the ethnic Chinese guerrillas of Malaysia. But that expedient will only work for a while. In time, China will be forced to a choice between guerrillas and established government, a choice that will, presumably, be primarily determined by success or failure in building the anti-hegemonistic bloc.
The importance Peking assigns to the declaration of determination to resist hegemony is demonstrated by China’s present posture toward Japan. Prime Minister Kikuei Tanaka gladly subscribed to the anti-hegemonism pledge when he visited China and issued a joint communiqué modeled on the Nixon pattern in late 1972. China is now pressing Prime Minister Takeo Miki to include a declaration of mutual determination to resist hegemony in the preamble of a long-delayed Sino-Japanese treaty formally ending the state of war between those two countries that began in 1937. Miki is, therefore, presented with the choice of formally alienating the Soviets, who have stated their strong objections to the proposed clause, or alienating the Chinese. And the Chinese are adamant. No anti-hegemony clause, no treaty, they say.
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Beyond question, the Chinese envision a new military alliance in Asia that will, in time, link itself to other right-minded nations and groups of nations elsewhere in the world. All are, according to the Chinese analysis, threatened by Soviet ambitions. For the time being, the Asian alliance would be backed by the United States, the only nation that possesses the military and economic power to support such a grandiose project. The fact that the new alliance was locally generated and sustained should, Peking apparently reckons, be a strong inducement to the United States, whose interests already dictate such support. Initially, at least, it excludes Vietnam and North Korea, in the hope of isolating those Soviet-inclined regimes. Unlike SEATO, it would not be an alien creation. Unlike South Vietnam, it would base its resistance upon deep-rooted convictions of nationhood and common interests. Those factors would, further, make strong American support less critical in time.
Once the nucleus had been firmly established, the Asian Anti-Hegemony Group (or whatever it would be called) would seek ties with similar groups elsewhere. The adherence of a number of Western European countries to the anti-hegemonism pledge should, presumably, facilitate such links. China is also wooing all nations that have grievances against the Soviet Union. West Germany is cheered, if not overly impressed, by Peking’s declarations in favor of German reunification. Uganda was honored by an invitation from Chairman Mao Tse-tung himself to President Idi Amin to visit China after his break with the Soviets. Like Winston Churchill when he was fighting Hitler, the Chinese will make friends with anyone who opposes their enemy, the Soviet Union.
The military alliance would be sustained by a new economic grouping, an Asian mini-Common Market, that would, in time, seek close association with the European Economic Community, as well as Third World nations. China’s unofficial spokesmen in Hong Kong, the Peking-controlled Chinese-language press, have already flown a trial balloon by calling for a regional association “in order to advance the economic cooperation of the Southeast Asian nations and protect their economic rights and interests.” The Hong Kong newspapers have proposed not only a lowering of tariff barriers and supranational cooperation after the model of the European Common Market, but also commodity embargoes and price-fixing after the OPEC model. China itself occupies a potentially powerful position because it can confidently anticipate greatly increased oil exports.
If Tokyo could be brought into the envisioned economic association, its success would be assured. The economic power of Japan is a major force not only in Asia, but throughout the world. Yet Japan is also dependent upon Southeast Asian markets and raw materials. A perfect symbiosis could, presumably, be created.
Peking feels that the military-economic association, based upon the principle of anti-hegemonism, would inevitably attract other nations outside Asia that feel themselves threatened by the Soviet Union or exploited by either of the great powers. Peking is working hard in Africa to win adherents to the concept. Peking has also made numerous advances in Western Europe, most formally by accrediting an ambassador to the European Economic Community. Though less openly forthright regarding the North Atlantic Treaty Organization because of ideological strictures, the Chinese constantly urge NATO to make itself stronger and better unified in order to resist Soviet aggression, direct or indirect.
“It would not surprise me,” an astute European diplomat remarks only half jesting, “if the Chinese applied for observer status at NATO.”
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While spinning such grandiose designs, the Chinese are looking to their own defense and to their bilateral relations, notably with the United States. Such concerns are only prudent, for the grand design is indeed visionary and, perhaps, incapable of consummation, though it is wholly in accord with the Chinese passion for transcendent conceptions.
But the world is changing so rapidly that it would be presumptuous to dismiss the Chinese vision as illusory. So many of the events of the past decade would have been regarded as utterly impossible by astute observers only ten or twenty years ago that one hesitates to exclude any possibility, however far-fetched. A new military-economic grouping under the banner of anti-hegemonism, originally loosely structured and, subsequently, more tightly bound, could fail miserably. It could, on the other hand, become the first functioning alliance based upon a concept three-millennia-old in a world where only rapid, kaleidoscopic change is constant.
At the very least, the Chinese endeavor to create such an association makes the Soviets extremely unhappy and perhaps more wary—thus serving China’s immediate interests.
