Air University Review, May-June 1969
Some time ago the Chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Senator J. William Fulbright, ruminated on U.S. foreign policy, and in some detail about our Far Eastern and China policies, under the title Old Myths and New Realities (1964). Perhaps, in discussing China these days, the subject heading might better be “New Myths and Old Realities.” Our fascination with the grandiose experiments in Communist China has frequently led us to ignore some of the basic realities of the Chinese scene that are likely to remain. Of course there have been dramatic developments inside China, but there have been dramatic developments all over the world. And the drama of what has been happening outside China may be far more important for the world than the destruction that has been recently related to the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution.
Our Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs, William P. Bundy, has recently remarked: “Communist China is without doubt the most serious and perplexing problem that confronts our foreign policy today.” An interesting fact about China and our interpretation of it is the wide fluctuations that have characterized the assessment of what China and its power are all about. On the one hand, some leading American scholars, favorably disposed in some ways toward the large-scale experimentation in human engineering by Peking, argue that Communist China is such a great world power that America dares not antagonize it. On the other hand, others assert that mainland China’s power has been grossly overestimated and we have given Chinese Communist leaders too much credit and overplay their position on the world scene.
A leading American China scholar published a book in 1967 in which he stressed the modernization, sophistication, and potential of China under Communist rule. He said: “The Communists have created the foundations of a modern industry, science, and technology, and China is becoming one of the world’s great industrial nations.” Yet, only a few months after this statement appeared, the Peking People’s Daily carried an article hardly reflective of a modern approach to science and technology. The article claimed that as a result of studying the “Thought of Chairman Mao” in one of the hospitals in Shanghai, nurses had reduced their training period to three months and that one nurse was already proficient in brain surgery in that short time.
How, then, does one assess the great power that could be China’s? Peking itself asserts that it is a power of top importance, a super power at the center of world attention. The final communiqué of the recently convened Twelfth Plenum of the Chinese Communist Party asserted: “We are not in the least isolated, for the people who want revolution comprising over 90 percent of the world’s population are our friends,” Then, too, there has been the reaction to China’s nuclear detonations among her weaker neighbors. How should we assess China as a nuclear power? It is worth remembering that a number of people who served in China during World War II shook their heads dourly and predicted that China would never be a world power. We recall also that Winston Churchill disagreed with Roosevelt’s determination toward China’s great power status. Obviously, there has been wide diversity of opinion in the assessment of China and its power.
An interesting aspect of this diversity for the policies of the outside world, however, is that the assessments may be as important as the power itself. That is to say, what people think is sometimes more important than the facts. The assessment of China’s power may be largely composed of myth and wishful thinking, or of unrelated facts. It may stem from the phrases handed down through history, from the statements of the Chinese themselves, from the China-admirers, or from the irresponsible manufacturers of the threat of the “yellow peril.”
The documents are replete with historical claims to great power status by the Chinese. The emperors through many dynasties and centuries asserted their all-encompassing sway and even proclaimed that they were the governors of the world. In the fourteenth century, for example, the first emperor of the Ming dynasty said: “. . . since our emperors governed the whole world, China formed the central power within which to govern the barbarians.” In the following century a Chinese scholar wrote: “Our emperor plans his government by modeling himself on his heaven; the fame of his teaching has spread; the East is impregnated with it and the West has received it. There is no darkness but is brightened; there is no distance but is illuminated.” Again, in the eighteenth century the Chinese emperor told England’s King George III: “Swaying the wide world, I have but one aim in view, to maintain a perfect governance.”
As the Chinese have asserted their importance, their central position, their world sway, much of the language has been repeated, many of the claims have filtered out, and this in part eventually finds its way into the textbooks. Even today we hear, particularly on the part of those who have become enamored of Chinese culture, a repeating of the claims that China is, so to speak, the center of the world, at least the world of Asia. The “Chinaphiles” have helped to develop the image of a super land power with which other countries dare not contend. Whether reinforced by the memory of human sea tactics in Korea or assertions connected with the great parades of organized masses in Peking, many people have eventually absorbed and in turn projected this image of great power, unlimited power, in interpreting China. Add such items as Napoleon’s warning not to disturb the sleeping dragon or the China fixation of her neighbors, which has been artfully exploited by Peking and called upon frequently by the overseas Chinese, and we can begin to appreciate the critical importance of our own assessment of China’s power, given America’s decisive position as the strongest single power in the Pacific area.
We obviously have an obligation to be as realistic as possible about what China is, what it is not, what it can do, and what it cannot do.
For the sake of schematization and discussion, it can be noted that there are eight general reasons usually adduced for asserting that China is a super power in the world. These are reasons that the Chinese themselves use and that much of the rest of the world accepts.
The first of these obviously is population. We see all too many claims that population is a source of formidable strength. Many times we have heard that one-quarter of the earth’s population cannot be ignored. The emperors of old argued that the “myriad millions” of China, their mighty population, constituted an element of strength. Compared to the minuscule or minor populations around China’s borders that had not yet learned to match the Chinese in intensive agriculture, China’s millions were indeed formidable. But within the context of the modern industrial world, we are enjoined to ask what kind of population, how mobilized, and how much capital is required to make this population formidable? It is estimated that up to $10,000 capital per year and other investment are required for one college student in the United States today, and we are dissatisfied with our system. Imagine the investment necessary for China to have, proportionately, even one-tenth the number of their population going to school in high-level, sophisticated, modern technological institutions, as in the United States.
Even if the world concedes China 800 million people, still only 20 million at most are engaged in the kind of modern technological production that is related to power in today’s world. In terms of nonhuman power and energy, China, with 800 million people, finds itself far behind the middle-level powers in Europe.
A second basis for the claim to great power status for China is linked to its history. The cultural influences of the past have undoubtedly swayed many people. For example, the Japanese have long felt that, for historical reasons and because of a cultural debt, China should be treated as a great power. It should be noted, however, that since the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution even the Japanese, including a number of prominent Japanese Socialists, have not been so uncritical about China. Many are abandoning the guilt complex which held them in grasp in the 1950s and early 1960s and which was not unrelated to an uncritical assessment of Chinese power.
As an extension of the historical great power argument, some scholars and diplomats have asserted that China has a natural sphere of influence. This “sphere of influence” argument for China’s great power status has been developed, for instance, by Professor Hans Morgenthau. But the acceptance of this argument has all too frequently had deleterious by-products. It can, for instance, lead to the underplaying of the role of Japan, the third industrial power in the world. The “sphere of influence” argument, we should remember, was used to justify Japan’s own expansion four decades ago. Then, too, the new nations of Southeast Asia do not want to be a part of China’s sphere of influence; their leaders have said this forthrightly many times. They refuse to accept any modern or historical grounds for the power of “The China model” in their future.
A third item that has helped to build the illusion of great power for China—one that has entranced Americans for more than seven decades—is the persisting myth of the “China market.” It is true, of course, that some nations are doing a comparatively thriving business with mainland China—West Germany, France, Britain, and Japan. Yet the mystique of the great China market is an inflated one. Eight hundred million customers may sound impressive, but the total gross national product for mainland China for 1967 was estimated roughly at only 75 billion dollars, and China’s foreign trade remained relatively small. Uncritical assertions that overplay the “China market” ignore the simple economic fact that the greatest trading partners of industrialized countries are other industrialized countries. The more industrialized, the more developed a country, the greater the proportion of its trade with other industrialized countries. Mainland China’s foreign trade is likely to continue to be a relatively minor factor in world trade.
A fourth argument is the geographical size and extent of China. It is a big country, to be sure, but it is a divided country, and there is far less geographical unity than most of us appreciate. The division and the inhospitable terrain of much of China may well be sources of weakness rather than strength, but aspects of the relationship of geographical size as a basis of weakness are frequently forgotten.
A fifth reason for according China great power status has been in terms of modern military power. The Chinese Communists have a nuclear capability, it is true, but this has been achieved at the expense of solving some of the problems which might have been helping China to move more rationally into the twenty-first century as a great power able to sustain a modern military force over a protracted period. Other countries have far more know-how—Japan, West Germany, even Sweden-and an equally impressive industrial base. They are eminently capable of matching China’s achievements in nuclear power. They have, however, chosen a path of modernization and a philosophy of peace, and, as a result, their potential power may eclipse China’s in a revolutionary and technological age. But China’s military forces in-being and her capacity for short-term military engagements remain a formidable power base in the Far East.
A sixth and perhaps the most telling and important argument for China’s great power status lies in the relativity of power-the fact that there are many minor neighbors who are frightened by Peking’s assertiveness. Prince Sihanouk has said, “When elephants quarrel, the ants and mice run for cover.” Little Cambodia with its relatively minuscule population is dwarfed in every respect. When Sihanouk goes to Peking and witnesses the tremendous parades of over half a million civilians as well as mobilized military might, his reactions help to build the vocabulary and images of a formidable China. The weakness and division around the borders of China have thus helped to build the picture of an all-powerful China.
A seventh reason lies in the achievements of the first ten years of the present regime. When the Chinese Communists came to power, they faced formidable odds: corruption, inflation, a breakdown of transportation, intellectual disillusionment, and many other conditions which have characterized underdeveloped countries. But in those first years the Communist leaders achieved near miracles. They displayed a remarkable verve and energy. By the end of the First Five-Year Plan in 1957, China, despite some of the limitations mentioned, was on the way to becoming a modem industrial power, and in many respects it remains a modern industrial power. It is, however, obviously still not a first-rate one or a great one. The illusion of power also stemmed from the impressions of the guided tourists who went to see the “New China” in the first ten years. Many were sympathetic towards a regime which seemed in those early years to have answers for China’s great problems.
Finally, there is the matter of ideology, and this is important because revolution and instability are constant worries in a world that seeks peace. The strident propaganda from Peking, claiming Communist China’s revolutionary leadership, has had formidable world impact. It is not inconsequential that even some Americans have come to believe that Mao Tse-tung and the Chinese Communists should be credited with conspiratorial involvement and ideological leadership of campus revolutions in the United States. Such reactions help to build the image of a powerful ideological force coming from China. It seems likely, however, that 99.44 percent of our student protest is just protest rather than a reflection of Chinese power. Surely Maoist ideology does not hold that much attraction in America.
Such reasons as these combine and create the illusion of China’s great power. Obviously the assessment of China as a great power has formidable implications for present-day international relations. In the tragic and complicated American involvement in Vietnam, for example, the China threat, the illusion of the great power of China, has perhaps intimidated some American leaders and may well have prevented us from assuming certain tactical or strategic approaches that might have been more effective. This is just one reason why the mystique of “great China” deserves careful examination.
As indicated earlier, what we think may be more important than what is. What we think about China, how we assess it, may be more important than the realities of power. Therefore, it is perhaps useful to consider some of the bases for questioning China’s power. It is, in fact, possible to turn the eight items around and find that some of the supposed elements of strength are in reality evidences of weakness.
Five points at least deserve elaboration. The first of these is the population problem. China’s population, far more than we realize, is an incredible drain and weakness. Walt W. Rostow once pointed out that China faces a Malthusian counterrevolution, and Mao Tsetung, the inconsummate revolutionary, has been unable to meet it or defeat it.
Hunger in China thus remains a real factor. This tragedy is doubly unnecessary, because of the organizational efforts plowed into impractical schemes dreamed up by Mao, a deranged Chinese peasant become God, with no knowledge of economics, or of modern science, impatient with figures, and certainly with little knowledge of the outside world. All too frequently Mao’s own personal dicta have caused the Chinese people tremendous sorrow and suffering. The population problem, the Malthusian counterrevolution, is real and pressing. In six months more people are added to the already overburdened Chinese land than the total population of Louisiana and Alabama. Further, contrary to the usual myths projected about the dynamism of the vast hordes of Chinese masses, hungry people are ineffective and apathetic. They do not necessarily add power to a country, though they may through their submission help to build the egos of the autocrats who direct them, and they may provide cheap conventional firepower in times of great land wars.
A second area where there is need for a more realistic appraisal of the strength of Communist China involves the problem of unity. We frequently see that word “China” on a map, and we forget the division and diversity of China. Even among the Chinese or Han people, divisions and antagonisms are great. Contrast, for example, the sometimes contemptuous Cantonese with the benign, condescending man from Peking. Most analysts forget that 60 percent of the land we concede to China on our maps belongs to nonChinese people: Tibetans, Uigurs, Kazaks, Uzbeks, Mongols, Chuangs, Lolos, Miaos, Hui hui, etc. There are roughly 50 million non-Chinese minorities in China today who have not been successfully convinced that they really are second-class Chinese citizens. They generally have one thing in common, a dislike for the Han people.
Again, there are the divisions within the Communist elite itself. There are serious divisions within the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), between the party bureaucrats and the revolutionaries. The alienation of the intellectuals, to use a favorite phrase in America, is almost complete in China; the key intellectuals, Party and non-Party, have been sent down to the commune. But we can wonder: “How are you going to keep them down on the commune after they’ve seen Peking?”
The decline in verve and unity in the second decade of Chinese Communist rule has too frequently been forgotten. We have tended to ignore downward dynamics because of our fascination with the first decade. If the first decade was reason for asserting a great power role for China, what has happened in the last ten years of Chinese Communist rule at least raises some questions about how much strength China actually has in today’s world. This is a third area where reassessment of China’s power status is called for. No longer is there an unquestioned unifying force of a world Communist movement. No longer is there the driving strength that comes with the unity of a monolith that was so much geared into the whole ideology of the Communist system. Much of the cause of the fracturing of the world Communist church is traceable to some of Mao’s un-Communist schemes, such as the “Great Leap Forward.” Mao and his impractical followers promised their people heaven in three years or that they would overtake Britain in fifteen years. As one Canadian correspondent put it, it seemed as though someone had gotten into the driver’s seat of a locomotive, turned the throttle on full, and was just sitting there laughing and waiting for something to happen. Again, there came the Socialist education movement of 1962 and finally the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, which began in late 1965 and has now disrupted the universities and graduate schools and dealt a ruinous blow to the educational system. The future impact of the last ten years will likely prove sad indeed for the Chinese people. The Maoists seem, for instance, to have created an “education gap” for the Chinese. In effect, Chairman Mao and his colleagues have also created a major generation gap in mainland China. Its full portents have not generally been realized.
Fourth, there is the isolation of China. On October 1, 1968, the only high-ranking foreign representative present in Peking for the nineteenth anniversary of Communist rule came from China’s strongest and most faithful ally, the People’s Republic of Albania. (Mainland China adds the total population of Albania in just six weeks!) Peking lives in a fantasy world! The present drive toward autarky in mainland China has been accompanied by a belief in intellectual, scientific, industrial, and ideological self-sufficiency. Since the Great Leap the Chinese have been involuting, turning inward, disassociating themselves from the major intellectual currents and developments in the world.
The New York Times Magazine on November 17, 1968, carried an interview with a veteran French journalist who said:
. . . the Chinese are completely cut off from the world and seriously believe themselves the most advanced people on earth. Their contempt for the West is limitless and is equalled only by their ignorance of the outside world.
It is interesting to see the parallel with the observation in 1840 of a noted British journalist who wrote:
Not unjustly proud of their country, her people and her rulers have believed her impregnably strong, adopting but little of the wisdom of other lands and adopting that little in native garb, they have thought themselves the first among nations in knowledge as well as material power. They have displayed to foreigners, in all their intercourse with them, the petty tyranny of the self-sufficient pedagogue and have frequently laid on them the strong hand of the unrestrained despot.
It should be noted that the isolation and fantasy world of the Chinese stem in part from the derangement of the personality cult of Mao and the “Thought of Mao Tse-tung.”
Finally, there are the changes outside of China. The remarkable productive growth of Japan, for example, constitutes a factor against which China’s power must be measured. The 100 million people of Japan in 1967 turned out 62½ million tons of steel, moved into the modern computer age for marketing, and displayed a dynamism and organizational ability which have enabled them to become the third industrial power of the world. There has been an almost equally striking adjustment made to the modern world of the third quarter of the twentieth century by other free countries in East and Southeast Asia. One of the most encouraging and dynamic examples of this is the Republic of Korea. What has been accomplished by other Chinese in Taiwan in their attempt to adjust Chinese civilization to the modern world is of great importance, too. Or again, there are the examples of Malaysia and Thailand or other countries that have developed alternate patterns of relations with the outside world. More important, perhaps, the countries around China have developed and are continuing to expand patterns of relations that are going to be important to us and for them in the 1980s: industrial, financial, tooling, intellectual. The Chinese self-exclusion from these patterns may result in even more problems and weaknesses for the Chinese people in the years ahead.
Within the pattern of such strengths and weaknesses as have been enumerated for Communist China, it is of course necessary to strike a balance. In large part American foreign policy, in dealing with mainland China over the years, has been balanced. It has frequently reflected more balance in the appraisal of Communist China than have its critics, whose assessments of China’s power and potential have fluctuated widely and whose seeming derogation of U.S. policy as being on dead center may well be an accurate description of a good policy.
To be sure, China’s current problems division, alienation of the intellectuals, regionalism, provincialism, economic decline-should not be allowed to mislead us on China’s continuing capability to threaten peace in the western Pacific. Communist China can be a great danger, and we dare not, to be sure, underestimate the possibility of the danger’s becoming very real. It is likely that the experts in 1940 and early 1941 felt that Japan would never dare attack the United States. They could have pointed to divisions in Japan and its still relative weakness in the same way that it is possible to underplay Communist China today. We must therefore not dismiss the danger posed by Communist China out of hand. There is, in the first place, the possibility that the paranoia, the current megalomania of the aging autocrat, or the power struggle that follows his death could push the Chinese leadership into an external adventure for the sake of solidifying or unifying their country. The Security Research Council of the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan has expressed this as one of its major worries. Irrational external ventures are certainly possible by a nation that has believed it could outstrip Britain in steel production with backyard iron furnaces. Second, the Communist leaders are well aware of the blackmail potential of their nuclear weapons. Almost inadvertently, the Soviets and the U.S. by playing up Mao Tse-tung’s statements about being willing to see millions of people lost in a nuclear war have helped to build credibility for Chinese threats. Third, Mao’s strategy of wars of national liberation offers an inexpensive path to world influence for a weak power. The training of guerrilla cadres from target areas is, after all, not an expensive process, and there is still romance connected with revolution. Mainland China also retains the capability for quick and decisive military-political power plays, such as the limited war against India in 1962. Then, too, we dare not forget that what has been fashioned by Mao Tse-tung is a totalitarian mode of operation, and it still is able to act within a totalitarian framework.
All of these facts are important, and we do have to weigh them with detachment. For this reason, it is important for Americans to know that we have a far more talented, well-trained group with more information about mainland China in the service of our government today than we ever had on Japan in preWorld War II or in the early days of the cold war for the Soviet Union. Indeed, one reason for dismay during recent years has been the implicit assumption of some of the critics of U.S. policies in the Far East that these well-trained, dedicated people, many of whom are working 18 hours a day, are somehow part of an “establishment plot” (to use the current New Left verbiage) to do our country in. There is the implicit assumption that the critics, many without background, experience, or expertise in the Far East, have more valid bases for judgment of U.S. policies than the talented and trained experts who serve our government so well.
We in the United States have been required to fashion policies which can endure against the outward thrusts of a frenzied giant and at the same time to withstand the polemic thrusts of critics who may be somewhat emotionally accepting one or another of the interpretations of China, either as a tremendous power giant or as a country which need not worry us. Yet those who design our policies must deal with the “givens.” America is a Pacific power as well as an Atlantic power; we have commitments; there are these interrelationships, especially security relationships, around the periphery of China. From the critics who base their assumptions on China’s great power, any time American policy seems to be too firm, there is a dire warning of the threat of a nuclear holocaust.
Our policy over the nineteen-year period of existence of the Chinese People’s Republic, though obviously not designed in heaven, has nevertheless (possibly in some instances through inadvertence or even absentmindedness) been successful. It has helped as a major force in restraining Peking’s great power pretensions and ambitions. Of course, there have been mistakes, but we do not have a monopoly stupidity. The leaders in Peking have at times stumbled from one blunder into another. Their U.S. policy has been dogmatic and inflexible. Meanwhile, around the periphery of China, the U.S. has been a major motive force in helping to create viable alternatives to the violent Chinese approach to development. It is the citizens of the United States, their taxpayers, their troops, and their blood that have helped hold up a shield against a totalitarian China, hopefully until the madness has burned itself out and a great and wonderful people can once again start to solve their problems in consonance with the mainstream of the rest of the world.
We have displayed a growing understanding in our policies for an area of the world for which we had little preparation. We have in effect—despite the criticism of some of our firmest Western allies—waited (with Oriental patience?) until the Chinese model has been discredited, until the Sino-Soviet dispute has undermined the appeals of the Communist movement around the world, until a number of our friends have learned that their brightest future depends upon refurbishing their economic and political ties with the West rather than with the Communist bloc. We waited until the myth of Afro-Asian solidarity created at Bandung, Indonesia, in April 1955 ran its course and the leaders of newly independent nations learned the importance of worldwide cooperation in development. We have waited until a great number of Socialist or even Communist leaders throughout the Far East have learned that Mao did not possess the answer for their peoples.
Our policy has met the continuing need to strike the balance, but we need to continue to “play it cool.” It is necessary to keep the door open for change in the policies of a new Chinese leadership that may emerge in the post-Mao period and who may urge that our two nations begin to get back into some sort of peaceful atmosphere. When that happens, a critical issue that has helped to deny Mao his myth of infallibility and inevitability, which is the single issue between America and Peking, is likely to disappear.
The future is obviously not clear. Given Chinese super-power ambitions in the years immediately ahead, it is unlikely that we can look forward to anything other than a continuing state of unholy deadlock in our relations with a country that still pretends it is the center of the world. Surely, we who bemoan our fate, we who worry about our tragic involvement in Vietnam, should be able to maintain a balanced and detached assessment of this currently divided angry giant.
We are obviously going to have our national purpose tested by the China problem in the years ahead, but surely there was never a fairer test of our ability to endure. Alexis de Tocqueville, that great commentator on American democracy, noted that democracies can pull themselves together and give great support in times of crisis, but he doubted whether they were suited for the long, sustained storms that beset the history of nations. To date our China policy has shown our ability to adopt a strategic perspective and sustain a long-range view.
Wars of national liberation, the training of cadres for violence, the ideology of violence -these are not the path of the future in Asia. Whether the Maoist formulas are the future of mankind or whether some adjustment among the peoples in a framework of understanding is to be the path of mankind is in large measure what Vietnam has been all about.
As we continue to confront the Chinese Communist center of the encouragement of revolutionary violence in the Third World today, we might borrow the words of Mao when he proclaimed his government in 1949. He said: “China has stood up.” In terms of responsibility, in terms of meaningful sacrifice and potential long-range success, the United States as a Pacific power has “stood up.” There is today a firm basis for confidence (though our critics, internal and external, have been many) that the assessment of our performance in facing a modern totalitarian regime in its outward frenzied thrust period will be judged as a “job well done.” We have not been led away from the correct course by illusions about China as a super power.
Columbia, South Carolina
Dr. Richard L. Walker (Ph.D., Yale University) is James F. Byrnes Professor of International Relations and Director of the Institute of International Studies, University of South Carolina. During World War II he served as Chinese interpreter with U.S. Army Intelligence in the Pacific Theater. While Assistant Professor of History at Yale 1950-57, he was Visiting Associate Professor of History at National Taiwan University for a year and was U.S. delegate and keynote speaker at the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) conference in Manila. Since joining the University of South Carolina in 1957, he has served a year on the faculty of the National War College; has lectured at the Foreign Service Institute, at various service schools, and at universities in the U.S. and Asia; and served as U.S. delegate to the XXV International Congress of Orientalists in Moscow. His published books include China under Communism, the First Five Years (1955); China and the West: Cultural Collision (1956); The Continuing Struggle (1959); and The China Danger (1966).
Disclaimer
The conclusions and opinions expressed in this document are those of the author cultivated in the freedom of expression, academic environment of Air University. They do not reflect the official position of the U.S. Government, Department of Defense, the United States Air Force or the Air University.
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