Air University Review, May-June 1979

The People’s Republic of China in World Affairs

Recent writings, Contemporary topics

Nearly thirty years ago, the noted Sinologist Mary C. Wright evaluated the famous China white paper of 1949 for the Far Eastern Quarterly. She concluded that in the first years after World War II the United States government had possessed adequate, accurate information for making policy decisions on China following the Japanese surrender.¹ That information, of course, was not in itself sufficient to ensure indisputably good decisions, but it was more of an advantage than any American government has had in subsequent years. China-watchers since 1950, whether in government or out, have necessarily engaged in the "somewhat foolhardy practice of writing history on the basis of dubious data, rumors, and rumors of rumors."²

In discussing contemporary China, one immediately confronts the contradiction between how little is known and how much is written. To be sure, both Chinese and westerners know more about each other, and about the world at large, than they did at some points earlier in their relations. The leaders of contemporary China probably would not write to a western head of state in the terms Emperor Chien Lung addressed to George III of England in 1793: "I have already taken note of your respectful spirit of submission," he wrote in reply to a démarche from the king. "I do not forget the lonely remoteness of your island, cut off from the world by intervening wastes of sea."³ After all, Henry A. Kissinger--the "inscrutable Occidental," in the words of the New York Times--has proclaimed that China's leaders today have sophisticated understandings of world politics and power relationships, though perhaps one should note also that Kissinger sometimes seems to have confused sophistication with ruthlessness in matters pertaining to the use of power. Similarly, in the West no contemporary journalist of merit would be likely to report along the lines of a young English reporter who, in 1933, wrote about "Mao Osu Tung, a gifted and fanatical young man of thirty-five suffering from an incurable disease."⁴

Yet Chinese society and government remain more hidden than revealed. For example, on 16 July 1966, after a long absence from public view, Mao Tse-tung and 5000 individuals swam in the Yangtze River for a reported one hour and ten minutes, with about 200,000 onlookers present. It was ten days before the diplomatic representatives of other countries, the foreign press, and indeed the rest of the Chinese populace knew of it.⁵ Again, in 1976, after Mao's death and the accession to power of Hua Kuo-feng, it was six weeks before the American liaison office in Peking even knew that Hua had a wife, and longer still before the U. S. government knew his family and given names and not just his revolutionary sobriquet.⁶

What we know and do not know about contemporary China depends fundamentally on the sources of information and insight available to westerners and, for purposes of this article, particularly to Americans. As reflected in these writings, the sources consist of four categories: the Chinese themselves, the Nationalist Chinese on Taiwan, the officials and employees of the United States government, and academic scholars, both Americans and others.

Undoubtedly the most important source of information, if not always of insight, into contemporary China is mainland China's government and, to a lesser extent, its people. The outside world receives a modest amount of information on what is happening in China through official speeches, publications, and statistics (when available). In ordinary diplomatic intercourse outsiders learn something of the view of China's leaders and perhaps also some things of substance concerning developments in the country. Chinese broadcasts are monitored, transcribed, and translated, mostly by government agencies. The outside world also learns from the Chinese press. Although the press in China appears to be among the most tightly controlled in the world, several hundred newspapers and countless periodicals circulate in China. Many of these have only local or regional circulation; many seldom if ever come to the notice or into the hands of foreigners whether inside or outside China. Still, from the large-character "newspapers" on the walls of Peking to the national, regional, and local papers, the press and other periodicals constitute the single largest source of information for most China-watchers. Mainland China also provides less direct avenues of information that deserve brief mention. Refugees, principally from the southeastern and southwestern portions of China, provide some information of real importance; presumably, refugees and nomadic peoples on the Sino-Soviet frontiers are of similar usefulness to the Russians. Foreign diplomats stationed in China, of which there are now quite a number, also transmit their own observations and deductions, based not only on what they read but on what they see--and sometimes on what they do not see. Finally, travelers--the new China experts mocked by Mao Tse-tung and others for having acquired their expertise by sitting in the Peking airport for thirty minutes--have provided some information and occasional insights into China today. One must remember, of course, that there is no such thing as freedom of travel or association for foreigners in China. The expert consensus is that visitors to China, even very important ones, see only what their hosts wish to show them. Now, with formal Sino-American relations, this may take a considerable turn.

In still another way, mainland China has proved a source of information about itself. Occasionally, and usually through irregular channels such as refugees or espionage, western authorities have obtained government documents of interest. Perhaps the best-known such instance occurred in 1961-62 when 29 issues of a classified military journal, the Bulletin of Activities, made their way out of China and into American hands during the course of the Khamba insurrection in Tibet.⁷ At least as far as public knowledge goes, there has been no comparable acquisition since, but certainly there have been lesser instances in the intervening years.

A second source of data regarding mainland China, the Nationalist Chinese on Taiwan, contributes much in the way of information and analysis. Virtually all of the political and military leaders of Taiwan are mainland-born. They lived with, and sometimes fought with, men of the generation that still leads China. By culture, language, and life experience--and more than any other people in the world outside of mainland China--they know the land, the people, the problems, and the leaders of China today. In addition, they have the ability to penetrate mainland China with intelligence operatives and to exploit to the fullest the knowledge of refugees in places such as Hong Kong. Until the late 1960s, they also had so-called "technical means" of collecting intelligence; Nationalist Chinese U-2 aircraft flew regular photographic missions over the mainland until Chinese surface-to-air missiles (SAM), improved versions of Russian SAM-2s, made that aircraft unprofitably vulnerable.

Until this year, as allies, the Nationalist Chinese naturally exchanged some information and analyses with the American government. They continue to sustain a lively scholarly enterprise. The Institute of International Relations and the Academia Sinica, both in Taipei, support the work of Chinese and foreign scholars with programs of research, travel, conferences, publications, and with uniquely valuable libraries.

A third important source of information and views on China today is the United States government, from its diplomats to its intelligence officers to analysts on contract in think tanks around the country. Although much of what the government learns and supposes never reaches the public, a surprisingly large amount of government information makes its way into the public domain, usually after some lapse of time. This is true even of results derived from the highly secret operations of overhead surveillance systems. They are also persistent, though unconfirmed, rumors about Russian-American exchanges of information about the People's Republic of China (PRC).

Academic scholars of the United States and other countries (especially those of Taiwan and Japan) and perhaps a handful of journalists comprise a fourth category of sources on modern China. They draw on all three foregoing categories of information and thus constitute a resource of informed opinion, especially for officials in the American government who deal with China policy. Sometimes, in fact, academic experts on China become important "players" in Washington policy circles. The number one China-watcher in the United States government early in the Carter administration has been Michel Oksenberg on the National Security Council Staff; until 1977 he was a professor of political science at the University of Michigan. A few journalists, such as Fox Butterfield of the New York Times, have also developed the ability to comment with insight on things Chinese.

Academicians and journalists produce most of the large number of books, monographs, articles, and essays forming the usual information base of nonexperts who interest themselves in Chinese affairs. Many military officers also are writing on Chinese politics and military affairs, mostly in unpublished papers at the senior service schools and in periodicals directed toward military audiences. To date, however, these officers' writings have had little appreciable influence either on government policy circles or on the academic experts.

Limitations on knowledge and sources concerning mainland China have become increasingly acute matters in the last decade. For there is, as Chou En-lai said to Henry Kissinger in 1971, a "turmoil under the heavens." Great power relationships, especially but not exclusively in the Far East, are fluctuating more significantly than at any time since World War II. International relations are evolving from an era in which Soviet-American relations were the fundamental dynamic of world affairs to a more complex, more difficult political context, in which not only Russia and the United States but China, Japan, Western Europe, the cartels of resource-producing states, and even lesser states such as Korea may exert considerable influence on the course of events.

China has had central importance in causing the turmoil of contemporary world politics, a fact laden with irony. For the Chinese today, like their forebears, display a certain Sino-centrism, an attitude more like that of Emperor Chien Lung than different from it. In mainland China, this outlook has shown recently in several ways. For one thing, the PRC has established national priorities in which domestic affairs overshadow things external to the Middle Kingdom. For another, although Russian, American, and Japanese heads of state and other high officials have journeyed to Peking, some of them repeatedly, high Chinese officials have stayed at home, venturing occasionally to visit only obviously inferior former tributary states such as Burma and Nepal. The visit of China's Teng Hsiao-ping to the U.S. in January 1979 was exceptional, not a change in basic outlook. The Chinese have expressed a fear of encirclement, another manifestation of a Sino-centrist mindset.

On Taiwan, at least one leading Chinese official has enunciated an even more distinct view of a world centered on China--and indeed on the Republic of China! "All in all," he has written, "the Republic of China is the key to the solution of the problems of the world." His point, simply summarized, is that in the longterm struggle between communism and more liberal values and institutions, China, with one quarter of the world's population, will playa decisive role. Thus, as the only political alternative to communism in China, the government of the Republic of China assumes worldwide significance.⁸

It is easier to say that China has been central in the turmoil of our times than to say whether or how much China may contribute to the alleviation of that turmoil. Here one confronts what the Chinese, with their fondness for lists and slogans, might call the "two ignorances": one resulting from lack of adequate information about China itself and the other from the unpredictability of a changing world order. These difficulties show, in varying measure, in each off our topics prominent in recent writings: Sino-Soviet relations, Sino-American affairs, China's relations with the rest of the world, and China's military development.

In discussing the Sino-Soviet relationship, one may recall a dictum of the philosopher Hegel: "Peoples and governments never have learned anything from history...." American ability to assess that relationship has for thirty years been marred by shortsightedness. In the first years after World War II, American policy-makers confidently expected Sino-American antagonism to develop into a limitation on the power of the Soviet Union in the Far East, without any investment of American military resources. The Soviets, after all, occupied traditionally Chinese territory.

But expectations based on history were disappointed in short order. A series of accidents and errors in American strategy and policy at the time of the Korean War altered, at least temporarily, American ability to await the developments they had expected. Then the American reaction to China's intervention in Korea forced China into a closer connection with the Russians than otherwise would have developed.⁹ Now that recent scholarly analyses are casting doubt on the idea that the North Koreans were merely Russian stooges in their aggression, it is interesting to speculate on the enormous effects such a small country as Korea can have on great power relations.¹⁰

In the accidents and errors of the Korean War, the communist monolith took its place at the center of American political and strategic thought, despite the better-reasoned and still valid perceptions of earlier leaders concerning the grounds for long-term Sino-Soviet hostility. Since the late 1950s and early 1960s, when the Sino-Soviet split became truly serious, discussion has returned repeatedly to the question of whether Sino-Soviet cooperation is the aberration in that relationship or whether confrontation between communist states is the abnormal and transitory mode of relations.

The view of Henry Kissinger, and of many others, has been that the history of Sino-Soviet relations shows far more reasons for long-term antagonism than for adjustment of differences. As Harold Hinton, author of the best short summary of the dispute, noted, the Russians so hate the Chinese that "next to lowering the price of vodka, nothing would increase the popularity of the Soviet regime more than declaring war on China."¹¹ In contrast, the Taiwanese insist that ultimately communists in China and communists in Russia will have goals more consonant than dissonant, so that the Sino-Soviet dispute is at best temporary and at worst tactical--an outright sham for the purpose of relaxing the vigilance of the noncommunist world.

Apart from the ideological and emotional aspects of the Sino-Soviet conflict, however, there are the more durable and genuine issues of border disputes. As one commentator on world politics has shrewdly noted, border disputes practically guarantee enduring enmity; for "people tend to attack and defend small territorial claims with the same viciousness that they defend or attack large ones. Just as the size of the territory claimed is unimportant, so too is the strategic or economic value of it."¹² And, of course, some of the Chinese claims against the Russians are rather sizable.

Like so many topics in Chinese affairs, the Sino-Soviet conflict raises a "contradiction"; although scarcely anyone would question its importance in world politics, hardly anyone can agree on exactly what that importance is and whether, on balance, the conflict is beneficial or harmful to world politics.

There are clear benefits for the United States and for other powers in the Sino-Soviet rivalry. The tensions keep both China and the Soviet Union tied down in the Far East, at least to some extent. The rivalry raises the importance of the outside world to China and thus supplies a fundamental motive for more constructive and substantial Chinese relations with states China might otherwise ignore or annoy. These factors provide political, economic, and military opportunities, perhaps even benefits, to the United States, Japan, and other Asian nations.

There are also detriments in the situation of Sino-Soviet enmity. For in this context, the United States faces extremely difficult policy choices in both peace and war. In peacetime, the adversary relationship has led Peking to explore questions of military assistance from the United States, which has made for great uneasiness in Washington--and Moscow. Associated issues, even discussion of possible alliance, hold great potential for aggravation of the Russians. The possibility of Sino-Soviet war on a large scale, possibly even involving nuclear weapons, must also be one of the constant nightmares of Washington officials who might have to identify and pursue American interests in such circumstances.¹³ As George F. Kennan wrote in the summer of 1977, under such conditions it cannot be in the interest of the United States to encourage dangerously hostile relations between two such powerful countries as China and Russia.¹⁴ One must constantly remember that the United States inhabits the same strategic environment as do the other superpowers.¹⁵

In the long run, it will probably be difficult to avoid damage to American interests as a result of Sino-Soviet conflict. It is essential to remember, as Hinton has written, that the United States "has benefited from the dispute without having caused it or having been able actively to exploit it."¹⁶ Over time, the United States may be as likely to suffer as to profit from the dispute, and it will suffer most of all if policy-makers assume that no amelioration of tensions is possible, that the United States can count on permanent advantage from a Sino-Soviet conflict.

Problems of the Sino-Soviet relationship lead directly to those of Sino-American relations: "normalization," concerted action on "parallel interests" in Asia, potential military cooperation, trade, travel--and Taiwan.

Aspects of domestic politics have caused special difficulties for both Chinese and Americans in attempting to deal with the real issues of Sino-American affairs. The opening to America was unquestionably a factor in radical-moderate political struggle within China in the last ten years. In the United States, the China-question has long held an unusually sensitive position in politics.

Yet, intellectual difficulties in Sino-American affairs are, if anything, more severely crippling than political liabilities. These intellectual difficulties arise from the fact that China is more important for what it may be eventually than for what it is now. For the present, China policy thus depends on the ability to perceive clearly the probable relationships between the immediate and the eventual, in spite of the "two ignorances" mentioned earlier: those resulting from the uncertainty of international political evolution and from the impenetrability of Chinese government and society.

The United States is in a sense dealing with three Chinas: the China of the past, present, and future. It will be readily apparent how much this compounds the problem caused by limitations of information and sources. Even if Americans can acquire a grasp of China past and present, which is much in doubt, it is not clear that they will be able to comprehend or to forecast China future. The paradox is that the single most important influence on American policy toward China today is perception of China's future, of what China will eventually become.

The framework sketched above to some extent predisposes American policy-makers to sacrifice or to compromise immediate interests in the hope of creating a residue, or tradition, of good will in relations with a country presumed to be on the way to superpower status. It is fashionable to say that, because China is heading toward such power, no important issues in Asia can be decided against Chinese opposition or without Chinese cooperation. Such reasoning has led directly to the widespread conviction that "normalization" of relations with China was an early and urgent requirement for the United States in the latter 1970s.¹⁷

Yet, it is sobering to reflect on the scarcity of gratitude in international relations. Can one really expect to create long-term good will or heighten American influence by compromising or conceding on issues in Sino-American relations? It is possible to argue that now, after normalization of relations, the United States will have less influence in Peking than before; the granting of recognition carried enormous potential leverage, which is lost--and irrecoverable--now that the United States has committed itself by recognizing mainland China.¹⁸ In 1976, Kennan made another point about the Chinese that is relevant:

However things may turn out in Sino-American relations, it is certain that any development will be both politically significant and technically difficult. The United States has a China problem, and, ironically, one very much of its own making. By persevering in treating China as a great power and the issues of Sino-American relations as urgent, the United States has made China much more important than it would have to be at present. By hastening to anticipate China's future, American leaders have immensely complicated America's present, and one can only hope that they prove equal to the tests they have set themselves.

It may seem ridiculous to address a subject as broad as that of China and the world in a format such as this. Yet it is both possible and necessary to make brief observations on two aspects of that general subject: China's political influence outside its borders and China's importance as an ideological, strategic, and/or economic development model.

China's political and economic influence outside its borders, at least in the traditional context of state-to-state relations, has never been very great, and is not now. For a time after the Communists came to power, China made a serious effort to assume leadership of the Third World, but this drive for influence peaked quickly, perhaps as early as the middle 1950s, certainly by the time of China's nuclear and thermonuclear explosions in the middle 1960s. The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, with its drastic redirection of Chinese political priorities, marked the virtual end of China's ability to assert significant political influence outside its border except on the two superpowers.

Despite its success in displacing Taiwan in most international organizations and in state-to-state relations with all but five governments, mainland China today exerts little influence on other governments. Although there are occasional indications that some Chinese leaders hope, and even expect, that this will change, until mainland China develops considerably more economic and military strength, coupled with more advanced technology, its influence is likely to be high only in the small contiguous states, such as Burma and Nepal, that traditionally have acknowledged a tributary relationship to Peking.

The one important exception to the foregoing generalizations about China's lack of influence beyond the circle of superpowers, of course, is the relationship between China and Japan. The elaboration of extremely large and promising trade relations between China and Japan, coupled with Japan's cautious adjustment of its political orientation, has constituted the single most important actual--in contrast to potential--political-economic change in northeast Asia in recent years, at least for American interests.²⁰ American policy toward China from 1969 to 1971 not only accelerated the increase in China's importance to the United States but similarly raised its importance to Japan. The consequent adjustments--some might call them disturbances--in Japanese-American relations have held the most far-reaching significance. The potential for adverse developments in this three-sided relationship is high enough to claim priority attention in Washington for years to come.

The Chinese-Japanese relationship is also of concern to Moscow. For years it has been evident that Japan would need reliable supplies of energy and ores from the Asian mainland, as well as large markets for its consumer goods. It is an open question--in fact, an open competition--to see whether Russia or China will succeed in preventing Japanese economic dependence on, and possibly political cooperation with, the other.

Although in the long run China's importance in state-to-state relations will probably increase, in the short run China's principal influence outside its borders and contiguous areas, where it has any, is likely to be as an exemplar of ideology, strategy, and development methods.

The prospect of China's influence as a model should not overly concern the United"-States, whether in terms of ideology, strategy, or development. Only 13 years ago, in 1966, Lin Piao was hailing the thought of Mao Tse-tung as a "spiritual atom bomb of infinite power."²¹ Today, the successors of Lin and Mao are using quotations from Mao to undo the revolution, at least as the Great Helmsman conceived and directed it.²² It is true that Mao-thought has become a fad with some small proportion of revolutionaries around the world. In importance, however, Mao-thought as radical chic resembles the hula hoop in America some years ago: everywhere one could see people in vigorous movement, but they moved 'mostly in circles while keeping their feet firmly planted on one spot; and soon the fad passed. The world revolution, if it ever comes, scarcely seems likely to be Maoist.

As for strategy, the tendency of many writers to confuse Mao's strategy of people's war with irregular warfare of any kind, and occasionally even with terrorism and so-called urban guerrilla tactics, has muddied discussion almost to the point of hopelessness. At present, the precise applications, and correspondingly the limitations, of Mao's strategic thought seem poorly understood in the West, with the result that opinions on the future significance of people's war vary from extreme to extreme. Some consider it the ultimate weapon against the industrialized nations, the unbeatable counter to conventional war and high-technology armies. Others, perhaps more soberly and accurately, regard it as a strategic method of circumscribed usefulness, and perhaps more a failure than a success in its most recent applications.²³

Like people's war, Chinese development methods seem at least for the present difficult to evaluate unambiguously in terms of their potential influence outside China. There is unanimous agreement that, with the exception of the years 1969-71, Chinese development since the Great Leap Forward of 1958 has been disastrously mismanaged. Yet admirers of the Chinese experiment persist in attempting to find praiseworthy models for capital-poor, labor-rich developing countries.²⁴ Perhaps all that one can say for now is that, until revolution and development Chinese-style have progressed yet further, with more attempts to transplant their elements to other societies, the subject will remain hazy, open to debate if not dispute.²⁵

China's Military Development

To some extent, each of the three relationships just discussed--Sino-Soviet relations, Sino-American affairs, and Sino-world relations--depends on the facts and expectations of China's military capability. Although many people today are repelled by the idea, it is no less true that in world affairs political influence and military power remain linked. Thirty years ago George F. Kennan and others with influence on American political and military priorities could, and did, view a potentially Communist China as no real threat to American security. They reasoned, correctly, that for decades to come China would lack the combination of resources, technology, industrial capacity, and skilled labor necessary for projecting modern military power.²⁶ Today, fewer people would be comfortable with that view for the long run, even though it remains true at present and probably will for some time. With the explosion of Chinese nuclear and thermonuclear devices, the orbiting of Chinese earth satellites, and such things as the Sino-Soviet conflict to motivate improvements in Chinese war-fighting capability, Chinese military development has become parallel in importance to the Chinese ascent in great power politics. As Jacques Guillermaz wrote near the end of his two-volume history of the Chinese Communists from 1921 to 1976:

The general evolution of Chinese military policy, China's progress in the field of modern weapons, and its attitude toward the disarmament question are by far the most important subjects for reflection that the country has to offer us today.²⁷

Here the problems of China's impenetrability loom large indeed. The Chinese promulgate virtually no information about their armed forces and equipment except to propagandize, somewhat inaccurately it now seems, about the army's contribution to China's economy and development. Although over the years it has been possible to learn quite a lot about Chinese armed forces as regards order of battle, and to a lesser degree equipment, for the most part Chinese military doctrine remains unknown. No two western analysts seem able to agree exactly on organization, command, and control relationships within the Chinese military and government; even less is known about trends and priorities in Chinese technical development for military applications.²⁸ And all that is known of the latter is either highly classified, highly technical, or highly inferential.

It is obvious, as suggested, that China's military development has the greatest potential for disturbing the already delicate Sino-Soviet relationship. Some analysts believe that the Russians were on the verge of invading China in 1966, out of exasperation at the polemical and military posturing accompanying the opening phases of the Cultural Revolution.²⁹ Recently, H.R. Haldeman, former assistant to President Richard M. Nixon, has asserted that the Soviets asked the United States to join in, or at least permit, a Russian disarming strike against China's nuclear facilities.³⁰ In contexts of less global scope, the United States and China in their bilateral discussions clearly expect that, as time passes and China's military power grows, the Chinese may simply insist on terms or take action to resolve regional political and border questions--including that of Taiwan--unilaterally and possibly militarily.

Chinese military development will depend to a considerable extent on Chinese progress in basic science and engineering as well as in industrial capacity. Here the Chinese face difficult problems, even though the scientific community has revived considerably since the death of Mao.³¹ Advanced electronics, for instance, are the sine qua non of modern weaponry, and it will be years before the Chinese even approach Soviet and American ability in this field. It is significant that the Chinese have been able to explode thermonuclear weapons long before they could devise guidance systems adequate to make them explode on, or over, meaningful targets. Similarly, production capacity and quality control constitute immense barriers to Chinese progress in advanced weapons. China's attempt to build a high-performance combat aircraft of Chinese design has stalled in recent years, probably due to inadequacies in high-temperature metallurgy processes.

Given its weaknesses in technology and industry, for many years China will be forced to meet some of its military needs by importing technology in various forms, probably including outright purchase of military equipment. Few areas of international relations are as difficult to manage as transfer of technology. In so many instances, the difference between initial use and end use of given technologies depends more on the imagination of the persons acquiring them than on the foresight and controls of those supplying them. For reasons alluded to earlier, China's search for improved military capability is fraught with anxious ambiguities. It is possible that China's military needs may force accommodation with the Soviets, at least in part.³² Analysts now are also exploring the general issues of a Sino-American military and technical relationship.³³ It is certain that China's trade with Japan, and eventually with other states, will result in benefits to Chinese science and industry, some of military significance.

China's fundamental problem in military modernization, familiar also in the experiences of the United States and the Soviet Union since World War II, lies in the trade-off between present needs and future requirements. China's problem with the Soviet Union places immediate and high demand on the resources available for military use in China, but China's longer-range military necessities as an emerging superpower place competing demands on resources. China thus faces hard choices between purchases of current capability on one hand and investment in long-term research, development, and procurement of long lead-time equipment on the other. The Chinese must also address the all-too-familiar problem of the extraordinary cost of high technology weapons as they approach modernization.

A prudent view to the future, therefore, would seem to require the Chinese to manage their disputes with the Russians at the lowest levels of conflict and cost consistent with acceptable definitions of interest and political appeal, and to avoid, when possible, the expenditure of military resources on military aid, adventurism, suppression of minorities within China, or even a military approach to resolution of the Taiwan problem.

It is not certain, however, that the Chinese will see their problem in these terms, or that, even seeing it thus, they will be able to maintain a long-term perspective. Chinese aid to Cambodia against Vietnam in 1977-78, for instance, would seem to run counter to the prudent prescription outlined above. It may be some time before a consistent Chinese policy becomes apparent to outside observers.³⁴

Thus, as China's relation to the world alters and enlarges, there is turmoil under the heavens. Some twenty years ago, the Assistant Secretary of State for Far Eastern Affairs, Walter Robertson, told Congress that it was the policy objective of the United States government to overthrow that of Peking. Scarcely ten years ago, then Secretary of State Dean Rusk informed the United States Senate that "Peking's behavior is violent, irascible, unyielding, and hostile." By 1972, Chou En-lai and Richard M. Nixon were assuring each other, and declaiming to the world, that the Americans and Chinese were great peoples, with great leaders, great pasts, and great futures. Within five years, it was commonplace to hear commentators and officials discussing the "parallelism" of Chinese and American interests in both Asian and world issues. As of 1979, then, it remains to be seen whether such utterances revealed a constructive trend in China's relations with America, and with the world, or whether turmoil would, after all, constitute China's chief contribution to world affairs.

Dr Etzold's essay derived from his study of the six recent Asian monographs: Jacques Guillermaz, The Chinese Communist Party in Power, 1949-1976 (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1976, $24.75), xxi and 614 pages.

Francis H. Heller, editor, The Korean War: A 25-Year Perspective (Lawrence: The Regents Press of Kansas, 1977, $1300), xxii and 251 pages.

Harold C. Hinton, The Sino-Soviet Confrontation Implications for the Future (New York: Crane, Russak & Company, Inc., 1976, $4.95), viii and 68 pages.

Harold Lasswell, Daniel Lerner, and John D. Montgomery, editors, Values and Development: Appraising Asian Experience (Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1976, $19.95), x and 291 pages.

Harvey W. Nelsen, The Chinese Military System: An Organizational Study of the Chinese People's Liberation Army (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1977, $18.00), xiv and 266 pages.

Louis J. Samelson, Soviet and Chinese Negotiating Behavior The Western View (Beverly Hills, California: Sage Publications, 1976, $3.00), 62 pages.

1. Thomas H. Etzold and Jerome K Holloway, Jr., "America's Relations with China's Leaders The 1920s to the 1970s," in Etzold editor, Aspects of Sino-American Relations since 1784 (New York: Franklin Watts/New Viewpoints, 1978).

2 Kenneth R. Whiting, The Chinese Communist Armed Forces (Maxwell AFB, Alabama: Air University, 1974), p. iv.

3. This quotation appears, among other places, in Richard W. Van Alstyne, The United States and East Asia (New York: W. W. Norton, 1973), p. 17.

4. Etzold and Holloway, p. 128.

5. Jacques Guillermaz, The Chinese Communist Party in Power, 1949-1976, pp. 385, 386.

6. Etzold and Holloway, p 158.

7. A large portion of one issue of the China Quarterly was given over to a discussion of these revealing papers See China Quarterly #18, April-June 1964, pp. 67-99. The papers were published in English in J. Chester Cheng, editor, The Politics of the Chinese Red Army A Translation of the Bulletin of Activities of the People's Liberation Army (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1966).

8. General Chiang Wei-kuo, "My View on the Issues That We Are Concerned About," unpublished essay dated 19 September 1977 and personal letter to the author of the same date.

9. This point is developed at length, with supporting documentation, in Thomas H. Etzold, "The Far East in American Strategy, 194&-1951," chapter five in Etzold, Aspects of Sino-American Relations, pp. 102-22.

10. See Robert R. Simmons, "The Communist Side An Exploratory Sketch," in Francis H. Heller, editor, The Korean War, pp. 197-208, Robert R. Simmons, The Strained Alliance: Peking, Pyongyang, Moscow and the Politics of the Korean Civil War (New York Free Press, 1975); and John L Gaddis, "Korea in American Politics, Strategy, and Diplomacy, 1945--1950," in Yōnosuke Nagai and Akira Iriye, editors, The Origins of the Cold War in Asia (New York: Columbia University Press, 1977), pp. 277-98.

11. Harold C. Hinton, The Sino-Soviet Confrontation Implications for the Future, p. 4. A useful factual reference book on the background of Sino-Soviet antagonism up to 1969 is Keesing's Research Report The Sino-Soviet Dispute (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1969)

12. See the witty discussion in Shimon Tzabar, The White Flag Principle How to Lose a War and Why (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1972), especially pp. 32, 33.

13. For the suggestion that this subject has come up in recent years, see reports on the contents of the memoirs of H R Haldeman in the Washington Past, 17 February 1978, and the New York Times, 19 February 1978. See also Haldeman's memoir, The Ends of Power (New York Times Books, 1978).

14. George F. Kennan, The Cloud of Danger Current Realities of American Foreign Policy (Boston: Atlantic-Little, Brown, 1977), pp. 106, 107. See also the argument in Thomas H. Etzold, "Are 'Full' Relations Important to China?" Washington Post, 7 August 1977.

15. Etzold, ibid.

16. Hinton, p. 62.

17. Michel Oksenberg and Robert B. Oxnam, China and America: Past and Future (New York: Foreign Policy Association, 1977), is one good example of this view Two other expert China-watchers, slightly less insistent on the urgency of normalization, also deserve a careful reading: A. Doak Barnett, China Policy: Old Problems and New Challenges (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1977) and Ralph N. Clough, East Asia and U.S Security (Washington: Brookings Institution, 1975).

18. Etzold, "Are 'Full' Relations Important to China?"

19. Interview with Martin Agronsky, 16lbecember 1976, published in the New York Review of Books, 20 January 1977, pp. 12 ff.

20. The New York Times of 19 February 1978 indicates that Japan and China have reached an eight-year agreement worth about $20 billion.

21. This famous quotation appears most widely in Lin Piao's introduction to "the little red book," Quotations from Chairman Mao Tse-tung, second edition (Peking: Foreign Language Press, 1967), p. iii.

22. One of the most interesting analyses of what is distinctive about Chinese revolution under Mao Tse-tung appears in the work of sociologist Charles P. Cell, Revolution at Work Mobilization Campaigns in China (New York: Academic Press, 1977). He argues that mass mobilization via campaigns and slogans was the hallmark of Maoist revolution and concludes that although "it is too early to tell whether there will be more mass mobilization campaigns of a genuinely enduring and penetrating character…it is not too early to predict that if there are not more of these kinds of campaigns in the years to come, Mao's revolution as the world and the Chinese people have known it will be at an end" p. 185. See also John Gardner, "The Gang of Four and Chinese Science," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, September 1977, pp. 24-30.

23. This latter view is capably presented in Chalmers Johnson, Autopsy an People's Wars (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973).

24 One recent example is Vaclav Smil, "Intermediate Energy Technology in China," Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, February 1977, pp. 25-31.

25. A good example of the limitations of such studies at present is Jorge I. Dominguez, "Revolutionary Values and Development Performance China, Cuba, and the Soviet Union," in Harold Lasswell, Daniel Lerner, and John D. Montgomery, editors, Values and Development Appraising Asian Experience, pp. 20-54.

26. For documentation on this point, see Thomas H. Etzold and John Lewis Gaddis, editors, Containment Documents on American Strategy and Policy, 1945--1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1978). The documents in chapter five, especially Policy Planning Staff paper number 39, are particularly relevant.

27. Guillermaz, The Chinese Communist Party in Power, p. 509.

28. Compare, for instance, Harvey W. Nelsen, The Chinese Military System

An Organizational Study of the Chinese People's Liberation Army; Whiting, The Chinese Communist Armed Farces; Karl P Piotrowski, "Military Leadership in the People's Republic of China," Military Review, January 1977; and Bohdan L. Suprowicz, "The Role of the PLA in the Chinese Economy and Foreign Affairs," Military Review, December 1977 Some differences are undoubtedly a consequence of time passing and situation changing, but most reflect the actual deficiencies of western information on these points

29. Hinton, p. 10.

30. Washington Post, 17 February 1978. See also note 13 above.

31. Gardner, pp. 24-30.

32. Hinton, pp. 56, 57.

33. Especially interesting are Michael Pillsbury, "U.S.--Chinese Military Ties?" Foreign Policy, Fall 1975, pp. 50-64 and A Doak Barnett, "Military Security Relations between China and the United States," Foreign Affairs, April 1977, pp. 584-97, Barnett's article also formed part of his book, China Policy: Old Problems and New Challenges.

34. New York Times, 19 February 1978.

Thomas H. Etzold (Ph.D., Yale University) is professor of strategy at the United States Naval War College, Newport, Rhode Island He is the author of The Conduct of American Foreign Relations The Other Side of Diplomacy as well as co-author and editor of Aspects of Sino-American Relations since 1784. He has written many articles for professional historical and military periodicals concerning American defense and diplomacy Dr Etzold is a previous contributor to the Review.

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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