Notes From China

by Barbara W. Tuchman

  Here we made a significant finding. We blundered into the courtyard of the local high school where we watched rehearsals of a dance-drama, gymnastics on the playground, and were invited by smiles and gestures into the reading room. It was the only institution unalerted to our coming that we managed to visit. In the fact that nothing was notably different or deficient in comparison with the planned visits to pre-selected schools lies the significance. What the Revolution and the Communist regime have accomplished for the revival and rehabilitation of China and for the material welfare, dignity, and political participation of the people speaks for itself. Visitors do not need to be carefully steered and shepherded to see that.

  Chinese officialdom, however, will doubtless continue to insist on control, not only because it is in the nature of the Marxist system but because it is in their blood. In China’s past the chief obstacle to normal relations with the outside world was the refusal to receive foreigners as equals and the insubstantial belief that China could control access under a set of absurd regulations and impossible restrictions. What the Westerners wanted at first was not dominion but trade. If China had opened her ports to begin with, there might have been no Opium Wars. Thereafter her contact with foreigners became one of forced penetration, concessions, unequal treaties, patronage by missionaries, and the humiliation of being treated by the whites as “natives.” In the twentieth century China became the victim of Japan, a suppliant for Western aid, an unequal ally in World War II, and finally the betrayed partner of the chief Marxist power. Given this history, one would hardly expect to find an easy relationship with foreigners.

  Nor should we expect to find a greater understanding of Western mental habits than we have traditionally shown for theirs. Never having been a democracy, China has only the most nominal understanding of the principles of democratic government. Recently disliking some articles in the British press, Peking lodged a protest in London. When the Foreign Office endeavored to explain the limits of its influence on a free press, the Chinese Ambassador brushed aside the disclaimer, saying, “You must take effective measures.”

  The fanciful explanations and evasions which are meant to be understood as “No” or “No comment” or “Don’t pursue this further” are another source of difficulty. The Chinese consider failure to accept these circumlocutions as bad manners while the Westerner considers their transparent nonsense an insult to his intelligence. When he is told that he cannot go from Sian to Loyang on the same east-west railway line without returning to Peking 550 miles to the north, and he insists on a reason, he is disinclined to accept meekly the explanation that there is no toilet on the Sian-Loyang train. When after vain requests to see the Yellow River at various points, he is told that the drive cannot be arranged from Sian because the great bend of the river is 350 kilometers away, and he unforgivably gets out his map and demonstrates the distance to be under 150 kilometers, the procedure on neither side is the best path to friendship.

  When the Westerner, to make conversation at a banquet with the Vice-Chairman of the Provincial Revolutionary Committee of Shensi, brings up the name of the famous “Christian General,” Feng Yu-hsiang, governor and warlord of Shensi for a quarter century preceding the Communists, and the Vice-Chairman replies flatly, “Feng Yu-hsiang was never governor or warlord of Shensi,” one is left bewildered. It is as if Mayor Lindsay looking one straight in the eye were to say, “Fiorello La Guardia? No, he was never mayor of New York.” What motivated the Vice-Chairman of Shensi to make his assertion I have no idea. I could only feel myself facing a cultural gap without a bridge.

  The future of relations is clearly not without pitfalls, but the opportunity now to establish a workable relationship is probably as good as it is likely to be—if for no other reason than China’s extreme bitterness toward Russia. The rise of acute hostility between the two Communist giants is one of those turns in human affairs that happily make fools of the dogmatists, and history eternally fascinating. It has redirected the course of the last quarter of our century and, as a case of hate and fear in one quarter causing détente elsewhere, it has brought good out of bad to confuse the sentimentalists and inspire philosophers.

  The hostility arose on the one side from the Soviet Union’s jealousy, gradually becoming apprehension, of a younger rival’s challenge to its supremacy over the Communist world, and on the other side from China’s mixed dependence on Soviet assistance, mistrust of Soviet ambitions, and resentment of Soviet dictation. Physical contiguity and a disputed frontier exacerbated these mutual sentiments. When the Russians decided that in assisting China’s nuclear development, they were creating a potential threat to themselves, they broke it off midway and withdrew all industrial aid. Left to their own technology with unfinished installations, the Chinese felt the fury of the betrayed. Mention Russia and they talk first of “broken contracts”; orthodox scorn of “revisionists” and “socialist-imperialists” comes second. Since the break, the Russians have moved what appears to be a permanent force of a million men up against the frontier with the result that both nations live in the paranoid shadow of war—the Russians tempted by the idea of a preemptive strike, the Chinese preparing for it. Not without reason it has been said that for China, Nixon’s visit was equivalent in worrying the Russians to a million men on China’s side of the frontier. Meanwhile the Chinese feel forced to turn their energies into building underground cities which, it is claimed, could save a quarter of the population in the event of nuclear attack.

  With the other super-power allied to Chiang Kai-shek and represented by a belligerent American presence off Formosa and on the Asiatic mainland, China understandably felt encircled prior to 1971. It is this situation that explains the heavy internal propaganda on armed force and the glory of the gun and the heroic virtues of the PLA. Reaching down to primary schoolchildren who conduct military games and exercises with mock rifles, it is designed to instill military self-confidence and dignify the formerly despised status of the soldier. The purpose is more defensive than aggressive. As a Socialist state, the Chinese seem genuinely convinced of their own nonaggressiveness. The Socialist system, they maintain, does not allow invasion of other countries. “How could we explain to the world if we engaged in aggression against another state?” Since the party line establishes the equal status of all nations, China according to this dogma can never become a super-power because it will never dominate others. Similar assertions about noninterference in the affairs of others are less convincing.

  The one people whom the Chinese seem to exclude from the unity of the masses and regard as somehow undetachable from their government are the Israelis, the world’s eternal exception. No doubt this can be explained as a matter of wooing the Arabs away from the Russians, yet the Chinese show a particular animus in this case that is surprising, especially as Israel is the enemy of their enemy and is similar to them in many ways that might be expected to evoke empathy. They are the two oldest peoples with a continuous history and a continuous language and the only two now maintaining sovereignty over the same territory as 3,000 years ago. Both went through a long struggle and a final armed fight to achieve that sovereignty, both came to power at about the same time, 1948–49, both pursued a dominant idea, in one case revival, in the other revolution. Socialism if not Marxism was the early Zionist goal, and the communal system of the kibbutzim antedates the present communes of China. Both nations stress self-sufficiency for similar reasons, and both live in fear of invasion.

  To test the reaction, I attempted once or twice to bring out this likeness and suggest that China could exercise a unique influence in the Middle East that might make a major contribution to world peace. The reaction was not a bland pretense that I was talking about the weather which is the usual Chinese way of avoiding an uncomfortable subject, but an angry rejection of any likeness to “imperialist” Israel. In the case of a reasonably sophisticated diplomat like Huang Hua, chief of the Chinese delegation to the UN, it elicited a fiery denunciation of Israel as “the
tool of American oil interests,” a twist that would make even Aramco laugh. One never knows, when the Chinese talk like this, whether it is ignorance, or befuddled Marxist orthodoxy, or some kind of reverse oriental version of reality.

  —

  From the point of view of a single, unofficial, necessarily superficial traveler, these are some of the factors that will enter into the process of forging a Sino-American relationship. The relationship is of large importance to both countries, not to mention the world, but I do not think it should be approached sentimentally or with too great expectations. The Chinese are not likely, I expect, soon to expand very appreciably the admission of foreigners although the pressure on their doors is going to be hard to resist, as it was before, and may compel some relaxation of their tight system of selection. The given excuse of limited facilities is not determining; in an authoritarian state facilities are expandable but “friendships” must be supervised, and China intends to ensure that these develop according to her design.

  On our side there are problems too. Vis-à-vis Communist China, our heterodox political opinions make some of us too starry-eyed and others too hard-nosed. Anti-Communism has conditioned our foreign and military policy for too long not to have cut a deep channel. McCarthyism is never dead in this country, a fact too little appreciated by the Chinese, themselves suffering from a sentimental illusion about the masses being always right. They fail to realize that a large proportion of Americans firmly regard “Commy bastard” as one word and Communism as the source of all evil from long hair to crime, and are not so much bemused by a reactionary government as ahead of it.

  What one would like to hope for from our side is goodwill and a cool realism; a recognition that Communist China has different needs, different goals, and a different outlook on the world from ours and has committed itself to a political system which may be antithetical but need not be inimical. On that understanding we could move toward a reasonably sound relationship, not forgetting that “friendship is a form of struggle, too.”

  If Mao Had Come to Washington in 1945

  An Essay in Alternatives

  I

  ONE OF THE great “ifs” and harsh ironies of history hangs on the fact that in January 1945, four and a half years before they achieved national power in China, Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai, in an effort to establish a working relationship with the United States, offered to come to Washington to talk in person with President Roosevelt. What became of the offer has been a mystery until, with the declassification of new material, we now know for the first time that the United States made no response to the overture. Twenty-seven years, two wars, and x million lives later, after immeasurable harm wrought by the mutual suspicion and phobia of two great powers not on speaking terms, an American President, reversing the unmade journey of 1945, has traveled to Peking to treat with the same two Chinese leaders. Might the interim have been otherwise?

  The original proposal, transmitted on January 9 by Major Ray Cromley, Acting Chief of the American Military Observers Mission then in Yenan, to the Headquarters of General Albert C. Wedemeyer in Chungking, stated that Mao and Chou wanted their request to be sent to the “highest United States officials.” The text*1 was as follows:

  Yenan Government wants [to] dispatch to America an unofficial rpt unofficial group to interpret and explain to American civilians and officials interested the present situation and problems of China. Next is strictly off record suggestion by same: Mao and Chou will be immediately available either singly or together for exploratory conference at Washington should President Roosevelt express desire to receive them at White House as leaders of a primary Chinese party.

  Chou requested air travel to the United States if the invitation from Roosevelt were forthcoming. In case it was not, Mao and Chou wanted their request to remain secret in order to protect their relationship with Chiang Kai-shek, which was then in the throes of negotiation.

  The message, received in Chungking on January 10, was not forwarded, except as secondary reference in another context, either to the President, the State Department, or the War Department. It was held up in Chungking by Ambassador Patrick J. Hurley with the arm-twisted concurrence of General Wedemeyer.

  Before examining the circumstances and reasons for this procedure, let us imagine instead that, following a more normal process, the message had been duly forwarded to the “highest officials,” and had received an affirmative response which is 99 and 44/100 percent unlikely but not absolutely impossible. If Mao and Chou had then gone to Washington, if they had succeeded in persuading Roosevelt of the real and growing strength of their sub-government relative to that of the decadent Central Government, and if they had gained what they came for—some supply of arms, a cessation of America’s unqualified commitment to Chiang Kai-shek, and firm American pressure on Chiang to admit the Communists on acceptable terms to a coalition government (a base from which they expected to expand)—what then would have been the consequences?

  With prestige and power enhanced by an American connection, the Communists’ rise and the Kuomintang’s demise, both by then inevitable, would have been accelerated. Three years of civil war in a country desperately weary of war and misgovernment might have been, if not entirely averted, certainly curtailed. The United States, in that case guiltless of prolonging the civil war by consistently aiding the certain loser, would not then have aroused the profound antagonism of the ultimate winner. This antagonism would not then have been expressed in the arrest, beating, and in some cases imprisonment and deportation of American consular officials, the seizure of our consulate in Mukden, and other harassments, and these acts in turn might not then have decided us in anger against recognition of the Communist government. If, in the absence of ill-feeling, we had established relations on some level with the People’s Republic, permitting communication in a crisis, and if the Chinese had not been moved by hate and suspicion of us to make common cause with the Soviet Union, it is conceivable that there might have been no Korean War with all its evil consequences. From that war rose the twin specters of an expansionist Chinese Communism and an indivisible Sino-Soviet partnership. Without those two concepts to addle statesmen and nourish demagogues, our history, our present, and our future, would have been different. We might not have come to Vietnam.

  II

  ALTHOUGH every link in this chain is an “if,” together they tell us something about the conduct and the quirks of American foreign policy. What we have to ask is whether the quirks were accidents only, or was the bent built in? Was there a real alternative or was the outcome ineluctable? Looking back to find the answer, one perceives the ghost of the present, and from the perspective of a quarter century’s distance, its outline is more clearly visible than among the too-near trees of the Pentagon Papers.

  In the circumstances of 1945 there are three main points to remember: first, the Japanese were as yet undefeated; second, American policy was concentrated urgently and almost obsessively on the need to bring Nationalists and Communists into some form of coalition; third, the American Military Observers Mission of nine, later enlarged to eighteen members (known as the Dixie Mission), was already in contact with the Communists, having been functioning in Yenan since July 1944. Its purpose was to organize an intelligence network using Communist men and facilities in a strategic area vital to future operations, and generally to assess Communist capabilities and aims. These had become acutely important with the approach of an American landing in China (at that time still contemplated as part of the final assault), and with the approach, too, of Russian entry against Japan.

  Coalition was the central factor in American plans because only in this way would it be possible, while still supporting the legal government, to utilize Communist forces and territory against the Japanese entrenched in the north. A patched-up unity was the more imperative from our point of view because of the need to avert civil war between the Chinese parties. This above all else was the thing we most feared because it could defeat our maj
or objective, a stable, united China after the war—and because civil chaos would tempt outsiders. If the conflict erupted before the Japanese had been defeated and repatriated, they might take advantage of it to dig themselves into the mainland. And then there was the looming shadow of the Soviet Union. In the absence of coalition, we feared the Russians might use their influence, when they entered the war, to stir up the Communists and increase the possibility of a disunited China afterward. As early as May 1941, it may be worth noting, an unpublished policy study of the Council on Foreign Relations on the interrelation of the Chinese Communists, Japan, and the Soviet Union, stated: “It is vital that there be no civil war in China.”

  During November and December 1944, negotiations for coalition were pursued by Ambassador Hurley as go-between, with optimism, enthusiasm, and a minimum of acquaintance with the causes, nature, and history of the problem. On November 10 he had succeeded in hammering out with the Communists a Five-Point Plan for their participation in a coalition government. Its terms would have allowed them relative freedom of political action while acknowledging Chiang’s leadership and joint authority over their armed forces. Because Mao and his colleagues saw coalition as an avenue to American aid and, in the long run, to national power, they were prepared to pay this temporary price. To Hurley, who thought the Communists were a kind of Chinese populist Farmer-Labor party whose aim was a democratic share in national government, the terms seemed so workable and such a triumph of his own diplomacy that he signed the document along with Mao.

  On November 16, to his dismay, Chiang Kai-shek rejected the plan in toto on the ground, as he told Hurley, that to admit the Communists to government on the terms Hurley had signed would eventually result in their taking control of it. Hurley, who identified the Generalissimo’s tenure with American interest—and with his own—was ready at once to adapt coalition to the Generalissimo’s terms. That these did not reflect the realities in China was not apparent to the Ambassador, although it was to his staff, who had been observing conditions under the Kuomintang for years and now had the opportunity to visit and investigate the Communist zone. Their assessment pointed to a different American interest, and this became the critical issue: Was the American objective preservation of the Generalissimo, or was it a wider option that would not involve us in the fate of a “steadily decaying regime”?