by Odd Westad
Since the early part of the nineteenth century, China had never been more isolated in international affairs than it was during the 1960s. The CCP revolution, which had promised to make China rich and strong had, it seemed, ended up making it poor and weak. True, China under Communism had kept its territorial unity and made huge advances in technology and in areas such as public health. It had also carried out a social revolution which had eliminated private control of agriculture and industry, thereby making all Chinese (except the surviving party elite) more equal. But this equality, in the 1970s, was a question of being equally poor and visibly helpless in an international context. No wonder that some Chinese were starting to ask themselves questions that were distinctly similar to those of the 1920s: How could China be saved from poverty and stagnation? How could China be made modern and successful? What was the meaning of being Chinese in a world where those who had left the country prospered, while those who stayed at home suffered and failed?
CHAPTER 10
CHINA’S AMERICA
THROUGHOUT THE TWENTIETH CENTURY, Chinese have had a complicated but almost obsessive relationship with the United States. It is a place many Chinese would like to go to, in order to visit, to sojourn, or to settle. But it is also a threatening and confusing zone, where politics, values, friendships and even the landscape itself are in constant flux. America challenges much of what Chinese think of as their values: tradition, family, and concern for the collective. It is also suspect because Americans are believed by some to look down on the Chinese, viewing them as inferior and that is why Americans locked their country’s gates to them. It is impossible for most Chinese to understand how the United States, which is a nation of immigrants, could have any other reason for Chinese exclusion than prejudice. History matters a great deal in China, and in terms of memory, the negative in Chinese historical relations with the United States often outweighs the positive.
But then there is also the endless fascination with things American, with American wealth, and with American ideas. Although few Chinese today see it this way, the United States and China have had much in common during the twentieth century. Chinese often laud their traditions, but they have spent most of the past hundred years throwing them away and transforming—endlessly, it seems—into something different. Much of this transformation has been inspired by the United States: Technology, business, culture, and political concepts with American origins have been ubiquitous in China, even when the Chinese state has been most preoccupied with rooting out all American influence. What connects, though, goes further than simple exchanges. It has to do with the speed of change itself and with dissatisfaction with things as they are. It also has to do with accepting change. Even though the political trajectories of China and the United States in the twentieth century could hardly be more different, both peoples have been primed to accept rapid transformation of their daily lives. The intense drive toward modernity that has motivated both American and Chinese elites may have come about for different reasons—for the Chinese the urgency of reviving the past, for the Americans the necessity of recreating the future. Still, both have a teleological purpose for entering into modernity, and a firm belief that only their country can fully possess it.
In 1970, Mao Zedong made the decision to “ease,” as he put it, the overall conflict with the United States. China was exiting from the most disastrous phase of the Cultural Revolution, but this reorientation in China’s foreign policy had nothing to do with any reevaluation by Mao of his political ideals. For the rest of his life he remained wedded to China’s complete revolutionary transformation. The reason for his turnaround was China’s increasing conflict with the Soviet Union and the fear of a Soviet attack. Most of this fear was born of the ideological conflict with Moscow in the 1960s, a conflict that grew in the minds of the Chinese leadership to a cataclysmic contest that could end in nuclear war. But the opening to the United States had unintended consequences that Mao could not foresee and which would have horrified him if he had been able to. The final part of the twentieth century became America’s decades in China, a time when one foreign country dominated the sense most Chinese had of “abroad” in a way that had never happened before and probably will never happen again. American influence was everywhere: in the economy, politics, arts, and consumer patterns. For a while it seemed that all that mattered in China’s relations with the world was the relationship, for good and bad, with the United States.
At the start of the twenty-first century, the fascination with America persists, even if diplomatic relations are sometimes problematic. The Chinese Communist leadership may talk a great deal about their troubles with the United States and about extending their cooperation with other powers so as to balance the predominance of Washington within the international system. But the CCP has accepted that system more or less the way it was created, first by Britain and then by the United States, on all matters from the framework for trade to the functions of the UN Security Council. A rising China may want to be seen as an alternative to the United States in international affairs. But while rising, its domestic social and economic system has been transformed in America’s image to an extent that even Europeans and Latin Americans sometimes find puzzling. China’s American dream may be discordant, but it is still very intense.
WHEN MAO ZEDONG, at the height of the crisis with the Soviets in 1969, issued orders to begin easing relations with the United States, few among his top colleagues were surprised. The CCP heads had worked themselves into a frenzy over the conflict with Moscow. Because ideology was the only significant aspect of life during the Cultural Revolution, all attention was on political divergence among Communists, be it outside or inside China. Those of his colleagues who had survived the purges saw that the Chairman’s move was a tactical one, similar to his contacts with the Americans during the war with Japan: When a great danger is threatening, every deflection helps. None among the leaders thought that China’s willingness to work with the Americans to confront what they saw as the growth of Soviet power would influence the course of the revolution at home. And only the most well-informed among them knew how desperately weak China was in military terms after the ravages of Mao’s political campaigns and how important it therefore was for it to break out of its isolation.
Mao was exceptionally lucky with the timing of his American overtures. Richard Nixon, who became president in 1969, was the only US Cold War leader who believed that the United States needed broad alliances outside Europe and Japan in order to prevail in the competition with the Soviet Union. The war in Vietnam and domestic unrest had convinced Nixon, and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, that an opening to China was an option for American diplomacy, in addition to working with anti-Soviet Third World powers such as Brazil, South Africa, Iran, and Indonesia. The intensification of the Sino-Soviet conflict accelerated Nixon’s wish for a dialogue with Beijing. In October 1969 he asked the Pakistanis to facilitate such contacts and for them to tell Mao that “the US would welcome accommodation with Communist China.” It frustrated the new leaders in Washington that Beijing was so slow to respond. But in spite of Mao’s willingness to ease relations, the chaos of the Cultural Revolution had created near paralysis in Chinese diplomacy and ensured that any new initiative would take time to materialize. When the two sides finally, in February 1970, agreed to a meeting in Beijing, the intense and prolonged US attack in mid-1970 on Cambodia set the tentative negotiations back by several months. And when Mao, finally, in October 1970 decided to send a personal signal, he did not exactly find the easiest route. Receiving his old American acquaintance, the left-wing journalist Edgar Snow, atop Tian’anmen for the national day celebrations, and telling him that Nixon himself would be welcome to China, was not the best way of contacting a Republican president.
In the end, it was Nixon himself who cut to the chase and decided on the greatest political gamble of his career. He was, he told Zhou Enlai in a secret message in May 1971, willing to come to Beijing i
f a secret trip by Kissinger could be arranged first and a suitable format for the visit could be found. The Chinese interpreted the proposal as a sign of US weakness. The Politburo speculated that Nixon acted mainly on account of pressures from “the broad masses of the people” who were against the “Vietnam War and racial discrimination.” But China’s leaders concluded that “since there is no way to be sure that an armed revolution would break out in the United States,” Nixon’s offer should be accepted. Kissinger arrived in Beijing for a secret visit in July 1971, after having feigned illness during a trip to Pakistan. Nixon followed for an official visit in February 1972. For Mao, ill and politically weakened after his second in command, Lin Biao, had broken with the regime and died while trying to flee to the Soviet Union, Nixon’s visit was a true godsend. In the eyes of many Chinese, the leader of the most powerful Western country recognized China’s centrality by himself coming to Beijing to sit with the Chairman and listen to his political wisdom. The Americans were full of praise for their new acquaintances. Kissinger said that Mao’s chief diplomat, Zhou Enlai, was “the most impressive foreign leader I have ever met. We spoke for 20 hours, he completely without notes. . . . Those 20 hours were the most impressive conversations I have ever had.” Mao was less fulsome. “Kissinger is a university professor who does not know anything about diplomacy,” he told the North Vietnamese.1 As could be expected, everyone agreed that Nixon in China was the week that changed the world. But no one could say how it had actually changed.
It took Chinese and Americans almost the rest of the decade to decide the content of what Kissinger had called Sino-American “rapprochement.” The Chinese wanted trade, which got underway quickly, and military technology, which was slower in coming. The two countries began a limited cooperation against the Soviets, especially in the Third World, with the Chinese helping the CIA get in touch with small Maoist or anti-Soviet groups in southern Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. Most importantly, Beijing helped the United States get out of the Vietnam War. The moment the North Vietnamese leaders heard of Nixon’s visit to China, they knew that they had better settle fast. The Vietnamese, alongside the great majority of the world’s left-wing movements, saw Mao’s willingness to work with Washington as treason, and the most important effect in the Third World was probably to drive radical regimes and movements closer to working with the Soviets. China was no longer an alternative for those who wanted world revolution.
Despite the hopes for a quick normalization of Sino-American relations after Nixon’s visit, another seven years would pass before full mutual recognition took place. The main reason for this delay, which gave the Soviets time to mobilize against Chinese and US collusion in the Third World, was the political turbulence of the 1970s in both Beijing and Washington. On the Chinese side, much of the political madness of the Cultural Revolution continued up to Mao’s death in 1976, and uncertainty reigned afterward. On the American side, Nixon was forced to resign in disgrace in 1974 because of the Watergate scandal, and his successors, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, shared neither his political bravery nor his brutality against political enemies. The relationship to Taiwan became a major irritant. Most Americans were unwilling to give up the old alliance with the rump Guomindang regime (with Chiang Kai-shek, now in his mid-eighties, still president) in order to normalize fully with Communist Beijing. Despite increases in trade and technology transfers, the complete lack of dynamism in the state-run Chinese economy prevented strong links from being developed. Inside China, after years of anti-American propaganda, Mao’s about-face contributed to the dominant political cynicism, in spite of the leadership’s lame explanations that the Americans had finally come to their senses and realized the strength of the Chinese people. Among Americans who visited, such as the US representative in Beijing, George H. W. Bush, the Maoist dictatorship was orientalized into an expression of the collectivism and regimented will of the Chinese. Meanwhile the Chinese leaders’ gnomic statements on international strategy were taken as ultimate examples of the realist wisdom of an ancient civilization, instead of the ignorance about the world that they really represented. The main advantages China had in the first years of its renewed relationship with the United States were probably the chance it now got to normalize relations with other US allies—Japan, Indonesia, Thailand, and the West European countries, for instance—and the increased security it received vis-à-vis the Soviet Union.2
MAO ZEDONG DIED ON 9 September 1976. In spite of the chaos and confusion he had created over the last part of his rule, most Chinese looked upon Mao as a once-great leader who had united the country and made it strong. Just as after Stalin’s death in the Soviet Union, many people felt bereaved and uncertain, and it took time for the immensity of Mao’s misjudgments and crimes to become known. In fact, the CCP government has never admitted them fully, and, absurdly, Mao’s portrait still dominates the vista at the central square in Beijing, Tian’anmen. In terms of foreign as well as domestic policy, all cards were off the table once the Chairman had died. China could have moved further to the left and become a genocidal hell not unlike Pol Pot’s Cambodia (Pol Pot was China’s closest foreign ally when Mao died) or it could have moved toward a more open and pluralistic form of socialism. Mao’s chosen successor was the recently appointed Premier Hua Guofeng. His main attraction for the Chairman, beside his oafish loyalty, seems to have been that he was from Hunan, Mao’s home province, and therefore could better understand what the party leader said. Hua did not have much of a vision of his own, but after weeks of uncertainty he allied himself with the military and carried out a coup d’état in which the Chairman’s radical allies on the Politburo were arrested. The military, afraid of a return to the chaos of the height of the Cultural Revolution, insisted that old leaders such as the party’s former general secretary Deng Xiaoping and Chen Yun, the planning expert, both purged by Mao before his death, be brought back into power. All over the country those who had been sent away, purged, or arrested began coming back to their homes. For the Communist Party old guard, and for many ordinary Chinese, especially in the cities, it was as if a nightmare was over.
Deng Xiaoping, given his third chance to set China’s course, did not waste time. More than any other Chinese leader, Deng realized that his country’s isolation and endless political campaigns had cost it dearly in terms of development. He wanted to experiment in order to advance. First he wanted to go back to using material incentives to increase production in agriculture, along the lines of what he and Liu Shaoqi had proposed in the early 1960s, before Mao had purged Deng and killed Liu. He was looking at the more liberal socialist economies of Hungary and Yugoslavia as possible models for China. Then, as his power grew within the leadership, Deng began considering more radical reforms. While exiled in the south in 1976, Deng had noticed attempts by factories and collectives to import technology through Hong Kong or use surpluses to barter for materials or equipment they needed. In 1978 he began asking whether all of China now needed such reform and opening. Deng told the CCP that instead of being denounced as smugglers and traitors, those who wanted to develop fast and test political theory against practical results were heroes of the four modernizations that China needed. By 1981, with Mao’s successor, Hua Guofeng, demoted and the military firmly behind a policy of growth, Deng was ready to go further. In agriculture, industry, technology, and military affairs China was still a backward country, he declared, and the party had to throw overboard Mao’s errors and focus on “modernization centering on economic construction.” In that process, “some people may get rich first, through hard work.”3 That did not matter, as long as the Chinese economy could grow.
Upon returning to the frontline of Chinese politics, Deng made it clear that the United States would serve as the model for China’s technological needs. After he had been purged for a second time, Deng had spent much time thinking about the significance of the change that was taking place in science and technology in the 1970s. In a conversation with the Chines
e-Belgian writer Han Suyin in 1977, he spoke about his concerns over China falling behind.4
In the 1960s, the gap between the scientific and technological levels of China and the rest of the world was not very big. However, in the late 1960s and the early 1970s, the . . . levels of the rest of the world improved tremendously. All fields of science developed quickly. The improvement made in one year amounted to that of several years; we might even say the improvement made in one day amounted to that of several years. In 1975, I once said, China was fifty years behind Japan in science. At the time, I had wanted to pay more attention to scientific study, but, in the end, I could not do so, since I myself was under house arrest. If we do not take the newest scientific achievements as our starting points. . . , I am afraid there is no hope for China.5
For Deng, the easing of tension with the United States could be made to serve China’s economic development. Visiting several American cities in 1979, the Chinese leader was bowled over by the technology, the productivity, and the consumer choices he found. After returning home, he told his colleagues that he could not sleep for several nights, thinking about how China might achieve such abundance. One thing was clear to Deng: Working with the United States on foreign affairs opened gigantic opportunities for US technology transfers to China, both military and civilian. America was the world’s leading power, and opposing it made no sense, even if the Taiwan issue remained unresolved. Deng often said that there would be a time for China to take a more prominent position in international affairs. But that time was not now, when China was weak and needed to grow fast.