Why the West Rules—for Now

by Morris, Ian;

  The century of civil war and factional fighting between the 1840s and 1940s had prevented China from following Japan’s rapid industrialization, but after his victory in 1949, Mao Zedong quickly adopted Lenin’s example and reorganized his realm as a subcontinental empire. Peace brought huge dividends, and just as had happened when the Sui dynasty reunited China in the sixth century, the Song in the tenth, and the Ming in the fourteenth, the economy revived. The Soviet-style Five Year Plan that Mao launched when the Korean War petered out was much less effective than the Asian Tigers’ capitalism, but it still more than doubled industrial output and pushed real wages up by a third. Life expectancy at birth soared from thirty-six years in 1950 to fifty-seven in 1957.

  There is good reason to think the Chinese economy would have continued growing strongly through the 1960s and ’70s if Mao had let it, but, like so many earlier Chinese emperors, Mao mistrusted his bureaucrats. The spurious laws of economics, he insisted, must yield to the truer laws of Marxism, but his planners—with their slide rules and graphs—seemed suspiciously bourgeois. Only when the indomitable will of the masses was unleashed, Mao insisted, would the people’s paradise be established.

  Mao had come of intellectual age in the 1910s, reading Marx (and Spencer); he was a long-term lock-in theorist, convinced that Eastern inferiority had been set in stone centuries ago. The answer, he decided, was to sweep away the “Four Olds”—old customs, old habits, old culture, and old thinking. Even the family had to go: “The dearest people in the world are our parents,” the China Youth Journal explained, “yet they cannot be compared with Chairman Mao and the Communist Party … which has given us everything.” Proclaiming a “Great Leap Forward” in which China would catch up with the West, Mao bundled 99 percent of the population into collective farms with thousands of members. In some places, utopianism ran riot:

  The Party Secretary of Paoma town announced in October 1958 that Socialism would end on November 7th and Communism would begin on November 8th. After the meeting, everyone immediately took to the streets and began grabbing goods out of the shops. When the shelves were bare, they went to other people’s homes and took their chickens and vegetables home to eat. People even stopped making a distinction as to which children belonged to whom. Only wives were safe from this sharing because the Party Secretary was unsure about this.

  In other places, cynicism prevailed. Some called this the Eat-It-All-Up Period: with every incentive to work and save taken away, many people did neither.

  Pressured from higher up to report bigger harvests even though yields were falling, party officials did so and then confiscated ever-larger slices of production to justify their figures. “It is not that there is no food,” one commissar insisted. “There is plenty of grain, but 90 percent of the people have ideological problems.”

  To make matters worse, Mao fell out with Khrushchev. Cut off from Soviet aid, he tried to match Western steel production by pulling 40 million peasants off the land to build backyard foundries, smelting whatever ores they could find locally and even melting their pots and pans to forge homemade steel. Little of what they produced was usable, but no one dared say so.

  The countryside became increasingly surreal. “The air,” said one reporter, “is filled with the high-pitched melodies of local operas pouring through an amplifier above the site and accompanied by the hum of blowers, the panting of gasoline engines, the honking of heavily laden lorries, and the bellowing of oxen hauling ore and coal.”

  “Communism is paradise,” the peasants were expected to sing; “the People’s Communes are the bridge to it.” But there was trouble in paradise. When not singing, the people were starving. The following recollection is unusual only in its dispassionate tone:

  No one in our family died. By February 1960, Grandpa’s legs were completely swollen. His hair fell out, his body was covered in sores, and he was too weak to open his mouth. A friend came by and drained off some of the sores and this helped. We still had three small goats and an aunt killed two of them secretly to help him. Unfortunately, the cadres discovered this and took the carcasses away.

  Even so, Grandpa was lucky. According to another informant,

  The worst thing that happened during the famine was this: parents would decide to allow the old and the young to die first … a mother would say to her daughter, “You have to go and see your granny in heaven.” They stopped giving the girl-children food. They just gave them water … One woman was reported and arrested by the Public Security Bureau. No one in the village criticized her when she returned from a labor camp a few years later.

  About 20 million starved between 1958 and 1962. After Mao’s death, the Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party officially concluded that the Great Helmsman had been right 70 percent of the time and wrong 30 percent, but around 1960 the party was much less convinced of this. A technocratic clique sidelined Mao and reintroduced some private property. By 1965 harvests had returned to 1957 levels.

  Mao, though, was not beaten. China, like the West, had gone through a postwar baby boom, spawning a huge cohort of impatient teenagers. Affluent youngsters in the liberal Western core exploited their purchasing power to reorient taste around their music, clothes, and sexual mores, but in China Mao reoriented the tastes of angry youngsters around himself. Preaching a permanent “Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution,” in 1966 he incited the young to attack everything.

  Abandoning schools and colleges, millions of adolescents became rampaging Red Guards, beating and humiliating first their teachers and then anyone else who looked reactionary. While Western youths sang about revolution, Chinese youths lived it. “It was class hatred that made me denounce [my classmate] Li Jianping,” one literature student proudly wrote on a poster,

  and that drove the masses to such popular fury. They beat her—a counterrevolutionary element sheltered by the old municipal party committee for so many years—to death with their clubs. It was an immensely satisfying event, to avenge the revolutionary people, to avenge the dead martyrs. Next I am going to settle scores with those bastards who shelter traitors.

  Mao tried to direct this rage against his rivals but never really controlled it. With no one safe from denunciation as a counterrevolutionary, people rushed to get their criticisms in first. To many it was just bewildering: one latrine attendant grumbled that he was out of work because too many professors were being forced to clean toilets as reeducation. Yet plenty found it exhilarating. Young workers flocked to join the students and factories ground to a halt. Red Guards invited film crews to record them smashing Buddhist statues, Confucian temples, and Han dynasty relics. One gang even occupied the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and appointed its own properly proletarian diplomats.

  In 1969, with events apparently lurching toward disaster on the scale of the Great Leap Forward, even Mao lost his nerve. Thousands had died. Millions had had their lives ruined. The Asian Tigers were steadily pulling away from the People’s Republic. Relations with the Soviets were so bad that eight hundred Chinese had been killed in border clashes. Mao belatedly distanced himself from the radicals and looked around for a lifeline.

  He was thrown one by perhaps the least likely person on earth—the United States’ virulently anti-Communist president Richard Nixon. Nixon saw a deal with China as a way to outflank the Soviets in the Cold War, and in 1972, after much back-channel diplomacy, he flew to Beijing and shook Mao’s hand. “This was the week that changed the world,” Nixon crowed, and in some ways he was right. The prospect of a Washington-Beijing axis terrified Brezhnev so much that within three months of going to China, Nixon was sitting in Moscow making deals.

  Mao profited almost as much. By meeting Nixon he signaled support for the pragmatists who hungered after Western technology and opposition to the radicals who had gutted China’s educated classes. In one celebrated case, a student won a coveted university place by turning in a blank examination book with a note claiming that revolutionary purity was more valuable than “boo
kworms who for many years have been taking it easy and have done nothing useful.” In a flourish that Soviet jokers might have appreciated, radical bigwigs (allegedly) argued that “a socialist train behind schedule is better than a revisionist train on schedule.”

  After 1972 the pragmatists pushed back, although it was only after Mao died in 1976 that the tide turned decisively in their favor. Deng Xiaoping, twice purged as a Right Deviationist under Mao and twice rehabilitated, now muscled his rivals aside and showed his true colors. Taking Mao’s old mantra “seek truth from facts” as his motto, Deng squarely confronted the most inconvenient truth in China: that the population was growing faster than the economy. To feed all the empty stomachs that came onto the job market each year, China’s economy needed to grow by 7 percent every year for at least a generation. The alternative could be famines that would dwarf the Great Leap Forward.

  Every experience suggested that given peace and a united government—both largely lacking since the 1840s—China, too, could prosper within the Western-dominated global economy, but Deng went further still, actively pushing China toward integration. To reduce the pressure on resources, he promoted the notorious One Child Policy, which (in theory) required women who had two babies to be sterilized,* and to increase the resources available he embraced the global economy. China joined the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, opened Special Economic Zones to attract capitalists from Macao, Hong Kong, and Taiwan, and even admitted a Coca-Cola plant to Shanghai.

  By 1983 Deng had effectively killed Mao’s communes. Peasants were pursuing “sideline” activities for personal gain and businessmen were keeping some of their profits. Farmland still belonged to collectives but families could now lease plots for thirty years and work them privately. Urban property, on longer leases, could even be mortgaged. Output soared, and although liberalization horrified conservatives, there was no going back. “During the ‘Cultural Revolution,’” Deng pronounced,

  there was a view that poor communism was preferable to rich capitalism … Because I refuted that view, I was brought down … [but] the main task of socialism is to develop the productive forces, steadily improve the life of the people, and keep increasing the material wealth of the society … To get rich is no sin.

  Similar thoughts were also assailing Communists four thousand miles away in Moscow. After the shock of Nixon’s trip to China the 1970s had gone rather well for the Soviet Union. When the Arab states drove up the price of oil, the Soviet Union, a massive exporter, benefited too, and with money rolling in, Moscow funded and won a series of proxy wars and overtook America in nuclear arms in 1978. But that was communism’s high tide. An intervention to prop up a client regime in Afghanistan turned into a draining war that dragged on through the 1980s. Oil prices fell by two-thirds, and the United States sharply increased military spending, especially on high-tech weapons.

  The politburo was already worried that ordinary Russians could see their train was standing still. Its state-run economy could churn out tanks and Kalashnikovs but not computers or cars (another Soviet joke—“How do you double a Lada’s* value?” The answer: “Fill up the tank”). Dissent was simmering everywhere. The thought of a new arms race terrified the Soviet Empire’s rulers.

  “We can’t go on living like this,” Mikhail Gorbachev confessed to his wife, Raisa, as they paced their garden in 1985. Gorbachev would, in a few hours, be named premier of the Soviet Union, yet the garden was the only place he could escape his own snooping spies. Like Deng, Gorbachev knew he had to face reality. The explosion of an antiquated nuclear reactor at Chernobyl in 1986 revealed that the Soviet Union was not just falling behind but actually falling apart, and Gorbachev threw restructuring (perestroika) and transparency (glasnost’) into high gear—only to rediscover what Marx and Engels had known a century and a half before: liberalization sweeps away all fixed, fast-frozen relations, not just those we dislike.

  All that was solid melted into air, and Deng and Gorbachev both learned that economic freedoms merely whetted appetites for political ones. Sometimes Deng found the protesters useful allies against hard-line Communists; sometimes he cracked down on them. Gorbachev, though, suspected that trying to use force could cause the whole regime to collapse. When he allowed open elections to the Congress of People’s Deputies in spring 1989 and the deputies repaid this by jeering him on live television, he declined to suspend Congress. Instead he flew to Beijing, where protestors against one-party rule cheered him. “In the Soviet Union they have Gorbachev,” one student poster read. “In China, we have whom?”

  Deng, not amused, declared martial law the day after Gorbachev left. By early June 1989 a million protestors were crammed around Tiananmen Square, some dancing and singing, some dying on hunger strike. Deng branded them the “dregs of society,” people determined to “establish a bourgeois republic entirely dependent on the West,” and sent in the troops. Pictures flashed around the world of torn bodies, crushed bicycles, and a lone, unknown protestor blocking the path of advancing tanks.

  Repression won in China, but even when Hungary and Poland announced multiparty elections, Gorbachev still resisted Deng’s lead. Following what one minister called the Sinatra Doctrine, he left the Soviet satellites to do it their way. So astonished was the newly elected Polish prime minister that he fainted during his own inauguration. Testing the limits, Hungarian troops rolled up the barbed wire along their border with Austria. Thousands of East Germans “vacationing” in Hungary abandoned their cars and walked across the border to freedom.

  And still Gorbachev did nothing. When he visited Berlin in October, crowds again cheered him and begged him to stay. Over the next few weeks East Germans started dancing on top of the Berlin Wall and chipping at it with hammers and chisels. When no one shot them, thousands crossed into West Berlin. Confused and incompetent, the East German regime disintegrated. Over the next few months Communist dictators all across eastern Europe went the same way and the nations bundled together within the Soviet Union started declaring independence. When even the president of the new Russian Federation announced his intention to quit the union, Gorbachev was left as general secretary of an empire that no longer existed. On Christmas Day, 1991, he bowed to pressure to sign a decree formally dissolving it. The end was almost too perfect: Gorbachev’s Soviet pen would not write and he had to borrow one from a CNN cameraman.

  The United States had won the War of the West.

  EAST WIND, WEST WIND

  When dynastic empires proved unable to cope with total war, almost vanishing from the earth between 1917 and 1922, the United States had shown itself a very reluctant leviathan, but when communism proved equally inadequate between 1989 and 1991, Americans were ready to fill the void. Every two years, the Department of Defense reviews its grand strategy in a report called the Defense Planning Guidance. The first draft of the report due in March 1992, just three months after the fall of the Soviet Union, laid out a bold new vision:

  Our first objective is to prevent the reemergence of a new rival, either on the territory of the former Soviet Union or elsewhere, that poses a threat on the order of that posed formerly by the Soviet Union. This … requires that we endeavor to prevent any hostile power from dominating a region whose resources would, under consolidated control, be sufficient to generate global power. These regions include Western Europe, East Asia, the territory of the former Soviet Union, and Southwest Asia.

  When “an official who believes this post-cold-war strategy debate should be carried out in the public domain” (as The New York Times put it) leaked this draft, the government quickly softened its tone, but something very like the original vision of a world with the United States as its sole superpower came to pass all the same.

  The old Soviet Union imploded in a scramble to loot its assets. The breakdown was not as bad as the civil war that had followed the fall of the Romanovs, but Russia, the main successor state, nevertheless saw output fall 40 percent in the 1990s and real wages 45 percent. In 1970
the average Soviet citizen died at sixty-eight, just four years younger than the average western European; by 2000 the average Russian died at sixty-six, twelve years behind residents of the European Union. Russia was still enormous, resource-rich, and the world’s biggest nuclear power, and by 2008 the return of strong government and rising energy prices had emboldened it into bullying the former Soviet republics and blackmailing the European Union. But as the Defense Planning Guidance had hoped, Russia posed nothing like the threat of the old Soviet Union.

  Nor did the European Union challenge America’s dominance of the Western core. To some viewers Europe’s lurches toward (then away from) economic and political integration looked like steps toward a mighty subcontinental empire, finally achieving peacefully what the Habsburgs, Bourbons, Napoleon, and Hitler had failed to achieve through violence, but in reality Europe’s continuing divisions, slowing economic growth, aging population, and military weakness left it far from superpower status.