That threat continues to concern us. In fact, it is greater today than it was sixteen years ago. The specter of encirclement haunts the Chinese. In 1972, the PRC had friendly relations with North Vietnam, Americans were in South Vietnam and Cambodia, and Afghanistan was neutral. Today Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Afghanistan are pro-Soviet and anti-Chinese. In 1979 China clashed with the Soviet-backed Vietnamese, suffering 20,000 casualties.
But even if there had been no Soviet threat, it was imperative that we build a new relationship between the world’s most powerful nation and the world’s most populous nation. One reason was the obvious economic and cultural benefits that would grow from friendly relations. The other was the harsh realities of the atomic age. When I met with Charles de Gaulle in 1967, he said that while he had no illusions about China’s ideology, the United States should not “leave them isolated in their rage.” I responded, “In ten years, when China has made significant nuclear progress, we will have no choice. It is vital that we have more communications with them than we have today.” The modern world cannot afford the risk of the misunderstandings and misjudgments that can occur when powerful nations fail to communicate in spite of their differences. Our estrangement from China, justified though it may have been on purely ideological grounds, was an ideological luxury neither we nor they could afford any longer. Nuclear weapons represent many things to many people; to responsible national leaders, they represent a compelling reason to search for common ground.
In the long run the Sino–U.S. relationship will endure not because of fear but because of hope. Nothing will come between us so long as neither side harbors territorial ambitions against the other or the other’s friends and allies. We have nothing to lose from friendship with each other; we have everything to gain. In just over sixteen years the United States, whose trade with China had been virtually nil during the years 1949 to 1972, has become China’s third largest trading partner. China is still a developing country, but it is developing at an extraordinary rate. Between 1978, when Deng’s reforms began, and 1983 the personal income of China’s 800 million peasants—the earliest beneficiaries of the reforms—increased by 70 percent. Some experts predict that at the beginning of the next century the GNP of China will be greater than that of West Germany.
To keep this in perspective, however, it is important to add that in the year 2000 the per-capita income of sixty million West Germans will be $20,000 a year, compared with $875 for China’s one billion people. China’s new Communist Party General Secretary, Zhao Ziyang, recently said matter-of-factly that it could take as long as one hundred years for the modernization drive begun by Deng to bring China to the level of advanced countries such as the United States. Some of Zhao’s predecessors in the communist world—especially Mao in China and Stalin in the Soviet Union—thought such progress could be forced in a matter of years rather than decades. Tens of millions of Chinese and Russians died in the resulting upheavals. To some analysts Zhao’s more realistic predictions sound like lowered expectations. To me, they simply sound Chinese. Unlike many leaders in both East and West, Zhao knows that instant solutions are no solutions at all. But he is also supremely confident that a superior people will inevitably produce superior results once their productive and creative energies are released.
When we again talked about China in 1969 de Gaulle said, “It would be better for you to recognize China before you are obligated to do so by the growth of China.” He was right. The potential of a billion of the ablest people in the world will inevitably make China into an economic giant and also a military giant. Our goal now and in the remaining years of the twentieth century should be to make certain that the China of the twenty-first century will be an independent giant—not necessarily pro-Western, but definitely not pro-Soviet.
The two-decades-long freeze between Washington and Beijing was an unnatural estrangement between two peoples who, as events since 1972 have shown, have much to offer each other. So long as China was allied with the Soviet Union, we had no choice but to be adversaries. With that barrier removed, we have powerful reasons to be friends.
Today the people of the United States and China are partners in China’s development. Assuming that both sides stay the course, in the twenty-first century the Sino–U.S. relationship will be one of the most important, and most mutually beneficial, bilateral relationships in the world.
China’s economic revolution is a product of two dramatic changes of outlook by its leaders: their new attitude toward the West and Deng Xiaoping’s economic reforms in 1978. The Sino–U.S. rapprochement in 1972 gave China access to Western markets and technology; Deng’s reforms in 1978 enabled China to put its new access to use. The first change followed China’s realization that it needed a way to balance the threat of Soviet military power. The second followed China’s realization that it needed an alternative to the Soviet economic model that was threatening to doom the Chinese people to permanent poverty.
These two declarations of independence from Soviet domination and influence were the products of three strikingly different leaders.
Mao and Chou were the two immutable forces behind the 1949 revolution. Working in tandem they changed China forever; the few times they were at odds they nearly ripped it apart. When I met them in 1972, to the outside world they appeared in the studied guises of Mao the philosopher and Chou the administrator. During our first meeting Mao pointedly brushed aside discussion of specific foreign-policy and domestic issues; such matters, he said, were to be taken up with Premier Chou. “I discuss the philosophical questions,” he said. Sunk into an easy chair in his cluttered, book-lined study, presenting his visitors with inscribed copies of his collected poems, Mao affected the posture of father of his country, a beloved and bemused figure who occupied a space just outside and above the course of everyday events. The reality was different. Until his death in 1976 Mao remained the pivotal force in China.
Both men had been dedicated revolutionaries. After the communists took power in 1949, Mao continued to be a revolutionary. Chou became a nation-builder, a consolidator of central national authority instead of a destroyer of it. He brought the same cold, calculating ruthlessness to bear on building a new China that he had previously brought to bear on driving the old China, in the form of Chiang Kai-shek’s army, from the mainland.
Chou had turned from revolutionary politics to the challenge of how China was to be governed after the revolution. But Mao did not want the governing to get in the way of what he saw as a permanent revolution. He was quirky and unpredictable—“a man inhabited by a vision, possessed by it,” as André Malraux described him to me before my 1972 trip. To China’s masses he was poet, prophet, pedant, and frequently punisher. In the 1960s, believing that China was losing its revolutionary zeal, he unleashed the Cultural Revolution to gouge out all Western influence. Chou and the gradual policy of economic modernization he had set in motion were engulfed in the frenzy of Mao’s Red Guards. In the end Chou, and his partnership with Mao, survived. Its most lasting consequence, besides the revolution itself, was China’s split from the Soviet Union and its rapprochement with the United States.
China’s second revolution, the sharp turn away from Marxist-Leninist economic doctrine, was engineered by a leader who had been with Mao and Chou on the Long March that preceded the first. Deng Xiaoping was, and remains, a dedicated communist whose presence at the creation of the new China in 1949 and contributions to the consolidation of the regime earned him a position as a trusted subordinate of Mao and Chou. But his anguish over the failure of Mao’s Great Leap Forward caused him to rethink his faith in doctrinaire Marxism-Leninism, and his first tentative reform proposals in the 1960s caused the Maoist radicals to rethink Deng. In 1967 he was sent into internal exile, but by 1973 he had reappeared as a potential successor to Chou En-lai, whose own first cautious steps toward economic modernization had also been thwarted by Mao. In 1975 Deng and Chou, by now near death, had begun work on the “Four Modernizations”—the prin
ciples that govern China today—when the radicals lashed out again, returning Deng to exile and leaving Chou to spend the last few months of his life on the fringes of power. But soon the nation-builders won out over the fanatics, the “Gang of Four” was crushed, and Deng—twice down for the count—was China’s “paramount leader.”
I have met Deng four times—in Washington in 1979 and in Beijing in 1979, 1982, and 1985. Each time I left Beijing more impressed with his driven determination and his total self-confidence. And each time my impressions of the leader were strengthened by the changes under way in the nation he led. The people brim with confidence and with curiosity about things Western and American. When I met Mao and Chou in 1972, the young women who translated for us were dressed in baggy gray Mao suits and had short, severe haircuts. The Chinese communists had apparently taken too seriously Henry Higgins’ admonition “Why can’t a woman be like a man?” When I visited Canton in 1985, we were served by beautiful Chinese girls wearing high heels and stylish, multicolored gowns. My host observed, “You will note that we have more color in our clothes today. The same is true of our ideology.”
It would be naive to read too much into either change. China’s leaders are still communists, not capitalists. And despite their warm hospitality and their seemingly insatiable thirst for contact with the West, the goal of their broad economic reforms is not to change the essence of China but to make China stronger by importing those influences that can be put to work in China without changing it. This is in accordance with Chinese tradition. For centuries China has never been permanently conquered by foreign invaders or foreign ideas. It has absorbed them. In commenting on Mao’s revolution, Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Kwan Yew told me in 1967, “Mao is painting on a mosaic. When the rains come they will wash away what he has painted, and China will remain.”
Until Deng came to power in 1978, the effect of China’s doctrinaire Marxism was to give every Chinese an equal share in poverty. Today, some are being given a chance to earn their way out of poverty. Deng recognized that his choice was between equality at the price of poverty and progress at the price of inequality. As he compared the plight of his desperately poor country with what the Chinese people have accomplished in Singapore and Hong Kong and on Taiwan, he made the choice of progress with some inequality over rigid equality and no progess.
My first glimpse of China in 1972 was during the dismal wake of the Cultural Revolution. The superficial changes since then are astonishing. China is still a poor Third World country. But a majority of China’s people now have access to television. The streets of the big cities are crowded with people wearing Western-style trench coats and sweat suits. Teenagers go to American movies, hear concerts by Western rock groups, and eat Kentucky Fried Chicken. Women who once tucked their short hair under Mao caps today make appointments at Elizabeth Arden’s salon in Beijing. Tourists from China’s distant provinces flock to the capital, clutching their Japanese-made cameras, to see the Great Wall and the Forbidden City. In 1972 most of the people in Beijing were shuffling along on foot; today they ride bicycles, and some have automobiles.
More significantly, China’s economy is booming. It grew at a rate of 11 percent in 1986, three times the average rate in the industrialized West. The most striking success story is in agriculture. In the first two years of Deng’s reforms, farmers’ incomes rose more than they had in the previous twenty years of Mao’s era. Because of the new incentive system, under which farmers are permitted to keep and sell whatever they produce over and above their government quotas, China now produces enough to feed its one billion people and have enough left over to export. Han Xu, China’s ambassador to the United States, recently pointed out to me that China, with only 6 percent of the world’s arable land, now feeds 22 percent of the world’s people. In contrast, Russian peasants still laboring on Stalin-style collective farms are unable to produce enough to feed the Soviet Union’s 250 million people.
The West has been watching with breathless anticipation every move Gorbachev has made. Each minor concession to human rights, each hint of reform or Glasnost, has been met with enthusiastic applause from a Western audience that is all too eager to expect great things from each new Soviet leader. It is true that what happens in the Soviet Union is fraught with special significance because of its status as a military superpower. But so far Gorbachev has only shown himself willing to oil the faltering engine that Stalin built. Deng, through his methodical plan to modernize Chinese agriculture, industry, and science, has begun to completely rebuild China’s engine. So at least for the moment the young, vigorous Gorbachev, well-cut suits and well-turned phrases notwithstanding, must take a backseat to his eighty-four-year-old, Mao-suited, chain-smoking Chinese counterpart with the guttural laugh and the spittoon at his feet. What Gorbachev so far only dreams, Deng does.
By acting boldly, Deng has run great risks. Reducing the authority of the central government over the economy threatens those in the Communist Party bureaucracy whose power resides in the exercise of such authority. Reorganizing China’s armed forces threatens the defense establishment. And toying with Western notions of economic freedom risks activating the severely xenophobic strain in the Chinese character that fueled the Boxer Rebellion, the Cultural Revolution, and the brief reign of the Gang of Four.
The conventional wisdom says that China’s reformers cannot continue to permit economic freedom without significantly altering its totalitarian political system. Many experts say that if farmers and factory managers are given the freedom to act in the marketplace, they will demand freedom to act in the political realm as well. If the party’s authority to control the economy is limited, its authority to control the people will be weakened, too.
As is often the case with great leaders, however, Deng has looked over the heads of the experts into a future he can see but they cannot imagine. It is true that what he is doing has never been done in a communist nation. But it is by no means clear that it cannot be done. In the end, if the conventional wisdom about Deng’s reforms is proved wrong, it will be for one simple reason: they work. Deng is gambling that, power and ideology aside, China will not turn its back on a good thing.
Some in the West feared that China had done exactly that in 1987 when Deng was forced to remove his chosen successor, Hu Yaobang, as head of the Communist Party. Hard-liners blamed Hu for demonstrations in China’s big cities by students who wanted more political and academic freedom to match the new economic freedoms. Hu was faulted for failing to maintain rigorous ideological discipline, and Deng himself responded to the demonstrations by promising to strike back ruthlessly against those who encouraged any more like them.
Deng’s actions drew sharp criticism from Western editorial writers who expressed their disappointment that he had apparently reversed what they had believed was a promising march toward a new, democratic China. These critics showed a total lack of understanding of Deng’s goals and predicament. The source of his authority is the Communist Party. He needs that authority to govern China. Deng realizes that his reforms must not strain the party’s authority to the point where it strikes back again and deals him a mortal blow—or, even worse, loses its capacity to maintain order. And while some Western superhawks would like nothing better than to see China convulsed by another revolution, such a development would cause untold deaths and plunge China, and Asia, into turmoil.
By the end of 1987 the reformers were again firmly in control, and it was clear many had underestimated Deng. His reforms may not be popular with the aging hard-line conservatives in the government, but they are popular with the people, many of whom for the first time since the revolution are finding they have enough income to afford luxuries, such as televisions and refrigerators, that were unimaginable in Mao’s China. More money in circulation has caused some corruption and inflation. Tensions may develop between the countryside and the cities as a result of the industrial sector’s inability to produce enough to satisfy increased consumer demand. All these proble
ms can be dealt with without reversing the overall course of the reforms. But what can never be reversed are the Chinese people’s new expectations for the future. One of the unhappy lessons of history is that those who have never tasted prosperity and freedom can live indefinitely without them. But once people have them, they will not give them up without a fight. The political turmoil Deng has unleashed through his reforms is nothing compared to what will happen if they are quashed by Beijing’s hard-liners.
When Deng relinquished operational control over China’s government to Zhao at last year’s party congress, many Western observers commented condescendingly about how extraordinary it was for a communist leader to step aside gracefully and voluntarily, leaving younger, carefully groomed successors behind to carry on his policies. They failed to recognize that this is extraordinary under any form of government, including democracies. De Gaulle put down his apparent successor Georges Pompidou; Churchill put down Eden; Adenauer put down his own able Finance Minister, Ludwig Erhard, so cruelly that Erhard once broke into tears when he described to me one of Adenauer’s slights. Japan’s Shigeru Yoshida was a rare exception. He carefully prepared men such as Ikeda, Fukuda, and Sato to serve after he had left the scene. As a result Japan has been ruled for nearly a quarter century according to Yoshida’s conservative, pro-Western principles.
In such situations it is not only the system that matters. It is also the leader. The West is known for orderly, solemn transfers of power that can nonetheless leave policies in complete shambles. In authoritarian and totalitarian governments there can be forcible ousters of leaders, such as the removal of Habib Bourguiba as President of Tunisia last year, that leave basic national policy unchanged. In stepping aside as he did, leaving behind him both the men and the policies he wanted to leave, Deng performed a deft political miracle.
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