Neither of these dire outcomes is likely. Deng wants better relations with the Soviet Union because they will permit him to focus more of his resources on economic development and less on defense. And he wants to reduce tensions that might escalate into war. For China the twentieth century has been a century of war. Above all China now needs a century of peace. But Deng does not want to return to the pre-1961 relationship, when China was economically dependent on the Soviet Union. He knows that China’s greatest need is for economic progress. Here it is no contest between the West and the Soviet Union. The West offers everything; the Soviet Union offers very little. Only if China gives up on the West will it turn back to its ominous neighbor in the north.
Another reason China will be reluctant to return to its old relationship with the Soviet Union is that it never again wants to be a junior partner in the communist bloc. China’s days of dependency are over. It is a major player in a world filled with nations that realize the force it is destined to become and that are eager to play a role in helping it develop its potential. In recent years one leader after another, Western and communist alike, has found it in his and in his country’s interests to ride what one journalist called the “milk train to China” and stand with its leaders on the Great Wall. China’s leaders are wise to receive every supplicant. Deng summed up China’s independent foreign policy succinctly when he told me in 1985, “We are not going to tie ourselves to one chariot.”
For the same reason, at least for the moment there is a limit beyond which the relationship between the United States and the People’s Republic of China cannot grow. We are not allies. Just thirty-five years ago we were enemies. Thousands of Chinese and Americans fought each other in Korea. One of Mao’s sons was among the casualties. Today we are new friends who have been brought together after years of hostility, even hatred and war, by coldly calculated common interests. These interests could change, and the friendship would change with them. We have no shared experiences, struggles, or ideals to hold us together in the face of shifting international realities; absent a major political reform movement in China, our philosophies of government will remain diametrically opposed to each other. Therefore to a large extent this promising new relationship is hostage to events over which neither side has complete control.
We must avoid romanticizing the relationship or putting too much stock in superficial curiosities about each other. Neither student exchanges nor tourism nor blue jeans nor American rock music nor cloisonné jewelry will hold us together if either China or the United States behaves in a way that the other finds unacceptable. Relations between great nations are not a tea party or a love fest; they are complicated, intricately structured devices that have to be watched and tended constantly. Unless we take care, anything that can go wrong probably will.
For the sake of our grandchildren in the next century, however, we must ensure that our relationship survives and grows. Today we are dealing with a nation that is just beginning to feel its way in the modern world; tomorrow they will be dealing with what could be the dominant power in the world. Between now and then the new friends could become new allies, and the shared experiences and values that are missing today could come to be as a result of now-unimagined events in a changing, violent, unpredictable world.
At our meeting in Hangzhou in 1972, Chou En-lai and I completed the negotiations for the Shanghai Communiqué, which marked the beginning of a new, peaceful relationship between the United States and China. To commemorate the event, we planted a three-foot-high sequoia that I had brought with me from California. It was a sapling from the oldest and tallest tree in the world, in California’s Sequoia National Park. At the time neither of us was sure the tree would grow in Chinese soil.
The soil and the climate proved to be friendly. In October 1987 Governor Thomas Kean of New Jersey visited Hangzhou. His hosts showed him the tree, now ninety feet tall. Even more significant, they said that forty thousand saplings from the tree were thriving in seven Chinese provinces.
The Chinese people and the American people are among the ablest in the world. They are both endowed with enormous potential. As we look into the twenty-first century, the soil and the climate are right for a productive Chinese–American relationship that could move the world to unprecedented heights of peace and freedom.
9
THIRD WORLD
BATTLEGROUNDS
The countries outside the industrialized West and the Soviet bloc are commonly lumped together and called “the Third World.” It is a virtually meaningless term—just about as useful as “none of the above” in describing over 150 countries spread north and south of the equator over four continents and containing people of all races and religions. What most have in common is that they are grindingly, desperately poor. The average per-capita income of the over three billion people of the Third World is less than $800 a year, compared with $18,000 in the United States. They are poor for many reasons, but the single largest is that they have not yet found the way to productively harness their own vast human and natural resources.
We cannot solve all their problems. But in the years ahead we must do everything we can to help them solve them. If we do not we will be abrogating our moral responsibilities. We will also be permitting an endless cycle of poverty, despair, and conflict that will inevitably prevent us from building a structure of real peace in the world.
The most insidious aspect of the term “Third World” is the suggestion that we need a single, all-encompassing “Third World policy.” Most of those who think, speak, and act in such simplistic terms are playing variations on the same theme. We are rich, they chant, and the Third World is poor. That much is true. But then they go on to say that the solution is “a transfer of resources from north to south”—in other words, the developed world should give the undeveloped world more money. They reduce the world with all its diversity and complexity to the simplistic dimensions of a Dickens novel: the selfish tycoon ignoring the starving beggar with the outstretched hand.
Western liberals spend far too much time on this kind of guilty hand-wringing over the Third World and far too little time rendering the kind of practical assistance the developing world can actually put to use. Recently a book critic writing for a major American newspaper condemned Kipling’s Gunga Din for its racist overtones, but, over two centuries after the British arrived in India and a generation after the European powers abandoned their colonies, many Western intellectuals and politicians still have a superior, “white man’s burden” mentality toward the poorer nations.
There is one simple reason why share-the-wealth schemes have never worked and never will. The developed world did not cause the Third World’s problems by itself, and it cannot solve them by itself. It is the height of arrogance, even racism, to suggest otherwise. We can show these struggling nations the way because we have traveled the road from poverty to prosperity ourselves. But we do them no favors by simply carrying them along on our backs. We would only be creating a permanent underclass of pauper nations seeking handouts. Each step forward we take for them is really two steps backward as they become more dependent on our help and less able to cope on their own when our ability or willingness to help is exhausted.
But in shedding our counterproductive sense of guilt about the developing world, we do not shed our responsibilities. Poverty, malnutrition, disease, and war in these nations may not be our fault, but they are definitely our problems as well as theirs. If we stay on the sidelines, we will witness a competition for the future of the developing world that the West is certain to lose.
The Third World is important for four reasons:
First, the Third World has enormous natural and human resources. It produces most of the world’s oil and other raw materials. Without them the industrial economies would collapse. By 1999, four out of five people on earth will be residents of the Third World. In 1899, the ten largest cities in the world were in Europe, the United States, and Japan. By 1999, eight out of ten will be in
the Third World.
Second, the Third World is where the real Third World war is already being fought. In Asia, Africa, Latin America, and the Mideast, the Soviet Union is waging unconventional war to gain domination over the nations that have the oil and other resources vital to the survival of the West. Poverty, malnutrition, and disease are the ideal breeding grounds for political turmoil. Despair, despotism, and cynical Soviet opportunism all combine in the Third World to create a festering climate of economic stagnation and political instability.
Third, the Third World is the worldwide epicenter of war and revolution. Since the end of World War II, eighteen million people have lost their lives in Third World wars. This is more than were killed in action in World War I. Over forty wars rage in the Third World today. Most have nothing to do with the Soviet Union, but they have everything to do with the U.S.–Soviet rivalry. The greatest danger of war between the superpowers is the possibility of the escalation of a small war where superpower interests collide. A small war always has the potential of igniting a world war.
Fourth, we cannot in good conscience tolerate the status quo where the West is an island of wealth in a vast sea of poverty. We should not tolerate it, and the billions who live in the Third World will not. I have been to most of the Third World countries. The cold statistic of a low per capita income does not capture the picture of abject poverty and misery that one sees if he can break away from the restraints of protocol and guided tours. One quarter of the Third World’s people live below the threshold of absolute poverty. Forty-five percent of urban dwellers and 85 percent of rural dwellers lack adequate sanitation facilities. Thirty thousand people die every day from dirty water and inadequate sanitation. Average life expectancy in much of the Third World is less than fifty years; it is over seventy in the United States. At the end of this century, the Third World’s infant-mortality rate will be four times that of the United States. Because the average population growth in the Third World is three times as great as the West’s, the Third World’s average per-capita income could decrease by the year 1999.
If the next century is to be a century of peace, the causes of misery and war in the Third World must be addressed. Its security needs must be met, its economic potential fulfilled, and its political aspirations satisfied if the suffering that has plagued so much of the globe in the twentieth century is to be eradicated in the twenty-first.
The causes of unrest and poverty in the Third World are different in every direction we look.
In the Far East we see the stark contrast between the vitality produced by economic freedom and the depressing dullness of totalitarian communism. The color of communism is gray, not red. In Latin America we see a similar contrast as the security of many promising but sometimes unstable young democracies is threatened by aggressive Soviet satellites. In the feuds between India and Pakistan we see the unforgivable waste of resources that both nations need for the good of their people being spent instead on an ongoing religious and political rivalry. In poverty-stricken Africa we see living, and dying, proof of the fallacy of throwing good money at bad governments in nations that are poorer today than they were before the West pumped in hundreds of billions in aid. And in the Mideast we see the traditional rivalry of Arab versus Jew evolving into a conflict between Islamic fundamentalists on the one hand and Israel and the moderate Arab states on the other. Unless these nations overcome their differences and recognize that they face a far more dangerous threat emanating from Tehran, the Mideast will remain the most potentially explosive area of the world—the cradle of civilization that could become its grave.
In Asia we see incontrovertible proof of which social, economic, and political policies permit nations and people to live and grow and which cause them to decay and die. The world has never before had such an effective contrast in the same region between the misery produced by communism and the rich blessings of political and economic systems that permit a large measure of freedom.
Singapore, Hong Kong, and Taiwan give the lie to the commonplace notion that developing nations without natural resources are doomed to poverty. Singapore’s economy has grown an astounding 7.5 percent a year over the past quarter of a century. If this trend continues, in 1999 it will have a higher per-capita income than the United States. The population of the 404-square-mile British protectorate of Hong Kong has a life expectancy of seventy-six years and a per-capita income of almost $7,000; its economy has no external debt. At the end of the 1940s, the average income in Taiwan was $50, roughly equal to that of mainland China. Today its per-capita income is $3,500, ten times that of the People’s Republic 120 miles away.
South Korea has replaced Japan as the Asian economic miracle most talked about by the West, the Soviets, and the Chinese. A 6.5 percent average annual growth rate over the past generation has allowed a war-devastated nation with a per-capita income of $50 in 1953 to develop into a potential economic giant with a per-capita income of $2,200 and a literacy rate higher than that of the United States.
Some explain away the economic success stories of Asia as the products of some mystical characteristics of the “inscrutable East.” But while Orientals are well known for their hard work and high productivity, these countries’ successes are the results of well-considered and practical economic strategies that need not be unique to Asia. They all followed free-market policies designed to spur growth and increase their peoples’ wealth. They responded to the opportunities offered by the world economy, interacting with it and profiting from it rather than stubbornly denying its existence as Marxist-Leninists do.
Political freedom in these countries does not meet American or European standards. But they do provide basic economic, social, and religious rights, and in absolute terms they look like Disneyland compared to their drab communist neighbors. In South Korea students have been arrested for holding demonstrations to urge that free elections be held earlier; in North Korea there are no demonstrations, no free elections, and no freedom at all. In Lee Kwan Yew’s Singapore young people are sometimes lectured by their stern Prime Minister for letting their hair grow too long; in Pol Pot’s Cambodia they were machine-gunned for holding hands.
Progress toward democracy around the world may never proceed at the speedy pace we would prefer. In view of the poor record of the twentieth century’s various revolutions and “national-liberation movements,” we should be thankful it is proceeding at all. In fact, throughout noncommunist Asia today we see nations moving toward representative democracy. In one of the most significant political achievements of the twentieth century, 90 percent of South Korea’s eligible voters went to the polls in December 1987 to end an era of authoritarianism and begin an era of democracy. Taiwan has also taken irrevocable steps toward free, multiparty elections. Hong Kong may soon have representational self-government. Thailand has strengthened its democracy. In all these nations, material progress may well be matched by political progress by 1999.
South Korea is a classic example of how national security and economic growth have prepared the ground for the seeds of sturdy representative government. Some critics contend that it took too long to achieve democracy. But those who take the historical perspective, especially in the context of the rest of the Third World, must conclude that South Korea’s accomplishments in providing political stability, producing economic progress, and moving toward democracy are spectacular.
Across the 38th parallel from South Korea the people incarcerated in communist dictator Kim Il-Sung’s closed society know neither the challenges and benefits of democracy nor the satisfactions of economic success. This is not because North Koreans are any less hard-working than South Koreans. It is because they live under a system that demands servility rather than encourages initiative. Totalitarian communism such as North Korea’s is the cause of Asia’s worst failures and greatest suffering.
Those who opposed United States participation in the Vietnam War because they thought communism would bring prosperity to Asia must now face the hard
facts of the hard life tens of millions now lead in today’s Indochina. As Lenin said, “Facts are stubborn things.”
Vietnam is one of the world’s poorest nations, with a per capita income of less than $160. In South Vietnam before the fall of Saigon in 1975 it was $500. For the 600,000 South Vietnamese who drowned in the South China Sea trying to escape the savageries of their Soviet-backed conquerors from the north, the communist peace was the peace of the grave. Even thirteen years after the end of the war, at a time when Americans are understandably eager to put the Vietnam experience behind them, 1,500 boat people are still putting Vietnam behind them every month.
Communism also killed the once-independent, prosperous nation of Cambodia. In a matter of days the brutal Khmer Rouge, acting according to a grim master plan prepared years before when their leaders lived in Paris, emptied the city of Phnom Penh so that they could create an agrarian communist society. Families, those with educations, monks and priests, racial minorities, and all suspected and imagined resisters were slaughtered. Children were encouraged to turn their parents in to the executioners. During the next three years over two million out of seven million starved or were liquidated. Today, after being occupied by 140,000 Vietnamese troops, Cambodia is one of the most malnourished nations in the world. Twenty-one percent of its children die before reaching age five, the average life expectancy is forty-six years, and the per-capita income is $80 a year. For all intents and purposes, the nation of Cambodia has ceased to exist.
Today’s Cambodia will be tomorrow’s Philippines if the ruthless, brutal communist New People’s Army succeeds at its avowed goal of overthrowing the elected government. The NPA has used negotiations with Manila as all communists do: to consolidate military gains and to sap the will of the enemy to win. Neither the government of Mrs. Aquino nor a democratic Philippines will survive unless she accepts the fact that the NPA must be defeated militarily.
1999 Page 30