Vietnam did not prove that guerrilla wars are unwinnable or that “revolutionary” forces are invincible. Quite the contrary: our side won the guerrilla war, and it was winning the conventional war—until the United States pulled the rug out from under its ally by drastically cutting back supplies while the Soviets poured huge quantities of arms and ammunition into the arsenals of their ally. When that happened, Vietnam finally fell to the same kind of large-scale conventional assault we successfully repelled in Korea.
• • •
As William Colby has pointed out, “In an ironic asymmetry, the Communists initiated the war against Diem in the late 1950s as a people’s war and the Americans and the Vietnamese initially responded to it as a conventional military one; in the end the Thieu government was fighting a successful people’s war, but lost to a military assault. The Presidential Palace in Saigon was not entered by a barefoot guerrilla but by a North Vietnamese tank with an enormous cannon.”
Revolutionary war will remain in the Soviets’ repertoire, but now—partly as a result of Vietnam—they have been emboldened to a greater use of more direct means as well.
The Soviets started out in Vietnam by giving matériel to the communist guerrillas; they later graduated to supplying massive arms for North Vietnam’s conventional invasion of the South. Then in 1975, having succeeded in Southeast Asia, they stepped aggression up a notch by shipping Cuban proxy troops across the Atlantic to achieve the conquest of Angola. On Christmas Eve in 1979 they escalated to a new level, sending the Red Army itself into Afghanistan, the “hinge of Asia’s fate,” to crush a rebellion against a communist government imposed by coup less than two years earlier. The next logical Soviet step is use of the Red Army against a friend or ally of the West.
Hanoi seems as determined as ever to fulfill its long-proclaimed ambition to conquer not only South Vietnam but all of Indochina. In Cambodia the Vietnamese are pressing what may be the final offensive against the Cambodians opposing them. In Laos they have dropped poison gas on hill tribesmen who oppose their rule. Thailand is feeling the heat of Vietnamese ambitions; its armed forces of 216,000 are outnumbered 5:1 by the North Vietnamese war machine. Vietnam’s armed forces now approach the size of India’s—the second most populous country in the world. This medium-sized country now has the fifth largest armed forces in the world, half the size of the American forces. If they complete the conquest of Indochina and then decide to move on to the rest of Southeast Asia, it will take an enormous effort to stop them.
Had the United States stayed the course and taken the action necessary to ensure adherence to the peace agreement of January 23, 1973, the Soviet leaders would have been less tempted to engage in their aggressive probes in other parts of the world. Our friends and allies would have less doubt about the reliability of American will as well as the effectiveness of American power. And most important, the American people could look back on ten years of sacrifice of men and money in Vietnam with pride rather than with apology and frustration, which lead so many to say, even where America’s vital interests may be involved, “Do nothing—no more Vietnams.”
6
The Awakening Giant
China? There lies a sleeping giant. Let him sleep! For when he wakes he will move the world.
—Napoleon
Seek truth from facts.
—Deng Xiaoping
China now is awakening, and it may soon move the world.
Exotic, mysterious, fascinating—China from time immemorial has tantalized the imagination of Western man. However, even the prescient Tocqueville, who predicted 150 years ago that the United States and Russia would emerge as two great contending world powers, could not have foreseen that the nation that potentially could decide the world balance of power in the last decades of the twentieth century, and that could become the most powerful nation on earth during the twenty-first century, would be China.
China is a nation of almost limitless possibilities that is only beginning to realize those possibilities. The seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries all exist side by side in China. Peasants still stoop over the rice fields as they have for centuries, planting the shoots individually by hand. They walk barefoot along dusty paths with long wooden poles over their shoulders, baskets of produce slung from the poles. Many live in mud huts. In the central cities cars and trucks share crowded streets with rustic horse-drawn carriages, tractor carts, and bicycle carts, as well as with masses of pedestrians and swarms of bicycles. For all its huge population, China still has only limited military strength, primitive agriculture, and a largely preindustrial economy. But it has enormous natural resources, and some of the ablest people in the world—a fourth of all the people alive today. It could emerge during the twenty-first century as the strongest power on earth, and also one of the more advanced economically—if it successfully completes its transition to the modern world, and if it continues to move away from doctrinaire communist economic theories.
Which of its possible courses China takes might eventually determine whether the West survives.
Getting to know China is more than the work of a lifetime. The most a person can hope for is some understanding of some parts of the Chinese experience, and the more deeply one probes into that experience, the clearer it becomes that the mysteries are infinite. Teilhard de Chardin once advised, “Write about China before you have been there too long; later you would break your pen.”
But if we can never know everything about China, we can learn something about it—particularly what we might reasonably expect in the way of Chinese behavior. China’s present leaders are statesmen with a keen sense of the world who think in global terms. They also are communists. They also are Chinese. Since Mao’s death they have seemed to grow less communist and more Chinese, less the prisoners of ideology and more pragmatic, less revolutionary and more traditional.
• • •
I have visited China three times, in 1972, 1976, and 1979. The first time, in 1972, Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai were in power. The second time, in 1976, Zhou was dead; Mao and Hua Guofeng were in power. The third time, in 1979, Mao also was dead, and power was shared between Hua and Deng Xiaoping.
In China, as the leaders have changed, so also have the policies—whether temporarily or permanently remains to be seen. It could even be said that for China watchers today the key word is change: China is changing, and the changes in China, if they continue, may profoundly change the world.
As with Russia, we can only hope to understand present-day China if we know something about its past. Even the changes now taking place have roots in the past, and in some respects are a return to tradition. More than most countries, China is a product of its past, and its history is unique. Other nations come and go, other empires rise and fall, but China endures; China is forever.
China’s civilization stretches back four thousand years—the oldest continuous civilization in the world. While Greek and Roman civilizations rose and fell, China’s continued. While Europe was plunged into the Dark Ages, Chinese learning, science and philosophy flourished uninterrupted. China is the only large region of the world that has never been under Western rule. Even Japan, which never lost its independence, was run by General MacArthur in the years after World War II. China has repeatedly been invaded, but each time it has absorbed the invaders and eventually converted them. Over the centuries this has produced a sort of stoicism; in 1976 Hua Guofeng commented to me, “Let the Russians come in. They may get in a long way, but they will never get out.”
China’s past is distinguished by more than longevity, resiliency, and culture. Historically, the Chinese saw China as “the Middle Kingdom”—as the center of the world, the celestial empire, “all under Heaven.” Other nations existed, but they were barbarian, of no consequence. The Chinese became aware of other civilizations, but these were too remote to be viewed as either threats or alternatives. To the Chinese, theirs was not a civilization, but the civilization. In 1793 the emperor Qi
an Long rebuffed a British trade mission by writing to King George III: “The Celestial Empire, ruling all within the four seas . . . does not value rare and precious things. . . . We have never valued ingenious articles, nor do we have the slightest need of your country’s manufactures.” As late as the nineteenth century, Chinese maps still showed a vast China at the center of the world, with a scattering of tiny islands—with names such as France, England, America—in the sea around it.
The Chinese empire lasted more than two thousand years, from its founding in 221 B.C. until its overthrow early in the twentieth century. At times, it was the largest empire in the world. Yet it never extended beyond China, except into border regions. There were no overseas outposts of empire. Greeks, Romans, and other architects of empire in the West set out in search of worlds to conquer; the emperors of China already ruled the “world,” and their chief aim was to keep the barbarians out. In our own time, the Russians built the Berlin Wall to keep their subjects in; for more than two thousand years the Chinese maintained the Great Wall to keep invaders out. Beyond the Great Wall there is not enough rainfall to support agriculture; below it there is. To the north, nomadic tribes have always roamed, developing skills of horsemanship, raiding, and warfare. To the south, sedentary cities and civilizations with all their riches evolved. For all but the last 150 years of China’s history the threat to Chinese civilization has always come from the north, from the nomadic barbarians who periodically swept in to conquer and plunder. As the Chinese look today at the new “barbarians” again threatening from the north, the specter invokes national memories so deeply rooted as to be almost instinctive.
• • •
For China, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been a time of shattering collision with the outside world, and of shattering change within China itself.
From China’s standpoint, its early contacts with the West—and many of its later contacts as well—were both humiliating and disastrous, and served only to solidify hostility toward the “foreign devils,” while intensifying a sense of cultural superiority. Some Westerners came to colonize; others came to convert; most came to exploit. The most demoralizing impact, however, was not economic or political, but was rather the affront to the dignity of the Chinese people. On my first visit to Hong Kong in 1953 I asked a very successful pro-British Chinese businessman how the people of Hong Kong would vote if they had a choice between independence and remaining a British colony. He replied that in spite of the fact that the Chinese living in Hong Kong were better off economically than those living under independent governments elsewhere in non-communist Asia, 95 percent would probably vote for independence. I asked why. He said that the British were certainly the most respected and most progressive of European colonizers, but that there was a common saying among Chinese throughout Asia that when the British set up a colony, they built three institutions in this order: first, a church; then a racetrack; then a club to which Orientals could not belong. In 1972, while escorting me to the airport, the hard-line Communist Party chairman of Shanghai pointed proudly to an immaculate children’s playground. He said quietly that it had formerly been a golf course, and that the sign at the entrance read, “No dogs or Chinese allowed.” Nothing more was said, or needed to be. On my last trip, in 1979, my host in China’s third largest city repeatedly pointed out hospitals, schools, and other buildings that had once been part of a British, German, French, Dutch, or other European “concession,” that Chinese had been allowed to enter only when invited by Europeans. To the Chinese, with their enormous pride, these slights were unforgivable.
• • •
Readers of American fiction associate China with “opium dens,” and many probably imagine that the drugs that later ravaged so many young Americans were insidiously introduced from there. Hearing that Britain and China fought two “Opium Wars” in the mid-nineteenth century, an American today might suppose that these were righteous British efforts to stamp out the opium trade. In fact, opium was pressed on China, over vigorous Chinese objections, by British merchants; the Chinese tried to prohibit both its importation and its use. Britain went to war against China in part to compel the Chinese to accept the continued sale of opium. The Opium Wars were also pretexts to force China open to foreign trade and exploitation, and to wrest special commercial and other privileges from China. Britain took Hong Kong in the first Opium War, secured the designation of five “treaty ports,” and won rights of extraterritoriality for its citizens in China; in the second Opium War, Britain and France together forced more of China open to foreign trade, and won more special privileges for Western nationals. These humiliations were followed by more territorial grabs and establishment of foreign “spheres of influence” in China, with Russia and Japan joining the Western nations in the scramble.
The Chinese themselves were bitterly divided over how to respond to the Western inroads, whether to reach back to Chinese isolation or reach out to Western technology in the hope of gaining sufficient strength to repel the foreigners. But even those who argued for adoption of Western technology saw Western ways as a corrupting, unwelcome influence. The fact that the Westerners came with greater firepower, and therefore were able to impose their will on China, hardly lessened the Chinese tendency to view them as barbarians and devils. A Cantonese denunciation of the British in 1841 read: “We note that you English barbarians have formed the habits and developed the nature of wolves, plundering and seizing things by force. . . . Except for your ships being solid, your gunfire fierce, and your rockets powerful, what other abilities have you?”
Hatred of the foreigner exploded dramatically at the turn of the century in the Boxer Rebellion. The “Boxers” were a group who called themselves the “Fists of Righteous Harmony,” and who bitterly resented Western interference with traditional Chinese ways. They saw the foreigners as desecrators of holy places, and many believed that tall buildings had been put up by the “foreign devils” so that low-flying good spirits would be killed as they crashed into them; they were sure that the rusty water that fell from railroad tracks and telegraph lines when it rained was the blood of good spirits who died on them. Religious fervor combined with xenophobia. Roving bands of Boxers not only burned and pillaged, but also killed Chinese converts to Christianity. In 1900 they swept into Peking, murdered the German and Japanese ministers, and besieged the foreign legations. The Western powers moved in with overwhelming force, smashed the rebellion, and exacted even more concessions—as well as reparations—from the Chinese as punishment.
• • •
China was ripe for revolution in 1911 because it needed a revolution. It had been plagued too long by governments that could neither control the marauding brutalities of local warlords nor resist the encroachment and exploitation by foreigners. After years of struggle, the revolutionary forces led by Dr. Sun Yat-sen—a physician who received his early education in Hawaii—finally triumphed, and the empire that had lasted more than two thousand years was overthrown. But the victory of the revolution only ushered in a new time of turmoil.
Throughout the twentieth century China has been in upheaval. The revolutionaries of 1911 themselves had divergent aims. The new government was torn by rivalries, and was unable to establish its authority throughout China. After Sun Yatsen’s death in 1925 the faction led by Chiang Kai-shek and the one that eventually was led by Mao Zedong battled each other until Mao won final control of the mainland in 1949. Meanwhile, China fought a grueling war with Japan and suffered brutally under the Japanese invasion. Since 1949 China also has fought the United States in Korea, it has fought India, it has engaged in border warfare with the Soviet Union, and more recently it has fought its former client state of Vietnam. But more fundamentally, during much of the century China fought China. The long civil war was followed by one upheaval after another, as Mao purged first one faction and then another, launching his Great Leap Forward and his Cultural Revolution, “purifying” the party by eliminating first one group and then another—w
ith millions dying in the process of that purification.
The rape of China by the Western powers in the nineteenth century left an indelible imprint, but so too did the struggles of the twentieth century.
Like family quarrels, civil wars are often the most bitterly fought of all. Yet again like family quarrels, they also produce a certain ambivalence. Chinese on both sides of the long struggle were still Chinese, with the same pride in China, the same feelings of Chinese nationalism, the same shared heritage. Chiang and Mao both served under Sun Yat-sen; Madame Chiang is the sister of Madame Sun, who remained on the mainland and continues to be a revered figure in China. In the 1920s, Chiang was commander and Zhou the political director of the Chinese military academy at Whampoa. In my talks with the Chinese leaders, I found that they had curiously mixed feelings toward Chiang. As communists they hated him, but as Chinese they respected and, grudgingly, even admired him. At my first meeting with Mao in 1972, he made a sweeping gesture with his hand and said, “Our common old friend Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek doesn’t approve of this,” adding: “He calls us communist bandits.” I asked Mao what he called Chiang Kai-shek. Mao laughed; Zhou replied, “Generally speaking, we call them ‘Chiang Kai-shek’s clique.’ In the newspapers sometimes we call him a bandit; he calls us bandits in turn. Anyway, we abuse each other.” Mao added, “Actually, the history of our friendship with him is much longer than the history of your friendship with him.”
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