On China (27 page)

No institution was spared from the ensuing waves of upheaval. Across the country, local governments were dissolved in violent confrontations with “the masses,” urged on by propaganda from Beijing. Distinguished Communist Party and People’s Liberation Army leaders, including leaders of the revolutionary wars, were purged and subjected to public humiliation. China’s education system—so long the backbone of the Chinese social order—ground to a halt, with classes suspended indefinitely so that the younger generation could wander the country and follow Mao’s exhortation to “learn revolution by making revolution.”
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Many of these suddenly unconstrained youths joined factions of the Red Guards, youth militias bonded by ideological fervor, operating above the law and outside of (and often in explicit opposition to) ordinary institutional structures. Mao endorsed their efforts with vague but incendiary slogans, such as “To rebel is justified” and “Bombard the headquarters.”
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He approved their violent attacks on the existing Communist Party bureaucracy and traditional social mores and encouraged them not to fear “disorder” as they fought to eradicate the dreaded “Four Olds”—old ideas, old culture, old customs, and old habits—that, in Maoist thinking, had kept China weak.
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The
People’s Daily
fanned the flames by editorializing “In Praise of Lawlessness”—an explicit, government-sanctioned rebuke to China’s millennial tradition of harmony and order.
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The result was a spectacular human and institutional carnage, as one by one China’s organs of power and authority—including the highest ranks of the Communist Party—succumbed to the assaults of teenage ideological shock troops. China—a civilization heretofore known for its respect for learning and erudition—became an upside-down world, with children turning on parents, students brutalizing teachers and burning books, and professionals and high officials sent down to farms and factories to learn revolutionary practice from illiterate peasants. Scenes of cruelty unfolded across the country, as Red Guards and citizens allied to them—some simply picking a faction at random in the hope of surviving the storm—turned their fury on any target that might conceivably augur a return of the old “feudal” order to China.

That some of these targets were individuals who had been dead for centuries did not diminish the fury of the assault. Revolutionary students and teachers from Beijing descended on Confucius’s home village, vowing to put an end to the old sage’s influence on Chinese society once and for all by burning ancient books, smashing memorial tablets, and razing the gravesites of Confucius and his descendants. In Beijing, Red Guard assaults destroyed 4,922 of the capital’s 6,843 designated “places of cultural or historical interest.” The Forbidden City itself was reportedly saved only by Zhou Enlai’s personal intervention.
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A society traditionally governed by an elite of Confucian literati now looked to uneducated peasants as its source of wisdom. Universities were closed. Anyone identified as an “expert” was suspect, professional competence being a dangerously bourgeois concept.

China’s diplomatic posture came unhinged. The world was treated to the nearly incomprehensible sight of a China raging with indiscriminate fury against the Soviet bloc, the Western powers, and its own history and culture. Chinese diplomats and support staffs abroad harangued the citizens of their host countries with calls to revolution and lectures on “Mao Zedong Thought.” In scenes reminiscent of the Boxer Uprising seventy years earlier, throngs of Red Guards attacked foreign embassies in Beijing, including a sack of the British mission complete with the beating and molestation of its fleeing staff. When the British Foreign Secretary wrote to Foreign Minister Marshal Chen Yi, suggesting that Britain and China, “while maintaining diplomatic relations . . . withdr[a]w their mission and personnel from each other’s capital for the time being,” he was met by silence: the Chinese Foreign Minister was himself being “struggled” against and could not reply.
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Eventually all but one of China’s ambassadors—the able and ideologically unimpeachable Huang Hua in Cairo—and roughly two-thirds of embassy staffs were called home for reeducation in the countryside or participation in revolutionary activities.
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China was actively embroiled in disputes with the governments of several dozen countries during this time. It had genuinely positive relations with just one—the People’s Republic of Albania.

Emblematic of the Cultural Revolution was the “Little Red Book” of Mao quotations, compiled in 1964 by Lin Biao, later designated as Mao’s successor and killed while fleeing the country in an obscure airline crash, allegedly after attempting a coup. All Chinese were required to carry a copy of the “Little Red Book.” Red Guards brandishing copies conducted “seizures” of public buildings throughout China under the authorization—or at least toleration—of Beijing, violently challenging the provincial bureaucracies.

But the Red Guards were no more immune to the dilemma of revolutions turning on themselves than the cadres they were supposed to purify. Bonded by ideology rather than formal training, the Red Guards became factions pursuing their own ideological and personal preferences. Conflict between them became so intense that, by 1968, Mao officially disbanded the Red Guards and placed loyal Party and military leaders in charge of reestablishing provincial governments.

A new policy of “sending down” a generation of youths to remote parts of the countryside to learn from the peasantry was enunciated. By this point, the military was the last major Chinese institution whose command structure remained standing, and it assumed roles far outside its ordinary competencies. Military personnel ran the gutted government ministries, tended fields, and administered factories—all in addition to their original mission of defending the country from attack.

The immediate impact of the Cultural Revolution was disastrous. After the death of Mao, the assessment by the second and third generations of leaders—almost all of whom were victims at one time or another—has been condemnatory. Deng Xiaoping, the principal leader of China from 1979 to 1991, argued that the Cultural Revolution had nearly destroyed the Communist Party as an institution and wrecked its credibility at least temporarily.
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In recent years, as personal memories have faded, another perspective is beginning to make a tentative appearance. This view acknowledges the colossal wrongs committed during the Cultural Revolution, but it begins to inquire whether perhaps Mao raised an important question, even if his answer to it proved disastrous. The problem Mao is said to have identified is the relationship of the modern state—especially the Communist state—to the people it governs. In largely agricultural—and even incipient industrial—societies, governance concerns issues within the capacity of the general public to understand. Of course, in aristocratic societies, the relevant public is limited. But whatever the formal legitimacy, some tacit consensus by those who are to carry out directives is needed—unless governance is to be entirely by imposition, which is usually unsustainable over a historic period.

A challenge of the modern period is that issues have become so complex that the legal framework is increasingly impenetrable. The political system issues directives but the execution is left, to an ever larger degree, to bureaucracies separated from both the political process and the public, whose only control is periodic elections, if that. Even in the United States, major legislative acts often comprise thousands of pages that, to put it mildly, only the fewest legislators have read in detail. Especially in Communist states, bureaucracies operate in self-contained units with their own rules in pursuance of procedures they often define for themselves. Fissures open up between the political and the bureaucratic classes and between both of those and the general public. In this manner, a new mandarin class risks emerging by bureaucratic momentum. Mao’s attempt to solve the problem in one grand assault nearly wrecked Chinese society. A recent book by the Chinese scholar and government advisor Hu Angang argues that the Cultural Revolution, while a failure, set the stage for Deng’s reforms of the late 1970s and 1980s. Hu now proposes using the Cultural Revolution as a case study for ways in which the “decision-making systems” in China’s existing political system could become “more democratic, scientific, and institutionalized.”
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In retrospect, one wonders whether the United States was in a position to start a dialogue with China perhaps a decade earlier than it did. Could the turmoil in China have become the starting point for a serious dialogue? In other words, were the 1960s a lost opportunity for Sino-American rapprochement? Could the opening to China have occurred earlier?

In truth, the fundamental obstacle to a more imaginative American foreign policy was Mao’s concept of continuous revolution. Mao was determined at this stage to forestall any moment of calm. Attempts at reconciliation with the capitalist archenemy were not conceivable while the blood feud with Moscow revolved around Mao’s adamant rejection of Khrushchev’s commitment to peaceful coexistence.

There were some tentative gropings on the American side toward a more flexible perception of China. In October 1957, Senator John F. Kennedy published an article in
Foreign Affairs
remarking on “the fragmentation of authority within the Soviet orbit” and calling American policy in Asia “probably too rigid.” He argued that the policy of not recognizing the People’s Republic should be continued but that America should be prepared to revisit the “brittle conception of a shiftless totalitarian China” as circumstances developed. He counseled that “we must be very careful not to strait-jacket our policy as a result of ignorance and fail to detect a change in the objective situation when it comes.”
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Kennedy’s perception was subtle—but by the time he became President, the next change in Mao’s dialectic was in the opposite direction: toward
more
hostility, not less; and toward the increasingly violent elimination of domestic opponents and countervailing institutional structures, not moderate reform.

In the years immediately following Kennedy’s article, Mao launched the Anti-Rightist Campaign in 1957, a second crisis in the Taiwan Strait in 1958 (which he described as an attempt to “teach the Americans a lesson”
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), and the Great Leap Forward. When Kennedy became President, China undertook a military attack in its border conflict with India, a country that the Kennedy administration had conceived of as offering an Asian alternative to Communism. These were not the signs of conciliation and change for which Kennedy had advised Americans to stay attuned.

The Kennedy administration did offer a humanitarian gesture to alleviate China’s precarious agricultural condition during the famine triggered by the Great Leap Forward. Described as an effort to secure “food for peace,” the offer required, however, a specific Chinese request acknowledging a “serious desire” for assistance. Mao’s commitment to self-reliance precluded any admission of dependence on foreign assistance. China, its representative at the Warsaw ambassadorial talks replied, was “overcoming its difficulties by its own efforts.”
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In the last years of Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, senior staff members and eventually the President himself began considering a move toward a less confrontational course. In 1966, the State Department instructed its negotiators to take a more forthcoming attitude at the Warsaw ambassadorial talks and authorized them to initiate informal social contacts on the sidelines of negotiations. In March 1966, the American representative at the talks offered an olive branch by stating that “the United States government was willing to develop further relations with the People’s Republic of China”—the first time an American official had used the official post-1949 appellation for China in any formal capacity.

Finally, Johnson himself held out a peaceful option in a July 1966 speech on Asia policy. “Lasting peace,” he observed, “can never come to Asia as long as the 700 million people of mainland China are isolated by their rulers from the outside world.” While pledging to resist China’s “policy of aggression by proxy” in Southeast Asia, he looked forward to an eventual era of “peaceful cooperation” and of “reconciliation between nations that now call themselves enemies.”
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These views were put forward as abstract hopes geared to some undefined change in Chinese attitudes. No practical conclusion followed. Nor could it have. For these statements coincided almost exactly with the onset of the Cultural Revolution, when China swung back to a stance of defiant hostility.
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China’s policies during this period did little to invite—and may have been designed to dissuade—a conciliatory approach from the United States. For its part, Washington exhibited considerable tactical skill in resisting military challenges, as in the two Taiwan Strait Crises, but showed much less imagination in shaping foreign policy in an evolving, fluid political framework.

An American National Intelligence Estimate of 1960 expressed, and perhaps helped shape, the underlying assessment:

There was much evidence to support the prevailing view. But the analysis left open the question as to what extent China could possibly achieve such sweeping objectives. Wracked by the catastrophic consequences of the Great Leap Forward, the China of the 1960s was exhausted. By 1966, it was embarking on the Cultural Revolution, which spelled a de facto retreat from the world with most diplomats recalled to Beijing, many for reeducation. What were the implications for American foreign policy? How was it possible to speak of a unified Asian bloc? What about the basic premise of America’s Indochina policy that the world was facing a conspiracy directed from Moscow and Beijing? The United States, preoccupied with Vietnam and its own domestic turmoil, found few occasions to address these issues.