Restless Empire (51 page)

We are talking about victory. This means that we must guarantee that we should unite the vast masses of the entire country to pursue victory under the leadership of the proletariat. The socialist revolution must continue. There are still unfinished tasks for this
revolution to fulfill, such as to conduct struggle, to conduct criticism, and to conduct transformation. After a few years, we will probably need to carry out another revolution.
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A
MAIN REASON WHY
M
AO
Z
EDONG
, assisted by Zhou Enlai and the army, pulled China back from almost total chaos of the cultural revolution in 1968 was the increasing fear of war with the Soviet Union. While there is no evidence of the Soviets having prepared such an attack, it is easy to see how such a fear could come out of the Cultural Revolution frenzy and the Chairman’s own rhetoric. Having put China and its revolution squarely at the center of world history, as the envy of all peoples, it was only logical that their enemies should try to destroy them through military force. Other scenarios than a Soviet attack were contemplated as well. There could be a Soviet-American war, which China could be drawn into. The Americans could attack from the south, if the war in Vietnam went badly for them. Mao ruminated to his visitors:

Since Japan’s surrender in 1945, 23 years have passed. In another five years, 28 years will have passed. Without a war in 28 years? In reality, all kinds of wars have occurred since the end of World War II. According to Lenin, capitalism is war, and capitalism cannot exist without war. There are two superpowers in the world today. They not only have conventional weapons, but also have nuclear weapons. This is something that is not easy to deal with.
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In order to suss out Soviet intentions and assure himself of the army’s loyalty, Mao agreed to a limited military operation against Soviet forces. The March 1969 attack was on Zhenbao/Damanskii island in the Ussuri river, part of the north Manchurian border zone claimed by both countries. About thirty Soviet soldiers were killed in the initial strike. While fighting continued in the area, Soviet Premier Kosygin desperately tried to speak to Mao by phone. The Chinese operator refused
to connect the call, shouting slogans against the revisionists. For a few days the question of war or peace hung in the balance. The Soviets considered an attack on Chinese nuclear installations as a preventive measure. While Mao quickly backtracked, allowing negotiations to begin on the border issue, tension along the frontier remained. In August new clashes took place in the western sector, along the Xinjiang border. There were heavy casualties on both sides. This time the Chinese leaders believed that the Soviets were planning a large-scale attack on China, in spite of a visit by Kosygin to Beijing, where he tried to negotiate. Lin Biao, acting on Mao’s behalf, issued his “order number one” in October 1969, putting the army on emergency alert and evacuating the senior leaders (and their most prominent Cultural Revolution victims) from the capital.

Although the war never came, the situation in China remained tense up to the early 1970s. The war scare of 1969 convinced Mao that China’s isolation was dangerous and ineffectual. Now he wanted more order and less revolution at home, at least for a while. His mobilization orders attempted to suspend most of the Cultural Revolution excesses:

All factional struggle by violent means should be stopped unconditionally and immediately. All professional teams for struggle by violent means should be dissolved. All strongholds for struggle by violent means should be eliminated. All weapons should be handed back. If any team for struggle by violent means continues to occupy a stronghold and stubbornly refuses to surrender, the People’s Liberation Army can surround the stronghold by force, launch a political offensive toward it, and confiscate the weapons [held by the team] by force.
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But the genie of disorder was not easily to put back in the bottle. Mao, after all, refused to give up his Cultural Revolution ideals and inner-party politics remained as frenzied as ever. In September 1971 Lin Biao, Mao’s putative successor, attempted to flee to the Soviet
Union as the Chairman prepared to purge him from the leadership. Lin’s plane crashed in Mongolia.

From the summer of 1969 on, Mao sought the advice of the old heads of the army (many of whom he had allowed to be tortured and imprisoned in the previous three years) about how to handle an international crisis he himself had created. In their report, the marshals emphasized that the Soviet Union was the main enemy, now and in the future. Soviet power was growing, they wrote, while American power was waning. They asserted that “the Soviet revisionists have made China their main enemy, imposing a more serious threat to our security than the U.S. imperialists. . . . [But] both China and the United States take the Soviet Union as their enemy, thus the Soviet revisionists do not dare to fight a two-front war.” In a personal memo to the Chairman, Chen Yi—still with the title of foreign minister, but in reality under house arrest—discussed his “wild ideas”: “It is necessary for us,” Chen wrote in September 1969, “to utilize the contradiction between the United States and the Soviet Union in a strategic sense, and pursue a breakthrough in Sino-American relations.” He suggested unconditional high-level meetings with Washington. Over the two years that followed, Mao took up many of Chen’s “wild ideas” while sticking to his Cultural Revolution agenda and condemning Chen himself as a “sham Marxist” and “anti-party careerist.”
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M
AO’S CAMPAIGNS
, begun in the late 1950s, isolated China and made it vulnerable to attack. Inside the country the violent attempts to purge all outside influence and reorient party policy to center on Mao alone held back the country’s development and created a cynical generation, whose initial idealism had been drowned in blood and broken promises. For some Chinese historians, the collapse of the Sino-Soviet alliance was a good thing, because it made China more independent and nationally oriented. In reality, however, Mao wanted freedom from Soviet influence precisely so that he could undertake the disastrous
campaigns that set China’s progress back by decades. To the CCP of the 1960s, Cultural Revolution and isolation went together. Both aims would make the country stronger.

Since the early part of the nineteenth century, China had never been more isolated in international affairs than it was during the 1960s. The CCP revolution, which had promised to make China rich and strong had, it seemed, ended up making it poor and weak. True, China under Communism had kept its territorial unity and made huge advances in technology and in areas such as public health. It had also carried out a social revolution which had eliminated private control of agriculture and industry, thereby making all Chinese (except the surviving party elite) more equal. But this equality, in the 1970s, was a question of being equally
poor
and visibly helpless in an international context. No wonder that some Chinese were starting to ask themselves questions that were distinctly similar to those of the 1920s: How could China be saved from poverty and stagnation? How could China be made modern and successful? What was the meaning of being Chinese in a world where those who had left the country prospered, while those who stayed at home suffered and failed?

T
HROUGHOUT THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
, Chinese have had a complicated but almost obsessive relationship with the United States. It is a place many Chinese would like to go to, in order to visit, to sojourn, or to settle. But it is also a threatening and confusing zone, where politics, values, friendships and even the landscape itself are in constant flux. America challenges much of what Chinese think of as their values: tradition, family, and concern for the collective. It is also suspect because Americans are believed by some to look down on the Chinese, viewing them as inferior and that is why Americans locked their country’s gates to them. It is impossible for most Chinese to understand how the United States, which is a nation of immigrants, could have any other reason for Chinese exclusion than prejudice. History matters a great deal in China, and in terms of memory, the negative in Chinese historical relations with the United States often outweighs the positive.

But then there is also the endless fascination with things American, with American wealth, and with American ideas. Although few Chinese today see it this way, the United States and China have had much in common during the twentieth century. Chinese often laud their traditions, but they have spent most of the past hundred years throwing them away and transforming—endlessly, it seems—into something different. Much of this transformation has been inspired by the United
States: Technology, business, culture, and political concepts with American origins have been ubiquitous in China, even when the Chinese state has been most preoccupied with rooting out all American influence. What connects, though, goes further than simple exchanges. It has to do with the speed of change itself and with dissatisfaction with things as they are. It also has to do with accepting change. Even though the political trajectories of China and the United States in the twentieth century could hardly be more different, both peoples have been primed to accept rapid transformation of their daily lives. The intense drive toward modernity that has motivated both American and Chinese elites may have come about for different reasons—for the Chinese the urgency of reviving the past, for the Americans the necessity of recreating the future. Still, both have a teleological purpose for entering into modernity, and a firm belief that only their country can fully possess it.

In 1970, Mao Zedong made the decision to “ease,” as he put it, the overall conflict with the United States. China was exiting from the most disastrous phase of the Cultural Revolution, but this reorientation in China’s foreign policy had nothing to do with any reevaluation by Mao of his political ideals. For the rest of his life he remained wedded to China’s complete revolutionary transformation. The reason for his turnaround was China’s increasing conflict with the Soviet Union and the fear of a Soviet attack. Most of this fear was born of the ideological conflict with Moscow in the 1960s, a conflict that grew in the minds of the Chinese leadership to a cataclysmic contest that could end in nuclear war. But the opening to the United States had unintended consequences that Mao could not foresee and which would have horrified him if he had been able to. The final part of the twentieth century became America’s decades in China, a time when one foreign country dominated the sense most Chinese had of “abroad” in a way that had never happened before and probably will never happen again. American influence was everywhere: in the economy, politics, arts, and consumer patterns. For a while it seemed that all that mattered in China’s relations
with the world was the relationship, for good and bad, with the United States.

At the start of the twenty-first century, the fascination with America persists, even if diplomatic relations are sometimes problematic. The Chinese Communist leadership may talk a great deal about their troubles with the United States and about extending their cooperation with other powers so as to balance the predominance of Washington within the international system. But the CCP has accepted that system more or less the way it was created, first by Britain and then by the United States, on all matters from the framework for trade to the functions of the UN Security Council. A rising China may want to be seen as an alternative to the United States in international affairs. But while rising, its domestic social and economic system has been transformed in America’s image to an extent that even Europeans and Latin Americans sometimes find puzzling. China’s American dream may be discordant, but it is still very intense.

W
HEN
M
AO
Z
EDONG
, at the height of the crisis with the Soviets in 1969, issued orders to begin easing relations with the United States, few among his top colleagues were surprised. The CCP heads had worked themselves into a frenzy over the conflict with Moscow. Because ideology was the only significant aspect of life during the Cultural Revolution, all attention was on political divergence among Communists, be it outside or inside China. Those of his colleagues who had survived the purges saw that the Chairman’s move was a tactical one, similar to his contacts with the Americans during the war with Japan: When a great danger is threatening, every deflection helps. None among the leaders thought that China’s willingness to work with the Americans to confront what they saw as the growth of Soviet power would influence the course of the revolution at home. And only the most well-informed among them knew how desperately weak China was in military terms after the ravages of Mao’s political campaigns and how important it therefore was for it to break out of its isolation.

Mao was exceptionally lucky with the timing of his American overtures. Richard Nixon, who became president in 1969, was the only US Cold War leader who believed that the United States needed broad alliances outside Europe and Japan in order to prevail in the competition with the Soviet Union. The war in Vietnam and domestic unrest had convinced Nixon, and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, that an opening to China was an option for American diplomacy, in addition to working with anti-Soviet Third World powers such as Brazil, South Africa, Iran, and Indonesia. The intensification of the Sino-Soviet conflict accelerated Nixon’s wish for a dialogue with Beijing. In October 1969 he asked the Pakistanis to facilitate such contacts and for them to tell Mao that “the US would welcome accommodation with Communist China.” It frustrated the new leaders in Washington that Beijing was so slow to respond. But in spite of Mao’s willingness to ease relations, the chaos of the Cultural Revolution had created near paralysis in Chinese diplomacy and ensured that any new initiative would take time to materialize. When the two sides finally, in February 1970, agreed to a meeting in Beijing, the intense and prolonged US attack in mid-1970 on Cambodia set the tentative negotiations back by several months. And when Mao, finally, in October 1970 decided to send a personal signal, he did not exactly find the easiest route. Receiving his old American acquaintance, the left-wing journalist Edgar Snow, atop Tian’anmen for the national day celebrations, and telling him that Nixon himself would be welcome to China, was not the best way of contacting a Republican president.