On China (47 page)

Ideology had disappeared from the conflict. The Communist power centers were conducting a balance-of-power contest based not on ideology but on national interest.

Viewed from Beijing, a strategic nightmare was evolving along China’s borders. In the north, the Soviet buildup continued unabated: Moscow still maintained nearly fifty divisions along the border. To China’s west, Afghanistan had undergone a Marxist coup and was subjected to increasingly overt Soviet influence.
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Beijing also saw Moscow’s hand in the Iranian revolution, which culminated with the flight of the Shah on January 16, 1979. Moscow continued to push an Asian collective security system with no other plausible purpose than to contain China
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Meanwhile, Moscow was negotiating the SALT II treaty with Washington. In Beijing’s perception, such agreements served to “push the ill waters of the Soviet Union eastward” toward China. China seemed to be in an exceptionally vulnerable position. Now Vietnam had joined the Soviet camp. The “unforeseeable outcomes” predicted by Pham Van Dong to Zhou in 1968 appeared to include Soviet encirclement of China. An additional complication was that all these challenges occurred while Deng was still consolidating his position in his second return to power—a process not completed until 1980.

A principal difference between Chinese and Western diplomatic strategy is the reaction to perceived vulnerability. American and Western diplomats conclude that they should move carefully to avoid provocation; Chinese response is more likely to magnify defiance. Western diplomats tend to conclude from an unfavorable balance of forces an imperative for a diplomatic solution; they urge diplomatic initiatives to place the other side in the “wrong” to isolate it morally but to desist from the use of force—this was essentially the American advice to Deng after Vietnam invaded Cambodia and occupied it. Chinese strategists are more likely to increase their commitment to substitute courage and psychological pressure against the material advantage of the adversary. They believe in deterrence in the form of preemption. When Chinese planners conclude that their opponent is gaining unacceptable advantage and that the strategic trend is turning against them, they respond by seeking to undermine the enemy’s confidence and allow China to reclaim the psychological, if not material, upper hand
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Faced with a threat on all fronts, Deng decided to go on the diplomatic and strategic offensive. Though not yet in complete control in Beijing, he moved daringly on several levels abroad. He changed the Chinese position toward the Soviet Union from containment to explicit strategic hostility and, in effect, to roll-back. China would no longer confine itself to advising the United States on how to contain the Soviet Union; it would now play an active role in constructing an anti-Soviet and anti-Vietnam coalition, especially in Asia. It would put the pieces in place for a possible showdown with Hanoi.

When Deng returned from his second exile in 1977, he reversed Mao’s domestic policy but left Mao’s foreign policy largely in place. This was because both shared strong national feelings and had parallel views of the Chinese national interest. It was also because foreign policy had set more absolute limits to Mao’s revolutionary impulses than domestic policy.

There was, however, a significant difference in style between Mao’s criticism and Deng’s. Mao had questioned the strategic intentions of America’s Soviet policy. Deng assumed an identity of strategic interests and concentrated on achieving a parallel implementation. Mao dealt with the Soviet Union as a kind of abstract strategic threat whose menace was no more applicable to China than to the rest of the world. Deng recognized the special danger to China, especially an immediate threat at China’s southern border compounding a latent threat in the north. Dialogue therefore took on a more operational character. Mao acted like a frustrated teacher, Deng as a demanding partner.

In the face of actual peril, Deng ended the ambivalence about the American relationship of Mao’s last year. There was no longer any Chinese nostalgia for opportunities on behalf of world revolution. Deng, in all conversations after his return, argued that, in resisting the thrust of Soviet policy toward Europe, China and Japan needed to be brought into a global design.

However close the consultation had become between China and the United States, the anomaly continued that America still formally recognized Taiwan as the legitimate government of China and Taipei as the capital of China. China’s adversaries along its northern and southern borders might misconstrue the absence of recognition as an opportunity.

Normalization of relations moved to the top of the Sino-American agenda as Jimmy Carter took office. The first visit to Beijing of the new Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, in August 1977 did not turn out well. “I left Washington,” he wrote in his memoirs,

The American proposal on Taiwan contained a series of ideas involving retention of some limited American diplomatic presence on Taiwan that had been put forward and rejected during the Ford administration. The proposals were rejected again by Deng, who called them a step backward. A year later, the internal American debate ended when President Carter decided to assign high priority to the relationship with China. Soviet pressures in Africa and the Middle East convinced the new President to opt for rapid normalization with China, by what amounted to the quest for a de facto strategic alliance with China. On May 17, 1978, Carter sent his National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, to Beijing with these instructions:

Brzezinski was also authorized to reaffirm the five principles enunciated by Nixon to Zhou in 1972.
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Long a strong advocate of strategic cooperation with China, Brzezinski carried out his instructions with enthusiasm and skill. When he visited Beijing in May 1978 in pursuit of normalizing relations, Brzezinski found a receptive audience. Deng was eager to proceed with normalization to enlist Washington more firmly in a coalition to oppose, by means of what he called “real, solid, down-to-earth work,”
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Soviet advances in every corner of the globe.

The Chinese leaders were deeply aware of the strategic dangers surrounding them; but they presented their analysis less as a national concern than as a broader view of global conditions. “Turmoil under heaven,” the “horizontal line,” the “Three Worlds”: all represented general theories of international relations, not distinct national perceptions.

Foreign Minister Huang Hua’s analysis of the international situation displayed a remarkable self-confidence. Rather than appearing as a supplicant in what was, after all, a very difficult situation for China, Huang struck the attitude of a Confucian teacher, lecturing on how to conduct a comprehensive foreign policy. He opened with a general assessment of the “contradictions” between the two superpowers, the futility of negotiations with the Soviet Union, and the inevitability of a world war:

Huang raised concerns that also bothered American students of strategy—especially those which tried to relate nuclear weapons to traditional ways of thinking about strategy. Reliance on nuclear weapons would open up a gap between deterrent threats and the willingness to implement them: “As for the argument that the Soviet Union would not dare to use conventional arms for fear of nuclear attack from the West, this is only wishful thinking. To base a strategic stance on this thinking is not only dangerous but also unreliable.”
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In the Middle East—“the flank of Europe” and a “source of energy in a future war”—the United States had failed to check Soviet advances. It had issued a joint statement on the Middle East with the Soviet Union (inviting regional states to a conference to explore the prospect of a comprehensive Palestinian settlement), “thus opening the door wide for the Soviet Union to further infiltrate the Middle East.” Washington had left President Anwar Sadat of Egypt—whose “bold action” had “created a situation unfavorable to the Soviet Union”—in a dangerous position and allowed the Soviet Union to “seize the chance to raise serious division among the Arab countries.”
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Huang summed up the situation by invoking an old Chinese proverb: “appeasement” of Moscow, he said, was “like giving wings to a tiger to strengthen it.” But a policy of coordinated pressure would prevail, since the Soviet Union was “only outwardly strong but inwardly weak. It bullies the weak and fears the strong.”
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All this was to supply the context for Indochina. Huang addressed “the problem of regional hegemony.” America, of course, had trod this path a good ten years earlier. Vietnam aimed to dominate Cambodia and Laos and establish an Indochinese Federation—and “behind that there lies the Soviet Union.” Hanoi had already achieved a dominant position in Laos, stationing troops there and maintaining “advisors in every department and in every level in Laos.” But Hanoi had encountered resistance in Cambodia, which opposed Vietnamese regional ambitions. Vietnamese-Cambodian tension represented “not merely some sporadic skirmishes along the borders” but a major conflict which “may last for a long time.” Unless Hanoi gave up its goal of dominating Indochina, “the problem will not be solved in a short period.”
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Deng followed up the Huang Hua critique later that day. Concessions and agreements had never produced Soviet restraint, he warned Brzezinski. Fifteen years of arms control agreements had allowed the Soviet Union to achieve strategic parity with the United States. Trade with the Soviet Union meant that “the U.S. is helping the Soviet Union overcome its weaknesses.” Deng offered a mocking assessment of American responses to Soviet adventurism in the Third World and chided Washington for trying to “please” Moscow:

It was an extraordinary performance. The country which was the principal target of the Soviet Union was proposing joint action as a conceptual obligation, not a bargain between nations, much less as a request. At a moment of great national danger—which its own analysis demonstrated—China nevertheless acted as an instructor on strategy, not as a passive consumer of American prescriptions, as America’s European allies frequently did.

The staples of much of the American debate—international law, multilateral solutions, popular consensus—were absent from the Chinese analysis except as practical tools to an agreed objective. And that objective, as Deng pointed out to Brzezinski, was “coping with the polar bear and that’s that.”
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But for Americans there is a limit to the so-called realist approach in the fundamental values of American society. And the murderous Khmer Rouge governing Cambodia represented such a limit. No American President could treat the Khmer Rouge as another stone in the
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strategy. Its genocidal conduct—driving the population of Phnom Penh into the jungle, mass killings of designated categories of civilians—could not simply be ignored (though as we shall see necessity did on occasion abort principle).

Hua Guofeng, still Premier, was even more emphatic in a meeting the next day:

No member of the Atlantic Alliance had put forward a comparably sweeping call to joint—essentially preemptive—action or had indicated that it was prepared to act alone on its assessment.

Operationally the Chinese leaders were proposing a kind of cooperation in many ways more intimate and surely more risk taking than the Atlantic Alliance. They sought to implement the strategy of offensive deterrence described in earlier chapters. Its special feature was that Deng proposed no formal structure or long-term obligation. A common assessment would supply the impetus for common action, but the de facto alliance would not survive if the assessments began to diverge—China insisted on being self-reliant even when in extreme danger. That China was so insistent on joint action despite the scathing criticism of specific American policies demonstrated that cooperation with the United States for security was perceived as imperative.