Sleepwalking With the Bomb (17 page)

All this came as the United States was beginning to flex its muscles in the Pacific. U.S. Commodore Matthew Perry’s 1853 visit to Tokyo Bay ended Japan’s 250-year isolation and opened trade between the U.S. and the Far East. After the U.S. Navy defeated the Spanish Navy at Manila Bay (looking out at the South China Sea), Secretary of State John Hay’s 1899 Open Door Policy pressed for wider trade with China, thus increasing pressure on the decaying Manchu Dynasty to open up to all sources of Western trade.

Without in any way down playing the harm caused China by foreign powers, however, internal decisions and events were of immense consequence in retarding the global fortunes of China, arguably of greater impact than external pressures. In 1434 the Ming emperor (why remains unclear) suddenly halted the series of seven massive seagoing explorations begun in 1401, which had taken the great Admiral Zheng He as far as Africa, and dismantled the Chinese fleet. China’s fleet featured ships far larger than the tiny vessels in which Christopher Columbus sailed at the end of the century, and superior in many aspects of design and construction. The “treasure ships” of the fleet were purportedly 450 feet long and 180 feet wide—half the length of a World War II aircraft carrier. Unlike the voyages of European explorers, mounted in search of trade and treasure, China’s voyages, historian Daniel Boorstin explains, were simply to show the rest of the world how advanced and refined China’s civilization was.

Just 26 years after China destroyed its awesome fleet, Prince Henry the Navigator launched the first of Europe’s great explorations that eventually would take Christopher Columbus to the New World (in 1492) and Vasco de Gama to India (in 1498). As China began to retreat into its shell—sporadically banning private shipping and coastal settlement—the West began its 500-year rise to global supremacy.

The “Middle Kingdom” disdained “barbarians” from its perch at the center of the earth—China had a gross domestic product in 1820 that was, at 30 percent of world GDP, larger than that of the U.S. and Europe combined. (Chinese GDP was to be the world’s largest for 18 of the last 20 centuries.) But its feeble military position gave it few levers in the face of foreign aggression. A China that had stayed among the leaders in military power and influence would have been in a far stronger position to resist the incursions that began a full four centuries after the dismantling of its world’s-best fleet.

The next huge event impoverishing China came in the mid-nineteenth century: the 1850–1864 Tai Ping Rebellion, in which ethnic Chinese revolted against the Manchus who had ruled China since 1644. With the aid of the French and British imperial powers, the Manchu overlords prevailed over the Tai Ping rebels, but at a tremendous cost. The crushing of the rebellion, combined with other mid-nineteenth-century turmoil, resulted in a staggering 15 percent decline in China’s population between 1850 and 1873, from 410 to 350 million. (Ironically, Tai Ping means “Great Peace.”) By comparison, the American Civil War—which ran four years—killed 2 percent of America’s population of 30 million, a slightly lower annual percentage loss, but for one-quarter the time span. To recall the impact of the Civil War on American politics to this day suggests the long-term devastation the ethnic enmities of the Tai Ping Rebellion have caused.

In the twentieth century, China suffered several other signal catastrophes—two internal, and one from its neighbor—each of which, alone, would have derailed any normal nation’s progress. First was Japan’s 1937 attack against a China riven by civil strife. The subsequent eight years’ war was marked by extreme Japanese brutality, including the infamous Rape of Nanking that killed some 300,000 people in six weeks, and the use of outlawed chemical and bacteriological weapons. Estimates place China’s casualties at 35 million, with 20 million dead and 15 million wounded. Even in a country with over 500 million people, the toll astonishes.

The second and third mega-events both came to China courtesy of one man: the self-styled “Great Helmsman,” Mao Zedong, who marched into Beijing on October 1, 1949, bringing doctrinaire Marxist economics with him. In 1958 he began the grand agricultural collectivization experiment called the “Great Leap Forward.” It lasted just shy of three years and claimed—through famine, oppression, and suicide—as many as 40 million lives. In a country with about 650 million in 1960,
the Great Leap thus killed one of every 16 Chinese.
For America today the equivalent figure would be over 20 million deaths. Compared to this stupefying mass murder due to ideological fervor, the 2 to 2.5 million toll from two Chinese civil wars (1928–1937 and 1946–1950) is almost lost in the shuffle.

Add the four percent death toll of the Sino-Japanese War to the six percent death toll of the Great Leap Forward, and China lost roughly ten percent of its population in the two catastrophes. Now throw in the third mega-catastrophe, Mao’s 1966–1969 Cultural Revolution. In an effort to impose socialist norms, Mao purged academics, sent urban populations en masse to remote rural areas, and interred dissidents in “reeducation” camps. The result was an estimated 1 to 20 million dead.

Over 120 years, the loss of some 150 million lives through the serial carnages of the nineteenth-century conflicts, Sino-Japanese War, Great Leap Forward, and Cultural Revolution—coupled with China’s half millennium retreat from world trade—surely had a vastly greater impact on China’s geopolitical fortunes than the much-trumpeted Western imperial humiliations of the self-weakened country.

Today China has about 1.3 billion people. Its GDP in purchasing power parity (GDP adjusted for relative currency value) is roughly two-thirds that for the U.S., but spread over more than four times as many people. This means that once China’s GDP is adjusted both for purchasing power parity and per capita, it is perhaps one-sixth of America’s. One question lingers: Where would China rank today had it not suffered the series of catastrophes that began in 1434?

C
HINA’S FALL
began with a retreat from the world, and its resurgence began when it opened to the United States in 1971, ending the American government’s refusal to recognize Mao’s regime. Later that year, the Communist mainland replaced Nationalist China as permanent member of the UN Security Council—and as sole internationally recognized representative of the Chinese people. President Nixon went to China early in 1972.

Mao’s China appallingly underperformed economically and wreaked havoc socially and politically. But Deng Xiaoping succeeded him after his death in 1976, and in 1979 opened China’s trade to the world. Thus ended 545 years of first isolation and then reluctant limited participation in global commerce.

China’s economic power can be overstated—it is well shy of the power of the U.S. economy, despite the latter’s recent severe trials. Yet its sheer size makes it a force to be contended with. China is America’s second-largest trading partner, holding a one-sixth share of American international trade. It holds trillions in U.S. securities and dollar-denominated reserves. It is not for nothing that in 2011 Chinese president Hu Jintao questioned the dollar’s status as global reserve currency.

China is in the midst of a huge push to upgrade its military. It is building modern nuclear submarines and even an aircraft carrier—a warship only the U.S., Russia, Great Britain, and France have ever constructed. Its anti-ship missiles include models that can carry nuclear warheads a thousand miles. American air power based on carriers (or on Taiwan, often called by strategists America’s largest aircraft carrier) is a major part of America’s ability to project power across the Pacific. Neutralize these assets, and China’s ability to dominate the western Pacific becomes a strategic reality. (Neither South Korea nor Japan would be likely to allow its territory or equipment to be used in a U.S.-China conflict, lest China target it directly.)

Most impressive of all is China’s 2010 rollout of a stealth combat aircraft prototype, the J-20. Its configuration and size suggest a medium-range fighter-bomber that can target Taiwan or American naval ships (rather than an interceptor, which would shoot down bombers, or a pure air superiority fighter, designed to shoot down other fighters). The J-20 will be markedly inferior to the American F-22, the world’s only operational fifth-generation combat aircraft. But that is cold comfort to allied strategic planners, since America ended its F-22 production run at one-quarter the number originally planned. The Pentagon’s assessment was that China would not have a stealth fighter before the 2020s. The 2011 test flight of the J-20 suggests China is on a faster track. This comes as America’s F-35, the future stealth fighter of choice for the U.S., continues to encounter technical problems that have pushed back its likely operational status into the mid-teens. Were China to deploy a sufficient number of J-20s, it could prevail over superior American quality in a major regional conflict.

Underpinning China’s growing military machine is its nuclear arsenal. After American nuclear threats during the Korean War, the August 1954 first crisis over offshore islands Quemoy and Matsu, and then the American mutual defense treaty with Taiwan in December of 1954, Mao gave the go-ahead on January 15, 1955, to start China’s nuclear program. Although secrets stolen from the Manhattan Project may have played a role in China’s program, China early on developed a formidable in-country team of nuclear scientists. Russia also transferred technology and know-how, from 1954 through 1958 (the year of the second crisis over Quemoy and Matsu, when the United States threatened to use tactical nuclear weapons in a fight with China over its shelling of the islands). Henry Kissinger writes that a key motive behind Khrushchev’s decision to transfer nuclear technology to China was so that Moscow would not feel obligated to back China in event of another major confrontation with the United States.

But in 1959 Khrushchev decided to halt Russian assistance, unnerved, Kissinger writes, by Mao Zedong’s nuclear brinkmanship over Quemoy and Matsu. Weapons designers Thomas C. Reed and Danny Stillman write in
The Nuclear Express
that the Russians, upon deciding to slow China’s march to nuclear weapon status, even supplied the Chinese with deliberately false data in order to sabotage their progress. But many of China’s top scientists studied in other countries, including the United States, and then brought their knowledge back to China.

In 1961, Mao declared he would build nuclear weapons “even if the Chinese had to pawn their trousers.” He was expressing a sentiment the West would hear often, from various leaders, in the years that followed. In starting Pakistan’s quest for the bomb, Prime Minster Zulfikar Ali Bhutto famously said that his people would “eat grass,” if need be, to go nuclear. Starving millions did not deflect North Korea from its program. Put simply, no police state has qualms about pursuing weapons amidst its population’s destitution, even literal starvation.

Mao rejected Russia as patron and ally in 1962, sundering China’s alliance with Russia after Khrushchev stopped supporting his nuclear program. The next year, President Kennedy approached the Russians about seeking to stop China’s program, possibly by nuclear means. Despite their split with China, the Russians refused to join the U.S. effort, as the superpower rivalry then was at its height.

Like Russia’s 1949 test of a clone of the Nagasaki bomb, China’s first atomic bomb test, in October 1964, caught international observers completely by surprise. Stillman and Reed note that from the outset, China’s instrumentation was “sophisticated in the extreme.” This test weapon— a uranium bomb—was four times more efficient in its explosive yield– to-weight ratio than was the Hiroshima uranium device. Danny Still-man visited China’s Lop Nor test facility in 1998, and the astonished weapons designer found it to be seven times larger than the U.S. test site in Nevada. In 1966 China tested its first H-bomb.

This test strained relations between the Russians and Chinese, and in 1969, the USSR apparently considered launching a nuclear first strike over border clashes with China. Chinese documents shown Henry Kissinger verify that Russia and China were so close to nuclear war that Chinese ruler Mao Zedong ordered government officials to disperse from Beijing in the summer of 1969. The Soviets deployed over a million troops along the Russo-Chinese border. Mid-level officials asked counterparts in various chancelleries around the globe how their governments would react to a Soviet nuclear first strike aimed at China’s nuclear installations.

Aware of these signals, senior American officials publicly voiced grave concern that war might break out, in an effort to signal that the U.S. would not support such a move. Fear of a potential full-scale Sino-Soviet war was a key trigger that induced the newly nuclear-armed Mao to seek formal diplomatic relations with the U.S., and led to the famous 1972 handshake with Nixon.

In his penetrating diplomatic history
On China,
Kissinger assesses Mao’s overall posture on nuclear weapons. Mao grasped that in the 1950s America’s nuclear arsenal was far too small to destroy China, with its vast geographic area and 600 million people. Kissinger is not convinced that Mao was serious about being willing to sacrifice 300 million people in a nuclear war, but clearly Mao had a far greater willingness to tolerate mass casualties than did America and its Western allies. Mao told Kissinger in October 1975 that American public opinion would prevent the U.S. from using nuclear weapons to help overmatched NATO conventional forces ward off a Soviet attack. In the same conversation Mao rejected Kissinger’s statement that the U.S. would use nuclear weapons to defend its Mideast ally Egypt.

China’s current leaders seem to share Mao’s view of the western Pacific as an area within China’s sphere of influence, and thus can be expected to vigorously pursue a diplomatic and military strategy of seeking to supplant America as the predominant western Pacific power. It has embarked on an impressive military program, in apparent pursuit of just that objective.