1999 (40 page)

It would be good if the Japanese did all of these things. But they will not because we tell them to or because it is in our interest for them to take certain actions. Instead they may well have an agenda for us: “We will spend more money on your goods if you tackle your budget deficit. We will spend more on defense and venture into the Third World if you show that you too have a consistent
foreign policy, a middle ground between 'in with both feet' as in Vietnam and 'head in the sand' as in the Vietnam syndrome.”

The Japanese are shrewd, polite diplomats who would never publicly state their case in such a crude, tit-for-tat fashion. By the same token they will not react positively to receiving their marching orders in an equally crude way from us, in the form of statements by government officials, speeches in Congress, or newspaper editorials. In dealing with the Japanese we often forget that international affairs are a subtle art that is fraught with the potential for misunderstanding. We would never treat our European allies so cavalierly unless we were willing to face dire consequences, such as the years-long Franco–American chill that followed President Johnson's public criticism of de Gaulle. And yet we are all too willing to lecture, cajole, even threaten the Japanese. What are they to conclude? That we take their friendship for granted? That we think we have the right to throw our weight around because we won the war? During the last forty years the United States has proved itself an enthusiastic friend of Japan, especially when U.S.–Japanese friendship has been in our interests. We have yet to prove ourselves a dependable friend in the long term—since forty years, to the Asian mind, is only a moment. To deserve and earn the trust not only of the Japanese but of all our friends and allies in the world, we must stop criticizing them solely for the sake of domestic political gain. And we must resist lecturing those whom we would not permit to lecture us.

In the final analysis the greatest impediment to the development of a healthy alliance mentality between the United States and Japan is that the two nations are not yet equal members of the alliance.

One observer in Japan said, “For Japan to be equal requires Japan to be separate. If Japan were not separate, it could only be inferior, and would soon be a colony of the West.” The irony of this statement is that because Japan depends upon another nation for its security it to an extent is a colony of the West; it is equal only as an economic power. Thus the Japanese have the opposite dilemma to that of the Soviet Union, whose status as a superpower comes only from its military strength. Just as the Japanese are self-conscious about depending on the United States for their security,
the Soviets are self-conscious about their economic backwardness. The problem with the Soviet economy is communism. The problem with Japanese national security is Japan's inability to protect itself as a result of both political and psychological constraints.

What will help banish Japan's fear of losing its individuality is a more activist role on the world stage—diplomatically, developmentally, and eventually militarily. The Japanese people have good reason to be repelled by the thought of war, and many do not want their nation to rearm. Americans are also repelled by war. The difference is that Americans support a level of national-security spending that is adequate to protect their country against any aggressor. The Japanese attitude will inevitably change, especially if Japan's neighbors become less concerned about its reemergence. With the change will come a new self-confidence among Japanese, born of the certain knowledge that Japan is once again a truly independent nation. A more active and confident Japan will mean that the prospects for freedom and peace in the Pacific in the next century will be infinitely greater.

C
hina's twentieth century has been a crucible of revolution and suffering, of poverty and promise, of political and ideological upheaval, of order fashioned out of chaos and chaos forcibly thrust into the midst of order. Within sixty years China has been wrenched from ancient kingdom to infant republic to communist dictatorship. It has swung between angry rejection of any hint of Western influence and cautious acceptance of the benefits of good relations with the West. It is one of the world's most homogeneous societies, but for most of this century it has been at war with itself.

During its years of hostile isolation after the 1949 revolution China was distrusted and feared by many in the West. It was the mysterious, smoldering red giant of the East, preoccupied with imposing a punishing, fanatical code of ideological purity on its people at the same time the peoples of the West were enjoying an explosive postwar economic boom. Few Western leaders took the time to study China or its torturous history. One who did was Charles de Gaulle. To the surprise of some of his anticommunist supporters he recognized the People's Republic of China in 1962. Asked why, de Gaulle answered, “Because China is so big, so old and has been so much abused.”

When I was out of office during the 1960s, my own thinking about China had already begun to change as a result of the Sino–Soviet
split and the advice of such statesmen as de Gaulle and Konrad Adenauer, both of whom told me it was essential for the United States to develop a relationship with China. But I will never forget a conversation I had with Herbert Hoover in New York City in 1963, when I went to see him on his eighty-ninth birthday. He gave me the opposite advice. We should not deal with the Chinese, because they were “bloodthirsty,” he said. He shuddered visibly as he described his experiences in China as a young engineer in 1900. It was the time of the Boxer Rebellion, a violent uprising by a small group of fanatics against Western exploitation. Both the Boxers and the government troops who smashed the rebellion committed horrible atrocities. Hoover and his wife recalled seeing thousands of bodies float past in the river that ran by their settlement.

They were witnesses at the dawn of a savage century. Civil war came two decades later, when the forces of Sun Yat-sen brought down an empire that had ruled for two millennia. In the 1930s China suffered under a brutal Japanese invasion and occupation in which the Chinese government says 22 million people died. After World War II, more than 5 million died in another civil war and in the consolidation of the new communist regime following the victory of Mao Tse-tung's forces over Chiang Kai-shek's in 1949. Twenty-seven million people starved to death during the industrialization drive and forced collectivization of the late 1950s and early 1960s, ironically dubbed the “Great Leap Forward” by China's leaders. A few years later Mao dragged his country through the ideological wringer of the Cultural Revolution, violently disrupting the lives of millions of his countrymen and leaving deep scars that still remain today among the educated classes. One of the casualties was Deng Pufang, the son of Deng Xiaoping. The fanatical Red Guards threw him out of a window, and he fell three stories to the ground. He is now confined to a wheelchair.

Yet one of the miracles of our time is that China, which has endured the worst scourges of the twentieth century, is destined to be one of the world's leading powers in the twenty-first century. One hundred and sixty years ago Napoleon said of China, “There lies a sleeping giant. Let him sleep! For when he wakes he will
move the world.” The giant is awake. His time has come, and he is ready to move the world.

After a half century of war with others and with itself, China is united. In just fifty years it has grown from 400 million people to over one billion. Under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping, one of the most remarkable statesmen of the twentieth century, it has moved away from doctrinaire Marxism. By lifting the deadening weight of total bureaucratic planning, Deng has freed the enormous potential of a fifth of the world's people. If China continues to follow Deng's path, our grandchildren will live in a world not of two superpowers, but of three: the United States, the Soviet Union, and the People's Republic of China.

The China I visited for the first time in 1972 was not even a major power. It was, and to a large extent remains, a developing country. Some experts concluded at the time that the Chinese had responded favorably to our initiative only because they wanted access to Western markets and Western investments. One predicted that the first question Mao would ask me was, “What is the richest country in the world going to do for the most populous country in the world?” He was wrong. During over twenty hours of meetings I had in 1972 with Mao and with Chou En-lai, the Chinese did not raise economic issues. What mattered to China's leaders was not American money but American muscle. China and the United States were brought together by the overriding imperatives of national security.

Our rapprochement may have been the the most dramatic geopolitical event of the postwar era. But the most significant such event was the Sino–Soviet split during the early 1960s, after which China's former ideological mentors and economic benefactors in Moscow became threatening adversaries. China's unease about Soviet troops massed along its northern border, Soviet missiles targeted on its cities, Soviet aid to its antagonist India, and Soviet territorial ambitions elsewhere in Asia gave it no choice but to reach out to the Soviet Union's most powerful adversary, the United States. China and the Soviet Union are communist nations;
as a free nation the United States is a natural ideological adversary of both. But the Chinese knew that the Soviet Union threatened them, while the United States did not. As I told then party head Hua Guofeng in Beijing in 1976, there are times when a great nation must choose between ideology and survival. Hua agreed. In 1972, China had chosen survival.

Just as a few hard-liners in Beijing were stubbornly opposed to relations with the capitalist United States, our decision to seek a new relationship with China was traumatic for some Americans who felt we would betray our democratic principles by dealing with communists. But like the Chinese we had no other practical choice. If we had not undertaken the initiative and China had been forced back into the Soviet orbit, the threat to the West of Soviet communist aggression would be infinitely greater than it is today. It was in the interests of both nations that we forge a link based not on common ideals, which bind us to our allies in Western Europe and around the world, but on common interests. Both sides recognized that despite our profound philosophical differences we had no reason to be enemies and a powerful reason to be friends: our mutual interest in deterring the Soviet threat.

That threat continues to concern us. In fact, it is greater today than it was sixteen years ago. The specter of encirclement haunts the Chinese. In 1972, the PRC had friendly relations with North Vietnam, Americans were in South Vietnam and Cambodia, and Afghanistan was neutral. Today Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, and Afghanistan are pro-Soviet and anti-Chinese. In 1979 China clashed with the Soviet-backed Vietnamese, suffering 20,000 casualties.

But even if there had been no Soviet threat, it was imperative that we build a new relationship between the world's most powerful nation and the world's most populous nation. One reason was the obvious economic and cultural benefits that would grow from friendly relations. The other was the harsh realities of the atomic age. When I met with Charles de Gaulle in 1967, he said that while he had no illusions about China's ideology, the United States should not “leave them isolated in their rage.” I responded, “In ten years, when China has made significant nuclear progress, we will have no choice. It is vital that we have more communications
with them than we have today.” The modern world cannot afford the risk of the misunderstandings and misjudgments that can occur when powerful nations fail to communicate in spite of their differences. Our estrangement from China, justified though it may have been on purely ideological grounds, was an ideological luxury neither we nor they could afford any longer. Nuclear weapons represent many things to many people; to responsible national leaders, they represent a compelling reason to search for common ground.