On China (15 page)

Diplomatic traditionalists would have rejected this attitude of aloof challenge as unfeasible. But Mao believed in the objective impact of ideological and, above all, psychological factors. He proposed to achieve psychological equivalence to the superpowers by calculated indifference to their military capabilities.

One of the classic tales of the Chinese strategic tradition was that of Zhuge Liang’s “Empty City Stratagem” from
The Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
In it, a commander notices an approaching army far superior to his own. Since resistance guarantees destruction, and surrender would bring about loss of control over the future, the commander opts for a stratagem. He opens the gates of his city, places himself there in a posture of repose, playing a lute, and behind him shows normal life without any sign of panic or concern. The general of the invading army interprets this sangfroid as a sign of the existence of hidden reserves, stops his advance, and withdraws.

Mao’s avowed indifference to the threat of nuclear war surely owed something to that tradition. From the very beginning, the People’s Republic of China had to maneuver in a triangular relationship with the two nuclear powers, each of which was individually capable of posing a great threat and, together, were in a position to overwhelm China. Mao dealt with this endemic state of affairs by pretending it did not exist. He claimed to be impervious to nuclear threats; indeed, he developed a public posture of being willing to accept hundreds of millions of casualties, even welcoming it as a guarantee for the more rapid victory of Communist ideology. Whether Mao believed his own pronouncements on nuclear war it is impossible to say. But he clearly succeeded in making much of the rest of the world believe that he meant it—an ultimate test of credibility. (Of course in China’s case, the city was not entirely “empty.” China eventually developed its own nuclear weapons capability, though on a much smaller scale than that of the Soviet Union or the United States.)

Mao was able to draw on a long tradition in Chinese statecraft of accomplishing long-term goals from a position of relative weakness. For centuries, Chinese statesmen enmeshed the “barbarians” in relationships that kept them at bay and studiously maintained the political fiction of superiority through diplomatic stagecraft. From the beginning of the People’s Republic, China played a world role surpassing its objective strength. By consequence of its fierce defense of its definition of its national patrimony, the People’s Republic of China became an influential force in the Non-Aligned Movement—the grouping of newly independent countries seeking to position themselves between the superpowers. China established itself as a great power not to be trifled with while conducting a redefinition of the Chinese identity at home and challenging the nuclear powers diplomatically, sometimes concurrently, sometimes sequentially.

In pursuit of this foreign policy agenda, Mao owed more to Sun Tzu than to Lenin. He drew inspiration from his reading of the Chinese classics and the tradition he outwardly disdained. In charting foreign policy initiatives he was less likely to refer to Marxist doctrine than to traditional Chinese works: Confucian texts; the canonical “24 Dynastic Histories” recounting the rise and fall of China’s imperial dynasties; Sun Tzu,
The Romance of the Three Kingdoms,
and other texts on warfare and strategy; tales of adventure and rebellion such as
Outlaws of the Marsh
; and the novel of romance and courtly intrigue,
Dream of the Red Chamber
, which Mao claimed to have read five times.
¹⁰
In an echo of the traditional Confucian scholar-officials whom he denounced as oppressors and parasites, Mao wrote poetry and philosophical essays and took great pride in his unorthodox calligraphy. These literary and artistic elements were not a refuge from his political labors but an integral part of them. When Mao, after a thirty-two-year absence, returned to his native village in 1959, he wrote a poem not of Marxism or materialism but of romantic sweep: “It is the bitter sacrifices that strengthen our firm resolve, and which give us the courage to dare to change heavens and skies, to change the sun, and to make a new world.”
¹¹

So ingrained was this literary tradition that, in 1969, at a turning point in Mao’s foreign policy, four marshals assigned by Mao to outline his strategic options illustrated their recommendations of the need to open relations with the then archenemy America by citing
The Romance of the Three Kingdoms
, which was banned in China but which they could be certain Mao had read. So, too, even in the midst of his most sweeping assaults on China’s ancient heritage, Mao framed his foreign policy doctrines in terms of analogies with highly traditional Chinese games of the intellect. He described the opening maneuvers in the Sino-Indian War as “crossing the Han-Chu boundary,” an ancient metaphor drawn from the Chinese version of chess.
¹²
He held up the traditional gambling game of mahjong as a school for strategic thought: “If you knew how to play the game,” he told his doctor, “you would also understand the relationship between the principle of probability and the principle of certainty.”
¹³
And in China’s conflicts with both the United States and the Soviet Union, Mao and his top associates conceived of the threat in terms of a
wei qi
concept—that of preventing strategic encirclement.

It was in precisely these most traditional aspects that the superpowers had the most difficulty comprehending Mao’s strategic motives. Through the lens of Western strategic analysis, most of Beijing’s military undertakings in the first three decades of the Cold War were improbable and, on paper at least, impossible affairs. Setting China against usually far stronger powers and occurring in territories previously deemed of secondary strategic importance—North Korea, the offshore islands of the Taiwan Strait, sparsely populated tracts of the Himalayas, frozen swatches of territory in the Ussuri River—these Chinese interventions and offensives caught almost all foreign observers—and each of the adversaries—by surprise. Mao was determined to prevent encirclement by any power or combination of powers, regardless of ideology, that he perceived as securing too many
wei qi
“stones” surrounding China, by disrupting their calculations.

This was the catalyst that led China into the Korean War despite its relative weakness—and that, in the aftermath of Mao’s death, would lead Beijing to war with Vietnam, a recent ally, in defiance of a mutual defense treaty between Hanoi and Moscow and while the Soviet Union maintained a million troops on China’s northern borders. Long-range calculations of the configuration of forces around China’s periphery were considered more significant than a literal calculus of the immediate balance of power. This combination of the long-range and the psychological also came to expression in Mao’s approach to deterring perceived military threats.

However much Mao absorbed from China’s history, no previous Chinese ruler combined traditional elements with the same mix of authority and ruthlessness and global sweep as Mao: ferocity in the face of challenge and skillful diplomacy when circumstances prevented his preference for drastic overpowering initiatives. His vast and daring foreign policy initiatives, however traditional his tactics, were carried out amidst a violent churning of Chinese society. The whole world, he promised, would be transformed, and things turned into their opposites:

Mao was too much of a realist, however, to pursue world revolution as a practical goal. As a result, the tangible impact of China on world revolution was largely ideological and consisted of intelligence support for local Communist parties. Mao explained this attitude in an interview with Edgar Snow, the first American journalist to describe the Chinese Communist base in Yan’an during the civil war, in 1965: “China supported revolutionary movements, but not by invading countries. Of course, whenever a liberation struggle existed China would publish statements and called demonstrations to support it.”
¹⁵

In the same vein,
Long Live the Victory of People’s War,
a 1965 pamphlet by Lin Biao, then Mao’s presumptive successor, argued that the countryside of the world (that is, the developing countries) would defeat the cities of the world (that is, the advanced countries) much as the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) had defeated Chiang Kai-shek. The administration of Lyndon Johnson read these lines as a Chinese blueprint for support for—and probably outright participation in—Communist subversion all around the world and especially in Indochina. Lin’s pamphlet was a contributing factor in the decision to send American forces to Vietnam. Contemporary scholarship, however, treats his document as a statement of the limits of Chinese military support for Vietnam and other revolutionary movements. For, in fact, Lin was proclaiming that “[t]he liberation of the masses is accomplished by the masses themselves—this is a basic principle of Marxism-Leninism. Revolution or people’s war in any country is the business of the masses in that country and should be carried out primarily by their own efforts; there is no other way.”
¹⁶

This restraint reflected a realistic appreciation of the real balance of forces. We cannot know what Mao might have decided if the equilibrium had been tilted in favor of the Communist power. But whether as a reflection of realism or philosophical motivation, revolutionary ideology was a means to transform the world by performance rather than war, much as the traditional emperors had perceived their role.

A team of Chinese scholars with access to Beijing’s Central Archives has written a fascinating account of Mao’s ambivalence: dedicated to world revolution, ready to encourage it wherever possible, yet also protective of the necessities of China’s survival.
¹⁷
This ambivalence came to expression in a conversation with the head of the Australian Communist Party, E. F. Hill, in 1969, while Mao was considering the opening with the United States, with which China had been locked in an adversarial relationship for two decades. He put a question to his interlocutor: Are we heading into a revolution that will prevent war?

Or into a war that will produce revolution?
¹⁸
If the former, the rapprochement with the United States would be improvident; if the latter, it would be imperative, to prevent an attack on China. In the end, after some hesitation, Mao chose the option of rapprochement with America. The prevention of war (which, by this point, would most likely involve a Soviet attack on China) was more important than the encouragement of global revolution.

Mao’s opening to the United States was a major ideological as well as strategic decision. But it did not alter his commitment to the concept of continuous revolution at home. Even in 1972, the year of President Richard Nixon’s visit to China, he caused to be distributed nationwide a letter he had sent to his wife, Jiang Qing, at the beginning of the Cultural Revolution six years earlier:

This call to ideological commitment also epitomized Mao’s dilemma as that of any victorious revolution: once revolutionaries seize power, they are obliged to govern hierarchically if they want to avoid either paralysis or chaos. The more sweeping the overthrow, the more hierarchy has to substitute for the consensus that holds a functioning society together. The more elaborate the hierarchy, the more likely it is to turn into another even more elaborate version of the replaced oppressive Establishment.

Thus from the beginning Mao was engaged in a quest whose logical end could only be an attack on Communism’s own institutions, even those he had created himself. Where Leninism had asserted that the advent of Communism would solve the “contradictions” of society, Mao’s philosophy knew no resting place. It was not enough to industrialize the country as the Soviet Union had done. In the quest for the historic Chinese uniqueness, the social order needed to be in constant flux to prevent the sin of “revisionism,” of which Mao increasingly accused post-Stalin Russia. A Communist state, according to Mao, must not turn into a bureaucratic society; the motivating force must be ideology rather than hierarchy.

In this manner, Mao generated a series of built-in contradictions. In pursuit of the Great Harmony, Mao launched the Hundred Flowers Campaign in 1956, which invited public debate and then turned on those intellectuals who practiced it; the Great Leap Forward in 1958, designed to catch up with the West industrially in a three-year period but which led to one of the most pervasive famines in modern history and produced a split in the Communist Party; and the Cultural Revolution in 1966, in which a generation of trained leaders, professors, diplomats, and experts were sent to the countryside to work on farms to learn from the masses.

Millions died to implement the Chairman’s quest for egalitarian virtue. Yet in his rebellion against China’s pervasive bureaucracy, he kept coming up against the dilemma that the campaign to save his people from themselves generated ever larger bureaucracies. In the end, destroying his own disciples turned into Mao’s vast enterprise.