On China (39 page)

How would global coordination between the United States and China be implemented? Mao suggested that each side develop a clear concept of its national interest and cooperate out of its own necessity:

In other words, each side could arm itself with whatever ideological slogans fulfilled its own domestic necessities, so long as it did not let them interfere with the need for cooperation against the Soviet danger. Ideology would be relegated to domestic management; it took a leave from foreign policy. The ideological armistice was, of course, valid only so long as objectives remained compatible.

In the execution of policy, Mao could be pragmatic; in the conception of it, he always strove for some overriding principles. Mao had not been the leader of an ideological movement for half a century to turn suddenly to pure pragmatism. Kennan’s containment theory applied primarily to Europe and Atlantic relations; Mao’s was global. In Mao’s concept, countries threatened by Soviet expansionism “should draw a horizontal line—the U.S.–Japan–Pakistan–Iran . . . Turkey and Europe.”
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(This is why Iraq had appeared in the earlier dialogue.) Mao put forward his concept to me in February 1973, explaining how this grouping should conduct the struggle with the Soviet Union. Later, he canvassed it with the Japanese foreign minister in terms of a “big terrain” composed of countries along the frontal line.
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We agreed with the substance of the analysis. But the differences between the Chinese and American domestic systems that it sought to skirt reemerged over issues of implementation. How were two such different political systems to carry out the same policy? For Mao, conception and execution were identical. For the United States, the difficulty lay in building a supportive consensus among our public and among our allies at a time when the Watergate scandal threatened the authority of the President.

The strategy of holding a horizontal line against the Soviet Union reflected China’s dispassionate analysis of the international situation. Its strategic necessity would be its own justification. But it raised the inherent ambiguities of a policy based largely on national interest. It depended on the ability of all sides to sustain comparable calculations from case to case. A coalition of the United States, China, Japan, and Europe was bound to prevail against the Soviet Union. But what if some partners calculated differently—especially in the absence of formal obligations? What if, as the Chinese feared, some partners concluded that the best means to create a balance was for the United States or Europe or Japan, instead of confronting the Soviet Union, to conciliate it? What if one of the components of the triangular relationship perceived an opportunity to alter the nature of the triangle rather than stabilize it? What, in short, might other countries do if they applied the Chinese principle of aloof self-reliance to themselves? Thus the moment of greatest cooperation between China and the United States also led to discussions between their leaders over how the various elements of the quasi-alliance might be tempted to exploit it for their own purposes. China’s concept of self-reliance had the paradoxical consequence of making it difficult for Chinese leaders to believe in the willingness of their partners to run the same risks they were.

In applying his horizontal line concept, Mao, the specialist in contradictions, confronted an inevitable series of them. One was that the concept was difficult to reconcile with the Chinese idea of self-reliance. Cooperation depended on a merging of independent analyses. If they all coincided with China’s, there was no problem. But in the event of disagreement between the parties, China’s suspicions would become sui generis and grow difficult to overcome.

The horizontal line concept implied a muscular version of the Western concept of collective security. But in practice collective security is more likely to operate by the least common denominator than on the basis of the convictions of the country with the most elaborate geopolitical design. This surely has been the experience of America in the alliances it has sought to lead.

These difficulties, inherent in any global system of security, were compounded for Mao because the opening with America did not have the impact on U.S.-Soviet relations he had originally calculated. Mao’s turn toward the United States was based on the belief that U.S.-Soviet differences would, in the end, prevent any substantial compromises between the two nuclear superpowers. It was, in a sense, an application of the Communist “united front” strategies of the 1930s and 1940s, as expressed in the slogan promulgated after Nixon’s visit: “utilizing contradictions and defeating enemies one by one.” Mao had assumed that America’s opening to China would multiply Soviet suspicions and magnify tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union. The former happened; the latter did not. After the opening to China, Moscow started to compete for Washington’s favor. Contacts between the nuclear superpowers multiplied. While the United States clearly signaled that it considered China an essential component of the international order and would support it if threatened, the mere fact that America had a separate and more strategic option ran against the old revolutionary’s strategic instincts.

The trouble with the horizontal line concept, as Mao began to examine it, was that, if calculations of power determined all conduct, the relative military weakness of China would make it somewhat dependent on American support, at least for an interim period.

This is why, at every stage of the dialogue about cooperation, Mao and other Chinese leaders insisted on a proposition designed to preserve Chinese freedom of maneuver and self-respect: that they did not need protection and that China was able to handle all foreseeable crises, alone if necessary. They used the rhetoric of collective security but reserved the right to prescribe its content.

In each of the conversations with Mao in 1973 he made a point of conveying China’s imperviousness to any form of pressure, even and perhaps especially nuclear pressure. If a nuclear war killed all Chinese above the age of thirty, he said in February, it might prove of long-term benefit to China by helping unify it linguistically: “[I]f the Soviet Union would throw its bombs and kill all those over 30 who are Chinese, that would solve the problem [of the complexity of China’s many dialects] for us. Because the old people like me can’t learn [Mandarin] Chinese.”
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When Mao described in detail how deep into China he might retreat to lure the aggressor into the trap of an engulfing hostile population, I asked, “But if they use bombs and do not send armies?” To which Mao replied, “What should we do? Perhaps you can organize a committee to study the problem. We’ll let them beat us up and they will lose any resources.”
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The innuendo that Americans were prone to indulge in study while Chinese acted explains why Mao, even while advocating his horizontal line theory, inevitably included dramatic details on how China would be prepared to stand alone if the quasi-alliance failed. Mao and Zhou (and later Deng) stressed that China was “digging tunnels” and was equipped to survive for decades on “rifles and millet” alone. In a way, the bombast was likely calculated to mask China’s vulnerability—but it reflected as well a serious analysis about how it would confront the existential nightmare of a global war.

Mao’s repeated musings about China’s ability to survive a nuclear war, sometimes with breezy humor—because there were simply too many Chinese to kill even with nuclear weapons—were treated as a sign of derangement by some Western observers and, in a sense, weakened Western determination because they stirred the fear of nuclear war.

What Mao was really worried about, however, was facing the implications of the doctrine on which the United States and the Western world was basing its concept of security. The dominant theory of Mutual Assured Destruction deterrence depended on the ability to inflict a given percentage of total devastation. The adversary presumably had a comparable capability. How could a threat of global suicide be kept from turning into a bluff? Mao interpreted the U.S. reliance on Mutual Assured Destruction as reflecting a lack of confidence in its other armed forces. It was the subject of a conversation in 1975, in which Mao penetrated to the heart of our Cold War nuclear dilemma: “You have confidence in, you believe in, nuclear weapons. You do not have confidence in your own army.”
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What about China, exposed to nuclear threat without, for some time, adequate means of retaliation? Mao’s answer was that it would create a narrative based on historical performance and biblical endurance. No other society could imagine that it would be able to achieve a credible security policy by a willingness to prevail after casualties in the hundreds of millions and the devastation or occupation of most of its cities. That gap alone defined the difference between Western and Chinese perceptions of security. Chinese history testified to the ability to overcome depredations inconceivable anywhere else and, at the end, to prevail by imposing its culture or its vastness on the would-be conqueror. That faith in his own people and culture was the reverse side of Mao’s sometimes misanthropic reflections on their day-to-day performance. It was not only that there were so many Chinese; it was also the tenacity of their culture and the cohesiveness of their relationships.

But Western leaders, more attuned and responsive to their populations, were not prepared to offer them in so categorical a manner (though they did it indirectly via their strategic doctrine). For them, nuclear war had to be a demonstrated last resort, not a standard operating procedure.

The Chinese almost obsessive self-reliance was not always fully understood on the American side. Accustomed to strengthening our European ties by a ritual of reassurance, we did not always judge correctly the impact of comparable statements on Chinese leaders. When Colonel Alexander Haig, leading the American advance team for the Nixon trip, met with Zhou in January 1972, he used standard NATO phraseology when he said that the Nixon administration would resist Soviet efforts to encircle China. Mao’s reaction was emphatic: “Encircling China? I need them to rescue me, how could that be? . . . They are concerned about me? That is like ‘the cat weeping over the dead mouse’!”
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At the end of my November 1973 visit, I suggested to Zhou a hotline between Washington and Beijing as part of an agreement on reducing the risks of accidental war. My purpose was to take account of Chinese suspicions that arms control negotiations were part of a joint U.S.-Soviet design to isolate China by giving China an opportunity to participate in the process. Mao saw it differently. “Someone wants to lend us an umbrella,” he said. “We don’t want it, a protective nuclear umbrella.”
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China did not share our strategic view on nuclear weapons, much less our doctrine of collective security; it was applying the traditional maxim of “using barbarians against barbarians” in order to achieve a divided periphery. China’s historic nightmare had been that the barbarians would decline to be so “used,” would unite, and would then use their superior force to either conquer China outright or divide it into separate fiefdoms. From the Chinese perspective, that nightmare never completely disappeared, locked as China was in an antagonistic relationship with the Soviet Union and India and not without suspicions of its own toward the United States.

There was a difference in underlying approach toward the Soviet Union. China favored a posture of uncompromising confrontation. The United States was equally uncompromising in resisting threats to the international equilibrium. But we insisted on keeping open the prospect of improved relations on other issues. The opening to China shook up Moscow; this was one of our reasons for undertaking it. In fact, during the months of preparation for the secret trip we were simultaneously exploring a summit between Nixon and Brezhnev. That the Beijing summit came first was due in large part to the Soviet attempt to make the Moscow visit dependent on conditions, a tactic quickly abandoned once the Nixon visit to Beijing was announced. The Chinese of course noticed that we were closer to Moscow and Beijing than they were to each other. It elicited caustic comments about détente from Chinese leaders.

Even at the high point of Sino-U.S. relations, Mao and Zhou would occasionally express their concern about how the United States might implement its strategic flexibility. Was the intention of the United States to “reach out to the Soviet Union by standing on Chinese shoulders”?
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Was America’s commitment to “anti-hegemony” a ruse, and once China let its guard down, would Washington and Moscow collude in Beijing’s destruction? Was the West deceiving China, or was the West deceiving itself? In either case, the practical consequence could be to push the “ill waters of the Soviet Union” eastward toward China. This was Zhou’s theme in February 1973: