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Reflections on the United States and China
Robert A. Kapp
On October 1, the People's Republic of China celebrates its 50th birthday. Looking back, looking around, and looking ahead, it's hard not to trip over the evidence of how much has changed. But looking at five decades of US-China relations, the staying power of history is astonishingly strong as well.
One lovely evening in 1997, as we strolled down one of Shanghai's busy and prosperous main streets after a nice dinner, my friend--working for a US law firm by then--pointed out to me a small, fluorescent-lit building across the road. It was the hospital where she had been born in 1949.
At the moment of her birth, her father, a Western-trained professional, was at his place of work near the waterfront. Her mother was miles away, in labor in the tiny hospital.
The Communist armies were poised at the edge of town, awaiting the order to enter Shanghai and claim the city. The Nationalist forces, routed, were retreating pell mell. On the streets, my friend told me, fleeing government soldiers were stopping passing cars, shooting the drivers, and commandeering the cars to make their own escape from the city. My friend's mother was desperate: how could she reach her husband at The Bund to warn him not to come to her side, lest he be killed in the chaos?
Amid such chaos my friend--and the PRC--came into the world.
Only eight days before the establishment of the PRC, on September 23, 1949, the USSR had exploded its first nuclear device, inaugurating four decades of "Balance of Terror" and galvanizing domestic American fears that "Soviet agents" encysted in positions of the highest sensitivity were boring from within, scheming on behalf of a foreign power bent on destroying the United States and all it stood for.
By the fall of 1949, US policy toward China was in ruins. During the war, the United States had worked to elevate China to one of the "Big Four," alongside the USSR and Britain and itself. The Americans believed that despite its internal weaknesses and political fragility China's sheer size and immense potential would make it the critical factor in postwar Asian affairs once Japan's power was broken. But for all the verbal reassurances, the United States had never met the Nationalist government's incessant demand for a place at the top of America's list of strategic priorities. China had remained a backwater theater of war, as the United States devoted its primary resources to victory in Europe and to a maritime island-hopping strategy against Japan in the Pacific.
As the wartime Chinese economy descended into inflation and disorder, no amount of American financial assistance seemed to suffice to stabilize the chaos, and American aid was not unlimited. Symbolically, perhaps the most important US action during the conflict was to abandon "extraterritoriality," that system of exemption from Chinese legal jurisdiction that the United States and the other major industrial powers had forced upon China during the Opium War, and which remained for a century the most galling symbol of Euro-American civilization's contempt for a weak and humiliated China.
Staring Cold War in the face in 1949, most Americans interpreted the communist victory in China as a Soviet victory, in the manner of recent Sovie t takeovers in Eastern Europe. Encouraged by a thirsty and partisan political community and a media instinct for the sensational, prominent Americans asked, "Who lost China?" and sought answers in repeated searches for domestic "subversives."
As the Cold War froze into place and Americans faced the reality of merciless global confrontation, China's political upheaval became a crucible for the politics of fear at home. Loyalty Boards scoured the State Department. Special congressional committees set out to expose those who had created the China disaster. Newly risen political stars named Americans as pro-Chinese Communist operatives. Americans were "investigated" for their social contacts. "Guilt by association" became a household term. Political meteors blazed in the darkened skies, lighting the way for the crusade against the domestic treachery that had "lost" China to Mao Zedong and Joe Stalin. The China Story, published in 1951, bore the subtitle, "How We Lost 400,000,000 Allies;" inside were chapters entitled "How Communists Captured Diplomats," "...And the Secretary of State," "...And the Public."
To put it simply, the very establishment of the People's Republic of China, a momentous event in China's modern history, was also a towering political trauma for the United States. Even now, with most of the key actors long gone, the scars incurred half a century ago itch and burn from time to time.
A year after t he birth of the PRC, the United States and China were at war in Korea. America's wartime allies had become the enemy; the patient, long-suffering recipients of Americans' wartime United China Relief charity were now human-wave attackers, and would soon be Mao's "blue ants." Meanwhile, the new Chinese rulers pressed forward to establish unquestioned control and crush all opposition, mobilizing the populace into one of the first of the great "mass campaigns" of the Mao era: "Aid Korea/Resist America." "Thought Reform," the method of psychological remolding employed by Mao to deal with dissidence within his political movement, was applied to American prisoners of war captured in Korea. Americans called it "brain washing."
Then the two nations went their ways. China turned first to the USSR, trying to transplant the Stalinist economic system onto Chinese soil, and later pursuing a messy disengagement from the Soviet "elder brother." Repeated mass campaigns in the name of political purity and obedience to the supreme leader had, by the time the Cultural Revolution collapsed in 1976, left a legacy of needless death, doctrinal exhaustion, economic disruption, and nearly irreparable political and psychic wounds. More than once through that long period, "US Imperialism" was the political target of choice for Chinese domestic figures intent on the achievement of internal political objectives.
Americans noticed and responded; many did not forget what they saw. America's growing and ultimately unsuccessful intervention in Vietnam was defined, early on, as a life-or-death resistance to China's appetites for territory and ideological conquest, necessary whatever the cost. In spite of Eisenhower's injunction against American involvement in a "land war in Asia," there would be no "appeasing" China, as Britain's Chamberlain had "appeased" Hitler in 1938. Americans went to bed at night fearful not only of Soviet nuclear attack but, as one key American administration figure put it in the 1960s, "A billion Chinese armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons." During the riveting Offshore Islands crisis of 1958 in the Taiwan Strait, the use of US nuclear weapons was quietly on the table in Washington.
Of all the ways the world has changed since 1949, the most salient here is that it is no longer gripped by a single frozen and transcendent rivalry between two militarized ideological systems whose conflict provided a demonic ordering principle to world affairs for four terror-backed decades.
The China that lay exhausted in 1949, its political structures in ruins and its economy prostr ated, now lives within secure borders, an increasingly significant force to reckon with in a world still unaccustomed to China's ability to do much more than protect its interests by playing off one "barbarian" against another. Originally established on a foundation of iron doctrine instilled through coercion and authoritarian control, the People's Republic at 50 is an entity that neither the modern world nor China itself has known before.
The "mass campaign style" of Maoist politics is nearly (but, apparently, not quite) gone; the Great Leader is no more; the coercive insistence on literal-minded devotion to the Chairman and his Word has been almost totally abandoned. The proletariat, so beloved of Marxist-Leninist ideologues and rulers, goes nearly unmentioned. "Class struggle," the first principle of political life for three decades after 1949, has been officially discarded. Living standards have risen spectacularly, and hundreds of millions of Chinese citizens have escaped the bonds of poverty. High-decibel purges and annihilations of politicians defeated in obscure inner-court struggles are 20 years out of date. China is "younger brother" to no one, least of all the now-defunct Soviet Union. China has joined the world in a myriad of ways that it once rejected, and the world has accepted China in institutions that for decades had no room for Beijing: the UN, international financial organizations, and hundreds of int ernational agreements and covenants.
The United States, 50 years after the emergence of the PRC, remains the most powerful military force in the world. Its economy continues to grow and thrive. Its leaders and citizens bask in the luxury of not having to bear moment by moment the burden of preventing mankind's destruction. The world at large seems, to many Americans, far away and probably not worth worrying too much about. Vietnam is a receding memory, stopping Chinese Communist expansion a quaint curiosity remembered by only a few.
Again, in 1999, Beijing's organs of opinion thunder at the United States, or "US-led NATO," or "US hegemonists," recalling the canonical Mao essay on America as a "pa per tiger" that was required reading during the Cultural Revolution. Senior figures in the US Congress lash out at China as a nation of "child molesters and torturers." Again, a wave of fear pulses across the United States over the loss of atomic secrets--not, this time, to the rampant Soviet Union of Joe Stalin that confronted the United States on every continent in 1949, but to a China whose "shadowy" operatives and "sleeper" spies are said to be at work deep within the fabric of American life in 1999. Political stump speeches explicitly link the China-focused national security scare of 1999 to the searingly traumatic execution of Americans convicted of nuclear spying for the USSR in 1949. Columnists re-discover for the umpteenth time the well-worn accusation of "appeasement," and apply it this time to US policy toward Beijing.
It is disconcerting to find the legacies of 50 years ago so vivid. It is troubling to note the mixture of overheated anxiety and incurable casualness in American perceptions of a China that focuses our attention only when something terrible happens or a domestic "angle" ignites the media and the political sector. It is frustrating that the United States remains hostage to an only partially visible Chinese ballet across the Taiwan Strait, with each of the adversaries demanding that the United States bestow better treatment, spend more resources, offer better terms, and show more respect lest Amer ica embolden the other to greater misconduct.
America's business and economic relations with the People's Republic of China are not 50 years old but twenty-five. They embody many of the progressive breaks with the past that have marked China's development and US-China relations since the late 1970s. They are above all the products of China's decision to move from ideological rigidity toward greater practicality, from self-imposed isolation to self-motivated global engagement. They are also a reflection of American technological prowess, agricultural productivity, managerial-entrepreneurial vigor, and from time to time the strength of the American example.
American and world commercial engagement with China has been unintentionally transformative within China. As Professor Doug Guthrie's new study, Dragon in a Three-Piece Suit: The Emergence of Capitalism in China, concludes:
In other words, political pressure at the state level is not meaningful without the pressure in the marketplace to take these institutional changes seriously. A fundamental component of the pressur e for institutional change in China is the pressure of individual economic actors in the markets of China's transforming economic system....The best hope for helping a formal rational-legal system emerge over the course of China's transition is to continue allowing the local-level negotiations between Chinese citizens and foreign companies to occur i n China's market.
Economic engagement between Americans and Chinese has not wafted the United States and China beyond the reach of their darker tendencies. But neither has it entombed America and China in a downward spiral. Instead, economic and commercial engagement is gradually fostering something much more positive. No one listening to the remarkable presentations offered by Premier Zhu Rongji during his April visit to the United States could fail to be struck by this realization.
Deeper economic interactions are not the be-all and end-all of Sino-American relations, but they are today the most promising way forward for two great and proud nations facing each other in a world both transformed over 50 years and sadly chained to its not-so-distant past.
Last Updated: 2-Jul-99