CHAPTER 10

The Quasi-Alliance: Conversations with Mao

T HE SECRET TRIP to China reestablished the Sino-American relationship. The Nixon visit began a period of strategic cooperation. But while the principles of that cooperation were emerging, its framework remained to be settled. The language of the Shanghai Communiqué implied a kind of alliance. The reality of China’s self-reliance made it difficult to relate form to substance.

Alliances have existed as long as history records international affairs. They have been formed for many reasons: to pool the strength of individual allies; to provide an obligation of mutual assistance; to supply an element of deterrence beyond the tactical considerations of the moment. The special aspect of Sino-American relations was that the partners sought to coordinate their actions without creating a formal obligation to do so.

Such a state of affairs was inherent in the nature of China’s perception of international relations. Having proclaimed that China had “stood up,” Mao would reach out to the United States but never admit that China’s strength might not be adequate for whatever challenge it might confront. Nor would he accept an abstract obligation to render assistance beyond the requirements of the national interest as it appeared at any given moment. China in the early stages of Mao’s leadership made only one alliance: that with the Soviet Union at the very beginning of the People’s Republic, when China needed support as it felt its way toward international status. It entered into a Treaty of Friendship, Cooperation, and Mutual Assistance with North Korea in 1961, containing a clause on mutual defense against outside attack that is still in force at this writing. But that was more in the nature of the tributary relationship familiar from Chinese history: Beijing offered protection; North Korean reciprocity was irrelevant to the relationship. The Soviet alliance frayed from the very outset largely because Mao would not accept even the hint of subordination.

After Nixon’s visit to China, there emerged a partnership not by way of formal reciprocal assurances enshrined in documentation. It was not even a tacit alliance, based on informal agreements. It was a kind of quasi-alliance, growing out of understandings that emerged from conversations with Mao—in February and November of 1973—and long meetings with Zhou—hours of them in 1973. From then on, Beijing no longer sought to constrain or check the projection of American power—as it had before President Nixon’s visit. Instead China’s avowed goal became to enlist the United States as a counterweight to the “polar bear” by means of an explicit strategic design.

This parallelism depended on whether Chinese and American leaders could come to share common geopolitical aims, especially with regard to the Soviet Union. American leaders were treated by their Chinese counterparts to private seminars on Soviet intentions—often in uncharacteristically blunt language, as if the Chinese feared this topic was too important to be left to their customary subtlety and indirection. The United States reciprocated with extensive briefings about its strategic design.

In the early years of the new relationship, Chinese leaders would continue occasionally to fire ideological “cannons” against American imperialism—some of them involving well-practiced rhetoric—but in private, they would criticize U.S. officials for being, if anything, too restrained in foreign policy. In fact, throughout the 1970s, Beijing was more in favor of the United States acting robustly against Soviet designs than much of the American public or Congress.

The “Horizontal Line”: Chinese Approaches to Containment

For a year what was lacking in this design was Mao’s imprimatur. He had blessed the general direction in the conversations with Nixon but he had ostentatiously refused to discuss either strategy or tactics, probably because what became the Shanghai Communiqué was still unsettled.

Mao filled this gap in two extensive conversations with me: the first one, late at night on February 17, 1973, lasted from 11:30 P.M. to 1:20 A.M. The second occurred on November 12, 1973, and lasted from 5:40 P.M. to 8:25 P.M. The context of the conversations explains their scope. The first took place less than a month after Le Duc Tho—the principal North Vietnamese negotiator—and I had initialed the Paris Peace Accords to end the Vietnam War. This freed China from any further need to demonstrate Communist solidarity with Hanoi. The second occurred following the decisive U.S. role during the 1973 Arab-Israeli War and the resulting switch in Arab reliance from the Soviet Union to the United States, especially in Egypt.

On both occasions, Mao warmly endorsed the Sino-American relationship in front of assembled media. In February he noted that the United States and China had once been “two enemies,” but that “[n] ow we call the relationship between ourselves a friendship.” ¹ Having proclaimed the new relationship as friendship Mao proceeded to give it an operational definition. Since he liked to speak in parables, he chose a subject that we were least worried about, possible Chinese intelligence operations against American officials visiting China. It was an indirect way of proclaiming a kind of partnership without making a request for reciprocity:

But let us not speak false words or engage in trickery. We don’t steal your documents. You can deliberately leave them somewhere and try us out. Nor do we engage in eavesdropping and bugging. There is no use in those small tricks. And some of the big maneuvering, there is no use to them too. I said that to your correspondent, Mr. Edgar Snow. . . . We also have our intelligence service and it is the same with them. They do not work well [Prime Minister Zhou laughs ]. For instance, they didn’t know about Lin Biao [Prime Minister Zhou laughs. ] Then again they didn’t know you wanted to come. ²

The least plausible prospect was that China and the United States would abandon collecting intelligence on each other. If the United States and China were indeed entering a new era in their relationship, it was important for each side to be transparent with the other and to elaborate parallel calculations. But limiting the activities of their intelligence services was an unlikely way to start. The Chairman was conveying an offer of transparency but also a warning that he was beyond being tricked—a point with which Mao led into the November conversation as well. As an introduction he recounted with a blend of humor, contempt, and strategy how he had amended his promise to wage ten thousand years of ideological struggle against the Soviets:

MAO: They tried to make peace through [Communist leader Nicolae] Ceauşescu of Romania, and they tried to persuade us not to continue the struggle in the ideological field.

KISSINGER: I remember he was here.

MAO/ZHOU: That was long ago.

ZHOU: The first time he came to China. [Said in English. ]

MAO: And the second time [Soviet Prime Minister Aleksei] Kosygin came himself, and that was in 1960. I declared to him that we were going to wage a struggle against him for ten thousand years [laughter ].

INTERPRETER: The Chairman was saying ten thousand years of struggle.

MAO: And this time I made a concession to Kosygin. I said that I originally said this struggle was going to go on for ten thousand years. On the merit of his coming to see me in person, I will cut it down by one thousand years [laughter ]. And you must see how generous I am. Once I make a concession, it is for one thousand years. ³

The basic message was the same: cooperation if possible and no tactical maneuvering, for it would not prove possible to deceive this veteran of every kind of conflict imaginable. On a deeper level, it was also a warning that, if thwarted in conciliation, China would turn into a tenacious and forbidding enemy.

When talking to Nixon a year earlier Mao had omitted any substantive reference to Taiwan. Now to remove any element of threat Mao explicitly delinked the issue of Taiwan from the overall U.S.-China relationship: “The question of the U.S. relations with us should be separate from that of our relations with Taiwan.” The United States, Mao suggested, should “sever the diplomatic relations with Taiwan” as Japan had done (while maintaining unofficial social and economic ties); “then it is possible for our two countries to solve the issue of diplomatic relations.” But as for the question of Beijing’s relations with Taiwan, Mao warned, “[T]hat is quite complex. I do not believe in a peaceful transition.” Mao then turned to Foreign Minister Ji Pengfei and asked, “Do you believe in it?” After further colloquy with the other Chinese in the room, Mao made his principal point—that there were no time pressures of any kind:

MAO: They are a bunch of counterrevolutionaries. How could they cooperate with us? I say that we can do without Taiwan for the time being, and let it come after one hundred years. Do not take matters on this world so rapidly. Why is there need to be in such great haste? It is only such an island with a population of a dozen or more million.

ZHOU: They now have 16 million.

MAO: As for your relations with us, I think they need not take a hundred years.

KISSINGER: I would count on that. I think they should come much faster.

MAO: But that is to be decided by you. We will not rush you. If you feel the need, we can do it. If you feel it cannot be done now, then we can postpone it to a later date. . . .

KISSINGER: It isn’t a question of needing it; it is a question of practical possibilities.

MAO: That’s the same [laughter ]. ⁴

In Mao’s typical paradoxical style, there were two principal points here of equal importance: first, that Beijing would not foreclose its option to use force over Taiwan—and indeed expected to have to use force someday; but second, for the time being at least, Mao was putting off this day, indeed he spoke of being willing to wait for a hundred years. The banter was designed to clear the way for the dominant theme, which was a militant application of the containment theory of George Kennan to the effect that the Soviet system, if prevented from expanding, would collapse as a result of its internal tensions. ⁵ But while Kennan applied his principles primarily to the conduct of diplomacy and domestic policy, Mao argued for direct confrontation across the range of available pressures.

The Soviet Union, Mao told me, represented a global threat that needed to be resisted globally. Whatever any other nation might do, China would resist an attack, even if its forces had to retire into the interior of the country to fight a guerrilla war. But cooperation with the United States and other likeminded countries would speed the victory in the struggle whose outcome was predetermined by the long-term weakness of the Soviet Union. China would not ask for help nor make its cooperation conditional on the cooperation of others. But it was prepared to adopt parallel strategies, especially with the United States. The bond would be common convictions, not formal obligations. A policy of determined global containment of the Soviets, Mao argued, was bound to prevail because Soviet ambitions were beyond their capacities:

MAO: They have to deal with so many adversaries. They have to deal with the Pacific. They have to deal with Japan. They have to deal with China. They have to deal with South Asia which also consists of quite a number of countries. And they only have a million troops here—not enough even for the defense of themselves and still less for attack forces. But they can’t attack unless you let them in first, and you first give them the Middle East and Europe so they are able to deploy troops eastward. And that would take over a million troops.

KISSINGER: That will not happen. I agree with the Chairman that if Europe and Japan and the U.S. hold together—and we are doing in the Middle East what the Chairman discussed with me last time—then the danger of an attack on China will be very low.

MAO: We are also holding down a portion of their troops which is favorable to you in Europe and the Middle East. For instance, they have troops stationed in Outer Mongolia, and that had not happened as late as Khrushchev’s time. At that time they had still not stationed troops in Outer Mongolia, because the Zhenbao Island incident occurred after Khrushchev. It occurred in Brezhnev’s time.

KISSINGER: It was 1969. That is why it is important that Western Europe and China and the U.S. pursue a coordinated course in this period.

MAO: Yes. ⁶

The cooperation Mao encouraged was not limited to Asian issues. With no trace of irony, Mao encouraged U.S. military involvement in the Middle East to counter the Soviets—exactly the type of “imperialist aggression” that Chinese propaganda had traditionally thundered against. Shortly after the 1973 Arab-Israeli War, and following Saddam Hussein’s visit to Moscow, Iraq attracted Mao’s attention and was presented as part of his global strategy:

MAO: And now there is a crucial issue, that is the question of Iraq, Baghdad. We don’t know if it is possible for you to do some work in that area. As for us, the possibilities are not so very great.

ZHOU: It is relatively difficult to do that. It is possible to have contacts with them, but it takes a period of time for them to change their orientation. It is possible they would change their orientation after they have suffered from them. ⁷

Zhou was suggesting that it was necessary for a coordinated policy to make Iraq’s reliance on the Soviet Union so costly that it would have to change its orientation—much as Egypt was doing. (It may also have been a wry comment on how allies would eventually tire of Moscow’s overbearing treatment, as China had.) In this manner Mao reviewed the strengths and weaknesses of various states in the Middle East, almost country by country. He stressed the importance of Turkey, Iran, and Pakistan as barriers to Soviet expansion. In addition to Iraq, he was uneasy about South Yemen. ⁸ He urged the United States to increase its strength in the Indian Ocean. He was the quintessential Cold Warrior; American conservatives would have approved of him.

Japan was to be a principal component for Mao’s coordinated strategy. At the secret meeting in 1971, the Chinese leaders still professed considerable suspicion about U.S.-Japanese collusion. Zhou warned us to beware of Japan; the existing friendship, he said, would wither once economic recovery had put Japan into a position to challenge us. In October 1971 he stressed that Japan’s “feathers have grown on its wings and it is about to take off.” ⁹ I replied, and Nixon elaborated during his visit, that Japan would be much more problematical if isolated than as part of an international order, including an alliance with the United States. By the time of our conversations in November 1973, Mao had accepted that point of view. He was now urging me to pay more attention to Japan and spend more time cultivating Japanese leaders:

MAO: Let’s discuss something about Japan. This time you are going to Japan to stay a few more days there.

KISSINGER: The Chairman always scolds me about Japan. I’m taking the Chairman very seriously, and this time I’m staying two and a half days. And he’s quite right. It is very important that Japan does not feel isolated and left alone. And we should not give them too many temptations to maneuver.

MAO: That is not to force them over to the Soviet side. ¹⁰

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:

MAO: We also say in the same situation [gesturing with his hand ] that’s what your President said when he was sitting here, that each side has its own means and acted out of its own necessity. That resulted in the two countries acting hand-in-hand.

KISSINGER: Yes, we both face the same danger. We may have to use different methods sometimes but for the same objectives.

MAO: That would be good. So long as the objectives are the same, we would not harm you nor would you harm us. And we can work together to commonly deal with a bastard. [Laughter ] Actually it would be that sometime we want to criticize you for a while and you want to criticize us for a while. That, your President said, is the ideological influence. You say, away with you Communists. We say, away with you imperialists. Sometimes we say things like that. It would not do not to do that. ¹¹

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.” ¹² (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. ¹³

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.” ¹⁴

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.” ¹⁵ 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.” ¹⁶

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’!” ¹⁷

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.” ¹⁸

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”? ¹⁹ 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:

ZHOU: Perhaps they [the Europeans] want to push the ill waters of the Soviet Union in another direction—eastward.

KISSINGER: Whether the Soviet Union attacks eastward or westward is equally dangerous for the U.S. The U.S. gains no advantage if the Soviet Union attacks eastward. In fact, if the Soviet Union attacks it is more convenient if it attacks westward because we have more public support for resistance.

ZHOU: Yes, therefore, we believe that the Western European aspiration to push the Soviet Union eastward is also an illusion. ²⁰

Mao, ever carrying ideas to their ultimate conclusion, sometimes ascribed to the United States a dialectical strategy as he might have practiced it. He argued that America might think of solving the problem of Communism once and for all by applying the lesson of Vietnam: that involvement in local wars drains the big power participant. In that interpretation, the horizontal line theory or the Western concept of collective security might turn into a trap for China:

MAO: Because since in being bogged down in Vietnam you met so many difficulties, do you think they [the Soviets] would feel good if they were bogged down in China?

KISSINGER: The Soviet Union?

NANCY TANG: The Soviet Union.

MAO: And then you can let them get bogged down in China, for half a year, or one, or two, or three, or four years. And then you can poke your finger at the Soviet back. And your slogan then will be for peace, that is you must bring down Socialist imperialism for the sake of peace. And perhaps you can begin to help them in doing business, saying whatever you need we will help against China.

KISSINGER: Mr. Chairman, it is really very important that we understand each other’s motives. We will never knowingly cooperate in an attack on China.

MAO: [Interrupting ] No, that’s not so. Your aim in doing that would be to bring the Soviet Union down. ²¹

Mao had a point. This was a theoretically feasible strategy for the United States. All it lacked was a leader to conceive it or a public to support it. Its abstract manipulation was not attainable in the United States, nor was it desirable; American foreign policy can never be based on power politics alone. The Nixon administration was serious about the importance it attached to China’s security. In practice the United States and China exchanged a great deal of information and were cooperating in many fields. But Washington could not abdicate the right to determine the tactics of how to achieve its security to another country, however important.

The Impact of Watergate

At a point when American and Chinese strategic thinking was striving for congruence, the Watergate crisis threatened to derail the progress of the relationship by enfeebling the American capacity to manage the geopolitical challenge. The destruction of the President who had conceived the opening to China was incomprehensible in Beijing. Nixon’s resignation on August 8, 1974, and the assumption of the presidency by Vice President Gerald Ford led to a collapse of congressional support for an activist foreign policy in the subsequent congressional elections in November 1974. The military budget became controversial. Embargoes were placed on a key ally (Turkey); a public investigation of the intelligence community was launched by two congressional committees (the Church Committee in the Senate and the Pike Committee in the House), hemorrhaging classified intelligence information. The American capacity to prevent Soviet adventures in the developing world was reduced by the passage of the War Powers Act. The United States was sliding into a position of domestic paralysis—with an unelected President facing a hostile Congress—producing an opportunity for the Soviets that some Chinese leaders were tempted to believe had been our design in the first place. In early 1975 the congressional action that stopped a joint U.S.-China effort to establish a coalition government in Cambodia came to be interpreted in Beijing as weakness in the face of the Soviet encirclement of China. ²² In that atmosphere, in the Chinese view, the policy of détente threatened to turn into what Mao called shadowboxing, creating the illusion, not the reality, of diplomatic progress. Chinese leaders lectured the Americans (and many other Western leaders) about the dangers of appeasement. The Helsinki Conference on Security and Cooperation was a special candidate for Chinese criticism on the grounds that it created the illusion of stability and peace. ²³

The basis for the quasi-alliance had been the Chinese conviction that the United States’s contribution to global security was indispensable. Beijing had entered the relationship looking to Washington as a bulwark against Soviet expansionism. Now Mao and Zhou began to hint that what looked like feebleness in Washington was in reality a deep game—trying to set the Soviets and Chinese against each other in a war designed to destroy them both. Increasingly, however, the Chinese accused the United States of something worse than treachery: ineffectualness. This is where matters stood when, at the end of 1973, China’s domestic travail began to parallel our own.

CHAPTER 11

The End of the Mao Era

A T EVERY STAGE of China’s diplomatic revolution, Mao was torn between Sinocentrist pragmatism and revolutionary fervor. He made the necessary choices and opted for pragmatism cold-bloodedly though never happily. When we first met Mao in 1972, he was already ill and speaking—with some irony for an avowed atheist—about having received an “invitation from God.” He had destroyed or radicalized most of the country’s institutions, including even the Communist Party, increasingly ruling by personal magnetism and the manipulation of opposing factions. Now, as his rule was nearing its end, Mao’s grip on power—and his capacity to manipulate—were both slipping away. The crisis over Lin Biao had destroyed Mao’s designated successor. Now Mao had no accepted heir, and there was no blueprint for a post-Mao China.

The Succession Crisis

Instead of choosing a new successor, Mao attempted to institutionalize his own ambivalence. He bequeathed to China an extraordinarily complex set of political rivalries by promoting officials from both sides of his vision of China’s destiny. With characteristic convolution, he fostered each camp and then set them against each other—all while fomenting “contradictions” within each faction (such as between Zhou and Deng) to make sure no one person became dominant enough to emerge with authority approaching his own. On the one side stood a camp of practical administrators led by Zhou and subsequently Deng; on the other were the ideological purists around Jiang Qing and her faction of Shanghai-based radicals (to whom Mao later applied the derisive label “the Gang of Four”). They insisted on a literal application of Mao Zedong Thought. Between them stood Hua Guofeng, Mao’s immediate successor—to whom fell the awesome (and eventually unmanageable) task of mastering the “contradictions” that Mao had enshrined (and with whose brief career the next chapter will deal).

The two principal factions engaged in numerous disputes over culture, politics, economic policy, and the perquisites of power—in short, on how to run the country. But a fundamental subtext concerned the philosophical questions that had occupied China’s best minds in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries: how to define China’s relationship with the outside world and what, if anything, it could learn from foreigners.

The Gang of Four advocated turning inward. They sought to purify Chinese culture and politics of suspect influences (including anything deemed foreign, “revisionist,” bourgeois, traditional, capitalist, or potentially anti-Party), to reinvigorate China’s ethic of revolutionary struggle and radical egalitarianism, and to reorient social life around an essentially religious worship of Mao Zedong. Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, a former actress, oversaw the reform and radicalization of traditional Beijing opera and the development of revolutionary ballets—including The Red Detachment of Women, performed for President Nixon in 1972, to the American delegation’s general stupefaction.

After Lin fell from grace, Jiang Qing and the Gang of Four survived. Ideologues under their sway dominated much of the Chinese press, universities, and the cultural sphere, and they used this influence to vilify Zhou, Deng, and China’s supposed tendency toward “revisionism.” Their conduct during the Cultural Revolution had made them a number of powerful enemies, however, and they were unlikely contenders for succession. Lacking association with the military establishment or the Long March veterans, they were unlikely aspirants for the top position: an actress and theatrical producer seeking posts that only a small handful of women had reached in all of Chinese history (Jiang Qing); a journalist and political theorist (Zhang Chunqiao); a leftist literary critic (Yao Wenyuan); and a former security guard, plucked from obscurity after agitating against his factory’s management and possessing no power base of his own (Wang Hongwen). ¹

The Gang of Four stood opposite a camp of relative pragmatists associated with Zhou Enlai and, increasingly, Deng Xiaoping. Though Zhou himself was a dedicated Communist with decades of devoted service to Mao, for many Chinese he had come to represent order and moderation. Both to his critics and to his admirers, Zhou was a symbol of China’s long tradition of mandarin gentleman-officials—urbane, highly educated, restrained in his personal habits and, within the spectrum of Chinese Communism, his political preferences.

Deng possessed a blunter and less refined personal style than Zhou; he punctuated his conversations by spitting loudly into a spittoon, producing occasional incongruous moments. Yet he shared, and went beyond, Zhou’s vision of a China that balanced its revolutionary principles with order and a quest for prosperity. Eventually he was to resolve Mao’s ambivalence between radical ideology and a more strategically based reform approach. Neither man was a believer in Western principles of democracy. Both had been uncritical participants in Mao’s first waves of upheaval. But in contrast to Mao and the Gang of Four, Zhou and Deng were reluctant to mortgage China’s future to continuous revolution.

Accused by their critics of “selling out” China to foreigners, both the nineteenth- and twentieth-century sets of reformers sought to use Western technology and economic innovations to bolster China’s strength while preserving China’s essence. ² Zhou was closely identified with the Sino-U.S. rapprochement and with the attempt to return Chinese domestic affairs to a more normal pattern in the wake of the Cultural Revolution, both of which the Gang of Four opposed as a betrayal of revolutionary principles. Deng and likeminded officials, such as Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, were associated with economic pragmatism, which the Gang of Four attacked as the restoration of aspects of the capitalist system.

As Mao grew increasingly frail, the Chinese leadership was locked in a power struggle and a debate over China’s destiny, profoundly affecting Sino-U.S. relations. When China’s radicals gained in relative power, the U.S.-China relationship cooled; when America’s freedom of action was limited by domestic upheavals, it strengthened the radicals’ arguments that China was unnecessarily compromising its ideological purity by tying its foreign policy to a country itself riven by domestic disputes and incapable of assisting China’s security. To the end, Mao attempted to manage the contradiction of preserving his legacy of continuous revolution while safeguarding the strategic rapprochement with the United States, which he continued to deem important for China’s security. He left the impression that he sympathized with the radicals even as the national interest impelled him to sustain the new relationship with America, which, in turn, frustrated him with its own domestic divisions.

Mao, in his prime, could have overcome internal conflicts, but the aging Mao was increasingly torn by the complexities he had created. Zhou, the Mao loyalist for forty years, became a victim of this ambivalence.

The Fall of Zhou Enlai

Political survival for the second man in an autocracy is inherently difficult. It requires being close enough to the leader to leave no space for a competitor but not so close as to make the leader feel threatened. None of Mao’s number twos had managed that tightrope act: Liu Shaoqi, who served as number two with the title of President from 1959 to 1967 and was imprisoned during the Cultural Revolution, and Lin Biao had both been destroyed politically and lost their lives in the process.

Zhou had been our principal interlocutor at all meetings. We noticed on the visit in November 1973 that he was a shade more tentative than usual and even more deferential to Mao than customarily. But it was compensated for by a conversation of nearly three hours with Mao, the most comprehensive review of foreign policy strategy we had had yet. It ended with Mao escorting me to the anteroom and an official release announcing that the Chairman and I had had “a far-ranging discussion in a friendly atmosphere.”

With Mao’s apparent imprimatur, all negotiations ended rapidly and favorably. The final communiqué extended the joint opposition to hegemony from “the Asia-Pacific region” (as in the Shanghai Communiqué of 1972) to the global plane. It affirmed the need to deepen consultations between the two countries at “authoritative levels” even further. Exchanges and trade were to be increased. The scope of the liaison offices was to be expanded. Zhou said he would recall the head of the Chinese Liaison Office from Washington to instruct him on the nature of the agreed intensified dialogue.

Contemporary Chinese historians point out that the criticisms of the Gang of Four against Zhou were reaching a crisis point at this time. We were aware from the media that an anti-Confucian campaign was taking place but did not consider that it had any immediate relevance to foreign policy or Chinese leadership issues. In his dealings with Americans, Zhou continued to exhibit unflappable self-assurance. On only one occasion did his serenity leave him. At a banquet in the Great Hall of the People in November 1973, in a general conversation, I made the observation that China seemed to me to have remained essentially Confucian in its belief in a single, universal, generally applicable truth as the standard of individual conduct and social cohesion. What Communism had done, I suggested, was to establish Marxism as the content of that truth.

I cannot recall what possessed me to make this statement, which, however accurate, surely did not take into account Mao’s attacks on Confucians who were alleged to be impeding his policies. Zhou exploded, the only time I saw him lose his temper. Confucianism, he said, was a doctrine of class oppression while Communism represented a philosophy of liberation. With uncharacteristic insistence, he kept up the argument, no doubt to some degree so as to have it on record for the benefit of Nancy Tang, the interpreter who was close to Jiang Qing, and Wang Hairong, the grand-niece of Mao, who was always in Zhou’s entourage.

Shortly afterward, we learned that Zhou was stricken with cancer and that he was withdrawing from the day-to-day management of affairs. A dramatic upheaval followed. The visit to China had ended on a dramatic high. The meeting with Mao was not only the most substantive of all previous dialogues; its symbolism—its length, the demonstrative courtesies such as escorting me to the anteroom, the warm communiqué—was designed to emphasize its significance. As I was leaving, Zhou told me that he thought the dialogue had been the most significant since the secret visit:

ZHOU: We wish you success and also success to the President.

KISSINGER: Thank you and thank you for the reception we have received as always.

ZHOU: It is what you deserve. And once the course has been set, as in 1971, we will persevere in the course.

KISSINGER: So will we.

ZHOU: That is why we use the term farsightedness to describe your meeting with the Chairman. ³

The dialogue provided for in the communiqué never got underway. The nearly completed negotiations on financial issues languished. The head of the liaison office returned to Beijing but did not come back for four months. The National Security Council officer in charge of China reported that bilateral relations were “immobilized.” ⁴ Within a month, the change in Zhou’s fortunes—though not its extent—became visible.

It has since emerged that in December 1973, less than a month after the events described here, Mao obliged Zhou to undergo “struggle sessions” in front of the Politburo to justify his foreign policy, described as too accommodating by Nancy Tang and Wang Hairong, the Mao loyalists in his entourage. In the course of the sessions, Deng, who had been brought back from exile as a possible alternative to Zhou, summed up the prevailing criticism as follows: “Your position is just one step away from [the] Chairman. . . . To others, the Chairmanship is within sight, but beyond reach. To you, however, it is within sight and within reach. I hope you will always keep this in mind.” ⁵ Zhou was, in effect, accused of overreaching.

When the session ended, a Politburo meeting criticized Zhou openly:

Generally speaking, [Zhou] forgot about the principle of preventing “rightism” while allying with [the United States]. This is mainly because [he] forgot about the Chairman’s instructions. [He] over-estimated the power of the enemy and devaluated the power of the people. [He] also failed to grasp the principle of combining the diplomatic line with supporting revolution. ⁶

By early 1974, Zhou disappeared as a policymaker, ostensibly on account of his cancer. But illness was not a sufficient explanation for the oblivion into which he fell. No Chinese official referred to him again. In my first meeting with Deng in early 1974, he mentioned Mao repeatedly and ignored any reference I made to Zhou. If a negotiating record was needed, our Chinese opposite numbers would cite the two conversations with Mao in 1973. I saw Zhou only one more time, in December 1974, when I had taken some members of my family to Beijing with me on an official visit. My family was invited to the meeting. In what was described as a hospital but looked like a State Guesthouse, Zhou avoided any political or diplomatic subjects by saying his doctors had forbidden any exertions. The meeting lasted a little more than twenty minutes. It was carefully staged to symbolize that dialogue about Sino-American relations with Zhou had come to an end.

There was no little poignancy at such an end to a career defined by ultimate loyalty to Mao. Zhou had stood by the aging Chairman through crises that obliged him to balance his admiration for Mao’s revolutionary leadership against the pragmatic and more humane instincts of his own nature. He had survived because he was indispensable and, in an ultimate sense, loyal—too loyal, his critics argued. Now he was removed from authority when the storms seemed to be subsiding and with the reassuring shore within sight. He had not differed from Mao’s policies as Deng had done a decade earlier. No American dealing with him noted any departure from what Mao had said (and in any event, the Chairman seemed to be monitoring the meetings by reading the transcripts every evening). True, Zhou treated the American delegations with consummate—though aloof—courtesy; that was the prerequisite for moving toward partnership with America, which China’s difficult security situation required. I interpreted his conduct as a way to facilitate Chinese imperatives, not as concessions to my or any other American’s personality.

It is conceivable that Zhou may have begun to view the American relationship as a permanent feature, while Mao treated it as a tactical phase. Zhou may have concluded that China, emerging from the wreckage of the Cultural Revolution, would not be able to thrive in the world unless it ended its isolation and became a genuine part of the international order. But this is something I surmise from Zhou’s conduct, not his words. Our dialogue never reached an exchange of personal comments. Some of Zhou’s successors tend to refer to him as “your friend, Zhou.” To the extent that they mean this literally—and even if it has a sardonic undertone—I consider it an honor.

Politically hobbled, emaciated, and terminally ill, Zhou surfaced in January 1975 for one last public gesture. The occasion was a meeting of China’s National People’s Congress, the first convocation of its kind since the start of the Cultural Revolution. Zhou was still technically Premier. He opened with a declaration of carefully worded praise for the Cultural Revolution and the anti-Confucius campaign, both of which had nearly destroyed him and both of which he now hailed as “great,” “important,” and “far-reaching” in their influence. It was the last public declaration of loyalty to the Chairman whom he had served for forty years. But then halfway through the speech, Zhou presented, as if it were simply the logical continuation of this program, a completely new direction. He revisited a long dormant proposal from before the Cultural Revolution—that China should strive to achieve “comprehensive modernization” in four key sectors: agriculture; industry; national defense; and science and technology. Zhou noted that he was issuing this call—effectively a repudiation of the goals of the Cultural Revolution—“on Chairman Mao’s instructions,” though when and how these were issued was left unclear. ⁷

Zhou exhorted China to achieve the “Four Modernizations” “before the end of the century.” Zhou’s listeners could not fail to note that he would never live to see this goal realized. And as the first half of Zhou’s speech attested, such modernization would be achieved, if at all, only after further ideological struggle. But Zhou’s audience would remember his assessment—part forecast, part challenge—that by the end of the twentieth century, China’s “national economy will be advancing in the front ranks of the world.” ⁸ In the years to come, some of them would heed this call and champion the cause of technological advancement and economic liberalization, even at serious political and personal risk.

Final Meetings with Mao: The Swallows and the Coming of the Storm

After the disappearance of Zhou, in early 1974, Deng Xiaoping became our interlocutor. Though he had only recently returned from exile, he conducted affairs with the aplomb and self-assurance with which Chinese leaders seem naturally endowed, and he was soon named Executive Vice Premier.

By that time, the horizontal line concept was abandoned—after only one year—because it was too close to traditional alliance concepts, thus limiting China’s freedom of action. In its place Mao put forward the vision of the “Three Worlds,” which he ordered Deng to announce at a special session of the United Nations General Assembly in 1974. The new approach replaced the horizontal line with a vision of three worlds: The United States and the Soviet Union belonged to the first world. Countries such as Japan and Europe were part of the second world. All the underdeveloped countries constituted the Third World, to which China belonged as well. ⁹

According to that vision, world affairs were conducted in the shadow of the conflict of the two nuclear superpowers. As Deng argued in his U.N. speech:

Since the two superpowers are contending for world hegemony, the contradiction between them is irreconcilable; one either overpowers the other, or is overpowered. Their compromise and collusion can only be partial, temporary and relative, while their contention is all-embracing, permanent and absolute. . . . They may reach certain agreements, but their agreements are only a facade and a deception. ¹⁰

The developing world should use this conflict for its own purposes: the two superpowers had “created their own antithesis” by “arous[ing] strong resistance among the Third World and the people of the whole world.” ¹¹ Real power lay not with the United States or the Soviet Union; instead “the really powerful are the Third World and the people of all countries uniting together and daring to fight and daring to win.” ¹²

The Three Worlds theory restored China’s freedom of action at least from the ideological point of view. It permitted differentiation between the two superpowers for temporary convenience. It provided a vehicle for an active, independent role for China through its role in the developing world, and it gave China tactical flexibility. Still, it could not solve China’s strategic challenge, as Mao had described it in his two long conversations in 1973: the Soviet Union was threatening in both Asia and Europe; China needed to participate in the world if it wanted to speed its economic development; and a quasi-alliance between China and the United States had to be sustained even as the domestic evolution in both countries pressed their governments in the opposite direction.

Had the radical element achieved enough influence with Mao to lead to the removal of Zhou? Or had Mao used the radicals to overthrow his number two associate just as he had done with Zhou’s predecessors? Whatever the answer, Mao needed to triangulate. He sympathized with the radicals, but he was too significant a strategist to abandon the American safety net; on the contrary, he sought to strengthen it so long as America appeared as an effective partner.

A clumsy American agreement to a summit between President Ford and Soviet Premier Brezhnev in Vladivostok in November 1974 complicated U.S.-Chinese relations. The decision had been made for purely practical reasons. Ford, as a new President, wanted to meet his Soviet counterpart. It was determined that he could not go to Europe without meeting some European leaders eager to establish their relations with the new President, which would crowd Ford’s schedule. A presidential trip to Japan and Korea had already been scheduled during the Nixon presidency; a twenty-four-hour side trip to Vladivostok would make the least demand on presidential time. In the process, we overlooked that Vladivostok was acquired by Russia only a century earlier in one of the “unequal treaties” regularly castigated in China and that it was located in the Russian Far East, where military clashes between China and the Soviet Union had triggered the reassessment of our China policy just a few years earlier. Technical convenience had been allowed to override common sense.

Chinese irritation with Washington in the wake of the Vladivostok meeting was evident when I traveled to Beijing from Vladivostok in December 1974. It was the only visit during which Mao did not receive me. (Since one could never request a meeting, the slight could be presented as an omission rather than a rebuff.)

Misstep aside, the United States remained committed to the strategy inaugurated in the Nixon administration, whatever the fluctuations of internal Chinese and American politics. Should the Soviets have attacked China, both Presidents I served, Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford, would have strongly supported China and done their utmost to defeat such a Soviet adventure. We were also determined to defend the international equilibrium. But we judged the American national interest and global peace best served if the United States maintained the capacity for dialogue with both Communist giants. By being closer to each of them than they were to each other, we would achieve the maximum diplomatic flexibility. What Mao described as “shadowboxing” was what both Nixon and Ford were convinced was required to build a consensus for foreign policy in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, Watergate, and the coming into office of a nonelected President.

In this international and domestic environment, my last two conversations with Mao took place in October and December 1975. The occasion was the first visit to China of President Ford. The initial meeting was to prepare the summit between the two leaders; the second concerned their actual conversation. In addition to providing a summary of the dying Chairman’s last views, they demonstrated Mao’s colossal willpower. He had not been well when he met Nixon; now he was desperately ill. He needed the assistance of two nurses to rise from the chair. He could barely speak. Chinese being a tonal language, the stricken Mao made his interpreter write down her interpretation of the wheezes issuing from his broken hulk. She would then show them to him, and Mao would nod or shake his head before the translation. In the face of his infirmities, Mao conducted both conversations with extraordinary lucidity.

Even more remarkable was the way these conversations at the edge of the grave exhibited the turmoil within Mao. Sarcastic and penetrating, taunting and cooperative, they distilled one final time revolutionary conviction grappling with a complex sense of strategy. Mao began the conversation of October 21, 1975, by challenging a banality I had uttered to Deng the day before to the effect that China and the United States wanted nothing from each other: “If neither side had anything to ask from the other, why would you be coming to Beijing? If neither side had anything to ask, then why did you want to come to Beijing, and why would we want to receive you and the President?” ¹³ In other words, abstract expressions of goodwill were meaningless to the apostle of continuous revolution. He was still in quest of a common strategy, and as a strategist he recognized the need for priorities even at the temporary sacrifice of some of China’s historic goals. Therefore he volunteered an assurance from a previous meeting: “The small issue is Taiwan, the big issue is the world.” ¹⁴ As was his habit, Mao pushed the necessary to its extreme with his characteristic combination of whimsy, aloof patience, and implicit threat—at times in elusive, if not unfathomable, phrasing. Not only would Mao continue to be patient as he had indicated he would be in the meeting with Nixon and the follow-up meetings with me, he did not want to confuse the debate about Taiwan with the strategy for protecting the global equilibrium. Therefore he made what would have seemed an incredible assertion two years earlier—that China did not want Taiwan at this moment:

MAO: It’s better for it to be in your hands. And if you were to send it back to me now, I would not want it, because it’s not wantable. There are a huge bunch of counter-revolutionaries there. A hundred years hence we will want it [gesturing with his hand ], and we are going to fight for it.

KISSINGER: Not a hundred years.

MAO: [Gesturing with his hand, counting ] It is hard to say. Five years, ten, twenty, a hundred years. It’s hard to say. [Points toward the ceiling ] And when I go to heaven to see God, I’ll tell him it’s better to have Taiwan under the care of the United States now.

KISSINGER: He will be very astonished to hear that from the Chairman.

MAO: No, because God blesses you, not us. God does not like us [waves his hands ] because I am a militant warlord, also a communist. That’s why he doesn’t like me. [Pointing to the three Americans ] ¹⁵ He likes you and you and you. ¹⁶

There was an urgency, however, in getting the issue of international security right: China, Mao argued, had slid to last place in American priorities among the five power centers of the world, with the Soviet Union having pride of place, followed by Europe and Japan: “We see that what you are doing is leaping to Moscow by way of our shoulders, and these shoulders are now useless. You see, we are the fifth. We are the small finger.” ¹⁷ Moreover, Mao claimed, the European countries, though outranking China in terms of power, were overwhelmed by their fear of the Soviet Union, summed up in an allegory:

MAO: This world is not tranquil, and a storm—the wind and rain—are coming. And at the approach of the rain and wind the swallows are busy.

TANG: He [the Chairman] asks me how one says “swallow” in English and what is “sparrow.” Then I said it is a different kind of bird.

KISSINGER: Yes, but I hope we have a little more effect on the storm than the swallows do on the wind and rain.

MAO: It is possible to postpone the arrival of the wind and rain, but it’s difficult to obstruct the coming. ¹⁸

When I replied that we agreed about the coming of the storm but maneuvered to be in the best position to survive it, Mao answered with a lapidary word: “Dunkirk.” ¹⁹

Mao elaborated that the American army in Europe was not strong enough to resist the Soviet ground forces there, and public opinion would prevent the use of nuclear weapons. He rejected my assertion that the United States would surely use nuclear weapons in defense of Europe: “There are two possibilities. One is your possibility, the other is that of The New York Times ” ²⁰ (referring to the book Can America Win the Next War? , by New York Times reporter Drew Middleton, which doubted whether America could prevail in a general war with the Soviet Union over Europe). At any rate, added the Chairman, it did not matter, because in neither case would China rely on the decisions of other countries:

We adopt the Dunkirk strategy, that is we will allow them to occupy Beijing, Tianjin, Wuhan, and Shanghai, and in that way through such tactics we will become victorious and the enemy will be defeated. Both world wars, the first and the second, were conducted in that way and victory was obtained only later. ²¹

In the meantime, Mao sketched the place of some pieces of his international vision of the wei qi board. Europe was “too scattered, too loose”; ²² Japan aspired to be hegemonial; German unification was desirable but achievable only if the Soviet Union grew weaker and “without a fight the Soviet Union cannot be weakened.” ²³ As for the United States, “it was not necessary to conduct the Watergate affair in that manner” ²⁴ —in other words, destroy a strong President over domestic controversies. Mao invited Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger to visit China—perhaps as part of the entourage of President Ford’s visit—where he could tour the frontier regions near the Soviet Union like Xinjiang and Manchuria. Presumably this was to demonstrate American willingness to risk confrontation with the Soviet Union. It also was a not very subtle attempt to interject China into the American domestic discussions, since Schlesinger had been reported as having challenged the prevailing détente policy.

Part of the difficulty was a problem of perspective. Mao was aware that he did not have long to live and was anxious to ensure that his vision would prevail afterward. He spoke with the melancholy of old age, intellectually aware of limits, not yet fully prepared to face that, for him, the range of choices was fading and the means to implement them disappearing.

MAO: I’m 82 years old now. [Points toward Secretary Kissinger ] And how old are you? 50 maybe.

KISSINGER: 51.

MAO: [Pointing toward Vice Premier Deng ] He’s 71. [Waving his hands ] And after we’re all dead, myself, him [Deng], Zhou Enlai, and Ye Jianying, you will still be alive. See? We old ones will not do. We are not going to make it out. ²⁵

He added, “You know I’m a showcase exhibit for visitors.” ²⁶ But whatever his physical decrepitude, the frail Chairman could never remain in a passive position. As the meeting was breaking up—a point usually inviting a gesture of conciliation—he suddenly spewed defiance, affirming the immutability of his revolutionary credentials:

MAO: You don’t know my temperament. I like people to curse me [raising his voice and hitting his chair with his hand ]. You must say that Chairman Mao is an old bureaucrat and in that case I will speed up and meet you. In such a case I will make haste to see you. If you don’t curse me, I won’t see you, and I will just sleep peacefully.

KISSINGER: That is difficult for us to do, particularly to call you a bureaucrat.

MAO: I ratify that [slamming his chair with his hand ]. I will only be happy when all foreigners slam on tables and curse me.

Mao escalated the element of menace even further by taunting me about Chinese intervention in the Korean War:

MAO: The UN passed a resolution which was sponsored by the U.S. in which it was declared that China committed aggression against Korea.

KISSINGER: That was 25 years ago.

MAO: Yes. So it is not directly linked to you. That was during Truman’s time.

KISSINGER: Yes. That was a long time ago, and our perception has changed.

MAO: [Touching the top of his head ] But the resolution has not yet been cancelled. I am still wearing this hat “aggressor.” I equally consider that the greatest honor which no other honor could excel. It is good, very good.

KISSINGER: But then we shouldn’t change the UN resolution?

MAO: No, don’t do that. We have never put forward that request. . . . We have no way to deny that. We have indeed committed aggression against China [Taiwan], and also in Korea. Will you please assist me on making that statement public, perhaps in one of your briefings? . . .

KISSINGER: I think I will let you make that public. I might not get the historically correct statement. ²⁷

Mao was making at least three points: First, China was prepared to stand alone, as it had in the Korean War against America and in the 1960s against the Soviet Union. Second, he reaffirmed the principles of permanent revolution advanced in these confrontations, however unattractive they might be to the superpowers. Finally, he was prepared to return to them if thwarted on his current course. The opening to America did not, for Mao, imply an end of ideology.

Mao’s prolix comments reflected a deep ambivalence. No one understood China’s geopolitical imperatives better than the dying Chairman. At that point in history, they clashed with the traditional concept of self-reliance for China. Whatever Mao’s criticisms of the policy of détente, the United States bore the brunt of confrontation with the Soviets and most of the military expenditures for the non-Communist world. These were the prerequisites of China’s security. We were in the fourth year of reestablishing relations with China. We agreed with Mao’s general view on strategy. It was not possible to delegate its execution to China, and Mao knew it. But it was precisely that margin of flexibility to which Mao was objecting.

At the same time, to make sure that the world understood the continuing ties and distilled the correct conclusions, a Chinese statement announced that Mao “had a conversation with Dr. Kissinger in a friendly atmosphere.” This positive statement was given a subtle perspective in the accompanying picture: it showed a smiling Mao next to my wife and me but wagging a finger, suggesting that perhaps the United States was in need of some benevolent tutoring.

It was always difficult to sum up Mao’s elliptical and aphoristic comments and sometimes even to understand them. In an oral report to President Ford, I described Mao’s stance as “sort of admirable” and reminded him that these were the same people who had led the Long March (the yearlong strategic retreat, across arduous terrain and under frequent attack, that had preserved the Chinese Communist cause in the civil war). ²⁸ The thrust of Mao’s comment was not about détente but about which of the three parties of the triangular relationship could avoid being engulfed at the beginning of evolving crises. As I told President Ford:

I guarantee you that if we do go into confrontation with the Soviet Union, they will attack us and the Soviet Union and draw the Third World around them. Good relations with the Soviet Union are the best for our Chinese relations—and vice versa. Our weakness is the problem—they see us in trouble with SALT and détente. That plays into their hands. ²⁹

Winston Lord, then head of the Policy Planning Staff of the State Department and my principal planner for the secret visit as well as later China policy, added a subtle interpretation of ambiguous Mao comments, which I passed on to the President:

The Chairman’s basic message and principal themes were clear. They clearly formed the strategic framework for the Kissinger visit, indeed for the evolution in our relations in the past couple of years. But there were several cryptic passages that are unclear. The tendency is to dig for the subtleties, the deeper meanings behind the Chairman’s laconic, earthy prose.

In most instances the larger meaning is apparent. In others, however, there may be nothing particularly significant, or a somewhat senile man might have been wandering aimlessly for a moment. . . . To cite just one example of ambiguity: “Do you have any way to assist me in curing my present inability to speak clearly?” The odds are that this was basically small talk about his own health. It is very doubtful that he was seriously asking for medical assistance. But was the Chairman saying that his voice within China (or in the world) was not being heard, that his influence is being circumscribed, and that he wants U.S. help to strengthen his position through our policies? Does he want us to help him “speak clearly” in the larger sense? ³⁰

At the time, I thought Lord’s comments probably farfetched. Having since learned more about internal Chinese maneuvering, I now consider that Mao meant it in the larger sense.

In any event, the October trip to pave the way for Ford’s visit took place in a very chilly atmosphere, reflecting the internal Chinese tensions. It seemed so unpromising that we reduced the presidential visit from five to three days, eliminating two stops outside Beijing and replacing them with brief visits to the Philippines and Indonesia.

On the day I returned from China, Schlesinger had been dismissed as Secretary of Defense and replaced by Donald Rumsfeld. I was advised about it after the fact and would indeed have preferred it not happen; I was sure it would generate controversy over foreign policy in Washington, with arguments challenging the diplomatic process in which we were currently engaged. In fact, the dismissal had nothing to do with Mao’s invitation that Schlesinger visit China. Ford’s move was an attempt to batten down the hatches for the imminent political campaign, and he had always been uncomfortable with the acerbic Schlesinger. But, undoubtedly, some in the Chinese leadership read the Schlesinger dismissal as a demonstrative rebuff of the Chinese taunt.

A few weeks later, the first week of December, President Ford paid his inaugural visit to China. During Ford’s visit, the internal Chinese split was evident. Mao’s wife, Jiang Qing, one of the architects of the Cultural Revolution, appeared only once for a few minutes at a reception during a sporting event. Still powerful, she conducted herself with aloof, icy politeness during her demonstratively brief stay. (Her one appearance during the Nixon visit had been to host her revolutionary ballet.)

Mao chose a nearly two-hour meeting with Ford to make the split within the Chinese leadership explicit. Mao’s condition had deteriorated somewhat from when he had received me five weeks earlier. However, he had decided that relations with America needed some warming up and conveyed this by a jocular beginning:

MAO: Your Secretary of State has been interfering in my internal affairs.

FORD: Tell me about it.

MAO: He does not allow me to go and meet God. He even tells me to disobey the order that God has given to me. God has sent me an invitation, yet he [Kissinger] says, don’t go.

KISSINGER: That would be too powerful a combination if he went there.

MAO: He is an atheist [Kissinger]. He is opposed to God. And he is also undermining my relations with God. He is a very ferocious man and I have no other recourse than to obey his orders. ³¹

Mao went on to observe that he expected “nothing great” to occur in U.S.-Chinese relations for the next two years, that is, during the period of the 1976 presidential election and its aftermath. “Perhaps afterwards, the situation might become a bit better.” ³² Did he mean that a more united America might emerge or that, by then, Chinese internal struggles would have been overcome? His words implied that he expected the shaky relationship to last through the Ford presidency.

The more significant explanation for the hiatus in the U.S.-China relationship concerned China’s internal situation. Mao seized on a comment by Ford that he appreciated the work of the head of the Beijing Liaison Office in Washington (Huang Zhen) and hoped he would stay:

There are some young people who have some criticism about him [Ambassador Huang]. ³³ And these two [Wang and Tang] ³⁴ also have some criticism of Lord Qiao. ³⁵ And these people are not to be trifled with. Otherwise, you will suffer at their hands—that is, a civil war. There are now many big character posters out. And you perhaps can go to Tsinghua University and Peking University to have a look at them. ³⁶

If Mao’s interpreters—Nancy Tang and Wang Hairong, who was close to Mao’s wife—were opposing the Foreign Minister and the de facto ambassador to Washington, matters had reached a fraught moment, and the internal split had reached the highest levels. Mao’s calling the Foreign Minister “Lord Qiao”—implying that the Foreign Minister was a Confucian—was another danger sign of the domestic rift. If there were big character posters—the large-font declarations by which the ideological campaigns were conducted during the Cultural Revolution—being put up at the universities, some of the methods and surely some of the arguments of the Cultural Revolution were beginning to reappear. In that case, Mao’s reference to a possible civil war could have been more than a figure of speech.

Ford, who obscured his shrewdness behind a facade of Midwestern simplicity and directness, chose to ignore the signs of division. Instead, he conducted himself as if the premises of the Zhou era of Sino-U.S. relations were still valid and launched himself into a case-by-case discussion of issues around the world. His basic theme was the measures America was taking to prevent Soviet hegemony, and he invited specific Chinese cooperation, especially in Africa. Mao had rebuffed Nixon for attempting much less in their conversation three years earlier. Whether Ford’s seeming guilelessness disarmed Mao or Mao had planned a strategic dialogue all along, this time he joined in, adding characteristically mordant comments, especially about Soviet moves in Africa, that proved that he had maintained his mastery of detail.

At the very end of the conversation, there was a strange appeal by Mao for help on presenting a better public posture on U.S.-China relations:

MAO: . . . [T]here are now some newspaper reports that describe relations between us two as being very bad. Perhaps you should let them in on the story a bit and maybe brief them.

KISSINGER: On both sides. They hear some of it in Peking.

MAO: But that is not from us. Those foreigners give that briefing. ³⁷

There was no time to inquire which foreigners were in a position to give briefings that the media would believe. It was a problem Mao traditionally could have solved by ordering up a positive communiqué, assuming he still had the power to impose his will on his factions.

Mao did not do so. No practical consequences followed. We found the draft communiqué, presumably overseen by Foreign Minister Qiao Guanhua, to be unhelpful, if not provocative, and refused to accept it. Clearly, a significant power struggle was taking place inside China. Deng, though critical of our tactics with the Soviets, was eager to maintain the relationship with America established by Zhou and Mao. Equally obviously, some groups in the power structure were challenging this course. Deng overcame the impasse by issuing a statement, in his capacity as a member of the Politburo Standing Committee (the executive committee of the Communist Party), affirming the usefulness of Ford’s visit and the importance of Sino-U.S. friendship.

For months following the meetings, the Chinese split was in plain view. Deng, who had replaced Zhou without being given the title of Premier, was once more under attack, presumably from the same forces that had exiled him a decade earlier. Zhou had disappeared from the scene. The conduct of the Foreign Minister, Qiao Guanhua, turned confrontational. The silken style with which Zhou had eased the road toward collaboration was replaced by a taunting insistence.

The potential for confrontation was kept in check because Deng sought occasions to demonstrate the importance of close relations with the United States. For example, at the welcoming dinner for my visit in October 1975, Qiao had delivered a fire-breathing toast in front of American television castigating U.S. policy toward the Soviet Union—a violation of diplomatic protocol at total variance with the sensitive handling of American delegations heretofore. When I responded sharply, the television lights were turned off so that my words could not be broadcast.

The next day, Deng invited the American delegation to a picnic in the Western Hills near Beijing where the Chinese leaders live, which had not been on the schedule originally, and conducted it with the solicitude that had characterized all meetings since the opening to China.

Matters came to a head when Zhou died on January 8, 1976. Roughly coincident with the Qingming Festival (Tomb-Sweeping Day) in April, hundreds of thousands of Chinese visited the Monument to the People’s Heroes in Tiananmen Square to pay tribute to Zhou’s memory, leaving wreaths and poems. The memorials revealed a deep admiration for Zhou and a hunger for the principles of order and moderation he had come to represent. Some poems contained thinly veiled criticism of Mao and Jiang Qing (again using the favored technique of historical analogy). ³⁸ The memorials were cleared overnight, leading to a standoff between police and mourners (known as the “Tiananmen Incident” of 1976). The Gang of Four persuaded Mao that Deng’s reforming tendencies had led to counterrevolutionary protests. The next day, the Gang of Four organized counterdemonstrations. Two days after the mourning for Zhou, Mao dismissed Deng from all Party posts. The position of acting Premier went to a little-known provincial party secretary from Hunan named Hua Guofeng.

Chinese relations with the United States became increasingly distant. George H. W. Bush having been named CIA Director, Tom Gates, a former Secretary of Defense, was appointed head of the Beijing Liaison Office. Hua Guofeng did not receive him for four months and, when he did, stuck to established, if formal, phraseology. A month later in mid-July, Vice Premier Zhang Chunqiao, generally regarded as the strongest man in the leadership and a key member of the Gang of Four, took the occasion of a visit by Senate Minority Leader Hugh Scott to put forward an extremely bellicose position regarding Taiwan, quite at odds with what Mao had told us:

We are very clear on Taiwan. Since the issue of Taiwan has arisen, this is a noose around the neck of the U.S. It is in the interests of the American people to take it off. If you don’t, the PLA will cut it off. This will be good both for the American and Chinese peoples—we are generous—we are ready to help the U.S. solve the problem by our bayonets—perhaps that doesn’t sound pleasant, but that is the way it is. ³⁹

The Gang of Four was pushing China in a direction reminiscent of the Cultural Revolution and of the provocative Maoist style toward Khrushchev.

On September 9, 1976, Mao succumbed to his illness, leaving his successors with his achievements and premonitions, with the legacy of his grandiosity and brutality, of great vision distorted by self-absorption. He left behind a China unified as it had not been for centuries, with most vestiges of the original regime eliminated, clearing away the underbrush for reforms never intended by the Chairman. If China remains united and emerges as a twenty-first-century superpower, Mao may hold, for many Chinese, the same ambiguous yet respected role in Chinese history as Qin Shihuang, the Emperor he personally revered: the dynasty-founding autocrat who dragged China into the next era by conscripting its population for a massive national exertion, and whose excesses were later acknowledged by some as a necessary evil. For others, the tremendous suffering Mao inflicted on his people will dwarf his achievements.

Two strands of policy had been competing with each other through the turbulences of Mao’s rule. There was the revolutionary thrust that saw China as a moral and political force, insisting on dispensing its unique precepts by example to an awestruck world. There was the geopolitical China coolly assessing trends and manipulating them to its own advantage. There was a China seeking coalitions for the first time in its history but also the one defiantly challenging the entire world. Mao had taken a war-wracked country and maneuvered it between competing domestic factions, hostile superpowers, an ambivalent Third World, and suspicious neighbors. He managed to have China participate in each overlapping concentric circle but commit itself to none. China had survived wars, tensions, and doubts while its influence grew, and in the end, it became an emerging superpower whose Communist form of government survived the collapse of the Communist world. Mao achieved this at horrendous cost by relying on the tenacity and perseverance of the Chinese people, using their endurance and cohesion, which so often exasperated him, as the bedrock of his edifice.

Approaching the end of his life, Mao was edging toward a challenge to the American design of world order, insisting on defining tactics and not only strategy. His successors shared his belief in Chinese strengths, but they did not think China capable of achieving its unique potential by willpower and ideological commitment alone. They sought self-reliance but knew that inspiration was not enough, and so they devoted their energies to domestic reform. This new wave of reform would bring China back to the foreign policy conducted by Zhou—characterized by an effort to connect China to global economic and political trends for the first time in its long history. This policy would be embodied by a leader purged twice in a decade and returned from internal exile for the third time: Deng Xiaoping.

CHAPTER 12

The Indestructible Deng

O NLY THOSE WHO experienced Mao Zedong’s China can fully appreciate the transformations wrought by Deng Xiaoping. China’s bustling cities, the construction booms, the traffic gridlocks, the un-Communist dilemma of a growth rate occasionally threatened by inflation and, at other times, looked to by the Western democracies as a bulwark against global recession—all of these were inconceivable in Mao’s drab China of agricultural communes, a stagnant economy, and a population wearing standard jackets while professing ideological fervor from the “Little Red Book” of Mao quotations.

Mao destroyed traditional China and left its rubble as building blocks for ultimate modernization. Deng had the courage to base modernization on the initiative and resilience of the individual Chinese. He abolished the communes and fostered provincial autonomy to introduce what he called “socialism with Chinese characteristics.” The China of today—with the world’s second-largest economy and largest volume of foreign exchange reserves, and with multiple cities boasting skyscrapers taller than the Empire State Building—is a testimonial to Deng’s vision, tenacity, and common sense.

Deng’s First Return to Power

Deng’s was a fitful and improbable road to power. In 1974, when Deng Xiaoping became America’s principal interlocutor, we knew very little about him. He had been General Secretary of the Communist Party’s powerful Central Committee until he was arrested in 1966, charged with being a “capitalist roader.” We learned that, in 1973, he had been restored to the Central Committee through Mao’s personal intervention and against the opposition of the radicals in the Politburo. Though Jiang Qing had publicly snubbed Deng shortly after his return to Beijing, he was clearly important to Mao. Uncharacteristically, Mao apologized for Deng’s humiliation during the Cultural Revolution. The same reports also told us that, in speaking to a delegation of Australian scientists, Deng had struck themes that were to become his trademark. China was a poor country, he had said, in need of scientific exchanges and learning from advanced countries such as Australia—the sort of admission China’s leaders had never made heretofore. Deng advised the Australian visitors to look at the backward side of China in their travels and not only at its achievements, another unprecedented comment for a Chinese leader.

Deng arrived in New York in April 1974 as part of a Chinese delegation, technically headed by the Foreign Minister, to a special session of the U.N. General Assembly dealing with economic development. When I invited the Chinese delegation to dinner, it became immediately evident who its senior member was and, even more important, that far from being restored to ease Zhou’s burden, as our intelligence reports claimed, Deng was, in fact, assigned to replace Zhou and, in a way, to exorcise him. Several friendly references to Zhou were ignored; allusions to remarks of the Premier were answered by comparable quotes from Mao’s conversations with me.

Shortly afterward, Deng was made Vice Premier in charge of foreign policy, and only a little later, he emerged as Executive Vice Premier with a supervisory role over domestic policy—an informal replacement for Zhou, who was, however, left with the now largely symbolic title of Premier.

Soon after Mao initiated the Cultural Revolution in 1966, Deng had been stripped of his Party and government positions. He had spent the next seven years first on an army base, then in exile in Jiangxi province, growing vegetables and working a half-day shift as a manual laborer in a tractor repair plant. His family was deemed ideologically incorrect and received no protection from the Red Guards. His son, Deng Pufang, was tormented by Red Guards and pushed off the top of a building at Beijing University. Though he broke his back, Deng Pufang was denied admission to a hospital. He emerged from the ordeal a paraplegic. ¹

Among the many extraordinary aspects of the Chinese people is the manner in which many of them have retained a commitment to their society regardless of how much agony and injustice it may have inflicted on them. None of the victims of the Cultural Revolution I have known has ever volunteered his suffering to me or responded to queries with more than minimal information. The Cultural Revolution is treated, sometimes wryly, as a kind of natural catastrophe that had to be endured but is not dwelt on as defining the person’s life afterward.

For his part, Mao seems to have reflected much of the same attitude. Suffering inflicted by him or on his orders was not necessarily his final judgment on the victim but a necessity, potentially temporary, for his view of the purification of society. Mao seems to have considered many of those exiled as available for service as a kind of strategic reserve. He recalled the four marshals from exile when he needed advice on how to position China in the face of the international crisis of 1969. This, too, is how Deng returned to high office. When Mao decided to drop Zhou, Deng was the best—perhaps the only—strategic reserve available to run the country.

Having grown accustomed to Mao’s philosophical disquisitions and indirect allusions and to Zhou’s elegant professionalism, I needed some time to adjust to Deng’s acerbic, no-nonsense style, his occasional sarcastic interjections, and his disdain of the philosophical in favor of the eminently practical. Compact and wiry, he entered a room as if propelled by some invisible force, ready for business. Deng rarely wasted time on pleasantries, nor did he feel it necessary to soften his remarks by swaddling them in parables as Mao was wont to do. He did not envelop one with solicitude as Zhou did, nor did he treat me, as Mao had, as a fellow philosopher from among whose ranks only a select few were worthy of his personal attention. Deng’s attitude was that we were both there to do our nations’ business and adult enough to handle the rough patches without taking them personally. Zhou understood English without translation and would occasionally speak it. Deng described himself to me as a “rustic person” and confessed, “Languages are hard. When I was a student in France, I never learned French.”

As time went on, I developed enormous regard for this doughty little man with the melancholy eyes who had maintained his convictions and sense of proportion in the face of extraordinary vicissitudes and who would, in time, renew his country. After 1974, out of the wreckage of the Cultural Revolution, Deng, at some personal risk since Mao was still in charge, began to fashion a modernization that during the twenty-first century was to turn China into an economic superpower.

In 1974, when Deng returned from his first exile, he conveyed little sense that he would be a figure of historic consequence. He articulated no grand philosophy; unlike Mao, he made no sweeping claims about the Chinese people’s unique destiny. His pronouncements seemed pedestrian, and many were concerned with practical details. Deng spoke on the importance of discipline in the military and the reform of the Ministry of Metallurgical Industry. ² He issued a call to increase the number of railway cars loaded per day, to bar conductors from drinking on the job, and to regularize their lunch breaks. ³ These were technical, not transcendent, speeches.

In the wake of the Cultural Revolution and given the hovering presence of Mao and the Gang of Four, workaday pragmatism was a bold statement in itself. For a decade, Mao and the Gang of Four had advocated anarchy as a means of social organization, endless “struggle” as a means of national purification, and a sort of violent amateurism in economic and academic endeavors. The Cultural Revolution having elevated the pursuit of ideological fervor as a badge of authenticity, Deng’s call for a return to order, professionalism, and efficiency—almost boilerplate in the developed world—was a daring proposition. China had endured a decade of rampaging youth militias that had come close to destroying Deng’s career and family. His pragmatic, matter-of-fact style recalled China from the dream of cutting short history to a world where history is fulfilled by sweeping ambitions but in practical stages.

On September 26, 1975, in remarks entitled “Priority Should Be Given to Scientific Research,” Deng sounded several of the themes that would become his trademarks: the need to emphasize science and technology in Chinese economic development; the reprofessionalization of the Chinese workforce; and the encouragement of individual talent and initiative—precisely the qualities that had been paralyzed by political purges, the shuttering of the universities during the Cultural Revolution, and the promotion of incompetent individuals on ideological grounds.

Above all, Deng sought to end once and for all the debate about what, if anything, China could learn from foreigners that had been raging since the nineteenth century. Deng insisted that China emphasize professional competence above political correctness (even to the point of encouraging “eccentric” individuals’ professional pursuits) and to reward individuals for excelling in their chosen fields. This was a radical shift of emphasis for a society in which government officials and work units had dictated the most minute details of individuals’ educational, professional, and personal lives for decades. Where Mao took issues into the stratosphere of ideological parables, Deng subordinated ideological pursuits to professional competence:

Presently, some scientific research personnel are involved in factional struggles and pay little or no attention to research. A few of them are engaged in research privately, as if they were committing crimes. . . . It would be advantageous for China to have one thousand such talented people whose authority is generally recognized by the world. . . . As long as they are working in the interest of the People’s Republic of China, these people are much more valuable than those who are engaged in factionalism and thereby obstruct others from working. ⁴

Deng defined traditional Chinese priorities as “the need to achieve consolidation, stability and unity.” ⁵ Though not in the position of supreme power with Mao still active and the Gang of Four remaining influential, Deng spoke bluntly about the need to overcome the prevailing chaos and “put things in order”:

There is at present a need to put things in order in every field. Agriculture and industry must be put in order, and the policies on literature and art need to be adjusted. Adjustment, in fact, also means putting things in order. By putting things in order, we want to solve problems in rural areas, in factories, in science and technology, and in all other spheres. At Political Bureau meetings I have discussed the need for doing so in several fields, and when I reported to Comrade Mao Zedong, he gave his approval. ⁶

What Mao was, in fact, approving when he had given his “approval” was left vague. If Deng was brought back to supply a more ideological alternative to Zhou, the opposite was the result. How Deng defined order and stability remained the subject of intense challenge from the Gang of Four.

The Death of Leaders—Hua Guofeng

Before Deng could fully launch his reform program, China’s power structure underwent an upheaval, and he himself was purged a second time.

On January 8, 1976, Zhou Enlai succumbed to his long battle with cancer. His death evoked an outpouring of public grief unprecedented in the history of the People’s Republic. Deng used the occasion of Zhou’s funeral on January 15 to eulogize him for his human qualities:

He was open and aboveboard, paid attention to the interests of the whole, observed Party discipline, was strict in “dissecting” himself and good at uniting the mass of cadres, and upheld the unity and solidarity of the Party. He maintained broad and close ties with the masses and showed boundless warmheartedness toward all comrades and the people. . . . We should learn from his fine style—being modest and prudent, unassuming and approachable, setting an example by his conduct, and living in a plain and hard-working way. ⁷

Almost all of these qualities—especially the devotion to unity and discipline—had been criticized at the Politburo meeting of December 1973, after which Zhou’s powers were removed (though he kept a title). Deng’s eulogy was thus an act of considerable courage. After the demonstrations in memory of Zhou, Deng was purged again from all his offices. He avoided being arrested only because the PLA protected him on military bases, first in Beijing, then in southern China.

Five months later, Mao died. His death was preceded by (and in the view of some Chinese, augured by) a catastrophic earthquake in the city of Tangshan.

With the downfall of Lin Biao and the passing of Zhou and Mao in such close succession, the future of the Party and the country was thrown wide open. After Mao, no other figure came close to commanding comparable authority.

As Mao came to distrust the ambitions and probably the suitability of the Gang of Four, he had engineered the rise of Hua Guofeng. Hua has remained something of a cipher; he was not in office long enough to stand for anything in particular except succeeding Mao. Mao first appointed Hua as Premier when Zhou died. And when Mao died shortly thereafter, Hua Guofeng inherited his positions as Chairman and head of the Central Military Commission, though not necessarily his authority. As he rose through the ranks of the Chinese leadership, Hua adopted Mao’s personality cult, but he exhibited little of his predecessor’s personal magnetism. Hua named his economic program the “Great Leap Outward,” in an unfortunate echo of Mao’s disastrous industrial and agricultural policy of the 1950s.

Hua’s chief contribution to post-Mao Chinese political theory was his February 1977 promulgation of what came to be known as the “Two Whatevers”: “We will resolutely uphold whatever policy decisions Chairman Mao made, and unswervingly follow whatever instructions Chairman Mao gave.” ⁸ This was hardly the type of principle that inspired a rush to the ramparts.

I met Hua only twice—the first time in Beijing in April 1979, and the second in October 1979 when he was on a state visit to France. Both occasions revealed a considerable gap between Hua’s performance and the oblivion into which he eventually disappeared. The same must be said about the records of his conversations with Zbigniew Brzezinski, National Security Advisor during the administration of Jimmy Carter. Hua conducted each conversation with the assurance that senior Chinese officials invariably display in meetings with foreigners. He was well briefed and confident, if less polished than Zhou and with none of the biting sarcasm of Mao. There was no reason to suppose that Hua would vanish as suddenly as he had emerged.

What Hua lacked was a political constituency. He had been projected into power because he belonged to neither of the principal contending factions, the Gang of Four or the Zhou/Deng moderate faction. But once Mao had disappeared, Hua fell over the supreme contradiction of attempting to combine uncritical adherence to Maoist precepts of collectivization and class struggle with Deng’s ideas of economic and technological modernization. The Gang of Four adherents opposed Hua for insufficient radicalism; Deng and his supporters would in time reject Hua, increasingly openly, for insufficient pragmatism. Outmaneuvered by Deng, he became increasingly irrelevant to the fate of the nation whose primary leadership posts he still technically held.

But before slipping from the pinnacle, Hua performed an act of transcendent consequence. Within a month of Mao’s death, Hua Guofeng allied himself with the moderates—and high-level victims of the Cultural Revolution—to arrest the Gang of Four.

Deng’s Ascendance—“Reform and Opening Up”

In this highly fluid environment, Deng Xiaoping emerged from his second exile in 1977 and began to articulate a vision of Chinese modernity.

Deng started from a position that in a bureaucratic sense could not have been more disadvantageous. Hua held all the key offices, which he had inherited from Mao and Zhou: he was Chairman of the Communist Party, Premier, and Chairman of the Central Military Commission. He had the benefit of Mao’s explicit endorsement. (Mao had famously told Hua, “With you in charge, I’m at ease.”) ⁹ Deng was restored to his former posts in the political and military establishment, but in every aspect of formal hierarchy he was Hua’s subordinate.

Their views on foreign policy were relatively parallel, but they were strikingly different in their visions of China’s future. In April 1979 on a visit to Beijing, I had separate meetings with the two leaders. Both put forward their ideas for economic reform. For the only time in my experience with Chinese leaders, philosophical and practical disagreements were made explicit. Hua described an economic program to spur production by traditional Soviet methods, emphasizing heavy industry, improvements in agricultural production based on communes, increased mechanization, and use of fertilizers within the framework of a ubiquitous Five-Year Plan.

Deng rejected all these orthodoxies. The people, he said, needed to be given a stake in what they produced. Consumer goods had to have priority over heavy industry, the ingenuity of Chinese farmers had to be liberated, the Communist Party needed to become less intrusive, and government would have to be decentralized. The conversation continued over a banquet, with a number of round tables. I was seated next to Deng. In what was essentially a dinner conversation, I raised the question of the balance between centralization and decentralization. Deng stressed the importance of decentralization in a vast country with a huge population and significant regional differences. But this was not the principal challenge, he said. Modern technology had to be introduced to China, tens of thousands of Chinese students would be sent abroad (“We have nothing to fear from Western education”), and the abuses of the Cultural Revolution would be ended once and for all. While Deng had not raised his voice, the tables around us had fallen silent. The other Chinese present were sitting at the edge of their seats, not even pretending not to be listening in on the old man as he outlined his vision of their future. “We have to get it right this time,” concluded Deng. “We have made too many mistakes already.” Soon after, Hua faded from the leadership. Over the course of the next decade, Deng implemented what he had described at the banquet in 1979.

Deng prevailed because he had over the decades built connections within the Party and especially in the PLA, and operated with far greater political dexterity than Hua. As a veteran of decades of internal Party struggles, he had learned how to make ideological arguments serve political purposes. Deng’s speeches during this period were masterpieces of ideological flexibility and political ambiguity. His main tactic was to elevate the concepts of “seeking truth from facts” and “integrating theory with practice” to “the fundamental principle of Mao Zedong Thought”—a proposition seldom advanced before Mao’s death.

Like every Chinese contender for power, Deng was careful to present his ideas as elaborations of statements by Mao, quoting liberally (if sometimes artfully out of context) from the Chairman’s speeches. Mao had not placed any particular emphasis on practical domestic precepts, at least since the mid-1960s. And he would in general have held that ideology overrode and could overwhelm practical experience. Marshaling disparate fragments of Maoist orthodoxy, Deng abandoned Mao’s continuous revolution. In Deng’s account, Mao emerged as a pragmatist:

Comrades, let’s think it over: Isn’t it true that seeking truth from facts, proceeding from reality and integrating theory with practice form the fundamental principle of Mao Zedong Thought? Is this fundamental principle outdated? Will it ever become outdated? How can we be true to Marxism-Leninism and Mao Zedong Thought if we are against seeking truth from facts, proceeding from reality and integrating theory with practice? Where would that lead us? ¹⁰

On the basis of defending Maoist orthodoxy, Deng criticized Hua Guofeng’s Two Whatevers statement because it implied that Mao was infallible, which even the Great Helmsman had not claimed. (On the other hand, the fallibility of Mao was rarely asserted while he was living.) Deng invoked the formula by which Mao had judged Stalin—that he had been 70 percent correct and 30 percent wrong—suggesting that Mao himself might deserve a “70-30” rating (this would soon become official Party policy and remains so to this day). In the process, he managed to accuse the heir appointed by Mao, Hua Guofeng, of falsifying Mao’s legacy in his insistence on its literal application:

[T]he “two whatevers” are unacceptable. If this principle were correct, there could be no justification for my rehabilitation, nor could there be any for the statement that the activities of the masses at Tiananmen Square in 1976 [that is, the mourning and demonstrations following the death of Zhou Enlai] were reasonable. We cannot mechanically apply what Comrade Mao Zedong said about a particular question to another question. . . . Comrade Mao Zedong himself said repeatedly . . . that if one’s work was rated as consisting 70 per cent of achievements and 30 per cent of mistakes, that would be quite all right, and that he himself would be very happy and satisfied if future generations could give him this “70-30” rating after his death. ¹¹

In short, there was no unchangeable orthodoxy. Chinese reform would be based to a large extent on what worked.

Deng sounded his basic themes with increasing urgency. In a May 1977 speech, he challenged China to “do better” than the Meiji Restoration, Japan’s dramatic modernization drive of the nineteenth century. Invoking Communist ideology to encourage what amounted to a market economy, Deng suggested that “as proletarians,” the Chinese would be able to exceed a program engineered by the “emerging Japanese bourgeoisie” (though one suspects that this was really an attempt to mobilize Chinese national pride). Unlike Mao, who appealed to his people by the vision of a transcendent, glorious future, Deng challenged them into a major commitment to overcome their backwardness:

The key to achieving modernization is the development of science and technology. And unless we pay special attention to education, it will be impossible to develop science and technology. Empty talk will get our modernization programme nowhere; we must have knowledge and trained personnel. . . . Now it appears that China is fully 20 years behind the developed countries in science, technology and education. ¹²

As Deng consolidated power, these principles turned into the operational maxims of China’s efforts to become a world power. Mao had shown little interest in increasing China’s international trade or making its economy internationally competitive. On Mao’s death, America’s total trade with China amounted to $336 million, slightly lower than the level of America’s trade with Honduras and one-tenth of America’s trade with Taiwan, which had approximately 1.6 percent of China’s population. ¹³

China as the present-day economic superpower is the legacy of Deng Xiaoping. It is not that he designed specific programs to accomplish his ends. Rather, he fulfilled the ultimate task of a leader—of taking his society from where it is to where it has never been. Societies operate by standards of average performance. They sustain themselves by practicing the familiar. But they progress through leaders with a vision of the necessary and the courage to undertake a course whose benefits at first reside largely in their vision.

Deng’s political challenge was that, in the first thirty years of Communist rule, China had been governed by a dominating leader who propelled it toward unity and international respect but also toward unsustainable domestic and social goals. Mao had unified the country and, except for Taiwan and Mongolia, restored it to its historic limits. But he demanded of it efforts contrary to its historic distinctiveness. China had achieved greatness by developing a cultural model in rhythm with the pace its society could sustain. Mao’s continuous revolution had driven China to the limits of even its vast endurance. It had produced pride in the reemergence of a national identity taken seriously by the international community. But it had not discovered how China could progress other than through fits of ideological exaltation.

Mao had governed as a traditional emperor of a majestic and aweinspiring kind. He embodied the myth of the imperial ruler supplying the link between heaven and earth and closer to the divine than the terrestrial. Deng governed in the spirit of another Chinese tradition: basing omnipotence on the ubiquitousness but also the invisibility of the ruler.

Many cultures, and surely all Western ones, buttress the authority of the ruler by demonstrative contact of some kind with the ruled. This is why in Athens, Rome, and most Western pluralistic states, oratory was considered an asset in government. There is no general tradition of oratory in China (Mao was somewhat of an exception). Chinese leaders traditionally have not based their authority on rhetorical skills or physical contact with the masses. In the mandarin tradition, they operate essentially out of sight, legitimized by performance. Deng held no major office; he refused all honorific titles; he almost never appeared on television, and practiced politics almost entirely behind the scenes. He ruled not like an emperor but as the principal mandarin. ¹⁴

Mao had governed by counting on the endurance of the Chinese people to sustain the suffering his personal visions would impose on them. Deng governed by liberating the creativeness of the Chinese people to bring about their own vision of the future. Mao strove for economic advancement with mystical faith in the power of the Chinese “masses” to overcome any obstacle by sheer willpower and ideological purity. Deng was forthright about China’s poverty and the vast gaps that separated its standard of living from that of the developed world. Decreeing that “poverty is not socialism,” Deng proclaimed that China needed to obtain foreign technology, expertise, and capital to remedy its deficiencies.

Deng culminated his return at the December 1978 Third Plenum of the Eleventh Central Committee of the Chinese Communist Party. The Plenum promulgated the slogan that would characterize all of Deng’s subsequent policies: “Reform and Opening Up.” Marking a break with Maoist orthodoxy, the Central Committee approved pragmatic “socialist modernization” policies echoing Zhou Enlai’s Four Modernizations. Private initiative in agriculture was again permitted. The verdict on the crowds mourning Zhou (which had earlier been deemed “counterrevolutionary”) was reversed, and the veteran military commander Peng Dehuai—who had commanded during the Korean War and was later purged by Mao for criticizing the Great Leap Forward—was posthumously rehabilitated. At the close of the conference, Deng issued a clarion call in a speech on “how to emancipate our minds, use our heads, seek truth from facts and unite as one in looking to the future.” After a decade in which Mao Zedong had prescribed the answer to virtually all of life’s questions, Deng stressed the need to loosen ideological constraints and encourage “thinking things out for yourself.” ¹⁵

Using Lin Biao as a metaphor for the Gang of Four and aspects of Mao, Deng condemned “intellectual taboos” and “bureaucratism.” Merit needed to replace ideological correctness; too many took the road of least resistance and fell in with the prevalent stagnation:

In fact, the current debate about whether practice is the sole criterion for testing truth is also a debate about whether people’s minds need to be emancipated. . . . When everything has to be done by the book, when thinking turns rigid and blind faith is the fashion, it is impossible for a party or a nation to make progress. Its life will cease and that party or nation will perish. ¹⁶

Independent creative thinking was to be the principal guideline of the future:

The more Party members and other people there are who use their heads and think things through, the more our cause will benefit. To make revolution and build socialism we need large numbers of pathbreakers who dare to think, explore new ways and generate new ideas. Otherwise, we won’t be able to rid our country of poverty and backwardness or to catch up with—still less surpass—the advanced countries. ¹⁷

The break with Maoist orthodoxy, at the same time, revealed the reformer’s dilemma. The revolutionary’s dilemma is that most revolutions occur in opposition to what is perceived as abuse of power. But the more existing obligations are dismantled, the more force must be used to re-create a sense of obligation. Hence the frequent outcome of revolution is an increase in central power; the more sweeping the revolution, the more this is true.

The dilemma of reform is the opposite. The more the scope of choice is expanded, the harder it becomes to compartmentalize it. In pursuit of productivity, Deng stressed the importance of “thinking things out for yourself” and advocated the “complete” emancipation of minds. Yet what if those minds, once emancipated, demanded political pluralism? Deng’s vision called for “large numbers of pathbreakers who dare to think, explore new ways and generate new ideas,” but it assumed that these pathbreakers would limit themselves to exploring practical ways to build a prosperous China and stay away from exploration of ultimate political objectives. How did Deng envision reconciling emancipation of thought with the imperative for political stability? Was this a calculated risk, based on the assessment that China had no better alternative? Or did he, following Chinese tradition, reject the likelihood of any challenge to political stability, especially as Deng was making the Chinese people better off and considerably freer? Deng’s vision of economic liberalization and national revitalization did not include a significant move toward what would be recognized in the West as pluralistic democracy. Deng sought to preserve one-party rule not so much because he reveled in the perquisites of power (he famously abjured many of the luxuries of Mao and Jiang Qing), but because he believed the alternative was anarchy.

Deng was soon forced to confront these issues. In the 1970s, he had encouraged individuals to air their grievances about suffering during the Cultural Revolution. But when this newfound openness developed into nascent pluralism, Deng in 1979 found himself obliged to discuss in detail how he understood the nature of freedom as well as its limits:

In the recent period a small number of persons have provoked incidents in some places. Instead of accepting the guidance, advice, and explanations of leading officials of the Party and government, certain bad elements have raised sundry demands that cannot be met at present or are altogether unreasonable. They have provoked or tricked some of the masses into raiding Party and government organizations, occupying offices, holding sit-down and hunger strikes and obstructing traffic, thereby seriously disrupting production, other work and public order. ¹⁸

That these incidents were not isolated or rare events was demonstrated by the catalogue of them presented by Deng. He described the China Human Rights Group, which had gone so far as to request that the President of the United States show concern for human rights in China: “Can we permit such an open call for intervention in China’s internal affairs?” ¹⁹ Deng’s catalogue included the Shanghai Democracy Forum, which, according to Deng, advocated a turn to capitalism. Some of these groups, according to Deng, had made clandestine contact with the Nationalist authorities in Taiwan, and others were talking of seeking political asylum abroad.

This was an astonishing admission of political challenge. Deng was clearer about its scope than about how to deal with it:

[T]he struggle against these individuals is no simple matter that can be settled quickly. We must strive to clearly distinguish between people (many of them innocent young people) and the counter-revolutionaries and bad elements who have hoodwinked them, and whom we must deal with sternly and according to law. . . .

What kind of democracy do the Chinese people need today? It can only be socialist democracy, people’s democracy, and not bourgeois democracy, individualist democracy. ²⁰

Though he was insistent on authoritarian conduct of politics, Deng abandoned the personality cult, declined to purge his predecessor Hua Guofeng (instead allowing him to fade into insignificance), and began planning for an orderly succession for himself. After consolidating power, Deng declined to occupy most of the top formal positions in the Party hierarchy. ²¹ As he explained to me in 1982, when I met with him in Beijing:

DENG: . . . I am approaching the stage when I will become outmoded.

KISSINGER: It doesn’t appear so from reading the documents of the Party Congress.

DENG: I am now on the Advisory Commission.

KISSINGER: I consider that a sign of self-confidence. . . .

DENG: The aging of our leadership has compelled us to this so we have historical experience and lessons. . . .

KISSINGER: I do not know what title to use for you.

DENG: I have several hats. I am a member of the Standing Committee of the Politburo and Chairman of the Advisory Commission and also Chairman of the People’s Political Consultative Conference. I would like to give this out to others. I have too many titles. . . . I have so many titles. I want to do as less as possible. My colleagues also hope I will take care of less routine affairs. The only purpose is that I can live longer.

Deng broke with the precedent set by Mao by downplaying his own expertise rather than presenting himself as a genius in any particular field. He entrusted his subordinates to innovate, then endorsed what worked. As he explained, with typical directness, in a 1984 conference on foreign investment: “I am a layman in the field of economics. I have made a few remarks on the subject but all from a political point of view. For example, I proposed China’s economic policy of opening to the outside world, but as for the details or specifics of how to implement it, I know very little indeed.” ²²

As he elaborated his domestic vision, Deng grew into China’s face to the world. By 1980, his ascendance was complete. At the Fifth Plenum of the Central Committee of the Communist Party in February 1980, Hua Guofeng’s supporters were demoted or relieved of their posts; Deng’s allies, Hu Yaobang and Zhao Ziyang, were appointed to the Politburo Standing Committee. Deng’s massive changes were not achieved without significant social and political tensions, ultimately culminating in the Tiananmen Square crisis of 1989. But a century after the thwarted promise of China’s self-strengthening nineteenth-century reformers, Deng had tamed and reinvented Mao’s legacy, launching China headlong on a course of reform that was, in time, to reclaim the influence to which its performance and history entitled it.

CHAPTER 13

“Touching the Tiger’s Buttocks” The Third Vietnam War

I N APRIL 1979, Hua Guofeng, still China’s Premier, summed up the results of the Third Vietnam War, in which China had invaded Vietnam and withdrawn after six weeks, in a contemptuous dig at the Soviet role: “They did not dare to move. So after all we could still touch the buttocks of the tiger.” ¹

China had invaded Vietnam to “teach it a lesson” after Vietnamese troops had occupied Cambodia in response to a series of border clashes with the Khmer Rouge, which had taken over Cambodia in 1975, and in ultimate pursuit of Hanoi’s goal of creating an Indochinese Federation. China had done so in defiance of a mutual defense treaty between Hanoi and Moscow, signed less than a month earlier. The war had been extremely costly to the Chinese armed forces, not yet fully restored from the depredations of the Cultural Revolution. ² But the invasion served its fundamental objective: when the Soviet Union failed to respond it demonstrated the limitations of its strategic reach. From that point of view, it can be considered a turning point of the Cold War, though it was not fully understood as such at the time. The Third Vietnam War was also the high point of Sino-American strategic cooperation during the Cold War.

Vietnam: Confounder of Great Powers

China found itself involved in the Third Vietnam War by factors comparable to what had drawn the United States into the second one. Something in the almost maniacal Vietnamese nationalism drives other societies to lose their sense of proportion and to misapprehend Vietnamese motivations and their own possibilities. That certainly was America’s fate in what is now treated by historians as the Second Vietnam War (the first being Vietnam’s anticolonial war with France). Americans found it difficult to accept that a medium-sized developing nation could cultivate such a fierce commitment only for its own parochial causes. Hence they interpreted Vietnamese actions as symbols of a deeper design. Hanoi’s combativeness was treated as a vanguard of a Sino-Soviet coordinated conspiracy to dominate at least Asia. And Washington believed as well that once the initial thrust by Hanoi was blocked, some diplomatic compromise might emerge.

The assessment was wrong on both grounds. Hanoi was not any other country’s proxy. It fought for its vision of independence and, ultimately, for an Indochinese Federation, which assigned to Hanoi in Southeast Asia the dominant role Beijing had historically played in East Asia. To these single-minded survivors of centuries of conflict with China, compromise was inconceivable between their idea of independence and any outsider’s conception of stability. The poignancy of the Second Vietnam War in Indochina was the interaction between the American yearning for compromise and the North Vietnamese insistence on victory.

In that sense, America’s overriding mistake in the Vietnam War was not what divided the American public: whether the U.S. government was sufficiently devoted to a diplomatic outcome. Rather, it was the inability to face the fact that a so-called diplomatic outcome, so earnestly—even desperately—sought by successive administrations of both American political parties, required pressures equivalent to what amounted to the total defeat of Hanoi—and that Moscow and Beijing had only a facilitating, not a directive, role.

In a more limited way, Beijing fell into a parallel misconception. When the U.S. buildup in Vietnam began, Beijing interpreted it in wei qi terms: as another example of American bases surrounding China from Korea to the Taiwan Strait and now to Indochina. China supported the North Vietnamese guerrilla war, partly for reasons of ideology, partly in order to push American bases as far from Chinese borders as possible. Zhou Enlai told North Vietnamese Prime Minister Pham Van Dong in April 1968 that China supported North Vietnam to prevent the strategic encirclement of China, to which Pham Van Dong gave an equivocal reply—largely because preventing the encirclement of China was not a Vietnamese objective and Vietnamese objectives were national ones:

ZHOU: For a long time, the United States has been halfencircling China. Now the Soviet Union is also encircling China. The circle is getting complete, except [the part of] Vietnam.

PHAM: We are all the more determined to defeat the US imperialists in all of Vietnamese territory.

ZHOU: That is why we support you.

PHAM: That we are victorious will have a positive impact in Asia. Our victory will bring about unforeseeable outcomes.

ZHOU: You should think that way. ³

In pursuit of a Chinese strategy from which Pham Van Dong had been careful to stay aloof, China sent over 100,000 noncombat military personnel to support North Vietnamese infrastructure and logistics. The United States opposed North Vietnam as the spearhead of a Soviet-Chinese design. China supported Hanoi to blunt a perceived American thrust to dominate Asia. Both were mistaken. Hanoi fought only for its own national account. And a unified Communist-led Vietnam, victorious in its second war in 1975, would turn out to be a far greater strategic threat to China than to the United States.

The Vietnamese eyed their northern neighbor with suspicion approaching paranoia. During long periods of Chinese domination, Vietnam had absorbed the Chinese writing system and political and cultural forms (evidenced, most spectacularly, in the imperial palace and tombs at the former capital of Hue). Vietnam had used these “Chinese” institutions, however, to build a separate state and bolster its own independence. Geography did not allow Vietnam to retreat into isolation as Japan had at a comparable period in its history. From the second century B.C. through the tenth century, Vietnam was under more or less direct Chinese rule, reemerging fully as an independent state only with the collapse of the Tang Dynasty in the year 907.

Vietnamese national identity came to reflect the legacy of two somewhat contradictory forces: on the one hand, absorption of Chinese culture; on the other, opposition to Chinese political and military domination. Resistance to China helped produce a passionate pride in Vietnamese independence and a formidable military tradition. Absorption of Chinese culture provided Vietnam with a Chinese-style Confucian elite who possessed something of a regional Middle Kingdom complex of their own vis-à-vis their neighbors. During the Indochina wars of the twentieth century, Hanoi displayed its sense of political and cultural entitlement by availing itself of Lao and Cambodian neutral territory as if by right and, after the war, extending “special relationships” with the Communist movements in each of these countries, amounting to Vietnamese dominance.

Vietnam confronted China with an unprecedented psychological and geopolitical challenge. Hanoi’s leaders were familiar with Sun Tzu’s Art of War and employed its principles to significant effect against both France and the United States. Even before the end of the long Vietnam wars, first with the French seeking to reclaim their colony after World War II, and then with the United States from 1963 to 1975, both Beijing and Hanoi began to realize that the next contest would be between themselves for dominance in Indochina and Southeast Asia.

Cultural proximity may account for the relative absence of the sure touch in strategic analysis that usually guided Chinese policy during America’s Vietnam War. Ironically, Beijing’s long-term strategic interest was probably parallel to Washington’s: an outcome in which four Indochinese states (North and South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos) balanced each other. This may explain why Mao, in outlining possible outcomes of the war to Edgar Snow in 1965, listed an outcome preserving South Vietnam as possible and, therefore, presumably acceptable. ⁴

During my secret trip to Beijing in 1971, Zhou explained China’s objectives in Indochina as being neither strategic nor ideological. According to Zhou, Chinese policy in Indochina was based entirely on a historical debt incurred by ancient dynasties. China’s leaders probably assumed that America could not be defeated and that the north of a divided Vietnam would come to depend on Chinese support much as North Korea did after the end of the Korean War.

As the war evolved, there were several signs that China was preparing itself—albeit reluctantly—for Hanoi’s victory. Intelligence noticed Chinese road building in northern Laos that had no relevance to the ongoing conflict with the United States but would be useful for postwar strategy to balance Hanoi or even a possible conflict over Laos. In 1973, after the Paris Agreement to end the Vietnam War, Zhou and I were negotiating a postwar settlement for Cambodia based on a coalition among Norodom Sihanouk (the exiled former ruler of Cambodia residing in Beijing), the existing Phnom Penh government, and the Khmer Rouge. Its main purpose was to create an obstacle to a takeover of Indochina by Hanoi. The agreement ultimately aborted when the U.S. Congress in effect prohibited any further military role for America in the region, making the American role irrelevant. ⁵

Hanoi’s latent hostility to its then ally was brought home to me on a visit to Hanoi in February 1973 designed to work out the implementation of the Paris Agreement, which had been initialed two weeks earlier. Le Duc Tho took me on a visit to Hanoi’s national museum primarily to show me the sections devoted to Vietnam’s historic struggles against China—still formally an ally of Vietnam.

With the fall of Saigon in 1975, the inherent and historic rivalries burst into the open, leading to a victory of geopolitics over ideology. It proved that the United States was not alone in wrongly assessing the significance of the Vietnam War. When the United States had first intervened, China viewed it as a kind of last gasp of imperialism. It had—almost routinely—cast its lot with Hanoi. It interpreted the American intervention as another step toward the encirclement of China—much as it had viewed the U.S. intervention in Korea a decade earlier.

Ironically, from a geopolitical point of view, Beijing’s and Washington’s long-term interests should have been parallel. Both should have preferred the status quo, which was an Indochina divided among four states. Washington resisted Hanoi’s domination of Indochina because of the Wilsonian idea of global order—the right of self-determination of existing states—and the notion of a global Communist conspiracy. Beijing had the same general objective, but from the geopolitical point of view, because it wanted to avoid the emergence of a Southeast Asia bloc on its southern border.

For a while, Beijing seemed to believe that Communist ideology would trump a thousand-year history of Vietnamese opposition to Chinese predominance. Or else it did not think it possible that the United States could be brought to total defeat. In the aftermath of the fall of Saigon, Beijing was obliged to face the implications of its own policy. And it recoiled before them. The outcome in Indochina merged with the permanent Chinese fear of encirclement. Preventing an Indochina bloc linked to the Soviet Union became the dominant preoccupation of Chinese foreign policy under Deng and a link to increased cooperation with the United States. Hanoi, Beijing, Moscow, and Washington were playing a quadripartite game of wei qi . Events in Cambodia and in Vietnam would determine who would wind up surrounded and neutralized: Beijing or Hanoi.

Beijing’s nightmare of encirclement by a hostile power appeared to be coming true. Vietnam alone was formidable enough. But if it realized its aim of an Indochinese Federation, it would approach a bloc of 100 million in population and be in a position to bring significant pressure on Thailand and other Southeast Asian states. In this context, the independence of Cambodia as a counterweight to Hanoi became a principal Chinese objective. As early as August 1975—three months after the fall of Saigon—Deng Xiaoping told the visiting Khmer Rouge leader Khieu Samphan: “[W]hen one superpower [the United States] was compelled to withdraw its forces from Indochina, the other superpower [the Soviet Union] seized the opportunity . . . to extend its evil tentacles to Southeast Asia . . . in an attempt to carry out expansion there.” ⁶ Cambodia and China, Deng said, “both . . . face the task of combating imperialism and hegemonies. . . . We firmly believe that . . . our two peoples will unite even more closely and march together towards new victories in the common struggle.” ⁷ During a March 1976 visit of Lao Prime Minister Kaysone Phomvihane to Beijing, Hua Guofeng, then Premier, warned of the Soviet Union to the effect that: “In particular, the superpower that hawks ‘détente’ while extending its grabbing claws everywhere is stepping up its armed expansion and war preparations and attempting to bring more countries into its sphere of influence and play the hegemonic overlord.” ⁸

Freed from the necessity of feigning Communist solidarity in the face of the American “imperialist” threat, the adversaries moved into open opposition to each other soon after the fall of Saigon in April 1975. Within six months of the fall of all of Indochina, 150,000 Vietnamese were forced to leave Cambodia. A comparable number of ethnically Chinese Vietnamese citizens were obliged to flee Vietnam. By February 1976, China ended its aid program to Vietnam, and a year later, it cut off any deliveries based on existing programs. Concurrently, Hanoi moved toward the Soviet Union. At a meeting of the Vietnamese Politburo in June 1978, China was identified as Vietnam’s “principal enemy.” The same month, Vietnam joined Comecon, the Soviet-led trade bloc. In November 1978, the Soviet Union and Vietnam signed the Treaty of Friendship and Cooperation, which contained military clauses. In December 1978, Vietnamese troops invaded Cambodia, overthrowing the Khmer Rouge and installing a pro-Vietnamese government.

Ideology had disappeared from the conflict. The Communist power centers were conducting a balance-of-power contest based not on ideology but on national interest.

Viewed from Beijing, a strategic nightmare was evolving along China’s borders. In the north, the Soviet buildup continued unabated: Moscow still maintained nearly fifty divisions along the border. To China’s west, Afghanistan had undergone a Marxist coup and was subjected to increasingly overt Soviet influence. ⁹ Beijing also saw Moscow’s hand in the Iranian revolution, which culminated with the flight of the Shah on January 16, 1979. Moscow continued to push an Asian collective security system with no other plausible purpose than to contain China. Meanwhile, Moscow was negotiating the SALT II treaty with Washington. In Beijing’s perception, such agreements served to “push the ill waters of the Soviet Union eastward” toward China. China seemed to be in an exceptionally vulnerable position. Now Vietnam had joined the Soviet camp. The “unforeseeable outcomes” predicted by Pham Van Dong to Zhou in 1968 appeared to include Soviet encirclement of China. An additional complication was that all these challenges occurred while Deng was still consolidating his position in his second return to power—a process not completed until 1980.

A principal difference between Chinese and Western diplomatic strategy is the reaction to perceived vulnerability. American and Western diplomats conclude that they should move carefully to avoid provocation; Chinese response is more likely to magnify defiance. Western diplomats tend to conclude from an unfavorable balance of forces an imperative for a diplomatic solution; they urge diplomatic initiatives to place the other side in the “wrong” to isolate it morally but to desist from the use of force—this was essentially the American advice to Deng after Vietnam invaded Cambodia and occupied it. Chinese strategists are more likely to increase their commitment to substitute courage and psychological pressure against the material advantage of the adversary. They believe in deterrence in the form of preemption. When Chinese planners conclude that their opponent is gaining unacceptable advantage and that the strategic trend is turning against them, they respond by seeking to undermine the enemy’s confidence and allow China to reclaim the psychological, if not material, upper hand.

Faced with a threat on all fronts, Deng decided to go on the diplomatic and strategic offensive. Though not yet in complete control in Beijing, he moved daringly on several levels abroad. He changed the Chinese position toward the Soviet Union from containment to explicit strategic hostility and, in effect, to roll-back. China would no longer confine itself to advising the United States on how to contain the Soviet Union; it would now play an active role in constructing an anti-Soviet and anti-Vietnam coalition, especially in Asia. It would put the pieces in place for a possible showdown with Hanoi.

Deng’s Foreign Policy—Dialogue with America and Normalization

When Deng returned from his second exile in 1977, he reversed Mao’s domestic policy but left Mao’s foreign policy largely in place. This was because both shared strong national feelings and had parallel views of the Chinese national interest. It was also because foreign policy had set more absolute limits to Mao’s revolutionary impulses than domestic policy.

There was, however, a significant difference in style between Mao’s criticism and Deng’s. Mao had questioned the strategic intentions of America’s Soviet policy. Deng assumed an identity of strategic interests and concentrated on achieving a parallel implementation. Mao dealt with the Soviet Union as a kind of abstract strategic threat whose menace was no more applicable to China than to the rest of the world. Deng recognized the special danger to China, especially an immediate threat at China’s southern border compounding a latent threat in the north. Dialogue therefore took on a more operational character. Mao acted like a frustrated teacher, Deng as a demanding partner.

In the face of actual peril, Deng ended the ambivalence about the American relationship of Mao’s last year. There was no longer any Chinese nostalgia for opportunities on behalf of world revolution. Deng, in all conversations after his return, argued that, in resisting the thrust of Soviet policy toward Europe, China and Japan needed to be brought into a global design.

However close the consultation had become between China and the United States, the anomaly continued that America still formally recognized Taiwan as the legitimate government of China and Taipei as the capital of China. China’s adversaries along its northern and southern borders might misconstrue the absence of recognition as an opportunity.

Normalization of relations moved to the top of the Sino-American agenda as Jimmy Carter took office. The first visit to Beijing of the new Secretary of State, Cyrus Vance, in August 1977 did not turn out well. “I left Washington,” he wrote in his memoirs,

believing it would be unwise to take on an issue as politically controversial as normalization with China until the Panama issue [referring to the ratification of the Panama Canal treaty turning over operation of the canal] was out of the way, unless—and I did not expect it to happen—the Chinese were to accept our proposal across the board. For political reasons, I intended to represent a maximum position to the Chinese on the Taiwan issue. . . . Accordingly, I did not expect the Chinese to accept our proposal, but I felt it wise to make it, even though we might eventually have to abandon it. ¹⁰

The American proposal on Taiwan contained a series of ideas involving retention of some limited American diplomatic presence on Taiwan that had been put forward and rejected during the Ford administration. The proposals were rejected again by Deng, who called them a step backward. A year later, the internal American debate ended when President Carter decided to assign high priority to the relationship with China. Soviet pressures in Africa and the Middle East convinced the new President to opt for rapid normalization with China, by what amounted to the quest for a de facto strategic alliance with China. On May 17, 1978, Carter sent his National Security Advisor, Zbigniew Brzezinski, to Beijing with these instructions:

You should stress that I see the Soviet Union as essentially in a competitive relationship with the United States, though there are also some cooperative aspects. . . .

To state it most succinctly, my concern is that the combination of increasing Soviet military power and political shortsightedness, fed by big-power ambitions, might tempt the Soviet Union both to exploit local turbulence (especially in the Third World) and to intimidate our friends in order to seek political advantage and eventually even political preponderance. ¹¹

Brzezinski was also authorized to reaffirm the five principles enunciated by Nixon to Zhou in 1972. ¹² Long a strong advocate of strategic cooperation with China, Brzezinski carried out his instructions with enthusiasm and skill. When he visited Beijing in May 1978 in pursuit of normalizing relations, Brzezinski found a receptive audience. Deng was eager to proceed with normalization to enlist Washington more firmly in a coalition to oppose, by means of what he called “real, solid, down-to-earth work,” ¹³ Soviet advances in every corner of the globe.

The Chinese leaders were deeply aware of the strategic dangers surrounding them; but they presented their analysis less as a national concern than as a broader view of global conditions. “Turmoil under heaven,” the “horizontal line,” the “Three Worlds”: all represented general theories of international relations, not distinct national perceptions.

Foreign Minister Huang Hua’s analysis of the international situation displayed a remarkable self-confidence. Rather than appearing as a supplicant in what was, after all, a very difficult situation for China, Huang struck the attitude of a Confucian teacher, lecturing on how to conduct a comprehensive foreign policy. He opened with a general assessment of the “contradictions” between the two superpowers, the futility of negotiations with the Soviet Union, and the inevitability of a world war:

[T]he Soviet Union is the most dangerous source of war. Your excellency has mentioned that the Soviet Union is confronted with many difficulties. That is true. To strive for world hegemony is the fixed strategic goal of Soviet socialist imperialism. Although it may suffer a lot of setbacks, it will never give up its ambition. ¹⁴

Huang raised concerns that also bothered American students of strategy—especially those which tried to relate nuclear weapons to traditional ways of thinking about strategy. Reliance on nuclear weapons would open up a gap between deterrent threats and the willingness to implement them: “As for the argument that the Soviet Union would not dare to use conventional arms for fear of nuclear attack from the West, this is only wishful thinking. To base a strategic stance on this thinking is not only dangerous but also unreliable.” ¹⁵

In the Middle East—“the flank of Europe” and a “source of energy in a future war”—the United States had failed to check Soviet advances. It had issued a joint statement on the Middle East with the Soviet Union (inviting regional states to a conference to explore the prospect of a comprehensive Palestinian settlement), “thus opening the door wide for the Soviet Union to further infiltrate the Middle East.” Washington had left President Anwar Sadat of Egypt—whose “bold action” had “created a situation unfavorable to the Soviet Union”—in a dangerous position and allowed the Soviet Union to “seize the chance to raise serious division among the Arab countries.” ¹⁶

Huang summed up the situation by invoking an old Chinese proverb: “appeasement” of Moscow, he said, was “like giving wings to a tiger to strengthen it.” But a policy of coordinated pressure would prevail, since the Soviet Union was “only outwardly strong but inwardly weak. It bullies the weak and fears the strong.” ¹⁷

All this was to supply the context for Indochina. Huang addressed “the problem of regional hegemony.” America, of course, had trod this path a good ten years earlier. Vietnam aimed to dominate Cambodia and Laos and establish an Indochinese Federation—and “behind that there lies the Soviet Union.” Hanoi had already achieved a dominant position in Laos, stationing troops there and maintaining “advisors in every department and in every level in Laos.” But Hanoi had encountered resistance in Cambodia, which opposed Vietnamese regional ambitions. Vietnamese-Cambodian tension represented “not merely some sporadic skirmishes along the borders” but a major conflict which “may last for a long time.” Unless Hanoi gave up its goal of dominating Indochina, “the problem will not be solved in a short period.” ¹⁸

Deng followed up the Huang Hua critique later that day. Concessions and agreements had never produced Soviet restraint, he warned Brzezinski. Fifteen years of arms control agreements had allowed the Soviet Union to achieve strategic parity with the United States. Trade with the Soviet Union meant that “the U.S. is helping the Soviet Union overcome its weaknesses.” Deng offered a mocking assessment of American responses to Soviet adventurism in the Third World and chided Washington for trying to “please” Moscow:

Your spokesmen have constantly justified and apologized for Soviet actions. Sometimes they say there are no signs to prove that there is the meddling of the Soviet Union and Cuba in the case of Zaire or Angola. It is of no use for you to say so. To be candid with you, whenever you are about to conclude an agreement with the Soviet Union it is the product of [a] concession on the U.S. side to please the Soviet side. ¹⁹

It was an extraordinary performance. The country which was the principal target of the Soviet Union was proposing joint action as a conceptual obligation, not a bargain between nations, much less as a request. At a moment of great national danger—which its own analysis demonstrated—China nevertheless acted as an instructor on strategy, not as a passive consumer of American prescriptions, as America’s European allies frequently did.

The staples of much of the American debate—international law, multilateral solutions, popular consensus—were absent from the Chinese analysis except as practical tools to an agreed objective. And that objective, as Deng pointed out to Brzezinski, was “coping with the polar bear and that’s that.” ²⁰

But for Americans there is a limit to the so-called realist approach in the fundamental values of American society. And the murderous Khmer Rouge governing Cambodia represented such a limit. No American President could treat the Khmer Rouge as another stone in the wei qi strategy. Its genocidal conduct—driving the population of Phnom Penh into the jungle, mass killings of designated categories of civilians—could not simply be ignored (though as we shall see necessity did on occasion abort principle).

Hua Guofeng, still Premier, was even more emphatic in a meeting the next day:

[W]e have also told a lot of our friends that the main danger of war comes from the Soviet Union. Then how should we deal with it? The first thing is one should make preparations. . . . If one is prepared and once a war breaks out, one will not find himself in a disadvantageous position. The second thing is that it is imperative to try to upset the strategic deployment of Soviet aggression. Because in order to obtain hegemony in the world the Soviet Union has first to obtain air and naval bases throughout the world, so it has to make [a] strategic deployment. And we must try to upset its plans for global deployment. ²¹

No member of the Atlantic Alliance had put forward a comparably sweeping call to joint—essentially preemptive—action or had indicated that it was prepared to act alone on its assessment.

Operationally the Chinese leaders were proposing a kind of cooperation in many ways more intimate and surely more risk taking than the Atlantic Alliance. They sought to implement the strategy of offensive deterrence described in earlier chapters. Its special feature was that Deng proposed no formal structure or long-term obligation. A common assessment would supply the impetus for common action, but the de facto alliance would not survive if the assessments began to diverge—China insisted on being self-reliant even when in extreme danger. That China was so insistent on joint action despite the scathing criticism of specific American policies demonstrated that cooperation with the United States for security was perceived as imperative.

Normalization emerged as a first step toward a common global policy. From the time of the secret visit in July 1971, the Chinese conditions for normalization had been explicit and unchanging: withdrawal of all American forces from Taiwan; ending the defense treaty with Taiwan; and establishing diplomatic relations with China exclusively with the government in Beijing. It had been part of the Chinese position in the Shanghai Communiqué. Two Presidents—Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford—had agreed to these conditions. Nixon had indicated he would realize them in his second term. Both Nixon and Ford had emphasized America’s concern for a peaceful solution to the issue, including continuation of some security assistance for Taiwan. They had not been able to fulfill these promises because of the impact of Watergate.

In an unusual act of nonpartisan foreign policy, President Carter early in his term reaffirmed all the undertakings regarding Taiwan that Nixon had made to Zhou in February 1972. In 1978, he put forward a specific formula for normalization to enable both sides to maintain their established principles: reaffirmation of the principles accepted by Nixon and Ford; an American statement stressing the country’s commitment to peaceful change; Chinese acquiescence to some American arms sales to Taiwan. Carter advanced these ideas personally in a conversation with the Chinese ambassador, Chai Zemin, in which he threatened that, in the absence of American arms sales, Taiwan would be obliged to resort to developing nuclear weapons—as if the United States had no influence over Taiwan’s plans or actions. ²²

In the end, normalization came about when Carter supplied a deadline by inviting Deng to visit Washington. Deng agreed with unspecified arms sales to Taiwan and did not contradict an American declaration that Washington expected the ultimate solution of the Taiwan issue to be peaceful—even though China had established an extended record that it would undertake no formal obligation to that effect. Beijing’s position remained, as Deng had stressed to Brzezinski, that “the liberation of Taiwan is an internal affair of China in which no foreign country has the right to interfere.” ²³

Normalization meant that the American Embassy would move from Taipei to Beijing; a diplomat from Beijing would replace Taipei’s representative in Washington. In response the U.S. Congress passed the Taiwan Relations Act in April 1979, which expressed the American concerns regarding the future as a binding law for Americans. It could not, of course, bind China.

This balance between American and Chinese imperatives illustrates why ambiguity is sometimes the lifeblood of diplomacy. Much of normalization has been sustained for forty years by a series of ambiguities. But it cannot do so indefinitely. Wise statesmanship on both sides is needed to move the process forward.

Deng’s Journeys

As Deng moved from exhortation to implementation, he saw to it that China would not wait passively for American decisions. Wherever possible—especially in Southeast Asia—he would create the political framework he was advocating.

Where Mao had summoned foreign leaders to his residence like an emperor, Deng adopted the opposite approach—touring Southeast Asia, the United States, and Japan and practicing his own brand of highly visible, blunt, and occasionally hectoring diplomacy. In 1978 and 1979, Deng undertook a series of journeys to change China’s image abroad from revolutionary challenger to fellow victim of Soviet and Vietnamese geopolitical designs. China had been on the other side during the Vietnam War. In Thailand and Malaysia, China had previously encouraged revolution among the overseas Chinese and minority populations. ²⁴ All this was now subordinated to dealing with the immediate threat.

In an interview with Time magazine in February 1979, Deng advertised the Chinese strategic design to a large public: “If we really want to be able to place curbs on the polar bear, the only realistic thing for us is to unite. If we only depend on the strength of the U.S., it is not enough. If we only depend on the strength of Europe, it is not enough. We are an insignificant, poor country, but if we unite, well, it will then carry weight.” ²⁵

Throughout his trips, Deng stressed China’s relative backwardness and its desire to acquire technology and expertise from advanced industrial nations. But he maintained that China’s lack of development did not alter its determination to resist Soviet and Vietnamese expansion, if necessary by force and alone.

Deng’s overseas travel—and his repeated invocations of China’s poverty—were striking departures from the tradition of Chinese statecraft. Few Chinese rulers had ever gone abroad. (Of course, since in the traditional conception they ruled all under heaven, there technically was no “abroad” to go to.) Deng’s willingness openly to emphasize China’s backwardness and need to learn from others stood in sharp contrast to the aloofness of China’s Emperors and officialdom in dealing with foreigners. Never had a Chinese ruler proclaimed to foreigners a need for foreign goods. The Qing court had accepted foreign innovations in limited doses (for example, in its welcoming attitude to Jesuit astronomers and mathematicians) but had always insisted that foreign trade was an expression of Chinese goodwill, not a necessity for China. Mao, too, had stressed self-reliance, even at the price of impoverishment and isolation.

Deng began his travels in Japan. The occasion was the ratification of the treaty by which normalization of diplomatic relations between Japan and China had been negotiated. Deng’s strategic design required reconciliation, not simply normalization, so that Japan could help isolate the Soviet Union and Vietnam.

For this objective Deng was prepared to bring to a close half a century of suffering inflicted on China by Japan. Deng conducted himself exuberantly, declaring “My heart is full of joy,” and hugging his Japanese counterpart, a gesture for which his host could have found few precedents in his own society or, for that matter, in China’s. Deng made no attempt to hide China’s economic lag: “If you have an ugly face, it is no use pretending that you are handsome.” When asked to sign a visitors’ book, he wrote an unprecedented appreciation of Japanese accomplishments: “We learn from and pay respect to the Japanese people, who are great, diligent, brave and intelligent.” ²⁶

In November 1978, Deng visited Southeast Asia, traveling to Malaysia, Singapore, and Thailand. He branded Vietnam the “Cuba of the East” and spoke of the newly signed Soviet-Vietnamese treaty as a threat to world peace. ²⁷ In Thailand on November 8, 1978, Deng stressed that the “security and peace of Asia, the Pacific and the whole world are threatened” by the Soviet-Vietnamese treaty: “This treaty is not directed against China alone. . . . It is a very important worldwide Soviet scheme. You may believe that the meaning of the treaty is to encircle China. I have told friendly countries that China is not afraid of being encircled. It has a most important meaning for Asia and the Pacific. The security and peace of Asia, the Pacific and the whole world are threatened.” ²⁸

On his visit to Singapore, Deng met a kindred spirit in the extraordinary Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew and glimpsed a vision of China’s possible future—a majority-Chinese society prospering under what Deng would later describe admiringly as “strict administration” and “good public order.” ²⁹ At the time, China was still desperately poor, and its own “public order” had barely survived the Cultural Revolution. Lee Kuan Yew recounted a memorable exchange:

He invited me to visit China again. I said I would when China had recovered from the Cultural Revolution. That, he said, would take a long time. I countered that they should have no problem getting ahead and doing much better than Singapore because we were the descendants of illiterate, landless peasants from Fujian and Guangdong while they had the progeny of the scholars, mandarins and literati who had stayed at home. He was silent. ³⁰

Lee paid tribute to Deng’s pragmatism and willingness to learn from experience. Lee also used the opportunity to express some of Southeast Asia’s concerns that might not filter through the Chinese bureaucratic and diplomatic screen:

China wanted Southeast Asian countries to unite with it to isolate the “Russian bear”; the fact was that our neighbors wanted us to unite and isolate the “Chinese dragon.” There were no “overseas Russians” in Southeast Asia leading communist insurgencies supported by the Soviet Union, as there were “overseas Chinese” encouraged and supported by the Chinese Communist Party and government, posing threats to Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, and, to a lesser extent, Indonesia. Also, China was openly asserting a special relationship with the overseas Chinese because of blood ties, and was making direct appeals to their patriotism over the heads of the governments of these countries of which they were citizens. . . . [I] suggested that we discuss how to resolve this problem. ³¹

In the event, Lee proved correct. The Southeast Asian countries, with the exception of Singapore, behaved with great caution in confronting either the Soviet Union or Vietnam. Nevertheless, Deng achieved his fundamental objectives: his many public statements constituted a warning of a possible Chinese effort to remedy the situation. And they were bound to be noted by the United States, which was a key building block for Deng’s design. That strategic design needed a more firmly defined relationship with America.

Deng’s Visit to America and the New Definition of Alliance

Deng’s visit to the United States was announced to celebrate the normalization of relations between the two countries and to inaugurate a common strategy that, elaborating on the Shanghai Communiqué, applied primarily to the Soviet Union.

It also demonstrated a special skill of Chinese diplomacy: to create the impression of support by countries that have not in fact agreed to that role or even been asked to play it. The pattern began in the crisis over the offshore islands twenty years earlier. Mao had begun the 1958 shelling of Quemoy and Matsu three weeks after Khrushchev’s tense visit to Beijing, creating the impression that Moscow had agreed to Beijing’s actions in advance, which was not the case. Eisenhower had gone so far as to accuse Khrushchev of helping to instigate the crisis.

Following the same tactic, Deng preceded the war with Vietnam with a high-profile visit to the United States. In neither case did China ask for assistance for its impending military endeavor. Khrushchev was apparently not informed of the 1958 operation and resented being faced with the risk of nuclear war; Washington was informed of the 1979 invasion after Deng’s arrival in America but gave no explicit support and limited the U.S. role to intelligence sharing and diplomatic coordination. In both cases, Beijing succeeded in creating the impression that its actions enjoyed the blessing of one superpower, thus discouraging the other superpower from intervening. In that subtle and daring strategy, the Soviet Union in 1958 had been powerless to prevent the Chinese attack on the offshore islands; with respect to Vietnam, it was left guessing as to what had been agreed during Deng’s visit and was likely to assume the worst from its point of view.

In that sense, Deng’s visit to the United States was a kind of shadow play, one of whose purposes was to intimidate the Soviet Union. Deng’s week-long tour of the United States was part diplomatic summit, part business trip, part barnstorming political campaign, and part psychological warfare for the Third Vietnam War. The trip included stops in Washington, D.C., Atlanta, Houston, and Seattle, and produced scenes unimaginable under Mao. At a state dinner at the White House on January 29, the leader of “Red China” dined with the heads of Coca-Cola, PepsiCo, and General Motors. At a gala event at the Kennedy Center, the diminutive Vice Premier shook hands with members of the Harlem Globetrotters basketball team. ³² Deng played to the crowd at a rodeo and barbecue in Simonton, Texas, donning a ten-gallon hat and riding in a stagecoach.

Throughout the visit, Deng stressed China’s need to acquire foreign technology and develop its economy. At his request, he toured manufacturing and technology facilities, including a Ford assembly plant in Hapeville, Georgia; the Hughes Tool Company in Houston (where Deng inspected drill bits for use in offshore oil exploration); and the Boeing plant outside Seattle. On his arrival in Houston, Deng avowed his desire to “learn about your advanced experience in the petroleum industry and other fields.” ³³ Deng offered a hopeful assessment of Sino-U. S. relations, proclaiming his desire to “get to know all about American life” and “absorb everything of benefit to us.” ³⁴ At the Johnson Space Center in Houston, Deng lingered in the space shuttle flight simulator. One news report captured the scene:

Deng Xiaoping, who is using his trip to the United States to dramatize China’s eagerness for advanced technology, climbed into the cockpit of a flight simulator here today to discover what it would be like to land this newest American spacecraft from an altitude of 100,000 feet.

China’s senior Deputy Prime Minister [Deng] seemed to be so fascinated by the experience that he went through a second landing and even then seemed reluctant to leave the simulator. ³⁵

This was worlds away from the Qing Emperor’s studied indifference to Macartney’s gifts and promises of trade or Mao’s rigid insistence on economic autarky. At his meeting with President Carter on January 29, Deng explained China’s Four Modernizations policy, put forward by Zhou in his last public appearance, which promised to modernize the fields of agriculture, industry, science and technology, and national defense. All this was subordinate to the overriding purpose of Deng’s trip: to develop a de facto alliance between the United States and China. He summed up:

Mr. President, you asked for a sketch of our strategy. To realize our Four Modernizations, we need a prolonged period of a peaceful environment. But even now we believe the Soviet Union will launch a war. But if we act well and properly, it is possible to postpone it. China hopes to postpone a war for twenty-two years. ³⁶

Under such a premise, we are not recommending the establishment of a formal alliance, but each should act on the basis of our standpoint and coordinate our activities and adopt necessary measures. This aim could be attained. If our efforts are to no avail, then the situation will become more and more empty. ³⁷

To act as allies without forming an alliance was pushing realism to extremes. If all leaders were competent strategists and thought deeply and systematically about strategy, they would all come to the same conclusions. Alliances would be unnecessary; the logic of their analysis would impel parallel directions.

But differences of history and geography apart, even similarly situated leaders do not necessarily come to identical conclusions—especially under stress. Analysis depends on interpretation; judgments differ as to what constitutes a fact, even more about its significance. Countries have therefore made alliances—formal instruments that insulate the common interest, to the extent possible, from extraneous circumstances or domestic pressures. They create an additional obligation to calculations of national interest. They also provide a legal obligation to justify common defense, which can be appealed to in a crisis. Finally, alliances reduce—to the extent that they are seriously pursued—the danger of miscalculation by the potential adversary and thereby inject an element of calculability into the conduct of foreign policy.

Deng—and most Chinese leaders—considered a formal alliance unnecessary in the U.S.-Chinese relationship and, on the whole, redundant in the conduct of their foreign policy. They were prepared to rely on tacit understandings. But there was also an implied warning in Deng’s last sentence. If it was not possible to define or implement parallel interests, the relationship would turn “empty,” that is to say, would wither, and China would presumably return to Mao’s Three Worlds concept—which was still official policy—to enable China to navigate between the superpowers.

The parallel interests, in Deng’s view, would express themselves in an informal global arrangement to contain the Soviet Union in Asia by political/military cooperation with parallel objectives to NATO in Europe. It was to be less structured and depended largely on the bilateral Sino-U.S. political relationship. It was also based on a different geopolitical doctrine. NATO sought to unite its partners, above all, in resistance against actual Soviet aggression. It demonstratively avoided any concept of military preemption. Concerned with avoiding diplomatic confrontation, the strategic doctrine of NATO has been exclusively defensive.

What Deng was proposing was an essentially preemptive policy; it was an aspect of China’s offensive deterrence doctrine. The Soviet Union was to be pressured along its entire periphery and especially in regions to which it had extended its presence only recently, notably in Southeast Asia and even in Africa. If necessary, China would be prepared to initiate military action to thwart Soviet designs—especially in Southeast Asia.

The Soviet Union would never be bound by agreements, Deng warned; it understood only the language of countervailing force. The Roman statesman Cato the Elder is reputed to have ended all his speeches with the clarion call “Carthago delenda est” (“Carthage must be destroyed”). Deng had his own trademark exhortation: that the Soviet Union must be resisted. He included in all his presentations some variation on the admonition that Moscow’s unchanging nature was to “squeeze in wherever there is an opening,” ³⁸ and that, as Deng told President Carter, “[w]herever the Soviet Union sticks its fingers, there we must chop them off.” ³⁹

Deng’s analysis of the strategic situation included a notification to the White House that China intended to go to war with Vietnam because it had concluded that Vietnam would not stop at Cambodia. “[T]he so-called Indochinese Federation is to include more than three states,” Deng warned. “Ho Chi Minh cherished this idea. The three states is only the first step. Then Thailand is to be included.” ⁴⁰ China had an obligation to act, Deng declared. It could not await developments; once they had occurred, it would be too late.

Deng told Carter that he had considered the “worst possibility”—massive Soviet intervention, as the new Moscow-Hanoi defense treaty seemingly required. Indeed, reports indicated that Beijing had evacuated up to 300,000 civilians from its northern border territories and put its forces along the Sino-Soviet border on maximum alert. ⁴¹ But, Deng told Carter, Beijing judged that a brief, limited war would not give Moscow time for “a large reaction” and that winter conditions would make a full-scale Soviet attack on northern China difficult. China was “not afraid,” Deng stated, but it needed Washington’s “moral support,” ⁴² by which he meant sufficient ambiguity about American designs to give the Soviets pause.

A month after the war, Hua Guofeng explained to me the careful strategic analysis that had preceded it:

We also considered this possibility of a Soviet reaction. The first possibility was a major attack on us. That we considered a low possibility. A million troops are along the border, but for a major attack on China, that is not enough. If they took back some of the troops from Europe, it would take time and they would worry about Europe. They know a battle with China would be a major matter and could not be concluded in a short period of time.

Deng confronted Carter with a challenge to both principle and public attitude. In principle, Carter did not approve preemptive strategies, especially since they involved military movements across sovereign borders. At the same time, he took seriously, even when he did not fully share, National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski’s view of the strategic implications of the Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia, which was parallel to Deng’s. Carter resolved his dilemma by invoking principle but leaving scope for adjustment to circumstance. Mild disapproval shaded into vague, tacit endorsement. He called attention to the favorable moral position that Beijing would forfeit by attacking Vietnam. China, now widely considered a peaceful country, would run the risk of being accused of aggression:

This is a serious issue. Not only do you face a military threat from the North, but also a change in international attitude. China is now seen as a peaceful country that is against aggression. The ASEAN countries, as well as the UN, have condemned the Soviet Union, Vietnam, and Cuba. I do not need to know the punitive action being contemplated, but it could result in escalation of violence and a change in the world posture from being against Vietnam to partial support for Vietnam.

It would be difficult for us to encourage violence. We can give you intelligence briefings. We know of no recent movements of Soviet troops towards your borders.

I have no other answer for you. We have joined in the condemnation of Vietnam, but invasion of Vietnam would be [a] very serious destabilizing action. ⁴³

To refuse to endorse violence but to offer intelligence about Soviet troop movements was to give a new dimension to ambivalence. It might mean that Carter did not share Deng’s view of an underlying Soviet threat. Or, by reducing Chinese fears of a possible Soviet reaction, it might be construed as an encouragement to invasion.

The next day, Carter and Deng met alone, and Carter handed Deng a note (as yet unpublished) summarizing the American position. According to Brzezinski: “The President himself drafted by hand a letter to Deng, moderate in tone and sober in content, stressing the importance of restraint and summarizing the likely adverse international consequences. I felt that this was the right approach, for we could not collude formally with the Chinese in sponsoring what was tantamount to overt military aggression.” ⁴⁴ Informal collusion was another matter.

According to a memorandum recounting the private conversation (at which only an interpreter was present), Deng insisted that strategic analysis overrode Carter’s invocation of world opinion. Above all, China must not be thought of as pliable: “China must still teach Vietnam a lesson. The Soviet Union can use Cuba, Vietnam, and then Afghanistan will evolve into a proxy [for the Soviet Union]. The PRC is approaching this issue from a position of strength. The action will be very limited. If Vietnam thought the PRC soft, the situation will get worse.” ⁴⁵

Deng left the United States on February 4, 1979. On his return trip from the United States, he completed placing the last wei qi piece on the board. He stopped off in Tokyo for the second time in six months, to assure himself of Japanese support for the imminent military action and to isolate the Soviet Union further. To Prime Minister Masayoshi Ohira, Deng reiterated China’s position that Vietnam had to be “punished” for its invasion of Cambodia, and he pledged: “To uphold the long-term prospects of international peace and stability . . . [the Chinese people] will firmly fulfill our internationalist duties, and will not hesitate to even bear the necessary sacrifices.” ⁴⁶

After having visited Burma, Nepal, Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Japan twice, and the United States, Deng had accomplished his objective of drawing China into the world and isolating Hanoi. He never left China again, adopting in his last years the remoteness and inaccessibility of traditional Chinese rulers.

The Third Vietnam War

On February 17, China mounted a multipronged invasion of northern Vietnam from southern China’s Guangxi and Yunnan provinces. The size of the Chinese force reflected the importance China attached to the operation; it has been estimated to have numbered more than 200,000 and perhaps as many as 400,000 PLA soldiers. ⁴⁷ One historian has concluded that the invasion force, which included “regular ground forces, militia, and naval and air force units . . . was similar in scale to the assault with which China made such an impact on its entry into the Korean War in November 1950.” ⁴⁸ The official Chinese press accounts called it the “Self-Defensive Counterattack Against Vietnam” or the “Counterattack in Self-Defense on the Sino-Vietnamese Border.” It represented the Chinese version of deterrence, an invasion advertised in advance to forestall the next Vietnamese move.

The target of China’s military was a fellow Communist country, recent ally, and longtime beneficiary of Chinese economic and military support. The goal was to preserve the strategic equilibrium in Asia, as China saw it. Further, China undertook the campaign with the moral support, diplomatic backing, and intelligence cooperation of the United States—the same “imperialist power” that Beijing had helped eject from Indochina five years earlier.

The stated Chinese war aim was to “put a restraint on the wild ambitions of the Vietnamese and to give them an appropriate limited lesson.” ⁴⁹ “Appropriate” meant to inflict sufficient damage to affect Vietnamese options and calculations for the future; “limited” implied that it would be ended before outside intervention or other factors drove it out of control. It was also a direct challenge to the Soviet Union.

Deng’s prediction that the Soviet Union would not attack China was borne out. The day after China launched its invasion, the Soviet government released a lukewarm statement that, while condemning China’s “criminal” attack, emphasized that “the heroic Vietnamese people . . . is capable of standing up for itself this time again[.]” ⁵⁰ The Soviet military response was limited to sending a naval task force to the South China Sea, undertaking a limited arms airlift to Hanoi, and stepping up air patrols along the Sino-Soviet border. The airlift was constrained by geography but also by internal hesitations. In the end, the Soviet Union gave as much support in 1979 to its new ally, Vietnam, as it had extended twenty years earlier to its then ally, China, in the Taiwan Strait Crises. In neither case would the Soviet Union run any risks of a wider war.

Shortly after the war, Hua Guofeng summed up the outcome in a pithy phrase contemptuous of Soviet leaders: “As for threatening us, they did that by maneuvers near the border, sending ships to the South China Sea. But they did not dare to move. So after all we could still touch the buttocks of the tiger.”

Deng sarcastically rejected American advice to be careful. During a late February 1979 visit of Treasury Secretary Michael Blumenthal to Beijing, Blumenthal called for Chinese troops to withdraw from Vietnam “as quickly as possible” because Beijing “ran risks that were unwarranted.” ⁵¹ Deng demurred. Speaking to American reporters just before his meeting with Blumenthal, Deng displayed his disdain for equivocation, mocking “some people” who were “afraid of offending” the “Cuba of the Orient.” ⁵²

As in the Sino-Indian War, China executed a limited “punitive” strike followed immediately by a retreat. It was over in twenty-nine days. Shortly after the PLA captured (and reportedly laid waste to) the capitals of the three Vietnamese provinces along the border, Beijing announced that Chinese forces would withdraw from Vietnam, save for several disputed pieces of territory. Beijing made no attempt to overthrow the Hanoi government or to enter Cambodia in any overt capacity.

A month after the Chinese troops had withdrawn, Deng explained the Chinese strategy to me on a visit to Beijing:

DENG: After I came back [from the United States], we immediately fought a war. But we asked you for your opinion beforehand. I talked it over with President Carter and then he replied in a very formal and solemn way. He read a written text to me. I said to him: China will handle this question independently and if there is any risk, China will take on the risk alone. In retrospect, we think if we had driven deeper into Vietnam in our punitive action, it would have been even better.

KISSINGER: It could be.

DENG: Because our forces were sufficient to drive all the way to Hanoi. But it wouldn’t be advisable to go that far.

KISSINGER: No, it would probably have gone beyond the limits of calculation.

DENG: Yes, you’re right. But we could have driven 30 kilometers deeper into Vietnam. We occupied all the defensive areas of fortification. There wasn’t a defense line left all the way to Hanoi.

The conventional wisdom among historians is that the war was a costly Chinese failure. ⁵³ The effects of the PLA’s politicization during the Cultural Revolution became apparent during the campaign: hampered by outdated equipment, logistical problems, personnel shortages, and inflexible tactics, Chinese forces advanced slowly and at great cost. By some analysts’ estimates, the PLA suffered as many killed in action in one month of fighting the Third Vietnam War as the United States suffered in the most costly years of the second one. ⁵⁴

Conventional wisdom is based, however, on a misapprehension of the Chinese strategy. Whatever the shortcomings of its execution, the Chinese campaign reflected a serious long-term strategic analysis. In the Chinese leadership’s explanations to their American counterparts, they described the consolidation of Soviet-backed Vietnamese power in Indochina as a crucial step in the Soviet Union’s worldwide “strategic deployment.” The Soviet Union had already concentrated troops in Eastern Europe and along China’s northern border. Now, the Chinese leaders warned, Moscow was “beginning to get bases” in Indochina, Africa, and the Middle East. ⁵⁵ If it consolidated its position in these areas, it would control vital energy resources and be able to block key sea lanes—most notably the Malacca Strait connecting the Pacific Ocean and the Indian Ocean. This would give Moscow the strategic initiative in any future conflict. In a broader sense, the war resulted from Beijing’s analysis of Sun Tzu’s concept of shi —the trend and “potential energy” of the strategic landscape. Deng aimed to arrest and, if possible, reverse what he saw as an unacceptable momentum of Soviet strategy.

China achieved this objective in part by its military daring, in part by drawing the United States into unprecedentedly close cooperation. China’s leaders had navigated the Third Vietnam War by meticulous analysis of their strategic choices, daring execution, and skillful diplomacy. With all these qualities, they would not have been able to “touch the buttocks of the tiger” but for the cooperation of the United States.

The Third Vietnam War ushered in the closest collaboration between China and the United States for the period of the Cold War. Two trips to China by American emissaries established an extraordinary degree of joint action. Vice President Walter “Fritz” Mondale visited China in August 1979 to devise a diplomacy for the aftermath of the Deng visit, especially with respect to Indochina. It was a complex problem in which strategic and moral considerations were in severe conflict. The United States and China agreed that it was in each country’s national interest to prevent the emergence of an Indochinese Federation under Hanoi’s control. But the only part of Indochina that was still contested was Cambodia, which had been governed by the execrable Pol Pot, who had murdered millions of his compatriots. The Khmer Rouge constituted the best organized element of Cambodia’s anti-Vietnam resistance.

Carter and Mondale took a long and dedicated record of devotion to human rights into government; indeed they had, in their presidential campaign, attacked Ford on the ground of insufficient attention to the issue of human rights.

Deng had first raised the issue of aid to the Cambodian guerrilla resistance against the Vietnamese invaders during the private conversation with Carter about the invasion of Vietnam. According to the official report: “The President asked if the Thais could accept and relay it to the Cambodians. Deng said yes and that he has in mind light weapons. The Thais are now sending a senior officer to the Thai-Cambodian border to keep communications more secure.” ⁵⁶ The de facto cooperation between Washington and Beijing on aid to Cambodia through Thailand had the practical effect of indirectly assisting the remnants of the Khmer Rouge. American officials were careful to stress to Beijing that the United States “cannot support Pol Pot” and welcomed China’s assurances that Pol Pot no longer exercised full control over the Khmer Rouge. This sop to conscience did not change the reality that Washington provided material and diplomatic support to the “Cambodian resistance” in a manner that the administration must have known would benefit the Khmer Rouge. Carter’s successors in Ronald Reagan’s administration followed the same strategy. America’s leaders undoubtedly expected that if the Cambodian resistance prevailed, they or their successors would oppose the Khmer Rouge element of it in the aftermath—which is what in effect happened after the Vietnamese withdrawal over a decade later.

American ideals had encountered the imperatives of geopolitical reality. It was not cynicism, even less hypocrisy, that forged this attitude: the Carter administration had to choose between strategic necessities and moral conviction. They decided that for their moral convictions to be implemented ultimately they needed first to prevail in the geopolitical struggle. The American leaders faced the dilemma of statesmanship. Leaders cannot choose the options history affords them, even less that they be unambiguous.

The visit of Secretary of Defense Harold Brown marked a further step toward Sino-American cooperation unimaginable only a few years earlier. Deng welcomed him: “Your coming here itself is of major significance,” he noted to Brown, “because you are the Secretary of Defense.” ⁵⁷ A few veterans of the Ford administration understood this hint about the invitation to Secretary Schlesinger, aborted when Ford dismissed him.

The main agenda was to define the United States’ military relationship with China. The Carter administration had come to the conclusion that an increase in China’s technological and military capacity was important for global equilibrium and American national security. Washington had “drawn a distinction between the Soviet Union and China,” Secretary Brown explained, and was willing to transfer some military technology to China that it would not make available to the Soviets. ⁵⁸ Further, the United States was willing to sell “military equipment” to China (such as surveillance equipment and vehicles), though not “arms.” It would not, moreover, interfere in decisions by NATO allies to sell arms to China. As President Carter explained in his instructions to Brzezinski:

[T]he United States does not object to the more forthcoming attitude which our allies are adopting in regard to trade with China in technology-sensitive areas. We have an interest in a strong and secure China—and we recognize and respect this interest. ⁵⁹

In the end, China was not able to rescue the Khmer Rouge or force Hanoi to withdraw its troops from Cambodia for another decade; perhaps recognizing this, Beijing framed its war aims in much more limited terms. However, Beijing did impose heavy costs on Vietnam. Chinese diplomacy in Southeast Asia before, during, and after the war worked with great determination and skill to isolate Hanoi. China maintained a heavy military presence along the border, retained several disputed pieces of territory, and continued to hold out the threat of a “second lesson” to Hanoi. For years afterward, Vietnam was forced to support considerable forces on its northern border to defend against another possible Chinese attack. ⁶⁰ As Deng had told Mondale in August 1979:

For a country of that size to keep a standing force of more than one million, where will you find enough work force? A standing force of one million needs a lot of logistical support. Now they depend on the Soviet Union. Some estimates say they are getting $2 million a day from the Soviet Union, some estimates say $2½ million. . . . [I]t will increase difficulties, and this burden on the Soviet Union will grow heavier and heavier. Things will become more difficult. In time the Vietnamese will come to realize that not all their requests to the Soviet Union can be met. In those circumstances perhaps a new situation will emerge. ⁶¹

That situation did, in fact, occur over a decade later when the collapse of the Soviet Union and of Soviet financial support brought about a retrenchment in Vietnamese deployment in Cambodia. Ultimately over a time period more difficult to sustain for democratic societies, China achieved a considerable part of its strategic objectives in Southeast Asia. Deng achieved sufficient maneuvering room to meet his objective of thwarting Soviet domination of Southeast Asia and the Malacca Strait.

The Carter administration performed a tightrope act that maintained an option toward the Soviet Union via negotiations over the limitations of strategic arms while basing its Asian policy on the recognition that Moscow remained the principal strategic adversary.

The ultimate loser in the conflict was the Soviet Union, whose global ambitions had caused alarm around the world. A Soviet ally had been attacked by the Soviet Union’s most vocal and strategically most explicit adversary, which was openly agitating for a containment alliance against Moscow—all this within a month of the conclusion of the Soviet-Vietnamese alliance. In retrospect, Moscow’s relative passivity in the Third Vietnam War can be seen as the first symptom of the decline of the Soviet Union. One wonders whether the Soviets’ decision a year later to intervene in Afghanistan was prompted in part by an attempt to compensate for their ineffectuality in supporting Vietnam against the Chinese attack. In either case, the Soviets’ miscalculation in both situations was in not realizing the extent to which the correlation of global forces had shifted against them. The Third Vietnam War may thus be counted as another example in which Chinese statesmen succeeded in achieving long-term, big-picture strategic objectives without the benefit of a military establishment comparable to that of their adversaries. Though providing breathing space for the remnants of the Khmer Rouge can hardly be counted as a moral victory, China achieved its larger geopolitical aims vis-à-vis the Soviet Union and Vietnam—both of whose militaries were better trained and equipped than China’s.

Equanimity in the face of materially superior forces has been deeply ingrained in Chinese strategic thinking—as is apparent from the parallels with China’s decision to intervene in the Korean War. Both Chinese decisions were directed against what Beijing perceived to be a gathering danger—a hostile power’s consolidation of bases at multiple points along the Chinese periphery. In both cases, Beijing believed that if the hostile power were allowed to complete its design, China would be encircled and thus remain in a permanent state of vulnerability. The adversary would be in a position to launch a war at a time of its choosing, and knowledge of this advantage would allow it to act, as Hua Guofeng told President Carter when they met in Tokyo, “without scruples.” ⁶² Therefore, a seemingly regional issue—in the first case the American rebuff of North Korea, in the second case Vietnam’s occupation of Cambodia—was treated as “the focus of the struggles in the world” (as Zhou described Korea). ⁶³

Both interventions set China against a stronger power that threatened its perception of its security; each, however, did so on terrain and at a time of Beijing’s choosing. As Vice Premier Geng Biao later told Brzezinski: “The Soviet Union’s support for Vietnam is a component of its global strategy. It is directed not just at Thailand, but at Malaysia, Singapore, Indonesia, and the Straits of Malacca. If they succeeded, it would be a fatal blow to ASEAN and would also interdict the lines of communications for Japan and the United States. We are committed to do something about this. We may have no capability to cope with the Soviet Union, but we have the capability to cope with Vietnam.” ⁶⁴

These were not elegant affairs: China threw troops into immensely costly battles and sustained casualties on a scale that would have been unacceptable in the Western world. In the Sino-Vietnam War, the PLA seems to have pursued its task with many shortcomings, significantly increasing the scale of Chinese losses. But both interventions achieved noteworthy strategic goals. At two key moments in the Cold War, Beijing applied its doctrine of offensive deterrence successfully. In Vietnam, China succeeded in exposing the limits of the Soviet defense commitment to Hanoi and, more important, of its overall strategic reach. China was willing to risk war with the Soviet Union to prove that it refused to be intimidated by the Soviet presence on its southern flank.

Singapore’s Prime Minister Lee Kuan Yew has summed up the ultimate result of the war: “The Western press wrote off the Chinese punitive action as a failure. I believe it changed the history of East Asia.” ⁶⁵