On China (72 page)

20
I am indebted to my associate, Ambassador J. Stapleton Roy, for bringing this linguistic point to my attention.

21
This account of Li’s career draws on events related in William J. Hail, “Li Hung-Chang,” in Arthur W. Hummel, ed.,
Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period
(Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1943), 464–71; J. O. P. Bland,
Li Hung-chang
(New York: Henry Holt, 1917); and Edgar Sanderson, ed.,
Six Thousand Years of World History
, vol. 7,
Foreign Statesmen
(Philadelphia: E. R. DuMont, 1900), 425–44.

22
Hail, “Li Hung-Chang,” in Hummel, ed.,
Eminent Chinese of the Ch’ing Period
, 466.

23
“Excerpts from Tseng’s Letters, 1862,” as translated and excerpted in Teng and Fairbank, eds.,
China’s Response to the West
, 62.

24
Li Hung-chang, “Problems of Industrialization,” in Franz Schurmann and Orville Schell,
Imperial China: The Decline of the Last Dynasty and the Origins of Modern China, the 18th and 19th Centuries
(New York: Vintage, 1967), 238.

25
Teng and Fairbank, eds.,
China’s Response to the West
, 87.

26
“Letter to Tsungli Yamen Urging Study of Western Arms,” in ibid., 70–72.

27
“Li Hung-chang’s Support of Western Studies,” in ibid., 75.

28
Ibid.

29
Ibid.

30
As cited in Wright,
The Last Stand of Chinese Conservatism
, 222.

31
As cited in Jerome Ch’en,
China and the West: Society and Culture, 1815–1937
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1979), 429.

32
According to the fourteenth-century “Records of the Legitimate Succession of the Divine Sovereigns” (a work later widely distributed in the 1930s by the Thought Bureau of Japan’s Ministry of Education): “Japan is the divine country. The heavenly ancestor it was who first laid its foundations, and the Sun Goddess left her descendants to reign over it forever and ever. This is true only of our country, and nothing similar may be found in foreign lands. That is why it is called the divine country.” John W. Dower,
War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War
(New York: Pantheon, 1986), 222.

33
See Kenneth B. Pyle,
Japan Rising
(New York: PublicAffairs, 2007), 37–38.

34
See Karel van Wolferen,
The Enigma of Japanese Power: People and Politics in a Stateless Nation
(London: Macmillan, 1989), 13.

35
On the classical conception of a Japancentered tributary order, see Michael R. Auslin,
Negotiating with Imperialism: The Unequal Treaties and the Culture of Japanese Diplomacy
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 14; and Marius B. Jansen,
The Making of Modern Japan
(Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2000), 69.

36
Jansen,
The Making of Modern Japan
, 87.

37
Cited in Ch’en,
China and the West
, 431.

38
Masakazu Iwata,
Okubo Toshimichi: The Bismarck of Japan
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1964), citing Wang Yusheng,
China and Japan in the Last Sixty Years
(Tientsin: Ta Kung Pao, 1932–34).

39
The occasion of the 1874 crisis was a shipwreck of a Ryukyu Islands crew on the far southeast coast of Taiwan, and the murder of the sailors by a Taiwanese tribe. When Japan demanded a harsh indemnity, Beijing initially responded that it had no jurisdiction over un-Sinicized tribes. In the traditional Chinese view, this had a certain logic: “barbarians” were not Beijing’s responsibility. Seen in modern international legal and political terms, it was almost certainly a miscalculation, since it signaled that China did not exert full authority over Taiwan. Japan responded with a punitive expedition against the island, which Qing authorities proved powerless to stop. Tokyo then prevailed on Beijing to pay an indemnity, which one contemporary observer called “a transaction which really sealed the fate of China, in advertising to the world that here was a rich Empire which was ready to pay, but not ready to fight.” (Alexander Michie,
An Englishman in China During the Victorian Era,
vol. 2 [London: William Blackwood & Sons, 1900], 256.) What made the crisis additionally damaging to China was that until that point, both Beijing and Tokyo had laid claim to the Ryukyu Islands as a tribute state; after the crisis, the islands fell under Japan’s sway. See Hsü,
The Rise of Modern China
, 315–17.

40
Teng and Fairbank, eds.,
China’s Response to the West,
71.

41
As quoted in Bland,
Li Hung-chang,
160.

42
Ibid., 160–61.

43
“Text of the Sino-Russian Secret Treaty of 1896,” in Teng and Fairbank, eds.,
China’s Response to the West,
131.

44
Bland,
Li Hung-chang,
306.

45
For an account of these events and of the Chinese court’s internal deliberations, see Hsü,
The Rise of Modern China,
390–98.

46
In contrast with earlier indemnities, most of the Boxer indemnity was later renounced or redirected by the foreign powers to charitable enterprises within China. The United States directed a portion of its indemnity to the construction of Tsinghua University in Beijing.

47
These strategies are recounted in compelling detail in Scott A. Boorman,
The Protracted Game: A Wei-ch’i Interpretation of Maoist Revolutionary Strategy
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1969).

48
Jonathan Spence,
The Search for Modern China
(New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), 485.

1
For Mao on Qin Shihuang, see, for example, “Talks at the Beidaihe Conference: August 19, 1958,” in Roderick MacFarquhar, Timothy Cheek, and Eugene Wu, eds.,
The Secret Speeches of Chairman Mao: From the Hundred Flowers to the Great Leap Forward
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989), 405; “Talks at the First Zhengzhou Conference: November 10, 1958,” in MacFarquhar, Cheek, and Wu, eds.,
The Secret Speeches of Chairman Mao,
476; Tim Adams, “Behold the Mighty Qin,”
The Observer
(August 19, 2007); and Li Zhisui,
The Private Life of Chairman Mao
, trans. Tai Hung-chao (New York: Random House, 1994), 122.

2
André Malraux,
Anti-Memoirs,
trans. Terence Kilmartin (New York: Henry Holt, 1967), 373–74.

3
“Speech at the Supreme State Conference: Excerpts, 28 January 1958,” in Stuart Schram, ed.,
Mao Tse-tung Unrehearsed: Talks and Letters: 1956–71
(Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1975), 92–93.

4
“On the People’s Democratic Dictatorship: In Commemoration of the Twenty-eighth Anniversary of the Communist Party of China: June 30, 1949,”
Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung,
vol. 4 (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1969), 412.

5
“Sixty Points on Working Methods—A Draft Resolution from the Office of the Centre of the CPC: 19.2.1958,” in Jerome Ch’en, ed.,
Mao Papers: Anthology and Bibliography
(London: Oxford University Press, 1970), 63.

6
Ibid., 66.

7
“The Chinese People Have Stood Up: September 1949,” in Timothy Cheek, ed.,
Mao Zedong and China’s Revolutions: A Brief History with Documents
(New York: Palgrave, 2002), 126.

8
See M. Taylor Fravel, “Regime Insecurity and International Cooperation: Explaining China’s Compromises in Territorial Disputes,”
International Security
30, no. 2 (Fall 2005): 56–57; “A Himalayan Rivalry: India and China,”
The Economist
396, no. 8696 (August 21, 2010), 17–20.

9
Zhang Baijia, “Zhou Enlai—The Shaper and Founder of China’s Diplomacy,” in Michael H. Hunt and Niu Jun, eds.,
Toward a History of Chinese Communist Foreign Relations, 1920s–1960s: Personalities and Interpretive Approaches
(Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Asia Program, 1992), 77.

10
Charles Hill,
Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010), 2.

11
“Memorandum of Conversation: Beijing, July 10, 1971, 12:10–6 p.m.,” in Steven E. Phillips, ed.,
Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS), 1969–1976
, vol. 17,
China 1969–1972
, (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 2006), 404. Zhou Enlai recited these lines during one of our first meetings in Beijing in July 1971.

12
John W. Garver, “China’s Decision for War with India in 1962,” in Alastair Iain Johnston and Robert S. Ross, eds.,
New Directions in the Study of China’s Foreign Policy
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006), 107.

13
Li,
The Private Life of Chairman Mao
, 83.

14
“On the Correct Handling of Contradictions Among the People: February 27, 1957,”
Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung,
vol. 5 (Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1977), 417.

15
Edgar Snow,
The Long Revolution
(New York: Random House, 1972), 217.

16
Lin Piao [Lin Biao],
Long Live the Victory of People’s War!
(Peking: Foreign Languages Press, 1967), 38 (originally published September 3, 1965, in the
Renmin Ribao
[
People’s Daily
]).

17
Kuisong Yang and Yafeng Xia, “Vacillating Between Revolution and Détente: Mao’s Changing Psyche and Policy Toward the United States, 1969–1976,”
Diplomatic History
34, no. 2 (April 2010).

18
Chen Jian and David L. Wilson, eds., “All Under the Heaven Is Great Chaos: Beijing, the Sino-Soviet Border Clashes, and the Turn Toward Sino-American Rapprochement, 1968–69,”
Cold War International History Project Bulletin
11 (Washington, D.C.: Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, Winter 1998), 161.

19
Michel Oksenberg, “The Political Leader,” in Dick Wilson, ed.,
Mao Tse-tung in the Scales of History
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 90.

20
Stuart Schram,
The Thought of Mao Tse-Tung
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 23.

21
“The Chinese Revolution and the Chinese Communist Party: December 1939,”
Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung,
vol. 2, 306.

22
John King Fairbank and Merle Goldman,
China: A New History,
2nd enlarged edition (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 2006), 395.

23
“Memorandum of Conversation: Beijing, Feb. 21, 1972, 2:50–3:55 pm.,”
FRUS
17, 678.

24
“The Foolish Old Man Who Removed the Mountains,”
Selected Works of Mao Tse-tung,
vol. 3, 272.

1
“Conversation Between I. V. Stalin and Mao Zedong: Moscow, December 16, 1949,” Archive of the President of the Russian Federation (APRF), fond 45, opis 1, delo 329, listy 9–17, trans. Danny Rozas, from
Cold War International History Project: Virtual Archive,
Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars, accessed at
www.cwihp.org
.

2
Strobe Talbott, trans. and ed.,
Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament
(Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), 240.

3
“Conversation Between I. V. Stalin and Mao Zedong,”
www.cwihp.org
.

4
Ibid.

5
Ibid.

6
Ibid.

7
See Chapter 6, “China Confronts Both Superpowers,” page 170.

8
“Appendix D to Part II—China: The Military Situation in China and Proposed Military Aid,” in
The China White Paper: August 1949,
vol. 2 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967), 814.

9
“Letter of Transmittal: Washington, July 30, 1949,” in
The China White Paper: August 1949,
vol. 1 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1967), xvi.

10
Dean Acheson, “Crisis in Asia—An Examination of U.S. Policy,”
Department of State Bulletin
(January 23, 1950), 113.

11
Sergei N. Goncharov, John W. Lewis, and Xue Litai,
Uncertain Partners: Stalin, Mao, and the Korean War
(Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993), 98.

12
Acheson, “Crisis in Asia—An Examination of U.S. Policy,” 115.

13
Ibid.

14
Ibid., 118.

15
The results of postwar Sino-Soviet negotiations still rankled four decades later. In 1989, Deng Xiaoping urged President George H. W. Bush to “look at the map to see what happened after the Soviet Union severed Outer Mongolia from China. What kind of strategic situation did we find ourselves in? Those over fifty in China remember that the shape of China was like a maple leaf. Now, if you look at a map, you see a huge chunk of the north cut away.” George H. W. Bush and Brent Scowcroft,
A World Transformed
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 95–96. Deng’s reference to China’s strategic situation must be understood also in light of the significant Soviet military presence in Mongolia, which began during the Sino-Soviet split and lasted throughout the Cold War.

16
Goncharov, Lewis, and Xue,
Uncertain Partners,
103.

17
Stuart Schram,
The Thought of Mao Tse-Tung
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 153.

18
“Conversation Between I. V. Stalin and Mao Zedong,” at
www.cwihp.org
.

19
Soviet forces had initially advanced further south, past the 38th parallel, but heeded a call from Washington to return north and divide the peninsula roughly halfway.