Real War (20 page)

The Chinese empire lasted more than two thousand years, from its founding in 221
B.C
. until its overthrow early in the twentieth century. At times, it was the largest empire in the world. Yet it never extended beyond China, except into border
regions. There were no overseas outposts of empire. Greeks, Romans, and other architects of empire in the West set out in search of worlds to conquer; the emperors of China already ruled the “world,” and their chief aim was to keep the barbarians out. In our own time, the Russians built the Berlin Wall to keep their subjects in; for more than two thousand years the Chinese maintained the Great Wall to keep invaders out. Beyond the Great Wall there is not enough rainfall to support agriculture; below it there is. To the north, nomadic tribes have always roamed, developing skills of horsemanship, raiding, and warfare. To the south, sedentary cities and civilizations with all their riches evolved. For all but the last 150 years of China's history the threat to Chinese civilization has always come from the north, from the nomadic barbarians who periodically swept in to conquer and plunder. As the Chinese look today at the new “barbarians” again threatening from the north, the specter invokes national memories so deeply rooted as to be almost instinctive.

•  •  •

For China, the nineteenth and twentieth centuries have been a time of shattering collision with the outside world, and of shattering change within China itself.

From China's standpoint, its early contacts with the West—and many of its later contacts as well—were both humiliating and disastrous, and served only to solidify hostility toward the “foreign devils,” while intensifying a sense of cultural superiority. Some Westerners came to colonize; others came to convert; most came to exploit. The most demoralizing impact, however, was not economic or political, but was rather the affront to the dignity of the Chinese people. On my first visit to Hong Kong in 1953 I asked a very successful pro-British Chinese businessman how the people of Hong Kong would vote if they had a choice between independence and remaining a British colony. He replied that in spite of the fact that the Chinese living in Hong Kong were better off economically than those living under independent governments elsewhere in non-communist Asia, 95 percent would probably vote for independence. I asked why. He said that the British were certainly the most respected and most progressive of European colonizers, but that there was a common saying among Chinese throughout
Asia that when the British set up a colony, they built three institutions in this order: first, a church; then a racetrack; then a club to which Orientals could not belong. In 1972, while escorting me to the airport, the hard-line Communist Party chairman of Shanghai pointed proudly to an immaculate children's playground. He said quietly that it had formerly been a golf course, and that the sign at the entrance read, “No dogs or Chinese allowed.” Nothing more was said, or needed to be. On my last trip, in 1979, my host in China's third largest city repeatedly pointed out hospitals, schools, and other buildings that had once been part of a British, German, French, Dutch, or other European “concession,” that Chinese had been allowed to enter only when invited by Europeans. To the Chinese, with their enormous pride, these slights were unforgivable.

•  •  •

Readers of American fiction associate China with “opium dens,” and many probably imagine that the drugs that later ravaged so many young Americans were insidiously introduced from there. Hearing that Britain and China fought two “Opium Wars” in the mid-nineteenth century, an American today might suppose that these were righteous British efforts to stamp out the opium trade. In fact, opium was pressed on China, over vigorous Chinese objections, by British merchants; the Chinese tried to prohibit both its importation and its use. Britain went to war against China in part to compel the Chinese to accept the continued sale of opium. The Opium Wars were also pretexts to force China open to foreign trade and exploitation, and to wrest special commercial and other privileges from China. Britain took Hong Kong in the first Opium War, secured the designation of five “treaty ports,” and won rights of extraterritoriality for its citizens in China; in the second Opium War, Britain and France together forced more of China open to foreign trade, and won more special privileges for Western nationals. These humiliations were followed by more territorial grabs and establishment of foreign “spheres of influence” in China, with Russia and Japan joining the Western nations in the scramble.

The Chinese themselves were bitterly divided over how to respond to the Western inroads, whether to reach back to Chinese isolation or reach out to Western technology in the hope
of gaining sufficient strength to repel the foreigners. But even those who argued for adoption of Western technology saw Western ways as a corrupting, unwelcome influence. The fact that the Westerners came with greater firepower, and therefore were able to impose their will on China, hardly lessened the Chinese tendency to view them as barbarians and devils. A Cantonese denunciation of the British in 1841 read: “We note that you English barbarians have formed the habits and developed the nature of wolves, plundering and seizing things by force. . . . Except for your ships being solid, your gunfire fierce, and your rockets powerful, what other abilities have you?”

Hatred of the foreigner exploded dramatically at the turn of the century in the Boxer Rebellion. The “Boxers” were a group who called themselves the “Fists of Righteous Harmony,” and who bitterly resented Western interference with traditional Chinese ways. They saw the foreigners as desecrators of holy places, and many believed that tall buildings had been put up by the “foreign devils” so that low-flying good spirits would be killed as they crashed into them; they were sure that the rusty water that fell from railroad tracks and telegraph lines when it rained was the blood of good spirits who died on them. Religious fervor combined with xenophobia. Roving bands of Boxers not only burned and pillaged, but also killed Chinese converts to Christianity. In 1900 they swept into Peking, murdered the German and Japanese ministers, and besieged the foreign legations. The Western powers moved in with overwhelming force, smashed the rebellion, and exacted even more concessions—as well as reparations—from the Chinese as punishment.

•  •  •

China was ripe for revolution in 1911 because it needed a revolution. It had been plagued too long by governments that could neither control the marauding brutalities of local warlords nor resist the encroachment and exploitation by foreigners. After years of struggle, the revolutionary forces led by Dr. Sun Yat-sen—a physician who received his early education in Hawaii—finally triumphed, and the empire that had lasted more than two thousand years was overthrown. But the victory of the revolution only ushered in a new time of turmoil.

Throughout the twentieth century China has been in upheaval.
The revolutionaries of 1911 themselves had divergent aims. The new government was torn by rivalries, and was unable to establish its authority throughout China. After Sun Yatsen's death in 1925 the faction led by Chiang Kai-shek and the one that eventually was led by Mao Zedong battled each other until Mao won final control of the mainland in 1949. Meanwhile, China fought a grueling war with Japan and suffered brutally under the Japanese invasion. Since 1949 China also has fought the United States in Korea, it has fought India, it has engaged in border warfare with the Soviet Union, and more recently it has fought its former client state of Vietnam. But more fundamentally, during much of the century China fought China. The long civil war was followed by one upheaval after another, as Mao purged first one faction and then another, launching his Great Leap Forward and his Cultural Revolution, “purifying” the party by eliminating first one group and then another—with millions dying in the process of that purification.

The rape of China by the Western powers in the nineteenth century left an indelible imprint, but so too did the struggles of the twentieth century.

Like family quarrels, civil wars are often the most bitterly fought of all. Yet again like family quarrels, they also produce a certain ambivalence. Chinese on both sides of the long struggle were still Chinese, with the same pride in China, the same feelings of Chinese nationalism, the same shared heritage. Chiang and Mao both served under Sun Yat-sen; Madame Chiang is the sister of Madame Sun, who remained on the mainland and continues to be a revered figure in China. In the 1920s, Chiang was commander and Zhou the political director of the Chinese military academy at Whampoa. In my talks with the Chinese leaders, I found that they had curiously mixed feelings toward Chiang. As communists they hated him, but as Chinese they respected and, grudgingly, even admired him. At my first meeting with Mao in 1972, he made a sweeping gesture with his hand and said, “Our common old friend Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek doesn't approve of this,” adding: “He calls us communist bandits.” I asked Mao what he called Chiang Kai-shek. Mao laughed; Zhou replied, “Generally speaking, we call them ‘Chiang Kai-shek's clique.' In the newspapers sometimes we call him a bandit; he calls us bandits in turn. Anyway, we abuse
each other.” Mao added, “Actually, the history of our friendship with him is much longer than the history of your friendship with him.”

The leaders of China's communist revolution were toughened by hardship, and driven by a zeal that often verged on fanaticism. This should not be surprising. Setting value judgments aside, the sheer magnitude of the task they set for themselves required both toughness and zeal. Mao sometimes identified himself with the first Emperor of Qin, Qin Shihuang-di, who unified the warring states of China into a single empire in 221
B.C
. Even by the standards of China's history, which, as the scholar
O. Edmund Clubb has put it, “yields to none in bloodshed,” the brutality of the Qin is legendary. Once, when an army of 400,000 surrendered to them, the entire 400,000 were massacred; to discipline the intellectuals of his day, Qin Shihuang-di ordered 460 scholars executed and buried in a mass grave. Mao himself, when China's population was smaller than it is now, once dismissed the threat of nuclear war by commenting that even if 300 million Chinese were killed, there would still be 300 million left.

When I first met Mao in 1972, he was enfeebled by age and ill health. But his mind was sharp, and there was no question that he was in command on the Chinese side. He spoke in broad terms of philosophy, of history, of the sweep of events; and yet also in peculiarly humble terms he spoke of his own limits. Once when I commented to him that his writings had “moved a nation and have changed the world,” he replied self-deprecatingly, “I haven't been able to change it. I've only been able to change a few places in the vicinity of Peking.” Before my visit André Malraux, who had known Mao for many years, commented to me that in Mao's view “the great leaders—Churchill, Gandhi, de Gaulle—were created by the kind of traumatic historical events that will not occur in the world anymore. In that sense he feels that he has no successors. I once asked him if he did not think of himself as the heir of the last great Chinese emperors of the sixteenth century. Mao said, ‘But of course I am their heir.' Mr. President, you operate within a rational framework, but Mao does not. There is something of the sorcerer in him. He is a man inhabited by a vision, possessed by it.”

The vision that possessed Mao convulsed China.

During the decades that followed Mao's victory on the mainland, three lines of thought were in more or less constant contention among the Chinese leadership. One, identified with Liu Shaoqi, was the classic, doctrinaire Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist line that looked to Moscow for leadership, example, and assistance. This was in the ascendancy in the early years. Another, identified today with Vice-Premier Deng Xiaoping, was essentially pragmatic, concerned with economic development and willing to compromise ideology and deal with the West. This is in the ascendancy now. The third, Mao's own, was rooted in the experience of the Long March and devoted to the ideal of constant struggle: revolution was an end in itself; whenever any group, including the Communist Party bureaucracy, got too entrenched or too comfortable, it was time to turn the country upside down. The people's communes, the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, all were examples of Mao's determination to maintain the spirit of struggle and purify through purge, chaos, and dislocation; millions died in his drive to keep the “revolution” revolutionary.

The communist victory in China came only four years after the end of World War II, and it was aided by the Soviet Union. At first the new regime was firmly allied with the Soviet Union. But strains soon developed. The Soviets turned out to be unreliable allies; the Chinese government, being Chinese, was not long willing to concede Moscow unchallenged supremacy as leader of the communist world.

The Chinese-American rapprochement of 1972 may have been the most dramatic geopolitical event since World War II, but the most significant geopolitical event was the Sino-Soviet split that preceded it. This split made the later rapprochement with the United States possible. Together with continuing Soviet belligerence, it also made the rapprochement indispensable from both the Chinese and the American viewpoints.

Perhaps the split was inevitable, given the respective backgrounds
of the two countries, their history of conflict, and their differing interests. But its inevitability was not apparent to most Americans, including myself, during the first decade of communist rule in China. The specter that haunted the world then was that of an aggressive, monolithic Sino-Soviet bloc, a new and menacing force on the world scene. The Chinese at that stage were even more implacably hostile toward the West than were the Soviets. Both Peking and Moscow supported North Korea's invasion of South Korea in 1950. But the Soviet Union provided only arms; thousands of Chinese were killed in action, including one of Mao's sons. As competition between the two communist giants developed, it was increasingly directed toward leadership of the communist world, with each accusing the other of deviation from “true” communist orthodoxy. Ultimately, one of the key forces that drove them apart was precisely the one—communism—that many of us had thought would hold them together. They could not both be number one, and neither was willing to be number two; in the rigidly hierarchical structure of world communism there was room for only one supreme authority. Russia was accustomed to being supreme in the communist world; China was accustomed to being supreme in its own world.