Prologue
IN OCTOBER 1962, China’s revolutionary leader Mao
Zedong summoned his top military and political commanders to meet
with him in Beijing. Two thousand miles to the west, in the
forbidding and sparsely populated terrain of the Himalayas, Chinese
and Indian troops were locked in a standoff over the two countries’
disputed border. The dispute arose over different versions of
history: India claimed the frontier demarcated during British rule,
China the limits of imperial China. India had deployed its outposts
to the edge of its conception of the border; China had surrounded
the Indian positions. Attempts to negotiate a territorial
settlement had foundered.
Mao had decided to
break the stalemate. He reached far back into the classical Chinese
tradition that he was otherwise in the process of dismantling.
China and India, Mao told his commanders, had previously fought
“one and a half” wars. Beijing could draw operational lessons from
each. The first war had occurred over 1,300 years earlier, during
the Tang Dynasty (618–907), when China dispatched troops to support
an Indian kingdom against an illegitimate and aggressive rival.
After China’s intervention, the two countries had enjoyed centuries
of flourishing religious and economic exchange. The lesson learned
from the ancient campaign, as Mao described it, was that China and
India were not doomed to perpetual enmity. They could enjoy a long
period of peace again, but to do so, China had to use force to
“knock” India back “to the negotiating table.” The “half war,” in
Mao’s mind, had taken place seven hundred years later, when the
Mongol ruler Timurlane sacked Delhi. (Mao reasoned that since
Mongolia and China were then part of the same political entity,
this was a “half” Sino-Indian war.) Timurlane had won a significant
victory, but once in India his army had killed over 100,000
prisoners. This time, Mao enjoined his Chinese forces to be
“restrained and principled.”1
No one in Mao’s
audience—the Communist Party leadership of a revolutionary “New
China” proclaiming its intent to remake the international order and
abolish China’s own feudal past—seems to have questioned the
relevance of these ancient precedents to China’s current strategic
imperatives. Planning for an attack continued on the basis of the
principles Mao had outlined. Weeks later the offensive proceeded
much as he described: China executed a sudden, devastating blow on
the Indian positions and then retreated to the previous line of
control, even going so far as to return the captured Indian heavy
weaponry.
In no other country
is it conceivable that a modern leader would initiate a major
national undertaking by invoking strategic principles from a
millennium-old event—nor that he could confidently expect his
colleagues to understand the significance of his allusions. Yet
China is singular. No other country can claim so long a continuous
civilization, or such an intimate link to its ancient past and
classical principles of strategy and statesmanship.
Other societies, the
United States included, have claimed universal applicability for
their values and institutions. Still, none equals China in
persisting—and persuading its neighbors to acquiesce—in such an
elevated conception of its world role for so long, and in the face
of so many historical vicissitudes. From the emergence of China as
a unified state in the third century B.C. until the collapse of the
Qing Dynasty in 1912, China stood at the center of an East Asian
international system of remarkable durability. The Chinese Emperor
was conceived of (and recognized by most neighboring states) as the
pinnacle of a universal political hierarchy, with all other states’
rulers theoretically serving as vassals. Chinese language, culture,
and political institutions were the hallmarks of civilization, such
that even regional rivals and foreign conquerors adopted them to
varying degrees as a sign of their own legitimacy (often as a first
step to being subsumed within China).
The traditional
cosmology endured despite catastrophes and centuries-long periods
of political decay. Even when China was weak or divided, its
centrality remained the touchstone of regional legitimacy;
aspirants, both Chinese and foreign, vied to unify or conquer it,
then ruled from the Chinese capital without challenging the basic
premise that it was the center of the universe. While other
countries were named after ethnic groups or geographical landmarks,
China called itself zhongguo—the
“Middle Kingdom” or the “Central Country.” 2 Any attempt to
understand China’s twentieth-century diplomacy or its
twenty-first-century world role must begin—even at the cost of some
potential oversimplification—with a basic appreciation of the
traditional context.