Mao and International Relations: The Empty City Stratagem, Chinese Deterrence, and the Quest for Psychological Advantage
Mao proclaimed his
basic attitude toward international affairs on the eve of taking
power. Before the newly assembled People’s Political Consultative
Conference, he summed up China’s attitude toward the prevailing
international order in the phrase “The Chinese people have stood
up”:
We have a common feeling that our work will be recorded in the history of mankind, and that it will clearly demonstrate that the Chinese, who comprise one quarter of humanity, have begun to stand up. The Chinese have always been a great, courageous and industrious people. It was only in modern times that they have fallen behind, and this was due solely to the oppression and exploitation of foreign imperialism and the domestic reactionary government. . . . Our predecessors instructed us to carry their work to completion. We are doing this now. We have united ourselves and defeated both our foreign and domestic oppressors by means of the people’s liberation war and the people’s great revolution, and we proclaim the establishment of the People’s Republic of China.7
To stand up to the
world was a daunting prospect for China in 1949. The country was
underdeveloped, without the military capacity to impose its own
preferences on a world that vastly outmatched it in resources and,
above all, in technology. When the People’s Republic emerged on the
world stage, the United States was the principal nuclear superpower
(the Soviet Union having just exploded its first nuclear weapon).
The United States had supported Chiang Kai-shek during the Chinese
civil war, transporting Nationalist troops to northern Chinese
cities after the Japanese surrender in World War II to preempt the
Communist armies. Mao Zedong’s victory was greeted with dismay in
Washington and triggered a debate over who had “lost” China. That
implied, at least in Beijing, an eventual attempt to reverse the
outcome—a conviction reinforced when in 1950, upon the North Korean
invasion of the South, President Truman moved the Seventh Fleet
into the Taiwan Strait, forestalling an attempt by the new
government on the mainland to reconquer Taiwan.
The Soviet Union was
an ideological ally and was needed initially as a strategic partner
to balance the United States. But China’s leaders had not forgotten
the series of “unequal treaties” extorted for a century to
establish the Russian possession of its Far East maritime provinces
and a zone of special influence in Manchuria and Xinjiang, nor that
the Soviet Union was still claiming the validity of concessions in
northern China extracted from Chiang Kai-shek in wartime agreements
in 1945. Stalin took for granted Soviet dominance in the Communist
world, a stance incompatible in the long run with Mao’s fierce
nationalism and claim to ideological importance.
China was also
involved in a border dispute with India in the Himalayas, over the
territory known as Aksai Chin in the west and over the so-called
McMahon Line in the east. The disputed region was no small matter:
at roughly 125,000 square kilometers, the total contested area was
approximately the size of Pennsylvania or, as Mao later noted to
his top commanders, the Chinese province of Fujian.8
Mao divided these
challenges into two categories. At home, he proclaimed continuous
revolution and was able to implement it because he increasingly
exercised total control. Abroad, world revolution was a slogan,
perhaps a long-range objective, but China’s leaders were
sufficiently realistic to recognize that they lacked the means to
challenge the prevailing international order except by ideological
means. Within China, Mao recognized few objective limits to his
philosophic visions other than the ingrained attitudes of the
Chinese people, which he struggled to overwhelm. In the realm of
foreign policy, he was substantially more circumspect.
When the Communist
Party seized power in 1949, substantial regions had broken away
from the historic Chinese Empire, notably Tibet, parts of Xinjiang,
parts of Mongolia, and the border areas of Burma. The Soviet Union
maintained a sphere of influence in the northeast, including an
occupation force and a fleet in the strategically located Lushun
harbor. Mao, like several founders of dynasties before him, claimed
the frontiers of China that the empire had established at its
maximum historic extent. To territories Mao considered part of that
historic China—Taiwan, Tibet, Xinjiang, Mongolia, border regions in
the Himalayas or the north—he applied the maxim of domestic
politics: he was implacable; he sought to impose China’s governance
and generally succeeded. As soon as the civil war ended, Mao set
out to reoccupy the secessionist regions, such as Xinjiang, Inner
Mongolia, and eventually Tibet. In that context, Taiwan was not so
much a test of Communist ideology as a demand to respect Chinese
history. Even when he refrained from military measures, Mao would
put forward claims to territories given up in the “unequal
treaties” of the nineteenth century—for example, claims to
territory lost in the Russian Far East in the settlements of 1860
and 1895.
With respect to the
rest of the world, Mao introduced a special style that substituted
ideological militancy and psychological perception for physical
strength. It was composed of a Sinocentric view of the world, a
touch of world revolution, and a diplomacy using the Chinese
tradition of manipulating the barbarians, with great attention paid
to meticulous planning and the psychological domination of the
other side.
Mao eschewed what
Western diplomats viewed as the commonsense dictum that to recover
from the decades of upheaval China should conciliate the major
powers. He refused to convey any appearance of weakness, chose
defiance over accommodation, and avoided contact with Western
countries after establishing the People’s Republic of
China.
Zhou Enlai, the first
Foreign Minister of the People’s Republic of China, summed up this
attitude of aloofness in a series of aphorisms. The new China would
not simply slip into existing diplomatic relationships. It would
set up “a separate kitchen.” Relations with the new regime would
have to be negotiated from case to case. The new China would “sweep
the house clean before inviting the guests”—in other words, it
would clean up lingering colonial influences before establishing
diplomatic relations with Western “imperialist” countries. It would
use its influence to “unite the world’s people”—in other words,
encourage revolution in the developing world.9
Diplomatic
traditionalists would have rejected this attitude of aloof
challenge as unfeasible. But Mao believed in the objective impact
of ideological and, above all, psychological factors. He proposed
to achieve psychological equivalence to the superpowers by
calculated indifference to their military
capabilities.
One of the classic
tales of the Chinese strategic tradition was that of Zhuge Liang’s
“Empty City Stratagem” from The Romance of the
Three Kingdoms. In it, a commander notices an approaching
army far superior to his own. Since resistance guarantees
destruction, and surrender would bring about loss of control over
the future, the commander opts for a stratagem. He opens the gates
of his city, places himself there in a posture of repose, playing a
lute, and behind him shows normal life without any sign of panic or
concern. The general of the invading army interprets this sangfroid
as a sign of the existence of hidden reserves, stops his advance,
and withdraws.
Mao’s avowed
indifference to the threat of nuclear war surely owed something to
that tradition. From the very beginning, the People’s Republic of
China had to maneuver in a triangular relationship with the two
nuclear powers, each of which was individually capable of posing a
great threat and, together, were in a position to overwhelm China.
Mao dealt with this endemic state of affairs by pretending it did
not exist. He claimed to be impervious to nuclear threats; indeed,
he developed a public posture of being willing to accept hundreds
of millions of casualties, even welcoming it as a guarantee for the
more rapid victory of Communist ideology. Whether Mao believed his
own pronouncements on nuclear war it is impossible to say. But he
clearly succeeded in making much of the rest of the world believe
that he meant it—an ultimate test of credibility. (Of course in
China’s case, the city was not entirely “empty.” China eventually
developed its own nuclear weapons capability, though on a much
smaller scale than that of the Soviet Union or the United
States.)
Mao was able to draw
on a long tradition in Chinese statecraft of accomplishing
long-term goals from a position of relative weakness. For
centuries, Chinese statesmen enmeshed the “barbarians” in
relationships that kept them at bay and studiously maintained the
political fiction of superiority through diplomatic stagecraft.
From the beginning of the People’s Republic, China played a world
role surpassing its objective strength. By consequence of its
fierce defense of its definition of its national patrimony, the
People’s Republic of China became an influential force in the
Non-Aligned Movement—the grouping of newly independent countries
seeking to position themselves between the superpowers. China
established itself as a great power not to be trifled with while
conducting a redefinition of the Chinese identity at home and
challenging the nuclear powers diplomatically, sometimes
concurrently, sometimes sequentially.
In pursuit of this
foreign policy agenda, Mao owed more to Sun Tzu than to Lenin. He
drew inspiration from his reading of the Chinese classics and the
tradition he outwardly disdained. In charting foreign policy
initiatives he was less likely to refer to Marxist doctrine than to
traditional Chinese works: Confucian texts; the canonical “24
Dynastic Histories” recounting the rise and fall of China’s
imperial dynasties; Sun Tzu, The Romance of
the Three Kingdoms, and other texts on warfare and strategy;
tales of adventure and rebellion such as Outlaws of the Marsh; and the novel of romance and
courtly intrigue, Dream of the Red
Chamber, which Mao claimed to have read five times.10 In an echo of the
traditional Confucian scholar-officials whom he denounced as
oppressors and parasites, Mao wrote poetry and philosophical essays
and took great pride in his unorthodox calligraphy. These literary
and artistic elements were not a refuge from his political labors
but an integral part of them. When Mao, after a thirty-two-year
absence, returned to his native village in 1959, he wrote a poem
not of Marxism or materialism but of romantic sweep: “It is the
bitter sacrifices that strengthen our firm resolve, and which give
us the courage to dare to change heavens and skies, to change the
sun, and to make a new world.”11
So ingrained was this
literary tradition that, in 1969, at a turning point in Mao’s
foreign policy, four marshals assigned by Mao to outline his
strategic options illustrated their recommendations of the need to
open relations with the then archenemy America by citing
The Romance of the Three Kingdoms,
which was banned in China but which they could be certain Mao had
read. So, too, even in the midst of his most sweeping assaults on
China’s ancient heritage, Mao framed his foreign policy doctrines
in terms of analogies with highly traditional Chinese games of the
intellect. He described the opening maneuvers in the Sino-Indian
War as “crossing the Han-Chu boundary,” an ancient metaphor drawn
from the Chinese version of chess.12 He held up the traditional gambling game
of mahjong as a school for strategic thought: “If you knew how to
play the game,” he told his doctor, “you would also understand the
relationship between the principle of probability and the principle
of certainty.”13 And in China’s conflicts with both the
United States and the Soviet Union, Mao and his top associates
conceived of the threat in terms of a wei
qi concept—that of preventing strategic
encirclement.
It was in precisely
these most traditional aspects that the superpowers had the most
difficulty comprehending Mao’s strategic motives. Through the lens
of Western strategic analysis, most of Beijing’s military
undertakings in the first three decades of the Cold War were
improbable and, on paper at least, impossible affairs. Setting
China against usually far stronger powers and occurring in
territories previously deemed of secondary strategic
importance—North Korea, the offshore islands of the Taiwan Strait,
sparsely populated tracts of the Himalayas, frozen swatches of
territory in the Ussuri River—these Chinese interventions and
offensives caught almost all foreign observers—and each of the
adversaries—by surprise. Mao was determined to prevent encirclement
by any power or combination of powers, regardless of ideology, that
he perceived as securing too many wei
qi “stones” surrounding China, by disrupting their
calculations.
This was the catalyst
that led China into the Korean War despite its relative
weakness—and that, in the aftermath of Mao’s death, would lead
Beijing to war with Vietnam, a recent ally, in defiance of a mutual
defense treaty between Hanoi and Moscow and while the Soviet Union
maintained a million troops on China’s northern borders. Long-range
calculations of the configuration of forces around China’s
periphery were considered more significant than a literal calculus
of the immediate balance of power. This combination of the
long-range and the psychological also came to expression in Mao’s
approach to deterring perceived military threats.
However much Mao
absorbed from China’s history, no previous Chinese ruler combined
traditional elements with the same mix of authority and
ruthlessness and global sweep as Mao: ferocity in the face of
challenge and skillful diplomacy when circumstances prevented his
preference for drastic overpowering initiatives. His vast and
daring foreign policy initiatives, however traditional his tactics,
were carried out amidst a violent churning of Chinese society. The
whole world, he promised, would be transformed, and things turned
into their opposites:
Of all the classes in the world the proletariat is the one which is most eager to change its position, and next comes the semi-proletariat, for the former possesses nothing at all while the latter is hardly any better off. The United States now controls a majority in the United Nations and dominates many parts of the world—this state of affairs is temporary and will be changed one of these days. China’s position as a poor country denied its rights in international affairs will also be changed—the poor country will change into a rich one, the country denied its rights into one enjoying them—a transformation of things into their opposites.14
Mao was too much of a
realist, however, to pursue world revolution as a practical goal.
As a result, the tangible impact of China on world revolution was
largely ideological and consisted of intelligence support for local
Communist parties. Mao explained this attitude in an interview with
Edgar Snow, the first American journalist to describe the Chinese
Communist base in Yan’an during the civil war, in 1965: “China
supported revolutionary movements, but not by invading countries.
Of course, whenever a liberation struggle existed China would
publish statements and called demonstrations to support it.”15
In the same vein,
Long Live the Victory of People’s War,
a 1965 pamphlet by Lin Biao, then Mao’s presumptive successor,
argued that the countryside of the world (that is, the developing
countries) would defeat the cities of the world (that is, the
advanced countries) much as the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) had
defeated Chiang Kai-shek. The administration of Lyndon Johnson read
these lines as a Chinese blueprint for support for—and probably
outright participation in—Communist subversion all around the world
and especially in Indochina. Lin’s pamphlet was a contributing
factor in the decision to send American forces to Vietnam.
Contemporary scholarship, however, treats his document as a
statement of the limits of Chinese military support for Vietnam and
other revolutionary movements. For, in fact, Lin was proclaiming
that “[t]he liberation of the masses is accomplished by the masses
themselves—this is a basic principle of Marxism-Leninism.
Revolution or people’s war in any country is the business of the
masses in that country and should be carried out primarily by their
own efforts; there is no other way.”16
This restraint
reflected a realistic appreciation of the real balance of forces.
We cannot know what Mao might have decided if the equilibrium had
been tilted in favor of the Communist power. But whether as a
reflection of realism or philosophical motivation, revolutionary
ideology was a means to transform the world by performance rather
than war, much as the traditional emperors had perceived their
role.
A team of Chinese
scholars with access to Beijing’s Central Archives has written a
fascinating account of Mao’s ambivalence: dedicated to world
revolution, ready to encourage it wherever possible, yet also
protective of the necessities of China’s survival.17 This ambivalence
came to expression in a conversation with the head of the
Australian Communist Party, E. F. Hill, in 1969, while Mao was
considering the opening with the United States, with which China
had been locked in an adversarial relationship for two decades. He
put a question to his interlocutor: Are we heading into a
revolution that will prevent war?
Or into a war that
will produce revolution?18 If the former, the rapprochement with the
United States would be improvident; if the latter, it would be
imperative, to prevent an attack on China. In the end, after some
hesitation, Mao chose the option of rapprochement with America. The
prevention of war (which, by this point, would most likely involve
a Soviet attack on China) was more important than the encouragement
of global revolution.