Was There a Lost Opportunity?
In retrospect, one
wonders whether the United States was in a position to start a
dialogue with China perhaps a decade earlier than it did. Could the
turmoil in China have become the starting point for a serious
dialogue? In other words, were the 1960s a lost opportunity for
Sino-American rapprochement? Could the opening to China have
occurred earlier?
In truth, the
fundamental obstacle to a more imaginative American foreign policy
was Mao’s concept of continuous revolution. Mao was determined at
this stage to forestall any moment of calm. Attempts at
reconciliation with the capitalist archenemy were not conceivable
while the blood feud with Moscow revolved around Mao’s adamant
rejection of Khrushchev’s commitment to peaceful
coexistence.
There were some
tentative gropings on the American side toward a more flexible
perception of China. In October 1957, Senator John F. Kennedy
published an article in Foreign Affairs
remarking on “the fragmentation of authority within the Soviet
orbit” and calling American policy in Asia “probably too rigid.” He
argued that the policy of not recognizing the People’s Republic
should be continued but that America should be prepared to revisit
the “brittle conception of a shiftless totalitarian China” as
circumstances developed. He counseled that “we must be very careful
not to strait-jacket our policy as a result of ignorance and fail
to detect a change in the objective situation when it comes.”28
Kennedy’s perception
was subtle—but by the time he became President, the next change in
Mao’s dialectic was in the opposite direction: toward more hostility, not less; and toward the
increasingly violent elimination of domestic opponents and
countervailing institutional structures, not moderate
reform.
In the years
immediately following Kennedy’s article, Mao launched the
Anti-Rightist Campaign in 1957, a second crisis in the Taiwan
Strait in 1958 (which he described as an attempt to “teach the
Americans a lesson”29), and the Great Leap Forward. When Kennedy
became President, China undertook a military attack in its border
conflict with India, a country that the Kennedy administration had
conceived of as offering an Asian alternative to Communism. These
were not the signs of conciliation and change for which Kennedy had
advised Americans to stay attuned.
The Kennedy
administration did offer a humanitarian gesture to alleviate
China’s precarious agricultural condition during the famine
triggered by the Great Leap Forward. Described as an effort to
secure “food for peace,” the offer required, however, a specific
Chinese request acknowledging a “serious desire” for assistance.
Mao’s commitment to self-reliance precluded any admission of
dependence on foreign assistance. China, its representative at the
Warsaw ambassadorial talks replied, was “overcoming its
difficulties by its own efforts.”30
In the last years of
Lyndon Johnson’s presidency, senior staff members and eventually
the President himself began considering a move toward a less
confrontational course. In 1966, the State Department instructed
its negotiators to take a more forthcoming attitude at the Warsaw
ambassadorial talks and authorized them to initiate informal social
contacts on the sidelines of negotiations. In March 1966, the
American representative at the talks offered an olive branch by
stating that “the United States government was willing to develop
further relations with the People’s Republic of China”—the first
time an American official had used the official post-1949
appellation for China in any formal capacity.
Finally, Johnson
himself held out a peaceful option in a July 1966 speech on Asia
policy. “Lasting peace,” he observed, “can never come to Asia as
long as the 700 million people of mainland China are isolated by
their rulers from the outside world.” While pledging to resist
China’s “policy of aggression by proxy” in Southeast Asia, he
looked forward to an eventual era of “peaceful cooperation” and of
“reconciliation between nations that now call themselves
enemies.”31
These views were put
forward as abstract hopes geared to some undefined change in
Chinese attitudes. No practical conclusion followed. Nor could it
have. For these statements coincided almost exactly with the onset
of the Cultural Revolution, when China swung back to a stance of
defiant hostility.32
China’s policies
during this period did little to invite—and may have been designed
to dissuade—a conciliatory approach from the United States. For its
part, Washington exhibited considerable tactical skill in resisting
military challenges, as in the two Taiwan Strait Crises, but showed
much less imagination in shaping foreign policy in an evolving,
fluid political framework.
An American National
Intelligence Estimate of 1960 expressed, and perhaps helped shape,
the underlying assessment:
A basic tenet of Communist China’s foreign policy—to establish Chinese hegemony in the Far East—almost certainly will not change appreciably during the period of this estimate. The regime will continue to be violently anti-American and to strike at US interests wherever and whenever it can do so without paying a disproportionate price. . . . Its arrogant self-confidence, revolutionary fervor and distorted view of the world may lead Peiping to miscalculate risks.33
There was much
evidence to support the prevailing view. But the analysis left open
the question as to what extent China could possibly achieve such
sweeping objectives. Wracked by the catastrophic consequences of
the Great Leap Forward, the China of the 1960s was exhausted. By
1966, it was embarking on the Cultural Revolution, which spelled a
de facto retreat from the world with most diplomats recalled to
Beijing, many for reeducation. What were the implications for
American foreign policy? How was it possible to speak of a unified
Asian bloc? What about the basic premise of America’s Indochina
policy that the world was facing a conspiracy directed from Moscow
and Beijing? The United States, preoccupied with Vietnam and its
own domestic turmoil, found few occasions to address these
issues.
Part of the reason
for American single-mindedness was that, in the 1950s, many of the
leading China experts had left the State Department during the
various investigations into who “lost” China. As a result, a truly
extraordinary group of Soviet experts—including George Kennan,
Charles “Chip” Bohlen, Llewellyn Thompson, and Foy Kohler—dominated
State Department thinking without counterpoise, and they were
convinced that any rapprochement with China risked war with the
Soviet Union.
But even had the
right questions been asked, there would have been no opportunity to
test the answers. Some Chinese policymakers urged Mao to adapt his
policies to new conditions. In February 1962, Wang Jiaxiang, head
of the International Liaison Department of the Central Committee of
the Communist Party, addressed a memorandum to Zhou urging that a
peaceful international environment would more effectively assist
China to build a stronger socialist state and a more rapidly
growing economy than the prevailing posture of confrontation in all
directions.34
Mao would not hear of
it, declaring:
In our Party there are some who advocate the “three moderations and one reduction.” They say we should be more moderate toward the imperialist, more moderate toward the reactionaries, and more moderate toward the revisionists, while toward the struggle of the peoples of Asia, Africa and Latin-America, we should reduce assistance. This is a revisionist line.35
Mao insisted on the
policy of challenging all potential adversaries simultaneously. He
countered that “China should struggle against the imperialists, the
revisionists, and the reactionaries of all countries,” and that
“more assistance should be given to anti-imperialist,
revolutionary, and Marxist-Leninist political parties and
factions.”36
In the end, as the
1960s progressed, even Mao began to recognize that potential perils
to China were multiplying. Along its vast borders, China faced a
potential enemy in the Soviet Union; a humiliated adversary in
India; a massive American deployment and an escalating war in
Vietnam; self-proclaimed governments-in-exile in Taipei and the
Tibetan enclave of northern India; a historic opponent in Japan;
and, across the Pacific, an America that viewed China as an
implacable adversary. Only the rivalries between these countries
had prevented a common challenge so far. But no prudent statesman
could gamble forever that this self-restraint would last—especially
as the Soviet Union seemed to be preparing to put an end to the
mounting challenges from Beijing. The Chairman would soon be
obliged to prove that he knew how to be prudent as well as
daring.