Deng’s Foreign Policy—Dialogue with America and Normalization
When Deng returned
from his second exile in 1977, he reversed Mao’s domestic policy
but left Mao’s foreign policy largely in place. This was because
both shared strong national feelings and had parallel views of the
Chinese national interest. It was also because foreign policy had
set more absolute limits to Mao’s revolutionary impulses than
domestic policy.
There was, however, a
significant difference in style between Mao’s criticism and Deng’s.
Mao had questioned the strategic intentions of America’s Soviet
policy. Deng assumed an identity of strategic interests and
concentrated on achieving a parallel implementation. Mao dealt with
the Soviet Union as a kind of abstract strategic threat whose
menace was no more applicable to China than to the rest of the
world. Deng recognized the special danger to China, especially an
immediate threat at China’s southern border compounding a latent
threat in the north. Dialogue therefore took on a more operational
character. Mao acted like a frustrated teacher, Deng as a demanding
partner.
In the face of actual
peril, Deng ended the ambivalence about the American relationship
of Mao’s last year. There was no longer any Chinese nostalgia for
opportunities on behalf of world revolution. Deng, in all
conversations after his return, argued that, in resisting the
thrust of Soviet policy toward Europe, China and Japan needed to be
brought into a global design.
However close the
consultation had become between China and the United States, the
anomaly continued that America still formally recognized Taiwan as
the legitimate government of China and Taipei as the capital of
China. China’s adversaries along its northern and southern borders
might misconstrue the absence of recognition as an
opportunity.
Normalization of
relations moved to the top of the Sino-American agenda as Jimmy
Carter took office. The first visit to Beijing of the new Secretary
of State, Cyrus Vance, in August 1977 did not turn out well. “I
left Washington,” he wrote in his memoirs,
believing it would be unwise to take on an issue as politically controversial as normalization with China until the Panama issue [referring to the ratification of the Panama Canal treaty turning over operation of the canal] was out of the way, unless—and I did not expect it to happen—the Chinese were to accept our proposal across the board. For political reasons, I intended to represent a maximum position to the Chinese on the Taiwan issue. . . . Accordingly, I did not expect the Chinese to accept our proposal, but I felt it wise to make it, even though we might eventually have to abandon it.10
The American proposal
on Taiwan contained a series of ideas involving retention of some
limited American diplomatic presence on Taiwan that had been put
forward and rejected during the Ford administration. The proposals
were rejected again by Deng, who called them a step backward. A
year later, the internal American debate ended when President
Carter decided to assign high priority to the relationship with
China. Soviet pressures in Africa and the Middle East convinced the
new President to opt for rapid normalization with China, by what
amounted to the quest for a de facto strategic alliance with China.
On May 17, 1978, Carter sent his National Security Advisor,
Zbigniew Brzezinski, to Beijing with these instructions:
You should stress that I see the Soviet Union as essentially in a competitive relationship with the United States, though there are also some cooperative aspects. . . .To state it most succinctly, my concern is that the combination of increasing Soviet military power and political shortsightedness, fed by big-power ambitions, might tempt the Soviet Union both to exploit local turbulence (especially in the Third World) and to intimidate our friends in order to seek political advantage and eventually even political preponderance. 11
Brzezinski was also
authorized to reaffirm the five principles enunciated by Nixon to
Zhou in 1972.12 Long a strong advocate of strategic
cooperation with China, Brzezinski carried out his instructions
with enthusiasm and skill. When he visited Beijing in May 1978 in
pursuit of normalizing relations, Brzezinski found a receptive
audience. Deng was eager to proceed with normalization to enlist
Washington more firmly in a coalition to oppose, by means of what
he called “real, solid, down-to-earth work,”13 Soviet advances in
every corner of the globe.
The Chinese leaders
were deeply aware of the strategic dangers surrounding them; but
they presented their analysis less as a national concern than as a
broader view of global conditions. “Turmoil under heaven,” the
“horizontal line,” the “Three Worlds”: all represented general
theories of international relations, not distinct national
perceptions.
Foreign Minister
Huang Hua’s analysis of the international situation displayed a
remarkable self-confidence. Rather than appearing as a supplicant
in what was, after all, a very difficult situation for China, Huang
struck the attitude of a Confucian teacher, lecturing on how to
conduct a comprehensive foreign policy. He opened with a general
assessment of the “contradictions” between the two superpowers, the
futility of negotiations with the Soviet Union, and the
inevitability of a world war:
[T]he Soviet Union is the most dangerous source of war. Your excellency has mentioned that the Soviet Union is confronted with many difficulties. That is true. To strive for world hegemony is the fixed strategic goal of Soviet socialist imperialism. Although it may suffer a lot of setbacks, it will never give up its ambition.14
Huang raised concerns
that also bothered American students of strategy—especially those
which tried to relate nuclear weapons to traditional ways of
thinking about strategy. Reliance on nuclear weapons would open up
a gap between deterrent threats and the willingness to implement
them: “As for the argument that the Soviet Union would not dare to
use conventional arms for fear of nuclear attack from the West,
this is only wishful thinking. To base a strategic stance on this
thinking is not only dangerous but also unreliable.”15
In the Middle
East—“the flank of Europe” and a “source of energy in a future
war”—the United States had failed to check Soviet advances. It had
issued a joint statement on the Middle East with the Soviet Union
(inviting regional states to a conference to explore the prospect
of a comprehensive Palestinian settlement), “thus opening the door
wide for the Soviet Union to further infiltrate the Middle East.”
Washington had left President Anwar Sadat of Egypt—whose “bold
action” had “created a situation unfavorable to the Soviet
Union”—in a dangerous position and allowed the Soviet Union to
“seize the chance to raise serious division among the Arab
countries.”16
Huang summed up the
situation by invoking an old Chinese proverb: “appeasement” of
Moscow, he said, was “like giving wings to a tiger to strengthen
it.” But a policy of coordinated pressure would prevail, since the
Soviet Union was “only outwardly strong but inwardly weak. It
bullies the weak and fears the strong.”17
All this was to
supply the context for Indochina. Huang addressed “the problem of
regional hegemony.” America, of course, had trod this path a good
ten years earlier. Vietnam aimed to dominate Cambodia and Laos and
establish an Indochinese Federation—and “behind that there lies the
Soviet Union.” Hanoi had already achieved a dominant position in
Laos, stationing troops there and maintaining “advisors in every
department and in every level in Laos.” But Hanoi had encountered
resistance in Cambodia, which opposed Vietnamese regional
ambitions. Vietnamese-Cambodian tension represented “not merely
some sporadic skirmishes along the borders” but a major conflict
which “may last for a long time.” Unless Hanoi gave up its goal of
dominating Indochina, “the problem will not be solved in a short
period.”18
Deng followed up the
Huang Hua critique later that day. Concessions and agreements had
never produced Soviet restraint, he warned Brzezinski. Fifteen
years of arms control agreements had allowed the Soviet Union to
achieve strategic parity with the United States. Trade with the
Soviet Union meant that “the U.S. is helping the Soviet Union
overcome its weaknesses.” Deng offered a mocking assessment of
American responses to Soviet adventurism in the Third World and
chided Washington for trying to “please” Moscow:
Your spokesmen have constantly justified and apologized for Soviet actions. Sometimes they say there are no signs to prove that there is the meddling of the Soviet Union and Cuba in the case of Zaire or Angola. It is of no use for you to say so. To be candid with you, whenever you are about to conclude an agreement with the Soviet Union it is the product of [a] concession on the U.S. side to please the Soviet side.19
It was an
extraordinary performance. The country which was the principal
target of the Soviet Union was proposing joint action as a
conceptual obligation, not a bargain between nations, much less as
a request. At a moment of great national danger—which its own
analysis demonstrated—China nevertheless acted as an instructor on
strategy, not as a passive consumer of American prescriptions, as
America’s European allies frequently did.
The staples of much
of the American debate—international law, multilateral solutions,
popular consensus—were absent from the Chinese analysis except as
practical tools to an agreed objective. And that objective, as Deng
pointed out to Brzezinski, was “coping with the polar bear and
that’s that.”20
But for Americans
there is a limit to the so-called realist approach in the
fundamental values of American society. And the murderous Khmer
Rouge governing Cambodia represented such a limit. No American
President could treat the Khmer Rouge as another stone in the
wei qi strategy. Its genocidal
conduct—driving the population of Phnom Penh into the jungle, mass
killings of designated categories of civilians—could not simply be
ignored (though as we shall see necessity did on occasion abort
principle).
Hua Guofeng, still
Premier, was even more emphatic in a meeting the next day:
[W]e have also told a lot of our friends that the main danger of war comes from the Soviet Union. Then how should we deal with it? The first thing is one should make preparations. . . . If one is prepared and once a war breaks out, one will not find himself in a disadvantageous position. The second thing is that it is imperative to try to upset the strategic deployment of Soviet aggression. Because in order to obtain hegemony in the world the Soviet Union has first to obtain air and naval bases throughout the world, so it has to make [a] strategic deployment. And we must try to upset its plans for global deployment.21
No member of the
Atlantic Alliance had put forward a comparably sweeping call to
joint—essentially preemptive—action or had indicated that it was
prepared to act alone on its assessment.
Operationally the
Chinese leaders were proposing a kind of cooperation in many ways
more intimate and surely more risk taking than the Atlantic
Alliance. They sought to implement the strategy of offensive
deterrence described in earlier chapters. Its special feature was
that Deng proposed no formal structure or long-term obligation. A
common assessment would supply the impetus for common action, but
the de facto alliance would not survive if the assessments began to
diverge—China insisted on being self-reliant even when in extreme
danger. That China was so insistent on joint action despite the
scathing criticism of specific American policies demonstrated that
cooperation with the United States for security was perceived as
imperative.
Normalization emerged
as a first step toward a common global policy. From the time of the
secret visit in July 1971, the Chinese conditions for normalization
had been explicit and unchanging: withdrawal of all American forces
from Taiwan; ending the defense treaty with Taiwan; and
establishing diplomatic relations with China exclusively with the
government in Beijing. It had been part of the Chinese position in
the Shanghai Communiqué. Two Presidents—Richard Nixon and Gerald
Ford—had agreed to these conditions. Nixon had indicated he would
realize them in his second term. Both Nixon and Ford had emphasized
America’s concern for a peaceful solution to the issue, including
continuation of some security assistance for Taiwan. They had not
been able to fulfill these promises because of the impact of
Watergate.
In an unusual act of
nonpartisan foreign policy, President Carter early in his term
reaffirmed all the undertakings regarding Taiwan that Nixon had
made to Zhou in February 1972. In 1978, he put forward a specific
formula for normalization to enable both sides to maintain their
established principles: reaffirmation of the principles accepted by
Nixon and Ford; an American statement stressing the country’s
commitment to peaceful change; Chinese acquiescence to some
American arms sales to Taiwan. Carter advanced these ideas
personally in a conversation with the Chinese ambassador, Chai
Zemin, in which he threatened that, in the absence of American arms
sales, Taiwan would be obliged to resort to developing nuclear
weapons—as if the United States had no influence over Taiwan’s
plans or actions.22
In the end,
normalization came about when Carter supplied a deadline by
inviting Deng to visit Washington. Deng agreed with unspecified
arms sales to Taiwan and did not contradict an American declaration
that Washington expected the ultimate solution of the Taiwan issue
to be peaceful—even though China had established an extended record
that it would undertake no formal obligation to that effect.
Beijing’s position remained, as Deng had stressed to Brzezinski,
that “the liberation of Taiwan is an internal affair of China in
which no foreign country has the right to interfere.”23
Normalization meant
that the American Embassy would move from Taipei to Beijing; a
diplomat from Beijing would replace Taipei’s representative in
Washington. In response the U.S. Congress passed the Taiwan
Relations Act in April 1979, which expressed the American concerns
regarding the future as a binding law for Americans. It could not,
of course, bind China.
This balance between
American and Chinese imperatives illustrates why ambiguity is
sometimes the lifeblood of diplomacy. Much of normalization has
been sustained for forty years by a series of ambiguities. But it
cannot do so indefinitely. Wise statesmanship on both sides is
needed to move the process forward.