Deng’s Journeys
As Deng moved from
exhortation to implementation, he saw to it that China would not
wait passively for American decisions. Wherever possible—especially
in Southeast Asia—he would create the political framework he was
advocating.
Where Mao had
summoned foreign leaders to his residence like an emperor, Deng
adopted the opposite approach—touring Southeast Asia, the United
States, and Japan and practicing his own brand of highly visible,
blunt, and occasionally hectoring diplomacy. In 1978 and 1979, Deng
undertook a series of journeys to change China’s image abroad from
revolutionary challenger to fellow victim of Soviet and Vietnamese
geopolitical designs. China had been on the other side during the
Vietnam War. In Thailand and Malaysia, China had previously
encouraged revolution among the overseas Chinese and minority
populations.24 All this was now subordinated to dealing
with the immediate threat.
In an interview with
Time magazine in February 1979, Deng
advertised the Chinese strategic design to a large public: “If we
really want to be able to place curbs on the polar bear, the only
realistic thing for us is to unite. If we only depend on the
strength of the U.S., it is not enough. If we only depend on the
strength of Europe, it is not enough. We are an insignificant, poor
country, but if we unite, well, it will then carry weight.”25
Throughout his trips,
Deng stressed China’s relative backwardness and its desire to
acquire technology and expertise from advanced industrial nations.
But he maintained that China’s lack of development did not alter
its determination to resist Soviet and Vietnamese expansion, if
necessary by force and alone.
Deng’s overseas
travel—and his repeated invocations of China’s poverty—were
striking departures from the tradition of Chinese statecraft. Few
Chinese rulers had ever gone abroad. (Of course, since in the
traditional conception they ruled all under heaven, there
technically was no “abroad” to go to.) Deng’s willingness openly to
emphasize China’s backwardness and need to learn from others stood
in sharp contrast to the aloofness of China’s Emperors and
officialdom in dealing with foreigners. Never had a Chinese ruler
proclaimed to foreigners a need for foreign goods. The Qing court
had accepted foreign innovations in limited doses (for example, in
its welcoming attitude to Jesuit astronomers and mathematicians)
but had always insisted that foreign trade was an expression of
Chinese goodwill, not a necessity for China. Mao, too, had stressed
self-reliance, even at the price of impoverishment and
isolation.
Deng began his
travels in Japan. The occasion was the ratification of the treaty
by which normalization of diplomatic relations between Japan and
China had been negotiated. Deng’s strategic design required
reconciliation, not simply normalization, so that Japan could help
isolate the Soviet Union and Vietnam.
For this objective
Deng was prepared to bring to a close half a century of suffering
inflicted on China by Japan. Deng conducted himself exuberantly,
declaring “My heart is full of joy,” and hugging his Japanese
counterpart, a gesture for which his host could have found few
precedents in his own society or, for that matter, in China’s. Deng
made no attempt to hide China’s economic lag: “If you have an ugly
face, it is no use pretending that you are handsome.” When asked to
sign a visitors’ book, he wrote an unprecedented appreciation of
Japanese accomplishments: “We learn from and pay respect to the
Japanese people, who are great, diligent, brave and
intelligent.”26
In November 1978,
Deng visited Southeast Asia, traveling to Malaysia, Singapore, and
Thailand. He branded Vietnam the “Cuba of the East” and spoke of
the newly signed Soviet-Vietnamese treaty as a threat to world
peace.27 In Thailand on November 8, 1978, Deng
stressed that the “security and peace of Asia, the Pacific and the
whole world are threatened” by the Soviet-Vietnamese treaty: “This
treaty is not directed against China alone. . . . It is a very
important worldwide Soviet scheme. You may believe that the meaning
of the treaty is to encircle China. I have told friendly countries
that China is not afraid of being encircled. It has a most
important meaning for Asia and the Pacific. The security and peace
of Asia, the Pacific and the whole world are threatened.”28
On his visit to
Singapore, Deng met a kindred spirit in the extraordinary Prime
Minister Lee Kuan Yew and glimpsed a vision of China’s possible
future—a majority-Chinese society prospering under what Deng would
later describe admiringly as “strict administration” and “good
public order.”29 At the time, China was still desperately
poor, and its own “public order” had barely survived the Cultural
Revolution. Lee Kuan Yew recounted a memorable exchange:
He invited me to visit China again. I said I would when China had recovered from the Cultural Revolution. That, he said, would take a long time. I countered that they should have no problem getting ahead and doing much better than Singapore because we were the descendants of illiterate, landless peasants from Fujian and Guangdong while they had the progeny of the scholars, mandarins and literati who had stayed at home. He was silent.30
Lee paid tribute to
Deng’s pragmatism and willingness to learn from experience. Lee
also used the opportunity to express some of Southeast Asia’s
concerns that might not filter through the Chinese bureaucratic and
diplomatic screen:
China wanted Southeast Asian countries to unite with it to isolate the “Russian bear”; the fact was that our neighbors wanted us to unite and isolate the “Chinese dragon.” There were no “overseas Russians” in Southeast Asia leading communist insurgencies supported by the Soviet Union, as there were “overseas Chinese” encouraged and supported by the Chinese Communist Party and government, posing threats to Thailand, Malaysia, the Philippines, and, to a lesser extent, Indonesia. Also, China was openly asserting a special relationship with the overseas Chinese because of blood ties, and was making direct appeals to their patriotism over the heads of the governments of these countries of which they were citizens. . . . [I] suggested that we discuss how to resolve this problem.31
In the event, Lee
proved correct. The Southeast Asian countries, with the exception
of Singapore, behaved with great caution in confronting either the
Soviet Union or Vietnam. Nevertheless, Deng achieved his
fundamental objectives: his many public statements constituted a
warning of a possible Chinese effort to remedy the situation. And
they were bound to be noted by the United States, which was a key
building block for Deng’s design. That strategic design needed a
more firmly defined relationship with America.