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China and the Superpowers—The New Equilibrium

The real drama of the 1980s was not in Washington’s and Beijing’s relations with each other, but in their respective relationships with Moscow. The impetus was a series of significant shifts in the strategic landscape.

In assessing China’s policies, one contingency can generally be excluded: that Chinese policymakers overlooked a set of discoverable facts. So when China went along with the ambiguous language and the flexible interpretation of the Taiwan clause in the Third Communiqué, it can only have been because it thought cooperation with the United States would fulfill its other national purposes.

When Ronald Reagan came into office, the strategic offensive started by the Soviet Union in the late 1970s had not yet run its course. In the years since the collapse of the American position in Indochina, the Soviet Union and its proxies had embarked on an unprecedented (and nearly indiscriminate) series of advances in the developing world: in Angola, Ethiopia, Afghanistan, and Indochina. But the U.S.-China rapprochement had set up a significant bulwark against further expansion. Powered by the convictions of Deng and his colleagues and skillful cooperation by American officials of both political parties, the horizontal line Mao envisioned had, in fact, taken shape.

By the mid-1980s, the Soviet Union faced coordinated defense—and, in many cases, active resistance—on almost all of its borders. In the United States, Western Europe, and East Asia, a loose coalition of nearly all the industrial countries had formed against the Soviet Union. In the developed world, the Soviet Union’s only remaining allies were the Eastern European satellites in which it stationed troops. Meanwhile, the developing world had proven skeptical about the benefits of popular “liberation” under Soviet and Cuban arms. In Africa, Asia, and Latin America, Soviet expansionist efforts were turning into costly stalemates or discredited failures. In Afghanistan, the Soviet Union experienced many of the same trials America had undergone in Vietnam—in this case, backed by coordinated efforts of the United States, China, the Gulf States, and Pakistan to sponsor and train an armed resistance. In Vietnam itself, Moscow’s attempt to bring Indochina united under Hanoi into the Soviet orbit met a forceful rebuff from China, facilitated by American cooperation. Beijing and Washington were—as Deng had so vividly described it to Carter—“chopping off” Soviet fingers. At the same time, the American strategic buildup, especially the Strategic Defense Initiative championed by Reagan, posed a technological challenge that the stagnant and overburdened Soviet economy—already bearing a defense burden three times that of the United States as a percentage of each country’s respective GDP—could not begin to meet.⁷

At this high point in Sino-American cooperation, the Reagan White House and the top Chinese leadership had roughly congruent assessments of Soviet weakness; but they drew significantly different conclusions about the policy implications of this new state of affairs. Reagan and his top officials perceived Soviet disarray as an opportunity to go on the offensive. Pairing a major military buildup with a new ideological assertiveness, they sought to pressure the Soviet Union both financially and geopolitically and drive for what amounted to victory in the Cold War.

The Chinese leaders had a similar conception of Soviet weakness, but they drew the opposite lesson: they saw it as an invitation to recalibrate the global equilibrium. Beginning in 1969, they had tacked toward Washington to redress China’s precarious geopolitical position; they had no interest in the global triumph of American values and Western liberal democracy that Reagan proclaimed as his ultimate goal. Having “touched the buttocks of the tiger” in Vietnam, Beijing concluded that it had withstood the high point of the Soviet threat. It now behooved China to tack back toward an enhanced freedom of maneuver.

In the 1980s, therefore, the euphoria of the original opening had run its course; the overriding Cold War concerns of the recent past were being overcome. Sino-American relations settled into the sort of interactions major powers have with each other more or less routinely with fewer high points or troughs. The beginning of the decline of Soviet power played a role although the chief actors on both the American and the Chinese side had become so used to Cold War patterns that it took them a while to recognize it. The weak Soviet response to the Chinese invasion of Vietnam marked the beginning of an at first gradual, then accelerating, Soviet decline. The three transitions in Moscow—from Leonid Brezhnev to Yuri Andropov in 1982, from Andropov to Konstantin Chernenko in 1984, and from Chernenko to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1985—at a minimum signified that the Soviet Union would be preoccupied with its domestic crises. The American rearmament begun under Carter and accelerated under Reagan gradually altered the balance of power and constrained the Soviet readiness to intervene around its periphery.

Most of the Soviet gains of the 1970s were reversed—though several of these retreats did not take place until the George H. W. Bush administration. The Vietnamese occupation of Cambodia was ended in 1990, elections were held in 1993, and refugees prepared to return home; Cuban troops withdrew from Angola by 1991; the Communist-backed government in Ethiopia collapsed in 1991; in 1990, the Sandinistas in Nicaragua were brought to accept free elections, a risk no governing Communist Party had ever before been prepared to take; perhaps the most important, Soviet armies withdrew from Afghanistan in 1989.

Soviet retreats gave Chinese diplomacy a new flexibility to maneuver. Chinese leaders spoke less of military containment and began to explore their scope for a new diplomacy with Moscow. They continued to list three conditions for improving relations with the Soviets: evacuation of Cambodia; ending Soviet troop concentrations in Siberia and Mongolia along the northern Chinese border; and evacuation of Afghanistan. These demands were in the process of being fulfilled largely by changes in the balance of power that made Soviet forward positions untenable and the decisions to withdraw inevitable. The United States received reassurances that China was not ready to move toward Moscow—the Chinese proving that two sides could play at triangular diplomacy. The reassurances, in any event, had a dual purpose: they affirmed continued adherence to the established strategy of preventing Soviet expansion, but they also served to bring China’s growing options before the United States.

China soon began to exercise its new options globally. In a conversation I had with Deng in September 1987, he applied the new framework of analysis to the Iran-Iraq War, then raging in its fifth year. The United States was backing Iraq—at least enough to prevent its being defeated by the revolutionary regime in Tehran. Deng argued that China needed “leeway” to take a more “flexible position” toward Iran so that it could play a more significant role in the diplomacy to end the war.

Deng had been carrying out Mao’s horizontal line concept during the confrontation with the Soviet Union. It was now being transformed back into a Three Worlds approach in which China stood apart from superpower competition and in which adherence to an independent foreign policy would allow it to pursue its preferences in all three circles: the superpowers; the developed country circle; and the Third World.

Hu Yaobang, a Deng protégé and Party Secretary, outlined the prevailing Chinese foreign policy concept to the Communist Party’s Twelfth National Congress in September 1982. Its key provision was a reprise of Mao’s “China has stood up”: “China never attaches itself to any big power or group of powers, and never yields to pressure from any big power.”⁸ Hu began with a tour d’horizon outlining China’s critical assessment of American and Soviet foreign policies and a list of demands for actions by which each power could demonstrate its good faith. The failure to resolve the Taiwan issue meant that “a cloud has all along hung over the relations” between China and the United States. Relations would “develop soundly” only if the United States ceased interfering in what China regarded as its purely internal affair. Meanwhile, Hu commented loftily, “We note that Soviet leaders have expressed more than once the desire to improve relations with China. But deeds, rather than words, are important.”⁹

China, for its part, was solidifying its position in the Third World, standing apart from and to some degree against both superpowers: “The main forces jeopardizing peaceful coexistence among nations today are imperialism, hegemonism and colonialism. . . . The most important task for the people of the world today is to oppose hegemonism and safeguard world peace.”¹⁰

In effect, China claimed a unique moral stature as the largest of the “neutral” powers, standing above superpower contests:

We have always firmly opposed the arms race between the superpowers, stood for the prohibition of the use of nuclear weapons and for their complete destruction and demanded that the superpowers be the first to cut their nuclear and conventional arsenals drastically. . . .

China regards it as her sacred international duty to struggle resolutely against imperialism, hegemonism and colonialism together with the other third world countries.¹¹

It was traditional Chinese foreign policy served up at a Communist Party Congress: self-reliance, moral aloofness, and superiority, coupled with a commitment to negate superpower aspirations.

A 1984 State Department memorandum sent to President Reagan explained that China had positioned itself

both to support [the American] military buildup against Soviet expansionism and to attack superpower rivalry as the major cause of global tension. As a result, China is able to pursue parallel strategic interests with the US and, at the same time, to strengthen its relations with what it perceives to be an ascendant Third World bloc.¹²

In 1985 a CIA report described China as “maneuvering in the triangle” by cultivating closer ties with the Soviet Union through a series of high-level meetings and inter–Communist Party exchanges of a protocol level and frequency not seen since the Sino-Soviet split. The analysis noted that Chinese leaders had resumed referring to their Soviet counterparts as “comrade,” and calling the Soviet Union a “socialist” (as opposed to “revisionist”) country. Top Chinese and Soviet officials had held substantive consultations on arms control—an unthinkable concept in the previous two decades—and during a week-long 1985 visit by the Chinese Vice Premier Yao Yilin to Moscow, the two sides signed a landmark agreement on bilateral trade and economic cooperation. ¹³

The notion of overlapping circles was more or less what Mao had been advancing toward the end of his life. But the practical consequence was limited. The Third World defined itself by its distinction from the two superpowers. It would lose this status if it shifted definitively to one side or another, even in the guise of admitting a superpower to its ranks. As a practical matter, China was on the way to becoming a superpower, and it was acting like one even now, when it was just beginning its reforms. The Third World, in short, would exercise major influence only if one of the superpowers joined, and then, by definition, it would stop being a Third World. So long as the Soviet Union was a nuclear superpower and relations with it were precarious, China would have no incentive to move away from the United States. (After the Soviet Union’s collapse, there were only two circles left, and the question would be whether China would step into the place vacated by the Soviet Union as a challenger or opt for cooperation with the United States.) The Sino-American relationship of the 1980s was, in short, in transition from a Cold War pattern to a global international order that created new challenges for China-U.S. partnership. All this assumed that the Soviet Union remained the basic security threat.

The architect of the opening to China, Richard Nixon, understood the world in the same way. In a memorandum to President Reagan after a private visit to China in late 1982, Nixon wrote:

I believe it is very much in our interest to encourage the Chinese to play a greater role in the third world. The more successful they are, the less successful the Soviet Union will be. . . .

What brought us together primarily in 1972 was our common concern about the threat of Soviet aggression. While that threat is far greater today than it was in 1972, the major unifying factor which will draw us closer together in the next decade could well be our economic interdependence.¹⁴

Nixon went on to urge that, for the next decade, the United States, its Western allies, and Japan should work jointly to speed the economic development of China. He had a vision of an entirely new international order emerging based essentially on using China’s influence to build the Third World into an anti-Soviet coalition. But not even Nixon’s prescience extended to a world in which the Soviet Union had collapsed and, within a generation, China would be in a position where much of the world’s economic health depended on its economic performance. Or where the question would be raised whether China’s rise would make international relations bipolar again.

George Shultz, Reagan’s redoubtable Secretary of State and a trained economist, came up with another, American conception of concentric circles, which placed the Sino-U.S. relationship into a context beyond the Soviet-American conflict. He argued that overemphasis on China’s indispensability for dealing with the Soviet threat gave China an excessive bargaining advantage.¹⁵ Relations with it should be on the basis of strict reciprocity. In such a diplomacy, China would play its role for its own national reasons. Chinese goodwill should result from common projects in the joint interest. The purpose of China policy should be to elaborate these common interests. Simultaneously, the United States would seek to reinvigorate its alliance with Japan—the country in which Mao, a few years earlier, had urged American officials to “spend more time”—a fellow democracy, and now, after decades of rapid growth in the aftermath of the Second World War, a major global economic player. (Decades of intervening economic malaise have obscured the fact that in the 1980s Japan’s economic capacity not only vastly outmatched China’s, but was assumed by many analysts to be on the verge of surpassing that of the United States.) This relationship was given a new footing by the personal camaraderie that developed between Reagan and Japan’s Prime Minister Yasuhiro Nakasone—or, as it came to be known in the media, the “Ron and Yasu show.”

Both the United States and China were edging away from the previous alignment in which they saw themselves as strategic partners facing a common existential threat. Now that the Soviet menace had begun to recede, China and the United States were in effect partners of convenience on selected issues on which their interests aligned.

During the Reagan period, no fundamental new tensions developed, and inherited issues like Taiwan were handled undramatically. Reagan performed with characteristic vitality during a 1984 state visit to China—at several points even conjuring up phrases from classical Chinese poetry and the ancient divination manual the I Ching or Book of Changes to describe the cooperative relationship between the United States and China. Attempting more Mandarin Chinese than any of his predecessors, Reagan even invoked the Chinese idioms “tong li he zuo” (“connect strength, work together”) and “ hu jing hu hui” (“mutual respect, mutual benefit”) to describe the U.S.-China relationship.¹⁶ Yet Reagan never developed a record of close exchanges with any Chinese counterpart as he had with Nakasone—for that matter, no American President did with his Chinese counterpart—and his visit was given no major issues to settle and confined itself to a review of the world situation. When Reagan criticized a certain unnamed “major power” for massing troops on China’s borders and threatening its neighbors, this portion of his speech was omitted from the Chinese broadcast.

As the Reagan years ended, the situation in Asia was the most tranquil it had been in decades. A half century of war and revolution in China, Japan, Korea, Indochina, and maritime Southeast Asia had given way to a system of Asian states on essentially Westphalian lines—following the pattern of sovereign states emerging in Europe at the end of the Thirty Years’ War in 1648. With the exception of periodic provocations from the impoverished and isolated North Korea and the insurgency against the Soviet occupation in Afghanistan, Asia was now a world of discrete states with sovereign governments, recognized borders, and a nearly universal tacit agreement to refrain from involvement in each other’s domestic political and ideological alignments. The project of exporting Communist revolution—taken up eagerly in turn by Chinese, North Korean, and North Vietnamese proponents—had drawn to a close. An equilibrium between the various centers of power had been preserved, in part due to the exhaustion of the parties and in part due to American (and subsequently Chinese) efforts to turn back various contestants for dominance. Within this context, a new era of Asian economic reform and prosperity was taking root—one that in the twenty-first century may well return the region to its historic role as the world’s most productive and prosperous continent.

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China and the Superpowers—The New Equilibrium

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