The Changes of China

...Arguments about the comparative importance of "frontier defense" in the north and "maritime defense" in the south and east consumed Chinese officialdom--whether to modernize the army or the navy, whether to resist more strongly the land power or the naval powers...

...Dodo, a chubby girl, was reading The Amityville Horror at her desk..Screamer, a woman in her 30s, was cutting "autumn leaves" out of construction paper and taping them to the wall behind her desk...

...Even if renovation were to become Marxist revolution, the Westerner could still find in Marxism's claim to be the most "scientific" of political ideologies something in common with his own experience...

...The Japanese achieved almost total" encirclement" by closing the famous Burma Road, leaving only theequally famous "hump" air route, from northeast India over into China...

...A mong the vicissitudes in the life of a young novelist is the need to resort to unwholesome ways of getting by...

...Even today, as China's "response to the West" continues, one finds strains of thought and action rooted in the initial reaction to the great crisis of the nineteenth century...

...And he meant it too...

...I found it quickly in the nearby apple orchards, but after the first arduous and demoralizing day of picking, I quit...

...China, especially, was to be the initiator, of the tactic of encirclement, rather than its intended victim at the hands of someone else...

...But the offensive rhetoric of Lin Piao has been replaced by the defensive prescriptions of the current Chinese establishment...

...i n 1299 the Venetian merchant Marco Polo published his account of his journey to the East...

...Call him Bungler...

...It was decided that the French threat was the more dangerous, and the result was a disastrous Sino-French war...

...In the twentieth century, China faced two grave threats to its political survival...

...In this endless ebb and flow the superior man (i.e...

...and "barbarian management," the tedious business of insuring that the fiercer peoples of inner Asia did not threaten China's security...

...The crisis was most acuteduring the period of open and continuous Sino-Japanese warfare between 1937 and 1945...

...imperialism...

...he who sets the danger of disorder before him is he who will maintain the state of order...

...The game is old indeed, and has spawned a vast literature exploring its subtleties, complexities, and difficulties Westerners tend to find the game rather demanding, and few if any have ever excelled at it...

...The first five pages were a simple budgetary report...

...A rising young administrator on the state payroll, Bungler ran a department called Recreation Services at the regional office of the state Parks Commission...

...He wrote: Taking the entire globe, if North America and Western Europe can be called-"the cities of the world," then Asia, Africa, and Latin America constitute "the rural areas of the world...

...The recent visit to the United States of Teng Hsiao-ping--who sat at the controls of a spacecraft atthe Lyndon B. Johnson Space Flight Center in Houston--reminds us that China's process of discovery continues still...

...That war is still within the conscious memory of important leaders in China today, and is a source of useful insights into current Chinese concerns with the Soviet Union, Chinese policy towards the United States, Chinese diplomacy generally, and recent Chinese behavior towards Vietnam particularly...

...imperialism" as the primary threat...

...Better known, of course, was the Boxer Uprising of 1900, a movement with strong roots in chiliastic religion and anti-state violence--even if enlisted by the dynasty in one last great effort to drive the foreigners from the land...

...For twO days I ran Chinese fire drills between the Department of Labor office and the county CETA office, Where they checked my qualifications...

...There were those who argued, quite early, that a thorough renovation of the traditional society was required...

...But this has been the Chinese view of i i i ~I~~O~0~~~Q~~O~0~I~Q~B~0~Q~0Q~B000o0~IQ00Q~I such changes across the centuries...

...The "stones" of Western power inside China were gradually encircled and destroyed during the protracted Chinese revolution...

...The tributary system itself collapsed under Western pressures for the world order represented by 19th-century "imperialism...

...The Japanese played the game of wei-ch'i encirclement with little subtlety...

...Therefore, the superior man, when resting in safety, does not forget that . danger may come...

...Sure...

...As the memorableprologue of his classic put it: "It must be knownl then, that from the creation of Adam to the present day, no man, whether Pagan, or Saracen, or Christian, or other, ever saw or inquired into so many great things as Marco Polo...

...As described by Professor Susan Naquin, its vision encompassed the existence of great eras in human history, each to be ended by cosmic holocaust, leading ultimately to the last violent upheaval which would establish the rule on earth of Maitreya Buddha...

...once placed, they are not moved...

...I have dug ditches, humped around quarter-ton sections of iron fencing, scraped paint from porches...

...The geographical expression "China" is of comparatively recent origin...

...Whatever else may be said of China's use of armed force outside its own borders during the Communist period--the "teaching of lessons," reassuring of clients, posturing on the world scene-one also intuits the sensibility of a generation of leaders whose formative military experience occurred during the 1937-1945 war, even if they themselves fought only part of it...

...Having travelled throughout China during one of its great and prosperous periods, he sensed that the technological, economic, and political sophistication of Cathay would not readily be grasped, even by the educated men of his day...

...Who knows...

...His story was astounding indeed...

...Mass rebellions with exotic names such as "White Lotus" and "Eight Trigrams" were a persistent challenge to the reigning dynasty throughout the nineteenth century...

...And an earlier Chinese hubris gives way to more tempered ambitions...

...They annexed Formosa in 1895, Korea in 1911, and, in effect, Manchuria in 1931 They invaded China proper in 1937, occuPied Peking, and simultaneously moved down the China coast in an effort to close off China's access to outside assistance...

...As one text put it, "the harmony of all things would be achieved...

...By 1940, China' s principal link with the outside world was through the Vietnamese port of Haiphong, connected to southwest China by a French-owned railway system...

...Clearly, an older, more measured Chinese orthodoxy is in control today, but how deeply has it buried apocalyptic passions...

...Bungler took off...

...Had I been out of work for six months...

...This echoes, to be sure, the Communist tactic of the "united front," the effort to define one's enemy as narrowly as possible and one's friends as broadly as possible so as to build the widest coalition against the hostile forces...

...Had Bungler troubled himself to read this, I wondered...

...This latter effort had failed on occasion...

...But more has changed than the substitution of "Soviet hegemonism" for "U.S...

...Lin's glorification of the purifying role of war is redolent of the memory of that older millenarian vision~the "cosmic holocaust," the "terrifying prophecies of catastrophe and destruction" which would create a new order for all men...

...Among men, there will be neither youth nor old age, neither birth nor death...

...Later that morning, Bungler came into our room from his suite down the hall...

...The next day I chanced to be in the YMCA locker room and was telling someone about my flame-out in the orchard when another guy overheard it and said, "Hey, you need a job?I got a job for you...

...The pieces are all of equal power...

...But the emergence of new players, who placed "stones" in Korea or Southeast Asia or the Philippines or even within China itself, added new, and dangerous, dimensions...

...Foreign relations were of two sorts: the management of the traditional "tributary system," whereby China's neighbors acknowledged Chinese suzerainty in both vague and concrete ways and were "rewarded" accordingly...

...There was, for example, a strand of Buddhist thought, scarcely in keeping with the gentleness and passivity we traditionally associate with that faith, that was grounded in millenarian views...

...It had quite naturally developed a hierarchical view of world politics, with itself at the top of the "civilized" world...

...For the student of China's modern history, these are familiar themes...

...Not yet the "polar bear," or the "eagle," China's antagonists nonetheless existed in clear enough outline...

...This suggestive foray into the Chinese strategic consciousness can be amplified by equally interesting historical analogies...

...All will live for eighty-one thousand years...

...The most spectacular and destructive of such uprisings, the Taiping rebellion, had incorporated bastar&*zed Christian notions as well, and was led by a man who thought himself the younger brother of Jesus Christ...

...We come upon Chinese Foreign Minister Huang Hua visiting Teheran in June 1978, urging Third World countries to unite with Western Europe to thwart the designs of a Soviet Union "that wishes to conquer the whole world...

...Weunderstand, they said...

...In the mid-19th century, the industrial-military power of the West reduced China to what Mao Tse-tung called "semi:colonial" status...

...There will be no distinction between men and women...

...Heaven and earth will be in harmony...

...the man of many qualities) seeks to find out when to be aggressive and when submissive, when bold and when cautious, when proud or humble, when to move, when to stand still in the great spontaneous stream of life through which all things are produced...

...The Mongols held the imperial throne in Marco Polo's time...

...For some, there is the temptation of outright crime, like dealing drugs, but this has its drawbacks--e.g., a life sentence under the penal codes of the state where I live...

...In times of such obvious failure, two views have tended to emerge as to both cause and solution...

...Terrific...

...For the less adventurous there is often only the moiling drudgery of brute labor...

...Charles Homer The Changes of China The I Ching (Book of Changes)provides the key to Chinese strategic thought...

...And even the Confucian mandarin, whom the Westerner encountered from the first, seemed far more the "modern" 9man than his own enemies within China--those violent exponents of obscurantist cults and creeds, often xenophobic and militantly "uncivilized" in both Chinese and Western view alike...

...Charles Homer is Senior Legislative Assistant to Senator Daniel Patrick Moyniban of New York.~ The first point of view, congenial to Westerners and understandable to them (and superbly represented in Asia by the successes of Japan, even in the late nineteenth century), has always been the more "respectable...

...As scholars have reached more deeply into the tumultuous history of modern China, they have discovered a netherworld of heterodoxy, folk religion, Buddhist cults, "secret societies," and violent rebellion which had as its purpose not only the overthrow of the "ruling class," but the elimination of alien influences as well...

...Over the centuries, China had established itself as the preeminent power in Asia and, at times, in the world...

...a foot-dragger," "a crook," and "a delinquent...

...Anyway, new at the job and eager to please, I edited the report by detaching the last 25 pages and chucking them into the trash basket...

...he who keeps ruin in mind is he who will preserve his :interests secure...

...1 ~ 0 ~ Q ~ O I m OOOOOOOQOIOOeOOOOOeOIOOOOOleOOOOOODOOOeeOOOOOOeOOOQODOQOOO James HowardKun~stler 1 Was a CETA Goldbrick Put a little social welfare in your life...

...An ancient commentary on The Book of Changes provides the necessary caveat: "He who keeps danger in mind is he who will rest safe in his seat...

...I didn't enjoy it very much, but it was necessary at the time...

...Manchu imperial policy of the nineteenth century became a large part of Chinese foreign and military policy of the twentieth...

...The next time I saw Bungler, which was not that day or even that week, he said, "Swell job...

...He had some papers in his hand...

...The American Spectator May 1979 technically, since I had collected the advance from my publisher the previous spring...

...Commemorating the 20th anniversary of Japan's capitulation, Lin applied the Maoist dictum of "encircling the city from the countryside" to the global arena in order to create a new strategy for the final defeat of "U.S...

...For the .situation is more confused...

...The highway ol~ened in June 1978, and, as described by Reuters, climbs 15,000 feet over the Kunjharab Pass, having been carved out of mountain walls and glaciers" "The highway will speed goods and equipment toward the port of Karachi for transshipment...

...This highway is a little-noticed "stone" in the "protracted game," but the turmoil in Iran, and the pressures against Pakistan that originate in the new Soviet satellite of Afghanistan, absorb the attention of Chinese players of international welch 'i...

...There were others who believed that it was not so much tradition as such that was wanting, as vitality in parts of the tradition...

...It is in fact the Manchu empire, of which the historic China proper was but one part, the others being Manchuria itself, Inner Mongolia, Tibet, and Chinese T~arkestan (Sinkiang...

...The rest, about 25 pages, were an angry indictment of Bungler's performance, calling him by turns "an oaf...

...Nobody seemed to be doing anything...

...Connecting with a railhead in China, the new highway is intended to cut days, perhaps weeks, offthe present route across the Pacific from China to the West...

...While we wondered whether the recent Chinese invasion of Vietnam would occasion a third world war, they treated the "reversal of alliances" implicit in the invasion as all part of a day's work...

...French attacks on Chinese territory decided the issue, and the Chinese were forced to acknowledge Vietnam's "independence," ~that is, French predominance...

...I'm your boyW...

...The empty board is gradually filled as the players alternately place their pieces...

...It is now .for China to play the game so that more distant positions of hostile power can also be neutralized...

...FO r it was not only the carriers of China's "high culture" who were drawn into the struggle against the Westerner...

...that there might be found within the vast cultural, intellectual, and religious tradition of China a force of sufficient power to expel the hated foreigners and enforce China's isolation from the rest of the world...

...The Manchus were overthrown in 1912, and their empire became a republic, but the problems endured...

...Sprout, an earth-mother type who moonlighted as a clerk in an organic food store, was perusing a wholesale catalog...

...With one novel sold and in production, the penurious advance long since spent, and no ABC mini-series in the offing, I began to do what's known as a"hurt dance" and was constrained to look for work...

...Now this was a very curious document...

...Indeed, the Chinese government thought of responding with an invasion of northern Vietnam in an attempt to reopen a now critical line of supply, but finally did not...

...a shirker," "a liar...

...One .. after the other, the great port cities fell under Japanese control...

...And what better explains the Chinese absorption, for many years, in the Karakoram Highway linking China and Pakistan, a project rightly called "a masterpiece of modern road engineering...

...I knew things were going to be weird within my first hour on the job...

...In September 1965, then Chinese Minister of Natiorml Defense Lin Piao published a sensationalized article entitled "Long Live the Victory of the People's War...

...For China, the great game of strategy is very old, intimately associated with China's survival as a political unit across the centuriesl Before the rise of the West, the game was relatively 9simple and stacked in China's favor...

...When the time destined by Heaven has been fulfilled, this new universe will be established...

...No problem...

...and it was then the turn of venturesome Chinese to report on the marvels which gave to the West unprecedented wealth and power...

...It had acquired an inherited sense of its own superiority and selfsufficiency...

...Capitalizing on the fall of France, Japan pressured the local colonial administration to close the system to Chinese shipping...

...I was having a hard time while waiting for my six-figure paperback sale, I explained...

...Unlike chess, where the object is the capture of a single king, the object of welch 'i is the surrounding of the opponent's pieces through gradual expansion Of control of "territory" on the board...

...The "Third World" is itself split between Soviet The American Spectator May 1979 "stones" encircling China and Chinese "stones" hopefully to be played in the counterencirclement, that is, the political and diplomatic isolation, of the Soviet Union...

...Provoked to the point of imprudence by the desire of Lin and Mao to drown the West "in a sea of people's war," we are now reassured by the words of Teng and Hua that our enemies have since become theirs: The Chinese have embraced this transformation with apparent ease...

...Then, for a brief and shining season, CETA came into my life--or rather, I came into its life, since it seems to have a life of its own...

...In a sense, the contemporary world revolution also presents.a picture of the encirclement of cities by the rural areas...

...There were five of us in the office, a scabrousroom furnished with cast-off desks and odd-lot crates of fossil paperwork from the previous, Republican, administration...

...Peking was occupied in 1901 by a joint, eight-nation, expeditionary force, and it seemed for a while as if the "melon" might finally be carved up...

...After a final cursory "interview" with Bungler at his office, I was hired as a Recreation Assistant...

...Since World War II, the proletarian revolutionary movement has for various reasgns been temporarily held back in the North American and West European capitalist countries, while the people's revolutionary movement in Asia, Africa, and Latin America has been growing vigorously...

...Northeast India in 1962, North Viemam in 1979, even the Chinese interest in the Bangladesh crisis of 1971, bespeak a certain conviction in Peking that the isolation of China is once again a real possibility...

...China's greatest territorial expansion, and its greatest humiliations, occurred during the reign of the Manchus (1644-1912...

...The second crisis was the 50-year effort of Japan--from the Sino-Japanese war of 1895 to the end of World War II in 1945 to establish "hegemony" over China...

...To note the change in Chinese strategic rhetoric over the past 15 years is to grasp how China's view of the world situation has changed from one of opportunity to threat...

...Professor Naquin writes of "terrifying prophecies of catastrophe and destruction," which would finally establish "the true moral order, the basis for all relationships between men and between heaven and earth and men...

...Then, as in the 1960s, relations with the Russians had seriously deteriorated because of Russian pressure against China, and relations with the "West," in this instance France, were threatened by the ongoing French conquest of Vietnam (traditionally China's "tributary"), and a possible extension therefrom of French influence directly into China's southwest...

...Boorman's analysis of Maoist strategy at home offers more than an intriguing metaphor for Chinese strategic thinking, for there is indeed ample evidence that the encirclement-counterencirclement approach to long-term conflict is well-ingrained in the Chinese temperament...

...It was possible, they claimed, to borrow Western technique so as to defend the independence of the polity and even to restore it to a position of first rank among the nations...

...The first came at the very turn of the century, when the Empire declared war on all the major Western powers and enlisted the Boxer sect to drive the foreigners out of the country...

...Thus, if one finds a tension in China today between radicals and moderates, between Maoists and Chouists, between cosmopolitans and xenophobes, one is not so far away, in historical terms, The American SpectatOr May 1979 intersections...

...Americans, whose history teaches them that the stream of life moves in one direction only, are not given to such introspection, but to near-spontaneous enthusiasms~including the prospect for permanent harmony between the United States and China...

...s the Chinese state decayed, the pressures became more obvious and more ominous...

...He had an 9opening there, a CETA position...

...His movement was suppressed after 15 years of struggle that resulted in millions of deaths...

...The oldest of the ancient Chinese classics, the I Ching (The Book of Changes), is more than two millennia old...

...Dumdum, the only other male in the office, was reading People magazine...

...For example, at the height of the war between the United States and Vietnam in the 1960s, Communist China faced a situation not so different from that of Imperial China in the 1880s...

...It was a "final report," he explained, compiled by my predecessor, and since I was "a writer," would I please look it over and edit it...

...Instead, we now find a seemingly more limited objective, pale perhaps when compared with exhortations for vast upheaval but, once again, more understandable to the Western mind...

...It took several centuries for the sense of wonder to be reversed...

...Charles San has written that the central idea of this opaque book is that "good fortune and misfortune are constantly overcoming one another...

...I told him...

...Well, yes, James Howard Kunstler is author of The Wampanaki Tales, a humorous novel of summer camp life to be published by Doubleday this month...

...The job paid $120 a week, net...

...For believers, it was sometimes important to hasten the day...