How Mao Bluffed Dulles
BORKENAU, FRANZ
Was There a 'Brink of War'? How Mao Bluffed Dulles In the following observations, which deal with the Formosa crisis, I shall not discuss Secretary Dulles's controversial article in Life and the...
...When you take a feint for a serious move and in the greatest hurry hit out--and hit thin air, your adversary reaps the benefits of panic...
...Having diverted your attention to the wrong point, he trips you swiftly and, while you are pointing an H-bomb at him, strips you of the revolver in your pocket which was his only object...
...This has become clear since the Peking People's Daily published Mao's speech on the agrarian question before the Party Central Committee last July 31...
...How are we sure Mao was not in earnest about Formosa...
...Mao provoked the Formosa crisis, and with it an Allied renunciation of a mainland invasion, in order to shield that revolution...
...implicit in all that was said and done in America, in all that was transacted between America on the one hand and Britain and France on the other at that time under the circumstances...
...Dulles might reply that the Formosa crisis happened before the start of the Second Chinese Revolution...
...We might nevertheless have avoided disaster, had we simply disbelieved Mao's threats, which in any case did not deserve credence: had we not, as we have done so many times in the last two years, panicked before the non-existent threat of global war...
...Here a little chronology is in order...
...The point is that Mao was then moving into a phase where much less than a major war could jeopardize his regime...
...It follows that the issue of social transformation was under debate in Peking almost from the moment of the conquest of the mainland...
...How Mao Bluffed Dulles In the following observations, which deal with the Formosa crisis, I shall not discuss Secretary Dulles's controversial article in Life and the debate which followed its publication...
...Borkenau, Mao Tse-tung's main goal was Second Revolution inside China to collectivize the peasants and build heavy industry (a revolution the author described in The New Leader of November 28...
...I think that only half the credit for Communist victory in China belongs to Mao...
...In this situation, we thought that Mao seriously wished to attack Formosa (fighting the U.S...
...The Chinese peasant has no collecti-vist traditions of any kind...
...Yet, in view of the pending U.S...
...I think we succumbed tragically last spring to a crude bluff...
...from that belief an unholy sequence of disasters has followed...
...Never could smaller forces exert a greater threat...
...But I do deny that anything anybody in the West did prevented Mao from doing anything he wished to do...
...Seventh Fleet if necessary) and Mr...
...In such a situation, no American bombs, no massive Kuomintang invasion, but simply a few Nationalist parachutists might have been enough to rouse whole provinces to revolt and to threaten the regime's very existence...
...Mao Tse-tung must have made up his mind...
...Dulles tells us that he, stern defender of our interests, did not panic...
...undertaken in spite of the war...
...His critics, whatever their objections, seem agreed that it was a success...
...Now we shall meet Communist China again in the international arena, not in bluff but in full earnest, within the next three to five years...
...According to Dr...
...The spine of the Chinese people will have been broken...
...They will therefore feel infinitely stronger and, in addition, they will be well on the way to building up a major heavy industry...
...that the final decision must have been debated in higher Party echelons months before the proclamation of the new line in July 1955...
...In other words, Mao got us to tie our own hands at the very moment of his greatest weakness...
...And China's industrial base is much smaller now than Russia's was in 1929...
...Mao proposes to achieve this transformation by stages: total agrarian collectivization of about 80 million peasant holdings within roughly two years...
...Furthermore, both sides in last spring's Formosa crisis-those who threatened atomic war and those who opposed such threats--may have been equally in state of panic--a panic induced by total misreading of Chinese Communist intentions...
...I am not a warmonger, still less a McCarthyist...
...Assuming, however, that the internal Iran-formation was serious and the propaganda over Formosa a bluff, the two campaigns tally perfectly...
...That speech ought to have caused more excitement in the chancelleries of the world than any of the dozen fake crises Mao Tse-tung has created abroad in recent years, crises Mao created largely to cover up precisely what he blurted out on the last July day of last year...
...Borkenau, one of the world's leading experts on the international Communist movement, is author of definitive history of European Communism...
...More precisely, they would have gone to such lengths until Mao's speech last July and the beginning of the implementation of that speech...
...which we just mentioned, and another in 1952 (prompted by the late Kao Kang, leader of the party's left extremists...
...Mao and Khrushchev knew only too well that the West would never take the initiative for a major war (and they still know it, even if Dulles has roared like a lion, because the ultimate decisions are by no means his...
...And we shall have only ourselves to thank, for we might have prevented it both after the war and in 1955...
...and that, while this debate was taking concrete shape...
...never could one of the world's worst aggressors be maimed at a cheaper price and with less risk of major war...
...He has also contributed to most of the leading political magazines on the Continent...
...We have paid dearly for believing him...
...The present final decision to launch a full-scale social revolution was preceded by two lesser attempts in the same direction: one in 1954...
...If Mao does succeed, the face of the world will be altered...
...Once such a will has been disintegrated, however, all the invasion bases in the China Sea cannot by themselves produce it...
...Mild attempts to move in this direction at the beginning of 1954 already led to widespread floods and famine...
...Why the bluff...
...Certainly it was not out of fear of Western determination...
...When the Korean War was over, the issue was raised again, but the objections always raised by moderates (whom Mao now attacks violently) rose to fierce resistance when the consequences of such extreme action, even in peacetime, became apparent...
...gives some idea of the urgency of the whole issue, but this push also showed that a Second Revolution could not be successfully completed with a war on...
...the Chinese are a trading people...
...most major organs of the Western press devoted about as much space to it as to the latest Government reshuffle in Australia...
...It would be foolish, after the Russian experience, to deny the very real possibility of success in such a plan...
...Had there been an Allied will to invade the Chinese mainland, the loss of all Chiang's coastal islands would not have been a decisive obstacle...
...What Mao succeeded in getting was a virtual (if not a formal) guarantee of non-invasion provided he made no overt moves toward Formosa...
...The first of these, no doubt, was the Korean War...
...Mao made us believe that at that moment and under these circumstances he really wanted Formosa...
...This, moreover, should be self-evident to students of Communism...
...Nor do the respective merits and demerits of Republicans and Democrats, of America and Britain, matter greatly if one takes a viewpoint outside these debates...
...I do not think it matters greatly whether Life's account of what Dulles said was entirely accurate...
...A year or two ago, I believe, the Chinese masses would have gone to any lengths to prevent the return of the corrupt Kuomintang bureaucrat, the looting Kuomintang soldier, the Kuomintang-protected usurer and Kuomintang-fostered inflation...
...After the public rejection of a mainland invasion implicit in the cession of the Tachens, any such attempt, even if undertaken with the small means which might now prove sufficient, would produce such contentions within the U.S., such a crisis between Washington and London, such reactions in Europe and Asia, that the thing could hardly be launched and could never succeed...
...But Mao's speech did not create much of an impression...
...the other half belongs to the leaders of the Kuomintang whose behavior transformed innumerable peasants and intellectuals into Communists...
...True, at the time not even the greatest political genius could have seen Mao's real motives as we can see them now...
...I should say here that I am not a great admirer of Chiang Kai-shek...
...In ten years, the Chinese Communists will be able to deal with both Russia and the West on a level of practical, if not statistical, equality of power, for what they will lack in economic development they will make up by the vastness of their country, the immensity of their population, the fanaticism of their creed...
...I do not regard the evacuation of the Tachen Islands as a great disaster (though I do not regard it as a triumph either...
...election campaign and of the constant need for Anglo-American recriminations, the world pays no real attention...
...I shall try to demonstrate, by contrast, that, in provoking the Formosa crisis, Mao had a definite object which he fully achieved--an object of such paramount importance that this generation will never get over the results of his success...
...This guarantee was implicit in the cession of the Tachens and the crisis of morale it produced on Formosa...
...However, it is almost certain that now, to protect their beloved farm plots from the greedy hands of the Communist regime, to avoid being driven into the cities by the millions--in short, to avoid all the horrors now descending on them--the Chinese peasants, intellectuals and soldiers would welcome not only the much-reformed Chiang Kai-shek but the Emperor Pu-yi, the Dowager Empress of evil memory, or even all the evil spirits of Buddhist hell, if only they could rid them of a regime which, after having freed their land from usurers and corruptionists, is now taking it away wholesale...
...Borkenau currently resides in Zurich, where he writes for Swiss and German papers...
...Our leaders got their deserts for not understanding that the pretended aim of any Communist action never, as a matter of Communist principle, corresponds to its real aim...
...That price was paid symbolically in the shape of the Tachen Islands...
...It is rather the ground common to all sides in this matter which I wish to challenge...
...Dulles thought that atomic threats were required...
...In a word, the Formosa crisis was started at about the time Mao decided to launch his Second Revolution...
...Of course, it was important to Mao to eliminate Chiang's invasion bases, and it was a victory for him, and not for Dulles, that he got the most important of them...
...This in itself was advantageous to Mao, but it was not his major aim...
...The push of 1952...
...But there can be just as much panic in retorting to enemy diplomacy by threatening world war as there is in running away...
...Dulles claimed credit for a successful diplomatic defense of Formosa by using the atomic threat...
...Mao was in a hurry to settle because he sought not crude material advantages, but political ones...
...I shall attempt to prove that it was a terrible defeat...
...How many opportunities do we think we can play away without perishing...
...Another proof that foreign war and social transformation are incompatible in Mao's view...
...Then all we are experiencing today in Asia, Africa and Latin America will look like child's play...
...This, presumably, had been his chief reason for accepting an Indo-China settlement which did not include Communist rule in Laos, Cambodia and South Vietnam...
...Dulles's panic consisted in believing that Mao was seriously preparing a massive attack on Formosa...
...That speech announced the official beginning of a Second Revolution in China, aimed at bringing China's hitherto individualist economy and social structure into line with its Communist totalitarian regime...
...Several factors, however, acted to delay the social transformation...
...His prime objective was to create the mistaken impression that, to safeguard Formosa, the U.S...
...That is why Mao, who had calculated these dangers in advance, had to guarantee not simply peace in the Formosa Straits but complete paralysis of the Nationalist Government before he began to expropriate the peasants...
...What will happen now that a full-scale revolution is being launched...
...In any case, it should be clear that since 1954 the task has never been off the agenda...
...transformation of China into a great industrial power within fifteen years...
...Last spring's crisis roused apprehensions all over the world and activated all those determined to get Formosa into Communist hands...
...For all these reasons, such a transformation, performed in such haste (its speed was the crux of an intra-Party struggle), cannot proceed without producing a most terrible economic and political crisis...
...The word "revolution" is not being used figuratively...
...I am not a partisan of preventive war, massive retaliation or anything of that kind...
...Had he started the two eam-paigus in earnest at the same time, one would have to regard him as madder than Hitler...
...Mao has much less to build on than Stalin had in 1029...
...Yet, as in Indo-China he had settled for the time being without Saigon and Pnompenh, he now settled without Quemoy and Matsu...
...Private business in China was much more frequent, more successful and more respected than it ever was in Russia...
...it will be an unresisting instrument in the hands of its self-appointed leaders...
...it was, certainly, his only reason for starting, and then settling, the Formosa crisis...
...The controversy provoked by Secretary of State John Foster Dulles's interview with Life's James Shepley may be completely irrelevant, Franz Borkenau suggests here...
...on the contrary, where others advised meek retreat, he threatened use of the H-bomb, and Peking bowed before him...
...It involves more than half a billion men, women and children, and will completely transform the most populous country of the world...
...total nationalization of urban business within about five years...
...Or is our doom implicit in the smug assumption that we can make as many mistakes as we like without approaching a position where we can no longer effectively react...
...had to pay some sort of price...
Vol. 39 • January 1956 • No. 5
