The Sources of Chinese Statecraft

...One, the tribute system, obliged the rulers of non-Chinese "barbarians" to guard the hedges of the imperial enclave, to Adda B. Bozeman, a new contributor, is Professor of International Relations at Sarah Lawrence College...

...The historical facts????that dynasties usually usurped the celestial mandate by military force, that China has always been plagued by internecine wars and popular revolts, that the contours of the realm have seldom if ever been reliably defined?have never been allowed to weaken the pervasive impact of this Sinocen-tric ideology on non-Chinese neighboring peoples...

...Government, then, can be successful only if it is headed by one who can make his subjects delight in war...

...Similarly, Mao Tse-tung instructs guerrillas????the modern variety of the "fiery spies" described in the artasastra, the Hindu analogue of The Art of War????that they must be "as cautious as virgins and as quick as rabbits," mobile and forever changing in appearance so that "when you [the enemy] want to fight us, we won't let you and you can't even find us...

...During the period of the warring states, when All-Under-Heaven was in chaos and large states were eating up smaller ones as systematically as silkworms eat mulberry leaves, the Legalists realized that a science of political organization was needed if China was to triumph over its foreign enemies, cope with domestic turbulence, and coordinate fanning with large-scale hydraulic works, wall building, tax collecting, etc...

...He must also initiate and coordinate "multilevel operations," especially through the use of double agents, for "an army without secret agents is exactly like a man without ears or eyes...

...Just as "tunneling operations"?vividly described in Sun Tzu's and Mao's manuals????are designed to undermine the physical foundations of the enemy's military position, psychological offensives are meant to subvert his moral and intellectual bases...

...Yet China succeeded in concealing the real shape of its intentions, revealed after the Nehru government had been outwitted and enfeebled...

...The theoreticians, diplomats and generals who perfected this dimension of Chinese statecraft, and then succeeded in unifying China for the first time, are known collectively as the Legalists or Realists...

...Experience in the class struggle of the era of imperialism teaches us that the working class and the toiling masses cannot defeat the armed bourgeois and landlords except by the power of the gun...

...And much the same scenario, similarly camouflaged, has been steadily perfected in the northern provinces of Buddhist Burma, Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam...

...Hence the stress in his writings and those of his Legalist mentors on the creation of "agromilitary communes...

...Peace is scorned in one text as "the source of the six maggots of the state...

...Areading of the works of Mao Tse-tung-Who frequently paraphrases Sun Tzu?­Shows that The Art of War joins Leninism as the living source of Maoist thought and statecraft...

...It is a pastime, inci-dentlv, bearing no resemblance to Ping-Pong...

...Among them none has achieved more lasting renown than Sun Tzu (ca...

...They are also comparable in his view to the basic processes of play and command decision that mark wei-ch'i, the game of strategy favored by Chinese statesmen and literati throughout the ages...

...Other forms, like mass organization and mass struggles, are also extremely important...

...For just as filial piety at home could rightfully be enforced by killing misbehaving offspring, so might the art of persuasion in the community of unequal states be supplemented by the rod of war...

...act as middlemen in trade operations beneficial to the Middle Kingdom, and to comply with numerous ceremonial requirements such as the kowtow and the periodic visit to the royal court...

...The other is the new Maoist realm, in which, the optimists among us contend, the crude principles of Leninist-Stalinist statecraft are steadily, albeit painfully, being aligned with the diplomatic practices symbolized in the rhetoric of the UN...

...Also developed under the aegis of Confucianism were two diplomatically pivotal institutions instrumental in assuring Chinese supremacy on the Asian continent...

...Hence, too, in the Maoist blueprint for world politics, the constant metaphoric references (presented, for example, in Lin Piao's famous speech of 1965) to all non-Westem societies as "the countryside"????rural base areas that need to be organized so they may encircle, throttle and eventually capture "the city system" portrayed by Europe and the United States...

...In the Maoist theory of insurgency, as in the wei-ch'i context, time is long, the grid is large, and warfare is protracted or continuous, shifting from one sub-board of the world arena to the next...

...The Chairman explains: "Thus there are two forms of encirclement by the enemy forces and two forms of encirclement by our own????rather like a game of wei-ch'i...

...In fact, the convergence of these two codes on certain fundamental propositions????plus the obvious parallels between the troubles in the last centuries of the first millennium B.C...

...China's actions in Tibet later enabled it to alter Sino-Indian frontiers, entrenching its might south of what had hitherto been India's strategically forbidding Himalayan ramparts...

...One is the old Confucian Middle Kingdom (the 18 inner provinces), renowned for its stress on etiquette and benevolent imperial rule by example, yet doomed to disestablishment under pressures from within and without...

...The major Confucian bequest is the time-transcendent thesis that the Middle Kingdom is the center of the world and therefore superior to any other society...

...The essence of this science is the uncompromising recognition that war and organization for war are the mainstays of government...

...But I think the gulf would not appear so great, nor would the disorientation it has evoked in our policymaking circles be so fateful, if the Chinese literature on military and psychological warfare were as widely known (and respected) in the West as the classical Confucian wisdom...

...In 1954, for example, the Maoist regime adopted the Buddhist "disguise" in negotiating a mutual nonaggression pact with India that supplied de facto recognition of China's conquest of Buddhist Tibet three years earlier...

...Numerous imperial dynasties had effectively manipulated this religion as an adjunct to the art of managing Buddhists in the border regions, and the Communists have consistently employed it as a diplomatic tool for softening terrain they mean to conquer...

...Of course, the duty to wage righteous war (confirmed by the Confucians and even the Moh-ists as necessary for the chastisement of uncouth peoples being badly ruled) often served as a moral cloak for open acts of Chinese aggression, preferably after atrocity stories had been spread concerning the society singled out for punishment...

...The second, extending the Confucian family scheme to international relations, regarded sovereigns of satellite fringe areas as junior members in constant need of parental tutelage, benevolent if possible, punitive if necessary...

...and the 20th century A.D.????explains why Leninism could be Sini-fied so effectively...

...In Sun Tzu's words this calls for deceiving the enemy by "creating shapes," or concealing one's own shape from him...

...Legalist and Maoist objectives are the same: to counter the enemy's plans, isolate him, "if possible drive him insane" (Sun Tzu) in "peace" time so that costly battles become unnecessary...

...Among the techniques employed to achieve these ends, none has received as much careful elaboration as the art of dissimulation and simulation...

...Indeed, according to Legalist doctrine it is a misfortune for a prosperous country not to be at war...

...Accordingly, the governance of China proper and the areas it claims to control is incon-testably right because, proceeding from Heaven's Mandate, it is in harmony with nature and the universe...

...It is in the matter of 'dominating the spaces' that the great strategic role of guerrilla base areas in the rear of the enemy is revealed...

...Yet careful analysis reveals that the diplomatic design of Maoist China is a skillful blend of three operational codes emanating from Leninism, Confucianism, and the doctrines of the Legalists or Realists...

...Asian intellectual elites on China's periphery are as familiar with the intricacies of wei-ch'i and Sun Tzu's work as they are -with the Maoist doctrine that politics is war and diplomacy the art of deliberate sham or deceit...

...Thus "a great gulf of discontinuity" ????to quote John Fairbank, the noted American student of Chinese history??is commonly b:lieved to separate China's present from its past...

...And in the Chinese heartland, as well as in the hedge-guarding fringe states like North Korea and North Vietnam, combat theory is conveyed in pithy sayings: "He who does something that his enemy would be ashamed to do has the advantage," or "Carry your enemy on your shoulders until you have no further use for him, then dash his head on a stone like an earthen pot...

...This unabashed commitment to war and military science as the sole determinants of foreign policy is supported by an impressive arsenal of diplomatic stratagems, also reflecting the coalescence of Leninist, Legalist and Maoist genius...

...But when we want to fight you, we make sure you can't get away and we hit you squarely on the chin and wipe you out...

...For what counts in the Maoist game of "enclosing" or "forming" territory????in the psychological as well as geographical sense????is what counts in wei-ch'i...

...The traditional Chinese use of Buddhism????officially dismissed by Mao's Confucian forbears as a "barbarian" creed, and disdained by Marxist-Leninists as an opiate of the masses????illustrates the point...

...Together with the common folk, they are familiar too with the wisdom of the shadow play, an ancient art form popular throughout the Orient...

...Struggle-while-negotiating" was the motto more than 2,000 years ago as it is today, it was enacted by China's North Vietnamese disciples in the Tet Offensive of 1968...

...in this sense . . . the whole world can be remolded only with the gun...

...That is to say, since peace is meaningless in Legalist tradition except as disguised war, the conduct of international relations is understood and practiced as "warrior diplomacy," squarely aimed at attacking the enemy's plans, dismantling his alliances, spreading false rumors, corrupting officials, creating fifth columns, inflaming internal disorders...

...but they are all for the sake of war...

...Such a man, we learn from a Legalist sage, may well emerge a king of kings, provided he is equally adept in the established diplomatic and psychological devices that can demoralize, confuse and corner an enemy before the time comes to deliver the military coup de grace...

...In armed conflict, Sun Tzu insists, a general must master these complementary skills if he is to hit his primary target, namely the mind of the opposing commander...

...when these parasites????pncluding filial piety, sincerity, criticism of the Army, and aversion to fighting????are at work, the ruler is unable to make people farm or take up arms, the nation becomes so poor as to invite disintegration...

...Protected by the cloak of a Sino-Indian treaty regulating trade with Tibet, China's armies could despoil this Buddhist land it had ruthlessly annexed...

...As Mao writes, the tactics of Chinese diplomacy, being "laws for conducting war, constitute the art of swimming in the ocean of war...

...Campaigns and battles fought by the two sides resemble the capturing of each other's pieces, and the establishment of strongholds by the enemy and of guerrilla base areas by us resembles moves to dominate spaces on the board...

...All organization, whether of the village or the world, is war organization, Mao reminds us on page after page...

...The same maxims must rule the conduct of the war of nerves...

...With supreme hypocrisy, China and India (which itself had expunged Buddhism almost 2,000 years earlier) affixed as a preamble to the treaty the famous pancha shila????five basic, totally apolitical precepts for the conduct of individual Buddhist believers...

...Neglectful of these martial works and the use made of them by successive Chinese governments, the Occident was thoroughly perplexed earlier in this century when China appeared to accept Western notions of law and diplomacy, and later when China acceded to the Marxist-Leninist frame of conceptual references...

...the Army must secure the rural base areas if it is to "organize the tactics of strife" and correctly "recognize the utility of the barricades...

...4th century B.C...

...in Mao's, for "creating illusions," such as propagating possibilities for peace when peace is in fact understood as war...

...whose The Art of War has remained an authoritative guide for Chinese military operations...

...Thoroughly immersed in both his own tradition and the Marxist science borrowed from the Russians, Mao feels that war is neither an aberration nor a calamity but the highest form of struggle: "In China the main form of struggle is war and the main form of organization is the Army...

...It teaches simply that the real world behind all appearances and facades is being held together by conflict and conspiracy...