The Global Triangle

...Is there to be a reconciliation between Peking and Moscow...

...In his keynote speech to the gathering, Defense Minister Lin Piao bravely quoted the messianic Mao: "An unprecedentedly gigantic revolutionary mass movement has broken out in Japan, Western Europe, and North America, the 'heartlands' of capitalism...

...With Mao alive, it seems highly unlikely that an all-around settlement of issues will be reached...

...Mao would have to trade...

...This was, however, inadequate as a political settlement, and in late August the U.S.S.R...

...For the time being, however, Peking made no response...

...The April congress nevertheless proved to be something of a watershed...

...Mao Tse-tung's long anti-"revisionist" campaign has to a degree left him politically boxed in...

...Moscow might even prove ready—who knows...

...This will become clearly evident in Peking's relations with the Third World, and with countries of Western as well as Eastern Europe...

...in particular, it was buttressing its international economic and political position in a manner which would enable it to play an enhanced role in Asian affairs—and one not in conformity with the Maoist line...

...And Washington's anti-Communism, which permeates the very flesh and bones of American foreign policy, makes the U.S...

...The Global Triangle by O. EDMUND CLUBB Is a thaw impending in China's foreign relations...

...In the realm of foreign policy, there were discernible important changes of emphasis—which became changes of substance...

...That was patently not a definitive move...

...Approach to those questions must be made against the background of the Cultural Revolution, the effects of which will be felt for a long time to come in China's domestic and foreign affairs...

...Reversal of the existing policy would not be easy: Mao Tse-tung in power has never admitted to personal error, or to defeat...

...After a two-year break, the American and Chinese ambassadors have resumed their meetings at Warsaw...

...And Japan, which Peking's propaganda described as being torn asunder by revolution, was rapidly becoming stronger, not weaker...

...O. EDMUND CLUBB, a lecturer on Asian affairs at Columbia University, spent eighteen years in China during his twenty-four years with the U.S...

...Given our martial stance in the West Pacific, Peking can be expected to manifest little genuine warmth toward the United States as Washington strives, less than mightily, to bring China out of "its angry, alienated shell...

...It can be argued (and occasionally is) that Peking might turn to the United States, to enlist its aid against the Soviet "revisionists," thus interchanging the roles in its recurrent propaganda charge that Moscow and Washington act in "collusion" to encircle China...

...The Soviet leaders on various occasions in the past have proposed improvement of lagging Sino-Soviet trade relations and the return of Russian technicians to China...

...Mao presumably thought such action against a "socialist" state safe, and at the same time useful for his domestic "struggle...

...Where polemical exchanges had been the rule, Peking and Moscow now have recourse again to the channels of diplomacy for consideration of issues between them...

...There are also substantial political benefits which Peking might reasonably expect to receive, under certain conditions...

...Lin Piao went on, however, to suggest a partial shift in Peking's foreign policy away from militancy and back to the moderate position of 1953-57: China's foreign policy, he said, would be governed by the five Bandung Principles, including that of peaceful coexistence...

...The "revolutionary" foreign policy that attended the Cultural Revolution was the brainchild of Chinese Communist Party (CCP) Chairman Mao Tse-tung...

...Moscow drew closer than ever to India, China's Asian rival...

...Nor did the Soviet Union, the site of that "modern revisionism" which Peking purported to find so vile, weaken under the verbal battering to which the Maoists had subjected it from 1963 onwards...

...The inexorable logic of the American strategy of containment of China requires that the United States function as the policeman of Asia...

...Peking had decided to accept, for the time being, the bad old world as it is, and to undertake political coexistence even with the U.S.S.R...

...In 1969 there was no "gigantic revolutionary movement" shaking "the heartlands of capitalism" to their foundations...

...It was only standard operating procedure that the ninth CCP congress, meeting in April, 1969, should by Mao's obiter dictum be labeled "a congress of unity and a congress of victory...

...Although on home grounds, the Chinese premier was at a political disadvantage...

...They seemingly are demanding, as a precondition for substantive talks on border issues, that the Soviets withdraw the military forces poised on the Sino-Soviet border—whereupon Peking would presumably be pleased to voice benign intent vis-a-vis the Soviet Union...

...Chiang Kai-shek had miscalculated when he seized the Chinese Eastern Railway, which was joint Sino-Soviet property, in Manchuria in 1929...

...The Chinese doctrinal position is crystallized: Mao's anti-imperialism is an essential element of Marx-ism-Leninism itself, and from the beginning has occupied a dominant position in CCP thought...

...There were suggestions that a Soviet military strike against China's nuclear installations and urban centers might be imminent...

...Mao Tse-tung will not shift sides in exchange for a mess of crumbs from the "imperialist" table...

...Premier Chou was compelled to deal with the reality of power...

...But one of the most dangerous aspects of the present situation is that the real possibilities for a rapprochement between Peking and Washington are notably less than for China's reconciliation with any other country, including the Soviet Union...

...and Washington has bent further by relaxing the China trade embargo enough to permit foreign affiliates of American firms to deal in Chinese goods—abroad...

...So, in circumstances where for years it has been exhorting Hanoi to fight on valiantly until all American forces have been cast out of Vietnam, Peking can hardly settle amicably for a hostile American presence that blocks China on the sea side from Korea to Thailand and denies the Chinese nation its "natural" access to Southeast Asia and the South Seas...

...On October 7, Peking announced that the Chinese and Soviet governments had decided to negotiate border issues...

...to extend to Communist China as much in the way of economic aid, including credits, as it is currently supplying "bourgeois" India...

...On that occasion the Soviets, after issuing what amounted to an ultimatum, had launched a quick military strike at Chinese positions on and near the border, and China had been forced to accept restoration of the status quo ante...

...imperialism" and "Soviet revisionism" from the pale of Chinese benevolence...

...The East European bloc survived the shock of the August, 1968, Czechoslovak affair...

...Mao Tse-tung in power has never admitted to personal error, or to defeat...

...But it is a sound working hypothesis to assume that Peking will, for the visible future, continue to regard the United States as the main contradiction in its international life...

...According to Mao's Thought, there can be only one principal "contradiction" at a time, and all other contradictions must be subordinate to it...

...Nor were the Soviet people about to rise up and overthrow "the Soviet revisionist clique," as also forecast by Lin Piao in April...

...The policeman feels impelled to keep a close watch on revolutionary, unruly China...

...and he viewed with apparent equanimity the possibility that international war might result from such a policy...

...The 1929 precedent cannot have failed to enter the Chinese mind...

...The Chinese saying has it that "the ways of the world are like a sheep's entrails...

...On September 11, Soviet Premier Kosygin met with Chinese Premier Chou En-lai at the Peking airport for a discussion which lasted four hours...

...The Peking leadership must therefore have read with keen interest a long statement issued by Moscow on March 29 (on the eve of the Chinese Communist Party's congress) reviewing Sino-Soviet relations and proposing political negotiations...

...As a result of the ravages of the Cultural Revolution, however, China in 1968 was left weaker politically and economically at home than when the movement began...

...There is a Chinese foreign policy thaw in progress...

...It is certain, by all the precedents, that the Chinese delegation will bargain hard, demanding much and offering little...

...A Soviet military strike would more likely be punitive, and limited, than the prelude to all-out war...

...A joint Sino-Soviet river navigation commission, long inactive, resumed functioning on June 18, 1969, and on August 8 there was announced an agreement to govern navigation on the border rivers for the current year...

...For all of its fulminations against "U.S...

...Such an ideological element is not easily dislodged, or "reinterpreted...

...Of prime importance, the political currents in the three main worldpower centers, the United States, the Soviet Union, and Japan, had run ever more strongly against Mao's aspirations and expectations...

...The Sino-Soviet conference began at Peking, at vice-ministerial level, on October 20...

...It was thus evident by late 1968 that a continuation of the Maoist foreign policy could only lead to China's increased isolation from the world community, with consequent added difficulties in both the economic and political spheres...

...There, of course, is the rub...

...In a logical extension of its aim of containing China, the United States remains committed to winning the Vietnam war (or its equivalent, the "Vietnam peace...

...In that connection, it may cast out lures in the direction of Washington...

...Lin Piao, speaking on the occasion of the October 1 celebrations of the twentieth anniversary of the People's Republic of China, called for preparations against war— while asserting that "China has always upheld the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence" (emphasis added...

...The April, 1969, defiance of Moscow was, however, uttered in a situation drastically changed from that existing between 1963 and 1968, when Moscow had ordinarily done no more than react locally and protest against Chinese border harassments...

...He still made a categorical exception, excluding "U.S...

...Peking's efforts to exacerbate the international situation, and its tactics of assailing one and all in a reckless expression of China's presumed inherent right to act as it chose without regard to international law or customary amenities, alienated present as well as potential friends...

...The talk was patently designed to fend off a military conflict...

...In Asia, the Soviet political strategy won out readily against all of Peking's thrusts at the Mongolian People's Republic...

...Washington may permit Americans to import Chinese goods for non-commercial purposes, and offer to permit American journalists and scholars to travel to China, but this will not tip the political balance...

...It requires from the Soviet Union, as an essential minimum, a reduction of the Soviet military threat on its inner Asian border...

...and Japan improved steadily...

...The Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution effectively came to an end in the summer of 1968...

...American "imperialism" was indeed still mired down in Southeast Asia, and Mao had that much cause for rejoicing...

...His two books, "Communism in China" and "Twentieth Century China," were published by Columbia University Press...

...And reference to Mao Tse-tung's Thought could easily lead the observer to suspect that Peking's resort to diplomatic negotiations was no more than the oft-used tactic of striving to avert an impending blow by making conciliatory signs...

...imperialism," Peking, from the beginning of the American military intervention in North Vietnam in early 1965, had taken extraordinary care not to act in such manner as might provoke retaliation by the United States...

...There is a Chinese foreign policy thaw in progress...

...There was no gain for Peking with respect to Japan...

...Things were even worse for China abroad, where Peking had staged extravaganzas of radicalism...

...In service of that same strategy, it shows no signs whatsoever of withdrawing its military presence from the West Pacific— regardless of the way the Vietnam war may end...

...A critical event intervened...

...This time he listed no countries to be excepted from that policy, limiting himself to warning "U.S...

...Foreign Service...

...The United States thus quite fits the demonic image sketched by Mao Tse-tung: In this era, it is manifestly the one world power which, implementing its grand strategy by maintenance of a semicircle of military bases ringing China in on the sea side, in "imperialist" stance threatens the Chinese national existence...

...The results of the meeting were soon discovered...

...and economic relations between the U.S.S.R...

...Slowly and laboriously, Peking shows signs of beginning to shift away from its bellicose stance of recent years in foreign affairs...

...Mao's basic thought was that "wars of liberation" should be fostered...

...Those were figments of Mao's perfervid revolutionary imagination...

...From 1950 to 1952 he was director of the Office of Chinese Affairs in the State Department...

...In his address to the congress Lin Piao reported that the government was giving consideration to the Soviet invitation...

...It must be deemed probable that in the end an agreement, explicit or tacit, will be reached, an agreement which will bring at least those minimal fruits to the two Communist powers...

...Now, forty years afterwards, it was evident that Mao Tse-tung had similarly erred: Moscow appeared ready once more to undertake punitive military strikes against which China, for all of the Maoist bombast about the invincible hundreds of millions of Chinese, lacked adequate defense...

...As the Cultural Revolution progressed, it became evident that the aging Mao intended to establish himself as the successor Communist ideologue to Marx and Lenin, and proposed that his Thought should be fixed as immutable doctrine to guide not only China, but the world, to Communism, and that his Uninterrupted Revolution should be manifested worldwide...

...In the circle of major hostility, China will probably try at the same time to attain a position from which it can maneuver to play the United States, the Soviet Union, and Japan severally against one another...

...It is unlikely that Moscow will renounce its advantageous military (and political) position in exchange for a Maoist smile...

...Moscow's relations with the United States, instead of being exacerbated in line with the Maoist urgings, underwent further detente...

...But the assumption that the world's "revolutionary masses" were eager to accept Mao's leadership to the end that both "American imperialism" and "Soviet revisionism" should be overthrown proved erroneous...

...China, without a major ally, found itself confronting a superior foe in an aggressive stance...

...But, if Peking is willing to give a quid pro quo, Moscow can tender more than the absence of hostilities...

...but the United States remained no less a threat to China than before...

...However, China occupies the inferior bargaining position, for neither is it a first-rate power in its own right nor does it have a powerful ally from whom it might borrow strength for use against Moscow...

...In the final analysis, China still remains closer to Communist "revisionists" than to American "imperialists...

...The reason for this is basically simple: Both China and the United States are ideological powers, one flaunting its "anti-imperialism" and the other committed firmly to "anti-Communism...

...None of this would be lost upon the Russians, who have known the Chinese over three centuries...

...At the conclusion of the Cultural Revolution, China was found without a major political supporter in the world...

...Will perhaps Washington and Peking achieve some meeting of minds, for better Sino-American relations...

...The Soviet Union had for some time been strengthening its military positions along the common border, and on March 15, in the second of two clashes in the vicinity of Damanski Island in the Ussuri River, struck back hard...

...imperialism and social imperialism" (without identifying "social imperialism" by nationality) that if they dared to attack China they would be fought to the finish...

...The border situation continued strained, with "incidents" still recurring...

...China's current relationship with the Soviet Union on their long common frontier was markedly different: Hundreds of border incidents had occurred during the Cultural Revolution, and it was reasonably clear that many of those clashes had resulted from Chinese initiative...

...Government, as far as revolutionary change is concerned, every bit as inflexible as Peking in the foreign field...

...Peking had been confronted by an ineluctable issue: Should it be war—or peace...

...assumed its most threatening stance...

...To get that, Peking must offer a matching restraint, and contribute its own share to border calm...

...And the hand-picked congress dutifully approved the new Communist Party constitution, which provided that "Mao Tse-tung Thought is Marxism-Lenin-ism in the era in which imperialism is heading for total collapse and socialism is advancing to world-wide victory...