BOOK REVIEW Ideology? Don't you believe it US-China Cold War Collaboration, 1971-1989,
by S Mahmud AliBuy
this book
Reviewed by Dmitry Shlapentokh
This is a good, well-researched book. It could have been even better if the
author, apparently carried away by the fascinating materials he displays in his
narrative, had read his manuscript
again and provided good, theoretical theses that would place his data in a
broader perspective.
Even so, US-China Cold War Collaboration, 1971-1989 is interesting
reading, and readers can easily draw their own conclusions from the data. And
the potential conclusions are manifold. The most important theme - one that
clearly cuts through the entire narrative - is that ideology and sociopolitical
differences are in most cases meaningless in understanding global affairs.
Supposedly - this notion has been widespread throughout historiography - the
cause of the Cold War was sociopolitical, about ideological conflicts between
the capitalist, democratic West, with the US as its embodiment, and the USSR,
which represented the opposite.
This theory is not a good fit for the Chinese-American relationship.
One could hardly take at face value the Chinese and Soviet proclamations that
they were at odds because of different interpretations of Marxism-Leninism.
With all their differences, the Chinese had much more in common ideologically
with the Soviets than with the United States.
The latter differences seem to be absolutely unbreachable if one remembers that
in the early 1970s China was in the grip of the Cultural Revolution, whose
leader Mao Zedong saw the Soviets as "rotten revisionists" who had forsaken
true socialism and were sliding toward capitalism. At the same time, president
Richard Nixon in the US was being blasted by liberals and the left as a
reactionary scoundrel who had plunged the country into a bloody imperialist war
in Indochina. This universal hatred by the liberal left contributed to his
final, humiliating demise.
All this seems to prove that irreconcilable ideological conflicts played no
role when Nixon emerged in China in 1972. Moreover, as the book reveals,
ideology was hardly discussed at all during Nixon's and other presidents'
visits. The focal point was more pragmatic: fear of the rising power of the
USSR. At the beginning of the engagement, the US frightened China with the
possibility of Soviet attacks.
Later, the situation changed and the Chinese - Mao and then Deng Xiaoping -
chastised Americans for being too soft. The gravitational pull between the US
and China that started with presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford became
more and more visible during the administrations of Jimmy Carter and
(especially) Ronald Reagan. The actual irrelevance of ideology in shaping the
global arrangement is especially clear in Reagan's case.
The champion of the struggle against the "evil empire", the USSR, was ready to
overlook the fact that Red China was far more "evil" in terms of internal
repression than the basically "vegetarian" Leonid Brezhnev regime, which in
general tried to push troublemakers - Jews and dissidents - to the West rather
than deport them to the gulags of Siberia. This amicable relationship between
the US and China became chilly not because China became more "oppressive" and
violated human rights more than before, but simply because it became much
stronger and the USSR disappeared.
The reader of this book, of course, can compare these events of the past with
the present. If one applies the same models to US pressure on Iraq and North
Korea, one can see that it hardly connects with the ideological/political
conflict between "good" and "evil" but is rooted in the cynical practicality of
geopolitical gain.
US-China Cold War Collaboration, 1971-1989, by S Mahmud Ali. Routledge;
first edition (September 27, 2005). ISBN: 0415358191. Price US$115. Hardcover,
276 pages.
Dmitry Shlapentokh, PhD, is associate professor of history, College of
Liberal Arts and Sciences, Indiana University South Bend. He is author of
East Against West: The First Encounter - The Life of Themistocles, 2005.
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