Asia Times: China's twisted road to coexistence


	October 6, 2001	atimes.com

China

China's twisted road to coexistence
By Wu Zichen

The May 8 "incident" in May 1999 when the United States mistakenly bombing the Chinese embassy in Belgrade and the spy plane air collision incident in April this year caused an upsurge of nationalist sentiment among the Chinese public.

On the one hand, this was the outpouring of their true emotions; on the other hand, it was the natural outcome after a long period of indoctrination of political ideologies. As a double-edged sword, nationalism may be taken as the back-up force of public opinion, and when a diplomatic compromise is inevitable, it also may weaken the political strength of the government, whose existing level of legitimacy is insufficient.

For a long time in China diplomatic practices and theories and academic studies and propaganda have been out of kilter, which is the main cause of irrational fear and and hostility towards foreign countries.

In 1972, the first time Mao Zedong met then US president Richard Nixon, he said, "Generally speaking, I feel sometimes I make some groundless remarks. For example, words like 'the whole world be united to beat down the imperialists, revisionists and all reactionaries to construct socialism'."

And then he added with a smile that Nixon and secretary of State Henry Kissinger were not among those to be beaten down. "If you were beaten down, we would have no friends." At that time, however, ordinary Chinese people had no way to know that "beating down the American imperialists" was just empty talk and that the Chinese government was pursuing a diplomatic strategy of following a common path with the Washington.

While China and the US still maintained good relations, Deng Xiaoping adopted the new diplomatic guideline of "peace and development". In November 1989, at a conference. he said, "I wish the Cold War would end. But now I am disappointed. Probably one Cold War is over, but the other two Cold Wars have broken out. One is again the south, the third world, and the other again socialist countries. The Western countries are fighting World War III with no gun smoke."

But only two weeks later he said to National Security Advisor Brent Scowcroft, "Though there are disputes between China and America, there are this and that kind of problems and divergences, in the long run it is much better to maintain good Sino-US relations. This is the need of peace and stability of the world. ... in the past 17 years, since 1972, the general situation of the world has been fairly stable. The development of Sino-US relations is one of the contributing causes, a rather weighty cause. There should be no fights between China and America; I don't only mean no wars, but not even verbal attacks."

If theoretical discussions are made according to the great man's remarks rather than by looking at diplomatic practices, both optimistic and pessimistic interpretations of "peace and development" may be put forth. In order to help our fellow countrymen sustain a healthy and rational diplomatic attitude, the theorists should make an all-round summary of China's diplomatic practices, clarify the foggy ideologies behind them, and construct a diplomatic philosophy and strategy on the basis of national and human interests by combining theory and practice.

Shunning wars and growing stronger
In the past 50 years, the orthodox diplomatic theory of China has been taking Vladimir Lenin's epochal view of "wars and revolutions" as the main guiding doctrine. According to Lenin, imperialism was the final stage of capitalist development; the 20th Century was the era of imperialism and of the revolution of the proletariats; imperialism means war, which inevitably leads to revolution, which is the only event that can stop war; unless proletarian revolutions broke out in the imperialist countries, world wars would be unavoidable.

This theory was framed before the October Revolution in 1917 in Czarist Russia led by Lenin and Lev Trotsky. In a short period after the revolution, they began to preach a European and worldwide revolution, including exporting revolution to China and other Asian countries. At that time they thought that the Soviet power would be broken by wars that imperialist states would wage against it.

However, developments did not follow the theories. In the serious famine of 1921, many millions of Russians were pushed to the brink of starvation. Instead of taking the chance and strangling the Soviet state in its cradle, the imperialist countries generously gave it grain. Herbert Hoover, the US secretary of commerce and chief of the American relief administration, signed the Riga Agreement. In terms of the agreement, the relief administration transported 700,000 tons of materials, mainly food and drugs, which were distributed from 15,000 stations, and which cost US$60 million.

Thanks to this cooperation at least 10 million Russians (mostly children) were saved. This taught Lenin a lesson from which he learned that it was possible for the newly born Soviet state to coexist peacefully with other countries. In fact, the Soviet diplomatic strategy of "wars and revolution" was soon replaced by "peaceful coexistence". Lenin's new diplomatic policy created the indispensable external conditions for Soviet Russia to divert energy and resources to its New Economic Policy.

In scrambling for the leadership of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU) with Trotsky, Stalin posited the theory of "the establishment of socialism in one country", which provided a reasonable rationale for peaceful coexistence. The New Economic Policy was in nature capitalist and it was not uncommon for capitalist systems to coexist historically. He argued, indeed, that "the struggle among the capitalist countries and the intention to get their competitors drowned are in practice more intense than the conflict between the capitalist and socialist camps".

On the basis of Stalin's theory, Mao Zedong put forth the theory of the intermediate zone. In April 1946, he talked with American journalist Anna Louise Strong. In answering the question whether the US was likely to launch a war against the USSR, he said, "Between the US and the USSR there is an extremely expansive belt, wherein lie many capitalist countries as well as their colonies and semi-colonies in Europe, Asia and Africa. Before overpowering these countries, it is impossible for the American reactionaries to launch the attack against the Soviet Union."

In January 1947, propaganda chief Lu Dingyi wrote an article in which he explicitly pointed out that "the main conflicts in the actual politics in the world after World War II are not between the capitalist world and the socialist Soviet Union, nor between the US and the USSR, but between the democratic powers and the anti-democratic powers within the capitalist world".

Later, the author said that he was just voicing Mao's ideas. In the 1960s, Mao went further and fully presented the theory of two intermediate zones. "There are two parts in the intermediate zone: one is the economically backward countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America, the other part is the imperialist countries in Europe, who are the representatives, and the developed capitalist countries ... Asia, Africa and Latin America constitute the first intermediate zone; Europe, Canada in North America and Oceania constitute the second intermediate zone. Japan belongs to the second intermediate zone too."

In accordance with the idea of peaceful coexistence developed by Lenin and Stalin, the Soviet Union did not start wars against capitalist countries, but rather prompted the breakout of World War II by concluding a secret agreement with Adolf Hitler. Later, the Soviet Union itself became the biggest victim of the war. In April 1945, when the war was coming to an end, Stalin said to a Yugoslav communist delegation, "This war is different from those of the past because whoever occupies the land will impose his own social system. He will impose his social system on the land as far as the military forces go."

Indeed, the Yalta accords introduced the principle of peaceful coexistence between the Soviet Union and the US-Britain, two different social systems, into the system of international relations. During the Cold War, the US and the Soviet Union experienced no direct military conflicts - the conflicts mainly occurred when scrambling for the intermediate zones.

In Mao's words, however, the compromise between the two camps did not mean a domestic compromise within every country in the capitalist world, and people would go on with their struggle according to different situations. During Mao's first visit to the Soviet Union, Stalin said to him that the Communist Party of China (CPC) should take more responsibilities in aiding the national and democratic revolutionary movements in the East and in the colonies and the semi-colonies.

Though China's economy had not recovered and the Taiwan issue was still pending, the CPC shouldered the responsibility of providing assistance to the communist parties in Korea, Vietnam and other Eastern countries. First, thousands of soldiers were dispatched to Korea, and became the main force in the Korean civil war, and later, over a million "Chinese People's Volunteers" fought face-to-face against the US-led United Nations troops there.

In Vietnam, the CPC provided a large quantity of materials and logistic support, and dispatched military advisors to help develop plans and participate in the command of operations. China's involvement in these local wars brought heavy casualties and increased the possibility of imminent nuclear strikes, greatly increased its economic difficulties and financial burdens, and let any opportunity of solving the Taiwan issue slip through its fingers.

After Stalin's death in March 1953, the new leadership (Lavrentija Berija, Georgiy Malenkov, Mikhailovich Molotov and Nikita Chruschev) of the CPSU placed unanimous stress on peaceful coexistence and peaceful competition between the two systems of socialism and capitalism.

In Asia, they thought that a "procrastination" policy should be abandoned in favor of a "termination" policy, and believed that concessions on the prisoners of war issue had to be made to end the Korean War. This shift in Soviet diplomatic policy was acclaimed by China and Korea, which were exhausted by the war, and in a short time reached the armistice agreement with the UN troops. The ensuing year was a time of peaceful coexistence in China's diplomacy.

Negotiations between the delegations of China and India on their relations in the Tibet region were also held in Beijing from December 1953 to April 1954. Premier Zhou Enlai met members of the Indian government delegation, where he put forward for the first time the Five Principles of Peaceful Coexistence, which were formally incorporated into the preamble of the "Agreement between the People's Republic of China and the Republic of India on trade and intercourse between the Tibet region of China and India".

The five principles were mutual respect for each other's territorial integrity and sovereignty, mutual non-aggression, non-interference in each other's internal affairs, equality and mutual benefit and peaceful co-existence..

And after a long bargaining process, all of the parties at the Geneva Conference on Indochina reached an agreement: Vietnam was divided into two halves along the 17th parallel, France withdrew its forces from the three countries of Indochina, the Allied Forces of Vietnam withdrew from Laos and Cambodia.

On July 7, 1954, at an enlarged session of the politburo of the central committee of CPC, Mao gave a speech entitled "To Unite and Cooperate with all Nations with a Peaceful Will" in which he said, "To ease the tense international situation and to coexist with countries in different systems are two slogans put forth by the Soviet Union, and they are our slogans as well. And now they came from [British premier Anthony] Eden's mouth, then from [Indian premier Jawaharlal ] Nehru's, and they too are babbling about easing the tense international situation. This is a big change ... all in all, in international affairs we will follow this guideline. In order to protect our country and socialism and strive for the establishment of a great socialist country, we will try to be close to those who share the same ideas on the issue of peace."

China could accede to the Korean armistice and reach agreement in Geneva concerning Indochina in the light of the principles of peaceful coexistence, but could not give consent to the settlement of the Taiwan issue on the same principle, for the CPC leadership, headed by Mao, while it could accept two Koreas and two Vietnams, it could never accept two Chinas. Thus the Taiwan issue became the unbreakable barrier in following China's diplomatic line of peaceful coexistence.

Since the beginning of the Korean War, diplomatic officials from the Kuomintang government in Taipei had been actively conspiring to conclude a military treaty with the US. The Americans, however, had always given them a cold shoulder for fear of becoming involved in China's civil war. In May 1954, Secretary of State John Foster Dulles still warned the Kuomintang government that "it should be patient". In July, the Chinese government started its propaganda campaign to "liberate Taiwan" and in early September bombed the nationalist-held island of Jinmen (Quemoy) in the Taiwan Strait between China and Taiwan.

In an incident, a British airliner was brought down over Yulin on Hainan Island. In early October 1954, the American government decided at last to sign a treaty with the Taiwan authorities and on December 1, the US formally concluded the so-called "Mutual Defense Treaty" with Taiwan. In early 1955, the People's Liberation Army successively conquered Dachen Island and the peripheral islands, and the American Congress authorized the president to assist Taiwan with its defense of its positions, and ratified the US-Taiwan treaty. Thus, the US and China were placed in direct confrontation again due to the crisis in the Taiwan Strait.

However, China could neither obtain support or aid from Chruschev in order to attack Taiwan, nor could it press the Soviet Union to confront the US with its military and political strength in Europe and all over the world to ease the US pressure on the Taiwan Strait. The adjustment of the diplomatic balance after the Korean War placed China in a dilemma: for the sake of peace, it had to beg a favor from the US; for the sake of winning a possible war, it had to obtain help from the USSR, both of which seemed unobtainable. This resulted in Mao Zedong's profound suspicion of peaceful coexistence. At the Moscow conference of November 1957, he put forth the judgement that "the East Wind prevails over the West Wind", and restated the conclusion that all the so-called powerful reactionaries were paper tigers.

In April 1958, again he ordered the bombing of Jinmen and put forth the "brink-of-war v brink-of-war" strategy to fight against the US, both of which were considered challenges to the "Three-Ps" line (peaceful transition, peaceful coexistence and peaceful competition) and a mitigating strategy to deal with the US, put forth at the 20th party congress of Soviet communists.

The incongruous diplomatic lines and strategies in dealing with the US between China and the Soviet Union began to emerge: Chruschev publicly stated that as a means to settle international disputes, wars should be abandoned forever, and it was unwise to test the stability of the capitalist system by using force. These differences characterized the intense ideological debates of the 1960s.

On June 14, 1963, replying to the central committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, the central committee of the Communist Party of China stated, "Peaceful coexistence cannot replace the revolutionary struggles by the peoples of every country. The transition of every country from capitalism to socialism can but be achieved through the country's proletarian revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat."

To sum up, arguments over the two kinds of peaceful coexistence seem to have revolved around the distinction between a general line of global peaceful coexistence and the policy of local peaceful coexistence (which the CPC opposed). The different understandings of Lenin's theory of peaceful coexistence would not lead to a complete breach in the relations between the two countries, but in fact more real divergences lay behind the ideological debates. Mao Zedong could not tolerate certain of the CPSU's expressions, such as, "The two greatest modern powers - the Soviet Union and the US have left any other countries in the world far behind ... each of the two countries is leading a large number of countries - the Soviet Union leading the socialist system of the world and the United States leading the capitalist camp".

The CPC would not adjust its diplomatic policies to the orientation of a Soviet-American rapprochement, but rather insisted that the CPSU adjust its diplomatic policy to the CPC's goal of liberating Taiwan. As Lenin himself had repeatedly pointed out, the establishment of the proletariat's dictatorship in one socialist country is the basis to advance the proletariat's worldwide revolution. Thus, the Soviet Union should provide the impetus and support for China to liberate Taiwan, and should not become the barrier between China and the liberation of Taiwan for fear of nuclear wars, nor should it point its "nuclear finger" at China together with the United States.

We might say that history unfolded following the logic of centering on the "proletariat's internationalist principle" and opposition to "the general line of peaceful coexistence". The outcome, however, was quite astonishing: by the late 1960s, instead of mutual aid and support between the socialist countries, there was a Sino-Soviet military confrontation and small-scale frontier skirmishes; Sino-US relations, instead, had gone beyond peaceful coexistence between the countries in different systems, and formed an anti-Soviet Union strategic quasi-military alliance, while the liberation of Taiwan had been laid aside. As Mao Zedong put it to Kissinger, the small issue is Taiwan; the big issue is the world. It is not the time to tackle the Taiwan issue. In 100 years we will take it.

By the 1980s, there was a strategy of peaceful coexistence in a large "triangular" structure. Around the mid and late 1980s, the divergence of the two policies of peaceful coexistence between China and the Soviet Union had in fact disappeared. The campaigns for national independence in Asian, African and Latin American countries had been completed long before, the armed struggles led by the communist parties in Malaysia, Thailand, Burma, etc had generally failed, revolutionary movements within the capitalist countries no longer existed, the the depth and extent of Sino-US cooperation had gone far beyond Soviet-American cooperation, and Sino-Soviet relations had also gone from military confrontation to rapprochement.

Peace and development:
For 'common prosperity' in 'one world'
Retrospectively, two noticeable differences between the diplomatic lines of Chruschev and Mao can be spotted. First, Chruschev excluded the ultimate victory over capitalism by world war in an era of nuclear weapons. He said, "Efforts must be made to change the inevitable struggle between two systems into the struggle between two ideologies," and the peaceful coexistence policy was "the strategic line during the whole period of the worldwide transition from capitalism to socialism".

Mao, however, did not entirely rule out the possibility of a world war and nuclear war. At the Moscow conference of 1957, he noted that the population of China was 600 million, and that of the entire world 2.7 billion. If a nuclear war broke out, "half of the population would die, and another half would survive. Thus, imperialism would perish in the war, and socialism would be realized on the earth."

With regard to cooperation with the capitalist countries on economic grounds, time and again Mao stated that China had a strong backbone. China was not afraid of an economic blockade by the capitalist camp. With blockades, China's economy would be more self-contained and the spirit of self-reliance would be more vigorous. If the blockade lasted 10,000 years, all problems in China would be solved. Like the contemporary Chinese "economic nationalists", the "dependency theorists" who advocated "endogenous development" and "delinking strategy" in 1960s and 1970s were also against economic cooperation with the capitalist countries. The so-called "peaceful competition" and "peaceful international cooperation" put forth by Chruschev presupposed the separation and coexistence of the two camps and the two world markets, which was not the same thing as what we call economic globalization.

Yet, these principles were applied by China in a way that allowed for some degree of cooperation: in the Spring of 1962, Wang Jiaxiang, director of the foreign liaison department of the CPC, expounded his opinions by declaring, "Do not say that the cardinal contradiction between the socialist camp and the imperialist camp will lead to nowhere but world war; do not say that a third world war cannot be averted without wiping out the American imperialist; do not simply say 'to have or not to have a third world war, this question rests with the imperialists, not with us'. To advance, retreat, attack, defend, struggle, give up, delay and settle, all these are indispensable means in the struggles against foreign nations".

Later, in talks with communist leaders from New Zealand, Mao summarized Wang Jiaxiang's words as, "To be more polite to the imperialists, more polite to the reactionaries, more polite to the revisionists, and to give less help to the struggle of the peoples in Asia, Africa and Latin America," which was abbreviated as "Three-Ps and One-L".

As early as 1954, when pursuing the diplomatic policy of peaceful coexistence, Zhou Enlai won Mao's full support. But in that diplomatic framework, the goal of liberating Taiwan could not be achieved, which resulted in the substitution of brink-of-war for peaceful coexistence. The positions Mao took in the 1970s (the small issue is Taiwan, the big issue is the world; and in settling the Taiwan issue, we can wait for 100 years) actually underlie Deng Xiaoping's line of "one country, two systems".

Since Deng's time some people have kicked up a fuss over the Taiwan issue. The new leaders of Taiwan, however, originally "Taiwan Independentists", have put forth a policy based on the proposition that "the future is one China"; and the rate of support of the Taiwan public for the one country, two systems policy, according to a public opinion poll conducted by the Taiwan mainland affairs committee, has shown that it is entirely groundless to create tension by spreading the notion that the independence of Taiwan is imminent and that a war across the Taiwan Strait is inevitable, and that this idea has been spread by special interests groups for a certain purpose.

It was in the 1990s that the "one world" theory was put forth. At the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) forum in Seattle in November 1993, for the first time, Jiang Zemin asserted that the present leaders of the world should usher a peaceful, stable and developing world into the 21st Century. In the Sino-French joint communique singed by Jiang Zemin and President Jacques Chirac on May 16, 1997, there are also words as "to realize a more prosperous, stable, secure and balanced world".

But in fact, the one world concept originated much earlier. In 1985, Deng said, "I can say explicitly and definitely, China is now a force to maintain, not to destroy the peace and stability of the world." In 1986, Zhao Ziyang, the premier of the Chinese government at the time, declared, "On the basis of the long-range and essential benefits of the people in the country and the world, China takes as our general goal of foreign policy to maintain world peace, develop friendly cooperation with all countries and push forward mutual economic prosperity." In 1988, Deng said to Indian premier Rajiv Gandhi, "The issue of development should be viewed for the benefit of all the human beings," and "in the present world there are two things that have to be dealt with simultaneously, one is to establish the new international political order, the other is to establish the new international economic order." Deng's idea of peace and development moves generally in the same direction as Mikhail Gorbachev's "new diplomatic mentality" and Eduard Shevardnadze's "substitute dialogue for opposition, cooperation for hostility, and candor for suspicion". With this, the Sino-Soviet conciliation came at last after 30 years of tension.

The theoretical breakthrough of the one world pioneered a series of other theoretical innovations. As pointed out in a political report of the 15th central committee of the CPC, "In the globalizing tendency, we must stride into the world more vigorously, perfecting the all-direction, multilevel and wide-ranged pattern of opening up, developing an export-oriented economy, enhancing international competitiveness and speeding up the optimization of the economic structure and the improvement of the national economy."

Only in the framework of one world can it be affirmed that globalization is "an irresistible historical trend", while the historical trend of worshipping "who defeats whom" has long passed. The political report openly declared that the difference of social systems and ideologies should be transcended, the convergence of the common interests sought and the cooperation of mutual benefits expanded to jointly deal with the challenges in human existence and development.

Differences should be solved for the mutual long-term benefits of all and by taking into consideration the overall situation of the world's peace and development. And only on the basis of one world can national interests be placed over ideological interests, and the correlation between military security and integral security, between national security and global security be properly considered.

The birth of the "common prosperity" idea shows that the Chinese leaders have broken through the limitations of the traditional ideas such as conspiracy theories, international class struggle and zero-sum game, and begun to see diplomacy as a tool to strive for win-win and mutual benefits situations, create a benign international environment and serve the overall goal of the country's modernization.

This reflects the circumstance that the Chinese have repositioned themselves, and their commitment to the international community represents historical progress. As Harvard professor of history Alastair Iain Johnston pointed out, in the late 20th Century there is an emerging norm about what constitutes the characteristics of a major power: these characteristics differ from those of a typical 19th Century major power, and among the "acceptable" traits of a major power now are active involvement in international relations, and that the regulation and, in some cases, weakening of state sovereignty, is essential to solve most global problems.

It was clear that China's decision-makers believed that it was right to oppose such a trend, even though opposition was going to undermine China's self-categorization as a "responsible major power", and the country was going to incur severe international criticism. In the past, during the Maoist era for instance, such criticism had been ignored because the relevant "audience" that provided social rewards and punishments was a community of radical third world states and revolutionary movements. Today, the relevant audience is made essentially of status quo states. Image is not the only consideration, but an important one.

Wu Zichen is a researcher and an expert in Chinese-American relations

Translated by Yao Ximing and Lu Weizhong

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