Prologue

In October 1962, China’s revolutionary leader Mao Zedong summoned his top military and political commanders to meet with him in Beijing. Two thousand miles to the west, in the forbidding and sparsely populated terrain of the Himalayas, Chinese and Indian troops were locked in a standoff over the two countries’ disputed border. The dispute arose over different versions of history: India claimed the frontier demarcated during British rule, China the limits of imperial China. India had deployed its outposts to the edge of its conception of the border; China had surrounded the Indian positions. Attempts to negotiate a territorial settlement had foundered.

Mao had decided to break the stalemate. He reached far back into the classical Chinese tradition that he was otherwise in the process of dismantling. China and India, Mao told his commanders, had previously fought “one and a half” wars. Beijing could draw operational lessons from each. The first war had occurred over 1,300 years earlier, during the Tang Dynasty (618–907), when China dispatched troops to support an Indian kingdom against an illegitimate and aggressive rival. After China’s intervention, the two countries had enjoyed centuries of flourishing religious and economic exchange. The lesson learned from the ancient campaign, as Mao described it, was that China and India were not doomed to perpetual enmity. They could enjoy a long period of peace again, but to do so, China had to use force to “knock” India back “to the negotiating table.” The “half war,” in Mao’s mind, had taken place seven hundred years later, when the Mongol ruler Timurlane sacked Delhi. (Mao reasoned that since Mongolia and China were then part of the same political entity, this was a “half” Sino-Indian war.) Timurlane had won a significant victory, but once in India his army had killed over 100,000 prisoners. This time, Mao enjoined his Chinese forces to be “restrained and principled.”

No one in Mao’s audience—the Communist Party leadership of a revolutionary “New China” proclaiming its intent to remake the international order and abolish China’s own feudal past—seems to have questioned the relevance of these ancient precedents to China’s current strategic imperatives. Planning for an attack continued on the basis of the principles Mao had outlined. Weeks later the offensive proceeded much as he described: China executed a sudden, devastating blow on the Indian positions and then retreated to the previous line of control, even going so far as to return the captured Indian heavy weaponry. In no other country is it conceivable that a modern leader would initiate a major national undertaking by invoking strategic principles from a millennium-old event—nor that he could confidently expect his colleagues to understand the significance of his allusions. Yet China is singular. No other country can claim so long a continuous civilization, or such an intimate link to its ancient past and classical principles of strategy and statesmanship.

Other societies, the United States included, have claimed universal applicability for their values and institutions. Still, none equals China in persisting—and persuading its neighbors to acquiesce—in such an elevated conception of its world role for so long, and in the face of so many historical vicissitudes. From the emergence of China as a unified state in the third century B.C. until the collapse of the Qing Dynasty in 1912, China stood at the center of an East Asian international system of remarkable durability. The Chinese Emperor was conceived of (and recognized by most neighboring states) as the pinnacle of a universal political hierarchy, with all other states’ rulers theoretically serving as vassals. Chinese language, culture, and political institutions were the hallmarks of civilization, such that even regional rivals and foreign conquerors adopted them to varying degrees as a sign of their own legitimacy (often as a first step to being subsumed within China).

The traditional cosmology endured despite catastrophes and centuries- long periods of political decay. Even when China was weak or divided, its centrality remained the touchstone of regional legitimacy; aspirants, both Chinese and foreign, vied to unify or conquer it, then ruled from the Chinese capital without challenging the basic premise that it was the center of the universe. While other countries were named after ethnic groups or geographical landmarks, China called itself zhongguo—the “Middle Kingdom” or the “Central Country.” Any attempt to understand China’s twentieth-century diplomacy or its twenty-first-century world role must begin—even at the cost of some potential oversimplification—with a basic appreciation of the traditional context.

PREFACE

NOTE ON CHINESE SPELLINGS

PROLOGUE

CHAPTER 1: The Singularity of China
• The Era of Chinese Preeminence
• Confucianism
• Concepts of international Relations: Impartiality or Equality?
• Chinese Realpolitik and Sun Tzu's Art of War

CHAPTER 2: The Kowtow Question and the Opium War
• The Macartney Mission
• The Clash of Two World Orders: The Opium War
• Qiying's Diplomacy: Soothing the Barbarians

CHAPTER 3: From Preeminence to Decline
• Wei Yuan's Blueprint: "Using Barbarians Against Barbarians," Learning Their Techniques
• The Erosion of Authority: Domestic Upheavals and the Challenge of Foreign Encroachments
• Managing Decline
• The Challenge of Japan
• Korea
• The Boxer Uprising and the New Era of Warring States

CHAPTER 4: Mao's Continuous Revolution
•Mao and the Great Harmony
• Mao and International Relations: The Empty City Stratagem, Chinese Deterrence, and the Quest for Psychological Advantage
• The Continuous Revolution and the Chinese People

CHAPTER 5: Triangular Diplomacy and the Korean War
• Acheson and the Lure of Chinese Titoism
• Kim Il-sung and the Outbreak of War
• American Intervention: Resisting Aggression
• Chinese Reactions: Another Approach to Deterrence
• Sino-American Confrontation

CHAPTER 6: China Confronts Both Superpowers
• The First Taiwan Strait Crisis
• Diplomatic Interlude with the United States
• Mao, Khrushchev, and the Sino-Soviet Split
• The Second Taiwan Strait Crisis

CHAPTER 7: A Decade of Crises
• The Great Leap Forward
• The Himalayan Border Dispute and the 1962 Sino-Indian War
• The Cultural Revolution
• Was There a Lost Opportunity?

CHAPTER 8: The Road to Reconciliation
• The Chinese Strategy
• The American Strategy
• First Steps—Clashes at the Ussuri River

CHAPTER 9: Resumption of Relations: First Encounters with Mao and Zhou
• Zhou Enlai
• Nixon in China: The Meeting with Mao
• The Nixon-Zhou Dialogue
• The Shanghai Communiqué
• The Aftermath

CHAPTER 10: The Quasi-Alliance: Conversations with Mao
• The "Horizontal Line": Chinese Approaches to Containment
• The Impact of Watergate

CHAPTER 11: The End of the Mao Era
• The Succession Crisis
• The Fall of Zhou Enlai
• Final Meetings with Mao: The Swallows and the Coming of the Storm

CHAPTER 12: The Indestructible Deng
• Deng's First Return to Power
• The Death of Leaders—Hua Guofeng
• Deng's Ascendance—"Reform and Opening Up"

CHAPTER 13: "Touching the Tiger's Buttocks": The Third Vietnam War
• Vietnam: Confounder of the Greats
• Deng's Foreign Policy—Dialogue with America and Normalization
• Deng's Journeys
• Deng's Visit to America and the New Definition of Alliance
• The Third Vietnam War

CHAPTER 14: Reagan and the Advent of Normalcy
• Taiwan Arms Sales and the Third Communiqué
• China and the Superpowers—The New Equilibrium
• Deng's Reform Program

CHAPTER 15: Tiananmen
• American Dilemmas
• The Fang Lizhi Controversy
• The 12- and 24-Character Statements

CHAPTER 16: What Kind of Reform? Deng's Southern Tour

CHAPTER 17: A Roller Coaster Ride Toward Another Reconciliation: The Jiang Zemin Era
• China and Disintegrating Soviet Union
• The Clinton Administration and China Policy
• The Third Taiwan Strait Crisis
• China's Resurgence and Jiang's Reflections

CHAPTER 18: The New Millennium
• Differences in Perspective
• How to Define Strategic Opportunity
• The National Destiny Debate—The Triumphalist View
• Dai Bingguo—A Reaffirmation of Peaceful Rise

Epilogue: Does History Repeat Itself?
The Crowe Memorandum
Toward a Pacific Community?

Afterword to the Paperback Edition
Notes
Index