Ironically, the biggest loser in the Korean War was Stalin, who had given the green light to Kim Il-sung to start and had urged, even blackmailed, Mao to intervene massively. Encouraged by America’s acquiescence in the Communist victory in China, he had calculated that Kim Il-sung could repeat the pattern in Korea. The American intervention thwarted that objective. He urged Mao to intervene, expecting that such an act would create a lasting hostility between China and the United States and increase China’s dependence on Moscow.
Stalin was right in his strategic prediction but erred grievously in assessing the consequences. Chinese dependence on the Soviet Union was double-edged. The rearmament of China that the Soviet Union undertook, in the end, shortened the time until China would be able to act on its own. The Sino-American schism Stalin was promoting did not lead to an improvement of Sino-Soviet relations, nor did it reduce China’s Titoist option. On the contrary, Mao calculated that he could defy both superpowers simultaneously. American conflicts with the Soviet Union were so profound that Mao judged he needed to pay no price for Soviet backing in the Cold War, indeed that he could use it as a threat even without its approval, as he did in a number of subsequent crises. Starting with the end of the Korean War, Soviet relations with China deteriorated, caused in no small part by the opaqueness with which Stalin had encouraged Kim Il-sung’s adventure, the brutality with which he had pressed China toward intervention, and, above all, the grudging manner of Soviet support, all of which was in the form of repayable loans. Within a decade, the Soviet Union would become China’s principal adversary. And before another decade had passed, another reversal of alliance would take place.
CHAPTER 6
China Confronts Both Superpowers
O
TTO VON BISMARCK, probably the greatest diplomat of the second half of the nineteenth century, once said that in a world order of five states, it is always desirable to be part of a group of three. Applied to the interplay of three countries, one would therefore think that it is always desirable to be in a group of two.
That truth escaped the chief actors of the China-Soviet-U.S. triangle for a decade and a half—partly because of the unprecedented maneuvers of Mao. In foreign policy, statesmen often serve their objectives by bringing about a confluence of interests. Mao’s policy was based on the opposite. He learned to exploit overlapping hostilities. The conflict between Moscow and Washington was the strategic essence of the Cold War; the hostility between Washington and Beijing dominated Asian diplomacy. But the two Communist states could never merge their respective hostility toward the United States—except briefly and incompletely in the Korean War—because of Mao’s evolving rivalry with Moscow over ideological primacy and geostrategic analysis.
From the point of view of traditional power politics, Mao, of course, was in no position to act as an equal member of the triangular relationship. He was by far the weakest and most vulnerable. But by playing on the mutual hostility of the nuclear superpowers and creating the impression of being impervious to nuclear devastation, he managed to bring about a kind of diplomatic sanctuary for China. Mao added a novel dimension to power politics, one for which I know of no precedent. Far from seeking the support of either superpower—as traditional balance-of-power theory would have counseled—he exploited the Soviet-U.S. fear of each other by challenging each of the rivals simultaneously.
Within a year of the end of the Korean War, Mao confronted America militarily in a crisis in the Taiwan Strait. Almost simultaneously, he began to confront the Soviet Union ideologically. He felt confident in pursuing both courses because he calculated that neither superpower would permit his defeat by the other. It was a brilliant application of the Zhuge Liang Empty City Stratagem described in an earlier chapter, which turns material weakness into a psychological asset.
At the end of the Korean War, traditional students of international affairs—especially Western scholars—expected that Mao would seek a period of respite. Since the victory of the Communists, there had been nary a month of even apparent tranquility. Land reform, the implementation of the Soviet economic model, and the destruction of the domestic opposition had constituted a packed and dramatic domestic agenda. Simultaneously the still quite underdeveloped country was engaged in a war with a nuclear superpower in possession of advanced military technology.
Mao had no intention to enter history for the respites he availed to his society. Instead, he launched China into a set of new upheavals: two conflicts with the United States in the Taiwan Strait, the beginning of conflict with India, and a growing ideological and geopolitical controversy with the Soviet Union.
For the United States, by contrast, the end of the Korean War and the advent of the administration of Dwight Eisenhower marked the return to domestic “normalcy” that would last for the rest of the decade. Internationally, the Korean War became a template for Communism’s commitment to expansion by political subversion or military aggression wherever possible. Other parts of Asia supplied corroborating evidence: the guerrilla war in Malaysia; the violent bid for power by leftists in Singapore; and, increasingly, in the wars in Indochina. Where the American perception went partially awry was in thinking of Communism as a monolith and failing to understand the depth of suspicion, even at this early stage, between the two Communist giants.
The Eisenhower administration dealt with the threat of aggression by methods borrowed from America’s European experience. It tried to shore up the viability of countries bordering the Communist world following the example of the Marshall Plan, and it constructed military alliances in the style of NATO, such as the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization (SEATO) between the new nations bordering China in Southeast Asia. It did not fully consider the essential difference between European conditions and those at the fringe of Asia. The postwar European countries were established states with elaborated institutions. Their viability depended on closing the gap between expectation and reality, caused by the depredations of the Second World War—an expansive project that proved manageable, however, in a relatively brief period of time as history is measured. With domestic stability substantially assured, the security problem turned into defense against a potential military attack across established international frontiers.
In Asia around the rim of China, however, the states were still in the process of formation. The challenge was to create political institutions and a political consensus out of ethnic and religious divisions. This was less a military, more a conceptual, task; the security threat was domestic insurrection or guerrilla warfare rather than organized units crossing military frontiers. This was a particular challenge in Indochina, where the end of the French colonial project left four countries (North Vietnam, South Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos) with contested borders and weak independent national traditions. These conflicts had their own dynamism not controllable in detail from Beijing or Moscow or Washington, yet influenced by the policies of the strategic triangle. In Asia, therefore, there were very few, if any, purely military challenges. Military strategy and political and social reform were inextricably linked.
The First Taiwan Strait Crisis
Beijing and Taipei proclaimed what amounted to two competing versions of the same Chinese national identity. In the Nationalist view, Taiwan was not an independent state: it was the home of the Republic of China’s government-in-exile, which had been temporarily displaced by Communist usurpers, but which—as Nationalist propaganda insistently proclaimed—would return to assume its rightful place on the mainland. In Beijing’s conception, Taiwan was a renegade province whose separation from the mainland and alliance with foreign powers represented the last vestige of China’s “century of humiliation.” Both Chinese sides agreed that Taiwan and the mainland were part of the same political entity. The disagreement was about
which
Chinese government was the rightful ruler.
Washington and its allies periodically floated the idea of recognizing the Republic of China and the People’s Republic of China as separate states—the so-called two China solution. Both Chinese sides vociferously rejected this proposal on the ground that it would prevent them from fulfilling a sacred national obligation to liberate the other. Against its initial judgment, Washington affirmed Taipei’s stance that the Republic of China was the “real” Chinese government, entitled to China’s seat in the United Nations and other international institutions. Assistant Secretary of State for Eastern Affairs Dean Rusk—later to become Secretary of State—articulated this stance for the Truman administration in 1951, stating that, despite appearances to the contrary, “The Peiping [then the Nationalist appellation for Beijing] . . . regime is not the Government of China. . . . It is not Chinese. It is not entitled to speak for China in the community of nations.”
1
The People’s Republic of China with its capital in Beijing was, for Washington, a legal and diplomatic nonentity, despite its actual control over the world’s largest population. This would remain, with only minor variations, the official American position for the next two decades.
The unintended consequence was American involvement in the Chinese civil war. It cast the United States, in Beijing’s conception of international affairs, as the latest in a string of foreign powers perceived as conspiring for a century to divide and dominate China. In Beijing’s view, so long as Taiwan remained under a separate administrative authority receiving foreign political and military assistance, the project of founding a “New China” would remain incomplete.
The United States, Chiang’s primary ally, had little appetite for a Nationalist reconquest of the mainland. Though Taipei’s supporters in Congress periodically called on the White House to “unleash Chiang,” no American President seriously considered a campaign to reverse the Communist victory in the Chinese civil war—a source of profound misapprehension on the Communist side.
The first direct Taiwan crisis erupted in August 1954, little more than a year after the end of active hostilities in the Korean War. The pretext for it was a territorial quirk of the Nationalist retreat from the mainland: the remaining presence of Nationalist forces on several heavily fortified islands hugging the Chinese coast. These offshore islands, which were much closer to the mainland than to Taiwan, included Quemoy, Matsu, and several smaller outcroppings of land.
2
Depending on one’s view, the offshore islands were either Taiwan’s first line of defense or, as Nationalist propaganda proclaimed, its forward operating base for an eventual reconquest of the mainland.
The offshore islands were an odd location for what turned into two major crises within a decade in which, at one point, both the Soviet Union and the United States implied a readiness to use nuclear weapons. Neither the Soviet Union nor the United States had any strategic interest in the offshore islands. Neither, as it turned out, did China. Instead, Mao used them to make a general point about international relations: as part of his grand strategy against the United States in the first crisis and against the Soviet Union—especially Khrushchev—in the second.
At the closest point, Quemoy was roughly two miles from the major Chinese port city of Xiamen; Matsu was similarly close to the city of Fuzhou.
3
The islands were visible with the naked eye from the mainland and within easy artillery range. Taiwan was well over a hundred miles away. PLA forays against the offshore islands in 1949 were turned back by strong Nationalist resistance. Truman’s dispatch of the Seventh Fleet to the Taiwan Strait at the outset of the Korean War forced Mao to postpone the planned invasion of Taiwan indefinitely and Beijing’s appeals to Moscow for support in the full “liberation” of Taiwan were met by evasions—a first stage toward the ultimate estrangement.
The situation grew more complex when Eisenhower succeeded Truman as President. In his first State of the Union address on February 2, 1953, Eisenhower announced an end to the Seventh Fleet’s patrol in the Taiwan Strait. Because the fleet had prevented attacks in both directions, Eisenhower reasoned that the mission had “meant, in effect, that the U.S. Navy was required to serve as a defensive arm of Communist China” even while Chinese forces were killing American troops in Korea. Now he was ordering it out of the strait, since Americans “certainly have no obligation to protect a nation fighting us in Korea.”
4
In China, the Seventh Fleet’s deployment to the strait had been seen as a major American offensive move. Now, paradoxically, its redeployment set the stage for a new crisis. Taipei began reinforcing Quemoy and Matsu with thousands of additional troops and a significant store of military hardware.
Both sides now faced a dilemma. China would never abandon its commitment to the return of Taiwan, but it could postpone its implementation in the face of overwhelming obstacles such as the presence of the Seventh Fleet. After the fleet’s withdrawal, it faced no comparable obstacle vis-à-vis the offshore islands. For its part, America had committed itself to the defense of Taiwan, but a war over offshore islands that Secretary of State John Foster Dulles described as “a bunch of rocks” was another matter.
5
The confrontation became more acute when the Eisenhower administration began negotiating a formal mutual defense treaty with Taiwan, followed by the creation of the Southeast Asia Treaty Organization.
When faced with a challenge, Mao generally took the most unexpected and most intricate course. While Secretary of State John Dulles was flying to Manila for the formation of SEATO Mao ordered a massive shelling of Quemoy and Matsu—a shot across the bow of Taiwan’s increasing autonomy and a test of Washington’s commitment to multilateral defense of Asia.