The Dynamics of China's Foreign Relations

The Dynamics of China's Foreign Relations

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Even before the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution burst upon the scene in 1966, students of Chinese foreign policy were struggling to explain what many perceived to be the beginning of a decline in Perking’s international position during the 1960s. Was it wise for China’s Communist leaders to permit their country to become profoundly alienated from its Soviet elder brother? What was the rationale for China’s virtually simultaneous loss of friendship of India, the other major state with which it shared an extensive territorial boundary? Why, especially in view of the Sino-Soviet dispute, had Peking not responded to the modest initiatives belatedly taken by Washington to moderate the legacy of Sino-American hostility bequeathed by the 1950s? How should one interpret the PRC’s generally unsuccessful efforts to sow revolution in the fertile soil of Africa, Asia and Latin America? An obvious theme of such inquiries concerned the extent to which the apparent deterioration of China’s relations with a given country or area reflected factors peculiar to the relationship involved rather than factors common to the overall conduct of China’s foreign policy. Understandably, the advent of the Cultural Revolution and the more strident policy that Peking adopted toward most countries during that period made it tempting for observers to emphasize the new “general line” rather than the particular features of its application to concrete situations. Now that the paroxysm has passed, and Peking has begun to moderate certain aspects of its foreign policy again, it seems useful to devote further attention to case studies of China’s foreign relations that reveal the dynamics of China’s unique interaction with different areas and that adopt time frames of sufficient duration to permit us to view recent events in appropriate perspective. This, at least, is the premise upon which the following essays rest. They seek to examine specific problems that the PRC has encountered in some of the principal areas of the world with which it is concerned and to place those problems in the broader context of the PRC’s overall relationship to each area. All but one of these essays were originally prepared for presentation at the annual meeting of the Association for Asian Studies, held in San Francisco, April 3-5, 1970. In the first essay, Professor George Ginsburgs, of the Graduate Faculty of the New School for Social Research, analyzes the nature of the Sino-Soviet dispute over certain islands in the Amur and Ussuri Rivers, the evidence of the armed clashes to which it has given rise, and the reasons that each side may have had for instigating those clashes. After scrutinizing the subtleties and style of the debate, Professor Ginsburgs concluded that the dispute over the islands has contributed relatively little to Sino-Soviet hostility and that it is unlikely either side wishes to go to ware over so trivial an issue; nonetheless, each fins it advantageous to maintain its participation in a carefully calibrated contest over the islands. The consequences of border clashes with India that actually developed into serious conflict in 1962 constitute the subject of Professor Arthur A. Stahnke’s study of Chinas’ policies toward the South Asian subcontinent during the past decade. Professor Stahnke, of the Government Department of Southern Illinois University (Edwardsville), reviews the PRC’s support for Pakistan as part of its effort to isolate India diplomatically, and traces the successful comeback that India staged with the aid of the Soviet Union and the United States, which minimized the significance of Pakistan’s friendship with China and isolated the PRC. Professor Gene T. Hsiao, a colleague of Professor Stahnke at Southern Illinois University, explores the more unconventional triangular relationship that exist among Peking, Tokyo and Taipei. Focusing on the specific problem of trade, he describes Chinese Communist attempts to exact political gains from a Japan that enjoys the best of both Chinese worlds by doing business with the mainland, which it refuses to recognize diplomatically, as well as with Taiwan, which it continues to recognize. This account makes clear the relativelyhigh degree of flexibility and toleration with which, during most periods, Peking has reacted to Japan’s dexterity in steering between the two sides of the Taiwan strait. If the PRC has sometimes been willing to subordinate politics to economics in its relations with Japan, my own study of Peking’s attitude toward trade with the United States reveals no similar ambivalence. During the mid-1950s, when the new revolutionary regime persistently sought to persuade Washington to establish a variety of contacts with it and thereby gradually enhance its legitimacy, as one of the steps on the route to normalization of relations it tried in vain to eliminate the American embargo. In 1960, however, the PRC abandoned this unsuccessful gradualist approach as a “waste of time” and announced that the reestablishment of trade and other contacts would have to follow rather than precede resolution of the major political questions plaguing Sino-American relations. Thus, during the past decade, when it was the United States that adopted a gradualist approach and sought to establish contacts with china, including limited trade, Washington was consistently rebuffed by Peking, which preferred to await the withdrawal of American support from the Nationalist government on Taiwan and a return to the American (pre-Korean war) positions that Taiwan was part of China. The two final essays in this volume discuss Chinese policy toward Africa and Latin America, areas which, in the early 1960s, the PRC regarded as ripe for revolutionary change. Professor George T. Yu, of the University of Illinois, summarized the intensive and frequently effective PRC activity in Africa from 1960 to 1965, and the subsequent overall decline of Peking’s influence despite continuing success with a few governments and with national liberation movements in several other countries. In evaluating China’s ability to compete with the USSR and the United States in Africa, he concluded that China has been severely handicapped by its limited capacity to provide economic aid. Nevertheless, as the case of Tanzania indicates, the PRC owes its success in several countries to skillful use of its small aid program, combined with deft political maneuvering. Elsewhere, especially among the suppressed black majorities of Southern Africa, its anti-status quo orientation and its support of the doctrine of revolutionary armed struggle have proved its most reliable assets. Daniel Tretiak, senior political scientist of the Advanced Studies Group-Westinghouse, explains China’s lack of success in fomenting revolution in Latin America in terms of a classic pattern of interaction that he discerns between a new revolutionary nation-state and, on the one hand, the principal status quo members of the international community, and, on the other, revolutionary leaders in foreign countries governed by nonrevolutionary regimes. The high level of verbal support Peking gave to revolutionary leaders in Latin America reinforced the cycle of mutual hostility existing between revolutionary China and status quo United States. But it also reinforced the foreign revolutionary leaders’ expectations of substantial material aid from China, expectations that were doomed to disappointment because of the revolutionary nations-state’s need to give higher priority to other demands upon its scarce resources. Moreover, despite the low level of actual support it offered and despite that fact that contemporary Latin American conditions differ markedly from earlier Chinese conditions, Peking sought to impose the Chinese revolutionary model upon foreign revolutionary leaders. The Chinese indeed seem to have demonstrated as little sensitivity and understanding toward social revolutionaries seeking national independence in Latin America and the Soviet Union did in a previous era in China. The dominant theme common to these essays is largely implicit. Although three years of Cultural Revolutions had an immediate and damaging impact upon China’s relations with many countries, one can infer from these essays that this was not invariably the case and that, at least with respect to the particular areas studied, the long-range effects of the Cultural Revolution are likely to be relatively inconsequential. During the Cultural Revolution China’s foreign policy leaders seemed to be engaged in a systematic attempt to alienate most of the world, an attempt that enabled both the American and Soviet propaganda machines to foster the image of an elite gone mad. Yet this volume, written in early 1970, less than a year after the Cultural Revolution can be said to have ended, conjures a very different image of Chinese statesmen. It suggests that they can be farsighted or fallible, militant or flexible, subtle or insensitive, skillful or inept. But nowhere in this collection is there evidence that they are irrational, and perhaps the clearest impression is that, rhetoric to the contrary, they are a very cautious lot.

Publication Date

1970

The Dynamics of China's Foreign Relations

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