It is naive to say, as the ministry of external affairs has said in slightly different words, that the establishment of full diplomatic relations between the United States and China, involving, as they do, the severance of diplomatic ties between Washington and Taipeh, is the logical culmination of the process of normalisation that began in 1972 with Mr Nixon’s visit to Peking. There is nothing logical about such developments. Long-term calculations can easily go awry in these matters. As it happens, the initiators of the process of reconciliation on the Chinese side are dead – Mr Mao Tse-tung and Mr Chou En-lai – and on the US side out of office – Mr Nixon and Mr Kissinger – and thereby hangs a tale.
A remarkable change has taken place in the policies of the two countries as a result of the change of guards. It is self-evident in the case of China where Mr Teng Hsiao-ping is clearly in command and is calling the shots. He has not repudiated the “great helmsman” in the same way as Mr Khrushchev denounced Stalin. But he has repudiated the deceased leader’s basic approach to the development of China – self-reliance on the basis of the use of its enormous manpower, minimum contact with the outside world and acceptance of equally shared poverty as a way of life – and gone in for modernisation based on the import of Western and Japanese technology on a scale the world has never known and the enormous credits that must go with it.
Agreement
The change is not so evident in the case of the United States. But it has taken place all the same. Surprisingly though it may appear, on the face of it, Mr Nixon and Mr Kissinger, though themselves products of the cold war, had come to recognise and acknowledge that the development of co-operative relations with the Soviet Union must be the centre-piece of American foreign policy if a dangerous escalation in the nuclear arms race and worse were to be avoided. They sought an opening with China partly in the hope that this would enable them to wind up the Vietnam war on “honourable” terms and partly in the calculation that it would give them an additional leverage in dealing with the Soviet Union. The same cannot be said of the Carter administration. It, too, is seeking agreements with Moscow. Indeed, it has said that the SALT-II agreement is almost ready to be signed. But the search for cooperative relations with the Kremlin is not the centre-piece of its overall policy.
It may be somewhat rash to conclude that President Carter has bought the national security adviser, Mr Zbigniew Brzezinski’s theory regarding the need to contain the Soviet Union lock, stock and barrel and that he has rushed the agreement on the establishment of diplomatic relations with China on that count. But one need not be surprised if this turns out to be the case. Anyway, that is how the dominant section of the Chinese leadership is likely to view it. Mr Teng’s interview to Mr Rowland Evans and Mr Robert Novak as reported in the International Herald Tribune (December 5) should clinch the issue.
This newspaper alone in India took note of this stunning interview. It drew the policy-makers’ and other interested readers’ attention to it in an editorial “China Seeks US Alliance” (December 13/14). Even so it is pertinent to recall what Mr Teng told the two American journalists in that on-the-record but not-for-quotation (direct) interview. He favoured “not only diplomatic relations with Washington but a strong Chinese-US alliance against Moscow”. As he saw it, “In the Pacific …. the Soviet Navy has surpassed the strength of the US Seventh Fleet”. Beyond that “he stressed the pro-Soviet coup in Afghanistan and Moscow’s alliance with Vietnam as part of the so-called Soviet collective security system”. Though the Chinese vice-premier was convinced that the Sino-Japanese peace treaty with its anti-hegemony clause “produces better security in the region”, only “a US-Chinese treaty would bring better security to the world” at least partly because, in his view, “with its own forces, the United States does not have the strength” to contain the Soviet Union. It was in the same interview that Mr Teng gave an explicit assurance that even if Formosa was to be united with China, Peking would not seek to change the island’s social and economic system.
The interview need not, and indeed, should not, be interpreted to mean that China will now seek a formal security arrangement with the United States and that the later will oblige it. For an informal understanding can suffice so long is Peking is assured of Western support in terms of supply of sophisticated weapons, credits, technology and access to Western markets for its exports. This is true of its relations with Japan as well, the pertinent point is that China is seeking nothing short of a Washington-Peking-Tokyo entente aimed at isolating the Soviet Union and its friends in Asia and the Pacific and that by going in for full-fledged diplomatic relations with the United States it has plugged the main gap in the proposed arrangement.
Considerations
As far as the published material is concerned, there is no evidence to suggest that the Mao-Chou leadership was thinking in terms of a Washington-Peking-Tokyo entente when it agreed to receive first Mr Kissinger and then Mr Nixon in Peking in 1971 and 1972. On the contrary, judging by chairman Mao’s emphasis on continued radicalisation of the Chinese people and self-reliance and people’s war, it would not be unreasonable to conclude that, at least as far as he was concerned, the opening to the United States was intended to serve the limited purpose of ending China’s self-imposed isolation and creating an uncertainty in the minds of Soviet policy-makers regarding the American role in case major armed conflict broke out between their country and the Soviet Union. He was engaged in what he regarded as an ideological struggle with the Soviet Union. For he took his alternative model of ushering in communism pretty seriously.
The situation In China is now quite different, though it is well-nigh impossible to predict whether this will hold and whether there will occur an ideological backlash against Mr Teng’s pragmatism. For the time being, however, it has given up the talk of another road to communism and therefore the ideological struggle with the Russians. Thus its decision to establish diplomatic relations with the United States and its search for a Washington-Peking-Tokyo political axis must be said to have been inspired largely by power considerations.
In this connection it may or may not be pertinent to note that in his talk with some Japanese leaders during their recent visit to Peking, Mr Teng is reported to have said that the Tokyo-Peking dispute over Senkaku islands can be left to the next generation to solve and he added, who knows what will be the political-economic system in China then. But there can be little doubt that ideology will be taking a back seat in Peking if the present leadership is able to consolidate itself.
It may also be too early to suggest that the nightmare of a Washington-Peking-Tokyo axis, which has haunted the Soviet leaders since the break with China in the late ‘fifties, is finally threatening to materialise. For it may still be possible for them to frustrate the Chinese plans by being more forthcoming in the on-going negotiations in respect of strategic nuclear weapons and reduction of forces in Europe. But there can be no question that they face a formidable challenge which will not disappear whatever they do. They will be cementing China-US ties if they adopt a tough stance and continue to expand their military strength in Europe and their role in Southern Africa and the Persian Gulf. And will invite further pressures if they suddenly begin to make concessions and therefore appear to be operating from a position of weakness.
Superiority
If, on top of it all, the CIA’s and other recent Western studies turn out to be right, we may be witnessing the beginning of a marked shift in the world’s power balance to the disadvantage of the Soviet Union and its allies. These studies suggest that technological breakthroughs in the West in the field of conventional weapons will by the early ‘eighties nullify the advantage that the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact allies – their reliability is open to question but that is a separate issue – now enjoy by virtue of their numerical superiority in terms of both men and weapons, particularly tanks and aeroplanes. These studies also emphasise that the technological gap between the Soviet Union and the West in key industries like chemicals and computers has not been reduced in the past decade and is not likely to be reduced in coming years in view of the excessive emphasis in the Soviet Union on defence which eats up too many resources in men and materials, senseless security arrangements which make the transfer of knowledge from one laboratory to another well-nigh impossible and the inability of the system as a whole to innovate. Surely then such gains as the Soviet Union is able to make on the periphery of the main areas of contention with the West, as in Africa recently, cannot compensate for these structural weaknesses of the system, especially when the empire is riddled with inner contradictions as revealed once again by Romania’s refusal to fall in line with the Warsaw Pact governments’ decision to increase military expenditure.
The Times of India, 19 December 1978