politics

The Personal was Political: Mao’s Foreign Policy from 1950-1976

/ Jim Sojourner / Leave a comment

Above all else, Mao Zedong was a revolutionary.

From 1949 to 1976, Chairman Mao ruled his People’s Republic of China, directing its actions inside and out. During the last 27 years of his life, the Great Helmsman steered his country from crisis to crisis as he battled to piece together his China, keep it whole and safe, and win recognition for the socialist nation that he had forged in the fires of revolution. Mao’s foreign policy decisions were directed in part by hostile geostrategic circumstances. But as importantly, they were driven forward by Mao’s personal desire for continuous revolution inside China – to tear down the structures of old China and erect a new, revolutionary edifice with Mao, the greatest revolutionary, sitting atop. Mao’s need to keep the revolution burning influenced the foreign policy decisions he made during the Cold War, from the Korean War to the Taiwan Crisis and from the Vietnam War to the final rapprochement with the United States. But like any hot fire, Mao’s revolution warped the structure of China’s foreign policy and left China increasingly brittle as the fires cooled.

Mao learned early the efficacy of using foreign policy to manipulate domestic forces to serve his revolutionary projects. The eruption of the Korean War in the summer of 1950 threatened China’s geostrategic position, but it also presented an opportunity for the Chinese Communist Party leadership. Having declared the establishment of the PRC from Tiananmen less than a year earlier, Mao saw in the Korean conflict a chance to re-direct pressure from outside of China to consolidate the CCPs power within it. [i] By resolutely confronting U.S. imperialism in Asia, Mao sensed he could bolster the revolutionary fervor of China’s people to legitimize the CCP’s authority as the new ruler of China and propel forward his plans to remake the country.[ii] Although failing to defeat the Americans in Korea would create a dangerous geostrategic problem for China, the fight itself would mobilize the revolutionary potential of the weary Chinese masses, and victory would enhance the CCP’s standing in a country still not yet fully united.[iii] It was, Mao decided, worth the risk. After months of propaganda, once American forces crossed into North Korea, China surged to war in October 1950. Hundreds of thousands dead and wounded was a high price, but Mao got what he paid for. By fighting the Americans to a stalemate over the next three years, he secured CCP rule and his own status as the resolute leader of a revolutionary movement.[iv]

But Mao had far grander plans for China, and by 1958 he was yanking the nation into his Great Leap Forward, a mass campaign intended to thrust China out of the agricultural dark ages and into the revolutionary future by rapid industrialization and collectivization. The Chairman, increasingly worried that growing discord with the Soviet Union threatened to dampen his dreams of revolution, saw an opportunity in Guomindang-held Taiwan to once again to stoke China’s revolutionary sentiment and build support for the Great Leap.[v] When the United States and Britain intervened to break a left-wing coup in Iraq in July 1958, protests erupted in Beijing, Shanghai, and other major Chinese cities. Mao had his official pretext to shell Taiwan: solidarity against Western imperialism.[vi] During the episode, Mao himself best elucidated his Cold War foreign policy: “Besides it’s disadvantageous side, a tense [international] situation can mobilize the population, can particularly mobilize the backward people, can mobilize the people in the middle, and can therefore promote the Great Leap Forward in economic construction. … Tension … is to our advantage in that it will mobilize all [our] positive forces … To have an enemy in front of us, to have tension, is to our advantage.”[vii] The timing, too, gave partial lie to the official justification. On August 23, two months after the Western intervention in Iraq, the People’s Liberation Army opened fire on Jinmen and Mazu Islands, just off the mainland coast. The shelling went on into October, at which time the CCP leadership began looking for a way out, having gotten the enthusiastic domestic response Mao sought. In the end, the Chairman simply left both islands in Taiwan’s hands. He understood the usefulness of having a ready-made enemy to play up China’s “victim mentality” to encourage nationwide mobilization.[viii]

With the shelling of Taiwan, Mao had gotten such mobilization, and China leapt into a great abyss. But by 1960, however, it was clear that Mao’s Great Leap Forward was a catastrophe, leaving the countryside in ruins and tens of millions dead from starvation.[ix] More important to the Chairman himself, however, the Great Leap dimmed Mao’s aura of “eternal correctness”, and his eternal revolution was in danger of melting away.[x] Revolution was in retreat across the country, so by the time the economy began to recover in 1962, Mao was preparing to leap again. Mao had learned his lessons well in the 1950s; if he were to restart his revolution and save his reputation, he needed another crisis, and he had one in America’s war in Vietnam. By creating the impression that China faced a serious counterrevolutionary threat there, Mao could rekindle the dying revolution at home and re-secure his authority as the head of the CCP. Vietnam was tricky, though. If China’s involvement led to a direct Chinese-American military confrontation, the unwinnable war could sabotage his revolution at home.[xi] From 1965-1969, China sent engineering troops, antiaircraft artillery troops, and military equipment and materials to North Vietnam but not the full military support the Vietnamese expected.[xii] Frustrated by Mao’s balancing act and diverging political opinions regarding the Soviet Union, the carefully built relationship between China and North Vietnam frayed and then unraveled.[xiii]

It was just one of many deteriorating relationships in the background of Mao’s foreign policy.[xiv] After Stalin’s death in 1953, Mao saw a chance to take his place at the head of the international revolutionary movement. New Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev gave his “secret speech” criticizing Stalin in 1956,[xv] and Mao decided he needed to root out China’s own Krushchevs—traitors who might criticize the Chairman’s revolutionary decisions—to begin a great purge and his final revolution.[xvi] In this atmosphere, from the late 1950s onward Mao engineered a series of incidents that alienated China from its erstwhile Soviet ally, using both the paranoia seeping from Sino-Soviet split as well as the “People’s War” in Vietnam to launch his Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution. In 1966, China, more and more alone as a result of Mao’s foreign policy, descended madness and chaos, while the flames of student-led revolution raged everywhere, scorching even China’s last remaining friends in Burma, Cuba, and elsewhere Mao badge-bearing students and CCP-funded insurgencies spilled out of China’s borders.[xvii]

The old revolutionary’s great revolution failed. It could not build anything new, only burn and destroy. By 1969, belligerence and disfunction threated to bring Soviet bombs down on China, now totally alone.[xviii] Mao had a choice: burn with the revolution or save himself – now the unquestioned and unassailable revolutionary – and what was left of the edifice or rubble he had made. He chose the latter, and for one last time, Mao’s personal political ambitions drove his foreign policy. With the Soviet Union entrenched as the top imperialist enemy, Mao saw a chance to pull back from the brink of war by reaching out to the Americans.[xix] After shooting broke out on disputed Zhenbao Island and hundreds of thousands of troops massed along the Sino-Soviet border, Mao signaled to the newly elected President Richard Nixon in 1970 that he would be welcome in Beijing. Henry Kissinger’s secret 1971 visit followed, and Nixon himself came to China in 1972 for leader-to-leader talks—and to listen to Mao philosophize in the Chairman’s personal study.[xx] It would take seven more years for full relations to be restored and for China to begin its true recovery. Mao died before that in 1976, China’s great revolutionary lying amid the ashes of his revolution.

[i] Chen Jian. Mao’s China and the Cold War (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2001), Chapter 4, 85-117.
[ii] Ibid. Chapter 4, 85-117.
[iii] Waley-Cohen, Joanna. The Sextants of Beijing: Global Currents in Chinese History (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999, digital edition), 288-290.
[iv] Ibid, 288-290.
[v] Westad, Odd Arne. Restless Empire: China and the World Since 1750 (New York: Basic Books, 2012), 337.
[vi] Chen Jian, Mao’s China and the Cold War, 175.
[vii] Chen Jian. Mao’s China and the Cold War, Chapter 7, 161-204.
[viii] Ibid. Chapter 7, 161-204.
[ix] Westad. Restless Empire, 336.
[x] Chen Jian. Mao’s China and the Cold War, 210.
[xi] Westad. Restless Empire, 348.
[xii] Chen Jian, Mao’s China and the Cold War. Chapter 8, 205-237.
[xiii] Westad. Restless Empire, 348.
[xiv] Ibid, 350-352.
[xv] Khan, Sulmaan. “The Cultural Revolution” (class lecture, The Foreign Relations of Modern China, The Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy, Medford, Massachusetts, November 2018).
[xvi] Chen Jian. Mao’s China and the Cold War.
[xvii] Khan, “The Cultural Revolution”.
[xviii] Westad, Restless Empire, 360.
[xix]Chen Jian, Mao’s China and the Cold War, Chapter 9, 238-276.
[xx] Ibid, Chapter 9, 238-276.

Pence on China: Mere Flap-Doodle

/ Jim Sojourner / Leave a comment

In a speech to the Hudson Institute in October outlining his administration’s stance toward China, Vice President Mike Pence said:

“When China suffered through indignities and exploitation during her so-called ‘Century of Humiliation,’ America refused to join in, and advocated the ‘Open Door’ policy, so that we could have freer trade with China, and preserve their sovereignty…”[1]

To crib a line from John Hay, the US Secretary of State who personally outlined America’s Open Door Policy to all great powers in 1899, what Pence said is “mere flap-doodle.”[2]

By the time America formulated the Open Door Policy, which urged “the various powers claiming ‘spheres of interest’ that they shall enjoy perfect equality of treatment for their commerce and navigation within such ‘spheres,’” it had already signed multiple “unequal treaties” with China.[3] Those treaties guaranteed extraterritoriality for foreigners, pried open new treaty ports, opened Beijing to a legation, allowed American boats to access to the Yangtze River, and protected missionary activities throughout China.[4] America also supplied troops to the eight-power alliance dispatched to Beijing to quell the anti-foreign Boxer Rebellion in 1900, an intervention that killed a large number Chinese and the looted the capital’s treasures.[5] So much for “refusing to join in” and “preserving their sovereignty.”

As for free trade, America joined late in the carving up of China, having been preoccupied with its own colonialist Spanish-American War until 1898.[6] The Open Door Policy’s goal was to ensure the more-established “unequal treaty” powers wouldn’t exclude America from China. By claiming the “lofty principles of fair trade,”[7] Hay and the Americans tried to guarantee American products and capital would have equal access to the Chinese market—that Americans would get their slice of the melon. “Freer trade”, then, whether China wanted it or not.

Pence’s comments have implications beyond exposing historical illiteracy. From perspective of Chinese policy makers, Americans talking about the Open Door policy to rationalize a tougher line on bilateral relations recalls China’s “Century of Humiliation” and tints American intentions with 19th and 20th century aggression. Invoking the Open Door Policy is a fine way to signal by “free trade” American leaders really mean “American interests.” It’s hostile, counterproductive, and reminds the Chinese of a time when foreigners exploited China’s weakness for their advantage.

Unlike 1899, China is no longer weak and is eager to demonstrate it. Like 1899, America does not have the unilateral ability get want it wants. It needs some cooperation or at least acquiescence, this time from China. Talking about the Open Door, then, is perhaps not the best way to negotiate a troubled relationship.

[1] Pence, Mike, “Vice President Mike Pence’s Remarks on the Administration’s Policy Toward China” (delivered to the Hudson Institute, 4 October 2018).
[2] Westad, Odd Arne, Restless Empire: China and the World Since 1750 (New York: Basic Books, 2012), 130.|
[3] Waley-Cohen, Joanna, The Sextants of Beijing: Global Currents in Chinese History (New York: Norton, 1999, digital edition), 190-191.
[4] Ibid, 190-191.
[5] Westad, Odd Arne, Restless Empire, 127.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Ibid, 131.

Vietnam, Vietnam, Vietnam, We’ve All…

/ Jim Sojourner / Leave a comment

Hanoi, Vietnam – February 16, 2018

It is Larry’s second trip to Vietnam, if you don’t count the first one.

Larry did not spend his recent 70th birthday here. He did spend his 18th, 19th, and 20th birthdays here, on that first trip, the one he doesn’t count.

It is my first trip to Vietnam, and it is New Year’s Day, the beginning of Tet, a holiday known to Americans mostly because of the eponymous battle fought in this country exactly 50 years ago. The Viet Cong sacked Saigon, then, including the American Embassy, Hue, and other major cities in an attack that stunned both the American and South Vietnamese. In response, the B-52s of the U.S. Air Force bombed the cities into shards.

“It became necessary to destroy the town in order to save it,” U.S. Major Peter Arnett said.

Tens of thousands of combatants on both sides died in the fighting. Tens of thousands of civilians died in the bombing. Hundreds of thousands lost everything.

That was Larry’s first trip.

This Tet is not like that Tet. It is quiet in the streets this morning, the, perhaps, one day of the year when Vietnamese get up late, having celebrated late into the night after fireworks marked the beginning of the new year. Houses were cleaned, debts were settled, rice wine was swallowed. Even the police partied. Shortly after midnight a patrol  had pulled up in front of my hostel, shouted some things at the foreigners smoking out front, shot a tube of confetti, threw the spent tube out the back of the truck, and drove off, leaving the cannon and the rainbow river of sparkling paper lying in the lane.

Selling lucky pigs.
Selling lucky gold.
Hanoi temple.
New Year’s Morning.
An unhappy haircut.
St. Joseph’s.

So this morning is quiet. The coffee shops and pho stands mostly keep their shutters down and only a few motorbikes hum through the alleys. At Hoan Kiem lake, just south of Hanoi’s Old Quarter, people stroll across the aching stretch of red wood that links the shore to the temple island. I stand up from trying to snatch their likenesses from the morning mist.

The Bridge at Hoan Kiem Lake

The Bridge at Hoan Kiem Lake

“Did you get a good one?” someone behind me asks in American. And there Larry is, gray ponytail fluttering, smile tucked behind the points of his mustache. He is leaning on a shiny wooden cane.

We talk first, of course, about the weather, which in Hanoi is much warmer than it is his home in Juneau, Alaska, which itself is much warmer than it used to be. The snowblower he and his friend bought this year, well, they’ve only used it once. These days, the rain gets to the snow before he can. Larry’s wife, 16 years his junior, thinks that’s funny. She’s a workaholic executive in Juneau, and Larry knows the time difference by heart so he can text her every morning from Hanoi to chide her that it’s time to get out of the office.

Larry’s wife wanted to go to Africa this year, but Larry said he’s too old now to run away from rhinos.

“Where do you want to go?” she’d asked.

“I think I want to find the perfect bowl of pho,” he said.

And so he’s back in Vietnam, this time by himself, rather than with his wife and rather than with an army of other American boys.

The first time Larry came to Hanoi, about a decade ago, he’d gotten the shakes. He never planned to come Vietnam, not ever again after that uncounted first time. His wife had been planning a trip to Thailand with a jaunt into Vietnam and he’d stay in Thailand and wait, but then plans changed. The trip would be all Vietnam, instead.

Ah, what the hell, he’d thought and decided to go along. Then, as the plane descended into Hanoi the shaking started. He almost couldn’t get off the plane.

“I knew they’d hate me, after what we’d done to them,” he said.

The airport in Hanoi reeks of confusion and frustration, knots of foreigners trying to sort out their visas. It was worse 10 years ago, Larry says. He milled around trying to understand the chaos when someone tapped him on the shoulder. He turned.

The vomit green uniform, topped with that red star hat, hadn’t changed much since the  the last time Larry was here. The AK-47 slung across the man’s shoulder hadn’t changed much, either. Larry wanted to turn the floor the color of the uniform.

“Passport,” the man with the gun said. Larry knew what was going to happen. He handed it over with a trembling hand.

“American,” the man said. It wasn’t a question. “Come with me.”

This was it, Larry, thought as he followed. This was a big, big mistake. The soldier led Larry to the front of the immigration queue. As he passed, people bowed.

“American,” they said, smiling. It wasn’t a question.

Something was different about Vietnam, Larry realized. It was a realizations he’s come to again and again.

One thing hadn’t changed, though: the smell.

“As soon as I stepped out of the cab into the Old Quarter, bam, I was right back. It smelled the same,” Larry said. “There something about that olfactory memory, it never goes away.”

The smell. Hanoi is a city of things in millions: people, food stalls, motorbikes. A dash of cinnamon and anise, a slab roasting beef and onions, a plate of fresh herbs, a liter of gasoline. Mix it together and let it simmer, like the broth of the city’s most famous dish, and you get the smell.

Pho baby.
Making pho.
Noodles.
Generations.
New Year’s Eve.
Where’s the beef? Here.

It pervades the Old Quarter, as if the raucous, twisting alleyways were one giant pho stall during the lunchtime rush.

“If I didn’t have a wife, I’d never leave,” Larry says.

He loves that food stall more than anywhere on earth — and seen the earth he has — so much so that in the last few days he’s walked it back and forth until he couldn’t walk anymore. Bad hip, he says nodding sideways. Hence the new cane.

“Do things when you have the chance, that way when you can’t do them any more, you won’t regret it,” he says, then mimes picking up a pail of water with the hand that isn’t resting on the cane. “When people ask me what’s on my bucket list I say ‘My bucket’s already pretty full.’ I’ll tell you another thing: Don’t go to the grave healthy and safe; go screaming up to the edge, tip right in and say ‘That was a hell of a ride.'”

These days Larry doesn’t do much screaming, though, and that’s OK. He’s content to spend his mornings walking the lake, looking for students, who are always happy to practice their English and teach him more about Vietnam. Sometimes he heads into the Old Quarter searching for that perfect bowl of pho, and sometimes strolls the French Quarter to sip on the country’s famed coffee — strong and sweet, often with condensed milk — and gaze up at the jarring Hanoi skyline.

In Hanoi’s dynastic days, the crown levied property taxes based on the width of the storefront. So the vendors and homeowners built “tube houses”, narrow and really long, like gigantic square pipes. In recent decades Hanoi’s tube houses have also shot skyward, some as many as seven or eight stories, and have tacked on facades that look vaguely French, Chinese or both.

The result is a city that looks as if someone handed a toddler a set of Lego’s designed by a cocaine-addled, out-of-work architect with delusions of artistic grandeur and let the child go to town.

A tube house.
On the wrong side of the tracks.
Typical.
Walking the tracks.
Local coffee.
Hanoi from above.

Larry’s made a lot of friends already on his two trips to Hanoi, even if some of his conversations happen only in pantomime. He’s going out to a village with one friend next week (he hopes someone will speak a bit of English to avoid one really long game of charades), and the hotel staff even asks him to watch the desk while they run errands.

“I’m not just a tourist anymore,” he says. “I came down this morning and they said ‘No one eats alone on New Year’s Day,'” he says. He shared their New Year’s breakfast. In a country whose culture very much still revolves around the Confucian centrality of family, there’s not much higher honor.

Through his chats next to the lake, Larry no longer fears how people will react when they learn he’s American and that once, that uncounted time he came to Vietnam, he came here to kill.

“They say ‘Nobody cares anymore; that was our grandparents.’,” Larry says, then laughs. “But I’m the grandparent!”

Old man on the lake.
Legendary turtle building.

So they know, Larry says, the grandparents know.

Next week he’s arranged a meeting with a few of those grandparents — Vietnamese veterans of the American War — to talk. I don’t ask Larry what they will talk about. I’m not sure he knows. I do know he wants them to understand the fear he felt during that first trip to Vietnam in 1965 and the fear he felt on what he sees as his first trip 50 years later. I think that he wants, somehow, through shared experience communicated in gestures and translators, to try to atone for something.

“They kicked our asses,” Larry says, and I add the French and the Chinese to his list while he nods. “When I got back, I started reading about Ho Chi Minh. I probably read everything he wrote. We were wrong. Ho Chi Minh is a hero. For a country that is supposed to be about freedom and democracy, when they asked for it, we wouldn’t even let them have it.”

Uncle Ho rests here.

Uncle Ho rests here.

Because Larry is still trying to understand how the people of this country could embrace him the way they have even after what he and his country did to them.

“I was 20 years old when I left this place,” Larry says. “There aren’t too many of us left.  When I walk around here and I see someone my age and they see me, we just know.”

Hanging faces.
Hanging prayers.