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TOC | Summary | Foreword | Two | Three | Four | Five | Notes | About the Author The People’s Republic as a Revolutionary Power: A Brief Historical Review To understand the orientation of China’s external behavior in the twenty-first century, an analysis of the PRC’s history of external relations, especially during the Maoist era, is in order. That the study of the past may generate useful insights on the present and the future is particularly true in China’s case for two reasons. First, no other nation’s path toward modernity has been so overshadowed by the impact of its historical-cultural heritage than China. The Chinese collective memory of the “Central Kingdom’s” glorious past8 —remembered not just as the center of civilization, but the civilization in toto—and the nation’s humiliating experience in the modern age constituted a constant source for national mobilization in the twentieth century. Therefore, without a comprehension of the Central Kingdom mentality and its interactive relationship with Chinese perceptions of and attitudes toward the outside world, it is difficult to reconstruct the dynamics of the PRC’s external behavior in the recent past and predict its course in the future. Second, the study of Maoist China’s foreign policy is particularly relevant to understanding the PRC’s external behavior in the post–Cold War era, as the agendas of the two are shaped by the same fundamental problems. Despite the magnitude of Mao’s revolution, it was unable to produce ultimate answers to such fundamental problems as how to define the meaning of China, how to modernize China, and how to identify China’s position in the world, bequeathing them to the post-Mao era and making them the dominant themes underlying the PRC’s external behavior during the post–Cold War era. What, then, can be said about the history of China’s external relations? To be sure, after its establishment in 1949, the PRC emerged as a revolutionary country on the world scene. During the twenty-seven years of Mao’s reign (1949–1976), the PRC constantly challenged the legitimacy of the existing international order, which it believed to be the result of Western domination and thus inimical to revolutionary China. Within this context, the PRC provided extensive material and other kinds of support to revolutionary and nationalist movements in other parts of the world, with China’s neighboring areas as a particular focus. In the meantime, Mao and his fellow Chinese leaders seemed to have been unafraid of using force in dealing with foreign policy crises that they believed threatened the PRC’s vital interests. During Mao’s rule, in addition to several minor military encounters, the PRC had been involved in at least seven major military confrontations: the Korean War in 1950–53, the First Indo-China War in 1950–54, the first and second shellings of Nationalist-controlled Jinmen Island in 1954 and 1958, the border war with India in 1962, the Vietnam War in 1964–73, and the border clash with the Soviet Union in 1969. The PRC’s revolutionary foreign policy during Mao’s times was an integral component of his grand enterprise of “continuous revolution.” As Mao repeatedly emphasized, the final goal of the Chinese Communist revolution was the transformation of China’s “old” state and society, and the destruction of the “old world,” in which China had been a humiliated country. Mao never concealed his ambition that his revolution should turn China into a land of prosperity and universal justice and equality. At the same time, by presenting the Chinese experience as a model for other “oppressed peoples” in the world, the revolution would help China regain its central position in the international community. What should be emphasized is that, as a reflection of history and perception of historical experience, underlying the PRC’s revolutionary external behavior is a profound “victim mentality.” During modern times, the Chinese perception of their nation’s position in the world was continuously informed by the conviction that it was the political incursion, economic exploitation, and military aggression by foreign imperialist countries that had undermined the historical glory of the Chinese civilization and humiliated the Chinese nation. As a result, a victim mentality gradually dominated the Chinese conceptualization of its relations with the outside world. Such a mentality is an extraordinary phenomenon in Chinese history. While it is common for non-Western countries to identify themselves as victims of the Western-dominated worldwide course of modernization, the Chinese perception of itself as a victimized member of the international community is unique, because it formed such a sharp contrast with the age-old Central Kingdom concept. The Chinese thus felt that their nation’s modern experience was more humiliating and less tolerable than any other victimized non-Western country. Consequently, Mao and his fellow revolutionary leaders, as well as everyday Chinese, firmly believed that China’s victim status would not end until it was able to reclaim its central position in the world. The Chinese leaders’ perception of their revolution’s sacred mission, reinforced by the Chinese victim mentality, gave them an exceptional sense of insecurity throughout Mao’s times. In general, it is understandable that in a divided world in which peace and stability had been severely threatened by such factors as the emergence of nuclear weapons and the intensifying confrontation between the two superpowers, any country would have reasons to feel less secure than ever before. The sense of insecurity on the part of the Chinese Communist leadership, however, was special in several respects. First, the ambitious hope on the part of Mao and the CCP leadership to change China into a central international actor conflicted with the country’s power, which was still weak during the Maoist era. As Mao and his comrades would not give up the effort to chart their own course in the world and to make China a prominent world power, they would continue to feel insecure until China’s weakness had been turned into strength. Second, since Mao and the CCP leadership emphasized the central role of the Chinese revolution in promoting the worldwide proletarian revolution, thus making China the primary enemy of reactionary forces in the world, they logically felt that they faced a very threatening world. One could find in this perception a mutually restrictive or mutually supportive relationship in the Chinese leaders’ security concerns: The more Mao and his comrades stressed the significance of the Chinese revolution, the less secure they would feel in face of the perceived threat from the outside world. Third, the continuous emphasis by Mao and the CCP leadership on the necessity of maintaining the inner dynamics of the Chinese revolution represented another constant source of insecurity. In order to use the existence of the foreign threat to mobilize the Chinese masses, Mao and his comrades enhanced anti-imperialist propaganda. This propaganda, in turn, would inevitably lead to a deepening sense of insecurity on their own part. In the practical realm of policymaking, all of the above resulted in a low threshold of threat in Beijing’s definition of China’s national security interests. Compared with policymakers in other countries, Beijing’s leaders in the Maoist era were under great pressure to take extraordinary steps to defend and promote revolutionary China’s security interests. This explains to a large extent why the PRC frequently resorted to violence in dealing with foreign policy crises. But Mao’s China, despite its history of using force, was not an expansionist power. It is essential to make a distinction between the pursuit of centrality and dominance in international affairs as a fundamental goal of Chinese foreign policy. While Mao and his comrades were never shy of using force in pursuing China’s foreign policy goals, what they hoped to achieve was not the expansion of China’s political and military control of foreign territory or resources (which was, for Mao and his comrades, too inferior an aim), but the spread of the revolution’s influence to other “hearts and minds” around the world. Mao fully understood that only when China’s superior moral position had been willingly recognized by other peoples would the consolidation of his continuous revolution’s momentum at home become most effective. Under these circumstances, Beijing’s use of force during the Maoist period was characterized by three distinctive and consistent patterns. First, Beijing’s leaders resorted to force only when the confrontation was in one way or another related to China’s territorial integrity and physical security. Even when China’s purpose for entering a military confrontation was broader than the simple defense of its border (such as during the Korean War), Beijing’s leaders always emphasized that they had exercised the military option because China’s physical security would be in jeopardy otherwise.9 When China’s involvement in a military confrontation resulted in the occupation of foreign territory, such as during the 1962 Chinese-Indian border war, Beijing’s leaders were willing to order a retreat in order to prove that China’s war aims involved no more than the defense of the country’s borders. Second, Beijing’s leaders used force always for the purpose of domestic mobilization. Mao and his comrades fully understood that the tension created by an international crisis provided them with the best means to call the whole nation to act in accordance with the will and terms of the CCP. This was particularly true when Mao met with difficulty in pushing the party and the nation to carry out his continuous-revolution programs. For example, Mao’s decision to shell Jinmen in summer 1958 contributed to the rise of a nationwide wave of revolutionary nationalism, which made it possible to mobilize the Chinese populace for the “Great Leap Forward.” On the eve of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution, China’s involvement in the Vietnam War and the extensive mass mobilization that accompanied it created an atmosphere conducive to the rapid radicalization of China’s political and social life. Third, Beijing’s leaders have used force only when they believed that they were in a position to justify it in a “moral” sense. Probably no other policymakers have placed so much emphasis on morally justifying the decision to use force than Mao and his colleagues; otherwise, the mobilization effect they hoped to achieve would be compromised. During the Korean War, Beijing adopted “Defend our nation! Defend our home!” and “Defeating American arrogance!” as public war aims and central mobilization slogans alike. During China’s involvement in the Vietnam War, Mao pointed out that the relationship between Vietnam and China was like one between “lips and teeth,” and emphasized that it was China’s obligation of proletarian internationalism to support the just struggle of the Vietnamese people. “Justice,” indeed, became the talisman of China’s international military involvement during Mao Zedong’s rule. After Mao’s death in September 1976, Deng Xiaoping emerged in the late 1970s as China’s paramount leader. Deviating from Mao’s discourse and practice of continuous revolution, Deng placed modernizing China’s industry, agriculture, national defense, and science and technology at the top of his agenda. Deng allowed the primacy of economics to take over that of politics; consequently, Chinese foreign policy and security strategy experienced several important shifts. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Chinese leadership changed its fundamental estimation of the danger of a new world war. Since the 1960s, Mao and the Beijing leadership persistently claimed that because of the existence of imperialism and “social imperialism,” a new world war—one that most likely would involve the use of nuclear weapons—could only be delayed, but not avoided. Beijing held this view until the late 1970s. With the introduction of Deng’s modernization programs, the Chinese leadership gradually discarded this assessment. In accordance with this changing evaluation of the world situation, China substantially reduced the size of its military forces, the army in particular, throughout the 1980s.10 Starting in the late 1970s, Beijing also dramatically reduced its support for revolutionary/ radical nationalist states and movements in other parts of the world to focus more on China’s own economic development. In the meantime, Beijing managed to give up some of its ideological bias to improve relations with other prominent world powers, in both the West and the East. By the late 1980s, when China’s official ties with the United States, Britain, France, West Germany, and Japan were developing smoothly, its relations with the Soviet Union had also improved significantly. The most profound change during this period was Beijing’s adoption of a new opening to the outside world. Throughout Mao’s era, as is well known, China maintained only minimal exchanges with other countries. This rigid isolationism began to be abandoned under Deng’s reform and opening policies. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Chinese government took several important steps, including the dispatch of Chinese students to study abroad, promoting China’s international trade, and welcoming foreign investments in China, to open China’s door to the outside world. As a result of these policy shifts, the interconnections between China and the rest of the world have increased, strengthening the interdependence between China and other parts of the world, and increasingly making China a real member of the international community. Consequently, China’s leaders realized that the continuous development of China’s modernization has a close connection with the maintenance of peace and stability in the world in general and in the Asia-Pacific region in particular. It is not just for the purpose of propaganda that the leaders in Beijing have repeatedly claimed since the early 1980s that for the sake of China’s own development, it needs a long period of international peace and stability.11 But some of Mao’s vital legacies have continued to influence China’s attitude toward the outside world. A conspicuous revelation in this regard is that the CCP’s one-party reign has persisted in the post-Mao era. As a result, China’s opening to the outside world has become a highly unbalanced process: Its emphasis is in foreign exchanges in the economic and technological fields, while politics and ideology remain a forbidden zone. As has been identified by many China scholars, the huge gap between this political stagnation and the rapid social changes brought about by the reform-and-opening process constituted one of the most important causes underlying the tragedy of the Tiananmen bloodshed in 1989. In a deeper sense, the continuity of post-Mao China’s external relations is reflected in the lingering influence of the Central Kingdom mentality. The reform-and-opening policy of the past two decades has significantly reduced China’s self-isolation on the international scene, while at the same time exposing the Central Kingdom to an unprecedented extent to the values and norms held by other members of the international community. While one may expect that in the long run this exposure will bring about changes of the Central Kingdom mentality as a dominant theme in the Chinese attitude toward the outside world, one of its immediate consequences is that it has caused Beijing’s leaders to emphasize the significant differences between China’s values and codes of behavior and those of the international community. Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Beijing consistently claimed that in no circumstances would it allow foreign powers to impose their values on China’s external behavior, or to use their values and norms to judge and interfere with China’s internal affairs. Since 1989, the increased criticism by other, especially Western, countries of Beijing’s alleged human rights abuses and hard-nosed policy toward Tibet and, more recently, Taiwan has further offended Beijing’s leaders.12 In addition to rebutting the criticism, dismissing it as Western countries’ interference in matters within the domain of Chinese sovereignty, Beijing has also argued that to accommodate the post–Cold War international situation, it is necessary to establish a new international political and economic order and end the status quo of Western domination in international affairs.13 More than twenty years have passed since Mao’s death, and China today is no longer a revolutionary country. But China is not a real “insider” in the international community either. Indeed, foreign policy is the least criticized endeavor in post-Mao China, yet many of the principles underlying Mao’s revolutionary foreign policy, and the victim mentality that serves as their animus, remain the key elements influencing the PRC’s external behavior today.
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