RETHINKING U.S. CHINA POLICY

RETHINKING U.S CHINA POLICY

FOR the past two decades, since Mao Tse-tung seized control of nearly one-quarter of the human race, the U.S. has done its best to quarantine Communist China. The policy began with nonrecognition, based partly on moral disapproval of the Communist takeover. It was later stiffened with "containment," a strategy designed both to weaken the regime and to keep the Chinese from overrunning their neighbors. Despite a long tradition of U.S. sympathy for China, most Americans have regarded the quarantine as all the more prudent since China exploded its first nuclear device in 1964.

How well has that policy actually worked? It has certainly not helped bring about the "passing" of Chinese Communism that the late John Foster Dulles hoped for. It has probably deterred Chinese expansionist impulses, although to what extent is unknown; the strength of such impulses has never been clear. One possible result of the policy is Peking's intense hostility toward America: the world's most populous nation (750 million people) seems convinced that the world's most powerful is bent on destroying it at the first chance. It cannot be proved, of course, that a different U.S. attitude would have produced a different mood in China. But as Richard Nixon observed during last year's campaign: "We simply cannot afford to leave China forever outside the family of nations, there to nurture its fantasies, cherish its hates, threaten its neighbors. There is no place on this small planet for a billion of its potentially most able people to live in angry isolation."

Nixon was taking "the long view," and his Administration is not prepared, at present, to alter the U.S. position. The question remains whether "the long view" should not get somewhat shorter. Should the U.S. begin to change its policy now and start laying the foundation for eventual reconciliation? If so, can such an effort be successful?

Recovery Before Adventure

Most China experts question whether the assumptions on which present U.S. policy is based remain realistic in the '60s. Some U.S. officials still talk as if China were both ready and willing to conquer Asia. Is it? Despite its nuclear power and its formidable manpower reserves, China is one of the world's poorer countries (estimated annual per capita income: $100, compared with Japan's $1,100). China's recent Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution and the upheaval it caused may put domestic recovery ahead of foreign adventure for some time to come. Even before the Cultural Revolution, China was too weak in air, sea and industrial power to sustain a modern war much beyond its borders. However absurd it may seem to Americans, the Chi nese regard their actions in Korea and Viet Nam as defensive, and those in Tibet and India as attempts to regain territory that all Chinese (including the exiled Nationalists) have long claimed.

In fact, China has been involved less dramatically outside its borders than the Soviet Union, which has Hungary and Czechoslovakia on its record, to say nothing of the Middle East arms race and the mounting of missiles in Cuba. On the other hand, China has consistently posed a subversive threat to its neighbors, with the propagation of a militant revolutionary doctrine that generally scorns peaceful coexistence with "imperialists." Peking backs so-called national liberation movements from Thailand to Mozambique.

Arguing Against Change

Critics argue that U.S. efforts to isolate China have merely given the Communists a unifying and strengthening hate symbol--and spurred more subversion. Some regard the U.S. presence in Viet Nam as a particular blunder, because it may have weakened Viet Nam's historical role as a buffer against Chinese expansion. There is one theory that the U.S. should have let Ho Chi Minh unify Viet Nam and emerge as an anti-Chinese Asian Tito. This may be fantasy. Still, U.S. intervention may have helped to draw the Chinese into the war. The material aid that Peking has furnished Hanoi must give the Chinese a measure of control over North Viet Nam. There is no sign yet that Hanoi is eager to end the war or settle it in Paris, but presumably the Chinese are in a position to put further pressure on Ho Chi Minh to remain adamant.

The contrasting theory, of course, holds that the U.S. effort in Viet Nam has demonstrated that "wars of liberation" cannot succeed cheaply and has stiffened anti-Communist sentiment along China's rim. Some U.S. officials believe that a new U.S. policy would vitiate these benefits by handing Mao a "success" against the U.S. and seeming to signal a lessening of American firmness throughout Asia. Advocates against change also argue that a softer U.S. line would help Maoism recover from its self-inflicted domestic wounds, and would eventually lead the U.S. to break its commitment to Taiwan.

"Re-evaluating our policy means weakening it," says former Congressman Walter Judd, a longtime friend of Nationalist China. Even such moderates as former Under Secretary of State Nicholas deB. Katzenbach uphold the older view. "It is China's position that is inflexible--not ours," he says. "Our relations are not bad because of something we are not doing." Says John Gronouski, ex-U.S. Ambassador to Poland and a veteran of fruitless talks with

Chinese diplomats in Warsaw: "The U.S. can do little to sweeten the pot. When Peking is ready to talk seriously, it will --it is as simple and as frustrating as that."

Even so, the case for taking some conciliatory steps toward Peking is based on the likelihood that after the passing of Mao, who is 75, there will be a power struggle in China between the moderates and Mao-style radicals. An easing of tensions between the U.S. and Peking, goes the theory, would strengthen the moderates. Therefore, it might well be unwise to wait until the new regime is actually in place before the U.S. restyles its policy. By trying to draw China into the world mainstream, however futile at present, the U.S. could at least put the onus of intransigence on Peking. At best it could involve Peking in economic and cultural ties that might encourage the moderates.

The overall goal should be the evolution of an Asian balance of power, a mosaic of self-interest that induces Asians, including the Chinese, to trade rather than quarrel with their neighbors. To that end, distant as it now seems, Washington might well take several small to middling unilateral steps demonstrating that the U.S. poses no threat to China and its regime, and that it desires conciliation whenever Peking is ready for it. Says Harvard Sinologist James C. Thomson Jr., a former State Department and National Security Council official: "Why wait for the other man to blink? Why not try winking at him?" Among the many winks--some possible at once, others at a later time--that U.S. China specialists have suggested:

> Despite repeated Chinese rejections in recent years, the U.S. should reiterate its willingness to exchange journalists, artists, scientists and scholars with China.

> With the exception of strategic goods, such as armaments and fissionable materials, the U.S. should drop its trade embargo, which makes little sense now that U.S. allies like Japan, West Germany, Britain and France are trading with the mainland. The Chinese regard the mere existence of the embargo as a hostile act; its removal could be interpreted as a conciliatory gesture. In view of China's limited industrial capabilities and shortage of foreign exchange, such trade would be modest in any case--perhaps up to $10 million a year initially, rising to possibly $100 million after five years.

>The U.S. should play a less conspicuous role in the annual campaign at the United Nations against Peking's admission. Says former Ambassador to Japan Edwin O. Reischauer: "The moral judgment implied in the blackballing of the largest nonwhite nation by the most powerful white nation is deeply insulting to the Chinese and irritating to many other people in the world." With or without U.S. lobbying, the vote will probably go against Peking for some time. Even if it turns favorable, there are no indications that Peking will accept a seat until its terms for entering the U.N. are met; Peking insists that it be absolved of the Korean War aggressor label and that Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalists be expelled. Neither is likely to happen soon.

> U.S. Government officials might be more cautious in the language they use about Communist China. Much justification for the ABM, for instance, initially stressed that the system was designed against Chinese nuclear attack. The implication, holds University of Chicago Political Scientist Tang Tsou, is that "the Chinese leaders are mad enough to think of attacking the U.S. and thus inviting U.S. retaliation. The argument only encourages the radicals in China."

> The U.S. might consider scaling down its nuclear presence on Okinawa. This presence alarms not only China but also Japan, which has residual sovereignty over the Ryu--kyus. Alleged U.S. "colonial" rule there feeds Peking propaganda and incites those Japanese who demand both the return of the islands and the abolition of U.S. bases in Japan. Such a scale-down might be strategically risky, but the U.S. could compensate in part by relying on the deterrent of its submarine-borne Polaris and forthcoming Poseidon nuclear missiles.

> The U.S. should stop frowning whenever its allies try to establish relations with Peking. While Britain's and France's recognition of China does not seem to have done them much good, it is still valid to assume that the more contact Peking has with the West, the better. There seems to be no need for such expressions of "concern" as were heard from the State Department earlier this year when Canada announced its decision to negotiate recognition with Peking.

Beyond such steps, of course, remains the most troublesome issue: Taiwan. Washington steadfastly maintains that it is committed to Chiang Kai-shek's government, and by implication to his claim that he still heads the Republic of China. The U.S. is indeed committed to Chiang's regime by ties of history and honor. But it need not and cannot much longer sustain the fiction that Taiwan is China.

In his contribution to Agenda for the Nation, a Brookings Institution study of U.S. issues prepared last year for the incoming Administration, Reischauer says it is high time to admit that "continental China ruled from Peking is the true, historical China." The U.S. stand, he suggests, "should be that we recognize the existence of two separate political entities, whatever their names; that both merit representation in the United Nations; that we would not oppose reconciliation between Taiwan and the mainland if it should come; but that in the meantime the unit ruled from Peking is obviously the country assigned the permanent seat in the Security Council."

A Dramatic Opportunity

Senator Edward Kennedy has proposed a slightly different solution: both Chinas to be seated in the General Assembly, leaving to future discussion the allocation or abolition of the Security Council seat held by Nationalist China since 1945. The trouble with a two-China solution is, of course, that both Peking and Taipei bitterly denounce even the slightest suggestion of it. To skirt the problem, James Thomson has evolved a solution that he describes as "a step into ambiguity." If successful, it would temporarily shelve the Taiwan issue in its present form. Thomson advocates a tacit mutual acknowledgment of Peking's residual sovereignty over Taiwan, along with a similar acknowledgment of Taiwan's full autonomy. Such a vague status could be preserved until Chinese on both sides of the Taiwan Straits could attempt to defuse the issue themselves.

The strongest case for an adjustment in U.S. China policy can be made in a larger, global context. Given the steady widening of the Sino-Soviet rift, the world power equation has changed dramatically. With the passing of monolithic Communism, interesting possibilities open up for U.S. diplomacy. The U.S. has tended to look "pro-Russian" in the Sino-Soviet conflict. If that becomes a permanent label, it will only serve to exacerbate Peking's paranoia about collusion between "imperialist" Washington and "revisionist" Moscow.

Nonetheless, it is conceivable that Peking's fear of cooperation between the world's two superpowers, aggravated by skirmishes along the 4,500-mile Sino-Soviet frontier, could eventually pressure the Chinese into toning down their hostility toward the more remote of two evils--the U.S. Ultimate accommodation should not be ruled out. At the same time, it is obvious that Moscow is deeply worried about the possibility of a rapprochement between Washington and Peking. In this situation, it seems quite possible that the U.S. could use its China policy as a diplomatic lever for bargaining with the Russians over such pressing issues as arms control and a Middle East settlement. It would, of course, be quite an achievement to do this without substantially undermining the growing U.S. detente with Moscow.

Finding a way out of the China impasse--and exploiting possibilities after that--will demand extraordinary U.S. patience, ingenuity and forbearance. Any overtures toward China at this point may turn out to be a mistake because they might be based on a misreading of Chinese psychology and the country's political mechanisms. But on balance the risks involved seem relatively slight and the case for a change in U.S. policy is powerful.

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